Coralie Fargeat’s entertainment-industry body horror The Substance has hung around in theaters for way longer than I expected it to, likely propelled by its eye-catching marketability on social media platforms like TikTok & Instagram. While I’ve been struggling to catch the blink-and-miss-it local runs for similarly small, artfully grotesque oddities like Guy Maddin’s Rumours & Adam Schimberg’s A Different Man, I still have multiple daily options to rewatch The Substance, which premiered here weeks earlier. That kind of theatrical longevity is great for a genre film’s long-term reputation (just look what it did for Parasite), but in the short-term it does lead to some pretty annoying naysaying online. The two most frequently repeated, hack critiques I’ve seen of The Substance as it lingers weeks beyond its expected expiration date is that 1. “It’s not really a horror movie; it’s more of a body horror,” and 2. It’s a shallow movie that believes it’s deep, as indicated by its set-decor’s multiple allusions to Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining. I’m not entirely sure what to do with the pedantic hairsplitting that makes you believe the body horror subgenre is a separate medium than horror filmmaking at large, but I do believe both of those lines of critique would fall apart if the nitpickers would just . . . lighten up a little. Yes, Fargeat’s monstrous tale of the self-hatred that results from the unrealistic, misogynistic beauty standards of mass media does carry a lot of heavy emotional & political weight in theme, but in execution the film is functionally a comedy. Specifically, it is a horror comedy, which I cannot believe I have to clarify still counts as horror. It’s a grotesque picture with a righteously angry message, but it’s also meant to be a fun time at the movies, which I assume has a lot to do with how long it’s hung around on local marquees.
When The Substance‘s loudest detractors fixate on its background nods to the carpet patterns & bathroom tiles of The Shining, they’re deliberately looking past the large, glowing sign in the foreground pointing to the movie’s entertainment value as an over-the-top goof. Early festival reviews out of Cannes did Fargeat’s film no favors by likening it to the headier body horror of a Cronenberg or a Ducournau, when it tonally falls much closer to the traditions of body horror’s knucklehead class: Hennenlotter, Yuzna and, most prominently, Stuart Gordon. Its echoes of Gordon’s work ring loudest, of course, since the titular substance Demi Moore injects into her body to release her younger, better, monstrous self is visually modeled to look exactly like the “re-agent” chemical in Re-Animator. Both substances are green-glowing liquids injected via a comically oversized syringe, and both are misused to reverse the natural bodily process of aging – the “activator” serum of The Substance by releasing a younger form of the user and the “re-agent” serum of Re-Animator by reanimating the corpses of the recently deceased. As the attempts to cheat aging (and its kissing cousin Death) escalate in both films, the violence reaches a spectacular practical-effects crescendo, in one case on live television and in the other case at the morgue. The entire scripting of The Substance might as well have resulted from a writing exercise teasing out what would happen if you injected the re-agent serum of Re-Animator into a still-living person (a question with a much less satisfying answer in Re-Animator‘s own wisely deleted scenes). Fargeat’s background references to The Shining might have underlined the more somber themes of isolation & self-destruction her film shares with the Kubrick classic, but there’s a bright, glowing signal in the foreground telling the audience the exact kind of horror she was really going for here: blunt, gross, funny, excessive – just like Re-Animator.
Funnily enough, Re-Animator needed its own signal to the audience that it’s okay to laugh & have a good time with its morbid, literary mayhem as a Lovecraft adaptation. That signal arrived in the goofy musical stylings of Richard Band, who has over a hundred credits as a composer under the Full Moon brand run by his brother, Charles. Gordon might be the only horror auteur outside the Band family that’s made extensive use of Richard Band’s signature carnival music compositions, partly because his Saturday-morning children’s TV melodies are a poor fit for more serious horror movies and partly because his brother keeps him too busy to stray elsewhere. According to Band’s interviews about the making of Re-Animator, he was the first member of the creative team to suggest that it should be played as a horror comedy instead of a straight horror. When watching early rushes and trying to come up with a motif to match, he remembers urging Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna to see how silly and over-the-top the movie was, that even if they played it as a super-serious gore fest it would still make the audience laugh. Band credits himself for highlighting the sillier notes of Re-Animator in both his “quirky” riff on the Psycho score and his music’s influence on the final edit. Since every project Band, Gordon, and Yuzna have made since their early success with Re-Animator has continued its violently silly tone, it’s a difficult anecdote to believe. No matter what they tried to make on a script level, it likely would’ve come out goofy on the production end anyway. That’s just how they are. Even so, Richard Band’s quirked-up Psycho spoof cuts through as a loud signal to the audience that it’s okay to have fun no matter how thematically dark or viscerally fucked up Re-Animator gets as it escalates. I wonder if there were grumpy horror-nerd audiences at the time who were pissed about that score’s allusions to a Hitchcock classic, as if it were trying to convey something deep instead of something cartoonishly goofy. Thankfully, we don’t have to know.
There are two major advantages that Re-Animator has over The Substance, and they both have to do with time. One is that Re-Animator doesn’t waste a second of its own time, skipping right over the “Sue” segment of The Substance‘s evolution to get to the “Monstro ElisaSue” mayhem of its third act, shaving off an hour of runtime in the process. That will never change. The other is that it’s been around for four decades now, so that all of the most annoying bad-faith takes that it was met with in early release have all faded away, drowned out by celebrations of its over-the-top horror comedy delights. The Substance will eventually get there too, as evidenced by how long audiences have been keeping its theatrical run alive against all odds.
Normally, when I scan the New Orleans Film Fest line-up for titles I might be interested in, I rely heavily on the “Narrative Features” filter on their lineup. This year, I only caught a couple narrative films in-person at the festival: the Zambian funeral drama On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and the Australian stop-motion comedy Memoir of a Snail. Most of my NOFF selections were filed under the “Documentary Feature” tab instead, and I watched them at home. All of the documentaries I caught at the festival were intimate portraits of on-the-fringe artists – most empowering, one eerily alienating. They’re also all still currently available to stream on the festival’s Virtual Cinema portal through the end of this weekend.
So, here’s a quick-takes round-up of all the documentary features I watched during the 35th annual New Orleans Film Festival. It’s a short but commendable list, one that will make me think twice about my small-minded Narrative Feature biases in future years (and maybe about getting out of the house to see them in-person).
Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story
The Jackie Shane whose story is told in the Canadian-streamer documentary Any Other Way was a popular R&B singer turned agoraphobic recluse – the kind of life-changing discovery you always hope to find whenever you dig through dusty record crates. Shane was a transgender woman who performed in 1950s & 60s nightclubs in a “flamboyant” boymode persona, a younger contemporary and friend of the similarly styled Little Richard (to the point where early concert posters listed her as “Little Jackie”). Her early notoriety as a stage act was earned through singing raucous vocals while playing drums in a standing position, which upped the rock ‘n roll theatricality of her shows. Later, she leaned into the gender-nonconformity of her stage persona by introducing more women’s clothes into her onstage wardrobe, moving from Nashville to Toronto to mitigate the policing of her race & gender. Her work got increasingly personal, culminating in a confessional live-recording LP that the movie cites as her magnum opus. Then, she suddenly disappeared from public life, moving again to California and, eventually, back to Tennessee to fully embody her transgender identity, giving up fame for personal authenticity. It’s both a shame that she was pressured into sacrificing one for the other and a shame that she didn’t live long enough to fully actualize the career resurgence that she was on the precipice of enjoying in the 2010s, when her trans identity was less of a professional liability than a basic fact.
The other shame about Jackie Shane is that there isn’t much video of her performing her music, with the exception of a single televised performance that was almost lost to archival neglect. She did a wonderful job acting as her own archivist, though. There’s a wealth of audio, still photographs, journals, costumes, and other artifacts that Any Other Way transforms into an art gallery installation in Shane’s honor. Some Loving Vincent-style rotoscope animation helps fill in the gaps, with two actresses hired to portray Shane as both a young stage performer and an older shut-in who only communicated with her documentarians by phone in lengthy, candid interviews. Those actresses are also interviewed about how Shane’s story resonates with their own relationships with transgender identity, which adds another layer of context & thematic depth to the usual talking-head style interviews with the music-historian nerds who most appreciate her as a stage act. Jackie Shane is recreated as a lip-synced watercolor in motion, living on in anecdotes about the time she headlined a popular Toronto nightclub for 10 weeks straight or the time she upstaged Etta James (and, according to some photographs, stole her wig). It’s a loving tribute to an incredible artist who’s in danger of continuing to slip into obscurity without it, since there’s so little reference material in the world outside of Shane’s storage unit & surviving acquaintances.
Eponymous
In a way, Eponymous is also a portrait of an obscure artist, but it’s more of an exorcism than a tribute. Hiram Percy is most legendary for his invention of the gun silencer, having already been born into wealth as the son of Hiram Maxim, inventor of the fully automatic machine gun. Less notably, he was also an amateur filmmaking enthusiast in the early years of the medium, experimenting with the techniques & uses of cinematography in the early 20th century. This is a complicated legacy for Caroline Rumley, an experimental filmmaker married to a descendent of Hiram Maxim, who shares his ancestors’ name. Eponymous is an essay film in which Rumley voices her discomforts marrying into a family best known for inventing new, efficient ways to kill human beings in the arts of war & murder. She struggles with that in-law familial history through hushed narration, imposed onto footage shot by Hiram Percy Maxim in his independent-artist days as an early filmmaking pioneer (with particular attention paid to the double meaning of the word “shot” in filmmaking and weaponry). Diaristic notes from Percy detail the evolution of amateur, at-home filmmaking from simple portraiture to travel documentation to magic tricks to visual poetry. Meanwhile, Rumley reaches for the next evolution in the medium, now that it’s aged into a century-old artform: cursed windows into the past.
There are a lot of personal essay films out there illustrated by menacing home video footage, but usually that footage isn’t over a hundred years old, which gives this one a genuinely haunted feeling . . . Well, that and all the talk of machine gun deaths. The clips are often short, due to the physical and financial limitations of the home-movies medium in the early days of motion picture cameras. The way Rumley loops, reverses, and teases out those images in close-up study illustrates her fall down an especially dark family-history rabbit hole in obsessive detail. Some of her choices in presentation can be a little difficult to parse—including a bold white line that often bifurcates the frame—but the intense intimacy of the film suggests that it wasn’t made with an audience in mind outside her of own head anyway. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl was the best film I saw at the festival about a familial legacy of violence buried just beneath a cheery surface of social niceties, but Eponymous was the one with the more fascinating visual textures – the one that fixated on the art of the moving image.
I Love You, AllWays
A more recent document of D.I.Y. art history can be found in Stuart Sox’s I Love You, AllWays, a loving tribute to the dive-bar cabaret that hosts most of New Orleans’s best drag & burlesque shows. A spiritual sequel to Sox’s Decadence-weekend hustle doc To Decadence, With Love, this temporal check-in on the local drag scene mostly focuses on the first couple years of COVID, when the venue barely squeezed by to survive. Even though it’s still recent history, it’s an emotionally tough time to revisit, dragging the audience back to an era when virus variants & vaccination dodgers prolonged a never-ending social lockdown, made doubly devastating by the local impact of Hurricane Ida just as things were headed in a positive direction. That framing hit me hard, since I used to regularly attend shows at The AllWays until the pandemic, when I abruptly lost the momentum. There’s even a shot of the calendar from the month they had to close in 2020, and you can clearly see a listing for the Joni Michell drag night I went to right before doing absolutely nothing outside my house (besides work) for about two years.
While The AllWays’s function as a queer communal hub can lead to a lot of passionate interviews with its owner and regular performers, there is something a little silly about taking this subject so seriously. After intense emotional stress about what New Orleans life & culture would be without the AllWays, the venue bounces back to host the exact kind of pantomimed sexual anarchy it’s been home to for years: curbside peep shows, a twerking-Jesus passion play, and a burlesque performer pegging a watermelon with a strap-on dildo like the modern, erotic equivalent of Gallagher. I’d be lying if I said the film’s appeal to pathos didn’t work on me, though. Its genuine, soul-deep love for The AllWays made me so warmly nostalgic for pre-COVID drag shows there that I consciously overlooked its anachronistic VHS tape-warp filters that aimed to induce that nostalgia the cheap way (considering how much less that aesthetic marker has to do with the era it’s recalling than its other visual devices, like its vertical-video smartphone footage or its hesitantly typed Facebook posts). The good news is that there’s no need to be nostalgic at all, really. From what I can tell passing by, The AllWays appears to be just as lively today as all the other live performance venues on that busy strip of St. Claude Ave; I just need to start showing up again to get back into the flow of things.
The Flamingo
I said that all four of these documentaries are portraits of artists, and I guess Mary “The Flamingo” Phillips is the one I’d most have to make a case for that to be true. Defined in The Flamingo mostly as a late-blooming divorcee who became a 60-something dominatrix after being turned on by the Fifty Shades of Grey book series, Phillips functions more as a sex therapist than as an artist. She does paint and pose for visual art outside of her dungeon space, though, and she has turned her domme persona as The Flamingo into a visual branding project, decorating her body and her living spaces with as much pink-flamingo iconography as they can accommodate. The Flamingo is, of course, a kind of performance in itself, as alluded to by the terminology of her craft in words like “scene” and “play.”
As straightforward as The Flamingo is in documenting Phillips as she binds, spanks, swaddles, and dirty-talks her scene partners, the movie is admittedly less about the mechanics of her artistry than it is about the effect that artistry has on her plainclothes persona. She’s found renewed confidence & self-worth in the kink & polyamory scenes, often stressing that her fulfilment in these activities has little to do with penetrative sex; she’s finding herself by becoming someone else. That inward search makes for a calm, gentle, meditative portrait despite its often-salacious images & subject. It’s the kind of unrushed doc that will linger on the rippling waves of pool water or the squawking birds of its title for a half-minute of stationary reflection before moving onto the next stop in Phillips’s daily rounds. Even her interviews play like a casual chat over morning coffee rather than an all-important revelation in a moment of great personal upheaval. It’s nice.
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 watched Matt Reeves’s The Batman a couple of years ago, one of the things that struck me about it was how much more I thought I would have enjoyed it as a standard crime movie without all the baggage of being attached to a huge intellectual property. Although that comes with making a film that’s all but guaranteed to make a profit (note: I started composing this review before the underwhelming opening of Folie à Deux), it’s also ultimately pretty limiting in how creative you can be before you start alienating that core audience by deviating “too much” from the source material. When it comes to The Long Halloween, I read the source material some fifteen years ago, but there were elements of the Robert Pattinson movie that seemed familiar, and now having had my memory refreshed by the animated adaptation of that comic, it’s clear that the live action movie took major plot inspiration from it. Strange that two such similar projects/products were in production at the same time and released within such proximity, with this week’s double feature having been released in 2021, followed closely by The Batman in 2022. Given that this was split into two roughly 85-minute halves, they add up to almost the same length (2 hours 56 minutes for the Reeves film, 2 hours 52 minutes for The Long Halloween) as well, which makes the comparison between the two almost a requirement. Since this is also a special double feature “issue,” I also did something a little special this week and watched this movie with a couple of friends, instead of late at night, alone and ashamed in the dark, so we’ll have some additional commentary tonight.
A special note! This film is based on a highly regarded comic book from the 1990s, and which essentially continued the story from the 1987 miniseries Batman: Year One, which was previously adapted to an animated film. This film is not a sequel to that one. It is, however, placed in the “Tomorrowverse” series that began with Man of Tomorrow. This means that this one has that same thick-line art style as that film, which I mostly managed to get used to over the course of almost three hours, but every time Jim Gordon was on screen all I could think about was Rusty Venture. This is neither derogatory or a compliment, just an observation.
Ok, it’s a little derogatory.
It’s early in the career of the Batman (Jensen Ackles). Bruce Wayne is pressured by Gotham City mob boss Carmine Falcone (Titus Welliver) to help him launder his money, leading him to ally himself with new, seemingly incorruptible Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Josh Duhamel) and Commissioner Jim Gordon (Billy Burke) – not as Wayne, of course, but as Batman. When he breaks into the Falcone penthouse to search for evidence, he encounters Catwoman (Naya Rivera), who is doing the same thing; they chase each other around doing parkour and other such foreplay. She leads him to a warehouse where cash is waiting to be laundered, and Batman, Gordon, and Dent agree to destroy it in order to strike a crippling blow to Falcone’s machine. Falcone’s waging a war on two fronts, as people close to him begin to drop like flies at the hands of a serial killer that the press nicknames “Holiday,” as each of the victims is slain on a holiday, beginning with Halloween. The killer’s m.o. is simple: a single gunshot, silenced by the nipple of a baby bottle. As the year of the titular “long Halloween” plays out, Arkham Asylum lives up to its reputation, as several of the old rogues gallery escape from their confinement there, including Scarecrow, Poison Ivy (Katee Sackhoff!), and, as you would expect, the Joker (Troy Baker). At the heart of it all, however, remains the question: who is Holiday?
During the break between the first and second parts of this story, one of my viewing companions asked me how this one compared to the others that I have watched so far. I explained my tier system and said that, at least at that point, The Long Halloween was above average. I genuinely had no idea who the killer would turn out to be, I was engaged with the mystery, and I appreciated the film’s attempts to be more of a gangster movie than a comic book one, even if all of the goodwill it had in that arena required that it lift lines directly from The Godfather. And, hey, the last scene of that first one involved a man being shot overboard in Gotham Harbor and then getting atomized by a yacht’s giant subsurface turbines. You don’t see that every day! There are a few seemingly irrelevant scenes early in the film that featured Solomon Grundy, and I asked my not-well-versed-in-comics viewing companion if any of those scenes meant anything to her or if she even understood them, and she assured me that they did not. It’s rare to be able to get that kind of feedback from someone with neither much interest in these films in general or knowledge about all the things that get stuffed in here. This illustrated one of the issues that I have with these movies, which is that they aren’t really accessible to someone who isn’t already at least somewhat steeped in the fiction that this conglomerate has been producing for nearly a century. On the other hand, it’s not really clear who would be interested in these things other than those people.
For what it’s worth, I appreciated that the film had a consistent theme of duality throughout. That’s patently obvious in the character of Two-Face, but one of the things that I liked here was that it was unclear from the outset whether Bruce and Selena know about the other’s nocturnal activities. My interpretation of the narrative is that neither one of them knows, but that Selena figures it out first and it takes Bruce a bit longer. When the two of them break up (as Selena and Bruce), Bruce says something along the lines of “We’re just two different people,” which I appreciated as a little bit of clever dialogue since both of them do, in fact, literally have two different personae. Where this is least interesting is in Bruce’s struggle between working in the darkness versus the light, and I have to be honest—I could not make myself care about this at this point. There was this podcast about a decade ago called The Worst Idea of All Time, wherein two NZ comedians watched the same (bad) movie every week for a year and did 52 episodes about it. I had friends who were fans, and at the time I thought I would be tough enough to do that with certain movies. Now, having seen Batman contend with his moral code for the umpteenth time, I can say that those men were brave. It’s beginning to feel purgatorial, frankly.
That’s not this movie’s fault, however, and I would praise it for having a mystery that I found pretty compelling, and when all of the pieces fell into place, the resolution scratched that same part of my brain that gets pleasure from Murder She Wrote and Columbo. The clues really were there all along, and although I got to the solution before the characters did, it was only by a matter of minutes. That having been said, my viewing companions were not as entertained or engaged by it as I was. Their notes, collectively, identified that the mystery was not that interesting, that Batman seemed kind of dumb, and that the art style makes Jim Gordon look too much like Dr. Venture (oh, wait, that last one is me again). Neutral comments included that “the art style was easy to get used to,” and that it was derivative, but that this could be because it inspired some storytelling elements that are now commonplace or otherwise old hat. We were all in agreement that the film did not, perhaps, need to be this long. The film does not do itself any favors by featuring panels from the comic in its opening credits sequence—artwork which is moody, shadowed, and full of rich character detail—which makes the film’s animation look plain and dulled in comparison. If you want to experience this story, that’s the preferable option. This one makes a case for its existence and makes for a fairly interesting watch, though.
Practically every cinema in town has offered a screening of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre this month, since the movie is currently enjoying its 50th anniversary and those Halloween-season marquees have to be filled by something. No other venue rolled out as much novelty & ceremony for the occasion as The Broad, though, as they played host to Screamfest NOLA‘s Texas Chain Saw celebration. The event was commemorated with appearances by an animatronic Leatherface outside, a cosplaying Leatherface indoors, free barbeque catering (to enhance the movie’s cannibalistic themes), and an operational replica of the van driven by Leatherface’s teenage victims. Most importantly, though, the driver of that van was the guest of honor for the evening: actor Allen Danzinger, who plays Jerry, the discofied navigator who leads his fellow teens to bloody peril at the Louisiana/Texas border. Danziger has apparently developed a horror-circuit side hustle signing autographs as a minor player from the original Chain Saw Massacre, branding himself as “Chainsaw Jerry” and selling official Chainsaw Jerry merch, like Chainsaw Jerry bobbleheads and t-shirts boasting Chainsaw Jerry’s famous catchphrase that we all know and love, “Quit goofing on me!” It’s a little like how Paul Marco found a side career working horror convention booths thanks to his recurring Dumb Cop character “Kelton” in Ed Wood’s most famous films . . . except that Danzinger’s total screentime in Texas Chain Saw Massacre amounts to maybe ten minutes total, give or take his friends calling his name not realizing that he’s already been hacked to death.
To be honest, I’ve never been a huge fan of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I’m just more of an 80s splatstick guy than a 70s grindhouse guy, even if I can appreciate that Texas Chain Saw is the 70s grindhouse movie – the one that everything in its wake sweatily scrambled to emulate. Funnily enough, Allen Danzinger doesn’t care much for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre either. He joked during the post-screening “Q&A” (a rehearsed stand-up routine mostly comprised of preloaded quips) that when Tobe Hooper asked him if there were any ways the movie could be improved, he replied, “Yeah, turn the seats away from the screen.” His role as Jerry is mostly acting as comic relief in that same way, including a lengthy scene where he teases the scaredy-cat victim Franklin that he gave the unhinged hitchhiker they picked up (one of Leatherface’s loving relatives) his home address and his zip code (in an exchange that Danzinger recalls having mostly improvised). He described Jerry as a kind of “smart aleck” version of Disco Stu. When I asked if that disco costuming was true to how he dressed at the time, he reported that, yes, he wore his own personal wardrobe for the shoot. Allen Danzinger is Chainsaw Jerry. He’s a fun-loving goofball who doesn’t want to be involved in grisly gore-hound goings on of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre; he just wants attention and for you to buy a commemorative bobblehead. The horror nerd audience at the Screamfest NOLA screening kept pleading for him to say something positive about any horror movie that he enjoys, since he wouldn’t cosign the all-timer quality of the film that made him subculturally “famous,” and he would only concede to two: Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein and his own upcoming stoner-comedy slasher The Weed Hacker Massacre. That’s because there are only two things that Chainsaw Jerry loves to do: schtick & the hustle.
I highly recommend seeking out a Texas Chain Saw screening with Chainsaw Jerry in attendance, especially if you want to revisit the film even though it’s not entirely Your Thing. Personally, Texas Chain Saw might not even rank among my Top 5 Tobe Hooper films, much less my top 5 horrors of all time, since he later went on to direct 80s classics that speak much more directly to my own over-the-top sensibilities: Lifeforce, Poltergeist, Invaders from Mars, The Funhouse, etc. Seeing it on the big screen only confirmed that its proto-Terrifier style of shrill slaughterhouse violence isn’t entirely for me, even if I can appreciate the feel-bad brutality of its violence and the mise-en-scene of its taxidermy art installations. My only new observation on this rewatch was that it just missed being titled The Texas Sledgehammer Massacre, given how much more often that instrument is used to take out Jerry’s doomed friends before the titular chainsaw hacks them to bits. It helped tremendously to have Danziger at the screening signing autographs & doing schtick, then, since he brought a lot of cheeseball levity to the event that’s missing from the film itself. Yes, he shared the same anecdotes about the grueling 6-week shoot and the stink of the animal-parts set decor that you’ll hear at every other Texas Chain Saw event, but he also told us that New Orleans local John Larroquette was paid in weed for his narration over the opening scroll. I have no idea if that anecdote is insightful or even true, but it got a laugh out of me, which is exactly why you want to venture into the Texas Chain Saw Massacre with Chainsaw Jerry at the wheel of the van.
Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Sunday (October 20) at the third annual ACAB Zine Fest along with a bunch of other super cool Arts, Crafts, And Books exhibitors, hosted by Burn Barrel Press. We will be selling the print versions of six Swampflix zines, including a new collection of low-budget horror & sci-fi reviews to commemorate the Halloween season.
ACAB Zine Fest will take place Sunday, October 20, from 11am-7pm 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.
Here we go, boys and ghouls, the “Tomorrowverse” is officially on, as we now have our second film in this subfranchise. That title is a little on the silly side, but it is a fair sight better than “DCAMU,” and I’m hoping the number of times I have to type that particular acronym will now be fewer and further between. Justice Society: World War II is a narrative about the current-day Flash, Barry Allen (Matt Bomer), apparently traveling into the past as a result of moving so fast that he breaks the Speed Force barrier. Finding himself in the middle of World War II, the fastest man alive finds himself face-to-face with the Flash of the past, Jay Garrick (Armen Taylor), as well as a team of commandos who are operating on behalf of the Allies. There’s Hourman (Mathew Mercer), who can take a serum of his own invention that provides him with super strength and durability for an hour, but which he cannot take more than once per twenty-four hour cycle; Hawkman (Omid Abtahi), an infinitely reincarnated ancient Egyptian who possesses wings; Black Canary (Elysia Rotaru), a street-level vigilante and occasional scofflaw who harnesses sound as a weapon via her sonic scream; and the group’s leader, the Amazonian Wonder Woman (Stana Katic), as well as her longtime boyfriend and U.S. Army liaison Steve Trevor (Chris Diamantopoulos). Together, they are on a special mission to stop Hitler’s ongoing search for supernatural artifacts that he hopes will give him an edge in the war.
I’m still not won over by this art style, but it does fit a bit better here, with the thick line animation being more akin to the cartoonery of decades past. It still feels a bit Venture Bros. for something that’s supposed to be taken a bit more seriously, but within the context of this being a story set in a different time it manages to work, more or less. If this were the aesthetic solely of this time period (which, spoiler alert, is actually a different timeline, meaning that they’re going multiversal in only the second film of this new subfranchise—yikes), I’d be more accepting, but I guess for as many of these as I’m going to have to watch (four to eight, depending on how you count things), I’m just going to have to stomach it. For what it’s worth, before starting this project, I had already watched the upcoming-within-this-project Legion of Superheroes of my own volition—I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love Supergirl—and found it less distracting there, although it’s entirely possible that I assumed it was a one-off and not the defining visual style of a film series.
There’s not much to say about this one. It falls right in the middle ranking of these movies: solid, but unremarkable. I guess it’s fun that Matt Bomer and Stana Katic are together again after they previously played Superman and Lois Lane, respectively, all the way back in Superman: Unbound, if you’re into that kind of thing. As far as character work, the Flash/Iris relationship is really thin, but the stuff between Trevor and Wonder Woman, who has promised to marry him “one day” but who rejects each individual proposal, is probably the most interesting thing about this flick. Their ongoing incomplete engagement serves as a kind of good luck charm to get them through the war, and we start to believe in its efficacy just as much as they do, until that luck finally runs out. It’s the emotional crux on which this narrative hangs, and it reads and even elicits a twinge in the heartstrings, even if it never manages to pluck them. It’s also a welcome reprieve to see what may well be the only team-up movie in forty-odd movies that doesn’t feature Batman, especially given that the next few are set to be very Bat-heavy. The perfect place for this movie is on a Saturday afternoon on Cartoon Network ten years ago. Where it belongs now is where it is: near the end of an assembly line that’s starting to wind down (like Cartoon Network now). Not bad, but not special.
When you search for cinematic tourist attractions in Washington D.C., all signs point you towards Georgetown University – the setting and filming location for William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of the William Peter Blatty novel The Exorcist. Specifically, they route you to the bottom of “The Exorcist Steps”: the death site of the fictional composite character Father Karras, who launches himself down those horrifically steep steps as a heroic act of suicide at the film’s climax. Given Friedkin’s determination to make the supernatural terror of Blatty’s novel feel as believably authentic as possible, it’s not surprising to learn that the steps are a real location. Referred to as “The Hitchcock Steps” at the time of filming (either in reference to their 19th Century designer, according to Friedkin’s memoir or, more credibly, in reference to the famous 20th Century director, according to locals), they’re a vertigo-inducing connection point between two busy streets at the edge of Georgetown’s campus. The extreme concrete flight burned a hole in Blatty’s mind while he was a student there, as did a local news report about a legitimate, certified exorcism performed in the Washington, D.C. area. The only facts Friedkin had to fudge were minor geographical quibbles that allowed Karras to reach the steps from a nearby window, something that bothered the detail-obsessed filmmaker who wanted to keep his visualization of the novel as accurate as possible. It seems that time has since corrected that adaptational inaccuracy, since there are now several windows facing the concrete staircase that could easily accommodate Karras’s leap. I know this, of course, because I recently visited The Exorcist Steps on a trip to Washington, D.C., despite not being an especially big fan of The Exorcist.
I just find Friedkin’s grounded, real-world approach to supernatural horror to be a little too dry to deliver the genre goods. A lot of people highly regard The Exorcist as one of the all-time greats precisely because it’s “accurate” to the real-world events that inspired it, finding terror in the idea that what it depicts could really happen. I appreciate the tortured domestic drama that results from that approach, especially as a story about two lost adults (Ellen Burstyn as a semi-fictionalized stand-in for Shirley MacLaine and Jason Miller as the doomed Father Karras) desperately looking for a lifeline in a world that no longer makes sense. It’s only after they’ve thoroughly exhausted the scientific, atheistic explanations that could debunk the possibility of demonic possession that Friedkin fully gives in to the supernatural mania of the premise, allowing Linda Blair to literally spew pure evil into the world. Personally, I much prefer the ecstatic mania of The Exorcist‘s two direct sequels, The Exorcist II: The Heretic and The Exorcist III: Legion. That’s where the dark magic of the demonic-possession premise really comes to life, unconcerned with duty to real-world reporting or to Blatty’s writing (despite his continued creative participation in the series). The kinds of audiences who value tasteful restraint over uninhibited entertainment are likely to dismiss the Exorcist sequels outright as silly dilutions of an important, respectable piece of art. Those sequels are exactly what attracted me to visiting The Exorcist Steps in Georgetown, though, since they speak more loudly to my tastes as a horror fanatic who prefers his horror to be fantastic rather than realistic.
So, what most D.C. travel guides tend to gloss over is that The Exorcist Steps are not only significant to the events of the original Exorcist film. They are a constant, chilling presence throughout the initial trilogy, even more iconic to the series than Linda Blair’s spinning head. In The Exorcist, the steps are largely used as an ominous mood-setter, repeatedly presaging Karras’s fall in establishing shots that beckon the in-over-his-head, faith-questioning priest to meet an early end. The Exorcist II also uses them as an establishing exterior to signal that the story has returned to Georgetown. While most of The Heretic is spent detailing young Regan’s life in New York City therapists’ offices—attempting to heal from her demonic episode through radical dream-state hypnosis sessions—it can’t help but drag the audience back to Georgetown at regular intervals, afraid to stray too far away from the familiar details of the original. Each return to Georgetown is established by a shot of the infamous concrete steps . . . except, not really. The Exorcist II was shot on a studio lot in Los Angeles as a cost-saving measure, so all onscreen appearances of The Exorcist Steps are an artificial substitute for the real thing. The genuine, real-life steps reappear in the series’ crown jewel The Exorcist III, though, and without the continued participation of Linda Blair as a now-adult Reagan, the series has no choice but to treat them with total reverence. They’re lovingly framed with music-video smoke machines at exaggerated angles, including several action shots of the camera rolling down each step in a dizzying spectacle from Karras’s tumbling POV. The inciting beheadings at the start of The Exorcist III occur on the 15th anniversary of Karras’s fall down those steps, which get their own reverent shout-out during Brad Dourif’s show-stopping speech as the Devil incarnate. It isn’t until The Exorcist III that The Exorcist Steps truly got their full due as a horror nerd fetish object; it was a slow upward climb to get there.
The Exorcist Steps were officially designated as a Washington, D.C. landmark in 2015 with the installation of an informative plaque marking Karras’s death site. Shamefully, there are no mentions of The Exorcist II or The Exorcist III on that plaque, despite their significant contributions to those steps’ legacy. When I visited them on an clammy Monday morning, I was greeted by the exact two kinds of frequent visitors you’d expect to see: a fellow gothy tourist who, like me, was there to take pictures and an annoyed local jogger who was impatient for us to get out of the way of his workout routine zipping up & down the steps. I will share my pictures of the steps and their accompanying plaque below as documentation of the state they’re in as of this posting, in hopes that more joggers will be annoyed by horror movie nerds who happen to read this and will be visiting D.C. in the near future. More importantly, though, I’d like to highlight that The Exorcist Steps’ significance to The Exorcist are thunderously amplified by that film’s own sequels, which are just as much worth rewatching before your visit as the original. There’s even an added bonus to rewatching The Exorcist II before visiting D.C. in that the film also features a lengthy visit to the Natural History Museum, which is one of the city’s other must-visit tourist destinations. Of course, Linda Blair’s tour of the Natural History Museum appears to be the one in New York City, not the one in D.C., but the effect is largely the same, much like how that film’s version of The Exorcist Steps aren’t actually The Exorcist Steps. Let’s take a lesson from Friedkin’s folly and not get too wrapped up in the pursuit of accuracy at the expense of pleasure.
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.
Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been doing this project my whole life. I can’t remember a time before NSN52. I almost never mention these movies on the podcast because they’re rarely noteworthy enough to discuss there, but when I have mentioned it to the others off-mic or in conversation with friends, I have mentioned that doing this might be the metaphorical “smoke the whole carton” camel-crippling straw for me engaging with superhero media ever again. “I’m genuinely sick of typing the word ‘Batman,’” I say. “If I never type the word ‘Batman’ again, it’ll be too soon.” Last week, I mentioned that Man of Tomorrow was the last solo Superman outing, but we’ve got three more Batflicks after this to plow through, and of the remaining dozen or so movies after that, he’s a character in half of them. This franchise knows which cow gives the most milk and it’s never been afraid to tip its hand about its preferences, but I’m pleasantly surprised and happy to announce that this one was fun, clever, and original, so at least we’ve fended off despair for another week.
Batman: Soul of the Dragon is a pastiche of seventies kung fu-sploitation movies. As the film opens, martial arts master Richard Dragon (Mark Dacascos) infiltrates the swanky, swinging island compound of eccentric millionaire Jeffrey Burr. Burr, in true exploitation fashion, is introduced to us by paying a sex worker and then, instead of letting her leave peacefully, ushers her into dark enclosed space, where he unleashes several of his pet reptiles and watches with otherworldly satisfaction as they feast. (In another world, trying to find her now-missing friend would have Friday Foster out to this island to take some names.) Dragon discovers that Burr is the leader of the Kobra cult and seeks out his old friend Bruce Wayne (David Giuntoli) to tell him that Kobra has possession of “The Gate.” This leads us into a flashback in which Wayne, in his walking of the earth to learn all the martial arts known to man, finds himself at the temple of O-Sensei (James Hong), a legendary grandmaster who takes on the orphaned billionaire as one of his students. Richard is already there, as are Lady Shiva (Kelly Hu), Ben “Bronze Tiger” Turner (Michael Jai White, who previously portrayed the character in live action on Arrow), Jade Nguyen (Jamie Chung), and Rip Jagger. As they train under O-Sensei, they learn that he is protecting an interdimensional gateway that protects the world from the snake demon Nāga. There is a traitor in their midst, however, and they reveal themselves as a member of Kobra who is seeking to free Nāga, but when they open the gateway, they are killed by their deity immediately, forcing O-Sensei to sacrifice himself to close the portal … for now. In the (70s) present, Dragon learns that Bruce is Batman when he enlists him in preventing the legions of Kobra from opening the gate once more. But first, they’re going to have to get the gang back together.
This is a fun one. Creating this as a kung-fu potpourri makes it feel warm and familiar in a good way, and it also makes the action sequences more dynamic than the normal punch-punch-batarang-laserbeam ho-hummery of most of these non-spooky cartoons. There’s a fluidity to the motions of the characters that’s normally just handled as rote superhero action sequences with the occasional novel idea. Here, it’s not just an element of the style, it is the style, and it does wonders for making this one stand out from the pack. The selection of which characters to use for this exercise is inspired, and I’m sure that whoever was complaining about Lady Shiva going out like a chump on the TV Tropes page for Apokalips War was pleased to see her played as a badass here. Even the generic mysticism about portals and serpent cults and swords that capture souls plays to the film’s strengths. About the only thing that I can think of that anyone could have a grievance about is that this is barely a Batman movie, but you won’t hear that complaint from me. For me, it’s more praiseworthy that this one was so fun and enjoyable that even though I’m at a point of such Batsaturation that I’m exhausted of thinking about the character, this one still managed to be entertaining and worthwhile.
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.
With this film, a new subfranchise was born, entitled the “Tomorrowverse,” inspired by the title Superman: Man of Tomorrow. It’s yet another origin story for our old pal Superman: raised by simple farmers, aware of his extraterrestrial origin but with no knowledge of his people or culture; starting out as a flying vigilante in street clothes before Ma Kent creates his iconic outfit out of the clothing in which he was swaddled as a baby; meeting Lois Lane as the newest member of the Daily Planet; debuting as a public figure by saving a launched vehicle from plummeting into Metropolis; believing that he may have found an ally in Lex Luthor coming to trust him before the inevitable betrayal. If that all sounds a little rote, it’s because it is. Sure, there are some novel elements. Here, the big blue Boy Scout learns about his origins from Martian Manhunter, and the creation of longtime Superman villain Parasite is because of an attack from the interstellar bounty hunter Lobo. Even with that in mind, few of these films have plated it as safe as Man of Tomorrow. As a result, the end product is fine – 82 minutes of palatable, safe Superman stuff, but not something that you could call special or interesting.
After an opening sequence in which an elementary-aged Clark has to go home from a sleepover at another boy’s house; he’s disquieted by his peer’s reaction to an old horror movie in which the villainous alien invader reveals his true face. Flashing forward, the now adult Clark Kent (Darren Criss) is an intern at The Daily Planet, which mostly means that he’s fetching coffee for people with bylines. Delivering the staff’s orders to an event where Lex Luthor (Zachary Quinto, an inspired choice) is planning to launch his latest doohickey into space, Luthor is confronted by a grad student named Lois Lane (Alexandra Daddario), who exposes his unconcerned-to-the-point-of-malice negligence about the people living near the launch site. Clark, in the middle of a quick conversation with a janitor at the facility that serves to establish said janitor’s humanity before exposure to space technobabble turns him into one of the film’s antagonistic forces, leaps into action to stop everyone from being reduced to ashes by the falling debris. After this is done, he’s now a public figure. Ma Kent gives him the suit, he congratulates Lois on her scoop while learning that she’s got her sights on taking down the so-called “Superman” now, and he continues to find himself pursued by a shadowy figure. Said figure eventually reveals himself to be the shapeshifting J’onn J’onzz, aka Martian Manhunter (Ike Amadi), and establishes that they are both the last of their kind. When he first came to Earth, he sought out others like him and briefly touched the mind of the infant Kal-El, and in so doing was able to retain the baby’s earliest memories and can share the images of Clark’s birth parents with him, as well as learn the truth about his home planet’s destruction. This sets up the appearance of Lobo (Ryan Hurst), a bounty hunter from space who has been sent by parties unknown to “collect” the last Kryptonian. The initial conflict with Lobo results in one of the alien’s devices going off near that poor doomed janitor (Brett Dalton), interacting with the lab equipment around him to turn him into “Parasite,” a purple monster that absorbs energy, growing stronger with each encounter, becoming another threat to Metropolis that the freshman Superman must juggle.
Where there are highlights, they come mostly at the beginning and end of the film. The opening, in which a young Clark is disturbed by his friend’s innocent statements about scary aliens, sets up a story element that does return later, when a now-adult Superman tells a gathered mob that the monster attacking the power plant is human while he himself is extraterrestrial. It ends up a bit underdeveloped, and it’s a shame that the opening scene is the strongest one. When we first meet the man who will become Parasite, we learn about his home life (wife, elementary aged daughter, another one on the way), his past (two tours in Iraq), and that he has his suspicions about what’s going on at the laboratory that employs him. When he gets turned into a monster, I thought to myself, “Gee, this sure is a lot like Spider-Man 3’s Sandman plot,” and damned if the film didn’t follow through. We see him visit his daughter, he contemplates the monster he becomes, and he ultimately sacrifices himself when forced to consider his humanity. It’s a little cheap to go back to “the villain is defeated by love” as a climax after so recently (and more cynically and satisfactorily) going to that well in Constantine: City of Demons. Nothing is really new here, and everything that happens between the beginning and the end is such a mishmash that I had to go back and see if the satellite falling and Lobo encounter were part of the same set piece or not (they’re separate events, but I can’t separate them in my mind). Quinto’s Luthor is fresh; he’s really bringing back a lot of that old Sylar energy, and that’s fun. Lois and Clark have little in the way of chemistry at this point, but there is something that’s at least thoughtful in the way that she reveals to Clark that she plans to reschedule her Superman interview last minute as a power play, which allows him to pull a reverse Uno on her by doing the same as Superman.
As of this writing, this is the final Superman solo animated outing from this outfit, other than something called “Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons,” which looks like shit. That may end up saving this from being the worst of the Supes films, since it’s otherwise the most banal and flavorless of the bunch. Doomsday was pretty average but was elevated by a voice performance from Anne Heche that made it something more special than it really had the right to be. All-Star Superman has been one of the real highlights of this watch-through; Superman vs. The Elite was less than the sum of its parts, but the highs in did have were more than anything that was on display here; Unbound was characterized by more complex interpersonal dynamics. Even when these films have seemed immature or as if they were catering to an audience that it didn’t want to get “too cerebral” for, none of them have felt more like a Saturday morning cartoon than this one. The new artistic design is, to give it credit, very evocative of the thick ink lines that comic books are known for, and perhaps I’ll get used to it, but I was not won over. In truth, that makes this not only the least interesting Superman solo film, it’s also the ugliest (until Super Sons—shudder). It feels like a real slap to give a movie that’s as inoffensive and wispy as this one such a low star rating since there’s really nothing wrong with it; there’s just nothing really there.
Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!
“Technically, the villain is Satan in a jar, but this belongs to a canon of oddball horrors where the real killer is just remarkably bad vibes: The Happening, Messiah of Evil, Annihilation, Final Destination, etc. You could call it ‘cosmic’ or ‘Lovecraftian’ or whatever, but it’s really just the horror of stumbling into a party where the mood’s already gone rancid (and people occasionally explode into goo).” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“The sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky that this has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development and emotional stakes. It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty-line in French housing projects, except with way more gigantic, pissed off spider beasts than usual.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Chances are, if the title of this film sounds familiar to you, you’re either too into the movies (in which case, pull up a chair and join us) or you’re a fan of either The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, as Robert Smith of the former and Steven Severin of the latter collaborated as a micro supergroup under the name The Glove, which released only one album that took its title from this film. That alone would probably qualify it as a cult classic for some, but what makes this one work is how campy it is in spite of its earnestness. […] I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of movies that are competently made but with no apparent reason to exist or want to see a (sort of) conspiracy thriller version of a campy slasher.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A sci-fi erotic thriller about a yuppie Reaganite with a computerized ocular implant that makes him partial witness to serial killings. It plays like if De Palma made a sarcastic, purposefully idiotic version of what his most vicious detractors accused his schtick of being. And you know what? It’s still a mostly fun watch; just as sleazy as it is silly.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The nightmare surrealism of the Elm Street series, restricted by the production values of a 16mm regional-horror cheapie but also much freer to disregard the boundary between its dream sequences & waking “reality.” A wonderful example of passion outweighing resources; A+ outsider art.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This sets itself up as the Floridian hippiesploitation version of Psycho, but instead delivers a domestic melodrama where everyone’s love language is belligerent screaming.” Currently streaming on Screambox and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Argentinian schlock that classes up Jesús Franco-style vampire smut with the blocking & scoring of a vintage telenovela. It’s great fun, and a great confirmation that you can still find blood & titties on Tubi despite reports otherwise.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“While most Hammer Horror relics are buttoned-up, single-idea affairs, this off-brand equivalent is overstuffed with nutty/gnarly ideas on how to update the Frankenstein myth for the Free Love crowd. Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee star as rival half-brother mad scientists competing for industry awards & press, using their own children & ancient proto-human skeletons as pawns in their sick game of one-upsmanship. It’s so stately & faux-literary that you hardly have any time to register that you’re watching a dismembered finger writhe around on a lab table like a sentient pickle, representing Evil Incarnate.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“This often gets singled out as Ingmar Bergman’s Only Horror Movie, but it’s really not all that different from trickier-to-classify titles like Persona& Through a Glass Darkly. Those happen to be my favorites of his I’ve seen, though, so I mean that as a compliment. The man knew how to craft a spooky mood; one of his greatest talents, really.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“An icy, cruelly funny Irish ghost story where the undead are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. It’s basically a series of super consistent fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting real quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“An artist-goes-mad horror about a stop-motion animator who channels her darkest thoughts into her increasingly disturbing work, which then comes alive and attacks her. There’s wonderfully grotesque, fucked up imagery & sound design here, offering a small taste of pure-Hell animation for audiences who don’t have the patience for more immersive titles like Violence Voyager,The Wolf House, and Mad God.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Had me thinking about how well it’s aged vs. fellow slick ’96 teen horror Scream, both of which I was the perfect age to look up to as a wannabe goth young’n. Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics to catch up with, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years. Picking an enduring fav out of the two mostly comes down to performances: Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic as Matthew Lillard but much better dressed; Naomi Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both; and Skeet Ulrich puts on the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell, slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret. The victory belongs to the coven, praise be to Manon.” Currently streaming on HBO Max.
“While Frankenstein might have the better direct sequel overall, this one at least has the generosity of affording its titular villain more than three minutes of screentime, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters. She’s so effortlessly, tragically cool, and it was great to make her ghoulish acquaintance” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“You gotta love The Wolf Man’s ‘Aw shucks, gee-whiz, just call me Larry’ routine. He’s an adorable oaf when he’s not a violently horny beast, making for a great horror film about post-nut clarity.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A triumph of high-artifice production design, among other triumphs. The painted-backdrop graveyard set is like the goth older sister to the Wizard of Oz designs; just as sinisterly magical but dreaming up a world where every day is Halloween, a world that’s always a pleasure to revisit (until a child enters the frame)” Currently streaming on Peacock and The Criterion Channel.
“Anytime a director of this stature says they’re making an ‘erotic nightmare,’ you know they’re cooking up a masterpiece. This is Francis Ford Coppola’s best work as a visual stylist, which since he’s in the business of moving pictures, means it’s his best work overall (with the caveat that I’ve only tried a couple of his wines).” Currently streaming on MGM+ (free with a 7-day trial subscription).
“I suspect the reason this stands out as Jodorowsky’s best work because of Claudio Argento’s heavy involvement in the writing & production. The imagery is just as gorgeous as anything in The Holy Mountain, but it’s all driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum. It’s a fine-art carnival sideshow.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The Old French Extremity; the kind of gross-out gore film you can pair with a cheese plate & bubbly.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing. Very funny in how it gives horror-convention gorehounds exactly what they want (the most annoying idiot youths to ever disgrace the screen being gruesomely dismembered) while also being stubbornly withholding (shooting the stillness of the woods with an Apichatpongian sense of patience).” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“It’s a hypnotic, immersive vision of paranormal menace, one that could easily play as outdated kitsch but instead triggers a nightmarish trance. It’s the same effect that’s achieved throughoutBeyond the Black Rainbow, especially in its Altered States-reminiscent LSD experiment flashback where its main antagonist ‘looks into the Eye of God.’ It’s an effect that returns full-force in Phase IV’s psychedelic, nihilistic conclusion as well, which describes a next stage in human evolution triggered by the paranormal ants’ attacks on mankind.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“The last time I saw this I was hung up on its obvious influences on Alien. A decade later, I’m hung up on its production design’s obvious influence on Bertrand Mandico. I can practically hear Elina Löwensohn whispering about Kate Bush & Conan the Barbarian in the background.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“Grand-scale destruction in miniature, matching the impossibility of processing the communal grief of nuclear fallout in a novelty sci-fi film with the impossible spectacle of its mixed-scale monster attacks. It’s just as deeply sad as it is colossally thrilling.” Currently streaming on HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body. Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere. ” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“More of a genuine mashup of classic Godzilla & King Kong sensibilities than any of those monsters’ actual onscreen clashes. Mostly just helped clarify what I love about the kaiju genre (the giant rubber creatures, the more the better) vs what I tolerate (the retro extoticized adventurism) to get to the good stuff.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“It used to be that time maxing meant brushing your teeth in the shower; now we save time by watching our Guy Maddin & Matt Farley movies at the same time.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The best thing about haunted house movies is the third-act release of tension where there are no rules and every feature of the house goes haywire all at once, not just the ghosts. The reason this is the height of the genre is that it doesn’t wait to get to the good stuff; it doesn’t even wait to get to the house. It’s all haywire all the time, totally unrestrained.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“Classic zombie splatstick of the Evil Dead & Dead Alive variety, updated with a 90s sense of apathetic cool and heavily distorted through the Italo-schlock dream machine. Loved every confounding minute of it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A gory cheapie about an ancient mask buried in Nostradamus’s tomb. We watch this story unfold twice removed, where movie-within-a-movie victims try on the cursed mask, which transforms them into demonic, flesh-eating demons who torment their companions. Meanwhile, the in-film audience of the movie squirms in their seats, noticing an alarming resemblance of the mysterious horror film’s violence to their own journeys to the screening. Mainly, the promotional mask prop displayed in the cinema’s lobby has cut one of their cheeks the same way it cut & infected characters in the film they’re watching, which of course leads to a demon-zombie breakout in the theater that matches the chaos of the movie within the movie. They’re all effectively Skinamarinked—unable to leave the theater thorough the doors they entered from—as they individually transform into cannibalistic monsters and tear each other to shreds.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“There’s something to love in every single frame of this, but nothing to love more deeply than Brad Dourif being given more free reign than ever to rave like a demonic lunatic.” Currently streaming on Peacock, Starz, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This trades in the grimy cruelty of the original for the visual sensibilities of a children’s film, from its exaggerated cartoon framing to its primary color palette to its bookend trips to the toy factory. Speaking of which, the climactic spectacle on the factory floor is some A+ mayhem, really leaning into the novelty of killer-doll gore at its purest. It’s one of those R-rated horrors that feels like it was specifically made for an audience of children sneaking the TV remote past their sleeping parents.” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“Perfect Halloween night programming; just the absolute worst teen dipshits to ever disgrace the screen getting torn to shreds by demons whenever they get too horny to live.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Shudder, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
Swampflix 