{Movie Review} I’m That Bitch: They Call Her Death (2024)

“I ain’t deaf, I’m single-minded.”

There’s nothing new under the sun. In recent years, this truism has become something more like a manifesto for filmmakers who seem intent on creating pastiches and patch-ups of the media that many of us grew up with, often going so far as to set their pictures in an imagined past or slapping on post-production effects to simulate film grain, VHS noise, and so on.

And yet, too often these flicks wind up as nothing more than pale imitations of the things they’re setting out to remind us of. They wear their influences on their sleeves, but the sleeve itself is hollow. It’s one thing to reproduce smash cuts, music cues, and even film grain – it’s quite another to actually bring all those pieces together into a whole that says something more than, “Hey, remember this?”

Enter They Call Her Death. Despite its dizzying array of genre elements – it’s kind of a weird Western splatter revenge giallo – They Call Her Death is, on paper, something we’ve seen a lot of lately. It’s a throwback to the often-gonzo Italian genre movies of the 1970s and early ‘80s, mashing up spaghetti Westerns and black-gloved killers, complete with visual nods to everything from Blood and Black Lace to Kiss Me Deadly.

This specific combo may be unusual, but this kind of homage film is something we’ve seen before, and it’s easy to let that familiarity lull you into thinking you know what to expect. But They Call Her Death is something special; something more than the sum of its parts.

Rather than merely a pastiche of the movies that it is emulating, it steps up to seize its place among them in a way that makes every decision, from the narrative to the aesthetic, feel at once intentional and organic. Rather than layering on post-production effects to emulate the look of older movies, They Call Her Death is simply (and proudly) shot on 16mm Kodak film. It’s funny, but the humor never feels forced. It’s bloody, but the gore works in service of the form. It’s woke, but never pedantic. And it’s almost certainly a better remake of The Crow than the remake of The Crow that we’re getting later this year.

It’s also made on a shoestring budget, and shot on location in Kansas and Missouri, almost entirely by talent local to the Kansas City area, starting with writer/director Austin Snell and collaborators/producers Adam Jeffers and Jake Jackson. At the screening I saw at Screenland Armour, it seemed like about half the theater was involved in the production of the film in some way. As the protagonist picked up a farm implement, I heard one woman behind me exclaim, “That’s my shovel!” The set used for the main town was Wichita’s Old Cowtown Museum, which I was a frequent visitor to as a kid.

So, there’s a certain amount of bias at play here, but there’s also a certain degree of justified local pride. As I mentioned when reviewing Side Effects May Vary, it’s a pleasure to see a truly indie film like this succeed on its own merits under any circumstances. Knowing that it’s an almost entirely local production just adds savor.

The plot is familiar enough, at least to begin with. Molly Pray (an absolutely dynamite Sheri Rippel) is a woman living on the fringes of a little town on the “American prairie” in the 1870s with her husband, who is framed for murder and killed by a bounty hunter. With everything taken from her, Molly swears (extremely) bloody revenge on a whole passel of folks, even going so far as to make a deal with Death if it will help ensure that her husband’s killers get their comeuppance.

Making a period movie on a budget is always an ambitious task, and They Call Her Death is no exception. And it would be doing the film a disservice to suggest that it operates in the same meter that a more expensive studio production might. One has to make accommodations when viewing a film that was made so much by hand, that is so much the product of a small and enthusiastic community.

But these accommodations don’t have to extend to the quality of the finished product itself and, happily, They Call Her Death makes no sacrifices in that area. Even the limitations of the budget often serve to help place the film within the orbit of the movies that inspired it which, let’s face it, were not exactly Hollywood blockbusters to start with.

There’s a quote from Alan Moore, where he is describing the magic of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. “The trick,” he says, “the skill entailed in this delightful necromantic conjuring of things gone by is not, as might be thought, in crafting work as good as the work that inspired it really was, but in the more demanding task of crafting work as good as everyone remembers the original as being.”

It is this “delightful necromantic conjuring” that filmmakers are always reaching for when they create a throwback like this, and it is this “more demanding task of crafting work as good as everyone remembers the original as being” that They Call Her Death manages with such aplomb.

At the time of this writing, there are two more showings of They Call Her Death scheduled at the Screenland Armour on Saturday, June 22 at 1pm and 10pm. And there’s never been a better time to support extremely good, extremely local cinema.