The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Shot on a combination of bleary VHS and high-definition digital video, The Synthetic Man is mostly made up of footage of Iris wandering around with her eyes wide and staring, talking to herself (sometimes out loud) as she works out what happens next in her novel. The book is informed by cheap science fiction and horror movies, as shown by Iris visiting her local video store’s racks and racks of faceless genre films. She incorporates pulp sci-fi concepts and familiar genre tropes into her story, and the high-definition footage of the book offers many of the film’s most interesting moments, such as Richard being attacked in the forest by an alien woman, and the explicit finale in which we see exactly what The Synthetic Man does to his victims.

  Writer/director Hand’s previous two films have been strange in their own right, but The Synthetic Man is easily his most bizarre film yet. The Synthetic Man presents an oppressively claustrophobic portrait of Iris and her creative process, rightly suggesting that creation of anything– even the most derivative “art”– can be a painful, arduous experience for the creator. Most viewers may feel watching The Synthetic Man is much the same, but that is exactly the point. There is no doubt that Hand has created this film (like his previous films) exactly as he wanted. As difficult as most viewers will no doubt find it, The Synthetic Man is clearly the work of a passionate, idiosyncratic artist. Love it or hate it, this is the kind of film that makes scouring the independent genre landscape worthwhile.

  The Taint (2011)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 27 November 2010

  As I watched The Taint, I couldn’t help but imagine Lloyd Kaufman crying tears of pride as the influence of Troma films officially made itself known in yet another generation of young filmmakers. Completely ridiculous and as gleefully offensive as anything Troma has ever done, The Taint brings new meaning to the word “splatstick.” The filmmakers of this super low-budget smorgasbord of gross-out apparently never met a bodily fluid they didn’t want to splash across the screen in brightly-colored high definition digital video. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing is entirely up to the individual viewer.

  As the film opens, our hero Phil O’Ginny (writer/co-director Drew Bolduc) wakes from a nightmare and is immediately chased by a shitting hillbilly in long pajamas wielding a scythe. As he flees through the forest, Phil is stopped by a terrifying sight: a man staggering around with a huge erection sticking out of his pants, spewing semen everywhere, raising a rock to cave in Phil’s head. Enter Misandra (Colleen Walsh), who quickly dispatches the man and explains to Phil how society has completely fallen apart due to The Taint, a mysterious chemical that entered the water system and turns all men into rampaging misogynists bent on killing and/or having sex with any woman unlucky enough to fall into their grasp.

  As Phil and Misandra head to a well that Misandra believes to be untainted, they encounter other survivors of this bizarre apocalypse. One of these survivors happens to be Phil’s old gym teacher Houdini (Cody Crenshaw), who has settled in to anarchy very nicely and runs a gang of nomads with names like Balloon Knot and Alligator Fuckhouse. They then meet the masked stranger Ludas (Kenneth Hall), who takes them to his friend’s dad’s basement and tells them the whole terrifying story of The Taint. However, Ludas may have more in store for our heroes than just confessing his sins.

  As you may have guessed by now, The Taint is not a film for the easily– or even fairly reasonably– offended. Other plot points include child abuse flashbacks, Nazi imagery, and an impromptu abortion. Throughout the film there are scenes of men killing women in various gruesome ways, using some shockingly good special effects. While the film goes on at least one story detour too many, the pacing is still very quick, with a total running time of just around 70 minutes. The Taint is a surprisingly accomplished independent film that looks great and has something to offend pretty much everybody– what else could you possibly want?

  The Teacher (1974)

  Originally published on Criticplanet.org

  Earlier in this Crown International project, I reviewed a film called Coach in which a female basketball coach becomes romantically involved with one of her male players. In that film, released in 1978, it didn’t seem like a big deal and there were no negative repercussions. In stark contrast, 1974′s The Teacher features a female teacher who seduces her teenage neighbor. “She corrupted the youthful morality of an entire school,” the ads screamed, but really she slept with one student and another one got to see her topless through some binoculars. Still, in 1974 justice had to be served and things don’t turn out all that well for the titular teacher or her underage lover—infamously portrayed by Jay North, best known as TV’s “Dennis the Menace.”

  North plays goofy high schooler Sean Roberts, who lives next door to young teacher Diane Marshall (Angel Tompkins). Sean’s pal informs him that Diane is on the prowl since her husband left, and that she is obviously attracted to Sean. Sean tries to play it off, but before long he finds himself on the end of Diane’s increasingly overt come-ons. “Come inside for a minute,” she invites one day when Sean stops by her house, “It’s OK, I’m not going to rape you.” Ahem. Sean is understandably a little confused and intimidated by this and tries to avoid being alone with Diane if possible, but Diane knows what she wants and goes for it, even while super creepy stalker Ralph (Anthony James) poses an immediate threat to the safety of both Diane and Sean.

  The Teacher was written and directed by Howard Avedis, who also directed the similarly overheated melodrama The Stepmother for Crown International in 1972. In both films, Avedis displays a preference for overacting– the assumption seems to be that if someone’s not freaking the hell out, the audience might not really get what they’re going through. Also, Avedis puts Sean through nearly as much punishment as Frank in The Stepmother, putting him in situations where he sees a friend fall to his death, is put in danger of being found out in public with his teacher, and finally has to confront the dangerously unbalanced Ralph. Anthony James seems genuinely unhinged as Ralph, and it’s no surprise that he made a decent acting career for himself playing characters often described as “creepy” and “deranged.” Jay North mostly just looks awkward and surprised the whole movie, which is appropriate. No doubt audiences were lured in by the promise of seeing Dennis the Menace get involved in distasteful proceedings, and once Diane gets her hooks in him, the film does not disappoint in that respect.

  Still, The Teacher is a few notches lower on the crazy scale from The Stepmother, and is therefore not quite as entertaining. Angel Tompkins is very effective as the attractive young teacher, but she’s never more than a one-note character (the lonely, sexually voracious abandoned housewife). Anthony James easily walks off with every scene in which he appears, but he seems to be acting on a completely different level of hysteria than anyone else in the cast. By the end, The Teacher has packed in enough surprises and degenerate behavior to fill its quota in working toward shedding Jay North’s squeaky-clean image, but neither aims for nor achieves anything much beyond that.

  Teenage Ghost Punk (2017)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 24 April 2017

  The family-friendly straight to video and VOD movie is a strange subsection of independent cinema. There have always been occasional oddities that threw off kids browsing the all-ages section at their local video store with something inexplicably weird. In the late 80s and 90s, low-budget independent production companies cranked out bizarre “kids’ movies” like Munchie (produced by Roger Corman’s New Horizons and directed by exploitation legend Jim Wynorski) and releases by Full Moon Pictures’s Moonbeam Entertainment such as the Prehysteria! films (directed by Albert & Charles Band and David DeCoteau). Fast forward two decades and the video stores are gone, but the independent filmmakers and production companies are producing stuff like A Talking Cat!?! and Nessie & Me–not coincidentally directed by DeCoteau and Wynorski, respectively. It’s good to know that there will always be a place for weird family-friendly films, since regardless of their relative
quality it’s impossible to say what oddball movie is going to spark a kids’ imagination. Teenage Ghost Punk is the kind of movie that would have sat comfortably on the shelf next to Theodore Rex and Leapin’ Leprechauns!

  Amanda (Grace Madigan) is a high schooler who is none too happy to be moving with her mother Carol (Adria Dawn) and super genius little brother Adam (Noah Kitsos) from their home in Michigan to Oak Park, Illinois. She would have had a perfect life next year in school–head cheerleader for a squad that made it to #2 in the state the previous year, and with her football player boyfriend Amanda would have been high school royalty. Now she has to start all over again making new friends while Amanda struggles to fit in at work where she’s constantly annoyed by office lothario Barry (Darren Stephens). Shortly after the family moves in, things start happening that they can’t explain. Carol brings in the cops while Amanda and Adam call local ghost hunters the Super Paranormal Investigation Team (or, uh, SPIT). SPIT is immediately chased out of the house by a spirit who then reveals himself to Amanda: Brian (Jack Cramer) is the ghost of a punk rock-obsessed kid who was struck by lightning while playing his guitar on the roof in the 1980s. His friends in the afterlife are other “haunters” from different time periods who wander the neighborhood, and Amanda starts hanging out with them more than her living friends. But what’s she going to do when she can’t take her ghost boyfriend to the big dance?

  Teenage Ghost Punk is a very light teen comedy that coasts along on its considerable “let’s put on a show!” charm. There’s not much in the way of supernatural hijinks beyond Brian’s initial terrorizing of the inept goofballs of SPIT. The closest it gets to “scares” other than that is a sequence where Brian tells Amanda about the other ghosts that haunt her neighborhood including women in flowing white dresses who wander the streets endlessly and “Vlad the Bad” (Brian Shaw), an imposing caped character all the other ghosts avoid. Much of the humor is in Amanda’s interactions with Brian’s neighborhood ghost friends, each of which represent a different time period: a 1960s hippie, a 1950s greaser, a high-school buddy of Ernest Hemingway, an 1800s farm boy, and “Goose Hair” (Alex Waheed), a ghost from so long ago he can barely speak English and is mostly unable to process what the world is now. There’s nothing here that’s really laugh-out-loud funny for adults, but kids might get a kick out of it.

  What kids probably won’t get a kick out of is Carol’s travails at work with serial harasser Barry, who is given way too much screen time to deliver a torrent of lame pick-up lines. Most of these are just tiresome, although eventually they start to get genuinely bizarre: “You remind me of a jigsaw puzzle–I’d like to stuff you in my closet and save you for a rainy day,” he tells one of his coworkers. Whether actor Darren Stephens was riffing some of these or not is unclear, but they certainly could have used some more judicious pruning. At over 90 minutes, Teenage Ghost Punk is at least 10 minutes too long and could have used some tightening up in other areas as well. It’s clear the cast was having a great time, though, and that spirit of fun is infectious. The music, as you may have guessed, is mostly terrible, but it’s one more thing that adds to the film’s goofy charm. If it had been released in the 90s, it would have made a fun double feature with The Skateboard Kid. Whether or not that sounds like something you’d want to watch in the year 2017 will pretty much tell you exactly whether or not you should watch it.

  Terrifier (2017)

  Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 31 August 2017

  2017 has been a banner year for clowns in popular horror culture, thanks to the massively anticipated film adaptation of Stephen King’s It and smaller-scale scares like “Gags, The Green Bay Clown.” To provide some context for the current craze and a look at cinematic clowns present and past, the Yonkers location of the Alamo Drafthouse is running a special program entitled “Send in the Clowns.” Running from September 1st to the 7th, the series includes screenings of The Dark Knight, House of 1000 Corpses, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Quick Change, and Spawn among many others. One particularly noteworthy film screening during this series is a new independent horror film entitled Terrifier from filmmaker Damien Leone, which may just be the making of a future “clown horror” icon.

  Tara (Jenna Kanell) and Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) are out late partying on Halloween. They head to a pizza place for a quick slice, where they encounter “Art the Clown” (David Howard Thornton), a deeply creepy guy in a clown outfit and makeup. He doesn’t do much other than stare at them, but his presence alone is enough to scare Tara. When the ladies return to their car, they find it has a flat tire, so Tara calls her sister Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) to come pick them up. While they’re waiting, a friendly exterminator named Will (Michael Leavy) lets Tara into the building he’s preparing to spray so she can use the bathroom, but they’re not alone. Soon the ruthless Art has turned the building into his own personal abattoir, dispatching anyone unlucky enough to wander inside.

  Terrifier is a brutal and straightforward “slasher” that features what is unquestionably one of the most unsettling clown characters in recent memory. Art is tall and thin, with simple black and white paint and costume, his features augmented just enough to push him out of “weird clown” into “uncanny valley” territory. Thornton gives an impressive performance, especially considering Art never speaks a single word throughout the entire film. His deranged grin is genuinely terrifying, but the thing that really puts Art on a different level from standard slasher film villains is his pragmatism. Art wants to murder these people, and he’s happy to use whatever is at hand to help in his cause. This leads to some truly shocking moments when Art tosses out any kind of “slasher villain” rulebook and does things that are utterly unexpected. It’s also worth noting that the film features enough buckets of blood and exceptional practical effects to satisfy any discerning gorehound. It’s maybe a little too mean-spirited to be “fun,” exactly, but it’s certainly a hell of a ride.

  Writer/director Damien Leone has been working toward a full “Art the Clown” feature for years now, making a few shorts featuring the character and incorporating him into the 2012 anthology feature All Hallow’s Eve, so it follows that Leone would want the focus to be very much on Art. The only drawback is that with such a spectacular central character, all the others are doomed to seem less interesting unless they have some kind of hook to make them really stand out. They’re each given a little fleshing out but not much, and they mostly serve as targets for the next gruesome set piece. The cast isn’t bad at all, but it’s tough to make cookie-cutter machete fodder like these characters stand out. Pooya Mohseni is a notable exception as a disturbed woman who lives in the basement of the building in which the bulk of the film takes place. Her understated performance generates a few low-key chills of its own before Art’s killing spree gets into full swing.

  The Yonkers Alamo Drafthouse’s series spotlights a wide variety of clown characters, from horror films like the Rob Zombie double feature to Jodrowsky’s art-horror masterpiece Santa Sangre and George Miller’s infamous Babe: Pig in the City. Despite its independent origins, Terrifier absolutely deserves a spot in this series for taking the concept of the creepy clown to a whole new level. The Drafthouse brand is synonymous with excellent and adventurous programming, and this series is a prime example. It’s not hard to imagine a boom in clown-centric no-budget horror films in the wake of It, and the attendant Clown Fatigue (see also: Zombie Fatigue, Apocalypse Fatigue, etc.) that will inevitably follow. But what this Drafthouse series sets out to do is remind us of those films that put the clown to good use in different genre contexts as a sort of primer on how the character of the clown can be such a compelling cinematic figure.

  The Terror Experiment (2010)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 16 April 2012

  The last time a straight-to-disc screener starring C. Thomas Howell came my way, it was a bad scene. I could barely make it through that film, and it worried me when I saw Howell’s name pop up in the press release
for The Terror Experiment. However, another name also caught my eye: Judd Nelson. Could The Terror Experiment be for the 80s “Brat Pack” guys what Megapython Vs. Gatoroid was for Debbie Gibson and Tiffany? Unfortunately not– while Howell and Nelson are at odds in The Terror Experiment, we never get to see them have a full-on fight while quoting memorable lines from each other’s 80s films. Instead, The Terror Experiment is a mostly competent, straight-faced action/horror film that does little to stand out among the legions of other direct-to-disc releases.

  Jason London plays Cale, an IT supervisor working in the Federal Building in Lafayette, Louisiana. His ex-wife Carol (Serah D’Laine) also works there in a chemical lab, so their daughter spends her days in the day care of the building. As the film opens, Cale and Carol arrive at work just before an anonymous bomber working for a terrorist group explodes a bomb in a lab, releasing an experimental biological weapon into the building’s ventilation system. Anyone who breathes it becomes overwhelmed with paranoia and anger, turning them into mindless killing machines. In the panic, many people run for the stairwells to escape, which turns out to be the opposite of what they probably should have done: the gas is heavier than air and ends up being distributed only from the sixth floor down. A handful of survivors, including Cale and private investigator Mandy (Alicia Leigh Willis) manage to hole up on a higher floor behind electronically locked stairwell doors.