Episode 370: Karen Lam’s neon-drenched journey into the apocalypse

Sep 2

Sep 2 Episode 370: Karen Lam’s neon-drenched journey into the apocalypse

Filmmaker Karen Lam is a bundle of delicious incongruities in human form. On one hand, Karen is a master of highly stylised horror. Films like The Curse of Willow Song, Evangeline, and Mrs. Chang’s Perfect Teeth are terrifying and thoughtful, gruesome and evocative – and you wouldn’t be faulted for thinking that the writer-director behind these films is a spooky word-slinger. But on the other hand, Karen is whimsical. She loves knitting and sewing, cats and Muppets, and does Manitoba proud with everything she does. She’s the least Karen Karen you’ll ever meet – and her latest film Armageddon Road might be the most unapologetically Karen Lam film she’s ever made.

Armageddon Road is a darkly comic supernatural road trip set in 1976 Las Vegas where ambition, myth, and apocalypse collide. Steve, an ex-con with big dreams of building a theme-park empire from a desert parking lot, takes a simple job: driving Delilah, a mob boss’s girlfriend, through the Vegas night. But after a party spirals into chaos, Delilah dies—only to return possessed by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. What follows is a delirious descent into prophecy and paranoia as Delilah—now something far older and far less human—commands Steve toward a predetermined rendezvous that will trigger the end of days.

In other words: Armageddon Road is a helluva lot of psychedelic fun, which is appropriate, because so is Karen.

Armageddon Road had its official Canadian premiere on August 5, and begins its cross-country tour in Toronto on September 3 – and it’s got some other screenings in other countries, too. Karen Lam joins Sabrina in the YVR Screen Scene Podcast studio to talk 1970s nostalgia, why Gen X reigns as the survivor generation, the giddy glee she experienced working with miniatures, and what she and her team found in Nevada when they went in search of that distinctive neon-drenched Vegas vibe.

YVR Screen Scene is a division of Fish Flight Entertainment.

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CREDITS
Host and executive producer: Sabrina Rani-Kiperchuk Furminger
Editor: Simon Furminger
Producer: Paul Furminger
Patreon ad reader: Mariana Furminger
Original music: Dane Deviller