Reviews
‘Pearl’ Review: The Wicked Witch of Ti West

“Am I the drama?” Pearl asks of herself during a lengthy third-act monologue that will surely go down as a legendary moment in film history. Yes, she is, and that’s exactly why we’re seated for director Ti West’s surprise prequel to X, his hit Texas grindhouse slasher from earlier this year. Starring Mia Goth, who co-wrote with West, Pearl is the origin story of the titular character, who is both the geriatric villain of X and the doe-eyed anti-heroine of her own story set 61 years prior, in 1918. Positioned at the end of WWI during the Spanish flu pandemic, it’s West’s deranged tribute to technicolor films of yesteryear, which expands upon its predecessor’s themes of fate and desire like you’ve never quite seen before. It’s more shocking than frightening, but if The Wizard of Oz in the vein of Lars von Trier piques your interest, you’re in for a treat.
While X’s mantra was “I will not accept a life I do not deserve” Pearl focuses on how and why the murderous elderly woman living in a rural farmhouse seemingly came to accept hers. Pearl spends her days at the beck and call of her strict German mother, resenting her husband for serving in the war overseas and damning her to such an existence. She begrudgingly helps around the farm and cares for her infirm father, whom she pokes and prods with morbid curiosity as if to wonder why he bothers to stick around. In secret, Pearl drapes herself in her mother’s finest clothes and dances, dreaming of a life in the spotlight far away from home – Europe, perhaps. The onset of the Spanish flu only enhances her suffocating isolation in a way we are all too familiar with today. When auditions for a traveling dance troupe come to town, she plans her macabre escape. It’s more of a grisly character study than a straight-up slasher, and it could use a little more tension throughout, but watching Goth transform Pearl from bratty Dorothy into a blood-stained Wicked Witch will leave you transfixed.
For all its stylish delights, Mia Goth is the one who carries Pearl to greatness. As mentioned, she co-wrote the film with West, and having such a direct influence on the trajectory of her character has made a profound impact. Pearl’s charming instability as a sympathetic psychopath with child-like rage bubbling below the surface is immediately evident. Although she cares greatly for her farm animals, she slaughters a goose for her pet gator without blinking and incredulously tells a scarecrow she’s married before simulating sex with it. Displaying both comedic and dramatic range that certainly warrants discussion during awards season, Goth lays it all out on screen. Comparisons have been made to Toni Collette in Hereditary, and hopefully, the powers that be take note and get over their genre bias.
And speaking of that A24 classic, the film’s other standout is Tandi Wright as Pearl’s mother, Ruth. Unafraid to go toe to toe with Goth, her performance culminates in a dinner table monologue that mimics Hereditary to the point of being an homage – with a twist. Fear of wasted youth is generational, as Ruth sobs through the night at her miserable existence, while Pearl looks at her mother in disgust, and in 1979 X’s Maxine looks at elderly Pearl with as much contempt.
These ideas are given levity by the sheer whimsy West’s eye brings to such a grim tale. While known for his slow-burn approach, nothing has changed here, but he maintains focus in Pearl’s meandering world with tight pacing and editing. We’re transported immediately into a bygone era via the film’s opening credits, and the presence of sex and gore only highlights what a unique and strange experience this is. West illustrates Pearl’s journey through bold and bright colors that frame the hope of the outside world, while he enriches the imprisoning farmhouse interior with deep and dark hues. Her appearance, likewise, shifts from an innocent farmgirl to a literal replication of Miss Gulch (aka the Wicked Witch), and returning glances at a decaying pig carcass further symbolizes her transition. This attention to detail does not go unnoticed, and while it’s the farthest West has strayed from typical horror fare, it is an experiment gone right.
Such a thoughtful and demented background story of an already striking character is a gift. To that end, we have New Zealand’s strict COVID-19 quarantining measures to thank, which allowed West to write Pearl while waiting to shoot X and then film them back to back – it’s his personal Lord of the Rings. We’ve been enlightened as to why Pearl would remain in that decrepit farmhouse all those years later – protecting society from her homicidal tendencies – and even why she hates blondes so much. And finally, in one wild act of absolutely extravagant camp, Goth destroys Timothée Chalamet’s Call Me By Your Name end credits game with an iconic moment of her own. There’s no place like home, but for Pearl, home is hell on earth.
Check out our MaXXXine review here.
Reviews
‘Body Melt’ Review: An Irreverent Approach to Body Horror

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.
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.
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?”
Body Melt is streaming on Shudder.
Reviews
‘Tesis’ Review: A 90s Hidden Gem

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
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.