Author: swampflix

Neighborhood Rep, Neighborhood Pride

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I’ve said it before on this blog, but the current New Orleans repertory scene really is stronger than it has ever previously been in my lifetime. While the original uptown location of The Prytania has continued its Classic Movies series that used to encompass almost the entirety of local repertory programming, The Broad has massively stepped up its game in recent years to play a wide range of classic arthouse cinema titles I never thought I’d get a chance to see projected in a proper theater, making for a weekly spoil of riches. That recent vibe shift was especially apparent during this year’s Pride Month offerings at The Broad, which included separate programs from both the regular Gap Tooth series and a one-off Pride series sponsored by a self-explanatory social club called Crescent City Leathermen. Together, they combined for an impressively robust month of queer repertory cinema in one convenient venue, including a list of Swampflix-approved classics like Nowhere, The Celluloid Closet, The Queen and, most surprisingly, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. It was an overwhelming bounty for a single month of programming, so I got to be extremely selective about which screenings to attend and narrowed it down to two titles I had never seen before from directors I love: Pedro Almodóvar & Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The beautiful thing is that I didn’t even have to leave my neighborhood to see them; what a gift.

While Gap Tooth was perfectly astute for programming 1991’s High Heels during Pride Month, it could have just as easily screened a month earlier to celebrate Mother’s Day. Almodóvar’s entire catalog is recursive & accumulative but, even so, High Heels plays like the scrappier, goofier dry run for his later commercial triumph All About My Mother (while still being fabulous on its own terms). Victoria Abril stars as a Madrid TV news broadcaster with a near-psychotic obsession with her lifelong-absent mother, a once-famous actress & pop star played by Marisa Paredes. As a child, she conspired to keep her mother to herself through Rhoda Penmark-level machinations, but she grows up abandoned anyway, inspiring a lifelong fetishistic obsession with a woman who doesn’t think much of her in return. When her mother makes a grand return to Madrid in her adulthood, the details of her obsession become overwhelming. Not only is her TV broadcaster career a pale imitation of her mother’s international fame, but she’s also married to her mother’s former lover & biographer and soon starts a sexual affair with a drag performer who impersonates the famous torch singer for cash tips. The strangely incestuous sexual tension between those four players gets even more complex as the mother resumes a previous affair with the daughter’s husband, who is soon found murdered by a mysterious visitor to his bedroom. As always, Almodóvar has a way of tangling the interpersonal conflicts & romances of all involved so gradually that it takes a long while to realize just how much of a melodramatic mess the plot appears to be when spelled out on paper. Even when introducing this sordid mother-daughter dynamic in childhood flashback, he simplifies the jealousy-and-indifference tensions of their relationship down to a simple symbolic object: an earring. When that earring catches on one of the women’s hairdo in the awkward hug of their adult reunion decades later, it’s carrying enough emotional weight to make you cry. At the same time, he’s clearly having fun with the gaudy tableaux of the melodrama genre in a way that verges on ironic humor, filling the screen with enough drag performances, dance breaks, high heels, and lipstick kisses to make getting imprisoned for murder in Madrid seem like a genuinely fun time for any woman lucky enough to get arrested. It’s just as funny as it is sincerely heartbreaking & sexy, easily ranking among the best of his works.

The Crescent City Leathermen’s screening of 1982’s Querelle landed on the exact opposite extreme of the masc-femme spectrum, staying true to the spirit of the organization’s namesake. Fassbinder’s late-career adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel is a crime story in which the only lawman on hand is a leather-daddy fetishist who operates more as a barfly than a proper detective. The film is a kind of pornographic opera, starring Brad Davis as the titular sailor & murderer who ruins the lives of any poor soul who happens to gaze upon his beefcake beauty. Querelle arrives in the port city of Brest with the dual purpose of following naval orders from his superiors while, why not, orchestrating a massive opium deal with the local barkeep as a side hustle. In that bar, he stumbles directly into an already complex love triangle involving his own estranged brother, the aforementioned barkeep, and the barkeep’s wife. All three players are erotically obsessed with Querelle at first sight—brother inlcuded—but the sailor ends up bottoming for the barkeep first, while constantly protesting that he’s actually straight as an arrow no matter how much pleasure he takes in receiving anal sex. The sex scenes fall just short of pornographic, but they are incredibly lengthy, sweaty, and intense. To make up for the lack of onscreen penetration, the movie purposefully mistakes violence for a sexual act, having Querelle insert knives & bullets into the local citizenry as he gets increasingly greedy in his local, self-serving rise to power at everyone else’s expense. Not having read the novel, the character motivations & plot revelations can be confusing from scene to scene, but just like watching an opera in a foreign language, the overall emotion & eroticism of the piece shines through the fog. Querelle is a primarily visual piece, with Fassbinder bathing the screen in intense washes of orange & blue gel lighting and accentuating the dreamlike quality of the setting by mixing jazz-age speakeasy iconography with 80s-specific props like video game arcades. From Derek Jarman to Todd Haynes to Amanda Kramer, there’s no shortage of sensory comparison points in approximating the film’s visual aesthetic, but by the end I could only see it as the evolutionary link between James Bidgood’s Pink Naricssus & Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys — an unholy trinity of operatic male lust & violence refracted through cinematic artifice.

Both Querelle & High Heels are titles I’ve been meaning to see for years, but I dragged my feet on clearing them from my watchlist due to streaming inaccessibility and the cost of collecting physical media. As has been frequently happening lately, my procrastination was rewarded by local theatrical showings of these historically underrepresented queer classics, something I never would have dreamed possible just a few years ago. Now that Pride Month is over, Halloween Season programming is months away, and Gap Tooth is officially on their Summer Break, that overwhelming flood of once-in-a-lifetime repertory screenings is likely to dry up over the coming weeks, but I’m still feeling incredibly spoiled by what was recently on offer just a few short bus stops away from my house. New Orleans still doesn’t have nearly the breadth of repertory programming as larger cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or even Austin, but the work that’s being done on the few screens we do have within city limits has been getting exponentially more impressive & adventurous in recent years. The offerings at The Broad alone are worthy of local pride.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #242: Sinners (2025) & New Releases

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Welcome to Episode #242 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2025, starting with Ryan Coogler’s Southern-fried vampire musical Sinners.

00:00 Welcome

01:37 Mike Flanagan
03:04 Disclosure (1994)
04:50 Brokeback Mountain (2005)
09:53 Smiley Face (2007)
13:15 A Room with a View (1985)
17:01 High Heels (1991)
21:07 Querelle (1982)

25:12 Sinners (2025)
45:04 Companion (2025)
57:57 The Actor (2025)
1:08:58 Dead Talents Society (2025)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Gwen and the Book of Sand (1985)

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Gwen et le livre de sable (Gwen and the Book of Sand) is a 1985 animated feature directed by Jean-François Laguionie, with its illustrations and animations done in gouache, giving the whole film a very watercolor texture. The plot concerns Gwen, a teenage girl who is adopted into a nomadic tribe who live in a post-apocalyptic desert. One member of the tribe, Roseline, is identified as a witch, and is said to be over 170 years old, and it is through her we get what little knowledge we have of this world and how it came to be. She tells us that the gods destroyed the civilizations of the past, and that now the world is stalked by an Eldritch abomination called Makou, which periodically roams the desert and spews out reproductions of various household objects from the sky, usually of a gigantic variety. Of course, Roseline also believes that the walled city she and her people avoid and from which the Makou seems to originate is the afterlife and that those within it are spirits, but when we learn more about them later, it becomes clear that Roseline’s wisdom is incomplete and thus many of her concepts of the universe’s function are inaccurate. In Gwen, Roseline sees a girl who has never known fear and respects this about her, but when Gwen and Roseline’s grandson Nokmoon sneak out one night to make love and fall asleep in a giant chest of drawers, Nokmoon ends up taken by the Makou. As the rest of the tribe moves on, Roseline and Nokmoon journey to the “afterlife” to try and rescue him. 

This film, like The Tragedy of Man, is currently available in a remastered edition from boutique home video retailer Deaf Crocodile. I got to see it on the big screen at my local arthouse, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Although the motion of the animation is limited at times, that minimal movement lends the whole thing a storybook quality, rendering Gwen as a post-apocalyptic fairytale. It’s a fairly short feature, clocking in at under 70 minutes, but it feels no less fully realized than a film that was twice its length. The desert features fantastical creatures that feel like revisitations of earlier French animation experiments in design; there’s nothing as strange here as what you might see in La Planète sauvage or Les Maîtres du temps, but they are of a kind. The desert nomads live solely off of a diet of feathers harvested from a mutant ostrich, and the only light that they have at night comes from a bioluminescent scorpion. Where the film gets its most surreal visual elements is in the “gifts” of the Makou, as giant watering cans reign from the sky and Gwen and Roseline navigate a labyrinth of doors or summit a mountain range of clocks. We eventually learn that these items are generated by the Makou is response to religious supplication from the people who dwell within the walled city, where religion has dissolved into a unified cargo cult centered around the titular book of sand, which is in actuality a home goods catalogue from before the collapse of civilization. Their hymns consist of recitations of product descriptions, which then prompt the Makou into creating them. The leaders of this “faith” are two twin brothers who observe the captive Nokmoon’s psychically projected dreams and hope that this can help them to prompt the Makou to create something “alive” rather than the inanimate objects that it normally produces. 

The mechanics of all of this are mostly irrelevant. The world-building exists solely to allow for the visuals, and that’s where the film shines. Gwen is able to rescue Nokmoon because this is that kind of fable, and it’s mostly an accident. The twin priests observe that a spiral image in Nokmoon’s dream resembles the product image of a particular firework, and prompt their faithful throng into singing it into existence via the Makou, which backfires when the people below are terrified by the suddenly bright, loud heavens. Gwen’s presence in the climax has no real bearing on the events there, except that she is able to bring Nokmoon home. She knows a bit more about the world now than Roseline does, but she lets the old woman continue to believe as she always has. Even if that story is a little confusing for the audience (and there are certainly some things left up to interpretation and conjecture, which is why I would recommend watching this one with a friend), it’s the sumptuous use of a non-standard artistic technique that makes this one worth finding and checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wolf (1994)

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Wolf is an oddity. I went on a little bit of a werewolf movie sidequest earlier this year viewing The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Wolfen, and when I borrowed the latter from the library, I thought Mike Nichols’s Wolf was what I was getting. I have very strong memories of the evocative movie poster for this one in at least one of the video stores of my youth, and I’ve always been curious about it. How can you not have some curiosity about a werewolf flick helmed by the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two years before he made The Birdcage? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and James Spader, no less. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly noteworthy one either, which is likely why it gets mistaken for Wolfen. 

Will Randall (Nicholson) is the editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house, although he’s a relatively mild-mannered man—at least as mild-mannered as any Nicholson character can be—for someone of such prestige. He has a loving relationship with his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and the respect of his peers and subordinates (David Hyde Pierce, Eileen Atkins), as well as a strong affection for his protege Stewart (James Spader). While driving down a Vermont road one evening, he hits a large dark mammal with his car, and when he gets out to check on it, the beast bites him. Despite his doctor’s insistence that wolves are extinct in New England, Will is convinced that this is what bit him. At a party hosted by the owner of the company, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will is told that a new editor-in-chief has been appointed, and that Will can either transfer to an undesirable position manning the publisher’s office in Eastern Europe. Will immediately realizes that his “best friend” Stewart has stabbed him in the back, and he meets Alden’s daughter Laura (Pfeiffer) as he wanders the grounds, taking in the betrayal. Meanwhile, Will also starts to experience unusual physical changes, as the area around his wound sprouts long fur and his senses grow more enhanced, as he is able to smell tequila on the breath of a colleague, doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t need his glasses to read, and can hear conversations occurring in other parts of the office. Returning home one night, he smells something familiar on his wife’s clothing and confronts Stewart at the younger man’s front door before bounding up the stairs and animalistically and discovering his wife in Stewart’s bedroom, but not before snarling at (and perhaps biting) Stewart. 

It’s a pretty rote werewolf story, all things considered, and one that would have entered a market that was already saturated with American Werewolves, Teen Wolves, and Howlings. The script was co-written by Wesley Strick and, bizarrely, poet and essayist James Harrison. It is not based on Harrison’s novel Wolf: A False Memoir as one might suspect, and Harrison seems to have been involved initially simply because he and Nicholson were friends. This was Harrison’s second (and last) attempt at working in Hollywood, as he quit the film in exasperation over creative differences with Nichols. “I wanted Dionysian, but he wanted Apollonian,” he was quoted as saying (in literature, Dionysian attributes are those of intoxication and thus ecstasy, emotion, and disorder, while Appolonian attributes are logical, clear, and harmonious). That makes a certain amount of sense, but in the same interview, he then said, “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua,” which is less clear as a complaint. Strick, for his part, had risen to some prominence as the co-screenwriter of horror comedy Arachnophobia and had recently penned the script for the similarly messy 1991 Martin Scorsese picture Cape Fear as well as uncredited rewrites on Batman Returns. After 1997s underrated Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, his credits take a steep nosedive, as his credits include the much-maligned 2005 video game adaptation Doom, the ill-fated and poorly conceived 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and the 2014 rotten erotic thriller The Loft. I want to say that some of the weakness was already present in the script here, but it’s really impossible to tell what parts came from him and which were from Harrison, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Elaine May was brought in for some uncredited punch-ups (although the fact that Wolf is two full hours long and meanders in the middle shows her fingerprints if nothing else). 

Pfeiffer is excellent here as she always is, and it is interesting to see Nicholson play a more subdued character than he is normally known for. Spader is effective as the smarmy sycophant who turns out to be aiming for Will’s job (and bed), and it’s no surprise when he turns up late in the film undergoing his own lycanthrope transformation, although I couldn’t help but think about how much I would have enjoyed this film a little bit more if it had been Christian Slater in the role. The film’s supporting cast is quite good. Although Pierce gets very little to do, Eileen Atkins does very solid work as Will’s secretary. Richard Jenkins appears as the detective investigating the sudden death of Will’s wife Charlotte, and he’s paired with veteran TV actor Brian Markinson. Perhaps one of the biggest standouts is Om Puri, who appears as Dr. Vijay Alezais, the folklore specialist that Will tracks down in order to get a handle on all the changes that his body is going through. Alezais tells him that it’s less a transformation than it is a kind of possession, and that the wolf that now lives inside him isn’t evil, but will only make him “more” of whatever he currently is. He even gives Will an amulet that will keep the beast inside, and it does seem to be working until the moment that Will must remove it in order to gain the wolf-strength needed to save Laura from Stewart. 

There’s simply nothing special about Wolf. If anything, it’s pretty rote. A perfectly serviceable mid-90s cable afternoon feature, but no staggeringly clever take on any of its component elements. Pfeiffer is serving looks in this one that are so 1994 Eddie Bauer coded that you’ll get something out of this if that’s of interest to you. There’s a lot of slow-motion werewolf leaping that gives the impression that Nichols has never seen a single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, because all that’s missing is that bionic sound effect to complete the tableau, and I’m afraid that’s not complimentary. The film does make good use of the Bradbury Building, most notable for being the place where the climax of Blade Runner takes place but I also recently saw in D.O.A., and it’s always a comfort to the eye to see it in use. Still, it’s telling that I’m closing out this review of a werewolf review by praising the architecture. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cape Fear (1991)

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As the final moments of Cape Fear came to a close with a zoom-in on Juliette Lewis’s eyes and a half-heartedly delivered epilogue about how she and her family never spoke about what happened with Max Cady with one another, I turned to my viewing companion and asked, “Wait, was this a bad movie?” to which he replied “I think it might have been.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

It came up months ago in a discussion about Goodfellas in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Nowhere, but I have a pretty big Martin Scorsese gap in my film knowledge. Until this year, I thought I had seen only one of his films, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (which was discussed in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Richard III), although further review of his filmography revealed that I had also seen two movies that I didn’t realize were his: the concert film The Last Waltz and Shutter Island, neither of which I initially connect to him because, in the case of the former, it’s not very much like his primary body of work, and in the case of the latter, it wasn’t a very good movie. Since then, I’ve also seen Casino (discussed in our Junk Head episode) and Taxi Driver (discussed in our Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie episode), and now we can add Cape Fear to the list, although I had kind of already seen it given that it forms the basis of the Simpsons episode “Cape Feare,” which I would conservatively estimate that I have seen one hundred times. 

A remake of the 1962 film directed by J. Lee Thompson starring Gregory Peck as a lawyer stalked and harassed by a recently released felon played by Robert Mitchum, Scorsese’s Cape Fear casts Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden, a former Atlanta public defender now living in North Carolina. His wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) is a graphic designer and their daughter Danielle (Lewis) is a high school student whom they have enrolled in summer school to punish her for smoking pot. Bowden is also carrying on an emotional (but not physical—yet) affair with a county clerk employee named Lori (Ileana Douglas). It isn’t his flirtation with infidelity that turns his life upside down, however, but the release of Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a man Sam dismissively refers to as a “Pentecostal hillbilly,” the scion of a family of snake-handling whom Sam unsuccessfully defended against a charge of aggravated rape of a sixteen-year-old girl. During the trial, Sam followed his personal ethics while simultaneously committing dereliction of his duty as Cady’s appointed advocate by burying evidence that Cady’s victim was characterized as “promiscuous,” which would have allowed Cady to argue down to a lesser sentence. Sam assumed that this would never come to light since Cady was illiterate, but in the fourteen years that he spent in prison, Cady has not only learned to read but has studied philosophy, theology, and the law. Using his new knowledge, Cady sets about tormenting the Bowden family while always remaining just within the allowance of legal statutes and using Sam’s defensiveness and hot temper against him by goading him into starting altercations. When Cady assaults Lori after taking her home from a bar because he knows that she, with her knowledge of how her sexual and personal history will be dragged out in front of a courtroom full of her co-workers, will refuse to press charges, things take a turn for the violent, and things get worse for the Bowdens and their allies from there. 

It’s impossible to talk about this film in 2025 without taking it into consideration with the indelible pop cultural impression that its Simpsons adaptation left on the greater consciousness. “Marge on the Lam” will never be more famous than Thelma & Louise; “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(d’oh)cious” will never be better remembered than Mary Poppins; and “Rosebud” will never touch the widespread cultural importance of Citizen Kane. But Cape Fear? It may be less famous than “Cape Feare.” It doesn’t hurt that it’s widely considered one of the series’ best episodes, usually appearing in various top ten lists, and it’s a personal favorite of mine. When it comes to Sideshow Bob episodes, I think that I would give the edge to “Sideshow Bob Roberts” by just a hair because of that installment’s biting political edge, but “Cape Feare” is the funniest by a wide margin. Even if you’re someone who’s never seen the show, the omnipresence of memes that originate from it mean that it’s given us some of the longest lasting Simpsons jokes and images, like Homer’s extreme stupidity rendering him unable to respond to the name of his witness protection identity, Homer’s frightening offer of brownies and brandishing of a chainsaw on the “Thompson” family’s houseboat, and, of course, Bob and the rakes. It’s with this in mind that I offer the possibility that this movie was not intended to be as comedic as I found it, which contributed to a feeling of overall tonal whiplash and inconsistency that made it a strange text to interact with. That, combined with some experimental filmmaking choices that range from the interesting to the absurd, make for a film that is overall less than the sum of its parts. 

Despite the main conflict of the film happening between Nolte’s Sam and De Niro’s Cady, the most powerful scenes in this film are those that feature the film’s talented roster of actresses acting against one of them. Cady’s semi-seduction of Danielle by calling her the night before summer school starts to pose as her new drama teacher and direct her to the theatre in the film’s basement for “class” the next day, where he preys upon the fifteen-year-old’s desire to be treated more maturely, is skin-crawling, and Lewis plays Danielle perfectly in this scene —  disturbed but intrigued, flattered in spite of herself, and frighteningly naive. Lange gets two big scenes. While her big monologue in the finale, in which she attempts to redirect Cady’s imminent sexual violence against Danielle back onto herself by flattering him and lying about an emotional connection, is quite good, it’s the earlier scene in which she accuses Sam of sleeping with Lori after hearing him sounding overly concerned on the phone that is her powerhouse moment. She’s a tornado of fury, and it’s fantastic to witness. In Ileana Douglas’s penultimate scene, Sam comes to her in the hospital after Cady has beaten and sexually assaulted her, and we get our first glimpse of just how dangerous and vile a man Cady is; Lori has been brutalized. Douglas gives what may be a career-best performance delivering a harrowing monologue about what it’s like to be a woman who’s witnessed the justice system act as a secondary violating entity in the way that it forces the events to be revisited and picked over, examined and re-examined and cross-examined, and how often justice fails to be served in spite of all of it. 

It’s a gut-punch of a scene (genuinely the film’s greatest), one that’s immediately followed by one in which the furious Sam demands takes his anger out verbally upon sympathetic police lieutenant Elgart (Robert Mitchum, who previously portrayed Cady in 1962), who ends the scene with the uproariously funny line “Well, pardon me all over the place.” He’s not the only returning actor from the earlier film to appear in a scene that borders on camp in tone, either, as Peck portrays Lee Heller, an attorney that Cady engages to file a restraining order against Sam when Sam’s private investigator Kersek (Joe Don Baker) hires some goons to rough Cady up, in which Cady manages to get the upper hand. Heller appears in court wearing a suit that’s several sizes too big for him while Peck affects a Southern accent, to the effect that he feels like he’s a simple hyper chicken from a backwoods asteroid costumed by David Byrne. Cady himself is an interesting case, as De Niro plays him as a truly terrifying man, driven and determined and focused, with nothing but hatred and revenge in his heart. On the other hand, Cady is a clownish figure, dressing in garish clothing of various bold prints (notably, Cady also continues to wear bellbottoms in several scenes, which would have been the style at the time that he was sentenced in 1977), and his menace is undercut by some of De Niro’s choices to go a little “broad.” Or am I just too Simpsons-pilled? Do I read the scene in which a severely dirtied Cady detaches himself from the bottom of the Bowden’s Jeep Cherokee after they’ve driven out to Cape Fear as campy and funny because I’ve seen Sideshow Bob do it countless times? Am I not supposed to be laughing when Cady finally dies, being dragged beneath the surging waters of Cape Fear when he starts speaking in tongues before singing a hymn about the River Jordan? It feels like I shouldn’t be given that mere moments before this Leigh and Danielle were in harrowing sexual danger, but I also can’t imagine that the film could expect me to take Cady’s dying glossolalia seriously either. “Cape Feare” is in such a rhetorical conversation with Cape Fear that it’s essentially paratext, so I have to consider that I’m biased not to take the film’s drama seriously, but I also don’t think that the shadow of “Cape Feare” is entirely to blame for a Cape Fear’s tonal failings either. 

One of the things that is most praiseworthy in the film is the moral dilemma that it posits. Sam unequivocally betrayed his oath and broke the law by suppressing evidence that would have reduced Cady’s sentence; there’s no argument about that. But Cady had already bragged to him about beating two previous aggravated sexual assault charges and when Sam witnessed the extent of his brutality toward his teenaged victim, he made what is a reasonable moral and ethical choice to ensure that Cady could not continue his reign of terror. Justice failed, and justice was served. This is ultimately what Cady discovered and what set him off on his violent revenge campaign, and it turns out that Sam did it all in vain, anyway. Cady insists he would have served the seven years he would have gotten with his reduced charges and considered it just, but by the time he had spent that amount of time incarcerated, he had already murdered another inmate and made it look like an accident. This open secret meant that the parole board never even considered his early release. If Sam hadn’t hidden the “exonerating” evidence, Cady would still have served the same amount of time. Violence simply begets; that’s its nature. If the film had spent a little bit more time on this topic, I think it might have been able to pull these disparate threads together, but it never really comes to the forefront. As it is, this one is composed of some great elements, but they don’t work together. You can’t take it as seriously as it sometimes demands because it’s a little too campy in certain places, but you can’t take it as a fully straightforward campy thriller-comedy not because it’s often too frightening but because the omnipresent threat of sexual violence makes it too dark to comfortably enjoy on that level. Less worthy as a whole than the combined value of its individual parts.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Meet Maigret

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Literary police detective Jules Maigret was featured in at least 75 mystery novels published from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Maigret series was such an immediate hit that the fictional detective was adapted to cinema starting in the first year of publication, and he’s such an enduring literary icon that he’s still being portrayed in prestige television series, most recently by Gerard Depardieu. There’s a statue erected in his honor in the Netherlands where the first Maigret novel was written, despite his fictional & cultural home base being Paris, France. Personally, I’ve never heard of the guy. Considering the near-century of continued circulation & celebration, I have to assume that Maigret is as popular of a literary figure as fellow mystery-novel icons Sam Spade, Philip Marlow, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot. However, the first time I ever saw his name in print was on the covers of used DVDs at a local Goodwill, where I recently picked up two 1950s adaptations of famous Maigret novels directed by Jean Delannoy. The completionist in me would normally be intimidated by a new movie-watching project like this, since getting the full scope of Maigret’s cinematic output would mean watching a half-dozen actors portray the character across at least a dozen films. I’m not doing all that. Delannoy only directed two of those Maigret features, though, and they both starred Jean Gabin in the titular role. That’s about as manageable of a crash course as possible for such a prolific film subject.

Unsurprisingly, Delannoy & Gabin’s Maigret collaborations aren’t especially interested in introducing new audiences to the already-long famous character. They are both self-contained mysteries that presume audience familiarity with the titular detective, the same way a modern adaptation of The Hounds of Baskervilles wouldn’t feel the need to explain the basic character traits of Sherlock Holmes. So, 1958’s Maigret Sets a Trap is not especially helpful as an introduction to Maigret’s whole deal, but its central murder mystery is shocking & compelling enough for that not to matter. If anything, Jules Maigret is protective of his identity, hiding his personal feelings behind a mask of strait-laced, middle-aged machismo, with Jean Gabin playing the detective as the French equivalent of George C. Scott. As buttoned-up & conservative as Maigret can be, however, the crimes he’s tasked to solve are shockingly salacious. In this first outing, he must scheme to trap a serial “killer of sluts,” a psychosexual freak who’s been stabbing anonymous women in Parisian alleyways as punishment for the alleged sins of their gender. As soon as the audience meets the killer halfway through the film, his guilt is obvious, shifting the “whodunnit” structure into a “whydunnit” story instead, with Maigret boiling to an angry intensity as he hammers the suspect during interrogation into a full confession. The remaining mystery is in discovering his motivation and accomplice, untangling an unseemly tale of cuckoldry, impotence, and homosexual repression covered up by his doting mother & frustrated wife. The shadowy alleyways and mood-setting jazz of the early killings promise the genre trappings of a 1950s noir, but the details of the case eventually lead to Maigret Sets a Trap operating as a French precursor to Psycho & Peeping Tom. Maigret may not have the expressive charisma of a Sam Spade or a Norman Bates, but he does walk the streets of their shared sordid world.

In Delannoy & Gabin’s second Maigret outing, the detective becomes a little more personable to the audience through some nostalgic soul-searching. 1959’s Maigret and the Saint Fiacre Case sends him back to the rural hometown he left as a teenager to pursue a law enforcement career in the big city. There, he fails to protect the heiress of the local estate who was his first boyhood crush, and must spend the rest of the film solving her murder after it’s committed before his very eyes. At this point, it’s still difficult to fully understand what makes Maigret special detective after getting to know him over two films, but he can at least be narrowed down to a few scattered attributes: middle-aged, pipe smoker, mostly quiet but shouts during interrogations, detests ninnies & “dilettantes”, etc. This second case is much more of a traditional whodunnit than the first, with a wide field of nervous, effeminate weirdos serving as possible suspects for the overly severe brute to expose. Will the killer be the countess’s playboy heir, the gigolo art critic, the sexually repressed priest, or the pipsqueak bank teller who rides into town on a Vespa scooter? I found the field of suspects to be a clearly distinguished type but the exact guilty party to be entirely unpredictable. In a way, their contrast against the more traditional, stoic masculinity of the detective on the case is the greater crime that must be solved, which opens up this duo of films to a range of strangely reactionary sexual politics. At the very least, it seems like the appeal of these Maigret stories is partly that the mysteries he gets wrapped up in are way more salacious & distinctive than the detective solving them. He’d much rather be at home having a cup of coffee with his adoring housewife than getting his hands dirty with the effete riff raff of modern urban life, but duty calls, and it calls often.

As soon as its opening credits sequence, Maigret Sets a Trap nails down the iconography of Maigret’s detective work. Maigret is introduced through the silhouette of his signature pipe, casting a massive shadow over a map of Paris – an image that is violently interrupted by the stab of a dagger onto the city streets. That visual stylishness continues throughout the picture, with Dellanoy constantly moving the camera to capture every inch of the mise-en-scène and even experimenting with some 1st-person POV cinematography while navigating Parisian alleyways. The details of the case get surprisingly gruesome for a mainstream 50s production too, with frank depictions of rape, bloodshed, and male sex work upending standards & expectations set by Hays Code-inhibited Hollywood productions of the era. for In contrast, The Saint Fiarce Case is much more generic detective-novel fodder, with only occasional excursions to modern strip clubs & printing presses breaking up what’s essentially a by-the-books Old Dark House story. It’s most interesting as an attempt to pick at the personal backstory & hang-ups of a character who’s protective of his privacy even to his audience, whereas Sets a Trap stands on its own as a great film regardless of its connections to other Maigret tales. Jean Gabin was so celebrated for his portrayal of the character that he was later invited to return to the role in 1963’s Maigret Sees Red, well after Jean Delannoy had moved on to direct other projects. Personally, I didn’t get to know Maigret well enough over these two films to be on the hook for his continued adventures unless, like Maigret Sets a Trap, the mysteries he’s tasked to solve in them sound especially shocking or prurient. It would take another chance meeting at the second-hand shop to spend more time with the detective, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever fully get to know the man behind the pipe.

-Brandon Ledet

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

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One of my most distinct moviegoing memories from my childhood was seeing the post-Scream teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer with my parents opening weekend. As an exclusive new track from my then-favorite band played over the end credits (“Proud,” by KoЯn), I was in 12-year-old nü-metal brat heaven, beaming in delight. That’s when my father leaned over and whispered in a firm, disappointed tone, “You never get to pick the movie again.” Three decades later, I’m older now than my father’s age was then, and I totally get it. This mildly violent teenage melodrama must be torturously tedious for any adult outside its very narrow target demographic (gloomy Millennials who were 12—and exactly 12—years old in 1997). In retrospect, I can’t believe that I dragged my parents to see it in a theater, regardless of how giddy it made me personally. Even more so, I can’t believe that some poor parent my age now is about to suffer the same fate via legacyquel. Must we forever be tormented by the sins of our mall-goth past? Can’t the world finally forgive & forget what we did that summer? Will there ever be peace in the suburbs?

All of your favorite late-90s teen stars are here: Sarah Michelle Gellar as a small-town beauty queen, Ryan Phillipe as her spoiled fuckboy sweetheart, Freddie Prinze Jr. as the townie interloper who’s desperate to earn his way into his friend group’s tax bracket, and Jennifer Love Hewitt as the only normal, well-adjusted youngster among them. The four bright young things get into trouble one night after partying on the beach outside their small fishing village, when they accidentally strike & kill a pedestrian crossing a dimly lit road and dump his body into a nearby bay to avoid hassle from the law. A year later, this act of semi-voluntary manslaughter haunts all four of the now-estranged kids involved, derailing their professional & educational ambitions as they quietly stew in the isolation of their own guilt & grief. The haunting becomes a lot more literal when a mysterious killer dressed in a fisherman slicker starts picking them off one by one via fish hook, seemingly avenging their hit-and-run victim from beyond the grave. If you’ve seen any formulaic teen slasher, you’ve seen it all before (doubly so if you’ve seen 1985’s The Mutilator); you just haven’t seen it performed by this era-specific cast.

I Know What You Did Last Summer splits the difference between an 80s teen slasher & a 50s road-to-ruin PSA about the perils of reckless driving, updated with a totally 90s cast & an astonishingly shitty 90s soundtrack (including, among other atrocities, covers of “Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative and “Hey Bulldog” by Toad the Wet Sprocket). It’s a little too squeamish about bloodshed to be an effective horror film, slaying most of its victims offscreen and keeping their corpses on ice like freshly caught fish so they don’t stink up the place. It is relatively compelling as an afterschool melodrama, however, with the two main girls’ increasingly grim home lives leading to a few memorable scenes that outperform the undead fisherman’s kills. Its lack of slasher-genre ingenuity is a little surprising given that the screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson one year after he penned the meta-horror hit Scream, which is much smarter about reshaping & reexamining the slasher formula from new angles. His trademark post-modernism enters the frame in an early scene where the teens in peril share campfire stories of the urban legend about a killer with a hook for a hand before suffering an updated version of it in real life, but the same idea was pushed much further in the next year’s Urban Legend, leaving this one effectively moot.

It’s easy to point out the ways in which I Know What You Did Last Summer falls short of 90s slasher greatness, but it’s by no means the worst of Kevin Williamson’s post-Scream teen horror scripts (that would be Teaching Mrs. Tingle). If nothing else, its coastal fishing village on the 4th of July setting affords it some occasional distinguishing novelty, not least of all in the multiple parade sequences featuring gigantic paper mâché fish on wheels. Thanks to Williamson’s previous commercial triumph, it was also made in a time when these teen bodycount movies were produced with robust Hollywood budgets behind them, so director Jim Gillespie (of Venom “fame”) gets to make frequent use of swooping crane shots to liven up the dialogue-heavy melodrama. Still, of all the 90s properties to continually get serialized & rebooted, it makes no sense that something this generic is still being kept alive as Horror Icon IP instead of, say, the more stylish & memorable Williamson-penned classic The Faculty. I pity the poor parents whose pre-teens are going to drag them to the theater for the latest legacyquel addition to the I Know What You Did franchise this summer because they have a crush on one of its famous-only-to-children stars. It’s a tradition that’s gone on for far too long, dragging on since the long-gone days of Soul Asylum, Our Lady Peace, and KoЯn.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Paul Bartel’s entertainment-industry satire Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989).

00:00 Welcome

01:40 Spies (1928)
07:00 Buffalo ’66 (1998)
13:33 A Woman’s Torment (1977)
18:52 The Dinner Game (1988)
23:13 Maigret Sets a Trap (1958)
29:47 The Lodger (1927)
34:35 28 Weeks Later (2007)
40:00 28 Years Later (2025)
52:36 Materialists (2025)
58:30 Cape Fear (1991)
1:06:25 Wolf (1994)
1:13:00 Gwen and the Book of Sand (1985)

1:17:00 Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Dinner Game (1988)

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The English-language remake is enough of a modern anomaly that I can only name a few casualties in recent memory: Speak No Evil, Force Majeure, Let the Right One In – each softened & diluted from their European source material to appeal to mainstream audiences in the US. There surely have been meetings to put festival darlings like Anatomy of a Fall, Parasite, and Toni Erdmann through that dumbing-down process, but thankfully the practice of sparing American audiences from complex themes and the burden of reading subtitles has mostly dried up, so none of those projects got off the ground. I do not wish to participate in any nostalgia for the glory days of the English-language remake, but I will admit they’re not all bad. A recent screening of The Birdcage‘s source text La Cage aux Folles at New Orleans French Film Fest had me picking apart the ways that the American version tweaked the original’s template to greater comedic success, if not only through the strength of its performances. Likewise, I spent much of my time watching La Cage aux Folles screenwriter Francis Verber’s single-location farce The Dinner Game imagining how well it would have translated across cultural lines for multi-language remakes. It’s the first time in my life I can remember wanting to see an English-language remake of a European film instead of finding the concept repugnant. One Wikipedia search later, I discovered that not only had The Dinner Game already been remade in America, but I saw that remake when it came out, and it was predictably bland, like the majority of films given that treatment.

The titular dinner game is a cruel ritual in which a group of bourgeois assholes compete to see who can bring the biggest “idiot” to the table as an unsuspecting guest, a perverse hobby the business-prick sickos perform every Wednesday night. They target lonely men with esoteric hobbies like collecting boomerangs or antique ladles, while not recognizing that their own hobby of collecting “idiots” is equally dorky. In France, the film’s title Le Dîner de Cons translates literally to “Dinner for Idiots”. In America, it was remade as Dinner for Schmucks. There are two glaring reasons why I did not recognize the premise from my one-time viewing of Dinner for Schmucks over a decade ago: 1. Outside the opening credits sequence that details the titular schmuck’s mockable hobby (Steve Carell, taxidermist), there’s absolutely nothing memorable about it, and 2. It diluted & reshaped the French source material so much that their resemblance is effectively obliterated. The American version of The Dinner Game feels compelled to deliver on the promise of the premise, making sure that a significant chunk of the narrative action takes place during the dinner. In the original, however, dinner is never served, and the maddening ways in which the “World Champion Idiot” constantly derails the plot’s progression towards that dinner are almost Buñuelian in their absurdity (recalling, specifically, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise). It’s like a stage play where the audience is not allowed to escape Act 1, while the upper-class assholes are cosmically tortured for their crimes against the droll hobbyists of the world.

Jacques Villeret stars as a milquetoast tax auditor who staves off loneliness by making models of famous architecture using only matchsticks & glue. The square-jawed Thierry Lhermitte is excited to show off this breathtaking discovery of “idiocy” to his social circle of cads, but he never arrives to dinner with his World Champion Idiot in tow. Instead, Villeret unwittingly, systematically ruins Lermitte’s entire life one asset at a time – dissolving his marriage, driving his mistress to suicidal ideation, subjecting him to investigation for tax fraud, and effectively crippling him by tweaking his spasmatic back. None of these effects are the result of malicious intent, and most are achieved through mishandled phone calls made from Lermitte’s apartment. Alternating between the giddiness of a small child and the dead-eyed stare of a walking corpse, all the sweetheart imbecile Villeret can do is apologize by admitting, “I goofed,” after each social catastrophe. The audience is always on the pure-hearted idiot’s side, however, and any downfalls suffered by his straight-man victim register as just desserts for participating in the cruel ritual of the title. The fact that Villeret manages to make Lermitte’s plans backfire spectacularly before the game even starts is itself part of the cosmic torture. It’s a universally funny premise that translates well enough across cultural divides that every country could’ve staged its own Birdcage-style remake without deviating from the original script, each featuring its own National Champion Idiot: Roberto Benigni in Italy, Rowan Atkinson in the UK, Chris Farley in the US, etc. Instead, it got diluted & reshaped into Dinner for Schmucks, decades too late and mangled beyond recognition. Oh well. 

-Brandon Ledet

Buffalo ’66 (1998)

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There was a brief time a couple decades or so ago when Vincent Gallo was an exciting creative voice. I was recently reminded of this when visiting the independent theater Cine Tonalá in Mexico City, which prominently displays a framed poster of his directorial debut Buffalo ’66 in the lobby. It’s still a beautiful object that conveys a kind of in-the-know, independent-cinema cool, and it was worth framing to preserve the layer eye-catching glitter in its title text (which reads more as television static in the 2D version I’m more familiar with). The young, mysterious Vincent Gallo who made Buffalo ’66 and Brown Bunny is long-dead, though, having since been replaced by a grimy right-wing demon who lashes out at anyone who dares to question his all-knowing, all-powerful genius. Audiences no longer have to wonder how Gallo channeled such a putrid, self-centered asshole of a character as the lead of his own 1998 debut. The remaining wonder of the film is that Gallo does seem to be fully, demonstrably aware of how unpleasant he is to be around. He starts Buffalo ’66 being released from jail into the winter snow, with no loved ones meeting him at the gate. Unable to impress his parents with a genuine girlfriend, he kidnaps a teenager at gunpoint and forces her to play house to make himself appear loveable. He then spends the rest of the film working up the courage to settle a one-sided vendetta with a single act of violence he doesn’t have the stomach for. He’s deeply, thoroughly uncool – a total loser.

Vincent Gallo put a lot of himself into the depressive loserdom Buffalo ’66, which is something he’d go on to brag about to the press. Every chance he gets, he takes sole credit for everything about the picture that earns positive critical feedback, downplaying all contributions from his creative collaborators. The teenage Christina Ricci gives an incredibly bratty, disaffected performance as Gallo’s kidnap victim, modeling a babydoll grunge dress & tap shoes combo that affords the movie most of its late-90s cool. According to Gallo, she was more of a “puppet” than an actor, with him operating her every move on camera as the omnipotent puppet master. Similarly, he’s taken sole credit for all the creative work in the screenplay, describing his credited co-writer Alison Bagnall as a glorified “typist.” He doesn’t just take credit away from women, though. He’s also claimed ownership of every creative choice in the cinematography, firing industry legend Dick Pope early in the production and replacing him with Lance Acord, whom Gallo describes as a hired “button pusher.” That by no means covers the full scope of “difficulties” Gallo had with his cast & crew (his public feud with a nearly-unrecognizable Anjelica Huston, playing his mother, is even more storied), but it does cover the three factors that make the movie stand out as remarkably great, each apparently attributable to Vincent Gallo’s singular genius in a world full of lifeless automatons that he has to manage in order to see his vision through. Poor guy.

The first time I saw Buffalo ’66, I was around the age & temperament of Christina Ricci’s character in the movie, by which I mean I was a gloomy teenage grump. She’s the only character who fully falls for Gallo’s bullshit, fawning over him as “the sweetest guy in the world, and the most handsome” while his more jaded & faded friends & family resent his lingering presence as if he were a pestering ghost. I was similarly smitten with Gallo’s artistic vision at that age, finding Buffalo ’66‘s unpredictable camera angles and segmented picture-in-picture frames to be an exciting new spin on the lone-wolf crime genre. Revisiting the film a couple decades later, the relentless, exhausting rhythm of Gallo’s dialogue fits right in with the general overwritten machismo of the post-Tarantino cokehead 90s, and you have to squint a little harder to pick up on its one-of-a-kind novelty. Undoubtedly, the movie still looks cool, approximating the same Polaroid-in-motion aesthetic achieved in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” music video. The dialogue purposefully undercuts that cool at every turn, though, with Gallo’s explosively violent reaction to every minor setback in his go-nowhere missions to impress his parents and settle an old football betting vendetta making him look like the squirmiest of little worms. When I was a teenager, I understood this to be a cool movie for cool people; now I understand it to be a slickly-produced character study of a terminally uncool dipshit.

As relentlessly gabby as Gallo’s antihero is in Buffalo ’66, his self-edited cut of the trailer features no dialogue or moving images. It’s just a series of stills conveying how cool the movie looks as a collection of working-class-fringe aesthetics while avoiding how grating of a personality Gallo himself plays at the center. It’s the same smartly observed marketing approached that inspired the glitter on the poster, promising a kind of indie-cinema glamour that willfully ignores the rotten core just beneath that layer of glimmer. At no point in the film does any of this petty-bully characterization feel at all unintentional. Gallo seems to know exactly how queasily pathetic he’s coming across on camera, which only makes it odder that he seems unaware of how that small-minded narcissism is coming across behind the camera. Maybe his dwindling opportunities to follow through on the promise of Buffalo ’66 & Brown Bunny have cleared that up over the years as he’s burned professional bridge after bridge (at one point even getting into vicious public feuds with his critics, most infamously Roger Ebert). I don’t know that letting him out of director’s jail would do any good at this point, though. His late-90s moment is long gone, and now he’s just a pestering indie-cinema ghost haunting vintage posters & Goodwill DVD shelves.

-Brandon Ledet