Self-reflexive autobiography is the fascinating mode of Matt Farley’s backyard filmmaking style. Hyper-localized, shot with friends, and poured out from the heart, the films of Motern Media — of Charlie Roxburgh and Matt Farley — are the best examples we have of everything modern micro-budget moviemaking should be. And yet, perhaps the two most standout examples are the two auto-fiction movies directed by Matt Farley: Local Legends (2013) and Local Legends: Bloodbath.
Bloodbath is an unpacking of the first movie, a sequel made in self-examination. The partially examined film is not worth making, and if the first movie were about how to create art out of nothing and make it about everything, the sequel is a strict interrogation on the exuberant free will and self-motivated promotion it requires to get any deeply personal project off the ground.
In Bloodbath, personas bleed into one another. Shot again in well-considered black & white, we watch as several threads untangle multiple versions of Matt Farley. The movie remains a promotional vehicle: mentioning past works and how to access them, cultivating the same proof of Motern’s ability, while selling the brand as a wider experience, connecting to past movies and the wide breadth of Matt Farley’s endless Spotify catalogue.
Here, the plotting movies swiftly. This is a fairly short story. But in its text, it offers a complete and well-envisioned work of self-reflection. Known characters from the Motern universe slide in and out of the movie. In-jokes are abundant and the movie is so rewarding if you’re in-the-know about the process and how many movies there are and have a framework for how regional fiction works.
Bloodbath is a bloodless movie but does move the more grounded Local Legends into the same foreground as Motern’s more science fiction flavored backyard movies. That means some tropey genre blending happens. We get murdered by rakes, choking, and most importantly, magical hand-zapping powers.
Farley has more fun this time with the editing, structural choices, and some knowing winks and nods both to the Motern catalogue but also to the inside baseball of it all. Like the majority of Motern’s work, the vibes are so warm and pleasant and you might not laugh out loud, but you can still note the work as being massively clever.
If Local Legends is the all-time best reflection on the myth of cult moviemaking, Local Legends: Bloodbath is simply an unpackaging of the best movie about the myth of cult moviemaking. It’s still great in and of itself but does rely more broadly on these outside texts. So, it warrants a viewing, very much so, but first, it warrants going through the major notes of the Motern catalogue and getting a sense for things, before you come to this late-era project that deals so effectively with everything that came before it.