horror

Annabelle Comes Home (2019)

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I hated the first Annabelle film. The second was passably okay. This movie eventually bests them both, but jeez is it ever an exhausting journey getting here. The problems that hinder this series from fully blossoming into the Evil Doll splatter fest it so easily could be are consistent throughout each entry. Firstly, despite her effectively spooky visual design, Annabelle herself is embarrassingly underutilized. She’s a cursed doll who does not move or stab or kill or speak on her own accord, robbing the series of the usual payoffs of the Evil Doll horror genre. Instead, Annabelle is a talisman used to extend the reach of The Conjuring franchise’s function as the Spooky MCU. Her titular homecoming here refers to her arrival in the basement of the paranormal-investigator couple The Warrens, who tie this loose extended universe of undead creepy-crawlies together with a bookended cameo in each picture. From there, Annabelle is sidelined in her own movie, as always, to make room for non-doll creatures to be brought in to individually audition for their own spin-off series, expanding the Conjurverse even further instead of paying off their full potential in the moment. Unless you’re crafting soap operas or wrestling angles, it’s an awful approach to storytelling, as it always promises satisfaction next time instead of emphasizing in-the-moment, self-contained stakes. Thanks to every single movie production company wanting what Marvel has, though, it’s now the norm in commercial filmmaking, which is getting increasingly frustrating.

All that said, Annabelle Comes Home at least openly accepts its role as a franchise brand extender whereas previous entries in its series have downplayed that function as much as they can – saving teasers for Conjuring spinoffs like The Nun for their post-credits stingers. Here, Annabelle operates as the Nick Fury of the Warrens’ basement, assembling undead ghoulies like The Ferryman, The Killer Wedding Dress, and The Werewolf Ghost to torture the teens she shares a house with, effectively auditioning each of them for their own Spooky MCU spinoffs. She’s contextualized as a “beacon for other sprits” within the movie to justify this indulgence, but that throwaway dialogue does little to reconcile with the fact that this is an Annabelle movie where Annabelle disappears for long stretches of time to make room for another Conjurverse monsters. Once again, this is an evil doll movie that has no interest at all in being an evil doll movie, which is maybe Annabelle’s true curse. The good news is that Annabelle Comes Home eventually does pack the screen with plenty of non-doll spookies off all shapes & sizes. Once all of Annabelle’s fellow spirits are set loose around the Warrens’ house to torture the Generic Teen Babysitters inside, the movie does reach a few blissful moments of midnight movie mayhem. It just takes a lot of franchise place-setting effort to make it to that point, when you could just watch a standalone free-for-all like Hausu or The Gate and get ten times the payoff for 1/10th the effort.

I don’t care about the Warrens. I rarely tune into dispatches from The Conjurverse unless the individual film in question happens to touch on a subgenre I generally have a weakness for – like the killer doll movie. All I wanted to see here was a creepy doll torture some teens, and I was made to settle for the swerve of a decent haunted house movie instead, just like how Annabelle: Creation was a ghost story and the original Annabelle was a Rosemary’s Baby bastardization – not one genuine killer doll movie among them. It’s disappointing, then, to see this potentially bonkers free-for-all dampened so extensively by its franchise-building requirements. We eventually make our way to a very simple, contained haunted house story but not until after a lengthy frame story wherein the Warrens take a joy ride through an Ed Woodian graveyard only to disappear until the film’s conclusion. Also, because each monster’s appearance here is just an appetizer for a possible future spin-off, we only get a small taste of creatures like Werewolf Ghost so that we’re hungry for more Werewolf Ghost Content the next time it’s offered to us; and the cycle continues. Annabelle Comes Home is an adequate enough mainstream horror flick. It may even be the best Annabelle film to date, once it fully warms up. It just also participates in the worst tendencies of franchise filmmaking of the 2010s, which is getting more exhausting the more ubiquitous it becomes.

-Brandon Ledet

Cross-Promotion: Dagon (2001) on the We Love to Watch Podcast

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I was recently featured as a returning guest on an episode of the We Love to Watch podcast discussing two Stuart Gordon-directed adaptations of classic HP Lovecraft stories: Dagon (2001) & “Dreams in the Witch-House” (2005), as part of the show’s ongoing “Summer of Lovecraft” series.

Aaron & Peter were incredibly kind to invite me back after previous discussions of The Fly (1958) & Xanadu (1980). It’s always super fun to guest on their podcast, since I regularly listen as a fan. Their show is wonderfully in sync with the sincere & empathetic ethos we try to maintain on this site (especially when covering so-called “bad movies”), so I highly recommend digging through old episodes & clips on the We Love to Watch blog if you haven’t already. And, of course, please start by giving a listen to their episode on Dagon below.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week: 2019 Persistence of Vision Horror Fest Edition

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Persistence of Vision: A Three-Day Horror Film Event will be making its debut as a local film festival this weekend at the Three Keys venue inside The Ace Hotel. In collaboration with Creepy Fest, the weekend-long horror marathon will be screening a ton of classic genre titles (including The Descent, Poltergeist, Hocus Pocus, Shaun of the Dead, and An American Werewolf in London), along with new-to-New Orleans independent short films. The promoters explain on the event’s Facebook page, “Inspired by our current political climate—and our, like, actual real-life climate—we decided that the only way to make it to 2020 is to: #1 Feel all our feelings—like through catharsis while watching horror movies! #2 Gain a better understanding of the world of the world, and the part(s) we play in it.”

Listed below are the few films we’re most excited about that are screening at the festival, as well as a few other stand-out genre films screening throughout the city this weekend.

Selections from Persistence of Vision

Get Out (2017) – Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2017 is a staggeringly well-written work that has convincingly captured the current cultural zeitgeist, becoming instantly familiar & iconic in a way few movies have in our lifetime. It’s a horror film that families should watch together, especially if you have some f those white “I’m not racist, but” family members. Let it flow through you and inform you about the daily experiences of people of color in our country. Let it teach you a lesson about the power of cell phone video as a liberator, and about the frequent hypocrisy of white liberalism. Let it be the light for you in the dark (and sunken) places. Screening Friday 8/23, at the Ace Hotel

The Thing (1982) – John Carpenter’s classic cosmic horror is best experienced with a crowd in a proper theatrical environment, which is how I saw it for the first time at The Prytania in 2015. From my review after that screening: “The movie’s visuals are on-par with the best the director has ever crafted. The strange, rose-colored lighting of emergency flares & the sparse snow-covered Antarctica hellscape give the film an otherworldly look backed up, of course, by the foreign monstrosity of its titular alien beast.” Screening Friday 8/23 at the Ace Hotel

Vampire’s Kiss (1988) – The most absurd, bewildering, hilarious, upsetting, and absolutely essential Nic Cage performance to ever make it to the screen, which is no small feat. Preempts a lot of American Psycho’s themes & tones by casting Cage as a sociopathic businessman brute who gradually becomes convinced that he is, in fact, a vampire – a descent into madness that only looks more & more deranged from the outside looking in. Worth seeing alone for proof that Nicolas Cage can make even the simple act of reciting the alphabet the most compelling thing you’ve ever seen. Screening Sunday 8/25 at the Ace Hotel with live comedic commentary

Carrie (1976) – An iconic adaptation of Stephen King’s debut novel about a telekinetic teenage loner who’s pushed beyond her breaking point by her high school bullies and her extremely religious, abusive mother. Elevated by the auteurist vision of a young Brian De Palma and a stunning lead performance from Sissy Spacek. Screening Friday 8/23 at the Ace Hotel

Other Genre Films Playing Around New Orleans This Week

Phantasm (1979) – A late-70s indie horror cheapie (most recognized for its killer floating orb) that somehow earned a strong enough cult following that it spawned four sequels (the most recent of which was released in 2016). Screening in a new crisp digital restoration in the BYOB midnight slot at The Prytania on Friday 8/23 and Saturday 8/24

Desperate Living (1977) – My personal favorite John Waters film, and maybe the punkest thing about 1977. From Boomer’s review: “There are a lot of laughs to be had here if you’re in the right mood, and there’s also a lot of fetish fuel if you’re into that sort of thing, what with all the mesh shirts and leather pants floating around. Still, this is not a movie for the weak of stomach, or anyone who would find the detachment of a vestigial phallus odious. Recommended for lovers of the weird.” Screening free to the public (with donations encouraged) Thursday 8/22 at the LGBT Community Center of New Orleans as part of their ongoing Queer Root series.

Ready or Not – Samara Weaving continues her delightfully over-the-top genre work after the underappreciated Netflix novelty The Babysitter & her brief appearance in Monster Trucks with this new high-concept schlock piece about a young bride who’s hunted on her wedding night by a wealthy family of board game industry tycoons she married into in a deadly game of Hide & Seek. Playing wide.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark – A Guillermo del Toro-produced anthology horror adapted from a series of short stories that freaked us all out as children in the 80s & 90s. Playing wide.

-Brandon Ledet

Masked Mutilator (2019)

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Masked Mutilator checks off a suspiciously high number of my personal-interest boxes for a project that seemingly materialized out of thin air. A no-budget backyard slasher cheapie about mid-90s pro wrestlers and late-2010s podcasting? I’m not sure I didn’t conjure this movie into existence in the middle of a powerful dream, since it’s essentially a jumbled collection of nouns that rattle around in my brain all day anyway. All that’s really missing is a few drag queens & a Xiu Xiu soundtrack. The truth is, though, that the film has been gestating for 25 long years before finally being completed in 2019, so its out-of-thin-air mystique is a total illusion. Initially filmed on 16mm in the mid-90s and eventually bookended with a digital-age frame story in the 2010s (thanks to crowdfunding via IndieGoGo), Masked Mutilator is a fairly typical backyard horror cheapie that’s only made worth discussion because it’s been dislodged from its place in time. There’s almost no way the movie would be half as fascinating if it weren’t for its bizarre multi-decade production “schedule,” and even then it’s not all that remarkable. This is basically Shirkers for Idiots (like me). There’s no denying it has a great hook in its premise and an interesting context as a recovered object, but it’s terminally inessential.

The modern digi-grade frame story involves, as all masterpieces of Le Cinéma do, a podcast recording. Survivors of a fictional 1990s tragedy guest on a true-crime podcast about “Group Home Killings,” recalling the hyper-specific talk radio program “Why Do Boys Kill Their Mothers?” in Psycho IV. This setup is a convenient contextualization of the 16mm footage to follow, which makes up a bulk of the slight 76min runtime. While the podcast conversation stokes gravely serious topics surrounding the abuse of vulnerable teens in group homes, it comes to little surprise that the no-budget slasher plot it’s setting up in flashbacks doesn’t explore these times with any genuine concern or curiosity. An ex-luchador who was blacklisted from his industry for killing an opponent in the ring resurfaces as an unlikely counselor in a group home for teens. His violent past makes him the prime suspect when the teens under his care are picked off one by one at the hands of a muscly killer who wears his old wrestling gear, with his luchador mask now functioning as an executioner’s hood. The mutilated teens are too generic to especially care about (defined by such personality traits as Heavy Metal, Nunchucks, and Horny). The gore is too cheap to be gruesome and too restrained to be fun (despite the film being an early credit for SFX television personality Glenn Hedrick). The identity of the true killer is embarrassingly obvious long before its reveal. The only remarkable aspect of the picture, then, is that it exists – which truly is a feat for any film, to be fair. Movies are hard to make, especially when you’re just hanging around the living room with your friends (as appears to be the case in this instance).

I likely would have been able to overlook the low-energy aimlessness of this doomed project if I had been familiar with the pro wrestlers involved in its production. Brick Bronksy, Jim “The Tank” Dorsey, and Doug Yasinsky weren’t anywhere near my radar despite their involvement with massive promotions like WWF in their heyday. Even so, I was still amused to see these gigantic muscly men crammed into the tiny kitchens & living rooms of this group home location. I also appreciated that the kills were somewhat wrestling-specific, as the luchador executioner character crushes & punches his teen victims to death with brute force (before chopping them up for the incinerator in the film’s sparse moments of genuine gore). With some recognizable pro wrestling personalities, some Matt Farley-level joke writing, and slightly more grotesque violence, this might have been an abandoned relic turned cult classic. Instead, it’s only recommendable for the more hopeless fans of pro wrestling & no-budget slashers, total goners (like myself) who’d have no self-control to avoid it based on the luchador-horror premise – if not going as far as having donated to its crowdfunding campaign to complete it in the fist place. I was never especially thrilled by this recovered artifact from minute to minute, but I still maintained a “Good for them!” attitude towards the filmmakers throughout for having finally completed it, especially since their niche interests apparently overlap so extensively with my own.

-Brandon Ledet

Hagazussa (2019)

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On a superficial level, Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse is doomed to forever be reductively understood as the German answer to The Witch. In a lot of ways, the comparisons are unavoidable. Hagazussa may be set centuries earlier than its American counterpart and in an entirely different region of the world, but both films share an academic pride in being thoroughly researched recreations of antique lore & superstitions surrounding witchcraft – so that they both separately function as 2010s updates to the silent horror classic Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages. Both films also center on fringe families who live ostracized in the isolating wilderness outside their nearby community. Both films focus on the coming-of-age struggles of the daughter in particular, and what tragedies superstitions dictate that transformation brings upon her family. If Hagazussa was looking to avoid these Witch comparisons entirely, it did itself no favors by making this exiled family goatherders by trade, so that dozens of goat closeups recall the VVitchy presence of Black Phillip. Also, not for nothing, the title Hagazussa supposedly translates to “Witch” in Old High German.

I’m not sure this 1:1 comparison could ever be favorable to Hagazussa, which is somehow much, much more difficulty quiet, brutal, and inscrutable than its American predecessor. I remember hearing a lot of grumbling in my opening-weekend screening of The Witch, where an unprepared audience registered vocal dissent against what they had assumed was going to be a more conventional horror film than the slow-burn familial drama that was delivered. I imagine that same crowd would have hurled literal rotten tomatoes at the screen during Hagazussa, which makes The Witch look like a bombastic Michael Bay action comedy by comparison. This is a mostly dialogue-free descent into misery as one lonely young woman gradually loses everything & everyone she has because she’s understood to be a witch. Hagazussa often borders on the avant-garde subgenre of Slow Cinema in which long, silent takes hold on a single image for relative eternities in an effort to break through to something more artistically substantial than traditional entertainment. As someone who doesn’t have the patience for Slow Cinema even in the best of circumstances, watching Hagazussa alone in my living room was an effective window into what it feels like for mainstream audiences who suffer through Elevated Horror™ slowburns when expecting a more traditional slasher or creature feature. It comes across as tedious instead of properly atmospheric.

Still, although the film tested my patience (which often failed), I admired so much of its witchy, metal-as-fuck imagery. Black cats, cauldrons, thrones of skulls, plague carts, and mushroom trips into the darkness of the human soul decorated the screen in a continually compelling way, even despite my personal issues with the pacing. As soon as I hit the drone metal title card, I knew I was in for a quietly spooky visual feast, one that recalled similar history-minded arthouse Euro horrors like Häxan, November, and The Juniper Tree. It’s not like nothing happens plot-wise either. There are plenty of heartbreaking betrayals, psychedelic freak-outs, shocking sexual transgressions, and tragic downfalls throughout to keep you mind occupied, even if they’re doled out at a glacial pace. I wonder if I would have been more on-board with the film in a proper theater, with no opportunities to be distracted from the black-magic tragedy on the screen. At least, I can see it going over well among a film fest crowd with the right temperament. As is, though, I mostly appreciated Hagazussa as a folk-metal mood board, not necessarily a feature film. It was most useful to me as a taste of my own medicine for rolling my eyes at the strangers around me who were audibly bored by The Witch.

-Brandon Ledet

The Reflecting Skin (1990)

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There are only a few films I could cite that touch on the exact discomforting horrors of childhood explored in the 1990 curio The Reflecting Skin – Gummo, Tideland, Heavenly Creatures, Welcome to the Dollhouse, maybe certain aspects of Pan’s Labyrinth. None come anywhere near predating this forgotten indie cinema relic, yet they’ve each garnered more notoriety for their willingness to Go There when it comes to discomforting childhood fears, violence, and psychosexuality. I presume that’s mostly because no one really knew what to do with The Reflecting Skin in 1990, a sentiment I can confidently echo nearly thirty years later. The film was met with exuberant applause & demands for additional screenings when it debuted at Cannes, but it’s since faded into cultural obscurity due to a shamefully spotty history of physical media distribution. Thanks to a new digital restoration of the film for its first-ever Blu-Ray release, I was lucky to catch it completely blind at the local arthouse venue Zeitgeist, wholly unprepared for the haunted curio cabinet I’d be stumbling through for 90 intensely uncomfortable minutes. It felt like plucking a cursed book from a dusty library shelf and unknowingly releasing something wicked that was deliberately forgotten for the sake of humanity’s safety.

There’s a kind of protective innocence to the premise of The Reflecting Skin that doesn’t fully convey its antagonistically perverse tone. In the film, a young boy who lives at his family’s rural 1950s gas station creates an intricate series of fantasies to help soften the horrors of the insular world he occupies. Confused why his father is a local pariah, why his brother (Viggo Mortensen in his debut film role) is prematurely fading into illness, and why his snot-nosed peers are showing up dead around town, the child creates a fantasy scenario where his young, widowed neighbor is a vampire that’s draining the community of its vitality by literally draining its blood. The audience is never fooled by this illusion, as the widow in question (although stylistically a precursor to Tilda Swinton’s turn in Only Lovers Left Alive) is clearly just a young woman racked with grief. Still, our twisted little POV character’s interpretation of the world around him is even more of a shock without the possibility of a supernatural threat supporting it. We know exactly why the children around him are dying, why his family is being ostracized from the local community, and what’s haunting his “war hero” brother. Seeing those harsh realities clash with equally harsh fantasies never gets easier as the film goes on, especially since the fantasies only encourage our devious little protagonist to behave more monstrously as they spiral out of control.

The POV character of The Reflecting Skin is a chipper little devil in an off-putting bowl cut. He’s endlessly cruel in the way a lot of bored, unsupervised children can be – gleefully tormenting all helpless animals in his striking distance as a form of escapist entrainment, whether they be a grieving widow or a pathetic bull fog. His instinct when he encounters something precious or beautiful in his grimly dour environment is to immediately destroy it beyond recognition, an instinct the film generally frames as the commanding ethos of humanity & Nature. This destructive impulse and the hopeless cruelty of Life are discussed in flat, stage play-style dialogue, a tone accentuated by the nonprofessional child actors who are tasked to deliver it. Phrases like, “Innocence can be hell,” and “The nightmare of childhood . . . and then it only gets worse,” hang in the air like a black-magic curse over the sparse setting. Characters’ fixation on animalistic details like scent, skin, and thirst take on a literary importance that contextualizes its vampiric lore in a distinctly Southern Gothic tradition. The children of The Reflecting Skin are creepily obsessed with the mortality, sexuality, violent perversions, and biological limitations of adulthood in a way that confuses them, weaponizes them, and makes them vulnerable for exploitation. And when they grow up, it only gets worse. It’s an absolutely brutal worldview that no amount of escapist fantasy could ever fully cover up.

The oil painting-reminiscent wheat fields of this film’s farmland setting have since become such common cinematic language that it’s now considered a memeable cliché (usually at the expense of Terrence Malick). Its stage play dialogue and flat child-acting limitations could also be a major barrier for modern audience to fight past. I personally found both to be appropriately harsh, sparse backdrops for the film’s brutal worldview, in which life is a punishing force of destruction that deliberately targets the most beautiful & fragile things among us. Children, women, queer people, and sensitive men are squashed like bugs for the crime of existing, and the only thing protecting them from total annihilation is a romantic fantasy that can crumble at any moment. The worst part is that they can be just as guilty of passing that cruelty along as much as anyone else. The Reflecting Skin might be too cruel, too cynical, too stilted, and too stylized to strike a chord with everyone who stumbles into its nightmarish childhood fantasy unprepared (our screening did have at least one ceremonial walk-out midway through), but if you can fully sink into the hellish wavelength it establishes the experience is unforgettably unnerving. I watched it with my jaw agape for most of its runtime, as if it were a forbidden displeasure the world had meant to protect me from by burying it in several decades of obscurity.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #88 of The Swampflix Podcast: Crawl (2019) & Cinema Crocodilia

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Welcome to Episode #88 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our eighty-eighth episode, Brandon & Britnee fight off killer alligators & crocodiles in a nonstop, swampy fight to the death, starting with a discussion of the 2019 creature feature Crawl. Enjoy!

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

-Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas

Tenement (1985)

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No matter how turned off or disgusted you are by Roberta Findlay’s grim & grimy oeuvre, you could never be a harsher critic of her work than the filmmaker is herself. In an incredibly rare interview on her time as a pornographer & schlockteur with The Rialto Report, Findlay disparages the supposed artistic value of her work and dismisses the fans who attempt to reevaluate her films as dangerous lunatics she wants nothing to do with. Findlay describes herself as a human barnacle who would latch onto & follow the whims of the men in her life rather than finding any self-driven motivation of her own. She uses this metaphor to explain how she transformed from a trained pianist who would accompany silent films in a repertory cinemas to a cinematographer & eventual director of hardcore pornography, a business that interested her late husband & artistic collaborator. Findlay herself was disgusted by the sexual extremity of the rough pornos she was filming for profit, a revulsion that carried over to her depictions of extreme violence in the grindhouse horror industry (once the VHS market made porno less profitable). I imagine her disgust & horror with filming rough sex worked against her porno films’ ostensible goal of titillation, but in her hyperviolent genre work it only enhances her accomplishments. In Findlay’s signature exploitation piece, the 1985 home invasion cheapie Tenement, the director’s self-hatred & disgust with the sex, violence, and sexual violence on display oozes through the screen in every scene’s grotesque tableau. Roberta Findlay may report to despise the grime & cruelty of films like Tenement, but there’s no denying the effectiveness of that ill-will in the final product, which makes us all sick to our stomachs along with her.

Instead of invading a single home, the murderous hooligans of Tenement invade an entire community, keeping the film true to close-quarters NYC living. A dilapidated housing tenement in The Bronx (the exact kind of run-down apartment complex Findlay grew up in herself) is overrun by a gang of hyperviolent squatters on Angel Dust. Recalling the similar crime wave paranoia of films like I Drink Your Blood, The Class of 1984, Street Trash, and The Warriors, the film pits helpless families trying to scrape a peaceful life together against hedonist drug dealers who stave off boredom by playing with dead rats, snorting cocaine off switchblades, and mutilating normies with real jobs & families. The film devolves into a PCP-addled version of Home Alone from there, with the building’s proper tenants inventing gangster-killing booby traps (like box spring electric fences & rat poison heroin) to kill off the encroaching squatters. Both the gang & the community of victims are racially & culturally diverse enough to avoid the usual political offenses of this urban crime genre, but Findlay finds new ways to offend all on her own. Sometimes, her amoral cruelty makes for an excitingly heightened version of the home invasion template, especially in how no victim feels at all safe from being torn apart by the crazed hooligans – not children, not the elderly, not single mothers, not pets, no one. Other times, the cruelty goes too far and makes for a deeply unpleasant, almost impossible watch – such as in the first-person-POV staging of a gang rape or in watching the villains bathe in dog’s blood for a fun lark. In either instance, it’s Findlay’s unflinching, self-hating depictions of human viciousness & misery that distinguishes Tenement in its crowded field of grimy NYC exploitation cinema. A lot of schlock peddlers in the business didn’t especially care about the hyperviolence on display beyond its capacity to sell tickets. Findlay, by contrast, despised the stuff and found her own films grotesque, which shows through in the work in genuinely upsetting ways.

Given the heartless cruelty on display, especially in its pivotal scene of sexual assault, it’s not difficult to see why Roberta Findlay dismisses Tenement (along with the rest of her porno & exploitation catalog) as useless, despicable trash. I would at least hope that she can look back with some pride on what she accomplished in her filmmaking craft, though. This is a shockingly well-shot, tightly edited picture considering its budget. Plotted over the course of a single day and regularly time-stamped for temporal perspective, the film boasts an incredible efficiency in storytelling its fellow video nasties rarely mustered. The close-quarters violence of its invasion plot is partly so memorably brutal because it’s never obscured; you’re always aware of exactly what’s being done to the victims, with the camera often pausing for a mood-setting detail. In some ways, this unexpected production quality allows Tenement’s nastiness to catch the audience off-guard. In an early scene, the PCP gang’s head honcho spins on a lazy-Susan while shouting to the sky “I’m going to get my building back!” in a tone that promises major-studio fun rather than the grindhouse mayhem to come. Tenement is also bookended by my all-time favorite movie trope: the plot-summarizing rap song, also a staple of a more corporate, more inhibited product. This grimy NYC nightmare is all the more effective for having someone behind the camera who actually knows what she’s doing, so that you expect a level of quality control in its content that just isn’t there. Findlay’s curse is that she was skilled at her craft but hated the immoral content her efforts were applied to. It’s a tension between creator & art that makes for a grotesque, unsettling experience for the audience – the transgression of a work that hates its own guts and knows it should not exist but pushes on for the meager box office payoff anyway. The results of that payoff are fascinating, even if you can barely stomach to look at them.

-Brandon Ledet

The Perfection (2019)

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On paper, The Perfection sounds like it should be exactly My Thing. It’s an over-the-top, weirdly horny, queer horror cheapie after all – the kind of heightened trash that clashes cheap made-for-VOD genre sensibilities with an exquisite fine art setting. That’s why it’s so disappointing that I ended up hating the film early & often, practically despising it more for being almost enjoyable yet barely watchable than I would have if it had no potential for greatness. Only outdone by Under the Silver Lake in terms of wasted potential, this is truly one of the biggest letdowns of the cinematic year so far, but I almost feel as if I’m letting myself down by failing to enjoy it. It’s like someone poisoned my catnip.

I can’t get too far into the premise of The Perfection here without ruining its intended payoffs for those who might still enjoy it. The what-the-fuck-is-happening quality of the plot is one of its strongest assets, as long as you aren’t as utterly appalled by its unearned reveals as I ultimately was. It’s at least safe to say that Allison Williams stars as a world-class cellist who returns to the music academy that trained her as a child before her years of seclusion in caring for her sick mother & intensive therapy. The music academy’s director (Steven Weber) is cautiously suspicious of her return but delighted for the opportunity to hear her play with his new star pupil (Logan Browning). Things escalate quickly as the two women’s exquisite musical collaboration transforms into a passionate sexual tryst and then, almost immediately, a complex series of betrayals, revenge, cruelty, and bloodshed. This first act set-up prompts you to question the history, intentions, and mental stability of all the players involved, and the perverse fun of its fallout is in those mysteries being fully, exploitatively exposed. To reveal any more in this review would be a crime I’m not willing to commit, except to say that all of The Perfection’s twisty roads only lead to disappointment.

There’s plenty for me to complain about here. As with the similarly promising-but-disappointing Always Shine, The Perfection immediately hinders itself with gimmicky early-aughts-horror editing tricks – practically begging for audiences’ patience with promises that “Things will get wacky & crazy later! Hold tight!” Besides the artificial jump scares generated purely through those edits, the film repeatedly rewinds scenes of intense violence & betrayal to over-explain what was really going on – when those rewound flashbacks only reveal was already blatant & obvious. Ideally, the film would have just let its trashy premise clash against its pristine High Art setting, as superior films like In Fabric, Grand Piano, and Argento’s Opera have before it. Instead, everything about it comes across as cheap except that it happens to have a cello soundtrack. The film is also never quite as surprising as it believes itself to be, telegraphing many of its shocking Twists long before it rewinds itself to explain what was already obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a movie before – undercutting its own value as a what-the-fuck-is-happening oddity at every turn. Nothing typifies this more than a last-minute wig reveal where a central character yanks off their own wig to expose a smaller, scragglier wig underneath . . . and not much else.

The truth is, through, that I would have readily forgiven all these minor sins against good taste if the third act’s morbid obsession with sexual assault hadn’t been such a letdown. This a violently gory, sensually horny, playfully twisty genre film that touches on Lovecraftian fears of breaking through reality to reach divine, horrible transcendence through beautiful music. I don’t understand, then, what it finds so alluring about the horror canon’smost repugnantly pedestrian go-to for creating tension & conflict for female characters. It’s as unearned as it is boring, frankly. You can’t promise your audience the endless horrors of the great abyss only to deliver the cheapest, laziest form of cinematic violence there is – especially since that violence has a long history of exploitation without justification in the themes of the text.

I don’t begrudge anyone who managed to have a good time with this ludicrous schlock. In fact, I envy anyone who did. I even suspect my distaste for it will cause conflict with other Swampflixers around Best of the Year list-making season, since it’s the exact kind of thing we usually praise around here. Indeed, I even found plenty to enjoy from scene to scene: the psychedelic freak-outs, the gory body horror, the comical over-utilization of split diopter shots, the tension of a world-class cellist summoning all their willpower to not shit themselves on a public bus, etc. I just can’t personally get past how much the film wastes its own potential in its editing, its handling of sexual abuse, and its eagerness to over-explain and then re-explain to the audience what’s already embarrassingly obvious. The fact that it should have easily been one of my favorite films of the year only makes it stand out as one of my most hated, however personal that reaction may be.

-Brandon Ledet

Psycho Granny (2019)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Between the releases of Greta & Ma in recent months, it seems as if the psychobiddy genre might be making a quiet comeback in American movie theaters. It’s arguable, though, that the genre has been alive & well on our television sets for decades even without this theatrical-release revival, thanks to the melodramatic schlock regularly churned out on the Lifetime network. While the trope of once-respectable grande dames losing their minds & becoming crazed killers used to function as late-career revivals for aging stars as high on the food chain as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland, it’s since trickled down into made-for-cable schlock on Lifetime for sorta half-famous stars from long-forgotten soap operas & B-pictures. Few Lifetime Original Movies are as blatant about their participation in this hagsploitation tradition as Psycho Granny, which sidesteps the usual Lifetime method of hiding its exploitation cinema intentions behind titles like Wife, Mother, Murderer, by essentially just naming itself after the top Google result for “psycho biddy synonym.” Originally pitched under alternate titles like Lineage of Lies & Granny’s Home, Psycho Granny’s shamelessly honest moniker is a decisive affirmation that Lifetime has been keeping this sleazy tradition alive even in the decades when major studios have been slacking. And, just to drive the point home, it was aired as a double feature with another Lifetime Original titled Killer Grandma.

Just because Lifetime makes psychobiddy cheapies the most often doesn’t mean they make them best, though. At least, I don’t think you’ll find anything in Psycho Granny that wasn’t done to greater delight in Greta or Ma. Instead of world-class acting giants like Isabelle Huppert & Octavia Spencer slumming it in delirious genre trash unworthy of their talents, we’re treated to a typifying performance from Robin Riker, most “famous” for starring in the (badass, but underseen) creature feature relic Alligator nearly 40 year ago. Psycho Granny opens with its best scene, a camp tableau in which Riker toasts/berates the dead bodies of her “family” members arranged about the dining room table, all recently poisoned by her traditional, grandmotherly turkey dinner. The rest of the picture is standard Lifetime Movie fare: a trashy, low-energy thriller in which Riker’s delusional “grandmother” character elbows her way into a young, pregnant couple’s lives – convincing them that she’s actually family and not a sociopathic killer. Like in Ma, she scrapbooks relics from her crimes in a menacing tone. Like in Greta, the humor and the horror of the scenario derive from the moments when she drops her helpless-old-woman facade to reveal the monster underneath – usually in Gollum/Sméagol-style arguments with herself in the rearview mirror of her car. The effect of these common touches just comes across a little dulled here, as if they were business as usual for the Lifetime Original Movie format, not wild, delirious transgressions from actors who should know better.

Psycho Granny is mildly fun & incredibly sleazy in the way all Lifetime movies are. There are some delightfully absurdist details in Riker’s behavior (including a weird fixation on her newest granddaughter-victim’s toilet flushing habits) and an occasional line like “I would kill for a glass of Pinot right now!” that stand out as primo Lifetime fodder. The move also hits its most ideal strides once Riker starts killing again in the third act – disposing of her victims in specifically grandmotherly ways: strangling busybodies with the hanging tennis ball chord in the garage and bashing skulls in with whistling teapots. Where the movie really shines, though, is in having Riker’s “No more wire hangers!” trigger be Millennials sending too much time on their phones. The film is obsessed with young husbands & mothers being distracted from quality family time by “burying their faces in their phones,” so that when Riker chastises their smartphone addictions, she’s playing directly into the generational resentments of Lifetime’s aging, judgmental audience. It’s a detail that recalls not only the wire-hangers trigger from Mommie Dearest, but also the wearing-white-after-Labor-Day kill from Serial Mom and the chicken-beheading mania of (possibly the greatest psychobiddy of all time) Strait-Jacket, which I mean as the highest compliment. The film never threatens to match the heightened fever-pitch camp of those pinnacles of the genre, but it does help connect the dots between traditional psychobiddy tropes and the usual goings-on of the Lifetime network.

The only inkling I had that Psycho Granny may have achieved more than the usual Lifetime standard is that it was directed by Rebekah McKendry, co-host of the excellent Blumhouse horror podcast Shock Waves. McKendry promoted the film as a “darkly comedic thriller” on her own social media, and the opening turkey dinner tableau hints at that subversive impulse. For the most part, though, it’s a fairly standard Lifetime movie about an aging, smartphone-hating woman who’s gone headfirst off the deep end. Which is to say that it’s a three-star campy pleasure in the age-old psychobiddy tradition.

-Brandon Ledet