Welcome to Episode #22 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our twenty-second episode, we’re doing a little tidying up. Brandon, CC, and James continue their discussion of the Top Films of 2016 with some Honorable Mentions. Also, Brandon makes CC watch David Cronenberg’s cult classic Videodrome (1983) for the first time, a viewing experience that’s been in the works for years. Enjoy!
-Brandon Ledet, CC Chapman, and James Cohn
I’m having a difficult time understanding exactly why I Am Not a Serial Killer works as well as it does. The movie doesn’t ever fully succeed at any of the various genres it touches: horror comedy, murder mystery, familial drama, creature feature. Its story is frustratingly thin for a plot that shows so much potential in its initial ideas. Big character moments & narrative payoffs feel strangely removed, as if there were entire scenes missing from the film (a possible result of being adapted from a more fleshed out novel). Yet, I left I Am Not a Serial Killer with a fairly positive feeling about it, which means I’m either a sucker for the genre territory it touches in its sprawling horror nerdery or that the movie was doing something charming & worthwhile in such a subtle way that I didn’t at all take notice of the mechanics.
I’m at the very least clear on what the movie’s biggest strength is. The lead performances from old-timer Christopher Lloyd and newcomer Max Records (who is competing fairly strongly with Royalty Hightower for best celebrity name I’ve heard in a while) pull a lot of the weight in terms of the film’s entertainment value. Records stars as a teenage recluse & mortician’s son who’s been diagnosed as having predictors for potential serial killer behavior: pyromania, animal cruelty, stalking. He’s never portrayed to be a bad kid, though, just one who’s oblivious to social cues, unable to see why, in some instances, you can’t just gut someone with food utensils when they’re bullying you at school. As the title indicates, our protagonist never does follow through on his brief flashes of murderous impulses. He instead uses his morbid fascination with the true crime profiles of serial killer “celebrities” like Jeffrey Dahmer & Ted Bundy to track & identify a mysterious killer that’s stalking his small town.
Although it eventually finds some unexpected supernatural territory, the murder mystery at the center of the film is never as interesting as Records’s performance. The way he responds to his sociopathy diagnosis with, “That’s kinda cool,” or confesses to a flirtatious girl at a Halloween party, “I was thinking about dressing up as my mother, but I was worried what my therapist would say,” makes for some great slacker humor in a heightened crisis that calls for a more engaged response. For his part, Christopher Lloyd is as charming as ever as a quietly creepy, but tenderly sweet doddering old fool who knows more than he initially lets on. If there’s anything special about I Am Not a Serial Killer lurking under its Buzzard-esque Gen-X shrug of a coming of age thriller, it’s somewhere in those two actors’ performances and the way they interact.
I can’t help but think that this movie might have worked better as a television show. The non-existent law enforcement, the handsoap-pink embalming fluid & practical effects surgery of its morgue setting, the Toby Froud creature design, and organ music soundtrack all feel like they would be more at home on a serialized horror comedy show like a Buffy or an iZombie. Even the mortician’s name, Mrs. Cleaver, feels written for television. There are enough books in this same series that the material could easily support its second life as a weekly TV series, but I’m not at all negative on the version of I Am Not a Serial Killer that we got here. Even if I’m not sure exactly how or why I was charmed by this low ambition genre jumble, I’m still glad to have seen the performances Lloyd & Records deliver within it. They just might’ve been better served if fleshed out to a season long arc of serialized television.
-Brandon Ledet
The French sci-fi horror Evolution is too deliberately mysterious & quietly still to appeal to a wide audience. If I had to boil my take on the film down to a single adjective it’d be “stubborn.” Evolution presents a cold, discomforting world in which children are put in danger for a supernatural purpose, a circumstance the film has no interest in explaining, only for the camera to quietly, clinically stare at their unlikely predicament. Anyone who might have complained that the obscured, supernatural terrors of 2016’s flagship horror breakout The Witch were too loosely defined & uneager to entertain would cry themselves to sleep watching what director Lucile Hadžihalilović has carefully constructed here. For anyone with a little patience in the way they approach densely puzzling horror cinema with unconventional payoffs, however, it’s an eerie submersion in a stubbornly confounding nightmare, a rare kind of disorientation that’s entirely unfamiliar to the world we live in.
Evolution is a sort of menacing fairy tale about a small island of adult women caring for & grooming young boys for a mysterious purpose. One of the boys slowly gets wise that this false paradise isn’t what it seems to be on the surface. It’s a conspiracy theory ignited by the discovery of a dead body with a starfish attached to its belly and the growing suspicion that the woman who feeds & houses him isn’t actually his mother. Much like the audience, this young child-in-peril protagonist never gets clear answers on what exactly is happening in this nightmare realm of vague menace. What follows is a dreamlike body horror that touches on pregnancy anxiety, Body Snatchers paranoia, and the psychedelic nature imagery of Phase IV slowed down to a glacial whisper. Evolution‘s poorly lit operation rooms, endless stacks of specimen jars, and religious reverence for starfish imagery amount to a strangely abstracted art piece, one with an unnerving refusal to provide easy answers for the questions its imagery raises.
Outside the weightless underwater voids of the film’s starfish habitats, Evolution is largely an exercise in clinical stillness. The film effortlessly crafts memorably horrifying imagery at every turn, but stubbornly lingers on each visual achievement for an uncomfortably long time. As an art piece it’s begging to be dissected & rearranged for a fan edit music video (a couple on-the-nose suggestions might be a down-tempo cover of Bikini Kill’s “Star Bellied Boy” or a trip hop remix of a song from the animated version of Dr. Suess’s “The Sneetches”). As a film, it’s a strange experience, one that’s consistently fascinating, but also deliberately unsatisfying in a conventional sense. I’m not sure I could heartily recommend Evolution to the world at large, because it requires an open & patient kind of temperament not all audiences can command. If you’re in the right mood for this kind of open-ended obfuscation, though, its low-key pleasures can be downright haunting in a strikingly beautiful way.
-Brandon Ledet
When people claim that “bad on purpose,” winking-at-the-camera camp films of recent years aren’t ever as exciting as those of distant schlock cinema past, I don’t think they’re necessarily saying that, as a rule, intentional, “low” camp is by nature less engaging than bad-on-accident, “high” camp. I hope not, anyway. I just think there’s typically a laziness to straight-to-VOD/SyFy Channel schlock that stops at a premise or a title, say Shark Exorcist or Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs, without any thorough or passionate pursuit of where its initial ideas can lead. To put it simply, modern CG schlock is rarely as deeply weird as it’s advertised to be in its Ain’t This Weird?! titles. That doesn’t mean all “bad”-on-purpose cinema is worthless, though. Just look to last year’s camp cinema triumphs like The Love Witch, The Greasy Strangler, and Pee-wee’s Big Holiday to prove that’s not true. Modern camp just needs to keep in mind that its most memorable ancestors, from the likes of Roger Corman or John Waters or Ed Wood, were made with great filmmaking passion that covered up whatever shortcomings their microbudgets couldn’t. Even when their tone wasn’t genuine, their inherent weirdness was.
Death Race 2050 is a genuinely weird film. It isn’t much more than a R-rated version of straight-to-SyFy Channel schlock, but it makes its cheap camp aesthetic count when it can and it survives comfortably on its off-putting tone of deeply strange “bad”-on-purpose black comedy. Much more closely in line with the Paul Bartel-directed/Roger Corman-produced original film Death Race 2000 than its gritty, self-serious Paul W.S. Anderson remake, Death Race 2050 is a cheap cash-in on the combined popularity of Hunger Games & Fury Road and makes no apologies for that light-hearted transgression. Corman productions have a long history of cannibalizing the films they’ve influenced, like when Joe Dante’s Piranha film openly riffed on Jaws (which was essentially a Corman film on a Hollywood budget). The original Death Race 2000, along with countless other Corman productions, surely had an influence on both the Mad Max & Hunger Games franchises and it’s hilarious to see the tireless film producer still willing to borrow from his own spiritual descendants for a quick buck all these years later. It’s also funny to hear him describe Death Race 2050 as “a car racing picture with some black humor,” which is about the most mild-mannered way you could possibly put it. The movie is, more honestly put, a live-action cartoon bloodbath featuring broad comedic personalities that would make a pro wrestling promoter blush . . . with a little car racing thrown in for fun. It never tries to survive solely on the strength of its premise, but instead injects each possible moment with weird character details and ludicrous production design. That’s the open secret of its many minor successes.
The plot here is standard Death Race lore. A near-future dystopia known as The United Corporations of America enacts population control through a televised racing competition in which contestants earn points for each pedestrian they run over. Children & the elderly earn them extra. Each contestant has a pro wrestling-sized persona: an obnoxious pop music idol, a genetic freak with inner conflicts regarding his sexuality, a Texas Christian archetype who’s turned her faith into terrorist fanaticism. None are nearly as popular as Frankenstein, however. A cyborg crowd-favorite who has long remained masked, Frankenstein is the paradoxical heartless killer with a heart of gold. Because this film is at least partly a Fury Road knockoff, New Zealander Manu Bennett plays Frankenstein as a cheap Tom Hardy stand-in instead of a reflection of David Carradine’s work in the original film. He drives across the country racking up points, trying not to fall in love with his comely co-pilot/annoying audience surrogate, fighting off a misguided revolution, and ultimately taking aim at his most crucial foil: a CEO-type dictator who falls somewhere between Emperor Snow & Donald Trump (the film’s only casting “get,” Malcolm McDowell). Rapid montages of a pollution-crippled future mix with television gameshow gimmickry, dismembered body parts gore (both traditional & CG), a long list of pointless tangents (including an otherwise-useless scene that deliberarely points to its own minimum-effort satisfaction of The Bechdel Test), and a romance plot no one asked for to make this ultra-violent race across the country a consistently fun, if wholly predictable journey. Death Race 2050 never transcends the bounds of what it is: a straight-to-VOD trifle. It stands as an enthusiastically entertaining example of the format, though, one that pulls some weird punchlines like “When your DNA sleeps it dreams of me,” and “Looks like rain today . . . and enslavement by machines tomorrow” whenever it gets the chance.
The only glaring faults I can cite in Death Race 2050 are a total lack of chemistry between its dull protagonists (Frankenstein & his co-pilot) and a dinky production value that suffers under what must have been a microscopic budget. That’s not so bad for a shameless, winking-at-the-camera remake meant to capitalize on two unrelated franchises that have earned popularity in its original version’s wake. Although Death Race 2050 tries to update some of Death Race 2000‘s minor details for a modern context (VR goggles that look an awful lot like swimming goggles, a Donald Trump-like villain, a self-driving AI vehicle contestant, references to things like St. Dwayne The Rock Johnson & Bieber Elementary), its spirit is very much rooted in the genuine weirdness of the Paul Bartel original. It’s a difficult tone to strike, I presume, given how often these cheap CG camp exercises come off as lifeless, passion-free slogs. Through some simple production details (especially in its dystopian Rainbow Store costuming), a dedication to R-rated sex & gore, and a surprisingly authentic punk soundtrack, Death Race 2050 shines like a rare CG gem in a murky sea of unmemorable schlock. It’s loud, dumb, “bad-on-accident” fun, but in a deliberately strange fashion that never feels lazy or half-cooked the way its peers often do.
-Brandon Ledet
I first heard of the psychological horror cheapie Always Shine when its director, Sophia Takal, mentioned in an interview on the Lady Problems podcast that she was annoyed by its constant comparisons with the Alex Ross Perry film Queen of Earth, since the two works were produced simultaneously & independently. She even suggested in the interview that Perry may have read the screenplay for her film before writing his own, lightly suggesting that their coincidental parallels might not be so coincidental after all. As I pointed out when I labeled 2014 as The Year of the Doppelgänger, it’s not at all uncommon for doppelgänger films to find their own unlikely doppelgängers in the world. In fact, it’s an eerily frequent occurrence. If you can recall back a full year, though, Queen of Earth was highly rated around here as one of our Top Films of 2015, so seeing a smaller, less celebrated work that might have influenced its production was an exciting prospect for me. Unfortunately, I can only add to Takal’s frustration by admitting that Always Shine was only interesting to me as a comparison point for Perry’s superiorly executed work, and only barely so.
Always Shine opens with two striking, tightly framed monologues that codify its two main characters, played by recognizable-from-TV-roles actors Mackenzie Davis & Caitlin FitzGerald, as a demurely feminine waif & an “unladylike” take-no-shit brute. Best friends, but professional rivals in their acting careers, the two women often find themselves competing for roles, much to the detriment of their personal relationship. The demurely feminine character is rewarded for her sheepishness by the men who control her life: lovers, casting directors, strangers, etc. The confident one is punished for her perceived unfeminine brashness and is professionally unsuccessful as a result, despite being the more talented actor. This tension comes to a head when the two friends vacation together in a remote locale in Southern California, igniting a bottled up nightmare of competitive jealousies that results in a violent confrontation & a disorienting psychological break. Any tension lurking under the surface of their friendship is made explicitly clear & insurmountably cruel, leading the two women to a breaking point that cannot be mended once it’s reached.
I like the basic structure & themes of this narrative and both Davis & FitzGerald are exceptionally well suited for their respective roles. That’s about where my appreciation for Always Shine stops. The gloriously disorienting opening, where you can’t tell where an actor’s audition ends & the real world begins, is a great window into where the film will eventually go once it gets its plot rolling. However, that style of stilted, unnatural dialogue continues throughout the film’s entire length, never allowing either of its central characters to feel like a real person, since you can feel the screenwriter’s fingerprints on every word they deliver. The characters are way too cleanly categorized, to the point where the more confident one says something to the effect of, “If I weren’t a woman . . .” in at least the first three conversations she participates in. This clean cut stageyness bleeds into the way the film’s pinnacle psychological break is depicted as well. Unlike with Queen of Earth, there’s never any question of what a character is imagining & what is “really” happening. This means that its blend of identities & indulgences in fantasy signify nothing in any given moment, since it’s always evident they’ll have no effect on the “true” plotline. Worst yet, the film is overly impatient with its own sense of mood. As soon as the opening credits it begins an assault of quick, abrasive edits that scream “Don’t worry! This is Art Horror! It’ll get weird!” between calm scenes of dialogue that deserve a less oppressive hand in how they’re delivered. In attempting dread & disorientation, the atmosphere-evoking cuts of Always Shine feel like an obnoxious joke at th the expense of artsy horror films as a genre instead of a genuine participation in that aesthetic.
I really wanted to like Always Shine. It’s got all the necessary resources to put together a memorably eerie psychological horror picture, especially in its performances & its basic themes. It just falls flat so miserably in both its screenplay & editing choices that it’s difficult to get on its side. As frustrating as it must be for Takal to continually hear, the film is too reminiscent of Queen of Earth not to draw the comparison and, in all honesty, it often plays like an awful parody version of that far superior work. That’s not the only point of comparison that makes it look like a weak substitute for the genuine thing, either. Persona, an influence both films obviously owe a lot to, smartly jumbles its psychological break in a way that cannot be easily, neatly understood the same way Always Shine‘s can. The Neon Demon does a far better job filtering feminine jealousy & competition through an unrealistic art horror lens. Felt has a much firmer handle on the way feminist themes can be discussed openly & even viciously in a broken psyche narrative while still feeling like natural, human dialogue. Creep, Joshy, The One I Love, The Invitation, and The Overnight all top this near-miss in turning California wilderness locales into emotional hellscapes of isolation & hurt feelings. None of these movies’ successes dictate that Always Shine has no right to exist in the world as its own separate work of art. They just point to the various ways the film’s promising formula falls flat in an embarrassing way, Queen of Earth especially so.
-Brandon Ledet
I understand why a lot of people are immediately turned off by intentionally “bad” movies. Forced, manufactured camp value can often feel cheap & disingenuous, especially when the filmmaking it supports aims lazily low in its overall sense of ambition. Accusations of taking the low road and making an intentionally “bad” movie are certain to accompany Anna Biller’s erotic horror comedy The Love Witch, but the film is far from lazy in its ambition & attention to craft. The Love Witch carefully recalls the cheap sets, rear projections, absurdly stilted dialogue, and half-hearted attempts at sophisticated smut of many erotic horror B-pictures of the 60s & 70s. Biller doesn’t rely solely on easy humor & cinematic nostalgia to make this schlocky throwback worthwhile, however. Besides writing, directing, and editing The Love Witch, Biller is also credited with the film’s set & costume design. She exhibits a godlike control over her visual palette, crafting an intricately detailed work packed with occult paintings, pentagrams, potions, candles, jars, lingerie, and intensely-colored make-up. She elevates the depths of lazily decorated schlock to a new high standard of meticulous visual artistry, a kind of personalized, auteurist ambition that’s often missing from “bad”-on-purpose cinema. More importantly, though, Biller uses this backwards gaze into the B-picture abyss to reappropriate traditionally misogynist modes of genre filmmaking for a fresh, fiercely feminist purpose. The Love Witch is more than a comedic exercise in camp-minded nostalgia; it’s also a beautiful art piece with an unforgiving political bent.
Samantha Robinson stars as Elaine, the titular witch, who finds herself in constant trouble with the law for her deadly seduction of men. Elaine uses “love potions” & “sex magic” to lure men into her dangerous web of lust & overwhelming devotion. She doesn’t exactly murder her suitors & side flings in cold blood. Rather, the men she seduces just aren’t physically or spiritually capable of handling the immense pressure of true love & genuine emotion that accompanies her supernatural mode of romance. Their bodies crumble while trying to reconcile a basic human experience the women around them handle with grace on a daily basis. The Love Witch airdrops legitimate feminist criticism into its cartoonish narrative in this way. There’s plenty of inane banter played for laughs, like when Elaine babbles about “parapsychology” or explains that she first wanted to become a witch because she “wanted to have magical powers.” What’s striking, though, is the way these camp cinema callbacks are interrupted by lines like, “Men are very fragile. They can get crushed down if you assert yourself in any way,” and “You sound as if you’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy.” The Love Witch filters modern feminist ideology, particularly in relation to heterosexual power dynamics, through old modes of occultist erotica & vaguely goth burlesque to craft the ultimate post-modern camp cinema experience. Biller establishes herself as not only a stylist & a makeshift schlock historian, but also a sly political thinker and a no-fucks-given badass with a bone to pick, which is more than you’d typically expect with an intentionally “bad” movie about witchcraft & strippers.
The Love Witch plays like a restoration of the best camp film you’ve never heard of, one where time-traveling cellphones & feminist ideology appear as if they’re a natural part of the territory. The film is eerily accurate in its dedication to recreating cheap horror erotica, right down to the awkward dead space that punctuates each line of dialogue & the over-use of goofy lighting tricks to evoke its love potion psychedelia. It plays exceedingly well with a crowd; the raucous audience I saw it with was enthusiastic and treated it like a midnight movie despite it being an early evening screening. Beneath all of the film’s gloriously bad visual art, eye-melting costume design, and absurdly overstated dialogue, however, it’s a surprisingly dark, quietly angry political piece. The men of The Love Witch range from selfish crybabies & power-hungry rapists and the way the film undercuts & subverts their privilege & control is surprisingly pointed for something so deliberately silly & narratively slight. Mixing in a little sugar to sweeten the medicine, the film appears to be an intentional exercise in dimwitted, oversexed schlock, but that “so bad it’s good” facade is only one layer to a work that’s much more visually & politically fascinating than it initially appears to be.
-Brandon Ledet
Welcome to Episode #19 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our nineteenth episode, Brandon & CC are joined by Alli Hobbs to discuss five classic examples of ballet horror cinema. Also, Brandon makes CC watch the brutal fairy tale fantasy piece Tale of Tales (2016) for the first time. Enjoy!
-Brandon Ledet, CC Chapman, and Alli Hobbs
Director Guy Maddin is a weird little cookie. Admittedly I’ve only seen a small sampling of his work, but I’ve yet to fall in love with another one of his features quite as hard as I did with his beer-themed black comedy The Saddest Music in the World. His films are always interesting, though, if a little exhausting. Last year’s The Forbidden Room was a beautiful set of interconnected, humorous vignettes that worked really well for me as isolated short films, kind of like high art sketch comedy, but were especially tiring as a full-length collection. Looking a little further into Maddin’s catalog, though, the director has plenty of full-length experiments dedicated to a single idea; his ballet horror Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, for instance, is a much more focused & disciplined effort that matches his trademark visual aesthetic to its most logical genre structure. By fully committing to a single narrative & matching Maddin’s deliberately aged visuals to a silent horror era aesthetic, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary proves to be a much more digestible exhibition of the director’s peculiar talents than any of his vignette-structured works. This is a film with extremely limited commercial appeal and it’s one that might take the full context of his career to fully appreciate what he’s doing with the material, but it’s just as beautiful and amusing and flippantly high brow as anything he’s ever accomplished. I love seeing him indulge a single idea at a feature’s length and Pages from a Virgin’s Diary exemplifies exactly why that kind of extended focus is ideal for his directorial style, even when the main conceit is so narrowly minded.
Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is not a ballet-themed horror so much as a horror-themed ballet. The film finds Maddin shooting a straightforward ballet production of the Dracula story in a cinematic context. Instead of hanging back to display the dancers’ full bodies & artistry, he cuts the frame in very tightly and adds silent film era intertitles to advance the plot instead of conveying story entirely through dance. The playing-to-the-back-row stage play expressiveness of the ballet works really well in tandem with Maddin’s style, though, which requires a broad physical performance to recall the vaudevillian days of early cinema. Often, Pages from a Virgin’s Diary plays like a high art horror comedy. It makes a weird joke out of the details of Dracula lore: drowning the frame in cartoonishly large piles of garlic, mirroring Love & Friendship‘s character introduction gags with details like “Eater of Bugs,” playing the bumbling hubris of men for humor (like when Van Helsing performs the most inefficient & smugly disgusted gynecological exam of all time on Dracula’s prime victim). Maddin’s sly humor is contrasted with the dead babies, decapitations, and sexual violence of the source material to make for a truly horrifying, but strikingly flippant viewing experience, one that’s sex jokes & vampire kills are made oddly delicate by its very nature as a ballet. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary might be the kind of high faulting art film pretension that rolls eyes & changes channels at first glance, but it’s also playfully subversive in its prankster humor & genuine horror thrills, making for a very worthy entry in the director’s catalog, despite its deceptively slight premise.
Of course, as with all Guy Maddin projects, the flashiest aspect of Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is the director’s dedication to visual craft. Deliberately degraded film, tinted color changes, a screen segmented into tight parallel lines: Maddin seems to be working in a digital medium here, but his trademark throwback to ancient cinema past matches the material exceedingly well, making me desperately curious about what a high budget version of this movie would look like. The ballet aspect of the film is the only dynamic that distinguishes it from a genuine silent horror, but that aspect does feed into Maddin’s aesthetic as a traditionalist. I also had great appreciation for the way he played with the film’s pacing, speeding up comedic bits to a movie trailer tempo for greater humorous effect and slowing down certain ballet flourishes for moments of lyrical contrast. You won’t find many horror comedies this visually interesting or poetically minded, with giant pipe organs spewing green gas & perverted sex demons filling the frame between subtle gags about modesty & desire. Even if it isn’t his best film, you also won’t find a much more concise argument for Maddin’s distinct talents as a director, as he transforms traditional mediums like ballet, silent film, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula into something entirely new & oddly fresh. I’d love to dig up more of his features that are dedicated to exploring a single concept for the entirety of their runtimes. He seems like a director who has too many ideas at once and too little time or funding to follow them all at length, so I should probably be exceedingly grateful for the times such as this, when he finds inspiration to break out of his usual short film format and follow one spectacularly weird idea (say, a traditional ballet shot as a high art horror comedy) to a feature length. It’s his best self.
-Brandon Ledet
I’m not sure how much of my ecstatic reaction to the 1960 Italian horror cheapie The Vampire and the Ballerina had to do with my pitifully low expectations going in, but the film bowled me over. Where I expected lazy, thoughtless schlock, I happened to find something deliriously strange and carefully made. The Vampire and the Ballerina resembles so much cheaply made cult classic trash of its era, from the burlesque horror of Cat Women of the Moon to the vampiric kills & stock footage reliance of Plan 9 from Outer Space to the rubber mask monsters of The Brainiac. And yet, for a film so silly & so rooted in the context of its time, this throwaway horror title paradoxically feels ahead of the crowd in terms of where horror was going to go in the future. Hammer House horror, style over substance giallo, and, especially, over-sexed European vampire films of the 60s & 70s all feel somewhat indebted to the weirdly off-kilter shocks, scares, and titillation lurking in this strange little genre film. This is the exact kind of rare gem I’m looking for when I’m digging through piles of trash cinema and, as usual, I found it in a place I least expected it.
A group of young, attractive, scantily clad dancers are “preparing a ballet” while guests at a wealthy man’s estate near a remote village. There are several mysterious murders coinciding with their stay, explained by local superstitions to be the work of a vampire. The film’s rules adhere to traditional vampire lore: deadly sunlight, stakes through the heart, garlic, crosses, the whole deal. It only adds the caveat of the monsters needing to feed under a full moon to that dynamic, a little flavor borrowed from werewolf pictures. At first, the girls’ wealthy host (who wears capes & seems to know an awful lot about vampire history) or one of their macho beaus seem like prime suspects for these murders, but this film is anything but a murder mystery. As soon as the vampires appear onscreen, posing as gracious hosts of a crypt-like castle, you know for a fact that they’re the perpetrators. Where The Vampire and the Ballerina (a title that really should be pluralized) gets weird is in the strange revelation of how the two vampires’ relationship works. It’s a bizarre glimpse into one of cinema’s most toxic codependent relationships, a weirdly unromantic back & forth that’s far more satisfying than any who’s-the-undead-killer mystery could have possibly been.
The film’s thematic weirdness is only amplified by its strikingly thoughtful (although cheaply produced) cinematography. Images of silhouettes growing on cave walls, passing sky & falling dirt seen from the POV of a freshly bit victim being buried “alive,” and the vampire’s legitimately upsetting rubber mask & plaster visage all combine to make for a much more striking visual experience than you’d typically expect from this kind of work. Where The Vampire and the Ballerina shines best, though, is when it combines this visual thoughtfulness with the tawdry horniness that drives its most base thrills. The movie makes no excuse for oggling at the dancers as they lounge around in flimsy underwear and perform in revealing tights.The shameless butt shots in the dance scenes, which fuse ballet with world music & burlesque, crowd the screen in a leering cacophony of hip shaking, leg flashing filth. This combines in other scenes with the film’s more lyrical ambitions to make for some truly strange, sexually charged imagery: a victim shot from between her killer’s legs (a la Slumber Party Massacre), stock footage trees thrashing in the wind as hypnotized women writhe in sexual frustration, a woman sunbathing on a rock as a background waterfall flows the frame’s attention directly to her crotch. The Vampire and the Ballerina is in every way cheap, artful filth and I’m in awe of how much memorable imagery it was able to generate in spite of being such a slack jawed work of horror-minded eroticism.
I don’t want to make this sound as if it’s some long lost masterpiece that could rival the heights of a Bava or a Corman-Cycle Poe. It’s a deeply silly movie, one that features several nonsensical minutes of women chasing each other through the woods to big band music for reasons I couldn’t explain if I tried. I do, however, believe that The Vampire and the Ballerina has some strong, untapped cult classic potential. Cynically made as a cash grab in the wake of Christopher Lee’s Dracula finding popularity in Italy, this is a deliberately over-sexed work that anyone under the age of 16 was banned from watching at the theater. You can feel those trashy origins in every frame of The Vampire and the Ballerina, but the film still manages to be a surprisingly artful experience for me. Anyone who regularly enjoys a slice of cheap black & white schlock should get a kick out of the film’s creature designs & shameless, theremin-scored burlesque. What’ll really stick with you if you’re on that wavelength, though, is the strange relationship dynamics between its vampiric killers & the artfully odd images the film manages to pull out of a seemingly nonexistent budget. If you watch enough of these kinds of horror titles, they start to blend together and everything begins to feel monotonous; The Vampire and the Ballerina is an exciting reminder that there’s still weirdo outliers out there waiting to be discovered. There’s still gems lurking in cinema’s discarded trash.
-Brandon Ledet
Pet is directed by Carles Torrens, who recently helmed the well-received 2013 film Sequence, and written by Jeremy Slater, who co-wrote 2015’s underwhelming The Lazarus Effect as well as the critically derided Fant4stic (sic) Four. Slater was also the executive producer of the recent Fox miniseries The Exorcist; although I managed to miss his films, I did watch all of The Exorcist that has aired so far, and I didn’t care for it (each episode had some good skin-crawling horror imagery but the show itself is dreadfully dull).
The film follows feckless-if-reliable animal shelter employee Seth (Dominic Monaghan), who finds himself infatuated with the lovely-but- boring Holly (Ksenia Solo), supposedly a former classmate with whom he now shares part of a bus commute; she scarcely notices him, as she spends the entire ride journaling each day. Seth spends time gathering information from her off-brand social media profiles and endlessly rehearsing for each interaction, but his stalking quickly escalates despite her attempts to blow him off courteously. After Holly goes to the bar where her infidelious ex-boyfriend (Nathan Parsons) works to confront him about a gift of flowers, only to learn that he had nothing to do with it, she confronts Seth and hits him with her bag, scattering its contents. Seth is further beaten by the ex when Holly accuses him of impropriety, but he makes off with the journal that was left behind. Seth reads the journal at length and begins construction of a person-sized cage in a forgotten basement of the shelter; after following Holly home one night, he drugs her and absconds with her to the cage, where he tells her that he wants to “save” her.
This is where things get really interesting, as Pet swiftly takes its first major turn, setting us up for a chain of reveals, playing out like a more “eXtreme” version of Hard Candy, with the audience being unsure of which character really has the moral high ground and who’s really in control. Admittedly, the trailer for the film claimed that the movie challenged expectations about whether Seth or Holly was the real monster, and I found it difficult to conceive that this could be adequately pulled off; I have to say, however, that the film successfully manages to do so.
SPOILERS BEGIN.
Earlier, we see Holly have a few brief conversations with her best friend and roommate Claire (Jennette McCurdy), and we see Holly have another conversation with her after she is caged, apparently as a coping mechanism. Seth quickly lets her know that he has overheard one such conversation, and confronts her with her journal, in which Holly has recounted the evening on which she intentionally wrecked her car with Claire (with whom the ex was cheating) in the passenger seat. When Claire didn’t die immediately, Holly finished her off in a way that would make it appear she died in the crash. All of the appearances of Claire have been hallucinated. This killing seems to have unleashed something in Holly, as her journal details the killings of several other people. She attempts to play this off as creative writing, and although Seth tells her that she is a good writer (she most certainly isn’t, given the few brief insets that we saw flash by on the screen), but that after reading the journal, he followed her to make sure it was true before committing to his “cage the girl you love” plan.
The film continues to spiral into madness from there, with Seth believing that Holly kept the journal because she secretly wanted to get caught, and Holly believing (or perhaps pretending to believe for the sake of gaining his trust) that Seth was drawn to Holly because they are alike, encouraging him to consider his own potential for bloodlust. It’s never clear who’s telling the truth from moment to moment, who is playing who and to what end or for what reason. Although I was dissatisfied with the final twist, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that although I foresaw three possible endings, none of the predicted outcomes came to fruition (if you’re worried that the film will all end up being a story written by Holly, please allow me the honor of letting you know in advance that this is not the case).
SPOILERS END.
This is a flawed film. Above and beyond any knee-jerk reactions to the ostensible misogyny of the piece, there’s a weird tonal shift in the ending that makes it feel like a tacked-on reshoot, with a couple of strange elements that make one feel out of place. Notably, a character is considering violence, sees a knife, and approaches the person against whom they are enraged while hiding something behind their back before revealing that they are concealing something innocuous; why? Every action we saw the characters take up to that moment had been for the purpose of concealing something from another character, not the audience. It was disorienting. Combined with the fact that the epilogue raises quite a lot of logistical questions and has a notably different lighting and color scheme from the rest of the movie, it doesn’t feel
quite right.
Furthermore, the performances are a mixed bag. Monaghan performs ably as the nebbish Seth, whose apparent ineffectuality and affability makes even his emotional violence lack menace, which is disquieting in and of itself. On the other hand, while there are moments when Solo is knocking it out of the park, especially given that the audience is unsure if she’s truly revealing herself or creating a facade that will ultimately help her earn her freedom, there are weaknesses in her performance as well. The personality that ultimately seems to be her truest self feels the least authentic, and that hurts the film. McCurdy’s brief appearances contain the film’s weakest acting, but she’s not onscreen enough to affect it too negatively.
Overall, however, the film has more to praise than to denigrate. The cheapness of the film is apparent in several sequences that are genuinely cinematic in their framing but appear to be shot on low-end digital video; on the other hand, that same sparsity of funding also means that the film has room to breathe as a character piece, regardless of whether any of the character growth that we see is genuine. If Don’t Breathe is is a schlocky thriller with slick artistic design that disguises its crassness, Pet is a low-rent version of the same, with sufficient style but none to spare. There’s also a wonderfully executed duality in Seth and Holly: he accuses Holly of leading a double life, with a “Holly” character that she plays in public while hiding her real interests under the cover of night; this is ironic, coming from a man who, in private, meticulously practices conversations for each social interaction. Seth’s time spent alone is used exclusively to prepare for the character he plays in public; he has no real internal life. Holly may be playing a role in the real world too, but at least she knows it. It’s a lovely statement on identity wrapped in a nauseating thriller and marred by a subpar conclusion, but well worth the time if you can stomach it.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Swampflix 