reviews

Victor Frankenstein (2015)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

“You know their story . . .”

In the press/apology tour for Victor Frankenstein (critics have not been kind), director Paul McGuigan has been quoted as saying that Mary Shelly’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is “dull as dishwater“, not a surprising sentiment in light of how his film approaches its source material. Victor Frankenstein has the same reverence for Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein that Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters has for its Brothers Grimm origins. It’s so distanced from the novel, in fact, that I didn’t spot a single mention given to Mary Shelly in the final credits. Not even a “characters by” shout-out. Oddly enough, I think it’s that exact flippant approach to the now classic horror tale that makes the film an enjoyable (and mostly intentional) camp fest. Well, that & over-the-top performances from James McAvoy as the mad scientist Frankenstein, Daniel Radcliffe as the groveling Igor, and Andrew Scott as a soft spoken police inspector on a mission from God.

At first, it seems as though Victor Frankenstein doesn’t bring any new ideas to the table for a property that’s been already adapted for the screen roughly 50,000 times (including last year’s dismal I, Frankenstein). McAvoy’s feverish, spit-flinging performance is inspired in terms of camp value, but the movie’s early declarations like, “Life is temporary, so why should death be any different?” and “The world remembers the monster, but not the man . . , But sometimes the monster is the man,” aren’t particularly fresh, but rather a stitched-together homunculus made of old leftover movie parts. Eventually, however, a clear narrative appears. As the God-fearing police investigator starts butting heads with Frankenstein, it becomes clear that the film is a campy battle between Atheism vs. Christianity, Science vs. Faith. The policeman is incensed that the mad scientist is on a mission “to create life in direct, violent action against God,” claiming that he’s “in allegiance with Satan.” Frankenstein snaps back, “There is no Satan, no God, no me.” This aspect of the film is obsessively explored to the point that is plays as 100% sincere, but ultimately feels just as ridiculous as any of its outright horror comedy gags.

Half-cooked philosophy aside, there’s plenty of goofy charms that make the film surprisingly enjoyable as a camp fest. An early origin story for Igor that features Harry Potter crouched over in heavy clown make-up works as literal bread & circuses. Moving the narrative from a remote castle to the inner city gives it a distinct Tim Burton tone, particularly the movie Sweeney Todd. The film’s costume design is gorgeous (especially in the love interest & Downton Abbey vet Jessica Brown Findlay’s dresses & McAvoy’s vests), but the rest of the imagery is absurdly nasty. Grotesque practical effects surrounding bodily horror like eyes & other organs suspended in jars, steam punk medical tools, abscess fluid, and an early Frankenstein monster prototype (a chimp-esque “meat sculpture” homunculus made of dead animal parts) are all pitch perfect in their absurdity. The actual Frankenstein monster almost feels like a last-minute afterthought, but is ultimately satisfying in its design, looking like a mutant pro wrestler or Goro, the big boss character from Mortal Kombat, except with extra internal organs instead of extra limbs. Ultimately, though, it’s the over-the-top acting of its three heads that sell the movie as an absurdist slice of mindless entertainment.

It’s difficult to say if this was an intentional element to the movie’s  Max Landis screenplay, but the film also has an interesting level of homosexual subtext in the relationship between Igor & his master, which manifests both in subtle moments of body language & romantic jealousy as well as more obvious moments like when Frankenstein shouts about sperm in the only scene where he’s shown conversing with women. Again, it’s difficult to tell if this was Landis’ screenplay or McAvoy & Radcliffe’s performances in action, but it’s just another element in play to a surprisingly enjoyable film with an already-negative reputation due to its indifference for its source material & flights of ugly frivolity. Victor Frankenstein‘s latent homosexuality (which really does stretch just beyond the bounds of bromance), laughable atheism, and grotesque body humor all play like they were written in a late-night, whiskey-fuelled stupor, the same way the film’s monster was constructed by the titular mad scientist drunk & his perpetually terrified consort.  I know I’m alone here, but my only complaint about this film is that it could’ve pushed its more  ridiculous territory even further from Mary Shelly’s original vision, with Victor planting wet kisses on Igor’s cheeks & Rocky Horror‘s “In just seven days, I can make you a man . . .” blaring on the soundtrack.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

/ swampflix / 16 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fivestar

campstamp

“The ultimate Russ Meyer film has already been made: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Something special happened with that film . . . I’d never be able to approach it again.” – Russ Meyer

A lot of people would argue that the ultimate Russ Meyer film was made years earlier in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, but I tend to side with Meyer himself on this issue. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was his masterpiece, a grand manifesto of of the sex-crazed vitriol the director had been cultivating for more than a decade, a vicious satire attacking the “oft times nightmare world of show business”, a relentless display of the maniacal violence Meyer had used as highlights in his past work drawn out to a full length feature. Critics hated the film. A lot of Russ’ longtime fans hated it even more, citing screenwriter Roger Ebert (yes, that Roger Ebert) as a deathblow to the high camp value of Meyer’s oblivious earnestness the same way Tommy Wiseau’s self-awareness has ruined everything he’s touched since The Room. I disagree with that sentiment, though. Ebert did not ruin the Meyer aesthetic. He just complicated it with an over-the-top sense of ironic humor that added an extra layer of absurdity to what was already pretty knowingly ridiculous to begin with.

It’s difficult to put into words exactly what Beyond the Valley of the Dolls is or what it’s about, so I’ll just tell you how Ebert described the film’s genre: “It’s a camp sexploitation action horror musical that ends in a quadruple murder & a triple wedding.” Does that about clear it up? At times it feels like the only thing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls isn’t is a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, which is what Meyer was initially hired to direct. At least the film warns you of that outright in a prologue that distances itself from the melodrama original. What quickly follows is one of Meyer’s trademark industrial/sex montages, this time combatively pointed at Los Angeles & set to an inane slam-poetry style monologue about hippie culture. The difference is that the montage never ends this time, adopting Mondo Topless‘ frantic energy for a full-length narrative feature. As Meyer put it, he wanted the film to establish “a punishing rhythm, pummeling the audience.” Boy, did he succeed.

Buried somewhere under Meyer’s trademark mania is a story about an all-female rock band called The Carrie Nations getting corrupted by wicked Hollywood types as they try to Make It Big. The small town girls are destroyed by Los Angeles’ unwholesome cocktail of sex, drugs, murder, suicide, abortion, and pansexuality. What’s far more interesting than the band member’s individual downfalls, however, are two absurd party sequences that bookend the film. Hosted by Z-Man, king of the Hollywood weirdos, these ragers are sickeningly phony & psychedelic, a hateful portrait of Los Angeles’ excess at its most damnable. Even Z-man himself can’t seem to handle these soirées. In the opening party, where a cast of hundreds dance to The Carrie Nations and The Strawberry Alarm Clock, Z-Man exclaims, “This is my happening & it freaks me out!” At the film’s concluding party, a much more intimate affair where two same-sex couples pair off for psychedelic drug-fueled lovemaking, Z-Man reveals himself to be an androgynous, sex-crazed supervillain named Superwoman and attempts to murder everyone within reach while proclaiming things like “You will drink the black sperm of my vengeance.” I feel deranged just describing that unraveling, let alone watching it. This film is admittedly incomprehensible, but damn, what a ride.

With a $1 million budget & an inflated runtime that dwarfed any of the films the director had made prior to its release, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was Meyer going for broke, rightfully fearful that he may never have the opportunity again. The film was produced by Fox studios, but with a hands-off approach that left Meyer free reign to make what pretty much amounted to a big budget indie film under a major studio banner. Much like Myra Breckinridge, Fox’s other X-rated sex comedy, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was panned by critics. The difference is that it made money, tons of money. Ten times its original budget, in fact. Meyer somehow made a crowd favorite while sticking to his authorial vision, something he had mostly ditched for modest success in his then-recent, high-profile indie Vixen!. He even populated the film with past players from his oeuvre, including Vixen!‘s Erica Gavin, Fanny Hill‘s Veronica Erickson, and the wonderfully strange Princess Livingston, who brought  lot of proto-John Waters cool to early Meyer productions like Mudhoney & Wild Gals of the Naked West.

Despite rampant nudity & occasional sultry lines like “You’re a groovy boy. I’d like to strap you on sometime,” Meyer had found success while striving for a nasty, hateful vision instead of outright sexiness, something that had made his past work so interesting. Ebert pounded out the entire script for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in just six weeks, but by doing so he had managed to tap into something truly special in its loopiness & in its hateful take on Los Angeles as a scene, even poking fun at then-recent tragedies like the Sharon Tate/Charles Manson murders. And because Meyer made sure none of the actors knew that the film was intended to be a comedy, a lot of the campy charm from his past work rolled over to this change in direction in a humorously sinister way.

After revisiting Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for the dozenth time or so, it’s hard to imagine what the rest of the director’s catalog has to offer me, as I’ve never ventured further into the back end of his career before. As Meyer put it, the ultimate Russ Meyer film had already been made. Where was there left for the director to go but down, down, down? I guess I’ll find out soon in future titles like Up! & Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens, with peak Meyer perfection now surely in the rearview.

-Brandon Ledet

The Wolfpack (2015)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

I’ve watched a lot of recent media about false imprisonment, from Unbreakable to Kimmy Schmidt to Everly to Room, but The Wolfpack may have a thematic upper hand on the rest, given that it’s presented as a documentary. The low budget doc tells the story of six young, long-haired brothers explore external spaces by watching movies & re-creating their favorites in home-made cover versions similar to what you’ find in Be Kind Rewind or (*shudder*) Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Except that these are real recreations with a real life purpose . . . supposedly. Part of what makes The Wolfpack an interesting, but frustrating experience is that the story is just beyond the reach of believability, but it’s difficult to tell what, if anything, has been embellished for dramatic effect.

What is undeniable is that the story is fascinating. The six Angulo brothers & their shielded-from-the-camera sister are said to have been raised in insular, tribe-like environment by their parents, with their father serving as a tyrannical cult-leader type that keeps them under lock & key. Homeschooled & taught to avoid contact with strangers, they report that they’d sometimes go outside their apartment “nine times a year, sometimes once . . .” It’s no wonder, then, that they found cinema to be such a welcome escape. As the eldest, most defiant Angulo brother puts it, “If I didn’t have movies,life would be pretty boring and there would be no point to go on.” It’s slightly less clear why their father would pressure them to pursue creative expression through film & music, although vague answers are directly provided. I get a general sense from the film that even he isn’t quite sure of why he oppresses his family, outside of an oversized sense of hubris that borders on mental illness.

The vagueness & just-short-of-authenticity narrative of The Wolfpack rests more on the shoulders of first-time documentarian Crystal Moselle than it does on her subjects.  For starters, Moselle doesn’t provide nearly enough insight into the mechanics of the brothers’ creative process. There’s a couple details provided, like the way they use closed captions to transcribe their scripts or how they use cereal boxes & yoga mats to create homemade Batman costumes. The film does not provide, however, a sense of scope. For instance, are the Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, The Dark Knight, and The Nightmare Before Christmas remakes shown in the film a majority of their catalog or are their other home movies not shown to the audience? I felt that a lot of the circumstances of their confinement were also a little thin as presented, with a lot of the tone established through home movies paired with dramatic music.

I’m not exactly saying that The Wolfpack is poorly made, just that it doesn’t feel fully fleshed out considering the very distinct nature of its subject. It almost would’ve been more worthwhile to have the boys tell their own story through a dramatic reenactment, à la The Act of Killing, as that would’ve incorporated the film’s more striking imagery for the full length of the feature without wearing the limited details of its story thin. Either way, the story is oddly fascinating as presented & it’ll be interesting to see how the brother’s lives will develop now that they’ve been exposed to the world outside their father’s apartment. They certainly have a a well-developed cinematic eye, something that’s put to extraordinary use in the film’s final minutes when they’re working on a wholly original project. I’m not sure that they need the limelight quite as much as they need therapy, but I’m excited to see what art they bring the world now that they’re free from whatever exact trauma they no doubt suffered.

-Brandon Ledet

Room (2015)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

There’s been a lot of recent buzz about the Incredible, Show-stealing, Oscar-worthy performance Brie Larson provides in the indie drama Room that is feel does the movie (and the actor) a disservice. I went into Room with sky-high expectations from early word of its soaring virtues, so I was a little let down when I discovered it’s actually a somewhat muted small cast drama, grim in nature, but rarely brutal or affecting enough to leave a significant, lingering impression. Room is a pretty great film, for sure, but its early reputation bills it as so Big & Important that it was more or less doomed to fall short of the mark no matter what. I enjoyed Brie Larson’s wounded-animal performance in the film a great deal, but I find myself a little dubious about the idea that she stole the show. In my mind Room‘s most valuable player is not Larson at all, but instead a young boy named Jacob Tremblay.

In the film, Larson plays a young mother who’s been held captive as a sex slave in a ten-by-ten foot garden shed in a suburban backyard for seven years & counting. Her five year old son, Jack, has never known life outside their single-room home. The movie commands a very direct mode of storytelling that avoids flashbacks or easy answers, gradually filling in the audience on the circumstances of the pair’s captivity without providing much release from the understandably oppressive tone. As you can guess based on the premise, the mother & son protagonists experience levels of boredom & frustration that lead to destructive tantrums far beyond what would typically be described as cabin fever. I will say, though, that although it isn’t quite as light-hearted as narratively similar recent examples of false imprisonment media like Everly or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Room is not all broken spirits & grim yearnings. The film can at times be quite imaginative & uplifting, thanks to young Jack’s warped sense of reality & Jacob Tremblay’s wonderful performance.

Room‘s strongest asset is how it adopts a child POV the way films like The Adventures of Baron Mucnchausen, The Fall, and Beasts of the Southern Wild have in the past. Because Jack has only known life inside Room (which he refers to as a proper noun, like a god or a planet), he has a fascinatingly unique/warped perception of how life works & how the universe is structured. For him, Room is all there is, excepting “outer space” (the outdoors), “the TV planets” (which he believes aren’t real), and Heaven. Jack’s mother is often frustrated with his delusions, like when he asks, “Do we go into TV for dreaming?” but she also uses them to protect her son from the harshness of their severely limited reality. There’s a monumental dramatic shift halfway into Room that undercuts what makes the film special (something I suggest you avoid spoiling for yourself by watching the trailer), but much of the film can be downright uplifting whenever the story is told through Jack’s eyes. Of course, his perspective can also be a downer at times, like the pathetic way he addresses inanimate objects as if they were people (“Good morning, lamp.” “Good morning, TV.” “Good morning, sink.”), but because he’s a five year old boy he also brings levity to the situation with self-satisfying humor about things like poo & farts.

As I said earlier, Room is a pretty great movie. It occasionally reaches some impressive cinematic heights in moments of heart-pounding suspense or in the odd way it makes you appreciate abstract concepts like freedom & external spaces. However, I do feel that a lot of what makes the film special burns out a bit too early in its runtime, especially when it shifts perspectives from Jack’s to his mother’s. Brie Larson was undoubtedly understated & nuanced in her role as a captive mother here, which is admirable, but her character’s emotional crisis often felt like a distraction from what really makes the movie a distinct work in the first place: Jack. Try to temper your own trumped up anticipation for the film & you might find yourself bowled over in a way that I ruined for myself, especially if you can manage to shift your attention from Brie Larson’s lauded performance to that of Jacob Tremblay. That’s where the real magic resides.

-Brandon Ledet

The Final Girls (2015)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

EPSON MFP image

fourstar

campstamp

It’s difficult for me to speak objectively about The Final Girls‘  merits as a horror comedy, because so much of the film’s content is so distinctly in my wheelhouse. It’s also difficult to describe the film’s high-concept premise without spoiling its major conceit. So, I’ll just leave you with this vague recommendation for now: if you happen to be a fan of 80s “camp site slasher films” like Friday the 13th & Sleepaway Camp and you enjoy meta genre send-ups like Scream & The Last Action Hero, please check out The Final Girls as soon as you can. Save reading reviews (like this one, for instance) for after you give the film a chance. It’s best to go into this movie cold if you can manage it. I wish I had, anyway.

For those who need a little more convincing up front, here’s a quick run-down of the film’s premise. The Final Girls revolves around a fictional example of the oldschool “camp site slashers” mentioned above named Camp Bloodbath. Good title. When Camp Bloodbath is first introduced as a Grindhouse-style trailer on a smart phone, it’s unclear exactly how involved the plot will get with the horror relic. The answer is very. Five modern teens with varying degrees of familiarity with the film find themselves magically transplanted inside the move itself, à la The Last Action Hero. Don’t spend too much time questioning exactly how this could possibly happen, because the movie has very little interest in providing an answer. Instead, the device is used as a launchpad for lovingly spoofing the slasher genre from a modern perspective. It’s a means to a satisfying end.

As you can tell from The Final Girls‘ title, the film has a lot of fun playing with slasher genre tropes, especially in the film’s interactions between the self-aware modern teens & the fictional teen camp counselors at Camp Bloodbath. A lot of the teens’ plans to escape the machete-wielding Billy Murphy, a Jason Voorhees stand-in, revolves around abstaining from sex. The thinking is that teen sex invariably ends in death in oldschool slashers, which is something even the Friday the 13th series itself mocks in the humorously self-aware hologram scene in Jason X. The Final Girls also pokes fun at how teen dialogue is often moronic in oldschool slashers, like when an 80s teen tells a modern visitor, “Go suck a turd,” and he amusedly replies, “The writing is so bad.” Another modern character comments on her soon-to-end shelf life with the line, “I’m the mean girl in the 80s horror movie & we’re past the midpoint so . . .” There’s also attention paid to Camp Bloodbath‘s over-the-top John Carpenter score, the fact that cheap horror films can sometimes head to career-long typecasting, and the fact that there is often a very fine line between a slasher & a porno. The genre trope references are nothing if not relentless.

One of my favorite things about The Final Girls is that it not only participates in the trope-referencing meta play of Wes Craven’s Scream, but because of the film’s outlandish movie-within-a-movie concept, it also adopts the dream logic of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Although the film’s main goal is undoubtedly comedy, it does reach for eerie, otherworldly horror in its central conceit. As the modern teens attempt to escape their fictional prison they discover that all roads lead back to camp. In their words, “The movie won’t let us leave.” As a result, they find themselves stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque 90min loop until they can fulfil the slasher genre’s plot cycle to its conclusion, including establishing which virginal “final girl” would will remain alive to slay Not Jason at the film-within-the-film’s conclusion. There’s also a creepy interplay in the way exact dialogue from Camp Bloodbath bleeds over into “real life” conversation & in the way the 80s camp counselors are ritually devoted to their cues in certain scenes. Not all of the world-building is creepy, though. Just as the The Final Girls pokes fun at the predictability of horror movie tropes, it also mines humor from the artificiality of more general cinematic devices like black & white flashbacks, slow-motion escapes, and the physical appearance of production credits.

The reason I said earlier that I couldn’t be objective about The Final Girls as a finished product is that I recognize the film has some glaring faults, but I greatly enjoyed it anyway. Its straight-forward Jokes aren’t always as laugh-out-loud funny as they’re posed to be. The rules of its universe are more fluid & self-contradictory than they should be.  There’s also an unfortunate mount of weak CG imagery, which would normally be excusable in a cheap indie like this, except that the film calls direct attention to it in over-the-top Sam Raimi-style camera movement. However, that last complaint might be a little particular to my tastes, since I’m far from an Evil Dead fan. These are minor speed bumps for me, though, since so much of what’s going on in The Final Girls I’m already predisposed to enjoy. Not only am I a sucker for high-concept camp, but the movie features features contributions from a handful of minor personalities that I’m always down to watch in action: Alia “Maeby Fünke” Shawkat, Thomas “Silicon Valley” Middleditch, Joshua John “Teen Witch/Near Dark/Class of 1999” Miller (as a writer/producer), etc. The film’s 80s pop music cues also hit my sweet spot, including expert use of “Dance Hall Days“, “Cruel Summer“, and the most emotionally confusing “Bette Davis Eyes” strip tease you’re ever likely to see. There’s also a great deal of heart in the main protagonist’s personal relationship with one of the fictional 80s teens, one that’s particularly refreshing in its emotional severity considering the detached irony of a lot of the film’s meta humor.

Because so much of The Final Girls lines up with any particular interests it is difficult to say whether or not a majority of people will be able to get on its wavelength. I can, however, say this much in the movie’s behalf: audiences typically too squeamish for the slasher genre should be able to stomach the film’s limited gore, as it’s played for laughs more so than terror. I’m not sure that crowd will get as much out of the film’s trope play as the genre’s more dedicated fans, but as I said earlier, there’s plenty else going on to satiate anyone in the mood for a high-concept comedy with an occasional note of devastating heartbreak. If nothing else, The Final Girls will make an excellent compromise for those looking to introduce the horror comedy genre to the less-than-enthused. I expect it’ll make good fodder for many Halloween-themed movie binges in the years to come, perhaps sandwiched between the very “camp site slasher films” it lovingly spoofs.

-Brandon Ledet

Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! (1969)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

campstamp

When Russ Meyer voluntarily adopted the “X” rating for his first “hard sex” picture (read: softcore porn) Vixen!, he thought the distinction would serve as great free press. In a lot of ways he wasn’t wrong. Vixen! turned a huge, multi-million dollar profit for Meyer & opened a lot of doors to successes he wouldn’t have enjoyed otherwise. Unfortunately, not all of the attention of being the first American-made, X-rated release brought Vixen! was positive, though. A lot of moral policing followed the film across the country, resulting in, among other complications, arrests of projectionists & audience members at multiple screenings in the Deep South. In response, Meyer opened his next “hard sex” picture with the following rant:

“IN THE FACE OF RECENT EVENTS, SOME OF WHICH THREATEN OUR VERY EXISTENCE, THERE ARE STILL THOSE WHO CONCENTRATE THEIR PUNY EFFORTS IN AREAS WHERE NO CONCERN IS NEEDED. THEY CALL LOVE EVIL . . . THE HUMAN BODY OBSCENE . . . WHERE THEY CAN NEVER BE ANYTHING OTHER THAN BEAUTIFUL. OUR LAKES AND RIVERS FILL SLOWLY WITH DEATH. THE AIR WE BREATHE STRANGLES THE MIGHTY OAK. LITTLE BY LITTLE WE CAN SEE HUMAN COMPASSION AND LOVE GROWING LESS. AND STILL THERE ARE THOSE WHO HAVE THEIR TOY BANNERS OF PROTEST. THEY ATTEMPT TO THINK FOR THE REST OF US. DICTATE OUR FREEDOM OF CHOICE. THEY, THE STRONG AND PURE OF HEART, MUST PROTECT THOSE OF US WHO “THEY” HAVE DECIDED ARE WEAK. WE DO NOT QUESTION THEIR RIGHT TO PROTEST. BUT LET THEIR DECISIONS BE FOR THEMSELVES, FOR NO MAN HAS THE RIGHT TO DECIDE FOR ANOTHER. THINK ABOUT IT!”

Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! opens in this way, with that full rant scrolling in ALL CAPS on top of a frantic montage of pornographic & industrial imagery, announcing that Russ Meyer’s id was back in full swing. In a lot of ways, Vixen! felt like a toned-down Meyer trying to reshape his bizarrely straight-laced perversions into a  marketable commodity, his weirdo tendencies only showing at the fringes. Cherry ditches that pretense & lets Meyer’s freak flag fly. Here, the chaotic montage work of Mondo Topless meets the soap opera, soft crime machinations of Common Law Cabin to reveal a new, fully-realized Meyer aesthetic that would soon reach its full potential in the Ebert-penned Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Not wasting any time in unleashing its madness upon its victims . . . I mean audience, Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! opens with no less than three separate introductions. After the contextless, anti-censorship rant transcribed above, the film’s second opening rails against the “Evil of Marijuana” that “caresses all it comes in contact with.” Adopting some of Europe in the Raw‘s xenophobia (now directed at Mexico) & the industrial narration/pin-ups-in-motion formula of Meyer’s nudie cutie work, the film immediately launches into a second rant, this time against recreational marijuana use. The narrator flatly intones, “Pity the poor potheads, innocent victims subjugating their own free will at the mercy of the pusher, the real predator. Scant sympathy can be given to the parasites who would profit from the weaknesses & fragilities of the ill-informed.” Unfortunately, the film that follows is not exactly Meyer’s version of Reefer Madness. In fact, it has very little to do with marijuana at all. The best I can guess of what he was trying to accomplish there was in saying that just because he was willing to cash in on hippie counter-culture & “free love”, he in no way condoned the drugs that accompanied the scene. That’s Meyer in a nutshell. He’s willing to rail against censorship in one breath, but then chastise the youth for their recreational drugs in the next. To him, an unnatural, fetishistic obsession with gigantic breasts is wholesome & American. Marijuana? Not so much. That egotistical moralizing about What is Right & What’s Not often provides some of Meyer’s most fascinating work. For instance, the director’s new-found love of boobs-touching-boobs lesbian scenes wasn’t nearly as interesting when it was introduced in Vixen! as it is when paired in Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! with lines like “I don’t like women messing around with women. It’s un-American.” Meyer’s films work best when you can see his own self-contradicting moral core battling itself on the screen.

If you’re wondering why I’ve only touched on the film’s introductions so far, without even mentioning its central narrative, it’s because they’re relentless. Reportedly, actress Linda Ashton (who played the titular Cherry) stormed off set mid-production, leaving Meyer with a half-completed picture. Perhaps this is what saved Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! from Vixen!‘s made-for-TV-esque mediocrity. After a third introduction sequence (keep in mind this film is only 70 min long) that features a  psych rock theme song, Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! finally launches into action, telling an absurdly thin story about Harry, a corrupt, drug smuggling sheriff at the Mexican border, who’s ordered by his higher ups to take out a mysterious whistle-blower/assassin named Apache. Oh yeah, and he’s involved with a red hot nurse named Cherry. And other beautiful women are around also, including a prostitute named Raquel. And these women like to have sex. Some people die. It’s all very loose, as Meyer filled in the gaps of his half-finished scraps with his infamous sign & landscape montages, a naked mystic character named Soul (who recalls Haji’s distinctly similar role in Good Morning . . . And Goodbye!), and levels of sex & violence previously untouched in Meyer’s oeuvre. It’s a beautiful mess.

There are very few innovations brought to the table in Cherry, Harry, and Raquel!. It’s the first Meyer film to graphically suggest fellatio (which is pretty racy for him), the first to feature full-frontal male nudity, and the first to feature a black actress in the raw (a nice change of pace after the racist rants of Vixen!). Instead, Cherry is more remarkable for the way it brings all of Meyer’s old-hat tropes together for a single, incomprehensible picture. The lesbianism & food-fellation of Vixen! (this time it’s a celery stalk, not a dead fish) are back. Reaching further in the past, the violence of Meyer’s black & white roughies like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! return here in full color this time in the form of decapitations & bloody gunfights. Also present are the strange back & forth cuts between the sexual & the innocuous, this time mixing the image of the titular Cherry & Raquel making love with Harry fighting Apache over possession of a rifle. There’s also the aforementioned industrial montages, naked frolicking, Wild Gals of the Naked West‘s cowboys & Indians cosplay, and misguided, far-reaching statements about women like a closing monologue that calls them “bi-products of our society, pretty toys to play with, superficial in their make-up, but so necessary to our way of life.” It’s all there.

At the time of its release, Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! was the most Meyerest Meyer picture, a huge improvement upon the largely personality-free Vixen!. It’s a distinction that would be immediately surpassed in his next picture, but it still made for an interesting slice of over-sexed chaos nonetheless. It ended up being a blessing that Meyer had to piece together a half-completed picture in the editing room. I doubt the film would be nearly as fascinating if it were filmed as originally planned.

-Brandon Ledet

 

Pelts (2006)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

When I wrote my review of Jenifer, I noted that it was unique among Dario Argento’s body of work in a few ways, for better or worse. Jenifer herself was imagined by Argento as an alien life form, even if that wasn’t explicit in the text itself, making her the only extraterrestrial in his canon (unless I’m in for the shock of a lifetime when I get to Dracula 3D); further, the effects work on Jenifer was grotesque and monstrous, with the only similar prosthetic work in his films that I can recall being the monstrous child in Phenomena. Argento’s second Masters of Horror episode, Pelts, is also quite unlike his previous work, although not in the way that is frequently referenced. Nearly every review of Pelts mentions the short film’s “political message,” especially given the generally apolitical nature of all of Argento’s work, but I don’t really think that there is one, at least not in the way the uninitiated interpret the word. As a composition scholar, I am obliged to perceive and interpret all forms of composition and creation as inherently political, as all creation is an act of expressing individuality and thus is a political act in and of itself; by choosing what to include and what to exclude in the created thing, be it a poem, speech, or painting, the author/composer makes a de facto “political” statement. And, yes, the fact that Argento focused this film on the fur trade does lend itself to the assumption that the director is making a capital-P “Political” statement, but I don’t think that was Argento’s goal, nor do I think that decrying fur played a larger role in the inception of this plot than wanting to show a man skinning himself of his own flesh and then working backwards to create parallelism did. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Jake Feldman (the one and only Meat Loaf Aday) is a fur trader who lusts after Shanna (Ellen Ewusie), a stripper who is disgusted by Feldman’s possessiveness and the fact that, as a furrier, he constantly reeks of dead flesh. She has made it clear that she will dance for—but never sleep with—him, no matter how pathetic he is. One of his suppliers, Jeb Jameson (John Saxon, who previously worked with Argento in Tenebrae), is an old drunk who takes his son Larry (Michal Suchánek) into the woods to check the raccoon traps he set earlier. Larry expresses some concern when he realizes that his father is taking him beyond a warning fence, onto the land of Mother Mater (Brenda McDonald), but the elder Jameson scolds his son for his superstition. The two come upon stone ruins, which Larry notices are carved with the faces of raccoons, while his father instructs him to crush the windpipes of the animals they have trapped, apparently in abundance, and to take a baseball bat and crush the skulls of any raccoon that does not die instantly. Jeb calls Feldman to tell him that he has secured a large number of pelts, the most beautiful he has ever seen. Later, after the two have skinned the animals and their pelts are drying, Jeb heads to bed while Larry ecstatically examines the animal hides with a spiritual reverence. Moved by their beauty, he goes upstairs to his father’s room and crushes his skull with the baseball bat before gleefully setting up a trap and then killing himself with it.

Feldman and his lackey find the two in this position and, thinking quickly, take off with the raccoon skins. Various workers in Feldman’s shop begin to self-harm in ways that are reminiscent of their interactions with the furs in the coat-making process, until the coat is finally completed. In the meantime, Feldman visits Mother Mater, who warns him that the nearby fenced-off woods are protected by the “pine lights,” which he laughs off when he realizes she means raccoons. Feldman presents the coat to Shanna, who sleeps with him in exchange for it. He excuses himself to the restroom, where he proceeds to skin himself, cutting off his own flesh in roughly the shape of a tank top and then attempts to gift this flesh to Shanna, who flees from him. Feldman pursues her to the elevator, where her hand is trapped and then torn off (symbolic of the animal that gnawed its own foot off to escape the trap), and then they both die. The end.

I remember watching Tenebrae and being shocked by how unusually violent it was in comparison to the (comparatively) understated violence of the films that preceded it; Pelts gives that film a run for its money. Argento brought back Howard Berger, who had done the make-up and visual effects on Jenifer, and he was again interviewed on this DVD. Berger, who has worked with director Quentin Tarantino numerous times, recalled in his interview for this project that Tarantino’s directions on the set of Kill Bill largely consisted of “make it bloodier than Tenebrae.” He felt he had come full circle by contributing to this project, citing that it was the goriest thing he had ever worked on, and I can’t argue with that. There’s not a lot to engage an audience here on a philosophical level (and certainly nothing on a political level), but there’s more than enough to satisfy even the sickest fans of gore. I consider myself to have a fairly strong constitution, steeled by many a midnight horror flick, but some scenes were almost too much for even my stomach. The scene in which Feldman flays himself is horrifying in all the best ways, and the scene in which the younger Jameson serenely plunges his face into a bear trap carefully combined tension and the grotesque in perfect measure. That’s a real feather in the cap of the people who worked on the short’s practical effects, but it also highlights the poor quality of much of the CGI work. The worst offender in this arena has to be the scene in which one of Feldman’s employees sews her eyes, mouth, and nose shut; there’s no real reason why this couldn’t have been done practically using a dummy head, especially given Berger’s talents, and it looks terrible and rushed in the final product.

Although Meat Loaf is most well known as a musician and his most memorable role since The Rocky Horror Picture Show was a supporting one in Spice World as the Girls’ driver, he has a willingness to completely immerse himself in a part the way that many actors who are more “legitimate” or noteworthy do not. Feldman is an utterly vile person, and any humanization that he has is as a result of Meat Loaf’s surprisingly nuanced and careful performance. Saxon is the only other actor of note in the production, and he does the opposite, playing up the campiness of the Jameson character; it’s a bit of a relief to see him killed off so early, as that frees Saxon from sullying himself too much. The rest of the cast is largely comprised of nobodies; each of them has an IMDb page full of “Man #3,” “Bouncer,” “Tough Guy,” and “Stripper #4” credits, and there’s not much to say about any of them. Ellen Ewusie really gets the worst of this, however, as her interview (like Moran Atias’s in the supplemental materials for Mother of Tears) illuminates her as a woman saddled with attempting to discuss building the background and motivations of a character who exists solely for titillation, and I wish I could see her in a role that requires more than that.

Overall, this was an experience that I neither loved nor hated. The message is less “fur is murder” and more “selfishness is self-destructive,” which is all well and good but not very groundbreaking. The acting is a mixed bag, and there’s so much gore packed into this short run time that it is worth a watch if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s by far the better of Argento’s two Masters episodes, and while it’s not very good, it is an unusual part of the director’s canon that gives some insight into his mind that is lacking in his other works.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Vixen! (1968)

/ swampflix / 9 Comments

EPSON MFP image

twohalfstar

campstamp

“Is she woman or animal? TOO MUCH for one man!”

While Russ Meyer was cranking out a string of vitriolic “soap operas” about couples on the verge of murdering each other – Common Law Cabin, Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!, and Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! – his career was somewhat compromised by a sudden change in the cinematic landscape. Suddenly, in the freewheeling sexual revolution of the late 1960s, films bordering on hardcore pornography were beginning to play in somewhat respectable venues instead of underground porn theaters. In order to keep his career alive & relevant, Meyer had to adapt. It was difficult to sell a picture that teased, but never delivered onscreen sex if the public could get the goods elsewhere, so Meyer’s next couple of pictures– Vixen! & Cherry, Harry, and Raquel! – took a much harder turn to match the competition. Meyer’s first “hard sex” film, Vixen!, was the first American-made release to receive the “X” rating from censorship boards, an honor Meyer initially wore like a badge. Unfortunately, the director dulled down a lot of his more outlandish eccentricities, including his vitriolic dialogue & rapidfire montage edits in order to appeal to a larger audience, so the resulting film, however financially successful, plays a little dull after the darker, more bizarre territory of its direct predecessors.

As always with Meyer’s pictures, Vixen!‘s plot is razor thin. The titular hellcat, played by Erica Gavin, is an adulteress archetype we’ve seen before in Meyer films like Lorna & Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!, but while her cuckold husband may be shamed for paying more attention to his work than his wife’s sexual needs, Vixen herself suffers no consequences from her cheating ways. The lack of punishment with Vixen’s adultery isn’t necessarily a problem for the film. It’s kind of a cool idea that she’s a sexual healer who leaves a positively-changed trail of lovers behind her. First she seduces a visiting, married stranger. Then she seduces his wife (in Meyer’s first homosexual scene, which is very much against his film’s typical, no-frills, all-American sex). And then she seduces her own brother, who’s somewhat of a biker & a reprobate (in a depiction of incest that has got to be the closest thing to kink that Meyer had filmed outside the chest-shaving scene in Finders Keepers). Nothing of consequence comes of these encounters & they’re presented more or less for pure titillation. The problem with this formula is that instead of having hateful, knockdown arguments with her unsuspecting husband, Vixen directs her vitriol into racist attacks against a young draft-dodger named Niles. In her racist rants against Niles, Vixen drops words like “boy”, “watermelon”, “spade”, “chocolate drop”, and “Sambo” with hurtfully nasty abandon. For instance, when her brother asks her, “Is there anyone you wouldn’t make it with?” she replies “Only spades & cripples.” Fuck, that’s fucked. The thing is that Vixen is mostly portrayed as a positive character & the film’s concluding conflict involves an airplane hijacking that just skips right over the central couple’s adultery issues & just barely touches on the fact that the star of the show is a raging bigot, so then what’s the point of that character trait at all? At least when Meyer was depicting romantic monogamy as a hate-filled cesspool of bruised egos, I could tell what he was getting at, even if he was off-base. Here, I’m a little more confused & uneasy.

Still, it’s impossible to brush of Vixen!‘s significance as a Russ Meyer classic altogether. Meyer’s plan to make “hard sex” films (it’s not actually that “hard”, y’all; it’s barely even softcore porn) marketable to large audiences in Vixen! payed off nicely. The film cost very little to make, but made more than $7 million in its first year alone. As Meyer himself explains it, making a porn-leaning film palatable for couples instead of lone-masturbators “was the basis for Vixen!‘s huge success. Once you have that happen your gross doubles, even triples. It’s not just the raincoat brigade.” Unfortunately a lot of the old Meyer charm was lost in the translation as he reached for a more mainstream crowd, leaving the film with a distinct made-for-TV feel that would’ve left it to fit right in with the Skinemax market that followed decades later . . . if it weren’t for the not-sexy-at-all racist rants. Still, a great deal of Meyer’s weirdness shines through. If nothing else, Erica Gaven is a knockout as the titular Vixen. She’s more rabid animal than human sexpot & it’s great to see a woman take so much command of her own sex life in a skin flick from this era. It also helps that Gavin is a gorgeous actress with particularly striking eyebrows . . . and Meyer-approved breasts.

When she’s not screwing unsuspecting couple or ranting about the inferiority of other races, Vixen also is afforded some of Meyer’s strangest details to date, including a shot of her having sex framed from under a seemingly invisible bed as she bounces on the bare springs & an all-too-memorable scene in which she flirts by sticking a dead fish between her breasts & then mocking fellatio on its little, lifeless fish head. Even when Meyer was trying to tone himself down to appeal to larger audiences, he had a hard time concealing the fact that he was a total madman. This is also evident in a scene where Vixen is making love to her husband (for a change) that’s intercut with a separate pair of characters discussing the merits of Communism as a political system & in the lesbian seduction centerpiece where Meyer obsessively focuses on the image of boobs touching boobs as if he’s working out a new fetish for himself on camera (without bothering at all to discover how two women would actually have sex in the process). In a quicker paced, less-racist film with a true narrative conflict in any sense, these strange details could’ve amounted to something special, perhaps one of Meyer’s greatest films. As is, though, Vixen! is more important because it made Meyer a shit ton of money, money that afforded him more personal projects down the road. Some of his best work was just ahead of him.

-Brandon Ledet

Big Ass Spider! (2014)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

I was tabling at last week’s NOCAZ Fest when two brothers (I’m guessing between the ages of 10 & 14?) named Beau & Joey let me with a film recommendation I promised I’d look into ASAP. I forget exactly how we got on the subject, but it probably had to do with our Marabunta Cinema zine, which is a collection of reviews of movies about killer ants. Beau, the younger of the pair, enthusiastically described the gruesome scenes of a Z-grade creature feature in which a gigantic spider melted the faces off patients in a hospital. When it came to telling me the title of the film, however, he sheepishly deferred to his older, quieter brother, due to a mild expletive in its title. Joey’s response? “Big Ass Spider!“.

Big Ass Spider! is perfectly suited for Beau & Joey’s demographic. It’s got the intentionally campy, Z-movie feel of a Syfy Channel Original but, as the title suggests, its tongue-in-cheek violence is slightly racier than what you’d typically find in the Sharknado format. The titular big ass spider melts faces, stabs chest cavities, and devours victims after grabbing them with its web like Mortal Kombat‘s Scorpion. All of this mayhem is promised as soon as the opening prologue, where the spider is going full King Kong at the top of a Los Angeles skyscraper, soundtracked by a down-tempo cover of “Where Is My Mind?” (in a little bit of borrowed Fight Club cool). Schlock fans are unlikely too find too much new or surprising here, except maybe in the detail that the spider grows exponentially in size by the hour, but the film is intentionally goofy enough to work & I can attest to at least two testimonies of it serving as a decent introduction to the creature feature as a genre.

By the way, speaking of the Syfy Channel, director Mike Mendez’ project immediately following Big Ass Spider! was the previously-covered Lavalantula, a Syfy movie about spiders that spew hot volcano lava at Steve “The Gutte” Guttenberg. Big Ass Spider! may have landed Mendez the job for Lavalantula, but distinctly feels more like a personal pet project for the director. Because he couldn’t afford a casting director, for instance, Mendez supposedly cast the entire film using his Facebook friends list. That means that Mendez is Facebook friends with Lin Shaye (best known for her work in Detroit Rock City & the Insidious franchise), Ray Wise (best known to me from Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!), and Lloyd Kaufman (best known for blessing/cursing the world with Troma Video). Sounds like a cool dude to me. Mendez also stuck to his guns when distributors wanted to rename the film Dino Spider or Mega Spider, claiming that “Big Ass Spider! is the right title for the movie. I felt it in my heart and soul.” I can’t argue with him there. A lot of Big Ass Spider!’s charm is in knowing the whole time that there is a real-life movie called Big Ass Spider! and that you’re watching it.

Despite a couple missteps like an uncomfortable Hispanic stereotype sidekick, a stale “Hide your kids, hide your wife” reference, and some Da Hip Hop Witch-style street interview ramblings, Big Ass Spider! gets by enough on its inherent charm to stand out as an enjoyable, occasionally gruesome diversion. In short, if it’s good enough for Beau & Joey, it’s good enough for me.

-Brandon Ledet

People, Places, Things (2015)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

threehalfstar

With a little tweaking People, Places, Things could easily pass as the third Noah Baumbach black comedy of the year (following Mistress America & While We’re Young). The film’s mix of understated indie quirk with pitch-black dialogue like “Happiness is not a sustainable condition,” & “I’m fine. I’m just having a bad life. It’ll be over eventually,” fits right in with the typical Bambauchian formula. This doesn’t feel like a direct, intentional nod to the director’s work, however. It’s rather a side-effect of attempting to adopt the often dark humor & lightheartedly sullen tone of modern art comics & graphic novels. Featuring original artwork from comic book artist Gray Williams, People, Places, Things uses the comic book medium as a form of inner monologue to tell the story of the protagonist’s emotional state as his external, romantic life crumbles at his feet. Fans of Fantagraphics-leaning artists like Daniel Clowes & Charles Burns will probably get a lot of satisfaction from that storytelling device. The rest of the film’s entertainment value is largely dependent upon your interest in dark humor, romantic comedy, and Flight of the Conchords vet Jemaine Clement.

Clement plays the film’s protagonist, Will Henry, a super-bummed graphic novelist/art school professor having a toned-down sort of mid-life crisis. After catching his longtime girlfriend cheating during their twin daughters’ 5th birthday party, he spends a full year in a state of depression-laden stasis before reluctantly re-entering the dating game. After a tense first date with a surprisingly age-appropriate literary professor that had the two passionately arguing over the supposed merits of graphic novels as a legitimate form of literature, he finds himself torn between a new love interest who finds him snobbish & the leftover fragments of his love for the mother of his children. It’s a classic tale of arrested emotional development. Honestly, because Henry is in such a reflective state of depression & self-loathing, he comes across as the only properly-developed character in the film. As a result, none of People, Places, Things’ romantic detangling hits quite as hard as Clement’s portrayal of a broken man, which works perfectly in tandem with Gray William’s sullen comic book art. There’s obviously a great deal of humor in Clement’s performance, especially in the way he interacts with his daughters (for instance, on their 6th birthday he tells them, “It feels like just yesterday you were 5,”) & in the way he allows his lectures to devolve into topics like “Why Does Life Suck So Hard?”. Humor comes naturally for Clement, though, so it’s much more of a treat to see him showing off his dramatic chops here. The movie asks him to carry a hefty load of emotional weight & he seems to pull it off effortlessly.

As enjoyable as People, Places, Things is as an understated black comedy, it doesn’t break the mold in any significant way. It’s not even the best dark comedy about a comic book artist in a state of emotional crisis to be released this year. That distinction belongs to The Diary of a Teenage Girl. As with all of Jemaine Clement’s work, though, it is an exceedingly charming film in a way that feels natural & unforced. The movie even works in some Understanding Comics-type lectures on basic comic book concepts like the function of “the gap between the panels” without compromising its tone. I also liked that as fervently as the movie defends comics as an artform, it doesn’t hesitate to poke fun at the fine art of improv comedy in a dismissive way. Besides Clement’s exceptional performance as the lead, the best trick People, Places, Things pulls off is in exploring comic books as a form of storytelling while simultaneously adapting its techniques to the medium of film. It works surprisingly well & feels remarkably genuine, which is an important attribute for this Bambauchian sort of depressive indie comedy quirk. It’s not something you need to rush out to see, but it is currently, conveniently streaming on Netflix for whenever you’re in the mood for what it’s laying down.

-Brandon Ledet