Podcast #225: The Gleaners and I (2000) & Varda Docs

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Welcome to Episode #225 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, and Brandon discuss a grab bag of self-reflective documentaries directed by Agnès Varda, starting with her dumpster-diving doc The Gleaners and I (2000).

00:00 Welcome

01:20 The Company of Strangers (1990)
05:21 Adua and Her Friends (1960)
10:39 Corrina, Corrina (1994)

14:44 The Gleaners and I (2000)
32:25 Jane B for Agnès V (1988)
44:52 The Beaches of Agnès (2008)
54:26 Faces Places (2017)

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

The Phantom of the Opera (1989)

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I know it’s gauche to discuss a movie’s marketing instead of its content, but the 1989 adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera is an especially peculiar case.  Clearly, the best way to sell the film would be to piggyback off star Robert Englund’s success in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, especially since Freddy Kreuger’s make-up designer Kevin Yagher tagged along to apply the exact same make-up to this public-domain franchise.  The video store poster for The Phantom of the Opera tiptoes as close as it can to declaring “Freddy Kreuger is the Phantom of the Opera” without getting sued by New Line.  It’s not exactly false advertising, either.  The entire Phantom story is told as one long dream-sequence journey into the past, where a wisecracking Englund in the gooey Freddy makeup slashes down every fool who gets in the way of the young ingenue he wants to transform into an opera star.  What that premise doesn’t convey is that the film also adopts a romantic stage-theatre tone, playing like a throwback to classic Hammer Horror (or, at times, Masterpiece Theatre) that offers a classier, more literary take on the genre.  That’s the version of Phantom of the Opera you were sold if you happen to catch the film’s trailer, which shows you all of the period-piece tragic romance of the plot with none of the flayed-alive gorehound grue that frequently interrupts it. 

Setting up a modern-day sequel that never came to be (The Phantom of the Opera 2: Terror in Manhattan), our story starts in 1980s New York City, where The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen is auditioning to become a professional opera singer.  There’s a stage prop accident during her audition that smashes her into a mirror realm so, naturally, she travels back in time to a past life in 19th Century London, again working as a hopeful opera singer.  Only, the past version of herself is supported by a mysterious benefactor who skulks around the rafters and dungeons of the theatre, acting as her “angel” (through mentorship and murder) but carefully staying out of the spotlight.  According to the title, Englund is strictly playing the Phantom of the Opera here, but his character details are a hodgepodge amalgamation of the Phantom, Faust, Jack the Ripper and, of course, Freddy Kreuger.  The theatrical setting offers the film a classy surface aesthetic, like a straight-to-video version of Argento’s Opera.  The Phantom’s quipping & mugging in the extreme-gore kill scenes drags it back down to the base pleasures of a by-the-numbers slasher, though, which is a fun contrast to the stately background setting.  Then, when the story eventually smashes back through the looking glass to modern-day New York, bringing along Phantom Freddy with it, it’s even more fun to briefly see that dynamic flipped.

I always got the sense that Robert Englund never wanted to be fully pigeonholed as a Horror Guy, much less as Freddy Kreuger.  If nothing else, he commiserates with fellow reluctant-horror-icon Wes Craven over that professional disappointment in A New Nightmare, where the actor & director find a way to flex their more erudite offscreen personae under the Freddy Kreuger brand.  In The Phantom of the Opera, he’s clearly attempting to stray from the Freddy Krueger schtick into something more literary, but the furthest away he was allowed to get was emulating Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.  It doesn’t help that he’s wearing the Freddy makeup beneath his Phantom mask, which is stitched together from harvested patches of discolored human flesh.  That dual make-up layering is mirrored in the film’s double-exposure imagery during more surreal moments where the story travels time, echoes Faust, or underlines the Phantom’s extraordinary powers as a supernatural killer.  So much of the Phantom plays like a standard BBC adaptation of a literary classic that it’s shocking when an especially beautiful or grotesque image punches through: a vibrant shock of red fabric, a flayed man transformed into a human puppet, the Phantom posed in Mario Bava color-gel artifice, etc.  It may not be the career turn that Englund was hoping for, but it does offer a lovely, volatile contrast between the career he wished he had and the career he actually had, violently juxtaposed in real time.

-Brandon Ledet

Gamera’s 90s Makeover

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All you really need to earn respectability in the entertainment industry is to stick around long enough for the bad reviews to fade away and your presence is undeniable. It worked for Keanu Reeves, it worked for Adam Sandler, and it also worked for the fire-breathing turtle monster Gamera.  When Gamera first premiered in the 1960s, the giant turtle beast was essentially a goofy knockoff of Godzilla, and he was treated as such.  As a result, he quickly pivoted to become a “hero to children everywhere” in a long string of kiddie sequels (before Godzilla also got into that game), so that the original Daikaijū Gamera film was never treated with the same critical or historical respect as the original Gojira.  We all love Earth’s hard-shelled protector anyway, though, so it’s good to know that Gamera did eventually get his deserved victory lap in the 1990s, when he was given a slick, big-budget makeover to help boost his reputation as one of the kaiju greats.  I haven’t yet seen all of Gamera’s kid-friendly sequels from the 1960s & 70s, but I can’t imagine any could compare with his action-blockbuster spectacles from the 1990s.  Gamera’s Heisei-era trilogy is a glorious run of high-style, high-energy kaiju pictures that for once genuinely compete with the best of the Godzilla series, instead of registering as a court jester pretender to the King of Monsters’ throne.

The debut of that 90s makeover, 1995’s Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, is both the best and the most faithful of the trilogy.  Gamera is re-introduced to the world as a living relic of Atlantis, not a newly arrived extraterrestrial protector.  He battles the Giant Claw-like bird creatures the Gyaos from his 1960s days, who are theorized to have been activated by Climate Change, and his ability to fight them off is powered by a child’s love.  Just in case audiences weren’t sure that this straightforward Gamera revival was inspired by the success of Jurassic Park, Guardian of the Universe almost immediately includes an archeological dig and a scene where the scientist studying the Gyaos shoves an entire arm into their droppings like Laura Dern going shoulder deep in triceratops poop.  It’s the Jurassic Park style mixed-media approach to the visual effects that really makes this one stand out, since the plot and the monster-of-the-week enemies are such classic Gamera fare.  There’s something gorgeous about the film’s 90s green screen magic, surveillance video inserts, and rudimentary CGI mixing with the rubber monster suit tactility of classic kaiju pictures that inspires awe in this reputation-rehabilitator.  We are all Sam Neill gazing upwards, slack-jawed at our giant reptile friend and, then, begging the Japanese military to stop shooting at him so he can save the day.  Every time Gamera bleeds green ooze in his fight to save us, we too ooze a tear in solidarity.

Things turn more horrific in the 1996 sequel Gamera 2: Attack of Legion, shifting from Jurassic Park to Mimic in Hollywood comparison terms.  Instead of fighting off the Gyaos sky-beasts, Gamera has to face underground bug creatures collectively called Legion.  As a threat, Legion can be genuinely unnerving in their Phase IV-style insectoid organization skills, at one point carpeting Gamera’s entire body in a collective swarm.  In individual design, they’re a touch creepier than the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, adding a gross little cyclops eyeball to the center of each bug’s frame.  All we can do in the face of such horrors is to thank Gamera for sticking around to protect us . . . unless you happen to be one of the poor children orphaned by the large-scale destruction of his skyscraper heroism.  Gamera’s enemy in the third installment, 1999’s Revenge of Iris, is the titular parasitic monster that has been orphaned by the turtle’s heroic violence, birthed from a loan surviving egg seemingly borrowed from the set of an Alien sequel.  Really, though, Gamera has to contend with the disaffected child psychically linked to that monster, who lost her parents when Gamera crushed their apartment during a Legion attack in the previous picture.  It’s a plot that questions whether the widespread collateral damage of Gamera’s heroism is worth having him around to fight off lesser monsters, to the point where he has to fight a personified version of the Trauma he’s caused in past battles. We all still love the big guy, but accountability is important.

Of the two sequels, Revenge of Iris is the only true contender for possibly besting Guardian of the Universe as the best of Gamera’s 90s run.  By that point in the series, Gamera’s reputation as something too goofy to take seriously had been fully overcome, so there was only one goal left to achieve: make Gamera scary.  It’s an incredible accomplishment, achieved by filming the giant turtle beast from inside the homes he’s supposedly protecting with his righteous, vengeful violence.  There’s a somber, funereal tone to Revenge of Iris, as if it were clear to the filmmakers that Gamera’s 90s revival was a special moment in time that had already reached its natural conclusion.  Images of dead Gyaos covered in flies and a sea floor carpeted in dead Gameras from Atlantis’s ancient past convey a sad finality to the series echoed in Gamera’s “What have I done?” moment self-reflection when he realizes he has traumatized the very children he sought to protect.  Personally, I was much more impressed & delighted by the spectacle of Gamera’s official makeover in Guardian of the Universe, but the tonal & thematic accomplishments in Revenge of Iris are just as remarkable, considering the monster’s humble origins three decades earlier.  Attack of Legion is a worthy bridge between those two franchise pillars as well, especially on the strength of its creepy creature designs.  Gamera may not have emerged from his 90s run as a hero to all children everywhere, but he carved out an even bigger place for himself in this overgrown child’s heart.  I love my giant turtle friend, and I’m happy that he eventually found the respect he’s always deserved.

-Brandon Ledet

Zombi Holocaust (1980)

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There is no horror subgenre more hideously racist than the Italian cannibal film, and yet I keep tricking myself into watching them every time they appear in the wild on thrift-store DVDs.  The 1980 Fulci knockoff Zombi Holocaust was at least more memorably entertaining than the last time I picked up one of these cursed objects about five years ago, when I reviewed Slave of the Cannibal God.  I was hoping Zombi Holocaust would be Zombi-style gonzo Italo mayhem while fearing it might be Cannibal Holocaust-style racist Italo bullshit instead.  The results were just as evenly mixed as the title suggests.  Opening in a New York City med school where cadavers are being ransacked for lunchmeat behind professors’ backs, it at least promises a novel, urban angle on the Italo cannibal movie.  Soon enough, though, those unsanctioned organ harvests are revealed to be the work of “primitive savages” from a small Indonesian island, and the white academics set sail to see what’s causing those “Asiatic” brutes to go so violently mad.  Once on the island, the movie becomes more traditionally racist in the Mondo Italo style, except that the usual cannibal-tribesmen threat is made worse by the locals worshiping a small gang of rotting zombies who stalk the jungle and occasionally pop by for a human snack.  It’s a wild genre mashup between the kind of shameless schlock I love and the kind of shameless shlock I loathe, erratically alternating between them from minute to minute.

What’s fascinating about Zombi Holocaust‘s xenophobia is that the film actively attempts to convey an anti-racist sentiment; it’s just too tone-deaf to pull it off. In a laughable line of faux-profundity, a college professor asks if New York City is really all that different from a society of “primitive savages,” undercutting whatever point they think they’re making with their own racist terminology.  There is something to the juxtaposition of the university’s nighttime cannibal raids and its daytime surgery lectures, though, calling into question how medical study is functionally different from mad-scientist butchery.  That parallel is confirmed later when it turns out that the reason the islanders have been regressing to crazed cannibal savagery is that they’re being experimented on by the professors’ white academic colleague who has gone mad and gone rogue.  It’s a plot wrinkle spoiled by the film’s alternate American title Dr. Butcher M.D., which is a little less descriptive than Zombi Holocaust but a lot less embarrassing to say out loud when someone asks what movie you’re watching.  The messaging behind that white villainy reveal is somewhat commendable, even if it is driven by an impulse to shock & entertain rather than an impulse to discourse.  It’s also completely undone by the way every single Indonesian character is presented onscreen, since it still gets its thrills by depicting them as cannibalistic humanoids regardless of the reasoning.

It’s foolish to look for any coherent messaging in this vintage zombie cheapie, of course, so it’s ultimately a movie that lives & dies (and comes back to life) by the frequency & brutality of its violence.  There are a few mundane stretches wherein characters drive around NYC, change clothes in real time, and struggle to read a map, but for the most part it’s a volatilely entertaining picture.  When the island cannibals eat, they disembowel and chow down in swarms while their victims squirm & scream in protest.  When the mad doctor performs surgery, he cracks open his nonconsenting patients’ skulls to dig around the goop inside in full view of the camera.  There’s even an early giallo-style sequence in the hospital morgue where a gloved maniac meticulously removes a corpse’s hand with a bone saw and then runs off with it, presumably for a midnight snack.  For all of my wincing at Zombi Holocaust‘s racial stereotypes and willingness to dawdle, it did make me yell “WHAT?!” at the screen several times, which is invaluable for second-hand horror schlock.  I’m still not convinced that the Italo cannibal genre at large has anything of value to offer to cinema or to humanity, but this one example is just crazed enough in its practical-effects hyperviolence that for once I didn’t regret watching it.  I’m just a lot more likely to rewatch Burial Ground instead next time I get the itch, since it delivers the same Italo zombie goods without miring them in cannibal muck.

-Brandon Ledet

Play Dirty (1969)

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I’m not especially interested in War Films as a genre, but André de Toth’s WWII thriller Play Dirty sneaks past those well-guarded genre biases and hits me where I’m vulnerable.  Instead of being guided by the usual narrative maps of WWII stories about the valor of defeating Nazis or the horrors of what those Nazis achieved before defeat, Play Dirty is structured more like a heist picture that happens to be set on the battlefield.  It’s a crime picture first and a war movie second, as explained by a British colonel who declares in an early strategy meeting, “War is a criminal enterprise. I fight it with criminals.”  Those criminals are the men under his command: a gang of disaffected mercenaries who wear the British uniform but are more motivated by money & personal survival than they are by the prospect of defeating Hitler’s Germany.  If it were an American film, it might’ve been received as a reaction to our country’s ongoing, pointless involvement in The Vietnam War, but its pervasive Britishness divorces it from such a strict 1:1 reading, extending its commentary to all war everywhere at every time.  In Play Dirty, war is a sprawling, scrappy prison fight wherein you’re just as likely to be shot in the back by your own men as you are to be taken down by the enemy.  It deliberately strips all valor from history’s most noble victory over a warring enemy, with the Head Criminal in Charge advising, “Forget the noble sentiments if you want to live.”

A young Michael Caine provides the most familiar face (and voice) here as a clean-cut military officer who naively takes command of this criminal unit.  He immediately struggles to exert control over the undisciplined brutes, desperately pulling a gun on them whenever they refuse to obey his orders.  Unbeknownst to him, the only reason he survives these altercations is because the most undisciplined brute of all (Nigel Davenport) has been promised a bigger payout for the mission if Caine returns alive, unlike the other officers who’ve preceded him.  Their half-Inglorious Basterds, half- Sorcerer mission is to sneak behind enemy lines disguised as Italian soldiers and explode a critical Nazi fuel depot, expediting Hitler’s defeat.  The rocky path to victory is high in tension and sparse in dialogue, often with a shaky handheld camera jostling the audience with the uneasy feeling that gunfire or explosions could erupt at any moment; they often do.  On a character level, there’s no chance of meeting in the middle for Caine & Davenport, who represent opposing noble & savage philosophies of war.  In order to survive the mission, Caine has to cheat & kill just like the heartless criminals under his command, while Davenport just knowingly smiles and scoffs at the supposed differences between “playing dirty” and “playing safe.”  It’s by no means the only war picture that posits that “War makes monsters of us all,” but it is one of the only ones I’ve seen that frames that monstrous behavior as a lowly, scrappy crime spree.

Even if this gang of British soldiers weren’t sneaking behind enemy lines disguised as Italians, this would still clearly be the kind of cinematic relic Quentin Tarantino raves about through coke sweats at LA house parties to anyone who’ll listen. It’s got the exact haggard, macho hangout vibe he’s always praising in vintage genre cinema, and I’m sure he could rattle off the professional stats of all the various character actors who pad out the rest of the cast like a little kid who obsesses over baseball cards.  The only woman among those macho brutes is a German nurse whose capture raises the tension of the group dynamic for obvious, hideous reasons, which reminded me why I don’t spend much of my personal time perusing this particular video store aisle.  Even so, the rougher, confrontational approach to the genre did pique my interest in André de Toth’s directorial career, of which this was shockingly his final film. It’s got the showy, punchy impact of a much younger man with more to prove professionally, which speaks well to de Toth’s late-career enthusiasm behind the camera.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the horror & thriller titles in his catalog that speak more directly to my personal tastes (House of Wax, Crime Wave, Pitfall, etc.) almost as much as I’m looking forward to never picking up a gun on a battlefield, nor having a one-sided conversation with Quentin Tarantino.

-Brandon Ledet

Audition (1999)

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Between all the tradwife influencers, anti-feminist slanderers, anti-Choice Evangelicals, and pro-Trump merchandise bots that flood your doomscrolling app of choice, you don’t need me to tell you that old-fashioned Conservatism is back in a big way.  President-elect Donald Trump’s popular-vote victory this week was a sharp reminder that, in majority, we are a nation that yearns to turn the clock back to a made-up Leave It to Beaver 1950s at the expense of minor, inconvenient details like personal freedom & autonomy – especially for women.  There is no victory to be had over the ghouls who’ve funded & bulldozed our path to this new Conservative hellscape, since the election results indicate that they’re supplying exactly what the people demand: political & moral regression.  That’s why it can be such a relief to fantasize about victory & retribution through art, the only place left where the bad guys lose and our stories can be understood through lenses like progress, meaning, and justice.  At least, that’s what’s on my mind as I think back to watching Takashi Miike’s 1999 cult thriller Audition the week before the election.

If I can dial my own mental clock back a couple decades to when I first saw Audition in the mid-2000s (during a previous popular-vote-sanctioned Conservative hellscape), I believe my thoughts were less political.  They were more like, “Wow, this is boring,” followed by “Whoa, this is fucking sick.”  Audition is the kind of slow-burn horror that tests the patience of twentysomethings who are overeager to get to the gore, with much of its first hour playing more as a domestic drama than a serial killer thriller.  We follow a single-father widower (Ryo Ishibashi) who hopes to bring home a fresh new wife to help maintain a traditional domestic life for his teenage son, since, “A man needs a woman to support him, or he will exhaust himself.”  After sneering at a group of women who dare to have fun in public at an audible volume, he starts to doubt whether there are any demure, mindful women left worth wifing in all of Japan.  That’s when his gross filmmaker business partner steps in to introduce the titular conceit of The Audition, wherein they will host a casting call for young women to play the role of a traditional, submissive wife.  The women think it’s a fictional role for a movie, but the men know it’s for real life.

A Japanese production made to cash in on the popularity of Ring, Audition was obviously not speaking to the American political landscape.  The men who hope to entrap an unsuspecting actress in domestic servitude pine for an older, more conservative Japan.  When they overhear boisterous women daring to enjoy themselves in a public bar, they complain, “Japan in finished.”  The way the movie calls them out for indulging in the Japanese filmmaking industry’s casting couch culture obviously has its own echoes in Hollywood sexual abuse scandals, though, to the point where it’s amazing that the film wasn’t remade as a Good-For-Her Horror revenger in the #metoo era.  The widower is, of course, cosmically punished for his moral crimes by targeting the exact wrong actress from the casting call (Eihi Shiina): a torture-happy serial killer who poses as a wispy loner who’s too shy to make eye contact, when she’s really just waiting for the right time to pounce on her prey.  Men are her prey.  Yes, all men, as she explains, “All men are the same,” even if they’re using the casting couch to find a loving wife instead of a one-time hookup.

It’s easy to forget all of this patient set-up to Audition‘s hyperviolent conclusion.  The bone-sawing, needle-plunging imagery of the final act is so unnervingly grotesque that it obliterates most of what comes before it, at least as the movie lingers in memory.  That effect unfortunately influenced a lot of mainstream American horror filmmaking throughout the torture porn phase of the Bush era, but movies like Saw & Hostel did not echo the more nuanced touches of what Miike accomplished.  I was particularly struck during this rewatch by how the basic perspective and reality of the ending doesn’t fit into any one tidy interpretation.  When the killer reveals herself as a violent avenger of all abused women against the men who sexually exploit them, she doesn’t do so in a direct, declarative monologue like a Bond villain.  She speaks softly, mostly to herself, while the dipshit widower drifts in & out of consciousness (from both paralyzing drugs and unbearable pain), witnessing detailed reveals of her past experiences that he could not possibly know about, mixed with his own warped dreams & memories.  Meanwhile, she’s not treated as the moral hero of the story so much as a tragic figure who’s dangerous to those who happen to waltz into her trap, and there’s little relief or catharsis to be found for either combatant in her little self-waged war of the sexes.

Audition does not aim to make you feel better about modern culture’s longing for an over-idealized, unjust Conservative past.  It mostly aims to upset & disturb, leaving behind stabs of horrific imagery that you’ll clearly recall even as the plot details fade: pornographic camcorder footage, a ringing telephone, a smirk, a writhing burlap sack, etc.  Still, it can be comforting to know that there are other people out there who find our great cultural Conservative yearning to be grotesque, alienating, and worthy of violent retribution.  The only problem is they apparently do not represent the majority, who’d rather oppress than evolve.

-Brandon Ledet

The Not-So-New 52: Catwoman – Hunted (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.

There’s a moment in this movie where Selina “Catwoman” Kyle is in the middle of a heist, very early in the runtime, when—suddenly—a Batarang appears in front of her, and a cowled shape moves in the shadows. I sighed a heavy sigh; after Soul of the Dragon, nearly three hours of a Long Halloween, and the Batman-heavy Injustice, I was really, really tired of the Batman. You can’t imagine the relief I felt a few minutes later when Batwoman emerged from the shadows. At this point, I’ll take any reprieve that I can get. 

The film opens at a lavish party being hosted by Barbara “Cheetah” Minerva (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), which doubles as the onboarding of Gotham mob boss Black Mask (Jonathan Banks) into the criminal organization “Leviathan.” It’s a costume ball as well, which serves to help a woman who arrives in an old-school Catwoman outfit, catching Black Mask’s eye and prompting him to invite her to accompany his party inside. Unbeknownst to him, the woman on his arm is the real Selina Kyle (Elizabeth Gillies), and she makes her way through the party flirting and pickpocketing until she can get into Minerva’s vault. Along with her faithful feline companion Isis, abscond with the Cat’s Eye Emerald, which Black Mask brought as his buy-in on this criminal enterprise. Mask and his henchman pursue Catwoman along with Minerva’s brute Tobias Whale (Keith David), but she manages to escape, only to be apprehended by Kate Kane, aka Batwoman (Stephane Beatriz), who spirits her aboard an aircraft that Interpol has “acquired” from Penguin. There she meets secret agents Julia Pennyworth (Lauren Cohan) and King Faraday (Jonathan Frakes!), who enlist her help in bringing down Leviathan by acting as bait for Minerva et al’s cronies, promising to wipe her criminal record clean if she succeeds. 

Like Gotham Knight before it, Catwoman: Hunted is drawn in an anime style, although it was handled by a single studio rather than several, as the earlier, vignette-based film was. That studio is OLM, best known in the west for their work on various Pokemon projects, and I love the art style. Catwoman herself is adorable, as is Isis (uh, please don’t take that out of context), and the designs of all of the characters make this one a very pleasant watch, especially following so closely on the heels of more Tomorrowverse thick-line drawing and the ugly art style that was omnipresent in Injustice. Of particular note is just how cool Cheetah looks once she hulks out into her big, feline form; it makes for a much more dynamic visual experience than the rotating house styles that I had come to expect from these, and it was a pleasant surprise once the film got started. I was already pretty won over, however, as the opening credits featured a great jazz soundtrack (courtesy of Yutaka Yamada) and a fun sequence which has this grainy feeling, like the images are drawn with chalk on newsprint. It’s very 70s, and I loved it. Looking back, this film is also one in which those opening credits serve a narrative function; it tells an impressionistic story of Catwoman going to Sochi and rescuing a large group of women from some kind of imprisonment. At first, this seems to simply be a little bit of character development, to signal to potential new viewers that this Catwoman isn’t just the criminal with whom they are likely already familiar, but also establishes her moral code. Further than that, however, this event is actually the impetus for the plot, as it’s later revealed that Catwoman liberated a group of women who were being human trafficked by Minerva, and that what seemed like little more than typical Catwoman steal-a-big-jewel shenanigans was actually the first step in a more complicated plot to take down Minerva. 

I suppose it’s not that unusual for a script by Greg Weisman to be clever. I’ve sung the praises of his television series Young Justice many times in these pages. I love it so much that I put on a random episode while doing some chores the other day and ended up not only just sitting down and watching it, but also having to force myself not to spend the rest of the day like that. For fans of animation in general, Weisman’s name may be familiar because of his development of the criminally underrated Gargoyles, a 90s Saturday morning Disney product that wove mythology, magic, and Shakespeare into its text while tackling ambitious topics like prejudice, redemption, legacy, and identity. If you read the above paragraph and read the names David Keith and Jonathan Frakes(!) and you’re familiar with Gargoyles, you might have already assumed Weisman was involved, as Keith voiced lead gargoyle Goliath and Frakes provided the voice of the show’s first and primary antagonist, Xanatos. Weisman’s work has always been noteworthy, and he’s one of those writers who knows exactly what part of my brain to metaphorically reach inside of and scratch an itch with a perfectly, elegantly constructed narrative. While we’re on the topic of Weisman, this one will probably be of particular interest to fans of the aforementioned Young Justice, as the film’s interest in not just Catwoman but cat women, as evident in the choice of Cheetah as the primary villain, means that the character Cheshire shows up here, with Kelly Hu reprising her voice role. I honestly can’t think of a single thing in this movie that would contradict YJ, so if you’re looking for something to fill the void left by the series (second) cancellation, this can slot right into that continuity, if you like. 

One of the best scenes in the film involves Selina and Kate, left alone on the fancy jet that Interpol commandeered, getting surprisingly intimate for these largely sexless movies. Selina draws a bath and plays at inviting Kate to join her, clearly aware of both Kate’s secret identity and her sapphic inclination. It’s a ploy to get a piece of equipment from Kate, but that doesn’t mean that Selina isn’t into it, and in this house, we fully support bisexual Catwoman. Although Batman isn’t present in the narrative, it’s clear that he and Selina are or have been “a thing,” as Selina is hesitant to use lethal force against Solomon Grundy because of a promise she made to an unnamed friend (before she gets the go-ahead from her teammates since Grundy is technically undead), and bristles at Kate calling her “Cat,” saying that “only he gets to call her that.” Still, this is a new, fun take on the typical Bat/Cat dynamic that we’ve grown used to, and the quippy, flirtatious banter between the two is a highlight of the script. I get the feeling that this one was not well received—it’s the lowest rated of all of these movies by IMDb users (an admittedly feral and untrustworthy lot), has only a 64% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 2.9 star rating on Letterboxd—but if you’re not a stick in the mud, don’t let that deter you. I’m going to give this some of the highest praise I possibly can, which is that this is one of a very short list of these NSN52 titles that, after this project is over, I might actually watch again. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Uzumaki (2000)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the live-action adaptation of Junji Ito’s cosmic horror manga Uzumaki (Spiral, 2000).

00:00 Welcome

01:03 Ju-On – The Grudge (2002)
06:56 The Substance (2024)
10:30 Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
16:25 DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection (2010)
19:51 Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
21:17 Ghostwatch (1992)
25:25 The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall (2011)
29:49 Gothic (1986)
36:26 Rumours (2024)
43:23 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
48:21 Audition (1999)
54:00 Smile 2 (2024)
1:00:46 Memoir of a Snail (2024)

1:06:16 Uzumaki (2000)

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– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Local Legends: Bloodbath! (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Despite his deliberately milquetoast appearance, Matt Farley is a man of extremes. I see both the best and the worst version of myself in the Massachusetts-based backyard filmmaker, whose tireless self-promotion as a self-published artist is simultaneously admirable and diabolical.  As the world’s foremost Matt Farley scholar, Matt Farley is fully aware of this extreme duality in his own creative & professional drive, nakedly confessing to it in his self-portrait series Local Legends.  The original Local Legends was a self-portrait of Matt Farley as a D.I.Y. artist, breaking down the exact economics of how he makes a living improvising the novelty pop songs that fund the projects he really cares about: sincere rock anthems & regional horror comedies.  That film’s sequel, Local Legends: Bloodbath!, is a self-portrait of Matt Farley as a manic narcissist, breaking down the tireless self-promotion routines Farley has to maintain every waking minute to keep his Motern Media brand afloat through sheer momentum – all to satisfy his insatiable ego.  As a pair, the Local Legends films portray Matt Farley as both an aspirational figure and a cautionary tale for self-published songwriters & filmmakers.  Yes, it is possible for the average person to dedicate their entire life to their creative pursuits, but the level of self-obsession required to make that work will transform them into a grotesque monster unworthy of an audience’s admiration.

Not much has changed since the “Matt Farley” of Local Legends broke down his business model & production schedule a decade ago.  Farley’s still cranking out thousands of improvised novelty songs and carefully composed, heartfelt ballads for anyone who’s curious to listen.  The only thing that’s changed, really, is his increased demands for attention & compliments, which has escalated to him renting out music venues on his own dime just so he can feed off his half-empty audience (or half-full audience, depending on your perspective) in real time.  That personal stagnation and professional doubling-down has apparently strained every relationship in Matt Farley’s life.  His wife, his bandmates, his filmmaking partner, and even his audience regulars just can’t seem to match Matt Farley’s enthusiasm for the “Matt Farley” project, abandoning him one by one as he falls further down the novelty-song rabbit hole.  This triggers the return of Matt’s crude businessman alter-ego from the first Local Legends, who arrives on the scene to “eliminate distractions” from his production schedule.  I don’t remember the Business Matt persona looking so much like Paulie Walnuts last time, but the new look makes it all the more disturbing to watch him strangle friends & family to death for slowing down the poop-themed novelty song recording sessions that pay the bills.  Then you remember that he, too, is Matt Farley, who hilariously brands himself as “The nicest guy in showbiz!” despite all the murders.

With Bloodbath!, Matt Farley finds a way to push Local Legends under the horror-comedy umbrella that covers the rest of his output, while maintaining the original’s confessional honesty.  This genre-shifting sequel is very funny as a barrage of self-contained inside jokes, but it’s also genuinely unnerving in its honesty about every artist’s bottomless self-obsession, regardless of success or prestige.  Some of the jokes are benefited by having been fully submerged in the Motern Media filmography, like Farley’s madness being represented in his increased consumption of “coffee milk” or his businessman persona shooting lighting out of his fingertips, à la Druid Gladiator Clone.  Most are Bloodbath!-specific, though, and only become funny through repetition.  By the fifth time Farley repeats inane phrases like “statement analysis” or “No good deed goes unpunished” or leads his half-empty/half-full audience through a sing-along encore of a song about house keys, the laughs are frequent and genuinely earned.  Anyone initially uneasy with the rudimentary imagery’s hideous day-for-night greys or blown-out white balance clipping is gradually rewarded by sticking it out for what Farley is always determined to deliver: funny jokes and good times shared with friends.  Like the best of Motern’s output, Bloodbath! does a great job of making you feel like you’re part of that inner-circle friend group, building its own inside jokes without requiring knowledge of extratextual material.  Still, it’s a work best paired with its less fanciful, more documentary original, since they combine to give you the full Matt Farley experience: the praiseworthy underdog artist and the exhausting, off-putting narcissist.

-Brandon Ledet