Sex Demon (1975)

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These days, rip-offs & retreads of The Exorcist are all the same grim-grey trudges through tired Catholic iconography.  They’re so dutifully routine that I can close my eyes and picture the entirety of titles like The Exorcism, The Last Exorcism, The Pope’s Exorcist, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose without having seen so much as a trailer; the only novelty left in the genre is Russell Crowe occasionally doing an outrageous Italian accent.  That wasn’t always the case.  While William Friedkin’s original Exorcist was a relatively reserved, grounded horror film that tried to make a supernatural phenomenon feel like a genuine real-world threat, a lot of its immediate echoes were bonkers, wildly unpredictable novelties (not least of all its own sequel The Exorcist III).  We used to live in a world where an Exorcist riff could be a Blacksploitation sex romp like Abby, a Turkish copyright violator like Şeytan or, apparently, a hardcore gay porno like 1975’s Sex Demon.  To be clear, Sex Demon is not a porno parody of The Exorcist.  It’s a strangely serious, sinister knockoff of the original – a psychedelic story about a cursed medallion, nightmare-realm Satanic orgies, and a couple who’s normal, milquetoast life together is violently disrupted by demonic possession . . . and ejaculating erections.  It would take a lot of footage of Russell Crowe riding a Vespa to match that kind of novelty.

To celebrate their anniversary, a gay male couple have morning sex and then venture out of the apartment to buy each other gifts.  Some misguiding antiquing leads to the purchase of a cursed medallion (helpfully accompanied by a note that explains “This medallion is cursed”), which the older man buys for his younger lover as an affectionate gesture.  Since there’s less than an hour’s worth of celluloid to fill, the medallion makes quick work of transforming the younger boyfriend from gentle lover to demonic rapist, sending him on a manic quest to fist, piss on, and cum inside as many men as he can before either the spell wears off or his body expires.  The movie skips all of the science vs. religion diagnoses of its source text and gets right to the bed-rattling goods, but it somehow doesn’t lose an ounce of the feel-bad domestic horror in the process.  By mirroring specific objects & moments from the original Exorcist, it invites a parent-child reading on the main couple’s age gap relationship, which is a kind of 40-something/20-something affair.  Having given his younger boyfriend a cursed anniversary present, the older man is worried that he’s psychologically fucked the kid up for life, and a lot of the same helpless exasperation Reagan’s mother feels in the original carries over here.  It’s a feel-bad porno where even the sex scenes are set to a somber, menacing orchestral score, leaving you to wonder exactly what audience this was intended to please. 

Sex Demon‘s specific allusions to moments & totems from The Exorcist are relatively sparse beyond a brief recreation of the Catholic, climactic bedside ritual meant to cast the demon out of its host body.  It might not have clearly been presented as an Exorcist knockoff at all if it weren’t for the final scene’s violent tumble down a flight of apartment stairs or the marketing tagline declaring “Not even an exorcist could help!”  It’s only in retrospect that some moments stand out as allusions to The Exorcist, like Reagan’s masturbation with a crucifix being reworked as the possessed man stabbing a hookup in the anus with a screwdriver.  A lot of Sex Demon‘s horror is of its own making, including a ritualistic Satanic orgy that signals halfway through the runtime that the demonic possession has begun (a move that feels more inspired by Rosemary’s Baby than anything Friedkin directed).  The real creative centerpiece is a concluding montage that chaotically remixes all of the preceding film’s imagery into a violent, dizzying meltdown.  Sex scenes, antiques, dive bar strippers, candles, skulls, kitchen cabinets, and wobbly lamps rapidly flash over a menacing orchestral soundtrack, as if every frame snipped onto the editing room floor was randomly stitched together in lieu of filming something new for the climax.  That nauseating montage feels legitimately evil by the time it reaches its fever pitch, and for the first time you almost forget you’re watching something otherwise dutifully derivative.

Sex Demon was a lost film for nearly four decades, recently rediscovered and restored through the archival diligence of Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell.  This was a much more substantial preservation of a lost porno parody than the infamous Bat Pussy reels uncovered by Something Weird in the 1990s.  It’s a battered, seemingly incomplete print, but it gets across the film’s artistic significance as an independent queer cinema mutation of a now-canonized horror classic.  Bat Pussy is much too silly of a comparison point, since Sex Demon takes its dramatic, romantic tension seriously enough to match other vintage porno outliers like Both Ways, Equation to an Unknown, and Pandora’s Mirror.  If you’re looking for a goofy parody of The Exorcist, you’re looking for the 1990 Leslie Nielsen comedy Repossessed.  Sex Demon is much more concerned with echoing the evil, supernatural horrors of the original, which is a pretty lofty goal for low-budget pornography.

-Brandon Ledet

Burial Ground (1981)

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One of the great joys of Italo zombie schlock is the genre’s chaotic, anything-goes unpredictability.   In Zombi, a zombie has an underwater fist fight with a shark.  In Cemetery Man, a zombie’s severed head becomes a gravedigger’s loving bride.  In Demons, the zombies emerge through the silver screen to infect a horror-movie audience in their theater seats. In the most preposterous scenario of all, The Beyond imagines a New Orleans home with a basement (which, of course, opens a portal to Hell for the zombies to crawl through).  1981’s Burial Ground features none of that chaotic energy.  Narratively, it’s a by-the-numbers zombie invasion story that’s only extraordinary in its efficiency.  The film opens with an archeologist disturbing the ancient burial ground of the title and awakening the flesh-hungry zombies within.  This inciting incident is immediately followed by the arrival of several romantic couples at the estate who don’t seem terribly concerned about their missing archeologist friend.  They waste a little time exploring the musty mansion grounds (mostly looking for places to have sex, naturally), but it’s not long before the disturbed zombies arrive on the scene to eat them alive.  There isn’t much story to speak of from there – just an army of the undead slowly hunting down their soon-to-be-disemboweled victims one at a time.  It’s more commendable for its excess and its expediency than it is for its delivery of weirdo Italo-horror anomalies.

Well, that’s not entirely true.  There is one anomaly worth singling out in Burial Ground: a little boy named Michael.  Since most of the houseguests at the zombie-infested estate are adult couples, Michael stands out as the only child on the premises, which the movie frequently exploits by putting the vulnerable little chap in grave danger.  What really makes him stand out, though, is the casting of the 25-year-old actor Peter Bark in the role, playing a small child with an adult’s face.  The idea was to get around child labor laws that would have limited daily shooting schedules by casting an adult who could work more grueling production hours, but it’s a decision that adds an intensely absurd layer of menace on top of everything Michael does & says.  When he complains that the estate “smells of death” or suggests that his mother light an encroaching zombie on fire, his adult facial features undercut his childlike vocal dub with pure, ancient sadism.  Burial Ground intentionally leans into that discomfort too, spending a lot of time detailing Michael’s childlike curiosity about the adults’ sexual habits – at first as a Peeping Tom, then as an incestuous suitor for his freaked-out mother.  He is undoubtedly the star of the show, and once he inevitably joins the ranks of the zombie hoard you can’t help but leap out of your seat to cheer on his uncanny reign of terror like your favorite football team just scored a 100-yard touchdown.

I’m convinced that Burial Ground would still be recommendable as a late-night zombie horror even without the Michael weirdness.  It’s an all-killer-no-filler affair, not wasting any time explaining why zombies are attacking these horny couples or even why those couples gathered in the first place.  Instead, it invests that energy into making its zombies as grotesque as possible on a tight budget.  Tons of care went into costuming the ambling ghouls with a wide range of gnarly latex masks so that they all have distinct personalities.  Their faces drip with hanging worms and maggots.  Their victims bleed lipstick red as zombie hands tear out their guts in retro Romero fashion.  Not as much care went into making those zombie hands look gross enough to match the latex masks, though, leaving most of them fleshy and intact so it appears as if they’ve never worked a day in their undead zombie lives.  And yet, they clearly have a strong work ethic.  They tirelessly invade the palatial vacation home in search of gross-out gore gags to entertain the audience watching at home, each set piece scored in droning, arrhythmic 80s synths.  Peter Bark’s jarring performance as little Michael is an anomalous element of the film that makes it a must-see entry in the Italo zombie canon, but it’s not entirely reliant on his eerie novelty for its entertainment value.  I don’t know that I could say the same about a scenario where Zombi didn’t depict a zombie fighting a shark.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Soul of the Dragon (2021)

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

Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been doing this project my whole life. I can’t remember a time before NSN52. I almost never mention these movies on the podcast because they’re rarely noteworthy enough to discuss there, but when I have mentioned it to the others off-mic or in conversation with friends, I have mentioned that doing this might be the metaphorical “smoke the whole carton” camel-crippling straw for me engaging with superhero media ever again. “I’m genuinely sick of typing the word ‘Batman,’” I say. “If I never type the word ‘Batman’ again, it’ll be too soon.” Last week, I mentioned that Man of Tomorrow was the last solo Superman outing, but we’ve got three more Batflicks after this to plow through, and of the remaining dozen or so movies after that, he’s a character in half of them. This franchise knows which cow gives the most milk and it’s never been afraid to tip its hand about its preferences, but I’m pleasantly surprised and happy to announce that this one was fun, clever, and original, so at least we’ve fended off despair for another week.

Batman: Soul of the Dragon is a pastiche of seventies kung fu-sploitation movies. As the film opens, martial arts master Richard Dragon (Mark Dacascos) infiltrates the swanky, swinging island compound of eccentric millionaire Jeffrey Burr. Burr, in true exploitation fashion, is introduced to us by paying a sex worker and then, instead of letting her leave peacefully, ushers her into dark enclosed space, where he unleashes several of his pet reptiles and watches with otherworldly satisfaction as they feast. (In another world, trying to find her now-missing friend would have Friday Foster out to this island to take some names.) Dragon discovers that Burr is the leader of the Kobra cult and seeks out his old friend Bruce Wayne (David Giuntoli) to tell him that Kobra has possession of “The Gate.” This leads us into a flashback in which Wayne, in his walking of the earth to learn all the martial arts known to man, finds himself at the temple of O-Sensei (James Hong), a legendary grandmaster who takes on the orphaned billionaire as one of his students. Richard is already there, as are Lady Shiva (Kelly Hu), Ben “Bronze Tiger” Turner (Michael Jai White, who previously portrayed the character in live action on Arrow), Jade Nguyen (Jamie Chung), and Rip Jagger. As they train under O-Sensei, they learn that he is protecting an interdimensional gateway that protects the world from the snake demon Nāga. There is a traitor in their midst, however, and they reveal themselves as a member of Kobra who is seeking to free Nāga, but when they open the gateway, they are killed by their deity immediately, forcing O-Sensei to sacrifice himself to close the portal … for now. In the (70s) present, Dragon learns that Bruce is Batman when he enlists him in preventing the legions of Kobra from opening the gate once more. But first, they’re going to have to get the gang back together. 

This is a fun one. Creating this as a kung-fu potpourri makes it feel warm and familiar in a good way, and it also makes the action sequences more dynamic than the normal punch-punch-batarang-laserbeam ho-hummery of most of these non-spooky cartoons. There’s a fluidity to the motions of the characters that’s normally just handled as rote superhero action sequences with the occasional novel idea. Here, it’s not just an element of the style, it is the style, and it does wonders for making this one stand out from the pack. The selection of which characters to use for this exercise is inspired, and I’m sure that whoever was complaining about Lady Shiva going out like a chump on the TV Tropes page for Apokalips War was pleased to see her played as a badass here. Even the generic mysticism about portals and serpent cults and swords that capture souls plays to the film’s strengths. About the only thing that I can think of that anyone could have a grievance about is that this is barely a Batman movie, but you won’t hear that complaint from me. For me, it’s more praiseworthy that this one was so fun and enjoyable that even though I’m at a point of such Batsaturation that I’m exhausted of thinking about the character, this one still managed to be entertaining and worthwhile. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cure (1997)

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New Orleans is currently enjoying the best repertory cinema programming it’s had in my lifetime.  I may have missed the healthy art-cinema scene that was obliterated by the arrival of the AMC “Palace” multiplexes in the city’s suburbs in the 1990s, but something beautiful & exciting has sprouted from that rubble in the 2020s.  Looking back at the older movies we’ve covered on the blog over the past ten years because they happened to be screening locally, it’s immediately clear that local programmers are getting more adventurous & esoteric in their tastes.  It used to be that you could only catch rep screenings of Hitchcock classics like To Catch a Thief & Strangers on a Train on Sunday mornings at The Prytania’s ongoing Classic Movies series.  Now every Wednesday night is a head-to-head battle to see who can screen the hipper, edgier title between the Gap Tooth Cinema series at The Broad (formerly known as Wildwood) and the Prytania Cinema Club at Canal Place (former host of Wildwood).  That competitive battle has resulted in a robust local slate including hard-to-see titles like Entertaining Mr. Sloane, On the Silver Globe, and Coonskin as well as celebratory screenings of true cult classics like Pink Flamingos, Blue Velvet, and House.  And that’s not including the one-off barroom & coffee shop screenings and the week-long restoration runs of other weirdo classics around town.  The New Orleans repertory scene is still nowhere near matching the behemoth breadth of a New York, a Los Angeles, or even an Austin, but it’s at least better now than it was when we first started this blog ten years ago, and you can clearly see that progress charted on this Letterboxd list of what we’ve been able to cover because of it.

According to that list, the 100th local repertory screening I’ve attended in the first ten years of Swampflix was the hypnotic Japanese horror film Cure, thanks to the aforementioned Prytania Cinema Club.  An early calling card film for the still-working, still-thriving Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cure arrived during the serial killer thriller era of the post-Silence of the Lambs 1990s.  Kōji Yakusho stars as a Tokyo police detective working to connect a series of vicious murders in which victims’ throats are slashed in the same meticulous “X” pattern but were executed by different killers, found dazed at the scene of the crime.  The common link between these parallel domestic killings is an amnesiac drifter and former psychology student played by Masato Hagiwara, who appears to be weaponizing an old-fashioned form of Mesmerism to incite the murders.  While the detective struggles to pin these surrogate acts of violence on a man who can barely remember information told to him earlier in a single conversation, let alone his own life story or name, the mesmerism starts to infect the cop’s intrusive thoughts, interrupting the normal flow of a serial killer movie.  His mentally ill wife mutates from a patient in his care to the obvious next victim in the hypnosis-induced murder spree, and all he can really do to stop it is to feebly threaten violence against a dazed, checked-out slacker who only offers middle-distance stares and vague philosophical questions in response.  It’s a horror movie about an infectious idea, which is always a creepier enemy to fight against since there can be no physical, decisive victory.  Attempts to diminish or punish the killer mesmerist only bring him into the presence of even more dangerous men higher up the law-enforcement food chain, spreading the threat instead of squashing it.

I loved getting the chance to see Cure for the first time in a proper theater, fully submerged in its eerie, icy mood without the trivial distractions of home viewing.  It’s the kind of movie that asks you to pay attention to the roaring hums of machines—fluorescent lights, car engines, washing machines, ocean tide—and the jarring silence of their sudden absence.  The blink-and-miss-them flashes of the unreliable detective-protagonist’s hypnotic visions of his own domestic violence could easily be missed with a cell phone or a house pet or passing traffic competing for your momentary attention at home.  It’s an extraordinarily creepy film but also a subtle one.  At the same time, it made me question whether this entire enterprise of lauding repertory programming can be detrimental to the way we watch and think about contemporary releases.  At least, I left Cure a little skeptical about why so many movie nerds are willing to give into the pure-evil vibes of vintage Japanese horrors like this, Suicide Club, and Perfect Blue but get hung up on the supposed plot incoherence of their modern American equivalent in Longlegs.  All four of those works warp the familiar beats of the traditional serial killer thriller into new, grotesque configurations by dredging up the supernatural menace lurking just under the genre’s real-world surface.  Only Longlegs hasn’t had the benefit of multiple decades of critical analysis and cultural context lending additional meaning & significance to the events of its supernatural plot, so that discerning cinephile audiences get tripped up on whether its story makes practical sense instead of focusing on what really matters: its atmospheric sense, its evil vibes.  Cure has long since let go of that baggage.  It’s been canonized as a great work, so its ambiguity is taken as an asset instead of an oversight.

What I’m really celebrating here is the gift of access.  To date, I had only seen one other Kurosawa film: his atypical sci-fi comedy-thriller Doppelgänger, which has largely been forgotten as a lesser work.  That film’s DVD just happened to fall into my lap at my local Goodwill, which is how I find a lot of older movies outside the taste-making curation of streamers like The Criterion Channel, Mubi, and Tubi.  Having that curation spill out of my living room and into proper cinemas in recent years has been a wonderful, welcome change of pace.  I might’ve kept Cure on the watchlist backburner for another decade or two if it weren’t screening a couple bus stops away from my office cubicle.  I also likely would have missed one of its eerie, intrusive flashes of violence had I watched it alone at home, where I’m always one phone notification away from zapping a movie of all its sensory magic.  I hope The Prytania Cinema Club and Gap Tooth Cinema keep competing for my patronage every Wednesday into eternity to keep that magic alive.  Or, better yet, I hope one of them gives up their Wednesday slot for a different night so I don’t have to make an either/or choice every week.  I missed a screening of the Rowlands-Cassavetes collab Opening Night so I could finally check out Cure instead, even though it would have been a lovely way to commemorate the recent passing of an all-timer of a powerhouse actor.  Having that either/or choice is a privilege that I didn’t have just a few years ago, when the majority of local rep screenings were our weekly Sunday morning visits with Rene Brunet.

-Brandon Ledet

Shadowzone (1990)

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I’m a sucker for genre movies about the supernatural power of dreams, since it frees filmmakers up to visualize just about anything they want onscreen.  From obscure oddities like Paperhouse & Beyond Dream’s Door to beloved horror-nerd classics like the Nightmares on Elm Street to artsy-fartsy pioneers like Un Chien Andalou, some of the most powerfully surreal images ever achieved in cinema have resulted from dreamworld genre fare.  That’s why it’s a little disappointing when a dream-logic horror movie lacks that ambition to astonish, instead relying on more pedestrian thrills like, say, rubber monsters and naked breasts.  The early Full Moon feature Shadowzone is one such disappointment: a low-budget, straight-to-VHS sci-fi horror about an Extended Deep Sleep trial in which the power of the dream-state human brain unlocks a doorway to an alternate dimension . . . and all that comes through that doorway is tits & monsters.  In any other context, tits & monsters would be a satisfying payoff for renting VHS-horror schlock, but here they’re a little bit of a letdown, especially considering how much more expensive and less expressive Shadowzone is compared to its fellow sleep-study-horror Beyond Dream’s Door.

Louise Fletcher revives her role as the low-energy sleep study doctor she plays in The Exorcist II: The Heretic, except now with a mad scientist bent.  Along with a fellow drowsy mad scientist played by James Wong, she conducts Extended Deep Sleep studies on naked models in the low-rent version of the hypersleep pods from Alien.  Just as they’re starting to discover the awesome, supernatural power the human mind can unlock when submerged in Deep Sleep for days on end, their work is suddenly scrutinized by a military investigator because one of their test subjects inconveniently popped like a balloon.  The flayed corpse of that experiment gone wrong promises a level of gore the movie will not match again until the very end.  Instead, the still-sleeping subjects’ powerful minds let an interdimensional monster through the doorway between worlds that the remaining survivors in the lab (and the audience at home) cannot actually see.  It’s only visible to the lab-equipment monitors, not to the naked eye.  Still, it kills them off one by one in their sealed underground bunker, like an invisible version of The Thing . . . until it finally reveals its admittedly fantastic creature design in a strobe-lit ending borrowed from Altered States.

There’s a meta-element to Shadowzone, where it’s so boring between its mutant creature attacks that you can’t tell whether you actually saw them or you dreamed them during an unplanned mid-film nap.  It’s possible that my unenthused experience with it was a result of presentation, since the version currently streaming on Amazon Prime is a half-hour longer than its normal listed runtime of 80min, and none of the additional footage includes the tits & monsters that provide its only sources of entertainment value.  What’s left is just empty space that could have easily been filled by whatever surreal, outlandish images the fine folks at Full Moon could dare to imagine, and instead is just long stretches of nothing.  The good news is that you’re likely in no danger of being bored or let down by the film yourself, since the only scenario when any reasonable person would have sought this out would be if it were still 1990 and your local video store had already rented out every VHS of the better titles it visually references: Alien, Altered States, and The Thing.  Now, you can just stream Beyond Dream’s Door instead without worrying that Tubi is going to run out of copies.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Trekkies (1997)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Star Trek fandom documentary Trekkies, presented by Next Generation actor Denise “Tasha Yar” Crosby.

00:00 Halloween Streaming Report 2024
01:10 The Craft (1996)

03:30 Inside Out 2 (2024)
08:45 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
12:24 Close Your Eyes (2024)
20:39 The Substance (2024)
25:52 Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (1990)
30:04 Burial Ground (1981)
32:32 Megalopolis (2024)

36:46 Trekkies (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

Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout (1990)

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There will be countless reviews of Coralie Fargeat’s high-style gross-out The Substance that point to the body horror titles of the 1980s & 90s that influenced its over-the-top, surrealistic practical effects.  Instead of echoing those shoutouts to Yuzna, Cronenberg, and Hennenlotter—the gross-out greats—I’d like to instead highlight a different VHS-era relic that telegraphs The Substance‘s peculiar brand of horror filmmaking.  While Fargeat’s most memorable images result from the squelchy practical-effects mutations of star Demi Moore’s body as she takes extreme measures to reverse the toll that aging has taken on her career, long stretches of the film are less body horror than they are 1980s workout video.  Moore’s aging body is her entire livelihood, given that she hosts a retro, Jane Fonda-style morning workout show in a leotard, stripping & exercising on America’s television screens.  When she gives monstrous birth to her youthful replacement in Margaret Qualley through Yuznian transformation, the show zooms in even tighter on the workout host’s body – featuring aggressively repetitive closeups on Qualley’s gyrating, lycra-clad ass.  At least half of The Substance is essentially a horror-themed workout video, so any recommendations of vintage schlock primers for what it’s achieving should include horror movies that cashed in on the 1980s gym culture craze.  There are a few standout workout-horror novelties to choose from there, most prominently Death Spa and Killer Workout.  However, there’s only one horror novelty that matches The Substance‘s full-assed commitment to spoofing 80s workout video aesthetics: a VHS collectible titled Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout.

Linnea Quigley was only in her early 30s in the early 90s, but her workout video spoof already finds her panicking about the encroaching expiration date for her onscreen career as an object of desire, like Moore’s gorgeous 50-something protagonist in The Substance.  Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is ostensibly a Jane Fonda workout video parody in which the titular scream queen leads slumber-party-massacre victims & poolside zombies in low-energy, high-sleaze workout routines.  It’s more cheesecake than it is instructional, starting & ending with a nude Quigley screaming directly at camera during her pre-workout shower.  Having hit the nude scene quota that would satisfy horror-convention attendees who need to buy something for the perpetually topless actress to autograph, Quigley then takes the time to satisfy her own needs.  Much of the hour-long runtime is a highlight reel of her most outrageous performances, including clips from schlock titles like Nightmare Sisters, Creepozoids, Assault of the Party Nerds, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama.  Her most iconic scene as a punk stripper on the graveyard set of Return of The Living Dead is only shown in still images, sidestepping expensive licensing fees, so that most clips are pulled from her collaborations with David DeCoteau.  She’s directly making an argument to her salivating fans that she’s just as much of a scream queen icon as a Jamie Lee Curtis or a Heather Langenkamp, even if her filmography is laughably low-rent by comparison.

Smartly, Quigley constantly invites you to laugh at both that filmography and the workout video wraparound, preemptively mocking the entire exercise with her own shamelessly corny Elvira quips.  During a slideshow of her double-chainsaw striptease in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, she complains, “Ginger Rogers had Fred Astaire . . . and I get Black & Decker?!”  Later, when she breathily encourages the audience at home to sweat with her during a workout, she jokes “That’s right, stretch those muscles . . . Not THAT muscle!”  Of course, most of the self-deprecating jokes are at the expense of the workout video’s dual function as softcore pornography, making it a kind of proto-J.O.I. porno.  Her first, solo workout routine finds her doing absurdly erotic poses in a metal-plated bra and black fishnet stockings, an outrageously inappropriate sweatsuit alternative that Quigley herself mocks while making the most of its prurient benefits.  She looks great, she proves she’s self-aware about where she’s positioned in the grand cinematic spectrum of respectability, and she does a good job promoting her legacy as a horror legend while maintaining a sense of humor about it all.  The only sequence of the video that doesn’t quite work is her instructional “zombiecise” routine where she leads a small hoard of graveyard zombies through limp choreography at the edge of a backyard pool.  It’s a visual gag that doesn’t really go anywhere once the initial novelty wears off, but it does eventually drone on long enough that it achieves a kind of deliberate anti-comedy, so all is forgiven.  It’s also followed by a much more successful speed-run through a tropey slumber party slasher and a mid-credits blooper reel, guaranteeing that the video leaves you with a smile.

Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is beautifully, aggressively vapid, much like the repetitive Pump It Up with Sue dance video sequences in The Substance.  Whether it qualifies as a proper feature like The Substance is debatable.  At times, it’s essentially the horny horror nerd equivalent of those looping Yule Log videos people throw on the TV around Christmas, a connection it acknowledges with occasional, lingering shots of an actual fireplace (presumably lit to keep the half-dressed Quigley warm).  It’s just as much of an appropriate double-feature pairing with Fargeat’s film as the more commonly cited titles like Society, The Fly, and Basket Case, though, as The Substance is just as much a horror-themed workout video as it is a comedic body horror, and there’s only one previous horror-themed workout video that truly matters.

-Brandon Ledet

The Substance (2024)

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What is The Substance? It’s 5% Barbie, 5% Carrie, 5% Requiem for a Dream, 5% The Fly, 10% Akira, 10% just the old lady from Room 237 in The Shining, 25% Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video, 10% Jane Fonda workout tape, 5% Architectural Digest, and 20% sour lemon candy, and it’s all 100% fresh, new, and exciting. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, who bears some resemblance to Moore; both found commercial and critical success (including an Oscar) in the early parts of their career, but their star has faded somewhat in the intervening years. Elisabeth now hosts a morning workout program for an unidentified major network, or at least she did until her birthday, when executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—wink, wink—unceremoniously lets her go from the show, essentially simply for having turned fifty. A hurt and shocked Elisabeth is distracted while driving by the sight of a billboard of her being taken down and ends up in a horrific collision. Although she’s remarkably unharmed, she’s shaken by the experience, and an almost inhumanly attractive nurse slips something into her coat pocket: a thumb drive printed with a phone number on one side and “The Substance” on the other, along with a note stating simply “It changed my life.” She watches the surreal advertising campaign/pharmaceutical pitch on the drive—a promise that The Substance will create a younger, more idealized version of yourself—and tosses it in the trash, before ultimately caving in on both her curiosity and her wounded self-image and giving it a shot (literally, and it’s for single use and you really, really should dispose of it after). 

Everyone has been talking about how much this movie is a return to form for body horror, but it’s more than just that. Sure, there’s mutating flesh, necrotic digits, and self surgery, but this is a movie that’s gross from the jump, long before people start erupting from each like molting salamanders. It’s mostly the most disgusting images you can imagine intercut with the occasional too-sterile environment or softcore aerobics so chock full of lingering shots of gyrating youthful glutes that they stop looking like flesh altogether. The first shot of the film, which gives us a demonstration of what The Substance does by showing it being injected into the yolk of an egg as it sits in its white on a countertop, before the yolk suddenly duplicates. Not long after, we are treated to an intense, almost fisheye closeup of Harvey’s face while he goes on a screaming, chauvinistic phone tirade while using a urinal before we cut to him grossly and messily slathering prawns in a yellow sauce and stuffing them messily in his face while he gives Elisabeth a series of backhanded compliments while performing the world’s worst exit interview; and we in the audience know he didn’t wash his hands. As Elisabeth leaves the hospital after her accident, an old classmate from before she was a star gives her his number on a piece of paper that’s then dropped into a puddle of some unknown liquid that’s murky and features a couple of floating cigarette butts. By the time the youthful version of Elisabeth, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), is stitching up the wound on Elisabeth’s back from which she just emerged like a hot bloody Pop-Tart, you’re already so full of bile from the general nastiness that the gore is almost a reprieve. Of course, that’s before Sue starts taking more time than the rules of The Substance allow, with her selfishness morphing Elisabeth slowly (and then very quickly) into a witch of the Roald Dahl variety. 

That general grossness, as a departure from pure body horror, is also represented in the film’s use of yellows throughout, rather than (or at least in addition to) the reds that most flicks of this genre use. It’s omnipresent and I loved it, from the aforementioned yolks to the goldenrod color of Elisabeth’s coat to the neon yellow of The Substance itself and the fluids you may vomit as a result of its use. A ball of yellow clay is halved and reformed into two shapes in the demonstration video for The Substance to represent the “other” being formed from the “matrix.” The eggs reappear later when Elisabeth, in a fit of pique over Sue beginning to push the limits of their connection, starts cooking a large number of disgusting French dishes, which includes combining an ungodly number of eggs in a bowl and then beating them, splashing the yolks all over her. And, in the film’s final moments, a dandelion yellow sidewalk cleaner passes over Elisabeth’s Walk of Fame star, scrubbing up … well, that would be a spoiler. It’s a fun way to add a different kind of a splash of color; I’d go so far as to say yellow is used as effectively here as, say, red in Suspiria, and if you’ve been around here a while you know what high praise that is from me. 

Moore is revelatory here, and it’s great to see her on screen again, especially after such a long absence. She grounds a lot of the more surreal elements that become a larger and larger part of the story as reality becomes more and more detached from what we’re watching. She looks amazing here, which further underlines just how depraved the culture in which she resides is. While Elisabeth is fifty, Moore is a little over a decade older than that, and her body is, pardon my French, fucking phenomenal. That this makes Elisabeth the perfect person for her ongoing aspirational position as the host of Sparkle Your Life is completely lost on Harvey and the vapid executives and shareholders of the network, who salivate like Tex Avery hounds over Sue and the befeathered dancers who are set to perform on a show that Sue is set to host. Moore plays her with a quiet dignity that’s clearly covering a deep loneliness, which is itself exacerbated by the blow to her ego and her self-worth that come as the result of losing her job solely because of ageism. Qualley is also fun here. So far, she has been in one of the worst movies I have seen this year as well as one of the best, but even in the latter she was not among the moving pieces that garnered my esteem. Although a lot of what she’s tasked with here is more about how she looks than about her acting abilities, when she’s called on to perform, she delivers a solid performance that endeared her to me more than anything else I’ve seen her in before. 

Overall, this is one of the most fun movies I’ve seen all year. Gross when it needs to be, surreal when the narrative calls for it, and funny all the way through. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Megalopolis (2024)

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In an early scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis that attempts to introduce all its major players at once, Adam Driver recites the entirety of Prince Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy at a cacophonous press conference.  It’s a classic-theatre intrusion on an aesthetic that’s already precariously imbalanced between the antique Art Deco sci-fi of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the uncanny green screen CGI of our post-MCU future.  Old-timey newspaper reporters with “PRESS” badges tucked into the ribbons of their fedoras meet Driver’s recitation of Shakespeare with adoring, rapt attention, but the rest of the main cast is visibly unsure how to play the scene.  A wide range of talented, sought-after actors (i.e., Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito), cancelled has-beens (i.e., Dustin Hoffman, Shia LeBouef), and unproven upstarts who don’t yet have full control of their craft (i.e., Chloe Fineman, Nathalie Emmanuel) circle around Driver, individually calibrating their plans of attack.  Every single person in the scene has a different idea of what kind of movie they’re in, so that the world’s most frequently quoted soliloquy is the only anchor that provides the bizarre exchange any sense of structure.  Megalopolis appreciators will tell you that this teetering, unfocused tone is the sign of a genius director at work, exploring new cinematic territory by disregarding minor concerns like coherence or purpose.  In my eyes, it’s a sign that the film isn’t directed at all; it’s a gathering of immense resources and disparate ideas into a single frame to accomplish nothing in particular, just an awkward dissonance.  Coppola may have had a clear picture of Megalopolis envisioned in his mind, but he did a piss-poor job of communicating that vision to his collaborators and his audience.

This is a sprawling, extravagantly expensive movie with exactly two ideas.  The first is that America is currently experiencing its own Fall of Rome, an idea that was popular among academics and media types about two decades ago.  The second is that Francis Ford Coppola is an underappreciated genius, an idea that was popular among academics and media types about four decades ago.  The America-in-decline angle of the story is at least well suited to the past-his-own-prime auteur’s current mindset as a bitter old man.  It not only affords Megalopolis an easy aesthetic mashup of Roman & Manhattan architecture on which to build its chintzy CG future-world, but it also gives Coppola a platform to complain about the newfangled things that bother him as a geriatric grump, like cancel culture, queer people, and Taylor Swift.  The signs that America has lost its way in amoral decadence include public lesbian smooching, pop music hags like Swift masquerading as teenage virgins, journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes, and mouth-breathing masses finding their bread-and-circuses entertainment value in the lowly artform of professional wrestling.  This, of course, could all be turned around if great men like Coppola were handed the reins of culture & governance, as represented in Adam Driver’s genius architect inventor who’s held back by small-minded bureaucrats.  Driver’s Caesar Catalina has discovered & commodified a miraculous fix-all substance called Megalon that will transform society into a golden utopia through better housing, better fashion, better medicine, and better artistic inspiration . . . if only the evil government figures and conniving women in his life would just get out of the way.  He discovered this substance by loving his wife very much, as the main supernatural conceit of the film is that it’s set in a world where all women are either villainous sluts or virtuous spouses, and the only way to save America from becoming the next Rome is by returning to old-fashioned family values.  It looks & talks like a movie that cares about the future, but all of its actual ideas & attitudes long for the past.

Megalopolis is the ultimate vanity project, Coppola’s tribute to his own genius.  It’s debatable whether he sees himself more as the outside-the-box architect of the future (Driver) or the wealthy but fading uncle who will ensure that future’s existence by keeping his money in the family (Jon Voight), but the movie is astonishingly masturbatory either way.  I can’t get over his cowardice in not casting himself as an actor in one of those two roles, as is tradition with smaller-scale vanity projects like The Room, The Astrologer, and the Neil Breen oeuvre.  Even more so, I can’t get over the hubris of making this $120 mediocrity about how his world-changing genius is held back by small-minded money men, when those same resources could have funded a dozen projects from younger visionaries who actually do have something new to say but no capital behind them. Coppola somehow doesn’t see that he’s the villain of his own piece.  He’s the old-fashioned conservative mayor (Esposito) getting in the way of young, iconoclastic talent (Driver).  If you look at the films produced by his company American Zoetrope, it’s essentially a nepo baby slush fund, investing mostly in properties that bear the Coppola family name (with occasional exceptions for sex-pest friends who can’t find funding elsewhere).  Compare that to Martin Scorsese lending his name recognition as a producer to filmmakers like Joanna Hogg, Josephine Decker, and The Safdie Brothers.  Both New Hollywood legends have benefited from the critical scam of “late style” forgiving some of the looser, lazier touches of their recent works, but only one has been investing in the future of filmmaking beyond his own mortality.  Coppola has no moral obligation to spend his production money outside the bounds of his vanity or his family, but it’s a little rich to watch this self-funded self-portrait of misunderstood, cock-blocked genius projected on an IMAX screen at a corporate multiplex and not scoff at the lack of self-awareness.

There are fleeting moments of pleasure to be found in Megalopolis‘s 140min runtime.  While most of the cast appears to be totally lost in terms of intent or tone, Adam Driver gives a commanding, compelling performance that vibrates at just the right frequency to match the uncanniness of the material (a skill put to much better use in the similarly bizarre Annette).  Audrey Plaza & Shia LeBeouf gradually establish menacing chemistry together as a semi-incestuous duo of schemers who attempt a coup on Driver & Voight’s empire.  Their softly kinky aunt-on-nephew sex scene together is maybe the one moment that genuinely works on a dramatic level, and the downfall of their failed plot to seize power is the one moment of genuinely successful humor: a visual gag involving John Voight’s lethal boner.  However, even the punchline conclusion to their saga is a nasty, hateful lashing out at power-hungry women and gender-nonconformers that immediately sours the movie’s sole moment of levity.  Visually & thematically, it’s all very limited and uninspired, but there are enough talented performers on the cast list to make sure something lands.  Even the casting feels like a grotesque hoarding of misused resources, though, with formidable players like Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, and Jason Schwarzman being given nothing to do except stand around and support or thwart Driver’s world-changing genius as humanity’s Savior Artist.  After seeing Megalopolis, I’m less convinced than ever that any single man’s singular genius could possibly be the savior of anything. It’s a lot more likely that the resources earned by the world’s Great Men will be locked away in trophy cases, only to be passed down to family members as heirlooms & inherited wealth.  There’s no real future here, just mawkish glorification of the past.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Superman – Man of Tomorrow (2020)

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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. 

With this film, a new subfranchise was born, entitled the “Tomorrowverse,” inspired by the title Superman: Man of Tomorrow. It’s yet another origin story for our old pal Superman: raised by simple farmers, aware of his extraterrestrial origin but with no knowledge of his people or culture; starting out as a flying vigilante in street clothes before Ma Kent creates his iconic outfit out of the clothing in which he was swaddled as a baby; meeting Lois Lane as the newest member of the Daily Planet; debuting as a public figure by saving a launched vehicle from plummeting into Metropolis; believing that he may have found an ally in Lex Luthor coming to trust him before the inevitable betrayal. If that all sounds a little rote, it’s because it is. Sure, there are some novel elements. Here, the big blue Boy Scout learns about his origins from Martian Manhunter, and the creation of longtime Superman villain Parasite is because of an attack from the interstellar bounty hunter Lobo. Even with that in mind, few of these films have plated it as safe as Man of Tomorrow. As a result, the end product is fine – 82 minutes of palatable, safe Superman stuff, but not something that you could call special or interesting. 

After an opening sequence in which an elementary-aged Clark has to go home from a sleepover at another boy’s house; he’s disquieted by his peer’s reaction to an old horror movie in which the villainous alien invader reveals his true face. Flashing forward, the now adult Clark Kent (Darren Criss) is an intern at The Daily Planet, which mostly means that he’s fetching coffee for people with bylines. Delivering the staff’s orders to an event where Lex Luthor (Zachary Quinto, an inspired choice) is planning to launch his latest doohickey into space, Luthor is confronted by a grad student named Lois Lane (Alexandra Daddario), who exposes his unconcerned-to-the-point-of-malice negligence about the people living near the launch site. Clark, in the middle of a quick conversation with a janitor at the facility that serves to establish said janitor’s humanity before exposure to space technobabble turns him into one of the film’s antagonistic forces, leaps into action to stop everyone from being reduced to ashes by the falling debris. After this is done, he’s now a public figure. Ma Kent gives him the suit, he congratulates Lois on her scoop while learning that she’s got her sights on taking down the so-called “Superman” now, and he continues to find himself pursued by a shadowy figure. Said figure eventually reveals himself to be the shapeshifting J’onn J’onzz, aka Martian Manhunter (Ike Amadi), and establishes that they are both the last of their kind. When he first came to Earth, he sought out others like him and briefly touched the mind of the infant Kal-El, and in so doing was able to retain the baby’s earliest memories and can share the images of Clark’s birth parents with him, as well as learn the truth about his home planet’s destruction. This sets up the appearance of Lobo (Ryan Hurst), a bounty hunter from space who has been sent by parties unknown to “collect” the last Kryptonian. The initial conflict with Lobo results in one of the alien’s devices going off near that poor doomed janitor (Brett Dalton), interacting with the lab equipment around him to turn him into “Parasite,” a purple monster that absorbs energy, growing stronger with each encounter, becoming another threat to Metropolis that the freshman Superman must juggle. 

Where there are highlights, they come mostly at the beginning and end of the film. The opening, in which a young Clark is disturbed by his friend’s innocent statements about scary aliens, sets up a story element that does return later, when a now-adult Superman tells a gathered mob that the monster attacking the power plant is human while he himself is extraterrestrial. It ends up a bit underdeveloped, and it’s a shame that the opening scene is the strongest one. When we first meet the man who will become Parasite, we learn about his home life (wife, elementary aged daughter, another one on the way), his past (two tours in Iraq), and that he has his suspicions about what’s going on at the laboratory that employs him. When he gets turned into a monster, I thought to myself, “Gee, this sure is a lot like Spider-Man 3’s Sandman plot,” and damned if the film didn’t follow through. We see him visit his daughter, he contemplates the monster he becomes, and he ultimately sacrifices himself when forced to consider his humanity. It’s a little cheap to go back to “the villain is defeated by love” as a climax after so recently (and more cynically and satisfactorily) going to that well in Constantine: City of Demons. Nothing is really new here, and everything that happens between the beginning and the end is such a mishmash that I had to go back and see if the satellite falling and Lobo encounter were part of the same set piece or not (they’re separate events, but I can’t separate them in my mind). Quinto’s Luthor is fresh; he’s really bringing back a lot of that old Sylar energy, and that’s fun. Lois and Clark have little in the way of chemistry at this point, but there is something that’s at least thoughtful in the way that she reveals to Clark that she plans to reschedule her Superman interview last minute as a power play, which allows him to pull a reverse Uno on her by doing the same as Superman. 

As of this writing, this is the final Superman solo animated outing from this outfit, other than something called “Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons,” which looks like shit. That may end up saving this from being the worst of the Supes films, since it’s otherwise the most banal and flavorless of the bunch. Doomsday was pretty average but was elevated by a voice performance from Anne Heche that made it something more special than it really had the right to be. All-Star Superman has been one of the real highlights of this watch-through; Superman vs. The Elite was less than the sum of its parts, but the highs in did have were more than anything that was on display here; Unbound was characterized by more complex interpersonal dynamics. Even when these films have seemed immature or as if they were catering to an audience that it didn’t want to get “too cerebral” for, none of them have felt more like a Saturday morning cartoon than this one. The new artistic design is, to give it credit, very evocative of the thick ink lines that comic books are known for, and perhaps I’ll get used to it, but I was not won over. In truth, that makes this not only the least interesting Superman solo film, it’s also the ugliest (until Super Sons—shudder). It feels like a real slap to give a movie that’s as inoffensive and wispy as this one such a low star rating since there’s really nothing wrong with it; there’s just nothing really there. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond