My Bloody Valentine (1981)

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The easiest way for a low-budget horror movie to become a perennial classic is to stake its claim on a specific calendar date, so it has an annually recurring slot for ritual rewatches. This has been common knowledge since at least as far back as the first-wave slashers of the 1970s, with Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, and Halloween guaranteeing annual royalty checks from subsequent years’ cable TV broadcasts. Christmas & Halloween have proven to be popular seasonal settings in that scramble to claim a ritual calendar date, while other titles like April Fool’s Day, New Year’s Evil, and Mardi Gras Massacre have found much less competition in more casually celebrated holidays. 1981’s My Bloody Valentine staked its claim on Valentine’s Day relatively early, and has only been challenged by the occasional novelty like last year’s Heart Eyes or 2001’s Valentine in the decades since. It’s proven to be a difficult film to top for Valentine’s Day horror supremacy, since its killer’s method of ripping out victims’ hearts to stuff into heart-shaped Valentine chocolate boxes is the perfect balance of novelty & brutality needed to leave a mark on the genre. It also arrived early enough in the slasher cycle to participate in this Holiday Horror tradition with full sincerity, avoiding the Scream–era meta irony that ruins a good, silly scare with the distraction of self-awareness. If you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a classic horror title set on that holiday, there’s still really only one viable choice (give or take its relatively well-respected 2009 remake).

That’s what makes it so funny that My Bloody Valentine is a hat-on-a-hat situation. It would’ve been more than enough for it to stand out as a novelty slasher by delivering a killer who’s improbably activated by his home town’s Valentine’s Day celebrations. Instead, it adds the extra detail that its masked killer moonlights as a coalminer, inviting mine-specific tools & settings into each staged kill that have no direct association with the holiday in question. Yes, he uses his mining gear every kill, and yes, those kills are inspired by how much he hates his town’s annual Valentine’s Day dance. He’s a complicated guy with a lot going on. The more generic version of this slasher template can be found in the previous year’s Prom Night, in which a tragic childhood accident is avenged once those responsible are old enough to attend their senior prom. Shot in Canada but set in Anywhere, Small Town America, there’s nothing specific about the background details of Prom Night‘s setting — deliberately so. My Bloody Valentine was also shot in Canada (as frequently confirmed by the Canadian pronunciation of “sorry”), but you are unlikely to mistake it for the town you live in unless you happen to live in a cloistered coalmining community where every male person in your life has spent some time working in the mines. The inciting tragedy in this case was an accidental explosion that happened while the rest of the town was enjoying the local Valentine’s Day dance, carelessly leaving five workers to perish in the mines below. So, whenever the town decides it’s time to move on with their lives and bring back their Valentine’s Day traditions, masked killer Harry Warden returns to avenge his fallen coworkers (whom he unfortunately had to cannibalize to stay alive in the maddening days leading up to his own rescue). It’s two seemingly unrelated things—Valentine’s & coalmining—forever welded together in a single ludicrous screenplay.

My Bloody Valentine attempts to smooth over the discordance between its two competing novelty settings by focusing on the kind of love-triangle romance that typically springs up when you live in a small town where everyone knows each other from cradle to grave. You see, local golden boy T.J. (Paul Kelman) tried to leave small-town life behind by moving away to Los Angeles, but he quickly crashed & burned and shamefully found himself back in the mines. While T.J. was gone, his golden-haired girlfriend Sarah (Lori Hallier) started up a new relationship with his former bestie Axel (Neil Affleck), but now that he’s back in town he wants to default to their previous relationship. Will Sarah choose to reignite her white-hot passion for T.J., or will she stick with the stabler, nobler partnership she’s since built with Axel? Who gives a shit? The romantic melodrama at play here is necessary to justify the holiday setting, but it’s difficult to pay too close attention to its stakes when there’s also a crazed killer in town ripping out the trio’s friends’ hearts and plopping them into the hotdog waters, beer coolers, and chocolate boxes at their unsanctioned Valentine’s party, thrown behind the sheriff’s back. All that really matters is that the kills are consistently brutal and consistently afforded a mining-town specificity in the killer’s mask, weapons, and venues of attack. Shooting the majority of those kills down in the mines may darken the screen a little too much to reward modern home viewing, but they look great on the big screen, especially in the pop iconography of the opening scene, when a buxom blonde strokes the phallic hose of the killer’s mask mid-hookup before she’s penetrated with his pickaxe. Gnarly.

Speaking of horror-movie calendar watching, this year is especially apt for a My Bloody Valentine screening (an opportunity pounced upon by ScreamFest NOLA at The Broad earlier this week). That’s because Valentine’s Day happens to fall on a Saturday this year, the day after Friday the 13th. That’s also the case in the film itself, which we’re informed via title cards announcing both dates: Friday the 13th, then Saturday the 14th. It’s highly likely that My Bloody Valentine was greenlit as an attempt to capitalize on that calendrical coincidence in 1981, hoping to make Harry Warden as much of a household name as Jason Voorhees. The film did not succeed there, but it’s still the first title that comes to mind when someone thinks of Valentine’s Day horror and coalmining horror, which is an impressive double-dip success in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

OBEX (2026)

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In Albert Birney’s debut feature The Beast Pageant, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines in his job & home is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to go on a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural upstate New York (where Birney was living at the time). In Birney’s breakout collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines on his jobsite visits to strangers’ homes is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to dream of a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural Maryland (where Birney has been living since). In his most recent directorial outing, OBEX, Albert Birney himself appears onscreen as a lonely man who . . . you get the picture. Birney has six feature films to his name, and the three I’ve happened to have seen all follow the same basic narrative structure, the same way that all Neil Gaiman stories I’ve read happen to rely on the same Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole plot device. The only thing that’s changed between these career checkpoints, really, is the nature of the sad-sack protagonist’s job, the types of machines that distract him from his mind-numbing daily labor, and the type of fantasy adventure that breaks him out of the routine. If you’ve already seen The Beast Pageant or Strawberry Mansion, you’re already familiar with the general vibe & shape of OBEX but, thankfully, Birney still finds plenty room for variation & novelty when coloring within those rigid lines.

In this iteration, Birney plays a 1980s computer whiz & agoraphobe who never steps outside his modest Baltimore apartment. His only true friend is a geriatric lapdog named Sandy that randomly wandered into his yard and has been spoiled like a baby ever since. Birney’s sad-sack loner makes a living by “drawing” computerized portraits of strangers on commission, recreating family photos with carefully arranged keystrokes on commercial-grade printer paper. When it’s time to relax, he entertains himself with the other screens arranged throughout his house, most notably a tower of cathode-ray TVs stacked in his living room as a kind of unintentional video art instillation. He often runs three different programs out-of-sync on this TV tower like a televised-media DJ, cuddling up with Sandy on the couch and cranking up the volume to drown out the roar of cicadas outside of the house. Things go awry when he purchases a PC computer game through mail catalog that promises to bring great adventure into his life — a promise made literal when the game invites a demon named Ixaroth to invade his home through the screen, directly importing Sandy into the game. To rescue Sandy, he must then go on a harrowing adventure outside of his apartment by willingly entering the game himself, represented as a live-action roleplay version of 8-bit era Zelda puzzle games. The story is not unfamiliar (especially not if you’ve seen Riddle of Fire in addition to Birney’s prior work), but its familiarity is ultimately, warmly sweet.

The most notable shift in craft here is Birney’s newfound interest in horror genre tropes, which is usually where most low-budget directors start. Some of his best couch time with Sandy in the first act is spent recording the entirety of A Nightmare on Elm Street Film from TV broadcast to VHS tape, so they can rewatch it together later, anytime they want. This allusion opens the film up to a wide range of surrealistic horror touches, including dozens of rubber-masked cicada mutants straight out of 1950s creature features, a couple Harryhausen-style skeleton soldiers and, most improbably, some spooky late-night drives inspired by Lynch’s Lost Highway. The treacherous demon Ixaroth obviously adds to the film’s horror bona-fides as well, represented onscreen as a beast made entirely out of TV static, with a tangible taxidermy skull. It’s an image that pairs well with Birney’s return to the Game Boy Camera-style black & white cinematography of The Beast Pageant, but more importantly it’s one that signals the themes he’s getting at with this latest stylistic experiment. The evil entity is composed of the glowing-screen filler that keeps his protagonist from venturing outside his apartment, making the film out to be a dire warning about the price of staring at screens all day instead of living a real life. Sure, you get some mind-melting psychedelic video art out of it, but at what cost? In comparison, I’m not sure that The Beast Pageant had a similar underlying message other than that having a job sucks. Maybe OBEX is Birney admitting that making & looking at niche art all day sucks too, especially if that’s the only thing you do.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the classic tabloid noir Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

00:00 Welcome
03:09 Kill Bill – The Whole Bloody Affair (2025)
08:58 Blackmail (1929)
15:20 Gorgo (1961)
21:08 Bunny (2025)
25:00 Send Help (2026)
30:00 Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die (2026)
34:00 Bone Tomahawk (2015)
39:14 Obex (2026)
44:47 Crimson Peak (2015)
54:06 Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
59:32 The Moment (2026)
1:05:15 Eighth Grade (2018)
1:10:10 Mandy (2018)
1:14:00 Lapsis (2021)
1:17:00 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Mutant Mayhem (2023)

1:24:12 Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

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

Bunny (2025)

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2025’s Bunny is the directorial debut of Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the lead roles alongside first-billed actor Mo Stark, who is also credited with Jacobson and Stefan Marolachakis for writing the film’s screenplay. Stark plays the titular Bunny, a sex worker who provides for his wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) by hustling, and who also acts as the de facto leader of his apartment building and its array of kooks. He looks after the elderly Ian, who lost most of the use of one of his arms in a youthful motorcycle accident, and Ian in turn looks after the voluntarily bedbound Franklin, who spends all of his waking hours watching his VHS recordings of the David Carradine series Kung Fu. There’s also Linda (Linda Rong Mei Chen), the landlady who’s part of the fun, Bunny’s somewhat dimwitted friend Dino (Jacobson), a trio of partying girls who live downstairs, and a couple of douchey young bros who round out the rest of the cramped, claustrophobic tenement that they all inhabit. On Bunny’s birthday, he runs home in a heightened state and covered in blood, which he attempts to hide from his wife, and into this chaos several other characters enter: their short term rental guest Chana (Genevieve Hudson-Price), a rabbi (Henry Czerny) Chana summons to ensure that her temporary occupancy is in compliance with her extremely orthodox requirements, Bobbie’s estranged father Loren (Anthony Drazan), and two cops called in by Linda, who struggles through her limited English to explain to them that she fears one of her tenants has died in his apartment. These two cops (Ajay Naidu and Liz Caribel Sierra) end up spending much of the day lurking around Bunny’s front door, which complicates things when the employee of a spurned john appears and tries to murder him, forcing Bunny to kill him in self-defense. 

In our recent discussion of The Beast Pageant, Brandon and I talked about how there are two ways to respond to a cheaply made but nonetheless impressive piece of independent film: “I could make this” (derogatory, denigrating), and “I could make this!” (appreciative, inspired). Jacobson feels like a filmmaker who saw the works of directors like Sean Baker and had the latter reaction. In particular, the choice of making the film’s protagonist a sex worker, setting the film over a single day-long period, handheld guerilla shooting in cramped, real world locations, and focusing on a few intersectional stories with a small cast of mostly unknowns all call Tangerine to mind. The other things that the film feels like it’s borrowing from are both genre products of the nineties: stoner comedies and post-Pulp Fiction dialogue-driven crime capers. For the former, the film is mostly populated with potheads — Dino most obviously, as he smokes incessantly and also gets Bobbie’s father Loren high when he arrives unannounced while Bobbie and Bunny are away. For the latter, the film is a constant wirewalk of trying to figure out how to deal with the body in the hallway and the various lengths that the characters must go to in order to keep the police from finding a pretense to come inside. Where these two ideas intersect is in the constant poor decisions that Bunny and Dino make; when a second dead body is found inside (the tenant Linda was concerned about did, in fact, overdose in his bedroom), the gang quickly comes up with the idea to get rid of that body rather than the man Bunny killed, resulting in a lot of wacky hijinks surrounding getting the corpse into a suitcase and outside. There’s absolutely no reason to get involved with the neighbor’s body, but everyone’s so intoxicant-addled and dim-witted that they just keep making things worse for themselves. 

The film keeps itself from feeling too monotonous despite its single-location setting by threading in a parade of fun characters and letting them bounce off of one another. I was particularly fond of Chana, who defiantly notes that she must be called either “Happy Chana” or by her full name, “never just ‘Chana,’” and whose orthodoxy considerations throw a wrench into the already malfunctioning machine that is Linda’s tenement house. Bobbie leaves the apartment in a huff before Chana arrives, meaning that when their guest arrives to find that she is “alone” with Bunny, she demands that either Bunny leave his own home or that there be at least two other women present since “two women equals one wife.” It’s good stuff, reminiscent of the “Ski Lift” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and her presence is a fun complication when having to navigate keeping the cops outside while keeping her from discovering the body (later bodies) that are moved from apartment to apartment. I also appreciated the presence of Loren, whose absurdly self-serving nature is made apparent when he admits that he’s found himself at a loss when his wife finally leaves him—he’s left her before, of course, many times, but now that he’s on the other end of it he feels remorse for ditching his daughter. Loren is on a different journey, like he’s entered this picture from a completely different film in which he’s a deadbeat dad finally trying to make good, but everyone here finds him to be an eye-rolling dick until he actually comes in handy. In a lesser (and more racist) movie, Linda would be used as a comedic punching bag, but here she gets to be a part of the fun, which I enjoyed immensely after some initial skepticism about how respectfully she would be treated. 

With a necessary content warning for this film and its (respectful) treatment of sexual violence, I’d recommend it for anyone looking for something to scratch that Sean Baker-ish itch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Boomer’s Best-of-the-Year Oversights, Part One (2015-2019)

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In one of our end-of-the-year podcast episodes last year that was partially inspired by my having finally been convinced to watch The Twentieth Century based on my delight in director Matt Rankin’s follow-up feature Universal Language (it was my favorite movie of last year!), Brandon read off a list of film titles that he asked me to identify as a kind of makeshift quiz. Those titles were all films that had been on the Swampflix Top Ten list for their eligible year, and which I had not seen at the time of the relevant list’s publication. I’m not a completionist, but with an upcoming collaborative project, I took that list as homework and got to work filling out these blind spots to determine if the listed films would have made my own end-of-the-year list if I had seen them in time. Come along with me for part one: 2015-2019.

2015: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Crimson Peak – Watched February 1, 2026

Upon review: Crimson Peak has all of the strengths of Guillermo del Toro’s recent Frankenstein adaptation with none of its weaknesses . . . although it admittedly has other weaknesses of its own, mostly in regards to casting. A gorgeous period film with beautiful costumes and sets that all act in service of a Victorian gothic romance that also happens to be a ghost story, this is del Toro at his best and also his most unabashed. As his main character, an aspiring novelist, says of her own work, “It’s not a ghost story; it’s a love story. The ghosts are metaphors for the past.” The film is almost cringe-inducing in the nakedness with which it comments upon itself, but that same open and unabashed sincerity is what makes it so meaningful and worthwhile. The casting of 2010s Tumblr’s favorite “woobie” it-boy Tom Hiddleston is a miss, and although there’s nothing wrong with Jessica Chastain’s performance, doesn’t it just feel like Eva Green should be playing Lucille? 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

Tangerine – Watched January 22, 2026

Upon review: I wouldn’t consider myself an Anora hater per se, but I certainly wasn’t enamored of it in the same way that others were. The overwhelmingly positive critical response to a film that I considered solid but not necessarily remarkable made me somewhat hesitant to revisit director Sean Baker’s earlier work, as I felt fairly certain that I would fail to connect with it in the same way that I had with Anora. I was pleasantly shocked by this one, a film that I remember mostly as part of the discourse for the fact that it was shot entirely on smartphones, a brand-new trick at the time. This story of two trans sex workers, Sin-Dee Rella (who recently completed a prison stay on behalf of her pimp/boyfriend Chester) and her best friend Alexandra is an absolutely hilarious, heartbreaking, and overwhelmingly humane piece of narrative cinema. A true slice of life in the day of two women struggling, not to “have it all,” but just to have some little thing, whether it be a sad Christmas Eve singalong that’s barely a step up from a private karaoke room or the pathetic human specimen of Chester (R.I.P., James Ransone). Anora may have had the budget, the big release, and the acclaim, but this earlier outing blows it out of the water. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2016: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Kubo And The Two Strings – Watched February 6, 2026

Upon review: I was a latecomer to appreciating the animation studio Laika, as I didn’t get around to seeing Coraline, arguably their most famous film, until 2021. I also remember the discourse that surrounded Kubo when it first came out, mostly in the form of criticism of the film’s casting of mostly white voice actors for a story set in and inspired by feudal Japan. While that’s definitely worthy of discussion, I also found Kubo to be an unexpected delight, a gorgeously animated stop-motion film about a boy with magical, musical powers who finds himself thrust into a conflict with his mother’s family following her apparent death, after years of raising the boy in secret. The quest Kubo finds himself upon isn’t the most novel one, but the film takes an interesting twist at the end by having the protagonist forsake the items acquired during his journey and find a more humane way to deal with his evil grandfather. Dark but not too dark, this is one that I would recommend for any child or adult. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

Tale Of Tales – Watched January 25, 2026

Upon review: A fantastic fantasy film! When Brandon and I discussed this one while recording our Beast Pageant episode, he mentioned that it had one of the highest hit rates for a horror anthology, and I can’t help but agree. I’ll always think of this one first and foremost as a fantasy/fairy tale picture (it is an adaptation of multiple stories by Italian fairy tale collector Giambattista Basile) before I think of it as a horror film, but don’t be fooled by the Italian poster that makes it look like a collection of episodes of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller; there’s plenty here that aligns more with horror as a genre. A queen (Salma Hayek) eats the massive heart of a giant sea dragon, a dye-maker finds a man who will flay her alive in the misguided belief that it will make her appear younger, a young princess is given to an ogre as a wife and is brutalized by him, and when the last of these escapes, the ogre hunts her down and kills her companions with the ferocity of a slasher. Good stuff. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2017: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Lure – Watched January 13, 2026

Upon review: I loved this movie. A bizarre horror musical fantasia, The Lure follows two sirens who are lured onto land by the songs of an eighties Polish pop band called Figs & Dates, then become part of the band’s act before turning into stars of their own. Their eel-like mermaid tales, which only appear when they get wet (Splash or, depending on your generation, H20: Just Add Water rules), don’t prove to be much of an imposition, but when one of the girls starts to fall in love with the Evan Peters-esque moptop bassist of F&D, her more worldly-wise sister tries to get her to break it off. If she doesn’t, she’s in for a Little Mermaid ending, of the Hans Christian Anderson variety, not the Disney one. Running the gamut from club music to pop to thrash, the soundtrack is excellent, and the moments of horror are genuinely chilling. Not to be missed. 5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2018: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Cam – Watched some time in 2019. 

Upon review: I have to admit that I don’t remember this one too well, although I do recall that I enjoyed it. It’s not possible to legally watch this film anywhere anymore, as it was a direct-to-Netflix feature that the platform no longer hosts and it never got a physical media release, so I don’t have the option to go back and review it again to get a fuller, clearer picture than the one in my head. I remember not caring for actress Madeline Brewer very much at the time, mostly based on her performance on Hemlock Grove; since then, I’ve come around on her, especially when I came to like her quite a bit as the protagonist of the final season of You. This was one that hit with a lot of the Swampflix group based on the predisposition toward internet-based horror, and it went over fairly well in my house with me and my roommate of the time. Too bad I can’t confirm that anymore. 4 stars.

Would it have made my list? 2018 had some clear leaders of the pack with Hereditary, Annihilation, and Black Panther, but the lower rankings on the list aren’t as solidly defensible. Verdict: Possibly, lean toward yes.

Mandy – Watched January 29, 2026

Upon review: Back when we watched Beyond the Black Rainbow as a Movie of the Month years back, I remember reading that as a child director Panos Cosmatos would walk down the horror aisle at the video store and imagine what a movie would be based on the poster alone. Looking back on that, I do wonder if the abyss didn’t gaze back a little, since he has a tendency to make movies that sometimes linger on a single image for extended periods of time, as if the film is the poster. That bothered me much less in Mandy than it did in Rainbow, possibly because it’s driven by yet another in a long history of butterfly fearless performances from Nicolas Cage, or because this one’s nostalgia for VHS-era horror is more textual than referential. The evil gang of demonic bikers who help a cult subdue and torment the titular Mandy are almost exactly what one might imagine from sneaking a peak at the horror aisle at age eight and seeing the cover of Hellbound: Hellraiser II while an overhead TV played Psychomania. The psychedelia and too-familiar narrative structure are unlikely to please plot essentialists, but as a chainsaw duel enthusiast and a King Crimson fan, I liked this despite the soporific nature of its back half. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? I think that I would have overlooked this one or taken it for granted during the year of its release, especially given my cool reception to Black Rainbow. So no, it would not have made my list, but that would have been an error on my part. 

Eighth Grade – Watched February 6, 2026

Upon Review: Most online sources would say that this is a coming-of-age dramedy, but that would be incorrect; this is a horror film. Our young protagonist Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is growing up during a time in which social media use is essentially compulsory, while she’s also trying to navigate a world that, to the adult viewer, is largely alien, all while her hormones surge amidst a peer group whose treatment of her ranges from cruel to apathetic. That strangeness of the world in which children reside “now” (given that the film itself is nearly a decade old at this point) is made manifest in a scene during which Kayla spends some time with an older girl and her high school friend group, all of whom seem infinitely older and wiser to Kayla than herself despite the fact that they themselves are still children (and not that their youth stops one of them from being a predator). These older teens marvel at the idea that Kayla had SnapChat, a messaging app that their contemporaries use almost solely for exchanging nudes, when she was in fifth grade, and it blows their minds in the same way that I often marvel that there are entire generations now that have grown up on YouTube, a site that launched the summer after I graduated from high school. Kayla’s entire life is inscribed by the age-old pubescent need to be seen and acknowledged, filtered through a world in which validation is a currency that exists entirely within one’s phone. Good stuff. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

In Fabric – Watched April 4, 2025

Upon Review: An absolute marvel of a movie, I just happened to miss this one when it appeared, despite the affection I already held for Peter Strickland’s earlier giallo-adjacent psychological thriller Berberian Sound Studio. Featuring an excellent turn from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, one of our greatest living performers, this spooky feature about a red dress that torments its owners is an absolute delight. Briefly discussed at the time of viewing in our Buddha’s Palm episode at about the seventy-two minute mark. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Absolutely.

The Wild Boys – Watched December 21 and 22, 2025

Upon Review: I was not looking forward to disappointing Brandon when I watched this one and did not care for it. So much so, in fact, that I watched it again the following day to see if there was something that I could connect with and care for. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case. A mostly monochrome fantasia about boys becoming women on an island full of erotic flora, I felt in my bones how strongly this would connect to Brandon, but it just didn’t with me. The moments I loved most were when the film would suddenly turn almost Technicolor, bright and vibrant, and then would be disappointed when we went back to black and white. There must have been a reason for not shooting the whole thing in glorious color, but I couldn’t pin down exactly what the reasons were despite two viewings. It is, as Brandon wrote in his review, “decidedly not-for-everyone-but-definitely-for-someone.” 2.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Alas, no.

2019: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Lighthouse – Watched January 11, 2026

Upon Review: I was a big fan of The VVitch, so much so that it was my number one movie of 2016. Despite that, I let both of director Robert Eggers’s following films, The Lighthouse and The Northman, slip past me in the stream. Perhaps it was simply a matter of not being up to grappling with the film and its presaging of the madness of isolation when the film came to home viewing in the early days of lockdown. Having now seen The Lighthouse, this was a huge miss on my part. An utterly captivating story about two men on an island together tasked with maintaining an apparatus that captivates them like it were an unknowable elder god, the film is as rich with symbolism as it is dense with the old-timey dialogue for which Eggers continues to demonstrate his uncanny ear. An unpleasant delight. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Absolutely; it would have hit the top 10.

The Beach Bum – Watched January 20, 2026

Upon Review: Matthew McConaughey plays the worst person in the world, a very famous (Florida specific) poet named “Moondog,” who floats through life on little more than military grade marijuana, beer that’s barely fit for swine, and a garden of sun-dried poontang. This life of luxury is not sustained by his poetry, but by the fortune of his wife Minnie, who loves no man but Moondog but has taken to shacking up with R&B artist Lingerie (Snoop Dogg) in the “civilization” of Miami during Moondog’s long hiatus in the Keys. When Minnie tragically dies, the plot, such as it is, kicks in, as Moondog must now finish his current writing project in order to get the inheritance that will continue to fund his degenerate hedonism. Along the way, McConaughey as Moondog gets to spout the occasional fragment of genuinely decent poetry broken up with narcissistic phallocentric drivel that believably charms whatever constitutes the literati of Jacksonville and, less convincingly, the Pulitzer board. It’s all good fun with great editing, delirious neon, and a practiced eye for composition, but I could see this turning into a red flag favorite long term in the same genus as Fight Club or Scarface. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Not this time.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blackmail (1929)

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There’s an awkward transition period between silent and sound pictures, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail sits right in the middle of it. In fact, it straddles the line between the two. If you look up the film online and click the first streaming link that your search results present, you’ll find yourself watching the film in sound, but this was actually a late-breaking change made well into production. The Kino Lorber DVD release that my library has contains both the silent and the talkie versions of the film, and the silent one was actually more financially successful in its day than the other — largely due to the fact that most British cinemas didn’t have sound technology installed yet, reducing the talkie Blackmail’s overall box office. Blackmail stands at this crux in the leap in film technology, and so we must give it some grace for its issues. 

Flapper Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden), although she finds him a bit of a bore. On the side, she’s also occasionally going on dates with a painter named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). After an argument at a tea house, Frank storms out, allowing Crewe to offer to take Alice out, and Frank sees the two leaving together. Crewe takes Alice to his artist’s loft and the two flirt for a bit before Alice volunteers to wear a (for the time) racy dancing costume and model for Crewe; he hides her clothes while she’s changing and his personality drastically changes as he attempts to force himself on her. Alice manages to grab a nearby knife and kill Crewe in self-defense, but she goes home in a state of shock. The following day, reminders of Crewe’s death are all around her, and a gossipy neighbor standing about in her father’s newsstand recounting the grisly details doesn’t help. Frank visits the scene of the killing and finds one of Alice’s gloves, pocketing the evidence before anyone else sees it and bringing it to her, where she wants to tell him everything but can’t verbalize the horror of her situation the previous night. Unfortunately, Alice’s exit from Crewe’s building was witnessed by career criminal Tracy (Donald Calthrop), who arrives with Alice’s other glove and announces his intent to extort both Alice and Frank. 

I’m not entirely certain that calling this film a “thriller” accurately reflects the content. The title act of blackmail doesn’t really enter the narrative until quite late in the game, and although the film’s energy picks up in its final act, the first three quarters of its eighty-five-minute runtime is fairly slow-paced. If anything, the film is more of a character study of Alice White than anything else. The film follows her almost entirely and spends a great deal more time on extended examinations of her face as she reacts to things that happen around her. Ondra has the perfect features for this era of filmmaking, with the big eyes and pouty lips that were best suited to convey the outsized emotions that dialogue-free performance required. Her English was so accented, however, that Hitchcock had another actress (Joan Barry) say Alice’s lines off-camera while Ondra lip-synced the dialogue, and the result is a little uncanny. (This was a technological limitation of the time; in Murder!, released the following year, the main character’s internal monologue while listening to the radio was accomplished by having the actor record his lines and then act along to his own voice on the tape, all while a live orchestra played the music that was supposedly playing on his radio.) That slight awkwardness as a result of this method is a little strange, but it unintentionally adds another layer to the performance, as if Alice’s experiences have left her so out of sorts that she’s not entirely in sync with her own mind. 

This is Alice’s story: she’s just a girl wanting to have fun, and she’s bored of her cop boyfriend always taking her to the movies. Crewe, a mysterious artist, shows an interest in her and invites her back to his place, where he shows off his work and even lets Alice express herself on a canvas as well, and it’s all fun and games before he reveals his true intentions. She defends herself but kills him in the process and returns home to wash his blood out of her clothes. On the street, the positions of people at rest remind her too much of the state she left Crewe’s body in, and when she’s trying to have breakfast with her family, she can’t get any peace. Her boyfriend arrives with evidence that she’s been two-timing him and she can’t even speak about the kind of danger that she defended herself from. All of this is before Tracy even enters the picture. This isn’t a thriller, really; it’s a noir, one with an inciting incident that would appear in noirs for decades to come, at least into the fifties with titles like The Blue Gardenia. How much you’re going to be invested in the film depends on how much you like Alice, and although I did, I can see her characterization being a harder pill to swallow for others, even before getting into the strange lip syncing issue that may further turn some viewers off. In the end, Tracy is sought for questioning purely as a matter of having a criminal record and having been in the area, and he flees the police, leading to a chase that winds through the British Museum before he falls from the building’s roof to his death. This leads to Crewe’s death being pinned on Tracy and Alice being free to go, but the film lingers on her face in its final moments in a way that makes it plain that although she may be legally absolved, she’s been forever changed by having to slay a man in order to protect herself from his sexual assault. 

As to the elements that make the film memorable as a Hitchcock text, the final fourth of the film sees Tracy being chased by the police, presaging several images and ideas that would go on to be reliable tricks in the director’s bag. In the British Museum, Tracy descends a rope to escape his pursuers past a giant bust of presumably Egyptian origin. There’s a distinct visual genealogy between this and the finale of North by Northwest: 

The Mount Rushmore sequence is also part of another one of Hitchcock’s trademarks, which was to have the film’s final action scenes lead to a rooftop climax, most famously in Vertigo but also To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, and Foreign Correspondent, just to name a few (although for the last two of these Jimmy Stewart is dangled out of a window rather than off of a rooftop and the fall from Westminster Cathedral tower happens at the beginning of the third act rather than its end, respectively). The chase scene through the museum is also clearly echoed in the protracted sequence that concludes I Confess, although this one is stronger and Hitchcock is already demonstrating his strong eye for composition when it comes to setting up the most interesting version of a shot, sticking the camera in the vertices of an oddly shaped room or taking on an overhead view of a large reading area. He’s also already inserting his sly sense of humor into the proceedings. Despite the relative novelty of the art form, the characters within the film are already talking about movies as if the whole enterprise is old hat; Frank seemingly only wants to go to detective flicks which Alice finds boring and predictable, and Frank admits he’s still excited to see the latest one about Scotland Yard, even if “they’re bound to get most things wrong.” Hitchcock’s lack of respect for the institution of the police overall is on display as well, since the entirety of Scotland Yard does, in fact, get most things wrong; they latch onto Tracy based on circumstantial evidence and chase him to his death, unknowingly doing so in order to cover for a killing (albeit a legally defensible one) committed by the girlfriend of one of their own members. 

It’s all good stuff, but I doubt that Blackmail remains of much interest even to most film-lovers who don’t have an unhealthy interest in Hitchcock’s body of work. Narratively, it’s not in conversation with his other texts, at least not those we think of as the canonical forty thrillers. Insofar as it’s useful as an interpretative tool for his filmography as a whole, this film feels like an attempt at experimenting with techniques and images that he would perfect later and is fascinating in that right, but I once again fear that this fascination extends only to real Hitch-heads. The Lodger is a much more engaging film if you’re interested in what the director’s silent and silent-adjacent work was like, and for experiments with the artform that sound introduced into the medium, Murder! has more fascinating production trivia and smoother tone overall, although I’d go to bat for Blackmail’s value as a noir character study before I’d recommend the 1930 film. This is in the public domain, so hopefully it’s not too hard for you to find if I’ve sold you on it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Send Help (2026)

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Two decades after Red Eye, Rachel McAdams finally got back on a plane in a movie helmed by a horror director who already peaked decades earlier, and look what’s happened to her this time. Dowdy corporate strategist Linda Liddle (McAdams) is an incredibly valuable member of her team despite her social ineptitude, questionable hygiene, and lack of awareness about not having fish in the office. She’s so important, in fact, that her late employer promised her a vice presidency before he passed away, not that this piece of information is treated with any deference by the boss’s son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) when he takes over. He’s the kind of trust fund kid for whom the idiom about rich boys “born on third base [who] think they invented baseball” was crafted; he wastes no time in giving Linda’s promised promotion to one of his frat brothers who steals credit for her work, using his c-suite position to sleaze it up by asking an attractive applicant “how far above and beyond [she’s] willing to go for [him]” despite having a devoted supermodel fiancée, and otherwise abusing the position of power that’s been dumped into his lap. To string Linda along a little further, he invites her on an overseas business trip that will give her time to iron out some final details, and everything changes when their plane goes down. Everyone else involved is killed, but Linda finds that Bradley has washed up on the same beach that she has, and she immediately uses the skills she learned as a Survivor hopeful (and superfan) to set up shelter and prevent Bradley from dying of shock or sunstroke. He remains an ungrateful ingrate and attempts to leverage his position as her boss into getting her to follow his orders, but there’s no HR-mandated slideshow about office dynamics that could prepare either of them for what lies ahead. 

Send Help writers Mark Swift and Damian Shannon have made their careers out of revisiting dependable intellectual property, having a hand in two incarnations of Jason Voorhees by writing both 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason and the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot, as well as penning the screenplay for the 2017 Dwayne Johnson vanity project/nineties nostalgia cash-in Baywatch. (Their other writing credit listed on Wikipedia, Shark Tale, credits Ice Age franchise creator Michael J. Wilson as screenwriter, with them having only a story credit for an earlier version of Shark Tale’s script.) It’s not a huge body of material to work with when inferring what appeals to them as writers, but it does trend toward sequels and reboots. Send Help is the first original screenplay of theirs to make it to production with their credit intact, but this doesn’t feel like the most “original” script. I must confess that I underestimated the cultural penetration that Triangle of Sadness had; I wasn’t surprised when Brandon texted me to say that the trailer for this film looked like someone had adapted the second half of Sadness as a Tubi original, but I was a bit taken aback by another friend stating upon exiting Send Help that they were also worried it would just be Sadness all over again. It’s possible 20th Century Studios also assumed Sadness had limited broad appeal; although these films don’t have exactly the same ending, it does feel like someone was looking over their fellow student’s shoulder during exam time. 

Which is not to say that this isn’t a fun ride in and of itself. It’s been a while since director Sam Raimi helmed a horror picture (2009’s Drag Me To Hell, although Multiverse of Madness gave him the chance to play around with some horror concepts, putting his Deadite action figures in Marvel’s limited sandbox) and even longer since he put out an R-rated picture (2000’s The Gift, for which I have a fondness that’s largely unshared by others). In the visuals shown in the film’s trailers, it’s hard to see Raimi’s unique cinematic playfulness on display, and the fact that he’s working with modern studio-driven color correction and saturation limits means those pre-release materials do nothing to differentiate this from your standard mass appeal cheapie like Primate. Once you’ve bought your ticket and you’re actually sitting in the theater for Send Help, that Raimi touch starts to come through. It may be ironic to say this after slightly teasing the film’s screenwriters about their tendency toward retrospection in their writing output in the last paragraph, but there was a warm familiarity to his return to his goofy, gooey theatrics. When it comes to Raimi’s legacy, those in the know will always think about The Evil Dead (or Army of Darkness) first, but in the mainstream, Raimi’s probably best remembered as “the Spider-Man guy,” and anyone under the age of twenty is not going to remember a time when he was a reliable splatter man, especially if they associate him with Oz the Great and Powerful or Doctor Strange. With that in mind, I’m not entirely certain just how well this one is going to go over with a general audience. I didn’t go into this film expecting to see a CGI boar get its eye popped out and then spend its death throes covering Rachel McAdams with snot, but when that did happen, I thought to myself “Oh, right, Sam Raimi.” Most people will be utterly agog when McAdams’s character, in the midst of dealing with being poisoned, gives O’Brien CPR while vomiting neon gunk on him, and I was too, and then: “Oh, right, Sam Raimi.” A vision of a dead woman stalking onto a beach before disappearing, then reappearing in a fake-out waking-up-from-a-nested-nightmare jump scare? Sam Raimi to the core. 

It’s comforting to see the old Raimi touch nestled in this film, even if he didn’t bother to bring Ted in for a cameo, but Send Help is also a movie that feels like it’s playing a little too safe. Perhaps his best trademark combination of humor and horror comes early in the film, when one of the c-suite dudebros is blown out of the crashing plane while attempting to force Linda to give him her seat, his tie catching on a snag and leaving him flailing outside of her window, which she closes as he expires. The film could have used a little bit more of this. Given the R-rating, there was a real opportunity here to push the envelope a little further, and the film doesn’t take that opportunity. McAdams and O’Brien both deliver solid performances, with the former excellently underplaying the moments in which the perkiness which has been her facade for so long that it’s become her reality slips and she grapples with her complicity in a death in her past, while the latter is so smarmy and obnoxious that no matter how exaggerated his karmic retribution technically may be, you never doubt that he deserves every bit of it. Send Help isn’t quite scary or mean enough, but you’ll laugh enough that you’ll enjoy yourself. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Junk World (2026)

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After covering 2017’s Junk Head for the podcast last year, I was anxiously awaiting the stateside release of follow up Junk World. One of the friends with whom I watched the film last year managed to get a copy of World, and even found subtitles for it. Within the first few minutes, the subtitles already appeared to be less-than-accurate, then the film went into a several minute sequence with no subtitles at all—one that (based on images alone) was establishing the film’s set-up—and I realized the problem. This sequence featured loud rock music that blended with the dialogue, and I realized I had this same problem just a couple of weeks ago when trying to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! on Plex; that service appeared to be using some kind of generative text-to-translation software that spat out captions that didn’t undergo any kind of quality check before being slapped onto the film haphazardly. The scene that I had been watching that made me realize subtitles were needed was one in which that film’s main character has an internal monologue while the radio plays, and I realized that the captioning software was insufficient to distinguish the orchestra from the dialogue and so simply had no subtitles at all. The same was true for the version of Junk World that we watched, and the translation algorithm was also not up to snuff. Sometimes, the protagonists’ intended destination of Carp Bar was spelled as such in the subtitles, and sometimes as Kallubaru, which was very confusing. Moreover, every time a character expressed disbelief, the subtitles translated their audible gasps as “Picture?” This would have been less of a problem for Junk Head, as that film was neither dialogue-focused nor terribly narrative in its approach, but Junk World is a different beast altogether, still driven by its visuals but possessing an intricate plot, and a lot of it (perhaps too much). 

Most reviews of Junk World call it a prequel to Junk Head, and while there are parts of this where that seems like it could be true, I’m having a hard time reconciling that with the way that the story of Head played out. Here, the main thrust of the plot finds the titular cyborg in his Master Chief-esque military form, acting as bodyguard to a woman who’s overseeing some kind of peace talks between humans and the freed Marigans (or “Mulligans,” according to the subtitles) that are then interrupted by a group of sadomasochist Marigan separatists. Junk Head, here called “Robin,” then tries to lead the surviving humans, cyborgs, and Marigans to Carp Bar, dealing with attacks from more leatherbound separatists along the way as they seek the source of some anomalous readings. These readings lead to some kind of time bubble, which Robin enters after being rebuilt into his familiar Junk Head body, finding a species of primordial creatures who resemble the flocked Calico Critters toys of yesteryear and directing their evolution over generations so that he can re-emerge from the sphere at the same time that he left, but with better firepower. This then restarts the narrative back at the peace talks as we see them play out from a different character’s perspective, filling in some unanswered questions, even if the film doesn’t traffic in really resolving any of its bigger implications, which it’s presumably saving for the third and final film in the trilogy. 

At least, that’s what I think is happening. I debated whether or not to write about this film at all after this viewing, given that I wasn’t sure I had fully followed the plot or the character motivations, as that the subtitles seemed to only be correct about 50% of the time. The rest of the time, the captions were, for lack of a better term, “loose,” and I felt like I could interpret the intent of certain lines even if the specifics were less clear. I was reminded of the version of Sirāt that I saw featuring words that felt literally translated without much cultural understanding; each time there was a shot of the mountain face with the sound of the wind playing loudly in the soundtrack, those subtitles read “rumours of wind,” as if the phrase “murmuring wind” had been translated too literally from a word with multiple meanings. Or, to paraphrase myself during this Junk World screening, I felt like I understood the narrative holistically if not completely. I feel like this is going to be a hard sell for people who don’t regularly engage with films that are narratively loose and that leave some room for interpretation. Looking at reviews of Junk Head online, I filtered down to negative reviews and found a lot of people already complaining that Head was “boring,” “too long,” or “didn’t justify its runtime” because, one presumes, they engage with film in only one way (I have seen this methodology referred to as being plotpilled online, which is a neologism that I don’t like but which is nonetheless a perfect descriptor). If that’s the case, then those people will likely find more to enjoy here but may (like my viewing companions) find the frequent revisitation of certain sequences as a result of time-traveling shenanigans to be too repetitive. I don’t jibe with those complaining about either film, however. I’m looking forward to getting the chance to rewatch this in a more official capacity, with captions made by a human being and checked for errors, and I can promise you that my opinion will only go up from here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Broken (1993)

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The industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails is playing a concert in New Orleans this week, and I’ve been relistening to their records in anticipation of the event. This is a band I find easy to take for granted, as I’ve been listening to them since I was a teenager, so I’m always surprised by how consistently great they are whenever I give them my full attention. The few times I’ve seen Nine Inch Nails in concert before, they were always the secondary reason I’ve shown up (whether because they’re headlining a festival I’m already attending anyway or because they’re touring with an opening act I’m excited to see for the first time), and then midway through their set I have yet another epiphanic revelation that, oh yeah, this is one of the greatest bands of all time. I’ve been going through that cycle again this week revisiting Trent Reznor’s early output under the Nine Inch Nails banner, reviving my appreciation for their 80s & 90s album run especially — from Pretty Hate Machine through The Fragile, all impeccable. It’s such an obvious, redundant observation that I feel silly even repeating it, but every now and then a track like “Terrible Lie” or “The Becoming” will hit my ear in a way that cuts through my decades-long familiarity with the band and sound entirely new again. This week, I’ve been especially attentive to their early EP release Broken, which still sounds fresh to my ears since it’s a CD I didn’t have in high school, when I would’ve been endlessly looping their other discs on my no-skip Walkman.

As an album, Broken is a transition piece between the gothy synthpop of Pretty Hate Machine and the more abrasive noise of The Downward Spiral, going a little overboard in reaching for a harsher, heavier sound. At the very least, even Reznor would admit that he went overboard in the promotional videos that accompanied it, which are shockingly brutal to the point of simulating a snuff film. The NIN short film Broken has never been given an official commercial release, but it’s been floating around in tape-trading and online filesharing circles for three decades now, gathering a kind of mystique as “The fucked-up movie that that The Man didn’t want you to see.” In this case, “The Man” in question is Trent Reznor himself, who found the visual album version of Broken tasteless after spending a couple years of his life recording music in the Los Angeles home where Sharon Tate was murdered by The Manson Family. The film is so graphically violent that it was obviously never intended for wide commercial distribution through corporate hubs like MTV, but partway through his recording sessions at the Tate house, Reznor grew a conscience and asked whether it should be distributed at all. So, it was initially only passed around among friends as an insiders-only art project before inevitably being copied and spread through the tape-trading pipeline as an illegal object, effectively giving it the same mystique as a legitimate, real-life snuff tape. And now you can watch it in HD online anytime, no underground distro required.

Broken starts with camcorder-documented drives through a California neighborhood, recalling the icy true-crime landmark Landscape Suicide. Instead of merely documenting the landscape, however, the camera’s operator is in search of a victim to abduct & torture, which he seemingly finds with ease. The suburban abductee is next shown bound and gagged in a mysterious basement, where his torture initially consists of being forced to watch violent Nine Inch Nails music videos on a small television. The videos are demarcated by a switch to black & white film stock and an emphasis on literally industrial images of various pipes, wires, and gears. Reznor & co. perform “Wish” to a riotous crowd who threatens to tear at their flesh the second they break into the band’s cage. A bald businessman enjoys a steak-and-wine dinner swarming with flies while “Help Me I Am in Hell” plays, occasionally changing into S&M gear in a much more pleasant, padded cell. In the most famous standalone video, “Happiness in Slavery,” performance artist Bob Flanagan (of Sick fame) is sexually prodded and destroyed by a menacing fuck machine that doubles as a meat grinder. Meanwhile, each video is frequently interrupted by camcorder interstitials of our hostage in crisis being ritually raped & killed by his captor in a series of stunts that include castration, coprophagy, and amateur dentistry. There isn’t much of a narrative arc to it as a short film, but as video art it does convey something deeply, cathartically evil about the music Reznor sought to make at the time.

Something I like to say about my favorite working band, Xiu Xiu, is that the sound of their synths simulate the sensation of being stabbed. Broken literalizes that idea, interjecting camcorder footage of blades penetrating skin every time Reznor whips out the harshest noises in his tool bag. Those violent impulses have softened in the decades since, with a large portion of his modern output being ambient movie soundtrack work instead of the most evil rock songs ever recorded. I expect to hear tracks from recent films like Challengers & Tron: Ares at this week’s concert, but I’d be shocked to hear a selection from Reznor’s earliest cinematic output, a movie he’s morally & artistically outgrown. Its shock-value imagery remains remarkably, effectively upsetting, though, and it’s especially worthwhile to return to in the current moment when vintage SOV slashers and modern “analog horror” throwbacks are having A Moment in genre filmmaking circles. Just as when it was an underground cult object in 1993, it would work perfectly well as a “Hey, wanna see something fucked up?” dare among the maladjusted teens of today. It also doesn’t hurt that, like everything else Reznor recorded in the 80s & 90s, every track is still killer, which is not something I could say about most of the other metal-adjacent pop music I was obsessed with as a teenager.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #257: Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972) & Pre-Giuliani NYC

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Welcome to Episode #257 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movies made on the grimy streets of pre-Giuliani New York City, starting with the queer musical comedy Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972).

00:00 Krewe du Goo
03:53 While We’re Young (2014)
10:00 Lost in America (1985)
14:20 Another Woman’s Husband (2000)
21:03 Sudden Fury (1993)
25:23 Broken (1993)

36:00 Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972)
1:02:00 Klute (1971)
1:21:00 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
1:36:00 The Exterminator (1980)

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