Worth Mentioning - The Victory of Reason Against the Demonic

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. 

Full Moon, Dario Argento, and sonic catering.

The following reviews originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com 

PIRANHA WOMEN (2022)

Last year, Full Moon announced that one of their upcoming projects would be a film called Piranha Women, and to promote the concept they released some poster art that showed a trio of women in sunglasses and bikinis skiing – but they weren’t being pulled by a boat. They were being pulled through the water by giant piranha. Of course, now that Piranha Women has actually been made and released, there aren’t any scenes in the movie that are anything like the scene depicted on that poster art. Can you imagine how much it would cost to put three actresses out on the water and make it look like they were skiing behind giant piranha? What Piranha Women has to offer instead is the sight of women who have mouths full of razor sharp teeth. And if that’s not enough, when they drop their tops we see that their breasts also have little piranha mouths on them.

The early announcement also said that the Piranha Women would be thieves, but that was back when Lindsey Schmitz was going to be writing directing. The project was passed over to legendary and incredibly prolific writer/director Fred Olen Ray along the way (Piranha Women is the 80th writing credit on his IMDb page and the 163rd directing credit), and he only stuck with the idea that this would be a story of science run amok. Like so many other things in the horror genre, the piranha women are the result of scientific intentions to improve the world. Dr. Mark Sinclair (Shary Nassimi) at the Institute of Morphological Medicine in Antonio Bay (presumably a nod to John Carpenter’s The Fog) has come up with an experimental cancer treatment that involves binding their DNA with a strand of piranha DNA. Ray gets the technobabble out of the way as simply and quickly as possible. The how and why isn’t very important when we have to get to the scenes of women chomping on people with their mouths and their breast-mouths.

The protagonist of this story is a young man named Richard (Bobby Rice), whose girlfriend Lexi (Sof Puchley) is not doing well. While, unbeknownst to our heroes, the piranha women created by Dr. Sinclair are out there seducing men at the local bar so they can take them home and feed on them, Lexi seeks Sinclair’s help. The improvement is also instantaneous, but so is the transformation into a piranha woman. Lexi disappears from Richard’s life... and when he goes looking for her, he ends up on the bad side of the piranha women.

There is not much at all to Piranha Women. The movie barely scrapes 60 minutes, and some of those minutes are due to the fact that Full Moon has released it in two parts, both of them with an opening title sequence and end credits (plus a quick recap at the start of the second chapter). There aren’t many scenes packed into its short running time, and it moves through those scenes quickly, giving us multiple piranha women attacks along the way. Basically, this is exactly the sort of easy viewing experience you want a low budget B-movie to be. It’s not likely to become a new favorite for many viewers, but it’s entertaining that it’s not likely many viewers will regret spending an hour of their lives watching it.

Fans of Ray’s work will be glad to see that his frequent collaborator Richard Gabai, who previously worked with him on Dinosaur Island, Thirteen Erotic Ghosts, and a couple dozen other projects, made it into the cast of this one, playing one of the two detectives investigating the piranha women murders. The other detective is played by Michael Gaglio, who is credited on twenty other Ray movies, like Tarzeena: Jiggle in the Jungle and Dirty Blondes from Beyond. The most deadly piranha women in the film are played by Carrie Overgaard and newcomer Keep Chambers... and they do well with the material they were given to work with. I totally bought them as seductive ladies with piranha teeth and a hunger for human flesh.

If you put on a Full Moon / Fred Olen Ray movie called Piranha Women, you probably know exactly what you’re getting into at the start. It doesn’t stand alongside the classics in the filmographies of Full Moon and Ray, but it’s fine. It’s worth a watch if you’re into this sort of thing. You already know if you are or not; this isn’t the sort of movie that is going to win people over and create new B-movie fans. More could be done with the concept of piranha women, but that’s what sequels are for. 

SHE WILL (2021)

Legendary genre filmmaker Dario Argento was not involved with Charlotte Colbert’s feature directorial debut She Will from the beginning. He didn’t agree to put his name on the film as an executive producer until it was finished and showing at festivals. Now “Dario Argento Presents” is the first thing you see on She Will, following the distributor logos, which is sure to be a major drawing point for the film. And you can see why Argento himself was drawn to the material, as he has dealt with subject matter like this himself. It was just usually a lot bloodier and more interesting when he did it.

Colbert and co-writer Kitty Percy came up with a solid core idea for She Will and Colbert brought it to the screen with a nice visual style. But the movie also happens to be one of those achingly slow paced “art horror” movies that are all the rage these days. The sort of movie that some would refer to as “elevated horror”. The movie has a running time of 95 minutes, but viewers who want to see something interesting happening will find many of those minutes to be a struggle to sit through.

Stars Alice Krige and Kota Eberhardt do their best to keep the viewer engaged when nothing much seems to be going on in the movie. Both of them turn in great performances – and given that Eberhardt’s biggest projects previously were the poorly received X-Men: Dark Phoenix and the poorly reviewed Netflix show The I-Land, She Will might turn out to be a major breakthrough for her. Krige plays Veronica Ghent, a veteran actress who has just undergone a double mastectomy and chooses to recuperate in private at a retreat deep in the Scottish countryside. Eberhardt is Desi, the personal nurse who accompanies Veronica on this trip. Colbert and Percy gave Krige terrific dramatic material to work with, as Veronica is suffering not only because of her health issues and the fact that she’s aging, but also because a former associate, director Eric Hathbourne (Malcolm McDowell), has announced that he’ll be directing a remake of a movie he and Ghent made together in 1969, when she was just thirteen years old. As auditions are held to fill the role Ghent played more than fifty years ago, she sees herself literally being replaced. And worse, Hathbourne molested Veronica while she was starring in the original movie, so she’s disgusted to see him still around, successful, making movies, and even receiving knighthood.

Veronica is depressed and traumatized when we meet her, wanting to hide away from the world, mixing alcohol and painkillers. But this is a story of empowerment. As it turns out, witches were tried and burned at the stake in the same spot where her Scottish retreat is located. When a storm hits, groundskeeper Lois (Amy Manson) warns guests that they can expect to see peat in their water. Peat isn’t the only thing in the soil around here; it’s also infused and enriched with the ashes of the many witches that were burned there in the past. And when Veronica comes in contact with those ashes in the water and mud, she starts to gain some new abilities and insight. Like I said, it’s a solid core idea, but I found the slow pace and trippy vision sequences a chore to endure.

Rob Zombie fans may have flashbacks to Halloween II when they see a scene where McDowell sits in a room, watching footage from an embarrassing televised interview. Other notable cast members who show up at the retreat include Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Olwen Fouéré as Jean, who is always riding around on an ATV, and Cemetery Man himself Rupert Everett, in a comedic role as the head of a group who has come to the retreat to draw energy from a crystal pyramid and create art.

She Will has a fan in Dario Argento and is sure to gather more fans in the horror community. It is a very well-made film for what it is, but “what it is” happens to be a horror movie that will resonate with some while others find it to be quite dull. I liked the concept and the performances, I was impressed by Colbert’s style and by the score from Clint Mansell, but I wouldn’t want to sit through the movie’s 95 minutes again.

FLUX GOURMET (2022)

Some films are so unique, trying to review them as if they were a regular movie seems like an impossible task. For example, last week I wrote about Phil Tippett’s stop-motion feature Mad God. I was blown away by the artistry on display in that film, and yet had to give it a middle-of-the-road score because I didn’t enjoy sitting through it. It’s an awesome achievement, but it didn’t have the things I need to carry me through a viewing of a feature film, like characters to latch on to or a discernible plot. Writer/director Peter Strickland’s new film Flux Gourmet is more clearly understandable than Mad God and offers deeper insight into the lives of its characters, but it’s another movie that is so distinctive, it can be difficult to wrap your head around it.

The setting is the Sonic Catering Institute, run by Jan Stevens (Gwendoline Christie). An unnamed culinary art collective – a trio of people who combine performance art with the sounds of cooking food – has just been awarded a three week residency at the institute, and a writer has been assigned the task of chronicling their stay. As Flux Gourmet began, I was impressed by the world Strickland seemed to be building here. A “Sonic Catering Institute” focused on groups that build their art around cooking sounds. The ridiculous performances the culinary art collective puts on. I was thinking that this all just came from the mind of Strickland… but then it struck me, the art world can be so absurd and pretentious, there probably are groups who want people to listen to the sounds of them cooking food. It was only once the movie ended that I discovered Strickland is part of a group called The Sonic Catering Band. A group that takes “the raw sounds recorded from the cooking and preparing of a meal and treats them through processing, cutting, mixing and layering”. So this wasn’t just nonsense Strickland made up as a joke, it’s also something he has years of experience with.

The culinary art collective in Flux Gourmet is made up of Elle di Elle (Fatma Mohamed) and her two assistants, Billy Rubin (Asa Butterfield) and Lamina Propria (Ariane Labed). Elle performs up front while Billy and Lamina cook and fiddle with sound equipment in the background. And after their performances at the institute, the audience thanks them for their art by participating in orgies with the group. The collective members sit down with the writer chronicling their stay throughout the film, letting us know what makes them tick and revealing that there are some rather twisted personal relationships behind the art they create together. Jan really latches on to some of the personal details Billy gives away and uses them to her advantage… stirring up Elle’s suspicion that Jan is trying to sabotage their collective for some reason.

But the most interesting character in this movie is one who has no connection to the sonic catering performances. It’s the character who is watching these things. The writer. Call him a “dossierge”, call him a “hack”, but whatever you want to call him, the fact is that Stones, played by Makis Papadimitriou, is probably the only character most viewers are going to feel any empathy for. That’s because a surprisingly large portion of Flux Gourmet’s overly long 111 minute running time is devoted to Stones pondering the mysterious gastrointestinal distress he’s suffering from. The pain in his stomach. His attempts to hide the sound of his farts and fecal expulsions from the collective. His fear of getting a colonoscopy from the very creepy and strange gastroenterologist Dr. Glock (Richard Bremmer). Stones is a regular person surrounded by weirdos.

Despite how strange and meandering it is, this movie does have sort of a watchable charm about it. Even though the sound mix was often incredibly annoying, at least on the screener I had access to. One minute you have to strain to understand the hushed lines being spoken by characters with thick accents, and the next your ear drums are being blasted by the noise made by the collective. The movie is so odd, it’s even difficult to decide which genre to place it in, as is evident from the fact that many sources are referring to Flux Gourmet as being at least partially horror. I write about horror every day, and I didn’t see any horror in this movie. Apparently others have. One of Strickland’s sources of inspiration was This Is Spinal Tap, and comedy is probably what I would describe this movie as, although it was rarely laugh-out-loud funny. 

It is a bizarre film that isn’t going to go over very well with most viewers (the two people I watched it with thought it was atrocious), but I’m sure it will find a small but appreciative audience.