Worth Mentioning - The Past Can Pull You Under

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning. 

Troma, stop-motion, and a Christina Ricci creature feature.

The following reviews all originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

SHAKESPEARE'S SHITSTORM (2020)

There's a new Troma movie, and it's called Shakespeare's Shitstorm. If you're familiar with the works of Troma, a company that has been pumping out very unique low budget films for almost fifty years now, you probably don't need to hear anything more. You already know if you're on board to watch their latest production. Whether you love Troma or can't stand it, if you watch Shakespeare's Shitstorm you'll find that it's exactly the sort of movie you're expecting it to be. It's frenetic, completely out of its mind, and coated in filth, with slime and feces pouring out all over the screen.

Somehow simultaneously low and high brow, this movie happens to be a Tromatized adaptation of the William Shakespeare play The Tempest, thus the title. And here's where Troma gets educational: I have never read the works of Shakespeare, so I learned more about The Tempest simply by watching Shakespeare's Shitstorm than I had in my decades of life before witnessing this movie. The script, crafted by multiple contributors (director/Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman, Brandon Bassham, Gabriel Friedman, Frazer Brown, Doug Sakmann, and Zac Amico), uses Shakespeare's concept as the foundation for the story of a disgraced scientist named Prospero (Kaufman himself), who found a cure for opioid addiction, but big pharma had no interest in curing opioid addiction. That's a fifty billion dollar industry. So they ruined Prospero's life. Now he's seeking revenge against the heads of a company called Avonbard Pharmacy: Big Al King (Abraham Sparrow), the hard-partying president, and his VP Antoinette Duke - who happens to be Prospero's sister, and is also played by Kaufman.

Prospero carries out his revenge plot at a time when Avonbard has gathered their unscrupulous benefactors and associates together for a celebratory cruise. Their new product Safespacia, which helps people deal with their Entitlementia, has just made them the biggest pharmaceutical company in the world. In Shakespeare's writing, Prospero was a sorcerer who conjured up a tempest to wreck a boat carrying his enemies. In the Troma version, Prospero is able to flood his enemies' ship with whale feces. And I have to say, the special effects used to bring the sight of a series of whales leaping over the ship while spewing diarrhea were quite impressive for a modern day Troma movie.

The partiers make it to land in Tromaville, New Jersey and seek shelter in a place called Prospero's Retreat, where their debaucherous celebration continues, and Prospero continues manipulating events so he can really ruin their day. There's a "house special" drug at Prospero's Retreat that's called Tempest, and the partiers really should have declined to partake in that stuff. The party is raging for the majority of this movie's 94 minutes, so there are some crazy sights to see all throughout the film. Amidst the madness, we meet Prospero's blind daughter Miranda (Kate McGarrigle, turning in a great comedic performance), who falls in love with Big Al's son Ferdinand (Erin Miller), who is actually a decent guy. And from time to time, a character will break out in song.

As in the source material, Prospero is aided in his endeavors by characters named Ariel and Caliban. Here those characters are played by Amanda Flowers and Monique Dupree, and Ariel is repaid with crack.

While entertaining viewers with the feces, slime, and goofball sense of humor, Troma movies also deal in social commentary, and Shakespeare's Shitstorm is no different - as you probably gathered from Prospero's back story and the villains being big pharma reps. The film skewers cancel culture, political correctness, and social justice warriors (who are shown gathering together with a symbol of a snowflake shines in the sky like the Bat-Signal). Some viewers will be amused by this, others will be offended. The movie is quite aware that some will be offended, and is already making fun of them.

Personally, I respect Troma more than I actually enjoy their output. There are some Troma movies that I love, like Mother's Day and The Toxic Avenger, movies I think are generally more widely accessible than the likes of Tromeo and Juliet, Terror Firmer, Poultrygeist, etc. The ones like Shakespeare's Shitstorm are not the sort of movies I would choose to watch with any frequency. But I support Troma, I'm a fan of Lloyd Kaufman, I'm glad to see the company still doing things their own way after all these years. This movie wasn't for me, but if you love Troma you'll probably love this one. It has pretty much all you want or expect from a Troma movie.

And yes, it includes that car crash stock footage from Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D.

MONSTROUS (2022)

Chris Sivertson is best known for being the director responsible for the disastrous 2007 Lindsay Lohan thriller I Know Who Killed Me, a box office failure that only has a 9% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (The audience was kinder, being 26% positive.) Although the movie has gathered a following over the years, it has also been referred to as one of the worst movies ever made. Sivertson has been working steadily since making I Know Who Killed Me, with his new film Monstrous being perhaps his most high profile release in fifteen years. And if you only know him from I Know Who Killed Me, you’ll be glad to find that this movie is a substantial step up from that one. Monstrous probably won’t blow you away, but it’s certainly watchable.

Written by Carol Chrest, the film follows 1950s housewife Laura (Christina Ricci) as she escapes from her marriage, seeking to remove her husband from her life – and the life of their 7-year-old son Cody (Santino Barnard) – because of some vague terrible thing he did. Laura and Cody move into a large, secluded home that sits on the edge of a pond… and of course frightening things start happening once they’ve settled into this new place. Cody is one of those odd, creepy movie kids to begin with, and soon he’s claiming that there’s a monster lurking in the pond. A monster that’s specifically targeting him. It isn’t long before Laura also becomes aware that something weird is happening in this place.

Monstrous has a few twists to throw the audience’s way, and if you pay close attention to the dialogue and details you might guess at least one of them well before the “shocking reveal”. We’ve seen variations on this kind of thing plenty of times before. But even if you do figure out what’s going on, the journey to the reveal is a somewhat interesting ride. The answers might kill the movie for some viewers, especially those who haven’t been suspecting them, but that’s the risk of twists.

For a movie about a mother and son living beside a pond that contains a child-snatching creature, Monstrous is surprisingly relaxed for much of its running time. The sequences of the monster emerging from the lake and visiting the house aren’t the most thrilling. Not even for Cody, who becomes buddies with this thing and starts calling it the “Pretty Lady”. Monstrous is never all that scary. It occasionally tries to be intense, but doesn’t quite manage it. The mystery is what drives this film forward more than the scares, or attempts at scares. Don’t go into this one with high hopes for the monster that earns the film its title.

Barnard is effective at making Cody come off like a real pain in the neck, and Ricci delivers a strong performance as Laura. The majority of the movie is carried on the shoulders of these two cast members, and Sivertson found the right actors for the job. Everyone else in the film has brief roles, with a couple of the most prominent being Colleen Camp as Mrs. Langtree, the distrusting half of the couple that owns the house Laura and Cody have moved into, and Lew Temple as Laura’s boss Mr. Alonzo. It’s always good to see Camp and Temple in any movie, and Monstrous benefits from their presence.

If you want to kill some time with a dark mystery that has good performances and interesting but somewhat predictable twists, Monstrous is a fine choice to go with. Just keep your expectations low.

The biggest issue with this movie is the amount of times Ricci says the name “Cody”. Did no one on the set realize how ridiculous it was to have her say that name so many times? My name is Cody, and I usually like it when my name pops up in movies, but even I got tired of hearing it long before the movie was over. If you hate the name Cody, sitting through Monstrous will be torture for you. Even if you don’t have any strong feelings about the name, you’ll be sick of it by the time the end credits start rolling. I was reminded of a line from Batman Returns where Michelle Pfeiffer says, “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out, or I’ll make you buy me a new one.” The makers of Monstrous manage to wear out the name Cody in just 88 minutes.

MAD GOD (2021)

If you’re looking for a movie with a discernible plot, Phil Tippett’s stop-motion animated feature Mad God is not for you. In fact, this movie isn’t going to be for very many people at all. The average viewer is likely to switch it off after just a few minutes. Mad God is really an art piece to be marveled at, while being astounded that the artist could have this much otherworldly madness packed into their human mind.

We start off with a gas mask-wearing character called the Assassin, who follows a crumbling map into a dystopian world, descending deeper and deeper into a monster-filled waking nightmare. The further the Assassin goes, the crazier the visuals around this character get. There are tiny gnomes, disgusting creatures, slave workers that look like living hairballs, and giants strapped to electric chairs that have no center, like a toilet seat. They’re zapped so they’ll send a steady stream of feces flowing down into the mouths of monstrous heads situated below their chairs. Don’t get too concerned about the mission the Assassin is on, because soon enough the movie will remove this character and move on to something else – before coming back to the Assassin concept and sending another one on another mission. 

This movie was crafted with a very cynical, fatalistic point of view. Everything is awful in its world, and when it shows a new world being created there’s no hope for it. Any world is simply fated to decay and become filled with more awful things. Tippett seems to have the same sort of negative view on the idea of workers and bosses. There are visuals throughout the movie that get across a critique of workaday activities. The hairball creatures are easily replicated, easily replaced, completely expendable. As they go about their tasks, there’s a strong probability that they’re going to be destroyed… and it doesn’t matter at all. Later we see monsters that spew explosions of feces, and there are other beings there who are supposed to wipe their dirty butts for them. But in the process of doing this, they might get taken down by another explosion of feces. We have workers literally getting shit on here. 

Yes, in addition to the abundance of horrific creatures on display in Mad God, there are scatalogical visuals at multiple moments in this movie, which hade me thinking back to my earlier viewing of Shakespeare’s Shitstorm. There are also things like a masturbating doll and the sight of women giving a handjob to a creature with the head of a bull. This is as far from family friendly as you can get, so if you want to show your kids the wonders of stop-motion animation, don’t use Mad God as an example. Let them find this one on their own once they’ve reached adulthood.

But for those who are old enough and mentally prepared to watch it, Mad God is a dazzling artistic accomplishment. Tippett, who has provided visual effects work for the likes of Star Wars films, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and RoboCop, just started making Mad God on his own when he had a break after working on RoboCop 2. This was a personal project, something to satisfy his creativity while he wasn’t making things for someone else. It’s mind-blowing to think that an endeavor like this would start off as a time killer. It was clearly a monumental task to take on, so it’s no surprise that Tippett abandoned it for a while – although the reason he did so was because he worked on Jurassic Park. When he saw the potential of computer effects, he figured stop-motion was dead. Mad God was shelved for twenty years before a new generation of effects artists discovered the materials Tippett had put together for it and persuaded him to finish the movie with their assistance (and some Kickstarter funding). Things came full circle when the pandemic hit and Tippett had to put the final touches on Mad God by himself. It’s awesome that, nearly thirty years after he started working on Mad God, he had the chance to complete the film and bring his full vision to the screen.

As a viewer, I didn’t have a great time sitting through Mad God. While I was always impressed that Tippett was able to pull off the things I was seeing on screen, the novelty wore off quickly. A clear story or some expository dialogue about what was happening would have helped hold my attention. I was left thinking that Mad God might have been more effective as a short film, or as a series of shorts, rather than being the 84 minute experience that it is. But Tippett’s vision was a feature, and I’m glad he was able to achieve it. This wasn’t something that was meant to entertain the masses, or even me. Mad God will certainly find viewers who love sitting through its 84 minutes and being wowed by its visuals, but primarily it serves as a reason to be happy for Phil Tippett. He imagined this world, he had the opportunity to bring it to life, and now his movie is completed. I didn’t enjoy it all, but I’m glad it exists.