The first Misery Mill review went up October 9, 2015: Carnival of Crime and Absolution, two movies of no particular note. The purpose of the project was to systematically go through 5 Mill Creek Entertainment box sets to find public domain movies and upload them to the Internet Archive as I’d already done with the Horror and Sci-Fi box sets in the PD Project.
The impetus for that project, and its continuation in the Misery Mill, was the hope, still unrealized, of making a movie riffing show in the tradition of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (which had not yet announced its return). I didn’t want to copy MST3k, but my contention is that post-MST3k horror host shows have to intervene in the text in some way. Just presenting the movie is not enough. Plus, at the time, no one was doing riffing on TV and I felt like it was something worth doing. For many reasons comfortably summed up as “life,” the show never happened. Instead, I wrote up summaries and reviews of 344 movies. So, was it worth it and did it work?
To answer the second question first, at the most basic level the project was a success. I had been wanting to watch all these movies since I made the first PD Project post in February 2008. These DVDs were sitting on my shelf and in the my mind for nearly 11 years and I’ve finally watched them all. I’m proud of that. I set myself a big goal and achieved it.
As to if it was worth it, not all the movies I watched were bad. I’ve liked movies that I never would have thought to look for, specifically the old black and white quickies that felt like adaptations of radio or stage plays. Likewise, among the bad movies were some that were “good-bad” as the Flop House would say. Some of these, like Top Cop and Day of the Panther, I hope to share with future groups of friends on bad movie nights. I also encountered my own personal bugbear, Marimark Productions. Having a hate-on for these pictures was a lot of fun—more fun than watching most of them. Marimark, though, gave me the opportunity to get performatively angry which most of the movies didn’t.
On a basic level, I mostly enjoyed myself and I finished the project so it was both worth it and a success. Also, all those public domain movies are on the Internet Archive. Even though I didn’t make the show I was initially thinking about, those resources are still there if and when I decide to come back to them. I haven’t given up on that completely.
However, speaking of the performative anger highlights how the project failed. I don’t think I ever developed a voice or style writing what I hesitate to call reviews. Dan Olson, I think, offered the criticism of a lot of YouTube reviews like RedLetterMedia and Nostalgia Critic that they don’t actually review the movies. Instead, they give a long-form summary of the movie. The same criticism applies to the vast majority of my posts. One reason is that I was modeling myself after RedLetterMedia and Nostalgia Critic (the former of which I still watch, although with more skepticism. The latter I’ve dropped). Since I thought of them as being “how you talk about bad movies online,” well, that’s how I talked about bad movies online.
Another reason I think the project failed is that I was going through two movies a week. Part of my ambition was to write longer essays about what the movies suggested about the culture, what they were doing that was interesting, and what about them opened up larger discussions. Work like that takes both time and context, though. I didn’t have the context of 500 movies that I have now to make those larger claims and cranking out two of these a week while also trying to keep up with the rest of my life prevented me not only from writing those longer pieces but even conceiving of them.
Even now it’s difficult to say anything definitive about all the movies I’ve watched because they were all so different—different genres, different periods, different styles. One thing I can talk about that came up in a lot of the movies is rape culture. Jesus, we wonder why people of a certain age were jumping to defend Brett Kavanaugh—they themselves saying that even if he did it (he did it), it’s not that bad and what do we expect from teenagers?—and then I see movies where women are dragged literally screaming off the street to be driven into a field and fondled. And those were the comedies! Golly, I wonder why people who grew up with that would consider literal rape not that big a deal?
I ranted constantly about Cavegirl in these posts and while it’s not as bad as many of the films I watched, it does highlight an element that popped up far too often: female consent is a problem. If she’s interested or willing to have sex, that’s the least sexy thing there could be. You have to find the girl who doesn’t want to have sex and then keep needling her, coerce her, trick her into giving it up.
The reason I’ve hammered on these ideas when they came up in the movies and once again here is because these movies weren’t made with those (or any!) messages in mind. The rapey elements aren’t there because the producers wanted to say something about sexual assault, they are there because the producers thought the audience would be okay with it. Even phrasing it that way gives the producers too much agency. That’s how they viewed sex. If there was going to be sex in their movie (and there was going to be sex in their movie) that was how sex would be portrayed because that was what sex was to them. If this is how your culture imagines sex and relationships, how can you imagine anything else? What other examples or sources of information do you have? If this is how you always see these situations portrayed in stories, how do you write a story that’s different? Why would you think you should?
You recognize a culture by the stories it tells itself: How does it portray authority? How does it portray love? Who are the heroes and who are the villains? Who suffers and who succeeds? Thinking about questions like these in response to Z-grade films seem counter-intuitive, but these are the movies that answer those questions most effectively. Oscar-bait flicks like Crash or Green Book tell us stories of how we want to imagine our culture: racism is an individual/regional/settled issue and we all agree it’s bad. Just don’t look too closely at the racist jokes in all the other movies that came out that year if the movies aren’t, in fact, all white in front of and behind the camera.
The movies I watched in these sets generally didn’t set out with a message, they just wanted to turn a quick buck. Because of that, they’re both cultural ink blot tests and Freudian slips: they’re not thinking about what they’re saying so they’re saying what they really think. How much have we moved past these ideas? How much are we able to imagine new stories and new ways of relating to each other? These movies were the background noise of a culture, so what kind of movies are the people of that culture creating today?
I don’t have answers to those questions. If I did, I’d be writing academic essays about these flicks citing all sorts of other material—another goal I had for this project that I didn’t achieve! And that seems like a fitting end to a reflection on the Misery Mill. When I started this project October 9, 2015, I basically said, “Oh God, what have I done?” 3+ years later I can say, “a little, but not as much as I’d hoped.” I think that’s the only honest response to any reflection, that and the hope that the next project, my own or someone else's, manages to do a little more.
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