Roughly ten thousand horror movies come out a year. This genre attracts seriously devoted fans but sheer volume means titles still get overlooked. Did you know the Soska Sisters made a straight-to-Tubi zombie flick with the little Catwoman from “Gotham” this year? Me neither! Anyway, there are definitely levels of “overlooked” in this genre though. I saw a tweet a while back that said “Strange Darling” was overlooked. The film got great reviews from the industry websites and pulled in a decent amount of buzz among the fandom. But it didn't make “Terrifier” money, which I guess means it's an underperformer. Well, I never forget a title and I've had “Strange Darling” on my list since it started to grab positive notices on the festival circuit not too long ago. Let's sneak this one in before October is over.
The opening narration promises that the film depicts the final hours of an infamous serial killer's rampage. A woman, identified as only The Lady, speeds away in a vehicle from a man pursuing her. Following a car accident, she runs into the woods where the man stays on her trail. She arrives at the home of a pair of eccentrics and hides within. This chase began the night before in a seedy hotel, the man and woman met up for some casual sex. This quickly escalated to a game of erotic roleplay, both parties soon arguing over who is truly in control. “Strange Darling's” structure continues to leap back and forth through time, as it reveals more of what led up to these moments and the true identities of both people.
The question must be asked though: To what purpose is this trickery invoked? It's tempting to compare "Strange Darling" to movies like "Hard Candy" or "Gone Girl," which play with expectations in order to make points about gender roles, capital punishment, or the media. What deeper reasoning is there to "Strange Darling's" twisting story? The woman asks the man to handcuff her and choke her, while roleplaying as a serial killer and his victim. Which certainly suggests a criticism of how we immediately assume men are the perpetrators of violence and women are the victims of it. Once the twist comes, you assume there's a feminist angle here, of a woman striking back at the patriarchal structures. Except our killer lady is unambiguously presented as a villain, the apparently murderous man actually being a hero. When the time comes to reveal any reasoning at all to the Lady's killing spree, the script provides a single line with vague connotations. There's no attempt to delve deeper into her warped psyche. This is paired with a frankly embarrassing scene where a female cop immediately believes the woman is in crisis and the reasonable male authority figure questions the scenario. In other words, "Strange Darling" flips our expectations on its head to prove that... Women are villains sometimes and men are victims sometimes? That we should... Doubt women and believe men? Is this some half-assed anti-#MeToo propaganda? What the fuck kind of message is that?
Ultimately, "Strange Darling" has some stylish filmmaking on its side and a decent pair of lead performances, in service of a smug story that never actually says much. Ironically, the strong first act suggests a straight-forward chase story – similar to John Hyams' "Alone" – without all the narrative fuckery probably would have made for a better movie. Alternatively, if the roleplay element of the story was embraced more, we might have gotten an interesting story about power dynamics, such as in "Sanctuary" or "Piercings." Instead, "Strange Darling" refuses to make any coherent point about gender at all and mostly exists as a testament to the "cleverness" of its own twist. And it's a decent twist but a feature length film needs more than that, which Mollner and his team stubbornly refuses to provide. An extra point for an effective use of "Love Hurts," despite that being probably the most obvious pop standard you could include a lo-fi cover of in your indie thriller about a hook-up gone horribly wrong. [6/10]
It is easy to overlook this fact but, during the original five year run of "Movie Macabre," Elvira actually did host some good movies. I don't know if weathered, forty year old VHS recordings of Elvira introducing "Peeping Tom," "Masque of the Red Death" or "Village of the Damned" are out there somewhere. The handful of commercial releases the original broadcasts have gotten are usually of the public domain movies – or at least very, very cheap to acquire movies – she presented. That was certainly the case with the handful of installments Shout! Factory put out on disc like a decade ago, releases that can still be found in thrift stores to this day. Most of the titles on those sets were for less-than-sterling motion pictures like "Monstroid" or "Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks." "Doomsday Machine," a forgotten attempt at a sci-fi thriller from 1972, is another such example. But I watched "Werewolf of Washington" the other day so I suppose there's no reason not for me to talk about the other presentation in that same double feature.
In the far-flung future year of 1975, U.S. spies use cat throwing and pigtail assisted homicide to sneak into a Chinese laboratory. Inside, they find a device that, if activated, could start a nuclear chain reaction that would destroy the world. The military immediately commandeers a manned space flight to Venus, forcing the all-male crew to include three female scientists. (Including a Soviet one.) This is to have a breeding population in space, should the worst happen. Well, it does. For reasons that aren't explained, the Chinese government activated the doomsday device and wipe out all life on Earth. Now, the crew of the Astra are the only humans left alive. They wrestle with the philosophical implications of this while encountering new perils on their way to Venus.
Not that the stolen effects shots and bizarre non-ending make that much of a difference. All of "Doomsday Machine" is paced like molasses rolling down a hillside, moving with a deeply drab and almost otherworldly stiltedness that makes the entire film feel like an sixties instructional film. The characters are all one-note and the acting is dry. Rather than attempt to build any tension from events as massive as the destruction of all life on Earth, the film rolls right along with little emotion registering. Much time is spent on droll nonsense like attempting to lighten the ship's load, dictate radiation levels, or slowly debate who should breed with whom. The only recognizable human emotions that rise to the surface in "Doomsday Machine" is a kind of pathetic horniness and a deeply unseemly resentment towards women. That the heroes are on a mission to repopulate the human race always floats under the surface, earlier scenes involving the girls changing into their underwear or teasing the guys while only wearing towels. While the film feels far too juvenile to be a sexploitation flick, the scorn and eventual violence the me show the women is far more startling. The film is so slow and uneventful – yes, I realize I'm saying that about a plot where the entire world is destroyed – that it numbs you into a sleep-like state before smacking you with an attempted rape and beating scene.
"Doomsday Machine" being an incomplete sixties film, dusted off in the early seventies and stapled together with some stock footage and crushingly slow new scenes, is difficult not to notice. If the movie had seen release when originally planned, it still would've felt like a throwback to fifties sci-fi. That feeling was amplified by 1972, creating a dull experience that feels truly out of time. One assumes "Doomsday Machine" was intended to capitalize on space race mania and Cold War tension but was sunk by its complete inability to be interesting and total lack of excitement. This is the kind of low budget schlock deeply improved by Elvira's quibs and gags, all of which are decently sharp. I'm also shocked it was never featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000," given its public domain status, but it was featured on quasi-revival series "Cinematic Titanic," if you want a good idea of what a riffed version of the film would feel like. Better yet, "Doomsday Machine" would be a great option to put on if you're struggling to get to sleep. Never before has the extinction of the human race and the Earth dying in nuclear hellfire been such a soothing nap aide. One extra point for the cat tossing and hilarious zero-G acting. [3/10]
One of the most freeing aspects of "Love, Death, and Robots," Tim Miller and David Fincher's animated sci-fi anthology, is that the episodes are not confined to one specific runtime. The episode I watched last year was comparable to a standard TV time slot while "The Witness" runs all of twelve minutes. It's the right length for this story: In a rather "Blade Runner"-like city, a woman is doing her makeup on a hotel room. A loud noise alerts her to something happening in the apartment across the street. Seemingly, she has witnessed a man committing a murder. She flees, the apparent assassin in hot pursuit. The woman arrives at her job, as a dancer in some sort of bondage-themed strip club/brothel, unaware that the killer has followed her there. She grabs a pistol from her boss' room and the chase begins again, the man drawing ever closer.
As I detailed last year, "Love, Death & Robots" arose out of an attempt to make a new film out of French magazine, "Heavy Metal." That publication was well known for two things: Introducing the highly detailed, often surreal artwork of visionaries like Moebius and Richard Corben to the west. On a more puerile level, the comic was also notorious for featuring lots of nudity and sex, far beyond what was permissible in American comics at the time. "The Witness" definitely draws as much, if not more so, from the latter instinct as the former. The female protagonist having the job of a stripper involves her slithering out of a dress, eventually thrusting her body directly at the viewer. While this is happening, the male antagonist has two sex droids of some sort, clad in fetish gear, squirming all over him. The entire last act of the story involves the female lead being clad only in an open robe, her naked body often exposed. This story being so preoccupied with the idea of being watched and observed suggests the flesh on display, and the main character being a sex worker, serves a purpose. She sees and is seen in turn, both seeking and sought after. Yet I also don't think "The Witness" is making a coherent point about women being objectified. I think the filmmakers involved – one of which is Alberto Mielgo, who won an Oscar for pretentious bullshit "The Windshield Wiper" and was a visual consultant on "Into the Spider-Verse" – probably wanted to see some cartoon titties and bush too.
Earlier this year, Jonathan Glazer's “The Zone of Interest” would win Oscars for Best International Film and Best Sound. It was a haunting film, more than one review comparing it to a horror movie. While his sci-fi mind-bender “Under the Skin” is probably Glazer's most proper entry into the horror genre, there is another example. “The Fall” is a seven minute short film Glazer directed for A24 in 2019. It concerns a panicked man hiding in a tree from a pursuing mob. Each person wears masks, depicting faces locked in grimacing expressions. The attackers pull the man from the tree, snap a photo of him, and strap him into a gallows. The trap door is opened and the man falls into a seemingly bottomless pit, the others watching patiently until the rope falls out of sight.
Yes, “The Fall” is another short film that falls – if you'll excuse the pun – into the artsy-fartsy domain. Like much of Glazer's work, “The Fall” does capture a properly unsettling, nightmare like tone. The basic gist of the short, of many pursuing one, could certainly have come out of any nightmare. As is the idea that this mob is attacking this single man – whose innonence is represented by his mask having a remorseful face – for no discernable reason. The masks remind me of Japanese Noh masks, in the way they freeze the human face in one expression. Such a simple but undoubtedly uncanny distortion of the commonplace is another element out of a bad dream. Ideas like a pit we fall into forever would be dismissed by the waking mind but is exactly the kind of thing the subconscious mind would literally dream up.
And for all these reasons and more, “The Fall” is an effective and disquieting burst of nightmare imagery. Now, what does it all mean? Most seem to read the film as symbolic of fascism, seeing parallels in the way a non-conformist is attacked by a faceless but identical mob. Considering Glazer cites a photograph of Trump's sons with an animal they killed as an inspiration, I'm sure this was no doubt intentional. Yet the visuals presented here are vague that you could read just about any meaning into them that you want. “The Fall” is probably best absorbed as an exercise in straight dream logic, recalling feelings and ideas without any specific destination behind them. I do know that, despite its potent visuals and expert production, “The Fall” struck me as incomplete. As if it's a prologue to a longer story, that ends just when it seems to really get moving. Simply put, it's a striking exercise in sound and images that didn't resonate with me on a deeper level. I guess it goes that way sometimes. [6/10]
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