Famous Monster B-Lister: The Mummy

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It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.

The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.

The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.

Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).

Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.

There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil.  It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.

Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.

Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Save the Green Planet! (2003)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the alien-invasion conspiracy comedy Save the Green Planet! (2003), recently remade by Yorgos Lanthimos.

00:00 Freaky Fridays at Double Trouble
09:33 Starchaser (1985)
14:15 Child of Peach (1987)
20:24 Nothing But Trouble (1991)
25:01 Linda Linda Linda (2005)
34:31 Him (2025)
38:28 The Smashing Machine (2025)
45:56 Animation Mixtape (2025)
50:22 One Battle After Another (2025)
56:45 Move Ya Body (2025)
1:00:24 Butthole Surfers – The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025)
1:04:52 We Are Pat (2025)

1:10:40 Save the Green Planet! (2003)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)

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It never pays off to be the first person to do something. Lindsay Denniberg’s 2012 feature debut Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a prescient collection of everything that’s hip & trending in genre filmmaking circles right now: VHS tapes as fetish-object collectibles, the burgeoning nostalgia for shot-on-video slasher textures, the black-box theatricality of Grace Glowicki’s Gothic horror throwback Dead Lover, the green-screen psychedelia of Vera Drew’s copyright-testing personal essay The People’s Joker, etc. If Video Diary of a Lost Girl were currently making the theatrical rounds in our new warped-VHS genre nerd dystopia, it would be humming with film nerd buzz, and Denniberg would be enjoying the same kind of Extremely Online microcelebrity of current cult directors like Matt Farley, Amanda Kramer, and Jennifer Reeder. Hopefully, its recent Blu-ray release through AGFA will help correct that oversight, as Denniberg’s time is very much now, after spending a decade tapping her foot in the horror schlock waiting room.

Pris McEver stars as the relatively young, immortal succubus Louise, self-named after the silent movie star Louise Brooks (who also inspired the name of Denniberg’s production company, Pandora’s Talk Box). Louise first saw the Old Hollywood star of the original Diary of a Lost Girl in the initial 1929 theatrical run for Pandora’s Box, when she was first starting out as a succubus and a cinephile. Nearly a century later, her cinephilia has continued through her slacker job as a VHS rental clerk, and her supernatural function as a succubus has continued through her routine acts of rape revenge. In this movie’s lore, all succubi are descendants of the Biblical figure Lilith, and they need to kill once a month by fucking a man to death in order to prevent bleeding out in the “unending bloodshed” of a lethal menstruation cycle. Louise has no drive to kill, really, but she does get horny and does want to keep on living (if not only to make time to watch more vintage horror movies), so she targets the neverending supply of street rapists who seemingly lurk in every alley between her job & home. The trouble is that she eventually falls in love with a boy she genuinely wants to fuck without hurting, and he may be the very same lover she first fell for and lost in her early silent cinema days, reincarnated.

At its heart, Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a supernatural romcom that just happens to be decorated with classic horror references. Not only is Louise’s apartment wallpapered with posters for cinematic provocations like Liquid Sky, American Psycho, and Anatomy of Hell, but she also spends most of her time on the clock watching public-domain horror classics like Carnival of Souls, Nosferatu, and Night of the Living Dead instead of, you know, actually working. Stylistically, Denniberg splits the difference between the German Expressionist fantasia of old and the straight-to-Tubi horror schlock of now. The whole thing is gloriously, grotesquely cheap, playing like what might happen if Annie Sprinkle directed a vampire movie. Every surface is bathed in blacklight fluorescents. Onscreen menstruate glows like red-glitter TV static. All exterior spaces are set in a greenscreen version of Stephen Sayaidan’s Dr. Caligari sets. Characters often sit around doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack is overpowered by spooky goth bedroom pop. It’s all just an excuse to watch video store occultists surf the channels of public-domain horror relics and scrambled-cable porno while, against all odds, falling in love.

Within the opening few seconds of psychedelic video-art color swirls and tongue-in-cheek gratuitous nudity, audiences should know whether Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a friend or foe to their sensibilities. There are plenty of buzzy, hip counterculture touchstones of recent years that indicate the movie has a sizeable cult audience waiting out there, though, however dormant. The problem is that those touchstones didn’t yet exist in 2012, so Denniberg was essentially shouting into the digital void. That’s a common story for underground filmmakers & outsider artists, most of whom don’t get this kind of decade-late victory lap, no matter how deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

The Bashing Machines

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There two high-style, blunt-force sports thrillers in theaters right now, neither of which are especially successful. Both Justin Tipping’s football-cult horror curio Him and Benny Safdie’s cinéma vérité MMA story The Smashing Machine reflect on the damage young men accept in their bodies in order to make a lot of money very quickly as wannabe-star athletes. In the fanciful former, that damage triggers a supernatural transformation into a kind of permanently concussed god, and in the more reality-grounded latter it results in a debilitating addiction to opiates. Unfortunately, neither movie is as invested in exploring the nuances of that shared theme as they are in platforming the surface-aesthetic visual experiments of their respective directors and the dramatically severe acting turns of their respective unconventional movie stars: former sketch-comedy clown Marlon Wayans and former professional wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. As a result, they both look very pretty but ring a little hollow, cushioning the bodyslamming impact of their damaged muscle men with superficial distractions that have little to do with the bodily exploitations of professional sports. Pity.

The dual disappointment of these bone & spirit crushing sports thrillers is mostly due to the high expectations set by the names of the filmmakers involved. Him is especially victim to its own marketing hype, with producer Jordan Peele’s name being foregrounded in the ads to compensate for first-time director Justin Tipping’s professional anonymity. Considering Tipping’s newcomer status, he does fairly well with the material at hand, shooting his football bootcamp torture film with the slick, luxury-brand commercialism of a Nike ad. The rhythmic repetition of its young, concussed football star (Tyriq Withers) suffering seven days of choreographed, ritualistic abuse from his childhood sports idol (Marlon Wayans) gets to be punishingly monotonous by the time it reaches the “Day 5” title card, but the movie does have visual panache to spare. It’s stylish enough in a Martyrs-for-meatheads kind of way that it probably would’ve gotten better reviews if it went straight to Shudder under the title The Goat instead of bearing the weight of Peele’s name in the studio system marketing machine, but instead it’s had the misfortune of being a flashy mediocrity in front of a lot of people. There’s no doubt that Tipping & Wayans’s work in particular could have been repurposed into something truly, brutally spectacular if the quality of the screenplay had matched their gusto.

Speaking of wasted talent, it’s been decades since The Rock has made any notably daring choices in his acting career, with early titles like Southland Tales and Pain & Gain having long disappeared in the Fast & Furious rearview mirror. And even in those early, wild jabs, he was still playing off his larger-than-life wrestling ring charisma to pummel his audience into being entertained. The Smashing Machine is a different beast, asking The Rock to play a real-life, complicated human being under a layer of face-obscuring prosthetics. The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it’s impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career, mimicking the gentle-giant politeness of pioneer UFC fighter Mark Kerr as profiled in the 2002 documentary of the same name. The problem is that there isn’t much else to the movie besides giving The Rock that opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, regardless of how well he makes use of the spotlight. It’s easy to see why director Benny Safdie might have been interested in Mark Kerr as a cinematic subject, given his previous thematic preoccupations with failed athletic gambles in Lenny Cooke & Uncut Gems and with drug addiction in Good Time & Heaven Knows What. He just doesn’t make much of an attempt to communicate why the audience should care about this retired athlete’s unremarkable what-could’ve-been story, besides gawking at The Rock’s acting chops.

Dramatically, there’s a lot more muscle on The Smashing Machine‘s bones than there are on Him‘s. The Rock’s chummy chemistry with frequent scene partner Emily Blunt is mutated into something squirmy & toxic here, with Kerr and his longterm girlfriend prolonging an explosively volatile relationship long past its obvious expiration date. Blunt’s role in that mutually corrosive romance is embarrassingly thankless, since the Mark Kerr story is mostly retold here in service of spotlighting The Rock. Still, the little ways they dig at each other in exponentially violent domestic arguments scores way more in-the-scene dramatic points than the mentor-protegee tensions of Him. Safdie might not arrange those individual pixels into a larger, satisfying picture, but they’ll make for great out-of-context awards season clips as The Rock launches yet another militaristic PR campaign. There’s a version of The Smashing Machine that might’ve been a thrilling relationship drama with the UFC backstory used only as a distant backdrop, but instead the major dramatic payoffs are staged off the back of Kerr’s performances in a career-defining Japanese tournament and the woulda-coulda-shoulda introspection of where he fits into the larger UFC story today. In the end, the movie feels like just as much of a sports-industry advertisement as the stylistic markers of Him, promoting both the UFC and The Rock as decades-spanning sports institutions.

I went into this double feature hoping to see a dramatic reckoning with the physical & emotional toll that professional sports take on young men’s fragile bodies, and I left still craving that reckoning. All that you’ll find here are a few inspired visual choices in how those bodies are commodified in sports-world iconography and a few inspired acting choices in how Wayans & Johnson subvert the more cartoonish archetypes they’re more famous for portraying. That’s all to say that just because neither movie is entirely successful doesn’t mean they’re entirely disposable. To misquote an infamous tweet, why must a movie be “good”? Is it not enough to sit somewhere dark and see a muscular bod, huge?

-Brandon Ledet

Nothing But Trouble (1991)

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For most of my life, I’ve heard about what a terrible movie Nothing But Trouble is. From my friend Michael telling me that the appearance of Dan Aykroyd’s judge character’s phallic nose scarred him as a child to the fact that the film was the subject of one of the earliest episodes of the movie-mocking podcast How Did This Get Made? (all the way back in 2013!), all signs pointed to this movie being utterly irredeemable. Our very own Brandon has even called it “a cinematic abomination.” With Spooky Season starting to get into swing, it happened to come up again in conversation when talking about what to watch among a small group of friends, and it ended up being a surprising crowd pleaser (as well as a crowd disguster). 

Chris Thorne (Chevy Chase) is the publisher of a financial newsletter who meets Diane Lightson (Demi Moore), a beautiful lawyer, on the elevator up to his Manhattan penthouse for a party in his honor featuring some clients whom he despises. She’s been dating one of her clients who is now proceeding with some kind of landfill redevelopment plan she warned him against, and she enlists Thorne to drive her to Atlantic City the following morning so that she can meet with her ex/client in person. Two of Thorne’s obnoxious South American clients (they’re stated to be Brazilian but speak Spanish rather than Portuguese, and an image of their documents later indicate that they are from Argentina), siblings Fausto (Taylor Negron) and Renalda (Bertila Damas), invite themselves on this trip and cannot be avoided. The unlikely quartet takes off for Atlantic City, but the siblings insist that they packed a nice picnic lunch and that they should leave the highway and instead take a nice back road so that they can enjoy it. After detouring onto a series of country roads that feature nothing but the blighted panorama of industry, Thorne fails to make a complete stop at a sign in the rural nowhere of Valkenvania. Although he at first attempts to evade the pursuing officer, Chief Dennis (John Candy), the beat-up old police cruiser proves capable of overtaking Chase’s European luxury car. Dennis hauls the group before the local Justice of the Peace, Alvin Valkenheiser (Aykroyd), who doesn’t take kindly to out-of-towners. 

All of this set-up is the least interesting thing in the whole film. Chase is a charisma-free doorjamb in this one. He’s always been stated to be someone who was difficult to work with and all material I’ve read about this film indicates that Nothing But Trouble was just another notch on the old asshole bedpost for Chase. Moore and Chase feuded constantly on set, and Chase spread his malice around by acting like the larger paycheck he was making for starring in the film gave him seniority over director/co-star Aykroyd, to the point that multiple sources state that someone in the crew threatened to drop a brick on his head if he kept it up. I’m not really sure how contemporary audiences read this film, and I’m curious if they found Thorne to be a sympathetic character and if that is part of the reason that this failed to find an audience. My reading of the text is that Thorne is an unrepentant asshole; he sees a beautiful woman crying and immediately maneuvers to be alone with her in an elevator to take advantage of her presumed vulnerability, nearly sends her off with his driver when he’s hungover on the day of their trip and only decides to proceed when he sees Diane’s skimpy outfit, and allows himself to be goaded into trying to outrun local police because it stokes his ego. Although it’s arguably not fair that he’s going to end up dead on Judge Valkenheiser’s compound simply because the judge has a grudge against bankers (Thorne’s protestations that he’s a financial advisor falling on deaf ears), he’s also a smug and arrogant yuppie whose flirtation verges on predatory, and his constant smarm at the presumed lack of sophistication regarding the people of Valkenvania (accurate or not) doesn’t make him someone in whose fate we are terribly invested. Ironically, however, this makes the harrows of the situation in which he finds himself more palatable than if the film featured a more likable character (or actor). 

Negron’s character was the first to get a legitimate laugh out of me, when he begs Thorne to find “a nice vista” for them to pull over at, and that’s mere moments before the car chase begins, a solid chunk of the way into the film’s runtime. Once the group is captured and sequestered at the Valkenheiser manse, things really start to pick up. We get a solid idea of what terrible fate could befall our leads when a car of even more unsavory characters arrives in Valkenvania and appears before the judge, only for him to sentence them to death via Bonestripper, which is a roller coaster that ends in a mashing metal mouth and which features a hair metal theme tune that plays every time that Bonestripper appears; the description is literal, as the end of the machine is a chute which disposes Halloween decor skeletons into a pile, complete with cartoonish sound effects. It’s ridiculous and quite a lot of fun, and although I understand the need to establish a more grounded reality outside of Valkenvania in order for the outlandish, deadly Saturday morning hijinks to land, it’s a shame it takes so long to get there. The Valkenheiser home and compound is an excellent location and effectively quite creepy; there’s a genuine sense of a former power in decay as a mansion that was clearly quite elegant in its day is now covered in detritus juts out of the middle of a maze of scrap metal. There’s even a great matte painting as the quartet first enters the compound where we can see a downed airplane at the property’s periphery, visually implying that this place is nothing but an industrial graveyard. My friend Sam marveled at “the pulley budget alone,” and the production design here really is something to admire. 

We haven’t gotten into the prosthetic work yet, and it’s probably this that people find the most distasteful, or at the very least off-putting, about the film. Both Candy and Aykroyd appear in dual roles, and while Candy’s characters don’t require a lot of time in make-up (there’s the previously mentioned Officer Dennis, but also Dennis’s presumed twin sister Eldona, who’s just Candy in drag), Aykroyd’s sure does. The biggest groan of disgust came after the midpoint of the film, when we see Judge Valkenheiser preparing for bed, and he removes his already disgusting (and dick-like) prosthetic nose to reveal that he has no nose at all and there’s just scar tissue where it would be. It’s a great bit of grossout prosthesis, credit where credit is due. Less convincing (but no less disgusting) are the severely deformed twins Bobo (Aykroyd again) and Li’l Debbul; imagine someone in a more realistic padded sumo wrestler suit that’s been slightly deflated, then covered with a fine mist of bacon grease. They are always wet, they are always disgusting, and every moment that they’re on screen is revolting, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not also fun. 

In a contemporary review, LA Times critic Peter Rainer described the film as “a slap-happy cross between Psycho and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” and Baltimore Sun’s Lou Cedrone called it an attempt at a comedic Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I would make similar comparisons, although the cultural touchstones I would reach for are probably more esoteric. The town itself and its insular nature bring to mind Deliverance or the arrival of our characters to the dilapidated town in Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, through the lens of the comedic shenanigans of Scooby Doo or Scary Movie 2 (whether this is damning or not is up to you, dear reader). I wouldn’t move this movie to the top of any lists, but as a Halloween season watch that’s troubling but largely bloodless, it might be of interest to some.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Child of Peach (1987)

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Although our discussion of The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains included ongoing discourse about whether the film was comprehensible, I have yet to be completely disappointed by any of the Wuxia films that was shared with the Swampflix crew by one of our listeners last year. I was excited to get back into the thick of it after loving Buddha’s Palm, and among the movie files I had downloaded to my phone to watch if I got bored while traveling was what I assumed was another Wuxia parody like Buddha’s Palm, titled Child of Peach. Upon completion, I can say that it almost certainly was, as it contains this image: 

However, unlike Buddha’s Palm, this movie is awful. 

Child of Peach is based on the story of Momotarō, a Japanese folk hero. The linked Wikipedia article gives a more detailed description, but the bare bones stations of the Momotarō canon are as follows . . . A boy is born from a giant peach found floating in a river by an elderly childless couple (in older versions the peach rejuvenates them to a younger age and they conceive of Momotarō more conventionally); he demonstrates essentially superhuman strength at a very early age; he leaves his parents in order to battle demonic Oni who are marauding the lands; and along the way he befriends a talking dog, monkey, and pheasant who join him in his quest to ultimately defeat the demons of Onigashimi, the demon island. This film adheres pretty closely to that schematic, adding in some additional villains, a backstory for our main character, some army shenanigans, and far, far too many puerile bathroom humor gags about piss. 

The film opens as every Wuxia film I’ve seen so far has, atop a misty mountaintop, where a master martial artist and his wife are raising their infant son while protecting the Sword of the Sun, attended by the master’s young apprentices who can shapeshift into the animal companions of the Momotarō legend. Here, their names are translated as Tiny-Dog, Tiny-Monkey and, um, “Tiny-Cock.” The mountaintop is invaded by an Oni whose name is translated as King Devil, who slays the couple, but not before the wife beseeches the giant magic peach that is the centerpiece of their cave home to save her child, which it does by taking the baby within itself and flying off of the mountain like a pod out of Krypton. The young animorphs are exiled from the mountain as well as King Demon emerges victorious. Below, an elderly couple argues “humorously” with one another before the wife goes to the river to wash clothes. The giant peach floats by and she gets into some tiresome slapstick shenanigans while trying to capture it. When she does, she plans to eat the peach, only to discover a human(?) child within. Also, before she does so, the big peach urinates on her from its peach crack. Comedy!

“Peach Kid,” as the subtitles refer to him, grows up quickly due to interference from a magic fairy who also used to reside on the mountain of the Sword of the Sun, as she is aware that King Devil has gone to the underworld and resurrected some evil warriors, and his hordes start to ravage the land. A local known as the Melon Knight holds a contest to gather together a group of warriors to fight off King Devil and his goofy minions, with one such event involving the wrestling of a bull. Peach Kid, now a magically aged adult (and very clearly played by a woman, Hsiao-Lao Lin), has already demonstrated super breath when an attempt to stoke the stove fire in his adopted parents’ home results in him blowing the thing apart and whom we have also already seen splitting firewood in half with his bare hands like Captain America in Age of Ultron, manages to flip the animal completely. The soldiers laugh him off, and his animal friends help him get revenge on Melon Knight and his vizier by peeing in their sake. Comedy! 

Eventually, all of this comes to a head. Peach Kid and his animal buddies form into a peach-themed Voltron kind of thing (as seen above) and defeat King Devil and all is right in the land. 

I really wanted to like this one, and went into it with the expectation that, even if it weren’t great, there would at least be some cool wizard fights, but it barely has any of that. A few of the lieutenant Oni have some cool things going for them; one has a big bag of mystical wind that he can use in fights to blow his opponents backwards, and “Granny” has a staff that shoots a stream of fire, but that’s really all that there is to speak of. It’s also worth noting that the version I saw referred to the windbag Oni as “Aeolus,” whom you may remember from The Odyssey as the god of the wind. I’m not sure that this allusion to Greek mythology is present in the original text, but I did fail to mention earlier that the mountain on which Peach Kid is first born is referred to in the subtitled dialogue as “Olympus.” I can’t tell if that’s just thematic naming on the part of the translator, but I would assume so. There’s very little information about this film online (in English, anyway), and the IMDb translations of the characters names make a lot more sense that what was present in the version I saw. I’ll also admit that the copy I saw had some of the worst subtitle quality control that I have ever seen, as there were large swathes of the dialogue that were rendered completely illegible by their placement on white portions of the screen. I may have understood the film better if a little more care had been put into it, but I don’t think that I would have liked it more. This was intended to be enjoyed only by children, as the preponderance of scat humor and lack of any comedy that would appeal to a more mature audience make clear. If you’re working your way through the Wuxia canon, skip this one. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Get Excited! Swampflix Will Be at This Year’s Art for Art’s Sake

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Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this Saturday (October 4th) at the annual Art for Art’s Sake event on Magazine Street. We will be selling the print versions of six Swampflix zines, including “flash art” collections of hand-drawn illustrations from past reviews.

Art for Art’s Sake will take place from 6 to 9pm on Saturday, October 4th, all along Magazine Street. Swampflix will be stationed outside Tattooagogo at 4421 Magazine St, 70115.

We hope to see y’all there!

-The Swampflix Crew

Animation Mixtape (2025)

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Last year, legendary animator Don Hertzfeldt self-distributed a traveling roadshow release for his latest short film ME in a double-feature package with his 2012 masterpiece It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Encouraged by the expediency of that release after decades of struggling to get his work into wide distribution, Hertzfeldt has now put together a new roadshow collection of weirdo experiments in animation, reportedly as a theatrical-only release. With this year’s Animation Mixtape, Hertzfeldt has collected a chaotic assemblage of animated outsider art that he personally finds amusing, ranging in decade of production from the 1980s to the 2020s, in medium from stop-motion to computer graphics, and in runtime from a few seconds to 18 minutes. The individual shorts don’t speak to each other except in how they might inform or reflect Hertzfeldt’s own artistic sensibilities. Maks Rzontkowki’s “Martyr’s Guidebook” is a dispirited diary entry from our current digital wasteland, rendered in video game ones & zeroes. Mark Baker’s “The Hill Farm” is a self-amused relic of hippie slacker sentiments from decades in the past, illustrated in traditional pencil sketches. Jesse Moynihan’s “Jesus 2” is a prophetic vision of our singularity hell future, regurgitated from the psychedelic fantasia of Adventure Time-era children’s cartoons. The other ten or so shorts fall somewhere between those aesthetic & temporal markers, each with their own distinct tones & styles. The only discernible reason they’ve been grouped together is because Don Hertzfeldt likes them and wants to use his cinephile-approved name brand to offer them wider public attention.

Beyond his curational oversight of this mixtape project, Hertzfeldt contributed two short wraparound segments to bookend the program, hosted by the little whooping “My anus is bleeding!” cloud puffs from his infamous Rejected cartoons. Between their fits of inane “Whoo!” and “Yayyy!” cheerleading, the little cloud puffs explain that the main purpose of the project is make money for the filmmakers involved, confessing that they are all broke and desperate. Our whooping hosts then warn that because of lack of funding for this kind of work, portions of the program had to be created with generative A.I. technology in order to cut corners. Hertzfeldt then proceeds to flippantly mock the A.I. slop that’s threatening to put this kind of personal, handmade animation out of business, transforming his beloved bleeding-anus puffballs into machine-like A.I. monstrosities that continually shapeshift and puke their digital guts out in an aggressively meaningless display. Given these bookends’ open hostility towards A.I. as a substitute for personable, handcrafted art, it’s likely that they were animated by Hertzfeldt and not created using the very plagiarism engines he intended to mock. I hope so, anyway. In either case, these brief anti-A.I. segments are useful as a contrast to the genuinely imaginative work Hertzfeldt highlights in the mixtape playlist, effectively issued as a threat illustrating what the state of art will soon become if actual, real-life artists can no longer afford to make a living. Even the trippy Takeshi Murata short “Larry”—in which infinite computer renderings of a dog dunking a basketball devolve into digital slop—has a more personable quality to it than its generative A.I. equivalents.

Hertzfeldt credibly names generative A.I. as the biggest threat to these artists’ livelihood, but I found another throughline in the shorts’ credits to be just as alarming. Almost every film in this mixtape includes a title card acknowledging funding from national arts foundations like the National Film Board of Canada and the Polish Film Institute. While A.I.-addicted corporations are working to replace artists with computer programs in the private sphere, The Man is also working to eliminate that kind of public funding for the arts in order to shave a few measly bucks off of governments’ ledgers. The inevitable result of that financial restriction is that most modern animation is a computer-generated corporate product — an opportunity for brazenly lazy celebrities like Chris Pratt to collect easy paychecks voicing talking animals and famous video game characters. Besides the better-funded anime from Japan’s robust filmmaking industry, there are only occasional gems like the recent slacker comedy Boys Go to Jupiter that make it past animators’ personal YouTube & Vimeo accounts into proper theaters. The only venue I can think of where animation this diversely, playfully daring is exhibited in public is at local film festivals like NOFF, which will be programming ten or so animated shorts later this month. As Hertzfeldt acknowledges in the press notes for this year’s Animation Mixtape, however, “While over 10,000 short films are made every year by filmmakers at various stages of their career, only a fraction make it into film festivals and are able to be seen in a classic theatrical setting.” He decided to increase that fraction as best he could with this limited-release roadshow, which is admirable considering how little support these animators are getting from other established institutions.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #248: The Hidden (1987) & Parasites

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Welcome to Episode #248 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of creature features about body-invading parasites, starting with the sci-fi action horror The Hidden (1987), starring Kyle MacLachlan.

0:00 Spooky season
06:16 The Long Walk (2025)
12:12 Robert Altman
16:46 Queens of Drama (2025)

21:07 The Hidden (1987)
36:20 The Tingler (1959)
52:23 Brain Damage (1988)
1:04:15 PussyCake (2021)

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

– The Podcast Crew

One Battle After Another (2025)

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The 2023 political thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline was a small production with no household-name movie stars and limited theatrical distribution. It vocalized leftist politics within the visual language of a mainstream heist thriller, often pausing its most explosive moments to explain the political motivations of its young domestic-terrorist dissidents, who actively disrupt the industrial processing of oil as a desperate act of global self-defense in the face of Climate Change. Despite all of its populist genre markers and its traditional Dad Movie rhythms, it didn’t make much of a cultural impact outside the usual cinephile circles. What it did accomplish, though, was presenting a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, dreaming of a better world for the American moviegoer and the American political discourse. And now, somehow, one of the last few Hollywood studios standing has put some real money behind making the real thing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is the finished action-blockbuster product that How to Blow Up a Pipeline only sketched out in blueprint, one with real Hollywood money and recognizable Hollywood celebrities vocalizing revolutionary politics within the structure of a 4-quadrant crowdpleaser. It’s in no more danger of transforming the real-life American political landscape than its low-budget indie prototype was a couple years ago, but it does have a much better chance of provoking substantial political conversations among a wide, mainstream audience, because it’s got major studio muscle behind its production & distribution — improbably.

If there’s any glaring deviation from the traditional Hollywood studio action thriller here, it’s in One Battle‘s choice to de-center its archetypal lone hero to instead give credit to the heroic work of political collectives. Much like Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling stoner detective in Anderson’s previous Thomas Pynchon adaptation, 2014’s Inherent Vice, Leonardo DiCaprio’s revolutionary burnout is continually ineffective in his attempts to save the day; he’s mostly just thrashed about by political systems larger than him as he drinks & smokes his way through the pain. At the start of the picture, he’s a young bombmaker who’s joined a political resistance collective called The French 75, helping them destroy property and free prisoners of the state in the name of a future America with “free borders, free bodies, free choices, and [freedom] from fucking fear.” However, after he fathers a child with the most erratic radical in the crew (Teyana Taylor), his politics become secondary to his domestic duties as a parent. His girlfriend splits the scene and the French 75 fall apart spectacularly under the pressure of a militant fascist named Lockjaw (Sean Penn), leaving DiCaprio’s stoner dad raising his daughter alone under a stolen identity, separated from any meaningful political resistance in his middle age. He’s only dragged back into action by the abduction of the mostly oblivious teen in his care (relative newcomer Chase Infiniti), who becomes a pawn in a three-way battle between an ICE-like immigration taskforce run by Lockjaw, the remnant scraps of the surviving French 75ers, and a secret white nationalist cabal that wields more political power than anyone else involved.

A lot of the humor in One Battle After Another‘s action sequences is a result of its would-be hero’s complete lack of heroic skills. He’s long scorched away the political rhetoric & secret passcodes from his early revolutionary days with decades of bong rips, and the countless gallons of beer have left him too sluggish to keep up in the endless string of chase sequences. When tasked to attempt small parkour maneuvers following skaters to safety during a police chase, for instance, he falls 40 feet to the ground and is immediately tasered unconscious. All of the meaningful political action in the film is executed by underground networks of revolutionaries working as a collective, including one run by a karate dojo owner played by Benicio del Toro, who helps him limp along for much longer than he possibly could otherwise. At his age, DiCaprio’s revolutionary is mostly a dad whose mission is to retrieve his daughter before she’s harmed by a fascistic government he failed to change for the better in his own youth. Even in that context, he has little effect on the outcome, pathetically so. That’s largely because the right-wing forces he’s racing to keep up with are so absurdly evil and well-funded that a paunchy, middle-aged stoner has no chance to make a dent in their armor. Sean Penn is especially grotesque as Lockjaw, continually finding new, inhuman ways to hold his body & mouth that are just as worthy of laughter as they are of disgust. The racist cabal that calls the shots above Lockjaw’s head are also presented as a hilarious punchline despite their vicious cruelty, as they’re characterized as a Christmas cult that chants, “Hail, St. Nick!” with the same ecstatic fervor that their imagined enemies chant, “Hail, Satan!”

I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio spectacle at this point in my life; the most potent images & ideas in modern cinema are lurking in microbudget indies that would be lucky to secure 1% of One Battle‘s speculated budget. Still, it’s encouraging to know the modern studio picture can be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people. Paul Thomas Anderson announced himself as a skilled craftsman as soon as he debuted with Hard Eight & Boogie Nights in the 1990s. His immediate Altmanesque control on large ensemble casts and his Scorsese-inspired tension between humor & violence have only become more personal to his own name & style as his work has sprawled over the decades since. Here, he acknowledges that the revolution will not be televised (going as far as to reduce that infamous Gil Scott-Heron piece to call center hold music), but he also argues that the revolution can be sexy & fun anyway. For all of the sparse piano-key tension of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the restless kineticism of Michael Bauman’s bulky VistaVision camerawork, the tone remains remarkably light. These revolutionaries cut up, they fuck, and they celebrate their minor victories with wild, infectious abandon. Before Anderson funnels all of the plot’s political warfare into a single highway chase on an open desert road, the audience would be forgiven for forgetting that we’re watching an action thriller and not an ensemble-cast character comedy. What’s most impressive about the movie is that it credibly succeeds in both genres while making time to clearly define the nation’s current political factions: our cartoonishly racist overlords, their pathetically naive servants who hope to join their ranks, the largely disorganized leftist resistance, and the ill-equipped everyday people struggling to just take care of their own despite the boots pressing on all of our necks.

-Brandon Ledet