M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

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I was absolutely, utterly, desperately sick of seeing trailers for M3GAN 2.0 — months ago. I couldn’t wait for the movie to hit theaters not because I had any real interest in it, but because that would mean that I would finally be able to go to the theater safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to see that ad again. No more audio clips from Boyz II Men or Brittney Spears, no more “Hold on to your vaginas,” no more M3GAN in a wingsuit, no more “You threatened to pull out my tongue and put me in a wheelchair,” “I was upset!”, no more “She’s a smoking hot warrior princess.” The trailer is imprinted into my brain now to the point where I feel like I could quote it in the same vein as Jenny Nicholson’s full cover of the China Beach season one Time Warner DVD set. But after returning from a nice international holiday, despite nearly a full day of flight, I was too wired to sleep, and I happened to get back on a $5 Tuesday, so … why not? 

Since we’re already on the subject of the film’s marketing, it’s worth noting up top that the trailer for M3GAN 2.0 is very misleading. The “smoking hot warrior princess” line and all of the attendant implications thereof—that M3GAN has fans, that there’s a culture of weird online creeps who fetishize her, etc.—are completely absent here. M3GAN never offers Gemma (Allison Williams) up as a sacrifice in order to save Cady (Violet McGraw), and other lines that do appear in the film occur in completely different contexts. I’ve known people in the past who would consider this kind of trailer-to-film discrepancy to be a form of false advertising, and to whom no amount of explanation that trailers are often created months in advance of a movie’s final cut will mollify them. This instance, however, is a clear case of that misdirection working in the film’s favor, as the advertising undersold the final product, which itself overdelivered. The only real plot point that appears in the trailer that’s accurate to the film is that the sequel is going the Terminator 2 route by making the first film’s villain a protagonist in the second, defending the previous film’s survivors against a more advanced version of themself. It’s not at all what one would expect in a sequel to the unexpectedly successful first film, but I would argue that it manages to find its footing, at least insofar as a film this campy and over-the-top can. 

It’s been a couple of years since young Cady came to live with her Aunt Gemma following the death of her parents, and Gemma’s creation of a robotic “friend” for her troubled niece as a prototype for a toy line ending in disaster when M3GAN turned homicidal and killed four people. In the interim, Gemma has served a brief stint in prison and emerged from the other side as a passionate advocate for oversight in the tech industry, delivering (similar to but legally distinct) TED Talks, releasing a book about the dangers of AI, and partnering (perhaps even romantically) with a former cyber security guru named Christian Bradley (Aristotle Athari) to work on potential legal regulation. In all of this, she also seeks to highlight that what M3GAN represented: a potential opportunity for guardians to outsource many of the duties of parenting to technology as part of a greater social movement toward automating and alienating the things that make us human. Ironically, throwing herself into this new passion project with such fervor causes her to be less present for Cady in exactly the same way that her robotics work did in the first film. On a greater scope, Colonel Tim Sattler (Timm Sharp) has loaned out an android soldier based on M3GAN’s original specs to a foreign government to demonstrate its proficiency, only for AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) to go rogue almost immediately. After killing the hostage that she was supposed to liberate, she begins systematically tracking down and killing everyone involved with her creation, including the arms dealer who brokered her sale to the government and the technocrat Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement) whose shady activities related to his products means that he is the only one who could shut her down remotely. When armed men show up in the middle of the night, M3GAN reveals that she’s actually been staying close in a technologically ethereal form this whole time, and offers to help stop AMELIA, in exchange for a new body. 

I saw this in an empty theater. Sure, it was a 10:15 PM screening, but it was also $5 movie night, which is usually packed. As I waited to buy my ticket, I watched as a couple of families with elementary aged children brought in blankets and other cozy accoutrement to settle in for a late screening of the new Jurassic Park World movie. No one was there for M3GAN 2.0 but me. One of my quirks is that I rarely laugh out loud when I’m watching a movie by myself. It’s not because I feel the need to perform enjoyment in the presence of others so much as it is that I think there’s an element to comedy that’s social. It might just have been the travel exhaustion, but I found myself laughing aloud at multiple points in this film, especially in the back half. Of all the horror flick classic killers the easiest comparison would be to compare M3GAN to Chucky, since they’re both killer dolls, but when it comes to character, M3GAN has a bit of the Freddy Krueger about her. She’s sarcastic, quippy, and often just plain mean, with only one overriding and eternal imperative: protect Cady. What doesn’t take the edge off of her character is the character growth she’s undergone between the first two films as a result of watching Gemma and Cady as a kind of techno omniscience, to the point that her Cady-based directives have evolved into genuine affection and care, or she’s gotten quite good at pretending this is the case. She’s still M3GAN, and I still enjoyed her presence, even if she’s in a completely different movie. What’s not to love? 

(Listen to me and Brandon discuss M3GAN 2.0 more here.)

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Son of Godzilla (1967)

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Godzilla’s titular offspring in the 1967 kaiju comedy Son of Godzilla doesn’t officially have a name, or at least he didn’t yet. Between the film’s release and the character’s return in the following year’s Destroy All Monsters, Toho held a contest for Godzilla fans to name the reptilian tyke, and the world settled on the name “Minilla,” a portmanteau of “Mini” and “Godzilla”. In his initial appearance, however, he’s only referred to as “Baby Godzilla” by the humans on the ground gazing up at his towering, toddling glory. Minilla has gone on to become a viciously hated name within the larger, ongoing Godzilla fandom. He’s cited in online sources as Godzilla’s “adopted son,” but I’m not sure that his initial appearance backs that detail up either. In Son of Godzilla, Baby Godzilla is prematurely hatched from a mysterious egg when his nest is discovered by gigantic mantises (Kamakuras) looking for an easy meal. Before he can gather the strength to flee, he is immediately rescued by Godzilla, who is summoned by his pathetic cries for help. There is no appearance or mention of a mother figure who might have laid that egg, but the scientists & freelance reporter watching from the ground all immediately refer to Godzilla as the pitiful creature’s father. The King of Monsters takes on that responsibility with enough gusto that the question of their biological relation is beside the point. Godzilla teaches Baby Godzilla how to breathe fire and how to rule over the giant bugs that infest the small island where he hatched, like a dad teaching his son how to play catch or how to change a car’s engine oil. It’s all very cute, assuming that you can stand looking directly at the mini-Godzilla’s craggly face.

Baby Godzilla is cute in the exact way that a pathetically ugly rescue dog is cute. Every bumbling minute spent with him is a gift, since it’s a miracle he wasn’t immediately put down. When the giant mantises poke at his freshly hatched body, all he can do is roll around in the dirt like a waterlogged roast turkey that fell off the kitchen table. Minilla has neither a name nor a neck in his first appearance, the latter of which presumably develops during puberty for his species. He falls down constantly, he squawks like an injured donkey, and his every movement is scored as if he were an overweight clown trying to squeeze himself into an impossibly tiny car. I love him. The great thing about Godzilla movies is that they are, at their very least, 2-for-1 creature features that double the number of rubber-suited monsters you’d expect to see in an equivalent Roger Corman cheapie. Whether Godzilla’s fighting a three-headed hell beast, a giant crawfish, or a sentient pile of trash, you’re getting at least two monsters for the price of one. For its part, Son of Godzilla offers you four giant beasts: Godzilla himself (who graciously appears less than a minute into the opening scene), the aforementioned glowing-eyed Kamakura mantises, a giant spider named Kumonga and, the most unholy abomination of all, Baby Godzilla. That’s a lot of bang for your buck, so it’s a little silly that dedicated fans of the series waste so much energy complaining about this outing just because they have to babysit Godzilla’s uggo offspring to get to the good stuff. Not even Godzilla bodyslamming Kamakuras to death and then lighting their mantis corpses on fire is enough to overcome the film’s reputation as Kiddie Junk, à la Godzilla vs Megalon. Pity.

As always, the human drama in the periphery of these kaiju battles is mostly an afterthought. Director Jun Fukuda continues the fun island hangout vibe he previously established in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, putting in a bare-minimum effort to connect the kaiju shenanigans to an obligatory environmental message. A secret collective of environmental scientists has taken over a small island off the Japanese coast to conduct experiments in controlling the weather, in preparation for future climate change & overpopulation crises. Mysterious machines whir in the background while the scientists float balloons full of experimental chemical compounds into the atmosphere that can adjust the local temperature on demand. A freelance journalist crashes the party but ultimately doesn’t find these experiments nefarious, so he casually joins the crew as a cook (and a potential lover for the island’s sole resident, who lurks in the nearby jungle). The weather machine business does eventually come in handy in two ways, though. It offers Godzilla some miniature structures to knock down, as is his wont, and it sets up a graphically beautiful conclusion in which the scientists trigger a snowstorm that freezes Godzilla & Baby Godzilla into forced hibernation. The final image is of the parent & child huddling for warmth as they’re buried alive in snow, while the scientists escape the island via raft and congratulate themselves on a humane resolution to the monster attacks. Admittedly, they do find a way to escape without killing Godzilla’s baby, but I still found the image to be hauntingly sad. Baby Godzilla has a fucked up little face that only a parent could love, and Son of Godzilla vividly illustrates that cold isolation from an otherwise unkind world in its final minute. It’s almost enough to make you cry.

-Brandon Ledet

Maddening Odysseys

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Let’s ignore for a second who’s directing it. It’s insane that hordes of young movie nerds are buying tickets to an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey a full year in advance of its release date next summer. Of course, what those nerds are actually buying tickets to is The New Christopher Nolan Picture, as they’d show up to just about anything with that director’s name on it, in blind faith. There’s nothing culturally current or relevant about Homer otherwise, at least not in the decade since JLo was wooed with a thrifted “first-edition” copy of The Iliad in the  dipshit erotic thriller The Boy Next Door. So, there’s something incredibly funny about Nolan leading Dark Knight die-hards into Greek Lit scholarship for the next year, studying ancient verse and Wikipedia summaries in anticipation of the biggest summer blockbuster of 2026. I won’t be purchasing an advanced Odyssey ticket myself (partially because they’re already selling out), but I can’t pretend I’m above that kind of literary hoodwinking either. In fact, in the past week I’ve watched multiple 3-hour epic adaptations of ancient literary texts that I wouldn’t have any personal interest in if they weren’t repackaged as Movie Nerd fodder. Whether I was lured in by the director, the genre, the screengrabs, or—my biggest weakness—a physical media flash sale, I found myself spending hours getting lost in maddening odysseys into literary adaptation every night after work this week, finding way more academia than usual in my cinematic escapism.

Watching Federico Fellini’s 1969 adaptation of the ancient Roman epic Satyricon, it becomes clear why humanity bothered to invent the film camera in the first place: pornographic opera, operatic porno, and everything in-between. Every image elicits a “Whoa,” while every sound earns an “Eww,” splitting the difference between Hollywood Babylon extravagance & Grand Guignol grotesquerie. It’s also an impossible adaptation, as entire chapters of its source text have been lost to time, leaving gigantic holes in the story Fellini dared himself to tell. What’s left is a long journey in which our hero Encolpius attempts to reclaim a lost love slave who was stolen & sold by his best frenemy, Ascyltus. Much like Odysseus finding his way home after the Trojan War, Satyricon is an episodic adventure in which Encolpius repeatedly fails to reclaim ownership of his beautiful boy-slave while repeatedly running into Ascyltus having the time of his life no matter what perils the former bros find themselves in from scene to scene. There’s often no connective tissue between the individual set pieces, since entire chapters of the book are missing. So, it mostly functions as a collection of living tableaux, with Fellini striving to create images as beautiful and, to quote him directing the background actors on-set, “as wild & crazy as possible!” In some scenes, characters lament that fine arts like poetry, painting, and sculpture are not what they used to be while chatting in the ancient Roman equivalent of an art gallery. Other scenes are built around fart jokes & sexual farce in which the cure for impotence is getting your tush spanked by a harem of late-60s hippie babes. For your sanity, it’s best not to pay too close attention to the beat-to-beat progress of the story and instead save that energy for planning the next decade of Mardi Gras costumes around what lewks the hundreds of extras are modeling in the background.

Paying too close attention to every narrative avenue of 1965’s The Saragossa Manuscript would also drive an audience insane, which in that case is entirely the point. A Polish adaptation of an early-19th Century novel written in French but set in Spain, it’s already a Russian nesting doll of international post-modern contexts before you get into the particulars of the plot. In the first framing device, Spanish & French officers on opposing sides of The Napoleonic War find the titular manuscript in a home that’s crumbling under gunfire. Illustrated with surrealist art & vulgar erotica, the manuscript appears to tell the story of the Spanish officer’s own grandfather, baiting him to continue reading with promised insights into his own heritage. Roaming a countryside populated almost exclusively by demons & “evil ghosts,” the Spaniard in the manuscript finds himself listening to the endless anecdotes & half-remembered dreams of fellow travelers (each with their own characters who have stories to tell), mapping out an impossible labyrinth of framing devices within framing devices so absurdly complex even Guy Maddin couldn’t find the exit. By the time he’s five or so layers deep into anecdotes within dreams within tales within sagas, the Spaniard complains that he has lost track of the border “where reality ends and fantasy takes over,” which fellow listeners helpfully compare to abstract concepts like Poetry and The Infinite. Nothing especially exciting happens in The Saragossa Manuscript. The story involves demons, ghosts, Spanish Inquisitors, dream-realm polygamists, and swashbuckling swordplay, but it’s all just as mundane as listening to a friend describe a dream they had last week (in which a dreamed-up character recounted their own half-remembered dream). The most thrilling plot development is a moment when the Spaniard within the manuscript places his hands on a copy of the manuscript himself and starts reading the book of his own life, making it clear that the audience is being relentlessly fucked with without mercy.

The narrative shape of Marcell Jankovics’s animated epic The Tragedy of Man is much easier to define than either Satyricon‘s or Saragossa Manuscript‘s. It’s just as maddening in its narrative ambition & scale, however, as it attempts to recount the entire history of everything — from the birth of the universe to its inevitable future collapse. Completed over several decades of hand-drawn animation, The Tragedy of Man is a psychedelic infographic that illustrates humanity’s entire existence through the visual art, philosophy sermons, and methods of power in each era depicted. It’s as visually stunning as it is intellectually exhaustive, not least of all because it is adapted from a 19th Century play cited as the pinnacle of Hungarian literature. It’s difficult to imagine what a staging of that play might look like based on the constantly shifting psychedelia rendered here, in which early humanity is depicted in a series of cave paintings, ancient Egypt is depicted in animated hieroglyphics, modern times are depicted in Ralph Bakshi-style pop art, and the distant future is depicted in unfathomable science fiction speculation. The stage-play source text makes sense in the constant dual-voiced dialogue between the Biblical figures of Adam & Lucifer, however, who spend the entire three-hour runtime narrating the evolution of man’s self-destructive introspection & philosophy. No matter how harshly the art style or historical circumstances shift from segment to segment, it’s a constant refrain that humanity’s main folly is our ambition for everlasting fame, which leads us only to harm ourselves & each other instead of being happy with our current, temporary lot in life. What’s staggering about the film is its millennia-spanning quest to prove that point with visual & historical citations across the entirety of time, which is too large of a scale for the human brain to fully comprehend, let alone contain in a single work of art.

Each of these epic-scale literary adaptations were immensely satisfying as self-contained art films, but I’m not convinced that they’re effective as advertisements for their source texts. I’m no closer to reading Petronius’s Satyricon now that I’ve enjoyed the perverse visual delights of Fellini Satyricon. Likewise, I doubt Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is going to spark a renewed cultural interest in ancient art & poetry beyond inspiring a few opening-weekend clickbait articles. These unwieldy, impossible-to-fully-adapt literary source texts are much more useful to filmmakers than they are to the resulting films’ audiences. They inspire grand-scale, abstract storytelling in a medium that’s at its best when it reaches for Poetry & The Infinite instead of getting mired in pettier concerns like Logic & Plot. According to The Tragedy of Man, that kind of transcendent ambition is corruptive to the human spirit, but since all we’re doing here is telling stories and making pretty pictures, I guess it’s okay in this case. Hopefully, adapting a saga as immense & sprawling as The Odyssey will help break Nolan away from the more clinical, reserved approach he generally takes to blockbuster filmmaking. And if he happens to sell a few paperback copies of The Complete Works of Homer in the process, all the better.

-Brandon Ledet

The Age of Innocence (1993)

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The period-piece romance The Age of Innocence is never the first title that comes to mind in discussions of Martin Scorsese’s work, nor even the tenth. After a long career defined by stories of Catholic faith, brutal violence, and the mafia, the name Scorsese usually conjures crime-thriller titles like GoodFellas, Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman, not his adaptation of a Gilded Age romance novel by Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence is not all that extreme of an outlier within his larger catalog, though, at least not in terms of theme. Despite first appearances, it is a quintessential Martin Scorsese picture, in that it’s a distinctly New York story about violent passion & conspiracy. It’s also immediately recognizable as one of his very best, calling into question whether his career would’ve been improved if he were diverted into only directing the American equivalent of Merchant-Ivory costume dramas instead of sticking to his typical crisis-of-faith & organized-crime stories.

The plot is centered on a love-triangle scandal in 19th Century NYC, in which a young, ambitious lawyer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is distracted from his impending marriage to a naive socialite (Winona Ryder) by the arrival of her disgraced, free-spirited cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer), to whom he is a better-suited romantic match. While helping the cousin break free from an abusive marriage to a European nobleman without stumbling into the public scandal of divorce, the lawyer falls into obsessive, feverish love with her without even noticing his transgression. Everyone around the forbidden couple notices, however, even if the organized gossip network of NYC society would never speak such sin aloud in mixed company. The result is a competition between two simultaneous conspiracies: one in which the potentially adulterous lovers believe they are discreetly indulging in their shared passion without notice, and a larger one in which their city-wide social circle closes ranks to shut their emotional affair down for good before it has a chance to become physical. The shock of the story is in learning just how active the younger, performatively dim fiancée is within the conspiracy to nip the affair in the bud, which is the kind of last-minute reveal that makes you want to immediately rewatch from the beginning through a new lens — the highest compliment that can be paid to any movie.

All of the passion, yearning, and unspoken political maneuvering of the story is inherited from its literary source material, with Scorsese going as far as to preserve the beauty of Wharton’s prose in a constant narration track from Joanne Woodward. He makes his presence known in the visual language, though, pulling influence from infamously showy, experimental directors in his mental cinematic encyclopedia. He employed Saul Bass for the opening credits sequence—time-elapsed flowers blooming in double exposure over vintage lace—sharing a core collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock. Full-screen flashes of white, yellow, and red express the violent passion of his characters in direct allusion to François Truffaut. Stuttered montage of opera-house audiences recalls the crude, tactile animation of Stan Brakhage. The opera theatre itself—the grandest temple of New York social life—is shot with the erratic, swooping verve of Argento’s Opera. Longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker is equally aggressive in the editing room, overwhelming the audience with insert shots of extravagant meals & tobacco-smoking instruments in fetishistic detail. The director even physically inserts himself into the picture in a single-scene cameo as a portrait photographer, again recalling the legend & legacy of Hitchcock. He is respectful of Wharton’s source text, but he’s not delicate with it.

Even without Scorsese’s technical bravado intensifying the breathy dialogue exchanges, The Age of Innocence would still register as a cut above most of the literary dramas that rack up easy Best Costume Design Oscars year to year. The central cast is phenomenal, with Winona Ryder weaponizing her appearance of naivety to devastating effect, Michelle Pfeiffer causing havoc as the only member of New York Society who dares to speak & live honestly, and Daniel Day-Lewis showing a softer, more vulnerable side of himself before his wayward yearning transforms him into one of the violently passionate freaks he usually plays. His own naivety is neither cultivated nor performative, as he believes he is keeping his sinful desires hidden from the public while comparing the idea of his would-be lover returning to her marriage as a sentence worse than death & Hell in Byronic hyperbole. He never allows himself to fully consummate his lust, but the small ways he indulges it is somehow more sexual than actual sex — sneaking kisses to her wrists, her slippers, and her parasol as if those sneaky micro-transgressions could go possibly go unnoticed. The other two corners of the central love triangle are equally strong, but all of the passion, pain, and betrayal of the story is clearly visible in his dark, burning eyes, a reminder that he used to be one of the best actors in the world before he became an unlikely fashionista.

One of Wharton’s most clever lines preserved here is Pfeiffer’s observation that “all of the blind obeying of traditions, somebody else’s traditions” in New York society is self-defeating, since “it seems stupid to have discovered America only it make it a copy of another country.” All of the rules about virtue, propriety, fashion, and divorce that keep the central trio locked in a social prison of their own design are leftover from the social values of upper-class Europe. An entirely new world is being actively built around them, while they insist in living by the rules of an old one. Scorsese appears to be operating in a temporal limbo between old & new worlds here as well, gazing slack-jawed at the gorgeous oil-painting galleries & soaring architecture of the story’s Gilded Age setting while also brazenly distorting the visual aesthetics of the era through his own distinctly 1990s style. Both the romance of the picture and the auteur behind it are torn in two by the conflicting interests of tradition & passion. In that way, the seemingly incongruous marriage of filmmaker & genre is exactly what makes The Age of Innocence so remarkably great. It’s almost enough to make you wonder what would happen if Julian Fellows were making a hyperviolent organized-crime saga instead of coasting on Downton Abbey fumes with The Gilded Age.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: M3GAN v Superman – Dusk of Justice

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two superhero movies currently in wide theatrical release: M3GAN 2.0 (2025) & Superman (2025).

00:00 Welcome

04:17 I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
15:10 The Age of Innocence (1993)
21:57 Misericordia (2025)
28:50 Looney Tunes – The Day the Earth Blew Up (2025)
34:24 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

38:24 Megan 2.0 (2025) vs. Superman (2025)

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

The Leather Boys (1965)

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To my surprise, the film I’m most looking forward to from this year’s Cannes slate is not the new Lynne Ramsay, the new Ari Aster, the new Julia Ducournau, nor any other new release from an established-name auteur. The Un Certain Regard selection Pillion was the title that most caught my attention in the trades, teased with a premise in which “A timid man is swept off his feet when an enigmatic, impossibly handsome biker takes him on as his submissive.” Given their recent freakshow outings in Please Baby Please & Infinity Pool, respectively, the casting of Harry Melling & Alexander Skarsgård as that unlikely couple is certainly part of the attraction, despite debut writer-director Harry Lighton being an unproven no-namer at the time of this posting. Honestly, though, it’s just an alluring logline premise on its own no matter the talent involved, even if it’s more or less been done before: recently in Jeff Nichols’s excessively hetero biker-culture melodrama The Bikeriders and a half-century ago in the kitchen-sink drama The Leather Boys.

The Bikeriders starred Austin Butler as a gorgeous greaser whose affection is fought over by his wife (Jodie Comer) and his gang leader (Tom Hardy) despite his one true love being the open road, breaking both their hearts. That bisexual love triangle goes more or less unspoken despite the homoeroticism inherent to depicting a group of men whose sole passion is to get filthy, roughhouse, and pound beers together while dressed in heavy leather. It’s so blatantly intrinsic to biker culture that a 1960s British studio film could get away with telling its own queer love triangle story without being censored out of existence. The Leather Boys is just as carefully chaste in depicting its unspoken bisexual tug-of-war as The Bikeriders, and yet it was saddled with an X rating because it did not similarly bury those themes in subtext. In contrast, Pillion promises to be explicit enough in its themes and its sexual imagery to have legitimately earned that X rating, at least according to early festival-circuit reviews. Still, it’s impressive that such a non-judgemetal portrayal of closeted, hush-hush homosexuality within 60s biker culture was made in its time at all.

Colin Campbell stars as the lead leather boy, Reggie, who’s still a hotheaded teenager when he marries his high school sweetheart Dot (Rita Tushingham). The working-class knuckleheads aren’t at all prepared for the day-to-day realities of marriage, and they struggle to settle into a healthy routine after the initial rush of lust cools. Every conversation quickly escalates into a top-volume shouting match, with Reggie frustrated that his wife isn’t motivated to cook or clean while he works at the local garage and Dot frustrated that her husband no longer wants to have sex. To blow off steam, Reggie starts spending more time around his leather-jacketed biker buddies at the local cafe, where he strikes up a fast, passionate friendship with a flamboyant jokester named Pete (Dudley Sutton). Pete & Reggie hit it off so well that they end up sharing a bed every night in a relative’s spare room while the naive teens’ marriage hangs in limbo. Only Pete seems to be aware of the romantic tensions of this “friendship”, while Reggie doesn’t have any self-awareness of his own feelings or desires whatsoever.

The Leather Boys is a sordid love triangle played as kitchen sink melodrama . . . with motorcycle races! While its source-material novel depicts two young leather-clad lovers on a wild sex & crime spree, the movie version is deliberately subtle & underplayed, avoiding all of the typical road-to-ruin trappings of similar teen thrillers of the 1950s. No one dies. Reggie & Pete sleep together, but they do not fuck. The early implications that Pete is gay start as a general disinterest in girls and an eagerness to perform the wifely duties Dot neglects, and his queerness is only confirmed by the delicate way he holds his “fags” while smoking in bed. Reggie’s own sexuality is even more subtly played, to the point where it’s never fully defined. He’s confused by Pete’s social flamboyance, confused by his own disinterest in bedding his wife, and generally just all-around confused by his feelings & life. The only thing he’s certain about is that he’s intensely uncomfortable when Pete introduces him to a larger queer community at the local gay bar, which breaks the spell of their brief tryst as best bros.

Through all of its rocker-culture ephemera and the hormonal confusion of its lost teen lead, The Leather Boys ultimately proves to be a more direct prototype for the coming-of-age rock opera Quadrophenia than for The Bikeriders or Pillion. Its kitchen-sink realism mostly manifests in its improvised slang, with the Cockney teens punctuating their every thought with phrases like, “You’re a right blighter,” “Get roffed!” and, of course, “Innit?” There’s also a kind of hidden-camera quality to the visual style, framing both the cramped interiors & wide exteriors of the location shoots through an extreme wide-angle lens, as if the entire film were shot in a motorcycle’s rearview mirror. It’s a cool, sensitive, surprisingly frank story of a young man with conflicted feelings, torn between his love for his wife and his attraction to his fellow leather boys. The only reason it was rated X was so that impressionable teenagers wouldn’t leave the theater to buy bikes & leather jackets of their own and flirt with a little confused gay romance for themselves.

-Brandon Ledet

Neighborhood Rep, Neighborhood Pride

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I’ve said it before on this blog, but the current New Orleans repertory scene really is stronger than it has ever previously been in my lifetime. While the original uptown location of The Prytania has continued its Classic Movies series that used to encompass almost the entirety of local repertory programming, The Broad has massively stepped up its game in recent years to play a wide range of classic arthouse cinema titles I never thought I’d get a chance to see projected in a proper theater, making for a weekly spoil of riches. That recent vibe shift was especially apparent during this year’s Pride Month offerings at The Broad, which included separate programs from both the regular Gap Tooth series and a one-off Pride series sponsored by a self-explanatory social club called Crescent City Leathermen. Together, they combined for an impressively robust month of queer repertory cinema in one convenient venue, including a list of Swampflix-approved classics like Nowhere, The Celluloid Closet, The Queen and, most surprisingly, Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. It was an overwhelming bounty for a single month of programming, so I got to be extremely selective about which screenings to attend and narrowed it down to two titles I had never seen before from directors I love: Pedro Almodóvar & Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The beautiful thing is that I didn’t even have to leave my neighborhood to see them; what a gift.

While Gap Tooth was perfectly astute for programming 1991’s High Heels during Pride Month, it could have just as easily screened a month earlier to celebrate Mother’s Day. Almodóvar’s entire catalog is recursive & accumulative but, even so, High Heels plays like the scrappier, goofier dry run for his later commercial triumph All About My Mother (while still being fabulous on its own terms). Victoria Abril stars as a Madrid TV news broadcaster with a near-psychotic obsession with her lifelong-absent mother, a once-famous actress & pop star played by Marisa Paredes. As a child, she conspired to keep her mother to herself through Rhoda Penmark-level machinations, but she grows up abandoned anyway, inspiring a lifelong fetishistic obsession with a woman who doesn’t think much of her in return. When her mother makes a grand return to Madrid in her adulthood, the details of her obsession become overwhelming. Not only is her TV broadcaster career a pale imitation of her mother’s international fame, but she’s also married to her mother’s former lover & biographer and soon starts a sexual affair with a drag performer who impersonates the famous torch singer for cash tips. The strangely incestuous sexual tension between those four players gets even more complex as the mother resumes a previous affair with the daughter’s husband, who is soon found murdered by a mysterious visitor to his bedroom. As always, Almodóvar has a way of tangling the interpersonal conflicts & romances of all involved so gradually that it takes a long while to realize just how much of a melodramatic mess the plot appears to be when spelled out on paper. Even when introducing this sordid mother-daughter dynamic in childhood flashback, he simplifies the jealousy-and-indifference tensions of their relationship down to a simple symbolic object: an earring. When that earring catches on one of the women’s hairdo in the awkward hug of their adult reunion decades later, it’s carrying enough emotional weight to make you cry. At the same time, he’s clearly having fun with the gaudy tableaux of the melodrama genre in a way that verges on ironic humor, filling the screen with enough drag performances, dance breaks, high heels, and lipstick kisses to make getting imprisoned for murder in Madrid seem like a genuinely fun time for any woman lucky enough to get arrested. It’s just as funny as it is sincerely heartbreaking & sexy, easily ranking among the best of his works.

The Crescent City Leathermen’s screening of 1982’s Querelle landed on the exact opposite extreme of the masc-femme spectrum, staying true to the spirit of the organization’s namesake. Fassbinder’s late-career adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel is a crime story in which the only lawman on hand is a leather-daddy fetishist who operates more as a barfly than a proper detective. The film is a kind of pornographic opera, starring Brad Davis as the titular sailor & murderer who ruins the lives of any poor soul who happens to gaze upon his beefcake beauty. Querelle arrives in the port city of Brest with the dual purpose of following naval orders from his superiors while, why not, orchestrating a massive opium deal with the local barkeep as a side hustle. In that bar, he stumbles directly into an already complex love triangle involving his own estranged brother, the aforementioned barkeep, and the barkeep’s wife. All three players are erotically obsessed with Querelle at first sight—brother inlcuded—but the sailor ends up bottoming for the barkeep first, while constantly protesting that he’s actually straight as an arrow no matter how much pleasure he takes in receiving anal sex. The sex scenes fall just short of pornographic, but they are incredibly lengthy, sweaty, and intense. To make up for the lack of onscreen penetration, the movie purposefully mistakes violence for a sexual act, having Querelle insert knives & bullets into the local citizenry as he gets increasingly greedy in his local, self-serving rise to power at everyone else’s expense. Not having read the novel, the character motivations & plot revelations can be confusing from scene to scene, but just like watching an opera in a foreign language, the overall emotion & eroticism of the piece shines through the fog. Querelle is a primarily visual piece, with Fassbinder bathing the screen in intense washes of orange & blue gel lighting and accentuating the dreamlike quality of the setting by mixing jazz-age speakeasy iconography with 80s-specific props like video game arcades. From Derek Jarman to Todd Haynes to Amanda Kramer, there’s no shortage of sensory comparison points in approximating the film’s visual aesthetic, but by the end I could only see it as the evolutionary link between James Bidgood’s Pink Naricssus & Bertrand Mandico’s The Wild Boys — an unholy trinity of operatic male lust & violence refracted through cinematic artifice.

Both Querelle & High Heels are titles I’ve been meaning to see for years, but I dragged my feet on clearing them from my watchlist due to streaming inaccessibility and the cost of collecting physical media. As has been frequently happening lately, my procrastination was rewarded by local theatrical showings of these historically underrepresented queer classics, something I never would have dreamed possible just a few years ago. Now that Pride Month is over, Halloween Season programming is months away, and Gap Tooth is officially on their Summer Break, that overwhelming flood of once-in-a-lifetime repertory screenings is likely to dry up over the coming weeks, but I’m still feeling incredibly spoiled by what was recently on offer just a few short bus stops away from my house. New Orleans still doesn’t have nearly the breadth of repertory programming as larger cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or even Austin, but the work that’s being done on the few screens we do have within city limits has been getting exponentially more impressive & adventurous in recent years. The offerings at The Broad alone are worthy of local pride.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #242: Sinners (2025) & New Releases

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Welcome to Episode #242 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2025, starting with Ryan Coogler’s Southern-fried vampire musical Sinners.

00:00 Welcome

01:37 Mike Flanagan
03:04 Disclosure (1994)
04:50 Brokeback Mountain (2005)
09:53 Smiley Face (2007)
13:15 A Room with a View (1985)
17:01 High Heels (1991)
21:07 Querelle (1982)

25:12 Sinners (2025)
45:04 Companion (2025)
57:57 The Actor (2025)
1:08:58 Dead Talents Society (2025)

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

Gwen and the Book of Sand (1985)

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Gwen et le livre de sable (Gwen and the Book of Sand) is a 1985 animated feature directed by Jean-François Laguionie, with its illustrations and animations done in gouache, giving the whole film a very watercolor texture. The plot concerns Gwen, a teenage girl who is adopted into a nomadic tribe who live in a post-apocalyptic desert. One member of the tribe, Roseline, is identified as a witch, and is said to be over 170 years old, and it is through her we get what little knowledge we have of this world and how it came to be. She tells us that the gods destroyed the civilizations of the past, and that now the world is stalked by an Eldritch abomination called Makou, which periodically roams the desert and spews out reproductions of various household objects from the sky, usually of a gigantic variety. Of course, Roseline also believes that the walled city she and her people avoid and from which the Makou seems to originate is the afterlife and that those within it are spirits, but when we learn more about them later, it becomes clear that Roseline’s wisdom is incomplete and thus many of her concepts of the universe’s function are inaccurate. In Gwen, Roseline sees a girl who has never known fear and respects this about her, but when Gwen and Roseline’s grandson Nokmoon sneak out one night to make love and fall asleep in a giant chest of drawers, Nokmoon ends up taken by the Makou. As the rest of the tribe moves on, Roseline and Nokmoon journey to the “afterlife” to try and rescue him. 

This film, like The Tragedy of Man, is currently available in a remastered edition from boutique home video retailer Deaf Crocodile. I got to see it on the big screen at my local arthouse, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Although the motion of the animation is limited at times, that minimal movement lends the whole thing a storybook quality, rendering Gwen as a post-apocalyptic fairytale. It’s a fairly short feature, clocking in at under 70 minutes, but it feels no less fully realized than a film that was twice its length. The desert features fantastical creatures that feel like revisitations of earlier French animation experiments in design; there’s nothing as strange here as what you might see in La Planète sauvage or Les Maîtres du temps, but they are of a kind. The desert nomads live solely off of a diet of feathers harvested from a mutant ostrich, and the only light that they have at night comes from a bioluminescent scorpion. Where the film gets its most surreal visual elements is in the “gifts” of the Makou, as giant watering cans reign from the sky and Gwen and Roseline navigate a labyrinth of doors or summit a mountain range of clocks. We eventually learn that these items are generated by the Makou is response to religious supplication from the people who dwell within the walled city, where religion has dissolved into a unified cargo cult centered around the titular book of sand, which is in actuality a home goods catalogue from before the collapse of civilization. Their hymns consist of recitations of product descriptions, which then prompt the Makou into creating them. The leaders of this “faith” are two twin brothers who observe the captive Nokmoon’s psychically projected dreams and hope that this can help them to prompt the Makou to create something “alive” rather than the inanimate objects that it normally produces. 

The mechanics of all of this are mostly irrelevant. The world-building exists solely to allow for the visuals, and that’s where the film shines. Gwen is able to rescue Nokmoon because this is that kind of fable, and it’s mostly an accident. The twin priests observe that a spiral image in Nokmoon’s dream resembles the product image of a particular firework, and prompt their faithful throng into singing it into existence via the Makou, which backfires when the people below are terrified by the suddenly bright, loud heavens. Gwen’s presence in the climax has no real bearing on the events there, except that she is able to bring Nokmoon home. She knows a bit more about the world now than Roseline does, but she lets the old woman continue to believe as she always has. Even if that story is a little confusing for the audience (and there are certainly some things left up to interpretation and conjecture, which is why I would recommend watching this one with a friend), it’s the sumptuous use of a non-standard artistic technique that makes this one worth finding and checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wolf (1994)

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Wolf is an oddity. I went on a little bit of a werewolf movie sidequest earlier this year viewing The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Wolfen, and when I borrowed the latter from the library, I thought Mike Nichols’s Wolf was what I was getting. I have very strong memories of the evocative movie poster for this one in at least one of the video stores of my youth, and I’ve always been curious about it. How can you not have some curiosity about a werewolf flick helmed by the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two years before he made The Birdcage? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and James Spader, no less. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly noteworthy one either, which is likely why it gets mistaken for Wolfen. 

Will Randall (Nicholson) is the editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house, although he’s a relatively mild-mannered man—at least as mild-mannered as any Nicholson character can be—for someone of such prestige. He has a loving relationship with his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and the respect of his peers and subordinates (David Hyde Pierce, Eileen Atkins), as well as a strong affection for his protege Stewart (James Spader). While driving down a Vermont road one evening, he hits a large dark mammal with his car, and when he gets out to check on it, the beast bites him. Despite his doctor’s insistence that wolves are extinct in New England, Will is convinced that this is what bit him. At a party hosted by the owner of the company, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will is told that a new editor-in-chief has been appointed, and that Will can either transfer to an undesirable position manning the publisher’s office in Eastern Europe. Will immediately realizes that his “best friend” Stewart has stabbed him in the back, and he meets Alden’s daughter Laura (Pfeiffer) as he wanders the grounds, taking in the betrayal. Meanwhile, Will also starts to experience unusual physical changes, as the area around his wound sprouts long fur and his senses grow more enhanced, as he is able to smell tequila on the breath of a colleague, doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t need his glasses to read, and can hear conversations occurring in other parts of the office. Returning home one night, he smells something familiar on his wife’s clothing and confronts Stewart at the younger man’s front door before bounding up the stairs and animalistically and discovering his wife in Stewart’s bedroom, but not before snarling at (and perhaps biting) Stewart. 

It’s a pretty rote werewolf story, all things considered, and one that would have entered a market that was already saturated with American Werewolves, Teen Wolves, and Howlings. The script was co-written by Wesley Strick and, bizarrely, poet and essayist James Harrison. It is not based on Harrison’s novel Wolf: A False Memoir as one might suspect, and Harrison seems to have been involved initially simply because he and Nicholson were friends. This was Harrison’s second (and last) attempt at working in Hollywood, as he quit the film in exasperation over creative differences with Nichols. “I wanted Dionysian, but he wanted Apollonian,” he was quoted as saying (in literature, Dionysian attributes are those of intoxication and thus ecstasy, emotion, and disorder, while Appolonian attributes are logical, clear, and harmonious). That makes a certain amount of sense, but in the same interview, he then said, “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua,” which is less clear as a complaint. Strick, for his part, had risen to some prominence as the co-screenwriter of horror comedy Arachnophobia and had recently penned the script for the similarly messy 1991 Martin Scorsese picture Cape Fear as well as uncredited rewrites on Batman Returns. After 1997s underrated Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, his credits take a steep nosedive, as his credits include the much-maligned 2005 video game adaptation Doom, the ill-fated and poorly conceived 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and the 2014 rotten erotic thriller The Loft. I want to say that some of the weakness was already present in the script here, but it’s really impossible to tell what parts came from him and which were from Harrison, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Elaine May was brought in for some uncredited punch-ups (although the fact that Wolf is two full hours long and meanders in the middle shows her fingerprints if nothing else). 

Pfeiffer is excellent here as she always is, and it is interesting to see Nicholson play a more subdued character than he is normally known for. Spader is effective as the smarmy sycophant who turns out to be aiming for Will’s job (and bed), and it’s no surprise when he turns up late in the film undergoing his own lycanthrope transformation, although I couldn’t help but think about how much I would have enjoyed this film a little bit more if it had been Christian Slater in the role. The film’s supporting cast is quite good. Although Pierce gets very little to do, Eileen Atkins does very solid work as Will’s secretary. Richard Jenkins appears as the detective investigating the sudden death of Will’s wife Charlotte, and he’s paired with veteran TV actor Brian Markinson. Perhaps one of the biggest standouts is Om Puri, who appears as Dr. Vijay Alezais, the folklore specialist that Will tracks down in order to get a handle on all the changes that his body is going through. Alezais tells him that it’s less a transformation than it is a kind of possession, and that the wolf that now lives inside him isn’t evil, but will only make him “more” of whatever he currently is. He even gives Will an amulet that will keep the beast inside, and it does seem to be working until the moment that Will must remove it in order to gain the wolf-strength needed to save Laura from Stewart. 

There’s simply nothing special about Wolf. If anything, it’s pretty rote. A perfectly serviceable mid-90s cable afternoon feature, but no staggeringly clever take on any of its component elements. Pfeiffer is serving looks in this one that are so 1994 Eddie Bauer coded that you’ll get something out of this if that’s of interest to you. There’s a lot of slow-motion werewolf leaping that gives the impression that Nichols has never seen a single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, because all that’s missing is that bionic sound effect to complete the tableau, and I’m afraid that’s not complimentary. The film does make good use of the Bradbury Building, most notable for being the place where the climax of Blade Runner takes place but I also recently saw in D.O.A., and it’s always a comfort to the eye to see it in use. Still, it’s telling that I’m closing out this review of a werewolf review by praising the architecture. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond