Spirited Away (2001)

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Nearly a decade ago, when I was getting ready to move away from Baton Rouge, a friend of mine was likewise preparing to head back west to be with her now-husband. We had a dual garage sale in which we tried to get rid of some various knick-knacks. We didn’t have much that anyone would want, and we weren’t very successful. As a joke, she had priced her DVD of Spirited Away at a million dollars, because she didn’t actually want to part with it, and when she realized that I had never seen it, she gave it to me. I’m ashamed to say that in the interim, half-remembered bits of other Miyazaki films blended together during a rewatch of several of them shortly after my accident in 2018, making me think that I had watched it. When I sat down to do a rewatch in preparation for the culmination of Swampflix’s upcoming ten-year anniversary project, it turned out that I hadn’t, so this was a beautiful first-time watch for me. I have a friend who has only recently come into my life but with whom I’ve grown very close very quickly was looking forward to sharing this one with me at a screening at our local arthouse theater as it was a huge part of his childhood, plans which were dashed when we both tested positive for COVID the day before the screening. Since we both had it, however, we decided to push forward with our plans and watch it together that same night anyway. 

I’ve been digesting it ever since, and I’m still not fully sure what to say about it. It’s not just a movie; it’s a magic spell, a fairy tale journey, an unconventional narrative composed of little condensations of fantasy that moves blithely from storybeat to storybeat without ever stopping to catch its breath. It introduces and resolves so many things so quickly that the pacing reminds one of an episode of golden-age Simpsons, where a bag-boy strike in act one leads to near-death on an African waterfall at the climax. It runs on feverish imagination, unrestrained by the need to adhere to any real act structure at all. 

Chihiro is an elementary-aged girl who, along with her parents, is moving to a new home. Along the way, her father takes a detour down a road that ends at a red pedestrian gate in a wall that extends as far as the eye can see in either direction. The trio enters the area, which her father believes (and perceives) to be an abandoned amusement park; her father and mother unquestioningly eat food which they stumble upon while Chihiro explores further, meeting a boy named Haku, who implores her to take her parents back across the river before sunset. When Chihiro returns to her parents, however, they have been turned into pigs by the spirit food, as the place reveals itself to be the home of innumerable kami spirits. She refuses to leave them behind and becomes trapped there, while various parties attempt to locate her as they can smell a human amongst them. Haku helps her to evade capture and directs her to find and seek employment with a spider-like spirit named Kamaji, who runs the boiler that powers the baths of the bathhouse that serves as the primary location for the film. She proves herself to him and he asks Lin, a more humanoid bathhouse worker, to take Chihiro to Yubaba, the witch who runs the bathhouse (and is responsible for her parents’ transformation). Yubaba attempts to scare Chihiro into running off, but when she is unable to do so, she gives the girl a job, although her contract is Faustian. She takes part of the kanji of Chihiro’s name away, leaving only “Sen,” which becomes the girl’s new name. Chihiro/Sen later learns from Haku that this stripping of one’s name also leads to the loss of one’s memory, and that he is also cursed to work for Yubaba since he cannot remember his own true name. 

It’s hard to describe Spirited Away other than to outline the plot like I have above, but it goes in so many interesting directions with such vivid and luscious imagery that simply recapitulating the narrative diminishes it. Chihiro is the kind of kid everyone wishes they could have been: stalwart in the face of overwhelming odds, unrelenting in her devotion to saving her parents and returning to the real world, and compelled by an abundance of compassion that seeks no reward but nonetheless is granted them. She’s Dorothy Gale, and she’s Alice, and she’s also completely her own character, brave and fierce but always kind and thoughtful. She’s unwilling to trade her freedom for anyone else’s, and although this morality seems alien to the spirits who inhabit the world around her, it also gives her fresh eyes that grant her the ability to resolve issues the spirits can’t, like finding the source of a polluted river spirit’s pain and removing it like the thorn from the paw of Aesop’s lion, healing it. When she fails, it’s never because of her lack of ingenuity, it’s merely because she fails to grasp all of the social rules of a culture that she’s only recently found herself within. 

Visually, the film is stunning. After nearly two decades, it’s still as vibrant and gorgeous as it was the first time audiences saw it. Each sequence is beautiful, and every frame is filled to the brim with baroque details of the spirit world, but it’s almost impossible to try and explain it, because this is a movie that one has to see in order to really understand. It’s like trying to explain a painting to someone who’s never seen it; it has to be experienced, has to be felt, has to wash over you and make you a part of its world. It’s magic.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Longlegs (2024)

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We’re Oz Perkins fans around these parts. Brandon gave both The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel and Hansel four-star reviews. While the director’s first feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, got a cooler reaction from him, it remains my favorite of his works. (Admittedly, part of that might be the fact that I find Ruth Wilson to be one of the most utterly watchable and magnetic performers currently working). Or it was my favorite … until Longlegs came along. 

Set in Oregon sometime during the Clinton administration, Longlegs is the story of Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a young FBI field agent whose preternatural hunches catch the attention of her superiors, resulting in her reassignment to a decades-long hunt for a serial killer known as “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage) based upon Zodiac-like notes that he leaves behind at the scenes of brutal murders of entire families. As she spends time working on the case, she concludes that Longlegs’ targeting of families of young girls whose birthdays all fall on the fourteenth of the month is Satanic in nature, and that when plotted out on a calendar, it becomes clear that Longlegs is creating an image of an inverted triangle, which Harker finds in occult literature. Her boss, Carter (Blair Underwood), is impressed by her initiative and insight, and after a night of bonding, he gets drunk and asks Harker to drive him home, where she meets his family: wife Anna (Carmel Amit) and precocious daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders). Their relationship is slightly complicated when Carter discovers that on Harker’s ninth birthday, her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) filed a police report about a strange man approaching the young Lee when she was home alone. Ruth, with whom Lee is in frequent contact, lives in a dilapidated farmhouse that is choked with hoarder ephemera, and when she directs her daughter to take a look through some Polaroids that are still in a box in her childhood bedroom, Lee suddenly remembers the day that she—barely—managed to avoid becoming one of Longlegs’ victims. Of course, why that is the case turns out to be much more complex (not to mention sinister) than is immediately apparent. 

The biggest influence on the film, and the one that is most often cited in criticism, is The Silence of the Lambs. That much is apparent, from the setting to the choice of a young female FBI agent as the lead, all the way down to Longlegs’ not-quite-Buffalo-Bill basement lair, where instead of making suits out of women’s flesh he crafts lovingly faithful doll reproductions of the young girls who, along with their family, are killed at his hands. There’s also a bit of other Thomas Harris Lecter-containing media in play here; the walk-through of one of the crime scenes is straight out of Manhunter (or Red Dragon, if you prefer), and Underwood seems to be channeling a bit of Laurence Fishburne’s portrayal of Jack Crawford from the Hannibal TV series. 

Outside of that franchise, what I was most reminded of while watching the film were two separate novels by South African writer Lauren Beukes: The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. The former is about an early twentieth century serial killer and drifter who happens upon a house that is itself a nexus of evil, allowing him to exit into any time between 1929 and 1993 and directing him to seek out and murder certain women (the titular “shining girls”) for unknown purposes. When he brutally stabs a teenage girl named Kirby Mizrachi in 1989, he leaves her for dead, but she survives and, years later, she seeks her still unidentified attempted murderer. That 1990s setting, a killer who targets specific young women based on direction from a malevolent entity, and a main character has an encounter with her would-be killer in her youth and becomes the impetus behind his demise in her adulthood are all details that Longlegs shares, although the stories are markedly different in almost every other way. 

The connection to Broken Monsters is a little more oblique, as the narrative of that novel features an ambitiously (and fruitfully) large net of point of view characters, but of whom one is a serial killer who creates “art” out of body parts of humans and animals alike, not unlike several of the killers from the aforementioned Hannibal series. When with other characters, the narrative is alternatively a straightforward urban crime drama (the homicide detective), a little bit Hard Candy (her daughter), an ironically voiced view of Detroit’s art scene that provides important context for the killer’s motivation (the aging hipster journalist), etc. When we are in the killer’s point-of-view chapters, their point of view includes being forced/inspired by an ominous force that the reader assumes is a manifestation of the killer’s broken mind … until the same thing appears in a chapter that’s focused on one of their victims, revealing that the demonic entity is, in fact, very real. That happens here as well, as Longlegs shifts from an unconventional homage to Silence of the Lambs with the slightly supernatural narrative conceit that the lead character has preternatural insight into a horror that all-but-literally goes to hell.

I haven’t really engaged with the discourse about the movie, so I’m not sure whether this is being cited elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that this film was very funny. Underwood is a natural charmer, so Carter’s interactions with the stoic, reserved, and frankly spooky Harker are fun to watch, and this moved into outright laughter for me when Harker meets young Ruby and she asks her parents if she can show Harker her room. As the two awkwardly sit next to one another, Harker notes that Ruby has one those canopies that some kids have and asks her, stiltedly, “Do you … go … in it?” I saw this with a very responsive audience, and this got a big laugh. There’s also a great scene with the flamboyant administrator of a mental facility where the sole survivor of one of Longlegs’ family slayings resides, and a forensics nerd who gets far too excited about a strange doll that’s found hidden at one of the previous murder sites. I’ve heard reports that some screenings have had people laughing in response to Nicolas Cage, but I’m happy to say that this didn’t happen at my screening, and I found his performance terrifying. It’s the overcorrection to Harker’s stoicism, which I think is played for laughs at certain points; I can see people finding it too much, but it worked for me. I’ll also say that Alicia Witt is phenomenal here; as a longtime defender of Urban Legend, she’s one of my favorites that I feel like we never get to see enough of. I did spend a chunk of the movie thinking that Ruth was being played by Samantha Sloyan, but I’ll let you Google that yourself and tell me if you think I’m that far off the mark. 

Over on the podcast, we often talk about when a film “Does That Thing I Like,” which is when a horror movie features up a deliberately ambiguous premise that could conclude with either a rational explanation for events or a supernatural one, and, instead of going the well-worn route of concluding with “[the devil/witchcraft/possession/ghosts/whatever] [is/are] real!” (I’ll admit that if the ratio of demonic-to-scientific rationales were reversed, movies would be both a lot more boring and most of them would end exactly like an episode of Scooby-Doo, but I still appreciate it when it happens.) Unfortunately, there are so few of these movies that mentioning any of them would spoil them, especially given how often the twist is simply that there’s a boy living in the walls. Longlegs is like the platonic ideal of how to “Do the Thing I Think Is Tired” but make it fresh, new, exciting, and scary. I am a person who has lived alone for most of his adult life and who can count the number of nightmares he has had in that time on just two hands, but the night after I saw this movie, I got up and went to the bathroom in the night, I had to turn the light on, not because I needed it to find my way, but because I needed it to dispel the shadows before I could get out of bed. The reason why The Thing I Like is The Thing I Like is because I live in the real world; I’m not afraid of ghosts or demons or swamp monsters (other than alligators, obviously), so they don’t scare me in the movies, either. Your Ghostfaces, your various Thomas Harris serial killers like Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill, even that home invasion scene in Fargo—slapstick as it is—those are things that get my anxiety up; those are the reason that I occasionally have to pull the shower curtain back or check my closets. When we briefly discussed the film on our recent podcast episode about Planet of the Vampires, Brandon noted that Longlegs is a movie that feels evil. And that’s as succinctly as I can put it. Nothing in this film is something that I am afraid of in real life, but its evil is so palpable and real that I had to turn on the lights in the middle of the night. I don’t know that I can give a movie higher praise than that. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Kim’s Video (2024)

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In the new documentary about the lost & recovered legacy of the cinephilic wet-dream video store Kim’s Video, narrator & co-director David Redmon surveys the current tenants of the building that used to house Kim’s famed collection of rare tapes & DVDs.  On the first floor, there’s a barcade; on the second, a gym; on the third & fourth, a karaoke restaurant.  These businesses that have physically replaced Kim’s storefront are presented as evidence of some great cultural loss and the emptiness of our current capitalist dystopia.  I’m not so convinced.  If anything, it’s somewhat comforting to know that the location was taken over by other small businesses that all have a strong social aspect built into their trade.  In a big picture sense, there’s really not all that much actual cultural difference between a video store & a barcade; they just service slightly different customer base of hopeless nerds.  Who knows, there might even be a future documentary in the works about the weirdos who regularly meet at that barcade and consider it their subcultural refuge from the unforgiving chaos of the Big City outside.  Maybe there’s a high pinball score on one of that bar’s machines that means a lot to those weirdos the same way a bootleg VHS of Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinéma would mean a lot to me. 

There are two reasons Kim’s Video is afforded a hagiographic spotlight that’s unlikely to be repeated for the workout gym that’s replaced its second floor.  The most obvious reason is that it was located in a large enough city to support a strong repertory cinema scene.  Thousands of aspiring filmmakers, NYU academics, and gorehound punks frequented the store in its pre-streaming heyday, finding access to a much larger, more adventurous library than what most American VCR owners could pick up at the nearest Blockbuster.  The documentary namedrops the Coen Brothers as former Kim’s Video members as a signal to the store’s historical importance, but the picture is much better sketched out by the slate of New York rep scenesters it gathers for testimonials.  Alex Ross Perry, Sean Price Williams, Eric Hynes . . . Its talking-heads cast list reads like a typical panel of guests for the Film Comment podcast.  The other major reason the store matters to inner-circle cinephiles is that the store’s owner, Yongman Kim, is one of them.  A failed filmmaker turned successful businessman, Kim made superheroic efforts to amass the best-curated video library in the world, out of love for the art and love for the hunt.

A lesser documentary might have stopped after collecting a few interviews about how great Kim’s Video was and profiling the eponymous Kim, who was coldly mysterious to the store’s members & employees.  A lot of its nostalgia waxing about the bootlegs & rare tapes Kim collected in the store ends early on, but after you catch a glimpse of the owner’s own rare feature film as a director (a post-Tarantino crime picture about a monk who spies on a teenage sex worker through a peephole, titled One-Third), you kinda get the sense that he’s just another dweeb who’s obsessed with movies.  He just happens to be tall & handsome as well, which makes him an anomaly on the scene.  Short of cataloging the 10,000 videos left in the Kim’s Video collection through a nonstop slideshow, it’s worrisome that there’s nothing left for the movie to accomplish just a few minutes in.  Thankfully, the mission shifts from that point to launching a David Farrier-style investigative piece about where, exactly, the collection ended up after the store closed.  Most of the rest of the documentary is relocated from NYC to Salemi, Italy, a small Sicilian village where the video collection was relocated in full.  I won’t spoil how the story develops after that expansion in scope, but it does include enough mafia threats, heist planning, and political intrigue to justify in-crowd New Yorkers making a feature-length documentary about their favorite video store.

Admittedly, the hunt for and return of the famed Kim’s Video library gets legitimately juicy as its story escalates, but a lot of this falls neatly into two familiar categories of mediocre pop media docs: the good kind (a montage of clips & posters of better movies to watch later) and the bad kind (navel-gazing diaries from a nerd who finds themself more interesting than the audience does).  The biggest hurdle in appreciating Kim’s Video as its own standalone movie is warming up to David Redmon’s personality.  He maintains a Michael Moore-style omnipresence onscreen, so that all of the film’s observations about the importance of cinematic preservation are heavily filtered through his specific POV.  It’s clear that Redmon loves Movies, but his personal version of cinephilia ultimately just isn’t all that interesting.  He has a strong handle on what qualifies as The Canon (frequently citing Godard, Hitchcock, Scorsese, Varda, and all the other usual suspects), but you can find The Canon in most public & university libraries.  When it comes to the obscure microgenre relics that made Kim’s collection special, he’s much spottier.  A stray title like Dream Demon or Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger will occasionally interrupt the endless parade of clips from Intro to Film 101 standards like Bicycle Thieves, Blow-up, and I am Cuba, but you get the sense that they’re only important to the documentary because they’re important to Redmon; they’re the ones he happened to rent from Kim’s or happened to catch on late-night cable as a child.  All of the grimier horror, porn, and experimental titles that you could exclusively find on the shelves at Kim’s only appear as VHS covers, indicating that Redmon only finds them interesting for their surface aesthetics.

The real shortcoming, though, is not in which clips Redmon and co-director Ashley Sabin select to illustrate their international movie heist; it’s how those clips are introduced.  It’s not enough for them to juxtapose images of Charles Foster Kane’s collection of treasures with the treasure vault of Kim’s video tapes.  Redmon also has to explicitly state out loud that looking at the collection reminds him of a scene from Citizen Kane.  It’s already a little on the nose for them to include clips from The Godfather to illustrate his travels to Sicily, but Redmon still feels a need to verbally explain the connection in narration.  Not only is that presentation a little clunky, but it also suggests that Redmon doesn’t fully trust in the visual medium he professes to love so much, or he doesn’t fully understand it.  I shouldn’t pick on him too much, though.  He loves Movies, so do I, and so do the other former Kim’s Video members who’d be curious to watch this and find out what happened to the treasure trove of rare tapes that used to be stored just a few subway stops away from their cramped apartments.  The documentary is ultimately a communal celebration, and Redmon & Sabin deserve kudos for turning that celebration into an entertaining story instead of a purely self-indulgent memorial for one small cultural access point among many.  I don’t know that its entertaining yarn about the recovery of Kim’s tapes is ultimately more valuable than the inevitable Letterboxd list that will catalog every title in the current collection, but it’s at least more entertaining to me, personally, than a documentary about a very special membership gym would be.

-Brandon Ledet

Asphalt (1929)

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I am by no means well studied in the broader history of German Expressionism, but I have seen a horror movie or two.  When I think of the German Expressionist visual style, my mind immediately conjures up the fantastic, transportive images of titles like Nosferatu, M, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Man Who Laughs, The Hands of Orlac, Destiny, The Golem and, of course, Metropolis.  Even the cultural impact of those films’ innovative directors & cinematographers emigrating to America has always been most immediately apparent in early Hollywood horrors like The Black Cat & Dracula, given their surrealistic production design and shadowy visual play.  It was surprising, then, to find no supernatural dream logic in the once-lost German Expressionist drama Asphalt, which might account for the film’s relatively low name recognition in that field.  In terms of narrative, Joe May’s tragic story of mismatched lovers feels more familiar to early Hollywood dramas about misbehaved women than it does to the nightmare-realm horrors more typically associated with German Expressionism.  However, all of the ecstatic visual flourish associated with that film movement is in full swing, as the camera sways wildly in an attempt to capture the bustling urban chaos of Berlin, where its doomed love story is set.  Its plot synopsis might sound like the German equivalent of early US films like A Fool There Was, The Red Kimona, Parisian Love, or A Woman of the World, but it’s way less restrained & stage-bound than any of those titles.  It’s pure cinema, made by the people who established the language of that artform in its infancy.

Metropolis star Gustav Fröhlich plays a bumbling, naive cop who’s not quite streetwise enough to handle the streets of Berlin.  Else Heller (doing her best Louise Brooks drag) plays the young man’s downfall: a cunning, compulsive thief he catches robbing a jewelry store when he should be directing traffic his first day on the job.  The poor rube buys her sob story about needing to steal to survive, as she is perilously close to being evicted onto the harsh streets of Berlin.  An unlikely romance blossoms between cop & criminal as his sympathy grows, until she can’t stand his naivety any longer and fully confesses her betrayal of trust.  She does not, in fact, steal for survival.  She steals because it’s thrilling to get away with taking home diamonds & furs.  She steals for the fun of stealing.  What ruins the fun is the way her flirty pickpocket lifestyle gets her new beau into steep trouble, both with the macho brutes of her past and with the strictly law-abiding members of his own family.  The dramatic entertainment value of Asphalt is in watching a young, fashionable woman thieve, lie, and cheat in hedonistic excess, even if the morals of the era require it to eventually condemn her for crimes against morality.  No matter how deplorable the femme fatale’s behavior is in the abstract, the movie takes obvious delight in watching her smoke cigarettes and smolder in a heated bathtub, treating herself to a life of luxury that she would be denied through any legal path.  She might not steal to survive, exactly, but she does steal to make life worth surviving.

Asphalt intuitively takes for granted that crime is sexy & fun, so it gets to spend a lot of its time playing around with new, exciting ways to move the camera instead of complicating its central romantic dynamic.  It opens with kaleidoscopic mirroring of Berlin street traffic and sweeping montages of the rain-slicked asphalt beneath those cars & feet.  The camera is in constant motion, either evoking the mania of navigating a city’s cacophonous busyness in exterior scenes or taking inventory of individual objects & players on interior sets.  It represents an end of an era for ecstatic, inventive German filmmaking, but there’s no solemn, settled maturity to its cinematography.  It’s desperate to impress.  Like Metropolis, a complete print of Asphalt was considered lost media for decades, until it pieced back together through archival discovery & recovery in the 1990s.  Unlike Metropolis, it’s been largely forgotten to time a second time since that restoration.  There just isn’t as much of a completionist streak among romance & crime film enjoyers the same way that horror & sci-fi freaks will seek out anything that falls into their genre of choice.  I’m as guilty of that bias as anyone, having never heard of this film until a used DVD copy fell into my hands at the Minneapolis record store Electric Fetus.  Meanwhile, I’ve actively sought out at least a dozen horror films from the German Expressionist era in my frantic search to guzzle down all things horror.  It turns out they were making romantic dramas in that period too, just like in Hollywood (except way dreamier & prettier).

-Brandon Ledet

Wicked Little Letters (2024)

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They may not be respected as taste-arbiters or as models of good theater etiquette, but the elderly moviegoers of America are the core customer base that keep cinemas running.  While movie studios are flailing in their courtship of a teenage audience that would rather be playing videogames or watching influencer ads at home, the Senior Discount crowd is keeping the industry afloat with only minimal pandering.  Every local film fest, repertory series, and daytime matinee in the nation owes a significant chunk of its cashflow to geriatric retirees, who generally have a much more adventurous approach to art-film programming than younger audiences, who tend to save their trips to the cinema for major Event Films instead of taking a chance on whatever happens to be out from week to week.  It’s a shame, then, that most movies that are cynically marketed to the 65+ age demographic are so … safe, so toothless.  Senior Citizen Comedies like Book Club and 80 for Brady mostly function as feature-length advertisements (for 50 Shades of Gray and the NFL, respectively), relying on the excess charm of their all-star casts without actually giving those actors much to do.  There’s a hint towards sexual naughtiness in their playfully saucy humor, but the movies are afraid to follow through on anything genuinely risqué, in fear of offending or alienating the morals of its target audience.  They take their customers’ attendance & amusement for granted.

Within that context, Wicked Little Letters is essentially a John Waters comedy for the senior set.  A 1920s period piece about women’s changing roles in public life post-WWI, it looks & feels like a routine BBC Films production that packs cinemas for weeks without ever attracting a single attendee under 30.  It doesn’t sound like those movies, though, since its dialogue features long strings of profane, nonsensical insults referring to various characters as “mangy old titless turnips”, “bloody fucking old saggy sacks of chicken piss”, and “fucking old steaming bags of wet leaking shit.”  I know Mrs. Harris was met with an icy response when she went to Paris, but I don’t remember it being that extreme.  Wicked Little Letters is about a pre-Internet shitposting campaign in which a not-so-mysterious letter writer bombards her otherwise wholesome British community with handwritten outbursts of extreme profanity.  Set against the backdrop of women “losing their decorum” after taking on traditionally masculine roles in public life during the war, it’s a comedic overcorrection wherein one especially peculiar woman takes a little too much delight in being able to express herself through cuss for the first time in her pious life.  It played very funny at home, but I imagine its pottymouth punchlines got even bigger laughs in the theater among its target demographic, considering the uproarious response to Mr. Molesley laying out the wrong silverware or whatever in the Downtown Abbey movies.  Its biggest swing is that it does not baby its very much grown-up audience, which is a rarity in this style of comedy.

As a gumshoe mystery and subsequent courtroom drama, Wicked Little Letters is less of a whodunnit than it is a howcatchem.  Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley star as next-door neighbors with unlikely mutual admiration.  Buckley is a loudmouth, hard-drinking Irish lass who says & does exactly what she wants at all times, unburdened by any filters of ladylike public behavior.  Colman is Buckley’s older, more socially restrained frenemy, mostly as a result of the strictly religious, emotionally abusive oppression of her father (Timothy Spall).  Colman is also the sole recipient of the first barrage of pottymouth hate mail, which is immediately blamed on Buckley, given her public disregard for decorum.  Unconvinced that a woman that brazen would hide behind the anonymity of a pen, a local policewoman (Ladyparts guitarist Anjana Vasan) launches an off-the-books investigation of who’s really behind the transgression, which quickly escalates beyond a neighborly spat to instead terrorize an entire community.  It’s immediately obvious who is guilty, and a lot of the early comedic tension is in watching her barely contained amusement with her own naughtiness give herself away.  The fun of the investigation is in watching a small group of women join the effort to expose the truth and vindicate their foul-mouth lush of a friend.  Like with John Waters’s classic suburban invasion comedies, the movie pits the hypocrisy of the upstanding Christian majority against the winning charm of “queers and drunkards” in the court of public opinion and declares a clear, populist victor.  It’s delightful.

Of course, you won’t find any singing buttholes, cannibalized cops, or drag queens eating dog shit in Wicked Little Letters.  All of its naughty profanity is purely verbal, but when contrasted against the typically safe, toothless comedies of manners in this milieu, it’s more than enough to earn its laughs.  I’m sure the real-life gossip column story that inspired the movie is much grimmer & more complicated than how it’s presented onscreen, but I don’t know that there’s any way to depict morally uptight Brits reading the words “You’re a sad stinky bitch” without inviting an audience to laugh.  This audience deserves that laugh, too.  They’ve been drawn to the theater with the promise of naughty, risqué comedies so many times that it’s nice one finally decided to deliver the goods. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Suicide Squad – Hell to Pay (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. 

A few years back, [Erstwhile Roommate of Boomer] and I were browsing through the then-current version of the HBO app and stumbled upon the then-latest DC animated movie. We managed to barely get through the opening, which we found kind of distasteful and crass. That movie was Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay, and I wasn’t really looking forward to this one on this watch-through, since my previous experience was negative. Upon watching the film in its entirety, however, I can report it’s actually pretty fun. Whereas the humor in Batman and Harley Quinn mostly missed the mark, this one manages to weave together an interesting narrative that plays to the strengths of the characters chosen for this outing, while also tapping into an irreverence that previous darker attempts at comedy failed to achieve. 

After a cold open in which an ill-conceived attempt by a couple of hotheads to get out of Suicide Squad duty leaves everyone but Deadshot (Christian Slater) dead, Amanda Waller (a perfectly cast Vanessa Williams) sends him into the field alongside the moralistic martial artist Bronze Tiger (Billy Brown), gimmicky sharpshooter Captain Boomerang, literal and figurative ice queen Killer Frost (Kristin Bauer van Straten), cybernetically enhanced Copperhead, and, of course, Harley Quinn (Tara Strong). Their mission: to retrieve a magical object, a literal “Get Out of Hell Free” card, which Waller secretly seeks for herself as she has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and now that the truth is out that hell is quite real, she knows she’s got a better shot at cheating her way out of it than seeking redemption. Two other parties are after the object, however, as immortal (but as he points out, not invulnerable) mutant caveman Vandal Savage is after is in pursuit of the card, as is the Reverse Flash. This film ties itself back to Flashpoint Paradox by having C. Thomas Howell reprise this role, and his whole deal is that when he was shot in the head at the end of that film, he “froze” himself in the moments before death with his superspeed, but each time he uses it, he gets that much closer to dying from the wound. (You just kind of have to go with it.) 

The end of this one is a bit of a foregone conclusion. You don’t really introduce a member of this team whose imprisonment is the result of revenge killing the men who murdered his family, and who remains tortured by the loss of them despite being a vigilante who is willing to kill, and then also have a get out of hell free card, without the audience putting those two puzzle pieces together long before the finale. There are a lot of fun twists and turns along the way, though, and the comedy pretty much lands. Waller has to make this mission “off the books” (since it’s really her personal play to avoid damnation rather than a government sanctioned action), so the Squad heads out to the card’s last known location in a decrepit RV. This means that, of course we’re going to have a scene where Copperhead flashes his fangs at a child in the next car while they’re on their road trip to scare them, and of course we’re going to have a bus full of nuns show up at some point as a visual gag. A lot of it is pretty rote, but there’s some playfulness that makes this one a little more memorable. Of particular note is that the person that the group is initially sent to find, Steel Maxum, turns out to be both an exotic dancer and the unlikely former host of DC cosmic org chart bigwig Doctor Fate. Greg Grunberg has some fun with the role, playing up the guy’s himbo nature, which is so at odds with extreme stoicism of Doctor Fate that it makes for some good gags. Used to less comedic and more dramatic effect is the way that Vandal Savage’s plans are ultimately undone by his own inhuman morality; his daughter turns on him after Vandal allows her girlfriend to be killed in some crossfire, citing that she is “expendable.” He later says that he has had more children than he could ever count, and yet they always fail him because they think too small, when it seems like the real lesson he keeps failing over and over again is not to underestimate the power of love. 

With one that functions as well as this one does, there’s not much more to say without simply recapping more of the film’s comedic moments, and I think that this one is better enjoyed than it is retold. It’s pretty funny, so I say: go forth and enjoy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Planet of the Vampires (1965)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Planet of the Vampires (1965), Mario Bava’s atmospheric Italo sci-fi precursor to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

00:00 Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh
05:40 Video rental stores

08:11 Fright Night (1985)
13:35 Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
20:07 Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985)
22:49 Spirited Away (2001)
27:01 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
30:48 But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
33:48 Blade Runner (1982)
37:02 Am I Okay? (2024)
42:13 Longlegs (2024)
55:26 MaXXXine (2024)
1:00:00 A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
1:03:13 Twisters (2024)

1:06:36 Planet of the Vampires (1965)

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

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