The Daily Grindhouse: The Children (dir by Max Kalmonwicz)

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Let’s just be honest: Children are scary. Especially when they’re evil killer children with black fingernails who can scald you to death with a hug. “Oh, Lisa,” you’re saying, “there aren’t any children like that!”

Oh really?

Obviously, you’ve never seen a low-budget little horror film from 1980 called The Children.

The small town of Ravensbrook is a great place to live. The scenery is green and pretty. The people are affluent and, for the most part, pleasant. The sheriff does his best to maintain the law and his deputy is usually too busy fooling around with the farmer’s daughter to issue any speeding tickets. There’s less than a dozen children in the town but they’re all cute, nice, and happy. It’s a nice little town …. with the exception of the gigantic chemical plant that happens to be sitting off in the distance.

Yes, that chemical plant is kind of a problem. As the film begins, one of the pipes breaks and a gigantic yellow toxic cloud is released into the air just in time for the local school bus to drive through it. It’s never really made clear just what exact chemicals are in that yellow cloud but they sure must be powerful because, instantly, all the children on the bus are transformed into a bloodless zombies with black fingernails, perpetual smiles, and the ability to microwave anything they touch. The children quickly burn their kindly driver to a cinder, abandon the bus, and then start to head back home on foot.

Eventually, the abandoned bus is discovered and a search is launched for the “missing” children. However, as the search only turns up the remains of parents burned to a crisp, the sheriff comes to realize that maybe something weird is happening with the children. Now, he’s faced with the task of convincing kindly adults not to accept hugs while the children slowly and methodically kill everyone in town.

That plot description probably makes The Children sound pretty silly but actually, it’s a surprisingly effective B-movie. The acting is pretty uneven but the children are undeniably creepy and this is one of those rare horror films where even the people who you naturally assume are safe end up getting burned up. The film’s finale — with the children laying siege to a farmhouse populated with the few surviving townspeople — is undeniably effective and even the surprise ending — while silly and predictable – is also oddly disturbing.

Incidentally, the best way to watch the film on DVD is to watch it while listening to producer Carlton Albright’s commentary. Quite rightfully (and as opposed to a lot of other horror filmmakers), Albright never apologizes for making an exploitation film and instead provides a lot of insight into what it’s like to make a low-budget horror film.

LeonTh3Duke’s Favorite Films of 2012

Posted on January 26, 2013 by leonth3duke

20) Rust and Bone (dir. Jacques Audiard)

19) Oslo, August 31st (dir. Joachim Trier)

18) The Grey (dir. Joe Carnahan)

17) Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino)

16) Killer Joe (dir. William Friedkin)

15) Les Miserables (dir. Tom Hooper)

14) Argo (dir. Ben Affleck)

13) Dredd (dir. Peter Travis)

12) Safety Not Guaranteed (dir. Colin Trevorrow)

11) The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)

10) The Deep Blue Sea (dir. Terence Davies)

9) Amour (dir. Michael Haneke)

8) Lincoln (dir. Steven Spielberg)

7) Silver Lining Playbook (dir. David O. Russell)

6) Skyfall (dir. Sam Mendes)

5) Moonrise Kingdom (dir. Wes Anderson)

4) Beasts of the Southern Wild (dir. Behn Zeitlin)

3) The Kid With A Bike (dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne)

2) Looper (dir. Rian Johnson)

1) Zero Dark Thirty (dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

(Still need to see: Life of Pi, Holy Motors, The Master, Anna Karenina)

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Favorite Performances:

Best Actor:

Daniel Day Lewis (Lincoln)
Hugh Jackman (Les Miserables)
Bradley Cooper (Silver Lining Playbook)
Matthew MCConaughey (Killer Joe)
Jean Louis Trintignant (Amour)

Best Actress:

Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty)
Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Lining Playbook)
Emmanuelle Riva (Amour)
Marion Cotillard (Rust and Bone)
Quvenzhane Wallis (Beasts of the Southern Wild)

Best Sup Actor:

Tommy Lee Jones (Lincoln)
Dwight Henry (Beasts of the Southern Wild)
Robert De Niro (Silver Lining Playbook)

Best Sup Actress:

Anne Hathaway (Les Miserables)
Sally Field (Lincoln)
Jacki Weaver (Silver Lining Playbook)

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Best Song or Score:

Maya on a Plane (Zero Dark Thirty)

I Dreamed A Dream (Les Miserables)

Skyfall (Adele)

Ma Ma’s Requiem (Dredd)

Once There Was a Hushpuppy (Beasts of the Southern Wilds)

The Daily Grindhouse: My Brother’s Wife (dir by Doris Wishman)

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Released in 1966 and directed by Doris Wishman, one of the few women to make a living from directing grindhouse films, My Brother’s Wife is an odd one. Filmed in stark black-and-white and featuring restless camerawork that suggests that the camera is as desperate as the characters in the film, My Brother’s Wife plays out like a wonderfully sordid dream.

My Brother’s Wife opens with two men getting into a fight at a pool hall. As they fight, we hear (via the film’s oddly disconnected dialogue) that someone is dead and that one of the men is responsible. In the best tradition of film noir, the rest of the movie is told in flashback.

Frankie (Sam Stewart) is a loser, a drifter who wanders from town to town and who carries a gun in his suitcase. On a whim, he pays a surprise visit to his older brother, Bob (Bob Oran). Bob is everything that Frankie isn’t. Bob is successful, kind, responsible, bald, and married to the much younger Mary (June Roberts). Mary, who is frustrated with Bob’s lack of sexual passion, finds herself attracted to Frankie. Soon, she and Frankie are having an affair. Frankie starts to put pressure on Mary to steal all of Bob’s money and give it to him so that he can leave town.

Mary, of course, assumes that she’s going to be leaving town with Frankie but what she doesn’t know is that Frankie has got another girlfriend. Zena (Darlene Bennett) is Mary’s opposite. Whereas Mary is wracked with guilt over her affair with Frankie, Zena is a prototypical lingerie-clad grindhouse bad girl. However, Zena lives in fear of her lesbian cousin and is just as anxious as Frankie to get her hands on some money and to get out of town…

Doris Wishman was one of the more eccentric grindhouse directors and her trademark surreal aesthetic is on display in My Brother’s Wife. Very little actually happens in this 61-minute film but it remains watchable because Wishman brings so many odd touches to the material that the film could easily be mistaken for a film from David Lynch.

Visually, My Brother’s Wife is a film full of jarring camera angles and restless energy. When Mary complains to Bob about their nonexistent sex life, the camera shows us their reflection in the bedroom mirror before panning over to show the two of them in the flesh before then panning back to their reflection in the mirror. When the film’s characters leave a room, they do it by walking straight towards and occasionally looking directly at the camera. Rarely does the camera ever film anyone straight on. Instead, it always seems to be situated either above or directly below the film’s cast.

Of course, it can be argued that a lot of the film’s aesthetic touches were due less to artistic vision and more to the low-budget realities of grindhouse filmmaking. For instance, Wishman shot the film without sound and the film’s sparse dialogue was dubbed during post-production. As a result, there’s no background noise (which gives the entire film a sparse, ennui-drenched feel) and the tone of the voices delivering the dialogue often feels totally disconnected from the action on-screen.

Of course, the major issue with dubbed films is that the dialogue rarely matches the movement of the lips on-screen. Wishman handles this issue by rarely allowing us to actually see anyone talk. Instead, she shows us people reacting to someone else speaking. Often times, she’ll cut to a shot of someone’s feet while they speak or else the camera will seem to randomly focus on whatever inanimate objects happens to be sharing the room with the people talking. In perhaps the film’s strongest visual, we listen to Mary and Frank have a conversation while we look at their shadows projected on the bedroom wall. It’s all rather dream-like and compulsively watchable.

Much like David Lynch and the filmmakers of the French New Wave, Doris Wishman built the foundation of her own unique sensibility on B-movie material. The cinematic world of Doris Wishman is one where weak men can’t resist duplicitous women and where everyone — regardless of innocence or guilt — is left punished at the end. In Wishman world, all the men speak in hard-boiled dialogue and you can tell whether a woman is a good girl or a bad girl by what color lingerie she’s wearing. Personally, if I had a time machine, I would love to go back to 1960s New York and audition to be a Doris Wishman bad girl.

Seriously, bad girls have all the fun.

While My Brother’s Wife may not be the best known film in Wishman’s eccentric filmography (that honor would probably go to either Nude on the Moon or Bad Girls Go To Hell), it’s still a valuable example of the Wishman aesthetic.

The Daily Grindhouse: Bunnyman (dir by Carl Lindbergh)

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

It seems like almost every holiday has inspired at least one horror film. There’s been a host of films about killer Santas, there’s the Halloween films, and who could possibly forget Valentine? Even Thanksgiving inspired Eli Roth to make a fake trailer for Grindhouse.

But what about Easter?

My BFF Evelyn and I were discussing this a while back. Though both of us know our horror history, neither one of us could think of one horror film that takes place on Easter. Finally, we both agree that the Easter Bunny just isn’t scary enough to inspire a horror film. Santa Claus, after all, punishes boys and girls who haven’t been nice while the Tooth Fairy is just a paranormal dentist. But the Easter Bunny…nobody could possibly be scared of the Easter Bunny, right?

Well, it would appear that director Carl Lindbergh disagreed with both me and Evelyn and he set out to prove it by making a movie.

Ladies and gentleman, it’s Bunnyman!

As Bunnyman begins, we meet six young morons who are driving through the countryside. We never find out why they were all together or where exactly they were driving to but, before we can spend too much time worrying about that, they’re suddenly being chased by a mysterious truck which forces them off the road and causes them to crash and get stuck. One of the six morons gets out of the car and starts trying to fix it. (I’m using the term “moron” because — though the end credits claim that all of these characters have individual names — nobody uses them during the actual movie. Instead, they communicate mostly by going, “Hey you!’ and “Let’s go!” and “Run!”) While the mechanic moron is under the car, the truck comes driving up again and rams the car, killing mechanic moron. The surviving morons get out of the car and spend the rest of the movie running through the woods. Pursuing them is the driver of the truck who is carrying a chainsaw and dressed like the Easter bunny.

And that’s pretty much the entire film. Oh sure, the morons run into a few random country folks, the majority of whom tell them to go away. On this note, I do have to give the movie credit. I may be a city girl now but I grew up in the country and I can tell you that, if there was anything that we weren’t going to mess with, it would have been a man carrying a chainsaw while dressed up like the Easter bunny.

Seriously, no way!

As always happens in these unfortunate situations, some of the morons die in the wilderness and then some more die when they stumble into Bunnyman’s cabin. Bunnyman, by the way, lives with a hunchback and likes to perform experimental surgery while listening to classical music.

Bunnyman might not sound like much and, to be honest, it’s a pretty bad movie that only occasionally manages to be so bad that it’s good. The writing is terrible and the acting is worst and director Lindbergh tells his story with absolutely no sense of pace or subtext. (Seriously, there’s one scene where the morons talk to a redneck and that scene seems to go on for about 3 hours. It’s a bit like some sort of odd MK-Ultra endurance test.) The film also has a very strange sound mix. Sometimes, the movie is way too loud and then other times, you can’t hear a thing.

However, with all that said, Bunnyman is also literally your only chance to see a man in an Easter bunny costume chasing a bunch of morons with a chainsaw.

That has to be worth something.

Supposedly, Bunnyman is based on an actual urban legend from Virginia and, according to the legend’s wikipedia page entry, the legend is actually pretty close to the film. To which I have to say “Really? A bunny costume?” Then again, I’m from the southwest, the home of La Llorona, Goatman, and the Chupacabra so maybe I should just let sleeping bunnymen lie.

A Quickie With Lisa Marie: The Harrad Experiment (dir by Ted Post)

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Earlier this week, when I reviewed the obscure Sissy Spacek film Katherine, I mentioned that I had seen Katherine as one of the three films included on the Classic Films of the 70s DVD. The other two films included on the DVD were Born to Win and The Harrad Experiment. Now, I have to admit that I’m having trouble recalling much about Born To Win but The Harrad Experiment … seriously, that’s a film that I’ll never forget.

First released in 1973 and reportedly based on a “daring” book about the sexual revolution, The Harrad Experiment opens with Sheila (Laurie Walters) hugging a tree and it’s all downhill from there.

Sheila is excited because she’s just enrolled at Harrad College, an experimental school that’s run by Prof. Stuffy Q. Borington (James Whitmore) and his wife, Cougar Milf (Tippi Hedren). Okay, I made up those two names. Prof. Borington is actually named Philip Harrad and his wife is named Margaret but seriously, I like my names for them better. Anyway, Philip and Margaret are obsessed with the need for society to throw off the shackles of sexual repression and Harrad College’s entire curriculum is devoted to students debating monogamy, taking yoga classes, and standing in a circle while holding hands and chanting, “Zoom.” Everyone has a roommate of the opposite sex and they’re encouraged to have sex with every other student enrolled at the college. (Interestingly enough, all of the students at the college appear to be heterosexual.)

Sheila, it turns out, is not only a virgin but is also so extremely prudish that you have to kind of wonder why she enrolled at Harrad College to begin with. Her roommate Stanley (Don Johnson, who was so criminally hot here that it’s hard to believe that he would eventually end up playing the loathsome Big Danny Bennett in Django Unchained) has the opposite problem. Stanley’s a long-haired rebel type and both Philip and Margaret are worried that he’s mostly attending their sex school because he just wants to get laid as opposed to getting laid and then discussing the social ramifications of getting laid.

Now, you’re probably thinking that The Harrad Experiment, being a film about sex, would feature a lot of sex. Well, you would be wrong. Instead, there’s a lot of scenes of Philip smoking a pipe and talking about sex and explaining why the concept of marriage is a dying one. At one point, a students asks Philip to explain why, if he believes that, he’s still married to Margaret.

“We represent the past,” Philip explains, which is seriously such a cop-out.

(While I agreed with a lot of what Philip had to say about the prudish ways of our hypocritical society and I’m certainly not a believer in traditional marriage, I still found myself wondering what one would actually do with a degree from Harrad College. This led to me imagining that annoying Everest College pitchman doing commercials for Harrad College — “You’re spendin’ all day on the couch, you ain’t getting none…” — and I started giggling for so long that I temporarily forgot that I was watching a movie.)

While there isn’t much sex, there is a lot of nudity and almost the entire cast (except for Whitmore, Hedren, and Fred Willard — yes, Fred Willard is in this movie) appears naked at some point. That’s pretty good when it’s someone like Don Johnson but, unfortunately, the majority of the cast is made up of people like this guy:

The Harrad Experiment is a slow, boring, and bad film but it’s one that everyone should see at least once, if just so they can say that they’ve seen it. If nothing else, it’s a time capsule of the late 60s and the early 70s and we all know the only saying about those who forget the past.

Zoom indeed!

Hottie of the Day: Jessica Chastain

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Arleigh

JESSICA CHASTAIN

Well, I might as well get on the Jessica Chastain bandwagon. She’s the latest pick for “Hottie of the Day” and also another addition to the redhead selections that’s growing (but still not the number 1 redhead on the site).

Jessica Chastain seemed to have come out of nowhere in the last two years. While she has been acting for many years before 2010 it wasn’t until 2011’s release of Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life which finally got her noticed. Since then she has been such films as Corialanus, Take Shelter, The Help, The Debt and Lawless. In each and every film she has been singled out as one of the highlight performances and from what I’ve seen she’s definitely deserving of the praise she’s been receiving.

Yet, it’s in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty that Chastain may have finally gone from ingenue stage to full-blown star. She carries Kathryn Bigelow’s film from start to finish and all the accolades and acclaim she has been receiving for that performance may just snag her a Best Actress Oscar award next month. Even the box-office is not immune to the redhead’s growing star power as the top two films in North America for the weekend of Jan. 18-20 has her in the starring role with Zero Dark Thirty and the horror film Mama.

Born near my neck of the woods of Sonoma, California, Jessica Chastain is a graduate of the famed Julliard School in New York City and worked her way through the Hollywood system by getting supporting roles in tv series after tv series before her breakout role as the mother in The Tree of Life.

PAST HOTTIES

The Daily Grindhouse: The Last Resort (dir by Brandon Nutt)

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Last Resort is a low-budget horror film from 2009 that tends to show up on Chiller a lot. It’s a low-budget film about annoying people who, largely as the result of their own stupidity, get trapped in a really bad situation. It’s a movie that many people dismiss but I’ve always found it to be a pretty effective little horror film.

In The Last Resort, Kathleen (played by Marissa Tait) is a bride-to-be who decides to go down to Mexico with her bridesmaids and have one last wild weekend for getting married. They spend their first night in Mexico getting drunk and one of the bridesmaids, Sophia (America Olivio), leaves the group to spend the night with an American tourist named Rob (Nick Ballard). The next morning, Kathleen and the three bridesmaids decide to take a tour of the countryside with two rather sleazy locals. Sophia is left behind.

Not surprisingly, the two locals drive the group out to the middle of nowhere and then rob them, seriously wounding one of the girls in the process. Kathleen and her bridesmaids are abandoned to die in the desert but they manage to find a deserted resort where they take shelter for the night. Unfortunately, it appears that the resort is also home to a murderous demon which proceeds to possess each of the girls, one after another.

The Last Resort has a really terrible reputation and if you happen to look it up on the imdb, you’ll come across a lot of negative comments about the film. But you know what? For what it is, The Last Resort is not that bad of a film. The deserted resort is a genuinely menacing location and the director Brandon Nutt does a good job of maintaining an ominous atmosphere once the girls reach the location. (Though it should also be admitted that it seems to take the film forever to reach that point.)

While the girls might not be memorable as individual characters, they are believable as a group. You sincerely believe that they would not only all be friends but that they would also be the type of friends who, once they all get together, would end up spending a drunken weekend in Mexico and get stranded at a haunted resort. In all honesty, one reason why this film resonated with me is because I’ve been on a few similar wild weekends myself. Fortunately, neither me nor any of my friends were ever kidnapped at gunpoint but I do think that there were a few cases of demonic possession on some of those weekends.

Hey, it happens.

The Last Resort is one of those films that we tend to watch and go, “God, these people are so stupid,” but, to be honest, the stupider the characters act, the more strangely plausible a film like this feels. The fact of the matter is that, at any given moment, 85% of the world is engaged in doing something stupid. Smart people find themselves in stupid situations because, seriously, you don’t ever expect to find yourself being kidnapped or possessed until you already are.

That’s one reason why horror will always be a popular genre. It’s one of the few genres that forces us to admit that, for the most part, we have no idea how vulnerable we are until it’s too late. It’s easy to dismiss The Last Resort as being a film about stupid people making stupid decisions but, for me, it works precisely because it reminds us that we are capable of being just as stupid as the unfortunate bridesmaids in this film.

Review: Mama (dir. by Andres Muschietti)

Posted on January 22, 2013 by Arleigh

In 2008 a young Argentine filmmaker made a 3-minute short film that caught the eye of one Guillermo Del Toro. The short film was titled Mama and it’s simple premise of ghostly mother chasing after two young girls in a darkened home was so well-received by Del Toro that he decided to produce a feature-length adaptation of the short film. He could’ve easily put himself in the director’s chair for the adaptation, but liking the work done by the short film’s original director the Mexican filmmaker gave the job to the original director, Andres Muschietti, and allowed him the freedom to make Mama the way it was meant to be made.

The feature-length version of the film works off of the screenplay written by the filmmaker Andres Muschietti and his sister Barbara Muschietti (with some help from Neil Cross) and expands on the brief sequence from the short film. We get a backstory as to the origins of the titular character and how she came to be throughout the film. We even get a much more detailed work up of the two young sisters who have become the obsession of the ghostly “Mama” and how they had gotten involved with her.

Mama opens up with a disturbing sequence where a father has murdered his partners in his company and his wife then taking his two young daughters out into the country where his grief at what he’s done leads him in an attempt to complete the cycle of becoming a family annihilator through the killing of his children then his own suicide. It’s only through the intervention of a shadowy figure in the abandoned cabin they’ve come across in the forest that this father’s plan fails. It’s a truly disturbing scene to see a father comforting his 3-year old daughter and at the same time hold a gun to her head. It’s almost a wonder that the audience feels both a sense of relief and horror at seeing “Mama” protect the young girls by killing the father.

We skip five years later as we find out that the father has a twin brother named Lucas (played by Game of Thrones‘ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who has spent the intervening years using whatever money the dead brother had left in an attempt to find the two young girls. Victoria and Lilly do get found by the scouts sent out by Lucas in the very same cabin where their father had taken them earlier in the film, but what the scouts find look more like feral animals than children.

One would think that the film would be about “Mama” wreaking havoc on Lucas to try and get her young girls back, but this film is not about mother versus father but mother versus mother. We’ve already met “Mama” briefly in the start of the film. The other mama in this fight for the girls’ love and soul is Lucas’ rocker girlfriend whose attitude in the beginning doesn’t shout maternal at all. Annabelle (played by Jessica Chastain) doesn’t think it’s her job to have to raise the two girls. It’s her love for Lucas that keeps her from bolting and trying to find a common ground with the two young girls. As the film moves forward Annabelle begins to feel protective of the two young girls and begins to believe that “Mama” is real and that she has followed Victoria and Lilly back from the cabin.

To say that this film is a horror film would be understating things. While it does have some jump scare moments and some creepy and disturbing images the story itself plays out more like a dark fairy tale set in a modern setting. just like another Del Toro produced horror film from the last couple years in The Orphanage, this film uses a fairy tale template to tell the story of the maternal love mothers have for their children. It’s interesting to note that the two mothers vying for Victoria and Lilly are not their biological mother, but surrogates who have come to love and care for the two girls in their own way.

Mama doesn’t break new grounds in the field of horror. It’s liberal use of gothic horror cliches and tropes by the Andres and Barbara Muschietti detracts from some darkly beautiful visuals and imagery that the filmmaker seemed very adept in creating to build that very sense of the fairy tale. What could’ve been a “been there and done that” and “paint-by-the-numbers” ghost story gets elevated by the performances by Jessica Chastain and the two young girls (Megan Charpentier as the elder sister Victoria and Isabelle Nélisse as the younger Lilly). Chastain in particular shines in the role of Annabelle as we believe her growth from reluctant caretaker to loving mother figure to protective mama bear by the time film ends on a very un-Hollywood ending.

Mama will definitely lose some fans of the horror genre who expect gore (which the film doesn’t have a drop of) and tons of scary moments (the film has jump scares but not much). This film will attract audiences looking for something familiar but at the same time with the added visual flair of a young filmmaker who looks to have a future in the genre, if not the industry, as a new creative eye who can work with something unoriginal and give it his own spin.

While the film is not on the same creative and storytelling level as Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage it is much better than Troy Nixey’s remake of the 1973 horror film Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark. The film does continue Guillermo Del Toro’s streak of finding new and upcoming young filmmakers in the horror genre and giving them a chance to break into the industry with him mentoring them through the process. Mama might not be a perfect film but Andres Muschietti’s work as a director shows that he has repaid Del Toro’s faith in him. I, for one, can’t wait to see what this filmmaker has up next.

An Obscure Film Review: Katherine (dir by Jeremy Kagan)

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

One of the great things about being an online film critic is that you occasionally come across a good but obscure film that you can then let the rest of the world know about as well. Katherine is one such film.

I came across Katherine as part of a 3-film compilation DVD called Classic Films Of The 70s. The other two films on the DVD were The Harrad Experiment and Born To Win and both of those films were so bad that I nearly tossed the DVD to the side without watching Katherine. I’m glad I changed my mind because, while it may not have truly lived up to the promise of being a classic film of the 70s, Katherine was still a thousand times better than The Harrad Experiment.

Beginning with the idealism and hope of the early 60s and ending with a literal bang in the 70s, Katherine tells the story of how one woman is transformed from being a sheltered, upper class liberal to being a political revolutionary who is proud to embrace violence in order to bring about change. Katherine ( Sissy Spacek, before she was Carrie) starts out as a teacher before falling in love with a civil rights activist (played, in a nicely smarmy performance, by Henry Winkler). Against the backdrop of the Viet Nam War and the violence of the late 60s, Spacek and Winkler gradually become more and more radicalized until they eventually go underground and turn violent. The film is made up of interviews with people who knew Katherine and Katherine herself even pops up and tells us her own version of her story. Despite being forced to wear a horrid wig in the latter half of the film, Sissy Spacek gives a wonderfully empathetic and multi-layered performance as Katherine. Even if you don’t always like the self-righteous stridency of the character, you never doubt her sincerity.

After I watched Katherine, I did a little research on the IMDb and I discovered that Katherine was a made-for-TV movie that was originally broadcast in 1975. This did not surprise me because, even as I was watching it, it was very easy to imagine a remake of Katherine (starring, I decided after much debate, Leighton Meester) being broadcast on the Lifetime Movie Network. However, if Katherine felt like a Lifetime movie with a political subtext, that’s only because I happen to love Lifetime movies. Katherine is both an intelligent and interesting look at a very specific period of American history and a portrait of youthful idealism, disillusionment, and wanderlust. We have all had to deal with that moment when our beliefs run into the wall of reality and Katherine captures that experience perfectly.

I found myself thinking about Katherine earlier today as I watched the presidential inauguration in Washington D.C. Though the film might be close to 40 years old, its portrait of naive idealism, political stridency, and destructive activism still feels relevant. Katherine is a film that most people have never heard of but it’s also one that is worth tracking down.