horror

The Devil’s Candy (2017)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Heavy metal & horror seem like an obvious, foolproof combination, but mixing the two comparably macabre mediums for easy cinematic terror without backsliding into clichéd cheese is actually a very difficult balance to strike. For every successful metal-themed horror film, like the recent triumph​ Deathgasm, there’s a thousand corny hair metal & nu-metal failures that make the entire enterprise feel like a cheap, half-cooked financial ploy. As with most hyper-specific fandoms, such as superhero comics or pro wrestling or video game cultures, there’s always a sense with metal that inauthentic outsiders will be eaten alive by those in the know if they aren’t coming from the knowledgeable starting point of a true fan. The metal in Deathgasm and even Tenacious D’s Pick of Destiny feels true to the culture in ways that less successful (but enjoyably campy) features like Shock ‘Em Dead & Trick or Treat (1986) don’t and through that authenticity they build a more long-lasting, dedicated fan base. I believe The Devil’s Candy will also strike a chord (heh, heh) with true metal fandom in the same way. It makes a strong case for itself as a title worth being championed by the legions of black leather-clad headbangers out there who’re hungry for authentic metal-themed horror. It even does so without acknowledging the basic silliness of that combo the way the more comedic titles Deathgasm & Pick of Destiny do.

A young family moves into what’s quickly revealed to be a haunted house. The gloomy teen daughter struggles to find footing in her new school, but bonds with her work-at-home artist father (Can’t Hardly Wait/Empire Records‘s all-growed-up Ethan Embry) over a shared love of melt-your-face metal riffs. The mother (UnReal‘s Shiri Appelby) doesn’t share their passion for ear-shattering monster riffs, but the family functions well as an insular unit. This cohesion unravels, of course, as the demons that haunt their new home show themselves as an artistic muse both for the paterfamilias painter and for the mentally disabled man who formerly occupied their home and is revealed very early in the proceedings to be a self-conflicted murderer. The painter loses time while feverishly working on increasingly disturbing art in his new studio space, dropping the ball on his familial obligations while sinking into a hypnotic state. This leaves his wife & daughter vulnerable to the cursed home’s former resident, who’s similarly compelled to hypnotically riff on his candy red, flying-V guitar at unreasonable volumes . . . as well as to chop up children with a hacksaw. As the painter reflects on the young figures that suddenly populate his increasingly violent works, he explains, “It’s like these children are inside of me, begging, screaming to get out. And I don’t know why.” Presumably, the child killer feels the same way about his own unsavory passion, but he much less eloquently states that children “are the sweetest candy of all.” It’s an effectively creepy line.

Story-wise, The Devil’s Candy is a fairly standard haunted house creepshow, not much different from other recent low budget horrors like We Are Still Here or I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House. The film is slickly edited, however, especially in scenes where Ethan Embry’s painter loses time in a trance while images of his intensifying artistic process mix with the equally haunted killer’s own mode of expression: dead children. It’s an eerie device for depicting possession, one where ghosts & demons are only felt onscreen through the artistic muse of the people they torment. The metal soundtrack that flavors these scenes is only ever disrupted by the always-creepy sounds of Catholic mass (I feel comfortable saying that as someone who was reluctantly raised in the Church), which pushes the central hauntings beyond basic artistic obsession into a religious (if blasphemous) zealotry. Character actor Leland Oser (who recently killed it as the lead in Faults) appears occasionally as a priest on the killer’s personal collection of VHS tapes to explain that Satan is very much real and that humans are His demons who walk the Earth, allowing Him to express His evil through their bodies. Sometimes this takes the form of oil on canvas; sometimes it looks like hacked-up dead children. The basic premise of the film might be an overly familiar concept, but the way it’s expressed onscreen as artistic muse is still chillingly effective.

Initially premiering at the Toronto International Film Fest in 2015 and being quietly dumped to VOD two years later, The Devil’s Candy isn’t likely to make waves outside eagle-eyed horror circles. Within these clusters of people who obsessively pick over every new horror release, however, the film’s likely to find a significant, dedicated audience, especially with folks who regularly listen to metal. The Devil’s Candy‘s haunted house premise is far from a game changer, but its slick editing style and authentic heavy metal aesthetic is likely to win over a very specific, very dedicated audience in the long run. They might award the film two devil horns way up \m/ \m/ instead of the traditional Siskel & Ebert thumbs, but the sentiment will be all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #27 of The Swampflix Podcast: Beyond Society – Brian Yuzna’s Collabs With Screaming Mad George & Blood Diner (1987)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Welcome to Episode #27 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our twenty-seventh episode, Brandon makes James watch the blood-soaked horror comedy Blood Diner (1987) for the first time. Also, James & Brandon discuss all ten collaborations between director Brian Yuzna & “surrealistic” special effects master Screaming Mad George, the monstrous creative team behind the horror classic Society (1992). Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet & James Cohn

Raw (2017)

/ swampflix / 42 Comments

2017 is turning out to be a banner year for horror. After the absolutely stunning Get Out, which was so richly steeped in both metaphor and lived experience, Julia Ducournau’s beautiful and haunting Raw has just hit American audiences like a ton of bricks, or buckets of grue dropped from a great height. It’s a well-worn topic of discussion within the intersection of horror fandom and social criticism that the monsters that we create are reflective of our political climate: zombie movies are more popular during republican presidencies, while vampire films abound during democratic ones. The conclusions drawn from this generally tend to focus on how zombies (rampantly consumerist, at least in Romero’s films; horde-like; unthinking in their consumption; mindless and easily led) represent progressive view of conservatives, while vampires (often foreign, sexually deviant, parasitic) represent the conservative view of progressives. It annoys me that Raw is already identified as a “cannibal movie” in much of the press since that spoils so much of the surprise, but the cat’s out of the bag now; on this political spectrum, I’m not sure where films about cannibalism lie, especially when we’re seeing great zombie flicks coming out of Asia (like Train to Busan) and Raw itself is a Belgian/French co-production.

Raw follows the arrival of new vet student Justine (Garance Marillier) at her parents’ alma mater, where her older sister Alex (Ella Rumpf) is already an upperclassman. Awoken on her first night by gay roommate Adrien (Raba Nait Oufella), Justine is taken through the first in a series of hazing rituals, which ends with the lifelong vegetarian being forced to eat a raw rabbit kidney. Unexpectedly, this awakens a ravenous hunger in her for meat, of increasingly exotic kinds. This is all paired with the other things that young women often go through: sexual lusts, falling for a gay best friend, and finding out more about yourself than you ever really wanted.

To say more would give away too much of what makes this film such a delightful (if stomach-churning) experience, but I was beaten to the punch by Catherine Bray of Variety in the comparisons that were most evident to me, as she called the film “Suspiria meets Ginger Snaps,” which was my thought exactly while sitting in the theater. The school setting lends itself to the former allusion, as does the stunningly saturated color pallette and the viscerality of the gore (which is less present than one would expect from either the marketing or the oft-cited fainting of several audience members at the Toronto premier), while the coming-of-age narrative as explored by two sisters with a complex relationship makes the latter reference apparent. Make no mistake, however: even for the strongest stomachs amongst us, there will be something in this film that turns that organ inside out.

I’m not usually averse to spoiling the films that I review, but I’ll say no more about Raw, because this film demands to be seen, especially on the big screen. If you’re fortunate enough to have a screening near you, waste not a minute more: go see this movie tonight before someone spoils it for you. In my review of my favorite films of 2016, I mentioned that I was left unsatisfied by The Neon Demon; this is the film I wanted The Neon Demon to be. Go see it. Go now!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A Night to Dismember (1983)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

campstamp

Doris Wishman is primarily known for her work in sexploitation cinema, building her career as a low-energy, oddly punk version of Russ Meyer with films like Nude on the Moon, and Another Day, Another Man. Once you get into the back half of her career, however, there are plenty of weird genre outliers that complicate that reputation, like the killer breasts espionage thriller Deadly Weapons. Nothing I’ve seen from Wishman so far, though, Deadly Weapons included, has been comparable to the way out of bounds, dissonant horror cheapie A Night to Dismember. Although the film stars porn actress Samantha Fox and makes occasional use if her nude body, it’s a work that finds Wishman operating far outside her sexploitation comfort zone. A Night to Dismember is a Doris Wishman slasher, purely so. It finds the director shooting gloom & gore the way she usually shoots scantily clad women, following a very strict Halloween/Friday the 13th-style narrative structure to deliver its jarringly violent genre thrills. What makes it notably bizarre beyond Wishman stepping outside her usual genre box is that the film makes no attempt to tell a clearly intelligible story besides mimicking the general feel of a slasher. So sloppy it’s avant garde, A Night to Dismember adheres to a strict “Axe murders for all, coherent plot for none” political platform. Almost unwatchable, yet undeniably entertaining, Wishman’s sole slasher is chaotic outsider art, a watch that’s just as challenging as it is inane.

I can’t say with total confidence that I fully understand the plot of this picture. A young woman is released from a mental institution where she’s imprisoned for supposedly killing two teen boys. Her siblings conspire to have her re-committed by gaslighting her with prankish “hallucinations” and by framing her for a series of axe murders. That’s all I’ve got. Rapid, continuous narration from a detective who worked on this case of violent crimes is the only aspect of A Night to Dismember that affords the film any level of cohesion. There are a few scenes of badly dubbed dialogue that if you squint at them just right feel as if they belong to a proper feature film, but for the most part the movie a jumbled mess of candy red blood, kaleidoscope graphics, and brief flashes of nudity. It’s a full-length exercise in oddly disjointed editing, but I found an enjoyable sense of kinetic energy in that constant, off-kilter disorder. From the opening scene where a woman axe murders her sister in a bathtub to light-hearted elevator music, to the narrator’s instructions to contact authorities with any intel in the whereabouts of the killer over the end credits, A Night to Dismember is a total nuclear meltdown of a mess, but it’s an undeniably entertaining mess. I can honestly say that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it before, which makes it a valuable work as a cinematic experience, even if some of its most interesting results might be attributable to ineptitude.

Headless necks squirt blood in tidy steams, knives are rhythmically stabbed into victims’ throats, hearts are ripped out by hand, fingers are severed, a skull is crushed under a spinning car tire: Wishman’s horror show features gore galore. Some scenes are much stranger in their visual effects: disembodied hands reach to grope our would-be final girl from all directions, dreams of fratricide are accompanied by orgasmic moans, unexplained skulls & 80s computer graphics overlay the action, lightning strike stock footage straight out of 1930s horror appear to signify dread. Wishman forgoes her duties as a storyteller here to deliver a disorienting montage instead of a proper feature film. She readily supplies the basic components of blood & tits 80s horror, but makes no effort to reign them in as an understandable narrative. A Night to Dismember bluntly delivers the goods with no concern for justifying their presence onscreen. It’s just as blatantly to the point as it is a total mess and I greatly admire the punk energy Wishman finds in that sloppiness even if it is a constant struggle to understand exactly what she’s doing onscreen throughout the experience.

According to Wishman herself, most of the film negative for the original version of A Night to Dismember was destroyed in a lab, which made the constant, overbearing narration necessary to tell a cohesive story. The VHS cover art for the film claims an 80 minute runtime and the original poster credits an entirely different actress than Samantha Fox. It’s widely believed that the original version of the film was intentionally “lost” & re-shot to include Fox, completely ditching the story told in the first version to boost ticket sales with a recognizable actress. Not having seen the lengthier version of the film, which is apparently hosted by a different narrator & follows a more supernatural plotline, I can only report that the short, hour-long version of A Night to Dismember is an entertaining oddity, a fine example of avant garde filmmaking at its trashiest.

-Brandon Ledet

The Girl with All the Gifts (2017)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

Whoever botched the distribution for the recent zombie-themed sci-fi horror The Girl with All the Gifts should be ashamed of themselves. It took two full years for this British production to reach American shores, only to be quietly dumped onto VOD instead of enjoying a full theatrical run. A little apprehension about its chances in wide release is understandable. If this film were released in the mid-00s it’d be considered highly marketable, but its genre’s cultural status has changed since then. The zombie film as a medium may have reached its cultural nadir last year with the exceedingly silly Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but that doesn’t mean the genre is thematically bankrupt by nature. The recent South Korean action thriller Train to Busan alone was exciting enough for some critics to declare the zombie genre undead and now we have a small, thoughtful drama with a strong sci-fi bent arriving in its wake to very little, if any fanfare. On paper, a sci-fi horror with a female lead (and several well-written female supporting characters) that narratively splits the difference between Logan & 28 Days Later sounds like an easy sell. It must have arrived to the market at the exact wrong time, though, as it only earned half of its budget back in its brief run at the box office. Time should be very kind to The Girl with All the Gifts, but modern audiences & distributors weren’t, probably due to an understandable bout of genre exhaustion.

The opening half hour of this film is absolutely stunning. The concluding half hour is similarly worthy of praise & attention. It’s everything between those points that could be accused of slipping into overly-familiar genre territory. The Girl with All the Gifts begins in a military facility where children are being groomed & studied for mysterious scientific purposes, not unlike in the recent art horror piece Evolution. The star pupil/prisoner at this facility is an unusually intelligent youngster named Melanie (promising newcomer Sennia Nanua). This eternally chipper, persistently curious young’n responds to the military security guards referring to her as “it” and “an abortion” with a smiling “Good morning!” and “You’re very welcome!” despite being restrained and wheeled around like a pint-sized Hannibal Lector. She eventually sets in motion an action adventure plot where she, her most adoring teacher, a few overly-cautious security guards, and an uncaring scientist creep (an effectively chilling Glenn Close) venture into a cinematically familiar world of abandoned, zombie-infested cities. It’s out in this post-apocalyptic hellscape that the movie begins to feel a little disappointingly generic, especially in its assertion that Melanie may just be the key to their search for a cure. However, the solution to the problem of The Cure is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a zombie film before and The Girl with All the Gifts finds its own way to refresh the genre by focusing on the scientific implications of the way its zombie virus spreads & the philosophical implications of what it means to attempt to stop it.

The major variation on genre expectation here is the way the film plays with the children in peril trope. The initial hook of The Girl with All the Gifts is that it complicates the emotional effect of placing a child in danger by making that child a danger herself. Like in Logan, we’re asked to sympathize & identify with a young girl who has to be held back from doing harm to others, even to the people she loves. It’s difficult not to pity a child who’s locked in a cell & forced to eat worms for sustenance, but once you see the potential damage that can be wrought if those worms & that cell are taken away from her the scenario becomes a little more nuanced. Thankfully, that twist on the children in peril trope isn’t the only major conflict the film has in mind. After a brief, forgivable trek through Search for a Cure zombie film tedium, The Girl with All the Gifts sinks into a fascinating exploration of the ways Nature reclaims human structures when given enough time and how human bodies are a part of that reclamation. Fighting against Nature’s course is proposed to be potentially futile, which is a pretty hefty lesson to stomach within a genre that’s often reduced to cheap jump scares and Michael Jackson dance routines. The post-Romero tradition of zombie cinema has always thrived on reaching for metaphor in its modes of undead havoc and although The Girl with All the Gifts may briefly appear to be something you’ve seen before in its second act stretch, it eventually finds new thematic purpose for the genre. That’s no small feat, considering the decades of tradition it’s riding in on, not to mention the oversaturation of the zombie market in the past decade alone.

If nothing else, this film is proof that a straightforward, gimmick-free zombie movie can still be worthwhile. There’s no real need for Zombieland, Fido, Life After Beth, Warm Bodies, The Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, and their like-minded contemporaries to shake up the genre with jokey meta humor (although I’ll admit to enjoying all five of those films to some degree, due to being a huge sucker for gimmicky horror in general). The Girl with All the Gifts does what it can to best distinguish itself within the genre, searching for a very specific aesthetic in its militaristic grey & green color palette, its loopy drone soundtrack, and its world-building details like a scent-distorting “blocker gel” that repels the zombies, who characters call “hungries.” There’s also a literary feel to the film in a larger sense, which includes blatant references to things like Pandora’s Box & Schroedinger’s Cat, perhaps as a result of its nature as an adaptation of a pre-existing novel. For the most part, though, the film tries to excel through basic measurements of craft. Its dialogue is well-performed, its creepy sound design is top notch in terms of tension & atmosphere, and it manages to stage a convincing, fantastic image of widespread, zombie-fueled chaos on a miniscule indie horror budget. If released in the mid-00s days of the James Gunn/Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later I have no doubt this film would have been a hit. It’s an impressively well-made genre entry that wrings plenty of surprise pleasures out of a medium everyone presumed was bone dry, simply through strength of craft & metaphor. Hopefully as modern culture’s zombie fatigue lifts, The Girl with All the Gifts will get its due as a thoughtful, thematically-rich sci-fi horror flick. Even if that never happens, it will always remain a great film.

-Brandon Ledet

The Belko Experiment (2017)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

When we were praising the sci-fi fantasy superhero flick Guardians of the Galaxy for our Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. series last year, one of the things that most impressed me on the rewatch was just how much the Disney-owned Marvel Studios was able to reign in writer-director James Gunn’s nastier tendencies. There’s certainly a sense of tragedy & trauma hanging in the air above Guardians that’s missing from a lot of Marvel’s more whiz-bang blockbuster productions, but it’s far from the gleefully horrific cruelty of other James Gunn creations like Slither & Super. With the follow-up to that surprise 2014 hit approaching this summer, however, it’s actually kind of endearing to see Gunn return to the cruelty of his smaller, meaner works in his latest-produced screenplay. Released by the kings of cheap, but effective horror in the 2010s, Blumhouse Productions (who’ve recently had big enough hits in both Split & Get Out that they could probably just coast for the rest of the year), the Gunn-penned exploitation piece The Belko Experiment finds the once-restrained prankster shaking off the Disney cobwebs and returning to the gleeful brutality that defined his career before he was a widely-recognized name.

The poster for The Belko Experiment plainly promises a “Office Space meets Battle Royale” genre mashup and that five-word descriptor might as well serve as the film’s IMDb plot synopsis. A Columbian office building staffed with mostly foreign, English-speaking workers is shut down by mysterious, off-screen forces who prevent escape for the employees trapped within by barricading all doors & windows. The imprisoned population is instructed over an intercom to murder thirty of their own coworkers within a certain timeframe or sixty will be killed as punishment. Non-compliance means that participants’ heads will be exploded by a remotely detonated bomb. Of course, grabs for power arise within the group as former bosses attempt to pull rank among their now-equal employees and “fire” them with the aid of the security guard’s firearms. Our hero (10 Cloverfield Lane‘s John Gallagher Jr.) attempts to put an end to this disgusting, brutally violent mode of corporate ladder-climbing early & often with rationalized pleas for peace, but the killings continue anyway. As the experiment goes on it becomes apparent that no character, no matter how harmless or affable, is safe from being murdered in cold blood and that this is the kind of nihilistic exploitation exercise that deliberately avoids any possible chance of a “happy” ending.

This high-concept premise makes The Belko Experiment out to be something like a bloodier, corporate-set version of the recent sci-fi cheapie Circle. It initially traffics in the same social science philosophy in rationalizing who “deserves” to survive and what makes one life more “worthwhile” than another (youth, parenting, wealth, etc.), but honestly that’s far from its #1 concern. Mostly, Gunn just tries to have fun with his eighty or so archetype characters that populate the Columbian office building setting by strategically ending their lives for maximum comedic shock value. It’s clearly a video game-style premise, with explicit rules & objectives set by an off-screen gamemaster, but the film does manage to squeeze a few good corporate satire jabs out of the format. I was especially tickled by the way the basic concept of productivity quotas & metrics that drive capitalist enterprise were translated directly into lives lost in the film’s ridiculous dog-eat-dog fight for survival. There are some Trump-like platitudes about how to survive in the business world like, “We have to be bold here. This is not a time for timidity,” and some music choices like an elevator-friendly, Spanish-language version of “I Will Survive” that also got a good chuckle out of me. The Belko Experiment excels when it jokingly focuses on its fictional company’s eerie slogan, “Business without boundaries,” and in other jabs at corporate office culture, but not so much when it asks big questions like whether it’s best to futilely attempt to save everyone or strive for the seemingly more attainable goal of just saving yourself.

My one major problem with The Belko Experiment seems antithetical to what I thought made Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy film so enjoyable: it’s just not cruel enough. This is a bloody film with a ludicrously high body count and, yet, it seems to be shy of practical effects gore. If you compare the violence in this film to the recent superhero bloodbath Logan, the kills have a weightless frivolity to them that I think undercuts the film’s nihilism. The only time The Belko Experiment attempts to get truly grotesque in its gleeful ultraviolence is when one character’s skull is caved in with repeated blows from an axe. The cuts in that scene are rapid, though, only briefly flashing the consequences of the axe’s blows before shying away to focus elsewhere. If the film’s nihilism is supposed to mean just as much as its satire of office environment power structures, it makes no sense to shy away from the physical consequences of the violence in this way. The movie proudly displays plenty of blood. It was just lacking in viscera.

Maybe that one sticking point for me was a result of The Belko Experiment‘s allowance of gun violence to enter the scenario. Its office supplies murder weapons (including tape dispensers, letter openers, meat cleavers, Molotov cocktails, etc.) made much more interesting, grotesque kills. The film could’ve easily pushed the novelty & brutality of its high-concept scenario much further by sticking to that set-specific limitation. Still, The Belko Experiment was a decent exploitation exercise in all its own bloody-but-not-gory glory. If nothing else, it’s great to see James Gunn’s sick sense of humor return to the screen unfiltered and, given the current hard right shift of our political climate, a violent corporate culture parody might be the exact kind of mildly satirical schlock we need right now.

-Brandon Ledet

The Lure (2017)

/ swampflix / 21 Comments

Synths! Sequins! Sex! Gore! What more could you ask for? The Lure is a mermaid-themed horror musical that’s equal parts MTV & Hans Christian Andersen in its modernized fairy tale folklore. Far from the Disnified retelling of The Little Mermaid that arrived in the late 1980s, this blood-soaked disco fantasy is much more convincing in its attempts to draw a dividing line between mermaid animality & the (mostly) more civilized nature of humanity while still recounting an abstract version of the same story. As a genre film with a striking hook in its basic premise, it’s the kind of work that invites glib descriptors & points of comparison like An Aquatic Ginger Snaps Musical or La La Land of the Damned, but there’s much more going on in its basic appeal than that sense of genre mash-up novelty. This debut feature from Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska somehow tackles themes as varied as love, greed, feminism, alcoholism, body dysmorphia, betrayal, revenge, camaraderie, and (forgive my phrasing here) fluid sexuality all while feeling like a nonstop party or an especially lively, glitterful nightmare. It’s astounding.

Two young mermaid sisters, Golden & Silver, join us legged folk on land after curiously spying on some drunken revelers from just under the surface of the water at a cityside beach. Fascinated with the mermaids’ siren song duet & apparent ability to temporarily sprout legs (but no human genitalia, much to everyone’s dismay), the beach-side drunks adopt the sisters into their band: an adult-themed nightclub act that sounds something like synthpop act Berlin gone disco. Soon they’re the most popular act at any disco burlesque in all of Warsaw, first providing the backing track for other topless performers and then quickly becoming topless performers themselves. The club makes no effort to hide the fact that these are fantastical creatures, making their gigantic, muscular mermaid tails a central part of the act. The problems that break up this sexed-up reverie arise when Silver & Golden aren’t performing. One falls in love with a human, both grow frustrated with their over-controlling band mates, and neither are sure what to make of Triton, who leads a similar life on land fronting a wildly popular punk band at a nearby club. All of these conflicts come to a head the way they also did in Poland’s last significant international horror release, Demon: through a drunken wedding celebration that ends much, much later into the night than it should.

It’s possible that some of the cultural significance of themes lurking just under the surface of The Lure might be going over my head as an American outsider (a concern I also had with Demon, to be honest). Inscrutable dialogue like, “Do you live in some old monkey’s ear?” occasionally threw me off-balance in that way, but that open-for-interpretation oddness lends itself well to the universality of pop music lyrics’ subjectivity. Lines like, “Bitter tastes can be delicious,” “We’re all gloomy as hell,” and “Put your hand deep inside me and drag me to shore,” cut through the language barrier of the pop lyrics translations to feel significant despite their enigmatic nature. This dynamic also plays well into how the sisters relate to the outside world in ways we don’t fully understand as an audience of land-walkers. Sometimes their dolphin-noise communication between one another is subtitled for our benefit, but often we’re left completely in the dark. This not only maintains the suspense of whether Golden or Silver are about to strike out in another act of animalistic, flesh-eating violence (or equally animalistic acts of sexual perversion), but also supports the film’s necessary distinction of their unknowable inhumanity. As Triton puts it, “We are not human. We are just on vacation here.” Any tragedy that befalls the mermaids or the humans who desire to interact with them is a direct result of losing track of that basic truth, which is an easy enough narrative through-line to hold onto, even if some of the details in the phrasing present a communicative struggle.

Of course, the lure of The Lure isn’t entirely dependent on the film’s dialogue or thematic weight. From a filmmaking standpoint, my favorite aspect of the movie is just its value as a stunning collection of sights & sounds. Every scene in the film looks either like a music video dream sequence or a flashlight-illuminated crime scene. The costuming & old school musical sound stage imagery is impeccable. Its The Knife-esque synths & vocal distortions had me tapping my foot for the entire length of the runtime. I could ramble on forever praising The Lure for the way it handles themes like the infantilization & casual dismissal of women after their commodification loses potency or its admirably blasé attitudes toward bisexuality or feminist revenge narratives. That kind of highfalutin critical praise would be somewhat dishonest to what I most fell in love with in the film, however. Smoczyńska’s major accomplishment is in how she captures the grand scale spectacle of a Baz Luhrmann musical within the context of a slick, modern horror film that’s both comically light on its feet and chillingly brutal in its gore-heavy cruelty. It’s an incredible love-at-first-sight debut that already has me willing to give the director a lifetime pass just one entry into her career.

-Brandon Ledet

The Being (1983)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

After falling in love with Jackie Kong’s weirdo live action cartoon horror comedy Blood Diner, I was intrigued to see what other hidden gems the director managed to deliver in her modest four film career. Besides a couple mid-80s comedies (one featuring Andrew Dice Clay, yikes), Kong had only directed one other horror film, a creature feature titled The Being. Part The Thing, part Toxic Avenger, and released in-between the two, The Being is unfortunately not nearly as idiosyncratic as Blood Diner in terms of tone or context. It finds Kong younger and more restrained in both her bravery & her budget, aiming for a more generic drive-in horror aesthetic than what would later be delivered in her midnight movie circuit cult classic. It’s still impressively entertaining for a dirt cheap slice of drive-in schlock, though, and you can easily detect that Blood Diner sense of humor informing every scene of monster-driven mayhem.

Twilight Zone-spoofing narration reports the strange disappearances of young children in the small town of Puttsville, Idaho in an opening scene that plays more like a trailer than an actual movie. These mysterious disappearances seem to be tied to the town’s crisis of radiation-contaminated water from local, uncaring Big Business jerks. The company guilty for this Flint-reminiscent offense makes no effort to hide the fact that they’re dumping toxic chemicals into the water supply; they just have their evil PR stooge (Martin Landeau, the film’s only recognizable face) claim in public forums that the pollution is harmless. Of course, the pollution is far from harmless, unwittingly giving birth to a horrific monster (the titular “being”) who swoops in for frequent kills, the source of the film’s central disappearances. The company is aware of this mutated beast, but deflects attention by claiming the citizens of Puttsville really need to worry about the moral contamination of the sins of pornography peddlers & massage parlors. The product they’re protecting by covering up these supernatural murders? Potatoes.

Jackie Kong employs a much subtler hand in her blood-soaked satire here than she does with Blood Diner, but both films reveal her to be a great talent at surprising audiences from within the familiar. She keeps the titular mutated beast from The Being in the dark for the majority of its runtime the way most cheap horror films would, mostly just showing its gooey, demonic arms reaching for victims in its flights of murderous rampage. There’s plenty to be entertained by in the details even while the film’s withholding, though: a trucker decapitated while driving, a drive-in audience attacked through blood-oozing cars & screen, a bizarre Wizard of Oz-inspired black & white dream sequence. And when the being’s full body is revealed, Kong makes her limited effects budget count for all that it can, constructing a uniquely uncanny creature that resembles a gooey, organic version of the monster from Hardware.

The Being is less confident in its spooky-goofy tone than Blood Diner, but by the time the film ends on a comedic “Where are they now?” gag before the credits roll, it’s clear that Kong had not delivered just another by-the-books creature feature. Her sense of humor and her punk rock pranksterism are readily apparent in this earlier, less-formed work and it’s a shame she never had the chance to make a dozen more monster-driven horror movies after she had pushed her horror comedy formula even further. Two Jackie Kong horror titles aren’t nearly enough. Event though it’s been a few decades since her last film, I’m hoping to see her return to the director’s chair and crank out some more pictures ASAP.

-Brandon Ledet

Train to Busan (Busanhaeng, 2016)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

It’s an oft-cited criticism among professional reviewers, the laity, and everyone in between (like me and probably you) that there are too few original ideas being produced in film, with various thinkpieces arguing the relative merits of remakes (like the upcoming Beauty and the Beast), reboots (like the upcoming The Mummy), reimaginings (like the upcoming IT), and sequels (of which there will be at least a dozen this year, but let’s just put a pin in Transformers: The Last Knight as the one that’s least likely to have any objective value). In the fight between the pedantic “You know that Wizard of Oz and The Maltese Falcon were remakes, don’t you?” camp versus the equally annoying “Everything’s a remake these days!” camp, there’s not a lot of room for middle ground. Although we’re no longer in the heyday of remakes that we were  ten years ago (for instance, Hollywood’s top performers in 2005 had a high percentage of remakes, 17%, which fell to 5% by 2014), the rise of narratively homogeneous “cinematic universes,” the tendency on the part of studios to fund financially safe sequels, and the widespread proliferation of lay criticism on YouTube and beyond means that you’re no less likely to hear kvetching about unoriginality today than you were in the summer of 2006; in fact, you probably hear it more often.

With regards to horror, the tendency to “follow the leader” whenever the wheel happens to be reinvented, either intentionally or accidentally, is non-negligible. The relative profundity of originality that catapulted The Blair Witch Project to success means that we’re approaching nearly two decades of found-footage horror, with six Paranormal Activity films in eight years and the most recent season of American Horror Story using the format as its central gimmick. The nineties saw a huge uptick in teen-oriented slasher films following the release of Scream, although the extent to which they retained that film’s sly metacommentary varied from project to project. Before that, the international success of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead spawned a slew of imitators, including an entire separate string of foreign sequels starting with  Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2.

Of course, Romero’s zombies became the default conception of the reanimated undead from that point forward, with the occasional outlier generating considerable interest in the horror fan community, despite the frequent obstinance of zombie “purists.” Danny Boyle’s astonishing 28 Days Later rocked the boat in 2001 with its so-called rage-zombies (although whether or not the infectees of the film are “true” zombies is still a matter of debate among the persnickety), and Edgar Wright’s delightful 2004 romp Shaun of the Dead adhered to the more traditional Romero zombie apocalypse scenario filtered through a distinctly comedic (and British) lens. It’s noteworthy that both of these zombie films of the aughts were made by Brits, following the distinct and entrenched American orientation of Romero’s satirism. At the same time that Shaun and 28 Days were making zombies interesting again, Americans were putting out regrettable and forgettable nonsense like the made-for- TV Return of the Living Dead sequels, Tobe Hooper’s Mortuary, and Romero’s own Land of the Dead, which is better than its contemporaries but suffers from both a lack of subtlety in its social criticism and its lack of freshness (there’s a reason that it’s not recalled or discussed with the reverence that is reserved for Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead).

It should come as no surprise, then, that following another decade of retreads of the zombie genre, with adaptations like World War Z (aka the zombie movie that your dad can watch), more Resident Evil movies than you can shake a stick at, and other flash-in- the-pan flicks, the next great thing in zombies also comes from outside America’s borders: Busanhaeng (aka Train to Busan), a South Korean production, is frenetic, gorgeous, and ironically full of life.

Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) is a workaholic fund manager who is inattentive to his young daughter Soo-an (Kim Su-an), to such an extent that his belated birthday gift to her is the same gaming system he bought the year before. Soo-an asks only that she be taken to her mother’s home in Busan as her birthday gift, and her father obliges. Unfortunately, before their train leaves the station, an infected young woman jumps aboard, and soon it’s zombies, zombies, zombies! Also along for the ride are: Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok), a working class ruffian with a heart of gold; his pregnant wife Seong-kyeong (Jung Yu-mi); young baseball player Yong-guk (Choi Woo-shik) and his team, including cheerleader Jin-hee (Ahn So-hee); and Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung), a stereotypical (but no less true-to-life) rich CEO who is concerned with saving his own skin at the expense of all others.

There’s some social commentary in that Yon-suk’s pragmatic and unrelenting self-interest is reflective of Seok-woo’s potential to be just as monstrous in his banal  inhumanity as the older businessman. This is especially evident when Yon-suk is able to make contact with a friend on the outside who tells him to take a different path away from the platform when the train stops briefly at Daejeon and he tells no others, not even Sang-hwa and Seong-kyeong. He becomes a better man throughout, however, and ultimately makes the right choices for both himself and what survivors remain as they begin the final leg of their journey.

Train to Busan doesn’t reinvent the wheel; in fact, there’s an awful lot of 28 Days Later in its DNA, what with the Rage-like zombies, the urban environments, the involvement of military forces (although there’s no unsettling discussion about repopulating the earth by force here as there is in Days), and the ending. Still, placing the action on a train puts a new spin on things, as when one group of survivors is trying to reach another group in a distant compartment, with the horde between them. The interplay of light and darkness, the addition of color, and a child character who’s actually quite likable (serving as her father’s conscience) are all touches that this genre was missing. It’s such an obviously great idea that I’m honestly surprised it was never done before (despite searching my memory and the internet, I can find no evidence of previous zombies-on-a-train films). It’s worth checking out at the earliest opportunity.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mirror Mirror (1990)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

Every now and then a great celebrity name like a Rip Torn or a Royalty Hightower will jump out at you as a kind of artform unto itself, but I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a name quite like Rainbow Harvest before. Ms. Harvest was an actress & a public figure for a brief stretch in the early 90s, making something of a career out of vaguely resembling Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. At least, that’s the most I can gather from Google Image searches & her lead role in the 1990 horror cheapie Mirror Mirror. In a sea of 90s-era pastel prairie dresses & loose, faded blue jeans, Rainbow Harvest stands out vividly as a goth teen who lives every day like it’s Halloween. I can’t say there’s anything particularly exceptional about her performance in Mirror Mirror, but it is exceedingly difficult to take your eyes off her and her name alone ensures you’ll never forget who she is.

If there’s anything especially interesting about Mirror Mirror‘s narrative it’s that it telegraphs the basic elements of two superior horror movies that would follow years after its arrival: Oculus & The Craft. A goth teen arrives in a new town with a dead dad and an excess of angst. Feeling like a total outsider, she finds solace in newfound friends that grant her dangerous witchcraft powers that allow her to enact petty revenge on her bullies. Where Mirror Mirror deviates from The Craft is that this goth teen’s black magic friendships are with an evil antique mirror and the demon who lives inside it, recalling the basic premise of Oculus. Of course, our goth girl antihero’s new powers backfire and her casual evocation of the mirror demon snowballs in a dangerous, deadly way. The only thing that subverts what you might expect from this Oculus vs. The Craft plot mashup is a supernatural twist ending that acts as a last minute rug pull. I guess there’s also a slight novelty to the outsider teen being bullied actually being the real monster in a story like this, but teen girls are punished for transgressing outside the bounds of their limited agency all the time in film, so that aspect ultimately feels like par for the course.

Mirror Mirror is a decidedly minor work despite those narrative prototypes for better horror films to follow, but it’s charming enough in its smaller details to stand out as an entertaining trifle. The very idea of dark mirror realm magic has a dream logic charm to it that leads to some inventive teen bully kills. As the mirror oozes blood & covers itself with flies, its victims similarly bleed and swat away pests. There are plenty of horror films where girls are killed in showers, but this is the first I’ve seen where girls are killed by a shower, not to mention at the hands of an off-screen mirror demon. Speaking of the demon, my favorite scene in Mirror Mirror is a ludicrous moment if morbid teen narcissism where Rainbow Harvest makes out with her own reflection, Neon Demon style, and the devil’s hand extends from behind the glass to feel her up. It’s wildly over-the-top stuff the film could’ve used more of. Mirror Mirror also could’ve used more of actors like Karen Black (extending her horror resume beyond titles like Trilogy of Terror, Burnt Offerings, and Invaders from Mars & curiously trying on a new wig every few scenes) & Steven Tobolowsky (a That Guy! type most recognizable from his insurance salesman role in Groundhog Day) to add an air of legitimacy to what often feels like straight-to-VHS schlock.

I still found the movie enjoyable overall, though. It’s at least 20 minutes overlong for what it accomplishes, but it boasts enough inventive kills, 90s fashion quirks, and trippy plot twists in its goth girl/antique mirror buddy picture premise to remain a delight. I’d be a liar, though, if I didn’t admit that the most memorable aspect of Mirror Mirror was the real-life name of its star. Rainbow Harvest will likely stick with me as a celebrity for far longer than anything she actually did in-character. It’s the kind of name that is a work of art all on its own.

-Brandon Ledet