For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychotronic ’70s oddity The Kirlian Witness, a murder mystery in which the only witness to the crime is an ordinary house plant.
I only saw The Devil Wears Prada once, in theaters during its original theatrical run. I didn’t care too much for it at the time. I was a teenager who was working two jobs while going to college, struggling financially and at the peak of my indie pretension, and I found the film to be both too mainstream and too propagandistic to really be enjoyable. This was still two years before the 2008 financial crisis hit, a cultural disruption that changed a lot about the way that people engaged with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Hit reality series like MTV Cribs and My Super Sweet 16, which trafficked in both envy of the wealthy and derision for their excesses, were both quietly scuttled by 2010 (although new seasons went into production for both in 2021 and 2016, respectively). At nineteen, I was already struggling too hard in my own life to find the world of couture fashion to be escapist fantasy. When Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) gives her memetic “cerulean sweater” dressing down to Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) about how she sees herself as being outside of, uninfluenced by, and dismissively “above” the world of fashion, she may as well have been speaking directly to me. I, admittedly immaturely, saw the 2006 film as a movie about a woman with high career aspirations who is brainwashed into giving an industry that is predicated on wealthy elitism a pass. Further, I was still impressionable enough that the film’s rampant body-shaming was both distasteful and had a negative lasting impact on me personally. (Also, I just hate KT Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See.”)
In the years since, the original film’s finer moments have become Mean Girls-scale internet background radiation in the form of Miranda Priestly girlboss gifsets, “Are you wearing the?”/”The [x]? Yes I am” memes, and “Adrian Grenier is the real villain” thinkpieces. The Devil Wears Prada is a film that’s, if you’ll excuse the pun, tailor-made to be chopped into pieces for fancams of Miranda Priestly, and the predominance of vertical/portrait video means that we perpetual scrollers never have to miss whatever outfit she’s wearing at the time. The less memorable elements, like the fact that Andy’s in a love triangle between Entourage, and The Mentalist, aren’t what people think about when the film’s title comes up in conversation or online. Now, twenty years later, we’re back with another entry in what Brandon likes to call the “should have been a Super Bowl commercial” genre, a legacy sequel that for most people will simply be a nice nostalgic ride but for others will be a piece of art that is forever responsible for justifying its existence. I was surprisingly on board for Freakier Friday, so why not?
On the same night that Miranda Priestly is hosting the similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from (henceforth STBLDF) Met Gala, Andy Sachs is present at a journalistic awards ceremony. Andy and her entire team from the New York Vanguard are laid off via text message in the same moment that her win is announced, and she ascends the dais to express both her gratitude and her frustration at the ongoing one-percenter-led gutting of journalism as both a career and a necessary pillar that supports a theoretically free society. Miranda also finds herself in crisis mode when the reputation of Runway, the STBLDF-Vogue that she oversees, is endangered by an exposé that shows the magazine’s negligence in regards to an article about a supposed ethical manufacturer that secretly runs sweatshops. The CEO of STBLDF-Condé Nast puts his plans to move Miranda into a global editorial role on hold and hires Miranda as the new Features editor at Runway, which brings Miranda and Andy back together again. The latter is also reunited with Nigel (Stanley Tucci), still serving as Miranda’s right hand, and Emily (Emily Blunt), who has moved out of publishing and into luxury retail with Dior, which makes up a healthy chunk of Runway’s advertising and thus gives her the chance to play hardball with Miranda following the “fast fash”(ion) debacle.
The set-up here is pretty solid. Even though Miranda still reigns over her office like she did decades previously, changes in expectations about workplace behavior mean that she doesn’t have the liberty to throw her coats at her assistants as she once did, and her current assistant Amari (Simone Ashley)’s job seems to entail no small amount of reining in Miranda’s déclassé sentiments about body positivity and trivial references to killing herself. Although she still commands respect, it’s only a matter of time before the elderly STBLDF-Condé Nast CEO hands the reins over to his mouth-breathing, athleisure-sporting, wannabe-disruptor idiot son (BJ Novak). The film also gets in on 2025’s general abuse of STBLDF-Elon Musk archetypes, with a little bit of Bill Gates thrown in for good measure. Justin Theroux plays Benji Barnes, a tech billionaire who’s unbelievably unfunny and out of touch, who, instead of aspiring to colonize Mars, instead wants to look into the potential of exploring the sun. Lucy Liu plays Sasha, his Melinda Gates-esque ex-wife, who supported him initially while he “tinkered around with code,” and is now unconscionably wealthy and hopes to give away her entire fortune before her death. When Andy’s dogged persistence nets her an interview with the infamously reclusive Sasha, one that results in an exclusive on the announcement of her new engagement, it solidifies her value to Runway, but their attempts to save the magazine (and, by extension, journalism as a whole) may all be in vain.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 smartly decides to be about something, in a way that actually justifies going back to this well twenty years later. This is a film about the death of journalism, and it manages to be smartly trenchant for a lot of its runtime before fizzling a bit with an ending that’s both too pat and too happy while also kind of missing the point of this entire enterprise. When Andy returns to Runway, Nigel is candid with her about the publication’s deteriorating state, citing that features which would once have been budgeted as a month long international trip now only cover a couple of afternoons at a nearby studio. The magazine chugs along, but the physical copies that appear in newsstands have been whittled down to the point that Nigel jokes it could be used as dental floss. The changing social media landscape means that Andy’s writing isn’t connecting with an audience; her features are incisive and informative, but no one seems to actually be clicking through and reading them. Even something that Andy once dismissed as utterly frivolous is now another barometer for the end of the Fourth Estate as a whole, an old world dying while a new one struggles to be born.
The film manifests the discussion of the death of culture and whatever is to follow it in the world to come in the form of Andy’s token love interest, Peter (Patrick Brammall), a contractor who has recently converted a classic New York architectural beauty into apartments painted millennial grey and furnished with faux-MCM Wayfair purchases. Peter makes the argument that, if he hadn’t done so, the building would have been torn down completely and something modern would have been built in its place, and in some way he’s managing to hold onto the old form while making it into something new. It’s a little on-the-nose as a metaphor, and the film wobbles on whether he’s right or not. He’s pretty thinly characterized, overall, and seems to exist solely to fulfill the need for a romance that the film wouldn’t suffer for lacking if it were excised. Ultimately, the film comes down to a message of “it’s okay if a billionaire owns a media monopoly, as long as it’s the right billionaire, preferably a girlboss who leans in.” I could see that this was where the film was going as it headed into the final act, but I was still a little shocked that this was where all of the rigmarole about integrity and personal growth led us. At the end of the day, this film is still a corporate product that is being seen at for-profit megaplexes, and it was never going to be able to imagine a conclusion where all of this was resolved by anything other than appealing to someone with deeper pockets. This is a film about fashion as journalism, but one of the key differences between those things is that journalism, despite often being driven by capital, is not inherently so, and as such it’s difficult to imagine any solution to the characters’ problems that isn’t the one that the screenwriters came up with. That’s not my job, though; it was theirs.
I’m coming down pretty hard on a movie that I mostly enjoyed. I appreciated that Hathaway’s love interest was played by an actor who was handsome in a very normal way, not someone with a chiseled jawline and perfect facial symmetry, but I also found my mind wandering the most during their romantic scenes. They feel rather rote, all things considered, and at two hours, the comedy isn’t quite sufficient to really carry the film all the way to the finish line. It gets sentimental but never goes maudlin, and I was sufficiently invested for the entire runtime. It’s worth noting that every single trailer before this one was advertising a legacy sequel: the new Scary Movie, Focker-in-Law, Practical Magic 2, the live-action Moana, and, of course, the omnipresent Mandalorian and Grogu. (There was also a DWP2-themed Loreal ad with Kiran Soni and the Pepsi copaganda Jenner.) With that as an appetizer, I was primed and ready for a narrative about the death of commercial art and the strangling weed of capitalism. Other than DWP2 itself, none of these films feel like they were made with any artistic intent, or with a particular story to tell that justifies its existence the way that DWP2 does, with the possible exception of Scary Movie, a parody franchise which has lain fallow for long enough that there’s a wealth of new material for it to satirize. What all of these titles offer is the chance to take a second walk through a familiar world, and DWP2 succeeds with this in a way that doesn’t feel like it exists solely as a corporate product. It’s funny, if not quite funny enough, and it’s a little broader in its comedy than its predecessor, but it’s worth a watch. It falls short of being as worthwhile as Creed, Doctor Sleep, or Freakier Friday, but it doesn’t deserve to be sorted into the same dustbin as The Craft: Legacy and Hocus Pocus 2.
They say all pornography, no matter how scripted, is partially documentary. You’ll find the phoniest characters, dialogue, and scenarios cinema has to offer in porno, and yet the physical sexual contact between performers is more real than all other cinematic action — unstimulated, often documented by the camera in medical detail. It’s easy to look back to vintage titles of the Porno Chic era and retroactively impose anthropological meaning on them, citing them as a document of a bygone era, since their unpermitted street shoots and nonexistent costume budgets often captured the people of the time as they were in daily life. Pornography is also immediately documentary, though, caught between the extremes of both staged cinematic fantasy and the documented reality of the performers within that fantasy. This is not a new observation. One of Porno Chic’s earliest auteurs was playing around with the tension between those extremes a half-century ago, coining the term “docufantasy” to describe his chosen artform’s dual, self-conflicting nature. Wakefield Poole’s 1977 “docufantasy” Take One opens by warning the audience that trying to parse out what’s fiction and what’s reality is a fool’s errand, announcing, “For your enjoyment, do not try to understand this film: there is nothing to understand. It is only real people doing reel things and making them real together.” That distinction between the “real” and the “reel” sums it all up more concisely than I ever could.
Take One finds Wakefield Poole on the opposite coast than his crown jewel Bijou, now docu-fantasizing about the gay men in 1970s San Francisco. In an early precursor to Beth B’s reality-TV prototype Visiting Desire, Poole invites eight men from the local scene to confess their fantasies in videotaped interviews, then act them out in front of 16mm cameras. Unlike in Visiting Desire, this experiment reliably results in onscreen fucking, with each performer given a spotlight fantasy sequence before they all gather for a climactic orgy in the theater where the movie they’re participating in premieres mid-runtime. Some fantasies are more abstract than others, such as an early sequence where a young man gets so revved up thinking about his muscle car that he finds a way to passionately penetrate its hood ornament, à la Julia Ducournau’s Titane or Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos. In another, a domestic couple has semi-public sex on the sunny roof of their isolated desert home, leaning heavily into the soft psychedelia of the film’s post-hippie era. The most shocking sequence is the one in which two real-life brothers have sex on camera, fulfilling an incest fantasy most pornos only playfully hint at to capitalize on a convenient taboo. Here, the siblings’ lovemaking is warmly tender to an almost disconcerting degree, as if the audience has been invited to witness an intimate moment that no one outside their unusual relationship was ever meant to see. That sequence is more “real” than it is “reel,” alarmingly so.
If Take One falls short on either side of the real/reel divide, it’s in the supposedly documentary interview sequences that justify their resulting fantasies. For the most part, the initial video interviews that inspired the film aren’t incorporated into the final cut and are instead restaged and scripted in a more traditional pornographic narrative style. So, like Bijou, the film is at its best when it goes full fantasy mode, staging the abstract sex acts inspired by those interviews in an endless black void. The best scenes in the film are pure jack-off material, with men narrating their fantasies to the audience while masturbating in a featureless room decorated only with slideshow projections of momentary illustrations, as described in their horned-up ramblings. It’s a surprisingly poetic approach to pornography that’s introduced as soon as the opening scene, wherein a nude ballet dancer performs a full routine for the audience after emerging from the silver screen like a cryptid hatching from an egg. That poetic approach to the genre is later echoed in Poole’s liberal use of color gels, as he bathes his performers in fantastic colored lights that untether them from this earthly realm. The film’s incidentally documentary glimpses of vintage gay San Francisco are cool & all, but we spend most of the runtime indoors, so Poole is smart to attempt to document their internal lives instead. We learn about them by finding out what gets them off.
Because this project is so dependent on Wakefield Poole’s distinctions between the “real” and the “reel,” the filmmaker himself inevitably becomes part of the story. Take One is a meta-porno, including footage of Poole & crew recruiting performers, conducting interviews, operating cameras, and exhibiting film prints between the purer sensory immersions of the full-on fantasy sequences. The reality of the movie being made & projected in-film fully breaks down by the mid-premiere orgy sequence, which gets so out of control that even the projectionist gets in on the action, receiving a surprise blowjob in his hermetic booth above the fray. Having already fulfilled all of his obligations as a documentarian and a pornographer, Poole fully lets loose in that sequence, playing around with as many color gels and camera angles he can afford to shoot while his performers shoot all over each other. He becomes especially enamored with repurposing a glory hole as a peephole in that sequence, viewing the action from a self-imposed distance on the other side of a faux patrician. For all of the semi-documentary elements that make Take One interesting as a consciously academic object from porno’s distant past, it’s still most useful and most remarkable when it drops the bullshit and gets down to the task at hand: filming unstimulated sex acts in the most aesthetically pleasing light possible. Poole didn’t need to go out of his way to stage a “docufantasy”; that’s already the business he was working in.
Radley Metzger’s late-60s romance Camille 2000 slips through the cracks of most marketable genre definitions. Its title suggests a Swingin’ 60s sci-fi futurism, but its story is set in contemporary Rome; the only thing futuristic about it is its see-through inflatable furniture. Its fashionable Italian production design and scene-to-scene dramatic sensibilities recall the post-Hitchcock stylings of a giallo, but there’s no murder nor mystery to be found in its plot. Its director’s reputation as an unusually stylish hardcore pornographer sets the mood for lewd on-screen sex, but its historical timing as pre-Deep Throat erotica means it can only deliver softcore posing of nude bodies, with no genital contact nor thrusting. So, what exactly is a sci-fi title without science fiction, a giallo without murder, a porno without penetration? Like with many artsy Euro dramas, it’s all just a vibe. In this case, the vibe happens to be a Pierre Cardin magazine layout inspired by Valley of the Dolls. Adjust your expectations accordingly.
The titular Camille is a wealthy Roman socialite who’s living a dangerously fast life of pure, high-fashion hedonism. She spends her careless days drunk & stoned, shopping for dresses, and party-hopping from orgy to opera to orgy. The only thing she needs to do to sustain this fabulous lifestyle is to marry rich, an obligation that stresses her out as she half-heartedly attempts to placate an aging sugar-daddy fiancée while continually humping the more age-appropriate fuckboys whom she actually desires. She warns the latest fuckboy not to fall in love with her, since that life-dependent need to marry rich will certainly break his heart in the long run, but the young Frenchman can’t help but fall for her anyway. He swears that even if he sleeps with 2,000 other women, he still won’t be able to get over her (thus the futuristic-sounding title). He copes by draining his modest bank account trying to keep her clothed and happy until she can’t help but move on and officially marry, securing her place in life. She copes by popping pills in-between her nonstop parade of orgiastic cocktail parties, too numb to feel the full brunt of her burgeoning love for the dolt. Their toxic dynamic inevitably leaves him drunk and her dead. It takes 131 long minutes to arrive at that predetermined destination, like a train that takes lengthy breaks at every station.
Camille 2000 is not a movie you watch for its drama or its action; you watch it for its production design. Its social conflicts and stoney-baloney fuck sessions are frustratingly inert, but they’re at least staged inside an Italo fashion magazine layout, where it’s appropriate to wear see-through swimsuits to an afternoon cocktail party and no bedroom is complete without at least a dozen strategically angled mirrors. It’s less actual pornography than it is lifestyle pornography, inviting the audience to hang out with emptyheaded European socialites whose only immediate concern in life is finding the chicest place to smoke their dope and get their rocks off. Metzger can’t go full-hardcore here the way he does in later, more famous pictures like The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but he has plenty of opportunity to leer & drool over his actors’ carefully arranged nude bodies. In the most stylish scene, Camille is being eaten out by her favorite Frenchman in the background while a vase of camelias is framed close-up in the foreground, with Metzger’s lens alternating focus between the two displays to the rhythm of her orgasmic breaths. Like everything else in the picture, it’s gorgeous, it’s indulgent, and it lasts for several more minutes than you expect it to, so it’s best not to be in a rush to get off and get over to the next swanky locale.
Roger Ebert wrote a 1-star review of Camille 2000 for the Chicago Sun-Times, frustrated by the excess of mirrored nude modeling and the total lack of actual phonographic thrusting. That review was published in October of 1969, and I am dying to know if that was before or after Ebert wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyers’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls that same year. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls resembles Camille 2000 in its garish look and its erotic sensibilities far more closely than it recalls the original Valley of the Dolls it was supposedly a sequel to, almost to the point where it feels like a direct parody of Metzger’s film. Camille even has a gay fashionista bestie that stands in as the film’s very own Z-Man, whom I fully expected to transform into Superwoman during the film’s climactic, prison-themed S&M orgy. I must admit that a large part of my enjoyment of Camille 2000 is in its resemblance to Russ Meyer’s much crasser, much more exciting follow-up, since it was a joy to spend more time luxuriating in mise-en-scène that so closely recalled one of my all-time favorite films. Meanwhile, Ebert would’ve been confronted with it as a routine work assignment that tested his patience & forgiveness as its drama refused to progress and its nude models refused to hump. All I can say is that all movies become more interesting with time, which tends to flatten their differences and accentuate their shared value as cultural snapshots of a bygone era.
Last year, after watching The Blue Gardenia and being particularly taken with Ann Sothern in it, I looked her up and discovered that, over the course of eight years, she had starred in ten(!) films as a character named Maisie Ravier, a misadventuring showgirl. Those ten films are largely forgotten now, but I found all of them on Russia’s YouTube equivalent as uploaded VHS rips from Turner Classic Movies airings, and I dutifully archived them for this year with the intent of watching them all and writing about them for something I intended to call “Maisie May.” Then, almost halfway through this month, as a result of working on a fiction project, I realized I had spent almost half of May in writing mode instead of movie mode. Will I be able to finish all ten Maisie films before the end of the month? Let’s find out together.
The film opens as Maisie (Sothern) arrives in Big Horn, Wyoming to discover that the stage show for which she left New York has folded after a single performance. With only a nickel to her name, she convinces a carny to let her work the shooting gallery, which sets up her meet cute with “Slim” Martin (Robert Young, a few years after his appearance in Hitchcock’s Secret Agent), the manager of Bar-O Ranch. When his wallet gets lifted, Maisie ends up arrested for the theft, and although she’s cleared of the charges, she stows away in the back of his pick-up truck to avoid being arrested again for vagrancy should she remain in town. Slim is less than enthused to discover this, but allows her to stay overnight with the intention of sending her off on the train the next morning, as one of the ranch hands is already going into town to pick up the ranch’s owner, Cliff Ames, and his wife Sybil (Ruth Hussey), whom he has spirited away from New York to put some distance between her and the man with whom she’s been carrying on an affair. Maisie again latches on to an opportunity and presents herself as a maid that Slim has hired for Sybil for the summer. She comes clean to Mr. Ames once they get back to the ranch, who is impressed with her gumption and allows her to stay.
Sybil asks Slim to show her where the “old ranch house” is, and she latches onto it immediately as a place where she can have her lover come and meet her discreetly. Maisie also manages to break through Slim’s resistance and learn that his unfriendliness is the result of previous heartbreak; the two start to fall in love. One day, while touring the ranch in his car with Maisie, Mr. Ames gets into an accident and his arm is pinned in the overturned car. Maisie, believing that she will find Slim and the other ranch hands at the old ranch house because they are on a cattle drive, and instead finds Sybil in flagrante delicto with her lover. Once Mr. Ames is safely back at the ranch, Maisie gives Sybil a dressing down about her behavior and her treatment of her loving husband, and Sybil is able to manipulate her words in conversation with Slim to convince the ranchman that Maisie has spent the summer trying to lure Mr. Ames away. Slim sends Maisie away, and shortly thereafter, Mr. Ames sends a letter to his lawyers in New York and then kills himself. Unfortunately, as Slim discovers the body first and is found standing over the body with the gun Ames used, he is arrested for murder. When Maisie learns of this, she must make her way to the trial to try and save him.
This is a fun enough little seventy-five minute romp, and it practically breezes by. It’s also a bit of a genre-bender, as it starts out as a contemporary Western romcom before the dark twist of Mr. Ames’s suicide and a final act that turns into a courtroom drama. It’s also fairly unconventional in the sense that it plays with certain character stereotypes. Maisie’s a big city showgirl, so one expects there to be some kind of culture clash between her and the simpler Wyoming ranch hands and their employer, but instead of her being brassy and bossy, it’s instead she who is almost immediately taken advantage of by the podunks and conmen of the west, although she manages to turn things around for herself by conning her way into a job at Bar-O Ranch. Once that development occurs, one then expects that there’s going to be some comic hijinks about her not being suited for rural living, but she actually adjusts fairly quickly and does quite well for herself, coming to be adored by both Mr. Ames and Slim’s right hand man, Shorty (musician Cliff Edwards, who would be immortalized the following year as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio). The conflicts aren’t at all what one would expect, and I appreciated that I never really knew where the plot was going to go next, even if the stakes are relatively low throughout, at least until Slim’s trial.
As a movie of a bygone era, it has its detriments, most notably in its casual racism. Even our beloved hero refers to a Black train porter as “boy,” and there’s occasional fun being had at the expense of ranch cook Lee, who is referred to more than once as “the China boy.” It’s a relief that he’s played by an actual Chinese-American actor, Willie Fung, rather than a white actor in yellowface, but he’s also played as a “humorous” stereotype; it’s a mercy that his scenes are few and brief. This was, unfortunately, the exact role that Fung was often funneled into during this more (overtly and openly) racist period in Hollywood history. He has seven films in his 120+ feature filmography where he’s an uncredited “Chinese Cook,” six as “Chinese Waiter,” then “Chinese Bartender,” “Chinese Tailor,” “Chinese Laundryman,” and so on. It’s an unfortunate legacy for a man who came to the U.S. following the collapse of his uncle’s peanut business and made a name for himself as the owner and operator of East Hollywood’s New Moon Café in addition to appearing in 125 films.
There is already trouble on the horizon for Maisie May. The very next film starring Sothern in one of her defining roles is the 1940 picture Congo Maisie, which from the title alone I expect is likely to be unconscionably racist (although I’ll eat crow if Maisie ends up communicating with a mountain gorilla). The synopsis for that one includes both mentions of a rubber plantation and Maisie having to save it from a “native attack.” This could be so awful it derails the entire thing. Stay tuned to find out.
Gazer is a 2025 film from first-time director Ryan J. Sloan, who shares writing credit with the film’s star, Ariella Mastroianni. Mastroianni portrays Frankie Rhodes, a woman with a progressive neurological disorder that distorts her memories, induces psychedelic dreams, and sends her into long blackout periods of lost time. She’s separated from her daughter Cynthia, whose current guardian is Diane, the mother of Frankie’s late husband, whose death was ruled a suicide but which Diane suspects Frankie had a hand in. Finding it difficult to hold down a job because of her degenerating condition, Frankie opens the movie being fired from her job as a gas station attendant due to perpetually zoning out in the middle of her shifts. The film takes its title from Frankie’s activities on the job, as she stares up at the building across the street, losing time while making up narratives about the people that she sees, Rear Window style. On the night that she’s fired, she sees an episode of violence happen in one of the windows. Frankie attends a grief group for people whose loved ones committed suicide, where a woman she saw leaving the building (Renee Gagner) approaches her. She introduces herself as Paige Foster and relates that her mother overdosed, and telling Frankie that her brother has since become overprotective, which prompted the domestic assault incident Frankie witnessed. Paige offers Frankie $3000 dollars to sneak into the apartment, get her car keys, and bring the car to her at a different location so she can flee her brother, and Frankie agrees.
I’ve seen the film described as Hitchcockian, which is accurate. Beyond the shameless cribbing from Rear Window, the film takes on one of Alfred’s favorite elements, that of the wrongfully accused protagonist being pursued by the authorities while seeking to clear their name, and a Vertiginous series of mistaken identities. It’s also Lynchian, in that important information is revealed through surrealist dream sequences and characters that mirror one another or become confused with one another in esoteric, Mulhollandian ways, while psychedelic nightmare sequences pull from Twin Peaks for set and blocking inspiration. It’s also Cronenbergian, in that Frankie’s nightmares also often involve body horror imagery that’s directly taken from his catalog, and I do mean directly; there’s a shot of dream Frankie pulling an audiocassette out of a wound in her husband’s torso that’s so close to Videodromethat it might be legally actionable.
If all of that sounds like this film is trafficking in too many ideas and lacks a cohesive creative vision, that’s because it is, and it does. It’s not a bad film at all, but it does have a lot of the hallmarks of being a freshman outing, and given that director Sloan has zero other credits on IMDb, it gives the impression that he emerged fully formed out of thin air as a filmmaker. Given that there’s no evidence of him getting any crew experience in the rest of his CV, this is even more impressive as a technical achievement, but its dependency on the use of other directors’ metaphorical color palettes means that, as a text, it fails to be more than the sum of its parts. There’s also a narrative device throughout the film in which Frankie listens to cassette tapes that she makes for herself, and the conceit never quite works, and it feels very much like a darling that the screenwriters couldn’t bring themselves to kill. It’s possible to excise the use of them in scenes like the one where Tape!Frankie is telling Present!Frankie not to linger too long in Paige’s apartment after getting her keys (a direction that Present! Frankie fails to follow, of course, and loses track of time) while also retaining the narrative throughline of Frankie recording journal entries for her daughter so that she can still communicate with her after her disorder takes her life as well as the scenes in which Frankie listens to previous recordings of Cynthia to keep herself company. As played in most scenes, however, the tapes are little more than a distraction in the scenes where Frankie listens to them “to focus,” and it feels like the hallmark of a director who’s too afraid to trust the audience as much as he should.
That’s a shame, since the film has a lot going for it. The soundtrack is excellent, and perfectly meshes with the film’s overall sound design. There’s a really fantastic element in the visual design where all of the environments Frankie occupies while she’s dreaming are uncannily symmetrical, which is a nicely subtle way of playing with the narrative’s themes of mistaken identity and mirroring. I really sat up and paid attention when Dream!Frankie goes into her old house and opens a TV cabinet to find a one-eyed meat cube inside, the tongue of which Frankie pulls out like a magician’s endless string of handkerchiefs and then connects to her navel like a gross umbilical cord. Out of context, all of these dream sequences would work as their own individual horror shorts, and I appreciate that they don’t always mesh in a comprehensible way with Frankie’s real life decisions or memories, since it accurately reflects both her medical condition and the anxieties thereof. Mastroianni is also an odd but perfect choice for the lead. She’s quite petite, and the choice for Frankie to have a non-femme hair style renders her androgynous in a way that you rarely see in a main character unless it’s plot-mandated or narratively relevant. I found myself frequently frustrated with her choices in a way that threatened to make her impossible to root for, but not every lead has to be unchallenging. The film is also gorgeously photographed, with film grain artifacts and focus choices that make the film feel like it fell out of a time capsule from the New Hollywood era, so much so that when a newer version $100 bill or a cell phone pops up, you’re a little surprised.
Where Gazer borrows too much from that New Hollywood era, however, is in its choice to be deliberately contemplative to an excessive degree. While in Paige’s apartment, Frankie looks down at the gas station where she used to work and we in the audience understand that this was the view that Paige and her attacker had the night of the assault; we don’t need to revisit this exact angle and reverse shot on Frankie on two additional occasions. I recently picked up a fun phrase from an old Siskel & Ebert episode that someone uploaded to YouTube, in which Roger criticized the performances in a certain film by saying that the actors were reciting their lines “like they had all day” to do it. I praised Mastroianni above, and while she’s usually quite good here, there are far too many scenes in which she enters and exits scenes with no energy at all, and it makes the film itself feel more sluggish, while Sloan leaves the camera running on some things like, as Roger would say, he had all to film it. Revelations about the central mystery happen quickly and get skipped over, while some scenes play out just shy of interminably, and I don’t think it’s quite the right choice.
Gazer was recently added to Shudder, and you can find it there as of this writing. It allows its contemplation to get a little long in the tooth and the mystery itself is convoluted in a way that is going to leave a lot of viewers puzzled, but there are worse ways to spend an evening.
My local video store is run as a non-profit, and one of their ongoing community projects is to offer a window display residency. Artists submit their design concepts, and award recipients get the opportunity to actualize their ideas. Right now, that display is a testament to film piracy:
Unless you’re a real cinemaniac, you’ve probably never seen Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a bizarre forty-three-minute cult film created in 1987 by Todd Haynes. In it, the strife between Karen Carpenter and her (according to the semi-biographical film) controlling brother Richard plays out, with all characters being portrayed by Barbie dolls. Memorably, Karen’s worsening health due to her anorexia is demonstrated by her doll being slowly whittled away. If you have seen Superstar, then the only reason you’ve ever had the opportunity to do so was through piracy. Whether because the use of Barbies does not fall under fair use, because of the presence of contemporary music that is unlicensed, or just because Richard Carpenter raised a big enough stink about it, there’s no way for you to watch this film legally. A copy exists at the Museum of Modern Art, but it is not exhibited. I personally have seen it, and the copy that I watched was on a burned bootleg Maxell DVD-R just like the one recreated in Maura Murnane’s display above.
The question of the ethics of piracy arose recently when I texted Brandon about whether or not we (read: I) should cover the leaked film Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a continuation of the animated 2005-2008 Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, following the show’s child characters into young adulthood (some of them had also appeared as elderly characters in continuation series The Legend of Korra). AATLA was set to be released theatrically this year, but Paramount opted to pull the film from its planned cinema release and drop it solely to their streaming service, Paramount+. This announced change ruffled some feathers. Fans who wanted to see the film on the big screen and would have happily paid to do so would now have to sign up for a subscription service to see it, and at a reduced scale than the creators intended; members of the crew and animation teams were likewise disappointed to learn that something that had been created to be visually stunning and grand in scope would not get the opportunity to reach the intended audience. Universally, the decision to paywall the film in the winter was met with criticism. Avatar fans who want to have access to that content are more likely to already be subscribed to Paramount+ in the first place, meaning that the addition of the film to the service would likely have a negligible effect on overall subscription numbers. The money was already spent, there would be no chance for the film to recoup its budget theatrically, and the hellscape that is the current streaming service subscription model grinds on.
In general, although Swampflix and its contributors in no uncertain terms do not recommend piracy, as a legal disclaimer, I’m flexible about what this means for works that are inaccessible due to rights-holders’ choices and decisions. Consolidation of the ownership of all media into a few conglomerates is a bad thing. Even the least cinemanic among us have cottoned on to the fact that every streaming service is less functional, robust, and egalitarian they they once were, and the national government’s antipathy against monopoly prosecution in the death throes of our current economic era mean that it’s only going to get worse. The next inbound round of money-laundering square-dancing means that next year the guy who makes your toothpaste might also own The Little Rascals, or that every time you buy corn chips you’ll be adding a nickel to an account that will eventually fund a live-action Rocko’s Modern Life, or that some anarchocapitalist’s nepotistically inherited pyramid scheme will get to decide whether you can make Dorothy Gale’s slippers ruby or not. The back catalogs of films that are gatekept behind faceless entities are held back not so that said entities can do something with them, but just to keep others from having access.
Or, more frequently in recent years, to cancel huge, completed projects because not releasing them to the public means that they can be written off for tax purposes. It’s far from the worst thing that most of the 1% has done, but like most of their unethical actions, it’s rooted in the seed of all evil: a love of money. A couple hundred internet malcontents with too much time on their hands managed to leverage a global pandemic into browbeating Warner Brothers into releasing a supposed “lost” film at a time when productions were shut down. This emboldened probably the worst people it could have, but it also means that nothing is really set in stone. Three years after its cancellation was announced, Coyote vs. Acme is finally being released this August; maybe there’s even some hope that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Batgirl might see the light of day someday. But as Brandon pointed out to me when I texted him, there wasn’t really a good reason to review the animated Avatar film when it had a real scheduled release date, even if its release was a downgrade. That’s a different story.
I won’t reveal the circumstances under which I viewed Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender. Maybe someone was screening it at a bar, a bar that has since closed down and therefore no one can be held responsible. Maybe I watched it through a storefront window like a kid in a corny Christmas commercial. Maybe someone burned a bunch of copies onto Memorex DVD-Rs and let them fall off of the back of a truck. A full review will come, when the film is legally available. I would recommend that, should the winds change and you get the chance to see it theatrically, it will be well worth the cost of the ticket. As to whether it will be worth the cost of the subscription to Paramount+, only you, dear reader, know if you’re responsible enough to cancel before the renewal date if Avatar Aang is all that you want to see. I’m not entirely sold on the new voice cast (in short, Toph is pretty good, Katara is acceptable, Aang is iffy but occasionally perfect, and—all love and respect to Steven Yeun—Zuko is completely wrong), but the film is absolutely gorgeous. I struggled to adjust to the cast changes and what I perceived as tonal changes, but by the time Aang was soaring around and having a good time, so was I. I had missed him, and it was good to spend time with him again. If anything, Paramount’s bungling of this whole debacle means that it’s unlikely that we’ll get the opportunity again (unless you count the Netflix live action series, which has its own host of problems). Only time will tell.
“Why is Earth such a hard place to live?” That’s the question at the core of the greater Godzilla filmography, in which the King of the Monsters is episodically attacked by lesser kaiju that individually represent Earth-life’s many challenges: war, pollution, overfishing, techno modernization, etc. It’s also a question directly asked in the opening-credits theme song to the kaiju monster-mash picture All Monsters Attack (1969), which is essentially a clip show featuring highlights from those metaphorical battles. While previews of those clips flash and freeze as title cards, the song “Monster March” tosses out a few sing-along catchphrases like “Wham! Bang! Crash!” and “Go-go-Godzilla!” to invite the children in the audience to join in on the fun. All Monsters Attack is, undeniably, kiddie stuff. Just in case its target audience is a little too young to have caught onto the kaiju-as-metaphor themes of the greater Godzilla project, the song goes on to spell it out, accompanying images of an industrialized, overcrowded Tokyo with the lyrics, “Megaton smog and exhaust fumes […] are the real monsters!” So, it’s a little surprising, then, that the story that follows such a direct opening statement isn’t about modern urban pollution at all, despite the proto-Hedorah themes suggested by those images & lyrics. Instead, All Monsters Attack is about how Earth is a hard place to live for children in particular, whose only reprieve from the planet’s cruelties is to keep watching Godzilla movies.
Our hero is a young, lonely latchkey kid, left unsupervised for hours on end while his mother works hard to pay the rent. He’s bullied daily by other kids in his industrial neighborhood, a routine that escalates when he stumbles into the lives of two adult bank-robbers who happen to choose his private hiding spot for their own and bully him even harder. Without the familial love & attention and the personal resilience he needs to survive modern urbanity, the poor little tyke only has one coping mechanism that makes his life worth living: dreaming about Godzilla. Whenever life gets too tough to handle, he rushes to a homemade computer that hypnotizes him into dreaming he’s on Monster Island, where he makes fast friends with Godzilla’s useless, hideous son, Minilla. The two interspecies buddies mostly just watch recycled footage of previous Godzilla battles from the sidelines, cheering their favorite monster on as he beats up Ebirah, Anguirus, and The Kamacuras, among other skyscraper creatures. A brand-new monster then enters the picture in form of Gabara, the kaiju equivalent of the bullies that our hero has been avoiding fighting back against in real life. While Minilla learns the confidence to fight his own battles without Godzilla’s help against the obnoxious Gabara in the dreamworld, his new human bestie does the same in the real world, even though he’d rather be napping and dreaming of his favorite Godzilla clips. If it weren’t for all the rubber-suited wrestling matches and the aggressively swanky jazz soundtrack keeping the mood lively, it would be a sad little story about the world’s loneliest boy.
The title All Monsters Attack promises a repeat sequel to the battle-royale kaiju showcase of Destroy All Monsters, so it’s kind of a letdown that so much of its monster action is recycled from previous Godzilla outings. That disappointment is then compounded by the dorky, unintimidating design of the bully Gabara, who looks like a geriatric housecat with an elongated neck and a Donald Trump wig. Still, I found myself charmed by the psychic space it affords Monster Island as an escapist fantasy for young Godzilla fans. The idea of astral projecting yourself all the way there just to hang out with Minilla, of all monsters, is a hilarious indignity. Here, the laughably ugly little thing has somehow mastered human speech but still brays like a donkey when he gets nervous, which happens a lot as he’s mercilessly bullied by Gabara. Our hero seems fond of the pitiful mutant, though, which is sweet, even if it’s an indication of why he’s the kind of nerd who might get bullied around the schoolyard. It’s easy to imagine kids his age enjoying All Monsters Attack in the sequences where it turns into a clip show of Godzilla’s greatest hits (or, more accurately, his then-recent hits), so I can’t fault the movie too much for playing directly to that age group’s corny sensibilities. The worst I can say about it is that it has since been made obsolete by the invention of home video & YouTube, which would allow children to rewatch their favorite Godzilla battles without having to suffer through Minilla’s buffoonery or the afterschool special messaging to get there. Being a lonely, unsupervised nerd has never been more fun.
Until 1956’s Forbidden Planet screened at The Prytania last week, I had only ever watched it as a VHS tape, fuzzed out and color-faded on a squared-off TV screen. It’s easy to take the movie for granted as an Atomic Age sci-fi novelty in that format, where it resembles any number of 1950s space adventures of the Buck Rogers mold. Revisiting it in CinemaScope on the big screen painted a much clearer picture of just how extravagant its production was for that genre. If anything, Forbidden Planet is the Atomic Age sci-fi novelty. Between its flying saucers, laser battles, psychic monsters, synthesizers, mini-skirted alien babes, and Mid-Century Modern decor, it stands as the Platonic ideal of Atomic Age sci-fi, a perfect specimen. Its influence on all space-adventure sci-fi to follow is also glaringly apparent in retrospect. Within the first five minutes, the Earthling astronaut heroes step into a light-beam transporter device that looks suspiciously like the ones on Star Trek; the yellow text scroll of its original trailer looks suspiciously like the opening prologues of classic Star Wars films. Not for nothing, composers Bebe & Louis Barron’s far-out analog synth soundtrack is also cited as the first feature-length electronic score in movie history, overloaded with futuristic beep-boop sounds that would change the shape of music forever, in cinema and beyond. I was delighted by the Barrons’ opening credit for “electronic tonalities,” since what they were doing with their self-invented gadgetry was so experimental the studio unions weren’t convinced it technically qualified as music. I was even more delighted by the similar credit “introducing Robby the Robot” in that sequence, though, as if Forbidden Planet‘s breakout robo-star was a working actor instead of a movie prop.
Robby the Robot should be familiar to any movie lover regardless of their personal interest in Atomic Age sci-fi or whether they know Robby by name. His image is synonymous with the genre, to the point where he earned the nickname “the hardest working robot in Hollywood” for how often he was referenced in other works. Robby has dozens of acting credits on IMDb, ranging from speaking roles in vintage TV shows like Lost in Space, Twilight Zone, and Columbo to uncredited background cameos in Gremlins, Explorers, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and even a few movies not directed by Joe Dante. His continued popularity after his “introduction” in Forbidden Planet was at least partly genuine, since he is an instant charmer in that big screen debut. Robby was introduced to audiences as a kind of robot butler & 3D printer, always available to serve cocktails and fabricate gem-studded haute couture gowns at the simplest request. His flat vocal affect (provided by actual-human actor Marvin Miller) and his overly buff body design also made him an oddly manly screen presence, so bulkily muscular that he had to toddle across the screen like a baby taking its first steps. A lot of Robby’s continued public circulation after Forbidden Planet was an effort from MGM to recoup a return on investment, though, since his construction for his introductory film appearance was exorbitantly expensive, estimated at nearly 7% of the film’s overall budget. That money was put to great use, affording Forbidden Planet a recognizable mascot that could sell tickets with his coneheaded good looks and dry robotic wit, but it was a huge gamble to invest so much of the special effects budget on a single prop. The only way to justify the expense, really, was to put the robot to work.
Without question, the most bizarre ploy to squeeze more return on investment out of Robby’s robo-body came the immediate year after Forbidden Planet, when the sci-fi mascot was once again billed as a big-name actor in the children’s comedy The Invisible Boy. Robby’s second acting credit only does the bare minimum to justify the logic of his screen presence, gesturing towards an offscreen time travel device that connects its 1950s suburbia setting to a future century when Robby could’ve conceivably traveled to Earth after the events of Forbidden Planet. All of this half-baked lore is effectively contained to a single postcard, briefly discussed by the father-son duo who hog most of the runtime. Personally, I prefer to take the opening credits at face value, agreeing to a reality where Robby is a working actor whose appearance onscreen doesn’t need to be narratively justified any more than his human costars’. The important thing is that Robby is given the opportunity to make friends with a young nerd in the American suburbs, offering some direct-to-consumer wish fulfillment for the target audience of sci-fi adventures like Forbidden Planet. Then, a dirty Commie supercomputer hijacks Robby’s programming, temporarily turning him evil and overriding his prime objective to do no harm to living beings. He gets up to increasingly ridiculous, nefarious deeds in his second outing: turning the young boy invisible, kidnapping him to the moon, and getting hit with a military-grade flamethrower for his troubles. Then, he finally snaps out of it and becomes the Robby we all know & love in the final scene. All’s well that ends well, I guess, as long as you don’t pay too much attention to the Father Knows Best familial dynamics that continue in the subtly abusive family home Robby invades, in which spankings are frequent and other expressions of parental affection are difficult to come by.
The Invisible Boy is kiddie stuff, but it’s at least memorably deranged kiddie stuff. There’s a brief comedic sequence after Robby first turns his young friend invisible that threatens to run out the rest of the runtime with slapstick hijinks (again, mostly involving unseen spankings). Instead, the movie gets admirably bizarre in its scene-to-scene plotting, diverting attention from Robby’s new homelife to the evil machinations of a treasonous supercomputer, hellbent on ruling the world in an AI takeover by hypnotizing the humans at its controls. That computer is about the size of an average home’s living room, but it’s said to contain the sum total of human knowledge in its memory banks the same way the cavernous underground computers in Forbidden Planet were explained to contain the sum total of space-alien Krell knowledge. Any of The Invisible Boy‘s direct connections to Forbidden Planet could only diminish it in comparison, though, since that bigger-budgeted work was set entirely in a sound stage otherworld (the first of its kind in that regard as well), while the action sequences of its kinda-sorta follow-up mostly amount to military goons firing blanks at its most expensive prop in an open, barren field. Whenever Robby’s not onscreen in The Invisible Boy, the audience is asking, “Where’s Robby?,” whereas he’s just one of many wonders in Forbidden Planet, competing with flying saucers, psychic monsters, and laser battles for the audience’s attention. It sure is fun to imagine what life would be like with Robby hanging around as your big, buff robo-butler as a child, though, which makes the overall appeal of The Invisible Boy immediately apparent. We all wish we could spend more quality time with our good friend Robby, which is partly why he has never truly gone away. He’s always hanging around in the background somewhere, chilling and collecting royalty checks from past acting gigs.
Welcome to Episode #264 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and returning guest Joey Laura to discuss a selection of films from experimental Belgian animator Raoul Servais, starting with his Palme d’Or winning short Harpya (1979).
00:00 Welcome 06:16 Raoul Servais 11:49 Harpya (1979) 20:00 Other works
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