sydney sweeney

Immaculate (2024)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

There’s an emerging form of mainstream horror movie that appears to be generic & mediocre for most of its runtime, then springs a bonkers third act on its audience that retroactively makes it a Must-See Event Film through last-minute chutzpah.  Let’s call it Grower-Not-Shower Horror, a genre that’s typified by titles like Malignant, The Boy, Orphan, Barbarian, The Empty Man, etc.  Let’s also throw the recent Sydney Sweeney vehicle Immaculate on that list, as it’s a seemingly typical, unremarkable horror film set at a spooky convent that eventually becomes uniquely, explosively entertaining through the sheer audacity of its conclusion.  It may be the least remarkable of the Grower-Not-Shower titles that I’ve listed, but it’s still bonkers enough in its third-act resolution to make the cut, and that accomplishment is entirely owed to Sweeney’s performance.

In the story’s grim-grey, mediocre beginnings, Sweeney arrives at the remote Italian convent Our Lady of Sorrows mumbling like a socially inept teenager, totally unsure of herself.  There’s a plug-and-play spooky atmosphere to any Catholic setting in a horror film, as The Church is essentially just a well-funded cult with a bottomless supply of haunted fetish objects – in this case particularly obsessing over a rusty nail said to have been pried from Jesus’s cross.  All of the conspiratorial whispering, jump-scare nightmares, and crucifix-shaped blood stains that rattle Sweeney in the early stretch could just as easily have been recycled footage from the Conjuring spin-off The Nun without anyone really taking notice.  It isn’t until she starts fighting back against the Catholic cult in the back half that the movie comes alive.  That’s when her performance finally kicks into the melodramatic overdrive of Cassie from Season 2 of Euphoria, rather than recalling the sleepwalking-for-a-paycheck mumblings of her more recent role in Madame Web.

As the setting & title indicate, this is the story of an “immaculate” conception of child, meaning Sweeney’s nun-in-training unexpectedly finds herself a pregnant virgin.  The religious superiors around her declare the pregnancy a miracle, but both the reluctant mother and the genre-savvy audience immediately know better.  Segmented into three Trimester chapter breaks, the rest of the movie from there is all about the lengths she must go to escape her convent-prison before she gives birth to the antichrist abomination that’s been planted inside her body.  It’s in the third trimester where the movie earns the audience’s attention, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the particular events or character details that are saved for that gruesome finale.  Mostly, it’s just surprising how far Sweeney is willing to push her craft into extreme, bloody mania – reaching for a cathartically violent release for all of the ready-made, cookie-cutter tension of the first couple chapters.

There’s been some quibbling debate about whether Immaculate should be classified as nunsploitation, given that it does not lean into the seedier, sexier hallmarks of the subgenre.  There’s enough communal bathing & intimate touching between the nuns to at least count as acknowledgement of the subgenre’s sexploitative past, but it does appear to be much more interested in the bodily violation of unwanted pregnancy than it is interested in the bodily sacrilege of lesbian sex behind convent walls.  In a way, that topic is a perfect metatextual fit for Sweeney, whose body has been a constant, baffling source of culture-war discourse in recent months.  It makes sense to me, then, that she believed enough in the project to ensure its completion as a producer, bringing in former collaborator Michael Mohan (The Voyeurs) to direct.  When the Catholic pregnancy cult refers to the poor nun’s body as “the perfect fertile vessel” it doesn’t sound any more unhinged than Conservative internet pundits firing off think pieces about the political significance of her large breasts.  It’s just that here she gets to violently fight back, with surprising gusto.

If I had to speculate about why Grower-Not-Shower Horror has become a popular narrative template for mainstream studios in recent years, it’s that they’re afraid of losing audiences in the opening act.  There’s no reason why Malignant could not have been a nonstop bonkers action horror from start to end in throwback Hong Kong filmmaking tradition, except that it would’ve immediately lost the audience who were looking for more typical horror payoffs.  By pretending to be a much more normal, forgettable horror for most of its runtime, it holds onto its respectability just long enough to hook a wide audience, and then it’s allowed to let loose what’s actually on its mind.  Immaculate likewise gets by as a generic Catholic-setting horror for as long as possible before it unleashes Sweeney to seek bloody catharsis against the men who treat her like breeding cattle.  Personally, I’d rather watch a movie that feels unrestrained from start to end, but Showers-Not-Growers are much harder to come by these days, so I’ll take what I can get.

-Brandon Ledet

Madame Web (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

There’s something very important about movies that are “so bad it’s good” (henceforth SBIG) that a lot of people don’t understand. If you look up a list of these movies, you’ll find some titles that are indisputable: Troll 2, The Room, Battlefield: Earth. But you’ll also see people citing things like Sharknado and Birdemic, and although I think those could be argued to fall under this category, what those films are lacking is a sense of honesty, of earnestness. In the last fifteen years, I can’t think of a single film that was SBIG that disqualified itself from that qualifier by virtue of being too self-aware (not counting Neil Breen, who is the exception that proves the rule). A true SBIG can’t wink at the audience, can’t show its cards, can’t let you know that it’s in on the joke, because then it’s not true. Madame Web is perhaps the first mainstream, studio-released movie in nearly two decades that’s earned this distinction. Like fellow SBIG flick Showgirls, it succeeds by having a main character whose responses to their situation are so bizarre that they’re mesmerizing, and like 1998’s Lost in Space, it’s absolutely filled to the brim with endless ideas, almost all of which are terrible. I went into this movie thinking that it might have all been a ploy by Dakota Johnson to make people forget about her involvement with the Fifty Shades movies by making sure that Madame Web was the film they thought of when they thought of her name (because, admit it, you kinda had until I just mentioned it, hadn’t you?). But by the time that the credits rolled (to The Cranberries’ “Dreams,” inexplicably), I couldn’t wait to own this movie, and I may have to go and see it in theaters again. 

You probably already know what this one is about. Johnson portrays Cassie Webb, a paramedic whose precognitive powers are awakened by a near death experience. She begins to have visions of a man named Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim) killing three young women, Julia (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), and Anya (Isabela Merced), and sets out to protect them from him. She begins to connect the dots—because her web connects them all—and realizes that she has a past, um, connection to Ezekiel via her mother as, say it with me now, “he was in the Amazon with [her] mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” As she comes to realize, the mother that she has resented for her whole life (Kerry Bishé) for choosing to be deep in the Peruvian jungle—well, not that deep, since she doesn’t work up a sweat hiking to the same spot from a bus stop later in the film, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves—despite being in her last trimester was actually there doing said spider research to prevent Cassie from developing a life-threatening muscular disorder. Also, did I mention that it’s 2003? And did we also mention that Cassie’s partner in the FDNY is Ben Parker (Adam Scott), and that his sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts) is heavily pregnant? 

I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun in a theater. And here’s the thing: despite the incredible negative backlash that the movie has received, it’s actually not that bad. In fact, if this had come out in 1998, it would be one of the best blockbusters of that year. Venom didn’t hit for me, but what people seemed to like about that one was the absolute batshit performance from charm machine Tom Hardy, and this movie is similar insofar as the fact that Dakota Johnson is giving a really fun performance here. Cassie is a bizarre, antisocial weirdo, and I love that for her. Before she falls from a bridge into the water and has to be rescued, the child of someone that she helped save tries to give her a drawing that he made as a way of saying thanks, she behaves as if she’s never encountered a child before and that she thinks this one is trying to give her a manila envelope full of anthrax. Ben has to tell her to take it and just throw it away somewhere else later (Cassie: “I can’t even fold it, it’s like it’s cardboard.”). When one of the other tenants in her building calls her out for leaving her junk mail in the entryway for other people to deal with, Cassie says that there should be a recycling bin for it, but it’s clearly a defensive deflection rather than a passion for the environment. When she boards a train to attend a funeral in Poughkeepsie, a man next to her asks if he is aboard the train headed to Mount Vernon, and she replies “I hope not;” later, when she is fleeing from the ceiling-crawling Ezekiel, she ends up on another train where the same man is seated, who asks again if he’s on the wrong train, and she’s just like “Man, I don’t know,” and her tone is so disdainful that I couldn’t help but fall in love with this character. 

At Mary’s baby shower, Cassie is handed a Pepsi, and Johnson does some of the most bizarre business with a canned soda that you’ve ever seen. She already handled a Mountain Dew Code Red like it was poisoned earlier in the film, but she carries around this unopened Pepsi for almost an entire scene, holding it in one hand while making a claw shape with her other hand that sort of hovers over the top, but she never opens it. I mean this in the most loving way possible, but it honestly looks like Dakota Johnson may have never opened a coke before. I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s even a scene where Cassie is sent home by a doctor after trying to get herself tested for her “weird deja vu,” and the doctor tells her to go home and lie on the couch and watch old movies until she feels better; in the next scene, she’s watching Alistair Sim’s A Christmas Carol. This movie is not set at Christmas; in fact, everyone dresses like it’s August or September. There’s a narrative reason for this, that they want to have Cassie talk back to the TV when Scrooge asks the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come “Are these the shadows of things that must be, or are they the shadows of things that might be?”, but the fact that she’s watching a Christmas movie in the middle of the year is psychotic. And that’s not even getting into the fact that, after rescuing the three girls, she promises them that she’s not abducting them, only to drive them straight to the woods (hilarious) and then tell them that she’ll be back in three hours because she has to go home and dig through her mother’s old journals for more info about “Las Arañas,” the secret Peruvian tribe of Spider People who get powers from spider bites. 

“Flawless” movies are rare, if they exist, but this one is flawful, and although that makes it delightful in many ways, I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t some things here that are actually bad. For whatever reason, Rahim is dubbed over in every single scene, and the performance in the ADR is so flat a marble wouldn’t roll off of it. In one of his first scenes, he seduces a woman at the opera and, after they show each other a good time, he awakes next to her from his nightly nightmare, in which a slightly more grey-haired version of himself is killed by the young women that he later pursues. The nightmare sequence is fun, even if it does make it seem like the girls are not going to grow up to be heroes despite the costumes they wear and powers they display, as they do straight up murder him in his vision, but what’s even better is that he relates all of this to the woman in bed with him, babbling, talking about having foreseen his death every time he sleeps for decades. It is revealed that he targeted her specifically, as she has access to NSA tech that he can get his hacker employee (Zosia Mamet) to use to find his victims, but even before he reveals this, she should have been on her way out of the door based purely on his nonsense conspiracy talk, but she was clearly putting up with his conspiracy gobbledygook because she wanted to go a second round, and I respect that. 

The exposition is as inorganic as it could possibly be, the contemporary technology does things that are hilariously impossible, the dubbing is bad, and there are a dozen other things that you can find to complain about if that’s what movies are to you — things to complain about. That’s a way, but it isn’t my way. Maybe I just have big dumb baby brain and every time a scene opened with a shot through some kind of web-like obstruction (breezeblocks, lacy curtains, chain-link fencing, actual cobwebs on chain link fencing) or spiderwebs were evoked in broken glass or the structure of a window was the equivalent of having keys jangled in front of my face, because I was thoroughly entertained. Her web really does connect us all, and in the years to come when the immediate backlash dies down, I expect that this one will get a critical re-evaluation in the same vein as Showgirls. At long last, its hour come round again, another truly great bad movie has entered the chat. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Voyeurs (2021)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

I’ve been seeing a lot of praise online for the supposed return to form for erotic thrillers that’s been happening on major streaming services.  While the biggest movie franchises in the world—The Fast and the Furious, the MCU, Star Wars, etc.—have completely removed sex & eroticism from the movie theater, at-home streamers like Netflix have scored minor word-of-mouth hits for hornt-up trash like 365 Days and Deadly Illusions.  I think praising this ripple-sized “wave” of straight-to-streaming erotic thrillers as some kind of return to the genre’s 1980s-90s heyday overlooks a plenty of much better, riskier examples of the recent past like Double Lover, Knife+Heart, and Stranger By the Lake.  What’s being championed instead of those modern genre gems is the straight-to-VHS softcore version of that revival, which is fine.  At the very least, Netflix’s recent, self-reported success in producing mainstream home-video erotica is inspiring their competitors to make more of the stuff to attract that bored & thirsty market while it’s viable.  And now Amazon Prime has taken a swing at the erotic thriller throwback with its in-house release The Voyeurs.  I’d argue that their movie studio wing has already done a great job of bringing erotic menace back to the multiplex in much more creative, daring titles like The Neon Demon, Suspiria and, most recently, Annette.  Still, I had a lot of fun with their goofy, salacious entry into the home-video end of the genre, with all of its lustful coveting of what Netflix was doing in private.

The Voyeurs is basically Hitchcock’s Rear Window reimagined (maybe un-imagined?) for the straight-to-video erotic thriller genre, making it the second delightfully inane Rear Window homage of the year, following The Woman in the Window.  It’s much more ludicrous & consistently fun than Joe Wright’s film, however, pushing its idiotic internal logic towards a spectacularly trashy third-act climax that would be a water-cooler discussion topic for months if it were a proper theatrical release instead of a disposable streamer.  We start with a young couple (Euphoria‘s Sydney Sweeney & Detective Pikachu‘s Justice Smith) moving into their first apartment together in Montreal.  The French-Canadian substitute for Parisian lust & romance is pronounced early & often, with Montreal being introduced through its lingerie boutiques and described as “Fuck City”.  Mostly, though, it’s as cold and isolating as any major city in the North, which leads its doe-eyed Millennial protagonists to huddle up in their gorgeous apartment.  Instead of retreating into the modern incuriosity with the physical world around them that plagues most Kids These Days, they find themselves fascinated with the constantly nude gym-body couple across the street whose living room & bedroom windows are clearly visible from their own loft.  This initial curiosity quickly snowballs into full-blown erotic obsession, with many crossed lines, a surprising number of dead bodies, and an even more surprising number of onscreen orgasms. 

It’s the third act twists that really elevate The Voyeurs above the routine tedium of straight-to-streaming thrillers that get released on a weekly basis.  Its flat cinematography and the robotic mannerisms of its cast reinforce the terrifying reality that the house style of The CW has become one of the major cinematic influences of our time, but there is one major benefit to it suffering the many ills of modern streaming #content: its sprawling 2-hour runtime.  The rising-action portion of this steamy thriller hits all the exact beats that you’d expect, from the young couple’s decision to buy baby-pervs’ first set of binoculars to their inevitable escalation of making physical contact with the neighbors they’ve been spying on as foreplay.  Once all those lustful indulgences are out of the way, it’s time to teach them (and the lustful audience indulging through their POV) a hard-earned lesson through the most ludicrous mechanism possible.  And then the film goes an extra beat to allow our horny-for-the-first-time anti-heroes a chance to take revenge.  It’s a rare instance where the unrushed, over-plotted runtime that’s become standard for most modern mainstream films is actually used to its full advantage: giving the audience exactly what we want out of the genre, then pushing it into shameless, delirious excess no one really wanted or needed out of this simple tale of erotic voyeurism.  It delivers on the sexual menace promised by its premise, then stumbles around making incredibly goofy decisions in the post-coital afterglow, something we’ve all been through before.

There are a few distinguishing details that make The Voyeurs memorably stylish in its own dopey way: its soundtrack’s dream pop cover of Billy Idol’s “Eyes Without a Face,” its attempts to kink-up the intimacy of routine eye exams, its protagonist’s unlikely transformation into a rooftop superhero, etc.  For the most part, though, it’s most enjoyable as a standout example of a larger industry trend: the shameful slinking-off of the mainstream erotic thriller from public movie theaters to private maturbatoriums.  I doubt any of these word-of-mouth streamers will ever hit me the same way as seeing my beloved, filthy Double Lover with a packed, in-the-flesh film festival crowd, but I guess I have to appreciate these deliriously horny novelties wherever I can find them.  I’m always pushing for movies to be simultaneously sexier & sillier, and The Voyeurs admirably tears itself in both directions.

-Brandon Ledet