David Bradley’s Silent Monsters

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The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended, Zeitgeist’s Silent Films series feels like an open secret, a kind of backroom speakeasy version of local theatrical programming. The vibe in the room can be electric, as pianist David Bradley’s live, semi-improvised movie scores add an immediacy to century-old relics like Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! that wouldn’t earn nearly as big of laughs or gasps streaming alone at home with a canned soundtrack. It can also be remarkably intimate, echoing the spirit of a D.I.Y. punk show whenever Bradley finds himself playing to a near empty room, engaging his audience in conversation and asking for help wheeling his instrument into the theatre. These are live concerts after all, even more so than they are movie screenings, with all of the fluctuating charm & chaos that distinction suggests.

The reason I got such a wide sample of live-concert experiences at Zeitgeist’s Silent Films showings is that Bradley’s weekly programming veered hard into my personal interests last month, in a series he titled “Silent Monster May.” In the immediate days after I had fallen in love with the century-old romance horror of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), Bradley announced that he’d be exclusively screening silent horror movies that month, including a precursor to Chaney’s Phantom in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I hit all three screenings in the “Silent Monster May” series, which varied in attendance & intensity but were consistently high quality. Before live-scoring 1920’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Bradley mentioned that he hadn’t seen the movie in a while and doesn’t like to overprepare before showtimes, choosing instead to react and respond in real time along with the audience. His silent movie soundtracks are rolling moodsetters that emotionally ebb & flow along with the action onscreen, which in the case of “Silent Monster May” meant accentuating the pitiable romance & tragedy of horror cinema’s earliest monsters.

The most pitiable monsters in the program were also the most famous, both penned by French literary hero Victor Hugo. Lon Chaney’s aforementioned hunchback, Quasimodo, is ugly-cute like a scraggly stray dog. He lusts after the Romani bombshell Esmeralda while playing voyeur from the upper tiers of Notre Dame’s ornate walls, occasionally descending to join in her community’s orgiastic parties so he can watch her dance along with her other, handsomer suitors. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gets a little sleepy in the middle stretch whenever Esmeralda indulges in romantic flings outside of Quasimodo’s’ crooked view, but Chaney is dependably entertaining as the lovelorn monster in every scene which he appears. Not only is “The Man of a Thousand Faces” notoriously talented at transforming himself through rudimentary prosthetics, but he also proves to be an impressive stunt performer here; he crawls all over the church’s exterior walls and hangs upside down from the ropes of its ringing bells like an impish Tom Cruise with wagging tongue & protruding eye. He is, unquestionably, a silent horror movie star, and he carries that burden on his bulging, knotted shoulder with apparent ease.

1928’s The Man Who Laughs also presented a kind of silent-horror celebrity, although one associated less with an actor than with pop-culture IP. Conrad Veidt’s titular laughing man is most famous for having inspired the design for Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker, which would be immediately apparent to any modern audience who catches a glimpse of his Glasgow smile. Paul Leni’s post-German Expressionist adaptation of Hugo’s novel says less about comic books than it does about the ever-evolving history of Universal horror movies, though. Since they’re no longer considered scary, the modern take on Universal’s famous monsters is that they’re tragic figures, sympathetic victims of society’s ills. The Man Who Laughs didn’t waste any time waiting around for that reclamation; the laughing man’s only monstrous quality is a surgical disfigurement that makes him look extremely friendly, however grotesque. Its circus-carny setting (the only place a permanently smiling abomination could find work) also positions it as a softer, kinder version of Freaks, which Tod Browning would soon direct for MGM. Like every monster in this series, he’s just looking for love, but the world around him is too cruel to allow it. It wouldn’t even qualify as a monster movie at all if it weren’t for the disturbing intensity of Conrad Veidt’s facial contortions, which he intentionally undercuts by reflecting deep wells of pain from behind his watery eyes.

Because the legends of Lon Chaney and The Joker came with their own pre-packaged expectations, I was most impressed by the 1920 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, which is saddled with a much lighter load of modern scholarship & hype. Admittedly, it’s been several decades since I last read its Robert Louis Stevenson source material, but I don’t remember quite so much of the original Jekyll & Hyde novel being set in a strip club & brothel, so the silent movie version largely took me by surprise. John Barrymore plays the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose future father-in-law and other colleagues find unnerving for his high morals and buttoned-up demeanor. So, they drag him to the local house of pleasure to catch a glimpse of the real him and, thus, trigger his first ever crisis of conscience. Jekyll doesn’t especially enjoy feeling adulterous lust for the first time in his life, so he invents the mad-scientist concoction that separates his monstrous impulses into the dastardly doppelganger Mr. Hyde. It’s a continually relatable story about the fact that there’s a lecherous pervert lurking in all of us, desperate to claw its way out at the slightest wayward temptation. As a result, it’s not only a great monster movie but also a great strip club movie, placing its dual nature early in the lineages of both Striptease and The Substance — the full Demi Moore spectrum.

All of these vintage monster flicks are highly demanding on the modern attention span, but well worth the effort. The color-tinted frames that distinguish their interior-exterior settings (like the pink hue of Jekyll’s brothel and the cold blue of Hyde’s moonlight strolls) and the massive scale of their crowd scenes (like the castle-storming sequence of Hunchback, wherein Quasimodo scalds the crowds below with vats of molten lead) are remarkably, inextricably cinematic for an artform that was still working to distinguish itself from the moods & methods of stage theatre. You just have to put down your smartphone long enough to witness them. Even with the distracting sounds of traffic, parties, and general urbanite mayhem occasionally audible through Zeitgeist’s theater walls, it’s much easier to lock into the wavelengths of these cinematic relics than it would be at home, especially with the guiding hand of a live piano score reacting to each scene’s emotional gearshifts in real time. If you have any interest in silent era cinema, there’s no better way to experience its old-world magic in New Orleans than to keep up with David Bradley’s microcinema concerts. I’ll be returning to them soon myself, and I’ll hopefully meet more classic movie monsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried’s Death (1924)

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I really had no idea what to expect when I put a hold on a library DVD copy of Die Nibelungun. I just wanted to watch some more Fritz Lang. When I opened the case, I found two discs inside and, upon examination, discovered that they were two halves of a single story (or a film and its immediate sequel; I’m sure there is a distinction, but it makes little difference). I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, well, they must be short.” Dear reader, they are not. I haven’t watched the second half yet, but the runtime of Siegfried’s Death alone is 150 minutes, although some portion of that is introductory information about the Kino Lorber restoration and its sources. Sorry about that spoiler title, by the way, but it’s in the text (or this version of it, anyway); but also, this story is so old that it’s referenced tangentially in Beowulf, so don’t blame me. Putting this disc in, hitting play, and seeing that runtime, I admit that I felt a little daunted. And then, two and a half hours later, I was still utterly entranced when it came to an end. 

Even if you think you haven’t heard this story before, you have, if not in the form of all the pieces it shares with more familiar epics that preceded, then in the stories which took inspiration from it, probably most notably The Lord of the Rings. Siegfried (Paul Richter), son of Westphalian King Sigmund (or Sigmonde, if you prefer the spelling from Beowulf), surpasses the forging skills of his teacher, a craven man named Mime. When Sigfried learns of the beauty of Princess Kriemhild of Burgund (Margarete Schön), he decides to seek her hand, and Mime, in a fit of pique, directs him to Burgund through a wood that contains monsters. Siegfried happens upon a dragon, which he slays; a taste of the dragon’s blood gives him the power to understand birdsong, and a nearby bird tells him to bathe in the dragon’s blood to become invincible. Sigmund does so, but a falling leaf lands on his back above his shoulderblades, leaving him with one vulnerable spot. 

Siegfried finds himself in a land of dwarves, and manages to defeat their king, Alberich, despite the latter being invisible. In exchange for his life, he offers Siegfried the sword Balmung, the magical net he has which allows him to be invisible or appear in another form, and a horde of gold. When Alberich tries to kill Siegfried atop the treasure heap, Siegfried easily bests him, and with his dying breath, Alberich curses the treasure and all who might use it. With his newfound wealth, Siegfried is able to present himself at the court of Burgund as a king with several vassals. There, he meets King Gunther (Theodor Loos), Kriemhild’s brother, and his obviously evil vizier, Hagen of Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow). Hagen tells Gunther not to allow Siegfried to woo Kriemhild unless Siegfried agrees to help Gunther win the hand of Icelandic queen Brunhild (Hanna Ralph), a maiden warrior whose suitors must best her in a triple sport competition. Siegfried goes to Brunhild’s castle under the guise of one of Gunther’s bannermen and, using the helm he won from Alberich, becomes invisible and helps Gunther cheat. 

Brunhild returns to Burgund with Gunther, whom she reluctantly marries in a double ceremony with Kriemhild and Siegfried, and Siegfreid and Gunther become blood brothers. Brunhild initially refuses to consummate the marriage, until Gunther convinces Siegfried to “tame” her, disguised as Gunther, which he does by wrestling her. Brunhild, still bristling, antagonizes Kriemhild by insisting that as the queen of Burgund, she should be able to walk into church before Kriemhild, as the wife of a vassal, and the argument leads to Kriemhild revealing Siegfried’s role in Brunhild’s hostile wife-takeover. Brunhild, furious, demands that Gunther kill Siegfried, and lies that Siegfried deflowered her. Gunther is torn by his blood oath, but Hagen convinces him to allow him to do the deed, and likewise tricks Kriemhild into revealing Siegfried’s vulnerable spot, which he uses to kill him during a hunt. Brunhild mocks Gunther for allowing the lie of a woman to trick him into taking his best friend’s life, then takes her own. When Siegfried’s body is returned, Kriemhild demands justice against Hagen, but her family protects him because of their complicity. 

Kriemhild swears vengeance: “Whether you hide behind my family, or upon the altar of God, or beyond the edge of the world, you will not escape my vengeance, Hagen Tronje!”

This movie is so fucking cool. There are images in here that are so potent and so powerful that I’m surprised this film doesn’t have the same broad awareness that Metropolis does. It’s clearly been incredibly influential. There are shots in Die Nibelungen that are recreated almost identically in Dune, Lord of the Rings, and even Star Wars. There are images here that are incredibly powerful: Brunhild brooding, perfectly centered in the frame; Siegfried, holding aloft the sword that he has just forged; Alberich and his cohort turning to stone upon defeat. Kriemhild’s dreams are manifested in beautiful, if crude, animation, and there’s a sequence at the end where Kriemhild looks at the place where Siegfried said his last goodbye to her and the image slowly crossfades into an image of a skull. Siegfried’s fight against the landwyrm in the forest still looks sick as hell, and the framing of Brunhild’s stronghold, bracketed above with the aurora borealis and below with a field of unquenchable flame is an image that I’ll never forget. 

So one must wonder, why exactly has this film been largely forgotten while Metropolis, M, and others endure? Well … this is an adaptation of Germany’s national epic, which I mean in the literary tradition of great poetic works which define, delineate the founding of, and reinforce national identities. The more well known adaptation of this text is Richard Wagner’s operatic The Ring Cycle, which has been accused of carrying over the composer’s own antisemitic views (although his friendship with the racial science codifying historical monster Arthur de Gobineau did not begin until at least half a decade after The Ring Cycle was completed). Die Nibelungen, having Fritz Lang as its director, excludes Wagner’s more regressive choices (notably, Alberich and Mime are largely considered to be anti-Jewish stereotypes in The Ring Cycle, which they are not here, at least as far as I can tell). Still, that doesn’t mean that a film adaptation of Germany’s national epic poem, which was all about the proud traditions of Germanic ancestry and nation building, wasn’t considered fair game by the Nazi propaganda machine. The opening of the film sees Lang dedicating the movie to the “proud German people,” whom he himself would flee less than a decade later after an ominous meeting with Joseph Goebbels, which made it easy for Die Nibelungen to be trotted out at party meetings. 

This becomes the default means for examining any piece of German interbellum art, and it’s valid, but I’m not a sufficiently qualified historian to get into that extensively, and there’s already probably a decent amount of scholarship about that which you can find online (for now, anyway). What I do find interesting, if not surprising, is that the primary conflict of this text is so blatantly patriarchal. Brunhild is treated as a kind of villain here, but to a modern reader/viewer, she’s completely justified. Her unwilling marriage to Gunther makes her, for all practical purposes, a sex slave in a gilded castle, and Siegfried’s use of glamour and magic to deceive her into believing that Gunther has passed the challenges she created to maintain her dominion and anonymity means that, yes, Siegfried is an accessory to her rape. She has every right to demand his death, and Gunther’s, for that matter. Instead, within the narrative itself, she’s a vindictive woman whose manipulations cause her husband’s downfall. 

I’m going to go ahead and disregard authorial intent, which would have us agree that her line about “a kingdom brought down by a woman’s lie” is clearly meant to be taken at face value. I also have a feeling that Kriemhild’s revelation to Hagen about Siegfried’s weakness is also supposed to be more “a woman can bring a nation to ruin” reinforcement of sexist presuppositions. To some, Kriemhild is the Madonna whose naivete creates the possibility for Siegfried to be killed, and Brunhild the Whore whose lies lead to his death. I’m going to reject that paradigm and say that, as a text, Die Nibelungen makes it explicit that Gunther is the root cause of every conflict here, either because of his belief that he deserves Brunhild or because of his craven weakness as a monarch so easily misled by Hagen, who is the other villain of the piece. Helen didn’t start the Trojan War; Paris did. 

A five hour epic in two parts is a hard sell. In ten years, I have convinced fewer than a dozen people to check out Baahubali, and I only have to overcome people’s resistance to subtitles for that; for Die Nibelungen, I’m also fighting their resistance to silent film. And, it’s also entirely possible that the back of this filmic diptych will be awful and I’m setting them (and myself) up for disappointment. I’ll let you know once I’ve engaged with Kriemhild’s Revenge.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Demonwarp (1988)

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Most low-budget genre movies I tend to recommend on this blog make up for their lack of resources with an excess of style. I love a scrappy production that strives to impress its audience in every frame, distracting us from the shoddiness of the acting, sets, and props with an extravagance of over-the-top images & ideas. A major problem with those kinds of high-style, low budget oddities, though, is that the initial novelty can wear off in the first or second act, around the time when they’re done establishing a world or mood and have to start telling a compelling story within it, or else fall flat. In contrast, the 1988 creature feature Demonwarp flips that trajectory around, starting with a going-through-the-motions plot trudge in its first hour before attempting to wow its audience with over-the-top, go-for-broke novelty in its final act. It’s a major risk to operate that way, since most of the audience might doze off or wander away before they get to the goods, but for those too stoned to get off the couch and swap out the VHS tape for something more exciting, the movie leaves you on a high note. I guess in some ways it’s better to finish strong than to start strong, if it’s going to be an either/or choice.

Demonwarp is a bugnuts alien invasion movie hiding in plain sight as a mediocre sasquatch movie. A mysterious space egg crashes in the American woodlands in the opening scene, setting expectations for a far-out mutant creature feature. Instead, that opening leads to a lazy procession of sasquatch attacks, mostly thinning out the ranks of a college-age Reaganite polycule. Those young dolts have no discernible chemistry to speak of, as if they all just met minutes before camera arrived, despite the scripts’ insistence that they’re all longtime friends & lovers. The only saving grace in the cast is the movie star charisma of Academy Award winner (and Naked Gun alum) George Kennedy, who babysits the dopey duds as they’re all throttled to death one sasquatch attack after another. Then, the dwindling group of survivors arrive at the sasquatch’s hidden cave lair, and the movie suddenly decides to get interesting, throwing everything it can at the screen at the last minute to pass itself off as a latent cult classic: zombies, occultists, scorpion-tailed alien beasts, bare breasts, you name it. It’s your reward for putting up with the boring, going-through-the-motions presentation that precedes it, like sitting through a timeshare sales pitch for the “free” gift.

Before Demonwarp finally gets interesting in its final minutes, it at least has the decency to be laughably incoherent. It treats its woodland setting as a boundaryless otherworld with no spatial rules or logic. The edit constantly alternates between different factions of sasquatch victims fearfully running in arbitrary directions, with no clear sense of which group the monster is actively hunting. Occasionally, they’ll stop to trade half-hearted quips or take their tops off (with those duties rigidly assigned along gender lines), but for the most part they run and yell and ineffectually point guns in the sasquatch’s general direction. The only memorable paragraph of dialogue in the entire picture is a brief monologue in which George Kennedy explains the backstory of why he’s wearing a yellow hat. It’s all just barely entertaining enough to drain beers to with your closest buddies until it shifts gears in the final minutes, to the point where entering the sasquatch’s cave feels like entering an entirely different film. I almost feel bad for ruining the surprise that the sasquatch’s space-alien antics extend beyond the opening crash, but I also suspect most audiences wouldn’t make it to the end credits without dangling that proverbial carrot.

-Brandon Ledet

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

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There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later, they’re now both understood to be historic landmarks in the slasher subgenre, with little need to distinguish which arrived first. I’m sure the first couple body horrors of the 80s gore era were dismissed as shameless knockoffs by Cronenberg devotees, just as the found footage wave was first met with Blair Witchy skepticism and the giant-turtle creature feature Gamera was understood solely as a Godzilla copycat before there were other kaiju to compare it against. Likewise, when the killer-animatronics horrors Willys Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie were first released a few years ago, they were initially understood to be shameless knockoffs of the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series (albeit more successful movie adaptations of that series than its officially licensed ones). Since then, there have been enough Five Nights-riffing “What if the Chuck E. Cheese band tried to kill you?” variations that the subgenre has been legitimized with its own name: mascot horror. Write it down, commit it to memory; mascot horror is officially a thing.  There will likely be college courses about it at some point, so yes there will be a quiz.

Mere days after Casper Kelly’s “What if Barney was evil?” mascot horror Buddy screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I saw an online advertisement for the straight-to-Screambox “What if Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was evil?” mascot horror Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, signaling to me that this newly coined subgenre is having a real moment. If I weren’t aware of Five Nights at Freddy’s or the previously mentioned mascot horrors that beat it to the big screen, I might’ve mistaken Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round as a rushed-to-market mockbuster of Kelly’s Sundance-premiered oddity. They are remarkably similar in narrative structure and production design, framing their mascots-gone-wild horror stories within the rules & rhythms of vintage children’s TV shows. For its part, Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round starts as a direct parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with a kindly, sweatered TV host explaining simple concepts like mailboxes, welcome mats, and memories to the children at home. That last concept proves to be a sticking point for the poor TV host, who discovers that he has lost access to his own memories outisde the pocket universe where he’s stuck hanging out with sock-puppet animals on a fenced-in playground set made entirely out of cardboard. His chipper animal friends needle him about his lost memory in increasingly hostile, passive-aggressive ways until his concept of reality breaks down entirely, and he starts begging the audience through the camera to set him free from his play-pretend prison cell. Instead, his imaginary-friend playground adventure turns into a televised blood bath.

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round suffers a lot of the same structural issues as Casper Kelly’s Buddy. Both movies are at their most compelling in the earliest stretch when they play as uncanny parodies of vintage children’s TV shows that are just slightly, menacingly off. Once that hyperartificial reality is broken and the ultraviolence starts in earnest, they become much more conventional horror stories, testing the audience’s patience as they meander towards their inevitable, genre-mandated conclusions. Admittedly, the highs are higher in Buddy, while Mr. Monkey‘s lows are much, much lower, which makes for a no-brainer choice if you’re only going to watch one mascot horror this year and skip the other. If there’s anything that makes Mr. Monkey worth a look it’s in the extremity of its ultraviolence, featuring lengthy, torturous scenes of surgical gore as our semi-demented TV host is strapped down to the titular merry-go-round and tormented by the sock-puppet avatars of his own subconscious. Once the mood lighting shifts from bright & bubbly children’s show cartoonery to dingy torture porn grit & grime, the novelty appeal of the picture falls apart, and it starts to resemble the mascot-adjacent slashers of the public-domainsploitation “Poohniverse.” I very much preferred hanging out with the dead-eyed, cheery puppets in their children’s playhouse before it becomes an adult flayhouse, when the scares are centered on odd details like Mr. Monkey‘s dirty human fingernails instead of maniacal screaming & disembowelings, which you can find in pretty much any horror subgenre. The most illuminating thing about the picture overall was how it makes apparent just how ahead of the curve pro wrestler Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse gimmick was on the current “mascot horror” trend, not to mention the even earlier genre prototype in Wonder Showzen, which predates Five Nights at Freddy’s by a full decade. In that long mascot-horror continuum there isn’t much room for Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round to stand out as anything special in particular, but it’s at least a convenient bite-sized appetizer of what Buddy will offer once it hits theaters later this year.

-Brandon Ledet

Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)

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John Waters’s Desperate Living is, for all practical purposes, my favorite movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times — twice theatrically. This week, I learned something new about one of its most outrageous scenes: the babysitter on acid vignette. It’s a minutes-long gag wherein one of the citizens of Mortville explains that their expulsion from proper society resulted from brutally murdering their teenage babysitter, as retribution for cooking her baby in the oven while high on LSD (presumably mistaking it for a roast chicken or turkey). When I first saw this scene as a teen, I correctly assumed it was based on an urban legend, because its story was already familiar to me as a fan of the Lunachicks’ punk-rock novelty song “Babysitters on Acid,” which gives a full play-by-play of the same absurd scenario. While the “Baby-Roast” story did prove to be an urban legend after all, the recent documentary Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks added a new wrinkle to its pop-culture history by explaining that the band’s most recognizable song was directly inspired by that scene in Desperate Living, not by the legend itself. Curiously, Wikipedia cites the Lunachicks track as a retelling of the urban legend but omits any reference to John Waters’s film, instead referencing Rudy Ray Moore’s Disco Godfather (another personal high school favorite) as its most prominent cinematic depiction of note. This information is very important to me, specifically, but I doubt it means much to anyone else.

The question of “Does this mean anything to anyone?” constantly nags at the heart of Pretty Ugly. The original members of Lunachicks are all alive and eager to wax nostalgic about their punk-rock glory days, but they also seem a little baffled why anyone would want to listen. If anything, the project appears to be the result of peer pressure, collectively willed into existence by other recent documentaries of culturally dormant bands like DEVO, Pavement, Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Sparks, and Judas Priest. Pretty Ugly lays out a clear path that these revivals are supposed to take: a written biography, then some reunion concert dates, and then a documentary promoting & encapsulating the entire project. This band seems especially reluctant to go through any of it—especially the concert reunions—but they eventually drag their feet across the finish line anyway. As an artistic project, Lunachicks represents a moment that has passed, with each member moving on to adult jobs & responsibilities after spending the entirety of the 1990s touring & recording without ever fully “making it” on the same level as their peers. There’s something personally embarrassing about picking their instruments back up to play decades-old novelty songs about the junk food, junk movies, and junk TV they consumed as young snotty punks, no matter how loudly or how often they’re encouraged by loyal fans. They still eventually go through with it, though, because that’s what 90s nostalgia acts are now required to do under the law of mob rule.

Personally, I’m grateful for the result of that peer pressure campaign. Unlike the more famous bands referenced above, I never really knew much about Lunachicks despite owning every single album they released on CD. A lot of the revelations in this documentary are things I would’ve assumed just by looking at their still images in those CDs’ liner notes. Of course they were heavily inspired by John Waters movies; of course most of their interpersonal issues were the result of drug abuse; of course they never broke through to major-label success. However, a lot of my assumptions about their place in the punk-rock ecosystem were heavily distorted by the era when I caught up with them as a teen. By the time I first heard Lunachicks, they were making a modedty living on the Vans Warped Tour mall-punk circuit; what I didn’t know is that they had earned decades of NYC punk-scene bona fides long before that cultural moment, initially “discovered” & promoted by members of Sonic Youth before working as contemporaries of better-remembered acts like L7, Luscious Jackson, and The Go-Go’s. I had never seen footage of them playing to rowdy barroom crowds, provided in excess here via camcorder-quality VHS footage (but mercifully synced to the cleaner studio recordings of their most popular songs). They were, by every measure, a real band. They just never broke through to a wider audience the way their peers did, as most brutally illustrated here by having to trade opening-headliner slots with The Offspring on successive tours, after the lesser band won the war of the charts.

It’s difficult to not blame the entirety of the Lunachicks’ failure to break through to industry misogyny. As young, hip NYC brats with a professional fashion model for a lead singer (Theo Kogan), they were actively resistant to being sexualized in their art, choosing to purposefully ugly themselves up in Waters-inspired drag instead of playing pretty for the camera. I loved that about them as a teenager, but I can also see how that could limit their marketability — as opposed to, say, The Donnas, who eventually had to go full glam to earn a full paycheck. Even in the 2020s, the punk rock marketing machine is a little squeamish about fully promoting their act. The documentary opens with band members encountering a NYC subway ad featuring a vintage Lunachicks concert photo that has edited out the stage-makeup menstruate running down their legs in the original still, leaving only the image of hot girls playing guitar. That squeamishness says a lot in the context of the recent nontroversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s adoption of the 90s kinderwhore aesthetic, wherein she dresses in the babydoll gear once perverted by grunge-era acts like Hole & Babes in Toyland but doesn’t have the grit & grime to pull it off, so she just looks like an actual baby. Everyone wants to profit off the 90s rocker aesthetic but no one wants the 90s rocker attitude that comes with it, which apparently has been true since the Lunachicks were helping define that aesthetic in the 1990s, to little lasting acclaim.

At the same time, the Lunachicks’ missed opportunities as a great band that could’ve been are also somewhat a result of happenstance. They put in the work, producing five fun, rockin’ records packed with memorable hooks and genuinely funny lyrics. They toured relentlessly, living in vans & RVs for a decade solid while some of their peers were arbitrarily called up to millionaires’ lives touring in a megabus instead. In the long run, time has flattened out the difference; each of those 90s acts are assigned their own reunion tour and nostalgia doc regardless of their achieved level of fame, each cherished by loyal fans and forgotten to time by the rest of the masses. In a way, this band-validating documentary is the reward for all that work, something I’m sure every Lunachick would happily trade for a regular royalty check from an Offspring-level radio hit they never got to enjoy.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Turksploitation sci-fi parody Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973).

00:00 Welcome
02:37 Maisie Was a Lady (1941)
06:47 Ringside Maisie (1941)
10:56 Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)
15:32 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
18:58 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
20:15 The Man Who Laughs (1928)
25:11 Die Nibelungen (1924)
35:15 All Monsters Attack (1969)
38:53 Happiness (1998)
46:13 Chungking Express (1994)
50:05 Obsession (2026)
1:00:45 Blue Film (2026)
1:06:16 How to Make a Killing (2026)
1:11:10 Scream 7 (2026)
1:16:44 Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)
1:21:26 I Love Boosters (2026)
1:35:00 Is God Is (2026)
1:39:28 Backrooms (2026)

2:01:45 Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

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I Love Boosters (2026)

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I Love Boosters is many things. It’s a heist movie that takes a sharp left turn into science fiction territory. It’s a jeremiad about the life-destroying conditions of the sweat shops in which most of our clothing is manufactured. It’s a meditation on the material conditions of entry level retail work, and it’s a barely exaggerated take on C-suite self-aggrandization, and it’s a satire that takes the concept of “crisis actors” to an absurd extreme. It’s a parable about the way that consent is manufactured across multiple social tiers, and a slumber party movie for fashion girlies, and a call for unionization and collective action. It’s also a Scooby Doo cartoon where Keke Palmer peels out, legs cycling, as she tries to get her footing in a slanted room. What a delight! 

Corvette (Palmer) is the ringleader of a group of Bay Area “boosters,” people who steal merchandise, specifically quasi-high end retail fashion in this case, and resell it. She and friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) have been dubbed “The Velvet Gang” by the media, and their primary target is Metro Designers, a chain of shops owned and operated by fashion “genius” Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whom Corvette admires and despises in equal measure. Corvette has dreams of becoming a designer herself, and they’re not hampered by the fact that her current living conditions find her squatting in a defunct fast-food restaurant, although she’s beginning to lose hope. While casually fending off the flirtatious advances of an unnamed bargain fashion model (LaKeith Stanfield), Corvette also finds herself plagued with visions about a giant rolling ball of trash. When Corvette finds herself offered a job at Metro Designs by authoritarian store manager Grayson (Will Poulter) during an interview that’s only meant to be a distraction, the trio decides to infiltrate the store and clean it out completely. Then things go really sideways. 

Most of us can only wish we had half the imagination and vision that Boots Riley does. This movie is as vibrantly beautiful as it is chaotic and bizarre. At times, the entire frame is completely dominated by a single color, either through the use of saturation from red lights or because each Metro Designers location is monochromatic (as Christie says on the in-store displays, “If you want it in a different color, go to another location!”) on a monthly rotating basis. At other times, through their coordinated-to-clash outfits, the frame is filled with so many candy colors that once can’t help but be lost in the fantasia of it all. There is stop motion animation and there are car chases that appear to be done in Number Seventeen-esque miniature, alongside low-tech old school cinematic techniques like having a character shapeshift by having one performer sink out of frame while the other rises into it and having an entire set built at an angle to emulate a crooked building. The film is a feast for the eyes and an utter delight. 

Lest you think that the director of Sorry to Bother You has decided to make a film that’s all style and no substance, let me allay your fears. The film is entirely about the methods by which every individual is kept disenfranchised exist at every level, and it’s insidious everywhere it goes. Workers die from unsafe working conditions and CEOs respond to collective action with violence and retribution. Local “guru” Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle) is the head of a very successful “friends being friendly” con that is a literal pyramid scheme. Metro Designers employee Violeta (Eiza González)’s paycheck is less than $40, with Christie’s rotating monochromatic color scheme forcing the store clerks to update their workwear every month with the cost of their new outfits deducted from their pay. Christie’s office features a photo of her with Barack Obama next to the awards documenting her involvement with “Democracy Forge,” which sounds like the handle of blue check Twitter Lib and is just as sinister; this ultimately connects with the “man on the street” style interviews we see throughout the film with chyron-identified characters like Based Young Dude, Crying Black Mother, and Upstanding Community Member, but I won’t spoil the surprise of how. 

Just do yourself a favor, and see this one on the biggest screen you can. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Backrooms (2026)

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At last! A freshman feature from a filmmaker who made their bones on YouTube that I actually enjoyed! When I walked out of Obsession, I texted Brandon to let him know that, alas, I had hated it. He replied that this meant that “the Talk to Me curse has not lifted,” and I responded that I had loved Bring Her Back, and he astutely noted that this was a different thing: “That one’s elevated Grief Is The Monster horror; the other two are YouTube pranks for the children.” At long last, Backrooms feels like an appropriate synthesis of the two; it clearly takes inspiration from the recent horror trend of using monsters as metaphors but isn’t completely preoccupied with that conceit, while its use of jumpscares, muffled voices from distant rooms, and eerie imagery taken straight from internet creepypasta means it has an appeal for viewers of a younger generation. 

It’s June of 1990, and failed architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is living in his struggling furniture store after being kicked out of his house by his wife following a nasty, drunken argument. He’s seeing Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a therapist, about his drinking problems and his belief that he’s “wired” to be confrontational and unpleasant. In one session, they role play the night of the marriage-threatening argument, which reveals that Clark is resentful of having to manage Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire while his wife fumbles her way through law school. When an electrician is unable to find the source of issues that are causing the store’s bills to skyrocket, he and Clark discover a couple of extra switches haphazardly added to the store’s breaker box. Investigating the box again late one night, he finds an invisible portal through the wall of the store’s basement into a seemingly infinite series of fluorescent-lit, white-walled, beige-carpeted rooms. When he tries to tell Mary about this discovery, he can tell that she doesn’t believe him, so he sets out to get proof, enlisting store employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), who has access to recording equipment via his college. They enter the titular backrooms to document their discovery, only to find that they’re not alone down there. 

While having coffee with a friend recently, the topic of the upcoming X-Files reboot came up. We each agreed that it’s hard to imagine a functional version of that franchise in a post-9/11 world, specifically that the concept of mostly-for-fun conspiracy theories is difficult to play with in a world where fringe lunatics run our government. There already is a functional post-9/11 X-Files, and it’s called Fringe, and we briefly discussed what that meant on a level beyond the textual. Specifically, the strange and paranormal encounters that the various innocents on The X-Files always occur in remote areas: deep in the woods, out in the desert, or in vast fields of crops that seem to have no end. On Fringe, the horrible things that happen to people mostly occur in urban environments: diners, downtown Boston, and, fairly often, on airplanes. The safety of a metropolis is not a given after 9/11, and Fringe took that to a logical end. I thought about that a lot during Backrooms, specifically in how it managed to feel as fresh and new to me as The Blair Witch Project must have seemed in 1999, and that with time and distance, we no longer need to send Heather and her crew out to the woods to find something spooky. The backrooms are already here, in urban environments that contain them and camouflage them to the naked eye. You can make sure you never encounter the Blair Witch by making sure that you avoid her forest; but you might wander into the backrooms completely unaware, which is more immediate and spookier. 

I’m not really that into the current state of creepypasta. Jenny Nicholson made a Patreon video last year in which she effectively delineated something that had occurred to me conceptually but hadn’t put into words: things are usually creepier the less defined they are, and because creepypasta and SCP appeal to a very specific kind of online nerd, what used to be a story about some evil, inexplicable stairs in a state park or a basketball that caused psychic nosebleeds started to get more and more lore, to the point that the premise of the object or place becomes more important than the mystery. The concept of liminal spaces has become a matter of no small niche internet interest in recent years, as the prevalence of computer imagery rendering software has given rise to the ability to easily make creepy, Escherian office spaces for internet consumption. (I also think that there’s an argument to be made that omnipresent GPS mapping has made people generally less able to orient themselves without outside assistance, which makes labyrinthine spaces more frightening to people who have poor directional sense.)That influence has already leaked into the film world at large, as it inspired the creator of the game on which Exit 8 was based, and that’s what director Kane Parsons has been up to online. The film’s opening sequence appears to have been made entirely in Blender, and even though that means that some of the seams show through (there’s an audiocassette on a desk that’s as thin as a 3.5 inch floppy disk), it’s still effective. 

For a film set in the nineties, the fact that this was made by a director who’s only just barely able to legally drink means that it eschews a lot of the nostalgia factor that one would expect to be a huge part of a film set decades earlier. Artifacts of the time period are limited to the use of a camcorder for the documentation of the backrooms themselves, inexpensively produced local commercials, and self-help audiocassettes, and the only direct nostalgia bait is that we find a mysterious researcher at home with his family watching The Neverending Story on TV (the finale also features audio lifted directly from Star Trek IV, but I don’t think that will be noticed by many). The VHS camcorder quality of the found footage style segments of the film is extremely well done and effective at creating a feeling of the nineties without needing to rely on cheap “I remember that!” moments. After several years of nostalgia-poisoned period pieces like Stranger Things, this is a welcome relief. 

The performances here are very strong as well. One would think that a young director would take an easier route and focus his storytelling on characters closer to his own age, but either he or screenwriter Will Soodik made the wise choice to instead focus the film on characters of a more mature age. Ejiofor and Reinsve are two extremely competent performers, with multiple Oscar and BAFTA nominations between them, and there are several powerful scenes between the two of them that have no bearing on the eldritch location in Clark’s store at all. Reinsve’s Mary is haunted by a childhood raised by a mother who slowly lost her battle with schizophrenia, and Ejiofor’s Clark is a man whose psychology leads him to deflect all blame for his life and circumstances onto others. The latter of these two is a little weaker than the other; we only get Clark’s side of the story, but if he gave up his career for something more stable in order to support his wife through an extended education, and she really did quit for no real reason and still isn’t working, his resentment isn’t entirely unfounded. Still, whether one feels that Clark is an awful man before the backrooms start to exert their influence over him or if it’s only their evil that pushes him to a point where we can no longer sympathize, Ejiofor manages to play it well. Still, neither of these past griefs is so predominant in the film’s narrative that this feels like a retread of similar elevated horrors of recent years. The backrooms recreate things that it “remembers,” with each recreation becoming less and less like the thing that it’s supposed to represent, and in that way it’s like the imperfection of memory, but this works perfectly well as a variation on a haunted house as conceived in a digital age without needing to use “the apparition is a metaphor” as a crutch. 

This is probably the best straightforward horror that I’ve seen so far this year. It’s creepy, effective, disorienting, well-directed, and nicely acted. Finally!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ramekin (2018)

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The abundance of praise for Obsession is making me feel like I’m losing my mind. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it, well, obsessively. Was I, as my friend Jeb has suggested, simply in the wrong mood when I saw it? Am I simply getting too old and out of touch with, as Brandon has suggested to me, youthful prankster horror? I feel like it was fine, but I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and gore-heavy shockers before, so I don’t understand how anyone can figure this is the best movie of the year. To me, the extremely high Letterboxd reviews tell a story not about the film’s overall quality but about the filmmaker’s popularity with an online generation. 

Perhaps the greatest signifier that I may simply be losing my grip on what makes a movie good or bad is what a great time I had with $0 budget indie Ramekin, a 70-minute single location horror thriller with a main cast of three unknown actors that’s currently floating around on Tubi. College student Emily (Jamie Saunders) is living in an awful sublet situation when she gets a call from her mother letting her know that her reclusive grandmother on the other side of NYC has died. Emily takes up residence in her late grandmother’s home and becomes immediately fascinated with a very normal looking ramekin, which then starts to appear in random parts of the apartment. Emily comes to realize there’s something supernatural going on when she is physically unable to throw the thing out of a window, and when it prevents her from leaving. The two manage to communicate somewhat via Emily’s questions and the ramekin’s slight movements, which eventually leads to an altercation over the ramekin’s insistence on watching the shy, self-conscious Emily shower. As an apology, the ramekin begins to offer her gifts in the form of cupcakes and cash which it manifests within itself, and plays music for her, all of which allow the ramekin to slowly infiltrate her mind. 

Under the ramekin’s influence, Emily devotes all of her time to composing poetry, most of it containing violent imagery about blood and death. In fugue states, she holds a knife to her own throat and destroys upholstery. She also becomes utterly narcissistic, continuously praising her beauty, her body, and her creative work. This leads to a schism between her and her best friend, a lovely but dim-witted girl named Jane (Renee Adrienne Vito) who speaks with a Valley Girl’s vernacular. At the same time, Emily befriends Mark (Adriano La Rocca), the neighbor who had previously brought Emily’s grandmother her mail and took out her trash for her, who somehow overlooks all of Emily’s strange behaviors because of his interest in her. When Emily finally goes too far, Mark breaks off contact, but is lured back inside for a final visit, during which Emily kills him, pouring his blood into the ramekin, which seems to drink it. Things only get stranger from there. 

Ramekin is an odd duck. 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 what makes it so strange. Even at seventy minutes, it threatens to get repetitive at times, especially in the sequence in which Emily continuously moves the ramekin to the dish drying rack only for it to reappear on the kitchen table; despite this, I never grew bored with it. I can only assume that the ramekin itself was moved around with magnets, and all of its other special abilities, like manifesting money and sweets, occur between cuts. I can see this easily being a film that other people will find boring or dull, but the performances by its nonprofessional actors are utterly compelling. I love that the actor portraying Mark has bad skin, and that I can’t tell if Jane’s overreliance on “like” as a placeholder word is a scripting choice or just something that came from the performer. Jamie Saunders is tasked with carrying this entire narrative with only an Ikea dish as her scene partner, and she manages to do it with aplomb. The jokes here land, and although one is never truly frightened by the ramekin, it’s still effectively creepy when it needs to be. My only real problem with the film overall is that it ends with an “all just a dream” fakeout, which I think was unnecessary. Just let it end on the bummer ending! I feel completely alone in my apathetic-to-negative reaction to Obsession, but if you’re like me, you may find more to love in this genuinely original oddball cheapie about obsessive behavior.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Sheep Detectives (2026)

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I had zero interest in seeing The Sheep Detectives. Any film that advertises itself as being “from the director of Minions and Despicable Me 3” knows that it is both reaching out to its intended audience as well as forewarning those, like me, who are not part of that number. I also don’t normally bother with family films; I have no children and know almost none, but I got to meet my partner’s family last weekend and, since our choices were either Obsession, Passenger, or The Sheep Detectives, we packed into two cars and drove to the AMC in Deerfield, Illinois (birthplace of Kitty Pryde!) to watch Hugh Jackman get murdered, in a PG way. 

George Hardy (Jackman) is a vegetarian shepherd who is adored by his flock and either ignored or disliked by most of the human residents of the village of Denbrook. He has a deep and abiding dislike for both butcher Ham Gilyard (who, for his part, says he can tolerate vegetarianism in women but finds it distasteful in men) and a fellow shepherd named Caleb (Tosin Cole) who leases meadowland from George. There’s also some amount of friction between him and local innkeeper Beth (Hong Chau) and Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), although the nature of their beef is part of the mystery. His flock, however, adores him as their caregiver. Notable members of the herd include a mysterious recent addition named Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) with a dark and troubled past, the elderly and stentorious contagious ecthyma sufferer Sir Richfield (Patrick Stewart), the beautiful diva Cloud (Regina Hall), and oddball Mopple (Chris O’Dowd). George’s pride and joy, however, is Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), who is named for George’s late wife and who is, by the other sheep’s reckoning, the smartest sheep in the world. After all, she’s the only one who always figures out who the killer is in the mystery novels that George reads to the flock nightly. 

Shortly after the arrival of Elliott Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), an obituary reporter who has come to Denbrook to cover their “heritage festival” only to discover it consists of three folding tables behind the inn, George is murdered. Local constable Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) is a clumsy oaf who has little hope of solving the killing and enlists Elliott to assist him. Further complicating matters is the arrival of George’s fancy lawyer Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), who reveals that George’s home-brewed remedy for contagious ecthyma has been sold to a major farm pharmaceutical company, and that she has brought George’s long-lost daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon) to Denbrook for the reading of the will. 

When I texted Brandon about the film, he mentioned that he had seen it reviewed elsewhere as “Knives Out meets Babe,” and I’ve seen it referred to that way in other places as well. That’s fairly accurate, but what’s most striking about the film is the way that it handles the internal lives of the sheep who make up most of its cast. They have a cosmological theology, namely that they believe sheep eventually turn into clouds at the end of their lives, the same clouds which rain down and nourish the grass of future generations. They also have the ability to willfully forget any information which bothers them or gives them anxiety, which means that even though Lily herself witnessed the death of her parents, she has Men in Blacked herself into hanging onto her beliefs. Only Mopple, who is treated as somewhat disabled by the other sheep for his inability to intentionally forget, understands the reality of the world, and has to bear this alone. This also means that the sheep have no real concept of “death,” thinking of murder as a literary device only, not something that could happen to their beloved shepherd. And, instinctively, they reject a lamb born in the winter rather than the spring (a behavior of real sheep) for being “wrong” in ways that they never articulate and probably couldn’t if they tried. 

It’s all fascinating stuff, but given that this is a family feature, it’s only explored insofar as it relates to the main mystery. Although there were a couple of scenes that were frightening for our nine-year-old viewing companion (most notably a fight between some frightening guard dogs and Sebastian), this is a movie where the biggest clue to the murderer’s identity requires no more sophisticated knowledge than blue + yellow = green. It’s the kind of film that you see and think to yourself that now you know what you should watch with your parents the next time you can’t agree on something during the holidays. I’m a huge fan of cozy mysteries, but the actual mystery here is on par with a slightly below average episode of Murder, She Wrote, succeeding mostly in getting into the alien minds of the sheep characters more than it does as a whodunnit. Still, there’s a place in this world for films like this, and if this sounds like something you’d like, you probably will. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond