"COCKAZOID" (2022)

Cockazoid (2022)
Written by Nick Verdi, B.R. Yeager
Directed by Nick Verdi
Starring Jimmy Laine, Ethan Hansen, Franklin Statz
Running time 1 hour, 26 minutes

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, MJ Podcast Czar

It’s finally turning cold in Philadelphia after a unseasonably late turn from the warm weather. And oddly I find my mind returning to a flick I caught a few months back at this year’s Philadelphia Unnamed Film Festival. Cockazoid is a very uncomfortable film, as emotionally cold as the Massachusetts landscape it takes place in, but I find it exceedingly fascinating. It’s been sitting in the back of my mind since the screening ended, a sinister hum undermining my every quiet moment.

Cockazoid is the brainchild of director/co-writer Nick Verdi (co-written with author B.R. Yeager) and it’s …unsettling to say the least. Andrew (Jimmy Laine) is a loner. A disaffected young man who, it is obvious from the film’s opening moments, has become untethered from reality. He travels back to his hometown using a family tragedy as an excuse but his ultimate goal is to kill all the white men (not unlike himself) in Massachusetts. While he doesn’t even come close to achieving his goal, he comes a lot closer than most people ever would.

Now, I’m going to say something that might sound really odd: This movie is very funny. It’s super dark in tone, and filled with an almost continual sense of dread. The kills in the movie are brutal and the kind of low-budget explicit where the unrealism of them makes them more horrific - watching Andrew attempt to dismember a victim’s corpse in the woods with just a pocket knife and some random stick he found on the ground is kind of nauseating but it’s also hilarious in its futility. It’s why butchers don’t cut meat with a Swiss Army knife. It’s only because this is a film; because you can see that the torso he’s mutilating is fake, that it’s funny at all.

There’s a kind of sick humor in Andrew himself. He’s so cartoonishly incompetent and socially impotent that to even compare him to any type of specific mindset feels like an insult. He’s a cautionary tale. What sadly occasionally does really happen when extreme, deep-seeded mental illness and the kind of self-aggrandizing keyboard warrior mindset get too high on their own supply and think their fantasies of being some kind of philosophical warrior for a higher truth are in any way connected to reality. It’s the kind of thinking we see whenever any mass shooter or aspirant serial killer’s manifesto comes to light.

That’s also what I found most interesting in Cockazoid. Andrew’s inner monologues contain just glimpses into his beliefs, if you can even consider them actual, capital-B “Beliefs”. These brief bits of his headspace seem as unrelated to each other as they are to reality. One moment he’s rattling off statistics: how many white men live in Massachusetts, how much square footage the state has available for him to bury his army of victims, etc., and in the next moment he’s fantasizing about retiring to the afterlife to live in a mansion with a roof shingled in their teeth. This seemingly constant flux of his core motivation makes Andrew both more frightening and more pathetic in equal measure. Does he just want to kill for the sake of killing or is he hiding behind the scapegoat of a nebulous “greater purpose”.

I’m trying not to overuse the word “fascinating”. Just because it’s bad writing, not because I’m worried what you’ll think of my being fascinated by Cockazoid. I think the point of Cockazoid is to be fascinated by it. And disgusted, in equal measure.

The filmmaking is incredibly well done. Everything, everywhere feels cold. There’s hardly a moment where the tension or discomfort is allowed to ease up. The neighborhoods, woods, and fields of Massachusetts feel labyrinthine and claustrophobic. There are occasional peeks into Andrew’s early life that are shown as degraded and warped VHS home videos in his mind’s eye, a format that is inherently off-putting no matter what’s shown, but with the feeling of a horrific impending revelation looming, it becomes nail-biting.

Jimmy Laine’s performance as Andrew is just as incredible. There’s something to be said for a performance that isn’t afraid to be ugly that’s absolutely commendable when it fits the subject matter this well. As a character, Andrew has hyped himself up to the point that he almost has to kill someone or else admit that maybe the problem isn’t the entire world, maybe it’s just him. But once he’s done it, he has to justify it, which leads him back to the same place, mentally. And around and around it goes. As a performer, Laine’s large eyes bulge and shift, his motions are ungainly and awkward, the internal struggle he is having is clearly depicted at all times.

Not that I see myself as any great tastemaker, but I hope this article can help generate a little buzz about this film. It really should be seen. I reached out to director Nick Verdi, and as of yet he has gotten no real response about getting Cockazoid any proper distribution, which is honestly a disappointment. It’s not a film for everyone, nor is it one I could see myself rewatching every year - it’s much too unpleasant for that - but it’s still a film I’d like to own. I’d like to be able to show it to people (certain people who would appreciate/could handle it). It’s honestly a masterclass in low-budget filmmaking, in maintaining a very specific tone, in managing that sense of dread; all things that (especially) horror filmmakers should have access to. I hope it becomes more readily available soon.

Just as a footnote: the film’s title, as Verdi explained after the screening, is a derogatory term for white people (a bastardization of “caucasoid”), which I only mention because it’s not explained in the film itself, but I think it’s a fabulously perfect title in how the meaning and the almost creature-like imagery it conjures perfectly coalesce in the themes of the film.

Cockazoid is currently unavailable to view but hopefully that will change.
In the meantime, watch the teaser trailer for Sweet Relief, Nick’s next project, here on YouTube.
Support small films. Long Live the Movies.

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.This piece was written for MovieJawn, a fabulous site where you can find tons of other excellent movie-centric writings, a shop where you can subscribe to the quarterly physical zine, or listen to me on the  Hate Watch/Great Watch  podcast! Support the MovieJawn Patreon here!

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The PHRANCHISE of the OPERA (1989 - 1999)

The Phranchise of the Opera:
In which I throw flowers on stage for an under-seen horror franchise

By “Doc” Hunter Bush, MovieJawn Podcast Czar

In 1989 director Dwight H. Little (whose Halloween 4 was released the previous year) unleashed a then-new version of The Phantom of the Opera on the world. Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, it stars Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise) as Victorian composer Eric Destler, and Jill Schoelen (Popcorn, The Stepfather) as modern-day aspiring opera singer Christine. When Christine uncovers the notation for Destler’s composition Don Juan Triumphant as well as rumors of his involvement in many deaths and disappearances, she still decides to perform the piece for an audition and is subsequently knocked unconscious and awakens in 1885. After surviving numerous attempts on her life and well-being by Destler, and simultaneously pursuing an opera career in 1885, Christine returns to her own time believing Destler is dead, only to find that he has survived for a century due to a deal with the devil, and is now the producer of her opera, Mr. Foster. Christine steals his copy of Don Juan Triumphant, stabs Foster, and flees into the night.

Phantom ‘89 didn’t reinvent the horror wheel but it did enough things right that it spawned a seemingly little-known franchise spanning seven DTV (direct to video) sequels - eight total films in just ten years! - that rivals the highs and lows of horror franchises of the era, like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Hellraiser. It also perfectly encapsulates where franchise horror was in the years between the boom of the 1980s and its resurrection following Scream in 1996. For better or worse.

The filmography is as follows:
The Phantom of the Opera (1989)  - dir. Dwight H. Little
The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror of Manhattan (1990) - dir. Peter Lyons Collister
The Phantom of the Opera 3: Miseria Cantare (1991) - dir. Kinka Usher
The Phantom of the Opera 4: Nocturne (1994) - dir. Marc Forster
The Phantom of the Opera 5: O, Discordia (a.k.a Fear of Sound) (1996) - dir. Dick Bachmann
The Phantom of the Opera 6: The Last Canticle (1997) - dir. Risa Bramon Garcia
The Phantom of the Opera 7: Cacophony (1998) - dir. Alejandro Amenábar
The Phantom of the Opera 8: Epoch Dirge (1999) - Tony Trov, Johnny Zito

I won’t go into extensive detail about all of them, but there are some areas of the Phranchise of the Opera (as I think of it) which are absolutely worth noting. First of all, the films’ various directors are an interesting bunch. Horror has, and was especially in this era, a proving ground for aspiring filmmakers and the assorted Phantoms’ directors went on to direct a very diverse crop of films including Mystery Men (1999 - Usher), Monster’s Ball (2001 - Forster), The Others (2001 - Amenábar, who had directed Abre Los Ojos in ‘97), Alpha Girls (2013 - Trov, Zito), and 200 Cigarettes (Garcia). The only outliers are Peter Lyons Collister - Dwight H. Little’s cinematographer on Halloween 4, and the original Phantom ‘89 - who has a long cinematography career but never returned to directing, and Bachmann who just kind of vanished?

Likewise, horror tends to have a high turnover of new, relatively unknown talent. Before Scream became the phenomenon that it would eventually become, horror (especially of the franchise kind) was of a low enough priority that casting well-knowns wasn’t seen as very important which combined with the generally high character turnover rate, meant that most sequels featured less than 3 returning characters - though there are exceptions. Phantom ‘89’s original final girl Jill Schoelen only shows up in three of the sequels, while Englund bats a thousand appearing in all eight films in the Phranchise! Molly Shannon, who had a small supporting role in the original, actually reappears in The Last Canticle (1997) with no direct mention of the events of the original film. Other notable cast members appearing across the sequels include Christina Ricci (Wednesday from the ‘90s Addams Family movies), Jane Weidlin (Clue, The Go-Gos), Calvert DeForest (Larry Bud Melman from The Late Show with David Letterman), Mos Def (Monster’s Ball), Jennifer Rubin (Taryn from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), Pat Maztroianni (Degrassi franchise), Gabrielle Union (Bring It On), Taran Noah Smith (the youngest brother from Home Improvement) Lee Pace (recently of Bodies Bodies Bodies - more on him later), and weirdest of all given his eventual popularity, an uncredited, dialogue-less appearance from Philip Seymour Hoffman (Twister).

The plots of the sequels were at the best of times what you might call “loosely connected” by the concept of Destler’s music as a destructive force. In the finale of Phantom ‘89, after wounding Destler, Christine passes a street violinist who begins playing Don Juan Triumphant. Terror of Manhattan runs with this idea, with Christine hearing the song everywhere she goes. Haunted by this music, she can’t sleep, and seems to have lost her mind, claiming to have visions of Destler taunting her, narrowly avoiding being committed to an asylum. In further installments, the music is shown to be alternately hypnotic (Nocturne), to be an extension of Destler’s consciousness (Cacophony), or to induce madness in assorted forms (Miseria, Discordia, Canticle, Dirge) and in fact Miseria Cantare revealed that music was the dark art of choice of the demon Destler made his Faustian deal with in Phantom ‘89, implying that the demon was responsible for the dancing plague of 1518 as well as the frenzied phenomenon of Lisztomania. 

When the horror monsters popular throughout the 1980’s reached the 1990’s, things got very weird. The Hellraiser films touched on demonic construction and architecture, The Leprechaun went from space to the hood, Michael Myers was revealed to be the puppet for the druidic Cult of Thorn, and Jason Voorhees, after battling a stand in for Carrie, somehow takes a boat from a lake to NY harbor, and then goes to Hell. It’s a real “IYKYK” situation and describing 1990’s horror to people who don’t can sometimes seem like you’re just making the whole thing up. The Pharanchise of the Opera is no exception. Changing locations from New York to Philadelphia with little explanation (Miseria), not to mention the summer camp in the fictional town of Caramel Hill (Canticle, which filmed in New Jersey, but Caramel Hill’s location is never given), or the sensory deprivation tank-inspired feature length flashback to Destler and Jack the Ripper (Discordia), as well as the shifting tone of the flicks, and the changing effects of Don Juan Triumphant all come out of left field for first-time viewers.

In The Last Canticle, the counselors of a summer music camp (one played by the returning Molly Shannon) teach the children’s choir to sing DJT which somehow doesn’t affect anyone at the camp, but drives the residents of the nearby small town insane turning this sixth film - marketed as the supposed final installment - into a kind of redneck zombie film in which Destler ultimately almost becomes an antihero, sacrificing himself to Hell in the final moments.

The following film, 1998’s Cacophony dips the deepest into Horror/Comedy, opening with Destler in Hell, introducing other spirits who had fallen prey to the demon including ones seemingly based on the original Universal Studios versions of the Phantom of the Opera (1925, 1943), a disfigured ‘70s rock star - seemingly an allusion to Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974), one that appears to be a reference to Fantômas (the silent film criminal character created in 1911) and Jack the Ripper. They all follow when Destler manages to escape from Hell and he spends the film tracking them down and returning them to Hell with the assistance of a 1998 Lee Pace. The relatively recent rediscovery of noted babe Pace in this bonkers film has even led to a few versions of the popular “Spider-Men pointing” meme.

The last film in the Phranchise, 1999’s Epoch Dirge has had a similar grassroots rediscovery-via-meme. Released on the eve of the new millennium, the film’s plot is a bubbling cauldron of Y2K-fearing hacker clichés where the climax sees the heroes (including Jennifer Rubin) fail to prevent a mass destructive upload that, among other effects sees satellites somehow blasting Don Juan Triumphant at midnight around the globe - the final moments show the astronauts aboard a Mir station stand-in sabotaging the station and steering it towards North America before cutting to black. The series ended on this potential cliffhanger, but the film’s real legacy is the memetic reappropriation via .gif of a particular line of dialogue, similar to Silent Night, Deadly Night 2’s (1987) “Garbage day!” line. In Dirge’s case, a gruff-voiced computer tech (often erroneously identified as Michael Chiklis) says the line “Tha innernet. It’s tha wave of tha future!”

Hilarious as that may be (and it is), the true draw, and what should rightfully be the lasting legacy of the series, is the monster, Eric Destler himself. Robert Englund gradually leans into camp as the Phranchise continues, and by the time he’s in a weird buddy-cop type movie hunting down escaped killers (Cacophony), the series had taken on a tone almost like the Batman series from 1966 but made through a Paul Greengrass-esque lens. The makeup for the Destler Phantom also evolved over time. In the ‘89 Phantom, he looked, well, kinda like Freddy Krueger. It’s hard to say whether this is exacerbated by it being Englund under the makeup or not. But Destler’s version of the traditional Phantom of the Opera mask is one made of human skin, which lends the whole thing a different dimension. Any time the series is flashing back to Destler’s era of 1885, he has this kind of Hannibal Lecter-meets-Leatherface disguise that’s constantly rotting and falling apart. It’s gruesome and wonderful. In his future (1989 and on) he has access to these synthetic appliances; essentially Darkman style false faces. They mostly all resemble Englund/Destler throughout the series, with the exception of one nightmare in Nocturne where the final girl caresses her boyfriend’s face only for her fingers to go right through the skin to Destler’s face underneath, and a gag in Cacophony - again, the most madcap in the series - where he briefly disguises himself as a cop. 

Also, notably for a horror franchise of the era, Destler is mostly just A Guy. He’s never explicitly shown to have supernatural abilities, though you could argue his resilience to bodily harm and instances of nearly superhuman strength might qualify, it’s left fairly open ended, à la Halloween’s Michael Myers (pre Curse of Michael Myers in 1995 with the overtly supernatural Mark of Thorn). Aside from Destler’s implied nearly inexhaustible fortune (the result of his long life? Or possibly another stipulation in his demonic deal?), he has no notable special abilities. He’s essentially a psychopathic Batman.

The logic, plot, and continuity of the Phantom of the Opera's ‘90s Phranchise is tangled and inconsistent, but not any worse than its theoretical shelf-mates like Hellraiser, Friday the 13th, the aforementioned Halloween, or Leprechaun, among many others. As we keep seeing these more well-known franchises getting spotlighted with relaunches, reimaginings, or long-gap sequels, I keep waiting for the moment that light shines on the Phantom. Presumably some version of the Phantom character would have ended up in Universal’s Dark Universe, had that succeeded. But it didn’t, so let’s get weird and musical! I think the Phantom of the Opera (1989) has earned an encore.

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Disclaimer:
The preceding article, save the opening paragraph, is entirely a falsehood. While there was a Phantom of the Opera made in 1989 and it is as described, it spawned no sequels despite being actually quite good. This article was written as a thought experiment and celebration of both the kitchen-sink approach to ‘90s horror franchises, as well as a monster, character, and performance I feel has been woefully overlooked.

After first viewing Phantom ‘89, I could not believe it hadn’t caught on and in considering what the ensuing films might have looked like, I conceived the rough approximation of a franchise described above. Would that we all had lived in that world. I hope you enjoyed it, that it may have ignited some creative spark in you, and that you’re not too mad at being ever-so-briefly deceived.

It should be mentioned that a sequel was proposed, but never made and eventually became the film Dance Macabre (1992), also starring Robert Englund.

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This piece was written for MovieJawn, a fabulous site where you can find tons of other excellent movie-centric writings, a shop where you can subscribe to the quarterly physical zine, or listen to me on the  Hate Watch/Great Watch  podcast! Support the MovieJawn Patreon here!

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"THE OUTWATERS" (2022)

The Outwaters
Directed & written by Robbie Banfitch
Starring Robbie Banfitch, Angela Basolis, Scott Schamell, Michelle May
Currently unrated
Runtime 1 hour, 40 minutes

“The Outwaters shows that Found Footage is the Haiku of Horror Filmmaking”

By Allison Yakulis & Hunter Bush

Hunter Bush: Filmmakers are always fighting against limitations. Sometimes it’s an idea that can’t be realized, sometimes it’s having a very slim budget, sometimes it’s just scheduling constraints. Regardless, they’re all roadblocks between a filmmaker and their ideal finished project. Creative filmmakers find ways to not just work around their limitations, but to work with them; use these hurdles to their advantage.

Found footage, as a genre, works within limitations. You don’t need professional gear, actors, or cinematography. The almost user-generated nature of the conceit also allows for narrative gaps that can help with pacing and budget. Even still, within the sub genre of found footage, some films are more inventive or innovative than others. With The Outwaters, writer/director/star Robbie Banfitch may have used the limitations of a young filmmaker more creatively than any other example I can call to mind.

Allison Yakulis: To me, found footage is a genre fraught with mediocre efforts. It has enough structure to delineate it as its own genre, is cheap enough that anyone with access to any sort of camera can film in this style, and when actually done well is considered a triumph in monetizing art as it is, again, cheap and accessible to produce. Of course, when it’s done poorly there’s a lot of shaky camera, often in the dark, to hide seams and give the appearance of a novice photographer, and in some of the most egregious instances it breaks the “rules” and depicts sequences that no camera handheld or otherwise could’ve picked up. Found footage is the haiku of horror filmmaking: beautiful in its simplicity when well-executed, but too frequently lackluster or incoherent due in large part to the perception that anybody can do it.

Overall I enjoyed The Outwaters. In fact, I would argue it’s in the top of its genre, on par with films like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Cloverfield (2008), and Host (2020). When this film hits, it hits hard and cuts deep. Is it a perfect film? No, it’s laggy in parts of the third act with a few nighttime sequences that are too dark and chaotic to glean a meaningful understanding of what is actually going on. In these moments it started to lose me as a viewer. Banfitch carefully arranges his setting, characters, goals, and scope, but when given a slow burn setup I expect a splashy, manic ending. An impartial editing for pace would give the drop-at-the-end-of-the-rollercoaster feeling, rather than the emotional whiplash I felt.

There are moments in this movie that are so arresting, so wickedly gleeful that it’s going to stick with me for years, I can feel it already. 

HB: The basic premise of The Outwaters, just so that we’re all on the same page, is that four friends go into the Mojave desert to film a music video: aspiring director Robbie (Banfitch), his brother Scott (Scott Schamell) who will function as an assistant, hair & makeup stylist Ange (Angela Basolis), and Michelle (Michelle May) the video’s star. Michelle is a singer, and the quartet’s plan is to just film a bunch of beautiful footage of a glamorous looking Michelle in the natural splendor of the Mojave.

Low budget found footage can get a little repetitive, right? There’s usually only a few locations, because they’re shooting on the cheap. Outwaters almost suffers from this but, for my mileage, every time we repeated a gag or location, Banfitch at least tried to make it feel different. The flick is divided up into three memory cards recovered after the film’s events, and things build in a very by-the-book manner. The first card is all preliminaries; getting to know the characters and how they interact. Card two is getting to the desert, filming a music video, and some spookiness that’s light enough to be laughed off the next day. Card three is not just the most concentrated supernatural madness, but it keeps changing; recontextualizing what I thought was going on. To be clear, what I mean is not just what my guesses were for what the movie was, but actually changing what I thought things I had already seen meant.

Early on, having only seen the trailer (which to be fair is mostly darkness, blood and yelling), after the characters find a fire ax stuck into the crest of a low hill, I figured that I was settling in for a The Hills Have Eyes type survival horror. That was a guess and it was wrong. That’s not what I’m talking about. The reliance on darkness (full dark, no stars; absolute blackness) means your mind’s eye is taking fragments of shapes glimpsed in a flashlight beam and trying to use the sonic information being presented (footfalls, scraping across the desert floor, yelling, panting, *noises*, etc) to form an image of what might be happening. Then something else would happen that would change all those mental images. This third act basically functions as that parable of the blind men and the elephant, which I think is fascinating. I won’t go into specifics I guess because The Outwaters should be experienced with the least foreknowledge possible. 

AY: Hunter had also mentioned in our discussions that the conceit of filming a music video allows for more artistic flairs than many other found footage-type films. When you make one of your characters a filmmaker or cinematographer, that can be a really smart move to allow some nice, attractive, old-school camera use to establish setting and dole out some eye-candy before things get weird and shaky. He noticed it, and yes, I really dug that too. It not only fleshes out a character but it gives these early sequences an excuse to be fun and beautiful and light and arresting, improving the overall visual quality of the film and providing a nice counterpoint to the darkness and gore in the latter half.

Tropes or pitfalls, you decide. It’s these very things that take me out of other found footage films that The Outwaters generally executes or subverts pretty well. It makes a lot of smart choices, selecting a beautiful location that photographs excellently and feels remote, going for practical effects and sharp editing, often using suggestion and indirect shooting to let your imagination do the heavy lifting.

How do you feel about found footage as a genre? Do you prefer it steeped in realism? A way to tell a story creatively and within a rigid framework? Or do you find it a difficult style to work within/enjoy as a viewer?

HB: What Allison said about Found Footage being the Haiku of Horror Filmmaking is absolutely spot-on. With The Outwaters, if you get too hung up on the narrative you’d be missing the point. Robbie Banfitch has crafted something that seems very simple, but he’s gotten every ounce of impact from it. What it might lack for you in traditional logic it more than makes up for as a masterwork of form. It truly shows that with enough creativity and sheer will, you can manage fantastic things even when working within constraints.

AY: I think Hunter and I both recommend this movie and I agree that it should be viewed without knowing specifics - it is at its best and most fun when it blindsides you. I think where our feelings diverge is in this third act. I was anticipating similar clarity as in earlier sequences and felt restless when presented with lots of sound and little picture (the lagginess I mentioned earlier) - I didn’t have enough suggestion as to what was going on so these parts started to lose me rather than sharpen my nerves. Yet they would be interspersed with enough weirdness or clear daylight views or, yes, references to earlier locations or events that I could reorient myself into what was still a very surreal “distemporal” narrative; in fact, it really stuck the landing for me and I walked out happy at the end. In summation I think our feelings differ as to whether The Outwaters is a credit to, or the exception in, its horror subgenre.

The Outwaters should be available on Screambox in January 2023, after a limited theatrical run.