Directed by Chris Skotchdopole; written by Chris Skotchdopole, Larry Fessenden, & Rigo Garay; starring John Speredakos, Rigo Garay, Ella Rae Peck, & Lorraine Farris
The last eight years of American political cinema contains its share of movies adapted from history and headlines, with little mystery about intent left to the imagination. Chris Skotchdopole’s unhinged debut Crumb Catcherheads the opposite direction: the film doesn’t betray itself by declaring outright what, or who, it’s “about.” You have to work that out yourself.
Honeymooners Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck), plagued by implied, stewing tensions, put their friction on pause when their rental house is called on by uninvited guests: John (John Speredakos), a waiter at their wedding reception, and his wife, Rose (Lorraine Farris). They’ve stalked the newlyweds to offer them a once in a lifetime opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the next consumer craze — or else. Crumb Catcher is a nail-biting ode to American failure, where side-hustle-and-grind entrepreneurship synthesizes with the insecurities wrought by our bootstraps mentality; it’s a chiller about entitlements and unearned outrage that’s attuned to our times through black comic plotting.
Larry Fessenden is among the most fiercely independent filmmakers working in the American genre cinema today—and, not coincidentally, one of its chronically undervalued. Even as his New York-based Glass Eye Pix has backed filmmakers like Ti West, Jim Mickle, and Kelly Reichardt in breaking through, Fessenden himself has continued to operate at a low-budget level, where his chillingly atmospheric features—all monster movies, to some degree—have for decades observed the philosophical struggle of people to know themselves in the face of larger socioeconomic and environmental collapse. Together, films like vampirism-as-addiction allegory “Habit” and climate-change reckoning “The Last Winter” comprise a singular, deeply personal body of work; individually, they’re all striking, emotionally resonant studies of the beast within.
“Blackout,” released quietly to VOD this year, is perhaps Fessenden’s most haunting and poignantly hand-crafted creature feature to date—a werewolf film where an existentially afflicted outsider (Alex Hurt), having contracted the curse amid grieving his father’s death and separating from his partner, falls back into an old drinking habit and enters a downward spiral. With his liberal upstate New York community besieged by politicians who exploit voters’ fears of the Other for their own financial gain, exposing a rot in the heart of small-town America, our protagonist is caught between skipping town and standing up for what’s right — even as his efforts to suppress his animalistic instincts, and the self-loathing he’s felt all his life, make “Blackout” blurrier than a study in good and evil. That our protagonist is a painter, specializing in nature scenes that grow more violent and abstract as he transforms, gives “Blackout” an ingenious device through which to explore art as an outlet for anguish, as a mirror to the soul.
Fessenden’s long been fascinated by perversions of the psyche, and by the sorry state of a world filled with such damaged individuals; his “Blackout” is personal and political in the way of all enduring horror. – Isaac Feldberg
BLISS by Joe Maggio premieres at Slamdance 2024 coming to theaters in 2025: a Glass Eye Pix co-production
BLACKOUT by Larry Fessenden releases in theaters and on Blu-ray through long-time collaborator MPI
CRUMB CATCHER by Chris Skotchdopole; a Glass Eye Pix Production releases in multiple theaters and Drive-Ins through Doppelgänger Releasing Coming to Blu-ray on Arrow in 2025
Ti West’s MAXXXINE opens wide across the US through A24 Featuring Fessenden
Fessenden and Graham Reznick-scribed Bafta-Winning Video Game UNTIL DAWN Re-released for PS5 and PC
Ilya Chaiken’s documentary PRETTY UGLY unspools at international Festivals.
JOHN MITCHELL MIND OF AN ARTIST documents the years-long collaboration between painter John Mitchell and filmmaker Larry Fessenden that resulted in Fessenden’s werewolf movie BLACKOUT. Mitchell describes themes and influences and the lifelong artistic journey that lead him to create over 100 paintings and drawings for the film, drawing parallels and connections between seemingly disparate art forms and traditions from Bernie Wrightson, Vincent Van Gogh, Martin Scorsese, Francis Bacon, Rembrandt, Goya, and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Interviews and Camera by Rigo Garay; Producer and Edit by Larry Fessenden; Glass Eye Pix 2024.
Halloween may be in the mirror, but a bonkers horror comedy has been part of Netflix’s top ten for most of the month of December, and it might just be the strangest success story of the month. The Dead Don’t Die isn’t a straightforward zombie comedy like Shaun of the Deadand manages to go even further than the absurdist zombie film Fido with twists that are impossible to see coming. Granted, they’re impossible because the director, Jim Jarmusch, upends everything that’s expected from a typical zombie film and replaces it with the type of bitter, sardonic black comedy you don’t expect from such a star-studded celebrity cast.
Trying to describe the actual plot of The Dead Don’t Die is futile. It starts off normally enough, with two police officers investigating a report of missing animals, and then they start to notice strange things, like how a watch has suddenly stopped working. Background news reports hint at what’s happening before zombies start to rise from the ground and begin feasting on the living residents of Centerville.
From that simple beginning, The Dead Don’t Die quickly spirals wildly out of control, shattering the fourth wall for one brief, well-earned hysterical moment. The two Centerville officers, Cliff and Ronnie, are played, respectively, by Bill Murray and Adam Driver, in a film pairing I never knew I needed to see before this film, but now consider it one of the greatest cross-generation pairings of all time. No matter what’s going on around them, Murray and Driver maintain the same deadpan delivery from start to finish, like how Farmer Miller doesn’t deserve to be warned about the zombies or how Ronnie has an affinity for Mexicans.
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Netflix’s top ten usually includes the latest original movie that’s getting pushed hard by the algorithm, a major new release or two, and usually a seasonal film. What it typically doesn’t feature, and especially not in the top five for over a week, is a film like The Dead Don’t Die that would be described by your average moviegoer as “weird.” The reason I mention a fourth wall break is because that’s not even the weirdest thing that happens during the film, and after watching it again, I’m even more impressed that it’s enjoying such a surge of popularity since it means that there’s hope that your average Netflix subscriber actually has good taste.
A Rare Original Movie
The Dead Don’t Die is an easy recommendation for anyone who’s seen more than one zombie movie or if you want to watch something that dares to be different, takes chances, and is the exact opposite of the movies seemingly designed by focus groups that have plagued theaters for the past decade. Bill Murray and Adam Driver’s zombie flick won’t make you scream in terror, but it will make you laugh, and a few of the kills might make you cringe, but it will surprise you.
Since 1989, various New York artists gathered annually to entertain guests during a Holiday Party in the East Village with a performance of A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens, a favorite of Fessenden’s right up there with FRANKENSTEIN.
During the Covid shutdown Beck Underwood, Jack and Larry Fessenden made a video facsimile of the show to get us through the pandemic though nothing quite captures the unhinged chaos of the actual performance, which continues again to the present day.
Glass Eye Pix is the fierce independent NYC-based production outfit headed by award-winning art-horror auteur Larry Fessenden with the mission of supporting individual voices in the arts. Read more...
