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Fright Club

Fright Club: Food in Horror Movies

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There is a lot about eating in horror movies. Sometimes it’s a single meal (Ray Liotta’s brain, for example), other times it’s a pervasive theme to the entire movie, as in Troll 2 or The Stuff.

We’re focused on the bigger theme here, which is a bit of a shame because spending some time talking about that spaghetti scene in Se7en, or the finger in the french fries in The Hitcher, or that tasty Texas barbeque in Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have been fun. Don’t even get us started on Oldboy and the octopus!

5. Motel Hell (1980)

It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters!

Farmer Vincent (Fifties heartthrob Rory Calhoun) makes the county’s tastiest sausage and runs the Motel Hello as well. Now if swingers keep disappearing from the motel, and mysterious, bubbly moans echo around the farm, that does not necessarily mean anything is amiss.

Farmer Vincent, along with his sister Ida (a super creepy Nancy Parsons) rids the world of human filth while serving the righteous some tasty vittles. Just don’t look under those wiggling, gurgling sacks out behind the butcherin’ barn!

Motel Hell is a deeply disturbed, inspired little low budget jewel. A dark comedy, the film nonetheless offers some unsettling images, not to mention sounds. Sure, less admiring eyes may see only that super-cheese director Kevin Connor teamed up with Parsons and Calhoun – as well as Elaine Joyce and John Ratzenberger – for a quick buck. But in reality, they teamed up to create one of the best bad horror films ever made.

So gloriously bad!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmxlnvqjSNM

4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Here’s a bizarre idea for a musical: The barber upstairs kills his clients and the baker downstairs uses the bodies in her meat pies. Odd for a Broadway musical, yes, but for a Tim Burton film? That sounds a little more natural.

Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a full-on musical – Burton’s first – and every inch a stage play reproduction. For many films, this would be a criticism, but Burton’s knack for dark artificiality serves the project beautifully, and he achieves the perfect Dickensian Goth tone. His production is very stagy and theatrical but never veers from his distinct, ghoulish visual flair.

As in most of Burton’s best efforts, Sweeney Todd stars Johnny Depp in the title role. Depp is unmistakably fantastic – consumed, morose, twisted with vengeance – and he’s in fine voice, to boot.

With Burton’s help, Depp found another dark, bizarre anti-hero to showcase his considerable talent. With Depp’s help, Burton gorgeously, grotesquely realized another macabre fantasy.

3. The Bad Batch (2016)

Ana Lily Amirpour follows themes that fascinated her with her feature debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, this time setting those preoccupations in a wasteland of conformity, survival and food.

The Bridge People are hyper-bulked up, ultra-tanned cannibals represented by Miami Man (Jason Momoa). They may not have access to steroids, but they’re certainly getting a lot of protein. The second community of Comfort offers a colorful, almost habitable environment led by charismatic leader The Dream (Keanu Reeves).

One version of America sees the vain, self-centered “winners” literally feeding on the weak. The second may seem more accepting, but it pushes religion, drugs and other “comforts” to encourage passivity.

Amirpour has such a facility with creating mood and environment, and though the approach here is different than with her debut, she once again loads the soundtrack and screen with inspired images, sounds and idiosyncrasies.

2. The Greasy Strangler (2016)

Like the by-product of a high cholesterol diet, The Greasy Strangler will lodge itself into your brain and do a lot of damage.

A touching father/son story about romance, car washes and disco, this movie is like little else ever set to film, showcasing unholy familial unions, men in their underwear, and merkins. (Look it up.)

Brayden (Sky Elobar) and his dad Big Ronnie (Michael St. Michaels – that is a name!) share the family business: LA walking tours of disco landmarks. They live together, work together, eat together.

Father and son possess a seriously unusual family dynamic that seems to work for them until they meet Janet (Elizabeth De Razzo – brave and funny). Both men fall for this “rootie tootie disco cutie,” and if that wasn’t enough, there’s a marauder on the loose – an inhuman beast covered head to toe in cooking grease.

The result is ingenious. Or repellant. Or maybe hilarious – it just depends on your tolerance for WTF horror and sick, sick shit. Whatever else it may be, though, The Greasy Strangler is – I promise you – hard to forget.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPl1vcb4hao

1. Dumplings (2004)

Fruit Chan’s Dumplings satirizes the global obsession with youth and beauty in taboo-shattering ways.

Gorgeous if off-putting Aunt Mei (Bai Ling) balances her time between performing black market medical functions and selling youth-rejuvenating dumplings. She’s found a customer for the dumplings in Mrs. Li (Miriam Yeung ChinWah), the discarded wife of a wealthy man.

With darkest humor and sharp insight, Chan situates the horror in a specifically Chinese history but skewers a youth-obsessed culture that circles the globe.

The secret ingredient is Bai Ling, whose performance is a sly work of genius. There are layers to this character that are only slowly revealed, but Ling clearly knows them inside and out, hinting at them all the while and flatly surprised at everything Mrs. Li (and you and everyone else) hasn’t guessed.

Gross and intimate, uncomfortable and wise, mean, well-acted and really nicely photographed, Dumplings will likely not be for everyone. But it’s certainly a change of pace from your day-to-day horror diet.

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out: Week of September 11

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The biggest turd of the summer is finally stinking up homes this week, but there are two truly outstanding indies releasing this week that you should watch instead. Because The Mummy‘s not even “this is so bad I’ll just watch it at home and enjoy it ironically” bad. It’s the bad kind of bad.

Click the film title for the full review.

It Comes at Night

Beatriz at Dinner

The Mummy

New In Theaters

Jiggidy Jog

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Home Again

by Hope Madden

Let’s say you love Nancy Meyers’s movies – you know, those fantasies like It’s Complicated or Something’s Gotta Give where late-middle-aged women land all the attention, sex, career opportunities and marital comeuppance they’ve always really deserved, only to realize that they had it all in them the whole time. Let’s say you love those, but you’d like them to skew maybe 15 – 20 years younger.

Boy howdy, is Home Again the movie for you.

Written and directed by Meyers’s daughter Hallie Meyers-Shyer, it spins a familiar, albeit younger, yarn.

Newly single, freshly 40, gorgeous, living in an unbelievable house and raising two precocious and adorable kids – man, does Alice Kinney (Reese Witherspoon) have it rough.

One contrivance leads to another and suddenly three Hollywood dreamers in the form of gorgeous twentysomething dudes hoping to realize their moviemaking ambitions are living in her guest house.

Why not? I mean, except for the high potential for murder and/or child molestation, but this isn’t that kind of movie. This is the kind that would never happen.

What will happen when Alice’s  estranged husband (Michael Sheen) comes home unexpectedly?

Gasp – do you think he’ll finally see how special she is? Will she hear all those things she’s wanted to hear from him for years? Will it work, or will she slowly realize that she deserves better?

Hell, she deserves it all!

I will tell you who deserves better—besides the audience—Reese Witherspoon.

How great was she earlier this year in HBO’s Big Little Lies? Well, she’s not great here. She coasts along with awkward and/or appreciative faces. She does have some fun chemistry with the underused (but always welcome) Candice Bergen.

None, surprisingly, with the usually reliable Sheen and less than none with the trio of hotties (Nat Wolff, Pico Alexander and Jon Rudnitsky) taking up residence.

It doesn’t help that those actors are bland (Wolff) to middling (Alexander) to weak (Rudnitsky).

No problem appears to be especially troubling, no solution feels earned, no relationship looks authentic. Even Nancy Meyers’s most self-indulgent work had a hard earned charm about it.

What Home Again needed was a different Meyers. That or a scary clown.

 

 

New In Theaters, Slider

Fun & Games

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It

by Hope Madden

Clowns are fun, aren’t they?

Back in ’86, Stephen King released the novel It, about a bunch of New England kids plagued by a flesh-hungry monster who showed itself as whatever scared them the most. Like, say, a clown.

The basic premise of It is this: little kids are afraid of everything, and that’s just good thinking.

Four years later, It made its way to TV as a miniseries, the first episode of which is one of the most terrifying things ever to grace the small screen, much thanks to the unforgettable presence of Tim Curry as Pennywise the clown.

It’s been 27 years, and as the story itself dictates, the time has come for It to return.

The Derry, Maine “losers club” finds itself in 1988 in this adaptation, an era that not only brings the possibility of Part 2 much closer to present day, but it gives the pre-teen adventures a nostalgic and familiar quality.

Though The Goonies this is not. Nor is it made for TV.

This version shares a lot of tonal qualities with one of the best King adaptations, Stand By Me. Both are bittersweet tales of the early bonds that help you survive your own childhood.

Bill Skarsgård has the unenviable task of following a letter-perfect Curry in the role of Pennywise. Those are some big clown shoes to fill, but Skarsgård is up to the challenge. His Pennywise is more theatrical, more of an exploitation of all that’s inherently macabre and grotesque about clowns.

Is he better than the original? Let’s not get nutty here, but he is great.

He and the kids really make this work. The young cast is led by the always strong Jaeden Lieberher (Midnight Special), and he’s surrounded by very strong support. Sophia Lillis charms as the shiniest gem in the losers’ club, and Finn Wolfhard (that is a name!) is a scream as the foul mouthed class clown Richie.

The almost inexcusably cute Jackson Robert Scott is little, doomed Georgie, he of the yellow slicker.

In keeping with that Eighties theme, both characters cast as minorities—the Jewish Stanely Uris (Wyatt Oleff) and African American “Homeschool” Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs)—are noticeably underwritten.

So, they weren’t perfect, but the team adapting for this go-round got a lot right.

The best Stephen King adaptations are those with writers who know how to prune and refocus. Luckily, newcomer Chase Palmer, longtime horror writer Gary Dauberman and, maybe most importantly, Cary Fukunaga (who wrote Beasts of No Nation) are on it.

The trio streamlines King’s more unwieldy plot turns and bloat, creating a much-appreciated focus.

Director Andy Muschietti shows great instinct for taking advantage of foreground, background and sound. Yes, It relies heavily on jump scares, but Muschietti’s approach to plumbing your fear has more depth than that and he manages your rising terror expertly.

New In Theaters, Slider

Playing God

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The Oath

by Hope Madden

A fight for alpha ensues with a rugged Icelandic backdrop in director Baltasar Kormákur’s latest, The Oath.

Kormákur, a filmmaker known for action-heavy thrillers, also stars as Finnur, a surgeon with some family troubles.

Though his young wife and small daughter seem picture-perfect, Finnur’s 18-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Anna (Hera Hilmar), is spiraling out of control. An entitled party girl, her drug flirtation blossoms into a full-blown habit, much thanks to her love interest and dealer, Óttar (Gísli Örn Garðarsson).

Finnur’s increasingly reckless behavior, all aimed at removing Óttar from Anna’s life, points as much to a need for control as it does misdirected protectiveness. The film’s title refers to the surgeon’s oath never to play god – which, of course, surgeons do daily. It’s an occupational habit, though, that Finnur is bringing into his time outside the office.

As director, Kormákur works to make both men equally detestable and tender. Óttar is vulgar and brutish, but regardless of the havoc he wreaks or the horror he threatens as Finnur tries harder and harder to separate the lovers, his affection for Anna feels authentic.

Likewise, Finnur’s behavior oscillates between imprudent protectiveness and troubling malevolence. Kormákur’s performance is the picture of restraint, his conflict primarily dealt with internally. It robs the film of some excitement but delivers tension and urgency.

Though both male leads impress, it’s really Hilmar who leaves a mark. Vulnerable, naïve and headstrong, her Anna’s a perfectly frustrating culmination of post-adolescent volatility.

The Oath lacks the slick production values and audience-friendly narrative found primarily in Kormákur’s English-language product (2 Guns, Everest, Contraband), favoring grittier fare and more subdued energy. These are choices that benefit the story, although Kormákur struggles to maintain a tone that suits the tale.

Finnur’s behavior at a highly critical point feels nefarious in a way that doesn’t fit Kormákur’s characterization, and his actions are so atrocious that the resolution feels unsatisfyingly easy. The Oath dips into horror territory, not necessarily a bad thing, but the film can’t make its shifting approach feel anything but jarring – as if an entirely different film landed around Act 3, then vanished for the final reel or so.

For Your Queue

I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of September 4

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So many movies of the brand-spankin’ variety available this week in home viewing. You’ve got your bona fide awesomeness, some better-than-you-think big budget bombs, and one flaming piece of garbage. And more! More! So much, there may be no reason to leave home all week. Except to go see It, of course.

Raw

The Wedding Plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDn73s-oEJc

Megan Leavy

All Eyez on Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VC0aSPfyQk

Rough Night

Paris Can Wait

New In Theaters

Sounds of America

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Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World

by Rachel Willis

The history of indigenous people in America is one of erasure. Their contributions are overlooked, rewritten, or simply forgotten. In Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, Catherine Bainbridge (and co-director Alfonso Maiorana) seeks to shed light on the American Indian musicians who helped form the sound of American music.

The documentary explores many aspects of indigenous influence in American music. It profiles individual artists, including Link Wray, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Charlie Patton, among others, but also examines how traditional Indian music, specifically the music of the Mississippi delta, shaped rock and roll, blues, and the big band sound of the 1930’s.

With each artist profiled, there is a shift in narrative style. In some ways, this works as many of the musicians represent different genres of music. The shifts help to better highlight the hand indigenous peoples have had in multiple areas of American music. However, it also gives the film an episodic feel. One wonders if the material would have been better served as a multi-part television documentary.

Interviews with music historians and ethnologists help explain the evolution of traditional indigenous music into different aspects of rock and roll and blues. Vocal styles heard in recordings from 1907 can be heard again in the early blues of Charlie Patton. Many Americans consider these sounds to be the traditional sounds of African music, but the reality is more complex. The true history is one that blends cultures, with a heavy emphasis on American indigenous music. When one hears the comparison, it’s hard not to hear the traditional music of the American Indian in the blues.

Musicians like Iggy Pop, George Clinton, and Steve Van Zandt are also interviewed. They provide a context in which the early American Indian musicians influenced scores of famous bands and musicians. At times, it feels they’re revealing a secret that many in the music world know to the rest of us. They’ve known all along where the indigenous musicians fit into the history of music and they’re finally opening the eyes of the rest of us.

While the music history is interesting, the most important aspect of the film is what it gives to indigenous communities. It emphasizes their role in American history. It gives Indian kids heroes to emulate. It shows the rest of us that the culture of the American Indian exists within the fabric of what makes us all Americans. It’s the kind of documentary that deserves a wide audience.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Sisters in Horror

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Oh, siblings—our closest friends and the bane of our existence. Horror movies know that, which is why both sibling rivalry and sisterly bonds populate so many worthwhile flicks: Sisters, Excision, Mama, Only Lovers Left Alive, Kiss of the Vampire. Too many to count, really, but that’s exactly what we plan to do: count down the five best.

5. The Lure (2015)

Sisters Gold (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek) are not your typical movie mermaids, and director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s feature debut The Lure is not your typical – well, anything.

The musical fable offers a vivid mix of fairy tale, socio-political commentary, whimsy and throat tearing. But it’s not as bizarre a combination as you might thing.

The Little Mermaid is actually a heartbreaking story. Not Disney’s crustacean song-stravaganza, but Hans Christian Andersen’s bleak meditation on the catastrophic consequences of sacrificing who you are for someone undeserving. It’s a cautionary tale for young girls, really, and Lure writer Robert Bolesto remains true to that theme.

But that’s really too tidy a description for a film that wriggles in disorienting directions every few minutes. There are slyly feminist observations made about objectification, but that’s never the point. Expect other lurid side turns, fetishistic explorations, dissonant musical numbers and a host of other vaguely defined sea creatures to color the fable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxhi_3hDUPE

4. Ginger Snaps (2000)

Sisters Ginger and Bridget, outcasts in the wasteland of Canadian suburbia, cling to each other, and reject/loathe high school (a feeling that high school in general returns).

On the evening of Ginger’s first period, she’s bitten by a werewolf. Writer Karen Walton cares not for subtlety: the curse, get it? It turns out, lycanthropy makes for a pretty vivid metaphor for puberty. This turn of events proves especially provocative and appropriate for a film that upends many mainstay female cliches.

Walton’s wickedly humorous script stays in your face with the metaphors, successfully building an entire film on clever turns of phrase, puns, and analogies, stirring up the kind of hysteria that surrounds puberty, sex, reputations, body hair, and one’s own helplessness to these very elements. It’s as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore – kind of A Canadian Werewolf in High School, if you will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zoa1A987A_k

3. 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.

A vegetarian from a meat-free family, Justine objects to the freshman hazing ritual of eating a piece of raw meat. But once she submits to peer pressure and tastes that taboo, her appetite is awakened and it will take more and more dangerous, self-destructive acts to indulge her blood lust.

In a very obvious way, Raw is a metaphor for what can and often does happen to a sheltered girl when she leaves home for college. But as Ducournau looks at those excesses committed on the cusp of adulthood, she creates opportunities to explore and comment on so many upsetting realities and does so with absolute fidelity to her core metaphor.

2. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford? Yes, please!

The two then-aging (just barely, if we’re honest) starlets played aging starlets who were sisters. One (Davis’s Jane) had been a child star darling. The other (Crawford’s Blanche) didn’t steal the limelight from her sister until both were older, then Blanche was admired for her skill as an adult actress. Meanwhile, Jane descended into alcoholism and madness. She also seemed a bit lax on hygiene.

Blanche winds up wheelchair bound (How? Why? Is Jane to blame?!) and Jane’s envy and insanity get the better of her while they’re alone in their house.

Famously, the two celebrities did not get along on set or off. Whether true or rumor, the performances suggest a deep, authentic and frightening hatred borne of envy that fuels the escalating tension.

Davis is at her unhinged best in a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination. Crawford pales by comparison (as the part requires), but between the hateful chemistry and the story’s sometimes surprising turns, this is a movie that ages well, even if its characters did not.

1. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)

A lurid Korean fairy tale of sorts – replete with dreamy cottage and evil stepmother – Jee-woon Kim’s Tale of Two Sisters is saturated with bold colors and family troubles.

A tight-lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear time frame, and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.

The director’s use of space, the composition of his frame, the set decoration, and the disturbing and constant anxiety he creates about what’s just beyond the edge of the frame wrings tensions and heightens chills. The composite effect disturbs more then it horrifies, but it stays with you either way.

Tale masters the slow reveal, and the dinner party scene is a pivotal one for that reason. One of the great things about this picture is not the surprise about to be revealed – one you may have guessed by this point, but is nonetheless handled beautifully – but the fact that Tale has something else up its sleeve. And under its table.