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.
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.
Ever since the beginning of the so-called “DC Animated Movie Universe” subfranchise, most of them have been serviceable, and there have been a few stinkers, but I’ve rarely been “wowed” with any of the films so far. Justice League vs. Teen Titans and its follow up Teen Titans: Judas Contract were noteworthy, and Justice League Dark and Wonder Woman: Bloodlines both had something special going for them, but none of them have reached the level of exceptional. Here, in the grand finale of the DCAMU, however, they managed to pull off something really special, and even though I have lukewarm feelings about the continuity overall, I really liked this one.
As Justice League Dark: Apokolips War opens, Superman (Jerry O’Connell) has gathered several groups together to discuss a pre-emptive strike against Darkseid (Tony Todd), the ruler of the hellish planet Apokolips. After his most recent unsuccessful attempt to conquer Earth, the Justice League has observed new activity from Apokolips that are interpreted as a prelude to invasion. Leaving the Teen Titans behind to act as security while they’re away, the League sets off to stop Darkseid on his home turf. However, as exit the wormhole-like “boom tube” near Apokolips’s orbit, they are attacked by Darkseid’s newest forces, hybrids of his previously-encountered Parademons and Doomsday (who previously—if temporarily—killed Superman), and the League goes down as the titles roll. We then cut to two years later, where John Constantine (Matt Ryan) and his demon buddy Etrigan (Ray Chase) are drinking themselves through one of the few remaining pubs in London, alphabetically. Constantine, who was in the assault team on Apokolips two years earlier, is particularly ashamed of his cowardice, as he left his lover Zatanna behind on the planet to be ripped to shreds by “Paradooms” while he fled through a portal. Two hooded figures emerge from the darkness to interrupt their well-earned pity party: Raven (Taissa Farmiga) and Superman, upon whom Darkseid tattooed the man’s “S” crest with kryptonite ink, rendering him powerless and forcing him to watch his adopted planet fall under occupation and resource strip-mining.
We get an update on the new status quo. Most of our heroes are dead, and I do mean dead. We see some of them taking major injuries in flashbacks and who are presumed dead for much of the run time; Shazam gets his leg ripped off, Wonder Woman loses an arm, and Cyborg gets torn to pieces. Some of them die utterly horribly during the time skip; many heroes (including Zatanna) are overwhelmed with Paradooms and we only see their blood spray from amidst the gathered horde, while Atlantean Mera gets half her face ripped off, and Martian Manhunter is burned alive. When Damian tells the others what it was like on Earth on the day that the war began, we see our girl Starfire in two separate pieces, her viscera lying on the ground. As the film continues in the present, still more people die; Green Lanterns get skewered by giant claws and burned to crisps down to their skeleton like the poor souls in Sarah Connor’s dreams, Cheetah gets shot to death by quisling mercenaries, and Batgirl gets eaten alive, or at least that’s what I think happened. Even those who are still alive are in bad shape; Nightwing died during the invasion and was resurrected via Lazarus Pit, but he came back soulless, while Batman has been completely assimilated and is now under Darkseid’s thrall, using his intellect to plot the despot’s next moves, and Raven’s ability to keep her extradimensional demon father, Trigon, trapped in the gem on her forehead is starting to slip. Things are bad.
Superman’s plan is to try and find Damian Wayne (Stuart Allan) and see if Bruce’s love for his son can break through Darkseid’s conditioning, and to distract the Apokoliptan forces by diverting their attention to the sites of several giant “reaper” mining devices via attacking them, while taking a small group to Apokolips while Darkseid’s forces are away and destroy Apokolips itself. Snags get hit, of course. Forces aren’t initially diverted to the “reaper” machines because only two of three are under attack, prompting John Constantine to seek help from Swamp Thing (Roger Cross) to take down the third platform. The resultant action sequence, in which Swamp Thing wrecks shit, it one of the coolest things in all forty-ish of these movies so far. Although the League gets back-up from the remnants of the Titans and the Suicide Squad, they lose more people than expected in the siege on the portal tower, and when they get to Apokolips, they have to face off against the cybernetically reanimated corpses of some of their fallen friends. Worse still, the appeal to Batman’s humanity doesn’t go as planned, and their plan to destroy the planet’s energy core turn out to be for nothing when they discover that the whole planet is being powered by an enslaved Flash on a treadmill, so there’s no reactor to blow. As things fall apart, Trigon is unleashed, adding a further unstable element to the fray.
I like big finales like this; they really rev the easily-pleased engine of my heart. And I also enjoy a grand conclusion that feels genuinely conclusive. This is essentially this continuity’s Endgame, a chance to establish real stakes with life hanging in the balance and demonstrate that even our favorites (alas, Starfire) aren’t guaranteed to make it out alive (R.I.P., Zatanna). It feels like there’s a lot on the line, and the tone is consistent while also still offering opportunities for levity and the franchise’s trademark humor; apparently, the scene in which there’s a bait-and-switch joke about Constantine’s ex turning out not to be Harley Quinn but the anthropomorphic King Shark was heavily memed upon release. Shark even winks! The crossover nature of the film also means that we get to see interactions between characters that we haven’t seen on screen together before, and those character moments are always what I enjoy most in these movies (Lois Lane gets Harley’s Suicide Squad to join the resistance by beating her in an MMA match, of all things). Apparently, the ending of this one causes some minor furor online. I won’t get into the specifics, but the ending caps this narrative while also setting the stage for a new continuity to begin. I don’t know what to say about that other than that this is superhero media, babes; I don’t know what you were expecting. That another continuity might happen now—in fact, given that these were/are still making a profit, that another continuity will begin is inevitable—doesn’t make my appreciation of the tone of finality and melancholy in this one less palpable or meaningful.
Wrapping up my thoughts on this, I think that it’s funny how much of this subfranchise was taken up with Batman (and Batfamily) media, for virtually none of those associated characters and relationships to have an impact on this capstone, other than the obvious one between Bruce and Damian. One of the reaping platforms is attacked by the minor leaguer Batfolk we met once before, but those roles could have been filled by anyone. The two Teen Titans movies ended up having more of an impact on the final chapter, and I love that. Despite his oversaturation in these animated movies in general, all those Batflicks wound up mattering almost not at all here. In fact, this movie could almost be watched completely out of context, and you’d still be able to follow the plot of this one pretty well, and the exposition to get you there doesn’t slow anything down. I don’t know that it would be as meaningful, but it would still be a hell of a lot of fun.
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.
In my recent write-up of Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, I posited my overall ranking system of these films outside of just a star rating. Superman: Red Son falls solidly in the “Fine, I Guess” tier. Taking its name and general plot outline from a 2003 comic that I once owned and read many times, the film posits the question of what would have happened if the Kryptonian pod bearing Kal-El to Earth had landed in the Soviet Union instead of the American breadbasket? In the comic, we get to see this landing in a Ukrainian collective farm, but the film opens with the extraterrestrial boy already aged four or five, as he runs from bullies through a crop field. His friend, Svetlana (as in Lana Lang) tells him that he should stand up for himself, but he demonstrates that he doesn’t fight out of cowardice, but out of compassion, as he lifts a tractor over his head. We then cut to the now adult Superman, the hammer and sickle in place of the “S” in his crest, as he wears a black and red version of the iconic look. He is the ultimate piece of Soviet propaganda: an invincible symbol of triumph. In the West, President Eisenhower tasks Lex Luthor with developing a means to combat this “Soviet Superman,” both physically and in public perception.
I have no complaints about the animation or the performances here. For the former, there’s nothing really noteworthy one way or the other; it’s serviceable, but nothing exciting. To be fair, that’s largely true of the original comic, as well. Unlike Gotham by Gaslight, which forsook the atmosphere of the source text for animated ease, the original Red Son comic had four different pencillers, so there’s a requisite lack of individualistic flourish to maintain uniformity across the whole thing, which leads to not-very-detailed art. For the latter, Jason Isaacs donning a Russian accent is fun and fine, and I can actually imagine it working a little better in live action, where one can emote for the camera, but I think having to layer that patois over the performance comes at the cost of pathos when we’re talking about animation that’s more utilitarian than expressive. It’s also a strange experience to hear Lex Luthor as voiced by Diedrich Bader, given that I associate that voice with his portrayal of the title character on Batman: The Brave and the Bold (after The Drew Carey Show, of course). Once again, my favorite performance comes from the actor portraying Lois Lane; in this case, it’s Amy Acker, better known as Fred from Angel (not to pigeonhole her). What I’ve always liked about Acker’s work is that she can move back and forth between vulnerability and tenacity over the course of a single line, or even a single word, and that’s such an obvious choice for Lois Lane that I’m surprised it took this long to make it happen. Of course, this world’s Lois isn’t romantically associated with Superman, but with Lex, eventually becoming Secretary of the Press once Luthor ascends to the presidency.
The story, however, is a little lacking. It’s structured suitably, with events falling as they must when they must, but there’s no real sense of escalation even as the stakes theoretically get higher. Luthor gets permission to attempt to crash a U.S. satellite into Metropolis, drawing out Superman in order to save the city and—in the short term—make Superman more appealing but also allow Lex access to his DNA via shed epithelial cells on the salvaged satellite. This in turn allows Lex to create a clone of him in the form of “Superior Man,” which of course flies around spitting out Manifest Destiny jargon and ultimately dies when Lex pushes him too hard. The most interesting thing that happens occurs when Lois gives Superman a U.S. intelligence file about gulags that Stalin has hidden from Superman by concealing them underground beneath lead shielding; he goes to one and discovers his childhood friend, Svetlana, who has been worked to near death for the sole crime of having known the Kryptonian “before,” that is, before he became a tool of the state whose every historical detail is treated as a matter of national security. When she dies in his arms, he goes directly to Stalin’s palace, where he confronts the man and then executes him for betraying Soviet values, becoming the new leader of the U.S.S.R.
So much could have been done with this, but there’s not enough room in this film to go anywhere interesting with it while also making sure to shove in all those DC Comics Cameos™. Of course Superman doesn’t get to the aforementioned gulag and liberate it in time to prevent the death of the parents of a young boy, now orphaned and seeking revenge (and who at one point is obscured by a flock of bats, just so that you’re not confused later). Of course Lex Luthor somehow captured the downed ship and biological remains of a Green Lantern in the desert and was able to reverse engineer the technology to create a squad of jingoistic G.I.-Lanterns. Of course we’ve got to have Wonder Woman offering to act as liaison between the U.S.S.R. and the West. It’s the last of these that gets the most focus and is the most worthwhile, but she’s also largely extraneous, as we don’t actually see her do anything in this capacity. In fact, she’s the column upon which two other extraneous, vestigial plot lines rest; the Batman the anarcho-terrorist plot serves only to disillusion her that the Soviet Union is as utopian as she believed, and the Green Lantern thing only exists so that she can show up and play cavalry to save Superman when Lex sets out to kill him. You scoop out all the fanservice and there’s almost nothing to this one, narratively, and that’s a shame when you have the potential to actually tell an interesting, multifaceted story about an alternate history in which the West is in decline while a communism that does not fail internally because of human nature continues to ascend precisely because of the inhumanity of its leader.
That’s not what this movie (or any of these movies) set out to do. As much as this franchise interacts with the pageantry and theater of politics at all, it does so only in the most broad strokes and confined almost solely to “Lex Luthor is a bad president,” “Not all cops,” “Government hit squads made up of convicts are bad … and badass.” It’s no secret that I’m much more invested in these films when they’re about character relationships and dynamics, so those are the ones that stick with me, but these movies have never set out to be Big or Important in the way that some people think that the live action versions of these characters are envisioned to be. Maybe it’s not fair for me to look at this film, which has so much potential to tell a story with some meaning rather than create a parade of answers to the question “What would [X] be like in this world?”, and demand that it be more than the corporate product based on brand name recognition that it is. But, if we’re not here to demand more from our art than that, what are we even doing here? After nearly forty of these movies, this is the first time that I really feel like what dragged this one down is that it just doesn’t live up to its potential. Instead, all we get is that Superman respects Luthor’s penchant for propaganda, and then the finale is all about an external influence that forces the hand of both sides rather than imagining any other kind of resolution to their ideological differences (I’ll save you the time of checking Wikipedia: it’s Brainiac; it’s always Brainiac). An unremarkable version of a more interesting comic and a disappointingly lackluster one at that. It’s … fine, I guess.
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 one takes a look at the “released films” section of the Wikipedia article about these DC animated releases, The Death of Superman is listed as the 33rd film, with Reign of the Supermen coming in at number 34. But if you go to those two entries’ individual pages, Death is listed at number 33 while Reign is listed at the 35th. For anyone familiar with comics, this kind of inexact numbering is pretty standard; comic book publishers are constantly having to tread a thin line between giving longtime fans a feeling of legacy, which keeps them coming back for more, while also not wanting to frighten off new readers who might see Batman #338 and have too much of a sense of archive/continuity panic. As a result, there are constant reboots and rebrands (of which the New 52, from which this project draws its name, is merely one of dozens), re-numberings that take a PhD to understand, and ultimately, confusion. If you’re wondering what the missing 34th film in this franchise is, it’s this one, which began its life as a webseries that sort-of continued the story from the live action NBC Constantine series, before it was edited together into a single cohesive story. Of course, right around that same time, Matt Ryan’s portrayal of the character was imported whole cloth into the larger “Arrowverse” following a very well-received cameo in Arrow, ultimately becoming a recurring character in the season of Legends of Tomorrow that was airing when this “film” released, and became a main character from the next season onward. That series did a version of the classic Constantine origin story about the lost soul of a little girl, Astra, who was damned because of a young Johnny Constantine’s hubris, and it conflicts with this one, so it’s anyone’s guess if this is connected to anything else at this point, and whether that matters to anyone but me and the perhaps eight or nine other people who have seen both this and Legends. And that’s before you even consider if this is connected to Justice League Dark, considering that that Constantine is also voiced by Matt Ryan. To paraphrase Chinatown, forget it — it’s comic books.
We open in a flashback showing a young John Constantine (Ryan) being held in a mental institution following the “Newcastle Incident,” although we only later learn what this means. He’s visited by his childhood friend, Chas Chandler (Damian O’Hare), who is disappointed to discover that Constantine is still fiddling about with magic, even after what happened. Constantine then awakes in the present, where he faces off against a horde of tiny homunculi that share his face, albeit cast ghastly and demonic. He at first tries to fight them before realizing that as “his demons,” he has to let them back inside of him, and own his mistakes and regrets (subtle!). He is reunited with Chas, who begs him to come and check on his comatose daughter, saying that medical science can’t provide any answers about her condition and begging the beleaguered wizard to pursue a magical solution. Long story short, the girl’s spirit is being held captive by a demon that draws Constantine to Los Angeles; John does so, with Chas in tow, while leaving the girl’s body in the care of an inhuman spirit known as the “Night Nurse” (Laura Bailey). In L.A., he confronts Beroul, the demon who has Chas’s daughter captive; Beroul summoned Constantine because he wants to rule L.A., and he can’t do that with five other demons also jockeying for the same position. If Constantine gets rid of them, the girl will go free, and the film’s plot revolves around John trying to outthink Beroul and take down the beast himself as well as his enemies without killing Chas’s daughter, all while being both helped and hindered by a mysterious entity known as “Angela,” a kind of apotheotic representation of the city itself who can observe and communicate with him via possessing the metropolis’s citizens.
I had pretty high praise for the hellish grotesqueries that we got to see in Justice League vs. Teen Titans (and more muted appreciation for the same in the aforementioned Justice League Dark), and there are some really cool character designs here that help spruce up what is a noticeably more cheaply animated product than the norm. The version of Constantine’s backstory in this one is that John and Chas learned that their mentor was planning to use his daughter, Astra, in a spell that would cost the girl her life. John and Chas storm in and the former summons a real demon, Nergal, who kills their mentor and his gathered cultists, but who dragged Astra back to Hell with him when he disappeared. Nergal has a cool design: a kind of horned, winged serpent that stands upright as if his upper torso were the hood of a cobra. The designs of the five demons whom Beroul demands Constantine destroy, on the other hand, are pretty rote; my inner Miranda Priestly commented “Mouths for eyes? Groundbreaking.” Beroul himself is somewhere in the middle; he’s a pretty basic gluttony demon thing that you’ve seen a hundred times, but he inhabits the more atmospheric parts of the story. Beroul captures starry-eyed arrivals in the City of Angels (get it?) and then forces them into individual hells that take the form of different movie “eras,” where they are then tortured, eviscerated, etc. because that’s what demons do. It’s a fine enough conceit, and Beroul’s barbary is creepy even if his design is underwhelming (he’s working on filling an entire swimming pool with human viscera in which he will submerge himself, and he consumes human flesh with abandon). The Night Nurse is also fun, especially when she lets down her humanoid disguise as a sexy nurse with mummy-wrapped arms and shows off her real face. The best design by far is the Aztec death god Mictlāntēcutli, which is a real piece of art. The visual storytelling for him is strong, as you can see that he is decayed from years of being starved of worship (he is only able to survive by living beneath a slaughterhouse and feeding on the deaths of pigs and cattle) but that he was once strong. I won’t pretend that it doesn’t feel appropriative to use the death god of a colonized people (at present, most Nahua people practice Catholicism, another of Europe’s scars on the world), and I have no interest in making excuses for it, but I am obligated to tell you that he’s really cool here.
I liked the ending of this one. It’s pretty cliche to have the solution to a demonic possession be “love,” but it’s effective here because said love is a consumable resource. Constantine channeled Chas and his wife’s love for their daughter into his final spell, causing both of them to forget Chas, but that wasn’t enough; John had to use his and Chas’s fraternal love as well, costing him a bond that went all the way back to their boyhoods in Liverpool. For a man with so few emotional anchors to the world, losing one of his strongest is another awful thing happening to the world’s unluckiest magician. The tragedy of it resonates more than it has the right to, and that worked for me on an emotional level, especially as it comes on the heels of Constantine finally finding some redemption for the errors of his youth in refusing to be tempted to save Astra instead at the cost of Chas’s daughter. That the film ends with Constantine starting the journey back to London accompanied by one of his manifested homunculi demons is bittersweet; the day has been saved, for now, and Constantine seems to have found some solace in this, but he’s still a man with no one to keep him company but his own demons. Not too shabby for something that was produced for the CW Seed.
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