"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 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.