The festival-circuit documentary The Oldest Person in the World is an intentionally incomplete project, in that it could theoretically be expanded upon into infinity . . . or at least for as long as humanity is still viable and still making movies. As such, it’s a project without a clear goal beyond marking the passage of time, one that director Sam Green has taken on as a personal mission within the scope of his own family life but could, theoretically, stray into any direction the next filmmaker in his lineage wants to take it. The logline premise is simple. Green has spent the past decade interviewing the world’s currently oldest living person, as determined by Guinness World Records, one reigning champion at a time. He hopes to continue this project for as long as he continues working & living as a filmmaker, with an open-ended invitation for it to carry on beyond him in another documentarian’s hands — preferably his young son’s. The idea is that, every ten years, a new edition of The Oldest Person in the World would be issued with a new batch of interviews as the title changes hands, inviting the audience to reflect on the passage of time at the furthest edges of a human lifespan. That project only takes up so much of the movie’s runtime, however, as Green allows himself space for his own self-reflections on the passage of time within his immediate family, getting sentimental about his growing son, his aging mother, his deceased brother, and his own prematurely failing health. The world’s oldest living people only have the strength and the self-awareness to say so much about what it means to live an extraordinarily long life, so Green fills the void with his own ups, downs, and neuroses. It’s unclear what place, exactly, that perspective would have in a future edition of this project once Green passes the baton, which is probably why the Guinness Book of World Records isn’t typically written in first-person.
It likely goes without saying that Green’s interview subjects are of far greater interest than his personal video diary entries that fill the gaps between them. It also likely goes without saying that the oldest person in the world is almost always asleep or grumpy, which makes them terrible interviewees — delightfully so. The MVP subject of this initial batch is the 118-year-old French nun Lucile Randon, who attributes her longevity to the mystery of God’s will, which she treats as a kind of supernatural hostage situation she wishes to be over as soon as He’s ready to relent. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the kindly 117-year-old Jamaican woman Violet Brown sees her continued life as more of a gift than an extended prison sentence, stressing to Green how important it is to hold onto the memories that matter most for as long as you can, lest they slip away to time. Green also does some extracurricular research between interviews into the history of the Oldest Living Person title, uncovering bar-trivia tidbits like how all-time champion Jeanne Calment was not only the world’s oldest living person ever at 122 years of age, but also became the world’s oldest rapper on a novelty record to promote her achievement in delaying the inevitable. These women (and they’re seemingly always women) are endlessly fascinating subjects in their own right, so it can’t help but feel a little disappointing that Green relies so heavily on his own cutesy narration to sell their shared story’s poignancy. The resulting film is frequently poignant, though, and funny too, so the indulgence is forgivable. It’s just always a relief when he finds himself at a loss for words (if not only because he doesn’t always speak his interviewee’s language) and sits with his subjects in a shared silence, allowing the passage of time to naturally imbue the moment with meaning.
Conceptually, the idea of The Oldest Person in the World continuing on as a collaborative project is a little flawed, given how much of himself Green has inserted into the initial work. The way he proposes it, the movie would not be followed up by sequels every decade like the Seven Up! series, so much as it would be continually expanded upon in new, fluctuating edits. A new edit from a new contributor would have to transform the work radically to be at all worthwhile, though, as Bresson’s axiom goes that, “A film is born three times: first in the writing of the script, once again in the shooting, and finally in the editing.” What happens if Green’s son grows up to be an avant-garde experimental filmmaker in the Godardian tradition? Would he be allowed to remix footage from this first edition into a multimedia collage of abstract, incongruent imagery, or would Green’s more Varda-inspired approach to documentary filmmaking play out in full before abruptly switching modes as the next contributor takes over? Furthermore, who’s to say that anyone besides Green would be interested in continuing this project at all, including his own son, given how personal the initial outing is to his own familial sentimentality? The imperfection of the proposed project does not delegitimize its existence, though, no more than the imperfection of Guinness World Records’ tracking of the world’s oldest living person makes that pursuit meaningless. Guinness sometimes struggles to fully verify the birth records of the reigning champion, so that there are stretches of time where there technically is no official oldest living person until the next legitimate one can be crowned. Time marches on, though, and things are inevitably taken out of our hands as we’re decommissioned and replaced by the next batch of human beings behind us. All we can really do in the meantime is observe & document the process.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychic-visions thriller The Dead Zone (1983), a Stephen King adaptation directed by David Cronenberg.
Practically every single zombie movie made since 1970 has been influenced by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in some way. Every time a small group of survivors boards themselves up in a cramped locale only to be besieged & disemboweled by an invading zombie horde, Romero’s legacy hangs heavy in the putrid air. And so, I found myself thinking a lot about Romero’s Living Dead series this Halloween season as I saw its influence echoing throughout all the zombie titles I binged during the heaviest days of my horror-movie mania. What confounded me most about seeing Romero’s work infinitely reiterated and reinterpreted was that I was starting to forget why, exactly, the dead rose in the original Night of the Living Dead in the first place. The only explanation I can recall is that, “When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth,” and that the phenomenon is otherwise treated as a natural disaster that can neither be understood nor prevented by the living. So, then, why were all the post-Romero zombie flicks I watched this October so intent on explaining the sources of their zombie outbreaks instead of just letting the walking dead speak (i.e., groan) for themselves? If anything, it felt as if they were all in an ever-escalating competition to come up with the most preposterous, absurdly over-specific reason for the dead rising instead of following Romero’s lead and leaving it deliberately ambiguous.
Romero’s zombie-attack victims philosophizing about Hell running out of room for deceased sinners at least gestures towards a religious reason for the phenomenon, even if it is pure speculation. Maybe that’s what inspired MVP Romero enthusiast Lucio Fulci to lean into religious blasphemy for the source of the zombie outbreak in his 1980 classic City of the Living Dead, a.k.a. Gates of Hell. City of the Living Dead was Fulci’s attempt to pay homage to H.P. Lovecraft, as indicated by its setting in the Lovecraft-invented town of Dunwitch but, as the inclusion of “The Living Dead” in its title suggests, it’s a pure Romero riff through & through. All of the zombie-horde invasion & disemboweling you’d expect to see in a later, proper Living Dead film is on full, shameless display, with Fulci going his usual extra mile to make sure everything is as disgusting as possible in a series of for-their-own-sake gags: ocular bleeding, victims puking their literal guts up, windy blasts of flying maggots, etc. And what is the reason for all of this hellish mayhem? A Catholic priest has hanged himself in a Dunwitch graveyard. We first see the priest’s suicide as a psychic vision during a distant seance, and once we travel to Dunwitch to investigate, the image repeats itself at the start of every gross-out zombie attack. Fulci presents that suicide as an act so blasphemous that it has opened the literal gates of Hell, so that any fucked up horror he can imagine is justified in being unleashed upon the audience. Meanwhile, Romero & Lovecraft both likely would’ve skipped the explanation part and left the source of that supernatural mayhem horrifically unknowable.
Scooter McCrae’s 1994 SOV horror Shatter Dead also uses religious blasphemy to explain the source of its zombie outbreak, but it at least tries to keep the inciting incident unfathomable to the human mind. The film opens with a meeting of the sacred and the profane: a sexual tryst between The Angel of Death and a human woman, staged under a ceiling fan light and a layer of warped-VHS grime. Months later, we watch a Romero-style heroine survive the daily banality of a post-zombie apocalypse, wherein religious cults run amok and the undead are homeless societal rejects. Like City of the Living Dead, most of its thematic blasphemy is suicide-based, establishing a world where everyone & everything conspire to pressure you into joining the zombie horde via suicide, so you can stay “young” forever. Shatter Dead has earned some cult-cinema notoriety as an obscene object by allowing that nihilistic sales pitch to follow its characters into the bedroom, including some incredibly graphic sexual imagery involving gun play. In the most memorable sequence, our suicide-avoidant protagonist has sex with her undead boyfriend and works around the lack of bloodflow to his penis by strapping a pistol to his belt and using its barrel as a marital aid. It’s a shocking image, and it’s one that recalls the Angel of Death sex scene at the start of the picture, where a gender-ambiguous angel appears to be wielding an unseen hard-on despite their external feminine appearance. The angel’s phallus is never revealed to the audience with the same pornographic detail as the strap-on handgun, but it is indicated to be a dangerous weapon in its own right, given that it incites a zombie apocalypse by getting a human woman pregnant.
If the reason behind a zombie outbreak isn’t religious, it’s usually scientific. Even Night of the Living Dead includes a throwaway line from a news reporter supposing that the dead may have risen because of a passing satellite. The 1974 Spanish whatsit The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (a.k.a. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie) is much clearer in passing the blame for a zombie outbreak to newfangled scientific machinery. Set in the English countryside, its own zombie lore involves a new piece of experimental agriculture equipment that eliminates pests & parasites from farm crops via new forms of radiation. The danger of this experiment is only apparent to the hippie Londoner who happens to be passing through this farmland on vacation, given that his all-natural granola lifestyle means he’d rather see the parasites kept at bay via more traditional methods. He’s proven to be in the right when the radiation from this newfangled farm equipment starts to bring the dead back to life and they start to drag the living back to the graves with him. Only, no one believes him, and the small-minded townies suspect that he’s responsible for all the murders himself. The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue is very clearly a post-Romero zombie movie, but its main villains are the cops who suspect the urbanite out-of-towners for the undead’s supernatural crimes. Every single time the heroes see a way out of a tight jam, the cops rush in to fuck it all up, all the way through the bummer ending. Then, the radioactive farm equipment gets switched back on again, no lessons learned. Brutal.
Not all dead-raising science is accidental, nor is it always exclusive from religion. In 1981’s Dead & Buried, a mad-scientist mortician (played by Jack “Grandpa Joe” Albertson of Chocolate Factory fame) has found a means of reconstructing the human body post-death in cosmetic procedures that go far beyond his usual duties as a corpse beautician. We watch in time-elapse as reconstructs the human form from the skeleton outward like Dr. Frankenstein building his monster. Only, he needs a little religion to help animate those corpses, so he turns to Voodoo to help get them back on their lumbering feet. It turns out this combination of religion & science makes for a relatively healthy mix, as far as zombie outbreaks go. The living dead in the small town of Potter’s Bluff, where this crazed mortician reigns supreme, are thoroughly re-integrated back into society post-death. They’re given jobs; they’re given a hobby (even if it’s always the same amateur photography hobby, documenting the mad scientist’s crimes); they’re made part of a real, functional community. All of that plot explanation likely constitutes major spoilers for the uninitiated, but I imagine if you’re reading this far into a blog post about vintage zombie movies you already have at least a vague idea of what Dead & Buried is about. If not, you might switch it off halfway through, impatient that there are no zombies in the movie at all, given that the first half plays like a story about small-town weirdos who violently murder outsiders for daring to treat their coastal home as a vacation getaway. Once those murdered interlopers start popping up around town as reanimated corpses, however, Potter’s Bluff turns out to be a very welcoming community to outsiders; they want you to stay forever.
Romero teases several explanations for the initial zombie outbreak in Night of the Living Dead without ever confirming one in particular. It seems that in the half-century since those teases, other filmmakers have gone mad attempting to find solid, specific reasoning for the dead to rise from their graves. We know that we like to see the dead walk around every October, but we’re not entirely sure there’s a good enough reason why they’d want to re-join the living to do so. It only fully makes sense if they’ve been ejected from Hell, the only place that’s presumably less miserable than this one. Everything else just plays as wild supposition and faint political commentary, when no excuse is truly needed to get those corpses walking.
The big-ticket repertory title this Halloween season was, undoubtedly, the theatrical re-release of Ken Russell’s 1971 classic The Devils, finally restored to its full blasphemous glory in 4k HD detail. What was supposed to be a one-week limited run for that holy-grail cult title gradually snowballed into a month-long celebration, lingering in theaters long past the expected end of its stay. I appreciated finally seeing The Devils projected on the big screen just as much as anyone and, if nothing else, that larger canvas inspired an even deeper respect for Derek Jarman’s work on its production design than I’ve ever felt before. The movie’s heavily marketed re-release was a largely corporate effort, though, as handled by the new Warner Bros sub-label Clockwork. And so, there were other, smaller cult-cinema restoration projects last month that The Devils inevitably overshadowed, since they didn’t have the same Major Studio muscle behind their marketing campaigns. They came and they went, largely unnoticed. I’d like to take a moment to highlight a couple of them here before they’re forgotten entirely.
The recent 4k restoration of 1989’s Begotten was just as much a labor of love as Mark Kermode’s decades-long campaign to fully restore The Devils. You just might not instantly recognize that effort by looking at the picture, since it presents such a deliberately ugly, degraded image. Much like The Devils, Begotten enjoys some cult-cinema notoriety as an extremely violent, highly offensive work of intricate visual craft. The difference is that, unlike Russell & Jarman, director E. Elias Merhige (later of Shadow of the Vampire notoriety) sought to apply that craft to exclusively hideous images, drowning his audience in blood, mud, shit, and cum until we collectively gurgle our last breath. Every image in Begotten is a “Wait, what am I looking at?” situation as the audience squints at its intentionally degraded black & white film stock, and the answer is always disgusting. It’s impressively relentless in that way, following one vaguely defined divine figure after the next as they’re disemboweled, defiled, and pummeled into the earth to an ambient noise soundtrack. Even when all of that death & destruction seemingly gives birth to new life in time-elapse plant growth, the cycle of life they’re participating in is too depressingly dingy to find the least bit beautiful. The only clue Merhige affords his audience that we’re being subjected to a cruelly cyclical creation myth is the end credits’ indication that its actors are playing characters like “God killing himself,” “Mother Earth,” and “Flesh on bone.” Otherwise, we’re just dragged through the muck of the world’s gloomiest experimental art film, now presented in even more harrowing detail.
It’s easy to imagine why Begotten might’ve fallen into distribution limbo, given that it starts with God’s suicide and only gets more gratuitously blasphemous from there. The prolonged effort to restore and re-release 1988’s Fright Night Part 2 is more surprising, given that it’s no more risqué nor uncommercial than the original, widely beloved Fright Night. This direct sequel picks up only a few months after the slaying of Chris Sarandon’s vampire hottie at the end of the first Fright Night, transforming reluctant hero Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale) from sexually confused high school dweeb to sexually confused college dweeb. He’s successfully undergone intensive therapy that has erased the trauma of his initial run-in with the undead, but then he’s once again distracted by an invading vampire coven at the exact moment that he’s supposed to be losing his virginity to his girlfriend. So, instead of getting hot & heavy with his current sweetheart, he disappears into the night to hang around vampire-hunter horror host Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall), starting the whole cycle over again. The main difference is that the head vampire in this second outing is a bodacious babe (Julie Camden) instead of a handsome hunk (Sarandon). The suppressed queer themes of the original still carry over, though, since the new vampire coven is styled to resemble the kind of gender-ambiguous bisexuals you’d expect to see on every college campus, or at least in the background of every 80s Prince music video. Fright Night Part 2 drops the retro Hammer Horror homages from the first Fright Night, but it does bring back all of the 80s gross-out gore effects in its own go-for-broke climax, credibly living up to the original’s legacy. Most audiences wouldn’t know that, though, given that it’s been allowed to fall into distribution limbo due to corporate “regrouping”. It just fell through the cracks, like loose change abandoned in a movie studio’s couch.
Kino Lorber is handling the re-release of Begotten, while Synapse is working on getting Fright Night Part 2 back in circulation as well. I was lucky to catch both movies as a Halloween Weekend double feature at my local downtown shopping mall, where they were met with a much more muted reception than Clockwork’s re-release of The Devils in other parts of town. Maybe it says something about the constant spoil of riches that genre film nerds are currently being pampered with that two 80s cult objects that have been missing from official distribution channels for over 20 years have returned to such quiet fanfare. More likely, it’s just another indication that robust marketing goes a long way in finding niche moviegoing audiences, since The Devils was so successfully propped up as a must-see event by the Warner Bros promotional muscle. All you can really do as a fan is to help spread the word. Either dare your movie-nerd buddies to subject themselves to the grimy horrors of Begotten or suggest they lighten things up with another goofball episode of Fright Night that hasn’t been as thoroughly re-run into the ground as the first. It’s never been easier to access them, and they’ve never looked better, but most people wouldn’t know that without hearing word of mouth.
One of The Prytania’s Classic Movie selections this Halloween season was the 1958 Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, starring Christopher Lee as the famous vampire. It’s a gorgeous picture in the exact way that most Hammer Horrors are, but it’s also one that doesn’t take a lot of risks in its transformation from page to screen, to the point where its US release had to be retitled The Horror of Dracula in order to distinguish it from the decades-old Bela Lugosi classic from Universal. If anything, Hammer’s Dracula film goes out of its way to streamline and normalize the Bram Stoker source material, consolidating characters and skipping over the novel’s strange fixations on real estate deals & oceanic travel. As a result, I greatly enjoyed looking at The Horror of Dracula but didn’t think much about it after leaving the theater, since it deliberately made itself more inconspicuous so as not to be dismissed as a silly novelty. I believe this was a mistake. By the 1950s, the first run of the Universal Monster movies had established a concrete canon of iconic horror villains in Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the Gill-man (with no offense meant to my egomaniacal bestie the Invisible Man). Those famous creatures’ early outings in the Universal Monsterverse defined the look, feel, and tone of horror cinema (if not only by bringing some dark German Expressionist magic to Old Hollywood), so that any reiteration in subsequent decades would have to stand out as a silly novelty in order to stand out at all. Restaging Dracula in sumptuous 1950s Technicolor is not enough; you need a fun, memorable gimmick to zhuzh up the material. Even Universal knew that by the 1950s, when they regularly dispatched their Famous Monsters to terrorize Abbott & Costello in a series of slapstick comedies for children. And so, I left The Horror of Dracula craving the goofier, zanier side of Count Dracula in a novelty take on the character, and I’ve spent the rest of this Halloween season tracking down similar goof-offs from his Famous Monster brethren.
Of all the silly Dracula-adjacent novelties that called out to me this month, 1977’s Dracula’s Dog barked my name the loudest. In this far-afield deviation from the original novel, the Dracula surname has carried down through multiple generations all the way to Michael Dracula, a suburban dad who loves spending quality time with his middle-class family in sunny California. During an especially sun-dappled camping trip, Michael Dracula and the rest of the Dracula clan are attacked by a vampiric Doberman that once belonged to his ancestor, the Count Dracula of Dracula lore. The undead, ever-loyal Doberman attacks whomever has the misfortune of crossing his muzzle from scene to scene, but the real way he continues his former owner’s legacy is by biting and converting all nearby dogs into his canine vampire army, further ruining Michael Dracula’s family vacation on an escalating scale. You won’t be surprised to learn that Dracula’s Dog (aka Zoltan . . . Hound of Dracula) is not an especially well regarded addition to the Dracula canon, but I think that’s a shame. Anytime the hellhound Zoltan leapt out of his little doggie coffin to expose his bloody vampire fangs and gently nibble on his victims’ exposed necks, I experienced pure childlike delight, and that’s exactly what the Famous Monsters are good for. Sure, Zoltan and his loyal vampire-dog army trap Michael Dracula in a locked car and viciously attack him from all sides in a living-nightmare sequence straight out of Cujo, but any movie with the title Dracula’s Dog is going to feel like it was made for children, regardless of its content (a dissonance that director Albert Band would later push to further extremes with this son Charlie under the Full Moon home video brand). It’s not as controlled nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror take on Dracula, but it’s undeniably more memorable. You’ll never get the details of Dracula’s Dog mixed up with other Dracula adaptations in memory. For better or worse, it’s its own thing.
Maybe if the goofier, off-brand versions of Famous Monsters are going to primarily appeal to children, it’s best not to torment the little tykes with nightmare fuel like Dracula’s Dog; maybe the kiddos should just be pandered to. Universal realized this as early as their Abbott & Costello Meet The Monsters series in the 1940s & 50s, and they continued the tradition through the end of the millennium with another kiddie-friendly IP in 1999’s Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein. By then, the appeal of marketing directly to children was that their little brains are soft and malleable for advertisers, which is why this direct-to-video Frankencomedy doubles as a tourism ad for the Universal Studios theme park. You see, while Alvin and his band of chipmunk brothers are between rock gigs at Universal Studios, they discover that the real Dr. Frankenstein has also been employed by the park’s haunted house attraction and, of course, has released his lumbering undead creature into the wider park. Selling children on the timeless fun of the Chipmunks brand, the Famous Monsters brand, and the in-house amusement park brand, this disposable Halloween Season novelty is more a relic of shameless corporate synergy than it is a sincere addition to the Universal Frankenstein canon (even if its black & white opening positions it as a direct sequel in the James Whale lineage). By the time Alvin and the boys are performing a high-pitched Ozzy pastiche or rapping about fighting the monsters under their bed, however, the artistic merit of the project becomes a secondary concern. Much like Dracula’s Dog, it’s funny enough that it simply exists. Not for nothing, it also works as a great educational tool for young children who have not yet met everyone’s good friend Frankenstein and don’t know that he can be a big old sweetheart if you don’t treat him like a monster. Once loose, the creature quickly proves to just be a big, dumb kid, much like the suckers in the audience who begged their parents to buy this promotional video in the first place.
The next year’s follow-up, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet The Wolfman, was a bit of a letdown in comparison to the Frankenstein one, but that disappointment can be a useful educational tool for children too. It sets healthy expectations for what kids will find when they’re old enough to watch the actual Universal monster movies; the Wolf Man is kind of a drip. 1973’s The Werewolf of Washington is aware of this, making sure that its lycanthropic protagonist is recognizable as a dipshit putz long before he’s bitten by a werewolf. Dean Stockwell stars as a Washington D.C. political reporter who’s sent on assignment to Eastern Europe, where he annoys the local yokels until one of them gets fed up and bites him during a full moon (while disguised in werewolf form, of course). Back in Washington, he becomes increasingly fraught & paranoid as he transforms into a werewolf himself, in what gradually reveals itself to be a caricature of Richard Nixon’s then-deteriorating mental state. If it had been released a few years later, The Werewolf of Washington might be understood as a parody of the era’s political paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor or All the President’s Men. Instead, it’s just one of that genre’s goofier contemporaries, complete with very silly jokes about mixing up the words “pentagram” and “Pentagon,” among other groaner one-liners. And because Universal’s Wolf Man movie starring Lon Chaney Jr. established so much of the core iconography of the werewolf genre, it frequently pays homage to that specific iteration of werewolf lore, including fixation on the werewolf-smiting power of a silver-handled walking cane and its own low-budget recreation of Jack Pierce’s time-elapse makeup transformation effects. Like Dracula’s Dog, The Werewolf of Washington is both too preposterous to take fully seriously but also frequently too beautiful to dismiss as a throwaway novelty. Both movies are built on ridiculous premises, but they play them admirably straight for all they’re worth.
As much as the Wolf Man is a remarkably bad hang in the Universal Monsters crew, the Mummy is the biggest bummer of all. Most of the Mummy movies in that monster’s initial run are so punishingly boring that they’ve been forgotten to time entirely — their memories replaced with visions of Brendan Fraser & Rachel Weisz looking hot & sweaty in the big-budget desertscape of the late-90s reboot. The Mummy is the only Universal Monsters movie whose cultural memory has been surpassed by its derivatives’ and, as a result, most of the more prominent Mummy knockoffs are to be found in that late-90s era. Take for instance 1998’s ridiculously titled Bram Stoker’s The Mummy, a double-edged mockbuster of the then-upcoming Mummy remake and the long-cooled Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “starring” the third-billed actors from some of the 90s’ blandest sitcoms (Caroline in the City‘s Eric Lutes, Home Improvement‘s Richard Karn; Tubi is a truly magical place). Better yet, take 1999’s even more ridiculously titled The All New Adventures of Laurel & Hardy in For Love or Mummy: an Ernestless outing from Jim Varney collaborator John Cherry, improbably cashing in on the era’s Mummy revival by resurrecting Laurel & Hardy from the dead to star in their own Abbott & Costello Meet the Monsters comedy. Now that’s what off-brand Famous Monster movies are all about. Never at any point in For Love or Mummy‘s runtime do you believe that it exists or that you’re spending your precious time on this Earth watching it. It’s also, admittedly, pretty funny. “Laurel” (Bronson Pinchot) & “Hardy” (Gailard Sartain) fit right into the Dumb & Dumber mold of the era’s comedic sensibilities, landing easy laughs as they prattle & pratfall their way through their run-in with a magically resurrected Egyptian mummy. The mummy itself has a pretty cool design to it too, even if it is a remarkably stupid one. The head from a sarcophagus is propped up on a traditionally-bandaged mummy body like a giant papier-mâché mask in an image that would feel more at home in a Saturday morning cartoon than in live action. It’s just the right kind of dumb.
The knockoff Gill-man movies of the 1960s are even dumber. During the era’s beach-party craze, the latecomer Universal Monster was resurrected for two cult-classic creature features in 1964’s The Horror of Party Beach & 1965’s The Beach Girls and the Monster. Together, they teach the ultimate lesson to studios like Hammer and, more recently, the failed grim-dark Universal Monsterverse reboots: have fun. It turns out that making movies is easy. All you need to do is pay some twentysomethings to dance in bikinis to surf rock and point the camera in the right direction. The only hard part, really, is convincing them to also let you pour chocolate syrup on them while getting pawed at by a man in a rubber suit; it sounds sketchy out of context. The monsters in these two beach-party monster movies are both instantly recognizable as direct descendants of the Gill-man. More specifically, the one in The Beach Girls and the Monster looks like a child’s crayon drawing of the Gill-man (complete with goofily round eyeballs) and the one in The Horror of Party Beach looks like a wax figure of the Gill-man that has melted in the beachside sun, but they’re both honorary Gill-men all the same. The Horror of Party Beach even goes the extra mile by including some underwater cinematography in wimpy homage to the original Creature from the Black Lagoon, demonstrating in time-elapse photography how fish DNA, human skeletons, and nuclear waste have mixed to create its not-quite-Gill-man creature. The resulting monster looks a little like if Big Bird’s cousin was a fish and his only known photo was taken at the height of a hotdog eating contest. Then, the goofy beach party fun goes sour during his routine monster attacks, wherein the chocolate-syrup blood looks shockingly brutal in black & white contrast. The Beach Girls and the Monster puts less effort into its own monster mayhem, but it hits just about every other entertainment metric you would want out of a so-called Bad Movie. Its performances are perfectly stilted, its knockoff Gill-man is perfectly doofy, and anytime they’re not sure what to do between kills everyone starts aggressively go-go dancing to surf rock & stock footage. Perfection.
None of these Famous Monster knockoffs are nearly as handsome nor as respectable as the Hammer Horror adaptation of Dracula, but they’re all much more memorably bizarre. Why make Dracula’s tactics & motivations more logical & methodical when you could also choose to mount him on a surfboard while bikini babes go-go dance on a nearby beach, cheering him on? The original run of Universal Monster movies are not only perfect pieces of pop art, but they’re also warm, unrepeatable introductions to cinephiles’ best friends. We’ve already met Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and Gill-man in their prime, and we’ll always primarily remember them as they were in that black & white heyday. So, my impulse with their later films is to watch my ghoulish friends have a little fun. Let them enjoy time with their family pets or get into buffoonish mishaps with the biggest dum-dums within striking distance. There’s no need to take any of this kiddie stuff at all seriously. Now, please remember to excuse my hypocrisy when I fall in love with Robert Eggers’s super-serious “werwulf” picture next month, negating everything I just said.
Sipping a late-night beer while flipping through trash TV channels in an overly air-conditioned hotel room is one of the great luxuries of modern living. It doesn’t matter the quality of the hotel, the beer, or what’s on the TV; it always feels indulgent in the exact right way. I recently found myself enjoying this modern luxury while vacationing in Hot Springs, Arkansas, during a time when basic-cable TV channels were deep in their Halloween season programming. Every night, I would flip between the available movie channels to catch brief, out-of-context glimpses of crowd-favorite horror titles between commercial breaks, hopping from one movie to the next the second an ad would interrupt the spook show. From night to night, it seemed the same movies were playing in rotation while also hopping from channel to channel, establishing a moment-in-time canon of horror classics that are both famous enough to draw ad sales and currently cheap enough to license: Aliens, Beetlejuice, Bride of Chucky, Seed of Chucky, Stephen King’s IT, Jaws II, Halloween II, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Lake Placid, The Mummy Returns, and several other titles I’ve already seen plenty of times before. Somewhere in that mix, I also caught glimpses of the 1983 Stephen King adaptation Cujo, which I was surprised to discover I hadn’t seen all the way through before, despite its obvious cultural familiarity. It seems to me that if a horror movie was famous enough to be included in that rotation of well-worn classics, I should probably make time to properly watch it, which I dutifully followed through on as soon as we returned home. Vacation is over, and I am no longer watching movies in out-of-context snippets; this blog is serious business.
Cujo stars Dee Wallace as the mother of a young child, caught between her duties as a housewife and her desires as a lonely, frustrated woman. Her husband (Daniel Hugh-Kelly) is a total drip whose high-pressure advertising job has him ceaselessly babbling on the phone about breakfast cereal commercials, so she instead seeks sexual release with their rough-handed handyman (Christopher Stone), who’s too much of a brute for the tryst to last long-term. While this peak-divorce-era adultery drama plays out in the suburbs, a junkyard St. Bernard named Cujo is suffering his own personal crisis on the rural outskirts of town, where the family employs an off-the-books mechanic. Cujo is usually a very sweet, good boy, but he sticks his snout where it doesn’t belong and gets bitten on the face by a rabid bat, transforming him from loving family dog to giant, froth-mouthed monster. When the jilted husband leaves for a work trip after discovering his wife’s infidelity, mother & son bring the family car to Cujo’s junkyard for repair, where they find that the dog has already started a vicious murder spree, and they’re next on the menu. The film becomes intensely claustrophobic from there, with Wallace’s distraught & dehydrated mother fighting to keep her son alive in a broken car that Cujo guards like a prison warden, viciously attacking the duo any time they attempt escape. Through the struggle, she proves her worth to herself as a familial protector who’ll do anything to keep her son alive and her family intact, whereas she starts the film listlessly detached. She also gets in a paw-to-paw fight with a gigantic, rabid dog, whose supernatural relentlessness is comparable to a Freddy, a Jason, a Michael, or a Chucky.
At its start, Cujo doesn’t appear to be in much of a rush to terrorize its audience. The first half of the film is pure domestic drama, with its horror elements only hinted at in the young child Tad’s insistence that there is a monster under his bed that will eat him as soon as the lights are switched off. His otherwise absent father gets all the glory as the family protector in those scenes, scaring the make-believe monster away while his mother does the less glamorous work of actually raising him at home from day to day. That is, until the rabid dog attacks start halfway through, when she has to go to battle with the very real monster lurking under the family car instead of the fake one hiding under the bed. Once mother & son are isolated in that automotive prison, Cujo is legitimately terrifying. It’s the most I’ve been unnerved by a scary movie since I first saw the home-invasion thriller The Strangers a few years ago, likely because—like senseless home break-ins—an angry, barking dog covered in blood is a more probable threat in my life than ghosts or ghouls or goblins or the other go-to monsters I usually seek out in classic horror movies. Even so, Cujo does transform from a common dog to a supernatural monster somewhere in the process of his mental decline. Early in the movie, Tad makes a jokey reference to the movie Jaws at the family dinner table, which places this firmly in the canon of cross-species Jaws knockoffs from its era: Jaws, except it’s an octopus in Orca; Jaws, except it’s a bear in Grizzly; Jaws, except it’s a boar in Razorback; and so on. Appropriately enough, the director of Cujo made one of the finest specimens of that subgenre in the 1980 Jaws, except it’s an alligator banger Alligator.
It’s easy to see how Alligator landed Lewis Teague the job of adapting King’s novel — big creature, big chompers, etc. Along with frequent Verhoeven cinematographer Jan De Bont, Teague finds infinite angles on the car-imprisonment scenario of the second half to exploit for effective scares. The camera spins on a 360º swivel inside the car, searching for an unseen Cujo. The rabid dog’s own POV is shown in first-person Cujo Cam during his more slasher-inspired attacks. In the smartest production move, the dog is often portrayed by a man in a costume during his attacks, allowing him to get physical with his costars in a way more traditional animal-attack creature features can’t achieve. It’s a convincingly tactile tactic that helped clarify why I found Primate to be one of this year’s most satisfying horror titles, despite its muted reputations among more high-concept hits like Backrooms, Obsession, and Camp Miasma. It turns out that a freaked-out actor wrestling with a rabid, enraged animal is enough of a hook to carry an otherwise middling family drama, as long as you can sell the viciousness & physicality of that interspecies clash. I doubt that Cujo was ranked near the top of many critics’ Best of the Year lists back in 1983 either, but the scariness of its back half has proven to be enough to solidify it as a lasting horror classic . . . if the metric of continual basic-cable broadcast means anything in establishing that canon. It’s unlikely that Primate will experience the same long-term vindication over the decades, considering the current absence of a legitimate monoculture, but I would be just as happy to see out-of-context clips of it while surfing channels in a hotel room over a beer in the 2060s, God willing.
People like to say that the best biopics focus on a small window of time in their subjects’ lives instead of scrambling to cover everything from birth to death. The traditional cradle-to-grave biopic format (as so perfectly parodied in Walk Hard: The Lend of Dewey Cox) has long gone out of favor, with the current preference being for slice-of-life portraits of famous people in their quieter, private moments. The 1986 true-crime biopic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was ahead of the curve on that trend, choosing to focus on a small snippet of real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas’s infamous crime spree instead of creating a full profile of his life from childhood to arrest. Only, the movie eventually proved to be a warning about choosing the wrong slice-of-life moment in your subject’s biography, since it happened to focus on a small window of time in Lucas’s life that he very likely made up and did not happen at all, thank God. Lucas became famous for confessing to hundreds of murders during police interrogation after arrest in Texas, with his former cellmate Ottis Toole bragging that he was an accomplice in the headline-grabbing crime spree. The problem is that Lucas was just telling the cops what they wanted to hear, allowing them to close as many unsolved murder cases as they wanted to pin on him as long as it made the jailtime for his actual crimes easier to bear. Of the 600 murders he confessed to, it’s difficult to fully decipher which ones he was actually guilty of, and so Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer has eventually transformed into a print-the-legend endeavor, operating more as a composite portrait of a serial killer rather than a detailed portrait of this serial killer.
A young Michael Rooker stars as the cold, unfeeling Henry, portraying his brief time in Chicago as the roommate of former prison buddy Ottis Toole (Tom Towles). Ottis invites his semi-estranged sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) to crash on the couch for a while, and the trio momentarily form a fucked-up family unit that repeats the abuses they each suffered as children. Ottis & Becky both reveal to Henry that they were raised by a physically abusive father, and Henry subconsciously takes over that role in their new family home — keeping them both in line with weaponized sexual tension and threats of physical violence. Things get even more unseemly as he takes Ottis under his wing as a night-owl serial killer, strangling, stabbing, and shooting the citizens of Chicago at random as a form of stress relief. It’s unclear what Henry’s own abusive backstory might be, as nailing down the details of how and why he killed his own mother is just as difficult for these fictionalized characters as nailing down the details of his actual crime spree was for real-life journalists. Rooker mostly portrays him as a blank slate with nothing going on behind his empty, black eyes besides an unexplained compulsion to kill. He’s equally soft-spoken and vicious, without much internal life to be accessed past his hardened surface. Likewise, his crimes are depicted from an alienating distance, focused more on the stillness of his victims’ bodies in the aftermath than on the passionate thrill of his murders in real time. As a result, Henry’s only truly knowable in how he interacts with his abuse-victim roommates, making this more of a family portrait than the portrait of a single man.
Speaking of family portraits, the movie Henry most reminded me of was the 2003 horror anthology Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America, which also found infinite cruelty behind the closed doors of American family homes. That insidious tone is also echoed in James Benning’s experimental true-crime documentary Landscape Suicide, where the setting and the aftermath of vicious crimes are similarly preserved in cold tableaux. It’s a discomforting approach to crime-story filmmaking, no matter how true the crimes being depicted are to real life, which likely helps explain why Henry was stuck in distribution limbo for four years after its festival premiere despite the wide accessibility of the era’s more fantastical body-count slashers. Most of the real-time violence depicted onscreen is mediated through the remove of VHS camcorder recordings that Henry & Ottis film to review later at home over beers, once again chilling the audience at an unfeeling distance instead of submerging us in the heat of the moment. No matter what distribution issues it may have initially suffered for its unforgiving iciness, the movie’s long-term legacy has endured to hold cult-horror audiences’ fasciation as a kind of sleepover-dare endurance test. I happened to catch it in a new, cleaned-up 4k restoration at this year’s ScreamFest NOLA, where I got to experience the browns & greys of its abject squalor in fine HD detail. It no longer matters, really, whether any of the crimes Henry depicts actually happened, since the movie itself has been traumatizing enough on its own merits for thrill-seeking audiences looking to be chilled to the bone.
What do Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, Andrew Scott, Matt Damon, John Malkovich, and now Alden Ehrenreich share in common? As of 2026, all of them have played some version of novelist Patricia Highsmith’s most well-known character, Tom Ripley. Of course, Ehrenreich isn’t really playing Ripley, is he?
A Talent for Murder (not to be confused with the Angela Lansbury telefilm A Talent for Killing) stars Ehrenreich as Edward Ridgeway, who travels to Switzerland in 1995 on behalf of his New York publishing house in order to convince Highsmith (Helen Mirren) to sign a contract for a sixth novel in her “Ripliad.” En route, he meets a young American woman named Clementine (Olivia Cooke) who is visiting her well-to-do European relatives. Aboard the train, she notices that he’s reading The Talented Mr. Ripley, while she falls asleep reading Camus. The cab driver who takes Ridgeway to Highsmith’s remote home notes that she has more local notoriety for having killed a neighbor’s annoying dog than for any of her literary accomplishments, which does nothing to assuage Ridgeway’s concerns over the fact that the last agent sent by his company called home to say he felt unsafe with Highsmith and was never heard from again. Upon arrival, Highsmith greets him with hostility, immediately declaring that she will never return to New York, tipping her hand to reveal some old school racism in the process (she explicitly names Jewish, Korean, and Black people as the reason she left). Ehrenreich nevertheless presents her with the peace offerings she previously expressed interest in: some American notebooks, six cans of Campbell soup, some shirts from Brooks Brothers, and a fancy knife, which she adds to the collection on her wall, Deathtrap style.
After getting some jollies from giving the young man a hard time, like sending him to fetch a beer from a fridge in her pantry, which is filled with various poisons, and feeding him a breakfast to which she may or may not have added arsenic, the two brainstorm a potential new adventure for Tom Ripley. This is envisioned with Ridgeway in the Ripley role, where he reimagines his first encounter with Clementine, this time casting himself as unapproachable and seductive. Using details from their discussion aboard the train, he paints the rest of Clementine’s life as background for Tom’s next project: the loving grandfather who controls the first set of purse strings, the sophisticated aunt who is the second to stand in the way of inheritance, and eventually Clementine herself, whom Tom will ultimately have to kill in order to get her money — or, rather, the beautiful art and travel that her inheritance will allow him to go on enjoying. After they plan out the killing of (fictional) Clementine’s grandfather, Highsmith issues a challenge: if Ridgeway can come up with a “sufficiently Highsmith” method of murder for the aunt, she’ll sign his contract.
Mirren is quite good as Highsmith, although this isn’t a very demanding role. For the most part, she’s cranky and irascible, without too much else required. There’s a moment early on when Ridgeway awakes in the night with an unexplained cut on his neck, and when he checks to see if Highsmith is in bed, he finds her supposedly asleep, only for her to turn on her desk lamp and cackle at him. Although the play on which the film is based is a decade old, there are moments here that make this feel like Camp Miasma for those whose hyperfixation is literature rather than slashers, as this also features a super fan (Ridgeway can recognize a passage from a lesser known work, The Heroine, in only a couple of lines) visiting a reclusive artist to convince her to take one more ride on the gravy train, only for the visitor to find themselves lost in the blurred lines between reality and fiction. Mirren gets less to play with than Gillian Anderson did in Miasma, as she spends most of her onscreen time sitting in a chair, smoking, and making cryptic statements about Ridgeway’s sexuality and comparing him to the hermaphroditic snails that she keeps as pets. She might smirk from time to time, but there’s nothing to challenge her as a performer. Much of the insight that we get into her as a character comes from her home: the remote location; a withering, nasty letter from her mother which she keeps framed in her guest room; a French literary award to which she has added “and Tom Ripley” next to her name, as she says that he is always with her, like a longtime companion. She’s oddly defensive of her character, rebutting Ridgeway when he calls Tom “evil,” as she says that every person has a killer inside.
Ehrenreich has more to do, balancing between Ripley’s suave, practiced manipulator and Ridgeway’s stammering nerdiness. He fills both roles well, with the difference between them illustrated when Ridgeway coincidentally runs into Clementine in the nearby town and is invited to a party at her real aunt’s home; he’s noticeably out of step with the elite, while Ripley immediately endears himself to the fictional avatars of Clementine’s family. They’re more alike than initially meets the eye, however, as Ridgeway’s journey, being sent to Europe from New York to retrieve someone, echoes Tom Ripley’s being sent to find Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and has to blend in with Clementine’s aunt by pretending to have gone to school with Clementine in New York, which was also Tom and Dickie’s connection. Ridgeway discovers the previous literary agent’s clothing in a closet and wears it to meet Clementine’s family, just as Ripley stole Dickie’s clothes after killing him, and the lines between fact and fiction start to blur. Is Ridgeway actually Highsmith’s creation somehow manifested in the real world, come round at last to visit his maker, or is Ridgeway simply losing his grip on reality?
I reread The Talented Mr. Ripley earlier this year, and as I write this, I’ve got a library copy of Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (the Hitchcock adaptation gets a shout-out when Clementine and Ridgeway first meet) sitting about ten feet from me, waiting to be read during some upcoming travel. In the past couple of years, we’ve covered Purple Noon as a podcast episode, I watched the Andrew Scott Netflix Ripley series, and I was pretty disappointed by The American Friend. This is a movie that was virtually tailor-made for me, and perhaps that set my expectations a little too high. I have a feeling that it will only improve in the rewatch, when I’m already familiar with its overall structure and I can interact with the text directly rather than being distracted by what I was expecting. It’s a fun ride, if a little messy.
It’s been ten years since Laika Studios released Travis Knight’s first film under their banner as director, the excellent Kubo and the Two Strings. In the interim, they’ve released the mostly forgotten Missing Link while Knight has directed two big intellectually driven properties, the positively received Bumblebee and, earlier this year, the critical and commercial failure Masters of the Universe. The last five years have been spent on the production of another instant masterpiece, a dark fairy tale that cribs from Rapunzel, The Birds, Labyrinth, and other dark children’s fantasies of yesteryear, ultimately crafting one of the best films of 2026 in Wildwood.
Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is the too-mature-for-her-age, espresso drinking teenage daughter of two Portland hipsters. Despite being forbidden from taking her baby brother Mac out of the house while their parents attend a craft festival, she takes the boy on a tour of the city, getting Voodoo Doughnuts and dealing with unicycling bagpipers. She even bikes past the Legionnaire’s Lament bookstore, a nod to the source novel written by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, who contributed some songs to the film’s soundtrack. Unable to ditch a more juvenile and naive schoolmate, Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), Prue takes Mac to a playground, where the baby is abducted by a countless number of crows who fly the baby directly into the same impassable forest that her father has warned her about for her entire life. The kids follow, finding themselves in a magical world where they encounter coyote soldiers in service of a “dowager governess” and are forced to split up. Curtis is taken to the governess (Carey Mulligan), who enlists him in her service because when she looks at him, all she can see is her deceased son, Aleksi. Prue, elsewhere, eventually finds her way to the community of South Wood, where she runs afoul of the current governor and his sniveling assistant before being rescued by the leader of the Avian Principality, Owl Rex (Richard E. Grant), and his general (Angela Bassett).
The narrative here is quite dense. The film clocks in at over two hours and is half an hour longer than Kubo, which was already pretty complex. Although the inciting incident bears more than a passing resemblance to Labyrinth, given that it’s a “girl goes into a bizarre fantasy world to save her infant brother” plot, that’s ultimately only a small part of this sprawling story. There are many, many ideas from the wider fairy tale canon: the mechanical recreation of life, a Robin Hood figure, a fertility deal made with a witch, a world covered in magical, possibly malicious kudzu. It also whips out new ideas all of its own, but what really makes this one sing is just how much of a technical marvel the film is. The magical origami creations in Kubo were already masterful, but in Wildwood we witness fusing ivy vines growing like mystical beanstalks, hundreds of birds in flight at once, and dozens of other images that are sheer magic in their scale and imagination before one even considers the intensive labor that went into bringing them to stop-motion life.
Wildwood is already struggling in theaters, which is unfortunate. Laika, one hopes, will continue to provide funding for works like this even if the return on investment continues to fall in the red. In a film year where most of the animation slate is taken up with intellectual property in various stages of descent into slop (Toy Story 5, Minions and Monsters, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Angry Birds 3, PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, and more, if you can believe it), this film’s PG-13 rating is probably hurting its chances with a younger audience. Of course, it’s also not for those audiences, despite what the child-friendly trailers that played before it (for The Cat in the Hat and Cocomelon: The Movie, among others) might have you believe. I attended a midday Sunday screening and I only noticed one kid in the audience of what is already one of my multiplex’s smaller screening rooms, and to be quite frank, I found myself worrying about what that stranger’s child might be experiencing. I always have been and forever shall be a proponent of films for children that are frightening; I’ve seen the kind of adults that kids who never experience fear in a safe, manageable environment grow up to be, and their lives are not enviable. Maybe today’s youth are being exposed to worse things online generally, but without the safety net of “it was all a story” that Are You Afraid of the Dark? had or the overall goofiness of Goosebumps to undermine any long-term trauma, they’re not getting the chance to experience terror and then see how it’s not really that scary after all. Make no mistake: Wildwood is decidedly too dark for a child under the age of eleven or so, and its rating is well deserved. The problem, then, becomes the fact that its more reasonable demographic of teenagers will dismiss it because it’s animated and gets looped in with the Cocomelons and the PAW Patrols. That makes for something that’s hard to market.
As such, the film is already being pulled from some markets, and that’s a shame. This is a sprawling, expansive, beautiful movie, and one that you truly should treat yourself to seeing in a theater. It won’t be the end of the world if you see this once it comes to home video and/or streaming, but it won’t be the same. See this one on the big screen if you can, while you can.
Welcome to Episode #276 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of horror titles from India & Indonesia, starting with the unsanctioned Child’s Play remake Papi Gudia (1996).
00:00 Welcome 02:13 Soulm8te (2026) 05:40 Savage House (2026) 09:08 Killer Condom (1996) 17:00 The Appointment (1982) 22:30 The Devils (1971) 25:15 Dracula (1958) 26:55 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
31:55 Papi Gudia (1996) 1:04:04 The Ornate Lock (Manichitrathazhu, 1993)
1:17:40 The Queen of Black Magic (1981) 1:28:35 Santet (1988)
