Being a teenager, especially a teenage girl, can come with its own set of horrors to endure. Director Kansas Bowling has taken a novel approach to capturing growing up in her feature film debut, Cuddly Toys, which has its St. Louis premiere at Arkadin Cinema & Bar on Thursday, August 10, followed by a virtual Q&A.
The film draws inspiration from the Mondo film genre, a subgenre of exploitation and pseudo-educational documentary films (often called “shockumentaries”) that originated in Italy in the 1960s. In the film, Bowling plays Dr. Kansas Bowling, an expert in “teenage studies,” who narrates vignettes featuring 100 different actresses and show the dangerous, sometimes horrific, situations that seem to be all too common for many teenage girls—as well as their shocking outcomes.
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Bowling was particularly inspired by the film Faces of Death, a pseudo-documentary composed of different death scenes, with Dr. Kansas Bowling paying homage to that film’s narrator, Dr. Francis B. Gross.
“I wanted to tell a coming-of-age story in a way that hadn’t been done before,” Bowling says. “I thought it would be an interesting way to tell that story.” Bowling also shot Cuddly Toys on Super 16 film, which has become a trademark of her work, adding to the film’s ‘60s/’70s educational vibe. “I started out shooting on Super 16 and haven’t really shot on anything else outside of some music videos on Super 8,” she says. “It all goes back to Texas Chainsaw Massacre and wanting to make movies that look like that.”
While Cuddly Toys is Bowling’s first feature, she made a name for herself as a director in 2016 with a prehistoric slasher film she wrote with a friend while still in high school, BC Butcher. The film was eventually picked up and released by Troma, the independent film production and distribution company that has notably released cult films like The Toxic Avenger series. While she found success with BC Butcher, Bowling notes that Cuddly Toys allowed her more room to get creative and better realize the kinds of stories she wants to bring to audiences.
“It’s been really exciting, because everyone has varied responses to it,” Bowling says. “Some people find it very funny, others find it very disturbing. Some really connect to it, and others don’t at all.”
While the film can be shocking and graphic in its content, Bowling takes care to balance it out with dark humor to undercut some of that tension, and she advocates for seeing it in a theater with an audience.
“It’s funny to have it in a theater, where people are maybe a little confused as to whether they should be laughing at it or not,” Bowling says. “It’s part of what makes the movie-going experience really fun.”
For more information and to purchase tickets for Cuddly Toys, visit arkadincinema.com/event/kansas-bowlings-cuddly-toys-stl-premiere/
