For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Hideaki Anno’s live-action debut, the coming-of-age sugar babies drama Love & Pop (1998).
Recently, Brandon wrote a piece about the unfortunate position of The Mummy as Universal’s most side-lined classic horror character, and how the general public’s association of the title The Mummy with the 1999 action-adventure film directed by Stephen Sommers rather than the Karl Freund original cements The Mummy as a second-tier hanger-on. During the umpteenth viewing of the trailer for the upcoming release of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a friend of mine leaned over to me in the theater and asked me a question about the frequency of these remakes, and I mentioned my own framework of the understanding about why The Mummy (the character) rarely works. Namely, you can make a movie about Wolfmen, Invisible Men, reanimated Promethei, and Dracula (et al) without the text being, necessitated by its nature, inherently racist. The Northern Hemisphere positively plundered Egypt and its historical sites, and the ongoing behavior of the British Museum acting in miniature on behalf of the colonialist experiment demonstrates that they are pathologically unable to comprehend the extent of the evil and shame inherent in their “expeditions.” Mummies were ground up into powder and used for paint pigmentation, medicine, and countless other things, again with Britain nationally acting as the microcosm of colonialist enterprise by rushing headlong into turning other people’s ancestors, a finite resource indeed, into a monetized enterprise. That’s why no big-budget mummy movie in the 21st century has actually been about a mummy; they’ve been about death gods creating avatars for themselves (the 2017 Tom Cruise film) or a child being possessed by something after spending some time in a sarcophagus (the new Lee Cronin film, at least based on the trailer).
The last time that a Mummy was about a mummy was in 1999, when Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz memetically lit the libidos of bisexuals worldwide ablaze. Fraser plays Rick O’Connell, an American in interbellum Egypt for unknown reasons, whom we meet making a final stand against presumed locals while defending(?) some ruins. It’s a big guns-blazing action sequence that doesn’t really want you to ask questions about why Rick’s there, whose territory is rightfully whose, or other questions about the “veiled protectorate” period. Meanwhile in Cairo, Weisz’s Evelyn clumsily destroys a lot of priceless texts before her gadabout brother Jonathan (John Hannah) presents her with an artifact he pickpocketed that supposedly came from the lost city of Hamunaptra, a legendary treasure repository as well as “the city of the dead.” Evelyn, Rick, and Jonathan set out to find the city again, and find themselves in a race to the lost city with Beni (Kevin J. O’Connor), a cowardly man who was previously at Hamunaptra at the same time as Rick, and the American cowboys he’s guiding along the same path. Upon arrival, the Americans almost immediately release the undead ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), who was mummified alive as a punishment for touching the Pharaoh’s concubine, from his tomb, unleashing plagues and the potential to end the world.
I used to love this movie. I was in middle school when both it and its sequel were released, and as a kid who had grown up obsessed with Indiana Jones and with an interest in Egyptology, this was an exciting mash-up of horror and action-adventure that really hit my sweet spot. It also didn’t hurt that there were large swathes of time when it was on cable almost constantly, so it really left a mark on me. Going back to it now, however, I can’t help but find it a little distasteful, and a product of its time. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the person of Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr), a character descended from a long line of secret defenders of the pharaonic order. Despite living a life that implies an ongoing belief in the Egyptian pantheon of old, Ardeth praises Allah, something that was uncommon but unremarkable among heroic characters in films of the period but would become contentious just a couple of years later during the era of kneejerk American Islamophobia. Ardeth is also not played by an Egyptian actor (Fehr was born in Tel Aviv), nor is Imhotep (Vosloo is white South African), nor are the pharaoh (Aharon Ipalé is Israeli) or his Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velásquez is Venezuelan). The casting of the roles in the film outside of our white leads is classic Hollywood “brown is brown” racism of a bygone era, and watching this as an adult who is fully conscious of all of the implications greatly dulls one’s enthusiasm for what is, otherwise, an adventurous romp.
A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the upcoming release of the aforementioned Lee Cronin Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.) Preteens, like I was when I first saw it, are really the best demographic for this film, as its overwritten corny dialogue and telegraphed acting choices read like a throwback to old-timey pictures, until you’ve watched as many of them as I have and realize it’s more shallow parody than homage. Weisz and Fraser are sexy, yes, and they have great chemistry together, but Rick is much more of an asshole than I remember, and Evey, with her clumsy awkwardness and frustration at Cambridge’s rejection of her despite her outsized genius, feels like a fanfiction character, right down to her being a nepo baby.
I wish that I could love this one as much as I did when I was younger, but most of the enjoyment that can be derived from it now comes at the film’s expense. If you have fond memories of it, let that sleeping dog lie; don’t go disturbing the sarcophagus of your memory.
I’ve been seeing a lot of advertising (or maybe just the same thumbnail from a singular YouTube video, over and over) for Exit 8 that refers to the film as “Cube meets Tokyo.” Despite the fact that we already had that, and it was bad, I was still intrigued enough by the trailer to want to give this one a shot. The premise is fairly simple. A lost man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself caught in a repeating loop of the same few sections of corridor in an underground subway tunnel. Initially spooked at finding himself completely alone and unable to locate an exit, he encounters increasingly unsettling visions before realizing that there are a set of instructions on the wall that boil down to “continue walking until you encounter an anomaly, then turn around and keep walking.” Said anomalies surface as things as relatively mundane as misplaced doorknobs and distant voices of crying babies to mutant rat creatures that resemble the experiments he barely noticed while scrolling through social media on the train. The lost man is in a state of turmoil, having learned that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant mere moments after he failed to confront a salaryman on the train for screaming at a mother with a cranky infant, then immediately finding himself in the infinitely-looping corridor. When he encounters a little boy (Naru Asanuma) and realizes that he’s not part of whatever purgatorial situation within which he’s been entrapped, he and the child try to get out together. If they can get through all eight levels without being deceived or overlooking an anomaly, they’ll find their way out.
I’m going to make three points of comparison here to horror movies past, and Cube is not going to be one of them. First, in what I intend to be the most flattering comparison, Exit 8 has a great deal of similarities to one of my favorite horror films, Jacob’s Ladder. The 1990 Adrian Lyne film features Tim Robbins as a man potentially trapped in a reality he can’t be sure is real while experiencing subliminal visions of horrors beyond his comprehension, with a few memorable sequences set in the NYC subway system. Exit 8 dilates those underground set pieces to encompass the entire purgatorial situation, which is a neat trick, and it plays with the hypnotic monotony of depersonalized commuting in a series of seemingly identical hallways. Jacob’s Ladder finds Robbins’s character interacting with an almost angelic version of the deceased son he lost (a pre-Home Alone Macaulay Culkin), who helps him in a way that I can’t really talk about without spoiling that film, other than to say that Jacob’s journey, like The Lost Man’s, requires a certain level of acceptance.
Secondly, in what I intend to be an unflattering comparison, Exit 8 has the distinction of being the second horror film I’ve seen so far this year that also happens to be, intentionally or not, pro-life propaganda. Concerning! Arguably, this one’s the worse of the two. At least in Undertone, the choice of whether or not to keep her baby was a decision that the mother was making; here, one of her only lines of dialogue, repeated almost as often as we see the “Exit 8” sign is, “Which is it?” Still, this is mitigated by the third point of previous film similarity, which is a neutral comparison at best. Exit 8 reminds me most of Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, in that they have the same (mildly spoilery) conceit, which is that the protagonist is guided by a specter of their as-yet-unborn child. In Dream Child, that takes the form of Alice’s fetus appearing to her as a young child in her dreams and helping her fight Freddy Krueger; here it’s The Boy, who responds to an apparition of The Lost Man’s girlfriend by calling for her as his mother, revealing that he is, somehow, the man’s son.
From what I can tell by perusing some reviews and summaries of the video game this film adapts, the player character therein is an utterly blank canvas, and there’s no real “plot” to speak of: no unplanned pregnancy woes, no encounters with a non-anomaly character like The Boy, no shameful cowardice at failing to confront a raging asshole. It doesn’t even seem like The Lost Man’s asthma, which I assumed had to be a gameplay mechanic, originated there. All of this is newly written for the film, and while I understand that the film, being based upon a game that is all about the mechanics and the tension rather than any real narrative, had to come up with some stakes. I’m not sure why it had to be this narrative, but the other way that this most evokes Dream Child is that its pro-”keeping the baby” messaging is also so bizarrely incoherent that it utterly falls apart; Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” ends up being more effectively propagandistic in just a couple of minutes than Exit 8 and Dream Child combined. It’s not a defense of the film’s politics, but it’s so sloppy that it’s hard to grasp onto anything substantial enough to be annoyed by.
I suppose, eventually, we do have to get around to examining this film in conversation with Cube. When we talked about that film on the podcast (as well as its sequel and prequel), Brandon’s primary complaint was that what Cube failed to deliver upon was the promise of cool death traps in the series of successive, identical, cubical rooms. As someone who saw those movies in earlier, more formative years, I already had an idea of the shape of the narrative, so I wasn’t set up to be underwhelmed by the ride in the same way that he was. I experienced my own great disappointment when we watched the 2021 version from Japan, which, among its many other faults, broke the cardinal rule of The Cube: we should never see what’s outside The Cube. I was very frustrated the first time that Exit 8 also showed us something that was happening outside of the liminal space in which our characters are trapped, as we see the woman on the other end of the phone call that The Lost Man receives while lost in the corridors. This does turn out to be an (obvious) misdirect, but there’s a sequence that comes later in which The Lost Man imagines himself on the beach with The Boy and his mother, and I can’t help but think that would feel more emotionally impactful if we didn’t have the earlier scene, and that conversation in itself would be more exciting if we only saw The Lost Man’s end of the line and stayed inside the spooky hallway.
Further, the film’s decision to literalize the metaphor with The Boy, by making him actually be his future son rather than simply a reflection of what his future child could be. It’s a hat on a hat, lacking a subtle touch that would make the film more emotionally impactful. I’m grasping at straws trying to articulate it, but it’s almost as D.O.A. an idea as making Newt be Ripley’s actual daughter in Aliens rather than an objective correlative representing her guilt about outliving her actual child. Excise the scene in which The Boy recognizes The Lost Man’s ex as his mother and this is instantly a more thoughtful movie, even if you leave in the beach dream. That also lends more emotional heft to what we learn about The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who appears as part of the loop in The Lost Man’s journey, but whom we learn was himself a previous captive of the space who was trying to find his own way out. When he experiences frustration with having to start over after getting within spitting distance of level eight, he laments that he “was supposed to meet [his] son today.” As a manifestation of what The Lost Man could become, it’s admittedly a little on the nose, but it too would feel more nuanced if we just cut out the “mother” stuff.
All of these quibbles having been laid out, it’s worth noting that this is a fun experiment and a masterful success on a technical level. The space itself is perfectly sterile and unsettlingly empty. The opening sequence, which is shot entirely in the first person, is an impressive feat, with the first shot we see of our main character being his reflection in the window of the subway car as he turns up his music to ignore the verbally abusive salaryman. I had a very immersive experience, as the only tickets still available were in the very front row, and I had a hell of a ride even as I found myself stumbling over the film’s slippery, amorphous thesis. I also appreciate that the film is open-ended; this is a mild spoiler, but after he manages to find Exit 8 and return to the real world, The Lost Man once again finds himself in a (presumably) metaphorical loop, as he experiences an identical situation as the one which opened the movie, as the same salaryman is screaming at the same young mother. The film cuts to credits with our lead once again staring into his own reflection. It seems that most reviewers infer that he will now confront this man and make up for his earlier bystander syndrome. I prefer to read the ambiguity of the ending from the other direction, and that for all he experienced in the liminal subway corridor he’s still essentially the same man, cowardice and all. It leaves some room for interpretation, that there may be some truth in his conviction that a person who stands idly by while someone is aggressively harassed may not be suited to parenthood. It’s not a mark in this film’s favor that I’ve spent so much time describing the film that I wish it was rather than the film that it is, but it’s still an excellently executed premise, and worth checking out for its design and camera movement if nothing else.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, despite the seven years that have passed since the first Ready or Not was released, picks up right where it left off. Grace Le Domas née MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) has just survived until dawn while being hunted by her new husband’s family on her wedding night. As the paramedics and EMS arrive, she’s asked what happened, to which she just replies “in-laws.” While this was the punchline capper on the end of that film, here, an offscreen voice asks her what this means, moments before she faints from exhaustion and is taken to the hospital, complete with an ambulance ride that allows for her to have flashbacks to the first film each time she is defibrillated. When she awakens, she’s greeted by the local sheriff, who has handcuffed her to the bed so that he can explain clearly and plainly that she’s in a lot of trouble. Her sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), arrives; despite their estrangement, Grace never bothered to remove Faith as her emergency contact. Grace also gets to recap the first film for the benefit of both her sister and the audience, which was, frankly, needed after such a long time between films. We witness some very basic signs of past conflict between them that the film will later belabor but, luckily, we move past that fairly quickly upon the arrival of Mr. Le Bail (aka Satan)’s lawyer (Elijah Wood).
From here, we get introduced to the overall plot of this sequel. Grace’s survival of the Le Domas’ game of hide and seek means that the current “high seat” of the council of families who rule the world is up for grabs. Grace, along with Faith, will now be hunted across the grounds of a resort owned by the Danforths, twins named Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), who are fighting to keep the Danforth family in the high chair. Also gathered for the occasion are Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), Viraj Rajan (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), and Ignacio (Néstor Carbonell) as well as his two children, the elder of whom was engaged to Grace’s late husband before he abandoned her for Grace. Ready, set, go.
It’s not uncommon for horror sequels to follow the past of least resistance when crafting a follow up to a film that was never intended to be more than a one-and-done. Ready or Not 2, for as enjoyable as it was, seems to have chosen the easiest option for all of its story beats. The basic premise—girl must survive the night while being hunted by rich assholes—is essentially the same, and the expansive resort on which the most dangerous game is being pursued is little more than the Le Domas mansion and its grounds magnified. Other than the presence of an industrial washing machine and a wedding-decorated ballroom that allows for a bride-on-bride brawl, it’s functionally identical to the previous film’s locale. When there’s nothing fresh in the setting or the logline, the only places where you can shake things up a little are in the characters and the mythology, and Here I Come takes a stab at each of these, with mixed results.
Character-wise, there’s nothing that Kathryn Newton’s Faith contributes to the narrative here. If you remove her from the film completely, you would have to come up with a different motivation for a couple of Grace’s choices, but nothing that would fundamentally change the narrative or the climax. Weaving carried Ready or Not with her performance, and I don’t buy that the sequel needed her to have a scene partner in order to make it work. It’s not that Newton’s a bad performer, but she’s completely superfluous here. Further, there’s a sense that this film wanted to, for lack of a better term, “go international,” but instead of taking that opportunity to shoot Here I Come in a substantially visually different location, it’s mostly just an excuse to gather a cast of actors of color to act as cannon fodder for the hunt before the finale focuses solely on the MacCaullays versus the Danforths. You’re not going to catch me complaining about getting to see Gellar for so much of this film (she looks great, by the way), but it is to its detriment that so many of its non-white characters read as caricatures who die hilariously while the white villains get more nuance and screen time. Other than Ursula and the lawyer, none of these new characters are particularly memorable.
That leaves the lore and the mythology to do most of the heavy lifting in the novelty department, and boy, there sure is a lot of it. Remember how the rules of the world of assassins in the John Wick films just kept getting bigger and more consequential, to the point where it was bogging down what we were all here for? Here I Come does much the same. Woods is very charming as Le Bail’s advocate, and the elaborate bylaws of the various Satanic covenants and their attendant loopholes do push us through to a visually dynamic conclusion that sees Grace get to don a cool, new, evil wedding dress. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the elaboration of Le Bail’s big scary book of infernal torts and nefarious estate dispersal regulations makes for exciting viewing, however. No one ever even seems to consider suggesting an alternative to Grace marrying Titus to save her and her sister’s life, namely, why don’t Grace and Ursula just get married? Does Mr. Le Bail not recognize marriage equality? This is the devil we’re talking about; are we supposed to believe that he has the same views on marriage that Kim Davis does? (Wait, actually, strike that; it actually does hold water that they would both be evil.) We do get to see a series of load-bearing evil statutes collapse in a series of dominos, but it starts to feel a bit like edutainment aimed at assisting the viewer in studying for the bar exam in hell.
All of those negatives having been said, this is still a fair bit of fun. It’s going to suffer in comparison to its spiritual sibling They Will Kill You, and that’s going to be warranted; that film does the whole “one woman fights evil cultists to save her sister” plot with more style and flair, even if the sister subplot in both is mere window dressing. But while that was primarily a film focused on its visual dynamism and elaborate fight choreography, this one is more interested in playing the hits from its predecessor, with an additional layer of familial conflict that gets run into the ground long before the film resolves it. In the meantime, though, the gore is still delightful and fun, and the script is peppered with some pretty good jokes. The best fight sequence finds Grace fighting Ignacio’s daughter in their dual wedding dresses, ineffectually flailing at one another after both are doused with pepper spray. Ignacio and his daughter’s incompetence with their weapons in comparison to his hypercompetent young son is a good bit, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome. An early use of the aforementioned industrial washer leads to one gruesome early kill of the MacCaullay women’s assailants, even if very few that follow are as inventive or funny. Weaving also continues to shine here, as she does in everything she appears in. If you’re going to choose only one movie about rich Satanists getting taken out by a girl from an abusive home who’s only involved in the events of the film because of a threat to her sister in theaters this month, They Will Kill You is the better choice, but if you’re going to do a double feature, these will pair well with one another . . . if you watch Here I Come first.
I had mixed feelings upon first seeing the trailer for They Will Kill You, the first English feature from Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who previously directed two Russian language films that, based on their trailers, appear to have a similar tone and style as this one. At first, I was very excited for the film, since it looked like a lot of fun, but I was also annoyed that its advertising felt like it gave away too much of the movie’s plot. Although that’s true to a certain extent, I was pleasantly surprised that there were still many more twists and turns to come in the feature itself than the promotional materials let on.
Ten years after nonfatally shooting their abusive father and failing to rescue her younger sister from his clutches, a woman calling herself Isabella (Zazie Beetz) appears at The Virgil, an extremely upscale Manhattan hotel, introducing herself as the new maid. After she’s given a brief tour of the maids’ floor by head of housekeeping Lily (Patricia Arquette), she’s ushered into her room, where she immediately barricades the door. In the night, several cloaked figures (including Heather Graham and Tom Felton) manage to enter her room a different way and attempt to kill her, alternately calling her a “sacrifice” and an “offering.” They quickly realize, however, that their latest lamb to be led to the slaughter is more than she appears, and that she’s not trapped in The Virgil with them; they’re trapped inside with her.
“Isabella,” who reveals her name is Asia, has a motivation that’s pretty straightforward. After being paroled from prison, where she was incarcerated for the attempted murder of her father, she went to the place where her younger sister was last seen, in the hopes of saving her from whatever shenanigans were happening in the place. Some of the set up is a little flimsy, but it’s all just window dressing to get to the film’s purpose: showing Zazie Beetz going utterly feral against hordes of cultists with axes, machetes, shotguns, and any and every weapon she can get her hands on. It’s a gory splatterfest of decapitations, crushed eyeballs, impaled hands, exploding heads, screwdriver stabbings, and flaming hatchets, and it’s an objective success in the glorious violence department.
The action choreography is extremely competent. After more than two decades of Bourne Identity-inspired shake cams and excessive editing, it’s refreshing to see that the dedication to craft that John Wick reminded everyone was possible continues to inspire successive action filmmakers. It’s that franchise that this film seems to draw a lot of inspiration from, especially with regards to the lead character’s virtually god-mode fighting prowess and the setting of a specialized hotel that comes preloaded with mythology, lore, and rules of engagement. Its other major inspiration seems to be the filmography of disgraced director Quentin Tarantino, most especially Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill; its order isn’t necessarily anachronic in the same way that those films are, but the chronology of the story often stops for a scene or two to reveal some past event that informs the current scene, and there are certain moments where Asia’s movements and poses seem to be styled directly on Uma Thurman’s The Bride.
Visually, the film has a lot of style. Although the film foregoes the Bourne Identity style, that doesn’t mean that the audience is watching these excellent action sequences play out statically. The camera is constantly moving, following characters around hotel corners and through crawlspaces and ducts on a moving track. There’s one really excellent oner that follows Asia and Lily facing off in a hallway that moves toward Lily, gives Arquette a moment to deliver one of her trademark bits of visceral vitriol, and then tracks back to the other end of the hallway to complete an orbital shot around battle-poised Asia before continuing back into the room she just exited. It’s really good stuff. The film also makes excellent use of empty/black space, as the film will sometimes “zoom out” to show only a hallway or a vertical tunnel so that we can track where every party is in The Virgil’s labyrinthine structure, and it looks fantastic.
I don’t want to reveal too much about the multiple directions that this one takes narratively. I thought that the trailer gave away too much, but unlike recent spoiled-by-the-trailer films that come to mind like Abigail and Speak No Evil, this one makes you think you know too much about it, before pulling the rug from under you. It’s not that this is a plot that you’ve never seen before; you almost certainly have, but it’s worth remembering that the reason you’re here is to see Zazie Beetz bludgeon some Satanists into pulp, not to get caught up on loopholes and infernal contract law. That having been said, there are some things that it’s really worth keeping a secret until one can see the film themselves. This one probably won’t be in theaters too much longer, based on its current box office performance, but it’s worth seeing with others in a group setting to get the maximum fun factor out of it. Then again, I don’t blame you if you’d rather wait til it hits streaming so you don’t have to see the same jokes from The Devil Wears Prada 2twice in both the film’s trailer and the “silence your phones” ad before the feature starts.
In 1987, Fisher Price introduced the PXL2000, a toy black and white camera that used audio cassettes to capture video images. It didn’t go over well initially, but 90s indie filmmakers apparently liked to futz about with them. After directing Twister—not the one that you’re thinking of, a movie released by Vestron and which I have seen the trailer for across dozens of their VHS tapes without ever stumbling across a cassette of the film itself—director Michael Almereyda made a fifty-six-minute feature using the PXL2000 in its entirety. For his third feature, Nadja, Almereyda decided to use the toy camera only intermittently. Theoretically, it was only for the shots that were supposed to represent the point of view of the title character, but in practice, I don’t think that’s the case.
Nadja is, naturally, the story of Nadja (Elina Löwensohn), Dracula’s daughter via a serf somewhere “in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains.” When her father dies, having been killed at long last by Van Helsing (Peter Fonda, with grey hair almost down to his waist), she, alongside her attendant, Renfield (Karl Geary), claims his body and ensures that he will not rise again. Van Helsing, inexplicably released from prison despite being caught in the act of murdering someone, impresses upon his disbelieving nephew Jim (longtime Hal Hartley collaborator Martin Donovan) that Dracula’s daughter may still be at large in their unnamed American city; meanwhile, Nadja is in the process of seducing Jim’s wife Lucy (Galaxy Craze) into joining her in the darkness. Nadja’s other primary goal is to reunite with her twin brother, Edgar (Jared Harris), who has seemingly allowed himself to slip into virtual catatonia as a result of refusing to feed on humans, leaving him bedridden and attended to by his beloved Cassandra (Suzy Amis), who also happens to be Van Helsing’s daughter.
Those parts of the film that are shot on film are gorgeous, and sumptuous. The periodic intrusion of “footage” from the PXL2000 is incredibly off-putting, even as a stylistic choice. It doesn’t hold weight conceptually, either, as it at first appears that it is supposed to be in use to indicate when a character is being affected by Nadja’s psychic powers, but it also seems to be used randomly at other points. In essence, the effect it creates is one that presages what it’s like to watch a high quality video online only for it to randomly buffer from 1080p to 120p for the duration of a scene, then cut back to crystal clarity. My neck was actually stiff from the contortions I made sitting in the arthouse theatre trying to clearly understand what was happening when Almereyda suddenly switched recording devices. It looked almost as bad as the version of Hitchcock’s Secret Agent that’s currently available on Hoopla, which is really saying something. When it would cut back to the actual film, it was a wave of relief, and I can only imagine that may have been the intention, but it did not make for a pleasant viewing experience.
Narratively, there’s not much to the film. Fonda’s Van Helsing is bizarrely fascinating as he wanders into scenes full of energy that his younger co-stars don’t really seem to match, either because this was too far outside of Donovan’s wheelhouse or because Craze’s character was simply in the midst of one of her many dull sequences of being a mindless thrall. For most of the film, characters simply stand around and deliver exposition to one another, and while it’s nice that the screen is full of pretty people (and Jared Harris) when that’s happening, there’s very little plot to speak of. I’d have been much more entertained if the film had been more full of deadpan humor, but the really fun bits of dialogue are few and far between. After a brief cameo from David Lynch as the morgue attendant who falls under Nadja’s spell, the laughs are hard to come by, and one can never be sure just how much of the film one is laughing with instead of at. This was a packed screening, and I still often found myself the only one chuckling during scenes which I was certain were being played for humor. Surely, the idea of calling the communication between Edgar and Nadja a “psychic fax” was a joke, right? This also sets up the biggest laugh of the film for me, when Edgar puts his fingertips to his temple and says “I’m getting a psychic fax… [Nadja’s] on a plane… she’s dying. For a cigarette.” This did manage to get a guffaw from most of the audience, but I’m not sure that we were all aware just what we were in for. I can see this one developing a cult audience in the 90s, especially when it has a soundtrack that features both The Verve and Portishead, but it’s also a puzzling little oddity that I’m not sure I’ll remember much about in the months to come.
A new contender for this generation’s Heathers has emerged, and it has the strongest claim to that championship belt of any movie that I’ve seen in the two decades since Mean Girls. We love Heathers around here (it claimed the #19 spot on the Swampflix top 100), and I have a fondness for it that is, perhaps, not entirely normal (I went to NYC in 2014 to see the off-Broadway musical adaptation in its original staging at a time when I was vehement that I hated musicals). We also reference it a lot; I used it as a plot reference when writing about 2022’s Do Revenge, Brandon discussed it in conversation with spiritual successor Jawbreaker, and both he and I have nominated a couple of potential options for the crown in recent years, with me throwing my weight behind Sophia Takal’s anthologized New Year, New You and Brandon offering up (the first half of) Spontaneous as a potential candidate. It’s time for all other nominees to pack their bags and go home, though, because Forbidden Fruits is here, and I think it’s here to stay. While we’re at it, we can knock off the search for this generation’s The Craft as well, since Fruits is just as suitable for that designation, too.
Apple (Lili Reinhart) is the most powerful person in all of the Dallas Highland Mall. She’s the highest ranking of the “forbidden fruits,” a trio of gorgeous women who run free eden, an Anthropologie-esque boutique, despite the shop nominally being managed by an unseen (until the epilogue) woman named Sharon. Under Apple’s perfectly manicured thumbs are Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), a beautiful blonde airhead who dresses like Sabrina Carpenter, and Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the more “alternative” one, which means that she’s just as supermodel-hot as the other two but dresses a little more glam-goth. Dallas newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) initially finds herself completely beneath their notice, but Fig takes a liking to her and convinces Heather Chandler—um, I mean Apple—to give Pumpkin a chance. The three Free Eden employees bring her on board and invite her to join them for “Paradise,” which is what they call the coven meetings that they hold in the upstairs changing area of the store. After some light hazing, Pumpkin finds herself part of the inner circle, and from there she begins to work toward the ultimate goal of dethroning Apple for something she did in their past. Unfortunately, despite the new age hippery-dippery of their beliefs and “ceremonies,” there may be some actual magic afoot, as a former member of the Free Eden crew, Pickle, seems to be suffering actual effects from a “hex” that the others placed on her for breaking Apple’s sacred rules.
Forbidden Fruits wears its pop culture genealogy on its sleeves, just as openly and blatantly as it does its Biblical allegories. Pickle’s pre-breakdown beauty is described by calling her “Gorge-ina George.” During Pumpkin’s induction rite, each of the girls names the plant from which her fruit name grows (branch, vine, bush, etc.) and the season in which it ripens. With the addition of Pumpkin, whose fruit is harvested in autumn, they excitedly note that they now have all four seasons in their quartet, just as the witches of The Craft were delighted that the appearance of Robin Tunney’s Sarah meant that they finally had enough girls to “call the corners.” Although the Heathers influences are the strongest here, it’s not all a one-to-one comparison. Pumpkin is very much the Veronica of the narrative, but her being a member of the group with an ulterior motive to infiltrate and upend it is more like Lindsay Lohan’s Cady from Mean Girls. Apple is both Regina George and Heather Chandler, as the HBIC of the group who’s casually cruel and exerts undue influence over her underlings’ lives, but there’s no real analog to Heather Duke here, as neither of Apple’s flunkies is lying in wait to become the next queen bee should she be dethroned. Cherry is more like Amanda Seyfried’s Karen, although her ditziness is taken to such an extreme that Tara Reid’s Melody in Josie and the Pussycats is another clear, strong influence.
That almost makes it seem like the character dynamics are more rooted in emulating Mean Girls than Heathers, but we can also pretty closely align them with the characters from The Craft: Apple is the Nancy, the biggest believer and the one with the nastiest traits buried underneath; Pumpkin is the Sarah, as previously mentioned; and Fig is the Rochelle, in that she’s fully capable of having a rich, full, fulfilling life if she just stopped hanging out with these troublemaking white girls. There’s even a little bit of a reverse Wizard of Ozhappening here, as the film’s climax takes place in the mall while a tornado tears the building apart, and ironically it’s the wicked witch who survives that particular event (it’s not a spoiler if I don’t mention if anyone else was even around!). I won’t bother you with a complete recapitulation of the film’s use of Genesis-based iconography, as it’s pretty much all there on the surface: the store is Eden, Apple offers temptation, the coven’s enemies are “snakes,” etc., but the film keeps a light touch here as it does in its other homages, so it’s not distracting or heavy-handed.
All of this is to say that when I read that this was based on a play, I wasn’t surprised, as it had all of the telltale density of a story that was originally written for the stage. The play, which has the poetic and unwieldy title of Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die (a slogan which is later emblazoned on a t-shirt that one of the characters wears throughout the third act), was penned by playwright Lily Houghton, who co-wrote the screenplay for Fruits with director Meredith Alloway. Both of them appear to be quite young, and I found the breathless wittiness of it all jubilant and refreshing, even when some of the darker elements start to intrude on this bubblegum world. Cinematographer Karim Hussain is doing great work here as well; a longtime collaborator of Brandon Cronenberg (serving as either D.P. or cinematographer on all three of his features), every shot here is perfectly composed and sumptuously photographed. Some of that energy can also be attributed to editor Hanna Park, who also worked on fellow Heathers descendent Bottoms. When it comes to the cast, everyone is a delight; I’m one of the dozens of people who saw Riverdale through to its conclusion, and although I was charmed enough by Reinhard’s brief appearance in Hustlers, her performance as Betty Cooper really undersold her potential to be the sexiest, scariest woman in her domain. Shipp’s Fig is the character we all wish we could be, the sweetheart in the bitter clique, and she’s warmly inviting and fun to be around. The person having the most fun, though, is Pedretti, who’s mostly developed a reputation as a scream queen following her leading roles in both of Mike Flanagan’s Haunting shows as well as the thriller series You. She really gets to let her hair down here and get into the flow of her character’s naive vapidity, and it’s such a delight that she essentially steals the show.
This will soon see its streaming premiere on Shudder, but I went and saw it in a theater, and I would recommend that experience over trying to watch it at home by yourself. This was a very responsive audience, the perfect strangers & companions that you want to watch a comedy with because the jokes land on different levels for different people. Failing that, invite your coven over, make up a little chant about pressed juice and cowboy boots, and have a good time.
This movie has everything. Bald-headed Peter Lorre hyperfixating on BDSM theater. Sad little orphans with weak spines. A condemned man praising the Hoover Dam. Evil hand transplants. Carnies being guillotined. One—and only one—Caligarian German Expressionist interior set. A wax Galatea. Drunken double vision cockatiels. Train derailments. It is a masterpiece. And not even seventy minutes long!
Dr. Gogol (Lorre) is a masterful surgeon, a veritable miracle worker who spends his spare time occupying the same balcony seat for every performance at a “theatre” in which Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) is kinkily tortured, night after night, in a scene that perfunctorily depicts some historical event. When he learns that not only has Yvonne been married for the entire period of his distant infatuation but also that she’s leaving for England to be with her up and coming pianist/composer husband Stephen (Colin Clive), Gogol is bereft. As luck would have it, a train bearing both Stephen and a skilled knife-thrower being escorted to his execution gets into an accident; Stephen’s hands are crushed and require amputation, but a desperate Yvonne begs Gogol to save her husband’s hands, and he lights upon the idea of using the executed criminal’s appendages to save Stephen’s livelihood. Even after months of expensive physical therapy, Stephen finds himself unable to play like he used to, although he seems to have developed an acute ability to throw sharp objects, all while his temper seems to grow ever worse.
I was looking for something to wash out the bad aftertaste of seeing Lorre in brownface in Secret Agent, and I could not have asked for a more perfect palate cleanser. Dr. Gogol is one of Lorre’s greatest characters, easily the equal of the impulsive, pathetic monster Hans in M or the perpetually sweating Abbott in The Man Who Knew Too Much, just an absolute freak whose gifted talent as a surgeon makes him a respectable member of a community that can never know just how much of a deviant pervert he is behind closed doors. Just when you think the film can’t get any more exciting, there he is in the distance putting a negligee on the wax figure of Yvonne he saved from being destroyed when her stage tenure came to an end. Then Gogol one-ups himself when a bid to frame Stephen for the murder of his own stepfather leads to a scene that features Yvonne coming face to face with this harrowing image, and all of us in the audience are close to crawling out of our skin.
Of course, much of the film’s success depends on the masterful direction of Metropoliscinematographer and later The Mummy helmer Karl Freund. The film is hauntingly gothic in its imagery, even when the subject matter is lewd, manic, or quite funny. Even the opening credits get in on the action, as the film’s stars are listed on a pane of glass that’s shattered by an angry fist. The script is also a delight, with my biggest laugh coming in the moment that the condemned murderer, Rollo, asks for a moment to speak with a nearby reporter named Reagan who happens to be American; their discourse is brief but ends with Rollo’s underwhelming final words, “Oh well, so long.” I can’t even fully put into words how wonderful this one is; you’ll just have to see it for yourself.
The last fifteen minutes of Number Seventeen are representative of Alfred Hitchcock at his finest: tense, thrilling, laden with spectacle, and very fun. It’s unfortunate that for a film with such a short runtime (under 65 minutes!), it spends its first three quarters treading water in a sloppy, lousy, mishmash of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery and an Oscar Wilde farce.
The titular location is a seemingly abandoned house where a number of figures converge over the course of a dark and stormy night. There’s an awful lot of farting about during which the difficulty in telling all of the characters apart is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of proper names are thrown around—Fordyce, Sheldrake, Brant, Barton, etc—among four of the five men, but the characters give false identities at different times and swap them about between each other. Two of the men even have matching hats and identical moustaches! The gist is that a very expensive diamond necklace has been stolen, some number of the men are criminals, one of them is probably a detective, a seemingly dead body is actually alive (twice!), and one of the criminals is accompanied by a woman named Nora (Anne Grey) who is pretending to be deaf and mute, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The only man who seems to be what he presents himself to be is a squatter named Ben (Leon St. Lion, who had previously appeared in the stage version), an alcoholic who has a much-abused sausage in his pocket. It’s all even less thrilling than it sounds.
The plot gets going at last when the necklace turns up and it’s revealed that the house sits atop an access hatch that allows one to descend to a set of railroad tracks that eventually lead to a train ferry. A few of the criminals manage to board it with Nora in tow believing that the necklace is in their possession despite it having been picked from one of their pockets by Ben, while the man who introduced himself as Fordyce attempts to head off their getaway by commandeering a public bus. This is when things finally get interesting, as the thieves crawl around on the outside of the train to take out its various crew when they refuse to accommodate their demands, leaving a few petty burglars at the helm of a runaway locomotive that they don’t know how to stop. This is intercut with the rapid approach of the bus, as we watch the riders’ initial thrill of it all before they start to get tossed around a bit, and there are even brief moments when it appears that the bus and the train will collide, only for the engine to divert to an overpass while the bus passes through a tunnel that goes under the tracks. All the while, peacefully and inexorably, the ferry ship is coming into port.
All of this is done with miniature work that most modern viewers would find laughable, but which I find utterly charming. That’s come to be one of my favorite things about revisiting his earlier films of late, from the impressive opening sequence of The Lady Vanishes to Young and Innocent’s delightful trainyard sequences. This was also a young director who just absolutely loved a train derailment, and Number Seventeen has one that involves smashing through a series of gates and crashing into a ship, with the train car bearing characters I presume we are supposed to care about are slowly sinking beneath the surface of the water like one of those convenient submarine air pockets that the photogenic leads on Baywatch were always finding themselves trapped in. It’s a delight, and it’s almost enough to save the film, but not quite. The final fifteen minutes alone in isolation are worth the ticket price, but if you can, just skip to that ending and don’t worry about the plot at all. Hitchcock didn’t.
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