Does anybody remember those old Shrink to fit only you
501 jeans ads? They are creepier now.
Absurdism meets consumerism in co-writer/director Elza
Kephart’s bloody comedy, Slaxx.
Brightly lit and colorful CCC clothing store—offering high priced garments that are sustainably sourced without sweatshops, GMOs, or any other unsightly thing—is on shutdown to prep for the 8am onslaught as their new line of jeans finally hits the market.
It’s not just any jeans. This denim adjusts to your body and
makes you look even more glorious than you already do. And these jeans fit every
single figure, from 5 pounds underweight to 5 pounds overweight. It’s a dream
come true.
Also, they kill you. Their zipper might bite your hand off,
the legs might slip around your neck like a noose, or the waist might just
slice you in two.
Kephart is not the first filmmaker to animate bloodthirsty clothing. Peter Strickland’s 2018 treasure In Fabric followed a red dress wantonly slaughtering its wearers, while Yong-gyun Kim gave us murderous shoes in 2005’s The Red Shoes. And who can forget Martin Walz’s 1996 glory Killer Condom? (Well, no, they’re not clothes, but you do wear them.)
CCCis the type of trendy clothier that uses terms like ecosystem to define different sections of the store. Kephart’s message is that this kind of establishment is as dedicated to capitalism as any other form, and therefore it enslaves those working at the store, those working for the store before product makes it to their shelves, and even those who show up in hordes to purchase those wares.
Where Romero mainly pointed fingers at the hordes mindlessly drawn to stores like CCC, Kephart sees the villains as those perpetuating clean corporate hypocrisy. Still, it’s their customers and workers she murders—by the pantload.
Profoundly typical in its structure, Slaxx still has
fun with its kills and characters. Romane Denis is likeably earnest as the teen
on her first night at work, while Brett Donahue’s broad stroke sycophant boss
fits into the general tone of the film.
Sehar Bhojani steals every scene as the cynical Shruti, but the jeans are the real stars here. Kephart finds endlessly entertaining ways to sic them on unsuspecting wearers.
Kephart can’t overcome tonal confusion once she and co-scribe Patricia Gomez uncover the source of the jeans’ power. The filmmakers are unable to balance the serious nature of this curse with the brightly colored bloodbath of the previous 80 minutes.
We have certain expectations when it comes to documentaries. Maybe we expect to be informed, enlightened, sometimes moved, and when we’re really lucky, taken on a journey that both surprises and delights us. That’s the case with Selina Miles’s Martha: A Picture Story.
In Martha, Miles has crafted amulti-layered film that paints a vivid portrait of photographer Martha “Marty” Cooper as an artist who is, above all else, true to herself. We also see Cooper as a pioneer from 1963 when at the age of 20 she joined the Peace Corps to be able to “take pictures in foreign places,” followed by her solo motorcycle ride from Thailand to England, her role as the first female intern at National Geographic, and her position as the first female staff photographer at the New York Post in the 1970s.
The heart of the film is Cooper’s personal history of her work in photographing the graffiti scene in New York City of the 70s and 80s, which took it from a national phenomenon to a global phenomenon. Miles goes further in shining a light on the origins of hip-hop culture, the casitas and community gardens that sprouted in vacant lots of a city trying to rebuild itself, and Sowebo, Southwest Baltimore as an impoverished neighborhood on the cusp of gentrification. Cooper photographed it all and we learn that her work is virtually the only meaningful documentation of some cultures.
As Steve Zeitlin, Founder of
City Lore at the New York Center for Urban Folk Culture puts it in the film,
“She’s photographing these corners of life which are often forgotten about.
Having that record of how people lived is important. That’s the only way that
we have of transcending time. And the only thing we’ll have to go back to is
the record that Marty left.”
In the early 80s, Cooper teamed up with photographer Henry Chalfant. Both were attracted to the vibrant graffiti scene and as Cooper puts it, “He was very interested in the art and I was interested in the culture.” Their combined efforts in capturing the art form gave rise to the book, Subway Art, released in 1984 by a German publisher. While the book was a financial loss in its time, it inspired generations of new artists over the following decades and changed visual culture all over the world. Many street artists refer to it as their Bible.
Miles’s filmmaking style parallels and complements Cooper’s story: it’s kinetic and holds our interest. Tight and artful editing keeps the story moving. The music score supports and elevates Miles’s telling of the story of Cooper’s work and her global impact on generations of people and artists worldwide. The contemporary footage, much of which was shot by Miles herself, grounds the film and shows Cooper at the age of 75, still shooting pictures on the street, meeting fans, and even accompanying German graffiti artists on illegal, clandestine hits, racing along with them as they tag subway tunnels and train yards.
Together, Miles and Cooper explore themes such as accepting when something has run its course, the sidelining of marginalized cultures, and the ongoing battle over what is valued as art. At one point, Cooper tells us, “I’m not comfortable with the idea that I’m a legend or icon.”
What about Groundhog Day, but with unrelenting psychological dread? That’s the premise of Johannes Nyholm’s horror fable Koko-di, Koko-da, and it’s a testament to writer/director Nyholm that the film’s excruciating time loop manages to go from torturous to therapeutic.
After a family vacation takes a shocking turn, Tobias (Leif Edlund) and Elin (Ylva Gallon) lose themselves in their own private grief, their marriage one submerged argument away from total annihilation. What better time for a camping trip in the foreboding Swedish forests to get that old magic back?
Their unresolved trauma starts to literally stalk the couple
in the shape of three carnivalesque figures, with each nightmare encounter ending
the same way: some gruesome death, and then Tobias wakes up to repeat the loop
all over again.
The horror of Koko-di Koko-da rarely gets gory.
Tobias and Elin continually suffer extreme violence and torture, but it’s all
(thankfully) implied. Instead, what’s so unnerving about the film is the
inescapable dream logic that suffuses their fateful loop: no matter how hard
Tobias tries or how fast he runs, it’s only a matter of time before the first
strains of the fateful nursery rhyme on which the title is based start up, and
the couple’s shared torture begins anew.
The film’s main down side is that we aren’t allowed to see
or know much beyond the confines of this inexorable—and unrelenting—loop. And
once the metaphor is clear, there’s little else to do besides feel like an
eavesdropper in a long overdue couples therapy session. (An unconventional one,
sure, with more murder and animal attacks than the APA likely recommends, but
who knows what they get up to in Sweden.)
Still, it’s impossible not to feel for the grieving pair.
Anyone deserves some kind of catharsis after enduring such tragedy, and both
Edlund and Gallon manage to make it feel earned, even with their thinly
detailed characters.
Koko-di Koko-da is not a pleasant film to watch, but it is often a beautiful one. And it lays bare the truth that there’s no escaping misery in life—that the only way to break the cycle is to confront it, pain and all.
Our son Donovan joins us this episode, so obviously the best idea is to look into horror movie families that make ours look downright wholesome. Check out the boy’s band, NEW PLAGUE RADIO!
6. The Woman (2011)
Forget Pollyanna McIntosh for one minute (if that’s even possible). One of many reasons that Lucky McKee’s powerhouse of horror is so memorable is that McIntosh’s feral cannibal (who must smell awful) is not the scariest person on screen.
There’s something not quite right about Chris Cleese (an unsettlingly cherubic Sean Bridgers), and his family’s uber-wholesomeness is clearly suspect. This becomes evident once Chris hunts down a wild woman, chains her, and invites the family to help him “civilize” her.
It doesn’t go that well for anybody, really, in a film rethinks family.
Well, patriarchy, anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL50yBcw5wA&t=27s
5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
Poor, unlikeable Franklin Hardesty, his pretty sister Sally, and a few other friends head out to Grampa Hardesty’s final resting place after hearing the news of some Texas cemeteries being grave-robbed. They just want to make sure Grampy’s still resting in peace – an adventure which eventually leads to most of them making a second trip to a cemetery.
But that’s not the family we’re after. The clan that will come to be known as the Sawyers begin humbly enough in Toby Hooper’s original nightmare: a cook, a hitchhiker, a handyman of sorts, and of course, Grandpa.
There are so many moments to recall. Maybe it’s the slamming metal door, or the hanging meat hook, or the now iconic image of the hysterical and blood-soaked Sally Hardesty hugging the back of a pick up truck bed as the vehicle speeds away from Leatherface.
Or maybe it’s dinner, when Hooper really gives us some family context. He uses extreme close up on Sally’s eyeball as she takes in the bickering family lunacy of a dinner table quite unlike any we’d seen before.
4. The Lodge (2019)
It’s Christmas, and regardless of a profound, almost insurmountable family tragedy, one irredeemably oblivious father (Richard Armitage) decides his kids (Jaeden Martell and Lia McHugh) should get to know the woman (Riley Keough) he left their mother for. A week in an isolated mountain cabin during a blizzard should do it.
Dad stays just long enough to make things really uncomfortable, then heads back to town for a few days to work. Surely everybody will be caroling and toasting marshmallows by the time he returns.
What is wrong with this guy?! And it’s not just him. Turns out his kids are pretty seriously messed up as well. But fear not (or fear a lot) because Grace has some profound family dysfunction to fall back on, and pretty soon it’s just a guess as to who’s going to out-dysfunction the other.
3. We Are What We Are (2010)
In a quiet opening sequence, a man dies in a mall. It happens that this is a family patriarch and his passing leaves the desperately poor family in shambles. While their particular quandary veers spectacularly from expectations, there is something primal and authentic about it.
It’s as if a simple relic from a hunter-gatherer population evolved separately but within the larger urban population, and now this little tribe is left without a leader. An internal power struggle begins to determine the member most suited to take over as the head of the household, and therefore, there is some conflict and competition – however reluctant – over who will handle the principal task of the patriarch: that of putting meat on the table.
Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are is among the finest family dramas or social commentaries of 2010. Blend into that drama some deep perversity, spooky ambiguities and mysteries, deftly handled acting, and a lot of freaky shit and you have hardly the goriest film ever made about cannibals, but perhaps the most relevant.
2. Raw (2016)
Justine (Garance Marillier, impressive) is off to join her older sister (Ella Rumpf) at veterinary school – the very same school where their parents met. Justine may be a bit sheltered, a bit prudish to settle in immediately, but surely with her sister’s help, she’ll be fine.
Writer/director Julia Ducournau has her cagey way with the same themes that populate any coming-of-age story – pressure to conform, peer pressure generally, societal order and sexual hysteria. Here all take on a sly, macabre humor that’s both refreshing and unsettling.
Because what we learn is not just that Justine’s sister will not be a good mentor, or that there is definitely something wrong with Justine. By the blackly hilarious final moments on the screen, we see the big family portrait.
1.Hereditary (2016)
What else?!
With just a handful of mannerisms, one melodic clucking noise, and a few seemingly throwaway lines, Aster and his magnificent cast quickly establish what will become nuanced, layered human characters, all of them scarred and battered by family.
Art and life imitate each other to macabre degrees while family members strain to behave in the manner that feels human, seems connected, or might be normal. What is said and what stays hidden, what’s festering in the attic and in the unspoken tensions within the family, it’s all part of a horrific atmosphere meticulously crafted to unnerve you.
Aster takes advantage of a remarkably committed cast to explore family dysfunction of the most insidious type. Whether his supernatural twisting and turning amount to metaphor or fact hardly matters with performances this unnerving and visual storytelling this hypnotic.
There are elements of Anthony Scott Burns’s sci fi horror Come
True that put you in mind of early David Cronenberg, although what Canadian
filmmaker hasn’t been inspired by the master?
Like Cronenberg, Burns sets his unnerving tale amid the
humming florescents, beeping machines and grainy medical equipment displays of
an institution—someplace hospital-like, if not quite hospital-proper.
But where Cronenberg usually populated these dreary medtech landscapes
with the most disturbing body horror, Burns has other, slower terror in mind.
This is where 18-year-old runaway Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone)
finds herself. Nights spent on friends’ couches or at the local playground have
Sarah strung out enough that a two-month sleep study sounds exactly like the
safe, sound rest she needs.
Unfortunately, Sarah suffers from nightmares.
This is where Burns develops a marvelous sense of universal dread. As his camera (he also acted as cinematographer) weaves through hallways and caverns too dark to truly make out, human shapes or something like them hang, drape, congeal and otherwise loom in shadows. They are at unnatural angles and heights. Some seem to be looking at you.
What Burns sets in the corridors of Sarah’s mind abandons the Cronenberg universe in favor of a terror more reminiscent of Rodney Ascher’s documentary, The Nightmare.
Whew—heady stuff, and big shoes to fill. Burns follows
through with the tone and look of the film, creating a dreamy, retro vibe that
he amplifies with a score by Anthony Scott Burns, Pilotpriest and Electric Youth.
He also has quite a find in Stone, whose elfen look
perfectly suits the project. She projects something scrappy, vulnerable and
otherworldly and she carries this film on her narrow shoulders.
The cast around her does wonders to suggest a backstory that
isn’t shared, each pair or group with its own lingo and worn in rapport.
Where Come True falls short is in its story. The slow pace eventually works against the film. Worse still, it’s hard to see the climax as anything other than a cheat. Come True leaves you feeling massively let down, which is truly unfortunate after so much investment in a world this well built.
A few months back, Jamie Dornan and Emily Blunt stupefied us
all (well, the dozen or so of us who saw Wild
Mountain Thyme) with an Irish romance about as authentic as a Shamrock
Shake. Writer/director Aoife Crehan’s The Last Right takes us back to
the Emerald Isle to see if there’s any romance or magic left.
Oh, there is? Well, fine then.
Dutch actor Michiel Huisman plays Daniel Murphy, Irishman.
Or American. Well, that’s fuzzy, but he’s certainly not Dutch, although his
accent is tough to pinpoint. Daniel’s been called back from Boston to County Cork
for his ma’s funeral, and to look in on his younger brother Louis (Samuel
Bottomley, Get
Duked!)
And old man – also named Murphy – dies on the airplane and authorities
believe Daniel is his next of kin. They want him to deliver the remains to a
church on the northern tip of Ireland, but that’s not his responsibility plus
he has all this work to do and he can’t wait to get back to Beantown where his
fancy lawyer job waits for him.
But Louis wants to go, and Louis has autism, which is where
the film really gets a bit off the rails.
Crehan nods to Barry Levinson’s Rain Man early into
the cross-country drive between two brothers with a large age gap, a long way
to go and a lot to learn. Along for the ride is mortuary assistant Mary (Naimh
Algar) and more contrivances than you can shake a shillelagh at.
Performances are solid. Algar brings a fiery spirit to the
roadtrip experience, and Crehan fills small roles with the venerable talents of
Brian Cox, Colm Meaney and Jim Norton. Plus the scenery is gorgeous.
There is a perfectly middle-of-the-road romantic dramedy here somewhere. You may enjoy it, assuming you can get past the tangle of convenient plot twists and you don’t wince at the device of an autistic character (played by an actor who is not on the spectrum, although Bottomley delivers a layered and respectful performance) teaching the real lessons.
Knowing that Cosmic Sin comes from the writers behind last year’s Breach probably won’t fill you with confidence about their latest sci-fi adventure.
But the good news is Edward Drake and Corey Large are improving. Very, very slowly.
Drake also takes the director’s chair this time, and coaxes a mildly interested performance out of returning star Bruce Willis (which Breach could never manage).
The year is 2524 (remember that) and Earth’s forces have formed the Alliance of colonies throughout the universe. Willis is General James Ford, renamed the “Blood General” after he wiped out one of the colonies with a “Q-bomb” and was stripped of rank and pension (ouch!).
But minutes after learning of first contact with an alien life form, General Ryle (Frank Grillo) calls Ford back to duty, where he’ll join a rag tag group of you know who to make a heroic you know what and save you know where.
Drake and Large (who also plays Ford’s sidekick) clearly blew the budget on Grillo and Willis (Grillis!), with a side of Costas Mandylor. 500 years from now looks a lot like next Tuesday, while planets light years away look like next Tuesday in Michigan.
And still, cinematographer Brandon Cox manages some slick deep space panoramas…that are often ruined by Saturday morning-worthy effects of our heroes flying through the stars and “pew pew pew”-ing in battle with the aliens.
Likewise, Drake and Large’s script toys with the meaty issues of war, sacrifice, and colonialism, only to abandon them in the name of heroic grandstanding. Potential threads (and Grillo’s entire character) grab our attention and then vanish at random, rendering much of the 88 minute running time a meandering mess.
Big, old, empty houses are creepy, right? Lots of dark, musty spaces to get the imagination conjuring up all manner of nasty things that might be lurking.
There are some nasty things lurking in Shudder’s Stay Out of the F**kingAttic, but the way they’re conjured leans more toward laborious and silly.
Shillinger (Ryan Francis), Imani (Morgan Alexandria) and Carlos (Bryce Fernelius) are three ex-cons working for the Second Chance moving company. When they show up to move the elderly Vern (Michael Flynn) out of his mansion, he surprises them with a hard-to-resist offer.
If the three will work through the night to get the job done by morning, Vern will reward them with a nice chunk of cash. Two things, though: stay out of the attic and the basement.
Bet they don’t.
The use of the edited F**king in the title suggests a mischievous, knowing tone that got off the bus in a totally different zip code than director/co-writer Jerren Lauder. That’s too bad, because this film is in serious need of lightening up.
Almost every element – from performances to dialog to cheesy score to practical creature effects – lands as stilted and overly staged. Though Flynn does make an effective villain and one particular creature ain’t half bad, even the brisk 80-minute run of Lauder’s feature debut seems like an overstayed welcome.
As our Second Chance movers uncover secrets about Vern (and each other), Lauder leans on body horror closeups and weak jump scares on the way to a big reveal that is bigly ridiculous.
Shudder’s been on an impressive run of originals lately, which makes this misfire a little surprising. Here’s hoping Lauder’s second chance will be a bit more worthy of the investment.
Any deep dive into the day-to-day realities of asylum seekers
and the racism they face can end in horror (His House) or tragedy. Sophie
Deraspe’s Antigone takes the second path, obviously.
Though the story is thoroughly updated, Deraspe keeps the ancient Greek names for her Algerian family living in Quebec. Antigone (Nahéma Ricco) also retains the strength and rebellious nature of the heroine created more than 2500 years back.
In the original story, two brothers died in battle. One died
a hero because he fought on the side that won, so he receives a hero’s burial. Because
the other brother fought with the rebels, his body is left to rot in the sun.
His sister doesn’t care what her brothers have done, her
responsibility to them as family requires that she risk her own future to do
what she believes is right.
An imaginative reworking of the Sophocles play, Deraspe’s drama
still sees one sister challenging institutions to do what’s right by her
family.
Ricco astounds in the title role. Her fiery grace impresses,
especially as her physical performance flows effortlessly from wide-eyed
searching to crumbling vulnerability to straight-spined resolve. She develops a
timeless quality for the heroine, a conscience rooted in some primal virtue.
The cast around her matches her step for step, and as
Deraspe subverts tropes and expectations, her performers rise to the challenge.
Rawad El-Zein is especially powerful in the role of frustrating brother
Polynice, and both Antoine DesRochers and Paul Doucet excel as the filmmaker
finds new directions to take very old characters.
Deraspe’s film explores institutional hatred, justice versus
family loyalty, and the nature of heroism. It’s a powerful look at
generational, religious and cultural fractures. It’s a beautifully written and
executed reworking of an all-time classic.
More than anything, it is a singular performance that demands attention and respect.
