Video Violence (1987)

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I wonder how true film snobs feel about the current moment in restoration & distribution. In past decades, Janus Films & The Criterion Collection were the standard-bearers for cinephilic home media, putting a heavy emphasis on getting classic art films into customers’ living rooms before they were lost to time. Nowadays, that effort has been overrun by a gang of boutique distribution labels that produce high-gloss prints of low-class genre schlock, best represented by Vinegar Syndrome’s dozens of genre-specific sublabels and its pornographic sister company Mélusine. Instead of collecting the cleanest scans possible of masterworks by the likes of Bresson, Godard, and Buñuel, modern cinephiles spend hundreds of dollars hunting down pristine copies of bargain-bin martial arts novelties, shot-on-video slashers, and vintage narrative pornos. I am not complaining. Personally, I love that there’s a Blu-ray company that specializes in every disreputable subgenre you can name, catering to an increasingly niche clientele of antisocial freaks (myself included), but I also imagine there’s a silent class of classic film snobs out there distraught by the sordid state of things.

To see some of that old-fashioned film snobbery in action, I recommend returning to its roots in retro video store culture, as represented in the 1987 cult curio Video Violence. It’s a shot-on-video horror film about a video store owner who’s disgusted with his gorehound clientele, directed by a real-life video store clerk who was disgusted with his gorehound clientele. For classic film snobs, it’s a cathartic screed against the scumbag schlock gobblers who overrepresent low-brow genre trash in the all-important Film Canon of great works. For the horror nerds  actually likely to watch it, it’s the filmic equivalent of getting smacked on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. For the vast majority of us who fall somewhere between those polar extremes, it’s a documentary relic of 80s video store culture, with lengthy explanations of video-return drop boxes, membership cards, late fees, and the democratizing nature of the display shelf (wherein when a customer requests “that chainsaw movie” they’re handed a copy of Pieces, not the more obvious Tobe Hooper classic). At a time when retro hipster video stores like L.A.’s Vidiots (or, locally, Future Shock) are making headlines and Alex Ross Perry is constructing feature-length essay films entirely out of video store representation in pre-existing films (Videoheaven), that temporal snapshot of 80s video stores in their prime is just as essential as documenting the film nerd-culture bickering that terrorized their aisles.

Gary Schwartz stars as director Gary Cohen’s onscreen surrogate, a disgruntled cinephile who used to program art cinema in an New York City repertory theater and now finds himself renting out video tapes to local yokels with no discerning taste. He’s trapped in small-town America, where everyone is an anti-social loner with a VCR, frustrated that his customers would rather watch cheap-o horror movies or “the occasional triple X’r” in the privacy of their own homes than chat about “the Woody Allen or a classic Abbot & Costello” with the knowledgeable store clerk. Hosting a podcast would have fixed him. Instead, he grows increasingly disgusted with the mouthbreathing ghouls he peddles tapes to, especially once they start returning home-made tapes to the store instead of the professional movies they rented. Several mysterious blank tapes land on the poor movie buff’s counter, which he soon discovers are real-life snuff films made by the gorehound townies, torturing & dismembering outsiders who don’t fit in with the local culture. Of course, he foolishly investigates these horrific deaths on a vigilante mission and eventually becomes a videotaped victim himself, with his humble video store ultimately run as a co-op by the bloodthirsty freaks who used to come to him for their gore flicks before they started making their own.

The only thing Video Violence hates more than its audience is itself. While describing the mysterious snuff tapes to his incredulous wife, our video-store-clerk-in-peril explains that he knows the violence in them is real because it’s all shot on video, likening the production values of that format to soap operas & TV commercials, not a proper film. Its most hateful “fuck you” to its audience is a scene in which a customer asks whether a horror film titled Blood Cult is rated R for violence or for nudity, since she’s only willing to show it to her young children if there’s no nudity. So, when the staged snuff footage then lingers on grotesque shot-on-video violence—like a human arm being processed by a deli slicer or a basement sadist giving his screaming stab victim a bloody kiss—it feels like being potty trained by having your face shoved into your own piss. You can absolutely feel the difference between this self-hating, “Is this what you sick fucks want?” approach to video gore vs. the more self-indulgent, guilty-pleasure gore of Lucio Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, which delivers the same goods with introspection rather than revulsion. Video Violence is a movie made by a classic cinephile who’s disgusted with what’s been done to his artform of choice, and I imagine that sentiment is still lurking out there somewhere in the ether now that the vintage-schlock lunatics are running the boutique-label asylum.

-Brandon Ledet

Grand Theft Hamlet (2025)

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Making art is hard work, even when you’re just goofing off with your friends. No matter how silly a collaborative art project is on a conceptual level—a novelty punk band, an amateur movie blog, a Mardi Gras costuming krewe (to name the few I have personal experience with)—the practicalities of seeing it through gets mired down in the general bullshit drudgery of modern life. Between everyone’s duties to work, to family, and to personal health and well-being, real-life circumstances are always stacked against your success, which can make you question why you’re working so hard for something so silly as, say, organizing a meet-up for a small group of friends to dress as Divine on Mardi Gras day. It does feel great when everything clicks in to place, though. There are few victories sweeter than defying the odds or our modern capitalist hellscape by making something sublimely stupid with your friends.

Even by my personal standards, the communal art project documented in Grand Theft Hamlet is exceedingly inane. “Filmed” entirely inside the video game Grand Theft Auto Online during the early lockdown years of COVID-19 (in the style of We Met in Virtual Reality), Grand Theft Hamlet documents the efforts of two goofball British blokes to organize a staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet entirely within the gaming platform. It’s an absurdly specific novelty project that quickly leads to a broader story about how hard it is to complete any piece of collaborative art. All the usual roadblocks of squeezing in rehearsals around work schedules, balancing personal obsession with familial obligation, and navigating contributors’ differing excitement levels to distribute labor according to enthusiasm all apply to meeting online to recite Shakespeare while digitally represented as archetypal sex workers & thugs. Only, the video game platform literalizes those obstacles in the form of outside players firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to goof off with your friends.

The tradition of adapting Shakespeare in a novelty setting is long & storied. Even the modern specificity of Grand Theft Auto can’t make this staging a total anomaly, since a digital office-building setting will instantly recall Hamlet (2000) or a burst of neon-lit gunfire will recall Romeo+Juliet (1996). I’m sure there have also been unpermitted guerilla productions of Shakespeare plays periodically shut down by the cops, even if those cops are usually not algorithmically generated NPCs. It’s the effort that Sam Crane & Mark Oosterveen (along with central documentarian Pinny Grylls) put into working around the intended purpose of GTA Online that affords the project its true uniqueness. The triumphant perseverance of a player shouting their lines over machine gunfire during rehearsal while fellow collaborators play defense against disruptive trolls & “griefers” adds a new obstacle to the usual “Let’s put on a show!” artistic sprit. The defiance of carrying on in those chaotic circumstances is energizing, inspiring an actor to shout “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers!” into the digital void.

Hamlet proves to be an apt play to stage for this ludicrous project, not least of all because its tragic Shakespearean violence fits right in with the basic control functions of GTA. The actual themes of the play are genuinely felt in the final edit, especially in scenes where Crane & Oosterveen slip into suicidal ideation thanks to the isolation of COVID-19 lockdowns or when GTA‘s in-universe superhero franchise Impotent Rage is advertised in block letters on billboards & slot machines. The most critical Shakespeare quote repeated in this particular staging, however, isn’t from Hamlet at all. It’s the Macbeth line about how life is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That pretty much sums up the whole project, from the proudly idiotic premise to the meaningless displays of violence to the general, persistent emptiness of being alive. It’s also a succinct explanation of why it’s so important to make dumb art projects with your friends despite the effort required to pull it off. Nothing matters anyway; you might as well have a little fun while you’re here.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #233: By the Sword (1991) & Swordplay

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Welcome to Episode #233 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Alli discuss a grab bag of movies about swords & swordplay, starting with the fencing academy drama By the Sword (1991). Swords!

00:00 Plot is Optional & Spooky Tuesday
02:55 I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987)
09:18 The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024)

16:42 By the Sword (1991)
37:55 Captain Blood (1939)
48:14 Conan the Barbarian (1982)
56:27 She (1984)
1:06:06 Sword of the Stranger (2007)

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

Chocolate Babies (1996)

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Would it be too redundant to call a movie “the ACT UP version of Born in Flames“? Born in Flames was already a pro-queer, pro-safe-sex, pro-sex-worker activism piece made in New York City when ACT UP was at its most loudly active — so radical in its politics that it climaxes with a celebratory act of terrorism blowing up the World Trade Center. Still, the political themes of Lizzie Borden’s D.I.Y. No Wave provocation was more focused on feminist issues than the AIDS crisis in particular, as it was made early in the still-worsening epidemic. Over a decade later, another microbudget NYC indie picked up where Born in Flames left off, redirecting its exact brand of political fury at the smiling politicians who left AIDS-suffering citizens to die in droves without lifting a systemic finger to help. Stephen Winter’s 1996 rabblerouser Chocolate Babies may have been made well after ACT UP’s loudest, headline-earning protests, but it’s directly informed by those political actions, exaggerated for shock value & be-gay-do-crimes inspo. It opens with a closeted Councilman being confronted on the front steps of his NYC apartment by a group of protestors, who cut themselves with a switchblade and smear HIV+ blood on the shocked man’s face, who then likens the act to “murder” in the press. Nothing is said of the mass murder he is committing by downplaying & exacerbating the AIDS crisis among his local constituents, of course, which is exactly why that kind of violent public confrontation was necessary to save lives.

The taboo of exposing the public to HIV+ blood becomes a core shock-value tactic for Chocolate Babies, which climaxes with a living-room surgery in a cramped apartment wherein a group of friends dislodge a bullet from their star protestor’s shoulder with bloody tweezers. It’s an excruciatingly long, drawn-out scene shot as if it were a live birth, complete with moaning screams of pain. Between all that bloody violence & shouting, you might miss that the movie is structurally a low-budget romcom. Like Born in Flames, Chocolate Babies is a collection of standalone vignettes musing on a core political theme, loosely stitched together by a propulsive, repetitive soundtrack (in this case, abrasive tribal drums). The story that holds that scatterbrained edit together is an unlikely love triangle between an HIV+ political activist (Max, Claude E. Sloan), the closeted homophobe politician he most often targets (Councilman Melvin Freeman, Bryan Webster), and that politician’s naively idealistic staff member (Sam, Jon Kit Lee). The youngest of the three is caught between two worlds, acting as a subversive employee of the exact government official his friends are protesting, while accidentally falling in love with the men in charge on both sides of that divide. The drag queens, rooftop hedonists, and political dissidents who escalate that conflict to a bloody climax are all lovely people and his closest friends. It’s all very wholesome & sweet, even if it’s politically furious.

The dramatic themes of Chocolate Babies can be sincerely heavy, touching on the loneliness, addiction, and familial bigotry that weigh down its queer community. However, the overall tone of the film is flippantly joyous, with characters complaining that their political actions aren’t accomplishing enough in quips like “I have better things to do with my time. I could be sucking dick!” They self-describe as “raging, atheist, meat-eating, HIV+, colored terrorists,” or “Black faggots with a political agenda” for short. Their politics are shouted in the horrified faces of politicians & businessmen who’d rather peacefully ignore the AIDS epidemic on NYC streets, but they’re just as often delivered as open-mic standup in out-of-context interstitials. The movie ultimately ends on a calming note, with crashing waves and familial love eroding the nonstop barrage of belligerent shouting that preceded. The moment is earned, given the film’s tender love-triangle conflict and sincere internal wrestling with loving someone who’s already given up on surviving their illness. The majority of the runtime is loud, celebratory, and energizing, though, mostly working as a political catalyst for the audience to get in their representatives’ faces instead of just getting high to manage the pain of living.

Chocolate Babies has been available to stream for free on director Stephen Winter’s Vimeo page for years now, seemingly ripped directly from a 1990s VHS tape. Recently, however, the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema screened the film at The Broadside in a much nicer, cleaner digital scan that suggests a better future for the film’s home presentation. It belongs to a company of low-budget, queer communal provocations that have finally gotten their full due in cinephile circles over the past decade — titles like Tongues Untied, Fresh Kill, Buddies, Paris is Burning, The Watermelon Woman and, of course, Born in Flames. The only thing it’s missing is a spiffy new Blu-ray release with a crisp, collectible slipcover to cement that status.

-Brandon Ledet

Rats! (2025)

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Hollywood studios are struggling to get back on their feet after years of being knocked to the ground by blows like the COVID-19 pandemic, labor union strikes, and the decline of the Marvel Cinematic Industrial Complex. That’s bad news for shareholders & below-the-line workers alike, but it has cleared a lot of space on local marquees for microbudget indie cinema that would otherwise be elbowed out of the frame by superhero flicks, nostalgic remakes, and other Disney products of that cursed ilk. It’s easy to doomsay about the future of theatrical moviegoing in our current blockbuster lull, but I can’t get too dispirited by a trend that’s left room for independently-funded filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun, Vera Drew, Kyle Edward Ball, Robbie Banfitch, Matt Farley, Kansas Bowling, Dylan Greenberg, Mike Cheslik and Ryland Tews to land major headlines & showtimes when just a decade ago their work would’ve been stuck in straight-to-Vimeo purgatory. Maybe it’s a bad time to own a movie studio, but things are looking up for outsider artists with attention-grabbing filmmaking styles, an active After Effects subscription, and a dream.

I’m excited to add Maxwell Nalevansky & Carl Fry to that growing list of microbudget freaks who’ve landed major impact with minor resources in this new era of outsider cinema. Their debut feature Rats! calls back to an older tradition of Texan slacker art sparked by a previous independent cinema boom, but I don’t know that any of those post-Linklater buttscratchers were ever as exceedingly gross or as truly anarchic. A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk, Rats! is a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens. Set in small-town Texas in the mid-aughts, it follows the daily follies of a permanently stoned graffiti artist who earns himself a night in jail when he’s caught tagging the town’s beloved public phone booth. The especially deranged cop on his case offers him amnesty for this crime if he rats on his small-time drug dealer cousin, whom she suspects of selling nukes to Osama Bin Laden but does not have the evidence to prove it. Meanwhile, a local serial killer is systematically removing the hands of unsuspecting victims around town, which also gets unfairly pinned on the cousins despite their collective ambitions mostly amounting to ripping bongs & chilling out. There isn’t much else going on in terms of plot, but much violence, romance, pop-punk whining, and lazing about ensues.

Rats! estimates what it might be like if the singing-butthole sequence of Pink Flamingos were staged in the live-action cartoon playhouse of Cool as Ice. The audience is afforded no time to adjust to its cavity-boring sugar rush, as the film frequently cuts to one-off Looney Tunes gags & nauseating Farrelly Brothers gross-outs without warning. It’s an unrelenting editing rhythm that’s sure to trigger a fight-or-flight response in unsuspecting viewers, but it’s also one with promising cult-classic potential for those who stick with it, given the density & intensity of its jokes. Like with other recent outsider-art triumphs like The People’s Joker & Hundreds of Beavers, it only gets funnier the more time you spend with it, as it builds its own inside-jokes with repeated gags like its persistent, nonsensical mispronunciation of the word “hands.” There might be some subversive political commentary in its lampooning of fascist suburban paranoia and its declaration that “The only good cop is a dead cop,” but for the most part its only goal from minute to minute is to make the audience laugh, and it consistently succeeds. Everything else is just a loving effort to make every frame as cartoonishly 2007 as possible, collecting as many totems from the era as it can in 85 breakneck minutes: an Alkaline Trio poster, a Converge t-shirt, a McCain/Palin billboard, Game Stop & Hot Topic shoplifting sprees, Xanax tablets, a panini press, etc.

Yellow Veil is giving Rats! a proper theatrical run before it hits VOD, including a local screening at The Broad on 3/28. Regardless of its immediate response from a wide audience, that level of distribution is an immediate victory for a film this cheap, this gross, and this prankishly abrasive. Not that long ago, it likely would have stalled on the regional festival circuit before trickling into self-published online platforms. That’s cause to celebrate, preferably over 40ozs and Black & Milds with your closest knucklehead friends for the full effect.

-Brandon Ledet

Striptease (1996)

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This year’s Oscar race for Best Actress has narrowed down to two fierce combatants: Demi Moore for her career-reviving role as an aged-out aerobics TV show host in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance vs. Mikey Madison for her career-making role as a wronged erotic dancer in Sean Baker’s Anora. Thankfully, they’re both great performances in great movies, but since this is Awards Season, they share a combined running time of 280 minutes, which is a lot of homework to squeeze in before this Sunday’s ceremony if you’ve fallen behind on the syllabus. So, at this point it’s probably best recommended to watch the one title that combines those two flavors in one easy-to-swallow, two-hour treat. 1996’s Striptease stars Demi Moore in a career-pinnacle role as a wronged erotic dancer, lacing up her stripper boots and spinning the poles years before Mikey Madison was born. It’s got none of The Substance‘s gross-out humor nor any of Anora‘s violent despair, but it does find the exact Venn-Diagram overlap where Moore & Madison’s awards-season spotlights currently intersect. It’s also, on its own terms, a total hoot.

Released just one year after Paul Verhoeven’s vicious camp classic Showgirls, Striptease is mostly remembered as a hollow echo of one of the great erotic thrillers of its era. Despite their shared strip club setting, the two movies are wildly different in tone & intent, which makes Striptease‘s lighter, fluffier approach hugely beneficial in retrospect. It’s shockingly cute & playful for its scummy setting—populated with perverted Congressmen & gropey strip club patrons—ultimately playing more like a precursor for Miss Congeniality than an echo of Showgirls. Like Madison in Anora, Moore stars as an erotic dancer who has to chase down her fuckboy ex to get what’s owed to her (in this case, custody of her young daughter) while suffering a series of screwball hijinks that are tonally incongruent with the violence threatened by the crime-world goons circling around her. Moore was no young upstart ingénue at the time of filming, though. Her performance was the highest paid actress gig in Hollywood history at the point of paycheck, and she deserved every penny. Unfortunately and unfairly, it was also the start of her professional decline that hadn’t fully recovered until this year’s Oscar campaign, three decades later.

On a technical level, Striptease excels foremost as a feat of mainstream screenwriting. In an opening scene that lasts less than a minute, we’re introduced to Demi Moore in a Floridian divorce court, pleading to a good-old-boy judge not to grant custody of her daughter to her pill-head ex (Robert Patrick), whose flagrant criminality caused her to lose her job as a secretary for the FBI. That’s some incredible efficiency. From there, we immediately jump eight weeks into her new career as the rising-star dancer at The Eager Beaver, a humble strip club that struggles to match the class-standard set by its better-funded rival, The Flesh Farm. In that club, Moore exclusively strips to Annie Lennox tunes in absurdly athletic, MTV-style strip routines that recall Adrian Lynne’s girl-on-the-go 80s classic Flashdance . . . with a lot more nudity. She also makes fast friends with a cast of adorable fellow dancers and their living-cartoon bodyguard, played by Ving Rhames in what might be his career-funniest performance. Every exchange between Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff is genuinely, warmly funny and hints to a screenplay that was refined trough several joke punch-ups by screenwriter-turned-director Andrew Bergman. That affable tone then goes a long way to soften the thriller elements that threaten to sour the good mood but never can, not in a movie where Ving Rhames trades quips with a pet monkey in perfect deadpan.

Burt Reynolds anchors the serious end of the plot in a deeply unserious role as a drunken lush Congressman with a panty fetish, who is so obsessed with Moore’s rising-star dancer that he at one point douses himself in Vaseline and huffs her dryer lint just to feel close to her. The role perfectly completes the comedic pervert trifecta established by his more celebrated parts in Boogie Nights & The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, balancing out the thriller requirements of his character with some vintage kinky kitsch. Because the Congressman is so obviously, publicly horny for Moore, his staff has to clean up the trail of witnesses to his depravity with murderous violence, which escalates the stakes of Moore’s custody struggles. To the Right-Wing Christian voter base, he’s a God-fearing soldier of Christ who uses his office to uphold Family Values in the Deep South. To anyone who’s ever been alone with him, he’s a dangerously horny freak with no functional sense of interpersonal decorum, a total menace. Meanwhile, Moore and the rest of the Eager Beaver staff are portrayed as adorable women struggling to make do with “honest work.” Sure, a couple of them have the largest breast implants you’ll ever see outside of a Russ Meyer film, but they’re truly a wholesome bunch who love & support each other. It’s really very sweet, especially in comparison with the sleazy lawyers, politicians, and fixers in their orbit.

Demi Moore is more widely beloved for earlier 90s classics like Indecent Proposal & Ghost, but Striptease might be the best total-package encapsulation of what makes her great. She’s funny, she’s relatable, and she’s an exquisitely sculpted physical specimen that defies the usual limitations of the human body. A lot of the subtext of her role in The Substance relies on the audience’s understanding that she is a perfectly calibrated Hollywood actress who is still made to feel like she’s not living up to the impossible, illusionary standard set by her industry; Striptease puts her body on display in the same way, which had to have been a vulnerable act even at the height of her star power. The main struggle of Mikey Madison’s Oscar campaign this year is that she doesn’t have that built-in rapport with her audience, since she’s really just getting started. Her body is also being ogled in her star-making role, though, so it would be great to see her compare notes with Moore in a dual interview discussing what it’s like to work a stripper pole on a 50-foot movie screen with nowhere to hide from strangers’ eyes. You’d think that, because of the time of its release, Striptease would’ve been a lot more dismissive or gross about Moore’s fictional dancer than Anora was about Madison’s, but that’s really not the case. The two women were both given a chance to play these vulnerable, wronged sex workers with full heart, humor, and humanity, sidestepping the nastier, scuzzier tropes typically associated with the archetype. And they were both great at it.

-Brandon Ledet

Naughty New Orleans (1954)

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It’s Carnival time in New Orleans, when civic pride is its most glowingly beautiful. This is not always an easy city to live in, but it is an easy city to love, and Mardi Gras is our annual reminder of how wonderful it can be at its best. It’s also an annual reminder that its wonders & beauty have never changed in any significant way. The dozens of Carnival seasons I’ve celebrated all feel part of one grand hedonistic continuum, set against the unchanging backdrop of centuries-old French Quarter facades. It’s a rejuvenating ritual that helps me combat the “Ain’t dere no more” nostalgia of grumps who complain that the city isn’t the same as it used to be since Katrina, or since the ’70s, or since whenever that particular grump happened to be in their carefree twenties. People change, governments change, but the city stays the same, like how a river keeps its name even as new water flows through it.

There are much less expensive, exhausting ways to be reminded of this grand New Orleanian continuum than attending Mardi Gras in-person. You could also just watch a movie. Any picture filmed in the French Quarter, regardless of purpose or quality, is a documentary about the city’s temporal stasis. The opening montage of 1954’s semi-nudie cutie Naughty New Orleans takes that mission more seriously than most, explaining the allure of “the city that care forgot […] where life is lived at a different pace” in overly formal newsreel narration. Of course, this narration is illustrated by a slideshow of French Quarter architecture, which looks exactly the same now as it did 70 years ago, give or take changes in fashion among the day-drinking pedestrians and hand-painted advertisements that adorn it. That is, until the movie settles on Bourbon Street, which has been unofficially annexed from the city proper and now exclusively belongs to the tourists.

Naughty New Orleans is less of a feature film than it is a lengthy tourism ad for the Bourbon Street strip club strip. Its poster is drowning in ad copy, enticing viewers to “actually visit the heart of world-famed French Quarter” where we’ll be treated to “delightful adult entertainment, exactly as seen by millions of visitors from across the world [….] a sophisticated treat with the girls you’ll meet on Bourbon Street.” Bourbon Street is still anchored by strip bars and dance clubs today, but the “adult entertainment” dancing style therein has changed dramatically. If you want to see burlesque, you have to flock to nerdier spaces like The AllWays Lounge on St Claude Ave, where actual New Orleanians drink. Bourbon Street strip clubs are where men from Ohio get blackout drunk to half-remember pole dances that would’ve been identical to what’s offered back in Cleveland, just now with commemorative plastic beads.

A document of stripping-fashions past, Naughty New Orleans is a vintage Bourbon Street striptease revue set to somber jazz and routinely interrupted by hack comedy routines & whispers of a plot. Set inside the “Ain’t dere no more” Bourbon Street club The Moulin Rouge, the core of the film is a series of burlesque acts akin to what I’ve seen performed in more recent years at The AllWays and One Eyed Jacks. Occasionally, a dancer will perform a superheroic feat like simultaneously helicoptering four independent tassels on her bra & panties in opposing directions, but mostly they just put on and take off their gartered stockings one leg at a time, just like everybody else. If you can ignore the heavily laugh-tracked, light-on-actual-laughs comedy sketches that interrupt those dance routines, it’s a warmly pleasant, classically smutty good time.

The ideal version of Naughty New Orleans would’ve continued the overly verbose newsreel narration throughout and strictly stuck to the striptease revue format in the mondo-movie fashion of a Mondo Topless or a Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield. Instead, the film is flimsily held together by a story involving a star dancer’s deception of her out-of-town boyfriend, who believes she works as a “night secretary” until he stumbles into her headlining act at The Moulin Rouge. That’s it; that’s the entire story. The boyfriend is delighted instead of angered, to the dancer’s relief, then returns to his hometown while she pines from her French Quarter bedroom for another male visitor, leading the audience on through open implication. If the movie hadn’t bothered with that plotline and cut out the comedy routines to make more room for French Quarter strip shows & tourist photos, it might’ve really been something. Oh well.

Naughty New Orleans is best enjoyed as background noise on Tubi while folding laundry, only glancing up when the funeral-jazz hits the soundtrack so you know someone’s about to strip. The crowd reaction shots during those strip shows are a spectacle worth seeing in their own right, even if they are chaotically inserted images of toothless men & overdressed women repeating the same drunken, knowing grins for 77 haphazard minutes. It’s also a movie best enjoyed if you already have an affection for New Orleans as a temporal anomaly. You might not be able to recreate the exact night out advertised here on Bourbon Street in particular, but you can pass by these same buildings on your walk to a classic burlesque show on one of Bourbon’s less-crowded tributaries. The city is still—as the poster advertises—”tranquil by day, naughty by nite,” same as it ever was.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Conversation (1974)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance paranoia thriller The Conversation, which recently screened at Prytania’s Classic Movie Series.

00:00 Welcome

05:08 George Dureau: New Orleans Artist (2023)
19:10 The Roommate (2011)
32:35 Crimes of Passion (1984)

45:08 The Conversation (1974)

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

Armand (2025)

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There is currently an American remake of Andrei Żuławski’s monstrous divorce meltdown Possession in the works, to be directed by Smile‘s Parker Finn and produced by Robert Pattinson. The project is both catastrophically misguided and totally understandable. Just a decade ago, it was difficult to access the 1981 political psych thriller through any official, legal means, which afforded it a kind of cult-curio prestige. The full-bodied mania of Isabelle Adjani’s performance in out-of-context clips in which she writhes in a tunnel while smashing her groceries against the concrete wall got passed around the internet enough that it gradually became a staple of online film culture, though, initiated by its copyright-infringing use in the Crystal Castles music video for “Plague.” A few expensive physical-media reissues & short streaming-platform stints later, and Possession is now an official part of the canon. There’s even enough evidence to argue that Adjani’s interpretive-dance tunnel freakout is the most influential movie scene of the current moment. It was cited as direct inspiration for at least three of last year’s biggest horror-heroine performances (Nosferatu, Immaculate, The First Omen), and now some poor actress will be tasked with retracing Adjani’s exact steps in a mainstream remake removed from its original cultural & political context — the final stage in legitimizing any once-subversive piece of art.

Adjani’s interpretive-dance freakout is now so cinematically ubiquitous that it’s influencing procedural dramas about tense parent-teacher conferences, not just horror flicks. The Norwegian film Armand is mostly structured as a stage play in a single primary school classroom wherein two couples argue about a physical altercation between their 6-year-old sons, as mediated by a timid schoolteacher and her hard-nosed administrative higher-ups. In the initial telling of the story, the titular child Armand is accused of having sexually assaulted his playmate in a school bathroom, an event that neither (unseen) child has the full vocabulary to communicate to the confused, horrified adults. Every parent and school employee has a hidden, selfish agenda in how they react to this crisis, which is slowly teased out in a web of secrets & resentments that link the two families far beyond the transgression they’re currently debating. It’s Armand’s mother Elizabeth who’s afforded the most complex internal life, though, as performed by Renate “Worst Person in the World” Reinsve. As the intensity of the parent-teacher conference escalates, she has a full psychotic breakdown that destroys all decorum by releasing something monstrously inhuman in the room, transforming a small-scale drama into a full-blown psych thriller merely by laughing & crying with violent intensity at unpredictable intervals. Armand might have gotten the title, but the movie is Elizabeth’s story.

It’s when Elizabeth steps into the school’s hallways & empty classrooms that the movie goes full Possession. The whispered rumors that spiral out of that closed-door meeting haunt her like vengeful ghosts as they echo off of every hard surface to the point of supernatural cacophony. Her public-figure role as a semi-famous actress combines with the scrutiny of her mothering technique to give her the feeling of constantly being pawed at from every direction, which is literalized by the imagined hands of fellow parents roughly groping her flesh in interpretive dance. The proceedings are coldly clerical in nature, but there’s an erotic violence to the tone that reverberates throughout the building, frequently turning moments of heated intimacy into physical abuse as parents & staff siphon each other off into empty rooms. Whether abuse is learned or inherited and whether you can ever fully separate truth from spin provide the film a thematic justification for what’s mostly just an excuse to rattle the audience, often through unexpected nosebleeds, fire alarms, and thundercracks. First-time director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel is playing a game of tonal precarity here, unlocking something intangibly evil in a parent-teacher conference the way Possession unlocks something intangibly evil in a simple act of adultery or, more notably, a trip to the grocer. My comparing Reinsve to Adjani is probably doing her performance no favors, but she does hold her own among other recent actresses who’ve explicitly stated that’s where they’re drawing their inspo.

It’s entirely possible that no one making Armand had Possession in mind during production. As the nepo-grandbaby of Ingmar Bergman & Liv Ullman, Tøndel has plenty of under-the-surface menace to pull from just within his own family’s cinematic legacy. Where & when he chooses to break from reality in this psychological meltdown felt Possession adjacent to me, though, especially by the time the cast breaks into violent, abstract dance. By default, it’s a more compelling, interpretive use of Possession’s influence than any straight-forward Hollywood remake could be, regardless of whether the influence was conscious. The influence is unavoidable right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do something new with it.

-Brandon Ledet

George Dureau: New Orleans Artist (2023)

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I have been aware of George Dureau’s legacy as a local artist for as long as I have been aware of local art, but until now I’ve only ever seen a toned-down, smoothed-out presentation of his actual work. Dureau was an edgy, confrontational presence in the early decades of his notoriety, but by the time I was old enough to explore local art galleries on my own in the 2000s, he had become a respectable cultural ambassador for the city, delivering commissioned works of public art for institutions like NOMA & Gallier Hall. The only time I’ve ever seen his image outside of self-portraits and still photographs is in a made-for-PBS documentary about the process of constructing Mardi Gras parade-floats, titled From the Ground Up. Introduced to him as a venerated public artist, I assumed his personal work was as safe & kitschy as George Rodrigue’s, but Dureau was much more provocative than that. He had just already gone through the John Waters trajectory of outsider-art iconoclast turned Respected Filth Elder before I was around to see the transformation. Thankfully, the new documentary George Dureau: New Orleans Artist is here to correct the record.

George Dureau: New Orleans Artist is a documentary portrait of a classic French Quarter eccentric, crudely stitched together from the stories & works he left behind.  The movie itself is ragged in its construction, seemingly assembled from whatever scraps of interviews with Dureau could be found on YouTube and molding camcorder tapes, with little attention paid to their mismatched sound quality. Despite enjoying an active social & professional life in the city for over eight decades, only eight interviewees are included in this hagiographic portrait, which either feels lazy or cowardly (depending on how divisive other participants might have found his personality or art). The filmmaking team of Sergio Andres Lobo-Navia & Jarret Lofstead are inconsistent in the final edit on when to illustrate those interviewees’ anecdotes with location-specific images captured around the city and when to just repeat triple-exposure shots of oak tree canopies filmed from below as a place-holder background image for the audience to zone out to. Still, no matter the moment-to-moment quibbles I had with the presentation, I left overall grateful for them giving this subject a feature-length treatment in the first place.

As a slideshow of art stills, New Orleans Artist is thrilling. Dureau thought of himself primarily as a painter and was frustrated by the curational attention paid to his photographs instead. Both mediums are presented with equal weight & importance here, drawing a throughline between the macho, muscular models he scouted to photograph in his home studio and the classical figure paintings that resulted from those studies. A homosexual lush with a warm but caustic demeanor, Dureau is portrayed as his own worst professional enemy, self-sabotaging his way through The Art World as he blew easy opportunities in order to maintain a vague personal integrity that only he fully understood. This self-driven conflict is mostly explained in his relationship with infamous NYC photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whom both the film and Dureau himself argue photocopied all of his best visual ideas in less interesting, crueler works that made a lot more money in a market that thrives on cruelty. Dureau’s own work could cynically be seen as exploitative towards his nonprofessional models, whom he often sought for their differences in race & physical disfigurement. Mapplethorpe is presented at length as both an example of Dureau’s self-sabotaging professional combativeness and as an example of how this same work could be truly exploitative in the wrong hands.

A better movie might have focused entirely on Dureau’s warmly bitchy clashes with Mapplethorpe and the mutual influences of their work as contemporaries. There’s a specificity & purpose to that subject that’s missing in the film’s broader recollections of Dureau’s life in the city, which often devolve into “Ain’t dere no more” nostalgia and understandable-but-rote mourning over the devastation of AIDS & Hurricane Katrina (both of which Dureau survived relatively intact). By the time local art gallery owner Arthur Rogers explains that the French Quarter of the 1970s was different from today because it was full of “true eccentrics” then, I was nauseated by the obliviousness to the city’s ongoing art-scene counterculture; speaking of it purely in the past tense is embarrassing, not validating. Dureau’s work is powerful enough to speak for itself, though, and it loudly speaks over any good-old-days distractions from the film’s few interviewees. His work feels especially alive when compared with Mapplethorpe’s, seeming much cooler & kinder than his more famous frenemy’s (which was blurred at local screenings, presumably due to copyright issues). No one would have hated a side-by-side Dureau/Mapplethorpe documentary more than George Dureau himself, though, so it’s probably for the best that the only feature-length documentary of his work to date is about his relationship with New Orleans instead, something he did have genuine affection for.

-Brandon Ledet