overlook film fest

Les horreurs d’Overlook

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One thing I’m always searching for at New Orleans French Film Fest every year is French-language horror films: the kinds of artsy genre titles that premiere in the Midnight or Un Certain Regard programs at Cannes and then quietly seep onto streaming platforms like Mubi & Kanopy years later with no wide theatrical distro.  This year’s French Film Fest lineup delivered the familial sorcery drama Omen and the bestial body horror The Animal Kingdom, which where both solid but left me wanting more.  Thankfully, Overlook Film Fest came through town just a few weeks later, screening a surprising number of French-language titles that would have been just as worthy of New Orleans French Film Fest proper.  Partially sponsored by Mubi, the international programming at this year’s Overlook was impressively robust, and I made the most of what French-language horrors I could cram into my schedule . . .

Hood Witch

Like the aforementioned Animal Kingdom, Hood Witch is more of a fugitive-on-the-run thriller than a proper horror film.  Like Omen, it’s also an attempt to reconcile old-world witchcraft practices with modern cultural sensibilities.  Golshifteh Farahani stars as Nour, a single mother who exploits her Parisian neighborhood’s religious superstitions so she can financially  support her young son.  This mostly manifests in a smuggling operation that sneaks dangerous, exotic animals into the country for elaborate healing rituals and in developing an app that connects users to the faith healers who practice them – like Uber for exorcists.  Her schemes blow up in her face when one of her customers suddenly dies, having relied on old-world sorcery where modern medicine should have intervened.  She’s blamed for the tragedy by the most conservative zealots of her community, which leads to a literal witch hunt through city streets.  It’s an exciting clash of modernized, urban witchcraft and old-fashioned, tried and true cultural misogyny – a clash that’s telegraphed by an opening montage of witchcraft documentation through the ages, from Häxan to TikTok.

Hood Witch is most inventive in its weaponization of smartphones on both sides of the witches vs mob justice divide.  The mob uses their phones to broadcast the fugitive witch’s live location to fellow vigilantes, stirring up paranoia in the ability to turn anyone with an internet connection into a Matrix-style sleeper agent; they also use their phones’ flashlights as makeshift torches.  The so-called witch uses her social media feed to antagonize her legion of anonymous enemies with broadcasts of spells & curses they don’t need to be physically present for to suffer.  In some ways the movie pulls its punches in constantly teasing the audience about whether Nour is an atheist or a believer (and in occasionally shying away from onscreen gore), but Nour herself relies on that ambiguity to survive.  It also wouldn’t be a modernization of old-world witch hunts if she wasn’t wrongly accused of practicing sorcery, so it can’t fully commit to the supernatural implications of its premise without completely undermining its thesis.  Omen does a much better job of fully satisfying both sides of that believer-skeptic divide, but that’s about the only way the two films can be compared.

Red Rooms

The reason I’m specifying “French-language” so much here is that there are always a few French-Canadian titles that sneak onto the French Film Fest lineup, which means I’m also going to sneak one onto this list. Like Hood Witch, Red Rooms is more of a thriller than an outright horror film, and it’s also one of that generates a lot of its tension through online misbehavior.  Set in Quebec, it’s a Fincherian cyberthriller about an edgy fashion model who’s romantically obsessed with a tabloid-famous serial killer.

The film opens in the sterilized white void of a Quebecois courtroom, where one long shot follows the opening arguments of the obviously guilty killer’s crimes, floating between the horror on the faces of his teen victims’ parents and the perverse attraction on the faces of his doting fan club.  Later, the screen glows red as our fashion model anti-heroine watches direct evidence of the gruesome crimes in question: dark web snuff videos purchased with Bitcoin currency she earns through shady video poker transactions & Neon Demon-style photo shoots.  This bizarre, improbable collection of character details never gets any easier to understand or to stomach.  Red Rooms is mostly just a chilling character study of an absolute weirdo, one who’s only one or two dark web searches beyond the average true crime junkie.  Nothing especially shocking happens in the movie, but every new detail about our POV fashionista is revealed as a twisty Event, while the world around her breaks down into pixelated digital waste.

Infested

In a way, the when-spiders-attack horror Infested is the perfect crossroads between typical French Film Fest & Overlook programming, where Shudder meets Mubi.  Since the sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky, the movie has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development & emotional stakes.  Another Parisian horror in which a well-meaning exotic animal smuggler whose personal-survival hustles result in a body count, it’s a story about the breakdown of community in a time of supernatural crisis.  Our boneheaded sweetheart protagonist is introduced specifically in the context of his relationships with his housing block community, so that later there’s genuine emotional heft to his friendships & family bonds being tested by selfish survival instincts once his escaped specimens mutate into supernatural arachnid monsters.  It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty line in French housing projects (Girlhood, Gagarine, Cuties, etc.), except with way more gigantic, pissed off spiders than usual.

If there’s anything especially nuanced about Infested‘s scares, it’s in the way the cops outside the housing block are just as dangerous as the killer spiders inside.  There’s a deep, valid mistrust of the armed brutes who are supposedly quarantining residents for their own safety that not only informs characters’ desperate decision making here, but also illuminates some of the mob justice mentality of Hood Witch in retrospect.  That’s not what makes the movie scary, though.  It’s the constant flood of CGI spiders that invade the homes & bodies of that community that makes the movie so effectively upsetting.  All told, I attended thirteen screenings at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, and without question Infested was the scariest theatrical experience of the weekend.  It didn’t have to try all that hard to earn that accolade (at least not when compared to more inventive, cerebral horrors like I Saw the TV Glow or Cuckoo) but it more than made up for that easy layup by investing in its characters, taking care to make sure each of their deaths matter to the audience.

-Brandon Ledet

Azrael (2024)

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Do you think becoming known as a scream queen is a blessing or a curse?  Both?  Australian actress Samara Weaving is only a household name among horror nerds, but she’s been a must-see performer for that tattoos-and-black-t-shirts contingent since she starred in Ready or Not & The Babysitter a half-decade ago.  Watching her latest star vehicle Azrael at Overlook Film Festival this weekend, I wondered whether her career was stalling there rather than starting.  Watching Weaving go on another one-woman revenge mission that soaks her gorgeous face & blonde hair in buckets of her enemies’ blood & viscera made me question how satisfying it is for her as an actor to return to the exact same beats that have already made her horror-convention-famous.  It’s likely comforting to know she can always fall back on consistent paychecks by starring gimmicky, gory horror flicks, but she shows just enough talent in them that you have to wonder why no one is sending her scripts for anything else (give or take a metatextual gag in Babylon that jokes about her striking resemblance to Margot Robbie).

At least Azrael offers Weaving an acting challenge to maintain her scream queen status in a role where she’s technically not allowed to scream at all.  Set in an apocalyptic future where Rapture cults have renounced the sin of Speech (whatever that means), Weaving’s mute protagonist attempts to live a quiet, domestic life in the woods outside society with her doting romantic partner.  The nearby cult has other ideas, kidnapping those lovers with plans to feed them to the charred-flesh Rapture zombies who hunt left-behind humans whenever the wind blows the wrong way.  There are vague gestures towards explaining the mythology behind this convoluted set up, mostly spelled out in the cult’s crude finger paintings and in the rhythmic breathing rituals that summon the woodland demons.  However, writer Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest, Blair Witch) has said in interviews that the idea for the film came to him in a recurring dream, so let’s just assume you’re supposed to feel it more than understand it.  It’s all just background dressing for an adorable Samara Weaving to descend into hideous, cathartic violence, something she’s now proven she can do credibly while not uttering a sound. Next time, she’ll do it with her eyes closed, and then backwards in heels.

Between this film, last year’s No One Will Save You, and the ongoing Quiet Place series, it appears horror filmmakers are now actively combating the second-screen viewing habits of the streaming era, stubbornly making sure the audience watching along at home has to put down their phones to fully follow the plot.  Azrael director E.L. Katz doesn’t bring much new to the table within that burgeoning Hey Pay Attention horror subgenre, except maybe in the extremity of the scene-to-scene violence (something he already proved cruel enough to deliver in the pitch-black comedy Cheap Thrills).  Elderly and pregnant women are vulnerable targets; Weaving’s final showdown with the evil cult leader is a machete vs. meat cleaver fight; and the camera is always willing to linger on the painful aftermath of a fresh wound.  Still, there’s nothing especially novel about the doomsday-survival cult setting or the burn-victim zombies who lurk at its edges.  The movie’s main hook is for horror nerds who want to watch Weaving go through it one more time in their own perverse cult ritual.  Admittedly, I am one of those nerds, but I’m still hopeful that she’ll soon break free from our captivity.

-Brandon Ledet

Arcadian (2024)

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Like most hopeless, depraved movie nerds, I’ll watch pretty much anything with Nicolas Cage in it, since he’s a reliably entertaining performer no mattery the quality of the project signing that week’s paycheck.  That means I’ve seen a lot of mediocre DTV action movies over the years, often ones where Cage’s prominence on the poster is outright dishonest about his prominence in the picture advertised.  I had somehow deluded myself into believing this slumming-it phase of Cage’s career was coming to a close, though, since recent projects like Mandy, Pig, and Dream Scenario were starting to reveal a light at the end of that particular sewer tunnel.  Cage’s latest made-for-streaming action horror Arcadian—which locally premiered at Overlook Film Festival last weekend—was a reality check on that delusion.  Between its post-apocalyptic setting, its grim-grey lighting, and Nicolas Cage dutifully showing up just along enough to earn a sizeable payment to the IRS, Arcadian feels as if it’s about five to ten years behind the times, even when it’s trying its hardest to show you something new.

Cage stars as a single, grieving father who moves his surviving family to remote farmland at the start of The Apocalypse.  His twin boys get increasingly difficult to manage when they age into teenage grumps, which makes it even more difficult to survive the nightly attacks of the mutant creatures who ended modern civilization in the first place.  Since there is no shortage of reference points for this kind of doomsday prepper action-horror, Arcadian doesn’t put much effort into explaining the details of the world Cage & his boys are fighting to survive.  Whether it’s the artsy abstraction of It Comes at Night or the weekly soap opera of The Walking Dead, you’ve seen this exact setup before.  What you haven’t seen is the peculiar biological details of these exact monsters: hairy ostrich-wolves who clap their jaws like chattering-teeth novelty toys and travel as a pack in a rolling Ferris wheel formation.  There’s plenty of intrigue there for anyone drawn in by Cage’s name & face on the poster, which does a lot to make up for him spending half of the runtime offscreen, comatose.  When he suddenly perks up for the climactic fight against the impossible wolf-beasts, you can practically see him flipping on his It Factor movie star presence like a light switch.  It’s only a few seconds of screentime, but it’s exactly what you paid to see.

Arcadian is decently entertaining for a Shudder-brand creature feature, by which I mean its monsters’ design is inventive & upsetting enough to hold your attention despite the banality of their surroundings.  Director Benjamin Brewer’s most prominent IMDb credit to date is as the lead visual effects artist for Everything Everywhere All at Once, which shows here in the ambition & absurdity of the wolf-beasts’ hideous biology.  The dark, muddled color palette and handheld cinematography style are more befitting of a war drama than a creature feature, but again it’s worth pushing through that tedium to get a better look at the monsters.  And hey, there’s still making popular, big-budget Quiet Place sequels long after that series has maintained any purpose or novelty, so I can’t say this film is entirely out of date.  Brewer leveraged Cage’s image on a poster and piggybacked off a familiar mainstream horror template to show off his prowess for inventive, impressive visual effects.  I can’t be mad at that kind of Roger Corman marketing hustle, especially since Cage has lent this likeness to far, far worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Cuckoo (2024)

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Tilman Singer has quickly become the most exciting new voice in cosmic horror.  His debut feature Luz started as a film school thesis project but was so strangely, psychically powerful that it broke out into wide release as one of the very best films of 2019 (according to me, anyway).  I watched Luz as a quietly buzzy horror curio that reached my living room via VOD rental, and I was blown away by the volatile imbalance between its cosmic-scale ambitions and its dirt-cheap budget.  His follow-up sophomore feature Cuckoo arrived in New Orleans with much louder fanfare.  Backed by Neon’s hip-cred marketing machine and starring one of the few non-influencer celebrities that teens care about (Hunter Schafer, of Euphoria fame), Cuckoo is a much hotter ticket than Luz was just a few years ago.  Its recent local premiere at Overlook Film Fest was packed to the walls with horror-hungry eyeballs, and although the enthusiasm in the room sounded mixed, anyone familiar with Luz knew exactly what kind of a surreal mindfuck we were in for.  Cuckoo escalates the verbal psychedelia of Luz to something more traditionally thrilling, hopping genres from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintaining the same screenwriting ambitions of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools.

Hunter Schafer stars as a grieving teen who joins her estranged, emotionally distant, German father’s new family after her mother’s death.  That new, uneasy family unit moves into a seasonally unoccupied resort in the Alps so the father & stepmother can work for the site’s enigmatic owner, played by a cartoonishly evil Dan Stevens.  Of course, the resort doubles as a mad scientist laboratory for Stevens’s Dr. Caligari-style medical experiments, which somehow involve strange shrieking sounds in the woods outside the cabins and the strange woman who makes them.  The movie explains exactly what’s going on in due time, but it’s the kind of explanation that only further twists your brain in knots with every new detail.  What’s important is that Singer effectively squeezes unnerving scares out of simple, straightforward methods, somehow crafting one of modern cinema’s creepiest cryptids by dressing one of his actresses in a trench coat, wig, and sunglasses.  I suppose it’s also important that Schafer’s teen brattiness is what ultimately saves the day, since her resolve to drown out the world with comically large, loud headphones until she’s old enough to move out on her own is exactly what protects her from the wigged cryptid’s aural violence.  She also eventually learns how to love at least one member of her new family, but it’s a perilous road getting there, one with many pitstops on hospital beds.

Cuckoo slowly builds its own unique mythology instead of leaning on traditional creature-feature or mad scientist payoffs.  It’s an impressive mix of sly humor & unnerving psychedelia, one that gets genuinely nightmarish in its forced pregnancy threats but also allows Dan Stevens to goof off with an exaggerated German accent & a magical flute, as if he were a recurring SNL character instead of a villainous fascist.  It’s a great theatrical experience, less so for its visual eccentricities (which mostly amount to time-loop editing & a vibrating frame) than for its aural ones (constant shrieks & gunshots that are best heard loud). I get the sense that all the central collaborators are getting away with something here.  Schafer recently said in a GQ interview that she’s no longer interested in playing roles that center her transgender identity, and this movie doesn’t care about that at all; it just cares how cool she looks wielding a butterfly knife: very.  Stevens also gets plenty of room to go big as an absolute maniac, something it feels like he hasn’t gotten to do on this scale since The Guest a full decade ago.  Then there’s Singer, who’s now found a much bigger canvas and a much bigger audience for his cosmic horror oddities.  I hope his work continues to escalate this way, since he has a lot of potential to become one of the all-time greats in the genre, if not only in his power to bewilder.

-Brandon Ledet

The Suckling (1990)

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One of the things I look forward to most every Overlook Film Fest is their vendor partnership with Vinegar Syndrome, who usually bring a table of pervy, schlocky products to peddle in the festival’s shopping mall lobby.  There are certainly cheaper ways to shop for Vinegar Syndrome titles; the boutique Blu-ray label is infamous in genre-nerd circles for their generous Black Friday sales.  Still, that annual trip to the Vinegar Syndrome table at Overlook is the closest feeling I still get to browsing the Cult section at long-defunct video rental stores like Major Video. There’s just no beating the physical touch of physical media. The staff always points me to titles I would’ve overlooked if I were just scrolling on their website, too, which is how I got around to seeing gems like Nightbeast & Fleshpot on 42nd Street in the past.  Sidestepping the shipping costs doesn’t hurt either.  Vinegar Syndrome has never before complimented my Overlook experience quite as decisively nor directly as it did this year, though, when the vendor rep nudged me into picking up a copy of the early-90s creature feature The Suckling.  It was perfect timing, since I had just wandered from a screening of the couture-culture body horror Appendage, which featured a great rubber monster puppet but had no real grit or texture to it elsewhere.  You could feel the audience pop every time the retro, gurgling monster appeared onscreen, which unfortunately becomes less frequent as the film chases down mental health metaphors instead of practical-effects gore gags.  I liked Appendage okay, but I left it starving for more rubber monster mayhem, which that Blu-ray restoration of The Suckling immediately supplied in grotesque HD excess.  God bless Vinegar Syndrome for coming through that night and, for balance, Hail Satan too.

While The Suckling may have a major advantage over Appendage in its commitment to rubber-monster puppetry, it’s an extremely inferior product in terms of political rhetoric.  Instead of pursuing a thoughtful, responsible representation of women’s bottled-up familial, romantic, and professional frustrations in the modern world, The Suckling pursues a politically reckless subversion of women’s right to choose.  Only, I don’t get the sense that it meant to say anything coherently political at all.  This is a kind of anti-choice, pro-environmentalist creature feature where an aborted, toxically mutated fetus gets its revenge on the brothel-clinic that brought it into this sick, sad world.  It knows that abortion is enough of a hot-button political issue to grab jaded, seen-it-all horror audiences’ attention, but it doesn’t know what to do with that thorny subject except to milk it for easy shock value.  The illegal dumping of toxic waste that mutates the aborted fetus into the titular monster is just as much of underbaked political messaging, a boneheaded matter of course that got no more thoughtful consideration than its knock-off John Carpenter score.  The Suckling uses abortion as lazy rage-bait marketing, even going as far as to hand out fake, miniature aborted fetuses in jars as mementos during its original New Jersey grindhouse run.  Personally, I found being offended by the movie’s amorphous politics part of its grimy charm. It’s not a full-on Troma style edgelord comedy at pregnant women’s expense, but it’s still playing with thematic heft that’s way out of its depth as a dumb-as-rocks monster flick.  By contrast, Appendage is way more coherent & agreeable politically but loses a lot of texture by prioritizing that agreeability over its titular monster, and The Suckling is way more memorable in its commitment to political tastelessness.

Set in 1970s Brooklyn to make its indulgence in post-Halloween slasher tedium feel relevant to the plot, The Suckling follows a young, timid couple’s visit to a seedy brothel that doubles as an illegal abortion clinic.  Once their fetus is flushed down the toilet by the clinic’s nursetitutes, it’s greeted by illegally dumped toxic waste in Brooklyn’s sewers, then rapidly evolves like a flesh-hungry Pokémon until it becomes a Xenomorphic killing machine.  Its fetal killing powers are supernatural and vaguely defined, turning the brothel-clinic into a womblike prison by covering all the doors & windows with fleshy membrane so it can hunt down its freaked-out prisoners one at a time.  Once Skinamrinked in this liminal space for days on end, the Suckling’s victims turn on one another in violent fits of cabin fever, to the point where their infighting has a higher kill count than the monster attacks.  The sex workers are, of course, the highlights among the cast, especially the mafiosa madame Big Mama and her world-weary star employee Candy, who frequently fires off nihilistic zingers like “I hope we die in this fucking sewer” as if she were telling knock-knock jokes.  The only time we see them at work is before the Suckling gets loose in the house’s plumbing, in a scene where a teenage dominatrix pegs a jackass businessman with a vibrator wand while rolling her eyes in boredom.  Otherwise, they’re just killing time between Suckling attacks, to the point where the film becomes a kind of perverse hangout comedy in which every joke is punctuated by a violent character death.  The longer they’re trapped in the house the looser the logic gets, taking on a dream-within-a-dream abstraction that had me worried it would end with the abortion-patient mother waking up in the brothel-clinic waiting room and fleeing from the procedure.  Thankfully, the ending goes for something much grander & stranger that I will not do the disservice of describing in text.

The Suckling is not a perfect movie, but it is a perfect This Kind Of Movie, delivering everything you could possibly want to see out of schlock of its ilk: a wide range of rubber monster puppets, over-the-top character work, stop-motion buffoonery, and opportunities to feel offended without ever being able to exactly pinpoint its politics.  It’s New Jersey outsider art, the only directorial credit for local no-namer Francis Teri.  You can feel Teri’s enthusiasm in every frame, just as often resonating in the film’s off-kilter compositions as in its rubber-puppet monster attacks.  I don’t know if it’s the cleaned-up Blu-ray image talking, but The Suckling does feel like it belongs to a higher caliber than most made-on-the-weekends subprofessional horrors of the video store era, turning its cheapness & limited scope into an eerie, self-contained dreamworld instead of an excuse for laziness.  The only place where the film is lazy is in its political messaging, which makes the entire medical practice of abortion look as grotesquely fucked up as how the Texas Chainsaw family runs their slaughterhouse.  And I haven’t even gotten into its hackneyed depiction of mental institutions.  Whether you can overlook that political bonheadedness to enjoy the boneheaded monster action it sets the stage for is a matter of personal taste but, given how hungry the Appendage audience was for more rubber monster puppetry, I assume this movie has plenty potential fans out there who need to seek it out ASAP – whether on Blu-ray or on Tubi.  If anything, there should’ve been a long line in the Overlook lobby leading to the Vinegar Syndrome table where the entire Appendage audience queued up to buy a copy.  It’s wonderfully fucked up stuff, and exactly what I was looking for that night.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: We Kill for Love & Overlook Film Fest 2023

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon, James, Hanna, and guest Bill Arceneaux discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, including the exhaustive direct-to-video erotic thriller documentary We Kill for Love (2023).

00:00 Welcome

03:32 Aberrance (2023)
09:04 Appendage (2023)
15:18 The Five Devils (2023)
21:31 Smoking Causes Coughing (2023)

27:03 We Kill for Love (2023)

1:01:31 Moviegoing with Bill
1:05:15 A Street Cat Named Desire (2023)
1:08:04 FROM.BEYOND (2023)
1:11:45 Give Me an A (2023)
1:19:35 Birth/Rebirth (2023)
1:24:15 Mister Organ (2023)
1:27:05 Late Night with the Devil (2023)

Overlook Film Fest 2023 Selections Ranked & Reviewed

1. Smoking Causes Coughing
2. The Five Devils
3. We Kill for Love
4. Late Night with the Devil
5. Birth/Rebirth
6. Appendage
7. Mister Organ
8. The Artifice Girl
9. Aberrance

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

-The Podcast Crew

Identity & Artifice @ Overlook Film Fest 2023

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After I happened to spend an entire day watching horror movies about motherhood at this year’s Overlook Film Fest, I found myself searching for patterns in the festival’s programming wherein the movies were communicating with each other just as much as they were provoking the audience.  I didn’t have to squint too hard at my next double-feature to see their thematic connections, since the word “artifice” was already staring back at me in the first film’s title.  My third & final day at this year’s Overlook was all about the tension between identity & artifice, and how the latter obscures the former.  In the philosophical sci-fi horror at the top of that self-programmed double bill, the opaque surface of artifice is stripped away to reveal a complex, futuristic sense of identity underneath.  In the true crime documentary that followed, the surface of artifice is removed to uncover no discernible human identity at all, which makes for a much bleaker, scarier reveal.  Please forgive me for the inanity of reporting that this is an instance where the truth is stranger than fiction; I watched these particular movies hungover in a chilly downtown shopping mall, and I’m not sure my brain has fully recovered from watching two twisty thrillers about the complexities of human identity in that hazy state.

That morning’s theme-unlocking opener, The Artifice Girl, is a well-timed A.I. chatbot technothriller, turning just a few actors running lines in drab office spaces into a complex study of the fuzzy borders between human & artificial identity.  Approached with the same unrushed, underplayed drama as the similarly structured Marjorie Prime, The Artifice Girl jumps time frames between acts as the titular A.I. chatbot is introduced in her infancy, gains sentience, and eventually earns her autonomy.  She is initially created with queasy but altruistic intentions: designed to bait and indict online child molesters with the visage of a little girl who does not actually, physically exist.  As the technology behind her “brain” patterns exponentially evolves, the ethics of giving something with even a simulation of intelligence & emotion that horrifically shitty of a job becomes a lot murkier.  By the time she’s creating art and expressing genuine feelings, her entire purpose becomes explicitly immoral, since there’s no foolproof way to determine what counts as her identity or free will vs. what counts as her user-determined programming.  The Artifice Girl does a lot with a little, asking big questions with limited resources.  The closest it gets to feeling like a professional production is in the climactic intrusion of genre legend Lance Henriksen in the cast, whose journey as Bishop in the Alien series has already traveled these same A.I. autonomy roads on a much larger scale in the past.  It’s got enough surprisingly complex stage play dialogue to stand on its own without Henriksen’s support, but his weighty late-career presence is the exact kind of hook it needs to draw an audience’s attention.

By contrast, David Farrier’s new documentary Mister Organ desperately searches for an attention-grabbing hook but never finds one.  The New Zealand journalist drives himself mad attempting to recapture the lighting-in-a-bottle exposé he engineered in Tickled, investigating another unbelievable shit-heel subject who “earns” his living in nefarious, exploitative ways.  At first, it seems like Farrier is really onto something.  The titular Mr. Organ is an obvious conman, introduced to Farrier as a parking lot bully who “clamps” locals’ tires for daring to park in the wrong lot, then shakes them down for exorbitant piles of cash to remove the boots – making the high-end antique store he patrols a front for a much more lucrative, predatory side hustle.  With only a little digging, that parking lot thug turns out to be a much bigger news story, one with fascinating anecdotes about stolen yachts, abandoned asylums, micro cults, and forged royal bloodlines.  Or so Farrier thinks.  The more he digs into his latest subject’s past to uncover his cleverly obscured identity, the more Farrier comes away empty-handed & bewildered.  Mr. Organ is more an obnoxious Ricky Gervais caricature of a human being than he is a genuine one.  He babbles for hours on end about nothing, holding Farrier hostage on speakerphone with the promise of a gotcha breakthrough moment that will never come.  Organ is a literal ghoul, a real-life energy vampire, an artificial surface with no identity underneath.  As a result, the documentary is a creepy but frustrating journey to nowhere, one where by the end the artist behind it is just as unsure what the point of the entire exercise was as the audience. It is a document of a failure.

Normally, when I contrast & compare two similarly themed features I walk away with a clearer understanding of both.  In this case, my opinion of this unlikely pair only becomes more conflicted as I weigh them against each other.  In the controlled, clinical, fictional environment of The Artifice Girl, an identity-obscuring layer of artifice is methodically, scientifically removed to reveal a complex post-human persona underneath.  In the messy, real-world manipulations of Mister Organ, the surface-level artifice is all there is, and stripping it away reveals nothing that can be cleanly interpreted nor understood.  Of course, the fictional stage play version of that exercise is more narratively satisfying than the reality-bound mechanics of true crime storytelling, which often leads to unsolved cases & loose, frayed ends.  The Artifice Girl tells you exactly how to feel at the end of its artificially engineered drama, which is effective in the moment but leaves little room for its story to linger after the credits.  The open-ended frustration of Mister Organ is maybe worthier to dwell in as you leave the theater, then, even if its own conclusion amounts to Farrier throwing up his hands in forfeit, walking away from an opaque nothing of a subject – the abstract personification of Bad Vibes.  As a result, neither film was wholly satisfying either in comparison or in isolation, and I don’t know that I’ll ever fully make sense of my dehydrated, dispirited afternoon spent pondering them.

-Brandon Ledet

Mommy Issues @ Overlook Film Fest 2023

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Film festival programming is a real-world Choose Your Own Adventure game where individual moviegoers can have wildly varied, simultaneous experiences at the exact same venue.  Overall, I had a great time at this year’s Overlook (an annual horror festival that’s quickly become the most rewarding cinematic Cultural Event on the New Orleans social calendar), but I weirdly frontloaded my personal programming choices so that the films I was most excited to see—Late Night with the Devil, The Five Devils, and Smoking Causes Coughing—were all knocked out as a rapid-fire triple feature on the very first day.  For the rest of the weekend, I wandered around Overlook in a self-induced daze, wowed by my Opening Night selections and hoping something smaller & more anonymous would match those early highs as I bounced between screening rooms at the downtown Prytania.  I can’t say I ever got there (at least not in the way other festivalgoers gushed about big-name titles like Renfield, Talk to Me, and Evil Dead Rise throughout the weekend), but I did find some clear thematic patterns in my personal program as the fest stretched on.  For instance, my entire second day at this year’s Overlook focused on the horrors of motherhood, a self-engineered happenstance I can’t imagine was the intent of the festival’s programmers, since they could not have known which exact Choose Your Own Adventure path their audience would lock ourselves into.  While nothing on Day 2 floored me the way buzzier titles had on Day 1, they collectively gave me a lot of squicky Mommy Issues to dwell on in the festival’s downtown shopping mall locale – a theme that, come to think of it, was also echoed elsewhere on the docket in Clock, The Five Devils, Give Me an A, and Evil Dead Rise.

The best of the motherhood horrors I caught that day was the prickly pregnancy story Birth/Rebirth, which will premiere on Shudder later this year.  In its simplest terms, Birth/Rebirth is a morbid little Found Family story where the family glue is composed of reanimated corpses & unethically harvested fetal tissue.  Let’s call it Women in FrankenSTEM.  It details the unlikely team-up of a brash, uncaring pathologist who experiments on reanimating dead bodies in her inner-city apartment and a warm, compassionate nurse from the same hospital who loses her young daughter to an aggressive bacterial infection.  The two women form a makeshift family when they inevitably bring the daughter back to “life” via a serum derived from prenatal tissue, harvested through a chemical process that eventually leads to desperate acts of violence to keep the experiment going.  There’s plenty of morbid humor in the film’s “Honey, I’m home,” “How was work?” domestic banter as this new family routine becomes more comfortable, but its tone & central themes are relatively heavy.  For all of its upsetting surgical imagery involving needles, spines, and wombs (sometimes made even grimier through found-footage camcorder grain), the film often just engages in a very thoughtful contrast/compare debate about the differences between science & medicine.  That debate gets especially heated when hospital staff maintain a cold, scientific distancing from their pregnant patients instead of treating them like human beings in need of compassionate care, a threshold that even the more humane nurse crosses in pursuit of keeping her daughter “alive.”  Birth/Rebirth is refreshingly honest & matter-of-fact about pregnant women’s bodily functions and the medical industry’s indifference to their wellbeing.  It’s not a great film (often lacking a pronounced sense of style or narrative momentum), but it is a satisfying, provocative one.

The worst of the motherhood horrors on my docket was the Mongolian axe-murder thriller Aberrance.  Aberrance may even be the worst feature I can remember seeing at any film festival, a self-programming mistake that became apparent as soon as its opening frames foreshadow its pregnant damsel in distress running from its axe-wielding killer under a veil of cheaply rendered digital snowfall.  Whereas Birth/Rebirth had smart, straightforward observations to make about how misogynist the medical industry can be, Aberrance instead follows a series of for-their-own sake plot twists that muddle any possible good-faith readings of its social messaging.  At the start, this vapid, cheap-o thriller pretends to be a domestic violence story about a heroic neighbor bravely standing up to the abuser next door, who keeps his pregnant wife locked away from the world in order to “protect” her from her own mental illness.  Several generic plot twists & mainstream horror tropes later, the movie appears to be asserting an extensive list of incendiary falsehoods that get more infuriating as they thoughtlessly pile up: Don’t be nosy about apparent domestic abuse conflicts in other people’s homes; don’t trust the medication prescribed to treat your mental illness; and, most importantly, if a woman is mentally ill, the best fix is for her to just have a baby.  While Birth/Rebirth has incisive things to say about women’s minds, bodies, and care, Aberrance doesn’t care at all about the pregnant victim at the center of its story.  She’s a mostly wordless vehicle for thematically inane, irresponsible plot twists and flashy, for-its-own sake camerawork that initially appears playful & inventive but quickly becomes dull & repetitive.  The only halfway interesting thing about the movie is the cultural specificity of its Mongolian setting, but that’s not nearly enough to compensate for its boneheaded qualities as a mother-in-peril story.

Lurking somewhere between the disparate quality of those two polar-opposite motherhood thrillers is the couture-culture body horror Appendage, which will premiere on Hulu sometime later this year (likely as part of their annual “Huluween” package).  Appendage‘s connections to the day’s unintentional motherhood theme are initially less apparent than the first two films’, unless you consider a woman growing a sentient, talking tumor on her hip to represent an abstract form of giving birth.  The story follows a young fashion designer whose professional stress over a highly competitive, demanding job manifests in a hateful, id-indulging tumor that grows on her body and gradually develops a life of its own.  It’s a fairly common creature feature set-up, especially in a horror comedy context.  Think Basket Case but make it fashion (or Hatching but make it fashion, or Bad Milo but make it fashion, or How to Get Ahead in Advertising but make it fashion, etc.).  The scenes featuring the rubber-puppet monster make for an adorable addition to that subgenre, but they also highlight how bland Appendage can feel when the absorbed-twin tumor is nowhere to be seen.  Except, I did find its connective-tissue drama interesting within the larger theme of the day, if only through happenstance.  By the end of the film, it’s clear that our troubled fashionista’s self-negging workplace woes are less about job stress than they are an echo of her uptight WASP mother’s overly harsh criticisms of her every decision.  As it chugs along, Appendage proves to have way more on its mind about its underlying Mommy Issues than it does about the fashion industry, which is mostly used as an arbitrary broad-comedy backdrop akin to the killer-blue-jeans novelty horror Slaxx.  The promise of the premise is that we’ll watch a young woman spar against the monstrously abnormal growth on her body, but instead we often watch her do petty, verbal battle with the abnormal monster who birthed her.

Birth/Rebirth was my favorite selection from the second day of Overlook by any metric, and it only grew in my estimation as the day’s incidental horrors-of-motherhood patterns revealed themselves.  Even so, there are brief moments of Appendage that make it recommendable as potential Halloween Season viewing, especially for anyone who’s delighted by throwback practical-effects monsters.  The same cannot be said about Aberrance, an entirely useless work as both a pregnancy narrative and as an axe-wielding slasher cheapie.  It’s admirable that Overlook programmed a low-budget no-namer from an underserved market like Mongolia but, much like me, they took a chance on a dud.  It still helped guide & flesh out my Choose Your Own Adventure programming choices for the day, though, even if only to make the other motherhood horror titles that bookended it appear even greater by comparison.

-Brandon Ledet

Late Night with the Devil (2023)

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It’s easy to get dispirited by the deluge of current pop culture product that’s just nostalgic regurgitation of vintage hits from decades ago.  If you dwell on how much of our current “creative” output is just a distant echo of pre-existing iconic works, you’re only going to see a culture in decline.  Not all pastiche is empty, though.  While most nostalgia bait cites past triumphs for an easy pop of recognition, there are plenty modern throwbacks that sincerely interrogate or subvert the artistic intent & cultural context of their inspirational texts.  For every Netflix special that drags the Power Rangers out of retirement for a nostalgia-stoker victory lap, there’s an absurdist French comedy that subverts & recontextualizes that same vintage 90s iconography into something wonderfully new & strange.  The same day I saw Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist Power Rangers parody Smoking Causes Coughing at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I also happened to catch a similarly subversive nostalgia piece in Late Night with the Devil, which dialed the pop culture clock even further back for even weirder effect (and won the festival’s Audience Award for Best Feature as a result).  Late Night with the Devil is vintage TV Land horror, a parody of a late-night 70s talk show broadcast that’s hijacked midway by The Devil.  It stokes vintage 1970s pop culture nostalgia as its initial hook, but mostly just uses that temporal backdrop for a sense of comfort & familiarity that can be stripped away for effective third-act scares once the titular Devil is conjured.  It’s also thematically purposeful in returning to that era because it has something specific to say about pop culture at that time, an embarrassingly low bar that isn’t cleared by more routine nostalgia cash-ins like the upcoming Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: Once & Always.

David Dastmalchian stars as a late-night talk show host who teeters somewhere between the post-vaudevillian comedy of Johnny Carson and the cigar-smoke intellectualism of Dick Cavett.  After a faux-documentary prologue sketches out the basic outline of Dastmalchian’s fictional Night Owl talk show (including its imagined ratings war with Carson and its host’s personal dabblings in the occult), we’re submerged in a real-time Sweeps Week novelty episode of the show, supposedly broadcast on Halloween Night in 1977.  Even within that Halloween Special context, Late Night with the Devil mostly functions as a loose collection of 70s kitsch, touching on iconic-to-forgotten figures of the era like Orson Welles, Anton LaVey, and The Amazing Kreskin as if they’re all of equal importance.  Things get dicey when the Night Owl producers restage a real-life version of Friedkin’s 70s horror classic The Exorcist as a shameless ratings stunt, unwittingly unleashing a powerful demon that calls itself Mr. Wriggles onto the American public through live broadcast.  The demonic scares of the film’s back half allow its initial Nick at Nite nostalgia trip to go wildly off the rails in exciting, unpredictable ways.  It also opens the text up for direct, sincere criticism of the era’s professional machismo – interrogating the ways that men nearing the top of the corporate ladder were willing to exploit the vulnerable underlings below them (especially if they’re women) just to scramble up the last few rungs.  Sweeps Week desperation has never been so deadly, nor has inane talk show chatter about “current” events & the weather. 

If there’s anything holding Late Night with the Devil back from achieving greatness as a standalone novelty, it’s that there are so many nostalgia-critical genre throwbacks already out there to match or best.  In particular, its real-time simulation of an actual cursed, vintage TV broadcast is outshone by the Satanic Panic era news report parody film WNUF Halloween Special, which is also framed as a ratings stunt gone wrong.  Not only does WNUF have more politically incisive things to say about the cultural moment it time-travels to for cheap gags & scares, but it also fully commits to the bit in a way Late Night with the Devil doesn’t dare.  Instead of repeating the WNUF trick of breaking up its broadcast with parodies of vintage television commercials, Late Night cheats by bolstering its narrative with backstage drama & impossible “documentary” footage that distract from the verisimilitude of its premise.  It’s a frustrating indulgence at first, but the film eventually makes the most of it in a go-for-broke, reality-bending finale that’s worth forgiving the few shortcut cheats it takes to get there.  If you don’t mind a little logical looseness in your “found footage” horror novelties, Late Night with the Devil is perfectly calibrated Halloween Season programming.  It pulls double duty in both nostalgically calling back to vintage horrors past (which is especially welcome if you’ve already seen The Exorcist and its many knockoffs one too many times) and finds modern political & technological justifications in returning to those well-treaded waters.  It’s not nostalgia bait so much as it’s nostalgia perversion, which is a much more interesting angle than you’ll find most modern pop culture attempting.

-Brandon Ledet

The Five Devils (2023)

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One of the major reasons I love film festivals is that they transform otherwise low-profile, niche-interest oddities into the hottest tickets in town.  I always find it a little silly when festival crowds fight for a seat to see a wide-release studio film just a few weeks before it’ll play at every suburban multiplex anyway, but I’m charmed when that enthusiasm trickles down the program to smaller titles that will otherwise play to empty arthouse auditoriums before dying a slow death on streaming.  I was sharply aware of that phenomenon when lining up to see the weirdo fantasy drama The Five Devils at this year’s Overlook Film Fest the same day that it was premiering at The Broad Theater just a few blocks away from my house.  The Five Devils is the exact kind of low-budget, high-ambition art film that I’m used to watching alone at The Broad (or even at the same downtown location of The Prytania where most of Overlook is staged), so it was heartwarming to queue up with a swarm of like-minded, enthusiastic freaks psyched to be bewildered by it in unison.  It shouldn’t be surprising that a local genre festival could draw a sizable crowd to see a title that’s already screening outside its downtown shopping mall locale, considering the self-selection process of an audience already receptive to what Overlook offers.  Still, it was wonderful to see an odd, alienating little movie like The Five Devils get treated like a Cultural Event, when outside of festivals that kind of buzzy Thursday-night premiere is strictly reserved for superhero sequels & Tom Cruise suicide missions.

The last time I saw a French time-travel drama about a little girl who meets the younger, more troubled version of her mother through an unexplained, magical-realist device, it was in a near-empty auditorium.  Petite Maman is a much more accommodating, crowd-pleasing version of that story template too, underplaying the supernatural immensity of its time-travel premise to instead focus on subtle moments of dramatic grace.  In contrast, The Five Devils is Petite Maman for sickos, which is why it’s so heartwarming that Overlook was able to scrape together a full crowd of sickos to bask in its abrasive, brain-rattling glory.  Calling its time traveling anti-hero a “little girl” is a little reductive.  She’s more of an untrained, irresponsible witch, one who uses her supernatural sense of smell to jar up homemade potions that distill the unique essence of her few loved ones so she can mentally revisit them at will through sense memory.  This lonely pastime gets out of control when she gets a hold of an elixir that allows her to astral-project into those memories, effectively time-travelling to her mother’s youth.  What she discovers while traveling via these jarred scents is that she hails from a complex lineage of similarly obsessive, volatile women – most notably the younger, brasher version of her mother and her mother’s secret high school lover.  From there, The Five Devils unravels to reveal an intensely fucked-up little time-travel family drama, one punctuated by wild jabs of style & emotion that you won’t find outside of buzzy festival line-ups, empty arthouse theaters and, eventually, public library DVD loans.

There are plenty of readymade reference points that might help define The Five Devils through comparison: the childhood time travel & poolside romance of Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman & Water Lilies; the ecstatic gymnastic seizures of Ana Rose Holmer’s The Fits; Divine’s supernatural sniffer in John Water’s Polyester; etc.  Its wide range of vaguely familiar elements are reconfigured into such a uniquely high-style, high-drama mode of modern queer filmmaking that it can’t be cleanly categorized into any one long-running genre, though, except maybe to say that it makes for an incredibly uncomfortable Christmas film.  Similarly, I can’t pinpoint exactly what’s being conjured by its provocative title, since there are no literal devils in its narrative (which would more firmly push it into the horror territory covered by most of Overlook’s programming).  Are the five “devils” the five senses?  It certainly made me squirm under the sense of touch as the hard sequins of a gymnastic uniform scraped against freshly burnt flesh in its barnburner finale, but most of the story is dominated by smell.  Are they the four family members that crowd the small French household where the little scent-witch dwells, plus the one spurned & injured lover her parents left behind when they hooked up as teenagers?  Maybe. But no one among them is evil or villainous, exactly.  They all just indulge in messy, passionate human behavior, sometimes heighted by their unexplained supernatural powers.  Ultimately, I don’t actually want an answer to the question.  It’s just indicative of the rhetorical games of provocation & illogic that the film plays with the audience, and it’s often shocking how complex & emotional the results of those games can be.

To find the passionate cult audience it deserves, The Five Devils needs to be chopped up into easily digestible, memeable morsels the way similar crowd alienators like Midsommar, Tár, and Annette have in the recent past.  There’s plenty to work with there, from the striking visuals of young newcomer Sally Dramé huffing her collection of self-labeled scents to the total emotional breakdown of indie darling Adèle Exarchopoulos drunkenly slurring “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on a karaoke stage.  Hell, even I’m guilty of reducing it to something cuter & simpler than it is with my little “Petite Maman for sickos” quip.  In truth, it’s a very thorny, elusive work that’s difficult to market in any effective way without spoiling & overexplaining each of its dramatic twists.  That’s why it’s so great that festivals like Overlook & Cannes (where The Five Devils premiered) are able to drum up actual, real-life enthusiasm for a film this abrasively weird.  I love that I regularly get to see this kind of genre-defiant anomaly at The Prytania & The Broad, but it’s often a much quieter, lonelier experience.

-Brandon Ledet