mark boomer redmond

Rare Beasts (2021)

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Rare Beasts is the directorial debut of Billie Piper, whom you might know as a nineties British pop star, the companion of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, or perhaps even from Secret Diary of a Call Girl or Penny Dreadful. It also stars the talented Piper and was written by her as well, and it’s a bizarre, barbed delight, despite the mixed reviews, which we’ll get to. 

Mandy (Piper) is a single mother to the behaviorally challenged Larch (Toby Woolf), who may be on the spectrum. She works for a TV production company where she and several others are tasked with delivering pitch ideas, and the ones which the audience is allowed to hear are universally bad. It’s here that Mandy meets her relationship interest, Pete (Leo Bill). I say “relationship interest” because I initially typed “love interest” and then gagged a little, updated it to “romantic interest” and thought that this was an inaccurate adjective as well, given that there’s very little in the way of romance either. Pete’s a horrible man who comes very close to turning red and having kettle steam jet out of the sides of his head on their first date, as he spews unprompted vitriol about how much he hates women and desires what he considers an ideal marriage (one of female subservience), and how these questionable values align with his religious identity. Like, no one ever says “MRA” or “red pilled” but there’s a very clear reason why he’s alone. 

Nonetheless, the two navigate through the stations of the canon of the romcom plot; they go to their first wedding together (where Mandy briefly flirts with a man with whom she clearly has a history, and whose eyes twitch exactly like Larch’s), have a day in the park (which ends in a scene in which Pete and Larch bond and seemingly come to some kind of understanding by way of a screeching tantrum mirror match), and Mandy meeting Pete’s family for the first time. Every situation is frighteningly familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a screaming match break out at a wedding or family dinner, but also takes comfort in the bleak humor of detachment; it’s Marge Simpson in “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield” murmuring her way into the act break after grimly telling herself “At times like this, I guess all you can do is laugh” – The Movie. That’s especially true as these relationship woes play out against the scenery of her relationship with her mother (Kerry Fox), who is terminally ill and, although separated from him, is still tormented by the not-so-harmless shenanigans of Mandy’s mostly absentee father (David Thewlis). 

I’m always someone who’s more interested in a fascinating movie over one that’s “good,” but I think Rare Beasts manages to be both. There’s a hyperreality to the bizarre dialogue, which is stilted and almost impenetrable in its content at times, but always delivered in a perfect clipped cadence. It’s an experience that ends up feeling like you’re hovering halfway between an unfamiliar Shakespeare play performed with the original dialogue but in a modern setting and one of those short films or musical performances that are meant to evoke the experience of what English sounds like to non-English speakers. It’s surreal and hyperreal at the same time. 

Mandy is captivating (as is Piper). She’s struggling, and that’s life. Larch is going to be who he is, and there’s very little that can be done about it. People are horrible, meeting dates is a tragedy in slow motion, and your parents will, someday, die. My favorite detail about Mandy is that, according to her father, she would write little death threats when she was a child. He laughs this off, but when pressed for what kind of threats they were, he notes that they were the kind “that would have you thinking,” as his eyes widen. Rare Beasts is a film of subtle details in that way; in an attempt at foregoing all the potential issues with intimacy, she shows Pete every part of herself, revealing in extreme detail which parts of her body she is neurotically obsessed about (there are many, including her legs, which are “too much femur, not enough tibia.”

The camerawork here is fantastic, shockingly ambitious for a first-time director and surprisingly effective and empathetic where it needs to be. When her sexist boss insults her talent and fires her, there’s a reversal of the kind of shot that’s so frequently applied to women; she is framed though his legs, and instead of being titillating, the angle at which his legs are spread (much more than would make logical sense for a standing person not in the middle of a cheer routine) creates a sense of overall wrongness that permeates the film just as it permeates our existence. At one point after Mandy stands up for herself, there’s an immediate cut to a crane shot of Pete and Mandy running through a deserted London intersection, and it’s like something out of a coming-of-age film, but it feels wrong, long before the details set in. At one point, when Mandy is eavesdropping on her parents by sitting on the floor outside of her mother’s bedroom, her father notices here and shuts the door, but he’s looking down on her as if she were a child, shortly before a sequence in which Mandy tap dances from childhood to her present age, in line with the film’s frequent dream logic. 

I was surprised by the film’s low Rotten Tomatoes score, which is an extremely imperfect metric at best, but when looking at the reviews and the critics who provided them, I noticed a pattern, and dug in a little further. There were 50 reviews, and for 48 of them, I could identify the critic’s gender (bless Rory Doherty for putting his pronouns in his Twitter bio and keeping that from being 47). Of those, 26 (54.2%) were written by women, and 22 (45.8%) were written by men, which is pretty uncommon; normally, reviews from male critics on RT outnumber those by women 2:1. I tried to find a film with similar statistics that I could compare that to and confirm, and after taking a look at The Novice, which had 60 reviews, I realized that it was also a film with a woman helming it, as both writer and director, so that would hew too close and skew the results. Then I found Cyrano, which at the time had 51 reviews, Joe Wright’s period piece with Peter Dinklage in the title role. With roughly equivalent reviews, 12 (25.5%) were written by women, and 38 (75.5%) by men. So yeah. Of Rare Beasts‘ 48, 10 of the male critics (45.5%) gave it a negative review, as opposed to 8 (30.8%) critics who are women. So not only did this film attract disproportionately female critical attention, more men still somehow managed to dislike it than women, and with women having an internal positive/negative ratio of 2.25:1, compared to 1.2:1 for dudes. So, I guess what I’m saying is that if you’re a man, maybe this one won’t be to your liking, but that’s not a guarantee since, you know, I thought it was excellent. Then again, this film is very much Not For Everyone, so maybe that’s to be expected. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Titane (2021)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Julia Ducournau’s Titane, a distinctly macho, thematically elusive nightmare about a serial killer who learns how to love a fellow human being as much as she loves cars.

00:00 Welcome

04:55 Midnight Mass (2021)
06:45 The Medium (2021)
09:05 Pig (2021)
11:17 Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
15:01 Willy’s Wonderland (2021)
17:00 Pottersville (2017)
18:38 I Blame Society (2021)
20:15 All Light, Everywhere (2021)
24:27 Cruella (2021)
25:37 The MCU
42:04 The Matrix Resurrections (2021)

49:49 Titane (2021)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: The Visitor (1979)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the psychedelic sci-fi horror The Visitor (1979), a chaotic mix of psychic space aliens, killer birds, and Satanic blood cults.

00:00 Welcome

01:11 The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
03:24 Don’t Hang Up (2016)
05:22 In the Earth (2021)
09:27 Gaia (2021)
10:50 A Nasty Piece of Work (2019)
12:55 A Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
18:33 The Innocents (1961)
23:23 Streets of Fire (1984)
27:00 The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971)

30:03 The Visitor (1979)
50:50 Deadly Games (1989)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Into the Dark: A Nasty Piece of Work (2019)

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Although the Hulu/Blumhouse collaboration Into the Dark has come to an end, I was still holding out on catching up on the episodes I hadn’t seen yet, since it was a tradition between me and Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer to watch them together, and although we have seen each other in person several times this year, as things start to open back up, catching up on movies from an anthology series wasn’t really at the forefront of anyone’s agenda. The series was never very far from my mind, however, as I still managed to mention it several times, whether I was saying that The Unholy or Black Box felt better suited for the series, or including one of its installments at number 13 in my Top Films of 2019 list. However, after getting my little family unit to buy in on the delightful Deadly Games, I didn’t want to push things by nominating another subtitled Christmas horror flick, and there was much objecting to the Creepshow holiday special (you still have one fan in this house, Anna Camp), so we switched from Shudder to Hulu and checked out the 2019 December/Christmas release, A Nasty Piece of Work. Some spoilers! Big ones! But not of everything! 

Ted (Kyle Howard) just can’t seem to get into the good graces of his unpleasant and unpleasable boss, Steven (Julian Sands, star of the worst Phantom of the Opera), especially in comparison to and competition with perennially brown-nosing Gavin (Dustin Milligan). After a particularly embarrassing incident in which he put himself in harm’s way to retrieve and deliver Steven’s golf clubs in an ass-kissing attempt, only to be dressed down by Steven for doing so and shown up by Gavin, who mocks him for picking up Steven’s [dumb rich people bullshit] clubs instead of his [also dumb rich people bullshit] ones, Ted destroys the mirror in an executive bathroom with said implements. He’s got impulse issues! Later, following the announcement at the annual office holiday party that there will be no Christmas bonuses that year, Ted sees Steven alone on the office balcony and at first seems to be planning to push the older man to his demise, but instead delivers a clipped corporate platitude of gratitude about what an honor it is to work there, etc. Steven takes this opportunity to invite Ted out to his home for a special Christmas celebration, implying that he plans to share more information about a promotion for Ted then. 

When Ted and his wife Tatum (Angela Sarafyan) arrive at the party, they barely have any time to bask in the opulence of the exterior of Steven’s home before they’re nearly run down by Gavin in his Porsche; he and his wife Missy (Natalie Hall) have also been invited. Although Ted spots someone in an upstairs window, Steven’s wife Kiwi (Molly Hagan) insists that the three couples are alone in the house. What follows is an evening of increasing mind games, some of which work and some of which are purely fantastical. Kiwi and Steven go full Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with her withering remarks about his priorital elevation of his business over starting a family as well as his present impotence, while he bons mot about her drinking and other indulgences. Paul Soter of Broken Lizard fame is the credited writer here, but there may as well be a “based upon characters created by Edward Albee” thrown in there for good measure, since we even get a staged shooting, just as in Woolf, although this time when Steven splatters Kiwi’s “brains” all over the marble walls, he immediately turns to Gavin and Ted for recommendations for plans of action to ensure none of them see jail time. It bears mentioning here that, like their husbands, Tatum and Missy are also fundamentally different. Tatum is a down-to-earth woman who works as an insurance mediator and is excited about her snowflake earrings. Missy, for her part, is an astrology-espousing unemployed trophy* wife who shares her husband’s drive for sucking up, although she’s less successful at it; when she tells Kiwi that the older couple’s home has excellent feng shui, Kiwi playfully says that at least designers don’t charge extra for that, but her contemptuous scowl doesn’t disguise just how little she thinks of this input. Missy’s not a complete slouch, however, as when Steven prompts his employees for a solution for what to do about Kiwi’s “corpse,” Gavin is speechless, while Missy manages to kick him into gear, and when Ted reluctantly joins in, Tatum is justifiably horrified. 

Things only get stranger from there, and although the film never really got quite as weird in the way that I wanted, it exceeded my expectations in other areas. Kiwi jokes that they got a great deal on the house due to a series of murders that were performed by people living in the walls, which, in combination with Ted’s aformentioned spotting of masked people in an upstairs window and a sequence in which Missy is watched by someone peeping from a hidden room, makes you think that this little Mike Nichols LARP is bound to take a Bad Ronaldian twist any second, but the actual resolution of that particular plot thread is an underwhelming revelation that will have you saying “You’ve got to be Eyes Wide Shitting me!”, which sort of makes sense in context and which I thought was very funny, although no one else laughed. Instead, things take a turn for the even more bizarre. For instance, we learn that Ted’s been lying to Tatum about his Friday night activities, which everyone initially infers to mean that he’s an adulterer. Instead, he’s actually visiting a boy, Daniel, whom Ted paralyzed as the result of a traffic accident that Ted catalyzed by driving in while in an infuriated state following a previous work outburst, years before he and Tatum met. This twists further when Kiwi and Steven reveal that they have Daniel (Nico Greetham) in the house with them and plan to adopt him, and that if Ted doesn’t fulfill Steven’s latest demented command, Daniel will be intentionally subjected to a life of neglect and abuse, but that scene alone contains at least two more additional revelations that push the absurdity to the extreme, but I couldn’t help loving every minute of it. 

Essentially, this is a movie in which we get not only such genre-standard classics as: 

  • Rich old creep creeps on his employee’s wife. 
  • Drunk rich lady creeps on husband’s employee in front of her husband.  
  • Chekhov’s guns!
  • Rich old creep creeps on his other employee’s wife. 
  • Intramural voyeurism. 

We also get such strange new heights as: 

  • Bros wearing a suit of armor. 
  • Angrily smashing delicate face masks.
  • Drunk rich lady threatens to kill herself by tying her scarf to a life-sized poolside statue and pushing it in. 
  • Schrödinger’s ammunition!  
  • A truly outstanding amount of gaslighting and preparation.

Contemporary criticism of the movie from closer to its release largely focused on the film’s lack of discussion of class friction. While that’s a valid critique, I suppose, most of them cite that there’s little discussion of the vast differences in wealth between Steven and his employees, and I’m not really sure that I agree, especially because my biggest problem with the film’s economic commentary lies in what it doesn’t talk about, rather than what it does. Essentially, I have the same complaint that I’ve had about National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation for years: the money problems that Clark Griswold faces are not relatable to me, as he has a large and lovely home, no trouble providing for his family, and doesn’t seem to be in any danger of losing his job if he takes a truly staggering amount of vacation time.  Clark just wants a Christmas bonus so that he can get a swimming pool, and because he assumed he would be getting it, he made plans for it without making sure funding was secure; Christmas Vacation requires Cousin Eddy to show up and good-naturedly antagonize Clark because otherwise the only conflict is the result of Clark’s bad decision. Likewise, we never really get a very good explanation of why Ted and Tatum need this bonus so much. Ted’s so angry about being shown up by Gavin in one scene that he destroys a very expensive bathroom, but the fact that he, like Clark Griswold, has so much riding in a bonus, makes him feel like an artifact from a different era. 

Clark Griswold is unrelatable because, in the 1980s, a middle class chucklenut was living the American Dream. In a 2021 where everything is worse, Ted’s desperation for a bonus, when he seems to be doing better than a lot of people, is a premise that is alienating in just how out of touch it is. One of the strengths of Into the Dark is the way that it streamlines its storytelling, and this installment (like most) takes place almost entirely in one location (Steven and Kiwi’s house), other than a couple of bookend office sequences and an interior dialogue scene in Ted and Tatum’s car. They don’t openly talk about their financial straits on that drive; they just talk about the long hours that Ted has been putting in, and because of the budget constraints that force these smooth-running narratives we see nothing of their home and the life they lead therein. There’s no sense that Ted feels distant from his wife or that she feels a particularly sharp loneliness because of their long hours apart. Of the two, it’s Gavin who’s having money problems because he’s leveraged his credit to create a facade of wealth to impress Steven, while Tatum and Ted seem to be… fine. Only 12% of employers provided bonuses in 2020, with that number up to 23% in 2021, and while that’s self-reporting from businesses, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics data from 2019 backs this up, with year-end/holiday bonuses ranging from 6-15% depending on the industry and type of bonus. I happen to be fortunate enough to work a day job where I usually get a bonus at the end of the year, but it’s not every year and I know better than to count on getting it in order to maintain financial stability (and all of them added together for the past 6 years still wouldn’t get me a swimming pool), and most people don’t at all. I certainly never got one from working in the public sector as a teacher or in academic support, and the only bonus I ever got while working retail was a frozen turkey. Hell, if we’re going to crib from Albee and Harold Ramis, why not bring old Dickens into this and give Ted and Tatum a son who needs an expensive treatment, or maybe one of them has an ill parent who needs full time care. Even being behind on a mortgage payment because of a surprise short term medical emergency would add a little bit more urgency to the proceedings. 

That same need for an aerodynamic production process and quick and easy cash returns on investment that are a hallmark of even the best Blumhouse releases is great, because they’re the only company giving any real money to small-scale productions, but those pursestrings are tight when it comes to locations. Usually where Dark succeeds or fails is in the performance and the style. Director Charles Hood made only two features prior to this, and if you don’t recognize the names of the TV shows he’s directed episodes of, I don’t either. Cinematographer James Kniest, however, is a frequent Mike Flanagan collaborator, and that shows in the shot choices and composition here, elevating this episode of the anthology above some of its less ambitious peers. Milligan is known more for his comedy roles, and while he’s good at playing dim-witted here as he did on Dirk Gently, there’s a talent in the way that he can deliver a serious scene, as he does here as Gavin while Steven plays back unkind things that Gavin said about Missy in front of her, then effortlessly and seamlessly transition right back to childlike wonder. Molly Hagan is the real MVP here, however. Hagan’s an actress who has made a single appearance in virtually every television show produced between 1992 and 2015. Scarecrow and Mrs. King? Yes! NCIS: New Orleans? Of course! The Golden Girls? You bet! Chicago Hope? Uh- huh. Six Feet Under? Well, obviously! Numb3rs, Monk, JAG, and Friends? Yes, yes, yes, and duh. But here she really gets to be Elizabeth Taylor, and she does it with style and aplomb. 

So yes,  A Nasty Piece of Work is more than the sum of its parts. If you happen to have Hulu and want to have a little fun with a horror-adjacent Christmas special, take another journey into the dark. 

* The film does seem to pretend that Sarafyan isn’t a beautiful woman, and later in the narrative Missy calls her “podunk,” but the rest of the movie doesn’t really sell that, other than a moment wherein Kiwi compliments her boots and Tatum talks about getting them on sale, to which Kiwi gently chastises her that rich people don’t brag about that sort of thing. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

3615 code Père Noël (aka Deadly Games, 1989)

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In our recent discussion of Paprika for the Lagniappe podcast, Brandon mentioned that he likes Christmas slashers, and I challenged him to name three (since Black Christmas is a given, and everyone has their own favorite Silent Night, Deadly Night – for Brandon, it’s Initiation). Luckily, streaming service Shudder has an “Unhappy Holidays” selection. There are some perennial favorites in there, like the aforementioned Black Christmas and its much-maligned 2006 remake as well as prior Movie of the Month Rare Exports. While fishing for something to watch to help get into the spirit of the season, I stumbled upon 3615 code Père Noël (literally “3615 code Santa Claus” in reference to the Minitel code for sending messages to “Santa,” but released in the U.S. as Dial Code Santa Claus and Deadly Games). And boy was it a treat! 

Thomas de Frémont (Alain Musy), age 8, has the epitome of a charmed life, living in a castle with his widowed mother Julie (Brigitte Fossey) and her father, Papy (Louis Ducreux). Deep within the walls of the castle lies a series of secret passages and a gigantic playroom, filled with toys that once belonged to his late father, and his father’s father, etc. Even the boy’s mother does not know about this room, as this secret is passed from father to son. As his mother is the manager of a nearby location of the famous French department store Printemps, he also has all of the latest high tech gadgets, including the aforementioned Minitel system, a closed circuit surveillance system that he can operate with a chunky wrist remote, and even a trapdoor with a net, which he uses to capture his dog during an opening sequence in which he gives himself Rambo-style guerilla campaign war paint and acts out a quasi-Vietnam in miniature, all before breakfast. Thomas is a young millennial Pippi Longstocking: a child’s wish-fulfillment character, a hypercompetent little boy who mostly takes care of himself while still maintaining a childlike sense of wonder 3615; he can repair his mother’s car without adult assistance, but also still believes in Santa Claus. For now, anyway. 

It’s Christmas Eve, and in the city, a man in his forties wearing a yellow scarf (Patrick Floersheim) attempts to join in a children’s snowball fight, but they are disturbed by him and flee. Meanwhile, Julie manages to elicit her son’s Christmas list from him, despite his insistence that he can communicate directly with Santa using his Minitel, and leaves for work, but not before reminding him to make sure that Papy takes his insulin. Julie is given a ride by her assistant, Roland (François-Eric Gendron), much to Thomas’s annoyance, which prompts him to set to work repairing her vehicle. At work, Roland hands Thomas’s Christmas list off to an employee, to gather the desired toys and have them delivered to the caretakers at the de Frémont house, as Julie will be working late for the last-minute Christmas Eve push, which includes getting as many Santas into the store as possible. After a visit from a friend who tries to convince him that Santa is a lie, Thomas uses his Minitel to communicate with the 3516 Santa line, but unbeknownst to him, the person on the other end is the man in the yellow scarf, who asks increasingly invasive questions, until Thomas logs off. The yellow scarfed man then takes one of the Printemps Santa positions, but when a young girl is disturbed by him, he ends up striking her, which Julie sees, prompting her to fire him immediately. In the personnel office to collect his payment and be discharged, he overhears Roland giving final instructions for the delivery of Thomas’s Christmas presents, and he hides in the back of the van, with the intent to make some merry (and murderous) mischief. 

This is going to date me, but the first memory I have of going to the movies was to see Beauty and the Beast. According to my mother, however, I was first taken to the theater at age 3 in 1990, to see Home Alone, which, according to Deadly Games director René Manzor, was plagiarized from his film. And yeah, there are definitely similarities; ironically, when I think about sitting in that theater watching Beauty and the Beast and being utterly captivated, what I remember most is that opening sequence with the stained glass and the musical track that is similar-to-but-legally(?)-distinct-from the seventh movement of Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns’s Le Carnaval des animaux, so in reality, both of my earliest filmgoing experiences were in some part (allegedly) stolen from the French. The thing about Deadly Games is that it’s infinitely superior to its alleged American rip-off. Home Alone is a perfectly fine family movie with slapstick comedy that acts as a sort of fantasy for children, and which is slotted into being a Christmas movie by default simply because it takes place during the holidays (see also: Die Hard); the fact that Kevin is alone at Christmas is fairly incidental to the plot, and the film could just as easily be set in July with no real change to the plot and only a few minor changes to dialogue. Deadly Games, with its Santa-dressed antagonist, Christmas Eve plot elements, and explicit connection to the loss of innocence and faith in magic that comes as a result of learning that Santa Claus isn’t real, cannot be separated from the narrative without changing it substantially. Even the whiteness in the killer’s beard and hair comes from using a can of tree flocking. 

Not to keep harping on the similarities to (and differences from) Home Alone, Thomas and Kevin are very different kids living in very different universes. Kevin is buoyant and well-tempered, and although our heartstrings are tugged when he misses his family, he never seems to be in too much danger; we never really fear for his life. Thomas, on the other hand, gets injured (pretty badly) over the course of Deadly Games, although he manages to take care of himself and his grandfather fairly well in spite of being a child, and his innocence is contrasted with both his hypercompetence and the distinctly adult nature of the danger that he is in. Before she leaves for work, Thomas’s mother tells him not to try and stay up to wait for Santa Claus, or see him, as Santa turns into an “ogre” if he is seen by children on Christmas Eve. Thomas still tries to use his security camera set-up to be the first kid to get proof of Santa’s existence, but when he does see the less-than-jolly intruder enter the house (through the chimney, no less), he’s excited, until the moment that the killer hurts his dog. From there, an intense cat-and-mouse ensues, and Thomas matches wits pretty well, despite his injuries including presumed frostbite from both climbing around on the roof to escape “Santa” and running through the woods to the caretakers’ house to get his grandfather’s spare insulin, a leg injury that he is forced to splint using a broken chair, and a lifetime of mental scars. 

A lot of people in my friend group hate Christmas, and I’m actually the odd one out for loving it. I love Christmas lights, the joy of getting someone something that they didn’t know existed but which fits them perfectly, wrapping presents, tinsel, hot chocolate and cider and mulled wine, and the aesthetics of the Winter Wonderland. By the same token, however, I dislike many of the trappings of the holiday: the idea of “gift guides” is, in and of itself, disgusting commercialist, consumerist propaganda to me; I find Christmas music exhausting, pervasive, and annoying; I can’t stand the right wing propaganda mills’ annual manufactured outrage about the supposed “War on Christmas” and how those “news” outlets have simultaneously radicalized and rotted the brains of large swaths of multiple generations of American voters. Other than holiday-themed episodes of generally cynical shows that I already enjoy, most Christmas filmic media is far too saccharine, cloying, and regressive for my taste. How I long for a subversive anti-Hallmark Christmas movie where our lead goes back to their hometown and, instead of encountering a situation that inscribes and glorifies the morally questionable values of rampant consumerism, patriarchal family structures, and having precisely one (1) apolitical black friend, they instead are reminded that they left their podunk nowheres to pursue dreams, not of having more, but of being more, and that home is actually full of undisguised racism, self-congratulating political hypocrisy, and abuse, only to return to their found family in The City and having a truly merry Christmas. But alas, such a thing does not seem to exist. For those of us who love both Christmas and thrills, however, at least there’s Deadly Games. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: Lifeforce (1985)

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Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Brandon made Hanna, Boomer, and Britnee watch Lifeforce (1985).

Brandon:  Lifeforce is a Golan-Globus production directed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Tobe Hooper and adapted from the sci-fi pulp novel The Space Vampires by Dan O’Bannon, screenwriter for Alien.  It is an absurdly lavish production for a Cannon Group film—or really for any film with this chaotic of an imagination—especially considering the scrappier genre pictures its creators usually helm. 

It starts as an Alien-style sci-fi pulp throwback where dormant “space vampires” are discovered in both bat & humanoid form on an abandoned spaceship parked on Haley’s Comet, then brought back to London for scientific examination.  Once the lead vampire awakes on the autopsy table and sucks the electrified “lifeforce” out of the first nearby victim, the boundaries of the film’s genre classification explode into every possible direction.  This is at times an alien invasion film, a body-possession story, a sci-fi spin on vampire lore, a post-Romero zombie apocalypse picture, and an all-around genre meltdown whatsit that keeps piling new, upsetting ideas onto each subsequent sequence until you’re crushed by the enormity of its imagination.  With Lifeforce, Hooper & O’Bannon found the rare freedom to stage a gross-out B-picture on a proper Hollywood blockbuster budget, and they indulged every bizarre idea they could conjure in the process – complete with extravagant practical effects and a swashbuckling action-hero score performed by The London Symphony Orchestra.

I’ve been meaning to make time for Lifeforce since as far back as our buddies at the We Love to Watch podcast covered it five years ago.  I am not surprised that I loved it, but I was delighted to discover how much its space-vampire mayhem is a supernatural form of erotic menace, which is my #1 horror sweet spot.  It would have been more than enough for the soul-sucking space-vampires to turn Earthlings into exploding dust-zombies & leaky bloodsacks, but what really made me fall in love is how they start the process by hypnotizing their victims with intense horniness. 

Like with Alien, Dan O’Bannon is playing with the psychosexual terror lurking just below the surface of retro sci-fi relics like Queen of Blood & The Astounding She-Monster, but the approach to modernizing that erotic menace is much more heteronormative here than with the male-pregnancy & penetrative fears of H.R. Giger’s iconic alien designs.  Lifeforce portrays modern-day London as a city of sexually repressed Conservative men whose greatest fear is a confident, nude woman.  The lead nudist vampire is not only too sexy & self-assured for the terminally British subs who fall under her spell, she also terrorizes them by linking that intense erotic attraction to the blurred gender boundaries of their own psyches.  Some of the best scenes of the film are when her victims describe her as “the most overwhelmingly feminine presence [they’ve] ever encountered” or when she confesses that her physical form is just a projection of the femininity trapped inside their own minds.  By the time a silhouette of her breasts is framed as if it were Nosferatu‘s creeping shadow, I was fully in love with the way this film attacks its uptight macho victims through the vulnerability of their erotic imaginations.  I love a good wet nightmare, and it was endlessly fun to watch them squirm.

Hanna, what do you make of this film’s sexual & gender politics?  Does its erotic terror add anything substantial to the more traditional zombie & vampire scares that throw London into chaos, or does it just feel like an exploitative excuse to cram some straight-boy-marketed nudity onto the screen?

Hanna: Boy howdy!  Lifeforce was one of the exponentially wildest things I’ve seen in recent memory.  Brandon, I think you mentioned The Wicker Man during our screening, which is the exact vein of horny fear I found in this movie; the ill-fated, repressed sexualities of Anglo-Saxon men never cease to delight me.  I was completely on board with a beautiful naked woman walking her way—unbelievably slowly—through quivering throngs of Brits.

Overall, Lifeforce is a fantastic addition to the vampire canon, which has always had lots to say about the terror of sex and sexuality.  Most of the vampire movies I’ve seen feature naturally hot, youthful vamps, lounging around in sensuous mansions.  I’ll never turn down a coven of hot Draculas, but I loved that these vampires of Lifeforce were truly horrifying space hell beasts using the fantasies of their hosts to craft their appearances (I like to imagine the other aliens that these vampires have sucked dry throughout the galaxy – imagine the hottest tentacled space glob in the universe).  Human sexuality is so specific to particular events and images at different moments of a person’s life that I think lots of people don’t understand where their kinks and preferences come from.  I loved that moment Brandon mentioned when the lead space vampire (named “Space Girl” in the credits, which tickles me) tells Col. Carlsen that she’s the manifestation of his femininity; he’s totally locked that aspect of his sexuality away from himself, but it’s plainly obvious and extremely easy to exploit.  What would Space Girl find in my mind?  I kind of want to know, but I kind of don’t!

I do have to say that I was a little disappointed by the exclusive focus on heteronormative sexuality.  On one hand, part of the humor of this movie is that Space Girl exerts minimal effort while successfully throwing London into unchecked chaos with her cadre of androgynous space vampire hunks, due in large part to the desperately horny male leaders of foundational institutions.  Clearly, this was the correct tack to take from a strategic standpoint.  It’s just that for a super sexy movie that featuring exploding dust zombies, shapeshifting space vampires, and a floating, coagulated blob comprised of torrents of Sir Patrick Stewart’s blood, couldn’t we have gotten just a little touch of queer flirtation?  (I guess she sucks the life force out of a woman in the park, but we don’t actually see it happen, so I’m not counting it!) We get a little touch of that in the femininity scene, but I wish the movie would have delved into even kinkier territory.

Boomer, I thought these space vampires were a great direction for film’s hall of vampires.  What did you think?  How do these monsters compare to their terrestrial blueprints? 

Boomer: I was also hung up on the vampires’ heteronormativity.  We spend so much full-frontal time with Space Girl that I could draw her labia from memory right now, weeks after seeing the movie, but we (of course) had plentiful and abundant convenient censorship of our hot space twunks’ docking equipment. I suppose it’s logical that a film that exists solely because of the male gaze and which requires the ubiquity of the male gaze to make narrative sense should also cater solely to it, but that doesn’t mean one can’t complain about it. 

Unusually for me, I prefer my vampire fiction mystical rather than scientific.  It’s not just because most sci-fi vampire films are pretty bad (Daybreakers immediately comes to mind, followed by Bloodsuckers and Ultraviolet); there are plenty of terrible supernatural vampire movies. Still, when measuring good against bad, the ratio of good sci-fi vampires to bad ones skews much more negatively than their magical brethren. As much as I liked Lifeforce, that this (blessed) mess counts as one of the good ones kind of tells you everything that you need to know, right? I just like it when vampires have to glamour people or have to be invited in; I think it makes for more interesting storytelling than vampirism-as-a-virus or, as is the case here, vampires are extraterrestrial beings that suck out life force.  When it comes to twists on the lore, however, there was one thing that I really did like: the reanimation of victims who must likewise consume life energy, and which turn to dust if unable to do so.  The effects in these scenes were nothing short of spectacular, and they were the best part of the film.  I know that they must have been remastered at some point, but those puppets were really something fascinating to behold. 

One of the things that I did have some trouble with was the pacing, especially with regards to character introductions.  For the first 20 minutes or so, it’s like watching 2001 (or Star Trek: The Motion Picture) on fast-forward as spectacular vistas and space structures are explored, before we’re suddenly in a very boring office space, and we’re figuratively and literally down to earth for the rest of the movie.  There’s not that much interesting about any of the spaces we explore (other than that one lady’s apartment with the Liza Minnelli poster), and it felt like every 20 minutes a new guy just sort of walked into the view of the camera and the film became about him for a while.  I wasn’t sure who was supposed to be our protagonist, which left me spinning.  That our leads were all largely indistinguishable white dudes also contributed to this for me; when Steve Railsback reappeared after not having been seen since the ship exploration sequence, I thought he was the same character as the guy who had exploded into dust in the scene immediately prior.  Was this also an issue for you, Britnee?  Did the pacing work for you? 

Britnee: When looking back on the scenery in Lifeforce, all I can recall is the color brown. All of those wood paneled walls and dull office spaces made the sets feel a little musty. The one major exception is when the space crew explores the mysterious 150-mile-long spacecraft (a scale I still can’t wrap my head around). I loved the uncomfortable rectum-looking entrance that leads them to the collection of dried-up bat creatures and the hive of nude “humans” in glass containers. I wasn’t ready to leave that funky space place so quickly. I wanted to see more compartments of the craft explored. There was 150 miles of it after all, and they only went through what seemed to be less than a mile. I know poking around the craft would cost money, but with the massive budget for this film, the money was obviously there. It just should have been spent better. 

As for the pacing, I was so focused on all of the space vampire mayhem that I didn’t pay much attention to all of the boring white guys who were main characters . . . unless they were getting their life sucked out of them and exploding into dust. It was pretty difficult to keep up with who was who and how they plugged into all of the insanity, but it didn’t really bother me because just about everything else in the movie was so much fun. 

Lagniappe

Britnee: Lifeforce would do so well as an animated series. I saw that there was talk about a potential remake, but it seems like animation would be the way to go. That way, there would be fewer financial limitations, so all the freaky stuff could be even freakier. 

Boomer: That both of our male leads (at least I think they’re our leads) had hard-C alliterative names (Colonel Carlsen and Colonel Colin Caine) was a real detriment.  But once Kat pointed out that Carlsen was Steve Railsback, aka Duane Barry, I could at least keep track of him. 

Brandon: I was initially disappointed by the lack of onscreen peen myself, but the more I think about how much this movie is about straight men’s psychosexual discomforts the more I’m okay with it.  If you’re going to frame your lusty B-movie this strictly through male gaze, you need to at least interrogate the limitations & vulnerabilities of that gaze, and I think Lifeforce does that well.  Rather than a remake, I think there’s an angle for a spinoff sequel that follows the two Nude Dudes around the entire night instead of Space Girl, since most of their adventures were off-screen.  Coming to Hulu as soon as Disney buys up the Cannon Group catalog, after they’ve gobbled up the rest of the pop media landscape.

Hanna: Speaking of constant female nudity, my favorite tidbit of trivia about Lifeforce is that it was extremely difficult to find a female lead willing to be naked for the entire movie. Hooper had to resort to chartering a plane of German actresses to London after failing to find an English actress; by the time the actresses got to London, they had collectively agreed not to audition for the part. Thank God for Mathilda May! Maybe it would have been too much trouble to get some peen in the picture; I’m glad we got at least a little ethereal, vampiric nakedness.

Upcoming Movies of the Month
January: The Top Films of 2021

-The Swampflix Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Paprika (2006)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the psychedelic sci-fi anime Paprika (2006), an explosively imaginative movie about shared dreams from the genius Satoshi Kon. 

00:00 Welcome

00:40 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
05:15 #swampboox
11:52 Pig (2021)
14:10 There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021)
17:24 The MCU
19:02 The Paper Tigers (2021)
24:30 We Need to Do Something (2021)
27:52 The Medium (2021)
31:00 All Light Everywhere (2021)
33:50 Benedetta (2021)
36:08 Jumbo (2021)
38:40 Mandibles (2021)
40:16 Cryptozoo (2021)

43:27 Paprika (2006)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Paper Tigers (2021)

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The Paper Tigers is a 2021 martial arts dramedy about three men who were once the pupils of a kung fu (or gung fu, as a character notes in this film is the correct pronunciation) master, now middle-aged adults who reunite after years of no contact when their beloved former teacher dies under mysterious circumstances. I’ve also seen the film billed elsewhere as a comedy, and while it’s certainly a charming film, the USA Today pull quote on the poster that says the film is “filled with laughs” is a little overblown. It’s more of a feel-food, leaves-you-with-a-smile movie than a laugh riot, but the world needs both. And if you’re looking for something that won’t offend the sensibilities of the family that you’ll be spending time with over the holidays, this is a pretty good choice. 

The film opens in 1986 with the training of young Danny, Hing, and Jim (Kieran Tamondong, Bryan Kinder, and Malakai James, respectively) by their teacher, Cheung (Roger Yuan). Their learning is unconventional, with shades of Karate Kid, but even more unusual; it wouldn’t have been too out of place to have Mr. Miyagi teach Daniel body control and perseverance by having him balance on a paint can, but he wouldn’t have done it while smoking cigarettes that he ashed directly into the trash can and looking at racing results in the newspaper. In an expertly edited piece of VHS-styled home videography, the boys age into high school by 1991 (now played, respectively, by Yoshi Sudarso, Peter Adrian Sudarso, and Gui DaSilva-Greene), where they have become undisputed masters of their craft, effortlessly fending off challenges from Carter (Mark Poletti), a student of a rival gung fu school. Finally, the three young men graduate from Cheung’s training, fully becoming “Tigers,” as Danny prepares to go and fight in Japan after their graduation in 1993.

In the present day, Danny (Alain Uy) is struggling to juggle part-time custody of his son Ed (Joziah Lagonoy) with his ex-wife Caryn (Jae Suh Park) with his job, which leads to an ultimatum when he’s late for pickup, again, and he has to go back to the office instead of taking Ed to similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from Disneyland (the child’s favorite ride is “Mountain Splash”), resulting in him asking Ed to lie to his mother about their activities. Danny is visited by Hing (Ron Yuan), who tells him that Cheung has died, seemingly of a heart attack, but something about it all seems fishy. At their deceased mentor’s funeral, they reunite with Carter (Matthew Page), who has gone into full cultural appropriation mode, and his own teacher Wong (Raymond Ma), who owns the restaurant at which Cheung had been employed as a chef for decades and runs his own gung fu school. Carter also confesses a belief that Cheung was murdered, and points to three young “punks” who interrupt the ceremony and disrespect Cheung’s memory as possible persons of interest. Hing and Danny reunite with Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins) to get to the bottom of their mentor’s murder, and in the process learn that he may have trained a fourth Tiger (Ken Quitugua) after his surrogate sons abandoned him. 

The action here is nothing short of spectacular. It’s always a treat to see martial arts depicted with an emphasis on the arts over the martial, and this is a truly elegant film to behold. This isn’t really all that surprising, really, given the talent behind and in front of the camera; for over half of the cast, clicking through to their IMDb profiles reveals a host of stunt credits alongside their acting performances and that many of them come from stunt families—Roger Yuan (54 acting credits, 38 stunt credits) is the older brother of Ron Yuan (actor 169, stunts 36), and Yoshi Sudarso (actor 51, stunts 43) is the elder of two brothers as well, with Peter Adrian Sudarso alongside him in this film. The three actors playing the disrespectful punks (Brian Le, Phillip Dang, and Andy Le) have 34 acting credits between them, and 32 stunt credits. This is a truly stacked cast, and they are fantastic to watch. While several of the more obvious jokey bits didn’t work for me—in the opening training sequence of the guys as children, Cheung has them hold a squatting pose until one of them farts, and I almost opted out immediately—the action provides plenty of opportunity for physical comedy as well, which is well used. 

The comic elements are more grounded in character than we’re accustomed to in modern comedies as well. Unlike other movies that pastiche and homage martial arts films (The FP comes to mind), Paper Tigers doesn’t rely on old stereotypes and tiresome cliches to create a rhetorical space for joke-telling, and the comedy that does recall those dead horses is punching (and kicking, and breaking bricks) up, not down. In the nineties, Carter was a joke to the Tigers because he kept challenging the far-superior Danny to fights, even after eight spectacular losses (in the ninth encounter, Danny doesn’t even bother to take his jacket off); in the present, Carter has, as noted above, gone into full appropriation mode, and the joke’s on him as a result, even going so far as to have him say things like “We Chinese have a saying” in front of several Asian Americans. Later, one of the punks uses a slur as part of a larger appropriation of AAVE, and his ass gets rightfully, and hilariously, beaten for it. (In a non-comedic example, there’s a use of the f-slur by Ed, but it’s in the context of explaining to his parents how he got into a fight with another boy at school as the result of defending a friend against a slurring bully, and it’s one of the things that reminds Danny why he learned gung fu in the first place, setting up the film’s climax.) 

My other concern that arose in the first few minutes was that we were also immediately treated to a scene of Danny as a subpar parent, and I was worried we would eventually veer into territory of the overly sentimental. There are few storytelling devices of which I tired as quickly as a child than the “Workaholic Dad” who appeared in so many of the family films of the 90s, virtually always using a mobile phone of a now incredible size, who ultimately comes through for his child/ren in the end (The 6th Day, Jack Frost, Liar Liar, Little Giants, and especially and egregiously Hook) while treacly music plays. This family dynamic ends up being a smaller and quieter part of this film while having a genuine impact on the story eventually. This is, after all, a film about legacy and fatherhood. In fact, the Tigers don’t call their teacher “sensei” or “master,” but “sifu,” which means “master,” yes, but also father. Their martial art isn’t merely a general kind of gung fu, but a lineage and genealogy of instruction and mastery. We learn that there was a reason that Danny and Sify Cheung first became estranged, and that this led Danny down a path to conflict avoidance that has left him rusty in his skills after all this time; it’s only when he finally admits to his son that asking him to lie was dishonorable and that fighting to protect others when there is no other choice is a valid stance to take that Danny once again feels the inner strength that made him so formidable in his youth, which allows him not to avenge his Sifu’s death, but to deliver justice. At an earlier point in the film, Danny and Hing ask Sifu Wong to maintain Sifu Cheung’s ashes at his dojo despite being of a different clan, as they believe he would prefer to be enshrined where gung fu is practiced, to which Wong replies that his ashes belong with his disciples; at the film’s conclusion, we see Danny in his garage training Ed in his master’s ways, including balancing on paint cans, and that he now has his Sifu’s ashes there. Danny is embracing and continuing that legacy, and it’s actually very sweet without hitting you over the head with its symbolism or becoming cloying and insufferable. 

This is a debut feature from writer/director Quoc Bao Tran, and he’s made a spectacular first impression. Surprisingly for something with such sumptuous visuals and excellent transitional and fight editing, this is also cinematographer Shaun Mayor’s first feature with that particular credit, although he’s had extensive camera operation experience, as well as an editor, Kris Kristensen, whose prior work has been in shorts and documentaries (other than a 2004 film entitled Inheritance, which was also directed and written by Kristensen, leading me to believe this was probably a student film situation). Somehow, this turned out to be a dream team, and I’m excited to see what each of them does next. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

There’s Someone Inside Your House (2021)

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Thanksgiving was last week, and if your family is anything like mine, you probably heard the phrase “social justice” sneeringly used as an epithet as if we were talking about something as vile as omnipresent police brutality or human trafficking. Look in the mirror, reader, we made it through that! We are strong. Although you and I have managed to prevent having our brains completely rotted by propaganda, seeing the way that corporations can attempt to co-opt (whoops, sorry, I meant to say “address”) issues of social justice in their digestible products and mangle those concepts horribly gives a bit of insight into what those issues look like once they’ve filtered down to the level of the largely-unengaged (or propagandized) consumer. And it’s not great! 

Makani Young (Sydney Park) is the most recent addition to the group of outsiders at a high school in small town Nebraska, having transferred just a short time prior. Also in the group are: Makani’s best friend Alexandra Crisp (Asjha Cooper); Rodrigo Doran (Diego Josef), who has a mutual unspoken crush on Alexandra; and Zach Sandford (Dale Whibley), an archetypical stoner kid and the son of “Skipper” Sandford, a wealthy farmer with aims to control the whole town by purchasing foreclosed properties, including those that were home to the families of his son’s peers, and is engaged in an ongoing effort to dismantle the local police force and set up his own privatized department in town. 

Also rounding out this group of outcasts is Darby (Jesse LaTourette), a trans and apparently gender non-confirming student whose hopes to get out of this small town mostly revolve around a NASA internship for which they have replied. As a side note, I’m using “they” here, but the film is never very explicit on this topic; a quick Google search for performer Jesse LaTourette returns results that describe LaTourette as an actress and which use she/her pronouns, while a search for that name with “trans” in the search line located this blog post which states that “a friend reached out and confirmed that Jesse LaTourette identifies as genderfluid, and uses any pronouns,” but I’m hewing on the safe side since I can’t corroborate that elsewhere. The half-assedness of the film’s inclusivity is manifest in the text: we the audience are never really told what Darby’s pronouns are; the only explicit mention of their gender comes when self-congratulatory student council president Katie (Sarah Dugdale) reads an excerpt from their college application essay, which begins with your typical “I didn’t really understand diversity/struggle until I met someone who was different from me” spiel. On the one hand, this is actually a pretty good piece of storytelling in the way that it demonstrates the tendency of white, cisgender people to not only co-opt non-white and non-cis narratives as their own but to do so for profit (or in this case, to get into college), but on the other, it amuses me that Netflix doesn’t see themselves reflected in this narratively vilified character. 

We don’t meet these characters right away, however. Taking a page from the Scream playbook, we have the film equivalent of a cold open here, as the school’s presumably teenaged quarterback Jackson Pace (the very twenty-eight-year-old Markian Tarasiuk) engages in some telephonic locker room talk that establishes that he’s a pig and that there’s a Big Game™ that night. Jackson awakes from his pregame rest to discover that his phone has been stolen and the front door has been left ajar, but before he can complete his call to 911, he finds a trail of photographs that depict his violent hazing of a fellow footballer (we learn after the opening credits that this supposedly teenaged victim was still-alive Caleb, played by the also-28 Burkely Duffield, but from the photos it looked like Jackson had beaten a kid to death, which is also part of this film’s storytelling issues). Jackson follows the path laid out by these photos to his bedroom closet where he is confronted by a hooded killer wearing Jackson’s face. While begging for his life, Jackson asks the killer if they want money and offers to Venmo them, which was actually a fairly inspired bit of dialogue that got a chuckle out of me; these pleas fall on deaf ears, and Jackson is killed, while his killer simultaneously sends the evidence of Jackson being an abusive psycho to everyone at the football game. 

After Jackson’s Drew Barrymore pre-credits death, we meet the above-mentioned main characters as they huddle up and extend an olive branch to Caleb, who never reported the hazing that happened to him for fear of being outed as gay, only to end up outed by Jackson’s death and facing exactly the kind of ostracization he expected (combined with paranoia that he might have been involved in Jackson’s killing for revenge, despite being on the football field at the time of death). Suspicion also falls on Ollie Larsson (Théodore Pellerin), the school’s resident trench coat kid with the requisite tragic backstory: alcoholic parents who died in a drunk driving accident, teased by others that mom and dad killed themselves because their son was a psychopath, and being raised by his older brother who happens to be a local deputy, which gives him plenty of opportunities to access “files” for red herring purposes. Other potential killers include the aforementioned Skipper, what with his expansionist desires, attempts to set up his own police, and his extensive collection of Nazi memorabilia (most of which Zach has turned into marijuana paraphernalia), as well as Dave (Ryan Beil), “the only Uber driver in town,” whose attempts at standard rideshare driver small talk could also be interpreted sinisterly. 

After the second killing, of previously mentioned overachiever Katie, who is murdered while setting up for Jackson’s memorial service and is outed as the host of an anonymous but virulent white supremacist podcast, the local police set up a curfew after ineptly and thus unsuccessfully interviewing the students from the high school, except Zach, whose father’s lawyer pulls the boy from the line-up. That night, Ollie and Makani try to sneak away for a tryst, but join the rest of the town’s teenagers in gathering at a large house party to reveal their most hidden truths to one another in the hopes that doing so will protect them from the killer, assuming that the victims are being murdered because of their secrets. During the party, however, Rodrigo is outed as a secret drug addict and killed, with the killer once again wearing a 3D printed mask of the victim’s face. Makani, still hiding the real reason that she was sent to Nebraska to live with her grandmother, fears that she is next, and although the killer nearly does her in, she’s rescued just in time, although not before her secret is revealed to her peers: when she and several other junior varsity girls were force-fed alcohol at a bonfire in a hazing ritual by upperclassmen, she pushed another girl into the fire in an inebriated rage, burning the other girl severely. Her friends forgive her, and tell her that Ollie is in custody. It seems all is well, unless the killer is still out there, ready to strike terror at the seasonal corn maze. 

There are a lot of fun ideas at play here, and I wish that they were in a better movie. I don’t think that any of the film’s failures, which ultimately make this film feel like less than the sum of its parts, can be attributed to any one individual. The lack of cohesion with regards to the killer’s motivation may have been better handled in the novel on which the film is based; I haven’t read it, but internal motivations can be more easily conveyed on the page than on screen, and I get the feeling this happened here. The killer’s final lines, and the lines that our heroine delivers to the killer regarding the incoherence of their stated motives, both feel like the dramatic equivalent of orphaned punchlines, as they’re portrayed as if they are capstones on thematic statements about privilege and the lack thereof, but these supposed elements aren’t as present throughout the text as much as the finale tries to convince you they were. It feels empty and postural, a cynical attempt to appeal to the social justice generation by assimilating its language without grappling with its intent or the meaning of that discourse. If this is what everyone’s dads think social justice is, no wonder they hate it so much. Special praise should be given to the direction and the cinematography, however; director Patrick Brice (Creep) makes some really great choices, and cinematographer Jeff Cutter supports them with some beautiful photography. The finale of the opening scene is particularly striking, as the typical drama of for-cinema American high school football plays out on the field while the stands fall deathly silent as everyone assembled receives a message with the details of Jackson’s bullying, with Caleb then turning triumphantly to the stands after a successful touchdown to find all attention elsewhere. The scenes near the end of the film that take place in a burning corn field are also delightfully composed and visually dynamic, and the idea of a killer creating a mask of the victim is also a stroke of genius and makes for several unsettling scenes. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to make this one worth checking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dune (2021)

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My best friend has recently taken to watching Quantum Leap, so I was trying to describe the premise of the show to my born-in-1995 significant other, and I did so mostly with lines from the show’s opening. If you’re reading this site, I assume you remember the gist. Theorizing that one could travel within their own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the quantum leap accelerator and disappeared. Yada yada, yada, setting right what once went wrong, always hoping that the next leap would be the leap home, that sort of thing. I’ve never read Dune. I saw the David Lynch version precisely once when I was quite young (for its Sci-Fi Channel Scinema Event premiere, so … September 1999), and although I was a little bit older when the same station broadcast its self-produced Frank Herbert’s Dune miniseries in 2000, when I tell you that I can’t recall a single thing about it other than that Matt Keeslar was in it, I mean that I can’t recall a single thing about it other than Matt Keeslar. I didn’t even remember that William Hurt was in it until I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and I love that guy. I remembered bits and pieces of Virginia Madsen dressed like the Childlike Empress delivering a huge dump of exposition at the beginning of the 1984 film, mostly her saying the word “spice” a lot. When Brandon asked if I was planning to see the new Dune and if I planned to write about it, asking if I had any personal connection to the source material, I refrained from elaborating that I once bore witness to a not-entirely-cohesive explanation of the novel’s plot while on a largely unsuccessful date, attempting to grasp the relevance of why Kyle McLachlan was named after a mouse while sitting outside of the cafe that used to be next to Funky Monkey and trying to hear my companion’s thin voice over the Number 11 bus loudly idling right next to us. Other than that, most of my Dune knowledge came from an (admittedly ill-informed) Lindsay Ellis video mocking the Lynch adaptation, which was nonetheless beloved by a certain group of my friends; we still sometimes quote “All aboard the party worm, Harkonnens aren’t invited!” to one another. 

Suffice it to say, I gave myself a quick idea of the general plot with a little Wikipedia skim before making my way to the theater, and although it’s complicated, it’s also not impenetrable Coruscant bullshit, either; it makes sense. Some twenty millennia from now, mankind has scattered amongst the stars and settled into fiefdom, with planets ruled by various royal houses who all swear fealty to an emperor. Space travel is enabled by use of the spice melange, a resource found only on the planet Arrakis, a desert world nicknamed “Dune” and inhabited by giant worm creatures and the scavengers known as the Fremen. As our story opens, the emperor has transferred control of Arrakis from its previous caretakers, the morally bankrupt House Harkonnen, to the more popular House Atreides. This is a ploy to weaken the emperor-threatening Atreides family, who are inexperienced with handling the harsh Dune and the demands of mining spice in such an inhospitable environment. Duke Leto Atreides, along with his concubine Jessica and their teenage son Paul, journey to Arrakis with their retinue;  Leto seeks to ally with the Fremen by extending an olive branch rather than carrying on an antagonist relationship with them as the Harkonnens had. Jessica has her own agenda, being a member of the mysterious religious order of the Bene Gesserit, a sisterhood of mystics who have been secretly carrying out a galactic eugenics experiment to create a messiah; despite being instructed to bear only daughters for Leto, she gave birth to Paul out of her love for the Duke. The sisters of the order are practiced in both martial arts, stress conditioning, and a kind of super neuro linguistic programming technique called The Voice. 

That’s the backstory, anyway. It’s here that I’ll also admit that I was slightly exaggerating my lack of familiarity with Dune up at the top there, after a fashion. The narrative has always seemed needlessly confusing to me (although it’s pared down here to be extremely parsable for a general audience, not least of all because everybody in 2021 understands fealty, house affiliations, and the like thanks to Game of Thrones), but someone who has spent as much down time reading TV Tropes as I have in the past 13 years doesn’t escape that kind of wiki rabbit-holing without garnering some useless knowledge. So yes, I know a little something about Mentats (human computers who do calculations in lieu of machines due to anti-mechanist sentiment held over following a devastating war between humans and AI), ego-memory (the individual memory of one of the individuals in the chain of matrilinear genetic memory curated by the Bene Gesserit using refined sand worm bile), and kanly (the strictures that allowed for certain forms of socially and legally acceptable conflict and combat between great houses to avoid the potentially greater loss of life resulting from outright war or atomic weaponry). But none of that is really relevant for the narrative of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, all you really need to know is what I’ve outlined for you, and even that’s mostly well-communicated in the text of the film. Or the part of it that’s relevant for this film, anyway.

Duke Leto is herein portrayed by Oscar Isaac, and Lady Jessica is played by Rebecca Ferguson, whom I adore. Since part of the Bene Gesserit’s plan is creating the whitest, twinkiest little messiah you ever did see, we’ve got our whitest, twinkiest actor Timothée Chalamet as Paul. Stellan Skarsgård is unrecognizable as Baron Harkonnen, and Jason Momoa is momoa-ing it up as Duncan Idaho, the super warrior guy that has been training Paul in combat and who spends some time embedded with the Fremen on Arrakis in preparation for the Atreides family’s arrival. Josh Brolin is also there, and Zendaya is Meechee Chani, a Fremen woman about whom Paul has visions. Because of the eugenics, remember. 

So, yeah, about that. The day after I saw the movie, I saw this tweet, in which a person made a blanket statement about what they perceived to be the racist, sexist, gender essentialist, and homophobic intent of Dune, based solely on reading various plot outlines across different wikis. And that person appears, based upon feedback from readers who engaged with the text directly instead of through secondary sources, to be quite wrong about the thesis of Dune. That’s the danger of engaging only with content instead of context, which is the whole reason that freshman composition courses stress the importance of using both primary and secondary sources. And you know, I hope and pray that if I ever make a public declaration that is just flat out incorrect, that I’ll have the humility and to not double down on being an ignorant stubborn asshole. I think about people like this lady after getting ratio’d regarding her extremely niche pet peeve of … people eating bread, or that guy from The Long Winters saw a teachable moment and decided to do the opposite of teaching, or that person who dropped this worm-riddled take about relationships and then smugly got off on pretending that all the responses, even the ones made in good faith, were all in bad faith and thus proved their point (luckily the term “asshole” is not gendered). So when this person, who in general is someone with whom I agree about most cultural critique, responded with, essentially, “lol, even though the error was mine, all feedback will be considered in bad faith regardless of accuracy or intent.” And what’s most frustrating about this—other than everybody has fucking worms in their brain and lacks the humility to even acknowledge when they misread something—is that this person isn’t wrong per se about the Dune film (that they claim not to have watched). 

As a text, Dune (the novel) can be entirely about how racism, eugenics, white saviorism, etc. are all not only facile but also dangerous, but this film opts to drop its cliffhanger at a point where that hasn’t been made clear. However, unless this film were going to be six hours long (or 4.5, as the miniseries was), it arguably can’t get to the narrative point where it doubles back on audience expectation that what appears to be a straightforward western white savior narrative of a kind that they’ve seen before. To invert assumptions, it has to exist in the form that it’s in, and that’s not a bad thing, but our instant gratification, humility-scorning, wikipedia skimming, knee-jerk presumption culture has reached a point where we actually fail to recognize and realize that this is a problem of consumption and commodification. This comes from the left just as often as it does from the right, but there’s a profound inability among the left to see that large IP-holding monoliths have spoonfed audiences for so long that they said consumers have reached a point where no one has the patience to allow time for a narrative to actually create a compelling condemnation of moral ills, and that they themselves are not immune to that kind of indoctrination. Selling the idea of activism as reading a wiki and developing a thesis about a text without engaging with the primary source is part of the commodification of art into yet another thing to mindlessly tweet about without consideration of one’s own foolishness. 

Consider this: Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer had different feelings about Dune than I did. He hated the ending, describing it to me (before I saw it) as “basically a lightsaber fight” and comparing the way that the Fremen crawl around on the rock face in the film’s concluding sequence as something “straight out of West Side Story.” After I saw it and we were texting about it, he sent me a message saying “Tell me you didn’t expect them to start snapping their fingers and closing in like the Sharks.” It reminded me of when I explained the ending of Batman v. Superman mostly talking about the different musical leitmotifs that were used in the climax, as to me that was (and remains) the most interesting thing that happened in the last hour of that movie; this included a (poor) reenactment of the guitar-heavy Wonder Woman theme. Years later, when he saw the movie, that had somehow morphed in his memory into being a story about how the film ended with a literal musical battle, and he was disappointed. But he didn’t have to go on Twitter and say something like “Well excuse me very much for hearing that plot synopsis and thinking that maybe it would be a better movie if it ended with a battle of the bands instead of whatever it actually ended with” because he never went online and proudly declared his misunderstanding in the first place. And the thing is, that the Fremen looked like the Sharks never crossed my mind. But that doesn’t make his reading any less real or true, because he’s engaging with the text directly, not projecting because he’d rather appear to be “better” than the text by not engaging with it. I can’t and don’t agree with that particular sentiment, but that’s ok! It’s still legitimate. 

Anyway, this has, as it often does, turned into less of a review of this movie and more of a jeremiad about how exhausting the discourse is and what that means for our society. Dune is good. It’s great, even. Although I don’t think it’s a good idea for megacorps to try and pressure people who aren’t ready, people who are immunocompromised, people who lack vaccine access, and people who are victims of anti-science rhetoric to the point of complete dissociation from reality to go back to theaters so that they can “see Dune on the biggest screen possible,” I can affirm that I don’t regret that decision. I don’t want to be the Boss Baby vibes guy, but there was an actual moment where the vistas and visuals of the movie made me gasp a little with their beauty, and my first thought was “Disney Star Wars could never.” Dune is good. See it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond