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Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)’s Black & Chrome Makeover

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When I first reviewed George Miller’s high octane action spectacle Mad Max: Fury Road last summer, I was a little late to the table and the film had already been relegated to cult classic status, earning high marks from fans & critics, but failing to beat out less memorable films like Tomorrowland & San Andreas at the box office. Before reviewing the film I watched it twice in the theater in two different formats, 2D & 3D, and contextualized it by plowing through Miller’s entire catalog for perspective (for the record, it was just slightly bested by Babe 2: Pig in the City & The Witches of Eastwick as a career high for me). Despite all of that effort I floundered to find anything new or interesting to say about the film that wasn’t a mere echo of the praise it was already lauded with. Over a year later, I’ve now seen Fury Road reach its third theatrical format, the colorless Black & Chrome edition, and I still have nothing significant to add outside an echo of how wonderfully bizarre & overwhelmingly kinetic this film is. It’s still one of the best action films in recent memory. Immorten Joe is still a total fucking nightmare. Not much has changed in this most recent theatrical release but the color, so don’t beat yourself up if you couldn’t catch it in theaters (especially since there’s a Black & Chrome release on BluRay & VOD currently available for the still curious).

All that being said, I absolutely loved returning to the theater to witness this bizarre work unfold for a third time. Catching Fury Road in three distinct formats has been illuminating in that it allowed me to appreciate different aspects of the film in each run, while I still don’t believe I’ve seen it enough times to fully take it all in. While the campy, drive-in spectacle of watching it in 3D was my personal favorite way of experiencing the film, there was a definite novelty to the Black & Chrome version that highlighted aspects of what Miller accomplished I don’t remember noticing before. The story goes that while screening a work print of Fury Road without a score & without color, Miller found his preferred version of the film. The studio obviously rejected the idea of releasing the film in that state for fear of scaring off general audiences, but a year later a home video & brief theatrical release has made its way into the world after this production anecdote piqued fans’ interest (although with the score intact). As the title suggests, the black & chrome Fury Road is a little shinier and higher contrast than a traditional colorless film is presented, particularly in details like when Immorten Joe’s “war boys” spray that mysterious chrome substance across their teeth as a pick-me-up. This aspect of the print is emphasized in-film by lines like “Look at that! So shiny! So chrome!” and “You will ride eternal, shiny & chrome.” Although the color change doesn’t entirely alter the film’s DNA (how could it?), it is a shift that’s often justified & accentuated by the script.

I caught the black & chrome Fury Road at the only theater in Louisiana (and one of only a few dozen in the nation) that was screening a print. A little dazed by catching Moonlight earlier that afternoon & enjoying a few cocktails downtown in the meantime, I was confronted with two major annoyances at the cinema: a very talkative older couple who were brazen in their interruptions since there were only three of us “witnessing” Miller’s glory & a loud, hideous whine emanating from the projector. In an attempt to escape both distractions, I moved to the very front row of the tiny theater, completely immersed in the black & chrome madness blasting before me. Although I was mostly annoyed by the talking, I was a little amused when, after the glorious dust storm finish to the first chase scene, a man exclaimed, “Son of a bitch. I’m worn out! That was fucking genius.” As long as I’m echoing already-expressed sentiments here, I guess I have to whole-heartedly agree with that drunk man-child. Fury Road wore me out every single time I’ve seen it long before the end credits rolled. And, despite my exhaustion, it was indeed “fucking genius”. There’s an undeniable, infectious “how did this get made?” quality to Fury Road (as if it’s something Miller got away with, not just something he filmed), that strikes me every time no matter what row I’m sitting in, how disruptive the audience is, or in what state it’s being projected. There was something especially cool about watching it a few feet away from the screen, though. I’ll readily admit that, even if it wasn’t my first choice.

Overall, I am saying that the Black & Chrome edition of Fury Road isn’t an entirely unique experience, but that doesn’t mean nothing changed for me in that format. In a lot of ways, the black & white digital grain makes the film feel more 90s, recalling Aronofsky’s π or, once the supermodels appear, the world’s craziest perfume ad. A lack of color also called attention to the film’s dust & grit, as if it were a feature length adaptation of a White Zombie music video (the Russ Meyer-inspired “Thunderkiss ’65,” specifically). The horror of the zombie-like war boys popped off the screen more in the opening capture & detainment sequence. A little of the CGI is clouded without the color, making it play like a forgotten relic, maybe along the lines of Hardware or, hell, even Metropolis. All of these elements were already lurking in Fury Road to begin with, though. All switching formats does is make them more obvious. Some would even argue that the original version of the movie is near-monochromatic to begin with, so the difference is negligible at best. Personally, I would miss the bright reds & purples of details like the dust storm or the guitar goblin if this were the only version of the movie available, but thankfully it’s not. There’s now three versions of Fury Road out there waiting to impress & confound you as to how something so goddamn insane was ever made in the first place. I’m lucky to have seen it even once, let alone from so many angles & shifted perspectives. If nothing else, the black & chrome flavored Fury Road is at least worth seeking out to add that extra layer of appreciation to something we all already knew was wonderful. When you seek it out, though, just try to avoid the whining projectors & talkative drunks out there aiming to distract from it. There are many roadblocks to avoid on the path to Valhalla.

-Brandon Ledet

Paperhouse (1988) as a Warning Shot for the Atmospheric Horror of Candyman (1992)

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When we were first discussing November’s Movie of the Month, the lucid dreaming fantasy drama Paperhouse, we were very adamant that the film didn’t entirely fall under the horror genre, despite the way it carried itself with a horror atmosphere. The film’s alternating dream world vs reality dichotomy lent itself to some horror genre hallmarks: an eerie score, a mutilated villain, an overwhelming sense of dread. Yet, the story was about a young girl exuding godlike control in a self-created dream space as a means of bucking against the health & home life helplessness she suffered in the “real world,” sometimes with the two realms meeting in unexpected ways. That’s not exactly the blueprint for the ghost stories, slashers, and monster movies we usually pin under the horror umbrella. Four years after Paperhouse, however, director Bernard Rose repurposed a lot of the dread-stirring techniques of the children’s film for something entirely different: Candyman. The supernatural slasher Candyman is certainly Rose’s most infamous film to date, but a lot of what makes it work as a bone-chilling, reality-disrupting horror can easily be traced back to the familial drama nightmare of Paperhouse.

Just like how Paperhouse distinguises between the natural world and the dream world of its protagonist’s crayon drawing, Candyman exists in two distinct spaces: in front of & behind the mirror. The killer from this Clive Barker-penned story is summoned in a mix of Beetlejuice lore & “Bloody Mary” urban legend shenanigans. After someone/anyone says “Candyman” five times in the mirror, the spirit of a brutally murdered slave with a hook for a hand and a body full of bees materializes to murder them. What’s brilliant about the way Candyman’s mirror realm is presented onscreen is that it partly exists as a physical space characters/victims can climb into through the back of medicine cabinets. This space exists both as a physical part of the building and as a dream world where the Candyman can hold hostages, sometimes infants, as bait to lure his more prized victims into full cooperation with his evil plans. The fantasy realm in Paperhouse works likewise. It’s physically represented in a crayon drawing the protagonist can manipulate while awake and as a dream realm she can only enter while asleep. The way one realm can affect the other in Paperhouse is also reflected in the way the Candyman frames his victims for murder while they’re under his spell, enacting a physical change in the “real” world while the protagonist is helplessly trapped in a supernatural one.

Besides their established dichotomies between “real” and fantasy spaces & the occasional crossovers that disrupt them, Paperhouse and Candyman also share a general sense of fairy tale storytelling. Paperhouse most notably feels like a classic fairy tale, following a young girl who can enter & change the world through her own drawings. Candyman, however, is specifically about the power of urban legends & myth making. It’s not too difficult to draw a line between traditional fairy tale folklore and the modern urban legend, particularly in the case of the Candyman’s legend, which includes supernatural detail in its mirror realms & its Biblically massive swarms of bees. The Candyman himself is desperately concerned with the strength and prominence of his own legend, focusing as much effort as possible on making sure people still believe in his fairy tale folklore as if his (after)life depends on it. As the series continues in its campier, less effective sequels, the Candyman even begins to somewhat reflect the intention of the eyes-scratched-out dream Dad of Paperhouse, specifically tormenting the living members of his family as part of his revenge strategy. By the third film in the series, his supernatural power is also revealed to be tied to a work of art, a self-portrait, which is even more of an encroachment on Paperhouse territory. Bernard Rose had no discernible influence on those diminishing returns ventures, but the fairy tale aesthetic & power he established in both Paperhouse & Candyman mirror each other close enough even without that connection.

There’s a lot to dissect in Paperhouse & Candyman‘s shared fairy tale narratives about dueling reality & fantasy realms, but it’s the way director Bernard Rose establishes a distressing mood in both films that truly ties them together. The menacing score from Hans Zimmer that makes so much of Paperhouse feel like a nightmare is recognizably echoed in Phillip Glass’s masterfully eerie work in Candyman. Both films turn cheap, cold sets into assets, distorting reality by making everything feel tactile, but off. The disorientation in how the two works distinguish between fantasy & reality similarly put the audience on edge. Paperhouse sets the table for a lot of the horror genre thrills Rose later pulled off in Candyman. Even though that latter work’s sequels pushed it into more traditional slasher territory, the film itself doesn’t ever feel like a strict horror narrative. Clive Barker’s writing style surely had an influence there, as his works like Hellraiser & Nightbreed never exactly fit into the traditional Jason Voorhees-type slasher box (despite Pinhead often being referenced in that context). Anyone who’s looking for standardized Candyman thrills where atmosphere is made secondary to violence & gore would likely find the most solace in that film’s less-than-stellar sequels. On the other hand, if the atmosphere & surrealism is what made Candyman feel special to you in the first place, Paperhouse demonstrates just how effective Rose can make that tone feel even with most of the horror removed. Paperhouse is remarkable in many ways that has nothing to do with Rose’s latter work in Candyman, but the film is still noteworthy as proof that his best known effort would still be horrifying even if it were completely removed from the horror genre.

For more on November’s Movie of the Month, the lucid dreaming fantasy drama Paperhouse, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

The Funhouse (1981) as an Ideal, Forgotten Midpoint Between Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacres (1974, 1986)

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We’ve been scratching our heads all month trying to figure out why Tobe Hooper’s grimy carnival slasher The Funhouse isn’t more of a household name. One of my theories was that Hooper had already changed the game years earlier with his weirdo slasher opus The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, inspiring so many similar oddball horror entries in its wake (Tourist Trap, for instance) that The Funhouse had a little too much company to stand out on its own as anything radical or idiosyncratic. By the time of its release the Tobe Hooper grime of The Funhouse was just a drop in really strange, hideously dirty bucket. Maybe that’s why Hooper’s next return to the slasher genre in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 strived for a much campier, more colorful aesthetic than the original. It was a decision that (intentionally) pissed off a lot of fans at the time of its release, but led to a much more infamous work that’s still regularly discussed today, despite The Funhouse being the better movie overall.

The Funhouse was released more or less at the temporal midpoint between Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, which were separated by twelve years and a few wildly varied experiments from the director. 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre details a backwoods Texas family of chainsaw-wielding cannibals with a weird collection of skeleton art & Ed Gein-inspired modes of improving their self image. 1986’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 follows a very similar narrative structure, sometimes recreating exact scenes from the original, but punches them up with hideously shrill humor, jaw-dropping gore effects, and color-soaked camp spectacle. The Funhouse splits the difference, offering a more colorfully surreal setting for its cold-blooded violence than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre without aiming for the full-goof absurdism of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

Hooper’s career is wildly chaotic, haunted by ghosts, Martian invaders, sexy space vampires, and all kinds of other horror genre eccentricities that are worlds away from standard slasher fare. The Funhouse serves as a great, typifying middle ground for his difficult to pinpoint work that somehow captured the spirit of both of his violently disparate Texas Chainsaw Massacre films, while still pointing to the otherworldly quality of his non-slasher work. It doesn’t ever bring in the supernatural funhouse goofery of Ghoulies II, but The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 also remains grounded in the real world and that film stands as a strange slasher genre outlier in its own right.

It makes total sense that the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre film would have the biggest cultural impact in this trio. Not only was it the earliest & most financially successful title of the bunch, its humans-as-meat slaughterhouse horror is also more darkly humorous than it’s often given credit for. I do believe The Funhouse deserves a closer look than that film’s sequel, though. The gory kills and the cartoon energy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 have earned it an easy cult following in recent years (not to mention that it seemingly laid out the blueprint for Rob Zombie’s entire directorial career), but I think The Funhouse is more deserving of the attention. Instead of punching up and altering his original outlier slasher like in the sequel, Hooper found new, colorfully surreal ways to repurpose The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s energy in The Funhouse that should be regularly celebrated, but is instead largely forgotten. A month after watching it for the first time, I still can’t pinpoint exactly why.

For more on October’s Movie of the Month, Tobe Hooper’s grimy carnival slasher The Funhouse, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this comparison of its carnival-setting horrors with those of Ghoulies II (1988), and last week’s look at its unexpected companion in Tourist Trap (1978).

-Brandon Ledet

Cross-Promotion: The Fly (1958) on the We Love to Watch Podcast

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I was recently invited to join in on an episode of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the iconic 1958 Vincent Price sci-fi horror The Fly. It’s always great to have a chance to talk about the original version of The Fly, which is generally overshadowed by its wonderfully grotesque Cronenberg body horror remake, because has its own merits & idiosyncrasies that can often be too easily dismissed or misremembered. On a more personal note, though, it was also just fun to join in on a podcast I listen to regularly as a fan.

It’s already pretty rare to find a podcast as in tune with my own taste in film as We Love to Watch, but the show is even more remarkable in the way it approaches its selections from an honest & receptive place. Co-hosts Pete Moran & Aaron Armstrong have the easy chemistry of long-time friends, which makes for a consistently pleasant listen, even when they disagree or digress at length. More importantly, though, they discuss all films sincerely and humbly. They always looking for the legitimate value in a work, no matter how prestigious or seemingly insignificant, instead of an excuse to tear it down, which is exactly the way we strive to approach criticism in our own reviews on this site.

Give a listen to We Love to Watch’s episode on The Fly below! For fans of the Cronenberg remake, check back with them next week for an episode on that practical effects masterwork as a point of contrast. You can also dig through old episodes & clips on their blog & their YouTube page if you like what you hear. They tend to cover a lot of the same territory we do here, both on our own podcast & in our reviews (The Thing, Southland Tales, Possession, High-Rise, Phase IV, etc.), often with a completely different, playfully enlightening take on the material. Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet

Watching The Dark Crystal (1982) with Toby Froud

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I’ve been a huge Jim Henson fan basically my entire life. I grew up with The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, Fraggle Rock, and all of the Muppet movies. Given all of that, The Dark Crystal was a movie I watched a lot as a kid, but at that time, I don’t think any of the important detail stuck. It wasn’t until watching it last year as an adult I finally really appreciated it. The Dark Crystal functions in such a dense, beautiful world. It’s got new cultures, strange creatures, and symbols on top of symbols. I recently got the chance to see it with a Q&A by Toby Froud that expanded upon the time and love it took to create this masterpiece.

The Dark Crystal is an epic. It was Jim Henson’s passion project. He wanted to be known as a filmmaker and not just The Muppet Guy. It took Henson five years to make along with a team of highly dedicated creatives with a wide range of talents (jewelry making, costume designers, puppeteers, writers). Among them were Brain Froud who was the designer for The Dark Crystal and Wendy Midener who sculpted and created the Gelflings. They met working on the film. Toby Froud is their son and, following in the footsteps of his parents, a puppet fabricator for Laika. (He also was the baby in  Labyrinth.) Although The Dark Crystal was before he was born, he grew up with goblins and Gelflings all around, and has a unique perspective. It obviously was extremely influential for him.

Toby showed a slideshow of original concept art, screen tests, behind the scenes messing around, and supplied anecdotes to go along with each one. The Dark Crystal is one of the only movies in the world that is all puppetry. So many of the pictures showed just how much work and ingenuity these creatures took: men being stuck into Garthim suits, faces being sculpted, strange contraptions to figure out exactly how things would realistically move. Everything was crafted from the ground up. There was no story even to begin with. Jim Henson just started with images of creatures and ideas about the world; everything else just came as they started making things. People dedicated their time. Some people even risked their lives walking on stilts in Landstrider costumes on top of raised sets.

Given the dense nature of the world a lot of material has been written to expand it. There are the Creation Myths graphic novels and an upcoming full length novelization of events that occur after the original story. There have been rumors of a sequel coming for years, some sounding more serious than others. Toby Froud even said not to count the possibility out. That got me wishful thinking. A Laika-made Dark Crystal sequel is something that I would line up to see.

-Alli Hobbs

The Maries of Daisies (1966) vs The Merrye Girls of Spider Baby (1964)

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Daisies is a well-respected surrealistic art film from the Czech New Wave. It’s been discussed at length for its important status as a feminist film. Spider Baby, on the other hand, is a cult favorite, an oddball movie that, sadly, has mostly been forgotten. Despite those pretty major differences, there’s a key similarity that deserves discussion: the main pairs of characters in both films are almost the same people, right down to one being a brunette and the other a blonde. Both pairs are immature, mischievous, and have very little concept of real life consequences.

Spider Baby focuses on the Merrye family, which is so inbred that they suffer from a terrible condition which causes individual members to mentally regress as they age until they become savages. The Merrye clan lives in seclusion, and once a member of the family has fully regressed they get isolated further until they become such a threat to everyone that they get moved to their own section of the basement. Virginia and Elizabeth are two of the three remaining family members of their dying line, not yet old enough to be shoved into the basement. Being isolated from society gives them a dark, sprite-like quality. Due to their regression they have no knowledge of circumstances for their actions. Together they wantonly romp about the house, taking in pet spiders, eating bugs and suspicious fungi from their yard, and bickering almost constantly. Elizabeth is as volatile as a three year old on a bad day. Virginia regularly “plays spider,” which is a handy euphemism for murder. In their isolation, they act outside of society, with unkempt hair and make-believe games gone too far.

Daisies is a critique of Czechoslovakia under communist rule and the laws and regulations within. Marie and Marie are bored and disgusted with society. They decide one day to “go bad”. They turn into savages in flower crowns. The Maries of Daisies act stuntedly, but rather than being isolated, they’re wanton and disrespectful in public. They rip through the town, taking advantage of men, getting drunk, stealing, and eating to excess every time they get the chance. Despite their quirky destruction ultimately being intolerable, they never quite progress to murder, (though in their lawless chaos, killing doesn’t seem that far away). It is actually because of that chaos and anarchy the film was banned in its own country and from export at the time of it’s release, which resulted in Věra Chytilová being prohibited from filmmaking for 7 years.

Daisies is pointed to as a landmark of feminist cinema. Part of that distinction is that it’s an arthouse film directed by woman, but the other part comes from its idea of agency. The two Maries of Daisies are immature, “unladylike”, and savage by choice. They relish in the idea of bucking society, no matter how despicable they become. It’s no real surprise that Spider Baby would be neglected in a conversation of feminist films (or really any critical conversation about cinema), even though it features two distinct, disturbed women presented pretty sympathetically. One thing that discounts it from being a feminist film is that Elizabeth and Virginia are not given agency. They inherit their savagery via a family curse. They can’t help how wretched and impulsive they are. This makes them an object of pity and even demotes them to a damsel status resulting in them needing to be saved from society. Also, Spider Baby is directed by a man, so there’s that.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Daisies in an arthouse masterpiece and Spider Baby is a low budget horror-comedy that brings to mind the best moments of any Ed Wood film. From a character standpoint, they’re surprisingly similar. Marie and Marie don’t have a demented family in the basement, but that doesn’t stop them from being regressively chaotic like Elizabeth and Virginia. There’s a similar theme of chaos in both films that comes from presenting women who actively and violently don’t conform. Especially when, in the end, nonconformity is both sets’ downfall.

-Alli Hobbs

Movie of the Month: The Funhouse (1981)

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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 Brandon, Alli, and Boomer  watch The Funhouse (1981).

Britnee: Carnivals are hell on earth. The image of crusty old rides, greasy funnel cakes, animal droppings, and dirt mixed together to create a nasty sludge is enough to send shivers down my spine, but the most terrifying part of carnivals is the crew. Unfortunately, carnival folk don’t have the most welcoming image in popular culture (killer clowns, evil magicians, etc.), and this is definitely apparent in horror films. Of all the carnival-themed horror film’s I’ve seen, Tobe Hooper’s extremely underrated horror flick, The Funhouse, is by far the scariest.

The Funhouse comes across as a run-of-the-mill B-movie because it follows the generic B-horror movie storyline; a group of teens get high and decide to get crazy & spend the night in their local carnival’s funhouse. It really doesn’t get cheesier than that, but somehow The Funhouse manages to be seriously scary. Of course, it has a handful of humorous moments, like when the carnival’s fortune teller, Madame Zena, gives a quick handjob to a deformed human-like monster in a Frankenstein costume or when the funhouse barker says in an absolutely ridiculous tone, “You will scream with terror, you will beg for release, but there will be no escaping, for there is no release, from the funhouse.” But honestly, the majority of the film is straight up disturbing. The gruesome murders that take place in the funhouse filled with horrifying animatronic clowns and evil dolls will haunt your dreams forever, or at least for a day or two.

Boomer, did you find The Funhouse to be a legitimately scary movie? Or do you think it falls more into the B-movie category?

Boomer: That’s an interesting thing to ask, because it begs the question of what exactly a B-Movie is, especially with regards to the Tobe Hooper oeuvre. Is Texas Chainsaw Massacre a B-Movie? Is Poltergeist? What’s the real difference between Funhouse and those two films that makes film scholarship so dismissive of it? Chainsaw is definitely a B-Movie by every objective measure: budget (a mere $300K), cast (all virtual unknowns, with the Edwin Neal having the largest pre-Chainsaw filmography, consisting entirely of dubbing voices for the American import of Gatchaman), and overall feeling of cheapness. Instead of B-Movie fodder that is remembered for its campiness, however, Chainsaw is generally regarded as a landmark horror movie for bringing terror out of the night and into the light of day, and its legacy holds up despite seven follow up films of various quality and dubious chronology (there are three sequels, then a reboot, a prequel to the reboot, then a sequel just to the original skipping all others, and an upcoming film about Leatherface’s teenage years). It’s easier to single out Poltergeist as a more traditional “prestige” horror film; having Steven Spielberg as producer lent the movie an air of credibility that neither Chainsaw nor Funhouse before it had had (and that Lifeforce,which followed in 1985, was certainly missing; even a script by Dan “I wrote Alien” O’Bannon wasn’t enough to cover the Cannon Films stench on that one, but I digress). I think the reason that Chainsaw is so widely praised is simply that it transcended the barriers of the conventional B-horror fillm to become something more fascinating and terrifying altogether. Chainsaw and Poltergeist are very Gothic at their core, with the latter heavily focusing on the brutishness of the wilderness outside of society and the uber-Gothic imagery of decaying homesteads with trapdoors and hidden rooms, and the latter focusing on pairing the very old-school Gothic concepts of hauntings and beings beyond human comprehension and pairing those ideas with the aesthetic of contemporary suburbanism.

Although I think that Funhouse is a B-Movie overall, just like the Hooper films that it is sandwiched between (minus the not-very-good Eaten Alive and the telefilm adaptation of Salem’s Lot), it certainly transcends the mold of similarly budgeted and marketed contemporaries. Often, the hallmarks of these films are that they were obviously churned out by a pulp writer with an idea that had not quite had time to mature, full of barely-realized characters and driven more by the need to reach certain scenes than weaving an organic story to get the viewer there. Funhouse can’t be described this way (in fact, if the Wikipedia page for the Dean Koontz [!] novelization based on Larry Block’s original screenplay is anything to go by, the original story idea may have verged on being overproduced); the progression of events is logical and cohesive, and although not every character could be considered three dimensional, they do all have different voices and motivations. More than that, Funhouse is also legitimately freaky at various points, and there’s an artfulness to the direction that elevates the film over other films of the same type and of the same era. Specific scenes that come to mind include the playfulness of the light coming through the fan vent in the scene where Liz meets her end at the hands of the monster, the recurring image of the Hammer Frankenstein monster that is first seen on a poster in Joey’s room before reappearing on the television downstairs and as the monster’s disguise, and the blowing wind that billows Amy’s hair in the final scenes, lending a surrealist element to the proceedings. It’s not Hooper’s finest or most memorable work, but it does show how Hooper’s eye can find something novel in even the most tired mises en scène. 

So why is the visually intriguing and memorable Funhouse, which was a moderately well-received success at the time of its release, so largely forgotten? What do you think, Brandon?

Brandon: I think that’s a fair question to ask of Hooper’s career at large, honestly. Before catching glimpses of Lifeforce & the completely insane-looking horror comedy sequel Texas Chainsaw Massacre II in the recent Golan-Globus doc Electric Boogaloo, I personally had no idea who Hooper even was. I’ve seen & enjoyed his original Chainsaw movie & the loving 50s sci-fi homage Invaders from Mars by happenstance, but he was never familiar to me as a household name, despite the fact I that I’m an obvious sucker for the genre film territory he usually treads in. The Funhouse‘s forgotten place in the cult movie canon seems to be indicative of Hooper’s often overlooked career at large. I don’t know if it was the Canon Films documentary’s doing or just slowly spreading reports of how batshit Lifeforce (a movie I’ve been dying to catch up with myself) appears to be, but his name recognition seems to be growing in certain film geek circles over the past year. I was stoked when Hooper’s name appeared in the opening credits of The Funhouse (along with special effects master Rick Baker, who absolutely kills on the creature design here) so I’d have an excuse to dive further into his work. Six months ago I would have had no idea who he was or that Texas Chainsaw Massacre & Poltergeist were even directed by the same person.

Hooper’s general lack of recognition as a household name aside, The Funhouse‘s particular forgotten state might be somewhat attributable to its mode of instant familiarity. Like Britnee & Boomer both said, the film has a visually striking, memorably discomforting way of terrorizing its audience with its creepy dolls & its murderous carnie psychopaths, but there’s something oddly warm & nostalgic at its center that cuts through its overriding nastiness. The homages to old line monster movies (in the form of the aforementioned posters, television broadcasts, and Halloween masks as well as an early-in-the-runtime spoof of the shower scene from Psycho) nest the film in a long history of horror cinema tradition that somewhat eases the shock of its early 80s nastiness (the likes of which we recently saw in former MotM Alligator). You easily can see this adherence to horror tradition in the film’s basic plot. The idea of teens sleeping in a carnival funhouse overnight and being confronted by real-life monsters within feels as old as time to me. It might be that I’ve grown up in a post-The Funhouse era where that basic plot seeps into familiar-to-me properties like Goosebumps novels & Ghoulies II, but I suspect that its fundamental narrative scenario goes back even further than those titles. The traveling carnival setting of The Funhouse feels anachronistic for even the early 1980s. This movie feels like a live-action adaptation of an urban legend dating back to a time when the arrival of traveling carnivals & funhouses were the highlight of the year for little kids, especially in small towns, even those understandably freaked out by the carnies who ran them. I could see how drive-in era horror audiences would initially take delight in watching that urban legend play out onscreen, but then gradually forget that the movie ever existed because its basic premise had already been a familiar part of the greater cultural landscape for so long.

Where do you think The Funhouse fits into the arena of urban legends & oldschool horror titles, Alli? Is it more at home with its slasher genre contemporaries, seeing how our teens in peril are hunted down by real life human creeps after indulging in *gasp* marijuana & premarital sex, or does it call back to an older, more nostalgic tone overall?

Alli: Let me start this off by saying that I feel a little unqualified to talk about the slasher genre, since I haven’t seen that many. When the term “slasher genre” comes to mind, I think about earlier ones, Psycho and Peeping Tom, and also I guess some giallo fits in there somehow. But I don’t think of them in the “true slasher” sense, somehow.

So now that I’ve gotten that disclaimer out of the way, The Funhouse seems to fit pretty well in the slasher genre right down to the idea of the final girl, though it subverts it a little. Of course, all slashers share influences which definitely creates a sense of nostalgia. Very early on, there’s a play on the Psycho shower scene and as you guys all mentioned there’s Frankenstein references throughout. Also, I think the idea of a carnival based horror goes way, way back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (which I think there are strong arguments to be made for it being a very early example of the genre). So what I’m trying to say is that I think since the slasher genre itself is pretty timeless, nostalgia is inevitable. Then The Funhouse has the added whammy of a carnival background since as long as there have been carnivals and freak shows there have been urban legends about the horrors therein.

I mentioned about the idea of the final girl above and I want to expand that a bit more. Slasher movies traditionally have a girl as the survivor. She is usually the chaste one, who avoids drugs and alcohol. Amy at the beginning is the good girl. She is a virgin. She’s against going to the carnival and breaking the rules. But somewhere along the line, I feel like she drops the good girl act. In the bathroom during a conversation with Liz, she mentions that maybe she’s not saving her virginity. A little later on, she’s smoking marijuana. I guess I just feel like maybe she’s not quite pure, virginal, final girl material, unless it’s being comparatively chaste and drug free that gets you out of horror movies alive.

Britnee, what do you think of Amy as our protagonist? Do you think she meets the criteria for the Final Girl? Are there any other interesting plays on traditional horror tropes you noticed?

Britnee: When comparing Amy to the others in the group, I think that she’s an angel. She does give in to the ganja and isn’t the poster girl for virginity, but she’s still the most level-headed of the bunch. Buzz, Liz, and Richie (especially Richie) were all horrible people. Buzz is this ignorant macho-man that comes off as a total creep when he’s alone with Amy, Liz is a straight up bad friend, and Richie is an obnoxious, greedy little bastard. Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised to see them each meet their gruesome deaths in the funhouse. Now that I’m thinking of it, the dumb teenager that gets violently killed is definitely a horror trope that is present in The Funhouse. Buzz, Liz, and Richie each meet have their one-on-one time with the killer, which is the most popular way for a bad teenager to die in slasher flicks.

Now as for Amy being the final girl, I do think that she meets the criteria. She’s got a good head on her shoulders (at least when compared to her friends), and when she comes face to face with the funhouse monster at the end of the film, she does everything in her power to defeat him. Amy is far from being a damsel in distress and she defeats the film’s male antagonist, so I would consider her to be final girl material. She really does have one of the most interesting final girl exits that I’ve ever seen. After she survives the hell of the funhouse, she walks silently into the carnival grounds and doesn’t utter a peep to the few people hanging around. Something about her exit from the funhouse just makes me think of her as badass heroine. It’s probably because she doesn’t crawl out of the building crying and screaming for help, as one would expect anyone to do when under those circumstances.

Boomer, I can’t figure out the importance of the creepy witchy woman that lingers in the background of the film. Her most notable scene was when she was in the bathroom with Liz and Amy, and she approaches them with her famous words, “God is watching you!” Do you think that the Bathroom Witch (Brandon gave her this name during the viewing) was underused in this film? Or do you think her presence was completely unnecessary?

Boomer: In my previous section, I mentioned the novel adaptation the film written by Dean Koontz; that book has its own separate Wikipedia page that outlines a more in-depth (and, honestly, needlessly complicated) plot that features a back story that involves a previous relationship between the carnival barker and Ellen, the religious alcoholic mother of Amy and Joey. I guess I spoiled myself on this question, because the issues of faith and evil seem to be more present in the book (and thus the original screenplay): Ellen and the barker were married and had an evil son, whom Ellen killed; she then had Amy and Joey, whom she religiously oppresses. The barker had Gunther with Madame Zena (yeah, think about that for a second), and believes that Gunther’s evil nature is Satan giving him an assist to exact vengeance on Ellen.

The religious overtones of the original story lead me to infer that this woman played a more significant role in the first draft and was largely cut. Part of Amy’s internal struggle in the novel is that her mother accuses of her of being evil, like a Margaret White who never really commits to a full-on closet-locking; being confronted by a Bathroom Witch who reminds Amy of her repressed doubt would have probably been a single moment in a larger appearance, although having all of that back story omitted from the final screen product does make this scene seem a bit inexplicable. Still, if this had been a story that was more grandiose in its treatment of generational evil, I think it would have traded the sleazy charm that it does possess for a bathetic melodrama; it’s better this way.

Brandon, if you could add a different back story for the film or otherwise weave in additional plot elements, what would you add to make the film better?

Brandon: If there’s anything missing or underutilized in the film I think it’s somewhere in the titular funhouse setting itself. The Funhouse does well enough in establishing a surreal, nightmarish tone without relying on any explicitly supernatural element. Even Gunther’s monstrous, Rick Baker-created appearance is explained to be a natural occurrence, one mirrored by the real life two-headed cows & mutated specimens in the carnival’s freak show. The audience sees the carnival from Final Girl Amy’s perspective, which establishes the otherworldly nightmare tone as she seems to be the only one among her gang of idiot teens who seems to notice how grotesque & off everything feels before the shit inevitably hits the fan in the funhouse. I appreciate that the movie keeps its terrors anchored in the real world. It’s a choice that helps maintain the film’s tangible danger & menace. However, I think a little more play with the laws of nature inside the funhouse might’ve benefited the film’s longterm legacy.

Horror films & funhouses were made for each other for obvious reasons: spooky atmosphere, ambiguity for “real” scary monsters to hide among the fake ones, ample opportunity for jump scares, etc. The Funhouse makes the most out of these obvious set-specific opportunities that it can, but I think it might’ve missed out on bending the rules of reality a bit within its funhouse setting. The bright colors, spooky lighting, and playful ambience of a funhouse already aims for a supernatural subversion of reality, one that could have justified some reality-bending trickery on-camera once the teens are being hunted down. I think The Funhouse works perfectly well as a straightforward slasher at a specific, bizarre setting and it does make good use of set-specific props in its final act, but I wouldn’t have minded a little supernatural surreality mixed in with its real world horrors.

Alli, do you think The Funhouse could have benefited from some supernatural horror once it reaches its titular setting, or did it benefit by keeping its horror explicitly “real”?

Alli: I was kind of relieved that it took it in a more real direction. It was really interesting to me that a lot of the scariest parts were the behind-the-scenes inner-workings of the carnival. Funhouses are generally not as exciting or as fun as the name implies. They’re generally cheap smoke and mirrors, but it’s that cut-throat cheapness that makes them actually terrifying. (Or maybe I spend too much time looking at rideaccidents.com) The inside is creepy for sure, but the final scene takes place underneath it all. The clanking of chains and whirling of fans are disorienting and disconcerting. The ghouls and ghosts that jump out while the thing is running are not as deadly or threatening as an angry fortune teller or carnival lackey. Even the monster wears a mask of another monster because the reality is more hideous.  I think the real world horror grounds this in a way that makes it fairly believable. Weirdos are scary: bathroom preachers, sideshow barkers, fetuses in jars. The Funhouse does a good job at preying on that.

I’m not trying to rule out the idea of a demon-possessed funhouse completely, but any time the supernatural is involved a movie really starts pushing it towards cheesy. What could have worked in the supernatural direction is more rumors in the set-up, like kids talking about real skeletons of past victims being used or ghosts of dead carnies cursed to wander forever from town to town waiting to spook unsuspecting teens. That sort of ambiguity added to the real life fright could have upped the ambience.

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Lagniappe

Boomer: I’d love to go back to Alli’s question about whether Amy is the Final Girl or just a final girl. Amy is an interesting candidate for this title, given that she’s very unlike the women who served to canonize this archetype. She’s neither chaste nor sober, and, minus the early draft inclusion of Ellen’s relationship with the barker, she has no connection to the killer. Still, there does seem to be an ineffable Final Girlness to her that belies her nonstandard status.

Britnee: Joey is the absolute worst. He is one of the most disturbingly creepy little brothers in the history of film. There’s a mysterious scene where Joey almost gets killed by a truck driver with a shotgun, and it’s the only time I slightly felt worried for his well-being. Well, that and the fact that he lives with an alcoholic mother.

Brandon:  Like Britnee, I mostly found Joey to be an insufferable little shit. After he scares his sister in the shower with the opening scene’s giallo/Psycho homage it’s difficult to feel any empathy for the detestable little scamp. However, I will admit that my Joey-hatred did fade a little once I realized how much worse the adults of his world are. Before we even meet the Bathroom Witch or see the worst of the barker & Gunther, we get Madame Zena yelling at (admittedly disrespectful) stoner teens, “Don’t come back or I’ll break every bone in your fucking bodies!” Every on-screen adult pounds back hard liquor. A tent full of working class men make a grotesque display out of ogling strippers that’s somehow just as much of a nightmare as the last-act teen hunt. A random trucker pulls over on the highway to point a gun at Joey, a small child, just so he can laugh in his face. Joey never earns likeability, exactly, but it’s at least a lot easier to understand why he’s such a shit once you get the full picture of the hate-filled early 80s hellscape he was raised in.

Alli: To go back to Joey: at the end we never really know too much of what happened to him, just that he was in some carnie’s trailer knocked out with a fever. They chase him down, catch him and drag him off. What exactly did they do to him off-screen? He may have been the definition of obnoxious little brother, but whatever happened in the meantime to him he probably didn’t deserve. 

Upcoming Movies of the Month:
November: Boomer presents Paperhouse (1988)
December: Alli presents Last Night (1999)
January: The Top Films of 2016

-The Swampflix Crew

An Evening with Richard Kelly: A Southland Tales (2007) Q&A

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“No film is every really finished, just abandoned by the filmmaker.”

This is the philosophy, or rather one of the facets of the real-life and filmmaking philosophies, of Richard Kelly. In something of a MotM miracle, I received an email last week advising that Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse would be hosting a screening of Kelly’s 2007 opus Southland Tales, with an introduction by the director and a Q&A following the film. As discussed in our email roundtable, I was a fan of Donnie Darko when it was first brought to my attention in 2003, when a DVD of the film was passed around like wildfire at the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. Although time and distance (and a strong wave of hype backlash as the film caught on outside of the cult scene) have dulled my teenage enthusiasm for the film, my interest in Kelly’s work was piqued again by our viewing of The Box, a film I didn’t love but haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I never got the chance to see Southland Tales before this past Sunday, but I’m glad that my first viewing experience was on the big screen and not limited to the comparatively tiny television in my living room.

What’s the film about? I’ll try to be as succinct as I can: Southland Tales takes place in an alternate 2008, where post-9/11 paranoia and the overreach of infringement upon civil liberties that followed that incident has been further exacerbated by a nuclear attack on American soil (Texas, to be precise). The draft has been reinstated, interstate travel is extremely restricted, and citizens are heavily monitored via the use of information network USIdent and the deployment of heavily militarized Urban Pacification Units, which seem to have taken the place of standard police forces. The Republican Party, most notably represented by Texas Senator and potential VP Bobby Frost (Holmes Osborne) and his wife, NSA Deputy Director cum USIdent overlord Nana Mae (Miranda Richardson), is seeking to swing California to the red in order to ensure the continued power of USIdent and the party. Popular action star Boxer Santaros (Dwayne Johnson), the husband of the Frosts’ daughter Madeleine (Mandy Moore), has recently awoken in the desert with amnesia; he makes his way into the arms of Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a psychic porn star seeking to expand her media and merchandise empires through diversification. Krysta has recently completed a screenplay entitled The Power, which foretells the end of the world.

Elsewhere, the underground liberal forces of the Neo-Marxists oppose the Republican Party (this entire group is composed almost entirely of former SNL cast members, including but not limited to Nora Dunn, Amy Poehler, and Cheri Oteri). Their current plan involves staging a racially-motivated police shooting committed by haunted veteran Roland Taverner posing as his twin brother Ronald (Seann William Scott), an UPU officer; the intention is to have this captured on film by Boxer during a ride-along for research purposes, then use the footage to discredit Bush’s apparent successors. Their machinations are held in check by a series of double-crosses that undermine their ability to take any real political action. Elsewhere elsewhere, the wizard Baron von Westphalen (Wallace Shawn) has invented both a device that uses the power of the ocean to generate wireless electricity as well as several injectable liquids of various colors that are used as drugs for both recreational and psychic purposes. He and his band of assorted cronies (Bai Ling, Curtis Armstrong, Zelda Rubinsten, and Beth Grant) move throughout the various factions at play, gaining political power and prestige while well aware that the alternative energy source that they have created could bring about the end of humanity. And all of this is narrated by Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake), a former movie star whose face was disfigured by friendly fire in Iraq after he was drafted. And, hey, if you were starting to think any of this was too straightforward, don’t worry; there are also stable time loops, predestination paradoxes, mistaken identities, and all the other Kelly elements you’ve come to know and, perhaps, love. Plus a lip-synch music video.

Part multimedia experiment, part time travel film, part jeremiad prophecy of the dangers of unchecked rightwing expansion into surveillance and homeland policing, part philosophy lecture, but mostly a political satire, Southland Tales has been called many things: unwatchable, convoluted, pretentious, and incomprehensible. For my money, however, the film (and its expanded materials, which I hesitate to call “supplementary” given that they were always intended to be part of the experience) is simply too ambitious to ever have any kind of mainstream penetration, even on the level that Darko did. There’s also been a lot of name-calling and assumptions with regards to Kelly’s ego and affectations of intellectualism, even from those of us here at Swampflix; in person, however, Kelly comes across as approachable, well-spoken, thoughtful, and shy (and he’s a total babe as well– look up a picture or two if you haven’t already done yourself this great service; those triceps are poppin’). Kelly directed this film when he was twenty-nine; that’s my age, and all I have to show for a life is a stack of unopened mail and a heap of student loan debt that I’ll finish paying off seven years after I’m dead– if I’m lucky.

In case you weren’t aware, Southland was originally envisioned as the final three chapters in a six-chapter arc, with the first three components released as graphic novels (Kelly said that when these materials, which were not quite complete at the time of the Cannes premiere, were given to the press, they sneered). There is a certain feeling of incompleteness that can be felt in the film as a result, but this is not the same thing as saying that the film is, as Kelly said in his introduction, “unfinished.” There’s certainly an element of that in play in the theatrical version that was screened, but I didn’t find it as distracting as others have. He discussed the nature of the release of the film, the way that certain visual effects were never quite completed due to the fact that the money for said polishing was to have come from one studio that held the international distribution rights, but there were issues with the domestic distributor. It’s all information that you can find elsewhere, I’m sure, so I won’t get into it here. There were some new tidbits that were shared in the Q&A that I’ll share here, though.

Why is Janeane Garofalo in the final scene? In the earlier, longer version of the film that was screened at Cannes, there is an additional subplot in which Garofalo plays a general who is engaged in a Dungeons & Dragons game with veteran Simon Theory (Kevin Smith) and a couple of other characters, with that game serving as an additional metaphorical layer to the events of the film, just line the screenplay for The Power. (I did see a credit for a D&D consultant in the final credits, which confused me until this was explained.)

Was this movie inspired by Brazil? Yes, Kelly loves Brazil.

Where did the character names come from? Kelly discussed that there’s a music to character names, and described how some come from more obvious sources (like the Robert Frost-quoting Senator Bobby Frost), and some a bit more obscure from sources both historical (like the von Westphalen family, whose true allegiances are obvious from the outset for those who know Jenny von Westphalen was the wife of Karl Marx), and literary (the Taverners share their surname with Jason Taverner, protagonist of Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which shares a rightwing autocratic dictatorship with Southland). So, like many of the references to extratextual real-world works that we mentioned in The Box discussion, they’re present less because Kelly wants to prove how smart he is and more because he thinks we’re all on his level, which is a compliment more than anything else.

Why so many Saturday Night Live actors? Besides the aforementioned Poehler, Oteri, Dunn, and Garofalo, other SNL alums include Jon Lovitz and John Larroquette. I really liked Kelly’s answer to this question; when we talk about political satire, at least in America, SNL is the troupe that is on the cutting edge of that discussion.

Is the recurring theme of free will versus predestination representative of a personal philosophy or just something that Kelly finds intriguing to play with on film? This was my question, and was admittedly a little longer in the actual asking (which involved referencing the Job-like structure of The Box and eschatological nature of Southland, leading Richard Kelly to compliment me personally, so take that, world!), but Kelly stated that this was something that he thinks about a lot, that humans beings are often bandied about by forces outside of their control, and how much agency any of us have at all (one audience member asked about Krysta Now’s agency in regards to the film, but I missed the answer to that one trying to calm myself enough to ask my question). Kelly had previously mentioned that Southland was intended to be a cathartic film experience; given that the themes of the film boil down to the idea that salvation comes from forgiving the self, which is an entirely internal emotional journey, I think that this could be reflective of that idea. Forgiving one’s self, like Taverner does in the film’s final moments, removes the external elements of predestination and is purely an act of personal decision, and through that comes real existential relief.

Whatever happened to the Norma Lewis prosthetic foot prop? This one I had to ask for Britnee, per her final thoughts on The Box. As it turns out, Kelly’s father, who really did work on the Mars Viking Lander project, did something similar for Kelly’s mother, whose own foot was disfigured, not unlike Norma’s. As for the prop, Kelly said he would have to make some calls to be absolutely certain, but he’s pretty sure it’s in a props warehouse in Boston.

For more on September’s Movie of the Month, Richard Kelly’s sci-fi mystery thriller The Box, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film and last week’s look at how the film works as a literary adaptation.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 20: Help! (1965)

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Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Help! (1965) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 152 of the first-edition hardback, Ebert praises a Chicagoan revival house cinema called The Clark Theater. He wrote, “It was there one Sunday, while sitting in the balcony watching Help! with The Beatles, that I saw a fan run down the aisle, cry out ‘I’m coming, John!’ and throw himself over the rail. Strangely, there were no serious injuries.”

What Ebert had to say in his review:  Unfortunately, if he ever officially reviewed the film, it’s not currently available on his website.

Richard Lester’s first collaboration with The Beatles, the classic 1964 boyband comedy pioneer A Hard Day’s Night, has a flippantly absurdist edge to it, but mostly remains grounded in reality as the Fab Four navigate a world where fans & the press are ravenous for more, more, more. Help! trades in that absurdist tinge for all-out surreality & psychedelia, mostly to the film’s detriment. It’s as if A Hard Day’s Night captured their boozy, pill-popping rock band phase & Help! happened to catch them just a year later after they had just smoked pot for the first time. Every half-baked highdea Lester & the boys had made it to the screen without filter and the results can include some great gags & striking imagery in the film’s long string of throwaway moments. However, as a whole Help! is messy in a druggy, pot-addled way that a lot of comedies would come to be in the decade that followed. Still, you could do much worse that watching the greatest band of all time get stoned off their asses & act like goofballs in-between tour dates for two hours & Help! remains consistently entertaining, even in its blasé, ramshackle state of dazed giddiness.

For the entirety of Help!’s opening scene, I thought for sure I had popped in the wrong DVD. A Hindu-adjacent Indian cult (ostensibly modeled after the Thugee) prepare a human sacrifice to their in the flesh god-king only to discover that *gasp* she’s not wearing the sacrificial ring necessary to complete the act. Smash cut to The Beatles performing a proto music video rendition of the song “Help!” where it’s revealed that, duh, Ringo is wearing the ring. Somehow catching that detail on their era’s version of MTV (a reel-to-reel projector), a group of higher-ups in the cult go on a mission to steal the ring back from the goofball drummer. The quest to reclaim Ringo’s ring (which seems to be magically stuck to his finger) beings in London, but follows his band all over Europe (presumably between a hectic schedule of tour dates). Magic, science, and high concept hijinks all fail to remove the ring from Ringo’s finger. The espionage-themed antics that ensue recall James Bond by way of Benny Hill and the movie constantly shifts gears as it sees fit, occasionally dropping the storyline in favor of allowing The Beatles to perform music video renditions of songs like “Lose that Girl” & “Ticket to Ride”, as well as to be cute & cheeky in their downtime. It’s in some ways more of the same after A Hard Day’s Night, except with a bigger budget & a more obvious attempt to shoehorn a plot into its very loose structure.

If I had to liken Help!’s comedy style to anything more specific, I guess I could see how it would’ve had an influence on its ZAZ-style comedies like Airplane! & Naked Gun that would follow over a decade after its premiere. In true ZAZ fashion the film throws so many gags at the wall that it doesn’t at all matter that they don’t all stick. If the film’s flamethrower umbrella doesn’t elicit a chuckle then maybe you’ll laugh at its killer hand drier or its ludicrous undercover espionage costumes (of which Ringo’s gradually would become true to life over time) or whatever else flies at the screen from moment to moment. Also true to ZAZ comedies, Help! has an obvious problem with cultural . . . insensitivity when it comes to othering its neighbors from the East for their kooky religious ways. The Beatles likely included the Indian cult in their film to acknowledge their growing interest in incorporating Eastern sounds into their music, but it’s hard to watch Help! & believe this was the most ethical way of going about that. The problem is especially noticeable in a repeated gag where John Lennon chides an Indian woman for her “filthy Eastern ways,” a running joke that only gets increasingly uncomfortable with each occurrence.

According to Richard Lester, Duck Soup was a huge inspiration for the making of Help!, but I can just barely see the connection myself. I guess The Beatles have always had a Marx Brothers style of rapid-fire banter & the film does devolve into the chaos of warfare in its final act the way Duck Soup does, but Help! is done no favors by being compared to, in my opinion, one of the greatest comedies of all time. Personally, I think the film is much more reminiscent of the down-the-line ZAZ comedy Top Secret!, except that it was pulling form contemporary James Bond titles like From Russia with Love (including that film’s cultural gawking) instead of Bond films of the 80s. There are some inspired moments in the whimsical set designs, especially in The Beatles’s color-coded flat & a scene where Paul McCartney is shrunken down to thumbsize among towering, oversized props. For the most part, though, Help! is a nonstop assault of Looney Tunes goofery run amok, a dedication to irreverence that can vary from moment to moment in terms of entertainment or annoyance.

According to my extensive online research (a quick Google search), The Beatles had indeed been introduced to the dysfunctional joys of marijuana by Bob Dylan in the year prior to writing & performing Help!. If anyone can get away with dicking around while stoned on camera & still make it charming, however, it might as well be The Beatles. Help! probably could’ve used a second draft & a editor, but it’s still a joy to watch due to the inherent charm of its blitzed moptops.

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Roger’s Rating: (N/A)

Brandon’s Rating: (3/5, 60%)

three star

Next Lesson: Bonnie & Clyde (1967)

-Brandon Ledet

Kraftwerk 3-D and the Modern Concert as Cinema

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At the time I’m writing this it’s been over a week since I’ve seen a proper movie, which is likely the longest stretch I’ve gone without watching one in at least two years. Thanks to the ever-expanding grey area of what does & does not qualify as cinema, however, I feel like that itch is being scratched elsewhere, with a surprising amount of that content relating to pop music. For instance, long form music videos like Beyoncé’s Lemonade or our former Movie of the Month Girl Walk //All Day and prestige television shows like Baz Luhrmann’s recent chaotic mess of a hip-hop disco musical The Get Down all feel cinematic without being what’s traditionally considered cinema. Gallons of ink have already been spilled about how television is becoming more like film & vice versa (in the form of never-ending franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe),but what’s been of particular interest to me lately is how music videos & live concerts have been doing the same. This might explain why while attending a 3-D Kraftwerk concert in New Orleans last Friday I found myself (between spaced out, gin & soda fueled dancing) asking “Is this cinema?” I don’t know if it was because I hadn’t watched a film in days & was desperate to tap myself into that headspace, but I wound up deciding that yes, it was. And it was one of the best movies I had seen all year.

If you’re wondering, like I was before I reached the Orpheum that Friday, exactly what a “3-D concert” is (besides watching three-dimensional musicians perform in a three-dimensional space), Kraftwerk basically performed in front of a stage-sized screen that displayed a moving image to correspond with each song, not unlike a live music video. These images were made to look 3-D through cardboard glasses specifically printed for the show & distributed at the entrance. Now, watching a screen at a live event isn’t all that novel for a 2010s concert experience. In fact, it’s almost become standard. Besides attendees watching acts through their view-blocking, media-capturing smartphones, bands often use projections & display screens to enhance the live music experience. From metal bands doing living room sets in front of projections of silent horror relics to gigantic crowd music festivals using jumbotrons to reach the folk miles form the stage, we’ve all witnessed 2-D visual media incorporated as part of the live concert experience. The concept goes back pretty far down the history of rock n’ roll too, touching on the rudimentary light shows of 60s psychedelia & the multimedia assault on the senses of acts like The Butthole Surfers. There’s something different about the way Kraftwerk is crafting their live experience that makes it more of a recognizably cinematic endeavor, however, and that difference has a lot to do with the immersion & the gimmickry of the 3-D experience.

When trying to conjure the ways live music is gradually becoming more cinematic the first thing that might come to mind is the live performance of movie scores for public screenings. Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood performed live versions of his There Will Be Blood score for recent events. Prog rock legends Goblin embarked on an entire international tour where they performed their killer score for Dario Argento’s Suspiria along with screenings of the movie. Local musician Hellen Gillet recently performed a live score for Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis at an outdoor screening outside the US Mint in the French Quarter. These examples of cinema seeping into the live music experience are exciting, but they’re also more traditional than they might initially appear. Think back to the early days of silent cinema where soundtracks would be performed by a live, in-house pianist. Updating that dynamic for a pop music context is exciting, but it’s not necessarily the innovation of a homogenous live music & cinema blend that acts like Kraftwerk have been bringing to concert venues.

What’s fascinating to me lately is the film-concert hybrid, a cinematic experience specifically designed to be engaged with as a live musical act. The multimedia performances of Björk’s Biophilia & Laurie Anderson’s United States I-IV were brave steps in that direction, but the first live music cinema experience I can remember attending myself was Dan Deacon’s collaboration with visual artist Jimmy Joe Roche. Live performances of their visual album, the blisteringly psychedelic Ultimate Reality, were singularly overwhelming experiences. Two live drummers set up on opposite sides of the stage in front of an oversized projector screen. They played mechanically in sync over a recording of Deacon’s trademark synth assault, accompanied by a mid-length feature film collage of bright, kaleidoscopic imagery lifted from various Arnold Schwarzenegger films. Ultimate Reality pushes its concert-cinema hybrid even a step further by marrying its aural & visual assault with a loose narrative in which all of Arnold’s movies, from Total Recall to Junior, are melted into an incomprehensible mess of a storyline that doesn’t exactly resemble the story structure of even the loosest, most Lynchian of film narratives or the vibe-driven, movement-based structure of a live concert. Ultimate Reality occupies a strange gray area between those two extremes, the same cinematic live music territory I experienced while watching Kraftwerk 3-D.

Kraftwerk is a seminal band, having played the role of innovator for nearly half a century. Listening to them perform live you can detect the early beginnings of pop music genres as varied as hip-hop, techno, industrial, and (duh) new wave lurking in the sparse, cold sounds of their digital meditations. They marry this slow, synth-soaked hypnosis, each song stretching on for dozens of minutes at a time, with a stark, minimalist, stage show. All four members of the band are centered at their own synthesizer podiums, remaining stoically still as they mix their digital soundscapes into a cohesive whole. It took me almost two songs into their set to even realize that the vocals were being provided live by one of the members. Everything felt so fixed & so clinical. Behind those four synth-commanding demigods stands a gigantic projector screen, which of course displays 3-D imagery related to each song performed. The imagery can range from archival footage of supermodels of the 1950s (during my personal favorite Kraftwerk tune “Das Model”) to crude digital renderings of a pixelated car on the highway (during the song “Autobahn”), an intentionally outdated aesthetic that recalls the look of certain Tim & Eric segments or, perhaps more appropriately, the music video project that accompanied the Death Grips album Government Plates. The rudimentary, elemental nature of these images matched the sparse genre seedlings of Kraftwerk’s music and transported their audience into a cinematic headspace that’s foreign to most concert experiences, even ones aided by higher tech on their display screens.

Unlike Ultimate Reality, 3-D Kraftwerk didn’t form its individual vignettes into a larger narrative whole. Instead, each music video experience was allowed to exist as its own separate meditation, functioning almost like a horror anthology, with the concert hall itself standing in as a wraparound segment. One song dove into the ever-present threat of nuclear war. One meditated on the machine-like efficiency of athletes who participate in the Tour de France. One provided a visualization of the digital landscape where the band’s Tron-like costumes might be considered high fashion. A particularly playful rendition of “We are Robots” had the band replaced onstage with mannequins propped up behind their synth podiums & projected in 3-D behind them. That last moment in particular pointed to the absurdity of paying to see a band so rooted in the artistry of music studio production perform “live” in the first place. The very idea of “a 3-D concert” is an exceedingly ridiculous concept on its own and the band never shied away from pointing to that absurdity. Instead of pursuing a more kinetic stage show, they turned their songs into a collection of short films with live music accompaniment, each devolving into long form meditations on concepts like international travel & “computer love”. The result felt a lot like watching a movie. Instead of feeling comradery with the band, like being within arms’ reach at a $5 punk show, you feel as if you’re watching a collection of mannequins stand before a silver screen; it’s distancing, but it’s also dazzling.

3-D technology has always been a William Castle-type gimmick meant to sell extra movie tickets to audiences looking for a novel & immersive cinematic experience. It was a perfect choice for Kraftwerk to draw an audience in with that cinema-specific gimmick because their live show already feels so similar to watching a movie in the first place. As the screen-heavy multimedia approach to the live concert becomes increasingly cinematic it’ll be interesting to see where other bands can take the basic idea explored by 3-D Kraftwerk, Dan Deacon, and others into new, more narrative territories. It’s not a perfect fit for every musical act, but in a struggling industry suffering long-term declines in album sales the idea of live music cinema could be a great potential moneymaker for bands more prone to in-the-studio tinkering than live rock n’ roll antics. More importantly, though, it could lead to innovative modes of great, cinematic art, the next evolution in both the movie going & live music experiences as we know them. It’s only appropriate that Kraftwerk would be one of the acts on the forefront of that innovation, as they have been with so many other musical advancements since the late 1960s.

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-Brandon Ledet