-Brandon Ledet
The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (1968)
reviews
Wild Beasts (1984)
I have a bad habit of ordering Blu-rays every single time I see an advertisement for a boutique label sale. It used to just be an occasional dip into the Criterion Collection during that prestige label’s regular Black Friday and Barnes & Nobles sales, but it has since escalated to include loving restorations of vintage genre trash from labels like Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, and Mélusine. I’ve been watching a lot of button-pushing, amoral schlock recently as a result – the kind of outré bad-taste material that you can often only find on disc because streaming service curators don’t want to touch it. It was a strange comfort, then, to recently discover that I’m not yet totally immune to that hazardous material. My recently purchased copy of the when-animals-attack Italo horror Wild Beats managed to offend me early & often. It’s less of a narrative feature than it is a document of real-life crimes against animals, children, and anonymous character actors. By the end credits, I found myself hoping that one of the special features on the disc would be a montage of mugshots for everyone involved in the production. And yet, I was also appreciative for each of those sweaty European bastards for teaching me how to feel again, even if most of what I was feeling was shock & disgust.
I might have been better prepared for that shock had I paid attention to the credited director: Franco Prosperi, of Mondo Cane fame. Prosperi brings the same misanthropic gusto to this outlandish story of a PCP-contaminated zoo that he brought to his earlier mondo “documentaries,” matching their unhinged, diabolical energy by again nudging the audience to question which onscreen atrocities are real and which are staged. Set in “a Northern European city” (with signage that’s conspicuously, universally printed in German), Wild Beasts is a disaster film about escaped, drug-crazed wild animals that terrorize unsuspecting urbanites who are understandably unprepared for attacks from literal lions, tigers, and bears. The initial shock of the premise is in the exotic varieties of animals that Prosperi sourced from circuses & zoos. A wild cheetah stalks a woman in a speeding convertible; a polar bear peruses elementary school hallways like it’s visiting a buffet; a small gang of elephants take over airplane runways by stomping anyone who gets in their way. It’s an impressive assemblage of animals that you’re not used to seeing in productions this cheap, but once the initial awe wears off you start to wonder how well those animals could possibly be cared for. Then, there’s the sickening tension of trying to determine whether those animals’ onscreen terror & peril are genuine, real-life events, something that doesn’t seem out of the question for the Mondo Cane crew.
According to Severin’s bonus-feature interview on the production of Wild Beasts, Prosperi claims “We did not hurt any animals at all,” explaining that they shot the film entirely under the watchful eye of the World Wildlife Federation. If so, I was fooled. It’s not always easy to tell when the image alternates between live animal & furry prop, and I swear I saw some documentation of real-life cruelties somewhere in that mix: live rats on fire, cats of all sizes antagonized for dramatic effect, seizure-like responses to tranquilization, etc. It’s like the grindhouse version of Roar in that way, with the fact & fiction narratives competing for the spotlight. Prosperi isn’t all that much better with humans either. Stunt actors are allowed to be jostled by large, dangerous animals for several beats too many, walking up to the line of becoming a snuff film. Child actors are framed & vocally dubbed as if they were adults, which is intensely upsetting in scenes where they appear half-dressed. It’s actually unclear that Prosperi even fully knows what a child is, since he increasingly dwells on their alien, indecipherable behavior as if they were just another breed of wild animal. That thematic preoccupation does eventually pay off at the film’s jarring climax, but there’s no dramatic payoff great enough to forgive the transgression of endangering performers as vulnerable as children & animals for Z-grade genre entertainment.
Despite being deeply offended by nearly every scene in Wild Beasts, I cannot deny that I found the transgression thrilling. Maybe it’s because the long-deceased Prosperi is no longer around to imperil children or animals that I feel somewhat comfortable to delight in the amoral mayhem he documented here. Truthfully, though, I found his tasteless misanthropy & misothery to be a major aspect of the film’s entertainment value. The opening sequence is a music video montage of urban filth, depicting a modern world so overfilling with drugs that PCP & lysergic acid (treated in-dialogue as the same substance) has collected as a visible scum in the municipal water supply, thus infecting animals at the city zoo. One standout image of fried chicken leftovers and hypodermic needles littering the city’s public transit platforms spells out all you need to know about what Prosperi thought of humanity and the joys of being alive in modern times. For all I know, he was a super sweet guy in his personal life, but the crude, cheap ways he exploited his performers for profit in his cinema betrays a deeply cynical worldview that leaves his audience feeling ill. I can almost guarantee that if he were a current, working filmmaker I’d have a much more difficult time appreciating the effect of his work without fretting over the practicalities of its production, which is probably a compartmentalization I should work out privately in therapy instead of a public blog.
-Brandon Ledet
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
I don’t have strong feelings about the original Beetlejuice. I definitely saw it as a kid (although the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff was verboten in our God-fearing trailerhold), and, through the magic of channel surfing and intermittent cable access in my adult years, I’ve “rewatched” it a few times since. It’s a fun one, although most of that fun comes in the form of the underworld bureaucracy that the recently deceased Maitlands have to navigate and their great character work between themselves and teenaged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), with the title role of the chaos demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) being less a presence in the film proper than most people correctly recall. Upon the film’s great success as the most profitable movie that Geffen Film put out in the eighties, a sequel was immediately greenlit, but never came to pass. Until now, three and a half decades later. I wasn’t thrilled by initial promotional material, but the second theatrical trailer did manage to generate some interest in me, and my cautious optimism was rewarded.
It’s been a long time since Lydia Deetz was in Winter River, the town to which she moved as a teenager and first became aware of her ability to see through the veil that separates the living and the dead. Now, she’s a TV show host of Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, a hybrid talk show/ghost hunters program, produced by her current beau, Rory (Justin Theroux). She’s disrupted when she starts to see flashes of her old nemesis Beetlejuice in the crowd at her show, and her day only gets worse when she learns that her father, Charles, has been killed in a freak accident. Along with her still overly theatrical stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), she retrieves her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from boarding school to attend the funeral, which is to be held in Winter River. Astrid doesn’t believe in her mother’s abilities and is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother’s disingenuousness about why she can’t contact her deceased husband Richard, Astrid’s father. Some of the tension between them is eased when Astrid discovers some old photo albums in the attic of “the original ghost house,” but her mother’s apparent overreaction to her discovery of an ad for the services of “Betelgeuse” causes Astrid to put her guard up again. The situation is further exacerbated when Rory chooses Charles’s wake as the opportunity to compel Lydia publicly to set a date for their wedding; and why not Halloween, which is only a couple of days away. Repulsed, Astrid rides off on her bike, eventually crashing through a fence into the backyard of a cute boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), prompting a little romance. Rory’s insistence that Lydia confront her supposed repressed childhood trauma by repeating the name “Beetlejuice” three times opens the door for the old trickster to do his ghoulish Cat-in-the-Hat thing all over Winter River again.
I’m going to level with you: with this cast, it would be impossible for this movie to have no redeeming qualities. My house is a “Free Winona” house, now and forever, and this feels like the first time in a long time that I can tell she’s having a lot of fun. Although I’m sure Lydia is the first character that a lot of people think of when you invoke Winona’s name, that’s not the case for me. I’m team Veronica Sawyer all day every day, and after that I think of Mermaids, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then that moment in Strangers with Candy wherein she tosses out a cigarette and then pulls another lit cigarette from offscreen. With so much time having passed, Lydia Deetz could essentially be a completely different person, but there’s a consistency that I appreciated and that only Ryder could bring to the table. Apparently, Ryder’s sole condition for taking on her role in Stranger Things was that she had to be allowed time to play this character again if the opportunity arose, so you know it’s one that she’s invested in, and it shows. When it comes to Delia, I don’t really know what their relationship is like off-camera, but there’s a part of me that believes with every fiber of my being that O’Hara and Ryder are having the time of their lives reuniting here, as O’Hara is also clearly having a great time reprising her role as well. Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek is one of many refractions of a similar (but always distinct) archetype in the O’Hara oeuvre, and it’s one that’s found a way into this character. I have to think that’s somewhat textual, as we see that her current multimedia gallery space includes at least one screen showing a video of Delia in a white wig and gown with images of birds projected over her, and it has to be a visual reference to Moira’s in-universe memetic role in The Crows Have Eyes III.
When it comes to the film itself, there are ways that it writes around and includes the length of time since its predecessor, as well as elements that must be written around because of certain performers’ . . . unsavory lives. The elephant in the room here is that Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the first film, is a convicted sex offender now. To get around this, the film shows his unfortunate demise in the form of a claymation-esque sequence in which Charles’s plane goes down over the ocean when he is on his way back from a birdwatching expedition; he survives the crash but is then killed by a shark. This also allows for him to appear in the underworld with most of his upper torso missing, and thus allows the character to (sort of) continue to be a part of the narrative. There’s also some clever foreshadowing throughout, like the fact that Astrid notices Jeremy’s vinyl collection is very nineties-heavy and thinks that this is an affectation, but this sets up not one twist but two. Less cleverly, the Maitlands are simply written off as having been able to move on to the afterlife through a loophole that Lydia helped them find.
The biggest problem with the film is that it’s overstuffed. You might have read that synopsis above and thought to yourself, “Wait, isn’t Willem Dafoe in this movie? And Monica Belluci?” And yes, they are. In the thirty-six years since Beetlejuice was released, countless sequel ideas must have been proposed, and this film feels like it tries to contain all of them at once. What if Lydia had a television show about her powers? Topical! What about a sequel about Beetlejuice’s literally soul-sucking wife coming back to life (well, undeath) and seeking vengeance against him? Sounds good, throw it in. What about a sequel about an egotistical actor specializing in law enforcement action films who is inexplicably the head of the underworld police? Why not. What if the Deetz family’s teenage daughter falls for a ghost boy whose true intentions might be more sinister than it seems? Oh, sounds romantic! (This plot in particular feels like it was meant to be in a more immediate sequel to the original film with a still-teenaged Lydia.) What if Lydia’s daughter doesn’t believe her and has the same fraught relationship with her that Lydia once had with Delia? What if Lydia was going to marry a man who didn’t really love her, didn’t really believe in her abilities, and whose new age bullshit was a front to meet vulnerable women, and Beetlejuice gets her out of this marriage for his own selfish reasons? Check and check!
This means that the movie moves at a pretty frenetic pace, and I’m pleased to say that there was never a moment when I was bored or felt my mind wandering, although I did start to feel the length of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” by the time everyone was being Beetlejuice-puppeted to it in the film’s climax. It wears out its welcome a little, but the fact that this is the only scene that does so (other than the tedious scenes of Willem Dafoe as the not-a-cop hunting Beetlejuice’s undead Belluci wife, all of which could have been cut without anything being lost—and you know that if I’m saying this about Dafoe, they have to be very tedious) tells you something about this film’s overall energy, which is surprisingly high. I don’t think that I’ve appreciated a new Tim Burton film in twenty years (I’m a Big Fish defender), and this one works. There’s CGI, of course, but it’s largely used to imitate the cartoony stop-motion images of the original, and there’re still plenty of practical effects that I was pleased to see in action. Of all the legacy sequels we’ve seen in the past few years, this one is solid and fun. It’s a little more toothless than the original, but it’s not without its gory eccentricities (a well-delivered “spill my guts” bit in the trailer is what won me over). It seems to have become even more toned-down in the editing process as well, as Astrid snidely predicts the futures of the girls who bully her by joking about “driving carpool and banging Pilates instructors to fill the empty void” in the trailer, while in the film, the line is a tamer bit about “having [their] third children with [their] second husbands.” I have to think that the marketing push for this one and the need to make it more palatable for a wider audience is to blame, and that’s a shame. It’s still worth seeing, but I do think it could have been just a smidge meaner.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Alien: Romulus (2024)
One of the oft-vaunted strengths of the original Alien is that, for most of the film, there’s no clear protagonist. The characters were (also infamously) written gender-blind, and for much of the film’s runtime, everyone gets equal attention, until Ripley is the only character left alive. The sequels that followed that center on Ripley permanently solidified her as the franchise’s final girl, but there’s no foreshadowing in the original text that she’s destined to be so. This is not the case with Alien: Romulus, which opens and closes on a singular woman. That’s not a complaint, or a weakness, but when we’re talking about a film that has largely been a subject of discussion because of what it borrows and homages, I figured I would start out by talking about one of its differences.
Orphaned Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) lives on a Weyland-Yutani mining colony on a planet that experiences no sunlight. She’s been, for all intents and purposes, an indentured servant on this rock for her entire life, but there’s a literal and metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Yvaga, an idyllic world that she intends to set out for as soon as she gets her release, which she has accumulated enough hours of labor to qualify for. Weyland-Yutani’s management, however, forcibly extends her contract citing a lack of additional labor forces. Thus, she’s more malleable than expected when her ex, Tyler (Archie Renaux), approaches her to ask for her help in getting aboard a W-Y spaceship that’s adrift in orbit; you see, Rain isn’t completely alone in the world, as she has an android “brother” named Andy (David Jonsson), whom her father dug out of a recycling heap and reprogrammed to be Rain’s companion and protector. Andy is the key to getting aboard, as he can interface with the ship’s systems and allow Tyler and his merry band aboard so that they can abscond with a set of cryobeds that they can then install aboard their own ship and make their way to Yvaga. Of course, they have no idea that the ship up there isn’t a ship at all, but a research station composed of modules Romulus and Remus, and that Romulus has an unexpected guest in the form of the xenomorph that Ripley ejected into space all the way back in 1979, resuscitated and ready to wreak some havoc. An Alien movie ensues.
Alien is one of our faves around here. We recently covered Planet of the Vampires on the Lagniappe Podcast specifically in preparation for the release of Romulus, we previously covered a documentary about the original Alien, Brandon has rated and ranked all the previous films in this franchise, I took an absurd amount of umbrage (really—3.5 stars isn’t a bad score) at his review of Covenant, and I wrote an impassioned defense of Covenant and a dismissal of Prometheus. We are freaks, is what I’m saying. I was cautiously optimistic about this one, having been a bigger fan of director Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe than Brandon was, although to my recollection neither of us was impressed by his Evil Dead remake. It’s taken eight years for him to direct another feature, but it was well worth the wait, and when we were talking about our mutual interest in Romulus in the weeks leading up to release, Brandon mentioned that he felt Álvarez’s particular talents were well-suited to an entry in this canon. Some friends and I saw the trailer for this one multiple times over the past few months and we were excited; I felt almost as excited for this one as I did for Prometheus lo these many years ago now. And hey, this one even made me appreciate something introduced in Prometheus for the first time, which is no small feat.
You may have noticed that I only identified three characters in the paragraph outlining the film’s premise, and although they aren’t the only ones here, this is a pretty sparsely populated movie than most of these, with only five major human characters and an android (or two…). Rain and Andy, as our protagonists, are given the most characterization, while the others are barely sketched out. They’re fodder for the alien, which is pretty standard fare for this franchise at this point, but whereas previous films managed to get away with giving the participants minimal dimension because there were more of them, it’s a flaw in a small cast of actors here. Other than Rain, Andy, and Tyler, we also have Kay’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced, of Madame Web); pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), and interstellar chav Bjorn (Spike Fearn). Jonsson’s performance as Andy is fantastic and is one of the highlights of the film, and Spaeny is at turns serviceable and pretty good. I’m torn in my feeling about Fearn, whose performance makes him feel like he’s in a season of Skins that I would get so annoyed by that I’d stop watching. There’s an attempt to make his hostility toward Andy a matter of anti-android prejudice based in personal tragedy (a synthetic made a judgment call to save a dozen people in a mining accident, sacrificing three others, including Bjorn’s family), but he’s still obnoxious and shortsighted. It’s his idiocy that costs most of the others their lives; it’s so satisfying to see the alien kill him that I’m led to believe we’re not supposed to like him, so I guess this makes it a “good” performance, but the CW-caliber of his and Merced’s performances is out of place here. Consider Aliens, in which the marines are all similarly thinly written, but there’s more of them and their oversimplified characteristics—the coward, the macho lady, the veteran, the one with ice water in his veins, the cigar-chomping tough—don’t feel as one-dimensional as Bjorn or Navarro. Here, it’s a detracting factor.
That’s the most glaring flaw for me in Romulus, and it isn’t enough to turn me against the film, which I really rather liked. The plot is very cleverly constructed, with the need for Andy to use a data chip from one of the androids on the station itself in order to access a part of the station that houses the fuel for the cryopods leading to his personality being corrupted into something more clever and devious. In a franchise where synthetic humanoids can be relied upon to be morally upstanding as much as their creators can (which is to say that they have just as much chance to be good or evil), it’s a refreshing change to have a character whose ethics are completely malleable, with that mercuriality being entirely outside of his control. I’m mixed on That Reprisal (I won’t spoil it here), although I am pleased that there was extensive use of puppetry in the portrayal of the character, even if there was a perhaps-inescapable amount of Uncanny Valley happening. Feelings about digital necromancy aside, it’s effective, and is one of many tethers between this film and the franchise at large that make this feel of a piece with what came before, paying reverent homage rather than performing mere lip service to the films it follows. The xenomorph is the scariest it’s been since the last millennia, and there’s a new monster here that’s also very frightening and creepy. I’ll try to talk around it as much as possible to avoid spoiling it as well, but the final monster (which comes about through application of reverse engineered black goo) is nauseating to look at, a perfect synthesis of H.R. Gieger’s designs for the alien and, well, something you’ll know when you see it.
All in all, this one is pretty solid. The action sequences are fantastic (there’s a particular standout zero gravity sequence) and build logically upon one another, the introduction of a ticking clock in the form of the station’s deteriorating orbit is well-done and ups the stakes at exactly the right time, and the characters who have characters are interesting. Their interactions feel at home in this universe of films in which the night is dark and full of monsters but in which humans (and maybe androids) can find a connection with each other that makes the dual horrors of late-stage space capitalism and acidic organisms that impregnate and kill seem surmountable, if at great cost. A worthy sequel in an uneven franchise.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Strange Darling (2024)
The critical decorum for writing about the new high-style serial killer thriller Strange Darling is that you’re supposed to recommend audiences see the movie without reading a full description or review, which benefits the movie in two ways. One, it preserves the surprise of discovery as the movie walks the audience through various What’s Really Going On plot twists like a puppy on a leash. More importantly, it also saves the movie from having its themes & ideas discussed in any detail, so that critics are instead encouraged to gush over its candy-coated hyperviolence (“shot entirely on 35mm film”, as the first title card goofily boasts) without fretting about the meaning behind those striking images. That second benefit is crucial, since the actual substance protected by Strange Darling‘s candy shell is rotted hollow. There’s no color saturation level high enough nor any needle drop ironic enough to cover the taste of the misogyny molding at the core of this empty entertainment vessel, despite director JT Mollner & cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi (yes, that Giovanni Ribisi) trying their damnedest at every turn. So, go ahead and swallow it down without reading the full ingredient list if you like, but be prepared to walk away feeling ill.
Kyle Gallner & Willa Fitzgerald star as a pair of beer-buzzed hedonists who meet in a roadside motel room for a kinky one-night stand. Several false-start openings (to bookend the several fake-out conclusions) tease the audience with awareness that a serial killer is afoot, which casts Gallner in an unsavory light as a macho brute who gets off on strangling women. But wait, it turns out the editor is not the only shameless tease warping the picture. The more time we spend in the motel, the more Fitzgerald’s strangulation victim is revealed to be a huge tease herself, goading Gallner into playfully abusing her according to a roleplay script they agreed to before booking the room, then repeatedly pulling back the exact moments when the violent foreplay is about to naturally spill over into consensual sex. There’s some hack Pulp Fiction chapter shuffling in how the story is ordered that maintains her innocence for as long as possible, at first characterizing her as a frustrating hookup who triggers misogynist violence in her date through unintentional sexual teasing. Eventually, though, it can’t hold back its condemnation of her as a “crazy bitch” and a “cunt” who deserves any violence Gallner exacts upon her in revenge, since she uses the general assumed victimhood of women in heterosexual partnerships gone awry to her advantage, so that she can get away with murder. The entire motel hookup kink scenario was a setup, you see, because you’re watching a Promising Young Woman remake that coddles Tarantino-obsessed MRAs.
Pushing the movie’s thoughts on consent, kink, and rape aside for as long as possible really does benefit its value as stylish entertainment. Its pride in shooting on film is a little corny in presentation, but the colors are gorgeously rich enough to excuse the faux pas. Ribisi has fun playing with his traditionalist camera equipment, delivering the kind of vintage genre throwback that’ll have movie nerds hooting & hollering at multiple split-diopter shots like salivating dogs. Barbara Hershey & Ed Begley, Jr. briefly drop by to lend the production an air of credibility as aging sweetheart hippies who are unprepared for how violently the War of the Sexes has escalated since their heyday. Car chases, shoot-outs, and intimate stabbings keep the adrenaline up once the motel tryst fully falls apart, spilling the intimate violence of that room into the 2-lane highways of rural America. The whole thing is pretty exciting, excitingly pretty, and then pretty atrocious as soon as it starts rebutting cultural assumptions about who’s the real victim when men & women fight. I’m usually not in the business of judging a movie entirely by its moral character—especially not as someone who regularly watches the vintage schlock this pulls direct visual inspiration from—but I couldn’t help but feeling like if Strange Darling were a person and not a feature film it would have some really specific, fucked up opinions about The Amber Heard Situation. Its vibes are just as rancid as its visuals are immaculate.
-Brandon Ledet
Vendetta (1986)
There are currently no fewer than four feature films that populate on Tubi when you search for the title “Vendetta“. That’s including longer titles like Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy but excluding partial matches like Midnight Vendetta or Vendetta Road. Honestly, I thought there’d be more. Vendetta is such a vague, generic title for the exact kind of cheap-o action revenge flicks that pad out Tubi’s vast library that I would not have been surprised if the results tallied to at least a dozen. Still, among the half-dozen or so Vendettas currently streaming on Tubi, it’s unlikely any are half as entertaining as the crown jewel of the collection, the one from 1986. A sleazy women-in-prison revenge thriller about a stuntwoman scorned, 1986’s Vendetta mixes two familiar genres into one surprisingly novel, volatile concoction. Just like there’s a long tradition of titling your generic revenge actioner Vendetta, there’s also a long tradition of highlighting behind-the-scenes stunt actors as real-life, authentic action heroes, from classic novelties like 1978’s Stunt Rock to this year’s big-screen adaptation of The Fall Guy. Likewise, there’s also a long tradition of leering exploitation films that offer a risqué peak at the intimate sex & violence of women’s prisons, often with more salacious titles like Caged Heat, The Naked Cage, Sex Hell, and Sadomania. As far as I can tell, though, Vendetta ’86 is the only film that’s thought to combine all of those genre tropes into a single 90min exploitation pic, and it deserves some respect for that efficiency.
Vendetta opens during a Fulci-style zombie stampede, inexplicably set in small-town 1980s America instead of 70s-sleaze Italy. After running from a rabid hoard of Italo zombies, our hero is shown collapsed and burning alive on city pavement. This, of course, turns out to be just another day on the job for the professional stuntwoman played by Karen Chase, who cheerfully pops up from this controlled burn shoot as soon as the fire-extinguishers cool her down. She doesn’t even bother to change out of her charred jumpsuit before speeding off to the wrap party, waving along her younger, even bubblier sister. Soon, it becomes apparent that the staged free-falls, car chases, and bare-knuckled brawls of the movie-within-the-movie aren’t nearly as dangerous as the small-town mentality of its shooting location. After downing a few brewskies at the local bar (while a band of new-wave punks play square-dance country schtick in the background), the younger sister sneaks out with the cutest roughneck she can find and immediately finds trouble. He sexually assaults her, she shoots him dead with his own pistol, and the local cops, judge, and jury unsurprisingly side with their hometown boy instead of the Hollywood outsider who killed him in self-defense. Worse yet, the local-yokel bullying continues once the teenager lands in prison, quickly getting her killed after she refuses the hard drugs and sexual advances of the top dog of the prison yard (It’s Always Sunny‘s Sandy Martin). It’s up to the stuntwoman, then, to seek true justice and avenge her sister’s murder, purposefully getting herself locked up so she can kill the women responsible one by one in a newfound, immoral use for her martial-arts skills.
Every plot point of Vendetta is pure exploitation, but it more often implies than it dwells on the grislier details. The instigating roadside rape that lands our hero behind bars is shocking but not eroticized. Admittedly, the prison-yard bullying that escalates that tragedy is eroticized, leaning into the lesbian leering of the wider women-in-prison genre. Still, there are no actual sex scenes to speak of, just some casual nudity as women hang around the showers and locker rooms as spectators to the violence. The contraband drug trade that fuels that violence gets pretty salacious too, with multiple scenes of forced heroin injection raising the dramatic stakes at every turn. All of this sensational material is softened by sincere scenes of intense melodrama scored by Lifetime music cues, affording Vendetta an oddly tender touch for a VHS-era exploitation picture. It’s also just as much an excuse for Karen Chase to road-test action stunts outside of a movie set as it is an excuse to position her in mildly salacious women’s prison scenarios. It’s essentially the soft-rock Skinemax version of Stunt Rock, complete with a climactic stage performance from a drag king Prince impersonator in the prison cafeteria to match the wizardly stadium rock act of its predecessor. It’s all very disjointed, but it’s also all very 80s, which you might expect from the only feature film directed by Bruce Logan, cinematographer for the original Tron. It’s also all exactly what you’d expect from a revenge picture titled Vendetta streaming on Tubi, except with maybe three or four Vendetta movies’ worth of plot & novelty for the price* of one.
*free with ads
-Brandon Ledet
Frogman (2024)
There are two things that can quickly win me over to enjoying an otherwise mediocre movie: a cool-looking monster and a go-for-broke ending. Thankfully, the new found-footage cryptid horror Frogman has both. Based on real-life legends of a half-human, half-frog mutant who wields a magic sparkler wand in the woods outside of Loveland, Ohio, Frogman gets away with a lot of time-wasting bullshit just by delivering on an adorable creature design, lovingly rendered as a rubber-suit monster. The titular Frogman appears early in flashback camcorder footage from the late-90s, assuring the audience that this is not exactly a Blair Witch Project or Willow Creek situation where the monster will go entirely unseen. He’s around, and he’s so dang cute that you can’t wait to spend more time with him. Unfortunately, the movie then makes you wait a full hour to return to the pleasure of the Loveland Frog’s company, but it does reward your patience by ending on 20 hectic minutes of over-the-top Frogman action, adding to the cryptid’s lore by dreaming up a frogperson death cult who worship the wizardly beast and offer up their bodies to be merged with his froggy DNA. It’s entirely possible to roll your eyes through a majority of the film’s runtime and still get excited by the concluding title card warning that “Frogman is still out there,” teasing a potential sequel. Any time spent with Frogman is time well spent.
While Frogman does not mimic Blair Witch & Willow Creek‘s withholding of an onscreen monster, it mimics everything else about their narrative structure, often reading like a copy of a copy. A struggling low-fi filmmaker who captured the late-90s camcorder footage of Frogman as a child (Nathan Tymoshuk) returns to Loveland to prove wrong all the haters & doubters of the “Hey guys” YouTube commentariat who mock the credibility of his sighting. He brings along two friends who also don’t take the existence of Frogman seriously but are still excited about the idea of making a movie (Chelsey Grant as an insufferably corny actress who’s road-testing a hack Southern Belle stock character named Norma Jean Wynette, and Benny Barrett as an aspiring cinematographer who constantly complains about “losing light” even though he shoots every single interaction backlit & out of focus on an ancient camcorder). The friend-dynamic drama between that central trio is autopilot found-footage filmmaking, but things pick up quick once they start interacting with the local yokels of Loveland. The amount of true believers who are deadly serious about Frogman give the wayward crew the creeps, then the wizardly Frogman’s “telekinetic interference” with the shoot throws the project into chaos, trapping them in a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a bloodthirsty frog cult. So, while Frogman is not always ribbeting, given enough time it is plenty ribbiculous.
If there’s anything new that Frogman brings to the found-footage horror canon, it’s all contained in its ending and in its monster. The titular rubber-suited Frogman looks great and—defying found-footage tradition—does not kill every single character who lays eyes on him, which means the movie has to find a new way to end its story that doesn’t just mindlessly echo the exact beats of Blair Witch. Otherwise, Frogman is most recommendable as regional cinema. Recalling Matt Farley’s modern small-town cryptid classic Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, there’s something charming about Frogman’s extremely local sensibilities in the quest to put Loveland, Ohio on the map by promoting the existence of its resident cryptid; the only shame is that nothing in the movie is half as funny nor as surprising as any random page of a Matt Farley script. Still, Frogman excels as a tourism ad for the city, which just adopted the Loveland Frog as its official mascot in 2023, after nearly seven decades of reported sightings. Even when I was bored with the interpersonal drama between the central mockumentary crew, I was still delighted by the Frogman merch they found in their interrogation of the Loveland citizenry: a sign that reads “Frog parking only; violators will be toad” and t-shirts with slogans like “Frog around and find out” or “M.I.L.F. (Man I Love Frogman)”. It made me want to travel to Loveland just to visit the gift shop.
-Brandon Ledet
Day for Night (1973)
One of my weaknesses as a critical thinker is that I’m pathetically vulnerable to enjoying movies about how great The Movies are, from nostalgic recreations of large-scale Old Hollywood spectacles in movies like Hail, Caesar! to comedic takes on scrappy D.I.Y. communal filmmaking in low-budget genre trash like One Cut of the Dead. I even choke up during those hokey little Magic of the Movies montages that everyone else complains about during Oscars broadcasts every year. The same goes for poems about poetry and rock songs about rocking out. The creation of art ranks highly among the few worthy things you can do with your brief time on this planet, so it deserves to be the subject of that art just as much as the few other go-to subjects of every other song, poem, and movie out there (mainly God, sex, and death). So, I’m less willing than most movie-obsessed cynics to roll my eyes when Oscar voters award top prizes to love-letter-to-cinema movies about The Movies. I totally understand the impulse. The cool, hip opinion to have is that Jean-Luc Godard’s poison-penned hate letters to cinema like The Image Book are much worthier of time and study than his intellectual frenemy François Truffaut’s magic-of-moviemaking dramedy Day for Night, because they are more challenging in their observation & interrogation of the medium. The thing is, though, that as intellectually lazy as it may be, it feels much better to celebrate than to challenge, especially when the subject is as wonderful as the art of the moving image. If my two choices as a cinephile are to be corny or self-loathing, I’m perfectly fine being corny.
Director François Truffaut stars in Day for Night as a François Truffaut-type director, lording over the film shoot of a mediocre-looking melodrama titled Meet Pamela. The metatextual joke of the movie is that there’s nothing as dramatic nor exciting in the narrative of Meet Pamela as the drama & excitement of its production. As the auteur du jour, Truffaut is responsible for guiding the decision-making of hundreds of cast & crew members, who bombard him with random, dissonant either/or questions as he attempts to funnel their chaotic input into a single, coherent picture. The bigger personalities he struggles to manage are, of course, his actors, who include Fellini collaborator Valentina Cortese as a has-been drunk who refuses to learn her cues and longtime Truffaut muse Jean-Pierre Léaud as a “spoiled brat who will not grow up,” always angling to go to the movies instead of making one. Newcomer chanteuse Dani also makes a star-making impact as the level-headed script girl who puts out the fires Truffaut himself does not notice, simply because she’s a true believer in the cause of Cinema. Explaining her passion for the medium above all else, she sweetly declares “I’d drop a guy for a film. I’d never drop a film for a guy.” True to the nature of real-life film production, most of the drama between these players occurs during the punishing rhythm of having to get multiple takes until a scene fully works or during the punishing boredom of time spent on set waiting around for those takes to be fully set up. It’s essentially an ensemble cast comedy set in a hyper-specific industry & locale, made by the people who know that industry better than anyone else in the world.
Where Day for Night becomes a transcendent piece of art in its own right (rather than just an appreciation for the transcendent nature of art) is in the sweeping montages when all of these chaotic personalities are overpowered by the momentum of the production, and everything fall exactly into place. The behind-the-camera busyness of the set is drowned out by heavy orchestration on the soundtrack, relaxing all tension & frustration with the stop-and-start repetition of filming a scene to instead ease into the flow of a shooting day where everything goes exactly right. Given how many different, opposing people it takes to make a professional movie, it’s a miracle every time one is completed, let alone is any good. Truffaut digs deep into the mechanics of how movies are made, to the point where it’s likely Day for Night was many people’s first instance of hearing the terms “headshots,” “pans,” “rushes,” and “reshoots” outside of the trades. You can tell that those practical details aren’t as interesting to him as the poetry that they produce, though, especially in scenes where he doesn’t bother hiding the shadow of the crane-shot camera crew shooting the fictional camera crew of the movie-within-the movie. He puts a lot more care & effort into displaying a reading list of film books on the great auteurs, proudly displaying names like Dreyer, Bergman, and Buñuel for the camera while romantic orchestrations swells. The only sequence where this mechanics-vs-poetry dynamic is flipped is the opener, where an extensive tracking shot full of life & wonder is revealed to be a movie-within-the-movie fake-out and is then broken down into individual, choreographed components through multiple takes. Otherwise, it works the other way around; the mechanics come before the poetry.
I can only think of two instances in Day for Night wherein Truffaut becomes noticeably cynical about his craft. The major one is in Léaud’s characterization as a petulant child who refuses to grow up, treating women as either caretakers or playthings depending on his scene-to-scene whims. It’s very much the same fuckboy posturing that he displays in The Mother and the Whore, and both instances feel like a knowing commentary on the sexual & moral immaturity of Léaud’s generation, since he had become a kind of living mascot for The French New Wave as soon as Truffaut first cast him in The 400 Blows. The other cynical note is a one-liner potshot at Hollywood as a competing movie industry, dismissing it as a playground “where kids try to live up to their famous parents.” If Hollywood was offended by that friendly jab, they didn’t show it in their adoring appreciation of Day for Night, which they awarded the 1975 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In a way, the film is a major pioneer in the Magic of the Movies montages that have become an annual tradition for the ceremony’s television broadcasts, but with an obvious major difference. Those montages only celebrate The Movies when they achieve transcendent visual poetry (and box office profits), whereas Truffaut loves The Movies as they are, warts & all. You get the sense watching Day for Night that he genuinely enjoyed the chaos of wrangling brats, drunks, and freaks to make mediocre art in artificial locales; he loved making movies. That might seem like a shallow subject to rigorous academic cynics or to more narrative-focused moviegoers who are just “looking for a good story,” but it feels deeply spiritual & meaningful to me, a guy who also loves The Movies.
-Brandon Ledet
Trap (2024)
My best friend constantly teases me about how I rate and rank movies, and how sometimes I’ll describe what seems to her to be the worst movie she’s ever heard of, but which I’ll find something to praise about and then wind up giving it 3.5 stars. For weeks in advance of the premiere of Trap, while she predicted (accurately) that I’d give this one that rating, we speculated about what the major twist would be. I put my money on the premise being that Josh Hartnett’s character was actually kidnapping people because his daughter was some kind of vampire creature, which may simply have been because I saw the trailer for this in conjunction with the one for Abigail so many times that it incepted me a little. In reality, there’s no “big twist” in this one, with the portioned revelations coming not in the form of a huge rug pull but like actual ongoing narrative reveals. I know that what I’m describing is just “a movie” but when you’re talking about a director whose early career was so defined by his whiplash endings that, (A) if you remember Robot Chicken mocking him with the quote “What a twist!”, then congratulations, it’s time to schedule that colonoscopy—that episode aired in 2005—and (B) something this relatively straightforward seems like a novelty.
Tweenage Riley (Ariel Donoghue) has been having a tough time at school lately, entering that period of adolescence where friend groups start to change and ostracization can be at its most emotionally damaging. She still got good grades this semester, so, as promised, her father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is taking her to see her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). Upon arrival, however, he starts to note that there’s a massive police presence at the arena where the concert is being held, and he discovers that the police learned that a serial killer known as “The Butcher” would be attendance that evening and have turned the entire place into a, well, Trap in order to put an end to his reign of terror. That’s bad news for Cooper, since The Butcher is him. Of course, if you saw the trailer, then you already know that, and you might even assume that this will be the film’s entire premise (I did), but this reveal comes very early in the film and the movie eventually spills out of the arena and into the streets, with quite a lot of plot left to go. I was delighted to see Alison Pill’s name in the credits, and flabbergasted to see the name “Hayley Mills” appear before my eyes. She’s in far less of the movie than one would want, as she plays the FBI profiler who has helped to create the titular trap; the film does play with this, however, as she frequently explains over the radio (one of which Cooper has pilfered) what the Butcher’s next most likely action will be while Cooper is doing it, forcing him to have to reverse and rethink his actions on the fly. Although her role is small, it’s omnipresent and pervasive, and that was fun.
This feels like M. Night Shyamalan doing his version of a Hitchcock plot. We’ve got a dangerous man stuck in a situation that was devised specifically to entrap him and use his own psychology against him, using his quick thinking (and a lot of luck) to stay one step ahead of his pursuers. It’s as if Roger Thornhill from North by Northwest actually was George Kaplan, and Kaplan was a murderer. Like Norman Bates, Cooper is a man that we know is guilty, and for whom we can’t help but hope that his plan succeeds, because we’re with him every moment — trying to get away from the overly apologetic and invested mother of one of Riley’s friends-turned-mean-girls, watching nervously as other men are pulled out of the crowd for questioning, and being directly questioned by an officer after having learned the codeword taught to stadium staff, but not realizing that he would need to present additional documentation. All through it, Hartnett’s choice to play Cooper as ever-so-slightly off is incredibly effective; he seems superficially charming, and Josh Hartnett’s natural good looks go a long way to explaining why no one seems to notice that there’s something wrong. There’s a real juggling act going on in this performance, as Cooper’s mannerisms seem practiced and artificial every time that he has to interact with another person, like he’s spent a long time imitating human behavior but still hasn’t quite gotten it down, like he’s fluent in being normal, but it’s unmistakably accented. The only time he seems to be himself and not putting on the character of “Cooper” is when he’s alone and calculating his escape route, or when he’s with Riley, which does a lot of work humanizing him.
One really noteworthy thing here is that this empathy we naturally have for our primary viewpoint character takes a strange turn at about the midpoint, when Lady Raven becomes aware that Cooper is The Butcher and thinks quickly and cleverly in order to stick with him in a way that he can’t prevent without revealing himself. She briefly becomes the heroine of the story, as she manages to get Cooper’s phone away from him and use it to get more information about where his latest victim is being held and then going on Instagram live to ask her massive group of fans to help her find and save the man. The trailers would lead you to believe that the pop superstar arena show is just set dressing, or a means to justify having all of the action take place in a stadium for the novelty of the location, but Lady Raven actually ends up being central to the plot and even emanates a bit of Final Girl energy. Surprisingly, I also found Raven’s music, which Saleka Shyamalan composed and performed herself, to be a lot of fun. Not every one of the tracks that she performs hits the same, but there were a few legitimate bops in there; not since Josie and the Pussycats or Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping have I enjoyed a movie’s representation of in-universe popular music as much as this, and both of those were comedies. If this movie was a backdoor into springboarding a larger music career for her, I’d say she has a decent chance, and it got me out of the house and into a place where I witnessed shirtless Josh Hartnett (he’s still got it, in case you were wondering) get tased by Hayley Mills (she does too), larger than life.
There are, of course, some issues. The fact that all of Cooper/The Butcher’s victims are talked about in glowing terms about what great parents/teachers/children/community members they were got a bit of an eyeroll out of me; I don’t need the victims of a serial murderer to be paragons of heteronormative virtue in order to think that their deaths are tragic. If anything, heaping that much praise on them early in the film made me think that the big Shyamalan Twist™ was going to be that Cooper was some kind of vigilante picking off people whose apparent moral perfection belied their true, evil natures. Further, nitpickers will find a lot to complain about here, as there are a number of instances in which Cooper eludes the law’s grasp through pure luck rather than through any ingenuity. This starts first when he manages to find himself in the good graces of an arena employee (Jonathan Langdon) mostly because of his handling of a situation in which Riley and another girl have conflict over the last tour shirt in their shared size, which feels like a reach. Later, however, Cooper dons an apron to pose as staff while attempting to escape to the roof and is stopped by security, who ask him to present a card in conjunction with the codeword, and he just so happens to have grabbed an apron in which the real employee left their wallet, “I’m not The Butcher” card and all. It’s a narrative necessity, but you already know how the people who treat the enjoyment of the cinematic art as some kind of argument to win are going to beat this talking point to death whenever the social media algorithm figures out how to spin Trap discourse into your timeline. I hate to side with them at all, but by the time that Riley gets pulled on-stage to dance with Lady Raven, I had to concede that there were some “conveniences” that might have been spackled over with just one more draft of the script. The fact that Cooper has OCD and that this is something that is only barely hinted at (when he folds his napkin very precisely when he and Riley grab food at the concert) before it becomes a major part of his profile, which ends up seeming a little underbaked, but otherwise, the planting and payoff is effective.
This is a pretty good time. Nepotism aside, Saleka Shyamalan is a welcome screen presence with musical talent that makes this one work in a way that it absolutely wouldn’t if the concert that the characters were attending felt as artificial as they often do in movies and TV. (There’s actually a cute moment in the early part of the film wherein Riley is singing along to Lady Raven in the car and missing many of the notes, then says to her father that she might want to be a singer one day, and he politely goes along with this dream, which is very funny in the context of said singer being the director’s daughter.) Hartnett is always a welcome addition to any cast, and although seeing the heartthrob of The Faculty and Halloween H20 playing the father of a middle schooler aged me like I had just stepped onto the beach that makes you old, he was great here. I honestly didn’t really realize that Hayley Mills was alive, but seeing her here made me realize how much I’ve missed her, and I hope that this emergence from retirement is long lived and that I get to see her again soon (she also really classes up the joint). It may not be worth running out to the theater to see, but this is one I’d recommend checking out for a nice, low stakes movie night when it comes to home video.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Showdown in Little Tokyo (1992)
Growing up, I only knew the bookends of Brandon Lee’s biography: birth and death. Brandon Lee was born famous as the son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee and, shockingly, died at the height of that fame while filming his breakout role in the goth superhero classic The Crow. There were obviously other highlights to his fame in the 28 years between those bookends, but I don’t remember them happening in real time. I’ve since been getting to know Lee posthumously as he randomly appears on the covers of used DVDs at local thrift stores, starring in low-rent martial arts actioners with titles like Laser Mission, Rapid Fire, and Kung Fu: The Movie. He’s not especially talented as a dramatic actor in any of those forgotten action cheapies, but he does share his father’s talents for sharp, convincing fight choreography and, not for nothing, his father’s handsomeness. Maybe that’s why Lee was paired with a more charismatic actor for his leap from Hong Kong to Hollywood productions in 1992’s Showdown in Little Tokyo. Just a couple short years before his major break in The Crow, Lee was cast as a sidekick to cartoon muscle freak Dolph Lundgren, who gets all of the best one-liners and over-the-top stunts while Lee plays straight man, cheering him on. Like Laser Mission, I had never heard of this film before I found it at the thrift store, and it helped flesh out my understanding of Lee’s brief movie star career between birth & death. Unlike Laser Mission, though, it was a memorably fun, goofy action flick regardless of its significance to Lee’s biography.
A sleazy Los Angeles buddy cop movie from the director of Commando, Showdown in Little Tokyo has great pedigree as a VHS-era action classic. It also has one of the most racist premises in that canon, which is no small feat for an era obsessed with urban and immigrant crime. Brandon Lee (a half-Chinese actor) plays a half-Japanese cop who was raised in California, disconnected from his cultural heritage. Dolph Lundgren (a Swedish actor) plays an all-American cop who was raised in Japan, submerged in that heritage, so he serves as Lee’s tour guide on all of the finer points of Japanese culture as they take down the yakuza stronghold in Little Tokyo. It’s a racist angle on mismatched multicultural partnership that’s not at all helped by the decision to avoid subtitling most of the Japanese dialogue, nor by the Orientalist notes of the soundtrack cues whenever they encounter the head of the yakuza (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, of Mortal Kombat fame). And yet, even though the central white-cop-Asian-cop dynamic of Showdown in Little Tokyo is heinous in concept, it’s often adorable in practice. Lundgren & Lee have an oddly romantic rapport, even partnering up after a meet-cute fight scene and spending some quality time at a local bathhouse. In the movie’s most often-quoted scene, Lee compliments the size of Lundgren’s penis after spotting him disrobing for a soak in the hot tub, remarking “You have the biggest dick I’ve ever seen on a man,” to which Lundgren replies, “Thank you.” The two end that exchange unsure how to say “I love you” in a macho way, so they opt for “Don’t get killed,” and “You too,” instead. Since they can’t have sex with each other for 1980s reasons, they’re assigned to protect the life of Tia Carrere from the yakuza, whom Lundgren beds while Lee salivates, but it’s mostly a formality.
The homoeroticism of Showdown in Little Tokyo is apparent as soon as the opening credits, which are a dreamlike montage of biceps, swords, guns, abs, and tattoo ink shot with the erotic tenderness of a Red Shoe Diaries episode. The women of the film get little to do beyond being rescued and stripping topless – sometimes as erotic dancers, sometimes as erotic sumo wrestlers, sometimes as live sushi platters, always as objects. Otherwise, it’s a film entirely about men and the male form. Having defined the pinnacle of the genre with Commando, director Mark Lester has an eye for the shameless beefcake ultraviolence and an ear for the groany, juvenile one-liners that make for a memorable action classic. Lundgren doesn’t have Schwarzenegger’s comedic chops, but he still fires off line-deliveries of phrases like “This is illegal, and it pisses me off,” and “If I don’t have breakfast, I get grumpy. I don’t think you’ll like me grumpy” with enough deadpan bravado for those moments to land. More importantly, he looks like a cartoon superhero in the flesh, especially with the exaggerated shoulder pads of his Japanese-themed leather jacket extending his frame. Lee doesn’t come anywhere close to touching Lundgren’s action-star charisma here, but the movie also isn’t all that interested in giving him a chance to do so. He’s just there to pump up Lundgren’s ego, compliment the gargantuan size of his dick, and give credibility to the phrase “reverse racism.” Thankfully, Lester often distracts from that uneasy dynamic with enough explosions, swordfights, and beheadings to get away with the worst cross-cultural impulses of the script. He has complained about the studio removing 10 minutes of footage from the final cut without his permission, but what’s left is one of the leanest, funniest, gayest action novelties of its era (and, by default, of Lee’s entire career).
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 