horror

Theatre of Blood (1973)

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three star campstamp

I’d love to live in a world where Vincent Price is considered “the world’s greatest actor”, but not like this. Not like this. Theatre of Blood is a puzzling meta horror vehicle for Price, both striking in the range it allows for the B-movie legend to chew scenery (plus its gore grotesqueness his films don’t usually approach) and disappointing in its lackluster execution. By all means, this gimmicky revenge thriller should be the exact kind of genre trash that has me head over heels, especially considering how unhinged Price manages to be in his lead performance, but by the end I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for what I had seen. This is decent schlock, but it had the opportunity to be much more significant than that. I didn’t hate it, but I really wanted to love it.

Price stars here as “the world’s greatest actor”, Edward Lionheart, a true thespian of the stage who refuses to take on any role unless it’s the lead part in a Shakespeare production. Fans agree that he is truly the world’s finest performer, but theater critics lock him out of all accolades due to his Shakespearean limitations. After a failed suicide attempt the bitter actor comes seemingly from beyond the grave to make each critic individually eat their own words (and, in one particularly brutal case, their own dogs) by killing them in elaborate ways that recall Shakespeare’s most notable works. There’s great subtext here about Vincent Price himself getting revenge on his own critics for brushing off his work as genre schlock by proving he’s at ease with difficult classical works, but for the most part the film is only exciting for its dozen or so brutal murders, which reportedly required six gallons of fake blood to bring to the screen.

What most confuses me about Theatre of Blood is its 96% approval rating on the Tomatometer. The film was a personal favorite for Price because he enjoyed being able to make money performing various Shakespeare monologues instead of pure horror cheese, which is totally understandable (if not more than a little sad). The truth is, though, that when Price isn’t performing these soliloquies or murdering his critics for an audience of Mortville bums, the film gets very one-note & boring, playing at best like a televised police procedural. It’s likely that people had fun with the film’s very campy tone & I’ll admit that the novelty of a grindhouse-esque work from Price that manages to be this silly is enjoyable in & of itself. I especially love its alternate title, Much Ado about Murder, as a note of exceptional  goofiness. However,  the film has nothing on similar revenge-minded works from the actor’s catalog like The Abominable Dr. Phibes, so there’s an oppressive cloud of seen-it-all-before hanging over the production. It’s at best on par with his other middling 70s meta horror, Madhouse, which isn’t too great of a position to be in at all.

Theatre of Blood is a serviceable Vincent Price flick probably best enjoyed in YouTube clips compiling its various gimmicky kills instead of watching its rough around the edges totality. As a critic, saying this might be inviting Price to rise from beyond the grave to smite me, but I’m okay with that. There are surely worse ways to die.

-Brandon Ledet

Artist Ramón Santiago’s Unlikely Influence on the Creature Feature Alligator (1980)

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June’s Movie of the Month, Alligator, is an early 80s creature feature about a baby alligator named Ramón who grows mythically gigantic after being flushed down the toilet & feeding on a cruel science experiment’s cast-off corpses of animal subjects he finds in the Chicago sewers. Ramón is a fascinating monster in many ways. He not only embodies the urban legend of alligators living out of place in the sewer systems of major American cities; he’s also the size of a dinosaur and has an uncanny ability to hunt down & exact revenge upon the heartless people who’ve wronged him & other discarded animals. Still yet, one of the strangest aspects of Alligator‘s titular monster is that he’s indicated to be named after the little known, late painter Ramón Santiago. How or why that association between the gator & the painter was made is a total mystery.

Britnee wrote in our Swampchat discussion on Alligator, “During the scenes in David’s apartment, there are prints on the wall by Ramón Santiago (obvious inspiration for the alligator’s name). I was unaware of Santiago’s work prior to noticing the prints in the film, and I have to say that this guy has some phenomenal art. […] According to Santiago’s website, he stated, ‘My paintings are what dreams are made of.’ I would say that’s a pretty accurate description of his work. Unfortunately, I haven’t stumbled across an Santiago gator paintings yet.” Indeed, Google search results for “Ramón Santiago alligator” don’t lead any Santiago depictions of gators or even any discussions of the 1980 horror film in question (except for our own). At what point, exactly, was Santiago brought in as inspiration for our reptilian antihero Ramón? The artist could theoretically have served as a point of inspiration for director Lewis Teague or screenwriter John Sayles, but he could just as easily have been brought in as a sly visual joke by the set designer. There’s not a lot of evidence or context to point this connection in any solid direction.

Although there are no Santiago paintings of gators we were able to hunt down & the artist’s unlikely inclusion in the film might’ve been a question of set design or clever prop, it’s easy to see how his work fits into the Alligator universe on a very basic aesthetic level. Santiago’s work is dark & brooding, the exact same muted & grimy color palette of the gator Ramón’s urban environment. There’s also a magician’s touch to the painter’s work that is simultaneously a little corny & vastly mysterious, a combo of sentiments I could also assign to the gator Ramón’s artistry: chomping people to bits for crimes against animalia. The two Ramóns, painter & gator, are artists who largely go unrecognized for their accomplishments (pretty pictures & spectacular violence, respectfully). At first glance their work can appear a little common or even silly, but there’s a dark, mysterious soul lurking underneath he surface in both cases that makes them oddly fascinating in an unexpected way.

Until the greater mystery of the two Ramón’s true connection (if any truly exists) is cracked, here are a few of their works juxtaposed for your own consideration.

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For more on June’s Movie of the Month, the 1980 creature feature Alligator, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

A Page of Madness (1926)

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I’ve been on something of a silent horror tangent lately,which has lead me to watching some really striking works of early cinematic achievement, but nothing comes close to the (literal) insanity on display in the Japanese film A Page of Madness. The film plays like a cold splash of water or an  open-handed slap to the face. From the first frame on, its wild, chaotic mode of loose story telling and terrifying black & white cinematography feels entirely anachronistic for the time of its release. A whirlwind of rapid edits, bizarre imagery, and an oppressive absence of linear storytelling make A Page of Madness feel like a contemporary with, say, Eraserhead or Tetsuo: The Iron Man instead of a distant relic of horror cinema. It’s an early masterwork of disjointed, abstract filmmaking and it’s one that was nearly lost forever, considered unobtainable for nearly four decades before a salvageable (and significantly shortened) print was re-discovered.

A Page of Madness opens with a flood of, well, madness: storm water pours; train engines roar; a woman dances in a ceremonial gown on a set that is simultaneously ethereal & industrial. The film pulls back here to reveal its hand. The woman dances for no particular audience. She’s wearing a hospital gown, not a fine piece of luxurious fabric. She is a patient in a mental ward, not entirely sure of what place or time she occupies. The audience isn’t sure either. We’re introduced to her husband, who poses as a janitor at the hospital in hopes of setting her free. His attempts to make himself or their former life together recognizable to her are in vain. His attempts to stage a prison break ultimately end in ultraviolent futility. Everything else in between is up for interpretation as a tornado of screaming babies, wild dogs, creepy masks, and crosshatched jail cell bars tear across the screen. From beginning to end A Page of Madness is smeared, stretched, mirrored, sped-up, and doubled over. The result is downright maddening, like Häxan by way of Hausu.

This film is way more expressionistic & chaotic than what I’m used to from cinema’s silent era. It takes a very one-note, stubborn view of mental illness that lacks any semblance of modern nuance in the subject, but the play it gets out of interpreting its mental patients’ hallucinations in a visual language is awe-inspiring even by today’s standards. The overall aesthetic feels akin to turning on a flashlight in pitch black darkness only to be startled by the haunted house terrors lurking within. Very early on the film intentionally relates itself to jazz by throwing images of the then-young art’s instruments in with the rest of its kinetic collage, a very apt act of self-awareness. Its great feat is in the way it consistently disrupts your sense of location and temporal setting. Jail cells & external spaces bleed together, as do the past & present. It’s all delightfully, horrifyingly dizzying.

A lot of A Page of Madness‘s obfuscation is a likely result of its modernized form. When screened in Japan in the 1920s, the film was accompanied by live storytellers who would clarify characters’ inner dialogue & general intent in a way that’s missing when watching the film in your living room. Without that embellishment, the film’s total lack of intercut dialogue cards leaves the audience to drown without a lifeline. Its hypnotic soundtrack recalls a particularly noisy Xiu Xiu experiment stretched thin & hammered out of shape, which is not likely what original audiences experienced either. Also, the film’s missing footage might’ve softened its abstraction to a degree (although some historians suspect director Teinosuke Kinugasa himself might’ve shortened & sped up the film to enhance this effect once he re-discovered his lost print).

All of this speculation is ultimately meaningless, however. The version of A Page of Madness we do have today is immaculately abrasive & I wouldn’t change one confusing frame of it. I doubt any other silent horror I’ll watch will match its sheer memorability, but I’ll gladly welcome the challenge of any film that’s willing to try.

-Brandon Ledet

The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence (2015)

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halfstar

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I’m calling it now, folks. The Human Centipede 3 is the single least enjoyable motion picture I’ve ever seen in my life. I pray that never changes. This is a franchise that’s been known for its vile, misanthropic humor & shameless navel-gazing since its meme-like inception in the late 2000s, but I’ll admit to actually enjoying the first couple titles in what’s likely to remain cinema’s least prestigious trilogy of all time. Unfortunately for my eyes (but perhaps fortunately for my soul), I could not carry that mild enthusiasm into the third and, as the merciful title promises, hopefully final work.

I assume most people who would bother reading this review in the first place would be fully aware of the franchise’s central conceit, so I’ll do my best to spare you the (literally) shitty details here. Instead, here’s a brief overview of its, um, artistic trajectory. First Sequence, released wide in 2010, boasted the tagline “100% medically accurate.” In a way, it’s difficult to argue the point. It’s a small, quiet torture porn horror where the titular poop-eating science experiment fails immediately & miserably due to infection, as any reasonable person would expect. 2012’s Full Sequence upped the ante significantly & almost retroactively made its comparatively dull predecessor a joy to watch. Its tagline reading “100% medically inaccurate,” it tells the story of a mentally disabled, sexually perverse superfan of First Sequence recreating the film’s experiment in a warehouse and, major surprise, it actually kind of works. His centipede is longer and more durable despite the disgusting conditions of its environment begging for a life-ending infection to take hold. Full Sequence is not only meaner & more disgusting than the first film; it’s also much more satirically pointed, revealing an indictment of its own audience for being the sick fucks who would want to watch not one, but two of these atrocities in the first place. I saw the film at a packed New Orleans Film Fest screening at Chalmette Movies and was both tickled by the darkly comic depravity I had just witnessed & strongly tempted to ask each attendee what’s wrong with them for showing up in the first place on their way out the exit. The Human Centipede 3: Full Sequence thoroughly ruined all of that questionable goodwill.

The all-important tagline of Final Sequence is “100% politically incorrect.” I hope you can already see the problem there. Long gone are the morbid fascination factor of the first film and the unexpected satirical edge & audience hatred 0f the second. In their place is a desperately unfunny, try-hard “political” comedy of legendarily hideous & vapid proportions. The same intense focus on gore & human cruelty that’s consistently present throughout the franchise is in tact here, but Full Sequence finds entirely new, unwelcome ways to disappoint & disgust. In some ways it’s director Tom Six’s greatest achievement yet, as it is a truly depraved work surely no decent human being could enjoy without failing a litmus test that calls into question their capacity for empathy, compassion, maturity or potential for spiritual growth. If someone ever tells you that The Human Centipede 3 is their favorite film, do the world a favor and push them into the nearest incinerator. Anytime a property claims that its goal is to be “100% politically incorrect” prepare yourself to witness some vile, misanthropic shit that’s toxic at best in its societal & spiritual value. Final Sequence surpasses even that low bar of depravity, sucking all joy out of its entire franchise & anything else unfortunate enough to lie in its vicinity. By the time I made it to the end credits (no small feat, that), I had to fight back an urge to alternate between screaming & chugging hard liquor in a scalding hot shower.

Inexplicably, though, it’s not necessarily the “100% politically incorrect” humor that makes the movie such a chore to survive. It’s the lead performance by actor Dieter Laser that sinks the film decisively before it even gives itself a chance to offend the audience with an onslaught of rape jokes & racial slurs. Laser delivers what is, hands down, the single most annoying lead performance in the history of the motion picture as an artform, if not the history of scripted theater. He is loud, brash, incomprehensible, devoid of value. His work here should be legally deemed criminal with some kind of mandatory penalty leveled on him as a penance (though, hopefully not one that takes inspiration from the film itself). Did I mention that Dieter Laser is profoundly awful in The Human Centipede 3? Good, because he’s shit, or perhaps something even more difficult to stomach.

For those of you paying close attention to this franchise (God help you), you may recall that Dieter Laser played the Nazi-esque doctor in First Sequence who invented the human centipede torture meme in the first place. Both he & the actor who portrayed his copycat in Full Sequence are recast here as the heads of a prison in the fiercely Republican state of Texas despite this being a universe where the first two films exist & are available on DVD. As the warden & assistant warden of George H.W. Bush Prison (topical humor! funny!), these two evil fucks attempt to please their right wing governor (played by Eric Roberts of A Talking Cat?! & Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs fame) by implementing methods of discipline that wouldn’t fly on Adult Swim’s Superjail!. Laser explains openly, “I believe in bringing back medieval torture methods” when he’s not busy screaming racial epithets at the top of his lungs. His assistant does him one better by suggesting a recreation of Tom Six’s visionary work in First Sequence & Full Sequence. Their centipedal masterwork isn’t realized until the final fifteen minutes of Final Sequence, a choice that withholds whatever perverse pleasure could possibly derived from the spectacle of seeing the longest human centipede yet in favor of boring/annoying the audience with Laser’s beyond-grating lack of subtle nuance or basic dignity. You know exactly where the film is going and yet it drags is little insectoid feet getting there so that you can spend more time “enjoying” political commentary that relates conservative Texans to Nazis in the first two minutes & doesn’t bother expanding its scope from there. What a godawful piece of trash.

I’ll admit that I didn’t watch this film in the best environment. Instead of heckling it with friends on a late night or quietly squirming in a crowded film fest screening like the fist two, I swallowed this shit while enjoying my breakfast alone on a Sunday morning. I doubt a better venue would’ve helped much, though. Outside a couple stray one-liners like “We don’t get to deal with their shit no more. They just got to deal with each others'” and a doctor’s fretting that the experiment is “in serious conflict with [his] Hippocratic Oath,” there’s truly nothing of value here. Even the intense gore, which includes an up-close, believably real castration, pales in comparison to the depravity of Full Sequence. On its list of achievements, Final Sequence boasts the two most disgusting rape scenes I’ve ever seen in my life (two low points I hope to never experience again), only to pull back & reveal that one of them was all just a dream, an empty exercise.

Tom Six, who appears as himself in the film & is aptly described by Laser’s cruelly unbearable warden as “a poop-infested toddler” knows a thing or tow about empty exercises. His one true accomplishment in Final Sequence is making the longest centipede yet to appear in the series, but no one could possibly care, considering the rotting pile of garbage he births it in. Six appears smug here, proud of his work & its cultural impact, directly referencing a South Park episode his magnum opus inspired. He forms a makeshift human centipede Ouroboros here, fashioning a cinematic monster that greedily feeds on its own filth. Everything feels off, a complete failure overflowing out the sides of Six’s pull-up diaper. Only porn star Bree Olson seems comfortable with the production value & “political incorrectness” on display and for some reason Six feels the need to mercilessly punish her for it. A final scene of Dieter Laser screaming unintelligibly into a bullhorn aimed at no one in particular, perhaps a long-dead God, suggests that Six knows exactly what a shitty monument to nothing he’s constructed here, but that doesn’t make the nihilistic exercise worthwhile in the least.

Trust me, folks. I’ve been known to enjoy many a shitty movie in my time, but my claim that Final Sequence is the worst film I’ve ever endured is not a challenge or a low-key recommendation or a thinly-veiled dare. This is a hateful, empty work meant to be enjoyed by no one. No one. If you can avoid giving Tom Six even the microscopic revenue of a hate watch on Netflix I highly recommend toughing out a life without having seen a spiritless, self-obsessed work of misanthropic masturbation that might forever define of sewers of needless, failed horror cinema . . . if you can manage to bear the thought. At the very least, I’ll envy you.

-Brandon Ledet

Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs (2015)

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three star

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As the less fortunate among you surely know by now, The SyFy Channel usually churns out its CGI mockbusters to siphon off money from the especially content-hungry in anticipation of major summer releases. While there’s no accounting for certain titles like Sharknado or Lavalantula, which have no “real” cinema counterparts to speak of, SyFy will usually pull a stunt like preempting del Toro’s kaiju love-letter Pacific Rim with its own mech suit cheapie called Atlantic Rim or riding the MCU’s Thor‘s coattails with some generic atrocity called The Almighty Thor, etc. My curiosity, then, was recently piqued while scrolling through Netflix after midnight when I noticed that SyFy had produced a film last year titled Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs. The most obvious comparison point to that title would be Jon Favreau’s better-than-its-reputation Cowboys & Aliens, but that film’s from all the way back in 2011 & Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs aired in 2015, so the timeline didn’t make much sense to me.

It wasn’t until I was a good 20 minutes or so into Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs (thanks to a complete lack of willpower) that I remembered, oh yeah, there was a CGI dinosaur movie that came out last year. It was called Jurassic World and starred one of Hollywood’s up & coming leading men and made a ridiculous amount of money all over the world, despite apparently being less memorable than a box office flop that came out five years ago. By the time I had this epiphany I was too far into Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs to bail, though, and I just sort of gave into finishing it the same way your body gives into the numbness of freezing to death when you plunge into icy waters.

Truth be told, Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs isn’t all that bad when judged by the perilously low standards of SyFy mockbusters. The characters are laughably wooden & the entire premise is just as try-hard as they come, but damn if I didn’t laugh every time some dope was eaten by a CG dino. In a world of cowboy cliches that range from fallen rodeo hero to power-hungry sheriff to country music video skanks of all genders, a CG dino is more savior than monster. The wicked creatures are released early on from their dino treasure trove inside an active mine shaft thanks to a shitty little CGI dynamite charge and are thankfully violent at every given opportunity: chomping heads, removing guts, biting people purely out of malice instead of hunger. The mine shaft works like some kind of bizarre 3D dino printer, emanating countless copies of the same generic, raptor-like dinosaur that move in quick jerks like a video game glitch and bleed explosive methane, because why not? The movie drowns in its own mediocrity when there’s no dino mayhem on display, focusing mostly on a romantically-charged rivalry between the sheriff & his rodeo cowboy nemesis that no one could possibly care about, but the plot is mostly an inconvenience at best. The dinosaurs are easily the more interesting half of the dino-cowboy equation, but the movie knows it & does its best to disperse their murderous chaos evenly throughout the production.

I was just shy of abandoning all hope on Cowboys vs. Dinosaurs when a second round of explosions happened to set loose a new, more varied batch of dinosaurs. This is when the cowboy gimmick really pays off. Our rodeo hero lassos himself a wild one & ends up riding a stegosaurus like an ornery bull. There’s even an exploding T-Rex. Where else are you going to see that? Don’t answer that. Look, the production value is essentially on par with a softcore porno, the gore is goofy but never quite gruesome, and the plot feels like one beat in a screenplay instead of a finished product. Even SyFy’s signature celebrity stunt casting is lackluster here, featuring Eric Roberts of such prestigious works as A Talking Cat?! & The Human Centipede 3. If Roberts’s IMDb page is to be believed, he appears in roughly 4,000 projects a year, so that wasn’t much of a get by any measure.

Still, I chuckled at far too many dino attacks in this film to brush it off completely. This must be how the poor people who enjoy watching Birdemic must feel. I wasn’t excited when Cowboys vs.Dinosaurs left the door open for a sequel, but I honestly would be more likely to watch that then giving Jurassic World a second look. If you want to consider that an insult to one movie instead of a compliment to the other, that’s up to you.

-Brandon Ledet

Movie of the Month: Alligator (1980)

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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 Britnee made Boomer & Brandon watch Alligator (1980).

Britnee: There’s a popular urban legend about alligator sightings in the streets of major U.S. cities.  It’s said that city dwellers would bring back baby alligators as souvenirs from trips to Louisiana and Florida, and once they grew tired of the baby gators, they would flush them down the toilet. The baby alligators would then grow up in city sewers and become giant mutant gators. Lewis Teague brings this myth to life in his 1980 sci-fi horror flick Alligator.

Campy creature features were a hot commodity around the time Alligator was released (Piranha, Humanoids from the Deep, C.H.U.D., etc.), and usually the film gets thrown into that group. Yes, there are many campy moments in Alligator, but it’s actually an excellent, well-rounded film. I would go as far as to say it’s close to being on the same level as Jaws.

Upon recently re-watching the film, I found myself to be really let down by the fact that our leading lady, Marisa (Robin Ryker), didn’t have even the smallest emotional connection with the star of the film, an alligator named Ramón. In the beginning of the film, a young Marisa has baby Ramón as a pet in a pretty lame reptile tank setup (crappy neon pebbles included). Her douchebag of a father flushes Ramón down the toilet, sending him to live a horrible life in the disgusting garbage-filled sewers of Chicago. The film then flashes forward to 20 years later, and Marisa is a reptile expert that assists a police officer, David (Robert Forester), in hunting down Ramón, who has become a giant, mutated alligator that is terrorizing the city. Marisa never realizes that the mutant gator is in fact her childhood pet Ramón, and that just didn’t sit well with me. I’m all about a good human-animal connection in film, and I think just a small moment where Marisa sees a spark in Ramón’s eye and realizes who he is would make this film so much better.

Brandon, were you also a little let down by the lack of a connection between Marisa and Ramón? What did you ultimately think of Ramón? Was he really the film’s villain?

Brandon: Okay, I am stoked that we’re getting into this question of Ramón‘s morality this early, because there’s a lot more to unpack there than you might expect. As a mythically gigantic, bloodthirsty reptile you might expect that Ramón was pure evil (or at the very least a chaotic neutral force of Nature). However, there’s a spirit of moralistic vigilantism to some of his kills that makes him more akin to the nuanced antiheroism of folks like your Bruce Waynes or your Don Drapers or your Walter Whites. We are unclear as to who Ramón‘s first victim is, as all the police discover is a severed limb in a Chicago sewer. His second victim is a wicked pet store owner who kidnaps neighborhood dogs, sells them to a crooked science lab, and disposes of their bodies in Ramón‘s underground home. Later, in one of the film’s most spectacular scenes of alligator mayhem, Ramón also hunts down & dismantles the science lab employees that cruelly abused these discarded animals in the first place at a stuffy wedding party. There’s also a tangent where Ramón gets payback on a sleazeball big game hunter meant to take him out.

If Ramón is the hero of Alligator the proof is in these moments, which position him as some sort of sewer-dwelling vigilante who punishes evil Chicagoans who flush their pets down the toilet. It’s only when police & news reporter investigations drive Ramón out of the sewers & disrupt his shit-stained habitat that he resorts to killing innocents, including cops & children. As these are the exact kinds of victims people tend not to forgive, this greatly complicates the question of Ramón‘s moral compass.

Another thing that complicates how we see Ramón as a misunderstood friend or a murderous foe is in the surprising high quality of Alligator‘s special effects. He’s just too spectacularly terrifying to take lightly. I think the effects also cloud the issue of whether or not Alligator qualifies as camp cinema, as Britnee was concerned with above. There are some larger-than-life caricatures in this film, not least of all the sentient sausage/cigar hybrid police chief & the nastily creepy pet store owner that make Alligator feel far short of Jaws (a movie it openly riffs on) in terms of quality, no doubt. However, on a technical note, the combination of real-life gators & gigantic gator puppets are near seamless. As many times as I was tempted to scoff at certain moments (the spinning toilet cam when baby Ramón is first flushed comes to mind), I was also just as impressed with some technical achievements in Ramón‘s gator attacks, especially once he emerges above ground. Watching the mutant gator smash through city streets, destroy cars with its massive tail, swallow victims whole, and completely raise hell at the aforementioned wedding party were all more visually impressive moments than I what I expected from this film, given its sillier flourishes. The movie wastes no time opening with a gator attack, so I expected it to be violent, but I didn’t expect the violence to be so well crafted on a technical (or budgetary) level.

There were also ways Alligator could’ve gone even further in a campier direction, such as a more formal, on-the-nose reunion with Ramón & the adult Marissa or more attention paid to the evil science lab that made Ramón so large in the first place. I would’ve loved to see Ramón & Marissa have their moment of recognition or the results some of the experiment’s other failed test subjects, but either detail would’ve undoubtedly played as a silly indulgence. The resulting tone, then, is somewhere in the middle. Alligator is at times very silly, and at times well-crafted & darkly grotesque.

I have a hard time imagining one of us reviewing this film & not slapping a “Camp Stamp” on it, but I’m also the mostly likely contributor around here to apply that label to any movie. What do you think, Boomer? Where does Alligator fall in or outside the spectrum of camp cinema?

Boomer: I don’t know that I would call this a camp film, actually. It has its fair share of campy ideas, but the general seriousness of the situation and the brutality of the onscreen deaths (particularly that of the child who is killed at some kind of costume party) make up for the sillier elements. There are certainly some deranged elements that threaten to push the film over the edge into full on camp, like Marisa’s excitable and possibly crazy mother and the archetypal irascible police chief’s Mentat-style eyebrows, but Alligator has something that a lot of genre satires don’t: respect for the source material that is being referenced. The Jaws parallels mentioned above are the most obvious, as the film is unabashedly aping that film’s style and plotline right down to mayoral corruption, here the result of the unnamed mayor’s relationship with the pharmaceutical chief whose company’s experiments indirectly led to the alligator’s mutation rather than an attempt to preserve the summer tourism economy boom. There’s a lot here that’s played for laughs, but the film manages to do so without irrevocably breaking the tension, which is a refreshing change of pace from other pastiche parodies. Even if we disregard contemporary rubbish parodies like Date Movie or Meet the Spartans and only consider genre classics, great movies like Airplane! and The Naked Gun don’t really work as legitimate examples of disaster film or cop drama when divested of their parodic elements; in contrast, even if you were to somehow never seen or heard of Jaws, Alligator would still hold up as a surprisingly decent example of the “giant animal” horror subgenre.

I also particularly liked that there was a reason given for why Ramón was so large, and that this reason tied this mutation back to human involvement. There’s nothing about Jaws that makes him a victim at all, but Ramón is surprisingly sympathetic for a swamp monster that’s literally a dinosaur. We see that the environment he was born into would have eventually led to him being wrestled by humans regardless of whether or not your Marisa had taken him as a pet; he was displaced from his natural habitat and transplanted to a city sewer, where the only food he was able to find consisted of castoff, hormone-injected puppy corpses. Everything that mankind reaps in this movie is, as Brandon points out, sown by them, even though a few innocent people get caught up in the midst of his vengeful rampage. Jaws, on the other hand, never explains how the titular shark managed to grow to such an absurd size (ten feet longer than the average male Great White) or why he has such an insatiable hunger for human flesh; this doesn’t make this a better film than Jaws at all, as that movie is at least partially about the terror of the unknown, but it does add a different element to Alligator that differentiates it from being a straightforward rip-off. It’s not clear how or why Ramón knows to go to the Slade mansion and devour guests (or why he knows to specifically target the lead scientist and Slade), but that doesn’t matter. At least the film didn’t take the same approach as the novelization of Jaws: The Revenge, which indirectly gave us the term “Voodoo Shark.”

One of the things that amused me most about this movie was the way that everyone, hero and villain alike, had nothing but disdain for the journalistic community, and the primary antagonistic reporter, Kemp, obliged them by being as weaselly as possible. What did you make of this element, Britnee? And, further, were you creeped out by the relationship between Robert Forster and Robin Riker, given that he is supposed to be roughly 40 and her character is at most 26?

Britnee: Before getting into the ridiculousness that is Kemp’s character, I just want to point out how insane his eyebrows are. Of course, Kemp wasn’t the only person in this movie with giant caterpillar eyebrows. As Boomer pointed out, Chief Clark had crazy eyebrows too! Maybe I’m overthinking this similarity, but there could be a possible good versus evil eyebrow battle occurring deep within the film. If so, it’s obvious that Chief Clark takes the cake.

Kemp’s character serves as the stereotypical reporter that would do anything to get a good story, even if it means exploiting someone’s personal tragedy. Of course, we know that not every journalist is as savage as Kemp, but I feel as though the film was attempting to convey some sort of message to the audience in regards to the authenticity of mass media. I can’t help but think of the title of one of my favorite Barbra Streisand songs, “Don’t Believe What You Read.” Not all media outlets are necessarily reliable, and Kemp is a representation of the deceitful side of the world of journalism.

As for the intimate relationship between Robert Forester and Robin Ryker’s characters, it did throw me a little off-guard at first. Mainly because Robert Forester gives off some really intense dad vibes. Marisa’s dad was a total jerk that flushed Ramón down the toilet, so she obviously had some underlying daddy issues. If David’s character was played by another actor, such as Harrison Ford, I think their love affair would have sat better with me. Honestly, I love a good age-gap relationship in movies. Harold and Maude and White Palace are two fantastic, unconventional romantic films that come to mind, and Alligator could’ve been on their level if Robert Forester wasn’t so dad-like.

Brandon, watching the film again recently got me to focus a little more on the terror that is Colonel Brock (Henry Silva). While he is definitely one of the film’s villains, he is probably one of the funniest characters in the movie. The scene in which he is awkwardly flirting with the television reporter was by far one of the funniest scenes in Alligator. Did you find Colonel Brock to be as comedic as I did? If so, did his unique brand of humor add value to the film? Would a more serious character have been a better choice?

Brandon: I love the cartoonish cad energy the dastardly hunter Colonel Brock brings to the film. He struck me as an odd combination of Jumanji‘s safari hunter Van Pelt & Empire Records‘s Neil Diamond surrogate Rex Manning, a sleazeball dandy plucked directly from either a children’s film or a 50s big studio epic. I also love the transparency of his presence within the film. Once Ramón dispenses with the crooked pet store owner & the evil science lab technicians, there aren’t many potential victims for his vengeful reptilian chomping. Colonel Brock is a perfectly calibrated last minute injection for the film because he gives the audience one more sleazebag to want to see dead. Ramón, of course, wastes no time obliging that bloodthirst and swallows the self-important goon whole in spectacular fashion. I could see how someone treating the film with a more serious tone could want more significant villainy that what Brock delivers, but I’m perfectly happy with his whole silly ass deal.

As much as I’m willing to view this movie through the trashy goofery of a camp cinema lens, there’s no denying that it’s a largely grotesque, hateful work. The alligator attacks start immediately from the outset & upon watching a man’s limbs ripped to shreds in the opening seconds a little girl wants to take one of the little beasts home. Once flushed down the toilet, Ramón‘s newfound home is a disgusting lair of trash & human filth somehow made worse by a greedy scientist lab willing to abuse & discard puppies in the most heartless way imaginable. At one point a mentally unstable suicide bomber is ridiculed & turned into a police station punchline. At some points it’s even difficult to rejoice in Ramón‘s revenge on the wicked because his means are so brutal (see: him devouring a child). I love the film’s more cartoonish, sillier moments (there’s a genuine star wipe transition between shots at one point, for God’s sake), but there’s so much ugliness mixed in that the clashing tones are downright jarring.

Boomer, is there an particular moment of shocking alligator mayhem or cruel human folly that sticks out to you as especially ugly that we haven’t covered here yet? There was so much nastiness going around that we surely haven’t touched on it all.

Boomer: We’ve already talked about the devoured child, which was the big violent moment that I didn’t expect. For the most part, Ramón was sticking to either enacting vengeance on his oppressors in a way that was, conceptually, more human than animal, or against people foolish enough to wander into his lair, which is a very animalistic and understandable reaction (RIP Officer Rookie, we hardly knew ye). And Brandon really has a point with his notation that the people in the film are cruel and hateful, like the police officers who mock the erstwhile suicide bomber; in fact, the general lack of empathy among the human characters in this film is what stood out to me more than Ramón‘s appetite and the things he did to sate it.

What stood out to me were the vendors who appear at the site of a mangling where police officers are tossing depth charges into a small body of water while trying to get the gator’s attention. It seems that, in universe, the peddlers of cheap wares have named Ramón “Alexander the Alligator” and arrive at the scene of a horrible tragedy in an attempt to capitalize on it with foam hats and plastic gator trinkets. It’s been a long time since I rewatched Jaws, so I’m not sure whether or not this particular element was included there or not, but this capitalistic opportunism in the face of human misery shocked me much more than the casual violence of Ramón, whose swathe of killings are motivated more or less by base instinct. It’s merely one more layer on this film, reminding us that people are the real monsters.

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Boomer: I notice that we mentioned that this film takes place in Chicago, and the Wikipedia page for the film also states that this is the case. This is never mentioned in the film, however; I kept trying to figure out where the film was set, and even googled “Marquette Place” when a sign with that name showed up on screen. Apparently, we only know this because it is mentioned in the director’s commentary. Before seeing the movie, I always assumed it was set in New York, which is probably the result of having long ago seen the Growing Pains episode in which Ben makes a movie that is, essentially, Alligator.

Britnee: During the scenes in David’s apartment, there are prints on the wall by Ramón Santiago (obvious inspiration for the alligator’s name). I was unaware of Santiago’s work prior to noticing the prints in the film, and I have to say that this guy has some phenomenal art. Not only is his art featured in the background of Alligator, but his art can also be found in the insanity that is the 1981 film Tattoo. According to Santiago’s website, he stated, “my paintings are what dreams are made of.” I would say that’s a pretty accurate description of his work. Unfortunately, I haven’t stumbled across an Santiago gator paintings yet.

Brandon: Alligator is a near-perfect slice of nasty 70s schlock (despite its early 80s release date) that begs to be loved for its faults instead of in spite of them. However, I do think that Britnee was onto something when she was wishing for a rewrite where a more solid connection between the now-monstrously large Ramón & the adult Marissa was established. However, instead of them sharing a moment of recognition at the film’s climax, I would’ve somehow implied that the body parts first discovered in the sewer belonged to Marissa’s father. Instead of an unidentified victim kicking off the police investigation that drives Ramón out of the sewers, Ramón killing Marissa’s father would both help explain her mother’s deranged state & add another name to Ramón‘s revenge list. One of the most fascinating concepts at work in Alligator is the idea of its titular monster intentionally seeking revenge on those who’ve wronged him, so it would’ve been incredible to see him devour the wicked brute that flushed him down the toilet as a baby. I enjoy the movie’s misshapen, incomplete feeling in general, but I do think that detail alteration would’ve improved the significance of Ramón‘s first recorded kill, however on-the-nose it would’ve been.

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
July: Boomer presents Citizen Ruth (1996)
August: Alli presents Black Moon (1975)
September: Brandon presents The Box (2009)

-The Swampflix Crew

The Bat (1926)

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One scene into The Bat I felt an intense swell of confusion & disbelief as if I had just won the movie lottery. The film’s titular antagonist appeared in the black & white haze of degraded celluloid with the general look of the familiar, but in a completely foreign shape. It was like running into a dear friend’s close relative & mistaking them for your pal. Batman as we know him may not have made it to the cinema until his incarnation in 1940s serial shorts, but his misshapen ancestor The Bat appeared onscreen two decades earlier, predating even the first Batman comic. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I sat down to watch this silent era crime mystery, but it surely wasn’t the prototype of a movie franchise hero I grew up loving dearly.

There are some major differences between The Bat & The Batman that I should probably get out of the way early. The Batman flirts with criminality in his vigilantism, but The Bat is an outright criminal. In fact, his background as a jewel thief & a bank robber makes him much more akin to a masculine version of Catwoman in Batman’s clothing. Speaking of the clothing, the two characters’ costumes also deffer in a few significant ways. While The Batman is a smoothed out, leather-clad ideal of what a humanoid bat might look like, The Bat is much more realistic to his animal kingdom inspiration. He has goofy, gigantic ears like a horror show version of Mickey Mouse. He’s also much furrier, with a terrifyingly accurate mask the film smartly waits to reveal until the third act. He also carries around his weapons/tools in an old doctor’s bag instead of the utility belt rocked by the Caped Crusader.

Whatever. This is still a masked man in bat costume, complete with black cape & gloves, who runs around the rooftops of an Art Deco metropolis. He climbs the sides of buildings by rope like a far less campy Adam West. He casts a goddamn bat signal across an interior wall using a car’s headlamp. He spends mot of his runtime skulking around an old, city-side mansion that looks like gothic castle & contains secret rooms that house illegal acts. Why take my word for it, though? Comic book artist Bob Kane cites the film’s 1930s talkie remake The Bat Whispers (which shares a director with this version’s Roland West) as  a direct inspiration for the creation & design of Batman as a character. So, there you go. The Bat is in itself an adaptation of a Broadway stage play, so maybe Batman’s roots go back just a little further, but his existence in cinema undeniably starts here, an impressive forever ago.

As for The Bat‘s achievements outside its eventual massive influence on modern pop culture, the film works just fine as a tiny murder mystery & heist thriller. For the stretches where The Bat doesn’t appear onscreen, the film’s plot isn’t particularly flashy or experimental in any recognizable way. The only thing that stands out as a sore spot is the comic relief of a ditzy maid who continuously misguesses the identity of The Bat. “Maybe he’s The Bat!” “Maybe he’s The Bat!” “That Jap butler gives me the willies […] Maybe he’s The Bat!” I’m not sure I’m allowed to go any further into the details here, since ht film opens with the stern talking-to, “Can you keep a secret? Don’t reveal the identity of ‘The Bat’. Future audiences will fully enjoy this mystery play if left to find out for themselves.” Yes, I can keep a secret, especially since the film’s stage play mystery structure isn’t the most significant thing at work anyway.

The Bat is a must-see work of seminal art. It’s not some antiquated bore with an antagonist that was plucked from lowly ranks for a higher purpose. The film directly influenced the creation of Batman, but it also achieves its own, exquisite Art Deco horror aesthetic that recalls the immense wonders of the Hollywood classic The Black Cat, except with more of a creature feature lean. Its stunts are impressively dangerous-looking. Its actors are dwarfed by its beautifully immense sets. Shadows creeping up city walls & perfectly lit gunsmoke shooting down a stairwell make for some unforgettable imagery/cinematic history. It’s no wonder, really, that the film has been remade twice (the second was in 1959 with horror legend Vincent Price) or that its influence reached into comic books & beyond. It’s a gorgeous & violent work of early horror/crime cinema that caught me off-guard with its power & improtance as soon as the first scene.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #7 of The Swampflix Podcast: Daredevil Cinema & Possession (1981)

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Welcome to Episode #7 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our seventh episode, James & Brandon discuss the Marvel character Daredevil’s humble beginnings on the silver screen in the early 2000s with illustrator Jon Marquez. Also, Brandon & James discuss the art house romance horror masterpiece Possession. Enjoy!

Production note: The musical “bumps” between segments were provided by the long-defunct band Trash Trash Trash.

-Brandon Ledet & James Cohn

The Darkness (2016)

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Early summer’s kind of a weird time of the year to release a goofy, low-rent horror. The Darkness might’ve been more at home among the year’s earlier horror cheapies like The Boy or The Forest or maybe held off until  whatever lackluster PG-13 terrors await us this Halloween season. Instead, it arrived now, begging to be drowned among blockbuster releases like Captain America: Civil War & X-Men: Apocalypse. Even I, connoisseur of bland horror cheapness, almost passed over the film based on its not so memorable ad campaign. It was the IMDb plot synopsis that drew me back in: “A family returns from a Grand Canyon vacation, haunted by an ancient supernatural entity they unknowingly awakened and engages them in a fight for their survival.” Now that sounds silly enough to work. Obviously, I would rather would rather see a Mt. Rushmore ghost story, but a Grand Canyon one is enough to raise my eyebrow & get my ass to a theater.

Kevin Baton is the paterfamilias of a dysfunctional family vacationing at The Grand Canyon. His autistic son angers ancient spirits by stealing mystic pebbles from a forbidden cave. Some dumb teen we thankfully never see helpfully explains, “There’s all kinds of creepy old shit in this place.” He’s not wrong. The caves & curves of The Grand Canyon have an ancient, old world magnetism to them that can really chill you in their enormity. That’s why, I’m assuming, The Darkness spends as little time there as possible & scuttles the family back to their standard issue suburban home as soon as it gets the chance. You wouldn’t want the majestic beauty & ancient spookiness of a natural phenomenon getting in the way of a familial melodrama after all, especially not in a cheap horror flick. No way. The Darkness is mostly of a portrait of a family unraveling where each member is dutifully assigned a personal struggle to overcome (adultery, alcoholism, autism, an eating disorder) and evil pebbles that open dimensional gateways to the Native American version of the Apocalypse are reduced to manifestations of bad karma due to a business dad’s selfishness in choosing work over family. Oh yeah, and Paul Reiser stops by, which I guess is scary in its own way too.

The Darkness is never truly scary, but it can occasionally be amusing in its ineptitude. I especially found it humorous when the film claims that autism puts children in a more spiritually receptive state, which is why its spooky-autistic tyke who steals the Apocalypse stones befriends a ghost he names Jenny & opens a portal to a ghost dimension on his bedroom wall (a plot detail that’s very reminiscent of last year’s Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension). If turning a mental disorder into a source of cheap horror isn’t goofily offensive/insensitive enough for you, the film is just as willing as any 80s misfire you can think of to other Native American societies as some kind of spooky mystics and only portray them performing spooky-mystic rituals involving chants & feathers. There’s also more standard-issue cliches the film tosses out (I assume) for a laugh: crows as foreshadowing, husbands ignoring their wives’ claims of hauntings, spooky Google (em, “E-web”) search results, etc.

Had The Darkness stayed in the desert it might’ve borrowed some of the same location-specific horror that colored properties like Pitch Black, The Descent, and 127 Hours in a memorable way. Had it portrayed evil spirits a little more menacing than a dude wearing fake wolf hide to Burning Man it might’ve convincingly threatened an imminent Apocalypse. Had it not reduced autism or Native American rituals into cheap gimmicks & novelties I might not have laughed in its face. As is, it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill PG-13 horror with just enough goofy misfires to make the experience enjoyably corny & mildly offensive, as if the Lifetime Channel had started producing late night creature features (which is a racket Lifetime totally should break into).

-Brandon Ledet

Tale of Tales (2016)

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“Every new life calls for a life to be lost. The equilibrium of the world must be maintained.”

It’s almost a cliché concept to explain at this point, but traditional fairy tales are not the saccharine Disney romances they’re often believed to be. Fairy tales are often horrifically brutal stories of otherworldly magic meant to warn real world people, often children, about the dangers of human follies like lust, greed, selfishness, or curiosity. It isn’t often that an authentic-feeling, appropriately brutal fairy tale makes to the big screen. It’s even rarer that it’d be live-action and an original property, rather than an adaptation of a Brothers Grimm or a Hans Christian Andersen tale. Tale of Tales is a once-in-a-lifetime gem in the way it not only fills this requirement, but also excels as an intricately detailed piece of high art & cinematic finery.

I didn’t expect to see a more exquisite, idiosyncratic work than Hail, Caesar! all year, but Tale of Tales might’ve blown it out of the water. It’s like The Fall, Pan’s Labyrinth, and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover all rolled into one hideous fairy tale directed by Cronenberg in his prime. It’s beautiful, morbidly funny, brutally cold, everything you could ask for from a not-all-fairy-tales-are-for-children corrective. It’s sometimes necessary to remind yourself of the immense wonder & dreamlike stupor a great movie can immerse you in and Tale of Tales does so only to stab you in the back with a harsh life lesson (or three) once you let your guard down. This is ambitious filmmaking at its most concise & successful, never wavering from its sense of purpose or attention to craft. I’d be extremely lucky to catch a better-looking, more emotionally effective work of cinematic fantasy before 2016 comes to a close. Or ever, really.

The film opens with Salma Hayek & John C. Reilly sitting as the king & queen of a fantasy realm kingdom. Hayek is perfectly regal on the throne while Reilly feels plucked from an especially expensive episode of Wishbone, recalling his blissfully clueless husband role in We Need to Talk about Kevin. There’s a strain on their relationship and, thus, the kingdom as it’s revealed that the couple cannot conceive a child as a future heir. Advised by an old, wizardly fella who lives in a cave, the royal couple addresses this problem by slaying a sea beast & eating its heart after it’s cooked by a virgin. The trick works & the queen carries her pregnancy to term over the course of a single night. And that’s when things get weird.

I reveal this plot detail only to illustrate just how varied & far-reaching the territory Tale of Tales covers can be. The tale of the sea monster’s heart is just one facet of just one story that continues to spiral out from there over the course of the film. All told, there are three tales covering three adjacent kingdoms that give this film its shape. Inexplicably, the Hayek & Reilly royalty aren’t even the most interesting characters of the bunch. Tale of Tales is crawling with witches, ogres, giant insects, and the like that all make magic feel just as real and as dangerous as it does in The Witch, albeit with a lavish depiction of wealth in its costume & set design the latter can’t match in its more muted imagery. The three tales told here all stand separately strong & immaculate on their own, but also combine to teach its characters/victims (and, less harshly, its audience) about the dangers & evils of self-absorption. Each character featured here suffers a hideous fate because of their own obsessive selfishness. And if there’s any who don’t, they likely suffer at the hands of others’, especially the ones who supposedly love them.

I urge you not to watch the trailer to this film if you can avoid it. It both spoils way too much of the plot(s) that you’re better off discovering on your own and completely misreads the tone of the film as a whole. Tale of Tales fearlessly alternates between the grotesque & the beautiful, the darkly funny & the cruelly tragic. Its cinematography as well as its set & costume design will make you wonder how something so delicately pretty can be so willing to get so spiritually ugly at the drop of a hat (or a sea beast’s heart). Don’t be fooled when the film threatens to devolve into modernist showboating with its explicit gore or its exploitative lesbian make-outs in the early proceedings. It’s very much in the tradition of fairy tales in their purest form, immense beauty, cruelty, warts, and all. I highly recommend lending it your full attention & willing imagination, especially if you have the chance to watch it on the big screen. You’ll both love & loathe the places it takes you.

-Brandon Ledet