Chronovisor (2026)

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Chronovisor is one of my favorite films that I’ve seen all year, and also one that I will find myself reluctant to recommend to others. Similar to 2024’s Last Things, it is a kind of science fiction documentary, and although I was thoroughly enraptured by it, I must also acknowledge that it is a film in a challenging, novel format, and it will likely be a difficult sell for most audiences. The question of whether one will find it fascinating or banal will largely come down to how much you enjoy doing research. This is a roughly 100-minute feature in which the first eighty minutes involve watching someone else performing academic research and cross-referencing various texts and recordings before the final twenty minutes turn into a psychedelic sequence that is both dream and nightmare. If you have the patience for it, it’s quite an experience, but I also don’t expect that many viewers in the audience will be willing to go along for the entire ride.

Dr. Béatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier) is a professor at Columbia University whom we meet boring her colleagues over dinner with a long monologue about oratory rhetoric and mind palace techniques. It functions as a litmus test for the rest of the film. If you’re as disinterested as her dinner companions are, you’re not going to enjoy the rest of the movie, but if her extemporaneous lecture about historical memory techniques intrigues you, you’re going to be completely engaged. She returns home to her lonely apartment and resumes her ongoing research, which largely revolves around a parascientific device, the titular “chronovisor.” Allegedly invented by a group of scientists and clergyman, foremost among them a Benedictine monk named Pellegrino Ernetti, the chronovisor was a device that, by interpreting the “echoes” of events, allowed the user to view and even photograph history, including the day of Jesus of Nazareth’s crucifixion. Through reviewing videotapes of lectures, reading through dozens of historical texts in multiple languages (which are translated for us in the audience as textual overlays on the page), listening to cassettes of talks given by various pseudoscientific figureheads, and playing vinyl records of Gregorian chants collected by Ernetti, Beatrice uncovers a historical mystery, one with potentially unfathomable effects on our understanding of history, faith, and reality. Was the chronovisor real? What happened to it?

The camera’s eye alternates between providing an omniscient view of Béatrice as she goes about her research in various sumptuous, antiquated libraries (the press materials mention the German Society of Philadelphia, the NYC Yale Club, and the George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins) and allowing us to see the documents and magazines that she peruses from her first-person point of view. This is the place where the film will either succeed or fail to engage the audience, as it effectively captures the feeling of doing research, which is something that I find delightful while understanding that my reaction represents a fairly small minority. Other than a couple of dinners that she attends with her fellow scholars that establish that she is isolated even within the academic world and a single scene in which she requests a long list of material from an unseen librarian, we don’t see her interact with others until she’s fully devoted to the pursuit of the truth about the chronovisor, as she concocts various narratives to spin over the phone with publishers, biographers, and distant relatives of Father Ernetti and his cohort. All the while, the text on screen that lays out the events of his life and research vacillates between factual translations of texts and hyper-edited remixes of the words therein into montages that read like flash poetry.

It’s compelling stuff, if the prospect of doing research into a paranormal device is exciting to you. As such, I would expect this film to land best with a viewer who enjoys variations on mystery narratives and who is already in tune with this kind of “ride along with the investigator” narrative, by which I mean that this is likely to find an audience among (patient) people with an interest in true crime. That may seem ironic, given that I myself am not a proponent of that genre generally, but it’s ultimately rather fitting, given that the chronovisor is real, or at least, it was a real hoax. Pellegrino Ernetti was a real Italian monk, one who really did generate and distribute a wealth of scholarship about Gregorian chants and other early ecclesiastic music, and he really did announce the invention of the chronovisor in the May 1972 issue of Domenica del Corriere (Italian for Sunday Courier). That article, “A Machine Has Been Invented That Photographs the Past,” was the catalyst for writing/directing/editing duo Jack Auen and Kevin Walker to dig into Father Ernetti’s claims, just as we witness Béatrice doing. Although the “evidence” provided for the chronovisor’s functionality was ultimately refuted; a widely distributed, supposed photo of Christ was found to be identical to a souvenir postcard of a Lorenzo Coullaut Valera sculpture in a remote Spanish church, and the alleged recreation of the lost Latin tragedy Thyestes was dismissed by a contemporary academic as betraying that its author had only a rudimentary understanding of the language. Chronovisor takes this real-life counter-evidence as proof of deliberate suppression, and builds a mystery around it.

Of course, you probably surmised from the breakdown in the opening paragraph above, Béatrice does eventually track down the location of the device. By this point in the narrative, we have learned that users of the device not only observed the events of the past but became psychically entangled with them, so we know that Béatrice’s discovery does not bode well for her. We once again bear witness to what she sees through her own perspective, as she engages with the machine and perceives history through a distorted lens that brings the “etch-a-sketch” visuals of the 1984 erotic thriller Blind Date to mind. This is the part of the film that I would expect to alienate the true crime audience, as it will speak more to fans of experimental filmmaking, and once you’ve met enough members of both those groups, you’ll understand that the overlap in the Venn diagram between them is small. That’s a great misfortune, as this is a very rewarding journey for those patient enough to allow the mystery to be doled out to them in this novel and inventive form.

As a visual effort, Chronovisor is gorgeous. It’s shot on 16mm, which gives a lot of text and depth to what we see on the screen, which is wise when many of the shots are almost indistinguishable from a still photo. Béatrice is portrayed not by a trained actor but by an actual academic. Sellier is a faculty member at the London Business School, NYU’s Stern Business School, the Columbia Business School, and a Cartier-Chaired Professor at the Paris School of Advanced Business Studies. That may not seem to be terribly aligned with Béatrice’s area of expertise, but she is currently researching creativity, cognitive biases, and human perception of time, and she carries that academic authority into the role, such as it is. Béatrice is, ultimately, little more than a cypher who decodes the mystery of the chronovisor for the audience to experience vicariously. What little we might surmise about her as a character other than her dedication to study is all interpretive (she wears a wedding ring despite no mention or appearance of a spouse, from which we can speculate a motivation on her part to see a deceased partner, but nothing more). This is not to the film’s detriment, however, any more than its insistence upon the use of antiquated technology is. If one were to forget or overlook the presence of recent car models on the street or a letter being dated (via typewriter!) February 2026, then the film feels like a period piece until the moment that Béatrice picks up her smartphone to start making calls. It makes for a bit of playfulness, which is welcome in a film that most people will complain feels like a group study project.

If I’ve managed to sell you on Chronovisor, the distributor’s website currently includes a “where to watch” drop-down at the bottom of the page so that you can check for screening dates near you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

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I first saw The Trouble with Harry on a VHS that I bought from a video store on Essen Lane in Baton Rouge that was driven out of business by Blockbuster, around 2008. My roommate at the time hated the film when we watched it together, and I, at the height of my first Alfred Hitchcock phase, defended the film against his criticism. Upon rewatch, however, I must admit that he was right; this is not a good movie. 

That’s a shame, because it opens very promisingly. A young boy named Arnie (Jerry Mathers, aka Beaver Cleaver) is playing with a plastic toy ray gun on an autumnal Vermont hillside when he hears gunshots and drops to the ground. As he continues to explore, he comes upon the dead body of a man dressed in a gray suit. When he runs off to tell his mother, retired (alleged) naval captain Albert Wiles (Edmund Gwenn, of Miracle on 34th Street fame) emerges from the woods, where he has spent the day hunting for rabbits despite the land being posted. Upon discovery of the same body, he believes that he must have killed the man with a stray shot and resolves to bury the corpse to avoid arrest. His attempts to dispose of the evidence are continuously interrupted, however, first by the appearance of local spinster Miss Gravely (Mildren Natwick) who accepts his explanation and condones his course of action before inviting him to tea that afternoon, then by a wandering hobo who steals the dead man’s shoes, followed by the eccentric local doctor, Greenbow, who is so absorbed in his reading that he fails to notice the body even when he trips over it, and finally by Arnie and his mother, Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine), who identifies the body as that of Harry Worp, her estranged husband, before dragging her son off for lemonades.

All are residents of the small town of Highwater, which appears to have only about four other residents in total. Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe) is a gadabout artist with empty pockets, and although he has failed to sell even one of his paintings, local general store owner Mrs. Wiggs (Mildred Dunnock), a widow, finds his work beautiful, if incomprehensible. Her son, Clay (Royal Dano), is the sheriff’s deputy in the town, who supplements that position’s low income by repairing and reselling antique cars. After Sam and Clay have a brief interaction that demonstrates Sam’s lack of respect for law enforcement and Clay’s simple-minded nature, Sam goes to a scenic spot for some charcoal sketches, drawing the dead man’s feet sticking out from behind a bush without realizing what he’s espied. When he goes to inspect the man, he meets Captain Wiles, who tells him the whole story. From there, Harry’s body is buried, un-buried, interred, dug up, buried again, and then retrieved one final time over the course of a single day, as various parties realize that they may be the party actually responsible for his death.

Like Under Capricorn before it, this one barely qualifies as one of Hitch’s “thrillers,” if one categorizes it that way at all. There’s definitely a mystery, but this is a comedy first and foremost, and a screwball one at that, featuring character studies of the eccentric villagers of Highwater, Vermont. It’s odd that it feels so out of place, as the crew was full of longtime Hitchcock collaborators: composer Bernard Herrmann (nine films together), cinematographer Robert Burks (twelve collaborations, including several of the greats), costuming by Edith Head (eleven films together), and screenplay by John Michael Hayes (only four collaborations, but includes Rear Window). This should be running like a well-oiled machine, and several of the pieces do even if the total is less than the sum of its parts, with the standout positive being the visuals. In the special features for North by Northwest, one can find an advertisement for that film that features the director introducing it as if he were a travel agent selling the viewer on a cross-country trip from New York to Chicago to South Dakota; for all that it’s lacking, The Trouble With Harry could almost function perfectly well as an actual advertisement for Vermont during changing of the leaves. The scenery is so gorgeous and so well photographed that, before the film’s actual plot started to chug along, I was already earmarking this as a potential perennial favorite to watch every fall. What Douglas Sirk and Russell Metty did for New England winters in All That Heaven Allows, Hitchcock and Burks are doing for New England autumns in The Trouble with Harry.

Unfortunately, sumptuous scenery does not a great, or even good, film make. Things begin to tank the moment that Sam appears on screen; the wisecracks he rattles off are neither wise nor cracking, and I genuinely am unable to tell if Forsythe is making the acting choice to render Sam Marlow the most annoying character in the entire Hitchcock canon or if he’s simply trying to do the best he can with a bad script and failing. Unlike the audience, the other characters within the film are charmed by him, which is a baffling choice, although it may be chalked up to the fact that he’s the only man in Highwater who isn’t a child, elderly, or dead. He volunteers to guess Miss Gravely’s age and pegs her at fifty despite her only being forty-two, and not a single woman in this town bashes a cider jug over his head for his impertinence. MacLaine plays Jennifer Rogers like a woman blissed out on pills, which one could hardly blame her for if this were the case (her first husband died six weeks before she learned she was pregnant, and her single brother-in-law married her out of a sense of obligation before leaving her alone on their wedding night because of his horoscope), but she seems to just be like that, and it doesn’t make for exciting viewing. The dialogue for everyone is overwritten, which causes the so-called jokes to mostly land with a dull thud, although I did get a chuckle or two every once in a great while. As a result, although this one is only 100 minutes long, it drags along to its conclusion. The only character I really enjoyed was Mrs. Wiggins, whose half-mean jokes about her dead husband and her fascination with Sam’s (hideous, hideous) paintings give her a depth of character that the others struggle to achieve, as they fall back on cliches and eccentricities instead. 

The DVD I got from the library identifies this as part of the Alfred Hitchcock: The Masterpiece Collection Blu-Ray set, with the cover identifying it as an “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece.” I regret to inform you that this is a lie, and my college roommate was correct. A film that is only for Hitchcock completists or someone who is looking for a movie to put on, muted, in the background at a harvest festival after-party; don’t trouble yourself with it otherwise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #274: Jamaica Inn (1939) & Hitchcock Blind Spots

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Welcome to Episode #274 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Boomer catch up on some personal Alfred Hitchcock blind spots, starting with his final British production, Jamaica Inn (1939).

00:00 Halloween Streaming Report
02:00 Dead Calm (1989) at Barrett’s Too
05:37 Hitchcock rankings
08:06 Jamaica Inn (1939)
30:20 Rebecca (1940)
51:11 The Wrong Man (1956)
1:15:34 North by Northwest (1959)
1:43:18 Hitch quiz

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

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026)

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In case you haven’t already met him, Shaun is a claymation sheep, one who’s too smart and too independent for his own good. Initially introduced as a side character in Aardman’s flagship Wallace & Gromit shorts, Shaun the Sheep has since gone on to become a name brand of his own, headlining an eponymous stop-motion TV show in which his mischievous schemes cause great episodic trouble for the farmer & dog that are supposed to be keeping him fenced in. The show is subverbal, with characters exclusively communicating in expressive grunts instead of using their words, which levels the intellectual playing field between the humans and farm animals in the cast. It’s a consistently, cozily delightful set-up for some classic silent comedy gags, and it’s proven to be popular enough to inspire a series of feature-film sequels outside the confines of television. 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie played as an action-spectacle escalation of the Shaun the Sheep TV show, dragging Shaun and his fellow barnyard animals off the farm and to The Big City in the George Miller tradition. Then, the series temporarily lost its way in its attempt at Atomic Age sci-fi pastiche in 2019’s Farmageddon, which disrupted the calming simplicity of its silent-comedy-farm-life premise by allowing a cutesy, hyperactive space alien to invade the scene, dragging the whole enterprise down to the low-attention-span antics of a Trolls sequel. Thankfully, while shifting genres to horror pastiche in the newest addition, the Shaun the Sheep franchise has retreated to the warmer tone and core character dynamics that separate Aardman Animations from the lesser, computer-animated DreamWorks of the world. Shaun is back causing covertly anthropomorphic mischief, the farmer gets into exponentially absurd mishaps through no fault of his own, and all the other people & animals hanging around have a sweetly silly time watching their hijinks ensue — this time while hanging Halloween decorations to help each other get into the seasonal mood.

The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens with the farmer and his animals waking at dawn with the creaky mobility of zombies rising from their graves. Once they’re alert and going about their separate days, both halves of the farm set about getting their Halloween plans in order; the farmer works on mustering up the courage to invite the local vet to his town’s annual Halloween Hoedown, while Shaun works on growing a secret pumpkin patch that would allow his fellow sheep to carve traditional jack-o-lanterns behind the farmer’s back. After a gruesome mishap massacres Shaun’s precious pumpkins in a blood-orgy of gourd guts, the determined sheep decides to play mad scientist and invent a growth serum that will rapidly develop new full-size pumpkins from seed in a couple days’ time, so they’ll be ready by Halloween. Only, his mad science experiment works too well, and the pumpkins never stop growing. Naturally, the serum is also mistaken for hair-growth gel by the balding farmer, who thinks he has a better shot at landing a Halloween Hoedown date if he can regrow the luscious locks of his youth. So, Shaun lives out the classic sci-fi horror plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein while the farmer finds himself in more of a Peanut Butter Solution rapid-hair-growth situation, of which it’s unclear whether the homage was at all intentional; it’s more important to know that his new hirsute look gets him mistaken for an errant sasquatch monster by freaked-out townsfolk. Certainly, there are blatant, unmistakable callbacks to more famous horror iconography elsewhere, including onscreen references to Psycho, Thriller, Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, and Friday the 13th. Those references are all likely to go over the heads of the children in the target audience, though, the same way that the first Shaun the Sheep movie got away with referencing Taxi Driver, The Terminator, and Silence of the Lambs without offending overly protective parents. It’s the kind of horror-movie-reference starter pack that can acclimate younger viewers to a lifelong genre fandom without immediately scaring them off with the macabre.

This latest Shaun the Sheep outing is Halloween-season kids’ fluff; it also might be the best movie in the series to date. The closest it gets to actively scaring children is in its climactic introduction of a kaiju-scale jack-o-lantern monster, but even that gag is quickly revealed to be all in good fun. Mostly, the scene-to-scene scares are character based, keeping the farm-life silent comedy of the series as simple as possible. For instance, when the town vet visits the farm, everyone is scared for entirely personal reasons: the farmer because he is scared of women, the animals because they’re scared of vaccinations. When the farmer’s Gromit-like hound is tasked to retrieve his missing, sasquatched owner, he visualizes the farmer’s scent as a ghost made of green vaporous stench. The Halloweeny quality of the picture is mostly due to seasonal decor. Jack-o-lanterns, rubber bats, mad-scientist lab equipment, and mysterious monster footprints decorate every set piece, while it’s continually clear that no one is in danger of suffering anything worse than a pratfall. The only real sour note is the film’s department-store pop music soundtrack, which has been a consistent earsore throughout this series. Only, this time the end credits play over a delightfully corny plot-summarizing rap song in Halloween goof-off tradition, so it’s difficult to get too angered up about it. Is The Beast of Mossy Bottom legitimately just as good as the first Shaun the Sheep movie or is its Spirit Halloween Store set decor just an especially pleasant backdrop for its old-school silent comedy gags? It’s difficult to say for sure, but The Beast of Mossy Bottom is unmistakably more successful as a Shaun the Sheep horror pastiche than Farmageddon was as the Shaun the Sheep take on alien-invasion sci-fi. It manages to naturally integrate the holiday into Shaun’s farm-disrupting antics without distracting from the show’s streamlined sitcom premise, and as a result it might incidentally inspire some future monster-movie fandom in impressionable youngsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Halloween Streaming Report 2026

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on streaming. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

“I’ve been toying around with creating a bit of an ’80s kid horror syllabus’ lately, which has involved a first-time watch or a rewatch of some of the mini-genre’s greatest hits: The Watcher in the Woods, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Paperhouse, The Dark Crystal, and, regrettably, Transylvania 6-5000. I remember being somewhat less than impressed with Something Wicked upon first viewing, but this time around, I found myself utterly captivated by it.” Currently streaming on Disney+

Oct 2: Demon Pond (1979)

“A surprisingly romantic Japanese folk horror with a moody Moog score. Floats somewhere between The Wicker Man and Wizard of Oz for most of its runtime, then it’ll swerve into a special effects showcase sequence unlike anything you’ve seen anywhere else.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 3: The Doll (1962)

“A Swedish attempt to class up Psycho for the arthouse crowd that accidentally invents Peter Strickland’s whole deal in the process.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 4: Ramekin (2018)

“If Julio Torres and Quentin Dupieux were to collaborate on a project (with no budget), this would probably be the result. The ramekin, like the tire in Rubber, is a menacing figure despite being a faceless, inanimate object, but its ordinariness is exactly what makes it so strange.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and (with ads) Tubi

Oct 5: Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)

“Descriptions across different film-oriented websites vary, but all manage to touch on the major plot elements: across a small suburb, a series of women are all having affairs with the town horndog, eventually contracting sexually transmitted cannibalism, which the kids in the town must then try to cure. What that undersells is that this ‘cannibalism’ is sentient, self-aware zombism in all but name, and also that the ‘kids’ are, politely, not very convincing as high schoolers.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 5: I Married a Vampire (1987)

“You’re not going to get a lot of butts in seats for a movie in which a woman marries a vampire without titling that film I Married a Vampire, but that reveal would be a little more fun if you were able to go into a screening without that knowledge. Of course, the fact that marriage to a bloodsucker is the inevitable outcome of this story is made clear from the outset, when young Viola picks up her parents from the airport in an unnamed city; they’ve arrived in town after learning secondhand from Viola’s sister that she’s gotten married and are insistent on meeting her new husband. Of course, before she brings mom and dad home, she’s got to give them the whole story of how she met her undead husband …” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 6: Habit (1995)

“Oh no, did I get so drunk last night that I had risky public sex with that mysterious hipster vampire chick? Again?!?” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) Tubi

Oct 7: El Vampiro (1957)

“An early Mexican vampire movie that bridges the gap between classic Universal Monster & Hammer Horror aesthetics. Doesn’t do anything you haven’t seen before, but it’s got an excellent sense of Halloween decor. It’s the kind of movie where every surface is veiled behind a thick layer of cobwebs regardless of whether someone’s “living” in the space. It’s a pure pleasure for anyone who enjoys hanging out on foggy sound stages with flapping rubber bats (i.e., cool people, sexy people).” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Pluto TV

Oct 8: The Vourdalak (2023)

“I know people in the industry are already struggling enough, but I really do believe all movies should be required to replace at least one human actor with a puppet, the more prominent the character the better.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 9: Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

“If the play and film Gaslight had never been produced, the psychological term that we take from it would instead be called ‘Sweet Charlotting’ or ‘Hush Hushing.'” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 10: Relic (2020)

“Dementia is represented as a haunted house, although the early stages of the haunting present very similarly to demonic possession, which also gives this 2020 picture the feeling of being a more sensitive, more expensively shot Taking of Deborah Logan. It excises Deborah Logan’s found footage elements and is instead shot more traditionally, which makes for a more sumptuous viewing experience and, one might argue, a better movie.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 11: Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

“Horror nerds have already thoroughly mined every last golden nugget of vintage Italo horror schlock, so all that’s left to pick through is their Spanish equivalents. For your giallo fix, you can look to The Corruption of Chris Miller, and for your next late-night zombi flick you can look here.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 12: Maniac Cop (1988)

“Whereas Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, ‘What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?’, his script for Maniac Cop asks, ‘What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?’ It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable.” Currently streaming on Shudder, on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 13: Species (1995)

“Decent enough for a mid-budget/mid-90s creature feature, but much more fun as a novelty mutation of the era’s erotic thriller craze. The only bummer is that we didn’t get even more movies based on Giger designs, so that this would feel less like an Alien knockoff and more like a routine entry in a wet-nightmare Gigersploitation subgenre.” Currently streaming on MGM+, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 14: The Host (2006)

“In 2006, this was undoubtedly seen a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of Bong’s other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy & Hoopla

Oct 15: Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

“Ishirō Honda exits the Godzilla series on a serious note, keeping all of the space alien invaders and remote-controlled kaiju that had crept into routine formula over the years but deciding to play them straight instead of goofy. He even makes the recycling of previous films’ footage feel elegant, playing it back in a 4-way splitscreen layout. His sincerity makes for some surprisingly compelling drama, to the point where you forget he also directed a couple of Godzilla’s silliest, flimsiest outings (namely King Kong vs Godzilla and All Monsters Attack).” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, on HBO Max, and for free (with ads) on The Roku Channel

Oct 16: Gorgo (1961)

“The poster promises monster mayhem “LIKE NOTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN BEFORE”, then the monster looks exactly like Godzilla (now with ears) and the opening credits shamelessly borrow the King Kong font. Really makes you think.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 17: Demonwarp (1988)

“A bugnuts alien invasion movie hiding in plain sight as a mediocre sasquatch movie.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 18: Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988)

“Angela skips several rites of passage in the slasher villain evolutionary chain and goes straight into ‘Ain’t I a stinker?’ goofball mode.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 19: Death Metal Zombies (1995)

“An SOV backyard metalsploitation relic that’s way more interested in quirky character comedy than it is in staging the expected gore gags. Wall to wall metal tunes playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media. In a word, adorable. Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads are devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths should be forced to watch this so they can see the truth: they’re just dorks in black t-shirts.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 20: Nekromantik (1988)

“A German geek show about a perverted couple who use a human corpse as a marital aid in bed. I don’t say this lightly, but the most shocking thing about it is how tender & sensual the ‘threesome’ sex is in practice, despite it also being, you know, unforgivably vile.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 21: Phantom of the Opera (1925)

“Okay wow this really is a macabre masterpiece, to the point where no Best of All Time horror list is complete without it. It’s not just on those out of duty & obligation & kudos for Chaney’s makeup.” Currently streaming on Shudder, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 22: The Mummy (1932)

“A harrowing reminder to never pilfer cultural artifacts for museum exhibits, never dismiss ancient curses as ‘mumbo jumbo’, and never forget to wear your sunscreen.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 23: The Mummy (1999)

“A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the recent release of Lee Cronin’s Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.)” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 24: 13 Ghosts (1960)

“Plays like William Castle’s backdoor pilot for a Munsters/Addams-style spooky TV sitcom.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 25: The Invisible Man (1933)

“Sure, The Invisible Man is an unrepentant mass murderer, but he also mostly uses his invisibility powers to slap around and humiliate cops, so I don’t have it in my heart to condemn him. This quite possibly the greatest mad scientist film of all time, and if it’s not that’s only because James Whale already bested himself with Frankenstein.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 26: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

“Gorgeous picture. I wonder if James Cameron struggles with the knowledge that underwater 3D filmmaking was already perfected months (months!) before he was born.” Currently streaming on Peacock

Oct 27: Forbidden Planet (1957)

“Flying saucers, laser battles, psychic monsters, synthesizers, a cute robot, a mini-skirted alien babe, mid-century modern decor: the Platonic ideal of Atomic Age sci-fi.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 28: The Toxic Avenger II (1989)

“Much more wholesome than the Toxic Avenger’s first outing. It’s mostly a Troma travelogue, with Toxie reporting on his Tokyo vacation with the same childlike cadence as Big Bird traveling on assignment.” Currently streaming on Shudder, on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 29: Brain Damage (1988)

“Incredibly funny to discover the monster sounds like That after so many years of only seeing him in still images. It’s the kind of vocal performance you’d expect in a Rankin Bass cartoon and not the sleaziest horror comedy to ever disgrace the streets of NYC.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 30: Evil Dead II (1987)

“Only a fool would wait decades for a Hollywood studio to remake their calling card indie film with bigger, slicker production values. Best to scrape the money together to do it yourself before anyone else gets to it.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 31: Orgy of the Dead (1965)

“I found this punishingly boring as a college-era VHS rental, outside a few Criswell line readings that we would quote from time to time. Now that I’m 40, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than watching an endless nudie cutie striptease on an ooky-spooky graveyard set. Glad to know I’ve matured over the years.” Currently streaming on Mubi

-The Swampflix Crew

Hope (2026)

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Hope is the latest film from The Wailing director Na Hong-jin. Early reactions were fairly mixed, and now having seen the film myself, I can understand why. For much of its run, Hope is an exciting action thriller, with thrilling chase scenes, suspenseful sequences, and quiet moments of humanity. All of this works quite well, especially when we see less of the monster(s) that are running around and causing trouble, but once we do see them, it takes a downhill turn before ending on a truly bizarre note, one that comes after a film that’s a little too long for its own good.

Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is the police chief of Hope Harbor, a South Korean village that abuts the Demilitarized Zone, the population of which is made up largely of elderly people and supermodel-hot younger folks. He’s summoned by his cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to the site of a mutilated cow that Sung-ki and his fellow hunters discovered in the middle of the road. The cow’s corpse shows evidence of being attacked by some large animal with razor-sharp claws, which the hunters convince Bum-seok a tiger must have been responsible for despite the unlikelihood that a large cat would have been able to cross the minefields that lie between them and the rest of the continent. Upon returning to town, Bum-seok learns that several other locals have been killed, and his attempts to call in additional manpower are rebuffed due to wildfires that are raging elsewhere, prompting him to ally with a retired colonel named Ahn Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee), whom he finds hiding in a culvert after his own encounter with the monster. Out of sight, the monster rages on, as it leaves a trail of broken bodies and buildings in its wake. After Bum-seok accidentally shoots and kills a local who was hiding from the monster, he ends up facing the creature itself and narrowly escapes only because of assistance from his rocket launcher-toting rookie, Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon). After a long and costly conflict, the monster is killed, and its body turned over to a local surgeon to perform an autopsy, although she’s not able to cut through the creature’s hide with anything less than a chainsaw. Sung-ae assists with triage in a makeshift hospital, where she learns from one of the locals that he had seen several of the creatures in the woods, indicating that the danger is far from over. Elsewhere, Sung-ki and his hunting buddies are still looking for the tiger that threatens the village when they stumble upon a crashed spaceship in the forest, one that has a control room that features seating and buttons for very, very large crewmembers.

The creatures here are the film’s weakest point, in multiple ways. The alien designs are unique, and it’s a mark in the film’s favor that they’re individually designed with distinctive textures and faces, but that does not necessarily mean that they’re good. Western actors like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Lost in Space’s Taylor Russell are credited here, and I suppose you can see the resemblance between them and the aliens that they voice (in an alien language) if you look hard enough, but I’m at a loss to understand what they bring to the film other than marquee appeal outside of Korea. The quality with which they are rendered on screen varies wildly from scene to scene, with some sequences looking like they were built for a PS2 game while others are smoother and more convincing. They’re a much more threatening presence when they’re not onscreen, when dismembered bodies are discovered in collapsing buildings or the only evidence of their presence is the far-off sounds of gunfire cut short by screaming. Characters can see over rooftops that cars are being thrown around like toys, and it’s quite effective.

I can concede that it’s likely that we’re meant to find the aliens uncannily human but off-putting considering the revelation that they are intelligent creatures seeking a lost child, who has already been killed by a hillbilly taxidermist named Yang-bae (Eum Moon-suk, a handsome former K-pop star who’s saddled with goofy teeth). The intention is to induce fear and then humanize them; I get that. I just don’t feel that it’s very successful, and it’s not all entirely down to the design. For one thing, this isn’t exactly new ground, given that the “man is the real monster” isn’t a novel monster-movie concept at this point, and the reason it’s so well-worn is because it forces the audience to look inward at their own prejudices. Here, however, the blame for the interspecies conflict falls solely in the lap of a trigger-happy bumpkin. No one is going to look at this man onscreen and see themselves, and it’s a change from the formula that demonstrates why the trope exists in the first place. There’s also a lot of sudden and unexpected lore that ends up being shoehorned in during the film’s final act, belabored exposition that largely comes via the form of not-very-interesting dialogue between Vikander and Fassbender (I mean, um … let me check my notes here … “J’aur” and “Ma’veyyo”). Some of it re-establishes what we’ve already gleaned from the scenes with our human characters, including their search for the missing alien child, but it also drops several extra-terrestrial proper nouns that are a lot to try and take in after two hours of runtime that was mostly a humans-versus-monsters movie. 

This is a film that feels incomplete, and it’s not just the cliffhanger ending that gives it that quality. Hope doesn’t feel like half of a narrative; it feels like a 95% complete monster film and a 35% complete sci-fi epic. That adds up to more than 100%, of course, which is reflected in the film’s whopping 156 minute runtime. That should be more than enough to tell a complete story, but it doesn’t. There are dangling plot threads on the human side that are left to be resolved in a sequel if one is made, most notably the fallout of Bum-seok’s shooting of a non-combatant, but it’s almost all the way there. The alien side of things is just getting started, with the sudden crashing of another, larger spaceship into a mountain on the horizon near the film’s conclusion, and all of the political machinations that are implied by the too-late info dump, which isn’t of interest to me in the slightest. Given that Na is known for releasing films at a glacial pace (the aforementioned The Wailing was his last picture, and it was released in 2016), it’s strange to me that he would create a film so open-ended and demanding of a sequel. Worse, Hope features such great action sequences that it demands to be seen on a big screen, but the ultimate experience is so taxing that it is a film that will work best when you’re at home and can take bathroom breaks, where the horseback battle with a galloping alien creature isn’t going to hit as hard. 

All of this sounds pretty negative, but I’m not trying to talk you out of experiencing the film. Reports that it is the best monster movie in years are no more an exaggeration than critical responses that the film is an overlong, narratively confused beast. Going in with that knowledge, I think you’ll still find plenty to enjoy; just caffeinate beforehand and feel free to run to the restroom when the aliens start talking to one another.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Resident Evil (2026)

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Screaming Mad George passed away this year, and there hasn’t been nearly enough public mourning over that loss for my taste. The 80s gore wizard was so uniquely talented as a visual artist (as especially evident in his collaborations with director Bryan Yuzna) that he would get special title card credits like “surrealistic make-up effects by Screaming Mad George” or “surrealistic visual design by Screaming Mad George,” each well earned by the mutant freak shows that would follow in all-timer gross-outs like Society, The Guyver, and Freaked!. The recent announcement of George’s passing was quietly received by the general movie-loving public, so it was nice to see him finally, properly honored by the surrealistic gore effects of Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil adaptation, even if the homage was unintentional or indirect. The snowbound setting, mutated dogs, and tentacled humanoids of Resident Evil are naturally drawing a lot of comparisons to Rob Bottin’s legendary creature effects for The Thing, but I still felt the presence of George’s screaming-mad spirit in the theater opening weekend. There’s something about the anything-goes nightmare reconfigurations of the human form in Resident Evil‘s creature designs that can’t help but recall Screaming Mad George’s calling-card works in addition to Bottin’s, and I think it’s beautiful that you can now find the fucked-up surrealistic ideas he developed in a major studio adaptation of a video game playing in every multiplex across America. It used to be that you had to go to the video store to rent disreputable schlock like Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation to see what screaming-mad stuff George was cooking up; now it’s being projected on thousands of screens nationwide.

It probably says something about the current moment in mainstream filmmaking that a splatter-gore horror comedy based on a video game feels like a no-brainer sure thing for a major studio to produce, when a few decades ago it would’ve been budgeted as a direct-to-video B-picture. Zach Cregger cashed in his industry clout after the unlikely success of his Oscar-winning whatsit Weapons to make the grossest, gnarliest horror comedy he could manage, timed perfectly to the industry’s current shift away from superhero actioners to memeable horrors and video game IP. There are no discernible themes or metaphors behind most of the imagery in Resident Evil. Instead of playing into the “elevated” trauma-metaphor horror trends of the past decade, it operates on pure video game logic. Weapons favorite Austin Abrams stars as a gig-economy worker who’s tasked to deliver a medical cooler to the zombie shoot-em-up game’s infamous Raccoon City headquarters, where a science lab is desperately awaiting his arrival. Along the way, it becomes clear that Raccoon City is ground zero for some kind of body-transforming virus breakout, making the delivery comically impossible as Abrams is attacked by one undead mutant freak after another. Structurally, it’s an all-in-one-night story built on crisis-to-crisis problem solving, like an absurdly gory redux of After Hours or Miracle Mile. Experientially, it feels like playing a video game as an unskilled novice, with Abrams’s in-over-his-head delivery driver voicing the audience’s overwhelmed, underprepared reactions to each unholy tentacled beast that lunges at him as if he were operating a game console controller instead of a real-world human body. Everything that happens to him is a nightmare, but it’s all for our low-stakes, time-passing entertainment.

It may sound like I’m downplaying Resident Evil‘s artistic merits by characterizing it as a themeless video game playthrough, but that is not my intent. It took Paul W.S. Anderson and Mila Jovovich five Resident Evil adaptations before they realized that this premise plays best as a playthrough spookshow in 2012’s Retribution, whereas Cregger’s vision for the property is immediately, sharply clear-eyed. Video-game storytelling tropes are a major asset to making sure this latest adaptation feels fresh and of-the-moment. In most instances, a CGI-animated throwback to practical gore effects of the Screaming Mad George era would feel disappointingly stale, but Resident Evil is just inventive enough in its constantly mutating creature designs and just modern enough in its video game puzzle-solving narrative to dig itself out of that 80s nostalgia pit. In a time when most directors are afraid to set their horror stories in the current moment because of the intrusive presence of smartphones, Cregger is one of the few who understands how those phones can add to his movie’s scares instead of detracting from them. The cold, isolated beam of the flashlight app on Abrams’s phone as he navigates the haunted house setting of each video-game-level sequence is essential to the movie’s visual palette and, by extension, to its modernity. Likewise, there’s something of-the-moment in the delivery dude’s under-his-breath jokiness as he’s assaulted by one brain-breaking mutant monstrosity after another, since that’s just what it feels like to leave the house to accomplish any basic task in recent years. All public life is an anxiety-inducing horror video game, but you do have to play along (if not only to make a little money), so the only option, really, is to joke to yourself along the way. I won’t claim that Resident Evil is the first or the best movie to modernize that screaming-mad 80s splatterfest sensibility to the current moment; it’s got titles like Deadstream, The Substance, and Cregger’s own Barbarian to compete with for those superlatives. It is super impressive to see that sensibility blown up to this major-studio scale, though, and it’s a hoot to holler at with first-weekend horror crowds instead of quietly watching it alone on a rented VHS tape.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Trial (1962)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Orson Welles’s surreal legal-thriller Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962), starring Anthony Perkins as Josef K.

00:00 Welcome
04:50 Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir (2021) by Brent Spiner
12:02 Deathtrap (1982)
23:46 Slacker (1990)

36:08 The Trial (1962)

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

Cigarettes in Paradise

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How Many Cigarettes? is the dirtbag slacker equivalent of fellow movie-metric website Does the Dog Die?. Instead of measuring movies by their tally of potential trauma-triggers (such as gratuitous canine deaths), How Many Cigarettes? tallies the number of cigarettes smoked onscreen. If its characters rip enough cigs to reach a one-smoke-every-5-minutes runtime ratio, a movie automatically qualifies as “A Real Smoker Movie,” since its audience could conceivably chainsmoke throughout it without ever having to smoke alone. How Many Cigarettes? is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek project, one my friend Leigh started as an ex-smoker who still recognizes the allure of a cinematic cigarette and a life-pausing smoke break. The project is even more thorough than it is silly, though, capturing dozens of screengrabs each from hundreds of movies so people can get a quick glimpse of how many cigarettes are smoked in classics like Jurassic Park (7), GoodFellas (53), Mulholland Drive (7), and Casablanca (124!). As arbitrary as that metric may seem at first, it has forever altered how I watch movies. Once you start looking for cigarettes, it’s hard to stop. I remember sitting next to Leigh at a local screening of Almodóvar’s High Heels and had to ask if the pregnant woman smoking onscreeen counted as two cigarettes, since she was technically smoking for two. He seemed amused by the question, but my guess is that the hardline answer is it only counted as one cig. When you’re collecting raw data for “Real Smoker Movie” metrics, these distinctions really matter.

The How Many Cigarettes? project reached its natural zenith this week when Leigh presented a Gap Tooth screening of Aki Kaurismäki’s dead-eyed 1986 romcom Shadows in Paradise at The Broad. He introduced the film—Kaurismäki’s finest work, from what I’ve seen—as a core title in the Real Smoker Movie canon, citing it as the movie that first inspired him to start counting cigs in the first place. There are 71 cigarettes smoked in Shadows in Paradise, which is impressive for a film only 74 minutes in length. In the hand-illustrated zine he produced to accompany the screening, Leigh writes, “The number of cigarettes smoked here seems like a joke. Almost every scene has between 1 and 9 people smoking cigarettes.” He’s right. Once you start counting, the rate of cigarettes being lit from scene to scene becomes outright comical. Every single conversation is punctuated with the flick of a lighter, pulls on a filter, and the stamping of a cherry. And yet, it’s honestly something I didn’t notice the first time I watched the film back in 2021, alongside the other Kaurismäki classics The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, and The Other Side of Hope. Growing up in the 80s & 90s, chainsmoking just seemed like a normal, everyday part of adulthood, back when my dad would smoke entire packs of Marlboro Golds indoors, as if he were enjoying a snack or a soda. So, watching the despondent, lovelorn characters of Kaurismäki’s Helsinki chat over a constant procession of smoke breaks just felt natural to the movie’s time & place. Rewatching the movie through the How Many Cigarettes? filter, though, some of the cigarette-specific images do feel intentionally comical, like when Matti Pellonpää appears smoking while wearing sunglasses indoors, hiding his romantic heartbreak behind a costumey idea of vintage rock ‘n’ roll cool. The cigarettes are both artificial movie props and natural urban decor. They are essential to the movie’s mise-en-scène.

Something I did notice about Shadows in Paradise the first time I watched it was all the trash. There are enough standalone shots of wet garbage in the film to inspire a How Many Cigarettes? sister site that measures movies by their literal trashiness, per-pound. Pellonpää stars as a lonely garbage man who slowly, carefully sparks a romance with a jaded grocery store clerk, played by fellow Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen. In genre terms, it’s an awkwardly stilted romcom, delivered in a proto-Wes Anderson flat affect as the blue-collar pair gradually earn equal footing in each other’s esteem one smoke break at a time. From a broader view, it offers stray documentary glimpses into 1980 Finnish waste treatment processes, trailing Pellonpää from dumpster to dumpster as he hauls away endless heaps of trash. His social status as a garbage man directly plays into his dateability too, as his only viable romantic foil is a middle-manager yuppie dipshit who lords over a trendy clothing store. Outinen seems a little embarrassed to be dating a garbage collector, but it’s still instantly obvious that she won’t be able to make it last with the yuppie, because it’s impossible to picture her sharing a cigarette with him behind a grocery store dumpster. Pellonpää knows his way around an ashtray, though, and his social status as a trash-hauling beer guzzler can be adorable in its own way, once you get past the smell. There’s a pitch-black urban despair to Shadows in Paradise that echoes throughout Kaurismäki’s other works, but it’s mostly one of set dressing & social circumstance, as typified by its empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts. It’s ultimately a very sweet love story, though, a romcom that deals exclusively in deadpan whimsy.

If there’s anything direct Kaurismäki was attempting to signal to his audience through all of the onscreen trash & cigarettes, it’s that Shadows in Paradise is meant to be a love story for The People. He even went as far as to group it with The Match Factory Girl & Ariel as his official “Proletariat Trilogy.” It probably means something, for instance, that when Pellonpää & Outinen exit the film via cruise ship for a makeshift honeymoon, the vessel is decorated with the Communist hammer & sickle. Likewise, How Many Cigarettes? is a movie database for The People, decidedly unpretentious in its selections and open for collaboration with its patrons. Leigh has opened the database up for volunteer contributions, which you can find information about on the site’s About page. Even more generously, he has uploaded a printable copy of the “Every Cigarette Smoked in Aki Kaurismäki’s Shadows in Paradise” zine, which includes a brush-pen illustration of every cigarette smoked in the movie, along with a leaderboard of some Real Smoker Movie heavy-hitters like The Bikeriders (104), Road House (71), The French Dispatch (86), and Smithereens (37). Print yourself a copy and poke around the website the next time you’re bored on a smoke break or just looking for your next Movie Night selection, to be determined by one absurdly specific metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Nuclear Missed Connections

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Ross McElwee’s landmark 1985 documentary Sherman’s March is now back in circulation, pristinely restored and streaming VOD for anyone who’s already watched every episode of How To with John Wilson and is searching for their next softspoken doomsayer fix. At first glance, Sherman’s March appears to be wryly narcissistic, with McElwee spending nearly three hours overanalyzing his own trivial romantic foibles instead of directly tackling the historical topic he was granted money to document. It’s not so much the Civil War military campaign of Sherman March‘s title that has been lingering with me in the weeks since I first saw the film, though. I’ve instead found myself dwelling on the significance of its subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation. Like everyone else raised during the existential uncertainty of the Cold War, McElwee can’t help but filter his personal decisions and worldview through the lens of imminent nuclear annihilation. What, ultimately, would be the point making a romantic connection in the end times of the 1980s, given that the push of a few buttons could end all human existence the entire planet over at any given minute? In practice, the potential for nuclear war doesn’t directly affect McElwee’s love life all that much in Sherman’s March, except during the stretch where he romantically pursues a nuclear disarmament activist. The threat of nuclear holocaust does quietly hum in the background throughout the picture, though, as intentionally provoked by its subtitle. It was, presumably, a constant hum in the background of everything in that era, as I’ve continued to hear it humming in the couple other late-80s, early-90s titles that I’ve happened to catch in the past couple weeks since writing about Sherman’s March.

I mostly threw on 1988’s Miracle Mile because it offered a rare opportunity to see Anthony Edwards in a lead role outside the television show I’m currently binge-watching: ER. Even better, Edwards’s love interest in the film is played by Mare Winningham, who had a brief run as Edwards’s maniacally obsessed stalker on ER and who also recently married him in real life after a long-simmering infatuation. That odd, bittersweet connection between the two actors is only amplified by Miracle Mile, which initially plays like a video store-era romcom before it blows up into a nuclear disaster epic. Edwards stars as a bitterly sarcastic Los Angeleno who finally finds a woman he vibes with in the desperately lonely, phony West Coast city — a devil-may-care free spirit played by Winningham. Unfortunately, they only go on one sweetheart date before Edwards receives the payphone call that ruins everything.  A stranger on the other end of the line tells him that the world is about to end and the bombs are already on their way, so Edwards scrambles to recruit a crew of fellow survivors from an all-night diner to escape the fallout, in a prototype for Gore Verbinki’s recent apocalyptic satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Only, no one can manage to catch the first helicopter out of town because everyone has someone in their life they want to take with them to safety, delaying departure to disastrous results. For Edwards’s sadsack lead, that special someone is a girl he just met, which would be sweetly romantic if it weren’t for the fact that both of their faces will likely be melted off by a nuclear blast before they get a chance to properly smooch. If it weren’t for Miracle Miles‘s moody synth score from Tangerine Dream, you could mistake its opening half for an old-school Hollywood romcom. Once the bombs are on their way, though, things get increasingly bleak, and the “possibility of romantic love in […] an era of nuclear proliferation” only gets bleaker by the minute until the story abruptly ends at the bleakest moment imaginable.

In the broadest terms, Miracle Mile does function as a comedy, but it’s also a city-wide portrait of a Cold War community in distress. Tonally, it’s the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours, just as funny as it is stressful. The geographic specificity of its setting and the maniacally episodic nature of Edwards’s interactions with his fellow freaked-out Los Angelenos also reminded me a lot of McElwee’s romantic missed connections in Sherman’s March in ways I didn’t expect, given the disparity in the two films’ chosen genres. Likewise, I didn’t expect to be dwelling on that same topic yet again while watching Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut Slacker, which recently screened at The Broad’s repertory Gap Tooth series. Linklater himself appears on camera in the opening scene of Slacker to lay out the film’s episodic structure. He plays an aimless Gen-X slacker who’s too overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of life to make any significant choice about what to do with himself, since every path he could take is just as valid and justifiable as the other. This apparently extends to his indecision on what story to tell, as Slacker spends an entire day hopping from one conversation to another down the sun-damaged streets of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on a nonstop parade of absurdly verbose underachievers as they ramble about whatever’s on their empty minds, one thought at a time. Like the regional South of Sherman’s March and the late-night Los Angeles of Miracle Mile, the Austin of Slacker is revealed to the audience through broad communal portraiture, with every chatty loser who crosses the screen just as worthy of their own day-in-the-life portrait as the next. Like in the other two movies, Slacker also finds its community psychologically fucked up by the constant threat of nuclear obliteration, as expressed in random characters’ paranoid political rants and in one specific weirdo’s video-art instillation that loops nuclear test footage across a haphazard collection of cathode-ray TVs. Only, Linklater’s proudly unambitious characters appear to be preemptively operating as if the world has already ended, without waiting for the bombs to actually go off. It’s long been over, and everyone who’s left hanging around after our undetected apocalypse has their own crackpot theories on how it happened and how humanity can best spend our time toiling in the rubble.

I was a lot more charmed by Slacker than I usually am by Linklater’s low-effort Gen-X posturings, if not only because its turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out hipsterdom spoke to a larger political sentiment within its contemporary moment (something his later, bigger-budgeted works would repeatedly attempt to recreate with no discernible thematic point at all). As one Austinite slacker puts it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” Admittedly, I also enjoyed the movie simply because I enjoyed hanging around the late-80s Austin scene populated by its various losers & eccentrics. Sure, it’s overrun with twentysomething stoner philosophers who are way too confident that they understand How the World Works for kids who haven’t yet lived a real life, but there’s something undeniably charming about their zen-like collective naivete. I also found myself getting excited by minor details specific to that exact Austin moment, like the deranged conman rant from Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa or the brief sound of Daniel Johnston’s chord organ playing in a passing car (or, even more particularly, the appearance of Johnston’s one-time girlfriend Kathy McCarty, who gives extensive interviews about his life & art in The Devil and Daniel Johnston). It’s impossible to love every crazed Austinite who spouts their own personal conspiracy theories about our post-apocalyptic planet in Slacker, but it’s easy to love the city that allows them blow around in the Texas breeze like human tumbleweeds, jobless and relatively carefree. The same goes for the late-night diner patrons of Miracle Mile and the genteel, Southern-accented women of Sherman’s March. As individuals, they can be grating or alarming, but as broader communities, they’re a joy to spend time with. That’s why it’s so tragic that time is running out for them, that the doomsday clock is tirelessly ticking away. Each of these Cold War communal portraits find their doomed citizens scrambling to make meaningful connections with each other while the threat of nuclear apocalypse looms outside the frame. They all make a point to portray a version of humanity that is worth saving while also acknowledging that it’s likely too late to stop the bombs from going off anyway. Thank your lucky stars that it’s not the 1980s anymore, and it no longer feels like we’re living pointless lives in the earliest hours of the apocalypse. It might be difficult to fully enjoy each other’s company knowing that we’ve already reached the beginning of the end.

-Brandon Ledet