reviews

99 Homes (2015)

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fourstar

You’d be forgiven for assuming that an indie drama about forcible evictions during the 2007-2009 U.S. Subprime Morgage Crisis would be a thoroughly bleak affair. And even if you didn’t assume that about 99 Homes, the film sets its pessimistic tone early by opening with the fallout of a suicide. There is a wild card at play here, however, and its name is Michael Shannon. Shannon is notoriously deft at playing hilariously terrifying monsters & his turn as a money-obsessed real estate broker in 99 Homes is certainly not relatable or even remotely likeable, but it is, at times, riotously funny. Shannon is such a darkly amusing joy to watch in 99 Homes that his performance often threatens to turn the film into a black comedy. It’s whenever he’s offscreen, leaving Andrew Garfield’s much-suffering construction worker & single father to pick up the pieces of a broken life left in the evil broker’s wake, that Shannon’s antagonist stops being darkly amusing & just simply feels dark.

The story of 99 Homes is fairly straightforward. Michael Shannon’s real estate broker makes most of his money by evicting people from their homes on behalf of the bank. When Shannon’s monster broker evicts Andrew Garfield’s out-of-work construction dad from his family home, Garfield’s desperate blue collar everyman ends up working for the less-than-legal brute. He works his way up from literally shovelling shit to making ludicrous piles of cash as the evil broker’s right hand man. This, of course, leads to Garfield’s sad dad performing the very same heartless eviction practices that ruined his life in the first place & hiding his newfound source of income from his suspicious mother, played by the always-welcome Laura Dern. There’s a devastating amount of empathetic pain in Garfield’s eyes as he explains to people that their homes are now owned by the bank & that they are trespassing on bank property that makes the film at times bleakly arresting. For the most part, though, there aren’t too many surprises in the film’s indie drama formula & it plays out exactly as you’d expect.

It really is Michael Shannon’s performance that makes 99 Homes a memorably visceral experience. Although there is a unignorable consistency to his work as an actor, Shannon brings a terrifying authenticity to the role, something that truly makes you feel bad for laughing, seeing as how this was a real thing that happened to real people very recently. Shannon’s heartless real estate broker is a pitch perfect update to the wicked bankers with the cigar-chomping switched out for e-cigs. (Our next generation of irredeemable villains are vapers. There’s no way around that.) Cop’s call Shannon’s evil broker “boss”. He golfs with politicians in one scene & makes backroom deals to rip off the government with higher-ups at the bank in the next. He brags about how he “made more money during the crash than before” & talks cynically about America as “a nation of the winners by the winners for the winners.” I also particularly liked a moment where he describes houses as boxes that you shouldn’t get emotional about. Instead of saying what matters is what you fill the boxes with, he says it matters how many boxes you have, which is a perfectly succinct summation of his monstrously greedy soul. As with a lot of Shannon’s work, the real estate broker at the center of 99 Homes‘ true-to-life nightmare is deliciously over-the-top in his villainy. Andrew Garfield & Laura Dern are talented actors who hold their own when needed, but Shannon devours so much scenery that there isn’t much left room for them left to stand on. He’s a sight to behold.

-Brandon Ledet

The Love Butcher (1975)

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fourhalfstar

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I first became aware of the ridiculously titled The Love Butcher when the crew over at RedLetterMedia planned to watch it for one of their Best of the Worsts specials, only to discover that the tape in their possession was damaged and unwatchable. A week later, the Alamo announced its Weird Wednesday line-up for the month of October, and Butcher was the revealed as the month’s first screening. A forgotten oddity, the 1975 proto-slasher focuses on the the split personality of physically handicapped Caleb and his suave, handsome, murderous alter ego Lester.

Caleb (Erik Stern) is a gardener referred to by many of his beautiful but insensitive clients as “a cripple,” due to his malformed left hand, clubfoot, and coke bottle glasses. Bald and with perpetually gross bits of black gunk on his teeth, Caleb shares a shack with his brother, Lester. Caleb failed to protect Lester from some terrible event when they were children, leading Caleb to be haunted by his own psyche; Lester is in reality only a figment of Caleb’s warped mind, one who sometimes takes over Caleb’s body (and dons a wig) to murder the “sluts” who populate their town. Meanwhile, journalist Russell Wilson (Jeremiah Beecher, in his only film role) first antagonizes the police and then works with them to track down the murderer, much to the chagrin of both the perpetually annoyed Captain Stark (Richard Kennedy) and Wilson’s long-suffering girlfriend, Florence (Kay Neer, also in her only film role), who has grown increasingly weary of his unpredictable newspaperman hours.

Of all Caleb’s clients, Florence is the one who treats him best. The first victim that we see is a woman who gives him a hard time for asking for water then suddenly turning into a sly seductress when asking if Caleb can recommend an AC repairman; he “sends” Lester, who murders her. Lester also seduces and then murders a Texan expat (Eve Mac, also in her only film role; sensing a pattern here?) whose irritation at Caleb for placing a lawn sprinkler right outside of her window and spilling manure everywhere is actually fairly reasonable, up until the point that she starts berating him for being a freak. All throughout, Lester goes into hysterical diatribes that feature some of the most outlandishly misogynistic dialogue ever uttered on screen, so blatantly and outrageously sexist that it cannot possibly have been meant to be taken seriously. Lester blames the women of the world—all of them, including the boys’ own dead mother—for literally draining the life force out of men through sex. Not all of his victims are so cruel, however; the woman with whom he shares the screen for the longest time, Sheila (Robin Sherwood, who also appeared in Blow Out and Death Wish 2, so, hey, good for her) is the sweet young wife of a dickish older husband who withholds sex from her and berates her musical choices while also demanding his Ovaltine. Sheila asks Caleb to take some time off because she’s not comfortable being alone with a man while her husband is out of town on business, and when Lester approaches her as a record salesman, she spurns his sexual advances. Her only real crime is being too naive; she recognizes Lester in his second disguise when he comes to repair her plumbing but still lets him into the house. What?

The police can’t figure out who the killer is, despite the fact that virtually all of the murders are committed with gardening tools and in a single neighborhood, against a group of women who all have the same gardener (whoever could the killer be?!). Florence is so kind as to invite Caleb into her home for lunch, a gesture that it seems no one has ever shown him before. Lester is infuriated by this person who doesn’t jibe with his conception of women, so he sets out to seduce Flo, only to be spurned by her on the evening that Russell has finally proposed. This somehow allows Caleb to finally overcome Lester and realize that it was Caleb, not Lester, who died when they were children, and that Lester took on the affectations of being Caleb because Caleb was their mother’s favorite. On screen, it’s much less confusing than it sounds.

The film’s first cut was directed by Mikel Angel, who also co-wrote the script. Initially more of a straightforward exploitation movie, Don Jones (whose directing career began with the luridly titled Schoolgirls in Chains and ended with Molly and the Ghost, which doesn’t sound so bad until you see the cover) was tasked with recutting the film into something more comedic. Instead of the hodgepodge film you would expect from such a cobbled together affair, Butcher is fairly straightforward in its brief 82 minute run time, although I suspect that earlier versions of the film featured more of Captain Stark and the reporter investigating, as their combined screen time in the finished product in comparison to Stern’s elegantly delivered monologues is so minimal as to seem almost superfluous. These monologues have to be seen to be believed; imagine Dandy from American Horror Story: Freak Show, but as played by someone with a real hunger for scenery that manages to deftly tread the line between camp and menace rather than just crossing back and forth over it. Some great lines include “I’m the great male Adonis of the universe!” (which, frankly, he isn’t too far off the mark, because damn) and “You’re going to make love to me; satiate me, fill me with nymphoid satisfaction. Drain me, and then you’ll lie at the foot of my altar and adore my godly beauty.”

Lester’s overly verbose and surprisingly sophisticated rants manage to be at once menacing and hilarious, and it’s a testament to the late Erik Stern’s acting that they work at all. For a performance in a movie with no pretensions about being anything other than schlockbait, Stern really commits to his dual role, and to the various other roles and disguises Lester dons in his murdercapades; “Buck” is a treasure, as is the British plumber, although his brown-faced Puerto Rican record salesman disguise is a little uncomfortable (not to mention, what was he going to do if he successfully seduced Sheila on this first attempt and his body had a completely different fleshtone from his face?). Stern brings a pronounced, theatrical-but-understated physicality to the role, crafting very different screen presences for Caleb and Lester, to the extent that you may actually find yourself forgetting that it’s a dual role. There was real potential and talent there; perusing the list of one-shot TV guest appearances that make up the bulk of his career saddened me because he actually could have gone pretty far as an actor but he never caught the break he needed.

This is a fun, and funny, movie. In much the same way that Tristram Shandy satirized the novel as a form despite being one of the first ten or so novels in the Western world, The Love Butcher mocks, subverts, and emulates the slasher despite having been conceived when that concept was only beginning to solidify. It’s an exploitation film that will use a cartoon sound effect when an older man shows off his bicep in one scene and then have a woman beaten to death with a sharp rake in the next. One scene may show Stern as Caleb having a discussion with “Lester,” personified as Lester’s wig on a styrofoam head—with a lit cigar in its “mouth”; in the next, Stern may be wringing a surprising amount of pathos out of being apprehended just after Caleb finally wrests control from Lester permanently, mewlingly pleading with the police to understand that Lester had done all those horrible things. It’s a movie that demands to be seen.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Queen of Earth (2015)

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fivestar

I’ve read a lot of positive reviews of Alex Ross Perry’s 2014 film Listen Up Philip, but my deep and abiding loathing for Jason Schwartzman ensured that I was never tempted to see the film, despite the fact that it also starred Elisabeth Moss, an actress that I like quite a lot. Perry’s new film, Queen of Earth, has generated a great deal of buzz, and I’m happy to say that I found the film to be deserving of every accolade it’s received so far. Set at a lake house in the Hudson River Valley, the film focuses on the relationship between lifelong friends Catherine (Moss) and Virginia (Katherine Waterston), and the way that that people who love each other can cause more damage to those they care about than any outsider can, as well as the fact that, as Virginia says in one of her fantastic monologues, “You can escape other people’s cycles, but you can’t escape your own.”

The previous summer, Virginia invited Catherine to her parent’s lake house for what was supposed to be a week of healing intimacy between friends after Virginia experienced a painful event (implied to be a complicated childbirth before giving the baby up for adoption). Catherine spoiled their getaway by bringing along her codependent boyfriend, James (Kentucker Audley), with whom Virginia had a mutual open loathing. This summer, Catherine is the person suffering; as revealed in the film’s opening moments, James recently dumped her shortly after her artist father’s suicide, citing a relationship with another woman with whom he had been involved even before Catherine’s father’s “accident.” Catherine, herself an artist who worked for and idolized her father in an unhealthy way, is distraught and breaking down, and her recuperation at the lake house is impeded by the frequent presence of Rich (Patrick Fugit), Virginia’s neighbor. He and Virginia were in a long term relationship, but he ignored her attempts to let him down easily when he chose to leave for grad school and she decided to let the relationship end. Both Virginia and Catherine are emotionally ignorant and immature; Virginia was much less traumatized by her experience the previous year than Catherine is by the dissolution of the relationships that she allowed to define her. This is best exemplified in a flashback showing Virginia discussing her hospital experience but ultimately ending her monologue with declarations of how much she despises people who weigh on her emotionally and eventually cuts them out of her life. She dismisses Rich’s desires to maintain their relationship despite the distance between them as delusional, but her attempts to turn the tables on Catherine (by inviting Rich, an interloping lover, to spend time at the lake house during what is supposed to be a healing period for Catherine) are petty and heartless in a way that exceeds any reasonable amount of resentment.

Catherine, for her part, is little better. Although a great deal of the film’s conflict is found in implication, flashbacks show her to be a self-interested child of privilege with little regard for the concerns of others. Bringing James with her to the previous year’s retreat was a mistake that she fails to appreciate the gravity of and does not apologize for, even after Virginia makes her displeasure evident. Further, her reactions to the attempts that people make to connect with her, and the way she perceives all communication as meddling in her personal affairs, paint her as a bit of a brat. Although she is surrounded by people who do not seem to be significantly less privileged than she is (Virginia’s parents’ lake house is beautiful and doubtlessly expensive, and Rich’s parents own a similar, neighboring location, so it’s not as if the two are struggling), her peers perceive her as cold and unapproachable. It’s implied that her late father may have schemed to take advantage of others’ money, but nothing is ever made explicit, and, if her father was the Bernie Madoff of the Hudson River Valley, her denial of his sins and weaknesses despite being his assistant as well as his daughter would make their dislike of her more understandable. Overall, however, our sympathy lies with her, as she descends into the kind of spiraling depression that is rarely depicted onscreen, as she becomes more and more detached from social mores and human behavior, becoming more feral and inhuman with each passing day. Virginia’s failure to realize how much her vengeance is hurting her oldest and dearest friend, and her refusal to send Rich away as he becomes more confrontational and cruel, paints her in a more unsympathetic light, although we also empathize with her inability to properly conceptualize just how deep Catherine’s wounds are.

This is a deeply emotional and cinematically beautiful movie that gets to the heart of interpersonal relationships and how affection can sour due to an individual’s blindness to his or her own faults. The musical cues, increasing tension, and sense of dread are all cribbed from thrillers of the seventies, but the violence on display never transcends from emotional to physical (or does it?), and the intentionally ambiguous ending is at once both a perfect ending and a somewhat unsatisfactory one, although that does not detract from the overall quality of the picture. What’s more, it’s impossible not to note what a funny movie this can be in its smaller moments, as it doesn’t shy away from the ways that a person’s breakdown can often lead to moments of unintentional hilarity. As rare as it is to see a film that so unabashedly stares into the face of mental illness, it’s even rarer to see a film that understands and appreciates that, from the outside, the behaviors of an irrational person can be objectively humorous even if they are subjectively heartbreaking, and the film manages to tread that line in an insightful and deft way. More than just adding more scenes to Moss’s career highlight reel, this movie is the most honest portrayal of unhealthy bonds I’ve seen in as long as I can remember. It will break your heart and then make it sing, and you’ll be haunted by the images and their emotional resonance for weeks.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Midnight Offerings (1981)

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fourstar

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Melissa Sue Anderson (Mary Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie) and Mary Beth McDonough (Erin Walton from The Waltons) step away from their well-known country girl roles to become dueling teen witches in this made-for-TV horror flick. When I first realized that Midnight Offerings was a made-for-tv movie from the early 80s, I expected it to be a joke of a horror film, oozing with campiness, but to my surprise, it was actually a little more on the serious side. There were even a couple of scenes that I found to be legitimately frightening, but unfortunately, the film wasn’t serious enough to avoid getting a Camp Stamp.

Vivian Sotherland (Anderson) is an evil teenage witch who uses her supernatural powers for selfish reasons. For example, her football star boyfriend was at risk of flunking out of high school, so she had his teacher killed in a pretty impressive car explosion. Also, she wanted to have her own car, so she gave her father’s supervisor a heart attack in order for him to get a promotion and use his pay increase to get her a vehicle. As her reign of terror really starts to take off, a new girl moves into town, and guess what? She’s also a witch! The new girl, Robin Prentiss (McDonough), knows that she has powers, but she doesn’t know that she’s a real witch until she does a little bit of research. Once Vivian realizes that Robin is also a witch, the good witch versus bad witch battles begin!

Interestingly, Anderson would go on to star in the cult classic horror film, Happy Birthday to Me, in the same year that Midnight Offerings was released. It seems as though she was really trying to get away from her Little House on the Prairie image, but she will forever be known as sweet little Mary Ingalls. I think that her Prairie reputation made her role in Midnight Offerings even more terrifying. She had this “good girl gone bad” vibe going on, and it was amazing. If it’s at all possible to get your hands on this forgotten film, it’s definitely worth a watch or two.

-Britnee Lombas

Turbo Kid (2015)

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fourhalfstar
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Functioning as an unassuming but surprisingly elegant eighties nostalgia vehicle, Turbo Kid is a New Zealand-Canadian co-production starring Munro Chambers (formerly Eli of Degrassi TNG) as “The Kid,” an otherwise-nameless survivor of a nondescript apocalypse fighting to stay alive in the distant, irradiated future year of 1997. His hero is comic book character Turbo Blaster, master of the Turbo Punch, and he obtains water (which is becoming less drinkable by the day) by trapping and trading mutant rats. His life changes when he meets and reluctantly befriends Apple (Laurence Leboeuf), a strange girl who comes from the other side of the wasteland, and discovers an underground bunker containing the Turbo Blaster’s real armor and weaponry. The master of this domain is the implacable Zeus (Michael Ironside, because of course), a warlord who is attended by his masked lieutenant Skeletron (Edwin Wright), a voiceless monster with a metal skull mask and razor-studded football pads. When Apple, the newly christened Turbo Kid, and renegade cowboy Frederic (Aaron Jeffery) are captured by Zeus to compete in his murderous bloodsports, the trio learns that the water they’ve been drinking is made of the same stuff as Soylent Green; they escape and begin to take the fight to Zeus.

This is an eccentric movie, and it’s definitely not for everyone. Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com refers to the film’s aesthetic as an “infantilizing vintage fetish,” which isn’t inaccurate but fails to account for how much joy a properly attuned viewer can derive from the film’s strange blend of innocence and gore, born from nostalgia for a time when films like this were more commonplace. The late eighties and early nineties were a strange time, when R-rated films like Robocop, Police Academy, and Rambo were made for adults but marketed to children in the form of action figures and cartoon adaptations, and the peculiarity of that idiosyncratic time acts as a kind of unstated thesis or leitmotif at the core of this film. So much of the movie plays like something that a group of kids would make in their backyard, with the prominence of playground equipment in the areas where Kid spends his time, his eighties kid dream bedroom in the underground station where he has made a home, and the fact that the only apparent mode of transportation is by bicycle (presumably due to a lack of fuel); with this in mind, it would be easy to assume that the movie would feel like it was made for children as well, until the ludicrous blood squibs start popping off.

The film’s darker comedy elements come from the fact that this flick is very, very violent. And bloody. Underneath the primary colors of the Turbo suit and the Punky Brewster by-way-of Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure sartorial choices, there’s gore to satiate even the most bloodthirsty viewer. At one point, a person’s body is blown in half, and his torso and head land atop another person’s shoulders, effectively blinding him and turning the 1.5 men into a human totem pole; it’s so over-the-top that it crosses a line… until the bottom half of said mauled fighter also lands on yet another person’s shoulders, and skips right back across the line to be bloody hilarious once more. Skeletron’s weapon of choice is a gauntlet that shoots saw blades (like the makeshift weapons from Blood Massacre), which provides plenty of opportunities for fountains of blood, and even Turbo Kid’s overpowered gauntlet causes people’s bodies to burst like giant hemoglobin balloons. And I forgot to mention–these are practical effects, at least for the most part. That’s dedication that you don’t see often anymore, and it’s best to appreciate it when the opportunity arises. It’s silly and farcical and oh-so-wonderful, and I can’t recommend it enough.

From the throwback rock & roll music that Kid listens to on his walkman (when he can scavenge some batteries) to the sound effect cues and overall usage of color and depth of frame, this is a movie that made me so happy that I immediately watched it a second time on the day following my first viewing. As noted above, it’s not a movie that everyone can love; you have to be of a certain mindset and have a certain fondness for films of yore. It’s a solid film predicated upon a familiarity with films of the Cold War, featuring homages to Terminator, Star Wars, Mad Max, and everything else your Muppet Babies-loving heart has dreamed of combining into one narrative. The only potential problem that I can foresee for this film is that it could become a surprise indie hit that crosses over into mainstream saturation; check it out now before the Napoleon Dynamite-like hype and inevitable backlash destroys your capacity to love it for what it is.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Martian (2015)

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threehalfstar

I don’t know if it’s just a mood I’m in or a reflection of the kind of studio films that get released this time of year, but The Martian is the third in-the-theater experience I’ve had in a row where I enjoyed what I was watching without ever being super impressed. Black Mass was a serviceable 70s gangster pastiche made entertaining by a long list of great performances from incredible actors putting in above average work. Sicario was a decent war (on drugs) film that survived mostly on the strength of its intense action sequences & striking cinematography. Going for the hat trick, The Martian was pretty good, but nothing out of the ordinary in terms of structure or narrative in the context of hard sci-fi cinema. In this case, what saves the movie from genre-related tedium is a depiction of believable people (read: nerds) engaging in practical problem solving in an impractical scenario: rescuing an astronaut/botanist who’s been stranded on Mars with limited resources for survival. The movie loses a good bit of steam when it gets mired in NASA politics & the logistics of making physical contact with the MIA astro-botanist, but for the most part the recognizable humanity in its extraordinary extraterrestrial situation makes for an interesting watch.

Matt Damon is asked to hold down a lot of the film’s weight as the titular astro-botanist Mark Watney, who might as well be considered a ghost as well as a Martian, as he has been assumed dead by his colleagues (with good reason). I almost hate to say it, but it’s the found footage aspects of his early post-abandonment screentime that holds most of the film’s charms. Despite facing almost certain death in The Martian‘s first act, Watney logically explains the details of exactly how/why he’s fucked as well as the practical day-to-day details other films would usually skip over, such as the bathroom situation in a Martian space lab. Speaking of the scatological, there’s a surprising amount of poop in this film. You could even say that poop saves the day, which is certainly more interesting than whatever control room shenanigans solve the conflict in Apollo 13 or other similar fare. Besides his poop-related resourcefulness, Watney has an entertaining sense of humor that distinguishes him from typical space rescue heroes, exemplified in lines like “Mars will come to fear my botany skills,” “Fuck you, Mars,” “I’m going to have to science the shit out of this”, and constant tirades against his captain’s love of disco that remind me of the iconic “No more fucking ABBA!” line in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

The problem with The Martian, if there is one, is that every other actor in the film is completely wasted. Heavyweights Jessica Chastain & Michael Peña are given essentially nothing to do. Kristen Wiig is mostly present to look skeptical. Jeff Daniels is a run-of-the-mill business dick. And so on. Only Donald Glover’s performance stand out among the supporting cast, but not in a good way. Glover’s king nerd is distractingly awful in his attempts to outnerd his nerdy colleagues, providing the film’s sole representation of uncrecognizable human behavior. Glover is an island of falsehood in a film that generally feels believable. If I could ask director Ridley Scott one question about The Martian it would be what the hell was he thinking allowing Glover to embarrass himself/everyone else with that performance. It’s spectacularly awful.

Speaking of Ridley Scott, The Martian often feels as if it were a direct response to the backlash against more fanciful sci-fi like Scott’s own Prometheus & Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. If that’s the case, my lack of unbridled enthusiasm for the film may be a simple matter of taste. I loved Prometheus. Loved it. Also, Interstellar was my favorite movie last year. The practical problem solving & believably nerdy behavior of The Martian is likely to win over those two films’ naysayers, though, and believe me, they are in no short supply. A lot of people are really going to like this movie, but it lost me a little in the second half once the logical, step-by-step rescue process had larger political implications that extended beyond Watney’s immediate needs, such as growing crops & performing self-surgery. I know it makes me a cinematic philistine, but if The Martian had stuck to its found footage format or introduced some kind of The Angry Red Planet-esque space monsters to its believably human/nerdy aesthetic, I’d probably be singing its praises right now. Instead, I simply think it’s pretty good. Not Prometheus good, but pretty good.

-Brandon Ledet

Trauma (1993)

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three star

Well, here we are, folks. I wrote in my review of Opera that many considered that film to be Dario Argento’s last good movie, although I had also read that Trauma had its fans as well. I was pleasantly surprised by the director’s “Black Cat” segment of Two Evil Eyes, so I was looking forward to Trauma with some reservations but an open mind. On the whole, this 1993 film (released just a year after the director’s cameo in Innocent Blood) has a lot of meritorious elements in its favor and is a decent movie, but throughout the run time I kept thinking to myself, “Oh, so this is where we’re going now.” Although the giallo elements work, for the most part, the movie’s most memorably quality is blandness, although how much of that is intentional or not is unclear.

The film follows Aura (Asia Argento, in one of her earliest film roles and her first time being directed by her father), a sixteen year old girl who has escaped from a psychiatric hospital where she was undergoing treatment for anorexia. She meets David (Christopher Rydell), a TV news graphic artist and former heroin addict, and he befriends her after assuming that her IV feeding tube scars are track marks. Aura is soon recaptured by social services, however, and returned to the home of her parents, renowned mystics who are hosting a séance. Aura’s mother Adriana (Piper Laurie) claims that a spirit named Nicholas has hijacked the ceremony and is claiming that the serial decapitator The Headhunter is present. Aura watches from an upstairs window as her mother and father flee into the rainy night and runs after them, only to discover that The Headhunter has killed them both. She finds David and asks for his help, placing a strain on his relationship with news anchor Grace (Laura Johnson), who eventually calls the hospital and reports Aura so that she is forced to return there. Meanwhile, David’s investigation leads him to learn that (spoilers through the end of this paragraph) The Headhunter’s victims were all medical professionals in attendance on the night that Adriana was giving birth to her second child, a son to be named Nicholas; the doctor (Brad Dourif in what amounts to an extended cameo) insisted on pushing ahead with inducing labor despite inclement weather and intermittent power outages, and when he is startled by a lightning strike with a scalpel in his hand, he accidentally decapitated the baby. The nurses present convince him to use ECT on Adriana to erase her memory of the event, and her husband is complicit in their cover up. Of course, as in so many of Dario Argento’s movies, this repressed memory eventually resurfaces and the murderer seeks out vengeance.

In an interview on the DVD of La Terza madre, Asia Argento discussed the fact that working as a director had given her new insights as an actress, and it shows in the difference between her presence here and there. She is the weak performative link in this movie, but the film’s flaws are not restricted solely to her amateur abilities. Piper Laurie goes over the top here, as she often does, but Adriana Petrescu lacks the grounding that made Margaret White function so well as a sinister mother figure. Brad Dourif’s barely present on screen (and kudos to the editor of the film’s trailer for excising any reference to him, although the fact that his name appears at the top of the DVD box ruins that reveal), and his appearance ends with one of the worst uses of chroma-key effects I’ve seen in my life. That sequence stands out as particularly terrible, especially given how effective the rest of the movie’s decapitated heads, created by effects genius Tom Savini, are. It’s also strange to me that no one in the film seems to have a problem with the adult David’s romantic and ultimately sexual relationship with teenaged Aura is, other than Grace, whose issues are painted as being the result of jealousy rather than concern for the fact that a sixteen year old may be being taken advantage of by a much older beau. The film’s score also leaves much to be desired, especially in the sequences in which the young boy who lives next door to the killer’s home (Cory Garvin) sneaks into the murder house while chasing a butterfly; they feel more like unused tracks from Dennis the Menace than something created with the intent of increasing tension. The killer’s weapon of choice, a kind of bladed garrote, is a neat invention, but there’s too much tonal inconsistency present throughout, and the homages to Argento’s earlier work (especially Profondo rosso) only serve to demonstrate how much this film pales in comparison. I’m also unclear as to why Argento chose to shoot this picture in what he called “featureless Minnesota,” given that it adds to the overall banality of the film’s cinematography, especially given his masterful use of classic architecture and depth of field in his earlier work.

Having said that, this is not a bad movie, just an unmemorable one. For an Argento completist, it’s a movie that I would recommend over Inferno or Four Flies on Grey Velvet, and the mystery, despite being at times incoherent, works well in spite of its implausibility and absurdity. There are some great visual flourishes as well, especially in Aura’s hallucinatory sequence and in the discovery of the creepy nursery filled with gauzy screens. There’s a laudable attempt to trace the relationships between media, family, and psychological disorders here; it’s misguided and dated in its discussion, but I appreciate that there was an attempt to address this issue, even if the conceptualizations of the root cause of eating disorders is somewhat facile. The scenes set in the mental hospital are also effectively unnerving, even if that trope smacks of ableism when viewed through a modern lens. More than anything, I can tell that this is a movie that suggests a sharp downturn in the director’s work from here on out, even if it is decent within itself.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)

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three star

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The third & final picture in Russ Meyer’s trio of in-color “soap operas” plays very similar to the first, Common Law Cabin. As with Common Law Cabin, Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! is more or less Meyer on auto-pilot. With his career finally developing a sense of cohesion, Meyer was now able to make a film that was unmistakably his own without trying very hard to impress. All of the Meyer calling cards are here: buxom women, go-go dancing, bitter marriages on the rocks, non-sequitiur monologues, etc. The only thing missing from Meyer’s pictures in this phase of his career is the aggressive, disorienting editing style that turned pictures like Mondo Topless & Europe in the Raw from straight-forward “documentaries” into something much more sinister & psychedelic. The oddball editing is present, for sure, but it takes a back seat to the bitter war of the sexes that had tinged Meyer’s work since the adultery tale Lorna. Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! unfortunately doesn’t pack quite the same hateful punch that the now ex-Meyer writer Jack Moran’s scripts did in the past, but it does have plenty of bitter weirdness to spare that makes it a moderately enjoyable addition to the director’s catalog.

Starting with the go-go dancing “documentary” Mondo Topless, Meyer had made a habit of delivering early in his runtimes what his core audience had come to expect: gigantic, bare breasts. The opening credits of Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! features a topless go-go routine performed in the desert sand by a model sporting only a tight skirt, tall boots, and a motorcycle helmet. Instead of Meyer’s trademark of besides-the-point opening monolgues, the movie instead begins with a swanky titular theme song, the first since the lounge lizard opener for Lorna. The director also continued his recent trope of representing the opening credits in physical spaces. The credits for Common Law Cabin were displayed on hand carved signs, the credits for Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! were painted on mailboxes, and the credits here are printed on labels of liquor bottles. The claustrophobia of his staged play-like sets is also repeated here, as the film takes place almost exclusively in a bedroom, a brothel, and a go-go club/pool hall. As I said, Meyer had reached groove at this point of his career where his films were easily recognizable as his own, each following a relatively strict pattern.

Although Meyer had captured the unrestrained mania of go-go dancing before in pictures like Mondo Topless & Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, here he for the first time builds a narrative in a go-go club setting, intercutting the violent bursts of topless dancing with shots of money changing hands & alcohol being downed at a maddening pace. My best guess of what he was trying to get across there was something as simple & crass as the thought that big tits are big business. As his pictures are usually centered on the sexual failings of a male lover, Finders Keepers focuses on an adulterous employee of the go-go club featured in these scenes. Between being distracted by the erotic dancing & a side-hustle that connects the club to a nearby brothel, our bonehead antagonist is oblivious to his unattended wife & business, which leads the bored wife to dancing nude & philandering as payback and the club itself being held hostage by a couple of safe-breaking thieves. These themes are surely familiar to Meyer’s previous pictures, but within that framework he injects a couple unexpected touches, ones that oddly stray from his onscreen fornicating’s usual lack of adventure or experimentation.

The sex scenes in Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! are what make the film unique enough to be a wortwhile addition to the Russ Meyer catalog. In one scene, images of flesh bucking underwater are mixed (hilariously) with footage of cars crashing in a demolition derby. In another, a sex worker shaving a john’s chest while recounting her childhood experiments with incest is presented with the dementedly obsessive detail of a fetishist. The oddly arresting chest-shaving scene is certainly the film’s most memorable centerpiece, especially since the bare chest the sex worker is shaving is mixed with closeup footage of a much, much hairier specimen being stripped of its luxurious coat. The film also poses as an alternate timeline in which Meyer was a butt man instead of his obnoxiously apparent preference for breasts. The screen is filled with plenty of butt cheek during the film’s relatively short runtime, including a surprising amount of man-butt for those interested. Throw in a small dose of lipstick lesbianism and you have the director’s most sexually adventurous film at least since the vague BDSM leanings of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

Besides the unexpected kinks & oddities in these details, Finders Keepers stands out as a unique Meyer picture only in its half-assed attempts to establish itself as a crime noir. The hostage situation & safe-breaking scenes fall hilariously short of similar fare in films like, say, Michael Mann’s Thief, and instead feel like a half-cooked afterthought, taking a back seat to the much more detailed sexual perversity (duh). My favorite aspect of the failed noir aesthetic is the heavy reliance on the Venetian blinds lighting of the genre, which is so ever-present that it’s included in exterior shots outside the go-go club, which makes absolutely no logical sense. There’s also a last minute revelation of betrayal that constitutes the closest thing to a “twist” that any Meyer film to date had attempted. Otherwise, the director’s usual themes of adultery & sexual payback play out in typical Meyer fashion. Finders Keepers may only have a few scenes & spare details that distinguish it as a unique work in the director’s catalog, but it does have enough unnatural weirdness in those details (especially that chest-shaving scene) that make it a worthy drop in the Meyer bucket.

-Brandon Ledet

Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! (1967)

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fourstar

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If Russ Meyer’s first venture in in-color soap operas, Common Law Cabin, was a moderately enjoyable sampling of what the director had to offer as a horndog auteur & a misanthrope, his follow up Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! cranked up the heat to an almost insufferable degree, making for a much more memorable picture in its sex-crazed emotional sadism. A lot of what made Common Law Cabin a decent watch was its hateful battle of the sexes vibe. The dialogue had the abrasive quality of a longterm couple breaking up at an impossibly late, drunken hour, unloading all of their aggression onto each other in one last attempt to elicit hurt feelings. Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! twists the knife even further, improbably featuring some of Meyer’s most sadistic, anti-romantic exchanges to date. Although screenwriter Jack Moran had penned the early Meyer classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, it’s tempting to claim that Good Morning was actually the height of his work with the tirelessly perverted, curmudgeony Meyer. Faster, Pussycat! survived largely on the backs of its over the top performances from the likes of Tura Satana & Haji. Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!, on the other hand, excels on the spiteful, misanthropic dialogue Moran brought to the screen. It’s terrifyingly bleak stuff. It’s also darkly hilarious.

Of course, Good Morning begins with some true-to-Meyer form, besides-the point narration. The narrator asks the audience,“How would you define nymphomania?” Unwilling to settle for that simple question, he goes on to ask for the definitions of a long list of terms that include “irregular union”, “deflower”, “voyeurism”, “strumpet”, “hedonism”, “promiscuity”, “ribaldry” and so on. Although the narrator goes on to promise the definitions of these terms in the film to follow, along with an exploration of the “deepest complexities of modern life as applied to love & marriage in these United States”, this is all, of course, gobbledygook, as should be made apparent by the image of a naked woman galloping through an open field that accompanies the rambling. It isn’t until the narrator begins introducing the film’s central characters that a clear picture of what’s to come takes shape. He promises the story of “eleven losers in a game all of us play” coming together “like a beef stew, a casserole” (I’m guessing sex is the “beef” in that metaphor), a bit of preemptive plot summarizing that feels more like a trailer than an actual beginning to a movie. The go-go dancing, screwing, fistfights, cars, and skinny dipping that make up this would-be trailer are where Russ Meyer’s America starts to feel familiar & grace the screen. This is solidified by the time the narrator introduces Angel, a woman who serves as a “monument to unholy carnality & a cesspool of marital polution prepared to humiliate, provoke, and tantalize.” He also describes her as a “lush cushion of evil perched on the throne of immorality.” Meyer may not have an entirely favorable view of women (to say the least), but he does make them feel extremely powerful in their supposed wickedness.

The best part about this introduction to Angel’s vicious femininity is that she somehow lives up to the hype. Played by Alaina Capri, who filled a very similar role of a sex-crazed sadist in Common Law Cabin, Angel is an adulteress housewife who hates her husband’s guts because of his erectile dysfunction. She expresses this hatred as soon as the film’s first proper scene, a callback to the sexual failings that started the tragic adultery tale Lorna. After her husband Burt fails to get it up, Angel practically spits this insult in his face:“You’re a turd, Burt.” She goes on to say, “You’re the worst in town. Thank God I know somebody in the country.” When Burt complains about her infidelity, she shoots back, “My life is such a blank. I gotta fill it with something.” To his credit, Burt has some nasty, hate-filled things of his own to say. When Angel twists the knife with the line, “I lead you to it, spread it all out, ready & waiting and suddenly you got no appetite,” Burt retorts, “Well I don’t enjoy a picnic that cockroaches have beaten me to.” Yikes. This conversation is Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! in a darkly bitter nutshell. It’s funny stuff, but goddamn is it ever ugly. Burt is played in the film by Stuart Lancaster, who filled the role of the maniacal, train-hating, crippled paterfamilias in Faster, Pussycat!. By combining Lancaster’s natural ease with bitterness & Capri’s knack for cold, cuckolding provocations, Meyer created a powder keg of seething hatred. It’s a sight to behold.

Besides the film’s acerbic dialogue, there’s plenty of other ridiculousness to enjoy. Most notably, Faster, Pussycat! star Haji returns to the Meyer fold here to play some sort of natural, feral witch that meows like a cat & ostensibly cures Burt’s medical condition through vaguely defined sex magic. It’s ridiculous. There’s also a continuation of the swanky Gidget music of Common Law Cabin that brings some ill-deserved levity to what’s mostly a morbid, hateful affair and the would-be passion of the film’s big love-making scene is interrupted by absurd circumstances – a farmer’s report on the radio & the intrusion of Burt’s drunken teenage daughter. The film also sees the return of a new visual trick Meyer started with Common Law Cabin, displaying the opening credits on physical objects (this time they’re painted on mailboxes), as well as the return of nudity in Meyer’s dramatic work for the first time since the black & white “roughies” Lorna & Mudhoney got him in a heap of not-worth-it legal trouble.

These points of interest aside, it really is Jack Moran’s dark, hateful, anti-romance dialogue that makes Good Morning . . . and Goodbye! such a memorable piece of work. It would be Moran’s fifth & unfortunately final script for Russ Meyer, including the films Erotica, Wild Gals of the Naked West, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and, of course, Common Law Cabin. Besides Meyer’s eventual, unholy union with Roger Ebert, Moran proved to be the best writer the director ever partnered with, especially if you focus your attention on those last three credits. In appreciation of Moran’s contribution to the Meyer aesthetic and just because it’s hilariously inane, I’m going to close this review with his final words on a Russ Meyer project, the closing passage of Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!

“That’s keeping one’s family together the hard way. Yet while history has proven that might does not always make right and possession is 9/10ths of the law, more often than not what’s worth owning is worth fighting for, whether it be life, love, and the pursuit of happiness, Mom’s apple pie, or even something as basic as sex. And don’t go knocking it. That three letter word makes a mockery of the four letter ones that try to cheapen it. It’s a wonderful game for people of all ages. And even for losers it’s worth a try. That’s Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!.”

-Brandon Ledet

Gift of Gab (1934)

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twostar

Although it was pretty apparent from the get-go that The Black Cat, the first collaboration between rival horror legends Bela Lugosi & Boris Karloff, would be the pair’s best & most significant work together, it was not so apparent that their very next picture would be of no significance at all. A vague comedy about a slick-talking radio announcer, Gift of Gab has the everything but the kitchen sink, vaudeville style of yuck-it-up humor of the old Hollywood studio system when it simply wasn’t tyring. True to oldschool major studio comedy form, the film is more like a variety show than a work with any consistent tone or purpose. At various times it aims for romance, comedy, death-defying action, intrigue, musical performances, and (the reason why I tuned in) a little bit of spookiness to boot, all with no attempts to connect with one another. In trying to be everything to everyone, Gift of Gab ended up being nothing to anyone at all, a trifle of no consequence.

Should I even bother you with the plot to this movie? I’ll at least try to keep it quick. A fast-talking snake oil salesman named Phillip “Gift of Gab” Gabney cons his way off the streets & into “the radio racket” as the successful host of a kind of variety show meant to promote a rich drunk’s failing brand of chicken livers. Gabney also cons his way into the heart of the radio station’s “working girl” program director. And somewhere in there we’re treated to an obnoxiously long sequence about sneaking radio equipment into a football game for a pirate broadcast. There’s also some antics involving someone parachuting out of an airplane. None of it matters. The film’s plot is mostly a vague pretense meant to provide a structure for the film’s musical performances & painfully stale vaudeville routines. My favorite synopsis of Gift of Gab is this concise, one-sentence take on IMDb: “Conceited radio announcer irritates everyone else at the station.” That about sums it up.

As for Bela Lugosi’s & Boris Karloff’s contribution to this forgotten “treasure”, the two horror giants are relegated to the roles of bit players in the film’s long list of on-air radio performers. In a four minute radio sketch (which is for some reason staged like a play), Lugosi & Karloff appear as threatening, ghoulish rogues in a goofy short-form murder mystery. Lugosi’s entire contribution in this scene is to appear from behind a closet door, hold a gun, and ask “What time is it?” (which I’m sure played great on the radio) and Karloff tops him merely by having two lines, taking time to light a cigarette, and laughing maniacally upon his exit. There are some cute touches to the sketch, especially in the way that murderous, knife-wielding arms appear from offscreen (again, on the radio) to threaten the goofball detectives who can’t quite solve the murder, despite Karloff announcing himself as The Phantom & donning a Jack the Ripper-like costume of a cape & a top hat. The whole thing more or less amounts to one of those Saturday Night Live sketches where a politician pops in for a quick cameo as themselves to get a cheap pop from the audience.

The story goes that The Three Stooges were originally scheduled to appear in Gift of Gab & I assume that they were going to play the bonehead detectives in this scene, a sort of a short-form precursor to Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein.  Alas, that didn’t happen and what’s left isn’t much to speak of. If you’re morbidly curious about watching Karloff & Lugosi appear in a brief bout of broad comedy, do yourself a favor & skip the other 66 minutes of Gift of Gab. Instead, just watch this low-quality YouTube clip of their contribution to the shoddy variety show comedy. It’s for time savers like these that YouTube was launched in the first place.

-Brandon Ledet