Nothing But Trouble (1991)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

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)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

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

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

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)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

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

Halloween Streaming Report 2025

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: Presence (2025)

“Presence leans into the improbability of the found footage horror genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so you don’t question why the camera continues rolling; you only question why it’s choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The answer to that question gave me a goosebumpy shock and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way the best ghost stories do.” Currently streaming on Hulu

Oct 2: The Shrouds (2025)

“Grief has been the major theme of horror cinema for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 3: The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

“John Lithgow is always at his best when he’s playing inhuman villain, which in this case involves him performing a Punch & Judy puppet show that went so far off-script it became elder abuse.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 4: Cure (1997)

“A little skeptical of why so many movie nerds are willing to give into the pure-evil vibes of vintage Japanese horrors like this, Suicide Club, and Perfect Blue but get hung up on the plot incoherence of their modern American equivalent in Longlegs. Doesn’t really matter though; all are self-evidently great.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 5: The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

“This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

Oct 6: Sinners (2025)

“A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Funny & sexy too, improbably.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 7: Day of the Dead (1985)

“A brains vs brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse.  Hard to buy a premise in which scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population have their research derailed by meathead fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work.  Not really sure what Romero was on about there.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Peacock, and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 8: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

“The uselessness of the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping role seems clearly inspired by the handling of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ in which the States were actively involved, and the choice of a stadium as an evacuation area and the overreaction of armed authority to refugees and evacuees is evocative of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t stop the film’s treatment of the military from being a little “hoo-rah” in certain places, with Scarlet acting as the reasonable authority figure and Doyle evacuating survivors despite orders to kill on site, playing into tropes about good soldiers vs. morally questionable generals. Still, their ability to protect the citizens within seems doomed to failure from the start, based on the ease with which a couple of teenagers managed to slip out of the quarantine zone, so the criticism of the industrial complex holds.” Currently streaming on Hulu & Shudder

Oct 9: 28 Years Later (2025)

“It’s almost unfathomable to think that the rest of the world could simply move on from locking down multiple nations and washing their hands of the whole situation while consigning the people living there to almost certain eventual violent death at the hands of sprinting, infected undead. But then again, we’re kind of living in that world, aren’t we?” Currently streaming on Netflix

Oct 10: Tomie (1998)

“A perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

Oct 11: Audition (1999)

“I love how the perspective and basic reality of the ending doesn’t fit into any one tidy interpretation. A shame that the wave of American torture porn that followed didn’t pick up on that note and instead just echoed the gore” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 12: Carrie (1976)

“One of the core texts of the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, with especially thunderous echoes in titles like Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and Raw. This is the first time I’ve watched it that made me both cry (when Carrie is enjoying herself at the prom) and jump out of my seat (when Carrie’s hand reaches out from the rubble of her home). It’s so self-evidently great on its own terms that it’s easy to forget that it’s also a great De Palma film . . . until he starts splitting the screen and importing notes from the Psycho score. That’s our guy.” Currently streaming on MGM+ and AMC+

Oct 13: The Rage – Carrie 2 (1999)

“I haven’t wanted to see shitheel teens die in a movie this badly since, well, since I rewatched Carrie a few weeks ago . . . Except their deaths felt like an actual victory this time instead of just small & sad.” Currently streaming on MGM+

Oct 14: Companion (2025)

“It’s no surprise that this is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 15: The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

“A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. Sometimes “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 16: The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

“Shameless ‘Aren’t old people scary?’ exploitation, but super effective nonetheless.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Shudder

Oct 17: Communion (1989)

“The problem with casting Christopher Walken in your alien-encounter horror is that nothing you dream up could possibly be a convincingly alien as Christopher Walken. Full honesty, though, the first alien contact scene is 100% accurate to an uncanny experience I had in New Mexico about a decade ago, which is an embarrassing thing to say about a movie that’s otherwise so aggressively goofy.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 18: Tesis (1996)

“Often feels like the made-for-TV version of Red Rooms in its aesthetics, but it’s effectively eerie nonetheless. Does a great job playing with home-video audiences’ attraction/repulsion relationship with extremely violent images (and hetero women’s attraction/repulsion relationship with violent men), even if its own academic interest in the subject is self-admittedly superficial ” Currently streaming on Shudder & AMC+

Oct 19: Fade to Black (1980)

“An uncomfortably prescient film about how everyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 20: Deadline (1980)

“Canuxploitation meta-horror that puts itself on trial during the tax shelter era, belligerently presenting academic arguments that horror allows artists to process societal ills through metaphor while frequently interrupting itself with vignettes of low-brow, for-their-own-sake gore gags of dubious artistic merit. Just about as narratively flimsy as Lucio Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, and just about as unpredictably entertaining too.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 21: The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

“I didn’t expect to be expressing this, but this is easily the equal of Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Masque drew its production value from its elaborate sets and huge crowds of revelers, Corman knew what he had on his hands when he got the opportunity to film Ligeia at Castle Acre Priory, some of the best-preserved monastic ruins following the dissolution of most monasteries in the 1500s by Henry VIII. As a shooting location, this place lends this an immediate sense of gravitas. There are no in-studio “moors” full of machined fog and spindly little trees here, but a real, tangible sense of something manmade being reclaimed by nature, something historical but decayed.” Currently streaming on MGM+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 22: Nosferatu (2024)

“Wouldst thou like to live maliciously? It’s becoming apparent that Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a larger studio-budget scale. As a result, this doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date). It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

Oct 23: Alucarda (1977)

“A Satanic blood orgy between Carmilla, Carrie, The Devils, and The Exorcist, staged entirely on leftover sets from Kate Bush music videos. Impossible not to oversell it” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 24: Burial Ground (1981)

“So much care went into creating a wide range of gnarly latex zombie masks for this that it’s hilarious they left so many of the performers’ hands fleshy and relatively in-tact. It looks like they’ve never worked a day in their undead zombie lives.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 25: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

“More like The Texas Sledgehammer Massacre amirite? Honestly, this probably wouldn’t rank in my top 5 Tobe Hooper movies, since I’m more of an 80s splatstick guy than a 70s grindhouse guy, but I do respect that it is the 70s grindhouse movie: the one that everything in its wake has sweatily scrambled to emulate.” Currently streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Screambox, and for free (with ads) on Pluto TV

Oct 26: Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

“All the things that you want from a Final Destination movie are present: a harrowing opening scene, a bunch of people being snuffed out via Death’s contrived coincidences, an appearance from Tony Todd to explain the rules, a last-minute aversion of death that lulls the remaining survivors into a false sense of security, and a mean ending. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 27: Dead Talents Society (2025)

“Last year, this wonderful influencer-era update to Beetlejuice earned gradual acclaim & notoriety on the festival circuit only to be dumped on Netflix with no fanfare to speak of long after the word of mouth had cooled. Meanwhile, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice got the red-carpet festival premiere treatment at Venice before immediately cashing in on easy nostalgia money across every multiplex screen in America, despite not being half as charming or inspired. ‘I hate this world’ indeed” Currently streaming on Netflix

Oct 28: Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964)

“There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster design of all time. Loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. It’s so metal that it takes three other skyscraper monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head 🤘” Currently streaming on HBO and The Criterion Channel

Oct 29: Ash (2025)

“The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a ‘purpose’ or a ‘point,’ meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its ‘purpose’ is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its ‘point’ is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

Oct 30: Junk Head (2017)

“If this stop-motion nightmare comedy were made a decade or so earlier, it could’ve sold so many Hot Topic t-shirts. The world would’ve had no need for Salad Fingers. We’d be in a much better place.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and Kanopy

Oct 31: Frankie Freako (2024)

“Entirely accurate to the Gremlinsploitation genre it’s spoofing, in that for the first 20 minutes or so I was clawing my eyes out in fear they were never going to get around to setting loose the little monster on the poster. Once Frankie’s fully unleashed, however, it’s time to party. Shabadoo.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

-The Swampflix Crew

Dial M for Murder (1954)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

In narrative terms, the 1954 crime thriller Dial M for Murder isn’t much of an outlier in director Alfred Hitchcock’s career. If anything, it’s a useful timesaver for anyone looking for an overview crash course in Classic Hitchcock storytelling, as it effectively plays like what would happen if Strangers on a Train was retold within the stage-play limitations of Rope. Both of those preceding Hitch classics are hypothetical plottings of The Perfect Murder, which inevitably go awry in execution, leading to the murderer’s demise. The premeditated killer in this case (Ray “X-Ray Eyes” Milland) blackmails an old college classmate into killing his adulterous wife (Grace “Princess of Monaco” Kelly) as a lucrative act of marital revenge. The story is mostly contained in a single living room set and is rigidly sectioned into three dramatic acts: the opening act in which the killer explains the scheme to his accomplice, one in which the accomplice fails in his mission mid-strangling, and a final act of Columbo-style “howcatchem” investigation that puts the pieces of the puzzle back together through the nosy inquiries of an unassuming detective (John “Comic Relief” Williams). It’s all very tidy & succinct, possibly owing to the fact that Hitchcock was planning the much more elaborate production of Rear Window while going through the motions of adapting this morbid little stage play.

The surprising thing about Dial M for Murder is that its stage-bound telling doesn’t convey Hitchcock’s visual artistry, which is usually foregrounded as a knack for special effects dazzlement. At least, that’s what I thought when I first left the theater. At the start of the local screening of Dial M in The Prytania’s Classic Movies series, I was disappointed in the quality of the film scan, which appeared to be a fuzzy SD transfer from an ancient DVD print. Then, when Grace Kelly appears onscreen in the first interior scene, her gorgeous face & gowns were suddenly in sharp focus, as if someone had flipped on the HD-quality light switch. The initial fuzziness then periodically returned in a few exterior shots, which appeared to be partially composited or greenscreened for no practical, discernible reason. It turns out, of course, that this alternating visual quality was a result of the film being shot for 3D processing, then later retrofitted into a 2D print. It was produced in the brief early-50s window when the classic red-and-blue 3D glasses presentation was a popular fad, but the novelty of the effect had worn off by the time Dial M hit theaters, and the prints were descaled to a measly two dimensions halfway into its run. As Hitchcock bitterly acknowledged, 3D was “a nine-day wonder, and [he] came in on the ninth day,” making for one of the rare times when he was a latecomer instead of an innovator in visual effects.

The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies slot is a reliably wonderful way to catch up on any Old Hollywood mainstays that might be personal blindspots, and Hitchcock’s catalog has long been the backbone of that program. Since the single-screen theater is over a century old, it feels like time-traveling back to the classic films’ initial release, when they likely screened in that very theater. That effect was especially potent for their most recent screening of Dial M for Murder, which was preceded by a classic Looney Tunes short instead of trailers for upcoming attractions (the Hitchcock-spoofing Tweety Bird short “The Last Hungry Cat,” for anyone curious). Part of me wishes that they could have presented the film in its original 3D format, glasses and all, for maximum time-travel novelty. The truth is, though, that Dial M‘s 3D format was very quickly rejected by contemporary audiences, so that most people did see it screened in its confused & compromised 2D form, making my experience with the film authentic to its initial run. To the theater’s credit, they will also be screening William Castle’s 13 Ghosts in its original “Illusion-O” presentation this October, which was Castle’s personally branded 3D gimmick. There’s something beautiful about the fact that Castle’s own special-effects artistry is still chasing after its classier Hitchcock equivalents all these decades later, sometimes in the exact venues where they started their one-sided feud.

While learning about Dial M for Murder‘s retracted 3D tech after leaving the theater did help make sense of why its exterior & effects shots looked so bizarrely hazy, I still can’t figure out why Hitchcock would choose to give such a stage-bound story that treatment in the first place. The beauty of Dial M is in its narrative simplicity. By the final act, the nosy detective’s post-murder puzzle solving mostly comes down to three isolated pieces of evidence: a key, a letter, and a silk stocking. Those three pieces are moved around the puzzle board through verbal speculation, with most of the visual spectacle resulting from Grace Kelly’s elegant beauty and Ray Milland’s dastardly performance as a smug drip who hates his elegantly beautiful wife. Even so, Hitchcock finds small moments for visual extravagance, such as the husband’s explanation of how the murder should go down being framed in a high-angle shot from the ceiling’s POV, as if he and the killer were pieces on a board game. The only moments I can recall that may have benefited from the original 3D effect are the isolated shot of the contract killer reaching his hands out to strangle Kelly as she answers a phone call and the surreal shot of Kelly later answering to a judicial panel as if she were being tried for murder in the courts of Hell. Those few seconds of screentime are not worth filtering the rest of the picture through the 3D process, especially since it mostly consists of lengthy conversations in a single parlor.

It’s a testament to the strength of the stage-play source material and Hitchcock’s ability to wind up tension in his audience that Dial M is still solidly entertaining despite all of the needless distractions of its 3D processing. The Prytania’s Classic Movies crowd was an especially robust turnout that Sunday morning, likely owing to the director’s name recognition. Hitchcock always delivers, apparently even when working on autopilot.

-Brandon Ledet

Linda Linda Linda (2005)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

2005’s Linda Linda Linda is a very quiet movie about a very loud band. After a couple decades of spotty distribution in the US, the live-action Japanese high school drama has been restored and theatrically re-released by GKIDS, who mostly deal in hip, artful anime. The timing and the choice in distributor for this re-release make enough sense to me, both as a 20th anniversary celebration and as a companion to GKIDS’s recent theatrical run for the anime drama The Colors Within, which largely plays like Linda Linda Linda‘s animated remake. What I did not expect after years of seeing stills of its teen-girl punk band in social media posts championing the movie as an out-of-print, semi-lost gem is that it would be so gentle & understated. When the fictional band Paranmaum plays a hastily learned trio of raucous punk songs at the climax, the movie is exciting enough to make you pogo around the cinema. While Paranmaun is learning those songs in the few days before their first (and presumably only) gig, however, the energy is remarkably lethargic, to the point where the main narrative conflict is that the band is too sleepy to rock. To be fair, that’s exactly what I remember experiencing as a teenager: some of the most ecstatic, memorably chaotic moments of my life interspersed between long periods of feeling long overdue for a nap.

The name “Paranmaum” is presented as a Korean translation of “The Blue Hearts,” a real-life Japanese punk band. In the few days leading up to their high school’s annual rock festival, the teen girls of Paranmaum quickly form as a Blue Hearts cover band, inspired by the discovery of a cassette tape recording of the Hearts’ 80s hit “Linda Linda.” Initially, the major obstacle of their formation is the keyboardist scrambling to learn guitar after losing a couple former bandmates to injury & petty teen squabbling. The even bigger challenge, however, is the impulsive recruitment of a new lead singer, who didn’t fully understand what she was signing up for. Paranmaum takes a Korean name because their new singer is a Korean exchange student who can only speak rudimentary Japanese, agreeing to join the band through polite, confused nodding. As the guitarist learns a new instrument and the vocalist learns a new language, the girls learn to work as a real, legitimate group, effectively turning the band’s formation into a 72-hour sleepover. It’s an intensely romantic week in their young lives, one in which friendship & band practice are the most important things in the world; schoolwork & puppylove crushes can wait. When that cram session pays off and their three Blue Hearts tunes come together at the climactic concert, there’s no better feeling, and they’ll likely cherish that high for the rest of their lives.

This is primarily a movie about cultural exchange, with Japanese & Korean students reaching across a language barrier to become true friends and artistic collaborators. A lot of its nuance is likely lost to American audiences through its two levels of cross-cultural translation, but the rock ‘n’ roll bridge between its Japanese & Korean teen sensibilities is largely American made. While The Blue Hearts may be a Japanese band, their brand of ramshackle rock ‘n’ roll is inextricable from Western pop culture. As such, it was fun to take stock of the generic early-aughts rock posters that decorate Paranmaum’s practice space, which include artists as discordant & irrelevant to the text as Led Zeppelin, Marilyn Manson, Bob Marley, and The Verve. The only two band references that feel directly connected to the music that Paranmaum plays are the college-radio twee group Beat Happening (who appear on a background poster) and the CBGB-era punk icons The Ramones (who appear in a mildly surreal dream sequence that plays like a precursor to the 2010s Thai curio Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy). The other nondescript rock acts in that mix make for an overall sweet & unpretentious sentiment, though, one in which projecting hipster cool cred is secondary to having fun playing loud music with your friends.

Nostalgia for the playfulness of rock ‘n’ roll teenhood is obviously a major factor here. Maybe it’s for the best that I couldn’t access the film until 20 years after its initial release, when I was still a teen myself. Its early-aughts camcorders, flip-phones, and glue-on bling are firmly rooted in that era, but the film is so reserved in its pacing & tone that it likely would’ve tested my tastes at the time, which leaned towards more rambunctious punk rock chaos. Director Nobuhiro Yamashita views these teen bonding rituals from a physical & emotional distance. Characters are often shrunken by extreme wide shots that corral them into cramped doorframes while the camera studies them from afar. As a result, the film is oddly nostalgic for high school architecture as much as it is nostalgic for high school camaraderie. The most Yamashita gives himself a voice in the narrative is through the melancholic ramblings of a middle-aged teacher who gets overly emotional every time he attempts to reminisce about his own memories of forming a band with his high school buddies during the same festival. He gets too choked up to get the words out, so he instead keeps his distance, enjoying Paranmaum’s brief existence as a teenage art project for what it is. When that three-day punk band takes the stage in the final minutes of runtime, it really does feel like the most precious thing in the world, partly because it’s not designed to last. That’s a sentiment that only gets more potent with age & distance, even if the songs being played are immediately satisfying to everyone in the room.

-Brandon Ledet

Queens of Drama (2025)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I am a white, childless nerd rapidly nearing 40 years of age, so please take my trend-watching analysis of what’s cool & hip among the kids right now with a mountainous grain of salt. I do have the same 24/7 internet service and all-consuming social media addiction as every other doomed soul with the misfortune of living through these Uncertain Times, though, so I believe I am entitled to a little Youth Culture observation, however distanced. One clear theme so far this decade is that the fashions and pop iconography of the early 2000s are just as fetishized now as the 1980s were when I was a teen in those aughts. Everything crass & classless about the 2000s is now subject to ironic kitsch: middle-part hairdos, low-rise jeans, tramp stamps, belly rings, nu-metal, bejeweled & vajazzled everything. Since even I—an old man, a proverbial “Unc”—am aware of this current aughts-worship trend, I assume the moment is soon to pass, so I must act quickly in recommending a movie that fits the fad.

The new Altered Innocence release Queens of Drama is the perfect French musical for the supposed Y2K Indie Sleaze renaissance. It’s a knowing throwback to the vintage tastes of yore, drowning the audience in cathode-TV screens, compact disc rainbow sheen, and blinged-out nipple rings. The logline says it’s a sapphic romance between early-aughts pop & punk songstresses, so it makes sense the result of their union is pure electroclash. Imagine, if you will, a fanfic in which Kelly Clarkson and Peaches had a secret, decades-spanning love affair, and the only public record of its existence was a deep-dive YouTube video hosted by the “Leave Britney alone!” guy. Queens of Drama is Velvet Goldmine by way of Glitter, a self-aware attempt to give the pop culture runoff of the early aughts the epic rock-opera treatment that’s usually reserved for movements like punk, glam, and metal.

We start in the 2050s, with a squealing makeup-tutorial YouTuber getting the audience hyped to hear the lurid details of a secret love affair between their closeted pop-idol fav and her butch punk-scene girlfriend. The two women meet backstage during open auditions for an American Idol-style competition show called Starlets Factory. One is a formally trained singer whose mother has engineered her to be the next Maria Callas, while she’d personally much rather be the next Mariah Carey. The other is a self-proclaimed punk singer whose electroclash group Slit has built a small following in local lesbian bars singing outrageously filthy pop tunes about fisting & cunnilingus. Their attraction is mutual & ferocious, but the resulting love affair is quickly corrupted by their clashing levels of fame and their clashing comfort levels with their sexuality (as the pop singer stubbornly remains closeted to maximize the longevity of her career). Meanwhile, they discover another secret love affair conspiracy between their own favorite pop singers of the 1980s (think Madonna & Kate Bush) through breadcrumb trail hints left in vintage music videos, making their own story a part of a larger lesbian pop continuum.

At the risk of sounding like the twentysomething cinephiles who treat distributors like A24, Neon, and Criterion as if they were auteurs instead of corporations, Queens of Drama is perfectly in tune with the Altered Innocence brand. First-time filmmaker Alexis Langlois brings their own sensibilities to the screen here, especially in their fetishistic focus on the fashion iconography of the early aughts. At the same time, the film clearly belongs to the same queer fantasia realm as the work of Altered Innocence mainstays Yann Gonzalez & Bertrand Mandico. If nothing else, there’s a shot of the electroclash singer riding a miniature motorcycle that’s straight out of Gonzalez’s own debut You and the Night. As a result, the movie is much more easily recommendable to anyone who loves The Wild Boys & Knife+Heart than to anyone who loves Crossroads & Glitter, but surely there’s enough of a Venn Diagram overlap there for this title to find a dedicated cult audience. They just have to act quickly before the youth inevitably move on to indulging in 2010s kitsch instead.

-Brandon Ledet