Primal Stream 83: Genre Film Festival Wrap-Up

FILM PRIMAL STREAM 83: GENRE FILM FESTIVAL WRAP-UP

Boatloads of fresh horror and genre cinema, now (and soon) available to stream

BY JASON SHAWHAN

In the past month, I’ve covered four film festivals, and have a good and only moderately exhausted sense of the movies coming our way over the next year or so. I have a great affinity for horror and genre cinema, and the way the market works currently for those kinds of films is that they tend to go from the festival circuit to streaming services. (Shudder will likely end up being the home for many of these titles, and bless them for it, because someone’s got to keep the vibe alive.) Sadly, this is very much the case in Nashville. So this installment of Primal Stream is specifically focused on what’s coming in the way of genre cinema.

If you get the chance to see these films in theaters, you should (provided you’re smart and safe about it). The recently completed 2022 editions of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival and Knoxville Horror Film Festival are doing good work here, as is the Chattanooga Film Festival from earlier in the year (where I first saw a few of these titles). I’ve noted throughout where I screened each film.

First and foremost, both as an academic exercise and as a representation of what genre cinema can do, The Timekeepers of Eternity

(KHFF) is essential (and inspirational) viewing, taking a three-hour made-for-TV Stephen King adaptation, re-editing it, rephotographing it and recontextualizing it into an hour of distilled cosmic horror that hits the viewer like a train. Just as expansive in scope but retaining the earthy intimacy of their previous and best work (Resolution, The Endless), Benson and Moorhead’s Something in the Dirt (BHFF/KHFF) is an

emotional journey into the seduction of conspiracy theory, a soak in the intersection of science and magic, and a pitiless autopsy of what making art with someone you care about can do.

It’s been way too long since Carter Smith fucked up our minds with The Ruins. His queer slasher Midnight Kiss was fun, but in no way prepares the viewer for Swallowed (BHFF/also NewFest). Here, a last-minute scheme to help a friend escape small-town malaise leads to a surreal and scatological body-horror suspense thriller that gets at the heart of complicated friendships and also the divides between generations of gay men. When beloved icon Mark Patton turns up as a backwoods crime lord with an immaculate accessories game, everything levels up to an ideological battleground that delivers a whole lot of intense responses.

If Timekeepers of Eternity is one kind of academic exercise, then Tubi’s currently streaming remake of Terror Train is another: a remake that sticks surprisingly close to the original script, even duplicating some of the more memorable shots from the 1980 original, but trying to address which aspects of a “slasher classic” are subject to its time and space, and which are narrative functions. The original had Jamie Lee Curtis, Vanity and Hart Bochner. This one doesn’t really allow anyone to shine in such a capacity, but it’s essential viewing for anyone who loves the genre and is interested in how aesthetics shift.

As we roll into December, there will be a couple of holiday-themed films to keep an eye out for, both of which are keyed into whatever a post-midterm-election America may happen to look like. Eric Pennycoff’s The Leech (KHFF; streaming soon on Arrow Unlimited, on Blu-ray in December) is a grungy parable about a priest (indie stalwart Graham Skipper) who takes in a drifter and possible grifter (Jeremy Gardner) at the holidays. Fraught psychological warfare escalates. Perfect for anyone who needs confirmation that a holiday alone isn’t a terribly awful thing. And Joe Begos (The Mind’s Eye, VFW) is back with Christmas Bloody Christmas (BHFF/

KHFF), a colorful and nihilistic casserole of mayhem resulting from the militaryindustrial complex making robotic Santas so parents can feel safer at malls. Begos does shot-on-film atrocity like no one else, and respect to Mystery Science Theater 3000’s Jonah Ray Rodrigues for another superb addition to his gallery of The Doomed.

As far as post-apocalyptic tone for an uncertain world, Daughter (BHFF) and All Jacked Up and Full of Worms (BHFF, streaming

Nov. 8 on Screambox) get at very real terrors and express them in unconventional ways. The former uses the emotional legacy of Casper Van Dien to fill in an impressionist, authoritarian portrait of domestic life and community structure, while the latter is genuinely transgressive in its Hubert Selby Jr.-meets-old-school-Harmony Korine portrait of weirdos and fuck-ups in a society where psychedelic worms are plentiful and absolutes are not so much so. All Jacked Up is a bit much (it has many subplots and some of them will really throw the viewer off guard), but it’s something singular and special, and I await the conversations it will start and the friendships it will finish. Comedian Whitmer Thomas and his longtime collaborator Clay Tatum present The Civil Dead (KHFF), a comedy (with some sharp edges) about the fraught friendship between a struggling photographer (Tatum) and a recently dead struggling actor (Thomas). The two are great together, and Thomas is such an amiable presence that some of the latestage revelations and actions land completely differently from how the filmmakers might have hoped. It’s still worth checking out — just be ready to be angry for how the film does one of its characters wrong.

Lorcan Finnegan (Without Name) is back with a new film, Nocebo (BHFF), in which Christine (Eva Green — staggering, iconic, sly) is a designer for children’s fashion who finds herself with some live-in help after a debilitating shock. Diana (Chai Fonacier) is knowledgeable, perceptive and well-versed in folk and battle magic, and she’s here to help Christine get better and understand some things. This is political horror at its most delirious, sweeping the viewer up into a world Rod Serling would have approved of. Respect is due writers Garret Shanley and Ara Chawdhury for finding a whole new way of dynamiting a hackneyed old stereotype. Huesera (BHFF/KHFF) is an exceptional Mexican horror of pregnancy and cultural myth, with a dynamite central performance from Natalia Solián and a lesbian coven of aunties, so you know it’s very good. Joko Anwar’s sequel Satan’s Slaves 2: Communion takes the best impulses of Indonesiansploitation and gives us the surviving family members from the previous film now living in a high-rise apartment building on an isolated plain near the sea. There are demons, ghosts, cult action and a suspense sequence involving an elevator that all elevator horror in the future will have to reckon with. You are not ready.

And as far as exquisite political horror, anthology V/H/S/99 (BHFF; now streaming on Shudder) shines with “Ozzy’s Dungeon,” a short film from Flying Lotus that is about the ancient cosmic horror lurking behind every Nickelodeon game show. Equally versed in the racial optics of ’90s game shows and the way that so much of that beloved programming is keyed into unspoken kinks and the power structures of gross old people (Flying Lotus would be ideal to direct a film of Jennette McCurdy’s book), “Ozzy’s Dungeon” can’t help but stand out amongst this latest offering from the V/H/S crew. The folks who made Deadstream have a funny and imaginative segment called “To Hell and Back” that plays like a stoner-farce version of The Outwaters (be ready for that one), and even if it had done nothing else but introduce Mabel the Skull-Biter, it would be essential viewing. Horror buffs know the drill — it’s a V/H/S film and your mileage may vary — but there’s some great and visceral stuff to be had. But on the whole, this is a good assemblage — how can you not love horny teens versus a Gorgon, or pranksters dying horribly?

I hated Kids vs. Aliens (KHFF). Like, hated it enough that I started wondering if those people who hate horror maybe have a point. I know a lot of people who really loved this, so maybe it’s just me, but this starts out like Michael Haneke making The Goonies (not in terms of skill, but rather compelling you to end the process), tweens yelling “fuck” and suffering the cruelties of popular kids. Then the aliens show up and things get really disgusting (both because of gore and because of the absolute delight this film takes in making all its women characters suffer). This actually sprang from the “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” sequence in V/H/S/2, which was inspired and economical in its excesses, and it will serve as a great example of how not to adapt a short into a feature. Taking a similar impulse to much more genial and successful narrative points, Zach Passero’s The Weird Kidz (BHFF) is a scrappy, handdrawn animation about friends and family and a desert-community insect cult. It has a very teenage sense of humor, but it also has an unforced sweetness that rewards the shakier aspects of its first reel.

One other thing. Everybody needs something to be reading, and if you’ve never experienced Kier-La Janisse’s exceptional critical work House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Film, you are in luck: There’s a new, expanded edition available that is absolutely essential reading. Smart and perceptive and intense, it’s an ideal read for anyone who enjoys genre cinema on many levels, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. That, and the similarly expanded new edition of Cookie Mueller’s Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black were my recent subway reading of choice, and they are well worth your time.

Be on the lookout for the genre titles that will be popping up in my New York Film Festival and NewFest wrap-up, coming Nov. 3: Bones and All, Coma, Enys Men and The Eternal Daughter. EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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