Bull Durham (1988)

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As we’re nearing the midpoint of 2025, I’m making peace with the fact that my favorite new release so far this year is a movie about baseball. The laidback, casually philosophic baseball comedy Eephus finds tremendous thematic & spiritual significance in a sport that I’ve never really had much interest in before but now understand to be a rich cinematic subject. I was charmed by the team-camaraderie story told in A League of Their Own (both the 90s movie and the too-quickly cancelled TV show).  I had an unexpectedly emotional experience with the 90s baseball melodrama Field of Dreams as well, finding it to be a surprisingly affecting story about marriage, faith, and fatherhood – all filtered through the rhythms & spiritualism of baseball. My entire life, I’ve considered baseball to be about as boring of a spectator sport as watching someone assemble a jigsaw puzzle. I get that it’s an interesting strategic game for the players, but visually there’s just not much spectacle to it; it’s like watching competitive chess with the added excitement of … waiting around. All of that empty time spent loitering on the field and over-thinking game theory in the dugout does leave plenty of space for the transcendent poetry of cinema to flourish, though, and so I’m starting to appreciate the appeal of baseball movies these days even while still missing out on the appeal of baseball itself. As a result, it seemed like the perfect time to catch up with another classic example of the genre, the minor-league sex comedy Bull Durham.

Written & directed by former minor-league player Ron Shelton, Bull Durham attempts to provide behind-the-scenes insight to the general baseball-watching public of what it’s like to play for the minors. There are seemingly two career paths for competitive minor-league players, both defined by their relationship with The Major League (referred to in-film simply as “The Show”). Tim Robins is a young player on the upswing: a talented but undisciplined fuckboy who could earn his way into The Majors if he focused on honing his skills instead of bragging about what he’s already achieved. Kevin Costner is his older, wiser counterbalance: a dependable, level-headed player who’s aged out of his physical ability to compete in The Majors but is hopelessly addicted to the ritual of the game. Costner is hired to get Robins’s wildcard hotshot pitcher into shape as his more mature, grounded catcher, entering the scene with a verbatim “I’m too old for this shit” complaint of jaded exhaustion. Their old-timers vs. new blood conflict is quickly supercharged by the intrusion of Robins’s other unofficial sidelines coach: a fellow “too old for this shit” team groupie who sleeps with one promising player every season so she can help mold him into something great. Naturally, Susan Sarandon steals the heart of both men in that part, and the question of whether this will be her final season hangs just as heavily over her head as it does for Costner.

I might not ever fully understand the spiritual power of baseball, but I feel like I’ve intrinsically understood the full sexual dynamism of Susan Sarandon my entire life, so this is likely the most effective gateway to appreciating the sport as I’ll ever find. Sarandon is nuclear hot here, flavoring the cougar seductress role she later filled in White Palace with a thick Southern drawl, recalling Dolly Parton’s sweetly sexy narration track in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Her pursuit to reshape Robins’s wild horndog energy into something more purposeful & measured takes on a distinct BDSM power dynamic as soon as their first night together. He wants to tear his clothes off and immediately jump into bed, but she makes him slowly strip to really feel his body, then ties him to the bed and reads him classic poetry as foreplay. Later, she convinces him to wear black-lace lingerie under his uniform to help distract from the internal self-doubt monologue that throws off his pitches. When he first meets her, “he fucks like he pitches, all over the place,” but by the time they part she’s almost literally whipped him into shape. Meanwhile, her sexual dynamic with Costner is much more sincere & equitable. When Costner ties her to the same bed, it’s to paint her toenails as a visual substitute for cunnilingus. He’s mature enough to take things slow, all romantic-like, which is an energy Sarandon struggles to adjust to after “coaching” so many jumpy, undisciplined fuckboys over the years.

Bull Durham wastes no time to addressing the spiritual, transcendent aspects of baseball. In her opening narration, Sarandon explains that she has chosen to dedicate her spiritual life to the sport as a direct substitute for religion, musing about how the 108 beads in the Catholic rosary directly correspond to the 108 stitches in a regulation baseball. She’s not the only old-timer in the picture who pontificates about how The Church of Baseball is “the only thing that truly feeds the soul,” either. Whenever Costner gets misty-eyed bragging about his brief time playing in The Majors, he gets lost in the thought that “The ballparks are like cathedrals.” All of the game theory, philosophy, ritual, and superstition that goes into keeping even a mediocre minor-league team on its feet for a season gets away from everyone involved, and the genius of the film is in how it’s connected to Sarandon’s own complex theorizing on the transcendent poetry of casual sex. For his part, Ron Shelton brings all of this spiritual abstraction down to a tangible, real-world level once Costner & Sarandon make peace with their impending retirement. At the climax, Sarandon explains in narration, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a job.” Balancing that working-class practicality with the spiritually fulfilling poetry of the sport is something I’ve seen wrestled with in all of the various baseball movies I’ve been watching lately, so I suppose there’s an undeniable truth to the observation.

-Brandon Ledet

Beau Travail (1999)

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It’s no secret that I was no fan of Claire Denis’s High Life when I saw it nearly six years ago, but I had always heard the director’s name in conjunction with high praise for her work. Often foremost among those cited as her masterpieces is Beau Travail, a 1999 film loosely based on the (infamously unfinished) Herman Melville novel Billy Budd. And the people are right! Beau Travail is a ballet, a very simple story that plays out slowly over long tracking shots of desert topography and portraiture of stoic, unchanging faces, with very little dialogue. Instead, the narrative is composed almost entirely of internal monologue of Adjutant-Chef Galoup (Denis Lavant), as he recalls the last days he spent in Djibouti overseeing a division of the French Foreign Legion there, and the mistake that cost him his career. 

I’m going to relate to you the whole plot in this paragraph, because that’s not what’s important here, and there’s not much to it, really. In the desert, Galoup oversees a group of about fifteen Legionnaires. He has a heroic worship of his own superior, Commandant Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor), which may verge on the romantic. Galoup’s life takes a turn with the arrival of Gilles Sentain, a new young Legionnaire. Galoup takes an instant dislike to the newest member of the team, which is exacerbated when he perceives that Forestier has a fondness for Sentain. While in the field at an abandoned barracks, Galoup goads Sentain into striking him by excessively punishing another Legionnaire and kicking a canteen out of Sentain’s hands when the boy attempts to give water to the man being punished. Sentain’s own disciplinary action takes the form of being stranded in the desert and forced to walk back to camp, but Sentain’s compass has been tampered with, and he becomes lost and apparently dies. Although most assume that Sentain simply deserted, a common practice among Legionnaires, Forestier nonetheless sends Galoup back to France to face court martial and dismissal for his actions; back in Marseille, Galoup recollects the events that we have just witnessed while demonstrating that he cannot shake the habits of a soldier, and the film ends ambiguously as Galoup dances alone in an empty nightclub. 

Beau Travail is a film about ambiguity. We know next to nothing about Galoup’s past, so everything that we learn about him is delivered through his narration, which is clearly not always reliable. Discussing his relationship with Forestier first, it’s clear that Galoup is, or at least was, in love with him at some point in time, but my interpretation is that there probably was some kind of sexual relationship in the past in which Galoup was more emotionally invested. He narrates that the commandant never confided in him, but he does so while lovingly coaxing a memento: a bracelet inscribed Bruno. This aligns with my interpretation of the scene between Forestier and Sentain while the latter is on night watch (one of very few scenes in which Galoup is not present to witness what is otherwise a fairly straightforward first-person perspective on his part). Forestier seems flirty with the twenty-two-year-old and beautiful Sentain, from which I infer that Forestier occasionally latches onto young and handsome recruits, with Galoup having been one of his previous conquests/victims, with Galoup still harboring feelings for the commandant. 

None of this is explicit, however, and there’s a great deal left up to interpretation. Their relationship could very easily be the purely professional one that we actually witness onscreen, and it’s entirely possible that the scene in which Forestier coyly interacts with Sentain happened entirely in Galoup’s imagination. The departure from the “Galoup’s perspective” format could be implying this; even though he isn’t present in the scene, this is still his story, it’s just one that’s created by him rather than one that is being recalled. That’s another level of the film’s ambiguity, as much of it plays out as if what we’re seeing is the truth while what we’re hearing are Galoup’s internal rationalizations and judgments. In nothing that we see does Sentain do anything to earn Galoup’s scorn, we are merely told that Sentain was inordinately popular with the other Legionnaires, and we are told that Sentain goads Galoup. Yet there are other large sections of the film in which what we’re seeing feels more representational, most notably the various choreographed exercises that the Legionnaires do, glistening beneath the hot African sun. They are more dance than training, and there’s one sequence in which the group is doing a series of stretches which ends with all of them in a position that makes them appear dead, the camera winding about slowly to ensure we see the entire squad in a synchronized death pose. Are these scenes “real”? Why does Galoup go out one night in his uniform but is in his all-black civvies the next morning when he encounters the other Legionnaires? The reality being conveyed here isn’t important, the truth is, at least as far as what’s true for Galoup. 

As we catch up narratively to Galoup back home in Marseille, we see that the man may leave the military but the military does not leave the man. He irons his civilian clothing to a perfectly crisp press and in the penultimate scene makes his bed with the precision of man who’s faced inspection. Once this is complete, he sets his pistol next to the bed and lies down on it, the camera passing over his chest tattoo which reads “”Sert la bonne cause et meurt” (“Serve the good cause and die”) before finally closing in on a pulsing vein in his bicep that feels ominous, as if we are waiting for that movement to stop. Instead, the film cuts to Galoup in a nightclub. We know that he’s alone as he stands before a wall of diamond shaped mirrors, beveled at the edges, which we’ve seen a few times throughout the film, as through starts and fits, he dances alone to “Rhythm of the Night.” I thought that the mirrored wall was in the club in Djibouti, which would imply that this is a dream sequence, but is it? Or does Galoup just fill in the details with the familiar when his memory fails him? Did he kill himself, or is he finally just loosening up? I couldn’t tell you; I can only convey my interpretation, and it would be better for you to find this one and let it wash over you so that you can make your own judgments. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Quadrophenia (1979)

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I’ve never fully understood where Quadrophenia fits in the grand rock ‘n’ roll continuum. A love-letter to the Mod craze among UK rockers in the 1960s, it was made in a time when that fad’s clean-cut, tailored look had already been nostalgically reclaimed by British punk acts like The Damned. As a result, it’s difficult to tell whether some of the jerky, pogo-style dance moves the Mod kids pull in the film are period-accurate to 1960s rock shows, or if the punks filling out the crowd scenes were bringing some contemporary energy to the production that blurred those temporal boundaries. It’s just as likely the teenage reprobates of both eras happened to dance like that because they were on the same drugs—namely, a combination of cheap beer & stolen amphetamines—so it’s an impossible distinction to make. The project was strangely out of sync with itself since the point of conception, though, considering that it’s a bloated stadium-rock opera adapted from a concept album by The Who at their most overwrought, but it’s set in a time when The Who were a definitive force of ramshackle, no-frills rock ‘n’ roll. One of the most iconic scenes in the film features a Mods-only house party in which the entire crowd erupts into chaos when someone spins The Who’s proto-punk classic “My Generation” on the turntable, which is in disorienting aural contrast to the sleepier, sappier Who tunes that score the soundtrack proper. It’s a picture entirely out of time, evenly split between its setting and the era when it was made. That usually is the case with period pieces, but the ever-evolving trends & deviations of rock ‘n’ roll just makes the dissonance ring even louder than usual.

Perusing the extra features of the Criterion DVD copy of Quadrophenia I recently found at a Public Library liquidation sale, it seems that being out-of-sync with current rock ‘n’ roll trends was inherent to the Mod subculture from the start. Distinguished by their tailored suits, their rejection of early-50s rock ‘n’ roll, and their choice to ride motorized scooters instead of roadster motorbikes, Mods were in direct, violent opposition with the macho, leather-jacketed rockers that kept older rock traditions alive in the years before glam & punk changed everything. In addition to the usual talking-head interviews with the filmmakers, the Criterion discs include several French television news reports about these violent clashes, justifying the film’s third-act, beachside gang war with extratextual evidence that the two subcultures’ rumble was relatively credible to real-life events. However, what struck me most about those news reports was the culturally scattered, postmodern nature of their very existence. Here we have archived broadcasts from French journalists who are fascinated with the hard-edged lifestyle of British teens whose obsession with Italian fashion has spawned a newly mutated subspecies of American rock ‘n’ roll. The French reporters land a few zingers against Mod culture as a “new dandyism” that contextualizes it within older traditions of British counterculture. The postmodern multi-nationality of the phenomenon added an entirely new layer to rock ‘n’ roll cultural identity, though, whereas the motorcycle-riding rockers that the Mods clashed against were only one layer deep, idolizing American rock & fashion from earlier decades.

Appropriately, the strung-out protagonist who guides our tour through the Mods vs Rockers moment of the then-recent past is, himself, out of sync with the world around him. Phil Daniels stars as Jimmy Cooper, a pill-popping teenage Mod who can barely hold onto his entry-level mailroom job because he spends all of his nights sweating through his suits and jumping around to rock ‘n’ roll music with his dirtbag friends. Jimmy is constantly on the search for drugs he cannot find and cannot afford. He’s constantly crushing on a girl who’s only looking for a bit of fun, while constantly ignoring the flirtations of the other girl who actually wants him back. His desperation for Mod-scene notoriety (mostly so he can land his dream girl) only manifests in useless acts of teenage rebellion, like dragging his scooter through more uptight Brits’ flowerbeds, until he’s really given a chance to shine at a town-wide gang fight with rockers that ends in mass arrest. Only, when he’s released from jail, he’s found that his moment of fame was fleeting, his dream girl has already moved on, and the drugs are starting to weigh heavily on his fragile, hormone-addled psyche. In an early, telling scene he has a loud argument about music tastes with a rocker at the local baths (heads up for anyone who’d like to catch a glimpse of a young Ray Winstone’s cock & balls) that ends with the opposing Mod & rocker realizing that they were childhood friends, and there’s no substantial difference between them once stripped of their respective paraphernalia. The tragedy of the film is that Jimmy wants that subcultural distinction to signify a substantial difference between them; he relies on Mod-culture insignia to give his days & persona meaning, only to inevitably find it another empty frivolity, just like everything else in life.

Of course, Quadrophenia itself became a cultural touchstone to be disseminated in the great rock ‘n’ roll diaspora. The reviews & marketing for Jon Moritsugu’s 1994 punk-scene whatsit Mod Fuck Explosion reference West Side Story as the source of inspiration for its fictional gang war, but since the gangs in those films are the titular scooter-riding Mods vs. motorcycle-riding rock ‘n’ rollers, it’s a lot more likely Mortisugu was pulling directly (and cheekily) from The Who’s rock opera. So, there you have a snotty 90s-punk reiteration of a 70s-punk echo of a 60s-rock fad that split from 50s-rocker roots. It’s an out-of-sync rock cinema tradition you’ll find in other beloved period pieces like American Graffiti, Velvet Goldmine, and 24 Hour Party People — all precariously balanced between the eras they depict and the eras in which they were made. If there’s anything positive to glean from that temporal precarity, it’s the overall sense that rock ‘n’ roll never dies; it just tries on different silly outfits from time to time. The Mods’ outfits just happened to be sillier than most. I mean, who wears a tailored suit to a punk show?

-Brandon Ledet

Three by Jon Moritsugu

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There was a brief, glorious time a couple years back when AGFA’s scan of Jon Moritsugu’s 1993 trash-art classic Terminal USA was streaming on The Criterion Channel. Not only did that ungodly godsend set distorted expectations of Moritsugu’s working being legally & conveniently available for home viewing, but it also distorted my expectations of the director’s political themes. In Terminal USA, Moritsugu reached through the TV sets of suburban America (via highly improbable PBS broadcast) to mock & torment the suburbanites on the other side, offering a grotesque reflection of the nuclear family unit as performed by a punk-rot regional theatre troupe straight out of Mortville. Having not seen his other work, I assumed that John Waters-style strain of freaking-out-the-normies antagonism echoed throughout the rest of Moritsugu’s catalog, but it turns out he generally could not care less what suburbanites are up to. I recently lucked into purchasing a trio of lesser-seen Moritsugu films second-hand on DVD, which together painted a picture of a much more insular, flippant director concerned more with petty punk-culture preoccupations than any of the ideals those punks supposedly buck against. These are movies about young wannabe iconoclasts who are desperate to stand out, look cool, get famous, and be celebrated for doing nothing in particular, all while enjoying the street-cred status of never “selling out.” This trio finds Moritsugu mocking his own people rather than mocking the off-screen suburbanite conservatives whose phoniness is taken for granted, which in a way makes them more personal works than the bigger-picture political statement of Terminal USA.

Moritsugu’s first feature film was funded by a settlement from a factory-work accident that nearly tore off his arm. The only reason it qualifies as feature-length is that he stretched it past the 1-hour runtime mark on a dare from a friend who was tired of seeing him waste his time on shorts. The resulting ramshackle, barely held-together energy of 1990’s My Degeneration is about as D.I.Y. punk as cinema gets. It perfectly captures the editing style, snotty sarcasm, and punk-scene snobbery of a vintage Xerox’d zine . . . now in motion on the big screen! “A story of Greed, Scum, and Filth,” it follows a trio of California teens (despite being filmed in Rhode Island) whose punk band Bunny Love is co-opted by The American Beef Institute to promote meat consumption among disaffected, MTV-era youth. The movie opens with Bunny Love’s lead singer praying to portraits of Jesus Christ & Madonna in her bathroom mirror to make her famous – a prayer that’s immediately answered by an evil corporation that purchases her band, renames it Fetish, and starts landing her national headlines like “Is Meat Art? Fetish Thinks So!” The girls are quickly corrupted by “the stench of stardom,” but selling out their punk ideals registers as a small price to pay in exchange for national fame. Even the inevitable burnout & breakup part of the rock ‘n’ roll rise-to-fame cliché seems to be a career goal for them, rather than a dire warning. They want it all. Meanwhile, Moritsugu teases this short-film premise to feature length by filling the screen with hideous video-art footage of mimed punk performances and meat-industry waste, with detours featuring a talking pig head that romances the lead singer of Fetish in her spare time between gigs. It’s the much rougher, meaner version of proto-riot-grrrl classics like Times Square & The Fabulous Stains, with an incredibly cynical worldview about what punk iconoclasts really want to achieve with their music.

1994’s Mod Fuck Explosion is much more realistic about the kind of fame most teenage urbanite punks can achieve. It’s the story of one girl’s quest to earn her own leather jacket, so she can look as tough & cool as the motorcycle gangs who regularly clash in her neighborhood. Most reviews of Mod Fuck Explosion cite it as Moritsugu’s dirt-cheap remake of West Side Story, but really it’s his dirt-cheap remake of Quadrophenia: a gang warfare drama about a pathetic, meaningless clash between traditional rock ‘n’ roll bikers and nerdy scooter-riding Mods. It goes one step beyond Quadrophenia by graciously extending Kenneth Anger biker-gang fetishism to include moto-scooters, making that fetish much more financially accessible to its cast of terminally bored teenage wastoids. Otherwise, it allows that turf war to fade into a background hum while Amy Davis (Bunny Love’s fictional drummer & Moritsugu’s real-life spouse) frets about where she fits into the world of street-toughs as a teenage brat who doesn’t even have her own leather jacket. Despite all of Moritsugu’s snotty flippancy elsewhere, Davis gets genuinely introspective here in her frustrated teenage boredom. While roaming an industrial art-instillation piece, she worries in voiceover that she’ll never truly fight, never truly fuck, and never truly be cool. It’s later revealed that she’s mostly been comparing herself to her much cooler older sister, who has retired from local punk-scene notoriety to enjoy a static life consuming “schizophrenic painters, tortured writers, fashion designers, low & vulgar literature, porno movies, video games, punk music, motorcycles, tattoo artwork, homo poetry, disaster & murder magazines, and horoscopes.” Even though she no longer needs it herself, her sister still won’t hand over her own leather jacket, which sits in the closet unworn as a symbol of her past teen-years fame on the local scene.

While My Degenration & Mod Fuck Explosion are the much cooler and more recognizable Moritsugu titles in this trio, 1997’s Fame Whore is by far the funniest. That superlative is mostly earned by Amy Davis’s robotically verbose performance as a socialite sycophant who will not stop monotonously bragging about her accomplishments in her 27 simultaneous careers as a “video artist, fashion designer, painter, actress, photographer, producer, art director, image consultant, playwright, performance artist,” and the list goes on. That NYC wannabe fashionista splits the runtime with two other titular fame whores: a hothead tennis pro who brags about his insatiable libido in the third person and an animal-rights activist who’s reluctant to share his do-gooder cred with any coworkers at his New Jersey dog shelter, so he spends his work hours talking to an imaginary sports-mascot dog instead. They’re all pathetic losers, just like the rest of us. As with Terminal USA, there’s something especially heightened & subversive about Moritsugu’s freak-show characters escaping punk-scene containment and doing decidedly un-punk things like, in this case, filing their taxes & negotiating endorsement deals. It’s like when John Waters left the trailer park & Mortville behind to instead terrorize the normies in his own suburban-invasion comedies post-Polyester. Shot on a grainy, degraded 16mm film stock just like the rest of his punk-zine-in-motion features, Fame Whore would never be mistaken for a mainstream studio comedy, but it does find Moritsugu pretending that he has “made it” as a filmmaker. If he had included a sarcastic live-studio-audience soundtrack, it would’ve played exactly like a primetime multi-cam sitcom — complete with a goofball sidekick character in the imaginary Mr. Peepers, whose smartass quips follow in a long tradition of Great Gazoos, Alfs, and Mister Eds.

The only bonus feature to speak of on any of these mid-2000s discs is a feature-length commentary track for My Degeneration, but it does offer major insight into the bigger-picture ethos of Moritsugu & Davis’s film company Apathy Productions. They basically act as their own Beavis & Butthead-style stoner hecklers, complete with vocalized guitar noises and bored digressions from anything happening on the screen. The entire exercise is meant to mock anyone who’d take this work seriously as academic fodder (i.e., me) instead of what it truly was: a group of friends playing around with camera equipment in a quest to make something Cool. The way Moritsugu scratches up the celluloid for shots that didn’t come out right, films television sets at incompatible frame rates, and frequently fills the screen with punk-show-poster block text of phrases like “THE SHIT GENERATION” & “TEEN SUICIDE EXPLOSION” is all D.I.Y. formal experimentation to make art that visually appeals to his scuzzy friends (who’d assumedly rather be pounding beers than watching art films, if asked). There’s a tension between his own punk-rock credibility and his desire to reach a wide audience as a Famous Artist, then, as evidenced by his films being submitted to international film festivals instead of just being screened as opening acts at basement punk shows. In that context, his career highlight likely wasn’t hijacking PBS’s public funds to make Terminal USA. It was when Roger Ebert made a show out of walking out of My Degeneration seven minutes into its premiere at Sundance. That way, he became famous (on the independent film scene, anyway) without becoming marketable, so his films couldn’t be used to promote beef sales or tennis shoes.

-Brandon Ledet

Vision Quest (1985)

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The 1985 high school sports drama Vision Quest has exactly one attention-grabbing detail that argues for its continued cultural relevance four decades later: a mid-film Madonna concert. About halfway through his rise-to-local-notoriety story, the film’s high school wrestling hero (Matthew Modine) meets with his age-inappropriate romantic crush (Linda Florentino) at a dive bar where Madonna happens to be performing to a small crowd as if she were a punk act and not, in fact, an international pop star. At the time of casting & filming, Madonna was just one of many 80s pop acts included on the soundtrack to signal hip, with-it tastes to the teenage target demo: Journey, Dio, Berlin, Tangerine Dream, etc. By the time Vision Quest hit theaters, however, Madonna’s fame had exploded, and she was already a generational style-icon, prompting the film to be marketed under the alternate title Crazy for You in multiple countries outside the US. Italian distributors even featured her image on the retitled film’s poster, despite her commanding only two minutes or so of onscreen performance time. Madonna sings two songs in that brief sequence: a godawful tune I’ve never heard before called “Gambler” and the semi-titular hit “Crazy for You,” which later replays anytime the romantically conflicted wrestler gets in his feelings. Still, it was the notoriously cinephilic pop star’s first motion-picture appearance, which does afford it a lasting cultural significance.

Madonna aside, it’s worth noting that Vision Quest is a very good movie. It may walk & talk like a corny, cliché sports drama, but it finds surprising complexity & nuance in every character beat that elevates it above formulaic tripe. Modine’s troubled-young-man protagonist might think he’s struggling to get his body in shape to become a legendary high school wrestler, but he’s really struggling to get his mind in shape so that he doesn’t become a bully with an eating disorder. The 18-year-old kid is caught between two all-consuming pursuits: cutting weight so he can qualify to wrestle the county’s most intimidating competitor (the relatively unknown Frank Jasper) and losing his virginity to the 21-year-old drifter who’s temporarily staying in his family’s spare room (Florentino). Neither goal is especially high-stakes. The mutant teen he desperately wants to wrestle will lead to no championship trophies or financial scholarships; it’s an entirely arbitrary, self-imposed metric for greatness. Likewise, the mildly taboo Age Gap relationship he pursues with the drifter is not his only sexual or romantic opportunity (he is a sweetheart jock, after all), but he’s still so obsessed with the self-imposed goal that he starts to consider a professional career in gynecology so he can “be able to look inside women, to find the power they have over [him].” The only thing at stake in these pursuits are his own mind & body. Will he permanently harm himself in order to temporarily drop a couple weight classes for a wrestling match that ultimately doesn’t “matter”? Will he become a manipulative fuckboy in his frustrated yearning over the more sexually casual, mature drifter? These are not world-changing consequences, but they are life-changing ones.

As with all great genre films, it’s not what happens in Vision Quest that makes it stand out from its easiest comparisons; its greatness is all in the delivery. Modine does a great job playing a friendly, ambitious young man who’s in danger of becoming a dipshit if he allows his ambitions to overpower his friendliness. Most of his dialogue is delivered as shy muttering, which makes him a more convincingly authentic Movie Teen than most. Florentino conveys a laidback, detached sultriness as the (relatively) Older Woman archetype, a quality that her younger lover provocatively describes as exemplifying everything he likes about girls and everything he likes about guys. Even all of the obligatory gay-panic moments required of an 80s teen drama about male wrestlers are handled with surprising nuance & complexity, with Modine only describing himself feeling “a little freaked” by homosexual advances, not violently furious. More importantly, his older, grizzled coworker in a small hotel’s room service kitchen (J.C. Quinn) delivers a convincing argument that the climactic wrestling match does serve a greater communal purpose outside its importance to the teen’s self-worth. He describes sports as a divine transcendence of the human form, arguing that when an athlete can “lift himself, and the rest of us sad-assed human beings, up to a better place to be, if only for a minute […] it’s pretty goddamn glorious.” It’s such a great speech about the communal ritual of Sports that it doesn’t matter that the film ends on a hack freeze-frame image of the wrestler’s moment of personal triumph (or that Madonna’s prominence on the poster is a lie). It’s a conventional story told with great emotional impact.

-Brandon Ledet 

The Kid Detective (2020)

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Several years back when I was working on a pitch document for a potential subversive cozy mystery series, I wanted my main character (a riff on Miss Marple) to have had a previous mentor relationship with a now-jaded adult who was formerly a child detective. I imagined her as a kind of Veronica Mars by-way-of Encyclopedia Brown, a character whose books were among some of my favorite reading when I was eight or nine. Even at that age, there was a simplicity to the brief mysteries, and it was always fun to try and figure out what the clue was that led Encyclopedia to his always correct solution, flipping to the “solutions” section at the back of the book to see if I had come to the correct conclusion. I had also very much enjoyed Joe Meno’s novel The Boy Detective Fails when I read it while in college. There’s something so fascinating about that archetype to me, perhaps speaking to the former gifted child in me, about a kid whose potential fails to pan out as an adult because they peaked too early in life. There was a 2009 film starring Donald Glover called Mystery Team that I remember trying and failing to enjoy when it first came out; it was more about adults stuck in their misdemeanor-catching adolescence, and the humor was a little too broad for me. I was hesitant to give Kid Detective a shot after the bad taste that one left in my mouth, but the Adam Brody of it all pulled me in, and I’m glad it did. 

When he was a kid, Abe Applebaum was the similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from Encyclopedia Brown of his quiet town. He figured out who stole the cashbox from the student fair, solved the riddle of missing jewelry, and even managed to solve a couple of majorish crimes. His youth was his advantage, as any time he had to hide in a closet when someone came home while he was searching their house, they found the situation cute rather than troubling. Eventually, the town set him up with an office, where the mayor’s daughter Gracie was his secretary and got paid in soda pop, but at age twelve, he lost all zest for his shenanigans when Gracie went missing. Although all of the adults in his life tell him that this is out of his league, he gets calls from his peer group asking when he’ll find her, and he carries that psychological weight into adulthood. Now, Abe (Brody) is barely getting by on the meager money he makes doing private detective work, sharing a rental house with a slovenly roommate and bickering with his current assistant, Lucy (Sarah Sutherland). It’s mostly still the same half dollar ante nonsense as when he was a kid—finding out if a kid’s classmate actually played with the Mets while on summer vacation, locating a missing cat—until Caroline (Sophie Nélisse, now best known for playing teenaged Shauna on Yellowjackets) appears in his office. Her boyfriend Patrick Chang was murdered, stabbed seventeen times, and she doesn’t feel like the police are doing anything. She wants Abe to solve the case. 

The actual mystery throughline in this one is clever, with red herrings aplenty and revelations that seem important in the moment but which end up leading nowhere, while smaller moments have greater implications down the line. That’s the basic art of the mystery misdirect, but comedic ones like Kid Detective are rarely woven so expertly. It turns out that Patrick was living a bit of a double life, as the Red Shoe Gang had started turning to the tactic of recruiting academic high performers to sell in school since they were above suspicion, and he had cheated on Caroline with an older girl. There’s also the presence of Calvin, Patrick and Caroline’s schlubby friend who has a strong crush on her, and he joins a pack of potential suspects that populates the film. Caroline is along for most of the ride, or more accurately is there to provide the ride, as she carts Abe around in a beige 1990 Chrysler LeBaron convertible so he can interview people. 

When reminiscing, Abe narrates that he used to lie awake at night wondering if he was the smartest person in the world. We do see that a large part of his solutions to the mysteries from his childhood were the result of the exact kind of (simplistic) deduction that Encyclopedia Brown would come to. E.B. would figure out that Bugs Meany had never actually hidden a dollar bill in the book he claimed to because he said he hid it between “pages 77 and 78,” which is of course impossible because those two page numbers would be on opposite sides of the same leaf. Abe does the same, naming a boy who was bitten by a dog the previous summer for stealing the school’s money because it was for animal welfare, and his apparent random deduction does seem to be correct based on the cashbox being found in the kid’s desk the next day. Abe has gone through his whole life like this, synthesizing scientific tidbits with questions that get people to think around their problems, like asking someone who had a piece of jewelry stolen at a birthday party who had the most cake, to determine who the burgled person subconsciously trusts the least. A lot of his leaps in logic, like that a person’s recent preference for bananas over peaches suggests a depressive episode because one fruit requires much less effort and cleanup, are far from “evidence,” but he gets things right just often enough that he’s decently good at his “job” despite the trauma and failure that haunt him. 

The first two acts of the film are comedically balanced. We establish who Abe is and that he’s still literally reaping the rewards of his past despite people’s general apathy toward him in the present, like still cashing in on the “free ice cream for life” that he was given at Old Mr. Hepburn’s sweets shop for something that he did as a child, despite Mr. Hepburn’s clear resentment of him. The scenes with Calvin are among the best. When we first meet him, he attempts to delicately tread around revealing some of Patrick’s indiscretions in front of Caroline, while also unsuccessfully concealing his crush. Later, he sneaks into Calvin’s family’s home while he believes that they’re away and ends up trapped in an upstairs closet in the younger sister’s room, where he ends up being caught while trying to escape after night falls and ends up branded as a pedophile. Another decent running gag is that Abe is so disconnected that he never seems to know what day of the week it is, breaking into people’s houses when he expects them to be at work only to be told that it’s Sunday. The only thing that doesn’t really work is the relationship that Abe has with his parents; there’s just something that’s a little off about the “You need to get a real job” paternalism that’s undercut when they follow him around while he’s following leads. 

In the third act, we take a pretty steep turn into the dark. There turns out to be a connection between Patrick’s murder and Gracie’s disappearance two decades prior that I didn’t see coming, although there were a couple of things that were already failing to add up for me. Patrick’s killing turns out to have had nothing to do with the Red Shoe Gang leads that Abe was trying to track down, but I won’t spoil it for you here. This is one that’s worth checking out, especially if you always wanted to be a kid detective, too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Clown in a Cornfield (2025)

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It has got to be frustrating for kids & teens that almost all youth-marketed pop culture these days is reheated leftovers from their parents’ generations. The kids-on-bikes YA horrors of yesteryear have been repackaged in overly nostalgic teen fare like the most recent iterations Stranger Things, Ghostbusters, and Goosebumps. Recent animated kids’ movies have brought Super Mario Bros, Transformers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back from their 20th Century gravesites with updated pop culture references & Chris Pratt vocal tracks to appeal to the whole family, not just the children in the room. No wonder entire theaters full of sugar-addled middle schoolers are launching popcorn in ecstatic uproar for a “Chicken Jockey” meme reference in a Minecraft movie. I have no idea what a chicken jockey is, as I’ve never played the Minecraft video game, and that’s entirely the point. The kids deserve something of their own that has zero appeal for anyone over the age of 30, or the entire theatrical distribution system will die a slow death as Gen-Xers & Millennials age out of the moviegoing habit. I don’t know that the new teen slasher Clown in a Cornfield provides that fresh, much-needed teen appeal that’s missing from modern genre filmmaking, but it’s at least demonstratively aware of the problem.

Like most other YA horrors of recent decades, Clown in a Cornfield starts as a nostalgic throwback to a popular fad of yesteryear – in this case teen slashers of the 80s & 90s. Meanwhile, its setting & iconography pull as much influence from vintage Stephen King material as Stranger Things and the recent two-part adaptation of IT, blatantly positioned as a mashup of IT and Children of the Corn. You see, there’s something evil lurking in the cornfields of Kettle Springs, Missouri, and it’s taken the form of the local corn syrup factory’s birthday-clown mascot, Frendo. The local Gen-Z teens who find themselves at the wrong end of Frendo’s chainsaw anger the evil clown by making prankster YouTube videos mocking how scary he looks on the corn syrup’s advertising, setting up a clash between an ancient entity and Kids These Days’ newfangled online hobbies. Things get even eerier as the adults in town prove to be arbitrarily hostile towards the kids for merely existing, locking them up in afterschool detention, bedroom groundings, and literal jail cells for the slightest annoyances. By the time Frendo emerges from the liminal-space cornfield at the edge of town to massacre the teens at their annual barnyard kegger on Founders Day, it’s outright generational warfare, where the crime of being a teenager is an automatic death sentence.

The teens of Kettle Springs are vocally fed up with having to live in a world defined by their parents’ retro pop culture references. We meet the New Kid on the Block, Quinn (Katie Douglas), while she groans at her dad for half-mumbling the lyrics of an Eric B & Rakim track, reminding him that the 1980s is, mathematically speaking, just as outdated for her now as the 1940s was for him then. Later, when her new friend group of fun-loving Zoomer YouTubers is chased around her new hometown by a killer clown, their escape plans are frequently thwarted by their ignorance of older, more physical technology—namely, rotary phones & stick shifts—demonstrating that a disconnection from the past cuts both ways. When confronted with any “The problem with your generation is …” lectures from parents, teachers, and the local sheriff (an unusually macho Will Sasso), the kids spit back accusations of world-destroying apathy at those Gen-X grumps, laying out their motivations for declaring generational warfare in the clearest terms possible. The movie smartly lands on the teens’ side of that cultural debate, even if its violence is a little too safe and its soundtrack is a little too unhip to actually appeal to real-world teens. Maybe that means its appeal is most potent for a crowd slightly younger than its protagonist, which was exactly the case with the teen horrors of my own tween years way back when: I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, The Craft, Urban Legend, etc.

As the goofball title suggests, Clown in a Cornfield is foremost a horror comedy, finding ironic humor in these lethal intergenerational clashes. The title is fulfilled in the first three minutes of runtime, wherein two Gen-X teens are slain by Frendo in 1991, discovering his presence via the novelty squeaks and oversized prints of his clown shoes. As Frendo slashes, decapitates, and impales his way through Quinn’s Gen-Z friend group, their corn-syrup-thick blood fills the screen with convincing brutality, but the overall focus is on the teens-vs-adults culture clash, not on crafting memorable gore gags. The movie has a similar splatstick-satire energy as director Eli Craig’s earlier triumph Tucker & Dale vs Evil in that way, except maybe with fewer laughs per minute. Given the recent popularity of fellow killer-clown horror franchise Terrifier, it’s unlikely that there’s enough blood or cruelty here to satisfy teens who’re hungry for a memorably extreme, rowdy experience at the picture show with their dirtbag friends. Its YA patina means that it’s a little safer & healthier for their developing brains than the unbridled misogyny & general misanthropy of films like Terrifier, which is just about the last thing that audience wants to hear from a crusty adult like me. So, Clown in a Cornfield still ultimately appeals to parents more than kids, even while actively trying to combat that impulse. It’s cute, which makes it harmless, which makes it “cringe” to its target audience.

-Brandon Ledet

The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man (2025)

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Someone broke into my house last week, and none of the details from The Incident make much sense. While I was away at work, they kicked in my back door, napped in my bed, and stole only my denim jacket (leaving all of the usual go-to items untouched – cash, drugs, tools, electronics, etc). They also left behind a relatively pristine pair of Nikes, wedged between the rain barrel & wall of my side porch. The Incident was jarring and, I guess, mildly violating, but because there were no signs of significant theft or intent to return, it all felt weirdly unserious. It was in that rattled, baffled headspace that I made a trip to the Zeitgeist Theatre to catch a screening of The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man with friends (after reinforcing the security of my back door, of course). Based on a true story, The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is a microbudget comedy about a fecal terrorist who dumped buckets of piss & shit on his fellow Torontonians in 2019, seemingly at random. It was a violent, traumatizing crime spree that was obviously a total nightmare for all victims soaked in the disturbed man’s soupy diarrhea. However, as the meme-referencing title indicates, there’s no way to tell that story without acknowledging that the details of the violation are, in a way, unserious. As a movie prop, a bucket of diarrhea, while disgusting, is inherently a little funny.

First-time director Braden Sitter Sr. is surprisingly sincere about the severe mental illness that would inspire someone to attack strangers with buckets of his own filth. The majority of The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man‘s 80-min runtime is dedicated to psychologically profiling the mentally unwell loner who resorted to fecal terrorism as an alternative to committing suicide.  Rishi Rodriguez stars as the enigmatic Miguel, an unemployed incel who spends most of his time doing drugs and jerking off to Virtual Reality dinosaur porn. After a few horrific LSD trips through his social media feeds, Miguel is inspired by a pigeon that shits on his head to find a new way to connect with his fellow Torontonians, having already been failed by familial, professional, and romantic relationships. He undergoes a spiritual rebirth by dumping his first diarrhea bucket on his own naked body at a construction site, emerging as a kind of Shit Christ (an escalation of the infamous Piss Christ of the 1980s). The subsequent shit-bucket attacks are self-justified by a volatile mixture of Miguel’s religious psychosis & governmental conspiracy paranoia, represented onscreen in long sequences of triple-exposure psychedelic montage layering cheap, digital photography; it’s essentially Combat Shock updated for the smartphone era. None of Miguel’s victims are privy to his illness or reasoning, though. All they know is that they were peacefully walking through a public space, and now they’re soaked in shit.

Besides that dramatic sincerity, the most surprising thing about The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is that it’s not necessarily the piss & shit itself that earns all of the biggest laughs. Those laughs are earned by the custom-made parody songs about the piss & shit – all credited to The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man Band and all comedy gold. Familiar pop tunes from bands like The Beatles, The Who, Nirvana, Pixies, and CCR are reworked with lyrics about “pee pee” & “poo poo” in an aggressively juvenile commitment to the bit. Those parody tunes are reserved exclusively for the montage sequences that will draw most of the film’s cult-cinema notoriety: nonstop Jackass-style stunts in which innocent pedestrians are covered in shit. It’s a brilliant move, comedically, since the parody song lyrics add a fresh novelty to the centerpiece shit-bucket sequences that might become numbingly repetitive without it. Otherwise, most of the humor is crass, honest acknowledgement of the unrelenting hell of modern living. While Miguel is having his own mental health crisis isolated in his (literally) shitty apartment, his victims are introduced in standalone vignettes dealing with the constant annoyances of contemporary shitty city living: being hit on by shitty “friend-zoned” nice guys, being polite about friends’ shitty poetry, constantly being asked for obvious directions by clueless, shitty tourists. It’s all just shitty enough to make a man want to lash out Travis Bickle-style and leave his own shitty mark on the world. It’s also all deeply unserious and fixable with just the tiniest morsel of basic human empathy.

-Brandon Ledet 

The Surfer (2025)

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As with any other workaholic auteur (Roger Corman, Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Dupieux, etc.), being a Nicolas Cage fan is a numbers game.  He simply makes too many movies for them all to be great—or even watchable—but it’s easy to find moments of greatness in each of them, and occasionally he’ll surprise you with a gem. It’s been a slow trickle of those gems among the typical flood of Cagian schlock so far this decade. At the end of the 2010s, the one-two punch of Mandy & Color Out of Space signaled a professional & artistic comeback that hasn’t really come together since. Instead, Cage has spent the 2020s putting his name & face on the exact middling trash you’d expect him in (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Willy’s Wonderland, Prisoners of the Ghostland, Arcadian, Renfield, DTV actioners too dull to watch or name) and only occasionally landing in a project that’s actually worthy of his presence: Pig, Dream Scenario, Longlegs and, now, the beach-bum thriller The Surfer. An official Cannes selection helmed by an up-and-coming director of note (Vivarium‘s Lorcan Finnegan), The Surfer commands just enough art-cinema prestige to earn the intensely, consistently committed screen presence of our greatest living movie star. As with all of Cage’s greatest hits, he takes all of the glory for himself through that intensity, while his director-of-note sits quietly in the passenger seat and watches him work. However fallible, he is both actor & auteur, the total package.

The titular surfer (Cage, naturally) is a workaholic yuppie who drives himself mad trying to prove his manliness to a beachful of muscly, Australian bullies. He arrives in a linen suit and a shiny new Lexus, hours away from buying back the million-dollar beachside home his family owned back when his father was still alive and he was still happy. His stubborn mission to surf his childhood beach once again is abruptly cut short by a small cult of Bay Boys who police the area’s unofficial “LOCALS ONLY” policy, shouting “Don’t live here, don’t surf here!” in his face until he retreats in cowardice, humiliated in front of his teenage son. The gang of bullies is led by an Andrew Tate-type manliness guru (Julian McMahon), who’s transformed the beach into a Church of Toxic Masculinity, mirroring the yuppie surfer’s own status-obsessed relationship with the property. Unwilling to back down, the ostensibly wealthy surfer becomes a beach bum to reestablish his locality, going mad with heat exhaustion in the public parking lot while the guru takes everything he’s earned away from him: his board, his car, his food, his water, his house and, inevitably, his son. From there, the surfer must choose from the same diverging paths as the conflicted protagonists of Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel: either join in the old-fashioned Aussie masculinity or burn it all down. Disastrously, his indecision on which path to take leads him to do nothing, and the stasis starts to make the audience as crazed as our desperately dehydrated antihero.

For his part, director Lorcan Finnegan dresses up The Surfer as a vintage Ozploitation throwback, complete with crash zooms, wildlife B-roll, heatwave distortions, and dreamily laidback, chimes-heavy surf rock. As the Aussie sun wears the surfer down, however, that 70s Ozploitation aesthetic is gradually taken over by a distinct resemblance to Frank Perry’s The Swimmer; Cage retraces Burt Lancaster’s surreal heat-stroke journey into his own macho psyche, hating everything he sees. Finnegan cedes control of the project entirely to Cage, at times shooting him through a fisheye lens as he maniacally harasses all visitors to his parking lot prison and at times lingering on close-ups where his face fills the entire frame. Whereas Finnegan’s debut put the broad practice of Parenthood on trial in an intensely artificial environment, The Surfer interrogates Fatherhood in particular, with Cage acting as an avatar for Patriarchal Failure. Things get unexpectedly philosophical as the Bay Boys gang chants, “Suffer! Surfer! Suffer! Surfer!” while Cage whines in agony, seemingly unable to escape his concrete limbo under Exterminating Angel-style supernatural force. At first, that stasis feels like an excessive indulgence in exposition & foreshadowing, but the longer the audience rots there, the more memory, premonition, and hallucination mix until they’re indistinguishable and all that’s left is the surfer’s pathetic ego. If you need an actor to perform that kind of total psychological breakdown, Cage is obviously your guy. You just need to go in knowing that once cast, he claims authorship through sheer charismatic force.

-Brandon Ledet 

Lagniappe Podcast: Deadline (1980)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Canuxploitation meta-horror Deadline (1980).

00:00 Welcome

01:40 Tales of Terror (1962)
06:10 The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)
11:07 The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)
16:20 Wolfen (1981)
22:46 True Romance (1993)
27:58 My Cousin Vinny (1992)
31:36 Fame Whore (1997)
38:30 Quadrophenia (1979)
43:48 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)
47:43 The Doll (1919)

54:55 Deadline (1980)

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