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Wild Beasts (1984)

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I have a bad habit of ordering Blu-rays every single time I see an advertisement for a boutique label sale.  It used to just be an occasional dip into the Criterion Collection during that prestige label’s regular Black Friday and Barnes & Nobles sales, but it has since escalated to include loving restorations of vintage genre trash from labels like Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, and Mélusine.  I’ve been watching a lot of button-pushing, amoral schlock recently as a result – the kind of outré bad-taste material that you can often only find on disc because streaming service curators don’t want to touch it.  It was a strange comfort, then, to recently discover that I’m not yet totally immune to that hazardous material.  My recently purchased copy of the when-animals-attack Italo horror Wild Beats managed to offend me early & often.  It’s less of a narrative feature than it is a document of real-life crimes against animals, children, and anonymous character actors.  By the end credits, I found myself hoping that one of the special features on the disc would be a montage of mugshots for everyone involved in the production.  And yet, I was also appreciative for each of those sweaty European bastards for teaching me how to feel again, even if most of what I was feeling was shock & disgust. 

I might have been better prepared for that shock had I paid attention to the credited director: Franco Prosperi, of Mondo Cane fame.  Prosperi brings the same misanthropic gusto to this outlandish story of a PCP-contaminated zoo that he brought to his earlier mondo “documentaries,” matching their unhinged, diabolical energy by again nudging the audience to question which onscreen atrocities are real and which are staged.  Set in “a Northern European city” (with signage that’s conspicuously, universally printed in German), Wild Beasts is a disaster film about escaped, drug-crazed wild animals that terrorize unsuspecting urbanites who are understandably unprepared for attacks from literal lions, tigers, and bears.  The initial shock of the premise is in the exotic varieties of animals that Prosperi sourced from circuses & zoos.  A wild cheetah stalks a woman in a speeding convertible; a polar bear peruses elementary school hallways like it’s visiting a buffet; a small gang of elephants take over airplane runways by stomping anyone who gets in their way.  It’s an impressive assemblage of animals that you’re not used to seeing in productions this cheap, but once the initial awe wears off you start to wonder how well those animals could possibly be cared for.  Then, there’s the sickening tension of trying to determine whether those animals’ onscreen terror & peril are genuine, real-life events, something that doesn’t seem out of the question for the Mondo Cane crew.

According to Severin’s bonus-feature interview on the production of Wild Beasts, Prosperi claims “We did not hurt any animals at all,” explaining that they shot the film entirely under the watchful eye of the World Wildlife Federation.  If so, I was fooled.  It’s not always easy to tell when the image alternates between live animal & furry prop, and I swear I saw some documentation of real-life cruelties somewhere in that mix: live rats on fire, cats of all sizes antagonized for dramatic effect, seizure-like responses to tranquilization, etc.  It’s like the grindhouse version of Roar in that way, with the fact & fiction narratives competing for the spotlight.  Prosperi isn’t all that much better with humans either.  Stunt actors are allowed to be jostled by large, dangerous animals for several beats too many, walking up to the line of becoming a snuff film.  Child actors are framed & vocally dubbed as if they were adults, which is intensely upsetting in scenes where they appear half-dressed.  It’s actually unclear that Prosperi even fully knows what a child is, since he increasingly dwells on their alien, indecipherable behavior as if they were just another breed of wild animal.  That thematic preoccupation does eventually pay off at the film’s jarring climax, but there’s no dramatic payoff great enough to forgive the transgression of endangering performers as vulnerable as children & animals for Z-grade genre entertainment.

Despite being deeply offended by nearly every scene in Wild Beasts, I cannot deny that I found the transgression thrilling.  Maybe it’s because the long-deceased Prosperi is no longer around to imperil children or animals that I feel somewhat comfortable to delight in the amoral mayhem he documented here.  Truthfully, though, I found his tasteless misanthropy & misothery to be a major aspect of the film’s entertainment value.  The opening sequence is a music video montage of urban filth, depicting a modern world so overfilling with drugs that PCP & lysergic acid (treated in-dialogue as the same substance) has collected as a visible scum in the municipal water supply, thus infecting animals at the city zoo.  One standout image of fried chicken leftovers and hypodermic needles littering the city’s public transit platforms spells out all you need to know about what Prosperi thought of humanity and the joys of being alive in modern times.  For all I know, he was a super sweet guy in his personal life, but the crude, cheap ways he exploited his performers for profit in his cinema betrays a deeply cynical worldview that leaves his audience feeling ill.  I can almost guarantee that if he were a current, working filmmaker I’d have a much more difficult time appreciating the effect of his work without fretting over the practicalities of its production, which is probably a compartmentalization I should work out privately in therapy instead of a public blog.

-Brandon Ledet

Cuddly Toys (2023)

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They grow up so fast!  It seems like just yesterday Kansas Bowling was a teenage backyard filmmaker making horror-blog headlines with her debut feature B.C. Butcher, like the Tromaville equivalent of Lights Camera Jackson.   Now she’s an all-growed-up twentysomething edgelord, touring the country with her mondo genre throwback Cuddly Toys – officially graduating from enfant to enfant terrible.  Bowling’s recent visit to New Orleans felt like a mandatory cultural event even though I generally hate the retro mondo movies Cuddly Toys spoofs & subverts; I just had to see what other local schlock gobblers are excited about her work, since the things I knew her from felt so obscure: the aforementioned caveman slasher comedy B.C. Butcher, the Jackass style gorilla-on-the-loose slasher comedy Psycho Ape, and an excellent, years-old episode of the sorely missed Switchblade Sisters podcast in which she eloquently praises the psychedelic Monkees vehicle Head.  That curiosity led me somewhat astray, trapping me in a small theater with boisterous horror-bro laughter at some of the cruelest, gnarliest violence in Cuddly Toys, then forcing me to confront the possibility that some of that sour humor was intentional on the director’s end – given that she seems to have a genuine appreciation for the mondo schlock of olde.  You could even feel her genuine mondo appreciation in the film’s traveling road show presentation, which was likely inspired by mainstream distributors being weary of touching such sordid material but also feels true to the regional exhibition of the genre’s grindhouse heyday.

To be fair, Cuddly Toys isn’t as purely exploitative as vintage mondo schlock like Mondo Cane, Faces of Death, or whatever obscure, racist cannibalsploitation relic your friend’s scuzzy older brother dared you to watch at an unsupervised sleepover.  Bowling appears onscreen as “Professor Kansas Bowling”, recent graduate of teen-life university, narrating a feature-length slideshow with the same faux-educational tone of vintage mondo.  Her presentation includes references to distinctly 2010s teen life but is shot on 16mm film stock to match the look of her satirical target.  Her “academic” lecture to the clueless parents of America is pitched as a scare film about their teen daughter’s delinquent behavior when they leave the relative safety of home.  In practice, she’s “documenting” the horrific daily life of the typical teenage girl by mixing real-life interviews about rape & misogynist abuse with comically exaggerated depictions of rape & misogynist abuse. Like in true mondo tradition, it’s difficult to parse out what authentic snippets of real life are lurking in the exploitation sleaze bucket that swallows it, except now you also have to parse out what’s intended as irony vs what’s sincere.  Also in true mondo tradition, I often hated the experience of watching it, even though I’m hopelessly attracted to vintage sexploitation of its ilk (of which only Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless is innocent).  Every time I watch a 70s grindhouse relic for the first time, I always brace myself for sexual assault imagery that lingers a couple beats past making its point, and Cuddly Toys is queasily accurate to that tradition, even if its point is nobler than the vintage films it mimics.

And yet, I can’t totally dismiss the bratty outsider-art feminism of this D.I.Y. bombthrower.  Cuddly Toys makes admirable gestures to link the sexual violence of subcultural teen life in the 1970s with subcultural teen life now, even directly referencing Marilyn Manson’s despicable revival of the stadium-rock groupie era.  Despite ostensibly being structured as an academic lecture, it also does a good job of avoiding direct moralist instruction, both by muddling its Feminism 101 talking points with shocks of edgelord irony and by intercutting its testimonials and re-enactments in a deliberately messy, experimental editing style.  Somewhere in all its shock-value leering of underage sex & misogynist violence, there’s an earnest, soul-deep interest in the inner lives of American teen girls, recalling Lauren Greenfield’s portraiture of Californian teens in the 1990s.  It can be outright beautiful in individual, intimate moments, often straying from the mondo genre send-up at hand to promote Bowling’s side hustle as a prolific music video director.  In general, I found Cuddly Toys much more compelling as a sketchbook-in-motion for Bowling’s loose assemblage of Movie Ideas than as a satirical mondo throwback.  It appeared to be shot over several years in cities as far-spanning as LA, NYC, Vegas, and Mexico City, automatically making it a much denser & more personal work than B.C. Butcher, which was shot in a single week just outside Bowling’s childhood home.  In its best form, it functions as a kind of avant-garde travel diary, which is fitting for a movie in which a loose collection of wayward teens read semi-fictional selections from their own personal diaries, documented in their densely over-decorated bedrooms.

All of my self-conflicted handwringing about this film’s various failures & successes results from watching a director I find fascinating dabble in a genre I find distasteful.  Distastefulness appears to be a personal interest of Bowling’s, though, so I can’t fault her for trying to mine something politically powerful out of the vintage schlock she watches for fun.  For my sake, I hope her revival of kitsch genre relics leads her to make something more akin to nudie cuties than roughies in the future, but that’s an entirely selfish impulse.  Judging by the alternation between howling laughter and stunned silence in that Cuddly Toys audience, it’s apparent she has plenty enthusiastic devotees to what she’s already accomplishing – way more than I thought to expect.

-Brandon Ledet