reviews

The Children (2008)

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Gathering with family & friends over the Holiday Season is both a blessing and a burden. It’s heartwarming to reconnect with long-separated loved ones, huddled up in a shared warm space, sheltered from the bitter cold just outside the house. Family can also grate your nerves after an extended period locked in that domestic prison, especially with enough young children running around, spreading germs and chaos at top volume. Kids can be cute, but they’re also a nuisance & a terror to anyone who’s looking to have a quiet moment of relief from familial stress. The 2009 British horror cheapie The Children understands that terror deep in its bones and builds its entire story around the evil & the chaos screaming children bring into the already stressful environment of a holiday get-together. It’s not one of the most tastefully considered or slickly produced Christmas-set horror films I’ve ever seen, but it does capture that exact kind of domestic, familial terror better than almost any film I can name, save maybe for The Babadook.

Two adult siblings gather their families together for a Christmastime reunion. The adults drink cocktails & gab downstairs while their children play with a mess of toys in the bedroom. One moody teen finds herself caught between those two realms. Bitterness over petty drama involving financial decisions, parenting techniques, and so on make for a partially tense affair, but the adults do an admirable job of putting on a calm face in an uncomfortable situation . . . until the children get involved. For unexplained, seemingly supernatural reasons the kids upstairs become physically & mentally ill in a way that makes them murderous monsters. Using whimpers of “Mommy” &”Daddy” and loud bursts of playtime chaos as a distraction, the children start killing off their parents & other adult relatives one by one in brutal mutilations they either frame as accidents or the doings of the unruly teen. The Children poses its titular tykes as bacteria-filled Petri dishes of pure evil, a chaotic force of Nature that breaks down familial, Christmastime decorum into a violent mess. By the time their victims can decide if they’re even acting strangely or if they’re just “testing boundaries” the way all children tend to do, it’s already far too late.

Stylistically, The Children attempts to accomplish a lot with very few resources to back up its ambitions. Its sets & production values are limited, but it does what it can with quick cut montage edits, weirdo children’s toy sculptures, microbial Nature footage, and practical effects gore to terrorize its audience. Its children-as-monsters premise isn’t exactly a one of a kind in the horror genre; similar ground has been covered in works as wide-ranging as 1956’s The Bad Seed and 2015’s Cooties. It’s the specificity of the Christmas setting, where adults are bottled up in a cesspool of familial stress and the chaos of children whining or at play only adds to the real life terrors that surround them, that makes The Children such a uniquely effective picture. Its slick editing & brutal gotta are what allows it to succeed as a dirt cheap horror production, but the universally recognizable stress of trying to hold your shit together in the face of children-at-play chaos is what makes it special, especially as a Holiday Season genre entry.

-Brandon Ledet

The Book of Henry (2017)

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If you ask around for recommendations on the best “bad” movies of 2017, you’re likely to see the title The Book of Henry listed just as often as more obvious (and, honestly, more satisfying) selections like Power Rangers & Monster Trucks. What’s surprising about that is The Book of Henry doesn’t feature the grotesque creatures, cartoonishly eccentric performances, and shoddy filmmaking craft that usually makes a good “bad” movie fun. In fact, on the surface it appears to be a whimsical melodrama about a precocious child’s struggles in an adult world. There’s nothing especially gaudy about its filmmaking craft; if it weren’t for the story it tells you could easily mistake it for a mediocre children’s film. There’s even a cast of familiar, always-welcome faces that should assure the audience that the story it tells is to be taken in good faith: Naomi Watts, Lee Pace, Sarah Silverman, Bobby Moynihan, an original song by Stevie Nicks, etc. The Book of Henry is insanely, incomprehensibly bad, though. It’s so bad, in fact, it completely derailed the career of Safety Not Guaranteed & Jurassic World hotshot Colin Trevorrow, who was on track to directing a Star Wars film before the intensely negative critical reaction to The Book of Henry (presumably) bounced him off the project. The important thing, though, is that The Book of Henry is bad enough to be a fun watch. It really is one of the more rewardingly bizarre cinematic offerings of the year, even if its appeal is the misguided lunacy of its basic premise.

Naomi Watts stars as the world’s most ineffectual mother. Left alone to raise two boys in the absence of their deadbeat father, she essentially has the emotional & intellectual maturity of a teenager: she works a low-level job as a waitress at an ice cream parlor (?) and wastes most of her free time playing video games while her oldest, smartest son Henry (IT’s Jaeden Lieberher) runs the household and raises her younger, much less special son (Room’s Jacob Tremblay). Armed with a level of over-written precociousness we haven’t seen onscreen since Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, the 12-year-old Henry is an amateur inventor & stock market genius, a burdened talent whom too many people rely on to function as adults. As much pressure as all the adults in Henry’s life put on him to solve their grown-up problems, they paradoxically insist that he not interfere when he witnesses acts of domestic violence, a mental conflict that weighs on him so heavily it gives him a deadly brain tumor that takes his life halfway into the film. Here’s where the children’s film tone of The Book of Henry gets really weird. Henry continues to run his clueless mother’s life from beyond the grave, leaving behind notebooks, letters to her boss, forged legal documents, and audience-of-one podcasts planning every detail of her life, lest she waste it getting drunk & playing video games. Featured heavily among these detailed instructions is an assassination plot to murder the family’s next-door neighbor, a brutish police commissioner Henry has not been able to convince the other adults in his life is sexually assaulting his stepdaughter (Maddie Ziegler, of Sia music video fame). The whole thing culminates in Naomi Watts going along with these assassination instructions while her youngest, most alive son participates in a middle school talent show.  The two events tonally clash in an insane crescendo as the audience is asked, in bad taste, to alternate back & forth from alphabet burping to murder to break dancing to murder to magic tricks and back to murder again.

For me, The Book of Henry’s appeal as an unintended camp pleasure is entirely due to the unfathomably poor writing behind Naomi Watt’s mother figure. Her complete deferment to her 12-year-old son for every single decision is comically bizarre. In the film’s funniest moment she’s visibly frustrated that she can’t ask him for permission to sign medical documents because he’s in the middle of having a seizure. The ease in which she slips into following his post mortem instructions, including the proposed murder plot, is awe-inspiringly bizarre. Early in the process, she puts her foot down in a stern, parental line reading of “We are not murdering the Police Commissioner and that is final,” but Henry’s conversational instructions walk her through her doubts and she follows his deadly plan anyway. Admittedly, she’s not the only adult in the Henryverse who treats him like he’s triple his age; Sarah Silverman’s alcoholic waitress even makes good on a long-running flirtation with Henry (!) by kissing him sensually on his death bed (!!) and then lingering long enough for him to get a good look at her tits (!!!). The mother’s narrative trajectory of gradually figuring out that maybe she shouldn’t get all of her life advice from a precocious 12-year-old, not to mention a dead precocious 12 year old, is treated like a grand scale life lesson we all must learn in due time, when it’s something that’s already obvious from the outset. It’s also a scenario that only exists in this ludicrous screenplay anyway. Naomi Watts is the most ridiculously mishandled adult female character I can remember seeing since Bryce Dallas Howard’s starring role in Trevorrow’s Jurassic World, another performance I’d place firmly in the so-bad-it’s-good camp.

If nothing else, The Book of Henry is solid proof that the clash of adult themes & childlike whimsy you see in the films of twee-labeled directors like Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze is not as easy to pull off convincingly as it may appear. Thankfully, the movie never explicitly depicts the domestic sexual abuse that sparks its assassination plot, but it’s still difficult to reconcile all of its whimsical Rube Goldberg contraptions & ukulele lullabies with the fact that it’s a heartfelt melodrama about brain tumors & child rape. The way other adults finally come to believe Henry about the abuse he’s witnessed through the all-important talent show climax is just as hilariously baffling as any of Naomi Watts’s embarrassments as an ill-conceived matriarch character. The Book of Henry concludes at its most ludicrous point, leaving you in stunned disbelief that something so blissfully inane made it from page to screen, which makes it understandable why it’s being bandied about as one of the better high camp pleasures of the year. The only question now is how Colin Trevorrow is going to break himself out of director jail now that The Book of Henry has (rightfully) destroyed his path to Star Wars infamy; I’m actually super curious to see what he does next.

-Brandon Ledet

Princess Cyd (2017)

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There’s almost an entire subgenre of thrillers & acidic dramas specifically about intense female relationships that become dangerously strained in constrictive environments. Titles like Persona, Queen of Earth, and Always Shine lock their female leads alone in a house and draw increasing tension & even supernatural dread out of the various ways they clash under the pressure. Whether or not intentionally, the recent coming of age indie drama Princess Cyd completely subverts the typical trajectory of these pictures. At the start of the film, two female leads, unsure what to make of each other, bristle at perceived slights that make their summer spent alone in a house together unnecessarily tense & contentious. Instead of that tension ramping up to a violent, chaotic blowup, however, Princess Cyd slips further into empathy, love, and mutual understanding as that relationship develops. Its earliest moments are its most on-edge, with the relationship at its center thawing in the summertime sunshine.

The titular Cyd is a survivor of childhood tragedy, desperate to spend her last summer before college away from her eternally depressed father. This leads to her spending a few weeks with her estranged aunt, a hippie dippy novelist who writes mostly about Spiritualist self-discovery. Their early conversations start cordial, with the camera positioned at a great distance, slowly moving closer & tightening the frame as passive aggressive slights add unexpected tension to their getting-to-know-you chit chat. The aunt desperately wants the teen to think she’s cool, despite ample evidence to the contrary (mostly, the fragility of her self-confidence). As with all teens, Cyd has no idea what she wants, but carries enough enthusiastic curiosity in her attitude to drive herself towards figuring it out ASAP, even if she hurts feelings along the way. The clashes between aunt & niece are mostly over personal questions of Spirituality (the teen’s reference to Spiritualism as “fantasy” is taken as a direct insult) & sexuality (one is discovering a previously undetected capacity for bisexual desire; the other hasn’t considered having sex in years). These personal barriers eventually break down, though, and the heart of the film is in watching them mutually warm to one another.

Besides the unexpectedly sweet trajectory of its internal conflicts, Princess Cyd also finds ways to impress as a visual object. A dedication to sunlit, natural lighting affords the film an idyllic Garden of Eden glow that matches the warm, simple beauty of the story it tells. Often, its form & content work wonderfully in tandem, like in a shot where Cyd & her same-sex love interest approach the camera on a long stroll while getting acquainted, physically getting closer to the audience while they get socially get closer to one other. That kind of simple beauty in gradually blooming intimacy is a large part of what makes the film feel special & worthwhile. Princess Cyd tells a simple story of two estranged women becoming close over a couple isolated weeks spent together, but its lingering effect grows on you so gradually you don’t even realize how much you get out of the experience until well after it’s over. The coming of age, self-destructive aspect of the film as a narrative is pretty typical of that kind of effect (Lady Bird works a very similar magic on its audience, if nothing else). It’s much more foreign to the way tense, confined space female relationships typically develop (and eventually explode) onscreen, though, which makes it all the more uniquely rewarding as an isolated picture.

-Brandon Ledet

Coco (2017)

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Whenever reviewing modern CG-animated kids’ movies, I try to make a point of announcing up front that they’re never really my thing, Pixar properties included. I admit this as a way of softening, if not invalidating my opinion on the topic at hand (right before I say something unpopular). For instance, I didn’t even have the energy to properly review Moana, a movie seemingly everyone loves but I had no business watching, so I just wrote an article detailing the few isolated things I appreciated about it instead. My status as a Pixar heretic should probably exclude me from reviewing the Día de los Muertos adventure epic Coco as well, but I was attracted to the film by its visual allure and overwhelming critical praise anyway. Oddly, my general disappointment with Coco wasn’t tied to its surface level Pixar-ness, though. I was impressed with the film as a vibrantly colorful visual piece, something I don’t typically experience with CG animation. It was also refreshing to see Pixar move past its usual “What if toys/cars/feelings/dinosaurs could talk?” creative rut to walk kids through Mexican cultural immersion and healthy attitudes about the inevitability of death. What bothered me about the film was more to do with how it functions as a message piece, a morality tale with a concrete lesson for kids to learn: that loyalty to your family is more important than your own mental or emotional health. Fuck that.

Miguel is a young Mexican boy who dreams of one day becoming a musician, despite his family’s ancestral ban on all music in his household. Over the course of the film, Miguel goes on a transdimensional journey to the ghost-populated Land of the Dead, thanks to the bridge between worlds offered by annual Día de los Muertos rituals, to learn that his “selfish” dream of pursuing art is destructive to the values of community & tradition that guide his life. This “Nothing is more important that Family” life lesson is softened when his elders & ancestors eventually buckle to accept how much music means to him, but that change of heart only occurs once they personally see value in the art themselves. If you apply that same dynamic to something that doesn’t universally affect people the way music does (for instance, if Miguel had discovered a sexual orientation or gender identity they didn’t approve of), the message is much more clearly toxic. “The only family in Mexico who doesn’t love music” is cruelly dismissive, even outright abusive to Miguel, driving him to hide his passion in cramped attic spaces & smashing his only guitar in front of him before he even gets to fully explain himself. Teaching kids to feel obligated to put up with that kind of abuse merely because of biological bonds just in case your bullies might one day changer their minds is a grotesque life lesson. There’s nothing wrong with the message that community & family are more important than the individual self, especially since in this case the lesson is embedded in the culture depicted, but you should also leave it open for kids to know that their community is optional and cruelty isn’t okay just because you’re related to your abusers.

My unwillingness to forgive Miguel’s elders & long-dead ancestors aside, I did appreciate the way his adventures in The Land of the Dead offered a colorful, but also horrific version of a modern kids’ movie. Most of the jokes landed flat with me and I wish the film were screened in Spanish instead of English, but I still appreciated its family-friendly, culturally-specific immersion in a world of friendly ghosts & skeletons. You can find that same kind of kid-friendly adventure epic that healthily explores the topic of death & memory in Kubo & the Two Strings, though, with the bonus of also exploring how families can be complicated & even destructive instead of drawing a hard line that says you should always bend to their will. I’d be a liar if I said individual family-dynamic moments didn’t pull my heartstrings by the film’s ending, but I was still largely negative on Coco as an overall messaging piece. As soon as Miguel’s first guitar was smashed in front of his crying face, he should have boarded on a bus out of town to find a new, less cruel community elsewhere. The clear dichotomy the movie establishes between either a) the virtue of staying with your family no matter how shitty they are to you or b) “selfishly” branching out on your own to find a more hospitable environment sat with me in the wrong way. It was a thematic hurdle that all the pretty colors, goofy skeletons, and super cute canine sidekicks in the world couldn’t help me clear.

-Brandon Ledet

Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017)

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“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. It’s the only way to become what you’re meant to be.”

In the opening scene to the critical & commercial bomb Waterworld, we’re introduced to Kevin Costner’s dystopia-navigating action hero by learning two unique facts about him: 1) he has gills that allow him to breathe underwater and 2) he drinks his own piss. This is such an off-putting introduction to someone who’s supposed to be coded as a heroic badass that the audience has very little wiggle room to ever get entirely past it; critic Nathan Rabin even refers to Costner’s protagonist as a “pee-drinking man-fish” for the entirety of his My Year of Flops review of the film. Rian Johnson’s entry into the Star Wars canon, The Last Jedi, is even more grotesque in the way it tears down Luke Skywalker in his own introduction, despite him being the de facto hero of the series going as far back as A New Hope four decades ago. An aged, surly Luke Skywalker drinks something much, much worse than his own piss in one of his earliest moments onscreen in The Last Jedi. When offered the lightsaber Rey extends to him in the final aerial shot of the film’s predecessor, The Force Awakens, Luke casually tosses the sacred thing over his shoulder and over the side of a cliff, flippantly disregarding the emotional payoff of the lore J.J. Abrams built up for Johnson to deliver on. The rest of the canon goes over the cliff with it, with pre-established dichotomies of Good & Evil, boundaries on the limits of the space-magic practice of The Force, and even basic questions of tone & intent being burnt to the ground so that new seeds can sprout from the ashes. Luke’s disgusting beverage of choice and general apathy for the history & lore of the Jedi is emblematic of The Last Jedi’s willingness to let traditional Star Wars themes & narrative threads die so the series can begin anew. It’s an often awkward, even outright goofy kind of blasphemy, but it’s a necessary evil for moving the franchise forward instead of merely echoing the past.

Ill-conceived holiday specials. made-for-TV Ewok movies, and near-universally loathed prequels aside, The Last Jedi is the first proper Star Wars film that’s not about stopping the construction or deployment of the planet-destroying spaceship The Death Star. You’d think that the same fans who blasted Abrams’s The Force Awakens for supposedly copycatting (or, in my opinion, improving through revision) the first film in the series, A New Hope, would appreciate that Rian Johnson has steered Star Wars away from telling that same tired story yet again. That has not been the case. There has been a wide gulf between critic & audience scores on aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes & Metacritic in how The Last Jedi is being received. Many disgruntled superfans of the series are stressing out over the way Johnson has jumbled & set aflame their *shudder* fan theories, which extend from speculation on everything from what the film’s title might mean to who Rey, the new hero of the franchise, might be sired by to what purpose Porgs, adorable toy-selling space-chickens, might serve in the larger scope of Star Wars lore. Johnson is not only dismissive of these extratextual extrapolations on where the series is going; he also completely dismisses the many far, faraway places the series has already been. It’s difficult to tell that from the film’s basic plot, though, even if it is Death Star-free. The Last Jedi is a fairly by-the-books Star Wars story bifurcated between Rey & Luke debating whether the practice of Jedi space-magic is worth reviving (much to Kylo Ren’s watching-from-afar chagrin) and The Resistance’s numbers dwindling in the meantime as they flee from the crushing space-Nazi fascism of the First Order (despite the efforts of familiar faces like Poe, Finn, Leia, BB-8, Laura Dern, etc.). I don’t believe most of The Last Jedi’s divisiveness is a response to the film’s narrative choices (though I wouldn’t put it past the series’ die-hard fans to complain about anything), but rather a question of tone & respect for series-spanning lore.

Star Wars has always had a jokey flippancy built into its DNA (just look to fan-favorite Han Solo for examples); its humor is a defense mechanism meant to forgive or ease its more off-putting sci-fi nerdery. The Last Jedi is an outlier in that dynamic only in the way it alters the series’ sense of humor for modern sensibilities. The jokes in George Lucas’s original trilogy were geared for the Baby Boomer generation, the same kids who would have grown up on the space opera radio serials (and subsequent televisions shows) Star Wars regenerated nostalgia for. It’s a comedy style that’s only grown corny with time, drifting further away from modern sensibilities with each new trilogy cycle. The Last Jedi ditches the Baby Boomer humor to appeal to Millennials who have grown up on Simpsons snark & Adult Swim anti-humor. The film opens with a prank call. Luke Skywalker dismissively refers to lightsabers as “laser swords.” The toy-selling cuteness of the space-chicken Porgs is a constant visual gag, with even a few of the critters being prepared as meals and generally treated as unwanted pests. The open secret, though, is that Star Wars has always been awkwardly goofy, full of absurdist creatures worthy of derisive laughter, and loose with consistent logic in its space-wizardry. It’s only become normalized over time through decades-long cultural exposure. As gross as Luke Skywalker’s beverage of choice is in this film, it’s no goofier or out of step with the series at large than a Frank Oz-voiced Yoda puppet or a space-tavern full of bipedal sea creatures playing jizz music. Rian Johnson’s film is being torn apart by life-long fans of Star Wars for making a series they’ve grown up mythologizing feel nerdily weird & awkward again: something it’s always been, but they were once too young to see. Old-timers are likely feeling alienated by the modern humor that shapes its tone, but I’m totally okay with abandoning past devotees of the franchise to make the environment more hospitable for new ones.

Brushing aside the more hateful, inflammatory complaints about women & PoC being afforded the blockbuster spotlight for once, most negative reactions to The Last Jedi are totally understandable. It’s not difficult to see how a film about literally burning sacred texts & starting from scratch could alienate some old-timers. Honestly, I’m not even sure the film’s absurdist Millennial humor & blasphemous revision of the Jedi as a religious practice/force for Good are 100% successful myself. I was much more emotionally moved by the sincere mythmaking & familiar, but consistent craft of The Force Awakens than I was impressed with the flippant absurdity of The Last Jedi. The Last Jedi may have been eccentric enough to alienate lore-serious Star Wars nerds, but it still doesn’t quite reach the over-the-top lunacy of something like Okja or Fury Road. There are moments when I could swear Brigsby Bear’s Kyle Mooney secretly directed the picture under a pseudonym, even though the evidence is stacked against me, but it’s ultimately too long & too well-behaved to satisfy as an absurdist masterpiece. Instead, the absurdism comes in flashes, just flavoring the original space opera recipe enough to establish a freshly goofy tone as a replacement for the staler goofy one it started with. Indignation over blasphemy to the lore of the Jedi and The Force is slightly more justified than resisting the film’s updated sense of humor, but when the now-established rules of space-wizardry were first introduced in the original franchise they likely seem just as absurd & arbitrary. In a way, dedicated fans deserve to be trolled for thinking that they’ve firmly grasped the rules & trajectory of the franchise enough that they can map out the exact stories of future installments based only on titles, advertisements, and interview clips.

Rian Johnson disrespectfully throws all fan theories in the trash, along with the consistency in lore that made them possible in the first place. It may sting the ego to discover you can no longer “figure out” the future of a franchise you’ve spent your whole life obsessively studying as if it were a riddle with a concrete answer, not a fluid work of art. However, by shaking up the rules & tones of what’s come before, Johnson has created so much more space for possibility in the future, for new & exciting things to take us by surprise instead of following the trajectory of set-in-stone texts. He’s made Star Wars freshly funny, unpredictable, and awkwardly nerdy again, when it was in clear danger of becoming repetitive, by-the-books blockbuster filmmaking routine instead. It’s an admirable feat, even if not an entirely successful one, and yes, even if it forced me to equate Luke Skywalker to a pee-drinking man-fish.

-Brandon Ledet

The Shape of Water (2017)

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Supposedly, Guillermo del Toro saw The Creature from the Black Lagoon as a child and was disappointed that, at the film’s conclusion, the titular creature (also called Gill Man) was killed in a hail of bullets. This isn’t such an unusual reaction to have, given that the film borrowed some rhetorical resonance from the “Beauty and the Beast” archetypes, and hoping that the film would follow through on that emotional  thread and show the monster and his beloved achieving a kind of happily ever after isn’t that unreasonable. He sought out to correct that perceived mistake, and although it may have taken some time, he’s finally managed to put right what once went wrong with sci-fi/love story/1960s period piece The Shape of Water.

Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) is a lonely, mute night janitor working for Occam Aerospace Research Center in early sixties Baltimore. She is but one face in a multitude of such women, which also includes her talkative friend Delilah (Octavia Spencer), who fills the silence between the two women with stories about her home life with Bruce, the husband who causes her no end of old-school domestic strife comedy. Elisa’s is a life of precision that’s just a step out of sync with the rest of the world: instead of rising in the morning, she wakes at precisely the same time each night after the sun has set and makes the same egg-heavy breakfast meals day after day (or, rather, night after night). She also looks after her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), a gay man in his late fifties, whose intricate and perfect illustrations for advertisements have made him an unemployed dinosaur in the time of the rise of photo ads.

Elisa and Giles share a love of the divas of old Hollywood with their elaborate dance numbers and heightened emotions, which echoes the void in both of their love lives. Elisa has never fallen for anyone, and any love that may have touched Giles in his youth has long since slipped into the abyss of time. This doesn’t stop him from developing a schoolboy crush on the counter operator of a franchise pie restaurant (Morgan Kelly), but Elisa’s loneliness seems to have come to an end when Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) arrives at Occam with the “Asset” (Doug Jones), a being that is, for lack of a better term, a fishman. Elisa meets this strange creature when it takes a bite out of Strickland’s left hand and she and Delilah are called upon to mop up the blood. The two develop a bond over music and their mutual inability to express themselves verbally, until the Army orders the Asset vivisected for science. Elisa and her compatriots (along with sympathetic scientist–and secret Russian spy–Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, played by Michael Stuhlbarg) must find a way to save the fishman from the real monsters.

I’m a big fan of del Toro’s, as is likely evident from the fact that two of his films, Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth, were my favorite horror films of their respective release years. He knows how to take a tired concept like European vampires or fairy tales and suffuse them with a new energy and vitality, even if he does so by looking backward through time. As such, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this isn’t exactly the most original of premises. A more dismissive reviewer or critic might call this a greatest hits compilation of plot threads from movies and TV shows like E.T. (both in the bonding between human and not, and the The government will cut you up!” angle), Hidden Figures (given that the facility is explicitly aerospace and features the presence of Spencer), Mad Men (in that both works hold a mirror up to the culture of the fifties/sixties as a reminder that to romanticize this time is to ignore many of the prevailing toxic attitudes of the time), and most heist films that you can name. That doesn’t make this film any less ambitious, however, nor does it negate the validity of the emotional reaction that the film evokes.

It’s not just the richness of the narrative text that’s laudable here, either, but the depth of the subtext as well, which even a casual del Toro viewed likely expects. I’ve been a fan of Richard Jenkins ever since his Six Feet Under days (even though it’s not one of his lines, my roommate and I quote Ruth Fischer’s “Your father is dead, and my pot roast is ruined” to each other every time one of us scorches something while cooking), and he tackles this role with a kind of giddy glee that fills the heart with warmth. There’s magic in his every moment on screen, even if his shallow adoration for the pie slinger comes across as a little rushed, narratively speaking, and there’s an understated desperation in his interactions with his former co-worker Bernard (Stewart Arnott). There’s enough of a hint that technological progress is not the only thing that cost Giles his position, and a nuanced tenderness to the dialogue between him and Bernard that hints that there may have been something between them in the past. It’s sweet and heartbreaking all at once.

Strickland is a villain in the vein of Pan’s Labyrinth‘s Captain Vidal: a terrifyingly familiar figure of fascistic adherence to a nationalistic, ethnocentric, exploitative, and phallocentric worldview. Whereas Vidal was the embodiment of Fascist Spain and its ideals, Strickland is the ideal embodiment of sixties-era Red Pill morality: a racist, self-possessed sexual predator empowered by his workplace superiority. Strickland is a man who professes Christian values out of the left side of his mouth while joking about cheating on his wife and threatening to sexually assault his underlings out of the right side. He mansplains the biblical origins of Delilah’s name to her while, for the sake of her job and perhaps her safety, she plays along with his assumptions of her ignorance. This is above and beyond his inhumane (and pointless) torture of the Asset, an intelligent being that he cannot recognize as sentient because of his own prejudices and assumptions about the world.

Shannon is fantastic here, as he brings real, discomfiting menace to his performance in much the same way that Sergi López did as Vidal, including the arrogance of unquestioning adherence to an ideal that privileges oneself at the expense of others. This underlines the importance of this mirroring of characters as a rhetorical strategy: although Pan’s Labyrinth wasn’t created with an American audience in mind, U.S. viewers could reject Vidal and his violence as being part of a different time and place, distancing themselves from his ideologies. Not so with Strickland, who lifts this veil of enforced rhetorical distance and highlights the fact that idealizing and period of the American past is nothing more than telling oneself a lie about history. It’s a powerful punch in the face of the fascist ideologies that are infiltrating our daily lives bit by bit to see such a horrible villain (admittedly/possibly a bit of a caricature, but with good reason) come undone and be overcome. It’s a further tonic to the soul to see him defeated by an alliance comprised of the “other”: a “commie,” a woman of color, a woman with a physical disability, and an older queer man.

I could be undermining that thesis by ending this review here without highlighting or praising Hawkins or Spencer’s performances, but we’re over 1200 words already, and you should stop wasting time reading this and just go see the film. Let it lift your spirit as it lifted mine.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Most Beautiful Island (2017)

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The intensity of your reaction to the concluding minutes of the indie thriller Most Beautiful Island is likely to determine much of your overall opinion of the film. Most Beautiful Island is less of a slow burn art piece than it is a quiet character study that incrementally builds tension as it reaches for a last minute payoff. It’s a relatively short film, but it’s still one that requires patience, as the release of that tension relies heavily on last minute reveals & the mystery of what, exactly, awaits the audience there. Personally, I enjoyed the movie overall but found the mystery of what horrors await at the conclusion to be a little unsatisfying, if not an outright disappointment. There’s a level of intensity that underlines the everyday struggles of the film’s protagonist, an undocumented immigrant woman struggling to find even medial labor on the NYC job market, that I couldn’t quite connect with in the supposedly shocking conclusion to her story. I’d normally praise a movie for filtering these political themes of subjugation *& (lack of) cultural integration through a horror or a thriller premise, but in this case the genre film element waiting in the third act isn’t nearly as horrifying as the horrors of the real world they mirror.

Ana Asensia writes, directs, and stars in this debut thriller, which she introduces as being “mostly” based on true events. As an undocumented immigrant woman running from a recent familial trauma, her protagonist is incredibly vulnerable. Unable to find steady work because of her immigration status, she barely holds onto housing in a modest NYC apartment, fearing imminent homelessness despite holding several high stress, low pay jobs: babysitting, advertising fast food, participating in medical studies, etc. A friend in a similar economic rut offers an easy way out: a one-time gig modeling at a cocktail party, where she’ll make months’ wages over a single night, no sex work required. It’s too good to be true, of course, but the movie milks a lot of tension out what terrific exploitation could possibly be waiting for her at “The Party.” A labyrinth of cab rides, warehouses, and underground bunkers leads her to an art gallery space, where guests sip wine and consider which “models to select for their mysterious evil deeds. We wait, almost in real-time, for her to be selected, but for what? A human trafficking auction? An occultist ritual? A guillotine? The answer is unexpected, but also unsatisfying.

Even though I wasn’t nearly as invested in the answer to the mystery it posits as I was in the tension of its lead up, Most Beautiful Island still found surprising ways to chill my blood before it arrives at its dubious destination. Before it ramps up as a slice of life character study, the film opens searching for our protagonist in crowded NYC streets. From a distant, voyeuristic vantage point, the camera seeks out young women walking alone in anonymity, making our lead out to be just one vulnerable face among many (and setting up characters who will not reappear until The Party). Later, as she enjoys a bath in the apartment she cannot afford, a veritable plague of cockroaches spills from a hole in the plaster walls and the bugs frantically drown in her bath water. I swear there’s more tension in that opening act of voyeurism and the underwater HD roach photography than there is in the film’s disappointingly pedestrian conclusion, but since the majority of the runtime happens outside The Party it’s not necessarily a deal breaker. I’m not sure about what it says that the real life circumstances of an undocumented American immigrants are more horrifying than an extreme fictional metaphor for their exploitation, but Most Beautiful Island isn’t done any favors by starting off at its most intense, then tapering off.

-Brandon Ledet

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

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Is it possible to love every frame of a motion picture and still think it amounts to a bad movie? A Cure for Wellness is a visually stunning, go-for-broke slowburner that somehow estimates a Hammer Horror by way of The Matrix aesthetic and still fails to succeed as a complete, satisfactory picture. It’s impressive that a major studio production directed by a man best know for helming the exhaustingly empty swashbuckling blockbusters The Pirates of the Caribbean could possibly be this deeply strange & willing to delve into exploitative cruelty. The problems that plague other major Gore Verbinski projects persist here, however; A Cure for Wellness is too long, too dumb, and too disappointingly self-serious for how well crafted it is as a visual object. A filmmaker with this meticulously inventive of an eye should likely have much better taste when it comes to telling stories, instead of applying that craft to something so idiotically pointless at its best, genuinely evil at its worst.

Dane DeHaan echoes the same goofy Keanu Reeves impersonation he took to outer space in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets in his lead role as a laptop-addicted Business Prick. While climbing the corporate ladder at The Big Company (I honestly have no idea what his job details outside getting visibly frustrated with incongruous graphs on various computer screens), he is deployed on a mission to recover a member of the the board who has gone AWOL. This path leads him to a Swiss spa/health retreat, where the man he’s tasked to bring back to the Corporate World has checked himself in as an AWOL permanent patient. Like the commune in the back end of [safe], this sanitarium/cult is presented as a cure-all for the ills of modern living. “Diseases” like self-doubt & the “illusion of material success” are “cured” through sensory deprivation, “water therapy,” and mysterious droppers filled with special “vitamins,” leaving all patients essentially lobotomized & stuck in a limbo. The more times DeHaan’s Business Prick upstart declares “I am not a patient!” as he struggles to complete his intended mission, the further he loses himself in the daily rituals of the spa cult, discovering long-buried secrets of incest, murder, brainwashing, collusion with the law, and immortality-seeking science experiments along the way. By the time castle fires & monstrous ancestors are introduced in the mix, the film could easily pass for a Hammer production or an entry in The Corman-Poe Cycle (if it were half as long and half as dumb).

The most immediately apparent problem in A Cure for Wellness is its gleeful cruelty in its approach to sexual assault. This starts very early with an out of nowhere racist prison rape joke and culminates in a scene involving an underage girl that goes on way longer than necessary to gets its point across, easily slipping into exploitative cruelty. It’s a mean streak that has little, if anything, to do with the film’s core themes and likely should have been edited into oblivion, but it’s also a blatant flaw that doesn’t require much deliberation. What really drags the film down is unwieldy and underdeveloped it feels for a movie that’s nearly three hours long.

A Cure for Wellness‘s greatest strength is its absurdity as an overwhelming, bat shit crazy genre picture. Marrying high production values to a low trash premise that doesn’t deserve it, the film is loaded with weirdo imagery of slithering eels, steam punk machinery, medicine bottles, eels, ballerina figurines, soft naked flesh, eels, RoboCop action figures, and even more eels, sometimes all rapidly flashing on the screen in dream sequence montage. It just doesn’t contain enough of those visual pleasures to justify the massive weight of its runtime. In some respects, the weirdest choice the movie makes is withholding the answers to mysteries that are immediately apparent to the audience for several scenes, then treating their reveals like a big deal no one saw coming. Lies, accidents, past traumas, and untold motivations are kept under wraps in see-through gauze, essentially treading water instead of making the movie shorter or pulling the trigger immediately to make room for more oddities. For instance, why make a huge deal out of the mystery of what’s making DeHaan’s toilet tank rattle for three or four scenes if the reveal is only going to be that it was eels all along? We immediately knew it was eels. Everything in the film is brimming with eels. Delaying that reveal does not build tension; it just wastes time.

The ideal version of A Cure for Wellness is probably about an hour shorter and directed by Guillermo del Toro. On some level, I do very much appreciate the taste for excess that Verbinski brings to the project, especially when it comes to his eye for over-the-top visuals. Framing shots from the POVs of magnifying glasses, fish bowls, and taxidermy eyeballs, the film is about as tastefully overachieving as Michael Bay’s Armageddon and I love that kind of go-for-broke excess in my genre films. The eel imagery is also impressively chilling, even if employed often & never thematically justified. Equipped with that same imagery, I’d trust del Toro to deliver a much more satisfying narrative, though. Not only would the sexual assault mean streak lightly be softened or diminished, but there’s a fairy realm element to the Swiss spa (especially in how you’re not supposed to drink the water) I could see being better explored in his hands. Verbinski’s direction works very well when setting up individual scares gags (especially ones involving eels & dentistry), but his unwieldy, unending, thematically thin blockbuster approach to the Pirates movies has bled over here in a way that poisons what makes the movie enjoyable. A Cure for Wellness is an impressive visual achievement for sure, but not impressive enough to justify the enormity of its runtime or the exploitative cruelty of its ultimate destination. The resulting experience is endlessly frustrating, as it could easily be a much better picture with the right creative push, either towards brevity, away from sexual assault exploitation, or into another director’s hands entirely.

-Brandon Ledet

Blood Bath (1966)

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As a producer, Roger Corman’s tireless mission to miraculously make money out of scraps of garbage is legendary. He’d often reuse sequences from previous productions, purchase foreign films for American re-edits, rip off his own intellectual properties for self-cannibalized premises, and all other kinds of scrappy cinematic recycling imaginable just to sell a cheap genre picture for a tidy profit. I can’t argue that the 1966 Corman production Blood Bath is the pinnacle result of this kind of absurd, behind the scenes pragmatism gone mad, but it does deserve credit for gathering all of Corman’s penny-pinching schemes into a single project. Corman initially co-produced the Yugoslavian noir picture Operation: Titan with plans to reissue it as an American release. He then hired notable schlockmeister Jack Hill to direct new scenes to recontextualize the film for an American audience, which Hill did by transforming it into an oddly self-serious rip-off of the classic Corman comedy Bucket of Blood, a campy satire of beatniks & artist types. Unsatisfied with Hill’s treatment, titled Portrait in Terror, Corman then hired a third director, The Velvet Vampire’s Stephanie Rothman, who added an entirely new A-plot about a shapeshifting vampire to the mix. You’d think this cocktail of genres & premises would lead to an incoherent mess, which might partially be true, but the final version of Blood Bath Stephanie Rothman delivered is charming in the way that it’s blissfully insane. Corman threw every one of his tactics on how to cheaply scrap together a picture at the screen in a single go and the result is just as fascinating & amusing as it is creatively compromised.

The similarities between Blood Bath & Bucket of Blood’s basic plots are undeniable. A community of comically pretentious visual artists are disturbed when models form their community are reported dead or missing, then appear in the work of a colleague. Hill’s contribution to the film seems largely to be the Bucket of Blood-style humor of this arts scene drama, especially when the artists experiment with new processes for applying paint to canvas, such as shooting it out of a gun or directly applying it via a model’s face. According to Hill, Rothman “ruined” the picture with her vampirirc contribution, which shifts the work into a much more serious, psychedelic tone. If anything, she made it interesting & distinct, steering it away from a straight Bucket of Blood retread. Instead of the awkward bus boy Dick Miller plays in Bucket of Blood, Rothman crafts a villain that goes through Jekyll & Hyde transformations from passionate artist to centuries-old vampire with insatiable appetite. She maintains some of Hill’s humor, even including sequences that are essentially beach blanket parties with bikini babes. This humor is made to clash with a more serious, surreal tone, however, as her vampire/painter struggles with a classic Madonna-whore complex. He is romantically drawn to beautiful women, but transforms into a bloodthirsty monster whenever they make a pass at him, a dynamic that gives the movie a thematic point of view on top of a ridiculously fractured premise. I’m in love with the insane collage that emerges in the final draft of Blood Bath and that credit goes just as much to Rothman’s eye as it does to Corman’s machinations as a producer.

You’ll find very few films that can deliver this much movie in such a short amount of time. At just 60 minutes in length, Blood Bath is filled to the brim with seemingly incongruous, but oddly beautiful sequences: an underwater vampire kill, a rip-off of the carousel sequence from Strangers on a Train, surrealist scenes of women taunting the camera/killer from inside paintings & dreamlike desertscapes, interpretive dance, noir foot chases worthy of The Third Man, etc. Rothman & Corman’s mismatched film collage has no business even being watchable, much less as oddly fun & engaging as it feels as a “final” product (Corman later added several minutes of bikini-clad dancing to fill out more time for a TV-broadcast of the film). Jack Hill deserves some credit for lightening up the mood of the noir sequences with his own layer of beatnik-satirizing Bucket of Blood retreads, but it’s really Rothman’s surrealist eye & Corman’s insane production instincts that make Blood Bath so mesmerizing. Obviously, not all audiences are going to have a stomach for this kind of production-level incoherence, but I urge anyone interested in Corman’s weirdo decision making as a business man to give this picture an honest chance. Besides its easy-to-digest runtime and immediate appeal as an eccentric horror film, Blood Bath is also currently in the public to main and available to watch on Archive.org, so you really have no excuses to give this damned-from-conception Frankenfilm a chance.

-Brandon Ledet

Sacrilege (2017)

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We’re not the most harshly critical bunch over here at Swampflix, especially when it comes to cheaply-produced genre pictures. If you’re looking for a brutal evisceration of a micro budget indie horror like Sacrilege, we just don’t have it in our hearts. Still, I cannot give the film a hearty recommendation either. This Louisiana-produced VOD cheapie is difficult to get behind, even for the most forgiving of schlock junkies, but it’s not without its merits either. The level of care that went into staging its various jump scares & haunted house-style set pieces, as well as its various homages to classic titles from horror’s past is admirable, though not enough to compensate for the lack of care paid to its characters & plotting. The recent smash hit IT proved that exact dichotomy can be successful in an above-average film, but Sacrilege doesn’t have the same resources (namely time & money) to pull that trick off. What’s left, then, are a few decent horror spooks & gags that work well enough in isolation, but do little to salvage the picture at large. It’s honestly impressive that productions this cheap ever manage to accomplish more than that.

A group of (very unconvincing) college freshmen in their early 20s (?) find themselves on the wrong end of a demonic possession when the purchase a haunted music box from a yard sale. The ghost of a little girl who “lives” in the box torments their humble rental home by forcing each too-old-for-this-shit roommate to commit suicide one by one until they’re all dead or the curse is lifted, whichever comes first. There’s also an Insidious/The Conjuring-style paranormal investigative team that invades their space in an attempt to save the day, with mixed results. There isn’t enough gore or camp in Sacrilege to cover up the blemishes of its limited production values. This is wholly sincere digital schlock, not the winking live action cartoon of a WolfCop or Zombeavers. Because of that tonal restraint and the blatant deficiencies in authentic dialogue, human behavior can come across as amusingly odd in the film. Characters vocally reminding each other that they are college students after all or angrily insulting the very notion of yard sales at top volume convey the feeling of a horror script produced by a computer algorithm or a space alien. Still, Sacrilege manages to pack a fairly thin demonic possession premise with plenty of genre-specific hallmarks you’re not used to seeing in a single picture: vampire bites, creepy children, forced suicide, paranormal investigation, Catholic iconography, ghosts, exorcism, found footage, jump scares, and so on. The craft doesn’t often match the enthusiasm, but there’s a genuine love of horror necessary to assemble that kind of hodgepodge, a sentiment I appreciate.

There are two major studio horror releases from 2017 Sacrilege happens to superficially resemble: Wish Upon & Polaroid. I can’t fault the film for suffering the lower financial rung of a parallel-thinking happenstance, so my impulse is to blame the more expensive flicks for not applying their resources to a more distinctive idea. I also can’t really attack Sacrilege for its misleading cover art that promises the monstrous threat of demonic nuns who never appear or the awkwardness of its sub-professional dramatic performances; most of its faults seem like circumstances of its budget. Instead, I’ll say this: the parts of the movie where the effort feels focused & concentrated (namely the set pieces & scare gags) can often forgive the shortcomings of the much less intensely crafted dramatic & character-based beats. Drone shots & time elapse montage build tension released in moments where a bloody, demonic hand will reach out from within the evil music box to hover at the back of a character’s neck. Images in the dark are misinterpreted & reconfigured to throw off the audience’s sense of reality in the quiet lull before a jump scare. I don’t have it in me to tear down Sacrilege as viciously as the reception I’ve seen elsewhere online, because its (demonically possessed) heart is in the right place in that way. It’s just a shame these scare gags couldn’t be applied to a better-written, better-funded screenplay.

-Brandon Ledet