7/5/15 (Part One): Home is Where the Haunt Is

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Barbara Niven, cinema, dead children, father-son relationships, film reviews, films, ghosts, grown children, haunted houses, horror-comedies, Housebound, Jack Plotnick, Jeffrey Combs, John Waters, Kat Dennings, Lucas Lee Graham, Mackenzie Phillips, Mark Bruner, Matthew Gray Gubler, McKenna Grace, Mel Rodriguez, Michl Britsch, Movies, multiple writers, Muse Watson, Odd Thomas, paranormal investigators, racists, Ray Santiago, Ray Wise, Richard Bates Jr., Ronnie Gene Blevins, Sally Kirkland, scatological humor, seances, seeing ghosts, Sibyl Gregory, silly films, Soska Sisters, Suburban Gothic, suburban homes, suburban life, suburbia, The Frighteners, Under the Bed, writer-director-producer

Ah, suburbia: endless rows of identical houses, with identical lawns, with identical Suburbans parked in identical carports, tended to by identical suburbanites as they go about their virtually identical lives. For many people, suburbia is the very picture of success: after all, what really says “You’ve made it” more than your own house, family, steady job and reliable source of transportation? For the outsider, misanthrope and loner, however, the very concept of suburbia can be a kind of hell on earth: the place where all dreams go to become pureed into easily digestible slop. As the Descendents so aptly put it: “I want to be stereotyped…I want to be classified…I want to be a clone…I want a suburban home.”

For filmmakers, the concept of the dark underbelly of suburbia is nothing new: after all, films like The Stepford Wives (1975), The Amityville Horror (1979), Neighbors (1981), Parents (1989), The ‘Burbs (1989),  American Beauty (1999) and Donnie Darko (2001) have been equating cookie-cutter neighborhoods with existential dread for decades now. To this storied tradition we can now add writer-director Richard Bates Jr’s Suburban Gothic (2014): proving that there’s nothing wrong with ambition, Bates Jr takes the aforementioned suburban angst films and throws in elements of “I see ghosts” films, ala The Frighteners (1996) and Odd Thomas (2013), as well as “grown children moving back home” films, such as the instantly classic Housebound (2014) and the less successful Under the Bed (2012). If Suburban Gothic never comes close to reaching the heady heights of Housebound, there’s still enough silly, funny and outrageous material here to give genre fans a grin from ear to ear. Plus, it’s got Ray Wise: any film with Ray Wise is, of course, automatically better than any film without him…that’s just basic math, amigo.

Poor Raymond (Criminal Minds’ Matthew Gray Gubler) is in a bit of a pickle, the same conundrum that might befall many twenty-to-thirty-somethings: he’s over-educated and under-employed. Despite having his MBA, Raymond must swallow the bitterest pill of all and move back in with his over-protective, smothering mother, Eve (Barbara Niven), and obnoxious, disapproving and casually racist father, Donald (Ray Wise, swinging for the rafters), an event which is sure to put a crimp in any attempt he can make to take control of his life.

You see, Raymond is a bit of a mess: bullied as a child about his weight and “gifted” with the ability to see ghosts, he escaped his one horse town as soon as he could, hoping to put as much distance between him and the past as possible. Given to wearing outrageously showy clothes (his bright, purple scarf is a definite highlight), Raymond couldn’t be more out-of-place in his old hometown, especially once he ends up back in the sights of former bully Pope (Ronnie Gene Blevins) and his small crew of miscreants. Everyone in town is glad to see that Raymond failed at life, since it (somehow) validates their own humble existences. Everyone, that is, except for Raymond’s former classmate, Becca (2 Broke Girls’ Kat Dennings), who now tends bar at the local watering hole. To her, Raymond was always the only interesting person in town and she’s mighty glad to have him back, even if she has a snarky way of showing it.

Just in time for his homecoming, however, some truly weird shit has started to happen, seemingly centered around the makeshift childs’ coffin that Donald’s gardeners have just dug up in the yard. Before he knows what’s going on, Raymond is experiencing the same ghostly visions that he used to have, this time involving a sinister little girl. As the occurrences become more pronounced, Raymond and Becca are convinced that a wayward spirit is in need of a peaceful journey into the light, while Donald and Eve are convinced that their son is losing his ever-lovin’ mind. As Raymond and Becca dig deeper into the history of the house, however, they begin to realize that the spirit in question might not be that of a little lost girl: it might just be something a bit more on the “extreme evil” side of things. Will Raymond and Becca be able to set it all to rights or will this humdrum slice of suburban life end up destroying them all?

My anticipation level for Suburban Gothic was pretty high, right out of the gate, for one very important reason: I pretty much adored writer-director Bates Jr’s debut, the outrageous Excision (2012), a slice of high school life that managed to combine Grand Guignol gore with fanciful dream sequences and arrived at a wholly unique, if often repugnant, place that wasn’t so far removed from what the Soska Sisters did with their stunning American Mary (2012). Excision was the kind of debut that puts a filmmaker firmly on my radar, which leads us directly to the sophomore film, Suburban Gothic. If his newest possessed a tenth of the gonzo energy of his first, this seemed like a pretty sure-fire no-brainer.

In reality, Suburban Gothic is a good full-step (certainly at least a half-step) down from Bates Jr’s debut, although it’s still a thoroughly enjoyable romp on its own terms. The big difference ends up being tonal: unlike Excision, which buried its blackly comic sensibilities under a lot of very unpleasant material, Suburban Gothic is a much sillier, goofier affair. Nowhere is this made more explicit than the impossibly silly scene where Raymond watches his toenails rise and fall to the tune of the old chestnut “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Shoddy CGI aside, the scene has the feel of something truly slapstick and goofy, perhaps closer to The ‘Burbs than anything in Bates Jr’s debut.

This “silly” elements end up seeping into almost every aspect of the film: John Waters shows up as the blow job-obsessed head of the local historical society, the medium’s daughter is named Zelda (et tu, Poltergeist (1982)?), Raymond and Becca dress up in the most ridiculous ghost costumes ever (think Charles Schultz), anonymous hands grab Raymond from every-which direction and there’s more mugging going on than a thug convention. In one of the film’s most notable bits, Raymond masturbates while checking out his favorite site, “Latina Booty,” as an overhead light slowly fills with “ghostly” semen: at the “appropriate” moment, the light shatters, showering poor Raymond in about fifty gallons of spooky spunk. Disgusting? You bet yer bottom dollar! Terrifying? Not quite.

The aforementioned example, however, is also a good example of Suburban Gothic’s ace-up-the-sleeve, as it were: for all of the film’s silliness and scatological humor (along with the jizz, we get a lovingly filmed vomiting scene and a nice, long shot of a turd in a toilet), there’s also genuine intelligence and love for the genre. The light gag might be an easy-shot gross-out joke but it’s always a subtle, kind of brilliant nod to Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead (1981). There’s also a not-so subtle reference to del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), lots of visual ques for The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist and plenty of cameos by genre royalty (the legendary Jeffrey Combs gets to play a bugshit-crazy doctor (natch), while the Soska Sisters pop up in a crowd scene).

While the actual plot is nothing revolutionary, Suburban Gothic is such a good-natured, eager-to-please popcorn flick that it’s never painful to watch: the CGI is fairly well-integrated (save that rather dreadful toenail bit) and if the color-timing on the cinematography seems constantly off (the film has an odd red cast that’s pretty noticeable), cinematographer Lucas Lee Graham (who also shot the much more striking Excision) serves up plenty of nicely composed, evocative images.

On the acting side, Gubler is pitch-perfect as the sarcastic, quietly suffering schlub who must swallow his distaste for everything in order to save his (decidedly undeserving) childhood home. Gubler has a rare ability to mix wiseacre dialogue delivery with Stoogian physical comedy, an ability which serves him well here: one of the film’s easy highlights is the hilarious scene where Raymond accidentally drops an ice cream cake, over and over, until he finally stamps on the damn thing in an abject display of childish tantrums writ large.

While Dennings takes a little longer to get revved up (her early scenes have a rather distracting “I don’t give a shit” quality that’s off-putting), she fully comes into her own by the film’s final reel and her and Gubler make for a believable enough couple. Although she’s never as consistent as Gubler, Dennings shows enough steel, here, to make me interested in her next move: here’s to hoping she spends a little more time in the horror genre…we could use a few fresh faces!

While Niven is fun as Raymond’s mom, Wise really gets to run roughshod over the proceedings: whether he’s proclaiming that all of his Latin American workmen are “Mexicans,” telling his son to “take a knee” as he rolls up to him in a squeaky office chair or apologizing to his black football players for his lack of “grape pop,” Wise is an absolute blast. If anything, his performance as Donald makes a nice comparison to his role as Satan in Reaper, albeit tempered with more than a little lunk-headedness. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if there’s ever a Mount Rushmore for iconic genre personalities, Wise is guaranteed to be there.

Ultimately, Suburban Gothic is a thoroughly entertaining, amusing and mildly outrageous horror-comedy: fans of this particular style will find no end of delights, I’m willing to wager, although I still found myself slightly disappointed by the time the credits rolled (the less said about the ridiculously sunny coda, the better). Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by standout films like Housebound and The Frighteners, a pair of horror-comedies that are pretty much the first and last word on this particular subject…perhaps I was hoping for something with a little more bite, ala Excision. Whatever the reason, I have no problem whatsoever recommending Suburban Gothic (provided, of course, that potential viewers are prepared for the often rude humor), although it’s not quite the Richard Bates Jr joint that I hoped for.

I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that Bates Jr is going to become a force to reckon with in the next several years. If that doesn’t blow yer toenails back, pardner…well, I don’t know what will.

2/25/15 (Part One): The Tin Man With the Big Ol’ Heart

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'80s action films, '80s films, 1980s films, 4th Directive, action films, blockbusters, cinema, Clarence Boddicker, co-writers, cops, cybernetics, cyborgs, Dan O'Herlihy, dark humor, Delta City, Detroit, Dick Jones, dystopian future, ED-209, Edward Neumeier, evil corporations, fake commericals, film franchise, film reviews, films, Jesse Goins, Kurtwood Smith, Leeza Gibbons, man vs machine, Michael Miner, Miguel Ferrer, Movies, multiple writers, Nancy Allen, near future, OCP, past memories, Paul McCrane, Paul Verhoeven, Peter Weller, police, Ray Wise, Robert DoQui, RoboCop, Ronny Cox, sci-fi, science-fiction, set in Detroit, street gangs

It’s always a hoot to look back on bygone visions for “the future,” now that we’re firmly ensconced in it. The Jetsons promised us flying cars, Silent Running (1972) posited orbiting outer space greenhouses and 1984…well, we all know how rosy that was supposed to be, don’t we? While most notions of the future do a fair amount of credibility stretching (where are all those instant food machines and self-dressing booths that were supposed to make life so easy?), few have managed to be quite as fanciful as Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987): after all, this is a film that envisions Detroit as a bankrupt, crime-ridden wasteland, foresees mega-corporations taking over law enforcement (to the mass detriment of the lower classes) and theorizes that cybernetic implants will one day be advanced enough to allow the severely disabled and/or injured to resume some semblance of autonomous movement…in other words, what a bunch of malarkey, eh?

In all seriousness, despite its often campy tone, the original RoboCop is actually a pretty lean, mean, relentless little bruiser, similar in tone to Cameron’s original Terminator (1984) or Miller’s inaugural Mad Max (1979). Like these franchises (or pretty much any action franchises, to be honest), the original film is a much more modest, grounded affair than any of the resulting sequels. Thanks to an ever-prevalent streak of pitch-black humor and some great performances from the likes of Peter Weller, Kurtwood Smith (That ’70s Show’s Red Forman), Nancy Allen, Ray Wise and Ronny Cox, RoboCop is a fun, exhilarating and clever peek into a future where business and bureaucracy are king and humanity’s future rests on a pair of very sturdy steel shoulders.

It’s the mean streets of Detroit, in the near future, and the city’s police department is run by the omnipresent OmniCorp (OCP, to the punters), the kind of all-reaching octopus conglomerate that has its tentacles in everything from gene research to government insurrection to military weaponry. OCP CEO Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) has a pet project that threatens to revolutionize law enforcement and allow for the clean-up of the city’s crime problem ahead of a sparkly new development deal dubbed Delta City: the all-robotic, crime-fighting ED-209. Only problem is, the thing doesn’t work, as we see when it blasts a hapless volunteer to kingdom come during a test run in the board room.

Enter Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), a pretender to the throne with his own plan: the RoboCop project, wherein real police officers are infused with state-of-the-art cybernetics in order to create superior “cyborg” cops. They need a subject, of course, which comes around in the form of Murphy (Peter Weller), an eager-beaver, rising star who gets transferred into hell on earth and is promptly shot to shit by the villainous Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith, chewing delicious scenery by the mile) and his murderous street gang. Legally “dead,” Murphy is turned into the titular hero, a galvanized steel “peace officer” whose just as likely to leave the suspects in pieces.

As RoboCop cuts a swath through Detroit’s criminal population, he begins to regain some of his basic humanity, thanks to the attention of his former partner, Officer Lewis (Nancy Allen), and some recurring memory snippets that give tantalizing hints of his former life and family. Torn between being a soulless machine and a living, breathing human being, RoboCop fights with retaining the essential humanity that made him “Murphy.” As he gets closer to the criminal mastermind who originally ended his life, however, Murphy will learn that the web of corruption spins all the way to the hallowed halls of OCP’s upper echelon. Will RoboCop have what it takes to put an end to the evil or will the very nature of his existence prevent him from dispensing the justice that Detroit so desperately needs?

One of the biggest pleasures of Verhoeven’s RoboCop is the assured way in which the Dutch director builds his dystopic world, using a combination of pitch black humor, pulse-pounding action setpieces and some truly cool special effects, including some nicely realized stop-motion animation. The satiric commercials that break up the action are frequently funny (the one for the Nukem board game is simply sublime) but they also help to give peeks into the larger world, the skewed, slightly scary one that exists outside the framework of the film, proper. The series actually develops this further in the second installment but it’s a great aspect and really adds to the overall feel.

Any pulpy action flick lives or dies by two elements: its action sequences and its cast. In both of these aspects, RoboCop comes across as a pretty stellar example of the genre. While Weller’s performance here is iconic, it’s just one solid performance among many. Nancy Allen is great as his spunky partner, while Cox and Smith are pitch-perfect as the arch-villain and his sleazy second-in-command. Boddicker’s gang is one of the great groups of cinematic baddies, spotlighted by an incredibly spirited turn by veteran Ray Wise as Leon (the scene set in the “punk” club is absolutely delightful).

While it might be easy to associate Verhoeven with his most outrageous “low” (that would, of course, be Showgirls (1995)), his resume also includes Total Recall (1990) and Starship Troopers (1997): the director clearly knows his way around sci-fi action and the whole shebang kicked off with RoboCop. The film is full of great action moments, shootouts and car chases, reminding of the aforementioned Mad Max and Terminator in the ways in which the setpieces always seem grounded in some kind of physical reality, regardless of how fanciful the action gets. It’s the kind of physicality that gets lost in modern CGI-based action films and gives RoboCop a bruised, scuffed feeling that fits like a well-worn shoe.

Similar to the Mad Max and Terminator franchises, the RoboCop franchise would go on to bigger, louder and more outlandish heights in future installments. While the other films in the series all have their charms (the third one, much less so, admittedly), my heart will always belong with Verhoeven’s brash, snarky and full-blooded original. When the satire, action and political commentary all hit their mark, there are few ’80s blockbusters that are in the same league as RoboCop (no matter how many times I watch the finale, I always stand and cheer at the “You’re fired” line). Jones and Boddicker are classic villains, RoboCop is the quintessential knight in shining armor and Anne Lewis is just the kind of partner that you want watching your back, when the chips are down.

In an era where business and technology continue their vociferous joint march to the sea, it’s kind of nice to see a film where the little guy wins, even if we know that OCP is going to keep trying to get their pound of flesh long after the cameras cut. More importantly, RoboCop still holds up today as a great action film: compared to other ’80s fare, it’s much less dated and more streamlined. While it’s undeniably pulpy, it’s also pretty hard to hard to deny the film’s allure: you might have the right to remain silent but I’m willing to bet you’ll be doing a fair amount of cheering, too.

2/21/15 (Part Three): A Monster Mash

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Adam Green, Alex Pardee, ArieScope Pictures, auteur theory, Chillerama, cinema, creature feature, Digging Up the Marrow, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, found-footage, found-footage films, Frozen, Hatchet, horror, horror films, indie horror film, interviews, mockumentary, Monsters, Movies, Nightbreed, practical effects, pseudo-documentary, Ray Wise, self-promotion, Will Barratt, William Dekker, writer-director-editor

As I stare forty years of living in the face, there are precious few holdovers from my childhood but there are still a few: I’m still terrified of spiders, I’m still fascinated by outer space and I still believe in monsters. Call it a life-long delusion, a long-held conviction or just plain bull-headedness but I staunchly refuse to believe that we puny humans really know all there is to know about this massive ball of rock and water that we live on (much less the billions of unexplored ones that blanket the cosmos). The oceans are mighty deep, the jungles are mighty thick and there are plenty of dark places to poke around in…if you think about it, we know as much about our world as any child does, which is, of course, not much.

Indie horror auteur Adam Green also believes in monsters and, like me, isn’t afraid to admit it. The difference, of course, is that this stuff is his bread-and-butter: as the head of ArieScope Pictures, creator of the Hatchet franchise (2006-2013) and horror-oriented TV show Holliston, as well as writer-director of the ‘stuck-on-a-ski-lift’ chiller Frozen (2010) and a segment in the rather odious Chillerama (2011) anthology, Green is one of the brightest stars in the modern horror constellation. With his newest film, Digging Up the Marrow (2014), Green fuses his life-long love of monsters and horror to a sturdy found-footage template and comes up with something along the lines of a low-key, indie, found-footage Nightbreed (1990). In the process, he illustrates the fact that true believers have known all along: monsters are real…and they don’t always have our best interests in mind.

Structurally, Digging Up the Marrow is similar to another indie horror film: writer-director J.T. Petty’s S&man (2006). Like S&man, Green’s film begins as a mockumentary, with the writer-director going around various fan conventions and interviewing genre luminaries like Lloyd Kaufman, Tony Todd, Mick Garris and the like. On the surface, the subject is monsters but the early part of the film is actually all about Green and his film company, ArieScope Pictures. In an exceptionally clever bit of cross-promotion, Green and his associates play themselves in the picture and we get plenty of behind-the-scenes peeks into films like Hatchet (2006): it works within the structure of the film but it also serves as a neat little bit of fan service, a two-for-one that speaks volumes to the way Green approaches the subject (and his films, in general).

As Green discusses the various monster-related things that fans and peers send him, all while accompanied by erstwhile cameraman Will Barratt, we finally get to the “fiction” at the heart of the “fact.” In the midst of all the documentary footage and interviews, Green discusses one particular person, William Dekker (Ray Wise), who claims to have actual evidence of real monsters. Dropping everything, Green and Barratt head out to go see Dekker and prove (or disprove) his claims. Once there, the filmmaking duo find their host to be an exceedingly eccentric individual: intense, no-nonsense and utterly convinced of the existence of monsters, Dekker claims to know where the entrance to their underground world is. Dubbed “The Marrow,” Dekker claims that monsters regularly emerge from the otherwise unexceptional hole in the nearby forest and he gives Green the opportunity he’s waited his whole life for: the chance to actually see a real monster.

As Adam and Will settle in, however, they begin to get the gradual impression that Dekker isn’t playing with a full deck, especially when he claims to see monsters that neither of them can. When Green unexpectedly gets his wish and actually sees something, however, it sets off a fire in him: despite Dekker’s increasingly frantic pleas to leave well enough alone, he’s bound and determined to descend into The Marrow, scratching that unscratchable childhood itch for the first time. Will Adam and Will find the monsters that they seek? Is Dekker telling the truth, completely insane or some combo of the two? And where, exactly, does that ominous hole really lead?

Let’s get the negative stuff out of the way up front: Digging the Marrow suffers from many of the same issues that most found-footage films do (at this point, these issues are starting to seem like inherent genetic defects in the sub-genre), the finale is a little rough and we don’t get to see quite as much of the monsters as I’d like (pretty much a standard complaint in most horror fare, if you think about it). As with pretty much any found-footage film, the movie also ends just as it’s really kicking into gear: again, pretty much endemic of the sub-genre.

And that’s pretty much it, folks: past those few small complaints, Green’s film is a complete joy, a fan love letter to monsters that manages to push pretty much ever necessary button in my black, little heart. While I’ve been a fan of Green’s since Hatchet, I was unaware of how genuinely charismatic the guy is: it’s always a danger when directors “play themselves,” as it were, but Green manages to be friendly, likable, interesting and, most importantly, absolutely believeable during the fictional portions of the film. It shouldn’t be surprising that Green can interact effortlessly with the other directors and industry folks at the conventions (those are his peers, after all) but his acting scenes with Wise have just as much authenticity and realism. Ditto Barratt, who proves a more than capable foil to Green. In a subgenre that often suffers from unrealistic, unlikable actors/characters, Digging Up the Marrow acquits itself most ably.

This, of course, doesn’t even take into account the stellar contributions of long-time genre great Ray Wise. Always dependable and usually the best thing on any screen at any given time, Wise is one of those actors that lights up any production: to be honest, his part in Chillerama was just about the only thing I enjoyed in that entire film and it probably accounted for a grand total of five minutes, tops. Here, Wise has never been better, for one important reason: Green actually gives him the opportunity to stretch out and sink his teeth into a meatier role. We get much more of Wise, here, than we usually do (maybe since Swamp Thing (1982), to be honest) and the results are predictable: more Wise equals more badassitude, period. He’s tough, snarky, sarcastic, caustic, funny, vulnerable, sinister, innocent and all-around amazing: it’s a full-rounded performance and a multi-dimensional character. More than anything, this should serve as a wake up call for other filmmakers: stop using Wise as seasoning and start making him the main course…there’s no reason this guy shouldn’t be carrying more movies.

Any film about monsters, however, must still answer one very important question: how cool are the monsters? In the case of Digging Up the Marrow, the answer is “Very cool.” Based on the artwork of outsider illustrator Alex Pardee (who also appears during the film’s faux-interview portion), the monsters are unique, frightening, weird, cool and all-around unforgettable. My big complaint, of course, is that we never see as much (or as many) of them as we should but that’s also like complaining that free ice cream isn’t your favorite flavor: are we really going to bitch about free ice cream? What we do see, however, makes all the difference in the world: it’s obvious that Green and crew have genuine love for their subject and it really comes out in the exceptional practical effects and creature designs.

One of the biggest compliments I can give Digging Up the Marrow is that I wanted more as soon as the film was over: the film is ready-made for a sequel (The Marrow has many entrances, according to Dekker, all over the world…including in an IHOP, since monsters like pancakes) and I say “Bring it on.” Digging Up the Marrow is a fascinating, unique and extremely personal film by a massively talented filmmaker: I have a feeling that Green still has a lot to say about the subject and I can’t wait for him to say it.

While monsters always function better in the darkness, Adam Green is one of the few filmmakers to successfully grab them and haul them into the light. As a lifelong monster hunter, I tip my camouflaged hat.

10/29/14 (Part Two): Now THAT’S a Spider, Man!

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31 Days of Halloween, Abbott and Costello, Alexis Kendra, Big Ass Spider!, cinema, Clare Kramer, exterminator, film reviews, films, friends, giant insects, giant spiders, great openings, Greg Grunberg, Gregory Gieras, horror, horror-comedies, King Kong, Lin Shaye, Lloyd Kaufman, Lombardo Boyar, Mike Mendez, military coverup, Movies, pest exterminator, Ray Wise, sci-fi, Where Is My Mind?

As a tinkling, piano-led cover of the Pixies iconic “Where Is My Mind?” plays on the soundtrack, we watch as Alex (Greg Grunberg), clad in exterminator’s overalls, strides in slow motion through absolute chaos: soldiers fire at something behind him, people run away screaming and buildings collapse into rubble everywhere. And then, we see it: a massive spider, as big as a house, sits atop a skyscraper like an arachnid King Kong. It strikes a helicopter out of the air with one giant foreleg, sending it flaming to the ground as the screen cuts to black. Text comes up on the screen: 12 hours earlier.

This is the first three minutes of Mike Mendez’s Big Ass Spider! (2013) and let me assure you: it is three absolutely glorious, nearly perfect minutes. If the rest of the film fails to completely live up to that decidedly high bar, well, that’s one of the prices paid for ambition. From the title on down, there’s nothing about BAS! that necessarily screams “must-see”: if anything, the film seems like it would be nothing more than a SyFy-esque romp with serviceable effects, some stupid laughs and lots of cheese. Quite the contrary, however, Mendez’s film has plenty of heart and is non-stop fun: it’s the furthest thing from perfect but it’s also utterly charming and, in the end, that’s always going to win me over.

Our hero, Alex, is a pest exterminator who’s ended up in the hospital after coming across the business-end of a brown recluse spider during a house call. He’s a perpetually nice guy but he’s also sort of a clumsy doofus: his attempts to flirt with a nurse (Alexis Kendra) are awkward, to say the least, and he always seems one misstep away from complete chaos. Alex gets called into action when the hospital administrator approaches him about an issue: “something” appears to be loose in the hospital and they want Alex to kill it, an offer he gladly takes up in order to wipe his exorbitant bill clean. When he learns that the creature appears to be a large spider, Alex feels he’s more than up to the task: “I become a spider to catch a spider.”

As it turns out, however, Alex doesn’t really know what he’s up against. You see, this is no abnormally large spider, as we come to see: this thing is obviously some sort of mutated monster, an acid-spraying, lightning-fast nightmare that uses the hospital’s ventilation system to move from victim to victim. Suspicions are confirmed when the military quickly shows up, led by no-nonsense Major Braxton C. Tanner (Ray Wise). Turns out that the spider in question was actually part of a government experiment that went awry (natch) and they’re now faced with a creature that will continue to grow, unchecked, until they can destroy it.

With the help of his faithful partner (and resident security guard) Jose (Lombardo Boyar), along with Lt. Karly Brant (Clare Kramer), a soldier who’s a terrible shot but seems to have a crush on the exterminator, Alex pursues the rapidly growing spider from the hospital, into the sewers and, finally, onto the very streets of the terrified metropolis. To destroy this dreadful abomination, Alex is gonna needs lots of help, some hardcore firepower…and more than a little luck.

Despite coming out of the gate strong (incredibly strong, to be fair), BAS! wasn’t the grand slam that I was hoping it would be, although it still ended up being a ton of fun. There’s so much about the film that really works that it’s easier to gloss over the elements that don’t, chief among them being the often tedious relationship between Alex and Jose. For the most part, Jose exists as a gentle Mexican stereotype, never mean-spirited, per se, but ridiculously clichéd, none the less. His constant banter gets really grating, after a while, as does the ham-fisted Abbott and Costello routine that Grunberg and Boyar effectively beat into the ground. Although I didn’t find their interaction to be as noisome by the film’s final third (they actually become a rather cute duo), there’s an awful lot of corn to wade through to get there. The film could also get a little silly, at times, and I noticed that the CGI tended to get dodgier the bigger the spider got: by the time it’s car-sized, we’re squarely in SyFy territory, effects-wise.

But these are all minor quibbles, ultimately, the kinds of issues that plague pretty much any B-movie. For the most part, BAS! hits all of its beats and manages to maintain a breezy, good-natured sense of humor that keeps things from ever getting overly serious…not that a film about a giant spider could ever be overly serious, mind you, but you get the point. Grunberg, most notable as one of the “heroes” on the bygone “Heroes” show, is pretty great as the lead here and ably carries the film: he’s a perfect combination of innocence and sass, never so smarmy as to be insufferable, yet steely enough to be believable. It’s also nice to see Wise play the straight guy, for a change: his take-charge Major is still recognizably Wise but it’s a much flintier version than we normally get. I also really like the ending, which gives the perfect set-up for a sequel (“What’s the biggest cockroach you’ve ever seen?”) without seeming too obvious.

If anything, Big Ass Spider! is a gleeful throwback to the era of good-natured, drive-in flicks, the kind of film that goes perfectly with a lukewarm sixpack of cheap beer, a carload of friends and a warm, summer night. It won’t reinvent the wheel, technically speaking, but it doesn’t really need to (or mean to), either. If the thought of a Volkswagon-sized spider rampaging through a city park and eating a pervy jogger played by Troma head Lloyd Kaufman puts a smile on your lips, this is absolutely the film for you. I might dislike real spiders with a fervor approaching religious zeal but I’m happy to hang out with this webcrawler any day of the week.

10/29/14 (Part One): Live By the Swatter, Die By the Stinger

Tags

31 Days of Halloween, aliens, Brooke Nevin, Christopher Marquette, Deborah Geffner, E. Quincy Sloan, father-son relationships, flashbacks, giant bugs, giant insects, horror-comedies, human-spider hybrids, Infestation, Jim Cody Williams, Kyle Rankin, Linda Park, mutations, Ray Wise, reluctant hero, Wesley Thompson, writer-director, zombies

If there’s one thing that’s proven itself a time-tested, dependable trope in the sci-fi/horror world, it’s giant bugs attacking defenseless humans. It’s pretty much a no-brainer: most folks aren’t particularly fond of insects under the best of circumstances and the ones that are probably wouldn’t like them so much if they were the size of large horses. There’s something about bugs, in general, that’s almost alien: it’s no coincidence that so many filmmakers regularly use insectile elements in depictions of monsters and extraterrestrials.

Since the golden age of the giant bug movie in the ’50s, we’ve been treated to a pretty impressive menagerie of creepy crawly-focused films: audiences have thrilled as giant ants, spiders, wasps, cockroaches, scorpions, praying mantis, moths and ticks have all laid waste to the vestiges of human civilization. Science can’t help us…the military is defenseless…not much you can do about an “enemy” that outnumbers you a million to one, is there? To this long tradition of giant bug films, proudly add writer-director Kyle Rankin’s Infestation (2009), a snappy little horror-comedy that manages to overcome some rough patches and emerges as a fun choice for fans of the subgenre.

We begin “in the shit,” as it were, with an office building full of cocooned bodies and strange, beetle-like creatures roaming the halls, feeding on the captives. Our hero, Cooper (Christopher Marquette), has just fought his way out of his silken prison and has begun to free his co-workers, including Maureen (Deborah Geffner) and Jed (Jim Cody Williams). Via flashback, we learn that Cooper was actually sort of a lazy, do-nothing douchebag and that Maureen, his supervisor, had just fired him prior to the “event” that landed them all in their current predicament. That’s right, folks: we have ourselves another reluctant hero.

After freeing Maureen’s daughter, Sara (Brooke Nevin), Cooper leads the group, which now contains Leechee (Linda Park), Al (Wesley Thompson) and Al’s son, Hugo (E. Quincy Sloan), towards the presumed safety of his estranged survivalist father Ethan’s (Ray Wise) fortified bunker. All around them, the world seems to have gone to hell in a handbasket: giant wasp-things patrol the skies, swooping down to carry helpless victims away, while the beetle-creatures viciously attack anything they can hear, as they appear to be blind. To make matters worse, anyone who’s stung by one of the wasps becomes infected and gradually becomes a terrifying human-spider hybrid, adding a bit of a zombie element to proceedings.

Once at his father’s house, however, Cooper learns that Ethan isn’t particularly happy to see him. A power struggle ensues between father and son as both try to control the future of the group: Ethan wants to press on and find more survivors, while Cooper wants to plunge into the dark depths of the creatures’ nest and take on their queen, all in a desperate bid to safe humanity. Three guesses as to which path gets chosen and the first two, of course, don’t count.

For the most part, Infestation is lots of fun: the action is brisk and zany, the effects are actually really good (the human-spider hybrids are actually kind of amazing and made the 10-year-old boy in me super excited) and the cast is quite good. It’s always good to Ray Wise in anything and he certainly doesn’t disappoint here, turning in one of his trademark wise-ass/tough-guy roles but with enough paternal tenderness to sell his relationship with Cooper. Nevin holds her own as Sara, proving a gutsy, consistently interesting foil for Cooper. To be honest, only Marquette had to grow on me: for the first third of the film or so, I found Cooper to be nearly insufferable and I kept hoping that he’d get eaten and leave Sara as the defacto hero. No such luck, it turns out, although he did gradually reveal himself to be a more likeable character. A lot of this has to do with the writing, no doubt, but Marquette has a particular comic style that often reminded me of comedian Nick Swardson and could, in large doses, run rough-shod over the rest of the cast.

While the dialogue wasn’t always great and the film could, on occasion, be both clunky and inconsistent (the tone could swing wildly within the same scene, sometimes to the detriment of said scene), I really found myself drawn in by the energy and good-natured sense of fun. By the time everything wrapped-up with a gleefully gonzo homage to Aliens (1986), a set-up for an obvious sequel (Hugo looks off-screen, exclaims, and it cuts to credits) and a super-catchy Brit-poppy song over the end credits, I found myself quite fond of the film. While Infestation can, at times, have a bit of the feel of a Syfy film (albeit one of the better ones), it constantly strains against its limitations and is never less than entertaining. The biggest complement that I can pay the film is to say that I would gladly watch the (hopefully) inevitable sequel: if these are our new insect overlords, I’ll be happy to greet them with open arms.

10/9/14 (Part One): Nothing Divided By Four is Still Nothing

Tags

31 Days of Halloween, Adam Green, Adam Rifkin, AJ Bowen, anthology films, bad movies, Chillerama, cinema, Deathication, Detroit Rock City, drive-in fare, Eric Roberts, film reviews, films, horror, horror films, horror-comedies, I Was a Teenage Werebear, Joe Lynch, Kane Hodder, Knights of Badassdom, Lin Shaye, low-budget films, Mel Brooks, monster movies, Movies, multiple directors, multiple writers, parodies, Ray Wise, Richard Riehle, Ron Jeremy, satire, scatological humor, terrible films, The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, Tim Sullivan, Wadzilla, writer-director, Zom-B-Movie, zombies

I have absolutely nothing against offensive, abhorrent, socially-unacceptable humor: after all, I was raised on a steady diet of Mel Brooks, Troma, South Park and Italo-splatter films, so stuff like that is part of my cinematic DNA. When done well (and fearlessly), crude, rude humor can be a powerful tool, cutting through societal niceties in a way that allows filmmakers to make honest, pointed commentary about the less-than-perfect world we live in. Racism, sexism, gender politics, religion: these are but a few of the hot-button topics that fearlessly unflinching comedy can often handle in more powerful ways than more dramatic works. All this is by way of saying that I’m most definitely neither a prude nor an easily-outraged mouthpiece for the censorship of deviant ideas.

That being said, the multi-director horror anthology Chillerama (2011) is a complete and total piece of shit, a waste of both time and resources that manages to entertain for a scant 20 minutes out of an astoundingly painful two hour running time. This was a film that managed to lose me early, yet irritated me so profoundly that I was determined to sit through its wretched excesses in order to see how much more irritated I could become. This towering testament to scatological humor in all of its nasty, sticky excesses is both lazy and stupid, too cheaply made to be effective, too sloppily conceived to be entertaining and too needlessly offensive to be anything more than the foot-stomping tantrum of a collection of filmmakers that must, surely, fancy themselves more clever than they really are. Ultimately, my overall impression of the film can be summed up in one tidy, little declaration: I was not amused.

By their very nature, cinematic horror anthologies are always pretty safe bets for entertainment: the stories usually aren’t very long, so they don’t wear out their welcome, and they usually feature punchy twists and plenty of surprises to keep the audience guessing. In the past, I’ve watched anthologies where the current tale failed to grab me, yet my anticipation for upcoming stories would pull me through the rough patches. No such luck in Chillerama: as each fetid tale unfolded, I was only left with the sinking suspicion that each subsequent short would only be worse than the preceding one. In a feeling that Dante could certainly understand, I had abandoned all hope after entering the miraculous world of Chillerama.

Here’s what we get with this lovely little anthology film: a wrap-around segment involving horny zombies fucking and eating everything that moves at a drive-in movie theater (Zom-B-Movie, directed by Joe Lynch); a take-off on ’50s monster movies featuring a sperm that grows to the size of a house (Wadzilla, directed by and starring Adam Rifkin); a parody of ’60s surf-flicks that equates homosexuality with lycanthoropy (I Was a Teenage Werebear, directed by Tim Sullivan); an intermingling of Anne Frank and Universal Studios (The Diary of Anne Frankenstein, directed by Adam Green); and a “hilarious” send-up of scat films (Deathication, directed by Joe Lynch under the “hilarious” pseudonym, Fernando Phagabeefy).

From a purely conceptual-level, there’s no reason Chillerama shouldn’t have worked. The capsule descriptions for each short promise, at the very least, that they’ll be anything but boring. On their own rights, each of the film’s writers/directors have plenty of individual merits: Rifkin wrote and directed the ’90s cult classics The Invisible Maniac (1990) and The Dark Backward (1991), before going on to make more mainstream films like Detroit Rock City (1999) and Night At the Golden Eagle (2001); Sullivan was involved with the low-budget ’80s cult classic The Deadly Spawn (1983) and went on to write/direct the effective chiller Driftwood (2006); Green is the creator of the Hatchet series, one of the more interesting, effective modern horror franchises, as well as the subtly effective Frozen (2010); and Lynch directed the long-delayed but well-reviewed Knights of Badassdom (2013). The film features appearances from such genre greats as Ray Wise, Lin Shaye, Eric Roberts, Kane Hodder, Richard Riehle and AJ Bowen. And, most importantly, each short only clocks in at about 20-odd minutes. With all of these factors involved, what are the chances that Chillerama ends up being utterly and completely worthless? Unfortunately, the chances end up being pretty damn good.

As already mentioned above, there are a nearly limitless range of issues that help to scuttle the film but if I had to pick out my personal reason for this massive trainwreck, I lay the blame fully at the feet of the film’s lowest-common denominator obsession with scatology in all of its wonderful forms. Despite any pretensions otherwise, the entire point of “Wadzilla” becomes the final bit where the colossal sperm is blown-up and proceeds to coat the entire city with about 10,000 gallons of jizz: if you really enjoy seeing actors getting doused with buckets of fake spooge, this will, undoubtedly, be your Citizen Kane (1941). Any salient points that “I Was a Teenage Werebear” makes regarding homophobia are obliterated by things such as the forced rape of a character via baseball bat and ridiculously sub-Troma gore effects. “The Diary of Anne Frankenstein” comes out head-and-shoulders above the others simply by virtue of featuring actual jokes: despite being a little rough around the edges, it’s virtually a masterpiece compared to the others. “Deathication” is a minutes-long goof that features truly nauseating depictions of scat-play (staged, I’m hoping) and was the only short I had to fast-forward through: I like shit in films to be off-screen, thanks very much, although I’ve always laughed at Spud’s little “accident” in Trainspotting (1996). The wrap-around story, “Zom-B-Movie,” gets a big kick out of equating pseudo-pornographic humping with extreme gore, delighting in moments like a zombie plucking out an eyeball and “servicing” the hole or a wife zombie ripping off and eating her husband zombie’s penis. This particular short’s only grain of ingenuity comes from the fact that the blood in the segment is depicted as neon-blue fluid, like the inside of a Glo-stick. To be honest, it’s a simple concept that’s light-years beyond anything else in the film, “Diary of Anne Frankenstein” notwithstanding.

Look, here’s the thing: I didn’t hate Chillerama because it was offensive, scatalogical and stupid…I hated the film because it was all of these things AND poorly-made, sloppy, lazy and mean-spirited. There are plenty of ultra-low budget horror films out there that try their hardest, despite their limitations: Chillerama ain’t one of ’em. At the very least, it looks like the cast were all having a great time, so that must count for something (poor Lin Shaye even appears in two separate shorts, bless her heart). Sprinkled throughout the film are little inklings of the production it could have been, had anyone involved cared to make anything more than a tasteless goof. More than anything, Chillerama strikes me as a classic case of wasted potential, not least since it completely squanders the first gay-themed anthology short that I’ve seen in, quite possibly, forever. I mean, c’mon: the damn film squanders Ray fuckin’ Wise, for god’s sake…how do they live with themselves?

Ultimately, I haven’t felt as let-down by a film as I have by Chillerama in quite some time. Even though I enjoy the individual filmmakers’ work, to a greater or lesser degree (I actually really like Green’s films, especially the vastly under-rated Frozen), this was nothing but a complete disappointment. If you’re so inclined, check out Green’s short, which manages to hit some nearly Mel Brooksian levels of absurdity, mostly thanks to a truly inspired performance by Joel David Moore as a very stupid Hitler. Other than that (relative) high-point, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to recommend Chillerama. If you want an intentionally bad movie, go watch Sharknado (2013): at least that has a totally wacked-out Tara Reid to recommend it…all Chillerama features are a bunch of bored jokesters playing chicken with the audience. My advice? Don’t take the bet.

7/11/14: The Anarchist and the Damage Done

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Alessandro Mario, anarchists, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, based on a true story, cinema, crime film, Daniel Mooney, David Strathairn, Film, film reviews, historical drama, immigration, independent film, J. Edgar Hoover, James Madio, labor unions, Luigi Galleani, mail bombs, movie, Nicola Sacco, No God No Master, Ray Wise, rights of the workers, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sam Witwer, Sean McNall, terrorists, Terry Green, William Flynn, writer-director

Historical dramas walk a pretty difficult line, in many cases: they need to be close enough to the actual historical events to still be recognized as such but they also need to possess enough of the characteristics of fictional dramas to hold their own as actual cinematic narrative. Too much of the history and you might end up with something closer to a documentary, whereas too little history and you wind up with FDR: American Badass (2012).

In many ways, it’s to the credit of writer-director Terry Green’s No God, No Master (2012) that I didn’t realize I was watching something based on a true story until the character of Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Alessandro Mario) made his first appearance. At that point, however, my old high school history class kicked in and I knew that I was actually watching a fictionalized account of the famous Sacco and Vanzetti trial from the 1920s. Sneaky move there, Terry.

Up to that point, Green’s film had been a well-made, interesting and rather modest film about the hunt for someone mailing package bombs to prominent political figures. The person doing the hunting is U.S. Bureau of Investigations Agent William Flynn (David Strathairn), a kind-hearted, straight-as-an-arrow lawman navigating the often choppy seas of political self-interest and crooked superior officers. He’s on the case after a young delivery boy is literally blown off his bicycle after dropping one of the package bombs. Together with his partner, Gino (Sam Witwer), William ends up tracing the bombs all the way to an anarchist rabble-rouser by the name of Luigi Galleani (Daniel Mooney). Seems that Galleani wants to bring the system down the old-fashioned way: violence. Hiding within plain sight by allying himself with local labor organizer Carlo Tresca (Edoardo Ballerini), Galleani plans to blow up the various rich and powerful members of a planning commission, including bigwigs like the mayor and John D. Rockefeller.

Politics rears its ugly head, however, when various crooked politicos like Attorney General Mitchell Palmer (Ray Wise) and J. Edgar Hoover (Sean McNall) attempt to use the bombing situation as a way to strike back at not only the anarchists but also at innocent immigrants and labor activists. Soon, William realizes that the people he works for are getting harder and harder to tell apart from the criminals he’s been hired to put away.

Into all of this, then, come the aforementioned real-life historical figures of Nicola Sacco (James Maddio) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Sacco and Vanzetti are a couple of idealistic, hard-working immigrants who also happen to be anarchists and end up getting swept up in the turbulent events of the time and ground into powder by the political system. The pair find themselves framed for a crime that they didn’t commit, tried and sentenced with no thought for actual justice and executed so as to “set an example” for any who might follow in their footsteps. This, then, is really no different from the actual historical record: the fictional Sacco and Vanzetti end up the same as their real-life counterparts.

What’s interesting, however, is how Green treats the pair like footnotes in the film. Truth be told, the subplot about Sacco and Vanzetti might be the weakest part of the film, feeling like more of an extraneous addition than anything actually necessary. It’s abundantly clear from the get-go that our protagonist and primary focus is the character of William Flynn: he’s the “traditional” hero, gets the most screen-time, as a complete character arc, gets a backstory, etc. Sacco and Vanzetti, on the other hand, are more like historical background, similar to the various U.S. Presidents and other historical figures who appear in the margins of films like Forrest Gump (1994) or The Butler (2013). We never learn enough about them to prevent them from seeming more like symbols or plot devices in the film than actual characters.

Minor quibbles aside, however, I genuinely enjoyed No God, No Master. Strathairn is excellent as William Flynn, portraying a character that manages to be tough as nails yet strangely soothing at the same time. In many ways, the film’s look and tone reminded me of a modern TV series such as Copper or Ripper Street and I kept imagining what it would be like to have a serial that followed the adventures of Strathairn’s Flynn. The rest of the cast is suitably good, with Wise doing one of his patented slimy villain roles and Mooney bringing a believably bug-eyed zeal to his portrayal of Galleani. The whole film has a well-made, glossy feel and clips along at an energetic pace: there’s never a point where anything drags and if the film can get occasionally heavy-handed (many of the courtroom speeches in the latter half are hammered home), it never succumbs to melodrama. If anything, Green has a habit of downplaying everything, which works nicely with Strathairn’s laid-back style.

As a character-driven political mystery, No God, No Master is quite good, although I’m not sure how the film stands on a strictly historical level. Certainly, the subplot about Sacco and Vanzetti feels tagged on, as if Green wanted to attach yet one more layer of relevance to the project. He needn’t have bothered: on its own, No God, No Master is an above-average drama and well worth a watch. If you’ve come strictly for the tale of Sacco and Vanzetti, however, you might be at the wrong place.

 

4/26/14: To Project and Swerve

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absurdist, Arden Myrin, auteur theory, bad cops, Best of 2013, black comedies, cinema, comedies, cops, cops behaving badly, dark comedies, Eric Judor, Eric Roberts, Eric Wareheim, favorite films, Film auteurs, film reviews, films, French cinema, French films, Grace Zabriskie, Harmony Korine, Marilyn Manson, Mark Burnham, Movies, Mr. Oizo, Officer de Luca, Officer Duke, Officer Holmes, Officer Rough, Quentin Dupieux, Ray Wise, Rubber, Steve Little, surreal, Terry Gilliam, Tim & Eric, Wes Anderson, Wrong, Wrong Cops

Quentin Dupieux gets me. He really does. If any filmmaker operating in our modern age can really be tuned in to my bizarre little wave-length, Dupieux is definitely it. While I may hold Refn and Wheatley in the highest regard, never having seen one of their films that I haven’t adored, Dupieux is the crackpot auteur who seems to view the world with my eyes. Beginning with Rubber (2010), the French writer/director/musician (he’s also Mr. Oizo, the French electro artist) has seen fit to depict a world that’s one part Lynchian suburb, one part dystopic wasteland and one part absurdist stage play. While 2012’s brain-melting Wrong serves to set-up the bizarre wonderland that’s finally unleashed in Wrong Cops, Dupieux’s newest is a completely stand-alone triumph, an absurdist nightmare that manages to be both hilarious and disturbing. Basically, Dupieux is up to his old tricks.

Whereas Wrong told a more linear, complex but, essentially, traditional (or as traditional as Dupieux can get) narrative, Wrong Cops functions more as a bat-shit crazy Pulp Fiction, wherein we are introduced to a disparate collection of characters who we then follow about as their stories eventually intertwine. In the case of Wrong Cops, we’re introduced to the titular characters, a ragtag collection of “law enforcement” personnel that are sort of like Police Academy filtered through It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, by way of Harmony Korine. We have Officer Duke (Mark Burnham), who has sex with transsexual prostitutes, delivers the pot he sells to locals by stuffing it in dead rats, carts around a “75% dead” body in his trunk and needlessly hassles a poor teen nerd who just wants to listen to his headphones (Marilyn Manson, in a role that must, literally, be seen to be believed…and yes…he is playing a teenage boy). We get Officer de Luca (Eric Wareheim), who holds yoga students at gunpoint in order to get their phone numbers and his partner, Officer Holmes (Arden Myrin), who uses her young son as bag-man in a money-drop involving the blackmail of a fellow cop. Said fellow cop, Officer Sunshine (Steve Little), has an active side-career in law enforcement-themed gay porn, a business venture which he’s managed to successfully hide from his adoring wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Officer Rough (Eric Judor), is just trying to make the best damn dance track that he can. There’s something missing, however, and Rough just can’t quite put his finger on it. Good thing that the “75% dead” guy (Daniel Quinn) has a thing for beats, though: with a little luck, he may just be able to give the cut the extra oomph it needs to secure Officer Rough a meeting with a top record exec. That is, of course, if he doesn’t bleed to death first. Throw in Eric Roberts as Duke’s drug supplier and Ray Wise as the group “who gives a shit” Captain and you got yahtzee, folks!

Like all of Dupieux’s films, Wrong Cops is easier (and better) experienced then explained. He has a particular skill with enveloping viewers completely within the reality of his films, something that Wes Anderson and Harmony Korine are both experts at. There’s never a point in the film, regardless of how strange, random or absurd, where the viewer is taken out of Dupieux’s reality: for my money, it’s one of the most impressive displays of world-building I’ve seen this year. The film has a sun-bleached, washed-out color palette and tone that recalls not only Rubber but, almost subliminally, Alex Cox’s outsider classic Repo Man (1984). I actually see several parallels with Repo Man in this film, not least of which is the almost mundane way in which the characters all deal with the strangeness massed around them. There was definitely this feel in Dupieux’s previous film, Wrong, but that movie was also a much more explicitly fantasy/sci-fi oriented project, as was Rubber. Wrong Cops, by contrast, is set wholly within a world that could, technically, be ours, albeit one in which everything was tweaked a few degrees…a world in which everything was just a little wrong, as it were.

Part of the joy with Wrong Cops, similar to watching exploitation films or anything by Lloyd Kaufman, is seeing just how bad things will get. As with everything else, Wrong Cops doesn’t disappoint on this count: things start bad and get steadily worse until the whole thing becomes a roaring tsunami of bad taste, bad choices, bad behavior and bad, bad people. Truth be told, there isn’t a single character in the film that you can truly “root” for, not one person who passes the sniff test as a “hero.” We spend the most time with Duke but he’s the furthest thing we’d want from a protector. Ditto Officers de Luca and Holmes, a potential sexual assailant, on the one hand, and a cop so dirty that she even “feeds” on her own peers, on the other. The closest we get to an “innocent” cop in the film is Rough who wins by default: he doesn’t really do anything terrible (outside of some hanky-panky with his neighbor’s married wife, that is) but he also doesn’t lift a finger to help anyone, least of all the poor dying guy sitting in his living room.

Films like Wrong Cops walk a very fine line: on one hand, they only work spectacularly well if they push the envelope as far as it will go. On the other hand, however, there a definite difference between crudity with a point (see Blazing Saddles) and crude-for-its-own-sake (see pretty much any Troma film). Earlier this year, I lambasted The Comedy, a hateful hipster-skewering/lauding film that also featured Eric Wareheim in a prominent role. In that case, I was never sure which side of the issue the filmmakers were actually on: more often than not, The Comedy seemed to be celebrating their terrible behavior, while also trying to half-heartedly tsk tsk it. There’s no such hemming and hawing in Dupieux’s film, however: he’s all-in on the various officers terrible behavior but he makes no bones about what unrepentant assholes these people are. There’s nothing to look up to, here, no sense of cool cats thumbing their noses at a square world: these people are part of the problem, not any part of the solution, and Dupieux knows it. He also, however, knows that they are a seriously funny bunch of misanthropes (similar to that lovable bunch of apes in It’s Always Sunny) and gives them plenty of room to work their funny magic.

And the film is funny. Very funny. Unlike the ultra-dry, high-concept Rubber or the wry, tricky Wrong, Wrong Cops is all loud, belching, farting id, the Sam Kinison to the previous films George Carlin. Perhaps this speaks more to my sense of humor than anything else (remember…Dupieux gets me) but I laughed my way through the entire film. Hard. There are so many great scenes in the film that picking out favorites is a little hard but there’s stuff that still makes me crack up, even as I type it now: Eric Wareheim’s hair getting blown back by a tornado of pepper spray from a decidedly bored wannabe “victim”; Mark Burnham tossing a drug-filled rat onto a diner counter like it was no big deal; Officers de Luca and Holmes walking into a murder scene and proceeding to raid the fridge, featuring the priceless exchange, “Aren’t you going to ask any questions?” “I do have a question: how old is this mozzarella?”; the record executive dismissing Officer Rough’s efforts with the revelation that he doesn’t think “anyone’s going to want to listen to music from a black, one-eyed, slightly monstrous DJ.” Wrong Cops is like a bottomless treasure chest, constantly spewing forth glittering new comedic jewels at frequent intervals.

The acting, across the board, is dead on. All of the cops are pretty much perfect but there isn’t a single actor/character in the film that feels off, regardless of how much/little screen time they get. Marilyn Manson, in particular, is utterly fantastic: he plays the part of David Dolores Frank with absolutely zero hint of his more famous day job and the result is a pretty realistic portrait of a hassled teen. It’s a brilliant, metaphysical move that should have been nothing more than silly sight gag (oh look: the Antichrist Superstar is wearing jeans and a t-shirt) but plays like an honest-to-god directorial choice. This, in a nutshell, seems to sum up the Dupieux method: treat everything, regardless of how absurd or meaningless, with the utmost respect. Dupieux may be a court jester but he’s a smart one, perhaps as smart as Terry Gilliam, in his own way.

As previously mentioned, the film looks great and the sparse, dry electro score compliments everything perfectly. Truth be told, I just can’t find anything to really dun the film for: if this was a baseball game, this would have been a home run, no questions about it. As such, I’m pretty much left with just deciding where the film fits into Dupieux’s existing oeuvre. I actually like it quite a bit more than Rubber, which is easily the most “difficult” film in Dupieux’s catalog, but not quite as much as Wrong. While Wrong Cops is a much funnier film than its predecessor, I also think it’s a slightly smaller film: Wrong was working with some truly mind-blowing concepts and metaphysics, whereas Wrong Cops is a peek into an insane world. By the time Ray Wise showed up in a role that couldn’t help but remind me of his turn as Satan in Reaper, I had begun to wonder whether Dupieux’s whole point was to plop us down into a kind of purgatory while his various characters continued their slow shuffle into Hell.

A sentient tire…a talking dog…a collection of the worst police officers in history…if there’s a method to Quentin Dupieux’s exquisite madness, I’ve yet to see it. This, of course, is what makes waiting for his next film so excruciating. At this rate, the next movie could, literally, be absolutely anything under the sun. That’s kind of terrifying, if you think about it, but that’s also pretty damn exhilarating. It’s what creativity should always be. It’s what the movies should always be. It’s why I’m still here…and it’s why you should be, too.