reviews

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

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When I saw Don Hertzfeldt’s latest animated short at this year’s Overlook, there was an hour-long line of giddy nerds queued up to squeeze in for a specialty screening and Q&A.  A few months later, ME was paired with a victory-lap roadshow exhibition of Hertzfeldt’s 2012 feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which I attended with a smattering of fellow introverts avoiding eye contact and the afternoon sun in the complimentary AC.  Both experiences were immaculate.  The hustle & bustle of the film festival environment made ME feel like a burning-hot ticket, especially since fans could corner the animator in the flesh to force such intimate experiences as asking questions during a moderated panel, showing him the tattoos he inspired, asking for autographs and, in my case, catching a glimpse of him wolfing down Shake Shack between screenings like a regular Joe.  The theatrical rollout was obviously less intimate, but Hertzfeldt did his best to make it feel personal.  As an intermission between the short & feature, he FaceTimes the audience with a pre-recorded message to explain the ways in which It’s Such a Beautiful Day was a breakthrough formal experiment for his art and to also apologize for exhaustion of watching it so soon after ME.  It still felt like a one-of-a-kind presentation for a work that was once streaming without context or personalization on Netflix, even though this exact Cinematic Event is currently touring dozens of international cities.

I’ve never thought of Hertzfeldt as a public figure before this recent tour.  Since he largely works alone on self-taught animation techniques that take years to calibrate, I’ve always imagined him as a reclusive outsider artist, the exact kind of quiet introvert that his movies attract to the theater.  Early works like Billy’s Balloon, Rejected, and Beautiful Day all had a word-of-mouth quality to their cultural awareness, and if his widest critical breakout World of Tomorrow screened anywhere near where I live with this level of fanfare, I totally missed it.  Unsurprisingly, it turns out Hertzfeldt does carry himself with a quiet, shy, apologetic demeanor, seemingly surprised by the continued cult enthusiasm for his animated stick figure abstractions.  It also turns out that his public personality was a lot more integral to the tone & narrative of It’s Such a Beautiful Day than I remembered, since his gentle voice is a constant hum on its soundtrack as the film’s scene-by-scene narrator.  There’s an observational comic-strip humor to It’s Such a Beautiful Day that makes it feel a hand-drawn diary, especially considering the direct, intimate rapport the director establishes with his audience through narration.  That’s what makes it so horrifying when it develops into a diary of personal anxieties rather than a diary of personal experiences as its story escalates, given that if any of this happened to Hertzfeldt himself, he would be either institutionalized or, more likely, dead.

Hertzfeldt narrates the daily, mundane thoughts & experiences of a middle-aged stick figure named Bill.  Our milquetoast protagonist starts his journey suffering the same nagging indignities that plague us all: awkwardly waiting for buses, awkwardly chatting with strangers, awkwardly navigating urban hellscapes, etc.  Bill’s suffering takes on increasing specificity as his mental health declines, though, due largely to a brain tumor that distorts his ability to think clearly (and inevitably kills him).  Although told in third-person, the narration is filtered entirely through Bill’s increasingly warped perception of reality, and the imagery warps to match it.  The white copy-paper backdrop of Hertzfeldt’s early works give way to photographic mixed-media textures that Bill stumbles through in non-linear time loops, untethered from logic.  His observations occasionally become crass & offensive as his POV is compromised by his tumor, making this one of the great illustrations of intrusive thoughts, mental illness, and unreliable narration.  Like all of Hertzfeldt’s work, it’s also a great illustration of Millennial humor, from its grim death-wish nihilism to its LOL-so-random internet cringe.  There’s even a literal bacon joke that anchors the picture to the Epic Bacon humor of the 2010s, which only makes it more impressive that the film manages to sketch out an earnest, authentic big-picture demonstration of what it feels like to think & function with a brain distorted by anxiety, depression, and physical malady.  For a small, devoted audience, no film has ever felt truer.

When Hertzfeldt refers to It’s Such a Beautiful Day as experimental, he means it more in terms of process than in terms of genre.  He filmed the animation cells for the project using a bulky 1940s camera, experimenting with how to segment the frame through multiple exposures by blocking the lens, sometimes mixing traditional animation with stock footage.  Even so, there are some aesthetic touches to the film that do recall Experimental Cinema in the Stan Brakhage/Maya Deren sense, with flashes of pure color overtaking the screen to tell the story through emotion & mood rather than through figure & voice.  It was a drastic evolution for an animator who used to work exclusively in black & white line drawings, with only a few pops of color adding visual excitement to the frame – an evolution that’s since only gotten more extreme through multi-media layering in The World of Tomorrow & ME.  The one thing that hasn’t changed, really, is Hertzfeldt’s unique sense of comic timing, which mines dark humor out of the mundane absurdism of being alive.  His ability to perfectly time a punchline made him a cult figure long before he fully distinguished his craft as a visual artist, so it’s been wonderful to spend so much time hearing those jokes in his own voice this year, whether in his heavily-narrated cult classic or in his Q&A tour promoting his new, dialogue-free short.  It’s fitting, then, that the only way to access these films (if they aren’t physically traveling to your neighborhood theater) is to purchase them directly from the artist’s website.  I imagine he personally packages each shipment by hand and includes a scribbled note of apology for making your brain a little darker with his harsh approach to life & art.

-Brandon Ledet

The Sore Losers (1997)

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I recently saw Guitar Wolf perform at a crowded, raucous dive bar and was impressed by the band’s continued ferocity.  The Japanese garage-rock trio has been around for as long as I have been alive, but they’re rocking and rolling as hard as ever, shredding & crowdsurfing through neighborhood venues the size of living rooms.  Meanwhile, it took me two full days to recover from just one of their shows, suffering both headbanger’s whiplash and tinnitus from standing too few feet away from their overcranked amps.  I am convinced that a single week of touring with Guitar Wolf would literally kill me, especially since they insist on continuing to wear their black leather pants & jackets (the official Jet Rock n’ Roll uniform) in the Gulf South heat.  I left the show with a reignited excitement for the band, though, so I spent more time with them by revisiting their most prominent cinematic showcase to date: the late-90s splatstick horror comedy Wild Zero, in which they fight off a local breakout of astrozombies between playing gigs.  Despite only currently being accessible via YouTube, Wild Zero has a sizable cult following—partially due to Guitar Wolf’s Ramones-style rock n’ roll superheroes presence in the film, partially due to its surprisingly progressive queer themes—and it was without question my first introduction to the band.  That cult doesn’t account for all of Guitar Wolf’s audience, though, as evidenced by a recent failed Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel titled Wild Zero 2: The Strongest Blood of Humanity.  There’s apparently a disparity between the ecstatic enthusiasm of rock n’ roll maniacs who show up to see Guitar Wolf in concert (basically anyone who’s familiar with the phrase “Goner Records”) and the dimmed enthusiasm of schlock gobblers who’d show up to see Guitar Wolf onscreen again (aged internet nerds who used to trade zombie schlock recommendations on long-defunct message boards).  There’s obviously plenty of overlap between those two groups; there’s just not enough.

Fear not, Jet Rockers! There’s already another Guitar Wolf movie out there waiting for anyone who’s seen Wild Zero a few too many times but wants to spend more time with the band while the buzzsaw feedback from their most recent tour fades from your eardrums.  The 1997 indie cheapie The Sore Losers featured a small onscreen role for Guitar Wolf years before Wild Zero entered the chatroom.  The band appears as The Men in Black (Leather): a mysterious trio of villainous space aliens who frame a rival alien gang for intergalactic murders.  They’re introduced chugging beers in a Mississippi graveyard about halfway into the film, then randomly materialize at arbitrary points in the plot to wield swords, ogle strippers, and shoot CGI laser beams out of their eyes.  They’re very much like the Guitar Wolf of Wild Zero, except they have yet to learn how to use their powers for good.  The Sore Losers traffics in that kind of continued-adventures comic book storytelling throughout, directly referencing EC horror comics in its guiding iconography just as often as it references 1950s drive-in B-movies.  Guitar Wolf is only one faction of local garage-rock royalty who parade across the screen. Members of The Gories, Oblivians, and New Orleans’s own The Royal Pendletons appear alongside them to make it clear this is the document of a specific, contemporary scene just as much as it is a nostalgia piece about vintage schlock media.  Specifically, The Sore Losers is scuzzy, D.I.Y. exploitation trash starring hyper-local celebrities of the Memphis garage punk scene – a lost broadcast from the non-existent film division of Goner Records.  Given that Goner was initially established as a means to book & distribute Guitar Wolf in America just a few years before this film’s production, it fully has the credentials to back that up (even if competing garage label Sympathy for the Record Industry initially released the tie-in soundtrack, as advertised in the credits).

Like Wild Zero, The Sore Losers opens with CGI UFOs invading planet Earth, except in this case the UFO transforms into a hotrod the second it lands.  We’re told in voiceover that our antihero alien lead (Jack Oblivion) has been in exile from Earth for the past 42 years, punished for failing his 1950s mission to kill a dozen Northern Mississippi beatniks.  He immediately picks his mission back up again in a scheme to get back into the good graces of his alien overlords on The Invisible Wavelength, finding it much easier to locate & kill hippies in 1990s Mississippi than it was to locate & kill beatniks there four decades prior.  There are a lot of convoluted negotiations around hitting the exact dead-hippie metric that would earn his freedom, but narrative coherence isn’t among the movie’s priorities anyway.  Really, the hippie hunt is just an excuse for the intergalactic assassin to go on a short road trip to Memphis, so he can pose in vintage rock n’ roll gear along the way with redneck farmers, astrozombies, heavy-leather dominatrixes, and Betty Page pin-up girls.  The cinematic influences on this episodic adventure are clear: John Waters, David Freidman, Gregg Araki, Russ Meyer, etc.  The vintage sexploitation bent to that reference material leads to a lot of onscreen nudity, but not a lot of genuine horniness, giving the whole thing the feel of a rockabilly-themed Suicide Girls strip show.  It’s all mugging & posing, which is perfectly fine for a movie that’s clearly designed for an insular group of musician friends to celebrate how cool the scene they created together is by mimicking the cool the vintage media they grew up with.  It feels appropriate, then, that the end credits scroll includes the organizers of The Sore Losers Bash, since the local premiere & party for the film was almost more important than anything that actually happens in it.  As of yet, you cannot time travel back to that party to experience it for yourself, but you can order a reissue of the accompanying garage-rock soundtrack from Goner and blow out your eardrums in an attempt to recreate it.

It says something that the reissued Sore Losers soundtrack currently has a better at-home presentation than the film it promotes.  I rented The Sore Losers for $2 on VOD and was shocked by how gorgeous the digital restoration of its 16mm footage looked streaming at home.  The cranked-up color saturation vividly highlighted the vintage comic book influence of its guiding aesthetic, whereas just a few years later it likely would’ve been filmed in a grim, grey DV format.  However, the version I rented via Amazon had sound mixing issues that made the garage-rock soundtrack barely audible as a background whisper, as if those tracks were accidentally muted in export.  There are much fuzzier copies of the movie uploaded to YouTube where you can hear that the songs are supposed to be much louder in the mix, but a lot of the visual & aural details are lost in the lower quality of those transfers, so it’s really a matter of picking your poison.  The reason it’s worth mentioning is that the entire draw of the movie is watching cool people model outrageous leather outfits to loud rock n’ roll music (especially if you know those people personally), so a major component of that is experiencing missing if you can barely hear the rockin’ tunes.  The best way to view the movie, then, is likely to buy a physical copy on disc.  Better yet, don’t watch it at all.  Just go to the next garage rock show at your local dive bar and do some covert people-watching while the amplifiers cause irreparable brain damage.  From what I can tell, not much has changed on the scene fashion or personality-wise since the 90s.  You’re just likely to see more people wearing earplugs now, and I wish I was smart enough to be one of them.

-Brandon Ledet

Stunt Rock (1978)

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As a result of last year’s Hollywood labor strikes, there was a short-term drought of big-ticket blockbusters at the top of this summer’s release calendar, which has sent media journalists into a doomsaying tailspin.  A lot of attention & pressure has been focused on the box office performance of the mid-tier actioners The Fall Guy & Furiosa in particular, whereas most years they would’ve enjoyed their solid critical reviews without all the grim financial scrutiny weighing them down.  I don’t want to join in the collective handwringing over the short-term profits those films scraped together for their investors, so instead I’ll just point to the bizarre middle ground I recently discovered between them while they’re still a hot topic.  Like The Fall Guy, the 1978 action novelty Stunt Rock is a love letter to professional stuntmen, offering audiences a peek behind the scenes of film production stuntwork that’s usually left invisible.  In particular, the film was created as a star vehicle for Australian stuntman Grant Page who, among a hundred other credits, worked on the Mad Max series all the way up to Furiosa.  Unfortunately, Page did not live to see Furiosa‘s release, though, as he died in a car crash earlier this year as an octogenarian daredevil who did not know when to quit.  There’s been no better time to celebrate his life’s work, then, and there’s no better way to celebrate it than by watching Stunt Rock.

Grant Page stars as himself: a charismatic stuntman with an uncanny fearlessness.  The film is essentially an advertisement for his professional skills, with newsreel announcers cheering him on as “Australia’s favorite stuntman goes to Hollywood.”  While working his first regular gig on an American TV show, he woos two awestruck blondes: the show’s Dutch star (former Verhoeven collaborator Monique van de Ven, also playing herself) and a fictional reporter who’s fascinated by his craft (Margaret Trenchard-Smith, the director’s wife). There’s not too much drama behind Page’s flirtations with those women, though.  Mostly, the film is an excuse to watch him perform what the opening title-card warning calls “many extremely dangerous stunts.”  Page drowns himself, sets himself on fire, hang-glides, and jumps into the windshields of speeding cars with the going-through-the-motions calm of a bureaucrat filing paperwork.  His stuntwork is framed as an extension of Australian independent filmmaking in general, advertising the many thrills & spectacles of that industry with repackaged clips from Page’s resume.  Aussie schlockteur Brian Trenchard-Smith creates his own exciting filmic language during that clip show by doubling the 16mm frames of the cheaper films to fill the wider 35mm scope for a psychedelic splitscreen effect.  More importantly, though, he just wholly commits to worshipping at the altar of Grant Page, whom he was convinced he could make an international star.

Of course, “Stunt” only accounts for half of this film’s title & premise, and I’m somewhat burying the lede here by not also mentioning where the “Rock” fits in.  While brainstorming in the shower, Trenchard-Smith came up with Stunt Rock as a simple combination of two popular mediums, envisioning a showcase for Page’s talents that would score his stuntwork with bitchin’ rock n’ roll.  The Dutch production company who funded the project was confident that they could land a legitimate, popular rock act for the soundtrack, reaching out to bands like Kiss, The Police, and Foreigner before finally settling on a much-less famous Los Angeles act named Sorcery.  Instead of a perfect marriage of stunt & rock, the combination of Sorcery’s stage act with Page’s screenwork ended up being more of a hat on a hat.  The band plays generic, sub-Zeppelin stadium rock that wouldn’t be much to speak of on its own, but they pair it with a live performance of two pyrotechnic magicians who dress like Merlin & Satan to pantomime a Good vs. Evil battle while their songs narrate a play-by-play.  There is a vague gesture in the plot that ties Page’s stuntwork to the band, contracting him to help innovate stunts for their magic act as a favor to his cousin.  For the most part, though, the stunt and the rock of the title exist side by side as two separate, competing forces.

I suppose there’s some historic value to Stunt Rock‘s peek behind the scenes of 1970s movie-production stuntwork.  At the very least, it includes early acknowledgements of filmmaking techniques that have since spread to general public knowledge: wigging, squibs, fire gels, etc.  However, by the time Page is narrating the history of cinematic stuntwork over old-timey Buster Keaton & Harold Lloyd footage and comedic slide whistles, it’s clear you’re not supposed to be taking any of its film production insight too seriously.  Most of its cinematic history is rooted in watching Page conquer America like King Kong, climbing our highest peaks and immediately falling off them.  Meanwhile, he’s sharing the stage with one of the goofiest rock ‘n roll acts of all time, whose own stuntwork makes for a fun novelty while also elevating the grittier, gutsier film set stunts through side-by-side comparison.  The volatile combination of those two acts is exciting in a way that directly appeals to the audience’s lizard-brain instincts, to the point where there’s simply no way to describe Stunt Rock without sounding like a 13-year-old dweeb; “It’s like if Quentin Tarantino directed an episode of Jackass . . . on acid!!!”  It’s a great showcase for Grant Page, though, who really did have a peculiar, one-of-a-kind talent for getting into car accidents and setting himself on fire.

-Brandon Ledet

Rodan (1956)

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Most children grow up with innate knowledge of the main-cast monsters in the Godzilla series, regardless of whether they’ve ever seen a Godzilla film.  Names like Mothra, Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, and Jet Jaguar really mean something to children, who extend their fascination with real-world dinosaurs to the fantastic monsters of classic Toho tokusatsu as if they were interchangeable.  It isn’t until you’re older and learn the names of second-tier kaiju that the absurdity of that knowledge becomes apparent.  The names Dogora, Atragon, Matango, Varan, and Gorath sound like AI-generated nonsense to anyone not obsessed enough with the genre to collect those lesser monsters’ action figures, but it’s only their general unfamiliarity that makes them ridiculous.  Or that was at least my thought when I sat down to watch 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster for the first time and had to back away because I didn’t recognize one of the monsters billed on the poster.  Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah . . . these names all mean something to me, but Rodan the Pteranodon (speaking of the fuzzy border between fictional kaiju and real-world dinosaurs) was entirely foreign.  So, I took the time to get to know the winged beast before watching his official entry into the Godzilla canon.

Appropriately enough, the introduction of Rodan is as an Unidentified Flying Object that attacks jet fighter pilots who have no idea who he is either.  The flying dinosaur travels at supersonic speeds and leaves sky trails in his path, playing into 1950s sci-fi audiences’ fascination with contemporary reports of UFOs.  The answer to the mystery of his body is fairly straightforward; he’s an unearthed pterosaur who’s mutated to kaiju scale through radiation exposure – Godzilla-style.  His mutant abilities can be surprisingly devastating, though, as he can flap his wings with enough force to create shockwaves & wind gusts that level entire cities in a manner of minutes.  Since the monster design is a little unimaginative, it’s clear he needs help to carry the film along, so he’s joined in his debut by a race of giant bug larva with sword-sharp claws that slice people to death on the ground while Rodan attacks from the sky.  The bugs are identified as mutated dragonfly larvae and assigned their own official kaiju name Meganulon, which is well-earned, given than they carry the first half of the movie on their exoskeletal backs before the mystery of Rodan is fully revealed to the audience.  It turns out that even in his titular debut, Rodan was already presented as a second-tier monster and no threat to Godzilla’s reign as King to them all.

You obviously don’t need to know Rodan or Meganulon’s names to fully enjoy the Godzilla series.  Only hopelessly nerdy completists would feel compelled to Do The Homework for a genre that’s mostly just pro wrestling matches in novelty rubber costumes.  The only name you really need to know is Ishirō Honda, Toho’s go-to director for most of its tokusatsu classics.  From the sincere post-war devastation of the original Godzilla to the groovy psychedelia of Space Amoeba, Honda was central to the invention & evolution of kaiju filmmaking in his three decades as a director.  With Rodan, he hit the milestone of directing Toho’s first in-color kaiju picture, which makes for beautiful vintage pop art in its modern HD presentations, especially as the tactile monster costumes clash against the matte-painting vistas of the background.  More importantly, Rodan is interesting as a tonal middle ground in Honda’s kaiju oeuvre.  If you put aside the giant-bug attacks in the first hour, it’s a surprisingly grounded mining labor drama that’s just as grim as the original Godzilla.  Mining-town workers are drowned, crushed, and sliced while their widows wail in agony, making the movie just as much of a political piece about working conditions as it is a pollution allegory.  That dramatic sincerity can slow down the monster-action payoffs in the first hour, but it does make for a fascinating contrast with the screen presence of Rodan and his insect frenemies, who are too goofy to take 100% seriously. 

I am choosing to accept Rodan‘s self-conflicting tone as a feature and not a, uh, bug.  If it were made a decade later, it would’ve been pushed to a more cartoonish extreme to fully appeal to children, which might have robbed it of its interest as a volatile battleground for the sincere vs. silly sensibilities of early kaiju movies.  Arriving just a couple years after the 1954 Godzilla, it’s an early sign of the goofier direction Honda and the rest of the genre would go while still maintaining the brutality and harsh political messaging of that original text.  The least interesting aspect of Rodan, then, is likely Rodan himself, who only earns top bill by default.  I doubt the film would’ve lost all that much if it were just about miners being attacked on the job by Meganulon, so it’s somewhat a shame that their name was pushed to the back pages kaiju history books alongside the likes of Ebirah, Baragon, Destroyah, etc.  I’m never going to complain about getting a chance to see a flying dinosaur attack a miniature city, though, so count me among the dozens of nerds who are glad that Rodan was given his momentary spotlight.

-Brandon Ledet

Octaman (1971)

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I recently suffered an online indignity worse than being Rickrolled, Goatsied, Lemon Partied, 1-Cupped, and Dickbutted all at once: I was pressured into watching a YouTube clip from The Joe Rogan Experience.  After fifteen years of deliberately avoiding that Libertarian MRA anti-vaxxer shitshow, I finally caved, and it’s all because of my weakness for cheaply produced monster movies.  I was just minding my own business watching the forgotten 1970s creature feature Octaman on Tubi, and a couple Google searches later I discovered it was the very first professional monster makeup job for a college-student-age Rick Baker.  My interest was piqued, but my usual lazy research methods bore no fruit; Octaman is not currently listed among Baker’s IMDb credits, nor is it mentioned on his Wikipedia page.  To my horror, when you search for “Rick Baker Octaman” the only substantive result is a 13-minute clip of his career-spanning interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast.  I’m always down to hear anecdotes from Baker’s legendary career regardless of the venue, but I gotta say this one really tested that resolve.

I won’t be linking to Joe Rogan’s podcast on this blog, but I will report what I learned during my short visit there.  While Baker was a full-time student, he picked up side work in a small studio that created Harryhausen-style stop-motion effects, so he could learn the craft.  When B-movie producers approached that studio to animate their original octopus-monster creation Octaman, they ultimately decided that the stop-motion medium was too expensive for their budget and instead poached Baker (along with coworker Doug Beswick) to craft him as a traditional rubber-suiter instead.  Baker is careful to note that the titular Octaman was not his design; he worked from sketches that were already created before he was hired for the gig.  He had six weeks and $1000 to bring the aquatic beast to life, and he looks back on the final result with slight professional embarrassment.  That’s largely because the producers lied to the young artist, assuring him that the Octaman would only be shown briefly onscreen in forgiving low-light scenarios that obscured the cheapness of the costume.  They must’ve been surprised by the quality of Baker’s work, then, because the Octaman himself is all over the Octaman film, so much so that “Octaman” is listed among the acting credits in the opening title card sequence.

The most endearing detail of Baker’s involvement in Octaman is that the film was directed by the screenwriter for Creature from the Black Lagoon, a Universal monster classic for which this later work could only compare as a distant echo.  There’s something adorable about there being a rubber-suit monster movie directed by Harry Essex with creature effects from the much younger Rick Baker, who grew up idolizing his screenwriting credits like Black Lagoon & It Came from Outer Space.  At face value, there’s nothing especially important or unique about Octaman as an out-of-time Atomic Age sci-fi that arrived two decades too late to mean anything.  However, Baker & Essex’s collaboration position it as the exact dividing line between old-school creature features and their nostalgic throwbacks – a generational passing of the torch.  Baker was a toddler when Creature from the Black Lagoon first hit drive-in theaters, but he still got to work on a bargain bin knockoff from one of its central creators years later, and I think that’s beautiful.

If I’m avoiding talking about the events or themes of Octaman here, it’s because there’s not much to it.  American scientists researching environmental contamination from “underwater atomic detonations” in Mexico discover small, rubber, octopus-like puppets that live at the mouth of a polluted river, taking them back to the lab for dissection & study.  Ever the protective father, the titular Octaman swiftly arrives to slap those scientists to death with his giant rubber tentacles.  The 76-minute double feature filler is heavily padded out with Ed Woodian stock footage and faux-philosophic narration about the value of scientific research & adventure in the modern world.  It does not skimp on the Octaman action, though.  The aquatic beast frequently pops into the frame to strike scientists down for daring to experiment on his octababies, with the camera often shifting into 1st-person octavision so we can watch the kills though his monstrous eyes.  Baker gets to play with some light gore effects here, as Octaman rips throats and pops eyeballs out of their sockets, but for the most part the joy is in basic design of the suit.  Octaman is more than a little phallic in silhouette (and weirdly veiny to boot), and his eight tentacles sprout from comical angles around his body.  He’s more Riverbeast than he is Gill-man, but that is exactly why he’s loved by all who’ve gotten to know him.

Rick Baker is not so embarrassed of Octaman that he refuses to acknowledge his involvement.  If nothing else, one of his greatest film credits, Gremlins II: The New Batch, plays a clip from Octaman in a throwaway TV horror host gag (billing it as The Octopus People instead of its actual title), which alone shows that he’s a good sport about it.  Why Baker would choose to save all of his juiciest Octaman insight for The Joe Rogan Experience of all platforms remains a mystery to me, though.  Maybe Rogan was the only interviewer who’d listen.  Or maybe it’s just a result of the movie being so cheap that it couldn’t afford official advertising, so Baker couldn’t take those anecdotes to his usual home on Joe Dante’s Trailers from Hell YouTube series – a place I’m a lot more comfortable visiting.

-Brandon Ledet

Cemetery Man (1994)

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No one understands dream logic quite like an Italian horror filmmaker.  The 1994 horror comedy Cemetery Man might visually recall fellow zombie splatstick titles like Evil Dead & Dead Alive, but it updates that sensibility with a distinctly 90s sense of apathetic cool and then heavily distorts it through the Italo-horror dream machine.  Director Michele Soavi’s calling-card films Stage Fright & La Chiesa unmistakably belong to a tradition of post-giallo schlock in which the surreal scene-to-scene whims of his narratives are an expected part of the territory, but Cemetery Man is just generic-looking enough that those impulses feel remarkably out of place.  A contemporary of fellow horror-dreamers Dario Argento & Lucio Fulci, Soavi makes films that are just as logically sound as Suspriria or The Beyond, which can be confounding when you’re expecting the standard beats of a non-Zombi zombie film.  It’s the perfect midnight movie in that way, its lingering memory indistinguishable from the movie your dreaming mind would have assembled if you fell asleep halfway through.  It would be redundant to say that trying to remember it is like trying to remember a dream, since it very clearly is a dream that just happens to be on celluloid.

Rupert Everett stars as the slacker caretaker of a small cemetery where the dead have an annoying habit of rising from the grave within 7 days of burial.  He’s been working the job long enough that he’s bored with the routine, barely bothering to turn around from his writing desk to shoot the undead ghouls in the head and put them out of their supernatural misery.  That indifference to his work is somewhat surprising, given that there’s no real consistency to the zombie phenomenon.  Some of the “Returners” can continue talking & operating as a severed head, while most just groan incoherently and die the instance their heads are damaged.  The 7-day rule also has no real effect on who rises when, since Soavi is much more invested in the momentary pleasures of a visual gag than he is in the overarching logic of his narrative (an attitude a lot of movies would benefit from adopting).  The part of Everett’s job that really bothers him is that he has to pretend to be impotent so that local townies don’t assume he’s being sexually inappropriate with the corpses.  This gets in the way of his romantic life, of course, placing the handsome young bachelor on the same level of desirability as his unwashed, mentally disabled assistant Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro).  Cemetery Man starts with standard zombie attacks, then swerves into sweaty nightmares about male sexual performance anxiety, then swerves again into existential crisis for a last-minute stab at profundity.  I haven’t been this jostled by a movie’s narrative trajectory since I watched Argento’s Opera in the exact same movie theater last October, a huge smile beaming on my face in both instances.

If there is any unifying theme to Cemetery Man that ties it all together, I do think it’s lurking somewhere in its detached, apathetic 90s slackerdom.  Everett spends the entire movie grumbling about working a boring job where nothing he does natters, to the point where there’s “no difference to being alive or dead.”  Later, he tests this theory by actively sending fresh corpses to his workplace as a mass murderer (after some quippy negotiations with Death itself) and is frustrated to find that there are no consequences to his actions.  Every time he confesses his crimes to the local detective, he’s met with bemused chuckling.  Overall, there’s no rhyme or reason to the rhythms of the plot, but that pointlessness plays directly into the disaffected nihilism of the slacker era.  Everett’s line reading of “I’d give my life to be dead” first sounds like a clever play on words until you realize it doesn’t actually mean anything, and then that lack of meaning starts to mean Everything.  When he spends his evenings reading the phone book as if it were literature, it’s mostly a joke about how he only sees other living people as potential Returners that he’ll later have to execute, but it’s also a joke about the banality of his daily routine.  All jobs and lifestyles are ultimately boring, I guess, regardless of their supernatural circumstances.

The poster for Cemetery Man promises “Zombies, guns, and sex, oh my!”, and I suppose the movie technically delivers on all of those promises.  Anyone looking for a non-stop splatstick free-for-all based on that tagline would likely be much better served by Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, though.  Cemetery Man is a much calmer, more slippery kind of vintage zombie novelty: the kind best experienced half-awake on late-night cable, so that you’re tormented for years with vague questions if the movie actually exists or if you made it up in a dream.  Its limited distribution over the past couple decades has only amplified that effect, but there’s now a Severin restoration making the theatrical and home video distro rounds, so there’s evidence that this movie does, in fact, exist and is just as weirdly dreamy as you remember.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Madame Web (2024)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Amazonian spider-research actioner Madame Web (2024) and Dakota Johnson’s legendary press tour promoting it.

00:00 Welcome

02:22 The Tinder Swindler (2022)
07:00 The Contestant (2024)
17:27 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
22:13 The Lobster (2015)
26:26 Hundreds of Beavers (2024)
30:50 I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
44:35 Stunt Rock (1978)
48:16 Rodan (1956)

52:22 Madame Web (2024)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)

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There’s a long tradition of horror movies claiming to adapt Edgar Allan Poe stories while really only taking inspiration from those stories’ titles, from the Lugosi-Karloff classics The Black Cat & The Raven to David DeCoteau’s softcore beefcake take on The Pit and the Pendulum.  For as long as horror cinema has existed as a medium, Poe’s name has been exploited for easy marketing appeal, due to its synonymous association with Gothic tales of “the macabre.”  What makes the 1965 Italo schlock Bloody Pit of Horror stand out in that tradition is that it dares to imagine a world where rather than claiming to adapt Poe without any meaningful connection to his work, horror movies do the same to Marquis de Sade instead.  I suppose that’s because de Sade’s name is synonymous with kinky smut the same way Poe’s is with Gothic literature.  By slapping de Sade’s name onto Bloody Pit of Horror, American distributors weren’t claiming to directly adapt 120 Days of Sodom or Justine; they were merely conveying a whiff of sadomasochistic sleaze for those interested in watching buxom models get tortured in bikinis.  They did, however, slap a direct quote from de Sade into the opening credits, citing him as saying “My vengeance needs blood!”  Unsurprisingly, that quote only triggers results for Bloody Pit of Horror when you google it, either because the filmmakers completely made it up, or because de Sade’s smuttier material is what’s more typically associated with his name.

Bloody Pit of Horror is a low-budget haunted castle movie in which a small crew of horror-marketing advertisers are location scouting for a series of photographs meant to illustrate horror novels, mostly posing hot young women in old, rusty torture devices.  There is some metatextual humor to that premise, given that the movie itself is just an excuse to pose the same images, but any semblance of purpose or subtext stops there.  Mostly, the models & camera crew explore the castle’s crypts & hallways to low-energy lounge music, in no particular rush to do anything in particular between photoshoots.  Their lackadaisical workday is violently interrupted by the resident castle freak, of course, who believes himself to be possessed by the restless spirit of a red-hooded vigilante brute known as The Crimson Executioner, dead for centuries before their arrival.  In truth, he’s a former colleague – a professional muscle man who’s been driven mad by professional & romantic rejections to the point of an incel killing spree.  From there, it’s a beefcake vs. cheesecake showdown, with the masked madman strapping the models into ancient, complex torture devices so they can sensually writhe in bondage before ritualistic death.  Iron maidens, body stretchers, pulleyed-spikes, boobytrapped bondage ropes attached to loaded crossbows: he’s got an entire toy chest full of naughty lethal weapons, and he’s not afraid to bare his naked, oiled-up chest while operating them.

On the 1960s Italo horror spectrum, Bloody Pit of Horror falls somewhere between the literary Gothic staging of Black Sunday and the shameless porno-mag erotica of The Vampire and The Ballerina without ever matching the heights of either work.  The villain’s insane, confessional rants in the third act are far enough over the top to make it worthwhile for schlock junkies, though, especially if you have an appetite for vintage nudie-cutie kitsch.  Here’s where I’ll confess that I saw a censored, low-res American edit of the film on used DVD instead of tracking down a pristine, untouched copy of the original Italian cut.  I am apparently so adverse to sitting through ads on Tubi that I’m willing to watch an ancient thrift store DVD where the VHS tracking of the tape it was copied from is more visible in-frame than the cheesecake models’ naked breasts.  I’m ultimately glad I saw the slightly shortened American edit, though, since the Italian version did not include the unearned allusions to Marquis de Sade in the credits and on the poster.  That was an American marketing invention meant to signal exactly what flavor of smut was being sold (slightly non-vanilla), which I’ll confess still worked on me six decades later when I plucked it out of a Minneapolis record store bin.  I can’t say that Poe’s name on the front cover would’ve sold me on it in the same way, but that’s likely because his name’s too ubiquitous in the genre to maintain any novelty.

-Brandon Ledet

Death Dancers (1993)

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It wasn’t until decades after the genre’s American heyday that French critics coined the term “film noir”.  Meanwhile, noir’s younger, hornier dipshit cousin the erotic thriller was immediately self-labeled as a real-time marketing term instead of as a posthumous critical marker.  The recent documentary We Kill for Love is an excellent, exhaustive rundown on the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s & 90s, with specific attention paid to the cheaper, direct-to-video end of the genre.  There are some great insights throughout the doc, from how the bulk of the genre takes direct inspiration from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill more than any of the more obvious Joe Eszterhas reference points to how its popularity was greatly aided by video rental stores’ desperate need to stock their shelves with off-brand substitutes for more popular studio titles that were in greater demand than supply.  For instance, someone who was disappointed that they could not rent a fresh copy of Basic Instinct might be tempted to take home the dominatrix-themed, Troma-distributed serial killer erotica Death Dancers instead until the shelves could be restocked.  There’s a vast difference in budget & quality between those two pictures, but the video store shelf was a great equalizer that presented them on the same level, with Death Dancers self-labeled as “An Erotic Thriller” on its cardboard sleeve to attract browsers’ attention.  That announced genre distinction might actually be somewhat of a misnomer, since Death Dancers shamelessly crosses the line from erotic thriller to softcore porno, featuring multiple scenes of fully nude actors grinding their pelvises together in rhythmic pantomime.  Given how gleefully vulgar mainstream players like Showgirls were at the time, though, I suppose the distinction is mostly meaningless.

Do you know what else is mostly meaningless?  Practically everything that happens in Death Dancers.  We open in the sunny, beachfront apartment of our central dominatrix figure (Deborah Dutch), as she wistfully whispers to the world outside her window about her past trauma, apparently eroticizing the memory of a forced miscarriage as she writhes in ecstasy on a kitchen chair.  She’s dressed in full goth drag in the middle of a sunny afternoon: black wig, black satin gloves, black stockings, black soul.  Despite the physical abuse she suffers in black & white flashbacks, her breathy narration is horny nonsense, including the titular tangent “Come dance with me. Come death dance with me.  Come, oh god, come death dance with me.”  Gradually, we gather enough info to piece together her M.O.  She’s the madame for a small army of female submissives whom she pimps out to male clients, luring in customers with phone-sex promises of total servitude.  Those customers quickly become victims, though, as her submissives are ordered to immediately murder anyone who physically harms them, even within a consensual kink scenario.  You see, our antiheroine dominatrix is fed up with the abuse she’s suffered from the men in her life, so she’s gotten into the serial-murder racket through the kink scene as a way to exact her revenge on the entire gender.  Meanwhile, an undercover cop who’s hot on her tail has similar flashbacks to trauma of his own. As images of the volatile pair’s pasts become increasingly entwined, the audience is eventually clued into how they found themselves locked into the never-ending death dance of their opposing professions in the first place.  It takes a minute to get there, but thankfully S&M strippers frequently mime group sex configurations in the background to help keep the energy up in the meantime.

Death Dancers is more music video than feature film.  Sleazy synth & sax numbers drone constantly as nude actors model whips, chains, sunglasses, breast implants, and high-waist panties under nightclub stage lights & bubble machines.  It’s just as much a relic of MTV-era music video artistry as it is a video store shelf-filler from the erotic thriller boom.  It’s pretty amusing as a Skinemax-flavored screensaver, especially once it pretends that it has a Hitchcockian mystery worth solving when it’s really just a horny mood piece.  I can’t claim to have seen all of the hundreds of titles referenced in We Kill for Love as the bulk of the direct-to-video erotic thriller genre (at least not until I clear them from my disgustingly overstuffed Letterboxd watchlist), but I still recognized this as an exceedingly generic entry in the canon despite the S&M angle of its premise.  Death Dancers only made an impression on me in that it had me thinking, “This is fun & all, but it’s no Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls” and then, naturally, “I need a new hobby.”

-Brandon Ledet

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2024)

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Calling an actor’s performance “vulnerable” is often just a delicate way of saying they appear nude on screen in sub-glamorous circumstances.  Actor-writer-director-editor Joanna Arnow appears to be acutely aware of this critical cliche, which she goes out of her way to mock & undercut in her sophomore feature The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed.  After spending a third of her screentime lounging around nude in a lover’s cramped, poorly lit New York City apartment, she bends over to spread her buttcheeks for the older man’s pleasure, and he dryly declares “Now that’s vulnerable!”  It’s one funny punchline among many in a movie that’s more like a comic strip diary than an autofictional novel.  Joanna Arnow’s vulnerability is essential to the text, as she plays a fictionalized version of herself (named Ann, for short) opposite her real-life parents and a small cast of suitors who illustrate real-life anecdotes of misadventures in kink-scene dating.  Given the fictional Ann’s extensive experience with BDSM, it’s tempting to read Joanna‘s “vulnerability” as a public humiliation kink, but the truth is it’s not any more extreme than most semi-autobiographical comedies about an indie filmmaker’s NYC dating life (see also: Flames, Pvt Chat, Appropriate Behavior, etc.).  Arnow’s just willing to make a joke at her own expense after indulging in that narcissistic ritual.  Now that’s vulnerable!

Almost every scene of The Feeling has a set-up and punchline rhythm to it in that way.  It’s a film made entirely of short clips of low-stakes, emotionless interactions in which the joke is just how banal it feels to be alive.  We bounce around the three tidy corners of Ann’s limited existence—work, family, sex—where she’s constantly being told what to do by elder micromanagers.  At work, she’s ordered around by corporate-speak bureaucrats; at home, by adorably sour parents.  At her on-again-off-again dom’s apartment, she’s ordered around by a middle-aged man who’s just as indifferent to her presence as everyone else in her life, except with an added layer of opt-in roleplay.  The only relief from this universal indifference is the sanctuary of Ann’s undecorated apartment, where there are no pets or hanged pieces of art personalizing her space.  She is a character defined by absence of characteristics, which is darkly hilarious in scenes where doms command her to tell them what she desires and she can’t come up with anything specific, defaulting instead to stock-character roles like Fuck Pig or furniture.  In most BDSM relationship dynamics, it’s the sub’s job to tell the dom what to tell them to do, so the heroic journey of our protagonist is all in learning how to assert herself and define her own personality against a world that’s so deeply, oppressively bland.  It feels incredibly good when she gets there (and incredibly terrible when she backslides).

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the driest comedy you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about a BDSM confessional where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.  Most of its filmic artistry is in Arnow’s tight control of the edit, which both trims completely static interactions down to concentrated bursts of social tension and tells a larger story of personal growth through selective sequencing.  The audience can always tell exactly how emotionally invested Ann is in her various romantic & sexual relationships by how long Arnow is willing to linger with them.  When she’s trying to branch out from her long-term dom/sub relationship, the movie takes on a speed-dating rhythm that cuts between the various doofus men of NYC in rapid-fire clips.  When she’s indulging in her very first genuine romantic partnership, it maintains its average short-burst scene length but shows fewer interactions outside that relationship, putting her workplace and homelife annoyances on the backburner for a stretch (much to the audience’s relief).  If you catch Ann squeezing a sad envelope of room-temperature beans into a microwaveable glass bowl to eat for dinner alone, you know that she’s not particularly invested in any of her current relationships. It’s all told in editorial curation, which is the only element of the film with a pronounced sense of style; everything else is contained in a purposefully flat, digital, Soderberghian void.

If Joanna Arnow is expressing anything about herself to the audience through the avatar of Ann, it’s a young person’s anxiety about not being especially good at anything.  Ann is bad at her job, bad at small talk, bad at roleplay, bad at folding laundry, bad at everything.  She’s super relatable in that way, especially for anyone who was socially suffocated by overbearing parents and then unleashed unto the world at 18 with the expectation that they’re a fully formed adult with their own defined personality & desires.  Those efforts to define herself might’ve lacked specificity without the BDSM angle of her love life, so it’s for the best that Arnow chose vulnerability instead of cowering from cliche.

-Brandon Ledet