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)
There are two minor miracles to be found in the 1996 Shakespeare schlockification Tromeo & Juliet. The first is that it’s an unusually sweet, tender romance for the Troma brand (in the moments between its company-mandated fart & boner jokes). The second is that it helped launch a successful filmmaking career outside the Troma trenches, despite being just as obnoxious & grotesque as the worst offenders in the company’s catalog. These miracles are directly related to each other, of course, as Tromeo & Juliet‘s out-of-character sentimentality is the work of young screenwriter James Gunn, who has found an exponentially successful career grossing audiences out with goopy grotesqueries while remaining a soft-hearted cornball. The only difference is that Gunn used to write those cornball grossouts for the home video market under Lloyd Kauffman’s sleazy supervision, and now he directs $200mil superhero movies for major Hollywood studios. You can take the troll out of Tromaville, but you can you really take the Troma out of the troll?
Forgive me for my lack of interest in recapping the interfamilial beef between the Montegues & Capulets here; I really do try my best not to treat this blog like a high school book report. Tromeo & Juliet is relatively faithful to its literary source text, as signaled by hiring a half-drunk Lemmy (of Motörhead) to narrate the opening prologue in mumbled iambic pentameter. The central joke of the project is to transport the play’s action to the modern, grimy streets of New York City, making the source of its familial feud a dispute over ownership of an NYC porno studio. Every event from the play is “reinterpreted” (i.e., mucked up) in that way, shoehorning monster puppets, lesbian make-outs, and ADR’d fart noises into the tragic romance we all know & love. The tagline on the poster says it all, promising to deliver “all the body-piercing, kinky sex, and car crashes that Shakespeare wanted but never had!” The final image it leaves you on is the populist playwright chuckling in delighted approval, reassuring the audience that Shakespeare would love Troma-brand juvenilia if he were alive to see it.
James Gunn’s auteurism shows in the screenplay’s unexpected touches of romantic sincerity. When Juliet has steamy lesbian sex with her handmaiden, there’s surprising romantic chemistry there, playing like a genuine bodice-ripper instead of a half-hearted Playboy shoot. When Tromeo jerks off to interactive CD-ROM pornography, his go-to kink category is revealed to be “true love,” with an onscreen nude model professing her devotion to him in bridal gear. The biggest deviation from the Shakespeare play is that Tromeo & Juliet is ultimately not a tragedy at all. Instead of committing a double suicide at the climax, our young teens in love procure a potion that temporarily makes Juliet so monstrous to the eye that only Tromeo could continue to love her, scaring off her family’s chosen suitor. In true Troma fashion, it’s then revealed that Tromeo & Juliet are long lost siblings—a secret long guarded by their feuding parents—and their romantic union would be an unholy act of incest. They decide to marry & procreate anyway; their love is just that strong, and the screenwriter is just that much of a softie, despite his alarming edgelord tendencies.
I don’t mean to undermine director Lloyd Kaufman’s own auteurism in this project. Considering that the Yale graduate & Troma kingpin’s most recent feature is a Troma’d up version of The Tempest titled Shakespeare Shitstorm, I have to assume that much of the creative direction behind the camera originated with him. The young Gunn was hired to overhaul an early version of the screenplay that Kauffman was unsatisfied with, and it seems that the final product was a true collaboration between them. You can hear them mind-melding as two mutually respected sleazebags on the Blu-ray’s commentary track, indulging in some boys-will-be-boys locker room talk about all the hot chicks they got to see naked while working together. It’s gross, but their rapport is also oddly sweet, which carries over to the final product on the screen. In the scene where Tromeo flips through his stash of interactive porno CD-ROMs, we get a taste of all the other reparatory Troma stagings of Shakespeare works we could’ve been treated to over the decades, in titles like Et Tu Blowjob, The Merchant of Penis, As You Lick It, and Much Ado about Humping. It’s unlikely that James Gunn wishes he were still writing those shock-value frivolities instead of directing Superman spinoffs in the big leagues, but I dare say he was making more honest, personal work in his early Troma days — equally, extremely sappy & revolting.
Every country deserves its own trademark kaiju, just like every high school deserves its own sports mascot and every state deserves its own flower & song. Japan has Godzilla, of course, who continues his decades-long reign as King of the Monsters even though he has more local competition than most. America has King Kong, the only national delegate who’s been worthy enough to travel to Japan to meet Godzilla in-person for official kaiju business. Things get a little less impressive from there, since most other countries can only claim ownership of Godzilla & King Kong knockoffs instead of doing their own thing. On the Godzilla knockoff front, North Korea famously has Pulgasari and Denmark less famously has Reptilicus, while Hong Kong has its own resident King Kong knockoff in The Mighty Peking Man. If there’s anything especially daring about England’s national kaiju Gorgo is that it splits the difference, borrowing liberally from Godzilla and King Kong instead of showing preference for one over the other. Gorgo’s lobby posters promise kaiju mayhem “UNLIKE ANYTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN BEFORE,” but its monster design looks exactly like Godzilla (now with ears) and its opening credits shamelessly borrow the King Kong font, followed quickly by its on-the-ground characters reliving the King Kong plot. I want better than that for our international neighbors’ kaiju mascot legacies, but any & all classic movie monsters are welcome here, regardless of originality.
The most boneheaded aspect of Gorgo producers’ decision to rip off Godzilla & King Kong is that the United Kingdom already had a perfectly well-suited kaiju cryptid the monster could’ve been modeled from instead. Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster had been world-famous for several decades before Gorgo was produced, but instead of capitalizing on that with a creature feature called Nessie’s Revenge, producers sailed to Dublin instead. The plot is exactly what you’d imagine. Two professional sailors discover an underwater dino creature (the titular Gorgo) while deep-sea diving off the shores of Ireland, so they capture it in a giant net and drag it back to England as a kind of freak-show circus act — King Kong style. After parading the subdued creature through downtown London on a float helpfully labeled “Gorgo”, they start selling tickets for local blokes to point & laugh at its misfortunes as an Eighth Wonder of the World circus attraction. The good times don’t last long, though, since it turns out they’ve only captured a baby Gorgo, and the creature’s much larger, violently protective mother quickly storms London to break her baby free. The film’s only major deviation from the King Kong set-up and Godzilla punchline is that both Mama Gorgo and Baby Gorgo get away at the end, fucking off back into the ocean, safe once again from the monstrous actions of men. Meanwhile, human survivors pontificate empty platitudes about the nature of Nature or whatever, having accomplished nothing but disturbing an underwater monster family by invading its habitat.
What Gorgo lacks in originality it makes up for in the scale & duration of its climactic kaiju mayhem. For the record, both Mama Gorgo and Baby Gorgo are represented by the exact same rubber suit, and their respective sizes (boat-size and skyscraper size) are only differentiated by the scale of the miniature sets they inhabit. Baby Gorgo’s half of the movie is a little slow-moving, overloaded with sub-Black Lagoon underwater photography as he’s abducted & transported by mercenary sailors and their circus-promoter clientele. Once Mama Gorgo crashes the scene, however, the movie becomes a nonstop special effects showcase, with Godzilla’s big-eared cousin tearing her way across The Big City while huge crowds of nameless extras run for their lives below. Her most important moment is when she gets her Empire State Building shot by smashing Big Ben, marking her as Britain’s #1 kaiju mascot. Her bridge-crushing, bus-stomping, baby-avenging tour of London eats up a significant chunk of the 78min runtime, making up for lost time. There’s some surreal shoddiness in the offset green-screen composite photography, but for the most part the scale & relentlessness of Gorgo‘s urban destruction is genuinely impressive. The movie looks especially great in its current form, having recently been given the 4K Blu-ray restoration treatment by genre-cinema heroes Vinegar Syndrome. In the early stretch, you can tell why it was once featured on MST3K, since there’s plenty of dead air for the sarcastic robots to fill with mockery, but the energy picks up if you stick with it. Personally, I’m glad that this kind of vintage schlock is treated with more sincerely loving archival reverence these days, especially given Gorgo’s historical significance as a foreign dignitary of great British significance.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 film Murder! entered the public domain this year, which might lead one to think it would be easier for the public to access. I found a copy online and started watching it, only to make it about 20 minutes in before deciding that the degraded audio quality meant that I was never going to be able to make it through the film without subtitles. I then found a subtitle file online and attempted to burn it onto the video using Handbrake, but it was not in sync, and no amount of fiddling would make it work. After I had tried all of that, I found the film on a streaming service heretofore unused by me called Plex, but the subtitles there all appeared to have been auto-generated. Not only were they inaccurate, but the scene in which Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall, who would later appear in Foreign Correspondent) has an interior monologue that plays out in concert (no pun intended) with a radio orchestra broadcast had no captions at all because the auto-caption couldn’t hear the dialogue over the music, making them useless. And so, at last, I turned to our old friend, the people’s streaming service Tubi, where the film was free, the subtitles were mostly accurate, and the Charmin bears were playful indeed.
Diana Baring (Norah Baring) is an actress performing in a travelling troupe in “the provinces” when she is found in an unresponsive state next to the body of another actress; she cannot recall committing any crime but cannot account for her state of mind. She is quickly tried and found guilty, and in a miscarriage of justice that is almost on par with her erroneous conviction, one of the jurors is an acquaintance of hers, the aforementioned Sir John, who is browbeaten into giving a guilty verdict by the other jurors. Sir John feels at fault for what has happened to Diana, as he is a theatrical producer who recommended her for the tour on which the murder happened, and he sets out to try and overturn her conviction by finding the real killer. In this, he is assisted by two of Diana’s fellow actors: a husband-and-wife team named Doucie (Phyllis Konstam) and Ted (Edward Chapman) Markham.
Murder! was only Hitchcock’s third feature made with sound, and the film itself shows evidence of this in being less dialogue-driven and more image-oriented while also being innovative with regards to this new technology. The aforementioned scene in which Sir John, while shaving and listening to the radio, shames himself in voice over for being so easily influenced by his fellow jurors and recounts his disappointment at being the person who put Diana in the situation where she could be accused in the first place may be the first film depiction of a character having an inner monologue. Soliloquy is nothing new to drama, of course, but film afforded the unique opportunity to have these representations of internality appear as the character’s “thoughts” rather than on-stage asides, and if Hitchcock didn’t create this film language method outright, I have no doubt that he was certainly the first to have the character’s decisive moments align with the crescendoes of the background music. It’s an inspired touch, and one that demonstrates that Hitch really was the master of his craft, even if this film is slow and plodding to the modern eye. At 100 minutes, it’s only slightly longer than The Lodger, which came out three years prior, and a third as long again as the Peter Lorre-starring The Man Who Knew Too Much, which clocked in at seventy-five minutes with a perfect pace.
If anything, Murder! seems almost experimental, with Hitchcock taking the time to explore all of the ways that he might use sound as part of his films and not worrying too much about whether the runtime could be tightened up a little. The inciting act of violence is relayed via a tracking shot that finds the various performers from Diana and the Markhams’ troupe leaning out of their windows to discern the source of the commotion. The police’s investigation occurs backstage during the next evening’s performances (Diana and the murder victim having been replaced by their understudies, of course), which allows for the sequence to have a lot of life as actors emerge from the dressing room, interact with the detectives, and then get pulled onstage for their scene. Cleverly, this also introduces the fact that two of the characters in the play portray policemen on stage, which plays into a later-revealed clue that Mrs. Markham saw a policeman on the street earlier who was not the same copper who was present at the scene of the crime. If one pays close enough attention, this backstage insight tips us off early on about who the real killer might be. The trial itself plays out very modernly, with montages of witnesses, the judge, and the jury fading into one another before they are adjourned for deliberations, and the jurors discussing the case amongst themselves is good stuff; even though it takes up a solid chunk of screentime, it’s far from the first thing that I’d nominate for the chopping block if we wanted to edit this film down to something more concise. When we find Sir John in his home, we get a series of fade-in/out establishing shots that escort us from his front door to his apartment, which is something that I’m not sure is completely necessary but shows Hitch puzzling out the kind of transitions that will eventually be part and parcel of his unique style as a filmmaker.
The film is not without Hitchcock’s trademark humor, either. Before the Markhams are pressed into assisting Sir John with his investigation, we find them in their boarding house, threatened with eviction by their landlady as their young daughter plays the piano, haltingly and badly, and it’s a fun scene. Sir John also finds himself staying at a boarding house on the road where the landlady’s many children follow her about and climb all over the furniture and luggage, and it’s decently funny. There’s a good energy in the backstage investigation mentioned above that allows for the cast of the play to deliver pithy remarks. Where this remains strongest, though, is in the imaginative use of images and interplay between them; most strikingly, as Diana’s day of execution draws near despite Sir John’s attempts to find the real killer, the montages that show his desperation are double exposed with the shadow of a gallows rising, as the young actress’s fate draws nearer and nearer. This image is then alluded to later when the killer, having returned to their earlier profession as a trapeze artist, realizes that the law has caught up with them and hangs themselves in the middle of their act rather than face trial for their crime. I was also very fond of the shot-reverse-shot scene in which Sir John interviews Diana at the prison, which places them at opposite ends of an almost impossibly long table; they have almost a fisheye lens quality to them that I didn’t expect.
I also quite like how Murder! is in conversation with stage drama. Above and beyond the obvious elements, it’s a fun idea to have Sir John pretend that he’s planning to produce a new play in order to get all of the actors from the disbanded troupe to interact with him. Even more cleverly, he plans an entire “ripped from the headlines” story in which he’ll be dramatizing the killing, and he catches on the idea of having the man he’s determined is the likely killer play the part of the killer in an audition in hopes of eliciting an accidental confession. He even references the fact that he was inspired in part by Hamlet, which features a play within itself in order to “catch the conscience of the king.” The actors themselves provide a lot of color just by the nature of their profession and their eccentricities. The film’s final moments, in which Diana is freed and is ushered into a room to be embraced by Sir John, are revealed via zoom out to reveal the proscenium arch to all be a stage production as well. It’s playing with a lot for a piece of art in a form that was still so novel and fresh.
I seem to remember seeing the heading “Dimension Extreme” on quite a few DVDs during that imprint’s heyday. The Wikipedia page that lists all of Dimensions’s releases includes over thirty films, which is still fewer than I would have thought, but it also doesn’t include Eden Lake, so who’s to really say. Their quality runs the gamut, from distant follow-ups to franchises whose sequelitis ran them into the ground (Children of the Corn: Genesis, Hellraiser: Revelations, Diary of the Dead), direct-to-video cash-ins on moderately successful theatrical features originally released by parent company Dimension (Feast II and III, Pulse 2 and 3), and the occasional standout like Teeth, Black Sheep, and La Terza madre (to me, at least). In my mind, I had always associated them with the glut of torture-focused horror films that were released during Dimension Extreme’s active period (2007-2011, although the onslaught began with Saw in 2004), but based on a review of their titles, that wasn’t really their bread and butter. It could certainly be argued that 2008’s Eden Lake falls into that category, however, as it’s an unrelentingly brutal movie in which people are burned alive, bleed out, and get impaled by spikes while fleeing their killers, and it’s also decidedly reactionary in the way of much horror of that time. I found myself checking how much more of this there would be to endure at less than halfway through the film and had to do so several more times before the credits rolled.
Jenny (Kelly Reilly) is a primary school teacher going on a weekend away to Eden Lake with her boyfriend, Steve (Michael Fassbender), where he plans to propose. He’s picked the location because he and some friends have taken diving trips there before, and it’s soon to be overrun with micromansions by a pending development. Upon arrival, they have to drive some distance around the construction site’s fencing, but park somewhere with a lovely view before making their way down to the beachfront and setting up for the day. After a brief encounter with a shy boy named Adam, they see him later being harassed by a gaggle of local teen hooligans. The leader, Brett (Jack O’Connell), allows his unruly dog to hassle Jenny, prompting Steve to confront them, to no avail. Eventually, the kids grow bored and leave, and Steve & Jenny spend the night on the beach, only to discover the following morning that their provisions are full of insects; their trip back to the local village for more is delayed by a bottle that’s propped up to puncture the jeep’s tire when put in reverse. After a quick breakfast in town that includes a minor altercation with a waitress who is defensive about the potential that her kids may have been involved, they settle back in at the beach for the afternoon, but just before Steve can propose, they realize that the beach bag containing the car keys is gone, and climb up to their parking spot to find the Jeep is missing as well. A later confrontation with the teens results in them pulling a knife on the adults and Brett’s dog is killed in a scuffle, setting him off on a rampage of revenge against Jenny & Steve that can only end one way.
For some time, I was hesitant to check out Jack O’Connell’s work because he had just been too good as the utterly detestable James Cook in Skins, and it wasn’t until his one-two punch in Sinners & 28 Years Later last year that I realized that it had been long enough and it was time to let go of my hatred for Cook. He was still a loathsome monster in this year’s Bone Temple, but despite his propensity to play villains that are of a certain type, he can access a broader range within that category. Here, he’s a budding sociopath who blooms into murder and torture, and it plays like a preview of what his career would largely consist of. This could just as easily be what might have happened to Jimmy Crystal if the U.K. hadn’t fallen to the Rage virus, right down to his merry band of little soldiers. There’s the committed criminal who’s handy with the box-cutter, the baby-faced kid who wants out and eventually gets beaten to death by Brett, the one with no characteristics, the hesitant one who throws up when forced to take part in torturing the captured Steve, and the girl who’s there to pull her phone out and film when Brett tells her to, to use as insurance against any of the other kids from going to the authorities once things have gotten to a point of no return. It’s brutal, but it’s also cliché, and it’s so unrelenting that one finds one’s self wondering how much more of this we’re going to be subjected to.
I found myself thinking of the recent Swampflix favoriteThe Plague, which was also about the cruelty of teenagers, and how subtle that film is in comparison to this one. It’s a more interesting story to tell about how boys can be cruel to one another within social environments that should protect them, how they manage to inflict physical and emotional damage while skirting adult surveillance. There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled over the years about the correlation between reactionary Western politics and the torture porn genre, whether it be as a reckoning with the guilt of War on Terror-era torture politics or the more cruel, xenophobic instinct to see harm inflicted on others in the wake of national tragedy (i.e., Hostel). Although there is some comparison to the American torture porn wave in the rise of New French Extremism, I hadn’t imagined that the British film industry had their own take on the genre, which also happens to be politically reactionary, and it can’t afford to be subtle. Our unfortunate protagonists are too perfect, a sweet, beautiful kindergarten teacher and her chiseled diver boyfriend, and as they leave the city, we hear the voices of different women calling into a radio show to complain about their unruly children and their positions on the contemporary discourse around “Broken Britain,” a phrase coined by Conservative Party member and future Prime Minister David Cameron. Before they can even make it out to the lake, Steve has already sneered at the locals for keeping their children out at the pub late at night, joking that one child “needs a—” before the boy’s mother appears to slap him, as if on cue; Jenny is horrified. Both of them have a sense of superiority over these poorer rural folk, be it on the level of mere elitism or moral outrage, and because this movie is, with intent or not, evoking fear of the lower class on behalf of the yuppie one, the film contrives to reinforce those interclass sentiments and resentments.
I’m not siding with the teenaged killers here, to be clear. Steve and Jenny had plenty of opportunities to hightail it before things went as far as they did, sure. I would have gotten out of town as soon as I had a new tire without stopping for breakfast, and I would never have confronted a group of car thieves in the woods on my own when I could get past them and into town for help from the authorities. That doesn’t mean that they deserved what happened to them, however; it simply means that the average viewer doesn’t project themselves onto Steve & Jenny because we don’t see ourselves getting into the situation in which they find themselves. We’re empathetic to their plight, but the “Deliverance but set in England” narrative and the “demonize the poor for creating cycles of violence through child abuse” themes don’t mesh into a cohesive hole. Brett and his group of bullies are chav stereotypes, and long before his gang of criminal miscreants start to mess with Steve and Jenny, the crew is already tormenting small animals as a group with seemingly no remorse. They’re evil, and they’re poor, and in Cameron’s England they’re evil because they’re poor, and rude, and morality is in decline, and so on and so forth. The so-called heroes are so thinly written and make such foolish choices that my viewing companion stated at the midpoint that he hoped Jenny didn’t make it out, just because she was a terrible final girl. I couldn’t fully disagree, and what this means is that you’re watching a propagandistic film in which two people are hunted down while being subjected to abject misery for the sake of the misery. It appears to have been reasonably well received in its time, so maybe its politics spoke to the contemporary masses, but this one could only really be of interest to hardcore slasher (or Dimension Extreme) enthusiasts or those with an academic interest in torture porn as a genre.
Most documentary-style narrative filmmaking tends to fall in one of two categories: the mockumentary comedy or the found-footage horror. 2012’s Project X is most interesting for its Rorschach Test ability to fall into either category, depending on the audience. It’s got a Spring Breakers or The Real Cancun quality about it, in that you either see it as a simulation of a fun party or a simulation of Hell, mostly depending on whether you’re still a teenager when you watch it. It’s unquestionable that producer Todd Phipps set out to make a modernized 2010s boner comedy—filtering some of his Hangover-era bro humor with Jackass-style physical stunts—but the result is so monstrously grotesque that he instead ended up delivering the nightmare version of Superbad, by way of The Blair Witch Project.
Thomas Mann (of Me and Earl and The Dying Girl infamy) stars as a high school nerd whose parents are leaving town in the week leading up to his 17th birthday. His two mouthbreathing besties decide that this is the perfect opportunity to climb the social ladder by throwing a once-in-a-lifetime rager, hoping of course to get laid in the process. Notice and notoriety of the party quickly spreads outside of the school, however, to the point where anyone & everyone who chugs liquor & pills in Pasadena, CA shows up at the overwhelmed teen’s home, effectively destroying it in a party gone way out of bounds. The vibe is fun enough at the start, with all the DJs, skinny-dippers, and beer-shotgunners needed to make for a memorable night in these otherwise sheltered kids’ lives. A baby-faced Miles Teller even makes an appearance as the party’s celebrity guest. Then, the vibe sours. The family car is driven into the swimming pool. The family dog is ritually tortured by drunken goons. Fireworks are set off indoors. The neighborhood drug dealer shows up with a military-grade flamethrower. News helicopters circle the chaos. By the end of the night, it’s not a party at all; it’s a riot.
Project X is less interesting for its narrative than it is for its technique. Before the party starts, you can already guess exactly what’s going to happen to Thomas & his goons, right down to his “It isn’t what it looks like” romantic crisis when his lifelong crush catches him losing his virginity to an anonymous hottie. The picture’s dark, anarchic energy is mostly due to the experiment of its shooting style, in which Phillips & crew built a small replica of a Pasadena neighborhood so they could shoot an actual rager party across multiple homes, handing digicams, smartphones, and Blackberries to attendees to document the chaos from as many angles as possible. It’s like an evil mutation of what Jonathan Demme accomplished inRachel Getting Married: staging an intimate melodrama within the raucous, spontaneous atmosphere of a real-life party. Only, I doubt the Rachel Getting Married set reeked so heavily of Taaka vodka & Axe body spray. The simple kids-getting-laid story Project X tells, then, is less of the main focus than it is an excuse for endless montages of flashlit hedonism, straining at every moment to make it seem fun to make out with a stranger you just watched throw up on the lawn.
If there’s any continued cultural significance to Project X that’s lasted past its contemporary inspiration for similar out-of-control block parties IRL (despite Warner Bros. slapping a Jackass-style “Do not try this at home” message on the opening title card), it’s in its time-capsule document of the so-called “Indie Sleaze” aesthetic. You’d think its location on the wrong coast and the wrong decade would exclude it from an official Indie Sleaze designation, but that’s only because it took a decade for that scene’s influence to trickle out far enough into a mainstream to make it into a major motion picture from a big-name Hollywood producer. Despite the LFMAO-bro atmosphere of the party they soundtrack, the DJs pepper in hits from LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective, The XX, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to establish an unearned sense of indie-scene cool, which combines with the crime-scene lighting of the digi-era cinematography to approximate an authentic Indie Sleaze aesthetic. It just falls heavy on the “sleaze” end of that cultural marker, turning your stomach with the bro’d-out, gross-out behavior of every dipshit involved.
If you want to see the Lawful Good version of this same experiment, check out the Beastie Boys concert film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, in which the beloved-by-all rap trio distributed digicams to random members of their audience to capture the good-vibes party they put on in Madison Square Garden from every angle possible. Project X is more of a bad-vibes-only Chaotic Evil proposition, like chugging Everclear in the parking lot outside a Kanye West concert. Just try not to splash puke on your own shoes.
The only manga I’ve ever read was an adaptation of the 2004 sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill, and that’s because it was a gift. A family member who lives his life much deeper in the anime trenches bought it for me as a Christmas present after the novel was also adapted into the 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow (and famously retitled a second time under its tagline “Live, Die, Repeat” once it hit DVD). When I heard that there’s a new, Japanese adaptation of the same source text, then, my assumption was that someone had set out to illustrate a more faithful version of either the manga or the original semi-illustrated novel, undoing all of Hollywood’s work to center an action hero that Tom Cruise could credibly play instead of the novel’s heroine (sidelined as a supporting role in the live-action version, played by Emily Blunt). That’s not the case at all. The new version of All You Need is Kill doesn’t simply set the comic book illustrations of its source novel in motion; it redesigns them, introduces an overwhelming wealth of color to a world that was once entirely black & white, and once again makes major changes to the two main characters’ personae & dynamics. It’s less of a manga-faithful rebuke of Edge of Tomorrow than it is a fellow attempt at rogue reinterpretation, this time marketed to the cloistered nerds who actually read manga instead of the wider world of people who’ve heard of Tom Cruise.
That’s not to say that the new anime version of All You Need Is Kill is entirely novel in its reinterpretation. Edge of Tomorrow is not the only pre-existing work it evokes. It plays with the oil-slick color palette of Annihilation, echoes the YA mech-suit therapy sessions of Neon Genesis Evangelion, recalls the vintage sketchbook psychedelia of Mind Game, and touches on some parallel thinking with last year’s sci-fi adaptation Mickey 17. What I mean to say is that it pulls from so many varied sources that it eventually becomes its own thing, a stylish genre remix of its own unique flavor — however mild. For every inspired choice it makes (like redesigning its time-looping monster spawn to look like killer houseplants instead of meatballs with teeth), it also defaults to disappointingly basic choices elsewhere. It’s especially disappointing that the film ages down its two leads from near-future adult supersoldiers to near-future awkward teens. I don’t personally watch too much anime, but most of what I do see ends up being about shy teens who don’t know how to express their feelings to each other, which I suppose is a case of modern movie studios knowing their audience. There’s something absurd about shoehorning that shy-teen dynamic into this story about mech-suited futuresoldiers hunting alien beasts, but that choice does at least give it a different perspective than Tom Cruise’s action-hero-in-training role in the Hollywood version.
If I’m avoiding my plot recap duties here, it’s because talking about time-loop movies feels like its own kind of endless loop at this point. All You Need Is Kill‘s addition to the time-loop canon is that it’s set during a future space alien invasion, where the loop is started by infection with monster blood. The two infected soldiers stuck in this endless loop wake up every time they’re killed by the alien beasts, as if they discovered a video game cheat code for unlimited lives. In this version of the story, one of the characters even finds himself waking up to a video game prompt asking him if he wishes to continue playing, presumably having fallen asleep with a controller in hand. So, what you have is a militaristic sci-fi premise borrowed from an older text like Starship Troopers or The Forever War and made bizarrely existential through the recursive plot structure of Groundhog Day. If you regularly watch movies, you’ve seen more than a few variations of this story in recent titles like Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, Timecrimes, Triangle, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow (duh), and so on. So, all that’ll be new to you here is the visual splendor of its psychedelic animation style, which is very much worth the price of admission. And if you haven’t seen any of those movies before, I’m going to assume that you’re a teenager just getting into the medium, in which case the shy, nerdy leads of this version have something to offer you too: a mirror.
Our fearless leader Brandon texted me several days ago with a screenshot of an upcoming February 2026 Criterion line-up entitled “Yearning,” advertised as featuring The Deep Blue Sea, Merchant-Ivory production Maurice, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, God’s Own Country, “and more” (which includes All That Heaven Allows). He jokingly asked if I had been moonlighting as the programmer for this series, given my love for The Age of Innocence (discussed here), Mood (as discussed here), and films about yearning in general. I am very much myself, as only the night before, I watched God’s Own Country for the first time, completely coincidentally.
Johnny (Josh O’Connor) is a reluctant shepherd, living on an isolated farm and forced into growing responsibilities there by his hard father Martin’s recent stroke. Martin’s mother Deirdre also lives in the farmhouse and shares Martin’s low opinion of her grandson. For his part, the depressed Johnny fills his nights with raging alcoholism and finds no solace in the anonymous sexual encounters he has with other men when he manages to get off of the farm long enough to cruise. To help out for part of the calving season, Martin hires an itinerant laborer named Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu), and he and Johnny immediately come into conflict, with Johnny using racial slurs to attack Gheorghe’s Romanian heritage. When the two are sent out to repair a fence on a distant part of the property, they begin to bond once Johnny witnesses Gheorghe’s more tender approach to farm work, although they eventually end up in a physical altercation that immediately turns into sexual release for both of them. Gheorghe’s influence on Johnny makes him a better person, but when Johnny starts to fantasize about a future together, Gheorghe’s reluctance prompts Johnny to engage in behavior that has the potential to sabotage their burgeoning love. Their situation is further complicated by Martin’s second stroke, which leaves him completely unable to manage the farm.
I remember a fair amount of buzz around this one when it first arrived on the scene, although I don’t hear it discussed much anymore despite O’Connor’s rise to onscreen prominence in recent years. Perhaps it’s because he’s not a very likeable person in this film, and people might find him hard to relate to. We can identify with his resentment of his former peers for being able to move on with their lives and go to college while he’s stuck, seemingly permanently, doing manual labor that he’s not suited for. On the other hand, it’s hard to extend much empathy toward him when he’s hurling racial epithets or railing a random stranger in the pub bathroom while Gheorghe waits for him. That his journey is one of a white Briton whose harsh ways of viewing life are softened by the attentions of a loving “exotic stranger” makes the story a little iffy, and it seems like Gheorghe is way too good for Johnny from the outset.
I did like the way that Gheorghe’s farm techniques are contrasted with Martin’s and how that carries over into their different relationships with Johnny and what those interactions cultivate within him. Martin insists that Johnny put down a calf that experienced breech birth rather than let his son take the animal to a veterinarian who might save it, and this hardness is apparent in the way that his son longs for his approval and the affection that a single, gentle touch would show. In contrast, Gheorghe saves the life of a seemingly stillborn sheep and then nurses it back to health; when they find another lamb that has died, Gheorghe skins it and places its hide on the runt so that the ewe will let it nurse. Johnny bears witness to this gentleness and, when it’s extended to him, it changes him for the better. About halfway through this film, you’ll start to wonder if this is going to be one of those queer films with a happy ending or a sad one. I won’t spoil that for you; this one is worth the journey to find out for yourself. It’s a quiet, slow, beautiful movie that’s perfect for a long, cold weekend sheltering against the latest winter weather threat.
Someone alert Ned Flanders; they’ve finally found a way for you to watch Woody Allen movies without Woody Allen in them. Last year, there were two prestige dramas that borrowed The Woody Allen Font to billboard their discussions of sexual assault within the university system: Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. Those allusions to Allen’s past reign as the neurotic king of overly talky indie cinema were presumably semi-ironic—given Allen’s more recent association with sexual abuse outside of the cinema—but they’re at least honest about Allen’s continued influence on the Sundance drama as a medium. There are tons of recent options to check out if, like Ned Flanders, you like Woodsy Allen movies but don’t like that nervous fella that’s always in ’em: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, James Sweeney’s Straight Up, Matt Farley’s Local Legends, and now Baron Ryan’s Two Sleepy People. There’s a whole new crop nervous fellas to choose from if you don’t care for the last one.
First-time writer/director Baron Ryan stars as a scrawny, neurotic office worker who’s trapped in an endless loop of pointless couple’s therapy with a wife he doesn’t love. His co-writer Caroline Grossman co-stars as a new coworker who catches his eye during awkward pitch meetings for a marketing campaign to sell melatonin pills. They both quickly latch onto melatonin’s natural occurrence in breast milk, inappropriately blurting out ad pitches focusing on “mommy milkers” during team meetings. Whatever Mommy Issues inspire those outbursts then echo in their melatonin-fueled dreams, which they start to inexplicably share as a married couple in a psychic common-space, vaguely remembering their nightly otherworld trysts the next day at work. It’s a clever way to literalize a workplace emotional affair by staging it in a psychic space separate from everyday reality, and it allows the two lonely souls to safely pair up & confront childhood traumas they’ve suppressed in artificial stage play environments. It’s also a clever way to interrogate big-picture concepts through limited cast & locations, revealing more about the writers’ hang-ups with the way they were raised as children than their fictional avatars’ phony struggles with intimacy.
Two Sleepy People starts with a consciously equal balance between the two leads’ leftover Mommy Issues and subsequent young-adult neuroses. We get to know them in their respective real-world living spaces where they’ve trapped themselves in prisons of their own design, with jailcell bars made of unpacked moving boxes or compulsively purchased houseplants depending on the apartment. Things are much more pleasant in their emotional-cheating dreamscape apartment, give or take the Lynchian theatre stage just outside the front door that forces them to relive memories of the mommies who failed them. While those memories also start off equally balanced between the two characters, Baron Ryan’s Woodsy Alleny protagonist eventually takes the literal spotlight, and the back half of the film largely becomes about his impending, unavoidable divorce. The film is most enjoyable in its first half, while it’s unsure how to define the rules of its Sleep Life/Real Life divide and the audience is still learning to love the characters and their worlds. Once their in-the-moment romantic issues have to actually mean something to move the plot along, it loses a lot of steam, and the nervous fella at the center of it all unfortunately outlives his welcome by at least a few overly chatty minutes of runtime.
The miracle of this microbudget indie project is that it’s ever funny or charming at all. Clicking around online, I gather that Baron Ryan is usually billed as a “creator” instead of a filmmaker, which means he already has a small following from making short-form videos on platforms like Instagram & TikTok. For the most part, his Very Online sense of humor translates relatively well to a feature film format, landing punchlines that work just fine out of context (such as a short story pitch about a fetus who is issued an eviction notice from its mother’s womb) and jokes that only make sense in this high-concept scenario (such as the double meaning of a coworker’s accusation that “Everyone knows you’re sleeping together”). There’s a timidity in just how emotionally or psychologically vulnerable he & Grossman are willing to get in their script, though, which especially shows in their fear of broaching the subject of sex. Their characters never physically cheat in their shared psychic space; when the subject of sexual needs or kinks comes up in conversation, they brush it aside to instead embarrass themselves with reenacted childhood memories and read-aloud diary entries. Compare that guardedness with the open-book neuroses of Joanna Arnow’s similarly themed & budgeted The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, and you get a sense of just how careful Ryan & Grossman are to not fully Go There. To their credit, though, Woody Allen revealed way too much about himself in his own pioneering versions of this neurotic romcom subgenre, and we all now wish we knew way less. They may be sparing us in the long run.
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