For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the erotic Greek sci-fi thriller Blind Date (1984).
00:00 Oscars
04:45 Hundreds of Beavers (2024) 08:10 Eye of the Cat (1969) 11:42 Mamma Roma (1962) 16:16 Raising Arizona (1987) 19:20 Drive-Away Dolls (2024) 24:40 Dick (1999) 27:53 The Ritz (1976) 33:30 Gasoline Rainbow (2024) 39:03 Sleater-Kinney 41:05 Rebel Dykes (2021) 46:25 How to Have Sex (2024) 51:43 Blood of the Virgins (1967)
There’s nothing especially unique about the mid-90s cyberthriller Cyberstalker. Its novelty as internet chatroom techsploitation is not only drowned out by much bigger, louder Hollywood thrillers of its era like Hackers, Virtuosity, and The Net, but it also fought for video store shelf space with countless other direct-to-VHS cybertitles just like it: Cyberpunk (1990), Cyber-C.H.I.C. (1990), Cyber Tracker (1994), Cyberjack (1995), Cyber Bandits (1995), Cyber Zone (1995), Cyber Vengeance (1997), and cyber-so-on. Cyberstalker‘s home video distributor Troma has since attempted to distinguish it from that overflowing bucket of cyberschlock by retitling it The Digital Prophet, but there are no marketing strategies creative enough to save it from the anonymity of content dungeons like Amazon Prime, Tubi, and PlutoTV. The only distinguishing detail that might hook in an outsider audience who’s not a glutton for vintage cybertrash is a villainous role overperformed by horror convention veteran Jeffrey Combs, who counts as a major celebrity get for a film on this budget level.
Combs isn’t the main villain of Cyberstalker, though. He’s just her cult leader & heroin supplier. The titular cyberstalker is a reclusive chatroom nerd & comic book enthusiast played by Annie Biggs, an actress & director of little note. Troma’s “Digital Prophet” rebranding makes some sense as a marketing ploy, then, since it centers the much more recognizable Combs, who writes the comic books that drive the actual cyberstalker mad. Biggs plays a true believer in her dealer/abuser’s unhinged cyber-rhetoric, and her dedication to the cyber-cause gradually transforms her from a Lisa Loeb cosplayer shut-in to a cyborg dominatrix . . . at least in her mind. As she recruits victims from the Cyberthoughts comics’ Cyecom chatroom, they only see her as a nerd with a gun. The audience has the privilege of seeing the real world through her cyber-eyes, though, where her earthly body glitches out into PC monitor static and Windows 95 screensaver psychedelia. It’s a little disappointing that the most novel, cyber-specific imagery in the movie is all in the killer’s head, but it is real to her and, thus, temporarily real for us.
No-name, no-relation director Christopher Romero attempts to treat this chatroom-murders novelty subject like a standard serial killer thriller, borrowing from the disembodied, leather-gloved hands of gialli and the window-blinds shadows of noir instead of intently pushing the vaporwave CG imagery to its Brett Leonard extremes. In his most hilarious move, Romero even recreates the infamous Psycho shower scene with a handgun instead of a kitchen knife. Despite those misguided efforts to dull down & normalize the film’s cyberthriller elements, there are still plenty moments of 90s techsploitation kitsch that shine through: the first victim is strangled with a modem chord; all victims read their Cyecom chatroom correspondence out loud for the audience’s benefit, like Sandra Bullock in The Net; and the final showdown with the cops on the killer’s trail is staged in a warehouse stocked with Dell computer monitors. Of course, since there are countless other video store titles where you can find those exact mid-90s cyberthriller novelties, I should probably just be reporting on the one thing that might draw new audiences in to see Cyberstalker in particular: Combs. The production could only afford Combs for a few scenes, but he makes the most of them, especially when performing a gunshot wound during the final shootout, making a full meal of his death like Paul Reubens in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.
I rented Cyberstalker for one American dollar. It was a small fee to skip the ad breaks of whatever cyberequivalent I would’ve watched on Tubi instead if this one wasn’t so cheap to rent. I’m sure I would’ve gotten just as much (and just as little) out of Cyber-C.H.I.C., Cyber Vengeance, or whatever random noun Tubi would’ve autofilled as I typed the word “cyber” in the search bar, but I have no regrets watching this randomly selected cybertitle. If nothing else, I’ve never seen a serial killer character costumed to look like Lisa Loeb before. The closest example I can think of is Carol Kane in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer, but even she had more of a Big Bad Wolf in Grandma’s nightgown look.
Bong Joon-ho’s 2003 feature 살인의 추억 (Memories of Murder)is an example of a familiar genre made unfamiliar in its trappings, at least at first. Initially, this is because it is set in the yesteryear of 1986—and, as L.P. Hartley noted in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “the past is a foreign country” where things are done differently—but also because it takes place in the South Korean city of Hwaseong. It follows two police officers on opposite ends of the scale of corruption who, because of the depravity and darkness of the crimes that they are investigating, eventually exchange places on this spectrum. Detective Park (Song Kang-ho) is local to Hwaseong and is the lead on the investigation into a nascent series of serial assaults and murders on women in the community, and Detective Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) has been sent from Seoul to assist after the discovery of a second body. There’s some jurisdictional friction between the two, including a vigorous discussion about the lack of a national investigative agency like the U.S. has with the FBI. (A useful note here: S. Korea’s National Police Agency wasn’t founded until 1991, and during the time in which this film is set, this would theoretically have fallen under the auspices of the National Security Headquarters, but with Chun Doo-hwan and his junta in power, it’s a wonder that Seo was even sent.) Their biggest difference, however, lies in their approaches. Park may not be as violent or hot-tempered as his partner, another local detective named Cho (Kim Roi-ha), but his apathy about justice is in many ways worse; it’s clear that Cho is driven by his temper and his aggression, while Park’s casual treatment of, for instance, the elicitation of a false confession in order to close the case, demonstrates that performing that kind of quotidian evil is driven by nothing more than the banality of doing one’s job. Seo, in contrast, is more evidence and psychology driven, and sees through Park and Cho’s arrest of an innocent man with developmental disabilities and the rehearsed admission of guilt that he recites in Seo’s presence.
As I was thinking about how I would open my review while watching the film, a phrase came to mind about how the world that these characters inhabit is so unlike our own, where police brutality is so naked and unafraid, where violence and torture are commonplace means of maintaining the status quo. Then I remembered that we do live in that world. A girls’ school is visited in the film by one of the investigators, and the students there are practicing drills on how to escape from deadly attack and provide each other with first aid in the event of violence on the school grounds. Cho, the very same detective who has a special boot cover for when he is kicking prisoners to avoid leaving obvious marks, grows enraged when a local eatery’s television displays a report about a Seoul officer being indicted for similar actions, and he both destroys the television and physically attacks the students there who cheer on justice being served, protesting too much. Even the “good cop” Seo sits by idly while Park and Cho hang a suspect upside down, only becoming involved when the man says something that provides an epiphanic deduction. Park, an unapologetically bad cop, thinks he has some kind of preternatural sense that allows him to discern when someone is guilty or not, a frightening look into how someone can get the idea that they can sense other people’s spirits and then mete out punishment on them based on their own preconceptions. What Bong was saying in 2003 about both the contemporary present of the film’s production and about the 1986 on which it focused is the same thing that he’s still saying about the distant past, the near past, and today: “Essentially,” he said in 2019, “we all live in the same country called capitalism.” The S. Korea of 2003 is the present United States is S. Korea in 1986, and it’s jackboots all the way down.
For those who haven’t seen the film, a brief synopsis: Detectives Park and Cho, under orders from Sergeant Shin (Song Jae-ho), partner with Seoul city detective Seo when the body of a woman is found in a roadside culvert, the second victim of a potential serial killer. The two local detectives physically torture Kwang-ho (Park No-shik), their first prime suspect, the mentally handicapped and physically scarred son of a local restaurateur. They take him out to the woods to force him to dig a hole under the pretense that he is digging his own grave if he does not confess, and he does so, into a tape recorder. Seo is not convinced by any of this and, much to Shin’s chagrin, finds evidence that exonerates the man, embarrassing Park and Cho. Seo connects the dots on the fact that both women were murdered in the rain to a missing person case for a woman who also disappeared on a rainy night, and he is able to turn the search to a specific area and a search team finds her body relatively quickly, further driving a wedge between Park and Seo, the former of whom thinks the latter looks down on him as a comparative bumpkin. A trap is laid for the killer the next evening that it rains, but it fails; although Officer Kwon (Go Seo-hee), who was used as bait, fails to draw out the killer, she does discover a link between the nights of the murders, the rain, and a series of postcards to a local radio station that requests the song “Sad Letter” be played when it’s a rainy day. An accidental sting operation at the location where the fourth body was found leads to the arrest of the next prime suspect, Jo (Ryu Tae-Ho), while a follow up on the song requests leads to another, Park Hyeon-gyu (Park Hae-il). Jo is Park’s collar, and he grows infuriated when Seo finds proof of the man’s innocence, once again enraged that his case closure has been torn out of his hands, and Hyeon-gyu is Park’s man, but there’s no solid proof and even some physical evidence that seems to exonerate him. I wouldn’t consider any of this a spoiler, though, because although this is a crime thriller, it’s not a mystery, even though it occasionally wears one’s clothes.
Like the crime on which it was based (at least at the time of release), the killer is not found in this film. He’s present in the movie, in peripheral glances and blurred visions of final moments, but we never see his face and the police never apprehend him. The final scenes of the film, which take place in 2003, find Park returning to the road where the opening scene took place and staring into the culvert in which the second victim’s body was found, seventeen years older and now a small kitchen appliance salesman. A little girl asks him what he’s doing and tells him that another man was there a few weeks prior, also looking into the same space and, upon being asked, said he was remembering something that he did there a long time before, implying that the killer is still loose, but history ended up proving this one wrong. As it turns out, the Hwaseong serial killer had actually been in prison since 1994, for killing his sister-in-law, and he was prompted to confess to the Hwaseong killings upon the discovery of further DNA evidence to confess in 2019. This doesn’t hurt the film in any way, but I don’t want to leave pedant bait out there in the open like that.
This movie is beautifully shot, and the action is often kinetic and fun. Clocking in at 2 hours and 10 minutes, I can see how some of the scenes in the middle could feel like the film is going in circles if you don’t have the attention span for a film of that length, but I never felt like the film was spinning its wheels. There are countless independent pieces at play here that add up into a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts. Some of the police violence can be hard to stomach, and without some knowledge of S. Korean politics of the 1980s there are probably some details in the film’s metaphorical filigree that are lost. Even if you don’t, the violence of the police against protestors and students speaks for itself, as does the way that different members of the institution behave, with Cho being more violent than before and Shin growing increasingly furious that his subordinates are disobeying his direct orders to show restraint while they are under the microscope. It’s familiar even if the time and place are foreign to you, because we do all live in one national police state. If you can stomach that, this is a masterpiece you should see as soon as you can.
Holy Spider lands at the exact intersection of two genres I’m not especially interested in: the true crime serial killer thriller and the shoe-leather journalism drama. Its semi-fictional story of real-life confessed, convicted killer Saeed Hanaei’s street-level rivalry with a composite-character journalist determined to bring him to justice is something I was prepared to ignore entirely . . . until I saw who directed it. Iranian-born, Copenhagen-based filmmaker Ali Abbasi made such choppy waves with his previous film, Border, that I could not ignore whatever he made next, regardless of genre. Although no less morbid nor extreme, Border is in my genre wheelhouse, since its dark fairy tale setting lands it firmly in the supernatural. The ripped-from-the-headlines story behind Holy Spider can’t pretend to be as singular as that doomed trolls-in-love horror drama, but it does continue the disturbing brutality of Abbasi’s previous triumph, and likely puts it to more politically ethical use. No matter how little interest I may have in Holy Spider as a genre piece, it’s so fiercely unflinching & matter of fact in its observations of misogynist violence that I couldn’t help but be chilled by it. Abbasi is a fiercely effective purveyor of movie violence, often to a deliberately sickening degree.
Time-stamped with 9/11 footage looping on a background television, Holy Spider recounts the serial murders of sex workers in the “holy city” of Mashhad in the early 2000s. The women are choked to death—often in real-time on camera—with their headscarves by a serial killer posing as a potential john, using a religious symbol as a form of self-righteous punishment. Maintenance man Saeed Hanaei’s guilt in these crimes is not hidden from the audience. It’s barely hidden from the fictional journalist who takes him down, as her bare-minimum efforts to sniff him out expose the cruelty of local police’s indifference to the murder spree. Once caught, Hanaei proudly confesses his guilt, claiming the murders were a “jihad on vice”, calling for a “fatwa on immoral women”. Public response to his declarations is mostly positive, recalling the NIMBY cruelty towards real-life sex workers’ murders in the avant-garde musical London Road. It’s a pretty cut and dry story about the free-flowing bleedover of sexual repression into misogynist violence, one that only differs from its Hollywood true-crime equivalents in its cold, matter-of-fact depictions of sex & violence. Abbasi could be accused of edgelord pranksterism for some of the more shocking moments in Border, but these real-life murders are taken deadly seriously, without a hint of humor or sensational romance.
If Abbasi does anything especially unique with the genre traditions of the serial killer thriller, it’s in the way he continues Hanaei’s story beyond capture & punishment. Once caught, his rivalry with the feminist journalist determined to take him down continues in full stride, as he tries to weaponize the court of public opinion to justify his murders. After execution, his misogynist philosophies live on, particularly in the mind & actions of his teenage son, who idolizes his father as a morally righteous superhero. The typical Hollywood version of this story is pure copaganda, wherein putting Hanaei behind bars is enough to neutralize the threat. Instead, Abbasi finds deep terror & sadness in the continuation of Hanaei’s misogynist vision on a culture-wide level, continuing his work well after he’s physically neutralized. It’s a chilling picture, one that has more political & philosophical purpose than most true crime recaps of famous headlines or sensationalized hagiographies of journalists doing their jobs. As much as I would personally prefer that Abbasi return to the supernatural world in future projects, I still respect what he was able to accomplish while tethered to reality here. Both Border and Holy Spider feel like grueling ordeals rather than passive entertainment, and attaching that hurt to real-life victims doesn’t make them any easier to endure.
According to my count, there have now been four significant riffs on the classic paranoia thriller Rear Window in the past year, each starring freaked-out, disbelieved women in the James Stewart role. That trend could a response to the increased social isolation during the pandemic making us simultaneously agoraphobic and nosy about strangers’ lives (now seen entirely through the digital windows of social media apps). Or it could just as likely be that Hitchcock’s’ influence is eternal, and several Rear Window projects have happened to bottleneck in their distribution paths at a weirdly apt time. Either way, Chloe Okuno’s debut feature Watcher is done a huge disservice by this sudden deluge of Rear Window riffs, maybe even more so than its unintended sister films. Understated & unrushed, Watcher is a little too lacking in scene-to-scene tension and overall novelty to stand out in its crowded field (bested by both Kimi & The Voyeurs in those rankings, surpassing only The Woman in the Window). I appreciate the icy mood it echoes from post-Hitchcock Euro horrors of the 1970s, and the stern narrative follow-through of its ending is almost enough of a shock to make up for the preceding dead air, but I’m not convinced that’s enough to make it especially noteworthy or even worthwhile.
Maika Monroe (It Follows) stars as an out-of-work actress who moves to Bucharest at the behest of her workaholic boyfriend (Karl Glusman, Devs). Alienated by her endless days alone in the apartment and her inability to speak Romanian, she becomes more of a quiet observer than she is an active participant in her own life. Worse yet, a neighbor she can see from her apartment window has taken to staring back with an intense fixation on her every move, even when she leaves the relative safety of her new home. The actress is convinced her stalker is a neighborhood serial killer known as The Spider, so she sends the few men in her life to violently threaten him & interfere before his obsession gets out of hand. As their patience for humoring her suspicions wears thin, Watcher becomes a fairly typical Believe Women thriller. Its only distinguishing details, really, are the fashions & architecture of its Eastern European setting and the cold, stubborn brutality of its conclusion. It’s thematically rich in its intricate gender politics, especially in the way Monroe is dismissed & infantilized by the men in her social circle and endangered by demonstrating even the most benign friendliness to male strangers. The tonal & visual expressions of those themes are just a little too calm & well-behaved for the movie to stand out as anything special.
My fixation on Watcher‘s lack of novelty is likely just as much of a result of seeing it in a film festival setting as it is a result of its recent competition among other, flashier Rear Window updates. Watcher played at this year’s Overlook Film Festival among dozens of similar low-budget genre films with their own abundance of pre-loaded comparison points. To my eye, it’s the one that most suffered from its dedication to long-running genre tradition (at least among the nine titles I watched at the festival), precisely because it’s the one that was least interested in attention-grabbing novelty. And yet it’s the one title that was simultaneously playing in AMC theaters elsewhere in town, while most of the bolder, weirder Overlook titles I caught will get nowhere near screens that size. I appreciated the opportunity to see Watcher in a theatrical environment, since its distribution through Shudder means most audiences will force it to compete with smartphones for their attention when it inevitably hits streaming. It’s a pretty good movie with admirable political convictions and an effectively eerie mood. It’s just also nothing special, really, at least not when considered in comparison with its competition – Overlook, Soderbergh, Sweeney, or otherwise.
I’ve been working up the courage to watch Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl for two decades now, building its power in my mind as the kind of post-Haneke heartcrusher that’s specifically designed to ruin my day, and possibly my entire life. The high-style, low-budget thriller Piggy is as close as I’ve gotten to taking that icy Breillat plunge to date, as it processes a lot of the same squirmy coming-of-age discomforts through more recognizable, digestible genre tropes. Piggy also has a dark, winking sense of humor to it that keeps the mood oddly light as it stares down the ugliest truths of an outcast youth. Since I haven’t yet seen Fat Girl and not enough of the general public has seen The Reflecting Skin for that comparison to be meaningful, let’s go ahead and call Piggy an update of Welcome to the Dollhouse for the Instagram era. It’s the kind of button-pushing indie that’s made entirely of pre-existing genre building blocks, so it’s easy to discuss entirely through its similarities to earlier titles, but it still feels freshly upsetting & perversely fun in the moment.
“Piggy” is, of course, a term of disendearment lobbed at our teenage anti-heroine by her thinner, more popular bullies. While her peers pose pretty for a nonstop flood of Instagram hearts, Sara cowers behind the counter of her family’s butcher shop, desperately hoping to coast her way through puberty unnoticed. Her bullies are relentless, though, whether they’re the teen girls who oink at her from the side of the public pool or her overbearing mother who berates her for letting candy stain her teeth & expand her belly. That’s why she’s in no particular rush to rat out her neighborhood serial killer, who shows parasocial sympathy for Sara’s plight by abducting & torturing all of her harshest critics. Every second Sara withholds the killer’s identity & location from local cops, it becomes increasingly unlikely her nemeses will be recovered all in one piece. It’s a trade-off she’s willing to make, though, at least of a while. She’s finally found the space to develop as an independent young adult on the other side of the butcher counter without her bullies suffocating her – using her newfound freedom to experiment with teenage thrills like masturbation, marijuana, and lies. Besides, she’s developed an incredibly inappropriate crush on her adult serial killer “friend,” so there’s plenty incentive to just sit back & see how it all plays out.
-Brandon Ledet
There’s a satisfying, upsetting progression to how Sara’s violently accelerated maturation is matched by director Carlota Pereda’s visual aesthetic. There’s a soft, pink innocence & nostalgia to the film’s earliest scenes that feels totally at home in teen girls’ Instagram feeds & bedroom decor. By the final stretch, Sara is submerged in the dingy dungeon greys of the torture porn 2000s, losing her childhood innocence to her own newfound selfishness. It’s a worthwhile journey, as she emerges from the other end of that blood-drenched tunnel as a much more confident, fully formed person. Piggy is more of a character study than a proper thriller in that way; everything is in service of tracking Sara’s emotional development. And since it recalls so many coming-of-age horror stories that came before it, all it can really accomplish is to add Sara’s name to the list of all-time great outsiders who’ve already Gone Through It onscreen: Dawn Wiener, Maya Ishii Peters, Anna Kone, Dawn Davenport, Juliet Hulme, etc. I have no clue where Anaïs Pingot of Fat Girl infamy resides on that prestigious list, but I hope to one day have the courage to find out.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Copycat (1995), a post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer meta-thriller starring Holly Hunter & Sigourney Weaver.
I have a bottomless affection for the kinds of vintage Z-grade horror pictures that were regionally marketed under different titles depending on what drive-in double bill they were plugged into, like how Shivers is also known as Blood Orgy of the Parasites or The Exotic Ones is also known as The Monster and the Stripper. Few—if any—of those regional re-brands can compete with the marketing strategy for Ray Dennis Steckler’s The Thrill Killers, though, which was re-released a couple years into its run under the title The Maniacs Are Loose!. I don’t know if the title change itself was much of an improvement on Steckler’s original vision, but the re-brand also included an incredible theatrical gimmick of William Castle proportions. The Maniacs Are Loose! opens with a “professional hypnotist” named The Amazing Ormond who puts the audience under a spell so we can hallucinate axe-wielding maniacs stalking our very theater while the movie plays. The Amazing Ormond’s hypnosis technique involves a red-spiral “hypnodisc” that re-appears throughout the new edit of the film, the only flashes of color in the otherwise cheap-o black & white print (and also a callback to the hypnotic spirals of Steckler’s calling-card film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed Up Zombies). Whenever that image flashed during screenings of The Maniacs are Loose!, Steckler himself would run around the theater with a prop axe to scare the freaked-out, teenage audience, reprising his onscreen maniac-killer role (under the All-American pseudonym “Cash Flagg”) in the flesh. Now that‘s entertainment!
Besides helping to pad out its meager 70min runtime, that Criswell Presents-style framing device makes a lot of sense as a cheap way to accentuate The Thrill Killers‘s best qualities. Steckler is absolutely horrifying as a cold-hearted skinhead killer, looking like a straight edge punk scene prototype for Michael Myers. As a director, Steckler tries to top the proto-slasher grime of Hitchcock’s Psycho by releasing three violent escapees from “The State Asylum for the Criminally Insane” to stab, shoot, and decapitate the citizens of Los Angeles at random, just for the thrill of it. All three of the main killers are intimidating brutes but are so generic in their menace that you remember them by their weapon of choice rather than their character names: Knife, Gun, and Axe. Steckler himself makes the biggest impression as Scissors, the gang’s rogue, wordless accomplice who mostly operates outside the main plot until its action-packed finale (which oddly shifts away from cutting-edge horror to Old Hollywood Western territory). As a whole, The Thrill Killers is sloppy & sluggish but impressively mean as a cheap echo of Psycho in an urban setting. It’s a decent genre picture but doesn’t offer much that you couldn’t find better executed in The Honeymoon Killers, Spider Baby, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or even smutty roughies like She Mob. The one major exception is Steckler’s deeply creepy performance as one of the on-the-loose maniacs, and I imagine seeing him emerge in the flesh during his kill scenes only heightened that terror (despite the goofy novelty of the hypnodisc gimmick).
The theatrical gimmickry of The Thrill Killers‘s maniacs-on-the-loose rebrand not only accentuated Ray Dennis Steckler’s terrifying performance, but it also accentuates his adorable enthusiasm for filmmaking as a profession. For all its decapitations & stabbings, the most shocking aspect of the film is how much of it is directly about the self-fulfilling joy of making bad movies. Its maniacs are specifically on the loose in Hollywood, California, allowing Steckler plenty of room for metatextual jokes & jabs at the expense of his own drive to make movies that no one else really cares about. The film’s square-jawed hero is a failed actor whose slow path to success is testing his wife’s patience & his own sanity, so that an omniscient, Ed Woodian narrator can explain how years of trying to “make it” in the film industry can destroy your relationships with family & reality. There’s some obvious frustration in Steckler’s dialogue about the unrelenting “hunger to be a movie star” and Hollywood’s function as “the world of non-reality”, but he stops short of suggesting that the killer maniacs on the loose are all failed actors who never quite made it in the industry. By the end of the film, it’s clear that he has way too much fun making his dime store genre pictures to disparage the industry that way. And if even if it weren’t clear then, it must’ve been clear when he traveled with a print of the film, dressed in-character, waving around a prop axe to scare local crowds in-person. The Thrill Killers itself is only a moderate delight as a sickly, sloppy proto-slasher, but Ray Dennis Steckler’s enthusiasm on both sides of the camera is so infectious that I can’t help but be charmed by it (especially in the loose-maniacs version).
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon, Britnee, and Hanna watch London Road (2015).
Boomer: London Road is a 2015 film about a serial killer. Technically. It’s also a musical about NIMBYism. And a story about community organization and the horizons of understanding, featuring Olivia Colman playing the most hateable character on her CV.
In late 2006, a series of killings rocked the community of Ipswich, England. Five women, all sex workers, were murdered by a man nicknamed the Ipswich Ripper, later found to be 48-year-old Steve Wright, who had moved into a row house on London Road roughly half a year earlier. All of the women he murdered were known in the area for their line of work, and the area had experienced a huge boom in sex work in recent years due to a variety of socioeconomic factors, including the construction of a new stadium. London Road is not actually about Steve Wright; in fact, he never appears in the film, nor do his victims. Instead, the film focuses on Wright’s neighbors and the way that they dealt with the fallout of the murders and the public scrutiny that it caused to fall upon their small community. Through a series of musical arrangements of actual, verbatim quotes taken from Ipswich locals, journalists, police interviews, and other documentational evidence, Adam Cork and Alecky Blythe crafted a stage musical for London’s Royal National Theatre, where it was staged under the direction of newly hired Artistic Director Rufus Norris. Norris also directed the film version of the musical, released in 2015.
I’m one of those people who hates musicals. In any other form of writing, having characters walk around and declare their feelings is Bad Writing, but if you take those declarations and set them to music, suddenly it’s the highest form of theater? Please. The linguistic contortions that the author of the musical has to go through in order to turn dialogue (or more often, monologue) into a piece of music are painful to me. The only musicals that I do like are those such as 1984’s Top Secret, God Help the Girl, or True Stories, in which the music is either farcical (the former) or composed solely by a single band (the latter two). And now London Road. When I first wrote about it back in 2016, I noted even then that what I hated about the platonic Western ideal of The Musical was the “taxing way that exposition is forced to fit into the metrics of a song, the natural and idiosyncratic lyricism of plain speech being inelegantly strangled and forced to fit into a rhyme scheme while also carrying the heavy lifting of outlining a narrative.” By stripping away that level of perfidy to reality but maintaining the inherent artificiality of the musical as a form of media, London Road becomes something greater than its genre peers.
The performative enormity of the platonic Western stage-to-screen musical is mostly absent here. When making that migration from live performance to film, the change in medium is rarely used to enhance the narrative; sure, you might see a dance sequence shot from above in a way that would be impossible to replicate on stage, but in general the staging of the live performance is all-too-often translated directly to screen with as little change as possible. Consider the film version of The Producers, which changed even the dialogue as little as possible, changing Ulla’s line “Why Bloom go so far stage right?” to “Why Bloom go so far camera right?” The line works in the stage version because the narrative is about staging a musical, so in-jokes for the theatrically-attuned crowd work in context, but in the film, which by definition is designed to reach a larger, broader audience, the (barely) re-worked joke falls completely flat. London Road doesn’t have this problem, either, as it uses the medium of film effectively in telling its story, especially in the smaller moments. One of the most striking moments is so small: after the first community meeting post-verdict has concluded, everyone leaves the hall and the organizer of the meeting starts to slowly stack the chairs from the meeting to be stored away. Even though the film isn’t really about Steve Wright, the viewer still feels some elation and vindication when he’s convicted, but that joy is short-lived, and it doesn’t do the work of healing the community. Things won’t simply fall into place and be fine again; the work is real, and it’s long, and it’s often tedious and unrewarding, and stacking chairs is all of those things in a nutshell. It’s a lovely bit of visual storytelling.
There’s also something genuinely striking about the juxtaposition of the rebuilding of the community and the (often frankly horrible) things said by the people within it. With the final garden competition, things take a turn for the saccharine, like a song from a completely different, less dark musical, but it comes almost immediately on the heels of a quotation from Julie, a London Road resident portrayed by Olivia Colman, in which she empathizes with her neighbors, but not Wright’s victims, who are “better off ten foot under.” While the officially recognized community of London Road gathers to socialize in the hall at St. Jude’s, their cheerful voices carry to the industrial structures that loom large and unmistakably over the neighborhood, literally and metaphorically, where the surviving sex workers talk about their lived experience. “It took all of that for anyone to start helping us,” one woman says, referring to the killings, to which another responds “That’s what’s upsetting,” and then they all join in. “Let’s get those girls off the street,” one of them says, quoting a fairweather crusader, but none of them are. They’re still out there, trying to stay alive and get clean. At the end, the residents of London Road have literally covered the past with a fresh coat of paint, but their NIMBYism remains. Most of the neighborhood starts out with nothing but derision for the prostitutes, but it’s unfocused and unspecified; by the end, one of them looks at a makeshift memorial for the victims and remarks that they’re in Heaven now. In death, some of the same people who condemned them in life have made them saints, although many also still share Julie’s sentiments.
I’m going to be honest, I was surprised on the rewatch how much of the film there still is to go after the verdict has been delivered. That first section is much more interesting to me, in which “everyone is very very nervous,” and then they go through a range of other emotions leading up to and following the trial. That ending is the least interesting part to me, until we see the festivities through the eyes of Vicky (Kate Fleetwood), the sex worker whom we’ve seen the most often, as she makes her way through the crowd. We see two reactions to her passing through: a smiling, friendly little girl who gives her a balloon, and a frowning man who glares at her as she departs. These two interactions give the lie to what Julie and her like-minded neighbors keep using as the go-to blanket excuse for their callousness, that they are concerned for the children; the children aren’t the problem here, the adults are. Just as the film seems to be fading out and away from a triumphant moment for London Road, the last face that we actually see is Vicky’s, as she looks down at a world that’s not her own and releases the balloon, while the audio shifts to the real recordings of the sex workers of Ipswich.
I love this movie, and I think that it would be easy to read it as too forgiving of the residents of London Road with regard to their apathy to the fate of the sex workers in their area. I seem to recall that, when I was first reading reviews of it 5 years ago, a few critics mentioned the excision of at least one additional song from their point of view, and that the stage musical had a more sympathetic approach to them, but I can’t find anything that corroborates that. What do you think, Brandon? Would the inclusion of more from their point of view help the film feel more balanced? Does it seem sufficiently critical of London Road’s NIMBYism, or does it send mixed messages about the hard work of rebuilding a community?
Brandon: The overriding thought that lingered with me after this film concluded was “I hate people.” The residents of London Road are exceedingly Normal in their appearance and their interpersonal politics, and I hated those cruel, hideous beasts with all of my heart. I was initially skeptical of a movie about the lethal dangers of unregulated on-the-street sex work that included so little of the actual workers’ input, but as the film unfolds the intent of its POV choice gradually makes sense. Given that these women’s friends & coworkers were recently murdered for participating in their same trade, it makes sense that they’d be reluctant to speak with the interviewers whose transcripts were adapted to the stage & screen in the first place. Beyond that, this movie is specifically about the standard suburban opinion of that profession & those workers, and the longer the neighborhood busybodies muse on the murders & victims the more vile that opinion sounds. London Road digs deep into the ugliness of humanity at our least empathetic just by letting the most callously judgmental among us speak/sing for themselves; a movie from the workers’ perspective could totally be worthwhile, but it’d be a different film altogether.
This is an impressively odd, daring movie considering that it looks like the Dramatic Reenactment portions of an unaired Britain’s Most Wanted spin-off. I was enraged by the plain-text transcripts of the neighborhood interviewees from start to end. Listening to them deride the Ipswitch Ripper’s victims as “curb crawlers” as if they were some kind of pest infestation quickly chilled my blood in the early scenes. It didn’t get any better when they expressed admiration for the killers’ extermination of those women as if it were a morally righteous act of vigilante justice instead of a deranged actualization of their own culture-wide misogyny. Several residents complain that the police weren’t “doing anything” about the neighborhood’s sex work problem before the murders, then Coleman admits in her final speech that she’d like to shake the killer’s hand in thanks, making it crystal clear exactly what they would’ve liked the police to do. It’s a nauseating sentiment to stew in for a feature-length film, much less one that’s performed in sickly sweet song & dance.
The only residents of London Road I wasn’t furious with were the teenage girls, whose collective nervousness over the mysoginistic murder spree is highlighted in a song where they run through town whispering “It could be anyone; it could be him!” over a soft techno beat. There are very few moments where the actual music in this musical stands out to me, as the film’s exact-transcripts conceit homogenizes all of its sung dialogue to fit the meter of natural speech. The teen girls’ song stands out, though, both because it’s easier to sympathize with their paranoia than it is with their parents’ morally righteous fascism and because the soundtrack shifts to a mall-pop texture to match their POV. What did you think of the music of London Road, Britnee? Were there any songs or musical flourishes that stood out to you despite the soundtrack’s general monotony?
Britnee: The majority of the music in London Road wasn’t very catchy. I adore musicals, and I look forward to getting hooked on their soundtracks. Most of my playlists and mix tapes have a musical number thrown in. I’m that person. When I read the description of London Road, which I didn’t know existed until watching if for Movie of the Month, I was thrilled to find out it was a musical. And not only was it a musical, it was based on an actual crime that occurred in recent years. I was basically putting more excitement on my expectations of the songs and performances than the actual plot. This is not something I’m proud of, but I’m being honest. It turns out that majority of the musical numbers involved the cast singing verbatim lines from actual interviews and reports from the Ipswich murders. I found it fascinating, but was slightly disappointed that only one song stuck with me. That song would be “Everyone is Very, Very Nervous”. I sing along to the cast recording while driving to the office some mornings. It’s made it onto one of my musical playlists because it’s brilliant. The fear of the townsfolk really comes through in the way the lyrics are sung. The tone is so dark and depressing, and I love it so much.
London Road didn’t really hold my attention from beginning to end. At times, sitting through some of the duller scenes felt like a chore. I have the same problem with a few other plays that got turned into films. The simplicity of a single stage production being performed live just hits me in a different way than watching it as a film. One of the last plays that I saw live was Come From Away, which is also based on true events. It follows the true story of a plane that had an emergency landing in a small Canadian town during the September 11th attacks. I thought about it multiple times while watching London Road, and I can’t help but think that the stage play version of London Road would be just as fabulous. It’s unique and gives a different perspective on what we expect from true-crime dramas, but I would just prefer to see it on stage than on screen.
Hanna, did you think that London Road worked as a film or do you think it’s better suited as a stage production?
Hanna: I think London Road definitely worked as a film, but (and I’m just guessing) the stage production might be better equipped to exaggerate the seclusion/exclusion of the little row house community, and would have forced a little bit of focus that the film lacked. Musicals and stage productions usually have static prop placement for each location, so every setting in the story (“The Market”, “The Apartments”, “The Town Hall”) looks exactly the same every time it’s used. You get the sense that the residents of London Road inhabit a small community in the movie, but I would love to see all of the residents stuffed into the same claustrophobic sets, pacing around and wringing their hands together. You could also use that limited space to emphasize the exile of the sex workers, by keeping them squeezed around the periphery of the staged Community settings (although I think the film does this pretty well, especially in the final scene).
This is a small detail in favor of the film, but I liked that the actual road could be fully represented in the film in a way that wouldn’t really be possible on a stage. The long shots of nothing but the cold road, or of people wandering up and down the road, made me think about those intrinsically neutral public spaces that become battlegrounds for a community’s identity, especially in terms of who should/should not be allowed to exist there. London Road is first shared derisively between the row home residents and the workers; then shrouded by police tape and Steven Wright’s murders; and, finally, fully reclaimed by the residents (including men who paid the workers for sex) and their overwhelming flower arrangements. The battle for London Road reminded me of the deterrents cities install in public spaces, like bars on park benches or fences installed around old encampments sites; the focus is on restricting access to that public space, physically and socially, as opposed to expanding the definition of the community. I’m not sure if that aspect of the story would have been as salient to me in the stage production.
Lagniappe
Hanna: I went into London Road absolutely stone cold, and I wouldn’t recommend that approach in retrospect. I was VERY confused when the singing began, and I was convinced that the shifty axe-wielding neighbor was the real murderer for the majority of the film (even after Steven Wright is convicted), not realizing that London Road is less a whodunit and more of a community reckoning. I think I might get more out of it on a second watch. I also want to thank Boomer for introducing me to the term NIMBY, which is a term I feel like I’ve been looking for my whole life.
Britnee: I was concerned about London Road being a distasteful film, considering how recent it came out after the actual Ipswich murders and the fact that it’s a musical. It didn’t really go that route as it was more focused on the members of the community than the sensationalism of the murders, but I wondered what the family members of the victims thought of the play and the film. Especially since the play came out less than five years after the murders. It turns out the mother of Tania Nicol (one of the victims) did speak out against the tragedy being made into a production while she was still grieving the death of her daughter. I wasn’t able to find out much about the thoughts of the other victims’ family members, but I think this is definitely something important to consider.
Brandon: We can’t let this conversation go by without acknowledging how absurd it is that Tom Hardy is featured so prominently this movie’s marketing. He’s only in the film for a brief cameo (as a scruffy, super-sus cab driver who’s a little too into true-crime), but you’d think based on the posters and publicity stills that he was competing with Colman for the lead. I guess that sly act of false-advertising does add a little intrigue as to whether he’s a suspect (especially as an addition to the “It could be anyone!” pool of possibilities), but mostly it’s just amusingly pragmatic. A genuine, certified movie star wanted to lend his star-power to a stage drama he admired, and the producers milked that for all that it was worth. Smart.
Boomer: I’m realizing that, for someone who frontloaded their part of the conversation with discussion of how he felt about musicals, I didn’t note which songs on here I really liked. The number one has to be “It Could Be Him,” as I love its frenetic pacing and undercurrent of discomfort in spite of its catchy nature. “Everyone Is Very Very Nervous” is also a lot of fun, as it starts small and builds to a neat crescendo (it’s also the song that was most heavily featured in the trailer, which makes it the default London Road main theme in my mind). But for my money, the song that you’d never hear in a standard musical (give or take the occasional iconoclastic production) is “Cellular Material.”
Upcoming Movies of the Month May: Britnee presents Trouble in Mind (1985) June: Hanna presents Chicken People (2016) July: Brandon presents Starstruck (1982)
I usually don’t have much patience for home invasion thrillers. By default, there’s always been a misanthropic, Conservative viewpoint to the genre, wherein upstanding, taxpaying citizens are terrorized on their own property by the unwashed riffraff outside. The home invasion template preys on fears that the desperately poor are only one broken window away from robbing, raping, and disheveling away your illusion of middle-class suburban safety – bringing you down to their grimy, subhuman level. It’s gross. I am starting to notice a variation on the genre that does work for me, though, something I discovered when I first watched The Strangers a couple summers ago. Home invasion films are scariest and most relatable when the villains aren’t desperately poor or morally deficient, but rather have no motivation at all beyond a shrug and a “Just because.”
The pinnacle of the no-motivation home invasion film arrived decades before The Strangers and thousands of miles away from the pristine American suburbs where the genre usually dwells. The 1983 Austrian curio Angst spends much of its runtime attempting to understand the psyche & motivations of its killer trespasser, only to reveal that there’s nothing there to understand. He kills just because. The opening scene is an action shot of him already indiscriminately stalking and murdering strangers merely because they happen to be home and nearby. He’s arrested and eventually released, then kills again, this time drawing out his cruel torture to a movie-length displeasure. The killer narrates the film himself, explaining at length that he’s committing these crimes simply because he likes to commit them. He finds them thrilling, entertaining. With some level of accompanying disgust, the audience likely does as well.
The most immediately impressive aspect of Angst is its overactive camerawork & ice-cold atmosphere. Body-mounted cameras and severe-angle crane shots rattle the audience so that we feel just as crazed as the killer who takes us on the uninvited home tours of well-to-do Austrian neighborhoods. It’s a cold, dizzying sensibility shared only by over-stylized Euro horrors like Possession, Climax, and Luz. Meanwhile a Big Black-style industrial drum machine underscores the brutality on display, so that everything is simultaneously framed beautifully but presented as viciously ugly. It’s an impressively upsetting mood, offering no reprieve from the suffocating psyche of its narrator – a nastily hollow man who kills because he wants to kill. There’s something about that total lack of motivation that efficiently chills my blood, maybe because it’s more reflective of real-life cruelty & violence than the class war callousness that usually commands this genre (usually with a much duller aesthetic palate as well).
It seems that one-time director Gerald Kargl was also fascinated by no-motive home invaders, or at least by real-life killer Werner Kniesek in particular. When a title card announces “This film is based on true events” a few already-bloody minutes into the runtime, it plays almost like a jump scare. We’re treated to a brief true-crime slideshow detailing the killer’s history after that announcement, searching for answers to what appears to be pointless, aimless cruelty. Maybe it was the childhood abuse that led Kniesek to kill. Maybe his trail of dead could have been shortened if the legal system hadn’t found his sadism itself an argument for innocence by reason of insanity. By the time we rejoin the killer doing his thing from house to house, neither of those questions really matter. As we hear Kniesek tell it in his own words, he’s just acting on pure, self-pleasing impulse with no real need, philosophy, or ambition to speak of. Terrifying.
Swampflix 