Lists & Articles

The New Criterion Release of Polyester Stinks

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John Waters is my favorite director (and maybe human being?) of all time, which means his work is difficult to introduce to the uninitiated without gushing an overwhelming flood of “Here, just watch all of it!” recommendations. Late-career suburban comedies like Serial Mom & Hairspray don’t convey the dirt-cheap D.I.Y. filmmaking context that makes his work exceptional within cinematic history, but early, scuzzier works like Desperate Living & Multiple Maniacs are likely to scare off most new audiences with their acidic depravity. 1981’s Polyester is perhaps the perfect gateway into Waters’s cheaply intoxicating oeuvre then, as it’s a middle ground between the professional-grade suburban invasion comedies of his career’s latter half and the gonzo free-for-all that preceded them. Waters may have upgraded his camera equipment & attention to craft in that debauched ode to Sirkian melodramas, but he had not yet fully shed his early catalog’s dedication to putrid filth, which you can clearly see in his insistence that his first foray into “mainstream” filmmaking carry a literal stench.

In homage to one of his artistic role models, Waters decided to enhance the Polyester experience with a William Castle-style gimmick of his own design: Odorama. Often mislabeled as a “Smell-o-Vision” Odorama was a cheeky attempt to engage audiences’ sense of smell along with the usual sights & sounds of cinema. Numbered prompts would appear onscreen throughout the film to signal to audiences in the theater to activate their patented Odorama cards: scratch & sniff activity cards dispensed at the box office to mimic the (often vile) stenches depicted onscreen. I’ve been lucky enough to see many of my favorite John Waters flicks on the big screen (which I encourage anyone interested in his work to do; they’ve invariably improved with an audience), but I’ve never had the good fortune of catching Polyester in a proper theatrical environment for the full William Castle treatment. However, I’ve now owned the film on two different home video formats—DVD & Blu-ray—that both provided their own house-made Odorama cards, to varying results.

The Odorama card that came with my DVD copy was mostly for display only. I suppose the card had a light suggestion of a smell to it, if I’m being charitable, but it mostly amounted to a hint of stale hairspray or an airduster can. There were many reasons to justify upgrading my copy of Polyester to the new Criterion Collection restoration on Blu-ray. It’s loaded with bonus materials, like feature-length commentaries & behind-the-scenes interviews; its vivid color saturation is essential to its Sirkian homage; its romance novel cover of Divine sharing a passionate embrace with Tab Hunter is itself a gorgeous work of art. Before you have time to fully soak in these more elegant pleasures, however, the most striking aspect of the film’s Criterion update announces itself: the Odorama card. As soon as you crack open the plastic casing for the Criterion Blu-ray, the pungent stench of Polyester greets you in a cloud of odorous chemicals. Unlike previous home video releases of the Odorama card, this latest nasal assault actually, genuinely reeks. It’s a wonderful thing.

I can’t report that the new & improved Odorama experience is perfect, nor am I old enough to compare it to the original theatrical release’s aromatic potency. Scratching & sniffing along with the film for the first time was a delightful novelty, but I will say my experience with individual prompts on the card led to mixed results. It was most effective in the earliest scenes, with the first few prompts on the card approximating their corresponding imagery: the perfume of a rose, the funk of a fart, the chemical ambush of amyl nitrate. From there, the results become much more muddled, with prompts 4-9 mixing into a single, amorphous chemical stench before the air-freshener fragrance of prompt 10 restores order to the exercise. For all I know, the original, theatrical Odorama cards had the same problem, since I imagine keeping these chemical odors separate & distinct on a single slice of cardboard is near impossible. The 4-9 stench-muddling could’ve also been an issue of user error; maybe I should’ve sniffed fresh cookies or coffee grinds between as a palette cleanser between prompts for a more vivid experience.

One thing is certain: the new Odorama cards falling just short of Smell-o-Vision perfection wasn’t for lack of trying. The Criterion Collection has documented its efforts in collaborating with Waters himself to deliver the best Odorama experience possible, explaining that they had to contract a Tennessee company named Print-a-Scent to simulate a wide enough range of smells to approximate the film’s . . . unique set of aromas: farts, old sneakers, skunk spray, etc. Although you may not be able to individually distinguish those stenches on the new & improved Odorama card, it’s undeniable that they have created something much more effective than the near-scentless DVD print that preceded it. Polyester is now undeniably the most pungent film in the Criterion Collection, adding to its values as a John Waters gateway drug & a subversive act of trashing up “mainstream” cinema. I can recommend it with a newfound air of intellectual superiority, sticking out my pinky as I pinch my nose.

Pictured: the new card next to the ancient DVD copy that’s on its way out my house.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week 10/31/19 – 11/6/19

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Here are the few movies we’re most excited about that are playing in New Orleans this week.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

Terminator: Dark Fate –  James Cameron & Linda Hamilton return to the iconic series they abandoned sequels & prequels ago to restore its original function as a nonstop sci-fi action spectacle. It’s reported to be the best entry in the franchise since Judgement Day, which is admittedly a low bar to clear (even if we were unexpectedly tickled by the blasphemous lore-tinkering of Genisys) but at least sounds promising. Playing wide.

Burning Cane – A local drama starring Wendel Pierce as an alcoholic reverend in rural Louisiana who struggles to keep his community together despite the cruelties and vices that define their world. Director Phillip Yeomans, 19, shot this film when he was still in high school, making him the youngest and the first African-American filmmaker to win the top prize for Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival. Playing at Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge all week and for free at The Ogden on Tuesday 11/5 via New Orleans Film Society.

Movies We’ve Already Enjoyed

Parasite – The latest from Bong Joon-ho (director of Okja and Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2014, Snowpiercer) is a twisty, crowd-pleasing thriller that’s been selling out screenings & earning ecstatic critical praise in New York & Los Angeles for weeks, nearly cracking the top ten box office rankings in the US despite only playing on 33 screenings. Guaranteed to be in discussions of the best movies of the year, so don’t miss your chance to see it big, loud, and with an enraptured crowd. Playing only at The Broad & AMC Elmwood.

The Lighthouse – Robert Eggers’s follow up to The Witch (Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2016) is a Lovecraftian vision of madness wherein two lighthouse operators (Robert Pattinson & Wile Dafoe) grow to hate each other on a cosmic scale in tense, cramped quarters. A baroque, erotically charged exploration of the horrors of having a roommate. Playing wide.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #94 of The Swampflix Podcast: A Very Neil Breen Halloween

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Welcome to Episode #94 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our ninety-fourth episode, James, Brandon, and Hanna brave the murky depths of self-financed amateur filmmaking by examining the scariest director working today: Neil Breen, starting with his genocidal political screed Pass Thru (2016). Enjoy!

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

-James Cohn, Brandon Ledet, and Hanna Räsänen

The True Battle in Underworld (2003) Wasn’t Vampires vs. Werewolves, It Was Practical Effects vs. CGI

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Despite extending its presence on movie marquees all the way into 2017 through a series of unnecessary prequels & sequels, 2003’s action-horror epic Underworld has always been something of a critical punching bag. Registering with an embarrassing 31% aggregated approval rating on the Tomatometer, this bygone nu-metal era tale of an ancient race war between werewolves & vampires was the Twilight of its day: a critically derided mall-goth romance that found the right angsty audience at the right angsty time. It’s admittedly easy to see why pro critics would be harsh on the film immediately upon its release, despite its populist appeal. It’s practically a work of mu-metal horror pastiche – combining elements of Blade, The Matrix, Resident Evil, and Romeo+Juliet into a single flavorless gumbo without contributing much spice of its own. The film was even sued (and settled out of court) for “borrowing” its elaborate vampires vs. werewolves mythology from the popular tabletop RPG Vampire: the Masquerade – which was the one aspect of its initial outing that critics did praise. Finally catching up with Underworld myself, sixteen years after it was first panned and two years after its final installments passed through theaters unnoticed like a fart in the wind, I enjoyed the experience far more than I expected to. That enjoyment was purely a result of its visual effects work, though, which may have seemed less special at the time of its release than the modern miracle it feels like now in 2019.

I’m not about to rush out and gobble down all four sequels to Underworld or anything. Its vampires vs. werewolves race war mythology isn’t that exciting, nor is its star-crossed interspecies romance across those battle lines. Even the novelty of seeing legitimate actors like Kate Beckinsale, Michael Sheen, and Bill Nighy occupy this leather-fetish mall-goth fantasy space could only lead to diminishing returns, as I imagine the star power in, say, Underworld 4: Awakening is much less luminous. I enjoyed Underworld for exactly one (admittedly shallow) reason: the werewolves look really fucking cool (despite being referred to in-canon as “lycans,” which is not cool at all). Whenever you look back to creature features from this early 00s era, it’s always best to brace yourself for some horrifically shoddy CGI. Contemporaries like Ghosts of Mars, Queen of the Damned, and Spawn all feature early-CG monstrosities whose ambitions overshot their means, resulting in visual effects that have aged about as well as diapers on the beach. I couldn’t believe my eyes, then, when the werewolves onscreen in this Hollywood action-horror were genuine rubber-suit creations from practical gore artists. There’s so much physical blood, fangs, werewolf hair, and leathery nipples onscreen here when the standard for its era would have been a shapeless CG blur. Underworld is stubbornly committed to practical-effects gore (for its time at least) in a way I can’t help but respect, even if I can’t extend that same dorky enthusiasm to its romantic drama or its gothy worldbuilding.

You can get a concise snapshot of this stubbornness & dorky enthusiasm on the Special Features menu of the Underworld DVD, which includes a 12min featurette titled “Creature Effects.” Director (and all-around Underworld mastermind) Len Wiseman’s dorkiness just oozes from the screen in this behind-the-scenes interview. Dressed up like a mall-metal dweeb himself, Wiseman recounts meeting special effects artist Patrick Tatopoulos on the set of Stargate (where Wisemen was working as a props manager) and dreaming up ways to use the veteran’s expertise to craft a gothy creature feature of his own design (with some help from plenty of pre-exiting genre films of a higher caliber, of course). As Tatopoulos takes the audience on a backstage tour of the massive teams & teams of creators needed to achieve the film’s practical effects, it becomes apparent why CGI became the dominant industry standard. Animatronics tech, stilts, silicone body suits, and post-Matrix wire work all needed to operate in tandem to make just one werewolf crawl across the wall—and then CG effects were still used after the fact to smooth out the details. Watching artists work tirelessly to punch individual yak hairs into a werewolf mask or airbrush purple veins onto actors to indicate they’ve been poisoned with silver bullets is astonishing in its commitment to the value of real, tangible effects, even when they’re bolstered by CG touchups. Wiseman & Tatopoulos citing tiles like Aliens, the Predator, and Pumpkinhead as influences or insisting that they “wanted the werewolves to be sexy” really helps contextualize the horror nerd enthusiasm necessary to pull those effects off in the CGI-worshiping days of 2003 when the preference would be to just do it all on computers. It also helps explain why Underworld has aged (at least slightly) better than its contemporary critical reputation might have prepared us for.

Over time, Wiseman & Tatopoulos lost the war over preserving practical effects artistry in the face of CGI dominance. By Underworld 4: Awakening & Underworld 5: Blood Wars, CGI was no longer used to enhance their “sexy,” in-the-flesh werewolf creations, but instead had replaced them entirely. That’s a shame, since the obviously physical presence of those “lycans” in a time when everything was fading away into a CG blur was the one saving grace that makes Underworld something of a modern novelty. It would have been so cool to see that nerdy stubbornness extend into the 2010s, and might have afforded the series a second populist wind. Oh well, at least we can still revel in that dying artistry in the film’s behind-the-scenes tour, which some kind, copyright-infringing soul has uploaded to YouTube:

-Brandon Ledet

Who Can Kill a Child? Nic Cage, That’s Who

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When discussing the influencing texts & spiritual descendants of the 1970s grindhouse shocker Who Can Kill a Child?, the tendency is to focus on the Killer Children aspect of its plot. Seen as a gory follow-up to the shrewdly economic British chiller Village of the Damned and an early telegraph of the Stephen King-penned Children of the Corn, Who Can Kill a Child?’s lasting legacy has been rooted in bringing extreme 1970s ultraviolence to an otherwise well-worn Killer Children horror subgenre. Indeed, that is a large part of the film’s appeal as a gradually escalating creep-out. Its tale of British tourists being swarmed by an entire island of genocidal, adults-slaughtering children (as if they were Romero zombies instead of wide-eyed tykes) is incredibly harrowing. As its title suggests, though, most of the horror of that scenario is that at some point the cornered adults must fight back to ensure their own survival and, c’mon, who can kill a child? Just look at their innocent little faces! The British tourists eventually get there after much reluctance & inner turmoil, but there is a recent spiritual descendant to Who Can Kill a Child? that found adults who were much more enthusiastic about the prospect. Apparently, parents are the most enthusiastic child-killers we have around, especially when they’re played by Selma Blair & Nicolas Cage.

Both the adults-massacring phenomenon of Who Can Kill a Child? and the children-killing phenomenon of Mom & Dad (starring Blair & Cage as murderous parents) are unexplained supernatural events with ambiguous origins. The killer kids in our Movie of the Month are somewhat contextualized as exacting revenge on the adults of the world for the way children are always the ones who suffer most in times of war & famine, but the source of their newfound telepathic abilities and infectious killer instinct remains unexplained. Similarly, the widespread epidemic of crazed parents everywhere murdering their own children in Mom & Dad is visually linked to broadcasts of menacing static over television & radio, but the source of those broadcasts is never fully detailed – to the film’s benefit. However, the reason why those parents find it so easy to kill their own children once the static sets them off is much clearer here than the adults-slaughtering impulse of Who Can Kill a Child?. Before any supernatural event occurs in Mom & Dad, the familial relationships between parents & children are already hateful & combative. The film is first & foremost a satire about familial resentment in American suburbia, where passive-aggressive conflict, barely concealed racism, and disgust with teens’ bodies & sexuality are thinly paved over with epithets like, “You’re part of a family. That means you love each other even when you don’t love each other.” All the static broadcasts really do is chip away at that social convention to reveal that, of course, your family are the people you want to kill the most.

Selma Blair & Nicolas Cage are the exact kind of broad, over the-top actors necessary to make a horror comedy about parents who resent & murder their own children a fun romp instead of a vile slog. Their cartoon-level showboating is also necessary to match the filmmaking energy of Brian Taylor, who pushes his hyperactive sugar rush aesthetic from the Crank series to amore purposeful use here. Still, no matter how many deliriously over-the-top novelties are to be found in Mom & Dad—Nic Cage singing “The Hokey Pokey” while destroying a billiard table comes to mind—the underlying familial resentment that fuels its parent-child fights to the death remains palpable throughout. Blair & Cage play “successful” adults who find their manicured, suburban lives with The Right Career & The Right Family bitterly unfulfilling. Their light banter in early domestic scenes with their children barely conceals the family’s seething hatred for each other as they lie, cheat, steal, and insult their bonds into tatters. All the static phenomenon does is externalize the violence that was already threatening to explode under the surface. Who Can Kill a Child? is a much more somber, focused, and daringly explicit film in depicting its child-on-adult violence, but it never fully justifies its central premise with a clear reason or sentiment behind its Killer Children phenomenon. By contrast, Mom & Dad’s thematic justification for intergenerational violence is all too clear, uncomfortably mirroring the underlying resentment of all American households in a deeply ugly light. Despite its grindhouse-70s opening titles sequence, however, Mom & Dad is not nearly as willing to commit to depicting violence against children onscreen as Who Can Kill a Child? is, which almost makes its glibness with that violence land with less heft.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child? , check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our look at its more muted predecessor, Village of the Damned, and last week’s assessment of its influence on Children of the Corn.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #93 of The Swampflix Podcast: Queen of the Damned (2002) & Nu-Metal Vampires

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Welcome to Episode #93 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our ninety-third episode, Britnee & Brandon travel back in time to wage war with the vampires of the nu-metal era, with a particular focus on Queen of the Damned (2002), Underworld (2003), and Dracula 2000 (2000). Enjoy!

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

-Britnee Lombas & Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week: The Horrors of #NOFF2019 10/16/19 – 10/23/19

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There’s a wonderful overlap of goings-on in the city this week, as the 30th annual New Orleans Film Festival is descending upon us just as we approach Halloween. There are hundreds of titles screening all over the city for NOFF and we plan to cover at least a dozen or so of all types and shapes and genres for the site in the coming weeks. For the purposes of keeping our weekly Now Playing feature spooky all October, however, I’m only going to highlight a few horror-related NOFF titles here, so you can work the festival into your regular Halloween-season movie binging. Happy hauntings!

Spooky Movies Screening at NOFF

Scream Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street – A long-awaited documentary chronicling actor Mark Patton’s troubled relationship with the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Closeted at the height of Reagan Era homophobia, Patton felt he was bullied by the gay “subtext” the filmmakers behind Freddy’s Dead added to his de facto “Final Girl” character. He’s since embraced the role (and the horror community at large) in his journey to self-acceptance, but that turnaround has not been easy or fair. An important episode in queer horror history. Thursday 10/17 (9:15pm) & Friday 10/18 (8:30pm) at The Broad Theater.

The World is Full of Secrets – Set during the nostalgic haze of a mid-90s summertime sleepover, a group of teenage girls compete to one-up each other by telling the ghastliest, goriest stories they can conjure – answering the prompt “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever heard?” Described in the NOFF program as “something like a deconstructed episode of Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?.” Saturday 10/19 (7:30pm) at The Broad Theater.

Swallow – Recalling the horrors of modern life & patriarchal control in Todd Haynes’s classic chiller Safe, this discomforting atmospheric creep-out centers on “a newly pregnant woman whose idyllic existence takes an alarming turn when she develops a compulsion to eat dangerous objects.” Sunday 10/20 (9:00pm) at The Broad Theater.

Hunting for Hedonia – A Tilda Swinton-narrated documentary on the history of medical research in Deep Brain Stimulation. Both a testament to the practice’s benefits for neurological disorders and a nightmarish exploration of its implications in mind control, psychological abuse, and sexual debauchery. Only “horror” in the sense that it explores the uncomfortably thin, easily exploited border between our minds and modern tech. Saturday 10/19 (2:30pm) and Tuesday 10/22 (6:30pm) at The Broad Theater.

Horror Classics Screening Elsewhere

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) – This bizarro tale of child-melting Halloween masks and ancient Stonehenge-worshipping cults was once the most hated entry in its franchise (as an experiment in releasing a Halloween film that opted to not feature Michael Myers) but has since been reclaimed beyond the point of being a cult classic. It’s just a classic now. Maybe the best film about Halloween as a holiday; certainly has the all-time best Halloween jingle. Screening in the midnight slot at The Prytania on Friday 10/18 and Saturday 10/19.

Alien (1979) – Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic, bolstered by the bottomless subliminal nightmare of H.R. Giger’s visual art, is still the all-time scariest movie ever set in outer space (and maybe even beyond). Screening to commeorate its 40th Anniversary on Sunday 10/13, Tuesday 10/15, and Wednesday 10/16 via Fathom Events.

Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988) – The first Sleepaway Camp film stumbled into over-the-top melodrama, deep psychosexual discomfort, and Problematic-As-Fuck gender politics by attempting to spice up the first-wave slasher formula with some unexpected twists. This lesser-seen sequel is much more self-aware in its slasher-riffing intentions, functioning as a full-on parody of the genre in surprisingly fun & clever ways. Screening for free at the Frenchman Theater & Bar on Wednesday 10/23 (10:00pm, with a pre-party celebration beginning at 8:00).

House on Haunted Hill (1959) – Long before it trickled down into a nu-metal atrocity under the Dark Castle brand (thanks largely to its open-season copyright status in the public domain), this classic team-up between director William Castle and horror icon Vincent Price defined the haunted house horror flick for an entire generation of dweebs. No word yet on whether these showings will incorporate Castle’s innovative “Emergo” technology – in which a “skeleton” on a pulley system swooped over the audience to punctuate specific scares. Screening Sunday 10/20 (10:00am) and Wednesday 10/23 (10:00am) as part of The Prytania’s regular Classic Movies series.

-Brandon Ledet

Ancestors of the Corn

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My memories of it were never especially vivid, but the 1984 Stephen King adaptation Children of the Corn scared me silly as a kid. All I truly remembered about the film was a rural town of killer children roaming roadside cornfields under the cult-leader rule of the prophet Isaac, played by series mascot John Franklin. I didn’t even have that central character’s name locked down in memory, though, as I’ve been wrongly referring to him by the more memorable name Malachi for decades (despite that name belonging to one of Isaac’s faithful child soldiers, not the leader himself). Still, even with the only the vaguest memory of that mid-80s cult curio rattling around in the back of my brain, it was easy to recognize it as a clear descendent of our Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child?. It’s not nearly as vicious, purposeful or, frankly, as good as Who Can Kill a Child?, but it certainly shares a lot of its thematic DNA.

Originally a short story published in Penthouse Magazine one year after Who Can Kill a Child?’s theatrical release, Stephen King’s killer-children cult thriller is strongly reminiscent of its elder. In both films, a tourist couple are trapped in a remote village overrun by violently rebellious children who’ve massacred all other nearby adults. Both films open with the eeriness of being the only car on the road while violent children quietly watch from their hidey holes. They’re primarily Daylight Horror films staged in open, sunlit spaces that are unusual for a genre that loves to build tension in cramped darkness. Their respective Killer Children contingents are headed by enigmatic leaders who mock traditional religious ceremonies in their town’s abandon churches and, most damningly, share the rarely used scythe as a murder weapon. If King was entirely unaware of Who Can Kill a Child? when he wrote this film’s source material (or if Fritz Kiersch hadn’t seen the picture before directing this adaption nearly a decade later) then this is a phenomenally precise case of parallel thinking.

At first, it appears as if the major distinguishing factor that would deviate Children of the Corn from the Who Can Kill a Child? template is that Isaac’s corn-worshipping flock aren’t killing adults for a supernatural cause, but rather a misguided superstition. There’s a Wicker Man-inspired track here about a cult who believes they must sacrifice anyone over 18-years-old to a vengeful god they call “He Who Walks Behind the Rows” to ensure a good corn harvest. Being ritually murdered by alarmingly organized children on the orders of a false prophet with an overactive imagination sounds genuinely chilling, but that’s not exactly what’s gong on here. There’s plenty of confirmed-to-be-“real” supernatural shit transpiring in these corn fields: harvest demons, Hellish weather patterns, predictive visions, and anything else Stephen King’s coke-addled mind could excitedly splatter on the page in its default over-excited state. If anything, it complicates Who Can Kill a Child?’s supernatural horror by adding more, more, more to the pile instead of appreciating the simplicity of the original’s premise & execution.

The true mutation of the Who Can Kill a Child? formula here is that Children of the Corn perversely feels like a Killer Children horror film made for children. The adult couple abducted by Isaac’s corn-worshiping cult (featuring The Terminator’s Linda Hamilton in an against-type distressed damsel role) provide a basic plot for the story to follow as outsiders who interrupt the killer-children’s natural order. They’re not necessarily the POV characters, though. The film is narrated by a cutesy child actor who plays a detractor within the cult who questions Isaac’s “wisdom.” Even with all the bloodshed & spooky cult rituals, the film plays with a Kids’ Movie sensibility throughout, which excuses some of its sillier touches like its faux-Latin choral score and its dynamic shots of “menacing” corn. A too-early viewing of Who Can Kill a Child? would scar a child for life, but catching Children of the Corn on late-night cable at an early could easily create a lifelong horror fan, something I can personal confirm. I suspect that’s how this deeply silly film earned no fewer than nine sequels, anyway, while Who Can Kill a Child? has been relegated to in-the-know cult status. Children of the Corn is about as original & hard-hitting as a Kidz Bop cover of that superior work, but there are far worse things a film could do than transform impressionable children into future genre nerds.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child? , check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at its more muted predecessor, Village of the Damned.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans This Week: 10/10/19 – 10/16/19

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Here are the few movies we’re most excited about that are playing in New Orleans this week, including a couple horror classics to help fill out your Spooktober calendar.

Movies We Haven’t Seen (Yet)

Dolemite is My Name – Eddie Murphy stars in a celebratory biopic about raunchy comedian Rudy Ray Moore, whose iconic Dolemite character helped define the blacksploitation era. A festival darling with co-writing credits from the writing team behind Tim Burton’s Ed Wood; catch it with a crowd on the big screen before it’s forever trapped in the Netflix abyss. Playing only at The Broad.

Gemini Man – This Ang Lee-directed, Will Smith-starring sci-fi action epic about guns & clones looks like it could be a heap of big dumb fun (despite its early lackluster reviews). It’s almost guaranteed to bomb financially, but there’s a novelty to its obsession with filmmaking tech that I can’t help but be intrigued by – not least of all the fact that AMC Elmwood is one of the few cinemas in the nation screening it in its intended, absurd 120fps frame rate (essentially, motion smoothing on steroids). Playing wide.

Dial M for Murder (1954) – Alfred Hitchcock’s classic crime thriller was the first of his three collaborations with Grace Kelly (followed by Rear Window and To Catch a Thief in the following year). Originally shot in 3D but released only in 2D after that fad was quickly abandoned, the film has a striking visual playfulness to it that’s notable for even Hitch. Screening Sunday 10/13 and Wednesday 10/16 as part of the Prytania’s ongoing Classic Movies series.

Movies We’ve Already Enjoyed

Alien (1979) – Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic, bolstered by the bottomless subliminal nightmare of H.R. Giger’s visual art, is still the all-time scariest movie ever set in outer space (and maybe even beyond). Screening to commeorate its 40th Anniversary on Sunday 10/13, Tuesday 10/15, and Wednesday 10/16 via Fathom Events.

Child’s Play (1988) – Long before reports warned that the new Joker movie was going to incite violent acts from the incel “community” (angry online white men who’re likely to act violently no matter how many Scorsese movies the Crime Clown rips off at the cinema), there were protests claiming that this cult classic about a killer doll was going to incite violence in children. Instead, it inspired six sequels, a (surprisingly excellent) reboot, and an increasingly campy character we’ve all come to love despite his murderous ways. Maybe there’s hope for us yet. Screening in the midnight slot at The Prytania on Friday 10/11 and Saturday 10/12.

Hustlers – Boomer highly recommends this surprise critical-hit thriller about a crew of strippers who embezzle money from the Wall Street bozos who frequent their club. Features an absolute stunner of a performance from Jennifer Lopez in particular, who just wants to know one thing from her audience: “Doesn’t money make you horny?” Of course it does. Playing wide.

-Brandon Ledet

Island of the Damned

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One of the most underappreciated cul-de-sacs in horror cinema is the 1950s & 60s British thriller that turned expansive premises with global implications into bottled-up, dialogue-heavy teleplays. Sci-fi horror classics like Devil Girl from Mars, The Day of the Triffids, and The Earth Dies Screaming executed big ideas on constricted budgets in excitingly ambitious ways, even if they often amounted to back-and-forth philosophical conversations in parlors & pubs. It’s difficult to imagine so, but our current Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child? has strong roots in one of the most iconic examples of this buttoned-up British tradition – the 1964 chiller Village of the Damned. What’s most amazing about that influence is that the calmer, more dialogue-heavy example of the pair is somehow just as disturbing as its ultraviolent descendent. Even working under harsh financial restraints & systemic moral censorship in a more conservative time for horror cinema, Village of the Damned holds its own against the free-to-shock grindhouse nasties that followed in its wake.

It’s not that Village of the Damned was the only killer-children horror film that could or would have influenced Who Can Kill a Child?. From the classier Evil Children artifacts like Rosemary’s Baby & The Bad Seed to schlockier contemporaries like It’s Alive! & Kill Baby Kill, it’s remarkably rich thematic territory that’s been mined countless times before & since. Still, there’s something about the way the concept is handled in Village of the Damned that directly correlates to Who Can Kill a Child?, particularly in the two films’ opening acts. They both begin with the eerie quiet of a vacated city where the adults have been neutralized (in Who Can Kill a Child? because they were massacred, in Village of the Damned because they were gassed by alien invaders). Both films dwell on the mystery of those vacant rural-village settings for as long as possible before revealing that their central antagonists will be murderous children. Those children may have different respective supernatural abilities (the ones of Who Can Kill a Child? are unusually athletic & muscular while the toe-headed cherubs of Village of the Damned are hyper-inteligent), but they share a common penchant for telepathic communication that leaves their adult victims out of the loop. Most importantly, Village of the Damned concludes with its main protagonist (veteran stage actor George Sanders) making the “heroic” decision to kill a classroom full of children to save the planet, which touches on the exact thematic conflict referenced in its unlikely decedent’s title.

There are, of course, plenty of ways that Who Can Kill a Child? mutates & reconfigures the Village of the Damned template instead of merely copying it (lest it suffer the same fate as John Carpenter’s tepid 90s remake). Instead of the killer children being a set number of alien invaders in a small village, they’re instead a growing number of infectious revolutionaries who can recruit more tykes into their adult-massacring cause – making their eventual escape from their island home a global threat. Since the sensibilities of the horror genre in general has changed drastically between the two films – from teleplays to gore fests – Who Can Kill a Child? also translates the earlier film’s “The Birds except with Children” gimmick to more of a hyperviolent George Romero scenario. Surprisingly, though, the most pronounced difference between the two works is their respective relationships with the military. In Village of the Damned, the British military is a force for patriotic good against an invading space alien Other – who trigger post-War trauma over entire communities being gassed & destroyed. Who Can Kill a Child? is much, much tougher on military activity, framing its entire children’s-revenge-on-adults scenario as retribution for the way it’s always children who suffer most for adults’ war crimes. That makes this gory Spanish mutation of the buttoned-up British original the exact right kind of cinematic descendent – the kind that’s in active conversation with its predecessors instead of merely copying them.

Who Can Kill a Child? is less restrained than Village of the Damned in terms of its politics & its violence, but both films are on equal footing in terms of bone-deep chills—which speaks to the power of the teleplay-style writing & acting of 1960s British horror. Village of the Damned is nowhere near the flashiest nor the most audacious entry in the Evil Children subgenre, but it is an incredibly effective one that plays just as hauntingly today as it did a half century ago. It’s like being locked in a deep freezer for 77minutes of pure panic, so it makes sense that it’d have a wide-reaching influence on films that don’t either share its sense of restraint nor its politics.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, the 1976 Euro-grindhouse provocation Who Can Kill a Child? , check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet