Sampling dialogue from film and TV was a staple of 90s electro/industrial bands. As I was (still am) an avid listener of that genre, there are a number of line readings and deliveries I’ve heard hundreds if not thousands of times without ever been aware of the source material.
That’s why when I’m watching a horror or exploitation film, I’m always delighted when my ears perk up at a familiar line recitation. I finally have true context for the sample and a tiny unsolved mystery from my youth has been solved.
This month was the first time I’d seen THE EXORCIST III — despite the fact that I own it — and I was lucky enough to see a print of it with a packed crowd.
Yes, THE EXORCIST III is skillfully plotted with expertly crafted scares and angles and production design. Yes, it has one of the all-time classic jump scares.
However, what resonated most was hearing George C. Scott’s perfectly paced declaration of beliefs, a declaration I heard many, many times in FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY’s ‘Bio-Mechanic’:
“I believe in disease. I believe in pain… cruelty and infidelity!”
Obviously, with such a memorable, dialogue-driven film, it has been endlessly sampled by other bands such gabber act DELTA 9 and the fittingly named XORCIST. However, it’s Front Line Assembly’s use that has echoed in my head for years, and I organically stumbled upon it on my own.
If it weren’t for the fact that PROM NIGHT featured a post-HALLOWEEN Jamie Lee Curtis, I highly doubt it’d be remembered much at all today. While it’s a serviceable slasher and does what it says on the tin — a whole bunch of students are stalked and killed in their high school on prom night — it does get lost a bit in the deluge of 1980s slashers.
Now, HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II? There’s a film that stands out!
I’ll grant you: HELLO MARY LOU was never slated to be a PROM NIGHT sequel, but it featured a prom queen and murder so the studio appended PROM NIGHT II to the title and that was that.
Unlike PROM NIGHT, HELLO MARY LOU is far more supernatural, focused on the death of a 50s prom queen who, let loose in suburban 1987, inhabits bodies to reclaim her crown by any means necessary.
The result is smart and silly, and has inventively surreal set-pieces that rack up the bodies. Oh, and Michael Ironside is a priest! That’s worth the price of admission alone.
HELLO MARY LOU was followed by PROM NIGHT III, which veers into full supernatural slapstick, but I’ve already featured it! Find a copy of both any way that you can!
If you’re in Chicago on October 18th, 2024? HELLO MARY LOU is playing at the Music Box Theatre and features writer Ron Oliver! It promises to be a night to remember!
Classic Troma films are cheap and fun gross-out affairs by misfits, for misfits, and CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH is no exception.
The premise is paper thin: Tromaville High School — a typical 80s high school with jocks and nerds and a clutch of cartoonishly costumed gang members named ‘The Cretins’ — is situated next to a nuclear facility.
An accident occurs at the plant and nuclear waste spills into high school. Mutations ensue! An atomic baby-monster is birthed! The Cretins graduate from traditional bullying, drug dealing and deviant behavior to ultra-violent and psychotic behavior! Boyfriend and girlfriend Warren and Chrissy try to survive! Students cheer the shutdown of the school!
It’s a wild time, featuring all of the colorful camp and good-natured buckets of bodily fluids that you’d expect from Lloyd Kaufman’s scrappy DYI studio that brought you THE TOXIC AVENGER.
The Cretins are ostensibly the film’s villains as it’s the nuclear weed that they peddle that is the catalyst for the film’s mayhem, they punch down literally and figuratively, and their makeup and costumes are garish at best and culturally offensive at worse. However, they’re also a warm representation of smart-but-willful societal dropouts.
See, before they were The Cretins they were Tromaville High’s honor students. Now? Now they’re a whirlwind of disrespectful and abnormal behavior with no tolerance for conventional norms, ready to upend the system in every way they can. Body paint, fetish gear, severe piercings and gender fuckery! They’re society’s gremlins and damn proud of it!
I will note that the reason why these honor students became The Cretins is somewhat unclear. I like to think of them as having voluntarily checked out of normative culture and into fringe subcultures, much like myself as a teen.
Do they commit terrible acts, acts that damn them to gruesome deaths? Yeah, sure. Do we still root for them? Well, I certainly took glee in doing so. That’s because, well, at heart? I’m a dirtbag cretin.
Way back in the early dark days of 2022, in my ‘Favorite TV of 2021’ post I very briefly wrote about the first season of the UK’s Channel 4 TV show WE ARE LADY PARTS, solely comprised of two lines from the show:
“A confused mix of hash anthems and sour girl power. […] It was kind of like therapy, but with a lot of screaming.”
“I’m the lamb, by the way.”
Obviously, that does a disservice to such a uniquely brash and singular punk show, so I’m here to right some wrongs and rave in more exacting ways about the show.
WE ARE LADY PARTS centers around LADY PARTS, a punk band comprised of three Muslim women musicians and Momtaz (their ever-vaping manager) and they are seeking a lead guitarist to bring their sound together. They find one in Amina, an microbiology PhD student who used to performing but her nerves caused her body to violently react against her. Regardless of Amina’s unsavory bodily expulsion, LADY PARTS’s lead singer Saira is insistent that Amina is the one who will musically complete the circle. What follows is a lot of doubt, a lot of insecurity, and yes, some bodily fluids.
While WE ARE LADY PARTS feels very modern in that it’s still a pleasant surprise to see such a varied collection of characters, but I feel it’d be at home on 80s network TV or even a film. Creator/writer/director Nida Manzoor has gone on record citing the anarchic cult 80s BBC show THE YOUNG ONES as an inspiration for WE ARE LADY PARTS. I also can’t help but see a bit of LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS! in it.
Given that this show is centered around a fictional band, you’d better hope that the songs are fucking appropriately punk and makes you want to throw fingers, and Manzoor delivers. She took on song duty along with siblings Shez and Sanya Manzoor and Benni Fregin, plus all of the performers actually play their instruments! (I’ll note that Nida has gone on record that it helps that they’re punk, so they can be a bit sloppy musically and lyrically.)
Here are just a few of their numbers:
Bashir With the Good Beard:
Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister But Me:
Voldemort Under My Headscarf:
In November 2021 — a handful of months after the first season aired — WE ARE LADY PARTS was renewed for a second season. Then 2022 rolled around, and no second season. 2023? No second season. I’d given up hope but here we are! It’s 2024, a tad over three years after the first season premiered, and the second season dropped on peacock on May 30th!
I haven’t been able to watch the second season yet but if you’re extremely online like I am, you have probably heard of a surprise appearance from a very exceptional person. (I will not spoil who it is, but I am very excited to see it unfold.)
Part seventeen of an array of CD mixes I made for my wife over a long number of years! Read more about it here!
Yet again a I cover I don’t love.
This cover is a repetitive collage of images snapped while drunk at a posh club, one that I can no longer remember and probably do not want to remember.
That tracks.
I like it as an image though, but I love me my symmetry and striking lighting. It also reminds me of the hallway-facing glass bathroom wall of the first place I lived in when I moved to Chicago, although that was more colorful. (Fun fact? I did shoot an entire short film that only featured that bathroom. Not so fun fact? There was a hell of a lot of shouting and screaming in said short.)
Yet again, the text formatting here — while very intentional — yet again feels like slop to me and I regret it, but nothing to be done about it now.
As usual! Tracklist! (Artist / Album / Song):
WOVENHAND / Consider the Birds / To Make A Ring
OLD CANES / Feral Harmonic / Little Bird Courage
THE BUILDERS AND THE BUTCHERS / Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well / Short Way Home
POLLY SCATTERGOOD / Polly Scattergood / Bunny Club [Bonus Track]
This post mentions several early plot points regarding MR. MONK’S LAST CASE. It also details the ending of Agatha Christie’s CURTAIN.
MONK was a USA network TV procedural featuring the very nuanced Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk. Monk is a brilliant, married San Francisco detective who struggles with obsessive–compulsive disorder.
In the opening episode Trudy, an accomplished journalist and Monk’s wife, is murdered via a car bomb and Monk finds himself confronting what he sees as an unsolvable case which flares his OCD to unsociable levels. He leaves the force and holes himself up in his apartment, fastidiously dusting and wiping and fussing over his living space, attempting to enact order, at least until SFPD comes knocking at his door and pull him back into the real world.
“It’s a jungle out there.
Disorder and confusion everywhere.”
MONK certainly falls in the realm of cozy, non-threatening murder mysteries. There is no omnipresent sense of dread and little in the way of heightened emotions. However, unlike many other cozy murder mysteries, the heart of the show is its melancholy. Adrian Monk is haunted by his wife’s death for years and burdened by his many compulsions and fears. Shalhoub never plays Monk overly serious or nihilistic but instead portrays him as a petulant man-youth with a bit of hurt behind his eyes.
“No one seems to care; well I do! Hey who’s in charge here?”
The series finale let Monk solve Trudy’s murder, allowing him to move on with his life, to live with answers instead of questions. At least, that was the goal.
14 Years Later…
From out of nowhere — and at no one’s request — we have MR. MONK’S LAST CASE. Monk is no longer a consultant for the SFPD. He’s been working on a memoir of his cases which is deemed uncommercial thanks to being overly verbose and concerned with anything but his cases. He’s off of — and stockpiling — his meds, flaring up his OCD.
I will not spoil anything about the case apart from stating that why it pulls a reluctant Monk back into detective mode is surprisingly cruel, especially for a show like MONK but, as it’s a full-blown made-for-TV film, stakes are expected to be raised, and MR. MONK’S LAST CASE certainly raises them.
If you noted the stockpiled pills and immediately thought: ‘Oh, Monk is contemplating suicide.’ then give yourself a pat on your back. There’s also a scene very early out of the gate where Monk longingly stares out of a high-rise window at the sidewalk below, and his fingers inch close to the window clasp. Also, he’s literally counting down the days on his paper calendar to a day with the name ‘Trudy’.
Solving Trudy’s murder didn’t bring Adrian the solace he had hoped for. Instead, coming out the other side he felt unmoored, unnecessary, a ship without a sail, and in his mind the only solution is to join Trudy in his idea of the afterlife. Dark? Sure. Too dark for MONK? Not at all as it feels organic to the character. Post-Trudy, Monk is a man who is never content, driven to placate himself but never finding peace.
“Poison in the very air we breathe.
Do you know what’s in the water we drink? Well, I do and it’s amazing.”
While Adrian Monk certainly shares DNA with a number of other murder mystery/detective fiction protagonists — MR. MONK’S LAST CASE has a number of blatant riffs, especially a very not-so-subtle insertion of an adoptable dog named ‘Watson’ — he mirrors Agatha Christie’s fastidious and fussy Belgian ex-policeman-turned-private-detective Poirot more than others.
Putting aside recent adaptations of Poirot mysteries, Hercules Poirot is an overly neat and tidy man, a man who is very proud of his perfectly coiffed mustache, of his immaculately shined shoes, of the fabric that lines his coat. Like Monk, Poirot becomes very agitated when anything disrupts his sense of order, be it mussing his attire or imperfectly sized eggs.
Also, like Monk, Poirot has an bit of an ego, is very aware of his talents and — as he himself puts it — his ‘little grey cells’, and is steadfastly stuck in his own ways. However, Monk and Poirot couldn’t differ more about their deduction techniques:
Monk’s technique is in the Holmes-ian mould in that he pieces together the murders utilizing precision knowledge of items and dates and scuffs and cigarette ash which inevitably result in comedic moments where Monk is disgusted by having to get down and dirty and then he throws a childish fit.
Nonetheless, Poirot is in every which way a Christie protagonist. While she was a relentless researcher and certainly knew of many ways to physically enable someone to kill someone, she was always more interested in the circumstances, the emotions and motivations and flawed humanity that drove one to commit such an act. While, yes, Poirot does ask suspects to detail their time and place around the murder, it’s not just the time and place he’s making note of, but the words and body language in-between those bullet points.
Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s frustration with how wildly popular his Sherlock Holmes creation had become, after having published far more Poirot novels than she thought she ever would she found herself tiring of the character. However, like Doyle, she came to the realization that for as long as she lived, Poirot would live alongside her.
To cope with this, she did the next best thing. In the midst of WWII she penned Poirot’s final novel, CURTAIN: POIROT’S LAST CASE. While it starts like so many other Poirot novels — countryside inn, an ensemble of suspects, unexplained deaths — the circumstances are different this time around. Poirot and his affable sidekick Hastings are older. Times are changing. The world is different. The old guard is ailing, reduced to a number of medications to keep the heart beating. Tried-and-true techniques no longer guarantee the same results.
Part of Christie’s impetus was to ensure readers would receive proper closure regarding Poirot’s life and contributions, as it was also written with bombs falling around her and she was very unsure about the future.
Upon completion of CURTAIN, Christie locked the manuscript in a bank vault and continued to pen Poirot adventures, the last of which was ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER, published in 1972.
After penning the Tommy and Tuppence mystery POSTERN OF FATE in 1973, Christie knew that would be her last work so she unfurled CURTAIN and it was published in September of 1975. She lived to see the world react to Poirot’s literal end, but passed shortly after on January 12th, 1976.
It’s on record that Christie was a rather secretive person. Her ‘lost 11 days’ where she just up and vanished from her home and family, leaving behind numerous oddities that were construed as ‘clues’, including three envelopes handed out to staff only to be opened upon her death has the grist of a private joke. She was later found residing at a spa and she claimed to have no memory of the past 11 days.
What occurred between those 11 days, as well as the reasoning for leaving in the first place, has been the source of endless speculation, including several films and a Doctor Who episode.
“People think I’m crazy, ‘cause I worry all the time.
If you paid attention you’d be worried too.”
A brief aside: It’s been widely speculated that Christie was suffering from Alzeimers late in life. If you read her novels as they were published you can see her prose turn, leaning more into terse bouts of dialogue, characters often repeating or even contradicting themselves in non-writerly ways. Certain narrative twists don’t land or even make much sense. Hell, even the title of her last Poirot novel — ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER — seems to underscore that she was aware of her ailments.
The upside of this is that CURTAIN, a novel Christie wrote thirty years prior, a novel so rich and complex, a novel that reckons with one’s worth and ability and aging and expectations, reads thirty years later like nothing she has published in decades, but also reads like everything she’s wanted to put into words for so, so very long.
(I swear this is Eddie Campbell’s work! I wish I would have asked him when I met him!)
CURTAIN closes with Poirot murdering his suspect, despite the fact that he has no tangible evidence to link him to the five murders he’s investigating. Then, before bed, Poirot intentionally neglects his heart pills and he passes away in his sleep due to a heart attack. He dies torn between his actions to dole out justice, but also with the knowledge that he has enacted justice but can no longer be trusted to do so. He is tired; so tired.
He pens all of this to his sidekick Hastings, who receives Poirot’s scribed ‘drawing room speech’ several months after Poirot has been buried. Envelopes beget envelopes.
“And last of all, the pistol shot. My one weakness. I should, I am aware, have shot him through the temple. I could not bring myself to produce an effect so lopsided, so haphazard. No, I shot him symmetrically, in the exact center of the forehead…”
Poirot, CURTAIN, in a letter he penned for Hastings. [pg. 222]
MR. MONK’S LAST CASE leans heavily on all of the above, from the formal queasiness of asymmetry to feeling adrift from modern society, seeing one’s self as abnormal, the desire to kill one’s self to quell the madness around you, to be the sole person who can instill order no matter the cost, to hope for some kind of peace and solace that you’ve known in the past, to put a name and a date on it, to send envelopes containing words hedging around what all of this means, why one needed to see this through to the very bitter end…
“You better pay attention or else this world we love so much might just kill you.
(I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so!)”
I can’t say for sure that MR. MONK’S LAST CASE used Christie’s CURTAIN as an influence, a template, and — or — a springboard, but the pieces fit in a way that suits both protagonists, as well as for the viewers who are mystery nerds.
Despite having penned hundreds of words above about how MONK pays tribute to the detective fiction of the past, the show itself never calls attention to it or makes it the centerpiece of a scene. In other words, you don’t have to have read every Christie mystery or every Hammett potboiler in order to enjoy MONK. It’s a series that stands on its own two legs, while also acknowledging works that have inspired those willing the show into existence.
I should know. I started watching MONK a few seasons into its run and was smitten, despite having never glommed onto detective fiction in the past. I had barely read any of Doyle’s Sherlock tales, the only Christie works I saw were adaptations aired on MASTERPIECE THEATRE, which I mostly watched for the Edward Gorey animated opening sequence. I was into noir, but mostly for the moral ambiguity and the misfit characters and the grime and nihilism.
“‘Cause there’s a jungle out there.
It’s a jungle out there.”
Was MONK cozy? Sure. However, that general sense of melancholy, of feeling like you were a burr on society but also that society was a personal burr for you resonated deeply. Monk, the character, the persona, was one of a damaged individual just trying to get by. While he thought highly of himself, the world around him literally suffocated him. It may sound like a minor character tweak, but for the time — hell, even now — it’s far headier than the usual ‘oh I’m just a drunk with mommy/daddy issues but I’m also brilliant’.
MR. MONK’S LAST CASE is not just a shadow of CURTAIN. After all, this is a proper film — albeit made-for-streaming and all of the baggage that entails — and fills up two hours (with commercial breaks, naturally). Every facet of the show is dialed up to 11, including explosions, manner of deaths, almost all of the gang is back together and hell, even the number of exterior shots instead of bland offices and over-utilized Warner Bros. lot buildings have increased! They’re playing with a far larger budget than pretty much any TV-centric detective fiction fan is familiar with.
Also, simply because of Adrian’s germaphobic nature, the show handles COVID and the collective lockdown and repercussions far better than just about any other mainstream media work I can think of. Fittingly, the populace’s embrace of safety and awareness of infectious issues only serves to depress Monk further.
MR. MONK’S LAST CASE looks great: it no longer has its odd vaseline-ish patina, drones have been deployed, and the editing pushes and pulls where and when it should. The suspect? Well, let’s just say I wish the real-life counterpart faced the same sort of justice.
MONK was a certain type of show that is sadly going extinct; a crowd-pleaser of a collective effort that knew how to entertain, but also indulged itself in substantial and thoughtful riffs. It was show the whole family could watch, but each member would delight in vastly different facets of an episode.
MR. MONK’S LAST CASE manages to return to that form, to toe that line: it’s funny, it’s quippy, it’s smart, it pays homage to the past, it has a lot of spectacle, it explores the interiority of its namesake, it has a great villain, it’s not copaganda — I could go on and on.
Yes, MR. MONK’S LAST CASE is more open-ended than CURTAIN. However, I do hope it is how we leave him: in a better state than when we first met him.
“Eh bien.”
Hercule Poirot
“It’s a gift… and a curse.”
Adrian Monk
Addendum
Yes, I know. MONK has so many quotable moments, so why, why?! did I choose to only quote the Randy Newman song that serves as the title sequence, and wasn’t even part of MONK’s first season? ‘It’s a Jungle Out There’ is that succinct and, despite the fact that it was a song that pre-dates MONK, it perfectly encapsulates the show. That’s why. Best of luck getting that earworm outta your head now!
I am someone who considers themselves a horror fan — even though it took me a long time to become one — but there are some franchises I never glommed onto. CHILD’S PLAY’s one of them. I watched the first, maybe the second, and while they never took themselves too seriously, I didn’t find much to intrigue me.
Then I watched BRIDE OF CHUCKY.
Obviously, CHILD’S PLAY is Don Mancini’s babydoll, but it feels like he was a bit tired of the formula after three sequels and thought it was time to shake things up. Consequently, he took inspiration from one the greatest horror films of all time: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
While James Whale’s masterpiece is inferred in the title and, hell, even featured in BRIDE OF CHUCKY, Mancini puts his own spin on it, namely making the bride the unbridled star of the show and leaning into outright horror-comedy.
Jennifer Tilly exudes gleeful darkness and mayhem as Tiffany, Chucky’s prior paramour. She’s been pining for him for a decade and finagles Chucky back to life in hopes they’ll get hitched and live happily ever after. Chucky laughs in her face upon hearing her nuptial dream. Tiffany dumps his ass, locks him up with a wedding-dressed doll, and tries to move on. Chucky gets free, kills her, but she ends up trapped in said doll. The two coerce two teen star-crossed lovers into transporting them across state lines to get Chucky’s talisman which will allow them to escape their plastic bodies. Matters hilariously escalate.
BRIDE OF CHUCKY is far, far more irreverent and cutting than prior CHILD’S PLAY films. There are a lot of winks and nods — including one quip from Chucky noting that, if he had to describe the circumstances that got him where he is now, it would take a movie and two or three sequels — but they all are fun, witty, and hilarious. This is a well-steered lark of a film that entertains on every level: great set-pieces (not one, but two grandiose vehicular explosions), savvy dialogue, imaginative kills, and a jaw-dropping ending.
While Brad Dourif gamely reprises his role as the voice of Chucky, the real star here is Jennifer Tilly. I wouldn’t say that Tilly is underrated, but she is often under-utilized, shoehorned into ditzy, insubstantial characters. (Not always, of course. Watch BOUND!) That’s not the case here. Tiffany has agency. She’s the guiding force here. Is she obsessed with serial killers and death and violence and havoc? Yes. However, she is a lot of fun and she takes no shit, she’s determined, she’s smart and capable and she knows how to get what she wants.
Tilly plays every single facet with aplomb, from faux-seducing her weak-willed asshole goth, to making an overstuffed meal of voicing ‘doll Tiffany’. Without her, this film would be forgettable. With her, it’s iconically memorable.
I need to note that this was Rated Q’s October screening. I’ve previously written about Rated Q but, if you are unfamiliar: Rated Q is a monthly film event at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, organized by local misfit Ramona Slick. They solely program queer and cult films. Each screening features three drag performances that intersect with the film’s fashion and soundtrack. It’s not for everyone but — for me — it’s a chance to revel in joyous performances and be around like-minded individuals and laugh and grin and feel elated for two hours.
I am noting this because these screenings are my favorite monthly event and I will never shut up about them, but also because usually most folks attending these screenings are extremely familiar with the work. That was not the case here. While exiting the theater, I overheard so many folks exclaiming that BRIDE OF CHUCKY was so much better than they expected; far funnier than they’d anticipated; so much smarter than they thought it’d be when they bought a ticket. Everyone left glowing and happy and elated, and that’s exactly the experience Rated Q — and BRIDE OF CHUCKY — provides.
GRAND CREW is a Black ensemble hangout show that delightfully evokes HAPPY ENDINGS about a group of drinking buddies that is also an absolute joke-machine that also emotionally hits hard! The performers are perfect, the cinematography is immaculate, and it’s amazingly timed. It is absolutely delightful but I was honestly shocked that it received a second season because, apart from myself, I know of no one who watched the first season and heard absolutelyno one talk about it. Please, if you know me: remedy that. It’s a lot of fun! It has escalated to the phase where I am knee-slapping and have to muffle my laughter to keep from waking up those around me.
A few choice quotes:
“Woo, that text got ass!”
“Stupid face, always snitching on me.”
“I just don’t think she’s as young as she says she is! Why does she drink so much Ovaltine?!”
(Peacock) LEOPARD SKIN is an eight episode limited series from Sebastian Gutierrez, perhaps best known for the recent neo-noir series JETT or for the cult comedy ELEKTRA LUXX or a little joke of a film named SNAKES ON A PLANE, depending on the kind of person you are. (I fall in the first camp.)
JETT was known for its supremely hyper-stylized lighting and framing patchwork — segmenting the action to heighten tension as well as to just look cool. As you might imagine, it owes a great deal of debt to Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s OUT OF SIGHT with a dash of WILD THINGS. Tellingly, Gutierrez also wrote an episode of the short-lived Karen Sisco spin-off of the film where THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’s Carla Gugino played Sisco. (It’s worth noting that Gugino and Gutierrez have been entangled for quite some time.)
At first blush, LEOPARD SKIN appears to be a conventional heist-goes-wrong: three ruthless strangers are blackmailed into stealing millions of dollars worth of diamonds by a corrupt judge (an isolated Jeffrey Dean Morgan). They get the diamonds but shit goes sideways, their driver gets shot during the getaway, and they end up at the doorstep of a mansion occupied by an ex (Gugino) and a widow (Gaite Jansen), and the ex just happens to have footage of the widow killing her ex and then blackmails her by requesting that she becomes subservient to her every want.
In other words, it’s all about knowledge, power and sex.
While JETT was dreamlike, LEOPARD SKIN comes across as Lynchian in fashion commercial mode: overly visual and sumptuous, but often also stilted and performative in all the best ways. This is a show that should not exist, and the fact that it’s only available to stream via Peacock is even more mind-boggling, especially since it’s clear that this was not their intended network as the show is not paced for ad-breaks but yet has some of the most disjointed and abrupt ad-breaks, lending an even more surreal atmosphere to the show.
The always-brilliant Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya succinctly stated that “Carla Gugino and Gaite Jansen manage to bring nuance and velocity to a story that doesn’t ever seem to know what it’s doing or why.” LEOPARD SKIN feels groundless but is more interesting for being so. It’s an enigma wrapped in a riddle and is so confounding that you’ll either fall completely in love with it or you’ll find it to be pretentious softcore twaddle. Hopefully, like me, you’ll find it to be the former, but buyer beware.
(AMC+/kanopy/peacock/Prime/VOD) Shirley Jackson has been lucky in that she had to suffer few terrible film adaptations — even THE HAUNTING (1999) is better than it needed to be and probably wouldn’t cause her to roll in her grave — and this adaptation of WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE is no exception. While it ramps up the spectacle a bit and cuts a bit of the fat, it’s completely faithful to a tale of two sisters, of abuse, of being castigated by locals. Oh, and it’s bolstered by an amazing cast: Taissa Farmiga as the younger Blackwood, Alexandra Daddario as the elder, and Crispin Glover as their uncle.
Stacie Passon’s take captures the vacillation between fear and comfort that I felt Jackson captured as an anxious person; Daddario is perfectly cast, with her almost-preternatural blue eyes, and Passon commands the atmosphere. The set design is pitch-perfect, and she even manages to keep Crispin Glover dialed-in.
