Tribeca Film Festival 2023: SUITABLE FLESH and KIM’S VIDEO

I was delighted when I heard that this year’s Tribeca Film Festival would include a section called “Escape From Tribeca,” which essentially functions as an extension of the midnight movie category. Designed, in Tribeca’s words, to “increase our outreach by bringing in the rabid fans who have never been” to the festival, the category is perhaps a little condescending of genre fans in its marketing–– many of us enjoy our Frederico Fellini as much as we do our Frank Henenlotter, thank you very much.  Nevertheless, I eagerly signed up to cover Suitable Flesh, the only new release in the section’s lineup. 

All light genre snobbery aside, I wanted to pair my review of this film, an ode to midnight movies past, with another paean to movie obsessives that also happens to be the best film I’ve seen at the festival so far: Kim’s Video.

Let these two pieces together serve as a reminder that “highbrow” and “lowbrow” filmmaking aren’t really very different. They’re two sides of the same coin, dependent on each other in a film ecosystem that relies on an earnest, undiscriminating love of movies of all stripes to produce real art. 

Suitable Flesh (Joe Lynch)

Fans of oddball, B-movie antics should be entertained by Suitable Flesh, Joe Lynch‘s mischievous take on a long-shelved project from Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli, the minds behind Re-Animator, From Beyond, and other ’80s splatter classics. Based on H.P. Lovecraft‘s short story, “The Thing On The Doorstep,” Suitable Flesh is a broad, raunchy, bloody affair that feels like something pulled straight from the horror section of a video store like… well, Kim’s Video. Lovers of cult and kitsch horror that doesn’t take itself too seriously will find ample fun here. 

The sordid setup is this: When psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham) agrees to help Asa (Judah Lewis), a strange young man seemingly suffering from multiple personality disorder, her orderly life is thrown into supernatural–– and marital–– disarray. It seems young Asa isn’t suffering from MPD, and might not be Asa at all, but an ancient demon with a penchant for hand-rolled cigarettes and kinky sex. Naturally, this scintillating combination won’t sit well with Beth’s husband, Eddie (Johnathon Schaech), who described with delightful accuracy as a “sweet house boy” during the opening night Q&A this week. Turns out, in a twist fit for a John Waters film, this unnamed demon can hop from body to body with a quick incantation and just a little blood–– and it’s going through something of a gender crisis. 

The murderous rampage of this horny, gender-fluid ghost (played in vampy, scenery-chewing turns by almost every member of the cast) is shot as a Giallo film with plenty of spinning camera moves and dramatic dissolves and superimpositions. Some of the kills are downright demonically inspired (one scene involving a rearview camera got a huge round of cheers from an already rowdy audience) and there are enough twists and turns to keep the film chugging briskly along to its own weirdo rhythm.

Dedicated to the memory of Stuart Gordon, the film is a loving homage to the midnight horror film, featuring veterans of the genre Barbara Crampton and Bruce Davison as well as Heather Graham. One person I overheard after the Q&A complained that the dialogue at times felt “like porn,” and… this is true. But hey! That’s splatter. This is a movie by aficionados for aficionados, looking to laugh, cheer, and see some “weird f*cked up shit,” to quote Joe Lynch, who concluded his introduction by telling his audience that we’d probably either love it or hate it and either way he’d done his job. In one scene, a naked, blood-covered character holds up another character’s screaming, blood-gushing decapitated head. “Too much?” they ask coyly. Not for me!  

Kim’s Video (David Redmon)

“That was f*cking awesome!” hollered one member of the lively audience after a screening of Kim’s Video this Tuesday, to a round of hearty applause. Kim’s Video is a genre-defying piece of guerrilla investigative reporting, a documentary that examines everything from the gentrification of New York City’s East Village to the influence of the Sicilian mafia on Italian governance, and an essay film that uses the lyric cadences of a film buffs’ movie reference-studded stream of consciousness to tell a story of love and obsession. With its throbbing score created by an Italian giallo composer and its frenetic run and gun camera work, the film radiates a breathless, personal, underground quality even as its scope grows shockingly epic. It’s winning, hysterically funny, and truly must be seen to be believed. 

The film begins with director David Redmon (Girl Model, Night Labor) wandering the streets of the East Village asking strangers, “Do you know Kim’s Video?” Most don’t, but those who do light up with nostalgia for the titular video rental store. Redmon, like many directors including the Coen brothers and Alex Ross Perry, frequented the Kim’s Video flagship, Mondo Kim’s, during its long tenure in St. Marks, using its 55,000 film collection (the biggest in the country) to learn and grow as a filmmaker. As streaming fundamentally changed the movie ecosystem, the entire chain went out of business, but its vast collection, which included numerous underground titles unavailable anywhere else, was too significant to let disappear. So, Yongman Kim, the store’s founder, offered the entire collection to any facility that could feasibly house it and provide access for free. 

Thus begins Redmon‘s relentless, globetrotting mystery that left my jaw on the floor and drew gasps of helpless laughter from the entire audience. Where did the collection go? Who is Yongman Kim? What happens next? Will the Coen brothers ever pay their $600 late fee? I’ll leave the answers to the film itself. They’re presented as a Kafkaesque microcosm, their own theater of the absurd that keeps the viewer (and its participants) guessing until the very end. 

The beauty of Kim’s Video is the way it uses a film lover’s language to tell a story about filmmaking and film itself, pulling clips from diverse sources as metaphors to understand (and even shape) real-life situations: Redmon‘s old boss at Walmart looks like a character from Manos: The Hands of Fate; his youthful love for late-night TV movies is something out of Poltergeist; his search for the loss of Kim’s archive is like The Conversation or Blow Out. 

Films shape our dreams and, sometimes, our realities. They give language to emotions and circumstances we may not know how to express on our own. Taken all together, from The Godfather to Bride of the Gorilla, they form our collective memory, and visualizing them this way emphasizes the profound loss that the absence of collections like Kim’s would be to our culture–– and to Redmon. With a little help from “the ghosts of cinema’s past,” (literally–– thanks, Godard!) Kim’s Video, in its low-fi style, its unexpectedly Campbellian structure and its manic, cinephiliac content, brings us together to celebrate not just what film teaches us, but what the movies really mean to us… and how far we’ll go to rent them.

Both films premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival.