For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the children’s fantasy film The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), a gently magical folktale about selkies from director John Sayles.
00:00 Welcome
01:00 Beastly (2011) 01:40 House of the Witch (2017) 02:22 The Eagle (2011) 03:28 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) 05:51 The Core (2003) 06:51 Deadcon (2019) 08:30 The Wretched (2019) 09:50 Death Machine (1994) 12:00 The Hidden (1987) 13:55 The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (1988) 15:00 Over the Garden Wall (2014) 15:45 The Exorcist (1973) 18:22 Candyman (1992) 20:17 Promising Young Woman (2020) 22:23 Teeth (2007) 25:25 The Power (2021)
It’s difficult to make a documentary about yourself without coming across as a narcissistic bore. Every now and then, there’s an Agnès Varda level genius who can turn their personal travel journals into god-tier masterpieces like The Gleaners and Ior a celebrity with long-buried familial skeletons in the closet to unearth for cathartic entertainment, as in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. For the most part, though, it’s difficult for an audience to match a filmmaker’s fascination with their own everyday lives & relationships. The recent documentary/essay Madame somehow clears that hurdle with ease even without a flashy editing style or a grandly traumatic familial mystery to unearth. It’s a quiet, intimate documentary about a gay filmmaker’s loving but distanced relationship with his own grandmother, nothing more. And yet it has a lot of genuinely fascinating things to say that reach far beyond the expected navel-gazing of that subject.
Stéphane Riethauser structures Madame as a posthumous conversation with his deceased grandmother, mostly filling her in on all the things he didn’t get to say or convey in the years when they were most estranged. Those were the years when Riethauser was a closeted homosexual (at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s & 90s, no less), afraid to come out to even his most loving family members in fear that they would reject him for being himself. He starts by promising a frank discussion about gender, love, and sexuality from his own perspective, but the more he attempts to meet his grandmother on equal footing, he realizes that she was an iconoclast in her own time in a near-identical way. Ostracized by her Catholic family for divorcing young and making her own way as a businesswoman decades before Riethauser was born, his grandmother was no stranger to the alienation of being Different in a world that values conservatism & conformity. By recounting their respective, rigidly gendered upbringings, Madame sketches out a wide range of microscopic ways sexism & homophobia are reinforced in modern social structures, and how that can obstruct meaningful human connections – including the one between a loving grandmother & grandson with a shared defiant spirit.
Even beyond its prodding at larger social & philosophical ills, Madame is also just a wonderful looking film. Riethauser sequences tons of beautiful archival footage from his childhood into a gloomy diary-in-motion, with constant narration pointing out what’s rotting just under the surface of a seemingly happy family life. That molded photo album aesthetic wouldn’t be enough to fully engage an audience outside his immediate family circle, though. What really makes the film special is its exploration of homophobia as the “offspring” of sexism. It directly links the ways he & his grandmother were suppressed by their conservative, religious upbringings, and how rigid gender expectations created entirely unnecessary boundaries between them even after they broke free of those social shackles. It’s a long stare in the mirror in the way a lot of tedious, navel-gazing self-portraits can be, but it’s one of the few examples that transcends the expected limitations of that choice by making the personal universal. We all suffer under social expectations of traditional gender performance, and we’re all worse off for it.
All year, I’ve been working my way through my 4-disc DVD set of Joan Crawford classics, packaged for department store sale by TCM about a decade ago . . . It’s generally been a personal goal to clear my pile of unwatched physical media from my shelf during the pandemic, and with the more daunting sets like this (as opposed to standalone horror schlock with no air of sophistication or prestige) I genuinely have no idea how long I’ve allowed it to collect dust on its still in-tact shrink wrap. Three movies into the Joan Crawford set, I thought I had a grasp on the types of movies TCM was attempting to highlight with the collection: stylish noirs with a touch of romantic melodrama. Then, I got to the final film of the set, a full-on melodrama with no interest in crime genre tropes and barely any interest in Joan herself. I think I have a much better understanding of the inanely titled TCM Greatest Classic Legends Film Collection DVD set now; it’s just four movies Warner Bros would license to TCM for cheap that happened to share one of the studio’s biggest stars. Basically, it’s the Old Hollywood equivalent of those Drive-In Classic 50 Movie Pack DVDs you’ll find haunting the bottom of every Wal-Mart bargain bin in the country. The fact that all four of the Joan Crawford discs were stacked on top of each other in a single slot in the case should have tipped me off that this wasn’t a lovingly curated set with a clear, explicit theme.
Maybe going into Humoresque with expectations of seeing another stellar Joan Crawford Noir killed any chance I had of enjoying it for what it is. Humoresque is a sweeping melodrama about a virtuoso violinist whose promising career is derailed by his obsession with a wealthy drunk socialite played by Crawford (and by his own runaway hubris). While all the other films included in the TCM set have been stylish noirs with Crawford at the center, the much less charismatic John Garfield is the star of this picture as the troubled, romantically obsessed violinist. Crawford still plays a kind of sultry femme fatale, but she’s more of a supporting character than the center of attention. It’s at least a half-hour before she even appears onscreen. There are also no crime thriller tropes to speak of despite Crawford’s framing as the femme fatale. The movie is intensely fixated on the world of chamber music both as an industry and as an artistry. We follow the violinist through a prolonged rags-to-riches uphill battle where he defiantly proves himself as the greatest living artist in his field, locking the rest of the world away as he hones his craft to an unmatched extreme . . . until Crawford derails his attentions. As a result, the musical performances often overpower the film’s function as an actors’ showcase, with great attention paid to making it look as if Garfield were actually playing the violin (with a technique similar to how Sesame Street makes it look as if Weimaraners were actually eating spaghetti off a twirled fork). And because of the context I encountered the film within, I couldn’t help but spend those scenes asking “Where’s Joan?” instead of simply enjoying the show.
Of course, Crawford does make great use of the diminished screen time she’s allowed here. Her role as an adulterous socialite who wears old-lady glasses and downs way too much top-shelf liquor is a fun turn for the powerhouse actress, even if it’s one she could play in her sleep. Her alcoholism affords her some moments of violent, wildly passionate outbursts and her exorbitant wealth affords her opportunities to model gowns by Adrian – which look gorgeous on her, as always. She gets to be the life of the party, holding court over her socialite minions who bray at ever tossed-off quip she amuses herself with, like when she calls the violinist “a rare animal, a New Yorker from New York.” She’s also painfully aware of the fact that this is not her story, that she’s only lurking at the periphery. In the emotional climax of the film, she shouts in her young lover’s face that she’s “tired of playing second fiddle” to his art, and I totally got it. I was tired of watching it too. It’s in those drunken outbursts where the movie finally comes alive for me, especially once she punctuates her wildly jealous complaints by smashing her cocktail glasses in a fit. No one can hurl a drink at the wall in anger like our gal Joan, and here she earns bonus points by throwing a second one through a closed window. None of the film’s orchestral spectacle could match the pure ferocity of that drunken anger, and the movie could’ve used a lot more of it, centering her as the protagonist.
The good news is that there is a movie in this same TCM set where Joan Crawford is unhealthily obsessed with an (amateur) musician, and the story centers her story instead of the over-confident beau’s: 1947’s Possessed. At this point, it’s near impossible for me to watch any of these films without comparing it to the other inclusions in the DVD set. That’s especially true of Humoresque because it is such an outlier, both for falling entirely outside the confines of noir and for not featuring Crawford as its lead. In that spirit, here’s a picture of what the TCM Greatest Classic Legends Film Collection looks like and a best-to-worst ranking of how much I enjoyed each title.
It might be something of a Hot Take to say so, but I overall really enjoyed Soderbergh’s stripped-down, intimate Oscars broadcast – especially considering the context of this year. The general complaint in the weeks leading up to the 93rd Academy Awards was that none of the movies nominated matter/exist to most people, so it was kinda sweet to see an intimate, personalized broadcast pitched directly at the niche audience already in the know. I don’t think the streamlined, de-glitzed format would work as well in a year where people gather in groups for Oscar parties, but I had a nice pizza-on-the-couch night myself. Still, I can’t say I was especially invested in any of the night’s Big Wins, at least not as a casual movie nerd. My two least favorite films that I caught up with before the Oscars—Nomadland and Another Round—won major prizes; my two very favorite films nominated—Emma. and Pinocchio—were ignored even as technical achievements; and a lot of the awards in-between went to expensive-to-access 2021 releases that I have not yet seen: The Father and Minari. I was surprised, then, that the award that most excited me this year was the Best Original Screenplay win for Promising Young Woman, a film I only liked just Okay.
I remember listening to an interview with the executive producer of Horror Noire, Tananarive Due, a few years ago (on the now-defunct Shock Waves podcast) about the Black cinema documentary’s then-upcoming release. Due explained that the doc was greenlit the very next morning after Jordan Peele won his Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Get Out (Peele was a producer and interview subject involved in the production of Horror Noire). Then she & the Blumhouse reps in the room alluded to several other black-led genre projects in the works that got launched at that same time, ones Peele was not involved in whatsoever. That interview has stuck with me over the past few years as the noticeable uptick of mainstream Black horror films & TV shows have made their way into wide distribution, making it so that it’s almost already time for a Horror Noire sequel. Some of those projects have been great; some have been godawful. All of them directly benefited from the prestige of a Get Out Oscar win, no matter what you may think about the pageantry of Entertainment Industry Awards shows. That’s why it’s important to root for artists you like getting Oscars attention for work you appreciate, even if most of the other statues are handed out to movies you don’t care about at all.
I don’t believe Promising Young Woman is as successful or as Important of a film as Get Out by any stretch. To be honest, I can’t say I had a particularly strong reaction to it at all, either positive or negative. For such a deliberate Provocation—a bitterly funny rape revenge thriller with a music video pop art aesthetic—it’s a relatively timid film, deliberately withholding the shocking violence of its genre’s inherent trauma and catharsis. Pretty much everything I admired about it was tackled so much more fiercely & directly in films like Revenge,Felt, and Teeth, except this time with a poisoned candy coating that distinguishes it more as a stylistic flex than as a thematic discomfort. To its credit, the movie appears to be self-aware in the ways it’s sidestepping the trappings of its genre, like in the way it teases bloodshed to reveal only a leaking jelly donut, or in how it exclusively casts comedic actors as its Nice Guy villains. My personal favorite detail in that respect is the traditional Monster Movie music that hits every time Carrie Mulligan reveals herself to be stone-sober to the men taking advantage of her “drunken” state, as if there’s nothing scarier to a date rapist than a woman’s clear-eyed sobriety. I don’t believe Promising Young Woman overhauled or subverted the themes or content of the rape revenge thriller in any substantial way, but it’s at least playing with the form, which is all we usually ask of genre filmmakers.
While I’m not emphatically in love with Promising Young Woman as a film, I am totally invested in its significance as an Oscar-winner. Any time an over-stylized genre movie wins a major Academy Award—Get Out, Parasite, The Shape of Water, even Joker—I find myself celebrating the win no matter how in love I am with the movie itself outside that context. Even if I find the movie itself to be just passably Okay, I’m stoked that a hyper-femme, button-pushing genre film decorated with rainbow-pastel nail polish and Britney Spears & Paris Hilton music cues won a major Academy Award this year. That means that more, better funded genre movies tuned to my sensibilities are on their way. Hell, even Jordan Peele outdid himself after his Get Out win with the much wilder, more daringly surreal creep-out Us, so Promising Young Woman‘s win might even mean that writer-director Emerald Fennell’s next film will totally bowl me over the way I wanted Promising Young Woman to. Regardless, her win is a win for hyper-femme, discomforting genre filmmaking in general as a viable business, and that’s the victory I’m choosing to champion the loudest this Oscars cycle.
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before and we discuss it afterwards. This month Britnee made Brandon, Boomer, and Hanna watch Trouble in Mind (1985).
Britnee: Director Alan Rudolph’s 1985 film Trouble in Mind is truly a one-of-a-kind classic. It’s a neo-noir that blends in 80s new wave kitsch, creating its own genre that I like to call New Wave Noir. I’m not sure there are any other movies that would fall into that genre. Maybe Cool World or Who Framed Roger Rabbit? could qualify, but they’re way more on the fantasy side. I didn’t get around to watching Trouble in Mind until a few years ago when I was obsessing over Marianne Faithfull. After reading Faithfull: An Autobiography, I was constantly listening to her music, and that’s when I came across her rendition of the blues classic “Trouble in Mind”. I discovered that it was used in a film with the same title starring Kris Kristofferson, Lori Singer, and an out-of-drag Divine. That was more than enough to draw me to the movie, and it turned out to be such a hidden gem.
In the fictional Rain City (it’s basically Seattle), an ex-cop/ex-con with the most neo-noir name ever, Hawk (Kris Kristofferson), becomes entangled in the lives of a young couple from out in the country. Coop (Keith Carradine) and Georgia (Lori Singer) drive into Rain City in their beat-up camper to build a better life for themselves and their baby named Spike. Hawk, Coop, and Georgia are all brought together by a diner owned by Hawk’s ex-lover Wanda (Geneviève Bujold). Coop gets involved in selling knockoff watches and quickly gets pulled into Rain City’s criminal underworld, run by Hilly Blue (Divine). Coop’s fashion choices become progressively more cartoonish as he sinks deeper and deeper into the world of crime. His hair becomes a growing new wave pompadour, his face becomes paler, his outfits get wilder, and his makeup becomes increasingly intense. It’s my favorite thing about this movie. He literally becomes a new wave monster. While Coop is out and about being a criminal, Hawk sets his eyes on Georgia. He gets the hots for her and becomes her “protector”, even though I find him to be pretty creepy when it comes to how he forces himself into her life.
One major aspect of Trouble in Mind that really didn’t make much sense and was completely unnecessary is that Rain City is under militia patrol and some of the characters randomly go from speaking Korean to English. The state of the city is never really explained and doesn’t add much to the story. Brandon, what did you think about Rain City’s militia and random Korean lingo? Would the film be any different if that component just didn’t exist?
Brandon: If I had to guess what they were going for with the militia patrols and American/Korean cross-culture, I’d say they were borrowing a little New Wave Noir finesse from Ridley Scott’s 1982 game-changer Blade Runner. Trouble in Mind may take production notes from Seoul instead of Hong Kong, but its retro-futurization of Seattle feels like a direct echo of Blade Runner‘s retro-future Los Angeles. The difference is that Blade Runner is explicitly set in the future (2019, to be exact), updating the familiar tropes & fashions of noir with a sci-fi bent. Trouble in Mind, by contrast, doesn’t really subvert the noir genre template in any overt ways. It’s not a parody or an homage. It’s the real deal: a noir that just happens to be made in the 1980s (which makes the influence of Blade Runner near-impossible to avoid).
Personally, I was really into the characterization of Rain City as a setting. It’s an intricately detailed, lived-in alternate reality that makes the movie feel as if it were adapted from a long-running comic book series. I loved the “fictional” city’s clash of 1940s nostalgia with intensely 1980s fashion trends, and I was tickled by the scene set in the Space Needle restaurant, acknowledging that we’re basically just running around present-day Seattle. I was much less in love with the characterization of Kris Kristofferson’s gruffly macho ex-cop. Hawk is not so much of an enigmatic anti-hero as he is a boring loser, which is maybe the film’s one miscalculation in its low-key version of 1980s noir revival. When Divine’s degenerate mobster villain looks Kristofferson dead in the eyes to snarl, “You have nothing but bad qualities,” I couldn’t help but agree. What a pathetic asshole.
Hanna, did Hawk’s anti-hero status lean a little too hard into “anti” territory for you as well? If so, were the other citizens of Rain City charismatic enough to save the movie from that misstep?
Hanna: I love a good anti-hero, and I’m a cursed sucker for a gruff neo-noir cop/PI character, even when their behavior is problematic or despicable. Unfortunately, Hawk embodies all of the worst aspects of macho authority—including possessiveness and that special type of sexual aggression that somehow eludes the label of assault—and none of the appealing qualities (e.g., smoldering charisma). On top of everything, his relationship with Georgia was totally baffling and uncomfortable. I kept holding out for Hawk to develop some humility and self-reflection, but I was foiled at every turn. Will Hawk stop stalking Georgia outside of her trailer (a moment that reminded me of that scene in Smooth Talk where Arnold Friend tries to coax teenage Connie out of her house)? No? Okay, well maybe he’ll realize that he can care about a beautiful woman without having a sexual relationship with them? No again! Well, maybe he’ll care for her in a loving, non-controlling – oh, he’s demanding total ownership of her in exchange for saving her New-Wave pompadour’ed ex-thing. I guess he’s a changed man because he asks her out for dinner?
Fortunately, the world of Trouble in Mind has more than enough splendors to enjoy apart from Hawk and Georgia, especially in the vibrant criminal underground. Coop was actually one of my favorite characters; he’s a huge creep for the majority of the film, but he shows at least a semblance of self-reflection towards the end, and his transformation into an 80s glamour criminal is indeed a glorious surprise. Just when I thought his pompadour couldn’t get more delicious, a little curl would spring up at the top, or the tips would be touched with a kiss of red. Divine was totally captivating as Hilly Blue, and I even liked Nate (John Considine), the crazed criminal that Coop accidentally robs. I found myself wishing I could spend just more time amongst the various fiends of Rain City; I sighed every time the film cut from Coop slinking around in oversaturated suits to Hawk eating his dumb eggs. If nothing else, I would have loved to see a version of Trouble in Mind without Hawk where Wanda helps Georgia leave Coop while he goes off to crime it up with Solo and Hilly.
Boomer, what did you think of the balance between the two worlds of Rain City (the Diner and Hilly’s criminal cabal)? Do you think there were more interesting depths to plumb in the criminal underworld? Are there aspects of Rain City do you wish had been more developed, or developed differently?
Boomer: I’m torn on this question. On the one hand, this movie felt very loooong to me, to the point where I had to research whether a runtime of this magnitude was normal for film noir. I was convinced that they must normally be shorter than Trouble in Mind‘s 111 minutes, but reviewing the classics, it looks like this is pretty standard, with The Maltese Falcon clocking in at 101 minutes, Double Indemnity at 107, and Touch ofEvil matching Trouble exactly at 111. Those movies don’t feel their length to me the way that this one does, and although Geneviève Bujold is giving the performance here that I like the most and she only occupies the diner and its adjacent rooms, I would have liked to see more of the criminal underworld. By having the audience experience the seedy underbelly of not-Seattle mostly through the eyes of Coop, who is the least interesting character, it hinders our ability to fully realize both this city and its criminal element. On the other hand, part of the appeal is that Hilly Blue is a figure that exists outside of the characters’ day-to-day lives for a long time, building him up as a figure of great influence and prominence among the denizens of Rain City’s underclass, before we finally meet him. So while I want to see that world fully, I also think that seeing more would mean cherishing less, and any increase to the film’s runtime would be to its detriment as a piece of media overall.
What I think we could have benefitted from seeing more of without the risk of diminishing returns was exactly what was going on with all of the fascist goose-steppers constantly breaking up rallies. Every time Georgia gets more than two blocks from the diner, she doesn’t actually seem to be all that imperiled, but she’s certainly overstimulated to the point of losing her mind (and her baby!) histrionically. What I liked about the film’s aspirations to be more noirpunk than it succeeds in achieving is the unspoken acceptance of all of the odd little futurisms that pop up throughout and how they go uncommented upon, but that doesn’t mean I’m not curious and wouldn’t have liked to understand more. Their iconography is clearly aping that of the fascism of the day—red and black, harsh angles—and they appear throughout and people are tolerant of (if not necessarily deferential to) them, and I think that drawing a comparison between a fascist force and Hawk’s need to be the ultimate authority in the lives of the women he seeks to dominate and control was an opportunity that was missed. I don’t need to know the whole genealogy of their rise to prominence (if not power), but a few hints would have been nice.
Lagniappe
Boomer: I want to make sure that it isn’t overlooked that this is our second Movie of the Month featuring Geneviève Bujold, after Last Night. Also, as always, it’s worth mentioning that although Hawk is awful, Kris Kristofferson is a real goddamn hero.
Brandon: Of course, for degenerates like us the main draw of this film is going to be the novelty of seeing Divine play a male villain outside the context of one-off gags in John Waters classics like Hairspray & Female Trouble. To that end, I’ll just share a quick piece of trivia I picked up from a recent rewatch of the documentary I Am Divine . . . The gigantic diamond earring Hilly Blue rocks in this film was not provided by wardrobe but by Divine himself. He was super proud of saving up for that piece of jewelry (after a fabulously delinquent life funded mostly by shoplifting) and paraded it around in public as much as possible in his later years as a status symbol. It totally fits the mafioso character he’s playing, to the point where you might not even notice it, but I still love that Divine got to immortalize that obnoxious gem he was so proud of onscreen.
Britnee: The big shootout scene at Hilly Blue’s mansion is amazing. The Seattle Asian Art Museum was transformed into the unforgettable residence of Rain City’s big mob boss, and I find so much comfort in knowing that this wasn’t just a set build. The fact that I can someday visit Hilly Blue’s mansion (minus Divine and all the guns and stuff) lifts my spirits. I guess I have to pay a visit to the real-life Rain City soon!
Hanna: Whoever scouted locations for Trouble in Mind did a fantastic job. Every setting—Wanda’s lonely-heart diner, the Chinatown restaurant, the villainous mansion, etc. etc.—was the perfect version of itself in the cyber-noir/dystopian film landscape. Also, I was shocked to find out that this movie somehow only made $19,632 at the box office on a budget of $3 million! Thank you to Britnee for unearthing this gem of a financial flop.
Upcoming Movies of the Month June: Hanna presents Chicken People (2016) July: Brandon presents Starstruck (1982) August: Boomer presents Sneakers (1992)
Welcome to Episode #133 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, and Brandon discuss movie sequels they prefer to the originals, starting with the shockingly bleak Toy Story 3 (2010).
Must every cinematic property receive the extended-universe Marvel treatment now? It’s getting exhausting. The new movie adaptation of the Mortal Kombat video game is absolutely doused in the stink of the MCU, functioning more as a desperate franchise starter than a standalone film. This is a near two-hour shared origin story for longtime Mortal Kombat characters like Scorpion, Jax, and Sonya Blade (as well as the entirely new, entirely forgettable protagonist Cole Young). They spend the entire runtime learning to summon & hone their personal superpowers for the titular fight tournament, which never actually occurs; you have to wait until the next film for a proper payoff. Meanwhile, the cyborg jackass Kano sarcastically quips his way throughout the entire process to constantly remind the audience to not take its supernatural martial arts genre tropes too seriously, distancing itself from any potential for genuine nerdiness. It’s all explained-to-death and relentlessly undercut with corny “That’s so random!” humor to the point where you never really feel like the movie has actually started in earnest; it’s only the first piece in a planned 20+ film franchise, more concerned with justifying its sequels than satisfying its audience in the moment. The only MCU touchstones it’s missing are a post-credits teaser and a Stan Lee cameo.
It’s especially difficult to not look at the new Mortal Kombat film as an example of everything wrong with contemporary franchise filmmaking, since we have a clear example of how much better this same property would’ve been treated just a couple decades ago. Paul WS Anderson’s Mortal Kombat movie from 1995 only briefly introduces its central Human cast before diving headfirst into its titular fight tournament, working its story beats & character moments into the structure of a supernatural combat competition instead of delaying that payoff for another film. The 2021 version can’t help but over-explain every single step of its characters’ journey towards that competition, as if it were cowering from hack YouTube critics’ inevitable critiques of its “plot holes.” As a result, all of the film’s fun genre payoffs feel delayed & rushed, pushed out of the way to make room for the downplayed, normalizing drudgery of post-MCU franchise filmmaking. To put it in pro wrestling terms, it’s like watching an hour of promos followed by a few quick squash matches – the kind of lopsided booking that can drain a Pay-Per-View of all potential excitement no matter how may fun, crowd-pleasing payoffs are crammed into the final half-hour.
Despite the MCUification of its tone & plot structure, there were just enough over-the-top gore gags scattered throughout Mortal Kombat to make the film passably okay as dumb-fun entertainment. The film would’ve been a total disaster had it not leaned into the hyperviolence that made its arcade game source material controversial to begin with in the early 1990s, but it gets by okay. Combatants are disemboweled, sawed in half, stabbed in the skull, frozen & shattered, and just generally separated from their blood & vital organs in every way the 12-year-old hedonist still lurking in the back of your brain can imagine. It’s fun to watch. Too bad the film appears to be embarrassed of its source material’s more out-there details, so that it has to go out of its way to explain the practical reason for Scorpion’s chain-spear weapon or to have a character joke that Mortal Kombat is “spelled wrong.” By the time all that normalizing groundwork is laid out, there’s very little space left for the actual climactic fight scenes, which are edited together in a simultaneous, overlapping flood of violence that would’ve been much better served as individual action set pieces.
Maybe now that all the plot-obsessed foundational work is out of the way, the second film in this series will be able to just jump right into the ultraviolence fantasy fight tournament promised here without wasting any valuable time. It’s just a shame that we used to be able to pull that off in a single 100min goofball action movie without any concerns for appearing level-headed or respectable; now you’ve got to put up with at least an hour of eating your vegetables before you get even a small taste of the good stuff.
One of my favorite films of all time is Richard Kelly’s The Box, a much-mocked sci-fi thriller that starts as a faithful adaptation of a Twilight Zone plot (Richard Matheson’s short story “Button, Button” to be specific), then spirals out to become its own over-the-top art object once that story runs its course. I was delighted to see that template repeated in Shadow in the Cloud, then, which starts as a copyright-infringing adaptation of the Twilight Zone classic “Nightmare at 20,0000 Feet”, then mutates into its own monstrous beast separate from its obvious source of inspiration. The difference is that The Box expands on its core Twilight Zone story with a flood of increasingly outlandish, convoluted Ideas that explode the initial premise into scattered, irretrievable shrapnel. By contrast, Shadow in the Cloud reduces the initially bizarre outline of “Terror at 20,000 Feet” to the most basic, straightforward hand-to-hand combat action fluff imaginable. It just does so with a full-on Richard Kelly level commitment to the bit, creating something truly spectacular purely out of brute force.
When Shadow in the Cloud is still limited to its “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” beginnings, it does a decent enough job at finding new sources of tension & purpose in that dusty genre template. Chloë Grace Moretz stars as a WWII fighter pilot who’s at the mercy of an overly suspicious, grotesquely macho cargo-run crew who don’t trust her presence on their plane. To neutralize her potential threat to their mission, the men confine her to a gun turret below the plane’s belly, where she’s isolated—and lethally armed—in a free-floating bubble. The combination of that confined space, the radio chatter from the misogynist assholes above (who keep referring to her as a “dame” and a “broad” instead of a fellow soldier), and the eventual emergence of the Twilight Zone version of a gremlin on the plane’s wings is a wonderful tension-builder that makes full, glorious use of its seemingly limited, familiar premise. It’s the lengthy, over-the-top release of that tension in the film’s third act that really achieves something special, though.
After listening to the men on the plane delegitimize and sexualize her for the entire ride—while also ignoring her warnings of the gremlin on the wings and enemy fighters in the clouds—Moretz explodes into action. Once she emerges from her gun-turret prison cell, her deathmatch with the gremlin is nonstop carnage and catharsis, indulging in a Looney Tunes sense of physics & decorum that’s wildly divergent from the film’s confined-space beginnings. The 1940s setting is harshly contrasted with an 80s-synth John Carpenter score as Moretz proves herself to be the toughest solider on-board, effectively tearing the gremlin to shreds with her own bare hands as her fellow soldiers fall to their peril. It’s the same grounded-war-narrative-to-outrageous-horror-schlock trajectory played with in 2018’s Overlord, except in this case the grotesquely monstrous enemy is American misogynists rather than Nazi combatants.
It may not be as gloriously inane as The Box (few films are), but Shadow in the Cloud is a total blast. It’s 80 minutes of delicious, delirious pulp, settling halfway between a dumb-fun creature feature and a sincerely performed radio play. Not for nothing, it’s also the first time I’ve ever enthusiastically enjoyed a Chloë Grace Moretz performance, as I spent the final half hour of the film cheering her on as if she were a pro wrestler taking down the ultimate heel. I would love to live in a world where every classic Twilight Zone episode were exploited as a jumping-off point for an over-the-top sci-fi thriller that reaches beyond the outer limits of a 20min premise – especially if they all could manage to be this wonderfully absurd.
Plenty was already written about the X-Men genre-bender TheNew Mutants in the years before its actual release. Thanks to its very public production troubles, post-production tinkering, and release-date delays since its teaser trailer premiered in movie theaters way back in the Before Times of 2017, The New Mutants has been engaged with more as a News Item than as a Movie. I’ve even personally contributed to that phenomenon myself, cheekily declaring it to be “The Defining Film of the 2010s” a full year before it ever screened for the public. After living with the Idea of the movie and its bungled potential to mutate the superhero genre into an entirely new beast for multiple calendar years, general audiences (or at least the nerds who pay attention to this kind of cultural runoff) couldn’t help but enter The New Mutants with rigid preconceptions of what it was going to be – whether expecting a playful superhero-horror genre hybrid or an incomprehensible editing room disaster. It’s hilarious to me, then, that its journey into wide distribution ended with the film being unceremoniously dumped into empty movie theaters in the middle of a global pandemic, then quietly surfacing on cable television just a few months later to practically zero fanfare. In retrospect, it was the only fitting conclusion to that sad, drawn-out saga.
Approximately one million years ago, I was pretty dang excited for The New Mutants. The now-ancient teaser trailer for the film/news-item promised an X-Men version of The Dream Warriors, indicating that the superhero genre had established a sturdy enough cultural footing that it could now experiment with subgenre detours—including, apparently, Nightmare on Elm Street riffs—without alienating general audiences. The finished product (which is, reportedly, the exact version of the film director Josh Boone intended to release in the first place) is unfortunately much more timid than the horror genre detour I was expecting. Instead of a Mutant Dream Warriors creep-out, The New Mutants is essentially just the YA version of Glass. Its target audience skews way younger than what I initially hoped for, reeling in the broader possibilities of a superhero-horror blockbuster to settle for a PG-13 thriller aimed specifically at teens. It even openly acknowledges that aim by including multiple scenes where the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show is playing on a background television, clearly indicating the exact kind of media it hopes to emulate. Re-orienting its context from X-Men on Elm Street to over-the-plate PG-13 horror required a major expectation adjustment for me. Once I understood where it was coming from, though, I actually found the film passably decent . . . give or take a few ridiculous accents & wigs.
Like The Dream Warriors, The New Mutants features a small group of traumatized teens living in shared confinement in a mental ward, each haunted by the literalized versions of their worst nightmares. Except, in this case the teens are all X-Men type mutants in training. Also, instead of their worst fears being brought to life by the wicked scamp Freddy Krueger, it’s the fault of a new recruit who doesn’t yet know how to control her unwieldy powers. Because this is a superhero film, the surrealism of that teen-mutants-vs-their-own-psyches premise is eventually reduced to a smash-em-up CGI battle with a single, destructive villain (in this case, a kaiju-scale Demon Bear), but there are some truly great creature designs & jump scare gags in the build-up to that inevitable climax. Its commitment to PG-13 scares means there’s no true body count, and the cast is rounded out by less-than-charismatic performances from TV-star teens who got their start in now-dusty properties like Game of Thrones & Stranger Things (including a career-worst performance from usual-MVP Anya Taylor-Joy). As far as tween-friendly horror goes, though, it ain’t half bad. If nothing else, it scores easy bonus points for being centered around a cute, queer romance that’s more genuinely hormonal than what’s typical for the superhero genre, even in properties that are supposedly aimed at adults.
As a news item, The New Mutants was a cultural time capsule that typified a wide range of ways mainstream blockbusters were marketed, edited, distributed, and passed around between corporate buyouts in the 2010s. As a movie, it’s nothing special – especially not in a market already flooded with similar #content like Split, Morgan, Legion, The Umbrella Academy, and Ms. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. It could have been a game-changer within the superhero genre, had it taken the genre-blurring risks teased in its early advertisements. Still, that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyed for what it actually is: a dumb-fun popcorn movie for teens.
An exquisitely fucked up mutation of the Roger Corman creature feature. So many dirt-cheap horrors in its wake have aimed for its exact quietly eerie mood and inspired only frustrated boredom in the attempt. Here, every scare is a sharp knife to the brain no matter how familiar you are with what’s coming. I still can’t look directly at Giger’s goopy sex monster without shivering in pure disgust all these sequels & knockoffs later. Like the original Terminator, it’s got a reputation of having been surpassed by its louder, better-funded spawn, but I don’t believe that’s true for a second.
Alien: Resurrection (1997)
Far from the scariest entry in the franchise, but easily the most fun. The whole thing plays like a live-action cartoon, and its blasphemous disinterest in series lore is a refreshing blast of fresh air after watching Fincher take everything so relentlessly serious in its predecessor. Great creature gags, some endearingly goofy character work, and a wonderfully imaginative eye from Jeunet, as always. Big fan.
Prometheus (2012)
Fantastic mix of ludicrous retro sci-fi pulp & elegant visual artistry. I am forever in love with the idea of humans asking Big, Important philosophical questions about our origins & purpose to literal gods and receiving only brutal, wordless violence in response. Still kicking myself for allowing the negative word-of-mouth to talk me out of seeing it in 3D on the big screen when I had the chance.
Aliens (1986)
I’ll always have some philosophical hang-ups with the way Cameron simplifies & normalizes the subliminal nightmare fuel of the first Alien movie for much more familiar blockbuster entertainment. It’s still great as a standalone action movie though! Stan Winston’s wizardly creature effects are especially praiseworthy, affording the xenomorphs an exciting feeling of agility that matches the increased momentum of the shoot-em-up action sequences. I’ll never buy into the myth that this & T2 are somehow superior to their predecessors just because of their slicker production values, and the Director’s Cut’s sprawling 154min runtime is a crime against all reason & good taste. And yet pushing back against its hyperbolic reputation comes across as contrarian blasphemy, when the truth is it’s just a solidly entertaining popcorn movie and that’s a pleasure in itself.
AvP: Requiem (2007)
This is widely understood to be the worst Alien film, but I thoroughly enjoy it as dumb-fun teen horror. If nothing else, it’s impressively efficient and Mean. The gore gags are plentiful & cruel, maintaining a consistently entertaining rhythm of nasty, amoral kills. It’s like a modern throwback to the Roger Corman creature feature, with a suburban-invasion angle that brings some much-needed novelty to two once-great franchises that were running out of steam. I honestly believe that if it featured warring alien creatures that weren’t associated with pre-existing series, it wouldn’t be nearly as reviled. It probably wouldn’t be remembered at all, though, so maybe it’s for the best that it ruffled horror-nerd feathers.
Alien Covenant (2017)
Instead of aiming for the arty pulp of Prometheus, Covenant drags the Alien series’ newfound philosophical themes back down to the level of a body-count slasher. This prequel/sequel is much more of a paint-by-numbers space horror genre picture than its predecessor, but that’s not necessarily a quality that ruins its premise. Through horrific cruelty, striking production design, and the strangest villainous performance to hit a mainstream movie in years (it really should be retitled Michael Fassbender: Sex Robot), this easily gets by as a memorably entertaining entry in its series. If it could be considered middling, it’s only because the Alien franchise has maintained a better hit-to-miss ratio than seemingly any other decades-old horror brand has eight films into its catalog.
Alien³ (1992)
Really pushes the limits of the dictum “There’s no such thing as a bad Alien movie.” Even the revised Assembly Cut is an excessively dour bore, and the only thing that breathes any life into the damned thing is the continued instinctive terror of Giger’s creature designs (though the green sheen of the early-90s CGI isn’t doing that aesthetic any favors). Its only illuminating accomplishment is helping make sense why Jeunet was hired for the next entry in the series, as it often looks & feels like one of his steampunk grotesqueries with all of the Fun & Whimsy surgically removed. Otherwise, it just coasts on the series’ former glories.
AvP: Alien vs Predator (2004)
Maybe the most frustrating movie in the Alienverse for being deliriously stupid fun for its final 20 minutes or so, but not worth the effort it takes to get there. The restorative praise for it in Horror Noire had me hoping for a different reaction than I had in the theater, but this viewing was mostly a repeat: bored out of my skull for the first hour and then cheering on its climactic team-up sequence as if I were watching the creature-feature Super Bowl. Appropriately, that’s also a pretty accurate summation of Paul WS Anderson’s entire career; there’s just enough unhinged, goofball fun to keep your rooting for him even though he fumbles the ball every single game.
Swampflix 