horror

ARQ (2016)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I love bottle movies. There’s something that appeals to the wannabe filmmaker in me that is totally enraptured by films that take place almost entirely in one location, from independent horror cheapies that far exceed expectations like Housebound, higher profile haunted house flicks like Burnt Offerings, and high concept claustrophobic pieces that are successful beyond expectations, like Paranormal Activity and Alien. Of course, with that, you also end up with a lot of direct-to-video–and occasionally wide released–garbage fare starring the director’s family, friends, and fellow church-goers (i.e., not actors), and sometimes you end up with something that straddles the line, like Beyond the Gates, which is a movie that’s obviously low-budgeted but uses that to its advantage to make a pretty charming movie.

You’ll notice that all of the movies mentioned in the above paragraph are horror movies, and there’re a few reasons for this. First and foremost, horror movies are generally the cheapest to make and easiest to market, making their production a great entry point for first-time filmmakers (as mentioned in the DVD interviews that accompanied Sole Survivor, one of my first reviews for this site). There are plenty of housebound (no pun intended) family or personal drama films produced this way, but the occasional Repulsion that slips through the cracks is the exception, not the rule. Most of the time, you end up with something tedious and poorly edited that ends up on Red Letter Media’s The Wheel of the Worst, waiting to be mocked.

Netflix in particular has really embraced this with their original films, with movies like Hush and I am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House. This is probably more for budgetary reasons than for any ideological reason, but it’s working for them and I don’t foresee them putting a stop to this soon. This is also the case for ARQ, a sci-fi time loop thriller starring Robbie Amell (The Flash, the remade The Tomorrow People) and Rachael Taylor (Jessica Jones).

The film opens as Renton (Amell) catapults awake in a room with blacked-out windows, next to Hannah (Taylor). Moments later, the door bursts open and three masked and armed men enter to drag the two of them to Renton’s basement, where they are bound. The three men identify themselves as Sonny (Shaun Benson), Father (Gray Powell), and Brother (Jacob Neayem), and demand that Renton hand over his currency. Through expository dialogue, we learn that Renton used to be a military engineer for Torus Corporation, where he worked on development of a perpetual motion machine that was intended for use as a generator. Torus has become a de facto government opposed by a disorganized rebellion known as the Bloc, which the home invaders claim to be aligned with. When Renton is killed, he awakes back in bed with Hannah, again and again, using his knowledge from each previous cycle in an attempt to break free.

It’s an interesting premise, if not an original one. Starting with Groundhog Day, and although it was codified in a comedy film, it’s become a fairly standard science fiction narrative, popping up in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Farscape, Doctor Who (naturally), and even Supernatural. Its use is so common that a week before I watched this movie it was the centerpiece of the most recent episode of Dark Matter, which, as always, subverted and played with the idea in a refreshing and fun way. ARQ is likewise a fresh take, but it’s mired down by too much front-loaded world-building exposition, with terminology being introduced early and not explained for 30 minutes, which is a major problem in a film that barely crosses the finish line at 88 minutes total. There’s certainly something interesting about the universe that this film inhabits, but its presentation is hamstrung by poor choices about what plot elements should take precedence. Consider that the shows mentioned above played with this plot structure and managed to be intriguing and elicit investment despite the potential for repetitiveness in a mere 42-46 minutes; ARQ feels like it’s treading water long before it hits that minute mark.

Amell may not be the strongest actor in the world, but the performance he turns in here is bland and generic; any handsome face could fill this role. This may not be a mark against him, however, as Taylor was one of the subtler (but no less meaningful) strengths of Jessica Jones and she’s barely more than a cardboard stand-up here. One must conclude that the problems are probably in the directing and editing and not in the performers, although a more subtle actor in the role of Renton may have salvaged some of the films more bathetic moments. As it stands, the film is discomfiting in that it feels rushed and cluttered with exposition, and not in a good way. It’s worth a watch for people interested in bottle movies, or in Groundhog Day loop scenarios, but offers little else.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Episode #36 of The Swampflix Podcast: Disney Ride Movies & Ghoulies II (1988)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Welcome to Episode #36 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our thirty-sixth episode, we enjoy what’s left of the summer with a trip to cinematic amusement parks. Brandon makes Britnee watch the carnival ride-set Gremlins knockoff Ghoulies II (1988) for the first time. Also, Brandon & Britnee discuss Disney movies that were adapted from their corresponding theme park rides (as opposed to the other way around). Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas

The Eyes of Virginia Ducci: The Psychic (1977) and Laura Mars (1978)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

When The Psychic was released in the U.S. in 1979, there were immediate accusations of plagiarism, citing elements that the film supposedly stole from 1978’s Eyes of Laura Mars, directed by Irvin Kershner and based on the first mainstream Hollywood screenplay by up-and-comer John Carpenter, whose Halloween debuted later that year. What most audiences didn’t realize was that The Psychic actually came first, having been released in Italy in 1977. One can hardly blame them for this mistake, however, given the notable plot points that both films share.

Faye Dunaway stars as the title character, a controversial fashion photographer whose violent, erotic, and violently eroticized work over the past two years has caught the attention of Lieutenant John Neville, a detective in pursuit of a serial killer; some of Laura’s tableaux are virtually identical to unpublished crime scene photos, which raises suspicions. Further heightening the issue at hand is that the night before the release of a book of her photos, Laura experiences a psychic vision of the murder of one of her friends from the point of view of the killer; at the launch, she learns from Neville that said friend has really been killed.

Laura, like Virginia in The Psychic, is aided in her endeavors by a chaste male companion, her friend and agent Donald Phelps (a pre-Deep Space Nine Rene Auberjonois); unlike Luca, however, Donald is explicitly coded gay both in his profession and his affinity for effeminate bathrobes. But who could be the killer? Is it Donald, or perhaps Tommy Ludlow (Brad Dourif), Laura’s driver with a criminal past? Could it be Laura’s ex-husband Michael (Raúl Juliá), an unrepentant drunk and serial abuser, who does nothing to hide his jealousy over Laura’s successful artistic career in comparison to his failures as a writer? Or someone else altogether?

Above and beyond the nominal connections that arise from having a woman experience psychic visions of death, Eyes of Laura Mars is also notable in that it is often considered to be the first (and perhaps only) successful attempt at making a giallo film in the U.S. All the trappings are there: the bleakness of the city, the untrustworthy associates of the lead, the brutality of the violence and the P.O.V. shots of the killer. Like many Dario Argento protagonists, Laura is an artist who happens to get caught up in a killing spree outside of her control, and like many of his antagonists, the killer (once unmasked) has a tragic and traumatic backstory that is used as self-justification for homicidal violence. There are even elements of Argento’s work that are pre-saged here; the sudden reappearance of Laura’s ex-husband as a mysterious figure and suspect is like the reappearance of the lead’s wife in Tenebrae, which came out four years later; Brad Dourif appears as a red herring, just as he did in 1993’s Trauma; even the overt campiness of Auberjonois’s character recalls the appearance of Carlo’s lover in Profondo rosso (although that film appeared a few years before Laura Mars or The Psychic).

All in all, however, The Psychic is by far the better film. Although Faye Dunaway’s magnetic performance outpaces Jennifer O’Neill’s, and there’s a vitality to other performances, like Dourif’s and Auberjonois’s, that Fulci’s film lacks, Eyes of Laura Mars simply fails to hold interest all the way to the end. On a sequence-by-sequence basis, Mars is simply too uneven, varying broadly from the impressive and delightful scene of Laura’s Times Square photo shoot to the banal, vaseline-lensed blossoming love story between Dunaway and Jones. It has a strong start, what with Laura attending her book party and being harassed by a reporter about whether she feels her work is exploitative and damaging to women, and there are more scenes that stand out for their cinematic eloquence than in The Psychic, but I rarely felt like Laura was in any real danger. Both she and Virginia are forced into an observational role relative to their psychic visions, but Virginia never stops seeking the truth, while Laura drags her feet. She’s simply not the psychic detective we deserve.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the Lucio Fulci giallo picture The Psychic, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Beyond the Gates (2016)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

Do you remember VHS board games? What if you found one that was haunted; or worse, possessed? What if completing the game was the only way to save your father’s soul?

Gordon (Graham Skipper) and John (Chase Williamson) Hardesty are archetypically, even stereotypically, different brothers. Gordon is a buttoned-down salaryman with a dependable girlfriend (Margot, played by Brea Grant of Heroes), a mortgage, and skeletons in his closet that have driven him far from his home town. John, in contrast, is a scruffy layabout with frequent run-ins with the law. Their troubled father, the proprietor of a VHS rental outlet, has been missing for seven months, and the two come together to close down his store, sell off the merchandise, and part ways, presumably forever. Following some strange dreams and bizarre nighttime occurrences, the two brothers are finally able to enter their father’s office, where they find Beyond the Gates, an 80s-style VHS board game that contains the last tape their father watched.

Upon playing the tape, the brothers first experience lost time, but when Margot convinces them to play the game, a strange woman (Barbara Crampton, of Chopping Mall and Re-Animator) appears on screen and explains that they must play through the game and go in order to save their father and themselves. The tape is obviously interacting with them directly, not playing straight through, and even attempts to enlist the authorities in the form of their cop friend Derek (Matt Mercer) fail, as he can see nothing on the screen but static. Gradually, the trio comes to accept that they’re stuck in a Jumanji situation, and there’s no way out but to beat the game and go . . . beyond the gates.

This film is a bit of a surprise, as it doesn’t get off to a strong start. Gordon is ostensibly the lead, but Skipper is the weakest actor of the main trio, and his performance comes across as broad and unrefined. Williamson’s John is supposed to be a deadbeat, but other than his perpetual five o’clock shadow, his appearance is pretty well-maintained, and there’s no real menace to his presence. The film is also awfully cheap-looking, so much so that even visually dynamic shots, like the slow pan across seemingly endless shelves of VHS tapes, look more like they were shot for a daytime soap than a feature. Once we’re out of the starting gate, however, the ride gets weirder and gorier until you’re lost in the moment. My roommate even compared the film to those of David Lynch (although I wouldn’t personally go that far), citing that he often evokes the facade of normalcy before tearing down the curtain to show the evil that lies beneath. Here, we start with a fairly basic story about brothers in conflict that gets more cinematically complex as the narrative progresses, until you’re suddenly captivated and carried away by the film than anticipated.

The game itself has a board that’s prettily designed, even if the mechanics are unclear (and ultimately kind of irrelevant), and the gore is both hilarious in its overkill and surprisingly effective in the way that it suddenly appears in the film as a complete surprise after a long period of mostly-psychological horror. There’s also a great attempt to give the characters an interesting backstory, as we learn that Gordon and Margot are working out some relationship issues that arose from his overindulgence, and John’s elaboration of how he was the son who stayed when Gordon went out to find a new life belies the cliches that this genre convention usually relies upon. My favorite part of the film may be the scene in which the brothers visit the shop where the game was purchased and have a conversation with the creepy owner (Jesse Merlin) who’s so delightfully transparent in his evil that his name may as well be “Mr. Needful.”

It takes a little patience to get into Beyond the Gates, but it’s pretty rewarding if given half a chance. There’s a lot of love for the VHS era of horror in the movie’s DNA, but unlike other throwbacks, it’s not beholden to that aesthetic or the trappings thereof. The film is currently streaming on Netflix, and is a delightful way to keep Halloween in your heart on a hot summer night.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: The Psychic (1977)

/ swampflix / 13 Comments

Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Britnee, Brandon, and Alli watch The Psychic (1977).

Boomer:  Sette note in nero (literally Seven Notes in Black), marketed as The Psychic in the United States (among other missteps in the American marketing, including essentially spoiling the film with the English tag line) is a Lucio Fulci film about a woman who has a psychic vision. Jennifer O’Neill plays Virginia Ducci, a woman who has recently married a rich Italian (Francesco, played by Gianni Garko). When he leaves to go on a business trip, she decides to visit one of his unoccupied properties, intending to renovate. On her way to this farmhouse, she experiences a psychic vision detailing a red room, a tipped-over bust, a point of view of a wall being constructed “A Cask of Amontillado” style, and various other blinking lights and and images. Recognizing one of the rooms in the farmhouse from her vision, she tears down a section of the wall and discovers that there is a dead body behind it. Her husband is, naturally, arrested, but Virginia seeks to clear her husband’s name with the help of her sister-in-law Gloria (Ida Galli) and her parapsychologist friend, Luca (Marc Porel).

Unlike a great deal of Fulci’s ouevre, The Psychic is not a particularly gory or bloody film. Compare this, for instance, to The Beyond, The House by the Cemetery, and the greater part of his body of work, which feature lots of gore in the Romero vein. The film’s bloodiest moment comes at the very beginning, and in fact seems like part of another Fulci film that has been grafted on to the beginning of this one, and serves only to establish that our main character has experienced a psychic vision before. The rest of the deaths that are depicted, while perhaps not bloodless, are fairly restrained in comparison to the rest of the director’s body of work. Instead, Fulci focuses on the anxiety and the terror of the drama that unfolds onscreen. There are a lot of beautiful shots, like the overhead crane shot of our protagonist and her husband riding horses, the blinking red light of a taxicab’s radio, and various shots of the Italian countryside. All of this contributes to a film that is a very different animal from most of Fulci’s work, but is nonetheless my favorite of his films.

Brandon, one of my favorite things about The Psychic it is its score. Unlike the heavily synthesized scores of Argento’s work or the tense scores of other giallo films, this film features a simple seven note leit motif (the titular seven notes in black, or, as in my preferred translation, seven notes in the dark) that is not only haunting, but integral to the narrative as well. How did you feel about this musical arrangement? Do you think that the film would work as well if the score was not so innately tied to the plot?

Brandon: The most immediately noticeable aspect of the music in The Psychic is that it often isn’t noticeable at all. The central seven note theme that intrudes whenever Virginia picks apart the crime scene from her visions is certainly memorable and helps to shape the film’s tone. Otherwise, like Boomer says, the score is not nearly as conspicuous as the aggressively proggy sounds we’re used to hearing in our giallo fare, especially in Argento’s work. Instead, there’s a softness to The Psychic‘s music that often allows it to fade into the background until the central motif, the titular seven notes, presents itself again. This softness reminds me of the swanky opening credits sequence for the last giallo picture we covered as a Movie of the Month selection, Mario Bava’s Blood & Black Lace. This isn’t necessarily because they sound at all similar, but because they’re more tonally at odds with a traditional horror aesthetic than, say, Goblin’s infamous (an oddly spoiler-filled) score for Suspiria. The Psychic’s score is distinctly feminine to me in a way that matches the film’s overriding Agatha Christie soap opera tone. Blood & Black Lace deviates from giallo’s usual rock n’ roll psychedelia sounds to mirror the high class cocktail party soirees of its fashion world setting; the feminine energy of The Psychic‘s score is closely tied to Virginia’s inner life in a similar way as she mentally unravels the mystery of her visions. It presents a headspace that gets distinctly more haunting in its central motif whenever her mind returns to the details of the room where she discovers the body. It’s difficult to imagine bursts of synthy prog disrupting that insular tone in any way that wouldn’t be annoying, despite that being the traditional mode of the genre.

Speaking of giallo as a genre, it’s something we usually discuss in terms of stylized horror filmmaking, despite it earning its name from pulpy mystery novels. More often than not, the extreme violence & flashy style-over-substance filmmaking craft of giallo pictures outshine any narrative concerns with their central murder mysteries. I didn’t find that to be the case with The Psychic. Instead of flooding the screen with constant murders & psychedelic montages, The Psychic spills all of its (red acrylic) blood & incomprehensible imagery upfront in the form of Virginia’s visions. It then spends the rest of the runtime piecing them out one by one: a magazine, a lamp, a lit cigarette, a mirror, etc. This makes for a much more interesting mystery than a typical whodunnit for me, because it doesn’t only ask the identity of the killer. It also asks who is the victim, whether the crime has even happened yet, and whether it will happen at all. In a broad sense, The Psychic follows a very common horror trope of a woman sensing evil in the world and being told she’s crazy or irrational by the men around her. The structure Fulci uses to tell that story is anything but conventional, however, and I very much appreciated his patience in parsing out the details of how all the individual puzzle pieces fit snuggly together and in what order they did or will arrive.

Britnee, did you also appreciate that the psychedelic flashes of imagery slowed down after Virginia’s initial visions or would you rather that the whole movie had stuck to that exciting style-over-substance energy? Did the film’s unconventional structure & psychic visions conceit make you care about the answers to its central mystery more than you typically would with other giallo films?

Britnee: I haven’t seen many psychic movies, and I’m not even sure that there are many out there, but of those I’ve have watched (mainly The Gift), there’s usually a buttload of psychic visions from beginning to end. By keeping the psychic visions at a minimum, The Psychic really allows viewers to focus on every little detail in Virginia’s few visions. As Brandon stated earlier, the majority of the film is spent examining all these little details from Virginia’s visions and showing their connection to the murder that has yet to happen. I have a pretty short attention span, so being able to see the same visions over and over again without any change helped me really enjoy this movie, because I could keep up with piecing all the clues together. I was able to play detective, even though I completely sucked at it. I thought that her husband was a sex trafficker that would kill young women and hide them in the walls of his huge abandoned mansion. Little did I know the mystery was centered around a stolen painting. So yes, I definitely cared about piecing the puzzle together more than most other giallo films I’ve seen. Giallo films mostly deal with straight up murders, so it’s obvious that the killer will eventually surface, but with The Psychic, not only was I trying to figure out who the killer was, but I was also trying to figure out where the murder took place, if it really took place, and most importantly, what all that sludgy goo in the darkness was (it ended up being cement and bricks).

There’s no doubt that this film is a giallo, but there’s not a whole lot of bloody, slashed-up bodies like in most giallo films. Interestingly enough, the film starts out with a very violent and disturbing scene. Virginia is a schoolgirl and she has a vision of her mother committing suicide by jumping off a cliff; and when I say violent, I mean violent. Usually when someone jumps off a cliff in a movie, it’s understood that that person will die. Sometimes there’s even a shot of the body all smashed up at the bottom. The jumping-off-a-cliff scene in The Psychic was definitely one of a kind. The camera follows her mother’s body as her face chips away against the cliff’s rough, rocky edges. There’s even a fun little crunchy sound that’s made after each hit. For such an intense opening, I thought this was going to be one sick and bloody flick. To my surprise, there would only be a few other bloody scenes (the murder in the vision and the fall in the church).

While I truly enjoyed this film and can’t wait to watch it again, the ending really got under my skin. I usually like movie endings that leave unanswered questions, but I really wanted to know if Virginia would make it out of the wall alive. One would assume that her body would be found since the music of her watch could be heard, but as to whether or not she’ll be found alive or dead is really unclear.

Alli, were you disappointed with the way the movie ended? Would you have liked to see Virginia survive? Or would you rather see Virginia fulfill the prophecy in her visions?

Alli: I really liked the gradual, grim realization that she was the intended victim and watching her slow acceptance of the truth. I wouldn’t say I was disappointed when the movie ended, but I was certainly taken aback. I expected them to dig her out or for Francesco to fight his way through Luca and the ineffectual cops. I guess I was just expecting the typical giallo bloodbath to occur right there at the end, while the rest of the police force and detectives are racing to get out to the palazzo. Ending it right there was a refreshing level of restraint. Boomer already mentioned “A Cask of Amontillado”, but the end had a very “The Tell-Tale Heart” feel with the soft chimes ringing out Francesco’s guilt through the wall. Personally, I’m pro her being found too late. It adds a sense of symmetry, ending the film where it began.

That being said, for once in a giallo movie, except for Phenomena (big soft spot for Jennifer Connelly) or Suspiria, I actually really liked the main character. I feel like she wasn’t the typical blank slate female or wannabe detective male. Yes, she still turns into a bit of a damsel at the end, but she doesn’t let the other people’s skepticism invalidate her hunches. She knocks through a wall. She’s not just out to prove her husband’s innocence; she’s searching for answers. I feel like The Psychic gave its female characters more agency than other movies in this genre do in general. For instance, Bruna, Luca’s secretary, is a research beast, not Luca’s love interest. She is never put through the typical trials giallo movies throw at independent women, nor is she stalked down and killed. She gets respect and credit for her clever work and skills, and has a big part in the investigation.

Boomer, what did you think of the female characters in this movie? Would you agree that they don’t get the usual vaguely/overtly misogynistic treatment giallo movies inflict on them?

Boomer: I’m so glad you mentioned Bruna, who is a delight in this movie. She reminded me a great deal of Gianna, Daria Nicolodi’s character in Profundo Rosso. They have the same bubbly effusiveness, same insightful and inquisitive personality, and even the same haircut and fashion sense. That film is notable in Argento’s canon in that it, too, is more progressive than the usual giallo crop: one scene shows the male protagonist declaring to Gianna that men are more intelligent than women, only for her to correctly point out that she had put together the same conclusion that he had from available clues, and faster; he retorts that men are at least physically stronger. Later in the film, he is knocked unconscious and left in a burning house, only to be rescued and dragged to safety by the diminutive Gianna, showing that she possesses more strength than he credited her as well. Bruna is usually two steps ahead of Luca, who’s surprisingly disinterested in Virginia’s visions until she’s in demonstrable danger, and she has intuitive thought processes (like when she independently researched the history of radio taxis in the area) without which the plot would grind to a halt. Unlike Gianna, Bruna isn’t belittled by her male counterpart.

This unusual-for-the-genre feminism (understated and mild though it may be) is definitely one of the things that most impressed me when I first saw this film. My love for Argento is, I am sure, common knowledge to regular readers of our site; when I think of giallo, Argento’s is the work that first comes to mind. It’s interesting that you and I both went for references to Edgar Allan Poe and to Argento with our analysis of this film, as Poe was widely known influence on Argento and his work, as evidenced by his segment of Two Evil Eyes (you even mentioned Phenomena, my personal favorite!). There’s a connection there that shouldn’t be overlooked, especially with regards to certain misogynistic myths and devices that we see over over again both in Poe’s work and Argento’s work, and the larger society-enshrining machine that we call narrative, like the Madonna/Whore Complex, the sexualization of violence against women, and the infantilization of female intelligence.

Virginia’s role is unusual in that we rarely see women getting to play the everyman role in this genre, either. Genre fiction is overflowing with Neos and Harry Potters and Luke Skywalker: neutral masks unto whom the (presumed male by default) audience can project themselves with no difficulty. We usually only get to see this type of characterization for women in romance novels and rom-coms, usually to the point of insult. In horror, female protagonists are usually unique in characterization, like your Ellen Ripleys, Sidney Prescotts, and Nancy Thompsons. When the two ideals intersect, you usually end up with a Bella Swann. The Psychic is different: despite her fabulous sense of personal dress, Virginia is a bit of a blank slate. She’s recently married to a man she doesn’t know very well, meaning that all of her relationships (save her friendship with Luca) are new and thus still forming; she has no family to speak of. She’s adventurous and engaging, but she’s also generic enough that the viewer slips into the mental space of her character with great ease. It’s definitely not a standard giallo.

Also redefining what it means to be a woman in giallo is Ida Galli’s Gloria, Virginia’s sister in law. Gloria is idly rich, but her haughtiness is more detached than indifferent, and she drops her cold facade when the severity of the danger to her brother’s future becomes clear. She also genuinely cares about Virginia, and is taken aback when Virginia snaps at her and calls her a brat; I almost get the feeling that she was trying to treat this newest member of the family like one of her girlfriends, and Virginia’s interpretation was informed by some culture clash. I also appreciate the fact that Gloria’s promiscuouness is present but never commented upon; she has a lot of “friends” who give her expensive gifts, but she’s never demonized for or endangered by her lifestyle. In a way, she serves to be a mirror of Virginia. So often, when we seek a definition of what makes a Strong Female Character™, we find a great deal of discussion about characterization and motivation, with the end goal being to make women on the page as well-defined as their male counterparts; rarely do we see the also important need for ladies as Tabula Rasa, embodied in Virginia here. Gloria is her opposite, a woman with clearly defined attributes and character traits, to balance Virginia onscreen.

In the same vein of unexpected progressivism, something occurred to me on this watch that hadn’t before. I was always struck by how casually Gloria mentions Luca to Francesco. Francesco himself harbors no jealousy for Luca, as if having his wife spend time with her (devilishly handsome) friend is no cause for alarm. Although he should have no compulsions about Virginia’s platonic relationship with Luca, it would be more aligned with his character as betrayed, unless he had reason to assume that Luca is completely harmless. What I’m getting at is that Luca can be read as homosexual, despite their being no confirmation of that textually. Do you think I’m grasping at straws here, Brandon, or did you get that feeling as well? Do you have any of your own extratextual character interpretations you’d like to share?

Brandon: To be honest, that reading of Luca’s sexuality never occurred to me on the first watch, but that might just have been another result of the film’s notably progressive, empathetic character work. I am so used to men who are coded as gay in giallo films (among other vintage exploitation genres) to be such over the top, cartoonish caricatures that their sexual orientation is unignorable, often to the point of being a homophobic joke. Speaking of Argento, I remember Four Flies on Grey Velvet being especially egregious on thaat front. I had interpreted Francesco’s conspicuous disinterest in Luca as an extension of his general self-absorption. This might count as an extratextual character interpretation on my part, but to me Francesco doesn’t seem at all that interested in anything his wife is up to, her friends included. That only changes when her snooping leads to him being suspected for murder. I totally buy that interpretation of Luca as a legitimate possibility, though. It would at the very least fit in with the film’s overall egalitarian, empathetic approach to characters like Gloria & Virginia. It’ll certainly be something I keep in mind in future revisits of The Psychic, as it would be a welcome variation on typical giallo homophobia, but I honestly didn’t pay that much attention to Luca as a character on the first run through. Women like the clairvoyant Virginia & the Cruella de Ville-ish Gloria were much stronger standouts than any of the men in the film, including the one who ended up being the killer.

Besides its refreshing shift away from giallo’s typically macho genre trappings, The Psychic is also notable for the way it plays with time. Virginia’s visions have an A Christmas Carol way of touching on all three sectors of time: past, present, and future. Virginia’s vision of her mother’s suicide as a child was a clairvoyant glimpse of the present (besides being an absurdly grotesque opening to a fairly muted murder mystery). Her visions of the objects in the Murder Room end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy of a future crime that hasn’t even unfolded. At the same time, the curiosity her vision sparks uncovers a victim from a past murder that had somehow gone by uninvestigated. This temporal experimentation follows a much less conventional narrative structure than what I’m used to seeing in most giallo films, which typically function as proto-slasher, body count-focused exploitation pieces, as beautiful as they are to the eye.

Britnee, how did the relationship between Time & Virginia’s visions affect your own experience with The Psychic? What do the inclusion of the opening present-tense suicide & the discovery of the past murder victim add to Virginia’s visions of her future fate?

Britnee: The way Virginia’s visions relate to the past, present, and future caused me to go a little cross-eyed from having my mind blown. Her visions initially leading her to the skeleton in the mansion walls tricked me into truly believing that those violent visions were clues that would lead to solving that poor woman’s murder. Once realizing that the visions were actually intended for Virginia’s own future demise, I began to think of what was the point of having a young woman’s skeleton stuck in wall and how it contributed to completing the puzzle. My light bulb moment in the midst of all this mystery went off at this point; Virginia was intended to find the body because it helped her come to the realization that her visions were of the future and not the past. Her fixation on determining the reason for this young woman’s brutal death led her to one of the most riveting moments in the movie: the discovery of the true date on the magazine that contained a cover photo of the woman in the wall. Poor Virginia was teased by her own visions, thinking she was solving a crime of the past, only to find herself being buried alive in the wall in the end. Having that initial vision of seeing her mother committing suicide at the film’s beginning really leads the audience to assume what Virginia sees is happening in the moment, but I guess that’s not how psychic visions work. Although I have an interest in supernatural phenomena, I don’t know much about psychic visions. How do those with psychic abilities know if they are seeing the past, present, or future? Perhaps if Virginia sought out training for her ability, she would have been able to be more in tune with her gift.

When it comes to figuring out how her vision of her mother’s suicide contributes to her visions of her own death, I’m not exactly sure how that vision contributes to her fate, but it does contribute to the fact that all her visions deal with death. There’s never any indication that she’s had a vision that led to something more positive, like a marriage, birth, etc. Maybe her gift only allowed her to see visions of deaths for those in her bloodline? I think knowing a little more about her mother’s background would have added more to the story. We’re sort of just hit with this intense death/psychic vision with little explanation right at the beginning. Just a little dialogue from the mother as she drove to the cliff would have been great.

Other than the film’s unforgettable plot, I really enjoyed all its artistic aspects, especially the psychedelic close ups of Virginia’s eyes before she has a vision. It’s almost cartoonish, but in the most tasteful way possible. Alli, what are some visuals in the film that you particularly enjoyed?

Alli: I, too, really liked the scenes where she’s about to have a vision. In fact, one of my favorite scenes is in the very beginning when she’s going through the tunnel. There’s all these quick cuts and flashes of light. It builds so much tension. After the gruesome opening suicide, it lured me into thinking her husbands plane was about to crash and that she was going to see visions of that. It wasn’t a let down for there to be an unsolved murder, though. The quick moments when the murder cryptically unfolds are really effective: the blinking red light, the mortar oozing out of the bricks, the dead woman, and the overturned bust.’

In the tunnel, she’s just plunged into darkness with a little spot of glaring light on the other side. There’s also the scene where they’re unveiling the palazzo where everything is dark until the blinding light as the shades are being lifted. The use of that contrast is really great, and maybe a not too subtle metaphor about the world being illuminated and the truth coming to light. Both sort of feel like they’re gradually revealing a new world to her, the tunnel being one where she’s seen a dark secret and the palazzo where she’s introduced to the crime scene.

One of my favorite things about any giallo is the iconic use of red. It’s a standard across the genre, but I love it every time; be it used as a warning symbol, to make it seem like the set is tinted with blood, or just because. I’m just into it. This movie is definitely no exception, and uses it in conjunction with the clues in both rooms where murders happen. The first glimpse of this all red room was gorgeous. The wall paper and chairs and drapery are just spooky and eerie enough for a dead body to fit in there, but there’s also a sense of class. I disagree with Virginia when she says, “Only an old person would live in a room like that.” There’s also the red lamp in the palazzo ex-bedroom. It casts a bit of half light on her face, and I thought that was a great shot.

Lagniappe

Boomer: For what it’s worth, I’ve always read the final scene as ambiguous, but leaned on the side of Virginia being rescued from the wall. Admittedly, I never considered the possibility that she might be discovered too late . . .

Brandon: It makes me somewhat of an asshole, but I have to admit I got a little bit of a laugh out of this film’s opening suicide. It can’t be understated how bizarre of an introduction it is to see that mannequin-esque body double Superman its way down the side of the cliff and smash its bloody face against every rock on the way down. I don’t think I was necessarily laughing at The Psychic for beginning that way, but it was such a bold, unexpected opener that my first reaction was to guffaw at its audacity. Whether or not any humor was intended in that moment, it was certainly an effective way to grab my attention as an audience. I had no idea what was coming next, but that mannequin’s bloodied face promised it would be something memorable.

If I may also briefly weigh in on Virginia’s ultimate fate at the opposite end of the film, I believed her to clearly be dead by the credits, an assumption the tagline on the film’s absurdly spoilery poster seems to support. I do love that its ambiguity has left enough room for that conclusion to be debatable, though.

Alli: I love this movie’s attention to detail. There’s just such a consistency and nothing feels ignored. Like any good murder movie or show, we the audience are expected to pick up on the clues to put things together: the red room, the broken mirror, the changed furniture, the same kind of bricks that were used in the walling, the magazine, the cigarettes, and last but not least the alarm on the watch. Those twelve revealing notes.

Britnee: Almost each time Virginia’s name was stated throughout The Psychic, that horrible yet extremely catchy radio hit, “Meet Virginia” by Train would play in my head. I think it would be so cool if one of those fake music videos on YouTube was made for that song using scenes from this film. Imagine those bloody visions flashing on the screen when the chorus hits. I completely suck at doing anything that tech-heavy, so I’m just putting the request out there hoping that someone has enough free time and talent to make this a reality.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
September: Alli presents Schizopolis (1996)
October: Brandon presents Unfriended (2015)
November: Britnee presents Hearts of Fire (1987)

-The Swampflix Crew

Pam Grier’s Undervalued Career in Witchcraft & Voodoo

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I often complain about how much of a shame it is that there are two Pam Grier In Space movies and they both suck. One of the all-time great personalities in genre filmmaking, Grier deserves so much better than the likes of the late career Eddie Murphy comedy The Adventures of Pluto Nash and the nu metal era John Carpenter misfire Ghosts of Mars. If we’re only going to launch Grier’s visage into space twice in her career, she deserves a fate far more badass. It turns out, though, that her out-of-orbit sci-fi career isn’t even the most frustrating undercutting of her genre film potential. What’s even worse is the way Grier’s few performances as a witch or a Voodoo priestess have been deflated & underserved, when the idea of a Pam Grier Witchcraft picture should be instant B-movie gold. It’s not even that the movies where Grier dabbles in the art of magic are bad; they’re actually quite enjoyable. It’s that they don’t deliver the full power & glory that a Witchy Pam Grier should be able to command with ease.

My frustration with this witchy deficiency began with our current Movie of the Month, the Ray Bradbury-penned 1983 Disney horror Something Wicked This Way Comes. In the film, Pam Grier plays The Dust Witch, a mostly silent agent of dark magic who commands immense power & beauty, but isn’t given nearly enough to do as a character when compared to her overlord, Mr. Dark. Grier elevates every scene she’s in with just her mere presence. An image of her in a white veil overlayed with flying shards broken glass is just as intense & effecting as any of Mr. Dark’s fervent monologues. Still, it’s a shame that for an actor who had proven before in films like Foxy Brown & Coffy that she could hold down a picture on her own, there was no room in the film’s dialogue for her badass, attention-grabbing voice. I love the witchy image Grier strikes in Something Wicked; watching her collect souls of hapless male victims while adorned in gold paint & black lace is enough to get me excited for her performance. It’s just frustrating that she isn’t given much to do outside that physical presence. I would have readily traded all of the film’s other pleasures to watch a movie centered entirely on The Dust Witch instead.

It turns out that wasn’t the first or last time Grier’s career in magic would be undercut. The only other time the actor appeared in a straightforward horror picture, ten years before her appearance in Something Wicked, she was cast as a Voodoo priestess named Lisa Fortier. Scream Blacula Scream, the 1973 sequel to the popular blacksploitation horror Blacula, opens with Grier, as Lisa, preforming a Voodoo ritual on her recently deceased mentor. According to other characters in the film, “When it comes to Voodoo, Lisa has more Natural Powers than anyone in the past ten years.” It’s instantly believable. Lisa’s study of the “extremely complex science of Voodoo,” which she treats with the proper reverence as a religious faith, is unquestioned, making her the most obvious candidate to replace her local sect’s recently deceased high priestess. Unfortunately, one of her fellow practitioners wants to jump the line of succession and raises Mamuwalde (Blacula, for the laymen out there) from the dead to get her out of the picture. The plan backfires, obviously. Mamuwalde builds a new little vampire coven, inducting nearly everyone he meets into his mind slave army, everyone except Lisa. Recognizing her power & beauty, Blacula instead ropes Lisa into performing a ritual to cure him, a ceremony that’s broken up by the cops, who he promptly murders much to Lisa’s horror.

Scream Blacula Scream should be the perfect vehicle for delivery on a Pam Grier With Magical Powers premise, but somehow her Voodoo priestess practices are just as undercut here as they are in Something Wicked. As Lisa, Pam Grier commands a quiet strength & skepticism that perfectly matches the movie’s oddly quiet, somber tone. Outside a scene where she’s walking arm in arm with Blacula like a power couple and the final, interrupted Voodoo ritual to kill him (which looks like the standard dolls, candles, and chants image you’d expect), however, she isn’t given much to do in way of practicing her craft. This is Blacula’s film, after all. The best Lisa could do is wait for her climactic ceremony to test her skills, a scene that isn’t even allowed to fully play out.

A better-realized version of Pam Grier’s brief career as a Voodoo priestess would have had her waging a supernatural war against a foe like Blacula instead of meekly attempting to serve him from a victim’s position. There was a moment in the early 90s where that dream more or less came to life, but it unfortunately served a platform much less prestigious than a live action Disney horror or even a blacksploitation horror sequel. Grier appeared again as a Voodoo priestess in an episode of the syndicated horror anthology television series Monsters, a direct descendant of Tales from the Darkside. In the episode “Hostile Takeover” a business dick attempts to take the Reagan-coined term “Voodoo economics” literally, by employing Grier’s priestess to help him cheat his way to the top. Like all EC Comics/Tales from the Crypt descendants, this thirst for power obviously comes with a price and he’s ultimately punished at the hands of the demon Grier’s priestess worships. Here’s where Grier gets to really practice magic, having great fun with the power she visibly commands. She drinks a white businessman’s blood, forms a pact with an all-powerful demon, sends faxes from beyond the grave, hacks computer screens through the power of her Voodoo, etc. The only shame is that the product this witchy Pam Grier free for all serves is sadly short & embarrassingly cheap. Grier only appears in a couple scenes in this Monsters episode and although she looks badass smoking a cigar in the Party City Voodoo priestess costume they afford, even she can’t elevate the show’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?-level budget, it might just have been the Witchy Pam Grier project of my dreams.

Something Wicked, Scream Blacula Scream, and “Hostile Takeover” are all enjoyable genre fare. Even though her power is undercut in all three instances, watching Pam Grier practice witchcraft & Voodoo is a large part of their fun. It’s just frustrating in each case that her power wasn’t put to better & more prominent use. The good news is that Grier is still working. She seems to have mostly moved on from the genre film roles that defined her career in the 70s & 80s, mostly playing police detectives now, but she’s still out there. If there’s even a small chance that the magic potential Grier showed as The Dust Witch could be developed in a much better realized Witchy Grier project, I’m going to keep the hope alive. Her brief forays into witchcraft & Voodoo have created an itch I didn’t even know I had, but I’ve yet to find a movie that satisfactorily scratches it.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, the Ray Bradbury-penned Disney horror Something Wicked This Way Comes, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this look at its Bette Davis-starring predecessor The Watcher in the Woods (1980), and last week’s comparison to Bradbury’s other suburban horror feature adaptation, The Halloween Tree (1993).

-Brandon Ledet

Deathrow Gameshow (1987)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I’m a huge sucker for dystopian gameshow cinema, so my appreciation for Deathrow Gameshow might very well be entirely dependent on genre. There’s nothing particularly special about this mid-80s sci-fi cheapie that you couldn’t find in titles like The Running Man, Death Race 2000, The Hunger Games, or Nerve in terms of dystopian world-building or slick production design. Deathrow Gameshow even sidesteps the genre’s usual adherence to liberal, anti-authoritarian politics to sympathize & laugh along with the abusers in power, which seems like the exact wrong way to go about making one of these things. Still, I couldn’t help but take delight of some of the Killer Gameshow from the Future surface pleasures of the film’s premise because the genre territory it occupies is so instantly appealing to me. As the film went along, I even started to appreciate the way its disgusting Reagan era politics & sadistic black humor helped distinguish the work from its genre peers, even if by being spiritually repugnant.

In the not too-distant future of1991, a game show titled Live or Die executes prisoners for captivated audiences’ afternoon television entertainment. Deathrow inmates sign waivers to appear on the show, where they answer trivia questions or complete simple (but rigged) tasks in the hopes of winning prizes. The cost of an incorrect answer or a job half done is a televised execution – by guillotine, by electrocution, by explosion, by whatever keeps eyes glued to the television. The show is wildly popular, with citizens committing crimes for the opportunity to appear as contestants & family members of the executed cheering on their death for brief fame or small prizes. Live or Die does have its critics, though. Protestors gather in the streets holding signs saying the host “should be aborted.” There’s also, of course, people out to kill the host themselves to avenge lives he’s ended on air for personal profit. What’s weird is that we’re asked to sympathize with the sick, oppressive fuck instead of his portrayed-as-whiny detractors. Instead of watching him suffer under the weight of his own societal sins like, say, James Woods’s similar sleaze bag in Videodrome, we’re supposed to be invested in his spiritual growth as he’s threatened punishment, but ultimately gets out on top. That might be a result of the film’s dedication to comedy instead of horror or dystopian sci-fi, but it is a striking deviation from how these things usually go nonetheless.

Besides aligning audience sympathies with its selfish sleaze bag gameshow host, Deathrow Gameshow also disgusts in the targets of its misanthropic humor. This film takes jabs at “militant” feminism, makes casual references to prison rape & domestic violence for easy “humor,” and is convinced that the mere mention for homosexual desire is the height of hilarity. It’s also worth mentioning that although there’s diversity in its deathrow prisoner population, the only black characters represented onscreen are violent criminals. The film wholly & cruelly commits to a Reagan-era sense of Fuck You, I Got Mine selfishness, but in a way that almost works to its advantage. Even if its goal was to make me laugh with its cruel sense of punching down humor, the way those gleeful stabs at political incorrectness land make me recoil in horror, which in a way heightens the effect of its premise. This is a crass film with a complete absence of a moral center, but that kind of Money > Empathy sentiment fits its killer gameshow premise surprisingly well. I’m not sure the effect was entirely intentional, but the discomfort certainly makes for a memorable, authentically horrific viewing experience.

That’s not to say all of Deathrow Gameshow’s humor amounted to empty cruelty, though. I got a chuckle when one of the Live or Die contestants wins death by hanging as a gameshow prize, only for a The Price is Right-type announcer to declare, “Every man dreams of being well hung.” It’s not a particularly smart or inventive joke, but it’s well told, much like other gags where a secretary is caught masturbating or a rolled-up car window reads the message, “Blow it out your ass.” Everything in Deathrow Gameshow fits in one of two categories: sex or violence. Sometimes that 80s-era lizard brain idiocy can be amusing, like when an assassin, portrayed by an actor known simply as Beano, chows down on a whole mess of spaghetti while casually discussing murder. Sometimes it can be deflating, like when a character calling a woman coded to be a Feminist “a stupid bitch” is supposed to be a knee-slapper of a punchline.

There are some stranger, non-comedic touches to Deathrow Gameshow too: prisoners only being referred to as numbers, television advertisements for sex work, a nightmare sequence being rigidly blocked off like a movie trailer, a character justifying the show’s murder for entertainment ethos by explaining, “Life is a transitional state and Death is God’s way of saying ‘Take a Break.’” The movie’s just a little too compromised in its spiritually corrupt humor & underwhelming in its world-building ambition to award a hearty recommendation. I don’t mean to besmirch the good name of filmmaker Mark Pirro, whose other titles include Nudist Colony of the Dead, A Polish Vampire in Burbank, and Curse of the Queerwolf, but I’m not sure he was the best person to tackle the material. While Pirro’s grimy, off-putting sense of humor did provide the film a memorably sleazy, discomforting vibe, it’s a property that could’ve been an all-time classic in the more ambitious hands of The Canon Group or maybe Roger Corman’s crew. As is, Deathrow Gameshow is entertaining enough in its lighthearted approach to cruel, meat-headed exploitation cinema. It’s just difficult to shake the feeling that it could’ve been something more worthwhile.

-Brandon Ledet

Poison (1991)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

It’s a goddamn shame the world has not been treated to more Todd Haynes features. Although the director has a follow-up to his recent critical hit Carol already on its way, the near-ten year gap between Carol & its predecessor, I’m Not There., is alarming, to put it lightly. At the same time, though, it’s actually something of a miracle that Haynes has had a career at all. I’d count works like Velvet Goldmine & Safe among the greatest films I’ve seen in my lifetime (or they at least felt that way when I first saw them in high school), but it’s shocking that the director was even able to get them made, much less turn their minor indie world successes into more mainstream-friendly dramas like Carol or Far from Heaven. How is a director widely known for making an unsanctioned Karen Carpenter biopic with an all-Barbie doll cast or a pansexual glam rock opera that implies a rumored  romantic affair between Bowie & Iggy still around & pulling funding from prestigious, Oscar-worthy dramas? I love the improbability of his career. It’s an absurd unlikelihood that dates at least as far back as his first feature film, a fractured anthology about queer anxiety that somehow pulls influence from both 1950s drive-in creature features & Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. Todd Haynes has always been a movie industry anomaly, a fact proven by that debut somehow winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance the year of its release.

Poison is an interwoven tryptic of three separate narratives. One story is a documentary shot in lurid Douglas Sirk colors about a young, constantly bullied boy who “murders his father and then flies away.” Another details unspoken homosexual desire between two 1940s prisoners that grows increasingly violent the longer it’s ignored. The third, most oddly lighthearted story, is a parody of 1950s B-pictures where a scientist accidentally consumes his own “sex drive serum” and becomes a monstrous, lethal leper. These stories might feel entirely disharmonious at first glance, even ranging from black & white to dull color to full Douglas Sirk indulgences in visual richness. However, they are each tied together by an expression of queer anxiety. Childhood bullying, living closeted, unexpressed desire, and the menace of HIV/AIDS inform so much of the film’s unspoken conflict that its context as a work of pure queer anxiety cannot be ignored. It’s felt as soon as the opening quote exclaims, “The whole world is dying of panicky fright” and never lets up as its three stories concurrently barrel towards their unavoidably sour ends. What’s most bizarre is the way Haynes can play this anxiety for varied effect. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes shockingly brutal, and often trafficking in the delicate, distilled imagery of a Guy Maddin picture, Poison’s intent & effect is a scattered, but consistently fascinating mess of anxious expressions of queerness.

As with a lot of first time features, this is a film that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve. It’s jarring how widely ranging Haynes allows those influences to be, though, touching on everything from John Waters & Roger Corman to Jean Genet & James Bidgood. I’m not sure you can detect the eventual greatness Haynes would eventually synthesize these influences into in titles like Velvet Goldmine, but it’s so much fun watching him clash them against each other in this fractured anthology piece. Poison is recognizably the work of a young, enthusiastic, queer man aching to unleash his weirdo sensibilities on the movie world at large. I find it both improbable & delightful that he’s been rewarded for it, even if his work has been despairingly infrequent as of late. As a film, it’s difficult to deny that Poison is rough around the edges, perhaps even by design, but as a cultural object it has a kind of punk art world shakeup quality that’s easy to find infectious. At times I wished during its runtime that I could have watched any one of its vignettes play out on its own instead of the three fighting each other for air, but they worked well together as a kind of anxious artist’s statement and initiative war cry for a rewarding career that’s only gotten more delightfully improbable as the decades have rolled on.

-Brandon Ledet

Ray Bradbury’s Return to Tormenting Suburban Children in The Halloween Tree (1993)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

There’s something instantly familiar about the spooky, vintage Midwest suburbs of the Ray Bradbury-penned feature Something Wicked This Way Comes, our current Movie of the Month. Even watching the film for the first time in my 30s, I felt as if it had already been in my life forever, despite my familiarity with Bradbury’s work typically falling solidly under sci-fi, not horror. The spooky bygone suburbs of the film felt very much akin to horror movies I had grown up with as a kid, titles like Jumanji & The Monster Squads, a setting that’s been evoked & praised in so many Ebert reviews I don’t even know where to start citing them. Apparently, it’s a setting Bradbury had mentally returned to often himself, a spacial & temporal locale he had framed many of his children-targeted short stories & novels in, despite only one being adapted to a major motion picture release. Something Wicked This Way Comes does have some Bradbury-penned company in its nature as a feature length adaptation, though, just not anything with the financial backing of a live action Walt Disney production. Instead, its closest spiritual relative in nostalgic suburb horror would be a made-for-TV animated feature, a much cheaper mode of entertainment all around.

The Halloween Tree looks like an animated recreation of Something Wicked This Way Comes’s exact tone & setting, though it feels slightly behind that work in every way. Its fantasy novel source material was written in 1972, ten years behind Something Wicked’s 1962 publication date. It was produced as a late Hanna-Barbera animation, while Something Wicked was working with Disney dollars, which go a long way. Even in its central themes, which more or less amount to a history lesson on The True Meaning of Halloween, it pales in comparison to the much more complex subject matter of its predecessor, which explores intangible subjects like fear & desire. It’s difficult, then, to think of The Halloween Tree as anything but a minor work by comparison, but that doesn’t mean it’s charmless or worth excluding from the Something Wicked legacy. Bradbury himself was at least invested in the work’s value, providing a storybook-style narration for its framing device. The hand-drawn animation is much more complex than most Hanna-Barbera productions are afforded. Speaking from a personal standpoint, I’d also say it was nice to see a plot structure usually reserved for The True Meaning of Christmas applied to a holiday I actually give a shit about. The Halloween Tree feels somewhat like a scrappy echo of Something Wicked (which was something of a bomb itself), but it’s got enough of its own charm & personality to justify its existence outside that superior work’s shadow.

The spooky Midwest suburb setting The Halloween Tree shares with Something Wicked really only serves as a framing device. A group of kids preparing to trick ‘r treat on Halloween night see their sick friend’s ghost running through the woods just outside their suburb. Following his specter, they bump into a creepy old ghoul (voiced by an unrecognizable Leonard Nimoy) who seems to be threatening to claim the boy’s soul as he succumbs to appendicitis complications. In the process of bartering for their sick friend’s existence, the children are mocked for not understanding the meaning behind their various Halloween costumes: a mummy, a witch, a skeleton, etc. Chiding them, “All dressed up for Halloween and you don’t know why,” the old ghoul takes them on a temporal road trip through historical Halloween-type cultural traditions that relate to their costumes. Vignettes touching on Egyptian mummification, Stonehenge, witch trials, Día de Muertos, and so on provide meaning to the children’s various costume choices as they inch closer to saving their friend’s life through bleeding heart negotiation tactics. Much like with Something Wicked, the resolution to the threat of death is much more saccharine than the stakes appear during the conflict but the film could still potentially haunt an audience who catches it at a young enough age. The two movies’ real connection, though, is the way Bradbury makes a small crew of suburban scamps feel as if they’re the only kids in the world, saddling them with the responsibility of waging a metaphysical Good Vs. Evil battle.

To be honest, if I weren’t watching this film on Alli’s recommendation during our Movie of the Month conversation or I wasn’t aware of Bradbury’s involvement, I’m not sure The Halloween Tree would have immediately reminded me of Something Wicked This Way Comes. My mind likely would have gone more readily to Over the Garden Wall, a recent animated story that shares The Halloween Tree’s religious reverence for Jack-o-Lanterns & Halloween costuming. The similarities shared with Something Wicked are not at all difficult to reach for, however. By the time the gang of suburban tykes reach an abandoned circus where the attractions are haunted by an evil magic, Bradbury’s wicked fingerprints are detectable all over it. The most immediately noticeable difference in this version of his aesthetic is that one of the kids is a girl, which feels out of line with Something Wicked’s distinctive boyhood POV. That detail was apparently added in its adaptation from book to screen, a smart choice that helps broaden its appeal. For anyone looking to introduce children to horror as a genre, you could probably do no better than a double feature of these two Bradbury-penned works after a long night of trick ‘r treating under suburban streetlights. He’s got a welcoming touch to his spooky children’s fare that should prove to be invitingly universal, even if the settings are so consistently specific it’s difficult to tell them apart from work to work.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, the Ray Bradbury-penned Disney horror Something Wicked This Way Comes, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at its Bette Davis-starring predecessor, The Watcher in the Woods (1980).

-Brandon Ledet

American Fable (2017)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Anne Hamilton’s directorial debut is a film that floats between several recognizable, marketable genres without firmly landing on any single one in particular. American Fable is an 80s-set kids-on-bikes supernatural adventure film, except without any of the overt Amblin nostalgia that made Stranger Things a hot topic last winter. It feels like a Southern Gothic supernatural thriller at its edges, but its Midwest farmland setting & fairy tale tone distance it from that genre’s hallmarks. It flirts with the fairy tale horror tones defined by filmmakers like Terry Gilliam & Guillermo del Too, but never fully commits to the darkness of either influence. This genre-defiant, difficult to pin down quality is fascinating to watch unfold, because its various destinations are left wholly unpredictable. At the same time, its loopy dream logic paths through its own fantasy space can also be frustrating, since they never decisively choose a tonal direction to command its overall aesthetic. It’s easy to leave American Fable both vaguely let down by its ultimate effect, yet gleefully enthusiastic over the power Hamilton already wields behind the camera so early in her career.

In its experiments with a wide sampling of genres & tones, American Fable‘s one consistency is in sticking with the storytelling focus indicated by its title. Parables, fairy tales, bedtime stories, and even straightforward lies shape the logic & the narrative of its farmland tale of a young girl in crisis. Early on in American Fable, our young protagonist requests a bedtime story from her father that’s scary, but ultimately has a happy ending. As her own story unfolds, it becomes increasingly unlikely that it will meet both of those requirements itself, though it certainly follows the rhythms of a bedtime story as a narrative anchor. Suffering the shitty end of Reaganomics, the girl’s family is on the verge of losing its farm, its livelihood, to mythically greedy real estate developers who have been eating up the region. This leads to a version of the parable “The Lion and the Mouse,” except reimagined as “The Farmer and the Real Estate Mogul.” Our protagonist is asked to keep the secret that a wealthy man is being imprisoned in her farm’s empty silo, knowing that he’s likely to buy the land from under them if he’s ever freed. The imprisoned man is sweet to her. He buys her time & sympathy with the currency of well-told stories, but he’s still a potential danger if she grants him freedom, due to his basic nature as a wealthy businessman. Themes of power, control, and economics, as well as the negotiation & mechanism of the wealthy man’s imprisonment, are filtered through the dream logic rhythms of films like Paperhouse or MirrorMask. American Fable crumbles under any literal interpretation of its seemingly simplistic plot, but leaves behind an impressive impact in its wake.

The most immediately impressive aspect of American Fable is the way it captures an imaginative child’s POV. The film is often shot as if it were a child peering from under a table or through a cracked door while adults passionately, but quietly discuss a world they’ve been locked out of. The film also has the sweeping, breathless pacing of an 80min montage that, while undercutting the in-the-moment emotional impact of a few potentially powerful scenes, plays directly into a child’s eccentric view of the world. This perspective allows for the film’s haunted carnival imagery & its long stares at a horned witch on horseback who guards the silo-turned-prison to feel just as natural to its farmland setting as children catching fireflies in Mason jars at dusk. In an early scene an injured baby deer’s hospice is lit with the drastic dream world colors of a giallo film; the detail feels no more or less out of place than any of its outright fantasy spaces. This is likely a film made for an adult audience (not necessarily because of any “adult” content), but because of the tones & perspective Hamilton chooses to work with I feel like I might have been much more in tune with its headspace as a young child.

American Fable is an often exciting film, even it’s not a wholly satisfying one. Much like the recent Netflix-distributed indie Dig Two Graves, it reaches for an ambitious sense of otherworldly mystery & awe that sometimes outsizes its means, but it’s consistently impressive for reaching that far at all. Anne Hamilton undeniably shows promise in the potency her imagery. I also very much respect her confident looseness in narrative & genre constriction, even if I ultimately was left scratching my head over the totality of its effect. I didn’t especially love the film, but I was constantly fascinated by it, recalling the feeling of listening to an improvised bedtime story with no clear destination, but strange enough details to entertain along the way. I’m not sure this is the kind of film that’s going to attract big studio attention on its own merits, but I’d love to see what Hamilton could do in the future with the kinds of budgets del Toro & Gilliam have been afforded in the past. I’m sure it’d be a dream.

-Brandon Ledet