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Three by Jon Moritsugu

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There was a brief, glorious time a couple years back when AGFA’s scan of Jon Moritsugu’s 1993 trash-art classic Terminal USA was streaming on The Criterion Channel. Not only did that ungodly godsend set distorted expectations of Moritsugu’s working being legally & conveniently available for home viewing, but it also distorted my expectations of the director’s political themes. In Terminal USA, Moritsugu reached through the TV sets of suburban America (via highly improbable PBS broadcast) to mock & torment the suburbanites on the other side, offering a grotesque reflection of the nuclear family unit as performed by a punk-rot regional theatre troupe straight out of Mortville. Having not seen his other work, I assumed that John Waters-style strain of freaking-out-the-normies antagonism echoed throughout the rest of Moritsugu’s catalog, but it turns out he generally could not care less what suburbanites are up to. I recently lucked into purchasing a trio of lesser-seen Moritsugu films second-hand on DVD, which together painted a picture of a much more insular, flippant director concerned more with petty punk-culture preoccupations than any of the ideals those punks supposedly buck against. These are movies about young wannabe iconoclasts who are desperate to stand out, look cool, get famous, and be celebrated for doing nothing in particular, all while enjoying the street-cred status of never “selling out.” This trio finds Moritsugu mocking his own people rather than mocking the off-screen suburbanite conservatives whose phoniness is taken for granted, which in a way makes them more personal works than the bigger-picture political statement of Terminal USA.

Moritsugu’s first feature film was funded by a settlement from a factory-work accident that nearly tore off his arm. The only reason it qualifies as feature-length is that he stretched it past the 1-hour runtime mark on a dare from a friend who was tired of seeing him waste his time on shorts. The resulting ramshackle, barely held-together energy of 1990’s My Degeneration is about as D.I.Y. punk as cinema gets. It perfectly captures the editing style, snotty sarcasm, and punk-scene snobbery of a vintage Xerox’d zine . . . now in motion on the big screen! “A story of Greed, Scum, and Filth,” it follows a trio of California teens (despite being filmed in Rhode Island) whose punk band Bunny Love is co-opted by The American Beef Institute to promote meat consumption among disaffected, MTV-era youth. The movie opens with Bunny Love’s lead singer praying to portraits of Jesus Christ & Madonna in her bathroom mirror to make her famous – a prayer that’s immediately answered by an evil corporation that purchases her band, renames it Fetish, and starts landing her national headlines like “Is Meat Art? Fetish Thinks So!” The girls are quickly corrupted by “the stench of stardom,” but selling out their punk ideals registers as a small price to pay in exchange for national fame. Even the inevitable burnout & breakup part of the rock ‘n’ roll rise-to-fame cliché seems to be a career goal for them, rather than a dire warning. They want it all. Meanwhile, Moritsugu teases this short-film premise to feature length by filling the screen with hideous video-art footage of mimed punk performances and meat-industry waste, with detours featuring a talking pig head that romances the lead singer of Fetish in her spare time between gigs. It’s the much rougher, meaner version of proto-riot-grrrl classics like Times Square & The Fabulous Stains, with an incredibly cynical worldview about what punk iconoclasts really want to achieve with their music.

1994’s Mod Fuck Explosion is much more realistic about the kind of fame most teenage urbanite punks can achieve. It’s the story of one girl’s quest to earn her own leather jacket, so she can look as tough & cool as the motorcycle gangs who regularly clash in her neighborhood. Most reviews of Mod Fuck Explosion cite it as Moritsugu’s dirt-cheap remake of West Side Story, but really it’s his dirt-cheap remake of Quadrophenia: a gang warfare drama about a pathetic, meaningless clash between traditional rock ‘n’ roll bikers and nerdy scooter-riding Mods. It goes one step beyond Quadrophenia by graciously extending Kenneth Anger biker-gang fetishism to include moto-scooters, making that fetish much more financially accessible to its cast of terminally bored teenage wastoids. Otherwise, it allows that turf war to fade into a background hum while Amy Davis (Bunny Love’s fictional drummer & Moritsugu’s real-life spouse) frets about where she fits into the world of street-toughs as a teenage brat who doesn’t even have her own leather jacket. Despite all of Moritsugu’s snotty flippancy elsewhere, Davis gets genuinely introspective here in her frustrated teenage boredom. While roaming an industrial art-instillation piece, she worries in voiceover that she’ll never truly fight, never truly fuck, and never truly be cool. It’s later revealed that she’s mostly been comparing herself to her much cooler older sister, who has retired from local punk-scene notoriety to enjoy a static life consuming “schizophrenic painters, tortured writers, fashion designers, low & vulgar literature, porno movies, video games, punk music, motorcycles, tattoo artwork, homo poetry, disaster & murder magazines, and horoscopes.” Even though she no longer needs it herself, her sister still won’t hand over her own leather jacket, which sits in the closet unworn as a symbol of her past teen-years fame on the local scene.

While My Degenration & Mod Fuck Explosion are the much cooler and more recognizable Moritsugu titles in this trio, 1997’s Fame Whore is by far the funniest. That superlative is mostly earned by Amy Davis’s robotically verbose performance as a socialite sycophant who will not stop monotonously bragging about her accomplishments in her 27 simultaneous careers as a “video artist, fashion designer, painter, actress, photographer, producer, art director, image consultant, playwright, performance artist,” and the list goes on. That NYC wannabe fashionista splits the runtime with two other titular fame whores: a hothead tennis pro who brags about his insatiable libido in the third person and an animal-rights activist who’s reluctant to share his do-gooder cred with any coworkers at his New Jersey dog shelter, so he spends his work hours talking to an imaginary sports-mascot dog instead. They’re all pathetic losers, just like the rest of us. As with Terminal USA, there’s something especially heightened & subversive about Moritsugu’s freak-show characters escaping punk-scene containment and doing decidedly un-punk things like, in this case, filing their taxes & negotiating endorsement deals. It’s like when John Waters left the trailer park & Mortville behind to instead terrorize the normies in his own suburban-invasion comedies post-Polyester. Shot on a grainy, degraded 16mm film stock just like the rest of his punk-zine-in-motion features, Fame Whore would never be mistaken for a mainstream studio comedy, but it does find Moritsugu pretending that he has “made it” as a filmmaker. If he had included a sarcastic live-studio-audience soundtrack, it would’ve played exactly like a primetime multi-cam sitcom — complete with a goofball sidekick character in the imaginary Mr. Peepers, whose smartass quips follow in a long tradition of Great Gazoos, Alfs, and Mister Eds.

The only bonus feature to speak of on any of these mid-2000s discs is a feature-length commentary track for My Degeneration, but it does offer major insight into the bigger-picture ethos of Moritsugu & Davis’s film company Apathy Productions. They basically act as their own Beavis & Butthead-style stoner hecklers, complete with vocalized guitar noises and bored digressions from anything happening on the screen. The entire exercise is meant to mock anyone who’d take this work seriously as academic fodder (i.e., me) instead of what it truly was: a group of friends playing around with camera equipment in a quest to make something Cool. The way Moritsugu scratches up the celluloid for shots that didn’t come out right, films television sets at incompatible frame rates, and frequently fills the screen with punk-show-poster block text of phrases like “THE SHIT GENERATION” & “TEEN SUICIDE EXPLOSION” is all D.I.Y. formal experimentation to make art that visually appeals to his scuzzy friends (who’d assumedly rather be pounding beers than watching art films, if asked). There’s a tension between his own punk-rock credibility and his desire to reach a wide audience as a Famous Artist, then, as evidenced by his films being submitted to international film festivals instead of just being screened as opening acts at basement punk shows. In that context, his career highlight likely wasn’t hijacking PBS’s public funds to make Terminal USA. It was when Roger Ebert made a show out of walking out of My Degeneration seven minutes into its premiere at Sundance. That way, he became famous (on the independent film scene, anyway) without becoming marketable, so his films couldn’t be used to promote beef sales or tennis shoes.

-Brandon Ledet

The Overlook Film Festival 2025, Ranked & Reviewed

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Self-described as “a summer camp for genre fans,” The Overlook Film Festival has quickly become the best of New Orleans’s local film fests . . . as long as you’re a total sicko. I consistently catch a wide selection of the year’s most stylish, violent, and memorable horror films & thrillers in the festival’s lineup, many of which don’t otherwise reach local big screens before they get siphoned off to the cultural void of streaming platforms. In recent years, all films programmed have been corralled to the two locations of The Prytania Theatres, which allows you to form a weekend-long bond with fellow movie nerds you continually run into while lining up for the next fucked-up delight. Everyone’s watching too much, sleeping too little, and loving every horrific minute. It really does capture the summer camp or sleepover feeling of staying up all night watching scary movies with your friends after the adults fell asleep and can no longer police what’s playing on the living room TV.

This was the first year of the festival where I made some time in my schedule for a couple repertory screenings: the Corman-Poe classic The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and a block of David Lynch’s early short films (namely “Sick Men Getting Sick,” “The Grandmother, “The Amputee,” and “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed”). The Vincent Price campiness and costume drama fussiness of House of Usher made for a classically wonderful trip to the Prytania’s original location uptown, but the Lynch shorts made a much more significant impression on me. As a collective, they offered a glimpse into an alternate dimension where Lynch might have stuck to a full career as a Don Hertzfeldt-style outsider animator. More importantly, they also projected most of the scariest images I saw at this year’s festival, especially in the domestic blackbox-theatre artificiality of “The Grandmother.” There’s always something novel about watching challenging art films in a downtown shopping mall like Canal Place, and that Lynch block may have been the most abstract & challenging films ever screened there. It says a lot about Overlook’s sharp, thoughtful curation that they made room for films that academically rigorous alongside feature-length sex-and-fart-joke comedies like Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover (which, I might as well admit, was my favorite of the fest).

I see no point in rating or raking the works of recently fallen legends like Corman & Lynch here, since their contributions to the festival are so deeply engrained in genre cinema history, they’re beyond critique. Instead, I’m listing below the ten new-release feature films I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, ranked in the order that I appreciated them, each with a blurb and a link to a corresponding review. For a more detailed recap of the Swampflix Crew’s festival experience beyond these reviews, check out the most recent episode of The Swampflix Podcast.

Dead Lover

Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Some of the most gorgeous, perverted images you’ll see all year paired with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates its punchlines with ADR’d fart noises.  If Glowicki’s filmmaking career doesn’t work out, she can always pivot to becoming the world’s first drag king Crispin Glover impersonator, bless her putrid heart.

The Shrouds

Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought.  Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.

Hallow Road

An all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. Extremely satisfying for anyone who loves to watch Rosamund Pike act her way through a crisis.

Zodiac Killer Project

A self-deprecating meta doc about a true crime dramatization that fell apart in pre-production.  Reminded me of a couple postmodern television series of my youth: Breaking the Magician’s Code – Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed (for spoiling the magic of how the true-crime genre works) and The Soup (for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to Get It).

Cloud

The new Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no not that one, the other one) asks a really scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? Turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic.

LifeHack

Screenlife cinema that abandons horror in favor of the heist thriller, following the small-scale, laptop-bound schemes of four teens who steal a Bitcoin fortune from an Elon Musk-type dipshit.  I personally preferred when this still-burgeoning subgenre was fully supernatural, but it’s nice to see a version of it where teens are actually having fun being online (even when in peril).

Predators

A documentary about To Catch a Predator as an aughts-era reality TV phenomenon. Felt like I was going to throw up for the first 40 minutes or so, because I had never seen the show before and wasn’t fully prepared for how deeply evil it is.

Good Boy

You’ve seen a haunted house movie from the POV of a ghost. Now, line up for a haunted house movie kinda-sorta from the POV of a dog! What a time to be alive.

Orang Ikan (Monster Island)

A WWII-set creature feature stranded somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Continues a long tradition of unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas, now with a Roger Corman rubber-suited monster as lagniappe.

Redux Redux

A sci-fi revenge thriller about a grieving mother who gets addicted to killing her child’s murderer in multiple alternate dimensions. It brings me no pleasure to act as the logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of this one make no sense. It’s like they wrote it as a time-loop movie and subbed in the word “multi-verse” instead at the last minute without cleaning up the implications of how time passes differently in that genre. The violence is effectively nasty, though, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the quibbles.

-Brandon Ledet

Americans Under Siege, With and Without Context

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I recently caught a double feature at my local multiplex of high-style, high-tension thrillers about American soldiers under siege in claustrophobic locations. The stories told in Alex Garland’s Warfare & Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are separated by entire genres, decades, and oceans, and yet they both trap American soldiers in tight-space locales by surrounding them with enemy combatants, whittling down their ranks one corpse at a time. That shared Americans-under-siege dynamic puts them in unlikely conversation with each other as two feature films currently in wide release, but what really makes that conversation interesting is the films’ respective relationships with the cultural & historical context around their sieges. Warfare is so hostile to providing context that it borders on experimentation in narrative form, while Sinners is entirely about context, explaining its own supernatural siege’s relation to America’s past, present, and future. Together, they represent the two extremes of contextual explanation in cinematic storytelling, to the point where considering them together is something that would only occur to you if you happen to write movie reviews and catch them both at the same theatre in a single evening.

Assigning Warfare‘s authorship entirely to Alex Garland is a bit misleading, since he shares directorial credit with former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. In fact, the real-time, true-story siege thriller is most interesting for the battle between its two directors: one who wants to honor the soldiers depicted “for always answering the call” (Mendoza) and one who wants to examine them & pluck their limbs off like bugs he caught in a jar (Garland). An opening title card explains that the film’s reenactment of a failed 2006 American military mission during the Iraq War was made “using only the memories” of Mendoza’s platoon, who experienced the violent episode first-hand. After the reenactment concludes, surviving members of that platoon are shown visiting the film’s set mid-production to provide their insight, contextualizing the movie as an honorable commemoration of their service & sacrifice during the harshest conditions of war. Only, that final moment is undercut by inclusion of a portrait of the Iraqi family who were also present that day and whose home was invaded & destroyed to fit the American military’s needs & whims. Earlier, when the surviving American soldiers have safely escaped the real-time gunfight in rescue tanks, the camera then lingers on that family appearing puzzled & shellshocked in the rubble of their home, as if they were just invaded by space aliens and not fellow human beings.

Garland & Mendoza’s choice to reenact this one specific mission without explaining the larger context of the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq (under false pretenses of seeking weapons of mass destruction) has been hotly debated as a disingenuous, amoral screenwriting choice among the film’s detractors. From the Iraqi family’s perspective, however, that absence of context only makes the unlawful intrusion even more terrifying & cruel. The family is sleeping in their cozy duplex when Americans kick down their doors and sledgehammer their walls in the middle of the night, inviting enemy fire into the home as a makeshift military base while they’re gathered to huddle on a single bed, powerless. There is no warning or preparation for this invasion, nor is their any communication once the fighting ceases. There’s no context whatsoever, neither for that family nor for the audience. All that’s offered is a dramatic reenactment of the gunfight from the surviving American soldiers’ perspective, with the flattering casting of young Hollywood hunks like Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai to help sweeten the deal for those who “answered the call.” The absence of testimony from the Iraqi citizens invaded, shot at, and displaced by those soldiers’ mission becomes glaring by the final credits, though, and the questions that absence raises hang heavy in the air. I like to think that unease was Garland’s main contribution to the picture but, without context, I can only guess.

The political & historical context behind the all-in-one-day siege plot of Sinners is much easier to parse, since Ryan Coogler is much more upfront about what he’s saying through his art. The director’s fifth feature film (all starring career-long collaborator Michael B. Jordan) and his first not adapted from either pre-existing IP or real-life events, Sinners is set in a 1930s Mississippi overrun with bloodsucking vampires. You wouldn’t guess the vampire part in its first hour, though, which is mostly a getting-the-gang-back-together drama about two former soldiers and current booze-runners (twins, both played by Jordan) who return to their hometown to set up a juke joint for Black patrons during Prohibition. After a long stretch of friendly “Look what the cat dragged in” reunions (featuring consistently dependable character actors like Delroy Lindo & Wunmi Mosaku), the juke joint proves to be a communal success, if not a financial one. Unfortunately, the party gets to be a little too lively, which attracts the attention of white, vampiric interlopers (led by the consistently intense Jack O’Connell). The vampires are particularly attracted to the transcendently beautiful blues music played by the juke joint’s youngest employee, Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton), which introduces an unignorable cultural appropriation metaphor to the vampires’ violent desire to be let inside the party. More practically, it also sours the vibe of the evening by trapping the partygoers in a single location, waiting to be drained of their blood and assimilated into the vampire cult.

Sinners is a truly American horror story, a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Every detail of the story that isn’t character-based drama registers as commentary on American identity: the illusion of freedom, the fixation on money, the compulsory Christianity, the lingering infrastructures of slavery & The Klan. The only positive touchstones of American culture are, in fact, Black culture, as represented in a fish-fry dance party that offers a Mississippi farming community a few hours to cut loose before returning to a life of poverty & backbreaking labor . . . until the party attracts vampiric outsiders who want to claim that culture as their own. In one standout sequence, Coogler extrapolates on this idea to visually & aurally lay out how the Delta blues that Preacher Boy is playing in the juke joint is foundational for all fundamentally American music & pop culture, illustrating its connections to funk, rock, hip-hop, bounce, and beyond in a physical, impossible embodiment of the story’s context. It’s a moment that not only accomplishes everything Baz Lurhman’s Elvis picture failed to do across 150 extra minutes of runtime, but it also positions Sinners as one of the most distinctly American vampire stories ever told on screen (among which I suppose its closest competition is Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark).

The only dramatic context Warfare provides before kicking off its real-time siege sequence is a brief moment where all soldiers involved are watching a pop music video on a shared laptop, laughing at its over-the-top sexuality & pelvic thrusts. There’s just enough time allowed to that scene for the audience to discern a few key soldiers’ personalities through body language & facial expressions, before they’re immediately shown breaking into and destroying a sleeping family’s home. In contrast, Sinners spends the first half of its 140min runtime getting to know the gangsters, players, and partiers it eventually puts under vampiric siege, so that they feel like real people instead of walking, talking metaphors. It’s through that sprawling attention to context that we learn that the booze-running twins who open the Mississippi juke joint were WWI soldiers before they became gangster contemporaries of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Even after the siege story is officially over, Coogler can’t help but pile on more context about cultural vampires & the blues, dragging the setting into contemporary times with a surprise guest appearance by blues legend Buddy Guy. Normally, I would say less is more when it comes to a movie explaining its own themes & context, but Coogler overcommits to those explanations to the point of academic scholarship, while still managing to deliver a fun & sexy vampire movie in the process. Meanwhile, Warfare‘s deliberate aversion to context threatens to implode the entire project, with only a few stray shots of Americans viewed from an outsider’s perspective affording it any sense of artistic or political purpose.

-Brandon Ledet

The True-Crime Horrors of The Overlook Film Festival

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The scariest films I saw at this year’s Overlook Film Festival featured none of the ghouls, ghosts, goblins, demons, and vampires that typically populate the screen at the horror-leaning genre fest. I was mostly scared by the dark-sided media consumption habits of my fellow human beings, some of whom were in the audience of the very same theater as me. Personally, I can watch supernatural evil illustrated on the screen all day without being emotionally affected by the darkness & cruelty depicted, but when it comes to turning true-crime documentation of real-world evil into passive, consumptive entertainment, my heart sinks in my chest. True crime documentaries have recently become a hugely popular micro-industry, with a massive audience second-screening 10-hour miniseries about heinous murder sprees while eating dinner & folding laundry, as if they were half-listening to episodes of The Office or Friends. Something about that passive, disaffected viewing habit is even more disturbing than the crimes being dramatized for mass entertainment (and for easy, routine streaming-service profit). So, it’s appropriate that two of the documentary selections at this year’s Overlook focused on general audiences’ insatiable true-crime appetite from a critical distance, asking how, exactly, did we allow our formulaic background entertainment to get this fucked up?

Sometimes, you need a little distance to recognize just how rotted things have gotten. David Osit’s documentary Predators profiles the aughts-era true crime series To Catch a Predator as a reality-TV phenomenon in which Dateline NBC anchor Chris Hansen baited online child-molesters from behind their keyboards to stage sensational on-camera confrontations in the meat space, to great financial success. Deploying “decoy” actors who pretended to be underage, the show would then interview the titular predators in the lowest moment of their lives, watching them to beg for mercy & therapy before promptly being arrested by local cops. I remember finding this premise and the show’s success too grotesque to stomach as a teenager when it first aired, so I spent the first 40 minutes or so of Predators fighting back the urge to vomit, confronted with how deeply evil it was in practice after only being aware of it in the abstract. No one in the To Catch a Predator production—Chris Hansen included—cared about the children they were supposedly protecting by luring these men to a bait house. The show is a seasons-long ratings stunt meant to hook & shock an audience by tapping into our animalistic impulses for violent vengeance. Its legacy is not in making the streets safer; it’s in prompting one of its targets to commit suicide during a taping and in inspiring dipshit influencers to stage their own D.I.Y. versions of the show on YouTube & TikTok, each with their own brand-conscious catchphrases & subscription models. Osit eventually wrestles with his personal connection to the show and how his young mind was shaped by it while it initially aired, but I mostly walked away disgusted with the broader, mainstream audience that made it a hit in the first place.

Charlie Shackleton’s self-deprecating meta documentary Zodiac Killer Project is much more current and much more conceptual in its own examination of true-crime cinema’s popularity. Shackleton’s original pitch was to adapt a book about an unprovable theory on the identity of the titular serial killer into a generic true-crime miniseries, but the rights for the adaptation were pulled at the last minute before production, so he couldn’t legally complete it. Instead, he’s made a movie about what he would have done if he had maintained those rights, breaking down the tropes, rhythms, and attention-grabbing tactics of a formulaic true-crime documentary as he outlines the incomplete project. He illustrates this game plan through four rigidly segmented visual approaches that afford the film a kind of academic distance from the typical straight-to-streaming docs it satirizes. In one approach, he narrates the scenes he cannot legally film over celluloid images of empty Californian landscapes, slowly zooming in on minor background details whenever he gets wrapped up in the heat of the story. In another, he illustrates individual images from that story with “evocative B-roll” in a purposefully artificial sound stage environment, mimicking Errol Morris’s pioneering true-crime doc The Thin Blue Line as it’s been diluted through countless reiterations. He’s also often shown in the recording booth as he’s being interviewed by an off-screen collaborator, making all of this observation & deconstruction of the true crime genre sound casually improvised, as if it’s occurring to him in real time. In the most important approach, he proves his point by inserting scenes from the made-for-Netflix true crime docs he’s describing in a YouTube video essay presentation, demonstrating that he clearly knows what he’s talking about as a self-critical fan of the genre.

Zodiac Killer Project reminded me of a couple post-modern television series I did watch in the early 2000s, while avoiding the amoral cultural rot of shows like To Catch a Predator. I’m thinking of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed—for how it spoils the magic of how the true crime genre works its audience—and The Soup, for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to get it. Even when breaking down the laziest & evilest aspects of the genre in real time, however, you get the sense that Charlie Shackleton is still a little bummed that he didn’t get to complete his formulaic streaming-service doc as originally conceived. His mourning the loss of that work is even tied to his realization that so many fewer people are going to watch this artful, academic documentary than the audience that would have auto-played his formulaic Netflix slop, if completed. Indeed, only a miniscule fraction of the audience who watched To Catch a Predator as it originally aired are going to reckon with the moral implications of that mass-entertainment character blemish as examined in its post-mortem doc Predators. Hell, I’m sure David Osit would even settle for a fraction of the still-watching audience commanded by micro YouTube celebrity Skeet Hansen, who lamely punctuates his Chris Hansen-impersonating predator exposures with the catchphrase “You’ve just been Skeeted.” The scariest aspect of all of this is how little anyone gives a shit about the exploitation of real-life violence, suffering, and abuse that provides the background noise to our absent-minded chores & scrolling; it’s all comfort watching. The monsters are the audience.

-Brandon Ledet

Parental Hell at The Overlook Film Festival

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When I think of how the horrors of parenting are usually represented in genre cinema, I picture cruel, demonic children. In most horrors & thrillers that prompt you to think twice about having kids, the prompt is a warning that the kids themselves can be absolute nightmares, typified by titles like The Bad Seed, The Omen, Orphan, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. I was treated to an entirely different flavor of parental Hell at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, however, one that torments parents even when their kids are total angels. Both of the high-concept thrillers Redux Redux & Hallow Road ask what if the true horror of parenting is your own potential for failure? What if you fail to keep your children alive or, worse yet, fail to prepare them to keep themselves alive once your part of the job is done? The lifelong responsibility to raise, protect, and prepare another human being for the Hell of everyday living leaves parents incredibly vulnerable to the heightened pain of genre storytelling. It’s just unusual for the source of that pain to be a long, hard look in the mirror.

In Redux Redux, the major failure of the mother figure played by Michaela McManus (sister of co-directors Kevin & Matthew McManus) has already happened before the story begins. We meet her nursing her grief over the loss of her daughter with a weak cup of coffee in a roadside diner. She wordlessly trails the diner’s short-order cook back to his shitty apartment, then stabs him to death in his bedroom. Then, the scenario repeats: the same diner, the same doomed cook, the same violent end. The only thing that changes is the color of the coffee mug. Redux Redux is a revenge-thriller version of the television program Sliders, wherein our grieving-mother antihero jumps from alternate universe to alternate universe to murder her daughter’s killer in thousands of temporarily satisfying ways. Of course, these empty acts of revenge do nothing to bring her daughter back to life; it’s more of a multiversal addiction story than anything, where she hides from her pain by violently acting out against a convenient effigy of the man who ruined everything. The main tension of the movie is whether she can break this violent pattern of addiction to do better by her new, reluctantly adopted daughter figure: a street-smart wiseass teen (Stella Marcus) who’s in danger of becoming the spitting image of her worst self. The horrors of parenting are apparently inescapable, even when you have a magic microwave coffin that allows you to slide into an alternate dimension at a moment’s notice.

In Hallow Road, there’s still plenty of time to do the right thing, but the parents fail anyway. Rosamund Pike & Matthew Rhys star as a middle-aged yuppie couple who are woken in the middle of the night by a panicked phone-call from their college-age daughter. It seems that after a passionate fight with her parents, she decided to go do some drugs in the woods about it, and accidentally struck a stranger with her car on the drive back home. Panicked, the couple start racing to their daughter in their own vehicle, where most of the film is confined for the remainder of the runtime. With only their voices & wisdom to guide their child through this life-changing (and life-ending crisis), they find themselves at a moral crossroads. Do they instruct her to alert the authorities of the accident and face jailtime, potentially saving her stoned-driving victim’s life, or do they help her escape responsibility for her actions, taking a blame for the hit & run themselves to preserve her post-collegiate future? The resulting story is an all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. The further the couple drive into the woods to “rescue” (i.e., corrupt) their child, the more illogical and darkly magical the rules of their world become, and the the entire film functions as a kind of artificial stage-play examination of parents’ most harmful, regrettable impulses.

Personally, I was much more pleased with the genre payoffs of Hallow Road than I was with Redux Redux, mostly because its internal logic felt more purposeful & thoroughly considered. Because Hallow Road opens itself up to Old World supernatural magic, it’s a lot easier to accept its high-concept premise than the more grounded, sci-fi theorizing of Redux Redux. It brings me no pleasure to act as the screenwriting logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of Redux Redux made no sense to me, especially once I started counting up the untold thousands of weeks the mother figure claims to have been murdering her daughter’s killer for and noticed that she is not, in fact, 100 years old. It’s like the McManus family started writing it as a time-loop movie and subbed in the word “multi-verse” instead at the last minute without cleaning up the implications of how time passes differently in that genre. Meanwhile, director Babak Anvari is in total control of just how much information to reveal to the audience about the logic of his hermetic, supernatural world to keep us on the hook — very little. While Redux Redux plays like an audition for a bigger-budget Hollywood actioner for the McManus clan (if you squint hard enough, you can see Betty Gilpin & Jenny Ortega headlining this one as the makeshift mother-daughter avenger duo), Hallow Road is more realistic about what it can achieve on its car-bound scale, using its confinement & limited resources to increase the attention, rather than distracting from them. Its local premiere at this year’s Overlook was also a nice kind of homecoming for Anvari, whose previous picture Wounds is one of the best New Orleans-set horror movies in recent memory (despite what its general critical response will tell you).

Speaking even more personally, I will never know the full horrors of parental failure illustrated here, because I will never be a parent myself. Maybe the unthinkable nightmare of having lost a child and the resulting addictive, self-destructive coping mechanisms that inevitably follow that kind of tragedy stir up powerful enough emotions in a parental audience that the basic temporal logic of its conceit doesn’t matter much. The violence is effectively nasty at least, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the conceptual quibbles (and from the nagging feeling that you’re watching the DTV version of Midnight Special). Meanwhile, the violence of Hallow Road is more verbal & conceptual, as the entire narrative is teased out over the course of a feature-length phone call. I still found it to be the more rattling picture of the two, thanks to the aural jump scares of the sound design and the bigger, crueler questions it asks about what it means to truly be a Good Parent. In either case, I’m happy to have my suspicions that being a parent is a nonstop nightmare confirmed, even if it’s not the kids themselves who are the terror. Apparently, it’s the personal responsibilities & shortcomings that really haunt you.

-Brandon Ledet

Scenes from a Screenwriter’s Marriage

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We try our best to cover both the highest and the lowest ends of cinema here, from the finest of fine art to the trashiest of genre trash. Occasionally, those two polar-opposite ends of the medium intersect in unexpected ways. Last week, I found myself watching two seemingly discordant movies that covered the exact same metatextual topic – one because it screened in The Prytania’s Classic Cinema series during New Orleans French Film Fest and one because the Blu-ray was heavily discounted during an online flash sale. Both 1963’s Contempt and 1989’s The Black Cat are movies about screenwriters who jeopardize their marriages by taking on doomed-from-the-start film projects that put their wives’ personal safety at risk. The former was directed by French New Wave innovator Jean-Luc Godard at the height of his professional career, while the latter was directed by Italo schlockteur Luigi Cozzi in a sly attempt to cash in on his tutelage under his much more famous mentor, Dario Argento. They also both happen to be literary adaptations, at least in theory. While Godard was relatively faithful to his source-material novel, Cozzi’s film is an adaptation in name only, daring to bill itself as “Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat” in its opening-credits title card before immediately abandoning its source text to leech off Argento’s legacy instead of Poe’s. Godard does indulge in his own allusions to an earlier, foundational filmmaker’s work in Contempt, though, by casting Fritz Lang as himself and including discussions of Lang’s early artistic triumphs, like M. You’d never expect these two movies to have anything in common at first glance, but The Black Cat really is Contempt‘s trashy cousin, long estranged.

Typically, I don’t think of Jean-Luc Godard’s signature aesthetic to be all that distant from the low-budget, high-style genre filmmaking ethos that guided the Italo horror brats of the 70s & 80s. At the very least, both sides of that divide would have been passionately reverent of Alfred Hitchcock as a cinematic stylist. However, Contempt is so far removed from the handheld, D.I.Y. crime picture days of Breathless that it’s hardly Godardian at all, at least not visually. Shot on location at seaside Italian villas in Technicolor & Cinemascope, Contempt is often breathtaking in its visual grandeur, especially in its 2023 digital restoration that aggressively pops the intensity of its colors. Godard presents star Brigitte Bardot in several magazine glamour-shoot set-ups that accentuate the otherworldly beauty of her body, with particular attention paid to her buttcheeks. Of course, vacationing with a beautiful woman in an exotic locale doesn’t fundamentally change who you are, so the usual self-defeating macho bullshit that plagues Godard’s protagonists follow him there too. Michel Piccoli co-leads as a cash-strapped screenwriter who takes a well-paying job doing re-writes on an already-in-production Fritz Lang adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Lang is making a much more abstract, artsier picture than what his American producer had greenlit, so Piccoli ends up in a sickening position where he must undermine the work of a genius he respects to instead please a meathead cad from The States who values commerce over art (Jack Palance, playing a pitch-perfect dipshit). Worse yet, the American pig has the hots for Bardot, and Piccoli does nothing to get in his way or to protect his obviously uncomfortable wife. This leads to an endlessly vicious, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-style argument between the couple, so that they spend much of their time in an Italian paradise bickering about the purity of their love and the corruption of money. Meanwhile, Fritz Lang amusedly shakes his head, as if he’s seen this all before.

The marital crisis of The Black Cat is much more outlandish & abstract, but it also starts with a filmmaker taking on an ill-advised project. Our protagonist is a Luigi Cozzi-style horror director who decides to make good use of the Italian film industry’s loose copyright laws to make his own unsanctioned sequel to Suspiria. The project is in the early writing phase, where he is collaborating with a writing partner to sketch out the backstory of the Third Mother referenced in Argento’s Suspiria, believing there was room for another cash-grab witchcraft story in that lore (after the Second Mother was covered in Argento’s Inferno, and long before the Third Mother was covered in Argento’s Mother of Tears). They foolishly decide to pull inspiration from a “real”, powerful witch named Levana, who is awakened from her cosmic slumber by the project. Specifically, once the wart-faced Levana catches wind that she will be played onscreen by the director’s wife, she flips the fuck out and invades the real world through a mirror in the couple’s home, puking a chunky green goo in the actress’s face and then generally causing havoc. From there, The Black Cat is a supernatural horror free-for-all, following its scene-to-scene whims without any care or attention paid to the pre-existing work of Dario Argento, Edgar Allen Poe, or high school physics teachers. The movie is a jumbled mess of demonically possessed space fetuses, witchcraft-practicing house cats, 19th Century ghost children, telekinetic explosions, laser-shooting eyeballs, internal organ ruptures, creepy-crawly spiders, and whatever else amuses Levana as she tears apart this doomed marriage, all because she doesn’t want a movie made about her. What a diva.

You can assume a lot of what was on Godard’s mind while he was making Contempt just by watching the movie. Between the intensely bitter (and even more intensely gendered) marital argument that eats up most of the runtime and the art-vs-commerce argument that eats up the rest, you get a pretty clear picture of what was going on in his internal & professional life at the time. Even after watching the “Cat on the Brain” interview included on the Blu-ray disc, I cannot begin to tell you what Cozzi was attempting to communicate in The Black Cat. During the interview, he describes the picture as “science fiction,” likening it to his Star Wars knockoff Starcrash, with which it only shares a few extraneous insert shots of outer space. I’d say it’s much more spiritually in line with his supernatural slasher film Paganini Horror, which hooks the audience with the undead spirit of famous composer Niccolo Pagnini for a familiar starting point, then launches into a series of hair-metal music video vignettes where he just does whatever amuses him from scene to scene. Both of these vintage European relics might generally be about the artform of screenwriting, but only Contempt seems to put any sincere thought into that craft, while The Black Cat is much more about trying whatever looks cool in a scene, internal logic be damned. Something the two pictures do have in common, though, is the assertion that the basic labor & finance of filmmaking will ruin your marriage, whether through the intrusion of jackass Hollywood money men or the intrusion of evil mirror-dimension witches. If two movies so far apart in philosophy, tone, and intent happen to come to that same conclusion, I have to believe there’s some truth to it. Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be screenwriters.

-Brandon Ledet

That Gum You Like is Back in Style

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I had a classic theatrical experience at the downtown location of The Prytania this Wednesday, when I caught a double feature of the new Looney Tunes movie and the new Soderbergh. Since both films mercifully clock in around 90 minutes a piece, it was not an especially exhausting trip to the cinema, but more importantly they paired well as a charming throwback to theatrical programming of the distant past. The next morning, I read a series of confusing headlines about how “Moviegoers Want More Comedies, Thrillers and Action Titles,” so they haven’t been showing up to theaters for lack of interest in what’s currently out there. The survey generating those headlines is obviously flawed, since moviegoers simply don’t know what’s currently out there. Anyone claiming they don’t regularly go to the theater because “They don’t make ’em like they used to,” has lost sight of what’s actually on theatrical marquees, a problem that could be solved if they’d just glance up. The Day the Earth Blew Up & Black Bag are both exactly how they used to make ’em; it’s more that audiences “don’t watch ’em like they used to.” The habit of checking the newspaper for listings of what happens to be playing this afternoon or physically stopping by the nearest theater and catching whatever has the most convenient showtime is a lost cultural practice.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is about as classic as they come. Sure, its sexual & cultural references are a little more up to date than the anarchic sex & archaic pop culture parodies of Looney Tunes past (with innuendo about anonymous truck stop hookups and visual allusions to sci-fi horror classics like The Thing, Invasion of The Body Snatchers, Jurassic Park, and Night of the Living Dead). At its core, though, it’s just an extended Merrie Melodies short, following the goofball exploits of Daffy Duck & Porky Pig as they desperately attempt to hold onto their entry-level jobs at the local bubblegum factory while simultaneously fighting off a space alien who wants to poison that gum with a mind-controlling goo. Classic stuff. The humor ranges from vaudevillian slapstick to Ren & Stimpy gross-outs in a cacophonously loud celebration of all things loony, all rendered in glorious 2D animation. In a better world, every movie would open with a condensed version of this kind of goofball novelty as an appetizer for the Feature Presentation, maybe accompanied by a short news report about The War or what Lana Turner wore to her recent premiere. Instead, we live in a Hell dimension where its day-to-day box office uneasiness is a bargaining tool in backroom negotiations about whether the other recently completed Looney Tunes feature should be released to theaters or deleted from the Warner Brothers servers for a tax write-off. It’s grim out there.

For the adults in the room, Steven Soderberg has put a pause on his recent unsane genre experiments to instead re-establish his presence as one of Hollywood’s more classical entertainers. Black Bag finds the director returning to the suave professionalism of past commercial triumphs, this time casting Michael Fassbender & Cate Blanchett as a married couple of international cyber-spies who would literally kill for each other despite their shared need to constantly lie in order to do their jobs. The spy plot is a tangled mess of double-triple-crossings involving two “interlocked counterplans” to break this elite marriage part (and take over the world in the process), but none of that really matters. The project is more about signaling a return to the handsome, timeless world of tweed caps, stirred cocktails, and wholehearted monogamy. Soderbergh puts in a Herculean effort to make monogamous marital commitment sexy & cool. It’s a trick he finds much easier to pull off with Fassbender’s love of administering polygraph tests to fellow spies, since those come with their own bondage gear that signals sexiness from the jump. Setting all of this laidback, horny sophistication in the swankiest corners of downtown London and then going out of your way to cast a former James Bond actor in a prominent role (Pierce Brosnan, as the spy agency’s untrustworthy head honcho) all feels like a deliberate callback to the kind of classic thriller surveyed moviegoers claim to want, even if they’re not used to seeing it filtered through Soderbergh’s personal kink for commercial-grade digital textures.

In a word, Black Bag is cute. It’s a nice little treat for Soderbergh casuals who prefer the classic sophistication of Ocean’s 11 over the erratic playfulness of Ocean’s 12. I’m happy for that audience, even though I can’t relate. Similarly, The Day the Earth Blew Up is cute. It’s good for a few sensible chuckles and a few outright guffaws (the origin story for Porky Pig’s trademark stutter got an especially big, unexpected laugh out of me), but it’s in no way attempting to invent or innovate. It’s classic Looney Tunes buffoonery, a familiarly pleasant offering for anyone who’s looking to get out of the house and chomp some popcorn at The Movies. Watching it as a warm-up for a handsomely staged spy thriller about the timeless beauty of a traditional marriage felt like an experience that I could have had at the picture show at any time in the past century. People largely seem unaware that these traditionally entertaining movies are out in the world right now, though, since only the occasional Event Film (i.e., reboots, superhero flicks, live-action remakes of Disney cartoons) seems able to cut through the social media babble to grab their attention. It’s a problem I don’t really know how to fix, but thankfully I’m not in marketing, so it’s not really my job to fix. I just like going to the movies. Every week, I check my local listings and pop in to see what’s being offered to me. It’s a constantly rewarding hobby, one that requires minimal effort.

-Brandon Ledet

Bratty Woman

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This year’s Best Picture winner at the Oscars was about a sex worker who foolishly allows herself to be swept off her feet by a fantasy romance proposal from a wealthy fuckboy client, clashing classic “Cinderella story” & “hooker with a heart of gold” tropes with the harsh, transactional realities of the modern world. There’s obviously a lot of Pretty Woman (1990) DNA running through Anora‘s veins, even if the older, schmaltzier film is distanced from its offspring by several decades and the entire length of the United States. As opposing coastal stories, both movies are appropriately anchored, with Anora playing the scrappy Brooklynite brat who throws stray punches at Pretty Woman‘s dream-factory Hollywood romance. They have too much in common to be purely read as polar opposites, though. Pretty Woman strut the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard so that Anora could clack its Lucite heels on NYC pavement. The former was rewarded with great box office returns & terrible reviews, while the latter is a niche art-circuit crowdpleaser that sneakily nabbed Cinema’s Top Prize despite a relatively meager scale & budget.

Julia Roberts sealed her status as a Hollywood A-lister by playing a fresh-faced streetwalker. She hooks a once-in-a-lifetime trick in the form of a sleepwalking Richard Gere, playing a slutty businessman who’s feeling numb & lonely after the recent loss of his father. Their single-night luxury hotel room tryst quickly escalates into a weeklong engagement for the lifechanging sum of $3,000 (a figure that provided the working title of the original screenplay) and then, eventually, a genuine proposal of marriage. In Anora, the modern fairy-tale romance of that premise unravels quickly & violently, leaving its titular sex worker scrambling to hold onto some compensation after blowing up her life for a dishonorable john. In Pretty Woman, the big-kiss acceptance of the proposal is the end-goal, a consummation of Roberts declaring she “wants the fairy tale” instead of being kept as an on-staff sex worker. The deal-sealing kiss is then punctuated by an unnamed observer on the street pontificating, “Welcome to Hollywood! What’s your dream? Everybody comes here. This is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don’t; but keep dreamin’. This is Hollywood.”

The original scripted ending of Pretty Woman had a distinctly Sean Baker touch, mirroring the end of The Florida Project with Roberts taking her fairy-tale romance to Disneyland. I doubt the toothless Gary Marshall’s version of that trip would’ve had the same dramatic or satirical impact as Baker’s, but they’re both consciously dealing in the same tropes & cliches. If anything, I don’t see Anora upending Pretty Woman‘s naive view of sex-worker-and-client romance; I just see it starting where Pretty Woman ends, logically teasing the story out past the rush of the first Big Kiss. Julia Roberts’s Vivian has plenty in common with Mikey Madison’s Ani throughout the movie. She’s just as defiantly bratty in the face of obscene wealth, and she’s just as friendly to fellow staff workers who serve the same clientele. Marshall mixes sex & slapstick in a way that recalls Baker’s sensibilities in Roberts’s first sexual act with Gere, having her initiate fellatio between giggling fits during an I Love Lucy rerun. I doubt even Baker would call Anora a refutation of Pretty Woman, given that Roberts’s declaration that her tryst with her new client is just like “Cinder-fuckin’-rella” might as well have been recited word-for-word in his version of the story.

Overall, Anora really is the better film. It’s got an anarchic energy that swings wildly from comedic confection to bitter drama within the span of a single scene, whereas Pretty Woman is almost pure confection. After Roberts’s & Gere’s first night together, they immediately slip into a comfortable, domestic dynamic, and most of their scene-to-scene interactions are genuinely romantic, like their Moonstruck trip to the opera or the john playing Vivian’s body like a grand piano. The darker notes of a rape attempt (from Gere’s sleazy lawyer, played by Jason Alexander) or a fellow sex worker’s body being discovered in a nearby dumpster are just illustrations of why the fairy-tale romance is necessary for Vivian, who will accept no less. Gary Marshall is working in tonal contrast there, while Baker lets opposing tones wrestle & tangle until they’re indistinguishable. The audience is scared for Ani in the same scene where we’re laughing at the bumbling incompetence of the male brutes keeping her in place. All we’re really allowed to feel for Vivian is pure adoration, only scared that Julia Roberts might hurt her back carrying the movie while Richard Gere shrugs & mumbles his way through the script. She does so ably, though, with a 3,000-watt smile.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Conversation (1974)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance paranoia thriller The Conversation, which recently screened at Prytania’s Classic Movie Series.

00:00 Welcome

05:08 George Dureau: New Orleans Artist (2023)
19:10 The Roommate (2011)
32:35 Crimes of Passion (1984)

45:08 The Conversation (1974)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Boomer’s Academy Ballot 2024

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I have a deep and abiding love for watching old Siskel and Ebert reviews. You can find a lot of them on YouTube where people’s VHS copies have been cleaned up as much as possible, and there’s an even deeper back catalog on a dedicated site. Many of the episodes on the latter, like their 1983 “If We Picked the Oscars Special,” contain the commercials from the broadcast, which can be fun. In their honor, and so that I can highlight elements that I found fantastic even in works that I didn’t otherwise care for, I have begun to do this myself, annually. Feel free to check out my list from last year, and see below, the winners and the nominees, if I picked the Oscars. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond