Lagniappe Podcast: Madame Web (2024)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Amazonian spider-research actioner Madame Web (2024) and Dakota Johnson’s legendary press tour promoting it.

00:00 Welcome

02:22 The Tinder Swindler (2022)
07:00 The Contestant (2024)
17:27 Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
22:13 The Lobster (2015)
26:26 Hundreds of Beavers (2024)
30:50 I Saw the TV Glow (2024)
44:35 Stunt Rock (1978)
48:16 Rodan (1956)

52:22 Madame Web (2024)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Bloody Pit of Horror (1965)

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There’s a long tradition of horror movies claiming to adapt Edgar Allan Poe stories while really only taking inspiration from those stories’ titles, from the Lugosi-Karloff classics The Black Cat & The Raven to David DeCoteau’s softcore beefcake take on The Pit and the Pendulum.  For as long as horror cinema has existed as a medium, Poe’s name has been exploited for easy marketing appeal, due to its synonymous association with Gothic tales of “the macabre.”  What makes the 1965 Italo schlock Bloody Pit of Horror stand out in that tradition is that it dares to imagine a world where rather than claiming to adapt Poe without any meaningful connection to his work, horror movies do the same to Marquis de Sade instead.  I suppose that’s because de Sade’s name is synonymous with kinky smut the same way Poe’s is with Gothic literature.  By slapping de Sade’s name onto Bloody Pit of Horror, American distributors weren’t claiming to directly adapt 120 Days of Sodom or Justine; they were merely conveying a whiff of sadomasochistic sleaze for those interested in watching buxom models get tortured in bikinis.  They did, however, slap a direct quote from de Sade into the opening credits, citing him as saying “My vengeance needs blood!”  Unsurprisingly, that quote only triggers results for Bloody Pit of Horror when you google it, either because the filmmakers completely made it up, or because de Sade’s smuttier material is what’s more typically associated with his name.

Bloody Pit of Horror is a low-budget haunted castle movie in which a small crew of horror-marketing advertisers are location scouting for a series of photographs meant to illustrate horror novels, mostly posing hot young women in old, rusty torture devices.  There is some metatextual humor to that premise, given that the movie itself is just an excuse to pose the same images, but any semblance of purpose or subtext stops there.  Mostly, the models & camera crew explore the castle’s crypts & hallways to low-energy lounge music, in no particular rush to do anything in particular between photoshoots.  Their lackadaisical workday is violently interrupted by the resident castle freak, of course, who believes himself to be possessed by the restless spirit of a red-hooded vigilante brute known as The Crimson Executioner, dead for centuries before their arrival.  In truth, he’s a former colleague – a professional muscle man who’s been driven mad by professional & romantic rejections to the point of an incel killing spree.  From there, it’s a beefcake vs. cheesecake showdown, with the masked madman strapping the models into ancient, complex torture devices so they can sensually writhe in bondage before ritualistic death.  Iron maidens, body stretchers, pulleyed-spikes, boobytrapped bondage ropes attached to loaded crossbows: he’s got an entire toy chest full of naughty lethal weapons, and he’s not afraid to bare his naked, oiled-up chest while operating them.

On the 1960s Italo horror spectrum, Bloody Pit of Horror falls somewhere between the literary Gothic staging of Black Sunday and the shameless porno-mag erotica of The Vampire and The Ballerina without ever matching the heights of either work.  The villain’s insane, confessional rants in the third act are far enough over the top to make it worthwhile for schlock junkies, though, especially if you have an appetite for vintage nudie-cutie kitsch.  Here’s where I’ll confess that I saw a censored, low-res American edit of the film on used DVD instead of tracking down a pristine, untouched copy of the original Italian cut.  I am apparently so adverse to sitting through ads on Tubi that I’m willing to watch an ancient thrift store DVD where the VHS tracking of the tape it was copied from is more visible in-frame than the cheesecake models’ naked breasts.  I’m ultimately glad I saw the slightly shortened American edit, though, since the Italian version did not include the unearned allusions to Marquis de Sade in the credits and on the poster.  That was an American marketing invention meant to signal exactly what flavor of smut was being sold (slightly non-vanilla), which I’ll confess still worked on me six decades later when I plucked it out of a Minneapolis record store bin.  I can’t say that Poe’s name on the front cover would’ve sold me on it in the same way, but that’s likely because his name’s too ubiquitous in the genre to maintain any novelty.

-Brandon Ledet

Death Dancers (1993)

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It wasn’t until decades after the genre’s American heyday that French critics coined the term “film noir”.  Meanwhile, noir’s younger, hornier dipshit cousin the erotic thriller was immediately self-labeled as a real-time marketing term instead of as a posthumous critical marker.  The recent documentary We Kill for Love is an excellent, exhaustive rundown on the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s & 90s, with specific attention paid to the cheaper, direct-to-video end of the genre.  There are some great insights throughout the doc, from how the bulk of the genre takes direct inspiration from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill more than any of the more obvious Joe Eszterhas reference points to how its popularity was greatly aided by video rental stores’ desperate need to stock their shelves with off-brand substitutes for more popular studio titles that were in greater demand than supply.  For instance, someone who was disappointed that they could not rent a fresh copy of Basic Instinct might be tempted to take home the dominatrix-themed, Troma-distributed serial killer erotica Death Dancers instead until the shelves could be restocked.  There’s a vast difference in budget & quality between those two pictures, but the video store shelf was a great equalizer that presented them on the same level, with Death Dancers self-labeled as “An Erotic Thriller” on its cardboard sleeve to attract browsers’ attention.  That announced genre distinction might actually be somewhat of a misnomer, since Death Dancers shamelessly crosses the line from erotic thriller to softcore porno, featuring multiple scenes of fully nude actors grinding their pelvises together in rhythmic pantomime.  Given how gleefully vulgar mainstream players like Showgirls were at the time, though, I suppose the distinction is mostly meaningless.

Do you know what else is mostly meaningless?  Practically everything that happens in Death Dancers.  We open in the sunny, beachfront apartment of our central dominatrix figure (Deborah Dutch), as she wistfully whispers to the world outside her window about her past trauma, apparently eroticizing the memory of a forced miscarriage as she writhes in ecstasy on a kitchen chair.  She’s dressed in full goth drag in the middle of a sunny afternoon: black wig, black satin gloves, black stockings, black soul.  Despite the physical abuse she suffers in black & white flashbacks, her breathy narration is horny nonsense, including the titular tangent “Come dance with me. Come death dance with me.  Come, oh god, come death dance with me.”  Gradually, we gather enough info to piece together her M.O.  She’s the madame for a small army of female submissives whom she pimps out to male clients, luring in customers with phone-sex promises of total servitude.  Those customers quickly become victims, though, as her submissives are ordered to immediately murder anyone who physically harms them, even within a consensual kink scenario.  You see, our antiheroine dominatrix is fed up with the abuse she’s suffered from the men in her life, so she’s gotten into the serial-murder racket through the kink scene as a way to exact her revenge on the entire gender.  Meanwhile, an undercover cop who’s hot on her tail has similar flashbacks to trauma of his own. As images of the volatile pair’s pasts become increasingly entwined, the audience is eventually clued into how they found themselves locked into the never-ending death dance of their opposing professions in the first place.  It takes a minute to get there, but thankfully S&M strippers frequently mime group sex configurations in the background to help keep the energy up in the meantime.

Death Dancers is more music video than feature film.  Sleazy synth & sax numbers drone constantly as nude actors model whips, chains, sunglasses, breast implants, and high-waist panties under nightclub stage lights & bubble machines.  It’s just as much a relic of MTV-era music video artistry as it is a video store shelf-filler from the erotic thriller boom.  It’s pretty amusing as a Skinemax-flavored screensaver, especially once it pretends that it has a Hitchcockian mystery worth solving when it’s really just a horny mood piece.  I can’t claim to have seen all of the hundreds of titles referenced in We Kill for Love as the bulk of the direct-to-video erotic thriller genre (at least not until I clear them from my disgustingly overstuffed Letterboxd watchlist), but I still recognized this as an exceedingly generic entry in the canon despite the S&M angle of its premise.  Death Dancers only made an impression on me in that it had me thinking, “This is fun & all, but it’s no Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls” and then, naturally, “I need a new hobby.”

-Brandon Ledet

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2024)

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Calling an actor’s performance “vulnerable” is often just a delicate way of saying they appear nude on screen in sub-glamorous circumstances.  Actor-writer-director-editor Joanna Arnow appears to be acutely aware of this critical cliche, which she goes out of her way to mock & undercut in her sophomore feature The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed.  After spending a third of her screentime lounging around nude in a lover’s cramped, poorly lit New York City apartment, she bends over to spread her buttcheeks for the older man’s pleasure, and he dryly declares “Now that’s vulnerable!”  It’s one funny punchline among many in a movie that’s more like a comic strip diary than an autofictional novel.  Joanna Arnow’s vulnerability is essential to the text, as she plays a fictionalized version of herself (named Ann, for short) opposite her real-life parents and a small cast of suitors who illustrate real-life anecdotes of misadventures in kink-scene dating.  Given the fictional Ann’s extensive experience with BDSM, it’s tempting to read Joanna‘s “vulnerability” as a public humiliation kink, but the truth is it’s not any more extreme than most semi-autobiographical comedies about an indie filmmaker’s NYC dating life (see also: Flames, Pvt Chat, Appropriate Behavior, etc.).  Arnow’s just willing to make a joke at her own expense after indulging in that narcissistic ritual.  Now that’s vulnerable!

Almost every scene of The Feeling has a set-up and punchline rhythm to it in that way.  It’s a film made entirely of short clips of low-stakes, emotionless interactions in which the joke is just how banal it feels to be alive.  We bounce around the three tidy corners of Ann’s limited existence—work, family, sex—where she’s constantly being told what to do by elder micromanagers.  At work, she’s ordered around by corporate-speak bureaucrats; at home, by adorably sour parents.  At her on-again-off-again dom’s apartment, she’s ordered around by a middle-aged man who’s just as indifferent to her presence as everyone else in her life, except with an added layer of opt-in roleplay.  The only relief from this universal indifference is the sanctuary of Ann’s undecorated apartment, where there are no pets or hanged pieces of art personalizing her space.  She is a character defined by absence of characteristics, which is darkly hilarious in scenes where doms command her to tell them what she desires and she can’t come up with anything specific, defaulting instead to stock-character roles like Fuck Pig or furniture.  In most BDSM relationship dynamics, it’s the sub’s job to tell the dom what to tell them to do, so the heroic journey of our protagonist is all in learning how to assert herself and define her own personality against a world that’s so deeply, oppressively bland.  It feels incredibly good when she gets there (and incredibly terrible when she backslides).

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the driest comedy you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about a BDSM confessional where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.  Most of its filmic artistry is in Arnow’s tight control of the edit, which both trims completely static interactions down to concentrated bursts of social tension and tells a larger story of personal growth through selective sequencing.  The audience can always tell exactly how emotionally invested Ann is in her various romantic & sexual relationships by how long Arnow is willing to linger with them.  When she’s trying to branch out from her long-term dom/sub relationship, the movie takes on a speed-dating rhythm that cuts between the various doofus men of NYC in rapid-fire clips.  When she’s indulging in her very first genuine romantic partnership, it maintains its average short-burst scene length but shows fewer interactions outside that relationship, putting her workplace and homelife annoyances on the backburner for a stretch (much to the audience’s relief).  If you catch Ann squeezing a sad envelope of room-temperature beans into a microwaveable glass bowl to eat for dinner alone, you know that she’s not particularly invested in any of her current relationships. It’s all told in editorial curation, which is the only element of the film with a pronounced sense of style; everything else is contained in a purposefully flat, digital, Soderberghian void.

If Joanna Arnow is expressing anything about herself to the audience through the avatar of Ann, it’s a young person’s anxiety about not being especially good at anything.  Ann is bad at her job, bad at small talk, bad at roleplay, bad at folding laundry, bad at everything.  She’s super relatable in that way, especially for anyone who was socially suffocated by overbearing parents and then unleashed unto the world at 18 with the expectation that they’re a fully formed adult with their own defined personality & desires.  Those efforts to define herself might’ve lacked specificity without the BDSM angle of her love life, so it’s for the best that Arnow chose vulnerability instead of cowering from cliche.

-Brandon Ledet

Queendom (2024)

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After a softer-than-expected box office weekend for big-budget franchise extenders The Garfield Movie and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, my podcast playlist was flooded with mournful reports that movie theaters are dying and there’s nothing we can do to save them.  Spending a couple of days listening to these endless eulogies around the house had me grieving the loss of the only social & artistic outlet I can routinely afford, so I decided to say goodbye to my old friend by going to The Movies one final time.  At my neighborhood cinema that night, I was surprised to find that The Movies are still very much alive.  The Broad was playing three all-time classics on three separate screens—Tongues Untied, A Woman Under the Influence, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure—while also hosting a pop-up sushi restaurant and a weekly pinball club.  Meanwhile, I and a few dozen other movie nerds showed up to watch a documentary about a queer Russian street performer who weaponizes drag as high-fashion political activism under the constant threat of arrest.  Despite reports to the contrary, I think we’re going to be alright.

Queendom & Tongues Untied played as a double bill in New Orleans Film Society’s inaugural LGBTQ+ Film Showcase (with the other half of the program filled out by The Watermelon Woman & Desire Lines).  It was a great pairing not only because of their shared themes of confrontational queer activism in the face of fascist governments, but also because of their low-budget D.I.Y. production values.  While Marlon Riggs made Tongues Untied with contemporary video-art equipment, a significant portion of Queendom was filmed on its modern equivalent: smartphones.  The documentary is a portrait of nonbinary Russian drag queen Gena Marvin, roughly in the stretch of time between Moscow street protests over the arrest of Alexei Navalny and Moscow street protests over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Marvin was a silent participant in both spontaneous rallies, appearing in genderfucked space-alien drag to both highlight the political topic at hand and to defy the Russian state’s hostility toward any public queer life.  For her participation in the Navalny protests, she was expelled from beauty school.  For her participation in the Russo-Ukrainian War protests, She was arrested off the street.  We were told in the pre-film intro that the documentary’s cinematographer had to wear roller-skates for most of the shoot so they wouldn’t also get arrested and lose that day’s footage, but there would’ve been surviving documentation of Marvin’s protests regardless, given that any time she steps out of the house in her fetishistic high heels, she’s constantly recorded by gawking smartphones (and threatened with vigilante beatings for her supposed transgressions against decency).

Outside those protests, most of Marvin’s activism is in her refusal to dampen her visibly queer characteristics while existing in public.  If anything, she intentionally amplifies her gender nonconformity both for aesthetic beauty and for easy visual provocation – maintaining an entirely bald, eyebrowless head while modeling stripper boots and ripped lingerie, even when grocery shopping.  Her photoshoots documenting her various “costumes” are all fashion magazine editorials done on spec, primarily posted on Instagram when they should be in legitimate publication.  In the film’s most satisfying sequence, we’re treated to a montage of Marvin’s Insta stories, getting a taste of both how great her artistry is and just how much of it is confined to a phone screen.  Meanwhile, in her rural hometown of Magadan, her loving but queerphobic grandparents push her to drop the act, butch up, and get a formal education (or at least demand to be paid for her labor, since publications like Vogue Russia will only “compensate” her with exposure).  Much of the film follows Marvin’s frustrated attempts to get her grandfather to not just love her but accept her on her own terms.  He obviously wants the best for his grandchild, but he’s also a brutish old-schooler who will say unforgivably cruel things to her in the heat an argument in a way that betrays just how bigoted he is at heart, with no sign of softening.  As a result, just as much of the runtime is spent with Marvin rolling her eyes on speakerphone with her semi-estranged grandfather grumbling on the other end as it is spent inside that phone, submerged in her otherworldly artistry.

Gena Marvin’s art is a gorgeous, emotional fuck-you to the state that would rather she be dead than click-clacking down a public sidewalk.  As a documentary, Queendom can’t help but feel a little safe & formulaic when compared to the striking visuals of its subject’s artistry, which wasn’t helped by having to share a double bill with the confrontational, idiosyncratic genius of Marlon Riggs.  It’s still risky filmmaking, though, and there’s a violent tension to even its most mundane, everyday public scenes.  It’s incredible that this footage not only exists but was exported to an excited audience half a world away, proving to me that there’s always going to be a place for cinema as a public, communal ritual (while also putting the petty capitalism of box-office handwringing into a larger perspective of what’s happening in the world right now).  Maybe it’ll be tough for $200mil popcorn-bucket sellers to get funded by corporate investors in the near future, but those were never the heart of the artform anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Mind Game (2004)

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I’ve been incredibly lucky to see multiple movies by Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa in a proper theater, where his vibrant free-for-all imagery shines in all its psychedelic glory.  While he mostly works as a showrunner for televised anime, Yuasa’s feature films Inu-Oh and Night is Short, Walk on Girl both played at local multiplexes in their initial run, and both made it clear why his expressive, imaginative visual style often gets him cited as a successor to the late Satoshi Kon.  It’s a shame I was either too young or too out of the loop to catch his debut feature Mind Game that way in 2004, but thankfully local repertory series WW Cinema recently filled in that gap.  I was instantly on board for the layered multimedia animation style of Mind Game, which quickly establishes Yuasa as a visual genius, even if only in flashes.  It took me much longer to warm up to the film’s immature nerd-boy sexuality, but I eventually got there once that got psychedelic too.  Mind Game likely would’ve been my favorite movie as a teenager had I caught it fresh, but now I can only see it as a crude prototype for Yuasa’s more recent masterworks like Inu-Oh.  Regardless, any time one of his films plays on a nearby screen is a cultural event, especially since I don’t watch nearly enough television to keep up with the bulk of his work.

Nishi is a young 20-somethings loser who’s still hung up on his childhood crush and his childhood dreams of becoming a famous manga artist but is too shy & cowardly to do anything about either.  When his crush is threatened with rape by two yakuza in her family’s diner, he fails to come to her defense, speaking up just forcefully enough to get himself shot instead of saving the day.  In the afterlife, his soul is confronted with video footage of his cowardice, then defies the orders of a shapeshifting God to fade into oblivion by instead returning to his body to fight off the rapist gangsters who killed him.  The gamble works, sending the yakuza’s victims on a wild car chase that lands them in the belly of a whale for the majority of the remaining runtime.  Then things get weird.  Inside the whale, Nishi gradually learns emotional maturity and how to genuinely connect with people instead of ogling them as a pervy outsider.  It’s character growth that somewhat helps soften the grotesque sexual assault depicted in the first half and the constant commentary on the cartoonish proportions of his love interest’s breasts – just not entirely.  The main point of the story is about learning to fully embrace life instead of cowering from it, but there is some tangible subtext in a young Yuasa beating himself up about his own social immaturity as an illustrator who’s used to living & thinking alone instead of healthily interacting with others.  The good news is that two decades later he’s demonstrated that personal maturity in Inu-Oh, which has all of the visual inventiveness of Mind Game (including gorgeous animation of mythical whales) without all the teen-boy sexual hangups souring the vibe.

As much as I’m downplaying Mind Game as one of Yuasa’s finest works, it is oddly the one I’d most readily return to for rewatch.  That’s mostly because it’s bookended by gorgeous, rapid-fire montages of isolated images that piece together a birth-to-death lifespan for its four central characters (the whale-belly captives) that I’m not sure I fully absorbed on first watch.  Yuasa gives you just enough visual information for your brain’s pattern-recognition software to piece everything together, but I’m not sure I fully trust the conclusions I reached in the theater.  For a movie that spends most of its time sitting around the belly of a whale, waiting for something to happen in existential angst, it really does throw a lot at you.  The representation of God as a kaleidoscopic collection of impossible bodies that changes shape every time you look directly at it is a major highlight, recalling Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.  There’s a funhouse mirror warping to most of the imagery that stretches through the screen to literally bend your mind, but there’s also a Tom Goes to the Mayor-esque use of crude photocopy printouts that grounds the whole thing in the rudimentary tools of its era.  All of Yuasa’s magic tricks are already proudly on display in Mind Game; it’s just a shame that his immaturity was just as loudly vibrant in this instance. Or maybe it’s just a shame that I had personally aged out of its grody nerd-boy charms before I caught up with it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Batman vs. Robin (2015)

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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. 

In this follow-up to Son of Batman, the titular Batman and son butt heads over (sigh) the use of deadly force. It’s more complicated than that this time around, luckily, but that’s once again the dead horse we’re beating, still. It was hard to get my enthusiasm up for this one, since it not only features Damian, whom I’m mostly apathetic about, but also introduces the Court of Owls, a Gotham secret society introduced shortly after I stopped reading comics and which I don’t find particularly interesting. This ended up being a bit more interesting than expected, though, and helped me push through. 

The film opens with Batman (Jason O’Mara) following Robin/Damian (Stuart Allen) to the hideout of the evil Dollmaker (Weird Al(!)), where the latter has traced a series of kidnappings. The ten-year-old Boy Wonder has impulsively gone ahead and forced Batman to follow him instead of going together. By the time he catches up, he starts freeing the children while his son and sidekick pursues Dollmaker, leaving an opportunity for the mysterious Talon (Jeremy Sisto) to introduce himself (mysteriously, of course), give Damian a little speech about how murder is sometimes necessary, and then kill Dollmaker, leaving the scene so that it appears Damian did it. Bruce is quick to believe that this is the case, even if Alfred (David McCallum) and Dick/Nightwing (Sean Maher) are more willing to believe the boy. Alfred, rather irresponsibly, fiddles with the home security system to allow Robin the chance to go roaming about the city at night—remember, trained assassin or not, he is ten—which allows Talon to continue to try and lure the kid to the dark side. For his part, Bruce isn’t doing such a hot job at being a father, given that he hasn’t even mentioned Damian to the woman that he’s currently dating, Samantha (Grey DeLisle), let alone introduced them, and he’s having a hard time adjusting to suddenly being a father. Luckily, this leads easily into flashbacks to his own childhood, including his hearing about a secret society known as “the Court of Owls” that rule Gotham from the shadows, and his father’s gentle bedtime promises that there was no such thing. In the present, it’s clear that they do, and that they’re pulling some strings; in fact, their Grandmaster is unwittingly working away at him from two angles, as the Court is attempting to flush out Batman before he can end their criminal activities and court (no pun intended) Bruce Wayne into joining their ranks after his father had rejected them decades before. Talon is their enforcer, and his loyalty is based upon their promise to make him into one of their immortal soldiers (with the caveat that they haven’t really perfected the process, and it seems to always be a little bit of a failure). 

The fight scenes in this one are pretty good, which is always true, but there’s a little more variety in this outing. There’s sparring earlier on between Damian and other characters, and it’s fine and all, but there’s a clear difference in the body language of the characters later in the film when Damian has gone rogue. In his first fight with Batman, it’s clear that Bruce is just trying to let his son tire himself out with his spin kicks and acrobatics so that he doesn’t actually have to punch his child in the face, but eventually realizes he’s going to have to, and that was sufficiently dynamic visually that it’s worth noting upon. The big invasion of Wayne Manor by the Court’s “Owls” made for a satisfactory climactic set piece, albeit I’m very bored with Batmechs, I can tell you that much. What really makes this one stand out is Bruce getting dosed with hallucinogenic gas; he basically has a bad acid trip in which he foresees Damian becoming a killer, wearing the cape and cowl, and that makes him want to be a better father. In his hallucination, the child version of himself/Damian (their similarity to one another having previously been underscored by using the same character model with different eye colors in the earlier film is carried over into this one) tells him that, in his grief, he had allowed himself to become little better than the “dark forces” that killed his parents, and that his unwillingness to listen to his son would cause Damian to become something even worse. 

These movies are rarely this psychologically mature or complex, so I like that what drives the emotional story for the two main adult characters here, Talon and Bruce, is what each of them is projecting about themselves onto Damian. You know Batman’s backstory, and Talon’s is a kind of dark mirror of both Bruce’s and Damian’s. An orphan like Bruce, Talon was taken in by a thief who taught him how the finer points of burglary in a kind of criminal reflection of Bruce’s mentorship of Dick and Damian, but Talon was mercilessly beaten for his failures. This led to him becoming a vigilante as an adult as well, but under the guidance of the Court of Owls, his activity always has the flavor of violent vengeance, while Bruce (ostensibly) values justice over revenge. Bruce hallucinates Damian as a mass-murderer on an unimaginable scale because he fears this darkness in himself. Talon, for his part, sees a great deal of himself in Damian, and perhaps also sees the possibility of making up for what was done to him, turning the boy into a killer like himself but also making sure that the generational abusive trauma stops with him, as twisted as that might be. When it becomes the best option for the Court’s end goals to kill Damian, Talon ultimately refuses, looking into the boy’s face and seeing his own, just as Bruce had, and being unwilling to continue the cycle of violence, revolting against the Court instead. The ultimate conflict comes down to two different men projecting their traumas onto a little boy, and what they do when that trigger is brushed. It’s thoughtful, and elevates this one a little bit over some others in this franchise. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Brain Eaters (1958)

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There are a lot of TikTok clips floating around out there that muddle the definition of the “POV” shot, to the point where it feels like the war to maintain its original meaning has already been lost.  Thankfully, the 1958 AIP creature feature The Brain Eaters offers a handy tool for any teens confused by the meaning of a camera’s POV.  Halfway through the hour-long horror cheapie, one of the titular brain eaters (parasitic dust bunnies with space-alien antennae) crawls across the carpet, up the bedframe, and over the mattress of a sleeping woman’s bedroom so the ceremonial brain eating can commence.  We watch this slow, low-to-the-ground attack in 1st-person, with the camera inching towards the soon-to-be-brain-eaten victim as she slumbers, unaware.  Now, listen to me carefully. When posting clips of this scene to your socials, do caption it “POV: When you’re about to eat some lady’s brain.”  Do not caption it “POV: When you’re asleep and about to get your brain ate.”  I hope this handy guide clears the matter up for today’s youths once and for all.

Of course, most teenagers are not scouring Tubi for vintage schlock with short enough runtimes to squeeze in before bed, but once upon a time that demographic would’ve been The Brain Eaters‘s exact audience.  The reason it’s so short is that it was specifically made to fill out a double bill at the local drive-in, so that teens had an appropriate place to make out in public while parked in the family car.  That kind of old-school B-movie filmmaking can lead to a lot of dead air between the monster attacks (all the better to make out to), but The Brain Eaters instead chooses to accept the challenge of cramming two hours of plot into one hour of celluloid.  It doesn’t waste a second of its audience’s time as it hops from brain buffet to brain buffet, speeding along its standard-issue body snatcher plot with a narration track that’s impatient to get to the second half of that night’s double bill (either Earth vs. the Spider or Terror from the Year 5000, depending on the city where you parked).  That’s why I was not at all shocked to learn that the late, great Roger Corman worked on the film as an uncredited executive producer, given that it was exemplary of the energy & efficiency desperately missing from most other contemporary drive-in fillers produced by anyone else.

I also was not shocked to learn that the film’s star, regular Corman player Ed Nelson (Bucket of Blood, Swamp Women, Attack of the Crab Monster, etc.), served as the on-set producer of the picture, since it’s essentially a vanity project about how handsome & cool he is.  Nelson plays a buff scientist who’s just as comfortable studying field-research specimens on Bunsen burners as he is knocking out alien zombies with his fists.  He’s a sophisticated brute with his heart worn proudly on his rolled-up sleeves, dragging along his lab-assistant fiancée (the sleeping woman from the film’s Brain-Eater-Cam POV shot, I’m sad to say) for each of his world-saving adventures.  The frame is filled out by plenty of other B-movie archetypes—the perpetually scared girlfriend of a naively brave cop, the hardened detective from Washington D.C. who just wants results damnit, the local old fogey who knows the entire history of the town under attack, and so on—but the only one who really matters is our smart, strapping, all-American hero.  That hero worship is obviously secondary to the brain-eating parasites that Nelson volunteers to thwart, but it’s still an adorable starring-role showcase for him anyway.

As for the brain eaters themselves, they’re not especially impressive as monster puppets.  Stuck somewhere between a throwaway Jim Henson design for a background mouse and a ball of pet hair vacuumed from under your couch, their physical characteristics are more cute than scary.  The movie leans heavily into the uncanniness of their origins & behavior in an entertaining way, though, starting with the arrival of a giant metal cone believed to be a spaceship.  As our impatient narrator explains, a mysterious, 50-foot-tall metal structure appeared without warning in the woods outside Riverdale, Illinois, immediately prompting investigation from Congress’s official UFO Committee (complete with sly match-cut from the silhouette of the cone to the silhouette of the Capitol Dome). The brain eaters appear to rise from the ground at the direction of the cone, attaching themselves to the backs of innocent victims’ necks through vampiric puncture wounds, and piloting them like body-snatched zombies.  The scariest the little scamps get is when they start body-snatching local street toughs, giving adults legitimate reasons to be scared of the youths of the day instead of just the normal, paranoid ones.  Really, the core horror of the film can be found in the question, “What is the secret of The Cone?”, since every new detail about the alien structure just makes its appearance & purpose more confusing.  It’s impervious to bullets, filled with Seussian tunnels to nowhere, and houses a godlike figure played by a young Leonard Nimoy (misspelled as “Nemoy” in the credits) whose plan for peaceful, global takeover via brain eaters actually doesn’t sound all that bad once you hear him out.

There’s a lot going on in this disposable horror-of-the-week novelty, especially considering that it only runs half the length of an average feature film.  It can be harsh (depicting dead dogs & suicide attempts), goofy (in its cutesy creature design), and genuinely baffling (adding continual complications to the mystery of The Cone), but it is never boring, not for a second.  Corman was notorious for establishing a rigid formula in his early monster movies that consistently gripped his audiences’ attention (for as long as they could stand to delay making out in the back seat) and for allowing his employees freedom to express themselves creatively as long as they adhered to that set structure.  The exaggerated Dutch angles, glowing specimen jars full of ready-to-attack brain eaters, and mystical visit from the otherworldly Nimoy all suggest that Corman-actor-turned-Corman-director Bruno VeSota had just as much fun with that freedom behind the camera as Corman-actor-turned-Corman-producer Ed Nelson had posing as a movie star in front of it.  I know it’s a little silly to mourn someone who lived 98 years and continued doing what he loved until the very end, but Corman could have lived for another 100 and it still wouldn’t be enough. 

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #213: Grey Gardens (1975) vs. Grey Gardens (2009)

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Welcome to Episode #213 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee and Brandon compare the iconic documentary Grey Gardens (1975) against its made-for-TV dramatization Grey Gardens (2009).

00:00 Welcome
02:17 Mother of the Bride (2024)
06:23 Buddies (1985)
11:55 Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970)

17:44 Grey Gardens (1975)
35:02 The Beales of Grey Gardens (2006)
42:06 That Summer (2017)
53:00 Grey Gardens (2009)

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

– The Podcast Crew

White Room (1990)

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Patricia Rozema’s sophomore feature White Room is about to get its first-ever Blu-ray release through Kino Lorber, along with Rozema’s lesser seen follow-up When Night is Falling and her calling-card debut I Heard the Mermaids Singing.  I’m sure that the 4K restoration of White Room will be a worthy purchase for any crate-digging home video collector who’s interested, considering the sensual immersion of its video art fantasy aesthetic and its dreamy pop music soundtrack.  At the same time, I’m happy to report that the still-in-print Canadian DVD I bought for a third of Kino Lorber’s list price is impressively crisp and a great cost-cutting alternative to the upcoming upgrade.  I’m also holding out hope that the Blu-ray release will lead to White Room‘s return to online streaming platforms, since it’s not currently available and it’s the kind of bizarre discovery that makes you want to recommend it to anyone who’ll listen.

Maurice Godin stars as a squeamish suburban nerd with a bad habit of peering into his neighbors’ windows as the world’s least pervy Peeping Tom.  Like a boyish, wholesome variation on a De Palma voyeur, he accidentally witnesses the rape & murder of a famous rockstar while watching her lounge around her secluded home and spends the rest of the movie beating himself up over his inaction at her death scene (literally whipping himself with thorny roses, in this instance).  Determined to become a more courageous, active participant in his own life, he moves out of his confectionary family home and into the big scary city of Toronto, where he quickly finds himself at the funeral of the murdered woman: a famous rockstar named Madeline X, played by Margot Kidder.  At the funeral, he falls for an older, mysterious woman (Kate Nelligan) who appears overly distraught at the musician’s passing, and by following her further down the rabbit hole he accidentally uncovers a larger music industry conspiracy he wishes he had just left alone. 

White Room is part romance novel, part noir, and full urban fairy tale.  Despite its contemporary fascination with MTV-era music video artistry, its narrative operates on the kind of traditionalist fairytale logic that always makes for great cinema, no matter the era.  None of the acting or character details are especially convincing as Real, but they’re in total harmony with the storybook narration track that refers to our cowardly hero as Norman the Gentle instead of just Norm. Its fictional rock numbers (partially credited to frequent Robert Eggers collaborator Mark Korven) play into that fairytale vibe as well, falling somewhere between the timeless literary songwriting of classic Kate Bush and the dreamy rock & roll of the Mary Timony album Mountains, which wouldn’t arrive for another decade.  Norm only travels from the suburbs to the urbs, but he might as well have journeyed across several cursed kingdoms to break his beloved free from the witch’s spell that kept her imprisoned in a daze (by which I mean her record company contract).

By her second feature, Rozema was already incredibly smart as a low-budget indie filmmaker, squeezing major visual impact out of meager resources.  As the film’s only celebrity get, Margot Kidder’s time on set appears to have been limited to only a few days, which Rozema stretches out across music video & interview clips to build genuine mystique around the murdered pop idol Madeline X.  The location shooting around Toronto manages to transform familiar city streets into a convincing fantasy world just by isolating the geometric lines of architecture & infrastructure in abstracted frames.  Most importantly, Rozema fully embraces the low-budget aesthetic of MTV-era video art in a way that frees her from restrictions of the real, physical world.  Besides the obvious music-video tangents afforded by the mysterious Madeline X, the film also finds excuses to indulge in video-art inserts via Norman’s POV, giving us glimpses of primal feelings that he’s too timid to express in words through video-warped images of seagulls, chess pieces, softcore pornography – whatever abstract flashes of imagery overwhelm his imagination then disappear before he can pick up a pen to jot them down.

Speaking of Norman’s imagination, he’s a difficult character to pin down: a voyeuristic man-boy who’s both driven & repelled by sex but is somehow not a threat to the women in his life.  If anything, he’s a pure object of desire for those women, modeling a romance paperback blouse through the second half of the runtime while women stare at his denim-clad ass.  He’s sometimes feminized in the edit, taking the place of the women he stalks in their most vulnerable moments and cast as the only actor who appears nude onscreen.  Godin’s performance can be a little frustrating in its boyish naivety, prompting you to imagine what more eccentric actors might have done with the role (Crispin Glover, Kyle MacLachlan, and Matt Farley all came to mind), but by the time the more hardened urbanites around him mock his earnestness with laughter it’s clear his blank-slate screen presence was more of an artistic choice than an oversight.  Norm is a fairytale prince defined by his desires & pursuits, and a lot of the joy in the film can be found in the small smirks of the women who find his naivety irresistibly cute.

If there’s anyone I’d most enthusiastically recommend White Room to besides hardcore Rozema Heads already won over by I Heard the Mermaids Singing, it would be to anyone who was charmed by the urban fantasy logic of this year’s kids-on-bikes comedy Riddle of Fire.  The narrator’s introduction of Norman the Gentle’s is just as amusingly verbose as the introduction of Petal Hollyhock, Princess of the Enchanted Blade in that more recent oddity.  Both films understand the rhythms & reasoning of fairytale storytelling on such a deep spiritual level that they can include video games & MTV parodies without their participation in the ancient traditions ever being questioned.  We instantly get the magical thinking of their narratives based on vibes alone.  The only acknowledgement of influences White Room has to get out of the way is in an end-credits dedication “with apologies to Emily Dickinson,” since the poet’s work was heavily referenced in the fictional pop-music lyrics of Madeline X.

-Brandon Ledet