reviews

Mister America (2019)

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Over a year ago, Tim Heidecker posted a video on his Instragram account stating that he was running for District Attorney of San Bernardio County, California. Truthfully, I had no idea if this announcement was some sort of joke or if he was legitimately running for a political office.  For those who are familiar with Heidecker’s unique style of comedy (best conveyed on the series Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!), he walks a thin line between reality and satire, so my confusion was completely reasonable. Almost a year later, the movie Mister America was released, confirming that Tim was not really running for DA last year. He was working on a mockumentary and releasing social media clips that would eventually become part of this feature film. The whole situation is wild and extremely hard to explain to those who are unfamiliar with his comic genius. Last Wednesday, The Broad Theater had a one-night screening of the completed film, which I ab-so-lutely attended along with about twenty other fans of the Tim and Eric Awesome Show universe. It was by far the best comedy to come out this year.

Eric Notarnicola, the director of Mister America, is no stranger to Tim Heidecker’s hijinks. He also directed a few television and web series starring Heidecker: Decker, On Cinema at the Cinema, and The Trial, all of which reappear in Mister America at one point or another. While it is helpful to already be a fan of these Notarnicola-directed series with Heidecker (especially On Cinema) prior to watching the film, I don’t think it’s necessary to be familiar with the On Cinema Universe to enjoy Mister America. There’s enough background information provided throughout the movie to bring those unfamiliar with the series’ backstories up to speed. In Mister America, Heidecker is followed by a documentary crew throughout his journey of running as an independent candidate for District Attorney of San Bernardino County. Without having enough signatures to be on the ballot, no volunteers, barely any campaign funds, and no legitimate political platform, Heidecker has a tough time getting his campaign off the ground. To make matters worse, he has the reputation of being a murderer. While at an EDM music festival, he “supposedly” sold contaminated vape juice to several festival goers, causing them to die. His prosecutor for the case, Vincent Rosetti, is the incumbent DA of San Bernardino County, and Heidecker self-represented his defense in court during the legal battle. So with his legal self-representation experience and his connection with everyday San Bernardino citizens (he is officially a San Bernardino resident because he receives his mail at his hotel room), he truly believes that he has what is takes to beat Rosetti.

The style of humor that Mister America sells is the kind that has you cackling at the most minor details. For instance, while Heidecker is having a breakfast meeting with his campaign manager Toni (Terri Parks), he gets lost deep into his business/politician persona and can barely get his hashbrowns and eggs onto his fork. The camera kept zooming in on his fork failure, and I completely lost it. Another major player that brings the funny to this movie is mister Gregg Turkington, a regular guest on On Cinema. Turkington pops up for short interviews with the documentary crew to shit-talk Heidecker, and he always seems to come up with a bizarre movie reference for every scenario. My favorite scene with Turkington was when he tried to explain the similarities between The Shaggy D.A. and Heidecker’s campaign. He even goes so far as to bring a bootleg VHS copy of The Shaggy D.A. to the documentary crew, which he makes clear that he needs returned ASAP.  He also has a great moment where the crew follows him trash-hunting for VHS tapes (destined to become Popcorn Classics for On Cinema), and it’s something that I personally related to way too much.

Mister America is up there with the mockumentary greats, and it’s just a lot of stupid fun. I believe the movie theater screenings are finished, but the film is now available on demand. Trust me, it is worth every penny.

-Britnee Lombas

Bloody Birthday (1981)

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The lineage of films borrowing from the killer-children British chiller Village of the Damned has echoed thunderously over the last half-century – from the Euro-grindhouse provocation of Who Can Kill a Child? to the corny folk tale of Children of the Corn to the cosmic Christmas horror subversion of The Children and beyond. If 1986’s Bloody Birthday does anything especially novel with this Evil Children subgenre it’s in the way it retrofits Village of the Damned into the post-Halloween slasher format. If you cut the killer children angle out of the film entirely, this picture would be unmistakable as a cheap-o Halloween knockoff. Its designated bookworm Final Girl archetype walks down suburban streets fending off invitations to party & sin with her promiscuous friends, scenes that look like half-remembered recreations of specific Halloween moments. Her doomed-to-die neighbor friend’s dad is even town sheriff, like in the John Carpenter classic, and the final showdown with the film’s pint-sized killers is a harrowing night of babysitting gone awry. Swapping out the looming presence of Michael Myers with a small cult of toe-headed rascals is a pretty substantial deviation from the Halloween slasher template, however, offering the Village of the Damned formula an interesting new subgenre avenue to explore. It’s an unholy marriage of two horror sensibilities that likely shouldn’t mix, and that explosive combination makes for a wickedly fun time.

Unlike in Village of the Damned, there isn’t much explanation provided as to why the murderous tykes of Bloody Birthday are evil. The three unrelated miscreants are born simultaneously in a small town during an absurdly windy solar eclipse, and their wickedness is waved off with Astrological babblings about cosmic alignments. What’s more important than their origin is the Lawful Evil characterization in their costuming & murder tactics. They dress like shrunken-down Reaganite adults and sidestep the traditional slasher weapon of a glistening kitchen knife for more pedestrian tools of chaos: skateboards, baseball bats, shovels, cars, etc. One of the little tykes even hunts down his elders with a stolen handgun – which would be a disappointing weapon in the hands of a Michael Myers but is genuinely horrifying when operated by a child. It’s unexpected details like that gun that keeps Bloody Birthday exciting even if you’re already over-familiar with the slasher genre at large. It’s not interesting enough for teens to make out in a graveyard in this film; they have to make out in a grave. Not only do the children have an unsettling prurient interest in adult sexuality, peering in on sex & private stripteases; they also fire a bow & arrow through their peephole. After two 2019 releases (Ma & Psycho Granny), this is the third film I’ve seen this year where a killer maniacally scrapbooks about their crimes – a very unsettling hobby for a child. This is a deeply ugly, unwholesome glimpse at Reagan Era suburbia, and the kids are not alright, not at all.

That spiritual ugliness also extends to the film’s look & sound. This is a repugnantly colorless affair, dealing almost exclusively in muddied browns & greys. The sound quality of my blind-buy DVD copy left the dialogue outright indecipherable, prompting us to switch to Severin’s digital restoration currently streaming on Shudder (which was only slightly better, but at least audible). Unlike in most first-wave slashers of its era, the murders in the film actually weigh on the community they terrorize, which mostly manifests in teary-eyed funerals, public meltdowns at kids’ birthday parties, and hospitalized psychiatric retreats to aid recovery. It’s a sense of grief & despair that keeps the mood harshly grotesque & rotten, even when the Evil Children’s wicked deeds stray into over-the-top camp. I personally never tire of the killer-children horror genre and had a lot of fun with this film’s peculiar melding of Village of the Damned tradition with Halloween modernism. It’s an ugly watch in both texture & sentiment, though, one that’s bested as a bygone nasty in its genre only by Who Can Kill a Child?. It works wonderfully well as a genre deviation for both the killer-children thriller and the traditional first-wave slasher, and there are plenty of cartoonishly excessive joys to be found in its intergenerational kills. It’s just also a nasty slice of schlock in its own right, though, so be prepared to squirm between your guffaws.

-Brandon Ledet

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama (1988)

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It’s a shame that the David DeCoteau horror-comedy curio Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama couldn’t live up to the glorious sleaze of its A+ title, but what movie possibly could? From the hot pink comic sans & video game keyboards score of its opening credits to the Porky’s-level slimeballery of its nerds-desperate-to-get-laid rising action, everything about the film’s opening act plays like an attempt to undercut the expectations set by that wonderful title. It almost worked too. Once I adjusted to the limited scope of its horny teen-boy sexuality & no budget DeCoteau shapelessness I started to have fun with the film as a low-stakes Full Moon Entertainment acquisition (the exact VHS genre territory that encapsulates the entirety of the Canuxploitation schlockteur’s catalog). Unfortunately, it was the Full Moon calling card of a pint-sized monster puppet that interrupts the film’s party-time sleaze and sours the mood past the point of enjoyability.

Three virginal nerds escape the boredom of their college dorm by spying on a sorority pledge initiation ritual: a softcore display that leans heavily into girl-on-girl spanking erotica. Once inevitably caught in the act, the boys are paired off with the pledges they spied on for a much less titillating hazing ritual: being dispatched to break into the bowling alley at the nearby shopping mall. As you would expect, this transgression releases a demonic puppet known as an “imp” who lives in an enchanted bowling trophy. The imp then tortures the college-age bimbos of both genders by granting a series of backfiring monkey’s paw wishes. Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama is half sorority-initiation spanking erotica (which is admittedly fun for what it is) and half a goofball creature feature centered around this itsy-bitsy-cutie demon, who actively ruins the mood. It’s not that his design or his kills aren’t passably amusing. It’s that he’s inexplicably voiced with a minstrel show-level racial caricature, which is a deeply ugly impulse the film never recovers from.

The one saving grace of this picture as a cult curio is that it managed to collect an impressive gaggle of 1980s scream queens – The Slumber Party Massacre’s Brinke Stevens, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers’s Michelle Bauer, and all-around Sleazy Slasher goddess Linnea Quigley. You can see that exact trio share the screen in other titles like Nightmare Sisters, however, without having to suffer the “comedy” stylings of this film’s racist puppet. Only Quigley breaks through the tedium of the script with a notable performance, playing a no-fucks-to-give biker who hates the other character’s guts just as much as the audience does. Otherwise, the only exciting character work here is in the light kink teased in the sorority sisters’ prurient enthusiasm for spanking new recruits. Their horned-up declaration that “It’s better to give than it is to receive” frames them as young lesbian dominatrices in training, which the movie can’t help but accentuate with some leather fetish gear when a wish goes awry in the tiny, racist hands of the demon imp.

It’s a shame that this film never fully veers into genuine softcore porno, since that’s where its heart truly lies. A few occasional stunts like a car flipping over, a victim being set on fire, and a human head being substituted as a bowling ball justify its designation as a horror comedy, but it’s foremost a sorority-set spanking video that’s unfortunately hosted by a minstrel show puppet. I suppose there’s some novelty in seeing that kind of genre territory poke around a bowling alley setting and I highly doubt this is the worst specimen in DeCouteau’s expansive catalog of cheapo oddities, but there’s still not much to recommend here beyond an A+ title & poster:

-Brandon Ledet

Rukus (2019)

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A lifetime ago, I used to be friends with the Memphis filmmaking collectives behind the microbudget docudrama Rukus. They were making backyard movies as long as I’ve known them, from music video fan art to thematically daring documentaries to an ambitious feature-length fairy tale titled What I Love About Concrete (that felt like a breakthrough achievement for the crew). Rukus is a different beast entirely, not least of all in its personal, diary-like confessions of central contributor Brett Hanover as the film’s writer-director, with the rest of the collective (mainly Alanna Stewart & Katherine Dohan of Do You Know Where Your Children Are? Productions) taking on a myriad of supportive filmmaking duties – music, sound, cinematography, assistant-direction, etc. This sense of a long-lasting community collaborating on a single project over many years of spare weekends & rigidly structured “free time” affords Rukus a sense of depth in both subject & emotion, especially in how it tracks Hanover’s own maturity from high school sexual anxiety to a more confident, adult sense of self-understanding over what feels like fifteen years of footage & backstory. It’s over that exact span of time that I have drifted away from this community myself, to the point where I’m so far outside their orbit now I’m hesitant to suggest I have the right to still call them friends – even if “acquaintances” sounds too cold. I also don’t believe it’s extratextual to mention my fading personal connection to the filmmakers here or to recount their backstory as a microbudget filmmaking collective, as Rukus is a film about communities & intimate connections, both online and in the flesh (and fur). Like all great documents of personal importance, it has universal implications about relationships we’ve all had over the internet & irl; we all already know the players in Rukus, whether or not we’ve actually met them.

It’s important to mention the universality of Rukus’s themes of isolation, community, maturity, and self-harm upfront, because its on-paper premise indicates that it’s about something far more niche: furries. The most flippant (and inaccurate) way you could describe Rukus would be to contextualize it as the furries equivalent of the Netflix documentary Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. That might have even been Hanover’s original intent when he first documented a Memphis furries convention for a high school photography project in the aughts: a fascinated, but detached interrogation of furry culture that borders uncomfortably close to a gawking “Getta load of this freak show!” voyeurism. Smartly, Hanover instead shifts this eagerness to gaze at human oddities inward – confronting his initial impulse to engage with furry culture from the academic distance of an “anthropological observer” as a self-serving lie. Anyone looking for a culture-gawking doc on furry conventions is going to be disappointed by the breadcrumb trail of information Rukus leaves behind as it prods at something much more personally vulnerable & ambitious. I was frequently reminded throughout of Nathan Rabin’s (excellent) book You Don’t know Me but You Don’t Like Me, in which the pop culture critic learns almost too much about his own mental & emotional health while attempting to cheekily document the often-mocked subcultures of Phish & Insane Clown Posse fandoms, only to become a member of both communities himself. Hanover’s personal journey as the loudest creative voice & most central subject of Rukus parallels Rabin’s across two entirely separate communities: his irl Memphis friends who are directly confronted with his OCD & sexual hang-ups and an online contingent of furries whose digital anonymity offers a freer, more accepting playground where he can find himself. Larger themes of kink power dynamics, queer identity, depression, romance, abuse, and self-harm emerge over the long haul of the story’s over-sprawling narrative, but it’s all anchored to that pursuit of finding intimate connections & personal fulfillment while navigating the needs & politics of the communities that are willing to put up with you – furries and beyond.

The thematic ambition & personal vulnerability of Rukus is evenly matched by the film’s own formal adventurousness. It initially presents itself as a documentary on Hanover’s interaction with real-life furries (with a particular focus on his relationship with the titular self-published furry artist Rukus), but as it unravels the question of what is & what isn’t real becomes muddled to the point of not mattering at all. There are moments of pure fantasy represented through hand-drawn sketchbook animation and childhood fursona dreamscapes that recall the immersive artworlds of films like Paperhouse & MirrorMask. Outside those forays into escapist magic, though, the question of what’s “real” is much more deliberately confused. Real-life footage & interviews mix freely with dramatic reenactments and intangible online personae to test the boundaries of what could be considered a “documentary.” It’s a dissociative tactic that evokes the feeling of looking at the world through a video camera – a remove that’s echoed in the film’s multimedia indulgences in laptop-lit stage plays, webcam cinematography, and crudely drawn outsider art. It’s also a fitting approach for conveying the emotional lives & development of its subjects: furries that express their truest selves through the remove of carefully-sculpted costumes & online avatars and the director’s own expression of his sexual & romantic impulses through a detached “academic” interest in niche fetish communities outside his comfort zone. I’ve seen plenty of recent documentaries that blur the line between reality & crafted narrative in this way – Rat Film, Swagger, and The World is Mine to name a few. The overall effect of Rukus is something much more personal & vulnerable than what those dramatically obscured titles offer, though. It reaches more for the unembarrassed emotional exhibitionism of Josephine Decker’s (criminally underrated) project Flames: the volatile self-revelation of reading your private diary’s most intimate passages at top volume in a public space.

It’s doubtful that if Rukus were an outside-observer’s anthropological examination of furry culture it would have meant as much to the community it depicts. I doubt Bronies gather around to watch that Netflix documentary as a community, for instance, whereas past public screenings listed on Rukus’s website (where you can now watch the film in its entirety, for free) include multiple furry conventions. It’s tough to suppose whether that’s because Hanover & the Do You Know Where Your Children Are? crew tapped into something deeply true about furries in particular or if the movie moreso taps into something universally true about the roles of community & identity in our larger modern digital hellscape while inviting furries along for the ride. Either way, it’s the exact kind of ambitious, challenging filmmaking you’d hope to see from no-budget outsider artists passionate about their craft but locked outside official means of production. I’m proud to have ever been even on the periphery of a community this empathetic, inclusive, and vulnerably honest, even if time has eroded those connections to the point where we’re total strangers only flimsily tethered to our shared past online.

-Brandon Ledet

Steven Universe: The Movie (2019)

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If you’ve been watching the Cartoon Network fantasy series Steven Universe since its 2013 debut, it’s difficult to think back to when the show was a collection of one-off adventures instead of a complex intergalactic epic with five seasons of mythology guiding its every move. Insular adventures like Steven begging for French-fry bits at the wharf or raising an island of adorable Watermelon Stevens have gradually given way to emotionally tough, intellectually challenging tales of queer love & war across the endless canvas of Space & Time. It would be a total shame to roll back all that careful incremental progress from the canon adventures of Steven & The Crystal Gems at this point in their saga, which is entirely the point of Steven Universe: The Movie. Most “The Movie” addendums to television shows dial the clock back to their respective mythologies’ starting point to welcome in new audiences at a late stage in their run, once they’ve earned that larger platform. Steven Universe: The Movie isn’t screening in cinemas across America or anything, but it does mark the occasion of having gradually earned a sizeable audience by reaching for the grandiose spectacle of a feature-length musical. It also leans into its “The Movie” designation by resetting all character development & plot complications back to a square-one factory default setting. What’s most impressive about the movie is that this reset is treated as a devastating tragedy for longtime fans, not an ingratiating plea for a new audience.

As accustomed as we’ve become to our favorite pop culture institutions extending themselves into perpetuity through reboots, network jumps, and crowd-funded movie sequels, the harsh truth is that Steven Universe pretty much wrapped up the story it needed to tell by the end of its fifth season. This feature-length follow-up to that arc about says as much. All the work of dismantling an intergalactic empire is through; all the characters have reached a personal & communal place of self-acceptance; there’s nowhere left for the show to go. All that can be done at this point is to tread water solely so that we can spend more time with the Crystal Gems whom we love so much, or to dial the clock back and ruin all their progress for the sake of establishing a worthwhile conflict. Steven Universe: The Movie expertly demonstrates the folly of both approaches. It opens with the Crystal Gems on Earth in peaceful communal health and the empirical Gems in space no longer searching to destroy deviants outside their colonial rule. Steven announces that he hopes things never change, aligning himself with the satiated fandom. Then, a Fleicsher cartoon-style villain, Spinel, arrives on Earth to cause havoc by erasing all the memories & personal progress the Gems have earned over the course of the show as vengeance for a past wrong. It’s heartbreaking to lose all that progress at an instant, but at least the challenge of rebuilding the Gems’ memories & personae gives Steven something to do besides reveling in how perfect his life is now and how he never wants anything to change. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that Steven saves the day by empathizing with & healing Spinel (as is his usual M.O.), once again resetting the scenario back to normal with characters settled exactly where you’d want them to be. It’s an incredibly smart, concise demonstration of why the show needs to end as soon as it will (after its sixth, final season), as it looks back at all the work it’s already accomplished – work we don’t want or need to see cyclically destroyed & restored.

Unlike most “The Movie” mutations of ongoing television shows, I don’t think this will necessarily win over anyone who hasn’t already converted to the cult of the Crystal Gems. The show has gotten so detailed & insular in its own mythology that even slight changes in costume & character design have massive implications for fans of the show (especially regarding Steven’s physical maturity in this instance), whereas a casual viewer or newcomer would likely shrug those details off or fail to notice them at all. Because this movie resets its characters to their factory-default settings, it does somewhat work as an introduction to its featured players, but the recaps are so compressed that they mean more as a reminder to fans of how far we’ve come than they’d signify to the uninitiated. The best chance a Steven Universe newbie would have of being reeled in by the movie is in director (and series mastermind) Rebecca Sugar’s songwriting. The film’s structure as an Old Hollywood musical (or a Golden Era Disney throwback, depending on its whims) allows for plenty of space to feature Sugar’s emotionally potent songs, which have always been a vital cornerstone for the show. In particular, the fictional band Sadie Killer and The Suspects’ number “Disobedient” is legitimately the best song I’ve heard all year—in a movie or otherwise—and should work just as well for someone who doesn’t know how much personal progress Sadie had to achieve in order to perform it (a lot!). Otherwise, the movie is clearly aimed at an already converted audience. It reminds us of how far the story has progressed, allows us to briefly celebrate that victory, and then demonstrates why continuing the show past this point could only lead to stagnation or heartbreak. It’s apparently possible to love Steven Universe and still be happy that it’s coming to an end.

-Brandon Ledet

Lily C.A.T. (1987)

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There were countless Alien knockoffs that followed in the wake of Ridley Scott’s genre-shifting 1979 classic. Roger Corman alone produced three I can name offhand (Galaxy of Terror, Humanoids from the Deep, and Battle Beyond the Stars) and even that notorious schlockteur’s takes on the Alien template weren’t the cheapest or most derivative of the bunch. Within that crowded field, the straight-to-video cheapie Lily C.A.T. had very little chance of standing out as something especially unique or worthwhile. Yet, as it escalated to its own grotesque, cosmically horrific creature-feature crescendo, I found myself gradually convinced that I was watching something truly special, something that reaches beyond the confined-space creature feature dread of its obvious inspiration source to achieve its own rewarding, unnerving effect. If you’re going to be an Alien knockoff, you might as well strive to be the best Alien knockoff, or at least the most distinct.

Part of what saves Lily C.A.T. from devolving into sub-Alien tedium is that it’s more of a mutation of that seminal work than it is a Xerox copy. The film is immediately distinct from its fellow Alien riffs in its distinction as a mid-80s anime, converting the cheap sets & limited practical effects resources of this genre template into a freeing, visually impressive handdrawn animation style. It’s also, smartly, only an hour-long – firing off its checklist of genre requirements with rapid-fire efficiency where most cheap-o Alien riffs risk drifting into boredom in their half-hearted attempts to stir up atmospheric dread. Early in the film a character even asks aloud, “Hey captain, when are we getting to work? This is getting boring,” as if to signal to the audience that no time will be wasted in getting to the goods. Lily C.A.T. also mutates the Alien template by crossbreeding it with other creature feature influences: Cronenberg, The Thing, and any number of post-Lovecraft cosmic horrors you can conjure. It’s a quick, nasty little monster movie rendered in intricately handdrawn animation – the perfect genre nerd cocktail.

The story told here is so familiar it almost doesn’t require repeating for anyone who’s ever seen a spaceship-bound horror film. A motley crew of wisecracking Corporate employees are distracted from their stated mission by a distress call & a subsequent onboard alien invasion. They’re only broadly defined as “time-jumper” types: mercenaries who use the decades of hibernated sleep associated with deep-space travel to avoid personal troubles left back on Earth. Their individual archetypes are only developed from there in the way they’re drawn (uncomfortably so in the only black character’s exaggerated facial features) and their motivations for jumping time on their home planet (uncomfortably so in the main woman’s petty revenge on a romantic rival by returning twenty years younger than her). Their personalities matter less & less as they’re picked off by the invading alien creature, of course, although the film does generate suspense in an early reveal that there are dangerous intruders hiding among them under false credentials.

The threat of an intruder lurking among the crew is only an introduction to a larger theme of imposterism, which plays out in a much more grandiose fashion with a non-human member of the crew: the titular cat. Lily C.A.T. seems to be fascinated with the implications of traveling through the far reaches of outer space with a common housecat, and expands that detail from the original Alien film to generate the majority of its creature feature chills & thrills. While the crew assumes that it only has one cat onboard, that feline is actually copied by two of its own uncanny imposters. One cat is a robotic spy that secretly answers to Corporate back home behind their backs. In fact, it’s not a cat at all, but rather a C.A.T. (a Computerized Animal-shamed Technological Robot). The other imposter cat is a shapeshifting alien creature that fills its victims’ lungs with deadly body-morphing bacteria and gradually transforms into a grotesque Lovecraftian tentacle monster that absorbs the features of its growing list of victims in an exponential creepout. The original cat, unfortunately, does not make it too long into the film’s runtime, and we’re treated to a grisly confirmation of its . . . organic nature when its time onboard is up.

Weirdly, I’m not sure if Alien superfans would be the first audience I would recommend Lily C.A.T. to, unless their favorite detail from the original film happens to be Ripley’s relationship with her cat. This cheap DTV animation never had a chance to stack up to the original in a direct comparison, nor does it really attempt to. This film’s built-in audience is more likely nerds who salivate at the idea of any horror-themed anime or, more to my own alignment, weirdo genre enthusiasts who salivate over ludicrous killer-cat creature features like Cat People ’82, Sleepwalkers, and Night of a Thousand Cats. Surely, there’s some significant overlap between those two camps who will find Lily CA.T.’s shapeshifting-feline-tentacle-monster genre thrills exactly to their tastes. If nothing else, it’s a very specific niche that strikes a tone no other Alien knockoff ever could—animated or no.

-Brandon Ledet

Spookies (1986)

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At their best, horror anthologies revive the undead spirit of EC Comics and short-fiction collections like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: curated omnibuses of various ghouls & creepies that run the full creature-feature spectrum in one concise volume. The 1986 horror cheapie Spookies accomplishes that same effect in a roundabout way, even though it’s not technically an anthology picture. Its own tasting-menu collection of spooky monsters was not arranged as a deliberate series of vignettes, but rather hastily slapped together in post-production to save itself from being scrapped entirely. Originally conceived & shot as a haunted house picture titled Twisted Souls, the film was stripped from the hands of its original creators in a bitter post-production brawl with the studio. After-the-fact co-director & editor Eugenie Joseph was then hired to shoot additional footage set in the same haunted house locale to Frankenstein together a “cohesive” cut of the film without the input of the original crew. Joseph received top-bill over the original directors (Thomas Doran & Brendan Faulkner), as her revision of & addition to the Twisted Souls footage was molded into the delightful, creepy-crawly mess that is Spookies. Fractured across two separate production crews and held together only by its central haunted house locale, Spookies is effectively a creature feature horror anthology: a series of disconnected vignettes that each present a spooky-creature-of-the-minute for our temporary enjoyment.

It’s crystal clear why Joseph had to shoot additional footage to craft a cohesive “story” out of Twisted Souls’s leftovers. The original storyline, as presented in the finished product, involves a cast of drunken hooligans looking to party in a haunted house only to be tormented by the spooky creatures therein. There’s no goal, payoff, or overarching theme to this haunted house experience – just a Scooby-Doo style investigation: systematically opening very door in an old Gothic house to reveal the next consecutive jumpscare. Joseph’s first major addition is the semblance of a plot. She shot a series of ghoulish pontifications from a Vincent Price-type eccentric villain who seemingly dispatches the titular spookies on the housecrashers from a far-off parlor. He never shares the screen with the spookies for obvious reasons, but he at least affords them a purpose & an origin. Other additions were obviously a play to pad out the slim runtime of Twisted Souls’s leftovers, especially a B-story where a young boy unconnected to the housecrashers is chased through a graveyard by the ghoulish eccentric’s werecat servant. I also get the sense that Joseph made some of her more obnoxious additions to Spookies merely to amuse herself in the editing room –namely adding fart noises to a scene where characters are tormented by subterranean monsters that I suppose she interpreted to be septic. Whether the fart noises were something she genuinely believed improved the atmosphere of that scene or she added them solely to troll the financiers who put her in the position of cleaning up someone else’s mess in the editing room is anyone’s guess. Either way, it’s a hilariously juvenile gag that helps remind the audience to not take anything onscreen too seriously, lest we start getting annoyed at Spookies’s total disregard for purpose or continuity.

As interesting as Spookies is for its AIP-reminiscent production history (think The Terror or Blood Bath), the film’s only true merit as entertainment is how many spookies it can manage to deliver in its brisk 80min runtime. It does an admirable job in that respect, flooding the screen with as many “spookies” as it can think to conjure: demons, witches, zombies, werecats, spiderwomen, killer toys, Ouija boards, basement-dwelling fart monsters, and so on. Its disinterest in plot, its overflow of spooky creatures, and its classic haunted house & graveyard sets all make it perfect background fodder for your next cheap-beer Halloween gathering with spookies-loving friends. Horror anthologies are always an excellent choice for those short attention span scenarios, apparently including ones that become anthologies by accident in post. I even got a déjà vu sensation midway through the film that I had seen it before somewhere, so maybe I’ve even been to a party where Spookies was playing in the background – exactly where it belongs.

-Brandon Ledet

Phantasm (1979)

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Because we’re living in an absurdly spoiled golden age of physical media production & cult horror reappraisal, there’s a new, crisp digital 4K restoration the 1970s regional cheapie Phantasm currently making the rounds. It wasn’t until I saw that restoration listed in the BYOB Midnight Movie slot at the Prytania this summer that I realized I had never actually seen it before. I’m familiar with the film’s Tall Man villain (played by the recently deceased Angus Scrimm) and his armory of flying, bloodletting orbs from catching a sequel or two out of sequence over the years, but the original film has always eluded me. In retrospect, it’s incredible that it ever registered on my radar at all. Crowdfunded by director Don Coscarelli’s Long Beach, CA community (including major financial & production contributions from his own parents) and crewed mostly by locals, Phantasm likely should be relegated to the cult curio popularity level of other regional cheapies like Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, The Gate, and The Pit. Instead, it’s somehow earned horror-legend status for its Tall Man villain among the likes of Freddy, Jason, and Chucky, as well as four better-budgeted sequels in the decades since, most recently Phantasm: Ravager in 2016. After dragging my old-man bones to the Prytania’s midnight screening of this regional-cheapie-turned-cult-classic, the reason for that success became abundantly clear: Phantasm fuckin’ rules.

Like The Gate & The Pit, the film is framed through the POV of a young boy whose anxiety over his shifting family dynamic & his own coming of age discomforts is reflected in the increasingly nightmarish world around him. The protagonist here is slightly older than our usual nervous-child-with-bad-dreams tykes from this genre template, so his tween interest in the adult activities just beyond his reach get a little squicky in their prurience — especially when he trails his older brother to a graveyard to watch him have sex with a stranger. Mostly, though, it’s a familiar story in which the boy has trouble handling a recent death in the family, so that no one believes him when he reports that the evil ghouls he’s been spotting around town aren’t just an extension of his grief-stricken nightmares. Phantasm puts most of its emotional heft into exploring the feeling of abandonment & helplessness when family members die or move away while you’re still at a formative age. In that respect, its most distinct early scenes involve the teen boy’s fascination with the funeral business, both compelled and scarred by watching a member of his family going through process of being prepared for burial then hidden away forever. Angus Scrimm’s performance as The Tall Man starts off as a part of that morbid funeral business fascination, standing in as a Lurch-like funeral home mortician (and by extension, Death) in his earliest scenes before his role becomes something much, much stranger.

Of course, it’s not the Horror 101 themes of familial grief & childhood anxiety that make Phantasm stand out as a gem in its genre. The film is most remarkable for its constantly shifting, disorienting nightmare logic. It plays like a bad drug trip or a half-lucid dream, wherein its unprepared teenage victims struggle to establish their footing in a world that’s rules are completely governed by the moment-to-moment whims of a lanky ghoul. The Tall Man is a scary enough figure just in his enormous stature & funeral parlor costuming, but what really fucks with your head is his ever-evolving arsenal of creepy crawlies & sci-fi gadgets that he unloads on his victims. He commands an army of Druid-costumed dwarves from an alien planet; he disguises himself as a smokin’ hot Blonde Babe to lure men in with his feminine wiles; he appears in your actual dreams to expend his powers to a Freddy Krueger level command on the metaphysical world around him. And then there’s the Tall Man’s signature weapon: a flying metallic orb that latches onto victims’ skulls with a retractable blade to drain the blood from their bodies in a geyser of gore. This grab bag of surrealistic horrors all arrive to the same repetitive prog organ theme music, making the film play like a low-budget D.I.Y. version of an American giallo. It’s a beautiful, confusing, creepy, deliberately goofy film that surprises at every turn because it follows the cyclical, non-linear rhythms of a nightmare instead of the typical slasher template it teases in its first act.

This “Let’s put on a show!” communal enthusiasm & D.I.Y. approximation of nightmare-logic surrealism is the exact kind of thing I’m always looking for in low-budget genre films. Phantasm’s trajectory of starting with familiar regional slasher locations like suburban cul-de-sacs, dive bars, and graveyards before launching into a fully immersive nightmare realm of its own design is a perfect encapsulation of how it somehow turned low-budget scraps into cult classic gold in the real world as well. By the time the sparsely decorated mausoleum set starts to resemble a de Chirico painting (or a precursor to The Black Lodge) that opens a gateway to an alien planet, the film is bewilderingly impressive as an act of low-budget alchemy. And it only gets more surprising & impressive from there. I now get why Phantasm has earned so many sequels over the decades; I’m dying to see them myself, even if I doubt this is the kind of low-budget movie magic that could ever be duplicated. Any chance to continue poking around in the makeshift dreamworld Coscarelli created could only be a gift.

-Brandon Ledet

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)

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Brian Raftery’s film criticism book Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen has had many pop culture pundits gazing twenty years back to 1999 as a creative pinnacle of modern cinema. Frankly, I don’t fully buy the claim that the year was anything special, as many of the examples cited as phenomenal releases that year – Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut, Election, Audition, etc. – were not immediately hits upon release and took years to gain cultural traction as significant works. Every movie year is practically the same; most movies are bad, but a lot of them are great, and it takes time to sift though the deluge to single out the gems. I’m sure in twenty years’ time, with enough breathing room to reflect back and grow into nostalgia for the modern era, someone could compile a long enough list of standouts to contend that 2019 was the best movie year ever. Or 2017. Or 2003. Or any other year. Still, even if I don’t fully buy Raftery’s thesis the way other pop culture nerds have seemed to, the mental exercise of singling out a particular year for collective re-examination has been fun, and it’s thankfully lifted the profiles of smaller, niche films that still haven’t gotten their full due as great works. I’ve seen this play out with movies I personally love in genres that aren’t always critically respected – especially femme high school cruelty comedies like But I’m a Cheerleader!, Jawbreaker, Cruel Intentions, and Drop Dead Gorgeous. I’ve also been pushed outside my own comfort zone to check out excellent titles I’ve overlooked, like The Talented Mr. Ripley.

I was thirteen years old when The Talented Mr. Ripley was first released, and I did not understand its appeal from the scattered snippets of it I caught at the time whatsoever, other than that it was a thriller made for grown-ups. In fact, I’ve often mixed the film up with the innocuous-looking The Thomas Crown Affair remake of the same year, likely because they both involve con artists named Tom doing sexy European crimes among high-society snobs. I do get it now, though. Despite being generally suspicious of the “[Year X] was a better Movie Year than [Year Y] or [Year Z]” mode of criticism, I’m happy this celebration of 1999 cinema has boosted The Talented Mr. Ripley’s profile, as it’s the exact kind of “movies made for adults” that people bemoan have disappeared from the big screen in recent years (at least in terms of major studio Hollywood productions). Story-wise, it’s no less sleazy than lowly genre films like Single White Female or Fatal Attraction, but it’s dressed up with enough handsome costuming, cinematography, and in-their-prime movie stars to convince you of its intellectual value as a night out at the Theatre. Plus, it’s got something going for it that too few Hollywood productions can boast now, in the 90s, or otherwise: it’s gay. Not undertone/subtext/implied gay either; this is a menacing thriller about handsome young men who love each other to death in an explicitly gay context, leaving no wiggle room for any other interpretation. Of course, because it’s Hollywood, there’s unfortunately no explicit gay sex onscreen, but you must take your minor victories where you can find them. If only I had clued into the seedy, sordid, sexual menace of the film’s surface pleasures as a teen instead of passing it over as a boring drama for boring adults; it might have been a decades-long favorite instead of a late discovery.

Matt Damon stars as the titular Tom Ripley, a piano tuner turned con artist who grifts his way into the upper class of the jazzy, closeted days of the 1950s. After costuming as a Princeton alumnus at a swanky NYC cocktail party, Ripley is hired to retrieve a millionaire’s spoiled-brat son, Dickie (Jude Law), back from his permanent vacation in coastal Italy. Dickie has been living it up on his father’s dime, all the while fucking any & every willing participant who crosses his path – including a socially compatible fiancé (Gwyneth Paltrow), a village full of naïve working class women, and also possibly a string of closeted boytoys from his college days (most notably including Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a grotesque frat-boy ogre). At one point he even vows to fuck an icebox, the hedonist, simply because he loves cold beer. If there’s any major fault in The Talented Mr. Ripley, it’s that the who’s-fucking-who dynamics at play remain a little ambiguous, as there is somehow no onscreen sex in this incredibly horny movie. It’s all kept behind closed doors, mirroring the hush-hush extramarital sexuality of its temporal setting. Ripley himself, a supposedly dishonest con artist who elbows his way into a wealth class where he doesn’t “belong,” is the only character who is clear & direct about his intentions with Dickie, romantic or otherwise. He confesses, “I’ve gotten to like everything about the way you live. It’s one big love affair!” It’s difficult to give him too much credit for the virtue of that honesty, however, since the means by which he attempts to claim Dickie’s lifestyle & sexual charisma for himself quickly escalates from simple grifts to a complex web of lies – one with an exponential body count. Ripley is blatantly honest about being a liar, a forger, and an impersonator by trade, but he doesn’t quite let on how violent he’s willing to get to protect the believability of those lies once they inevitably spin out of control.

Thematically, there isn’t much going on in The Talented Mr. Ripley that you couldn’t find in plenty of other wealth-class thrillers. The way Dickie plays with other people’s lives like a spoiled brat with a shiny new toy and the incestuous in-circle politics wherein the ultra-rich all know each other (which is often the downfall of Ripley’s schemes) are common tropes in this setting. The unspoken cruising & spark of homosexual lust in a closeted past is of a rarer breed in pop culture media, but not totally unique either. If nothing else, Patricia Highsmith, who wrote this movie’s source material novel, also covered that territory in her work that eventually became Carol (and both adaptations feature Cate Blanchett!). Beneath its handsome, prestigey surface The Talented Mr. Ripley is essentially a genre film – a horny European-set crime thriller of a very particular type. Like with all great genre films, the exceptional achievements it manages to pull off are rooted in minor details & aesthetic choices, not in story or character dynamics. Seeing these particular young movie stars at their sexiest (Hoffman excluded) in gorgeous wealth-class locales is perhaps the most astonishing detail of all, as this is the kind of genre film that’s now relegated to small-budget indies & foreign pictures like Double Lover, The Duke of Burgundy, or Piercing in the 2010s. The other exciting quirks & details of the picture (like Dickie wielding “You can be quite boring” as the ultimate insult or Tom bludgeoning wealthy brats with tools of their own class – like boat ores & Grecian statues) can’t compete with that kind of bygone-era appeal. I can’t match the general enthusiasm for 1999 as the Best Movie Year Ever, but I was at the right age then (as many of the Millennial & Gen-X critics writing this stuff were) to have enough nostalgia for the era to make The Talented Mr. Ripley an incredibly sumptuous example of its genre. Well, that, and the gay stuff.

-Brandon Ledet

Cabaret (1972)

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It’s incredible how effective Bob Fosse’s 1972 adaptation of the Broadway stage musical Cabaret still felt to me on a delayed introductory viewing after years of feeling over-exposed to its basic elements. The lush sets & performative androgyny of its stage performances are a tamer, Hollywood-flavored version of the same acts I’ve seen play out at New Orleans cabarets like One Eyed Jacks & The AllWays Lounge for years. Liza Minnelli’s central performance as the lovable Manic Pixie Dream Bawd extraordinaire Sally Bowles might, unfathomably, be the first time I’ve ever seen her in a proper film, but I’ve already spent plenty of time with her persona in television clips, audio recordings, and local drag impersonations. Most notably, I had seen the 1993 filmed-for-television, Sam Mendes-directed adaptation of the same stage play several times before, as it had been singled out to me as the ultimate version of the source material available (mostly thanks to Alan Cumming’s definitive performance as the menacingly horny emcee). All this pre-exposure to Cabaret’s general milieu had prepared me to feel jaded & underwhelmed by Fosse’s Oscars-sweeping, Hollywoodized take on the material, but that wasn’t my experience at all. In the earliest sequences of the picture I was totally drunk on the pansexual bacchanal on display, and by the end I genuinely felt sick to my stomach, which I mean as a huge compliment. Fosse did not clean this property up for mass appeal. If anything, he found a way to make an already powerful substance even more dangerously potent by emphasizing the tools & tones of cinema to justify the act of adapting it in the first place. This is a great film in its own right, regardless of the virtues of any other form its story has taken since it was first published in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, the Broadway play included.

Fosse’s fame as a dancer & a stage choreographer had me expecting a version of Cabaret somewhat close to the Mendes broadcast. Wide, static shots that value choreographed dance over camera movement & editing trickery are the norm for this kind of adaptation; at least, they were in an earlier era when Old Hollywood would regularly churn out big-budget crowd-pleasing musicals in an almost vaudevillian tradition. The 1972 Cabaret is much more aggressively cinematic than what that tradition prepares you for. Quick cuts of intricately arranged bodies captured in sweaty, leering closeups immediately excite the audience in the film’s earliest stage performances, completely blowing open the possibilities of what a stage musical can look like with the camera roaming around, under, and behind the dancers who’d normally only be viewed from a safe, fixed distance. Fosse directs the hell out of these performances, using harsh backlighting & grotesque closeups of audience reactions to completely disorient the audience into a shared drunkenness with the Berliners frequenting its central club. Gradually, though, the party sours and the cabaret performances become less energetic & less frequent as the lives of the performers and the politics of the world outside the club sink into fascism & despair. As much as this is the personal story of Sally Bowles and her latest drama-filled love affair, it’s in a larger sense the story of a sexually, morally liberal Berlin that’s lost over the course of the movie. It isn’t until we fully return to the immersive, camera-on-the-stage performances of the Kit Kat Klub in the film’s final moments that we realize just how much has changed over the course of the film and just how devastating that loss is. It’s a harsh blow to the gut, especially in how reminiscent that quiet decline into fascism is to the world outside our own pleasure-dome bubbles in the 2010s.

Cabaret builds much of its in-the-moment drama around two central romantic affairs – one in which Sally Bowles finds herself navigating a bisexual love triangle with her roommate & a financial benefactor who’s quietly bedding them both, and one in which a young Jewish couple perilously navigate the heavily policed class lines that divide them. There is some genuinely upsetting, heartfelt melodrama shared between these four friends, particularly in Bowles’s existential crisis as a freewheeling cabaret artist whose career is going nowhere. If nothing else, her self-lacerating breakdown in the line, “Maybe I’m not worth caring about, maybe I’m nothing,” is pure heartbreak. Still, the real substance of the movie is in how a larger, political drama plays out in the background, largely unnoticed by these self-absorbed libertine artists & intellectuals. Set in a 1930s Berlin, the film quietly tracks the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. At first, its members are treated as fringe lunatic bullies who aren’t welcome in the Kit Kat or any other club around Berlin, ostracized for their hateful hooliganism. By the end, the lewd, amoral performers of the Kit Kat are performing for an audience comprised entirely of Nazi scum. The war for who defines the spirit of Berlin was lost just under their noses as they minimized the Nazi threat as an ugly fad and continued about their personal dramas, unaware of the seriousness of the party’s rise to power. There’s a quiet menace to the way Swastikas become incrementally more ubiquitous as the film goes on, a gradual temperature change that Fosse expertly handles to the point where it doesn’t really hit you until you’re already boiling alive. Even being familiar with Mendes’s version of the play and knowing exactly where the movie was going, I still felt physically ill by the film’s final scenes. It’s effectively handled on a technical level but also just feels true to how Nazi ideology is currently on the rise in American politics as well. We may already be past the point where they’re just fringe hooligans who can be ignored as we go about our daily business, deliberately unaware.

This direct correlation with current events is not some unintended happenstance either. As much as the film carries a spiritual reverence for the sexual hedonism & defiant artistry of pre-War Berlin, it’s also very much a product of its own time. A few 70s-specific blouses & mirrored “disco” balls (which, admittedly, had been nightclub fixtures for decades) loudly barge their way into the production design, drawing attention to the way hippie counterculture had already been pulling aesthetic influence from the pre-War era. If the Kit Kat Klub performances were just a tad grimier (and far less artfully documented) you could almost pass them off as footage of San Francisco bohemian weirdos like The Cockettes or contemporary proto-punk glam acts like The New York Dolls or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The sickening feeling I caught from Cabaret was likely just as potent in the early 70s, which had its own gradual rise in Conservative fascism to combat in the era’s anti-War, Free Love protests. In a best-case-scenario where our current bout with Nazi ideology is stomped out before it gains any more momentum, there will still likely be a quiet fascist contingent to keep at bay as the most vulnerable among us simply try to live fulfilling lives without having to constantly fight off oppressive bullies. In that way, the themes of this film are just as evergreen as the excitement of its stage musical cinematography, the drunkenness of its rapid-fire editing, and the sartorial pleasures of its sparkle-crotch tap costumes. That might not be good news for the world at large, but it speaks well to Cabaret’s value as a feature film adaptation, a work that’s apparently remarkably effective no matter how familiar you are with its source material or its real-world thematic substance.

-Brandon Ledet