For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Star Trek fandom documentary Trekkies, presented by Next Generation actor Denise “Tasha Yar” Crosby.
There will be countless reviews of Coralie Fargeat’s high-style gross-out The Substance that point to the body horror titles of the 1980s & 90s that influenced its over-the-top, surrealistic practical effects. Instead of echoing those shoutouts to Yuzna, Cronenberg, and Hennenlotter—the gross-out greats—I’d like to instead highlight a different VHS-era relic that telegraphs The Substance‘s peculiar brand of horror filmmaking. While Fargeat’s most memorable images result from the squelchy practical-effects mutations of star Demi Moore’s body as she takes extreme measures to reverse the toll that aging has taken on her career, long stretches of the film are less body horror than they are 1980s workout video. Moore’s aging body is her entire livelihood, given that she hosts a retro, Jane Fonda-style morning workout show in a leotard, stripping & exercising on America’s television screens. When she gives monstrous birth to her youthful replacement in Margaret Qualley through Yuznian transformation, the show zooms in even tighter on the workout host’s body – featuring aggressively repetitive closeups on Qualley’s gyrating, lycra-clad ass. At least half of The Substance is essentially a horror-themed workout video, so any recommendations of vintage schlock primers for what it’s achieving should include horror movies that cashed in on the 1980s gym culture craze. There are a few standout workout-horror novelties to choose from there, most prominently Death Spa and Killer Workout. However, there’s only one horror novelty that matches The Substance‘s full-assed commitment to spoofing 80s workout video aesthetics: a VHS collectible titled Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout.
Linnea Quigley was only in her early 30s in the early 90s, but her workout video spoof already finds her panicking about the encroaching expiration date for her onscreen career as an object of desire, like Moore’s gorgeous 50-something protagonist in The Substance. Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is ostensibly a Jane Fonda workout video parody in which the titular scream queen leads slumber-party-massacre victims & poolside zombies in low-energy, high-sleaze workout routines. It’s more cheesecake than it is instructional, starting & ending with a nude Quigley screaming directly at camera during her pre-workout shower. Having hit the nude scene quota that would satisfy horror-convention attendees who need to buy something for the perpetually topless actress to autograph, Quigley then takes the time to satisfy her own needs. Much of the hour-long runtime is a highlight reel of her most outrageous performances, including clips from schlock titles like Nightmare Sisters, Creepozoids, Assault of the Party Nerds, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama. Her most iconic scene as a punk stripper on the graveyard set of Return of The Living Dead is only shown in still images, sidestepping expensive licensing fees, so that most clips are pulled from her collaborations with David DeCoteau. She’s directly making an argument to her salivating fans that she’s just as much of a scream queen icon as a Jamie Lee Curtis or a Heather Langenkamp, even if her filmography is laughably low-rent by comparison.
Smartly, Quigley constantly invites you to laugh at both that filmography and the workout video wraparound, preemptively mocking the entire exercise with her own shamelessly corny Elvira quips. During a slideshow of her double-chainsaw striptease in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, she complains, “Ginger Rogers had Fred Astaire . . . and I get Black & Decker?!” Later, when she breathily encourages the audience at home to sweat with her during a workout, she jokes “That’s right, stretch those muscles . . . Not THAT muscle!” Of course, most of the self-deprecating jokes are at the expense of the workout video’s dual function as softcore pornography, making it a kind of proto-J.O.I. porno. Her first, solo workout routine finds her doing absurdly erotic poses in a metal-plated bra and black fishnet stockings, an outrageously inappropriate sweatsuit alternative that Quigley herself mocks while making the most of its prurient benefits. She looks great, she proves she’s self-aware about where she’s positioned in the grand cinematic spectrum of respectability, and she does a good job promoting her legacy as a horror legend while maintaining a sense of humor about it all. The only sequence of the video that doesn’t quite work is her instructional “zombiecise” routine where she leads a small hoard of graveyard zombies through limp choreography at the edge of a backyard pool. It’s a visual gag that doesn’t really go anywhere once the initial novelty wears off, but it does eventually drone on long enough that it achieves a kind of deliberate anti-comedy, so all is forgiven. It’s also followed by a much more successful speed-run through a tropey slumber party slasher and a mid-credits blooper reel, guaranteeing that the video leaves you with a smile.
Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is beautifully, aggressively vapid, much like the repetitive Pump It Up with Sue dance video sequences in The Substance. Whether it qualifies as a proper feature like The Substance is debatable. At times, it’s essentially the horny horror nerd equivalent of those looping Yule Log videos people throw on the TV around Christmas, a connection it acknowledges with occasional, lingering shots of an actual fireplace (presumably lit to keep the half-dressed Quigley warm). It’s just as much of an appropriate double-feature pairing with Fargeat’s film as the more commonly cited titles like Society, The Fly, and Basket Case, though, as The Substance is just as much a horror-themed workout video as it is a comedic body horror, and there’s only one previous horror-themed workout video that truly matters.
What is The Substance? It’s 5% Barbie, 5% Carrie, 5% Requiem for a Dream, 5% The Fly, 10% Akira, 10% just the old lady from Room 237 in The Shining, 25% Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video, 10% Jane Fonda workout tape, 5% Architectural Digest, and 20% sour lemon candy, and it’s all 100% fresh, new, and exciting. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, who bears some resemblance to Moore; both found commercial and critical success (including an Oscar) in the early parts of their career, but their star has faded somewhat in the intervening years. Elisabeth now hosts a morning workout program for an unidentified major network, or at least she did until her birthday, when executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—wink, wink—unceremoniously lets her go from the show, essentially simply for having turned fifty. A hurt and shocked Elisabeth is distracted while driving by the sight of a billboard of her being taken down and ends up in a horrific collision. Although she’s remarkably unharmed, she’s shaken by the experience, and an almost inhumanly attractive nurse slips something into her coat pocket: a thumb drive printed with a phone number on one side and “The Substance” on the other, along with a note stating simply “It changed my life.” She watches the surreal advertising campaign/pharmaceutical pitch on the drive—a promise that The Substance will create a younger, more idealized version of yourself—and tosses it in the trash, before ultimately caving in on both her curiosity and her wounded self-image and giving it a shot (literally, and it’s for single use and you really, really should dispose of it after).
Everyone has been talking about how much this movie is a return to form for body horror, but it’s more than just that. Sure, there’s mutating flesh, necrotic digits, and self surgery, but this is a movie that’s gross from the jump, long before people start erupting from each like molting salamanders. It’s mostly the most disgusting images you can imagine intercut with the occasional too-sterile environment or softcore aerobics so chock full of lingering shots of gyrating youthful glutes that they stop looking like flesh altogether. The first shot of the film, which gives us a demonstration of what The Substance does by showing it being injected into the yolk of an egg as it sits in its white on a countertop, before the yolk suddenly duplicates. Not long after, we are treated to an intense, almost fisheye closeup of Harvey’s face while he goes on a screaming, chauvinistic phone tirade while using a urinal before we cut to him grossly and messily slathering prawns in a yellow sauce and stuffing them messily in his face while he gives Elisabeth a series of backhanded compliments while performing the world’s worst exit interview; and we in the audience know he didn’t wash his hands. As Elisabeth leaves the hospital after her accident, an old classmate from before she was a star gives her his number on a piece of paper that’s then dropped into a puddle of some unknown liquid that’s murky and features a couple of floating cigarette butts. By the time the youthful version of Elisabeth, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), is stitching up the wound on Elisabeth’s back from which she just emerged like a hot bloody Pop-Tart, you’re already so full of bile from the general nastiness that the gore is almost a reprieve. Of course, that’s before Sue starts taking more time than the rules of The Substance allow, with her selfishness morphing Elisabeth slowly (and then very quickly) into a witch of the Roald Dahl variety.
That general grossness, as a departure from pure body horror, is also represented in the film’s use of yellows throughout, rather than (or at least in addition to) the reds that most flicks of this genre use. It’s omnipresent and I loved it, from the aforementioned yolks to the goldenrod color of Elisabeth’s coat to the neon yellow of The Substance itself and the fluids you may vomit as a result of its use. A ball of yellow clay is halved and reformed into two shapes in the demonstration video for The Substance to represent the “other” being formed from the “matrix.” The eggs reappear later when Elisabeth, in a fit of pique over Sue beginning to push the limits of their connection, starts cooking a large number of disgusting French dishes, which includes combining an ungodly number of eggs in a bowl and then beating them, splashing the yolks all over her. And, in the film’s final moments, a dandelion yellow sidewalk cleaner passes over Elisabeth’s Walk of Fame star, scrubbing up … well, that would be a spoiler. It’s a fun way to add a different kind of a splash of color; I’d go so far as to say yellow is used as effectively here as, say, red in Suspiria, and if you’ve been around here a while you know what high praise that is from me.
Moore is revelatory here, and it’s great to see her on screen again, especially after such a long absence. She grounds a lot of the more surreal elements that become a larger and larger part of the story as reality becomes more and more detached from what we’re watching. She looks amazing here, which further underlines just how depraved the culture in which she resides is. While Elisabeth is fifty, Moore is a little over a decade older than that, and her body is, pardon my French, fucking phenomenal. That this makes Elisabeth the perfect person for her ongoing aspirational position as the host of Sparkle Your Life is completely lost on Harvey and the vapid executives and shareholders of the network, who salivate like Tex Avery hounds over Sue and the befeathered dancers who are set to perform on a show that Sue is set to host. Moore plays her with a quiet dignity that’s clearly covering a deep loneliness, which is itself exacerbated by the blow to her ego and her self-worth that come as the result of losing her job solely because of ageism. Qualley is also fun here. So far, she has been in one of the worst movies I have seen this year as well as one of the best, but even in the latter she was not among the moving pieces that garnered my esteem. Although a lot of what she’s tasked with here is more about how she looks than about her acting abilities, when she’s called on to perform, she delivers a solid performance that endeared her to me more than anything else I’ve seen her in before.
Overall, this is one of the most fun movies I’ve seen all year. Gross when it needs to be, surreal when the narrative calls for it, and funny all the way through.
In an early scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis that attempts to introduce all its major players at once, Adam Driver recites the entirety of Prince Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy at a cacophonous press conference. It’s a classic-theatre intrusion on an aesthetic that’s already precariously imbalanced between the antique Art Deco sci-fi of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the uncanny green screen CGI of our post-MCU future. Old-timey newspaper reporters with “PRESS” badges tucked into the ribbons of their fedoras meet Driver’s recitation of Shakespeare with adoring, rapt attention, but the rest of the main cast is visibly unsure how to play the scene. A wide range of talented, sought-after actors (i.e., Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito), cancelled has-beens (i.e., Dustin Hoffman, Shia LeBouef), and unproven upstarts who don’t yet have full control of their craft (i.e., Chloe Fineman, Nathalie Emmanuel) circle around Driver, individually calibrating their plans of attack. Every single person in the scene has a different idea of what kind of movie they’re in, so that the world’s most frequently quoted soliloquy is the only anchor that provides the bizarre exchange any sense of structure. Megalopolis appreciators will tell you that this teetering, unfocused tone is the sign of a genius director at work, exploring new cinematic territory by disregarding minor concerns like coherence or purpose. In my eyes, it’s a sign that the film isn’t directed at all; it’s a gathering of immense resources and disparate ideas into a single frame to accomplish nothing in particular, just an awkward dissonance. Coppola may have had a clear picture of Megalopolis envisioned in his mind, but he did a piss-poor job of communicating that vision to his collaborators and his audience.
This is a sprawling, extravagantly expensive movie with exactly two ideas. The first is that America is currently experiencing its own Fall of Rome, an idea that was popular among academics and media types about two decades ago. The second is that Francis Ford Coppola is an underappreciated genius, an idea that was popular among academics and media types about four decades ago. The America-in-decline angle of the story is at least well suited to the past-his-own-prime auteur’s current mindset as a bitter old man. It not only affords Megalopolis an easy aesthetic mashup of Roman & Manhattan architecture on which to build its chintzy CG future-world, but it also gives Coppola a platform to complain about the newfangled things that bother him as a geriatric grump, like cancel culture, queer people, and Taylor Swift. The signs that America has lost its way in amoral decadence include public lesbian smooching, pop music hags like Swift masquerading as teenage virgins, journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes, and mouth-breathing masses finding their bread-and-circuses entertainment value in the lowly artform of professional wrestling. This, of course, could all be turned around if great men like Coppola were handed the reins of culture & governance, as represented in Adam Driver’s genius architect inventor who’s held back by small-minded bureaucrats. Driver’s Caesar Catalina has discovered & commodified a miraculous fix-all substance called Megalon that will transform society into a golden utopia through better housing, better fashion, better medicine, and better artistic inspiration . . . if only the evil government figures and conniving women in his life would just get out of the way. He discovered this substance by loving his wife very much, as the main supernatural conceit of the film is that it’s set in a world where all women are either villainous sluts or virtuous spouses, and the only way to save America from becoming the next Rome is by returning to old-fashioned family values. It looks & talks like a movie that cares about the future, but all of its actual ideas & attitudes long for the past.
Megalopolis is the ultimate vanity project, Coppola’s tribute to his own genius. It’s debatable whether he sees himself more as the outside-the-box architect of the future (Driver) or the wealthy but fading uncle who will ensure that future’s existence by keeping his money in the family (Jon Voight), but the movie is astonishingly masturbatory either way. I can’t get over his cowardice in not casting himself as an actor in one of those two roles, as is tradition with smaller-scale vanity projects like The Room, The Astrologer, and the Neil Breen oeuvre. Even more so, I can’t get over the hubris of making this $120 mediocrity about how his world-changing genius is held back by small-minded money men, when those same resources could have funded a dozen projects from younger visionaries who actually do have something new to say but no capital behind them. Coppola somehow doesn’t see that he’s the villain of his own piece. He’s the old-fashioned conservative mayor (Esposito) getting in the way of young, iconoclastic talent (Driver). If you look at the films produced by his company American Zoetrope, it’s essentially a nepo baby slush fund, investing mostly in properties that bear the Coppola family name (with occasional exceptions for sex-pest friends who can’t find funding elsewhere). Compare that to Martin Scorsese lending his name recognition as a producer to filmmakers like Joanna Hogg, Josephine Decker, and The Safdie Brothers. Both New Hollywood legends have benefited from the critical scam of “late style” forgiving some of the looser, lazier touches of their recent works, but only one has been investing in the future of filmmaking beyond his own mortality. Coppola has no moral obligation to spend his production money outside the bounds of his vanity or his family, but it’s a little rich to watch this self-funded self-portrait of misunderstood, cock-blocked genius projected on an IMAX screen at a corporate multiplex and not scoff at the lack of self-awareness.
There are fleeting moments of pleasure to be found in Megalopolis‘s 140min runtime. While most of the cast appears to be totally lost in terms of intent or tone, Adam Driver gives a commanding, compelling performance that vibrates at just the right frequency to match the uncanniness of the material (a skill put to much better use in the similarly bizarre Annette). Audrey Plaza & Shia LeBeouf gradually establish menacing chemistry together as a semi-incestuous duo of schemers who attempt a coup on Driver & Voight’s empire. Their softly kinky aunt-on-nephew sex scene together is maybe the one moment that genuinely works on a dramatic level, and the downfall of their failed plot to seize power is the one moment of genuinely successful humor: a visual gag involving John Voight’s lethal boner. However, even the punchline conclusion to their saga is a nasty, hateful lashing out at power-hungry women and gender-nonconformers that immediately sours the movie’s sole moment of levity. Visually & thematically, it’s all very limited and uninspired, but there are enough talented performers on the cast list to make sure something lands. Even the casting feels like a grotesque hoarding of misused resources, though, with formidable players like Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, and Jason Schwarzman being given nothing to do except stand around and support or thwart Driver’s world-changing genius as humanity’s Savior Artist. After seeing Megalopolis, I’m less convinced than ever that any single man’s singular genius could possibly be the savior of anything. It’s a lot more likely that the resources earned by the world’s Great Men will be locked away in trophy cases, only to be passed down to family members as heirlooms & inherited wealth. There’s no real future here, just mawkish glorification of the past.
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, Boomeris 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.
With this film, a new subfranchise was born, entitled the “Tomorrowverse,” inspired by the title Superman: Man of Tomorrow. It’s yet another origin story for our old pal Superman: raised by simple farmers, aware of his extraterrestrial origin but with no knowledge of his people or culture; starting out as a flying vigilante in street clothes before Ma Kent creates his iconic outfit out of the clothing in which he was swaddled as a baby; meeting Lois Lane as the newest member of the Daily Planet; debuting as a public figure by saving a launched vehicle from plummeting into Metropolis; believing that he may have found an ally in Lex Luthor coming to trust him before the inevitable betrayal. If that all sounds a little rote, it’s because it is. Sure, there are some novel elements. Here, the big blue Boy Scout learns about his origins from Martian Manhunter, and the creation of longtime Superman villain Parasite is because of an attack from the interstellar bounty hunter Lobo. Even with that in mind, few of these films have plated it as safe as Man of Tomorrow. As a result, the end product is fine – 82 minutes of palatable, safe Superman stuff, but not something that you could call special or interesting.
After an opening sequence in which an elementary-aged Clark has to go home from a sleepover at another boy’s house; he’s disquieted by his peer’s reaction to an old horror movie in which the villainous alien invader reveals his true face. Flashing forward, the now adult Clark Kent (Darren Criss) is an intern at The Daily Planet, which mostly means that he’s fetching coffee for people with bylines. Delivering the staff’s orders to an event where Lex Luthor (Zachary Quinto, an inspired choice) is planning to launch his latest doohickey into space, Luthor is confronted by a grad student named Lois Lane (Alexandra Daddario), who exposes his unconcerned-to-the-point-of-malice negligence about the people living near the launch site. Clark, in the middle of a quick conversation with a janitor at the facility that serves to establish said janitor’s humanity before exposure to space technobabble turns him into one of the film’s antagonistic forces, leaps into action to stop everyone from being reduced to ashes by the falling debris. After this is done, he’s now a public figure. Ma Kent gives him the suit, he congratulates Lois on her scoop while learning that she’s got her sights on taking down the so-called “Superman” now, and he continues to find himself pursued by a shadowy figure. Said figure eventually reveals himself to be the shapeshifting J’onn J’onzz, aka Martian Manhunter (Ike Amadi), and establishes that they are both the last of their kind. When he first came to Earth, he sought out others like him and briefly touched the mind of the infant Kal-El, and in so doing was able to retain the baby’s earliest memories and can share the images of Clark’s birth parents with him, as well as learn the truth about his home planet’s destruction. This sets up the appearance of Lobo (Ryan Hurst), a bounty hunter from space who has been sent by parties unknown to “collect” the last Kryptonian. The initial conflict with Lobo results in one of the alien’s devices going off near that poor doomed janitor (Brett Dalton), interacting with the lab equipment around him to turn him into “Parasite,” a purple monster that absorbs energy, growing stronger with each encounter, becoming another threat to Metropolis that the freshman Superman must juggle.
Where there are highlights, they come mostly at the beginning and end of the film. The opening, in which a young Clark is disturbed by his friend’s innocent statements about scary aliens, sets up a story element that does return later, when a now-adult Superman tells a gathered mob that the monster attacking the power plant is human while he himself is extraterrestrial. It ends up a bit underdeveloped, and it’s a shame that the opening scene is the strongest one. When we first meet the man who will become Parasite, we learn about his home life (wife, elementary aged daughter, another one on the way), his past (two tours in Iraq), and that he has his suspicions about what’s going on at the laboratory that employs him. When he gets turned into a monster, I thought to myself, “Gee, this sure is a lot like Spider-Man 3’s Sandman plot,” and damned if the film didn’t follow through. We see him visit his daughter, he contemplates the monster he becomes, and he ultimately sacrifices himself when forced to consider his humanity. It’s a little cheap to go back to “the villain is defeated by love” as a climax after so recently (and more cynically and satisfactorily) going to that well in Constantine: City of Demons. Nothing is really new here, and everything that happens between the beginning and the end is such a mishmash that I had to go back and see if the satellite falling and Lobo encounter were part of the same set piece or not (they’re separate events, but I can’t separate them in my mind). Quinto’s Luthor is fresh; he’s really bringing back a lot of that old Sylar energy, and that’s fun. Lois and Clark have little in the way of chemistry at this point, but there is something that’s at least thoughtful in the way that she reveals to Clark that she plans to reschedule her Superman interview last minute as a power play, which allows him to pull a reverse Uno on her by doing the same as Superman.
As of this writing, this is the final Superman solo animated outing from this outfit, other than something called “Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons,” which looks like shit. That may end up saving this from being the worst of the Supes films, since it’s otherwise the most banal and flavorless of the bunch. Doomsday was pretty average but was elevated by a voice performance from Anne Heche that made it something more special than it really had the right to be. All-Star Superman has been one of the real highlights of this watch-through; Superman vs. The Elite was less than the sum of its parts, but the highs in did have were more than anything that was on display here; Unbound was characterized by more complex interpersonal dynamics. Even when these films have seemed immature or as if they were catering to an audience that it didn’t want to get “too cerebral” for, none of them have felt more like a Saturday morning cartoon than this one. The new artistic design is, to give it credit, very evocative of the thick ink lines that comic books are known for, and perhaps I’ll get used to it, but I was not won over. In truth, that makes this not only the least interesting Superman solo film, it’s also the ugliest (until Super Sons—shudder). It feels like a real slap to give a movie that’s as inoffensive and wispy as this one such a low star rating since there’s really nothing wrong with it; there’s just nothing really there.
Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!
“Technically, the villain is Satan in a jar, but this belongs to a canon of oddball horrors where the real killer is just remarkably bad vibes: The Happening, Messiah of Evil, Annihilation, Final Destination, etc. You could call it ‘cosmic’ or ‘Lovecraftian’ or whatever, but it’s really just the horror of stumbling into a party where the mood’s already gone rancid (and people occasionally explode into goo).” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“The sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky that this has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development and emotional stakes. It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty-line in French housing projects, except with way more gigantic, pissed off spider beasts than usual.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Chances are, if the title of this film sounds familiar to you, you’re either too into the movies (in which case, pull up a chair and join us) or you’re a fan of either The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, as Robert Smith of the former and Steven Severin of the latter collaborated as a micro supergroup under the name The Glove, which released only one album that took its title from this film. That alone would probably qualify it as a cult classic for some, but what makes this one work is how campy it is in spite of its earnestness. […] I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of movies that are competently made but with no apparent reason to exist or want to see a (sort of) conspiracy thriller version of a campy slasher.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A sci-fi erotic thriller about a yuppie Reaganite with a computerized ocular implant that makes him partial witness to serial killings. It plays like if De Palma made a sarcastic, purposefully idiotic version of what his most vicious detractors accused his schtick of being. And you know what? It’s still a mostly fun watch; just as sleazy as it is silly.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The nightmare surrealism of the Elm Street series, restricted by the production values of a 16mm regional-horror cheapie but also much freer to disregard the boundary between its dream sequences & waking “reality.” A wonderful example of passion outweighing resources; A+ outsider art.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This sets itself up as the Floridian hippiesploitation version of Psycho, but instead delivers a domestic melodrama where everyone’s love language is belligerent screaming.” Currently streaming on Screambox and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Argentinian schlock that classes up Jesús Franco-style vampire smut with the blocking & scoring of a vintage telenovela. It’s great fun, and a great confirmation that you can still find blood & titties on Tubi despite reports otherwise.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“While most Hammer Horror relics are buttoned-up, single-idea affairs, this off-brand equivalent is overstuffed with nutty/gnarly ideas on how to update the Frankenstein myth for the Free Love crowd. Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee star as rival half-brother mad scientists competing for industry awards & press, using their own children & ancient proto-human skeletons as pawns in their sick game of one-upsmanship. It’s so stately & faux-literary that you hardly have any time to register that you’re watching a dismembered finger writhe around on a lab table like a sentient pickle, representing Evil Incarnate.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“This often gets singled out as Ingmar Bergman’s Only Horror Movie, but it’s really not all that different from trickier-to-classify titles like Persona& Through a Glass Darkly. Those happen to be my favorites of his I’ve seen, though, so I mean that as a compliment. The man knew how to craft a spooky mood; one of his greatest talents, really.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“An icy, cruelly funny Irish ghost story where the undead are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. It’s basically a series of super consistent fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting real quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“An artist-goes-mad horror about a stop-motion animator who channels her darkest thoughts into her increasingly disturbing work, which then comes alive and attacks her. There’s wonderfully grotesque, fucked up imagery & sound design here, offering a small taste of pure-Hell animation for audiences who don’t have the patience for more immersive titles like Violence Voyager,The Wolf House, and Mad God.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Had me thinking about how well it’s aged vs. fellow slick ’96 teen horror Scream, both of which I was the perfect age to look up to as a wannabe goth young’n. Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics to catch up with, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years. Picking an enduring fav out of the two mostly comes down to performances: Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic as Matthew Lillard but much better dressed; Naomi Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both; and Skeet Ulrich puts on the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell, slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret. The victory belongs to the coven, praise be to Manon.” Currently streaming on HBO Max.
“While Frankenstein might have the better direct sequel overall, this one at least has the generosity of affording its titular villain more than three minutes of screentime, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters. She’s so effortlessly, tragically cool, and it was great to make her ghoulish acquaintance” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“You gotta love The Wolf Man’s ‘Aw shucks, gee-whiz, just call me Larry’ routine. He’s an adorable oaf when he’s not a violently horny beast, making for a great horror film about post-nut clarity.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A triumph of high-artifice production design, among other triumphs. The painted-backdrop graveyard set is like the goth older sister to the Wizard of Oz designs; just as sinisterly magical but dreaming up a world where every day is Halloween, a world that’s always a pleasure to revisit (until a child enters the frame)” Currently streaming on Peacock and The Criterion Channel.
“Anytime a director of this stature says they’re making an ‘erotic nightmare,’ you know they’re cooking up a masterpiece. This is Francis Ford Coppola’s best work as a visual stylist, which since he’s in the business of moving pictures, means it’s his best work overall (with the caveat that I’ve only tried a couple of his wines).” Currently streaming on MGM+ (free with a 7-day trial subscription).
“I suspect the reason this stands out as Jodorowsky’s best work because of Claudio Argento’s heavy involvement in the writing & production. The imagery is just as gorgeous as anything in The Holy Mountain, but it’s all driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum. It’s a fine-art carnival sideshow.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The Old French Extremity; the kind of gross-out gore film you can pair with a cheese plate & bubbly.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing. Very funny in how it gives horror-convention gorehounds exactly what they want (the most annoying idiot youths to ever disgrace the screen being gruesomely dismembered) while also being stubbornly withholding (shooting the stillness of the woods with an Apichatpongian sense of patience).” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“It’s a hypnotic, immersive vision of paranormal menace, one that could easily play as outdated kitsch but instead triggers a nightmarish trance. It’s the same effect that’s achieved throughoutBeyond the Black Rainbow, especially in its Altered States-reminiscent LSD experiment flashback where its main antagonist ‘looks into the Eye of God.’ It’s an effect that returns full-force in Phase IV’s psychedelic, nihilistic conclusion as well, which describes a next stage in human evolution triggered by the paranormal ants’ attacks on mankind.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“The last time I saw this I was hung up on its obvious influences on Alien. A decade later, I’m hung up on its production design’s obvious influence on Bertrand Mandico. I can practically hear Elina Löwensohn whispering about Kate Bush & Conan the Barbarian in the background.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“Grand-scale destruction in miniature, matching the impossibility of processing the communal grief of nuclear fallout in a novelty sci-fi film with the impossible spectacle of its mixed-scale monster attacks. It’s just as deeply sad as it is colossally thrilling.” Currently streaming on HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body. Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere. ” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“More of a genuine mashup of classic Godzilla & King Kong sensibilities than any of those monsters’ actual onscreen clashes. Mostly just helped clarify what I love about the kaiju genre (the giant rubber creatures, the more the better) vs what I tolerate (the retro extoticized adventurism) to get to the good stuff.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“It used to be that time maxing meant brushing your teeth in the shower; now we save time by watching our Guy Maddin & Matt Farley movies at the same time.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The best thing about haunted house movies is the third-act release of tension where there are no rules and every feature of the house goes haywire all at once, not just the ghosts. The reason this is the height of the genre is that it doesn’t wait to get to the good stuff; it doesn’t even wait to get to the house. It’s all haywire all the time, totally unrestrained.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“Classic zombie splatstick of the Evil Dead & Dead Alive variety, updated with a 90s sense of apathetic cool and heavily distorted through the Italo-schlock dream machine. Loved every confounding minute of it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A gory cheapie about an ancient mask buried in Nostradamus’s tomb. We watch this story unfold twice removed, where movie-within-a-movie victims try on the cursed mask, which transforms them into demonic, flesh-eating demons who torment their companions. Meanwhile, the in-film audience of the movie squirms in their seats, noticing an alarming resemblance of the mysterious horror film’s violence to their own journeys to the screening. Mainly, the promotional mask prop displayed in the cinema’s lobby has cut one of their cheeks the same way it cut & infected characters in the film they’re watching, which of course leads to a demon-zombie breakout in the theater that matches the chaos of the movie within the movie. They’re all effectively Skinamarinked—unable to leave the theater thorough the doors they entered from—as they individually transform into cannibalistic monsters and tear each other to shreds.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“There’s something to love in every single frame of this, but nothing to love more deeply than Brad Dourif being given more free reign than ever to rave like a demonic lunatic.” Currently streaming on Peacock, Starz, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This trades in the grimy cruelty of the original for the visual sensibilities of a children’s film, from its exaggerated cartoon framing to its primary color palette to its bookend trips to the toy factory. Speaking of which, the climactic spectacle on the factory floor is some A+ mayhem, really leaning into the novelty of killer-doll gore at its purest. It’s one of those R-rated horrors that feels like it was specifically made for an audience of children sneaking the TV remote past their sleeping parents.” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“Perfect Halloween night programming; just the absolute worst teen dipshits to ever disgrace the screen getting torn to shreds by demons whenever they get too horny to live.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Shudder, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
Welcome to Episode #222 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of documentaries about metalheads, starting with the anthropological Judas Priest fan doc Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986).
00:00 Welcome 02:45 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) 06:00 Baby Cat (2023) 11:41 Hearts of Darkness – A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) 17:22 Tokyo Pop (1988)
21:40 Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986) 31:22 Kittie – Spit in Your Eye (2002) 43:47 The Decline of Western Civilization Pt II – The Metal Years (1987) 1:06:34 Last Days Here (2011) 1:18:35 March of the Gods – Botswana Metalheads (2014)
Taiwanese-born director Shu Lea Cheang has never stopped making experimental cinema since she first made a splash on the 1990s New York indie scene. You just wouldn’t know it based on the scope of her reputation & distribution. Just last year, Cheang directed a video game-inspired animated sequel to her early-2000s cyberpunk porno I.K.U., the very first pornographic film to screen at Sundance. That kind of provocation should be making indie publication headlines, but she doesn’t get the same festival-coverage attention as other post-cinema shockteurs like Gaspar Noe or Harmony Korine. At least, she hasn’t since her 1994 breakout Fresh Kill, which got positive reviews out of TIFF and has lived on as an early-internet cult classic, reaching Cheang’s widest audience to date. Even so, it’s a challenging work with niche appeal, and as far as I can tell it never landed any form of official distribution on tape, disc, or streaming. Smartly, Cheang is currently taking a break from continuing to push her art in current work to instead return to that early-career triumph, touring the country with newly restored 35mm prints of Fresh Kill for a 30th Anniversary victory lap. The only legal way to watch the film in 2024 is to meet Cheang herself at the cinema, so that you can see with your own eyes that she is still active, engaged, and ready to share her Digital Age outsider art with the public.
The title “Fresh Kill” refers to a massive landfill that was located near Staten Island when Cheang made the film in the early 90s but has since closed. At the time, Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world, which Cheang extrapolates to imagine a world that’s all one big landfill where half the waste is televised media babble. The movie has characters and events but no real narrative to speak of. It’s mostly a simulation of channel-surfing through our post-modern apocalypse, sandwiched between hipster lesbian hackers and dipshit Wall Street bros on the couch. The lesbian couple get by salvaging and reselling junk from the landfill and working waitress shifts at an upscale sushi restaurant. They go from politically aware to politically active when their daughter eats a can of contaminated fish from the evil, global GX Corporation, which causes her to glow green and then mysteriously disappear. In retaliation, they recruit fellow sushi shop employees to hack GX’s databases over dial-up connection and expose their food-supply pollution to the world via public access TV editorials (in one of the earliest onscreen depictions of “hacktivism”). The Wall Street bros are also poisoned with GX’s green-glow pollution via their trendy love of sushi, but they react in a different way; they try to rebrand as eco-friendly businessmen so they can make a quick profit off the public’s newfound interest in environmentalism (in an early onscreen depictions of corporate “greenwashing”).
One of the first images in Fresh Kill is a TV art-installation piece erected at the titular landfill – a wall of cathode-ray screens that seemingly only receive broadcasts of infomercials and public access call-in shows. It’s easy to reimagine the entire film as a video-art installation piece, as its narrative doesn’t progress so much as it alternates perspectives. The central couple’s home & sex life vaguely adheres to typical 90s indie drama structure, but it’s frequently interrupted by nonsense chatter from the sushi restaurant that keeps their lights on as well as the TV broadcasts that keep them addled, including friendly, heartfelt commercials from GX. There’s a total breakdown of language across these alternating, post-modern windows into 1990s NYC living, recalling William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups experiments and subsequent declarations that “Language is a virus from outer space.” Lizzie Borden’s no-wave classic Born in Flames took a similarly kaleidoscopic approach in its editing, and I was happy to hear Cheang mention it is a contemporary work in her post-film Q&A. Fresh Kill is just as politically enraged as Born in Flames, but it’s also not nearly as serious, allowing its characters to goof off in go-nowhere skits about lipsticked fish lips, orgasmic accordionists, and supermarket dance parties without worrying about diluting the seriousness of its messaging. Cheang tries something new every scene, confident that it’ll all amount to something meaningful when considered in total.
The political activism angle of Fresh Kill made it a no-brainer programming choice for Patois Film Fest, who thankfully booked a Shu Lea Cheang tour stop in New Orleans. The venue choice of The Broad makes a little less sense, since they do not have the capability to project celluloid like The Prytania. The newly restored print of the film was shown as a digital scan, then, which occasionally led to unintended freezing as the laptop struggled to process the video file without lag. It was a fitting format choice in its own way, though, since the miscommunication of the machinery projecting the film matched the miscommunication of the multicultural characters who all speak in different languages and idioms throughout, often simultaneously. Fresh Kill imagines a world overwhelmed by waste. A lot of that waste is physical but just as much is cultural, calling into question what value there could possibly be in filling our world and brains with so much disposable media & jargon. Since Cheang has since gone on to experiment with the visual textures of pornography & video games, I have to assume it’s a question that’s continued to occupy her own mind, and I’d love to see the result of that tinkering. Hopefully this victory-lap restoration of Fresh Kill will lead to those works being more accessible for people who missed their festival runs, like the recent Criterion box sets celebrating the similarly overlooked, underdistributed, politically furious films of Greg Araki & Marlon Riggs.
When I hear Cynthia Rothrock’s name, I immediately picture her hanging off scaffolding in what appears to be a mall’s parking garage, throwing punches & kicks at fellow martial artist Karen Sheperd, who attacks her with sharpened, weaponized jewelry. I’ve seen that clip shared hundreds of times out of times out of context on social media, so it was amusing to learn that there isn’t really much additional context to speak of. Sheperd’s assassin character is only in the movie Righting Wrongs for those few minutes, and Rothrock spends most of the runtime chasing & fighting the film’s hero, played by Yuen Biao. The Vinegar Syndrome release of the film includes a 1990s Golden Harvest “documentary” that’s basically just a highlight reel of the action cinema studio’s best fights, titled The Best of the Martial Arts Films. Seemingly half of the fights from that docu-advertisement are pulled from Righting Wrongs (billed as Above the Law), including the entirety of the Rothrock-Sheperd showdown. That’s because every fight sequence in the movie rules, and they each stand on their own as individual art pieces outside their duty to the plot. They’re so incredible, in fact, that you can know & respect the name “Cynthia Rothrock” just from seeing those clips in isolation, without having ever seen a full Cynthia Rothrock film.
Rothrock stars in Righting Wrongs as a kickass, righteous cop, and yet the movie ultimately makes it clear that it hates all cops — the perfect formula for an action film. Yuen Biao headlines as a prosecutor who’s frustrated with his job’s inability to bring high-end criminals to justice, so he becomes a murderous vigilante. Rothrock’s colonialist cop fights to stop him, essentially fighting against justice by doing her job as the white-lady enforcer of British rule over Hong Kong. Everyone at the police station refers to her as “Madam,” which means that the title of her previous film Yes, Madam! is repeated constantly in-dialogue. This one is just as great as that debut outing, both directed by Cory Yuen. They have the same spectacular martial artistry and the same grim worldview – ending on a bleak, defeatist note where the corrupt Bad Guys higher up the food chain always win (as long as you watch the Hong Kong cuts of Righting Wrongs, anyway; the extended international versions shoehorn in an ending where the Good Guys improbably prevail). The only difference, really, is whether you’re more in the mood to watch Rothrock fight alongside Yuen Biao or alongside Michelle Yeoh, to which there are no wrong answers, only right ones.
For all of its thematic preoccupations with The Justice System’s inability to enact true justice (or to protect children from being stabbed & exploded, which happens onscreen more than you might expect), Righting Wrongs is mostly an excuse to stage cool, elaborate fight sequences, almost as much so as the Best of the Martial Arts Films infomercial. Yuen Biao puts in some incredible, death-defying stunts here, which should be no surprise to anyone familiar with his background as one of the Seven Little Fortunes, alongside his “brothers” Jackie Chan & Sammo Hung. After winning a fistfight against a half-dozen speeding cars in a parking garage, he later hangs from a rope trailing from a small airplane. It’s exhilarating but worrying. He also risks severe injury in a scene where Rothrock attempts to handcuff him in arrest on an apartment balcony, so he moves the fight to the flimsy railing in evasion. Rothrock also makes skillful use of those handcuffs in a scene where she arrests several gangsters in a mahjong parlor, pulling them from a leather garter under her skirt to cuff them all to a chair with a single pair. Still, her highlight fight is the standalone showdown with Karen Sheperd, which has somewhat overshadowed the rest of the film’s legacy online. It’s one great fight among many, a spoil of riches you can only find in Golden Age Hong Kong action cinema.
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