Welcome to Episode #194 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four made-for-TV biopics about tabloid-magnet celebrities, starting with 1990’s messy real estate drama Leona Helmsley:The Queen of Mean.
01:00 Desperate Living (1977) 10:00 Where is the Friend’s House? (1987) 13:55 Beau is Afraid (2023) 17:55 Summer Heat (1987) 19:45 Fallen Angel (1981) 22:45 Passages (2023) 24:54 Bottoms (2023)
27:45 Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990) 48:22 The Late Shift (1996) 1:05:10 Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B (2014) 1:18:05 Wendy Williams: The Movie (2021)
You know I love a pastiche, and I was bummed when I wasn’t able to catch this one in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run. Despite the inherently sci-fi nature of the title, I wasn’t expecting just how far into that genre the film would lean, and I was delighted.
In the Glen, an area that federal and state funding has not so much forgotten as forsaken, Fontaine (John Boyega) is the dealer at the top of the food chain. Far from the exciting life of danger that one would expect, it’s a monotonous routine; he gets a bottle of alcohol and a lottery scratch-off from the corner store, pours some out into the extended cup of elderly, conspiracy-spouting Frog (Leon Lamar), pumps some iron, mournfully contemplates the “In Remembrance” clipping for his younger brother on the fridge, knocks on his mother’s door to see if she wants anything (she never does), and receives delivery of the day’s cash intake. On the day that the film opens, two out-of-the-ordinary things happen. The first is that he gets word from elementary aged Junebug (Trayce Malachi) that a pusher for rival dealer Issac (J. Alphonse Nicholson) has been spotted in Fontaine’s territory, leading Fontaine to kneecap said pusher. The second is that local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) has failed to pay up, so Fontaine tracks him down to his hotel, which leaves the younger man vulnerable to a drive-by at the hands of a retaliating Isaac. Then he wakes up. Dismissing the shooting as a dream, Fontaine resumes his quotidian: scratch-off, Frog, iron, Remembrance, mother. Only when he once again goes to confront Slick Charles, who tells him that he watched Fontaine die, a fact which is corroborated by sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). Following a suspicious black SUV, the unlikely trio discovers that there’s much more going on than meets the eye.
There are a few different misdirections in the film that lure the savvy audience member into thinking that they know where the film is headed. Fontaine’s day(s) has all the trappings of a time loop narrative, which wasn’t uncommon prior to COVID, but which has really blossomed as a story device since lockdown, during which many people began to see something of their own quarantined routine in these stories. This theory is blown out of the water when other characters recall Fontaine’s death. Further complicating matters is the widespread lack of specificity about the time period in which the film takes place. Older model cars line the streets and Charles dresses like Willie Dynamite, which would date the film to the 1970s, but Junebug talks excitedly about SpongeBob SquarePants, which moves the setting closer to our own, but given that the show premiered in 1999, that still jives with the omnipresence of CRT model televisions. That is, until Yo-Yo mentions blockchain, which means that this must take place in the present (or future), but a present dotted with anachronistic technology. Of course, given that this is an extremely tightly constructed script, it’s no surprise that there’s a reason for all of this, but revealing any more than that would spoil too much.
Speaking of which, this is one of those movies with a plot that’s all but impossible to talk about without revealing too much. Luckily, the performances give us more than enough text to dig through. Jamie Foxx stays working, which means that he’s forever ending up in projects that fail to really use him to his greatest potential; here, he’s utterly fantastic as the has-been Charles, whose bygone primacy is a point of pride (he boasts that he won Pimp of the Year at the Player’s Ball in 1996), undermined by his current washed-up status. There’s a bit of the Cowardly Lion in him, but he comes through when needed, and, just like the other characters rounding out the trio, he’s savvier than appearances would suggest. Boyega is also on top of this game here, and there’s a bit of his performance as Moses in Attack the Block that bleeds through here, perhaps intentionally. The breakout is Parris, who is having quite the year, given that she’s co-headlining the upcoming Marvel feature The Marvels after her character was introduced to the MCU via WandaVision, where she was easily one of the best things about the program. Every character’s hidden depths are important, as they bely the cluelessness and patronizing shallow-mindedness of the antagonists, but Yo-Yo’s fascination with Nancy Drew is particularly endearing to me, as is her ambition.
Just like when I rated & ranked the Alien franchise, the original Ninja Turtles movie remains an easy favorite. It’s not only a priceless time capusle of bodacious 90s kitsch, but it also exemplifies how attention to visual craft can make a classic out of potentially disastrous material. Without the Jim Henson Creature Shop’s involvement the first live-action Ninja Turtles film would be ranked on the same worst-of-all-time lists as Howard the Duck, Troll 2, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and Mac & Me. All those titles have their own mesmeric movie magic to them, but this one needs much less good will & forgiveness from the audience to legitimize it. It’s a legitimately great children’s film, one with a surprising amount of grit & gravitas considering the inherent goofiness of the source material.
The franchise’s most recent theatrical outing (and, obviously, the inspiration for this ranked list) is not only the best Ninja Turtles movie in the three decades since the original, but it’s also generally the best mutation of the breakthrough Spider-Verse CG animation aesthetic to date and the most a Trent Reznor score has actually sounded like Trent Reznor’s band. It’s particularly delightful to see a TMNT movie focus on the “teenage” portion of the acronym by making everything as gross as possible and by making the young, crimefighting turtles’ ultimate goal to save prom from being cancelled. In all other Ninja Turtles movies, the titular heroes’ “teenage” status is an aspirational quality for younger viewers, who look up to them as skateboarders, pizza-chompers, and users of obscure slang (“Cowabunga!”, “Radical!”, “Tubular!”, etc.); in this one, being teens means they’re charmingly awkward dorks still figuring out their place in the world, which feels more accurate as an adult looking back on those years.
Turtles Forever (2009)
This genuinely funny fish-out-of-water comedy imports the deliriously goofy Ninja Turtles from the 1980s cartoon series into the (slightly) more realistic world of the 2000s Ninja Turtles cartoon (and then eventually imports both crews into the even grittier world of the original underground comics, sans sarcasm). It has aged remarkably well, both as a loving nostalgia piece commemorating both TV shows and as an early predictor of the superhero genre’s current, implosive addiction to multiverse team-ups. I can’t wait to see the Mutant Mayhem turts repeat the gimmick in their own inevitable multiverse sequel.
It’s easy to work up nostalgia for 1990s pop culture all these decades later, but it takes a real trash connoisseur to look back fondly on the crass commercialism of the recent past. Michael Bay’s CGI Ninja Turtles film is bad-taste 2010s filmmaking in a nutshell or, if you will, on the half shell. It encapsulates everything “wrong” with the mainstream schlock of its era: lens flairs, found footage, product placement, fascination with viral videos, over-reliance on CGI, shaky cam, action confused by quick cuts, large-scale destruction of a major city, a phony third act death crisis, and a dubstep beat for the obligatory, plot-summarizing rap song that plays over the credits. The film itself is even an example our greatest, most frequent sin of the decade: the reboot. More specifically, it’s a gritty reboot, the most ludicrous gritty reboot of the post-Dark Knight era, considering the inherent goofiness of the source material. To top it all off, it boasts an above-it-all sense of irony that compels the movie to periodically point out how inherently silly that source material is. Characters poke fun at one another for “doing the Batman voice” and frequently mock the basic idea of talking humanoid turtles. The further we get away from a time when those qualities were our grotesque norm, the more endearing it will become as a cultural relic.
Instead of pushing the brooding grit of the Dark Knight era’s needless reboots to their most ludicrous extreme like its hilariously hideous predecessor, Out of the Shadows calls back to the light, fun, cartoonish energy that made the original live-action Ninja Turtles trilogy such a nostalgia-inducing relic of the 1990s. I guess you could ague that banking on 90s nostalgia is in itself a snapshot of modern blockbuster filmmaking, but that’s not what makes Out of the Shadows special. Here’s what does make it special: a manhole-shooting garbage truck modeled after the franchise’s infamous pizza van toy; a pro wrestler that plays a tank-operating rhinoceros; a perfectly hideous realization of the villainous mech suit-operating alien brain Krang; etc. Given enough time, this is a film both silly & visually memorable (read: deeply ugly) enough to generate its own future nostalgia entirely separate from that of a previous generation’s (not that it was above playing the 90s cartoon’s theme song over the end credits).
Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)
This direct-to-video crossover event is shockingly violent for an animated Ninja Turtles movie, frequently interrupting Michaelangelo’s teen-boy tomfoolery (voiced by a perfectly cast Kyle Mooney) with Raphael & Batman drawing blood from various outmatched combatants. I suppose that tonal imbalance makes sense, since the target audience has to be old enough to be nostalgic for both the Ninja Turtles’ & the Batman’s respective animated series but also immature enough to be watching a Batman vs Ninja Turtles movie in the first place. Luckily, I qualify, so I got treated to the once-in-a-lifetime phrase “Jokerfied ooze”.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)
This rushed-to-market sequel replaces the grit & gravitas of the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie with nonstop catchphrase recitals, hack comedy routines, Vanilla Ice product placement, and Looney Tunes sound effects. Those indulgences are still “turte-rific” in their own way, though, and it all amounts to a “max-amundo” action comedy that inspired an entire generation of Millennial children to “Go, ninja, go” to the polls to vote for environmental protection laws.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)
In which the turtles time-travel to feudal Japan, a setting that separates them from their most essential accoutrements (pizza, skateboards, urban grime, etc.), so it’s not surprising it killed the momentum of the original live-action franchise. This does make sense as toned-down course correction after the nonstop catchphrase goofballery of Secret of the Ooze, and I guess it’s nice to have official confirmation that the Jim Henson costume designs look like kappa. It just also feels like the least ninja-turtley Ninja Turtles movie, verifiable by the fact that there isn’t a single pizza delivery in either of its dual timelines.
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (2022)
This series finale Event Film (wrapping up an animated TV show I had never heard of before starting this project) is pleasant enough but entirely disposable, by which I mean it’s a Netflix movie. There’s some novelty in it plugging Ninja Turtles characters into the plot of The Terminator, but if you are not currently 7 years old and would rather just be watching The Terminator, that novelty can also be a huge hindrance. The animation itself is vibrant & colorful but also flat & unremarkable. The most remarkable thing about it, really, is that Ben Schwartz’s vocal work manages to make Leonardo more annoying than any previous movie version of Michaelangelo – a true miracle.
TMNT (2007)
The Michael Bay Ninja Turtle movies get a lot of shit for their hideous computer animation, which is probably deserved, but at least they have personality & texture to them, however grotesque. This room-temperature CG gruel is lifelessly, insipidly hideous, as if it were a proof-of-concept storyboard for a potential Ninja Turtles movie instead of the final product. I can’t believe it was released in theaters and not on an interactive CD-ROM. It’s also way too self-serious, both for a kids’ movies about pizza-addict turtle ninjas and for a reptilian joy ride on The Polar Express.
I’m not really sure that I have superhero fatigue. Scratch that; I definitely do, but I also have superhero fatigue fatigue. We’ve been hearing about how the general population is growing tired of superhero movies for over half a decade now, and yet, there’s still no real end in sight. Marvel is keeping its slate full while DC is getting ready to reboot everything again (which, to be fair, if you’ve ever been a fan of DC Comics, you know that this is DC’s modus operandi when things start to get complicated). Paul Rudd’s inherent charm couldn’t save the dreadfulAnt-Man: Quantumania, Ezra Miller’s extracurricular activities didn’t help The Flash reach an audience, and there’s a non-zero chance that this paragraph is the first that you’re hearing about Shazam: Fury of the Gods. It feels like being a corporate shill to call any comic book adaptation that’s hot off the presses a breath of fresh air, but Blue Beetle has a surprising amount of heart, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) just finished his pre-law undergrad—at Gotham University, naturally—and is returning to his Florida home to reunite with his family. Unbeknownst to him, the rest of the Reyes clan has undergone some shake-ups that threaten their home; his father (Damián Alcázar) suffered a heart attack, with the medical bills costing him his mechanic business, and worse, their landlord has sold their family home to the Kord Corporation, which intends to raze the property to build more luxury condominiums. Kord Industries, currently headed by Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) in the wake of the disappearance of her CEO brother Ted, is quickly becoming the only game in town, and they also employ Jaime’s younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) as part of the cleaning crew at the Kord estate. While working with her one day, Jaime witnesses a verbal altercation between Victoria and her niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), over Victoria’s planned direction for the company, turning their attention back to the machinery of war after her father purged weapon research and development when he was CEO. Both Jaime and Milagro end up fired, but Jenny tells Jaime to come to Kord HQ the following day so that she can find gainful employment for him there. Unfortunately, her attempts at corporate espionage—in the form of the theft of something called “the scarab”—that same day are discovered fairly quickly, and she entrusts her stolen goods to Jaime, who is able to abscond with them.
Back home, Jaime’s family insist that he open the box Jenny gave him and look inside, and the piece of alien tech within immediately bonds to him and takes him on a familiar Greatest American Hero/Raimi Spider-Man style “learning to control newfound powers” sequence. It’s pretty rote stuff all things considered, but the bog standard narrative is elevated by novelty in the performances of both the lead and the supporting cast. Sarandon lends the whole thing a sense of gravitas that the film proper doesn’t fully earn, but the real standout is George Lopez, who plays Jaime’s Uncle Rudy. A dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, Rudy acts as occasional expositor, such as in the scenes where he explains the legacy of the heretofore unmentioned previous crime-fighting Blue Beetle, unlikely gadgeteer, and comic relief. He’s clearly having a lot of fun in the role, and although the comedy of the first half of the film felt a little limp and forced, the second half makes up for it.
Look, I’m no fool. I know that there’s no profound moral reason that any company seeks to diversify its staff or output. Faced with outcry in the midst of the June 2020 protests, several major studios hired dozens of DEI employees and strategists and then, as soon as things got quite, those hires were first on the chopping block when “trimming the fat.” Your dad or your cousin or your old college roommate can repeat “Go woke, go broke” until they’re blue in the face, but the truth of the matter is that no megacorp is putting funding toward creating more diverse content out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s all about money, and it always is. Disney’s casting of Halle Berry in The Little Mermaid isn’t part of some grand conspiracy to obliterate “white culture,” they cast her because now they can sell a white Ariel doll and a Black Ariel doll. It’s really as simple as that. There may have been a time when I could have appreciated Blue Beetle more for its pure representation, but things have changed a lot since we could all rest on such neoliberal laurels. Warner Brothers didn’t release this film to theaters because of strong convictions about the treatment of Latine populations in the U.S. or concerns about gentrification of non-white neighborhoods or to take a stand against corporate overreach; in fact, the fact that it touches on these issues while being part of a giant corporate conglomerate is almost insulting.
With that in mind, it’s kind of a big deal that the reins of this movie were handed over to Angel Manuel Soto, whose larger body of work has been concerned with American imperialism in Puerto Rico, as well as the rise of American fascism. His C.V. includes the feature La Granja, a set of interconnecting stories about people from various walks of life struggling with PR’s economic collapse, as well as the short docs I Struggle Where You Vacation and Inside Trump’s America, which focus on the lives of ordinary Puerto Ricans as they struggle with Washington’s sluggishness in the fact of PR’s debt crisis and the terrifying reality of the merging of cult and mob mentalities, respectively. Soto doesn’t leave his past or his beliefs behind in making Blue Beetle, which makes for a bizarre melding, as Rudy (accurately) calls Batman a fascist and Jaime’s grandmother flashes back to her revolutionary days in Mexico while wielding a giant gun and shouting (in Spanish) “Death to the Imperialists!” The irony of this is thick: Batman is DC’s most lucrative cash cow, and there’s no separating the gorged tick that is Warner Brothers from American capitalistic imperialism’s hide. Audre Lorde reminds us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but Soto is giving it a shot. It may not make the movie better, but it certainly doesn’t make it worse.
The Criterion Channel has been spoiling me like a little brat all year, handfeeding me cult cinema curios I’ve been desperate to see forever but could never get my hands on through official channels: The Doom Generation, Kamikaze Hearts, Demonlover, Flaming Ears, and the list goes on. The pummeling rhythm of those dopamine hits have slowed to a trickle in recent months, though, so I’m seeking out my cult classic wishlist items in other venues. Thankfully, there are a thousand vintage genre-film Blu-ray labels happy to take money from an addict, and I recently scored another notoriously hard-to-find schlock relic off of the trash-hero distro Mondo Macabre. Their recent 4k restoration of the 1989 absurdist horror sequel Dr. Caligari did not disappoint. It’s less of a New Wave update of the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari than it is a guided tour of the inside of my mind, hosted by a vintage dominatrix with an academic appreciation of Camp. The second major Caligari revision after the 1920 original (following a Hitchcockian psychodrama version from 1962), this Totally 80s™ take on the story reimagines German Expressionist tropes & aesthetics as MTV era sleaze. Not to damn it with hyperbole, but it is cinema perfected.
Given the resume of director Stephen “Rinse Dream” Sayadian (Cafe Flesh, Nightdreams), it might be more appropriate to compare Dr. Caligari‘s spare sets & heightened aesthetics to video store pornography rather than music video artistry. The handbuilt, absurdly geometric art design and smoke-machine clouded sound stages are pure MTV movie magic, though, imagining a world where Devo scored an adults-only episode of Pee-wee’s Fuckhouse. Any list of its nearest stylistic comparison points could also be found scribbled in a late-80s art school weirdo’s discarded notebook: the Elfman brothers’ live-action cartoon playground Forbidden Zone; Tim Burton’s higher-budget refinement of Ed Woodian artifice; John Waters’s purposefully overwritten, underperformed brays of dialogue; David Lynch’s eerie atmospheric dissonance. The angular, poised performances resemble voguing more than acting, preceding Madonna’s appropriation of the trend by at least a year. There’s even a Cronenbergian flesh wall that kisses its victims back with full tongue. All of this up-to-date 80s Weirdo posturing is at least anchored to overt references to ancient filmmaking aesthetics, including the fellation of a Wizard of Oz scarecrow, a villainous combination of Marlene Dietrich & Ethyl Merman, and the obvious German Expressionist touches referenced in its title. It could have only been made in the glory days of early MTV, but its secret weapon is tying that moment to a larger continuum of wet-nightmare cinema – a long, throbbing history of populist art for perverts.
Still, Dr. Caligari‘s plot is befitting of a Rinse Dream porno, and its hyperfixation on women’s orgasms and bare breasts pushes it to the fuzzy borders of softcore. It’s not a porno parody of the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari so much as it’s a long-gestating sequel. The titular villain is the granddaughter of the original Caligari, running his legacy insane asylum with newly radical, perverted tactics more befitting of a dominatrix than a psychiatrist. Her most treasured patient is an oversexed suburban housewife whose Reaganite husband fears his spouse’s “diseased libido.” Caligari feigns to cure the monstrously horny woman by experimenting with “hormonal interfacing,” but in truth she’s tinkering with ways to weaponize her patient’s sex drive against the men who cower from it. Caligari’s true lab work involves “hypothalamus injections” that allow her to directly transplant brain fluid—and, thus, character traits—from one patient/victim to another. It’s a two-part plan that would allow her to fully claim power over her psych ward fiefdom: first by transplanting the horned-up housewife sex drive of her star patient into the minds of all of her professional nemeses, then by injecting the incredible mental powers of her legendary grandfather into her own mind, becoming unstoppable amidst the chaos. Things do not go according to plan, and her various injections from a “nympholepsy” poisoned mind into her enemies’ hypothalamuses eventually tears down the walls of the Caligari Insane Asylum for good, simply because everyone around her is too horny to control.
If Dr. Caligari is sincerely “about” anything, it’s about Reagan Era suburban fears of sex, particularly of women’s desire & pleasure. In that context, its spare, post-Apocalyptic set design appears to be a nuked-to-oblivion wasteland rather than a rented LA soundstage. The nuclear family unit has died from the slow radiation poisoning of the Cold War, leaving the men in charge terrified that the women below them will climb the ladder of chaos in the rubble. Transplanting those women’s scary libidos into the men’s fragile, fearful minds induces a distinct gender dysphoria horror, erasing their power at the top of the Patriarchy by erasing their manhood altogether. There’s always a question of whether this is pointed political commentary, an indulgence in softcore forced feminization pornography or, most likely, a purely aesthetic provocation with no guiding sense of purpose. Every line reading is an act of sarcastic poetry & performance art, putting each overt political statement and subconscious expression of sexual id in gigantic square quotes. It’s a very specific brand of jaded, ironic, hedonistic fashionista posturing that will test the patience of the sound of mind and pure of heart. However, if you are impure of heart & libido, you’re likely to fall in love with it, especially in its new, crisp presentation from Mondo Macabre.
Our current Movie of the Month, 1983’s A Night in Heaven is an oddly forgotten studio drama about a bored Floridian college professor who cheats on her husband with a young student, who happens to moonlight as a male stripper. Yes, a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype before I was born, and it’s somehow not a certified cult classic (yet), even though it helped popularize the eternal synthpop banger “Obsession”. Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the complications & safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess. In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter, so I guess it all evens out.
A Night in Heaven was released decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper movies, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print obscurity instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite. However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful. There’s nothing especially vulgar or raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to stripper Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front. Still, it’s still shocking to see a retro movie so sincerely stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for Hollywood filmmaking. It’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club movie with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales. Unfortunately, there aren’t many other high-profile male stripper movies to recommend alongside A Night in Heaven as a result, but there are plenty of other contemporary movies set in 1980s strip clubs that match & complement its vintage sleaze aesthetic. To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more 80s stripper movies that share in its distinctly retro grime & glamour.
Flashdance (1983)
A Night in Heaven’s biggest hurdle to earning long-term cult status might have been its short-term battle with Flashdance. Adrian Lyne’s aspirational welder-by-day-stripper-by-night story of a wannabe ballerina making her way in The Big City overshadowed A Night in Heaven so completely that People Magazine dubbed the latter film “Flashdunce” in its review. It’s not hard to see why. While A Night in Heaven is charming in its internal identity crisis, swinging wildly in genre & tone from scene to scene, Flashdance knows exactly what movie it wants to be and leaps gams first towards that goal. Flashdance is just as manically ambitious as its 18-year-old-with-three-jobs protagonist, hammering away at its early MTV fantasy aesthetic so hard in every scene that it’s practically a feature length music video. When Jennifer Beals welds, she’s surrounded by fantastical splashes of sparks & purple smoke. When she strips, the physical stage disappears to allow her (and her wig-wearing body doubles) to bounce around impossible otherworldly voids. When she practices ballet, she doesn’t really. She reinvents the artform of dance entirely, giving physical expression to a hip cassette tape soundtrack you’re directed to buy on your trip home from the theatre. A Night in Heaven can’t help but look small & dorky next to the biggest strip club fantasy movie of 1983, partly because Flashdance is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made.
I’m saying all this as a general skeptic of Adrian Lyne’s signature works, too. Flashdance delivers all of the messy, sweaty erotica of Lyne’s trademark sex thrillers, except with the bitter misogyny swapped out for high-style MTV escapism. It’s unquestionably his best film, challenged only by Jacob’s Ladder. It’s also very likely the best strip club movie of the 1980s, even if it has to pause mid-film to contrast its impossible high-art erotic dance gallery space against a much more realistic, grubby strip club where women actually take their clothes off for money.
Stripper (1986)
There aren’t many 80s stripper movies that demand to be taken as seriously as Stripper. The semi-staged hangout documentary was directed by Pumping Iron producer Jerome Gary, presenting a sincere portrait of North American strippers as artists & craftswomen doing their best to make a living. The six women profiled on camera are all seemingly genuine & passionate in their explanations of why they strip for money, interviewed in front of a blank Sears family photo backdrop to help dampen the subject’s inherent salaciousness. At the same time, the documentary is structured around a stripper convention’s fictional Golden G-String competition that’s inorganically staged for the camera, so that the women have a goal to achieve beyond day-to-day survival. That in-film kayfabe likely mattered a lot more to serious film critics of the 1980s, which is likely why it isn’t as widely canonized as its bodybuilding equivalents in the Pumping Iron series. Its flagrant dishonesty matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, though, where its mixture of high artifice & subcultural anthropology feels distinctly ahead of its time. Modern audiences are well used to parsing out what’s real and what’s kayfabe in semi-documentary television, and it’s fascinating to see that format pioneered in such a distinct subcultural context at such a distinct era in the stripping profession.
Stripper is just as self-conflicted in its tone as A Night in Heaven. It wants to present its titular profession as just another working-class side job, providing a borderline wholesome public service that’s been an American pastime since the old-timey saloon days of its sepia tone photographs. It can’t help but lean into the glam & smut of its 80s strip club milieu, though, and the only inclusion of male strippers among its hot-babe interviewees are the drunk oglers who join them onstage in sarcastic pantomime. On a documentary level, it’s about as academically rigorous as any random episode of HBO Real Sex, but it still makes for great peoplewatching & anthropological texture if you’re willing to peer beyond the sheer veil of fantasy in its onstage strip routines.
Vamp (1986)
It’s a shame that there aren’t many other male-stripper movies of the era to lump in with A Night in Heaven, since that’s the major detail that makes the film special. A Night in Heaven was released in an era when light-hearted erotica was defined by frat bro boner comedies like Animal House, Porky’s, and Revenge of the Nerds, when most sex objects depicted onscreen were women, not student-by-day-gigolo-by-night college age twinks. So, if you’re going to pair A Night in Heaven with one post-Porky’s boner comedy about strippers, you might as well watch Vamp: the one where a gang of neon-lit vampire strippers led by Grace Jones torture the horndog frat boy protagonists. Often cited as a prototype for From Dusk til Dawn the way A Night in Heaven is a prototype for Magic Mike, Vamp is a cutesy horror comedy that can only ogle women’s bodies for so long before those bodies transform into bloodsucking ghouls and turn the tables of power. In a way, it’s got the same older women preying on younger men sexual dynamic of our Movie of the Month, but the “preying” just happens to be a lot more literal & monstrous.
There’s nothing especially innovative or unique about Vamp, at least not once you get past Grace Jones’s centerpiece strip routine (which features set & body paint designs by legendary artist Keith Haring). It’s basically a David DeCoteau movie with a proper budget, a pure-80s novelty. As a vibe check of what audiences most stripper media served in that era, though, it’s at least a pleasant novelty – not least of all because that audience’s frat boy avatars are punished for their sins by one of the coolest, most powerful women to ever grace the stage.
Welcome to Episode #193 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four comedies about shameless opportunists who are living a lie, starting with the Scandinavian art world satire Sick of Myself (2023).
00:00 Welcome
01:33 Cuddly Toys (2023) 11:11 Touki Bouki (1973) 16:20 Blonde Venus (1932) 18:16 Shotgun Wedding (2022) 22:57 Paid in Full (2002) 29:56 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)
35:14 Sick of Myself (2023) 49:50 Not Okay (2022) 1:12:05 World’s Greatest Dad (2009) 1:33:01 Never Been Kissed (1999)
They grow up so fast! It seems like just yesterday Kansas Bowling was a teenage backyard filmmaker making horror-blog headlines with her debut feature B.C. Butcher, like the Tromaville equivalent of Lights Camera Jackson. Now she’s an all-growed-up twentysomething edgelord, touring the country with her mondo genre throwback Cuddly Toys – officially graduating from enfant to enfant terrible. Bowling’s recent visit to New Orleans felt like a mandatory cultural event even though I generally hate the retro mondo movies Cuddly Toys spoofs & subverts; I just had to see what other local schlock gobblers are excited about her work, since the things I knew her from felt so obscure: the aforementioned caveman slasher comedy B.C. Butcher, the Jackass style gorilla-on-the-loose slasher comedy Psycho Ape, and an excellent, years-old episode of the sorely missed Switchblade Sisters podcast in which she eloquently praises the psychedelic Monkees vehicle Head. That curiosity led me somewhat astray, trapping me in a small theater with boisterous horror-bro laughter at some of the cruelest, gnarliest violence in Cuddly Toys, then forcing me to confront the possibility that some of that sour humor was intentional on the director’s end – given that she seems to have a genuine appreciation for the mondo schlock of olde. You could even feel her genuine mondo appreciation in the film’s traveling road show presentation, which was likely inspired by mainstream distributors being weary of touching such sordid material but also feels true to the regional exhibition of the genre’s grindhouse heyday.
To be fair, Cuddly Toys isn’t as purely exploitative as vintage mondo schlock like Mondo Cane, Faces of Death, or whatever obscure, racist cannibalsploitation relic your friend’s scuzzy older brother dared you to watch at an unsupervised sleepover. Bowling appears onscreen as “Professor Kansas Bowling”, recent graduate of teen-life university, narrating a feature-length slideshow with the same faux-educational tone of vintage mondo. Her presentation includes references to distinctly 2010s teen life but is shot on 16mm film stock to match the look of her satirical target. Her “academic” lecture to the clueless parents of America is pitched as a scare film about their teen daughter’s delinquent behavior when they leave the relative safety of home. In practice, she’s “documenting” the horrific daily life of the typical teenage girl by mixing real-life interviews about rape & misogynist abuse with comically exaggerated depictions of rape & misogynist abuse. Like in true mondo tradition, it’s difficult to parse out what authentic snippets of real life are lurking in the exploitation sleaze bucket that swallows it, except now you also have to parse out what’s intended as irony vs what’s sincere. Also in true mondo tradition, I often hated the experience of watching it, even though I’m hopelessly attracted to vintage sexploitation of its ilk (of which only Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless is innocent). Every time I watch a 70s grindhouse relic for the first time, I always brace myself for sexual assault imagery that lingers a couple beats past making its point, and Cuddly Toys is queasily accurate to that tradition, even if its point is nobler than the vintage films it mimics.
And yet, I can’t totally dismiss the bratty outsider-art feminism of this D.I.Y. bombthrower. Cuddly Toys makes admirable gestures to link the sexual violence of subcultural teen life in the 1970s with subcultural teen life now, even directly referencing Marilyn Manson’s despicable revival of the stadium-rock groupie era. Despite ostensibly being structured as an academic lecture, it also does a good job of avoiding direct moralist instruction, both by muddling its Feminism 101 talking points with shocks of edgelord irony and by intercutting its testimonials and re-enactments in a deliberately messy, experimental editing style. Somewhere in all its shock-value leering of underage sex & misogynist violence, there’s an earnest, soul-deep interest in the inner lives of American teen girls, recalling Lauren Greenfield’s portraiture of Californian teens in the 1990s. It can be outright beautiful in individual, intimate moments, often straying from the mondo genre send-up at hand to promote Bowling’s side hustle as a prolific music video director. In general, I found Cuddly Toys much more compelling as a sketchbook-in-motion for Bowling’s loose assemblage of Movie Ideas than as a satirical mondo throwback. It appeared to be shot over several years in cities as far-spanning as LA, NYC, Vegas, and Mexico City, automatically making it a much denser & more personal work than B.C. Butcher, which was shot in a single week just outside Bowling’s childhood home. In its best form, it functions as a kind of avant-garde travel diary, which is fitting for a movie in which a loose collection of wayward teens read semi-fictional selections from their own personal diaries, documented in their densely over-decorated bedrooms.
All of my self-conflicted handwringing about this film’s various failures & successes results from watching a director I find fascinating dabble in a genre I find distasteful. Distastefulness appears to be a personal interest of Bowling’s, though, so I can’t fault her for trying to mine something politically powerful out of the vintage schlock she watches for fun. For my sake, I hope her revival of kitsch genre relics leads her to make something more akin to nudie cuties than roughies in the future, but that’s an entirely selfish impulse. Judging by the alternation between howling laughter and stunned silence in that Cuddly Toys audience, it’s apparent she has plenty enthusiastic devotees to what she’s already accomplishing – way more than I thought to expect.
La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future) is a beautiful, entrancing film, the first feature from writer-director Francisca Alegria. Although most reviews of the film that I have seen draw attention to the film’s environmental themes and magical-realist atmosphere, I’ve seen very little discussion about the film’s presentation of family. One of the film’s inciting incidents is the dumping of industrial waste from a paper factory into the Cruces River, but what stands out the most to me is the way that the movie focuses on a different kind of toxic waste, and the way that it can pollute the very thing that gives us life.
Magdalena (Mía Maestro) is a doctor living in a cold urban home, having put as much distance between herself and her rural upbringing as possible. When she receives a call from her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) telling her that their dairy farmer father Enrique (Alfredo Castro) has suffered from a heart attack, she returns home with her two daughters, including teenaged Tomás (Enzo Ferrada), whose gender identity she does not respect. Upon arriving and performing her own medical inspection of her father, she is told that he did not have a standard heart attack, but that it was a sudden stress-induced health issue. Enrique, for his part, tells his children that he passed out after seeing their long-dead mother Cecilia (Leonor Varela) outside of a cell phone store. Magdalena does not believe him, of course, since she was the one who watched her mother commit suicide by tying herself to her motorcycle and driving into the river when she was a mere seven years old, but he’s absolutely correct; we in the audience saw Cecilia climb out of that same river, accompanied by a mournful him that seems to come from the dead fish surrounding her, in the film’s opening moments. But what brought her back, and why?
As a character study, this is a piece about a woman who has long embodied the worst aspects of her father but learns to represent the best parts of her mother. As with many texts containing magical realism, much is left up to the interpretation, but we first see her being harsh and cold with the people closest to her, first telling Tomás that, as long as she lives in Magdalena’s house, she is her “son.” Her brother’s feelings about her are clear from their first onscreen interaction; although Bernardo lovingly embraces his nieces, when Magdalena moves in to hug him, he waves her off, citing that he has been working and is too filthy to be touched. When they arrive at the farm, Magdalena sends Bernardo off to take care of the dairy “for once” while she attends to their father. In comparison to the lush verdancy of the countryside, her home in the city is sterile, and when nature intrudes (in the form of a spider in her bathroom window), she doesn’t attempt to coax it outside and close the window, but instead runs off for a can of insecticide, which she sprays into the air futilely when she returns to find that the spider is nowhere to be seen.
All of these are elements that tie Magdalena to Enrique, who is likewise queerphobic, dismissive of his child, and sees the natural world as something that exists only to benefit human beings, diametrically opposed by civilization. Enrique also chides Bernardo for failing to take care of the dairy, even blaming him when their cows die despite their death being the direct result of Enrique’s refusal to listen to his son; his reaction to Bernardo’s insistence that they dig a new well for the cows shows that this is a recurring argument, but it’s that very lack of forethought that leads to the herd drinking from the poisoned river when they are overcome with thirst, essentially damning the dairy farm to close. When the tearful Bernardo brings this to his father’s attention, the older man calls his son a homophobic slur and degrades him. Magdalena has spent her life seeing things through her father’s myopic, cruel vision of the world, and her own family has suffered from his polluting influence as a result. That this traces itself back to her childhood is no surprise. Like her father, she has long seen her mother’s suicide as a sign of weakness due to not wanting to be a mother, as evidenced by all the times in her memory that her mother was absent while still alive. In truth, those absences were the fault of her father, who had Cecilia institutionalized multiple times because he could not control her. Luckily for her, learning this is epiphanic, and even if she is limited in her ability to heal the world, it’s not too late to heal her relationship with Tomás.
If you were wondering if there is an actual singing cow in this movie, then I regret to inform you that there is not … there are several. At the start of the film, what appears to be non-diegetic music plays as the shores of the Cruces give up hundreds of dead fish, with these images soundtracked by a mournful elegy about dying. After there are news reports that the toxic waste in the water has killed not only the fish but also the various water grasses and insects that sustain other animals in the ecosystem, which leave the area in search of other food resources. Finally, the cows drink the waters of the river and themselves succumb to the poison, but before they pass, they join their voices in a chorus, grieving for the calves that were taken from them so that they would continuously produce milk for the farm, and rejoicing that the pain that came from that separation, which they consider to be worse than death, will end soon. This has the potential to be unintentionally funny, especially in the odd occasional moment in which one of the cow “actors” is chewing cud almost in time to the song like something out of Mister Ed, but the sincerity of the moment manages to make it work despite the potential to be undermined.
That separation between mother and child stands as a metaphor not just for the relationship between Magdalena and the long-dead mother whom she unconsciously resents, but also between Magdalena and her own elder daughter. When we first meet Tomás, she is in her bedroom, showing her beau an online newspaper clipping about Cecilia’s death, asking if the boy sees the resemblance between Tomás and her grandmother. Her self-actualization is blocked not only by her mother’s bigotry but also her disconnection from her roots, and her hunger for a connection drives her to seek out her resurrected grandmother and the two bond. The revived Cecilia is mute throughout the film, but there’s a magic to the way that these two women who share a familial bond but who have never met are able to form a connection without the need for words. A love that transcends speech reappears again at the end, when Tomás and her mother reunite, and even without words, it’s clear that the two of them have gained a better understanding of each other, in unvoiced acceptance.
This is certainly one of the most moving films I’ve seen this year, as well as one of the most lyrical, beautifully composed, and haunting. It sets its mood and never alters course, hypnotic in its commitment to its themes. It should not be missed.
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