River of Blood: Light-Weight Cannibal Exploitation

Neither Margaret Mead or Napoleon Chagnon probably would have served as advisors on this film, even if they were still alive. The indigenous tribe in question is scary and it eats people. Sure, their guide talks a good game regarding the modern world encroaching and on their habitat, blah, blah, blah. Cultural relativity sounds all well and good until someone tries to eat you. That will be a real possibility when the tourists take a wrong turn in Howard J. Ford’s River of Blood, which releases this Friday in theaters and on VOD.

Ritchie and Jasmine are vacationing with AJ and Maya, even though AJ is sleeping with Jasmine. Frankly, it is a mystery why Jasmine would agree to such an affair, since Ritchie is exponentially richer and surly AJ clearly resents his success. Cheating on Maya happens to be a really bad idea too, since he works for her father. So, that is the baggage they take on their kayaking excursion with Nick an expatriate guide.

Nick is the most reasonable, level-headed character of the lot of them. Nevertheless, he finds himself stuck in the same metaphorical boat as his clients, when Ritchie gets into a snit and wanders off into cannibal territory. Of course, he makes them promise to turn back as soon as they retrieve their wayward friend, but we all know that isn’t going to work, because we’ve seen the prologue.

River of Blood is no Cannibal Holocaust. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing is up to you to decide. As you might guess, Ford’s film is much tamer. Yet, there is a throwback grunginess that some cult movie fans will find refreshing. Despite the lip service to green and multicultural values, there is no getting around the fact that the indigenous people are out to eat to modern interlopers. Indeed, Ford and screenwriter Tom Boyle seem to be daring critics to label their film—gasp—problematic. So you have to salute their truly independent spirit.

The Horror of Dolores Roach, on Prime

During the sixteen years Dolores Roach was in prison, Washington Heights considerably gentrified. The streets are now safer and the property values have greatly increased. Apparently, these are bad things. At least Roach can rectify the safer streets in creator Aaron Mark’s eight-part, Blumhouse-produced The Horror of Dolores Roach, based on his original podcast, which premieres tomorrow on Prime.

Empanadas are the meat pies of New York City, so it makes sense to make them the vessel for Mark’s modern-day Sweeney Todd riff. Getting us to sympathize with the notorious mass murderer will be a trickier proposition. The actress playing her in a one-woman show likes to think she humanizes the killer, but Roach begs to differ, when she introduces herself to the thesp after the opening night performance. She insists on telling her the full, supposedly unvarnished truth (if ever there were a narrator with the potential for “unreliability,” Roach would seem to be it, but Mark and the battery of writers do not play that game).

Roach was happy with Dominic, her drug-dealer lover, back in the era of Giuliani New York, except for the fact criminals like them were getting busted. Eventually, it happened to her, but not Dominic. Since she refused to turn on her lover, they threw the book at her. When she finally gets out, the Washington Heights she knew is completely changed (she even missed the Broadway musical—so unfair). Fatefully, the only thing that stayed the same is the empanada shop, now operated by Luis Batista, the late original owner’s son. Conveniently (or maybe not), he always carried a torch for Roach, so he is delighted to let her stay in his spare room.

For a while, Roach actually thinks she might get her life back together as an unlicensed masseuse, but then she starts killing people. It always happens in a one-darned-thing-after-another kind of way. Usually, they are asking for it too, like Batista’s sleazy landlord, Gedeon Pearlman (of course, the socially conscious series makes the implied Jewish character a greedy landlord). However, Roach and Batista are subsequently stuck with Pearlman’s son Jonah hanging around looking for his father and chatting up Nellie Morris, their cashier. Fortunately, he won’t look for his father where Batista has him hidden: in the meat locker and in the empanadas. In fact, Batista will need more “meat” when the new flavor becomes a hit. Reluctantly, Roach keeps obliging.

The writing is intermittently clever, but it is frequently undermined by the urge to offer social commentary. Frankly, HoDR is at its most interesting when Roach puts her pity party on hold, to start contemplating her own culpability—it does happen, eventually. The slightly meta twist towards the end is also genuinely amusing. If you can slog through the first episode, which is the longest and the slowest, you might as well go all the way.

Guadagnino’s Bones and All

It is a condition some people just have to live with, like mental health issues or drug addiction. Unfortunately, it forces them to live secretive underground lives. They call themselves “eaters.” It would be ever so un-woke to call them cannibals, especially since they seem to have physical differences, like an enhanced sense of smell. Regardless, they need to eat people from time to time in Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, which opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Maren’s father is suspiciously protective, but she still manages to sneak out to her friend’s slumber party, where she eats a girl’s finger. Her dad is disappointed when she comes home all bloody, but he is used to moving suddenly in the dead of night. He is also sick of it, so he abandons her after their latest relocation. Suddenly left to her own devices, and since attending school is always a risky proposition for her, Maren sets out to find her mother, whom she assumes can explain just what she is.

On the road, she meets several fellow eaters. Sully is the first. The older man radiates bad vibes, but he teaches her how to use her heightened sense of smell to detect other eaters and regular humans who are on the verge of death. (Unlike Anne Rice vampires, eaters can feed off dead people just fine.) That is very helpful, but he is still all kinds of creepy, so she decides to tag-along with the punky Lee instead.

Lee definitely looks like a skinny heroin addict, but he is a scrappy survivor. Unlike Maren, he still tries to maintain some connection to his family, particularly his little sister Kayla, but he deems it necessary to disappear for long stretches of time, for obvious reasons.

Bones and All just can’t decide if it is going to be a cheesy teen romance or cannibalistic horror movie. Frankly, the latter elements wok better. Probably the best scene in the film depicts a chance encounter with a rather sinister eater and his human-cannibal sidekick. It sort of had to be good, because that is where the title comes from.

However, the sloppy attempts to draw “born that way” eater analogies often blow-up in the film’s face, because Guadagnino’s visceral and entrails-filled eating scenes are so graphic and gory. Watching them chow down on intestines will convince most viewers young eaters really ought to be enrolled in Evangelical eater-conversion youth camps.

Nevertheless, Guadagnino vividly conveys a sense of Maren and Lee’s isolation. Clearly, Malick’s Badlands was a major visual and thematic influence. It is even partially set in the Dakota Badlands, which serves the film well.

Messaging the Monstrous: The Green Inferno

You can tell from imdb the cast of Eli Roth’s Cannibal Holocaust-inspired film appeared in many subsequent projects, some even soon after its release. Nobody died during the shoot and Roth never implied that they did, nor did he depict any animal killings on-screen, real or simulated. Yet, viewers cannot miss the spirit of old school Italian cannibal exploitation movies in Roth’s The Green Inferno, which screens at MoMA, as part of its Messaging the Monstrous: Eco Horror film series, in recognition of its status as a true work of modern cinematic art.

Initially, Justine admires the commitment and idealism of Alejandro’s campus “social justice” organization, but her roommate Kaycee recognizes his charisma as the persuasive snake oil of a cult leader. Nevertheless, Justine agrees to participate in their upcoming “action,” in which they will live-stream themselves blocking bulldozers poised to clear-cut a portion of the Peruvian Amazonian rainforest. However, she is bitterly disillusioned when Alejandro puts her life at risk, to capitalize on her father’s position as a UN attorney. Things get worse on the return trip, when their plane crashes in the middle of hostile indigenous territory.

Justine survives with a handful of activists, awkwardly including Alejandro. His behavior is a bit troubling, especially when he discourages and even actively hinders escape attempts. It turns out he is a truly hypocritical scumbag—and one of the most detestable, but distinctly notable movie villains of the late-twenty-teens.

As in Deodato’s cult-favorite, a group of privileged Americans (who would traditionally be profiled as woke hipsters) go to the Amazon and make everything worse. There might be an environmental message to Green Inferno (don’t raze the rainforest, because it will have dangerous consequences), but it is the depiction of the professional activist-class is what really defines the film, because it cuts so close to the bone. Roth’s screenplay, written with Guillermo Amoedo made a lot of critics uncomfortable, because there was a lot of truth to it.

Plus, it addresses the practice of Female Genital Mutilation, in ways that highlight the horror of the practice and undercut cultural relativism. Frankly, anyone requiring “trigger warnings” should skip this film. It was intended for grown-ups.

Cursed Films II: Cannibal Holocaust

Technically, no cast-members were killed during the making of this film, despite the director trying to create the illusion to the contrary, for the sake of publicity. The animals killed on-camera are a different story. Perhaps the most controversial and vilified film of all time, Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, is featured during the final episode of Cursed Films, season II, which premieres this Thursday on Shudder.

Cannibal Holocaust was the last gasp of Italian cannibal exploitation movies and Italian genre filmmaking in general. In retrospect, many consider it an early forerunner to the documentary-like horror that fully exploded with The Blair Witch Project. It also happened to be especially brutal—so much so, the cast were already regretting their participation, before even filming their scenes.

By all accounts, it was a horrible shoot, for reasons that are fully explained. In terms of the “curse,” it mostly just applies to the careers of those involved, except Deodato, who seems to have done just fine subsequently. (Remember, he helmed The Barbarians, a jokey Conan knock-off for Cannon). Yet, it definitely fits the theme of the series, because good lord, what a sleazy horror show it was.

Nightstream ’20: Bloody Hell

Much to Rex Coen's disappointment, Alia’s rustic Finnish family will not be serving him sauteed reindeer with lingonberry sauce. Instead, they will be serving Coen. However, the Scandinavian cannibals are about to learn the American is unusually hard to kill, thanks to his personified survival instinct. Coen’s snarky interior monologue helped him survive Afghanistan and a violent bank robbery, but they must face a truly monstrous family in Alister Grierson’s Bloody Hell, which screens on-demand as part of the online genre festival, Nightstream.

Most people think Coen is a hero for giving a gang of armed bank-robbers the Charles Bronson treatment, but some people blamed him for a tragic mishap that will eventually be revealed in flashbacks. Unfortunately, that included the DA, who forced Coen to accept an 8-year plea deal. After his release, the controversial Coen wanted to get away from it all, so he booked a vacation to Finland. As a pariah loner, he looked like perfect prey to Alia’s psycho family, but Coen has skills and his alter-ego projection, who refuses to let him give-up.

Coen might also have an ally in Alia, who has always been horrified by her family’s crimes. Nevertheless, it will be difficult for the long-tormented young woman to decisively turn against her abusive family. Coen will soon discover she has good reason to be so fearful when he comes to, hanging from a hook in their rural basement with one foot amputated. He will have to give himself some serious pep talks to get through this one.

Bloody Hell isn’t just a title Grierson and screenwriter Robert Benjamin picked out of a hat. It is brutally violent, but also often wickedly droll. It is probably the funniest cannibal horror comedy since Danny Mulheron’s Fresh Meat, but the tension is higher, because the stakes are greater and more realistic. There is considerable gore, but we pull for Coen all the way.

Corporate Animals: Demi Moore is the Boss

Is there anything worse than team-building exercises? Sure, cannibalism and getting trapped in confined spaces are bad too, but faux empowerment really takes the cake. Unfortunately, the employees of Incredible Edibles will have to endure all these things, plus their boss’s usual bullying in Patrick Brice’s Corporate Animals, which opens this Friday in New York.

Lucy Vanderton’s mean streak is only surpassed by her vanity. She really believes all her dressing-down sessions are for her employees’ own good—not that she cares about them. Regrettably, her business acumen is not as considerable. With rumors of insolvency swirling around the company, she packs up her staff for a mandatory outward bound-style outing. It gives her the opportunity to preen and show off her calculated wokeness, but her survival skills are not that hot either.

Of course, Vanderton insists they all engage in some high-risk spelunking, but when their guide dies through misadventure, they are trapped without food—and nobody will come looking for them anytime soon. Things get ugly as workplace resentments boil over. Before long, they must resort to Donner Party tactics to survive.

There are no revelations in Corporate Animals, but Brice and screenwriter Sam Bain keep it consistently brisk and amusing. There is no doubt Demi Moore is the film’s no-to-secret weapon shamelessly chewing the scenery as Vanderton. It is a claws-out, all-in performance that has no use for subtlety, but it is very funny.

The supporting cast get their digs in as well, particularly Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Dan Bakkedahl as the kind of employees who just radiate discontent. Jessica Williams and Karan Soni develop some nice rapport as Jess and Freddie, the two supposed protégés, whom Vanderton has been playing-off against themselves. Jennifer Kim (so memorable in Female Pervert) again shows off her remarkable facility for dead-pan humor, but she really should have had more screen time. Likewise, Ed Helms’ necessarily brief appearance as Brandon, the ill-fated guide, was probably considered a gag in its own right.

The laughs in Corporate mostly constitute dark comedy, but the cannibalism business never approaches the in-your-face discomfort of Raw. It really functions better as a zeitgeisty Serial-style satire than a horror or midnight movie. In fact, a high percentage of the jokes lampooning self-helpy business-and-success double talk land on target (Jonathan Swift might approve). Recommended for rude laughs, Corporate Animals opens this Friday (9/20) in New York, at the Village East.

Caniba: Problematic Experimental True Crime

Evidently, Japan does not have a “Son of Sam” Law, because if it did, Issei Sagawa probably would have starved. In a way, that would have been poetic justice. While studying in Paris at the Sorbonne, Sagawa murdered and partially ate his fellow student, Renée Hartevelt. In the years since, he has traded on his infamy through books, crude autobiographical manga, and appearance in hardcore films as well as documentaries. Noted ethnographic documentarians Véréna Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor are the latest to prolong Sagawa’s fifteen minutes of fame with Caniba (trailer here), which opens tomorrow at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Unfortunately, Hartevelt was not available to participate in the documentary, because Sagawa killed her. He was never really punished for it either. France deported him back to Japan, where he only spent a few years in a mental facility. Since then, his brother Jun has been his primary care-giver and adult supervision. As you might expect, it is a weird symbiotic relationship, but it reaches new levels of awkwardness when Jun finally reveals to his brother the sort of extreme S&M he both fantasizes about and participates in.

Clearly, Paravel & Castaing-Taylor envision the film as a sort of Grey Gardens for violent predators, but their experimental approach perversely drains the film of any lurid interest it might hold for cult movie patrons. Ironically, their extreme close-ups have a distancing effect. Most of their shots of Sagawa look like they were composed with the intent of recreating Bowie’s Hunky Dory album cover.

Without question, the most effective sequences show the Sagawa brothers when they were apparently happy and healthy children. It definitely begs the question: what happened? Yet, the filmmakers do not investigate in any meaningful way. Instead, they latch on to Sagawa’s banal bromides that supposedly explain the forbidden appeal of cannibalism. The truth is, it is pretty thin stuff. Again, Ms. Hartevelt is not afforded an opportunity to present a dissenting view.

The #metoo movement is as good as dead if established filmmakers who regularly present their work at festivals like Venice, Berlin, and Locarno are uncomfortable taking a firm moral stand against killing and eating women. That sounds gauchely harsh, but this film is sort of asking for it. It could very well be problematic in every way possible. Not recommended, Caniba opens tomorrow (10/19) in Queens, NY at MoMI.

The Bad Batch: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Sophomore Slump

Social Justice Warriors are sure to chastise us for minimizing the contributions of Cannibal-Americans to society. For instance, nobody considers all the people Jeffrey Dahmer helped while he worked as a phlebotomist. Call us unreconstructed, but many Americans would just as soon be rid of flesh-eating serial killers. However, cannibals, violent psychopaths, and drugged-out sociopaths will be championed as the marginalized and dispossessed victims of a anthropophagusaphobic-normative society in Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

After receiving her “bad batch” verdict, Arlen is dumped outside the Texas border fence (fences, get it?) with a bottle of water and told to sod off. She is quickly picked up by a gang of cannibals who live in post-apocalyptic Venice Beach-ish trailer park commune known as “The Bridge,” led by the distinctively tattooed “Miami Man.” After seeing an arm and a leg get served up, Arlen manages to pull off an unlikely escape. Fortunately, when she collapses in the desert, a twitchy drifter (a stunt cameo by Jim Carrey, probably supplying his own wardrobe and hairstyling) drags her to a safe haven called Comfort.

The entire economy of Comfort seems to revolve around a flea market, but the charismatic leader, “The Dream” provides free drugs and a nightly rave DJed by Diego Luna for all residents. Yet, The Dream is a lecherous bigamist, whereas Miami Man is a good to his wastelander urchin daughter, therefore the Bridge was actually the more ethical community—or so Amirpour would have us believe.

The problems with Bad Batch run wide and deep. Even more fundamental than its iffy logical consistency is the personality-less lead. As Arlen, Suki Waterhouse displays zero screen presence. We have no sense of what goes on in her head, so when she makes highly dubious decisions during the third act, we can only conclude she is also a sociopath and therefore most likely deserves to be where she is. At least Jason Momoa is well-cast as the bulked-up Miami Man, but his dodgy Cuban accent adds a further note of off-key pitchiness.

Frankly, Bad Batch is like a late 1980s vision of near-future post-apocalyptic dystopia (analog media, Ace of Bass cranking on the soundtrack), filtered through a prism of 2016 politics. In scene after scene, Amirpour takes us out of the film and invites us to marvel at its relevancy. Border fences, xenophobia, sexual exploitative leaders, ooooh how daring.

Considering how terrific Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is, Bad Batch is arguably one of the worst, expectation-dashing sophomore slumps ever, right down there with Southland Tales, Elysium, and S1m0ne. It is just an ugly, heavy-handed mess. Not recommended under any circumstances, The Bad Batch opens today (6/23) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Sundance ’17: Raw

Forget Goat (easily done) and Burning Sands. This is the Sundance hazing film that has real bite. As a first-year student at veterinary college, Justine will be drenched in animal blood and forced to eat uncooked liver as part of the initiation rituals. It all horribly disgusts the vegetarian, until her tastes start to radically change in Julia Ducournau’s Raw (trailer here), which screened at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

When driving Justine to her prestigious but way-the-heck-and-gone vet school, her parents throw a fit when a bit of sausage strays into her mashed potatoes. However, her upper classmen sister Alexia is not so supportive during hazing week (every week is hazing week at this school). She tells her flat-out to eat the darned liver, popping one down the hatch herself, leaving Justine disappointed by her sister’s apparent departure from family custom and hurt by the betrayal.

Soon Justine’s health suffers, most likely the result of bacteria from the raw meat (you think, maybe?). Her relationship with her sister also strains to its breaking point, due Justine’s resentment of Alexia’s bullying and her sister’s jealousy of her curve-shattering academic brilliance. In fact, things will get very bad between them, in ways that ought to irreversibly sever their relationship. Simultaneously, Justine also starts to crave meat—more specifically raw human flesh.

Arguably, Ducournou’s conflation of sexual empowerment with cannibalism is rather awkwardly on-the-nose. However, the rich emotional complexity of the bitter sibling rivalry stands Raw in a category all its own. These sisters are something else entirely. Docournou constantly calls and raises their excesses in ways that make the jaw slacken.

In fact, Garance Marillier and Ella Rumpf are both pretty incredible as Justine and Alexia, arguably giving two of the best performances you will ever see from thesps drenched in gore. As Justine (a name that deliberately carries associations with the notorious de Sade), the former is a nest of twitchy sexual insecurities, while the latter is an edgy, brooding bundle of accrued sleights and resentments, somewhat resembling a younger, Frencher, gother Rachel Weisz. Initially, it seems Laurent Lucas (probably best known for Fabrice Du Welz’s Alléluia and Calvaire) is ridiculously under-employed as Justine’s father, but he will have his moment.

If this is how they train vets in France than jet-setters should probably keep all their pets here in America. Regardless, Raw is such an intense film, precisely because it is so personal and intimate. Frankly, it really is the sort of family cannibalism drama We Are What We Are was supposedly cracked up to be. Highly recommended for cult cinema connoisseurs, Raw opens in select theaters March 10^th, after screening at this year’s Sundance.

Bone Tomahawk: Kurt Russell Tracks Cannibals

Whatever you do, don’t call them Native Americans, or any less politically correct term. They are Troglodytes, an ancient secret race of cannibals so brutal, they have been disavowed by all Native Peoples. When they kidnap a cowboy’s wife, he will set off after them, in the tradition of The Searchers. However, he has no worries she might “go native,” because he is keenly aware of her place on the menu in S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

All the trouble starts when two knuckle-headed outlaws go traipsing through a Troglodyte burial ground. Eventually, the thuggish Buddy will make it to the upstanding town of Bright Hope, but his sidekick Purvis will not. However, Buddy’s suspicious behavior and general bad attitude will get him shot in the leg by Sheriff Franklin Hunt. Since they can’t just let that get infected, they send for the medically trained Samantha O’Dwyer. She had been enjoying a quiet evening at home, tending the broken leg of her cattle-driving husband Arthur.

Inconveniently, when morning comes, the sheriff discovers Ms. O’Dwyer has been abducted, along with the prisoner and his legit deputy. Leg or no leg, O’Dwyer is saddling up and giving chase. The duty-bound Hunt will ride with him, as will the roguish gambler and ladies’ man John Brooder, who nurses a pathological hatred of Native tribes. Old Chicory will also tag along. The old timer Hunt indulgently dubbed his “back-up deputy” might not inspire a lot of confidence, but he did not survive the Civil War and years on the frontier because he wasn’t resourceful.

It is absolutely fascinating to watch all the hoops Tomahawk jumps through to make it okay for a cowboy to shoot a sort of, but not really Native American. (Does this mean the Toledo Troglodytes are now going to have to change their name too?) Regardless, those Trogs sure are hard to kill, but the manly cast is mostly up for the task, starting with the eternally cool Kurt Russell, who is as grizzled and hardnosed as ever as Sheriff Hunt. It is too bad Hollywood doesn’t make westerns as regularly as they used to, because the Hateful Eight co-star is a natural for the genre, just like his father Bing.

Frankly, most of the film’s best scenes play out between Hunt and Chicory, played by the ever-reliable Richard Jenkins as a Gabby Hayes figure, but with dignity and common sense. He invests the Back-up Deputy with so much tragic heft, he arguably takes ownership of the film. In contrast, Patrick Wilson’s O’Dwyer is basically a wet noodle with a gimpy leg. However, as Brooder, the heroic anti-hero, Matthew Fox absolutely gorges on the Paramount Ranch scenery.

With a running time of one hundred thirty minutes (seriously, its over two hours), Tomahawk takes too dang long to get from Bright Hope to the Troglodyte lair. Still, it is loaded with cool bits of business, starting with Roger Corman repertory player Sid Haig doing his thing as Buddy. The film’s respect for O’Dwyer’s abiding Christian faith is also unexpectedly refreshing, especially since Wilson played the abusive Evangelical in the laughably stilted atheist outreach film, The Ledge. Despite some pacing issues, Bone Tomahawk is still an entertaining excursion into weird west terrain. Recommended for Kurt Russell fans and Deadlands players, Bone Tomahawk opens this Friday (10/23) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

Ladies of the House: They’d Love to Have You Over for Dinner

These strippers really enjoy serving their customers—preferably with some melted butter and a side of potatoes. Yes, Damon Knight’s pun is still zingy sixty-five years later. However, these exotic dancers are not aliens. They are as earthy as it gets. Usually, they have to lure men (who really ought to be more suspicious) back to their (charnel) house, but this time dinner will unexpectedly delivery itself in John Stuart Wildman’s Ladies of the House, which releases today on VOD.

A relatively nice guy like Jacob never should have taken his slightly addled brother Kai to a strip club for his birthday, but their obnoxious friend Derek always has to get his way. When the club scene turns sour for them, Derek decides to follow home (i.e. stalk) one of the dancers. That would be Ginger, Lin’s newest housemate. There are rules to living in her house. Dinner rituals are a big deal, but Ginger has not fully acclimated. When the three lads try to invite themselves in she unwisely agrees. After a lot of boozing, the three amigos find themselves in a sticky Very Bad Things situation.

At this point, Ginger’s housemates arrive, locking in the intruders rather than calling five-o. They are pretty much done for, especially if Getty, Lin’s lover with anger management issues, gets a hold of them. Things are going to get ugly for the intruding trio, but at least their experiences will help kids learn proper strip club etiquette.

Known for his Utilitarian concept of filmmaking, John Stuart Wildman also happens to be a film publicist for some of New York’s more prestigious screening events, whom we all know and like quite a bit, so you can now consider yourself fully informed. However, House delivers the kind of grindhouse love any cult film fan can appreciate. Yet, this feels like an intensely personal film, almost like Blue is the Warmest Color, but with more cannibalism.

Shrewdly, Wildman and co-writer Justina Walford follow the EC Comics playbook, meting out gory payback for the appalling displays of loutish behavior. By the time we get to the third act, absolutely no one will want to see Derek the pond scum walk out of the house under his own steam. Indeed, Samrat Chakrabarti clearly enjoys playing that kind of a jerkweed character, which helps make House so subversive.

Still, Gabriel Horn’s Jacob is convincingly contrite enough to keep our loyalties divided between cannibals and the meat for their grinder. Farah White and Melodie Sisk convey a strangely legit sense of long-term couplehood, leaving us intrigued for more back story. Michelle Sinclair also comes across appropriately down-to-earth and slightly naïve as Ginger. Evidently, she has a lot of fans who know her for her work under the name “Belladonna,” but surely nobody here knows what that might be.

Frankly, it has been a while since we’ve had a good lesbian cannibal movie, so House arrives just in the nick of time. Wildman has a knack staging the blood-and-guts business of Lin’s food preparation without making the audience feel gross on a personal level (unlike a nasty piece of gristle like Butcher Boys, for instance). Not afraid of its exploitation elements, Ladies of the House is easily recommended for retro genre fans, now that it is available via iTunes and VOD platforms.

Cannibal: The Tailor of Granada

He has the fastidiousness of Hannibal Lecter and the social grace of Norman Bates. He has his faults, but his work is extremely dignified. He is Granada’s finest tailor. He also cooks—people. However, the threadsmith may or may not try to turn over a new leaf in Manuel Martín Cuenca’s Cannibal (trailer here), available on DVD today from Film Movement.

Outside of the kitchen, Carlos definitely seems to have issues with women. We never really learn how he reached this point, but the comments of his cranky old seamstress suggest he was always a little off. We immediately see Carlos stalking his prey and the almost sensual manner in which he goes about the butchery. He seems comfortable with his predatory existence until two Romanian sisters throw him off his game. Alexandra is the player and Nina is the plugger. When the former moves into his apartment building, she first tries to use the resolutely unseduced tailor to help build a clientele for her massage services. Soon though, she is pulling him into a drama with her abusive boyfriend.

When Alexandra disappears under mysterious circumstances, the earnest Nina comes looking for her. Despite his better judgment, Carlos constantly offers her small bits of assistance. Clearly, he feels an attraction to her, but is it romantic or culinary?

Without question, this has to be the most restrained cannibal movie in the history of the exploitation subgenre. There is no gore and precious little blood, but it shows the savagery of human nature in no uncertain terms. Cuenca also revels in the city’s ancient architecture and prominent Catholic trappings, using them as an ironic counterpoint to Carlos’s unspeakably lurid deeds.

Cannibal will be a hard film for man viewers to swallow, because it definitely invites sympathy for the devil or at least prompts us to root for him to change his spots. There is a lot of ambiguity, but arguably heinous sin will be its own punishment. Indeed, Cuenca’s film is light-years removed from Cannibal Apocalypse. In point of fact, it is shockingly refined and sophisticated, featuring the truly elegant cinematography of Pau Esteve Birba. Throughout the film, you can just feel the weight of Andalusian history and smell the humid evening air.

Aside from a few stock figures here and there, Cannibal is essentially a three-character two-hander, with Olimpia Melinte playing both sisters. In each personas, she develops subtly hued, erotically charged chemistry with Antonio de la Torre’s Carlos, who really supplies the bloody guts and dark soul of the picture. Arguably, it is the best cinematic serial killer performance since Anthony Perkins made the terribly under-appreciated Psycho sequels in the 980s, but de la Torre did not have the benefit of Norman Bates’ somewhat sympathetic backstory.

Cannibal is a strangely accomplished and deliberate film that slowly builds into classical tragedy rather blood-splattered mayhem. Its audience will fall within a narrow band of the cineaste spectrum, being too refined for midnight movie fanatics and too transgressive for proper art-house patrons. Recommended accordingly for adventurous and demanding viewers, Cannibal is now available on DVD from Film Movement.

ND/NF ’14: Fish & Cat

Even in Iran, you can find sketchy backwoods types out in the provinces. In one true-life incident, a provincial restaurant actually served up human flesh. That is what you call rustic. It is also easy to see how this sensationalistic episode could easily be adapted for the big screen. However, Shahram Mokri takes his lurid inspiration in a cerebral art-house direction with the marathon one-take, circular narrative, Fish & Cat (trailer here), which screens during this year’s New Directors/New Films, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.

There seems to be a lot of offal and detritus littered about Babak and Saeed’s greasy spoon. They also act highly suspicious when a carload of college students stops for directions. Deciding there are “too many of them,” they send the kite festival goers on their way. Instead, they start hassling Kambiz (another festival entrant) and his emotionally stunted father. For all viewers know, they eventually kill the old man. Kambiz just leaves him there and he is one of the few characters Mokri never revisits.

Making his way to the campsite, Kambiz starts interacting with other students participating in the festival. Mokri will move from one character to another Slacker-style, periodically doubling back to an early to an episode or conversation we have already seen, but showing it from a different perspective—all within the same continuous tracking shot. In addition to the intersecting narrative, Mokri also plays games with characters’ interior monologues that often obscure as much as they illuminate.

Yet, F&C is an oddly tense film, ever mindful of its macabre elements. Mokri deliberately plays on the sense some serious slasher business is always about to erupt, particularly during the nerve-wracking sequence in which Babak lures one of the young women into the woods on a dubious pretext. There is no question F&C is a highly accomplished work. Mokri just pushes his luck, taking one too many spins around the narrative track. The film clocks in at one hundred thirty-four minutes, but it really should have been twenty minutes shorter. Frankly, some of the characters Mokri introduces right before the final “pay-off” are not nearly as compelling as those we have been following since the first and second acts (roughly speaking). The unbroken chain of crisscrossing narratives also just gets exhausting over time.

Still, you have to admire Mokri’s ambition and his execution. The whole thing hangs together remarkably well and his cast (mostly drawn from the stage) rises to the challenge quite commendably. Ostensibly, there is nothing of a political nature for state censors to object to in F&C, but it is still somewhat surprising it has not been run afoul of the authorities, who have been known to object to any “negative portrayal” of Iranian society. A film about hillbilly cannibals would not exactly fit their Lake Woebegone vision of contemporary Iran, where everybody is above average.

Of course, nobody would wish him trouble and we should all be glad to have F&C screening openly for international audiences. Combining elements of We Are What We Are and Before the Rain, Fish & Cat is rather highly recommended for patient and adventurous viewers. It screens tomorrow (3/27) at MoMA and Friday (3/28) at the Walter Reade as part of the 2014 ND/NF.

The Colony: The Future on Ice

The future will be nasty, brutish, and snowy.  To combat global warming huge weather controlling machines were invented, but tragically they got stuck on snow—or something like that. On the positive side, summers in New York have become almost bearable.  Cash out your 401K’s now, because if that all weren’t bad enough, cannibalism starts to spike in Jeff Renfroe’s The Colony (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

So, its pretty cold out there.  Only scattershot handfuls of humanity survive in underground colonies, hoping to somehow outlast the big freeze.  Given their cramped living conditions, Flu has become a matter of life and death.  Basically, if you cough, you are sent out to die.  The overzealous Mason is the one in charge of “quarantine,” a fact that does not sit well with Sam, the sensitive handyman.  He takes the issue up with Briggs, Colony 7’s commander, who inconveniently has more pressing concerns.

Their sister colony sent a distress signal, ominously followed by radio silence, so Briggs takes Sam and an easily winded teenager out to investigate.  After making the arduous journey past a series of surprisingly cool looking matte paintings, the expeditionary party discovers their allied colony was over-run by a pack of cannibals. Despite descending into savagery, they prove to be dashed difficult to kill.

It is rather ironic this tale is climate catastrophe is Canadian-made, because the weather will look rather temperate to half the country.  Yet, the Northern location shoots, filmed at an old mouth-balled Canadian NORAD facility, are what work best for Colony.  Likewise, the hulking frost-encrusted weather machines are quite striking looking.  Unfortunately, the script (credited to Renfroe and three others) feels like it was cobbled together from Roland Emmerich’s slush pile.

For a derivative film, Laurence Fishburne’s performance as Briggs is largely derived from his work in the superior Event Horizon, but frankly, that is not entirely bad.  Similarly, Bill Paxton recycles his “game over, man” persona for Mason, but with less successful results.  Kevin Zegers and Charlotte Sullivan are pretty bland as Sam and his potential love interest, Kai the seed archivist and computer specialist, but at least her character listens to Ellington, so you have to tip your hat to that.  Considering Dru Viergever’s character is only credited as “Feral Leader,” it is probably safe to assume not much of an awards campaign is being planned on his behalf.  Nevertheless, he certainly looks the part.

To call The Colony a meathead movie would over-praise it.  Visually, it accomplishes much with its limited resources, but never rises above mediocrity in any other criteria.  Just kind of whatever (at best), it is hard to imagine anyone will pay Manhattan ticket prices to see it when The Colony opens tomorrow (9/20) in New York at the AMC Empire.

Butcher Boys: a Steady Diet of Bad Taste

You might think a horror film that opens with a quote from Jonathan Swift might have the potential for some for some smartly executed scares.  Well, you would be wrong.  Duane Graves & Justin Meeks’ Butcher Boys (trailer here) is that film and it is a nasty piece of genre gristle, releasing today in select theaters and on VOD.

Through their unbelievably stupid actions, Sissy’s outrageously reckless and irresponsible friends manage to antagonize a gang of cannibals or something.  She was in the backseat, so she had nothing to do with the death of their pooch.  Of course, that hardly matters.  The pack of urban savages chases the privileged kids into an ominous industrial park, where they quickly dispatch her friends.  Sissy proves harder to kill, but not because she is especially intelligent or resourceful.  Instead, her tormentors are simply reversing the course of evolution before our very eyes.

Ironically, Butcher is the second release of the week shot in and around San Antonio, which must have the absolute worst emergency services of any large city to judge from this film.  As Sissy, Ali Faulkner freaks out fairly convincingly, perhaps out of genuine panic for what this cinematic outing might mean for her career.  However, the only person that truly distinguished themselves on this production was the location scout, who found some truly eerie demilitarized looking spots to shoot.

In contrast, Butcher’s cinematography is often incomprehensibly dark, but in this case that is more an observation than a complaint.  This really a gruesome film that might even be scarring if there were any reasonably life like characters to invest in. The assorted villains are an especially weak hodge-podge of American Psycho-esque himbos and circus freaks.

To be fair, there is a flash of inspiration during the climax, but it is far too little, far too late. Absolutely not recommended, Butcher Boys is now available on VOD and opens today (9/6) in limited theatrical release (presumably Texan markets).

Tribeca ’13: Fresh Meat

Insert your own family dinner joke here.  Or don’t bother.  New Zealander Danny Mulheron’s fearless cannibal comedy will make them all for us.  Questions of good taste will entirely depend on the viewer’s palate when Fresh Meat (trailer here) screens as a Midnight selection of the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.

Rina Crane is a very proper young Maori lady who has come home from boarding school.  She is thinking it is about time to drop the lesbian bomb with her family, but they beat her to the punch, revealing the new family diet.  In hopes of finally achieving tenure, her academic father Hemi Crane has revived an ancient mystical cannibal cult.  Eating will flesh will give them supernatural powers or so the theory goes.  His new faith is about to be put to the test when a reckless gang of fugitives invades the Crane home.

For the freaked out Rina, this sudden turn of events is not all bad, largely because of Gigi, the ringleader’s less than enthusiastic girlfriend.  She happens to bear a strong resemblance to the fetish superhero character Rina created as a focus for her fantasies.  Clearly, the two share an instant attraction, at a time when Rina’s family loyalties are somewhat fraying.

Basically, Fresh combines elements of Desperate Hours with We Are What We Are, adding all kinds of politically incorrect humor.  At one point Hemi Crane declares: “we are not Maori cannibals, we are cannibals who happen to be Maori.”  Whew, feel better everybody?  The treatment of Lesbian themes is about as sensitive, with scenes clearly included for maximum leer value.  Oh right, there’s plenty of gore too.

You have to give Briar Grace-Smith’s screenplay credit for jumping on every third rail it could find.  Likewise, Temuera Morrison embraces the gleeful mayhem wholeheartedly as Hemi Crane.  As Rina, Hanna Tevita keeps her head above water amid all the bedlam, even conveying a measure of sensitive teen alienation.

If you don’t know by now whether this blood-splattered teen lesbian cannibal comedy is your cup of tea or not, I really can’t help you.  For what it’s worth, Mulheron maintains a brisk pace, allowing little time for the wrongness of it all to sink in.  Recommended for anyone out for some good clean fun at the movies, Fresh Meat screens again this Friday (4/26) and Saturday (4/27) as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Family Dinner: We Are What We Are

Call them sullen and sullener. It is not surprising brothers Alfredo and Julián have issues, considering their extreme family environment. Their father has a taste for prostitutes. As a result, they have no doubt eaten quite a few themselves in Jorge Michel Grau’s grisly social commentary We Are What We Are (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

The sensitive Alfredo is the eldest son of a family of Mexico City cannibals. His father is a reprobate who wastes whatever money he earns fixing watches on prostitutes. At least he has always brought home fresh victims for their cannibalistic “rituals.” Unfortunately, that reckless lifestyle catches up to dear old dad, as he fatally coughs up his guts in the film’s disconcerting early scenes. This leaves a power vacuum within the family. However, they have a more pressing need: fresh meat for the next ritual. (Evidently, simply buying some raw hamburger at the store is out of the question.)

In truth, the warped family dynamics of WAWWA are nearly as harrowing as the cannibalism. The shrewish mother has made everyone miserable with her jealousy and resentments. Brother Julián has major anger management issues. By contrast, Alfredo is a classic case of an under-developed personality, who may or may not be a closeted homosexual. Keep your eye on sister Sabina, though. She is a master manipulator.

Grau viscerally conveys the abject meanness of the family’s circumstances as well as the predatory corruption of contemporary Mexico, without ameliorating the horror of what the family does. Indeed, Grau’s angry depiction of lazy, venal cops feels a bit tacked on compared to the deeply disturbed and disturbing family drama. In fact, the class consciousness is rather clumsy at times, but the macabre and claustrophobic atmosphere of the family home, brimming with ticking clocks perfect for getting under one’s skin (courtesy of design team Aleajandro García and Sandra Flores), keeps the film on its genre track.

Paulina Gaitán is scary good as Sabina. As Alfredo, Francisco Barreiro’s slow burn is quite slow indeed, but he still has some effective moments, whereas Alan Chávez brings a real “angry young cannibal” presence to the screen as Julián.

While Grau starts WAWWA at a deliberate art-house pace, he subtly cranks up the tension, steadily pulling viewers into this dark and remorseless world. Grungy and twisted, is one of the creepier indie genre films of the year. Most definitely not to all tastes, it never shies away from its subject matter. Recommended for the bold, it opens this Friday (1/18) in New York at the IFC Center.

NYFF ’10: We Are What We Are

Call them sullen and sullener. It is not surprising brothers Alfredo and Julián have issues, considering their extreme family environment. Their father has a taste for prostitutes. As a result, they have probably consumed quite a few themselves in Jorge Michel Grau’s grisly social commentary We Are What We Are, which screens during the 48th New York Film Festival.

The sensitive Alfredo is the eldest son of a family of Mexico City cannibals. His father is a reprobate who wastes whatever money he earns fixing watches on prostitutes. At least he has always brought home fresh victims for their cannibalistic “rituals.” Unfortunately, that reckless lifestyle catches up to dear old dad, as he fatally coughs up his guts in the film’s disconcerting early scenes. This leaves a power vacuum within the family. However, they have a more pressing need: fresh meat for the next ritual. (Evidently, simply buying some raw hamburger at the store is out of the question.)

In truth, the warped family dynamics of WAWWA are nearly as harrowing as the cannibalism. The shrewish mother has made everyone miserable with her jealousy and resentments. Brother Julián has major anger management issues. By contrast, Alfredo is a classic case of an under-developed personality, who may or may not be a closeted homosexual. Keep your eye on sister Sabina though. She is a master manipulator.

The graphic WAWWA seems like a better fit for Tribeca’s midnight screening track than the up-town, up-scale New York Film Festival. Of course, that is neither here nor there when taking stock of the film’s merits, which are considerable. Grau viscerally conveys the abject meanness of the family’s circumstances as well as the predatory corruption of contemporary Mexico, without ameliorating the horror of what they do. Indeed, Grau’s angry depiction of lazy, venal cops feels a bit tacked on compared to the deeply disturbed and disturbing family drama.

Paulina Gaitán is scary good as Sabina. As Alfredo, Francisco Barreiro’s slow burn is quite slow indeed, but he still has some effective moments, whereas Alan Chávez brings a real “angry young cannibal” presence to the screen as Julián.

While Grau starts WAWWA at a deliberate art-house pace, he subtly cranks up the tension, steadily pulling viewers into this dark and remorseless world. Grungy and twisted, is one of the creepier indie genre films of the year. Most definitely not to all tastes, it never shies away from its subject matter. It screens this Thursday (10/7) at Alice Tully Hall and this Friday (10/8) at the Walter Reade, as the 2010 NYFF continues.