How to Make a Killing (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I was intrigued by the initial trailers for John Patton Ford’s modern update on Kind Hearts and Coronets, How to Make a Killing. Glen Powell as the disenfranchised heir to a massive fortune who has to pick off his awful relatives one by one, what’s not to love? Unfortunately, a better question would have been “What’s there to love?”, and the answer is “Not very much.” 

The extravagantly wealthy Redfellow clan exiles daughter Mary when she gets pregnant with the child of a commoner and refuses to abort it. The father of said child, whom Mary names Becket, dies on the day of his birth, and Mary spends the first several years of his life indoctrinating Becket into the belief that he “deserves” “the right kind of life.” Despite being a lowly civil servant, Mary ensures that Becket gets archery lessons and all of the other hallmarks of an upper class upbringing, which brings him into contact with Julia, an upper class girl with whom he falls in love. Becket shares with Julia that the Redfellow patriarch stipulated in his will that the last surviving member of the Redfellow clan inherits the entire $28M fortune, even those who were previously disinherited. As an adult, Becket (Powell) has a chance run-in with recently married Julia (Margaret Qualley) at the Manhattan haberdasherie where he works, where he’s reminded that she’s upper class and awful; it’s all very Kate Beaton’s Wuthering Heights.

When he is demoted from salesman to warehouse work at his job because the owner’s son is being slotted into Becket’s position, Becket decides to look into the whole “Let’s kill off my cousins so I can inherit everything” option. He starts with tech money halfwit Taylor (Jude Law’s son Raff), and his attendance of Taylor’s funeral brings him in contact with his uncle Warren (Bill Camp), who confesses that he always felt guilty about what happened to Mary but was powerless to stand up to current family head Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris); Warren offers Taylor’s old job to Becket, who accepts. Becket sets sights on his second victim/cousin, Noah (Zach Woods), a pretentious Brooklyn hipster in the mold of Pulp’s “Common People,” whose girlfriend Ruth (Jessica Fenwick) falls for Becket after Noah’s death. Now that he has the love of a paternal figure, a job that he excels in and which nets him enough money to rent a luxurious NY apartment, and a down-to-earth girlfriend, Becket has the life he “deserves,” but it’s still not quite enough. In quick succession, he knocks off his megachurch money laundering cousin (Topher Grace), aviation obsessed uncle McArthur, and faux-humanitarian mega-adopter aunt Cassandra, leaving only Becket, Uncle Warren, and Grandpa Whitelaw in the Redfellow clan’s tontine, at which point Becket takes a pause to decide if he wants to continue with his murder spree. This is complicated by Julia’s re-entry to Becket’s life, begging for a loan for her in-over-his-head husband, and despite Becket’s “careful” alibi-creation for all of the deaths of his relatives, Julia has the evidence that would put him away if he refuses to bail her and her husband out. When Warren dies of natural causes, it all comes down to a showdown with Whitelaw, which we assume can only end one way, since we’ve been told this entire story via flashback that is set in a framing device of Becket in prison awaiting his execution. 

This film has no idea what it wants to be. It’s not quite funny enough to be a true comedy and instead takes a sharp turn into knockoff noir territory, especially when it comes to Julia’s late-film-twist transformation into the femme fatale to serve as a foil to Ruth’s good girl. Qualley is horribly miscast in this role; I’ve been an advocate for her based on her performances in The Substance and Kinds of Kindness despite seeing her plumb the depths with Drive Away Dolls, but it might be time to throw in the towel on defending her against the accusations that she’s just not a very good actor. That may not entirely be her fault, though; this is just a bad movie, and no one comes off well here. I’m generally charmed by Powell and adore Fenwick, but both are underwhelming here, and even Powell’s charisma isn’t enough to make Becket someone in whom we can become emotionally invested. This is a movie about nepotism, explicitly and textually, and I can’t tell if Qualley and Law were cast with a sense of irony or not, but no one “deserves” the kind of life that a multimillion-dollar fortune provides. The only performance that I genuinely loved was Topher Grace’s, who appears in a single scene. Most of the pruning of the Redfellow family tree is done almost perfunctorily, when spending a little more time with them and their awfulness would lend at least some sense of justice to Becket’s actions. Instead, one gets the sense that we’re supposed to find them loathsome despite the fact that their sins are enjoying their wealth in the same way that we see Becket enjoy his when he starts to have his own folding money. A more sincere effort to inspect that would have been more effective, but then that wouldn’t leave enough room for the “comedy” that the film was sold on. It’s messy and inconsistent. How to Make a Killing is too many things and nothing at all: a noir with all of its grit sanded off, a comedy that isn’t very funny, good and bad actors alike having no charisma with one another, and all of it shot with flat, featureless Netflix lighting. No wonder it had no staying power in cinemas.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Scream 7 (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I was recently in Illinois, and the flights to and from O’Hare gave me the opportunity to catch up on some new releases I had missed. I had intentionally avoided (read: boycotted) seeing Scream 7 in theaters because of what happened to Melissa Barrera and the utter cowardice with which her morally correct opposition to the Palestinian genocide resulted in her being let go from the franchise. I must offer thanks to United Airlines for offering the chance to legally and ethically see the film; now having watched it, I can confirm: it fucking sucks. 

After sitting out Scream VI, Neve Campbell returns in this one as Sidney Prescott, now living in Pine Grove, IN and running a cafe called The Little Latte. This means that she’s hundreds of miles away from Woodsboro when a new Ghostface murders a couple who have rented out Stu Macher’s old house, which has been turned into an AirBnB experience themed after the real-life Woodsboro murders and the Stab film franchise that mythologized them. Ghostface torches the place, symbolically burning down the old. In Indiana, Sidney’s daughter Tatum (Isabel May), named for her best friend who was killed all the way back in Scream, is dating a boy named Ben, who recreates the “Billy sneaks into Sidney’s window” scene from that film, although Sidney isn’t fooled for a moment. Despite what we all inferred (and the previous production teams confirmed) about Sidney’s husband being the Mark from Scream 3, we learn here that she’s married to Pine Grove police chief Mark Evans (Joel McHale). 

In addition to Tatum’s boyfriend Ben, we also meet the rest of her friend group: Hanna (Mckenna Grace), Chloe (Celeste O’Connor, who hasn’t aged or changed their hair style since Madame Web), and creepy next door neighbor Lucas, whose mother Jessica (Anna Camp) is Sidney’s only real adult friend that we meet. Sidney begins to get FaceTime calls from none other than the presumed long-dead Stu Macher (Matthew Lillard) just as a new Ghostface appears in Pine Grove to terrorize Sidney, her daughter, and her daughter’s friends. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) appears on the scene, with more recent franchise additions Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Chad (Mason Gooding) in tow; her show has been cancelled, and she’s trying to climb her way back into relevance with the twins as her crew. Campbell’s fellow nineties mainstream teen actor Ethan Embry also appears as an employee of the mental institution where Stu has apparently spent the past three decades as an amnesiac John Doe before being released, just a couple of weeks prior to the events of the film. 

Scream is my favorite horror franchise, but it’s been well established that my favorite overall media empire is Star Trek, and there’s a quote from one of the producers of the ill-fated 2001 series Star Trek: Enterprise that I couldn’t stop thinking about all throughout Scream 7. I’ve been unable to relocate it, but I think it was Brannon Braga who said, in essence, that Enterprise failed because the shepherds of the franchise failed to consider that they needed a better reason to produce the series than “it’s time to go back to the well again.” The reason that Scream 4 and the two more recent sequels work so well is because they let the ground lie fallow for a while. Scream 3 (which was the worst of the franchise until this one, and even then was not without its inspired moments) ran everything into the ground, and by the time of Scream 4, there were all new elements of the horror genre to deconstruct. 5cream and Scream VI, likewise, justified their existence by playing with the relationship between legacy sequels, toxic fandom, and copycat killings. The franchise’s central conceit—that Ghostface is a mask anyone can wear and attracts people who are obsessed with horror media—is barely paid lip service here. Mindy mentions that this time, the killer is all about nostalgia, and Chad immediately shuts her down by saying that they’re not doing “the rules” this time because the idea is played out, which is the perfect microcosm of just how little care, thought, or effort mattered in the creation of Scream 7. This exists solely because it was time to go back to the well again, and boy, does it show, and it also does little to assuage accusations that this was an attempt to launder the franchise’s image in the wake of the Barrera controversy. 

The characters here are half-baked at best, and the performances are nothing to write home about, either. Isabel May is, as politely as I can put this, not a very good performer, and learning that Mckenna Grace was cast as early victim Hanna after auditioning for Tatum means that the producers passed on having Grace, who gives consistently strong performances, as Sidney’s daughter. That’s inconceivable! An unjustifiable whiff if ever there was one. When Mindy and Chad gather Tatum’s friend group to tell them that, statistically, one of them is likely a party to the killings, every person present is so thinly drawn that the audience knows they must all be red herrings (ironic, given that the actual killers are somehow even less developed, to the point that one of the actors portraying them had to beg for a couple more scenes of character development). Ben is a computer guy, so he might be able to pull off the potential deep-faking of Stu Macher; Lucas is deep in the “true crime lexicon” and is overly invested in the Woodsboro murders; and Chloe, um, has a crush on Lucas. That’s it! In 1996, Scream up-ended what had become the de facto slasher formula of having a bunch of interchangeable teenagers dying at the hands of an implacable killer; in 2026, Scream 7’s teenaged characters are those interchangeable kids. The most memorable new character here is Jimmy Tatro’s ill-fated AirBnB guest who’s dead by the title card. 

It’s impossible to say where the overreliance on nostalgia in this franchise first entered as the series’ original sin. Scream VI could be argued to have started this, given that the killers in that film were recreating kills from the previous movies using actual collected murder weapons. 5cream addressed nostalgia and its effect on toxic fan culture in its text with relation to the in-universe Stab franchise, but the first Stab film was referenced all the way back in Scream 2, so it’s been a part of this narrative for a long time. Scream 3 may have been the first to take it too far, with the narrative revolving around the shooting of a Stab film. A case can be made for any of them, even the original film, but it is undeniable that there is now a clear winner for the film in which this is the most poisonous. Scream 7 has a moment in which Tatum comes downstairs wearing Sidney’s leather jacket from Scream 2, and the music swells in a way that makes it apparent that we’re supposed to have some kind of emotional investment in this piece of apparel. Not even the biggest Screamhead could make a rational argument that this was a look that needed to be inscribed alongside the actual iconic outfits from the franchise (which are, in order, Rose McGowan’s Tatum’s bosomy sweater, Drew Barrymore’s blonde bob and cozy fleece, and Courteney Cox’s horrible bangs in Scream 3). We have dug through the bottom of the barrel for things to reference. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the killer’s deepfake of Stu isn’t the only one that we see of a prior Ghostface. It makes sense that the AI Stu would be made to look as if he had continued to age since 1996, because he’s supposed to be Stu, or close enough to convince Sidney. Why the hell they didn’t bother to de-age Laurie Metcalf or Scott Foley for their cameos at the end would be a riddle for the ages, were it not for the fact that we know the answer: the film-makers were lazy, and they just didn’t care. 

Every interpersonal conflict here is contrived and unrealistic. The idea that Sidney would try to shield her teenage daughter from all of the horrors she faced at the same age, it absolutely holds no water that this would mean that she’d fail to protect her daughter from the reality that their family will never not be in potential danger from various legacy Ghostfaces. Tatum should be strong, fierce, and self-sufficient, not whining to her mother about her over-protectiveness. This might have worked had Grace been in the Tatum role, but May doesn’t have the chops for it, although she’s not alone in the crop of teen actors when it comes to having talent that fails to pass muster. Original Tatum showed more character and imagination in the garage scene alone than new Tatum does in this entire film. Gale and Sidney go live on TV at one point to try and draw “Stu” out, and Gale gets a rise out of Sidney by asking questions about her offspring, which causes Sidney to get defensive and rip off her microphone. This scene doesn’t feel like the culmination of a long-awaited reunion between characters we’ve known for decades, and instead feels like forced conflict, one that’s immediately dismissed when Sidney gets a call from an under-attack Tatum. Chad and Mindy barely even have a reason to be present, and Mindy’s sudden desire to be the new Gale Weathers is baffling. 

Scream 7 has precisely three good ideas. The first is the opening sequence; that the Macher house has become a bit of a shrine that is of interest to true crime obsessives is a fresh concept, and having a new Ghostface murder a couple of them on the spot is such a good opening that I’m surprised it wasn’t already used before. The second good idea is that the film features the death of one of the Ghostfaces in the middle of the second act, catching the characters and the audience off guard. It was such a refreshing change that I was pleased with it, until I remembered that this was just a variation on the opening from Scream VI. Even one of its few good ideas is just a rehash. Finally, what this return to the well brings to the table is the discussion of AI and deepfakes. Having Stu Macher return and there be a question as to whether it’s really him or someone using his likeness to torment Sidney is perhaps the only bold choice that Scream 7 makes, although it ultimately amounts to little more than the nostalgia bait equivalent of dangling keys in front of a baby. There were countless different ways that this could have been incorporated, and better fit the Scream concept. Why not have the lead Ghostface pose as Stu Macher online to indoctrinate other would-be Ghostfaces, with the question of whether or not Stu remaining alive is the same? If you’re going to go to all the trouble of bringing Lillard back, why not have a plot point about members of the younger generation finding something that he pre-recorded, “movie rules for killers” on some VHS that a true crime collector discovers? It’s as bad a fumble as casting the lead of The Daily Wire’s Run Hide Fight as Sidney Prescott’s daughter instead of Mckenna Grace. 

As a Scream fan, my nomination is that we all agree that the series ended with Scream VI. Sidney was safe and far away, there was a decent capstone of using all of the previous films without retroactively making them “connected” in an unbelievable way, and Kirby got her redemption. Gale was never going to be able to get direct vengeance for Dewey’s death since “Ghostface” is only an idea and not a being, but she got the closest she was ever going to. Sam and her sister put an end to their family’s killer legacy and walked off into the sunset. That’s more than good enough for me. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Is God Is (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I live in a majority Black neighborhood in a majority Black city with its very own four-screen cinema just a few bus stops away from my front porch. In the decade or so since that theater has opened, this week is the first instance I’ve ever noticed that the majority of the movies on that cinema’s marquee were helmed by Black directors and Black leads, which suggests that we’re currently experiencing a notable cultural moment in film distribution, at least partially encouraged by last year’s box office success for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Of the three Black-led, Black-directed films screening at The Broad this week, Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is lands the closest to Sinners territory, at least in comparison to Antoine Fuqua’s amoral nostalgia-bait biopic Michael and Boots Riley’s lefty heist comedy I Love Boosters. Is God Is is a dusty, Southern-fried genre flick shot on location on the rural backroads of Louisiana, and thus the project of the trio that most likely benefited from Sinners‘s success. Much like Sinners, it’s also a film that’s more satisfying when it’s setting the stage for its violent climactic showdown than it is when actually depicting that violence, when its tension is supposed to be relieved through cathartic action. In both cases, it’s a fun ride getting there, regardless of the payoffs found at their predetermined destinations.

Aleshea Harris’s feature film debut feels like a natural evolution from her background as a playwright. It’s packed with compelling characters staging a series of standalone showdowns in single-location scenes, each linked via road trip montage. This structure allows formidable actors like Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox, Janelle Monáe, and (fresh off her hilarious turn in The Rise & Fall of Reggie Dinkins) Erika Alexander to make major impact with just a few minutes of screentime, rigidly sectioned off in their own hermetic realms. Each of those name-brand performers go toe-to-toe with the film’s up-and-comer leads: Kara Young & Mallori Johnson as telepathically linked twins on a familial revenge mission across the American South. After having essentially raised each other from foster home to foster home, the two young adults are enlisted by their estranged mother (Fox) to kill their even more estranged, abusive father (Brown) in retaliation for heartlessly setting his family on fire, leaving all three women horribly scarred & disfigured. The feistier twin (Young) is excited to be offered a path to tangible retribution & closure, while the kinder twin (Johnson) struggles to hold her sister on a leash, hoping to resolve the violence of the past without exacting further violence in the present. Because this is a revenge thriller, neither kindness nor forgiveness prevail.

Is God Is is funny, stylish, and cool in surprising ways. The twins’ lifelong social isolation resulting from their visible disfigurement has left them intensely strange & mutually obsessed, like a couple of Nells (or, more appropriately, like Letitia Wright’s titular dual role in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Silent Twins). Harris’s stage theatre background shows in the screenplay’s more allegorical touches, categorizing the twins’ oppositional parents as a small-town showdown between God (Fox) and The Devil (Brown) in a temporally ambiguous, sepiatone version of The South. Between the leads’ volatile sisterly chemistry and the anything-goes chaos of the otherworldly setting, the movie quickly establishes a distinct style & mood despite the familiarity of its road-trip revenge mission genre template. The major letdown, then, is that it doesn’t also deliver on the built-in genre payoffs of that template. Harris proves to be just as weary to get her hands dirty in the film’s violent action as the softer of her two protagonists. We know her characters are doing violent things; they are brutally killing each other with lit matches, rusty gardening sheers, and Biblically-accurate rocks. The movie is just disappointingly squeamish about actually depicting that ultraviolence onscreen instead of just hinting at it. We almost always see the aftermath instead of the point of impact, as if the producers were seeking a PG-13 rating that the crasser lines of Harris’s dialogue were never going to allow.

The most convincingly violent Is God Is gets is in the ice-cold tone of Sterling K. Brown’s villainous performance, suggesting a sociopathic level of cruelty the onscreen action is too timid to match. This is ultimately a very warm, sentimental story about two socially isolated women who only have each other in this otherwise cruel world; it hides all of the nastier business of smashed skulls, burnt flesh, and pierced lungs behind visual obstacles, shielding the audience from the full brunt of impact. This disparity between the level of violence demanded by the genre and the level of violence depicted on the screen calls into question whether Harris was actually interested in making a revenge thriller in particular, or if that screenplay was just the easiest to fundraise production funds for, as opposed to a dialogue-heavy drama. Then again, the last time I remember complaining about this kind of violence-averse squeamishness was in Nia DaCosta’s (otherwise compelling) Candyman reboot, and she later doubled down on horror’s mandatory violent catharsis in the excellent 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Maybe Harris is working her way up to soaking in the bloodbaths demanded by her scripts’ chosen genres. Maybe she’ll be able to leverage the attention earned by this flashy debut to instead pivot away from genre requirements entirely. Either way, this is an undeniably cool calling-card introduction of an exciting authorial voice to the moviegoing audience, and its wide theatrical distribution is an encouraging sign for where the industry is headed.

-Brandon Ledet

The Currents (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Everyone knows what you mean when you describe a film as “a character study,” but I’d like to expand on that genre descriptor to include a new subcategory: the character mystery. Many festival-circuit dramas operate as alienating character studies of inscrutable people—especially women—that the audience must puzzle through only to vaguely understand. The first time this occurred to me was during the local premiere of Red Rooms at the Overlook Film Festival; the film has since been heralded as an era-defining digi voyeurism thriller, but I spent the entire runtime thinking, “Okay what is this woman’s deal???” while each of the protagonist’s peculiar character traits were revealed one scene at a time. Since then, it has occurred to me that there are many great films of the “What is this woman’s deal???” variety, including such classics as Todd Haynes’s Safe, Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, Christian Petzoldt’s Undine, and the majority of Isabelle Huppert’s filmography. Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents is just the latest addition to that character-mystery canon, an Argentinian variation in the national tradition of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman.

We meet our mystery character outside of her usual environment. Isabel Aimé González Sola plays an Argentinian artist accepting an industry award while abroad in Switzerland, then immediately jumping off the nearest bridge in a shockingly nonchalant suicide attempt. When describing this incident to her sister back in Argentina, she confesses, “I fell into the water,” absolving herself of cause or intent. What we’ve come to learn about her by that point is that she feels fully disconnected from her body and her life, stuck in a constant dissociative state that alienates her from friends, family, and colleagues. A new wrinkle to that feeling is that the bridge “accident” has left her terrified of any & all contact with water, associating the flow of a river’s currents with the ceaseless allure of The Void. She describes her current state as existing in “suspended time,” as she lives out the lyrics of DEVO’s “Out of Syc” while drifting from one social or professional obligation to another. Seemingly, the only thing keeping her from jumping back into The Void is concern for her young daughter, and even that earthly tether is wearing thin.

In one of the most intriguing sequences, our dazed mystery woman is hypnotized by a lighthouse bulb and dissociates for several minutes while imagining the urban domestic scenarios playing out on the city streets below. We might as well assume that she’s under hypnosis for the entire runtime, as every mundane activity that fills her day registers an out-of-body experience, from bath time with the kiddo to passive-aggressive squabbles with the mother-in-law. As a result, we have a less solid sense of who she is than we have of the fluid state she finds herself drowning in. She is, herself, the mystery; all the audience can relate to or repel from is the familiarity of the undefined feeling she’s suffering through. I may have set expectations a little too high in that opening paragraph by likening The Currents to so many cinephile-approved masterworks, since its scene-to-scene payoffs are decidedly quiet & lowkey. It’s a strangely calming experience for what’s effectively a psychological thriller, often pausing its story beats for a quiet stroll through an art museum or a couture photo shoot or a VR headset rainstorm. It’s a mystery without a resolution, designed with the clean lines & jewel tones of a fashion catalog spread instead of more typical psych-thriller mise-en-scène. In that sense, it’s best recommended to fashion-forward fans of The Headless Woman; just because you’re a headless enigma doesn’t mean you can’t pull off a lewk.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #265: Chess of the Wind (1976) & The World Cinema Project

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #265 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that have been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, starting with the Iranian familial thriller Chess of the Wind (1976).

00:00 Welcome
02:11 Obsession (2026)
09:09 Microcosmos (1996)
18:42 The Housemaid (2025)
25:55 Maya Deren

32:54 The World Cinema Project
41:09 Chess of the Wind (1976)
1:09:39 Lucía (1968)
1:33:58 The Night of Counting the Years (1969)
1:51:01 Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Maisie Was a Lady (1941)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For the first time, we open a Maisie picture (this is the fourth) with our leading lady already employed. It’s not very dignified, unfortunately; she’s in a carnival sideshow set up in a contraption with a mirror that makes her appear headless. When troublemaking wealthy alcoholic Bob Rawlston (Lew Ayres) tickles her on stage and costs her the job, he allows her to borrow his car to get into town. Maisie takes him up on this offer but ends up spending the night in jail after being pulled over on suspicion of stealing the vehicle. When the judge lets her off per Bob’s admission of complicity in Maisie’s firing and his permission to use the car, he also requires Bob to pay Maisie the amount that she was supposed to receive for the remainder of her sideshow contract, Maisie refuses to take money for nothing, and it all shakes out that Bob will keep her on for the two months of her contract at the sprawling Rawlston manse as a maid. Maisie is taken to the house and introduced to family butler Walpole (C. Aubrey Smith). 

On her first day, she meets Bob’s sister Abigail (Maureen O’Sullivan) as well as her fiancé, Link Phillips (Edward Ashley), but is not aware of their relationship until after Link has tried (and failed) to make a pass at her. The house is full of guests who will be in attendance at the upcoming engagement party for Link and Abigail. They’re all rather hoity-toity and rude to Maisie, embarrassing Abigail so thoroughly that she asks Maisie to be her personal maid, to which our heroine agrees. We get to spend some time with Abigail and learn that, despite all her wealth and finery, the Rawlston family is in disarray; after Mrs. Rawlston’s death, the family patriarch, “Cap,” has become a largely absent presence, sending jewelry that Abigail never wears or cares about in lieu of being present in her (or Bob’s) life. We learn about most of this from Abigail herself, while Walpole relates the same is true for Bob, who won a scholarship for some kind of aviation innovation, but for whom a lack of fatherly interest meant that he abandoned all of his ambitions. Tensions in the house reach a boiling point with the arrival of Diana Webley, a woman Link Phillips previously spurned; he doesn’t see any reason that his money marriage to Abigail should spoil all of the fun that they could have together, and it’s up to Maisie to, once again, save the day. 

Maisie Was a Lady is the best of the Maisie series by a decent margin. Maisie wasn’t terrible, of course, but it wasn’t all that memorable, either, whereas this one hits the ground running right out of the gate. Maisie is still independent, witty, and vivacious, and as the series goes along, she’s simply dropped into place until she gets the chance to observe everyone’s foibles, then deliver a no-nonsense monologue to give them the what-for that sets everything right. For the first time since Maisie, she also gets a love interest in the form of Bob Rawlston, even if their sudden affection for each other comes out of left field in the film’s final moments. With peace restored to the Rawlston household, Abigail asks Maisie to go to Honolulu with the family and to stay on as her companion. Maisie’s eyes light up as she considers it, possibly considering what adventures she might get up to in Honolulu Maisie, but then asks Walpole what kind of woman he foresees for Bob, prompting the old butler to rattle off a description of old money gentility that causes those lights to dim. After the leading men in Congo Maisie and Gold Rush Maisie both turned out to be false flag romantic leads, perhaps I should have seen it coming that Bob was going to win Maisie’s heart in the final moments even if there was no indication of that kind of affection between them in the film’s first hour. It almost feels like this was hastily added at the end to give Maisie a happy ending, should this be the last time that we saw Ann Sothern in this role. 

The screenplay for this one is credited to Betty Reinhardt and Mary C. McCall, Jr., just as the previous films were, but this is the first time that there’s no credit given for Wilson Collison, other than “characters created by.” Reinhardt shares story credit with frequent Frank Capra collaborator Myles Connolly, which may be why this one soars out of all the Maisies so far. It’s almost an obvious choice to have Maisie play “downstairs” in a rich family’s home; this gives her the opportunity to have comic friction with both the guests and the other servants, who are accustomed to the kind of bowing and scraping that it never even occurs to Maisie to consider. It’s all in good fun, although it takes a melodramatic turn in the final act that’s very similar to the one that set up the final events of Maisie. Since these films are all essentially self-contained, it really doesn’t matter if you decide to pick one up at random and give it a chance, and this one is the best so far and doesn’t really require you to know anything about the previous; you could treat this as a standalone picture and have just as much fun (if not more) than if you didn’t know who Maisie was in the first place. 

The film has its old-timey moments, of course. When Mr. Rawlston finally returns to the manor after the one-two punch of his absence and the revelation of Link’s gold-digging nature sends poor Abigail over the edge, Maisie reads him the riot act. Notably, she compares him unfavorably to the abusive fathers of her Brooklyn neighborhood, because at least they knew their children, and, according to Maisie, “Givin’ em the flat of your hand stacks up against giving them nothing.” It’s the only noteworthy tone-deaf moment in an otherwise blistering scorcher of a dressing down, so it gets a pass. Maisie Was a Lady gives us a heaping helping of the gal we love, and, though predictable in the extreme, is worth the eighty minutes it’ll cost you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Gold Rush Maisie (1940)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

After her little outing to Africa, Maisie Ravier is back stateside. She’s not headed to check out the ranch she’s supposed to have inherited at the end of Maisie, though. Instead, we find her once again trying and failing to get to her next cabaret job, this time in Tucson. A car that she bought for a bargain to get her the rest of the way breaks down in the desert at night, and she finds her way to a ghost town whose two sole inhabitants are a gruff, hostile young recluse named Bill Anders (Lee Bowman) and his ornery hired hand, Fred Gubbins (Slim Summerville). Bill warms up to Maisie enough to pitch some woo her way, but she won’t have any of it, and the two men are less than receptive to her friendly overtures the following morning. When her car still won’t start after Bill takes a look at it, Maisie sets out on foot, finally arriving at her destination, a few days too late; the cafe owner has already hired different talent when Maisie didn’t arrive as expected. While ruminating on her next move, Maisie learns that there’s a gold rush boomtown developing near Anders’s property. Her kindness to a young girl whose family are following the gold rush earns her a place in their car, and she returns to get her car back and set out for her next adventure, but ends up invested in the future of the Davis family. 

The Davises are bargain bin Joads, former tenant farmers from Arkansas who lost everything in the Dust Bowl. Patriarch Bert remains cheerful and appreciative of his wife Sarah (Mary Nash)’s long-suffering patience, and Sarah herself is the kind of sweetheart who goes hungry so that her family can eat. The family has three children including a baby; the other two are played by notable child actors of the era. “Jubie” Davis was portrayed by Virginia Weidler, who appeared as Katherine Hepburn’s younger sister in The Philadelphia Story the same year as this film, and the perpetually hungry Harold was played by former Little Rascal Scotty Beckett, whose Rascal career as Spanky’s best friend came to an abrupt end once Alfalfa appeared on the scene. Overall, the Davis clan is likable and charming, and it’s easy to believe that Maisie would be willing to spend her last few dollars getting them some groceries and helping them stake out their claim. Of course, there has to be something to keep her present in Arizona to give her rough charms time to thaw Bill Anders’s stony heart so that he offers up his land for the disenfranchised farmers to homestead on when the gold in the area turns out to be so low in concentration that it’s not worth the effort of mining. It’s even less of a romance story this time around, too, since there’s no indication that Maisie has any designs on Anders, other than to get him to warm up a little. 

The format of these movies is starting to emerge, with Maisie as a kind of folk hero who goes from place to place, gets involved in people’s lives, and then moves on like Charlie Kale in Poker Face or Huckleberry Finn. There’s no real continuity to speak of, but one imagines that the studio must have been conscious that people would remember Slim from the first film and Maisie’s relationship with him even if he goes unmentioned, as Maisie’s further adventures are largely free of romance. She pretended to be into the male lead of Congo Maisie only so long as it helped her save another woman’s marriage by demonstrating how poorly suited the man was for love. One would expect that Maisie and Bill would have some romantic entanglement here based on their positioning in the film’s poster, but other than a couple of quick, chaste kisses, there’s nothing to indicate that Maisie reciprocates the tender feelings that she inspires in Bill. If anything, it feels like the first two films were aiming for that Ernst Lubitsch adultery comedy and missing the mark a bit, and decided to drop that entirely to just have Maisie wander the earth like David Banner (ironically, Scotty Beckett would go on to portray the child version of Don Ameche’s character in Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait just a few years later). 

Wilson Collison is credited with the story on this one, just as he was for Maisie (which was based on his novel Dark Dame) and for Congo Maisie (which was based on his non-Maisie novel Congo Landing). I’m not entirely sure that’s a worthy credit, however, given that the screenplay was actually pinned by two women, Mary C. McCall Jr. (credited for eight of the ten Maisie pictures) and Betty Reinhardt (who would later co-write Otto Preminger’s Laura and Give My Regards to Broadway). I’m not sure how much credit Collison really deserves for grafting the character of Maisie into a riff on The Grapes of Wrath, which would have been a hot commodity at the time, as John Steinbeck’s novel was published only the year before and the John Ford film adaptation reaching theaters only four months and 11 days before Gold Rush Maisie. That’s important context, since it also means that the somewhat corny-sounding dialogue of the Dust Bowl Okies (ex: “Tarnation, it’s nigh on to supper already”) is actually contemporary. 

Ann Sothern continues to shine in these, and while a lot of her non-comedy dialogue in the first two films had the ring of melodrama about them, her indomitable spirit comes through most clearly here. There’s a real sense of gravitas in her voice as she explains to Bill that the would-be miners have learned that the ore is useless and are holding a meeting about where each is going to go, since they can’t all try to go work the same temporary farm jobs. They’ve got to part for various different destinations, “spreading the starvation around a couple of states and not bringing it on each other,” and it’s quite good stuff. And this time, we get to see Maisie drive off into the sunset, off to spread barbs and charm elsewhere, the next time we see her in Maisie Was a Lady. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Congo Maisie (1940)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I’m pleased to report that Congo Maisie is not as racist as I had feared. Make no mistake; it’s still racist as fuck, presenting every African with whom the white characters interact as a pidgin-speaking stereotype, universally superstitious and fearful of local witch doctors, and very quick to both bow and scrape. Even the film’s only noteworthy highlight—the finale in which Maisie puts on a performance for the attacking natives to convince them that she’s more powerful than the witch doctors—is still infantilizing and insulting. It’s deeply unpleasant, but at least we don’t hear our hero use any slurs (other than, of course, the ubiquitous use of “boy” to refer to grown men). 

When we last saw Maisie, she had just received the happy news that the late Mr. Ames had left his fortune, including the Bar-O Ranch, to her, and she planned to run it with her newfound love interest Slim. Despite this, when we catch up with her in Congo Maisie, all indication that this was where we left her has vanished. She’s once again a showgirl on the lookout for the next big opportunity, which is what has brought her to Africa in the first place. She runs out on her hotel bill in (fictional) Kurmala, West Africa, and stows away on a riverboat that she believes is bound for Lagos, where her next engagement is, but turns out to be headed elsewhere. She’s discovered hiding in one of the cabins by Dr. Michael Shane (New Orleans native John Carroll), the foul-tempered manager of a rubber plantation. He’s journeying up the river to his place, but when the boiler on the boat overheats and explodes, all passengers are put ashore. Shane was previously the physician in residence at a different colonial plantation that’s nearby, and he and Maisie make the trek to it in order to find a place to stay until the boat can be repaired. 

The new plantation hospital doctor, McWade (Shepperd Strudwick) and his wife Kay (Rita Johnson), welcome them, and the cracks in their relationship are evident immediately. Kay is lonely and misses home, friends, and family, while Dr. McWade’s devotion to researching a cure for sleeping sickness drives him to work for long hours, and his own health is worsening as a result. Shane’s reunion with a local with whom he had become friends is marred by the revelation that the man’s son is very sick and he is afraid to bring him to McWade for fear of reprisals against his family from the local witch doctors, who act as the villains of the film who stir up fear and discontent against McWade, Shane, and the other settlers, who are our protagonists. Somehow, in all of this, Shane also finds the time to try and woo Kay, and she’s a receptive party given her isolation from familiar people or sights. Maisie, perhaps having learned something from Sybil Ames in Maisie, then allows Kay to witness as she herself flirts with Shane, who has no loyalty to anyone. In the final act, the locals, at the behest of the witch doctors, arrive at the plantation hospital mere minutes after Shane has completed successfully removing McWade’s appendix with Maisie acting as nurse and begin trying to tear the place to the ground. Maisie, thinking fast, dons one of the costumes from her act and does some stage magic, stalling long enough for an inbound thunderstorm to break and for rain to fall so that she can pretend that this was her doing, and turn the locals back on the witch doctors. 

The only reason any of this works is because of Ann Sothern’s performance as Maisie. Even when the movie itself is grossly colonialist and imperial, Maisie herself remains an undaunted, lovable figure. This is based on a totally unrelated book entitled Congo Landing, which I’ve been able to find very little information about other than a contemporary NYT book blurb that names the main character as Dolly, and describes her thus: “Her savoir faire is undisturbed by the deadly tropical heat, the pestiferous mosquitos, or the explosion of the boiler on the rotten little Congo River boat. Under a hardboiled exterior she has really a heart of gold and a shrewd, intelligent mind.” That also describes Maisie, and it’s clear why someone reading Congo Landing might see this as a perfect vehicle to quickly develop into a sequel to Maisie, with Congo Maisie appearing on screens a mere seven months after the character debuted in the previous film. There’s only a singular rating of the novel on GoodReads, although there are a few very low star ratings for Das Haus am Kongo, which appears to be the German translation; the one review for Das Haus cites that the reader “found the casual racism referring to all of the [B]lack characters unbearable.” I imagine it probably is worse in the book, but that doesn’t make this film any good. Utterly unworth preservation. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Microcosmos (1996)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Back in my college days, the go-to TV series to get stoned & zone out to was the BBC’s Planet Earth, a soothing nature doc series shot in then-astonishing HD clarity. I couldn’t afford cable back then, though, so I only caught snippets of it while drifting through friends’ & strangers’ living rooms, occasionally mesmerized by a glimpse of the Northern Lights or an insect-destroying fungus before moving on to the next mindless activity. My own personal Planet Earth back then was a much-rented DVD stocked at the off-campus Blockbuster, a 2005 French documentary titled Genesis. In it, an African mystic stirs a bucket of water to create a small whirlpool, which he then uses to explain the history of the planet and the evolution of all the life it hosts. Much like David Attenborough’s dry script-reads in Planet Earth, the narration never stops, with the mystic constantly explaining the subsequent nature footage that illustrates the evolution of Earth life in astonishingly gorgeous close-up photography. Genesis is a little hokey, but it’s less than 80 minutes long (as opposed to Planet Earth‘s 500+), and it gets the job done. As I’ve since come to learn, it’s also always functioned as a bargain-bin alternative to a superior work, even though it predates Planet Earth by a couple years. Long before they made Genesis, directors Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou had scored major acclaim with their 1996 masterwork Microcosmos, which offers an up-close, Planet Earth-style profile of insect life never before seen in such beautiful cinematic detail. Genesis is the watered-down version of their earlier success, which makes it a pity that’s the one I had access to on the nearest video store shelf.

The key to Microcosmos‘s success as a monumental work of art rather than a standard-issue nature doc is its almost complete lack of narration. While Genesis overexplains in metaphor and Planet Earth instructs in classroom lecture, Microcosmos includes only a small touch of narration to get the audience thinking about how insects, snails, and other miniature creatures live small lives that we rarely take the time to observe. Even those couple paragraphs of narration feel a little redundant, given that its opening theme song already explains it perfectly in a child’s falsetto, instructing “Look at your feet/this funny world/full of insane small creatures/and listen to/this buzzing chord/who keenly spreads such strange murmurs/The sound’s buzzing, swarming, sliding beetles, snails, and ladybirds.” Besides functioning as a presciently pitch-perfect parody of Björk’s career to come, that tune encapsulates the entire project in just a few simple words. Gazing at Microcomsos means pausing your busy brain to observe a world smaller than yours, the one just below your feet — where the bugs live. Nuridsany & Pérennou worked with state-of-the-art microscopic cameras to immerse their audience in that world, shrinking our moment-to-moment concerns down to the insectoid impulses to feed, breed, and shelter. It’s not a mode of observation & wonderment that can be explained in narration; it’s a practice that the movie teaches you by forcibly diverting your attention to the smallest things in life. I also have to assume that its lessons’ most accomplished students are 20-year-old stoners who’d rather focus on just about anything other than their actual homework, the same as with Genesis & Planet Earth one decade later.

The cast of Microcosmos is large & varied. You’ve got all of your classic microspecies here: your ants, your spiders, your ladybugs, your tadpoles, your moths, your butterflies. And then you’ve got a never-ending supply of esoteric creepy crawlies I couldn’t even begin to identify, as if they were found under a rock on an alien planet instead of the one we occupy. Even more mysterious is the moment-to-moment actions of these micro creatures, which Nuridsany & Pérennou playfully assign meaning through cheeky music & editing choices. It’s easy to read into insects’ intention & emotions while they’re mating, hunting, and organizing in groups, but when those acts all inevitably lead to no specified goal or result, the audience snaps out of the trance and remembers, oh yeah, they’re bugs. We’ll often watch the up-close struggles of a frog being pummeled with rain drops, a dung beetle struggling to push its self-assigned Sisyphean bolder, or a group of caterpillars lining up in military formation. We get emotionally involved in their toils, only for the edit to then switch to a wide shot that contextualizes these epic battles as the meaningless busywork of insects who have no idea what they’re doing or what’s happening around them. It’s an effect that says just as much about the manipulative nature of filmic storytelling as it does about the minute-to-minute meaninglessness of our own upscaled human lives. Nothing you’re working on right now matters all that much in the bigger picture of things, so you might as well take some time out of your day to look at some cool bugs doing cool bug shit. There’s a whole world down there, and it can be just as breathtakingly beautiful (snails having sex) as it is hilariously pitiful (ladybugs having sex).

Microcosmos recently screened at The Broad as part of their weekly Gap Tooth repertory series, with a fully engaged audience making their own audible insectoid rustlings in reaction to every microstruggle depicted onscreen. After a clueless dung beetle spent minutes freeing its little bolder from an errant stick in the mud, the room burst into spontaneous applause. Personally, I only spent half the screening marveling at the majesty of nature’s smallest wonders; I spent the other half thinking about how every species of insect deserves to be blown up to kaiju scale in its own standalone creature feature, an experience the packed house was already gifting to the latecomers in the front row. Access to such a beautiful communal event in my own neighborhood was also a blessing in its own way. It’s funny how access can affect your relationship with cinema. What we’re able to see can be severely limited by cable subscriptions, video store libraries, and geographic proximity, like how I spent repeated nights watching Genesis while most of my friends were watching Planet Earth and we all should have been watching Microcosmos.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Kirlian Witness (1979)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychotronic ’70s oddity The Kirlian Witness, a murder mystery in which the only witness to the crime is an ordinary house plant.

00:00 Welcome
01:41 Take One (1977)
09:20 Maisie (1939)
24:35 Camille 2000 (1969)
31:28 Heaven Can Wait (1943)
36:47 The Invisible Boy (1957)
41:39 Gazer (2025)
51:26 New Rose Hotel (1998)
56:50 The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)
1:16:26 The Puffy Chair (2005)
1:20:47 Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
1:27:20 Demonwarp (1988)

1:30:05 The Kirlian Witness (1979)

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