Shudder Streaming: The Scary of Sixty-First (2021) - Reviewed

Courtesy of Shudder

Have you ever heard of the American podcast Red Scare co-hosted by Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan?  I guess it’s some sort of provocative cultural commentary hosted by, as Nekrasova and Khachiyan attest, “bohemian layabouts” with Nekrasova wearing “Sailor Socialism” as a badge of honor.  

The podcasts ramble from topic to topic and often critiques everything from neoliberalism, feminism, #MeToo, and above all the death of Jeffrey Epstein.  So convinced of her own press clippings, Nekrasova decided to take it upon herself to mount her newfound conspiracy theorist obsessive ramblings about Jeffrey Epstein and the talky back-and-forth podcast word salads and somehow make something resembling a movie out of it. 
 
Picked up by Shudder and soon to be released on disc by Vinegar Syndrome, this overconfident unprocessed 16mm exercise in mumblegore with hints of 80s horror nostalgia represents a new height in artistic pretension and hubris, a film that wants to be topical while also being a bit of shameless self-promotion for the podcast.  

In other words, if you listened to an episode of the show by this film’s writer-director and leading actresses, this is basically the movie version of that with Eyes Wide Shut and Repulsion being named dropped that effectively takes on everything and nothing.  Kind of like the rambling drunk you hear at a bar pontificating about the meaning of life before falling asleep.

 
Preppy college kids Addie (Betsey Brown) and Noelle (Madeline Quinn) are searching for and settle on an apartment building in New York City, an ordinary looking flat.  One day a nameless woman played by Nekrasova herself lets herself into their apartment and begins with Noelle a deep dive into a bottomless labyrinth of conspiracy theories about their domicile when it is revealed the apartment was previously owned by none other than convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.   

While Noelle and the woman romp around playing sex games and reenacting autoerotic asphyxiation, Addie seems to become possessed by the spirit of one of Epstein’s victims and devolves into a frenzied psychosexual state including but not limited to public masturbation and for her to implore depraved sexual acts from her beleaguered boyfriend. 
 
Despite frequently intercutting subliminal flash edits of Epstein death photos and/or just pictures of his face flashed onscreen like the white-faced demon from The Exorcist, the so called The Scary of Sixty-First is a meandering soliloquy of disconnected nonsense purporting to be important.  

Wanting to be a #MeToo film while also taking the piss out of the movement, The Scary of Sixty-First is “elevated horror” for college elitists who want to feel spunky and edgy by talking about “issues”.  When it wallows in the characters having sex and/or making obscene vocal gestures that sound rather pornographic before hastily embarking on violence and gore for no real reason, Nekrasova intends for you to take this as allegorical for the collective suffering of Epstein’s victims…gimme a break.

 
Visually the film is nice to look at in Super 16mm thanks to Hunter Zimny though the unprocessed footage and frequent seemingly intentional hair follicles appearing on the sides of the image cement this as another hip retro horror effort though never once does Scary actually deliver on its title.  The soundtrack helps boost things with an electronic score by Eli Keszler that’s mostly memorable.  Madeline Quinn, Betsey Brown and Dasha Nekrasova do a mostly good job wrestling with the snooty snippy hipster dialogue though fellow podcaster Anna Khachiyan as a Ghislaine Maxwell doppelganger feels tacky and exploitative for no apparent reason.
 
Nekrasova intends with her film to let you know how culturally and politically inclined both she and her show are and that she has a lot to tell you about Jeffrey Epstein and the pain he inflicted on so many countless victims…if only she could figure out precisely what it is she wanted to say.  Like the title, The Scary of Sixty-First, released by the same sublabel behind the vastly superior Censor, is piffle.  

A self-indulgent non-movie that firmly believes it and especially its creator are saying something of deep social significance and it’s about a serious matter at heart, The Scary of Sixty-First might amuse fans of Room 237 which proved to be more about obsession than any actual revelations about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining but otherwise will likely infuriate if not annoy others.  If you’re eagerly anticipating a big screen takedown of the still unfolding Jeffrey Epstein crime saga, I’m sorry to say you’ll have to keep waiting for it.

--Andrew Kotwicki