William Instone and Matt Rifely joined forces to create a great slasher movie, Butcher’s Bluff. Though it is my favorite subgenre, I still have limits. Butcher’s Bluff checked almost every box for me. Butcher’s Bluff has all you need to enjoy an absurdly good slasher movie. Everything I love about slashers came to life here, and I was left a feral young kid again, soaking up some over-the-top kills.

Let’s get into the review.

Synopsis

When four college students set out to investigate the legend of the Hogman for their film thesis, they expect to uncover little more than small-town folklore. But as they dig deeper into the dark history of Emerald Falls, they realize the brutal killer may be more than just a myth. Wearing a grotesque hog mask, the Hogman is a relentless force of terror, hunting down anyone who crosses into his domain. As the students’ project turns into a desperate fight for survival, they must unravel the truth behind the blood-soaked legend before they become his next victims.

Packed with gruesome kills, intense suspense, and a heavy dose of ’80s slasher nostalgia, Butcher’s Bluff delivers a wild, gore-filled ride that horror fans won’t want to miss.

The Rundown

Butcher’s Bluff is part of a movement over the past few years to bring back the spirit of the ’80s slasher. Searching for premarital sex and lots of mind-altering substances. The plot is pretty basic, but how in-depth should it get? I see a lot of complaints about that Slasher movie magic lately. We have evolved as a genre to be a little snobby sometimes. The horror genre needs movies like Butcher’s Bluff because it doesn’t stray far from what it should be. Lately, we just can’t let people enjoy things. The era of the armchair critic is here, and it’s after films like this that we are trying to end a legacy of what many of us grew up on.

Butcher’s Bluff takes you somewhere else for a few hours, somewhere familiar and comforting in a twisted way. Are the acting and story phenomenal? Not exactly, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes a film can be silly and simple, it gives us that escape from reality for a while. The artistry in the film shows that someone has done their homework on slasher movies. Butcher’s Bluff meets all the criteria of a legendary slasher. Just like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, Hogman deserves his recognition. Horror does not need to win Oscars; as a matter of fact, the best horror creators stay far away from awards.

In The End

Butcher’s Bluff has the perfect mix of cringey moments you have to imagine yourself and tasteful gore. There didn’t need to be any over-the-top kills here like we see in Terrifier. Butcher’s Bluff is on its spectrum from modern movies.

I will always support the indie scene because there are so many films like Butcher’s Bluff that do not get the recognition they deserve. The only box that wasn’t checked on my list was the length. Butcher’s Bluff runs a little long at a stern 2 hours, and after a while, you have to fight getting distracted because almost everything happens at once. There are not too many slow and menacing instances, and oddly, that’s OK with me.

Normally, I am the first to complain or notice a squirrel while watching a slasher movie at this length. It was easy to fight off with this film because you feel the love and excitement. Butcvher’s Bluff was made out of pure love and holds a fantastic cast, including a special appearance by Jeremy London (Mallrats, 1995) and starring Bill Oberst Jr. (3 From Hell, 2019).

Give yourself a break and have a good time with Butcher’s Bluff, and if you live in the woods… Leave the light on.

At the center of The Secret of Me is Jim Ambrose, who grew up as Kristi. Looking into the camera as he begins to tell his story, he says, to be clear, that he is not transgender. He is intersex and was in the dark about that fact until he was 19 and discovered the truth: that he was born with male chromosomes and ambiguous genitalia but underwent surgery as an infant and was raised as a girl.

Grace Hughes-Hallett, directing her first feature, has created a lucid, absorbing film that uses Jim’s first-person account to reveal a much larger story about treating intersex children. The documentary lands as especially timely now, with the very idea of gender identity under right-wing attack.

Hughes-Hellett is a producer of Three Identical Strangers (2018) about triplets separated at birth as part of a social experiment, who only discovered their connection as adults. There are echoes of that film in The Secret of Me, in both its sharp, straightforward style and the theme of how such experiments can have devastating effects.

Like the subjects of Three Identical Strangers, Jim always sensed there was something off about his identity. He was in college in 1995 when, in a textbook, he read about John Money, a psychologist and once a respected, hugely influential researcher at Johns Hopkins. He saw himself in Money’s most famous case study, about treating twin boys. One twin was the victim of a botched circumcision, and Money told his parents to raise him as a girl. That child, David Reimer, grew up, troubled, as Brenda until learning the facts, and committed suicide as an adult in 2004.

Hughes-Hallett blends these two strands easily, interspersing Jim’s experience with interviews and archival footage about Money. Jim is an excellent choice to lead viewers through the film, someone who now seems comfortable in his own skin. His demeanor is calm, direct and earnest. After reading of Money’s case, he got his medical records and learned that he had been born with a penis below what is considered normal size, and that his parents were advised to allow the surgery and never tell him about it. He frequently refers to the operation as mutilation and sees the treatment as a double injury, the surgery compounded by his parents’ deception.

In archival footage, his parents explain that they were following the best medical advice they had and acknowledge his anger at them. In an interview for this film, Jim recalls his thoughts at the time: “You cut my genitals out. What did you think was going to happen?” It took a double mastectomy and removal of a constructed vagina, surgeries his parents approved when he was an adolescent, for him to feel like himself.

The treatment his parents agreed to was straight from the Money playbook. He insisted that gender was a matter of socialization, and that raising David as Brenda would mean he accepted himself as Brenda. Keeping the truth from the children was part of his prescribed treatment, which was followed in thousands of cases around the world, largely because he wrote articles falsely claiming that Brenda was a perfectly happy child. The film includes brief archival footage of the adult David, furious that Money’s lies about him had been so widely accepted. “I was appalled, disgusted and angry when I heard about it. People thought that my case was a success story? There was nothing further from the truth,” he says.

The documentary includes a few talking heads, all relevant and smoothly edited in. They include Tiger Devore, an activist and psychologist who is intersex and was once Money’s intern, and John Colapinto, a journalist who interviewed David and exposed Money’s deceptions in a 1997 Rolling Stone story.

The music is a minor misstep, jarring throughout, with a tinkly piano at the start and suspenseful notes when Colapinto is searching for some old files. It’s a more serous flaw that the film is framed around Jim’s wish to confront Dr. Richard Carter, who performed the surgery when he was an infant. At the end of the film they meet in a coffee shop in a scene too obviously orchestrated for the cameras. Carter apologizes and Jim seems satisfied that at least they’ve talked. What is meant to be climactic is an anti-climax. Worse, it plays as gimmicky, undercutting Jim’s obvious sincerity.

At its best, which is most of the time, The Secret of Me is strong enough not to need anything that artificial. The events and their consequences are powerful enough.

Back in 2012, 9.79* aired as part of ESPN’s 30 for 30 franchise. Daniel Gordon’s film focused on the 100-meter final at the Seoul Olympics, a race that was dominated by Ben Johnson, who then abdicated the crown after a positive steroid test, leaving Carl Lewis as the desultory victor.

In an era oversaturated with sports documentaries, the closest we came to a doc focused on Lewis, among the greatest track and field stars ever, was one that was really about The Other Guy.

Even after his career-ending long-jump victory at the Atlanta Olympics offered an opportunity for people to embrace Lewis fully, he was still seen as somewhere between unlikable and unknowable.

That contention is finally put to the test in Julie Anderson and Chris Hay‘s new feature documentary I’m Carl Lewis! 

Premiering at SXSW, I’m Carl Lewis! gives Lewis his due as an athlete. But more than that, it paints a portrait of a man who was decades ahead of his time as an advocate against the arbitrarily enforced “amateurism” of Olympic sports; who was criticized as brash and arrogant just years before those attitudes would be recoded as “confident”; who defied gender norms and paid the price in public perception. 

Regarding Lewis’ knowability, he still comes across as only as forthcoming as he wants to be, and you can sense Anderson and Hay nudging up against the limitations of Lewis’ warmth. But it’s easy to see the double standards — most of them racially coded — that harmed his image.

It’s easiest to chronicle Lewis’ athletic success and I’m Carl Lewis! takes a strictly, slightly blandly, chronological approach stretching across his four Olympiads, starting with the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, in which Lewis equalled Jesse Owens with four marquee golds.

The doc follows his two decades of unprecedented dominance with spotlights on the 1988 showdown with Johnson (who doesn’t appear in the film) and his legendary 1991 World Championships long-jumping battle with Mike Powell (interviewed enthusiastically), which saw both men threaten Bob Beamon’s long-held record.

There’s ample tremendous footage of Lewis at work, emphasizing his grace and dominance. There’s also ample footage of Lewis meeting with reporters, allowing us to see the combative attitude (on both sides, since plenty of journalists come off every bit as poorly) that denied Lewis some of the public-facing opportunities a performer of his profile should have received.

With distant hindsight and the 63-year-old Lewis’ current candor, the directors reposition what was presented as “confrontational” back in the ’80s. 

Was Lewis primarily obsessed with money or was he pushing back against a system that carved the pie up to benefit organizers and sponsors? It’s easiest to see what a threat Lewis was to the status quo through sniveling archival interviews with dismissive Madison Avenue types from back in the ’80s, along with current interviews from Lewis’ contemporaries crediting him with opening doors. Is the documentary able to make direct connections between Lewis’ outspoken support of getting paid and eventual changes to the infrastructure of the sport? Probably not.

It’s much easier to see Lewis’ impact on keeping the sport drug-free, as he was hardly coy in accusing Johnson of doping long before there was evidence, and the doc isn’t shy about admitting to and clearing up Lewis’ own pre-Olympics positive drug test from 1988 (not that anything he clears up wasn’t in the public record 30+ years ago).

You can see how carefully Anderson and Hay want to handle Lewis’ sexuality, which was the subject of speculation and slurs in his prime.

“Carl didn’t act in the traditional, hyper-masculine way that Black men were expected to, and that’s part of what made him threatening to some people and empowering to other people,” commentator Keith Boykin says of his friend.

I don’t think the documentary is successful at illustrating that last part — how Lewis really empowered anybody. Yes, he opened up the door for today’s athletes proudly serving lewks on the red carpets that have become a key facet of 21st century sports. But where was the empowerment in Lewis’ aggressive denials at the time that he was gay? He isn’t much more candid today, nor is he introspective about the way he handled those claims. Nor is the documentary able to illustrate if Lewis’ penchant for eye-liner, homoerotic pop videos and flamboyant bodysuits gave him support in a gay community of the ’80s starved for public representation that he didn’t embrace.

In his current interviews, he’s more playfully evasive, speaking proudly of his famous Pirelli ad in red stilettos and critiquing nude portraits he commissioned at the time. He seems happy today, as he relaxes in his hot tub or walks the filmmakers around his small orchard or enjoys a birthday party with friends and family. Whether there were situations he could have handled differently or slurs he could have addressed in different ways apparently doesn’t matter here. The documentary is more about what society owed Carl Lewis than what Carl Lewis owes society at this point.

I’m Carl Lewis! reminded me most of Alex Stapleton’s Reggie, an Amazon documentary that made me entirely reexamine my perspective on Reggie Jackson — especially the ways the narratives about him were crafted at the time and who was allowed to craft those narratives. This doesn’t offer as full an overhaul for Lewis, but it’s effective in underlining his athletic greatness.