Harper Steele and Will Ferrell started working on Saturday Night Live on the same day in 1995. They soon learned that their senses of humor were very compatible. Steele wrote many of the sketches that made Ferrell SNL’s standout star of the ’90s. Years in the SNL pressure cooker at 30 Rock built their camaraderie, and their friendship continued after 2002, when Ferrell left the show to pursue his movie career and Steele became the show’s head writer. They went on to collaborate on several films, including 2020’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
During this time, Steele had a secret. She was constantly battling gender dysphoria. After going through a messy divorce in the mid-2010s, Steele started journaling about the persistent feelings. Then the pandemic hit and like many people during that time of turmoil, Steele came to the realization that when it was all over, something would have to change. In 2022, Steele started writing emails to her family and friends announcing that she would be transitioning. The new name she chose for herself was Harper, after novelist Harper Lee.
The revelation was less than shocking for many people who had known Steele for a long time. Soon after Ferrell received his email, while he was on the set of a movie, an idea was born. Steele was notorious among friends for going on long, meandering road trips, stopping at greasy spoons, roadside attractions, and small-town dive bars. Steele was fearless, but now as a trans woman, America looked quite different. The small towns Steele loved to visit aren’t exactly known as beacons of tolerance for transgender people. So the two friends decided to embark on an epic, 16-day, 3,000-mile cross-country road-trip from New York City to Los Angeles to introduce the newly transitioned Harper Steele to the country, with Will Ferrell along as moral support.
Production-wise, Will & Harper is a bare-bones affair. It’s just the two stars in a vintage Jeep Grand Wagoneer, followed by a production van captained by director Josh Greenbaum. Originally, the idea was to do comedy sketches at various points along the way, but that plan was pretty much instantly abandoned. Instead, the two friends just have deep conversations in the car and visit the kinds of places they had gone to many times before while going amok in America. Along the way, they cover topics that are familiar to anyone who has ever had a friend come out as trans. Ferrell asks questions about what it’s like to suddenly have boobs (it’s awesome, according to Steele) and whether she’s going to date men or women (at age 61, Steele is ambivalent about it).
Greenbaum’s direction is clean, focused, and often subtle, picking up on little moments like the time when the two friends are chilling with some cheap beer in a West Virginia Walmart parking lot, and a passerby yells, “Will! You’re still the man!”
“And she’s the woman!” Ferrell yells back.
Surprisingly, the pair encounter very little overt transphobia in real life, even when Steele goes alone into an Oklahoma dive bar with “Fuck Biden” signs on the wall. They go to an Indiana Pacers game, where they sit courtside and meet Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb. He is friendly, as a politician normally is, but later they learn that he has signed a bill banning gender-affirming treatment for minors. In Peoria, Illinois, they meet a trans woman named Dana, who has lived openly in the small town for years and recounts a mixture of acceptance and fear among her neighbors. In Steele’s Iowa hometown, they visit her sister, who was immediately accepting, and Steele rides a unicycle while wearing heels. But their luck runs out in Amarillo, Texas, where they stop at the Big Texan steakhouse. As they eat their meal, the patrons crowd around and take pictures with their phones. Later, Steele reads off a litany of hateful online comments the pics generated.
And that, to me, is one of the lessons of Will & Harper. Social media makes it easy to hate. It transforms flesh and blood people into images and archetypes. It makes dehumanization into a sport and reduces identity to demographic categories to be pitted against each other. This increases platform engagement at the cost of our sanity. Of course, transphobia has always existed in real life, but it’s harder to hate someone in person. That’s why this election season, with its constant background of transphobia designed to activate Republican voters, has been so awful and dispiriting. Will & Harper is a great documentary that proves the way to defeat hate is through courage, love, and a liberal dose of laughs.
General Labor just released their second album, The Airtight Garage. Thomas Corbin says the album was recorded in 2023, when General Labor was still a four-piece band. It’s available on a double cassette with the techno punk band’s first album Galaxy Motors from Memphis cassette label Machine Duplication Recordings.
“From petty beef and LSD-fueled baseball to presidential elections and the end of the world, this album spans the emotional gamut,” says Corbin. “The opening track ‘Calculator’ seems the most innocuous, but it actually serves as a sort of surrealist mission statement for the band. The simple chorus, “I don’t trust your calculator,” aggressively screamed over stabbing synths and squealing, affected guitars is a pretty direct encapsulation of the band’s love/hate relationship with technology, using complicated gear to express our technophobia.”
The band’s split personality finds expression in the “Calculator” music video. “When Nia Rincon revealed that she had been working on a fully AI music video for ‘Calculator’ that exemplified our tech-paranoia, we were super excited to see what her artistic vision would be. The uncomfortable, uncanny valley horror that comes with AI generated video proved really effective in getting our point across, and adds to the contradictory nature of the band by using the most current software available to express our trepidation for that very type of technological advancement.”
Here is the world premiere of “Calculator”!
If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
Louise Page’s music video “Green Ribbon” will be screening at the Porretta Film Festival in Bologna, Italy. (Photo: Courtesy Oddly Buoyant Productions)
Six Memphis filmmakers will have their work screened at the 23rd annual Porretta Film Festival just outside of Bologna, Italy, in December. Thanks to a grant from the Dr. O’Farrell Shoemaker Foundation, the Memphis & Shelby County Film and Television Commission partnered with festival director Luca Elmi to select six short films by Memphis directors to screen at the Festival del Cinema di Porretta Terme.
The short films were selected from more than 25 entries by the film faculty of LeMoyne-Owen College and the University of Memphis. They are “What Were You Meant For?” by Kevin Brooks, “The Devil Will Run” by Noah Glenn, “What Life Is” by Brandon Russell, “Loveshake” by Caleb Suggs, “Soul Man” by Kyle Taubken, and Louise Page’s “Green Ribbon” music video by Laura Jean Hocking. “Soul Man” and “The Devil Will Run” both won Best Hometowner Short Film awards at the Indie Memphis Film Festival.
Film Commission board chair Gail Jones Carson and vice-chair Alicia George will travel to Italy to represent Memphis. Porretta Terme is situated in Italy’s picturesque Tuscan region and has been famous since antiquity for its hot springs. The town also hosts a long-running, soul music festival, which has hosted many Memphis music luminaries over the years. The film festival will take place December 7 through 15, 2024.
(left to right) Bob Roy, Barbara Roy, Emily Guenther, and Stephen Guenther (Photos: Toby Sells)
This week’s cover story by Toby Sells is about Historic Haunts Memphis. We followed the Bluff City paranormal investigators as they explored Memphis’ haunted juke joint Earnestine & Hazel’s, and tried to contact the many spirits who supposedly reside there. On the Memphis Flyer YouTube channel, we’ve got video of the spooky expedition. Happy Halloween!
In the sixth and final season, the vampires of What We Do in the Shadows suddenly remember to awaken their forgotten roommate Jerry.
Happy Halloween, everyone! With the looming presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and fascist degenerate Donald Trump on everyone’s mind, this spooky season has been scarier than normal, but not in a good way. As we rush toward the inevitable day of judgement, I trust Memphis Flyer readers to do the right thing next Tuesday, so that one day soon, we will never have to look at that evil orange clown again.
Since real life is pretty frightening, you can flee to TV for horror that’s a lot more funny than it is scary. I’m talking about What We Do in the Shadows, which debuted its sixth and final season this month on FX and Hulu.
What We Do in the Shadows began life 10 years ago as a movie directed by Flight of the Conchords co-creator Jemaine Clement and Thor: Love and Thunder director Taika Waititi. Originally set in a normie suburb of Wellington, New Zealand, the film made great use of the mockumentary format. Many contemporary reviewers compared it to The Office with vampires, but it had more in common with the seminal 1992 mockumentary Man Bites Dog. In that film, which is rarely seen these days, a Belgian documentary film crew follows a psychopathic serial killer named Ben as he goes about his grisly business. His avuncular, sometimes goofy nature is contrasted with the brutality of his murders, and the film crew slowly moves from detached objectivity to complicity. The vampires in What We Do in the Shadows are also stone-cold killers, but they’re stone-cold because they’re undead monsters. The original film was a reaction to the ridiculously popular Twilight series, which took the “forbidden monstrous passion” subtext inherent in vampire stories since Bram Stoker, and made it the whole of the text.
Now, with Twilight fading in memory, What We Do in the Shadows has flourished. The TV series, which premiered in 2019, moved the setting from New Zealand to Staten Island, New York, where four vampires live together in a crumbling Victorian haunted house. There’s Nandor the Relentless, a 760 year-old former Ottoman warlord, played by Kayvan Novak. Nadja of Antipaxos (Natasia Demetriou) is a 500-year-old Greek Romani sorceress who, last season, briefly became a nightclub manager. Laszlo Cravensworth, played by the imitable Matt Berry, is a 310-year-old British noble who was turned by, and later married, Nadja.
Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) is the youngest of the coven, at 100. He is an “energy vampire” who feeds by boring his victims to death with long soliloquies about nothing. The only non-vamp in the mix is Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who is Nandor’s familiar. But rather than a sniveling Igor type, mindlessly in thrall to his vampiric master, Guillermo is organized, thoughtful, and keeps the household running. He desperately wants to become a vampire himself, and in the fifth season it seemed he would get his wish. But he’s also a descendant of Van Helsing, Dracula’s arch enemy, so that complicates matters.
The main cast has been joined by a bevy of guest stars over the years, including the great Kristen Schaal as The Guide, a representative of the Vampiric Council who, a century ago, assigned the vampiric roomies to bring North America under the thrall of The Baron (Doug Jones), an ancient vampire lord. Needless to say, they haven’t made much progress towards that goal.
That’s where Season 6 kicks off. In the first of three episodes aired as the season premiere, the roomies suddenly remember to awaken their forgotten roommate Jerry, played by former SNLer Mike O’Brien. Jerry is a basic vampire who entered “super slumber” in 1976, leaving instructions that he be awakened in 1996. But Nandor and the crew got busy and kinda forgot. Jerry’s return serves as a wake-up call to our vamps. He’s baffled with the lack of progress at conquering the New World, and chalks it up to decadence. The Guide agrees and anoints Jerry as The Chosen One who will lead vampires to world domination. This leads the vamps to reconsider their comfortable, laid-back lives. But not too closely.
In the second episode, “Headhunting,” our vamps try to refocus themselves on their personal goals, which don’t really have anything to do with conquest. Laszlo returns to his scientific pursuits. He wants to reanimate dead tissue, like Dr. Frankenstein, and with the help of Colin and some gruesome slapstick, he pretty much succeeds. Meanwhile, in a subtle nod to The Office, Guillermo gets a job with another group of vampires, a private equity firm run by Jordan (Tim Heidecker). Nadja and Nandor, fearing their familiar’s betrayal, also infiltrate the firm to keep an eye on things.
The third episode, “Sleep Hypnosis,” is the funniest. Guillermo has moved out of the house and into the garden shed, to get a little much-needed independence from the vamps. This causes a power struggle in the house, as all four roomies want the space for themselves. When Colin complains to Guillermo that he can’t use his vampiric hypnosis on another vampire, the familiar recommends trying it when they’re asleep. It works, and as the idea spreads among the vamps, they take turns hypnotizing each other, with increasingly hilarious results.
So far, the final season has allowed the actors to stretch out and expand their characters. When Colin hypnotizes Nandor, Novak gets to do his dead-on Richard Nixon impersonation. Watching Guillermo interact with his new employer reveals that, for him, at least, the show has been a workplace comedy all along. So far, the final season shows every sign of What We Do in the Shadows going out while they’re at the top of their game. Unlike a certain monstrous presidential candidate, we’re going to miss these vampires when they’re gone.
What We Do in the Shadows Season 6 is now playing on FX and Hulu.
You might remember singer/songwriter Ted Horrell from his former band, The Central Standards, who won the Rock 103 Best Unsigned Band contest a few years back. Now, Horrell’s latest band, featuring David Twombly on drums, Eric Gentry on guitar, Casey Smith on bass, Dallas Pope on drums, and vocals from Natalie Duncan and Amy Gunnell, will celebrate the release of their album Mid-South Fare this Saturday, November 2 at Growlers. They call the band The Monday Night Card — which, not coincidentally, is the name of their first single.
Wrestling is a Memphis institution, and for decades, matches were broadcast from the Mid-South Coliseum. Big names and future superstars, from Jerry Lawler to Andy Kaufman to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, entered the squared circle on Memphis TV. The video for “The Monday Night Card” gives you a glimpse of the action in a montage directed by Ted’s brother Wilson Horrell.
If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
It’s Halloween weekend, so there’s plenty of scary stuff on the big screen this weekend. Let’s get to it!
Venom: The Last Dance
Tom Hardy returns for the third time as Eddie Brock, a former journalist who is the host for an alien symbiote named Venom. After defeating Carnage in the last film, he’s now on the run from the law in Mexico. But the man he’s accused of murdering is still alive, and the folks at Area 51 (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Juno Temple) are also looking for him, because the creator of the symbiotes, Knull (Andy Serkis), is on his way to Earth.
Your Monster
If you like your monsters a little friendlier, this indie rom com is the movie for you. Melissa Barrera is Laura, a young woman who survived cancer, only to have her boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) break up with her. As she’s trying to deal with all this trauma, a monster (Tommy Dewey) appears in her closet. And you know what? He may be boyfriend material.
I AM
Memphis filmmakers Jessica Chaney and Amanda Willoughby’s film about the mental health struggles of Black women will debut on WKNO on Friday, October 25th. The film, which was a hit at last year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival, is also screening at MoSH on Saturday, October 26th at 4 p.m., accompanied by a panel discussion with the film’s stars, Dr. Crystal DeBerry (Licensed Therapist), Angela Sargent (Educator), Angel Coleman (Hairstylist & Business Owner), and Jacqueline E. Oselen (wellness coach & certified Yoga Instructor), moderated by Indie Memphis programmer Kayla Myers. It’s free, but you’ll need to RSVP here.
Crosstown Fright-Tober
Crosstown Theater concludes their Fright-Tober series with a double feature on Saturday, October 26. First up is an all-time classic from Universal Pictures, The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Here’s one of the most famous sequences from the 1954 film, a landmark in underwater photography. That’s actor Ricou Browning holding his breath for 4 minutes per take in the Gill Man suit.
The second film of the double feature is 1981’s Evil Dead. Filmed in Tennessee, it’s a horror classic that launched the careers of director Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and, indirectly, the Coen Bros. Later films in the series, like Army of Darkness, pioneered modern horror comedy, but Evil Dead is legit scary and over-the-top as all hell.
Haxänwith Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra
One of the most influential horror films ever made is Haxän, director Benjamin Christensen’s hybrid documentary about the witch hunts of Europe in the Middle Ages. The recreations of black sabbath celebrations (with Christensen himself playing Satan) and inquisitions provide indelible images that have resonated through the decades. Wednesday, October 30th at the Crosstown Arts Green Room, Memphis Flyer music editor Alex Greene and his Rolling Head Orchestra with reprise the theremin-heavy live score he composed for the silent film, which was commissioned by Indie Memphis in 2022. I was there the first time, and it was awesome!
Steve Mulroy is the Shelby County District Attorney. He is also a science fiction fan who founded the annual Shelby County Star Trek Day. In this edition of “Never Seen It,” we filled in a major gap in Mulroy’s sci fi movie viewing: Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece Metropolis.
Chris McCoy: Steve Mulroy, what do you know about Metropolis?
Steve Mulroy: I know it is an old, black-and-white, silent classic by Fritz Lang. It’s a dystopian vision of the future, I think, of a city where the workers are exploited. I think this is the one that has the robots, Rossum’s Universal Robots?
CM: This was made after Rossum’s Universal Robots, which was a stage play, but it’s one of the first films to ever actually a feature a robot.
SM: Got it.
CM: So, how this came about was, you texted me and asked, “Should I see Megalopolis or not?” And I was like, “Well, I don’t know …” And then I gave one of my typically too-complex film critic answers. Then, you were like, “Well, I wanted to see Metropolis first to prepare myself, because I’ve never seen it.” I was like, “Oh, you said the magic words!”
153 minutes later…
CM: Okay, Steve Mulroy, you are now a person who has seen Metropolis. What did you think?
SM: I liked it! It was a little on the long side.
CM: We said a couple of times, “I can see why they cut this.”
SM: Yeah, definitely could use some editing, there. But no, I mean it was great. The plot was more convoluted than I expected. It wasn’t really simplistic, so it did keep my interest. I found it visually to be really impressive — not just for its time, but on its own merits. It was interesting, all the different architectural styles. You had some Gothic, you had some Art Deco, you had some Brutalist. Both of us were pointing out how it inspired things. I thought it was reminiscent of Modern Times in overall look.
Metropolis
CM: You definitely see visual echoes of it all over the place. Frederson, for example, looks like Moff Tarkin from Star Wars. And then the Thin Man is clearly the Darth Vader figure. Metropolis, the city itself, looks like Coruscant — or Coruscant looks like Metropolis, rather. And of course, the robot that becomes Maria, George Lucas basically said “For C3PO, I want something that looks like that!” All of Tim Burton’s movies comes from this. It was sort of the height of German Expressionism.
SM: You said earlier that this was the most expensive movie ever made up until this point. There were those huge sets! There were so many scenes where the screen just had thousands of people.
CM: They tried to drown some children.
SM: I know, right? And there are biplanes in the city of the future that looks very much like The Jetsons.
CM: One of the things I love about looking at this now — and I’ve seen this movie a dozen times in various forms — it makes me realize that, when you’re trying to see what the future looks like, you can see it to a certain extent, but there’s stuff that you’re always going to be stuck with that’s in your reality, like biplanes. We’ve got flying cars, but they can’t have just one wing. There’s gotta be two wings! They couldn’t get past that. But there’s other parts that that they that they really nailed, like the video phone. I’m not sure television had even been conceived of, but I know there wasn’t actually a working television until a few years later. There was a lot of attention paid to information technology throughout. Fredersen, the head guy, is depicted as the one who’s at the center of this web of information. And then, when he wants to sow discord to disrupt the revolution that’s coming, he tries a deep fake, basically. Make the robot look like their leader, and tell them to do destructive things.
SM: I was going to say the plot was more complicated than I thought, because I thought it was going to be simplistic: The workers are oppressed and the elite are exploitative, and then eventually there has to be some sort of revolution, or at least some resolution. It ends up being a little bit more convoluted than that. The industrialist tries to trick them into becoming violent so they’ll have an excuse to crack down on them. And then the twist is that the real bad guy, the inventor — it’s just nihilism, right? I mean, he just wants to burn everything.
CM: He’s gonna destroy the whole city because he’s jealous of Fredersen.
SM: So on the one hand, I give it credit for being a little bit more complicated and interesting than a simplistic plot. On the other hand, I could criticize it for being a cop-out, because the workers are sheep. They’re easily manipulated in one direction or another. Only the noble people who decide to lead them, kind of like a white savior thing, have any agency.
CM: And you did point that out while it was going on. It was like, wow, the masses of the people are just changing their mind on a whim.
SM: It just takes one demagogue, and not even a full speech! Just a couple of sentences into a demagogue of a speech, and they’re ready to turn.
CM: Let’s go!
SM: So the solution is not workers asserting their rights. It’s some sort of, I don’t know, half-assed, let’s all learn to live together …
CM: It’s a centrist movie.
SM: (laughs) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
CM: But the background is, this is 1927 in Germany, right? It’s 10 years after their defeat at the end of World War I. On their eastern border is the [Russian] Communist revolution. At this point, Lenin was dead, and Stalin had cracked down, so that’s the bogeyman to them, you know?
SM: That makes sense. If the message is anti-communist but pro-worker, I guess that makes a little more sense.
CM: I think the ultimate message is, you don’t have to go too far, because if you smash the whole society, then we’re all gonna die. The flood’s gonna come and we’re all gonna die. Which is what they were seeing next door to them. But it’s also very much an admission that the workers were in a bad spot.
SM: It was definitely sympathetic to the workers. And so the theme, which they hit over your head with multiple times, is that the heart has to be the mediator between the head and the hand. What exactly does that mean? Is it some sort of like, mixed economy message? I don’t know.
CM: Are we asking for too much from this?
SM: Maybe.
CM: I’m with you. I want the text to give me answers. But is that what it’s supposed to do? Maybe it isn’t what he set out to do? I don’t know. It’s a centrist movie.
SM: Yeah, it is like, we don’t have to go that far.
CM: Freder, the son, he switches place places with a worker.
SM: It’s like The Prince and the Pauper.
CM: He doesn’t even make it through a whole shift. He’s like, “Whoa, this is too much!” He can’t cut it down there. What does her [Maria’s] solution look like when they want to save the children at the end? You take them to the rich people’s place, to the Hall of the Sons. Evacuate to the pleasure palace.
SM: I thought that was good, and it made sense. Then there was the whole Whore of Babylon thing, which was an interesting side note. It definitely trafficked in the Madonna/whore binary, which was probably a product of its time.But notice the evil effect that the robot Whore of Babylon has in the upper classes. It makes them more decadent and dissolute. In the lower classes, it makes them violent. I just found it sort of an interesting dichotomy.
CM: There’s also this whole biblical thing. There’s a digression into the recreation of the story of the Tower of Babel …
SM: Slightly changed.
CM: Yeah, because it becomes like a …
SM: … a class warfare thing.
CM: Which is not what that story is about!
SM: I have to say I am actually pretty impressed with how sophisticated at all is, visually and thematically. When I heard it was 1927, I was expecting something really primitive.
CM: Some of those composite shots are incredible! I counted one, it had ten elements! The miniature work is incredible. too.
SM: Every shot where they were using miniatures or whatever to show the city from different angles was elegant and beautiful, and kind of striking. It compares favorably to some stuff from many, many decades later.
CM: There’s a reason people have been ripping this movie off for a hundred years.
CM: The actress who played Maria, Brigitte Helm, she’s incredible. I love watching actors do this in a movie, where they’re playing two different versions of the same person, and you can tell which one is which by the way they hold their shoulders.
SM: She does it very good job of portraying the dichotomy between the two versions of Maria. I’m forgiving the overdramatic, of its time, big acting because you don’t have the addition of the sound. You don’t have the words, right? So you’ve got to just use facial expressions and gestures to convey everything. I get all that. What bothers me about it, though, is everything takes too long. A reaction that should be a couple of seconds is 10 seconds. I don’t know if it was just the style of the time or whether it was a technical thing that they couldn’t cut as nimbly.
CM: I think part of that is stylistic and part of it is the people who are watching this originally did not have the visual vocabulary that’s been built up over the last hundred years that you and I do. There’s a trope that you see a lot in American films from the ’30s and ’40s, where, if they want to change locations, there’ll be an exterior shot, and you see the car drive up. We wouldn’t bother to do that.
Brigitte Helm as Maria.
SM: I give it a lot of credit. It’s more intelligent than a lot of movies that are made nowadays.
CM: God, yes!
SM: I’m not a purist. On the one hand, I do want to respect the director’s vision, so I can understand why people don’t want to colorize movies, or whatever. But I almost wish that there was floating around a more tightly edited version of this, just so that it would have a better chance of getting wider distribution among the general public.
CM: Well, there were! There’ve been a bunch of cuts of it over the years. We were watching the fully restored version. But that’s why some of it was lost for a long time, because it was cut way down for the American market. This version was pieced together out of several surviving negatives, one of which was found in Argentina.
SM: The slimmed down version that was shown to the American market, did it have that missing sequence where the father and the inventor fight it out?
CM: No.
SM: So that was never shown?
CM: No, that was never shown. That’s why it’s lost.
SM: In those versions, did they have a title card that explained it?
CM: No, they just cut it out.
SM: That seems like a pretty essential scene to just not show.
CM: Exactly. I think that was part of the reason why people didn’t understand it. You have a balance: this version is the completest version, and it is draggy in places, but you get the full sweep of the story. What was shown in America for a long time was butchered so badly that the plot hardly made any sense at all. There was a version that was released in the ’80s that was restored by Georgio Moroder, and it was colorized, but it was a really early colorization experiment. That’s the version that most people our age had seen. I think it’s like 90 minutes long, has songs by Freddy Mercury. It’s more like a giant music video. That’s when I was first introduced to it. I think probably on Night Flight, late night music video TV. A lot of people like to rescore it, too. One my favorite movie theater experiences of all time was an Indie Memphis screening where the Alloy Orchestra did a live score in front of an absolute packed house at The Paradiso, and it was amazing.
SM: I was just trying to think of all of the iconic sequences that this seems to have inspired.
CM: King Kong carrying Faye Wray up to the top of the building.
SM: I think the machinery sort of inspired Modern Times.
CM: Definitely Modern Times. Then Vertigo, the whole bit in the cathedral at the end. Hitchcock lifted the visuals on that, straight up. There’s so much more. People will use little riffs from it, too, because it’s taught in film schools.
SM:Frankenstein, with the inventor’s labs.
CM: Yeah, Freder hallucinates at the drop of a hat. Like, you need to chill, you know? I think it inspired Foundation, the city-planet of Trantor.
SM: Even those party scenes look like Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby.
CM: I also noticed this time the machine man. That’s a whole Kraftwerk album.
SM: I thought it was odd that they called it the machine man since it was so obviously a woman.
CM: Rotwang is just a a great villain. He’s got the mechanical hand, like Dr. Strangelove, which you pointed out.
SM: He’s got the wild hair. He’s got scientist hair.
Alfred Abel as Joh Fredersen, Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang, and Brigette Helm as The Machine Man in Metropolis.
CM: The boss Joh Fredersen, is like capital, right? The workers are like labor, right? And then there is the church, which is Maria, and then there’s an actual church, too, the cathedral. Rotwang is science. But Rotwang is the ultimate villain in the piece. It’s science fiction, but then there’s this anti-intellectual element to it, too.
SM: Right. But it’s also anti-Luddite.
CM: It is anti-Luddite, because it’s like, we have to have this progress. When they smash the machines, everybody dies. These are still debates that we’re having today, because we’ve never really gotten a good answer to them. Like you pointed out, the film doesn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion, either. They managed to lay out the problem, but they did not come to a satisfactory conclusion.
SM: Like you said, it’s probably unfair to expect a five-point plan at the end of it, but there was a through-line there. It was sympathy for the plight of the workers, but anti-Luddite, and anti-extremism.
CM And anti-violence. Violence is not gonna solve these problems. What’s your bottom line? Would you recommend people out there in TV land watch Metropolis today?
SM: If you are a cinephile you definitely need to see it, or if you’re really interested in history. I would recommend it for the average viewer, but I’d have to warn them that it’s a little patience taxing. I think maybe for the average viewer, I might recommend the slimmed down version.
David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown (Photos: courtesy Cineverse)
Those who know me, or read my column, have heard me go on and on about how the biggest problem in Hollywood today is executive incompetence. The heads of today’s major studios are so far removed from the product they’re producing, and so focused on boosting stock prices to juice their performance-based bonuses, that they miss obvious plays. The latest case in point is the month of October. The spooky season puts people in the mood for horror films. But the majors have missed the boat. First, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which couldn’t get more Halloween-themed, premiered the first week of September. Second, Robert Eggers of The Witch fame’s latest film is a remake of Nosferatu, a silent, German Expressionist film that was one of the earliest to bear the horror label. Universal scheduled its release on Christmas Day.
Instead of a high-art horror flick aimed straight at the zeitgeist, this October we got Joker: Folie à Deux, an epic disaster which will lose Warner Brothers a whopping $200 million. To add insult to injury, it’s not even the best evil clown movie of the year. That title will go to Terrifier 3, an indie film produced and released entirely outside of the Hollywood machine. It’s so indie, they didn’t even submit it for a rating.
The Terrifier series is written and directed by Damien Leone. The first film, which introduced David Howard Thornton as Art The Clown, cost $55,000, most of which was raised by a crowdfunding campaign. In 2022, Terrifier 2 upped the stakes to $250,000, introduced former stuntwoman Lauren LaVera as cosplaying final girl Sienna Shaw, and caught the imagination of horror heads to the tune of $15.7 million. For Terrifier 3, the budget has expanded to a whopping $2 million. That’s 100 times less than Joker’s budget, by the way. After its second weekend of wide release, it has grossed $41 million.
But enough business talk, how is it? Well, it’s disgusting, and I mean that in a good way. Ironically, it’s set at Christmas, five years after Sienna killed Art with a magic, demon-killing sword. But it takes more than a mere decapitation to keep a bad clown down. Art’s headless body reanimates and kills a cop (Stephen Cofield Jr.), then reunites with Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), a victim from the first installment who is now possessed by a demon known as the Little Pale Girl. After the pair recuperate by hanging out in a haunted house for five years, they are disturbed by a pair of workers scouting the house for demolition. Needless to say, it does not go well for them.
After gathering explosives, knives, guns, hammers, rats, and liquid nitrogen, Art and Victoria go off in search of Sienna, the one that got away. She’s getting out of the psych ward for the third time to spend Christmas with her Aunt Jess (Margaret Anne Florence), Uncle Greg (Bryce Johnson), and lovable but sneaky cousin Gabbie (Antonella Rose). They visit Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), Sienna’s younger brother who is dealing with his own PTSD while navigating his first year of college.
Leone hits all the beats of a classic slasher, and then some. The sound design can only be described as “juicy.” David Howard Thornton is absolutely terrifying as the wordless Art, a possessed undead clown (and worse, a mime) who experiences a high degree of job satisfaction. Amid the rivers of blood and viscera, there is winking humor. Art takes public transportation to his slaughter-fest, and nobody blinks an eye. A pair of true crime obsessed podcasters are convinced that Sienna is the prime suspect in the Miles County Clown Massacre, only to learn the hard way how wrong they were.
Terrifier 3 is a meat-and-potatoes horror flick that the majors seem incapable of making, and audiences are rewarding it. Who knew that people want to see horror at Halloween? Everyone but Hollywood.
Gonerfest 21 happened September 26-29, and by all accounts it was the biggest one yet. This year, the Memphis Flyer co-sponsored the live stream, and I handled the between-set interview segments. You can see the best interviews, featuring myself and Ryan Haley of Ryan’s Shorts fame in this supercut video.
One of the highlights of the interview reel is Annie-Claude Deschênes from PyPy. They tore up the stage on Friday, as the remnants of Hurricane Helene drove the festival indoors at Railgarten, and then did it again at the afterparty. The Montreal band’s new album Sacred Times was just released on Goner Records, so we’re bringing you a sample of their barn-burning performance. Here’s the album opener “Lonely Striped Sock” live at Railgarten, as captured by the Goner TV Stream Team.
You can see PyPy’s entire Gonerfest set at this link.
If you’d like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.
