There are few genres cozier than the talking-heads documentary about a subject you already love. It’s like switching your brain off to reality TV, except you get the vague feeling that it’s somehow good for you. In my case, I love kicking back to talking-heads docs about vintage smut – the kinds of movies that exist solely for Boomers to wax nostalgic on-camera about how grimy New York City was before Mayor Giuliani ruined everything. This year has seen the wide-release of two notable documentaries in that specific cozy-viewing category: Queen of the Deuce and Carol Doda Topless at the Condor. Split between opposite ends of the US coast, they both cover the professional lives & exploits of women who became infamous sex-industry titans of the 1960s & 70s. One’s about a stripper, one’s about a porno distributor, and both were great low-effort watches to enjoy with a warm cup of tea on my couch.
Unsurprisingly, the more famous of the two women was profiled in the better documentary of the pair, as her talent for publicity left more archival material behind for her biographers to work with. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is a glowing portrait of “The Queen of Topless,” America’s first topless dancer. A woman of many professional aliases, Carol Doda was first publicized as “The Girl on the Floating Piano,” since she was the only dancer brave enough to do her go-go routine on the Condor night club’s hydraulically lifted & lowered piano. She then transformed San Francisco’s striptease scene forever by being the first dancer brave enough to perform in the “monokini” (a topless swimsuit) and, thus, kickstarting “the topless craze” that made the city a global tourist destination for vice entertainment. Her first topless performance also happened to coincide with San Francisco hosting that year’s Republican National Convention, which allows the movie to argue that the city’s strip club scene was an epicenter of 1960s Civil Rights activism, while also shamelessly indulging in the vintage softcore of Russ Meyer’s America. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is overflowing with smutty stock footage, interview clips, rock & roll performances, and mafia-connected murder conspiracies involving the infamous Floating Piano. It’s got everything a bored pervert could want; it just doesn’t break any cinematic conventions delivering it.
Queen of the Deuce is not so fortunate. Its subject, Chelly Wilson, was more of a behind-the-scenes player on the NYC porno theatre circuit, so you can only catch direct glimpses of her in home-video footage and a single tape-recorded interview. When you hit the 2D animation in the first few minutes of the documentary, you might panic that there’s not enough archival material to justify a feature, but it is worth sticking around to get to know the singular Wilson . . . in other people’s words. Queen of the Deuce is a real-life girlboss story about a Greek lesbian Holocaust survivor who became an unlikely porno magnate in 1970s NYC. She worked her way up from importing Greek romances & comedies that reminded fellow immigrants of home to producing & screening hardcore pornography in cinemas like the all-male venue The Adonis (immortalized in the Golden Age porno A Night at The Adonis). Her life is retold as a flip through her family photo album, with her grandchildren fondly reminiscing about the long climb up the porno-theatre stairs to grandma’s apartment and listening in on the “cabal of Greek witches” who would chain-smoke there – some of them lovers, all of them friends. It’s not an especially impressive movie and it can barely drag itself across the finish line of a feature-length runtime, but it’s a warmly pleasant watch, especially if you’re the kind of audience who perks up in your chair when an interviewee drops names like Jamie Gillis, Al Goldstein, and Gerard Damiano.
Although Carol Doda Topless at the Condor was the better, more energetic documentary of the pair, I still got great cozy feelings from the vintage smut of Queen of the Deuce. It may not have had the bottomless wealth of archival clips to work with as its West Coast counterpart, but it did have me reaching for my notebook more often to write down the titles of other vintage schlock to check out later, most notably a pantyhose-fetish roughie Wilson produced titled Scarf of Mist, Thigh of Satin and a vampire comedy her grandson filmed inside The Adonis titled Gargoyle and Goblin (which sadly appears to have only ever screened once at the NYU Student Film Fest). As cinema in their own right, neither film is especially daring or groundbreaking; they both fall into the rigid template of the standard talking-heads doc without many bells & tassels getting in the way. Their entire goal is to introduce you to badass women who briefly held power in small corners of the traditionally macho sex industry, so that they are not forgotten to time. It is indeed a pleasure getting to know them, even if a simple one.
Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Saturday (December 7th) at the 21st annual New Orleans Bookfair along with a bunch of other super cool book & zine exhibitors. We will be selling the print versions of six Swampflix zines, including a brand new “flash art” collection of hand-drawn illustrations from past reviews.
The New Orleans Bookfair will take place on Saturday, December 7, from 11am-5pm at The Fred Hampton Free Store (5523 St Claude Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117) in the 9th Ward.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
When I first started this project, I knew that I would eventually have to watch these shorts in addition to the features in order to hit that magic number, 52. At that time, the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max still hosted just about every DC project ever made, as a result of Warner Bros. folding the DC Universe service into HBO. All of these shorts were available there, until they were slowly offboarded from the service. Never forget what they, and by “they” I mean David Zaslav, took from you. Most of these were only released as special additions to the DVDs of the feature films, which meant that tracking them all down proved no small feat. Ironically, although I have no issue with the wider internet at large knowing that I will soon have watched all of these films, I’m not exactly hot to expose this side of myself to the ubercool clerks at my local video rental. Somehow, we got there.
This short film, clocking in at just twelve minutes, is a strong start for this project. The Spectre features the voice of Gary Cole in the role of Jim Corrigan, an LAPD detective who inserts himself into the investigation into the death of a film producer. It’s not his case, as the assigned detectives and his chief remind him, but he has a vested interest in the case as the producer’s daughter Aimee (Alyssa Milano) is an old flame of his. His boss tells him to instead investigate the strange deaths of the suspects in the case of the producer’s death. The list of enemies is fairly long, but the potential motive of a few of them relates to not being hired for the guy’s most recent production. The first of these is a special effects man whose own macabre creations are animated by a spectral (naturally) being called The Spectre, an avenging spirit. The second suspect is killed while trying to flee to Mexico, as The Spectre forces him to flip his vehicle and, when he miraculously lives, repairs the vehicle supernaturally and has it run down its owner, Christine style. Finally, Corrigan confronts Aimee directly and accuses her of involvement in her father’s death, and when she manages to distract him long enough to pull out a gun, her shots pass through him without effect. Corrigan reveals that he is The Spectre, before avenging Aimee’s father by surrounding her with a cyclone composed of the money she was paid by the two dead men in order to give them the security code so that they could slip in and kill her father, killing her with a thousand cuts before the police arrive on the scene as Corrigan departs, unnoticed by the living people whom he passes by (and through) before driving away.
This is a neat one! A sly little horror story/renegade cop pastiche that features seventies style funk music and some genuinely creepy sequences. The Spectre himself is effectively scary, and his sense of punishment-by-irony is fun. The sequence set in the special effects warehouse allows the animators to go wild, as the SFX guy gets attacked by Dracula, the Wolfman, and even a (similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from) possessed Reagan animatronic, which dutifully vomits on him. The sequence in the desert in which the second suspect meets his fate is also a lot of fun, calling to mind the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker” as The Spectre’s sudden appearance in the car in the guilty man’s rearview mirror, and he proves an unshakeable avenging force. Even the death of Aimee is brutal, even if it’s mostly offscreen, as she screams to her dying breath before the windows of her father’s sleek Beverly Hills MCM mansion are coated in her blood. This short form really allows the animation team to go all in on something that would be unsustainable for a feature length film (even one that only clocks in at around only 80 minutes like most of these do) and focus on a character who would be a hard sell for a solo outing. Of these movies, over a third of them are Batman flicks, and it’s not because there were simply so many of these stories that demanded to be told; it’s purely a matter of marketing, because the Batbrand sells. The Spectre … not so much. This is the perfect bite-size story for the character and to give the team the chance to work on something different and weird. You can probably trace a clear line from this one to the darker, more horror-oriented flavor of later outings like Justice League Dark and City of Demons. Worth a watch.
Another strong early showing for these shorts. There’s not a huge demand for a full-length Jonah Hex animated film (hell, there wasn’t a market for the live action feature, which came out the same year), so one of these shorts was the right call to tell a little western story. In the animation, an outlaw named Red Doc shows up to a saloon, drunken and boisterous, and claims that he can outdraw any man in the place. The saloon’s proprietor, Madame Lorraine (Linda Hamilton) invites him up to her bedroom, and once he’s comfortable, she kills him, robs his corpse, and has two henchmen dispose of the body. The next day, bounty hunter Jonah Hex arrives in town on the trail of Red Doc, but the bartender at the saloon claims to have never seen the man when presented with his “wanted” poster. A bar girl (Michelle Trachtenberg) tells him that Madame Lorraine sometimes takes men up to her parlor, men who are never seen again; Hex allows Lorraine to see his billfold so that she invites him to her boudoir as well, but he knocks her out and takes care of her henchmen. When she awakes, Hex forces her to take him to the abandoned mine that she and her flunkies have turned into a mass grave pit, and Hex retrieves Red’s body to collect his bounty and leaves Lorraine in the hole with the evidence of her crime.
Jane is doing great voice work here with Hex. He’s such a passionate fan of the character that he petitioned to play the lead in the ill-fated live action adaptation by getting a make-up artist to give him Hex’s trademark scarred face to audition for the role, losing out to Josh Brolin, so he’s bringing his A-game here to make up for it, and it shows. Hamilton’s aged rasp lends a lot of gravitas to her frontier serial killer character, and our innate association as an audience of her voice with Sarah Connor means that her world-weariness comes naturally to mind. Although this one lacks the overt horror elements of The Spectre, there’s a creep factor to it that makes this more of a “weird west” than a standard saddle-and-spurs bounty hunter story. The final images that we see of Lorraine, surrounded by the rotting corpses of her victims as her lamp slowly dies, is chilling, and it’s interesting to note that the animation team behind this studio was willing to put in such good work on something that was destined to be seen by very few people (I’ve had Under the Red Hood on DVD for years and never even considered watching this short, which was bundled with it, until this project). I might be giving too much away about when I’m writing about this, but alongside The Spectre, this one would make a great addition to a playlist of spooky season shorts.
It’s very strange to hear Green Arrow voiced by Neal McDonough. The first piece of his work that comes to mind (after this role in Star Trek: First Contact, of course) is his longtime role as DC villain Damien Darhk in the CW TV series universe, where he first appeared as the primary antagonist on Arrow in that show’s fourth season before becoming an antagonist on Legends of Tomorrow. It’s also interesting that this one, which is a little lackluster in comparison to the previous two, is directed by the same person, Joaquim Dos Santos. After this, he mostly spent time focused on TV projects (notably working on every episode of Legend of Korra in some capacity) before he went on to become one of the co-directors of Across the Spider-Verse last year.
This short features Oliver “Green Arrow” Queen trying to get to the airport to pick up his girlfriend, Dinah “Black Canary” Lance, fiddling with an engagement ring in his pocket. He faces some difficulty in getting there on time as he’s fighting traffic that’s the result of a visit from royalty, the child princess of Vlatava, Perdita (Ariel Winter). It’s fortunate for her that he’s there, as he assists in the foiling of an assassination attempt, but the sheer number of snipers and goons forces him to protect her as they try to escape from them. As it turns out, Perdita’s father died the night before, making her the heir apparent to the throne and the only thing preventing her uncle, Count Vertigo, from ascending instead. Vertigo has hired the villainous archer Merlyn (Malcolm McDowell) to take out Perdita, and although Arrow has faced him before and been bested by him every time, he’s been practicing.
This one is serviceable, but nothing to get too excited about. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dos Santos was simply spread too thin, having to get all three of these first few shorts out, all for release in one calendar year. This one was penned by Greg Weisman, who I wrote about more extensively in my review of Catwoman: Hunted, and if you’re a Young Justice fan, Weisman has stated that this short is (essentially) in the same canon, so that may make it worth your while.
Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam (2010), released only in the DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection
This one is pretty rote. Orphan boy Billy Batson (Zach Callison, of Steven Universe fame) is living in a rundown slum after being kicked out of his foster home by his abusive parents, and he’s the runtiest of the street kids so he’s a target for bullies. The closest thing he has to a friend is Clark Kent (George Newbern), who is writing a series of articles about the boy’s struggles. When Billy is attacked by the supervillain Black Adam (Arnold Vosloo), Superman is thus close at hand to rescue him. From there, he gets an infodump from a mysterious wizard who tells him that Black Adam was once the wizard’s champion and had then been corrupted, forcing the wizard to banish him to a distant place, so far that he has spent the last 5000 years returning for his revenge. The wizard bestows his powers on Billy and tells him to speak the name “Shazam,” and you know how this goes from here. Billy turns into the adult superhero Shazam, he and Superman team up and defeat Black Adam, and he chooses to turn back into his human form and age into dust instantly rather than be banished again. And, of course, Billy gets to turn the tables on his bullies as Shazam, much in the vein of Bastian at the end of The NeverEnding Story.
There’s nothing special about this one, I’m afraid. It’s serviceable, but not special. The only thing interesting about it is, perhaps, that this features both a previous Superman voice actor reprising the role (Newbern had previously voiced the role on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and would later reprise the role further in Superman vs. The Elite and Justice League vs. The Fatal Five) and one who would play the character in the future (Jerry O’Connell, who voices Batson’s superheroic alter ego Shazam, would portray him in all of the so-called DCAMU movies). The animation is up to par, and the narrative is sufficient. Not exactly high praise, but this one may set the tone of the exact median of quality of this whole franchise overall. Perfectly balanced, not that interesting.
This one is unusual in that, unlike the others on this list, it was intended to be a tie-in to the film with which it was released. Eliza Dushku reprises her role as Selina “Catwoman” Kyle from Year One, this time on the trail of a Gotham heavy with diamond teeth called Rough Cut (John DiMaggio). After his thugs, trying to kill a cat, chase the poor thing over the edge of a bridge, it’s revealed that the cat was rescued by Selena, who recognizes the ornate collar the cat is wearing. She tracks Rough Cut down to a strip club, where a dancer named Buttermilk Skye (Tara Strong), who gets a diamond from Rough Cut as a tip, is warned by fellow stripper Lily (Cree Summer) that another girl got the same tip the week before, and no one has seen her recently. Catwoman appears through the back door and convinces the ladies to take a break, whereupon she takes the stage in her latex get-up, to much enthusiasm. Even her whip-cracking is appreciated, at least until she starts taking out Rough Cut’s lackeys. He escapes her, leading to a prolonged chase sequence that ultimately ends with the gangster driving off of Gotham pier in a hook truck, taking out the ship that was arriving to take on his latest shipment: trafficked women. One of them is a friend of Selena’s who returns her bracelet to her as the rescued women are tended by paramedics.
Catwoman is … weird. It’s not bad, per se, but much of it feels more like late night 90s softcore than anything else. Lauren Montgomery was the director on this one, having previously directed First Flight and Crisis on Two Earths, and having been a storyboard artist on Under the Red Hood and All Star-Superman, so she’d worked on pretty much all of these projects that I enjoyed until she left this franchise in 2016. It’s an unusually cheesecake-y product for her, although given that she’s spent so much of her career working on these superhero franchises, maybe she just wanted to direct a short film that’s twenty-five percent stripping. The work is impressive; Buttermilk and Selena both move with lithe, athletic grace, which I assume is pretty difficult to capture in a short that was budgeted as the add-on to a DVD that was already destined to haunt CVSes all over the country for the next fifteen years. But it’s also intended to capture sexiness for an audience that I am not a part of, so I mostly spent that time waiting for the scene to move on. At least when Tony Soprano and the boys are at the Bada Bing, there’s some narrative happening. I recently put on a David DeCoteau film in the background for some housework (it was Brotherhood II: Young Warlocks, if you must know, because of Sean Faris), and there were so many lingering scenes of swimming pools, locker rooms, and shirtless football tossing in that one. Those sequences exist solely because those movies are just material that you can fap to but also have on the shelf in your mid-aughts dorm room without having to come out to your roommate. Maybe the problem is just that I’ve never understood erotic animation, which this very much is, but I’ve honestly dwelt on it for so long that it’s starting to feel strange, so I’ll just say: to each their own. The chase sequence that follows is pretty good, and the dock setpiece works, but overall, this one didn’t leave much of an impression.
This was the hardest one of these to find. Most of them were available online to stream or download on the grey market, but for Sgt. Rock I had to go out and find a physical copy of Hush to watch this on. Luckily, there was a blockwide pop-up shopping experience going on outside of my local rental shop this weekend, so I was able to get in and get out with the movie without anyone paying too much mind to my renting of something so embarrassing. And, since I was only able to rent a BluRay copy, that also meant fighting with my extremely finicky machine just to get it to play (tweezers were involved).
This short stars Karl Urban as the titular army sergeant, who awakens in a hospital after his squad is killed in the line of duty in WWII. A superior officer tasks him with taking leadership over a small group of “unusual” soldiers to take out a Nazi base that intelligence reports indicate houses a facility that is in the middle of creating a doomsday device. Said group turns out to be the “Creature Commandos,” a trio of monster dudes: a wolfman, a Nosferatu-esque vampire named Velcoro, and a reanimated Frankenstein(’s monster). On the mission, they manage to enter the facility and discover a full Frankensteinian reanimation set-up, which the re-alived private sets out to destroy. As it turns out, this is the final weapon: undead, reanimated troops made up of the fallen enemy, with the first successes having been Rock’s previous squad, who attack their former leader and his current crew. Rock’s current forces emerge victorious, and when the Nazi major on-site teases Rock that he knows that they must be taken as captives as Rock must have been ordered to bring them in alive so that the U.S. could incorporate this research into their own war effort, Rock allows Velcoro to drain the Nazi scientists dry: “Bottoms up.”
Again, I might be giving away too much about how far in advance I am working on this project, but this strikes me as a perfect little Halloween short, and would work great in a mini-screening with The Spectre and Jonah Hex, although it beats the hell out of me how you’re going to get ahold of this short and somehow get it onto a playlist for you and your friends. I had no idea what I was going into with this one, and when it started, I was immediately bored by yet another scene of soldiers engaged in infantry fighting, but this is really only the prologue until we get to the good stuff, like a wolfman devouring Nazi soldiers and a vampire turning into a bat so that he can fly over a wall and open the reinforced door from the other side. This is the first of these shorts that I think would have really benefited from being extended to a feature length, as this was a pretty fun little ride.
Another little spooky short, this one both sweet and near and dear to my heart. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is my favorite comic book series of all time, and my favorite character within it (after Delirium) is Death, a personification of the concept and a member of “The Endless.” The Endless are not gods; they existed before mankind dreamt of gods, and are as old as the universe itself. First came Destiny, who was born alongside existence, as existence required Destiny to, well, exist. With the first living things came Destiny’s sister Death, as life does not exist without Death; she was followed by Sandman’s title character Dream, whose existence was necessitated when the first living thing to dream did so. (And so on and so forth.) Death was presented in Sandman as a perky goth lady, which has become a huge influence on the idea in pop culture and in real life, and some of my favorite stories from that series revolve around her (notably issues #43, “Brief Lives pt. 3,” and #20, “Façade,” which is my favorite Sandman story of all). It’s weird to see her being written by someone other than Gaiman, but this one was penned by J.M. DeMatteis, who had written the screenplays for Justice League Dark and City of Demons at this point, so his spooky DC credentials were already demonstrated.
Death follows a man named Vincent Omata (Leonardo Nam), a painter who never made it. Despite his love for making art from his youth, he was discouraged by his father as well as his art school professors —one of whom told him that he had no real talent for art and should consider transferring to the university’s dental school program. As an adult, he now finds himself unable to keep a job painting gates, as in, covering the entrance gate to Arkham Asylum in a new coat of paint rather than painting landscapes with such fixtures within them. His various personal demons appear to him in the guise of fiery specters that take the shape of people who have discouraged him, speaking the harsh words to him once again. After a chance encounter with a cute goth girl who gives him her top hat, she reappears later when he sparks up a cigarette to warn him that “Those things will kill [him],” and he offers to show her his artwork. He asks if he can paint her portrait, and he does; however, even realizing that he must have worked all through the night and it should be morning, he notices that the sun has not yet risen. In reality, Vincent has died, having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette, and that the woman he has painted, Death, has shown him a kind of tenderness by stopping the night from passing until he could complete one last work of art, one that he can be proud of. He begs her not to let the painting burn, and as she takes his hand to lead him to the door that opens into whatever comes after life, she does ensure that the portrait he painted of her survives, leaving it behind in the charred ruins of his apartment like that viral Stanley cup that survived the Kia Sorento fire.
This is another entry in the horror-adjacent shorts that form this sub-franchise, but one that focuses less on fright than on the only thing that all humans share: the inevitability of death. Like Sandman before it, the short chooses to imagine Death not as an end, but a transition, and not as something to fear, but as something to accept. It’s a lovely little story, and, if you’re only ever going to see one of these, this is the one to catch.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
I’ve seen the first fifteen minutes of this movie a few times now. It’s not boring, really, but it was something that I just kept trying to watch in the late hours when I didn’t feel like expending the effort to think about what to watch, so I would often put it on and then fall asleep. Now that I’ve managed to make it all the way through, it’s another solid but unexceptional entry in this franchise. And man, this period of films sure does have a hard-on for Solomon Grundy, don’t they?
After a pre-credits opening in which teenaged Kara Zor-El (Meg Donnelly) learns from her mother that she has been accepted to the “military guild” on the same day that Krypton is destroyed, she escapes in the only working pod, only to be knocked off course. When we catch up to the present day, Kara—still a teenager even though her infant cousin has now grown up and become Superman because of her pod having taken longer to reach Earth—is having trouble adjusting to life on our planet. Everything is technologically inferior in a way that isolates her. When she attempts to stop Solomon Grundy from going on a rampage, she’s confronted by a man who is upset that her activity has resulted in wanton property damage. Batman (Jensen Ackles) pulls Superman (Darren Criss) aside and says that Kara’s impulsivity makes her dangerous, and that something has to be done about this. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost exactly the same as the beginning of Apocalypse. As in that film, the solution is to send Kara off to train elsewhere with people who are more like her; in this case, that means heading off to the 31st Century, to train at the academy of the Legion of Superheroes, a kind of interplanetary Justice League of the future. There, she’s initially smitten with Mon-El, a flying invincible hero of the Superman mold, and has an instant altercation with a man she recognizes as Brainiac, but whom she later learns is fellow legionnaire in training Brainiac 5 (Harry Shum, Jr.). A quick tour of the grounds sets the groundwork for action later in the film, including foreshadowing the presence of a vault of confiscated weapons, which is subject to a heist later in the film.
Here’s a bit of a meta-spoiler; the animation studio is going to do a massive reset of this continuity after just one more of these, a film titled Warworld. That means that this is, for all intents and purposes, the second to last in this sub-franchise. After one Superman film, a sort-of Flash movie that mostly took place in an alternate past, a king-sized Batman flick, and a Green Lantern buddy space opera, we’re on our fifth film, and we’re already leaving a lot of story potential out there on the court to be swept under the rug as having happened between movies while racing toward a reset button. That begs the question of why they would even make these as interconnected movies in the first place if that interconnection is purely a matter of branding (oops, maybe I just answered my own question there). For all its flaws and variances between the films that made it up, the DCAMU at least felt like there was a reason for it to exist, and there was some reward for following them in the form of longer character arcs. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Here, we get a few brief minutes of Superman and Batman in the present before Supergirl’s gallivanting off to the future, and a quick check-in right in the middle of Kara’s adventures in superschooling to let us know that there’s a terrorist organization that almost managed to acquire Brainiac 1’s head from the lab in which it is being studied. Other than that, there’s no reason for this to not simply be a solo Supergirl outing, or it could keep the title it has now if there’s some concern about the movie selling fewer DVDs if it’s more obviously about a woman (the poor sales of Catwoman: Hunted probably contributed to this). The target demographic of this movie is very, very concerned about cooties.
What we do have is pretty rote. The rest of the student body at Legionnaire Academy is pretty lackluster. The most impressive is a woman who can split into three (and only three) versions of herself; the rest include your normal assortment of ragtag underdogs whose uncool powers are completely useless, until they’re all working in tandem at the end and everyone gets a moment to shine. There’s a guy who can turn himself invisible (but not anything else, like his clothing), a shy “phantom girl,” a man who can inflate himself and bounce around, and everybody’s favorite actually-a-comic-book-character Arms-Fall-Off-Boy, whose arms fall off. None of them have any hope of becoming Legionnaires when they complete their training, as it’s widely agreed that superChad Mon-El has the single open position on the team locked down. For half a second I got excited that they might be teasing a Mon-El/Brainiac 5 romantic pairing, but instead we have a pretty rote story about Kara having a crush on Mon-El before her friction with Brainiac 5 turns into begrudging respect, which is itself replaced by romantic interest. Brainiac 5 is a total Spock, though, since he won’t shut up about how he’s the smartest, most logical guy in the universe; I get the appeal. There is a traitor in the ranks, though, and given that this is little more than a futuristic variation on the stock “nerds vs. jocks” plot, you can probably guess who turns out to be the mole. Turns out they’re a member of the same terrorist organization that Bats and Superman dealt with in the 21st Century, which has existed for over a thousand years now and which serves one goal: help Brainiac (1) conquer the universe. Of course the man behind everything is Brainiac; it’s always, always Brainiac. I’m so tired.
As it turns out, one of the things in the superweapon vault has the potential to rewrite existence and Brainiac wants it but even he wasn’t smart enough to bypass the security system, so he let successive generations of himself become smarter until Brainiac 5 came along, whose sense of heroism could be manipulated into opening the vault. For what it’s worth, I am giving the film an extra half star purely because Brainiac 1 shows up at the end with Brainiacs 2-4 sticking out of his lumpy flesh and crying out in pain like Monstro Elisasue, so that was fun (he’s even defeated because all of his constituent parts decide they want ultimate power for themselves, and he’s torn apart by his own absorbed clones). Some amount of world shattering wigglies do expand, which I wouldn’t normally mention, but it might be important later since we’re speedrunning toward a crisis-style reset. In the end, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 make out and get together, and the Legionnaires who were conveniently kept away from HQ while all of this was going on return home and say that they’re going to let in all of the wacky misfits, even Arms-Fall-Off Boy! The end. Is this the last we’ve seen of Brainiac? I sure hope so. Y’all can keep Sinestro, too.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
Of all of the films on this list, this was the one I was least looking forward to. The few clips that I saw prior to my screening did not endear me to its 3D animation style, and it seemed squarely aimed at a child audience based on the premise alone. What this ended up being was much better than I expected, even if its PG-13 rating is a little baffling.
Jonathan Kent (Jack Dylan Grazer) is about to turn twelve, and is old enough to start to resent the frequent absences of his journalist father, Clark (Travis Willingham), despite frequent lectures from his mother Lois (Laura Bailey) about the importance of the fourth estate. When dear old dad misses Jonathan’s baseball game on his birthday, the boy broods in his room and runs from his father when he does come home, taking off into a cornfield before his emotional stress gets the better of him and he manifests heat vision. Hiding in the barn afterward, his father reveals to him for the first time that he’s not always off chasing stories, but averting tsunamis and stopping falling space debris, because pops is Superman. Jonathan is delighted at this news (despite, like many children, having a preference for the “cooler” Batman). After a touching father-and-son flight around the world in the vein of Aladdin’s “A Whole New World” musical sequence, the two go to Gotham, where Superman introduces his son to Batman (Troy Baker) and the latter’s own son, Damian/Robin (Jack Griffo). There’s immediate friction between the elitist Damian and “farm boy” Jonathan, and their conflict belies Damian’s own insecurities, specifically that the Teen Titans don’t want him because of his tendencies toward both violence and lone-wolfism, rejecting him from the team. When an interstellar invading force assimilates huge swathes of the earth’s population, including the Justice League and the Titans, it’s up to the boys to put aside their differences and save both their dads and the world.
Strangely, I had an easier time adjusting to the animation style here than I have in the “Tomorrowverse” movies, perhaps because these character models don’t constantly call to mind Adult Swim shows of a bygone era. It’s certainly not up to something like Pixar’s output, but it’s pretty decent, if occasionally wonky. I don’t think we ever see anyone close the front door of the Kent farmhouse, as characters often walk in and leave the door wide open while they have a conversation until the scene ends, so it really does seem like everyone here was raised in the proverbial barn. There are even scenes that were rather impressive, most notably the scene in which Green Arrow, bow cocked, searches the JL’s “Watchtower” satellite for a potential invader, as there’s a lot of fun rotation around the character and the movement of both model and lighting was effectively moody. There are also several scenes of characters walking out of dark shadows to reveal that they’ve been taken over by Starro spores that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite comfort Halloween watches, The Faculty, and that always gets points with me.
Characterwise, I appreciated that this film had one of the most infuriatingly unlikeable versions of Damian Wayne to date, and that his character arc over the course of this one moves him to a more sympathetic place, which was impressive. When we first meet him, he’s snide and condescending while Bruce stands by embarrassed, apologizing for the fact that his spawn is a bratty little edgelord. He even kicks Jonathan over the edge of one of the many non-OSHA-compliant platforms in the Batcave as a “test” to see if he can get the other boy’s flight power to activate in a traumatic situation (it does not work, and Jonathan is almost smashed to death on stalacmites). His decision to head straight to Jonathan’s school and recruit him to his “save the dads” mission is pragmatic, but also speaks to his desire to prove that he can be a team player. For his part, Jonathan himself is in a meeting with the principal following an altercation with a bully named Melvin; the school administrator tells Jonathan that Melvin is troubled and that if Jonathan can extend the other boy a little grace and look past his harsh exterior, people like Melvin can be the most loyal friend one can ask for. This doesn’t really seem to be true in the case of Melvin (that kid’s a little asshole), but it does echo through his scenes with Damian, as Jonathan is able to win him over through his own clever thinking and spirit of determination. It’s not the most nuanced or original storytelling, but it’s not talking down to its audience.
Speaking of which, I’m not really sure who this film is supposed to be for. I mentioned that PG-13 rating above, and for most of the runtime, I was hard-pressed to think of why that might be the case. Not every movie that’s about children is for children, obviously. No child should see Come and See or Graveyard of the Fireflies before they’re old enough to process what they’re seeing. This, however, definitely has the air of being made for a younger audience than these movies are normally suited for. In fact, the moment that a character said “damn,” I was a little shocked, as Super Sons had theretofore been so … family-friendly? The plot point about young Jonathan feeling ignored by his father because he missed the kid’s baseball game is a cliche lifted straight out of Hook, and both Damian and Jonathan’s playground insults are feeble in a way that couldn’t possibly interest an adult audience but might, perhaps, pass muster with a child. I found myself surprisingly touched by all the time that Clark and Jonathan spend together in Act I, but it’s not sophisticated, adult stuff; it’s for kids. After the midpoint, however, things start to get a little more violent, as if the film was lulling you into a false sense of security before moving on to Starro’s little seastar-with-an-eye things horribly emerging from characters’ mouths and, in the finale, all of those eyes bursting bloodily when the hive mind is defeated. I’m not sure what to make of this, honestly, since it takes what is clearly a PG family movie into something that’s more in line with what the standard audience of these movies would expect, but I find it hard to imagine them not being bored with the film’s more squeaky-clean daycare-safe first half. Ultimately, it’s pretty decent, if tonally uneven, and for someone who normally rolls his eyes at stories about fathers and sons, I found this story inoffensive and occasionally tender.
Sean Baker’s time is here. After nailing down his gig-labor docufiction style in the 2004 food-delivery tragedy Take Out and then applying it to a long string of sex-industry dramas in the couple decades since, Baker has finally earned his moment in the prestige-circuit spotlight. Earlier breakthroughs like Tangerine& The Florida Project perfectly calibrated his caustically funny, soberingly traumatic storytelling style in his best work to date, but he emerged from those triumphs recognized as a name to watch rather than one of the modern greats. He’s been recalibrating in the years since, going full heel in his deliberately unlovable black comedy Red Rocket before face-turning to the opposite extreme in his latest work, Anora. Clearly, Baker has decided he wants audiences to love him again, and it’s impressive to see him swing so wildly in tone between his last two features without losing his voice. Anora is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour Sean Baker of Red Rocket. Both are equally funny & frantic, but only one is affable enough to set the filmmaker up for a Best-Picture Oscar run after taking home the top prize at Cannes. It’s his time.
The surprising thing about Anora’s critical success is that it’s such a dutiful continuation of the work Baker’s already been doing for years – just with an extra dash of sugar to help sweeten the bitter. Mikey Madison stars as the titular erotic dancer, another trapped-by-capitalism sex worker in a long tradition of Sean Baker anti-heroines dating at least as far back as 2012’s Starlet. Anora is a thorny, chaotic, unfiltered baddie whom the audience instantly loves for her faults, because she’s fun to be around. Like in Tangerine & The Florida Project, we meet her working customers in a high-stress but manageable profession, then follow her on an anarchic journey through her larger urban community, walking a tightrope between slapstick physical comedy & face-slap physical violence until she’s offered a moment of grace in the final beat. As the editor, Baker has worked out a well-timed rhythm for this story template through its many repetitions in previous works. He sweeps the audience up in the hedonistic romance of Anora’s Vegas-strip marriage to a big-spender Russian brat who offers a Cinderellic escape from the strip club circuit in exchange for helping secure a green card. The quick-edit montage of that fantasy then slows down to linger on its real-world fallout, investing increasingly long, painful stretches of time on Russian gangsters’ retribution for the young couple generating tabloid headlines that embarrass the brat’s oligarch father. The laughs continue to roll in, but the punchlines (and physical punches) get more brutal with each impact until it just isn’t fun anymore, as is the Sean Baker way.
There’s nothing especially revelatory about the Sean Baker formula in Anora. In the context of his filmography, it’s just more of the same (of a very good thing). However, the increased attention to his career-long project as an auteur has had its immediate benefits, not least of all in Baker’s collaboration with the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema (formerly known as Wildwood). When asked to program a screening for Gap Tooth as a primer for what he was aiming to achieve in Anora, Baker offered three titles as options: Fellini’s Oscar-winning sex worker drama Nights of Cabiria, the fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, and a second Italian sex-work story in 1960’s Adua and Her Friends. Gap Tooth ultimately selected Adua, the most obscure title of the trio and, more importantly, one of the very best titles they’ve screened to date. I don’t know that Sean Baker’s name would have come to mind had I discovered Adua and Her Friends in a different context, since it’s a much more formally polished picture than the anarchic comedies he’s become known for since he filmed Tangerine on an iPhone. The comparisons that more readily came to mind were Mildred Pierce, Volver, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. It’s a less recognizable title than any of those comparisons, but that’s the only way in which it’s lesser. It’s an incredibly stylish, sexy, tragic, and cool story of self-reinvented sex workers making do in late-50s Italy, one that speaks well to Baker’s genuine interest in his characters’ inner lives beyond what they symbolize as society’s economic casualties.
Adua and Her Friends is a darkly comic drama about a small crew of sex workers who are forcibly retired by the Merlin Law of 1958, which ceased the legal operation of all Italian brothels. Unsure how to get by without the only trade they have experience in, the women conspire to open a rural, roadside restaurant as a front for a new, illegal brothel they will run themselves. Only, after a few successful months of food service—depicted as being equally difficult as prostitution—they decide they’d rather “go straight” in their new business than convert it into an underground brothel. As you’d expect, the self-reinvented women’s lives as restaurateurs are upended by men from their past that refuse to let them start fresh, the same way Anora is blocked from upgrading her social position from escort to wife. Where Adua excels is in taking the time to flesh out the inner lives & conflicts of each woman in its main cast. Lolita is led astray by conmen who take advantage of her youthful naivete; Marilina struggles to reestablish a familial relationship with her estranged son; Milly hopes to leave her past behind and start over as a devoted housewife, Anora-style. Adua (Oscar-winner Simone Signoret) gets the first & final word in her struggle to establish a new career before she ages out of her livelihood, but the movie is an ensemble-cast melodrama at heart, asking you to love, laugh with, and weep for every woman at the roadside restaurant (and to hiss at the cads who selfishly ruin it all).
Much like in Baker’s films, the majority of Adua and Her Friends is a surprisingly good time, with plenty slapstick gags & irreverently bawdy jokes undercutting the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tropes typical to this subject. Like Anora, it’s a 2+ hour comedy with an emotionally devastating ending, one that carefully avoids making its titular sex worker a purely pitiable symbol of societal cruelty even while acknowledging that she’s backed into a pretty shitty corner. Adua and Anora can be plenty cruel themselves when it helps their day-to-day survival. That might be where the two films’ overlapping interests end, since Adua lounges in a much more relaxed hangout vibe than Anora, scored by repetitions of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” rather than t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.” Adua and her friends loiter around their Italian villa, fanning themselves in a deep-focus tableau, while Anora is dragged around Vegas & NYC by Russian mobsters who (for the most part) don’t see her as a human being. There is one early sequence in Adua where a black-out drunken night is represented in choppy lost-time edits that may have been an influence on the rhythms of Anora’s first act, but otherwise I assume Baker was inspired less by the film’s formal style than he was by the characterizations of its main cast. The frank, sincere, humanizing approach to sex-worker portraiture in Adua and Her Friends speaks well to Sean Baker’s continued interest in sex-work as a cinematic subject and, although both were great, I feel like I learned more about his work through its presentation than I did by watching his latest film.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
Green Lantern: Beware My Power falls squarely in the “solid, but unexceptional” tier of these movies for me. The story is interesting, and it goes out of its way to deliver something different from the films that came before it, making overtures toward space opera as a genre, while also falling back on some old standby narrative elements, like framing the narrative around a central mystery (this time, it’s “What re-ignited the conflict between two worlds brokering an uneasy peace?”) and having a Green Lantern with PTSD serve as the main character. But it also errs on the side of being a bit messy, its moral quandary is muddled, and there’s something amiss in the editing.
John Stewart (Aldis Hodge and therefore automatically an extra half star) is a veteran of the Iraqi Quagmire struggling to deal with his PTSD now that he’s back in civilian life when a UFO crashes into the junkyard next door. He rescues a small blue alien dude from the wreckage, who speaks to him cryptically before his body self-destructs at the moment he dies, leaving behind a green ring that slips itself onto his finger and starts talking to him. Unable to remove it, he asks the ring if someone could help him understand what’s happening to him, and the ring surrounds him in a protective shield and take him to the JLA’s satellite “Watchtower,” where after a round of extremely typical “misunderstanding means fight” stuff, Green Arrow (Jimmi Simpson) and the newest Green Lantern are off to the GL HQ planet of Oa in the self-repaired crashed ship. Upon arrival, they find the headquarters in ruins and meet Shayera Hol (Jamie Gray Hyder), a warrior of the planet Thanagar, which is populated by winged humanoids. She tells them that the Green Lanterns had helped to create a truce between the Thanagarians and the basically human people of Rann, who were at war with one another. An attempt to build a bridge between their two planets, metaphorically and (using teleportation tech known as “zeta beams”) literally, went awry, putting the two planets right next to each other and wreaking untold havoc on both. Each side blames the other, with good evidence on both fronts, although this turns out to be due to an external party that’s performing false flag efforts on both Rann and Thanagar. Along the way, they pick up Adam Strange (Brian Bloom), a hero of Rann whom even the Thanagarians respect, and who has been presumed dead for years.
Of course, the villain behind everything is Sinestro. It’s always Sinestro. I got tricked into thinking for a while that this story might go somewhere different, but nope: Sinestro. There does turn out to be another party behind him pulling things from the shadows, but the moment that it was revealed that the Rann/Thanagar beam-bridge thing was sabotaged by Sinestro, I rolled my eyes. (Worse still, upon looking up the movie on Wikipedia to review the cast list, it looks like the film’s poster/DVD cover straight up shows Sinestro; so much for making it a “mystery” at all.) Up to this point, I was willing to forgive a lot of the film’s flaws. A lot of the animation seems a little choppy around the edges, and there’s a distinct feeling that I get that certain frames were extended by fractions of a second, as if they needed just an extra minute and change of runtime in order to meet a contractual obligation and they were going to get those 87 seconds with what was already completed, even if it meant making the time between each character’s lines feel juuuuuuust a teensy bit too long.
Further, there’s a real “Not all cops” vibe early in the film that I wasn’t a big fan of, and seems particularly tone deaf given the time of release and the film’s main character. After manhandling a guy because he was being an obnoxious jerk while John was having a PTSD flashback, John then comes across two men planning to burn an unhoused guy alive in an alley simply for being there, and he fights them off. The police arrive just as he puts on a few finishing moves and tase him, only letting him go once they run a background check and learn that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The whole thing feels weird, out of place, regressive, and apathetic about police brutality. Given that one of the film’s theses revolves around moral justifications for taking a life, it feels weird to include this run-in with the police one of the film’s first scenes. I’m not exaggerating either; the first time that GL and GA meet Shayera, John almost kills her in their fight, as he has her pinned under a mental construct and is in the process of crushing her to death as his ring repeats “Lethal force is not authorized,” over and over again. It’s because of John’s PTSD, of course, as he keeps flashing back to the moment that one of his fellow soldiers was killed next to him, followed by an attack by an enemy combatant who stabs John through his hand in the altercation before John is able to get the upper hand. This gets called back a couple of times, including a scene near the end when the film’s big bad does the same. When the gang manages to rescue the imprisoned Hal Jordan, his old buddy Green Arrow is shocked when the newly freed man kills one of the enemy facility’s guards without hesitation, as Hal says that his experience in Sinestro’s prison has hardened him. Still later, the final villain is defeated when Arrow is forced to kill them, as there’s no other choice.
Justification for homicide seems like a strange place for these movies to go. I suppose it could be construed as necessary given that our newest Lantern here is a combat veteran, and the fact that John is haunted by the things he saw (and did) in the war makes for a much more complex character than the ones we’ve seen so far in this series. I don’t want to complain about the creative team on this one giving more depth to any of the characters, but it’s definitely a weird choice. A lot of the other choices I really liked, though. Although Unbound spent some time in space aboard Brainiac’s ship and the failed assault on the planet Apokolips obviously launched from space, it’s surprising that it’s taken over forty of these movies to make a proper, space-set sci-fi story (it also took them more than forty of these before they made one with a Black lead, it should be mentioned). The influences from Star Wars are all over. The Green Lanterns’ powers are given elements of The Force here (during a long interstellar trip, John even practices his use of his new powers with the ring like Luke does aboard the Millennium Falcon). There’s a dark, corrupting influence that causes the moral fall of the greatest and most respected member of an intergalactic peace-keeping order, and the fall of that order leaves only one last Jedi Green Lantern, one free of the influence of previous generations. Hal Jordan’s prison beard even makes him look almost exactly like prequel Obi-Wan. If you’re going to borrow (or steal), do it from the best, I suppose.
From a production perspective, this one is a little sloppy, but I’ve finally gotten used to the animation style, so it’s not intolerable. Narratively, it’s a refreshing change of pace to get out and do some space stuff, since the last time we did anything close to this scale was in Emerald Knights, which was over thirty movies ago. Characterwise, the choices they made about John Stewart’s past are an interesting wrinkle that delivers more pathos than normal, and his interactions with Green Arrow are a lot of fun. I love Aldis Hodge, so that’s a plus. Still, this one gets a “Solid, But Unexceptional.”
All you really need to earn respectability in the entertainment industry is to stick around long enough for the bad reviews to fade away and your presence is undeniable. It worked for Keanu Reeves, it worked for Adam Sandler, and it also worked for the fire-breathing turtle monster Gamera. When Gamera first premiered in the 1960s, the giant turtle beast was essentially a goofy knockoff of Godzilla, and he was treated as such. As a result, he quickly pivoted to become a “hero to children everywhere” in a long string of kiddie sequels (before Godzilla also got into that game), so that the original Daikaijū Gamera film was never treated with the same critical or historical respect as the original Gojira. We all love Earth’s hard-shelled protector anyway, though, so it’s good to know that Gamera did eventually get his deserved victory lap in the 1990s, when he was given a slick, big-budget makeover to help boost his reputation as one of the kaiju greats. I haven’t yet seen all of Gamera’s kid-friendly sequels from the 1960s & 70s, but I can’t imagine any could compare with his action-blockbuster spectacles from the 1990s. Gamera’s Heisei-era trilogy is a glorious run of high-style, high-energy kaiju pictures that for once genuinely compete with the best of the Godzilla series, instead of registering as a court jester pretender to the King of Monsters’ throne.
The debut of that 90s makeover, 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is both the best and the most faithful of the trilogy. Gamera is re-introduced to the world as a living relic of Atlantis, not a newly arrived extraterrestrial protector. He battles the Giant Claw-like bird creatures the Gyaos from his 1960s days, who are theorized to have been activated by Climate Change, and his ability to fight them off is powered by a child’s love. Just in case audiences weren’t sure that this straightforward Gamera revival was inspired by the success of Jurassic Park, Guardian of the Universe almost immediately includes an archeological dig and a scene where the scientist studying the Gyaos shoves an entire arm into their droppings like Laura Dern going shoulder deep in triceratops poop. It’s the Jurassic Park style mixed-media approach to the visual effects that really makes this one stand out, since the plot and the monster-of-the-week enemies are such classic Gamera fare. There’s something gorgeous about the film’s 90s green screen magic, surveillance video inserts, and rudimentary CGI mixing with the rubber monster suit tactility of classic kaiju pictures that inspires awe in this reputation-rehabilitator. We are all Sam Neill gazing upwards, slack-jawed at our giant reptile friend and, then, begging the Japanese military to stop shooting at him so he can save the day. Every time Gamera bleeds green ooze in his fight to save us, we too ooze a tear in solidarity.
Things turn more horrific in the 1996 sequel Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, shifting from Jurassic Park to Mimic in Hollywood comparison terms. Instead of fighting off the Gyaos sky-beasts, Gamera has to face underground bug creatures collectively called Legion. As a threat, Legion can be genuinely unnerving in their Phase IV-style insectoid organization skills, at one point carpeting Gamera’s entire body in a collective swarm. In individual design, they’re a touch creepier than the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, adding a gross little cyclops eyeball to the center of each bug’s frame. All we can do in the face of such horrors is to thank Gamera for sticking around to protect us . . . unless you happen to be one of the poor children orphaned by the large-scale destruction of his skyscraper heroism. Gamera’s enemy in the third installment, 1999’s Revenge of Iris, is the titular parasitic monster that has been orphaned by the turtle’s heroic violence, birthed from a loan surviving egg seemingly borrowed from the set of an Alien sequel. Really, though, Gamera has to contend with the disaffected child psychically linked to that monster, who lost her parents when Gamera crushed their apartment during a Legion attack in the previous picture. It’s a plot that questions whether the widespread collateral damage of Gamera’s heroism is worth having him around to fight off lesser monsters, to the point where he has to fight a personified version of the Trauma he’s caused in past battles. We all still love the big guy, but accountability is important.
Of the two sequels, Revenge of Iris is the only true contender for possibly besting Guardian of the Universe as the best of Gamera’s 90s run. By that point in the series, Gamera’s reputation as something too goofy to take seriously had been fully overcome, so there was only one goal left to achieve: make Gamera scary. It’s an incredible accomplishment, achieved by filming the giant turtle beast from inside the homes he’s supposedly protecting with his righteous, vengeful violence. There’s a somber, funereal tone to Revenge of Iris, as if it were clear to the filmmakers that Gamera’s 90s revival was a special moment in time that had already reached its natural conclusion. Images of dead Gyaos covered in flies and a sea floor carpeted in dead Gameras from Atlantis’s ancient past convey a sad finality to the series echoed in Gamera’s “What have I done?” moment self-reflection when he realizes he has traumatized the very children he sought to protect. Personally, I was much more impressed & delighted by the spectacle of Gamera’s official makeover in Guardian of the Universe, but the tonal & thematic accomplishments in Revenge of Iris are just as remarkable, considering the monster’s humble origins three decades earlier. Attack of Legion is a worthy bridge between those two franchise pillars as well, especially on the strength of its creepy creature designs. Gamera may not have emerged from his 90s run as a hero to all children everywhere, but he carved out an even bigger place for himself in this overgrown child’s heart. I love my giant turtle friend, and I’m happy that he eventually found the respect he’s always deserved.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
There’s a moment in this movie where Selina “Catwoman” Kyle is in the middle of a heist, very early in the runtime, when—suddenly—a Batarang appears in front of her, and a cowled shape moves in the shadows. I sighed a heavy sigh; after Soul of the Dragon, nearly three hours of a Long Halloween, and the Batman-heavy Injustice, I was really, really tired of the Batman. You can’t imagine the relief I felt a few minutes later when Batwoman emerged from the shadows. At this point, I’ll take any reprieve that I can get.
The film opens at a lavish party being hosted by Barbara “Cheetah” Minerva (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), which doubles as the onboarding of Gotham mob boss Black Mask (Jonathan Banks) into the criminal organization “Leviathan.” It’s a costume ball as well, which serves to help a woman who arrives in an old-school Catwoman outfit, catching Black Mask’s eye and prompting him to invite her to accompany his party inside. Unbeknownst to him, the woman on his arm is the real Selina Kyle (Elizabeth Gillies), and she makes her way through the party flirting and pickpocketing until she can get into Minerva’s vault. Along with her faithful feline companion Isis, abscond with the Cat’s Eye Emerald, which Black Mask brought as his buy-in on this criminal enterprise. Mask and his henchman pursue Catwoman along with Minerva’s brute Tobias Whale (Keith David), but she manages to escape, only to be apprehended by Kate Kane, aka Batwoman (Stephane Beatriz), who spirits her aboard an aircraft that Interpol has “acquired” from Penguin. There she meets secret agents Julia Pennyworth (Lauren Cohan) and King Faraday (Jonathan Frakes!), who enlist her help in bringing down Leviathan by acting as bait for Minerva et al’s cronies, promising to wipe her criminal record clean if she succeeds.
Like Gotham Knight before it, Catwoman: Hunted is drawn in an anime style, although it was handled by a single studio rather than several, as the earlier, vignette-based film was. That studio is OLM, best known in the west for their work on various Pokemon projects, and I love the art style. Catwoman herself is adorable, as is Isis (uh, please don’t take that out of context), and the designs of all of the characters make this one a very pleasant watch, especially following so closely on the heels of more Tomorrowverse thick-line drawing and the ugly art style that was omnipresent in Injustice. Of particular note is just how cool Cheetah looks once she hulks out into her big, feline form; it makes for a much more dynamic visual experience than the rotating house styles that I had come to expect from these, and it was a pleasant surprise once the film got started. I was already pretty won over, however, as the opening credits featured a great jazz soundtrack (courtesy of Yutaka Yamada) and a fun sequence which has this grainy feeling, like the images are drawn with chalk on newsprint. It’s very 70s, and I loved it. Looking back, this film is also one in which those opening credits serve a narrative function; it tells an impressionistic story of Catwoman going to Sochi and rescuing a large group of women from some kind of imprisonment. At first, this seems to simply be a little bit of character development, to signal to potential new viewers that this Catwoman isn’t just the criminal with whom they are likely already familiar, but also establishes her moral code. Further than that, however, this event is actually the impetus for the plot, as it’s later revealed that Catwoman liberated a group of women who were being human trafficked by Minerva, and that what seemed like little more than typical Catwoman steal-a-big-jewel shenanigans was actually the first step in a more complicated plot to take down Minerva.
I suppose it’s not that unusual for a script by Greg Weisman to be clever. I’ve sung the praises of his television series Young Justice many times in these pages. I love it so much that I put on a random episode while doing some chores the other day and ended up not only just sitting down and watching it, but also having to force myself not to spend the rest of the day like that. For fans of animation in general, Weisman’s name may be familiar because of his development of the criminally underrated Gargoyles, a 90s Saturday morning Disney product that wove mythology, magic, and Shakespeare into its text while tackling ambitious topics like prejudice, redemption, legacy, and identity. If you read the above paragraph and read the names David Keith and Jonathan Frakes(!) and you’re familiar with Gargoyles, you might have already assumed Weisman was involved, as Keith voiced lead gargoyle Goliath and Frakes provided the voice of the show’s first and primary antagonist, Xanatos. Weisman’s work has always been noteworthy, and he’s one of those writers who knows exactly what part of my brain to metaphorically reach inside of and scratch an itch with a perfectly, elegantly constructed narrative. While we’re on the topic of Weisman, this one will probably be of particular interest to fans of the aforementioned Young Justice, as the film’s interest in not just Catwoman but cat women, as evident in the choice of Cheetah as the primary villain, means that the character Cheshire shows up here, with Kelly Hu reprising her voice role. I honestly can’t think of a single thing in this movie that would contradict YJ, so if you’re looking for something to fill the void left by the series (second) cancellation, this can slot right into that continuity, if you like.
One of the best scenes in the film involves Selina and Kate, left alone on the fancy jet that Interpol commandeered, getting surprisingly intimate for these largely sexless movies. Selina draws a bath and plays at inviting Kate to join her, clearly aware of both Kate’s secret identity and her sapphic inclination. It’s a ploy to get a piece of equipment from Kate, but that doesn’t mean that Selina isn’t into it, and in this house, we fully support bisexual Catwoman. Although Batman isn’t present in the narrative, it’s clear that he and Selina are or have been “a thing,” as Selina is hesitant to use lethal force against Solomon Grundy because of a promise she made to an unnamed friend (before she gets the go-ahead from her teammates since Grundy is technically undead), and bristles at Kate calling her “Cat,” saying that “only he gets to call her that.” Still, this is a new, fun take on the typical Bat/Cat dynamic that we’ve grown used to, and the quippy, flirtatious banter between the two is a highlight of the script. I get the feeling that this one was not well received—it’s the lowest rated of all of these movies by IMDb users (an admittedly feral and untrustworthy lot), has only a 64% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 2.9 star rating on Letterboxd—but if you’re not a stick in the mud, don’t let that deter you. I’m going to give this some of the highest praise I possibly can, which is that this is one of a very short list of these NSN52 titles that, after this project is over, I might actually watch again.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
We don’t talk about video games around here very often. Although our bread and butter is film talk, obviously, we occasionally diverge and talk about books, music, and Star Trek. I enjoy video games, although I wouldn’t consider myself much of a gamer. When I enjoy something, I usually do nothing but play that game to completion (or close enough to completion that I’m satisfied) and then might not pick up a controller again for months, and even over a year at certain points in my life. I don’t think I’ve ever even brought it up over on the podcast, although if you go back through the archives and are curious as to why I didn’t write a single review in September of last year, the solution to that mystery is that I had just gotten Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I’m the kind of person who thinks that the newest system is always too expensive, and normally wait until the next generation is out before I even consider purchasing one. The XBox 360 released for Christmas 2004, but I didn’t buy one until I used my tax return to do so in February of 2008. I used nothing but that as my entire entertainment center for over a decade. The PS4 was released in 2013 and the PS5 in 2020, and I upgraded to the PS4 on Black Friday 2019, when the prices were already starting to drop and there was additional savings. But what really prompted me to upgrade was the release of two games that had me salivating: Spider-Man and Injustice 2. The latter of these was a sequel to a game that I had played on my 360, and although I had little interest in the narrative (such as it was; this is a one-to-two player 1v1 fighter of the Mortal Kombat mold after all), but I was intrigued about getting to play as Supergirl, my love for whom is well documented in these reviews. The narrative of the first game is simple; a furious Superman, enraged at having been tricked into killing a pregnant Lois by Joker, forgoes due process and just straight up kills the murderous clown. This ends up splitting various heroes down ethical lines as Superman slides further and further down the slippery moral slope, ending with him setting up a regime. When you play the storyline (rather than just the arena), you mostly play as members of the rebellion against this despot.
It’s not the most original storyline. We’re up to our necks in “What if Superman, but evil?” at this point, and if you’re thinking that maybe this was before that was such a tired idea, then you’re sort of right. The game came out in 2013, while this film came out in 2021, at a point in time in which the world already had two seasons of The Boys. In 2013, this was fine — not just because it hadn’t been done to death yet, but also because it wasn’t supposed to be a movie, it was just supposed to be the bare skeleton upon which a fighting game was very thinly predicated. But piggies love slop (and I’m not excluding myself here) so of course the game got a prequel comic, and the prequel comic got an animated adaptation, and here we are. I never read that comic (and you can’t make me), but there were apparently enough changes that the film has a disputed reputation. For what its worth, this is one of the most fan-fictiony things that I have ever seen with a full animation budget, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. This movie is the equivalent of watching a child smash action figures into one another and weld together different half-remembered things that they know about characters into a messy narrative, except it’s also sadistic in a way that seems designed to appeal to someone who craves more adult media but can’t fathom going out of their DC comfort zone.
The film opens on Clark (Justin Hartley) and Lois (Laura Bailey) in bed together, when Clark is awakened because he hears an extra heartbeat, revealing that Lois is pregnant. She goes off to work while Clark gets his Superman on and meets with Batman (Anson Mount), who deduces the good news even before his friend can reveal it. Unfortunately, the Joker (Kevin Pollak) is in Metropolis, where he murders Jimmy Olsen and kidnaps Lois. The whole league is brought in to try and find her before something bad can happen, and they work together to find that Joker and Harley Quinn (Gillian Jacobs) have stolen a submarine and that one of the nuclear warheads is missing. Superman brings the sub back to shore and boards it, and inhales some Scarecrow gas that has been laced with kryptonite, then attacks what he believes to be Doomsday and takes the monster into space, only to discover upon exiting the atmosphere that he’s dragged his lover and their child into space, where they both die. Worse still, a timer has been surgically grafted onto Lois’s heart, so that when it stops, the missing nuke detonates in Metropolis, atomizing the city. While Green Arrow (Reid Scott) takes Harley into what amounts to protective custody, Superman tracks down Batman and the Joker to Arkham, where he—over Batman’s protests—extrajudicially murders Joker. This sets the two heroes at odds with one another, as Superman starts down the slippery slope with Wonder Woman (Janet Varney), Cyborg (Brandon Michael Hall), Bruce’s own son Damian/Robin (Zach Callison), and others joining his regime, while Batman, Arrow, Catwoman, Dick/Nightwing, and others form a “rebellion” against Superman’s overreach. This starts small, with enforced peacekeeping in the Middle East through invasion and deconstruction of the power structures of fictional countries like Bialya and Qurac, but gets out of hand when he murders an entire warehouse full of young ravers because of their idolization of Joker as a figurehead against Superman’s fascism. From here, it’s hero versus hero, yawn, etc.
You know that thing that people love to mock about MCU movies where a character says, “Well, that just happened,” even though no one has ever uttered that line in any of those? In this movie, someone actually says it, and I couldn’t believe just how creatively bankrupt the film already was at that point, a mere fifteen minutes in. It doesn’t bode well for the film overall, and is oddly also a part of the only thing in the movie that gave me any joy, which was the interaction between Arrow and Harley. He’s a very self-serious man, and their playful antipathy (complete with periodic gassings of one another) is some of the only levity that this gritty film musters. I’ve loved Jacobs since Community and she’s an inspired choice for Harley here, and she’s clearly having a lot of fun with it. Their rapport is fun, especially when she manages to crack through Arrow’s resistance on certain things (notably, she criticizes him for naming his secret HQ the “Arrowcave,” noting that “Batcave” makes sense as bats live in caves, she recommends the “Quiver,” which he adopts fairly quickly as he realizes that she has a point). That’s about all that there is to enjoy here, however, as the rest of the film alternates between being utterly dour, repetitive in its action sequences, and occasionally just straight up fanservice of the kind a child playing with toys would enjoy. What if Damian killed Nightwing? But, but what if when that happened Dick became, like, a version of Deadman called Deadwing (no, really)? It’s best enjoyed if you have the mind of a child, but isn’t really appropriate for children, which means it’s best suited exactly for the kind of manchildren that, to its credit, it’s clearly made for. That’s not a recipe for a good movie, though, and it shows in the final product.
Swampflix 