Horror

dir: Luca Guadagnino

2018

You might be asking yourself as to why I’m reviewing a six-year old movie when there are all sorts of films, contemporary or otherwise, that I could be finally getting around to seeing. I’ve been trying to make myself (almost at gunpoint) watch this for years, and I finally made myself do it.

Also, since Luca Guadagnino has the quite successful Challengers in cinemas at the moment, I thought I’d look back before looking forward.

Part of my reluctance to really watch this remake / redo all the way through is that I adore the original Suspiria. Seriously one of my favourite films. That’s not the same as me saying I think it’s a great film. It’s definitely not one of the greatest flicks of all time.

It was a lot of things. It was like the most extreme alternate reality version of an Alice in Wonderland-like story that you’ll probably ever see that isn’t pornographic. It had a strong visual palate that’s been imitated continuously since then. It also had a magnificent soundtrack by progressive metal band Goblin that I had a CD copy of.

Remember CDs? They were great! Their cases were perfect for doing lines on…

But anyway. I’m not a purist that hates the idea of flicks being remade in principle, but the idea of someone remaking Suspiria filled me with trepidation. I can’t claim to know Luca Guadagnino’s oeuvre that definitively, but I’ve seen enough to know that he’s a careful filmmaker. I loved his Io Sonno Amore / I Am Love way back in the day, which was when I thought he started working with Tilda Swinton. And I thought highly enough of Call Me By Your Name, before we got sick of Timothee Chalomet being everywhere, and before finding out Armie Hammer was a sadistic cannibal.

This flick is plenty faithful to the original film. Many of the same characters appear. The setting is similar, in that it’s a German dance academy, and the protagonist is again a naïf waif from America. Jessica Harper, who played the lead in the original back in the 70s, gets to have a cameo appearance, which is the price of entry.

But the new Susie Bannon is played by Dakota Johnson. She is a Mennonite from Ohio. When people ask her where she’s from, they don’t believe the answer.

How does a Mennonite, which is a step removed from the Amish (who they hate with a passion), get to be a dance star?

Isn’t that the thing about dance? With enough talent, drive, determination, hard work, starving yourself and nicotine you, too, can come from anywhere and become the lead in a hardcore dance troupe.

dirs.: Colin & Cameron Cairnes

2024

This is a surprisingly accomplished film, especially for one made in Melbourne. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie made in Melbourne. Love and other Catastrophes? Chopper? The Book of Revelation?

Fortunately or not, none of ‘Melbourne’ or Naarm factors into the story because it’s set in America in the 1970s, and mostly all transpires in or around a tv studio where a “Tonight” type program is being filmed.

The lead in this is Jack, played by David Dastmalchian, who has often played weirdos or psychos or a combination of both, but here plays the charismatic host of a late night program that is suffering in the ratings and doesn’t look like it’s going to survive. Even if you haven’t watched a tonight show lately, or in the last ten years, or even longer, the format hasn’t changed. There’s a host, there’s a sidekick, there’s a band, and there’s a studio audience made up of clapping seals who applaud and laugh whenever a sign lights up telling them to laugh like the mindless automatons that they are.

There’s musical guests, there’s people with animals, there’s probably movie stars and comedians and, I dunno, local celebrities, and it all transpires under the studio’s bright lights and beige / burnt orange / brown set designs.

But since the ratings for his show, which used to threaten Jimmy Carson, but now are scraping the bottom of the barrel, are terrible, he’s desperate for something to change his loser narrative.

Hence, the occult. The show goes to extreme lengths to court controversy, and there’s nothing more controversial, for the time period, than bringing on a teenage girl who says she’s possessed by a devil.

Not The Devil, mind you, but some other low-ranking shmuck who can still do the scary voices and the rotating head thing.

The ethics of bringing out a clearly mentally ill teenager and putting her in front of a national audience, well, let’s remember the time period. Sexual harassment was mandatory, everyone was smoking, even babies in the womb, and no one ever drank water, only spirits, all of the time, apparently.

dir: Michael Mohan

2024

Damn. And I thought I hated the Catholic Church.

I mean, no, there’s no doubt how much I loathe the Catholic Church, but the makers of this flick have an even keener and more creative way of getting back at that august, malevolent institution that’s been treating, amongst so many others, women like crap for millennia.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that other cultures, other religions are just as awful about women, and their perceived status as helpmeets and handmaidens to those that matter (men), if not more so – but, wow, the Catholics refined their misogyny and used the words of God to justify all sorts of fuckery against women right from the get go.

And they’re still fucking at it, don’t forget that the Catholic Churches motto is, in reality, whatever nonsense they preach about the wisdom of St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas, they barely considered women above dogs, writing that women were defective and incomplete men.

Regardless of their veneration of Jesus’s mum, and maybe because of it, their loathing for women was a feature, and not a bug, right from the get go. It’s been used to justify all the awful things that men do to women, but worst of all, the justification for trying to disallow by law women’s bodily autonomy, as in, the right to decide what to do and when to do it with one’s own body.

I had no idea that was even a theme in the flick up until the “turn” happens, and it’s a mighty one, and perhaps, in retrospect, not all that surprising considering the title.

Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) arrives in Italy from the States. She is ushered into the welcoming bosom of a convent whose main purpose seems to be looking after the elder nuns who are suffering physically or mentally the ravages of age. Many are on the way out, so their noble task is bringing them comfort until their last days, when they presumably fly on up to heaven and, I dunno, have group sex with Jesus finally.

Is…Isn’t that what they’ve been waiting for? I mean, they’ve been married to Jesus for so long, finally they can get some satisfaction.

dir: Joe Lynch

2023

I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it probably wasn’t this.

Another example of why it’s bad to have expectations. You’ll always be disappointed if you expect something.

It’s probably better than I give it credit for, it’s just that, wow, it’s a clear reminder that I don’t get to see a lot of flicks like this these days, and, uh, with good reason.

Suitable Flesh is such a tasty title. It held out to me a promise of perhaps Cronenbergian body horror, or something malign and freaky like the early films of Stuart Gordon.

Eh, nothing so fancy or highfalutin as that. This would have gone straight to video back in the day, it has a surprising amount of sex scenes, and I think there was some saxophone playing during those scenes.

I guess the people in this flick don’t mind. They know what they’re in. This has the production values of something from the Hallmark or Lifetime Movie Channel, but with a better cast, to some extent, but very little money. The premise is slightly freaky, and it’s loosely based on a HP Lovecraft short story, but really it’s in the service of a mediocre plot and some fairly comical visuals.

But if you enjoy watching attractive people pretend to have sex, well, there’s plenty of that.