This year's MOTHER! AWARD goes to Luca Guadagnino's re-imagining of SUSPIRIA

After this past Tuesday's South Florida critics' screening of SUSPIRIA -- the remake/re-imagining by Luca Guadagnino of the 1977 Dario Argento movie of the same name -- several of us were chatting about the film, and mentioned how it reminded us in some ways of last year's uber-divisive movie, Mother! This current Suspiria, we agreed, is as likely to be nearly as divisive, with the negative feedback perhaps stronger than the positive.

There are a lot of reasons for this, starting with the remake's enormous and uncalled for length. The original ran 97 minutes, this one lasts 152.

Both films' plots send a young and talented dancer to a famous European dance academy that doubles as a witches' coven. But Signore Guadagnino, pictured at left, has used all that extra time to gussy-up his movie with a bunch of themes and ideas that go nowhere and never add up to more than mere poorly-thought-out excess.

The director, along with screenwriter David Kajganich (based on the original by Argento and Daria Nicolodi), tosses in everything from family dysfunction, Baader-Meinhof terrorism, psychotherapy, guilt and shame to World War II and The Holocaust, some sort of coming apocalypse, a modern dance recital, satanic rites, and enough guts and gore to fill a dozen so-so slasher movies.

Worse, none of this ever really coalesces. It just piles up rather conspicuously, as the two-and-one-half-plus hours wear on. "What the fuck was he thinking?" may frequently occur to you along the way, about the fellow who earlier gave us much better movies, including I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name.

Guadagnino does possess a visual eye, at least, so there are compensations to be had now and then. And he has rounded up another first-rate cast -- even if he uses them rather poorly. Almost no characterization can found anywhere here. Even the usually fabulous Tilda Swinton (above) can barely bring to life Madame Blanc, the school's choreographer. Swinton fares much better playing the role of Dr. Josef  Klemperer (below), credited to Lutz Eberdorf but now known to be Swinton in some excellent make-up.

Although the leading role and main draw would seem to be Dakota Johnson (below), who plays the "star" student, Susie Bannion, you may find yourself, as did TrustMovies,

more interested in Mia Goth (below), who plays Susie's friend, a plucky but unlucky young dancer named Sara. Ms Goth works wonders with very little, while Ms Johnson proves pretty drab and one-note throughout.

In the film's opening, Chloë Grace Moretz (below) gets a nice scene as one of the academy's more frightened students, but then disappears from the proceedings until returning a good deal later as pretty much a corpse.

Yes, there's a bunch of meaningless scribbles and symbols, and eventually that maybe longed-for ritual so the blood can spurt and splatter.

The weirdest and most effective scene (for those who appreciate extremes) is probably the one early on in which a dancer (Elena Fokina, below) alone in another room is somehow pummeled, jerked, beaten and scrunched to death via Ms Johnson's oddball dancing. Go figure.

Some of us older viewers might take pleasure in seeing a few of Europe's noted actresses -- Germany's Angela Winkler (below, left),  France's Sylvie Testud and Holland's Renée Soutendijk (below, right) -- playing supporting witches. Winker gets the most screen time, while Testud and Soutendijk are utterly wasted.

Fans of the original film's star, Jessica Harper, can see her do a small cameo as the good doctor's dead wife. Otherwise, wait for all the climactic blood-letting and see what you think. I could only roll my eyes and mutter, "Oh, please" and then "So what?" All this is not just grueling but noticeably ugly, just as is the junky-looking poster for the film, at top.

From Amazon Studios, the new Suspiria opened in our cultural coastal cities last week and hits South Florida this Friday, November 2, at some of the local venues. To find the theater(s) nearest you, try clicking here, and I think some of these may appear....

TICKED-OFF TRANNIES WITH KNIVES: Israel Luna's lunatic fringe film debuts

Is the new "sleaze, please!" movie, TICKED-OFF TRANNIES WITH KNIVES, a piece of faux crap or the real thing?  That question hovers over the proceedings just a little bit longer than it ought, so TrustMovies will clue-you-in up-front that this is indeed faux crap. And pretty funny faux crap, at that. Writer/director Israel Luna has come up with the not terribly inventive notion of making a movie that looks like the kind of thing we used to see at Times Square grind houses -- complete with grainy, out-of-focus footage, those "scratch" lines up and down the film, and even an out-of-sync soundtrack that makes it seem like the movie was either dubbed -- and very badly -- or just a blob of poorly-paired visuals and sound.

Now, didn't we just see something like this a few years back with the Tarantino / Rodriguez GRINDHOUSE? We've also viewed the "scratchy line" thing many times by now and seen so many faux/mock narratives and documentaries that all this ought to seem very déjà vu.  Yet Mr. Luna (shown, sort of, at left) appears to possess such a bizarre combination of joyous but screw-loose fun that I've got to say his film did win me over, finally. And it offers a decidedly trannie viewpoint: The guy/gals on screen here are bigger than life and twice as boob-alicious.

The plot, such as it is, finds several frenemies/performers (above) at a trannie night club out for vengeance because one of their own own got a black eye from her guy. That should only be as bad as it gets. Before the film is finished, several trannies have bitten the dust while another has been hospitalized and the rest very cruelly punished by that naughty boyfriend/rapist and his cronies. Further vengeance is then sought and -- no surprise -- found. Consider the film's title, after all.

Luna's cast is more than game and a couple of them do stand out: Kelexis Davenport (shown above, right), playing the very big mama Pinky La Trimm, and Kristal Summers (below) as poor, put-upon Bubbles Cliquot.  Everyone's pretty much of a hoot, however, so don't get your panties in a twist, girls, because I singled out only a couple of you. As a director, Luna gets a lot of mileage from his Japanese scene (quite the hoot) -- managing to use his ultra-cheap budget to make great fun of some missing special effects.

The men playing men don't hold a candle to the men playing women; lead villain Tom Zembrod is cute but not terribly imposing, while his sidekicks are hunky but standard. As to the blood-and-gore quotient, it's there but relatively square. When a baseball bat comes down hard on the skull of our trannies, up it comes a second or two later covered with red goo and hair. But we never, thankfully, see much of the corpse. Compared to much else that's out there -- for instance the three gore films that opened just last week, this one's tame and much funnier than it is frightening.

Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives, from Breaking Glass Pictures, opens today, October 15, in New York City at the ultra-classy Cinema Village, and in Los Angeles on Oct. 22nd.  This will be followed (if you don't live on either coast) by a DVD release as soon as November 9th.  Though, in truth, this is the kind of movie you need to see with an audience -- so those theater venues are probably your best bet.