reviews

Trap (2024)

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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)

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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

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

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Gen-Z nostalgia for the early aughts aesthetic has been a tough adjustment for me, a Millennial nerd who suffered through that era in real time.  I do not think back to frosted tips, muddy JNCO strips, or Paris Hilton DJ sets with any lingering fondness.  If anything, I see that time as the nadir of modern pop culture.  I recognize that this is the same personal bias that my parent’s generation felt when Millennials aestheticized the 1980s during my college years.  Where I saw new wave neon punks & synths, they flashed back to cheap beer and overly teased, fried hair.  Likewise, there’s a novelty to hearing Limp Bizkit & Linkin Park for the first time in the 2020s that I can’t share as someone who vividly remembers my own cringey years as a nü metal dipshit when those groups first premiered on Alt Rock Radio™.  So, no, I cannot share in any cultural reclamation for the early-aughts movie adaptation of the Charlie’s Angels TV show, in which music video director McG amplifies all of the cheese & sleaze of the era to maximum volume.  Opening with a KoЯn guitar riff, a casually racist gag in which Drew Barrymore goes undercover as Black man in LL Cool J’s skin, and nonstop thinspo ogling of uniformly skinny women’s exposed midriffs, Charlie’s Angels wastes no time with its vicious onslaught of eraly-2000s kitsch.  It’s cinema’s most efficient, thorough crash course in the grotesque cheapness of the early aughts, celebrating everything I loathe about the era and my own participation in it with alarming gusto. 

Its sequel, however, is innocent.  If you do find yourself wanting to indulge in some delicious 2000s kitsch without making yourself sick on day-old fast food, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is the much healthier option.  You don’t even have to bother rewatching the 2000 original, since the sequel reintroduces its central trio of undercover lady spies with newly sharpened personalities for a fresh start.  Drew Barrymore plays a tough-but-girly tomboy, Lucy Liu plays an overachieving perfectionist, and Cameron Diaz plays a goofball ditz with a heart of gold.  They’re all best friends and frequently save the world while dating cute guys; it’s pretty easy to follow without any additional background info.  It also repeats a lot of the more successful gags (along with some of the more racist ones) from the first movie but does a much better job connecting them in the edit instead of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – not much, in the original’s case.  The only way Full Throttle is inferior, really, is that it’s significantly less gross than the first Charlie’s Angels film, making it less accurate as a time capsule of pop culture’s darkest days in the early 2000s. It makes up for it by continuing to pummel the audience with nonstop needle drops & cameos, though.  P!nk, Eve, The Olsen Twins, and members of OutKast, Jackass, and The Pussycat Dolls all appear onscreen while Kid Rock, Nickelback, and Rage Against the Machine rage on the soundtrack.  You never lose track of the movie’s place in time.

Regardless of Full Throttle‘s relationship with the first Charlie’s Angels film or with early-aughts culture at large, it’s a consistently entertaining, maximalist novelty.  Full Throttle is, at heart, a charmingly goofy action movie that makes great use of McG’s candy-coated music video aesthetic, disregarding the guiding laws of physics & good taste to deliver the most joyously over-the-top pleasures it can in every frame.  The girls now have the superhuman power of flight, Crispin Glover frequently disrupts scenes as a feral goblin assassin with no effect on the plot (wielding a sword and only communicating in yelps), and every set piece is an excuse for kitschy costume & production design stunts, often set against a full backdrop of CG flames.  The Angels are costumed as nuns, shipyard welders, strippers, hotdog vendors, and car wash babes during their world-saving adventures as they fight off a bikini-clad Demi Moore and an oiled-up Justin Theroux sporting an Astro Boy fauxhawk.  Whereas the first film was entirely about the fashionista posturing of those outfit changes, McG wastes no time getting to the action this go-round.  Within 10 seconds of entering the frame, Diaz hops onto a mechanical bull to distract a bar full of Mongolian brutes while her teammates rescue a political prisoner, eventually erupting the room into a free-for-all brawl.  Soon, they’re flying through the air in and out of exploding helicopters, and staging wuxia-style gunfights on flying motorcycles.  It took the Fast & Furious franchise seven films to get to the delirious CG action nonsense this series achieved in two.

Full Throttle might be McG’s best movie, but its only strong competition is the straight-to-Netflix 80s-nostalgia horror The Babysitter, so that’s a weak superlative.  What’s more important is how much of an improvement it is over his first crack at this franchise, to the point where he’s somewhat rehabilitated my disgust with the early-aughts pop culture that’s currently making a comeback.  You can even feel that positive shift in which respective Prodigy song the two films choose as their central motif: “Smack My Bitch Up” for the first Charlie’s Angels, betraying its underling baseline cultural misogyny, and “Firestarter” for Full Throttle, punctuating its ludicrously explosive action payoffs.  It’s even apparent in the two films’ appreciation for the Tom Green brand of shock comedy that was rampant in that era.  In the first film, Green appears onscreen himself as an empty symbol, relatively restrained in an extended cameo role that references his real-life tabloid romance with Barrymore.  By contrast, Full Throttle is not afraid to get its hands dirty, prompting Diaz to participate in the live, gooey birth of a baby cow in a sight gag that would’ve been perfectly suited for Green’s magnum opus Freddy Got Fingered.  Having just fallen in love with her sadistically prankish romcom The Sweetest Thing, I’m starting to develop a genuine fondness for Diaz’s gross-out goofball humor in that era, which I suppose means I’m warming up to the idea of appreciating early 2000s culture at large.  I’m just not quite ready to hear KoЯn score a fight scene yet without a little winking irony to soften the blow.  Those Issues Tour memories are still a little too fresh.

-Brandon Ledet

Kneecap (2024)

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If you spend enough time on the Internet, you’ll find that the two biggest stories to result from the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris were not of personal or athletic triumph.  They were stories of spectacular, humanizing failure.  I am, of course, referring to French athlete Anthony Ammirati’s pole-vaulting mishap when his Olympic dreams were thwarted by his massive dong, which knocked down the bar he was supposed to clear in an otherwise successful jump.  I am also referring to new online microcelebrity Raygun, an Australian breakdancer who partially worked her way into the competition by earning her PhD in the “sport”.  There were some legitimately impressive breakdancers who competed at the Olympics this year, but Raygun was not one of them.  Her awkward, corny dance moves on that worldwide stage were comically embarrassing, epitomizing the instant cringe of watching white people participate in hip-hop with a little too much gusto.  As funny as Raygun’s televised failure and the resulting memes have been in the past week, she’s also left a mark on The Culture in negative ways.  It’s not difficult to imagine that the announced decision to exclude breaking from the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles was somewhat influenced by the worldwide mockery her performance attracted to the event, despite the athleticism of the dozens of talented dancers who competed beside her.  She also set public opinion on white nerds’ enthusiasm for old-school hip-hop back decades, at least as far back as the Backpack Rap days of the early 2000s. 

Thankfully, there’s an excellent counterbalance to Raygun’s breakdancing shenanigans currently making the theatrical rounds, rehabilitating some of that white nerd street cred.  The new Irish music industry drama Kneecap details the rise to fame of the titular rap trio Kneecap, played by the group’s real-life members.  Set during a recent push to have Ireland’s native language recognized by the occupying government of the United Kingdom as legitimate and politically protected, the film characterizes its Irish-speaking stars as both cultural activists and shameless hedonists.  Because their public persona includes openly distributing & consuming hard drugs, they’re seen by fellow Irish speakers as a threat to the legitimacy of their shared Civil Rights cause.  Kneecap may be partyboys at heart, but they’re just as dedicated to the mission as the advocates pushing for the Irish Language Act on television.  They’re just doing it in dive bars and Spotify playlists instead, inspiring renewed interest and usage of the language by modernizing it through hip-hop.  Both the group and the movie are clear-eyed in their political messaging, repeating the mantra “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom” as many times as it can be shoehorned into the dialogue.  That’s about as legitimate of a case of white artists participating in old school hip-hop as you’re ever likely to find.  It’s purposeful, and it’s genuine.

While the political messaging and the rags-to-slightly-nicer-rags story structure of Kneecap are fairly straightforward, director Rich Peppiatt at least finds ways to match the group’s messy, energetic songwriting in the film’s visual style.  English translations of Irish rap lyrics appear onscreen in animated notebook scribbles.  Drug-induced hallucinations are represented in extreme fish-eye lens framing and crude stop-motion puppetry.  Michael Fassbender, playing one of the rappers’ political activist father, appears in a strobelit, dreamlike sequence so directly inspired by the liminal nightclub visions of Aftersun that it’s surprising when he returns alive just a couple scenes later.  All of this frantic music video visual style is wrangled in by a guiding voice narration track, framing Kneecap as a revision of Trainspotting about how doing drugs with your friends will improve your life, not ruin it.  That Trainspotting connection gets explicit when the band’s DJ dives headfirst into a garbage can to recover a lost strip of LSD, recalling Ewan McGregor flushing himself down a dive bar toilet.  I don’t know that Kneecap is the most dramatically satisfying rise-to-fame story for D.I.Y. musicians suffering the remnants of British imperialism that I’ve seen in recent years; that honor likely belongs to either Gully Boy or We Are Ladyparts.  It’s an exceptionally energetic one, though, and it’s got a great soundtrack to match.

Just in case the novelty of an Irish-language rap soundtrack or the effort to make the best Danny Boyle movie since 28 Days Later is not enough to draw an audience, Kneecap also mine some genuine dramatic tension from its relatively small cast.  Michael Fassbender represents an older, more reserved way of undermining British oppression, continuing to participate in IRA resistance as a kind of ineffectual ghost.  Simone Kirby is a scene-stealer as his estranged wife, struggling against her agoraphobia to mobilize the silent but powerful mothers behind the more vocal Irish rebels.  The middle-aged DJ Próvaí is committed to the cause as well, but has to hide from his wife and school-faculty employers that he’s been publicly doing hard drugs with twentysomethings at rap concerts as part of his own political praxis.  In one of the more surprising dramatic side plots, one Kneecap member grapples with the intoxicating eroticism of oppression, bringing his politics into the bedroom by having kinky roleplay sex with a local Brit who’s offended by his more inflammatory lyrics.  Not all of Kneecap is a rap-soundtracked party fueled by raver drugs ordered over the internet.  There’s actual substance and political intent behind its participation in hip-hop culture, which is more than you can say for poor Raygun’s brief moment of fame on the Olympic stage.

-Brandon Ledet

Blonde Ambition (1981)

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I recently picked up a used copy of Linda Williams’s landmark academic text Hard Core at The Book House in Dinky Town, a wonderful Minneapolis bookstore.  Written in response to the anti-porn feminist movements of the 1980s, the cultural context of Hard Core‘s arguments may initially seem outdated, but it’s proven to be an extremely useful read.  In attempting to assess the filmic medium of pornography from a neutral, objective distance, Williams found herself writing one of the first substantial academic works on the subject.  She breaks the genre down to its building-block elements, performing a kind of autopsy on the fresh corpse of porno’s Golden Age, killed by the rise of home video.  One of her methods in attempting to define pornography in academic terms (beyond the famously vague “I know it when I see it” definition coined by the Supreme Court) is finding direct 1:1 comparison with other cinematic genres.  The most obvious go-to for those comparisons is usually the horror film, since they are both genres that intend to stimulate a physiological response in the audience.  Williams goes a step further by citing horror’s “Final Girl” trope, indicating that pornography invites male viewers to identify with its female stars the same way they are when watching slashers.  The genre comparison that really tickled me in Hard Core, though, was pornography’s likeness to the Old Hollywood musical, which I had never considered before.

The generic parallels between the porno and the musical are obvious once you start looking for them.  Williams spends a lot of time cataloging the individual “numbers” that make up a typical porno feature (i.e, the blowjob scene, the masturbation scene, the lesbian scene, the group sex climax, etc.) and likens them to the way musicals stop their plot momentum dead to deliver a full song-and-dance number.  She writes, “It is commonplace for critics and viewers to ridicule narrative genres that seem to be only flimsy excuses for something else—musicals and phonography in particular are often singled out as being really about song and dance or sex.  But as much recent work on the movie musical has demonstrated, the episodic narratives typical of the genre are not simply frivolous pretexts for the display of song and dance; rather, narrative often permits the staging of song and dance spectacles as events themselves within the larger structure afforded by the story line.”  In that paradigm, the spectacle of a blowjob or a threesome is just as worthy of a minutes-long break from narrative as a Fred & Ginger dance routine; they’re the very reason for the film’s existence.  Porno may be similar to horror in its intent to provoke a bodily response in its audience, but in terms of narrative structure it’s much more akin to the movie musical. It’s a variation of musical with all of the usual song-and-dance numbers replaced by suck-and-fuck numbers instead. 

Given this astute observation of the structural similarities between the porno and the musical, it’s incredible that Williams does not cite the 1981 feature Blonde Ambition in her research.  It perfectly illustrates her point.  Blonde Ambition is deliberately structured as an Old Hollywood backstage musical wherein all of the song-and-dance numbers are replaced by sex numbers.  The movie chronicles the sexual exploits of the Kane Sisters (Suzy Mandel & Dory Devon) as they rise up the entertainment industry ranks from Podunk South vaudeville performers to reluctant porn stars to makeshift drag queens to Broadway legends.  They’re characterized with a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes dynamic, wherein the older sister (Mendel) shrewdly negotiates their business deals while the younger, ditsier sister (Devon) constantly cruises for men.  Like in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, there’s even a comedic mix-up involving a wealthy man’s inherited jewels (in this case, a diamond-encrusted broach instead of a diamond-encrusted tiara).  Otherwise, Blonde Ambition reaches even further back into the great Hollywood songbook to follow the example of Busby Berkeley backstage musicals like 42nd Street, finding hokey humor & romance in the lives of off-duty Broadway performers.  Only, the joke is that that the Kane Sisters are not especially talented.  When they receive their first round of applause from a smitten hunk during their dive-bar stage act, they ask “What was that noise?” in total confusion.

Blonde Ambition‘s substitution of song-and-dance numbers for hardcore sex numbers is so direct and so literal that there’s no point in hammering the point home any further.  My favorite example is a shower masturbation scene in which one of the sisters slips into what would normally be a dream ballet in another musical but instead is a kaleidoscopic homage to the gay-male psychedelia of Wakefield Poole’s Bijou.  Directed by and partially starring gay men, Blonde Ambition also shares DNA with the Old Hollywood musical in the conceptual conflict of its heterosexual romance narrative versus its aesthetic appeals to queer sensibilities.  Once the sisters make it to New York, they become overly friendly with a gay couple who live one floor below their apartment (including coercing them into sex with women, of course), and the whole saga climaxes at a dive-bar drag night hosted by one of those men.  In an effort to reclaim possession of the Buckingham Broach, the women sneak into the bar undercover as drag queens, performing for a room full of leather daddies who find themselves disappointed (and comically horrified) by the resulting strip show.  Blonde Ambition was ostensibly made with a straight male audience in mind, but it’s so classically Old Hollywood gay that it includes an “original gowns by” credit in its opening scroll. 

Less surprisingly, it turns out the shared intersection of the Golden Age porno and the Golden Age musical is shameless hack comedy.  Comedically, Blonde Ambition is located much closer to Branson than it is to Broadway, but its punny, campy humor is charming all the same.  Between its cutaways to barnyard animal reaction shots and the costuming of its orgiastic Gone with the Wind parody sequence, the musical it most directly resembles is The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (released just one year later), which has just the right sweetly hokey flavor to counterbalance its old-fashioned sensibilities.  Presumably, the locker room jockstrap number in that musical was also designed for a gay audience’s gaze, despite the totally hetero sex shenanigans in the foreground.  Although Linda Williams does not directly assess Blonde Ambition in her book, she does frequently touch on that dissonance between the presumed sexual orientation of pornography’s target audience and the audience mostly likely to enjoy it.  That topic mostly crops up in the way presumed-straight male consumers view pornography socially and value extraordinarily large male genitalia in their erotica, suggesting their enjoyment of the medium is somewhat inherently bisexual.  In the addendum of my 1999 edition of Hard Core, Williams also references her own participation in that dissonance, explaining that as a straight female viewer, her favorite, most effective category of pornography depicts male-on-male gay sex, something that was presumably not made with her gaze in mind.  Blonde Ambition works much in the same way.  It’s self-categorized as a straight film, but most of its scene-to-scene appeal would be to gay men who enjoy vintage showtunes.  Those men might have preferred to watch actual musical numbers instead of the sex numbers that provide the movie’s narrative-stopping spectacles, but the genre’s dissonance is often its greatest source of fascination & entertainment, especially after decades of distance. 

-Brandon Ledet

Happy Together (1997)

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When I first moved to Austin, there were four different video rental locations that were still open, despite the fact that streaming was already nearly omnipresent at the time. There were two locations for I Luv Video and two for Vulcan Video, with both organizations consolidating into one storefront each by 2020 and both of them ultimately closing during the pandemic. In those days, my devotion was to Vulcan Video, even though the giant outdoor mural of Spock on their campus-adjacent “North Vulcan” location, which I saw when visiting the city before moving, was long gone by the time that they had been pushed out to North Loop Boulevard. Back then, I Luv Video’s website didn’t have a catalog search feature, while Vulcan did, and that won me over. Back when I wrote about every Dario Argento movie, every single one of those DVDs was rented from Vulcan North (except for Le cinque giornate, which was, and to my knowledge remains, only available on VHS). Within the past year, however, both Vulcan and ILV have returned in some form, with the collection of the former being donated to the Alamo Drafthouse and operating as “Vulcan” out of the Village location, while ILV is now known as We Luv Video and has set up shop in the exact location that was once Vulcan North. They recently had their first anniversary and threw a block party to celebrate, with VHS swapping and getting new members to sign up. I was won over by the pitch, and invited my friend to have a nineties movie night this week, wherein we would go to the video store to pick out a movie, order a pizza, and enjoy. One of the great things about having a local rental store again is the “Staff Picks” selection, and my companion was immediately drawn to Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai’s tender but turbulent 1997 drama that’s easily one of the best examples of New Queer Cinema. 

Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung) are a gay couple from Hong Kong who, hoping that a visit to Argentina will break the cycle of their constant break-ups and reconciliations. Po-Wing insists that they rent a car instead of taking a bus to visit the Iguaza Falls, which results in them getting lost and never making it to their destination. Their trip is marked by the acquisition of a lamp that creates a simulated image of a waterfall, which Fai keeps when he and Po-Wing break up once more because of the stress of their failed venture and the conflict that ensues. Lacking the funds to fly home, Fai takes up residence in a rundown motel in Buenos Aires, where he has a shoebox of a room and shares cooking facilities with all of the other residents, and he finds work as a doorman at a tango club. Po-Wing takes up a life as a sex worker, and Fai is forced to watch him entertain john after john at the club where he works. After the two of them argue and Fai confronts Po-Wing about spending all of their money and stranding them there, Po-Wing steals an expensive watch from one of his clients so that Fai can pawn it and go home but is badly beaten by the man over it. Po-Wing’s hands are badly injured, and he is forced to wear plaster bandages on them for an extended period, and Fai reluctantly becomes his caretaker. 

Po-Wing makes his interest in resuming their affair clear—Fai notes that Po-Wing’s “Let’s start over” was a constant refrain over their rocky separations and reunions—but while Fai clearly still loves and cares for him, they do not become lovers again. Po-Wing’s attempts to climb into bed with Fai only alienate him, and his constant whining and demanding tell us a great deal about what their relationship was like, even before he became largely incapable of fending for himself. He forces Fai to go jogging with him in terrible weather despite his ex’s reluctance, and when Fai takes ill because of the weather, Po-Wing still demands that he cook for them. Of course, Fai is revealed to be no shrinking violet or victim either, as we see that he becomes intensely jealous; when Po-Wing goes to get cigarettes and isn’t home when Fai returns from work, Fai buys multiple cartons so that Po-Wing has no reason to leave. He even takes Po-Wing’s passport the first night that his former lover stays with him following his release from the hospital and hides it so that Po-Wing can’t leave him. It’s clear that they were always toxic for each other, but that they were also madly, passionately in love in a way that defies all logic and common sense and drives one to extreme highs that make the extreme lows seem worthwhile. And that love is still present, even if it’s so tainted by mutual bitterness at this point that there’s no way for them to walk the same path ever again. 

Fai is fired from the tango bar when he attacks the man who beat Po-Wing and starts working at a Chinese restaurant. There, he befriends a young, handsome Taiwanese man named Chang (Chen Chang). Although Chang never expresses overt attraction to Fai, his affection is clear. Po-Wing becomes jealous after overhearing Chang in the background of one of his constant, demanding phone calls to Fai at work, and this, combined with Fai’s continuous refusal to return his passport, leads Po-Wing to move out when he is recovered from his injuries. Fai opens up to Chang about having left Hong Kong in disgrace due to stealing money from his employer, who was a friend of his father’s, and Chang tells Fai about his family’s food stall in the night market in Taipei. Chang eventually earns enough money to continue his travels and tells Fai he intends to travel to the southernmost tip of South America, where he has heard that one can release all their cares. He offers his tape recorder to Fai so he can carry his worries for him, but Fai can muster no words, only sobs. Fai starts to work nights in an abattoir so that he can get his body back on Hong Kong time and goes home, with Po-Wing breaking down upon realizing that Fai is really gone. 

This is one of the most moving films that I have ever seen. I’ve never been in the kind of relationship that the film depicts, one in which one partner’s jealousy and control issues and the other’s learned helplessness and deliberate provocation of envy put them in constant conflict with one another, but I’ve been a teenager (and a twentysomething, and a thirtysomething) in love, the kind of love that’s so big and so loud that it takes up the whole room. Love immiserates as well as illuminates, love consumes as well as sustains, and love can craze as much as it can ground. Po-Wing and Fai’s relationship is one that can swing back and forth between Po-Wing’s mad desire for the physical intimacy of sharing a bed even if they don’t touch, with complete disregard for Fai’s boundaries or well-being, to Fai berating his former lover for his promiscuous ways (before later cruising in the same ways and in the same places after Chang leaves, noting in his internal monologue that all lonely people are the same, deep down) while making him a virtual prisoner, to the two of them slow dancing in the shared kitchen of Fai’s hostel, sweet and kind and perfect — but only for a moment. 

The copy of this film that I watched was a grey market region-free DVD, and although the transfer was terrible (there are several scenes during the portion of the film where Fai is working in the restaurant wherein the subtitles are completely illegible against his white chef’s wear), it was nonetheless a beautiful movie. It’s a mood piece, wherein there are several long shots of urban decrepity punctuated by neon and headlights as well as very long shots of Iguaza Falls as we take in the majesty of the pouring, pulsing water, countless gallons and tons of the stuff moving at incomprehensible volume, churning with a power that can only be imagined and yet which pales in comparison to the raging waters that push and pull inside of Po–Wing and Fai. It’s powerful stuff, and worth tracking down.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Am I OK? (2024)

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Guys, I think I just really like Dakota Johnson. Whatever it is that she’s doing, her charm just completely works on me. I sang the praises of Madame Web both upon release and again months later when I forced Brandon and Alli to watch it so we could talk about it. I love her performance in the Suspiria remake and I am among those who thoroughly enjoyed Bad Times at the El Royale. Those last two show that she has range, but I find myself still thoroughly enjoying when she plays a character that is either (a) just like she is in real life, or (b) the “Dakota Johnson” character that she performs when she’s called upon to be “herself.” I first heard about this movie when a friend—whom I had drafted into watching Madame Web with me on my May rewatch—came back from vacation having seen it, and recommended it to me directly because of my fondness for MW and DJ. And he was right! 

Am I OK? tells the story of thirty-two-year-old Lucy (Johnson), a painter who no longer paints and instead earns a living as a receptionist at a spa. Her best friend, Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), has a more professional career and is settled with her boyfriend Danny (Jermaine Fowler), until her boss (Sean Hayes) offers her an opportunity for a promotion, albeit one that would require Jane to relocate to London. The night that she learns of this, Jane takes Lucy and Danny out to celebrate; once they’re all good and drunk, Jane admits to having kissed another girl in high school, causing Lucy to spiral and admit to herself for the first time that she’s not attracted to men. With six months before she must move to the other side of the Atlantic, Jane sets out to help Lucy find a girlfriend. The biggest stumbling block is Lucy’s awkwardness and a shyness that verges on being antisocial, and her feelings of anxiety about Jane’s upcoming move only grow when she learns that Jane will be accompanied by her outgoing colleague Kat (Molly Gordon), an eccentric and fairly self-absorbed woman with whom Jane is friendly but whom Lucy can’t stand. When a new masseuse at Lucy’s work, Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), seems very flirtatious, Lucy attempts to respond but has to overcome her extreme, ingrained tendency to resist change. 

This movie takes precisely one risk, which is that it demands that you be smitten with Dakota Johnson (or “Dakota Johnson”) and enjoy watching her do her thing. (Luckily, I am and I do.) The script is very funny, and the performances are quite engaging, but this is a movie that is all about pushing Lucy out of her comfort zone while never doing the same with the viewer. And, hey, maybe that’s all that a comedy like this one needs. There were many scenes that reminded me of a friend’s recent complaint after seeing Hit Man, which was that half of the movie looked like it had been shot in an AirBnB; this movie has a very similar visual … blandness. I’ve heard Brandon bring this up in many episodes of the podcast—that a lot of movies now have a very even, clean, TV-camera friendly, CW lighting—and although that’s something that I don’t often notice (perhaps because the CW was one of the many straws that broke the camel’s back of my mind a long time ago now) this movie made it almost impossible to miss. It’s probably not something that most people would notice or care about, but I’ve never experienced this phenomenon so clearly. I really don’t want to insult the people who made this movie; I quite liked it, and I love Tig Notaro (who, alongside Stephanie Allynne, is credited as director), but there’s no camera, lighting, or blocking choice in this movie that one could describe as imaginative, thoughtful, or stylish. 

Looking at the list of other works that the film’s cinematographer Cristina Dunlap worked on, it’s a lot of shorts, TV work, and music videos, which strikes me as odd. The static nature of a lot of TV photography is present in the movie, which is, as noted, shot so conventionally that it’s almost an apotheosis of inoffensiveness; but there’s a lot of life in some of the music videos (and tour footage) that she’s shot, which doesn’t appear here at all. One of the few times that the film does something dynamic instead of rotating through the same sets (yoga studio, spa, Jane’s office, Lucy’s apartment, the diner where Lucy always orders the same thing) is when Jane and Lucy go on an exercise outing together, and it’s the scene from which the poster image of Lucy crying is taken. Jane and Lucy are going up and down a set of outdoor stairs, and the setting felt like an homage to that scene in You’ve Got Mail that shows Tom Hanks and Dave Chappelle at the gym. It’s the only time that the film ever really breaks out of its shot/reverse-shot TV rhythm and its antiseptic interiors, but that this is the only time it does so (other than a short sequence near the end at a “hammock retreat”) means that there’s a lot of this movie that relies solely on the wittiness of the dialogue and the charm of the characters. Luckily, there’s more than enough of that to go around. 

I will admit that I was hoping I could play The Madame Web Game while watching this one (that’s where you point at the screen and shout “It’s a web!” every time something vaguely weblike appears), and while I have to give it a zero out of ten for web sightings, it’s a solid seven out of ten spiders for comedy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

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Hundreds of Beavers is a film that doesn’t seem like it would be able to sustain its premise or its vision for the entirety of its 108 minute runtime, but it somehow manages to do so. This movie made me laugh aloud, on average, about every thirty seconds all the way through. I don’t know that it will work for everyone, but it certainly did for me. Shot in black and white, this is a Looney Tunes sketch stretched to feature length, about a man named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a successful applejacker who loses everything in a fire after imbibing a bit too much one night and finds himself alone and cold in the Canadian wilderness. After several unsuccessful attempts at catching wild game, he finally manages to put together a few Wile E. Coyote-esque traps (without any assistance from ACME at all) and sustain himself. Eventually, he stumbles upon a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his lovely daughter (Olivia Graves), decides to become a fur trapper himself in order to win her hand, and sets out to acquire the furs of the titular hundreds of beavers. Oh, and did we mention that every animal in this film is portrayed via high-quality mascot costumes? 

Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie. 

I recently had some trouble trying to figure out what to say about Spirited Away for similar reasons. It was hard to explain what works so well about Spirited Away because you find yourself simply recapping the movie, which undersells what makes it so special. It’s really best for you to discover all the things that it has in store for you by watching it, because no description of any of the film’s gags will do justice to taking it in with your own (presumably two) eyeballs. But, since you’re already here, I might as well list some of my favorites, right? At one point in the film, Kayak is taken under the wing of an older, wiser fur trapper (Wes Tank), who teaches him how to master the art; said trapper uses a dog-driven sled, and each night, the dogs (remember, every animal is a person in a mascot suit) play a card game. As they camp in a wolf-ridden forest, the dogs are slowly taken in the night, so that we go from a full table of dogs in the iconic “dogs playing poker” mold to a single, shivering dog playing solitaire alone. It’s a gag on top of a gag on top of a gag, and that’s Hundreds of Beavers to the core: gags all the way down. I was also particularly taken with a very droopy, stoned-looking frog puppet and was delighted when it reappeared later in the film, and the commitment to the humans-as-animals bit extends all the way to having the horses in the film be that stereotypical sitcom get-up of two people acting as the front and rear of a mare. It never gets old, and that’s the real treasure here. The film never lets you catch your breath long enough to get tired of its schtick, and that kind of sustained humor is a rarity. 

You (yes, you!) can watch Hundreds of Beavers, for free, right now, as long as you have your library card, and you’re stateside. As of this writing, the film is still streaming for free on Hoopla, the service that provides you with four free borrows a month via your local library. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Spirited Away (2001)

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Nearly a decade ago, when I was getting ready to move away from Baton Rouge, a friend of mine was likewise preparing to head back west to be with her now-husband. We had a dual garage sale in which we tried to get rid of some various knick-knacks. We didn’t have much that anyone would want, and we weren’t very successful. As a joke, she had priced her DVD of Spirited Away at a million dollars, because she didn’t actually want to part with it, and when she realized that I had never seen it, she gave it to me. I’m ashamed to say that in the interim, half-remembered bits of other Miyazaki films blended together during a rewatch of several of them shortly after my accident in 2018, making me think that I had watched it. When I sat down to do a rewatch in preparation for the culmination of Swampflix’s upcoming ten-year anniversary project, it turned out that I hadn’t, so this was a beautiful first-time watch for me. I have a friend who has only recently come into my life but with whom I’ve grown very close very quickly was looking forward to sharing this one with me at a screening at our local arthouse theater as it was a huge part of his childhood, plans which were dashed when we both tested positive for COVID the day before the screening. Since we both had it, however, we decided to push forward with our plans and watch it together that same night anyway. 

I’ve been digesting it ever since, and I’m still not fully sure what to say about it. It’s not just a movie; it’s a magic spell, a fairy tale journey, an unconventional narrative composed of little condensations of fantasy that moves blithely from storybeat to storybeat without ever stopping to catch its breath. It introduces and resolves so many things so quickly that the pacing reminds one of an episode of golden-age Simpsons, where a bag-boy strike in act one leads to near-death on an African waterfall at the climax. It runs on feverish imagination, unrestrained by the need to adhere to any real act structure at all. 

Chihiro is an elementary-aged girl who, along with her parents, is moving to a new home. Along the way, her father takes a detour down a road that ends at a red pedestrian gate in a wall that extends as far as the eye can see in either direction. The trio enters the area, which her father believes (and perceives) to be an abandoned amusement park; her father and mother unquestioningly eat food which they stumble upon while Chihiro explores further, meeting a boy named Haku, who implores her to take her parents back across the river before sunset. When Chihiro returns to her parents, however, they have been turned into pigs by the spirit food, as the place reveals itself to be the home of innumerable kami spirits. She refuses to leave them behind and becomes trapped there, while various parties attempt to locate her as they can smell a human amongst them. Haku helps her to evade capture and directs her to find and seek employment with a spider-like spirit named Kamaji, who runs the boiler that powers the baths of the bathhouse that serves as the primary location for the film. She proves herself to him and he asks Lin, a more humanoid bathhouse worker, to take Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse (and is responsible for her parents’ transformation). Yubaba attempts to scare Chihiro into running off, but when she is unable to do so, she gives the girl a job, although her contract is Faustian. She takes part of the kanji of Chihiro’s name away, leaving only “Sen,” which becomes the girl’s new name. Chihiro/Sen later learns from Haku that this stripping of one’s name also leads to the loss of one’s memory, and that he is also cursed to work for Yubaba since he cannot remember his own true name. 

It’s hard to describe Spirited Away other than to outline the plot like I have above, but it goes in so many interesting directions with such vivid and luscious imagery that simply recapitulating the narrative diminishes it. Chihiro is the kind of kid everyone wishes they could have been: stalwart in the face of overwhelming odds, unrelenting in her devotion to saving her parents and returning to the real world, and compelled by an abundance of compassion that seeks no reward but nonetheless is granted them. She’s Dorothy Gale, and she’s Alice, and she’s also completely her own character, brave and fierce but always kind and thoughtful. She’s unwilling to trade her freedom for anyone else’s, and although this morality seems alien to the spirits who inhabit the world around her, it also gives her fresh eyes that grant her the ability to resolve issues the spirits can’t, like finding the source of a polluted river spirit’s pain and removing it like the thorn from the paw of Aesop’s lion, healing it. When she fails, it’s never because of her lack of ingenuity, it’s merely because she fails to grasp all of the social rules of a culture that she’s only recently found herself within. 

Visually, the film is stunning. After nearly two decades, it’s still as vibrant and gorgeous as it was the first time audiences saw it. Each sequence is beautiful, and every frame is filled to the brim with baroque details of the spirit world, but it’s almost impossible to try and explain it, because this is a movie that one has to see in order to really understand. It’s like trying to explain a painting to someone who’s never seen it; it has to be experienced, has to be felt, has to wash over you and make you a part of its world. It’s magic.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Longlegs (2024)

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We’re Oz Perkins fans around these parts. Brandon gave both The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel and Hansel four-star reviews. While the director’s first feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, got a cooler reaction from him, it remains my favorite of his works. (Admittedly, part of that might be the fact that I find Ruth Wilson to be one of the most utterly watchable and magnetic performers currently working). Or it was my favorite … until Longlegs came along. 

Set in Oregon sometime during the Clinton administration, Longlegs is the story of Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a young FBI field agent whose preternatural hunches catch the attention of her superiors, resulting in her reassignment to a decades-long hunt for a serial killer known as “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage) based upon Zodiac-like notes that he leaves behind at the scenes of brutal murders of entire families. As she spends time working on the case, she concludes that Longlegs’ targeting of families of young girls whose birthdays all fall on the fourteenth of the month is Satanic in nature, and that when plotted out on a calendar, it becomes clear that Longlegs is creating an image of an inverted triangle, which Harker finds in occult literature. Her boss, Carter (Blair Underwood), is impressed by her initiative and insight, and after a night of bonding, he gets drunk and asks Harker to drive him home, where she meets his family: wife Anna (Carmel Amit) and precocious daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders). Their relationship is slightly complicated when Carter discovers that on Harker’s ninth birthday, her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) filed a police report about a strange man approaching the young Lee when she was home alone. Ruth, with whom Lee is in frequent contact, lives in a dilapidated farmhouse that is choked with hoarder ephemera, and when she directs her daughter to take a look through some Polaroids that are still in a box in her childhood bedroom, Lee suddenly remembers the day that she—barely—managed to avoid becoming one of Longlegs’ victims. Of course, why that is the case turns out to be much more complex (not to mention sinister) than is immediately apparent. 

The biggest influence on the film, and the one that is most often cited in criticism, is The Silence of the Lambs. That much is apparent, from the setting to the choice of a young female FBI agent as the lead, all the way down to Longlegs’ not-quite-Buffalo-Bill basement lair, where instead of making suits out of women’s flesh he crafts lovingly faithful doll reproductions of the young girls who, along with their family, are killed at his hands. There’s also a bit of other Thomas Harris Lecter-containing media in play here; the walk-through of one of the crime scenes is straight out of Manhunter (or Red Dragon, if you prefer), and Underwood seems to be channeling a bit of Laurence Fishburne’s portrayal of Jack Crawford from the Hannibal TV series. 

Outside of that franchise, what I was most reminded of while watching the film were two separate novels by South African writer Lauren Beukes: The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. The former is about an early twentieth century serial killer and drifter who happens upon a house that is itself a nexus of evil, allowing him to exit into any time between 1929 and 1993 and directing him to seek out and murder certain women (the titular “shining girls”) for unknown purposes. When he brutally stabs a teenage girl named Kirby Mizrachi in 1989, he leaves her for dead, but she survives and, years later, she seeks her still unidentified attempted murderer. That 1990s setting, a killer who targets specific young women based on direction from a malevolent entity, and a main character has an encounter with her would-be killer in her youth and becomes the impetus behind his demise in her adulthood are all details that Longlegs shares, although the stories are markedly different in almost every other way. 

The connection to Broken Monsters is a little more oblique, as the narrative of that novel features an ambitiously (and fruitfully) large net of point of view characters, but of whom one is a serial killer who creates “art” out of body parts of humans and animals alike, not unlike several of the killers from the aforementioned Hannibal series. When with other characters, the narrative is alternatively a straightforward urban crime drama (the homicide detective), a little bit Hard Candy (her daughter), an ironically voiced view of Detroit’s art scene that provides important context for the killer’s motivation (the aging hipster journalist), etc. When we are in the killer’s point-of-view chapters, their point of view includes being forced/inspired by an ominous force that the reader assumes is a manifestation of the killer’s broken mind … until the same thing appears in a chapter that’s focused on one of their victims, revealing that the demonic entity is, in fact, very real. That happens here as well, as Longlegs shifts from an unconventional homage to Silence of the Lambs with the slightly supernatural narrative conceit that the lead character has preternatural insight into a horror that all-but-literally goes to hell.

I haven’t really engaged with the discourse about the movie, so I’m not sure whether this is being cited elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that this film was very funny. Underwood is a natural charmer, so Carter’s interactions with the stoic, reserved, and frankly spooky Harker are fun to watch, and this moved into outright laughter for me when Harker meets young Ruby and she asks her parents if she can show Harker her room. As the two awkwardly sit next to one another, Harker notes that Ruby has one those canopies that some kids have and asks her, stiltedly, “Do you … go … in it?” I saw this with a very responsive audience, and this got a big laugh. There’s also a great scene with the flamboyant administrator of a mental facility where the sole survivor of one of Longlegs’ family slayings resides, and a forensics nerd who gets far too excited about a strange doll that’s found hidden at one of the previous murder sites. I’ve heard reports that some screenings have had people laughing in response to Nicolas Cage, but I’m happy to say that this didn’t happen at my screening, and I found his performance terrifying. It’s the overcorrection to Harker’s stoicism, which I think is played for laughs at certain points; I can see people finding it too much, but it worked for me. I’ll also say that Alicia Witt is phenomenal here; as a longtime defender of Urban Legend, she’s one of my favorites that I feel like we never get to see enough of. I did spend a chunk of the movie thinking that Ruth was being played by Samantha Sloyan, but I’ll let you Google that yourself and tell me if you think I’m that far off the mark. 

Over on the podcast, we often talk about when a film “Does That Thing I Like,” which is when a horror movie features up a deliberately ambiguous premise that could conclude with either a rational explanation for events or a supernatural one, and, instead of going the well-worn route of concluding with “[the devil/witchcraft/possession/ghosts/whatever] [is/are] real!” (I’ll admit that if the ratio of demonic-to-scientific rationales were reversed, movies would be both a lot more boring and most of them would end exactly like an episode of Scooby-Doo, but I still appreciate it when it happens.) Unfortunately, there are so few of these movies that mentioning any of them would spoil them, especially given how often the twist is simply that there’s a boy living in the walls. Longlegs is like the platonic ideal of how to “Do the Thing I Think Is Tired” but make it fresh, new, exciting, and scary. I am a person who has lived alone for most of his adult life and who can count the number of nightmares he has had in that time on just two hands, but the night after I saw this movie, I got up and went to the bathroom in the night, I had to turn the light on, not because I needed it to find my way, but because I needed it to dispel the shadows before I could get out of bed. The reason why The Thing I Like is The Thing I Like is because I live in the real world; I’m not afraid of ghosts or demons or swamp monsters (other than alligators, obviously), so they don’t scare me in the movies, either. Your Ghostfaces, your various Thomas Harris serial killers like Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill, even that home invasion scene in Fargo—slapstick as it is—those are things that get my anxiety up; those are the reason that I occasionally have to pull the shower curtain back or check my closets. When we briefly discussed the film on our recent podcast episode about Planet of the Vampires, Brandon noted that Longlegs is a movie that feels evil. And that’s as succinctly as I can put it. Nothing in this film is something that I am afraid of in real life, but its evil is so palpable and real that I had to turn on the lights in the middle of the night. I don’t know that I can give a movie higher praise than that. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond