Anora and Her Friends

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Sean Baker’s time is here.  After nailing down his gig-labor docufiction style in the 2004 food-delivery tragedy Take Out and then applying it to a long string of sex-industry dramas in the couple decades since, Baker has finally earned his moment in the prestige-circuit spotlight.  Earlier breakthroughs like Tangerine & The Florida Project perfectly calibrated his caustically funny, soberingly traumatic storytelling style in his best work to date, but he emerged from those triumphs recognized as a name to watch rather than one of the modern greats.  He’s been recalibrating in the years since, going full heel in his deliberately unlovable black comedy Red Rocket before face-turning to the opposite extreme in his latest work, Anora.  Clearly, Baker has decided he wants audiences to love him again, and it’s impressive to see him swing so wildly in tone between his last two features without losing his voice.  Anora is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour Sean Baker of Red Rocket.  Both are equally funny & frantic, but only one is affable enough to set the filmmaker up for a Best-Picture Oscar run after taking home the top prize at Cannes.  It’s his time.

The surprising thing about Anora’s critical success is that it’s such a dutiful continuation of the work Baker’s already been doing for years – just with an extra dash of sugar to help sweeten the bitter.  Mikey Madison stars as the titular erotic dancer, another trapped-by-capitalism sex worker in a long tradition of Sean Baker anti-heroines dating at least as far back as 2012’s Starlet.  Anora is a thorny, chaotic, unfiltered baddie whom the audience instantly loves for her faults, because she’s fun to be around.  Like in Tangerine & The Florida Project, we meet her working customers in a high-stress but manageable profession, then follow her on an anarchic journey through her larger urban community, walking a tightrope between slapstick physical comedy & face-slap physical violence until she’s offered a moment of grace in the final beat.  As the editor, Baker has worked out a well-timed rhythm for this story template through its many repetitions in previous works.  He sweeps the audience up in the hedonistic romance of Anora’s Vegas-strip marriage to a big-spender Russian brat who offers a Cinderellic escape from the strip club circuit in exchange for helping secure a green card.  The quick-edit montage of that fantasy then slows down to linger on its real-world fallout, investing increasingly long, painful stretches of time on Russian gangsters’ retribution for the young couple generating tabloid headlines that embarrass the brat’s oligarch father.  The laughs continue to roll in, but the punchlines (and physical punches) get more brutal with each impact until it just isn’t fun anymore, as is the Sean Baker way.

There’s nothing especially revelatory about the Sean Baker formula in Anora.  In the context of his filmography, it’s just more of the same (of a very good thing).  However, the increased attention to his career-long project as an auteur has had its immediate benefits, not least of all in Baker’s collaboration with the local repertory series Gap Tooth Cinema (formerly known as Wildwood).  When asked to program a screening for Gap Tooth as a primer for what he was aiming to achieve in Anora, Baker offered three titles as options: Fellini’s Oscar-winning sex worker drama Nights of Cabiria, the fish-out-of-water Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, and a second Italian sex-work story in 1960’s Adua and Her Friends.  Gap Tooth ultimately selected Adua, the most obscure title of the trio and, more importantly, one of the very best titles they’ve screened to date.  I don’t know that Sean Baker’s name would have come to mind had I discovered Adua and Her Friends in a different context, since it’s a much more formally polished picture than the anarchic comedies he’s become known for since he filmed Tangerine on an iPhone.  The comparisons that more readily came to mind were Mildred Pierce, Volver, and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.  It’s a less recognizable title than any of those comparisons, but that’s the only way in which it’s lesser.  It’s an incredibly stylish, sexy, tragic, and cool story of self-reinvented sex workers making do in late-50s Italy, one that speaks well to Baker’s genuine interest in his characters’ inner lives beyond what they symbolize as society’s economic casualties.

Adua and Her Friends is a darkly comic drama about a small crew of sex workers who are forcibly retired by the Merlin Law of 1958, which ceased the legal operation of all Italian brothels.  Unsure how to get by without the only trade they have experience in, the women conspire to open a rural, roadside restaurant as a front for a new, illegal brothel they will run themselves.  Only, after a few successful months of food service—depicted as being equally difficult as prostitution—they decide they’d rather “go straight” in their new business than convert it into an underground brothel.  As you’d expect, the self-reinvented women’s lives as restaurateurs are upended by men from their past that refuse to let them start fresh, the same way Anora is blocked from upgrading her social position from escort to wife.  Where Adua excels is in taking the time to flesh out the inner lives & conflicts of each woman in its main cast.  Lolita is led astray by conmen who take advantage of her youthful naivete; Marilina struggles to reestablish a familial relationship with her estranged son; Milly hopes to leave her past behind and start over as a devoted housewife, Anora-style.  Adua (Oscar-winner Simone Signoret) gets the first & final word in her struggle to establish a new career before she ages out of her livelihood, but the movie is an ensemble-cast melodrama at heart, asking you to love, laugh with, and weep for every woman at the roadside restaurant (and to hiss at the cads who selfishly ruin it all).

Much like in Baker’s films, the majority of Adua and Her Friends is a surprisingly good time, with plenty slapstick gags & irreverently bawdy jokes undercutting the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tropes typical to this subject.  Like Anora, it’s a 2+ hour comedy with an emotionally devastating ending, one that carefully avoids making its titular sex worker a purely pitiable symbol of societal cruelty even while acknowledging that she’s backed into a pretty shitty corner.  Adua and Anora can be plenty cruel themselves when it helps their day-to-day survival.  That might be where the two films’ overlapping interests end, since Adua lounges in a much more relaxed hangout vibe than Anora, scored by repetitions of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” rather than t.A.T.u.’s “All the Things She Said.”  Adua and her friends loiter around their Italian villa, fanning themselves in a deep-focus tableau, while Anora is dragged around Vegas & NYC by Russian mobsters who (for the most part) don’t see her as a human being.  There is one early sequence in Adua where a black-out drunken night is represented in choppy lost-time edits that may have been an influence on the rhythms of Anora’s first act, but otherwise I assume Baker was inspired less by the film’s formal style than he was by the characterizations of its main cast.  The frank, sincere, humanizing approach to sex-worker portraiture in Adua and Her Friends speaks well to Sean Baker’s continued interest in sex-work as a cinematic subject and, although both were great, I feel like I learned more about his work through its presentation than I did by watching his latest film.

 -Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Green Lantern – Beware My Power (2022)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

Green Lantern: Beware My Power falls squarely in the “solid, but unexceptional” tier of these movies for me. The story is interesting, and it goes out of its way to deliver something different from the films that came before it, making overtures toward space opera as a genre, while also falling back on some old standby narrative elements, like framing the narrative around a central mystery (this time, it’s “What re-ignited the conflict between two worlds brokering an uneasy peace?”) and having a Green Lantern with PTSD serve as the main character. But it also errs on the side of being a bit messy, its moral quandary is muddled, and there’s something amiss in the editing. 

John Stewart (Aldis Hodge and therefore automatically an extra half star) is a veteran of the Iraqi Quagmire struggling to deal with his PTSD now that he’s back in civilian life when a UFO crashes into the junkyard next door. He rescues a small blue alien dude from the wreckage, who speaks to him cryptically before his body self-destructs at the moment he dies, leaving behind a green ring that slips itself onto his finger and starts talking to him. Unable to remove it, he asks the ring if someone could help him understand what’s happening to him, and the ring surrounds him in a protective shield and take him to the JLA’s satellite “Watchtower,” where after a round of extremely typical “misunderstanding means fight” stuff, Green Arrow (Jimmi Simpson) and the newest Green Lantern are off to the GL HQ planet of Oa in the self-repaired crashed ship. Upon arrival, they find the headquarters in ruins and meet Shayera Hol (Jamie Gray Hyder), a warrior of the planet Thanagar, which is populated by winged humanoids. She tells them that the Green Lanterns had helped to create a truce between the Thanagarians and the basically human people of Rann, who were at war with one another. An attempt to build a bridge between their two planets, metaphorically and (using teleportation tech known as “zeta beams”) literally, went awry, putting the two planets right next to each other and wreaking untold havoc on both. Each side blames the other, with good evidence on both fronts, although this turns out to be due to an external party that’s performing false flag efforts on both Rann and Thanagar. Along the way, they pick up Adam Strange (Brian Bloom), a hero of Rann whom even the Thanagarians respect, and who has been presumed dead for years. 

Of course, the villain behind everything is Sinestro. It’s always Sinestro. I got tricked into thinking for a while that this story might go somewhere different, but nope: Sinestro. There does turn out to be another party behind him pulling things from the shadows, but the moment that it was revealed that the Rann/Thanagar beam-bridge thing was sabotaged by Sinestro, I rolled my eyes. (Worse still, upon looking up the movie on Wikipedia to review the cast list, it looks like the film’s poster/DVD cover straight up shows Sinestro; so much for making it a “mystery” at all.) Up to this point, I was willing to forgive a lot of the film’s flaws. A lot of the animation seems a little choppy around the edges, and there’s a distinct feeling that I get that certain frames were extended by fractions of a second, as if they needed just an extra minute and change of runtime in order to meet a contractual obligation and they were going to get those 87 seconds with what was already completed, even if it meant making the time between each character’s lines feel juuuuuuust a teensy bit too long. 

Further, there’s a real “Not all cops” vibe early in the film that I wasn’t a big fan of, and seems particularly tone deaf given the time of release and the film’s main character. After manhandling a guy because he was being an obnoxious jerk while John was having a PTSD flashback, John then comes across two men planning to burn an unhoused guy alive in an alley simply for being there, and he fights them off. The police arrive just as he puts on a few finishing moves and tase him, only letting him go once they run a background check and learn that he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. The whole thing feels weird, out of place, regressive, and apathetic about police brutality. Given that one of the film’s theses revolves around moral justifications for taking a life, it feels weird to include this run-in with the police one of the film’s first scenes. I’m not exaggerating either; the first time that GL and GA meet Shayera, John almost kills her in their fight, as he has her pinned under a mental construct and is in the process of crushing her to death as his ring repeats “Lethal force is not authorized,” over and over again. It’s because of John’s PTSD, of course, as he keeps flashing back to the moment that one of his fellow soldiers was killed next to him, followed by an attack by an enemy combatant who stabs John through his hand in the altercation before John is able to get the upper hand. This gets called back a couple of times, including a scene near the end when the film’s big bad does the same. When the gang manages to rescue the imprisoned Hal Jordan, his old buddy Green Arrow is shocked when the newly freed man kills one of the enemy facility’s guards without hesitation, as Hal says that his experience in Sinestro’s prison has hardened him. Still later, the final villain is defeated when Arrow is forced to kill them, as there’s no other choice. 

Justification for homicide seems like a strange place for these movies to go. I suppose it could be construed as necessary given that our newest Lantern here is a combat veteran, and the fact that John is haunted by the things he saw (and did) in the war makes for a much more complex character than the ones we’ve seen so far in this series. I don’t want to complain about the creative team on this one giving more depth to any of the characters, but it’s definitely a weird choice. A lot of the other choices I really liked, though. Although Unbound spent some time in space aboard Brainiac’s ship and the failed assault on the planet Apokolips obviously launched from space, it’s surprising that it’s taken over forty of these movies to make a proper, space-set sci-fi story (it also took them more than forty of these before they made one with a Black lead, it should be mentioned). The influences from Star Wars are all over. The Green Lanterns’ powers are given elements of The Force here (during a long interstellar trip, John even practices his use of his new powers with the ring like Luke does aboard the Millennium Falcon). There’s a dark, corrupting influence that causes the moral fall of the greatest and most respected member of an intergalactic peace-keeping order, and the fall of that order leaves only one last Jedi Green Lantern, one free of the influence of previous generations. Hal Jordan’s prison beard even makes him look almost exactly like prequel Obi-Wan. If you’re going to borrow (or steal), do it from the best, I suppose. 

From a production perspective, this one is a little sloppy, but I’ve finally gotten used to the animation style, so it’s not intolerable. Narratively, it’s a refreshing change of pace to get out and do some space stuff, since the last time we did anything close to this scale was in Emerald Knights, which was over thirty movies ago. Characterwise, the choices they made about John Stewart’s past are an interesting wrinkle that delivers more pathos than normal, and his interactions with Green Arrow are a lot of fun. I love Aldis Hodge, so that’s a plus. Still, this one gets a “Solid, But Unexceptional.” 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #225: The Gleaners and I (2000) & Varda Docs

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Welcome to Episode #225 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, and Brandon discuss a grab bag of self-reflective documentaries directed by Agnès Varda, starting with her dumpster-diving doc The Gleaners and I (2000).

00:00 Welcome

01:20 The Company of Strangers (1990)
05:21 Adua and Her Friends (1960)
10:39 Corrina, Corrina (1994)

14:44 The Gleaners and I (2000)
32:25 Jane B for Agnès V (1988)
44:52 The Beaches of Agnès (2008)
54:26 Faces Places (2017)

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

The Phantom of the Opera (1989)

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I know it’s gauche to discuss a movie’s marketing instead of its content, but the 1989 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera is an especially peculiar case.  Clearly, the best way to sell the film would be to piggyback off star Robert Englund’s success in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, especially since Freddy Kreuger’s make-up designer Kevin Yagher tagged along to apply the exact same make-up to this public-domain franchise.  The video store poster for The Phantom of the Opera tiptoes as close as it can to declaring “Freddy Kreuger is the Phantom of the Opera” without getting sued by New Line.  It’s not exactly false advertising, either.  The entire Phantom story is told as one long dream-sequence journey into the past, where a wisecracking Englund in the gooey Freddy makeup slashes down every fool who gets in the way of the young ingenue he wants to transform into an opera star.  What that premise doesn’t convey is that the film also adopts a romantic stage-theatre tone, playing like a throwback to classic Hammer Horror (or, at times, Masterpiece Theatre) that offers a classier, more literary take on the genre.  That’s the version of Phantom of the Opera you were sold if you happen to catch the film’s trailer, which shows you all of the period-piece tragic romance of the plot with none of the flayed-alive gorehound grue that frequently interrupts it. 

Setting up a modern-day sequel that never came to be (The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror in Manhattan), our story starts in 1980s New York City, where The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen is auditioning to become a professional opera singer.  There’s a stage prop accident during her audition that smashes her into a mirror realm so, naturally, she travels back in time to a past life in 19th Century London, again working as a hopeful opera singer.  Only, the past version of herself is supported by a mysterious benefactor who skulks around the rafters and dungeons of the theatre, acting as her “angel” (through mentorship and murder) but carefully staying out of the spotlight.  According to the title, Englund is strictly playing the Phantom of the Opera here, but his character details are a hodgepodge amalgamation of the Phantom, Faust, Jack the Ripper and, of course, Freddy Kreuger.  The theatrical setting offers the film a classy surface aesthetic, like a straight-to-video version of Argento’s Opera.  The Phantom’s quipping & mugging in the extreme-gore kill scenes drags it back down to the base pleasures of a by-the-numbers slasher, though, which is a fun contrast to the stately background setting.  Then, when the story eventually smashes back through the looking glass to modern-day New York, bringing along Phantom Freddy with it, it’s even more fun to briefly see that dynamic flipped.

I always got the sense that Robert Englund never wanted to be fully pigeonholed as a Horror Guy, much less as Freddy Kreuger.  If nothing else, he commiserates with fellow reluctant-horror-icon Wes Craven over that professional disappointment in A New Nightmare, where the actor & director find a way to flex their more erudite offscreen personae under the Freddy Kreuger brand.  In The Phantom of the Opera, he’s clearly attempting to stray from the Freddy Krueger schtick into something more literary, but the furthest away he was allowed to get was emulating Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  It doesn’t help that he’s wearing the Freddy makeup beneath his Phantom mask, which is stitched together from harvested patches of discolored human flesh.  That dual make-up layering is mirrored in the film’s double-exposure imagery during more surreal moments where the story travels time, echoes Faust, or underlines the Phantom’s extraordinary powers as a supernatural killer.  So much of the Phantom plays like a standard BBC adaptation of a literary classic that it’s shocking when an especially beautiful or grotesque image punches through: a vibrant shock of red fabric, a flayed man transformed into a human puppet, the Phantom posed in Mario Bava color-gel artifice, etc.  It may not be the career turn that Englund was hoping for, but it does offer a lovely, volatile contrast between the career he wished he had and the career he actually had, violently juxtaposed in real time.

-Brandon Ledet

Gamera’s 90s Makeover

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All you really need to earn respectability in the entertainment industry is to stick around long enough for the bad reviews to fade away and your presence is undeniable. It worked for Keanu Reeves, it worked for Adam Sandler, and it also worked for the fire-breathing turtle monster Gamera.  When Gamera first premiered in the 1960s, the giant turtle beast was essentially a goofy knockoff of Godzilla, and he was treated as such.  As a result, he quickly pivoted to become a “hero to children everywhere” in a long string of kiddie sequels (before Godzilla also got into that game), so that the original Daikaijū Gamera film was never treated with the same critical or historical respect as the original Gojira.  We all love Earth’s hard-shelled protector anyway, though, so it’s good to know that Gamera did eventually get his deserved victory lap in the 1990s, when he was given a slick, big-budget makeover to help boost his reputation as one of the kaiju greats.  I haven’t yet seen all of Gamera’s kid-friendly sequels from the 1960s & 70s, but I can’t imagine any could compare with his action-blockbuster spectacles from the 1990s.  Gamera’s Heisei-era trilogy is a glorious run of high-style, high-energy kaiju pictures that for once genuinely compete with the best of the Godzilla series, instead of registering as a court jester pretender to the King of Monsters’ throne.

The debut of that 90s makeover, 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is both the best and the most faithful of the trilogy.  Gamera is re-introduced to the world as a living relic of Atlantis, not a newly arrived extraterrestrial protector.  He battles the Giant Claw-like bird creatures the Gyaos from his 1960s days, who are theorized to have been activated by Climate Change, and his ability to fight them off is powered by a child’s love.  Just in case audiences weren’t sure that this straightforward Gamera revival was inspired by the success of Jurassic Park, Guardian of the Universe almost immediately includes an archeological dig and a scene where the scientist studying the Gyaos shoves an entire arm into their droppings like Laura Dern going shoulder deep in triceratops poop.  It’s the Jurassic Park style mixed-media approach to the visual effects that really makes this one stand out, since the plot and the monster-of-the-week enemies are such classic Gamera fare.  There’s something gorgeous about the film’s 90s green screen magic, surveillance video inserts, and rudimentary CGI mixing with the rubber monster suit tactility of classic kaiju pictures that inspires awe in this reputation-rehabilitator.  We are all Sam Neill gazing upwards, slack-jawed at our giant reptile friend and, then, begging the Japanese military to stop shooting at him so he can save the day.  Every time Gamera bleeds green ooze in his fight to save us, we too ooze a tear in solidarity.

Things turn more horrific in the 1996 sequel Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, shifting from Jurassic Park to Mimic in Hollywood comparison terms.  Instead of fighting off the Gyaos sky-beasts, Gamera has to face underground bug creatures collectively called Legion.  As a threat, Legion can be genuinely unnerving in their Phase IV-style insectoid organization skills, at one point carpeting Gamera’s entire body in a collective swarm.  In individual design, they’re a touch creepier than the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, adding a gross little cyclops eyeball to the center of each bug’s frame.  All we can do in the face of such horrors is to thank Gamera for sticking around to protect us . . . unless you happen to be one of the poor children orphaned by the large-scale destruction of his skyscraper heroism.  Gamera’s enemy in the third installment, 1999’s Revenge of Iris, is the titular parasitic monster that has been orphaned by the turtle’s heroic violence, birthed from a loan surviving egg seemingly borrowed from the set of an Alien sequel.  Really, though, Gamera has to contend with the disaffected child psychically linked to that monster, who lost her parents when Gamera crushed their apartment during a Legion attack in the previous picture.  It’s a plot that questions whether the widespread collateral damage of Gamera’s heroism is worth having him around to fight off lesser monsters, to the point where he has to fight a personified version of the Trauma he’s caused in past battles. We all still love the big guy, but accountability is important.

Of the two sequels, Revenge of Iris is the only true contender for possibly besting Guardian of the Universe as the best of Gamera’s 90s run.  By that point in the series, Gamera’s reputation as something too goofy to take seriously had been fully overcome, so there was only one goal left to achieve: make Gamera scary.  It’s an incredible accomplishment, achieved by filming the giant turtle beast from inside the homes he’s supposedly protecting with his righteous, vengeful violence.  There’s a somber, funereal tone to Revenge of Iris, as if it were clear to the filmmakers that Gamera’s 90s revival was a special moment in time that had already reached its natural conclusion.  Images of dead Gyaos covered in flies and a sea floor carpeted in dead Gameras from Atlantis’s ancient past convey a sad finality to the series echoed in Gamera’s “What have I done?” moment self-reflection when he realizes he has traumatized the very children he sought to protect.  Personally, I was much more impressed & delighted by the spectacle of Gamera’s official makeover in Guardian of the Universe, but the tonal & thematic accomplishments in Revenge of Iris are just as remarkable, considering the monster’s humble origins three decades earlier.  Attack of Legion is a worthy bridge between those two franchise pillars as well, especially on the strength of its creepy creature designs.  Gamera may not have emerged from his 90s run as a hero to all children everywhere, but he carved out an even bigger place for himself in this overgrown child’s heart.  I love my giant turtle friend, and I’m happy that he eventually found the respect he’s always deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

Zombi Holocaust (1980)

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There is no horror subgenre more hideously racist than the Italian cannibal film, and yet I keep tricking myself into watching them every time they appear in the wild on thrift-store DVDs.  The 1980 Fulci knockoff Zombi Holocaust was at least more memorably entertaining than the last time I picked up one of these cursed objects about five years ago, when I reviewed Slave of the Cannibal God.  I was hoping Zombi Holocaust would be Zombi-style gonzo Italo mayhem while fearing it might be Cannibal Holocaust-style racist Italo bullshit instead.  The results were just as evenly mixed as the title suggests.  Opening in a New York City med school where cadavers are being ransacked for lunchmeat behind professors’ backs, it at least promises a novel, urban angle on the Italo cannibal movie.  Soon enough, though, those unsanctioned organ harvests are revealed to be the work of “primitive savages” from a small Indonesian island, and the white academics set sail to see what’s causing those “Asiatic” brutes to go so violently mad.  Once on the island, the movie becomes more traditionally racist in the Mondo Italo style, except that the usual cannibal-tribesmen threat is made worse by the locals worshiping a small gang of rotting zombies who stalk the jungle and occasionally pop by for a human snack.  It’s a wild genre mashup between the kind of shameless schlock I love and the kind of shameless shlock I loathe, erratically alternating between them from minute to minute.

What’s fascinating about Zombi Holocaust‘s xenophobia is that the film actively attempts to convey an anti-racist sentiment; it’s just too tone-deaf to pull it off. In a laughable line of faux-profundity, a college professor asks if New York City is really all that different from a society of “primitive savages,” undercutting whatever point they think they’re making with their own racist terminology.  There is something to the juxtaposition of the university’s nighttime cannibal raids and its daytime surgery lectures, though, calling into question how medical study is functionally different from mad-scientist butchery.  That parallel is confirmed later when it turns out that the reason the islanders have been regressing to crazed cannibal savagery is that they’re being experimented on by the professors’ white academic colleague who has gone mad and gone rogue.  It’s a plot wrinkle spoiled by the film’s alternate American title Dr. Butcher M.D., which is a little less descriptive than Zombi Holocaust but a lot less embarrassing to say out loud when someone asks what movie you’re watching.  The messaging behind that white villainy reveal is somewhat commendable, even if it is driven by an impulse to shock & entertain rather than an impulse to discourse.  It’s also completely undone by the way every single Indonesian character is presented onscreen, since it still gets its thrills by depicting them as cannibalistic humanoids regardless of the reasoning.

It’s foolish to look for any coherent messaging in this vintage zombie cheapie, of course, so it’s ultimately a movie that lives & dies (and comes back to life) by the frequency & brutality of its violence.  There are a few mundane stretches wherein characters drive around NYC, change clothes in real time, and struggle to read a map, but for the most part it’s a volatilely entertaining picture.  When the island cannibals eat, they disembowel and chow down in swarms while their victims squirm & scream in protest.  When the mad doctor performs surgery, he cracks open his nonconsenting patients’ skulls to dig around the goop inside in full view of the camera.  There’s even an early giallo-style sequence in the hospital morgue where a gloved maniac meticulously removes a corpse’s hand with a bone saw and then runs off with it, presumably for a midnight snack.  For all of my wincing at Zombi Holocaust‘s racial stereotypes and willingness to dawdle, it did make me yell “WHAT?!” at the screen several times, which is invaluable for second-hand horror schlock.  I’m still not convinced that the Italo cannibal genre at large has anything of value to offer to cinema or to humanity, but this one example is just crazed enough in its practical-effects hyperviolence that for once I didn’t regret watching it.  I’m just a lot more likely to rewatch Burial Ground instead next time I get the itch, since it delivers the same Italo zombie goods without miring them in cannibal muck.

-Brandon Ledet

Play Dirty (1969)

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I’m not especially interested in War Films as a genre, but André de Toth’s WWII thriller Play Dirty sneaks past those well-guarded genre biases and hits me where I’m vulnerable.  Instead of being guided by the usual narrative maps of WWII stories about the valor of defeating Nazis or the horrors of what those Nazis achieved before defeat, Play Dirty is structured more like a heist picture that happens to be set on the battlefield.  It’s a crime picture first and a war movie second, as explained by a British colonel who declares in an early strategy meeting, “War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with criminals.”  Those criminals are the men under his command: a gang of disaffected mercenaries who wear the British uniform but are more motivated by money & personal survival than they are by the prospect of defeating Hitler’s Germany.  If it were an American film, it might’ve been received as a reaction to our country’s ongoing, pointless involvement in The Vietnam War, but its pervasive Britishness divorces it from such a strict 1:1 reading, extending its commentary to all war everywhere at every time.  In Play Dirty, war is a sprawling, scrappy prison fight wherein you’re just as likely to be shot in the back by your own men as you are to be taken down by the enemy.  It deliberately strips all valor from history’s most noble victory over a warring enemy, with the Head Criminal in Charge advising, “Forget the noble sentiments if you want to live.”

A young Michael Caine provides the most familiar face (and voice) here as a clean-cut military officer who naively takes command of this criminal unit.  He immediately struggles to exert control over the undisciplined brutes, desperately pulling a gun on them whenever they refuse to obey his orders.  Unbeknownst to him, the only reason he survives these altercations is because the most undisciplined brute of all (Nigel Davenport) has been promised a bigger payout for the mission if Caine returns alive, unlike the other officers who’ve preceded him.  Their half-Inglorious Basterds, half- Sorcerer mission is to sneak behind enemy lines disguised as Italian soldiers and explode a critical Nazi fuel depot, expediting Hitler’s defeat.  The rocky path to victory is high in tension and sparse in dialogue, often with a shaky handheld camera jostling the audience with the uneasy feeling that gunfire or explosions could erupt at any moment; they often do.  On a character level, there’s no chance of meeting in the middle for Caine & Davenport, who represent opposing noble & savage philosophies of war.  In order to survive the mission, Caine has to cheat & kill just like the heartless criminals under his command, while Davenport just knowingly smiles and scoffs at the supposed differences between “playing dirty” and “playing safe.”  It’s by no means the only war picture that posits that “War makes monsters of us all,” but it is one of the only ones I’ve seen that frames that monstrous behavior as a lowly, scrappy crime spree.

Even if this gang of British soldiers weren’t sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as Italians, this would still clearly be the kind of cinematic relic Quentin Tarantino raves about through coke sweats at LA house parties to anyone who’ll listen. It’s got the exact haggard, macho hangout vibe he’s always praising in vintage genre cinema, and I’m sure he could rattle off the professional stats of all the various character actors who pad out the rest of the cast like a little kid who obsesses over baseball cards.  The only woman among those macho brutes is a German nurse whose capture raises the tension of the group dynamic for obvious, hideous reasons, which reminded me why I don’t spend much of my personal time perusing this particular video store aisle.  Even so, the rougher, confrontational approach to the genre did pique my interest in André de Toth’s directorial career, of which this was shockingly his final film. It’s got the showy, punchy impact of a much younger man with more to prove professionally, which speaks well to de Toth’s late-career enthusiasm behind the camera.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the horror & thriller titles in his catalog that speak more directly to my personal tastes (House of Wax, Crime Wave, Pitfall, etc.) almost as much as I’m looking forward to never picking up a gun on a battlefield, nor having a one-sided conversation with Quentin Tarantino.

-Brandon Ledet

Audition (1999)

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Between all the tradwife influencers, anti-feminist slanderers, anti-Choice Evangelicals, and pro-Trump merchandise bots that flood your doomscrolling app of choice, you don’t need me to tell you that old-fashioned Conservatism is back in a big way.  President-elect Donald Trump’s popular-vote victory this week was a sharp reminder that, in majority, we are a nation that yearns to turn the clock back to a made-up Leave It to Beaver 1950s at the expense of minor, inconvenient details like personal freedom & autonomy – especially for women.  There is no victory to be had over the ghouls who’ve funded & bulldozed our path to this new Conservative hellscape, since the election results indicate that they’re supplying exactly what the people demand: political & moral regression.  That’s why it can be such a relief to fantasize about victory & retribution through art, the only place left where the bad guys lose and our stories can be understood through lenses like progress, meaning, and justice.  At least, that’s what’s on my mind as I think back to watching Takashi Miike’s 1999 cult thriller Audition the week before the election.

If I can dial my own mental clock back a couple decades to when I first saw Audition in the mid-2000s (during a previous popular-vote-sanctioned Conservative hellscape), I believe my thoughts were less political.  They were more like, “Wow, this is boring,” followed by “Whoa, this is fucking sick.”  Audition is the kind of slow-burn horror that tests the patience of twentysomethings who are overeager to get to the gore, with much of its first hour playing more as a domestic drama than a serial killer thriller.  We follow a single-father widower (Ryo Ishibashi) who hopes to bring home a fresh new wife to help maintain a traditional domestic life for his teenage son, since, “A man needs a woman to support him, or he will exhaust himself.”  After sneering at a group of women who dare to have fun in public at an audible volume, he starts to doubt whether there are any demure, mindful women left worth wifing in all of Japan.  That’s when his gross filmmaker business partner steps in to introduce the titular conceit of The Audition, wherein they will host a casting call for young women to play the role of a traditional, submissive wife.  The women think it’s a fictional role for a movie, but the men know it’s for real life.

A Japanese production made to cash in on the popularity of Ring, Audition was obviously not speaking to the American political landscape.  The men who hope to entrap an unsuspecting actress in domestic servitude pine for an older, more conservative Japan.  When they overhear boisterous women daring to enjoy themselves in a public bar, they complain, “Japan in finished.”  The way the movie calls them out for indulging in the Japanese filmmaking industry’s casting couch culture obviously has its own echoes in Hollywood sexual abuse scandals, though, to the point where it’s amazing that the film wasn’t remade as a Good-For-Her Horror revenger in the #metoo era.  The widower is, of course, cosmically punished for his moral crimes by targeting the exact wrong actress from the casting call (Eihi Shiina): a torture-happy serial killer who poses as a wispy loner who’s too shy to make eye contact, when she’s really just waiting for the right time to pounce on her prey.  Men are her prey.  Yes, all men, as she explains, “All men are the same,” even if they’re using the casting couch to find a loving wife instead of a one-time hookup.

It’s easy to forget all of this patient set-up to Audition‘s hyperviolent conclusion.  The bone-sawing, needle-plunging imagery of the final act is so unnervingly grotesque that it obliterates most of what comes before it, at least as the movie lingers in memory.  That effect unfortunately influenced a lot of mainstream American horror filmmaking throughout the torture porn phase of the Bush era, but movies like Saw & Hostel did not echo the more nuanced touches of what Miike accomplished.  I was particularly struck during this rewatch by how the basic perspective and reality of the ending doesn’t fit into any one tidy interpretation.  When the killer reveals herself as a violent avenger of all abused women against the men who sexually exploit them, she doesn’t do so in a direct, declarative monologue like a Bond villain.  She speaks softly, mostly to herself, while the dipshit widower drifts in & out of consciousness (from both paralyzing drugs and unbearable pain), witnessing detailed reveals of her past experiences that he could not possibly know about, mixed with his own warped dreams & memories.  Meanwhile, she’s not treated as the moral hero of the story so much as a tragic figure who’s dangerous to those who happen to waltz into her trap, and there’s little relief or catharsis to be found for either combatant in her little self-waged war of the sexes.

Audition does not aim to make you feel better about modern culture’s longing for an over-idealized, unjust Conservative past.  It mostly aims to upset & disturb, leaving behind stabs of horrific imagery that you’ll clearly recall even as the plot details fade: pornographic camcorder footage, a ringing telephone, a smirk, a writhing burlap sack, etc.  Still, it can be comforting to know that there are other people out there who find our great cultural Conservative yearning to be grotesque, alienating, and worthy of violent retribution.  The only problem is they apparently do not represent the majority, who’d rather oppress than evolve.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Catwoman – Hunted (2021)

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Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

There’s a moment in this movie where Selina “Catwoman” Kyle is in the middle of a heist, very early in the runtime, when—suddenly—a Batarang appears in front of her, and a cowled shape moves in the shadows. I sighed a heavy sigh; after Soul of the Dragon, nearly three hours of a Long Halloween, and the Batman-heavy Injustice, I was really, really tired of the Batman. You can’t imagine the relief I felt a few minutes later when Batwoman emerged from the shadows. At this point, I’ll take any reprieve that I can get. 

The film opens at a lavish party being hosted by Barbara “Cheetah” Minerva (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), which doubles as the onboarding of Gotham mob boss Black Mask (Jonathan Banks) into the criminal organization “Leviathan.” It’s a costume ball as well, which serves to help a woman who arrives in an old-school Catwoman outfit, catching Black Mask’s eye and prompting him to invite her to accompany his party inside. Unbeknownst to him, the woman on his arm is the real Selina Kyle (Elizabeth Gillies), and she makes her way through the party flirting and pickpocketing until she can get into Minerva’s vault. Along with her faithful feline companion Isis, abscond with the Cat’s Eye Emerald, which Black Mask brought as his buy-in on this criminal enterprise. Mask and his henchman pursue Catwoman along with Minerva’s brute Tobias Whale (Keith David), but she manages to escape, only to be apprehended by Kate Kane, aka Batwoman (Stephane Beatriz), who spirits her aboard an aircraft that Interpol has “acquired” from Penguin. There she meets secret agents Julia Pennyworth (Lauren Cohan) and King Faraday (Jonathan Frakes!), who enlist her help in bringing down Leviathan by acting as bait for Minerva et al’s cronies, promising to wipe her criminal record clean if she succeeds. 

Like Gotham Knight before it, Catwoman: Hunted is drawn in an anime style, although it was handled by a single studio rather than several, as the earlier, vignette-based film was. That studio is OLM, best known in the west for their work on various Pokemon projects, and I love the art style. Catwoman herself is adorable, as is Isis (uh, please don’t take that out of context), and the designs of all of the characters make this one a very pleasant watch, especially following so closely on the heels of more Tomorrowverse thick-line drawing and the ugly art style that was omnipresent in Injustice. Of particular note is just how cool Cheetah looks once she hulks out into her big, feline form; it makes for a much more dynamic visual experience than the rotating house styles that I had come to expect from these, and it was a pleasant surprise once the film got started. I was already pretty won over, however, as the opening credits featured a great jazz soundtrack (courtesy of Yutaka Yamada) and a fun sequence which has this grainy feeling, like the images are drawn with chalk on newsprint. It’s very 70s, and I loved it. Looking back, this film is also one in which those opening credits serve a narrative function; it tells an impressionistic story of Catwoman going to Sochi and rescuing a large group of women from some kind of imprisonment. At first, this seems to simply be a little bit of character development, to signal to potential new viewers that this Catwoman isn’t just the criminal with whom they are likely already familiar, but also establishes her moral code. Further than that, however, this event is actually the impetus for the plot, as it’s later revealed that Catwoman liberated a group of women who were being human trafficked by Minerva, and that what seemed like little more than typical Catwoman steal-a-big-jewel shenanigans was actually the first step in a more complicated plot to take down Minerva. 

I suppose it’s not that unusual for a script by Greg Weisman to be clever. I’ve sung the praises of his television series Young Justice many times in these pages. I love it so much that I put on a random episode while doing some chores the other day and ended up not only just sitting down and watching it, but also having to force myself not to spend the rest of the day like that. For fans of animation in general, Weisman’s name may be familiar because of his development of the criminally underrated Gargoyles, a 90s Saturday morning Disney product that wove mythology, magic, and Shakespeare into its text while tackling ambitious topics like prejudice, redemption, legacy, and identity. If you read the above paragraph and read the names David Keith and Jonathan Frakes(!) and you’re familiar with Gargoyles, you might have already assumed Weisman was involved, as Keith voiced lead gargoyle Goliath and Frakes provided the voice of the show’s first and primary antagonist, Xanatos. Weisman’s work has always been noteworthy, and he’s one of those writers who knows exactly what part of my brain to metaphorically reach inside of and scratch an itch with a perfectly, elegantly constructed narrative. While we’re on the topic of Weisman, this one will probably be of particular interest to fans of the aforementioned Young Justice, as the film’s interest in not just Catwoman but cat women, as evident in the choice of Cheetah as the primary villain, means that the character Cheshire shows up here, with Kelly Hu reprising her voice role. I honestly can’t think of a single thing in this movie that would contradict YJ, so if you’re looking for something to fill the void left by the series (second) cancellation, this can slot right into that continuity, if you like. 

One of the best scenes in the film involves Selina and Kate, left alone on the fancy jet that Interpol commandeered, getting surprisingly intimate for these largely sexless movies. Selina draws a bath and plays at inviting Kate to join her, clearly aware of both Kate’s secret identity and her sapphic inclination. It’s a ploy to get a piece of equipment from Kate, but that doesn’t mean that Selina isn’t into it, and in this house, we fully support bisexual Catwoman. Although Batman isn’t present in the narrative, it’s clear that he and Selina are or have been “a thing,” as Selina is hesitant to use lethal force against Solomon Grundy because of a promise she made to an unnamed friend (before she gets the go-ahead from her teammates since Grundy is technically undead), and bristles at Kate calling her “Cat,” saying that “only he gets to call her that.” Still, this is a new, fun take on the typical Bat/Cat dynamic that we’ve grown used to, and the quippy, flirtatious banter between the two is a highlight of the script. I get the feeling that this one was not well received—it’s the lowest rated of all of these movies by IMDb users (an admittedly feral and untrustworthy lot), has only a 64% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 2.9 star rating on Letterboxd—but if you’re not a stick in the mud, don’t let that deter you. I’m going to give this some of the highest praise I possibly can, which is that this is one of a very short list of these NSN52 titles that, after this project is over, I might actually watch again. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Uzumaki (2000)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the live-action adaptation of Junji Ito’s cosmic horror manga Uzumaki (Spiral, 2000).

00:00 Welcome

01:03 Ju-On – The Grudge (2002)
06:56 The Substance (2024)
10:30 Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
16:25 DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection (2010)
19:51 Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
21:17 Ghostwatch (1992)
25:25 The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall (2011)
29:49 Gothic (1986)
36:26 Rumours (2024)
43:23 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
48:21 Audition (1999)
54:00 Smile 2 (2024)
1:00:46 Memoir of a Snail (2024)

1:06:16 Uzumaki (2000)

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