reviews

The Severing (2023)

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Without question, the strangest moviegoing experience I’ve had all year was attending a repertory screening of the 2002 supernatural thriller The Mothman Prophecies, presented by a formerly incarcerated member of the West Memphis Three in a series about ceremonial magick.  There was just something intensely odd about seeing such a flavorless, anonymous PG-13 Studio Horror presented as a deeply spiritual text.  And just a few months later, I am once again confronted with a bizarrely idiosyncratic presentation of director Mark Pellington’s workman-for-hire artistry.  Pellington’s filmmaking career peaked in the Y2k era with The Mothman Prophecies & Arlington Road, two serviceable thrillers with mainstream appeal.  His most recent feature, The Severing, is borderline avant-garde in contrast, enduring a slow-trickle rollout from smaller festivals like Slamdance to the public library-supported streaming service Hoopla.  It’s an abstract interpretive dance horror film made in collaboration between Pellington (whose involvement doesn’t make much sense) and Nina McNeely, the choreographer of Climax (whose involvement makes all the sense).  Like The Broad’s recent screening of The Mothman Prophecies, this really was one of the stranger viewing experiences I’ve enjoyed all year, and although neither were especially great films, they were at the very least memorable.

I guess this film makes sense within Pellington’s larger catalog if you know him primarily as a music video director, which is the side hustle that’s been paying his bills since well before his feature-length breakout in Arlington Road.  Shot with a small dance crew in a single, crumbling warehouse locale, The Severing is essentially a feature-length music video without much actual music to speak of.  Composer Peter Adams mostly works in light piano twinkles and long, droning tones, so that the interpretive dance artistry on display never convincingly builds to any kind of crescendo or catharsis.  However, if you hit the mute button and throw on your favorite Nine Inch Nails record as soundtrack replacement, it’s easy to see the spooky mood Pellington & crew were aiming for.  The dancers craft some gorgeous, upsetting images throughout, painted in full-body bruising that makes them look like rhythmically decomposing corpses.  Their movements are pained & frustrated, often stuck in repetitive, throbbing movements like looping .GIFs.  The warehouse locale is lit with the sickly fluorescent washes of vintage torture porn, recalling the haunted house your dirtbag cousin worked at on the weekends more than a professional movie set.  It’s eerie, it’s uncanny, but it’s mostly hung off the shoulders of the contorted dancers and their avant-garde choreographer.  Pellington’s generic-horror touches mostly just get in their way.

Replacing the soundtrack with your industrial rock album of choice would help cover up some of the ill-advised dialogue snippets that distract from the dancers’ onscreen movements, but the film’s high school goth poetry is still inescapable as constant, on-screen text.  Title cards & incoherent ramblings about how we shallow humans “move like lemmings” or how “sleep is a doorway to the 4th dimension” detract from the inherent tension & beauty of the dance choreography.  In a year when horror has been shaken up by slow-cinema abstractions like Skinamarink, The Outwaters, and Enys Men, it’s frustrating to see a formal experiment like this repeatedly ground itself instead of fully giving into its true, alienating self.  Since my familiarity with Pellington is as an openly, thoroughly commercial director, I’m assuming a lot of that normalized framing is his doing.  As such, this is more of a balletic echo of the Michael Jackson “Thriller” video than it is some jarring breakthrough in cinematic form.  It makes for great spooky background imagery for the Halloween season, but it’s frustrating that it couldn’t amount to more than that, since there’s some truly powerful artistry expressed through these tortured, writhing bodies.  A more daring, adventurous director would’ve matched the dancers’ artistic boldness in their own visual medium, but there’s something to be said for Pellington’s workman spirit getting this project completed & distributed at all.

-Brandon Ledet

Buzz Cut (2022)

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There’s not a lot of information online about Buzz Cut, a New Zealand film from a couple of years ago that recently made its stateside debut. With most movies, you’ll see some variation between multiple synopses on different websites, but everywhere that the film has any online presence at all, the informative text is identical, from IMDb to the movie’s few sparse reviews to the description on Hoopla (where I found it): The Hash House Harriers (“a drinking club with a running problem”) encounter a killer Bee Keeper in a crazy Kiwi horror-comedy that is part Animal House and part 80’s slasher movie. It sounds promising, especially since NZ churned out one of the best horror comedies of the last decade with 2014’s Housebound (directed by future M3GAN helmer Gerard Johnstone). More, the film has a great retro horror poster featuring the film’s slasher, an apiarist (that is, a beekeeper) wielding a chainsaw while surrounded by bees and featuring two great taglines: “By the time you hear the buzzing[,] it’s too late” and “Bee prepared, bee warned, bee scared!” Unfortunately, although there are a few pretty funny bits throughout, some great stylistic choices, and a fairly well-developed plot for a parody, the film’s tendency toward outdated, mean-spirited humor makes the film feel like a throwback in a bad way. 

Jemma is the newest member of the Hash House Harriers, a group of runners who meet up once a year to go on a nature run and spend some time getting sloshed in a cabin. Jemma is especially out of her depth here, since the co-worker who invited her has contracted a bug that renders him unable to participate that year, and the other dozen or so participants are all strangers to her, although not to each other. The main case feels large and unwieldy at first, since it’s naturally a pretty large crew owing to the nature of slashers meaning they’re going to have to start dropping like flies sooner or later. We get two introductions to all of them, the fist of which comes as the camera moves through the converted bus on which they’re en route to “The Hash” and labels each of them with their “hash names,” which range from raunchy puns (Wino-na Ride-Her, Sir Cum Navigator) to mocking insults (Mini-Schlong, Fugly Moa, Rigid Beef Whistle) to what I think are NZ references that are impenetrable to me (Gnarly Barney, Angry Dragon, Gorb). When the gang stops for a rest break, Sir Cum provides Jemma, who has yet to be given a hash name, additional introduction to the players via bits of exposition about each member of the group … and drops a transphobic slur right out of the gate. 

So … yeah — when the film cites one of its influences as Animal House, we’re not talking about the parts where Dean Wormer delivers a hilarious speech about why he wants to get rid of Delta House, or the food fight, or the guitar smashing, or the unbelievable series of events leading up to the fate of that poor horse, we’re talking about the parts where our heroes use the word “n*gro,” play fast and loose with sexual assault and statutory laws, and all the other things that have aged more and more poorly in intervening years. This kind of shit is often present in slashers of yore, but it feels like writer-director Martin Renner really overshot the mark with this retro throwback and ended up in territory that’s not difficult to watch because it’s offensive (which it is), but because it’s not very funny. It stands out in sharp relief to a lot of other good jokes in the script. There’s a particularly funny sequence where the group gathers and drunkenly (and stonedly) argue about social mores, eating habits, and pop culture in a way that betrays both their present inebriation and their intrinsic idiocy. Dim-witted pretty boy Gnarly Barney mistakes Mini-Schlong’s statement that he’s a pescatarian as a profession of faith; Sir Cum is furious that Schlong believes that Deckard is a replicant; Barney confuses Stephen Hawking and Stephen King, and Angry Dragon is stuck on the idea that Star Trek star DeForest Kelley was somehow involved with the clearcutting of the Amazon because she’s hung up on his first name. It’s proof positive that the talent behind this film are not without comedic insight and ability and that they could have produced a funnier movie if they had reined in some of the bits that push past humorously raunchy into retch-inducing territory and cut all the racist shit. 

The film called to mind The FP, another independently produced parody of bygone genre gems, and another which wore its filmmaking competence on its sleeve while being mired down in making cheap jokes that punch down. There are some great stylistic choices here that betray a cleverness that carries over into the script, but only, like, 50% of it. I particularly like the use of old-timey black & white interstitials that explain the hash, and the bit where the pranksters in the group have to navigate the presence of two separate “local farmer with ominous warning” archetypes. In another callback to the cheapy horror flicks of yesteryear, there are two distinct scenes with gratuitous partial frontal nudity, and as the second takes place at a strip club visited in flashback, the characters gathered around to hear this story mock the teller for the unnecessary setting and narrative focus. It’s not that there’s nothing here to enjoy, but I’ve really skipped over a lot of things that are just awful. For instance, one of the runners is a New Zealander of Chinese descent, dudded out as a Rastafarian and going by the hash name “Bruce Ma Lee” (get it?). In one of his very few scenes, his every line of dialogue consists solely of describing the shapes of clouds as various couplings and copulations of his clubmates using language that is as puerile as it is exaggeratedly “broken.” Although there are many things about it that I wish I could recommend, you only get four free borrows from Hoopla a month, and I wouldn’t burn one of them on Buzz Cut. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Fire in the Sky (1993)

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After checking out recent release No One Will Save You, my appetite for extraterrestrial abduction content was whet, and the streaming service formerly known as HBOMax was there with a cleanup hitter in the form of 1993’s Fire in the Sky. The movie is based upon a book written by an Arizona logger named Travis Walton that purports to recount his encounter with aliens in 1975. Walton’s is one of the more noteworthy cases in that his alleged abduction was witnessed by five other men who were with him when they all saw the same strange phenomena, the standard light/energy/noise “emanations” that are common for UFO witnesses. Walton himself remained missing despite a few search parties before reemerging from the wilderness some five days later — starved, dehydrated, and seemingly traumatized to near-catatonia. 

The film plays with committing to the reality of Walton’s claims from the outset and does so rather cleverly, as it opens with the other five men arriving at the local watering hole disheveled and rattled and talking amongst themselves about the importance of getting their stories straight and other pieces of dialogue that maintain ambiguity about their relative guilt/innocence. From there, an out-of-town lawman named Watters (James Garner) arrives at the scene to assist in what’s being treated as a missing persons case. The foreman of the crew, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), recounts the events of the day, up to and including his future brother-in-law Travis (D. B. Sweeney) getting out of the truck to investigate an inexplicable light show and being struck by something invisible. The other loggers in the truck insist on fleeing whatever is out there, but Mike eventually insists that they go back for Travis; when they return to the spot where he collapsed, there’s no sign of him. 

For most of Act II, the film plays out more like a small town drama about people’s lives collapsing under the collective weight of the presumption of guilt heaped upon them by their community, with some investigative procedural elements thrown in for good measure. Watters believes that Travis was killed by one of the other loggers, Dallis (Craig Sheffer), a “drifter” who didn’t get along with Travis, and that the rest of the crew were helping to cover it up. Desperate to prove his innocence, Mike commits himself and his crew to polygraph tests, all of which seem to indicate that the men are telling the truth with the possible exception of Dallis, whose test is inconclusive. Suddenly,Travis reappears, and from this point, the film no longer plays coy with whether or not the abduction story is true within the film. Even as Watters adjusts his hypothesis to include the men pulling a publicity stunt that wasted time and resources, Travis is tormented by the remembrance of the events of his abduction as they slowly resurface. 

This is one of those movies that got significant airplay on Sci-Fi Channel in my youth, although I had never actually seen it; the commercials advertising its upcoming airings always included the iconic image of Travis Walton cling-wrapped to an alien operating table, which frankly scared the shit out of me. It was one of those childhood terrors that remained tantalizingly unresolved until this first viewing, and as such I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Unfortunately, the opening credits spoil some of the ambiguity pretty early on, given that there’s a huge wall of text declaring that the film is “Based on the book The Walton Experience by Travis Walton,” dulling the impact of the question of whether Walton was murdered by his co-workers. Still, a lot of pathos is wrung out of the disappearance, and that’s something that you don’t normally see in this kind of media, so it was a pleasant surprise. If alien abductions are your personal horror preference, this one might not exactly live up to every expectation, given that there’s less of that in the finished product than what trailers and clips might imply, but what is present is harrowing and memorable. Give it a shot. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Freejack (1992)

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Hoo boy is this one a lot of fun, and it’s free, Jack! (Sorry.) Crackerjack racecar star Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is looking forward to marrying sweetheart Julie Redlund (Rene Russo) once he gets all of his ducks in a row. Unfortunately, this crisp November 1991 day is the day that he crashes his racer in a deadly fireball, leaving behind a heartbroken Julie. Meanwhile, in the distant future of 2009, Vacendak (Mick Jagger) and his crew of “bonejackers” cruise through a hellish dystopia in order to line up their machinery with Furlong’s past accident and teleport (or “freejack”) him into the future. See, scientists have figured out how to transfer consciousness from one body to another, gifting immortality to (the wealthiest 1% of) humankind; however, since everyone in 2009 has lived with such intense and prolonged pollution and suffering, the rich don’t want their bodies. Instead, people like Vacendak are bounty hunters for people who can be plucked out of the stream of time like a fish without causing any time-snarling shenanigans — that is, moments before their death and only if they wouldn’t leave identifiable remains anyway. When the bonejacker caravan is knocked out of commission, Furlong escapes. 

After making his way home and finding that Julie no longer lives there, Furlong stumbles into a church, where an atypical nun (Amanda Plummer) fills in the background of the new world order. She explains the concept of freejacking, the immortality machine, and why it looks so much like Class of 1999 outside. She is unable to find Julie online but is able to connect Furlong with his old manager Brad (David Johansen of New York Dolls), who promises to get him in contact with Julie. Elsewhere, Julie has done rather well for herself, rising to an executive position at a major corporation headed by Ian McCandless (Anthony Hopkins), where she works alongside the CEO’s right-hand man Michelette (Jonathan Banks). She, along with the other elites, lives in one of a series of skyscrapers in a gated part of the city, far from the hoarse cries of any yearning masses longing to be free. Furlong must convince her that he is who he says he is—not some guy who freejacked her lost love—and avoid capture by Vacendak, Michelette, or any other interested party for 36 hours, at which point the mind of the mysterious rich person who wants to take over his body will be too degraded to be redownloaded. 

This is exactly the kind of movie that the camp stamp was made for. Normally, a low-brow, high-concept movie like this requires the invention of some kind of fantastical breakthrough or discovery, but this film requires two miraculous feats of science (mind transference and time trafficking), which should push the envelope to the point of being too unbelievable. And, yeah, it is, but once you see the series of casual leather outfits that Jagger gets to parade around in, the minitanks that the bonejackers drive (one of them is indigo with pink detailing and the name Sheila emblazoned in neon green script), the hideously eighties stone offices, and what the creators believed passenger cars would look like in 2009, then it’s impossible not to just give in and have a good time. In a way, Freejack presages companion Rip-Van-Winkle-but-as-a-nineties-action-flick film Demolition Man, but while that film is, in many ways, a conservative’s worst nightmare about a future ruled by political correctness, Freejack is movie that recognizes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that corporate interests and wealth hoarders’ desperation to prolong their lives are the things that will/do dominate the 21st century. Both films, however, spend a lot of time exploring the fish-out-of-temporal-water nature of the protagonist after just a couple of decades while also demonstrating technological and social leaps that are completely impossible during such a short time frame. And, because Furlong is a racer, Freejack is also chock full of chase scenes and races against time, which create the illusion of plot progression even when it spins its wheels from time to time. 

If anything, this is the result of being overstuffed. Production problems on the film were rife (YouTube channel GoodBadFlicks released a pretty extensive overview a few months ago), and although it doesn’t seem to have had much of a cultural impact, it’s strange that this one hasn’t had its day in the limelight as a wrongly maligned, misunderstood classic. This was released just at the start of Estevez’s star renaissance, as The Mighty Ducks released later that year, and came right on the heels of Hopkins’s career-defining role in Silence of the Lambs. A lot of major performers meet at this crossroads, but it’s been all but forgotten in the wake of their other successes, but in spite of all of the studio interference, I think that there’s actually a pretty great nineties action flick here. This would be the decade that, in the wake of the eighties sci-fi action hat trick of Terminator, Predator, and Aliens, speculative fiction would become a dominating factor in action film before reaching its apotheosis in 1999 with The Matrix; Freejack, with its “spiritual switchboard” technology and the hijacking of people’s bodies, is a part of that cyberpunk evolution. It’s somehow more than the sum of its parts; there’s a sequence near the end where Furlong confronts the person responsible for his freejacking in a spherical room that projects a series of holograms that represent the mind of the stored villain. Images fade in and out, and although I think it probably is not the exact effect that the filmmakers were trying to convey and a modern audience may reject them as “bad FX,” but I find their dreamlike gaussiness and the way that things appear and reappear to be a very effective visualization of the ever-changing thoughts and mental landscape of the antagonist. There’s so much attention to detail in so many places that are a true testament to Geoff Murphy’s work that, in spite of the production hell, this movie not only is more than functional but is in fact exceptional. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot of fun. And hey — it’s available for free right now on YouTube (with commercials). Why not? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Aporia (2023)

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“Aporia” refers to a declaration of one’s doubt in something, often a statement which does not actually reflect the speaker’s actual belief. Within the Socratic method, it was the state in which Socrates left his verbal sparring partners after he picked apart their definitions of a concept through a series of questions that ultimately revealed his opponent’s lack of solid philosophical standing. More recently, it’s become largely synonymous with the word “paradox,” which was likely the reason that the word was chosen as this film’s title; however, if one perceives the word as reference to a statement that does not match the belief of the speaker, it actually makes for a fairly decent joke about this film’s overall lack of self-reflection. 

Sophie (Judy Greer) is deep in mourning over the loss of her physicist husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) eight months ago. Their soon-to-be-twelve daughter Riley, who shared her father’s love of rocketry and astronomy, is likewise adrift, withdrawing from her mother, skipping school, and preparing to sell the model rockets she and her father built together. After Sophie is forced to call on Mal’s friend Jabir (Peyman Moaadi) to help her out by collecting Riley from school when she is suspended, Jabir lets her in on a quantum physics project that he and Mal were tinkering around with before the latter’s death. It’s a time machine, essentially, although not of the normal transportation variety; instead, it’s capable of sending a single particle back in time to a certain place, meaning that it’s functionally a gun that kills someone in the past. Jabir originally started working on the idea because he could never get over the massacre of his family, the tragedy which drove him to immigrate to the U.S. in the first place; affecting the past that far back will require a great deal of power, but a shorter time frame might work. It’s untested, but he can no longer sit on the sidelines of Sophie’s life and watch her drown in her grief without offering her the opportunity to “rescue” Mal by “taking out” the drunk driver who killed him before the accident ever occurred. 

Mal’s inevitable return to life needs to happen ten minutes sooner (with less hemming and hawing about the moral implications and fewer, denser scenes of Riley acting out); this would also open up some room in Act II for more interesting discussion about the consequences of Sophie and Jabir’s action. There’s something very interesting that happens in here, as those who are protected from the memory ripple effect slowly become more disconnected from the world because they remember it differently. It would have been fun to explore with more butterflies getting squashed, so to speak, but since there are just a few changes to the timeline, we go from Timeline B, where the changes are limited to work schedules and furniture arrangements, to Timelines C (with no apparent ripple effects that our characters notice) and then D, where the changes are so extreme that Mal and Sophie’s lives are barely recognizable. 

The removal of Mal’s killer leaves his wife Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) a single mother in dire financial straits, exacerbated by her daughter Aggie’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis and the medical costs thereof. Feeling responsible for the other woman’s situation and seeing her own grief reflected in Kara, Sophie invites her to dinner, and Aggie & Riley strike up a friendship after some initial friction. When Aggie’s symptoms worsen and she ends up in the hospital, Mal, Sophie, and Jabir debate whether or not to kill a man who, a decade prior, embezzled Kara’s money from her successful bakery, leaving her unable to afford to both keep her house and care for Aggie. Although the trio is reasonably convinced that the death of “the Bernie Madoff of Arizona” just a few months earlier than his natural death will have no effect on their life situations, they emerge from the room where they shot the man through time only to discover that they are impostors in their own lives: unknown to old friends, greeted with warmth by unknown faces, and, for Sophie and Mal, faced with a child who is a stranger to them. 

There’s a lot of promise here that simply isn’t lived up to. If nothing else, this is a showcase for Judy Greer to do some more dramatic work, and she sells it. The writing here is often good, although its highlights are interspersed with a lot of dialogue that is fairly workmanlike. I won’t bother getting into the minutia about fictional temporal mechanics either as that’s a hobby for pedants and bores, but I will say that anyone who’s ever seen a movie with time travel (or time murder, as is the case here) in it knows that Jabir can’t go back to his youth and save his family from being killed. If he does, he never comes to America, he never builds the time rifle, so he never goes back in time, bake at 350° F for 22 minutes and you’ve got a paradox, which in this narrative means a reset. Of course, this also means that anyone who’s ever seen one of these knows that this will come into play once our heroes decide they’ve mucked up the timeline badly enough that they have no choice but to nuke the whole thing and hope that whatever versions of themselves exist in the new timeline land on their feet. It’s to the film’s credit that it ultimately embraces ambiguity in its ending, but it’s not enough for me to give this one a recommendation. It’s a shame, too; there are so many potentially potent building blocks in play that are undercut by the film’s handheld camerawork, which is a common choice for these cheapy sci-fi time travel flicks, but one which is at odds with the attempts at nuanced storytelling, discussions of ethics, and Greer leaving it all out on the field. The film is simply working against itself in too many places to come together into a cohesive whole, and in the end, it seems to lack the very conviction that one definition of “aporia” implies. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Good Boy (2023)

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Scandinavian cinema has a distinctly fucked up sense of humor to it, so it’s not surprising that two of the year’s best black comedies have been released out of Norway.  Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature Sick of Myself (in which an art-world narcissist medically self-harms for media attention) is the higher profile of the two, already landing the director a buzzy follow-up starring Nic Cage (in Dream Scenario).  By contrast, the darkly comic Tinder thriller Good Boy is a much smaller, limited production – restricted to just four characters shooting in four sparse locales.  Despite earning a few key critical accolades on the festival circuit (including a coveted spot-on John Waters’s Best Films of the Year list), Sick of Myself is hardly an MCU-scale cultural behemoth worth rooting against in favor of its underfunded underdog.  Still, running only 75 minutes and released to zero fanfare, Good Boy is a fucked up little Norwegian romance drama worth championing for its minor, muted victories, at least so director Viljar Bøe might be able to torture audiences on a much bigger scale in his next production.  There’s plenty of dark Norwegian humor to go around.

Good Boy might not have a professional-level budget, but it does have a killer hook.  It’s a story of unethical puppy play, pulling some uneasy laughs and genuine chills out of the basic discomfort of stumbling into someone else’s elaborate kink scene without context or warning.  After scoring a successful Tinder date with a legitimate millionaire, an unsuspecting Psychology student is introduced to her new beau’s unconventional pet: a human man who spends 24/7 in a dog costume.  Any cautious probing about the weirdness of keeping a human being as a house pet is outright dismissed by the Norwegian Psycho; he responds to reasonable questions like “What’s his deal?” with “He’s a dog.”  Of course, because this is a movie, it turns out the dog’s deal is much sicker than that, and his loving captivity within the millionaire’s household turns out to be less voluntary & consensual than initially let on.  Much less.  The story gradually devolves into full-on torture porn from there, but much in the way that the equivalent American dating-app thriller Fresh did last year: maintaining a wicked sense of humor throughout.  It’s all one big joke about dating a total control freak; he just happens to be a very specific kind of freak.

For all of its kink-scene iconography, Good Boy is less about the degenerate amorality of real-life puppy players than it is about the violent amorality of stubbornly Conservative thinkers, recalling the sickly domesticity of recent titles like Swallow & Hatching.  It dodges a lot of the kink-shaming implications of its premise by doubling down on something we can all agree on: the ultra-wealthy are the world’s true degenerate freaks.  It undeniably banks on the viewer’s kneejerk discomfort with other people’s private kink play scenarios, though, drawing just as much terror out of the human-dog’s elaborate furry costuming (his mask has a hinged jaw!) as it does out of the violence that keeps him living the fantasy.  Speaking personally, the movie didn’t change the way I think about narcissist millionaires, trad homesteaders, or proudly kinky puppy players.  However, it did change how I interacted with my dog for the next couple days, causing me to pause while feeding her, pilling her, and getting her ready for bed to consider just how strange of a relationship we have on either side of the pet-owner divide.  It may not be an especially deep movie, thematically, but it still made something familiar & routine feel totally alien & horrific in its immediate afterglow, which is all I can really ask for out of a prankish, low-budget horror movie.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beast (1975)

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I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021.  All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him.  That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography).  A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture.  And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture!  The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime.  It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.

Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot.  Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes.  This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance.  And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union.  It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush.  You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries.  The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal.  The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail.  You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.

The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth.  Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress.  Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed.  Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity.  Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history.  There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place.  The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds.  The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).

Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to.  The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot.  There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand.  The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act.  “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason.  A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet.  In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies.  They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.

Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc.  As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places.  Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds.  In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience.  A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience. 

-Brandon Ledet

Cyberstalker (1995)

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There’s nothing especially unique about the mid-90s cyberthriller Cyberstalker.  Its novelty as internet chatroom techsploitation is not only drowned out by much bigger, louder Hollywood thrillers of its era like Hackers, Virtuosity, and The Net, but it also fought for video store shelf space with countless other direct-to-VHS cybertitles just like it: Cyberpunk (1990), Cyber-C.H.I.C. (1990), Cyber Tracker (1994), Cyberjack (1995), Cyber Bandits (1995), Cyber Zone (1995), Cyber Vengeance (1997), and cyber-so-on.  Cyberstalker‘s home video distributor Troma has since attempted to distinguish it from that overflowing bucket of cyberschlock by retitling it The Digital Prophet, but there are no marketing strategies creative enough to save it from the anonymity of content dungeons like Amazon Prime, Tubi, and PlutoTV.  The only distinguishing detail that might hook in an outsider audience who’s not a glutton for vintage cybertrash is a villainous role overperformed by horror convention veteran Jeffrey Combs, who counts as a major celebrity get for a film on this budget level.

Combs isn’t the main villain of Cyberstalker, though.  He’s just her cult leader & heroin supplier.  The titular cyberstalker is a reclusive chatroom nerd & comic book enthusiast played by Annie Biggs, an actress & director of little note.  Troma’s “Digital Prophet” rebranding makes some sense as a marketing ploy, then, since it centers the much more recognizable Combs, who writes the comic books that drive the actual cyberstalker mad.  Biggs plays a true believer in her dealer/abuser’s unhinged cyber-rhetoric, and her dedication to the cyber-cause gradually transforms her from a Lisa Loeb cosplayer shut-in to a cyborg dominatrix . . . at least in her mind.  As she recruits victims from the Cyberthoughts comics’ Cyecom chatroom, they only see her as a nerd with a gun.  The audience has the privilege of seeing the real world through her cyber-eyes, though, where her earthly body glitches out into PC monitor static and Windows 95 screensaver psychedelia.  It’s a little disappointing that the most novel, cyber-specific imagery in the movie is all in the killer’s head, but it is real to her and, thus, temporarily real for us.

No-name, no-relation director Christopher Romero attempts to treat this chatroom-murders novelty subject like a standard serial killer thriller, borrowing from the disembodied, leather-gloved hands of gialli and the window-blinds shadows of noir instead of intently pushing the vaporwave CG imagery to its Brett Leonard extremes.  In his most hilarious move, Romero even recreates the infamous Psycho shower scene with a handgun instead of a kitchen knife.  Despite those misguided efforts to dull down & normalize the film’s cyberthriller elements, there are still plenty moments of 90s techsploitation kitsch that shine through: the first victim is strangled with a modem chord; all victims read their Cyecom chatroom correspondence out loud for the audience’s benefit, like Sandra Bullock in The Net; and the final showdown with the cops on the killer’s trail is staged in a warehouse stocked with Dell computer monitors.  Of course, since there are countless other video store titles where you can find those exact mid-90s cyberthriller novelties, I should probably just be reporting on the one thing that might draw new audiences in to see Cyberstalker in particular: Combs.  The production could only afford Combs for a few scenes, but he makes the most of them, especially when performing a gunshot wound during the final shootout, making a full meal of his death like Paul Reubens in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.

I rented Cyberstalker for one American dollar.  It was a small fee to skip the ad breaks of whatever cyberequivalent I would’ve watched on Tubi instead if this one wasn’t so cheap to rent.  I’m sure I would’ve gotten just as much (and just as little) out of Cyber-C.H.I.C., Cyber Vengeance, or whatever random noun Tubi would’ve autofilled as I typed the word “cyber” in the search bar, but I have no regrets watching this randomly selected cybertitle.  If nothing else, I’ve never seen a serial killer character costumed to look like Lisa Loeb before.  The closest example I can think of is Carol Kane in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer, but even she had more of a Big Bad Wolf in Grandma’s nightgown look.

-Brandon Ledet

Jawan (2023)

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There was some mild online controversy earlier this year when American film critic Scott Mendleson referred to Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan as “India’s Tom Cruise” in headline shorthand, as if SRK’s legendary career was secondary to its closest Hollywood equivalent. I’m going to risk doubling down on that accidental insult here by comparing those two stars’ current run of action blockbusters, hopefully in a more specific way. The cultural & industrial contexts of Cruise & SRK’s respective careers might be incomparable, but right now they happen to be the only world-famous movie stars keeping the lone-wolf action genre alive, and they’re both doing so decades past the point where they could reasonably play the archetype.  While Cruise has put in two old school star-power performances in the past year with M:I Dead Reckoning (yay!) and Top Gun: Maverick (booo!), SRK has done the same, if not better, in Pathaan and now Jawan.  Both stars have long enjoyed a kind of ageless, plastic handsomeness that they’ve tirelessly applied to nationalistic action spectacles in recent years, often to deliriously entertaining results.  And as outdated as that muscles-and-explosions version of action cinema feels this long after Stallone & Schwarzenegger’s heyday in the Reagan Era, Cruise & SRK both managed to surprise me this year in the exact same way.  There was a moment in the ludicrously overstuffed Dead Reckoning: Part 1 when it suddenly occurred to me just how many badass women Cruise had managed to gather around him as Ethan Hunt over seven entries in the ongoing Mission: Impossible series.  No longer relegated to minor roles as arm candy, distressed damsels, and refrigerated wives, Cruise had slowly built a small crew of fierce femme fighters in actors Rebecca Fergusson, Venessa Kirby, Pom Klementieff, and Hayley Atwell.  While most lone-wolf action blockbusters provoke you to think “Dudes rock!” (including Maverick & Pathaan), there was a brief moment of Dead Reckoning that left me thinking “I love women so much!,” a much rarer feat.  So, I was delighted that SRK’s latest, Jawan, wholly dedicates itself to that same novel cause, at least once it gets the requisite hero worship of its macho lead out of the way.

Jawan stars Shah Rukh Khan as a renegade prison warden who routinely sneaks a small girl gang of select prisoners out of jail to help him commit wholesome acts of political terrorism.  In a plot similar to this year’s Ajith Kumar bank-heist actioner Thunivu, SRK’s populist terrorist only takes hostages for media attention, deliberately going viral so he can expose corporate & governmental greed directly to The People.  He never actually threatens the lives of the Mumbai citizens at the business end of his guns & explosives, but he uses their terror to amplify his political messages on social media & traditional newscasts.  It’s an extremist cause but a righteous one, ultimately re-routing corporate & governmental bribe money to heal societal ills like high suicide rates among farmers who owe predatory banks unreasonable sums, underfunded government hospitals left to rot without proper subsidies and, the issue closest to his heart, long-overdue prison reform.  It’s initially jarring to watch hundreds of women prisoners applaud their warden in universal celebration, not to mention the adulation of the hostages he takes at gunpoint while masking his identity in public.  He’s always on the right side of the Us vs Them political divide, though, a righteousness backed up by his wholly dedicated girl-gang prisoner crew.  It’s like watching SRK arm the cast of Gangubai Kathiawadi with rifles & grenades to aim at the politicians & bankers who damned them to poverty in the first place.  Of course, since law enforcement only exists to protect property, not serve the people, armed forces are sent to swiftly, violently shut down his one-man Joker/Anonymous movement ASAP.  And of course, since SRK is SRK, he escapes a fatal fate at the government’s hands by simply wooing the woman in charge, romancing her to his side of the fight as part of the gang.

I’ve maybe revealed a couple surprise, pre-intermission plot twists in the above paragraph, but there are plenty more to be discovered throughout Jawan (including a ludicrous development that directly addresses how far its star has aged out of these kinds of roles).  This is a non-stop entertainment machine, the full package.  It marries the recent transcendent achievements of South Indian action-blockbusters out of Tollywood & Kollywood with the classic payoffs of Bollywood masala cinema (by hiring Tamil director Atlee for a traditional big-budget Hindi production).  You can feel that marriage most clearly in the musical romance sequences, which in recent years have more often been downplayed as music video asides but here feature at a central, prominent place in the narrative, emphasized just as much as the CG action spectacle of its mass shoot-outs, liberally tossed explosives, and glimpses of flaming horses.  There are references in the dialogue to other mass-entertainers in the same vein like the S.S. Rajamouli historical action epic Baahubali and the reliably charming Indian actor Alia Bhatt, solidly rooting the film in a larger industry of peers.  SRK is a major, load bearing pilar in that industry, and he’s afforded plenty of screenspace to ham it up here, both as a dashing romantic lead and as a grizzled political terrorist who hides behind old-school Universal Monster masks styled after The Phantom of the Opera & The Mummy.  His appeal as an action star is universal (to the point where comparing him to Tom Cruise really is an insult to his own unique, unmatched celebrity), but it’s probably not out of line to note that he has a particular appeal to heterosexual women as an object of desire.  So, there’s something wonderful about the way this particular crowd-pleaser surrounds SRK with hundreds of women, filling the frame to cheer him on and fight beside him as if the entire gender as a social group were his co-star instead of his assigned romantic partner in South Indian “Lady Superstar” Nayanthara.  I was charmed by the brief flash of that army-of-women supporting cast in Dead Reckoning, but Jawan outshone that aspect of it with the same blinding commitment to excess that Pathaan outshone all other McQuarrie-era Mission: Impossible sequels with, besting them at their own game (even while their MVPs played on entirely different fields).

-Brandon Ledet

Invincible (2001)

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“Why do I watch WrestleMania?  My answer is that the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world.  In order to understand, you have to face it.”

“Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement, and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are.”

“What is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them.  This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama – evil uninterrupted by commercials.”

These are just a choice few Werner Herzog quotes about the cultural & literary virtues of professional wrestling, pulled from the 2019 GQ listicle “Werner Herzog Cannot Stop Talking About WrestleMania” – a masterpiece of modern clickbait publication that I return to often.  Herzog was promoting his work as an actor on the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian around the time those various press junket quotes were assembled, a time when his familiarity as a household name was bridging the gap between art cinema snobs and their sworn enemies, “Disney Adults.”  His public perception has since been bifurcated in recent years, split between his well-earned designation as a world-class auteur and his more recent evolution into a Nic Cagian human meme who pontificates about supposedly low-brow subjects like WrestleMania & Ana Nicole Smith in a severe German accent.  Unlike Nic Cage, though, Herzog has not allowed his YouTube Era reputation as a human meme affect the tone or content of his work as a serious filmmaker, give or take a few over-the-top scenes in his collaboration with Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans.  As often as you hear Herzog explain the grotesque poetry of reality TV & pro wrestling in interviews, it’s difficult to detect their influence on his actual work.  That is, unless you happen to be one of the few people who remember his 2001 historical fantasy drama Invincible, which presents an academic-level understanding of the historic origins of wrasslin’, as well as its modern mutation into mass, crass populist entertainment.

Invincible stars real-life strongman Jouko Ahola as historical strongman Zishe Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith from a small Polish village who grew to fame as “The Strongest Man in the World” in 1920s Germany.  Herzog takes a pro wrestling-style truthiness approach to the material, moving Breitbart’s story to the early stirrings of Nazi Germany a decade later, playing up the significance of his Jewish heritage in a heightened, more satisfying kayfabe version of his life’s story.  In the film, Breitbart enters the entertainment industry through the strongman circus acts that sparked pro wrestling as an artform.  He challenges a traveling strongman for prize money in what is supposed to be a rigged wrestling bout and easily defeats the brute in a Goliath vs Goliath matchup.  Word of his incredible strength quickly spreads, and he’s summoned to work as a regular stage act in a Berlin cabaret, ringmastered by a Nazi-friendly psychic played by Tim Roth.  Roth’s conman mystic is quick to use Breitbart’s Jewish heritage as a race-baiting point of division between the Nazi officers and Jewish citizens in the cabaret audience, which is perfectly in tune with how hot-topic political divisions are exploited for cheap heat in modern pro wrestling programs.  Breitbart is the underdog hero for the Jewish people, who feel increasingly hopeless as the Nazis rise to political power.  The carnie mystic MC is a hero to the Nazis, pretending to summon supernatural strength from The Dark Arts to overpower the strongman’s brute force (a “skill” he can sell as a war-winning weapon for Hitler’s army).  In truth, they’re working together as a scripted act, putting on a show to stoke their divided audience’s Us vs Them bloodlust; it’s wrestling in a nutshell.

Aesthetically, Invincible is worlds away from the reality-TV crassness of what Herzog refers to as “WrestleMania”.  In its best moments, there’s an ancient cinematic quality to the director’s visual storytelling, effectively remaking Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as if he were Tod Browning adapting a fairy tale.  In its worst moments, it plays like standard-issue Oscar bait of its era, bolstered by a prestige-desperate Hans Zimmer score that tells the audience exactly how to feel at every second of runtime.  Its Oscar chances were self-sabotaged by Herzog’s choice to have his European actors speak phonetic English in post-production dubs instead of performing naturally in their various native languages.  That might have been a deliberate attempt to evoke a Bressonian style of performance, but it just comes across as bizarre & confused, and only the established professional actors Tim Roth & Udo Kier come across as capable performers.  The camerawork can come across as bizarre & confused as well, alternating between a handheld documentary style and a Hollywood-schmaltz fantasy & artifice that attempts to (in Ross’s showman wording) “[articulate the audience’s] collective dreams”.  Its moments of visual lyricism make sense to me as a historically set fairy tale about Nazi obsession with mysticism clashing against a Freaks vs. The Reich style superhero.  They’re especially effective when Herzog gazes at the sea-life bodies of jellyfish & crabs as if he were a space alien considering their otherworldly beauty for the very first time.  He’s really good at articulating the uncanniness of everyday life & pop media in that way, which is how he’s gotten famous as an interviewee outside of art cinema circles.  It’s amusing, then, that he can’t convincingly translate that wonder with the world into an Oscar-friendly movie for normies; he’s too much of a genuine weirdo.

Around the time of Invincible, Herzog was essentially directing one feature film a year at a consistent pace, and he’s only gotten more prolific in the two decades since.  While some of his 2000s titles like Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant have endured with a certain cultural cachet, many like Invincible have fallen through the cultural cracks; they can’t all be stunners.  If you’re going to excavate this one Herzog title out of relative obscurity within that massive catalog, I do think it’s worth considering as a bizarre, failed attempt to reach for Awards Season prestige beyond the usual, routine boundaries of his critical accolades.  He has found wider public recognition in the years since, but mostly as a weirdo public persona (an extension of the first-person narration style he developed in his 2000s-era documentaries).  Invincible does recall one very specific aspect of that public persona, at least: his inability to stop talking about WrestleMania.  Whether that’s enough of a reason to dig this one particular discarded Herzog DVD out of the Goodwill pile is up to your completionist interest in his career, I guess, as well as your personal fascination with the Greek tragedy & grotesque poetry of wrasslin’ as an artform.

-Brandon Ledet