For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the supernatural horror sequel The Exorcist III (1990), written & directed by the author of the original Exorcist‘s source novel.
After checking out recent release No One Will Save You, my appetite for extraterrestrial abduction content was whet, and the streaming service formerly known as HBOMax was there with a cleanup hitter in the form of 1993’s Fire in the Sky. The movie is based upon a book written by an Arizona logger named Travis Walton that purports to recount his encounter with aliens in 1975. Walton’s is one of the more noteworthy cases in that his alleged abduction was witnessed by five other men who were with him when they all saw the same strange phenomena, the standard light/energy/noise “emanations” that are common for UFO witnesses. Walton himself remained missing despite a few search parties before reemerging from the wilderness some five days later — starved, dehydrated, and seemingly traumatized to near-catatonia.
The film plays with committing to the reality of Walton’s claims from the outset and does so rather cleverly, as it opens with the other five men arriving at the local watering hole disheveled and rattled and talking amongst themselves about the importance of getting their stories straight and other pieces of dialogue that maintain ambiguity about their relative guilt/innocence. From there, an out-of-town lawman named Watters (James Garner) arrives at the scene to assist in what’s being treated as a missing persons case. The foreman of the crew, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), recounts the events of the day, up to and including his future brother-in-law Travis (D. B. Sweeney) getting out of the truck to investigate an inexplicable light show and being struck by something invisible. The other loggers in the truck insist on fleeing whatever is out there, but Mike eventually insists that they go back for Travis; when they return to the spot where he collapsed, there’s no sign of him.
For most of Act II, the film plays out more like a small town drama about people’s lives collapsing under the collective weight of the presumption of guilt heaped upon them by their community, with some investigative procedural elements thrown in for good measure. Watters believes that Travis was killed by one of the other loggers, Dallis (Craig Sheffer), a “drifter” who didn’t get along with Travis, and that the rest of the crew were helping to cover it up. Desperate to prove his innocence, Mike commits himself and his crew to polygraph tests, all of which seem to indicate that the men are telling the truth with the possible exception of Dallis, whose test is inconclusive. Suddenly,Travis reappears, and from this point, the film no longer plays coy with whether or not the abduction story is true within the film. Even as Watters adjusts his hypothesis to include the men pulling a publicity stunt that wasted time and resources, Travis is tormented by the remembrance of the events of his abduction as they slowly resurface.
This is one of those movies that got significant airplay on Sci-Fi Channel in my youth, although I had never actually seen it; the commercials advertising its upcoming airings always included the iconic image of Travis Walton cling-wrapped to an alien operating table, which frankly scared the shit out of me. It was one of those childhood terrors that remained tantalizingly unresolved until this first viewing, and as such I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Unfortunately, the opening credits spoil some of the ambiguity pretty early on, given that there’s a huge wall of text declaring that the film is “Based on the book The Walton Experience by Travis Walton,” dulling the impact of the question of whether Walton was murdered by his co-workers. Still, a lot of pathos is wrung out of the disappearance, and that’s something that you don’t normally see in this kind of media, so it was a pleasant surprise. If alien abductions are your personal horror preference, this one might not exactly live up to every expectation, given that there’s less of that in the finished product than what trailers and clips might imply, but what is present is harrowing and memorable. Give it a shot.
Brynn Adams is alone. She doesn’t seem to be all that troubled by it, at least most of the time. She wiles away the hours in the sumptuous country home that she occupies by herself like a woman unstuck in time: she learns decades-old dance steps from numbered diagrams while listening to Ruby Murray’s “Knock On Any Door” from 1956; she designs and creates her own dresses; she’s even recreated the entire town of Mill River in miniature in her living room. When she ventures into the real town, she ducks to avoid certain people, and when she attempts to interact with others, all she gets in return are sneers and frigid shoulders. The closest thing she seems to have to human contact is a mailman who intentionally damages her packages. Brynn’s been alone for a long time, but she’s about to have … visitors.
Kaitlyn Dever, who I really liked in last year’s Rosaline, both stars in and executive produces for No One Will Save You, the sophomore directorial effort from Brian Duffield, who is perhaps best known around these parts for writing The Babysitter. I first became aware of the movie after a screenshot of Stephen King calling the film “Brilliant, daring, involving, [and] scary” as well as “Truly unique,” and I went into it blind, which allowed for me to be pleasantly surprised not only by all of the film’s tiny reveals but also its big one; namely, No One is almost entirely dialogue free. Dever is the only performer who ever gets to speak, and it’s telling that her single impactful line is spoken to no one, or at least to no one who can hear her. That’s not to say that she’s not well developed; in fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this becomes one of those films that achieves cult status through its use as a teaching tool via its masterful adherence to the timeless axion of “Show, don’t tell.” Everything important about Brynn is captured by the filmic eye: the regretful letters she composes to her childhood best friend Maud, her awkward attempts to practice waving and greeting others, her abject terror at the prospect of interacting with a middle-aged couple we later learn are Maud’s parents. The story moves clearly and cleanly without the need for dialogue, as the film cuts seamlessly and smartly between Brynn encountering a situation and her resolution of the same. For instance, in one simple sequence, we watch as Brynn rides her bike into town for help after being unable to start her car, experiencing an extremely unpleasant but nonetheless wordless encounter with Maud’s mother and father (the latter of whom is the chief of police) that reminds her that—as the title tells us—no one will help her, and then immediately cuts to her at a bus station, ticket in hand. There’s no spoon-feeding and there’s no need for it, either.
We eventually learn what happened between Brynn and Maud that left Brynn a pariah in Mill River, and it’s devastating. Outside of the flashbacks that fill this in, however, the film takes place over a brief time frame of only three days and two nights. The first of these nights sees Brynn (sort of) fend off a home invader, who just so happens to be an extraterrestrial. When she finds herself unable to gather assistance or successfully escape town the following day, she prepares to defend herself for a second night, only for the film to perform a little sleight of hand with its genre, transitioning from the home-invasion-with-an-outer-space-twist narrative to a more introspective form of psychological horror, as the aliens attempt to assimilate Brynn into a pod-people collective. Their means to do so involve tempting her to give up her mind and body through visions of a reality where she is no longer bound by the tragedy of her past and no longer missing the things which have been lost to her. When that doesn’t work, the snare she’s in just gets tighter.
This movie lives and/or dies on Kaitlyn Dever’s performance, and it’s a testament to her ability that it soars. The camerawork here is likewise deft in the way that the language of pans and zooms keeps us in Brynn’s headspace so effectively; the touch is so lightweight as to make its capture of all the moving parts appear almost effortless. The visual effects work is also top notch; the aliens feel appropriately otherworldly even if the CGI seams are unavoidable, while the film wisely chooses clever takes on familiar ways of visualizing standard abduction phenomena, borrowing heavily from The X-Files and its use of blinding beams of white light (the abductions of Duane Barry in the second season and Max Fenig in season four come to mind), although it also includes occasional pervasive red lighting that calls to mind the opening of Fire in the Sky. The film moves in novel and exciting ways, and it’s well worth checking out.
Hoo boy is this one a lot of fun, and it’s free, Jack! (Sorry.) Crackerjack racecar star Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is looking forward to marrying sweetheart Julie Redlund (Rene Russo) once he gets all of his ducks in a row. Unfortunately, this crisp November 1991 day is the day that he crashes his racer in a deadly fireball, leaving behind a heartbroken Julie. Meanwhile, in the distant future of 2009, Vacendak (Mick Jagger) and his crew of “bonejackers” cruise through a hellish dystopia in order to line up their machinery with Furlong’s past accident and teleport (or “freejack”) him into the future. See, scientists have figured out how to transfer consciousness from one body to another, gifting immortality to (the wealthiest 1% of) humankind; however, since everyone in 2009 has lived with such intense and prolonged pollution and suffering, the rich don’t want their bodies. Instead, people like Vacendak are bounty hunters for people who can be plucked out of the stream of time like a fish without causing any time-snarling shenanigans — that is, moments before their death and only if they wouldn’t leave identifiable remains anyway. When the bonejacker caravan is knocked out of commission, Furlong escapes.
After making his way home and finding that Julie no longer lives there, Furlong stumbles into a church, where an atypical nun (Amanda Plummer) fills in the background of the new world order. She explains the concept of freejacking, the immortality machine, and why it looks so much like Class of 1999 outside. She is unable to find Julie online but is able to connect Furlong with his old manager Brad (David Johansen of New York Dolls), who promises to get him in contact with Julie. Elsewhere, Julie has done rather well for herself, rising to an executive position at a major corporation headed by Ian McCandless (Anthony Hopkins), where she works alongside the CEO’s right-hand man Michelette (Jonathan Banks). She, along with the other elites, lives in one of a series of skyscrapers in a gated part of the city, far from the hoarse cries of any yearning masses longing to be free. Furlong must convince her that he is who he says he is—not some guy who freejacked her lost love—and avoid capture by Vacendak, Michelette, or any other interested party for 36 hours, at which point the mind of the mysterious rich person who wants to take over his body will be too degraded to be redownloaded.
This is exactly the kind of movie that the camp stamp was made for. Normally, a low-brow, high-concept movie like this requires the invention of some kind of fantastical breakthrough or discovery, but this film requires two miraculous feats of science (mind transference and time trafficking), which should push the envelope to the point of being too unbelievable. And, yeah, it is, but once you see the series of casual leather outfits that Jagger gets to parade around in, the minitanks that the bonejackers drive (one of them is indigo with pink detailing and the name Sheila emblazoned in neon green script), the hideously eighties stone offices, and what the creators believed passenger cars would look like in 2009, then it’s impossible not to just give in and have a good time. In a way, Freejack presages companion Rip-Van-Winkle-but-as-a-nineties-action-flick film Demolition Man, but while that film is, in many ways, a conservative’s worst nightmare about a future ruled by political correctness, Freejack is movie that recognizes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that corporate interests and wealth hoarders’ desperation to prolong their lives are the things that will/do dominate the 21st century. Both films, however, spend a lot of time exploring the fish-out-of-temporal-water nature of the protagonist after just a couple of decades while also demonstrating technological and social leaps that are completely impossible during such a short time frame. And, because Furlong is a racer, Freejack is also chock full of chase scenes and races against time, which create the illusion of plot progression even when it spins its wheels from time to time.
If anything, this is the result of being overstuffed. Production problems on the film were rife (YouTube channel GoodBadFlicks released a pretty extensive overview a few months ago), and although it doesn’t seem to have had much of a cultural impact, it’s strange that this one hasn’t had its day in the limelight as a wrongly maligned, misunderstood classic. This was released just at the start of Estevez’s star renaissance, as The Mighty Ducks released later that year, and came right on the heels of Hopkins’s career-defining role in Silence of the Lambs. A lot of major performers meet at this crossroads, but it’s been all but forgotten in the wake of their other successes, but in spite of all of the studio interference, I think that there’s actually a pretty great nineties action flick here. This would be the decade that, in the wake of the eighties sci-fi action hat trick of Terminator, Predator, and Aliens, speculative fiction would become a dominating factor in action film before reaching its apotheosis in 1999 with The Matrix; Freejack, with its “spiritual switchboard” technology and the hijacking of people’s bodies, is a part of that cyberpunk evolution. It’s somehow more than the sum of its parts; there’s a sequence near the end where Furlong confronts the person responsible for his freejacking in a spherical room that projects a series of holograms that represent the mind of the stored villain. Images fade in and out, and although I think it probably is not the exact effect that the filmmakers were trying to convey and a modern audience may reject them as “bad FX,” but I find their dreamlike gaussiness and the way that things appear and reappear to be a very effective visualization of the ever-changing thoughts and mental landscape of the antagonist. There’s so much attention to detail in so many places that are a true testament to Geoff Murphy’s work that, in spite of the production hell, this movie not only is more than functional but is in fact exceptional. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot of fun. And hey — it’s available for free right now on YouTube (with commercials). Why not?
“Aporia” refers to a declaration of one’s doubt in something, often a statement which does not actually reflect the speaker’s actual belief. Within the Socratic method, it was the state in which Socrates left his verbal sparring partners after he picked apart their definitions of a concept through a series of questions that ultimately revealed his opponent’s lack of solid philosophical standing. More recently, it’s become largely synonymous with the word “paradox,” which was likely the reason that the word was chosen as this film’s title; however, if one perceives the word as reference to a statement that does not match the belief of the speaker, it actually makes for a fairly decent joke about this film’s overall lack of self-reflection.
Sophie (Judy Greer) is deep in mourning over the loss of her physicist husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) eight months ago. Their soon-to-be-twelve daughter Riley, who shared her father’s love of rocketry and astronomy, is likewise adrift, withdrawing from her mother, skipping school, and preparing to sell the model rockets she and her father built together. After Sophie is forced to call on Mal’s friend Jabir (Peyman Moaadi) to help her out by collecting Riley from school when she is suspended, Jabir lets her in on a quantum physics project that he and Mal were tinkering around with before the latter’s death. It’s a time machine, essentially, although not of the normal transportation variety; instead, it’s capable of sending a single particle back in time to a certain place, meaning that it’s functionally a gun that kills someone in the past. Jabir originally started working on the idea because he could never get over the massacre of his family, the tragedy which drove him to immigrate to the U.S. in the first place; affecting the past that far back will require a great deal of power, but a shorter time frame might work. It’s untested, but he can no longer sit on the sidelines of Sophie’s life and watch her drown in her grief without offering her the opportunity to “rescue” Mal by “taking out” the drunk driver who killed him before the accident ever occurred.
Mal’s inevitable return to life needs to happen ten minutes sooner (with less hemming and hawing about the moral implications and fewer, denser scenes of Riley acting out); this would also open up some room in Act II for more interesting discussion about the consequences of Sophie and Jabir’s action. There’s something very interesting that happens in here, as those who are protected from the memory ripple effect slowly become more disconnected from the world because they remember it differently. It would have been fun to explore with more butterflies getting squashed, so to speak, but since there are just a few changes to the timeline, we go from Timeline B, where the changes are limited to work schedules and furniture arrangements, to Timelines C (with no apparent ripple effects that our characters notice) and then D, where the changes are so extreme that Mal and Sophie’s lives are barely recognizable.
The removal of Mal’s killer leaves his wife Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) a single mother in dire financial straits, exacerbated by her daughter Aggie’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis and the medical costs thereof. Feeling responsible for the other woman’s situation and seeing her own grief reflected in Kara, Sophie invites her to dinner, and Aggie & Riley strike up a friendship after some initial friction. When Aggie’s symptoms worsen and she ends up in the hospital, Mal, Sophie, and Jabir debate whether or not to kill a man who, a decade prior, embezzled Kara’s money from her successful bakery, leaving her unable to afford to both keep her house and care for Aggie. Although the trio is reasonably convinced that the death of “the Bernie Madoff of Arizona” just a few months earlier than his natural death will have no effect on their life situations, they emerge from the room where they shot the man through time only to discover that they are impostors in their own lives: unknown to old friends, greeted with warmth by unknown faces, and, for Sophie and Mal, faced with a child who is a stranger to them.
There’s a lot of promise here that simply isn’t lived up to. If nothing else, this is a showcase for Judy Greer to do some more dramatic work, and she sells it. The writing here is often good, although its highlights are interspersed with a lot of dialogue that is fairly workmanlike. I won’t bother getting into the minutia about fictional temporal mechanics either as that’s a hobby for pedants and bores, but I will say that anyone who’s ever seen a movie with time travel (or time murder, as is the case here) in it knows that Jabir can’t go back to his youth and save his family from being killed. If he does, he never comes to America, he never builds the time rifle, so he never goes back in time, bake at 350° F for 22 minutes and you’ve got a paradox, which in this narrative means a reset. Of course, this also means that anyone who’s ever seen one of these knows that this will come into play once our heroes decide they’ve mucked up the timeline badly enough that they have no choice but to nuke the whole thing and hope that whatever versions of themselves exist in the new timeline land on their feet. It’s to the film’s credit that it ultimately embraces ambiguity in its ending, but it’s not enough for me to give this one a recommendation. It’s a shame, too; there are so many potentially potent building blocks in play that are undercut by the film’s handheld camerawork, which is a common choice for these cheapy sci-fi time travel flicks, but one which is at odds with the attempts at nuanced storytelling, discussions of ethics, and Greer leaving it all out on the field. The film is simply working against itself in too many places to come together into a cohesive whole, and in the end, it seems to lack the very conviction that one definition of “aporia” implies.
Scandinavian cinema has a distinctly fucked up sense of humor to it, so it’s not surprising that two of the year’s best black comedies have been released out of Norway. Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature Sick of Myself (in which an art-world narcissist medically self-harms for media attention) is the higher profile of the two, already landing the director a buzzy follow-up starring Nic Cage (in Dream Scenario). By contrast, the darkly comic Tinder thriller Good Boy is a much smaller, limited production – restricted to just four characters shooting in four sparse locales. Despite earning a few key critical accolades on the festival circuit (including a coveted spot-on John Waters’s Best Films of the Year list), Sick of Myself is hardly an MCU-scale cultural behemoth worth rooting against in favor of its underfunded underdog. Still, running only 75 minutes and released to zero fanfare, Good Boy is a fucked up little Norwegian romance drama worth championing for its minor, muted victories, at least so director Viljar Bøe might be able to torture audiences on a much bigger scale in his next production. There’s plenty of dark Norwegian humor to go around.
Good Boy might not have a professional-level budget, but it does have a killer hook. It’s a story of unethical puppy play, pulling some uneasy laughs and genuine chills out of the basic discomfort of stumbling into someone else’s elaborate kink scene without context or warning. After scoring a successful Tinder date with a legitimate millionaire, an unsuspecting Psychology student is introduced to her new beau’s unconventional pet: a human man who spends 24/7 in a dog costume. Any cautious probing about the weirdness of keeping a human being as a house pet is outright dismissed by the Norwegian Psycho; he responds to reasonable questions like “What’s his deal?” with “He’s a dog.” Of course, because this is a movie, it turns out the dog’s deal is much sicker than that, and his loving captivity within the millionaire’s household turns out to be less voluntary & consensual than initially let on. Much less. The story gradually devolves into full-on torture porn from there, but much in the way that the equivalent American dating-app thriller Fresh did last year: maintaining a wicked sense of humor throughout. It’s all one big joke about dating a total control freak; he just happens to be a very specific kind of freak.
For all of its kink-scene iconography, Good Boy is less about the degenerate amorality of real-life puppy players than it is about the violent amorality of stubbornly Conservative thinkers, recalling the sickly domesticity of recent titles like Swallow & Hatching. It dodges a lot of the kink-shaming implications of its premise by doubling down on something we can all agree on: the ultra-wealthy are the world’s true degenerate freaks. It undeniably banks on the viewer’s kneejerk discomfort with other people’s private kink play scenarios, though, drawing just as much terror out of the human-dog’s elaborate furry costuming (his mask has a hinged jaw!) as it does out of the violence that keeps him living the fantasy. Speaking personally, the movie didn’t change the way I think about narcissist millionaires, trad homesteaders, or proudly kinky puppy players. However, it did change how I interacted with my dog for the next couple days, causing me to pause while feeding her, pilling her, and getting her ready for bed to consider just how strange of a relationship we have on either side of the pet-owner divide. It may not be an especially deep movie, thematically, but it still made something familiar & routine feel totally alien & horrific in its immediate afterglow, which is all I can really ask for out of a prankish, low-budget horror movie.
I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021. All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him. That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography). A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture. And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture! The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime. It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.
Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot. Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes. This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance. And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union. It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush. You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries. The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal. The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail. You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.
The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth. Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress. Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed. Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity. Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history. There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place. The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds. The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).
Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to. The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot. There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand. The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act. “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason. A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet. In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies. They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.
Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc. As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places. Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds. In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience. A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience.
Welcome to Episode #196 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four horror films directed by auteurs who only dabbled in the genre once, starting with Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).
00:00 Welcome
03:07 The Beast (1975) 08:31 No One Will Save You (2023) 10:22 Death of a Cheerleader (2019) 12:18 Night Tide (1961) 16:12 Anchorman (2004) 22:08 Good Boy (2023) 24:19 The Severing (2023)
28:47 Hour of the Wolf (1968) 50:54 Peeping Tom (1960) 1:10:25 Near Dark (1987) 1:27:22 Willow Creek (2013)
Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!
“Sunshine, wine, swimming, antiquing, ambient acoustic strumming … If it weren’t for all of the violent hallucinations & vampiric ghouls this would be a pleasant little getaway” Currently streaming on Paramount+, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on PlutoTV.
“I braced myself for it to be far more needlessly vicious than it was, given the New French Extremity’s fetish for grisly details. Calvaire does a good job of implying instead of dwelling and, more importantly, of cutting its unbearable tension with gallows humor so it’s not all misery & pain. Part of my amusement might have been enhanced by the two main characters being assigned names I associate with comedy: Marc Stevens (who shares a name with John Early’s grifter villain on Los Espookys) and Paul Bartel (who shares a name with one of the greatest comedic directors to ever do it). Regardless, director Fabrice du Welz also amuses himself by framing this grim & grueling torture session as ‘the best Christmas ever’ in its sicko villain’s mind, contrasting the hyperviolent hostage crisis the audience is watching with the delusional family reunion of his imagination in a bleakly hilarious clash of realities. I don’t mean to imply that Calvaire‘s not also a nonstop misery parade, though. It’s that too.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A very cool, loose hangout dramedy about truck stop sex workers that gradually turns into a rigidly formulaic grindhouse slasher to pay the bills. Not everyone gets to be Sean Baker; sometimes you gotta cosplay as Rob Zombie to land your funding.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“What I mean when I say ‘kids are scary’ is that being around other people’s children naturally makes people anxious and nervous, or at least that’s my experience. What if they trip and fall while running past my table at a cafe? Do I suddenly become responsible for their wellbeing? What if the parent thinks I tripped them? What if the kid thinks I tripped them and blames me? Kids are tiny, vulnerable people, but they also have a capability for pure, unfiltered malice that can be creepy as well, and since they’re only just learning how to regulate their emotions and communicate their thoughts, interaction with them can be a minefield. There’s Something Wrong with the Children is probably the first film that I’ve ever seen that captures that particular unease.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.
“In which a pair of drunkard ghosts coach a child who’s been scared bald on how to grow his hair back, only for their advice to work way too well for his own good. Little-kid nightmare logic that you can only find in German fairy tales and Canadian B-movies, pinpointing the middle ground between Hansel & Gretel and The Pit. Wonderfully deranged.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“I was starving for a genuinely over-the-top animal attack movie after being let down by Cocaine Bear, and this hit the spot. It’s basically the same faintly sketched-out story, but its tactility & sincerity go a long way in making its attack scenes much worthier of the ambling journey. There’s something especially unnerving about the way the animals appear to leap out of stock footage, as if they’re crossing a forbidden barrier into reality to tear into the character actors (and, more often, the stunt doubles). Incredible that it wasn’t directed by Larry Cohen.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“As trippy as it can be in its Skinamarinkian disorientation, it’s anchored to a concise, recognizable premise that could neatly be categorized as The Blair Witch Project Part IV: Blair Witch Goes to Hanging Rock. It strikes a nice balance between the slow-moving quiet of its bedroom art brethren and mainstream horror’s return to big, bold, bloody haunted house scares. Maybe that makes it a less artistically daring film than World’s Fair or Skinamarink, but it also makes it a more overtly entertaining one.”. Currently streamingon Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Seeing a lot of grossed-out responses from unsuspecting audiences wishing this was more of a straightforward road trip love story. I’m coming from the opposite direction, wishing it weren’t so tenderly underplayed & remorseful about its hunger pangs for gore. It’s kinda nice to have something that drifts between those two magnetic pulls, though, especially since it’s so unusual to see a Near Dark-style genre blender positioned as a prestigious Awards Contender.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.
“Feels like Lynch twisting himself in knots to make the James from Twin Peaks archetype genuinely compelling … and he eventually gets there. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how noir antiheroes are mostly just sad sack losers who make their own shit luck by feeling sorry for themselves, and this one turns their mopey interchangeability into a kind of existential horror.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“In The Lawnmower Man, director Brett Leonard justifies testing the limitations of stage-of-the-art 90s CG animation by inventing convoluted science lab experiments that create a VR cyberworld. Here, he takes a bold step forward by suggesting that exact CG cyberworld is where our souls go when our bodies die, treating his Windows 95 screensaver graphics as if they were the most typical, durable approach to visual effects available. Stunning, even if extraordinarily goofy.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Brandon Cronenberg’s deeply unnerving debut is a sickly TMZ geek show. I need to stop hanging out online, because I keep reading flippant dismissals about how unimpressive he is as body horror’s premier nepo baby, then still really enjoying each of his movies when I get to see them for myself.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“In which a madman plastic surgeon transforms an injured go-to dancer into his missing daughter’s doppelganger, in order to claim her inheritance in her absence. Technically, this is a PG-rated comedy, but it feels like it should have been bumped to the top of the video nasties list. Delicious, deep-fried Southern sleaze.” Currently streaming on Screambox.
“Hideous gore, gratuitous male & female nudity, and a babyfaced Udo Kier soaring miles over the top as a camped-up villainous lead. What more could you want?” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and AMC+.
“Like all other Amicus anthology horrors I’ve seen, this is consistently entertaining throughout but never exactly surprising nor even thrilling. It’s horror comfort viewing, best enjoyed under a blanket with a humongous mug of tea.” Currently streaming on Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The greatest British portmanteau horror of all time, trading in the rigid stage-play traditionalism of classic Amicus anthologies for a more fluid, music video era dream logic.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“A pure psychedelic meltdown of id at the bottom of a deep well of communal grief. Restructures the seaside ghost story of Carpenter’s The Fog through the methodical unraveling of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, dredging up something that’s at once eerily familiar & wholly unique.” Currently streaming on Hulu.
“A pensive motherhood horror about the pain of trading in youthful passion & rebellion for familial comfort & ease. Lots of thematic overlap with The Five Devils in that way, even if they’re nothing alike aesthetically. Besides landing every one of its scares and dramatic beats, this just has some truly world-class hand acting. Cracking knuckles and spatchcocking chickens will never feel the same again.” Currently streamingon Shudder and AMC+.
“Without question, the greatest evil-stepparent horror of all time, a superlative indicated by its definitive title. Terry O’Quinn is the stepfather, a sociopathic serial killer who cycles through families like he’s updating his wardrobe, killing the old batch in cold blood instead of dropping it off at Goodwill. O’Quinn is an explosive volcano of white-man rage, barely suppressing his violent outbursts under a thin facade of Ward Cleaver, Father Knows Best-style suburban Family Values. It is one of the all-time great villain performances, regardless of genre. There was already a bland, forgettable remake in the aughts, but the only other actor who could maybe pull this performance off is Will Forte, whose comedic version of bottled-up fury is a direct echo of the terror in O’Quinn’s piercing, hateful eyes.” Currently streamingon Peacock, Screambox, for free (with ads) on Tubi, and for free (with a librarby card) on Kanopy & Hoopla.
“A tense domestic thriller about a pushy, macho plumber who walks all over a married couple of uptight academics; directed for television by a young Peter Weir. Cuts to the core of liberal urbanites’ fear of the working-class brutes they invite into their home for routine repairs; a home invasion thriller where the menace is politely welcomed inside.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“As absurd as this prototypical slasher can be tonally, it feels true to how I remember high school: a conformity cult led by fascist jocks, lording over poorly socialized losers who would’ve been just as awful if we were given the opportunity. Our jocks never offered to take us hang-gliding, though, so now I feel like I missed out on something.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“A strong sequel in a very strong franchise, possibly the horror franchise with the best hit to miss ration (5:1, in my book, and even the dud has Parker Posey to liven it up, so that’s something). Even though there are moments that are questionable (some of the people we see attacked should not have survived what happened to them), there are more than enough great sequences, character beats, and thrills to make up for them.” Currently streaming on Paramount+.
“It wasn’t until after the viewing that I realized the director, Gerard Johnstone, was also the man behind Housebound, a film we loved so much that we made it into content for Swampflix twice: first with a very positive 2015 review and again five years later as the topic on one of our earliest episodes of the Lagniappe podcast. That actually explains the comedic sensibility; it’s not omnipresent, but it’s almost funnier that the jokes are paced with some distance between them, allowing them to break the tension when they reappear, and the emotional whiplash of it all is part of the fun. ” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A young, baby-faced Clint Howard stars as a military academy misfit who summons Satan to smite his bullies using the Latin translation software on the school computer. It’s a dual-novelty horror that cashes in on the personal desktop computer & Satanic Panic trends of its era, combining badass practical gore spectacles with proto-Lawnmower Man computer graphics. It isn’t long before the prematurely bald Baby Clint graduates from translating Latin phrases from a Satanic priest’s diary to asking the computer dangerous questions like ‘“’What elements do I need for a Black Mass?’”’ and ‘“’What are the keys to Satan’s magic?’”’, stoking parents’ technological and religious fears with full aggression. And the third-act gore spectacle he unleashes with those questions is gorgeously disgusting.” Currently streamingon Shudder.
“Some fun, fucked-up Discomfort Horror that Malignantizes the post-torture porn cruelty of titles like Don’t Breathe into something new & exciting. It also has the best end-credits needle drop since You Were Never Really Here, leaving the audience in a perversely upbeat mood despite the Hell we just squirmed through.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Max.
“Simultaneously a familiar experience and an alien one, mixing generic horror tropes with an experimental sensibility – like a Poltergeist remake guided by the spirit of Un Chien Andalou. It’s the kind of loosely plotted, bad-vibes-only, liminal-space horror that requires the audience to meet it halfway both in emotional impact and in logical interpretation. In the best-case scenario, audiences will find traces of their own childhood nightmares in its darkened hallways & Lego-piece art instillations. Personally, I was more hung up on the way it evokes two entirely separate eras of my youth: my alone-time online as a sleep-starved teen and my alone-time in front of cathode TVs as a sleep-starved tyke a decade earlier.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Shudder.
“Before pressing play I was skeptical this would be enough of a Horror Film to work as proper Halloween season viewing. One of the first shots is a newspaper headline that reads ‘STRANGLER STILL AT LARGE!'” Currently streamingon Amazon Prime and The Criterion Channel.
“Super scary, both as a traditional Gothic ghost story and as a worst-case-scenario vision of Daniel Radcliffe’s career path as a bland leading man instead of an eccentric weirdo millionaire.” Currently streamingon Paramount+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“The surprisingly goofy midway point between Poltergeist and Jacob’s Ladder. Can’t quite match the euphoric highs of either comparison, but it’s still a fun dark-ride attraction of its own merit. The rubber-mask monsters are adorably grotesque, and they pop out of the most surprising places.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Amazon Prime, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A deliciously trashy VHS slasher where every single kill comes with its own punny quip. You hardly have time to question why they call him Dr. Giggles before he’s performing involuntary open-heart surgery while giggling like a madman and proclaiming ‘”‘Laughter is the best medicine.'”‘ It has no idea how to fill the time between the kill gags, but it really delivers the goods where it counts.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A kind of anti-choice, pro-environmentalist creature feature where an aborted, toxically mutated fetus gets its revenge on the brothel-clinic that brought it into this sick, sad world. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s a perfect This Kind Of Movie, delivering everything you could possibly want to see out schlock of its ilk: a wide range of rubber monster puppets, over-the-top character work, stop-motion buffoonery, and multiple opportunities to feel greatly offended while never being able to exactly pinpoint its politics. Wonderfully fucked up stuff.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“I always assumed we didn’t have basements in Louisiana because we’re built on mushy swampland. Turns out it’s because we’re built on seven gateways to Hell. Honestly makes a lot more sense.” Currently streamingon Shudder, Peacock, andfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
There’s nothing especially unique about the mid-90s cyberthriller Cyberstalker. Its novelty as internet chatroom techsploitation is not only drowned out by much bigger, louder Hollywood thrillers of its era like Hackers, Virtuosity, and The Net, but it also fought for video store shelf space with countless other direct-to-VHS cybertitles just like it: Cyberpunk (1990), Cyber-C.H.I.C. (1990), Cyber Tracker (1994), Cyberjack (1995), Cyber Bandits (1995), Cyber Zone (1995), Cyber Vengeance (1997), and cyber-so-on. Cyberstalker‘s home video distributor Troma has since attempted to distinguish it from that overflowing bucket of cyberschlock by retitling it The Digital Prophet, but there are no marketing strategies creative enough to save it from the anonymity of content dungeons like Amazon Prime, Tubi, and PlutoTV. The only distinguishing detail that might hook in an outsider audience who’s not a glutton for vintage cybertrash is a villainous role overperformed by horror convention veteran Jeffrey Combs, who counts as a major celebrity get for a film on this budget level.
Combs isn’t the main villain of Cyberstalker, though. He’s just her cult leader & heroin supplier. The titular cyberstalker is a reclusive chatroom nerd & comic book enthusiast played by Annie Biggs, an actress & director of little note. Troma’s “Digital Prophet” rebranding makes some sense as a marketing ploy, then, since it centers the much more recognizable Combs, who writes the comic books that drive the actual cyberstalker mad. Biggs plays a true believer in her dealer/abuser’s unhinged cyber-rhetoric, and her dedication to the cyber-cause gradually transforms her from a Lisa Loeb cosplayer shut-in to a cyborg dominatrix . . . at least in her mind. As she recruits victims from the Cyberthoughts comics’ Cyecom chatroom, they only see her as a nerd with a gun. The audience has the privilege of seeing the real world through her cyber-eyes, though, where her earthly body glitches out into PC monitor static and Windows 95 screensaver psychedelia. It’s a little disappointing that the most novel, cyber-specific imagery in the movie is all in the killer’s head, but it is real to her and, thus, temporarily real for us.
No-name, no-relation director Christopher Romero attempts to treat this chatroom-murders novelty subject like a standard serial killer thriller, borrowing from the disembodied, leather-gloved hands of gialli and the window-blinds shadows of noir instead of intently pushing the vaporwave CG imagery to its Brett Leonard extremes. In his most hilarious move, Romero even recreates the infamous Psycho shower scene with a handgun instead of a kitchen knife. Despite those misguided efforts to dull down & normalize the film’s cyberthriller elements, there are still plenty moments of 90s techsploitation kitsch that shine through: the first victim is strangled with a modem chord; all victims read their Cyecom chatroom correspondence out loud for the audience’s benefit, like Sandra Bullock in The Net; and the final showdown with the cops on the killer’s trail is staged in a warehouse stocked with Dell computer monitors. Of course, since there are countless other video store titles where you can find those exact mid-90s cyberthriller novelties, I should probably just be reporting on the one thing that might draw new audiences in to see Cyberstalker in particular: Combs. The production could only afford Combs for a few scenes, but he makes the most of them, especially when performing a gunshot wound during the final shootout, making a full meal of his death like Paul Reubens in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.
I rented Cyberstalker for one American dollar. It was a small fee to skip the ad breaks of whatever cyberequivalent I would’ve watched on Tubi instead if this one wasn’t so cheap to rent. I’m sure I would’ve gotten just as much (and just as little) out of Cyber-C.H.I.C., Cyber Vengeance, or whatever random noun Tubi would’ve autofilled as I typed the word “cyber” in the search bar, but I have no regrets watching this randomly selected cybertitle. If nothing else, I’ve never seen a serial killer character costumed to look like Lisa Loeb before. The closest example I can think of is Carol Kane in Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer, but even she had more of a Big Bad Wolf in Grandma’s nightgown look.
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