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Cigarettes in Paradise

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How Many Cigarettes? is the dirtbag slacker equivalent of fellow movie-metric website Does the Dog Die?. Instead of measuring movies by their tally of potential trauma-triggers (such as gratuitous canine deaths), How Many Cigarettes? tallies the number of cigarettes smoked onscreen. If its characters rip enough cigs to reach a one-smoke-every-5-minutes runtime ratio, a movie automatically qualifies as “A Real Smoker Movie,” since its audience could conceivably chainsmoke throughout it without ever having to smoke alone. How Many Cigarettes? is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek project, one my friend Leigh started as an ex-smoker who still recognizes the allure of a cinematic cigarette and a life-pausing smoke break. The project is even more thorough than it is silly, though, capturing dozens of screengrabs each from hundreds of movies so people can get a quick glimpse of how many cigarettes are smoked in classics like Jurassic Park (7), GoodFellas (53), Mulholland Drive (7), and Casablanca (124!). As arbitrary as that metric may seem at first, it has forever altered how I watch movies. Once you start looking for cigarettes, it’s hard to stop. I remember sitting next to Leigh at a local screening of Almodóvar’s High Heels and had to ask if the pregnant woman smoking onscreeen counted as two cigarettes, since she was technically smoking for two. He seemed amused by the question, but my guess is that the hardline answer is it only counted as one cig. When you’re collecting raw data for “Real Smoker Movie” metrics, these distinctions really matter.

The How Many Cigarettes? project reached its natural zenith this week when Leigh presented a Gap Tooth screening of Aki Kaurismäki’s dead-eyed 1986 romcom Shadows in Paradise at The Broad. He introduced the film—Kaurismäki’s finest work, from what I’ve seen—as a core title in the Real Smoker Movie canon, citing it as the movie that first inspired him to start counting cigs in the first place. There are 71 cigarettes smoked in Shadows in Paradise, which is impressive for a film only 74 minutes in length. In the hand-illustrated zine he produced to accompany the screening, Leigh writes, “The number of cigarettes smoked here seems like a joke. Almost every scene has between 1 and 9 people smoking cigarettes.” He’s right. Once you start counting, the rate of cigarettes being lit from scene to scene becomes outright comical. Every single conversation is punctuated with the flick of a lighter, pulls on a filter, and the stamping of a cherry. And yet, it’s honestly something I didn’t notice the first time I watched the film back in 2021, alongside the other Kaurismäki classics The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, and The Other Side of Hope. Growing up in the 80s & 90s, chainsmoking just seemed like a normal, everyday part of adulthood, back when my dad would smoke entire packs of Marlboro Golds indoors, as if he were enjoying a snack or a soda. So, watching the despondent, lovelorn characters of Kaurismäki’s Helsinki chat over a constant procession of smoke breaks just felt natural to the movie’s time & place. Rewatching the movie through the How Many Cigarettes? filter, though, some of the cigarette-specific images do feel intentionally comical, like when Matti Pellonpää appears smoking while wearing sunglasses indoors, hiding his romantic heartbreak behind a costumey idea of vintage rock ‘n’ roll cool. The cigarettes are both artificial movie props and natural urban decor. They are essential to the movie’s mise-en-scène.

Something I did notice about Shadows in Paradise the first time I watched it was all the trash. There are enough standalone shots of wet garbage in the film to inspire a How Many Cigarettes? sister site that measures movies by their literal trashiness, per-pound. Pellonpää stars as a lonely garbage man who slowly, carefully sparks a romance with a jaded grocery store clerk, played by fellow Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen. In genre terms, it’s an awkwardly stilted romcom, delivered in a proto-Wes Anderson flat affect as the blue-collar pair gradually earn equal footing in each other’s esteem one smoke break at a time. From a broader view, it offers stray documentary glimpses into 1980 Finnish waste treatment processes, trailing Pellonpää from dumpster to dumpster as he hauls away endless heaps of trash. His social status as a garbage man directly plays into his dateability too, as his only viable romantic foil is a middle-manager yuppie dipshit who lords over a trendy clothing store. Outinen seems a little embarrassed to be dating a garbage collector, but it’s still instantly obvious that she won’t be able to make it last with the yuppie, because it’s impossible to picture her sharing a cigarette with him behind a grocery store dumpster. Pellonpää knows his way around an ashtray, though, and his social status as a trash-hauling beer guzzler can be adorable in its own way, once you get past the smell. There’s a pitch-black urban despair to Shadows in Paradise that echoes throughout Kaurismäki’s other works, but it’s mostly one of set dressing & social circumstance, as typified by its empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts. It’s ultimately a very sweet love story, though, a romcom that deals exclusively in deadpan whimsy.

If there’s anything direct Kaurismäki was attempting to signal to his audience through all of the onscreen trash & cigarettes, it’s that Shadows in Paradise is meant to be a love story for The People. He even went as far as to group it with The Match Factory Girl & Ariel as his official “Proletariat Trilogy.” It probably means something, for instance, that when Pellonpää & Outinen exit the film via cruise ship for a makeshift honeymoon, the vessel is decorated with the Communist hammer & sickle. Likewise, How Many Cigarettes? is a movie database for The People, decidedly unpretentious in its selections and open for collaboration with its patrons. Leigh has opened the database up for volunteer contributions, which you can find information about on the site’s About page. Even more generously, he has uploaded a printable copy of the “Every Cigarette Smoked in Aki Kaurismäki’s Shadows in Paradise” zine, which includes a brush-pen illustration of every cigarette smoked in the movie, along with a leaderboard of some Real Smoker Movie heavy-hitters like The Bikeriders (104), Road House (71), The French Dispatch (86), and Smithereens (37). Print yourself a copy and poke around the website the next time you’re bored on a smoke break or just looking for your next Movie Night selection, to be determined by one absurdly specific metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Nuclear Missed Connections

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Ross McElwee’s landmark 1985 documentary Sherman’s March is now back in circulation, pristinely restored and streaming VOD for anyone who’s already watched every episode of How To with John Wilson and is searching for their next softspoken doomsayer fix. At first glance, Sherman’s March appears to be wryly narcissistic, with McElwee spending nearly three hours overanalyzing his own trivial romantic foibles instead of directly tackling the historical topic he was granted money to document. It’s not so much the Civil War military campaign of Sherman March‘s title that has been lingering with me in the weeks since I first saw the film, though. I’ve instead found myself dwelling on the significance of its subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation. Like everyone else raised during the existential uncertainty of the Cold War, McElwee can’t help but filter his personal decisions and worldview through the lens of imminent nuclear annihilation. What, ultimately, would be the point making a romantic connection in the end times of the 1980s, given that the push of a few buttons could end all human existence the entire planet over at any given minute? In practice, the potential for nuclear war doesn’t directly affect McElwee’s love life all that much in Sherman’s March, except during the stretch where he romantically pursues a nuclear disarmament activist. The threat of nuclear holocaust does quietly hum in the background throughout the picture, though, as intentionally provoked by its subtitle. It was, presumably, a constant hum in the background of everything in that era, as I’ve continued to hear it humming in the couple other late-80s, early-90s titles that I’ve happened to catch in the past couple weeks since writing about Sherman’s March.

I mostly threw on 1988’s Miracle Mile because it offered a rare opportunity to see Anthony Edwards in a lead role outside the television show I’m currently binge-watching: ER. Even better, Edwards’s love interest in the film is played by Mare Winningham, who had a brief run as Edwards’s maniacally obsessed stalker on ER and who also recently married him in real life after a long-simmering infatuation. That odd, bittersweet connection between the two actors is only amplified by Miracle Mile, which initially plays like a video store-era romcom before it blows up into a nuclear disaster epic. Edwards stars as a bitterly sarcastic Los Angeleno who finally finds a woman he vibes with in the desperately lonely, phony West Coast city — a devil-may-care free spirit played by Winningham. Unfortunately, they only go on one sweetheart date before Edwards receives the payphone call that ruins everything.  A stranger on the other end of the line tells him that the world is about to end and the bombs are already on their way, so Edwards scrambles to recruit a crew of fellow survivors from an all-night diner to escape the fallout, in a prototype for Gore Verbinki’s recent apocalyptic satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Only, no one can manage to catch the first helicopter out of town because everyone has someone in their life they want to take with them to safety, delaying departure to disastrous results. For Edwards’s sadsack lead, that special someone is a girl he just met, which would be sweetly romantic if it weren’t for the fact that both of their faces will likely be melted off by a nuclear blast before they get a chance to properly smooch. If it weren’t for Miracle Miles‘s moody synth score from Tangerine Dream, you could mistake its opening half for an old-school Hollywood romcom. Once the bombs are on their way, though, things get increasingly bleak, and the “possibility of romantic love in […] an era of nuclear proliferation” only gets bleaker by the minute until the story abruptly ends at the bleakest moment imaginable.

In the broadest terms, Miracle Mile does function as a comedy, but it’s also a city-wide portrait of a Cold War community in distress. Tonally, it’s the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours, just as funny as it is stressful. The geographic specificity of its setting and the maniacally episodic nature of Edwards’s interactions with his fellow freaked-out Los Angelenos also reminded me a lot of McElwee’s romantic missed connections in Sherman’s March in ways I didn’t expect, given the disparity in the two films’ chosen genres. Likewise, I didn’t expect to be dwelling on that same topic yet again while watching Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut Slacker, which recently screened at The Broad’s repertory Gap Tooth series. Linklater himself appears on camera in the opening scene of Slacker to lay out the film’s episodic structure. He plays an aimless Gen-X slacker who’s too overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of life to make any significant choice about what to do with himself, since every path he could take is just as valid and justifiable as the other. This apparently extends to his indecision on what story to tell, as Slacker spends an entire day hopping from one conversation to another down the sun-damaged streets of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on a nonstop parade of absurdly verbose underachievers as they ramble about whatever’s on their empty minds, one thought at a time. Like the regional South of Sherman’s March and the late-night Los Angeles of Miracle Mile, the Austin of Slacker is revealed to the audience through broad communal portraiture, with every chatty loser who crosses the screen just as worthy of their own day-in-the-life portrait as the next. Like in the other two movies, Slacker also finds its community psychologically fucked up by the constant threat of nuclear obliteration, as expressed in random characters’ paranoid political rants and in one specific weirdo’s video-art instillation that loops nuclear test footage across a haphazard collection of cathode-ray TVs. Only, Linklater’s proudly unambitious characters appear to be preemptively operating as if the world has already ended, without waiting for the bombs to actually go off. It’s long been over, and everyone who’s left hanging around after our undetected apocalypse has their own crackpot theories on how it happened and how humanity can best spend our time toiling in the rubble.

I was a lot more charmed by Slacker than I usually am by Linklater’s low-effort Gen-X posturings, if not only because its turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out hipsterdom spoke to a larger political sentiment within its contemporary moment (something his later, bigger-budgeted works would repeatedly attempt to recreate with no discernible thematic point at all). As one Austinite slacker puts it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” Admittedly, I also enjoyed the movie simply because I enjoyed hanging around the late-80s Austin scene populated by its various losers & eccentrics. Sure, it’s overrun with twentysomething stoner philosophers who are way too confident that they understand How the World Works for kids who haven’t yet lived a real life, but there’s something undeniably charming about their zen-like collective naivete. I also found myself getting excited by minor details specific to that exact Austin moment, like the deranged conman rant from Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa or the brief sound of Daniel Johnston’s chord organ playing in a passing car (or, even more particularly, the appearance of Johnston’s one-time girlfriend Kathy McCarty, who gives extensive interviews about his life & art in The Devil and Daniel Johnston). It’s impossible to love every crazed Austinite who spouts their own personal conspiracy theories about our post-apocalyptic planet in Slacker, but it’s easy to love the city that allows them blow around in the Texas breeze like human tumbleweeds, jobless and relatively carefree. The same goes for the late-night diner patrons of Miracle Mile and the genteel, Southern-accented women of Sherman’s March. As individuals, they can be grating or alarming, but as broader communities, they’re a joy to spend time with. That’s why it’s so tragic that time is running out for them, that the doomsday clock is tirelessly ticking away. Each of these Cold War communal portraits find their doomed citizens scrambling to make meaningful connections with each other while the threat of nuclear apocalypse looms outside the frame. They all make a point to portray a version of humanity that is worth saving while also acknowledging that it’s likely too late to stop the bombs from going off anyway. Thank your lucky stars that it’s not the 1980s anymore, and it no longer feels like we’re living pointless lives in the earliest hours of the apocalypse. It might be difficult to fully enjoy each other’s company knowing that we’ve already reached the beginning of the end.

-Brandon Ledet

Rep Report: Back to (Film) School

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The New Orleans social calendar never feels emptier than it does in the summer, when it’s too hot to do much outside the house and anyone with real money leaves town to cool off anyway. As a result, I haven’t been catching many repertory screenings in recent months, as there haven’t been many enticing opportunities on offer. Smaller series like ScreamFest NOLA and Gap Tooth Cinema have been on summer hiatus, and the legacy institution of the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series has been on TCM-programming autopilot. Now that summer is officially over, though, the city is coming back to life, and the local classic-movies scene is waking up along with it. After only catching three rep screenings all summer (one-off showings of All the President’s Men, Under the Cherry Moon, and Sleepaway Camp), I’m once again hitting up my regular rotation of classic-movies hot spots. It’s like the fall semester of film school just started, with a randomized syllabus of vintage movie titles worth experiencing big & loud with a studious crowd. To that end, here are a few quick reviews of the local repertory screenings I happened to catch over the past couple weeks, now that school is back in session.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
@ Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies (The Prytania)

One of the biggest new releases of the summer—both in production scale and in box office returns—was Christopher Nolan’s ensemble-cast adaptation of The Odyssey, which The Prytania tirelessly ran on a 70mm film print every night for a solid month. The Odyssey also seemingly inspired a recent selection for their Classic Movies series: 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, another sword-and-sandal action epic inspired by Greek myth & poetry. The two behemoth actioners made for an instructive contrast-and-compare exercise, illustrating how Hollywood spectacle has changed over the years. Jason and the Argonauts boasts all of the island-hopping special effects showcases of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey without any of the procedural justification weighing down the bookends. Nolan makes you spend a tedious amount of time farting around a banquet hall with Tom Holland & John Leguizamo before he rewards your patience with the monsters, witches, and goddesses that liven up the middle stretch of The Odyssey, while older modes of Hollywood action filmmaking don’t feel the need to justify the indulgence. Jason and the Argonauts throws giants, harpies, and hydra heads at its audience as quickly as it can, only pulling away from the action to show the gods watching it unfold in amusement on their divine television. Once Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeleton army is defeated at the climax, the movie ends abruptly, knowing better than to bore its audience with the journey home. You’ve already gotten what you paid to see, now be on your merry way.

Black God, White Devil (1964)
@ Gap Tooth Cinema (The Broad)

One movie that’s in less of a rush to satisfy or entertain is the 1964 arthouse Western whatsit Black God, White Devil, which played to an unusually quiet crowd at its recent Gap Tooth screening. In Western terms, it’s helpful to think of it more in parallel with Jodorowsky than with Eastwood, since it’s more interested in the mood & iconography of the Western than any of the genre’s narrative payoffs. Black God, White Devil is not a proper Western so much as it is a Brazilian class-politics screed melted down in the midday sun and then loosely remolded into the vague shape of a Western. Landlords, cult leaders, outlaws, and bandits roam the draught-stricken 1940s Brazilian backcountry (the sertão), establishing a make-it-up-as-you-go version of justice as they murder each other for one personal wrong after another. Its violence can be shockingly gnarly, including acts of genital mutilation, flesh flaying, and ritualistic sacrifice of a newborn baby. At other times, its violence is pure genre pastiche, with individual episodes of religious or capitalist injustice being interrupted by unseen six-shooter gunfire while the camera waves around wildly and everyone scrambles for cover. For the most part, though, the movie is interested in talking out its violence in barely coherent mumblings about life’s many cruelties, each player in its wasteland crime saga dehydrated to the point of raving delirium. Its scene-to-scene logic is difficult to follow, and its donkey-trot pacing is brutally slow, but its political anger is clearly communicated through every frame all the same.

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
@ Films on the Green (Alliance Française)

As the temperature cools in early fall, people start hosting free outdoor screenings of cinematic classics around New Orleans’s various social hubs, usually marketed as family-friendly movie nights showing recent animated favorites. On the more daring end of that fall-semester ritual, the French cultural hub Alliance Française is hosting a series called Films on the Green this month, which they kicked off with 1958’s Elevator to the Gallows. Their introduction to the film claimed that Louis Malle’s first narrative feature was also the first film of the French New Wave, which feels a little historically dubious but spiritually true. Elevator to the Gallows opens with an amoral yuppie executing a fairly convincing plan to kill his boss and run away with that boss’s widow but then gets stuck in an elevator car mid-escape, leaving him vulnerable to discovery & arrest. Meanwhile, his mistress (the effortlessly chic Jeanne Moreau) and the neighboring flower shop girl are left distraught by his unexplained absence, going mad in the late-night hours waiting for his return. The lovelorn teenager and her reprobate boyfriend steal the amateur assassin’s car and commit other crimes under his alias, while Moreau listlessly wanders the rainy streets of Paris to an improvised jazz score from none other than Miles Davis. Elevator to the Gallows truly is a perfect encapsulation of the French New Wave project in the way it uses noirish American crime thriller tropes as an excuse for high-style, street-level renegade filmmaking, even if Malle’s name is far from the first to come to mind when citing the pioneers on the inside of the movement: Varda, Godard, Truffaut, etc.

Pandora’s Box (1929)
@ David Bradley’s Classic Silent Films (Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge)

If the jazzy arthouse noir flourishes of Elevator to the Gallows trumpeted the earliest notes of the French New Wave, then 1929’s Pandora’s Box signaled the arrival of an even earlier icon of cinematic cool. There’s something undeniably foundational about Louise Brooks’s gothy flapper vibe in this silent-era German classic, to the point where it’s almost Biblical. If I could quote Genesis, “On the eight day, G.W. Pabst said let there be a party girl with a blunt bob, and there was a party girl with a blunt bob. And people saw the bob and saw that it was cool as fuck.” Of course, no pleasure-seeking woman of the silver screen gets by without being punished for her hedonism, so Brooks’s iconic character Lulu is inevitably put through the ringer in the second half of Pandora’s Box, after the audience gets plenty of time to celebrate her for being the coolest woman who ever lived in the first. She drinks, she dances, she parties, she sleeps around, and then she temporarily lucks into marrying a wealthy man before being forced to shoot him dead. On the run from the law, her fabulous party girl lifestyle quickly falls apart, and the “Fucking Around” opening half of the film is equally balanced out by the unavoidable “Finding Out” concluding half. You can always tell that these classic road-to-ruin cautionary tales never really believe their own bullshit; they have way too much fun indulging in hedonistic excess for the audience to fully believe the tragic cosmic punishments that follow in moral rebuke. That aspect of Pandora’s Box was only underlined by its live-piano scoring at the Zeitgeist, which had to compete with the booming sound of bounce DJ sets from the party venue next door. Even when the mood got somber in the more dramatic back half, the first-half party still persistently echoed in the room. No matter what happens to her, Lulu remains aspirationally cool and fun to be around – poor thing.

-Brandon Ledet

Irony, Sincerity, Hilarity, Clarity

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Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry.  Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.

To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.

Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.

Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Conan the Sequelian

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It would be ridiculous to claim that the sword & sandal genre is having “a moment” in Hollywood right now, given that two isolated examples do not equal a trend, and the two examples in question—Christopher Nolan’s epic Odyssey adaptation and Mattel’s failed He-Man reboot—are more of a “hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby” situation than they are brothers in arms. Regardless, spending so much time watching ripped men wield swords against wizards & monsters in theaters this year (over 300 minutes of combined runtime) had me thinking back to the ultimate icon of muscly fantasy cinema: Conan the Barbarian. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s casting as the sword & sandal comic book warrior Conan made for some gorgeous meathead action-fantasy imagery, and much of the original 1982 Conan the Barbarian film plays like high art as a result, despite its thoughtless participation in the lowliest of genre tropes. That mix of high & low makes Conan one of the quintessential examples of its genre, but what’s to be made of its two lesser-seen, lesser-loved sequels? Are they also high-art pop cinema like Nolan’s The Odyssey or are they ironic toss-offs with open disdain for their childish audience like the new Masters of the Universe? The answer, of course, is yes; they’re both.

As hyper-violent & hyper-horny as the original Conan film can be, the audience who most gleefully latched onto it were children in the same age range as its source-material comic book’s demographic. At least, that appears to have been the thinking behind its 1984 sequel Conan the Destroyer, which softens Conan’s sex & violence just barely enough to step down from an “R” rating to “PG” (in the precarious months just before the invention of “PG-13”). Conan is in live-action He-Man mode here, thrusting his giant sword against goofball monsters (like the pro-wrestler goblin played by a rubber-masked André the Giant), and picking up a goofball sidekick to crack wise along the way (Tracey Walter, whose performance splits the vast difference between Rob Schneider & Peter Lorre). Still, blood spews by the gallon from open wounds, and decapitated heads still fly across the screen, so Conan the Destroyer ends up playing like a remarkably gory kiddie feature. The highly sexualized casting of Wilt Chamberlain & Grace Jones as Conan’s companions on a mission to transport a young princess with her virginity intact feels like a winking joke that the movie’s school-age audience is too young to get. What they would get, however, is some insanely age-inappropriate violence, like in the climactic battle where Conan slowly rips the bleeding horn out of a yonic demon’s skull while it screams in agony.

While Conan the Destroyer exposes its school-age audience to adult-level bloodshed, the 1985 Conan spinoff Red Sonja exposes them to adult-level sexuality. Red Sonja technically isn’t a Conan the Barbarian film at all, since it’s adapted from a different property penned by Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and Schwarzenegger is officially credited as playing “Lord Kalidor.” Whatever, he’s Conan; the audience cannot be fooled. The only non-Conan thing about him is that he plays second-fiddle to the titular female lead, the red-haired warrior Sonja. Major kudos to series producer Dino De Laurentiis for managing to find an actress who could match Schwarzenegger’s cartoonishly wooden line deliveries in Brigitte Nielsen; Sonja & Conan make a lovely bonehead couple, especially in scenes where they use violent swordplay as an act of foreplay — teasing their mutual intent to “conquer” each other. The only problem is that there’s now a literal child onscreen jealously watching these foreplay bouts, acting as the audience surrogate and the would-be couple’s pint-sized sidekick. Also, the story starts with Sonja’s violent rape (which scares her off of men until she meets the godlike Conan), then goes on to include footage of a topless belly dancer and jokes about the child companion’s enormous penis. On paper, I’m not sure “misandrist rape-revenge saga” screams “kid-friendly adventure comedy,” but that’s exactly how it plays out, which is probably  the reason why Red Sonja is considered the nadir of the series.

Despite their dire reputations, I was mostly amused by Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer. The only major disappointment, really, was that for kiddie version of Conan the Barbarian, they don’t make full use of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s talent for delivering groaner one-liners. There are a couple of jokes in Red Sonja that heroically go for the cheese, such as Arnold’s quip, “Tomorrow, I start my diet,” while crawling through a collapsed cave or “How’s the food around here?” when crashing a party in an enemy’s palace. For the most part, though, the wisecracking is left to the other sidekicks in his traveling parties, and no one comes near matching his comedic chops. There’s no reason why Conan the Destroyer had to have Conan punching out poor, innocent horses for the audience’s entertainment, but would it have killed them to have Arnold punctuate the gag with a deadpan line reading of “Quite horsin’ around”? Much like in the original Conan the Barbarian, he’s mostly used in the sequels as a visual symbol rather than a genuine acting talent, when he’d soon become one of the funniest comedic actors of his era, ironically or not. Neither of the Conan sequels go fully goofy with it, which leaves them trapped between violent action spectacle and kitschy kiddie fluff — a no man’s land for finding & pleasing an audience.

-Brandon Ledet

Au Revoir, Godzilla, Mon Amour

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It’s been three years since Criterion’s towering box set of Shōwa era Godzilla films arrived on my doorstep, and I’ve been madly in love ever since. Anytime I’m unsure what movie to watch, I’ll toss on a Godzilla disc to pass the time, the same way an old Beatles record is always there for me whenever I’m indecisive on what to listen to. It’s been lovely, but all affairs eventually run their course, and I’ve officially run out of new-to-me Godzilla movies to watch in that 15-film set. I recently ran through my last two remaining Godzilla titles in rapid succession—1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan and 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla—and found that the romantic spark was still very much alive. Together, they reminded me of two entirely different reasons why I first fell in love with my giant lizard friend, and why it’s so sad I’ll now only be able to revisit that loving feeling in nostalgic rewatches instead of experiencing the seductive rush of a brand-new romance. Of course, the Criterion box set only accounts for half of Godzilla’s ginormous cinematic footprint, and there’s plenty other movies left out there to discover, but I’m still granting myself a little space here to mourn the end of my relationship with the atomic monster’s original run from the 1950s to the 1970s.

By the time Godzilla faced off against Gigan in the early 1970s, he had already fully transformed from harrowing nuclear fallout metaphor to superhero protector of children everywhere. Much of the back half of Godzilla’s Shōwa era finds the skyscraper kaiju beast mugging for the kids in the cheap seats while performing pro wrestling moves on his fellow rubber-suited monsters. In the case of Godzilla vs. Gigan, that means facing off against an especially goofy looking combatant: a cycloptic mechachicken with a whirring buzzsaw in its belly, the creature-design equivalent of when Homer Simpson designed his ideal car. There’s nothing especially novel about the film’s plot, which is yet another alien-invasion story among many in the set, with recycled footage from previous monster attacks and recycled grumblings about how pollution has turned Earth into “a toxic world, a radioactive wasteland.” Still, though, the latter kiddie-fluff Godzilla pics can often surprise you with a novelty in style, in this case a comic book-inspired sensibility that makes the formula feel fresh again. The monster attacks are centered around an amusement park that features a Godzilla-shaped observation tower, and the alien invasion plot (involving cockroach humanoids from another planet) is uncovered by a manga artist who exclusively pitches kid-friendly monster designs like “The Homework Monster” and “The Strict Mom Monster”. That’s not to say that the kaiju action can’t get brutally violent; the climactic fight between Godzilla & Gigan is staged in an exploding oil refinery field and feels like a vision of Hell, leaving Godzilla visibly bleeding onscreen for the first time in the franchise. It’s just that the pronounced comic book sensibility leads to its biggest surprises in terms of novelty. When Godzilla starts chatting to his giant pet armadillo Anguirus in comic-panel speech bubbles, it feels like there are still endless possibilities for what this series can do, despite this entry relying so heavily on pre-existing images the audience has already seen before.

As much fun as the alien cockroaches and comic book speech bubbles of Godzilla vs. Gigan can be, I’m glad that the series toned down its kid-friendly hijinks for its final entry (before the monster’s return in the 80-90s Heisei era), Terror of Mechagodzilla. Original Godzilla director Ishirō Honda returned to conclude the Shōwa era on a serious note, keeping all of the space alien invaders and remote-controlled kaiju puppets that had crept into the go-to formula over the years but deciding to play them straight instead of goofy. The opening credits play out over a “Previously on . . .” recap of Godzilla’s first tussle with his “space-titanium” doppelganger Mechagodzilla, then the humans-on-the-ground plot introduces a new combatant to the ring in the underwater dinosaur creature Titanosaurus. Earth is once again characterized as a “polluted & chaotic” nuclear wasteland primed for takeover from mad scientists & alien invaders, but those stock villains’ lives are given more room to develop dramatic tension in this go-round. When the human hero holds the mad scientist’s robot daughter’s dying body in his arms and declares, “You may be a cyborg, but I still love you,” the emotions of the moment actually mean something, against all odds. Ishirō Honda seemed stubbornly determined to reclaim the Godzilla series as more than just kiddie stuff here, aging up the onscreen action with more Godzilla blood in the kaiju battles and cyborg nudity in the sci-fi machinations of the humans-on-the-ground subplot. He even manages to make the recycling of previous Godzilla films’ footage surprisingly elegant, playing highlights from previous monster attacks back in a 4-way splitscreen layout. Honda’s sincerity continually made for Godzilla’s most compelling non-kaiju drama in the monster’s original run, to the point where you forget he also directed a couple of the monster’s silliest, flimsiest outings (namely King Kong vs. Godzilla and All Monsters Attack). The Shōwa era started with Honda’s national heartbreaker Godzilla (1954), and it ended with the director reasserting that the increasingly goofy series still has a beating heart at its core.

Godzilla vs. Gigan was stunt actor Haruo Nakajima’s twelfth & final outing playing Godzilla onscreen, and Terror of Mechagodzilla was Ishirō Honda’s ninth & final Godzilla film as director. Together, they rounded out my personal years-long romance with the 8-disc, 15-film Criterion box set, which only helped underline the finality of Nakajima & Honda’s contributions to the series. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with classic, first-run Godzilla, to the point where I’m questioning whether I was ever properly critical or analytical about any individual entries in the series. When a Godzilla movie isn’t especially great, I’m still always grateful to spend more time with my good friend Godzilla, even having written lengthy apologia about his off-brand American outings. So, when you catch me saying glowing things about Adam Wingard’s King Kong crossovers, Criterion’s new restoration of Godzilla vs. Biollante, or the upcoming Reiwa era update Godzilla Minus Zero, please know that I am grading on a curve because I have nothing but love for Godzilla in my heart. Still, I feel compelled to recap my time spent with the Shōwa era box set by ranking the included films and linking to our reviews across a half-decade of website posts, despite the fact that I love them all and I’m sad to realize that our time together is over.

  1. Godzilla (1954)
  2. Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)
  3. Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)
  4. Destroy All Monsters (1966)
  5. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
  6. Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)
  7. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
  8. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
  9. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)
  10. Invasion of the Astro-Monster (1965)
  11. Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972)
  12. Son of Godzilla (1967)
  13. Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)
  14. All Monsters Attack (1969)
  15. Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: BLKNWS – Terms & Conditions (2026)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the encyclopedic Black culture mixtape BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2026).

00:00 Welcome
02:35 Supergirl (2026)
14:14 Roommates (1982)
18:45 Touch Me (2026)
33:05 BloodSisters (1995)
37:12 War and Peace (1965-1967)
1:02:22 Shōwa era Godzilla (1954–1975)
1:11:33 Vortex (2022)
1:21:51 Family Portraits – A Trilogy of America (2003)

1:27:30 BLKNWS – Terms & Conditions (2026)
2:04:50 2026 so far

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 Prince of Pictures

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Prince was a lot of things: a genius, a control freak, a madman, a pervert, an enigmatic visionary. Based on those descriptors, you might assume he was also a great filmmaker, but it’s difficult to make a convincing case. Having already mastered the medium of pop music by the mid 1980s (an indisputable fact by the time he produced the album 1999), Prince was determined to get into pictures, threatening to drop his then-manager Robert Cavallo if he couldn’t land a starring role in a big-time Hollywood movie. That’s how 1984’s Purple Rain came to be, and that’s how Prince’s big-screen career is mostly widely and most fondly remembered. Purple Rain was a huge hit, mythologizing the broad bullet points of the Minneapolis musician’s life story in what’s essentially a feature-length music video about the vicious cycle of domestic abuse. It’s the closest Prince ever got to making a normal, functional movie and it’s still an MTV-addled brainscrambler, repurposing the relentless quick-edit montages of Adrian Lynne’s Flashdance to illustrate & promote its eponymous album by Prince & The Revolution. Unwilling to cede any creative control of his music or image, Prince was heavily involved in the writing of the screenplay and the sounds of his onscreen avatar The Kid’s rival bands, most notably Morris Day and the Time. As a result, everyone in the film dresses & sounds exactly like Prince, while he saves the best tunes for himself and the fictional crowds reject him as an underdog anyway, betraying an underlying self-doubt that drove him to be such a controlling perfectionist in the first place. It’s a narratively confused & confusing film as a result, but it’s undeniable as an 80s-era pop artifact, the undisputed pinnacle of Prince cinema. Then, things got really strange, inscrutibly so.

After the commercial success of Purple Rain, Warner Bros issued a blank check for Prince to produce whatever he wanted for a follow-up, which resulted in the 1986 headscratcher Under the Cherry Moon. Recently restored & re-released for its 40th Anniversary, Under the Cherry Moon is a Merchant Ivory-themed music video set in an alternate universe only Prince could dream up: one exclusively populated by chic babes and flamboyantly gay skirtchasers. Prince stars alongside The Time member Jerome Benton as a pair of Miamian expats who are explained to be brothers living on the French Riviera, but whose onscreen personae are only explainable if they are a closeted gay couple. Regardless, their financial well-being is hinged on their dual schemes to woo local heiresses as boytoy gigolos, a status that’s threatened when Prince accidentally falls in love with a playfully bratty Kristin Scott Thomas. An anachronistic period-piece tragicomedy, Under the Cherry Moon is gorgeous, corny, hip, sexy, and disastrously unfunny in equal measure. Like a lot of failed comedians of their time, Prince & Benton’s approach to humor appears to be entirely based on impersonating Eddie Murphy, to consistently clumsy results. Most failed comedians don’t have access to Prince’s library of all-timer pop tunes, though, and it’s near impossible to hate a film that’s scored by tracks like this one’s hit single, “Kiss.” Prince seemed to be aware that the music video was the visual medium he was best suited for, initially hiring frequent Madonna collaborator Mary Lambert to direct. The same refusal to collaborate that led him to writing & recording all of The Time’s songs himself also led to him taking the project over from Lambert, however, and he ended up with his first official directorial credit — a beautiful, confounding mess.

Prince’s total creative control as a self-designated auteur only tightened from there. The rest of his cinematic output was contained entirely within the sound-stage studio space of Paisley Park, where he made both his very best and his very worst pictures. 1987’s Sign o’ the Times finds Prince in peak form, doing what he does best: music. Ostensibly a live concert film, Sign o’ the Times marks the exact moment Prince retreated to the hermetic studio space of Paisley Park, where he could exert total control over every sound & image captured on record. After shooting some genuine live concert footage in Northern Europe that he found lacking in quality, Prince then reshot a majority of his band’s live show in his home studio, with performers miming their instruments to pre-recorded tracks for optimal sound quality. Once again, the result is more closely aligned with music video filmmaking than a traditional concert doc, so much so that when the footage switches to an actual music video interlude for the Sheena Easton collaboration “U Got the Look,” there’s no discernible break from reality. In this one instance, Prince’s megalomaniacal control over every aspect of production proves to work in his favor, resulting in one of the greatest concert films of all time, regardless of its flimsy definition of what a “concert” even is. Still, some of his control-freak tendencies show in concerning ways. The one standout sequence that doesn’t highlight Prince’s all-powerful awesomeness is a minutes-long drum solo by bandmate Sheila E, who goes full beast mode on a 360° Neil Peart kit. Later, Prince attempts to steal her thunder by having Sheila E indulge in a stage-front dance break so he can show off on that drum kit himself, as if to prove to the audience that he could hit the skins just as well as anyone, if it weren’t for the physical limitation of only having enough arms to play one instrument at a time. In that moment, you get the sense that Prince’s ideal version of playing in “a band” would be taking the stage alongside five or six of his exact clones, but I’m sure he’d also find a way to get overly competitive with parallel versions of himself if he could.

Now self-isolated in the cavernous dungeons of Paisley Park, Prince returned to narrative filmmaking in the early 1990s, kicking off the decade with an instantly ignored & forgotten sequel to Purple Rain. Graffiti Bridge once again stars Prince as The Kid, professionally competing against his funky-unc nemesis Morris Day. Instead of riding his superhero motorcycle around the streets of Minneapolis, however, Prince is now trapped on a skyless sound stage, which is designed & lit in a way that suggests that all four Ninja Turtles are hanging around somewhere nearby, always just barely cropped out of the frame. Plot-wise, Graffiti Bridge makes its audience nostalgic for the relative coherence of Purple Rain, which at least includes narrative details like events and consequences among its more Princely abstract poetics. While Prince is still somehow struggling to convince crowds that his band (now The New Power Generation) is better than The Time, the years-long rivalry is interrupted by the intrusion of an ironically named muse, Aura (the auraless Ingrid Chavez). Aura reads bad poetry to no one in particular under an unconvincing bridge prop leftover from a Muppet Show set. Later, she’s hit by a speeding jeep, and an ambulance scrapes her body off the street, leaving behind her two pop-superstar suitors to call a truce because they’re both sad to see her go. Apparently, she was an angel sacrificed by God to inspire said truce, like a second, sexy coming of Jesus Christ. That non-story just about accounts for the majority of the runtime, give or take the expected music video interludes that mercifully interrupt this supernatural love triangle melodrama (and occasionally feature always-welcome industry luminaries George Clinton & Mavis Staples). The biggest creative leap Graffiti Bridge makes in Prince Cinema is allowing its characters to break into song in full movie-musical fantasy sequences, instead of restricting the song & dance numbers to diegetic stage acts. Otherwise, it finds Prince recoiling into an increasingly private sphere where no one can tell him “No” loud enough to inspire him to refine his ideas in a second draft. Like all first-draft poetry, it sucks.

Prince’s reclusive cinematic output at least got more entertainingly bizarre in 1994’s 3 Chains o’ Gold, even if qualifiers like “good” or “coherent” would be laughably generous. In this case, the muse-du-jour for his Pepe Le Pew romantic antics is short-time spouse Mayte Garcia, whom he met and courted at her mother’s suggestion while she was still a teenager. Alarmingly, 3 Chains o’ Gold includes even younger footage of Mayte as a small child appearing on a segment of the 1970s variety show That’s Incredible!, showing off her prodigal skills as a belly dancer. Prince watches a VHS recording of that performance with a Videodrome-style unseemly fixation and as a result finds himself psychically connected to the now-adult Matye, characterized onscreen as an Egyptian princess fleeing a violent regime change. You can tell 3 Chains o’ Gold was a straight-to-video affair as soon as Princess Matya is introduced during a nude game of lesbian grabass with her bathing handmaidens, intercut with images of her royal father’s nearby assassination. Meanwhile, in Paisley Park, Prince is going through a tough-as-nails hardcore rap phase in a string of music videos for songs with titles like “Sexy MF”. The two destined lovers meet in the US, have a brief soul-shattering affair, then quickly find trouble as the nonstop orgies of Prince’s more routine sex life call back to him like a siren song. Like Sign o’ the Times, 3 Chains o’ Gold finds Prince finally excelling at cinematic language because he’s fully given into the idea that all he’s making are long-form music videos. Only, the songs aren’t as good this time around, and the self-contained self-mythology has gotten so inscrutable to outsiders that it plays like Prince’s version of a Dianetics video. He makes the full transition from pop singer to compounded cult leader in the final minutes of the video, when he literally buries the Prince persona in the ground and resurrects himself as The Symbol — an idol to be worshipped for the endless cosmic power of his sexual charisma. It’s neither good nor coherent, but it is admirably insane.

Those five titles account for Prince’s filmography as listed on Wikipedia, a convenient reference point for audiences outside the Paisley Park cult. Prince’s official filmography gets much more unwieldy when you refer to the bottomless archives of The Prince Vault, which has separate pages listing titles of various TV movies, documentaries, and concert broadcasts Prince produced alongside his more widely distributed works. The most instructive page on the site, for me, is the subcategory of “Unreleased Movies and Documentaries“, which lists a dozen or so projects that were abandoned at various stages of production. It’s in Prince’s unreleased work that I believe he reached his final form as a filmmaker. No longer satisfied with the amount of control he could exert as a writer, director, producer, star, and composer, he eventually discovered a way he could also act as his movies’ sole audience member, so that they could be properly watched & appreciated by the only person who would know how to fully understand them. The stubborn assuredness in vision that Prince demonstrated as an artist allowed him to create some stunning cinematic objects — some great (Purple Rain, Sign o’ the Times), some merely bewildering (Under the Cherry Moon, 3 Chains o’ Gold). The way that same stubbornness got in the way of his ability to delegate & collaborate also cornered him in the lifeless, hermetic world of Graffiti Bridge, though, which I struggle to see as anything other than an elaborate embarrassment. The man was a one-of-a-kind genius, which made for some great art and some frustratingly overworked mediocrities. In either case, I’m surprisingly sad there’s not more of it around to puzzle through.

-Brandon Ledet

Deeper Inside Annie Sprinkle

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There’s a new HBO documentary out called Bang My Box that profiles the life and art of late-night TV host Robyn Byrd, who first became famous for hosting a pornographic call-in show on NYC public access channels in the mid 1970s. Byrd’s career spanned multiple decades of bright-eyed & bubbly political provocation, as she used her TV broadcast platform to advocate for free speech, safe sex, gay rights, trans visibility, and sex-positive feminism through the darkest days of Reagan’s regime and beyond. When the documentary crew catches up with her in the 2020s, she’s long outgrown & outlasted her signature crocheted bikini and mostly just lounges around her Fire Island home with her longtime partner, waxing nostalgic about the good old days. She’s a pure joy to be around in either timeline, but the audience is especially grateful for every frame of vintage footage from her heyday on The Robin Byrd Show in particular, which itself was a weekly document of the bigger personalities from the NYC Porno Chic scene of the 1970s & 80s, as filtered through Byrd’s personal brand of low-fi psychedelic video art. It’s no surprise at all, then, that the self-described “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle eventually pops up in both of the timelines covered by the doc, appearing as a creative collaborator for Byrd in the 1980s and as a personal friend in the 2020s. Sprinkle’s own career saw her starting as a Porno Chic starlet on the NYC scene before she moved to San Francisco in the 1990s, where she made pornographic self-help tapes that doubled as psychotronic video art in the Robyn Byrd Show tradition (most notably among them, the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop). Given their parallel career paths, a Robin Byrd retrospective documentary is just about the most likely place imaginable to find Annie Sprinkle besides maybe her own home. To find a proper recap of Sprinkle’s career in politicized porn production, however, you have to dig a little deeper than what you’ll find on the HBO Max splash page.

Annie Sprinkle was eager to reveal herself to her audience as early as her first directorial effort, the early-80s Porno Chic confessional Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle. There, she breaks the rules of pre-video porno production by making direct eye contact with the camera and verbally addressing her audience, inviting them into her bedroom. Deep Inside is more a loose collection of Sprinkle’s sexual fantasies than a true self-portrait, though, acting as a catalog of her personal turn-ons rather than a true autobiography. It does open with Sprinkle flipping through a family photo album from her actual childhood, though, which is a lot more personal than most professional pornos tend to get. The closest thing Sprinkle has to a true Bang My Box-style career retrospective is the one-woman stage show Herstory of Porn: Reel to Real, which she filmed for the home video screen in 1999. Cinematically, Herstory of Porn borrows from the meta-critical Gen-X sarcasm of Talk Soup & MST3k, placing Sprinkle front row at her local porno theater so she can comment on a Greatest Hits clip show package of her own pornographic highlights in real time through the magic of greenscreen. As an autobiographical documentary, it’s occasionally informative, especially in the earliest stretch where Sprinkle reveals that she got into the porno business while working as a popcorn girl at a theater that was screening the Porno Chic landmark Deep Throat. When her theater’s print of Deep Throat was confiscated by the feds for an obscenity trial, Sprinkle was summoned to testify in court about its exhibition, which is where she met director Gerard Damiano, who dutifully helped initiate her into the biz. It’s difficult to take insightful anecdotes like that too seriously, though, since Sprinkle spends the majority of the runtime shoving toothbrushes & rolled-up American flags up her anus, narrating a “cumshot medley” from her classic works, and performing drag queen lip-syncs to footage of herself from various scenes of Deep Inside. Herstory of Porn is relatively informative about the general shape of Annie Sprinkle’s career, but it’s also an anarchic riot meant to shock & awe the jaded off-Broadway theatre types of 1990s NYC, which is a far cry from the softcore respectability of the Robin Byrd documentary.

Maybe the most revealing snippet of Herstory of Porn is Sprinkle’s assertion that sex is “simply the most interesting subject in the world,” musing to herself “why anyone would want to make a film or a video about anything else, I don’t understand it.” She really means it too. The deeper you dig into her 90s-era video productions the more you realize how all-important sex is to her, to the point where it’s just as much of a religious pursuit as a professional one. Her self-help video Annie Sprinkle’s Amazing World of Orgasm (filmed in the 1990s, completed in the 2000s) continues the greenscreen psychedelia of the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop and the Herstory of Porn videos, with Sprinkle appearing onscreen in the pose of a local weather report girl to inform her audience about the spiritually transcendent power of the orgasm in all its many forms. She’s joined in her spatial void by a variety of experts on the subject: sex researchers, sex educators, sex therapists, cultural sexologists, regular sexologists, prostitution activists, chiropractors, poets, dominatrices, yoga instructors, and erotic touch experts. Each takes a turn describing a different facet of the human sexual orgasm in a standalone vignette: how to have one, how to fake one, what they feel like mixed with laughter, what they feel like mixed with pain, how they can occur during birth, how they can occur during death, how they can connect us to the world beyond observable life altogether. The Amazing World of Orgasm video is presented as an all-encompassing documentary on the health & spiritual benefits of sexual pleasure, but it looks & feels like a Dianetics or Unarius video — more New Age religion than quantifiable science. When it ends on the proclamation, “Happy orgasms to all!” it reads like a call to wands, inspiring its audience to change the world for the better by rubbing one out as soon as the tape concludes. It also consciously functions as an outsider-art curio, though, which is immediately apparent when the very first sexpert’s testimonial is illustrated by overlayed video-warp projections from both Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis and vintage porn from Sprinkle’s personal catalog. As sincere as Sprinkle is about the spiritual & political power about safe, pleasurable sex, she’s always careful to punctuate her rigorous research findings in that field with a sugary wink, signaling to her audience that it’s all in good fun.

As recounted in Herstory of Porn, Annie Sprinkle moved to San Francisco in the 1990s because she had earned a reputation for being too kinky for the professional pornographers of NYC. The cultish New Age hippie spirituality of California suits her well, and she’s since moved on from her “post-porn” self-help psychotronic phase to produce “eco-sexual” documentaries where she sensually fucks the planet Earth to promote Climate Change awareness (along with her wife and creative collaborator Beth Stephens). She’s also been incredibly smart about presenting & archiving her films in academic settings, where she can be primarily understood as an artist and a feminist instead of a pornographic actress, a designation that would undervalue her work in other contexts. I most frequently see her pop up as a talking head in documentaries on human sexuality these days, including the recent documentary on Fakir Musafar and the body modification movement, A Body to Live In. It may not surprise you to hear that Fakir also appears as a talking head in Sprinkle’s own Amazing World of Orgasm video, promoting body modification as a practical means for achieving religiously transcendent sexual climax. The only reason I know that is because Sprinkle maintains a subscription-based website where you can pay to access her archive of vintage “post-porn” self-help tapes online, including her must-see works: Amazing World of Orgasm, Herstory of Porn, and the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop. There’s a D.I.Y. ethos to her work in porn production & exhibition, refusing to wait around for institutions to fund, legitimize, or immortalize her art before it disappears forever. So, the most emotional I got while watching the new HBO doc Bang My Box was a scene where Robin Byrd reads a personal letter written by Sprinkle, urging her to have her personal VHS archive of The Robin Byrd Show scanned & preserved by an academic institution before that wealth of material is lost forever to time & decay. In that letter, Sprinkle stresses how important Byrd’s art is in both the realms of national politics and personal spirituality, and you can tell she means every word. Revisiting clips from that archive in Bang My Box, it became clear to me that The Robin Byrd Show was influential on Sprinkle’s signature “post-porn” video art style, and I was grateful that Sprinkle was retroactively influential on making sure that archive isn’t left to rot, unwatched.

-Brandon Ledet

Pornography Trichotomy

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Anytime the cult media distributor Vinegar Syndrome advertises an online sale, I immediately start perusing the offerings on their sister site Méluisne, where they’re also selling discounted Blu-rays of vintage pornography. Since most streaming services won’t touch hardcore titles of any quality, the only legal way to access most Golden Age pornos is to collect them on physical media, which makes Mélusine an irresistible siren during sales. That’s not to say that Vinegar Syndrome’s work restoring vintage horror schlock like Nightbeast, Demonwarp, Devil Fetus, or The Suckling is any less important than their restoration of retro pornos, but there’s something about the physical-media-only exclusivity of Mélusine’s library that routinely has me reaching for my wallet. It’s highly plausible that I could catch up with an Italo horror relic like Burial Ground on Tubi one day, for instance, while the same can’t be said for the hardcore cuts of titles like SexWorld, Blonde Ambition, or Pandora’s Mirror. So, during Vinegar Syndrome’s recent “Halfway to Black Friday” sale, I picked up a trio of Golden Age pornos to add to my personal schlock pile simply because they were discounted and looked interesting. As a group, the movies ultimately didn’t have much in common besides their shared X rating, their early-80s premiere dates, and their universal inclusion of a gentle lovemaking scene on the carpet in front of a fireplace. Individually, however, I found them taxonomically clarifying in the way they identify three distinct modes of traditional pornographic storytelling: the expected collection of standalone sex scenes that became an industry standard in the VHS era, the saga of absurd letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies you’ll find in stereotypically airheaded pornos, and the shockingly thoughtful & tragic dramas that are too much of a bummer for you to imagine anyone actually getting off to them despite all of the exposed & penetrated flesh.

1981’s Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was the directorial debut of its titular star, who makes direct eye contact with her audience while inviting us along to indulge her hottest sexual fantasies, one at a time. Sprinkle starts the picture pouring a glass of wine under the candelabra lighting of her living room piano, then shows the audience childhood photos from her life before the industry, when loved ones knew her as Ellen. After this photo album nostalgia trip, the camera pans over to a fireplace that’s been cropped just outside the frame, where two naked men are arm wrestling on the carpet as foreplay, waiting for Sprinkle to use their bodies. She quickly obliges, guiding the audience through her individual fantasies as she fucks new scene partners in every room of the house, narrating instructive demos for novelty sex acts like tit jobs, golden showers, and prostate play. The one-on-one intimacy of this non-narrative hangout would become much more common in the home video era that would soon snuff out the industry’s Porno Chic boom. In order to properly break the fourth wall, Sprinkle has to film herself instigating an orgy in the rows of a 42nd Street movie theater, exciting the audience with the fantasy that she might sit next to us at any time. It’s more an elaborately mediated act of mutual masturbation than it is a proper Golden Age porno, which has only become more standard and more direct in the modern era where performers can now interact with their audience in real time on video chat sites like OnlyFans. Sprinkle’s early prototype for that modern porno template—wherein narrative has been excised in favor of stringing together a collection of standalone sexual stunts—is still heavily scripted, though, and it includes such delightful cornball dialogue as, “Do you like big tits? Well, as you may have noticed, I have rather larger ones.” It’s just a nice, holesome hangout with our good friend Annie, who would later push its interactive format to much more psychedelic extremes in the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, an all-timer in pornographic video art.

You can tell Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle was ahead of the curve in its audience-interactive intimacy by watching the bonus features for Neon Nights, which was also released in 1981. While providing commentary for a reel of unused outtakes, Neon Nights director Cecil Howard calls attention to the shots where Kandi Barbour makes direct eye contact with the camera during her own fireplace lovemaking scene, which had to be trimmed as a result. Neon Nights is much more traditionally narrative than Deep Inside, following the hitchhiking adventures of a horny runaway teen (Lysa Thatcher). That’s not to say Howard’s movie is better behaved than Sprinkle’s, though. It starts with Jamie Gillis fisting that teenage runaway’s mother while the teen listens intently from the opposite side of her bedroom wall, brushing her hair & practicing her makeup before using her beauty instruments as makeshift dildos. She decides to hit the road when her stepfather hits on her the next morning, in one of two scenes that reference the infamous shower stabbing sequence from Hitchcock’s Psycho. The horrors continue on the road, where she encounters swinger magicians who make her levitate out of bed like Linda Blair, an unscrupulous nude photographer who likes to fuck on a bed of porcelain babydolls, and a dreamworld doppelganger for her creepy stepfather that she’s much more willing to sleep with. Neon Nights is one of the few movies where you’re grateful for a last-minute “It was all just a dream reveal,” since it recontextualizes a series of seemingly nonconsensual sex acts as the incoherent fantasies of a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants. More importantly, it’s an instructive look at the thin border that separated horror & pornographic filmmaking sensibilities in its era — two disreputable genres that were culturally dismissed for their shared cheapness & prurience. The runaway’s far-out sexual exploits are often set to the spooky theremin sounds of a sci-fi soundtrack. Veronica Hart’s sex scene among her babydoll collection is frequently punctuated by flashes of lightning to accentuate the taboo. Much like many dirt-cheap horror titles of its time, Neon Nights would make for an excellent classroom tool to demonstrate how simple lighting & color scheme choices (from the titular neon hues of a motel sign to the more porno-specific contrast of a pink-flushed face pressed against a lime green bedspread) can make even cheapest sets look fantastic … if it weren’t for all of the vigorous onscreen penetration that would alienate most students. It’s also just a very silly story about a teenage hitchhiker’s letters-to-the-editor sexual fantasies, nakedly so.

When most modern audiences picture a narrative porno, they’ll think of outlandish fluff like Neon Nights, wherein a hitchhiker’s road trip storyline is used as a flimsy excuse to connect a series of standalone goofy sex scenes, even if artfully staged. There was a brief time, however, when Porno Chic features were thought to have a “crossover” commercial appeal and, thus, were expected to be populated by real characters with real emotional crises that could be resolved dramatically instead of pornographically. 1982’s Roommates (directed by Chuck Vincent) is the rare hardcore title that leers harder at women’s internal lives than their external ones, the kind of Golden Era porno that’s so dramatically heavy that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being turned on by it. Samantha Fox, Veronica Hart, and Kelly Nichols star a trio of young professionals sharing rent in a New York City apartment while struggling to break into the entertainment industry. Fox is eager to get into movie production work but is professionally haunted by her previous career as a callgirl; Hart is getting her feet wet as an off-Broadway stage actor but is caught between the affections of her seemingly gay costar and her older, married drama teacher; Nichols is a fashion model whose escalating drug addiction leaves her vulnerable to creeps & stalkers (most notably Jamie Gillis, again playing to type). All three women are on the verge of thriving, with only the universal problem of men being disgusting getting in the way of their success. As a result, most of the sex they have along the way is intentionally, uncomfortably bad — tainted by coercion, extortion, intoxication, and abuse. It’s the only professional porno I’ve ever seen where women immediately disengage from oral sex to spit in disgust, once in a toilet and another time onto the trousers of a reviled colleague. It’s also the only professional porno I’ve seen that convincingly stages actual, recognizably human arguments instead of bouts of belligerent shouting (give or take Andy Milligan’s Fleshpot on 42nd Street). It’s as heavy on dialogue as it is short on sex, to the point where even its obligatory fireplace lovemaking scene is staged in front of the punier flame of several candles instead of the real deal. As a result, it’s the only title out of this trio that could be convincingly passed off as “a real movie” to most discerning audiences, which is a designation that’s often saved for pornos that are too dramatically upsetting to function as a genuine turn-on.

Obviously, the major cinematic draw of these vintage porno titles is the opportunity to see extreme images no other filmic genre would dare show onscreen. There is no shortage of those extreme moments in Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, but I think I was most surprised by the infinite angles & configurations Sprinkle (along with uncredited co-director Joe Sarno) came up with to capture the action of Ron Jeremy’s hardon sliding between her “rather large” breasts. On the opposite end of the dramatic-pornographic spectrum, Roommates thought to include representation of cis women huffing poppers on a nightclub dancefloor, a salacious pastime that has become something of a trend among young partygoers in recent years but has obviously been in practice for decades. The real standout moment to me, however, is a scene from Neon Nights where actress Arcadia Lake is painting a giant cock on her home easel while actively masturbating between brushstrokes, which is just about as honest of a depiction of artistic process as I’ve ever seen in cinema. While cheap-o horror schlock and other disreputable genres have gradually been legitimized as worthy cultural artifacts, vintage porno is still a niche beat for professional critics & academics to cover, if it’s touched on at all. Since sexual fantasy is just as integral to human life and cinematic expression as any other natural impulse, it’s a shame that it has so little room for discussion or exhibition in the modern discourse, while half a century ago it was being covered by outlets like Variety and The New York Times. Even as someone who already values this kind of cultural runoff, I’m struggling to not make qualitative judgements about the naked titillation tactics of Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle or the daffy daydream fantasies of Neon Nights against the more somber downbeats of Roommates, which earns instant respectability by undercutting its own eroticism. I’ll need to watch more vintage pornography to work on that. In fact, all serious cinephiles should be watching more pornography of all varieties, the more outdated the better. There’s much left to interrogate & discuss, while most avenues of vintage horror discourse have already been exhausted well past their dead ends.

-Brandon Ledet