Author: swampflix

The Not-So-New 52: The Dark Knight Returns (2012, 2013)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

In this very special double-sized issue of The Not-So-New 52, we will be covering not one but two films (after a fashion). Even though it’s Marvel that’s better known for their double-sized special editions, I won’t let the fact that Warner Premiere released their adaptation of Frank Miller’s seminal 1986 work The Dark Knight Returns in two separate parts keep me from reviewing them together. Combined, they make up a run time of just about two-and-a-half hours, which is the length of a real movie and is shorter than any live action Batman movie has been since 2005, so let’s get to it.

The Dark Knight Returns is probably one of the best known stories in the Batman canon, right? It, alongside Watchmen, basically shattered the paradigm of comic books as a medium in the late 1980s, ushering in (for better and for worse) a whole new era of comics, one designed with a more mature reader in mind. For some, this meant more adult storytelling; for others, this meant more grounded, realistic stories; for still others, this meant more tits, guns, and swearing, none of which are bad things in their own right, but which were not used creatively. The comic version of Returns can be considered a bit of an original sin with regards to creating expectations of maturity in the medium that instead ushered in an era characterized by a lack of subtlety, artistically meritless storytelling, and so, so, so many pockets—more than anyone could ever want or need. But Returns can’t be blamed for that, since other than a few poorly aged elements (as in Year One, Frank Miller’s depiction of Selena is once again as a sex worker, although she’s graduated to madame in her old age), there’s nothing that stands out. It was groundbreaking in its time and for good reason. Even reading it today, it’s hard not to be impressed with the unconventional use of the medium, from the way that political talking heads are presented in little boxes that capture the not-quite-square edges of a cathode ray tube TV, the way that simultaneous action is depicted not from simple panel-to-panel cutaways but in the way that a splash page might be boxed in by a series of smaller squares and errant dialogue boxes. Its place in the canon is well-deserved, and while I understand the critical backlash when it’s viewed through the lens of its (il)legacy, I see this for the landmark that it is. 

This is the story of an aged Bruce Wayne, forced out of retirement just as Jim Gordon is forced into it, back on the prowl after watching his city fall into disrepair and dystopia under the Reagan administration (an element that the film keeps intact, making a product of its time into a period piece). As more innocent civilians fall victim to the ever-expanding gang calling themselves The Mutants, Bruce once again dons the cowl in order to fight the rising tide of crime in Gotham. Along the way, he finds himself aided by Carrie Kelly, a teenage tomboy who christens herself the new Robin and refuses to be left out of things. Unfortunately, although the wounds of the past may scar and heal, they can also run deep. The supposedly reformed Harvey Dent, now having undergone extensive reconstruction of the side of his face that scarred him and made him Two-Face, is unable to avoid the temptations of recidivism and his own alter ego, while the Joker, catatonic (and thus harmless) for decades, awakens out of his waking sleep as soon as his nemesis returns to public attention. 

This ends Part 1 of the films, while Part 2 spends some time with the long-delayed final dance between Batman and Joker, which ends in a way that brings down the wrath of Gotham’s new commissioner, Ellen Yindel, who wants Batman brought down, dead or alive. Outside of the context of all of this, there’s Cold War shenanigans afoot, which finally intersects with our main story when the Gipper starts a nuclear war with the USSR via conflict with the fictional nation of Corto Maltese. Superman, reduced to little more than an errand boy for the White House, manages to divert the missiles that are bound for the US, but only just, and the resultant EMP blast causes chaos in Gotham. Through the respect that he commands from the Mutants gang—some of whom have already rechristened themselves “Sons of Batman” following his hard-won defeat of the Mutant leader—he conscripts them to help get people out of harm’s way in the forms of various fires and other disasters. In one memorable image, the shadow of an airplane that is falling out of the sky grows larger as people scream in terror below. And in the midst of all of this, Reagan sends Superman in to “handle” his old friend.

Frank Miller, who wrote both Year One and The Dark Knight Rises in a short period of time in the back half of the 1980s, is a polarizing figure, and there are elements of his political … “eccentricities” all over the original work and, as a result of being a pretty faithful adaptation, this film. Don’t be confused by the fact that Reagan is presented as a bumbling fool playing dice with the so-called free world in the name of his ego and the corporations that own him; this is a story that deeply reflects the right-wing views of its creator. It’s tricky, because Miller’s oeuvre often reflects a staunch anti-authoritarian bent, insofar as he depicts all politicians as either puppets or puppeteers, all police (other than Jim Gordon) as rotten and violent, and all authority as inherently corrupt. On the other hand, his heroes are usually somewhere on a narrow spectrum between the Randian hero (individualistic, suited to his life through intelligence and aptitude, characterized by moral fortitude — at least in the eyes of the author) and the Great Man Theory (that great leaders, like Batman and Jim Gordon, are born with the instinct to lead when the need for them to emerge is greatest, and that history is founded upon the acts of such men); the latter of these two is a pillar of fascism, and the former could charitably be called fascism-curious. Miller’s Batman is the libertarian Batman, for better or for worse, but in a way that feels so quaint that it’s almost comforting in its simplicity in comparison to whatever the fuck is happening today. 

So, yeah, Reagan is the overarching villain of this piece, but not because of any of the reasons that he was in real life (scratch just about any social problem in our country and Reagan bleeds), but because his cowboy aw-shucks approach to international conflict wrote a check that his ass couldn’t cash. All the other targets of ridicule are strawman sock puppets through whom Miller can verbalize a reductive caricature of bleeding hearts who get their comeuppance, always painfully and frequently fatally; they espouse the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to getting gassed to death. Carrie Kelley’s parents are burnouts too stoned to notice that their teenage daughter isn’t in her room at night, let alone that she’s become the protege of the local vigilante that they consider a fascist (a bit of pre-emptive mocking of any reader who might have the same criticism). All mainstream media TV anchors (other than Lana Lang) are empty-headed, spineless gigglepusses spouting glib puns while delivering devastating, life-changing news. A man-on-the-street interview features one man praising Batman’s defeat of the Mutant leader and expressing that he hopes the Dark Knight takes out the landlords next, and we’re supposed to disagree with him. The (then) newer, gentler approach to psychiatric treatment is painted as an elaborate pantomime of rendering individual responsibility irrelevant through the construction of a narrative of victimhood, which is a reactionary position to a reductive view of some mental health. 

The last of these is personified in Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, a fame-seeking psychiatrist who also identifies Batman as a “fascist vigilante,” and who first gains attention in the narrative as the doctor treating Harvey Dent. Wolper’s argument is that all of the rogues gallery of Gotham are all victims of Batman, you see, acting out horrific crimes because the Batman is so menacing that he creates his own villains. After three years of rehabilitation and extensive reconstructive surgery that restores him to his pre-Two-Face face, Wolper is successful in getting Dent paroled, only for Dent to disappear within hours and return to his old habits immediately, with his mantra of “both sides match” given a darker meaning as we see that he hallucinates himself as fully scarred now. Despite this clear error in judgment, when Joker is inspired out of his withdrawal from the world, Wolper is given the opportunity to treat him as well, and once again advocates for the release of a dangerous murderer. The irony, of course, is that Wolper is actually right this time, as the narrative makes it clear that Joker truly had no will to live without a
Batman to face, and he probably would have remained in his catatonia until he died of old age if Bruce hadn’t been forced to take up the cowl again and wake him up out of his stupor. Any kudos we could give Wolper for his insight here is immediately irrelevant, as he is the Joker’s first victim almost immediately, getting his throat slit live on television while on a thinly veiled late night show (in the original comic, the host is “Dave Endocrine” and clearly modeled on Letterman, while in the film he’s just a generic brunet voiced by the actual Conan O’Brien). 

This is a fundamentally conservative work in many ways, but more than that, it’s reactionary. The media, the peace movement, psychiatry as whole: it’s all quackery in Miller’s eyes and is therefore the same under his pen. In this most recent viewing, my second, I was struck by some of the similarities to a semi-contemporary work that we had recently discussed on the podcast, Tightrope, which was also right-of-center in its relationship with 80s urban crime. Even if you’ve never really identified it as such, you know the kind of thing that I’m talking about when you see it. Everything’s always grimy, the city is a place where it’s not safe to go out at night or in the day, as upstanding citizens are in constant mortal danger at the hands of violent addicts and remorseless sociopaths, and the only thing standing between life and death for the next victim is a morally gray cop who’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. It bears a lot in common with Returns, down to the Reagan cameo (in Tightrope, this is in the form of a papier-mâché head of the Gipp in a parade float storage facility). Returns takes place in a similarly dangerous locale, but with a societal order whose edges are more frayed and a greater sense of hopelessness, but it’s impossible to separate it from its regressive elements; that man on the street who wanted Batman to take care of landlords that I mentioned a few paragraphs back? In Miller’s original text, it’s homosexuals that he hopes Batman eradicates with violence. Even when the words are changed, that spirit of bone-deep right-wing meanness permeates everything. 

But the fact of the matter is this: The Dark Knight Returns is a great narrative. Truly one of the best. All through the first half of the story, I kept thinking about how it’s impossible to really translate the way that the comic used its form as part of its storytelling device into a feature for the screen, and grousing about the things that I didn’t like about it. Some of the 80s slang that the Mutants and Carrie use is like, totally radical, so razor, utterly fetch, but sounds artificial when actually spoken aloud instead of read on the page, and the casting of Ariel Winter (of Modern Family fame) as Carrie was also dissonant to me in a way that was distracting. But once the meat of the story gets going, it takes off and doesn’t stop, and I was won over by it. Peter Weller endows the aged Wayne with so much pathos that it’s impossible not to be moved by it, which feels silly to say about one of these little direct to video products, but there’s a great attention to detail here that’s worth the time, even if it’s twice what’s normal for one of these. It’s not perfect, but it’s so damn good that you forgive it for its shortcomings. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Azrael (2024)

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Do you think becoming known as a scream queen is a blessing or a curse?  Both?  Australian actress Samara Weaving is only a household name among horror nerds, but she’s been a must-see performer for that tattoos-and-black-t-shirts contingent since she starred in Ready or Not & The Babysitter a half-decade ago.  Watching her latest star vehicle Azrael at Overlook Film Festival this weekend, I wondered whether her career was stalling there rather than starting.  Watching Weaving go on another one-woman revenge mission that soaks her gorgeous face & blonde hair in buckets of her enemies’ blood & viscera made me question how satisfying it is for her as an actor to return to the exact same beats that have already made her horror-convention-famous.  It’s likely comforting to know she can always fall back on consistent paychecks by starring gimmicky, gory horror flicks, but she shows just enough talent in them that you have to wonder why no one is sending her scripts for anything else (give or take a metatextual gag in Babylon that jokes about her striking resemblance to Margot Robbie).

At least Azrael offers Weaving an acting challenge to maintain her scream queen status in a role where she’s technically not allowed to scream at all.  Set in an apocalyptic future where Rapture cults have renounced the sin of Speech (whatever that means), Weaving’s mute protagonist attempts to live a quiet, domestic life in the woods outside society with her doting romantic partner.  The nearby cult has other ideas, kidnapping those lovers with plans to feed them to the charred-flesh Rapture zombies who hunt left-behind humans whenever the wind blows the wrong way.  There are vague gestures towards explaining the mythology behind this convoluted set up, mostly spelled out in the cult’s crude finger paintings and in the rhythmic breathing rituals that summon the woodland demons.  However, writer Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest, Blair Witch) has said in interviews that the idea for the film came to him in a recurring dream, so let’s just assume you’re supposed to feel it more than understand it.  It’s all just background dressing for an adorable Samara Weaving to descend into hideous, cathartic violence, something she’s now proven she can do credibly while not uttering a sound. Next time, she’ll do it with her eyes closed, and then backwards in heels.

Between this film, last year’s No One Will Save You, and the ongoing Quiet Place series, it appears horror filmmakers are now actively combating the second-screen viewing habits of the streaming era, stubbornly making sure the audience watching along at home has to put down their phones to fully follow the plot.  Azrael director E.L. Katz doesn’t bring much new to the table within that burgeoning Hey Pay Attention horror subgenre, except maybe in the extremity of the scene-to-scene violence (something he already proved cruel enough to deliver in the pitch-black comedy Cheap Thrills).  Elderly and pregnant women are vulnerable targets; Weaving’s final showdown with the evil cult leader is a machete vs. meat cleaver fight; and the camera is always willing to linger on the painful aftermath of a fresh wound.  Still, there’s nothing especially novel about the doomsday-survival cult setting or the burn-victim zombies who lurk at its edges.  The movie’s main hook is for horror nerds who want to watch Weaving go through it one more time in their own perverse cult ritual.  Admittedly, I am one of those nerds, but I’m still hopeful that she’ll soon break free from our captivity.

-Brandon Ledet

Arcadian (2024)

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Like most hopeless, depraved movie nerds, I’ll watch pretty much anything with Nicolas Cage in it, since he’s a reliably entertaining performer no mattery the quality of the project signing that week’s paycheck.  That means I’ve seen a lot of mediocre DTV action movies over the years, often ones where Cage’s prominence on the poster is outright dishonest about his prominence in the picture advertised.  I had somehow deluded myself into believing this slumming-it phase of Cage’s career was coming to a close, though, since recent projects like Mandy, Pig, and Dream Scenario were starting to reveal a light at the end of that particular sewer tunnel.  Cage’s latest made-for-streaming action horror Arcadian—which locally premiered at Overlook Film Festival last weekend—was a reality check on that delusion.  Between its post-apocalyptic setting, its grim-grey lighting, and Nicolas Cage dutifully showing up just along enough to earn a sizeable payment to the IRS, Arcadian feels as if it’s about five to ten years behind the times, even when it’s trying its hardest to show you something new.

Cage stars as a single, grieving father who moves his surviving family to remote farmland at the start of The Apocalypse.  His twin boys get increasingly difficult to manage when they age into teenage grumps, which makes it even more difficult to survive the nightly attacks of the mutant creatures who ended modern civilization in the first place.  Since there is no shortage of reference points for this kind of doomsday prepper action-horror, Arcadian doesn’t put much effort into explaining the details of the world Cage & his boys are fighting to survive.  Whether it’s the artsy abstraction of It Comes at Night or the weekly soap opera of The Walking Dead, you’ve seen this exact setup before.  What you haven’t seen is the peculiar biological details of these exact monsters: hairy ostrich-wolves who clap their jaws like chattering-teeth novelty toys and travel as a pack in a rolling Ferris wheel formation.  There’s plenty of intrigue there for anyone drawn in by Cage’s name & face on the poster, which does a lot to make up for him spending half of the runtime offscreen, comatose.  When he suddenly perks up for the climactic fight against the impossible wolf-beasts, you can practically see him flipping on his It Factor movie star presence like a light switch.  It’s only a few seconds of screentime, but it’s exactly what you paid to see.

Arcadian is decently entertaining for a Shudder-brand creature feature, by which I mean its monsters’ design is inventive & upsetting enough to hold your attention despite the banality of their surroundings.  Director Benjamin Brewer’s most prominent IMDb credit to date is as the lead visual effects artist for Everything Everywhere All at Once, which shows here in the ambition & absurdity of the wolf-beasts’ hideous biology.  The dark, muddled color palette and handheld cinematography style are more befitting of a war drama than a creature feature, but again it’s worth pushing through that tedium to get a better look at the monsters.  And hey, there’s still making popular, big-budget Quiet Place sequels long after that series has maintained any purpose or novelty, so I can’t say this film is entirely out of date.  Brewer leveraged Cage’s image on a poster and piggybacked off a familiar mainstream horror template to show off his prowess for inventive, impressive visual effects.  I can’t be mad at that kind of Roger Corman marketing hustle, especially since Cage has lent this likeness to far, far worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Cuckoo (2024)

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Tilman Singer has quickly become the most exciting new voice in cosmic horror.  His debut feature Luz started as a film school thesis project but was so strangely, psychically powerful that it broke out into wide release as one of the very best films of 2019 (according to me, anyway).  I watched Luz as a quietly buzzy horror curio that reached my living room via VOD rental, and I was blown away by the volatile imbalance between its cosmic-scale ambitions and its dirt-cheap budget.  His follow-up sophomore feature Cuckoo arrived in New Orleans with much louder fanfare.  Backed by Neon’s hip-cred marketing machine and starring one of the few non-influencer celebrities that teens care about (Hunter Schafer, of Euphoria fame), Cuckoo is a much hotter ticket than Luz was just a few years ago.  Its recent local premiere at Overlook Film Fest was packed to the walls with horror-hungry eyeballs, and although the enthusiasm in the room sounded mixed, anyone familiar with Luz knew exactly what kind of a surreal mindfuck we were in for.  Cuckoo escalates the verbal psychedelia of Luz to something more traditionally thrilling, hopping genres from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintaining the same screenwriting ambitions of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools.

Hunter Schafer stars as a grieving teen who joins her estranged, emotionally distant, German father’s new family after her mother’s death.  That new, uneasy family unit moves into a seasonally unoccupied resort in the Alps so the father & stepmother can work for the site’s enigmatic owner, played by a cartoonishly evil Dan Stevens.  Of course, the resort doubles as a mad scientist laboratory for Stevens’s Dr. Caligari-style medical experiments, which somehow involve strange shrieking sounds in the woods outside the cabins and the strange woman who makes them.  The movie explains exactly what’s going on in due time, but it’s the kind of explanation that only further twists your brain in knots with every new detail.  What’s important is that Singer effectively squeezes unnerving scares out of simple, straightforward methods, somehow crafting one of modern cinema’s creepiest cryptids by dressing one of his actresses in a trench coat, wig, and sunglasses.  I suppose it’s also important that Schafer’s teen brattiness is what ultimately saves the day, since her resolve to drown out the world with comically large, loud headphones until she’s old enough to move out on her own is exactly what protects her from the wigged cryptid’s aural violence.  She also eventually learns how to love at least one member of her new family, but it’s a perilous road getting there, one with many pitstops on hospital beds.

Cuckoo slowly builds its own unique mythology instead of leaning on traditional creature-feature or mad scientist payoffs.  It’s an impressive mix of sly humor & unnerving psychedelia, one that gets genuinely nightmarish in its forced pregnancy threats but also allows Dan Stevens to goof off with an exaggerated German accent & a magical flute, as if he were a recurring SNL character instead of a villainous fascist.  It’s a great theatrical experience, less so for its visual eccentricities (which mostly amount to time-loop editing & a vibrating frame) than for its aural ones (constant shrieks & gunshots that are best heard loud). I get the sense that all the central collaborators are getting away with something here.  Schafer recently said in a GQ interview that she’s no longer interested in playing roles that center her transgender identity, and this movie doesn’t care about that at all; it just cares how cool she looks wielding a butterfly knife: very.  Stevens also gets plenty of room to go big as an absolute maniac, something it feels like he hasn’t gotten to do on this scale since The Guest a full decade ago.  Then there’s Singer, who’s now found a much bigger canvas and a much bigger audience for his cosmic horror oddities.  I hope his work continues to escalate this way, since he has a lot of potential to become one of the all-time greats in the genre, if not only in his power to bewilder.

-Brandon Ledet

Riddle of Fire (2024)

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It’s going to sound like an insult to immediately focus on its background details, but the low-budget kids’ adventure Riddle of Fire has some of the best set decoration artistry I’ve seen in any modern picture not directed by Wes Anderson.  A large portion of the film is set in the woods, which comes with its own ready-made production value, but the interiors of characters’ living spaces are intensely, wonderfully over-curated.  Whether cataloging a curio cabinet of one witchy mother’s taxidermy projects & Pagan relics or scanning over another, normier mother’s sickbed full of used tissues & plastic medicine bottles, the adult world at the outskirts of Riddle of Fire is crammed with tactile visual information.  It’s a fascinating collection of weird little talismans and the weird little dirtbags who cherish them, conjuring up childhood memories of a time when mundane objects held immense power.  It’s the feeling of bringing home a vintage t-shirt, a futuristic video game, a cool-looking rock; it’s magic practiced through obsessive, personal collection.

This practical magic of collecting just the right assemblage of seemingly mundane objects is central to the text.  The story is set in modern, suburban Wyoming, but it’s structured as a fairy tale quest to acquire a specific list of impossible-to-secure items, achieving legendary hero status once complete.  A small gang of children shoot paintballs & ride dirt bikes around their unimpressive suburb without much outside attention.  Their petty crime spree escalates when they steal a futuristic video game counsel from a poorly guarded warehouse, and they plan to waste away what’s left of their summer eating snacks and smashing controller buttons on the couch.  Only, their mother figure has locked the TV with a parental control to ensure they’ll spend some quality time outside.  They convince her to hand over the password if they bring home a blueberry pie to ease her flu symptoms, which leads them to doing a similar favor for the local baker, then seeking out a speckled egg to bake the pie recipe themselves, and so on.  The list of items gradually leads them astray to the point where they go to war with a Cottage Core death cult in the woods outside town, shooting paintballs at violent felons who pack real guns with real bullets – all in a fairy tale video game quest to bake an epic blueberry pie.

There’s an understated but over-verbalized magic to this film, which is mined for low-key absurdist humor.  The central trio of neighborhood brats announce themselves as The Three Immortal Reptiles, distinguished by the taxidermized reptile feet they wear on novelty necklaces as gang insignia.  When they make unlikely friends with the adult gang’s young daughter figure, she’s announced as Petal Hollyhock, The Princess of the Enchanted Blade, not simply as Petal.  The forest outside town is located at the edge of Faery Castle Mountain, described in-dialogue as “a wolf land of magic & dreams.”  Everything in the script is overly verbose in this way, so that when the kids collect a creepy babydoll to aid in their quest it is consistently described as “a rather chilling, ghastly doll” with no variation.  It’s like watching the rascals from The Florida Project get dropped off on the shores of Roan Inish, with their dialogue getting stuck somewhere between those two worlds.  Between its artful collection of strange objects and the shot-on-film textures of its visual aesthetic, there’s something familiarly magical in every frame of Riddle of Fire, and the dialogue underlines that magic every chance it gets.  Whether the humor of its dissonance between old-world magic and mundane modernity hits you in the right way is all personal bias, but you can’t deny that the magic is right there on the screen; the movie never lets you forget it.

-Brandon Ledet

Immaculate (2024)

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There’s an emerging form of mainstream horror movie that appears to be generic & mediocre for most of its runtime, then springs a bonkers third act on its audience that retroactively makes it a Must-See Event Film through last-minute chutzpah.  Let’s call it Grower-Not-Shower Horror, a genre that’s typified by titles like Malignant, The Boy, Orphan, Barbarian, The Empty Man, etc.  Let’s also throw the recent Sydney Sweeney vehicle Immaculate on that list, as it’s a seemingly typical, unremarkable horror film set at a spooky convent that eventually becomes uniquely, explosively entertaining through the sheer audacity of its conclusion.  It may be the least remarkable of the Grower-Not-Shower titles that I’ve listed, but it’s still bonkers enough in its third-act resolution to make the cut, and that accomplishment is entirely owed to Sweeney’s performance.

In the story’s grim-grey, mediocre beginnings, Sweeney arrives at the remote Italian convent Our Lady of Sorrows mumbling like a socially inept teenager, totally unsure of herself.  There’s a plug-and-play spooky atmosphere to any Catholic setting in a horror film, as The Church is essentially just a well-funded cult with a bottomless supply of haunted fetish objects – in this case particularly obsessing over a rusty nail said to have been pried from Jesus’s cross.  All of the conspiratorial whispering, jump-scare nightmares, and crucifix-shaped blood stains that rattle Sweeney in the early stretch could just as easily have been recycled footage from the Conjuring spin-off The Nun without anyone really taking notice.  It isn’t until she starts fighting back against the Catholic cult in the back half that the movie comes alive.  That’s when her performance finally kicks into the melodramatic overdrive of Cassie from Season 2 of Euphoria, rather than recalling the sleepwalking-for-a-paycheck mumblings of her more recent role in Madame Web.

As the setting & title indicate, this is the story of an “immaculate” conception of child, meaning Sweeney’s nun-in-training unexpectedly finds herself a pregnant virgin.  The religious superiors around her declare the pregnancy a miracle, but both the reluctant mother and the genre-savvy audience immediately know better.  Segmented into three Trimester chapter breaks, the rest of the movie from there is all about the lengths she must go to escape her convent-prison before she gives birth to the antichrist abomination that’s been planted inside her body.  It’s in the third trimester where the movie earns the audience’s attention, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the particular events or character details that are saved for that gruesome finale.  Mostly, it’s just surprising how far Sweeney is willing to push her craft into extreme, bloody mania – reaching for a cathartically violent release for all of the ready-made, cookie-cutter tension of the first couple chapters.

There’s been some quibbling debate about whether Immaculate should be classified as nunsploitation, given that it does not lean into the seedier, sexier hallmarks of the subgenre.  There’s enough communal bathing & intimate touching between the nuns to at least count as acknowledgement of the subgenre’s sexploitative past, but it does appear to be much more interested in the bodily violation of unwanted pregnancy than it is interested in the bodily sacrilege of lesbian sex behind convent walls.  In a way, that topic is a perfect metatextual fit for Sweeney, whose body has been a constant, baffling source of culture-war discourse in recent months.  It makes sense to me, then, that she believed enough in the project to ensure its completion as a producer, bringing in former collaborator Michael Mohan (The Voyeurs) to direct.  When the Catholic pregnancy cult refers to the poor nun’s body as “the perfect fertile vessel” it doesn’t sound any more unhinged than Conservative internet pundits firing off think pieces about the political significance of her large breasts.  It’s just that here she gets to violently fight back, with surprising gusto.

If I had to speculate about why Grower-Not-Shower Horror has become a popular narrative template for mainstream studios in recent years, it’s that they’re afraid of losing audiences in the opening act.  There’s no reason why Malignant could not have been a nonstop bonkers action horror from start to end in throwback Hong Kong filmmaking tradition, except that it would’ve immediately lost the audience who were looking for more typical horror payoffs.  By pretending to be a much more normal, forgettable horror for most of its runtime, it holds onto its respectability just long enough to hook a wide audience, and then it’s allowed to let loose what’s actually on its mind.  Immaculate likewise gets by as a generic Catholic-setting horror for as long as possible before it unleashes Sweeney to seek bloody catharsis against the men who treat her like breeding cattle.  Personally, I’d rather watch a movie that feels unrestrained from start to end, but Showers-Not-Growers are much harder to come by these days, so I’ll take what I can get.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

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The current run of American Godzilla movies so badly, nakedly want what Marvel Studios had in its Avengers era that they’re often referred to as The MonsterVerse, named of course after the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We’re now at a point where the MCU’s glory days are quickly fading in the rearview, but the Marvelification of Godzilla has just been completed.  After a few standalone stylistic experiments that mired Godzilla in grim-grey CGI drudgery and drafted his longtime frenemy King Kong into the Vietnam War, the two towering kaiju have been teamed up by their own Avengers Initiative in a couple dumb-fun action blockbusters designed to sell some opening-weekend popcorn and to tease the next popcorn-seller down the line, whenever another one inevitably arrives.  2021’s Godzilla vs Kong at least maintained some of the colorful cartoon spectacle of classic kaiju battles like 1963’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, arriving as a much-needed return to grand-scale filmmaking in those early years of COVID precautions.  In their second shared title, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, that classic Toho spirit has instead been completely replaced by the quippy, zippy action comedy of a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  Immensely talented actors Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, and Brian Tyree Henry stand around spewing exposition and inane “Well, that just happened” punchlines while CGI gods fight to start or stop the apocalypse in the sky above.  1980s pop tunes loop continuously on old school tape decks as contrast to the rest of the film’s future tech (including a giant mechanical arm built to enhance King Kong’s already mighty super-strength).  All that’s missing, really, is a talking raccoon, but hey you gotta leave something on the table for the next one.

The New Empire is much more flattering as a King Kong sequel than it is as a Godzilla one, mostly because that series has so many fewer, lower points of comparison.  Godzilla currently has 38 films to his name, while Kong only has 12 – most of which are not tied to the 1933 original.  Within that lineage, The New Empire works best as a stealth remake of 1933’s rushed-to-market Son of Kong.  Most of the best scenes involve Kong taking a young, violent, childlike ape under his tutelage as a mentor.  In an early fight, Kong uses him as a weapon, beating back other, meaner apes with the bitey little bastard’s limp body.  Later, they fully team up as a makeshift father-son duo to take down a Richard III-style mad king and free the enslaved apes who live in the even hollower Earth beneath Kong’s Hollow Earth stomping grounds.  By contrast, Godzilla doesn’t get nearly as much to do.  He mostly just swims to an underwater gender clinic to charge up from blue to pink, emerges to join the fight against the mad king in the final act, and then takes an angry cat nap once everything calms down.  Other surprise kaiju combatants join the battle in the back half, but none are as surprising as the Mechagodzilla reveal in the previous picture.  Mostly, the monsters just follow the same patterns of CGI superheroics we’ve already seen countless times in the past decade, just scaled up to skyscraper size for a false sense of escalation.  Meanwhile, the humans on the ground hang out in CSI-style tech labs, narrating the action like WWE announcers.  Director Adam Wingard does his best to add some style & personality to the proceedings, flinging fluorescent goop at the non-existent camera’s “lens” every time a monster is defeated, but style & personality is mostly just window-dressing when it comes to this kind of four-quadrant blockbuster filmmaking.

If there’s any clear artistic path forward for the American Godzilla picture, it might be in more sincerely tackling the POV of the fictional Indigenous tribes who worship & manage the kaiju of Hollow Earth.  So far in the MonsterVerse, the Indigenous peoples associated with each creature have been exoticized with the same old-school Indiana Jones adventurism that’s persisted in both the King Kong & Godzilla series since their respective 1930s & 50s origins.  There’s an unexplored angle in telling a story from their perspective instead of framing it through outsiders’ eyes, an approach already forged by the recent Predator prequel Prey. Of course, despite including the word “new” in its title, The New Empire isn’t much interested in new ideas or in unexplored angles on old ones.  It’s content to repeat what’s worked previously for another easy payout, whether repeating the cartoonish CGI smash-em-ups of Godzilla vs Kong or repeating the crossover superhero team-ups of the Avengers films.  There isn’t much awe or novelty in that approach to sure-thing, big-budget filmmaking, but there is some joy to be found in its familiarity – however minor.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Superman vs. The Elite (2012)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons. 

It’s funny that Batman: Year One is the shortest of these films, faithfully adapting a brief four-issue comic run, while this follow-up is about ten minutes longer despite adapting a single issue, Action Comics #775, titled “What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice & the American Way?” But let’s back up a bit; remember when we talked about All Star Superman and I mentioned in passing that DC Comics had a habit not just of rebooting, but also of buying out other comic book companies and then grafting that company’s line up onto their own as a new universe in their big multiversal complex? We didn’t get into it at the time, but that wasn’t just a thing that they did back in the golden era, it’s something that they still do, or at least they were still doing up until the turn of the millennium. You see, discussion of Superman vs. the Elite requires a little bit of discussion about The Authority, a comic published by Wildstorm, shortly after DC’s acquisition of said organization, and buckle up, because this is a wild one – no pun intended. Jim Lee, already a widely beloved and known comic book artist, founded WildStorm in 1992 as one of the initial studios working under Image Comics, starting out with two Lee-drawn series, WildC.A.T.S. and Stormwatch (hence “WildStorm”). Stormwatch saw sales and interest stagnate as the nineties continued, and in 1997, Warren Ellis was brought on to helm the series’ second volume; he used this opportunity to inspect comics as a medium, and he slowly introduced a couple of his original characters to the series. 

First up was Jenny Sparks (intro’d in 1996 in issue #37 of the first volume of Stormwatch), an electrical lady (let’s leave it at that, if you’re a fan, you know, but let’s not drag this down or out), followed by Apollo and Midnighter in February 1998’s Stormwatch vol. 2 #4. These two are obvious pastiches of more famous heroes, with the sun god representing Superman and the violent vigilante standing in for Batma; and they’re a couple, although this isn’t confirmed for a few years. Now, going back to WildStorm for a minute, it’s worth noting that they didn’t just publish entries in their own little superhero universe, but they also licensed other properties like The X-Files, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th. So, uh, in August of 1998, virtually all of the characters not created by Ellis were killed off … by xenomorphs … in an intracompany one-shot entitled WildC.A.T.s/Aliens. This let Ellis pick his favorites and start a new team with them, so that’s good news for him, right? Except, sometime late that year, Lee sold WildStorm to DC Comics, with the deal going into effect in January of 1999. In yet another plot twist, however, DC still gave Ellis the go-ahead to proceed with the planned comic The Authority, which was headed by Jenny Sparks and featured Superman Apollo and Batman Midnighter, as well as Hawkgirl Swift and Doctor Fate the Doctor, alongside characters like The Engineer and Jack Hawksmoor, whose analogues are less straightforward. The first issue of The Authority hit the newsstands in May of 1999, and it was already clearly a different kind of comic — one in which the “heroes” weren’t afraid to kill their enemies, with the issue’s final pages showing panels of Midnighter breaking necks and Jack Hawksmoor punching a man in the face so hard that his head explodes. Then issue #2 starts with this image:

Or at least it does in the reprints. That was what I read, lo these many years ago, when a friend loaned me his trade paperbacks when I was a freshman in college, a half decade or so after these were originally published. I really enjoyed them at the time, although I remember them with the same sort of “I can’t believe I’ve never read something like this before” awe that I felt about some other things which, looking back, have aged terribly (Garth Ennis’s Preacher comes to mind). A quick review of the comics themselves on a few sites of ill repute alongside the publication information among a frighteningly high number of tabs that were created since I started writing this document tells me that what I liked mostly came from the Ellis era, while what left a bad taste in my mouth (like the character of Seth Cowie) came later, when the comic was handed off to Mark Millar. In general, The Authority was a book about, essentially, a team of empowered people who were willing not just to kill, but to murder. 

Which brings us back to Superman vs. The Elite. The film is based, as previously mentioned, on the Authority Elite, a new team of “heroes,” who appear on the scene shortly after a bit of a mixed PR issue for Superman (George Newbern). Supervillain Atomic Skull escapes from his imprisonment and goes on a rampage in Metropolis, killing dozens of people and causing the standard evil amount of property damage, before the Kryptonian arrives on the scene and apprehends the Skull, remanding him once again to the custody of the authorities (no relation). But the public isn’t fully satisfied by this resolution, as Supes finds himself questioned by several members of the populace about why he doesn’t just execute the Skull there on the spot, since he has the power to do so, and if he did, it would ensure that he won’t escape to do it again. Called to account for this before the UN, under the lead of Secretary Efrain Baxter (Henry Simmons), Superman is asked point blank, right at the nine-and-a-half minute mark: “Are you the Superman that the 21st Century needs?” Superman starts to give one of his speeches about how he isn’t an executioner, but he’s called away due to escalating tensions between the recurring fictional DC Middle Eastern nations of Bialya and Pokolistan. When he arrives on the scene, the Pokolistani military unleashes a new bio-weapon in the form of a big bug monster thing, that Superman fights for a bit before splitting in half; unfortunately, each half regenerates into its own separate entity, and Supes is assisted in putting them both down by the titular Elite, led by Manchester Black (Robin Atkin Downes). Afterwards, the starstruck neophyte heroes teleport away before they can embarrass themselves. 

People are excited by these new figures, at least initially. Unfortunately, after they work with Superman to save a high number of civilians from becoming casualties of terrorism, they set out to prove themselves to be the kind of heroes that “the world needs” for the modern world, including executing Atomic Skull in the street after another prison break and assassinating the leaders of Bialya and Pokolistan to end the conflict abroad. Kal-El, disquieted by the speed at which the citizenry turn on him and embrace superpowered beings dealing out summary executions, spends some time out of the public eye with Lois (Pauley Perrette), but is ultimately drawn back into the conflict and shows the world just how scary he can be without his unflinching adherence to his own moral code, killing the Elite one by one and forcing Manchester to watch and await his own murder . . . Until, of course, the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Superman has killed no one, and that all of this was a bit of pageantry to remind everyone that mercy is a virtue, especially in the face of an alien god. 

Writing this review has been a pain, to be honest. I got through that first batch of reviews for the first quarter of the year and told myself that I’d keep on powering through and keep my nice publication buffer in place, but this one was a real speed bump in that plan. The fact of that matter is that this one isn’t bad; it would be hard pressed to be less than decent given that the story on which it’s based is considered top tier. There was a solid year and a half (and three other movies) between All Star Superman and this one, which is sufficient time between releases (and expected viewings) for the immediate comparisons to one another to be less obvious, but when you watch them within a couple of weeks of one another, it becomes hard not to. I dislike the animation and character designs in this one quite a lot, with special attention to Manchester Black’s severely angular face and the exaggeration of Superman’s chin to the point of making his face pear shaped a lot of the time. Again, it’s not “bad” in any objective way like some of these that had extremely cheap looking character designs (Public Enemies comes to mind), but I’m not a fan. At other times, the action can look quite good, with Superman’s de-escalation of the Pokolistani and Bialyan conflict without the loss of life being a nice bit of fun, but it adds up to an experience that’s a little bit less than the sum of its parts. I think I would have liked this one a little more if we were further removed from All Star. Both of them are stories that examine the classic character through the lens of viewing him as a humble god living amongst mortals, more powerful than they but in awe of their potential; their shepherd, their servant, their steward … their Superman. But whereas the previous film does so by showing us an aloof omniscient being spending his last days making sure that his work will continue after his death, and in so doing creating a peaceful parable about choosing to be the best versions of ourselves, this one turns it back around on us and is about recognizing that might does not make right and that Superman (and perhaps, by extension, God)’s deification isn’t because of his omnipotence, but because of his mercifulness.

There’s a lot to really enjoy here, from the intentionally comedic (there’s an in-universe cartoon about Superman that features an even more kid-friendly version of the character) to the meaningful (Superman’s solemn crisis after his super-hearing causes him to overhear a child who has fallen under the sway of the Elite’s media influencer campaign to talk about how it would be “fun to kill,” even in a backyard game), to the heartfelt (the revelation that the note he left behind for Lois prior to his final showdown with the Elite saying simply “Believe, always believe”). I’m going to chalk it up to its proximity to All Star Superman as the reason that it failed to connect with me, even as I can admire parts of it. It probably works a lot better with a little breathing room. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Movie of the Month: A Place in the Sun (1951)

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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 Boomer and Brandon watch A Place in the Sun (1951).

Britnee: Based on Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy, George Stevens’s melodramatic noir masterpiece A Place in the Sun is one of my all-time favorite films. It’s overdramatic, shocking, gripping, and stars a young Elizabeth Taylor. That alone should convince anyone to watch it. Stevens won the Academy Award for Best Director for A Place in the Sun in 1951, and several years later in 1956, he won the award again for Giant (which also stars Elizabeth Taylor!). He treats his characters with such thoughtfulness and uses unique filmmaking techniques to drill through the layers of their humanity, drilling especially deep in this one.

George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) hitchhikes to California with the hopes of starting a career at his wealthy uncle’s factory. He’s working class and comes from a poor family, but he badly wants to be a part of the upper class. That’s American dream, isn’t it? He is given an entry-level job at the factory, where he hits it off with his co-worker, Alice Tripp (Shelley Winters). They become a couple but don’t make their relationship public because it’s against the rules for male and female factory workers to fraternize. Gradually, George starts to step out on Alice to get closer to Angela Vickers (Elizabeth Taylor), the daughter of another wealthy industrialist in town. He’s hypnotized not only by Angela’s beauty, but by the status that she and her family hold. Angela is drawn to George as well, and she begins to invite him to more social events with the upper crust of society. Alice becomes increasingly upset as George puts her on the backburner to attend numerous fancy gatherings, and her frustrations are elevated when she finds out she is pregnant with his child. After her attempt to have an abortion is unsuccessful (in a very scandalous scene), she begins to pressure him into marriage. At the same time, his romantic relationship with Angela is blossoming.

Angela invites George to spend Labor Day weekend at her family’s lake house, which he does after telling Alice the trip is for his career advancement. Poor sweet Alice opens the morning paper to find a front-page photo of George having the time of his life on a boat with Angela. She tracks him down and quickly arrives to the town where they’re vacationing. This is the part of the film where I yell “Hell yeah, Alice! Show him you’re not messing around!” Unfortunately, when George meets her in town, he realizes that he needs to get rid of Alice to move on to a life with Angela, and that’s when the film takes the turn into being more of a legal thriller than a melodrama.

I’m always impressed by how much I’m drawn to the humanity of each main character in this film: Alice, Angela, and George. I know that George is terrible, but I’m almost able see into his soul. All of his sadness, confusion, and internal struggle with his conscience is boldly laid bare by Clift’s performance and enhanced by Stevens’s intense camera close-ups. Brandon, did you have a similar experience with George’s character?

Brandon: For me, the most surprising aspect of George’s character is that he’s not especially violent or sociopathic by nature; he’s just desperate.  When compared to the most infamous rowboat killer of Old Hollywood—Gene Tierny’s heartless murderess in 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven—George ain’t all that bad.  He’s operating from a similar place of selfishness, but it’s more out of financial gloom than it is out of inhuman cruelty.  His humanity didn’t strike me as especially deep or complex, though – just realistic.  One of the reasons Angela is so drawn to George is that he’s so quiet & pensive, which she misinterprets as him being “complicated”.  Really, he’s just distracted by the walls closing in on his potential future as the husband of a wealthy heiress, dooming him instead to a life as the impoverished husband of a lowly factory worker.  The more streetwise Alice, on the other hand, sees right through his desperate social climber schemes, since she doesn’t view his troubled badboy persona through the same naively romantic lens that Angela does.  Her own downfall is also one of financial desperation, making this more of a story about the evils of money & class division than it is a story about the evils of personal moral failure.

No matter the motivations for George’s mistreatment of Alice, he still behaves like an absolute scoundrel and a coward.  At its heart, A Place in the Sun is an epic-scale fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor, often at the expense of less outwardly elegant women like Shelley Winters.  After all, Taylor was the most marriageable woman of all time, apparently lethally so.  As with most classic melodramas, I found the interior lives of the two main actresses far more compelling than their counterpart in the male lead.  Montgomery Clift plays an adequate prototype for a leather clad street-tough that would soon be perfected by the likes of Marlon Brando & James Dean, but I mostly found him useful as a point of contrast between Taylor & Winters.  Elizabeth Taylor is the more stunningly beautiful actor of the pair, and she would go on to become one of the most-imitated, most-well-paid, and most-gossiped-about stars of studio-system Hollywood.  Shelley Winters acts circles around Taylor in the picture, though, and her talents were mostly rewarded with a late-stage career resurgence as a psychobiddy freakshow in hagsploitation schlock like Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?  One was great at acting, while the other was great at being a movie star, and I find it fascinating how that difference is reflected in their characters here, so early in their respective careers.

Boomer, since this is ultimately a movie about callously comparing women against each other, what do you make of the difference between what Elizabeth Taylor & Shelley Winters bring to the screen in their competing roles as Alice & Angela?

Boomer: Looking back to the Wikipedia summary for this film, I’m immediately struck by the second sentence. From the top, it reads: “In 1950, George Eastman, the poor nephew of rich industrialist Charles Eastman, is offered an entry-level job at his uncle’s factory, where he begins dating co-worker Alice Tripp. Alice believes George’s Eastman name will bring her advantages” [emphasis added]. I don’t think that this is true, actually. If it was said explicitly, then I missed it, and if it’s not explicit, I think that’s more of an inference on the part of the composer of the plot description than something that’s implied in the narrative. If anything, Alice just seems like a lonely girl stuck in the kind of job that women in the 50s were supposed to do until a man married them and they could become housewives, but there are plenty of women around her who are older than she is, so there’s an implication that she worries she could end up an “old maid” like them. The implication that Alice is concerned with hitching herself to George for financial reasons is particularly unkind to her; her willingness to terminate her pregnancy (even if she can’t find a doctor to perform the operation) makes it clear that she’s not trying to entrap him with a child, and her declaration that she doesn’t care if they have to live in poverty as long as their together rings true.

On the other hand, Taylor brings a lightness to her character that’s lovely to behold, and I think that we’re supposed to be as entranced by her ethereality as George is. Her name implies an angelic nature not just in that she remains faithfully devoted to George until the end, but also that she’s a being that’s forever out of his reach and unable to be touched. But there’s also a naivety to her, and I can’t tell if that’s something that I’m projecting from the metatext, or something that’s really there. Before this, Shelley Winters was a huge sex symbol, and her dressing down to play dowdy Alice here was actually her playing against type, and that undisguisable beauty that lies beneath is impossible to completely conceal. Some quick research tells me that this was filmed from October of 1949 to March of 1950, which means that Clift and Winters were 29 during filming, and Taylor turned 18 during February, 1950. Although Winters still has a healthy vitality and youthful glow under all their attempts to frump her down a little, Clift very much looks older than his age, and far too old for the high school aged Taylor. To me, that discrepancy implies that there was never really a chance that this would work out – that Angela’s infatuation with George, while reciprocated, is not really as deep as Alice’s genuine love for him, and is more of a passing fancy and a fascination with someone outside of her privileged class than loving devotion. Then again … I’m keenly aware that I’m looking at this from a modern perspective and from within the horizon of my own experience, so maybe I’m no better than the person who crafted that implication that Alice was a gold-digger in the Wikipedia article. At least I’m admitting it’s my interpretation and not citing it as a fact! Ultimately, I think that the fact that Taylor brings the air of the ingenue to the role and Winters, by default having to play the supposedly less desirable option, is the perfect foil to her. Both of them deserve better than what they got, but it’s particularly hard to watch what happens to Alice. 

While we’re on the topic of Alice, I do want to note that one of my favorite things about this one was the way that the art direction was such a powerful contributor to the narrative, since that hasn’t been touched upon yet. In the scene in which George calls home to tell his mother about his promotion, there’s a giant sign above the men camped out in her mission house asking the reader how long it’s been since they’ve written their mother, just to underline the distance between George and his mother, and the lack of contact between them. 

Still later, when George is at home obsessing over Angela, a neon sign in the distance flashes her last name (presumably on some building that her father owns) in the distance, illustrating his preoccupation. 

It’s not subtle, but I do like it. One that was subtle, however, was that every time we saw Alice’s address, whether it be on a piece of mail or on the side of the building where she lived, we saw that she lives at 4433 ½. It’s just another way that she’s stuck in the margins, a place not really held for her but one where she has to find somewhere to try and dig in and make space for herself. Poor Alice. 

Lagniappe

Boomer: The dissolve transitions in this movie are amazing. There’s so much storytelling happening in the visuals alone in this movie; the superimposition of shot over shot to convey mood, a character’s internal thoughts, everything — truly solid filmmaking, even if the movie milks its melodrama a little hard. 

Britnee: The atmosphere of Alice’s room in the boarding house really stuck with me. All of the claustrophobic shots in that room are so haunting. Particularly the scenes with that big open window at night. It’s the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about A Place in the Sun. I really can’t explain why.

Brandon: To further highlight the difference between what I appreciated in Taylor vs Winters, I’d like to point out my favorite moments of their respective, separate screentime.  Taylor’s best moment is in an early scene when she first flirts with Clift at a party, modeling an incredible, white floral Edith Head gown that has been imitated just as often in the decades since as her iconic hairstyle.  Meanwhile, Winters’s best moment is in the subtle choreography of her own flirtation with Clift at a movie theater, signaling her availability to him solely through strategic shifts in her body language.  Both contributions are essential to what makes this movie so great, but they’re very different contributions.

Next month: Brandon presents Torch Song Trilogy (1988)

– The Swampflix Crew

Podcast #209: Moonstruck (1987) & Valley Girl (1983)

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Welcome to Episode #209 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee & Brandon return to Nic Cage’s heartthrob era by discussing two classic 1980s romcoms: Moonstruck & Valley Girl.

00:00 Welcome

04:48 A Handful of Dust (1988)
08:16 Lisa Frankenstein (2024)
10:15 Immaculate (2024)
15:00 The Telephone Book (1971)

19:32 Moonstruck (1987)
40:22 Valley Girl (1983)

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