To kick off this year’s SHOCKtober season, we’re going to have a pair of movies featuring the always wonderful Barbara Crampton. Today, she is relegated to a supporting role, but what a role!
Into the Dark is a series of feature length films produced by Blumhouse Television and released straight to Hulu (much the way the entries for Welcome to the Blumhouse were released straight to Amazon.com). Into the Dark, however, takes the premise of releasing a holiday or month-appropriate theme to their features. I have not caught up with the movies that appeared under this banner (even though I picked up Hulu at a freakishly cheap monthly rate during last year’s Black Friday sale), but I wanted to catch director Gigi Saul Guerrero’s horrific meditation on the immigration situation Culture Shock (2019) in particular because Crampton appears. Let’s take a gander, shall we?
Marisol (Martha Higareda) paid a coyote (Sal Lopez) to help her across the border into America once before, and she ended up impregnated, robbed, and left behind by her boyfriend Oscar (Felipe de Lara). She’s scrounged the cash and is ready to try again. The going is not easy, of course. Money flows like water from the prospects to the men responsible for moving and housing them. The hope of starting fresh in a land overflowing with opportunities is attractive, though. We get the barest glimpse of what Marisol is leaving behind, her mother (Laura Cerón) counsels girls who are in bad ways, many of them impregnated by men who stepped out after wrecking their futures or so blinded to the reality that they refuse to carry contraception (Mexico is a Catholic country, after all, and such things go very much against the be fruitful and multiply methodology of the Catholic church). It doesn’t seem like a horrific place, but the grass is always greener on the other side of a border wall, so Marisol makes her decision and sticks with it.
This time around, she is part of a smaller core group, which includes a young Guatamalan boy Ricky (Ian Inigo) and a tatted-out killer called Santo (Richard Cabral). The already tough going takes a twisted turn when the hopeful immigrants stumble across a crazed cartel killing taking place. What was already a fraught sequence takes a surreal and suspenseful turn that propels Marisol and Ricky into the darkness of la frontera, until the lights kick on, authoritarian voices scream for everyone to surrender to U.S. Border Authorities, and we suddenly propel into the second act.
The transition is not necessarily a violent one but it is as disorienting as getting clobbered with a surprise fist to the cheek. Marisol wakes up in a pastel house, wearing a lovely yellow dress she never owned, in a small, welcoming American town. She’s no longer pregnant, her daughter has been born and is being tended to by some kind of guide/mentor/helper, Betty (Barbara Crampton). The stark lighting and heavily shadowed world of the border crossing has transformed into something far softer, welcoming, and colorful. A stroll around town reveals plenty of Hispanic people, Black folks, and whites working together to get things ready for the upcoming July 4 festivities. How did she get here? Who are all these people? Why do their smiles stretch a little too wide, their eyes watch a little too intensely? Marisol finds herself in a world that’s too good to be true, and her nature compels her to pull at the threads in order to unravel the mystery. As the old adage goes: Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back. This might not be the case in director/co-writer Gigi Saul Guerrero’s twisty mindfuck of an sf nightmare, Culture Shock.
Sometimes, genre pictures can tackle big, big issues and topics in ways that don’t call attention to themselves. All six of Romero’s Living Dead pictures have political angles, and it’s hard for people who are looking for such things to avoid them. Of course, they also spend time constructing entertaining stories that infuse those matters into the subtext. Then, there are the movies that eschew subtlety altogether, putting their concerns and issues up front and center. It’s an equally valid way for the arts to tackle those difficult topics society is grappling with, though it can be abrasive to watch. I love me some movies from each camp, though my preference is more toward the former. It can be enjoyable to get hammered on the foot or in the face by a sledgehammer of a story, but I prefer it not happen too often.
The screen story for Culture Shock is about immigration. It makes no apologies for being so. It gives us a character with a need to cross the border, who learns something horrible about the procedure as well as the place she is escaping to, and she must process this information. It’s a movie that will piss off hardline conservatives to no end. Luckily, I’m not one of those people.
Culture Shock might be upfront with its intentions and its messages, but it’s also gorgeously filmed. From a cinephile perspective, there are some terrific choices made in the use or withholding of colors, in particular, which make the film a true delight for the senses. Yes, it’s a movie with a mission, but it’s also a movie that glories in the ways to use the stuff of cinema to shine a light (or perhaps cast shadows) onto images in order to distinguish the waking nightmare of reality from the unsettling, surreal nightmare of a Lynchian small town.
The look and feel of the early stages of the film do their best to replicate a grungy reality. Clothes are worn out, faded, uncomfortable. People have rough features, and hands always reach for money. Even a walk on character like El Zorro (Oscar Camacho), an assistant to the coyote who dresses well and radiates charm, wears a wardrobe that looks a little sun bleached. All of this changes when Marisol wakes up in small town America. The clothes are all pastels whether worn by men or women. All the houses look like some kind of colorized Leave It To Beaver era suburban soap opera on the outside, but reveal rich colors decorating their interiors. The people smile all the freaking time, and they walk in orderly fashion. There’s a growing sense of unease that broods beneath this welcoming exterior. This arises in subtle ways, such as how some smiles hold just a little too long—particularly Barbara Crampton’s character. Of course, there’s the none-too-subtle way Marisol is never once allowed to hold her own child. Finally, there’s the way that whenever Marisol encounters some kind of emotionally explosive experience, she immediately wakes up in bed, wearing a completely different dress (mostly pastel, though in one rare case it’s a rich, sexy, confident red), and revisits the same succession of behavior: Eyes open, she sits up, hands caress her now flat belly, a momentary spasm of pain arises.
What’s happening here is decidedly sinister, It is tied with the local Mayor Thomas (Shawn Ashmore), as kindly looking a Caucasian face as we’d ever care to see. He tells Marisol the kinds of things people like to hear, but he is unable to answer questions she has. What is this place? How did she get here? Why can she suddenly speak fluid English?
As the clues amass, we find ourselves in Twilight Zone territory. This is the kind of story that Richard Matheson or Rod Serling would have had a field day telling. A mystery that plays out in that uneasy middle ground between the horror genre, the science fiction genre, and the fantasy genre, which arises from a clearly delineated social matter.
Scenarists Efrén Hernández, James Benson, and Guerrero have constructed a lovely little puzzle box of a creepfest that builds equally effective atmospheres of unease in its opening section and the middle one. They arise from very different sources, one a life-or-death struggle for a new beginning and the other a life-or-death struggle for understanding before one loses her soul, but they are both powerful stories. The finale tries to merge these two sources of unease into a singular conclusion, and that will be divisive among its audience as to whether it works as well as it ought to or not. For my money, the final act is all right, a little too long and gruesome than it needs to be, and a little too on the nose, particularly in the patriarchal character of Attwood (Creed Bratton) who appears both as the governor of the town as well as the mastermind behind the real situation. Still, the film manages to make its points, splash a little blood, and present its protagonist with enough uncomfortable truths before presenting her with a few hard choices. It’s a fine chance to see her development.
Martha Higareda brings sensitivity and a natural toughness to the role. She’s made appearances in quite a few genre flicks, has a face that rings the “I know her from somewhere” bell in my head. However, here she tackles the role of protagonist with cleverness and craft. I wanted to see Marisol get out of danger, wanted her to figure out what was happening, wanted to see how her story would be resolved. Higareda does a fine job lending heart, vulnerability and strength to the role. I hope she gets more work.
Likewise, Barbara Crampton is a delight as ever. This time, as in the LitRPG horror shocker Beyond the Gates (2016), she gets to play a character who is sinister in the way she says things, the way she looks, and through physicality choices without ever once taking it too far. She’s a delight, that Barbara Crampton is, and she sure has come a long way as an actress from her days in fun genre fare like Chopping Mall (1986).
The look of the movie is especially well done. I have to give serious props to Byron Weaver’s cinematography, Cecil Gentry’s production design, the costuming and the makeup departments. The way it transitions from gritty grotty life to something too bright and colorful to be real is handled just about effortlessly. It’s a perfectly designed and executed look.
Culture Shock is a movie that squeezes a compelling story out of a ripped-from-the-headlines issue. It’s not subtle about its intent, but it is a well-crafted film about one woman’s attempts to escape her uncomfortable reality only to find herself nested inside yet another. It’s a surreal and engaging picture, which knows how to use all the tools of cinema to establish a look, a mood, and then to play the audience’s emotions like a finely tuned concert piano. That it saw release on Independence Day back in 2019 is delightful, a sobering little horror story welcome to the difference between the idea of a thing and the reality underneath that lovely exterior.
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Culture Shock is a Hulu Original feature, and therefore available to subscribers to that service. Sadly, it is not yet available in DVD, Blu-ray, or streaming editions otherwise.
Tomorrow, we consider Barbara Crampton’s turn as a middle-aged woman who finds herself confronted with a supernatural promise of freedom … and the terrible cost associated with it. Jakob’s Wife (2021) is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming editions.
Writing for “Welcome To Dystopia: Culture Shock” is copyright © 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud.
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