Kalki 2898 AD (2024)

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Sometimes, a movie can be so aggressively derivative that it crosses a threshold into becoming thrillingly unique.  Recently, Vera Drew’s copyright-skirting The People’s Joker melted eight decades of Batman comics & movies into a shockingly personal, vulnerable self-portrait.  One of this year’s buzziest horror films, In a Violent Nature, is a novelty slasher that simulates the sensation of watching a Friday the 13th sequel on an overdose of cough syrup.  Further back, vintage Hong Kong action schlock like The Seventh Curse and The Dragon Lives Again “borrowed” familiar icons from better-funded American productions for their own absurd purposes, theorizing what it might be like if Indiana Jones had to fight off Xenomorphs or if “Bruce Lee” teamed up with “Popeye” to beat up “Dracula” in Hell.  Lucio Fulci might not have been doing his most personal, innovative work when making an unsanctioned sequel to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but without Italian producers’ complete disregard for American copyright, we never would have gotten the underwater zombie-on-shark fight scene of Zombi 2.  Genuinely transcendent, imaginative art can result from filmmakers being shamelessly derivative, as long as they fully embrace the practice and push it to its extreme.  Just call it “post-modern” and all is forgiven.

That’s why I was pleased to discover that the big-budget South Indian sci-fi film Kalki 2828 AD is even more derivative than I initially expected.  All of the promotional materials for the film led me to believe it was a mockbuster version of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, distinguished only from a Syfy Channel knockoff of that series by the fact that it boasts the biggest budget of any Indian production to date.  It turns out that Kalki 2898 is less of an overly expensive Dune bootleg than it is a more general sampler of any & every big-budget sci-fi property you can name: Dune, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Fury Road, Guardians of the Galaxy, everything. As a result, the movie it ended up reminding me most of was The Fifth Element: a mostly goofy genre derivative with a few genuinely transcendent moments all of its own making.  By the time a flashback reveals that its wisecracking anti-hero was trained by his mentor using laser-swords, it’s clear that the movie is uninterested in hiding its artistic debts to pre-existing material.  When it climaxes with a giant wizard figure doing Gandalf’s “You shall not pass!” routine during a bridge-fight with said anti-hero in a Transformers-styled mech suit, it’s also clear that those obvious debts do not matter.  Kalki 2898 may be derivative, but it’s also deliriously, deliciously entertaining.

Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan stars as the Gandalf-like wizard of that bridge fight: a wizened but weary warrior who has been cursed with immortality for a past sin but eventually uses his extended centuries on earth for good.  Tollywood action star Prabhas (of Baahubali fame) pilots the smart-car mech suit in that fight as a Han Solo type: a mercenary bad-boy who only does good when it fits his selfish needs.  They’re fighting over possession of a pregnant damsel in distress (Deepika Padukone, of last year’s Pathaan), who’s believed to be carrying a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.  There’s, of course, a prophecy going around that her child could be The One: a warrior savior who will bring light to a desert hell planet that has been suffering in greed & darkness.  Throw in a fascistic Empire who exploits the labor of the many to pamper the lives of the privileged few, and you’ve got the basic building blocks of a standard Dune or Star Wars knockoff, except maybe one with a concerning amount of attention paid to the Empire’s search for “fertile females.”  Kalki 2898 constantly refers to major events of Hindu mythology in flashbacks that can be disorienting for uninformed Western viewers, but so much of its story is borrowed from a universal source of worship (corporate pop-culture IP) that the knowledge gap doesn’t matter all too much.

If there’s any way that Kalki 2898 closely adheres to its Dune inspiration in particular, it’s that it abruptly ends after three hours with only half a story told.  One of the final images is a title card promising that the adventure will continue in the “Kalki Cinematic Universe,” and it’s been a while since I was excited instead of annoyed by that serialized approach to cinematic storytelling.  That’s not the only hack move it pulls that would’ve annoyed me in most American blockbusters either.  It includes many for-their-own sake cameos that wink to an insider audience (including one for Baahubali director S.S. Rajamouli); it follows up its “until next time . . .” title card with a mid-credits post-script that promises an evolution for the big bad villain.  Worse, early flashbacks include horrendous de-aging CGI effects for Bachchan that betray the fact that the film was rushed to market before it was fully completed, with production having wrapped only a month before release.  None of those usual red flags bothered me here, though, no more than I was bothered by watching it play around with the pre-fabricated action figures of more famous sci-fi properties.  Kalki 2898 AD is playful & extreme enough in its scene-to-scene action that any questions of artistic integrity or originality feel beside the point.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League Dark (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. 

After a semi-successful attempt at horror with Justice League vs. Teen Titans, we return to the ongoing animated cinematic universe with another horror-adjacent picture as well as a revisitation of supernatural themes. Following an opening sequence in which the big three—Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman—each deal with acts of violence instigated by normal civilians seeing other people as monstrous demons, we find DC’s resident occultist, we get our first glimpse of John Constantine (voiced by Matt Ryan, who played the character in live action on his own short-lived live action series that premiered in the 2014 TV season, and was later imported into the CW’s “Arrowverse” proper). He and Jason Blood (Ray Chase), a functionally immortal former medieval knight permanently bonded to a noble demon named Etrigan, are playing poker against some of Hell’s bigwigs. When Constantine wins big, it turns into a magic fight, in which Constantine and Blood/Etrigan emerge victorious. Elsewhere, Batman, who has faced off against magical villains multiple times, remains skeptical about the supernatural elements of his current cases, until he begins to receive messages telling him to seek out Constantine. To do so, he must first reunite with an old flame, the stage magician Zatanna (Camilla Luddington), who supplements her prestidigitation with real sorcery. She reveals that the messages he has been receiving are from Boston “Deadman” Brand (Nicholas Turturro), a former acrobat who was killed mid-act and who is now a roaming spirit with the ability to possess the living in order to fight crime. Once this “Justice League Dark” is assembled, they learn that their fight has something to do with the long presumed-dead villain Destiny, and that reality hangs in the balance. 

Personal confession time: Zatanna is one of my favorite comic book characters. I’m revealing my age a little here, but back when I still had a Tumblr, my custom background was a repeating image of Zatanna’s face from Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers run, which was one of the first comics that I read and, although it’s not as fondly remembered now as it once was, it was formative for me. I wish that she was in her more traditional magician’s outfit in this instead of the goofy ass New 52 costume that they’ve stuck her in here (it may be purely to make the animation easier, but the fact that they’ve given her detached sleeves here instead of those fishnet gauntlets from the comic book improves this look a solid 10%), but at least we’ll always have Young Justice for that, at least until Max cycles it off to some internet backwater like they’ve done with so much other programming. I also really like Ryan’s take on Constantine, and he’s played the character across so many mediums now that I can’t help but feel like he’s stamped himself onto the character just as much as the late Kevin Conroy did with Batman. There’s something deliciously Kolchak-like about his portrayal; everywhere that Constantine goes, everybody knows him, and they all hate his guts. It’s fun. 

As far as the horror elements go, this one is more understated than JLvTT. How scary it is depends on how weirded out you are by the demons that we meet. It’s frontloaded a little bit in that regard, as when we see the points of view of the characters who are enspelled to see demons in the form of those around them, the monsters they are seeing are truly repulsive and nauseating. The ultimate villain of the piece isn’t as imposing or uncannily inhuman as Trigon was, and while the magical fight at the end is cool, it doesn’t have that opening-scene-of-Wishmaster viscerality that made JLvTT stand out. That doesn’t mean it isn’t impressive or interesting, however. In fact, as this one gets to do a big magic battle that doesn’t come down to a big punch-’em-up at the end. Those vary in quality, but I can say that having watched so many of these in quick succession, a lot of them have become an undifferentiated battle sequence in my memories, if I retain any of those parts at all. This could have easily degenerated into a blue-beam-versus-red-beam fight as well, but some real detail went into differentiating the kinds of magic that each character wields and creating a sequence in which they work together and in conflict with each other at certain points. Like I said, it’s just not scary. But it is cool. 

Speaking of cool, we have to talk about the omnipresence of Batman in this series. So far, this seventh film is the fourth “Justice League” title, while all three other films have been “Batman” movies, and of the ones that have “Justice League” in the title, he’s been one of the major players in those plots as well, with him being the only member of the League in this movie with more than five minutes of screentime. It’s clear that DC Animation knows that he’s the moneymaker, and they’re not afraid to milk his presence for all that it’s worth, or overutilize him the same way that Marvel did Wolverine in the nineties or Star Wars is still doing with Darth Vader. Those aren’t positive comparisons, but I don’t think that this is as detrimental to the product. I would probably feel differently if this wasn’t following right on the heels of The Killing Joke, so I’m willing to account for viewer saturation fatigue as I remind myself once again that these films were never meant to be watched so shortly after one another. I just felt it was worth noting that the Leaguer most closely associated with the “dark” Justice League of the comics was Wonder Woman, which makes sense as she is a demigoddess and therefore a magical being. It’s Batman here for purely marketing purposes, and although that hasn’t created a negative effect yet, any time that becomes the case, the art itself declines.

Narratively, this one felt a bit like a Clive Barker novel. There’s a sequence in the movie where Constantine and Zatanna have to go into an enspelled victim’s mind, and the villain takes advantage of them being out of play in the physical world to make a move on them there. In order to do so, it creates a monster out of shit by backing up all of the toilets in the hospital where the man lies comatose. I know for sure that there was a shitmonster in Everville, and although I wouldn’t bet money on it, I think that there’s one in Imajica as well (as with these movies, I read those two in too-close proximity to one another and there’s a few things that are blended together in my recollection). That lends this rendition of Constantine a little bit of Barker’s Harry D’Amour character, which mixes well with Constantine’s constant—no pun intended—escapes from the consequences of his actions at the expense of those around him. It really comes back to bite him in the ass in this one, and it’s well-conceived. This one also feels like it can be watched separately from the rest of this series, if you’re just a Constantine (or Zatanna) fan and can’t be arsed with consuming the others. It’s a little more cheaply made than some of the others, but the seams are still pretty intact. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Boogie Nights (1997)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic Golden Age of Porno drama Boogie Nights (1997).

00:00 Boomer rants

12:04 Winter Kills (1979)
18:39 Dazed and Confused (1993)
24:12 Mars Express (2024)
30:46 Class Action Park (2020)
36:28 The First Omen (2024)
44:54 Kalki 2898 AD (2024)
49:29 The Bikeriders (2024)
52:39 Pandora’s Mirror (1981)

54:44 Boogie Nights (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

Pandora’s Mirror (1981)

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It doesn’t matter how many times you see the same story repeated in genre movies, as long as there’s a little stylistic or thematic novelty added to the template.  I’ve seen plenty of characters purchase possessed antique mirrors that warp their perception of reality and perception of their selves, mostly in cheaply produced horror pictures like Oculus, Mirror Mirror, and The Evil Within.  I’ve never seen that story adapted into a feature length Golden Age porno before, though, which is the novelty that the 1981 film Pandora’s Mirror brings to the template.  Vintage porno star Veronica Hart stars as the titular Pandora, who is mesmerized by an “enchanted” (i.e., cursed) mirror that she finds in the back of a dusty antique shop.  No one in the film ever refers to her by “Dora” or “Dorie” or any other nickname; it’s “Pandora” every time in case anyone in the audience loses track of the allusion.  Instead of seeing a demonic presence or an evil reflection of herself in the mirror like in most of these stories, Pandora’s mirror allows her to watch the sexual adventures of its previous owners over the past couple centuries, hypnotizing her in an erotic trance.  Obviously, that set-up is mostly just an excuse to stage hardcore sex scenes in various period costumes, but it also plays directly into one of my favorite genre tropes: the doomed protagonist who becomes obsessed with something that’s obviously going to kill them, but they keep at it anyway because it makes them horny.  The fact that the object of obsession is a magical mirror in this case is only the icing on the erotic novelty cake.

The only thing you need to know about Pandora is that her erotic obsession with her mirror is out of character and a cause for concern among her uptight yuppie social circle.  The only thing you need to know about the mirror is that its owner is a seemingly immortal Dan Ackroyd type (Frederick Foster), who appears in every vignette but never has sex on camera; he’s only around to ominously answer questions like “How long have you been here?” with “I have always been here.”  He does helpfully provide the backstory of the mirror’s enchantment, explaining that it was made from the wood of an oak tree that was struck by lightning, which is apparently where all enchanted lumber comes from.  For any information on why the mirror is evil, we just have to draw our conclusions from the spooky synth score and the fact that Pandora is immediately addicted to gazing into its enchanted glass.  There’s an interesting subversion there in how an object that’s typically associated with self-obsession and vanity is instead a voyeuristic window into the sex lives of others, but it all comes around by the time Pandora sees her own sexual fantasy reflected in cursed object (a threeway with the two gym bros who lift weights on the rooftop across the street from her apartment).  This is largely a story about a woman’s masturbatory fantasies taking over her waking life until all she can or wants to do is stare into the sex mirror, to the point where she’s literally consumed by it. 

If there’s anything especially notable about the sex here, it’s that every period-piece fantasy depicted is a group activity.  We start with a Revolutionary War foursome, ramp up to an Old Hollywood poolside fivesome, ease back into a 1970s Broadway foursome, and conclude with a full-on S&M dive bar orgy (at NYC’s infamous Hellfire Club, reigned over here by a tiara-crowned Annie Sprinkle).  The only one-on-one coupling occurs in a go-nowhere side plot in which Pandora’s boyfriend (Jamie Gillis) cheats with her conniving frenemy (Sandy Hillman) after being abandoned for too long as she stares into the mirror.  Situationally, the sexual scenarios that appear in the mirror are pretty hot, especially as they play with the power dynamics of timid newcomers being seduced into deep-end group sex hedonism.  In practice, the action can be a little too impractical & inhuman to maintain that erotic tension, though, especially since every single act of cunnilingues & analingus (and there are plenty) includes way more biting and random tongue flittering than direct, effectual licking.  Worse yet, the casting-couch Broadway audition segment requires a performer to masturbate with the world’s least convincing dildo: a hollow, plastic toy seemingly cut in half with scissors, so that it collapses any time it’s squeezed.  It would be beside the point to knock the film for not properly cropping out the shotgun mics & stage lights that creep into the frame during those sex scenes, but I don’t think it’s out of line to say the sex itself could’ve been a little more sincerely steamy.

Overall, this is a much classier picture than the only other title I know from director Shaun Costello (credited here as Warren Evans): the infamous 1970s enema-kink geek show Water Power (credited there as Helmuth Richler).  The gauzy soap-opera cinematography, ambient synth soundtrack, and urban fairy tale premise all add to its mystique as one of the eerier outliers of narrative pornography’s Golden Age, at least in the wraparound story that connects the less satisfying tangents of cosplay group sex.  It’s the sex that makes the picture an outlier in the larger canon of haunted mirror movies, though, so it almost doesn’t matter that none of the performers can seem to go down on each other without using every tooth in their jaw, or that Costello has seemingly never seen a functional dildo before.  Just the mere fact that they’re fucking on camera at all is enough.

-Brandon Ledet

The Sweetest Thing (2002)

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The Sweetest Thing is a major-studio comedy starring Cameron Diaz as a lovelorn socialite who’s become disenchanted with the nightclub hookup scene.  Having matured to the point where she’s ready to seek Mr. Right instead of Mr. Right Now, she drops everything going on in her busy life to crash a wedding in the suburbs where she knows she’ll run into Thomas Jane, the kind of cute guy whom she would normally bed & ghost instead of genuinely getting to know.  She’s joined on this impulsive road trip by her high-powered businesswoman bestie, Christina Applegate, who gently pushes Diaz out of her comfort zone as she gives being romantically vulnerable a shot for the first time in her life.  Meanwhile, they both support their good mutual friend, Selma Blair, as she recovers from a recent traumatic breakup by letting loose with a few low-stakes, short-term flings for comic relief.  It’s a story of three self-determined women supporting each other through the final years of their twenties in the cutthroat world of San Francisco dating.  Heck, they might even find true love along the way.

That plot description fits the version of The Sweetest Thing sold in its contemporary trailers & advertising: a cookie-cutter romcom the whole girl squad can enjoy.  It’s also technically accurate to the events of the story told in the film itself, and yet it is still a lie.  Many gaggles of gal pals were deceived by it in the dark days of 2002, when they lined up for a wholesome Girls Night Out and were instead taken on a road trip through the dankest pits of Hell.  The Sweetest Thing imagines an alternate reality where Romy & Michele are evil, high-functioning, and lethally overdosed on episodes of Sex and the City.  Diaz & Applegate play deeply awful people – the most selfish, morally repugnant women to ever disgrace a martini bar.  Blair plays a dead-eyed hedonist who continually stumbles into Rube Goldbergian sexual scenarios that expose her private bedroom indulgences to the wider San Francisco public, including nearby priests & schoolchildren.  By the time her luckier-in-love besties tease her by playing keep-away with her cum-stained laundry on a city sidewalk, it’s clear what kind of romcom this truly is: a demonic one.  Funny too.

While The Sweetest Thing may look like a classic Hollywood romcom from a safe distance, up close it’s clearly rooted in the tragically chintzy days of the post-9/11 2000s. It does not shy away from potential association with the most prominent “Women get horny too” media of its era, Sex and the City; it even opens with man-on-the-street interviews about Diaz’s heartbreaker behavior with her previous sexual partners, a device heavily relied on in early seasons of that landmark HBO sitcom.  There’s a lingering Farrelly Brothers stench to its over-the-top raunch, however, which includes gags involving exploding urinals, maggoty backseat leftovers, and an ocular glory hole injury everyone sees coming except the woman who suffers it.  Even just the casting of Cameron Diaz alone feels like a nod to that Something About Mary tradition of mainstream raunch, which brought a hetero brand of John Waters gross-out humor to the corporate multiplex.  The “Unrated” DVD version of the film also includes an impromptu electroclash flash mob, wherein our three hedonistic heroines lead an entire restaurant of strangers in an extended dance number about the joys of giant cocks.  What a trashy time to be alive.

Cruel Intentions director Roger Kumble brings little of note to the table here besides his working relationship with Selma Blair, apparently having gotten at least two all-timer comedic performances out of her to date.  If you want an auteurist read on The Sweetest Thing, you have to look to screenwriter Nancy Pimental instead, whose credits mostly consist of TV episodes for bad-taste comedies like Shameless, The Mick and, most importantly in this context, early seasons of South Park.  Critics, audiences, studio execs, and advertisers all seemed baffled by what Pimental was up to in her big-screen debut, but she was clear-eyed in her mission.  She wanted to make a girly version of the kinds of gross-out, reprehensible comedies that boys got to make all the time, dressed up in the surface aesthetic markers of the safer, sanitized material that’s more routinely marketed to women.  The biggest tip-off of her self-awareness is in the requisite dress-up montage before the climactic wedding-crash, in which Diaz & Applegate try on costumes from popular Hollywood comedies of previous decades.  When they dress up as characters from Pretty Woman, Grease, and Desperately Seeking Susan, they’re giving studio executives exactly what Pimental was contracted to deliver.  When they dress up in the pastel tuxedos from Dumb & Dumber, Pimental is signaling something entirely different to the audience.  She wanted to make something chaotic, evil and, above all else, dumb.  She succeeded greatly, and it’s a shame she hasn’t been given this much room to play around with genre expectations since.

-Brandon Ledet

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam (1985)

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Much like nu-metal, Crocs, and exposed-thong whale tail, it appears that VHS tapes are hip again.  There’s already been widespread aesthetic nostalgia for the tape-warp wear & tear of vintage VHS tapes in horror cinema from the past decade or so, as evidenced in titles like Late Night with the Devil, WNUF Halloween Special, Rent-a-Pal, Beyond the Gates, Censor, V/H/S, and VHYes.  But now I’m starting to see more appreciation for the physical tapes themselves, not just digital simulation of their degradation.  Soon after the old-school video store Future Shock opened in Mid-City, renting both VHS tapes and VCR players, I attended an unrelated screening of the classic 1987 slasher The Stepfather at The Mudlark Theatre, projected from VHS to a hanging bedsheet.  At the start of the movie, the audience warmly chuckled at the tape’s brief tracking issues and the projector’s struggle to calibrate its fuzzy image quality, but that attention to format eventually gave way to sincere tension & unease.  It was a genuine 1990s sleepover atmosphere, as if we had snuck an R-rated movie past our sleeping parents.  It was also very likely the first time I’ve watched a movie on VHS in almost a decade (specifically, since we covered Highway to Hell for Movie of the Month in 2015), since that’s around the time I gave away my VCRs because they all kept eating my tapes.

You don’t have to go to bootleg repertory screenings at Marigny puppet theatres to get in on the VHS nostalgia wave, though.  While the collection & exhibition of physical VHS tapes is the domain of only a few true sickos, plenty movie nerds are exposed to VHS scans on a regular basis without intentionally looking for them.  Anyone who regularly spends time searching YouTube, Tubi, Archive.org, and thrift-store DVD stacks for cheap-access cinema has been subjected to a deluge of sub-professional digi scans of VHS tapes, which are just as rampant now in the golden age of boutique Blu-ray restorations as they ever have been.  Consider the curious case of Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, a 1985 comedy that had an initial theatrical release on celluloid, but is unavailable for streaming in HD.  All official, legal uploads of the film to sites like Tubi, Freevee, and PlutoTV are the same scan of a vintage VHS cassette, since the film was a much bigger hit as a video store rental than it was as a theatrical release.  That’s likely because the VHS cover dared to advertise the appearance of the popular character Ernest P. Worrell, despite the fact that his last-minute inclusion in the film is essentially a celebrity cameo.  In theaters, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam was an anonymous, immediately forgotten comedy starring some nobody named Jim Varney.  In video stores, it lingered on the shelves for years, boosted its official branding as An Ernest Movie.  Even now, it’s still a kind of VHS rental, just one that’s untethered from a physical presence.

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam officially marks the first big-screen appearance of Ernest P. Worrell, the fast-talking Southern fool who’s always mugging directly to the camera and addressing the audience as his good friend “Vern”.  Before he was camping, slam-dunking, saving Christmas, going to jail, and getting scared stupid in his career-making star vehicles, Ernest was a recurring character in a series of 1980s television commercials directed by John Cherry, starring rubber-faced comedian Jim Varney.  Cherry (from Nashville) & Varney (from Kentucky) mostly sold their Ernest ads to the Louisiana & Mississippi at first, but the popularity of the character spread wide enough nationally that they figured they could cash in with a legitimate feature film.  Ernest was only one of Varney’s many stock characters, though; longtime Varney Heads will surely recall fellow ad-break mainstay Auntie Nelda, Varney’s old-biddy drag act with a perpetually sprained neck.  Instead of capitalizing on the popularity of Ernest in particular, Cherry & Varney chose to use The Riddle of the Gloom Beam as a showcase for every character Varney had in his comedic repertoire, giving the actor room to test-run a bunch of vague, go-nowhere archetypes like Evil German Scientist, Australian Militia Maniac, Filthy Pirate, and Literal Trash Monster, along with playing the hits.  It’s less comedically specific than the official Ernest movies as a result, working more like a sketch comedy revue than a feature film.

The titular Dr. Otto is, of course, a Varney creation: a broad mad-scientist character costumed with a living human hand for a hat.  The evil lair where he regularly attempts world domination looks like what might happen if Rita Repulsa couldn’t afford to pay the light bill, but it’s lavishly decorated with a wide range of evildoer machines that don’t do any evil thing in particular except light up & smoke.  His first plan of attack is fairly agreeable, using his “gloom beam” machine to erase all official records of debt, throwing banks & credit card companies into chaos, to the point where CEOs are putting revolvers in their mouths onscreen in what’s ostensibly a children’s film.  Later, he threatens to use the gloom beam to kill all the world’s first-born children like a Biblical plague, but let’s not focus too much on that plot point.  Instead, let’s all boo & hiss at the hero that the banks & government nominate to take Dr. Otto down: a square-jawed American patriot named Lance Sterling (Myke Mueller), Dr. Otto’s childhood rival.  In flashback, we witness the disturbing difference between Lance’s privileged, WASPy upbringing and Dr. Otto’s miserable life in the gutter, which only encourages us to root for the mad scientist as he seeks revenge on the planet.  That’s what makes it okay to cheer on the many disguises he takes in the present—including crowd favorites Ernest & Nelda—as they do objectively evil things to prevent the squeaky-clean hero from saving the day.

None of the individual jokes or visual gags in The Riddle of the Gloom Beam are especially funny, but the movie is charming anyway.  It’s high-energy, low-budget independent filmmaking, making up for a lot of the dead air between failed bits with aggressive music-video editing tactics and handmade arts & crafts ingenuity.  It’s also incredibly dark considering the average age of its target audience.  If nothing else, it’s got to be the only children’s film I’ve ever seen include a minutes-long Deer Hunter parody, making for two visual references to suicide by gun.  When I was a kid, television and the video store were cultural democratizers.  Jim Carrey & Robin Williams may have had more legitimate, widespread distribution in brick & mortar movie theaters, but Varney was their professional equal in my mind at the time, thanks to then-lifelong exposure to Ernest ads & videos in the Southern market where he hit heaviest.  If The Riddle of the Gloom Beam had any chance of earning cult-classic status, it would’ve needed a lot more Ernest content instead of flooding the screen with Varney’s lesser-known comedic personae (despite those characters’ later appearances on his short-lived CBS sketch show Hey Vern, It’s Ernest!).  Cherry & Varney soon figured that out in better-remembered titles like Ernest Goes to Jail & Ernest Scared Stupid, which have a much more distinct comedic personality than this early outing even if they don’t match its creative, try-anything energy.  Thus, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam is the exact kind of title that belongs on VHS; it would feel sacrilegious to watch it in any updated format, since it’s such a relic of its era.  And in a way, that makes Tubi just as hip and plugged-in to The Moment as your local underground video stores and D.I.Y. neighborhood rep screenings (as long as you politely ignore the fact that the company is owned by Rupert Murdoch).

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Notorious (1946)

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Our current Movie of the Month, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 post-war noir Notorious, is a love story first and an espionage story second.  Most of the thrills in its first hour are found in the bitter flirtation between Ingrid Bergman & Cary Grant, whose catty chemistry pounces on the dividing line of what the Hays Code would allow without ever fully crossing it.  There’s so much explosive energy in their love-hate situationship that you often forget the real threat in the picture is the Nazi cabal they’ve gone undercover to subvert.  It isn’t until the second half of the film that any of the Nazi expats step into the spotlight with vicious enough villainy to match the volatility of Bergman & Grant’s flirtation. That centerpiece isn’t any of the men who make up the secret Nazi cabal smuggling uranium into their Brazilian hideout, either.  It’s one of those men’s mother (Leopoldine Konstantiin), a true believer in the Nazi cause whose default distrust & hatred for Bergman proves useful in outing her as a spy. 

Notorious may have been one of the first instances of Hitchcock getting distracted from a movie’s more obvious villains to focus on an evil mother figure instead, but it would be far from the last.  In the 1960s in particular, he made a string of iconic thrillers that highlighted wicked mothers at the periphery of the center-stage evil.  So, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to further sink into one of the all-time great directors’ unresolved Mommy Issues.

Psycho (1960)

If you’re going to delve into Hitchcock’s auteurist Mommy Issues, you kinda have to start with the movie that put the “psycho” in “psychobiddy,” right?  Psycho is a notorious act of misdirection. It starts as a seedy noir about a lovelorn secretary who robs her boss blind in the daylight, then shifts halfway through to a proto-slasher about a Peeping Tom motel owner who slays that amateur thief and everyone who comes looking for her.  It’s also misdirection in the characterization of its sweaty, pervy killer, since its casting of the goofily charmingly Tony Perkins in the role masks the psychosexual violence of the shower scene until it’s too late for his first victim to escape.  Perkins is such an adorable, All-American sweetheart that the audience is tempted to continue blaming his overbearing mother for his . . . transgressions, even after it’s revealed that she’s been dead for a solid decade before the audience arrives at the Bates Motel.

Regardless of Norma Bates’s status as a living being, she’s a dark presence in the picture – sometimes literally, as when her silhouette appears in a shower curtain or at the top of a staircase during a kill scene.  Before we know what Norman is capable of, we hear Norma shaming him about his “cheap erotic mind” in shrill arguments from the Gothic home outside the motel.  By the time Norman insists that “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” we’re already aware of how abusive she is to him, framing him as more of a victim than a killer.  The fact that he’s the one keeping his mother alive through his taxidermy & cosplay hobbies is beside the point; the half-remembered, half-improvised arguments he has with her ghost tell a clear story about how her responsibility for his violence.

The Birds (1963)

There’s at least clear Freudian pop psychology reasoning behind the wicked motherhood themes of Psycho, whereas they’re almost completely arbitrary in Hitchcock’s when-animals-attack thriller The Birds.  For a long stretch of The Birds, Hitchcock seems uncertain of who’s more likely to peck Tippi Hedren’s eyes out: the supernaturally murderous birds swooping at her head or Lydia, her new boyfriend’s well-meaning but slightly overbearing mother.  He eventually does decide that the killer birds are the bigger threat, but it’s a hellish journey getting there.

Hedren stars as an heiress playgirl with an international tabloid reputation for living freely, pranking with wild abandon, and frolicking naked in public fountains.  When her flirtatious pranks lead her to the doorstep of a seaside small-town lawyer (Rod Taylor), she immediately finds herself at odds with the oblivious hunk’s mother (Jessica Tandy).  The women’s competition for the himbo lawyer’s affections is hilariously apparent in their casting & costuming, mirroring the combatants with similar height, hair, and icy demeanor.  Thankfully, being attacked by an organized army of winged hellbeasts in “The Bird War” eventually inspires the women to bond, but in the meantime their volatile tension inspires debates about whether it’s better to experience “a mother’s love” or to just be abandoned, spared of it.  There’s a lot of uncanny avian violence in The Birds, but it’s somehow just as unsettling watching a grown man peck his mother on the cheek and call her “Dear” while allowing her to compete against a would-be lover.  I have no idea what those two threats—crow & crone—have to do with each other, but I do know it makes for a great thriller.

Marnie (1964)

It’s somewhat foolish to push for a personal, auteurist read on Hitchcock’s adaptations of various novels & short stories that happen to dwell on fictional characters’ Mommy Issues, but by the 1960s his choices to adapt these specific projects really did spell out an obsessional pattern.  For instance, the director went through three hired screenwriters during the development of this 1964 noir Marnie, because each were too squeamish to get as psychologically dark as he wanted the picture to be.  Through Marnie, Hitchcock perversely lays out all of the various sexual & psychological hangups with women & marriage that echo throughout his work, so it’s impressive that he made a little time to parade around his Mommy Issues too.  Thorough!

Much like the initial protagonist of Psycho, the titular Marnie is a seemingly obedient secretary who loots her boss’s safe in the opening sequence, leaving town with grotesque piles of cash.  The difference is that Marnie is a habitual thief instead of an impulsive one. She’s also a Freudian headcase, her icy demeaner immediately melting whenever she’s confronted with a lightning storm or the color red.  Tippi Hedren plays her as the uneasy middle ground between Norman Bates & Marion Crane: a violently psychotic, intensely vulnerable victim.  What’s most unsettling (and maybe even unforgiveable) about Marnie is that Hedren’s victimhood is not blamed on the wealthy playboy (Sean Connery) who exploits her kleptomania to blackmail & rape her as his reluctant bride.  Instead, all of Marnie’s problems are—shocker—blamed on Marnie’s mother, a Baltimore widow whose “Aww shucks, I’m just a poor Southerner” facade barely covers up her distanced disgust with her only child.  Marnie’s mother adopts neighborhood children as surrogate daughters to ramp up Marnie’s jealousy, offering her actual daughter so little affection that she’ll shout, “Don’t be such a ninny!” at her during a full mental breakdown instead of laying a sympathetic hand on her shoulder.  A last-minute flashback eventually fills in the details of how these two women initially arrived at this hateful mother-daughter dynamic, but not until after Hedren mocks the impulse to investigate & explain their dynamic with the line “Me Freud, you Jane.”

Alfred Hitchcock made over 50 movies in his half-century career as a director.  I’m sure somewhere in that expansive canon you can find counter examples of his fictional mothers being lovely, loving people.  I do find it amusing that so many of his mother figures at the height of his auteurist control as a major filmmaker are awful, hateful women, though.  They’re the reason killers kill, the reason thieves steal; they’re the one thing in this world worse than literal Nazis.

-Brandon Ledet

The Bikeriders (2024)

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The thing about shamelessly borrowing from Scorsese’s Goodfellas is that it works.  It worked for Paul Thomas Anderson when he applied the Goodfellas template to the Golden Age of porno in Boogie Nights.  It worked for Todd Haynes when he applied it to the classic glam rock scene in Velvet Goldmine (even if he had to mix in a healthy dose of Citizen Kane to throw critics off the scent).  And now it has worked just as well for Jeff Nichols in his new film The Bikeriders, which is essentially just Goodfellas on motorbikes.  All three of these Goodfellas derivatives follow a distinct pattern that starts in a Fuck Around era (in which they introduce the audience to the power outsiders feel when they find community in seemingly dangerous subcultures), followed by the requisite Find Out Era (in which those subcultures are unraveled by drugs & violence), distinctly marked by the turning of a decade.  They all heavily rely on vintage pop-music montage and period-specific costume design to evoke the cool-factor appeal of their subcultural settings, often underlined in wry voiceover.  I’m also of the lowbrow opinion that all three are the career-best feature films of their respective directors to date. It’s an overly familiar genre template, but that’s because it’s a consistently effective one.

If Nichols narrows in on any particular element of the Goodfellas formula that other imitators miss, it’s in the second-act narrator switch in which the protagonist-gangster’s wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), highjacks the story’s POV for a short stretch.  We get a great taste of how overwhelming it is to be plunged into the deep end of a foreign subculture during Karen’s wedding-sequence narration in particular, but more importantly we get a woman’s perspective on what makes that particular subculture sexy.  One of the most important line-readings of Scorsese’s script is Karen describing the first time she directly witnessed mobster violence first-hand, confessing “I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn’t. I got to admit the truth. It turned me on.”  Jodie Comer’s wife-of-a-motorcycle rebel narrator Kathy keeps that horny engine running throughout the entire runtime of The Bikeriders, whereas Goodfellas only takes Karen’s POV for a few minutes.  It’s not enough that Jeff Nichols dresses up every young character-actor hunk of today in the fetishistic biker gear of yesteryear, mounted on the backs of roaring sex machines.  He also frames them from the perspective of a woman panting like a cartoon hound in disbelief of how ridiculous and how ridiculously sexy they are.  Comer gives the best lead performance of the year as a result, even if she is just a regional accent in high-waist jeans.

Otherwise, the movie rides within the painted lines of the road that Goodfellas paved.  The Shangri-Las check off the 60s-Girl-Group-Soundtrack requirement of the template, with “Out in the Streets” deployed as an overture that explains Comer’s lustful fascination with Austin Butler’s bad-boy rebel.  She has to compete for his attention with Tom Hardy’s gang leader, who is living out a fantasy in his head in which he is the Wild One Brando to Butler’s Causeless Rebel Dean.  Nichols positions Hardy as a weekend-warrior poser and Butler as the real-deal biker rebel that all of his fellow riders strive to emulate.  They form a motorcycle riding club in the Fuck Around 1960s, then cower in disgust as it spirals out of control in the Find Out 1970s, mostly due to Vietnam War PTSD from their younger recruits.  Comer maintains a “Can you believe these guys?” incredulity throughout that helps keep the mood light, recounting tales from the road to a photojournalist played by Mike Faist, who in real life published the anthropological portraits that Nichols adapted to the screen.  From there, the cast is rounded out by young That Guy character actors playing eccentric bikers with ludicrous nicknames: Norman Reedus as Funny Sonny, Karl Glusman as Corky, Michael Shannon as Zipco, Toby Wallace as The Kid, etc.  They all look just as great in their grimy leather jackets as the cast of Goodfellas looked in their shiny silk suits.

All of this posing & posturing in vintage biker gear makes total sense for a movie adapted from a series of portraits where motorcycle nerds & freaks posed for still images.  It’s also appropriate for a subculture that was so intrinsically image-obsessed, wherein men with regular jobs & families would play dress-up with their buddies to live out the rebel-biker fantasies they would otherwise only see at The Movies.  The Bikeriders is not a pure, prurient portrait of handsome men in leather & denim, though.  It’s much less of a capital-A Art Film than Katherine Bigelow’s The Loveless in that way, even though it shares its themes & interests.  The Goodfellas template allows it to indulge in as much sexy rebel-biker fantasy and subcultural anthropology as it wants without leaving a mainstream audience behind in its dust.  It might be an unimaginative way to hold a movie together, but dammit it works every time.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – The Killing Joke (2016)

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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. 

When we were recently discussing Brandon’s viewing of Theodore Rex on the podcast, he talked about how it was comforting to know that there are movies that have been universally derided as bad which are, in fact, bad. Batman: The Killing Joke has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score out of any of these movies; although there are nine films that didn’t get enough reviews to provide a score, that list of non-scored films includes some of the best, like All Star Superman and Crisis on Two Earths. Rotten Tomatoes is, as we always say, an imperfect criterion, but because it got a one-day theatrical release in order to generate buzz, it also has the highest number of reviews on that site with forty-one critics weighing in (the next highest, Batman: The Long Halloween, Part One, has nineteen reviews), so in this case, it bears out in the critical response. It’s true: this one is bad bad. I always assumed that it generated a negative response because it’s an adaptation of a truly top-tier Batman (and Joker) story, and that people simply didn’t like some of the changes that were made to it or were otherwise disappointed. I had also heard rumblings about the “character assassination” of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, which at the time seemed like typical Comic Book Guy grumblings, but no, that part is true as well. If anything, all the backlash against it that I remember seeing at the time was insufficient to express just what a fucking disaster this is. 

The film starts with voiceover from Batgirl (Tara Strong), as she opens with a fourth-wall wink about how we the viewers probably didn’t expect this story to begin this way. The first half, which is all new material, is mostly about her. She watches from afar as her father, the venerable Commissioner Gordon (Ray Wise), meets with her Batmentor (Kevin Conroy, our beloved); she becomes the obsessive fixation of the unlikely named Paris Franz (Maury Sterling), an upstart crime family scion who aims to decapitate and replace the organization’s leadership; she even gets a catty gay best friend with whom she works at the library and who provides a sounding board for her thinly disguised musings about her crush on Batman. Yep, that’s right. Barbara has the hots for Bruce in this one, and that relationship culminates. See, he gets on her about taking too many risks in her pursuit of Franz, and the narrative goes out of its way to make him correct, as she consistently gets in over her head and has to be rescued by Batman. Every scene in which she strikes out on her own, he has to bail her out, so yeah, you could say that one of the most beloved and competent characters in the canon does undergo character assassination, for sure. This eventually leads up to the two of them having an argument before she pins the older man down, and they have sex. 

I’ve seen this scene described as being “played for fanservice” in certain parts of the internet, and I don’t think that’s the case at all. What happens on screen takes barely a few seconds; Barbara is on top of Bats, she straddles him fully clothed and takes off the top half of her costume to reveal her bra, and the camera does a (to me) comical pan up to a gargoyle statue on the rooftop with them that appears to be enjoying the show. I’ve also seen a lot of criticism about that tired canard about age gap issues, and I also personally do not see a problem with that here. Bruce could have done more to discourage her, but as she is the initiator and the most enthusiastic participant, even with absolutely no previous encouragement from Bruce, my judgment is that she’s completely in control and has full agency in the situation. She’s got a thing for an emotionally unavailable older man, she gets her rocks off, and afterward, she talks to her one-dimensional gay BFF about how good it was. The problem here is that, shortly after this, she shakes off the cowl and hood for good when she nearly beats Franz to death and retires, then disappears from the narrative until it’s time for her to play her role in the part of the movie that’s actually an adaptation of The Killing Joke from 1988.

In the second half of the film, Batman comes to the realization that one day, he and the Joker will reach a point where the only choice will be to kill the villain or be killed by him. In an effort to try and prevent this, he goes to see Joker in Arkham, only to realize that the man himself has escaped yet again and left a decoy in his place. Elsewhere, Joker obtains an amusement park and a new band of sideshow folks—conjoined ladies, wolf boy, bearded lady, etc.—to act as his goons du jour. Interspersed in his new plans are flashbacks to before he became the Clown Prince of Crime. He was a comedian who couldn’t support his family, so he took a job with a local crime syndicate that was supposed to be for only one night; on the day of the heist, he learns his wife and unborn child were killed, but he’s strong-armed into moving forward with the crime anyway; when the robbery he’s involved in goes south, Batman arrives and he is frightened into falling over the edge into a vat of chemicals, which turns him into the Joker we know. Once everything is all arranged, he kidnaps Jim Gordon from his home and, in the process, shoots Barbara in her torso, the bullet ripping through her body and rendering her paraplegic. He also does something … untoward with her. Trigger warning for assault; skip to the next paragraph if that’s not something you can handle. You see, in the comic, I never got the impression that Joker raped Barbara. He definitely sexually assaulted her, as he stripped her and took pictures of her nude, gunshot body so that he could further torture Gordon with these images (the image of him holding his camera is the most iconic frame from the comic), but this film takes it further. When Batman is informed of the state that Barbara was in when she was found, much is left unsaid, and it’s implied that the Joker took advantage of her, beyond photography. The manhunt for Joker leads to a group of sex workers who tell the investigator with whom they are talking that the villain normally comes straight to them first as soon as he escapes, but that they haven’t heard from him and assume that this means he was able to get his kicks elsewhere. And that’s part of what makes this movie not just bad, but gross. We get two additions to the narrative here about Barbara’s sexuality: one a desired, consensual encounter with Batman, and the other a non-consensual assault by the Joker, with the former being added to the narrative to raise the stakes of the latter, not for Barbara’s sake, but for Bruce’s. See, now it’s even worse because Joker took that from him, too. 

The rest of the story plays out along the canonical narrative beats of the comic on which the film is based. Batman goes to the amusement park lair, he and Joker have a little cat and mouse game where they talk about their relationship and how it appears that it can only end one way, and Batman tries to get through to his insane archnemesis that things could be different and offers him another path. Jim Gordon survives Joker’s attempts to turn him into another Joker by breaking him psychologically. At the end, Joker is subdued, and he tells Batman a joke about two escaping asylum inmates that demonstrates the futility of one insane person trying to help the other, which forces even the dour Bats to laugh. Barbara awakens in the hospital and is on the road to recovery (if you’re curious, no, her friend never comes to see her and we never hear about him again after his last scene, because he’s just that superfluous), and we see her prepare to get to work fighting crime in a new way. Fin. 

I hated this. The animation is lazy in ways that I didn’t think I’d see in one of these productions (there seem to be about a dozen different book spines that were drawn for the movie, and they are repeated endlessly in both Barbara’s home and in the library scenes, sometimes in huge groups). The narrative choices are abysmal and so grossly misogynistic that the decades-old source material, which was criticized as sexist in its day, feels more modern. In this line of work and especially as the torch-bearers of low-art-as-real-art that we of Swampflix have been slotted into by the appetite for trash that drew us together in the first place, we end up revisiting a lot of things that mainstream (and armchair) critics have designated as “bad movies.” It’s simply in our nature to find the fun and joy in these, to see what glisters in the crap, and our evaluation is positive. However, as with Brandon and Theodore Rex, sometimes a film comes along that reminds you that, yeah, movies can be bad, actually, and that not everything to which that appellation is applied is a secret gem waiting to be unearthed. Sometimes, garbage is just garbage. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #215: Look Who’s Talking (1989) & Deciphering Heckerling

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Welcome to Episode #214 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss the arc of Amy Heckerling’s art & career as a Hollywood auteur, starting with her biggest commercial hit: the talking-baby comedy Look Who’s Talking (1989).

00:00 Welcome

02:28 Der Fan (1982)
05:36 Miller’s Girl (2024)
09:35 Blue Collar (1978)
11:20 Adam Resurrected (2008)
21:28 The Sweetest Thing (2002)

26:46 Look Who’s Talking (1989)
57:50 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
1:12:09 Clueless (1995)
1:20:47 I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew