The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Writer/director Henrique Couto has created one of the best independent slasher films to come down the pike in ages. This is mostly thanks to a solid cast, led by Erin R. Ryan’s great performance as Angela and Marylee Osborne’s as Bianca. Angela has scenes establishing her character and relationships with her mother and next-door neighbor (the father of the missing girl) that really flesh out both Angela and the supporting characters, and Bianca drives the story forward as she hunts for the killer and tentatively starts to work things out with her ex-boyfriend. There are some great throwaway gags that the supporting cast nails that give the film a nice counterpoint to its brutal scenes of murder and mayhem: the word “Massacre” in the title is not a threat, it’s a promise. And any slasher fanatics wondering if the film skimps on gratuitous nudity need not worry– there are enough naked coeds here to fill virtually any other franchise’s entire roster of sequels. Joe Bob Briggs is going to be absolutely ecstatic when he sees this movie.

  Oh, and the film also looks nice, has tons of blood and good makeup and effects, and you can actually hear all the dialogue and everything. That you actually give a damn about any of the characters is almost too much to ask, but Babysitter Massacre delivers anyway. It’s not perfect, of course– some of the characters’ decisions toward the end don’t make much sense, and the ending feels a little rushed (although appropriately open-ended), but those are pretty minor problems given how good the rest of the film is. This is one of the best microbudget horror films of the year and well worth seeking out for slasher aficionados.

  Basket Case (1982)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 26 September 2011

  There are certain films that do not seem to be candidates for a high-definition Blu-ray release, and writer/director Frank Henenlotter’s classic debut feature Basket Case is definitely one of them. Shot on 16mm in the early 1980s for very little money, Basket Case is a textbook example of the sort of nasty, no-budget films being shown on the screens of New York’s legendary 42nd Street grindhouses after being shot on the same streets. And so it’s something of a shock that Something Weird Video has made one of their first forays into the world of Blu-ray with a new release of Basket Case, although their approach is much different from that of most high-definition releases.

  For those unfamiliar with the film, Basket Case is the story of unfortunate Duane Bradley (Kevin Van Hentenryck) and his even more unfortunate twin brother Belial. Belial is hideously disfigured, and Duane carries him around in a wicker basket. Unsurprisingly, Duane gets asked “What’s in the basket?” an awful lot. Duane has tracked the doctors responsible for the brothers’ separation surgery to New York, where he takes Belial to exact revenge. In his downtime, Duane interacts with the oddball tenants of the Hotel Broslin, his temporary home, and tentatively dates Sharon (Terri Susan Smith), secretary to one of the doctors.

  While they arrived in New York with the common goal of revenge, the relationship between Duane and Belial begins to fall apart as Duane wants the things any normal guy wants– like sex– but Belial prevents him from having anything like a normal life. As Duane makes connections with his neighbors and Sharon, Belial becomes increasingly violent and difficult to hide. The brothers once connected physically are still inextricably bound by an inevitably tragic fate, but not before Belial tears through as many people as he can get his claws on.

  In a new video introduction to the film, Frank Henenlotter explains the concept behind the new Blu-ray HD transfer of the film. Instead of using digital trickery to bring the blown-up 35mm version of the film to Blu-ray, Henenlotter located a 16mm print of the film and the disc was mastered from this 16mm source. The result is not a typically slick HD film as most studios aim for, but instead a faithful replication of how the film originally looked in its 16mm incarnation, film grain and all. The transfer looks great, and really captures the grimy look and feel of the film in a way the previous DVD version did not.

  In addition to the new HD transfer (in the film’s original full-frame aspect ratio, naturally), this Blu-ray release of Basket Case includes a full-length commentary track with Henenlotter, producer Edgar Ievens, and actress Beverly Bonner as well as rare outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage, theatrical, TV and radio trailers, a short featurette from 2001 (“In Search of the Hotel Broslin”) and a gallery of behind-the-scenes photos and advertising art for the film. Overall, this is a great package and a huge upgrade to the previous DVD release, well worth the price of admission for the new transfer alone. With this and the new “Blood Trilogy” Blu-ray, Something Weird is off to a hell of a start in the Blu-ray market!

  Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 26 March 2016

  Generally speaking, I really feel like Zack Snyder has been piled on too much by critics and cinephiles. Since 300, Snyder has cultivated a very particular aesthetic, largely defined by things moving in extreme slow motion rendered in color palettes that usually look drained of life. But I’ve always gone to bat for Snyder, even after Sucker Punch and Man of Steel. To me, Snyder is like a next-generation Michael Bay: an auteur working with enormous resources, making films that only he could make. Snyder may be “Hollywood hack,” but he’s a Hollywood hack with a clear authorial voice, for better or worse.

  The ultimate expression of this, of course, is Sucker Punch. I will readily admit that it is a pretty awful movie, but it is certainly an interesting one. It’s loud, obnoxious, ridiculous, sexist, and profoundly goofy. I imagine it is what Zack Snyder’s sketchpads looked like when he was 12 years old, fleshed out from the page to live-action (and copious CGI) as meticulously — as slavishly, as lovingly — as he adapted Watchmen. Watching it, I was sort of awed by how Snyder was able to make what is clearly an incredibly personal film to him on this kind of scale. I was reminded of Roger Ebert’s review of David Cronenberg’s Crash, which he concluded by saying: “Afterward, I found myself wishing a major director would lavish this kind of love and attention on a movie about my fetishes.” In Sucker Punch, Snyder put all of his obsessions and fetishes out there on the screen for everybody to see in IMAX. You don’t learn much about anything else watching that film, but you learn an awful lot about Zack Snyder.

  Man of Steel signaled a kind of shift for Snyder. It still displayed the drained color palette common to his previous work (specifically in that it looks like a jeans commercial for much of its running time), but he dialed back the slow motion and seemed to instead focus on his concept of Superman as Alien Godzilla Jesus. This must have seemed like a huge gamble to Warnter Bros., especially after Snyder’s previous films underperformed at the box office and their own previous take on the character in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns was widely regarded as an embarrassing fiasco. But considering that, Man of Steel sort of does make sense. Singer’s approach was to literally make a sequel to an existing Superman movie, attempting to replicate the tone of a huge hit from decades earlier. It didn’t work for any number of reasons, so it is not surprising that Warnter Bros. figured going in a totally different direction might be the thing to do. Despite the fact that Man of Steel was a blockbuster hit, many critics reacted very negatively to Snyder’s Superman.

  Personally, I enjoyed the film as a unique take on the Superman mythology and the character. I really liked the opening sequences on Krypton, and how Snyder embraced the weird details of the old Superman comics like people riding dragons around. Once on Earth, the character’s moral quandaries seemed to rub a lot of people the wrong way, but most of those I found at least intriguing. The major complaint most detractors had about the film was the huge amount of collateral damage Superman left in his wake, and that was shocking given how previous film versions of the character managed to avoid depicting that sort of thing. But this was Snyder’s baby, and Snyder has come up in an age where mass-scale CGI destruction is de rigueur for tentpole blockbusters. Snyder wasn’t giving us Superman as defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. He was giving us Sup
erman as kaiju, and it was the guy’s first day on the job to boot. Sorry, Metropolis.

  Now with all that said, I truly feel that Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice is so astonishingly misguided and haphazard that I’m having a tough time finding the words to articulate all the things that are wrong with it. I’m honestly shocked that Warnter Bros. actually released it in the form we see in its theatrical cut. There are hints of Snyder’s fingerprints around its ragged edges–mostly in that it still looks like a Saw movie with its muted colors, and there’s some superfluous slow motion–but for the first time in his career, this is a film that feels like it could have been made by just about anybody. I don’t necessarily think that’s Snyder’s fault entirely: DC and Warnter Bros. saddled this film with the impossible task of launching a “Cinematic Universe” on par with what Marvel has built over the last decade, and it shows.

  This is barely a narrative film. Instead, it presents a series of barely-connected events that lay some very basic groundwork for DC’s upcoming movies. Much of this film serves literally no other purpose. It’s like reading a novel where every other page has been torn out. Characters, locations, motivations, plot points major and minor constantly bombard the audience in nonsensical fashion. Every character seems to be in a completely different movie from all the others. There’s sad Superman, hanging his head and pouting a lot. Sociopath Batman, straight-up murdering dozens of bad guys without a second thought. Jesse Eisenberg plays Lex Luthor as if he was told he was in the old Adam West Batman television series. Jeremy Irons and Holly Hunter both do typically great work in small, largely thankless roles. Only Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman makes any real impression here, giving the film its one absolutely perfect moment of characterization when she gets up off the ground with an irresistible smile, excited to be presented with a real fight.

  Unfortunately, that fight is with a character that has been translated from the comics as a mindless machine of destruction that looks suspiciously like Weta copied and pasted a cave troll from The Lord of the Rings directly into this film. This illustrates the biggest failing of all in Batman v. Superman. It’s not that the film presents schizophrenic, unrecognizable chimeras of different versions of its lead characters (although that is obviously a huge issue), but that in its desperate attempt to set up future films, this one has almost no identity of its own. It feels like a faceless amalgamation of the worst aspects of “comic book movies” in particular and modern blockbusters in general, presented as a trailer reel for a bunch of movies that don’t exist yet. It is the film that people who complain about “comic book movies” without actually having seen any of them (or having only seen, say, Avengers) have been complaining about all these years. Until now, it was an imaginary construct, a hypothetical. Now it’s finally a reality.

  Much has been made of how the film will be 30 minutes longer when it hits home video, but that doesn’t really mean anything to anyone who paid $20 to watch the other approximately 85% of the film in IMAX 3D. Extended cuts and deleted scenes are to be expected, but they’re hardly something an audience member should be expected to go into a film with knowledge of beforehand. Unless that 30 minutes is made up of a lot of connective tissue that help explain some of the legions of missing hows and whys in the film, there’s no reason to assume that the 3-hour version that hits home video will be any more coherent than this one. I’ve been going to bat for Snyder throughout his career, but the version of this film that we’ve gotten in its theatrical release is truly indefensible. It’s Snyder finally giving himself over to a ready-made aesthetic–which happens to be colorless, dour, and incoherent–even though he himself had a hand in creating it. In the past, it always seemed that at least Snyder was having fun in all of his previous work. This time, it’s virtually impossible to imagine any of the people on screen ever having smiled in their lives, let alone anyone behind the camera.

  Naturally, just as there is a school of thought that Michael Bay is actually an abstract artist working in the medium of billion-dollar blockbusters, there’s probably a solid argument to be made for Batman v. Superman as some kind of pinnacle of the Hollywood comic book tentpole as avant-garde film. But I’m not ready to make that argument, at least not yet. Mostly I’m just kind of sad I spent $17.50 to see it, and I hope that Zack Snyder is allowed to put a little more of his own personal style into his next film. For better and for worse, I’m really hoping next time we get something only he could make.

  The Battery (2012)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 16 August 2013

  Apocalypse fatigue is a real problem for fans of independent horror cinema. Post-apocalypse (or “PA,” henceforth) films are an attractive proposition for low-budget filmmakers: get a small cast out in the middle of nowhere for a small shoot, and it’s not too tough (in the States, anyway) to fake the end of the world. Scout out some forests, some abandoned cabins, and you’re set. Unfortunately, this means there are more cheap PA movies coming out every passing month that finding a way to stand out in the subgenre is increasingly difficult. This is particularly tough for PA films that overlap with “zombie films” (another popular low-budget choice), which they often do. It can wear an audience down watching dudes trudging through a forest and fighting off the occasional zombie over and over again. For a PA zombie film to truly stand out, it has to be something really special. Jeremy Gardner’s The Battery, for example, is one of the best horror films of the year, and well deserving of a wide audience.

  Ben (writer/director Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim) are two men wandering a mostly rural post-apocalyptic America trying to stay alive. When the film opens, we know virtually nothing about these two men, although as their travels continue we learn a little. They find themselves thrown together by circumstances, constantly on the move, scouring homes for supplies and fighting off zombies as they find them. Well, Ben fights them off; Mickey seems content to let them wander on their way. Ben seems to enjoy the nomadic life, but Mickey wants more. He cuts himself off from the world by listening to his cd player all the time, and refuses to kill any zombies. When a fluke leads the pair to communicating with a mysterious and threatening third party over a set of walkie-talkies, Ben is content to leave them be. Mickey, however, becomes obsessed with finding this tiny sliver of civilization that has somehow survived and tries to communicate with them despite being repeatedly warned that his presence is not welcome.

  The majority of the film follows Ben and Mickey around as they check out houses, rest, and move on. There are several moments that are really funny, but overall The Battery resembles a more laid-back and less cartoonish take on Zombieland. These two mismatched guys don’t know each other all that well, and both they and the audience tend to forget that, although they become a little closer as the film progresses. Unlike Zombieland, the audience is constantly aware that the stakes for Ben and Mickey are life and death. When Ben puts Mickey in close contact with a zombie to try to get him to finally kill one, it’s funny, but it’s also unsettling. Much of the film walks that line, an uncomfortable mix of comedy and fear, punctuated by long periods of quiet while Ben fishes or the guys play catch. This is one of the rare PA films that considers there may be some simple pleasures left after civilization is gone. Still, it’s just as important that the film reinforce the fragile nature of the men’s survival, heavily underlined in the film’s intense, protracted (and hugely daring) final act.

  Fortunately, Gardner and Cronheim are solid leads, because one or the other of them is in virtually every shot of the film. Their chemistry as sort-of friends stuck in this awful situation is fun and believable. As far as micro-budgets go, Gardner certainly made the most of his: despite a few odd image issues, The Battery looks great, and its few zombies are effectively made up without being too overly grotesque. If there is a minor complaint to be made, it is that the film may be a tad long at 101 minutes, but its relaxed pace and the fun of spending time with its characters makes this barely noticeable. With The Battery, writer/director
Gardner and his cast and crew have done the near-unimaginable: making the PA/zombie film truly fun and genuinely exciting again. For that final act alone, The Battery should become an instant classic.

  The Beach Girls (1982)

  Originally published on Criticplanet.org

  As The Beach Girls opens, three girls are heading for a beach house owned by one of their uncles to blow off some steam after school’s out. The girls are Sarah (Debra Blee), the mousy young woman whose uncle is letting them use the house; Ginger (Val Kline), the crazy blonde; and Ducky (Jeana Tomasina), the… uh, crazy brunette. It’s a situation that doesn’t make much sense, as Sarah explains later to another character that Ginger and Ducky aren’t really close friends of hers. She apparently just invited them along and they decided to take her up on the offer of a week spent in a luxurious beach house partying their asses off.

  Sarah arrives first and starts getting things in order while Ginger and Ducky pick up handsome hitchhiker Scott (James Daughton) and bring him along to the house. Once everyone is introduced, they all head to the beach and check out the locals. These include a big nerd with glasses, an overweight lady who chases him around, and lots of girls in bikinis. During the opening credits, most of these girls were doing aerobics– or perhaps they were jazzercising– on the beach while the bikini-stealing dog from Malibu Beach (1978) went around stealing girls’ tops as they tanned themselves. There’s more to his story, of course, but we’ll get to Malibu Beach later.