reviews

Ghosts of Mars (2001)

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In 1965 Italian horror mastermind Mario Bava released the eerie, way-ahead-of-its-time Planet of the Vampires. In 1979 directorial enigma Ridley Scott drew major influence from the atmospheric elements of Planet of the Vampires and reworked them into Alien, one of the scariest, most striking creature features of all time. In 2001 former-genius-turned-shlock-peddler John Carpenter borrowed Planet of the Vampires’ most superficial plot points and turned them into a nu-metal shootout in space that nobody asked for.

Told through the unnecessary framing device of a criminal hearing in a Martian mining colony of a future matriarchal society (we know this detail because of a title card that helpfully reads “Society: Matriarchal”), the bare bones story of Ghosts of Mars is awfully similar to that of Planet of the Vampires. While digging under Mars’ surface, miners mistakenly release disembodied Martian spirits (or “ghosts” if you will) who are none too pleased with the planet’s new human inhabitants. As one character puts it, “As far as they’re concerned, we are the invaders.” Yep. The ghosts of Mars exact their revenge on the Earth invaders by inhabiting their bodies, then causing them to self-mutilate & murder each other indiscriminately. The ghosts are essentially impossible to kill, because when one of their bodily vehicles dies they simply move on to the next.

Instead of properly utilizing the horrific potential of this premise, Carpenter mistakenly aims for a late-90s cool, the same effect he attempted in his 1998 misfire Vampires. Characters saunter around in black leather trench coats, getting high on space drugs, piloting steampunk hot air balloons, and trading we’re-so-cool quips like “Maybe I’d sleep with you if you were the last man on Earth. But we’re not on Earth.” If it weren’t for the ghosts, the Martian community could be mistaken for an especially dour year at Burning Man. Despite that, the ghosts themselves are menacing enough. Even though the cheapness of their costumes suggests Mad Max cosplay or a GWAR cover band, they have a distinct affinity for decapiation that makes them viable as a real threat. The problem is that any threat they pose is severely undercut by the nu-metal riffage that obnoxiously drones on in the background, trying (but failing) to portray them as super cool instead of super creepy.

Ghosts of Mars isn’t a total loss, but it is a disappointment. The cast is surprisingly decent, considering the quality of the film: Clea DuVall, Jason Statham, Natasha Henstridge, and Pam Grier are always welcome faces (although, how there are two Pam-Grier-In-Space movies and they both suck is beyond me). Ice Cube steals the show, firmly operating in angry NWA mode and not his more recent milquetoast-family-man mode. Although it’s a disappointment that the film’s genuinely cool ghosts-in-space concept devolves into a generic nu-metal shootout film, watching Ice Cube (and Clea DuVall for that matter) run around like a shoot-em-up action star is a draw in itself. Carpenter failed to utilize the body possession aspects of the premise to its full Planet of the Vampires potential & lazily used storytelling devices like flashbacks within the central flashback to get its point across and he paid the price for it. Ghosts of Mars was a huge flop, earning only half of its $28 million back at the box office. The most frustrating thing about the film is that you can see elements in play that could swing it either in the direction of an actually decent horror flick or at least a ridiculous camp fest if exploited properly. It instead mires itself in self-mutilating, nu-metal-soaked mediocrity.

-Brandon Ledet

Maps to the Stars (2015)

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David Cronenberg’s newest film is a cold, unforgiving puzzle that’s difficult to wrap your head around. It’s a familiar feeling. The Canadian auteur is responsible for some of the most disturbingly ambiguous horror films this side of David Lynch: Videodrome, The Fly, The Brood, etc. On the surface, Maps to the Stars is Cronenberg at his most clear-cut & candid. The film is deceivingly costumed as a straight-forward satirical indictment of Hollywood types’ various neuroses, a story we’ve seen told many times before. It wears the clothes of a bitter, navel-gazing comedy, but it’s so much stranger & more unsettling than that.

Much like with the recent entertainment industry caricature Birdman, the nasty humor in Maps to the Stars falls flat on its face. Rarely inspiring a chuckle, it’s downright embarrassing as wealthy Hollywood narcissists toss out bottomlessly cruel jokes that rarely land. With Birdman, the failure of the humor leaves a disappointing void that the beautiful cinematography struggles to fill & distract the audience from. In Maps to the Stars, there’s no such relief. The film boasts such a relentlessly negative worldview & such a matter-of-fact, uncaring visual style that it feels intentional that the humor falls flat. Characters are way less amusing than they think they are. Each cruel, unfunny joke posits them as increasingly monstrous and film revels in their vapid, self-absorbed callousness.

It’s difficult to appreciate the film as a comedy, but it does have legs as an off-putting ghost story. In Cronenberg’s Hollywood everyone’s interconnected in the usual ensemble cast ways, but they’re also linked by the ways they are haunted both by the past and by the rancorous decay of their inner selves. Tenuous personal & professional relationships are inconsequential compared to the way Maps’ characters are connected by less concrete elements like fire, incest, dead children, strange mantras, and weeping in bathtubs. In public the characters feign glamorous lifestyles; limo drivers, beautiful homes, baby-faced teens enjoying cocktails, and movie set pampering are all part of their M.O. In intimate company they become a little bleaker; they have sex with producers, joke about selling fans their feces, and celebrate the deaths of children. When they’re entirely alone they’re faced with the literal ghosts of their past and the self-hatred that their bravado barely conceals.

Maps to the Stars is a difficult film to recommend, because it’s near impossible to tell who will be able to get on the film’s wavelength. The film’s cast is phenomenal (Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Olivia Williams, Robert Pattinson, etc.), but they’re used for such an unpleasant effect that it’s difficult to sell their presence as a draw. As nasty as the film is it also has a strangely campy undertone that reveals itself in strikingly cheap details like CGI flames & Julianne Moore’s exaggerated California accent. It’s a ghost story, but it’s one that requires the patience to sit through bitterly unfunny comedy before the ball starts rolling. Self-contradiction aside, the movie unmistakably finds Cronenberg on a mean streak, seemingly uninterested in winning an audience over or earning accolades (although he does find a somewhat unconventional use for award statues here). Maps to the Stars is bound to be divisive in both its nastiness & its flat, uninviting tone, but it’s a film I found both curiously engaging & surprisingly haunting.

-Brandon Ledet

A Kid for Two Farthings (1955)

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fourstar

Not many films capture the essence of childhood innocence like A Kid for Two Farthings. At first, I mistook it for a classic live-action Disney film, but it’s not affiliated with Disney whatsoever. The film is based on a novel of the same name by Wolf Mankowitz, and was helmed by Academy Award winning director Carol Reed. A Kid for Two Farthings is not known as one of Reed’s best films and I’m having a hard time understanding exactly why it received such negative criticism. The enchanting story, filled with heart and whimsy, is far from being a failure.

Set in post-war London’s East End, specifically Petticoat Lane, the film focuses on the story of a delightful little boy named Joe (Jonathan Ashmore) and his diverse, overpopulated community. Joe’s neighbor, Mr. Kadinsky (David Kossof), tells him that unicorns have the magical ability to grant wishes and Joe becomes infatuated with getting his hands on one of the mystical creatures. Soon after listening to Mr. Kadinsky’s story, Joe uses his savings to purchase a unicorn, but it’s actually a baby goat with a crooked growth in the middle of its head that resembles a small horn. While most children would use their magical unicorn’s powers to grant selfish wishes, Joe is more concerned with helping out his loved ones. I’m not a fan of child actors in general, but Jonathan Ashmore is absolutely adorable and tremendously talented. It’s a shame that this is the only film he would ever act in.

As an adult, I really do appreciate the emphasis on the importance of imagination in this real-life fairytale. Imagination is what makes Joe’s childhood in the congested slums of London better and it gives him hope during a time of struggle. Joe is the only child that appears in the entire film and he participates in very adult activities. He attends evening wrestling matches, assists adults with their errands, and is involved with very grown-up situations, but his unicorn and Mr. Kadinsky’s tales keep him young and innocent by feeding into his imagination and allowing it to blossom.

Watching this flick for the first time was quite a memorable experience and it reminded me of the significance of creativity and fantasy in my own life. No matter how old we are, when times are rough, a little make-believe usually makes things a whole lot better. A Kid for Two Farthings should be widely known as a classic for all ages instead of being buried away with all the other forgotten children’s films.

A Kid for Two Farthings is currently streaming on Hulu Plus.

-Britnee Lombas

The Adventures of Hercules (1985)

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Following a day of Mardi Gras festivities and sustained alcohol consumption, I found myself mindlessly channel surfing through the wasteland of basic cable when an image of a neon green dinosaur battling a blue gorilla in outer space exploded on to the screen, convincing me that someone had spiked my PBR with a large dose of acid. I sat mesmerized but perplexed as the seizure-inducing images of The Adventure of Hercules continued to wash over me. In a flash it was over, like a fever dream implanted by some extraterrestrial life force, but the after effects were strong.

Combining science fiction with a very loose interpretation of Greek Mythology, the sequel to 1983’s Hercules stars the original Incredible Hulk Lou Ferrigno as the titular god who must rescue seven thunder bolts from a group of renegade gods in a plot so preposterous that it takes 26 lines of text to summarize it on Wikipedia. The Adventures of Hercules begins with a ridiculous, almost 8 minute long prelude that consists of flashbacks to the original film, including fights with various robot animals and a magical chariot ride through space. It also features a concise retelling of the formation of the universe and still somehow manages to sustain that insane tone throughout the rest of the film. The movies’s strange, hyper-kinetic images and bombastic trippiness will make many viewers reach for the nearest bong.

We are also treated to cheap CGI that must have looked dated even in 1985, an extreme overuse of neon, unnecessary screen swipes (I counted three in 30 seconds during one scene), and the kind of bad dialogue you would expect from a movie whose lead actor can barely speak English. But that only scratches the surface of the insanity found in The Adventures of Hercules. There’s also fire monsters, slime creatures, ice swords, a Medusa cameo, and nonsensically psychedelic journeys through space and time. A hidden gem for camp lovers, The Adventures of Hercules is the cinematic equivalent of a bong rip. Woah, dude!

-James Cohn

Lovely Molly (2011)

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three star

I recently had a goofy good time with Blair Witch director Eduardo Sánchez’s found footage Sasquatch movie Exists. I had so much fun with it in fact, that after reviewing the movie I wrote a second article detailing how to play the Exists drinking game. Exists isn’t exactly a laugh riot, but it was the kind of goofy, straight-forward horror flick that’s best served after midnight with a few game friends & a couple cocktails. Knowing nothing of the film’s plot or tone, I foolishly expected a similar experience with Sánchez’s gritty ghost story Lovely Molly. I was way, way off. Exists did nothing to prepare me for the emotional brutality of Lovely Molly. It turns out the cycles of child & substance abuse make for much more disturbing & much less campy horror movie fodder than Bigfoot. Go figure.

Similar to the way Possession turns the real life-horrors of divorce & romantic separation into dangerous, supernatural forces, Lovely Molly makes a monster out of child abuse & heroin addiction. When the titular protagonist and her newlywed husband move into her childhood home, demons of her past rise to the surface and begin to affect the physical world. Molly’s personal confrontations with her history of substance abuse & the hideous details of her youth start small. At first she’s getting stoned with her equally traumatized sister, the two adult women giggling, “I can’t believe we’re smoking weed in Mom’s kitchen.” The drug use escalates from there, as does Molly’s frantic mood as she’s left alone in a space where she used to suffer hellish acts of cruelty. Her husband becomes frustrated, the way loved ones of victims & addicts often do, confessing “I love her. I just don’t know how to help her.” Family, religion, and modern medicine all fail to slow the horror of Molly’s descent into the brutal cycles of abuse. Her sister desperately asks her, “Why did you have to move back into this goddamn house, Molly?” but it’s as if she had no choice. The house has an overwhelming draw for her, which eventually leads to a body-count, supernatural occurrences, and the unconventional use of a screwdriver.

Instead of telling the story entirely in a found footage style (à la Exists or The Blair Witch Project), Sánchez employs a mixture of professional cameras & camcorder footage here. The camcorder footage is mostly used for a chilling atmospheric effect, but still manages to serve the film’s central theme. Molly is compelled to record the horrors of the houses’ ghosts in fear that no one will believe her, which is a terrifying thought, considering her past. The film also uses an intense, roaring sound design to represent threats that cannot be seen, but this isn’t the completely obscured horror of Blair Witch either. Violence, gore, and the like are used sparingly, but effectively as the situation in the house deteriorates. Despite the lackluster acting (Molly’s boss is particularly awful) & limited scope inherent to Sanchez’s low-budget productions, Lovely Molly is a hauntingly disturbing picture. This is far from the goofy midnight movie of Exists, if not only because it portrays a horrifying threat that actually exists.

-Brandon Ledet

Exists (2014)

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I’m having a hard time figuring out exactly why mainstream critics were so hard on last year’s found footage Sasquatch movie Exists. The movie’s been called everything from “dismally generic” to “aggressively unimaginative” to “fucking stupid”. I’m not saying those claims aren’t at least partly true (especially that last one; the movie is stupid), but dumping this much vitriol on a low budget horror film about Bigfoot feels a lot like punching down. Exists is a straightforward horror cheapie that makes few to no attempts to stray from genre clichés, but does it really deserve to be trashed more than last year’s equally pedestrian (but far more expensive) I, Frankenstein, Annabelle, or Dracula Untold? All three of those films didn’t exactly run up great scores on Metacritic either, but they were mostly brushed off as boring, not spat on as “fucking stupid”.

The best explanation for this vicious critical beating I can come up with is that Exists’ director Eduardo Sánchez was one of the two minds behind the surprise cultural hit The Blair Witch Project. By punishing Sánchez for making a generic, post-Blair Witch found footage horror flick, critics are by extension punishing him for all the other generic found footage horrors we’ve suffered through since Blair Witch’s success over a decade ago. It’s an almost cut & dried case of Schadenfreude. I’m not saying Exists’ straightforward approach to the genre is criticism-proof; I’m just saying that if it weren’t for Blair Witch the film wouldn’t have been deemed worth the time of a lot of these one-to-zero star reviews.

The most common complaint about Exists is what I believe to be its biggest strength: the fact that it plays its material straight. The campy appeal of a found footage Sasquatch movie is silly enough in concept that it would’ve been a huge mistake to adopt a winking, ironic tone to back it up. Exists is fully committed to its genre, for better or for worse. Its opening title cards read “Since 1967, there have been over 3,000 Bigfoot encounters in the U.S. alone. Experts agree that the creatures are only violent when provoked.” While some may find this kind of self-serious nonsense to be a huge warning sign, it speaks to me as a fan of schlocky horror. It says to me, “This movie will be silly. Bring liquor.” When the film’s narrator/camera-operator/resident goofball first becomes aware of the Bigfoot that ruins his vacation in the woods, he drops his sad stabs at comic relief and adopts a serious tone similar to the one in the title cards. He says, “Years ago my uncle saw something out here. Something that freaked him the fuck out. Bad enough that he never came back to this beloved hunting cabin.” The film knows when to be dour & when to be playful. That line is so goofily ludicrous it had to be said with a straight face to work.

Unfortunately, Camera Dude (which I will henceforth call him, since he punctuates nearly every sentence with “dude”) isn’t always as charming as he is there. Mostly, he’s a device. The film’s five protagonists include two cute couples & one hairy hipster bro in a Daniel Johnston t-shirt, our beloved Camera Dude. As a 5th wheel, Camera Dude is free to document the goings on of the cabin trip & subsequent Sasquatch attacks, filming his buddies as they crack wise, swim, sleep (weird), fuck (super weird) and get torn apart by a Sasquatch (thank God). Why exactly is Camera Dude filming every mundane second of his vacation in the woods on his ungodly stockpile of GoPro cameras? To make “The Best YouTube Video Ever”, of course. If this sounds obnoxious, it’s because it is. Camera Dude’s best moments are when he drops the loveable goofball act and tries to convince his buddies that they’re under attack by a Bigfoot. He tells the audience, “I’ve got some GoPros set up all over the forest,” setting up a laughably implausible excuse for the film’s multiple camera angles. Camera Dude eats up a lot of the film’s run time but when he switches from Best YouTube Video Ever mode to Bigfoot Believer mode he becomes a fairly amusing one-dimensional plot device. I also enjoyed that the moment you can tell his spirit is broken is when he’s too sad about his dead friends to smoke weed.

Despite Camera Dude’s attempts to steal the show, Exists’ true comic relief comes from another character: Deer Bro. As the title cards revealed, Sasquatches will not attack unless provoked, so the film needs to set up the five victims’ reason for being hunted by the hairy beast. Borrowing a page from I Know What You Did Last Summer, they strike a Bigfoot with their car early in the film. A few characters are convinced that they clipped a dear, but no, not Deer Bro. He warns them all, “That wasn’t no deer, bro.” As far as terrible characters in horror movies go, Deer Bro is a gem. When he isn’t tossing out an indiscriminate amount of “bro”s with every awkward sentence, he’s claiming he should be in charge of the group’s sole rifle because he plays paintball or he’s accidentally sitting down on his best bro’s broken legs. Classic Deer Bro. If Exists is to be understood as The Adventures of Camera Dude & Deer Bro, Deer Bro is the clear winner as an audience favorite. Every idiotic moment he’s on screen is a gift to schlock lovers everywhere.

Enjoying Exists, much like surviving an encounter with a Sasquatch, requires approaching it the right way. Critics looking for Eduardo Sánchez to justify his fluke success with Blair Witch were wrong to expect anything but a silly trifle out of a found footage Sasquatch movie. At this point, it’s nearly impossible to make a Sasquatch costume 100% menacing. Audiences will always see a little Harry & The Hendersons or Geico Commercial Cavemen in Bigfoot, whether or not he’s crushing skulls & hurling bicycles. As a straightforward B-movie about a Sasquatch attack, Exists is a pleasant enough picture. Its clichéd plot devices about strategically placed GoPro cameras & lack of cellphone reception are excusable as modern horror tropes and the quiet calm of its pacing is much preferable to the shrill panic of other found footage cheapies. It’s far from the most inventive horror film I’ve ever seen, but it’s also far from the worst. As a schlocky genre diversion it’s a fun, inconsequential film. Especially if you focus on the goofy charms of Deer Bro.

-Brandon Ledet

Septic Man (2014)

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Watching a filth-covered man roll around in a septic tank for an hour and a half didn’t turn out to be as fun as I expected. The 2014 gross-out horror film Septic Man had the potential to be like a darker Toxic Avenger but instead has none of Troma’s charm and ends up being every bit as bad as its premise would imply.

Jack, a soon to be father and self-described “civic minded shit sucker” is hired by a mysterious organization to combat the city’s water contamination crisis and, after accidentally locking himself in a septic tank, diagnoses the problem as “shit zombies backing up the water supply”. In what amounts to The Fly in a septic tank, he begins to transform into a hideous poo beast. The septic plant is also inhabited by two in-bred monsters: an emotionally fragile giant and his seemingly rabies-infested brother whose teeth he helpfully sharpens with a piece of steel. In a bittersweet moment, the giant sobs over his brother’s death while simultaneously vomiting profusely.

Director Jesse Thomas Cook does a competent job and the soundtrack is actually pretty decent, but that can’t change the fact that the film is drab, ugly, and depressing. It’s also disappointing because the grossest scene happens before the opening credits. Sure, there are gross-out moments involving fecal fountains, intestines, and a sewer baby but the movie never tops the nastiness of its first scene. Most of the film is simply Jack wallowing in a single septic tank, covered with escalating degrees of bodily fluids.

Ultimately, Septic Man fails because it is boring and not nearly as transgressive as it could have been. Gross-out fests can be ridiculous fun (like Zombie Ass) or truly disturbing (like The Human Centipede), but Septic Man just ends up being crap.

-James Cohn

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)

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I’ve been curious about The Adventures of Pluto Nash for over a decade now. It’s widely accepted that Eddie Murphy has been putting in subpar work since at least the late 90s & Pluto Nash seemed to be one of those early signs that his best days were well behind him. With a $100 million budget and a mere $7 million dollar return, the movie was one of the top ten biggest box office flops of all time. While I didn’t expect it to be a particularly great movie, I though it did have potential as a trashy gem (à la Leonard Part 6 or Howard the Duck) because of its sci-fi premise. I suspected that Pluto Nash had potential as a fun bad movie because it was a Bad Movie in Space, which gave it a distinct advantage over the appeal of the Klumps & Norbits of Muprhy’s career. Unfortunately, it instead committed the number one sin in the Bad Movie Bible: it was boring.

When I pictured a Shitty Eddie-Murphy-in-Space Movie with a $100 Million Budget, I naively expected all kinds of goofy adventures featuring Murphy exploring improbable planets & cracking wise at the expense of goofy-looking aliens. Instead, Pluto Nash bottled all of its action on the Earth’s moon and supplanted madcap adventure with run-of-the-mill gunfights & a staggering surplus of jokes about horny robots. Murphy’s Nash is a retired smuggler struggling to run a clean nightclub business where oddly costumed weirdos can line dance to Outkast songs in a futuristic version of doing the robot. His wholesome nightclub is threatened by mafia types who want to turn the moon into a tacky outer space Atlantic City and he risks his life to stop them. The movie could’ve been set on Earth in the present and not lost much in the translation.

In the rare moments when the movie is in full gear the screen is littered with cheap-looking gunfights & car chases crippled with mediocrity. When it slows down Nash literally goes into hiding and essentially watches the Moon’s version of Netflix, which has to be one of the most boring approaches to a space adventure ever conceived. Imagine if The Fifth Element were adapted as a hackneyed UPN sitcom that frivolously wasted its entire budget on huge explosions & cameos that no one asked for and you’d have a pretty good idea of Pluto Nash’s style. Even the movie’s sole set outside on the Moon’s surface is embarrassingly cheap looking, faker than even 1969’s “real” Moon landing.

It’s hard to imagine where the film’s budget went outside the cast (and the gratuitous explosions). The list of supporting players is beyond impressive: B-Movie legend Pam Grier plays Nash’s gun-toting mother; the beautiful Rosario Dawson is his unlikely love interest; Peter Boyle is his partner in crime; Jay Mohr is a pop star that narrowly avoids drinking battery acid; John Cleese is some kind of AI butler. That’s not even including the appearances of Alec Baldwin, James Rebhorn, Joe Pantoliano, Illeana Douglas and Randy Quaid (as the aforementioned horny robot). Unfortunately, this ungodly stockpile of talent is put to waste and everyone seems to be in full paycheck mode. Even Murphy himself is dead weight here, keeping the antics to a minimum & surrounding himself with a script seemingly designed to massage his ego by constantly reminding everyone how awesome he is. The only actor that has any fun with the film is the always-dependable Luis Guzmán, but Guzmán is about as consistent as they come, so it’s a fairly hollow victory.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash is an action comedy that fails both in its action and its comedy. Jokes about Hilary Clinton’s face on future money (har har) and robots desperately trying to get laid (hee hee) aren’t funny the first time around and are downright painful in their repetition. The film even unironically uses a record scratch sound effect to punctuate its action gags, lest the audience forget to laugh. It’s that dire. As I’ve pointed out before in reviews of Exit to Eden & 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it’s possible for failed comedies or action movies to still be interesting as cultural time capsules or complete train wrecks. There’s a miniscule amount of early 2000’s charm in Pluto Nash’s shoddy rap versions of corny songs like “Blue Moon” & “Dancing in the Moonlight”, its semi-futuristic nightclub attire, and its use of Space Jam-inspired font, but it’s not enough to save the film from its own self-crushing blandness. In this case the schlock is both unfunny and boring, which is a brutal combination for any audience. I should’ve left Pluto Nash where it belongs: forgotten in the past, in hiding on the Moon, watching Moonflix (or whatever) in its pajamas, and trading tired quips with oversexed robots.

-Brandon Ledet

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)

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The best-selling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey recently made its long-awaited debut on the silver screen and, as a fan of the book series, I was very curious to see how this film could possibly be tame enough for movie theaters. What could have been one of the most iconic movies of the year turned out to be a total snoozefest. Literally. People in my theater were sleeping so hard they were snoring.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a film about a man incapable of love that falls for a hopeless romantic. What makes this average love story different from others is that he also likes to dominate his female partners in his “Red Room of Pain.” Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) is a successful, attractive businessman that really enjoys the color grey. He has a grey office, grey ties, grey cars, etc. Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) is a shy college student that earns the opportunity to interview the hottest billionaire in Seattle, Mr. Grey. After administering a truly crappy interview, she finds herself to be attracted to Christian, just as he finds himself to be infatuated with Ana. He instantly becomes disgustingly obsessed with her and takes time out of his busy schedule to make sure he knows her every move. There’s a mysterious aura about Christian, but Ana just can’t seem to figure out his big secret, even after he shows up at her hardware store job to buy cable ties, rope, and masking tape. Shortly after that uncomfortable encounter, he tells her “I don’t make love. I fuck. Hard.” Everything sort of went downhill after that.

I don’t understand how a film about a BDSM relationship could be so quiet and lackluster. There wasn’t very much dialogue between Ana and Christian, and that really didn’t do much to make their love for each other believable. There was so much awkward energy between the two that it just became too much to handle. In the book, which is told in first person by Ana, many of her internal emotions are discussed, but this isn’t really shown in the film. The film made it look like she really didn’t enjoy being dominated, and at some points, it seemed like she was being sexually abused. It’s been a while since I’ve read the novel, but from what I remember, she was actually enjoying the submissive lifestyle; she was just scared that she liked it too much. Something went terribly wrong when the information from the book was translated into a film script.

In all honesty, I didn’t expect much from this film. The book was pure smut, so I was prepared for a silly mess of a movie that it wasn’t. With lots of good one-liners, a wicked soundtrack, and an amazing slow-motion flogging scene, it was far from the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Actually, I’m kind of looking forward to the sequels.

-Britnee Lombas

Upside Down (2013)

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It’s probably safe to say that by the end of its whopping seven minutes of opening narration you’ll be prepared to tell if you’re game for where Upside Down wants to take you. In heavy, overreaching breaths the protagonist coos about pink bees, forbidden love, flying pancakes, and “the three basic laws of double gravity” in a stunningly over-explanation of the film’s ludicrous premise. It’s as if Romeo & Juliet were retold through the half-mad kaleidoscope of Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. The line “Once love was stronger than gravity” best sums up the tone, distinctly warning the audience that this is a fairy tale and a love story, not a crowd-pleaser for discerning sci-fi types.

As is common with fairy tales (and sci-fi for that matter), the film sets up a very simple haves-vs-have-nots dichotomy. Two worlds are connected by opposing gravitational pulls, so that inhabitants of one are always looking upside down at the inhabitants of the other. The world on top is rich. The world on bottom is poor. It’s about as simple of an allegory as you’ll get outside the front & back of the train in Snowpiercer. The fun is in the film’s more fantastic elements, like the aforementioned pink bees that pollinate flowers from both worlds and improbably make an interplanetary romance possible. Besides a few grim details in the wealth disparity and interplanetary oil trade, Upside Down is mostly light fare. If you have the ability (or desire) to turn off your brain and enjoy a sappy against-all-odds love story that involves distant planets and magical pink nectar, it’s a truly fun film.

Even though the movie requires a complete absence of cynicism, it does boast visually thoughtful rewards as well. The spaces where the two worlds meet (particularly in offices & ballrooms that stretch on like two mirrors facing each other) are just straight up nifty. There’s an effortless cool to watching Kirsten Dunst sip a martini out of an upside down glass or watching her love interest hop around on floating platforms like a video game character. After the film’s opening Richard Kelly-style rant, it slows way down to tell a simple love story that will sound awfully familiar to most, but it’s a cliché that’s substantially boosted by its outlandish setting. The romantic fairy tale Upside Down tells is trite, but it’s also timelessly cute and backed up by a puzzling visual landscape that’s deliciously stubborn to even the most basic logic.

Upside Down is currently streaming on Netflix.

-Brandon Ledet