Could our current Alt-Right Hype-Bart macho backwash moment be the last gasp of a drowning buffalo? If so, it's a comfort that what is best in man, his ability to celebrate and pay tribute to strong women, should be remembered and absorbed by the nation's upstart pretty young things. Maybe the mighty masterpieces of switchblades and eyeliner by Meyer, Hill, Wood, Corman, Tenney, Waters, Sarno, etc. will live on long past that buffalo's panicked squealing, ennobling a new breed of female filmmakers like Anne Biller (THE LOVE WITCH) and, most recently, precocious maniac Kansas Bowling, whose entry in the burgeoning prehistoric slasher-beach party genre, BC BUTCHER, was begun when she was just seventeen. Shot on bright and lovely actual film (16mm, but still), it's been released through Troma, and is currently available on Amazon Prime screaming und soon ze vorld. It's nowhere near as polished and coherent as Biller's film but damn if it don't look like itself, and it's the only one close to doing that. It's so itself it even clocks in at a mere 52 minutes, which as we all know is a weird length, too long to be a short, too short to be a feature. Usually if a distributor (Toma in this case) wanted to bring it out they'd give the filmmaker a few bucks to shoot some filler to get over the 65 minute mark. Bowling says, nay, no thank you Lloyd. It's perfect as it is. And what the hell is it if not its own damn thing? Bowling has made her own category, and there's no going back. The faux-leopard skin costumes are clearly cut from the fabric store by jagged scissors the way a mom might whip up a Halloween costume never meant to survive the night. And the group is regularly endangered by their tribal leader's adolescent insecurity. Everything is perfect.
As with so many of Bowling's admitted favorite films (she likes Herschel Gordon Lewis and Doris Wishman! Eww!) the BUTCHER ain't exactly CITIZEN KANE, or even ONE MILLION BC or even CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. Or even GAVE GIRL, ADAM AND EVE VS. THE CANNIBALS. or even EEGAH! But who wants them? Where da art der? No art at all for Bowling, just a THING THAT WOULDN'T DIE-style romance between hulking prehistoric monster, the Butcher (Dwayne Johnson) and the vengeful spirit of a girl murdered by the fierce amazonian tribal leader (Leilani Fideler) for sleeping with her man, an unbearably fey Rex (Kato Kaelin). Butcher finds her body, takes it to a cave, adorns it with fruit, and falls in love with her - her ghost (?) driving him forward to wreak bloody vengeance.
Later, Rodney 'the Mayor of the Sunset Strip' Bingenheimer and his friend Duck-Duck appear on a rock--in full 'modern' hipster clothes--to introduce 'the Ugly Kids,' a proto-punk band playing their latest "hit", using watermelons as instruments and generally behaving 'antically' as if they were in a Monkees video.
In other words, ain't a damn thing changed since the way old days, as high school-age Bowling coveys. This is a story of a girl clique that lives and dies in a few hundred yard radius, their turf, their territory, and their queen has to hold it. It's AAW (All About Women), ala a lion pride, where the male lions are either monsters (the Buthcer), mincing idiots (Kaelin), or punk rock anachronisms (the Ugly Kids). Instead of browbeating the issue, though: Bowling's rolled a perfect 'j' on the Bechdel Test.
We need girls like Kansas, they are the real future, if there's to be one. Her arrival on the scene is like a nascent Hill-Waters-Meyer version of John Connor, with the Terminator foe being the cookie cutter indie horror with its endless deluge of two-hander captivity dramas, torture-revenge cycles, haunted new tract homes, depressed misogyny masked as joyless softcore camp, and washed-out, wan HD video patinas. The rows of Prime streaming are choked with such things. Seek ye them not!
Look at her there, at left - a kind of Fiona Apple of the post-Psychotronic future, a groovy schlockmeister Joan of Arc. Whole cliques and tribes rise up around such figures, leading to the question of why and when will Bowling act in her own films (she's an extra in some of the scenes --left) but that's it. She should, for just like CITIZEN KANE is really as much about Orson as it is about Hearst, it's clear how her own charisma and cool has made a slight fan bubble around what is essentially a home movie almost lampooning her own mania for carnage. She turns the audience into an adoring and slightly senile grandfather. and the French troops besieging 1429 Orléan. We follow her into the flames, but then find her licking the walls and babbling about tiny monsters inside her skin ---or worse, giggling. We know we've made a huge mistake and will not escape the inferno alive.
Then again, who does? (As Edward James Olmos would say).
As for other films by women in the genre, (it would also make a good triple bill with THE LOVE WITCH and #HORROR) it bravely does what it wants far outside the normal patriarchal linear structure. Billed as a 'prehistoric slasher film,' BUCHER is certainly not the least bit scary and, for a mostly-female cast, not sexy. It's not even very funny. In fact, it's probably somewhere between an annoying slumber party your younger sister is having upstairs, and if you fell asleep flipping back and forth between TEENAGE CAVEMAN and BEACH BLANKET BINGO after a night getting drunk outside the City Gardens All-Ages punk rock show circa 1983. If that ain't your bag, Jimson, just move along. If your little sister's friends are bothering you, put on your headphones and pretend to be asleep. It's only one night, and you will probably survive. Just don't open your eyes or you might see some gnarly shit.
 |
| The shirt, sez it all |
We need girls like Kansas, they are the real future, if there's to be one. Her arrival on the scene is like a nascent Hill-Waters-Meyer version of John Connor, with the Terminator foe being the cookie cutter indie horror with its endless deluge of two-hander captivity dramas, torture-revenge cycles, haunted new tract homes, depressed misogyny masked as joyless softcore camp, and washed-out, wan HD video patinas. The rows of Prime streaming are choked with such things. Seek ye them not!
Then again, who does? (As Edward James Olmos would say).
As for other films by women in the genre, (it would also make a good triple bill with THE LOVE WITCH and #HORROR) it bravely does what it wants far outside the normal patriarchal linear structure. Billed as a 'prehistoric slasher film,' BUCHER is certainly not the least bit scary and, for a mostly-female cast, not sexy. It's not even very funny. In fact, it's probably somewhere between an annoying slumber party your younger sister is having upstairs, and if you fell asleep flipping back and forth between TEENAGE CAVEMAN and BEACH BLANKET BINGO after a night getting drunk outside the City Gardens All-Ages punk rock show circa 1983. If that ain't your bag, Jimson, just move along. If your little sister's friends are bothering you, put on your headphones and pretend to be asleep. It's only one night, and you will probably survive. Just don't open your eyes or you might see some gnarly shit.
 |
| Bowling - center - a worker among workers, melons. |
TRIBAL SLEDDING: THE CITIZEN KANE CAVE
The issue revealed within BUTCHER is the deep resemblance between an unchaperoned Girl Scout camping trip and life in a prehistoric tribe where the men went out hunting three years ago and never came back (ala Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent). Packs of girlfriends going through puberty, these gals rely on strength in numbers. Cockblockers run routine patrols around the camp perimeter, fully aware slashers strike when couples are at their most vulnerable and isolated, i.e. finding a secluded spot to fool around. There's safety-in-numbers, so going off alone, in pairs, or even to look for the last girl who vanished, is to risk never coming back. In these thick woods, a mere 20 yards away may as well be different country, or the territory of some hungry monster, or rival tribe
Despite the undercutting and man-stealing, what we do see throughout BC is a kind of monkey-grooming tribal togetherness that's usually very hard to capture and welcome to see. A lot of other female-clan-led overdo the girls' initial victimization - as if women warriors are all forged in the heat of abuse by men, rather than via their own desires. Bowling's movie is way beyond that. A boy or two might play a part either as monster or object of desire tussled over between tribal girls, but in the end the men are little more than objects meant more to be boasted about, to run from, or to get with in order to seem sexually mature, then for any hormonal drive. They might stab each other in the back, or front, over one, but they make up as fast as they squabble. In the end it's the boy who suffers - they both drop him - sisterhood comes first.
What I really admire about this weird little mess of a film is that Bowling writes like a 16-17 year-old girl rather than aiming beyond her years and sometimes coming off naive, i.e. winding up like a Paul Thomas Anderson-Richard Kelly type for whom high literature seems to underwrite even the expletives. If theirs is the airbrushed-ELO van-driving older brother cinema, Bowling's is little sister punk rock slow walk home through the bad neighborhood without fear version. And that's what BC is, make no mistake. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The things that would please BUTCHER's detractors (if she added more breasts, sex, gore, scares, terrible jokes) would knock it back into just another Troma piece of shit territory. The fans of such things may heave trollish resentment upon BC's imdb user comments just as higher-brow critics climbed over themselves with loathing for #HORROR and before that, TWILIGHT, or any other film that explores female psyche in its menstrual blood-drenched fury (re: The Bechdel Test), but they already lost. They is losers... incel 4 life. And they know it.
Despite its problems #HORROR is film I'll defend any time, for its 'evil wild child ride into the whirlwind of mini-lynching hot potato pariah badge passing' style is mad rare. It probably scares parents into blind hatred, much the way KIDS once did. But I'd rather see and hear that kind of organic madness, cohering and dissolving like salt pool eddies in an incoming or outgoing tide, than some white elephant 'story' any day. Bowling's characters are at each other's throats often enough, but united against more than exterior threats. They might kill each other and step on each other's turn to pick the activity for 'evening theater' but they make up and apologize too. It's the kind of clique-based insecurity round-robin intrinsic to adolescence (and threatening to a lot of adults) where depending on the group leader, even as you undermine her authority and steal her man, is no paradox. Little squabbles and apologies make up the ebb and flow of the 'pack mind'. Phrases are repeated and expanded on as if everyone is making declarative statements for the first time, then going back over them as if to remind themselves of their character notes which most dialogue hardly ever covers but is actually they way young groups of people talk, and is how slang spreads so fast.
Chief Neandra (Fideler) for example keeps reiterating she already killed "the beast" so there can't be a real external threat (a split second flashback shows super fast shows her ripping stuffing from a small stuffed tiger). She might be a little too chest-thumpingly insecure and needy but she also can check herself and make up with girls she wronged; she knows when to take credit for killing a monster before it's even dead, but also doesn't run from the fight if it comes around her way. She knows instinctively that the one way to beat a monster in a cave fight is to pick the fruit off his girlfriend's dead body. For his beloved is none other than the girl Leilana killed and, partially devoured, in the opening scene, gussied up in a weird Vorhees mom FRIDAY 13th PART 2-style shrine. In other words, it's true love between hulking monster and vengeance-crazed corpse/ghost (laughing in black and white nightmare flashbacks in ways shockingly similar to the girl laughing at William Campbell from inside his wet canvas in BLOOD BATH).
For that alone BC BUTCHER deserves to stand next to LOVE WITCH, DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT, and AMER (not in their league but it can still stand by them). Bowling's brazen anti-style idiocy proves a refreshing antidote to Brit Marling's self-important bourgeois 'intellectual' sci-fi films. Watching Marling's work you know she probably has never even seen any of the Hill-Meyer-Corman style primitivist drive-in fare. She's too busy cooing over SOLARIS and 2001. Her loss, man. Well, maybe there's room for both extremes. Maybe both the lowbrow/highbrow women can alike join Biller, Amirpour, Xan Cassavettes, and Helene Cattet, to stand with elders Jennifer Kent, Karyn Kusama, Roxanne Benjamin, to create a true kind of female horror, where men are neither the focus nor the demographic and Bechdel becomes an obsolete term.. My male gaze stands ready to feel alienated, to feel what the female gaze has felt for so long. Let the scissors fall through the center of my evening paper. The ancient past is now rewritten in Panic hair dye and cheap punk rock wigs. The future is in good, fake blood-smeared hands. She might be named Kansas Bowling, but she's not trying to be coy or conforming to some masculine gaze or nerd ideal. She actually loves this shit. She worked odd jobs all summer to afford 16mm instead of cheap video. Her love of the trash classics is palpable in every junky frame. I love that I don't even like it. It's the dawn of the non.
RELEVANT:
"It is the waving of her Heavenly Hair!' The Sanctiomonious Sci-Fi of Marvy Brit Marling
Let the Darionioni Nuovo Entrain your Dissonance: AMER (2009)
Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH (2016)
Take out the Kids and Tuck in the Trash: #HORROR
Prepare for the Coming of the Hillary Matriarchy: DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT
Babes of Wrath: Dangerous Women of the New Depression vs. American Dogma
America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton
CinemArchetype 23: The Wild Child
The Beautiful and the Darned: Avenging TWILIGHT
The issue revealed within BUTCHER is the deep resemblance between an unchaperoned Girl Scout camping trip and life in a prehistoric tribe where the men went out hunting three years ago and never came back (ala Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent). Packs of girlfriends going through puberty, these gals rely on strength in numbers. Cockblockers run routine patrols around the camp perimeter, fully aware slashers strike when couples are at their most vulnerable and isolated, i.e. finding a secluded spot to fool around. There's safety-in-numbers, so going off alone, in pairs, or even to look for the last girl who vanished, is to risk never coming back. In these thick woods, a mere 20 yards away may as well be different country, or the territory of some hungry monster, or rival tribe
Despite the undercutting and man-stealing, what we do see throughout BC is a kind of monkey-grooming tribal togetherness that's usually very hard to capture and welcome to see. A lot of other female-clan-led overdo the girls' initial victimization - as if women warriors are all forged in the heat of abuse by men, rather than via their own desires. Bowling's movie is way beyond that. A boy or two might play a part either as monster or object of desire tussled over between tribal girls, but in the end the men are little more than objects meant more to be boasted about, to run from, or to get with in order to seem sexually mature, then for any hormonal drive. They might stab each other in the back, or front, over one, but they make up as fast as they squabble. In the end it's the boy who suffers - they both drop him - sisterhood comes first.
What I really admire about this weird little mess of a film is that Bowling writes like a 16-17 year-old girl rather than aiming beyond her years and sometimes coming off naive, i.e. winding up like a Paul Thomas Anderson-Richard Kelly type for whom high literature seems to underwrite even the expletives. If theirs is the airbrushed-ELO van-driving older brother cinema, Bowling's is little sister punk rock slow walk home through the bad neighborhood without fear version. And that's what BC is, make no mistake. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation. The things that would please BUTCHER's detractors (if she added more breasts, sex, gore, scares, terrible jokes) would knock it back into just another Troma piece of shit territory. The fans of such things may heave trollish resentment upon BC's imdb user comments just as higher-brow critics climbed over themselves with loathing for #HORROR and before that, TWILIGHT, or any other film that explores female psyche in its menstrual blood-drenched fury (re: The Bechdel Test), but they already lost. They is losers... incel 4 life. And they know it.
Despite its problems #HORROR is film I'll defend any time, for its 'evil wild child ride into the whirlwind of mini-lynching hot potato pariah badge passing' style is mad rare. It probably scares parents into blind hatred, much the way KIDS once did. But I'd rather see and hear that kind of organic madness, cohering and dissolving like salt pool eddies in an incoming or outgoing tide, than some white elephant 'story' any day. Bowling's characters are at each other's throats often enough, but united against more than exterior threats. They might kill each other and step on each other's turn to pick the activity for 'evening theater' but they make up and apologize too. It's the kind of clique-based insecurity round-robin intrinsic to adolescence (and threatening to a lot of adults) where depending on the group leader, even as you undermine her authority and steal her man, is no paradox. Little squabbles and apologies make up the ebb and flow of the 'pack mind'. Phrases are repeated and expanded on as if everyone is making declarative statements for the first time, then going back over them as if to remind themselves of their character notes which most dialogue hardly ever covers but is actually they way young groups of people talk, and is how slang spreads so fast.
Chief Neandra (Fideler) for example keeps reiterating she already killed "the beast" so there can't be a real external threat (a split second flashback shows super fast shows her ripping stuffing from a small stuffed tiger). She might be a little too chest-thumpingly insecure and needy but she also can check herself and make up with girls she wronged; she knows when to take credit for killing a monster before it's even dead, but also doesn't run from the fight if it comes around her way. She knows instinctively that the one way to beat a monster in a cave fight is to pick the fruit off his girlfriend's dead body. For his beloved is none other than the girl Leilana killed and, partially devoured, in the opening scene, gussied up in a weird Vorhees mom FRIDAY 13th PART 2-style shrine. In other words, it's true love between hulking monster and vengeance-crazed corpse/ghost (laughing in black and white nightmare flashbacks in ways shockingly similar to the girl laughing at William Campbell from inside his wet canvas in BLOOD BATH).
For that alone BC BUTCHER deserves to stand next to LOVE WITCH, DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT, and AMER (not in their league but it can still stand by them). Bowling's brazen anti-style idiocy proves a refreshing antidote to Brit Marling's self-important bourgeois 'intellectual' sci-fi films. Watching Marling's work you know she probably has never even seen any of the Hill-Meyer-Corman style primitivist drive-in fare. She's too busy cooing over SOLARIS and 2001. Her loss, man. Well, maybe there's room for both extremes. Maybe both the lowbrow/highbrow women can alike join Biller, Amirpour, Xan Cassavettes, and Helene Cattet, to stand with elders Jennifer Kent, Karyn Kusama, Roxanne Benjamin, to create a true kind of female horror, where men are neither the focus nor the demographic and Bechdel becomes an obsolete term.. My male gaze stands ready to feel alienated, to feel what the female gaze has felt for so long. Let the scissors fall through the center of my evening paper. The ancient past is now rewritten in Panic hair dye and cheap punk rock wigs. The future is in good, fake blood-smeared hands. She might be named Kansas Bowling, but she's not trying to be coy or conforming to some masculine gaze or nerd ideal. She actually loves this shit. She worked odd jobs all summer to afford 16mm instead of cheap video. Her love of the trash classics is palpable in every junky frame. I love that I don't even like it. It's the dawn of the non.
RELEVANT:
"It is the waving of her Heavenly Hair!' The Sanctiomonious Sci-Fi of Marvy Brit Marling
Let the Darionioni Nuovo Entrain your Dissonance: AMER (2009)
Bell, Book, and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH (2016)
Take out the Kids and Tuck in the Trash: #HORROR
Prepare for the Coming of the Hillary Matriarchy: DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT
Babes of Wrath: Dangerous Women of the New Depression vs. American Dogma
America of Ghosts: Why Lana Del Rey is the New Val Lewton
CinemArchetype 23: The Wild Child
The Beautiful and the Darned: Avenging TWILIGHT
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