There two high-style, blunt-force sports thrillers in theaters right now, neither of which are especially successful. Both Justin Tipping’s football-cult horror curio Him and Benny Safdie’s cinéma vérité MMA story The Smashing Machine reflect on the damage young men accept in their bodies in order to make a lot of money very quickly as wannabe-star athletes. In the fanciful former, that damage triggers a supernatural transformation into a kind of permanently concussed god, and in the more reality-grounded latter it results in a debilitating addiction to opiates. Unfortunately, neither movie is as invested in exploring the nuances of that shared theme as they are in platforming the surface-aesthetic visual experiments of their respective directors and the dramatically severe acting turns of their respective unconventional movie stars: former sketch-comedy clown Marlon Wayans and former professional wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. As a result, they both look very pretty but ring a little hollow, cushioning the bodyslamming impact of their damaged muscle men with superficial distractions that have little to do with the bodily exploitations of professional sports. Pity.
The dual disappointment of these bone & spirit crushing sports thrillers is mostly due to the high expectations set by the names of the filmmakers involved. Him is especially victim to its own marketing hype, with producer Jordan Peele’s name being foregrounded in the ads to compensate for first-time director Justin Tipping’s professional anonymity. Considering Tipping’s newcomer status, he does fairly well with the material at hand, shooting his football bootcamp torture film with the slick, luxury-brand commercialism of a Nike ad. The rhythmic repetition of its young, concussed football star (Tyriq Withers) suffering seven days of choreographed, ritualistic abuse from his childhood sports idol (Marlon Wayans) gets to be punishingly monotonous by the time it reaches the “Day 5” title card, but the movie does have visual panache to spare. It’s stylish enough in a Martyrs-for-meatheads kind of way that it probably would’ve gotten better reviews if it went straight to Shudder under the title The Goat instead of bearing the weight of Peele’s name in the studio system marketing machine, but instead it’s had the misfortune of being a flashy mediocrity in front of a lot of people. There’s no doubt that Tipping & Wayans’s work in particular could have been repurposed into something truly, brutally spectacular if the quality of the screenplay had matched their gusto.
Speaking of wasted talent, it’s been decades since The Rock has made any notably daring choices in his acting career, with early titles like Southland Tales and Pain & Gain having long disappeared in the Fast & Furious rearview mirror. And even in those early, wild jabs, he was still playing off his larger-than-life wrestling ring charisma to pummel his audience into being entertained. The Smashing Machine is a different beast, asking The Rock to play a real-life, complicated human being under a layer of face-obscuring prosthetics. The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it’s impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career, mimicking the gentle-giant politeness of pioneer UFC fighter Mark Kerr as profiled in the 2002 documentary of the same name. The problem is that there isn’t much else to the movie besides giving The Rock that opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, regardless of how well he makes use of the spotlight. It’s easy to see why director Benny Safdie might have been interested in Mark Kerr as a cinematic subject, given his previous thematic preoccupations with failed athletic gambles in Lenny Cooke & Uncut Gems and with drug addiction in Good Time & Heaven Knows What. He just doesn’t make much of an attempt to communicate why the audience should care about this retired athlete’s unremarkable what-could’ve-been story, besides gawking at The Rock’s acting chops.
Dramatically, there’s a lot more muscle on The Smashing Machine‘s bones than there are on Him‘s. The Rock’s chummy chemistry with frequent scene partner Emily Blunt is mutated into something squirmy & toxic here, with Kerr and his longterm girlfriend prolonging an explosively volatile relationship long past its obvious expiration date. Blunt’s role in that mutually corrosive romance is embarrassingly thankless, since the Mark Kerr story is mostly retold here in service of spotlighting The Rock. Still, the little ways they dig at each other in exponentially violent domestic arguments scores way more in-the-scene dramatic points than the mentor-protegee tensions of Him. Safdie might not arrange those individual pixels into a larger, satisfying picture, but they’ll make for great out-of-context awards season clips as The Rock launches yet another militaristic PR campaign. There’s a version of The Smashing Machine that might’ve been a thrilling relationship drama with the UFC backstory used only as a distant backdrop, but instead the major dramatic payoffs are staged off the back of Kerr’s performances in a career-defining Japanese tournament and the woulda-coulda-shoulda introspection of where he fits into the larger UFC story today. In the end, the movie feels like just as much of a sports-industry advertisement as the stylistic markers of Him, promoting both the UFC and The Rock as decades-spanning sports institutions.
I went into this double feature hoping to see a dramatic reckoning with the physical & emotional toll that professional sports take on young men’s fragile bodies, and I left still craving that reckoning. All that you’ll find here are a few inspired visual choices in how those bodies are commodified in sports-world iconography and a few inspired acting choices in how Wayans & Johnson subvert the more cartoonish archetypes they’re more famous for portraying. That’s all to say that just because neither movie is entirely successful doesn’t mean they’re entirely disposable. To misquote an infamous tweet, why must a movie be “good”? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a muscular bod, huge?
Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Saturday (October 4th) at the annual Art for Art’s Sake event on Magazine Street. We will be selling the print versions of six Swampflix zines, including “flash art” collections of hand-drawn illustrations from past reviews.
Art for Art’s Sake will take place from 6 to 9pm on Saturday, October 4th, all along Magazine Street. Swampflix will be stationed outside Tattooagogo at 4421 Magazine St, 70115.
Over the past few months, I have consistently watched one to two classic episodes of Law & Order every night around dinner time. The ritual started as a fascination with the high cinematic quality of the show’s early seasons, especially in contributions from all-star cinematographer Ernest Dickerson and maniacally intense screen actor Michael Moriarty. Now that I’m about five seasons deep into the show, though, both of those notable names have departed, and I can no longer tell if I’m impressed with the craft anymore or if I’m just addicted to the storytelling format. There’s a hypnotic satisfaction to the show’s procedural narrative rhythms that soothes something deep in my otherwise anxious brain. It’s so hypnotizing, in fact, that every movie I watch just reads as different flavors of Law & Order now. The last time I went to a repertory screening was to see the grimy 80s crime thriller Night of the Juggler, which just played as an especially trashy episode of vintage Law & Order (with extended chase scenes that would’ve blown the show’s weekly budget). This week, I got to see a double feature of films by Akira Kurosawa and Spike Lee at The Prytania, and I still could only interpret them as variations of Law & Order. 1963’s High and Low? That’s classy Law & Order. Its new straight-to-AppleTV+ remake? That’s Law & Order as early-aughts melodrama, with some occasional twerking in the courthouse. Everything is Law & Order for those with eyes to see (and access to a family member’s Hulu log-in).
I would like to extend myself some grace for mentioning my new Law & Order habit in yet another classic movie review, since High and Low and Night of the Juggler share a similar first-act premise that invites the reference. Both films start with a crazed criminal kidnapping the child of a wealthy businessman they envy & loathe, only to discover that they have abducted the wrong kid by mistake, complicating their chances of collecting the demanded ransom. While Night of the Juggler uses that premise to launch into a Death Wish-style campaign of brute-force vengeance against the scurrying sickos of NYC, High and Low is much more thoughtful & introspective about the wealth disparity issues of Yokohama, Japan. Longtime Kurosawa muse Toshiro Mifune stars as an executive at a ladies’ shoe manufacturer who’s in the middle of a complex negotiation to take over the company when he’s informed by telephone that his son has been kidnapped. Only, his servile chauffer’s son has been abducted by mistake, which corners Mifune’s hard-edged business prick into a tough moral quandary: whether to use his life’s savings to fund the purchase of his business or to fund the return of an innocent child whose father cannot afford the outrageous ransom demands otherwise. While he struggles to make his choice, his wife, his grieving chauffer, and the detectives assigned to the case look on in horror, amazed that he would consider for a second to choose shoes over the life of a child. He eventually relents.
Like all great Law & Order episodes, High and Low really gets cooking in its second half, after the crime has been fully defined and all that’s left to do is exact punishment. It’s not only satisfying to watch detectives zero in on a prime suspect by listening for evidence of specific streetcar rattles in his recorded phone calls or by staging stake-outs to catch him purchasing heroin in an American GI jazz bar, but the way the investigation’s success is dependent on how public sentiment plays out in the press adds another layer of tension to the on-the-ground drama. As the walls close in around the working-class maniac who takes a wild shot at a corporate goon above his station by fucking with his family, the “high” and “low” signifiers of the title become increasingly literal, recalling the geographically “upper” & “lower” class distinctions of Parasite. The businessman’s invaded home is revealed to be perched at the top of an otherwise economically dire neighborhood, a symbol of financial superiority that visibly mocks the struggling workers below. As cruel as the kidnapper is for threatening the life of a child (and murdering his accomplices with overdoses of pure heroin) while rocking ice-cold mirrored sunglasses, the source of his resentment is vivid, and the businessman’s innocence in their clash is proven to be a matter of law, not of morality. The Law & Order connections also become unignorable in the back half once the detectives start interviewing the kidnapper’s neighbors for clues while they continue to work their manual-labor jobs at fish markets, junk yards, and bus depots. All that’s missing is the show’s iconic reverberated gavel-banging sound effect to punctuate each change in locale.
I wish I could say I got as much out of Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest as I got out of the Kurosawa film. His modernization of the classic crime picture is one of those conceptually baffling remakes that only invites you to question its changes to the source material instead of engaging with it as a standalone work. Lee casts Denzel Washington (one of the few working actors who could credibly be said to be on Mifune’s skill level) as a record company executive instead of the more logical hip-hop version of the original character: a sports sneaker magnate. Instead of mistakenly kidnapping the son of an anonymous employee, a disgruntled rapper who couldn’t earn his way on to the exec’s label (A$AP Rocky, holding his own against Washington’s trademark intensity) kidnaps the exec’s godson, as the chauffer in this version is a close family friend (the always-welcome Jeffrey Wright). That major change to the central dynamic weakens the tension of the businessman’s moral dilemma, but Lee makes other changes elsewhere that feel more thoughtful & pointed. At the very least, the update from tracking public sentiment in the press to tracking public sentiment in social media memes helps make it apparent why Lee might have thought to remake High and Low in the first place (even if it appears that he hasn’t seen a meme in at least fifteen years). Likewise, when the record exec and his chauffer decide to seek vigilante justice outside of the official, sluggish detectives’ investigation, it opens the movie up to broader social commentary about how true justice is achieved. There’s also some interesting visual play in how Lee relocates the final showdown between businessman & kidnaper on either side of a plexiglass barrier from prison to recording booth, but then he stages that same showdown a second time in a prison cell anyway, so the point of the exercise starts to muddle.
Questioning Spike Lee’s every minor decision does not stop at how Highest 2 Lowest relates to its source material. It’s constant. The movie opens with the worst Broadway showtune I’ve ever heard in my life, with its title populating onscreen in a childlish Toy Story font. The first half of the story, before the kidnapping victim is returned, is scored by an oppressive strings arrangement that makes every familial heart-to-heart play like TV movie melodrama instead of a big-screen thriller from a major auteur. The whole thing reads as laughably phony, especially by the time Washington has one of those melodramatic heart-to-hearts in his teenage son’s bedroom, which is decorated with a Kamala Harris campaign poster. Again, baffling. At the same time, Lee does occasionally convey total awareness of how he’s trolling his audience, pairing Jeffrey Wright’s casting with a full art-gallery collection of Basquiat paintings, drawing attention to his casting of Allstate TV commercial spokesman Dean Winters by nicknaming one of Wright’s handguns “Mayhem”, and having Washington erroneously refer to Law & Order: “SUV” like a true out-of-touch millionaire. The most generous reading of these small, playful touches could link them to Kurosawa’s own jokey details, like staging his kidnapping during a child’s game of Sherriff & Bandit or delegating the police-artist suspect sketches to a child who can barely fingerpaint. Personally, I don’t find any comparisons between the two films to be especially flattering to Lee. He seems to be having fun in Highest 2 Lowest, and I suppose it’s overall worth seeing for his trademark fleeting moments of brilliance, but its lows are much lower than its highs are high. It resembles the modern, corny version of Law & Order I had assumed the show had always been, whereas Kurosawa’s High and Low recalls the classic, refined version I never knew existed until this summer (which is somewhat ironic given Lee’s professional connection to vintage Law & Order cinematographer Ernest Dickerson).
I have owned the same used copy of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi actioner The Running Man for as long as I can remember. It’s been so long that the DVD itself has become just as kitsch as the cheesy 80s movie it stores. Between its standard-definition transfer, its double-disc presentation of both wide & full-screen formats, and its 3D-animated menu transitions, it’s a time capsule of physical media’s ancient past. What really dates that Special Edition DVD set, however, is its special features menu, which includes two short-form documentaries explaining The Running Man‘s continued cultural relevance into the early 2000s. One disc includes a featurette titled “Lockdown on Main Street,” which links the film’s themes of totalitarian government surveillance to the privacy-violating overreach of the Bush Administration post-9/11. Topical! The other disc’s featurette “Game Theory” covers the prescience of the film’s game-show premise in predicting the dystopian state of reality TV in the early aughts, which had then recently mutated from early human-interest documentaries PBS’s An American Family & MTV’s The Real World to more preposterous, sadistic programs like Survivor & Fear Factor. The titular, fictional TV game show The Running Man is a government-sanctioned crime & punishment program in which prisoners fight for their freedom against homicidal American Gladiator types with deadly weapons & pro wrestler gimmicks. The real-world state of reality TV hadn’t gotten quite that malicious by the early 2000s, but the other fictional programs advertised during its fictional television broadcasts—Paul Verhoeven-style—weren’t too much of an exaggeration. For instance, the commercial for a show titled Climbing for Dollars, in which contestants climb a rope over a pit of barbed wire & rabid dogs, no longer felt all that outlandish in a world that had already produced Fear Factor or the Japanese game show “A Life in Prizes” (as documented in last year’s The Contestant). Even when that Special Edition DVD was produced in 2004, the film’s dystopian game show America still seemed plausibly achievable by its far-away future setting of 2019.
The Running Man‘s quirks & charms have not changed much over the years. As a pun-heavy action showcase for a spandex-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s just as amusing now as it was four decades ago. The worst you can say about the way it has aged is that it’s been outshone by its Verhoeven-directed contemporaries RoboCop & Total Recall, which make for much sharper & more vicious satire. Oddly, the short-doc featurette “Game Theory: An Examination of Reality TV” feels much more out of date, since it speaks to current trends of reality TV production in the early 2000s instead of predicting what the format might evolve into in the future. There’s something surreal about watching talking heads explain the basic components of reality television after decades of drowning in household-name series like Real Housewives, Below Deck, Love Is Blind, The Bachelor, etc. Everything from those shows’ reduced production costs to the way they’re cast for conflict to the way their semi-scripted & heavily edited version of “reality” is a far cry from pure documentary filmmaking is spelled out as if the audience is considering those factors for the very first time. Even if obvious to a modern audience, there is still something validating about hearing former Survivor contestants and Fear Factor showrunners explain that what they’re attempting to capture is a genuine reaction to artificial scenarios — a conscious mix of reality & artifice. Sometimes, it does help to hear an everyday concept defined in simple terms like that, even if in this case it feels like explaining the existence of water to a fish. The fictional TV program The Running Man could not be more artificial; it has a pro-wrestling promotion’s relationship to Reality. The pain, shame, and death that contestants suffer on the show is real, though, which is why it’s totally plausible that massive audiences would tune into its bread-and-circuses entertainment spectacle as nightly appointment viewing. It’s the same sadistic impulse that recently inspired Netflix executives to greenlight a “real” version of The Squid Games to cash in on the popularity of the fictional one, with predictably inhumane results.
This early-2000s “Game Theory” understanding & definition of reality TV is both accurate & incomplete. It gets across the reality TV audience’s bottomless sadism, but it largely ignores the sexual voyeurism that also makes the format so enduringly popular. The success of Survivor & Fear Factor may have made it seem like society was headed towards more physically violent & punitive television programming in an impending Running Man dystopia, but it’s arguable that the format has veered towards a more sexually pornographic impulse instead. While early reality-TV breakouts like The Real World & Big Brother offered brief, night-vision glimpses into its contestants’ private sex lives, more recent shows like Love Island, Temptation Island, FBoy Island,MILF Manor, and Naked Attraction have disposed of any pretense that the audience cares about anything else but sex. While The Running Man & “Game Theory” only acknowledge the format’s sex appeal in context of casting hottie hunks & babes as eye candy, there were other early examinations of the format that fully understood its reliance on sexual voyeurism. For instance, No Wave filmmaker Beth B’s 1996 documentary Visiting Desire plays like a direct response to & escalation of the sexual voyeurism of MTV’s The Real World. Triangulating the middle ground between Annie Sprinkle, Marlon Riggs, and the street interview segments of HBO Real Sex, Visiting Desire is a social experiment shot in the cultural dead zone between reality TV & amateur pornography. It starts with a sequence of therapists & psychologists explaining the function of Fantasy in healthy adult sexuality, staged in a black-box void to look like an especially risqué episode of Charlie Rose. Then, Beth B points her camera at a series of NYC pedestrians, who ruminate on what fantasy they would want to play out if they could share a bedroom with a stranger for 30 minutes, no boundaries. Finally, she puts that scenario to a live test, bringing two strangers at a time into a sparse set decorated with only a bed, a chair, and a box of Kleenex, with 30 minutes to act out a fantasy of their choosing. It looks & feels like the set-up to an amateur porno, but the bridge from fantasy to reality becomes too intimidating in the moment for most participants to cross, and it ends up playing like an art-gallery video loop instead.
Already a few years into the initial run of The Real World, Visiting Desire totally understands the basic appeal of reality television. Beth B has set up an intensely artificial scenario (30 minutes of filmed fantasy play with a total stranger) hoping to illicit & capture a genuine human reaction (sex, or something like it). It’s not accurate to call it a failed experiment, exactly, but the range of genuine human behavior captured in the film isn’t as sexy nor as gratifying as its premise promises. Some participants are committed to the semi-scripted fantasy of their choosing: trading spankings, swapping clothes & gender roles, instructing a stranger to masturbate, etc. Unsurprisingly, NYC punk scene legend Lydia Lunch is especially game to lean into her dominatrix persona for the camera, fully playing out each fantasy prompt she’s confronted with regardless of whether she shares any attraction with her scene partner. Most participants completely chicken out, though, shying away from the fantasy they entered the room ready to perform and, in several instances, breaking down crying. That fear and that emotional release still count as unexpected genuine reaction to the artificial “reality” of the project, but they also so obviously miss the mark of what Beth B initially proposed that the cast often apologizes to the camera for not giving her what she wants. While the Running Man “Game Theory” undersells the pornographic aspect of reality TV, Beth B’s take on the format also misunderstands an essential component of what makes it work in the first place. 30 minutes is simply not enough time for her cast to adjust to her artificial environment or, more importantly, to her camera. In “Game Theory”, a former Survivor contestant describes how awkward she felt during her initial hours in front of the cameras, but then she became a more natural version of herself a few days into the shoot as she adjusted to their presence. All Visiting Desire has time to capture is that initial, awkward awareness of the camera without breaking through to the comfort that allows for genuine human response to its artificial scenario. If it were a multi-episode TV show instead of academic video art, it might’ve gotten somewhere genuinely interesting (and genuinely sexy). Instead, it’s a mixed-results experiment that’s neither pure documentary nor pure pornography.
If there’s anything instructive about this early reality-TV academia, it’s that Edgar Wright’s upcoming Running Man adaptation is unlikely to have much new to say about the violent or pornographic extremes that make the format popular. The Running Man-style violence of game shows like Survivor & Fear Factor peaked twenty years ago, while the pornographic avenues the genre has recently taken instead have no relation to the film’s Stephen King-penned source material. It’s difficult to imagine a new Running Man could even be dated in the fun way, not without Arnold Schwarzenegger quipping, “I’ll live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist, because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” in his trademark Austrian accent. The cartoonish action cinema of the original Running Man movie was already outdated by the 1990s, and the American game-show dystopia it predicts was already in full swing by the 2000s, long before its 2019 setting. So, what’s even left for a new movie adaptation to accomplish? Based on current trends, the future of reality TV looks a lot more like the semi-pornographic artifice of Beth B’s Visiting Desire, flaws & all. Maybe that’s what we should be remaking instead, now that TV producers know exactly how to manipulate game show contestants into fucking on camera. It would likely make for some very popular major-network primetime porn, à la Love Island UK (or whatever happens to be your island-themed softcore game show of choice).
Let’s ignore for a second who’s directing it. It’s insane that hordes of young movie nerds are buying tickets to an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey a full year in advance of its release date next summer. Of course, what those nerds are actually buying tickets to is The New Christopher Nolan Picture, as they’d show up to just about anything with that director’s name on it, in blind faith. There’s nothing culturally current or relevant about Homer otherwise, at least not in the decade since JLo was wooed with a thrifted “first-edition” copy of The Iliad in the dipshit erotic thriller The Boy Next Door. So, there’s something incredibly funny about Nolan leading Dark Knight die-hards into Greek Lit scholarship for the next year, studying ancient verse and Wikipedia summaries in anticipation of the biggest summer blockbuster of 2026. I won’t be purchasing an advanced Odyssey ticket myself (partially because they’re already selling out), but I can’t pretend I’m above that kind of literary hoodwinking either. In fact, in the past week I’ve watched multiple 3-hour epic adaptations of ancient literary texts that I wouldn’t have any personal interest in if they weren’t repackaged as Movie Nerd fodder. Whether I was lured in by the director, the genre, the screengrabs, or—my biggest weakness—a physical media flash sale, I found myself spending hours getting lost in maddening odysseys into literary adaptation every night after work this week, finding way more academia than usual in my cinematic escapism.
Watching Federico Fellini’s 1969 adaptation of the ancient Roman epic Satyricon, it becomes clear why humanity bothered to invent the film camera in the first place: pornographic opera, operatic porno, and everything in-between. Every image elicits a “Whoa,” while every sound earns an “Eww,” splitting the difference between Hollywood Babylon extravagance & Grand Guignol grotesquerie. It’s also an impossible adaptation, as entire chapters of its source text have been lost to time, leaving gigantic holes in the story Fellini dared himself to tell. What’s left is a long journey in which our hero Encolpius attempts to reclaim a lost love slave who was stolen & sold by his best frenemy, Ascyltus. Much like Odysseus finding his way home after the Trojan War, Satyricon is an episodic adventure in which Encolpius repeatedly fails to reclaim ownership of his beautiful boy-slave while repeatedly running into Ascyltus having the time of his life no matter what perils the former bros find themselves in from scene to scene. There’s often no connective tissue between the individual set pieces, since entire chapters of the book are missing. So, it mostly functions as a collection of living tableaux, with Fellini striving to create images as beautiful and, to quote him directing the background actors on-set, “as wild & crazy as possible!” In some scenes, characters lament that fine arts like poetry, painting, and sculpture are not what they used to be while chatting in the ancient Roman equivalent of an art gallery. Other scenes are built around fart jokes & sexual farce in which the cure for impotence is getting your tush spanked by a harem of late-60s hippie babes. For your sanity, it’s best not to pay too close attention to the beat-to-beat progress of the story and instead save that energy for planning the next decade of Mardi Gras costumes around what lewks the hundreds of extras are modeling in the background.
Paying too close attention to every narrative avenue of 1965’s The Saragossa Manuscript would also drive an audience insane, which in that case is entirely the point. A Polish adaptation of an early-19th Century novel written in French but set in Spain, it’s already a Russian nesting doll of international post-modern contexts before you get into the particulars of the plot. In the first framing device, Spanish & French officers on opposing sides of The Napoleonic War find the titular manuscript in a home that’s crumbling under gunfire. Illustrated with surrealist art & vulgar erotica, the manuscript appears to tell the story of the Spanish officer’s own grandfather, baiting him to continue reading with promised insights into his own heritage. Roaming a countryside populated almost exclusively by demons & “evil ghosts,” the Spaniard in the manuscript finds himself listening to the endless anecdotes & half-remembered dreams of fellow travelers (each with their own characters who have stories to tell), mapping out an impossible labyrinth of framing devices within framing devices so absurdly complex even Guy Maddin couldn’t find the exit. By the time he’s five or so layers deep into anecdotes within dreams within tales within sagas, the Spaniard complains that he has lost track of the border “where reality ends and fantasy takes over,” which fellow listeners helpfully compare to abstract concepts like Poetry and The Infinite. Nothing especially exciting happens in The Saragossa Manuscript. The story involves demons, ghosts, Spanish Inquisitors, dream-realm polygamists, and swashbuckling swordplay, but it’s all just as mundane as listening to a friend describe a dream they had last week (in which a dreamed-up character recounted their own half-remembered dream). The most thrilling plot development is a moment when the Spaniard within the manuscript places his hands on a copy of the manuscript himself and starts reading the book of his own life, making it clear that the audience is being relentlessly fucked with without mercy.
The narrative shape of Marcell Jankovics’s animated epic The Tragedy of Man is much easier to define than either Satyricon‘s or Saragossa Manuscript‘s. It’s just as maddening in its narrative ambition & scale, however, as it attempts to recount the entire history of everything — from the birth of the universe to its inevitable future collapse. Completed over several decades of hand-drawn animation, The Tragedy of Man is a psychedelic infographic that illustrates humanity’s entire existence through the visual art, philosophy sermons, and methods of power in each era depicted. It’s as visually stunning as it is intellectually exhaustive, not least of all because it is adapted from a 19th Century play cited as the pinnacle of Hungarian literature. It’s difficult to imagine what a staging of that play might look like based on the constantly shifting psychedelia rendered here, in which early humanity is depicted in a series of cave paintings, ancient Egypt is depicted in animated hieroglyphics, modern times are depicted in Ralph Bakshi-style pop art, and the distant future is depicted in unfathomable science fiction speculation. The stage-play source text makes sense in the constant dual-voiced dialogue between the Biblical figures of Adam & Lucifer, however, who spend the entire three-hour runtime narrating the evolution of man’s self-destructive introspection & philosophy. No matter how harshly the art style or historical circumstances shift from segment to segment, it’s a constant refrain that humanity’s main folly is our ambition for everlasting fame, which leads us only to harm ourselves & each other instead of being happy with our current, temporary lot in life. What’s staggering about the film is its millennia-spanning quest to prove that point with visual & historical citations across the entirety of time, which is too large of a scale for the human brain to fully comprehend, let alone contain in a single work of art.
Each of these epic-scale literary adaptations were immensely satisfying as self-contained art films, but I’m not convinced that they’re effective as advertisements for their source texts. I’m no closer to reading Petronius’s Satyricon now that I’ve enjoyed the perverse visual delights of Fellini Satyricon. Likewise, I doubt Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is going to spark a renewed cultural interest in ancient art & poetry beyond inspiring a few opening-weekend clickbait articles. These unwieldy, impossible-to-fully-adapt literary source texts are much more useful to filmmakers than they are to the resulting films’ audiences. They inspire grand-scale, abstract storytelling in a medium that’s at its best when it reaches for Poetry & The Infinite instead of getting mired in pettier concerns like Logic & Plot. According to The Tragedy of Man, that kind of transcendent ambition is corruptive to the human spirit, but since all we’re doing here is telling stories and making pretty pictures, I guess it’s okay in this case. Hopefully, adapting a saga as immense & sprawling as The Odyssey will help break Nolan away from the more clinical, reserved approach he generally takes to blockbuster filmmaking. And if he happens to sell a few paperback copies of The Complete Works of Homer in the process, all the better.
I’ve said it before on this blog, but the current New Orleans repertory scene really is stronger than it has ever previously been in my lifetime. While the original uptown location of The Prytania has continued its Classic Movies series that used to encompass almost the entirety of local repertory programming, The Broad has massively stepped up its game in recent years to play a wide range of classic arthouse cinema titles I never thought I’d get a chance to see projected in a proper theater, making for a weekly spoil of riches. That recent vibe shift was especially apparent during this year’s Pride Month offerings at The Broad, which included separate programs from both the regular Gap Tooth series and a one-off Pride series sponsored by a self-explanatory social club called Crescent City Leathermen. Together, they combined for an impressively robust month of queer repertory cinema in one convenient venue, including a list of Swampflix-approved classics like Nowhere, The Celluloid Closet, The Queen and,most surprisingly, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. It was an overwhelming bounty for a single month of programming, so I got to be extremely selective about which screenings to attend and narrowed it down to two titles I had never seen before from directors I love: Pedro Almodóvar & Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The beautiful thing is that I didn’t even have to leave my neighborhood to see them; what a gift.
While Gap Tooth was perfectly astute for programming 1991’s High Heels during Pride Month, it could have just as easily screened a month earlier to celebrate Mother’s Day. Almodóvar’s entire catalog is recursive & accumulative but, even so, High Heels plays like the scrappier, goofier dry run for his later commercial triumph All About My Mother (while still being fabulous on its own terms). Victoria Abril stars as a Madrid TV news broadcaster with a near-psychotic obsession with her lifelong-absent mother, a once-famous actress & pop star played by Marisa Paredes. As a child, she conspired to keep her mother to herself through Rhoda Penmark-level machinations, but she grows up abandoned anyway, inspiring a lifelong fetishistic obsession with a woman who doesn’t think much of her in return. When her mother makes a grand return to Madrid in her adulthood, the details of her obsession become overwhelming. Not only is her TV broadcaster career a pale imitation of her mother’s international fame, but she’s also married to her mother’s former lover & biographer and soon starts a sexual affair with a drag performer who impersonates the famous torch singer for cash tips. The strangely incestuous sexual tension between those four players gets even more complex as the mother resumes a previous affair with the daughter’s husband, who is soon found murdered by a mysterious visitor to his bedroom. As always, Almodóvar has a way of tangling the interpersonal conflicts & romances of all involved so gradually that it takes a long while to realize just how much of a melodramatic mess the plot appears to be when spelled out on paper. Even when introducing this sordid mother-daughter dynamic in childhood flashback, he simplifies the jealousy-and-indifference tensions of their relationship down to a simple symbolic object: an earring. When that earring catches on one of the women’s hairdo in the awkward hug of their adult reunion decades later, it’s carrying enough emotional weight to make you cry. At the same time, he’s clearly having fun with the gaudy tableaux of the melodrama genre in a way that verges on ironic humor, filling the screen with enough drag performances, dance breaks, high heels, and lipstick kisses to make getting imprisoned for murder in Madrid seem like a genuinely fun time for any woman lucky enough to get arrested. It’s just as funny as it is sincerely heartbreaking & sexy, easily ranking among the best of his works.
The Crescent City Leathermen’s screening of 1982’s Querelle landed on the exact opposite extreme of the masc-femme spectrum, staying true to the spirit of the organization’s namesake. Fassbinder’s late-career adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel is a crime story in which the only lawman on hand is a leather-daddy fetishist who operates more as a barfly than a proper detective. The film is a kind of pornographic opera, starring Brad Davis as the titular sailor & murderer who ruins the lives of any poor soul who happens to gaze upon his beefcake beauty. Querellearrives in the port city of Brest with the dual purpose of following naval orders from his superiors while, why not, orchestrating a massive opium deal with the local barkeep as a side hustle. In that bar, he stumbles directly into an already complex love triangle involving his own estranged brother, the aforementioned barkeep, and the barkeep’s wife. All three players are erotically obsessed with Querelle at first sight—brother inlcuded—but the sailor ends up bottoming for the barkeep first, while constantly protesting that he’s actually straight as an arrow no matter how much pleasure he takes in receiving anal sex. The sex scenes fall just short of pornographic, but they are incredibly lengthy, sweaty, and intense. To make up for the lack of onscreen penetration, the movie purposefully mistakes violence for a sexual act, having Querelle insert knives & bullets into the local citizenry as he gets increasingly greedy in his local, self-serving rise to power at everyone else’s expense. Not having read the novel, the character motivations & plot revelations can be confusing from scene to scene, but just like watching an opera in a foreign language, the overall emotion & eroticism of the piece shines through the fog. Querelle is a primarily visual piece, with Fassbinder bathing the screen in intense washes of orange & blue gel lighting and accentuating the dreamlike quality of the setting by mixing jazz-age speakeasy iconography with 80s-specific props like video game arcades. From Derek Jarman to Todd Haynes to Amanda Kramer, there’s no shortage of sensory comparison points in approximating the film’s visual aesthetic, but by the end I could only see it as the evolutionary link between James Bidgood’s Pink Naricssus & Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys — an unholy trinity of operatic male lust & violence refracted through cinematic artifice.
Both Querelle & High Heels are titles I’ve been meaning to see for years, but I dragged my feet on clearing them from my watchlist due to streaming inaccessibility and the cost of collecting physical media. As has been frequently happening lately, my procrastination was rewarded by local theatrical showings of these historically underrepresented queer classics, something I never would have dreamed possible just a few years ago. Now that Pride Month is over, Halloween Season programming is months away, and Gap Tooth is officially on their Summer Break, that overwhelming flood of once-in-a-lifetime repertory screenings is likely to dry up over the coming weeks, but I’m still feeling incredibly spoiled by what was recently on offer just a few short bus stops away from my house. New Orleans still doesn’t have nearly the breadth of repertory programming as larger cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or even Austin, but the work that’s being done on the few screens we do have within city limits has been getting exponentially more impressive & adventurous in recent years. The offerings at The Broad alone are worthy of local pride.
Literary police detective Jules Maigret was featured in at least 75 mystery novels published from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Maigret series was such an immediate hit that the fictional detective was adapted to cinema starting in the first year of publication, and he’s such an enduring literary icon that he’s still being portrayed in prestige television series, most recently by Gerard Depardieu. There’s a statue erected in his honor in the Netherlands where the first Maigret novel was written, despite his fictional & cultural home base being Paris, France. Personally, I’ve never heard of the guy. Considering the near-century of continued circulation & celebration, I have to assume that Maigret is as popular of a literary figure as fellow mystery-novel icons Sam Spade, Philip Marlow, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot. However, the first time I ever saw his name in print was on the covers of used DVDs at a local Goodwill, where I recently picked up two 1950s adaptations of famous Maigret novels directed by Jean Delannoy. The completionist in me would normally be intimidated by a new movie-watching project like this, since getting the full scope of Maigret’s cinematic output would mean watching a half-dozen actors portray the character across at least a dozen films. I’m not doing all that. Delannoy only directed two of those Maigret features, though, and they both starred Jean Gabin in the titular role. That’s about as manageable of a crash course as possible for such a prolific film subject.
Unsurprisingly, Delannoy & Gabin’s Maigretcollaborations aren’t especially interested in introducing new audiences to the already-long famous character. They are both self-contained mysteries that presume audience familiarity with the titular detective, the same way a modern adaptation of The Hounds of Baskervilles wouldn’t feel the need to explain the basic character traits of Sherlock Holmes. So, 1958’s Maigret Sets a Trap is not especially helpful as an introduction to Maigret’s whole deal, but its central murder mystery is shocking & compelling enough for that not to matter. If anything, Jules Maigret is protective of his identity, hiding his personal feelings behind a mask of strait-laced, middle-aged machismo, with Jean Gabin playing the detective as the French equivalent of George C. Scott. As buttoned-up & conservative as Maigret can be, however, the crimes he’s tasked to solve are shockingly salacious. In this first outing, he must scheme to trap a serial “killer of sluts,” a psychosexual freak who’s been stabbing anonymous women in Parisian alleyways as punishment for the alleged sins of their gender. As soon as the audience meets the killer halfway through the film, his guilt is obvious, shifting the “whodunnit” structure into a “whydunnit” story instead, with Maigret boiling to an angry intensity as he hammers the suspect during interrogation into a full confession. The remaining mystery is in discovering his motivation and accomplice, untangling an unseemly tale of cuckoldry, impotence, and homosexual repression covered up by his doting mother & frustrated wife. The shadowy alleyways and mood-setting jazz of the early killings promise the genre trappings of a 1950s noir, but the details of the case eventually lead to Maigret Sets a Trap operating as a French precursor to Psycho & Peeping Tom. Maigret may not have the expressive charisma of a Sam Spade or a Norman Bates, but he does walk the streets of their shared sordid world.
In Delannoy & Gabin’s second Maigret outing, the detective becomes a little more personable to the audience through some nostalgic soul-searching. 1959’s Maigret and the Saint Fiacre Case sends him back to the rural hometown he left as a teenager to pursue a law enforcement career in the big city. There, he fails to protect the heiress of the local estate who was his first boyhood crush, and must spend the rest of the film solving her murder after it’s committed before his very eyes. At this point, it’s still difficult to fully understand what makes Maigret special detective after getting to know him over two films, but he can at least be narrowed down to a few scattered attributes: middle-aged, pipe smoker, mostly quiet but shouts during interrogations, detests ninnies & “dilettantes”, etc. This second case is much more of a traditional whodunnit than the first, with a wide field of nervous, effeminate weirdos serving as possible suspects for the overly severe brute to expose. Will the killer be the countess’s playboy heir, the gigolo art critic, the sexually repressed priest, or the pipsqueak bank teller who rides into town on a Vespa scooter? I found the field of suspects to be a clearly distinguished type but the exact guilty party to be entirely unpredictable. In a way, their contrast against the more traditional, stoic masculinity of the detective on the case is the greater crime that must be solved, which opens up this duo of films to a range of strangely reactionary sexual politics. At the very least, it seems like the appeal of these Maigret stories is partly that the mysteries he gets wrapped up in are way more salacious & distinctive than the detective solving them. He’d much rather be at home having a cup of coffee with his adoring housewife than getting his hands dirty with the effete riff raff of modern urban life, but duty calls, and it calls often.
As soon as its opening credits sequence, Maigret Sets a Trap nails down the iconography of Maigret’s detective work. Maigret is introduced through the silhouette of his signature pipe, casting a massive shadow over a map of Paris – an image that is violently interrupted by the stab of a dagger onto the city streets. That visual stylishness continues throughout the picture, with Dellanoy constantly moving the camera to capture every inch of the mise-en-scène and even experimenting with some 1st-person POV cinematography while navigating Parisian alleyways. The details of the case get surprisingly gruesome for a mainstream 50s production too, with frank depictions of rape, bloodshed, and male sex work upending standards & expectations set by Hays Code-inhibited Hollywood productions of the era. for In contrast, The Saint Fiarce Case is much more generic detective-novel fodder, with only occasional excursions to modern strip clubs & printing presses breaking up what’s essentially a by-the-books Old Dark House story. It’s most interesting as an attempt to pick at the personal backstory & hang-ups of a character who’s protective of his privacy even to his audience, whereas Sets a Trap stands on its own as a great film regardless of its connections to other Maigret tales. Jean Gabin was so celebrated for his portrayal of the character that he was later invited to return to the role in 1963’s Maigret Sees Red, well after Jean Delannoy had moved on to direct other projects. Personally, I didn’t get to know Maigret well enough over these two films to be on the hook for his continued adventures unless, like Maigret Sets a Trap, the mysteries he’s tasked to solve in them sound especially shocking or prurient. It would take another chance meeting at the second-hand shop to spend more time with the detective, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever fully get to know the man behind the pipe.
There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster in movie history. I mean that in the literal sense, since the supreme kaiju being is seemingly armored by a layer of gold scales, making his “heavy metal” designation as matter-of-fact as Mechagodzilla‘s. Of course, I also mean it in the colloquial sense. The three-headed dragon beast is loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. When Ghidorah flies into the frame to take down Godzilla and his fellow skyscraper flunkies, the image conjures the crushing sounds of heavy-metal guitar riffs in audiences’ brains, even in the 1960s pictures that were produced well before Black Sabbath had a record deal. Ghidorah is so metal, in fact, that it takes at least three other Toho-brand monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head. 🤘
The first time I encountered King Ghidorah was in the 1968 kaiju crossover picture Destroy All Monsters, in which the space-alien bio weapon was unleashed to union-bust a gang of kaiju that included Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan (among the less-famous monsters Minilla, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, and Varan). Seen out of order in my winding journey through Criterion’s Godzilla box set, this appeared to be an especially grand ego-boost for the giant beast, like when WWE puts over their biggest, brawniest wrestler by having them eliminate every other competitor on the roster during the Royal Rumble. As it turns out, that was Ghidora’s exact funciton from the very beginning, and his debut entrance into the Toho kaiju ring marked the very first time Godzilla felt compelled to team up with other monsters to fight on humanity’s behalf. That Godzilla face-turn was in 1963’s Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, in which evil space aliens declare interplanetary warfare by launching Ghidorah at Planet Earth, threatening to take over. It’s then up to Mothra, in her squirming grub form, to convince Godzilla & the pterodactyl-like Rodan to stop throwing rocks at each other like schoolyard children and instead join forces to fight off this existential, heavy-metal threat. They’re both petty assholes about it, but they eventually relent and team up to repel the flying hell-beast before going their separate ways.
The reluctant tag team of Godzilla & Rodan reforms when King Ghidorah returns in 1965’s Invasion of the Astro-monster. Rebranded with his new wrestler gimmick as Monster Zero, Ghidorah is once again deployed as an interplanetary weapon of mass destruction, one that can only be disarmed by the collective power of multiple kaiju opponents. His inevitable 2-on-1 battle with Godzilla & Rodan is delayed until the climactic 15 minutes of the runtime, though, as the invading Xiliens from Planet X smartly abduct Godzilla & Rodan with UFO tractor beams and imprison them for as long as possible so Ghidorah can do maximum damage, unchecked. Without the large-scale monster battles to fill up the runtime, Invasion of the Astro-monster spins its wheels with lengthy indulgences in political espionage and The X From Outer Space-style extraterrestrial cocktail parties. It’s maybe not the most thrilling approach to making a monster movie, but it does lead to some gorgeous 60s-kitch imagery. It’s impossible to decide what the most striking image of the film is in retrospect, but I’ve narrowed it down to two options: literalizing the Cold War aspect of the Space Race by putting a gun in the flag-planting astronaut’s free hand or Godzilla being abducted by a UFO. Then, Ghidorah soars into the frame to battle Godzilla & Rodan once again, erasing such questions entirely with heavy-metal bursts of lightning.
If there’s one detail of Ghidorah’s design that makes his metal-as-fuck majesty immediately obvious, it’s that each of his individual dragon heads moves independently, which is especially impressive when combined with his suitmation power of flight. It’s a lot like watching Kermit the Frog ride a bicycle for the first time in The Muppet Movie, adding an entire new dimension to kaiju suitmation spectacle audiences previously did not dream was possible. The suit was reportedly exceedingly difficult to operate as a result, often leading to longer shooting schedules as his operators struggled to keep his long, golden necks from tangling like noodles. Like headbanging to thrash riffs, it was well worth the headache. Everything else that makes Ghidorah so thunderously badass is immediately, visually obvious. He is the essence of metal, skyborne and beautiful. Godzilla mastermind Ishirō Honda’s impulse to bulk up the monster’s reputation by making him undefeatable unless several other kaiju attack in unison was a smart one, but it was also necessary. Look at him. No one would buy into the kayfabe otherwise.
Brandon texted me a couple of weeks ago to ask if I would be interested in writing about Final Destination: Bloodlines, and I admitted that I hadn’t even planned on seeing it, as I had only seen the first movie years and years ago at a sleepover and hadn’t seen any of them since (although I, like almost everyone on Earth, was familiar with the log-truck opening of the first sequel). This surprised him, as my fondness for Screamand my almost academic interest in the post-Scream teen horror boom is something that has come up often around these parts. Looking back at the franchise, the release years perfectly overlap with the most academically rigorous years of my life, which explains why I never paid much attention to the franchise. I have a very good friend who was very interested in seeing Bloodlines, however, and I did ultimately see it in theaters after several attempts to plan an outing. I’ll be doing a full review of that one, but I didn’t feel fully qualified to do a write-up on it with so little familiarity with the series (despite its largely self-contained nature), since I also didn’t really foresee that I would get the chance to binge all of the others in order to make the most informed review possible. But something else bigger than me had a plan all along … and within six days of seeing Bloodlines, I had seen all five of the previous Final Destination entries. And I have thoughts.
Final Destination (2000)
There’s something legitimately special about this one. I already knew before going into it that this began life as an X-Files spec script, with Alex (Devon Sawa)’s character having initially been planned to be the younger brother of FBI agent Dana Scully. On the show, Scully is specifically noted to have three siblings: sister Melissa and older brother Bill Jr., both of whom appeared in four episodes in the present and a few others in flashbacks, and Melissa is mentioned frequently outside of her actual appearances. Younger brother Charles never appears in the present and, in Jeffrey Reddick’s initial script, occupied the role that would become Alex. The narrative of the film follows Alex as he has a premonition of a terrible air disaster occurring on his class trip to Paris, and his pursuant panic results in him being kicked off of the flight with several other students and a teacher: his nondescript best friend Tod, orphaned sculptor Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), class bully Carter (Kerr Smith) and his girlfriend, goofball Billy (Seann William Scott), and Miss Lewton (Kristen Cloke). As a result of this, he and the others are stated to have “cheated Death’s design,” which means that Death is now coming for all of them, as Alex tries to figure out if there is a way to get off of Death’s list permanently.
I watched this one last during my binge, as my buddy who wanted to watch the movies with me said we should skip to the second as we had both already seen the first, which ended up working out well, since Final Destination 5 is actually a stealth prequel that leads into the the events of this one. It also meant that I had already seen where the franchise was going before returning to the original text, which gave some insight into how this formula would be adapted and recycled. The film franchise that most came to mind as a result was not another horror series but the Mission: Impossible movies. As with those movies, this initial outing is in a genre that the other films aren’t necessarily. The first M:Iis a spy thriller that focuses mostly on spycraft and espionage but which happens to include a couple of major action sequences, notably the Langley heist (where Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt descends into a computer room to steal information) and the big train-set finale that includes a helicopter crashing into a tunnel. The later M:I films are really only spy movies in the broadest sense of the term, and could be more accurately defined as action adventure films that happen to include international intrigue. Every film after the first exists first and foremost as a vehicle to deliver high-octane stunt spectacle, with the “spy” elements only being present to the extent that they are needed to provide a scaffolding on which the action hangs. Likewise, Final Destination is structured as a mystery with the trappings of a horror movie, one that happens to have a singular Rube Goldbergian death in it (Miss Lewton’s), and which is more interested in the question of why these people are marked for death and acting as a somber meditation (as much as a mainstream horror film from the turn of the millennium could be) on survivor’s guilt. It’s not a top-tier Scream-era teen horror, but it’s solidly second rung given the care that went into it. As a franchise, the following Final Destination movies are structurally identical; the lead character has a vision of horrible death, they manage to save others from impending doom, and the survivors then find themselves marked for death and die off in a particular order while they try to figure out a way to avoid dying, all of their deaths being horrific. Like the M:I sequels, the FD sequels take the most memorable element from the first film—Ethan Hunt doing something nearly superhuman in the former and the complicated domino-falling deaths of the survivors in the latter—and then make that gimmick the primary selling point. The stories in the films that follow put more effort into the complexity of the deaths than into the narrative drive or character motivation … and that’s fine, honestly. The “Every movie is essentially the same but come see how complicated the machinery of death is” approach is a perfectly legitimate marketing strategy, since, as a friend of mine put it, “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way.”
The fingerprints of The X-Files are still all over this thing, if you’re familiar enough with the series. First time director James Wong was a producer on the series and wrote seventeen episodes of it (most, if not all, with writing partner Glen Morgan), largely within the first couple of seasons (including “Beyond the Sea,” the episode that first introduced Scully’s family). Coincidentally (or not?), I caught a rerun of the season two episode “Die Hand Die Verletzt” on Comet a couple of weeks ago and there were a lot of elements of it that I saw in Final Destination. That episode focused on teenagers at a high school dealing with a tragedy, a dark force that was claiming them and other members of the community, and a lot of Vancouver forest night shoots that featured lightning almost-but-not-quite killing people. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that this one was one of many episodes co-written by Wong and Morgan. There are also moments scattered throughout the film in which I could detect the influence of characters from the series speaking through the characters in the film, with Daniel Roebuck’s FBI character reciting dialogue that I could hear Scully saying. The overall somberness of the proceedings is really what makes this one both stand out as a film and feel like part of the X-mythos.
Opening Disaster: Despite being the original, this is not the best opening sequence, but it’s still a strong start. I’ve seen parts of this sequence an uncountable number of times, given the number of movies I’ve seen over the years that were released on DVDs that loved pitching the idea of expanding your home media collection based on the presence of special features. I’m fairly certain that every single New Line Cinema release had the same advertisement, that promised “behind the scenes looks” at special effects, playing over clips from this scene. With air disasters being relatively low in the two decades following the film, this one became less scary over time before the recent ongoing spate of crashes and other issues in the past few years make this one frighteningly plausible once again. We’re all watching The Rehearsal, right?
Best Death: It has to be Miss Lewton, although this could be considered the franchise’s “original sin” as far as what the series would devolve into. Special mention has to go to Tammy getting flattened by a bus mid-sentence as well.
Worst Death: Billy Hitchcock is barely a presence in this film, only appearing when a scene needs Carter to bully someone other than Alex for a while. His death is also the most forgettable, as he’s decapitated by a shard of debris after a train smashes Carter’s car.
MVP: Devon Sawa is undoubtedly giving this his all, and I really like him here. He was trying to distance himself from his image as a teen heartthrob at the time by taking on “weirder” roles, as in this and in Idle Hands. Special mention has to be made of Tony Todd, however, as he makes his first appearance here as Bludworth, the mortician who “explains” the rules of Death’s design, such as they are.
Spot the Battle “Star”: In a break from my normal Star Trek obsession, it’s worth mentioning that I noticed an actor from Battlestar Galactica in (practically) every one of these films. Alessandro Juliani appears in an extremely minor role as a street musician in Paris in the film’s epilogue scene. He’s been in tons of stuff, but I know him best as Lt. Felix Gaeta. I met Juliani at a GalaxyCon in 2023 and he was very nice!
Final Destination 2 (2003)
Right off the bat, this film feels cheaper than its predecessor. The opening credits of all of these movies range from good to excellent, with later entries going into full-blown 3D glass breaking and x-ray recreations of the films’ various fatalities. This one opens in the bedroom of Kimberly (A.J. Cook) as the camera pans around in the semi-darkness, occasionally settling on the TV that’s playing an interview with a conspiracy theorist obsessed with the previous film’s Flight 180. This got a theatrical release, but from the first frame, it feels like a sequel in a franchise making its leap from cinemas to the direct-to-video market; it’s all very Lifetime. Luckily, from there, we move fairly quickly to the franchise’s defining scene, Kimberly’s premonition of a massive highway pile-up that occurs as the result of an unsecured load on a log truck. This was the only part of this movie that I had seen prior to this big rewatch, and it has stuck with me forever, as it probably has for an entire generation of moviegoers. Not to spoil too much, but while I thought this movie was pretty mediocre overall, I have to credit Final Destination 2 for a horror sequence that is, in its own way, responsible for altering human behavior to the same extent that Jaws did.
It’s unfortunate that after such a strong opening premonition, what follows is the first instance of using the Final Destination plot mold as straightforwardly and ho-humly as possible. Kimberly’s fellow survivors are a cop (Thomas Burke), a kid and his mom, a workaholic (Keegan Connor Tracy), a recent lottery winner (David Paetkau), a motorcycle-riding high school teacher (T.C. Carson), a pregnant delivery driver (Justina Machado), and a burnout (Rory Peters). The lottery winner dies first, and we’re starting out by jumping into the Goldbergian deaths for everyone, every time now that will henceforth be the defining trait of these films. He throws some old pasta out of a window and then proceeds to experience a series of implausible chain reactions: a magnet falls off of the fridge into his takeout, which then goes into the microwave; he spills oil while preparing a skillet to fry up some frozen snacks; his new Rolex gets caught in the sink, trapping him. We in the audience ask ourselves: Will the oil start a fire? Will the garbage disposal in the sink suddenly click on and mangle him? Will he have to turn on the disposal to get free? It’s not necessarily a bad thing that this will be all that there is to these movies from here on out (see above, re: “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way”), and it’s also good that the first of these survivor offings is one of the better ones. Unfortunately, this once again means that FD2 is front-loaded with the best stuff with a much weaker second half.
My friend that I watched FDs 2-4 with said that this one was his favorite, because there are some impressive deaths here, and that’s what he likes best. In addition to the aforementioned lottery winner (who meets his death when he manages to escape a fiery explosion in his apartment but slips on the spaghetti he threw out earlier and is impaled when the sticky fire escape ladder finally descends all the way), teenager Tim is flattened by a pane of glass that falls from a crane outside of his dentist’s office, his mother is killed due to broken failsafes in an elevator, and the burnout is bisected by a flying barbed wire fence. That’s what you’re probably here for, and you get what you want. Another positive is that Larter reprises her role as Clear Rivers from the first film, and we get two contributions to the (convoluted) lore: she’s managed to stay alive by committing herself to an institution where she finds safety in a padded cell and additional precautions, and we’re also introduced to the concept that Death ties up its loose ends, as each of the survivors in this one should have died sometime in the past year, but for various reasons, Alex’s actions aboard Flight 180 led to their survival. One woman was headed to a bed and breakfast where everyone else died in a gas leak, but she missed her flight because she was on the bus that hit Tammy in the first film; the teacher missed a fatal stabbing that happened to one of his colleagues instead because the school district transferred him to replace Miss Lewton; and so on and so forth.
This is all well and good, but I couldn’t shake the overall sense of cheapness that cast a pall over this one. The set-ups for the Goldbergian deaths is a high water mark for some, but for me, the difference in production quality and overall directorial cleverness between this and the next film was stark, so it ranks a little low for me. In conclusion: strong death sequences, shoddy character and framework.
Opening Disaster: Speaking of high water marks, this is the highest for the entire series. Iconic, socially influential, and twenty years later the marketing for Bloodlines directly invoked people’s decades-long fears that were instilled by the log truck pile-up. Impeccable and unimpeachable.
Best Death: Although Tim’s death is one of the more memorable (since the film had the guts, no pun intended, to kill off a child), the unexpected postscript death by barbecue explosion of a farm kid who happened to be saved by one of the survivors in an earlier scene may be the best part of the film other than the opening sequence. The workaholic’s death via being impaled not during a car crash but after when the airbag is deployed due to first responders’ use of the jaws of life is a neat little subversion as well.
Worst Death: Eugene and Clear’s hospital fireball is pretty goofy, and an ignominious end for Clear after her survival of the first film.
MVP: Despite minimal screen time, it’s definitely Tony Todd.
Spot the Battle “Star”: This time we’ve got a two-fer. I adore Keegan Connor Tracy; she’s been in a million things that I enjoy, with one-off and recurring characters on virtually every show shot in Vancouver: the Blue Fairy in Once Upon a Time, Professor Lipson in The Magicians, Norman’s first onscreen victim in Bates Motel, not to mention appearances on Supernatural, SG-1, First Wave, the list goes on. I even have a particular affection for her “sleep stories” in the Calm app. She plays a major role in this one as one of the survivors, and I almost completely forgot that she was in nine episodes of Battlestar. This film also features an appearance from Aaron Douglas as a frazzled deputy who rushes the pregnant survivor to the hospital; he was the Galactica’s deck chief, Tyrol.
Final Destination 3 (2006)
From the very first moments of FD3, I was immediately more impressed with this one than with its direct predecessor. The credits are well rendered, playing out over images of carnival rides and activities, and the text graphics pattern matches it; it’s a minor thing, but really sets the tone for what followed. Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is at a senior night at the local amusement park with her boyfriend, best friend, and the best friend’s boyfriend Kevin (Ryan Merriman) when she foresees the derailment of the park’s roller coaster and the deaths of everyone aboard. She demands to be let off of the ride, and the operators release all of the seats in her section and they deboard: goth shithead Ian McKinley (Kris Lemche), his girlfriend Erin (Alexz Johnson), football jock Lewis (Texas Battle), a couple of people whose identities are hidden and form part of the mystery, plus two airheaded stereotypes and the creep who won’t stop trying to film them. The accident happens as Wendy foresaw, and Death comes for the survivors one by one, because that’s the Final Destination formula.
The extent to which this means that these films run together also means that when you talk to other people about these movies, the questions that they ask show you what parts of them had memorable staying power. Final Destination 3? Is that the one with the log truck? (No, that’s 2.) Is that the one with the bridge collapse? (No, that’s 5.) Is that the one with the racecars? (No, that’s 4.) Is that the one with the mall? (No, that’s 4 again.) Sorry, folks; the questions we were looking for were “Is that the one with the roller coaster?” and “Is that the one with the tanning beds?” The two airheads, Ashley and Ashlyn, could slot right into any openings in Daria’s younger sister Quinn’s Fashion Club with ease, and their deaths by being cooked alive while trying to bronze up are two of the more memorable kills that Death racks up. Just as importantly, there’s a match cut between their two tanning beds to their side-by-side caskets at the funeral that shows that there’s a bit more thought being put into the direction and editing of this one. It’s not just about following a trail of little contributions that create a big problem, but has some real interest in creating something visually interesting and well-composed outside of simply watching how Death tips the dominoes. That’s the James Wong touch, as he’s back to direct this installment.
That said, the rest of the fatalities in this one are nothing too special, until the climax at the town’s tricentennial. The sequence in the hardware store runs a little too long, and closing with the death-by-nailgun of Erin borders on trite. Similarly, Lewis’s fatal workout is also nothing to write home about. By the time the fireworks start going off and spooking horses into galloping through crowds of people while dragging a rope with a heavy stake at the end, you’ll be grateful that someone decided to put their foot on the gas a little. It’s also worth noting that although the metaphorical scaffolding of this one is stronger than FD2’s, the script itself is a little undercooked. A great deal of hay is made about Wendy’s supposed need to be in control, but this never really amounts to anything more than telling us that this is her Primary Character Trait, and it never really gets around to showing it. I did like the new twist that all of Wendy’s (terrible) photographs taken the night of the roller coaster incident provided clues about how the survivors would be picked off one by one, and it’s good that the film can find some new wrinkle to add despite being, skeletally, exactly the same as the movies that came before it. I also appreciated that the film included a human antagonist, as it did with Carter in the first one, as it gives the characters something more tangible and real to fight against than just a spooky wind. This one is in the top half of my rankings, if for no other reason than that it’s trying harder than FD2, and mostly succeeding.
Opening Disaster: A pretty solid opener, all things considered. There’s a bit more work put into introducing the characters and their various motivations, and the fact that Wendy’s best friend was planning on dumping Kevin, a secret that only Wendy knows (and plans to take to her grave) lends the whole thing a bittersweet quality. Where the log truck sequence succeeds is in making something completely mundane feel like it has the potential for massive death. On planes and rollercoasters, people already feel a certain (and usually normal) amount of uncertainty and anxiety, so it’s less surprising when something goes awry. The maulings are pretty brutal, though, if that’s what you’re into.
Best Death: There’s a reason that people still talk about the tanning beds.
Worst Death: It’s Ian getting smashed by a cherry picker, easily.
MVP: I really wish it was Mary Elizabeth Winstead/Wendy here, but that underbaked element to her “control freak” characterization leaves her feeling less fleshed out than she could have been. I think I’m actually going to have to give it to sleazeball Frankie Cheeks. He captures the 2006 vibe more than anything else, and his pervy nature makes his death decently satisfying. A little bit of air gets let out of the balloon when he’s no longer part of the story.
Spot the Battle “Star”: Patrick Gallagher is one of those “Hey it’s that guy” actors, having guested in a million things. He’s here as the carnival employee who escorts the survivors off of the ride, and he had a memorable appearance as a terrorist in the first season BSG episode “Colonial Day.” Weirdly, I know him best from his appearance in the Rapture flick Revelation.
The Final Destination, aka Final Destination 4 (2009)
People say that this is the worst one, and they’re right. The Final Destination was shot to make the most out of the (at the time) most recent attempt to foist the gimmick of 3D movies on the public, and as such there’s a lot of stuff flying at you. Final Destination is, admittedly, the perfect franchise to translate to the “Here comes something fast!!” experience, but the models used are just bafflingly awful. The main character’s visions appear as giant, poorly-rendered low-res images of scissors, tow chains, and a truly laughable snake that wraps around a pole before morphing into a caduceus. It’s a universally agreed upon low point, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it features the return of FD2’s creative team of David R. Ellis as director and Eric Bress as writer. In between that film and this one, Bress wrote The Butterfly Effect and Ellis directed Snakes on a Plane; this information is presented without comment. Even the things that worked about that one are absent here, and the film’s very short 82 minute runtime speaks to just how little inspiration there existed to fill out the scaffolding of this premise. It’s barely a movie.
At a race track, Nick (Bobby Campo) foresees a blowout on the track that results in an escalating accident that will take the life of a huge number of the attendees. He creates enough of a ruckus that his girlfriend Lori (Shantel VanSanten), her friend Janet (Haley Webb), and his bro-y bud Hunt (Nick Zano) are escorted out by security guard George (Mykelti Wiliamson). George also ejects a racist asshole, and the commotion also ends up saving the life of a mother of two young brats, who was trampled to death in the original vision. The racetrack disaster then unfolds, and, you know the drill by now, Death is tracking down each of the survivors one by one in the order that they would have died before. By this point, the scene in which the person with the vision presents their research/theories to the others is old hat, and the recap itself just keeps getting longer since each previous film’s disaster is added to the list of historical instances each time. The random deductions that characters make to reason out Death’s plan are always like the non sequitur trains of thought that would pop up in the old Adam West Batman, but it’s particularly tedious this time around. It also doesn’t help that this is the least developed or interesting group of characters, with even the shallow characterizations of the folks back in FD2 feeling like people with rich backstory in comparison. Presumably to suit the 3D conversion, everything has flat, boring, TV style lighting that calls back to the cheap-feeling nature of Ellis and Bress’s previous collaboration.
My friend who loved FD2 hated this one. At about halfway into the movie, he stood up to leave the group screening, since he was bored, but decided to sit back down to try and see at least “one good death scene” (this was after the racist was burned alive and dragged behind his own tow truck while trying to light a cross on George’s lawn, which would turn out to be the best that the film had to offer). He ended up staying all the way through the end—a man getting sliced into pieces by a chain-link fence (what we around here refer to as getting Cube-d), another man getting his guts sucked out through his rectum by an overpowered pool filter, and a man getting hit by an ambulance—not a one of them was good enough to satisfy the particular craving for creative gore that the film-going public has come to expect from a series that’s branded itself so strongly at this point. Part of what makes these so effective is when people can see tragedy befall the characters in a convoluted but not impossible way and recognize the potential for things to go horribly wrong in their own life. The most tragic things that occur at the racetrack are the things that could happen in any public setting when something awful is going down and people stampede or otherwise panic, and in that way it has an admitted kind of universal applicability. But I don’t see a man getting his asshole stuck on a pool filter or watch another man get shot into a fence by a gas canister so hard that he gets smooshed through it like he was secretly made of cake and think “That could happen to me.” Really and truly not worth the time.
Opening Disaster: It’s fine.
Best Death: The most cathartic death is watching the racist asshole get dragged/burned to death while “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” plays over his radio. But the best death is probably the one that Lori has in the second premonition, in which she gets mauled to death by an elevator that has been busted by architectural damage. It’s marred by the fact that she starts coughing up blood when she’s only in the gears up to her shins, but it’s still the only thing that happened in this movie that reflects any real life anxieties that I have.
MVP: I really only enjoyed two sequences in this, which were the scenes in which Janet almost drowns in a car wash and the part of the film in which George attempts to kill himself over and over again to get on with it, but his attempts keep failing since he’s not the next person on the list. Although his backstory basically blends that of Eugene (who tried and failed to kill himself to choose his death rather than let Death choose him) and Mrs. Carpenter (who was resigned to death and looked forward to meeting her spouse and child on the other side) from FD2, it doesn’t feel like a retreading of the same ground. That’s owed all to Wiliamson’s performance; he’s the best thing here.
Spot the Battle “Star”: There is no overlap between Battlestar and this, the worst Final Destination film. Take from that what you will, although it’s probably simply because this was the only one shot in New Orleans instead of Vancouver. There is still a connection, however, as actress Shantel VanSanten had a major role as Karen on For All Mankind, Battlestar creator Ronald D. Moore’s current series.
Final Destination 5 (2011)
So, Final Destination 5 is actually … great? Although this one doesn’t lean as hard into comedy as Bloodlines would after it, it’s still the first time that this one went for as many jokes as it does scares. I also found the characters in this one to be some of the most likable; I really appreciated that several of the characters were making ends meet by working multiple jobs, just like I was around the same time. Sam (Nicholas D’Agosto) spends his days as a salesman alongside with his buddy Peter (Miles Fisher) at Presage Paper, and at nights he works for the local branch of Le Cáfe Miro 81, where he’s impressed the head chef so much that he’s been nominated to apprentice at the flagship location in Paris. This complicates his relationship with Molly (Emma Bell), who also works at Presage, as does Peter’s girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe), a competitive gymnast. Candice’s work enemy is Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), the extremely nearsighted office hottie, although office IT guy Isaac (P.J. Byrne) is indiscriminate with his pervy flirtation with every woman in the office (and outside of it). All of them are being taken on a company retreat by bus by their boss, Lapman (David Koechner), and when the bus stops on a bridge that’s under construction, Sam has a vision of it collapsing, managing to prevent the deaths of the named characters above as well as new factory foreman Nathan (Arlen Escarpeta). You know the drill by now; this means that they’re all on Death’s list … except for Molly, who survived even in the original vision.
It was a pretty widely revealed spoiler at the time that this film was a stealth prequel to the original Final Destination, and it’s hard for me to imagine that this wasn’t obvious to anyone paying attention, even without that knowledge. There’s a noticeable backward technological step in all of the cell phones that people use, and there are some visible dates (like on the massage coupon that Isaac steals out of a dead co-worker’s desk, leading him to the very parlor in which he would meet his fare) that show that this is pre-2001. As in the original Final Destination, the main character is initially interrogated by federal agents under suspicion of committing an act of extremism, and they are pursued by a member of the FBI (Courtney B. Vance here), but the use of “extremist” instead of “terrorist” feels very 90s. And as soon as you realize that the job opportunity that Sam has means that he would be working at the same Paris cafe where Carter died in the epilogue of the first film, you get the inkling that he’s never going to make it to France. None of these movies has a happy ending (except perhaps 2), as the great cosmic joke of the series is that Death can never be cheated, and no matter what steps the characters take, they’re going to die just before the credits roll when they finally think that they’re safe. Despite this happening every single time, it’s always a little bit of a shock, and the way this one winds around and dovetails with the franchise’s beginning is nicely done. I watched 2–5 in order, then looped back around to the first, and the effect was seamless.
Tony Todd has his largest presence in any of these films in this one, where Bludworth reappears after a two film absence, once again a creepy figure at the scenes of the deaths of the bridge collapse survivors. Sam thinks he’s involved, but it’s revealed that he’s only the coroner (which isn’t exactly the same as a mortician, as Alex and Clear broke into a funeral home in the first one, not a morgue, but I’m quibbling), although he does clue them in on the whole “Death’s design” thing. There’s a fresh new wrinkle in this one for the first time in a while, as Bludworth mentions a theory that one could “steal” another person’s time by killing them directly, as kind of a sacrifice. When Nathan spots an accident about to happen while arguing with antagonistic union rep Roy, he tries to get both of them out of the way of a falling piece of industrial equipment, but Roy grapples with him instead and, when Nathan breaks free by pushing Roy away, Roy ends up impaled on a giant hook. When this does seem to cause Nathan’s death on the list to be skipped, Peter, already grieving the loss of Candice (who was the first survivor to die), goes a little off the deep end. Final Destination 5 doesn’t deviate too far from the formula, but it finally does something different and fresh, introducing a bit of a slasher element. Although he’s found a way to profit off of his resemblance to Tom Cruise, Fisher’s hairstyling and wardrobe as Peter give him a distinctively Patrick Bateman-esque aura, and it’s a lot of fun to watch him deteriorate into a willingness to kill to save himself.
Fundamentally, I think that I may simply be out of alignment with the audience that these are made for, with the biggest example of this being that I think these movies are at their best when there are other antagonists beyond simple, amorphous Death. If you’re into watching those dominoes fall, then you get what you want every time, and that’s what these movies exist for, so I’m the odd man out here. I’m much more invested when there’s something tangible for the heroes to grapple with, even if I know that they’re ultimately doomed and we’re all just killing time (no pun intended) before Death crashes a plain, train, or other automobile in (or around) which all of the so-happy-to-be-alive survivors will meet their inevitable gory deaths. Making one of the main characters devolve from friend to attempted murderer that the leads have to fight directly adds a level of complication, if not complexity, to the proceedings. This is the one I’m looking forward to watching again.
Opening Disaster: Ranks second behind the log truck pile-up in FD2. There may be a bit of geographical bias going on here as, being from Louisiana, I’ve spent a lot of my life driving over many, many somewhat scary bridges. The Mississippi River bridge between East and West Baton Rouge Parishes, the Morganza Spillway bridge, the Atchafalaya Spillway bridge, the Sunshine Bridge, and especially the structurally deficient Calcasieu River Bridge; I’ve travelled them all, countless times. And yet in all my anxious bridge crossings, I never considered that there were so many harrowing ways to die in a bridge collapse. Lapman is doused in hot road tar, Candice falls and is eviscerated by the mast of a sailboat passing below, Peter gets impaled by falling rebar, and Olivia manages to survive the fall into the water only to be crushed by a car. Horrifying.
Best Death: To reveal the cause and circumstances of Nathan’s death would give away too much after I’ve already said enough, but it’s classic stuff. Candice’s death in a gymnastics accident is certainly one of the more gruesome, and watching her do flips and spins on the bar while juuuust barely avoiding stepping on the screw that’s waiting to set off the chain of events is one of the most effectively tense set-ups. I have to give it to Isaac, though, as he really makes you groan with disgust at his whole deal before he bites it, comically.
Worst Death: Like FD4, this one was shot for 3D, but it’s much less obtrusive than in its predecessor. The credits feature lots of glass breaking at the audience, but I didn’t think much of it. When I read that this was the case, I could remember certain shots that, with that knowledge, were clearly throwing things at the camera, but I hadn’t given them a second thought. The only one that feels really out of place is Lapman getting beamed in the head by a heavy duty wrench that was shot out by machinery. It’s the least interesting by far.
MVP: I never really understood why Nick D’Agosto’s career wasn’t more successful. I remember first seeing him as West in the second season of Heroes, where he played Hayden Panettiere’s love interest that year before disappearing after the 2007 writer’s strike resulted in an abbreviated season. He got some exposure on The Office, where he played Jan’s handsome young assistant who spurred Michael’s jealousy, and then he was in that movie Fired Up, where he and Eric Christian Olsen con their way into attending cheerleading camp so that they can hook up. It was a flop, but somewhere in a box in my closet I still have a mini football from the movie’s marketing campaign, since we used to get a lot of that kind of stuff at KLSU, so it’s never all that far from my mind. I find him very charming here, and he has the precise amount of boy-next-door charisma to pull this role off.
Spot the Battle “Star”: The head chef at the restaurant where Isaac works is played by Mike Dopud, who played Specialist Gage (a crewman from the Battlestar Pegasus who later joined in the Season 4 mutiny) on Battlestar Galactica, and appeared again in the prequel webseries Blood & Chrome.
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)
A full review of this one is coming soon! Some initial thoughts on Bloodlines is that it’s a strong entry overall. It’s got a great opening sequence, manages to subvert expectations in several places, and goes full tilt into being more comedic, which made it feel very fresh.
Opening Disaster: One of the best. This one tapped into my primal fear of heights and pumped me for every ounce of adrenaline I had in my body. The rooftop restaurant that collapsed filled me with abject terror; I was sick for the entire first fifteen minutes.
Best Death: After such a long absence, it’s great that the film goes for broke with one of its earliest death sequences, for Uncle Howard. The dominoes in this one feel perfectly calibrated for maximum physical repulsion and suspense. It would have only been topped by one that followed, except that one was actually a fake-out, so I can’t count it officially.
Worst Death: Darlene kicking it mid-sentence when a light pole falls on her was a bit of a let down.
MVP: Tony Todd is the obvious choice once again, especially as the younger actors in this one are probably offering some of the least interesting performances. I think I have to give it up for Richard Harmons’s Erik Campbell here, however, as he has the most dynamic performance, delivers some pretty great lines (and, according to press releases, had a lot of great alternates for some of the ad libs that made it to the final print), and is overall one of the more endearing characters to come out of the series, even if he’s too obnoxious to get along with in real life. He’s the goth guy from FD3 done correctly.
Spot the Battle “Star”: I immediately recognized Vancouverian actor Richard Harmon, who plays major character Erik in this one, from his appearances in many of the shows shot there. He has a notable face, and the first time I saw him in something was in his appearance on Fringe, in the very important episode “White Tulip.” The next time I remember seeing him on screen was in two episodes of the Battlestar spinoff Caprica, and was going to use that as a slight cheat since he was never technically on BSG. But I also recognized Gabrielle Rose for her many TV movie and genre television appearances, having otherwise completely forgotten that she was in the BSG episode “The Woman King” until I was perusing her IMDb profile, so we’re in the clear! To be fair, “The Woman King” is a pretty forgettable episode.
Final (heh) ranking, from worst to best:
6.The Final Destination (aka 4): Absolute bottom of the barrel. Bad kills, unlikable or incomplete characters, hard to believe that this was released as a finished film.
5. Final Destination 2: Shoddy narrative framework, nothing to speak of in terms of cinematography, paper-thin character work, but good death sequences. Best opening sequence, though.
4./3. Final Destination 3 and Final Destination: Bloodlines (tie): Both very solid entries that have an equal balance of scares, character work, and narrative throughline.
2. Final Destination: The first and one of the best; strong work from X-Files alums.
1. Final Destination 5: Strongest overall, most consistent; brings something fresh to the table by introducing the slasher/human antagonist angle.
I recently enjoyed a weeklong vacation in Mexico City with my family, my first time traveling abroad. It was an indulgent trip that mostly consisted of visiting art museums, shopping for vintage clothes, and eating piles of delicious food. Those may not sound like especially strenuous activities, but they did require long hours strolling in the sunshine, which meant a lot of afternoon downtime for my fellow travelers to recover with a traditional siesta. While everyone else smartly took the opportunity to nap between major-event excursions to the lucha libre show or to Diego Rivera’s studio, I instead ventured out of our apartment on solo adventures to survey the local cinema scene. In total, I visited three of CDMX’s local theaters that week for three unique moviegoing experiences. The films I saw were English-language productions subtitled in Spanish, so the only language barrier was figuring out how to order tickets without totally embarrassing myself; I like to think I failed admirably. Here’s a quick recap of the titles & venues I was able to squeeze into the trip.
Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus (2025) @ Cine Tonalá
The one hip English-language film that screened at every indie CDMX cinema the week I happened to visit was the portrait-of-an-artist documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus. Like most audiences, I was previously only aware of its titular one-hit-wonder through her association with Jonathan Demme soundtracks. It turns out that was for a very obvious reason: racism. After running through about a dozen or so Q Lazzarus in the usual style of more famous artists’ docs, a title card in this new career recap reveals that she’s never had an official record release besides her contributions to movie soundtracks, because contemporary producers decided she was too “difficult to market.” It dropped my jaw. As a rise-to-near-fame story, Goodbye Horses gets intensely friendly & intimate with Q herself as she gets to know documentarian Eva Aridjis on a personal level. The most incredible part of her story, really, is the happenstance of meeting the two directors who’ve popularized her music through cinema—Aridjis & Demme—by picking them up as a cabbie working the streets of NYC, decades apart. For his part, Demme made an all-time classic out of “Goodbye Horses” by placing it in two separate films (Married to the Mob and, more infamously, Silence of the Lambs). Aridjis’s contribution is no less significant, though, since her new documentary includes a 21-track collection of Q Lazzarus songs that have been previously left unpublished.
Just as I knew little of Q Lazzarus’s personal or professional life before watching this new documentary, I also had no idea the documentary itself existed until I traveled to Mexico City, where it was playing relatively wide (partially because it’s director Eva Aridjis’s home town). That widespread distribution gave me plenty of options for cinemas to visit, and I settled on Cine Tonalá in the La Roma neighborhood. The single-screen theater is attached to a proudly laidback cocktail bar & performance venue, functioning as a multi-purpose arts space rather than a popcorn-shoveling corporate multiplex. Its closest local equivalent in New Orleans would be The Broad Theater, except with steeper incline seating and more lounging-around space in the lobby. It’s the kind of cozy spot with thoughtful programming that I would visit every week if I lived in the neighborhood (speaking from experience with The Broad).
The Cineteca Nacional museum in the Coyoacán neighborhood is anything but laidback. Built in the 1970s as a temple to celebrate & preserve the artform, it’s an impressively large & lively venue that was swarmed with visitors on the Saturday evening when I dropped by to see 1963’s The Haunted Palace. The 12-screen cinema was showing an eclectic mix of both repertory titles (including selections from Hayao Miyazaki & Agnieszka Holland) and new releases (including Goodbye Horses), but its public cinema is only one facet of the sprawling facility. The massive complex had a college campus feel, complete with museum exhibitions, appointment-only archives, multiple cafés & vendors, an outdoor market, and a quad area where young cineastes were chilling & chatting. I arrived at least a half-hour early, which allowed me enough time to go DVD shopping, picking up a copy of the Mexican horror staple El Vampiro. If I ever return, I’ll make sure to arrive a half-day early instead, since there was plenty more to explore elsewhere on-site.
Among the few repertory titles being offered that week, I of course went for the one directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price, since that’s squarely in my comfort zone. The Haunted Palace is an odd outlier in the Corman-Poe cycle that actor-director duo is best known for, since it only recites a few lines from an Edgar Allan Poe poem and mostly pulls its inspiration from Lovecraft instead. It’s also out of step with the typical payoffs of a classic Roger Corman creature feature, since its central monster doesn’t move an inch and Lon Chaney Jr. gets all of the best jump scares in a supporting role just by . . . hanging around. It’s only a pleasure for audiences who enjoy lounging in spooky castles and fog-machined graveyards while flipping through pages of the Necronomicon (or listening to its Vincent Price audiobook version), not in a rush to get anywhere. That is to say that I very much enjoyed seeing it screened big & loud with an enthusiastic crowd, even if there are far better titles in the Corman-Poe cycle that would’ve been a better use of the time & space (primarily, The Masque of the Red Death). In local terms, the experience was comparable to The Prytania’s recent afternoon screening of The Fall of the House of Usher, except the venue was a half-century newer and the audience was much fuller.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) @ Cinemex
If Cine Tonalá is the Mexico City equivalent of The Broad and Cineteca Nacional is the Mexico City equivalent of The Prytania, then Cinemex is the local equivalent of an AMC palace. I must’ve passed by a half-dozen locations of the corporate franchise while exploring different parts of the city, so it was hilarious that the one located closest to our apartment was called Casa de Arte, as if it were an independent arthouse. It’s the same way that AMC arbitrarily labels some of its offerings as “Artisan Films” even though they’re wide-release, major-studio productions with massive budgets (no offense meant to the artistry behind AMC Artisan titles like Sinners & The Phoenician Scheme). Cinemex does not offer a one-of-a-kind arthouse experience. It offers the same-as-it-is-everywhere multiplex experience, which is a different flavor that sometimes tastes just as good. It’s about as artisan as a cup of Coca-Cola.
It was in that downtown multiplex that I caught the latest (and possibly last) installment in the Misión: Imposible franchise, The Final Reckoning. Perhaps due to the lack of enthusiasm with the previous entry in that franchise, DeadReckoning, the three-hour epic does a lot of sweaty scrambling to connect its story to the larger, decades-spanning Mission: Impossible narrative arc before then settling into the tension of two lengthy Tom Cruise stunts: one in which he raids a sinking submarine and one in which he pilots an upside-down airplane with his foot. The resulting picture is one hour of aggressively incomprehensible crosscutting & flashbacks followed by two hours of old-school movie magic. I would say that it’s the kind of classic movie magic that you can only find in Hollywood, except the movie was mostly shot in England and I personally watched in it Mexico. There really isn’t anything especially recommendable about it beyond the excuse it offers to escape the summer sun for a few hours with a lapful of overpriced junk food, which is the only reason anyone would visit an AMC or a Cinemex anyway.
Swampflix 