I'll Take It Black

 

I'm going to make a declarative objective statement about something that is very much subjective: black comedy is the most divisive of all film genres. Either you click with a movie's intentionally polarizing sense of humor, or you find it deplorable. There is very little room in between.

Especially when it involves...

(SPOILER ALERT THAT YOU SHOULD PROBABLY KNOW GOING IN TO KNOW IF THIS IS GOING TO BE OKAY FOR YOU OR NOT)...

adorable dead babies.

Quick Plot: Opening credits read as an instruction manual for assembling the titular piece of furniture. Maybe it's because I just assembled my own outdoor cart by following pictures that kind of matched tiny parts, but this graphic design decision pleased me grandly.

Meet Jesus and Maria, a very tired married couple navigating the stress of new parenthood in a small city apartment. Despite the bags hanging under her eyes, Maria is actually quite happy. Years of IVF have finally given her exactly what she wanted: infant Cayetano. 

Jesus is less enthused. An overgrown child of sorts, he seems overwhelmed with fatherhood. It doesn't help that the 13-year-old neighbor down the hall is madly in love with him.

What does all of this have to do with a coffee table, you might ask? Doesn't EVERYTHING come down to your choice of coffee table?

Much to Maria's annoyance, Jesus insists on purchasing an incredibly tacky glass table complete with nude women posing as the legs in extremely fake gold. It's clearly his way of holding onto some remnant of his own identity, making a decision completely separate from both his wife and child. It's certainly not the worst crime a new father can commit. 

That comes a few minutes later. 

Spoilers for a movie that, as I've warned, is probably best slightly spoiled in order to know if you can stand it. Maria exits the apartment to do some grocery shopping (even THAT has some bitterness, as it's for a small dinner party for Jesus's not entirely welcome brother and much younger girlfriend). After realizing he's missing a component to complete his table's assembly, Jesus turns away just long enough for something to go terribly, terribly wrong: the unbreakable glass shatters and decapitates his only child. 

What does one do in that kind of situation? Call the authorities? Scream? Throw yourself out a window? Tell your wife?

In the case of Jesus, hide the evidence, go into shock, and host the world's most awkward dinner party in European history. 

Directed by Caye Casas (who also co-wrote with Cristina Borobia), The Coffee Table is a brutally uncomfortable film. It takes the cringe humor of something like The Office at its most extreme and turns it inside out to expose every part you'd rather not witness.

It's also very funny.

(ducks)

But I understand if you don't agree! 

High Points

There is some VERY funny writing here in Cases and Borobia's script, particularly around the wonderfully wry Ruth (perfectly played by Gala Flores) and her inappropriate obsession

Low Points

I understand that The Coffee Table is ultimately Jesus's story, but it feels a little bit of a cheat to not give us insight into Maria's final decision

Lessons Learned

A furniture salesman can solve your table problems, not name your newborn

Never recommend a book of poetry to a teenager, even if it's for a school project

Cowards never admit they're in love

Rent/Bury/Buy

If you (not unjustly) have an absolute zero tolerance for dead babies, The Coffee Table is not the film for you. But if your sense of humor is appropriately twisted, give it a go on Kanopy. 

I Only Came Here For the Meatballs

One of the best ways to bring some life to a predictable genre is to put the action in an unusual or rarely-used setting. Hunting teenagers in IKEA? Sign me up!

Quick Plot: A group of teenagers infiltrates House Idea (get it?), a home store that preaches environmental awareness while looting rain forests for raw materials. Their plan is to make some videos of their protest art to share it with the world. And if time allows, there's also some flirting and paintball.

Unfortunately for them, this happens to be the night that brother security guards Kevin and Jack are stuck on the overnight shift after the socially awkward, physically dominating Kevin freaked out some customers. Jack is already multiple sheets to the wind when the kids have made a full breach. Nervous about being caught drunk, he encourages Kevin to get the kids out without telling their supervisors. 

Kevin takes things a bit too far. 

See, when not lumbering around the home good section, Kevin spends most of his time watching survivalist videos and setting animal traps. He's one of those dangerous men who probably fantasizes about making it through an apocalypse in order to prove his own skills. 

The teenagers are woefully outmatched, both physically and mentally. Only Yasmin seems to have any sort of working brain cells. This is Kevin's terrain.

Wake Up is a good idea turned into a mediocre movie. Directing partners Anouk and Yoann-Karl Whissell (Turbo Kid, Summer of '84)  get a lot of fun out of their space, racing their teens around in flatbed carts as they hide in home store pockets when not being forced to assemble furniture. It's what you want from a slasher film set in this kind of location.

I wish the movie had a little more heft. The teenagers are as disposable as a bag of Swedish meatballs, with the script never treating their mission with an ounce of weight. Likewise, Kevin is basically Michael Meyers without a mask, which sounds more interesting than it plays out.

Still, it's hard to be too mad at an 83-minute slasher set in IKEA.

High Points

I wish a move set after hours in IKEA had more fun with its surroundings, but the Whissells do make some visual magic late in the film with some glow-in-the-dark body coatings that combine Predator with The Purge 

Low Points

I thought we moved past that nasty mid-2000s of [SPOILER ALERT] killing our final girl through some forgotten trap in the last minute of screentime, but I guess I forgot an eternal truth: French horror (even when part Canadian) is always mean

Lessons Learned

Corporate windows are a lot thicker than they look

Getting stabbed in the back is no excuse to not continue to run fairly quickly around a large store

Always use caution when reaching for a high shelf (this is useful advice whether you're shopping in a recent homicide site or just, you know, Costco)

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For a similar setup that takes a less slasher, more Michael Haneke-ish path, check out Bertrand Bonello's Nocturama. It's also a nihilist film about young French radicals hiding out after hours in a sprawling department store, but it's, well, good

Rent/Bury/Buy

Wake Up doesn't hit its potential, but it's a short, quick little watch that might still show you something new. It's a disappointment due to its promising setup, but I didn't feel like I wasted 83 minutes of my life. Find it on Kanopy the next time you lose a screw to your bookcase and need some way to vent.

Can't Say She Didn't See It Coming

Is there still any question that the best of the Italian horror filmmakers is Lucio Fulci? I know there are plenty of cinema fans who will die for Dario Argento or try to slap my face with a Sergio Martino for making such a statement, but come on! Whether he's making gooey gore, tasty trash, or actual objectively good thrillers, Fulci is, at least to me, never not interesting.

Quick Plot: As a child, young Virginia was walking through Florence with her classmates as she watched her mother fall to her death over a watery cliff. That's rough enough stuff for a kid, but all the more disturbing when we realize her mother was tumbling into bloody mannequin form at that exact time...but in England. 

Some years later, Virginia has grown into a chic decorator living in Italy. She's newly married to an older businessman named Francesco. While they're clearly in love, Virginia is also withholding, sharing some of her new psychic visions with her pal Luca instead.

Trouble strikes when Virginia visits her husband's country estate with the intention of going full HGTV but instead, discovers a young woman's rotting body hidden in the walls (and yes, I have long craved for that content on HGTV). When the victim is revealed to be an ex-girlfriend, Francesco is quickly arrested as the prime suspect. Virginia is determined to clear his name and solve the mystery of her premonitions.

Giallo is far from my favorite horror subgenre...unless it's directed by Lucio Fulci. In the case of Don't Torture a Duckling, Fulci uses the central crime to explore something very specific (Catholic guilt). With The Psychic, Fulci has two aces up his sleeve: a well-written time-looping narrative (with the assistance of co-screenwriters Roberto Gianviti and Dardano Sacchetti) and the gobsmacking glamour of Jennifer O'Neill. 

My notes say "Julie Christie chic", which should tell you what you need to know. This is the kind of woman who hammers her way through a dusty corpse-filled hole and has me the viewer wondering where she got her boots. There's a reason O'Neill had so much success as a model: the camera loves her and she knows exactly how to love it back. As Virginia, O'Neill is believable as a smart, determined woman gifted or cursed with clairvoyance, and it makes a big difference in fully investing the audience in her journey.

It helps that she's working with more solid material than is often found in this particular corner of the genre. Giallo is a tricky beast because it often sacrifices substance for style, or ultimately relies on a shocking twist that just leaves me feeling annoyed. In the case of The Psychic, the looping stuck in time structure takes it to a different level. It's almost more classic gothic, and I found it riveting. 

High Points

There are a lot of intelligent filmmaking choices at work in making The Psychic so effective, and one of the most important is the haunting score by Fabio Frizzi. It's both of its time and timeless in the best possible way.

Low Points

In all honesty, I did not fully understand EVERY detail of what actually went down in The Psychic, but I feel like that's more my fault than Fulci's. I'm not always that smart.

Lessons Learned

Visions are not legal alibis

Nothing says "trustworthy" like boasting 56 lovers and not having murdered a single one

Hell hath no fury like the hourly chime of an annoying watch

Rent/Bury/Buy

I had heard positive sentiments about The Psychic, but I was genuinely surprised by just how good it was, and how fresh the storytelling felt. Give it a go! I watched via Kanopy, though I believe it's also floating around a few other streaming locations. 

You Really Push My Buttons

There's a strong argument for setting any genre film in the past because it saves your writer the trouble of explaining away cell phones and the internet. More importantly, if you choose the 1970s, it lets your set and costume team go WILD.

Quick Plot: It's 1976 in Richmond, Virginia, where attractive but sad Norma and Arthur Lewis are struggling to financially stay above water. He's a NASA scientist with astronaut dreams, while she teaches at a private academy for the tuition discount. When the school changes its policy and Arthur's application is rejected on "psychological grounds" (which are never mentioned again), the Lewises reach desperation.

It's a perfectly timed worst-case-scenario because on that very day, who should arrive but a half-faced Frank Langella bearing a mystery gift: a simple box with a big clown nose button and a million dollar proposition: push it and win a briefcase of tax-free cash knowing someone you've never met will die because of your action.

Norma and Arthur are nice, earnest people cemented into a lifestyle they can't really afford. She suffered a horrible accident in her teens that left her with a few less toes and a permanent limp, while his grandest dreams of scientific exploration are shattered in a way the movie never seems ready to address. They just want what's best for their family, so you can almost understand why Norma, tired from a day of teaching existentialism to sulking teenagers (we've all been there), can't stop herself from pressing down.

What follows is...odd, but if you're familiar with the work of writer/director Richard E. Kelly, probably what you'd expect from the Donnie Darko creator tackling a Richard Matheson short story. There are NASA conspiracies and religious miracles, kidnapping plots and possessed nose-bleeding babysitters, beautifully staged historical library sequences and lots - and I mean LOTS - of distractingly '70s wallpaper scene-stealing.

And I haven't even brought up the southern accents.

Did I enjoy The Box? Most certainly. Is The Box a good movie? No, I would say not. It's ambitious without a solid plan, much like most of Kelly's catalog. But it's also incredibly bizarre, which is a refreshing thing to find in mid-budget studio horror. 

High Points

If you're going to make a convoluted and confused thriller, you might as well make it visually interesting, and that's definitely the case here. From the woe of '70s era bridesmaids dresses to the genuine beauty of some classic southern libraries, The Box has some ace production design that goes a long way

Low Points

Seriously: this plot is a mess, and if forced to give an actual explanation of what goes on in this film, I would receive a failing grade

Lessons learned

To a kid, 35 is old

You ALWAYS get the license plate number

Nothing says Merry Christmas like a production of Jean Paul Sartyr's existential classic No Exit!

Rent/Bury/Buy

I had never heard any ringing endorsements for this now 13-year-old film, but I'm glad I finally gave it a go on the Kanopy streaming service. It's definitely a mess, but not a boring one, and I'll take it. 

Bike-mare Beach

 

The snow might be falling. The temperature is dropping. We're thick in the dregs of 4PM sunset and the winter blues but damnit, that's why film exists as an escape. You want fantasy? You want saltwater breezes and carefully curated tanlines? We got this. Throw on your best fire red mesh t-shirt. We're going swimming.

Quick Plot: It's spring break  - 

Sorry, required reaction when those two words are spoken

- in the wilds of Florida when a biker named Diablo convicted of multiple homicide is executed via the electric chair. His crew insists Diablo was innocent, but when his body disappears and the murders resume, tensions rise higher than the tan lines you get from an above-the-waist thong.

Enter Skip and Ronny, two failed college football would-be stars who come to town to party. Ronny quickly becomes the mysterious Maybe-Diablo's victim, prompting Skip to team up with a bartender named Gail to solve the crime.

And WHAT a crime! This isn't your stabbing, machete swinging slasher. CHILD'S PLAY Nightmare Beach says to that! Our killer, you see, rides a juiced up motorcycle with its very own pop-up electric chair built into the passenger rear.

It. Is. Metal.

This is the kind of sleazy beach slasher that lacks even the restraint it takes to keep a woman's wet, nipple-showing top on during any of its MULTIPLE wet t-shirt contest time fillers. Directed by the aptly named James Justice (aka Harry Kirkpatrick, but James Justice is SO much more fun to say) after Umberto Lenzi lost a battle with the producers, is certainly one of the stranger slashers to battle it out on the shelves of your beloved VHS rental store. Naturally, I mean that in the best of ways.

You get bikers that feel like refugees from the bar in Pee-Wee's Great Adventure. John Saxon shifting his eyes as a dishonest cop. Murders far more creative than anything Jason Voorhes could cook up. And best of all, an actual point to the killings that genuinely does tack on an actual theme to the glorious chaos of the 90 minutes that came before. What more can you ask for from a cheap '80s slasher?

High Points

I'm a simple, simple woman, one made exceedingly giddy by such filmmaking decisions as "let's use as many dummies to simulate murder victims as possible." Folks, Nightmare Beach uses a LOT of dummies, and the world is a better place for it

Low Points

This is a very dumb thing to be mad about, but in such a glorious chunk of low quality but delicious cheese, I find it perfectly valid to be most angry that the token PRANKS guy (you know the type if you've watched any horror or horror-adjacent film from the '80s) who CONTINUES to throw on prosthetics and pose himself as dead even AFTER multiple homicides, just doesn't get NEARLY a painful enough or grand demise. This is a guy who dons greasy fake bullet wounds IN A PUBLIC POOL FOR GOODNESS SAKE, and yet all we get is the discover of his actual real body, while our most lovable character (the ridiculously cheerful and savvy sex worker) is brutally set fire to before our eyes

Lessons Learned
When you're 18, you can do what you want

Men were telling women they'd be prettier if they smiled since at least 1986, though back then, the price of such assholery was a cruel and immediate death

Less a lesson and more a question to keep you up in the middle of the night: who's dumber? The PRANKS guy who does the fake-Jaws shark swim on a crowded beach, or the police officer who fires his pistol at the water?

Rent/Bury/Buy
Nightmare Beach is gloriously steaming on Kanopy, the free-through-your-library service more commonly associated with educational documentaries and Criterion releases. What a time to be alive folks. What. A. Time.

There's Something About Mary

 

When your opening credits play out like a V.C. Andrews keyhole book cover come to life by the power of Italian synth rock, you've got me. 

Quick Plot: Julia is a fairly content teacher at a school for the deaf, while her twin sister Mary rots away in a hospital, a rare skin condition slowly destroying her from the outside in. Julia doesn't seem to mind, since Mary was a cruel child who made Julia's young life a living hell.

Despite a satisfied, well-adjusted life, Julia is swayed to visit Mary by their uncle James, a rather awful Catholic priest who seems intent on the girls reconciling in time for their shared 25th birthday. Mary is in even worse shape than Julie remembers, but somehow, the maladjusted patient manages to escape the hospital and embark upon a killing spree with the help of bloodthirsty Rottweiler.

Look, none of us animal lovers want to ever watch a lovable dog turned into a weapon (particularly when one of its targets is a sweet cat...and I suppose a nice blind kid) but when said dog attacks use a body double less convincing than Triumph the Insult Comic, I'm oddly okay with this choice.

Madhouse is a hoot, which isn't a surprise. Director Ovidio G. Assonitis (who eventually went on to head up Canon Films for a stretch) was well-experienced in spinning out blood-soaked cheese, and he doles it out with relish here. This is a movie that has a woman discussing how nice her favorite fourth grade student is only to cut to his immediate mauling one scene later. 

There's a lack of discipline about Madhouse which, depending on your level of taste, is either a very good thing or possibly just plain dumb. You have kernels of a murder mystery that are instead materialized into plot when a killer rather randomly reveals themselves to be a killer. The potential challenge of whether Julia has sinned by casting off her sick sister adds up to absolutely nothing. But hey! We are treated to one of the greatest tropes to survive the slasher boom:

the dead guest party reveal!

So that's what you get: a fun, fast mess that works because it simply throws whatever it has at the audience. Some of it sticks. Most of it will come off. 

High Points
Most films of this particular ilk invest very little in their performances, but Trish Everly manages to make Julia an instantly sympathetic heroine worth rooting for

Low Points
Maybe it's my fairly fresh viewing of The New York Ripper, but I've been thinking a lot about Lucio Fulci lately and how he managed to explore and even challenge convention, all while making splattery boob-filled schlock. I bring this up because (SPOILER) it's hard in some ways not to compare Madhouse to another Italian horror flick seeped deeply in some of the complications of Catholicism: Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling, which has a lot to say about the religion. Madhouse, on the other hand, features a priest as a sick villain without, it seems, having any interest in his pathology. It feels more like an economy of characters rather than a statement about faith and violence, and while I don't in any way require deep introspection from my puppet dog killing '80s horror, it just seems like a missed opportunity

Lessons Learned
A sister is the seed of your father and a miracle of your mother's body

The secret to successful surgery is good interns

It only takes 48 hours to train a Rottweiler to murder everyone close to your twin

Rent/Bury/Buy
Madhouse isn't a high point in Italian-American genre cinema (especially when you realize Assonitis had a key hand in bringing the bananas The Visitor into our world) but it's a fun, messy time. I watched it via the library streaming app Kanopy, which is, I'm sure, what Socrates always intended.