Dooba Dooba (2026)

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As often as it is reclaimed by the very people it others as monstrous villains, horror has always been a largely reactionary genre. You don’t have to scratch too hard at the surface of any classic horror title to find kneejerk fears of people with bodily, mental, gender, or sexual difference being expressed through metaphor. It’s a genre built on societal disgust with facial disfigurement, discomfort with ambiguous gender presentation, and paranoia over escaped mental patients, but it’s also one that’s routinely championed by the real-life targets of those societal phobias. Usually, it takes a couple decades for fans to reclaim blatantly homophobic films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as Queer, Actually but, given enough time, every major horror title eventually gets its due as a transgressive, funhouse mirror version of Representation. What’s funny about the new found-footage horror Dooba Dooba is that it encourages that reclamation to happen in real time. Textually, the film very directly preys on people’s suspicions that modern teens diagnosed with severe anxiety and other social disorders are just faking it to torture the rest of us. Subtextually, its flippant construction leaves room for younger audiences to celebrate that torture. It functions as a kind of power fantasy for socially anxious Zoomers to get their revenge on the Millennials & Gen-Xers who doubt the severity of their mental disabilities. From either perspective, it’s an act of generational warfare — a perversely amusing one.

If Dooba Dooba openly participates in any other long-running horror traditions, it’s in its modern interpretation of the classic babysitter slasher. A 20something aspiring singer takes on a babysitting gig to make ends meet, and the extent of her desperation for rent money is immediately tested. The child is 16 years old but too anxious to stay by herself because she once witnessed the murder of her young brother in the family home. Her overly horny, socially awkward parents explain that to alleviate the teen’s anxieties, the babysitter must sleep in the same bedroom as her, must constantly repeat the nonsense phrase “dooba dooba” whenever making noise elsewhere in the house, and must remain under constant surveillance via closed-circuit security cameras, stationed in every room. Although the story is set in 2022, the cameras are much older & lower-quality than modern tech, giving the entire film the feeling of a crime scene documented via stationary camcorder. Whenever the edit switches to a tight-zoom-in, you can practically count the grains on the screen. You never forget that you’re watching a contemporary story, though, because the way the Zoomer teen in the babysitter’s care weaponizes her social anxieties as a form of low-level torture is distinctly of-the-now. For instance, she mocks the poor babysitter’s Soundcloud tracks as facile novelties, then passes off the faux pas as an inability to read social cues. Then, the torture gets more literal & physical, once her malevolence is clearly established as intentional.

Where the film steps away from othering & mocking teens who struggle with anxiety or Autistic social disfunction is in handing its young villain the keys to the editing room. We are not watching raw security-camera footage of this babysitter’s torment, but rather a PowerPoint-style presentation of the night’s events as interpreted through a prankster teen’s online-troll sensibilities. The horrors documented in this suburban home are flippantly narrated in the lower-case, goofy-font text of a teen fucking around in an AIM chatroom, mocking the victim instead of her tormentor. They’re also frequently interrupted by stock footage of and “fun” factoids about past American presidents (such as their history as slave owners), as if the film were half snuff tape, half high school term paper assignment. All suburban-set horror tends to function as a stand-in for the horrors of America at large, but Dooba Dooba is smart to make that thematic connection explicit, so it’s clear that it isn’t only punching down at awkward teens on the spectrum. Our socially maladjusted villain, her gig-economy victim, and her alcoholic swinger parents all come together to represent something insidious about what’s going on behind the locked doors of the modern American suburban home, protected by the red-white-and-blue flags that wave above. Of course, some public domain horror clips and documents of surgical gore are also included in the mix, just to keep the genre exercise clearly defined.

Overall, Dooba Dooba may not be as ambitious nor as accomplished as other recent “analog” horrors like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Outwaters, or Skinamarink, but it’s got a real wicked streak to it, and it makes some impressively distinct visual & editing choices for something so obviously cheap. The cast is limited in both size and skill, but their awkwardness on camera only adds to the real-life social discomforts they’re supposed to evoke. The cathode-ray CCTV imagery is also limited in its texture & movement, but the sequencing of the edit maintains a perverse sense of humor & momentum throughout. Not for nothing, the film is also under 80 minutes long, making for a perfect January horror B-picture experience. Between Primate, The Bone Temple, and Dooba Dooba, the year’s off to a great trashy start. Just be careful not to play a drinking game with this particular one’s title, since it’s repeated often enough to send you to the hospital.

-Brandon Ledet

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

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In El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent), there is a scene in which indigenous river guide Karamakate revisits a former Catholic mission/residential school on the banks of the Amazon River. He first visited the place decades earlier, where he tried to teach the boys held captive there about their traditions, saying “Don’t believe their crazy tales about eating the body of their gods.” When he returns, he finds them long after the priest has died and they have devolved into an outright cannibalistic cult that quotes half-remembered bits of Christian scripture to support their current state of being. I wrote about this years ago (and proofread poorly, it seems), but Serpiente is a story about an apocalypse that has already happened, the total destruction of a wide swath of cultures and peoples under the heel of European colonialism. I found myself thinking about it a lot during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that one wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of as being in conversation with Serpiente, but which shares a common connection in that it spends a great deal of its runtime following a now-adult practitioner of extreme violence who was only a boy when the world as he knew it came to an end. They’re very different texts (with quite divergent intents), but I couldn’t help seeing something of the cannibalistic former wards of the church from Serpiente in Jack O’Connell’s here, and that enriched for me what was already a pretty great movie, especially for a January release. 

Our protagonist from 28 Years Later, Spike (Alfie Williams) takes more of a backseat role in this sequel. At the end of the last film, we last saw him leave the healthy infant who was born of a woman afflicted with the Rage virus before returning to the British mainland, where he was rescued from a pack of infected by a group of knife-wielding weirdos. As this film opens, we find him in the midst of being inducted into their ranks; “Sir” Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) is the leader of their gang of seven “fingers,” all re-christened “Jimmy” in his honor. Sir Jimmy lords over the others, who have scarred the space between their eyes with an inverted cross like the one he wears, although we don’t see this forced on Spike when he manages to slay his assigned Jimmy despite his physical disadvantages. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work on his macabre memento mori memorial, the bone temple of the title, while also making the “alpha” infected a subject of study, trying to see if the Rage can be tempered even if it can’t be cured. He names the alpha “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry) and realizes that the seemingly mindless monster has become addicted to the drugs in his blow darts, so the two of them essentially start doing recreational morphine together and listening to Kelson’s record collection. When the Jimmies come upon some survivors, most of the fingers torture them slowly while Spike vomits and writhes in emotional agony and Sir Jimmy sends one of his deputies, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) scouting; she sees Kelson and Samson cavorting from afar and reports back to Sir Jimmy that she’s seen Old Nick, setting up a confrontation between the killers, Kelson, and his pet monster. 

I have one complaint. Williams was given a wide range of emotions to play in the previous film as Spike entered an adulthood that was as alien to him as it was to us. He was sheltered from a changing world and trained to survive, but isolated in a way that meant that his first exposures to the hypocrisies and dishonesty of the adult world made him reject it and instead attempt the impossible and bring his mother to Kelson for treatment. Here, Williams only has one mode: utter, pants-soiling terror at being forced into the service of Sir Jimmy and his psychotic acolytes. This makes total sense narratively within the story that this film is telling, but it also means that Spike has no real arc, which is bizarre since the last time we were all here, he was the main character. Here, he’s static and secondary, as this film features a much larger role for Fiennes and alternates entirely between his activities and those of Jimmy and his fingers. There’s a lot of great stuff to be mined here. Kelson’s treatment of Samson is procedural, sure, but it also allows for some excellent music choices. It’s fascinating to watch a man who’s been isolated among the bones of the dead for so long essentially adopt a zombie onto whom he seems to be projecting a lot of intent and intelligence for no other reason than that he’s been lonely a long time, only for the film to surprise us by having these actions not have been in vain. Sir Jimmy’s self-mythologizing has a lot of flair, and he’s effectively menacing and depraved that the film had me on edge for most of it. I didn’t think anything would top the electricity between him and Kelson in their first scene together, but there that’s followed up by a sequence set to Iron Maiden that I expect to be the most talked-about element of the picture. Overall, however, straying so far from Spike as our central focus necessitated a realignment of the stakes that left me less emotionally invested in this outing. 

Nia DaCosta is in the director’s chair this time around, and although I loved the way that Danny Boyle slipped back into this world effortlessly in 28YL, I had a higher opinion of 28 Weeks Later than the consensus, and that film was likewise helmed by a different creative team. Alex Garland still returned to pen this one, and although there’s a distinct stylistic difference between Boyle and DaCosta, I welcome her stamp on this overall enterprise. The zombies have never really been the point in this franchise, and (Samson excepted) the presence of the Rage-afflicted is the smallest here it has ever been, with the extreme gruesome violence on display here coming at the hands of survivors. The infected and the Jimmies have both lost their humanity, but the former did so because of the Rage, while the latter are monsters of Jimmy’s making. This has been the film series’ driving force for as long as it has existed, that man is always the real monster, going all the way back to Christopher Eccleston in the original 28 Days Later. As such, the film’s conflict is also ideological, with Jimmy and the mythology he has built around himself as Satan’s son and heir to dominion over his demons (the infected) inevitably coming to a head with Kelson’s rational atheism, within which he is able to provide some manner of salvation. That he manages to use Jimmy’s follower’s faith against them in the end is clever and satisfying, and I had a great time with the film overall. 

Where I remain most excited to see this franchise continue to go is in its exploration of the way that a disease-ravaged, isolated Britain has, in the absence of a larger social structure, devolved into a series of cults. Sir Jimmy and his crew are an obvious example, as is Kelson’s non-religious (but creepy) solo project of building his elegy of human bones. It didn’t come up in this film, but the island community from which Spike hails seems to have developed some of its own creepy rituals involving a mask, and I expect that the next film in this franchise will see that community return in some form since they are completely absent from this one. Most intriguingly, Samson’s trophy-like acquisition of human heads with attached spines and the way that he displayed them in the woods also seems like a worshipful action, although deciphering the motivation for this is complicated by revelations from Bone Temple, so we shall see. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #256: Landscape Suicide (1987) & Elevated True Crime

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Welcome to Episode #256 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of high-concept true crime documentaries, starting with 1987’s Landscape Suicide.

0:00 Welcome
02:50 Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025
04:17 F.A.R.T. The Movie (1991)
07:52 Amish Stud – The Eli Weaver Story (2023)
11:13 Project X (2012)
15:02 January horror
18:45 Atom Egoyan
30:20 The Roottrees are Dead

33:37 Landscape Suicide (1987)
1:01:38 Zodiac Killer Project (2025)
1:26:00 Casting JonBenet (2017)
1:45:00 Voyeur (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

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025

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1. Sinners — A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.

2. Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.

3. The Phoenician Scheme — Its violence is Looney Tunes, its business negotiations are Three Stooges, its religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of The Phoenician Scheme for any other director’s work. It’s another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.

4. Eephus — A slow-paced, aimless movie that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game in real time … except that every single dialogue exchange & character detail is either deeply charming, riotously funny, or both. The film takes its title from a type of curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if time is standing still. The game it stages also plays out over an impossibly long time, an eephus hovering in the air while everyone hopes it will never end.

5. One Battle After Another — 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.

6. The Ugly Stepsister— A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous “villain” who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).

7. The Plague — A coming-of-age nightmare drama about hazing rituals at a children’s water polo summer camp. It might not fully qualify as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon among titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about boyhood bullying we’ve ever seen.

8. No Other Choice — Park Chan-Wook returns with another spectacular revenge thriller, except this time the antihero lead can’t actually fight the thing that’s wronged him. You can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure layoffs into a torture dungeon, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. So, he convinces himself that he has no other choice but to kill his fellow workers while competing for jobs, losing sight of the real enemy. Our relentlessly mundane & degrading corporate hellscape knows no borders nor mercy. Someone ought to do something about it … just preferably someone smarter & nobler than this guy.

9. Boys Go to Jupiter— Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, illustrating the listless ennui of unoccupied time between childhood school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Overflowing with killer music, adorable animation, and quietly hilarious characters, its Floridian otherworld is politically grim, but hanging out there feels like getting a foot massage while digesting an edible.

10. Rats! — A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but it’s doubtful any other post-Linklater buttscratchers have ever been this exceedingly gross or this truly anarchic. It’s a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens.

Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Hear Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

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The #1 rule when attending someone else’s wedding is that you are not, under any circumstances, to make the day about yourself. It’s okay to be a little overly playful, helpful, sentimental, or even chaotic, as long as you avoid becoming the main character on someone else’s Big Special Day. I say that to explain why Jonathan Demme’s 2008 family drama Rachel Getting Married is excruciatingly stressful from start to end despite its setting at what appears to be an overall successfully fun, pleasant party. Anne Hathaway’s recovering-addict antiheroine breaks the #1 wedding rule even more frequently & thoroughly than Julia Roberts’s psychopathic pond-scum romcom lead in My Best Friend’s Wedding. The titular Rachel (Rosemary DeWitt) may be getting married, but her prodigal sister Kym (Hathaway) is pathologically incapable of ceding the spotlight to her for the occasion, since every day of their lives since Kym’s years as a teenage pillhead have been about Kym’s catastrophic, life-ruining fuckups, one after another. The trick of the movie, then, is in Demme’s humanist approach to characterization, leaving you with an equally loving feeling for both sisters, despite one of them obviously being in the deep end of the moral wrong. Every minute of the movie is hell, and yet you walk away feeling like you just met dozens of new friends at a fabulous party, wishing them all the best.

We meet Kym as she’s chainsmoking outside of rehab, hiding behind inch-thick mascara, shaking off the sugary aftertaste of earlier Hathaway breakouts like The Princess Diaries & The Devil Wears Prada. She returns to her family home under intense scrutiny, raising the hairs on every neck in every room she walks into. It isn’t until a periodic NA meeting halfway into the film that it’s fully explained why her presence has that chilling effect. It’s because when she was a pilled-out teenager, she crashed the family car with her younger brother inside, killing him by accident. Her sister (DeWitt) & father (Bill Irwin) still love her, of course, but every day of their lives since that accident has been a reaction to and recovery from the biggest mistake she ever made — the reckless killing of the family’s most vulnerable member. So, when Rachel begs for her wedding to finally be one day that’s about her and not her sister, it’s not the megalomaniacal ramblings of a Bridezilla gone mad; it’s a desperate plea from a caring family member who just needs a break. Kym can’t give her that one day, though, because she hasn’t fully healed yet, and so Rachel getting married has no effect on yet another family gathering becoming another 24/7 marathon episode of The Kym Show, all Kym all the time. Even the sisters’ long-suffering father can’t help but direct his attention to that wayward lamb, even though her mere presence breaks his heart by reminding him of what he’s already lost.

Jonathan Demme manages to stage all of that small, intimate familial melodrama within a large, sprawling party that spreads out for days across rehearsals, nuptials, and goodbyes. As many Hollywood Studio auteurs found themselves doing in the aughts, Demme challenged himself by stripping back the grand-scale production of his more typical work to instead rely on direct, handheld digi cinematography. Under a self-imposed adherence to the rules & principles of Dogme 95, he shot Rachel Getting Married more like a wedding video than a proper feature film. An insanely stacked cast of party guests like rapper Fab Five Freddy, Soft Boys singer Robyn Hitchcock, Dan Deacon collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche, and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (as the mostly silent groom) fill the event space, often sharing their various musical talents to entertain each other as the main cast works out their familial issues in the foreground. It’s such a crowded cast of talented people that Demme’s early mentor Roger Corman is listed in the opening credits, but you only catch a single glimpse of him working a digicam during the ceremonial vows. It’s as if Jonathan Demme took the Gene Siskel Test of “Is this movie more interesting than a documentary about the same actors having lunch?” as a kind of challenge by instead asking “Why can’t it be both?” There’s a very real, infectiously fun party going on during Rachel’s wedding that makes the manufactured melodrama that threatens to unravel it all the more stressful.

It’s no small miracle that amongst all that chaotic, freeform partying—effectively shot in real time—Demme still managed to leave space for moments of quiet intimacy. There are countless personalities bouncing around this family home threatening to distract from Kym’s many, many ongoing crises, and Demme carefully takes the time to listen to them with great interest — whether they’re sharing hardships during NA meetings, embarrassing themselves during rehearsal dinner toasts, or jamming out with the wedding band. The single most miraculous scene involves a competitive loading & unloading of the house’s dishwasher: a moment that starts as a small jest between Bill Irwin & Tunde Adebimpe as newly united family members, then escalates into a party-wide bloodsport, and inevitably crashes down into heartbreak once Kym inserts herself into the fray once again. It’s a scene so perfectly conceived that it acts as its own proof-of-concept short film that encapsulates everything about the family & party dynamics that an outsider would need to know, and it’s just as instantly iconic as anything Demme achieved in bigger-scale projects like Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, or Silence of the Lambs. It also speaks well to him that he didn’t allow Kym to become just as much of an iconic villain as his version of Hannibal Lecter was, working with Hathaway to make sure that she’s another beloved member of that party even though she’s the sole source of all its teeth-grinding tension.

-Brandon Ledet

The Housemaid (2025)

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While my partner’s father was in town, we planned to go out and see Eternity, which still sufficiently piqued my interest despite Brandon’s (admittedly semi-positive) indifference to it, and it seemed like something that would be palatable for this kind of outing. Unfortunately, either I or someone responsible for updating the local chain theater’s showtimes made an error, so we arrived ninety minutes earlier than the next showtime, and instead opted to wait only half an hour to check out the most recent Sydney Sweeney vehicle, The Housemaid. I admit that the trailer had me intrigued, as it looked like the kind of trashy erotic thriller that we don’t see many of anymore, but I’ve also soured on Sweeney of late, so despite my lifetime adoration of co-lead Amanda Seyfried, I planned to sit this one out. Fate put me in that reclining seat of the Regal this past weekend, and I have to admit, I was entertained. I missed his name in the opening credits, but by the midpoint of this film, I knew that it was a Paul Feig production, so it was no surprise when his name appeared at the film’s conclusion. It’s strange to be able to pick up on that despite having only seen four of his twelve features (including this one), but there’s a certain inexplicable essence that’s unmistakably his; this has the same energy as A Simple Favor and an identical star rating, which is solid if unremarkable. Not that I’m judging him, really. I’m probably the last living person who ever thinks about Other Space, which I rather liked. 

Millie (Sweeney) is a recently paroled former inmate who was wrongfully convicted due to the friend whose assault she ended failing to corroborate her testimony. After serving ten years, she’s living in her car and can hardly believe her luck when her interview with Nina Winchester (Seyfried) to be the Winchester family’s live-in housemaid goes well and she’s hired. Although Nina’s eight-year-old daughter Cecilia is cold to Millie, Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) begins with puzzled courtesy that predictably escalates to some hot and heavy adultery. Millie only falls into Andrew’s charms, however, because of a constant campaign of gaslighting on Nina’s part. She tersely demands that she pick up Cecilia from ballet the same night that she’s supposed to sleep over at a friend’s in order to embarrass Millie. Nina instructs Millie to purchase Broadway tickets and an overnight stay at a hotel for Nina and Andrew in the city and then berates her for doing so for the date requested, when Nina will be driving Cecilia to camp. Andrew ends up taking Millie on the date night, getting them separate rooms when they’ve had too many cocktails to go back to Long Island, but they ultimately give in to their lusts. When Andrew finally throws Nina out after yet another outburst, Millie quickly moves into Andrew’s bed, but it isn’t long before she starts to wonder if she put too much stock in the local gossip about Nina’s past psychological history and their petty sniping about how Andrew was too good for her. 

Since I didn’t expect I would be seeing this movie, I allowed myself to be spoiled by an early review for it. I’ll happily confirm that what one would probably expect based solely on the trailer for the film isn’t quite the narrative that you’re in for. It’s much like A Simple Favor in that it’s recognizably a narrative born of a mind that’s burdened with the knowledge of far too many Lifetime thrillers. Recurring tropes of that genre abound: the overbearing mother (Elisabeth Perkins plays Andrew’s with icy perfection despite very little actual screentime), the single mom easily entrapped by a wealthy man, the gaslighting employer, the new domestic servant’s room being an isolated place that may as well be a cell, the too-perfect husband, the backbiting PTA friends, the elaborate gambits that play out satisfactorily if not necessarily sensibly. You have until the end of this paragraph to jump ship if you want to go into the film with no foreknowledge. To his credit, Feig understands that the modern audience needs a wider array of eroticism. One of the things that I thought about while watching Dressed to Kill recently was that erotic thrillers of the bygone eras were designed to sexually stimulate only those who get a thrill out of watching a woman undress and shower. Feig is an equal opportunity titillator, as while the camera lovingly showcases Sweeney’s toned abs and voluptuous bosom, it spends just as much time ogling Sklenar’s chiseled abdomen and statuesque physique; we even linger on a shot that invites us to dwell on his sculpted derriere while he brushes his teeth, and let’s not even get into the muscle-hugging tank tops that leave very little of the actor’s areola to the imagination. While Sweeney sleepwalks through her lines, Seyfried is knocking it out of the park with a performance that vacillates between seemingly sincere remorse and seething, feral ferocity. She gives a performance that’s on par with Jennifer Lawrence’s in Die My Love, and it’s perhaps too good for the kind of movie that it is: elevated schlock from someone whose brain was warped by seeing Mother May I Sleep With Danger? one too many times after school. It’s nothing all that novel, but it’s twisty and entertaining enough, and if my packed screening is any indication, it’s effectively reaching its target market (BookTok teens). 

Spoilers ahoy. I can’t sufficiently divorce the film as I saw it from the plot outline I already knew to parse exactly how I would have felt if I had seen the film in a vacuum with no prior knowledge. It certainly felt to me that Nina’s treatment of Millie was within the realm of reality of what it must be like to be a contemporary housemaid for a privileged family, even if the narrative requires that Millie either stick it out or go back to prison in order to justify why she tolerates the escalating tensions. On the other hand, one doesn’t go into a thriller without expecting the other shoe to drop eventually, and I don’t think that anyone in the audience is going to make it to about the forty-five minute mark and think that Millie is going to live happily ever after with Andrew and Cecilia after Nina is banished from the Winchester estate. One might think that Nina might then return for revenge, perhaps with the assistance of her groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone), or that Millie herself has been lying to us in her narration all along and she’s going to play black widow to Andrew now that Nina is out of the way. But to get to that conclusion, one has to ignore (what feels like) heavy-handed foreshadowing of Andrew’s hidden sociopathy. Sklenar pulls out the same charm that made him such a magnetic romantic lead in Drop, and its effectiveness is going to vary depending on whether or not he seems too perfect to be believed from the very beginning. Even knowing that going in, I didn’t have all of the details of how Millie would get the upper hand and how the power dynamics would further shift between the relevant trio. (It’s worth noting that the ending is changed from the source novel as well, meaning that even fans of the book are in for some surprises.) My desire for a twisty thriller was satiated. It’s not one that I would rush to see in a theater, but once it’s available for no-additional-cost streaming on one of the services you already have, you’ll have a better time than if you watch one of David DeCoteau’s twenty-eight (and counting) The Wrong… films. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Britnee’s Top 15 Films of 2025

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1. When Fall Is Coming – The one and only François Ozon blew me away yet again. Moral dilemmas wrapped in a melodrama following two elderly women in the French countryside feels tailor-made for me to devour. The dark secrets and mysteries in these women’s lives set against a cozy autumn backdrop completely won me over.

2. The Ugly Stepsister – A brilliant dark take on Cinderella that focuses on the “villain” who really isn’t a villain but a victim of circumstance. Complex characters and violent body horror born from unrealistic beauty standards and body image pressures come together to create nothing short of a masterpiece. 

3. Misericordia – Very French, very horny, very gay, and very funny. Claude Chabrol would have loved this one. The village priest is delightfully unhinged, and I just can’t get him out of my head. 

4. Marty Supreme – So many unlikeable characters who are endlessly entertaining. I simultaneously wanted Marty to fail and succeed at all of his insane schemes. Totally warped my brain. 

5. KPop Demon Hunters – My most re-watched film of the year. I adored the story, the energy, the vibrant animation, and the soundtrack packed with bangers. Everyone’s talking about it, and the hype is completely deserved.

6. The Plague – A coming-of-age nightmare that instantly proves that Charlie Polinger is a brilliant filmmaker and needs to keep making movies. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about bullying in boyhood that I’ve ever seen. 

7. Frankenstein – Another botched literary adaptation that I vibed with hard. I love a tall, brooding man and when it’s Jacob Elordi as The Creature, roaming along in search of human connection, I’m 100% on board.

8. Boys Go to Jupiter – This feels like getting a foot massage while taking an edible. Killer music, cute animation, and genuinely hilarious characters. This one feels like medicine for depression.

9. Bugonia – A thought-provoking, sometimes silly, very violent achievement for Yorgos Lanthimos. It takes aim at a lot of things I personally despise, which makes it an absolute delight. 

10. Sinners – The movie that made non-movie people go to the movies. There’s usually at least one each year, but Sinners became a full-blown cultural phenomenon. It’s an unbelievably cool vampire movie packed with stellar character-building.

11. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – This made me feel physically suffocated to the point of sweating. Navigating the complexities of being a sick child’s caregiver with no help from a significant other in a judgemental world just seems like hell, and Rose Byrne’s performance made me feel that pure terror.  

12. Weapons – The way the narrative structure revisits the same moments through multiple perspectives added so much depth to those small moments that usually go by unnoticed. I’m also forever grateful for the birth of the pop culture icon that is Aunt Gladys.

13. Hedda – I absolutely adored Hedda, inaccuracies and all. It may stray from Henrik Ibsen’s original play, but I would happily watch a chaotic, bisexual Tessa Thompson wreak havoc in a decadent mansion anytime.

14. Companion – A romcom sci-fi slasher with a feminist soul that is essentially this generation’s version of The Stepford Wives. I had a ton of fun watching this one.

15. Bring Her Back – I love a horror film that makes me cry and evokes an uncomfortable sense of empathy, because that emotional discomfort only deepens the disturbance. Hereditary has done that for me better than any other film, but Bring Her Back almost takes it to that same level. 

-Britnee Lombas

The Host (2006)

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When we discussed our conflicting feelings about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Brandon likened it to how Spanish critics have had to explain to English-speaking audiences that Pedro Almodóvar’s work in his native language has always been purposefully arch & overly theatrical. Specifically, the discourse revolved around allegations that English speakers perceive Almodóvar’s Spanish language works through a kind of veil of European exoticism while accurately identifying the more over-the-top and camp sensibilities in his recent films for audiences in the Western Hemisphere, which may also be the case with del Toro’s filmography. I’ve occasionally wondered about this in relation to last year’s Mickey 17, which was an overall disappointment to me as a Bong Joon-Ho fan, and which I dismissed as an example of his tendency to talk down to Western audiences that didn’t work for me this time, as it had in Snowpiercer. Was it possible that I was viewing Bong’s works in his native tongue through some kind of reverential veil and that Memories of Murder and Parasite were also over the top (outside of the moments of levity that were obvious across cultures) and I wasn’t picking up on it because I don’t speak Korean? Luckily, a viewing of Bong’s 2006 film The Host assuaged these doubts; when he’s going over the top, there’s no way to miss it. 

Half a decade after an American pathologist orders his Korean assistant to circumvent safety regulations about the disposal of toxic chemicals by directing him to pour (hundreds of bottles of) formaldehyde into a drain that eventually empties into the Han River, a mutant river beast emerges, killing dozens of people and abducting others. One of the abducted (and presumed deceased) is Park Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), the daughter of single father Gang-du (frequent Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho), a lazy manchild with bleached hair. Gang-du assists his father Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong) in the operation of a riverside snack bar that they occupy as well, but his “assistance” is hampered by his apparent laziness and frequent napping, and his overall flaws are further communicated by his ill-advised choice to give his daughter a beer. The two of them are excited to watch Nam-joo (Bae Doona), Gang-du’s sister and Hyun-seo’s aunt, in the Olympic archery competition, but her primary character traits of being extremely proficient but hesitant and timid are telegraphed by her receipt of “only” the bronze medal as she allowed her time clock to run out. Hee-bong’s third child, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is the only one to have gone to college, but his academic achievement has not netted him a job offer, and he’s taken refuge in the bottle. 

When the monster first emerges from the river, Gang-du manages to put up a pretty good effort, assisting a nearby American soldier who charges into the fray. He grabs Hyun-seo by the hand to flee and makes it some distance before falling, grabbing her again, and continuing to run, only to look down and see that he’s grabbed the wrong child in the fracas and is forced to watch helplessly as the monster brings her to the other side of the river and disappears. The Park family comes together in the wake of this tragedy, but during a mass memorial for the victims, a disease control team arrives in hazmat suits and advises that American scientists have theorized that some of the wounds left behind on survivors may indicate that the animal is a carrier for an unknown virus, and all present are shuttled off to a hospital for quarantine. Gang-du gets a call from Hyun-seo that indicates she’s still alive, and the Parks have to escape quarantine and work together to try and find the beast’s lair in the sewers before it’s too late. 

This is an unusual turn for Song Kang-ho as this is the first time I found it difficult to like him (at least in Bong’s filmography; he’s had a few effective villainous turns when working with Park Chan-Wook). It’s not his fault that his entire generation of the Park clan seems to be afflicted with narcolepsy, but his frequent sleepiness aside, he still does a lot of things that make him seem like a goofy old stoner in an American film about a guy who’s refused to grow up, even after having a child. That did not endear him to me as a character, especially when he later tries to explain to the authorities that he received a phone call from his presumed dead daughter and can’t hold it together long enough to explain this clearly. Instead he simply insists that “She’s deceased, but she’s not dead,” which doesn’t do him any favors, and not even the presence of his famous Olympian sister is enough to get anyone to listen to him. It’s in all of this that Bong is going very broad with the comedy, if it wasn’t already clear from the awkwardly long sequence in which Gang-du causes such a scene at the memorial that the rest of the Park family get involved in the bawl/brawl and security has to step in. It’s as campy as his movies for a Western audience, which comes through at the end when a forced lobotomy seems to suddenly make him hypercompetent. It’s not subtle, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief and rest assured I’m not simply elevating his Korean language films out of ignorance. 

There are other hallmarks of Bong’s work here, of course. It wouldn’t be a Bong Joon-Ho feature without some political commentary; it’s no surprise that American interference is the initial cause of the problem. On the cover of the DVD for the film is a pull-quote that says The Host “is on par with Jaws!” and while that’s a decent point of comparison, the film is much more like the original Godzilla in that it’s about an amphibious kaiju awakened (or in this case mutated) by American negligence, with tragic consequences for the respective coastal/island Asian nation states. Here, American interventionism continues throughout as a narrative thread, from the appearance of U.S. soldier Donald White at the first emergence of the beast from the river, to the American C.D.C. getting involved in quarantine and containment, eventually taking over the assault on the creature with a chemical weapon called Agent Yellow. That this deployment does virtually no long term damage to the creature (it’s up to Nam-il dousing it in gasoline, Nam-joo setting it ablaze with a burning arrow, and Gang-du stabbing it with a broken traffic post to bring it down) while harming if not killing the dozens of protestors who are opposed to the release of dangerous chemicals is, as always, a fun insight into Bong’s politics. Even when he’s doing a silly one, he’s still unmistakably at the helm. It’s worth noting as well that Gang-du’s aforementioned lobotomy was performed when he understood enough English to overhear a conversation in which an American scientist admits that there’s been no additional evidence of a virus and that they’re all in over their heads. 

In 2006 when the film was released, it was undoubtedly a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of his other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Primate (2026)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the first major theatrical release of the year: Johannes Roberts’s killer-chimp horror pic Primate (2026).

00:00 Welcome
03:06 The Islands of Yann Gonzalez (2006 – 2017)
07:51 The Wild Boys (2017)
12:10 Café Flesh (1982)
17:26 Star Trek – Section 31 (2025)
19:59 Rachel Getting Married (2008)
26:00 The Housemaid (2025)
32:00 Paris, Texas (1984)
36:10 The Host (2006)
42:04 Soul Survivors (2001)
47:46 The Lord of the Rings (2001 – 2003)
53:46 Looper (2012)
57:54 Bean (1997)
1:00:43 Eve’s Bayou (1997)
1:05:48 Peeping Tom (1960)
1:09:38 Sleeping Beauty (1959)
1:14:52 The Age of Innocence (1993)
1:18:46 Breakdown (1997)
1:20:38 Shakedown (1988)
1:24:35 Dressed to Kill (1980)
1:28:55 Priscilla (2023)
1:31:07 Megadoc (2025)
1:34:20 Holes (2003)
1:38:29 THX-1138 (1971)
1:43:41 The Lighthouse (2019)

1:46:00 Primate (2026)

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

Café Flesh (1982)

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The most infamous critical assessment of pornographic filmmaking was penned by a judge, not by a professional film critic. During a 1964 obscenity case, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was forced to legally define the dividing line where sexually explicit art becomes hardcore pornography, and the best he could come up with was “I know it when I see it.” At the time, he was ruling on what kinds of material would be legally approved for public exhibition in the US, participating in a long tradition of governmental censorship of pornographic art, but it was such a rarely honest, human moment within that tradition that it’s continued to reverberate in the half-century since. That “I know it when I see it” ruling even continues to resonate in how modern film critics write about pornographic cinema, as the Porno Chic moment of the 1970s & 80s has once again become a fascination for film-nerd tastemakers. There’s an attraction among hip genre-film aesthetes to treat vintage hardcore pornography as the next taboo cult-cinema frontier to be conquered, now that every last slasher, giallo, erotic thriller, and noir pic of any interest has already been given the loving 4K Blu-Ray restoration treatment. How far does that renewed critical interest in hardcore porno go, though? If a vintage porno like Bijou or Blonde Ambition is worthy of critical re-appraisal through a modern lens, why aren’t more recent best-seller titles like Visiting My Anal In-Laws 2 or POV Juggfuckers 8 also afforded that same critical consideration? I’ve personally reviewed feature-length porno parodies of films as wide-ranging as Batman, West World, The Exorcist, and Repulsion on this very website, so why haven’t I also made the time for Pulp Friction, American Whore Story, or Back to the Cooter? Part of that decision making is that all movies become more interesting and culturally significant with time, so the better-funded, better plotted pornos made in the Golden Age of Porno Chic are going to be inherently more attractive for critical analysis than the straight-to-VOD porno of today. But where is the dividing line? Is there a definitive temporal or budgetary cutoff that cleanly divides the art from the schlock? The simple answer is no; I just know it when I see it.

Of course, this fussy self-analysis over what forms of hardcore pornography I consider worth covering on this sub-professional film blog doesn’t carry much big-picture significance. I’m no Supreme Court Justice. It was just on my mind after I looked up the 1982 dystopian sci-fi porno Café Flesh on the social media website Letterboxd: this generation’s online hub for cinematic discourse. I had just watched Café Flesh for the first time after purchasing a nice, newly restored scan of it on Blu-ray from the niche genre-cinema label Mondo Macabre. As if it wasn’t already embarrassing enough that I was curious what my fellow Letterboxd users had to say about the artistic merits of a 40-year-old porno, my search also dug up three titles in the Café Flesh series, not just the infamous one from director Stephen Sayadian. Apparently there was a Café Flesh 2 produced in 1997 and a Café Flesh 3 in 2003, long after the Porno Chic wave had crested. While the original film maintains a small, niche place in genre-filmmaking history (and on the boutique Blu-ray market), those two direct-to-video sequels are the kind of long-abandoned porno schlock you’ll only find on copyright-infringing streaming sites with names like SpankBang & TNAFlix. Based on their release dates, screengrabs, and slipcover art, I totally get it. They appear to be purely, crassly commercial products that conform to the respective industry standards of their times, produced entirely with the intent of arousing a few orgasms and, more importantly, selling a few video tapes. Meanwhile, Sayadian’s original Café Flesh is a bizarre cultural oddity: a hardcore porno that routinely, deliberately makes creative decisions that undermine its commercial, erotic potential. A post-apocalyptic sci-fi parable about a near-future dystopia where most nuclear-fallout survivors can’t stomach sexual contact without wanting to vomit, the film is stubbornly silly, depressing, and gross. Maybe that’s the dividing line between pornographic art and porno schlock: the willingness to undermine any possible titillation to be found in visual depictions of penetrative sex with so much extraneous bullshit that the audience can only walk away wondering, “Who was this for? Why was it made?”

Set in “a world destroyed, a mutant universe” left over after our impending nuclear holocaust, Café Flesh imagines a future society in which 99% of surviving humans become insurmountably nauseated when they attempt to have sexual intercourse. So, a fascistic government agency has been created to force the remaining 1% of sexually viable survivors to perform for the majority population’s entertainment, as a kind of addictive surrogate for sexual release. The titular “café” is a nightclub in which large groups of Sex Negatives gather to watch a small celebrity class of Sex Positives get it on in public, performing on a small stage as if they were singing karaoke. Think it of it as the de-evolution porno, a series of novelty sex acts staged through music video choreo in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone’s horny but (almost) nobody fucks. Stephen Sayadian puts his personal stamp on the material as a name-brand reprobate auteur (under the porn-industry pseudonym Rinse Dream). Here, he develops a lot of the sound-stage surrealism imagery he would later push to ecstatic German Expressionist extremes in his career-high achievement Dr. Caligari, to much sillier results. In the opening sex number, a milkman in a humanoid rat mask fucks a bored housewife while her three overgrown man-babies watch from their high-chair perches in the background, dancing in place to the beat. Then, a giant sports-mascot pencil in a business suit fucks an office worker on his desk while his secretary types notes in rhythm, giving new meaning to the phrase “pencil dick.” Even when these cartoonish exhibitions are replaced with more traditional sex acts, Sayadian continues to undermine all potential for sincere arousal in his audience, such as in a lesbian orgy that is scored with maniacal male laughter and the droning bomb sirens of an oncoming air raid. These theatrical novelty acts are broken up by the recursive reaction shots and petty domestic squabbles of the Sex Negative audience watching from the floor, occasionally interrupted by a Steve Martin-impersonating MC who ads an air of state-sanctioned menace to the proceedings. The only genuine moments of eroticism are found in the taboo of crossing the threshold from observer to participant. When someone officially designated as Sex Negative is found out to be a Sex Positive in hiding and pressured into exhibitionism, the movie allows for genuine erotic tension to hang in the air; everything else is grotesque mockery of Reagan’s America and its inevitable toxic fallout.

While Dr. Caligari is Stephen Sayadian’s greater artistic achievement overall, Café Flesh holds its own cultural significance as the definitive 80s movie. It expresses all of the artistic & sexual neuroses of a generation rattled by Porno Chic, MTV, and nuclear bombing drills through a funhouse mirror reflection of the times. I’ve seen lowlier, crasser versions of this exact 80s-specific porno aesthetic in contemporary titles like New Wave Hookers, but I’ve yet to see it achieved with such an active disinterest in the erotic potential of the depicted sex. Even in making that distinction, I’m attempting to draw a line between the commercially minded pornographic filmmaking of Gregory Dark and the for-their-own-sake poetic indulgences of Stephen Sayadian, once again relying on a “I know it when I see it” system of assigning artistic merit to one version of pornography over another. Sometimes you just have to admit that there’s nothing new or novel left to say about film as a medium that wasn’t already better worded decades before you were born; it’s just that we’re more used to those short-hand critical wisdoms coming from a Roger Ebert or a Pauline Kael, not a judge on the Supreme Court.

-Brandon Ledet