New Orleans French Film Fest 2026

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During one of this year’s pre-screening introductions, it was announced that The New Orleans French Film Festival is the longest running foreign-language film festival in the United States. That’s an impressive feat for such a humble, unassuming event. Even though it’s a major highlight of the city’s cinematic calendar, French Film Fest is by far the more laidback of the New Orleans Film Society’s two annual festivals. It’s more of a for-the-locals event than the Oscars-qualifying red carpet pageantry of New Orleans Film Fest proper. That casual, low-stakes atmosphere is a major part of its charm. Every spring, French Film Fest takes over the original Uptown location of The Prytania for a solid week of French-language cinema from all over the world. It’s usually slotted in the lull between the chaos of Mardi Gras and the chaos of Festival Season, a time when there’s nothing better to do than hide from the few days of nice weather we’re allotted every year in a darkened movie theater. There are even short stints of time allotted to make friends outside in the sunshine, in line between start times. I make sure to never miss it.

I caught four films during this year’s festival. A couple were older titles, a couple were new releases, and they were all the exact kind of non-commercial art cinema that most audiences can only access streaming at home (unless they happen to live in a city with a bustling film festival calendar). It felt great to spend a weekend watching esoteric cinema with up-for-anything filmgoers in a century-old single-screener instead of puzzling through them alone on streaming, where they’d fight for attention with my diabolically addictive smartphone apps. It may be one of the city’s least flashy film festivals, but its casual, accessible, warmly friendly vibe is what makes it also one of our best. To quote every hack journalist who’s ever been flown out to Cannes … Vive le cinéma, vive la différence! And, while we’re at it, vive les théâtres!

Below, you’ll find a rating & blurb for every title I caught at this year’s New Orleans French Film Fest, listed in the order that they screened.

Orpheus (1950)

One of the more charming quirks of French Film Fest is the way it integrates The Prytania’s usual Sunday morning Classic Movies series into the program. This year, that repertory slot was filled by Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which previously played in the same slot way back in the Before Times of 2019. The programmers took the chance to make a mini-Cocteau retrospective out of the event this time around, pairing Beauty and the Beast with the director’s second-most celebrated title, 1950’s Orpheus (and inviting Cocteau scholar Chloe Cassens to contextualize both presentations). As with Beauty and the Beast, it was a pure pleasure to experience Orpheus for the first time in a proper theater, rewarding my procrastination in not catching up with it sooner on The Criterion Channel. Also like Beauty and the Beast, it retells a long-familiar literary tale, aiming to wow its audience with visual splendor instead of twists in narrative. Cocteau recounts the entire Orpheus & Eurydice myth in the opening credits, fully laying out where his tale of a frustrated poet and his even more frustrated wife will go by the final reel. His major deviations from that plot template are temporal and illusionary: updating the story to a 1950s beatnik setting and playing around with cinematic magic tricks to convince the audience of its otherworldly surrealism. It’s ultimately more domestic & restrained than Beauty and the Beast, but it’s no less essential as pre-New Wave French cinema — only “cinéma de papa” if you happen to have the coolest papa in Paris.

Jean Marais stars as both Orpheus and as Cocteau’s onscreen surrogate, a famous poet who feels out of step with the chaotic Left Bank youth who are taking over his industry. Orpheus threatens to blow up his life and his marriage when he starts flirting with the personification of his own Death (María Casares), embodied as an ice-queen heiress who funds the hipper, buzzier work of his youthful competition. The introduction of Death into his household kicks off a supernatural domestic drama that straddles two worlds: life and the afterlife. His wife is transported to the afterlife first, and his efforts to bring her back mimic the more famous section of the Orpheus myth. The amazing thing is that Orpheus initially succeeds, bringing Eurydice back to the land of the living for as long as he can manage to not directly look at her. The resulting sequence is a kind of domestic screwball comedy that literalizes the emotional distance between married partners who are considering cheating on each other, as Eurydice finds an employee of Death of her own to flirt with. The husband cannot see his wife, and the marriage can only last as long as the pair can stand to not confront each other head-on. In a way, this makes Orpheus a great thematic pairing with last year’s repertory selection for the festival, Jean-Luc Godard’s domestic drama Contempt, despite the vast differences in their genre & tone.

Of course, Orpheus‘s main attraction as a cinematic relic is Cocteau’s more surreal visual touches, which are largely saved for the afterlife sequences. There, bodies move backwards and in slow motion, unmoored from the physics of real life, as if in an underwater dream. That otherworld is accessed through household mirrors, which become doorways through an unspoken magic commanded by Death. That’s where the movie really won me over. I’ve always loved when fantasy movies dive into a scary mirror realm, but I usually have to find those realms in schlocky horror films like The Evil Within & Poltergeist III or the supernatural porno Pandora’s Mirror.  It was lovely to see that fantasy trope in a Good Movie for a change, one that I wouldn’t be embarrassed to recommend in mixed company. Orpheus is too closely tethered to contemporary Paris to compete with the visual extravagance of Beauty and the Beast, but when it leaves that realm to find another on the opposite side of a mirror, it’s splendidly surreal in its own way.

Dahomey (2024)

The other repertory title I caught at this year’s festival was a much more recent release. Mati Diop’s fine-art documentary Dahomey never screened locally between its 2024 premiere at Berlinale and its subsequent streaming release on Mubi, possibly because its one-hour runtime made it an awkward fit for proper theatrical distribution. Dahomey‘s quiet, distanced approach to documentary filmmaking does benefit from theatrical exhibition, though, so I’m once again grateful that my procrastination was rewarded by this festival. More importantly, it reflects well on the festival’s programmers that they thought to include such a politically combative snapshot of France’s cultural legacy, instead of merely coasting on the easy sophistication of beloved Parisian filmmakers from the past like Cocteau, Godard, and Varda. Diop looks to the past by tracking the recent return of two dozen artifacts plundered from the former Kingdom of Dahomey under French colonial rule to the modern nation of Benin. She attempts to give life back to these stolen & exported statues by literally giving them a voice, allowing them to narrate their own journey from European museums back to their African origins. We spend much of the film’s first half in the darkened crate during transport, then watch the statues’ identity emerge while being cataloged & contextualized once they’ve returned “home.”

For all of its art-house abstraction, I was most engaged with Dahomey in its second half, when the university youth of modern Benin were allowed extensive screentime to debate what those statues’ return means historically & politically, if it means anything at all.  It likely does mean something that the conversation—much like the artifacts’ return—is left frustratingly incomplete, with many of the students pointing out the insult of only two dozen artifacts being returned out of the seven thousand that were initially stolen. Not all of the Beninese reaction to the statues’ return is verbal, though. Often, we silently observe the observers, as visitors to the artifacts’ new museum home are documented as reflections in the display glass. What does it mean that these objects are now stored in an African museum instead of a European one, still removed from their original ceremonial purposes? Diop asks this question with no intent of answering it, and the voice she gives the statues is just as confused about what to do to fix the evils of the French colonial past as anyone else. The displacement has already happened; what to do next is literally up for debate. All she can do in the meantime is document the unsettled dissonance of the present.

The Piano Accident (2026)

The two new releases I caught this year were directed by French Film Fest regulars, starting with a new one from returning prankster Quentin Dupieux. Dupieux’s talking-leather-jacket horror comedy Deerskin became Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2020 after its riotous premiere at the festival, mere weeks before COVID-era lockdowns made it one of the year’s only theatrical outings for the crew. I only mention that to note that this year’s The Piano Accident is Dupieux’s best movie since Deerskin, despite heavy competition in intervening Swampflix favorites Mandibles & Smoking Causes Coughing. The major constant in those three Deerskin follow-ups is Dupieux’s ongoing collaboration with French actress Adèle Exarchopoulos, who has been making a bigger & bigger fool of herself in each outing, seemingly relishing the opportunity to de-glam and de-sexualize her onscreen image. Whereas she previously appeared in Dupieux’s goofball comedies as a scene-stealing supporting player, The Piano Accident expands their collaboration into a leading role, casting Exarchopoulos as a sociopathic social media influencer with no redeeming qualities beyond her skills to debase herself for money. She takes great delight in making herself ugly, inside and out, and their ongoing collaboration reaches new heights of deliberately vacuous absurdity in the process.

The titular piano incident is a social media stunt involving a piano dropped from a great height, turning a classic Looney Tunes gag into a grisly tragedy. The monster responsible for that tragedy is a ruthless content creator who goes by the screen name Megajugs (Exarchopoulos, naturally). At first, Megajugs appears to be a collection of off-putting physical quirks. She has the obnoxious laugh, haircut, braces, cruelty, and sense of humor of a teenage boy, stunted in her maturity from earning online fame at an early age. Her ugliness is revealed to run much deeper than the surface, however, when she’s blackmailed into her first longform interview by a journalist who wants to dig past her blank-stare surface. What that journalist finds is a vast, terrifying nothingness. Megajugs saw an out-of-context clip from Jackass as a teenager, discovered that she can make money hurting herself for other people’s amusement in increasingly violent “pranks” on her own body (smashing her hand with a hammer, setting herself on fire, “testing” her family’s electric turkey carver, etc.), and has since devolved into a nihilistic routine of producing self-harm video #content for likes — partly for profit, mostly out of habit. Dupiuex invites you to laugh at her self-destructive online stunts (such as dropping a grand piano on her own legs from a ten-meter height), the step back and gawk at the horrific mindset of someone who would produce or consume that content for idle amusement.

If The Piano Accident has anything direct to say about our post-social media world, it’s that nothing means anything, and the internet has turned us all into miserable pieces of shit. Looking at the larger breadth of his recent output, I think he’s also been expressing a growing frustration with having to explain his own meaningless, absurdist pranks. In Yannick, a theatrical audience talks back in open hostility to a stage play they see no meaning in. In Daaaaaalí, famous surrealist Salvador Dalí evades explaining the meaning behind his work to a documentarian who attempts to sit him down for a sincere interview. The Piano Accident voices that artistic discomfort with audiences & journalists even louder, with the villainous Megajugs grunting in frustration over the expectation to interact with her fans or to explain her artistic intent to the press. She has no idea why she hurts herself for other people’s entertainment other than that she feels compelled to do so. It’s starting to become clear Dupieux feels similarly about his own work; it’s more a matter of routine & compulsion than it is an intellectual pursuit. Thankfully, in both Dupieux’s & Megajugs’s cases the art itself is consistently funny, so it doesn’t matter in the moment that there’s a menacing meaningless behind the cheap-thrills surface. That’s something for you to ponder on your own time, miserably.

The Stranger (2026)

François Ozon is just as much of a New Orleans Film Festival staple as Quentin Dupieux, with past Swampflix favorites When Fall Comes & Double Lover seeing their local premieres at the fest. His latest film, The Stranger, is an adaptation of the eponymous 1940s Albert Camus novel, about an eerily vacant white man who murders an Indigenous local in French-occupied Algeria for seemingly no reason at all. Thematically, it splits the differences between all of the other titles I caught at this year’s fest, combining the literary traditions of Orpheus, the anti-colonialist politics of Dahomey, and the disturbingly vacuous absurdism of The Piano Accident into a single picture. Compared to the rest of Ozon’s catalog, it’s a little too stately to register among his personal best, but it very well might be his prettiest. There’s something to the John Waters adage that “If you come out of a movie and the first thing you say is, ‘The cinematography was beautiful,’ it’s a bad movie,” but since The Stranger is partly a story about the vast nothingness lurking under the surface of things, I feel okay saying that the black & white cinematography was beautiful, and the movie was good. It just falls slightly short of Great.

Benjamin Voisin stars as the titular stranger, a coldly quiet twentysomething who gets by on his handsome looks despite his near-sociopathic detachment from all human emotion & empathy. We first meet him as he receives the news that his elderly mother has passed away, spending two days with him in near silence while he travels to her isolated nursing home to see her body buried. As a result, we initially have no idea whether he’s always this emotionally detached or if he’s merely stunned by his grief, but it gradually becomes clear that the problem runs much deeper than familial loss. He is decidedly non-reactive to the constant human atrocities around him, from the neighbor who beats his own dog to the even nearer neighbor who beats his own lover to the daily systemic injustices against the Arab locals who walk the French-occupied streets outside his apartment. By the time he participates in those injustices by firing a gun, his apathy curdles into something much more sinister and much less personal. The entirety of human existence is literally put on trial as the movie picks at his motivations, which feel random & instinctual rather than meaningful. He simply just is, and existence is horrifying.

Camus’s political & philosophical ponderings at how “we are all guilty, we are all condemned” eventually prove worthy of the time spent with this quiet, impenetrable protagonist, but it’s a long journey to get there. The 1st-person voiceover narration that would give the stranger’s actions immediate meaning is delayed until after his random act of shocking violence in the 2nd act, so it takes a while for the narrative significance of the 1st-act events of his life to become clear. Before the terrifying nothingness of his personality is exposed in a French courtroom, we mostly just watch him sip coffee, have sex, smoke cigarettes, and experience a sustained, lifelong ennui — the standard French existence. If you have the patience to discover how the unremarkable hallmarks of his persona implicate much larger, existential evils outside his immediate orbit, the movie ultimately rewards you for sticking it out. Notably, part of that reward is hearing The Cure’s debut single “Killing an Arab” over the end credits, which will be stuck in your head for most of the runtime leading up to that stinger anyway. It’s a thuddingly obvious needle drop, but by the time it arrives it’s a welcome relief from singing it internally yourself.

-Brandon Ledet

A Body to Live In (2026)

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Practically every adult I know socially has either a tattoo or a body piercing, if not both. Even I, a total square, have a few small tattoos myself, which you’ve only ever seen if we’ve hung out in an environment where it was appropriate to not wear socks. It’s increasingly common to see visible tattoos, nose rings, and other low-level body modifications in professional settings, since they’re now so common that they’re no longer transgressive or taboo. It wasn’t too long ago that this wasn’t the case. I remember tattoos & body piercings signaling a much edgier, fringe personality type growing up in the 1990s, whereas they’re now just as casual of a fashion choice as a quirky hat or what color shirt to wear. You can track the timeline of that body-mod culture shift in the new documentary A Body to Live In, which profiles the life, art, and spiritual practice of “modern primitivist” Fakir Musafar. From his early experiments with corset-binding fetish photography in the 1940s through his educational body-piercing and body suspension workshops in the 2010s, Musafar’s entire artistic, spiritual, and professional life was dedicated to the practice of body modification, and he saw that practice evolve from private kink play to public fashion display first-hand, seemingly involved with every major milestone of the journey. So, the documentary doubles as both a portrait of Fakir Musafar and as a broader overview history of body modification in the American mainstream.

I had never heard of Fakir Musafar before seeing this documentary, but he lived such a Forrest Gumpish life across so many various subcultures that I am familiar with that he continually crossed paths with faces that were already familiar to me: fellow self-promoting ritualist Anton LaVey, feminist pornographer Annie Sprinkle, professional Bob Flanagan flogger Sheree Rose, etc. Musafar’s body-mod journey was inspired by pure impulse (charged, at least partially, by unresolved gender dysphoria), and his early photographs were all produced in private, mostly consisting of corseting his body to simulate a female figure and then piercing that figure with needles and heavy ornaments. Once he found likeminded spirits across underground queer subcultures in 1970s California, the practice became much more social & less insular, and he was involved with a seemingly impossible range of extreme subcultures: heavy leather kinksters, Radical Faerie hippies, gallery-scene performance artists, and whoever else would show a sexual or spiritual interest in the ritualistic piercing & contorting of the human body. A lot of ground is covered very quickly as he drifts from subculture to subculture, always positing himself as a kind of mystic elder for the young & uninitiated to up to for guidance. We get to witness the evolution of professional body modification from the very first body-piercing shop opening in 1970s San Francisco to their modern omnipresence in every small town’s strip malls, but it’s always filtered through Musafar’s very particular, singular worldview.

For how impressively influential is subject was in a wide range of hip vintage subcultures, A Body to Live In is surprisingly smart about not devolving into hagiography. Musafar’s most glaring faults & criticisms are out there in the open, including control issues in his private relationships and larger accusations of cultural appropriation. In describing his early, private body-mod practices, Musafar explains that he was often inspired by ethnographic photographs in National Geographic magazines but would not read the accompanying captions, because he did not want the imagery spoiled by journalistic “interpretation.” Later, while promoting his “modern primitivism” philosophy on daytime talk shows, he struggles to articulate the authenticity of his body-mod rituals when confronted by Indigenous audiences who find his pick-and-choose appropriation of their cultures politically offensive. Even the term “primitive” is directly challenged for its political implications in the opening minutes, which might not be expected of a documentary exalting the movement for its positive influence across American subcultures. It’s very thoughtful, measured, and yet sincerely participatory in the body-mod spirituality depicted, making sure to include voices of dissent & discomfort with the practices’ cultural insensitivity while also showing the therapeutic & political good it can do in the right contexts.

Director Angelo Madsen does his best not to personally intrude on the material, except in a brief expression of regret for not asking Musafar a couple clarifying questions while he was alive to answer them. The most stylistic imposition on the material is found in the colorful psychedelia of the photograph development process, which helps transition from still photo to still photo without the clinical rigidness of an art-gallery slideshow. Madsen also arranges individual photos and slides on the screen to deliberately create a frame-within-a-frame distance from the original images, drawing attention to how Musafar’s curation of his photographs pushed his practice further into a fine art sphere than mere personal documentation of religious ritual & sexual kink. Musafar publicized his work through a wide range of artistic mediums, from the still photography he experimented with in his parents’ basement to documentary hosting in 1985’s Dances Sacred and Profane to confrontational performance art in the post-AIDS 1990s. It’s clear that his own body was the medium he was most interested in expressing himself through, though, as evidenced by his decades-long development of his nipples into cylindrical ornaments of great public interest. There’s a range of debate offered by the documentary’s talking heads about whether his primary motivation for that art was sexual, political, intellectual, gendered, or purely spiritual, and it’s to the film’s benefit that no one could definitively answer the question. They’re all partially true.

-Brandon Ledet

The Bride! (2026)

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There are many more direct sequels to James Whale’s Frankenstein than most people realize. Universal made eight Frankenstein movies in the famous monster’s original run across the 1930s & 40s, while most modern audiences’ experience with him stops at the second one: 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, also directed by Whale. Whale was already in a “Okay, now let’s do a goofy one” mood by the time he made Bride, sacrificing some of the haunting beauty of his first Frankenstein film for screwball antics and intentional camp. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new Frankenstein riff is largely going to be interpreted as a feminist reboot of that early Frankenstein sequel, since it directly references a couple of its more outlandish details: the living bell-jar specimens of the mad scientist’s lab and the fact that actress Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley (in the intro) and the titular monster bride (in the finale). Hot off her Oscar-winning performance as the violently grieving mother of Shakespeare’s children in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley is deployed to hit both of those goofball references in The Bride!, briefly appearing as a floating head in a bell jar and, more importantly, pulling double duty as both Mary Shelley’s ghost and the undead woman’s body she possesses. That decision to extend Mary Shelley’s screentime via body possession is part of what pushes The Bride! past its limitations as a Bride of Frankenstein modernization to instead reach the even more ridiculous heights of later Frankenstein sequels like The Ghost of Frankenstein or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Gyllenhaal has effectively imagined an alternate timeline where Lanchester’s monster had continued to stumble through increasingly goofy Frankenstein sequels the way that Boris Karloff’s did in ours. Instead of spitballing, “Okay let’s put Chaney in the makeup this time, and now Lugosi’s Ygor plays a magical flute that controls him,” like Frankenstein producers of the past, she gets to riff, “Umm I don’t know, now she’s possessed by Mary Shelley’s ghost and we’ll dress up Fever Ray as The Joker or whatever. Let’s hit the road!” To be clear, this is why it rules.

Christian Bale co-stars alongside Buckley as the lit-famous Frankenstein, who assures the audience early on that it’s okay to call him that, since he took his scientist father’s name; for further convenience, he also goes by the nickname “Frank”. Having now roamed the Earth undead and lonely for over a century, he emerges from the shadows of 1930s Chicago to beg a mad-scientist woman in STEM (Anette Benning) to create a bride for him to love. True to the Frankensteins of old, he shows a surprising amount of tenderness & vulnerability for a monster, so the scientist eventually relents to what she initially sees as a piggish request. The corpse she revives as the titular monster bride is a recently murdered sex worker moll (Buckley), killed for her loudmouth blabbing about a local kingpin mobster’s evildoings after becoming possessed by the uninhibited spirit of Mary Shelley’s ghost (also Buckley). Once resurrected, she starts with a clean slate as a bratty agent of chaos who can’t remember much about who she is or why she exists, so she goes on a soul-searching road trip rampage with her newly assigned groom, acting like two giddy teenagers who just ran away from home . . . and who occasionally smash misogynist skulls along the way. They go to queer dance clubs soundtracked by a Jokerfied Fever Ray. They crash cocktail parties held by the wealthy elite, hiding in plain sight because no one would dare look directly at the help, no matter how grotesque. They kill any cops who try to stop their good times’ short, then feel immediate remorse for the transgression. Most importantly, they go to the movies. They go to the movies a lot, which is how they’re easily tracked down by an old-timey lady detective (Penelope Cruz) and her bumbling, good-for-nothing partner (Peter Sarsgaard). The Bride! is hyper aware of its temporal position in the long history of Frankenstein cinema, and it tracks the progression of the artform across a much longer timeline than what its 1930s setting should allow. Its character names are all inspired by Old Hollywood stars like Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers and, of course, Elsa Lanchester. Jake Gyllenhaal frequently appears as the onscreen avatar for that era, performing Busby Berkeley dance routines that Frank imagines himself dancing along to in his fantasies. It also introduces the 3D craze to its onscreen cinemas decades before The Bwana Devil did so in real life, frequently dips into New Hollywood homage and, in its most blatant effort to modernize the material, has The Bride shout “Me too! Me too!” during her climactic fit of rage. Just like its tone, the timeline of The Bride!‘s vintage cinepehlia is all over the place, as Gyllenhaal seems to be following her own whims scene to scene without worrying too much about whether the audience is following along.

Besides killing cops and hanging out at the movies, another thing these monsters do is fuck. Given that the film includes tender, heartfelt monster fucking and concludes on a needle drop of the Halloween season novelty song “The Monster Mash,” it’s entirely possible that Gyllenhaal’s initial inspiration was cracking up to the recurring “Monster Fuck” bit from Comedy Bang Bang and wondering whether it could be adapted into a feature-length screenplay. Other stylistic influences seemingly include the bratty supervillain goof-around Birds of Prey and the sour-taste supervillain thriller Joker, the latter of which The Bride! shares a composer (Oscar-winner Hildur Guðnadóttir) & cinematographer (Lawrence Sher) with, among 100(!) other below-the-line crew members. As much as they delight me, personally, none of these references are especially revered as recent cultural touchstones, so it’s presumptuous for the film to prepackage a readymade Halloween costume in The Bride!‘s design (crafted by industry legend Sandy Powell) that spreads as a fashion trend among 1930s molls within the film itself. The Bride! has been immediately disregarded as a financial & critical flop, with no way of telling whether it will be reclaimed as a cult classic or forgotten to time in the long run. Any criticisms of it as a shallow work of pop-art feminism will miss the mark on what Gyllenhaal is accomplishing here. Its Feminism 101 political talking points are more than welcome in a cultural climate where teens are constantly bombarded with manosphere & trad-wife propaganda, and I find the dismissals of those themes just as misguided here as they were in the more cynical dismissals of Barbie. More importantly, Gyllenhaal puts too much of her own personal interests & obsessions on the screen for the movie to be seen as pure political allegory. It’s a family affair, with her husband & brother invited along to play silly onscreen. She also gives in to her cringiest Theatre Kid shenanigans, allowing Buckley to run wild with the multiple personalities fighting for dominance in her character’s undead body: the ghost, the monster, and the woman. She also frequently gets lost in the geeky love story shared by her two famous monsters, bringing their Old Hollywood cinephilia into the New Hollywood era via a feature-length homage to 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde. She is suffering from a severe case of Hollywood actor brain here, but the resulting spectacle is so chaotic and so specific to her personal interests that I can’t imagine any other response to it than admiration & delight. It’s like a version of The People’s Joker where Vera Drew had $100mil to play with and grew up obsessed with Frankenstein instead of Batman. Bless her corny heart.

-Brandon Ledet

Undertone (2026)

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Undertone apparently began life as a radio play when it was first conceived by writer/director Ian Tuason, and it shows. It was also born out of his experiences taking care of his parents, who were both diagnosed with cancer in 2020; this, too, is apparent in the final film. It is, in many ways, deeply personal in a fashion that makes me feel bad giving it such a rotten rating, but while I hope that crafting the film gave Tuason the opportunity to process some of his grief, in so doing he created a piece of art for the public that treads no new ground and ultimately failed to connect with me on an emotional level, or deliver on much in the way of fear beyond the sufficient spooky atmosphere. 

Evy (Nina Kiri) is the co-host of a podcast that she hosts with her friend Justin (an entirely offscreen Adam DiMarco), in which he plays Mulder to her Scully as they go through listener submissions of paranormal encounters. Having returned to her childhood home, Evy has spent a year caring for her terminally ill religious mother, with the 3 AM recording times of episodes of The Undertone serving as the only thing she has to look forward to, other than occasional visits to her non-helpful boyfriend, Darren. As Evy’s mother enters her final days, The Undertone receives ten audio files via email that begin with a man named Mike recording his pregnant wife Jessa’s sleeptalking, before those recordings escalate into aural terror. 

There’s probably a really, really good short film in here. David F. Sandberg produced a no-budget short entitled Lights Out in 2013, which opened up the door for him to eventually make a feature of the same name in 2016. Smile and Night Swim followed suit as features that expanded creepy shorts into theatrical releases that have a decently functional core premise but which doesn’t have enough real substance to warrant a feature length picture. I was positive that this would prove to be the case for Undertone, but once I got home and looked it up, not only was this not based on a short film with a premise that was perfect for a 20ish minute runtime and which had imperfectly inflated to fill 90 minutes, but it also wasn’t a COVID-era script that spent the last half decade circling the drain in production purgatory (my other hypothesis about the film’s origins). It’s just a movie that looks, feels, and exhausts like one. 

There’s plenty to praise here. Critics and audiences alike are agog at the sound design, which is admittedly exceptional. One would expect nothing less from a film about podcasting and which was originally planned as an audio narrative, but it’s praiseworthy nonetheless. Although the most recent Oscars ceremony has just passed, this is a strong early contender for a nomination in the sound category right out of the gate for next year. Kiri’s performance is likewise laudable, as she, like Rose Byrne in last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is present in virtually every single frame in the film; other than her mother’s prone body, no other humans are ever visible on screen. While Legs spent most of its time in long close-ups of Byrne, Undertone balances that intimacy with long stretches in which the camera is distant from Kiri, isolating her at her desk in a third of the frame while the rest of the screen is filled with dark, empty space. That void invites the enlightened viewer, who knows about the subtle faces and figures in the edges of the frame in Hereditary and Longlegs, to lean in, searching for those subliminal demons here. The film foregoes the cliche of having something leap out of the darkness in a jump scare, which is also a strong point in its favor, instead opting for the audio equivalent by having Justin’s shattering of a glass play too loudly in Evy’s headset and other unexpected noises at unreasonable volumes. All of that’s good, and I again have to reiterate that this would likely make for a four star or higher short film, but as a feature, it just doesn’t work. 

Despite Kiri’s strong performance, there’s very little to Evy. We know that she has a boyfriend, that she loves her mother, and that she hosts a podcast. Other than that we know she feels guilty about her exhaustion from being her mother’s caretaker and that she feels disconnected from her mother’s devout Catholicism, there’s not much to contemplate about her inner life. Evy’s lapsed sobriety is given an offhanded comment that doesn’t amount to anything at all, a Chekov’s gun hanging over the mantle, frustratingly jammed. Maybe her skepticism about the apparent hoax nature of the recordings bleeds out slowly as she tips the bottle more frequently, so that the fever dream of an ending represents her descent; leaving the loop unclosed on this character choice means that her first drink, followed by lying to Justin about it, just takes up space in the screenplay, irrelevant and dangling. It’s one of the textbook tells that the film doesn’t have enough ideas to hit the minimum time to be considered for theatrical release, as does the podcasting duo’s decision to listen to only a few recordings at a time. Rather than get through them in a single session (or a maximum of two), the film artificially and illogically stretches the virtual listening party out to four different recording sessions. The film’s repetition of (a) spooky recordings listened to/played with in an audio compiler, (b) Evy talks to a doctor on the phone, (c) Evy administers to her unconscious mother’s needs, (d) Evy has a spooky dream, then back around to (a) is repeated so many times that, when my bladder was full, I knew I only had to wait a few minutes until the film would lull again and I could make a quick run for the theater restroom. 

Another thing that feels unsustainable about the premise is the inherent goofiness of following the narrative logic of “What if nursery rhymes contain secret evil messages?” to its conclusion. It’s not a secret that a great deal of folkloric melodies are based on schoolyard rhymes about historical events (or are retroactively diagnosed by later historians and critics as having been so) or that history is full of violence and ignorance, but the spooky, evil recording of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” really is a bridge too far into the absurd. Justin’s mind is frequently blown by reading the “origin and meaning” section of a Wikipedia page and acting as if he just got encrypted access to a declassified file, so when he downloads and sends the recording to Evy, he gets spooked by the coincidence that the version he found online is the same one that is playing in Jessa and Mike’s audio files. I don’t know, man, kinda seems like you and whoever is pulling this prank just landed on the same link on the first page of Google results for “spooky Baa Baa Black Sheep.” I know that I’m here to review the movie I saw and not rewrite it into the movie I wish it was, but when a film has this much potential only to squander it, I can’t seem to help myself. Imagine if Justin had masterminded this whole thing, that he had created Jessa and Mike’s recordings and sent Evy a version of an old song that he had deliberately backmasked in order to rattle her skepticism. From there, the story could delve into a more malicious reason for him to want to gaslight Evy (maybe her baby is actually his?), or keep it supernatural by having his audience-entertaining prank turn out to have actually summoned a demon. Instead, we get something that’s frustrating in just how much it’s held back by having too much imagination to dismiss as easy schlock and not quite enough to move the story in a less obvious, familiar direction. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Videoheaven (2026)

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The sprawling runtimes of amateur film-analysis videos on YouTube have seemingly inspired a new subgenre of documentary filmmaking among professional cinephilic directors: the durational essay doc. No longer restrained by what audiences would pay to sit through in a theater, essay films about niche cinematic topics are getting more unwieldy in length, aiming to be more exhaustive & definitive than they are concise. 2021’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched expanded what would normally be a 40min Blu-ray extra about the history of folk horror cinema to a three-hour flex, too gargantuan to be ignored. 2023’s We Kill for Love did the same for the history of the erotic thriller genre, exhaustively chronicling its straight-to-video period in a near-three-hour runtime (which I did thankfully get to experience in a theater, thanks to the fine freaks at Overlook Film Fest). That small canon has now expanded with Alex Ross Perry’s three-hour video essay Videoheaven, which has an official website advertising its availability for theatrical bookings but most audiences will watch streaming at home on The Criterion Channel. Videoheaven is arguably a more expansive project than We Kill for Love or Woodlands Dark, in that it doesn’t restrict itself to a single genre. It instead attempts to comprehensively catalog the onscreen depiction of video rental stores in all televised & cinematic genres, with all of its on-screen imagery pulled from vintage clips from movies, sitcoms, new broadcasts, commercials, and corporate training videos. It attempts to track the rise, reign, and decline of the American video store as a cultural institution by noting the ways it was characterized & documented over the past half-century of filmic media. It is, inarguably, more of an academic exercise than it is populist entertainment, but like other durational essay docs before it, its length & thoroughness transforms that exercise into an unignorable cinematic event.

Of course, these three-hour attention testers are only cinematic events for audiences who are already deeply nerdy about cinema as an artform. In the past, the durational documentary format was reserved for more socially or historically substantial subjects like Shoah‘s five-hour oral history of the Holocaust, Ken Burns’s eleven-hour recap of the American Civil War, or the unblinking institutional observations of any Frederick Wiseman film you can name. This new crop of post-YouTube essay movies about The Movies only offers a deviation from that tradition in the newfound frivolity of their subjects. It’s a newly achieved level of audience pandering, signaling to movie nerds that the micro-budget horror films and direct-to-video softcore schlock we waste our time with is Important, Actually. Within that new paradigm, Videoheaven already feels like the Final Boss of movie nerd pandering. It escalates the “Remember all these movies?” clip-show format from more routine pop docs to only include clips from movies that feature hundreds of posters for and references to even more movies. Not only are we revisiting televised & cinematic depictions of video rental stores, but we’re also leaning in to read the titles that populate the shelves of those stores. And since Perry is, himself, the same kind of movie nerd that he’s also pandering to, he shares his audience’s cinephilic interests to an almost uncanny degree. It’s not enough for him to include Matthew Lillard working a video store counter in John Waters’s Serial Mom; he makes sure to feature the scene where Lillard is watching William Castle’s Strait-Jacket on the store TV, doubling the reference. A wide shot of a video store exterior in Amazon Women of the Moon had me excitedly pointing to a poster for Russ Meyer’s Supervixens in the display window; Perry then immediately cuts to an image of Russ Meyer himself working that store counter, signaling that he shared in the same excitement. It was just as much of a pleasure to revisit longtime personal favorites like Muriel’s Wedding, Sugar & Spice, and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert in clips as it was to spot VHS covers for more recent personal discoveries like 52 Pick-Up and I Heard the Mermaids Singing on the background shelves. One scene from an obscure McG-directed romcom called This Means War featured Reese Witherspoon & Chris Pine flirting in front of a video store display for DVD copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope in the exact edition I had just returned to my neighborhood public library mere hours before pressing play. I was indeed in video heaven: overly pandered, pampered, and validated.

The other tact Perry takes besides pandering to already-in-the-know cinephiles is claiming space on future university syllabi, functioning as a teaching tool for Gen Z & Gen Alpha students who might not have any direct personal experience in video rental stores. Gen Z gets their own form of audience pandering in the employment of Maya Hawke as the narrator, who appears onscreen in several clips as a video store clerk in the TV show Stranger Things (after opening the movie narrating her dad’s performance of an existential crisis inside a Blockbuster Video in 2000’s Hamlet, further justifying her involvement). She plays mouthpiece for Perry’s observations about the video store’s evolution in culture and on the screen, landing some fairly convincing observations about how the video store setting is a uniquely American filmmaking phenomenon, providing a space for the film & television industry to talk about itself and its audience. Where the script might slightly overplay its hand is in the claim that all modern depictions of the video store experience (such as on Stranger Things) are now commentaries about the past, as if any remnants of the industry are a form of retro-media nostalgia. I don’t know if that’s entirely true; not yet, anyway. Sure, most newly launched video stores (like Los Angeles’s trendy Vidiots or our local indie spot Future Shock) lean into kitschy 80s & 90s aesthetics, but there are also several major hangers on from the old days that are still operating as normal. Just a couple months ago, I watched a new indie drama called Two Sleepy People that features characters hanging out in the continually operational We Luv Video, and it didn’t play as a nostalgia trip to the past at all; it’s just a hallmark of living in Austin. Ross’s point will inevitably be proven right, though, and future generations of young people will need to have The Video Store Experience explained to them in order to fully grasp what’s happening in, say, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, in which the main character spirals into her own academic video essay project while working as a video store clerk. In the meantime, it feels as if Perry forgot the axiom that “You can never quarantine the past” (as posited in his previous documentary, Pavements) while mourning the recent loss of his own go-to video store, Kim’s Video in New York City. The real deal is still out there, even if it won’t last forever.

Although its subject may initially sound shallow to non-cinephiles, Videoheaven continually proves to be a rich text throughout its deliberately excessive runtime. It addresses the video store clerk as both a villainous know-it-all movie nerd archetype and as an aspirational archetype for those know-it-alls, hoping to become the next Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino by applying their cinephillic knowledge to the perfect indie screenplay. It pauses at length on the looming presence of the beaded “back room,” exploring mainstream America’s attraction-repulsion relationship with commercially available pornography (something younger generations will likely only experience in increasingly private spheres). Personally, I was most thrilled whenever the movie touched on subjects I’ve recently covered on this website—the trashier, the better—like the self-hating video store owner of Video Violence or the hostile video store takeover of Toxic Avenger III: Citizen Toxie, both of which are discussed at length as helpfully illustrative texts. It was reassuring to know that someone else out there finds this societally meaningless topic just as personally meaningful as I do, and I found a kindred spirit in Perry’s clip-to-clip interests at every turn. Academic exercises or not, the curation & duration of these exhaustive cinephila essay docs always end up revealing something personal about their respective directors’ obsessions & motivations. They’re achieving every video store clerk & customer’s dream: conveying good taste & cinephilic knowledgeability through media selection & consumption, establishing themselves as the intellectual champions of Watching Movies.

-Brandon Ledet

The Oscar (1966)

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This year’s Oscars statues were doled out earlier this week, and most of them found their way to deserving hands. There were a lot of great winners this year among a lot of great nominees, so there isn’t really anything major to complain about (depending on the fervor of your Stan Wars allegiance to Sinners or One Battle After Another). Personally, I enjoy the annual ritual of the ceremony, which provides one of the few remaining incentives for mainstream studios & audiences to pay attention to Real Movies for a few months before the marketing machine defaults back to Summer Blockbuster season. The secret to enjoying the ritual is to celebrate the instances where the awards happen to go to good movies, without fixating on the awards not going to your favorites. Getting hung up on Oscar snubs & losses is a quick path to madness, only advisable if your favorite pastime is getting mad, not watching movies. That said, I was amused by one particular Oscars “loss” this year, in the Best Lead Actor category. A couple months ago, the narrative was that Timothée Chalamet was a lock to win for his starring role in Marty Supreme, but the tide quickly shifted at the last minute to favor Michael B. Jordan instead, who ultimately won the statue for playing twin brothers in Sinners. It was a late-breaking upset widely celebrated for both its winner and its “loser,” since Chalamet had quickly become The Villain of this Oscars season, while Jordan is by all accounts a total mensch. Chalamet seemingly earned that 2026 Oscar Villain designation (despite having heavy competition in actual-villain Sean Penn) by allowing the youthful narcissistic brashness of his Marty Supreme character to bleed over into his real-life press circuit persona, turning off onlookers by playing a deviously ambitious brat for the cameras. None of this matters in any meaningful way, but it is funny how many of the jokes made during the ceremony were at Chalamet’s expense, and the crowd seemed ready to line up and take turns spanking his pasty behind with ping-pong paddles for the transgression of believing his own hype. It was even funnier watching him have to politely smile through it all, so we wouldn’t add “spoil sport” to his growing list of supposed offenses (alongside “ballet & opera hater” and “all-around fuckboy”).

All of this baseless speculation about Oscar narratives, Oscar villains, and dirty behind-the-scenes Oscar campaigns can feel like a decidedly modern phenomenon, specific to online discourse in a post-Weinstein movie industry. As evidenced by the 1966 industry melodrama The Oscar, however, those unseemly aspects of the Oscars season have been part of the ritual for over half a century now. Stephen Boyd stars as the dastardly Frankie Fane, a New York City gangster turned big-shot Hollywood actor, wholly made up for the source-material novel. The film starts at a 1960s Academy Awards ceremony where Frankie is expected to win for Best Lead Actor, despite being the obvious Villain of that season. We then flash back to his earlier years as a ruffian hustler on the opposite coast, making chump change as a carnival-barker promoter for his stripper girlfriend. In its first act, The Oscar operates mostly as a scumbag noir, characterizing Frankie as the kind of fast-talking tough guy sociopath James Cagney used to play several decades earlier. Then, it shifts into macho melodrama once Frankie is “discovered” by Hollywood types while threatening unsuspecting stage actors with a knife, seeing in him a sexy volatility that had made stars out of character actors like James Dean & Marlon Brando. Once Frankie goes to Hollywood, the movie becomes an All About Eve knockoff for meatheads, satisfying male audiences’ repressed desire for juicy gossip while distracting them with brutish delights like switchblades, bikini babes, strip shows, and fist fights. Frankie learns no lessons along the way. He burns every bridge he crosses, hustling his way to the very top in a series of professional backstabbing maneuvers, then works the press into crafting a pre-packaged Oscar narrative sure to win him the Best Lead Actor statue. In his own devious words, “I can’t rig the votes, but I can rig the emotions of the voters,” which still rings true to how most Oscars are “won” today. Only, Frankie has set himself up to be publicly humiliated by the end, since his fate lies in the hands of “a black-tied jury of his peers,” in an industry exclusively populated by people who hate his guts. He’s an asshole, everyone knows he’s an asshole, and it’s hard to pity an asshole.

It’s amusing to see a movie take the absurd pageantry of The Oscars so seriously, as if the stakes were life or death instead of the size of a nominated actor’s paycheck for their next role. The Oscar literally rolls out the red carpet to sell the prestige & grandeur of the event, going as far as to brag in its opening credits that it borrowed actual Oscar statues from The Academy instead of using props, treating them like celebrity guests. Legendary costume designer Edith Head also gets Celebrity Guest Star billing in the opening credits, appearing in a wordless cameo as herself in multiple scenes in the third act (alongside other infamous Hollywood Types like gossip columnist Hedda Hopper & 19-time Oscar host Bob Hope). Head, of course, also gets her more typical “Gowns by” credit, alongside a “Furs by” credit for famed furrier Frank Somper, which is how you know this is a classy affair. The recent Kino Lorber scan boasts some gorgeously garish color saturation, which again heightens the pageantry of this paperback novel adaptation miles above its station. The first half of the runtime is a go-nowhere crime story mostly consisting of sweaty men throwing punches to a swanky jazz soundtrack; the second half is a fish-out-of-water melodrama about a New York City street tough who can’t adjust his brash machismo to the more genteel schmoozing of the California cocktail set. Neither of those modes are especially compelling on their own, but they combine for an amusingly overwrought character study of The Oscar Villain as an archetype. Here we have a knuckle-dragging meathead with no sense of social tact, who can only get by on his movie-star handsome looks for so long before no one in his industry can stand to work with him any longer. By the time his rancid reputation catches up with him, he’s seething in his theatre chair on live TV while pretending to applaud a professional rival. He is a broken man at the rock-bottom end of an existential crisis, like Burt Lancaster at the end of The Swimmer, except the only tangible fallout of his humiliation is that he’ll have to pivot from movies to TV. I doubt that absurd scenario shares much resemblance to Timothée Chalamet’s brief, superficial arc as this year’s Oscars Villain, but it is funny to think about as the melodramatic extreme of that movie-industry cliché.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #260: The 39 Steps (1935) & Hitchcock’s British Spy Thrillers

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Welcome to Episode #260 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Boomer & Brandon discuss a sampling of espionage thrillers Alfred Hitchcock directed in his early British period, starting with The 39 Steps (1935).

00:00 Welcome
01:03 By Design (2026)
08:01 Videoheaven (2026)
11:03 The Forbidden City (2026)
16:06 Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)
23:41 Self-Service Pumps (2025)

26:55 Hitchcock Quiz
42:30 The 39 Steps (1935)
1:23:03 Sabotage (1936)
1:50:11 Secret Agent (1936)

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

The Forbidden City (2026)

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Remember when 90s action movies like Hard Target & Rumble in the Bronx would import Hong Kong martial arts filmmaking sensibilities to American cities like New Orleans & NYC (or, at least, Toronto cosplaying as NYC)? The new Italo crime thriller The Forbidden City plays like a nostalgic throwback to that cross-cultural moment, except it’s set in Rome and takes its duties as a mafia melodrama just as seriously as its elaborate fight sequences. Stunt performer Yaxi Liu stuns in her first lead role, playing a Chinese martial artist on an international revenge mission to retrieve her lost sister, whom she suspects has been sold into sexual slavery in Roman brothels. Enrico Borello co-leads as a dopey local, whose Italian heritage is so important to his characterization that he literally makes pasta all day in a restaurant indebted to mobsters. The physical proximity of that restaurant to the Chinese brothel down the street proves to be important to the two leads’ shaky connection, as the chef’s father and the fighter’s sister were violently “disappeared” by the same violent thugs. They team up to get their dual revenge, combining their respective skills for bone-crunching violence and mouth-watering cuisine to take down the older, corrupt men who have broken up their families. And maybe, just maybe, they find love along the way.

The funny thing about this particular action-drama mashup is that its two genres mix like oil & water. Its dual modes as a Chinese martial arts revenger and an Italo family drama remain entirely separate, with their own beginning & ending. We start in China, detailing how the nation’s recent-history One Child Policy could make children invisible to the system and, thus, vulnerable to human trafficking. In that grimy storyline, every Roman backroom is a potential sex-traffic hotspot, including the upstairs portion of family restaurants where customers dine totally unaware of the crimes being committed above their heads. Yaxi Liu’s wronged woman makes quick work of punishing the ghouls who run those backroom brothels, relentlessly beating the life out of them with whatever makeshift weapons she can reach for on-site: knitting needles, Compact Discs, slabs of beef, dead fish, flowers, whatever. When she makes an uneasy connection the pasta chef down the street, she finds there are other skills that can be used to bring powerful men to their knees, such as Catholic guilt and a well-cooked meal. Both combatants find their own satisfaction in their dual revenge mission through two separate endings with their own respective Big Bads. Their stories only meaningfully intertwine in an unexpected romance plot, which feels semi-incestuous by the time you realize their missing relatives also indulged a romantic fling of their own, which is why they’re missing in the first place.

Director Gabriele Mainetti previously made a name for himself as an off-kilter genre masher in 2021’s Freaks vs. The Reich, which combined the superhero team-up picture with the vintage sideshow horrors of Todd Browning’s Freaks. Here, he hits all of the exact genre markers you’d want to see in both of his oil-and-water ingredients. The action set pieces feature some of the most elaborate & legible fight choreography around today, and the Old-World setting makes the whole thing feel surprisingly romantic despite its frequent bursts of violence. It’s impossible not to swoon at the gallery-style nocturnal lighting of ancient Roman architecture, so much so that you frequently forget just how sordid & absurd the details of the central romance are in context. If the doomed lovers’ clashing cultures are convincingly explored in any way, it’s through the assessment of a villainous gangster who muses that in Rome, “Nothing is important, and everything is permitted,” while in China the exact opposite is true: “Everything is important, and nothing is permitted.” Within that framework, emigration to Rome is both a liberating lifesaver and a soul-corrupting death sentence, which proves true in the fates of its characters’ families and fellow immigrant communities. The emotional impact of its interpersonal character drama never hits as hard as the sequences of Yaxi Liu throwing punches & kicks at Dutch angles, but Mainetti appears to be displaying his heart on his sleave throughout, and his dramatic sincerity is just as charming as it is quintessentially Italian.

-Brandon Ledet

By Design (2026)

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How do you feel about performance art? Interpretive dance? Experimental theatre? Poetry? If you walked into an art gallery and were confronted with a live performer pretending to inhabit the persona of a piece of furniture or an animal or an abstract concept, would you be repulsed or intrigued? Amanda Kramer does not make movies for audiences who recoil from earnest theatricality; she makes high-artifice headscratchers for the intrigued. Her latest stars Juliette Lewis as a tragically bored woman who inexplicably trades identities with a designer chair, leaving her human body behind as a lifeless piece of furniture. A large portion of By Design‘s audience will be immediately repulsed by its self-aware, mannered tone, which engages with big-picture abstract concepts through absurdist artifice and practiced affectation. Miranda July & Peter Strickland haters, stay away. Everyone else who can tune into its wavelength will find a wryly funny meditation on how we all socially function as objects, assessed & valued more as physical presences than as human beings.

Camille (Juliette Lewis) trudges through punishingly boring, repetitive days shopping & brunching with her gal pals in a life “devoid of ideas” . . . until she finally discovers something that arouses true desire in her: the perfect designer chair. Only, by the time she gathers the money needed to make the “perfect purchase,” the chair has already been sold and gifted to a lonely man (Mamoudou Athie). The heartbreak of not being able to own this “object of desire” shatters Camille’s sense of self, so instead of parting ways with the chair she makes a desperate, magical wish to become it, to be the object that is desired. Her essence leaves her body behind for the new, curvaceous body of the chair, and her old body collapses onto the floor, catatonic. From there, she is split into two separate selves: Camille The Chair, who comfortably basks in her newfound sense of purpose & desirability, and Camille The Human, who continues to have an active social life even though she has effectively become an inanimate object. Her friends and family continue to interact with her as if she were alert & responsive while she remains motionless, painting all person-to-person social interaction as a kind of one-sided narcissism where the other participant is more of a sounding board then a fellow human being.

Lewis is one of several actresses in the cast whose careers peaked in the 1990s. Her small friend group is rounded out by Robin Tunney (Empire Records, The Craft) & Samantha Mathis (Little Women, Super Mario Bros.), and the trio’s petty conflicts are narrated by the honey-voiced Melanie Griffith, who lands most of the best laugh lines about how all women are already treated (and, eventually, discarded) like furniture — not just Camille. There’s such a stilted, dazed affect to each performance that any one of these women could’ve been substituted with Jennifer Coolidge without significantly changing the meaning or tone of the overall picture, but through them Kramer still manages to work out some sincerely heady ideas about gendered objectification and how women’s friendships are often corrupted by competition & envy. Maybe it’s all one big, elaborate “Women be shoppin'” joke, but it’s one that takes the existential crisis of its literal chairwoman seriously. Camille has been societally reduced to a physical, purchased product, and the abstract meaning of that is just as horrific as the physical mechanics of it are amusingly absurd.

Aesthetically, Kramer leaves behind the disco & leather-kink nightclub fantasia of Give Me Pity! & Please Baby Please for a more clinical, brighter-lit art gallery feel. The frame is sparsely decorated with individual, identifiable objects (both Camilles included) as if to leave space for blocks of ad copy in a designer furniture catalog. That stylistic choice is announced as early as the opening credits, which are designed to resemble a fussy luxury brand catalog, setting the mood for the film’s high-end, inhuman shopping trips. It’s a visual sparseness that echoes Camille’s feared life “devoid of ideas” without distracting from the icy, abstracted zingers in the script, like Griffith’s intonation of “Wherever she goes, there she is — a lifetime horror” or a character answering the question “Who doesn’t like women?” with “Most men, most women.” If you’re at all allergic to camp, whimsy, or art-gallery pretentiousness, you already knew this movie is not for you as soon as you read the logline “A woman swaps bodies with a char, and everyone likes her better as a chair,” no review needed. It’s an odd, thorny little delight for everyone else, as all of Kramer’s films to date have been.

-Brandon Ledet

Flesh Eating Mothers (1988)

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Once in a while, one must turn to Tubi, The People’s Streaming Service, and check out what bizarre oddities are hiding in its servers. While attempting to track down a watchable version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Number Seventeen recently, I clicked on the Tubi link and couldn’t find the movie, even in my “to watch” list, before I realized it was because I had neglected to turn off my VPN and was only being shown films that were available in Mexico. One of the films that was accessible both from the U.S. and our neighbor to the south was the 1988 no-budget horror comedy Flesh Eating Mothers, made by a group of Baltimore locals. The film’s descriptions across different film-oriented websites vary, but all manage to touch on the major plot elements: across a small suburb, a series of women are all having affairs with the town horndog, eventually contracting sexually transmitted cannibalism, which the kids in the town must then try to cure. What that undersells is that this “cannibalism” is sentient, self-aware zombism in all but name, and also that the “kids” are, politely, not very convincing as high schoolers. 

For a movie that was clearly shot on weekends and around the full-time, adult work schedules of its actors, there’s a lot that feels more professional than amateur here. By the late eighties, there had been dozens of books about special effects that enabled anyone who had access to those texts and sufficient pocket money to acquire rubber cement and foam latex to at least attempt mounting their own Evil Dead with their friends. The gore is impressive, but it’s also not really the most interesting thing that happens visually. The film’s opening title sequence consists entirely of a slow pan all around what must have been a very large, time-consuming image of the town done in crayon. It’s inexpensive, but a less savvy amateur filmmaker would have had this play out over a series of smaller, static images rather than keeping the audience’s point of view in constant motion. It makes for a more interesting visual and maintains the film’s energy. 

The attention to detail is likewise striking; at one point, we see a couple of kids hanging out outside of a business that features an advertisement for barbecue chicken; later in the film, two of the “high schoolers” meet in front of this business, directly below the BBQ poultry sign. I was surprised by that level of attentiveness, especially given other places, especially in the musical score, which didn’t work at all. Most excitingly, every time the audience gets a peak at what’s under the microscope that the town’s only two responsible scientists are using to research a cure for the virus, what we actually see are very cute animations of slightly anthropomorphized cells and whatnot bouncing off of and fighting with each other. It’s not the C.S.I. zoom-in on fibers and flagella that one might expect, but more like a very basic educational short you might watch in a third-grade science class. That’s not to say that this is the kind of PG/PG-13 horror fodder that one could show to a child, however, unless you want to frighten them, as this film is utterly unsentimental about the lives of kids, with one scene memorably depicting the horndog’s “teen” daughter returning home to find her mother having eaten her baby brother. 

The plot’s fairly simple. Randy Roddy Douglas is sleeping with the proverbial town bicycle, deliciously named Booty Bernett, and even talks to his wife about having an open marriage, which doesn’t interest her. He hooks up with a couple of other women in the town, notably the mother of his daughter’s best friend, the mother of a different random “high schooler,” and eventually even “comforts” the abused wife of a local alcoholic, who also happens to be the mother of the town heartthrob. Meanwhile, Roddy keeps getting the all clear from the greasy doctor at the local sexual health clinic despite said doctor’s statuesque blonde nurse continuously asking him to review potential viral venereal diseases rather than just bacterial ones. Eventually, she teams up with the comically short, nebbish, effeminate coroner (imagine Corky St. Clair, then shave off half a foot), and the two make for a delightful mismatch every time they appear on screen with one another to try and develop a cure. A gaggle of kids who have gathered after seeing their mothers eating human flesh eventually collide with them, and they work together to try to save the day. 

I mentioned the school heartthrob above, and wanted to note that he is confusingly identified by his full-ish name “Jeff Nathan” in his intro scene. Later, he’s called “Jeffrey” by his mother and “Nathan” by his male classmates, leading one of my viewing companions to frustratedly interject “Who is Nathan?” at one point; this is a perfectly legitimate thing to quibble about, though, because where this film suffers is in an abundance of characters. There’s an entire additional plot line I haven’t even mentioned about the one-armed chief of police covering up the evidence that the mombies leave behind because he believes that the spreading disease is God’s punishment for his having committed adultery, which infected his wife who then ate his arm off before he killed her in self-defense. It’s not really narratively necessary and contributes greatly to the film’s overall muddled plot, which has too many different storylines happening, all featuring white brunet Baltimorians, such that it can become difficult to differentiate between them (one character dons a bandana at one point, and I was very grateful, since to that point I hadn’t realized he and the horny ice cream guy were different people). 

But the plot’s not what you’re here for, is it? You didn’t choose to watch something called Flesh Eating Mothers with the belief that you might stumble upon undiscovered poetry. The film delivers exactly what you expect it will from the title: moms eating flesh.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond