Halloween 2023: October 11th

Beau is Afraid (2023)

Whether Ari Aster is a genius or an overrated hack seems to be a matter of opinion. His films produce intense reactions in people, which makes sense. His work deals with heightened emotions and extreme scenarios. “Hereditary” went to the peaks of hysterical mourning while “Midsommar” slung us into the despair of a gaslighting relationship. This past spring, Aster unleashed his third and most divisive feature yet. “Beau Is Afraid” would delve even further into deeply Freudian themes. When combined with a rambling story and a three-hour run time, the film did nothing to deter those who consider Aster a self-indulgent, pretentious fraud who sniggers as he plays another elaborate prank on audiences. Yet a select group of weirdos would embrace this one-of-a-kind incursion into neuroses and psychological hang-ups, among which I can't help but consider myself. 

Beau is afraid of everything. He lives in a dilapidated building, the streets outside full of violent crime and the mentally ill. Yet his mother, billionaire industrialist Mona Wasserman, seems to be what he's most afraid of. After the key to his apartment is stolen, he misses a flight to see his mom. This sets off a catastrophic chain of events that ends with Beau, stark nude, running through the streets and getting struck by a van. From the home of the strange, overly possessive couple that tries to help him recover, Beau sets off on a journey back to his mother's house. Along the way, he will discover the horrifying secrets of his origins, be reunited with a lost love, and be put on trial for all crimes real and imagined.

In the run-up to “Beau Is Afraid's” release, Ari Aster – as part of an increasingly sarcastic press tour – said he wanted the movie to give the viewer the firsthand experience of being a loser. The film is thoroughly committed to this goal, of putting us inside Beau Wasserman's head. The world of “Beau Is Afraid” totally reflects the terrified, anxiety-ridden mindset of its protagonist. That's why the city he lives in is so apocalyptically crime-ridden. This is why his apartment building is infested with brown recluse spiders, why seemingly everything that can go wrong with a day's activity does. Beau has to sprint to his door to avoid being attacked by wildly tattooed vagrants, is hassled by a store owner for literally being a few cents short of a purchase, and is attacked by a knife-wielding psychopath in broad daylight. If you have the kind of anxious imagination that forced you to constantly predict horrible things will happen, the doom-laden absurdity of "Beau Is Afraid" will feel very familiar. He can't sleep at night because a crazy neighbor is sliding notes under his door about an imagined offense. He can't ever relax because blood-thirsty lunatics roam the streets and death is always at his doorstep. If it wasn't already clear that this nightmarish setting represents Beau's deeply neurotic point-of-view, Aster's camera directly looks out from Beau's eye-sockets a handful of times.

There's no debate about the source of Beau's anxiety-gripped mindset. “Beau Is Afraid” is a movie of titanic mommy issues. The more of the film we watch, the clearer it becomes that Mona Wasserman controls every aspect of Beau's life, right down to the food he eats. An extraordinary sequence – set to Bread's "Everything I Own," the latest example of Aster ironically using seventies soft-rock standards – shows that Mona devoted the entirety of her industrial empire to micromanaging her son's life. Reoccurring terms throughout "Beau Is Afraid" are "guilt" or "guilty." The final act, when Mona appears in the flesh, makes it clear that Aster means this primarily in the sense of the stereotypical guilting Jewish mother. Played with absolutely monstrous venom by Patti LuPone, Beau's mother emerges as the most vindictive and manipulative cinematic matriarch this side of Norma Bates. 

Aster doesn't just blowup Beau's mother hang-ups – and possibly his own??? – into a massive canvas of nightmarish comedy. Much like "Hereditary's" deeply neurotic brood, every family unit in this film is torn apart by compulsion and anxiety. The family our downtrodden hero stays with goes in the opposite direction of Beau's mother. Instead of needling their offspring for every decision he makes, Grace and Roger have deified their departed son. They even let his deeply traumatized war buddy stay with him, the source of some of this pitch-black comedy's darkest laughs. Yet it's clear that this obsessive shrine of devotion hides deeply ingrained issues of their own. Nathan Lane and Amy Ryan play the hosts as so outwardly generous, but so clearly tightly wound, that it's only a matter of time before one of them is revealed to be unhinged. Their kind facades cover inevitable paint drinking and sword swinging. That's the kind of arena all of "Beau Is Afraid" occupies: Smiling through an intensely awkward situation and laughing nervously because you're too uncomfortable to say what you're actually feeling. 

Beau's one respite, seemingly in his entire hellish life, was an extremely brief pre-teenage dalliance during a summer cruise. That's where he met Elaine, a rebellious young girl who is the opposite of Beau in many ways. While Beau is always utterly kowtowed by his mother, Elaine frequently snipes back at her's. While Beau is never less than frightened of the world around him, Elaine is fearless and even poses for a casual photo with a dead body. The two never do anything more than kiss but it's enough to hand Beau a torch he carries for the rest of his life. When they reunite, thirty years later, it seems like Beau is finally getting the taste of freedom he's always been denied... Of course, this isn't that kind of movie. Soon, the nightmare resumes and we discover that his mother's control even extends into his sex life. As a child, Beau was told that he has a hereditary heart murmur, which led to his father's death upon orgasm. Yes, he's spent his entire life without ever busting a nut, which Aster turns into a sick visual joke more than once. While Aster stops just short of digging totally into the Oedipal undercurrents of Beau's incredibly toxic relationship with his mother – I guess the director got all of that out of his system with "The Strange Thing About the Johnsons” – it's clear that Mona's psychic thumb-screws have a tight squeeze on her son's massive, distended testicles. 

It's clear why Beau has hung onto his memory of Elaine so tightly. It's the only time in his life he's ever done something his mother didn't tell him to do. Even then, the kiss was Elaine's idea. For those who dislike the film, part of that surely comes from Beau's utterly passive nature. It breaks the rule that usually governs screenwriting, that your protagonist must drive the story. Instead, everything happens to Beau. A key scene early on has him on the phone with his mother, explaining that he won't be able to make the flight, the camera tight on Joaquin Phoenix's face as he repeatedly asks his mother for an order. Even the movie's deepest dives into Beau's memories and psyche – an extensive flashback to his adolescence and a highly symbolic stage show – are prompted by other people. (Namely, a teenager forcing him to smoke a joint and a weird, cult-like group of traveling performers.) The element of water reappears throughout "Beau Is Afraid," usually whenever disaster is about to strike. It represents how our protagonist is set adrift in life, pushed around by natural forces totally beyond his control. Maybe Beau is so afraid precisely because he doesn't have any say in his own existence. Maybe that makes him a lot more like us than we'd prefer to admit it. 

As with his first two features and his short films, "Beau Is Afraid" is also a display for Aster's distinctive eye as a filmmaker. Much like the little miniature scenarios in "Hereditary," every set and tableau here is precisely constructed. The coordinated filth of the vandalism in Beau's apartment building is stunning and hilarious. The stage play sequence has to rank among this year's most visually captivating digressions, moving Beau through a construction paper world of primary colors and bizarre sight gags. The same instincts are on display in Mona's home, absurdist jokes perfectly played in finely assembled sets. The cinematography, editing, and music show the same perfectionist streak. 

While "Beau Is Afraid" can't exactly be described as a horror movie, it frequently moves at the same frenzied, anxiety attack ferocity as "Hereditary's" scariest moments. Much like Aster's debut, "Beau Is Afraid" climaxes with an ascent into an attic. In both films, a horrible secret is hidden, which plays Beau – and the audience – as children stumbling into a boogeyman's abode. The last act appearance of a chained-up beast may actually top "Hereditary" in terms of sheer, what-the-fuck shock value, while also wrapping up all of the movie's Freudian ideas and repressed sexuality in a burst of urban legend-like nightmare imagery. The horror here is rooted more in existential dread, than grabbed-by-the-throat scares. Yet for one glorious moment, "Beau Is Afraid" becomes a brilliantly twisted monster movie. Before once again sinking into the watery depths of colossal motherly guilt, as Beau travels into a deeply yonic cavern and the movie ends like the sick joke it likely began as. 

Aster originally envisioned "Beau Is Afraid" as his debut feature, shoving in every insane idea he had likely out of the fear that he might never get to make another movie. The film is so deeply uncommercial and hostile to the average multiplex-goer's sensibilities that I can't imagine it getting made at all in a world where A24 didn't exist. But god bless that studio for flushing 35 million – only ten of which they made back – on this insane movie and sticking it on thousands of screen. I can only hope some unsuspecting audiences wandered into it and had their minds blown by Aster's display of virtuoso filmmaking and frankly unflattering psychological hang-ups. It's the stuff of cult movie legend is made of. [9/10]

Axe (1974)

Frederick R. Friedel endeavored to make a movie by the time he was 25, the same age Orson Welles shot “Citizen Kane.” Though he had no experience, he managed to talk producer J.G. Patterson into giving him some money to make a horror film. The result was “Lisa, Lisa,” an extremely low-budget affair shot on short ends in North Carolina over the course of just nine days. The film would play in rural drive-ins throughout the mid-seventies without making much of an impact. Eventually, sexploitation distributor Harry Novak would re-release the movie under the more salacious title “Axe.” Yet Friedel's film would languish in relative obscurity until its British VHS release was banned as a Video Nasty in 1984. This would give the little-seen film international notoriety, slowly transforming “Axe” into a minor cult classic over the years. 

Three criminals – the stern Steele, the unhinged Lomax, and the remorseful Billy – corner a man in a hotel room. They torture him to death and the man's partner leaps out the window to his death. Fleeing the police, and after tormenting a random gas station attendant, the three arrive at an isolated farm house. A strange teenage girl named Lisa lives there with her disabled grandfather, as his sole caretaker. The crooks impose on Lisa and stay in the house. After Lomax attempts to assault Lisa, she kills him with a straight razor. This begins to the girl's bloody vengeance against the men who try to manipulate her.

From it's opening minutes, “Axe” is scored to a droning music that shifts between vaguely melodic and ear-splittingly harsh. As the action shifts to the hotel room, an even more discordant jazz-like score kicks in. The dialogue, and even the sound effects, are repetitive in these early scenes. The camera work is shaky. While the characters are driving from one location to the next, the dialogue is so muffled that you can hardly understand it. Once the villains and the film arrives at the farm house, often heard but rarely seen television programs act as a Greek chorus of sorts. An asinine game show, a performance of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” and a horse race seem to vaguely comment on the story's events. When combined with the extremely stilted acting and emotionally disaffected characters, the result is a film that quickly lures the viewer into a hypnotic state. Yes, “Axe” is one of those low-budget exploitation films, made largely by amateurs, that feels like a broadcast from an alternate universe.

Which isn't to say that “Axe” isn't frequently narcoleptic. Running only a little over an hour, the film feels much longer. There are long stretches where it seems like barely anything happens. Almost all the characters are totally remote, acting more like the catatonic grandfather than any normal humans. The only emotions that seem to exist in “Lisa, Lisa's” universe is anger, lust, sadism, and muted resentment. Adding to this uncomfortable environment is the film's focus on slimy substances. Lisa cracks eggs and feeds the runny yolks to her grandfather. She decapitates a chicken, blood spilling on her hands, and later cleans the dishes in an absolutely filthy sink. There's a bloated tie stuck in the shower drain. The most harrowing sequence involves the gangster terrorizing a woman in a gas station, ending with them shattered ketchup on her face, which is easily mistaken at blood for first. “Axe” is just a film smeared with nasty fluids, repelling the audience often.

It is a film of immense emotional disturbance. After the men invade the house, Lisa attempts suicide for reasons that are never elaborated on. She seems totally detached from the world, numbed by years of taking care of her unresponsive grandfather. The crooks, meanwhile, are psychopaths who torture for fun, kill without remorse, and take whatever they want. This combines with a “Last House on the Left” inspired story full of sexual menace, the men often ordering Lisa around and commenting on her physical attractiveness. The only semi-normal characters in the film are Billy, who is frequently stunned by the callousness of those around him, and that poor girl in the gas station, who is humiliated and left anguished. When the bloodshed happens, it feels like an inevitable pay-off of the hateful, uncomfortable energy that radiates through the whole movie. 

As far as blood and gore goes, “Axe” is not that explicit. Despite the title – and especially despite the alternate title of “California Axe Massacre” – very little of the murders are performed with an axe. The sexual violence is largely kept off-screen, Lisa staying fully clothed. One assumes that the British censors objected more to the film's tone of immorality and misanthropy than its violence. From any sort of objective perspective, “Axe” is not a very good movie. It frequently borders tedious and features an irritating score. Its writing is often nondescript and the acting is somnolent. Even the cleaned-up Severin Blu-Ray is pretty dark and grainy at times. Yet the film does have a strange, entombing effect on the viewer. It's a genuine slice of American-made nastiness, ready for the grindhouse. There's something unsettling about the ambiance this one cultivates, intentionally or not. [6/10]  

The Ray Bradbury Theater: The Lake

Among Ray Bradbury's most heartbreaking stories is “The Lake.” It follows a man – named Harold in the original story, called Douglas in this adaptation – returning to his childhood home town, bringing his newly acquired wife with him. They come to the lake and the beach he spent many days as a child, building sandcastles. There, as a boy, he met a pretty little blonde girl named Tally. She would become the first love of his life. One autumn day, while trying to encourage the boy to swim, Tally slipped into the water and never returned. Now, many years later, he returns to the same spot... And finds someone waiting for him.

Bradbury is one of the masters of wistful nostalgia and that is keenly displayed in “The Lake.” The version made for “Ray Bradbury Theater,” which the man himself adapted, inevitably isn't as good as the story. It adds a fairly ungainly voiceover narration, which grinds the pace to a slow gait. The device of Tally trying to teach the boy how to swim is added, to expand on their relationship some more. This is a good idea, yet it lends the episode a fairly repetitive structure. Since “The Lake” is fairly short on the page, some expansion is necessary. Douglas' wife is interested in seeing all his old haunts, which gives his lack of speech when they get to the lake more meaning. Yet it does feel like extraneous additions to a simple story of young love, lost and never to be regained.

Still, despite its inferiority to Bradbury's original text, “The Lake” isn't a bad episode of “Theater.” Gordon Thomson is compelling as the lead, with a face that can express a lot with just a look. Pat Robins directs it well enough, adding a warm, summer-like glow to the flashback scenes. (Though this means the episode lacks the story's autumnal yearning.) Robins has mostly worked as a script supervisor in New Zealand, which is presumably why the setting seems to have been shifted to the Pacific ocean here. Yet there are images here that speak volume, such as the boy working on the sandcastle in the rain the day Tally disappears. Or the final moment, of the adult Douglas holding a lock of blonde hair to his cheek. After finishing “The Lake,” I had to sit down and re-read the story. The episode doesn't have the kind of impact that Bradbury's words do but it's a decent enough translation to the screen. If nothing else, it captures the rush of young love and the bitter-sweetness of its end that is so integral to the story. [7/10]

The Munsters: Eddie's Brother / Herman, the Tire Kicker

“Eddie's Brother” has Eddie coming to his parents with a shocking request: He wants a little brother to play with. Herman can't convince Lily to have another child, so Grandpa thinks up another solution. He builds a robotic son named Boris. Yet this backfires when Eddie gets jealous of his new “sibling.” “Herman, the Tire Kicker” begins when the family notices how Marilyn has to leave early every morning to catch the bus. Herman endeavors to buy her a car. Unfortunately, he gets taken advantage of by a slick used car salesman. Things get worst when it turns out the car is stolen, the police assuming Herman is the thief. 

“Eddie's Brother” features some comedic high-lights and low points of “The Munsters'” second season. Herman brings down his old baby toys to get Lily in the child-rearing mode. This leads to an unfortunate sequence of Herman wearing a baby bonnet and babbling like an infant. It's immediately followed by a pretty sharp sequence of Lily asking her husband to do math. Overall, “Eddie's Brother” is a typically silly episode with a sweet enough conclusion. Eddie getting jealous of Boris provides a tiny bit of heart, while the scene of the robot attempting to run away is corny and absurd. (I mean that as a compliment.) Naturally, since this is an old sitcom, Boris would never appear again... Though at least the writers took the time to write him out first. Spot gets an amusing gag, though another scene implies that the Munsters sometimes eat dragons too. 

Poor Marilyn Munster. If a guy isn't running out on her because her family is too freaky, then the car that's been bought for turns out to be a lemon. How much of a lemon? It falls to piece the minute Herman starts it back up. “Herman, the Tire-Kicker” is probably most notable for featuring Frank Gorshin as the crooked used car salesman, though he's in more of his slick con artist mode than his manic Riddler mode. When the episode is focused on Grandpa being bitchy to Herman as they drive around, while things get a little less interesting when Herman is dragged off to jail. The episode is a little heavy on sped-up motion gags. The two plots converge nicely enough at the end though. [Eddie's Brother: 7/10 / Herman, the Tire-Kicker: 6/10]