reviews

Disco Dancer (1982)

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I love a good copyright infringement free-for-all.  In the cheap-o Brucesploitation picture The Dragon Lives Again, “Bruce Lee” (i.e., Bruce Leong) teams up with Popeye the Sailor Man to beat up James Bond, Dracula, The Exorcist and “Clint Eastwood” in Hell.  In The Seventh Curse, a James Bond-styled super-agent goes on international Indiana Jones adventures into ancient temples, ultimately teaming up with a Rambo-knockoff sidekick to defeat a flying Xenomorph with batwings; it’s somehow just as thrilling as it sounds.  At first glance, the Bollywood Saturday Night Fever knockoff Disco Dancer doesn’t appear to share the same free-flowing creative collage approach as those post-modern Hong Kong actioners, but as its collection of “borrowed” pop culture ephemera builds (especially on its soundtrack), so does its disregard for the real-world details of its disco nightclub setting.  Disco Dancer ultimately ends up being a huge improvement on Saturday Night Fever—actually delivering the delirious, retro fun audiences misremember the somber American film as—precisely because it feels no fealty to borrowing from just one inspiration source, nor sticking to just one tone.  It’s made entirely of pre-existing building blocks, but it manages to arrange them in new, exciting configurations that out-entertain the wholly “original” (i.e., more subtly derivative) creations it resembles.

In case its Saturday Night Fever inspiration source was not crystal clear, Disco Dancer is careful to include a scene where its dancing, fighting disco hero Jimmy (Mithun Chakraborty) dance-struts across a nighttime bridge in flared pants to a rolling Bee Gees bass line.  In the very next scene, he’s shown dancing alone in his bedroom under an actual Saturday Night Fever poster to underline the connection.  Most of Disco Dancer‘s other copyright oversteps are limited to its soundtrack, give or take a rival disco gang menacingly snapping in-rhythm like extras from West Side Story.  An instrumental backing track mimics the melody of Grease‘s “You’re the One that I Want,” scrambling the film’s Travolta reference points beyond recognition.  More importantly, the first big disco number, “Auva Avua” opens the story with a spectacular discofied rip-off of “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which should be all you need to know to understand that this film is great.  To be honest, most of the soundtrack’s other borrowed melodies from French disco & Indonesian rock legends soared miles over my head; it was the familiarity, recognition, and delight of that opening Buggles-inspired dance track that put me in a great mood, and the movie never let me down from that high.

If defining Disco Dancer by its collection of loose, disparate influences is making it sound creatively bankrupt, I’m doing a poor job selling its charms.  As a cultural artifact, it’s a wonderful snapshot of disco’s absurdity as an international export, with large, seated crowds watching disco performers from stadium benches as if they were watching an orchestra, not a participatory dance fad.  As a rags-to-riches, rise-to-fame story for a street musician climbing the ranks of the then-burgeoning Bombay disco scene, it’s a winning melodrama – especially in his mission to musically smite the wealthy bullies who publicly shamed his mother when he was a helpless, borderline-homeless child.  As a martial-arts action epic, it’s got plenty of deliciously over-the-top details, like the hero’s third-act development of “guitar phobia” zapping his ability to perform on stage, thanks to a guitar lethally weaponized by his enemies.  Disco Dancer was a huge international hit in its time (especially in the Soviet Union & China, oddly enough), and that success had nothing to do with its familiarity to pre-existing works.  It’s its own uniquely beautiful, deliriously unhinged novelty, often reaching a disco-scored, light-up-dancefloor euphoria you won’t find in any of the better known works it vaguely resembles.  I just also think its willingness to freely borrow from those works—totally unconcerned with accusations of theft—is an essential part of its appeal.  This kind of free-association borrowing is an artform in itself, not something to be ashamed of.

-Brandon Ledet

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022)

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Do you remember the great Bacon Craze of the early 2010s, when it was considered hilarious to burden your friends with bacon-scented candles and bacon-flavored chewing gum as novelty gifts?  Do you remember further back, in the mid-aughts, when you could buy “Vote for Pedro” t-shirts at practically any gas station?  How about “Mr. T in Your Pocket” talking keychains?  “Git-R-Done” trucker hats?  Big Mouth Billy Bass? 

Imagine someone handing you one of these ancient totems and expecting a full-bellied laugh in return, as if it were the darndest thing you’ve never seen.  The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a decade-old Nicolas Cage meme with nothing novel to say about his unique talents or celebrity.  It’s a faint but direct echo of the “Not the bees!” YouTube clip that kickstarted the massively talented actor’s meme era in the first place.  It offers nothing that Andy Samberg didn’t already accomplish with his “Get in the Cage” segments on SNL an entire decade ago, including bringing in Nicolas Cage as himself to emphasize that he’s in on the bit.  It might as well be an I Can Has Cheezburger? coffee table book or Chuck Norris Facts: The Movie; it is that outdated, that useless.

Nicolas Cage stars as two versions of himself: a has-been who can’t land a decent role & an imaginary-friend version of his younger, more successful self that occasionally swoops in for pep talks. Admittedly, it’s fun to watch these two Nic Cages make out in one of the only instant-classic Cagian stunts anyone will remember from this film after the next few months (thanks to its potential for “Not the bees!” style memeage).  The problem is that only one of those versions of Nic Cage ever existed in the real world: the imaginary one. He was a genuine Hollywood movie star in his youth; that is undeniable. It’s the positioning of the “real”, modern Nic Cage as a total loser who hasn’t been doing anything worthy of his talents since the action-blockbuster heyday of movies like Face/Off, The Rock, and Con Air that rings embarrassingly false.  While a lot of dismissive cynics consider Cage more meme than actor at this point, anyone who’s regularly engaging with his output knows he’s in his full-on auteur period, putting in consistently great, idiosyncratic work for smaller, more niche audiences that are always happy to see him. 

Pedro Pascal plays a true believer, a proud member of that niche audience who challenges Cage’s total-loser narrative.  His claim that “Mandy is a masterpiece” is the only acknowledgement that the Nicolas Cage brand is still going strong.  Most of the other references to his acting work are stuck in his 80s & 90s heyday, citing Guarding Tess & Captain Corelli’s Mandolin as Nic Cage deep cuts.  Pascal’s enthusiasm for Cage’s talents makes the film mildly affable, especially as Cage gradually bonds with his #1 fan as a genuine, cherished friend.  There’s a plot in which the real-life Nic Cage gets recruited by the CIA for a covert spy mission on Pascal’s remote island compound (again, covering territory already run into the ground by Samberg on Weekend Update), but the movie’s at its sweetest & most recommendable when it focuses on the two dudes just being good buds, talking about movies & enjoying each other’s company.  It’s too bad the premise is so outdated and the jokes are such a constant eyeroll.  When it’s not commenting on Cage’s memeability or lost celebrity, it’s halfway cute.

I will credit The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent with this: it got me thinking about Nic Cage’s Hollywood celebrity heyday in a way I haven’t engaged with much in recent years.  There was once a time when he could play Normal Guys in films like The Family Man & It Could Happen to You without raising an eyebrow.  That era has decisively come to an end and is likely worth revisiting, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been doing anything worthwhile in recent years.  Nicolas Cage is not a loser.  He is not a stale, stagnant meme.  He is our best working actor, and he gets more fascinating every year.  I likely should have looked to Keith Phipps’s new book Age of Cage for a more nuanced summation of where Cage is currently at (and where he’s already been) instead of expecting that kind of up-to-date critical analysis from a best-bros comedy about the CIA.  Still, it’s hard to laugh at a joke you’ve already heard a thousand times before, especially when the setup to the punchlines is no longer anchored to the modern world.

-Brandon Ledet

The Heroic Trio (1993)

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I recently read an encyclopedia of classic Hong Kong action movies titled Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head, which is overloaded with hundreds of capsule reviews of the once-vibrant industry’s greatest hits.  Each blurb makes each title sound like the most explosively badass movie you’ve never seen, fixating on the industry’s unmatched talent for absurd plot details, tactile fight choreography, and for-their-own-sake visual gags.  It’s a daunting surplus of giddy movie recommendations, with no real guide for what to prioritize besides whatever happens to be available to access.  After being pushed to check out the bonkers Indiana Jones mutation The Seventh Curse by the We Love to Watch podcast crew, I had no clear path for where to go next.  Thankfully, that decision was taken out of my hands by happenstance.  I lucked into a small haul of Hong Kong action DVDs (some bootlegs, some official releases, all pictured below) during a recent trip to Goodwill, which included the 1993 superhero oddity The Heroic Trio.  This was the same week that Criterion announced an upcoming Blu-ray release of The Heroic Trio and the same month that one of its stars, Michele Yeoh, was gifted a career-high acting showcase in the Daniels’ own novelty superhero picture Everything Everywhere All at Once, which made it the most obvious must-see.  I’m often overwhelmed deciding what movie to watch next when I’m left to my own devices, so it’s always a pleasure when the universe steps in to program that selection for me.

I am sure that the new Criterion restoration of The Heroic Trio will lovingly highlight the film’s technical beauty and pop-art iconography in a way few audiences have seen before.  I’ll still admit that I was charmed by the tape-warp warmth of the bootleg DVD that found its way into my collection, since it plays right into the film’s vintage appeal.  The Heroic Trio is a retro superhero team-up featuring the masked & powerful heroines Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung), Wonder Woman (Anita Mui), and Invisible Woman (Yeoh) – each a total badass.  They start disorganized & distrustful of each other as a mysterious case of 19 kidnapped babies derails Hong Kong into chaos.  Eventually, they find love & unity amongst their super selves to fight the methane-breathing sewer god responsible for those kidnappings, brutally confronting the gender-ambiguous deity in their underground lair/baby-storage facility.  Tonally, the film plays like the kind of R-rated kids’ movie that you’d normally find through American labels like Troma & Full Moon, even featuring the children’s nursery rhyme “London Bridge is Falling Down” as a soundtrack motif.  It is S&M superhero cinema for the permanently immature, indulging in vintage Saturday-morning-TV cheese with far more gore, kink fashion, and shock-value baby deaths than any child should be consuming with their breakfast cereal.  It just executes that volatile immaturity with exquisite technical skill you will not find in its low-budget American equivalents, especially in the beauty of its complex, tactile fight choreography.

Michele Yeoh’s inclusion in the titular trio was my prompt to watch the film and, dramatically, she gets the most to do.  Invisible Woman is the only complex character of the bunch, starting off as the brainwashed lackey of the baby-snatching Evil Master but eventually coming around to join arms with her master’s enemies.  I still found Maggie Cheung to be the MVP of the trio as Thief Catcher, providing most of the film’s comic relief as a Bugs Bunny-style anarchist, a motorcycle-riding vigilante in dressed in bike shorts & lingerie; Tank Girl, eat your heart out.  Anita Mui is saddled with the least exciting part as Wonder Woman, who—as her name implies—is the most stereotypical comic book hero of the bunch.  Her mask & cape iconography and secret-identity shenanigans are essential in grounding the film in a recognizable superhero genre, since most of its in-the-moment indulgences are more aligned with Hong Kong action antics than with comic book tradition.  Director Johnnie To uses the superhero team-up template as a playground for martial arts chaos & Looney Tunes goofballery, playing around with as much Evil Dead POV camera movement, wuxia-style wire work, and bone-crunching brutality as his scrappy budget will allow.  He gives each heroine room to establish separate, distinct personalities in the film’s early scenes, then smashes them together like action figures during an especially sugared-up recess.  It’s the most gleeful, energizing movie experience I can think of that depicts the death of a dozen innocent babies.

Watching The Heroic Trio left me no better equipped to select my next Hong Kong action title.  Yeoh, Cheung, and Mui each have extensive careers in martial arts classics exactly like this.  To was equally prolific in his directorial career without them.  All four of those collaborators reunited for a direct sequel to The Heroic Trio titled Executioners, also released in 1993, but it is not regarded as any of their respective best.  Below, I’ll list the essential continued-viewing titles for Michelle Yeoh alone, as suggested by the authors of Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head, just to demonstrate the overwhelming wealth of great, over-the-top Hong Kong action pics there are to choose from.  And she’s only one of the industry’s many, many creative geniuses.  I’ll likely just wait until another title falls directly into my lap the way The Heroic Trio did, taking the decision out of my hands.   Otherwise, I’ll browse these titles & blurbs for hours without ever settling on one, the modern movie streamer’s dilemma.

Michelle Yeoh’s “Selected Filmography,” per Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head, printed 1996:
Magnificent Warriors (1986)
Royal Warriors (1986)
Yes, Madam (1986)
Police Story 3: Supercop (1993)
Project S (1993)
The Tai Chi Master (1993)
Butterfly and Sword (1993)
The Heroic Trio (1993)
Wonder 7 (1994)

-Brandon Ledet

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

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I enjoyed the Daniels’ debut feature Swiss Army Man, which I categorized on my Top Films of 2016 list as “an unconventional love story, a road trip buddy comedy, and an indie pop musical about a farting corpse with a magical boner.”  Even as a fan of that understandably divisive gross-out, I still agree with the consensus that their follow-up film is a huge step up for the music video director-duo.  Everything Everywhere All at Once triples down on the Cold Stone Creamery approach to filmmaking that the Daniels toyed with in Swiss Army Man, mashing every cinematic indulgence the directors could manage—from alternate-dimension sci-fi to vaudevillian slapstick to sincere Wong Kar-Wai homage—into a massive, delectable headache.  And yet it securely anchors that chaos to a solid emotional rock in a way that Swiss Army Man could not, which left it feeling adrift.  I don’t even know that I would encourage fans of Everything Everywhere double back to check out the Daniels’ debut.  You probably already knew in 2016 whether a farting-corpse boner comedy was going to appeal to you, and that likely has not changed.  In contrast, Everything Everywhere crams in a little taste of something for absolutely everyone, so much so that you’ll find yourself recommending it to family & coworkers despite it featuring its own gross-out gags involving butt-plugs & hotdog fellatio.

The elevator pitch for this unlikely crowd-pleaser is that it offers a glimpse into an alternate reality where The Matrix was directed by Michel Gondry.  It’s nice there.  Everything Everywhere is structured around a standard-issue comic book plot in which a maniacal supervillain attempts to gain ultimate power over the infinite alternate timelines of “the Multiverse,” with only a specially equipped Chosen One hero standing in their way.  It distorts that superhero blockbuster template through the hand-crafted dream logic & heart-on-sleeve sentimentality of our twee yesteryear, bringing an earnestness & personality to the genre that’s sorely missing from its megacorporate equivalents.  The superpower that allows ordinary characters to leap between these infinite timelines is the cosmic surprise of an unexpected, improbable act, “the less it makes sense the better.” The Daniels openly dare you to roll your eyes at the “LOL! So random!” humor of that premise, packing the screen with randomly generated totems like googly eyes, talking racoons, pro wrestling finishers, lethal fanny packs, and an all-powerful, apocalyptic Everything Bagel.  However, every silly, randomsauce image is lovingly crafted and thoughtfully anchored to the film’s emotional rock, earning its place on the screen beyond a for-its-own-sake indulgence.  They somehow even make their Chosen One heroine’s Deadpool-style observations about the absurdity of her predicament (especially her stubborn mispronunciations of the villain’s name) feel well-earned & natural to her character.  It’s an incredible feat.

The aforementioned emotional rock is the lead performance from the always-solid Michelle Yeoh.  The infinite alternate timelines premise demands that Yeoh play infinite alternate versions of herself, and she excels at every turn.  Yeoh is funny.  Yeoh is frustrating.  Yeoh breaks your heart into a thousand shards, then lovingly glues them together again.  The Daniels obviously have immense respect for her range as a performer. They allow her to show off both the stern dramatic severity & classic Hong Kong action superheroics she’s already famous for, then demonstrate the thousands of possibilities in-between those extremes we’ve been robbed of seeing onscreen.  Ke Huy Quan & Stephanie Hsu are also wonderful as her husband & daughter, respectfully, exploding the boundaries of what audiences have been trained to expect from their Nice Guy side character & flamboyant Gay Villain archetypes.  It’s Yeoh who leaves you in total stunned awe, though, especially as the rare Strong Female Character who’s allowed to be a genuinely complicated person.  We’re introduced to our hero as the absolute worst version of herself across the vast multiverse.  She’s terrible at the enormous entirety of everything, most crucially in the way she relates to her family as they frantically scurry through their shared daily routine.  Watching her learn to be a better person by breaking out of her rigid-thinking patterns & emotional cowardice is inspirational, something I can’t say about most Chosen One superheroes.

It’s easy to be reductive about what makes Everything Everywhere great, since the Daniels are willing to pummel you with an infinite supply of absurdly disparate, deeply silly imagery.  Pushing past that impulse, it’s impressive that a loud, chaotic superhero movie can prompt you to evaluate how you live your daily life and how you can work towards becoming the best possible version of yourself.  Considering that I only walked away from their last picture with fond memories of laughing at farts & boners, I’m okay conceding this follow-up was a major improvement.  My own rigid, stubborn, contrarian impulses would usually have me defending their earlier, messier work against their popular break-out, but in this instance the consensus take is the correct one.

-Brandon Ledet

It is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971)

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Between the over-the-top caricatures of Christopher Guest comedies, the alarmist naturesploitation horror of The Hellstrom Chronicle, and the vile oil industry propaganda of Louisiana Story, I’ve seen the mockumentary format used for a wide range of tones & purposes.  As disparate as those movies are, though, they’re all decidedly insincere.  They imitate the methods and intellectual authority of documentary films to say things they do not really mean, whether for amusement or for profit.  I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a fully sincere mockumentary before recently checking out the 1971 political bombthrower It is Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, which made it difficult to pinpoint the film’s intent in its early scenes.  It is so militant and inflammatory in its political rhetoric that I initially assumed the film was being flippantly ironic, contrasting its narrator’s attacks on the middle-class gays of 1970s Berlin against images that celebrated their lives & fashion.  By the time the film concludes on a lengthy, didactic call-to-action, however, there is no question that it is 100% serious in its seething distaste for queer ambitions to assimilate into “normal” society instead of radically reforming it.  It’s surprisingly convincing in its arguments too, even if its politics and its imagery feel self-contradictory.

It is Not the Homosexual is an explicitly Marxist call-to-arms that ridicules Berlin gays for wanting to assimilate into the bourgeoisie instead of organizing to tear it down.  It is incendiary enough to wildly overstep its bounds, frequently coming across as outright homophobic (and transphobic to boot) despite obviously being rooted in the community it’s critiquing.  True activism is often ugly & combative, though, and there’s something admirable about its willingness to throw punches for the sake of gay liberation even when they hit the wrong targets.  It’s easy to cringe at the narrator’s assertion that gay marriage is a “ridiculous imitation” of a heterosexual institution.  It’s even easier roll your eyes at the hardline stance that all art must be outright rejected by queer radicals, as it is a leisure activity of the wealth class (a stance that is in direct conflict with director Rosa von Praunheim’s background in fringe avant-garde cinema).  Getting indignant over those deliberate provocations would have you overlook legitimate calls for the gay men of Berlin to come out of the closet, or to establish political solidarity with the Black Panthers and the Women’s Lib movement.  In its broadest strokes, it’s making the same righteously leftist political maneuvers that Tongues Untied made nearly two decades later, or that modern Twitter activists make against the liberal assimilation politics of Mayo Pete in the 2020s.  It’s just willing to jab its own potential comrades in an attempt to wake them up and get them pissed.

The film also doubles as a genuine documentary of early-70s gay culture in Berlin, despite its intent to radically overhaul it.  Even while the narrator is deriding the over-the-top fashion, tea-room cruising, and drag bar pageantry of the scene, you’re constantly aware that the footage that illustrates those bullet points is invaluable documentation of gay culture at that exact place & time.  The flat, inflectionless delivery of the narration compounds the tension between image & intent, explaining how to live a more virtuous gay life in the style of a vintage 1950s hygiene reel.  It’s often been referred to as a “camp” film as a result, but I believe its political intent is sincere.  It was so sincere, in fact, that it’s credited for igniting the modern gay liberation movement in Germany, becoming a legitimate part of history beyond just being an incidental historical document.  So, here we have a mockumentary that is both a genuine documentary and a sincere political manifesto.  It’s too firmly tethered to a fictional narrative to be understood as an essay film—structuring its tour of Berlin gay life through the assimilation of a fictional character named Daniel—and yet it operates like no other mockumentary I can name.  Even if it weren’t for its record, rejection, and alteration of German queer culture a half-century ago, the film would still be highly significant for the way it toys with tone & form.  Rosa von Praunheim’s political convictions are just so furious & clearly defined that you have to confront the ideas before you can scrutinize how they’re delivered.

-Brandon Ledet

Deadly Cuts (2022)

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There’s something charmingly retro about the hair salon ensemble comedy Deadly Cuts, both in its plotting and in the specific niche of the festival-circuit indie comedies it recalls.  This is a slobs-vs-snobs story about eccentric workers of an Irish hair salon getting one over on the gangsters, politicians, and big-city competition that bully them for being fabulous.  Not only do the hairstylists of the titular Deadly Cuts (derided for being a lowly “pun salon”) claim victory over their bullies by winning a televised competition, but they also use the prize money to save their small suburb of Piglinstown from financial ruin.  It’s the standard “save the community center” plot from every classic underdog comedy, but with a Christopher Guest-style talent show climax.  Deadly Cuts recalls the funniest bits in Sordid Lives, Strictly Ballroom, and Best in Show, wringing some huge, often crass laughs out of a TV sitcom budget.  It feels like the kind of movie that would have gathered a large but quiet cult following over the years had it come out in the time of video store rentals & limited movie options on cable (like all three of those comparison points).  I don’t know how much room there is for that kind of sleeper hit to gain traction in the modern pop culture landscape, but the movie itself is fun & charming enough that you wish it could time travel back to a more favorable era.

Maybe it’s that late-to-the-table, familiar appeal that convinced writer-director Rachel Carey she needed to zhuzh up her debut feature with a killer hook.  The oddball characters that work the film’s warring hair salons are distinct & funny enough on their own that the movie doesn’t really need an extra gimmick to make it worthwhile, but it does need to get eyeballs on the screen somehow.  Carey chose murder.  While the Deadly Cuts stylists are already super busy preparing for the avant-garde hairstyle competition Ahh Hair (broadcast nationally on Fad TV), where they’re outgunned by the skilled but passionless snobs of competing big-city salons, they also have to fight off local gangsters who extort them for “protection” money and local politicians who’re eager to knock their business down for an easy gentrification cash-in.  It would have been more than enough for our foul-mouthed heroines to smite their enemies with outrageous haircuts, but Carey goes the extra mile by having them literally smite their enemies with a series of slapstick murders.  The main conflict of the film is still in watching them beat the odds as the underdog favorites in the Ahh Hair competition, but there’s an added layer of tension in hoping they’ve disposed of their enemies’ bodies efficiently enough to collect their trophy before arrest.  The most wholesome thing about the movie is watching the Piglinstown community cheer them on from home (or, more accurately, from pub) despite it being an open secret that their scissors have been cutting more than hair.

I would love to live in a world where Deadly Cuts became a sleeper sleepover hit, inspiring a generation of young sassy weirdos to quote catchphrases like “Let’s do hair” and “As I live and weave” amongst each other as a long-running “inside” joke.  I just don’t see a lot of potential for the next Drop Dead Gorgeous or the next Romy & Michele to emerge from this current, disorganized zeitgeist, which is partly why this particular low-budget comedy feels at least twenty years out of place on the timeline.  It’s a major success in the two ways that count most, though: it’s funny & cute from start to end.  The challenge is in convincing your friends to watch it so you have someone to bounce your favorite quotes off of while everyone else in earshot has no idea what you’re babbling about.

-Brandon Ledet

Psycho Ape! (2020)

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The mini-DV backyard horror comedy Psycho Ape! proudly promises to be the “dumbest, cheapest” ape movie of all time, and then it delivers exactly that.  In case the audience dare question the scope of that mission statement, the movie is careful to catalog as many dumb-and-cheap ape movies as it can for context.  It treats retro ape-movie ephemera as sacred relics: an official Congo boardgame, a pristine Blu-ray restoration of Schlock, a store-bought gorilla suit you’d expect to see in a Bowery Boys comedy, etc.  Single-scene characters debate their personal rankings of famous primate franchises like King Kong, Planet of the Apes, and Mighty Joe Young as background-noise hangout banter.  When it devolves into a traditional bodycount slasher (with a gorilla-suit murderer instead of a kitchen-knife killer, naturally), the psych expert on the monster’s trail is Dr. Zoomis: a cheeky portmanteau of Dr. Zaius & Dr. Loomis.  Psycho Ape! goes absurdly overboard proving its credentials in dumb-and-cheap ape cinema scholarship, so that when it claims to be the “dumbest, cheapest” ape movie of all time, you have no choice but to take its word for it.  I’m probably supposed to be aging out of this kind of bad-on-purpose, Troma-tinged schlock at this point in my life, but it’s impossible not to be charmed by something so lovingly reverent of such a disreputable, outdated subgenre – especially since it cites my personal favorite title, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, as one of the all-time greats.

On a dark & eerie night “25 years ago” (so, say, 1995), a “teenage girl slumber party” is crashed by a violent gorilla with an unquenchable bloodlust.  His weapon of choice is a standard-issue Chiquita banana, but it wreaks the same bloody havoc as kitchen knives & meat cleavers in traditional slashers.  Although most of the slumber-party teens are bludgeoned, stabbed, and choked to death by the phallic fruit, the titular psychotic primate does leave behind one anointed final girl: the obsessive ape-movie cineaste Nancy Banana (played by Kansas Bowling, director of the similar retro-schlock throwback B.C. Butcher).  In the following decades, the gorilla continues to kill at random, while Nancy Banana pines for the love that could’ve been, dedicating her life to becoming “the next Jane Goodall” (by which she means she really wants to fuck that ape).  They inevitably re-unite, and the film takes wild detours from its initial slasher template into retro romcom & beach party tropes.  If you’re at all familiar with the history of ape-falls-in-love-with-platinum-blonde cinema, you know that their cutesy romantic bond can only end in tragedy – complete with an obligatory spoof of the genre’s iconic “Twas beauty killed the beast” stinger.  The main difference is that this example also starts with tragedy and is careful to intersperse as many bloody banana stabbings it can afford in-between its cutesy romcom gags.

I just put more effort into pulling a coherent plot out of Psycho Ape! than director Addison Binek intended his audience to bother with.  Structurally, it’s more of a loose sketch comedy than it is a linear narrative.  Binek raised $7,500 in production funds through Kickstarter, then spent it all on goofing off with a gorilla costume, a camera, and as many friends as he could gather (seemingly including a ton of Troma alumni).  It’s basically a hangout movie for sickos, Motern for edgelords.  As proudly dumb & cheap as Psycho Ape! is, though, it’s anything but lazy.  Most hodgepodge horror comedies shot in this scatterbrained, tangential style are infuriatingly lazy (see: Da Hip Hop Witch), but Psycho Ape! establishes a distinctive internal logic that transcends any need for plot or scene-to-scene logic.  It’s a temporal mash-up of schlock ephemera from the past half-century: 50s Benny Hill grabassery, 60s lava lamp psychedelia, 70s first-wave slashings, 80s splatstick gore, post-Kevin Williamson 90s meta horror, 2000s digi-cam backyard movies, 2010s YouTube pranks, sub-Sarah Squirm 2020s gross-outs, and timeless scat & murder gags to tie them all together.  Some of the most sublime moments of the entire picture are just throwaway transition shots of Nancy Banana dancing with her gorilla beau in a vintage yellow bikini, with everyone involved openly laughing at how idiotic the project is on a conceptual level.  The fun they’re having on-“set” is infectious.  It’s a reckless party movie dressed up like a bodycount horror, but it’s oddly sincere in its dedication to having a good time and to honoring the ape-horror comedies that came before it.  I had a blast.

-Brandon Ledet

RRR (2022)

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As I’ve already stated in reviews for titles like Karnan, War, Saaho, Master, and 2.0, there is nothing Hollywood has to offer than can out-entertain mainstream Indian action cinema.  While American action franchises like the MCU and the Fast & Furious “saga” have long outlasted their initial novelty, Indian movie industries like Kollywood & Tollywood routinely escalate the explosive absurdism of the genre to new, delirious heights audiences have never seen before.  They recall Hong Kong’s heyday as the most exciting, inventive action scene in the world, when seemingly every new title—no matter how anonymous or cheap—instantly earned a place in the canon of all-time greats.  And even with that miles-high industry standard looming over him, director S.S. Rajamouli might be establishing himself as the very best craftsman in modern Indian actioners – recently striking big with the two-part action epic Baahubali, and now following it up with the ferociously entertaining RRR.  While most modern, bloated American action pics only offer a post-nap headache, a Rajamouli picture guarantees a skull-cracking good time.

RRR is an anti-colonialist epic about the power of friendship (and the power of bullets, and the power of wolves, and the power of grenades, and the power of tigers, and the power of dynamite, and the power of bears, oh my!).  The two friends at the center are a fantastically unlikely pair, frequently compared to fire & water, or “a volcano & a wildfire” in the rock anthems that underscore their volatile bond.  One is a militant supercop whose wuxia superheroics enable him to fight off an ocean of unruly protestors while armed with just a baton.  The other is a rural tribal leader on a one-man, Schwarzenegger-style mission to avenge his people against a governmental wrong – culminating in releasing wild, blood-starved animals at a fancy garden party in a righteous act of terrorism.  Separately, either one of these burly supermen could’ve been highlighted as the hero of their own over-the-top action adventure; likewise, either one could’ve played villain.  Instead, the movie gives them equal time as dual protagonists, eventually pushing them to form Voltron (see also: Krang, Master Blaster) as one united force against a common, worthier enemy: white British colonizers.  It’s a beautiful bromance between good, muscly buds, with plenty explosions, dance-offs, and feral animal attacks keeping up the energy as they fall further in bruv.

RRR never strays from its mission as a populist crowd-pleaser, but it’s also a fiercely political film.  Every white British colonizer that rules over 1920s Delhi in the picture is a sneering, monstrous piece of shit, and the entire arc of the unlikely cop-dissident friendship that forms at that colony’s fringes is pushing for their violent overthrow.  A pre-credits warning explains that the events of the film are fictional (a disclaimer that’s even less necessary than its companion warning that the wild “animals” are entirely CG), but both of the film’s dual heroes were real-life revolutionaries & populist heroes.  Alluri Sitarama Raju & Komaram Bheem violently revolted against colonialist rule in the 1920s & 30s in separate rebellions.  RRR functions as a kind of anti-imperialist fan fiction that turns those historical heroes of the people into modern heroes of the screen.  At the very least, it’s a much more politically purposeful & satisfying superhero team-up than any comic book or street-racing equivalent I can name in its genre’s American competition.  That probably goes without saying, but it is stunning to see populist cinema with sharpened fangs, since so much of what we’re fed at home is conspicuously toothless.

Anything else I could say in praise of RRR would just be a rambling list of exciting images.  You don’t need to hear about a motorcycle being launched as an explosive projectile any more than you need to hear about a wolf & a tiger brawling for dominance or our two heroes locking arms for the first time against a full-flame backdrop.  All you need to know is that friendship is beautiful, imperialism is evil, and S.S. Rajamouli knows how to entertain.  See RRR big & loud while you can.  Otherwise, you’ll regret missing the chance when it’s shrunken down to TV-scale on Netflix in a couple months.

-Brandon Ledet

X (2022)

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Considered in isolation, X is okay.  It can be a little phony & shallow in spurts, but it’s a decent enough slasher with novel themes & settings not usually explored in the genre.  Considered in a larger scope, it’s frustratingly stagnant. It’s getting extremely tired watching so many modern horror movies borrow their authenticity from vintage grindhouse cinema instead of genuinely attempting something new & risky.  Ti West directed his breakout calling-card movie House of the Devil thirteen long years ago, and he was already indulging this kind of 70s & 80s throwback aesthetic back then.  Hell, Rob Zombie directed House of 1,000 Corpses two decades ago.  There have certainly been better grindhouse throwbacks made since 2003, but I don’t know that there have been any transcendent triumphs that justify wallowing in that nostalgia swamp for this long instead of attempting something freshly upsetting.  Even when X excels in its go-for-broke moments of icky discomfort, I find myself questioning why this filmmaking mode is always set in the 70s or 80s now and buried under so many retro style markers.  It feels stuck, as if West and his contemporaries are outright afraid of modern settings & new tones, using disreputable vintage subgenres as a stylistic, contextual crutch.

Worse, X is outright condescending to one of the drive-in era subgenres it’s supposedly paying tribute to.  This is a grimy slasher film about a small crew of subprofessional pornographers who are slaughtered by elderly Evangelicals in rural Texas, 1979.  The film is most satisfying as a Texas Chainsaw-inspired creep-out, unleashing a long-isolated family of murderous weirdos onto the big-city “sex fiends” who invade their small town.  It’s also admirable in the way it highlights the true independent filmmaking spirit shared between horror & pornography in that era – two low-budget/high-profitability genres that were closely paralleled in their production & reputation.  It’s annoying, then, that X‘s view of late-70s pornography is so phony & patronizing.  Its six-person film crew is supposedly committed to creating porn that can be enjoyed & appreciated as legitimate art instead of disposable smut, but they’re working on a goofy cliché titled The Farmer’s Daughters, which they intend to distribute on VHS (despite shooting on film, a more expensive format).  There’s a bizarre dissonance there, as if they’re discussing the production of Equation to an Unknown but in practice filming scenes from Bat Pussy. The audience has no choice but to laugh at their artistic ambitions, since the conflict between their words and their work is played as a joke.  I hate to be such a scold about this, but presenting the concept of artful pornography as inherently funny is pretty hack & outdated at this point, especially if your recreation of it is the same funk guitar & screeching orgasms as a 90s sketch parody.  This goes doubly so if you’re borrowing the look & feel of vintage pornography—low-budget genre films made fully in earnest—to boost the entertainment value of your A24-distributed horror mainstreamer.  It’s insulting.

It’s a testament to Mia Goth’s fearlessness & “X-factor” appeal that X amounts to anything remarkable at all.  She stars in dual roles as a young porno actress and her elderly, sexually-repressed admirer: a lonely old woman whose Evangelical husband no longer desires her, so she violently seeks extramarital satisfaction with the unsuspecting youth they lure to their farm.  There’s something special about the intergenerational dynamic Goth shares between the two versions of herself.  She paws at her own flesh in lecherous hunger, willing to burn down the entire world just to get one last taste of youthful beauty before death.  The closest The Farmer’s Daughters’ crew gets to announcing X‘s central theme is when they lament “One day we’re going to be too old to fuck.” It’s an epiphany that doubles as a blanket excuse for hedonism and as a genuinely horrific vision of their sexless, geriatric future.  What I can’t figure out is why West felt the need to bury that vision under so much phony vintage-grindhouse cheese.  His heart really isn’t in the throwback genre markers anyway.  The porno recreations are treated as a joke, and the slasher scenes include cross-cutting transition techniques that have no discernible purpose besides feeling quaintly outdated.  It’s not enough that West mocks his pornographer characters for wanting to make ambitious art out of smut; he can’t even match their “avant-garde cinema” ambitions in his own work.  Only Goth comes through with anything worth championing here. At least she gets to do it twice.

As far as retro porno-horrors go, X is no Knife+Heart.  I’m not even convinced it’s the better Texas Chainsaw throwback from this year.  There is a great, discomforting slasher film lurking somewhere in the tension between those two genre divides, though.  It’s just a shame it wasn’t allowed to be its own thing without paying homage to an already overmined past.

-Brandon Ledet

Deep Water (2022)

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If you have any inclination to check out the new direct-to-Hulu erotic thriller Deep Water, it’s because you’re a fan of at least one of its main three collaborators: Adrian Lyne, Ben Affleck, or Ana de Armas.  No offense meant to down-the-call-sheet performers like Tracy Letts & Lil Rel Howery—nor to Euphoria-famous screenwriter Sam Levinson—but Lyne, Affleck, and de Armas are the film’s only legitimate draws.   Deep Water‘s allure is entirely dependent on extratextual details from those three Hollywood celebs’ careers and tabloid notoriety.  Not only is it the first Adrian Lyne film in 20 years, it’s also a return to the genre that made him infamous in the first place: erotic thrillers like 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal.  It’s also a film that’s only hype-building press coverage was of Ben Affleck & Ana de Armas’s post-production love affair, as detailed in months-long paparazzi photo shoots.  Otherwise, Deep Water does not truly exist in any practical or meaningful way, having been unceremoniously dumped into a Disney streaming platform sub-dungeon after a couple years of COVID-related distribution delays.  You need to care about at least one of its three central collaborators to know or care about Deep Water to begin with, and you need all three of them to be in top form for the movie to fully satisfy.  Unfortunately, it only edges you 2/3rds of the way there.

Ben Affleck & Ana de Armas are blameless in the movie’s failure to perform.  De Armas is electric as a frustrating housewife-gone-wild, whose extramarital affairs appear to be equally for their own drunken-hedonist sake and a kinky role-play game she shares with her cuckolded husband, Affleck.  As amusingly erratic & irritating as her performance can be, Deep Water is Ben Affleck’s movie through & through.  He’s in his Gone Girl mode here, scruffy & gloomy to the point of self-parody.  He pretends to be troubled by his wife’s sexual flings with younger men, only putting up with it to avoid divorce while they’re raising a young daughter.  De Armas knows exactly how much fun he’s having as the silently “suffering” husband at home, though, quipping “If you were married to anyone else, you’d be so fucking bored you’d kill yourself.”  What’s unclear is whether he’s staving off boredom by killing her lovers, and whether his wife is aware that murder is part of their kink.  Like clockwork, each of her boytoys either go missing or are found dead as a new affair heats up, then she immediately replaces them with the next victim-du-jour.  In the meantime, Affleck dutifully attends to their daughter and to his own coterie of pet snails, occasionally bragging about murdering his wife’s lovers with a self-amused smirk, daring the audience to believe him.  It’s a deeply strange performance, an even more convincing supervillain origin story than Joker.  All it’s missing is a scene where Affleck gets dragged away to Arkham Asylum, exclaiming “I was poly under duress until I became The Snail, avenger of cuckolds, the Willard of adultery!”

It’s a shame, then, that the director fails to reciprocate his actors’ efforts.  Adrian Lyne is limp & passionless in his framing, as if he knew from the beginning this was a straight-to-streaming affair.  The novelty of the uptown New Orleans setting offers little in the way of personality, unless you were somehow unaware until now that the wealthy are depraved perverts with no sense of taste.   There are some nods to tropes of the erotic thriller’s heyday, mostly in de Armas’s unhinged villainy as an over-sexed woman and in Affleck’s more covert villainy as a ruthless businessman (this time as a tech-bro contributor to drone warfare, an update to Michael Douglas’s finance-bro jobs in decades past).  The sex scenes are brief and missing the gender-warfare combativeness that made the genre’s original run so thrilling to begin with.  The most antagonistic the sex gets is when de Armas demands that Affleck kiss her ass, and Lyne follows his immediately buried face in uncomfortable close-up.  You can feel the movie come alive in moments like that, like when she spitefully removes a single pube from her tongue after initiating a blowjob she had no intent to finish.  The problem is those moments feel like foreplay for a literal war-of-the-sexes that never fully heats up.  And then, cruelly, the movie abruptly ends without a proper payoff – again, no intent to finish.  It feels as if Lyne wasn’t sure what he was making or why, leaving it to the editors to figure it out in post.  Too bad Paul Verhoeven didn’t get the job instead, since he already improved Lyne’s Fatal Attraction through revision & parody in Basic Instinct: the very best specimen of the genre, and proof in itself that Lyne is kind of a hack.

Deep Water is fun in spurts, but it’s missing a few escalated sex scenes and a proper climax.  There’s only one dead-weight participant in its central threesome, but it’s enough to spoil everyone else’s good time.  Affleck at least seemed like he had fun playing with those snails, but the whole movie needed to be as off-putting & slimy as his hobby.

-Brandon Ledet