Blue Film (2026)

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The single location two-hander Blue Film is the kind of low budget, high stakes drama that compensates for its smallness in scale by asking big, provocative questions. Questions like, “How was this not adapted from a stage play?”, and “Do we think Dylan ‘Happiness‘ Baker was the first choice to play the pedophile?”, and “Was the working title Trade, Lies, and Videotape?”

I kid. Blue Film‘s open-ended provocations are all questions of intimacy, spirituality, sexual perversion, and therapeutic rehabilitation. Its stage play nature is not so much a result of its limitations as a story told by two actors talking in a room, but rather a reflection of its commitment to exploring abstract, philosophical subjects through ordinary means. Our two players are a beefy, overcompensating camboy who wears his chest hair & tighty-whities as a kind of emotionally distancing armor (Kieron Moore) and a lonely, elderly client who pays him $50,000 for a one-on-one house visit (Reed Birney). This contracted tryst starts with a Soderberghian interview sequence wherein the camboy is propped up on a couch and interviewed on video camera about his earliest sexual experiences, asking him to access a level of personal vulnerability that he didn’t agree to before arriving to the McMansion locale. The interviewer starts their conversation masked & guarded himself, but eventually reveals his connection to the camboy’s past, from before he reinvented his persona as an online Los Angeles dom. The older client resembles Dylan Baker’s Happiness performance both in his physicality and in his matter-of-fact confession of pedophilic attraction to children. Once his identity and his connection to his rented camboy’s small-town upbringing are revealed, the rest of their night together is spent picking through the rubble of their confused sexual dynamic, desperately searching for something salvageable, functional, and worthy of further exploration.

A more typical movie about an adult sex worker’s unexpected reunion with his hometown’s local pedophile would resolve that conflict with revenge-thriller genre tropes, seeking emotional catharsis in physical violence. Blue Film instead chooses a therapeutic tack, like a darker, gayer version of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. The geriatric pedophile never physically abused the self-reinvented camboy at a young age, although he did have intimate access to him as a schoolteacher in their secluded hometown. He did lust after the kid, though, and he feels terrible about it. The entire reason he’s staged this nonconsensual reunion is to test his own nature as a decrepit pervert. Was he attracted to the young boy because of his personality or because of his age? If it was the former, he might be able to redeem himself as a functional member of society, but if it was the latter he would have to accept his fate as a worthless lecher of the lowest order. In order to properly assess his compatibility with the now all-growed-up youngster, he asks the camboy to remove several layers of hyper macho social armor: shaving his body hair, dropping his “Aaron Eagle” online persona, and communicating a wider range of emotions than his usual “fuck,” “shit,” “fuckin’ shit” vocabulary allows. The two men also directly assess their compatibility by attempting to have sex, a night-long process of frustrated stops & starts as the uneasy vulnerability of the evening starts to weigh heavily on their respective psyches.

There’s not too much to Blue Film as a visual piece that couldn’t be replicated on the stage. The film opens with its most cinematic imagery in the first couple scenes, most notably in the camboy’s introduction as he performs for digital tips by ordering his “pay pig” clientele to sniff poppers & stroke themselves to his chiseled physique. The first barrier between him and his estranged schoolteacher is a generational one, as expressed by the technological jump from that laptop-framed introduction to the pedophile’s preference for the tripod camcorders of old. Once they take their attraction-repulsion sexual dynamic to the bedroom, the title becomes somewhat literal as their nude bodies are bathed in monochrome blue light, a stage-craft version of moonlight achieved through cinematic artifice. For the most part, though, Blue Film is a movie of ideas rather than one of images. Its initial question of whether therapeutic intimacy with an adult sex worker can cure a pedophile is only the start of what ends up becoming a double-pronged character study. Their mismatched camboy-client dynamic gets much more abstract from there, at one point linking the solitary nature of religious practice with the solitary nature of sexual kink. They pontificate about the spirituality in loneliness and the purity in perversion, which are much loftier subjects than you might expect from the opening laptop-framed performance exclusively communicated in BDSM-themed commands & grunts. The movie does eventually go places; those places just aren’t in any way visual or physical.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #266: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026) & Matt Johnson

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Welcome to Episode #266 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss the directorial career of alt-comedy prankster Matt Johnson, starting with his recent time-traveling sitcom sequel Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026).

00:00 Welcome
02:22 A Chinese Torture Chamber Story (1994)
12:12 Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies (1992)
18:51 Caroline Leaf & Suzan Pitt

28:55 Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
55:00 The Dirties (2013)
1:13:36 Operation Avalanche (2016)
1:26:00 BlackBerry (2023)

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

Sand on the Glass, Leaf in the Pitt

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A good friend recently lent me a DVD compilation of experimental short films from animator Caroline Leaf, titled Out on a Limb. He kept excitingly telling me that Leaf primarily works with a “sand on glass” animation technique, which I struggled to understand in the abstract. In retrospect, the term is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of working with the ink-on-paper or clay-on-wire or code-on-computer techniques of more popular animation styles (hand-drawn, stop-motion, and CG, respectively), Leaf made a name for herself on the 1970s art scene by producing short films entirely animated in beach sand. She’d spread her collected sand across an illuminated table, shaping it to represent all figures & settings captured by the camera. The technique was not entirely novel to her heyday, having been used as a texturing effect at least as far back as Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 landmark The Adventures of Prince Achmed (largely cited as the oldest surviving animated feature film). Leaf was among the first animators to utilize sand-on-glass animation as her primary medium, however, like a chef who only cooks potatoes or a guitarist who works only in arpeggio; it was an experiment in technical limitation.

It turns out, you can do a lot with the simple manipulation of light & sand. In her early experiments “Peter and the Wolf” (1969) & “The Owl Who Married a Goose” (1976), Leaf finds a freedom from the tyranny of setting & geography in her animated sandscapes. Those folktales are retold in a white, boundaryless void where figures transform from one animal to another as the story demands. The wolves, owls, geese, and children drawn in fine-grain beach sand often lose any & all distinctions between their differing animal bodies, turning into and maneuvering around each other in surreal configurations that would be impossible in any other medium. However, her sand-on-glass project didn’t reach its apotheosis until she adapted Franz Kafka’s most famous novella in the 1977 short “The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa.” Her Metamorphosis adaptation is the exact existential bug-transformation crisis you know & love, with the same anything-can-transform-into-anything surrealism of her previous shorts, except with the added limitation of having to actually depict a physical, closed-off setting. It’s her most claustrophobic work in sand-on-glass animation as a result, but its claustrophobic tension is entirely appropriate to the text it illustrates. There’s a muddied, charcoal-drawing style smear to her technique that emphasizes the story’s inherent grime while drawing comparisons between the artist’s solitary production style and her character’s pathetic, socially isolating plight. You cannot fully lose yourself in the story of The Metamorphosis, since the literal fingerprints of the artist conveying it are visible in every gritty frame.

While Leaf did explore other animation techniques, her most recognizable & influential works were rendered in beach sand, to the point where her name is near synonymous with the technique. At least, she was on my mind when diving into the collection of short films animated by Suzan Pitt that are currently hosted on The Criterion Channel. In Pitt’s 2006 short “El Doctor,” her titular hand-drawn doctor ends a drunken bender by hallucinating in the driver’s seat of his car outside a Mexican pub. His blurred vision is overpowered by a gigantic sea creature chasing a man in his impossibly bright windshield, an image illustrated in Leaf’s signature sand-on-glass technique. Later, when the same doctor is visited by an angel, Leaf illustrates the supernatural encounter by scratching that angel directly into the celluloid to accentuate the uncanniness of its image. Notably, this scratching technique was also a favorite got-to for Caroline Leaf’s later career, after she had abandoned beach sand as her primary medium of choice. It’s unclear whether Caroline Leaf was on Suzan Pitt’s mind when making “El Doctor,” but she was certainly on the top of mine while watching it.

Like Caroline Leaf, Suzan Pitt started her animation career with a distinct trademark style before moving on to experiment with other techniques & textures in later works. Her most formidable shorts “Crocus” (1971), “Asparagus” (1979), and “Joy Street” (1995) all reflect her fine-art background as a painter, literalizing the “every frame a painting” cinematic cliché. Pitt would paint her figures on traditional transparent animation cells against a black velvet-style backdrop, but the level of color & detail in her psychedelic fantasy realms far outpaced what you’ll find in the commercial end of the medium. She’s also unconventionally morose for an animator, centering all three of those works on the madness, loneliness, and despair of women isolated in dissatisfying domestic spaces, staring out their windows at the big, scary world outside. In “Crocus,” a woman performs mundane domestic duties like child-rearing, self-primping, and marital sex while occasionally taking breaks to stare out the window and dream of a freer life. In “Asparagus,” a woman struggles to make sense of the alien world outside her window but finds a way to repackage it as a psychedelic stage act for the delight of a bewildered theatre audience. In “Joy Street,” a woman stares at the desolate street life below her window before slitting her own wrists, and is then revived by Fleischer style cartoon characters who relocate her limp body to a Technicolor jungle outside city. All three films feel like funhouse mirror distortions of a lonely, dissatisfied artist’s diary, just as confessional as they are inscrutable, grotesque, and beautiful.

These experiments in form are most compelling in a multimedia approach, something Pitt was aware of early in her career. When her faceless onscreen surrogate puts on a surreal theatrical performance at the climax of “Asparagus,” her audience is rendered in a crude Claymation technique, further alienating the artist from the rest of her fellow citizenry. By the time she incorporated the sand-on-glass and scratched celluloid techniques from Leaf’s work in “El Doctor,” Pitt had already established an anything-goes approach to her animations, incorporating paper dolls, magazine collage, and live actors into her signature fine-art painting style. While Leaf is best known for her work with sand, she also reached her greatest artistic heights when expanding her approach to multimedia techniques — most notably in “Interview,” a short film collaboration with fellow animator Veronika Soul. “Interview” is a dual portrait of the two artists at work, vulnerably gushing about each other and confessing their own personal insecurities while excitedly jumping from one experimental animation technique to the next. It’s the closest I’ve ever seen any filmmaker come to approximating Agnès Varda’s free-flowing autofictional documentary style with any convincing success, and it took two filmmakers working in tandem to accomplish it. It’s also the most I feel like I got to know Caroline Leaf through the content her films, since so much of her most prominent work is more about technique than about personal expression. In contrast, Suzan Pitt lays bare the ugliest, most intimate parts of her own psyche in her signature animations, daring the audience not to look away. Both artists have trapped themselves in an isolating, labor-intensive medium that requires them to work alone in a dark room for untold hours; the difference is largely in whether the proverbial door to that room is locked shut or left open for the audience peer in.

-Brandon Ledet

David Bradley’s Silent Monsters

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The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended, Zeitgeist’s Silent Films series feels like an open secret, a kind of backroom speakeasy version of local theatrical programming. The vibe in the room can be electric, as pianist David Bradley’s live, semi-improvised movie scores add an immediacy to century-old relics like Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! that wouldn’t earn nearly as big of laughs or gasps streaming alone at home with a canned soundtrack. It can also be remarkably intimate, echoing the spirit of a D.I.Y. punk show whenever Bradley finds himself playing to a near empty room, engaging his audience in conversation and asking for help wheeling his instrument into the theatre. These are live concerts after all, even more so than they are movie screenings, with all of the fluctuating charm & chaos that distinction suggests.

The reason I got such a wide sample of live-concert experiences at Zeitgeist’s Silent Films showings is that Bradley’s weekly programming veered hard into my personal interests last month, in a series he titled “Silent Monster May.” In the immediate days after I had fallen in love with the century-old romance horror of Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera (1925), Bradley announced that he’d be exclusively screening silent horror movies that month, including a precursor to Chaney’s Phantom in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I hit all three screenings in the “Silent Monster May” series, which varied in attendance & intensity but were consistently high quality. Before live-scoring 1920’s Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, Bradley mentioned that he hadn’t seen the movie in a while and doesn’t like to overprepare before showtimes, choosing instead to react and respond in real time along with the audience. His silent movie soundtracks are rolling moodsetters that emotionally ebb & flow along with the action onscreen, which in the case of “Silent Monster May” meant accentuating the pitiable romance & tragedy of horror cinema’s earliest monsters.

The most pitiable monsters in the program were also the most famous, both penned by French literary hero Victor Hugo. Lon Chaney’s aforementioned hunchback, Quasimodo, is ugly-cute like a scraggly stray dog. He lusts after the Romani bombshell Esmeralda while playing voyeur from the upper tiers of Notre Dame’s ornate walls, occasionally descending to join in her community’s orgiastic parties so he can watch her dance along with her other, handsomer suitors. The Hunchback of Notre Dame gets a little sleepy in the middle stretch whenever Esmeralda indulges in romantic flings outside of Quasimodo’s’ crooked view, but Chaney is dependably entertaining as the lovelorn monster in every scene which he appears. Not only is “The Man of a Thousand Faces” notoriously talented at transforming himself through rudimentary prosthetics, but he also proves to be an impressive stunt performer here; he crawls all over the church’s exterior walls and hangs upside down from the ropes of its ringing bells like an impish Tom Cruise with wagging tongue & protruding eye. He is, unquestionably, a silent horror movie star, and he carries that burden on his bulging, knotted shoulder with apparent ease.

1928’s The Man Who Laughs also presented a kind of silent-horror celebrity, although one associated less with an actor than with pop-culture IP. Conrad Veidt’s titular laughing man is most famous for having inspired the design for Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker, which would be immediately apparent to any modern audience who catches a glimpse of his Glasgow smile. Paul Leni’s post-German Expressionist adaptation of Hugo’s novel says less about comic books than it does about the ever-evolving history of Universal horror movies, though. Since they’re no longer considered scary, the modern take on Universal’s famous monsters is that they’re tragic figures, sympathetic victims of society’s ills. The Man Who Laughs didn’t waste any time waiting around for that reclamation; the laughing man’s only monstrous quality is a surgical disfigurement that makes him look extremely friendly, however grotesque. Its circus-carny setting (the only place a permanently smiling abomination could find work) also positions it as a softer, kinder version of Freaks, which Tod Browning would soon direct for MGM. Like every monster in this series, he’s just looking for love, but the world around him is too cruel to allow it. It wouldn’t even qualify as a monster movie at all if it weren’t for the disturbing intensity of Conrad Veidt’s facial contortions, which he intentionally undercuts by reflecting deep wells of pain from behind his watery eyes.

Because the legends of Lon Chaney and The Joker came with their own pre-packaged expectations, I was most impressed by the 1920 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, which is saddled with a much lighter load of modern scholarship & hype. Admittedly, it’s been several decades since I last read its Robert Louis Stevenson source material, but I don’t remember quite so much of the original Jekyll & Hyde novel being set in a strip club & brothel, so the silent movie version largely took me by surprise. John Barrymore plays the virtuous Dr. Jekyll, whose future father-in-law and other colleagues find unnerving for his high morals and buttoned-up demeanor. So, they drag him to the local house of pleasure to catch a glimpse of the real him and, thus, trigger his first ever crisis of conscience. Jekyll doesn’t especially enjoy feeling adulterous lust for the first time in his life, so he invents the mad-scientist concoction that separates his monstrous impulses into the dastardly doppelganger Mr. Hyde. It’s a continually relatable story about the fact that there’s a lecherous pervert lurking in all of us, desperate to claw its way out at the slightest wayward temptation. As a result, it’s not only a great monster movie but also a great strip club movie, placing its dual nature early in the lineages of both Striptease and The Substance — the full Demi Moore spectrum.

All of these vintage monster flicks are highly demanding on the modern attention span, but well worth the effort. The color-tinted frames that distinguish their interior-exterior settings (like the pink hue of Jekyll’s brothel and the cold blue of Hyde’s moonlight strolls) and the massive scale of their crowd scenes (like the castle-storming sequence of Hunchback, wherein Quasimodo scalds the crowds below with vats of molten lead) are remarkably, inextricably cinematic for an artform that was still working to distinguish itself from the moods & methods of stage theatre. You just have to put down your smartphone long enough to witness them. Even with the distracting sounds of traffic, parties, and general urbanite mayhem occasionally audible through Zeitgeist’s theater walls, it’s much easier to lock into the wavelengths of these cinematic relics than it would be at home, especially with the guiding hand of a live piano score reacting to each scene’s emotional gearshifts in real time. If you have any interest in silent era cinema, there’s no better way to experience its old-world magic in New Orleans than to keep up with David Bradley’s microcinema concerts. I’ll be returning to them soon myself, and I’ll hopefully meet more classic movie monsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried’s Death (1924)

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I really had no idea what to expect when I put a hold on a library DVD copy of Die Nibelungun. I just wanted to watch some more Fritz Lang. When I opened the case, I found two discs inside and, upon examination, discovered that they were two halves of a single story (or a film and its immediate sequel; I’m sure there is a distinction, but it makes little difference). I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, well, they must be short.” Dear reader, they are not. I haven’t watched the second half yet, but the runtime of Siegfried’s Death alone is 150 minutes, although some portion of that is introductory information about the Kino Lorber restoration and its sources. Sorry about that spoiler title, by the way, but it’s in the text (or this version of it, anyway); but also, this story is so old that it’s referenced tangentially in Beowulf, so don’t blame me. Putting this disc in, hitting play, and seeing that runtime, I admit that I felt a little daunted. And then, two and a half hours later, I was still utterly entranced when it came to an end. 

Even if you think you haven’t heard this story before, you have, if not in the form of all the pieces it shares with more familiar epics that preceded, then in the stories which took inspiration from it, probably most notably The Lord of the Rings. Siegfried (Paul Richter), son of Westphalian King Sigmund (or Sigmonde, if you prefer the spelling from Beowulf), surpasses the forging skills of his teacher, a craven man named Mime. When Sigfried learns of the beauty of Princess Kriemhild of Burgund (Margarete Schön), he decides to seek her hand, and Mime, in a fit of pique, directs him to Burgund through a wood that contains monsters. Siegfried happens upon a dragon, which he slays; a taste of the dragon’s blood gives him the power to understand birdsong, and a nearby bird tells him to bathe in the dragon’s blood to become invincible. Sigmund does so, but a falling leaf lands on his back above his shoulderblades, leaving him with one vulnerable spot. 

Siegfried finds himself in a land of dwarves, and manages to defeat their king, Alberich, despite the latter being invisible. In exchange for his life, he offers Siegfried the sword Balmung, the magical net he has which allows him to be invisible or appear in another form, and a horde of gold. When Alberich tries to kill Siegfried atop the treasure heap, Siegfried easily bests him, and with his dying breath, Alberich curses the treasure and all who might use it. With his newfound wealth, Siegfried is able to present himself at the court of Burgund as a king with several vassals. There, he meets King Gunther (Theodor Loos), Kriemhild’s brother, and his obviously evil vizier, Hagen of Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow). Hagen tells Gunther not to allow Siegfried to woo Kriemhild unless Siegfried agrees to help Gunther win the hand of Icelandic queen Brunhild (Hanna Ralph), a maiden warrior whose suitors must best her in a triple sport competition. Siegfried goes to Brunhild’s castle under the guise of one of Gunther’s bannermen and, using the helm he won from Alberich, becomes invisible and helps Gunther cheat. 

Brunhild returns to Burgund with Gunther, whom she reluctantly marries in a double ceremony with Kriemhild and Siegfried, and Siegfreid and Gunther become blood brothers. Brunhild initially refuses to consummate the marriage, until Gunther convinces Siegfried to “tame” her, disguised as Gunther, which he does by wrestling her. Brunhild, still bristling, antagonizes Kriemhild by insisting that as the queen of Burgund, she should be able to walk into church before Kriemhild, as the wife of a vassal, and the argument leads to Kriemhild revealing Siegfried’s role in Brunhild’s hostile wife-takeover. Brunhild, furious, demands that Gunther kill Siegfried, and lies that Siegfried deflowered her. Gunther is torn by his blood oath, but Hagen convinces him to allow him to do the deed, and likewise tricks Kriemhild into revealing Siegfried’s vulnerable spot, which he uses to kill him during a hunt. Brunhild mocks Gunther for allowing the lie of a woman to trick him into taking his best friend’s life, then takes her own. When Siegfried’s body is returned, Kriemhild demands justice against Hagen, but her family protects him because of their complicity. 

Kriemhild swears vengeance: “Whether you hide behind my family, or upon the altar of God, or beyond the edge of the world, you will not escape my vengeance, Hagen Tronje!”

This movie is so fucking cool. There are images in here that are so potent and so powerful that I’m surprised this film doesn’t have the same broad awareness that Metropolis does. It’s clearly been incredibly influential. There are shots in Die Nibelungen that are recreated almost identically in Dune, Lord of the Rings, and even Star Wars. There are images here that are incredibly powerful: Brunhild brooding, perfectly centered in the frame; Siegfried, holding aloft the sword that he has just forged; Alberich and his cohort turning to stone upon defeat. Kriemhild’s dreams are manifested in beautiful, if crude, animation, and there’s a sequence at the end where Kriemhild looks at the place where Siegfried said his last goodbye to her and the image slowly crossfades into an image of a skull. Siegfried’s fight against the landwyrm in the forest still looks sick as hell, and the framing of Brunhild’s stronghold, bracketed above with the aurora borealis and below with a field of unquenchable flame is an image that I’ll never forget. 

So one must wonder, why exactly has this film been largely forgotten while Metropolis, M, and others endure? Well … this is an adaptation of Germany’s national epic, which I mean in the literary tradition of great poetic works which define, delineate the founding of, and reinforce national identities. The more well known adaptation of this text is Richard Wagner’s operatic The Ring Cycle, which has been accused of carrying over the composer’s own antisemitic views (although his friendship with the racial science codifying historical monster Arthur de Gobineau did not begin until at least half a decade after The Ring Cycle was completed). Die Nibelungen, having Fritz Lang as its director, excludes Wagner’s more regressive choices (notably, Alberich and Mime are largely considered to be anti-Jewish stereotypes in The Ring Cycle, which they are not here, at least as far as I can tell). Still, that doesn’t mean that a film adaptation of Germany’s national epic poem, which was all about the proud traditions of Germanic ancestry and nation building, wasn’t considered fair game by the Nazi propaganda machine. The opening of the film sees Lang dedicating the movie to the “proud German people,” whom he himself would flee less than a decade later after an ominous meeting with Joseph Goebbels, which made it easy for Die Nibelungen to be trotted out at party meetings. 

This becomes the default means for examining any piece of German interbellum art, and it’s valid, but I’m not a sufficiently qualified historian to get into that extensively, and there’s already probably a decent amount of scholarship about that which you can find online (for now, anyway). What I do find interesting, if not surprising, is that the primary conflict of this text is so blatantly patriarchal. Brunhild is treated as a kind of villain here, but to a modern reader/viewer, she’s completely justified. Her unwilling marriage to Gunther makes her, for all practical purposes, a sex slave in a gilded castle, and Siegfried’s use of glamour and magic to deceive her into believing that Gunther has passed the challenges she created to maintain her dominion and anonymity means that, yes, Siegfried is an accessory to her rape. She has every right to demand his death, and Gunther’s, for that matter. Instead, within the narrative itself, she’s a vindictive woman whose manipulations cause her husband’s downfall. 

I’m going to go ahead and disregard authorial intent, which would have us agree that her line about “a kingdom brought down by a woman’s lie” is clearly meant to be taken at face value. I also have a feeling that Kriemhild’s revelation to Hagen about Siegfried’s weakness is also supposed to be more “a woman can bring a nation to ruin” reinforcement of sexist presuppositions. To some, Kriemhild is the Madonna whose naivete creates the possibility for Siegfried to be killed, and Brunhild the Whore whose lies lead to his death. I’m going to reject that paradigm and say that, as a text, Die Nibelungen makes it explicit that Gunther is the root cause of every conflict here, either because of his belief that he deserves Brunhild or because of his craven weakness as a monarch so easily misled by Hagen, who is the other villain of the piece. Helen didn’t start the Trojan War; Paris did. 

A five hour epic in two parts is a hard sell. In ten years, I have convinced fewer than a dozen people to check out Baahubali, and I only have to overcome people’s resistance to subtitles for that; for Die Nibelungen, I’m also fighting their resistance to silent film. And, it’s also entirely possible that the back of this filmic diptych will be awful and I’m setting them (and myself) up for disappointment. I’ll let you know once I’ve engaged with Kriemhild’s Revenge.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Demonwarp (1988)

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Most low-budget genre movies I tend to recommend on this blog make up for their lack of resources with an excess of style. I love a scrappy production that strives to impress its audience in every frame, distracting us from the shoddiness of the acting, sets, and props with an extravagance of over-the-top images & ideas. A major problem with those kinds of high-style, low budget oddities, though, is that the initial novelty can wear off in the first or second act, around the time when they’re done establishing a world or mood and have to start telling a compelling story within it, or else fall flat. In contrast, the 1988 creature feature Demonwarp flips that trajectory around, starting with a going-through-the-motions plot trudge in its first hour before attempting to wow its audience with over-the-top, go-for-broke novelty in its final act. It’s a major risk to operate that way, since most of the audience might doze off or wander away before they get to the goods, but for those too stoned to get off the couch and swap out the VHS tape for something more exciting, the movie leaves you on a high note. I guess in some ways it’s better to finish strong than to start strong, if it’s going to be an either/or choice.

Demonwarp is a bugnuts alien invasion movie hiding in plain sight as a mediocre sasquatch movie. A mysterious space egg crashes in the American woodlands in the opening scene, setting expectations for a far-out mutant creature feature. Instead, that opening leads to a lazy procession of sasquatch attacks, mostly thinning out the ranks of a college-age Reaganite polycule. Those young dolts have no discernible chemistry to speak of, as if they all just met minutes before camera arrived, despite the scripts’ insistence that they’re all longtime friends & lovers. The only saving grace in the cast is the movie star charisma of Academy Award winner (and Naked Gun alum) George Kennedy, who babysits the dopey duds as they’re all throttled to death one sasquatch attack after another. Then, the dwindling group of survivors arrive at the sasquatch’s hidden cave lair, and the movie suddenly decides to get interesting, throwing everything it can at the screen at the last minute to pass itself off as a latent cult classic: zombies, occultists, scorpion-tailed alien beasts, bare breasts, you name it. It’s your reward for putting up with the boring, going-through-the-motions presentation that precedes it, like sitting through a timeshare sales pitch for the “free” gift.

Before Demonwarp finally gets interesting in its final minutes, it at least has the decency to be laughably incoherent. It treats its woodland setting as a boundaryless otherworld with no spatial rules or logic. The edit constantly alternates between different factions of sasquatch victims fearfully running in arbitrary directions, with no clear sense of which group the monster is actively hunting. Occasionally, they’ll stop to trade half-hearted quips or take their tops off (with those duties rigidly assigned along gender lines), but for the most part they run and yell and ineffectually point guns in the sasquatch’s general direction. The only memorable paragraph of dialogue in the entire picture is a brief monologue in which George Kennedy explains the backstory of why he’s wearing a yellow hat. It’s all just barely entertaining enough to drain beers to with your closest buddies until it shifts gears in the final minutes, to the point where entering the sasquatch’s cave feels like entering an entirely different film. I almost feel bad for ruining the surprise that the sasquatch’s space-alien antics extend beyond the opening crash, but I also suspect most audiences wouldn’t make it to the end credits without dangling that proverbial carrot.

-Brandon Ledet

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

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There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later, they’re now both understood to be historic landmarks in the slasher subgenre, with little need to distinguish which arrived first. I’m sure the first couple body horrors of the 80s gore era were dismissed as shameless knockoffs by Cronenberg devotees, just as the found footage wave was first met with Blair Witchy skepticism and the giant-turtle creature feature Gamera was understood solely as a Godzilla copycat before there were other kaiju to compare it against. Likewise, when the killer-animatronics horrors Willys Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie were first released a few years ago, they were initially understood to be shameless knockoffs of the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series (albeit more successful movie adaptations of that series than its officially licensed ones). Since then, there have been enough Five Nights-riffing “What if the Chuck E. Cheese band tried to kill you?” variations that the subgenre has been legitimized with its own name: mascot horror. Write it down, commit it to memory; mascot horror is officially a thing.  There will likely be college courses about it at some point, so yes there will be a quiz.

Mere days after Casper Kelly’s “What if Barney was evil?” mascot horror Buddy screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I saw an online advertisement for the straight-to-Screambox “What if Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was evil?” mascot horror Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, signaling to me that this newly coined subgenre is having a real moment. If I weren’t aware of Five Nights at Freddy’s or the previously mentioned mascot horrors that beat it to the big screen, I might’ve mistaken Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round as a rushed-to-market mockbuster of Kelly’s Sundance-premiered oddity. They are remarkably similar in narrative structure and production design, framing their mascots-gone-wild horror stories within the rules & rhythms of vintage children’s TV shows. For its part, Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round starts as a direct parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with a kindly, sweatered TV host explaining simple concepts like mailboxes, welcome mats, and memories to the children at home. That last concept proves to be a sticking point for the poor TV host, who discovers that he has lost access to his own memories outisde the pocket universe where he’s stuck hanging out with sock-puppet animals on a fenced-in playground set made entirely out of cardboard. His chipper animal friends needle him about his lost memory in increasingly hostile, passive-aggressive ways until his concept of reality breaks down entirely, and he starts begging the audience through the camera to set him free from his play-pretend prison cell. Instead, his imaginary-friend playground adventure turns into a televised blood bath.

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round suffers a lot of the same structural issues as Casper Kelly’s Buddy. Both movies are at their most compelling in the earliest stretch when they play as uncanny parodies of vintage children’s TV shows that are just slightly, menacingly off. Once that hyperartificial reality is broken and the ultraviolence starts in earnest, they become much more conventional horror stories, testing the audience’s patience as they meander towards their inevitable, genre-mandated conclusions. Admittedly, the highs are higher in Buddy, while Mr. Monkey‘s lows are much, much lower, which makes for a no-brainer choice if you’re only going to watch one mascot horror this year and skip the other. If there’s anything that makes Mr. Monkey worth a look it’s in the extremity of its ultraviolence, featuring lengthy, torturous scenes of surgical gore as our semi-demented TV host is strapped down to the titular merry-go-round and tormented by the sock-puppet avatars of his own subconscious. Once the mood lighting shifts from bright & bubbly children’s show cartoonery to dingy torture porn grit & grime, the novelty appeal of the picture falls apart, and it starts to resemble the mascot-adjacent slashers of the public-domainsploitation “Poohniverse.” I very much preferred hanging out with the dead-eyed, cheery puppets in their children’s playhouse before it becomes an adult flayhouse, when the scares are centered on odd details like Mr. Monkey‘s dirty human fingernails instead of maniacal screaming & disembowelings, which you can find in pretty much any horror subgenre. The most illuminating thing about the picture overall was how it makes apparent just how ahead of the curve pro wrestler Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse gimmick was on the current “mascot horror” trend, not to mention the even earlier genre prototype in Wonder Showzen, which predates Five Nights at Freddy’s by a full decade. In that long mascot-horror continuum there isn’t much room for Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round to stand out as anything special in particular, but it’s at least a convenient bite-sized appetizer of what Buddy will offer once it hits theaters later this year.

-Brandon Ledet

Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)

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John Waters’s Desperate Living is, for all practical purposes, my favorite movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times — twice theatrically. This week, I learned something new about one of its most outrageous scenes: the babysitter on acid vignette. It’s a minutes-long gag wherein one of the citizens of Mortville explains that their expulsion from proper society resulted from brutally murdering their teenage babysitter, as retribution for cooking her baby in the oven while high on LSD (presumably mistaking it for a roast chicken or turkey). When I first saw this scene as a teen, I correctly assumed it was based on an urban legend, because its story was already familiar to me as a fan of the Lunachicks’ punk-rock novelty song “Babysitters on Acid,” which gives a full play-by-play of the same absurd scenario. While the “Baby-Roast” story did prove to be an urban legend after all, the recent documentary Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks added a new wrinkle to its pop-culture history by explaining that the band’s most recognizable song was directly inspired by that scene in Desperate Living, not by the legend itself. Curiously, Wikipedia cites the Lunachicks track as a retelling of the urban legend but omits any reference to John Waters’s film, instead referencing Rudy Ray Moore’s Disco Godfather (another personal high school favorite) as its most prominent cinematic depiction of note. This information is very important to me, specifically, but I doubt it means much to anyone else.

The question of “Does this mean anything to anyone?” constantly nags at the heart of Pretty Ugly. The original members of Lunachicks are all alive and eager to wax nostalgic about their punk-rock glory days, but they also seem a little baffled why anyone would want to listen. If anything, the project appears to be the result of peer pressure, collectively willed into existence by other recent documentaries of culturally dormant bands like DEVO, Pavement, Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Sparks, and Judas Priest. Pretty Ugly lays out a clear path that these revivals are supposed to take: a written biography, then some reunion concert dates, and then a documentary promoting & encapsulating the entire project. This band seems especially reluctant to go through any of it—especially the concert reunions—but they eventually drag their feet across the finish line anyway. As an artistic project, Lunachicks represents a moment that has passed, with each member moving on to adult jobs & responsibilities after spending the entirety of the 1990s touring & recording without ever fully “making it” on the same level as their peers. There’s something personally embarrassing about picking their instruments back up to play decades-old novelty songs about the junk food, junk movies, and junk TV they consumed as young snotty punks, no matter how loudly or how often they’re encouraged by loyal fans. They still eventually go through with it, though, because that’s what 90s nostalgia acts are now required to do under the law of mob rule.

Personally, I’m grateful for the result of that peer pressure campaign. Unlike the more famous bands referenced above, I never really knew much about Lunachicks despite owning every single album they released on CD. A lot of the revelations in this documentary are things I would’ve assumed just by looking at their still images in those CDs’ liner notes. Of course they were heavily inspired by John Waters movies; of course most of their interpersonal issues were the result of drug abuse; of course they never broke through to major-label success. However, a lot of my assumptions about their place in the punk-rock ecosystem were heavily distorted by the era when I caught up with them as a teen. By the time I first heard Lunachicks, they were making a modedty living on the Vans Warped Tour mall-punk circuit; what I didn’t know is that they had earned decades of NYC punk-scene bona fides long before that cultural moment, initially “discovered” & promoted by members of Sonic Youth before working as contemporaries of better-remembered acts like L7, Luscious Jackson, and The Go-Go’s. I had never seen footage of them playing to rowdy barroom crowds, provided in excess here via camcorder-quality VHS footage (but mercifully synced to the cleaner studio recordings of their most popular songs). They were, by every measure, a real band. They just never broke through to a wider audience the way their peers did, as most brutally illustrated here by having to trade opening-headliner slots with The Offspring on successive tours, after the lesser band won the war of the charts.

It’s difficult to not blame the entirety of the Lunachicks’ failure to break through to industry misogyny. As young, hip NYC brats with a professional fashion model for a lead singer (Theo Kogan), they were actively resistant to being sexualized in their art, choosing to purposefully ugly themselves up in Waters-inspired drag instead of playing pretty for the camera. I loved that about them as a teenager, but I can also see how that could limit their marketability — as opposed to, say, The Donnas, who eventually had to go full glam to earn a full paycheck. Even in the 2020s, the punk rock marketing machine is a little squeamish about fully promoting their act. The documentary opens with band members encountering a NYC subway ad featuring a vintage Lunachicks concert photo that has edited out the stage-makeup menstruate running down their legs in the original still, leaving only the image of hot girls playing guitar. That squeamishness says a lot in the context of the recent nontroversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s adoption of the 90s kinderwhore aesthetic, wherein she dresses in the babydoll gear once perverted by grunge-era acts like Hole & Babes in Toyland but doesn’t have the grit & grime to pull it off, so she just looks like an actual baby. Everyone wants to profit off the 90s rocker aesthetic but no one wants the 90s rocker attitude that comes with it, which apparently has been true since the Lunachicks were helping define that aesthetic in the 1990s, to little lasting acclaim.

At the same time, the Lunachicks’ missed opportunities as a great band that could’ve been are also somewhat a result of happenstance. They put in the work, producing five fun, rockin’ records packed with memorable hooks and genuinely funny lyrics. They toured relentlessly, living in vans & RVs for a decade solid while some of their peers were arbitrarily called up to millionaires’ lives touring in a megabus instead. In the long run, time has flattened out the difference; each of those 90s acts are assigned their own reunion tour and nostalgia doc regardless of their achieved level of fame, each cherished by loyal fans and forgotten to time by the rest of the masses. In a way, this band-validating documentary is the reward for all that work, something I’m sure every Lunachick would happily trade for a regular royalty check from an Offspring-level radio hit they never got to enjoy.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Turksploitation sci-fi parody Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973).

00:00 Welcome
02:37 Maisie Was a Lady (1941)
06:47 Ringside Maisie (1941)
10:56 Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)
15:32 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
18:58 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
20:15 The Man Who Laughs (1928)
25:11 Die Nibelungen (1924)
35:15 All Monsters Attack (1969)
38:53 Happiness (1998)
46:13 Chungking Express (1994)
50:05 Obsession (2026)
1:00:45 Blue Film (2026)
1:06:16 How to Make a Killing (2026)
1:11:10 Scream 7 (2026)
1:16:44 Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)
1:21:26 I Love Boosters (2026)
1:35:00 Is God Is (2026)
1:39:28 Backrooms (2026)

2:01:45 Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

I Love Boosters (2026)

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I Love Boosters is many things. It’s a heist movie that takes a sharp left turn into science fiction territory. It’s a jeremiad about the life-destroying conditions of the sweat shops in which most of our clothing is manufactured. It’s a meditation on the material conditions of entry level retail work, and it’s a barely exaggerated take on C-suite self-aggrandization, and it’s a satire that takes the concept of “crisis actors” to an absurd extreme. It’s a parable about the way that consent is manufactured across multiple social tiers, and a slumber party movie for fashion girlies, and a call for unionization and collective action. It’s also a Scooby Doo cartoon where Keke Palmer peels out, legs cycling, as she tries to get her footing in a slanted room. What a delight! 

Corvette (Palmer) is the ringleader of a group of Bay Area “boosters,” people who steal merchandise, specifically quasi-high end retail fashion in this case, and resell it. She and friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) have been dubbed “The Velvet Gang” by the media, and their primary target is Metro Designers, a chain of shops owned and operated by fashion “genius” Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whom Corvette admires and despises in equal measure. Corvette has dreams of becoming a designer herself, and they’re not hampered by the fact that her current living conditions find her squatting in a defunct fast-food restaurant, although she’s beginning to lose hope. While casually fending off the flirtatious advances of an unnamed bargain fashion model (LaKeith Stanfield), Corvette also finds herself plagued with visions about a giant rolling ball of trash. When Corvette finds herself offered a job at Metro Designs by authoritarian store manager Grayson (Will Poulter) during an interview that’s only meant to be a distraction, the trio decides to infiltrate the store and clean it out completely. Then things go really sideways. 

Most of us can only wish we had half the imagination and vision that Boots Riley does. This movie is as vibrantly beautiful as it is chaotic and bizarre. At times, the entire frame is completely dominated by a single color, either through the use of saturation from red lights or because each Metro Designers location is monochromatic (as Christie says on the in-store displays, “If you want it in a different color, go to another location!”) on a monthly rotating basis. At other times, through their coordinated-to-clash outfits, the frame is filled with so many candy colors that once can’t help but be lost in the fantasia of it all. There is stop motion animation and there are car chases that appear to be done in Number Seventeen-esque miniature, alongside low-tech old school cinematic techniques like having a character shapeshift by having one performer sink out of frame while the other rises into it and having an entire set built at an angle to emulate a crooked building. The film is a feast for the eyes and an utter delight. 

Lest you think that the director of Sorry to Bother You has decided to make a film that’s all style and no substance, let me allay your fears. The film is entirely about the methods by which every individual is kept disenfranchised exist at every level, and it’s insidious everywhere it goes. Workers die from unsafe working conditions and CEOs respond to collective action with violence and retribution. Local “guru” Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle) is the head of a very successful “friends being friendly” con that is a literal pyramid scheme. Metro Designers employee Violeta (Eiza González)’s paycheck is less than $40, with Christie’s rotating monochromatic color scheme forcing the store clerks to update their workwear every month with the cost of their new outfits deducted from their pay. Christie’s office features a photo of her with Barack Obama next to the awards documenting her involvement with “Democracy Forge,” which sounds like the handle of blue check Twitter Lib and is just as sinister; this ultimately connects with the “man on the street” style interviews we see throughout the film with chyron-identified characters like Based Young Dude, Crying Black Mother, and Upstanding Community Member, but I won’t spoil the surprise of how. 

Just do yourself a favor, and see this one on the biggest screen you can. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond