reviews

Oldboy (2003)

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Like many bored, frugal Americans, I recently dragged myself out of the house on National Cinema Day to take advantage of the newly invented corporate holiday’s adverised movie ticket price of $4.  I very much appreciated the discount, just as I appreciate local theaters’ weekly $6 ticket deals on Tuesdays.  On the audience’s end, it’s nice to feel like we’re scoring a bargain; on theaters’ end, it’s a smart ploy to lure us through the door to buy the popcorn & cocktails that actually drive profits.  On both sides, it was just a great excuse to hide from the heat on what turned out to be the hottest day in the history of recorded temperatures in New Orleans (so far!).  What I couldn’t get over while sweating my way through The Broad Theater’s parking lot, though, was the genius of stoking ticket sales during such a low tide of new, exciting releases.  Besides the promise of central air-conditioning, there just wasn’t much on The Broad’s marquee that looked like it would pull in a huge crowd without the $4 ticket deal.  Barbie & Black Beetle were the blockbusters on offer, neither of which were in their first-weekend rush; Passages & Landscape with Invisible Hand were their smaller, artsier counterbalance, neither of which are especially attention-grabby outside a small circle of media obsessives who know the names Cory Finley & Ira Sachs.  And so that left room on the marquee for the true heroes of the day: a restoration of the four-hour French New Wave manboy autopsy The Mother and the Whore and an opportunistic re-release of Emma Seligman’s stress-nightmare comedy Shiva Baby, working up some enthusiasm for the following week’s follow-up Bottoms.  Early this summer, when there was absolutely nothing of importance or interest to see in local theaters, IP-driven monstrosities like Fast X, Super Mario Bros, and The Little Mermaid clogged up local marquees for months, leaving us in a stagnant cultural dead zone.  By National Cinema Day, theaters & distributors had figured out the perfect way to fill that cultural void: robust repertory programming.

Truth be told, August’s best repertory re-release had already left theaters by National Cinema Day, but I made time to catch it at The Broad earlier that week on a $6 Tuesday deal.  A new digital restoration of Park Chan-wook’s international breakout Oldboy was re-released nationwide by the hip cinema distributor Neon last month, commemorating the film’s 20th anniversary.  That’s two whole decades of college-freshmen edgelords daring each other to watch this Totally Badass, Totally Fucked Up revenge thriller over a case of the cheapest beer that’s ever been swallowed. And since I was a college freshman around when Oldboy first hit DVD myself, it’s incredible that I had never seen it before its prestigious victory lap this August, enjoying the afterglow of Park’s more refined, acclaimed works like The Handmaiden & Decision to Leave.  My friend group just happened to get our grubby, beer-clutching hands on other edgelord starter-pack films of the 2000s instead: American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Suicide Club, Ichi the Killer, etc.  However, I am a movie nerd with an internet connection, so I have absorbed plenty of the details & circumstances of the sex & violence in Oldboy over the past couple decades of “You’ve got to see this fucked up movie!” cultural osmosis, to the point where I wasn’t sure what was left to be discovered by finally watching it once its re-release arrived at my nearest theater.  I mostly showed up to watch Oldboy out of solemn duty as a Cult Cinema enthusiast needing to mark a major 2000s title off my checklist.  So, given how familiar I felt with its major bullet points (and hammer holes), I was shocked by how well the mystery aspect of the movie worked for me as a new viewer.  Just like its reformed shitbag protagonist, I really wanted to know the whos & whys behind the elaborate torture schemes.  Unlike the titular oldboy, though, I was fully aware of how much we’d have to suffer to get to those answers.

As a digital “restoration”, the new Oldboy release is not some revelatory visual experience; this is not Criterion cleaning up & hyper-saturating a Technicolor marvel like The Red Shoes.  Neon’s Oldboy scan still looks stuck in the mid-00s, and it’s much more likely to impress a longtime devotee who’s used to screening it on a cathode-ray TV than a first-time viewer.  Its overt aughtsiness is integral to its prominence in the pop culture canon, though, so it’s for the best that it still looks of its time.  Its sickly fluorescent lighting is true to the aesthetics of American torture porn in that era—typified by Saw & Hostel—while its absurdly convoluted plot mechanics recall the grander, elevated European torture porn of the time: Martyrs, Calvaire, Inside, etc.  Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) may have been imprisoned & tormented in a small cell outside of time for fifteen grueling years, but he’s allowed a window to the outside world in a small motel-style television, where he consumes early-aughts pop culture & news coverage like oxygen entering his lungs.  Once “freed,” he’s equipped with a 2000s-vintage flip phone, a pay-by-the-hour internet cafe, and a rudimentary video chat platform that doesn’t yet stream audio.  Of course, he hasn’t really been freed at all, as the mysterious tormenter behind his imprisonment uses these wicked tools of the early internet to imprison him in a slightly larger cell (the massive city of Seoul instead of just one room inside it).  He’s trapped by the lack of reasoning behind his torment and the mysterious face responsible for it, given five days to solve the puzzle and secure his revenge before the punishment gets even more severe.  The audience knows he’s being played with like a half-dead mouse, but it takes a while to find the cat who’s batting him around, and it takes even longer to figure out why that cat hasn’t gotten bored of him yet. 

Maybe I’m wrong about that.  Maybe all audiences everywhere already know every beat of Oldboy, and I was the last genre gobbler around who could enter the theater without knowing exactly where its twisty story is going.  After so many years of dorm room canonization, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were no surprises left in Oldboy for the uninitiated.  I hadn’t seen it, nor read its comic book source material, nor spoiled myself with its 2010s Spike Lee remake, and even I already felt like I had its iconic hallway fight scene and the grimiest details of the final villain’s speech committed to memory.  It was a joy to squirm along with fellow in-the-flesh moviegoers during its scenes of covert incest & unflinching dental gore, though, and I was surprised by how much I cared about the motivation behind those grotesqueries beyond their shock-value novelty.  In fact, I skipped out on seeing a personal-favorite cult classic I’ve seen many times before (but never in a proper theater) to make time for that first-time watch of Oldboy, and I left a satisfied customer; it was up against a 50-year anniversary restoration of the landmark folk horror The Wicker Man that same week.  Neon’s re-release of Oldboy appeared to be a successful financial gamble too, surpassing the box office sales of the film’s original run in just a couple weeks.  I can only hope that success means more nation-wide repertory programming is on the way, bolstering the couple regular local slots The Prytania clears in its schedule for its Wildwood & Classic Movies series.  The Broad is pretty great about picking these releases up when they’re offered by distributors, which is how I’ve gotten to see other, obscurer cult classics like The Doom Generation, Funeral Parade of Roses, and The Last Movie for the first time in a proper theater.  It’s a rare treat that’s getting a lot less rare, and I hope that it becomes the go-to move when padding out release schedules during the leaner months on the theatrical release calendar.  It would certainly lure me in to buy more cocktails & popcorn, whatever keeps the projectors on.

-Brandon Ledet

Bottoms (2023)

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It’s a disconcertingly popular pastime among Millennial & Gen-X film nerds to ponder “What’s the next Heathers?” every time the discourse turns its evil eye towards the high school comedy genre.  Maybe it’s because we’re old enough to remember a time when Heathers had legitimate pretenders to the throne: that bitchy late-90s malaise that birthed such vicious teen girl high school comedies as Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Sugar & Spice.  Maybe it’s because we’re too old to take full delight in those films’ recent, toned-down equivalents in titles like The Edge of Seventeen, Do Revenge, The DUFF, and Spontaneous.  If any films have earned enough cultural capital to compare to Heathers‘s sickly, surrealist take on high school culture in the decades since 1988, only Clueless & Mean Girls could claim to share in its enduring popularity and, although both are very funny in their own way, neither are nearly cruel enough to match the acidity of Daniel Waters’s influential screenplay (or its deliciously evil late-90s echoes).  Whatever the case, it’s not surprising that most professional reviews of Emma Seligman’s high school black comedy Bottoms mention its place in the Heathers lineage, despite there being infinite other heightened high school satires to choose from for easy points of comparison: Better Off Dead, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Clone High, Daria, and the list goes on.  I won’t go as far as to say declaring every successful high school dark comedy “the next Heathers” is a hack move (despite being a certifiable hack who’s guilty of that behavior myself), but I at least want to note that the search for The Next Heathers is becoming a time-honored tradition among an aging generation of media critics.

So, in the interest of mixing things up, I’d like to compare Bottoms to a different heightened high school comedy that I love dearly: Strangers with Candy.  Specific events and characters in Seligman & co-writer Rachel Sennott’s screenplay might have more direct correlations in Heathers (especially in the comedic approach to a potential school bomber), but the tone of the humor is much more closely aligned with the vintage Amy Sedaris sitcom.  The surrealism of Heathers has a dreamlike, soft-focus quality you will not find in Bottoms, which instead repurposes the rotten dirtbag energy of Sedaris’s cult show.  Sennott co-stars with Ayo Edebiri as the film’s Jerri Blank equivalents: two adult actors in hideously slovenly high school drag who relentlessly proposition their classmates for sex while everyone around them obliviously focuses on normal high school media conflicts like homework and the upcoming football game.  In both works, teachers and school staff match the teenage deviants’ dirtbag mentality with equally monstrous comebacks, sidestepping the decorum of professional, adult behavior.  No one acts like a real human being at any time, reflecting the collective, horned-up mania of American high schools’ insular worlds.  The filmmaking is deceptively commercial in both cases (mocking 1970s afterschool specials in Strangers with Candy and mocking 1990s high school boner comedies in Bottoms), delivering pitch-black narcissist line readings with the cheery poptimism of a well-behaved mainstream sitcom.  If you deeply miss the mixture of high-femme costume designs with high-artifice teen cruelty in Heathers, there are plenty of modern movies willing to offer a facsimile.  Meanwhile, if you deeply miss watching Jerri Blank hit on a comically naive Tammi Littlenut (“Pee on me.”) or trade vicious barbs with Principle Onyx Blackman (“You must be about as worn out as a hooker on VJ Day.”), Bottoms is your only viable modern substitute.

The only reason it’s so tempting to compare Bottoms to previously existing works—Strangers with Candy, Heathers, or otherwise—is because Seligman & Sennott’s screenplay is so referentially rooted in teen sex comedy tradition.  Its basic premise, in which two unpopular, unfashionable high school lesbians start an afterschool “defense class” in a misguided attempt to bed cheerleaders, functions as a basic-bullet-points mashup of Fight Club and Revenge of the Nerds.  Sennott & Edebiri are obviously not the typical protagonists of the genre’s losing-your-virginity crisis template, but there have already been plenty other post-Porky’s, post-Superbad correctives to make it clear that high school girls get desperately horny too: The To Do List, Blockers, Booksmart, Never Have I Ever, Plan B, Slut in a Good Way, etc.  None have quite matched the shameless selfishness of Sennott & Edebiri’s manic libidos, though, at least not since Jerri Blank described the way high school football makes her “damp as a cellar down there – all mildewy.”  There are two basic placement tests that will determine your relationship with Bottoms as an audience: whether you find the jokes funny and whether it speaks meaningfully to your personal, pre-loaded high school comedy reference points.  The former can’t be helped, but I would at least like to encourage people to look beyond Heathers to better support the latter.  In general, we could all stand to look past Heathers more often when considering the genre’s darkest subversions; there are plenty other titles to choose from, to the point where the exercise of identifying The Next Heathers is getting a little silly.  Really, what’s most encouraging about Bottoms is how little comparison it supports against Seligman & Sennott’s previous collaboration, Shiva Baby, despite both being queer nightmare comedies starring Sennott.  It’s nice to still feel surprised even while also feeling as if you’ve seen it all before.

-Brandon Ledet

They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

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You know I love a pastiche, and I was bummed when I wasn’t able to catch this one in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run. Despite the inherently sci-fi nature of the title, I wasn’t expecting just how far into that genre the film would lean, and I was delighted. 

In the Glen, an area that federal and state funding has not so much forgotten as forsaken, Fontaine (John Boyega) is the dealer at the top of the food chain. Far from the exciting life of danger that one would expect, it’s a monotonous routine; he gets a bottle of alcohol and a lottery scratch-off from the corner store, pours some out into the extended cup of elderly, conspiracy-spouting Frog (Leon Lamar), pumps some iron, mournfully contemplates the “In Remembrance” clipping for his younger brother on the fridge, knocks on his mother’s door to see if she wants anything (she never does), and receives delivery of the day’s cash intake. On the day that the film opens, two out-of-the-ordinary things happen. The first is that he gets word from elementary aged Junebug (Trayce Malachi) that a pusher for rival dealer Issac (J. Alphonse Nicholson) has been spotted in Fontaine’s territory, leading Fontaine to kneecap said pusher. The second is that local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) has failed to pay up, so Fontaine tracks him down to his hotel, which leaves the younger man vulnerable to a drive-by at the hands of a retaliating Isaac. Then he wakes up. Dismissing the shooting as a dream, Fontaine resumes his quotidian: scratch-off, Frog, iron, Remembrance, mother. Only when he once again goes to confront Slick Charles, who tells him that he watched Fontaine die, a fact which is corroborated by sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). Following a suspicious black SUV, the unlikely trio discovers that there’s much more going on than meets the eye. 

There are a few different misdirections in the film that lure the savvy audience member into thinking that they know where the film is headed. Fontaine’s day(s) has all the trappings of a time loop narrative, which wasn’t uncommon prior to COVID, but which has really blossomed as a story device since lockdown, during which many people began to see something of their own quarantined routine in these stories. This theory is blown out of the water when other characters recall Fontaine’s death. Further complicating matters is the widespread lack of specificity about the time period in which the film takes place. Older model cars line the streets and Charles dresses like Willie Dynamite, which would date the film to the 1970s, but Junebug talks excitedly about SpongeBob SquarePants, which moves the setting closer to our own, but given that the show premiered in 1999, that still jives with the omnipresence of CRT model televisions. That is, until Yo-Yo mentions blockchain, which means that this must take place in the present (or future), but a present dotted with anachronistic technology. Of course, given that this is an extremely tightly constructed script, it’s no surprise that there’s a reason for all of this, but revealing any more than that would spoil too much.

Speaking of which, this is one of those movies with a plot that’s all but impossible to talk about without revealing too much. Luckily, the performances give us more than enough text to dig through. Jamie Foxx stays working, which means that he’s forever ending up in projects that fail to really use him to his greatest potential; here, he’s utterly fantastic as the has-been Charles, whose bygone primacy is a point of pride (he boasts that he won Pimp of the Year at the Player’s Ball in 1996), undermined by his current washed-up status. There’s a bit of the Cowardly Lion in him, but he comes through when needed, and, just like the other characters rounding out the trio, he’s savvier than appearances would suggest. Boyega is also on top of this game here, and there’s a bit of his performance as Moses in Attack the Block that bleeds through here, perhaps intentionally. The breakout is Parris, who is having quite the year, given that she’s co-headlining the upcoming Marvel feature The Marvels after her character was introduced to the MCU via WandaVision, where she was easily one of the best things about the program. Every character’s hidden depths are important, as they bely the cluelessness and patronizing shallow-mindedness of the antagonists, but Yo-Yo’s fascination with Nancy Drew is particularly endearing to me, as is her ambition. 

They Cloned Tyrone is currently on Netflix.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blue Beetle (2023)

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I’m not really sure that I have superhero fatigue. Scratch that; I definitely do, but I also have superhero fatigue fatigue. We’ve been hearing about how the general population is growing tired of superhero movies for over half a decade now, and yet, there’s still no real end in sight. Marvel is keeping its slate full while DC is getting ready to reboot everything again (which, to be fair, if you’ve ever been a fan of DC Comics, you know that this is DC’s modus operandi when things start to get complicated). Paul Rudd’s inherent charm couldn’t save the dreadful Ant-Man: Quantumania, Ezra Miller’s extracurricular activities didn’t help The Flash reach an audience, and there’s a non-zero chance that this paragraph is the first that you’re hearing about Shazam: Fury of the Gods. It feels like being a corporate shill to call any comic book adaptation that’s hot off the presses a breath of fresh air, but Blue Beetle has a surprising amount of heart, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) just finished his pre-law undergrad—at Gotham University, naturally—and is returning to his Florida home to reunite with his family. Unbeknownst to him, the rest of the Reyes clan has undergone some shake-ups that threaten their home; his father (Damián Alcázar) suffered a heart attack, with the medical bills costing him his mechanic business, and worse, their landlord has sold their family home to the Kord Corporation, which intends to raze the property to build more luxury condominiums. Kord Industries, currently headed by Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) in the wake of the disappearance of her CEO brother Ted, is quickly becoming the only game in town, and they also employ Jaime’s younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) as part of the cleaning crew at the Kord estate. While working with her one day, Jaime witnesses a verbal altercation between Victoria and her niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), over Victoria’s planned direction for the company, turning their attention back to the machinery of war after her father purged weapon research and development when he was CEO. Both Jaime and Milagro end up fired, but Jenny tells Jaime to come to Kord HQ the following day so that she can find gainful employment for him there. Unfortunately, her attempts at corporate espionage—in the form of the theft of something called “the scarab”—that same day are discovered fairly quickly, and she entrusts her stolen goods to Jaime, who is able to abscond with them. 

Back home, Jaime’s family insist that he open the box Jenny gave him and look inside, and the piece of alien tech within immediately bonds to him and takes him on a familiar Greatest American Hero/Raimi Spider-Man style “learning to control newfound powers” sequence. It’s pretty rote stuff all things considered, but the bog standard narrative is elevated by novelty in the performances of both the lead and the supporting cast. Sarandon lends the whole thing a sense of gravitas that the film proper doesn’t fully earn, but the real standout is George Lopez, who plays Jaime’s Uncle Rudy. A dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, Rudy acts as occasional expositor, such as in the scenes where he explains the legacy of the heretofore unmentioned previous crime-fighting Blue Beetle, unlikely gadgeteer, and comic relief. He’s clearly having a lot of fun in the role, and although the comedy of the first half of the film felt a little limp and forced, the second half makes up for it. 

Look, I’m no fool. I know that there’s no profound moral reason that any company seeks to diversify its staff or output. Faced with outcry in the midst of the June 2020 protests, several major studios hired dozens of DEI employees and strategists and then, as soon as things got quite, those hires were first on the chopping block when “trimming the fat.” Your dad or your cousin or your old college roommate can repeat “Go woke, go broke” until they’re blue in the face, but the truth of the matter is that no megacorp is putting funding toward creating more diverse content out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s all about money, and it always is. Disney’s casting of Halle Berry in The Little Mermaid isn’t part of some grand conspiracy to obliterate “white culture,” they cast her because now they can sell a white Ariel doll and a Black Ariel doll. It’s really as simple as that. There may have been a time when I could have appreciated Blue Beetle more for its pure representation, but things have changed a lot since we could all rest on such neoliberal laurels. Warner Brothers didn’t release this film to theaters because of strong convictions about the treatment of Latine populations in the U.S. or concerns about gentrification of non-white neighborhoods or to take a stand against corporate overreach; in fact, the fact that it touches on these issues while being part of a giant corporate conglomerate is almost insulting. 

With that in mind, it’s kind of a big deal that the reins of this movie were handed over to Angel Manuel Soto, whose larger body of work has been concerned with American imperialism in Puerto Rico, as well as the rise of American fascism. His C.V. includes the feature La Granja, a set of interconnecting stories about people from various walks of life struggling with PR’s economic collapse, as well as the short docs I Struggle Where You Vacation and Inside Trump’s America, which focus on the lives of ordinary Puerto Ricans as they struggle with Washington’s sluggishness in the fact of PR’s debt crisis and the terrifying reality of the merging of cult and mob mentalities, respectively. Soto doesn’t leave his past or his beliefs behind in making Blue Beetle, which makes for a bizarre melding, as Rudy (accurately) calls Batman a fascist and Jaime’s grandmother flashes back to her revolutionary days in Mexico while wielding a giant gun and shouting (in Spanish) “Death to the Imperialists!” The irony of this is thick: Batman is DC’s most lucrative cash cow, and there’s no separating the gorged tick that is Warner Brothers from American capitalistic imperialism’s hide. Audre Lorde reminds us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but Soto is giving it a shot. It may not make the movie better, but it certainly doesn’t make it worse. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dr. Caligari (1989)

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The Criterion Channel has been spoiling me like a little brat all year, handfeeding me cult cinema curios I’ve been desperate to see forever but could never get my hands on through official channels: The Doom Generation, Kamikaze Hearts, Demonlover, Flaming Ears, and the list goes on.  The pummeling rhythm of those dopamine hits have slowed to a trickle in recent months, though, so I’m seeking out my cult classic wishlist items in other venues.  Thankfully, there are a thousand vintage genre-film Blu-ray labels happy to take money from an addict, and I recently scored another notoriously hard-to-find schlock relic off of the trash-hero distro Mondo Macabre.  Their recent 4k restoration of the 1989 absurdist horror sequel Dr. Caligari did not disappoint.  It’s less of a New Wave update of the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari than it is a guided tour of the inside of my mind, hosted by a vintage dominatrix with an academic appreciation of Camp.  The second major Caligari revision after the 1920 original (following a Hitchcockian psychodrama version from 1962), this Totally 80s™ take on the story reimagines German Expressionist tropes & aesthetics as MTV era sleaze.  Not to damn it with hyperbole, but it is cinema perfected. 

Given the resume of director Stephen “Rinse Dream” Sayadian (Cafe Flesh, Nightdreams), it might be more appropriate to compare Dr. Caligari‘s spare sets & heightened aesthetics to video store pornography rather than music video artistry.  The handbuilt, absurdly geometric art design and smoke-machine clouded sound stages are pure MTV movie magic, though, imagining a world where Devo scored an adults-only episode of Pee-wee’s Fuckhouse.  Any list of its nearest stylistic comparison points could also be found scribbled in a late-80s art school weirdo’s discarded notebook: the Elfman brothers’ live-action cartoon playground Forbidden Zone; Tim Burton’s higher-budget refinement of Ed Woodian artifice; John Waters’s purposefully overwritten, underperformed brays of dialogue; David Lynch’s eerie atmospheric dissonance.  The angular, poised performances resemble voguing more than acting, preceding Madonna’s appropriation of the trend by at least a year.  There’s even a Cronenbergian flesh wall that kisses its victims back with full tongue.  All of this up-to-date 80s Weirdo posturing is at least anchored to overt references to ancient filmmaking aesthetics, including the fellation of a Wizard of Oz scarecrow, a villainous combination of Marlene Dietrich & Ethyl Merman, and the obvious German Expressionist touches referenced in its title.  It could have only been made in the glory days of early MTV, but its secret weapon is tying that moment to a larger continuum of wet-nightmare cinema – a long, throbbing history of populist art for perverts.

Still, Dr. Caligari‘s plot is befitting of a Rinse Dream porno, and its hyperfixation on women’s orgasms and bare breasts pushes it to the fuzzy borders of softcore.  It’s not a porno parody of the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari so much as it’s a long-gestating sequel.  The titular villain is the granddaughter of the original Caligari, running his legacy insane asylum with newly radical, perverted tactics more befitting of a dominatrix than a psychiatrist.  Her most treasured patient is an oversexed suburban housewife whose Reaganite husband fears his spouse’s “diseased libido.”  Caligari feigns to cure the monstrously horny woman by experimenting with “hormonal interfacing,” but in truth she’s tinkering with ways to weaponize her patient’s sex drive against the men who cower from it.  Caligari’s true lab work involves “hypothalamus injections” that allow her to directly transplant brain fluid—and, thus, character traits—from one patient/victim to another.  It’s a two-part plan that would allow her to fully claim power over her psych ward fiefdom: first by transplanting the horned-up housewife sex drive of her star patient into the minds of all of her professional nemeses, then by injecting the incredible mental powers of her legendary grandfather into her own mind, becoming unstoppable amidst the chaos.  Things do not go according to plan, and her various injections from a “nympholepsy” poisoned mind into her enemies’ hypothalamuses eventually tears down the walls of the Caligari Insane Asylum for good, simply because everyone around her is too horny to control.

If Dr. Caligari is sincerely “about” anything, it’s about Reagan Era suburban fears of sex, particularly of women’s desire & pleasure.  In that context, its spare, post-Apocalyptic set design appears to be a nuked-to-oblivion wasteland rather than a rented LA soundstage.  The nuclear family unit has died from the slow radiation poisoning of the Cold War, leaving the men in charge terrified that the women below them will climb the ladder of chaos in the rubble.  Transplanting those women’s scary libidos into the men’s fragile, fearful minds induces a distinct gender dysphoria horror, erasing their power at the top of the Patriarchy by erasing their manhood altogether.  There’s always a question of whether this is pointed political commentary, an indulgence in softcore forced feminization pornography or, most likely, a purely aesthetic provocation with no guiding sense of purpose.  Every line reading is an act of sarcastic poetry & performance art, putting each overt political statement and subconscious expression of sexual id in gigantic square quotes.  It’s a very specific brand of jaded, ironic, hedonistic fashionista posturing that will test the patience of the sound of mind and pure of heart.  However, if you are impure of heart & libido, you’re likely to fall in love with it, especially in its new, crisp presentation from Mondo Macabre. 

-Brandon Ledet

Cuddly Toys (2023)

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They grow up so fast!  It seems like just yesterday Kansas Bowling was a teenage backyard filmmaker making horror-blog headlines with her debut feature B.C. Butcher, like the Tromaville equivalent of Lights Camera Jackson.   Now she’s an all-growed-up twentysomething edgelord, touring the country with her mondo genre throwback Cuddly Toys – officially graduating from enfant to enfant terrible.  Bowling’s recent visit to New Orleans felt like a mandatory cultural event even though I generally hate the retro mondo movies Cuddly Toys spoofs & subverts; I just had to see what other local schlock gobblers are excited about her work, since the things I knew her from felt so obscure: the aforementioned caveman slasher comedy B.C. Butcher, the Jackass style gorilla-on-the-loose slasher comedy Psycho Ape, and an excellent, years-old episode of the sorely missed Switchblade Sisters podcast in which she eloquently praises the psychedelic Monkees vehicle Head.  That curiosity led me somewhat astray, trapping me in a small theater with boisterous horror-bro laughter at some of the cruelest, gnarliest violence in Cuddly Toys, then forcing me to confront the possibility that some of that sour humor was intentional on the director’s end – given that she seems to have a genuine appreciation for the mondo schlock of olde.  You could even feel her genuine mondo appreciation in the film’s traveling road show presentation, which was likely inspired by mainstream distributors being weary of touching such sordid material but also feels true to the regional exhibition of the genre’s grindhouse heyday.

To be fair, Cuddly Toys isn’t as purely exploitative as vintage mondo schlock like Mondo Cane, Faces of Death, or whatever obscure, racist cannibalsploitation relic your friend’s scuzzy older brother dared you to watch at an unsupervised sleepover.  Bowling appears onscreen as “Professor Kansas Bowling”, recent graduate of teen-life university, narrating a feature-length slideshow with the same faux-educational tone of vintage mondo.  Her presentation includes references to distinctly 2010s teen life but is shot on 16mm film stock to match the look of her satirical target.  Her “academic” lecture to the clueless parents of America is pitched as a scare film about their teen daughter’s delinquent behavior when they leave the relative safety of home.  In practice, she’s “documenting” the horrific daily life of the typical teenage girl by mixing real-life interviews about rape & misogynist abuse with comically exaggerated depictions of rape & misogynist abuse. Like in true mondo tradition, it’s difficult to parse out what authentic snippets of real life are lurking in the exploitation sleaze bucket that swallows it, except now you also have to parse out what’s intended as irony vs what’s sincere.  Also in true mondo tradition, I often hated the experience of watching it, even though I’m hopelessly attracted to vintage sexploitation of its ilk (of which only Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless is innocent).  Every time I watch a 70s grindhouse relic for the first time, I always brace myself for sexual assault imagery that lingers a couple beats past making its point, and Cuddly Toys is queasily accurate to that tradition, even if its point is nobler than the vintage films it mimics.

And yet, I can’t totally dismiss the bratty outsider-art feminism of this D.I.Y. bombthrower.  Cuddly Toys makes admirable gestures to link the sexual violence of subcultural teen life in the 1970s with subcultural teen life now, even directly referencing Marilyn Manson’s despicable revival of the stadium-rock groupie era.  Despite ostensibly being structured as an academic lecture, it also does a good job of avoiding direct moralist instruction, both by muddling its Feminism 101 talking points with shocks of edgelord irony and by intercutting its testimonials and re-enactments in a deliberately messy, experimental editing style.  Somewhere in all its shock-value leering of underage sex & misogynist violence, there’s an earnest, soul-deep interest in the inner lives of American teen girls, recalling Lauren Greenfield’s portraiture of Californian teens in the 1990s.  It can be outright beautiful in individual, intimate moments, often straying from the mondo genre send-up at hand to promote Bowling’s side hustle as a prolific music video director.  In general, I found Cuddly Toys much more compelling as a sketchbook-in-motion for Bowling’s loose assemblage of Movie Ideas than as a satirical mondo throwback.  It appeared to be shot over several years in cities as far-spanning as LA, NYC, Vegas, and Mexico City, automatically making it a much denser & more personal work than B.C. Butcher, which was shot in a single week just outside Bowling’s childhood home.  In its best form, it functions as a kind of avant-garde travel diary, which is fitting for a movie in which a loose collection of wayward teens read semi-fictional selections from their own personal diaries, documented in their densely over-decorated bedrooms.

All of my self-conflicted handwringing about this film’s various failures & successes results from watching a director I find fascinating dabble in a genre I find distasteful.  Distastefulness appears to be a personal interest of Bowling’s, though, so I can’t fault her for trying to mine something politically powerful out of the vintage schlock she watches for fun.  For my sake, I hope her revival of kitsch genre relics leads her to make something more akin to nudie cuties than roughies in the future, but that’s an entirely selfish impulse.  Judging by the alternation between howling laughter and stunned silence in that Cuddly Toys audience, it’s apparent she has plenty enthusiastic devotees to what she’s already accomplishing – way more than I thought to expect.

-Brandon Ledet

The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023)

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La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future) is a beautiful, entrancing film, the first feature from writer-director Francisca Alegria. Although most reviews of the film that I have seen draw attention to the film’s environmental themes and magical-realist atmosphere, I’ve seen very little discussion about the film’s presentation of family. One of the film’s inciting incidents is the dumping of industrial waste from a paper factory into the Cruces River, but what stands out the most to me is the way that the movie focuses on a different kind of toxic waste, and the way that it can pollute the very thing that gives us life. 

Magdalena (Mía Maestro) is a doctor living in a cold urban home, having put as much distance between herself and her rural upbringing as possible. When she receives a call from her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) telling her that their dairy farmer father Enrique (Alfredo Castro) has suffered from a heart attack, she returns home with her two daughters, including teenaged Tomás (Enzo Ferrada), whose gender identity she does not respect. Upon arriving and performing her own medical inspection of her father, she is told that he did not have a standard heart attack, but that it was a sudden stress-induced health issue. Enrique, for his part, tells his children that he passed out after seeing their long-dead mother Cecilia (Leonor Varela) outside of a cell phone store. Magdalena does not believe him, of course, since she was the one who watched her mother commit suicide by tying herself to her motorcycle and driving into the river when she was a mere seven years old, but he’s absolutely correct; we in the audience saw Cecilia climb out of that same river, accompanied by a mournful him that seems to come from the dead fish surrounding her, in the film’s opening moments. But what brought her back, and why?

As a character study, this is a piece about a woman who has long embodied the worst aspects of her father but learns to represent the best parts of her mother. As with many texts containing magical realism, much is left up to the interpretation, but we first see her being harsh and cold with the people closest to her, first telling Tomás that, as long as she lives in Magdalena’s house, she is her “son.” Her brother’s feelings about her are clear from their first onscreen interaction; although Bernardo lovingly embraces his nieces, when Magdalena moves in to hug him, he waves her off, citing that he has been working and is too filthy to be touched. When they arrive at the farm, Magdalena sends Bernardo off to take care of the dairy “for once” while she attends to their father. In comparison to the lush verdancy of the countryside, her home in the city is sterile, and when nature intrudes (in the form of a spider in her bathroom window), she doesn’t attempt to coax it outside and close the window, but instead runs off for a can of insecticide, which she sprays into the air futilely when she returns to find that the spider is nowhere to be seen. 

All of these are elements that tie Magdalena to Enrique, who is likewise queerphobic, dismissive of his child, and sees the natural world as something that exists only to benefit human beings, diametrically opposed by civilization. Enrique also chides Bernardo for failing to take care of the dairy, even blaming him when their cows die despite their death being the direct result of Enrique’s refusal to listen to his son; his reaction to Bernardo’s insistence that they dig a new well for the cows shows that this is a recurring argument, but it’s that very lack of forethought that leads to the herd drinking from the poisoned river when they are overcome with thirst, essentially damning the dairy farm to close. When the tearful Bernardo brings this to his father’s attention, the older man calls his son a homophobic slur and degrades him. Magdalena has spent her life seeing things through her father’s myopic, cruel vision of the world, and her own family has suffered from his polluting influence as a result. That this traces itself back to her childhood is no surprise. Like her father, she has long seen her mother’s suicide as a sign of weakness due to not wanting to be a mother, as evidenced by all the times in her memory that her mother was absent while still alive. In truth, those absences were the fault of her father, who had Cecilia institutionalized multiple times because he could not control her. Luckily for her, learning this is epiphanic, and even if she is limited in her ability to heal the world, it’s not too late to heal her relationship with Tomás.

If you were wondering if there is an actual singing cow in this movie, then I regret to inform you that there is not … there are several. At the start of the film, what appears to be non-diegetic music plays as the shores of the Cruces give up hundreds of dead fish, with these images soundtracked by a mournful elegy about dying. After there are news reports that the toxic waste in the water has killed not only the fish but also the various water grasses and insects that sustain other animals in the ecosystem, which leave the area in search of other food resources. Finally, the cows drink the waters of the river and themselves succumb to the poison, but before they pass, they join their voices in a chorus, grieving for the calves that were taken from them so that they would continuously produce milk for the farm, and rejoicing that the pain that came from that separation, which they consider to be worse than death, will end soon. This has the potential to be unintentionally funny, especially in the odd occasional moment in which one of the cow “actors” is chewing cud almost in time to the song like something out of Mister Ed, but the sincerity of the moment manages to make it work despite the potential to be undermined. 

That separation between mother and child stands as a metaphor not just for the relationship between Magdalena and the long-dead mother whom she unconsciously resents, but also between Magdalena and her own elder daughter. When we first meet Tomás, she is in her bedroom, showing her beau an online newspaper clipping about Cecilia’s death, asking if the boy sees the resemblance between Tomás and her grandmother. Her self-actualization is blocked not only by her mother’s bigotry but also her disconnection from her roots, and her hunger for a connection drives her to seek out her resurrected grandmother and the two bond. The revived Cecilia is mute throughout the film, but there’s a magic to the way that these two women who share a familial bond but who have never met are able to form a connection without the need for words. A love that transcends speech reappears again at the end, when Tomás and her mother reunite, and even without words, it’s clear that the two of them have gained a better understanding of each other, in unvoiced acceptance. 

This is certainly one of the most moving films I’ve seen this year, as well as one of the most lyrical, beautifully composed, and haunting. It sets its mood and never alters course, hypnotic in its commitment to its themes. It should not be missed. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Until the Light Takes Us (2008)

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“In the mountains of Norway, where the weather is cold
There’s not much to do except kill each other
And play guitars in the snow
Corpse paint, which is a scary name for make-up, is what they wear
They’d resemble Ink and Dagger, if Ink and Dagger had long hair
They’re pretty evil, and they do not like God
I don’t care if they burn down churches
But they’d better not fucking touch a synagogue”

You won’t find a more succinct nor accurate summation of Norwegian black metal’s entire deal than that opening stanza to the Atom and His Package novelty song “Me and My Black Metal Friends,” which I listened to repeatedly years before I actually heard a proper black metal track.  It touches on everything you need to know about black metal in just a few quick bullet points: the theatricality of the image, the brutality of the sound, the isolation of the region, the allure of the arson & murder and, most pivotally, the stain of antisemitism that sours most of the scene’s mystique.  Maybe that’s why the 2008 documentary Until the Light Takes Us feels so thinly stretched across its 90-minute runtime.  After all, Adam Goren was able to get its point across in less than 90 seconds an entire decade earlier.  It doesn’t help that there have been two much heftier texts that have done much more extensive, contemplative work in autopsying the early black metal scene since: the 2013 “comprehensive guide” Black Metal: Evolution of the Occult, and the 2019 true crime drama Lords of Chaos (also adapted from a lengthy book).  You can refer to the former for a big-picture encyclopedia of the black metal scene, which is mostly disregarded here in favor of dwelling on the grisly details of the murder that broke up the band Mayhem and made Norwegian black metal internationally infamous.  The latter text, Lords of Chaos, also uses the Mayhem murder case as its focal point, but it does so with clear, critical purpose beyond morbid fascination: making fun of all involved.  As a result, Until the Light Takes Us has little to offer to a 2020s audience beyond the novelty of seeing those better fleshed-out texts & images illustrated with real-life detail.  Maybe it felt more significant 15 years ago, when I was still listening to smartass novelty songs, blissfully unaware of the white-nationalist ideology behind some of the scene’s monstrous guitar riffs.

The most salacious selling point for this festival-circuit documentary is that it interviews black metal musician Varg “Burzum” Vikernes in his jail cell about the reasoning behind his church burnings and his fatal stabbing of former Mayhem bandmate Euronymous, for which he was sentenced 21 years.  Forever a publicity hound, Varg is eager to speak on the record, as it gives him an audience for the antisemitic, white nationalist talking points he feels have been misconstrued by the media.  If this particular extension of The Media had a clear agenda of its own, it might not have given him such a wide platform to practice poised, philosophical hate speech without any editorial pushback either.  There is some joy to be found in Varg’s frustration that his church burnings were misinterpreted as Satanic ritual by the press, but that feeling fades as he explains at length that the arson was meant to protest the way Christianity has erased & replaced Norway’s more authentic, ancient culture.  It’s a sentiment that most reasonable people could agree with in broad strokes, which makes it all the more dangerous that it so easily slips into proud white-nationalist rhetoric (as easily as Varg labeling Christianity “a Jewish religion”).  The only fellow player on the early black metal scene given equal screentime is the much more likeable Darkthrone musician Fenriz, who bumbles around modern Norway without any guiding political ethos beyond a love & nostalgia for vintage black metal aesthetics.  Fenriz does a lot to explain what makes black metal such an enduring sound & image, but he does very little to overpower the hateful Nazi ideology Varg is spewing in their alternating interviews.  Thankfully, the movie also includes sarcastic contributions from the older, wiser band members of Immortal, who essentially serve as the black metal Statler and Waldorf – mocking the kids beneath them for taking metal so unnecessarily seriously in the first place.

If there’s any way in which Until the Light Takes Us takes a clear point of view on the black metal scene, it’s in the way it strips the musicians of the Xeroxed-corpse-paint album covers that made them look so cool & mysterious to outsiders in the early 90s.  It peers behind the veil of shock value self-promotion to show how mundane Varg & Fenriz’s lives look to the naked eye & camcorder.  Between their messy apartments, their fluorescent-lit prison cells, and the corporatized, McDonalds-lined streets of Oslo, the movie zaps away all of the dark ritual & romance the scene cultivated through zine culture publicity stunts.  The documentary’s low-fi digi sheen works in its favor in that way.  It also echoes Fenriz’s explanation of how black metal musicians pioneered their signature “necro sound” by seeking out the worst, cheapest equipment they could blow out for a deliberately crunchy, D.I.Y. affect.  Overall, Lords of Chaos does a much better job of taking a clear “point of view” on these gloomy nerds (by dunking on them mercilessly), but Until the Light Takes Us at least this makes their world look even smaller & less mystical.  It’s a little frustrating that its soundtrack is so light on actual black metal music (instead relying on low-fi electro beats to study to for most of its mood setting), but that choice also strips Varg and his compatriots of the sound’s inherent cool.  No matter how many vile “National Socialist Black Metal” bands with offensive-on-purpose names like Aryan Blood & Gestapo 666 have been inspired by Burzum’s Nazi rhetoric, the genre’s soaring guitar riffs still tower over you.  Its blast-beat drumming still pummels the brain in just the right way.  The trick is not letting the most despicable edgelords on the scene control the narrative and ruin the vibe, which is something this doc does without much of a fight.  Fenriz’s metalhead aimlessness is adorable, but it’s not nearly potent enough to wash away the sour taste left by Varg.  Thankfully, other works have since stepped in to take either a wider or a more fiercely critical view on the subject, although confusingly to much quieter fanfare.

-Brandon Ledet

Touch of Evil (1958)

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The recent, ongoing Barbenheimer phenomenon has been a shock for regular moviegoers, since we’ve long gotten used to having vast, empty multiplexes to ourselves, like rats making nests in abandoned hospitals.  The “Think pink!” Barbie army was out en masse on Barbenheimer Weekend, which was healthy for local cinemas’ survival in a post-streaming world and for our own generally anti-social routine of silently watching screens glow, alone in the dark.  This us-vs-them dichotomy was especially vivid to me on that Sunday morning, when I watched Orson Welles’s classic-period noir Touch of Evil at The Prytania.  The century-old single screener’s “Classic Movies” series is the only recurring repertory program in town where you can regularly see gems like Touch of Evil in a proper venue (give or take Prytania’s other, artier weekly rep series, Wildwood).  It’s also the only theater in town that was screening Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on a 70mm film print instead of a standard DCP, which means that a huge crowd of Oppieheads formed in the lobby during the final third of Touch of Evil, increasingly impatient with the opening film’s lengthy runtime.  I’m sure there were a few brave cinema soldiers who watched Touch of Evil and Oppenheimer as a back-to-back double feature that morning, since all-day double features were the commanding theme of the weekend.  Most of the people outside the theater walls likely hadn’t been to a movie since last year’s Top Gun & Avatar sequels, though, judging by the fact that there usually isn’t a line stretching all the way down the block outside The Prytania on Sunday mornings as I make my quick, anti-social exits to my bus stop.  It’s the Barbies & Oppies that allow theaters to stay open for those lesser-attended (but infinitely more precious) Classic Movies screenings, though, so in a way that block-long line out the door warmed my heart even more than watching another Old Hollywood relic in the Renet Brunet Classic Movie slot.

As you can tell by the title, Touch of Evil isn’t much of a heartwarmer anyway.  Welles’s major-studio noir is a shockingly grim & grimy crime picture; it’s also shockingly gorgeous.  It opens with a minutes-long, spectacularly complex tracking shot that follows two unsuspecting couples crossing into America from a Mexican border town, unaware that a bomb has been planted in the trunk of one couple’s car.  It’s a perfect illustration of the Hitchcock method of building suspense, showing the audience “the bomb under the table” long before the characters it threatens are aware of it.  That back-alley bombing is also a great source of political intrigue, leading to a feature-length investigation of the whos, wheres, whens, and whys behind the dynamite.  The detective from the Mexican side of the border is played by Charlton Heston (in a queasily outdated choice of cross-racial casting) as a noble, idealistic rule-follower who believes in the sanctity of the law.  The corrupt cop from the American side is played by Welles himself, matching the immense beauty of his camera work with his immense hideousness as a crooked, racist villain who frames young Mexican men for crimes they obviously did not commit.  In the movie’s view of law enforcement, all cops are bastards, but American cops are the slimiest, most repulsive bastards of all – something Welles conveys in the prophetic prosthetics that exaggerate his own facial features (by guessing exactly what his real-life face would eventually become) and in the exaggerated camera angles that frame that face at monstrous angles in sweaty close-ups.  His villainy really goes overboard when he attacks Heston for the transgression of actually following the law by dispatching drug-cartel biker boys to torment the detective’s naive, newlywed wife – a young Janet Leigh, who hadn’t yet learned from Norman Bates to beware handsome creeps at remote motels.  The whole picture is slimy & ugly in its heart, but stunningly beautiful to the eye.

Like every other Orson Welles picture after Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil suffers from discord between its director and its studio.  The version presented at The Prytania was the one most widely available to modern audiences: a digital restoration of a 1998 re-edit that attempted to reconstruct the film according to an Orson Welles memo to the execs at Universal, detailing how he would like to see it sequenced.  Touch of Evil had a much less prestigious reputation before that late-90s re-issue, since the studio butchered Welles’s vision in the editing room, leaving it just as much of a tattered mess as other notoriously muddled works like The Magnificent Ambersons.  The familiar tropes & rhythms of noir are a useful anchor for Welles’s studio-compromised fragments of genius, though, which you won’t find in Ambersons but is apparent in both Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai.  In the memo-corrected edit, there’s still some initial confusion about what action is set on which side of the border, but it feels like a small concern if you allow yourself to get swept up in the flow of the overachieving camerawork and in the jurisdictional clashes between the two nations’ police.  Thankfully, the Welles memo at least helped re-establish in the current edit that Heston’s investigation of American corruption should be intercut with the harassment & drugging of his wife, whom he’s essentially abandoned so he can play hero.  There’s incredible tension in watching this detective fall further down the rabbit hole while leaving ample time for the vultures outside to pick at his family, which I assume was lost in the initial edit that separated their stories as distinct & sequential rather than rottenly concurrent.  There’s still plenty space for smaller, less expected touches in the current tight-noir edit, though, most notably in Marlene Dietrich & Zsa Zsa Gabor’s small roles as border-town sex workers and in Welles’s own onscreen character-choice grotesqueries.

I didn’t walk out of The Prytania into the Sunday afternoon sunshine feeling “good”, exactly, even if it’s always a treat to watch such a formidable Old Hollywood classic for the first time on a proper screen.  There’s plenty to feel queasy about in Touch of Evil beyond Heston’s “respectful” brownface performance and the ogling of Leigh’s writhing, incapacitated body.  Welles leans into the downbeat misery of noir pretty hard here, the same way he leans into his camera’s extreme Dutch angles.  The movie’s not supposed to leave you feeling good about the American “justice” system, an effect Welles ensured would come across by playing the ugly, sweaty face of that system himself.  So, I desperately needed the little pick-me-up of seeing a huge crowd gather outside to watch Oppenheimer (another massive downer) on 70mm: a sign that The Movies aren’t fully dead yet, and that I’ll get to see a projection of some other butchered-by-the-studio Orson Welles picture in the future, thanks to the real money-makers like Barbenheimer.  

-Brandon Ledet

Sisu (2023)

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I got a huge kick out of Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s Yuletide creature feature Rare Exports when we watched it for a Movie of the Month discussion a few years back.  It has a morbid sense of humor and a willingness to go there when tormenting wayward children that’s missing in most modern echoes of traditional fairy tales.  However, I did get hung up on how overtly macho the film felt for a folk tale, writing “This is a weirdly masculine movie.  The central relationships between a boy and his single father, a boy and his bully/bestie, and a boy and his Christmas demon are all variances of masculine bonding or masculine conflict.  In fact, I don’t recall there being a single female character represented onscreen.”  I had somehow forgotten that aspect of Helander’s debut by the time I borrowed his English-language breakout from the library last month, but it came roaring back in an instant as soon as I pressed play.  It turns out Helander’s just as much of a consistently meatheaded director as David Ayer, S. Craig Zahler, or Michael Bay – a perspective that felt like a weird fit for the material when he was making a modern-day fairy tale about a Christmas demon but is perfectly suited for a shoot-em-up action cheapie about a one-man army.  In Rare Exports, Helander’s ultra-masc roid rage sensibilities were a total surprise; in Sisu, they’re par for the course.

The term “sisu” is helpfully translated in an opening title card as a Finnish word for “a white-knuckle form of courage and unimaginable determination.”  That cultural concept is personified by a defected Finnish commando (Jorma Tommila), described by his enemies as an “immortal” “one-man death squad.”  Fed up with the international politics and personal tragedies of WWII, he’s reinvented himself as an independent gold prospector.  His new solemn, solitary life is interrupted by a small band of Nazis enacting a “scorched Earth policy” on the land where he discovers his first goldmine.  When the Nazis attempt to steal that gold directly out of his pockets, he fights back with unimaginable fury, systematically destroying each of their blood-sack bodies and, as lagniappe, setting their sex-slave prisoners free in the process.  He goes about his work of killing the offending Nazis with the stoic silence of classic, rugged masculinity, acting as if he owes Brad Pitt one hundred Nazi scalps the same way a steel mill worker owes the punch-clock eight hours of repetitive labor.  The movie sticks to a consistent, predictable rhythm as a result, even if that rhythm is frequently punctuated by stabs, gunshots, and explosions.  I’d call it the old-man version of John Wick if it weren’t for the fact that Liam Neeson was already making old-man John Wicks before there was a John Wick around to riff on.

There are more women onscreen in Sisu than there are in Rare Exports, but they’re mostly props.  They start the film as captive rape victims for the Nazi scum, then are eventually set free to transform into an entirely different macho trope: chicks with guns.  In Sisu, women are victims, dogs are target practice, and men are wordless murder machines with an equal deficit of interior life.  The results are reasonably entertaining for a grotesque slapstick actioner that’s just out to crush 90 Nazi skulls in 90 minutes or less or your pizza’s free.  As soon as its English narration track and faux-vintage chapter titles hit in the opening seconds, my standards for it to succeed plummeted to DTV action levels, and the movie seemed complacent to meet me there.  If Helander’s going to stick around in the cultural zeitgeist, I do think his macho sensibilities and delight in over-the-top action choreography would be perfectly suited for direct-to-streaming action novelties.  In an interview extra on my library’s DVD, he openly admits to the limitations of his aesthetic, explaining, “I’m pretty certain you will never see me doing a film which happens in a kitchen where husband and wife are arguing about some stupid shit.  To me, you have to have big adventure.”  In other words, he’s fully committed to the cause of meathead cinema and, thus, restricted to the payoffs & shortcomings therein.

-Brandon Ledet