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DISSECTING ORGANIC CINEMA: ‘Crimes of the Future’ (2022) Review

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Is Cronenberg’s comeback brilliant or botched?

I’ve always felt like biopunk is a highly underrated genre, especially with how much screentime cyberpunk gets in mainstream media. The transhumanist dilemma that those works always delve into felt silly when the delineation between man and machine is so apparent.

But biopunk is a different beast altogether. What if those shiny new organs weren’t cybernetic, but organic, and perfectly melded with your own flesh? What if they were grown inside of and on your own body? At what point does the invasive flesh become native? How many new organs must be added until you’re not human? I mean, how human is humanity?

This idea is where David Cronenberg’s triumphant return to filmmaking, Crimes of the Future, dives deep like an exploratory biopsy. The philosophy of self in relation to the human body, culture, sex, morality, and everything in between is the heart of this film, and it’s a heart that beats hard enough for you to hear it from across the room. It’s a heart full of love and intrigue.

We follow performance artists Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Lea Sydoux), a duo specializing in artistic surgeries. They extract mysterious organs being sprouted de novo in the sickened Tenser’s body. As Tenser suffers from “Accelerated Evolutionary Syndrome,” a widespread conspiracy involving Tenser’s groupies, a reviled cult, and the highly bureaucratic government of this world seems to close in around the mesmerizing art he and his lover perform. All the while, a quiet biological disaster looms in the background of their dilapidated dystopia: human beings are no longer able to feel pain, leading to increasingly extreme displays of surgery and the popularization of self-harm for entertainment.

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This film has been widely described as sci-fi body horror, and while I agree, for the most part, I also think that a large element of this film is more the sci-fi thriller on a romantic streak, something that the body horror is embedded in. This film’s most gruesome and hard to stomach death is undoubtedly horror, horror so good I felt a tingling in my neck for a few minutes after it. But its framing felt reminiscent of a hit in a mob film, and one of the characters even refers to it as an assassination.

Compared to the rest of Cronenberg’s filmography, Crimes of the Future isn’t unique in this way. Videodrome feels like a spy film where our main character doesn’t even know what side he’s on, and Existenz itself is a full-on meta-psychological thriller. In an intuitive move, this film contains homages and echoes of both of those films plot-wise; if you can believe it, even a large part of the story resembles The Fly.

Overall, the movie ends up feeling self-referential to Cronenberg’s previous films, but in a way that seems fond of them and utilizes them transformatively rather than rehashing the material (even the title is transplanted from another of his films despite not being related to it). Cronenberg gives us a bizarre and enrapturing love story between two characters in an uncertain world, finding comfort together as everything around them crumbles.

And yes, there happens to be freaky deeky surgical sex going on in this relationship, but who are we to kink shame?

As expected, the special effects here are fleshy, uncomfortably squishy, and organically out of place in the cold world around them, so classic Cronenberg. However, some of them feel much too animatronic, and you can tell exactly which ones got the most attention. The highlight of these is the SARK, a bone-plated, biomechanical, autopsy performing sarcophagus. It’s the anchor point for some of the film’s most intimate and painful moments, where Mortensen and especially Seydoux excel. The latter has a gothic and heart-wrenching speech that she pours her heart and soul into at the film’s climax. While the dialogue feels stilted when exposition is on the table, the chemistry between Saul and Caprice is subtle and torrid, saving this film from some of its monotony.

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For a film about eccentric performers, it ironically squanders its greatest resource: Kristen Stewart, playing the unfortunately unforgettable Timlin. From the moment she’s first onscreen, she portrays the most perverse and strange character of the cast with a palpable and, at times, borderline comedic arousal. She’s awkward, erotically attuned to Tenser, and behaves like her mind is moving too fast to keep up with her physical, quaking need for recognition from him; it’s just so much fun to watch!

I don’t say unfortunately unforgettable because I dislike Stewart, but because she is irritatingly absent from the film for such an important player, both as an actress and an arm of the narrative. For some light spoilers, Timlin spends her final scene skulking around a corner rather than interacting with any of the main players, which is a crying shame since she could have been used so much more. The same could even be said for Welket Bungué’s Detective Cope, but it’s Stewart who was truly robbed here. That, on top of a potently abrupt ending, left me wanting more, for better or worse.

BOTTOMLINE: Cronenberg delivers a film that feels like looking back fondly on his most inventive works and creates a dramatically heavy piece. While it’s just shy of being truly great due to some of its choices, it’s an experience that grabs you and keeps you under the knife until it’s over. The haruspicy reads: get into the guts of this strange medical daydream and see this in theatres now.

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Luis Pomales-Diaz is a freelance writer and lover of fantasy, sci-fi, and of course, horror. When he isn't working on a new article or short story, he can usually be found watching schlocky movies and forgotten television shows.

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‘Body Melt’ Review: An Irreverent Approach to Body Horror

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In this world, few things are more mildly perturbing than leaving a film unsure of what exactly it was trying to say. At least for me. Death of the author withstanding, I like to have some grasp over what the filmmakers are trying to tell me. What is the writer saying? How is the director conveying it? What was the gaffer doing lighting the scene like that? Was it intentional, or was it just difficult angling a light there? Body Melt is one of those films.

WHAT IS BODY MELT (1993)?

Body Melt is a 1993 Australian special effects cult classic that delivers a lot of gooey and gorey deaths, but initially left me feeling ambivalent about its message. Given its efforts to nauseate are the main thing on display, there isn’t much deep conversation to be had by its characters. They’re mainly pastiches of people you would see around the neighborhood (the power walker, the doofy bachelors, the crochety old man, the young married couple, etc. etc.), and they’re treated just like that; cardboard cutout people to be cut apart.

While a horror film about a cul-de-sac being disfigured and sludged to death might seem like regular slasher fair, the villain this time around isn’t an alien with acid blood or an incredible melting man: it’s a pharmaceutical company called Vimuville, making guinea pigs out of the neighborhood and rapidly mutating them to death in the name of researching a new super drug.

Sending out free health supplements to the denizens of Pebble Court, the film is a series of loosely connected set pieces, with the throughline being Vimuville’s “vitamins” and the people who drink them to disastrous consequence (sort of like an evil wheatgrass shot, or Herbalife shakes if they made your spleen explode out of your chest).

INCREDIBLE EFFECTS ABOUND, COURTESY OF BOB CARRON

What results is a cartoonish splatter film, amplified in its grotesqueries by the effects of Bob Carron, an Australian special effects legend. If you need to know his street cred, fans of more obscure animal horror will know his biggest and boar-iest creation, the titular pig monster from Razorback.

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More likely you know him for helping to make the human battery scene from The Matrix, where a tube-fed catatonic Neo is awakened in a pod of viscous red goo. He’s also the man who helped do prosthetic application on the set of an early Peter Jackson classic Braindead, which was made only a year before Body Melt. Given how notoriously explosive the blood sprays and zombie deaths were in Braindead, there’s some definite creative crossover between the two.

His work here on Body Melt, like on Braindead, probably wouldn’t play well in most movies. It is excessive and absurd, with meaty melting tentacles and body fluid spraying demises. Imagine the defibrillator scene from The Thing, but repeatedly over roughly 80 minutes. People get inverted, imploded, and expanded, and then it happens again. And again. And again. And if it seems like I just keep talking about how insane the effects are, that’s because that’s really its main move; Body Melt is a circus of completely bad taste endings for each of its stars.

It’s Itchy and Scratchy’s idea of a public safety advertisement about checking with your doctor before taking a new medication. Ultimately, the story is sparse; you’re here to see Carron flex his skills with liquid latex and mixtures of lubricant and corn syrup. Which is quite fine, the movie is worth watching just for that. However, those looking for more than a highlight reel of splatter movie kills will be disappointed, and rightfully so.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN? (WHEN YOU BLOW UP YOUR SPLEEN?)

Which leads to the primary question that had me wrestling with how I would talk about the film: can a film be too irreverent to send a message? What is the goal here? I plumbed Australian pharmaceutical history to try and see if there was some sort of contemporary counterpart to events in the film, any inspiration that tracked.

The closest I could find was Australia’s slow and lacking response to the thalidomide scandals of the 1950s and 60s, but the ties were tenuous at best. The film’s goal of being a pitch-black horror comedy, mainly meant to skewer the fitness crazes of the 80s and 90s, are subsumed by its technical achievements in making the audience sickly with slime, and leave you mostly numb to the horrific things that happen in it.

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I think on a rewatch, the film’s philosophy was made clear by that numbness. As the vitamins take their last victim during a shootout– I won’t spoil how it happens, but I will spoil the reaction its witnesses have: being rapidly underwhelmed. It was at that moment that I realized what I feel is the real approach of the film. Body Melt does not try to convey a message about bioethics, but rather an approach to violations of bioethics. An approach, albeit a passive one to living with corrupt companies and the exploitation of people for profits.

AN ODDLY EXPERT SATIRE OF OUR APPROACH TO FEAR

Body Melt is a satire that plays in excess to make a point about how people become inured to the horrors they’re exposed to. In a surprisingly smart way, Body Melt becomes an absurdist shrug towards being turned into a lab rat, a rising and ever-related fear as companies push to gain ever increasing powers to skirt consequences for violating laws and human rights. When companies hide behind dozens of proxies of legal protection and walls of money to surround themselves, how do you keep from going insane as they mistreat swathes of the population and force you to watch? You sort of just learn to live with it.

And as bleak of an idea as it is, Body Melt’s ultimate dark humor stems from this. The joke is ultimately on the viewer; it mocks our own ability to turn a blind eye to them, turning the experiment gone wrong into an uncomfortable laugh through its extreme execution.

“How silly. That wouldn’t happen to us! Someone would stop them!”

“…Right?”

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Body Melt is streaming on Shudder.

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‘Tesis’ Review: A 90s Hidden Gem

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The film forums, threads, and pages I follow have recently been abuzz with talk about a film called Tesis. Usually, when older films are hyped out of nowhere, it means a new physical release is coming, or a new cut of the film has been assembled. To my surprise, Tesis returned to the conversation when Shudder released it just a few weeks ago. It should be noted that discussions around Tesis probably started when Umbrella Home Entertainment released a gorgeous collection around October of 2024. Still, I hadn’t seen much talk about it until its Shudder release. Does the movie hold up to the hype? The title of this piece might just give it away…

Tesis follows Ángela Márquez (Ana Torrent), a student working on her thesis project on audiovisual violence. Professor Figueroa (Miguel Picazo) and fellow student Chema (Fele Martínez) assist Ángela with finding gnarly films to further her studies. Ángela finds her professor dead in one of their university’s screening rooms. She takes the tape he was watching when he died and watches it with Chema. They soon realize the subject of the tape is none other than Vanessa (Olga Margallo), a student who went missing from campus roughly two years ago. After subsequent viewings, Ángela and Chema realize the tape they’re watching isn’t a film…it’s a snuff tape.

Comparing Tesis to A Serbian Film

Personally, I would never recommend A Serbian Film to anyone. And it’s not because the subject matter is “too offensive” but because it’s not a good film. Even though it deserves to be on disturbing movie lists, there’s little substance to it other than the political commentary that lightly shades the film in a positive light. Tesis is a film I would recommend to someone looking for a Serbian Film-like film. It may not have the same amount of gratuitous blood, violence, and sex that Serbian does, but it does not fail at being disturbing, raw, and well-made.

Besides Joel Schumacher’s 8MM, there is very little modern media set around snuff in general. Alejandro Amenábar’s feature directorial debut broke the mold of good taste with this 1996 instant classic. Amenábar’s freshman film tackles not just the idea of snuff within the genre, but the human condition and how violence in media affects everyone differently. Ángela is fascinated from an educational standpoint, while Chema is more enthralled in a way that feels a bit too personal. Each character approaches the idea of snuff/ultraviolence in their own unique way that feels more personal than anything Schumacher attempted to do in 8MM.

Ana Torrent’s Pivotal Performance

Tesis doesn’t rely on gallons of pinkish-red blood and dismembered body parts to be effective, but it’s far from conservative. Much of what makes Tesis work is its brilliant mixture of refined violence and gore with the authentic and reserved performance from Ana Torrent. Torrent sells this film in a way few others could. It’s like how Possession hinges on the performance of Isabelle Adjani; without Ana Torrent, Tesis would be a completely different beast. And might not work as well.

Much of Tesis is more akin to a murder mystery, with Ángela thrust into the middle of this murderous game of cat and mouse. For a debut script, Amenábar finds impressive ways to keep the twists and turns coming without anything feeling forced or over the top. Each piece of information the viewer gets makes them feel like they know how it will end, until they get the next piece of information. The script feels like it could have only come from a seasoned professional. It’s almost as twisty as David Fincher’s The Game, only with a much better payoff.

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Tesis Deserves More Recognition

Tesis is truly an undiscovered gem. Why are more people not talking about this film? It should be included in EVERY best of the ’90s horror lists. It’s been a while since I found a film I had never heard of that impacted me as much as Tesis did. With a careful mixture of gore, mystery, and truly impeccable storytelling, Tesis hits all of the right marks and doesn’t stop being entertaining for a single second.
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