Supergirl (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

It’s summer, which means that it’s the time when studios are putting out their big releases, hoping to get those big bucks from people seeking shelter in a cold dark theater on a hot afternoon or entire families coming out to see the latest computer animated intellectual property product together, getting snacks and commemorative blankets and popcorn buckets that will be leaching microplastics into landfills long after the human race is dead. It’s been an odd year, wherein the two most talked about films of the current season are both horror—Obsession and Backrooms—and both are still playing at my local megaplex, as are more recent wide releases like Leviticus. It feels strange to have the films that would normally be reserved for a late fall/early winter release appearing at the same time as more standard blockbuster-courting fare like Masters of the Universe (which the ten screen theater near me has already dropped, despite it being released less than a month ago). And into that market comes Supergirl, the follow-up to last year’s Superman, starring Milly Alcock as the younger cousin of the Big Blue Boy Scout, out on her solo adventure. Will it manage to find an audience, or will the one-two punch of Toy Story 5 and Minions & Monsters be too big of a kryptonite chunk for the Woman of Tomorrow to overcome? 

When the film opens, our heroine is a depressed party girl on an interstellar pub crawl, flying around in her caravan-esque spaceship with her unruly dog Krypto and drinking herself into a stupor. While spending time on a planet with a red sun so that its nullifying effect on her superpowers can allow her to get properly wasted, she encounters recently orphaned Ruthye (Eve Ridley), the young daughter of a master swordsmith who is seeking revenge on her family’s murderer, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Krem is the leader of a group of space brigands who sex traffic “wives” from the planets they pillage to continue to propagate their “all male species.” When Supergirl’s defense of the naive Ruthye garners the attention of Krem, he shoots Krypto with a poison that starts the clock on the film; the last daughter of Krypton only has three days to track Krem down and get the antidote, while also trying to impart a lesson about the emptiness of vengeance to the determined Ruthye. Along the way, the two encounter immortal intergalactic bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa), whose presence here is superfluous at best. 

There’s a lot to love and enjoy in Supergirl. Alcock is charming in the lead role, enough that some of the failures in character consistency are papered over by her performance. For the most part, the film also looks great. The title character’s barhopping showcases a myriad of excellent set designs and great alien creature effects, many if not all of which are practical in some way. When David Corenswet reappears as Superman in his video calls and in the flashbacks to his cousin’s arrival on Earth, he’s effectively corny in the way that made last summer’s outing so endearing. The film takes the opportunity that telling a story in a grungy, lived-in, space environment presents and offers the viewer a wide variety of environments to watch Supergirl kick ass in: an interstellar greyhound full of a dozen different alien species, a villainous bar full of unsavory space pirates, a gravity-defying aircraft carrier as it crashes into a mountain range. 

The drawbacks, however, are just as numerous. It’s not my habit to bully child actors, but to put it as politely as possible, fourteen-year-old Eve Ridley is not a very good actor. She has plenty of time to become one, but she fails to imbue the character with the kind of pathos that’s needed. Apparently, she was in the UK’s tour of Les Misérables when she was only ten years old, and you can see it in her performance; she’s a child of the stage, a student of a form of theatre that’s all about projecting enough to be heard in the back row. She has not yet learned the more nuanced acting that the close-up requires. When the effects are bad, they are quite bad, with the most frustrating example being the CGI effect used for Supergirl’s hair in space. Just get Milly Alcock in an actual pool of water and let her hair splay out naturally! It’s awful. Perhaps most glaring, however, is the overall presence of Lobo, who doesn’t really need to be here. He’s only present because Momoa was a “fan cast” for Lobo for a long time. Once upon a time, a fantasy casting was just something that you read in Wizard magazine and thought, “Huh, yeah, Josh Hartnett would make a good Nightwing,” and then move on. In the present, as the very existence of a released Snyder Cut shows, the outsized power of fandoms is enough to make or break a film. So sure, why not, let’s just let the extratextual reason of making the internet shut up justify sticking Lobo the bounty hunter in here, rather than the more traditional justifications like “narrative,” “character,” or “theme.” 

The director of this film, Craig Gillespie, is the man who helmed I, Tonya and Cruella, and those films’ use of tonally jarring humor and juxtaposition are present here. After all, this is a film in which a super dog delivers a groin attack and Supergirl pretends to be a Valley Girl to divert the anger of the aforementioned Lobo, but also one in which the villains are sex traffickers who treat the film’s young sidekick as merchandise to be haggled over. There’s also little point in denying that the fingerprints of Warner Bros.’s DC visionary James Gunn are all over it, especially when it comes to the more CGI-heavy fight scenes. It’s very reminiscent of Guardians of the Galaxy, which isn’t necessarily negative, but certainly bears mentioning. Where it also seems to draw inspiration from is in the glut of 80s Star Wars knockoffs like Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, but the eighties-ness of it all doesn’t end there, with villains taken straight from the Mad Max sequels. Nostalgia for that era has become radioactive over the past decade of Stranger Things and imitators thereof, but it feels somehow more sincere and real than most mainstream attempts at invoking the media of the decade. To put it succinctly, Supergirl is doing in earnest what Turbo Kid did ironically, and it mostly succeeds. 

You may have noticed that the character’s actual name, Kara, hasn’t come up yet in this review. The film also saves the first use of “Kara” on screen for quite some time, drawing attention to this fact by pointing out in act two that Ruthye doesn’t even know what Kara’s name is. This is done with intentionality, as the first time that anyone utters “Kara” is when her father, Zor-El (David Krumholtz) uses it in her expository flashback. As we learn, Zor-El (brother of Superman’s father Jor-El, whom we saw last summer telling his son to become a god on earth) and his wife Alura (Emily Beecham) escaped the destruction of Krypton via a force field that encircles an entire city, allowing it to live on after the planet exploded. Unfortunately, since said explosion resulted in kryptonite poisoning the soil of their little city in a bubble, Kara’s father sends their daughter, born 8 years after the Kryptonian apocalypse, out in an escape pod, along with the puppy she found rooting through the trash on the day of her mother’s funeral. “Kara” is a ghost of a world that no longer exists, and when someone finally verbalizes it out loud, it’s supposed to be emotionally effective in a way that the film struggles to fully convey. 

Most recent versions of Supergirl take their backstory from the 2005 relaunch of the character, in which she is technically Kal/Clark’s older cousin but whose pod was knocked off course, causing her to arrive as a teenager after he has already grown into an adult. This hews closer to the original concept, including the Argo City forcefield and her being born some years after Krypton’s destruction, but it also includes concepts from the aughts version, which makes the film a bit of a mish-mash in a way that plot hole pedants will likely latch onto and care too much about. Frankly, it does not make a lot of sense to try and have it both ways. For instance, at one point Kara saves Ruthye from an alien whom she has unintentionally insulted because of differing cultural norms. At this point in the narrative, we don’t know that Kara was born post-Krypton, so one assumes that she has knowledge about interstellar customs because she was from a world that was at least somewhat involved in interstellar communication. When we later learn that she lived her entire pre-Earth life in a literal bubble, it makes much less sense. Why would she know that setting your bag at the feet of this particular species is an insult if she’s never had contact with other aliens, especially in comparison to a child who lives on the planet that the space bus ferrying said alien arrives at? One must assume that Argo City never had contact with other non-Kryptonians. Otherwise, there would have been some option to save its citizens rather than letting them all die of Kryptonite cancer. It’s a plot element that’s not entirely thought-through, and although I’m not usually one to get hung up on something like this, it demonstrates that this was a narrative that was, perhaps, not given enough drafts to work out all the kinks (or, more likely, had so many drafts that the kinks became inevitable). 

This is a fun movie, and a cute one. It fails to recapture the effectiveness of last summer’s DC superhero outing, which was in some ways more narratively messy but nonetheless more thematically coherent. At the same time, it’s a cutesy little space adventure with lots of cool set designs, a braver approach to color and lighting than most post-Avengers comic book adaptations, and interesting aliens. A little more time spent rendering (or considering the necessity of) certain special effects would have been appreciated, but it’s decent overall. Perhaps not worth running out to the theater to see, but if you don’t do that, we may never see this version of Supergirl again. It’s up to you whether that’s something you want to vote for with your box office dollars. Between this and Minions & Monsters, it’s almost certainly the lesser of two evils.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Programming Maisie

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Last year, after watching The Blue Gardenia and being particularly taken with Ann Sothern in it, I looked her up and discovered that, over the course of eight years, she had starred in ten(!) films as a character named Maisie Ravier, a misadventuring showgirl. Those ten films are largely forgotten now, but I found all of them on Russia’s YouTube equivalent as uploaded VHS rips from Turner Classic Movies airings, and I dutifully archived them for this year with the intent of watching them all and writing about them for something I intended to call “Maisie May.”

Maisie May extended beyond the reach of the actual calendar month, but we still had a good time, didn’t we? In wrapping up these hours spent with Ann Sothern, I figured it would be best to do a ranking of the Maisie series, from worst to best. There’s virtually zero continuity within these films, so you can really pick up any of them at random. In a discussion that we had on a recent episode of the podcast, Brandon posited that these films would fit in easily as “programmers,” the kind of thing one would plug into an empty space in a screening event or programming block that could easily fit a broad theme. In that spirit, here comes Maisie, with recommendations for pairings. 

10. Congo Maisie

Easily the worst of the bunch. Should not be programmed outside of an academic setting about casual racism in Hollywood history, alongside Birth of a Nation and Crash. 

9. Maisie Gets Her Man

Below par. Sothern gets pushed to the side to make room for big name costar Red Skelton, who does a series of bits that are so awkwardly unfunny that time seems to stand still. Picks up once the intrigue of the plot starts to set in, but it’ll be far too late in the runtime for most to perk up about it. 

Series: Red Skelton Red-trospective, as the finale following Merton of the Movies and Whistling in the Dark. 

8. Gold Rush Maisie

A decent but somewhat middling effort, an attempt to cash in on both the recent publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the John Ford film adaptation thereof, coming out the very same year as the latter. Some charming performances from child actors, and Maisie’s conflict with the grumpy ghost town dwellers is a nice treat. Nothing to write home about. 

Series: The Dust Bowl, between The Grapes of Wrath, naturally, and Paper Moon. 

7. Ringside Maisie

Maisie finds herself employed as the companion of an elderly woman who doesn’t know that her son is making his money as a boxer. The story’s a little thin, but Maisie gets the opportunity to shine regardless, and it’s an unexpected twist that the decent girlfriend of the lead turns out to be a heel. Sothern has great chemistry with her real-life husband in what I believe is the only production they ever shared. 

Series: Let’s Get Ready to Rrrrrrumble, as the second feature following Body and Soul and preceding Raging Bull.

6. Maisie

The film in which we first meet our beloved heroine. The story beats in this nontraditional comic Western appear, retroactively, to be tired, but it’s only because the later films would lift bits: the unfaithful woman, the sudden appearance of an unexpected suicide (or an attempt thereof), Maisie settling down at the end with a man and a fortune, neither of which will ever be seen again. There’s a reason that there were so many sequels, though, and it’s because Ann Sothern really is just that charming. 

Series: How the West Was Fun, sandwiched between City Slickers and Support Your Local Sheriff!

5. Maisie Was a Lady

A fun little romp wherein we find Maisie in the employ of some mopey rich folks. She charms her way into everyone’s hearts, gives a father a dressing down for trying to fill the void he left in his children’s lives with money, and saves an ingenue from being taken advantage of by a philandering hanger-on. Good stuff. 

Series: Maid to Love You, at the top of the bill, followed by Diary of a Chambermaid and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.

4. Undercover Maisie

In her final screen outing, Maisie joins the LAPD as an undercover officer with the division that investigates scams and con artists. She flunks her first mission but refuses to give up, resulting in her being taken captive by a trio of criminals and forcing her to use all her wits to break free. Suffers a little for being too much like Maisie Goes to Reno in some of its broader elements, and one of the weaker romance plots for this stronger back half of the series. Fun, but not the strongest way to end the series. 

Series: Legendary Legal Ladies, sandwiched between Miss Congeniality and Yes, Madam!

3. Maisie Goes to Reno

Maisie, overworking herself in the war effort, develops a facial tic that causes her to wink at inopportune times, earning her a prescription for some time off. She decides to spend it in Reno working as an entertainer, but a promise to a young soldier leads her to stumble onto a plot to manipulate the soldier’s wife into a divorce, so that the new divorcee can be bled dry by her business partners. Maisie goes all out in trying to save a stranger’s marriage.

Series: Reno Divorcees, as the comedic breather between The Women and Desert Hearts.

2. Swing Shift Maisie

Maisie almost meets her match in conniving would-be actress Iris (Jean Rogers), while also documenting what women helping in the war effort did in their downtime and acting as a subliminal OSHA-esque reminder about protective equipment in the workplace. 

Series: B&W Women And War, alongside The Cranes are Flying and Millions Like Us. 

1. Up Goes Maisie

Maisie finally gets involved in some real espionage! It’s corporate espionage, sure, but it still counts. Maisie’s love interest du jour is the inventor of a helicopter that can be operated as easily as a car, but one of the men on his crew is in collaboration to steal the prototype and fake its destruction. Maisie gets drugged at her engagement party and does a high dive in her clothes, and by the end of the film she’s flying the sweetest miniature of retro futurist helicopter that you ever saw like she was born for the skies. An utter delight.

Series: Fantastic Aviatrices, as the lead up to Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, followed by Nausicaa. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Undercover Maisie (1947)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

And so, at last, we find ourselves on our final outing with Maisie Ravier. Before we get into Undercover Maisie, however, I’d like to offer an elegy for the Maisie films that never were and must only exist in our hearts and imaginations. Maisie the Pledge, wherein Maisie enters college as a non-traditional student, joins a sorority, discovers that the dean’s wife is embezzling from the university, exposes her, and falls in love with an English professor. Maisie on the Orient Express, which finds Maisie solving a not-too-vicious murder on a snowed-in train, becoming engaged to the movie’s Poirot stand-in during the final minutes. Maisie Goes to Washington, where Maisie visits her mother’s retirement home and discovers elder mistreatment happening there, and she goes all the way to the Supreme Court to put a stop to it, charming a handsome young lawmaker in the process. Chairman Maisie, which finds Maisie securing the acquittal of an innocent man by finding the still-living supposed victim while breaking out of being sequestered, all while softening the heart of a hard-nosed district attorney. Mayday for Maisie, Whoopsie Maisie (Brandon’s suggestion), Natural History Maisie . . . . We could have had it all. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Maisie did all of these things in her radio show that ran concurrently with the later films, but we’re not a vintage radio comedy website, and although I can foresee myself occasionally checking in on the audio adventures of our heroine if I start to feel the need for a little Maisie in my life, I’m not about to dive headlong into that rabbit hole. 

We open in classic Maisie fashion; she’s got a job offer somewhere distant and needs to make her way there. For Undercover Maisie, this means that we find our heroine in Los Angeles trying to make her way back to New York, where she has an offer for a job as a bubble bath demonstrator (as she says, it’s good, clean work). She meets a seemingly kindly elderly woman who needs a travel companion for the long drive, and she convinces Maisie to use the specially installed glove compartment mini-safe to hide her valuables, then ditches Maisie when she goes into the gas station to get road snacks. Just as an innocent and delighted Maisie notes that they won’t be seeing any men for a while so she can get onions on her hamburgers, the woman drives off. We then cut to Maisie giving her statement to “bunco” detective Paul Scott (Barry Nelson), who investigates con artists and schemes, and he’s so impressed by Maisie’s photographic memory and perfect recall that he pressures the chief of police into hiring her as an undercover officer. Maisie goes through an accelerated police academy course in montage, but when she goes to the gym to learn self-defense, most of the other trainees (and the trainer) find her gorgeous presence so distracting that she’s assigned to do her hand-to-hand training one-on-one with Chip Dolan (Mark Daniels), a bunco cop whom Scott previously busted down for a past failure that’s never quite clear. 

There’s not quite a love triangle here, but the tension is strong. Dolan has no real designs on Maisie; she simply sympathizes with him in a way that Scott responds to jealously, especially when she asks Scott to give Dolan another chance. Scott, for his part, is too by-the-book for his own good, and overly devoted to his job. On the night that Maisie passes her civil service exam, Scott wants to put her right to work, but Dolan convinces the chief to let Maisie have one night to relax and celebrate. Scott turns up at her apartment later and invites her out for a night on the town, but it turns out that this was a cover to catch a pickpocket at a night club, and Maisie’s rightfully peeved at the deception. Scott slowly softens toward Maisie, and toward Dolan too, and gets the other man his job back. 

For Maisie’s first official assignment, she goes to see a fortune teller named Amor (Leon Ames), who channels her character’s dead fiancé and mother to tell her that she will soon meet someone who will present her with a foolproof investment opportunity. Later that day, she “coincidentally” meets Gilfred Rogers, a real estate broker. A trap is laid for the con artists, but when she crouches down, she accidentally reveals her slip, which has her name embroidered on it. Rogers, deducing the deception, congratulates Maisie for passing her final test, claiming to be a fellow law enforcement officer who was secretly confirming her readiness for undercover work. He and his accomplices slip away, and Maisie is embarrassed, determining that she has to catch them herself to make up for her failure. She finds a scrap of evidence that leads to a function where the con artist group is planning to scam a large number of G.I.s out of the funds they were given to build homes, but before she can do anything about it, the trio of con artists binds and gags her. “Amor” is a thief, but not a murderer, and he plans to merely keep her captive until the checks they’ve acquired clear, then they’ll leave her somewhere that the police will find her and be on their merry way. Co-conspirator Mrs. Canford (Gloria Holden, aka Dracula’s Daughter) convinces her husband that there’s no way that they can let Maisie go alive, which leads to some pretty high stakes. 

The film’s biggest weakness is that it feels like it’s aping Harry Beaumont’s previous outing, Maisie Goes to Reno, a little too closely. Maisie is once again held against her will by two men and a woman, the latter of whom slaps her across the face in a moment of fury. What differentiates it is that “Amor” is a much more interesting character than the leader of the conspirators in Nevada. Maisie is also more physically capable this time around; when she’s slapped, she immediately uses some of her self-defense techniques, only failing because she’s outnumbered. Maisie is a character whose comedy is usually verbal or situational; she’s quick with a retort or witticism, or the humor comes from her failing to fit in socially, as in Maisie Was a Lady and Up Goes Maisie. Here, she gets to do some good physical work, although the film’s attempts to hide Maisie’s more broad-shouldered and muscular stunt double are about as effectively convincing as the miniature helicopter flying around Pasadena last time. We do get to see Maisie keep her wits about her, though, as she finds ways to sneak messages out during her captivity and even leaves a clue about where she’s being taken on a road sign by leaving behind the same trademark undergarment that gave her away to the con artists earlier. The film hits its most exciting point with only two minutes of runtime left, as Mrs. Canford and her husband march Maisie off into the brush on the side of the road to shoot her. Maisie pretends to fall, gathering a handful of sand, and uses it Dale Gribble style to get the drop on her captors. She takes a rolling tumble over the brow of a hill with Canford, and she spends the last 45 seconds of the movie judo flipping both of the Canfords, which was a step down from Maisie flying around, but was nonetheless very cute and fun. 

And that’s where we leave Maisie. She’s engaged (again), seemingly ready to settle down, but we’ll never really know. The character may have been getting a little long in the tooth (when an APB is put out for the missing Officer Ravier, she’s described as being 25; Ann Sothern was nearly 40), but I believe that Maisie could have carried on. At the very least, she’ll always be where we left her: ready to start a new adventure, once again rolling her boulder up a hill, ready to change the lives of everyone she meets. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Up Goes Maisie (1946)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

It’s 1946, the war is over, and like so many women of her generation, our beloved Maisie Ravier finds herself out of work now that the men have come back from Over There and resumed their civilian work. After finishing a secretarial program, Maisie starts applying to various suitable jobs all over the city, but finds that everywhere she goes, the wolfish men who interview her are only interested in her as an object of their carnal desire. She finally finds a position with Joe Morton (George Murphy) when she goes into his office dressed “frumpily” (which, in classic Hollywood fashion, does nothing to hide Ann Sothern’s beauty). When he discovers that she has deceived him, he initially believes that she’s a corporate spy sent to uncover the secrets of a prototype helicopter that he’s developing, but he warms to her when he realizes that she built the very same model of aircraft that he flew overseas. She gets to work as both his secretary and assisting in the construction of the copter, alongside Mitch O’Hara and Bill Stuart, whom Joe met in the service, and his college buddy Tim Kingby (Stephen McNally). This soon blossoms into love, and the two become engaged, although Joe can only afford a ring and not a stone to put in it, at least until the helicopter prototype is sold. 

Maisie’s hiring throws a wrench into the plans of Mr. Nuboult (Paul Harvey), who is posing as a kind of angel investor in Joe’s prototype while secretly working on stealing the designs for himself. He’s assisted in this by his lovely daughter Barbara (Hillary Brooke, who appeared two years earlier as the fake psychic medium in Ministry of Fear) as well as Tim, who is operating as Nuboult’s man on the inside. When Maisie discovers a discrepancy in Tim’s receipts that show that he’s ordered twice the number of a specific part, she’s insistent on reviewing all of the back invoices to make sure that they haven’t been double-billed in the past. When Tim relays his gaffe to Nuboult, the older man sends Barbara to town, ostensibly to take Maisie out for an engagement party with some of her high society friends. Maisie, feeling pressured by Barbara’s premonitions of a life of social obligations as a wealthy inventor’s wife, admits that she feels out of place among the wealthy women, given her lack of social class and education (she claims she “set a record for the mile running from the truant officer”). Despite a lifetime of teetotaling as a result of her father’s alcoholism, Maisie allows Barbara to pressure her into taking one drink to toast with, which Barbara has drugged. This results in Maisie making a bit of a spectacle of herself in front of what the following morning’s paper refers to as “hundreds of socialites,” which culminates in Maisie taking a dive into the hotel pool fully dressed. When she comes out of it, Barbara convinces her to save Joe from public humiliation and disappear, and Maisie agrees. Will she uncover the deception in time to save Joe’s patent? 

After Swing Shift Maisie played with the possibility of international intrigue before settling on a more down to earth conflict and then Maisie Goes to Reno sent our heroine to the desert in order to get mixed up in shady, complex legal shenanigans, the filmmakers behind Up Goes Maisie finally decided to go all-in on an espionage plot. It’s corporate espionage, of course, but it counts. It’s also a striking example of a thriller in which the MacGuffin isn’t a McGuffin at all, but is integral to the plot; the duplicate helicopter parts are used to swap out a partially completed version with the real deal, and the conspirators burn the storage facility down. Maisie puts the pieces together and ultimately ends up at the controls of the copter, which she is able to pilot due to having transcribed all of the directions in her secretary role. It’s a perfectly constructed Maisie plot: our favorite down on her luck showgirl shows a lot of pluck, gives several lying rats just what she thinks of them, and has a few zany set pieces, but it’s all wrapped around a pretty tightly plotted conspiracy narrative. If it weren’t for Maisie coming along, their plan would have gone off without a hitch; first, she welds Joe’s air medal into the frame of the helicopter as a good luck charm, and the object’s absence from the supposed burned out wreckage reveals the switch. Her discovery of the fudged invoices starts the ball rolling on the revelation that Tim is planning to sell Joe out, and if she hadn’t happened to be serving a couple of cops as a carhop when the report of the fire came in over the radio, no one would have been the wiser. They would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for that meddling Maisie! 

Visually, this is a standout picture as well. Director Harry Beaumont was born in 1888 and performed as an actor in silent films before taking the reins, directing MGM’s first talkie musical, The Broadway Melody, a 1929 release that won Best Picture that year (Beaumont lost best director to Frank Lloyd for The Divine Lady). This was his second Maisie picture, after having helmed the aforementioned Maisie Goes to Reno; the tight plotting and visual flourishes of both bode well for our final outing in Undercover Maisie, which was his penultimate credit. There’s a particularly beautifully composed shot of Maisie, Mitch, and Bill sneaking into the factory where the real copter has been taken by the corporate spies; the darker plot also allows Beaumont to add in some noir touches. It’s not just a good use of light that sets this one apart, however, as the camera has some fun with framing; my favorite is the scene in which Maisie, fugitive from love, observing his test flight at the Rose Bowl through a tiny little window in the scoreboard that’s just barely big enough to see her face: 

As for the helicopter itself, it’s a silver lozenge with two horizontal rotors, and it’s a charmingly perfect vision of atomic age futurism that looks great when the actors are interacting with it. The cheat to fake takeoffs and landings is obvious, but very easy to play along with. When Maisie pilots it in the climax, the chopper is represented by an utterly adorable miniature with a completely static figurine of Maisie inside. Before you know it, Maisie’s hovering outside of an office building, where she startles a woman who then uses a vertical flagpole to get Maisie a telephone, and while it’s very funny, it’s also tense. It’s worth noting that all of this is happening while Maisie is clad in her carhop uniform, which includes a heart-shaped bib with ruffles, puffed sleeves, an oversized sash bow on the rear, and petticoats; it’s her cutest look yet, and she makes it looks effortless. And she even gets to have a brief catfight with Barbara while wearing it! 

The Maisie series, here at the very end, is on a real upward trajectory, no pun intended. It’s unfortunate that we only have one more outing with her before we bid her farewell, but at least we have that to look forward to.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

All the President’s Men (1976)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

When it first hit theaters and scooped up a few Oscars half a century ago, the 1976 political thriller All the President’s Men was most impressive for its immediacy. Adapted from the eponymous book written by famed Washington Post journalists Woodward & Bernstein, All the President’s Men details the political fallout from the Watergate espionage scandal that eventually resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon just two years earlier. The movie depicts the hourly grind of newspaper reporters chasing leads and verifying sources as being largely unglamorous, with most of the story’s action taking place over phone calls, house visits, and silent copywriting sessions at desktop typewriters. Because Woodward & Bernstein’s rigorous beat journalism efforts resulted in such an usually spectacular political crashout, however, their hard work was rewarded by being retroactively glamorized by big-name Hollywood movie stars, performed onscreen by Robert Redford & Dustin Hoffman. The movie concludes with the two men hammering away at their respective typewriters while their coworkers are distracted by history being made in real time on the television as Nixon was being sworn into office. In real life, they turned out to be two of the few journalists to ever become household names, partly because it was a phenomenon to see such recent history make the jump from newspaper headlines to movie theater marquees.

Revisiting All the President’s Men all these decades later is an entirely different experience now that the newsprint ink has long dried. The film retroactively plays like a time-capsuled token of Boomer nostalgia, no longer reflecting the immediate, current state of US politics. A younger audience that has spent their entire cognizant political lives post-Trump would find the scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation laughably mundane (something that even Vice President JD Vance has recently bragged about to the press). In a modern context, All the President’s Men is set in a preposterous fantasy world where exposed political corruption actually leads to legal & professional consequences, as opposed to a few gotcha headlines and a culture-wide shrug. It’s treated like a major revelation when one journalistic source explains, “Forget the myths. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things get out of hand.” Today’s political corruption is even more blatant & boorish with no discernible consequences, and anyone who mistakes Trump’s lackeys as “bright guys” simply isn’t paying attention. Likewise, revisiting a time when professional publications employed legitimate copy editors to revise & strengthen their staff writers’ work feels like visiting an alien planet for a modern viewer. Print media is dead, political shame is even deader, and so everything that once felt fresh & sharp about All the President’s Men now plays as cute & quaint. It has somehow, shamefully transformed from 70s paranoid conspiracy thriller to modern comfort watch.

Speaking as a Millennial whose entire relationship with recent history & culture was shaped by second-hand references made on The Simpsons, All the President’s Men can’t help but play as vintage nostalgia. The 1994 Simpsons episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts” features a lengthy homage to the 70s classic, while telling the story of a Springfield mayoral election rigged by the nefarious clown Sideshow Bob. Bart & Lisa are tipped off to Bob’s corruption by an anonymous source who only appears in the shadows of a parking garage in hopes to maintain anonymity. Before his cover is blown by Homer’s trademark buffoonery, Smithers appears as a Simpsonized parody of the anonymous government source Woodward & Bernstein use to crack the Watergate scandal in All the President’s Men, interchangeably referred to in that film as “Deep Throat” and “Garage Freak.” While following Smithers’s “anonymous” tips, the kids pour over voter records in the Springfield public library, and the daunting monotony of their work is emphasized in a top-down aerial shot that dwarfs them in the frame, once again visually referencing All the President’s Men. I have no doubt that these cartoon images were my first exposure to the Woodward & Bernstein legend, as immortalized in All the President’s Men. In fact, I was exposed to the collective name “Woodward & Bernstein” through Lisa Simpson’s voice at such a young age that I couldn’t distinguish them from the naming convention of comedic stage acts like Abbott & Costello, Cheech & Chong, or Nichols & May. I assume the original intent of Deep Throat’s shadowy figure was to invoke conspiratorial paranoia & danger (as frequently aped by another childhood TV obsession, The X-Files), but it mostly just reminded me of my old friend Mr. Smithers.

As much as the real-life story told in All the President’s Men has been gradually diluted through declining political standards and pop culture mimicry, the film itself is still remarkably impressive in terms of basic craft. The Oscar-winning sound design still hits incredibly hard, to the point where the very first clack of a typewriter caught me off guard like a cheap-shot horror movie jump scare. There are split diopter shots galore throughout the Washington Post‘s office floor, even if they’re mostly deployed to capture the nail-biting excitement of two journalists making simultaneous phone calls in nearby cubicles. The seedy backlit compositions of Deep Throat’s parking garage confessionals are also legitimately stunning, fully justifying cinematographer Gordon Willis’s badass moniker “The Prince of Darkness”; it’s no wonder The Simpsons‘ direct homages to the film are almost entirely visual. Director Alan J. Pakula is largely remembered for his unofficial “Paranoia Trilogy”, which includes All the President’s Men alongside Klute & The Parallax View. While those earlier titles leaned into the cocaine & pot addled paranoia of the post-hippie 1970s, All the President’s Men is specifically paranoid in the jittery way that follows an evening spent chugging coffee & chain-smoking cigarettes while pushing through to meet a publication deadline. This is a writer’s movie first & foremost, so it’s not especially surprising that it won a Best Screenplay Oscar that year as well (the only statue it didn’t have to compete against fellow 1976 all-timer Network for, mercifully, due to that category’s original/adapted divide). It remains, by all metrics, a great film. It’s just a shame that its contemporary political cynicism now reads as modern political optimism — may God have mercy on our nation’s soul.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Three Days of the Condor (1975)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the paranoid 70s espionage thriller Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as the CIA’s biggest nerd.

00:00 Welcome
01:48 Night Nurse (2026)
08:00 Up Goes Maisie (1946)
12:40 Undercover Maisie (1947)
19:50 Stolen Kingdom (2026)
27:43 All the President’s Men (1976)
36:00 Disclosure Day (2026)
52:02 The Death of Robin Hood (2026)
1:02:50 Scary Movie (2026)
1:16:40 Time and Water (2026)
1:20:53 Leviticus (2026)

1:32:53 Three Days of the Condor (1975)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Scary Movie (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Of all the various legacy sequels that are propping up the Hollywood economy right now, the overwhelming majority have very little reason to exist beyond desperately trying to milk the cow one last time before the entire industry is put out to pasture. The new Scary Movie, to its credit, is the one among them with the most justification to be made in the current moment. After all, the last time that one of these shallow parody films was released was nearly 15 years ago, and the last time that they really had anything to do with parodying horror movies was in 2006. Franchise originators Shawn and Marlon Wayans departed the franchise after Scary Movie 2, all the way back in 2001. In the interim, a half-dozen horror trends have come and gone, so there’s a whole lot of ground to cover. We’ve seen the rise and fall of torture porn in Hostel and the Saw franchise, the glut of mid-aughts remakes that saw (among other things) Jackie Earle Haley take a turn as Freddy Krueger, a resurgence of zombie movies, an abundance of horror legacy sequels like David Gordon Green’s Halloween films and the Radio Silence-produced Scream sequels, MCU-ified horror like The Conjuring, and, of course, the much-vaunted rise of “elevated” horror. For 2026, though, the Scary Movie franchise returns to what it does … well, not “best,” exactly, since—despite the decline in quality over the series’ repeated returns to the well—none of these movies are particularly great, but it’s back to what it does adequately. 

Scary Movie (2026) bases most of its “plot” around 5cream, although its opening sequence most closely parodies Scream VI and cribs the NYC subway scene from the later sequel as well. The opening features a cameo from Carmen Electra and sees Teyana Taylor reenacting the opening sequence of Scream VI, in which Samara Weaving was lured into an alley in New York City. Here, however, she summons a crew of burly men to assist her in kicking Ghostface’s ass. As part of the movie-within-the-movie series Horror Movie, Teyana’s would-be date/killer calls her directly after a couple of back-and-forth text exchanges, and they break the fourth wall by noting that an audible phone call provides better exposition for the presumed audience than on-screen text messages, citing that most people who would turn out for a Wayans Bros. movie “are probably illiterate.” It’s supposed to be self-aware mockery of the audience but it mostly belittles the filmmakers themselves, demonstrating just how little regard the script has for its audience. Make no mistake; I laughed myself silly during this movie (under the influence of an edible, admittedly), but there’s not a single joke in here that doesn’t wear out its welcome by belaboring the point. One of the best bits arrives near the end when Brenda (Regina Hall) pretends to have been shot so that she doesn’t have to go back into the killer’s house with Cindy (Anna Faris), and we see that she’s faked her injury with ketchup packets. It’s funny stuff, but then Brenda overexplains the joke, and it makes the whole thing less comic than if the film wasn’t (over)narrating itself. There’s a potential cut of Scary Movie that’s twenty minutes shorter, cuts several of the dead-on-arrival “comedy” bits, is less dialogue heavy, and would be twice as funny. 

It’s been some amount of time since the last time Ghostface showed up to harass Brenda, Cindy, Brenda’s closeted partner Ray (Shawn Wayans), and her brother Shorty (Marlon Wayans). In the intervening time, Cindy has had two daughters, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan) and Tuesday, who essentially play the parts of Sam and Tara Carpenter from the recent Scream sequels — because Jenna Ortega also played Wednesday Addams, get it? Brenda has had two kids of her own, the Chad and Mindy equivalents Brad (Gregg Wayans, who is thirty-seven years old) and non-binary Dei (get it?). With the return of Ghostface and an attack on Tuesday, Sara returns home alongside her clearly-the-killer boyfriend “Jack” to find her mother, who now has Jamie Lee Curtis’s frazzled white hair from the aforementioned Green-helmed Halloween films. This leads to Cindy’s reunion with Brenda, who has turned into a Ma-like figure for the local high school kids, including Shorty, who is in his third decade of attempting to graduate. Ghostface comes back to town, stirs up some interpersonal conflict between Sara and her mother (whose insistence that the return of Ghostface is all about her drives her daughter insane), some people die in wacky ways, and the film frequently finds itself sidetracked into various shallow references to contemporary flash-in-the-pan pop culture. That’s all that these movies have ever been; when they manage to parody something that stood the test of time, like The Matrix, it’s more of an accident than it is an insight into cultural longevity (and, like, everyone was parodying The Matrix). 

Last year’s rebootquel of The Naked Gun proved that there is a place for parody films in the market. It was so much fun that it led me to rewatch the original and its sequels, and I’ve also long been a proponent of Top Secret! and recently rewatched both Hot Shots films. The thing about those ZAZ parodies is that the jokes are so layered and come so quickly that even if one of them lands with a resounding thud, the movie moves along quickly enough that you’re laughing again moments later. In Scary Movie, every bit is 1.5-4 times as long as it should be, which means that even the jokes that do land can wear out their welcome quickly, and when there’s a swing and a miss, one still has to sit there for an interminable amount of time before we move on to the next bit. The first real clunker is when Cindy tries to remind Sara of the good times from her childhood, which is illustrated by taking her to see a mall Santa who’s actually the Terrifier; it goes on just shy of forever and isn’t funny at all. Other particularly unfunny sequences include full recreations of non-horror pop culture as well. After the memorably surreal image of Ghostface taking the place of Catherine Keener across from Shorty as Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, the film segues into Shorty’s Sunken Place, which he calls a k-hole before Ghostface corrects him that he’s in a K-Pop hole. This leads to a fully animated sequence that sees Shorty hooking up with the three leads of KPop Demon Hunters while spoofing the song “Golden” with a chorus that includes the refrain “Gonna be gonna be smokin’.” It’s peak “Remember this?” style parody, and although that film’s widespread success may mean that this “joke” makes sense in twenty years (we’ll see if the references to Smile and cameo from Kai Cenat do the same), there’s no amount of time that will pass for it to ever be funny. (That having been said, the choice to do a parody of the marketing campaign for Michael with “Tubi original” Jermaine, featuring Kenan Thompson as Jermaine Jackson, was something that I thoroughly enjoyed. But why is it here, in Scary Movie? That’s an orphaned SNL sketch if I’ve ever seen one.)

Ultimately, Scary Movie leaves one with too much time to linger on and ponder the bits that aren’t landing. I was one of a group of five who went to see this movie, and only two of us laughed enough for it to have been worth the price of admission (one of whom was me), one person seemed to enjoy parts of it, and two people utterly hated it. One of the haters was a surprise to me, given that this is a longtime friend with whom I’ve spent no small time over the years chatting about our fondness for the first two Scary Movie films; we recognize that they’re not very good, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a certain nostalgia for movies that were airing virtually every week on Comedy Central during our formative years. He was the person I expected to enjoy this the most, since its comedy is really no different from the earlier Wayans Brothers-produced films. He was actively miserable the entire time, and I think that if you’re trying to decide whether this is worth your time, this is worth considering. It’s exactly as good as Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2, and if you didn’t like those, you probably won’t like this. If you do have positive memories associated with those, it’s still a crapshoot whether or not the humor of this one will land. All I can say is that, if you’re going to see it, you should try to get as high as Shorty beforehand (and for legal reasons, I remind you all to toke responsibly).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Disclosure Day (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I remember reading an interview with Steven Spielberg years ago in which he talked about how having children had changed his point of view as an artist. Specifically, he mentioned that Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that sees its protagonist abandon his family to go with the aliens, would have had a different ending if he had been a father when he made it, as this was a choice he couldn’t conceive of having a character make after he himself became a parent. There’s a lot to unpack there about the way that a person’s real life can impact their art. Roland Barthes’s delineation of the concept of the death of the author has largely been the North Star of my critical approach, but it’s also an imperfect guide.  The man who made 2005’s War of the Worlds is not the same man who made Close Encounters; as an auteur, Spielberg had changed too much in three decades, and his stamp on both is very different as a result. Close Encounters would not be a better movie if Richard Dreyfuss stayed behind with Teri Garr at the end. With even such a minor change, it wouldn’t even be the same film. Unfortunately, Disclosure Day is a weak effort that shows that Uncle Steven may be getting a little too out of touch. 

While WWIII threatens to break out in the background of the film, two people find themselves inexplicably and inextricably drawn to one another: Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). The former is a rootless tumbleweed, dragging boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) from one metro market to another while trying to find her niche, citing that she’ll know where she’s supposed to be when she gets there. Kellner is a fugitive on the run from the sinister intelligence organization Wardex and its overseer Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) while receiving directions from Wardex defector Hugo (Colman Domingo) about how to stay ahead of Scanlon long enough to get the classified data that Kellner stole into his hands so they can reveal an earth-shattering truth to the masses. Kellner is accompanied by his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former novitiate whose past connection to the church helps them briefly find shelter in the convent where she was raised under Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel). 

Spielberg will turn eighty at the end of this year, and I think that’s vital to understanding this film and its intentions, and where those intentions fail or otherwise fall short in this text from one of our most respected living directors. The marketing for this film almost seemed to promise a return to form for the man: government agents in pursuit of something inexplicable but perhaps wondrous, as in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; the potential to find beautiful meaning in something beyond ourselves as in Close Encounters; the promise of something spectacular and never before seen as in Jurassic Park. And credit where credit is due: the man knows how to shoot some stunning images. There are several exquisitely choreographed car chases, a daredevil train stunt, and numerous impressive tracking shots that follow characters narrowly escaping apprehension. But those are all technical achievements, not emotional ones, and as such fail to be cinematic ones. This does not feel like the Spielberg classic that the advertising would have you believe that it is; this is Spielberg recursively making an Amblin-inspired JJ Abrams movie, right down to the unnecessarily complicated mystery box at the center. 

Screenwriter David Koepp has had some misfires over the years, but he’s also the man who wrote or co-wrote Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Presence, and Black Bag. This script attempts to tackle the concept of faith and belief and what effect the proof of aliens may have on either; it’s not only terribly misguided while simultaneously being overwrought and undercooked, it’s also facile to the point of ridicule. Here, the dialogue is stilted and unnatural, if not downright corny. Josh O’Connor is an actor I’ve come to like quite a lot, and it’s unclear if his delivery of every line of dialogue as if he’s not sure what the next word he’s going to say will be is a result of an acting choice, an attempt to breathe some life into this flat screenplay, or a directorial mandate, but it’s not doing no favors for Koepp, Spielberg, or O’Connor. Margaret Fairchild is woefully undercharacterized, so that in one scene she’s almost messianically beneficent, then swinging into a broad tantrum about not wanting to become a religious figure, then weeping uncontrollably. It gives Blunt the opportunity to play a range of audition reel-ready emotional states, but they don’t flow into one another with any kind of plausibility or humanity. Domingo and Firth are probably my favorite out of the bunch. Domingo brings a beautiful empathy to most of the characters he plays, and Hugo is no different; his dialogue is some of the corniest, but it feels the most true when delivered by him. Firth rarely gets to play such one-dimensional villains, so it’s nice to see him do something different for once and menace someone, even if it doesn’t add up to much in the grand scheme of it all. 

What really makes Disclosure Day old-headed is its belief in humanity. That’s probably a very cynical way of looking at things, but it’s also the most honest one. If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading here. The “disclosure” of the title is the broadcasting of data that the U.S. government has, via proxy management of a private corporation, spent eight decades covered up evidence of extraterrestrial organic life, both in the form of corpses discovered in crashes and living beings kept imprisoned (and tortured) for years. This sudden revelation stops the entire world dead in its tracks, as every person with a cell phone or near a television watches with rapt attention as Kellner uploads classified video footage of the recovery of alien bodies, “interrogations” of living ETs, and so on. It’s implied that this is so universally life-changing that it brings mankind back from the brink of its final, extinction-level war. That’s a story that might have worked when Spielberg was a younger director, an optimism of an earlier age. All the protagonist has to do is get the truth out there, and the world will be saved! In 2026, it has the odor of neoliberal Boomerism—a West Wing-esque belief that we live in a world where the work of making societies as a whole empathetic again—is as simple and clean as making everyone watch videos of atrocities. Everyone already does that, every single day. It’s not helping! 

Most of the atrocities that Wardex have committed aren’t shown to us directly. We see the beginnings of videos, and then we watch the characters within the movie react to them with alarm, disgust, fear, and distress. We hear more than we see. But some of the images that the audience does get to witness are eerily familiar, especially as the aliens in most of the videos appear to be very small, like children. In the Roswell video that we see part of, we watch as government officials pick up their tiny, frail, broken bodies with shovels; they’re piled into body bags together en masse, evoking the imagery of mass graves. It’s distressing, yes, but it’s also virtually identical to the images of the broken bodies of children in Gaza, Darfur, and Uvalde, images that people see and then scroll past immediately, ignored background radiation of modern living. Large portions of the West have been brainwashed into not caring about these kids because they don’t have the same skin color as the observer, and the idea that showing childlike beings of a different planetary origin undergoing mistreatment would somehow bring everyone together is patently false. It’s only sweet, hopeful, and optimistic if you are completely out of touch with reality. I’m all for optimistic media, but when it’s this tone deaf, it comes off as irredeemably ignorant. 

This is a clumsy, clumsy movie. Technical proficiency does not in and of itself an excellent film make. Pair it with a flimsy, trite, facile look at religion, add in a purely Amerocentric view (what, has every UFO only ever landed in the U.S.?), and have actors of vastly different calibers deliver faux philosophical dialogue, and you’ve got the makings of a film that serves as a reminder that the cost of being the voice of a generation is that, if you allow yourself to be defined by your generation, eventually your art will stop having any real world relevance.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

There was a round of headlines earlier this month announcing that George Miller is looking to complete his ongoing Mad Max saga with a new TV show & movie, which is impressively ambitious for an 81-year-old filmmaker nearing the end of his career. To his credit, Miller’s advanced age didn’t affect his ability to deliver high-octane action spectacle in his last Mad Max chapter, Furiosa, which found the octogenarian still experimenting with new ways to wow his audience with comic book mythmaking in every brutal frame. Even so, it appears Warner Bros is reluctant to allow Miller another spin behind the wheel of the war rig, so it might be a while before we see what Furiosa and the gang are up to in the proposed final chapter (if we ever see it at all). In the meantime, Miller was on the top of my mind while watching a different over-the-top action spectacle from an aging auteur, 80-year-old Yuen Woo-Ping’s big budget comic book adaptation Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert. Yuen’s flying-swordsmen action epic recalls Miller’s work both in its CGI sandstorm surrealism and in its shockingly elaborate brutality for a man of Yuen’s age. His name may not be as readily familiar to American audiences as Miller’s, but rest assured you are already a fan of his work, and you owe it to yourself to see how far he’s still pushing his craft while major movie studios are still allowing him to do so.

As a director, Yuen Woo-Ping is most famous for making Jackie Chan a household name in 1978’s Drunken Master, half a century ago. However, he’s most revered by martial arts fans in the West for his work as the fight choreographer for 1990s & 2000s actioners as formidable as Kill Bill & The Matrix. He effectively brought authentic wuxia action to the America for the first time, notably choreographing the flying-swordsmen spectacle of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which still defines the wuxia genre for most Western audiences. So, even if you are not familiar with the comic-book source material for Blades of the Guardians, you likely have some expectation for what a top-of-his-game Yuen Woo-Ping can bring to big-screen fight choreo. He exceeds expectations by the end of the first fight, much like Miller wowing audiences with the late-in-the-game ferocity he brought to the nonstop chase scenes of Fury Road. Yuen’s camera gets inches away from the hand-to-hand street brawls that break out at the opening locale, then pull away to catch a top-down aerial view of the same ongoing action. A nameless goon is pantsed & humiliated mid-fight by our vagabond hero in that opening bout, recalling the anything-goes tonal shifts of Hong Kong’s action filmmaking heyday. Later, two assassins battle each other with flaming swords in an oil field setting worthy of a heavy metal album cover. Arrows fly all the way through horse riders’ skulls mid-gallop, throwing them lifeless to the ground. An epic one-on-one assassin battle is staged during a world-ending sandstorm of Fury Road proportions. Blades of the Guardians travels across the desert from one action set piece to another like a true big-budget blockbuster, far from the philosophical sparseness of King Hu-style wuxia titles like A Touch of Zen. It’s a big-canvas crowdpleaser designed to keep your heart rate up and your fist in the air, held there by a seasoned elder of its genre.

Wu Jing (Wolf Warrior) stars as a 1st Century transient bounty hunter who’s constantly dodging offers to settle down as a government official (training troops in sword fighting) or as a small-village family man (raising the adorable young child he’s seemingly adopted Grogu-style). His skills as the #2 fugitive of the empire are put to the test when he’s hired to transport the empire’s #1 fugitive—the enigmatic leader of The Flower Revolution—to safety at the opposite end of the desert. The revolutionary in his care does not help make this task easy in any way, both wearing a conspicuous cat mask that broadcasts his identity to all onlookers and being so feebly averse to conflict that he makes each fight harder just by hanging around. Meanwhile, every assassin in the game is eager to collect the bounty on the revolutionary’s head, and the protector’s unwanted road companions land him in larger crises of political intrigue that complicate the mission at every stop. Like most wuxia actioners, Blades of the Guardians is adapted from popular lit that presumes familiarity from its audience and only offers rapid-fire exposition dumps and character-intro title cards for narrative bearings. If you can let go of needing to know the political & historical alignment of every character beyond their obvious designations as “good” or “evil,” however, it’s follows a fairly familiar action blockbuster path, wherein a seemingly stoic warrior gradually warms up to his found family of traveling companions after initially taking on a mission for selfish personal gain. The rest is all communicated in the broad strokes of horseback battles, head-chopping sword fights, and unexpected whirlwind romance — each depicted with an incredible amount of elaborate detail and technical precision from a Hong Kong industry legend who doesn’t get the opportunities to flex his muscles nearly as often as he used to.

I don’t think it’s inappropriate to dwell so much on the long-spanning legacy Yuen Woo-Ping represents in the director’s chair. Blades of the Guardians very deliberately acts as a passing of the cultural torch from older generations of Chinese action blockbuster filmmakers to youthful up-and-comers. While Wu Jing might headline the film after two solid decades of onscreen martial arts spectacle, he has costars so young & fresh to the game that their cast listing on Wikipedia links to a K-pop boy band instead of their own designated page (namely, Dong Sicheng of NCT, among other boy banders in the cast). It’s a movie that goes out of its way to pay respect to the industry’s old-timers, though, including small roles for Jet Li & “Big Tony” Leung Ka-fai and a last-minute cameo from Yuen Woo-Ping himself. You just wouldn’t know that if you saw any of the film’s elaborately choreographed fight scenes out of context, since they each convey a relentless eagerness to wow the audience that’s usually associated with younger filmmakers who feel they have something to prove. The stylized fights of Blades of the Guardians are unmistakably aligned with Yuen Woo-Ping’s most iconic work (especially recalling The Matrix in its hand-to-hand closeups and Crouching Tiger in its fantastic swordfights), but I still found myself thinking of George Miller as he staged those fights across the vastness of the landscape’s whirling sands. The two old-timers share a demonstrated hunger & ferocity you wouldn’t typically expect from filmmakers’ their age, putting to shame all of the other auteurs of their generation who get generously graded on a curve for the sloppiness of their own “Late Style” missives.

-Brandon Ledet

Chinese Torture Chamber Stories

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Usually, when someone describes a movie as “torture porn,” they’re not being literal. The term is largely pejorative, wielded to shame & insult a crop of aughts-era horror thrillers that found pornographic satisfaction in torturing buxom young women under grimy fluorescent lights. The genre’s tone is decidedly unsexy, as it has been gradually understood as a subconscious expression of culture-wide discomfort with the US’s torturous interrogation tactics in the post-9/11 days of the War on Terror. It’s important, then, to distinguish 1994’s A Chinese Torture Chamber Story and its 1998 sequel as literal torture porn: overt attempts to titillate their audience through leering depictions of traditional Chinese torture techniques, repackaged into the sleek production values of 90s-era erotic thrillers. Unlike the accidental torture porn of the following decade, the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories are also very direct in their expression of horror with the governmental interrogation tactics of mainland China, voiced from the somewhat safe distance of British-ruled Hong Kong. So, while the cowardly Saw & Hostel hid their own queasy arousal with real-life torture victims of the American justice system under several layers of artificial, dramatic remove, A Chinese Torture Chamber I & II were bravely upfront about being simultaneously icked out & turned on by their own nation’s cruel & unusual tactics for beating “the truth” out of the accused.

The first Chinese Torture Chamber Story is structured like an especially crass episode of Law & Order, with a pair of accused adulterers standing trial under the duress of an arcane legal system. Before the 19th Century court, a poor chamber maid (Yvonne Yung) pleads for a panel of judges to believe that she did not sleep with her wealthy employer (Lawrence Ng) behind his wife’s back, nor did she conspire to kill her own husband (Tommy Wong) so that she could run away with said master in full adulterous sin. In flashbacks, we discover that she is telling the truth. In fact, she has been a victim all her life, from being effectively sold into sexual slavery as a potential concubine for her master, to being married off to a potentially violent husband as punishment for supposedly tempting said master, to being punished by a panel of judges for acts of adultery & murder she never actually committed. In the eyes of the law, however, she is guilty until proven innocent, so the audience is subjected to watching her get spanked, beaten, and lacerated in the present, between dramatic scenes proving her innocence in the past. This archaic interrogation might be interpreted as a political statement against the effectiveness of torture as a method of extracting a truthful confession out the accused, who mostly just wants the pain to stop, but in practice it’s played as an excuse to stage nonconsensual S&M acts for a disturbed, horny audience — starting with a bare-bottomed public spanking to set the tone.

What you might not gather from that plot recap is that A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a largely goofy slapstick comedy. The husband our poor handmaiden is married off to is introduced as another punishment for her supposed adultery, because he’s known to have a comically oversized penis that would physically harm any woman who attempts intercourse with him. When his timid bride finds him to be a tender soul and lovingly jacks him off from behind in a show of good will, the scene is played as a ZAZ-style parody of the pottery wheel scene from Ghost, complete with an Easternized remix of “Unchained Melody.” Her master also gets into over-the-top sexual mishaps while traveling away from home, most notably in a sequence where he meets a married pair of wuxia warriors, who perform violently athletic acts of wizard sex while flying through the treetops the same way most wuxia movies stage their sword fights. Any tonal seriousness elsewhere is a result of the extremity in the gore, which simulates historically accurate torture tactics involving chopped legs, pulled fingernails, crushed breasts, castration, and ritualistic penetration. Even those gross-out gore gags can be oddly humorous despite their heinous cruelty, though, never more so than in the opening credits sequence, which deploys the stock Wilhelm Scream sound effect a good dozen times before we even get to the title card. The movie wants you to squirm in discomfort, to squirm even harder in arousal, and to have a good laugh at its cartoon antics, all at the same time. It’s an all-timer cinematic feat in cognitive dissonance.

The 1998 sequel A Chinese Torture Chamber Story II falls much more solidly in-line with what an audience would expect from literal torture porn of this sort. Again, we are bearing witness to the ritualistic torture of a young woman accused of adultery & murder (Yolinda Yam), but in this case, she is guilty of the crime. In flashback, we learn the ways that her murder of an empire official (Mark Ho-nam Cheng)—whose entire job appears to be ritualistic torture of political dissidents—is morally justified. We meet her in a peasant village where her fiancée is hoping to earn enough money to one day make their marriage official, which opens the young couple up to a dangerous love triangle with a traveling warrior they find impressive in skill & social stature. The warrior’s potential to cuckold every small-town yokel who admires him is initially treated as a source of erotic intrigue, playing out like a mildly naughty Skinemax thriller with sweaty bouts of marital copulation relieving the tension. That hero worship quickly sours, however, when the noble warrior gets his puppy-dog devotees jobs in the local torture chamber, where they are horrified by the violent acts he emotionlessly performs as if he’s filing paperwork. Once his cold, villainous soul is revealed to the audience, he is free to commit horrific acts of sexual violence against his new employee’s wives, plunging the audience into a tonal ice bath that couldn’t differ further from the goofball boner comedy of the first movie in the series. We’re happy to see him killed.

The second Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a lot less playfully zany then the first one, which makes it difficult to recommend even to most schlock genre nerds. It’s strictly for freaks only. Still, it’s got such a psychologically fucked up villain that’s it proves to be a compelling watch in its own grimy way. At the very least, it’s the movie of the pair that more convincingly delivers on the “torture” qualifier of the “torture porn” designation, which is meaningful in a genre where the “porn” can never go past softcore. As exceedingly violent as Category III Hong Kong sex thrillers can be, their onscreen sexual activity is relatively tame compared to the hardcore pornos of America’s golden age. Characters will connect at the pelvis in sexual bliss, but there is no visible thrusting in that lower hemisphere; they can only heave their chests to simulate sexual motion. The screen can be overloaded with boobs & butts, but penises are only represented in veiled silhouette, except in nonsexual scenarios where they are separated from the body in elaborately violent acts of castration. The most onscreen sexual activity you’ll find in the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories is when the sex is at its most violence, as in when a comically gigantic penis literally explodes in a geyser of blood or when a character mimes forced fellatio on a magically invisible man. As literal torture porn, these movies are decidedly in bad taste, but they are also gorgeously staged acts of bad taste with surprising jolts of juvenile humor frequently interrupting their act of extreme sadism. The same cannot be said for American torture porn of the early aughts, which is just as dull tonally as it is visually & artistically.

-Brandon Ledet