La bola negra (trans. “the black ball”) is an unfinished play by Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Only four pages exist, which tell the story of a young man whose application to a prestigious casino in Granada is rejected, and who tells his father that his rejection was due to allegations of homosexual conduct. This year’s film of the same title imagines that the play is not unfinished, but merely partially lost, and weaves together three narratives across nearly a century of time in order to tell the rest of that story.
In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) is rejected by the casino, literally blackballed as they use a system of voting using white and onyx spheres. In 1937, Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) is a young trumpeter whose village is ready to welcome the Fascist forces of Mussolini (who is supporting the Nationalist rebels against the Republican forces), only for the Italian planes to open fire and kill most of the villagers. He escapes and is enlisted in the Spanish Nationalist forces, where he is tasked with guarding a prisoner of war, a Republican lieutenant colonel named Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau). Sebastián becomes enamored of the man, whom he learns was a footballer and actor in his younger days. Finally, in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a lapsed playwright who has become a historian, is searching for musical recordings that predate the Spanish Civil War in the hopes of recovering a buried and forgotten queer history. When he is contacted by the estate of a grandfather he has presumed long dead, his mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas), a troubled addict, tells him not to collect his inheritance. Albert chooses to go, and comes into possession of a manuscript that has been presumed lost for decades.
La bola negra is a majestic, sweeping, beautiful film. Carlos’s story is one that is haunted by gorgeous, surreal imagery that’s counterposed against the reality of closeted living in 1930s Granada, in both its dangers and its beauties. Carlos’s dreams are for him alone and are packed with beauty while his waking life is lived for others and is filled with monsters ready to leap out of cruisy alleyways to waylay him and call him back to heteronormativity. When the grandeur of his dreams breaks through into reality, he has a choice, and we learn only in the very end which one he makes, and whether it was the right one or not. Sebastián’s narrative is much more straightforward, and even more sorrowful; his mother dies, everyone he knows dies, he’s conscripted into an army fighting an ideological war that he wishes to have no stake in, and he falls in love with a prisoner that he knows he may one day be forced to execute. There’s beauty in the little moments that he can sneak, but it’s fleeting. The carnage of the war called to mind several sequences from On the Silver Globe (there’s one tracking shot that is composed almost identically, although I can’t be certain that this was a direct inspiration or simply a matter of great minds thinking alike) as well as Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, and it’s breathtaking.
Alberto’s story is smaller, more personal, and has the least bombast, but it would have to, as it is the one that is closest to us and thus most familiar. His attempts to make space in his life for his mother despite her abusive, erratic behavior are balanced by his supporting relationship with his partner Juan Pablo (Julio Torres). That ability to openly love and be loved is one of the defining differences between Alberto and the protagonists of the 1930s narratives. We get to see everyone’s mothers; Carlos’s is fretful but loving, minimally present in comparison to her daughter, whose struggles against the social restrictions of her gender mirror Carlos’s own inability to fully actualize; Sebastián’s mother is killed before we can learn anything about her, but her affection for her son is real; Alberto gets the benefit of being open, but he does not get to feel a mother’s unconditional love. The way that these narratives interweave with one another and serve as thematic and narrative bridges is something that I don’t want to reveal this early in the film’s run, as that pleasant feeling of everything falling into place is one that I enjoy and would like to preserve for others. It’s a satisfying reveal, and one that ultimately elevates the whole. You won’t want to miss it.
It’s really important to catch Laika movies in theaters — not so much to experience their innovative stop-motion artistry on the big screen or to financially support the brand, but because the trailers always remind you of how much less obnoxious they are than most other children’s movies on the market. The loud, sugar-addled trailers for upcoming Disney, Dreamworks, and Illumination titles that played before my local AMC screening of Wildwood were deeply depressing, a stark reminder of just how dire most kid-friendly corporate content is. In contrast, the dark mood, complex emotions, and visual majesty of the feature presentation was even more impressive, making it clear just how vital Travis Knight’s Nike-funded vanity project is on the modern animation landscape. Still, there were moments of Wildwood where the studio’s animation technique was so smoothly, competently achieved that it was near-indistinguishable from what its CG-animated competitors are peddling. As the modern stop-motion heavyweights, Laika & Aardman have both perfected the artform to the point where imperfections have to be artificially reinserted into the work to give it the handmade feel of stop-motion’s past. It’s wonderful that a modern movie studio is still making aesthetically beautiful animation for young audiences, but is it possible that it’s become too beautiful?
That’s at least a question I asked myself while watching the rougher-edged, lower-budget monster mash I Am Frankelda at home the same day I watched Wildwood in theaters. The straight-to-Netflix indie production has been advertised as Mexico’s first fully stop-motion animated feature film, one that’s been quietly received in the US but was popular enough elsewhere to serve as the prequel for a Cartoon Network Latin America TV series. Fraternal directors Arturo & Roy Ambriz seemingly deployed the same 3D printing technique that make Laika & Aardman productions so machine-perfect, but they’re working with a much smaller, scrappier crew than those two towering studios’, and it shows in the stilted, misshapen details of the work. And yet, the constant onscreen reminders that I Am Frankelda was made by human hands imbues it with a genuine, poetic magic that’s somewhat lost in larger productions like Wildwood. A lot of stop-motion’s charm is in the ordinariness & tactility of its creation, and the Ambriz bothers’ indie studio Cinema Fantasma is still intimate & hands-on enough to carry that charm from figurines to screen. It’s possible that the tie-in TV series Frankelda’s Book of Spooks will gradually become so popular that their production scale will eventually escalate to match Laika’s, and that tactile charm will be lost to time, but for now they’re operating in a perfect artistic sweet spot.
Besides their shared stop-motion medium, Frankelda & Wildwood are also linked as dark children’s fantasy stories about scary bird-people. In I Am Frankelda‘s case, those talking bird-creatures live underground, which feels somewhat counterintuitive as a limitation to their flight. To be specific, they are winged demons, connected to the humans aboveground in 19th Century Mexico through the power of literature. They are the monsters under our beds, an underground class of magical creatures who inspire humanity’s fears that we, in turn, translate into art. The titular Frankelda is the one artist who manages to physically access their demonic underworld, at first translating the fears the demons inspire into a storybook but eventually joining them in a supernatural hostage crisis she can’t fully escape. The resulting movie-musical struggle between human & monsterkind is the kind of mall-goth fantasia that Tim Burton & Guillermo del Toro dream about when they close their eyes at night, populated with a wide range of beautifully hideous monster puppets slathered in glow-in-the-dark paint. Like Wildwood, it’s a children’s adventure into a dark fantasy world, but its dream-logic rules of how fiction is “more real than reality” allows its imagination to stray as far into that demonic wilderness as the Ambriz brothers’ 3D printer can possibly go.
Another way that Frankelda resembles Wildwood is that it is overlong by a third. The TV series it sets up, Frankelda’s Book of Spooks, follows a Tales from the Crypt-style anthology format, in which Frankelda introduces 15-minute horror stories about misbehaved or cowardly children who need to be scared by monsters to learn a life lesson. Most episodes open & close with Frankelda playing Crypt Keeper, but in the finale her own childhood story of how she came to be trapped in the demonic underworld is told in fifteen concise minutes. This prequel film retells that exact story, recycling some of the exact imagery from the episode, at a 100-minute sprawl, which allows its internal lore a little too much space to get tangled up in its own convolutions. We learn very quickly that Frankelda is being held hostage specifically because the demons below are running out of good ideas for inspiring nightmares in the increasingly jaded youth of “today” (give or take a century or two), and so she’s stuck in their nightmare realm as an unpaid staff writer for all of eternity, or at least until Cinema Fantasma can’t earn any more outside funding. Without the anthology vignettes to break up that origin story at regular intervals, the movie version of Frankelda’s own morbid tale gets a little exhausting by its final stretch, especially once you’ve already met all the multi-eyed demons in her supporting cast of freaks.
It’s unclear what Frankelda‘s future will be. The first & only season of the show aired five years ago, and this subsequent prequel movie made such a quiet splash on Netflix that it’s unlikely to justify international distribution for another follow-up. The anthology format of the series means that the Ambriz brothers can continue telling Frankelda stories forever if they can find an outlet for it, though, and it’s got an Over the Garden Wall quality to it that makes it perfect Halloween Season ritual viewing in its brevity & rewatchability. My hope is that, like Over the Garden Wall, it’ll eventually earn enough of a cult following to make Cinema Fantasma as much of an animation-nerd household name as Laika & Aardman—if not only as their weirdo goth-kid little brother—and Frankelda’s demonic hostage crisis will continue on for all of eternity, alongside other stop-motion tales of the macabre.
Usually, whenever I’m confronted by an image that could be categorized as “furry art”, I immediately scroll past it and move on with my day, since it’s clearly not for me. Most furry art is seemingly designed to appeal to one of two audiences: adults who find anthropomorphized animals intensely erotic or, counterintuitively, young children — whose cartoon adventure comedies are often animated by adults who find anthropomorphized animals intensely erotic. Furry art is a closed loop. Even when it leaks out into mainstream productions like Zootopia, Bad Guys, and Forgotten Island, its talking anthro-animals always find their way back to horndog internet subdungeons like DeviantArt, returning to their primary audience’s busy hands. The computer-animated memoir Bouchra deviates from that closed-loop system to appeal to anyone who might be interested in broader-appeal artforms like personal essays, queer familial dramas, or independent filmmaking, regardless of whether they’re turned on by fursona character designs. It’s refreshing to finally be confronted with furry art that aims to make its audience feel other emotions besides Horny.
Obviously, Bouchra occasionally aims to make its audience feel Horny too; that’s unavoidable. It’s a low-key indie drama about struggling artists living in New York City, and just like any other movie in that category, those hip, young characters occasionally have sex onscreen. It’s just unusual for the sex to be performed between predator & prey-type fursonas animated through the video game engine Blender. As a personal memoir about a documentarian’s difficulties adjusting to queer city life while maintaining a healthy relationship with her conservative parents back home, there’s nothing especially flashy or novel about Bouchra‘s scene-to-scene drama. However, that lesbian filmmaker being represented onscreen as a CGI jackal who occasionally strips down to lick the scruff & thighs of the cows & other prey in her life does add some specificity to the project that distinguishes it from other confessional debut features of the same ilk. The CG animation itself can be outright beautiful too, with more attention paid to blocking and light sources than most modern animation bothers with while appealing to sugar-addled children. The smoke trailing from a character’s post-coital cigarette in a stream of liquid CG glitter is so beautiful that it’s easy to forget you’re watching a talking animal inhale it. These are real, fully fleshed out characters who love, fight, fret, and fuck just like anyone else . . . give or take some major anatomical details.
The drama is convincingly personal & heartfelt too. Our main jackal, Bouchra, finds herself unexpectedly homesick for Morocco while struggling to root herself in her new life as a up-and-coming NYC filmmaker. Her relationship with her mother remains close and openly communicative despite the geographical distance, with the devastating exception that her mother refuses to acknowledge her lesbian identity. Bouchra is working on an autofictional memoir as a way of dealing with that fractured family dynamic, which she uses as an excuse to interview her mother by phone about her decade-old coming out letter that otherwise remains undiscussed by the two jackal-women. Reality & fiction intertwine as their relationship and the fictional movie about their relationship play out simultaneously, alternating between NYC & Casablanca in a purposefully disorienting continuity. First-time filmmaker Meriem Bennani also deliberately confuses the details of her personal life with this autofictional narrative, voicing Bouchra herself as an invitation to read that character as her very own fursona avatar. In doing so, she’s found a way to express the broad queer-culture theme of frustration with family’s refusal to engage with the details of your romantic life in a way that feels both specific to her own life’s circumstances and convincingly translated into honest artistic expression.
A major reason I’m comfortable classifying Bouchra as furry art (beyond defining it by the “I know it when I see it” pornographic metric) that when we watch the jackal-documentarian storyboard her own life’s story on index cards, they’re sketched out in an unmistakably furry art style — complete with prurient yiffing detail. If we’re meant to see Bouchra as Bennani’s avatar, that inclusion is an essential insight into her creative process (alongside co-director Orian Barki, who voices her talking-lizard bestie). Those storyboard index cards, as highlighted in slideshow montage, contextualize Bouchra as an authentic art piece from a filmmaker who primarily sees the world through predator-prey fursona dynamics, having been raised in an Internet subculture with its own closed-loop logic & visual language. I haven’t personally engaged with enough furry art to claim that it’s the first major artistic work achieved within that closed loop, but it does feel like the first major title to fully escape containment and stand out on its own artistic, dramatic merits beyond its occasional erotic appeal.
Welcome to Episode #277 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movies about obsessed fans, starting with the West German pop-idol thriller Der Fan (1982).
00:00 Welcome 02:10 As Above, So Below (2014) 11:14 The Abduction (1996) 14:47 Haunted (1995) 20:26 Get Him to the Greek (2010) 29:35 Bouchra (2026)
38:11 Der Fan (1982) 57:58 Play Misty for Me (1971) 1:15:51 The Fan (1996) 1:34:25 All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001)
As we were walking to the car after our viewing of Clayface last night, my viewing companions and I were discussing the movie, and I mentioned how much it reminded me of Sam Raimi’s Darkman. As I described the 1990 film—a scientist experimenting with generating synthetic skin for burn victims is brutalized and left for dead by some mobsters, then enacts his revenge by using his experimental discoveries to get close to his victims by disguising himself as other people—my companion said, “Oh, so it’s the exact same.” And yeah, kind of. Clayface doesn’t have the same dark sense of humor, the lead character’s descent into madness is neither as successful or excitingly depicted, and it’s also a distractingly ugly movie. Darkman doesn’t have a poorly considered element of the protagonist being falsely accused of sexual assault, and the love interest in Clayface is the scientist this time around while the disfigured antivillain is an actor, but otherwise the changes are, if you’ll forgive the term, mostly cosmetic.
Matt Hagen (Thom Rhys Harries) is an actor on the rise, having come from humble beginnings in the Gotham City neighborhood known as The Narrows and risen to Hollywood stardom. On the day that he learns that he’s been nominated for an Oscar, he goes out clubbing with childhood friend Corey (Joshua James), who tries to warn him that he’s dancing with a mobster’s girlfriend. Matt ignores this and spends the night with the woman, only to wake up and get his face sliced to pieces by Markos Szabo (David Dencik)’s goons. Several costly and ineffective reconstruction surgeries later, not only has Szabo’s untouchable made man status and smear campaign (including having his moll claim that Matt drugged her) resulted in Gotham failing to prosecute criminally but also ensured Matt’s civil case is likewise dismissed. Bled dry by some bad investments on the part of his business manager Frank (Eddie Marsan), to whom Matt gave power of attorney, Matt crawls back to the roach-infested hole from which he thought he had escaped. Hope comes in the form of Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), whose research into nanotechnology may hold the key to fixing Matt’s facial scarring and help him get his life back. All the while, her fiancé John Borelli (Max Minghella), the one good cop in all of Gotham City, continues to investigate Matt’s disfigurement.
There are moments in Clayface that sing. The sequence near the end in which Matt manages to get inside of Szabo’s club and then proceeds to wipe the floor with his men because of his shapeshifting abilities is genuinely fun and exciting. It’s not a big CGI extravaganza where he overcomes with brute strength but is in a seemingly real environment full of actors and extras, and the shapeshifting cost-saving measure of having Matt transform as some object passes between him and the camera gives the whole thing a Twilight Zone flair that’s rather effective. This has been touted as a body horror film, and there’s enough of that to go around as well. The actual attack on Matt is harrowing, the goopification of his face is successful even when it’s computer generated, and the ways that he murders the recipients of his vengeance through various different applications of his newfound abilities is sufficiently gross and never gets boring. When prosthetics are in use, they’re also quite good; the scene of Matt having to cut through his own flesh during a bumpy plane ride to prevent his eyes from sealing shut has been in every preview, but it’s still effective in the final cut. It’s quite reminiscent of the Fringe episode “Ability,” which makes me wonder if screenwriter Mike Flanagan is as big a fan of that show as he is of Battlestar Galactica, as his recent casting of several BSG alums on Carrie demonstrated. There’s also a bizarre and erotically charged scene in which Caitlyn is studying Matt while he sleeps, only for him to partially morph into her and touch himself-as-her with his still-masculine hands. If nothing else, this one is at least a little “for the freaks.”
There are also moments that fall flat. The narrative choice to have Mia (Joana Ribeiro) accuse Matt of drugging and assaulting her is a strange one; the only excuse for it is that, once Matt’s face seems to have healed, he’s welcomed back onto the red carpet with nary a moment’s hesitation, which may have been intended as a commentary on how quick the media machine is to forgive men who are credibly accused (or convicted) of abuse. If that was the intent, it’s barely legible. The narrative journey of Matt’s supposed best friend Corey reads as an attempt at deepening the sense of betrayal that Matt feels when he realizes just how few people could actually rely upon and drive him further into an obsessive dependency upon Caitlyn to be friend, physician, confidante, and more. Unfortunately, the overall flat characterization of Corey and his glossed-over unlikely path to success in the wake of Matt’s fall means that everything having to do with this character feels forced and unnatural.
Having highlighted the good and the questionable, all that’s left to us is what doesn’t work, and there is, unfortunately, quite a bit of that. First and foremost, this is an ugly movie. I don’t want to keep comparing Clayface to Darkman, but there’s a quality to the grime and the gritty noir feeling in Raimi’s film that is not even attempted in James Watkins’s vision for Clayface. The interior sets range from decent (Matt’s awful Narrows apartment) to great (Szabo’s club), but every single outdoor shot looks like hot garbage. The presumably CGI backdrops look like something straight out of an early 2010s Syfy Channel show, and even if you try to ignore that your attention is constantly being drawn back to them by an overabundance of lens flare activity that makes JJ Abrams seem restrained. I rewatched the trailer for Darkman and although it has its fair share of special effect failure, you can tell that some thought and planning went into, for instance, the helicopter crash sequence. In night shots, Gotham City looks like Megalopolis, and it’s just awful. The romance here is also nothing to really write home about; Caitlyn’s fiancé is less a character and more of an afterthought. I did appreciate that the film had her be very resistant to Matt’s charms, but given where the narrative goes, it ends up having no real stakes.
I was not impressed with director Watkins’ Eden Lake, albeit for different reasons than my ultimately lukewarm feelings about Clayface, and I was subjected to the trailer for Speak No Evil for so many months that I refused to see it on principle. This is both a better and worse film than Eden Lake; that was an extended exercise in misery that was very much a product of its time: reactionary paranoia-mongering about dangerous youths as an excuse for extended misery with nothing substantive to say. This film is different; it’s at least trying to break out of the “low-budget movie about a B-list comic book villain” box by showcasing gross body horror and giving us no one to really root for. But the next time I feel a hankering for something like this, I’ll probably just watch Darkman instead.
FYC screener season is well under way, as critics and guild members are starting to draft ballots for their respective Best of 2026 awards rituals as part of the year-long movie-marketing cycle that never truly ends. Depending on what titles you afford your thinly-stretched attention, that can mean spending the last few months of 2026 watching overlong, overly dour festival-circuit dramas in a desperate effort to catch up with the year’s pre-ordained Important Movies, which are typically held back until the last minute before votes are due. A more relaxed approach could be to just coast through FYC season watching middlebrow crowdpleasers starring always-welcome celebrities you already know & love, playing dress-up & make-believe for easy layup accolades. This year, for instance, has seen prominent awards-seeking runs for John Malkovich in Wild Horse Nine, playing a too-old-for-this-shit wisecracking criminal in a 70s throwback acting vehicle, and John Turturro doing the exact same in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. I’d also like to offer, for your consideration, the unassuming crowd pleaser Tuner, featuring a prominent supporting role for Dustin Hoffman as a too-old-for-this-shit wisecracker in yet another 70s throwback crime-drama acting showcase. Tuner was released back in May to strong critical marks and relatively quiet fanfare among wide audiences, and it’s now resurfacing to seek potential placements on Best of 2026 ballots in the season where it truly belongs: the time of year when we endlessly discuss & promote movies people otherwise only engage with on the backs of airplane headrests.
If anything, Tuner acts as a symbolic passing of the torch from one generation’s always-welcome celebrity actor to the next. Dustin Hoffman’s role as an overly chatty piano tuner with a vaguely shady past and a heart of tarnished gold only accounts for a few minutes’ screentime, which he mostly spends in a hospital bed cheering on his young costar from the sidelines. The fresh-faced Leo Woodall is the Tuner of the title, a talented pianist whose career in music has been sidelined by a hearing disability that makes him overly sensitive to loud noises, relegating his perfect-pitch ear to the more humble craft of tuning dust-gathering pianos for the wealthy, jaded citizens of New York City. By happenstance, he also learns that his overly sensitive hearing also makes him perfectly skilled for cracking safes, which gets him in quick trouble as he scrambles to pay for his aging mentor’s out-of-control medical bills. Woodall mostly plays the titular safecracking piano tuner as a kind of gentle giant, a sensitive soul who’s constantly mumbling “Sorry” as he bumps into things despite his jockish, muscular physique. However, as the pressures of his duty to Hoffman’s mentor figure, his gradual integration into an underground crime world, and his burgeoning romance with a career-hungry composer (Havana Rose Liu) bring him to an uncontrolled boil, he becomes genuinely dangerous in his volatility. If he’s not capable of physical violence, he’s at least at risk of committing emotional violence against his precious few loved ones, especially as the constant, blaring sounds of NYC rattle his practiced sense of laidback cool.
Why does this safecracking piano tuner continue to live in New York City anyway? When explaining his extreme hearing sensitivity to his new girlfriend, he says, “You’d be surprised how loud the world is.” That’s doubly true for New Yorkers, though, especially the ones unlucky enough to drive a work van down city streets from job to job to make ends meet. Tuner is not nearly as interested in plausibility as it is in recreating a vintage 70s crime thriller vibe in its jazzy score, its character-actor quirks, and its whip-pan camera maneuvers. Director Daniel Roher is fighting an uphill battle on that front, since he’s shooting this big-city crime story on modern digital cameras instead of relying on the throwback celluloid grain of a Safdies-style production to sell its retro cool to the audience. As Woodall learns how to crack safes via YouTube tutorials, finds himself walking through security camera footage, and has to beg his fellow boneheaded criminals to turn down the volume on their video games & TikToks, the movie does gradually justify its flat digital patina, but if any modern thriller was begging for the shot-on-film treatment, it’s this one. Still, it establishes a relatively cool, laidback heist thriller vibe with some surprising visual choices in how to represent its routine safecracking sequences so they never become stale: fetishistic close-up details of the inner locks clicking into place, fish-eye views of the thieves from the safe dial’s POV, rapid-fire clicks & edits as the piano tuner hops from one rich prick’s safe to the next. It’s fun, it’s freewheeling, and when our handsome lead gets into legitimate trouble, it’s effectively thrilling in its brutality.
If there’s anything inadvisable about Dustin Hoffman’s deployment as Tuner’s celebrity mascot, it’s that his presence does recall the once celebrated, now disgraced autism drama Rain Man, especially in sequences where Woodall is tasked to recognize complex musical notes & patterns with near-supernatural accuracy. Otherwise, Hoffman’s perfectly suited for the task of affording the film some vintage New Hollywood authenticity as a 70s-era throwback and, more importantly, making sure it lingers in the discourse past its theatrical run, as his name inevitably will find its way onto a few Best Supporting Acting ballots in the next couple months. This is the one time of year that Dad Movies, Airplane Movies, and other solidly entertaining Middlebrow Crowdpleasers are treated as Important Cinema before they’re shuffled off to basic-cable rotation or forgotten to time entirely. It’s Hoffman’s performance that sneaks Tuner into that conversation, and it’s Woodall’s preposterous journey as history’s most musically talented safecracker that makes it worthy of the extra attention. Its FYC season victory lap is well earned.
The festival-circuit documentary The Oldest Person in the World is an intentionally incomplete project, in that it could theoretically be expanded upon into infinity . . . or at least for as long as humanity is still viable and still making movies. As such, it’s a project without a clear goal beyond marking the passage of time, one that director Sam Green has taken on as a personal mission within the scope of his own family life but could, theoretically, stray into any direction the next filmmaker in his lineage wants to take it. The logline premise is simple. Green has spent the past decade interviewing the world’s currently oldest living person, as determined by Guinness World Records, one reigning champion at a time. He hopes to continue this project for as long as he continues working & living as a filmmaker, with an open-ended invitation for it to carry on beyond him in another documentarian’s hands — preferably his young son’s. The idea is that, every ten years, a new edition of The Oldest Person in the World would be issued with a new batch of interviews as the title changes hands, inviting the audience to reflect on the passage of time at the furthest edges of a human lifespan. That project only takes up so much of the movie’s runtime, however, as Green allows himself space for his own self-reflections on the passage of time within his immediate family, getting sentimental about his growing son, his aging mother, his deceased brother, and his own prematurely failing health. The world’s oldest living people only have the strength and the self-awareness to say so much about what it means to live an extraordinarily long life, so Green fills the void with his own ups, downs, and neuroses. It’s unclear what place, exactly, that perspective would have in a future edition of this project once Green passes the baton, which is probably why the Guinness Book of World Records isn’t typically written in first-person.
It likely goes without saying that Green’s interview subjects are of far greater interest than his personal video diary entries that fill the gaps between them. It also likely goes without saying that the oldest person in the world is almost always asleep or grumpy, which makes them terrible interviewees — delightfully so. The MVP subject of this initial batch is the 118-year-old French nun Lucile Randon, who attributes her longevity to the mystery of God’s will, which she treats as a kind of supernatural hostage situation she wishes to be over as soon as He’s ready to relent. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the kindly 117-year-old Jamaican woman Violet Brown sees her continued life as more of a gift than an extended prison sentence, stressing to Green how important it is to hold onto the memories that matter most for as long as you can, lest they slip away to time. Green also does some extracurricular research between interviews into the history of the Oldest Living Person title, uncovering bar-trivia tidbits like how all-time champion Jeanne Calment was not only the world’s oldest living person ever at 122 years of age, but also became the world’s oldest rapper on a novelty record to promote her achievement in delaying the inevitable. These women (and they’re seemingly always women) are endlessly fascinating subjects in their own right, so it can’t help but feel a little disappointing that Green relies so heavily on his own cutesy narration to sell their shared story’s poignancy. The resulting film is frequently poignant, though, and funny too, so the indulgence is forgivable. It’s just always a relief when he finds himself at a loss for words (if not only because he doesn’t always speak his interviewee’s language) and sits with his subjects in a shared silence, allowing the passage of time to naturally imbue the moment with meaning.
Conceptually, the idea of The Oldest Person in the World continuing on as a collaborative project is a little flawed, given how much of himself Green has inserted into the initial work. The way he proposes it, the movie would not be followed up by sequels every decade like the Seven Up! series, so much as it would be continually expanded upon in new, fluctuating edits. A new edit from a new contributor would have to transform the work radically to be at all worthwhile, though, as Bresson’s axiom goes that, “A film is born three times: first in the writing of the script, once again in the shooting, and finally in the editing.” What happens if Green’s son grows up to be an avant-garde experimental filmmaker in the Godardian tradition? Would he be allowed to remix footage from this first edition into a multimedia collage of abstract, incongruent imagery, or would Green’s more Varda-inspired approach to documentary filmmaking play out in full before abruptly switching modes as the next contributor takes over? Furthermore, who’s to say that anyone besides Green would be interested in continuing this project at all, including his own son, given how personal the initial outing is to his own familial sentimentality? The imperfection of the proposed project does not delegitimize its existence, though, no more than the imperfection of Guinness World Records’ tracking of the world’s oldest living person makes that pursuit meaningless. Guinness sometimes struggles to fully verify the birth records of the reigning champion, so that there are stretches of time where there technically is no official oldest living person until the next legitimate one can be crowned. Time marches on, though, and things are inevitably taken out of our hands as we’re decommissioned and replaced by the next batch of human beings behind us. All we can really do in the meantime is observe & document the process.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychic-visions thriller The Dead Zone (1983), a Stephen King adaptation directed by David Cronenberg.
Practically every single zombie movie made since 1970 has been influenced by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in some way. Every time a small group of survivors boards themselves up in a cramped locale only to be besieged & disemboweled by an invading zombie horde, Romero’s legacy hangs heavy in the putrid air. And so, I found myself thinking a lot about Romero’s Living Dead series this Halloween season as I saw its influence echoing throughout all the zombie titles I binged during the heaviest days of my horror-movie mania. What confounded me most about seeing Romero’s work infinitely reiterated and reinterpreted was that I was starting to forget why, exactly, the dead rose in the original Night of the Living Dead in the first place. The only explanation I can recall is that, “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” and that the phenomenon is otherwise treated as a natural disaster that can neither be understood nor prevented by the living. So, then, why were all the post-Romero zombie flicks I watched this October so intent on explaining the sources of their zombie outbreaks instead of just letting the walking dead speak (i.e., groan) for themselves? If anything, it felt as if they were all in an ever-escalating competition to come up with the most preposterous, absurdly over-specific reason for the dead rising instead of following Romero’s lead and leaving it deliberately ambiguous.
Romero’s zombie-attack victims philosophizing about Hell running out of room for deceased sinners at least gestures towards a religious reason for the phenomenon, even if it is pure speculation. Maybe that’s what inspired MVP Romero enthusiast Lucio Fulci to lean into religious blasphemy for the source of the zombie outbreak in his 1980 classic City of the Living Dead, a.k.a. Gates of Hell. City of the Living Dead was Fulci’s attempt to pay homage to H.P. Lovecraft, as indicated by its setting in the Lovecraft-invented town of Dunwitch but, as the inclusion of “The Living Dead” in its title suggests, it’s a pure Romero riff through & through. All of the zombie-horde invasion & disemboweling you’d expect to see in a later, proper Living Dead film is on full, shameless display, with Fulci going his usual extra mile to make sure everything is as disgusting as possible in a series of for-their-own-sake gags: ocular bleeding, victims puking their literal guts up, windy blasts of flying maggots, etc. And what is the reason for all of this hellish mayhem? A Catholic priest has hanged himself in a Dunwitch graveyard. We first see the priest’s suicide as a psychic vision during a distant seance, and once we travel to Dunwitch to investigate, the image repeats itself at the start of every gross-out zombie attack. Fulci presents that suicide as an act so blasphemous that it has opened the literal gates of Hell, so that any fucked up horror he can imagine is justified in being unleashed upon the audience. Meanwhile, Romero & Lovecraft both likely would’ve skipped the explanation part and left the source of that supernatural mayhem horrifically unknowable.
Scooter McCrae’s 1994 SOV horror Shatter Dead also uses religious blasphemy to explain the source of its zombie outbreak, but it at least tries to keep the inciting incident unfathomable to the human mind. The film opens with a meeting of the sacred and the profane: a sexual tryst between The Angel of Death and a human woman, staged under a ceiling fan light and a layer of warped-VHS grime. Months later, we watch a Romero-style heroine survive the daily banality of a post-zombie apocalypse, wherein religious cults run amok and the undead are homeless societal rejects. Like City of the Living Dead, most of its thematic blasphemy is suicide-based, establishing a world where everyone & everything conspire to pressure you into joining the zombie horde via suicide, so you can stay “young” forever. Shatter Dead has earned some cult-cinema notoriety as an obscene object by allowing that nihilistic sales pitch to follow its characters into the bedroom, including some incredibly graphic sexual imagery involving gun play. In the most memorable sequence, our suicide-avoidant protagonist has sex with her undead boyfriend and works around the lack of bloodflow to his penis by strapping a pistol to his belt and using its barrel as a marital aid. It’s a shocking image, and it’s one that recalls the Angel of Death sex scene at the start of the picture, where a gender-ambiguous angel appears to be wielding an unseen hard-on despite their external feminine appearance. The angel’s phallus is never revealed to the audience with the same pornographic detail as the strap-on handgun, but it is indicated to be a dangerous weapon in its own right, given that it incites a zombie apocalypse by getting a human woman pregnant.
If the reason behind a zombie outbreak isn’t religious, it’s usually scientific. Even Night of the Living Dead includes a throwaway line from a news reporter supposing that the dead may have risen because of a passing satellite. The 1974 Spanish whatsit The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (a.k.a. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) is much clearer in passing the blame for a zombie outbreak to newfangled scientific machinery. Set in the English countryside, its own zombie lore involves a new piece of experimental agriculture equipment that eliminates pests & parasites from farm crops via new forms of radiation. The danger of this experiment is only apparent to the hippie Londoner who happens to be passing through this farmland on vacation, given that his all-natural granola lifestyle means he’d rather see the parasites kept at bay via more traditional methods. He’s proven to be in the right when the radiation from this newfangled farm equipment starts to bring the dead back to life and they start to drag the living back to the graves with him. Only, no one believes him, and the small-minded townies suspect that he’s responsible for all the murders himself. The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is very clearly a post-Romero zombie movie, but its main villains are the cops who suspect the urbanite out-of-towners for the undead’s supernatural crimes. Every single time the heroes see a way out of a tight jam, the cops rush in to fuck it all up, all the way through the bummer ending. Then, the radioactive farm equipment gets switched back on again, no lessons learned. Brutal.
Not all dead-raising science is accidental, nor is it always exclusive from religion. In 1981’s Dead & Buried, a mad-scientist mortician (played by Jack “Grandpa Joe” Albertson of Chocolate Factory fame) has found a means of reconstructing the human body post-death in cosmetic procedures that go far beyond his usual duties as a corpse beautician. We watch in time-elapse as reconstructs the human form from the skeleton outward like Dr. Frankenstein building his monster. Only, he needs a little religion to help animate those corpses, so he turns to Voodoo to help get them back on their lumbering feet. It turns out this combination of religion & science makes for a relatively healthy mix, as far as zombie outbreaks go. The living dead in the small town of Potter’s Bluff, where this crazed mortician reigns supreme, are thoroughly re-integrated back into society post-death. They’re given jobs; they’re given a hobby (even if it’s always the same amateur photography hobby, documenting the mad scientist’s crimes); they’re made part of a real, functional community. All of that plot explanation likely constitutes major spoilers for the uninitiated, but I imagine if you’re reading this far into a blog post about vintage zombie movies you already have at least a vague idea of what Dead & Buried is about. If not, you might switch it off halfway through, impatient that there are no zombies in the movie at all, given that the first half plays like a story about small-town weirdos who violently murder outsiders for daring to treat their coastal home as a vacation getaway. Once those murdered interlopers start popping up around town as reanimated corpses, however, Potter’s Bluff turns out to be a very welcoming community to outsiders; they want you to stay forever.
Romero teases several explanations for the initial zombie outbreak in Night of the Living Dead without ever confirming one in particular. It seems that in the half-century since those teases, other filmmakers have gone mad attempting to find solid, specific reasoning for the dead to rise from their graves. We know that we like to see the dead walk around every October, but we’re not entirely sure there’s a good enough reason why they’d want to re-join the living to do so. It only fully makes sense if they’ve been ejected from Hell, the only place that’s presumably less miserable than this one. Everything else just plays as wild supposition and faint political commentary, when no excuse is truly needed to get those corpses walking.
The big-ticket repertory title this Halloween season was, undoubtedly, the theatrical re-release of Ken Russell’s 1971 classic The Devils, finally restored to its full blasphemous glory in 4k HD detail. What was supposed to be a one-week limited run for that holy-grail cult title gradually snowballed into a month-long celebration, lingering in theaters long past the expected end of its stay. I appreciated finally seeing The Devils projected on the big screen just as much as anyone and, if nothing else, that larger canvas inspired an even deeper respect for Derek Jarman’s work on its production design than I’ve ever felt before. The movie’s heavily marketed re-release was a largely corporate effort, though, as handled by the new Warner Bros sub-label Clockwork. And so, there were other, smaller cult-cinema restoration projects last month that The Devils inevitably overshadowed, since they didn’t have the same Major Studio muscle behind their marketing campaigns. They came and they went, largely unnoticed. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a couple of them here before they’re forgotten entirely.
The recent 4k restoration of 1989’s Begotten was just as much a labor of love as Mark Kermode’s decades-long campaign to fully restore The Devils. You just might not instantly recognize that effort by looking at the picture, since it presents such a deliberately ugly, degraded image. Much like The Devils, Begotten enjoys some cult-cinema notoriety as an extremely violent, highly offensive work of intricate visual craft. The difference is that, unlike Russell & Jarman, director E. Elias Merhige (later of Shadow of the Vampire notoriety) sought to apply that craft to exclusively hideous images, drowning his audience in blood, mud, shit, and cum until we collectively gurgle our last breath. Every image in Begotten is a “Wait, what am I looking at?” situation as the audience squints at its intentionally degraded black & white film stock, and the answer is always disgusting. It’s impressively relentless in that way, following one vaguely defined divine figure after the next as they’re disemboweled, defiled, and pummeled into the earth to an ambient noise soundtrack. Even when all of that death & destruction seemingly gives birth to new life in time-elapse plant growth, the cycle of life they’re participating in is too depressingly dingy to find the least bit beautiful. The only clue Merhige affords his audience that we’re being subjected to a cruelly cyclical creation myth is the end credits’ indication that its actors are playing characters like “God killing himself,” “Mother Earth,” and “Flesh on bone.” Otherwise, we’re just dragged through the muck of the world’s gloomiest experimental art film, now presented in even more harrowing detail.
It’s easy to imagine why Begotten might’ve fallen into distribution limbo, given that it starts with God’s suicide and only gets more gratuitously blasphemous from there. The prolonged effort to restore and re-release 1988’s Fright Night Part 2 is more surprising, given that it’s no more risqué nor uncommercial than the original, widely beloved Fright Night. This direct sequel picks up only a few months after the slaying of Chris Sarandon’s vampire hottie at the end of the first Fright Night, transforming reluctant hero Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale) from sexually confused high school dweeb to sexually confused college dweeb. He’s successfully undergone intensive therapy that has erased the trauma of his initial run-in with the undead, but then he’s once again distracted by an invading vampire coven at the exact moment that he’s supposed to be losing his virginity to his girlfriend. So, instead of getting hot & heavy with his current sweetheart, he disappears into the night to hang around vampire-hunter horror host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), starting the whole cycle over again. The main difference is that the head vampire in this second outing is a bodacious babe (Julie Camden) instead of a handsome hunk (Sarandon). The suppressed queer themes of the original still carry over, though, since the new vampire coven is styled to resemble the kind of gender-ambiguous bisexuals you’d expect to see on every college campus, or at least in the background of every 80s Prince music video. Fright Night Part 2 drops the retro Hammer Horror homages from the first Fright Night, but it does bring back all of the 80s gross-out gore effects in its own go-for-broke climax, credibly living up to the original’s legacy. Most audiences wouldn’t know that, though, given that it’s been allowed to fall into distribution limbo due to corporate “regrouping”. It just fell through the cracks, like loose change abandoned in a movie studio’s couch.
Kino Lorber is handling the re-release of Begotten, while Synapse is working on getting Fright Night Part 2 back in circulation as well. I was lucky to catch both movies as a Halloween Weekend double feature at my local downtown shopping mall, where they were met with a much more muted reception than Clockwork’s re-release of The Devils in other parts of town. Maybe it says something about the constant spoil of riches that genre film nerds are currently being pampered with that two 80s cult objects that have been missing from official distribution channels for over 20 years have returned to such quiet fanfare. More likely, it’s just another indication that robust marketing goes a long way in finding niche moviegoing audiences, since The Devils was so successfully propped up as a must-see event by the Warner Bros promotional muscle. All you can really do as a fan is to help spread the word. Either dare your movie-nerd buddies to subject themselves to the grimy horrors of Begotten or suggest they lighten things up with another goofball episode of Fright Night that hasn’t been as thoroughly re-run into the ground as the first. It’s never been easier to access them, and they’ve never looked better, but most people wouldn’t know that without hearing word of mouth.
