Miami Blues (1990)

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What happens when a sociopathic California criminal flies to Miami to start a new series of con jobs and thefts and is surrounded by the most absurd people on earth (i.e., baseline Florida residents) in a film that proves 1990 was still basically the 1980s? You get Miami Blues, the second of four films adapted from Charles Willeford’s novels, and the only adaptation that came from his popular series of novels about hardboiled detective Hoke Mosely. Directed by the late George Armitage, one of Roger Corman’s many disciples, fourteen years after his last film (1976’s Vigilante Force) and seven years before his most famous (1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank), Miami Blues is a bizarre picture that combines elements of neo-noir, erotic thriller, dark comedy, crime drama, and action flicks into something fascinating, funny, and thrilling. 

A man calling himself “Junior Gottlieb” (Alec Baldwin) arrives in Miami, and he’s barely made it off the plane before he’s stolen a stranger’s suitcase and broken the finger of an obnoxious Hare Krishna. He slips onto a courtesy shuttle and checks into the luxurious hotel that it takes him to, where the lead bellhop offers to send up a prostitute, and Junior accepts. When the young woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) arrives, Junior reveals that he has no interest in her sexually, and that he was hoping to instead convince her to purchase some of the clothing in the luggage that he stole. Junior sees through her sex worker alias and tricks her into revealing that her real name is Susie, and the two end up sleeping together anyway, as the naive girl from Okeechobee falls for his dubious charms. Unbeknownst to Junior, the cultist that he assaulted at the airport died of shock, and the case falls into the lap of homicide detective Hoke Mosely (Fred Ward), a grizzled oaf of a man with terrible fashion sense, sharp observational skills that bely his slovenly appearance, and false teeth. He catches up with Junior at Susie’s apartment in less than 24 hours, implying that he knows the young man is guilty and highlighting the telltale signs in his behavior that indicate he’s served time, but also drinking up most of the young couple’s beer and (maybe) playing the dumb drunk in order to ingratiate himself. Junior sees through the act and tracks Hoke down to his residence, where he savagely beats the cop, stealing his badge, gun, and dentures, making him more dangerous than ever. 

It’s here that the film takes a fascinating turn. It’s very funny from its earliest moments; when Susie tries to beg off of spending the night together because she has a “lot” of homework that night—she has to write a haiku—Junior robs her neighbors while she takes a bath, all while extemporaneously composing several of them like “Breaking, entering / The dark and lonely places / Finding a big gun.” But once he has Hoke’s badge and gun, he opens up a whole new way to terrorize and rob people, which he gets away with for quite some time largely because he just … behaves like a cop. After shooting a would-be smash-and-grab thief at a dockside restaurant (only calling out “Freeze or I’ll shoot” after pulling the trigger) and realizing the power he wields, he tries to strongarm the bellboy/pimp who sent Susie to him by pretending that she was underage, at which point the man claims that he knows this isn’t true because her ID was checked by the cop he’s already bribing weekly. Junior interrupts several crimes in progress and takes advantage of the situation by “allowing” the perps to get away then making off with their loot, but what one notices the longer this goes on is that a violent psychopath is consistently responding to burglar alarms, purse-snatchings, and drug deals when the real police are nowhere to be found. At one point, Junior “busts” two musclehead drug smugglers and has them handcuff themselves to a metal bar, then he steals their product; Hoke’s soon-to-retire partner Henderson (Charles Napier) informs him that one of the two men was the killer in “The Dumbbell Murders,” a homicide that Hoke has been working for over a year, and jokes that maybe Hoke should let Junior close a couple more cases before apprehending him. 

The performances here are excellent. Jennifer Jason Leigh is almost unrecognizable, sporting a blonde pixie cut and an equally audacious southern accent, and although Susie’s under-written and dim-witted to a fault, Leigh still imbues her with a sense of pathos that demonstrates her understated abilities as an actor. Fred Ward is one of the great unsung character actors of his generation, and he is an absolute delight in this role. There were three more Hoke Mosely novels published after Miami Blues, and one gets the feeling that there was an attempted franchise in the making with this film that simply never continued, which is a shame; I would have loved to see him play this sleazeball a few more times. Perhaps the reason this never came to fruition is that Alec Baldwin simply steals the show here as the dangerous, deranged Junior. Miami Blues may be the best non-Jack Donaghy performance of his career, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that so effectively utilizes his icy, cold eyes as well as this one does. His ability to flip back and forth between dealing out unhinged violence and playing house with the beautiful young woman he’s conned into falling for his sob stories is truly something to behold, and he plays every scene with Leigh with a bizarre glee, as if he can’t believe he’s getting away with such an obvious farce. He thinks he’s hit the jackpot, but his cons mostly succeed because he’s facing off against deviants, simpletons, and deviant simpletons. It’s also worth noting that this is a film that isn’t hesitant to play on Baldwin’s contemporary sex appeal; he’s clad in nothing but his underwear or otherwise shirtless for long portions of the film, and the camera spends more time ogling his semi-nude form than it does Leigh’s. Fred Ward is also quite attractive (this was only two years after Big Business, after all), but the film keeps him covered up in tacky screen-printed silks and hospital neckbraces so as not to distract from the fact that this film is partially selling itself on Baldwin’s taut torso. 

The smaller roles here are also delightful. Charles Napier has a lot of fun playing off of Ward; their introductory scene finds them arguing about who has to break the news to the family of the deceased Hare Krishna, with Napier’s Henderson begging off even though it’s his turn because he took “the fat lady who sat on the kid,” which he claims “counts for two.” The exposition that he’s only one week away from retirement sets up the expectation that he’s going to die in the final reel, but he makes it to the end intact, firing off bon mots as he heads into the sunset. Nora Dunn gets less to do as Hoke’s new partner, Ellita Sánchez, but she’s memorable nonetheless, and it was probably more surprising to see her in a more serious role in 1990, fresh off of her five season run on SNL. Miami Blues is also a film that’s chock to the brim with one scene wonders. Paul Gleason, probably best remembered as the principal in The Breakfast Club, is a lot of fun playing against type as the vice cop who’s on the take with regards to the hotel prostitution ring, who finds and beats up the real Hoke after Junior tells the bellhop pimp to send money to him at Hoke’s apartment. The best minor performance, however, is probably the Honeymoon Killer herself, Shirley Stoler, as a no-nonsense pawn shop matron who sees through Junior’s act almost immediately and is one of the only characters who ever manages to get the better of him. 

Near the film’s end, there’s a scene in which vinegar pie, a nineteenth century custard pie that allowed for vinegar to be substituted as an acid for the more difficult to obtain lemon, plays a vital role. For contemporary critics, Miami Blues seems to have been a vinegar pie in and of itself, something that was almost unpalatable, too sweet and too sour at the same time, but it’s managed to become a bit of a cult classic, as indicated by its current presence on the Criterion streaming service. It’s definitely worth finding the time to enjoy.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

#271: Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988) & Summer Camp Slashers

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Welcome to Episode #270 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of summer camp slashers, starting with Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 The End of Oak Street (2026)
05:55 I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998)
09:11 Sequels of the Blind Dead
13:15 Popcorn (1991)
17:00 Nightborn (2026)

24:31 Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988)
40:43 Madman (1981)
57:50 The Burning (1981)
1:09:00 Cheerleader Camp (1988)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

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Horror nerds have thoroughly mined every last golden nugget of vintage Italo horror schlock. We’ve already seen & celebrated every Bava, Argento, and Fulci worth a damn, and Vinegar Syndrome is now approaching its dozenth volume of “Forgotten Gialli” Blu-ray box sets, having scraped past the bottom of the barrel into the mud underneath. There’s nothing left. One solution to this new scarcity of hidden 70s & 80s Euro horror gems is to look instead to the contemporary genre cinema of Spain, which boasts all of the same stylistic & cultural points of interest as their Italian equivalents, just dubbed in a different out-of-sync language. For your next giallo fix, for instance, you can look to the sleazy Spanish murder mystery The Corruption of Chris Miller, and for your next late night zombi flick, you can explore the Tombs of the Blind Dead, a Spanish graveyard whatsit with multiple deliriously plotted sequels and a decidedly Fulcistic vibe. There were, in fact, other countries in Europe besides Italy making their own high-style, low-logic horror movies throughout the 1970s & 80s, and Spain is as good of a place to start digging as any.

The titular blind dead of this series are the decrepit remains of the medieval Knights Templar, who made a Monkey’s Paw deal with Satan during the Crusades to live forever without thinking through the continual, natural decay of their ancient bodies. They haunt the crumbling ruins of rural Spain, occasionally rising from their graves as sword-wielding Harryhausen skeletons. The main attraction of the Blind Dead series is watching these skeletal knights ride their ghostly horses in slow-motion, making a show of waving around their swords as if posing for a heavy metal album cover. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, their blindness is a result of their eyes having been pecked out by birds while hanging for their crimes against living locals, while in Return of the Blind Dead, their eyes were intentionally burned out of their skulls by those angry locals. In either case, they cyclically rise for revenge, searching for hot young hippie babes to sacrifice to Satan for further supernatural favors (by eating those babes’ beating hearts fresh out of their exposed chests). They’re total jerks who cause great harm to their neighbors, but they look really cool doing so.

Like in their zombi Italo equivalents, the scene-to-scene logic of the Blind Dead films don’t matter as much as their overall mood, which relies heavily on the temporal contrast between the medieval knights of Old Europe and the sexually liberated youth of contemporary modernity. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, the knights are awoken when a young bikinied hippie breaks away from an awkward beach vacation where she’s being hounded for sex by both her current boyfriend and a lesbian boarding school chum from her past. Once alone, she makes the mistake of enjoying a cigarette while listening to swanky jazz at the burial site of the Knights Templar and is cosmically punished for her moral crimes by being violently swarmed and then gently nibbled alive. Once free from their graves, the knights are seemingly able to roam freely, and the movie finds great novelty in having the ancient ghouls invade distinctly urban spaces like the local mannequin factory and the nearby city morgue. We’re eventually treated to a flashback to the living knights’ heyday sacrificing an earlier generation of hot babes to Satan during the Crusades, but those medieval tapestries are just a brief reprieve from the knights’ oddly modern hijinks.

Blind Dead mastermind Amando de Ossorio was apparently very proud of his staging of the knights’ initial rising from the grave, since that exact footage from the first film is repeated in the following year’s Return of the Blind Dead and then again in 1975’s Night of the Seagulls. As you can likely tell by that latter title, the knights take an unexpected nautical detour halfway into the series, which further confuses its internal narrative logic. Return of the Blind Dead is a straightforward repeat & escalation of the original, while its immediate follow-up The Ghost Galleon (1974) leaves the graveyard behind to set sail. You see, the undead knights are now anchored to a gigantic ghost ship that exists in an alternate nightmare dimension that can only crossover into ours through the conduit of cosmic fog. Once that ship inevitably sinks, they go underwater, emerging from a nearby beach in Night of the Seagulls to once again gently cannibalize buxom women’s beating hearts. Those women’s spirits then return to this mortal plane as seagulls so they can scream in pain, which the townfolk can distinguish from the cries of regular seagulls because regular seagulls cannot fly at night. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but at least it’s poetic.

While the Knights Templar’s nautical side adventures in The Ghost Galleon & Night of the Seagulls sound wonderfully delirious on paper, Amando de Ossorio never again reached the artistic highs he achieved in the original Tombs of the Blind Dead. It’s impractical, but the blind dead really should be wielding swords on horseback in every picture regardless of whether they’re traveling by ghost ship. They’re severely less metal when they’re on-foot & swordless. The original film also has surprisingly surreal visual touches, like the intrusion of present-day train steam into the hippies’ boarding school flashbacks. Meanwhile, the most surreal aspect of Night of the Seagulls is how absurdly inept it is at the “day for night” illusion, completely disorienting its audience’s sense of time. Multiple scenes appear to take place both at midnight and at high-noon, simultaneously. The beachside locale is put to good use when local crabs are invited to join in on the knight’s oddly delicate flesh-eating, though, so it’s got its own minor points of visual interest here or there.

One way you can tell Tombs of the Blind Dead and its progressively ropy sequels belong to the same vintage Euro horror lineage as their Italo contemporaries is by puzzling through the confused history of their distribution. Upon initial release, they were each globally exported under different titles and different edits, with little care paid to artistic integrity or series continuity. Oddly, Tombs of the Blind Dead was rebranded for a US theatrical run as Revenge from Planet Ape, as if it were more directly inspired by Planet of the Apes than by the more obvious point of reference Night of the Living Dead. The Ghost Galleon was marketed as Horror of the Zombies, Ship of Zombies and, in Germany, The Ghost Ship of Swimming Corpses, while Night of the Seagulls was marketed as Don’t Go Out at Night and Night of the Death Cult, each title distancing these sequels from belonging to a larger Blind Dead franchise. Even within Spain, the “blind dead” became the “eyeless dead” in the series’ second outing, jumbling the brand. Nowadays, all four films are stuck between two extremely different modes of distribution: pristinely restored to their original form by boutique Blu-ray companies like Synapse, Vinegar Syndrome, and Shout Factory, or clumsily edited & dubbed as English-language bastardizations on Tubi, nothing inbetween. Movies don’t get much more vintage Italo horror than that.

-Brandon Ledet

Maniac Cop (1988)

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After venturing further into the neon-lit abyss of his own imagination with Her Private Hell (a self-referencing mashup of The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives), Nicolas Winding Refn is reportedly outsourcing pitches for his next planned project: a remake of the 1988 novelty slasher Maniac Cop. It’s easy to see the appeal. Like most of Refn’s work, Maniac Cop has a great look and a great hook but is in no rush to pay off the promise of its premise. Screenwriter Larry Cohen turns cops into the same abstract, high-concept source of terror as he would an inanimate object (like the killer yogurt in The Stuff and the killer ambulance in The Ambulance) or a prehistoric beast (like Quetzalcoatl in Q: The Winged Serpent and the voice of God in God Told Me To). Whereas Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, “What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?”, his script for Maniac Cop asks, “What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?” It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable. VHS era schlockteur James Glickenhaus (Shakedown, The Exterminator) offers some credibility to the film’s action cinema bona fides, and Blue Underground founder William Lustig does a cromulent job in the director’s chair making sure its visual style is up to snuff with other slicked-up slashers of its era. So why doesn’t it move? So much work went into the basic look, premise, and car-chase trailer clips of Maniac Cop that no one thought to put those individual pieces in motion in any convincing way. Its genre elements sit still onscreen purely to be admired, not to accomplish anything tangible or measurable, just like in a Nicolas Winding Refn film.

One reason for Maniac Cop‘s stubborn inertia is that there’s no clear, continuous lead character anchoring its narrative. For a while, Tom Atkins is heavily featured as a detective on the case of a mysterious series of randomized slayings, each attributed to an abnormally large, uniformed police officer. Richard “Shaft” Roundtree phones it in as Atkinson’s flagrantly corrupt higher-up, acting as the film’s extended celebrity cameo. An unusually subdued Bruce Campbell eventually steps in as the lead suspect in the case, a tall-enough cop who’s caught having an affair with a coworker just before his wife is violently murdered. Campbell is just one of many mutant freaks with badges working at his local station, and the movie continues character hopping until every butt-chinned cop who disgraces the screen is a credible suspect; every cop is a maniac until proven innocent. That investigation is mostly a distraction from the movie’s main mission, though, which is making high-concept horror tropes out of the everyday fear of being alone with an armed police officer. Despite its urban setting and all of its police-force paraphernalia, Maniac Cop is largely a by-the-books slasher, with a towering, undead killer stumbling from one slaying to the next in a series of isolated novelty set pieces. The initial shock of these killings is that the mutant cop is specifically targeting innocent people, committing random acts of violence simply because he has the authority to do so. A concerned citizen tells a TV news reporter, “I tell my kids, you see a cop, you cross to the other side of the street.” Another shoots a cop in the face after being pulled over in a routine traffic stop. The movie may not progress past that basic premise in a satisfying way, but it is shockingly honest about real-life cops’ fascistic relationship with the citizens they supposedly serve & protect.

Maniac Cop eventually has to deliver on its title by narrowing its field of potential suspects down to one specific maniacal police officer, no longer shielding his identity behind backlighting & shadowy silhouettes. The legend of the undead maniac Matthew Cordell is what roots this movie firmly in the slasher genre, in a naked attempt to establish a Jason Voorhees figure of its very own. Cordell wasn’t always a maniac. When alive, he played the mythical figure of the Good Cop on city streets, much to the annoyance of the Bad Cops on the force and the corrupt politicians in City Hall, whom he threatened to expose by being an uptight rule follower. As punishment, he was framed for fictional acts of police brutality and sentenced to prison, where he was promptly murdered by rabid criminals happy to kill any cop they could get their hands on. It’s upon resurrection that Cordell becomes a homicidal maniac himself, having been corrupted and mutated by an unjust legal system. He’s a ginormous, unignorable manifestation of all cops’ corruption & brutality, and he spends the first half of the movie representing all cops as one shadowy figure before his rotting, zombified face is revealed to the audience. Also like the Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Angela Bakers of slasher tradition, his original thematic purpose is immediately distorted & diluted in his return sequels. In Maniac Cop II, Matt Cordell joins forces with a local serial killer to seek personal revenge against the cops & prisoners who initially wronged him, no longer attacking random innocent citizens on city streets. In Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, he attacks sleazy TV journalists who sensationalize false accounts of police brutality for ratings, effectively letting cops off the hook for their everyday villainy by exposing it as fake news.

In the limited capacity that anyone discusses Maniac Cop in recent years, the film’s legacy has developed into a kind of Alien/Terminator situation, where its louder, flashier sequel Maniac Cop II gets praised as the best of its series for featuring more & better action scenes, while the original remains superior on a purely artistic level. And, like with Alien & Terminator, its sequels are so fun to watch you can’t even complain about it without sounding like a dweeb who doesn’t know how to party. Maniac Cop II is delightfully over-the-top, throwing as many car chases, chainsaws, strip routines, and explosions at the screen as it can in the name of VHS-warped entertainment. Maniac Cop III is a little more subdued at first, but it gradually builds to an elaborate high speed car chase where Matt Cordell is fully on fire for the final third of the runtime, driving a stolen cop car towards the proverbial gates of Hell. Both sequels feature extensive body burn stunts that are guaranteed to drop an audience’s jaws, while the audacity of the first film is purely conceptual. It’s extremely rare to find an American motion picture about daily police work that doesn’t make heroes out of monsters or at least excuse cops’ monstrous behavior as the work of a few bad apples. Even as a franchise, Maniac Cop can’t avoid backsliding into copaganda by its final outing, and its only clear, coherent commentary about the corruptive nature of the system can be found in the original Larry Cohen screenplay (despite the fact that Cohen also penned the sequels). There’s a good chance that Refn’s take on the material will return to the core, simple idea that everyday cops are terrifying alien monsters akin to a Jason Voorhees or a Michael Myers or Her Private Hell‘s The Leather Man. The longer he dwells on that point without distraction or relief, the better, but I guess an explosion or two wouldn’t hurt too much.

-Brandon Ledet

Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

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I’ve been going through a Marx Bros phase for the past week or so, which again has me thinking about how many Old Hollywood icons & archetypes were introduced to me via Looney Tunes as a child, long before I would’ve been exposed to their originating sources of inspiration. The wisecracking Groucho Marx is, of course, Bugs Bunny in human form. Bugs also borrowed his trademark carrot-munching technique from Clark Gable and would occasionally dip into Humphrey Bogart parody, in addition to his more overt Marxisms. Caricatures of Frank Sinatra, James Cagney, Cary Grant and Mice & Men-era Lon Chaney Jr. would frequently pop up in Looney Tunes shorts as well, as would, most famously, a beautifully warped caricature of Peter Lorre. There’s something especially subversive about Saturday morning cartoons exposing young children to Peter Lorre long before they’d have any personal interest in seeking out his iconic villain roles in M, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and titles otherwise alphabetized. Once Lorre was introduced as an in-universe character among other Old Hollywood celebrities, Looney Tunes animators had a ton of fun slapping his distinct mug on a wide range of characters: a Casablancan Tweety Bird, a fish with disconcertingly fleshy lips, and a mad scientist named Dr. Lorre, whom I was happy to discover plays a major role in the latest Looney Tunes feature Coyote vs. Acme, continuing the tradition into a new millennium.

Dr. Lorre serves as the Maltese Falcon-like MacGuffin of Coyote vs. Acme, a missing scientist who was violently disappeared by the insidious Acme corporation in a covert coverup effort. Finding Dr. Lorre means uncovering Acme’s crimes against the cartoon citizens who purchase its products, treating them like disposable animal test subjects despite their overt anthropomorphisms. The corporation’s most frequent victim, of course, is Wile E. Coyote, who is addicted to purchasing & deploying faulty Acme products in his deranged, single-minded pursuit to capture & devour the Road Runner. Sick of all the backfiring rockets, misleading magnets, and trickster dynamite fuses that have mangled his body over the decades, Wile E. Coyote finally decides to sue Acme for personal damages, employing an overwhelmed underachiever lawyer to plead his case, as portrayed by a live & in-the-flesh Will Forte. While researching Acme’s culpability in the cartoon coyote’s never-ending marathon of Sisyphean failures, Forte’s personal injury law firm accidentally undercovers a larger corporate conspiracy involving Dr. Lorre’s disappearance and the second-class citizen treatment of all toons everywhere. The resulting fight for truth & justice makes for the goofiest X-Files conspiracy thriller sendup since Disclosure Day, with Bugs Bunny putting in a crucial cameo appearance as the firm’s shadowy Deep Throat informant (in another classic movie reference to All the President’s Men, which was similarly parodied by fellow introducing-the-kids-to-the-classics cartoon series The Simpsons).

While Coyote vs. Acme goes out of its way to continue the Looney Tunes shorts’ caricatural celebrations of classic Hollywood iconography, it’s clear that Hollywood does not love the movie back. The film’s years-long struggles to reach theatrical distribution has been oddly storied & public. The initial blow was an announcement that Warner Bros was going to scrap the completed picture entirely, finding more value in recategorizing it as a tax write-off than in marketing it as populist entertainment. The upstart indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment then came to the rescue, buying the film out of oblivion so it can enjoy a full life outside a cyclical tax audit. That extratextual backstory is only relevant, really, because Coyote vs. Acme happens to be about shady corporate machinations that value profits over people, so that when Will Forte and his coyote client take Acme to court, it plays as if Warner Bros is also on trial for its crimes against its own IP. Screenwriter Samy Burch (May December) finds great inspiration & pathos in Wile E. Coyote’s stubborn persistence while taking on both Acme in court and the Road Runner on the road despite his repeated, hopeless failures, which brings the twinkle back to his schmuck lawyer’s long-dead eyes. It’s something worth keeping in mind once the inevitable reports of the movie’s box office disappointments hit national headlines; just getting the picture out to the public is a victory in itself, regardless of the result.

As admirable as I find Coyote vs. Acme‘s anti-corporate sentiments, and as charming as I find its classically minded participation in conspiracy thriller tropes, it’s difficult to claim that the movie ever rises above being, simply, cute. The jokes are consistently cute but never convincingly zany. Will Forte’s admiring relationship with his Sisyphean client is cute but never believably real nor tangible. Decades after Who Framed Roger Rabbit? mastered the form, there has yet to be another human-cartoon team up where the drawn & photographed characters share a physical space with the same movie-magic credibility. The textureless flatness of Coyote vs. Acme‘s computer animation does it no favors in that effort, nor does the choice to team Forte up with a mute character who can only communicate through exasperated grimaces & hand-written signs. We’re always aware that we’re watching a human actor speaking to no one but the camera, with his imaginary costar added later in post. More damningly, the film also struggles to replicate the madcap momentum of classic Looney Tunes shorts in its more stoic, procedural courtroom drama plotting. Just last year, Ketchup Entertainment distributed a much zanier, much more classically loony Looney Tunes revival in the fully animated The Day the Earth Blew Up, proving that it can still be done and making this secondary effort to keep the brand alive feel somewhat superfluous. It’s difficult to get too fired up about Coyote vs. Acme’s glaring shortcomings, though, since its very existence is an artistic fight against corporate greed and its overall effect is, not for nothing, cute.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Duck Soup (1933)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the classic Marx Bros war comedy Duck Soup (1933).

00:00 Welcome
02:26 Under Capricorn (1949)
09:50 The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)
19:45 The Others (2001)
25:21 Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)
29:12 Maniac Cop (1988)
35:58 Saccharine (2026)
50:05 Tony (2026)
59:16 Maddie’s Secret (2026)
1:15:39 Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

01:33:33 Duck Soup (1933)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)

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The latest Kiyoshi Kurosawa picture is a period piece, set during a military coup in 16th Century feudal Japan. For a director who’s best known for making low-budget genre exercises that inevitably climax with sparsely populated warehouse shootouts (Cure, Cloud, Doppelganger, etc.), that setting suggests a substantial escalation in scale of production. The sprawling cast of period-costumed actors alone presumes a larger budget than what Kurosawa usually works with, even if those actors spend most of the runtime talking in rooms instead of actively waging war on the battlefield. The Samurai and the Prisoner is a rare instance where it’s justified to mention Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s name in the same breath as Akira Kurosawa’s, whereas they’re usually only grouped together by mistake (like how Paul Haggis’s 2004 film Crash is frequently referenced in error while attempting to cite the 1996 Cronenberg classic of the same name). Here, Kurosawa courts the comparison, working in the same samurai warfare genre his elder filmsman mastered long ago in titles like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Throne of Blood. Once the audience adjusts expectations for what the phrase “a Kurosawa film” usually conjures, though, the payoffs are just as slyly playful & sinister as the low-budget, high-concept thrillers that have gradually made him a cinephilic favorite.

Masahiro Motoki stars as an unusually merciful lord turned self-appointed general, leading a small rebellion against a monstrously bloodthirsty warmonger who constantly threatens to invade the castle where his men take refuge. During his slow-moving political maneuvers to join forces with other rebellions against the villainous warlord, the uneasy general’s men quietly undermine his power, mostly in response to his moralistic refusal to behead prisoners of war in accordance to samurai custom. The more prisoners he holds hostage or sets free—heads attached to necks—the worse morale becomes, leading to a series of mysterious murders on castle grounds. In addition to his new duties as a general, Motoki finds himself playing detective to these puzzling crimes, which each include a seemingly supernatural element that shields those responsible from suspicion: a strike of lightning, an invisible arrow, a disappearing tea urn, and the contorted face of a severed head. To help solve these mysteries, he privately enlists the counsel of his wife (Yuriko Yosthitaka) and his most intelligent prisoner (Masaki Suda), who both offer great insights into the logistics of each crime and expose great vulnerabilities within the man struggling to keep his dwindling militia alive.

If there’s any easy, contemporary comparison for The Samurai and the Prisoner to be found outside either of the Kurosawas’ filmographies, it’s in the recent Chinese murder mystery Full River Red, directed by Crouching Tiger‘s Zhang Yimou. In Full River Red, the mystery of a traveling diplomat’s murder within a guarded military compound leads to a series of shadowy political double-crossings while the walls close in on the warrior-detectives chasing down clues. Both films sidestep the expected excitement of onscreen bloodshed to instead tell their stories of violent political intrigue as high-style stage plays. Whereas Zhang’s film ultimately comes across as a nationally propagandistic hip-hop music video, however, Kurosawa’s aims are much more coldly philosophical, as is typical of his work. The climactic reveal of how these faux-supernatural murder mysteries are connected is chilling, with grander implications about how the selfish desires & revenges of human beings are often hidden behind the religious justification of “divine punishment.” There’s also a hypocritical tension throughout in the differing morality of individual murders vs. battlefield slayings, which weighs heavily enough on the titular samurai’s conscience that he starts to question whether truly honorable warfare is either possible or worthwhile. As always, Kurosawa has a lot on his mind, and he expresses those large ideas through the smallest of gestures. The major deviations from his usual tactics here are all trivial matters of genre, scale, setting, and costuming.

-Brandon Ledet

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

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I made several mistakes before attending a screening of the latest MCU corporate product, Spider-Man Brand New Day. The first was re-watching Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that I gave 4.5 stars to upon my initial viewing, which was at a drive-in theater on top of a parking garage, continuing to observe COVID protocols in late 2021. In the years since its release, I’ve seen many people online attempt to revisit this film, only to discover that it fails to work at all outside of a theatrical experience, because the film has clear pauses for the audience to react to the return of characters from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films as well as those starring Andrew Garfield in the lead role. I never paid much attention to that criticism. After all, I hadn’t experienced it in a theater, and I found myself sufficiently pleased with the choices of who to include, and I was appropriately emotionally invested. Upon rewatch five years later, however, I could hardly believe how utterly bored I was. The first half hour meanders endlessly as we watch Peter Parker (Tom Holland) deal with the fallout of the exposure of his secret identity (and his being framed for the death of Mysterio) before the first returning villain, Arnold Vosloo’s Doc Ock, enters the narrative. I was still sufficiently moved by Garfield’s Peter’s emotional response to saving MJ (Zendaya) when he couldn’t save his own love, but otherwise, the stakes couldn’t have felt lower or more disinteresting; even the death of Aunt May lacked any kind of resonance this time around. No Way Home is nearly 2.5 hours of film-making so emotionally hollow that it did the opposite of making me excited for Brand New Day. 

My second mistake was probably the most common one for filmgoers, which was that I failed (or rather chose not) to do the homework. And the homework that I did do didn’t even help! Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is in this film, not as the “Smart Hulk” we last saw on the big screen in Endgame, but as his normal, collegiate professor self, with Hulk repressed via a wrist-worn device that exists solely so that it can be damaged later for dramatic purposes. I’m one of the dozens of people who watched She-Hulk through to its conclusion (there is nowhere on this earth that Tatiana Maslany can lead that I will not follow), and even I had completely forgotten about the inhibitor device being a plot point on that show. Even then, the last time we saw Hulk on screen, it was in the final episode, and he was still in his merged Smart Hulk form. So why are we back to a Banner/Hulk Jekyll/Hyde paradigm that hasn’t been the status quo since 2018? I don’t know, and the corporate overlords behind Brand New Day didn’t bother to make up a reason. They know you haven’t been able to keep up with all of this, and that as a result, you’re going to assume something happened on one of the shows you couldn’t be arsed to watch. If there really is a reason that I’m not aware of, please leave a comment on this post. 

The third, and perhaps biggest, mistake that I made was being an X-Men fan. The biggest comic book movie news heading into the weekend last week was the casting of Samara Weaving as the MCU’s Emma Frost, which was both (a) perfect casting and (b) incredibly awful optics at the very least, given that the announcement of the casting of “The White Queen” coincided with the quiet cancellation of both the long-delayed MCU Blade film starring Mahershalah Ali and the TV series Wonder Man, which also had a Black lead. The ongoing win-them-back campaign that the MCU corporate product machine has been working on over the past year has reeked of sweaty desperation for cultural relevance, from the return of Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr. in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday to the near-daily announcements of who’s-been-cast-as-who for the upcoming addition of the X-Men to the franchise. One of said announcements turned out to be something of a major spoiler for this movie, which really seems to indicate that the left and right hands of this greater enterprise aren’t entirely coordinated with one another. 

Enough preamble. It’s been almost five years since we last saw Peter Parker, who enlisted magical assistance in trying to reclaim his secret identity, ultimately requiring that he sacrifice all of his familial connections in order to save the multiverse. In the interim, he’s become New York’s beloved masked hero, taking on countless well-known villains and working with both NYPD detective DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), the head of the so-called “Department of Damage Control,” a former S.H.I.E.L.D. sub-unit created by Tony Stark for post-battle clean-up. Although his once-girlfriend MJ and former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) no longer remember him, Ned’s frequent social media posts have allowed Peter to keep up with their day-to-day lives. It’s a solitary existence, and it’s taking its toll on Peter, who begins to manifest black eyes and further mutation of his body (including the development of organic web shooters) even before he has a run-in with the film’s villain, a body-hopping consciousness that can move from person to person with ease but can’t possess Peter himself. Things come to a head when Peter learns that MJ and Ned have moved back to NYC after graduating from MIT, putting them in danger from the latest super-threat. 

If you thought that the pauses to allow audiences to whoop and holler when they recognized something that they saw on screen in No Way Home were distracting and unnecessary, you’ll really find yourself taken out of the moment when it happens here. Besides the aforementioned returning Hulk (who one must imagine is a deadbeat dad since there’s been no mention of his space son from She-Hulk in the last four years), there’s also new Black Widow Yelena (Florence Pugh) and Frank “Punisher” Castle (Jon Bernthal) in the mix. These amount to little more than cameos in which Pugh is given nothing to do but make unfunny jokes about the varying sizes of the metaphorical “potatoes” that she and Peter are tasked with (Bernthal is better integrated and better used). The reveal that the villain of the piece is someone that we know from other superhero media is also one of these moments, and although there was a gasp in my theater (second in volume only to the audible excitement at the appearance of Michael B. Jordan in the trailer for the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair), I had a much different experience with this revelation. 

I want to tread lightly around this subject, since this might come as a pleasant surprise twist to others, and who am I to steal that joy? This doesn’t appear to be a well-protected spoiler; my barista friend from whom I got coffee this morning already knew it and he’s going to see the film later this week. If you Google this movie, perhaps to see showtimes in your area, the performer and their character are the first result in the “cast” widget, even before Holland or Zendaya. Nevertheless, I’ll touch on this as lightly as I can. Early in the film, the villain’s ruthlessness and casual disregard for human life is made clear as they pilot a stolen tank through the streets of the city causing mass destruction and certain implied death, Peter’s last minute rescue of an awestruck child notwithstanding. After realizing Peter can’t be taken over, when surfing from body to body, the villain deliberately walks the person it’s possessing into the street to be hit by a car; later, the villain compels a possessed MJ to throw herself off a building. In the end, with the reveal that the obviously nefarious operation was unsurprisingly doing nefarious deeds (I’m sorry, what do you mean that the death cult works for you now?), we get a maudlin flashback that explains the character’s trite little origin story. In the moment that Peter turns his monitor around and says, “I’ve identified [them], [their] name is [major spoiler],” I didn’t get the little thrill that the interconnectedness of this universe used to inspire; my first thoughts were a simple “Really?” followed by an image of Don Corleone saying “Look at how they massacred my boy.” They made [redacted] a murderer right out of the gate! What are we doing here? In the same way that the promotional and productive arms of this behemoth don’t seem to be communicating with each other very much, the first and second halves of this film don’t cohere into a whole because our callous, murdering villain of part one is an innocent victim in part two, but you can’t have all that collateral damage early on and not grapple with it later. It’s maddening! 

With the rising tide of more, new Christopher Nolan discourse in the wake of The Odyssey, one of the talking points it appears we failed to leave in the past was whether or not Nolan was arguing for or against a fascist mass surveillance state in his Batman trilogy. The scenes in question revolve around Batman creating a network of cameras for tracking down criminals, and his trusted mentor Lucius telling him that this is a dangerous technology that should never be used. And he’s right! In this film, we get an “I didn’t hear that” reaction from Detective DeWolff when Peter admits that he’s created this very thing, and it’s just a passing joke. It’s not even plot-relevant, since that’s not how Peter manages to get an image of [redacted]’s face; he gets their photo with his goggles. I’m sorry if you thought that you could blissfully take a little excursion into the Marvel Cinematic Universe again and catch up with your old friends without getting soft Flock camera propaganda. Hey, look over here! Don’t think about how those cameras in your neighborhood are being used by cops to stalk women, misread license plates and create deadly situations as a result, or being used to monitor you with no reason and without a warrant. Get used to them being around all the time, because they’re not going anywhere (unless you do something)! They’re a totally normal thing that we’re joking about in your Spidertwunk adventure to normalize it, not a careful, constructed step into a full-blown surveillance state!

This movie is fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We’re fine. Peter saves the day by opening up his mind and letting the villain get a pep talk from a memory of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), because why not have the cake of milking the main character’s mother figure’s death for all it’s worth in the last movie and also eat it too by having her show up the very next outing. It cheapens the emotional stakes and impacts of both movies, but that’s fine. It’s fine. It would be nice if Peter had a few memories of May reminding him to eat a vegetable from time to time, but if I could subsist on nothing but label-to-camera Little Caesars and look like Tom Holland I wouldn’t bother with leafy greens either. Some extra iron might have helped with his spider-puberty, though.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #270: The Rose (1979) & Bette Midler

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Welcome to Episode #270 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss the early film career of stage performer Bette Midler, starting with her breakout debut The Rose (1979).

00:00 Welcome
02:38 I Want Your Sex (2026)
07:20 Strung (2026)
10:12 Blue Heron (2026)
13:49 Monterey Pop (1968)
15:10 Gimme Shelter (1970)

22:08 The Rose (1979)
37:11 Divine Madness (1980)
46:06 Ruthless People (1986)
56:14 Big Business (1988)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

I Want Your Sex (2026)

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Gregg Araki’s entire promotional campaign for his latest candy-coated slacker comedy has been focused on how Gen-Z is not having as much sex as Gen-X was at their age, a common online-discourse talking point you’ll hear echoed throughout the film itself. Araki will tell any interviewer who’ll listen about how kids these days aren’t fucking enough, that they’re robbing themselves of essential life experiences by being too socially timid during the most precious years of their sexual prime. Olivia Wilde acts as Araki’s Millennial mouthpiece for that complaint about the youth of today’s sexual cowardice in I Want Your Sex, while Cooper Hoffman acts as an ideological punching bag who has to suffer her blows, begging for forgiveness on behalf of his entire generation of anxious, undersexed dweebs. The only thing that saves this intergenerational dynamic from coming across as the “Old man yells at cloud” screed of a prurient 60-something curmudgeon is context & framing. Coming from Wilde’s onscreen persona as an art-scene dominatrix pushing her younger subordinate onto the mattress for a vigorous fuck session, Araki’s position shifts from a schoolhouse scolding to a form of negging dirty talk. It’s a way of teasing Gen-Z into having more sex with their elders in particular, not just each other, by turning that discourse into a degrading roleplay game all of its own — a playfully selfish maneuver.

Unfortunately, that kinky reframing of Gen-Z libido discourse is the only truly inspired idea in I Want Your Sex. The rest of the film swirling around it is just mildly naughty sitcom antics, with Cooper Hoffman playing Wyle E. Coyote to Olivia Wilde’s Roadrunner. Hoffman stars as a fresh-out-of-college slacker who’s openly groomed to become the next sexual plaything of his art-world celebrity boss, played by Wilde. Wilde pontificates through every conversation as if she’s always talking to press about her upcoming gallery show, exclusively communicating in platitudes about the philosophy, politics, and aesthetics of sex, which she’s built an entire career around commodifying in self-parodic pop art. The movie starts as a parody of Sunset Boulevard, with Wilde’s nude body floating face down in her own mansion’s swimming pool, which Hoffman’s befuddled underling has to explain to police detectives (Margaret Cho & Johnny Knoxville) in a classic noir flashback structure. Despite that tease of inevitable violence, the mood remains light & cartoony, to the point where even the S&M games between Wilde’s Norma Desmond dom and Hoffman’s Joe Gillis sub are too goofy to be taken seriously. Most of the kink in I Want Your Sex is comically gestured at instead of depicted in earnest. The seduction period where Hoffman is introduced to his boss’s dirty games is skipped entirely, with the edit jumping straight into depiction through montage rather than building genuine erotic tension scene to scene. The dialogue makes constant references to the act of pegging, but the only time a character straps on a harness onscreen is when they’re too drunk to figure out how it’s supposed to be worn. It’s a funny gag, but it’s also an indication that Araki may have lost some of his own sexually anarchic nerve as the decades have gone by. In his 90s indie days, he would’ve fully gone there instead of just talking about it.

For all of Araki’s preloaded discourse about the diminished returns of each generation’s sexual adventurism, the real story here is the diminished returns of each generation’s cinematic imagery. Araki recently gave an interview with GQ Magazine where he admitted that he vastly prefers the look & feel of digital cameras over the bulky analog film equipment of his early years, stating, “I love digital. I love the way it looks. I love the things you can do with it. I hate sprocket holes. I hate dealing with the labs.” It’s easy to see how that shift in format might’ve made Araki’s job easier & more fun, but he doesn’t seem to realize how detrimental it’s been to the overall quality of his work. I Want Your Sex‘s most pronounced visual idea is the contrast between the candy-colored pop art of Wilde’s art studio, the breakfast cereal commercial production design of Hoffman’s man-child apartment, and the grim, grey blandness of his checked-out girlfriend’s place, which is supposed to represent the sexless, passionless monotony of Gen-Z living (with Charli XCX playing its against-type spokeswoman). The problem is that, because it’s shot on digital cameras, there’s no richness or vibrancy to the colors in the more cartoonish spaces, and they end up looking a little bland as well, undercutting the point of the contrast. Some of the best touches of Araki classics like Nowhere & The Doom Generation are the absurd pops of color in the teenage fashion & interior decor, which is now being sacrificed for the convenience of digital filmmaking (an excuse that gets a little flimsy when you look at the high-contrast cartoon imagery of last year’s Araki-inspired, digitally shot Rats!). The unintended result is that I Want Your Sex often looks & feels like a straight-to-streaming comedy from an anonymous hack rather than the latest pop-art provocation from an indie cinema legend. Gregg Araki wants I Want Your Sex to read as a grand statement on the current moment in intergenerational sexual politics, but it instead mostly reads as a cute but inessential workplace comedy with a few more onscreen dildos than usual.

-Brandon Ledet