Reflections on ... The Substance (2024)

 

/ Demi Moore in The Substance (2024) /

Hagsploitation truly is the horror sub-genre that keeps on giving. Sparked by the unexpected success of 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in the 1960s and 70s, maturing female stars of golden age Hollywood extended their careers by swallowing their pride, embracing their inner scream queen and plunging into exploitation shockers: think of Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, Olivia de Havilland, Agnes Moorehead and Shelley Winters starring in the likes of Strait-Jacket, Hush … Hush … Sweet Charlotte, Berserk, Lady in a Cage, Die! Die! My Darling, Dear Dead Delilah and especially the “question movies” Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, What’s the Matter with Helen? and What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? 

Roaring back from career doldrums (I last remember her playing Miley Cyrus’ mother in 2012), 61-year-old Demi Moore finds herself in a similar position in director Coralie Fargeat’s grisly and stylish satire The Substance. In a gutsy, exposed (in every sense) performance, Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a middle-aged television celebrity abruptly fired by ageist and sexist network executive (Dennis Quaid, really chomping the scenery). Despondent, Elisabeth takes desperate measures to rejuvenate her “best self” with a mysterious unregulated black market scientific procedure called The Substance … and things swiftly unravel. 

Characterized by stunning art direction and a visceral sound design that emphasizes every repulsive squelching noise, The Substance ratchets up maximum dread and offers a goldmine of knowing movie references: Basket Case. Carrie. Death Becomes Her. The Elephant Man. The Shining. Every single David Cronenberg “body horror” flick but particularly The Fly. Thematically, it reminded me of two specific b-movies from the late 1950s: The Wasp Woman and The Leech Woman, in which the anti-heroine experiments with science (or voodoo) to restore youth and beauty with monstrous consequences (and – it must be noted - these films make their point with a fraction of The Substance’s budget and two hour-and 40-minute running time). 

The Substance is bound to be divisive. There was multiple “walk outs” when I saw it yesterday. Does it critique society's youth fixation or wind up reaffirming it? And has Fargeat lost control of the material by the ultra-gory splatter fest finale? However you cut it, it’s a wild ride and destined for cult status.

Reflections on ... The Weak and the Wicked (1954)

 

/ Pictured: Diana Dors and Glynis Johns in The Weak and the Wicked (1954) /

Recently watched: The Weak and the Wicked (1954) (re-titled Young and Willing for the North American market). Tagline: “Frank, raw-truth exposé of women’s prisons! The terrors … abuses … scandals!” 

Who doesn’t love a gritty women-in-prison exploitation movie? Give me a Caged (1950), Women’s Prison (1955), Betrayed Women (1955), Girls in Prison (1956), Women Without Men (1956) or Caged Heat (1974) and I am entranced! (The whole genre was brilliantly parodied by SCTV in 1977 in the essential sketch “Broads Behind Bars”). 

Compared to these lurid, hard-boiled American exemplars, the British variation The Weak and the Wicked undeniably feels buttoned-up, drab, downbeat and yes, tame, by comparison but it’s not without its merits. Glynis Johns stars as Jean Raymond, a posh upper-class woman (she wears prim little white gloves!) with a gambling addiction sentenced to prison on a trumped-up fraud charge. We watch as Jean and the other new arrivals file-in to be “processed” by the stern prison matrons: weighed, bathed (“strip!”), checked for lice and issued their frumpy uniforms. Once installed, Jean promptly befriends brassy peroxide blonde Betty Brown (the perennially sensational Diana Dors. Betty’s first words to Jean: “gizza fag!”). With each new female inmate Jean encounters, we get a flashback outlining her backstory (some are funny, some are tragic). British cinema aficionados should watch for Rachel Roberts, Sybil Thorndike, Irene Handl and Sid James in small roles. (I think it was contractually obligated for either James or Herbert Lom to appear in every single British film of the period). Director J Lee Thompson would reunite with Dors for yet another, better-known women-in-prison movie, Yield to the Night (inspired by the Ruth Ellis case) in 1956.

Reflections on ... The Deliverance (2024)

 

Recently watched: Netflix’s The Deliverance (2024). Tagline: “Every family has its demons.” 

Directed by the reliably juicy and lurid Lee Daniels (the filmmaker best known for Precious (2009) and The Paperboy (2012)), it begins as a gritty urban drama (complete with Lil’ Kim on the soundtrack) about poverty, abuse, alcoholism, and racism as we watch the troubled African American Jackson family (mother, three kids and grandmother) hoping for a fresh start by moving into a new home in blue collar Pittsburgh. But within no time, it becomes apparent the house is cursed, and The Deliverance shifts tone into berserk, traumatic down-and-dirty horror in the tradition of The Exorcist (1973) or Amityville Horror (1979). (Or more accurately, The Deliverance is like an update or variation of Abby, the 1974 Blaxploitation version of The Exorcist). All the demonic possession horror movie tropes are present and correct: possessed children scuttle up the walls. Characters suddenly adopt growling, guttural voices or speak in tongues or develop stigmata on their hands. A cross on the wall bursts into flame. When someone is sprinkled with holy water, they scream “It burns!” 

Is The Deliverance silly and cliched? Sure, and the reviews have been savage, but if you keep your expectations low it’s also a blast. And the acting is exceptional: Andra Day is ferocious as tough, beleaguered single mom Ebony Jackson, as is Mo’Nique as a no-nonsense social worker. But it’s Glenn Close - gamely sporting wig and make-up choices pitched somewhere between Tammy Faye Bakker and Rachel Dolezal - as flamboyant born again grandmother Alberta (her wildest role since playing J D Vance’s Mamaw in Hillbilly Elegy) who steals the whole thing. Alberta is the kind of part Shelley Winters or Susan Tyrrell once might have played and the way Close attacks it is pure, gleeful hagsploitation. My favourite scene: the three generations of Jackson women (grandmother, mother and granddaughter) braiding each other’s hair while watching 1967 camp classic Valley of the Dolls on TV and reciting the “Broadway doesn't go for booze and dope” dialogue off by heart. But weirdly, for such a cine-literate family, none of them seems to have watched The Exorcist!