Burning Palms

Every director with a successful career has a bad outlier. Spielberg has 1941 and the fourth Indiana Jones movie. Welles has The Immortal Story. Romero has There's Always Vanilla. Christopher Landon has eight movies under his belt as I write this (and a lot more as writer and producer). He hasn't had Spielberg levels of success, but he's had a fair number of movies held in high regard in the horror circle. And then there's his first movie, Burning Palms. It is not bad because it's his first movie. Burning Palms is bad because it is a cruel, cynical, nasty, joyless, abusive, pointless movie. Burning Palms is an anthology movie. Every one of the five stories is set in a different neighborhood of Los Angeles, and supposedly plays on tropes and stereotypes about these neighborhoods. I'm no expert on LA, so I'm not going to touch that aspect. I will, however, say this; Burning Palms's anthology format is an homage to Creepshow and Tales From The Crypt. The intro and outro to each story and the movie as a whole are presented as stories within a comic book someone finds on the street. Stories start off with narrative non-dialogue bubbles one would see in comic books, like "MEANWHILE, IN WEST HOLLYWOOD". Unfortunately, Landon (who also wrote this) misses the point of Creepshow and TftC; that villains will get what's coming to them for their terrible deeds, usually in a poetic manner. Landon's all miss that point, but in the worst possible way. I feel the need to break down each one, so you can get the full picture here. Take the first story, The Green-Eyed Monster. Dennis' 15-year old daughter, Chloe, is coming to town to spend the weekend with him and meet his fiance Dedra (why a 15 year old isn't living with him when he's a single parent, it never explains). Dennis and Chloe have an weird and uncomfortable relationship; Dennis is okay with her having sex and drinking, she sunbathes nude in front of him, and their physicality is more than a normal father/daughter relationship. After seeing them dance together -- which is less dancing and more grinding -- Dedra, feeling isolated and disgusted from what appears to be an incestuous relationship, kills herself in the exact same manner as Chloe's mom did when she was a baby. The end. Yes, after Dedra sees the grinding at the club, she ends up cheating on Dennis, but that doesn't make her worthy of death. And Dennis' defensiveness when called out on his behavior with his daughter shows how deeply he does not see the problems. By the end of the story, we're left with a woman whose happy life is wrecked, and ends, in the span of a couple days, and a potential incestual relationship will continue. Great. The second story, This Little Piggy, is about Ginny. Her boyfriend asks her to stick her finger in his butt during sex. At first, she is hesitant, thinking it's gross. Eventually, she agrees to make him happy. She is haunted by guilt from doing it, which manifests in thinking her finger smells like fecal matter. She scrubs it until it bleeds. The guilt drives her so crazy, she's committed to an asylum. During an escape attempt, she cuts off the finger with a pair of scissors. The end. So now we have a story about guilt driving someone off the deep end, built on the foundation of a stupid poop joke. Ginny does nothing wrong and gets punished for it anyway, just like the last story, but let's build the story around a one-note poop joke. Fantastic. The third story, Buyer's Remorse, is about a gay couple who pay to adopt a seven-year-old girl from Africa in what appears to be an illegal adoption. The girl doesn't seem to speak English at all. The men are not equipped to handle her, especially after an incident at a birthday party where she uses a pole to spear a possum to a tree (complete with a cartoony tribal "AIY-AIY-AIY" scream), and her getting hold of some crystal meth from the center console of the car of one of her new dads (who left her in the hot car so he could cheat on his life partner). They end up abandoning her in the forest. The end. So now we can add racial stereotypes, gay stereotypes (Landon himself is gay, so why he'd indulge in this, I have no idea), potential kidnapping and human trafficking, and child abandonment, and these two cretins get no punishment whatsoever. The fourth story, Kangaroo Court, sees three vile, rotten boys, being raised by a constantly-stoned nanny while their parents are always gone, actually holding a court proceeding to determine who stole the maid's preserved piece of umbilical cord from her dead baby. It turns out the oldest boy (acting as judge) did, so the court proceeding is a sham, but in stealing it, he found letters that end up leading to the revelation that the maid killed her own baby because she was jealous that her boyfriend seemingly loved the baby more than her. The maid then hangs herself out of guilt. The end. I failed to mention that the story starts with the boys actually preparing to hang a playmate of theirs, full-on from a tree, with a noose, so they're reprehensible. The nanny is a dumb hippie cliche. Why anyone goes along with the court proceeding is never explained. It's all so mean-spirited. And the final story is Maneater, and it is easily the worst. It opens with Sarah, in her apartment, being raped by someone in one of those white-face masks. She seems shell-shocked when it's over, but doesn't call the police. The next morning, as she's doing some picking up, she finds the rapist's wallet under the couch. She tracks him down, blackmails him to going out to dinner with her, takes him back to her apartment, and asks him to rape her again. He gets so weirded out that he flees, and she crumples to the floor in tears at being abandoned. The end. Do I even need to editorialize on this? Every story is built on stereotypes and finding the most offensive angle to look at a given idea. There are no morals to be found in these stories. No delightfully evil turns of the screw. The whole point of Burning Palms' five stories seems to be "haha, look at human suffering, isn't it funny". No, it's not. It doesn't even approach amusing. It doesn't even stumble over funny by accident. It seems to exist only to shock and offend, except it isn't really shocking or offensive of its own accord. It's shocking and offensive in the way your nineteen year old using three swear words in a nine-word sentence is shocking and offensive. The only thing shocking about this movie is its own smug confidence that it is being shocking. It isn't pushing the envelope or exploring taboos, because there's no exploration or grand statement to be found. It's an ugly movie full of ugly people who to ugly things, but because these stories are so reliant on being edgelordy, it results in the ugliness also being weightless. That results in a movie that trades in being offensive but the offending content has no bite, an attempt at satire that neglects to mock or satirize anything, twists of fate that only exist to be cruel, and a cast of characters that are either the worst of humanity, or the victims thereof. Burning Palms is never as offensive as it thinks it is, never once even challenging or intelligent, and certainly not clever in its gross misunderstanding of satire. It it only fatiguing, taking two hours of your life to scream in your face, but saying nothing at all.