reviews

Wonder Woman (2017)

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I’m going to admit up front that this movie was not made for me. I have not seen any other entries in the DC Universe other than the first two Christopher Nolan reboots of Batman. I’m not at all part of the superhero movie loving crowd, but in a world where the Dark Knight has at least twelve cinematic appearances, Superman has at least ten, and the Marvel Universe is dominated by male superheroes and small female roles in ensemble casts, it was about damn time we had a movie wholly dedicated to a female superhero. Also, in a world dominated by male directors, it was long overdue for a woman to helm a superhero film. It’s 2017 and Patty Jenkins is the first woman to direct a superhero film. Ever! It’s only fitting for that title to be Wonder Woman: an icon for women and young girls; a tough, no nonsense Amazon princess warrior; and arguably one of the best superheroes of all time. All this alone makes it a movie worth seeing and supporting; and it’s also fun, even for a superhero curmudgeon such as myself.

Wonder Woman starts with Diana’s childhood on the secret Island of the Amazons, Themyscira. Here we get a view of the culture of these women, why they exist, and how their island is eternally preserved and hidden by a veil of storm and fog. The training montages here are pretty cool, but a lot of what happens on the island (repetitive speeches about the gods and reiterations of what Diana is and is not allowed to do) just seems to drag. It’s cool to get a peak into the Amazon lifestyle, but only after so much of that do we finally get the inciting incident. A WWI era British Intelligence spy, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) manages to crash through the protective field around the island, followed by German troups. After a huge fight on the beach where we get some commentary about the destructive killing power of guns, Diana decides to leave with Trevor and save the world from war. After lots of fish out of water humor and wacky, “Oh my god, you can’t just carry a sword through turn of the century London!” hijinks, they assemble a team of misfits and go straight to the front lines.

For a tale that takes place with WWI as a backdrop, this film’s not that gritty. Thanks goodness for that, because it could have easily been another gray, dull action movie about the horrors of war. That’s not to say that the horrors of war aren’t present here, especially since World War I was a particularly savage example of carnage and loss of life. The main villains are still an evil general and his mad scientist lover/sidekick, who are developing a particularly lethal form of mustard gas. Despite this, there’s a tone of hope. We believe in our seriously scarred and flawed heroes. Diana is a source of justice and light in the darkness. War is still hell, but in the end we know Diana is going to succeed. There’s no way she can’t. She’s Wonder Woman. The movie really sells us on the idea that she can do anything, and that’s not a bad thing at all.

There’s been a lot of talk about the gender politics of Wonder Woman and what it means to finally have a female director on board for a blockbuster this big. The idea of Diana not being a piece of meat and eye candy has been floated around (oh, how our standards are so low). Other ideas I’ve seen have mentioned the design of the Amazonian armor and how it’s not run of the mill female boob armor. Both of those I have to sadly disagree with. Sure the armor isn’t Linda Carter bustier stuff, but there’s still the defined breast shapes, which has been discussed time and time again to be realistically useless except for the purpose of showing off boobs. You would think that an ancient race of warrior women would have figured that out. Also, there were many examples of Diana being presented to the audience as eye candy. In one particular scene she shows up to a gala in a stunning blue dress as Steve Trevor looks on with his jaw dropped. The real triumph as far as gender goes is that she’s allowed to be more than just eye candy. Not only is she presented as a desirable woman, she’s also given a story line with actual character development. The other refreshing thing about the way the film is written is that there’s no competition between women. She’s never given any lines implying how she’s not like the other girls or how the women outside her world are very weak, which was refreshing. Even on Themyscira, there’s a sense of camaraderie rather than oneupmanship. The other interesting catering-to-the-women-in-the-audience bit (though it’s debatable whether or not this is a win at all) is the reversal of the male gaze. Chris Pine is just there to be a handsome face and love interest, and there’s even a nude scene, albeit mostly implied, with a lot of double entendre. His character is not completely a cardboard cut-out, but compared to Diana it’s pretty darn close.

Wonder Woman is still guilty of the same sins as other superhero movies: cliché speeches about justice with nonsensical taglines (“It’s not about ‘deserve’; it’s about what you believe”), excessive slow motion (especially in the form of hair flips), and a cheesy fight sequence soundtrack. For true fans of the genre those aren’t necessarily problems, but more like charming quirks.  It manages to blend the darkness of war with the fun, superhero tone. A woman’s touch isn’t as immediately obvious to me as a lot of people believe, but where I see it I think it’s great. I’m glad the world finally has a female superhero movie, and that it’s living up to the hype and expectations.

-Alli Hobbs

Office Killer (1997)

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I’ve been singing the praises of the directorial debut of art world “it girl” Tara Subkoff, #horror, for at least a year now, but the film seems to have, um, limited appeal. A tongue-in-cheek art horror with a cartoonish hook in its premise (social media is killing our children!), #horror premiered at MoMA in NYC before being quietly dumped onto VOD platforms (including Netflix, eventually) to a tepid-at-best critical response. This is not the first time the directorial debut of an art world darling has been treated this way. In the mid 90s, visual artist Cindy Sherman joined in the then-blossoming indie film industry with her own cartoonish art horror. Like with Subkoff’s debut, Sherman’s Office Killer was trashed by critics, tanked financially, and was eyerolled quietly into home video oblivion. Sherman made a fun, visually gorgeous, sardonically humorous genre film that should have launched a whole new phase of her career, but instead was shrugged off & swept away.

One of the more infamous Cindy Sherman photography series (in my mind, anyway) was her early 80s collection of “fashion” photographs, which depicted women (often herself) wearing clothing that supposedly made them powerful, looking miserable, squirming under the microscope of the camera lens. The picture numbered #122 in this series finds Sherman disheveled, wearing one of those monstrous shoulder pad power suits, and grimacing under the harsh florescent light of what appears to be an office. This one image almost seems to be the roadmap for where her film Office Killer would go over a decade later. The harsh lighting, the visible discomfort, and the disruption of disorder eeking out from within the rigid business world containment of the clothing feel like the stirrings of what Office Killer would eventually come to be. The only pronounced difference is that Sherman would bring in a sense of absurdist humor from her other works into the project.

Although Office Killer has Cindy Sherman’s eye crawling over every inch of the film, the real highlight is Carol Kane’s lead performance. Starting off as the exact uncomfortable-in-her-designated-role archetype depicted in the above referenced Sherman series, Kane’s titular killer is a mousy homebody who cannot suffer the intense scrutiny of being a young woman in the modern workplace. Her murder spree begins by accident, but then develops into a conscious, cold-blooded effort to make herself comfortable in a more domestic work environment. Carol Kane is usually relegated​ to minor supporting roles in her career, like her violent fairy in Scrooged or her crazed landlord in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, but in Office Killer she’s allowed to command the screen whole-heartedly. What’s even better is that she’s given a chance to do so in a quietly campy, increasingly violent lead role that recalls Kathleen Turner’s performance in the John Waters classic Serial Mom, a comparison I evoke only as the highest of compliments.

Serving as a lowly, nobody office girl at a magazine publication, Kane’s anti-hero protagonist is an awkward ball of nervous energy. With a uniform of tightly-bunned hair, ratty sweaters, wire-framed glasses, and drawn-on eyebrows, she’s a sore thumb in the workplace, where more traditional Modern Women (including Molly Ringwald) poke fun at her discomfort & reclusiveness. The pressure of caring for her invalid mother (Alice Drummond of Ghostbusters fame) at home and fighting off the unwanted sexual advances of men at work tear her mind in half and she snaps. After accidentally killing a coworker after-hours, she takes the body home to her basement and finds them much easier to deal with that now that they’re lifelessly compliant with being manipulated and she’s in command. That’s when the killings become an intense obsession. She converts her basement into a “home office,” forgiving errands from her not at all alive victims to stave off search parties (in the same very early in the game Internet Age paranoia) and setting them up like mannequins at computers & typewriters. This is all in service of directly evoking a long simmering punchline about how she’s now able to “work from home.” It’s a deranged premise, but it’s all in good fun.

It took me a little while to get on the same wavelength as Office Killer. It’s the kind of film that improves exponentially each scene until it concludes at its most ridiculous point, so it makes sense to me that a contemporary audience in the 90s would turn on it early and never be able to land back on the same page as the film. Sherman has explained in interviews that the initial plan was for the film’s kills to be much bloodier & more gore-focused, but she scaled the violence back to focus on how Kane’s protagonist disposed (or doesn’t dispose) of the bodies instead of the actual acts of violence. I think this was ultimately the right decision, since it allows the film’s campy, Serial Mom vibe to play out much more brightly. The initial kills, which include electrocution, strangulations, and deaths by asthma inhaler, may not be bloody, but the softness of their initial impact makes way for a much more shocking, grotesque reveal once you get to see the full, gory scope of the killer’s self-made “home office” (which recalls John Landis’s “Family” episode of Masters of Horror). The dead bodies held together by scotch tape & Windex, including children, gives Office Killer the violent edge horror audiences may have been looking for throughout its runtime. Sherman chooses to save that mayhem for a morbid punchline that allows Carol Kane to shine in full Norman Bates glory before it hits. It may have been a decision that turned off audiences at the time, but plays in retrospect like an act of genius.

Cindy Sherman delivers exactly what I want from my genre films here, the exact formula that won me over in Tara Subkoff’s #horror. She mixes lowbrow camp with highbrow art production in an earnest, gleeful work that values both ends of that divide. As faintly silly as Carol Kane’s performance can be as a deranged killer, Sherman colors her background with a genuinely horrific history of sexual assault, where she constantly has to hear praise for her abuser in a work environment. She employs infamous provocateur Todd Haynes to provide “additional dialogue” to make sure that discomfort seeps in. The sickly, flickering florescent lights of her film’s office setting afford it a horror aesthetic long before the kills begin, especially when she focuses on the harsh, moving light of a copier running in the dark. Even the opening credits, which glides as projections across still, office environment objects, have an artfulness to them missing from a lot of tongue-in-cheek horror. Maybe some audiences don’t know what to do with that tonal clash and assumed Sherman similarly didn’t know what she was doing when she created it. Maybe it’s that exact attitude that also sank #horror before it really had a chance. All I can say for sure is that Office Killer deserved a much better response than the one it got and it’s criminal that Sherman hasn’t had a chance to make a follow-up to her near-perfect debut.

-Brandon Ledet

Don’t Kill It (2017)

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The first ten minutes of Don’t Kill It promise a wonderfully executed modern B-picture: a return to form from former action star Dolph Lundgren and a pointedly satirical takedown of modern Southern Conservativism by way of gory supernatural violence. Unfortunately, that film never arrives. Director Mike Mendez, who was also responsible for the moderately entertaining but gloriously titled Big Ass Spider!, seems to be far too comfortable with settling into an easy groove of direct-to-VOD schlock.  Don’t Kill It distinguishes itself from made-for-SyFy dreck only through the R-rating freedom of its gore, tits, and cusses. Mendez directs Lundgren as a world-weary demon hunter who has to save a small Mississippi town from a demon that hops from body to body as its human hosts are destroyed (hence the title). Along the way, he stumbles into what’s very nearly a brilliant social satire on a Get Out-level of gleeful transgression, seemingly entirely on accident. That’s why it’s a huge letdown, then, that any and all satirical elements fade into distant memories and the movie plays like It Follows by way of Walker Texas Ranger (yet not nearly as fun as that combination sounds).

Don’t Kill It opens with its best ideas on its sleeve. A camo-wearing white man hunts deer in the Mississippi woods where he’s possessed by a mysterious demonic force. With pitch black eyes and a hellish scream he returns from his hunting trip to murder his entire family with a shotgun. When he’s eventually taken down the demon that possesses him jumps to the body of another white man, who in turn kills a black family that lives nearby. Mendez establishes a modern nightmare in this way, one where Southern Conservative White Men are literal demons who must be stopped at all costs. The man tasked with stopping them, the hilariously named Jebediah Woodley (Lundgren) is introduced pounding liquor in a dive bar where a nearby bro won’t take “No.” for an answer from a young woman. Woodley kicks the jerk’s ass, teaches him the meaning of the word “consent,” and then follows the girl home himself for a sexual rendezvous. She rides him like a mechanical bull in a Refn-like, neon-lit bedroom until he hallucinates that their encounter was a demonic, evil exchange and the whole ordeal devolves into a nightmare. It’s quite an opening.

The movie immediately tanks from there. A grotesquely macho punchline about sex work cheapens the “consent” exchange from the previous sequence. Woodley then gets wrapped up in convincing an FBI investigator that demons have been behind the recent string of small town murders and, because she’s a woman in a for-the-boys action horror, eventually seduces her with his old man masculinity (between commands to shut up and wait in the car). Similarly, the film itself gets wrapped up in its own mythology and largely forgets what initially made it interesting. The rules of the demon’s body-hopping antics as well as unnecessary details about angels & alternate dimensions dilute the initial impact of the film’s political satire. The idea of scary white men snapping and going on killing sprees is somewhat echoed in later sequences, like when a Tea Party-type town hall meeting devolves into a chaotic bloodbath or when a man is impaled on taxidermy deer antlers. The movie just never calcifies or weaponizes that mode of satire in any significant way. It seems much more concerned with making Dolph Lundgren: Demon Hunter appear to be a late-in-life badass. I know the actor has his dedicated fans, but his persona is never big enough here to justify that loss of interest in the initial conceit. It’s a letdown.

If you’re only looking to Don’t Kill It for a light mood and moments of over the top violence, it delivers in a lot of ways VOD cheapies tend not to. Bodies are slashed, shot, exploded, and boiled as the It Follows-style demon hops from host to host. The problem is that the stretches between those bursts of violence are painfully dull when they really don’t have to be. Don’t Kill It sets itself up with a brilliant central metaphor and sense of purpose in its first few scenes, only to immediately drop them to make room for more Dolph Lundgren hero worship and unnecessary world-building. It’s an okay, goofy-enough film that feels like it was one or two rewrites away from being something truly great.

-Brandon Ledet

The Ape Man (1943)

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When looking back to the heights of Old Hollywood, what we’re really getting nostalgic for is the glut & extravagance of the old studio system. The high production values & workman sense of craft that went into each studio production in that era are missing from modern cinema’s more routine, mundane releases. For a brief, glorious time, even horror had its day in the sun during that studio era, particularly thanks to Universal’s Famous Monsters brand. This, of course, birthed the iconic career if Bela Lugosi, who starred in prestigious horror productions like The Black Cat & Todd Browning’s Dracula early in his career. Horror was treated as a flash-in-the-pan trend by the Hollywood studio system, however, and Lugosi’s leading man work eventually dried up. Shortly after putting in his final top-bill performance for a major studio in Columbia Pictures’ Return of the Vampire (which is widely considered to be an unofficial sequel to Dracula), Lugosi was nudged out of the major studio system and into B-picture work in the less nostalgia-worthy territory of Old Hollywood’s so-called “poverty row” studios, purveyors of schlock. The step down from Universal horror to poverty row B-pictures was exactly as drastic as it sounds and Lugosi’s first work for Monogram Pictures, The Ape Man, was clearly the actor’s first major “Oh, how the mighty have fallen” moment.

Although far from the worst, The Ape Man may be the first major embarrassment of Bela Lugosi’s career. It was also one of the few instances of his earlier works where he wasn’t asked to play a vampire. Instead, the Hungarian-born icon plays the titular ape man, the monstrous result of a failed experiment by the other horror movie staple he was often typecast as: a mad scientist. Weirdly enough, the film begins after the scientist has already transformed to his hideous ape man visage (which just looks like an especially hairy member of The Monkees). In later works like Alligator People or The Fly, that kind of introduction would mean that his failed experiment downfall would then be portrayed in a longform flashback. Instead, we’re simply told that he was once fully human and are asked to watch in horror as he hunts down innocent victims for their spinal fluid, which he shoots directly into his arm like heroin as a makeshift, temporary cure for his ape-ificiation (an image that would be just as shocking in the 40s as it is now, given heroin addiction’s prominence at the time). The ape man scientist dresses like a typical gangster when venturing out for these kills, equipped with a fedora and a cape. The difference is that instead of using a gun to slay his spinal fluid-providing victims, he uses his accomplice, an actual ape. The film’s main conflict is in following two news reporters as they get to the bottom of these mysterious killings, increasingly getting hot on the ape & ape man’s metaphorical tails. (Apes don’t have tails.)

The basic plot of The Ape Man has promise to it as a Bela Lugosi cheapie, but the film itself is a total embarrassment. The score is punishingly repetitive; Lugosi’s given nothing interesting to do outside donning the ape make-up; his primate accomplice is clearly just a dude in a costume shop gorilla suit; and the two reporters who chase them down cynically poke fun at the frivolity of the film’s premise, since horror had become something of a derided fad by the time of the film’s production. It probably doesn’t help that Monogram Pictures allowed The Ape Man to fall into public domain status, so the only commercially available prints are horrifically shoddy DVD transfers with nearly incomprehensible visual & aural clarity. I might’ve been better off streaming the film from YouTube than watching my bargain bin physical copy (purchased from a yard sale), but at least I got to exercise my rudimentary lip-reading skills?

The worst part about all of this is knowing that things only got worse for Bela Lugosi’s career. He might’ve had a couple decent Universal productions left in him as second fiddle to rival Boris Karloff (1945’s The Body Snatcher is especially great), but the rest of his career as a leading man would be relegated to works exactly like this slice of poverty row dreck. Even though The Ape Man was a nothing of a film, that wouldn’t stop Lugosi & Monogram from teaming up again for its sequel, Return of the Ape Man. Lugosi would even work again with The Ape Man director William Beaudine, whose prestigious credits include titles like Billy the Kid Versus Dracula & Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter, on the infamously terrible Martin & Lewis knockoff Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. At least that poorly-remembered gem is notably terrible, though. It’s possibly the most shrill & aggressively unfunny film I’ve ever seen, but The Ape Man is an even worse kind of awful: the unforgivably bland kind. It’s the first truly sour note in a career that had outworn its welcome in the Old Hollywood studio system, even if that career persisted endearingly in horror fans’ hearts in the more forgiving decades since. Yet, its worst offense is in being an entirely forgettable bore.

-Brandon Ledet

The Space Children (1958)

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There’s nothing more admirable in genre film production than basic efficiency. Cheaply made sci-fi and horror can often transcend its limited means by way of an over the top premise or an inspired knack for production design, but those virtues can be dulled so easily by a labored pace or runtime. At just under 70 minutes, the sci-fi cheapie The Space Children never had time to outlive the novelty of its basic premise. Although director Jack Arnold had previously made a fine example of artful prestige horror with The Creature from the Black Lagoon (which is stunning in its moments of underwater cinematography), The Space Children is nothing but a bare bones sci-fi yarn made to fill out a double bill with the similarly slight, but impressive The Colossus of New York. Those limiting factors of microscopic budget & necessity for a brief runtime only amplify & enhance its charms as a scrappy little horror oddity with a strange plot & an even stranger alien menace. Whenever catching up with these efficient examples of bizarre, but slight genre films from the drive-in era, it’s tempting to wish that our modern PG-13 horrors & superhero epics would stick to that exact kind of length & scale.

The Space Children is a message movie about the horrors of nuclear war, nakedly so. While its heavy-handed lesson about how it’s probably not super cool to get into a worldwide arms race that could very quickly destroy the planet isn’t exactly a revolutionary thought for a 1950s genre picture, it is handled in a way that somewhat subverts its genre expectations. This is an alien invasion picture where neither the Thing From Another World that challenges our military, nor the army of creepy children it hypnotizes are the villain. In a variation from the Children of the Damned standard, it’s the parents, adult humans, who are the enemy. Scientists & military families are contracted by the American military to live in an isolated community while developing The Thunderer, a hydrogen bomb that can be readily launched from an orbiting satellite instead of a fixed physical location. Concerned, a glowing, telepathic brain from outer space lands on a beach nearby the military base and hypnotizes the scientists’ children to do its evil bidding: preventing nuclear holocaust by dismantling The Thunderer. Short story shorter, its galactic mission is a success and the evil space brain (with a little help from its ragtag group if telepathic juvenile slaves) saves Earth from blowing itself apart.

The Space Children never had a chance to be as iconic or as memorable as other nuclear horrors of its time like Them! or The Day The Earth Stood Still, even though it concludes with the exact same kind of moralizing rant about the dangers of nuclear war (this time with a Bible verse printed over an outer space backdrop to drive the point home). It was too cheap & lean of a production to aspire to those genre film heights. The movie does a great job of working within the boundaries of its scale & budget, though, suggesting worldwide implications of its central crisis despite never leaving its artificial studio lot locations. Although not likely a conscious choice, the artificiality of those sets, which are supposed to feel like natural outdoors environments, only adds to the movie’s charming surreality. Seemingly, the entire budget of The Space Children was sunk into the look of its space alien brain, which was a smart choice. When the alien first arrives, it appears to be a glowing jellyfish that washed up on the beach. As it pulsates, expands, and glows brighter while psychically linking to its child mind-slaves that same brain gradually grows to be the size of a small, glowing hippo. The logistics of constructing such a thing seemingly zapped most of the production money, leaving only room for cheap-to-film horror movie touches like telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, and (scariest of all) Disney Channel levels of goofy child acting. It’s an expense that pays off nicely, though, and the brain is just as memorable for its physical presence as it is for somehow not being the villain.

The Space Children is a cheap, goofy sci-fi horror with nothing especially novel to say about the perils of nuclear war, bit still manages to feel like a fairly rewarding entry in its genre. Its efficiency in delivering the goods of its space alien brain special effects & its anti-war morality play in just over an hour of drive-in era absurdist fun is an impressive feat in itself. Backing up that efficiency is another excellent score from Twilight Zone vet Van Cleave (who also scored The Colossus of New York). As soon as the opening credits, which superimposes children’s heads over telescopic photos of outer space, Van Cleave’s organ & theremin arrangement elevates the material considerably. That Twilight Zone connection feels true to this movie’s overall spirit too, as that show was excellent at delivering the goods in a similarly lean time & budget. Something you won’t see on many Twilight Zone episodes, though, is a hippo-sized brain that glows, pulsates, hypnotizes children, and forces them to rebel against their war hungry parents. The Space Children wasn’t even the best movie on its own double bill at the drive-in (The Colossus of New York is so good), but it knew exactly how to milk its few saving virtues for all they were worth and, in some cases, how to make them glow.

-Brandon Ledet

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the term “pure cinema,” now that it’s become both a critical cliché and an apt descriptor of the kinds of films that have been winning me over in recent years. Films like Neon Demon, The Duke of Burgundy, and Beyond the Black Rainbow have all hit the pure cinema sweet spot for me, centering their artistic merits around the marriage of sound & the moving image, carving out a mood & a tone instead of structuring their goals through traditional stage play & television style narratives. As often as I find myself seeking a pure cinema aesthetic in my film selections, however, I do have to admit that the term’s sudden ubiquity, along with other descriptors like “tone poem” & “mood piece,” has watered down its meaning somewhat. There’s even been a recently launched Pure Cinema podcast jokingly titled after the term in a tongue in cheek way. As current as the “pure cinema” concern & descriptor feel in a hive mind sense, though, the type of art it describes has existed nearly as long as the medium as film itself. Last year, I fell in love with the early “pure cinema” silent era horror A Page of Madness, which explores its tone & mood-based concerns in a flood of intense, seemingly narrative-free imagery. Later that decade, director Dziga Vertov was even more direct & intentional in his pure cinema ambitions. Frustrated with early film’s adherence to narrative forms of art that came before it, like stage plays & literature, Vertov attempted to make a film purely concerned with the art of the moving image. The result was 1929’s avant-garde “documentary” Man with a Movie Camera.

Filmed over three years in a range of Soviet Russian cities, Man with a Movie Camera is structured as a day in the life in the modern industrialized age. The film has a from dusk until dawn narrative shape to it, but otherwise tells no coherent story. It is a silent film without intertitles, a movie with “no scenario, no sets, no actors.” Vertov attempts to establish a “universal language of cinema,” in which narrative adherence to an A-B plot would only get in the way of its pure cinema aspirations of a director as an artist attempting to test & define the boundaries of his medium. As a documentary, the film is an interesting look at what Soviet cities look like in the 1920s. The advertising, transportation systems, and assembly line machinery of places like Kiev & Moscow are documented with a kind of historical eye, even if they’re filtered through avant-garde cinematography & editing techniques. Modern leisure is captured just as much as factory work too, with the movie often breaking to document barroom alcohol consumption and families bumming around on the beach. There’s very little humanism to its documentary style, however, as the film deliberately avoids focusing on or developing anything resembling a character. Besides stray moments when a woman hooks a bra or a man walks across a construction beam, Man with a Camera films people from dehumanizing heights, like watching the scurrying citizens of an ant farm. The cities themselves are also abstracted in this way, as the camera searches for geometric lines in its buildings, nurseries, park benches, and typewriters. This emotionally distancing abstraction makes the film difficult to focus on in its entirety, even with its measly hour-long runtime, but any five minute stretch of the work is fascinating to the eye in a formal sense and this is ultimately a film about form.

A more accurate title for this work might have been Man with Two Cameras. Vertov’s favorite subject to film seems to be himself, filming.  The movie is overloaded with shots of camera equipment, projectors, film strips, and even movie theaters. Everything from principal shooting to the editing process to the screening of footage is represented onscreen, suggesting that Man with a Camera is less about documenting modern city life than it is about navel-gazing on the subject of what is art & what is cinema. Sometimes it finally ​finds a specific subject for audiences to latch onto in these reflections, like when stop motion footage of a camera turns it into a personified character. Overall, though, the movie more effectively breaks down the camera and the man who operates to their function as just two more machines in the larger, industrialized picture.

It can be striking how modern that goal & aesthetic are in a 2010s context. I imagine this is the exact kind of cinematic artifact that Guy Maddin daydreams about & drools over while planning out his own work. Personally, though, my fascination with Man with a Camera‘s early experiments in tracking shots, overlayed imagery, and mimicry of the human eye’s perspective as it darts around erratically can only take me so far. The avant-garde horrors of this film’s predecessor, A Page of Madness, were much easier for me to connect with because there was a humanity in its central narrative, however vaguely defined. The recent documentary Cameraperson also sounds more immediately interesting to me for similar humanist reasons, despite being just as loosely assembled over the course of disparately documented years, locations, and personalities. Man with a Movie Camera‘s dedication to a pure cinema ethos is both visually & philosophically interesting to me in an intellectual sense, but I do think a little influence from literary or dramatic narrative tradition would’ve been helpful in making it more interesting as a film instead of an academic exercise. Dziga Vertov was definitely onto something, though, and it’s fascinating to watch him reach for the outermost boundaries of his medium, something I wish more modern directors would do now that television & video games are encroaching on & democratizing their territory.

-Brandon Ledet

Gandahar (1988)

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French animator René Laloux is well known & respected for his debut feature, Fantastic Planet, a gorgeous work of political sci-fi psychedelia, but people unfairly treat his career as if he only ever directed that one film. Laloux actually directed three feature films (along with several shorts) in the Fantastic Planet style, each tied to similar themes of anti-fascism political empathy and each visually striking in their traditionalist, but psychedelic hand drawn animation. The last of these films, Gandahar, even came close to breaking through to mainstream success in America. Dubbed by American voice actors like Glenn Close, Bridgette Fonda, and Penn Jillette & slightly edited for sexual content, Gandahar was distributed in North America under the title Light Years by the Weinstein Company. Arriving during the 80s fantasy boom of titles like Legend, Labyrinth, and Ladyhawke & guided in translation by sci-fi heavyweight Isaac Asimov, Gandahar was in the exact right position to make a lasting mark on the public consciousness. Instead, it’s faded into relative obscurity, not having nearly as much of a cultural footprint as Fantastic Planet. It’s a shame too, because the film feels just as worthwhile as that bonafide classic, even in its compromised American form.

The title Gandahar refers to a sort of space alien Eden, a matriarchal hippie paradise in the stars ruled by Nature & peace. The Counsel of Women who govern Gandahar follow a strict boobs-out-for-empowerment philosophy that affords the film a wealth of National Geographic-style desexualized nudity. Their way of life is dedicated to a preference for organic Nature over manmade technology, an ethos that is challenged when their reverie is disrupted by war-hungry robots. Black, personality-free machines invade Gandahar and zap citizens into stone, like God punishing Sodom. This threat is clearly coded as a robotic stand-in for Nazi invaders a hateful force hellbent on destroying the diversifying concept of the individual self. They rebuke a life lived for freedom & pleasure, exemplified by Gandahar, and their mindless loyalty to a single Master gives them great strength in that conviction. To save their people, The Counsel of Women deploys a single male savior, Sylvain, on a journey to find salvation outside his home world Paradise. In his adventures to save Gandahar, Sylvain discovers love, time travel, the true evils of The Master, and a community of mutants who call into question whether Gandahar was ever the utopia it was reported to be before the robots even invaded.

All in all, Gandahar plays like a mashup between an extended He-Man and the Masters of the Universe episode and animated cover art from the prog band Yes. Its central metaphor about robo-Nazi invaders and the value of the individual self never extends too far beyond the robots shooting lasers out of their Hitler salutes and talking up threatening masterplans like “The Final Annihilation.” It’s possible that some of that subtext was stronger in the unadulterated French cut of the film, but it’s not what makes Gandahar special anyway. Laloux’s visual Dungeons & Dragons-flavored fantasy, overrun with odd details like alien bugs suckling off humanoid breasts, flying manta ray dragon beasts, and Godzilla-like kaiju is the main treat in Gandahar, as it was in Laloux’s biggest hit, Fantastic Planet. Clashing the organic, Cronenbergian terrors of his alien landscapes with a then-modern 80s synth score is more than enough to justify giving Gandahar a second look. Laloux’s political metaphors may feel like an outdated hippie fantasy, but his visual style is far too fascinating on its own accord to suffer under that shortcoming. Gandahar may not offer anything terribly new that wasn’t seen before in Fantastic Planet besides a distinctly 80s soundtrack, but a more of the same proposition shouldn’t be a problem for anyone captivated by Laloux’s eternally striking visual art.

-Brandon Ledet

The Colossus of New York (1958)

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fourstar

Written by hoaxter parapsychologist Thelma Moss & released on a double bill with something called The Space Children, you’d be forgiven for assuming that The Colossus of New York was an unworthy throwaway sci-fi picture only notable because it somehow wasn’t featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. You’d be wrong, though. Although the film is only a breezy 70min long, pads itself out with a little airport stock footage and is undeniably goofy in some of its special effects details, The Colossus of New York deserves way more respect than you might expect from its drive-in schlock pedigree. Unexpectedly serving as a bridge between Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein & Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop, I found the film far more inventive & thematically well-considered than I would have initially assumed. It looks from the outside to be just one of many cheap 1950s Frankenstein bastardizations, but the film pushes way past a simple brain transplant horror story into something that feels anachronistically forward-thinking. A lot of The Colossus of New York‘s initial appeal rests in its drive-in era charm & unique creature design, but it somehow amounts to far more than the sum of its parts.

The film starts with two sibling scientists watching footage of automated assembly line technology that the far more successful of the pair is pioneering. His jealous brother, tired of competing for their father’s praise, jokes that the invention will “put the human race out of business.” After hearing his father brag to the press that his son is one of the all-time great human minds, comparable to the likes of Einstein & Darwin, we watch the scientist die in a horrific car accident while retrieving his child’s toy airplane. The father is driven mad by this “foolish, wasteful” death and starts raving about the shame of the human body’s inferiority to the power of the mind and some slippery slope philosophy about the brain vs the soul. Long story short, the father resurrects his favorite son by implanting his brain in a more durable cyborg body, while the lesser, more alive brother starts making moves on the scientist’s widow. The experiment works at first, with the scientist’s new cyborg body finally matching the immense power of his mind. He’s essentially a gigantic, metal version of Frankenstein’s monster, with the added bonus of light-up eyes that shoot deadly lasers. Of course, the father’s meddling with the laws of God & Nature means that the creation’s temporary success doesn’t last forever. Eventually, the titular cyborg colossus uses his newfound strength to exact his brutal revenge, first on his wife-stealing brother and then on the world at large.

What’s most striking about The Colossus of New York is what happens when it ventures into the uncanny. Most drive-in schlock would’ve stopped at the Metal Frankenstein aspect of the premise, but this film pushes itself into much stranger, more adventurous territory. When the colossus is first switched on, we see the world through his POV, a television static-inspired technique that recalls the similarly shot birth of RoboCop. When he first sees himself in the mirror as a cyborg he squeals in horror, pleading to his father, “You want to help me? Then destroy me,” in a pathetic mechanical voice. He curses his “flesh that cannot feel,” pines to reconnect with his wife (who the father initially reports to be dead), and repeatedly visits the grave for his old human body. Things get even stranger from there as the scientist’s mind begins to push beyond normal human capacity. He’s tortured by “meaningless images,” visions that are later revealed to be premonitions of future events. He also becomes more erratic in his thoughts by the day, even discovering a new talent for hypnotism, which he immediately employs for evil. This escalates to the once great, humanitarian mind declaring the poor & hungry to be “human trash” and deciding to wage a one-cyborg war on world peace, starting with a massacre at a UN conference. What was once a standard black & white horror cheapie starts to feel much stranger, much more special, and by the end The Colossus of New York starts to feel like a long buried gem.

Even if my praise of the film’s adventurous sci-fi themes sounds a little hyperbolic, I believe it’s a work that could easily be enjoyed for the simple pleasures of its sights & sounds. Lack of facial expressiveness is usually not a plus in a monster movie mask, but the cyborg colossus uses that awkward stoicism quite well as an essential part of his self-tortured inhumanity. The movie also pulls a lot of great visual play out of terrified victims being lit solely by the monster’s light-up brain & eyes in the moment before he zaps them to death. Besides boasting a cool-looking monster who eats up a lot of screentime in a refreshing change from the genre’s status quo, the film also employs a minimalist piano score from frequent Twilight Zone musician Van Cleave that affords it a classic silent horror vibe in its simplicity. If you’re ever in the mood for a Universal Monster-type classic, but you’re feeling exhausted with endless rewatches of Frankenstein or The Black Cat, I highly recommend giving The Colossus of New York a shot. It just might surprise you.

-Brandon Ledet

Alien: Covenant (2017)

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Of all the wacky, scary, goofy, gory follow-ups to Ridley Scott’s space horror masterpiece Alien, it’s Scott’s own 2010s prequel Prometheus that stands as my clear favorite. Aesthetically, Prometheus is on the exact wavelength of arty pulp I crave in my genre cinema, the same gorgeous-imagery-meets-dime-store-novel-idiocy dynamic that wins me over in titles like Interstellar & The Neon Demon. I also love that film on a basic thematic level, though. The idea of human beings asking Big, Important philosophical questions about our origins & purpose to literal gods and receiving only brutal, wordless violence in response is such a killer concept, one that’s both morbidly funny & surprisingly truthful to the human condition. Alien: Covenant, also directed by Scott, picks up ten years after that Prometheus timeline, positioning itself as a sequel to a prequel (what a time to be alive). In some ways it attempts to continue those exact questions of Who We Are & Where We Come From, as if they’re the only things that matter. Humanity is once again punished for the hubris of trying to prove that its existence is no random accident, but rather a deliberate design from gods beyond our solar system. The results & significance of that query are severely downplayed in this second run-through, however. Instead of aiming for the arty pulp of Prometheus, Covenant drags these themes down to the level of a pure Roger Corman creature feature. This prequel-sequel is much more of a paint-by-numbers space horror genre picture than its predecessor, but that’s not necessarily a quality that ruins its premise. Through horrific cruelty, striking production design, and the strangest villainous performance to hit a mainstream movie in years, Covenant easily gets by as a memorably entertaining entry in its series, only middling because the Alien franchise has a better hit-to-miss ratio than seemingly any other decades-old horror brand typically has eight films into its catalog.

Alien: Covenant is, above all else, a Michael Fassbender showcase. Reprising his role as the A.I. robot David & appearing simultaneously as a second A.I. named Walter, Fassbender delivers his strangest onscreen performance going at least as far back as Frank. In the context of how Covenant fits into the Alien franchise at large, it could maybe be understood as a Jason Takes Manhattan-type eccentric outlier, if only retitled as Michael Fassbender: Sex Robot. A whole new crew of intergalactic colonists find themselves stranded on an alien planet with only one non-xenomorph related resident: David, Fassbender’s chilling A.I. robot from Prometheus. Among the crew is Fassbender’s Walter, who David takes a special liking to while the disposable human characters are picked off one by one by xenomorph teens (they’re less evolved, less “perfect” offshoots of the typical alien species). There’s a strange sexual tension between these two Fassbender bots that only gets stranger as they spend more time alone together. In the movie’s best moment there are no killer xenomorphs to be seen, no on-screen bloodbath to placate anyone looking for a straightforward body count horror. It’s a quiet moment in David’s art studio (which could easily pass for HR Geiger’s masturbatorium) where he teaches Walter how to play the flute, openly bringing any unspoken sexual tension to the surface by directly hitting on his A.I. brethren. Lines like, “Watch me, I’ll do the fingering,” & “Put gentle pressure on the holes” are almost enough to push Covenant solidly into outright camp and their relationship only gets more perverse from there. Fassbender does a mesmerizing job of differentiating between his two characters: one is a spooky robot with barely-secretive agendas and one’s a tough guy soldier with mommy issues involving his mothership. You never forget which character you’re watching, even when the plot should probably ask you to, and that kind of dramatic craft confidently carries a lot of scenes that could easily devolve into absurd inanity, like the seductive flute blowing or a brief foray into kung fu. Regardless of your thoughts on Prometheus or the collection of Alien sequels as a whole (which each seem to be individually divisive), Covenant is worth seeing for the Fassbender weirdness alone.

David & Walter aren’t the only romantic couple in Covenant, but they are the only one that matters. The titular space mission in the title references Abraham & Noah’s covenants with with God, setting up the spaceship, Mother, as a kind of Ark meant to rebuild humanity on an alien terrain. Every crew member is married in pairs and responsible for the transportation of thousands of future citizens meant to populate a distant world with human seed. Mostly, these human characters have no more personalities or purpose than the drawers full of human embryos they’re being paid to transport across the universe. Katherine Waterson does a decent job of physically emoting as she watches her crew members die at the hands(?) of the film’s teenomorphs. Billy Crudup is believably off-putting as a captain who’s in way over his head commanding a crew who doesn’t respect him because he’s a Kirk Cameron-style “man of faith.” Danny McBride never truly disappears into his role in any detectable way, but he somehow isn’t the most distracting celebrity presence in the film, against all odds (there’s a celebrity death that needs to be seen to be believed; it’s essentially a prank). None of these characters matter. Unlike in Prometheus, the questions of Faith & the Meaning of Life don’t matter here either. Only Fassbender’s Cruella De Vil levels of villainous camp & the teenomorph (and eventually straight up xenomorph) creature attacks register as memorable, worthwhile aspects of Covenant, but they’re both effective enough to save the picture from from horror film tedium, even individually. The moments of horrific monster movie gore are both plentiful & plenty fucked up. Fassbender’s weirdo characters are given plenty of screen time to warp the picture into a strange dual character study, correcting the one frequently cited Prometheus complaint I can truthfully echo. As with a lot of post-Corman creature features, the monsters & kills are exciting enough to cover up the shortcomings of the film’s basic philosophy & humanity. In fact, the human aspect of the film is so weak that it almost directly supports its own villainous arguments about the superiority of other, “perfected” beings.

I’m never really sure what audiences want from Alien sequels. Prometheus & Resurrection are my favorite follow-ups to the original film because they push its imagery & mythology into unexpected directions – goofy, gorgeous, or otherwise. They’re also both frequently cited as the worst of the franchise because they deliberately stray from a more-of-the-same horror sequel ethos, so what do I know? I can see Covenant eliciting a similar polarizing reaction from Alien devotees, as it dabbles both in the goofiness of Resurrection and the overreaching philosophy of Prometheus without ever landing convincingly on either side. I ultimately find that split a little middling in the grand scheme of the series, but the film is brutal enough in its sequel-by-numbers gore & campy enough in its Fassbender weirdness to survive as yet another entertaining entry into an increasingly trashy, but eternally mesmerizing horror franchise that’s likely the most consistently rewarding one we’ve got running.

-Brandon Ledet

Don’t Knock Twice (2017)

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I’m not sure it’s always necessary for a horror film to justify the surface pleasures of its scares & thrills by linking them to a dramatic metaphor. However, it can be frustrating when one comes close to achieving that dynamic without fully following through. The recent British ghost story Don’t Knock Twice enters into the modern tradition of horror flicks with clear metaphors specifically centering on the anxieties of motherhood: The Babadook, Goodnight Mommy, most of XX, We Need to Talk About Kevin, etc. The frustrating thing is that it nearly succeeds in joining those incredible ranks with an entirely​ new angle on motherhood terror its peers had not yet represented, but falls just short of hitting that target. Ultimately, its demonic scares & familial drama hang separately in the spooky air, never joining forces to drive home its significance as an individual work. That kind if strength in metaphor is not entirely necessary for a modern horror film to feel worthwhile, but without it Don’t Knock Twice struggles to feel substantial in any memorable way.

The always welcome Katee Sackhoff (Oculus, Battlestar Galactica) stars as an American sculptor and recovering drug addict who struggles to reconnect with her teenage daughter (Sing Street‘s Lucy “Riddle of the Model” Boynton) who she gave up for adoption in the British foster system. The daughter is reluctant for obvious reasons to welcome her mother, now essentially a stranger, back into her life, but finds herself in dire need of shelter from a supernatural threat. She & a fellow teen disturb a small, haunted shack near an interstate overpass where a witch’s ghost was rumored to live, knocking on the door twice (hence the title) after being told there would be urban legend-style consequences. The legend turns out to be exactly true and the teen girl finds herself haunted by a demonic witch that follows her from home to home to avenge the transgression. The monster itself (an aged, lanky, inhuman variation on the little girl from The Ring) and the film’s flashy over the top camera work make for plenty of effectively creepy moments: the witch climbing out of a kitchen sink, s ghost slitting its own throat, an Unfriended-style murder witnessed on Skype. The question of what the monster represents and how its terror communicates with the ex-addict mother’s suddenly possessive love for her estranged daughter, however, is much less effective.

There’s a distinct, nightmarish terror in this film’s teen victim being told that her parent, who has hurt her before, is now completely rehabilitated & worthy of trusting forgiveness. The vulnerability of welcoming that parent back into her life and not having her reservations for that forgiveness being taken seriously is not unlike being haunted by a literal ghost from the past that no one but she believes exists. If the demonic witch ghost that causes havoc in the film is supposed to somehow represent the mother’s past as an addict, however, Don’t Knock Twice doesn’t do much to help the metaphor along. A couple major plot twists that bring in murder mystery dynamics outside that central mother-daughter relationship suggest a mixed metaphor where the ghost also represents some kind of abusive evil in the foster system or, more likely yet, represents nothing specific at all. It’s not at all fair to burden Don’t Knock Twice with the expectation of a strong metaphor to support the presence of its demon witch antagonist, but the film comes too close to saying something freshly insightful about parental anxiety & the cycles of addiction not often depicted in horror cinema for the frustration in the shortcomings of its metaphorical potential to be ignored. When that aspect of its story doesn’t land, there’s not much left of its familial drama to hold onto and the film ultimately plays like a more visually striking version of mainstream horror titles like Lights Out & The Darkness. There’s nothing especially wrong with that distinction, but Don’t Knock Twice comes very close to being much greater than that limited ambition suggests.

-Brandon Ledet