Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985)

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The 1977 competitive bodybuilding documentary Pumping Iron isn’t especially thoughtful or artful in presentation.  It’s presented as an observational, fly-on-the-wall document of a peculiar subculture in its natural state, but too much of its dramatic framing and direct-to-camera interviewing feels phony for that approach to land convincingly.  Still, the movie has endured as a cult classic for the past half-century thanks to the genius decision to center a pre-Hollywood Arnold Schwarzenegger as its main subject.  Pumping Iron is essential Schwarzenegger cinema for two reasons: it constantly finds new, novel angles to point the camera at Arnie’s extraordinary body, and it perfectly illustrates his uncanny ability to make being the most arrogant man alive charming & fun to be around.  If Pumping Iron documents anything substantial, it’s Schwarzenegger’s dominance as a world-class bodybuilder and a world-class blowhard, taking an unnecessary victory lap as Mr. Universe before moving on to Real Fame as the star of Real Movies.  He’s hilariously obnoxious as the biggest of fish in the smallest of ponds, openly negging his younger, hungrier competition (including a twenty-something Lou Ferrigno) and bragging that his life is so great that every waking moment feels like a continuous orgasm.  The movie itself might not be much of a wonder, but Arnold Schwarzenegger certainly is.  He singlehandedly rescues Pumping Iron from registering as a second-rate Maysles or Wiseman doc to instead excel as a hilarious precursor to Christopher Guest comedies.

The central star of its lesser-known sequel, Pumping Iron II: The Women, is much humbler than Schwarzenegger, both by design and by default.  Like Schwarzenegger in his time, Bev Francis was very clearly the best of her competitive bodybuilding field when she was profiled for a documentary feature. Unlike Schwarzenegger, she was not properly celebrated for her physical accomplishments.  Excuse me for spoiling this decades-old curio, but she doesn’t even win the competition she’s favored to crush.  As the movie illustrates, that’s because the rules & standards of women’s bodybuilding competitions are much more muddled & controversial than men’s, like all forums for judging & regulating the human body.  In Arnie’s movie, the man who can convincingly display the biggest, best defined muscles wins.  By those standards, Bev Francis is the clear dominator.  Only, in her movie, judges are looking for defined muscles to be displayed within the strict confines of a traditionally “feminine” physique, which Francis has deliberately trained beyond to build as much muscle as possible.  As a result, the movie becomes less about the peculiarities of her personality than the original Pumping Iron is about the peculiarities of Arnie’s.  Instead, it’s a movie about the general ways women’s bodies are overly regulated & critiqued in ways men’s bodies aren’t.  Its obvious, ludicrous unfairness only becomes stranger once you realize that the competition the film documents is a one-off promotion created specifically for the camera’s benefit. 

Overall, the Pumping Iron producers’ erotic dance competition movie Stripper is much more successful as The Feminine Version of Pumping Iron, as it relies on a similar subcultural interview structure in a mirrored, gendered setting.  What makes Pumping Iron II interesting is that it gets surprisingly political & academic by attempting to define what “feminine” means in the first place.  Bev Francis’s absurdly muscular body type would’ve fit right in with Schwarzenegger’s & Ferrigno’s absurdly muscular body types in the first film, but when compared against the intentionally slimmed-down dancer types of her own competitive class, she’s a disruption to the entire system of competitive bodybuilding as a rigidly gendered sport.  The judges don’t know what to do with her, since she’s clearly got the biggest muscles on display, but her physicality short-circuits their personal & cultural definitions of what a Woman is.  The obvious phoniness of the 1983 Caesars World Cup of Women’s Bodybuilding staged for the film matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, where audiences have been well trained to parse out what’s real and what’s staged.  It’s clear that Francis’s challenge to the gendered aesthetics of women’s bodybuilding genuinely rattles the sport’s seasoned judges, who have a hard time articulating their opposition to her sculpted physique without sounding like fascist, misogynist ghouls. 

Among this trio of films in the Pumping Iron canon, The Women is my least favorite as cinematic entertainment, but that’s only because Stripper and the Schwarzenegger pic delight me as artifacts of vintage cheese & sleaze.  The Women is clearly the contender with the most on its mind, the one with the most to say.  The fact that fascist, misogynist ghouls like Matt Walsh are still asking disingenuous questions like “What is a woman?” with their own rigid, limiting definitions in mind only reinforces its continued academic resonance.  It’s also required viewing for anyone who’s enamored with Rose Glass’s muscular erotic thriller Love Lies Bleeding, since it had obvious influence on that film’s period-specific costume & production design, especially when pumping iron in the women’s home-town gyms.  Meanwhile, the only thing the original Pumping Iron is currently relevant to is the timeless tradition of imitating Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent for a goof among friends, since it’s second only to Commando for his scene-to-scene quotability.

-Brandon Ledet

The Rover (2014)

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It may seem like we’re not far enough past the 2010s for the decade’s distinguishing cultural markers to be fully clear in the rearview, but recently returning to pop media from that time has convinced me it’s been long enough.  They’re especially clear when watching episodes of reality TV shows from a decade ago, where the dated fashions & attitudes of the 2010s are already vividly distinct.  You don’t have to be a freak like me to find those cultural timestamps in old episodes of Top Chef or Total Divas, though.  Those shows are meant to be disposable fluff, not anthropological time capsules.  Look instead to the 2014 road-trip thriller The Rover, which was only released ten years ago and already feels like it was made on another planet.  A somber, stylish revenge mission set in Mad Max’s near-future Australia, The Rover should still feel like a relatively fresh take on a road-worn template, but it’s already coated with a thick layer of dust from the past decade of pop culture progress.  A lot’s changed since we first cracked open a new decade, which is surprising considering that most of us spent the first couple years of the 2020s in a state of domestic stasis, avoiding the outside world.

Following an intentionally vague global economic collapse, Guy Pearce solemnly spends his days in the Australian heat drinking hard liquor and neglecting to shave.  His lonely, self-destructive routine is disrupted when his car is stolen by a small gang of reprobates, giving him an excuse to be destructive towards someone else for a change.  The only lead on his stolen car is an injured member of the gang left to die in the road, played by Robert Pattinson.  The two men reluctantly bond on a road trip towards dual, parallel acts of revenge: one for stolen property, one for heartless abandonment.  The most readily apparent way the pop culture landscape has changed since The Rover‘s initial release is that this kind of relentless post-apocalyptic trudge is no longer as overly prevalent now as it was in the early 2010s, when it would have competed with titles like Take Shelter, Snowpiercer, These Final Hours, The Book of Eli, The Road, Mad Max: Fury Road, World War Z, The Walking Dead, and so on.  It had a hard time standing out in that crowded field even though it’s more committed than most to distinguish itself with bleak tones and off-kilter character quirks (including an extensive sequence of Pattinson mumbling “Pretty Girl Rock” to himself that felt custom-designed for a David Ehrlich countdown video).  That’s not the only thing that’s changed, though.

I assume The Rover was initially compared to the in-over-his-head antihero plot of Blue Ruin (since there’s a lot of crossover in the small group of movie obsessives who’d happen to catch both titles), given Pearce’s blatant lack of a Taken-style “set of skills” that would make him suitable to fight off a gang of thugs as a lone wolf.  He’s just an ordinary man who happens to be extraordinarily angry about the theft of his car.  At this point on the cultural timeline, though, no revenge mission movie can get by without being unfairly compared to John Wick, which was released just one year later.  It’s unlikely that The Rover & John Wick would’ve been directly compared at the time, but John Wick has since set a definitive template for modern revengers that The Rover happens to fit into: stories about ultra-violent heroes overcorrecting seemingly petty wrongs.  Usually that means slaughtered pets (the dog in John Wick, the pig in Pig, the bees in The Beekeeper, etc). In The Rover‘s case, it’s a stolen, unremarkable sedan that leads to a bloody body-count. Of course, there’s always a deeper well of Trauma hidden under those surface-level revenge missions, but the macho brutes at the center can only express themselves through Violence so it takes a while to gather the details.  When Pearce finally confesses what awful incident broke his moral compass halfway through the picture, it’s not so much a major dramatic reveal as it is one more grim detail passing by in an endless parade.

Something else that’s obviously changed in the past decade is A24’s brand identity as a film distributor. They were already making bold acquisitions like The Rover, Spring Breakers, and Under the Skin in their first year, but they didn’t really become a recognizable, dependable marketing machine until 2015’s The Witch.  It’s impossible to say whether The Rover might have been a hit if it had come out after A24 fully won over the hearts of the coveted Film Bro audience, but it is the exact kind of tough-exterior-soft-interior thriller that appeals to young men of that ilk, so it’s possible.  At the very least, it was better suited for a cult audience than the similarly somber post-apocalyptic tale It Comes At Night, which lucked into a higher level of name recognition by arriving later in the A24 film-bro ascendancy.  Releasing The Rover after Robert Pattinson’s recent turn as Batman couldn’t have hurt on that front either, considering that he was still mostly known as The Guy from Twilight in 2014.  By now, anyone paying attention knows that Pattinson is a talented actor with good taste for adventurous projects, but the combination of this & Cosmopolis were only the early signs that was the case (to the measly dozens of people who saw them in initial release).  The Rover is very much a film of its time, to its peril.  Its distinctive virtues are just as apparent to a 2020s set of eyes as the difference between the current Women’s Division of the WWE vs the Divas division of the 2010s, which you can now plainly see in any random episode of Total Divas but was a lot more difficult to parse in the thick of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Horror’s Summer Blockbuster Era

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The tongue-in-cheek superhero team-up Deadpool & Wolverine releases wide this week, and its box office performance is sure to attract a lot of scrutiny from online pundits who specialize in that kind of thing.  That’s because the once-dependable genre of live-action superhero blockbusters has largely retreated from suburban multiplexes to instead play it safe on streaming platforms like Disney+, leaving a massive void on movie theater marquees the past couple summers.  I’m sure much will be written about what the Deadpool sequel’s box office receipts indicate about the future of live-action superhero media in particular, as well as the future of theatrical exhibition for big-budget movies in general, but that’s not the story that’s got my attention right now.  What’s fascinated me in this summer’s superhero drought is the genre that’s swooped in to replace those traditional blockbusters with an entirely different kind of corporate IP: the horror franchise.  Instead of saving anticipated horror sequels for the Halloween pre-gaming of Fall, studios have found open space in the summer release calendar to position them as the big-ticket Movie of the Week, to easy financial success.  It helps that horror movies typically cost 1/100th of a superhero blockbuster budget, making them better suited to turn a profit with the current, shrunken moviegoing public, but it’s still an interesting shift.

There are two original, non-franchise horror movies of note in theaters right now that are easily the scariest I’ve seen all year: the Irish ghost story Oddity and the Satanic serial killer thriller Longlegs.  Those standalone creep-outs are not the kind of horror blockbuster I’m describing here.  When I recently had a couple days off work to spend at The Movies, most of what was accessible to me were IP-extenders for already-established horrors & thrillers, all released this summer.  I felt the same way watching that triple feature of MaXXXine (a sequel), A Quiet Place: Day One (a prequel), and Twisters (a rebootquel) that I usually feel watching sequels, prequels, and reboots to big-budget action movies this time of year: mild, momentary amusement that quickly faded from my memory the further away I got from the theater.  Longlegs & Oddity are designed to unnerve the audience by dragging us through previously unseen corners of Hell, guided by the Twisted Minds of their respective auteurs (Oz Perkins & Damian Mc Carthy).  The horror sequels & prequels they’re up against are too warmly familiar to unnerve anyone.  They were designed to remind us of movies we already like, providing a pleasantly violent atmosphere where we can purchase & consume popcorn.  They’re essentially the MCU for nerds in black t-shirts who already have definite Halloween plans months in advance.

In that context, this trio of movies were adequately entertaining.  Like X, MaXXXine is mostly a work of pastiche, updating the 70s Texas Porn Star Massacre grime of the original to the New Wave Hookers grime of the warped-VHS 1980s.  That 80s aesthetic may not be as novel for a modern slasher as the Old Hollywood melodrama of the X prequel Pearl, but it at least panders enough to my personal tastes to give the movie a pass.  For all of MaXXXine‘s vintage horror & porno references, though, the thing it reminded me of most was Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Red Riding Hood arc on the third season of The Deuce, which only places it about 5 years deep into the archives instead of the 40 it aimed for.  It’s fun, but it’s fluff.  Mia Goth is notably subdued as the porn-star-victim on the run after she got to play unhinged villain in the franchise’s last outing, which is something I could also say about director Michael Sarnoski’s presence in Day One, his prequel to A Quiet Place.  Sarnoski’s debut feature Pig was an emotionally devastating riff on the John Wick revenge pic, sending a wounded Nicolas Cage on a culinary warpath that established the director as a name to watch.  It’s a shame, then, that Sarnoski’s follow-up is just . . . another Quiet Place.  There’s a little novelty in the franchise’s move to an urban setting at the exact moment of alien invasion, but otherwise Day One is just more of the same – similar to MaXXXine‘s shift to an 80s horror-porno aesthetic only slightly shaking up the X status quo.

The most successful film of this trio is the decades-later rebootquel Twisters, which updates the storm-chasing hijinks of the 90s Jan De Bont blockbuster Twister with small touches of dramatic restraint from Minari director Lee Isaac Chung (joining Sarnoski in the one-for-them check cashing line at the bank).  Some might balk at the idea of labeling either Twister movie as Horror, but they’re both essentially monster-attack movies wherein the the monster happens to be bad weather.  Both films climax at small-town horror screenings (The Shining in Twister and Frankenstein in Twisters) where the tornado rips through the screen as a direct, literal replacement for horror icons being projected from the past.  The reason I’m pushing to include Twisters here is that it exemplifies what the future of horror blockbuster filmmaking might become.  I’m shocked to report that I enjoyed the tornado movie more than the apocalyptic monster movie or the retro porno-horror, likely because it’s the one that’s most honest about the familiar, unchallenging entertainment it aims to deliver.  Twisters is an emotionally satisfying pick-up truck commercial—complete with country-rock soundtrack—that occasionally takes breaks from promoting Dodge Ram products to indulge in thunderous kaiju horror action.  Chung asserts his tastefulness as a serious artist by cutting out two traditional summer blockbuster payoffs that would’ve mapped it directly to a 90s template: the movie’s Big Bad being sucked into a tornado and a Big Kiss being shared between the leads.  Otherwise, he’s making an anonymous, IP-driven action movie, and that shamelessness mostly works in his favor.  It’s the kind of summertime fun you want to eat mozzarella sticks to.

Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here.  It was cute & relatable for Lupita Nyong’o’s doomed hero in A Quiet Place: Day One to seek one last comfort before death at a neighborhood pizzeria, but the success of Twisters suggests a better way.  Maybe Sarnoski & company should have capitalized on the Blooming Onion facial design on the Quiet Place monsters and scored a tie-in promotional deal with Outback Steakhouse, sending Nyong’o to seek comfort there instead.  A24 certainly understands the value of that kind of old-school hucksterism, and you can currently purchase a commemorative MaXXXine thong from their online giftshop, among other X-branded wares.  All they need is some Universal Pictures-scale monetary backing to reach their full horror blockbuster potential.  Or maybe this is all just a fluke.  It’s possible that the lucrative return of Deadpool or The Joker or The Avengers will convince Hollywood to exclusively get back into the superhero movie business, putting this summer’s horror blockbuster era to a swift end.  Personally, I hope not.  I didn’t necessarily appreciate these horror sequels & prequels on any deeper level than I appreciate a Marvel or Star Wars or Fast & Furious picture, but I do prefer to spend my time in their stylistic milieu.  Any excuse to hide from the New Orleans heat in the darkened, air-conditioned rooms of my neighborhood theater is welcome, but the more monsters we can cram into those rooms the better.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Gotham by Gaslight (2018)

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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. 

It had to happen eventually that one of these animated movies would emerge as an object lesson in adaptation that’s faithful in some ways and divergent in others, to ill effect in both realms. Batman: Gotham by Gaslight was a critically and commonly well-received 1989 Elseworlds comic that asked, What if Batman, but steampunk? and What if Batman fought Jack the Ripper?, which was the style at the time. This film adapts both of those questions directly, although it chooses a different culprit for who the Ripper turns out to be (it’s still an effective mystery, but who’s behind the Ripper’s blade in the comic is that story’s equivalent of The Joker, that comparison is absent here and the killer is someone else. Gotham by Gaslight transports the (apparently) eternally fertile narrative ground of a serial killer in the London Fog has been transported to the nearly identical (but explicitly American, even in this setting) city of Gotham, where the city streets are stalked by two different disguised men. The first, of course, is the Ripper, whose true identity forms the core mystery of the story. The other is a Victorian Batman, who is in fact the city’s recently returned prodigal son, the orphaned billionaire Bruce Wayne (Bruce Greenwood). 

As with a lot of What if [Character] but [Specific Era/Location]? stories, this one transports all of the accoutrement of the character to the time and place that the author (or, more commonly, fanfiction writer) has a fascination with. So, while “Catwoman” isn’t here, Selina Kyle (Jennifer Carpenter) is, as an actress and singer who grew up as the daughter of a lion tamer, hence a handiness with a whip and an affection for cats. Leslie Thompkins, the kindly child psychologist who helped mend the young Bruce’s psyche in the comics, is here Sister Leslie (Grey Griffin), who ran the orphanage in which Bruce was raised. There’s a district attorney Harvey Dent, a showgirl (and, lest we forget because this is a Ripper story, sex worker) Pamela Isley, a police Commissioner named Gordon, a Doctor Hugo Strange, and so on and so forth. It’s a conceit that I think can be fun and rewarding, but can also be kind of tired. In fact, the thing that I felt most weighed down that recent Matt Reeves Batman movie was the fact that it was a Batman movie, and thus in the middle of this high budget, grimy neo-noir featuring some interesting creative choices, decent editing, and occasionally great visuals, you also had to have Colin Farrell as the Penguin for some reason. This kind of “Batman skin on a Victorian period piece” integration of the whole rogues gallery usually works best when the narrative finds something interesting to do with it or a way to twist expectations, and it does do that here in one small way, as there is both a Two-Face and a Harvey Dent, but they are not the same person here. 

Visually, the most frustrating thing about this one is that it uses the general design aesthetics of the source material (simplified for animation) but none of the grain or grit that made that one’s overall look so memorable. In fact, although there have been other releases in this overall franchise that looked worse, the discrepancy between the mood and atmosphere of the original comic and this adaptation make this one feel cheaper than those others. For instance, take a look at this page of the original comic, which evokes both the yellowing of a newspaper and the sickly yellow light of the oil lamps in the district in which the scene takes place. It sets a tone that is lacking from this movie. That’s an overall issue with a lot, but not all, of these movies. When adapting from a well-liked source material, one can choose to try and imitate the original art as closely as possible while also “sanding off” some of the detail work that would be too difficult to animate (like New Frontier or All-Star Superman), or make something that looks completely different (like Doomsday’s use of a more Bruce Timm style, or Superman vs. The Elite’s Tartakovsky-esque crescent moon head shapes). This chooses to do some detail sanding in order to ape the art style of the original, but in doing so genericizes the overall feel of Mike Mignola’s pre-Hellboy artwork and the moodiness that made the graphic novel memorable enough to attempt to adapt nearly thirty years later in the first place. Paradoxically, this one is well-drawn but ultimately flat-looking, and not dynamic enough or visually arresting enough to really capture your attention. 

That said, if you’re going to watch this one, it’s going to be because you’re interested in seeing who the Ripper is, and I won’t spoil that for you here. It’s a novel (and welcome) choice to forego any Jokery completely, and the twist is satisfactorily executed, with the fact that the Ripper was driven mad by the inhumanity he witnessed during the Civil War being an interesting touch. Performance-wise, the return of Greenwood to the Batman role after previously voicing him in Under the Red Hood is a good one, and his performance helps inflate some of the limper elements of the story. When it comes to the casting, however, the standout here is Anthony “Giles from Buffy” Head as Alfred, although he is underutilized. Perhaps you, dear reader, have not seen so many of these that you need them to be visually dynamic in order to be appreciated, and a middle of the road Jack the Ripper story dressed up in cape and cowl will be more fun for you. At the same time, if that’s what you’re looking for, what you really want to get your hands on is the 1989 comic. Your library system probably has a copy! Why don’t you go look that up right now, actually? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #217: Monkey Man (2024) & New Releases

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Welcome to Episode #217 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2024, starting with Dev Patel’s caste-system fight club revenger Monkey Man.

00:00 The best of 2024 (so far)

02:52 MaXXXine (2024)
05:03 Pretty Poison (1968)
07:29 Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (1963)
11:03 The Coffee Table (2024)
15:57 Kill (2024)
17:33 Deewaar (1975)

21:40 Monkey Man (2024)
38:17 Problemista (2024)
51:03 Sometimes I Think About Dying (2024)
1:08:06 Aishiteru! (Safe Word, 2024)

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

Carny (1980)

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One venue in which enthusiastic moviegoing is still alive & well is the Outdoor Movie Night, especially the free, inflatable-screen showings of Family Friendly favorites like Coco or Moana.  Those screenings are more of a community event than your typical, isolating trip to the cinema.  Families spread out on picnic blankets, halfheartedly try to keep their kids in eyesight as they play around with new friends and, whenever bored enough, pay attention to the movie being projected.  It’s cute.  The Broadside offers that same kind of Outdoor Movie Night experience with a little more formal structure & focus, having built a Family Friend compound next to The Broad Theater for regular concerts & laid-back screenings.  The recent Wildwood showing of 1980’s Carny made great use of that communal atmosphere.  To play off the movie’s traveling-carnival setting, they invited face-painters, stilt-walkers, tarot readers, and cotton candy spinners as a pre-show warmup, concluding with local musician Brookiecita (of LSD Clownsystem) introducing the film over a slideshow of her own childhood photographs from growing up on the carnival circuit.  There were indeed kids running around the grounds too, this time eating cotton candy and enjoying the “VIP room” of inflatable pools.

That Outdoor Movie Night atmosphere is worth noting here because Carny is absolutely not a Family Friendly affair.  This is one of those teenage Jodie Foster roles that edge right up to the line of being too slimy to stomach without ever fully crossing it (see also: Taxi Driver, Foxes, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane).  Foster plays an underage waitress who’s bored with the tedium of small-town living, so she joins a traveling carnival on a whim after lusting after its most boisterous performer (Gary Busey in horrifying clown makeup).  Struggling to establish her place in the carnival beyond her function as The Dunk Tank Clown’s girlfriend, she briefly auditions as one of the striptease dancers in the “hoochie coochie” tent.  This decision lands the teenager in multiple compromising scenarios: modeling lingerie for hooting drunkards, getting body-slammed onto the stage by said drunkards, and eventually getting tied to a bed by a villainous goon who threatens to sexually assault her before her fellow carnies intervene.  The worst part is that her much older boyfriend knows exactly how old she is (while she lies to everyone else about already being 18), and the safer, more appropriate job he eventually finds for her is still as sexual bait in one of the carnival-game booths – this time working marks for pocket change, which we see play out in a lengthy sequence of lesbian cruising.

All of this dangerous flirtation with Jodie Foster’s early cinematic persona as Teenage Jailbait is eased by the film always implying its sex scenes instead of fully illustrating them and by its characterization of her as a consenting participant in her own seduction & indoctrination.  It’s also eased by the fact that Carny isn’t really about her seduction into the carny lifestyle at all.  It’s more of a love story about the two best bros she gets between: Busey as the clown and musician Robbie Robertson as his “midway” hustler trailer-mate.  Busey & Robertson love each other with furious devotion, often expressing their mutual affection in drunken acts of group sex with women they pick up on the road.  It throws off their dynamic when Busey catches real feelings for Foster, then, and that goes double for when Robertson inevitably has sex with her too.  Their seething jealousies & whispered bickering just outside of her earshot end up taking over the foreground of the movie while her own coming of age carny-life story fades into the background, so that it’s less of a love triangle than it is a tortured bromance.  That helps steal some attention away from the situational leering at Foster’s body, but Carny still made for an intensely uncomfortable watch at times, especially in an Outdoor Movie Night setting.

Of course, discomfort was the intent.  The movie opens with Busey smearing on his greasy clown paint before hopping into the dunk-tank cage, antagonizing every mark who strolls by like a screeching gorilla.  It concludes with a classic hall-of-mirrors horror sequence in which the carnies plot to scare off local thugs who are shaking them down for obscene payouts, essentially borrowing its climax from Tod Browning’s 1930s cult classic Freaks.  Despite those intentionally scary images and the amoral sexual politics of Foster’s seduction into the carny lifestyle, Brookiecita introduced the movie as a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of traveling carnival folk as a type of found family.  Likewise, Robertson co-wrote, produced, and partially scored the picture based on his own experiences as a teenage carnival worker, fondly remembering his time in the business.  Personally, I got my own “seedy underbelly of the carnival” crash course from Bikini Kill’s “Carnival,” not The Band’s “Life is a Carnival,” but I like to think I still got the message.  In Carny, Robertson seemed to be acknowledging both the warmth of the carnival community when dealing with their own and the grimy, violent hucksterism they could stoop to when dealing with outsiders.  In a way, that clash of familial warmth and carnival grime actually made it a perfect Outdoor Movie Night selection, the best one I’ve seen since The Broadside screened Demons with live prog-rock accompaniment.

-Brandon Ledet

The Movie Orgy (1968)

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When Joe Dante’s mashup epic The Movie Orgy first toured the hippie-infested college campuses of 1960s America, it was a mobile party sponsored by Schlitz Beer – more of a “happening” than a movie.  The vibe was much calmer during its recent screening at The Broad, where a half-dozen or so hopeless nerds politely avoided eye contact by scrolling on our phones until the trailers started, then dutifully watched the film in its entirety while stragglers quietly filtered in & out during its sprawling runtime.  Even the length of The Movie Orgy is more sensible than it used to be.  The AGFA scan that’s currently available for public exhibition is “only” 5 hours long, when earlier cuts have been reported to reach the 7-hour mark.  Maybe the world has become too well behaved & socially awkward to ever recreate the raucous atmosphere of The Movie Orgy‘s stoners-at-a-kegger origins from a half-century ago.  More likely, it’s just hard to get a good party going at 2pm on a weekday.

It’s important to note the circumstances of exhibition in this case, because the movie is technically illegal to distribute at any price point higher than Free.  Long before Everything is Terrible! excavated moldy junk media from garage-sale VHS tapes in their own digital-era mashups, Joe Dante (along with fellow Corman alumnus Jon Davison) did the same for discarded strips of 16mm film.  The Movie Orgy is the great American scrapbook: a maniacal clip show stitched together from scraps of cartoons, commercials, newsreels, monster-movie schlock, government propaganda, and other disposable ephemera.  In its boozy college campus run, that ironic collage of American pop culture runoff would’ve invited loud, boisterous mockery from the turned-on/tuned-in/dropped-out audience, like an MST3k prototype for acid freaks.  In its current form, it’s more like digging through a shoebox of decades-old ticket stubs from your grandparents’ teenage years, unearthing evidence of low-budget, low-brow genre trash that’s otherwise been forgotten to time.

In theory, The Movie Orgy is a purely cinematic archive, but in practice it feels more like flipping through TV channels or clicking around the internet.  America’s racism, bloodlust, misogyny, hucksterism, and cheap monster movies are all compounded into one grotesque gestalt.  King Kong’s iconic climb up the Empire State Building shares the same psychic space as an urban attack from the giant turkey-monster of The Giant Claw, a film of much lowlier pedigree.  Richard Nixon, The Beatles, and early, optimistic reports about The Vietnam War are given equal footing as toothpaste ads and a contextless gag featuring a chimpanzee who plays the drums.  The construction of this absurd montage is much cruder than what you’ll find in its modern mashup descendants like The Great Satan or Ask Any Buddy, since there are no digital means to smooth over the abrupt transitions between each individual clip.  You can feel Joe Dante’s presence in the editing room, going mad while physically cutting & pasting everything together as a D.I.Y. outsider art project that got out of hand.

Dante made The Movie Orgy as a cinema-obsessed art school student looking to party.  Years later, Roger Corman hired him to edit trailers for the exact kind of low-budget creature features that The Movie Orgy lovingly mocked, turning that party into a profession.  Like most Corman hires, the job eventually led to Dante directing cheap-o horror pictures himself, to great success within and beyond the Roger Corman Film School.  His comic sensibilities were already well-honed in this early effort, landing huge laughs with runner gags involving a 50-foot-tall woman’s petty romantic jealousies, a bad-boy greaser who doesn’t like to be “crowded”, and a headache medicine for “sensitive people” that each get exponentially funnier the more they repeat over the seemingly infinite runtime.  The Movie Orgy is designed to be amusing for anyone who drifts in & out of attention as they consume & piss out another round of Schlitz Beer, but it’s most comedically rewarding for the long-haul movie nerds who stick with every relentless minute from start to end like it’s an academic research project – likely because Dante is one of us.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Baby Cakes (1989)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1989’s Baby Cakes, is a made-for-TV romcom starring Ricki Lake as the world’s most adorable stalker.  It follows the exact narrative beats of the original 1985 German film it adapts, Sugarbaby, but it handles them with a much lighter, gentler touch.  In Sugarbaby, our lonely mortician protagonist has no friends or hobbies outside her obsessive scheming to sleep with the married man who catches her lustful eye.  It’s a much darker film than Baby Cakes tonally, but it’s also much more colorful, as it’s lit with enough candy-color gels to halfway convince you that it was directed by Dario Argento under a German pseudonym.  Baby Cakes sands off all the stranger, off-putting details of the original to instead deliver a familiar, cutesy romcom about a woman struggling with self-image issues as the world constantly taunts her for being overweight; Ricki Lake’s bubbly personality lifts the general mood of that story, as does the decision to make her object of desire an engaged man instead of a married one.  Even her stalking is played as an adorable quirk in 80s-romcom montage, as she tries on different disguises while tracking down her supposed soulmate.

One essential romcom element of Baby Cakes is the quirky circumstances of its star-couple’s professions.  Ricki Lake not only plays a mortician in this case; she’s the morgue’s designated beautician, livening up dead bodies with cheery glam makeup.  The hunk she stalks in the NYC subway system is not traveling to a boring desk job in some office cubicle somewhere; he’s the subway train conductor who drives her to work everyday, a much less common occupation.  Naturally, then, the NYC subway setting where she first lays eyes on him becomes a defining component of the film, affording it some novelty as a Public Transit Romcom instead of just a generic one.  It’s in the subways where she forces a meet-cute, where she flirts by buying him Sugar Babies at a vending machine, where she dresses like a mustachioed janitor to sneak a peek at his work schedule, etc.  That setting had me thinking a lot about public-transit romances as a result, so here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

While You Were Sleeping (1995)

The most adorable public-transit romcom I could find also involves some unethical scheming and lusting from afar by its female star, in this case Sandra Bullock instead of Ricki Lake.  Like in The Net, Bullock stars as an unloved schlub with no social life outside her relationship with her cat.  Her only romantic prospect is making cartoon-wolf eyes at a handsome businessman stranger (Peter Gallagher), whom she watches board the train for his morning commute with ritualistic devotion.  You see, her quirky romcom occupation is working the token booth for the Chicago L-Train system, which the movie specifies early in an opening credits sequence that features hotdog stands, Wrigley Field, and a Michael Jordan statue to establish locality.  It also ends on an image of Bullock riding the L-Train herself as a passenger instead of a booth worker, modeling a classic white wedding dress and a “JUST MARRIED” sign as if she had hired a limousine in the suburbs.

While You Were Sleeping doesn’t spend too much time on that train platform, though.  In an early scene, her mysterious would-be beau is mugged and falls unconscious onto the tracks, when she suddenly springs to action for the first time in her go-nowhere life and pulls his limp body to safety.  Much of the rest of the film is spent in hospital rooms and the newly comatose man’s family home as she hides her non-relationship with him by pretending to be his fiancée.  It’s a convoluted sitcom set-up that would lead to one doozy of a “Grandma, how did you meet Grandpa?” conversation by the time she makes a genuine romantic connection, but in terms of romcom logic it’s all relatively reasonable & adorable.  Notably, she is eventually proposed to through the plexiglass barrier of the train-platform tollbooth, with an engagement ring passed along as if it were token fare.  Cute!

On the Line (2002)

If you wish While You Were Sleeping had more emphasis on the novelty of its Chicago L-Train setting and are willing to give up little things like the movie being good or watchable, On the Line is the perfect public-transit romcom alternative.  In fact, that is the only case in which it is recommendable.  *NSYNC backup singers Lance Bass & Joey Fatone play boneheaded bros in the worst college-campus cover band you’ve ever heard.  While Fatone refuses to grow up after college (continuing to live out his rockstar fantasy by playing dive bars and wearing t-shirts that helpfully say “ROCK” on them), Bass gets a boring desk job at an ad agency, which means a lot of morning commutes on the L.  It’s on one of those trips to work when he strikes up a genuine connection with a fellow rider, chickens out when it’s time to ask for her number, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to complete the missed connection.  When they inevitably find each other a second time, it’s on the same train platform, where they once again flirtatiously bond by reciting Al Green song titles and the lineage of American presidents.  I am not kidding.

Do not ask me what happens between those two fateful meetings on the L, because I am not sure there is an answer.  In lieu of minor details like plot, themes, or jokes, On the Line is a collection of occurrences that pass time between train stops.  Besides a heroic third-act nut shot in which one of Bass’s idiot friends catches a baseball with his crotch at the aforementioned Wrigley Field, most of the “humor” of the film consists of characters reacting to non-events with softly sarcastic retorts like “Okayyyy,” “Well excuuuuuse me,” and “Ooooohhh that’s gotta hurt.”  Otherwise, it’s all just background noise meant to promote a tie-in CD soundtrack that features acts like Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, Vitamin C and, of course, *NSYNC (the rest of whom show up for a “hilarious” post-credits gag where they play flamboyantly gay hairdressers, to the movie’s shame).  Other on-screen corporate sponsorships include Reebok, Total Request Live, McDonalds, Chyna, and Al Green, the poor bastard.  And because Bass works at an ad agency, the movie even dares to include a conversation with his boss (Dave Foley, embarrassing himself alongside coworker Jerry Stiller) that cynically attempts to define the term “tween females” as a marketing demographic.  The main product being marketed to those tween females was, of course, Lance Bass himself, who comes across here as a not especially talented singer who’s terrified of women.  Hopefully they vicariously learned to love public transit in the process too, which I suppose is also advertised among all those corporate brands.  If nothing else, the romance is directly tied to the wonders of the L-Train by the time a character declares “Love might not make the world go round, but it’s what makes the ride worthwhile” to a car full of semi-annoyed passengers. 

Paterson (2016)

If you’re looking for a movie that’s both good and heavily public transit-themed, I’d recommend stepping slightly outside the romcom genre to take a ride with Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s zen slice-of-life drama starring Adam Driver.  Paterson may not technically be a romcom, but it is both romantic & comedic.  Driver leans into his surname by driving a city bus around his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, earning just enough of a decent living to pay for his eccentric wife’s art supplies.  His character’s first name also happens to be Paterson, which is one of many amusing coincidences that become quietly surreal as they recur: seeing twins around town, hearing repeated lines of dialogue, and striking up conversations with strangers who happen to be practicing poets.  You see, Paterson is not only a bus driver, no more than Sandra Bullock’s lovelorn protagonist was only a tollbooth worker or Lance Bass was only a mediocre singer.  He’s also an amateur poet who spends his alone time between bus rides writing work he never intends to publish, poems that are only read by his adoring wife.  It’s all very aimless & low-stakes, but it’s also very lovely.

I generally find Jarmusch’s “I may be a millionaire but I’m still an aimless slacker at heart” schtick to be super irritating. However, as a former poetry major who rides the bus to work every day and whose biggest ambition in life is to write on the clock, I can’t be too too annoyed in this case.  If nothing else, Paterson gets the act of writing poetry correct in a way that few movies do.  It’s all about revising the same few lines over & over again until they’re exactly correct; it’s also all about the language of imagery.  Paterson gets the humble appeal of riding the city bus right too, even if it is a little idealistic about how pleasant & clean the bus itself and the conversations eavesdropped on it tend to be (speaking as a person of NORTA experience). While You Were Sleeping & Baby Cakes have the most adorable use of their public-transit settings on this list; On the Line has the most absurd.  For its part, Paterson just has the most.  There are a lot of quiet, contemplative bus rides as the movie peacefully rolls along, which is the exact kind of energy I try to bring to my morning commute every day.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman and Harley Quinn (2017)

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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. 

I think that I would have had a better impression of Batman and Harley Quinn if I had seen it when it was released, instead of in 2024, when we’ve already had a few seasons of the excellent animated adult Harley Quinn TV show. I’m sure this raucous, foul-mouthed representation of the character—which now seems like a tamer, less funny version of the TV series version—was probably more fun and exciting seven years ago, but it doesn’t hold up anymore. That’s only partially the film’s fault, however; it can’t be held accountable for the fact that what I think of as the best version of Harley Quinn was right around the corner, ready to overshadow it. I can blame it for being, well, not very good. 

In a (contentious and challenged) continuation of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series, Batman (Kevin Conroy) and Nightwing (Loren Lester, reprising) must turn to the recently paroled/released Harley Quinn (Melissa Rauch, taking over for Arleen Sorkin, who originated the role and the character in the 90s) to try and find out where her BFF Poison Ivy (an utterly wasted Paget Brewster) is hiding. Ivy has recently teamed with poor man’s Swamp Thing “Floronic Man” (Kevin Michael Richardson) to steal some actual Swamp Thing matter from STAR Labs, with the goal of doing some “One man’s eco-terrorism is another man’s most ethical way to save the planet” shenanigans. Noting that Harley hasn’t reported to her parole officer in months, Nightwing finds her working at a kind of Super-Hooters where women dress in skimpy(er) versions of superheroine/villainess costumes. Tailing her, the two end up fighting one another; he asks why she’s resorted to this line of work instead of using her psychology doctorate, and she gets real with him about what the job market is like for ex-cons. She knocks him out, he wakes up tied to the bed, and they eventually hook up (although one can read the consensuality of the situation as dubious). She agrees to help the Dynamic Duo, they go on a couple of fest quests, and eventually they find Ivy and her new co-conspirator and save the day. 

Due to time constraints as a result of work, travel, and my social life, I ended up accidentally watching this one as if it were a three-part episode of the series, as the film’s 74-minute runtime breaks down into three neat segments that are roughly the length of an episode of The Animated Series. I don’t think it suffered from that. In fact, I don’t mention it often, but I’ve probably watched about a third of these so far in more than one sitting, a practice I don’t normally condone (a movie is like a spell or most poems, to be consumed all at once or the magic could be dispelled), but which hasn’t really impacted my reading of these as texts. If anything, it’s made me engage with them more. The ones that really capture my interest are straightforward, one sitting, beginning to end viewing experiences, while the ones that fail to really grab me are the ones that I realize I have to rewind and rewatch parts of because my mind was starting to wander. And some, like Gotham Knight and Emerald Knights, are episodic by design, while others are episodic as a result of the fact that they are adapting stories that originated in a serialized, month-to-month medium, like All Star Superman (although that one gets a full viewing every time). Viewed through that lens, this is a three-parter with a first episode that I found mostly boring, a second part that was a big improvement, and a finale that was fine, I guess. 

First, the good. The “Superbabes” restaurant is a fun sight gag, but that’s all there really is to write home about in the first act. The middle is better, as the unlikely trio’s research brings them to a shack in the woods where assorted colorful hoodlums and hooligans gather, with visual references to the Adam West Batman series aplenty, and even includes two musical numbers, one of which is endearing and funny (we’ll get to the second in “the bad”). There’s even a toilet humor gag that managed to cross the line into getting an actual laugh from me; Harley has some greasy food, she begs for the Batmobile to be pulled over so that she can use the facilities, Batman assumes it’s a ruse to escape and refuses, Harley passes a great volume of gas, Nightwing begs to roll the window down, and Batman again refuses, saying that it “Smells like discipline.” It’s a good gag, as there’s an abundance of writers who adore Batman to the point of biblical idolatry, and to tweak their over-the-top stoicism is funny both with and without that context. The final act also includes a pretty funny bit, where it seems like the day will be saved by the appearance of Swamp Thing, here a nearly omniscient/omnipotent vegetation deity, but he really just shows up to wag his finger at the villain and affects the plot not at all. It’s like the seed of an idea for the kind of gags and bits that the Harley Quinn animated series pulls off, and although it’s in its infancy here, it’s a good joke. 

When it comes to the bad, I have to say, I don’t like Rauch as Harley. It’s funny, because I know she got her big break on Big Bang Theory, a series I have seen approximately 57 minutes of and all of them under duress, the same place that TV Harley Kaley Cuoco gathered much of her attention. (To me, I will always remember her from the endless promotion of 8 Simple Rules that aired constantly during reruns of Grounded for Life when I was in high school, as well as for her role as Billie, the Cousin Oliver of original recipe Charmed’s final season, because my brain is broken in so, so many ways.) Cuoco seems born to voice this role, while Rauch is doing … I don’t know, I’m sure it’s her best. It’s not quite as iconic as Sorkin’s original Harley, or as perfectly suited as Tara Strong’s chameleon-like version, or as unhinged as Cuoco’s ascension to animated Harley supreme. Sometimes, when watching the show, I can almost see Cuoco in the sound booth when she lets out one of Harley’s frustrated cries, really getting into the body language and everything. In this, Harley sounds so canned and rehearsed that you imagine that there was almost no motion during the entire recording session. It’s a very frustrating experience. This gets pushed past my tolerance limits when we have an entire musical performance of Rauch-as-Harley singing the seminal, perfect The Nerves (although obviously best known as a Blondie single) track “Hanging on the Telephone.” I’m not one to get upset when a filmmaker gets a little self-indulgent, but this is a real speedbump in this one, especially as it comes on the heels of the aforementioned fun music number. 

I wish that I could watch this with completely fresh eyes when it was a new release, without the baggage of a much better, funnier, more exciting, and better performed adaptation of the character. But we’re all trapped within the horizon of our experiences, so here I am, trying and failing to like this release. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Starship Troopers (1997)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation of the Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi military novel Starship Troopers.

00:00 Welcome

06:15 Contact (1997)
13:15 Monkey Man (2024)
19:48 Detective Pikachu (2019)
30:19 Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)
33:27 Kinds of Kindness (2024)
48:30 Queer Futures (2023–2024)
55:54 Santo vs The Martian Invasion (1967)
1:02:23 The Movie Orgy (1968)

1:12:08 Starship Troopers (1997)

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