Author: swampflix

Barbie (2023)

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When we were talking about coverage and discussing the Barbenheimer phenomenon, Brandon generously offered me the opportunity to be the one who covered Barbie, after I declared in no uncertain terms that I had no interest in Oppenheimer (sorry, Cillian). I did my part, going to the movie on opening night, wearing the only garment I own with any pink in it—a mostly-blue luau shirt with flamingos nestled in the pattern—and having my picture taken in the doll box that was being hastily assembled in the lobby when I arrived. It’s looking like this one will end up being a favorite for a lot of the Swampflix crew, and I’m happy to report that I had a good time as well. 

Barbie (Margot Robbie) is the most popular resident of Barbieland, a pink utopia inhabited by a seemingly endless series of Barbies, including President Barbie (Issa Rae), Doctor Barbie (Hari Neff), Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Journalist Barbie (Ritu Arya), and Author Barbie (Alexandra Schipp). There are also a multitude of Kens, including the “stereotypical” Ken (Ryan Gosling), whose job is “beach” and who is paired with likewise stereotypical Prime!Barbie. Also present is his primary rival Ken (Simu Liu), and several others (including Ncuti Gatwa), as well as one-offs like Ken’s friend Allan (Michael Cera) and poor pregnant Midge (Emerald Fennell). Every day is beautiful, as Barbie interacts with her dreamhouse, drinking imaginary milk from empty doll cups and bathing in a waterless shower, then goes about her adventures before retiring back to her home for a nightly dance party. Things couldn’t be more perfect, until one day Prime!Barbie asks the others if they ever think about dying, which brings the party to a screeching halt. The next day, nothing goes right; her shower is inexplicably cold, her imaginary milk is spoiled, her heart shaped waffles are burned and fail to land perfectly on her plate, and worst of all, she’s somehow become a flat-footed doll in a world of high heels. At the advice of her compatriots, she seeks guidance about her situation from “Weird” Barbie (Kate McKinnon), who was “played with too hard.” Weird Barbie sends Prime!Barbie on a quest to the real world to find the girl who’s playing with her so that she can cheer her back up so that her distinctly un-Barbie thoughts stop finding their way into Prime!Barbie’s head. 

In the real world, Gloria (America Ferrera) is the receptionist at Mattel, a company that, despite depending on the monetization of the fantasies of little girls, is run entirely by men in identical gray suits; she finds herself drawing concepts for new dolls that share/embody her personal ennui. When Barbie (with stowaway Ken) escapes the boundaries of Barbieland and enters California via a portal at Venice Beach, young Mattel employee Aaron (Connor Swindells, the third alum from Sex Education in the movie) is contacted by the FBI to warn the dollmakers about this breach, and he delivers the news directly to the CEO (Will Ferrell). Elsewhere, Barbie’s search for her doll seems to lead to a dead end as she finds Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), her presumed dollplayer, only to find that the girl has become a tween edgelady who dresses down the cowboy-clad living doll for her ties to capitalism, neoliberal feminism, and body dysmorphia. While this is happening, Ken comes face-to-face with the omnipresent patriarchal nature of the real world, wholeheartedly buying into the ideals of male domination because of his own lack of fulfillment in his non-relationship with Barbie. Upon his return, he spreads this anti-gospel around to the other Kens, which leads to all of the Barbies losing the memories of their impressive accomplishments in lieu of becoming servile dolls to the Kens with whom they are paired. With help from Gloria and Sasha, who are mother and daughter, Prime!Barbie has to try and wrest control of Barbieland back before it becomes the Kendom forever. 

Early marketing for the movie featured that famous image of Margot Robbie, currently poised at the moment between memetic and iconic, with the tagline “Barbie is everything.” And not only is she, but Robbie is a star, baby. Although there may never come a day when society forgives Suicide Squad, it’s time for us to all try and forget it, because Robbie is really outdoing herself with each new project. As an actress, her absolute control over her every movement and facial muscle is astonishing. When confronted by a world in which she is frequently hated instead of universally beloved, it would be easy for this sort of narrative turn to feel like one of those “the regent learns their subjects hate them” plots, but because Robbie’s Barbie is kind, empathetic, fun-loving, and heretofore carefree, it’s emotionally devastating, and Robbie makes it work. That having been said, the beating emotional heart at the center of the film is America Ferrera, whose Gloria is the motivating factor behind all of the events of the film, and who gives a powerhouse monologue near the film’s climax that utterly steals the show. Kate McKinnon’s smaller part is also a delight, and the explanations of how she came to be the way that she is have a kind of quintessence of truth that I couldn’t help but laugh at. I was a bit disappointed upon the initial entrance into the real world with Gosling’s Ken instead of Liu’s, the latter of whom I found much more charming in their initial scenes, but given that specific Ken is called on to temporarily become the king of the jerks, literally and figuratively, I came to prefer that it was Gosling’s Ken who becomes the film’s antagonist for a bit. 

At the core of that antagonism is Ken’s deep and profound insecurity. Ken’s existence, his destiny, is to be “and Ken” to Prime!Barbie, secondary to her. Since Barbie—as the idealization of a certain idea of liberated womanhood—doesn’t need him the way that he needs her, he lives in a perpetual existential crisis in which he has no real job or purpose other than an  exaggeratedly asymmetrical relationship. It’s precisely this lack of security in his identity that leaves him open to being brain-poisoned by patriarchy, and he even ultimately admits that he got carried away and that what he really wanted to get into wasn’t phallocentric government so much as horses (it makes sense in context … sort of). There was no way that a movie like this one wasn’t going to end up on the radar of all the expected grifter outrage manufacturing machine mouthpieces, but the ones who can’t stop blathering on and on about film’s “woke” agenda with the fury of a man who’s mad that his wife put the cookies on a shelf he can’t reach; they’re really tattling on themselves with this outing, even more than usual. It takes a truly deep level of self-doubt and an utter dearth of self-reflection to take a look at this movie, which is about how sad, unfulfilled men unsuccessfully try to fill that void inside with toxic masculinity and be like “This is a movie that attacks me personally.” Do you not even see how much you’re showing your whole ass with that, bro? The Kens aren’t even doing the things that are violent, just the things that are annoying, like keeping a slovenly house, favoring patent leather couches, and mansplaining The Godfather. They’re not trying to entrap women through emotionally manipulative therapy lingo, or being shitty to their pregnant wife while she begs to be allowed to leave the house without administering veterinary medicine that she’s medically forbidden to handle, or isolating a woman with the intent to do harm. Don’t be like that. Just have a “brewski-beer” and teach yourself how to play a Matchbox Twenty song or two and let this one float past you in the stream, man. 

In this case, the MST3k mantra applies on a couple of levels. Remember, this is just a movie, and you should just relax, both in any attempts to make this light, effervescent, bubblegum movie into another wedge in the culture war, and in the more traditional sense of letting go of the urge to try to figure out the exact limits of the film’s internal logic. It’s not what anyone is here for. This is an aesthetic experience just as much as (if not more than) it is a narrative one, and that’s what art is, baby. Just have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

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The consensus opinion on 1979’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is that it’s a mediocre document of a magnificent concert.  Even its recent re-release was timed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1973 London concert captured on film by D.A. Pennebaker, not the anniversary of the documentary.  The newly expanded and remastered version of the film cleans up Pennebaker’s footage in digital 4K resolution and includes additional backstage & onstage tidbits “lost” in the original, 90min cut (including brief appearances from Jeff Beck and Ringo Starr).  It was alternately referred to as Bowie ’73 in its original theatrical run, again stressing the importance of the event filmed rather than the film itself.  By ’79, Bowie had evolved past the Ziggy Stardust glam rocker persona, moving onto more depressive, cerebral projects like his Low collaboration with Brian Eno and his Iggy Pop collab The Idiot.  The Ziggy Stardust project was already a satellite broadcast from a distant past, and this 1973 concert was billed as the farewell to the persona and to David Bowie as the public knew him, with announcements on the PA declaring “For the last time, David Bowie . . .”  So, the logic goes that it’s worth suffering through this shabby, low-lighting footage just so there was some remnant of the Ziggy Stardust band on the record before Bowie transformed into something else altogether. 

I personally found the film much more substantial than that, at least in its new theatrical presentation.  All of the imperfections audiences have cited over the years are still present—if not expanded—in this restoration.  The 4:3 framing is frustratingly tight for a performer known for his galactic-scale glamour.  The dim lighting of the venue makes the crowd shots borderline incompressible, which undercuts the pleasure of scanning the faces & fashions of the audience.  The camera swings wildly around the room, finding a point of interest halfway into a shot instead of starting with a detail worth documenting.  Some shots go entirely black, the audio reel continuing to record while the film cartridges are switched out.  Maybe it’s my decades of being brainwashed by D.I.Y. punk aesthetics, but I found those grimy human fingerprints on Bowie’s pristine visual art to be a feature, not a distraction.  Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is a raw document of an immaculate art project, pulling great tension out of the disparate qualities of Bowie’s perfectionist songwriting and Pennebaker’s imperfect imagery.  The live arrangements of the Ziggy Stardust songbook work the same way, with guitarist Mick Ronson unraveling tight, familiar pop tunes into abstract, psychedelic noise.  The sweaty, sped-up performances of Bowie’s early bangers map out a solid bridge from glam to punk, which couldn’t be more direct by the time the band covers “White Light, White Heat” in raucous encore.

I suspect I had that rapturous, energizing experience with the Ziggy Stardust movie because of the newly restored sound mix.  Listening to a digitally cleaned-up, surround sound presentation of this concert in a modern movie theater is easily the best sound quality I’ve ever heard in a David Bowie recording, which certainly elevated the images captured by Pennebaker’s cameras.  This is the clearest case of “The work speaks for itself” that I can recall, given that a few minutes of Ziggy’s band performing “Moonage Daydream” in this shaky, cramped frame packs in more mystique & meaning than the entirety of the recent Brett Morgen documentary of the same name.  You do not need to dress Bowie up in iTunes visualizer kaleidoscopes to make his words & sounds intriguing to a modern audience.  He already dressed himself up in a slutty little kimono and put on a full show, so all Pennebaker had to do was show up with professional recording equipment, sit back, and gaze.  The low lighting of the venue and the chaotic movements of the camera evoke UFO conspiracy footage, desperate to catch a glimpse of this glam rock clown from outer space before he disappears back into the night sky.  Bowie often appears in orange monotone lighting against a black void, glowing as a strange visual object that just happens to produce beautiful music.  The sight of him is arresting, and so long-familiar tracks like “Changes” & “Space Oddity” are captivating in a way they haven’t been since I first heard their proper studio recordings on my sub-par headphones in high school.

My only lingering disappointment with this film is that I couldn’t get a better look at the crowd.  There’s enough strobe & disco ball lighting to catch glimpses of the queer nerds swooning in ecstasy over Bowie’s presence, but not enough to fully document their presence in the room.  Bowie’s sassy, talkative performances of “Changes” and “Oh, You Pretty Things” slow the momentum of Ronson’s guitar licks down to draw attention to the lyrics, which celebrate the eternal passion & progression of Youth Culture in a way I found genuinely touching.  So many of his early songs dwell on time, death, and impermanence that he comes across as a real Gloomy Gus, but he does take obvious solace in how those “changes” are a positive influence on the world from the perspective of youth.  So, I found myself scanning the youth in the crowd for their real-time reactions to his art – whether they were gently moshing to manic performances of “Hang Onto Yourself” & “Suffragette City” or they were awestruck by his genderless supermodel posing in various Space Age onesies.  It would’ve been nice to fully see those faces before the impermanence of time changed them into something unrecognizable, but there’s no way to fully go back and correct that mistake.  What this restoration was able to excavate & accentuate in Pennebaker’s documentary is well worth experiencing big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd of fellow Bowie obsessives.  Maybe the form doesn’t fully live up to the content, but in this case it’s difficult to imagine that any one movie ever could.

-Brandon Ledet

You Can’t Wake Up if You Don’t Fall Asleep

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I am no longer a true believer in the oft-repeated Ebert quote, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Or, I at least no longer believe that empathy is the most interesting or noble thing the movies machine can generate.  The more I’ve succumbed to incurable cinephilia in recent years the less interested I’ve become in the movies’ ability to document or reflect objective reality back at the audience, as if we don’t get more than enough real-life tedium outside the theater walls.  Even if there’s value to learning and vicariously experiencing the intimate details of each other’s lives through cinema, reducing the artform to its ability to generate empathy feels small & unimaginative, especially if that’s the only thing on a movie’s mind.  Subtlety, restraint, and adherence to real-world logic are boring, self-imposed restrictions for a medium that’s so apt for dreams & poetry.  It’s just as much of a well-worn cliché, but I’ve come to the point where cinema’s function as a machine that generates shared, communal dreams is its primary cultural value to me.  Empathy is a useful byproduct of the movie dream machine, but it’s at best secondary to the way cinema can deeply submerge us in the subconscious id of the artists behind it.  If a filmmaker is using the art of the moving image to achieve anything other than full sensory intoxication or communal mesmerism, they might as well write prose or record a podcast instead.  There’s so much more to the medium than farming empathy in the documentation or dramatic retelling of each other’s daily drudgery.

At least, that’s what I was thinking about while watching a double feature of this summer’s most critically lauded works: Wes Anderson’s ensemble cast sci-fi comedy Asteroid City and Celine Song’s long-distance relationship breakdown Past Lives.  I likely shouldn’t have bothered seeing Past Lives at all, since subtle, tastefully underplayed dramas aren’t really my thing.  I do allow myself to get talked into seeing a few gloomy exercises in real-world restraint every year, though, if not just to see what everyone else is gushing about while I’m seeking out high-style histrionics & novelty.  I had about the same experience with Past Lives as I had with last year’s similarly lauded & restrained Aftersun: respect for its craft but bafflement over its ecstatic praise, since practically every film festival is overflowing with similarly subtle, underplayed titles just like it (most of which never land proper distribution).  In contrast, I watched Asteroid City for the second time in 24 hours on that double bill and found its dreamlike artifice much more emotionally rewarding than Past Lives‘s real-world resignation.  In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment; in Asteroid City, the self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. I found the former funnier but the latter more affecting, sinking several layers of framing-devices deeper into his subconscious to pick at the same somber tones of yearning & heartbreak as Past Lives with less of a literal, straight-forward approach.  It likely says less about the merits of the movies than it says about my facilities as an audience that I needed to puzzle at the complex narrative structure & fussy visual craft of Asteroid City (a movie within a stage play within a television special) to enjoy its small, intimate character moments for their own pleasure, while Past Lives was willing to serve those pleasures to me directly. Apparently, to fully appreciate the small things I need them buried under a crushing excess of style & artifice; I need to feel like they came to me in a dream.

The pattern repeated with my library DVD haul that same week, which happened to include two coming-of-age stories about young women: the 70s-set Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and the French dirt-bike crime thriller Rodeo.  One was a critically-lauded empathy machine that documents and validates the awkwardness & inner turmoil of puberty in all young American girls who are impatient to become young American women.  The other alternates between the quiet restraint of a crime world docudrama and the sensory free-for-all of a legitimate art piece, submerging the audience in the dreams & volatile emotions of one particular teenage reprobate with an ecstatic passion for racing stolen dirt bikes.  You can likely guess which one I preferred.  Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is less extraordinary than it is warmly familiar.  It reminded me of a lot of classic comfort watches that I grew up with in the 1990s: Mermaids, My Girl, Now & Then, etc.  It’s a pleasant movie about pleasant people, one that directly asks you to empathize with common, everyday rites of passage.  Rodeo is a much thornier picture.  It documents the experiences of real-world dirt bike stunt racers by casting them as their own fictional avatars and—in the case of its disgruntled antiheroine—inviting you into their prophetic nightmares of self-destruction & immolation.  There’s no reason to contrast & compare the two movies other than that my public library requests for them happened to be fulfilled on the same day; they’re as structurally & aesthetically distinct from each other as the vintage postcard artifice of Asteroid City and the real-world melancholy of Past Lives.  The same questions of which film was making better, more purposeful use of their shared medium were rattling around in my empty skull, though, and I again came down in favor of the dream machine over the empathy machine.

I’ve been writing reviews for this humble movie blog for eight years now, which is a long enough duration that I can’t help but reflect on what I value in this artform I’ve spent so much time admiring & picking apart.  Wes Anderson’s spent at least three decades admiring & picking apart the artform himself, and Asteroid City appears to find him arriving at similar conclusions.  Throughout the film, performers within his multi-layered narrative break character to question the meaning behind their dialogue & actions as written, as well as their place within specific framing devices at specific times.  The Anderson avatar who wrote the piece they’re performing has no clear answers for the reasoning behind his words, only that they work to express subconscious emotion.  In a climactic scene that lovingly parodies The Twilight Zone, the performers stare at the camera directly and chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in a rhythmic, zombified monotone, reinforcing that to experience & share in that subconscious emotion the audience must give into the artifice of the work and forget the reasoning behind it.  We have to dream.  As thoughtful & empathetic as they are, neither Past Lives nor Are You There God? ever fully fall asleep; they are awake to the logical restrictions of the real world.  Rodeo drifts along in that in-between state you feel just before you fall asleep, purposefully confusing a documentation of reality with the shared-dream intoxication of cinema, only fully letting go of the handlebars in its emotional climax.  Of this group, only Asteroid City fully falls asleep, and I found its emotional provocations the most effective among them because they were allowed to be as indirect and inexplicable as our own internal responses to the world outside our heads.  It would be foolish to expect every movie to interact with (or entirely ignore) reality in that way, but the ones that do so are the ones that are most fully engaging with the tools, methods, and uses of the artform.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #191: Mac and Me (1988) & Junk Food Ads

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Welcome to Episode #191 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss feature films that advertise junk food brands, starting with the McDonald’s-sponsored E.T. rip-off Mac and Me (1988).

00:00 Welcome

04:25 Dear Evan Hansen (2021)
06:25 Stutz (2022)
08:25 They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
11:25 Miracle Mile (1988)
14:37 Barbie (2023)
16:44 Last Action Hero (1993)
20:18 Mystery Men (1999)

26:06 Mac and Me (1988)
56:53 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
1:22:07 Demolition Man (1993)
1:45:34 Flamin’ Hot (2023)

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

-The Podcast Crew

Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965)

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Who Killed Teddy Bear? is a 1965 neo-noir about a woman named Norah Dain who receives threatening phone calls from an unknown stalker, whose attentions escalate. You might not know that the identity of the stalker is meant to be unknown if you read virtually any synopsis, including the one that appears when you select the film on just about any streaming service where it is housed, or on the Google search results landing page. I’m telling you this now so you can avert your eyes as much as possible in navigating to watch this one, which I (mostly) recommend. 

Norah (Juliet Prowse, who was involved with both Elvis and Frank Sinatra at the same time in 1962!) has a small life, but it’s her own. She works at a discotheque as a DJ under the watchful eye of the world-weary but rapier-witted Marian (Elaine Stritch). It’s a job that occasionally means that drunken men try to get handsy with her, but it’s the kind of classy joint with not only waiters like Larry (Sal Mineo) but also hulking doormen like Carlo (Dan Travanty) to take care of men who get a little too familiar. On one such night, Carlo tosses a man into the alley, but gets slashed by the man when he turns his back, forcing Carlo, Marian, and Norah to go to the station to provide statements. There, Norah meets Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray), who appears to become interested when he overhears about the heavy-breather who keeps calling her at all hours. She continues to get these calls, and, until the midpoint, we are kept in suspense about who keeps making them. Could it be that the supposedly mute Carlo was being overprotective of Norah the night he was hurt, because he has his own interest? Could it be the slasher himself, who escaped into the night? Perhaps it’s soft-spoken Larry, who checks in on Norah whenever men pester her. It might even be Lt. Madden himself, who seems to become over-invested in Norah’s situation very quickly, and who is seen performing such odd behavior as listening to recordings of the calls. 

For the first half, the identity of the lecherous caller is hidden behind a series of interesting, noir visuals: a hand that seeks and finds a pack of cigarettes, only to find them empty and crush the package in a rage; gaussy shots of the man’s body as the camera’s focus renders his white-knuckle grip on the telephone in the foreground in stark relief; the corner of a mouth peeking around the jet black phone receiver, twisted in a leering grin. Although the implied sexual violence is palpable, there’s also something strangely erotic about the way that the film’s eye lingers on the killer’s muscular frame. Like a Grindr photo, he’s a torso without a face, and the way that he’s often almost-but-not-quite touching himself makes this feel like an under-the-radar muscleman flick. Both he and Norah are presented in states of undress, but in her case, the image is impersonal and detached, as we see her through Madden’s eyes as she changes, while the images of the killer’s body are intimate, almost first person, with no room for us to create a level of rhetorical distance between ourselves and the image. There’s something about it that reminds me of Dead Calm, where Billy Zane’s killer character is obviously dangerous and unstable, but also undeniably sexy, both in the text and the metatext. 

The film takes its title from a question asked by Larry’s sister Edie (Margot Bennett), a developmentally disabled young woman who he looks after. Her childlike innocence is framed as a foil to the worldly knowledge of Madden’s daughter, Pam (Diane Moore), who is younger but has learned too much about how the world and its dangers operate, both as the result of losing her mother to a random act of violence and from being too aware of her father’s work as he obsesses over criminal deviance. The men are likewise foils to one another, and although I won’t say who the killer is (or even if it’s one of these two), Madden is by far the more menacing to Norah. He’s hard-boiled and has a chip on his shoulder, and although that’s not an uncommon thing for a police character for this era and this genre, he’s boorish and pushy to the modern viewer. Despite the fact that his behavior ties this film to a certain place and time, there are many elements, especially in the cinematography, that feel very modern. There are multiple scenes in which Norah is followed around the city that are clearly shot from a moving car, which could easily be a normal tracking shot but because of its handheld-like camera movement, it creates a sense of unease as the audience is put in the point of view of her stalker, unless she isn’t being stalked at all. The scene in which the killer, in an attempt to purge himself of his sexual urges, wanders the streets of the city and stares into the windows of erotic bookstores is fantastic (as long as your brain hasn’t been completely broken by that Kath & Kim gay panic scene, which resembles this sequence). Where the film feels the most dated, however, is in its ending. Yes, Norah’s stalker does eventually get her alone and forces himself upon her, and it’s very distressing, before he meets his end at the hands of the police; this was, after all, the final year of the Hayes Code, so he must. But as a late-60s noir piece, there’s a lot to enjoy here, especially since this one often seems to end up on various free, ad-supported streaming services. It’s an oddball, but worth finding. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dead Man on Campus (1998)

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TW: Suicide, throughout

When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash. 

Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page). 

Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying. 

The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby. 

The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ranking the Mystery Men

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As ubiquitous as superhero cinema has felt in the past couple decades, it’s worth remembering that we’ve been here before, even within my lifetime.  Tim Burton’s Batman series was a cultural behemoth when I was a kid and inspired a robust generation of comic book adaptations in the 1990s the same way the 2010s was overflowing with various studios’ desperate attempts to echo the box office success of the MCU.  In 1997 alone, there were over three dozen announcements of major-studio comic book movies in development, a few of which actually arrived on screens: X-Men, Blade, The Fantastic Four, Daredevil, etc.  One of those many rushed-to-market cash-ins on the Burton & Schumacher Batman series was a spinoff of the satirical Flaming Carrots comics, titled Mystery Men.  It’s a sarcastic Gen-X riff on that era’s superhero boom, stuck somewhere between the smarty-pants irony of the recent Deadpool comedies and the kid-friendly goofballery of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, which were also adapted from superhero spoofs.  Even twenty years ago there was enough superhero media on the market that there was room for a movie making fun of the common tropes & trappings of superhero media; the only difference, really, is that studios used to produce other kinds of movies for adults at the same time.

There was something a little redundant about Mystery Men parodying the Batman series so soon after Schumacher already went full goofball cartoon in Batman & Robin a couple years earlier, the same way Scary Movie is redundant for parodying Scream.  Kinka Usher’s background directing the “Got Milk?” & Taco Bell Chihuahua ads made him a great fit for the material, though, balancing out the slacker irony of the comedians in the cast with sincere commercial-filmmaking aesthetics — complete with a tie-in Smash Mouth single.  I knew that Mystery Men was a comedy as a kid, but it didn’t feel out of step with Jim Carrey’s manic antics as the Riddler in Batman Forever or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s non-stop onslaught of cold weather puns in Batman & Robin.  I was tickled by Mystery Men‘s fart jokes & superloser anti-heroics in the theater, not quite old enough to see how it was spoofing the genre instead of genuinely participating in it.  As an adult who’s now lived through so many superhero action epics and their own subsequent waves of warped parodies (most recently in The Boys, Extra Ordinary, and Freaks vs The Reich), its jokes at comic book movies’ expense have somewhat dulled with time in a way Schumacher & Usher’s earnest breakfast cereal commercial energy haven’t, but there’s at least an interesting tension between those two sentiments in the production.

One thing that has unquestionably improved about Mystery Men in the two decades since I first saw it in the theater is my general fondness for the cast.  The screen was already overflowing with familiar faces in the 1990s, but twenty-plus years of pop media obsession has only made the crew assembled here even more incredible.  It’s the most shocked I’ve been by the talent assembled for a studio comedy since I revisited Galaxy Quest a few years ago; I’d even say it’s got Galaxy Quest beat, at least in terms of recognizable, always welcome faces.  And so, I feel the impulse to list the full cast of low-effort superheroes assembled on the titular Mystery Men team (not including other key contributors like Geoffrey Rush as the villainous Casanova Frankenstein, if not only to avoid copying & pasting the full IMDb cast list).  Here are the members of the Mystery Men, ranked by how important they are to the success of the film as a Gen-X comic book spoof, not how powerful they are as superpowered crimefighters — a nine-way tie for last.

1. Wes Studi as The Sphinx

Superpower: Cryptic doublespeak

Contribution: Wes Studi may be the least famous underpowered hero in the cast, but he’s a solid “That guy!” character actor who rarely gets to fire off as many punchlines as he’s armed with here.  The Sphinx arrives halfway into the film after the Mystery Men team is fully formed, stepping in as a Mister Miyagi-style philosophical trainer.  His pretzel-twisted wisdoms like “He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions” and “When you care what its outside, what is inside cares for you” are absurdly inane and consistently land the film’s biggest laughs.  His official superpower is the ability to cut firearms in half with his mind, but his real skill is in cutting apart the English language until it means nothing at all.

2. Greg Kinnear as Captain Amazing

Superpower: Inherited wealth

Contribution: Captain Amazing is even less of an official Mystery Men team member than group mentor The Sphinx, but he completes their missions and ungratefully takes advantage of their assistance often enough that I’m lumping him in with the crew.  A vague amalgamation of Batman & Superman (complete with Clark Kent’s magical glasses & Batman’s infinite funding), Captain Amazing is the perfect Handsome Chad counterbalance to official team’s bitterly inert slackerdom.  Greg Kinnear is perfectly cast for the role, weaponizing his generic good looks to play Amazing as a shameless fame chaser who’s more spon-con celebrity than genuine hero.  The visual gag of his superhero uniform being checkered with NASCAR-style sponsor patches feels ahead of its time, fully satirizing the property-protecting fascist leanings of all superheroism years before The Boys would make the same joke.

3. Janeane Garofalo as The Bowler

Superpower: Daddy issues

Contribution: The official spokesperson for detached Gen-X cool, Garofalo was the most aspirational character to me as a kid.  She carries around the film’s coolest prop—a sentient bowling ball that suspends her father’s telepathic, browbeating skull in clear resin—while glowering at the world through her trademark black eyeshadow.  She also carries the rest of the cast, establishing chemistry and cohesion among each of her fellow Mystery Men that would be totally absent without her.  Garofalo was reportedly an early believer in the project and put her legitimizing comedy-scene credibility behind Usher’s crassly commercial vision to bring the full production together.  Mystery Men wouldn’t be much of anything without Garofalo, which you could just as credibly say about 90s Gen-X comedy at large.

4. William H Macy as The Shoveler

Superpower: A strong work ethic

Contribution: In a film starring at least a dozen big-name comedians with selfish ambitions to steal the show, William H. Macy’s straight-man role is an essential tonal anchor, one that becomes its own metatextual punchline the more the film relies on him.  The Shoveler is a no-nonsense hard worker with a loving nuclear family waiting at home.  His supershovel is an off-the-rack “weapon” purchased from a hardware store, which he carries to work with quiet dignity as if her were punching the clock at a construction site.  An accomplished dramatic actor, Macy is overqualified for the role, which is partly why it’s so funny to watch him work alongside so many Looney Tunes lunatics.

5. Kel Mitchell as Invisible Boy

Superpower: Invisible invisibility

Contribution: Invisible Boy’s unconfirmable power to turn invisible only when no one is looking is a genius encapsulation of the Mystery Men’s team-wide ineffectiveness.  The plot’s machinations to engineer a situation where that power could be at all useful, even if only for a second, is also one of the film’s most inspired moments of comic book spoofery.  Most importantly, Kel Mitchell’s casting in the role was a smart marketing move in appealing to 90s kids, to whom All That & Good Burger were the absolute pinnacle of comedy as an artform.  At least that’s how I remember it.

6. Paul Ruebens as Spleen

Superpower: Hideous farts

Contribution: Likewise to Kel’s casting, you could not appeal to children’s comedic sensibilities in the 90s any more effectively than by casting Pee-wee Herman as a revolting superhero with rancid, long-range farts.  The only reason Spleen doesn’t rank higher here is that adults’ patience for his wet lisp & flatulence is stretched much thinner than their kids’, no matter how much of a cultural event it is to catch a glimpse of Ruebens outside his iconic grey suit.

7. Ben Stiller as Mister Furious

Superpower: Impotent white-boy rage

Contribution: Ben Stiller is ostensibly the star of the show, and his career-long rapport with fellow Ben Stiller Show alum Jeneane Garofalo affords Mystery Men a lot of its comedy-nerd street cred.  His heart just clearly isn’t in the project as much as Garofalo’s, and a lot of his stilted improv as an all-rage-and-no-skills Batman knockoff fails to land on any solid laughs.  The joke in the movie is that Mister Furious’s directionless, un-super anger isn’t especially useful to the team, and unfortunately the same is mostly true of Stiller’s chime-ins as the self-elected team leader.

8. Tom Waits as Doc Heller

Superpower: Tech savvy

Contribution: Doc Heller is another unofficial member of the Mystery Men team, but since he supplies the super-underachievers with high-tech weaponry his contributions to their vigilante crimefighting are invaluable.  In entertainment terms, his non-lethal superweapons encourage Usher to indulge in as much 90s-era CGI spectacle as the budget allowed, which helps date the film in an increasingly charming way.  It also means that one of the most notable members of the cast—barstool crooner Tom Waits—is sidelined for most of the action, which is unfortunate, since any amount of his presence contributes to the film’s general Gen-X cool.

9. Hank Azaria as The Blue Raja

Superpower: Fork-throwing

Contribution: Unfortunately, Hank Azaria’s cultural-appropriating silverware tosser is a one-man catchall for all of Mystery Men‘s worst qualities: Stiller’s go-nowhere improv, Ruebens’s grating vocal choices, and the vague threat that the next incoming punchline is going to be an actual hate crime.  Azaria’s onscreen way too much for a performer bringing so little to the table, but thankfully he’s got a full team of much funnier contributors backing him up with much funnier bits.

-Brandon Ledet

Cutie Honey (2004)

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I’ve been talking a lot of shit this year about the exhausting routine of superhero media.  It’s just been non-stop whining, to the point where I couldn’t even praise the ecstatic animation style of the universally beloved Across the Spider-Verse without also citing its narrative contributions to our growing, culture-wide superhero fatigue.  I should probably take time to note, then, that I am a total hypocrite on this exact subject.  While I’ve been mostly avoiding the ongoing deluge of major-studio superhero sequels (the new Guardians, the new Shazam, the new Justice League spinoff, etc.), two of my favorite trips to the theater so far this year were specialty screenings of two Japanese superhero films: Shin Ultraman & Shin Kamen Rider.  Hideaki Anno’s post-Evangelion career pivot to lovingly remaking the vintage tokusatsu media of his youth has been hugely rewarding lately, with the wholesome humanism of his Ultraman film and the earnest inner-turmoil of his take on Kamen Rider reviving the otherwise artistically dead medium of live-action superhero filmmaking.  It turns out there’s still plenty novelty & enthusiasm to be found in the tokusatsu end of superhero media, at least for Western audiences whose only major exposure to the subgenre was decades-old broadcasts of The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.  So, even though I’m supposedly fatigued by the Hollywood assembly line of live-action comic book adaptations, I recently found myself looking back to the first time Anno dipped his toe in the genre two decades ago with his take on the bubbly kawaii superhero Cutie Honey.

Reviving source material originally published as manga and animated series in the 1970s, Anno’s live-action Cutie Honey film is the clear bridge between his early anime career and his recent swerve into retro live-action tokusatsu reboots.  All of the absurd, anime-style shot compositions of his recent “Shin” films were already part of his established visual style in 2004, complete with his needlessly stylistic depictions of bureaucratic desk work.  He even incorporates hand-drawn animated sequences into Cutie Honey‘s opening credits & action set pieces, both as a nod to the character’s comic book origins and as a shrewd cost-saving tactic.  For all of its stylistic connections to Anno’s other work, it’s the first time I’ve seen him participate in the “magical girl” anime trope, which helps separate the film’s familiar Anno-isms from the macho, Batman-style brooding of Shin Kamen Rider and the gee-willickers Space Age awe of Shin Ultraman.  Cutie Honey approximates what it might be like if Anno produced a Shin Sailor Moon movie next; or at least that’s what came to mind for an anime-newb like me who’s only been exposed to the medium’s most iconic “magical girl” titles. He does update the vintage anime’s visual sensibilities with a little ironic kitsch and mid-aughts fashion choices (including an amusing amount of attention to flip phone bling), but for the most part the highlights of his Cutie Honey film are in the same register as his recent Ultraman & Kamen Rider films.  He approaches this kind of material with the goofy exuberance of a Looney Tunes short or an episode of Adam West’s 1960s Batman series, except amped up with the psychedelic visuals & self-hating sleaze he made a name for himself with in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

The titular Cutie Honey is a cute, sweet-as-honey office worker who loves taking bubble baths and playing dress-up.  She’s also a cyborg superhero who can “transform” into any conceivable disguise by pressing the heart-shaped pendant on her magical choker and shouting “Honey flash!” into the cosmic void. Her disguises mostly amount to her playing Gene Parmesan style dress-up games to fool her enemies, but when the situation at hand calls for violence she does change into hot pink body armor, going full kawaii superhero.  Anno takes a lot of obvious delight in filming the Sailor Moon-style magical girl transformation sequences in those battle scenes, as well as staging her fights with legions of faceless goons that she kicks into the air like limp mannequins.  The details of Cutie Honey’s global espionage sidekicks or her gender-ambiguous arch-enemies—known collectively as Panther Claw—don’t matter as much as the sugary joy of her cutesy quips & superheroic costume changes.  The film is simultaneously goofier and sleazier than Anno’s recent “Shin” movies, constantly ogling its bouncy superhero in her underwear between costumes and trapping her in damsel-in-distress lesbian kink scenarios.  Despite all that old-man leering, it’s aggressively girly for a superhero film, which pushes it even further into a campy, gay sensibility than the Batman ’66 vibes of Anno’s recent works.  It’s especially amusing that Cutie Honey fuels up for her superhero transformations by eating ungodly piles of junk food, which makes her the perfect hero for little girls and overgrown gay stoners everywhere.

Although Cutie Honey is an early rough-draft sketch of what he would later achieve in his “Shin Japan Heroes Universe” projects, I don’t know that I would as readily recommend it to Hideaki Anno die-hards as I would to fans of Girl Power superhero media like Tank Girl, Birds of Prey, Josie and the Pussycats, and Spice World.  It neatly belongs in that hyperactive, hyperfemme superhero canon, even with the thick male-gaze lens strapped to Anno’s camera.  In either case, it’s refreshing in the context of our modern MCU/DCEU sponsored hellscape, which 2008’s Iron Man kicked off just a few years after this seemingly ancient early-aughts novelty.  I highly recommend checking it out while Anno’s perspective on the superhero genre still feels fresh & exciting, even though the legal means of doing so is a little shaky.  YouTube has it dubbed; Internet Archive has it subbed.  Neither transfer is in especially great shape but, hey, at least you won’t be watching Uncle Ben’s corpse or Mrs. Batman’s pearls hit the pavement for the thousandth time.

-Brandon Ledet

Virtual Combat (1995)

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It’s well established by now that Tubi is the people’s streaming service – the only platform offering a century’s worth of high-brow cinema & cheap-thrills entertainment at an affordable price point: free with ads.  Even the bigger players in the business want what Tubi has, with more robust services like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, and Peacock now dabbling in an ads-supported model the industry has been resisting for years (but without matching the immense depth of Tubi’s streaming library).  I can’t say I’m totally happy about that development.  I appreciate Tubi for being one of the few streamers with a historical view that extends past the 2010s, something you’ll usually only find in hoitier, toitier art cinema streamers like Criterion, Kanopy, and Mubi.  Still, there’s something deflating about watching a New Hollywood classic or an avant-garde Euro art piece with out-of-nowhere ad breaks where the State Farm hunk or the Geico lizard interrupt the flow of the picture.  Tubi is arriving to the scene well after the Netflixes of the world have fully “disrupted” traditional modes of at-home film distribution and, like with all tech industry “disrupters,” the only thing streaming has really accomplished is replacing a perfectly functional industry with a near-exact, buggier copy.  What I mean to say is that Tubi provides the 2020s equivalent of the TV movie, and as a stubborn old man I need my TV movies to be cheap & trashy enough to justify being downgraded to that platform.  Tubi is great for watching Lifetime thrillers, DTV action schlock, and ancient re-runs of Project Runway.  For anything more artistically substantial than that, I usually put in the effort to pay for a VOD rental or drive to the library for an SD transfer on DVD.  Anything to avoid watching the Charmin bears wipe their asses in the middle of a movie I genuinely care about.

By that standard, 1995’s Virtual Combat is quintessential late-night Tubi programming.  Half a VR-themed Mortal Kombat mockbuster and half a VR-themed softcore porno, it’s the exact kind of video store shelf-filler that would be forgotten to time (and to jumps in physical media formats) if it weren’t for the archival diligence of the basement-dwelling genre freaks who upload this stuff to platforms like Tubi, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.  It’s a movie that marvels at the vague concept of Virtual Reality video gaming with the same naïve awe as The Lawnmower Man, at least three years past the novelty’s expiration date.  It’s a movie where a 30-second gag featuring Rip Taylor as a virtual carnival barker in the shape of a Zordon-style floating head counts as a celebrity cameo.  It’s a movie that treats a Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation of a video game as if it were as major of a Hollywood player as a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster starring animatronic dinosaurs, ripe for a rip-off. To be fair, Mortal Kombat was the biggest hit of Anderson’s career, making $120 million on a $20 million budget.  There was clearly a market for Virtual Combat‘s video game fight tournament premise among young men in videoland, especially if you could rush it to Blockbuster shelves for the brief time when every local VHS copy of Mortal Kombat was already checked out.  Adding gratuitous shots of naked breasts could only juice those sale & rental numbers too, as softcore-director-turned-action-schlockteur Andrew Stephens surely knew in his bones.  Every creative decision in Virtual Combat is driven by either production budget desperation or mockbuster market exploitation.  Therefore, it’s perfectly suited for crass commercial breaks in a way a Godard or Buñuel classic could never be (although I’m sure both appreciators of the crass & the absurd would’ve been fascinated by the random intrusions on their work).

Don “The Dragon” Wilson, World Kickboxing Champion (as he’s credited in the end scroll), stars as a Nevada border cop in the far-off future of 2025.  No lazy pig, his physical training regimen involves fighting a series of increasingly formidable, entirely digital martial artists in a virtual gaming realm.  Virtual Combat goes a step further than Mortal Kombat by setting its video game fighting tournament inside an actual video game, represented onscreen in weirdly artificial sound stages decorated by smoke machines & laser lights.  Because the nearby city of Las Vegas that houses this immersive fighting game is itself an artificial sin pit, that same VR tech is also used for simulated, legalized sex work that allows tourists to have “cybersex” with virtual hunks & pixelated babes.  The future’s looking pretty bright at first, until an overreaching scientist develops a way to “clone” the AI cybersex workers into physical real-world bodies, taking the technology a step too far.  Things go immediately awry when the invincible Final Boss of the cop’s favorite fighting game escapes into the real world too and uses his robotic voiceover hypnosis to recruit all the other newly birthed VR clones into his own personal digi militia, hell bent on Las Vegas (and perhaps world) domination.  Because this is a severely cheap, limited production, there are really only two other major AI players besides the fighting game’s Final Boss: a nudie mag Babe Next Door and a viciously militant dominatrix, whip in manicured hand.  These digi facsimiles of human beings are obviously no match for the real-world street smarts and world-class kickboxing skills of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, and so his face-kicking road to victory is not all that exciting or surprising. Most of the film’s novelty is in the absurdity of its first-act set up and in its weirdly fetishistic detail.

There’s not much on Virtual Combat‘s mind, thematically speaking.  Its vapid sci-fi pondering of AI technology never goes too far beyond the frustration of defeating a soulless enemy that you’ve trained yourself through pattern recognition as a user, kind of like how corporations are currently attempting to put writers & visual artists out of work by mining their previously published art through algorithmic synthesis.  I get the sense that it was a lot more interested in the sex trade end of that AI conundrum, though, especially by the time it gets to the sequence where Don “The Dragon” Wilson teaches a buxom VR clone about autonomy & consent so that she can immediately consent to having sex with him – of her own free will of course.  Everything else is action movie novelty and fetishistic titillation.  There’s no particular reason, really, why the corporate bad guys had to control their VR sex clones via shock collar, except the obvious reasons why men would write that detail into the script.  The sexual politics are just as quaintly dated as the real-world simulation of video game fighting (boosted by cheapo CGI credited onscreen to Motion Opticals), a novelty that demands the hero declare “Game Over” to the inevitably defeated Final Boss.  Surprisingly, there are a few fun smash-cut edits too, like when a poor victim’s snapped neck is immediately mirrored by the swing of a kicked-open door, or when cybersex being insulted as “sex with a machine” is immediately followed by the tacky casino lights of Las Vegas in montage – a city-size sex machine.  There’s nothing especially memorable or substantive about Virtual Combat beyond those minute-to-minute novelties, though, and its relative anonymity is exactly what makes it such a perfect candidate for streaming on Tubi.  In fact, Tubi goes out of its way to emphasize its anonymity by suggesting you watch an identical-looking movie titled Virtual Assassin as soon as the credits roll.  I’m sure it’s a hoot, just as I’m sure it’s better suitable to commercial breaks than the last movie I remember watching on the platform – Un Chien Andelou.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Demonlover (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Olivier Assayas’s early-aughts hentai thriller Demonlover (2002).

00:00 Welcome

02:45 X (2022)
07:45 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
11:45 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
15:25 Past Lives (2023)
24:08 Asteroid City (2023)
37:10 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

41:55 Demonlover (2002)

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

-The Podcast Crew