Author: swampflix

All You Need is Kill (2026)

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The only manga I’ve ever read was an adaptation of the 2004 sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill, and that’s because it was a gift. A family member who lives his life much deeper in the anime trenches bought it for me as a Christmas present after the novel was also adapted into the 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow (and famously retitled a second time under its tagline “Live, Die, Repeat” once it hit DVD). When I heard that there’s a new, Japanese adaptation of the same source text, then, my assumption was that someone had set out to illustrate a more faithful version of either the manga or the original semi-illustrated novel, undoing all of Hollywood’s work to center an action hero that Tom Cruise could credibly play instead of the novel’s heroine (sidelined as a supporting role in the live-action version, played by Emily Blunt). That’s not the case at all. The new version of All You Need is Kill doesn’t simply set the comic book illustrations of its source novel in motion; it redesigns them, introduces an overwhelming wealth of color to a world that was once entirely black & white, and once again makes major changes to the two main characters’ personae & dynamics. It’s less of a manga-faithful rebuke of Edge of Tomorrow than it is a fellow attempt at rogue reinterpretation, this time marketed to the cloistered nerds who actually read manga instead of the wider world of people who’ve heard of Tom Cruise.

That’s not to say that the new anime version of All You Need Is Kill is entirely novel in its reinterpretation. Edge of Tomorrow is not the only pre-existing work it evokes. It plays with the oil-slick color palette of Annihilation, echoes the YA mech-suit therapy sessions of Neon Genesis Evangelion, recalls the vintage sketchbook psychedelia of Mind Game, and touches on some parallel thinking with last year’s sci-fi adaptation Mickey 17. What I mean to say is that it pulls from so many varied sources that it eventually becomes its own thing, a stylish genre remix of its own unique flavor — however mild. For every inspired choice it makes (like redesigning its time-looping monster spawn to look like killer houseplants instead of meatballs with teeth), it also defaults to disappointingly basic choices elsewhere. It’s especially disappointing that the film ages down its two leads from near-future adult supersoldiers to near-future awkward teens. I don’t personally watch too much anime, but most of what I do see ends up being about shy teens who don’t know how to express their feelings to each other, which I suppose is a case of modern movie studios knowing their audience. There’s something absurd about shoehorning that shy-teen dynamic into this story about mech-suited futuresoldiers hunting alien beasts, but that choice does at least give it a different perspective than Tom Cruise’s action-hero-in-training role in the Hollywood version.

If I’m avoiding my plot recap duties here, it’s because talking about time-loop movies feels like its own kind of endless loop at this point. All You Need Is Kill‘s addition to the time-loop canon is that it’s set during a future space alien invasion, where the loop is started by infection with monster blood. The two infected soldiers stuck in this endless loop wake up every time they’re killed by the alien beasts, as if they discovered a video game cheat code for unlimited lives. In this version of the story, one of the characters even finds himself waking up to a video game prompt asking him if he wishes to continue playing, presumably having fallen asleep with a controller in hand. So, what you have is a militaristic sci-fi premise borrowed from an older text like Starship Troopers or The Forever War and made bizarrely existential through the recursive plot structure of Groundhog Day. If you regularly watch movies, you’ve seen more than a few variations of this story in recent titles like Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, Timecrimes, Triangle, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow (duh), and so on. So, all that’ll be new to you here is the visual splendor of its psychedelic animation style, which is very much worth the price of admission. And if you haven’t seen any of those movies before, I’m going to assume that you’re a teenager just getting into the medium, in which case the shy, nerdy leads of this version have something to offer you too: a mirror.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Beast Pageant (2010)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the industrial fantasy adventure The Beast Pageant (2010).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 Murder! (1930)
09:00 Tromeo & Juliet (1996)
13:00 Eden Lake (2008)
21:00 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
31:00 Dooba Dooba (2026)
37:07 The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
45:13 The Plague (2025)
52:46 All You Need is Kill (2026)
57:30 Tangerine (2015)
1:01:22 Tale of Tales (2016)
1:06:00 Mandibles (2021)
1:10:15 The Beach Bum (2019)
1:16:16 The Lure (2017)
1:18:50 Mississippi Masala (1991)
1:22:37 Two Sleepy People (2026)

1:26:00 The Beast Pageant (2010)

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

God’s Own Country (2017)

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Our fearless leader Brandon texted me several days ago with a screenshot of an upcoming February 2026 Criterion line-up entitled “Yearning,” advertised as featuring The Deep Blue Sea, Merchant-Ivory production Maurice, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, God’s Own Country, “and more” (which includes All That Heaven Allows). He jokingly asked if I had been moonlighting as the programmer for this series, given my love for The Age of Innocence (discussed here), Mood (as discussed here), and films about yearning in general. I am very much myself, as only the night before, I watched God’s Own Country for the first time, completely coincidentally. 

Johnny (Josh O’Connor) is a reluctant shepherd, living on an isolated farm and forced into growing responsibilities there by his hard father Martin’s recent stroke. Martin’s mother Deirdre also lives in the farmhouse and shares Martin’s low opinion of her grandson. For his part, the depressed Johnny fills his nights with raging alcoholism and finds no solace in the anonymous sexual encounters he has with other men when he manages to get off of the farm long enough to cruise. To help out for part of the calving season, Martin hires an itinerant laborer named Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu), and he and Johnny immediately come into conflict, with Johnny using racial slurs to attack Gheorghe’s Romanian heritage. When the two are sent out to repair a fence on a distant part of the property, they begin to bond once Johnny witnesses Gheorghe’s more tender approach to farm work, although they eventually end up in a physical altercation that immediately turns into sexual release for both of them. Gheorghe’s influence on Johnny makes him a better person, but when Johnny starts to fantasize about a future together, Gheorghe’s reluctance prompts Johnny to engage in behavior that has the potential to sabotage their burgeoning love. Their situation is further complicated by Martin’s second stroke, which leaves him completely unable to manage the farm. 

I remember a fair amount of buzz around this one when it first arrived on the scene, although I don’t hear it discussed much anymore despite O’Connor’s rise to onscreen prominence in recent years. Perhaps it’s because he’s not a very likeable person in this film, and people might find him hard to relate to. We can identify with his resentment of his former peers for being able to move on with their lives and go to college while he’s stuck, seemingly permanently, doing manual labor that he’s not suited for. On the other hand, it’s hard to extend much empathy toward him when he’s hurling racial epithets or railing a random stranger in the pub bathroom while Gheorghe waits for him. That his journey is one of a white Briton whose harsh ways of viewing life are softened by the attentions of a loving “exotic stranger” makes the story a little iffy, and it seems like Gheorghe is way too good for Johnny from the outset. 

I did like the way that Gheorghe’s farm techniques are contrasted with Martin’s and how that carries over into their different relationships with Johnny and what those interactions cultivate within him. Martin insists that Johnny put down a calf that experienced breech birth rather than let his son take the animal to a veterinarian who might save it, and this hardness is apparent in the way that his son longs for his approval and the affection that a single, gentle touch would show. In contrast, Gheorghe saves the life of a seemingly stillborn sheep and then nurses it back to health; when they find another lamb that has died, Gheorghe skins it and places its hide on the runt so that the ewe will let it nurse. Johnny bears witness to this gentleness and, when it’s extended to him, it changes him for the better. About halfway through this film, you’ll start to wonder if this is going to be one of those queer films with a happy ending or a sad one. I won’t spoil that for you; this one is worth the journey to find out for yourself. It’s a quiet, slow, beautiful movie that’s perfect for a long, cold weekend sheltering against the latest winter weather threat.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Two Sleepy People (2026)

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Someone alert Ned Flanders; they’ve finally found a way for you to watch Woody Allen movies without Woody Allen in them. Last year, there were two prestige dramas that borrowed The Woody Allen Font to billboard their discussions of sexual assault within the university system: Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. Those allusions to Allen’s past reign as the neurotic king of overly talky indie cinema were presumably semi-ironic—given Allen’s more recent association with sexual abuse outside of the cinema—but they’re at least honest about Allen’s continued influence on the Sundance drama as a medium. There are tons of recent options to check out if, like Ned Flanders, you like Woodsy Allen movies but don’t like that nervous fella that’s always in ’em: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, James Sweeney’s Straight Up, Matt Farley’s Local Legends, and now Baron Ryan’s Two Sleepy People. There’s a whole new crop nervous fellas to choose from if you don’t care for the last one.

First-time writer/director Baron Ryan stars as a scrawny, neurotic office worker who’s trapped in an endless loop of pointless couple’s therapy with a wife he doesn’t love. His co-writer Caroline Grossman co-stars as a new coworker who catches his eye during awkward pitch meetings for a marketing campaign to sell melatonin pills. They both quickly latch onto melatonin’s natural occurrence in breast milk, inappropriately blurting out ad pitches focusing on “mommy milkers” during team meetings. Whatever Mommy Issues inspire those outbursts then echo in their melatonin-fueled dreams, which they start to inexplicably share as a married couple in a psychic common-space, vaguely remembering their nightly otherworld trysts the next day at work. It’s a clever way to literalize a workplace emotional affair by staging it in a psychic space separate from everyday reality, and it allows the two lonely souls to safely pair up & confront childhood traumas they’ve suppressed in artificial stage play environments. It’s also a clever way to interrogate big-picture concepts through limited cast & locations, revealing more about the writers’ hang-ups with the way they were raised as children than their fictional avatars’ phony struggles with intimacy.

Two Sleepy People starts with a consciously equal balance between the two leads’ leftover Mommy Issues and subsequent young-adult neuroses. We get to know them in their respective real-world living spaces where they’ve trapped themselves in prisons of their own design, with jailcell bars made of unpacked moving boxes or compulsively purchased houseplants depending on the apartment. Things are much more pleasant in their emotional-cheating dreamscape apartment, give or take the Lynchian theatre stage just outside the front door that forces them to relive memories of the mommies who failed them. While those memories also start off equally balanced between the two characters, Baron Ryan’s Woodsy Alleny protagonist eventually takes the literal spotlight, and the back half of the film largely becomes about his impending, unavoidable divorce. The film is most enjoyable in its first half, while it’s unsure how to define the rules of its Sleep Life/Real Life divide and the audience is still learning to love the characters and their worlds. Once their in-the-moment romantic issues have to actually mean something to move the plot along, it loses a lot of steam, and the nervous fella at the center of it all unfortunately outlives his welcome by at least a few overly chatty minutes of runtime.

The miracle of this microbudget indie project is that it’s ever funny or charming at all. Clicking around online, I gather that Baron Ryan is usually billed as a “creator” instead of a filmmaker, which means he already has a small following from making short-form videos on platforms like Instagram & TikTok. For the most part, his Very Online sense of humor translates relatively well to a feature film format, landing punchlines that work just fine out of context (such as a short story pitch about a fetus who is issued an eviction notice from its mother’s womb) and jokes that only make sense in this high-concept scenario (such as the double meaning of a coworker’s accusation that “Everyone knows you’re sleeping together”). There’s a timidity in just how emotionally or psychologically vulnerable he & Grossman are willing to get in their script, though, which especially shows in their fear of broaching the subject of sex. Their characters never physically cheat in their shared psychic space; when the subject of sexual needs or kinks comes up in conversation, they brush it aside to instead embarrass themselves with reenacted childhood memories and read-aloud diary entries. Compare that guardedness with the open-book neuroses of Joanna Arnow’s similarly themed & budgeted The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, and you get a sense of just how careful Ryan & Grossman are to not fully Go There. To their credit, though, Woody Allen revealed way too much about himself in his own pioneering versions of this neurotic romcom subgenre, and we all now wish we knew way less. They may be sparing us in the long run.

-Brandon Ledet

Mississippi Masala (1991)

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The 1991 romantic dramedy Mississippi Masala is, to put it simply, a story about two incredibly hot people falling in love despite increasingly thorny circumstances. What Hollywood studios don’t want you to know is that every movie used to be like that, that life was once great. It turns out that all you need to make a lastingly beloved motion picture is to cast a couple nuclear-hot actors with nuclear-meltdown chemistry and then throw a few puny obstacles in the way of their union. It sounds like a simple formula, looking back, but from what I gather studio executives forgot to write it down, and it’s since been lost to time.

Sarita Choudhury & Denzel Washington star as the incredibly hot people in question: the daughter of motel workers in small-town Mississippi and a self-employed carpet cleaner who also does business at local motels, just outside of her periphery. The Indian immigrant & Black American communities they belong to are remarkably similar when compared in parallel, as the young couple angles for alone time between constant obligations to their aging parents. They’re also rigidly separate communities, to the point where it’s just as much of a transgression for them to date as it would be for a Montague to date a Capulet. Only, their worlds are separated by racial & xenophobic bigotry instead of interfamilial beef, which makes it even easier for the audience to root for their success.

The thorny circumstances that keep our incredibly hot would-be couple apart are given more political thought & attention than most by-the-numbers romances of the period. The story starts twenty years earlier in the Indian immigrant communities of 1970s Uganda, just as those communities are being forcibly ejected from the country by dictator Idi Amin. Roshan Seth plays a Ugandan-patriotic lawyer who’s heartbroken by his home country’s sudden rejection of his presence for not being “a real African,” which of course colors his opinions on mixed-race relationships twenty years later when his daughter dares to date a Mississippi local. Interracial bigotry is obviously not an uncommon source of conflict in romance dramas, but it is rare for a mainstream picture to dwell so thoughtfully on the historical, intersectional context of that conflict, let alone to tell a story with no white characters of consequence.

Director Mina Nair was very clear-headed in her mission to Trojan Horse political text into her traditionalist romance, doing on-the-ground research in Uganda while preparing the project. Nowadays, if you want to make a mainstream picture about geopolitical conflict, you have to sneak it into a $100mil superhero action spectacle; if you want to tell a story about small-town racial bigotry, you have to shroud it behind “elevated horror” metaphor. That is, if you want an audience to actually see your movie, as opposed to scrolling past its thumbnail on Netflix. In the 90s, the formula was much simpler. Side-by-side shots of Choudhury & Washington sharing a steamy phone call in their respective bedrooms was more than enough to justify the political substance of the larger text. I didn’t cry when that couple finally beats the odds, signing their romantic contract with a kiss at a highway gas station. I did, however, cry when Rashaan Seth finally returns to Uganda, fully reckoning with his lost home and his lost solidarity with fellow Africans. No one would finance a movie about the latter without indulging a little of the former, though, and Nair played the system perfectly to tell the story she wanted to tell to as many people as possible.

-Brandon Ledet

The Swampflix Oscars Guide 2026

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There are 35 feature films nominated for the 2026 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix have only reviewed half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the selection with any authority. We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including 40% of our own Top 10 Films of 2025 list. The fact that most top prizes are likely to go to one of two titles in that overlap (Sinners or One Battle After Another, both scoring high numbers of nominations) is also an encouraging sign of improving tastes within The Academy, validating this year’s list of nominees as a decent sample of what 2025 cinema had to offer.

Listed below are the 18 Oscar-Nominated films from 2025 that we’ve covered on the site, loosely ranked based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and the listed awards the films were nominated for.

Sinners

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Best Supporting Actress (Wunmi Mosaku), Best Supporting Actor (Delroy Lindo), Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song (“I Lied to You”)

“A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.”

Marty Supreme

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Timothée Chalamet), Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design

“Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.”

One Battle After Another

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actress (Teyana Taylor), Best Supporting Actor (Benicio del Toro), Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Sound, and Best Original Score

“2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.”

The Ugly Stepsister

Nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

“A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous ‘villain’ who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how ‘changing your outside to match your insides’ isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).”

Weapons

Nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Amy Madigan)

“Semi-functional alcoholism, conspiracy theory paranoia, Ring camera surveillance, cops harassing the homeless, mob justice vigilantism, institutional scapegoats for abuses at home … Oh yeah, we’re rockin’ the suburbs.”

Sirāt 

Nominated for Best Sound and Best International Feature

“When it’s time to party*, we will always party hard.

*distract ourselves from impending apocalypse and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Nominated for Best Actress (Rose Byrne)

“A portrait of parenthood as being cursed with an imaginary friend that demands your constant attention 24/7.”

Bugonia

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score

“Our corporate-speak overlords are literal demons on Earth and all we can do about it is conspire & seethe online. No action, just endless talk talk talk until the biggest lunatic among us ineffectively lashes out. Weirdly, if this inspires any been-there-seen-that jadedness, it’s coming from Kinds of Kindness, not Save the Green Planet!; would’ve fit right in as another vignette in the anthology, if condensed.”

KPop Demon Hunters

Nominated for Best Original Song (“Golden”) and Best Animated Feature

“The people yearn for the return of the music video.”

The Secret Agent

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), Best Casting, and Best International Feature

“I witnessed two verifiable miracles that night: the scale & period detail afforded by this movie’s budget, and an earthly visit from an angel (Udo Kier).”

Hamnet

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Score

“I expected this to exclusively be about one historically famous couple’s version of art therapy, but it hits on much broader themes about how we’ve all lost a genuine, Pagan relationship with the natural world and how making art can be a form of witchcraft that brings us back to it. It’s powerful stuff; cut right through my knee-jerk cynicism (except during one disastrously phony reading of ‘To be or not to be’ that temporarily broke the spell).”

It Was Just an Accident

Nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature

“A surprisingly straightforward thriller, considering what’s usually publicized about Panahi’s recent work. The urgency of its politics hangs heavy on each plot beat & morbid punchline, though, which makes for interesting comparison points as a contemporary of One Battle After Another.”

The Perfect Neighbor

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature

“A nightmare dispatch from the suburban US surveillance state. Probably amoral of me to say this about a documentary of a real-life tragedy, but this would be a helpful answer for anyone who was asking what Weapons is ‘about’. This country is terminally ill.”

Arco

Nominated for Best Animated Feature

“Between this, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, and Mars Express, it feels like there’s nice little new wave of sci-fi/fantasy films forming in French animation studios right now. Mars Express is a little more Blade Runner than Arco & Sirocco, which skew a little more Ghibli (making them less distinct in the process) but they’re all pleasant & enchanting enough in their own way.”

Sentimental Value

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Renate Reinsve), Best Supporting Actresses (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas & Elle Fanning), Best Supporting Actor (Stelan Skarsgard), Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best International Feature

“At times, a nice movie about a nice house; at other times, a sad movie about making a sad movie.”

Frankenstein

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Jacob Elordi), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Sound, and Best Original Score

“A more refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life. I’m excited to get to the point where Jack Pierce’s creature design is in the public domain so that every new version of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but this still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk.”

The Smashing Machine

Nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

“The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it was impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career. I don’t know that there’s much else to the movie besides giving him the opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, but he puts the spotlight to good use.”

Train Dreams

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song (“Train Dreams”)

“More of an illustrated audiobook than a movie. Specifically, it’s illustrated with the visual language of a macho, all-American TV commercial for a whiskey brand (which at least makes it interesting for how vocally pro-worker & anti-ICE it is in its politics).

I would be curious to know how many people dug this but didn’t vibe with Hamnet, which hits on a lot of the same themes (re: Old World Nature, familial grief) but actually makes an effort to adapt its source material instead of just reciting it. Personally, I found Hamnet powerful and this one hokey, but I’m sure that’s exactly flipped for a lot of people.”

-The Swampflix Crew

Dooba Dooba (2026)

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As often as it is reclaimed by the very people it others as monstrous villains, horror has always been a largely reactionary genre. You don’t have to scratch too hard at the surface of any classic horror title to find kneejerk fears of people with bodily, mental, gender, or sexual difference being expressed through metaphor. It’s a genre built on societal disgust with facial disfigurement, discomfort with ambiguous gender presentation, and paranoia over escaped mental patients, but it’s also one that’s routinely championed by the real-life targets of those societal phobias. Usually, it takes a couple decades for fans to reclaim blatantly homophobic films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as Queer, Actually but, given enough time, every major horror title eventually gets its due as a transgressive, funhouse mirror version of Representation. What’s funny about the new found-footage horror Dooba Dooba is that it encourages that reclamation to happen in real time. Textually, the film very directly preys on people’s suspicions that modern teens diagnosed with severe anxiety and other social disorders are just faking it to torture the rest of us. Subtextually, its flippant construction leaves room for younger audiences to celebrate that torture. It functions as a kind of power fantasy for socially anxious Zoomers to get their revenge on the Millennials & Gen-Xers who doubt the severity of their mental disabilities. From either perspective, it’s an act of generational warfare — a perversely amusing one.

If Dooba Dooba openly participates in any other long-running horror traditions, it’s in its modern interpretation of the classic babysitter slasher. A 20something aspiring singer takes on a babysitting gig to make ends meet, and the extent of her desperation for rent money is immediately tested. The child is 16 years old but too anxious to stay by herself because she once witnessed the murder of her young brother in the family home. Her overly horny, socially awkward parents explain that to alleviate the teen’s anxieties, the babysitter must sleep in the same bedroom as her, must constantly repeat the nonsense phrase “dooba dooba” whenever making noise elsewhere in the house, and must remain under constant surveillance via closed-circuit security cameras, stationed in every room. Although the story is set in 2022, the cameras are much older & lower-quality than modern tech, giving the entire film the feeling of a crime scene documented via stationary camcorder. Whenever the edit switches to a tight-zoom-in, you can practically count the grains on the screen. You never forget that you’re watching a contemporary story, though, because the way the Zoomer teen in the babysitter’s care weaponizes her social anxieties as a form of low-level torture is distinctly of-the-now. For instance, she mocks the poor babysitter’s Soundcloud tracks as facile novelties, then passes off the faux pas as an inability to read social cues. Then, the torture gets more literal & physical, once her malevolence is clearly established as intentional.

Where the film steps away from othering & mocking teens who struggle with anxiety or Autistic social disfunction is in handing its young villain the keys to the editing room. We are not watching raw security-camera footage of this babysitter’s torment, but rather a PowerPoint-style presentation of the night’s events as interpreted through a prankster teen’s online-troll sensibilities. The horrors documented in this suburban home are flippantly narrated in the lower-case, goofy-font text of a teen fucking around in an AIM chatroom, mocking the victim instead of her tormentor. They’re also frequently interrupted by stock footage of and “fun” factoids about past American presidents (such as their history as slave owners), as if the film were half snuff tape, half high school term paper assignment. All suburban-set horror tends to function as a stand-in for the horrors of America at large, but Dooba Dooba is smart to make that thematic connection explicit, so it’s clear that it isn’t only punching down at awkward teens on the spectrum. Our socially maladjusted villain, her gig-economy victim, and her alcoholic swinger parents all come together to represent something insidious about what’s going on behind the locked doors of the modern American suburban home, protected by the red-white-and-blue flags that wave above. Of course, some public domain horror clips and documents of surgical gore are also included in the mix, just to keep the genre exercise clearly defined.

Overall, Dooba Dooba may not be as ambitious nor as accomplished as other recent “analog” horrors like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Outwaters, or Skinamarink, but it’s got a real wicked streak to it, and it makes some impressively distinct visual & editing choices for something so obviously cheap. The cast is limited in both size and skill, but their awkwardness on camera only adds to the real-life social discomforts they’re supposed to evoke. The cathode-ray CCTV imagery is also limited in its texture & movement, but the sequencing of the edit maintains a perverse sense of humor & momentum throughout. Not for nothing, the film is also under 80 minutes long, making for a perfect January horror B-picture experience. Between Primate, The Bone Temple, and Dooba Dooba, the year’s off to a great trashy start. Just be careful not to play a drinking game with this particular one’s title, since it’s repeated often enough to send you to the hospital.

-Brandon Ledet

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

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In El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent), there is a scene in which indigenous river guide Karamakate revisits a former Catholic mission/residential school on the banks of the Amazon River. He first visited the place decades earlier, where he tried to teach the boys held captive there about their traditions, saying “Don’t believe their crazy tales about eating the body of their gods.” When he returns, he finds them long after the priest has died and they have devolved into an outright cannibalistic cult that quotes half-remembered bits of Christian scripture to support their current state of being. I wrote about this years ago (and proofread poorly, it seems), but Serpiente is a story about an apocalypse that has already happened, the total destruction of a wide swath of cultures and peoples under the heel of European colonialism. I found myself thinking about it a lot during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that one wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of as being in conversation with Serpiente, but which shares a common connection in that it spends a great deal of its runtime following a now-adult practitioner of extreme violence who was only a boy when the world as he knew it came to an end. They’re very different texts (with quite divergent intents), but I couldn’t help seeing something of the cannibalistic former wards of the church from Serpiente in Jack O’Connell’s here, and that enriched for me what was already a pretty great movie, especially for a January release. 

Our protagonist from 28 Years Later, Spike (Alfie Williams) takes more of a backseat role in this sequel. At the end of the last film, we last saw him leave the healthy infant who was born of a woman afflicted with the Rage virus before returning to the British mainland, where he was rescued from a pack of infected by a group of knife-wielding weirdos. As this film opens, we find him in the midst of being inducted into their ranks; “Sir” Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) is the leader of their gang of seven “fingers,” all re-christened “Jimmy” in his honor. Sir Jimmy lords over the others, who have scarred the space between their eyes with an inverted cross like the one he wears, although we don’t see this forced on Spike when he manages to slay his assigned Jimmy despite his physical disadvantages. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work on his macabre memento mori memorial, the bone temple of the title, while also making the “alpha” infected a subject of study, trying to see if the Rage can be tempered even if it can’t be cured. He names the alpha “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry) and realizes that the seemingly mindless monster has become addicted to the drugs in his blow darts, so the two of them essentially start doing recreational morphine together and listening to Kelson’s record collection. When the Jimmies come upon some survivors, most of the fingers torture them slowly while Spike vomits and writhes in emotional agony and Sir Jimmy sends one of his deputies, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) scouting; she sees Kelson and Samson cavorting from afar and reports back to Sir Jimmy that she’s seen Old Nick, setting up a confrontation between the killers, Kelson, and his pet monster. 

I have one complaint. Williams was given a wide range of emotions to play in the previous film as Spike entered an adulthood that was as alien to him as it was to us. He was sheltered from a changing world and trained to survive, but isolated in a way that meant that his first exposures to the hypocrisies and dishonesty of the adult world made him reject it and instead attempt the impossible and bring his mother to Kelson for treatment. Here, Williams only has one mode: utter, pants-soiling terror at being forced into the service of Sir Jimmy and his psychotic acolytes. This makes total sense narratively within the story that this film is telling, but it also means that Spike has no real arc, which is bizarre since the last time we were all here, he was the main character. Here, he’s static and secondary, as this film features a much larger role for Fiennes and alternates entirely between his activities and those of Jimmy and his fingers. There’s a lot of great stuff to be mined here. Kelson’s treatment of Samson is procedural, sure, but it also allows for some excellent music choices. It’s fascinating to watch a man who’s been isolated among the bones of the dead for so long essentially adopt a zombie onto whom he seems to be projecting a lot of intent and intelligence for no other reason than that he’s been lonely a long time, only for the film to surprise us by having these actions not have been in vain. Sir Jimmy’s self-mythologizing has a lot of flair, and he’s effectively menacing and depraved that the film had me on edge for most of it. I didn’t think anything would top the electricity between him and Kelson in their first scene together, but there that’s followed up by a sequence set to Iron Maiden that I expect to be the most talked-about element of the picture. Overall, however, straying so far from Spike as our central focus necessitated a realignment of the stakes that left me less emotionally invested in this outing. 

Nia DaCosta is in the director’s chair this time around, and although I loved the way that Danny Boyle slipped back into this world effortlessly in 28YL, I had a higher opinion of 28 Weeks Later than the consensus, and that film was likewise helmed by a different creative team. Alex Garland still returned to pen this one, and although there’s a distinct stylistic difference between Boyle and DaCosta, I welcome her stamp on this overall enterprise. The zombies have never really been the point in this franchise, and (Samson excepted) the presence of the Rage-afflicted is the smallest here it has ever been, with the extreme gruesome violence on display here coming at the hands of survivors. The infected and the Jimmies have both lost their humanity, but the former did so because of the Rage, while the latter are monsters of Jimmy’s making. This has been the film series’ driving force for as long as it has existed, that man is always the real monster, going all the way back to Christopher Eccleston in the original 28 Days Later. As such, the film’s conflict is also ideological, with Jimmy and the mythology he has built around himself as Satan’s son and heir to dominion over his demons (the infected) inevitably coming to a head with Kelson’s rational atheism, within which he is able to provide some manner of salvation. That he manages to use Jimmy’s follower’s faith against them in the end is clever and satisfying, and I had a great time with the film overall. 

Where I remain most excited to see this franchise continue to go is in its exploration of the way that a disease-ravaged, isolated Britain has, in the absence of a larger social structure, devolved into a series of cults. Sir Jimmy and his crew are an obvious example, as is Kelson’s non-religious (but creepy) solo project of building his elegy of human bones. It didn’t come up in this film, but the island community from which Spike hails seems to have developed some of its own creepy rituals involving a mask, and I expect that the next film in this franchise will see that community return in some form since they are completely absent from this one. Most intriguingly, Samson’s trophy-like acquisition of human heads with attached spines and the way that he displayed them in the woods also seems like a worshipful action, although deciphering the motivation for this is complicated by revelations from Bone Temple, so we shall see. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #256: Landscape Suicide (1987) & Elevated True Crime

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Welcome to Episode #256 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of high-concept true crime documentaries, starting with 1987’s Landscape Suicide.

0:00 Welcome
02:50 Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025
04:17 F.A.R.T. The Movie (1991)
07:52 Amish Stud – The Eli Weaver Story (2023)
11:13 Project X (2012)
15:02 January horror
18:45 Atom Egoyan
30:20 The Roottrees are Dead

33:37 Landscape Suicide (1987)
1:01:38 Zodiac Killer Project (2025)
1:26:00 Casting JonBenet (2017)
1:45:00 Voyeur (2017)

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

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025

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1. Sinners — A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.

2. Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.

3. The Phoenician Scheme — Its violence is Looney Tunes, its business negotiations are Three Stooges, its religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of The Phoenician Scheme for any other director’s work. It’s another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.

4. Eephus — A slow-paced, aimless movie that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game in real time … except that every single dialogue exchange & character detail is either deeply charming, riotously funny, or both. The film takes its title from a type of curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if time is standing still. The game it stages also plays out over an impossibly long time, an eephus hovering in the air while everyone hopes it will never end.

5. One Battle After Another — 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.

6. The Ugly Stepsister— A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous “villain” who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).

7. The Plague — A coming-of-age nightmare drama about hazing rituals at a children’s water polo summer camp. It might not fully qualify as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon among titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about boyhood bullying we’ve ever seen.

8. No Other Choice — Park Chan-Wook returns with another spectacular revenge thriller, except this time the antihero lead can’t actually fight the thing that’s wronged him. You can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure layoffs into a torture dungeon, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. So, he convinces himself that he has no other choice but to kill his fellow workers while competing for jobs, losing sight of the real enemy. Our relentlessly mundane & degrading corporate hellscape knows no borders nor mercy. Someone ought to do something about it … just preferably someone smarter & nobler than this guy.

9. Boys Go to Jupiter— Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, illustrating the listless ennui of unoccupied time between childhood school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Overflowing with killer music, adorable animation, and quietly hilarious characters, its Floridian otherworld is politically grim, but hanging out there feels like getting a foot massage while digesting an edible.

10. Rats! — A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but it’s doubtful any other post-Linklater buttscratchers have ever been this exceedingly gross or this truly anarchic. It’s a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens.

Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Hear Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew