Film Trace

A Wes Anderson double-header to close out Season 5 of Film Trace. Chris and I return to our roots as teenage film nerds. Wes Anderson was our first love as budding cinephiles, and despite the tumultuous last 20 years (Darjeeling anyone), we still get a jolt of excitement with every new Anderson film. The French Dispatch is Anderson's first portmanteau film, and the results are whimsically mixed as expected. We also cover one of Wes's best films, The Royal Tenenbaums as it hits the 20-year mark. The snowglobe world of Royal has aged incredibly well. It is a rich literary yarn woven of the finest pure cinema fibre, dyed millennial pink of course.

Joining us for the Season 5 Finale is Harry from the Trylove podcast, an awesome podcast dedicated to the wonderful The Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis.

The fifth film in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is 1982's mashup of George Romero and Stephen King, Creepshow.

Creepshow is an anthology horror film created as an hommage to the trashbin mid-century comic series, EC Comics. Romero and King grew up with EC Comics and its twisted tales of the macabre. Here the comic's ghastly ethos is distilled into five different segments starring big names of the time: Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Ted Danson, Leslie Nielson, and Stephen King himself. The film's particular mixture of gore, faux-naif satire, and moral comeuppance feels quite out of place today, a little Molotov mocktail aimed at the classic bogeyman of 1950's social conformity.

Special Guest: Max from the lively and fun Galaxy Of Film podcast.

For our chaser film, we face the music with House (1977). This bizzaro historical curio works the exact opposite of Creepshow. House feels like it could have been made yesterday: absurdist surrealism horror of a hipster vein. One suspects the t-shirts inspired by the film are more popular and seen than the film itself.

As the box office finally begins to be resuscitated, albeit largely with the help of the comic book movie crowd, straight-to-streaming films now seem to either cater to cinematic schlock addicts or art film dorks, and the latest from the IFC Midnight imprint, We Need to Do Something, falls in a strange but intriguing gray area between the two. The first feature narrative from director (and known indie producer) Sean King O'Grady, scripted and based on a novella by up-and-comer Max Booth III, the bottle episode-style story of a dysfunctional family stuck in a bathroom after a mysterious storm is as fun as it is disturbing.

But, as the saying goes, perhaps there were script problems from day one. Whether it be characters that seem to serve no other function than a vehicle for body horror or plot contrivances that distract more than they entertain, how does a small project like this with an uncompromising and borderline disgusting vision (arguably to a fault) wind up available to everyone with a Hulu subscription? And where does it go from here besides the annals of scary movie obscurity?

Let's get bummed. Back in 2006, the USA was deep in the 2nd term of George Bush II, aka the idiot king, and his 2nd Iraq war was raging. As a leftist, it felt like a total nightmare, but Alfonso Cuarón heard our cries. His Children of Men, a bleak dystopian manifesto, landed mostly with a thud when it was carelessly released on Christmas Day in 2006. A stellar cast helmed by Clive Owen and gorgeous cinematography via Emmanuel Lubzeki couldn't save this holiday humbug from financial failure. Accordingly, Children of Men instantly became a cult film among the Letterboxd set. Academics, film nerds, and art house scenesters all raved about the one-shots, the world-building, and the nihilism that mirrored their own. But how has that effuse praise aged after the Great Recession, Trump, and Covid. Has Cuarón's bleak vision been blurred by unstoppable climate change, social anarchy, and the new rise of fascism or has it merely been burned into our collective lens?

Special Guest: Friend of podcast and Hollywood Insider, Ryan, joins us to discuss this sad boy opus.

The sixth and final film in our Self-Aware Horror cycle is the landmark exploitation film, The Last House on the Left (1972).

Made off the proceeds of a successful pornographic film, this genuinely gonzo horror film sparked the careers of two kings of horror, Wes Craven and Friday the 13th creator, Sean Cunningham. On the surface, this rape-revenge exploitation film plays it straight: shock, rape, murder, revenge. But beneath the schlock is an avant-garde rip current that is essentially a middle finger to American Exceptionalism, a canary in the coalmine for a desiccated and fraying empire. This is a bizarre juxtaposition that never really settles right in your stomach. What is depicted vs what you feel seems separated by a grand canyon of satire, which is why we chose this as our final film in our Self-Aware Horror series.

For our chaser film, we try to decipher The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). It is a lark, a common parody, or is there something more going on in Roman Polanski's first major studio film. The year after Vampire came out, modern horror began with The Night of Living Dead. We try to decide whether Vampire Killers was a harbinger or an anachronism.