JAMESFEST #5: 666 Teen Warlock

While the scope and connecting tissue of James’ annual marathons are often as oblique as medieval scrolls, he always offers an oasis in the desert of obscure, often challenging films. Fittingly this “break,” as it were, is still definitely not for the average moviegoer. These yearly installments are directed by David DeCoteau, an ultra low-budget filmmaker whose works are at once obvious hackjobs and charmingly sincere in equal measure.

DeCoteau’s films are often shot in the same Los Angeles mansion (decorated like a showhouse) as various male underwear models wander through scenes, take their shirts off, and deliver dialogue with the cadence of a C-student in theater school. A small smattering of titles he’s made are: 1313: Wicked Stepbrother, 2: Voodoo Academy, A Talking Cat!?!, My Stepbrother is a Vampire!?!, 3 Scream Queens, 90210 Shark Attack. If you noticed a pattern of starting the movie title with a number, that’s not a coincidence. Much like the past hustlers and hucksters of film, including his mentor Roger Corman or William Castle, DeCoteau realized that there were shortcuts to be built to the audience (and their wallets) if you could figure out the right gimmick. 

In this case: that the nascent streaming market of the late 2000s and early 2010s often had an “alphabetical” sorting of films, so if a canny filmmaker were to, say, start all of his films with numbers, he’d be right at the top. By pumping movies out as quickly as possible, he could more or less dominate the front page and entice viewers to see at least one of his films.

As an actual filmmaker, it’s extremely difficult to get a handle on how sincere he is about his art. His movies are, if we’re being honest, often extremely boring. Sets are not decorated in a way that conveys either a lived-in reality or a sense of character; shots are often flat, with natural lighting and HD focus that feels closer to reality TV than anything cinematic. DeCoteau is gay, and many of his movies seem made entirely as an excuse to feature a bunch of shirtless Abercrombie & Finch-style shirtless hunks, but strangely, there’s very little eroticism in the films themselves. The actors are attractive, but the characters and situations are decidedly unsexy.

As a critic, as a movie watcher, as even just a guy whose livelihood depends in some capacity on my ability to communicate why a piece of art fascinates me, I don’t really know what to say. His works are the Marge Simpson potato meme for me: I just think they’re neat. If you’re familiar with my work at all, you may know about my term “maggot cheese movies.” These are movies for people who have seen so many films that conventional works no longer thrill, the cinephile equivalent of those people who travel to Sardinia to sample Casu Martzu. These films might as well come with an advisory sticker that says, “Sickos only.”

DeCoteau’s films epitomize this quality, but in an ocean of the unknown, seeing his particular oddities were a release. 666 Teen Warlock is a fairly short film at 40-ish minutes, and feels like an aborted TV pilot, like DeCoteau wanted to see if he could make his own Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Like Joss Whedon, this lets DeCoteau put his fetishes on full display with clueless hunks wandering around a mansion as a middle-aged actress makes snide remarks about the plot.

Speaking of the plot, nearly 600 words into a review is probably a good time to go over it. The story here is that newly 18-year-old Larry (Liam Hawley) wakes up on his birthday to discover that he is a warlock (and a teen one, at that) and has newly acquired magical powers. The ghost of his dead aunt Rogers (Hilary Shephard) lets him know that it’s his destiny to defeat the demon that killed her or the world is doomed. There is also some tepid magical shenanigans where Larry magically convinces his bullies to beat each other up, makes his crush play with herself (i.e. jump rope), and shapeshifts into his crush’s just-barely hunkier boyfriend just to see what it’s like to have an extra couple of visible ab muscles.

Hawley offers some impressive can-do attitude for a man who seems visibly into his late 20s at the time of playing an 18-year old, while Shephard vamps it up like a Real Housewife who had a few bottles before arriving on set. The rest of the cast are largely pretty bad, which, combined with the lifeless and flat sets, creates a persistent amateur quality. That said, DeCoteau adds some visual thrills, sort of, with CGI lightning and glowing balls, along with a demon visualized as a shirtless hunk with a plastic horn glued to his forehead.

It’s not hard to see why this didn’t catch on as a television series, but like Weerasethakul Apichatpong, the drowsy boredom this creates is fascinating. (I have to imagine I’m the first film critic in history to favorably compare DeCoteau to Weerasethakul.) This is maggot cheese, but I’ve lost the taste for mild cheddar.

This is Part 5 of Jamesfest.

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