Lagniappe Podcast: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the psychedelic daylight horror Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), a New England ghost story.

00:00 Welcome

02:14 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)
08:50 Dr. Strangelove (1964)
15:45 The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023)
25:30 Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)
35:55 Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3 (2023)
44:50 Invincible (2001)

51:20 Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Until the Light Takes Us (2008)

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“In the mountains of Norway, where the weather is cold
There’s not much to do except kill each other
And play guitars in the snow
Corpse paint, which is a scary name for make-up, is what they wear
They’d resemble Ink and Dagger, if Ink and Dagger had long hair
They’re pretty evil, and they do not like God
I don’t care if they burn down churches
But they’d better not fucking touch a synagogue”

You won’t find a more succinct nor accurate summation of Norwegian black metal’s entire deal than that opening stanza to the Atom and His Package novelty song “Me and My Black Metal Friends,” which I listened to repeatedly years before I actually heard a proper black metal track.  It touches on everything you need to know about black metal in just a few quick bullet points: the theatricality of the image, the brutality of the sound, the isolation of the region, the allure of the arson & murder and, most pivotally, the stain of antisemitism that sours most of the scene’s mystique.  Maybe that’s why the 2008 documentary Until the Light Takes Us feels so thinly stretched across its 90-minute runtime.  After all, Adam Goren was able to get its point across in less than 90 seconds an entire decade earlier.  It doesn’t help that there have been two much heftier texts that have done much more extensive, contemplative work in autopsying the early black metal scene since: the 2013 “comprehensive guide” Black Metal: Evolution of the Occult, and the 2019 true crime drama Lords of Chaos (also adapted from a lengthy book).  You can refer to the former for a big-picture encyclopedia of the black metal scene, which is mostly disregarded here in favor of dwelling on the grisly details of the murder that broke up the band Mayhem and made Norwegian black metal internationally infamous.  The latter text, Lords of Chaos, also uses the Mayhem murder case as its focal point, but it does so with clear, critical purpose beyond morbid fascination: making fun of all involved.  As a result, Until the Light Takes Us has little to offer to a 2020s audience beyond the novelty of seeing those better fleshed-out texts & images illustrated with real-life detail.  Maybe it felt more significant 15 years ago, when I was still listening to smartass novelty songs, blissfully unaware of the white-nationalist ideology behind some of the scene’s monstrous guitar riffs.

The most salacious selling point for this festival-circuit documentary is that it interviews black metal musician Varg “Burzum” Vikernes in his jail cell about the reasoning behind his church burnings and his fatal stabbing of former Mayhem bandmate Euronymous, for which he was sentenced 21 years.  Forever a publicity hound, Varg is eager to speak on the record, as it gives him an audience for the antisemitic, white nationalist talking points he feels have been misconstrued by the media.  If this particular extension of The Media had a clear agenda of its own, it might not have given him such a wide platform to practice poised, philosophical hate speech without any editorial pushback either.  There is some joy to be found in Varg’s frustration that his church burnings were misinterpreted as Satanic ritual by the press, but that feeling fades as he explains at length that the arson was meant to protest the way Christianity has erased & replaced Norway’s more authentic, ancient culture.  It’s a sentiment that most reasonable people could agree with in broad strokes, which makes it all the more dangerous that it so easily slips into proud white-nationalist rhetoric (as easily as Varg labeling Christianity “a Jewish religion”).  The only fellow player on the early black metal scene given equal screentime is the much more likeable Darkthrone musician Fenriz, who bumbles around modern Norway without any guiding political ethos beyond a love & nostalgia for vintage black metal aesthetics.  Fenriz does a lot to explain what makes black metal such an enduring sound & image, but he does very little to overpower the hateful Nazi ideology Varg is spewing in their alternating interviews.  Thankfully, the movie also includes sarcastic contributions from the older, wiser band members of Immortal, who essentially serve as the black metal Statler and Waldorf – mocking the kids beneath them for taking metal so unnecessarily seriously in the first place.

If there’s any way in which Until the Light Takes Us takes a clear point of view on the black metal scene, it’s in the way it strips the musicians of the Xeroxed-corpse-paint album covers that made them look so cool & mysterious to outsiders in the early 90s.  It peers behind the veil of shock value self-promotion to show how mundane Varg & Fenriz’s lives look to the naked eye & camcorder.  Between their messy apartments, their fluorescent-lit prison cells, and the corporatized, McDonalds-lined streets of Oslo, the movie zaps away all of the dark ritual & romance the scene cultivated through zine culture publicity stunts.  The documentary’s low-fi digi sheen works in its favor in that way.  It also echoes Fenriz’s explanation of how black metal musicians pioneered their signature “necro sound” by seeking out the worst, cheapest equipment they could blow out for a deliberately crunchy, D.I.Y. affect.  Overall, Lords of Chaos does a much better job of taking a clear “point of view” on these gloomy nerds (by dunking on them mercilessly), but Until the Light Takes Us at least this makes their world look even smaller & less mystical.  It’s a little frustrating that its soundtrack is so light on actual black metal music (instead relying on low-fi electro beats to study to for most of its mood setting), but that choice also strips Varg and his compatriots of the sound’s inherent cool.  No matter how many vile “National Socialist Black Metal” bands with offensive-on-purpose names like Aryan Blood & Gestapo 666 have been inspired by Burzum’s Nazi rhetoric, the genre’s soaring guitar riffs still tower over you.  Its blast-beat drumming still pummels the brain in just the right way.  The trick is not letting the most despicable edgelords on the scene control the narrative and ruin the vibe, which is something this doc does without much of a fight.  Fenriz’s metalhead aimlessness is adorable, but it’s not nearly potent enough to wash away the sour taste left by Varg.  Thankfully, other works have since stepped in to take either a wider or a more fiercely critical view on the subject, although confusingly to much quieter fanfare.

-Brandon Ledet

Touch of Evil (1958)

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The recent, ongoing Barbenheimer phenomenon has been a shock for regular moviegoers, since we’ve long gotten used to having vast, empty multiplexes to ourselves, like rats making nests in abandoned hospitals.  The “Think pink!” Barbie army was out en masse on Barbenheimer Weekend, which was healthy for local cinemas’ survival in a post-streaming world and for our own generally anti-social routine of silently watching screens glow, alone in the dark.  This us-vs-them dichotomy was especially vivid to me on that Sunday morning, when I watched Orson Welles’s classic-period noir Touch of Evil at The Prytania.  The century-old single screener’s “Classic Movies” series is the only recurring repertory program in town where you can regularly see gems like Touch of Evil in a proper venue (give or take Prytania’s other, artier weekly rep series, Wildwood).  It’s also the only theater in town that was screening Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer on a 70mm film print instead of a standard DCP, which means that a huge crowd of Oppieheads formed in the lobby during the final third of Touch of Evil, increasingly impatient with the opening film’s lengthy runtime.  I’m sure there were a few brave cinema soldiers who watched Touch of Evil and Oppenheimer as a back-to-back double feature that morning, since all-day double features were the commanding theme of the weekend.  Most of the people outside the theater walls likely hadn’t been to a movie since last year’s Top Gun & Avatar sequels, though, judging by the fact that there usually isn’t a line stretching all the way down the block outside The Prytania on Sunday mornings as I make my quick, anti-social exits to my bus stop.  It’s the Barbies & Oppies that allow theaters to stay open for those lesser-attended (but infinitely more precious) Classic Movies screenings, though, so in a way that block-long line out the door warmed my heart even more than watching another Old Hollywood relic in the Renet Brunet Classic Movie slot.

As you can tell by the title, Touch of Evil isn’t much of a heartwarmer anyway.  Welles’s major-studio noir is a shockingly grim & grimy crime picture; it’s also shockingly gorgeous.  It opens with a minutes-long, spectacularly complex tracking shot that follows two unsuspecting couples crossing into America from a Mexican border town, unaware that a bomb has been planted in the trunk of one couple’s car.  It’s a perfect illustration of the Hitchcock method of building suspense, showing the audience “the bomb under the table” long before the characters it threatens are aware of it.  That back-alley bombing is also a great source of political intrigue, leading to a feature-length investigation of the whos, wheres, whens, and whys behind the dynamite.  The detective from the Mexican side of the border is played by Charlton Heston (in a queasily outdated choice of cross-racial casting) as a noble, idealistic rule-follower who believes in the sanctity of the law.  The corrupt cop from the American side is played by Welles himself, matching the immense beauty of his camera work with his immense hideousness as a crooked, racist villain who frames young Mexican men for crimes they obviously did not commit.  In the movie’s view of law enforcement, all cops are bastards, but American cops are the slimiest, most repulsive bastards of all – something Welles conveys in the prophetic prosthetics that exaggerate his own facial features (by guessing exactly what his real-life face would eventually become) and in the exaggerated camera angles that frame that face at monstrous angles in sweaty close-ups.  His villainy really goes overboard when he attacks Heston for the transgression of actually following the law by dispatching drug-cartel biker boys to torment the detective’s naive, newlywed wife – a young Janet Leigh, who hadn’t yet learned from Norman Bates to beware handsome creeps at remote motels.  The whole picture is slimy & ugly in its heart, but stunningly beautiful to the eye.

Like every other Orson Welles picture after Citizen Kane, Touch of Evil suffers from discord between its director and its studio.  The version presented at The Prytania was the one most widely available to modern audiences: a digital restoration of a 1998 re-edit that attempted to reconstruct the film according to an Orson Welles memo to the execs at Universal, detailing how he would like to see it sequenced.  Touch of Evil had a much less prestigious reputation before that late-90s re-issue, since the studio butchered Welles’s vision in the editing room, leaving it just as much of a tattered mess as other notoriously muddled works like The Magnificent Ambersons.  The familiar tropes & rhythms of noir are a useful anchor for Welles’s studio-compromised fragments of genius, though, which you won’t find in Ambersons but is apparent in both Touch of Evil and The Lady from Shanghai.  In the memo-corrected edit, there’s still some initial confusion about what action is set on which side of the border, but it feels like a small concern if you allow yourself to get swept up in the flow of the overachieving camerawork and in the jurisdictional clashes between the two nations’ police.  Thankfully, the Welles memo at least helped re-establish in the current edit that Heston’s investigation of American corruption should be intercut with the harassment & drugging of his wife, whom he’s essentially abandoned so he can play hero.  There’s incredible tension in watching this detective fall further down the rabbit hole while leaving ample time for the vultures outside to pick at his family, which I assume was lost in the initial edit that separated their stories as distinct & sequential rather than rottenly concurrent.  There’s still plenty space for smaller, less expected touches in the current tight-noir edit, though, most notably in Marlene Dietrich & Zsa Zsa Gabor’s small roles as border-town sex workers and in Welles’s own onscreen character-choice grotesqueries.

I didn’t walk out of The Prytania into the Sunday afternoon sunshine feeling “good”, exactly, even if it’s always a treat to watch such a formidable Old Hollywood classic for the first time on a proper screen.  There’s plenty to feel queasy about in Touch of Evil beyond Heston’s “respectful” brownface performance and the ogling of Leigh’s writhing, incapacitated body.  Welles leans into the downbeat misery of noir pretty hard here, the same way he leans into his camera’s extreme Dutch angles.  The movie’s not supposed to leave you feeling good about the American “justice” system, an effect Welles ensured would come across by playing the ugly, sweaty face of that system himself.  So, I desperately needed the little pick-me-up of seeing a huge crowd gather outside to watch Oppenheimer (another massive downer) on 70mm: a sign that The Movies aren’t fully dead yet, and that I’ll get to see a projection of some other butchered-by-the-studio Orson Welles picture in the future, thanks to the real money-makers like Barbenheimer.  

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #192: Drunken Master (1978) & “Jacky” Chan

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Welcome to Episode #192 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss Jackie Chan’s early career as a Hong Kong action star, starting with Drunken Master (1978).

00:00 Welcome

03:06 San Soleil (1983)
06:15 Talk to Me (2023)
09:53 The Outlaws (2023)
12:49 Grizzly II: Revenge (2020)
16:09 Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (2023)
20:52 Sink or Swim (1990)
27:27 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

33:20 Drunken Master (1978)
54:15 Police Story (1985)
1:15:45 Police Story 3: Supercop (1993)
1:25:15 Rumble in the Bronx (1995)

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

-The Podcast Crew

Sisu (2023)

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I got a huge kick out of Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s Yuletide creature feature Rare Exports when we watched it for a Movie of the Month discussion a few years back.  It has a morbid sense of humor and a willingness to go there when tormenting wayward children that’s missing in most modern echoes of traditional fairy tales.  However, I did get hung up on how overtly macho the film felt for a folk tale, writing “This is a weirdly masculine movie.  The central relationships between a boy and his single father, a boy and his bully/bestie, and a boy and his Christmas demon are all variances of masculine bonding or masculine conflict.  In fact, I don’t recall there being a single female character represented onscreen.”  I had somehow forgotten that aspect of Helander’s debut by the time I borrowed his English-language breakout from the library last month, but it came roaring back in an instant as soon as I pressed play.  It turns out Helander’s just as much of a consistently meatheaded director as David Ayer, S. Craig Zahler, or Michael Bay – a perspective that felt like a weird fit for the material when he was making a modern-day fairy tale about a Christmas demon but is perfectly suited for a shoot-em-up action cheapie about a one-man army.  In Rare Exports, Helander’s ultra-masc roid rage sensibilities were a total surprise; in Sisu, they’re par for the course.

The term “sisu” is helpfully translated in an opening title card as a Finnish word for “a white-knuckle form of courage and unimaginable determination.”  That cultural concept is personified by a defected Finnish commando (Jorma Tommila), described by his enemies as an “immortal” “one-man death squad.”  Fed up with the international politics and personal tragedies of WWII, he’s reinvented himself as an independent gold prospector.  His new solemn, solitary life is interrupted by a small band of Nazis enacting a “scorched Earth policy” on the land where he discovers his first goldmine.  When the Nazis attempt to steal that gold directly out of his pockets, he fights back with unimaginable fury, systematically destroying each of their blood-sack bodies and, as lagniappe, setting their sex-slave prisoners free in the process.  He goes about his work of killing the offending Nazis with the stoic silence of classic, rugged masculinity, acting as if he owes Brad Pitt one hundred Nazi scalps the same way a steel mill worker owes the punch-clock eight hours of repetitive labor.  The movie sticks to a consistent, predictable rhythm as a result, even if that rhythm is frequently punctuated by stabs, gunshots, and explosions.  I’d call it the old-man version of John Wick if it weren’t for the fact that Liam Neeson was already making old-man John Wicks before there was a John Wick around to riff on.

There are more women onscreen in Sisu than there are in Rare Exports, but they’re mostly props.  They start the film as captive rape victims for the Nazi scum, then are eventually set free to transform into an entirely different macho trope: chicks with guns.  In Sisu, women are victims, dogs are target practice, and men are wordless murder machines with an equal deficit of interior life.  The results are reasonably entertaining for a grotesque slapstick actioner that’s just out to crush 90 Nazi skulls in 90 minutes or less or your pizza’s free.  As soon as its English narration track and faux-vintage chapter titles hit in the opening seconds, my standards for it to succeed plummeted to DTV action levels, and the movie seemed complacent to meet me there.  If Helander’s going to stick around in the cultural zeitgeist, I do think his macho sensibilities and delight in over-the-top action choreography would be perfectly suited for direct-to-streaming action novelties.  In an interview extra on my library’s DVD, he openly admits to the limitations of his aesthetic, explaining, “I’m pretty certain you will never see me doing a film which happens in a kitchen where husband and wife are arguing about some stupid shit.  To me, you have to have big adventure.”  In other words, he’s fully committed to the cause of meathead cinema and, thus, restricted to the payoffs & shortcomings therein.

-Brandon Ledet

Talk to Me (2023)

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The buzzy Aussie horror Talk to Me is being marketed & distributed by A24 in the US, which is likely setting misguided expectations for it as an “A24 Horror” film.  The independently produced demonic possession flick does dabble in themes typical to A24 Metaphor Horror, but its scares are much more direct, brutal, and ultimately conventional than the atmospheric slow-burn creepouts audiences have come to expect from the studio.  In truth, Talk to Me builds a solid bridge between two prominent horror trends of the moment: Grief Metaphor horror (Hereditary, The Babadook, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, etc.) and social media peer pressure horror (Unfriended, Truth or Dare, Host, Ma, etc.).  It falls somewhere between the artsy atmospherics of A24’s tastes as a curator and the trashier gimmickry of the Blumhouse brand, with the only apt comparison point on the former’s roster being last year’s bloody Gen-Z satire Bodies Bodies Bodies – another tonal outlier.  In either case, Talk to Me is novel enough in its mythology and brutal enough in its unflinching violence to earn a spot somewhere in the modern horror canon, even if it treads in the liminal waters between the genre’s artsiest & trashiest contemporary impulses.

Talk to Me‘s take on the horrors of social media is much more sharply defined than its demonic possession tropes or its ruminations on grief.  It’s effectively a “TikTok challenge” horror, except instead of doing a silly dance or chomping on a Tide pod, teens pressure each other to communicate with the dead.  Their doorway to the spiritual world is a ceramic hand: an instantly iconic prop that summons wayward ghouls when you shake it in greeting and say, “Talk to me.”  Going a step further, the teens invite those ghouls to possess their bodies for the LOLs, with all of their friends and casual acquaintances filming their freaky behavior for short-term video content.  So, the demons that sneak into the real world through this open doorway aren’t directly tied to the cultural menace of social media, but the youthful desire for attention from peers on social media is what keeps the door open long enough for things to get out of hand (literally).  The way those house party seances are lit by the searing, hungry eyes of smart phone cameras is often way more chilling & upsetting than the grotesque gore gags that result from the teens encouraging each other to play with powers they don’t comprehend.  There are much tighter stomach knots tied by the embarrassment of what the ghouls make the teens’ bodies do on camera than by the lethal torment they devise in private.

The social media peer pressure scares of Talk to Me are bookended by much more expected, routine methods of modern horror.  On the front end, our doomed lead (Sophie Wilde) is given a standard-issue reason to push her communication with the dead a little too far, to her friends’ demise; she’s grieving the death of her suicidal mother.  On the back end, the demons that grief unleashes act in the exact way you’d expect in a modern losing-grip-with-reality metaphor horror, give or take one standout hallucinatory vision inspired by The Shunt.  There’s no reason to hold it against any horror film for following the pre-set beats of its genre, though, especially not when the central mythology is this concisely clever and the violence is this excruciatingly cruel.  Talk to Me is clearly a step above recent by-the-numbers mainstream horrors about mental health crises like Smile or Lights Out, even if it’s not typical to the glacial abstractions synonymous with A24 branding.  At the very least, director-brothers Danny & Michael Phillipou’s shared background as shock value YouTube pranksters shows in the film’s sharp eye for social media menace, and their commitment to making sure that menace results in some truly gnarly on-screen violence is exactly what makes this the feel-bad movie of the summer.

-Brandon Ledet

I’m an Arnie Girl in an Arnie World

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Every year, I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself.  This year, that personal celebration happened to coincide with the national celebration of Barbenheimer: our newest, most sacred federal holiday.  I didn’t participate in the full Barbenheimer meme myself, largely because I didn’t understand the value in cramming Gerwig’s & Nolan’s latest into an incongruous double feature simply for the LOLs.  Instead, I paired Oppenheimer with fellow unfathomable-weaponry-of-war “Dad movie” Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, and I sought out an appropriate Schwarzenegger classic to watch with family the same day as Barbie.  Luckily, Last Action Hero happens to be celebrating a 30th birthday milestone of its own this year, and it proved to have a surprising amount of thematic overlap with the summer’s biggest hit.  In a way, Last Action Hero is Barbie for Boys™, which is to say that its fictional character’s real-world existential crisis at the opposite extreme of the gender spectrum made for a surprisingly rewarding double feature – much more so than I suspect I would’ve found in the all-day Barbenheimer mind melter.

Margot Robbie stars in her own existential meta comedy as Stereotypical Barbie, a plastic ideal of girl-power pop feminism whose insular dollhouse world is shaken when she’s introduced to real-life human problems, emotions, and politics.  Barbie is both a delirious celebration and a pointed critique of the world-famous Mattel toy brand – combining the bubbly pop feminism of sleepover classics like Legally Blonde with the menacing, high-artifice movie magic of Old Hollywood nightmares like The Wizard of Oz.  It’s fantastic, an instant classic.  Last Action Hero is more of a cult curio that had to gradually earn its cultural footing over time, but it approaches Schwarzenegger as a household brand the same way Gerwig’s film approaches Barbie.  Schwarzenegger stars as both himself and as a typical Schwarzenegger action hero, Jack Slade, who does not initially realize he is a fictional character sidestepping the harsher consequences of life in the Real World.  When a magical golden movie ticket frees him from the silver screen and he gets a taste of reality, Slade is confronted with the limitations of his once indestructible body and his insatiable addiction to macho hyperviolence, sending him into an existential tailspin.  There are few things more hack than assigning movies a strict placement on the gender binary in the year of our Dark Lord 2023, but both of these meta comedies are specifically about the ways gender stereotypes are established & reinforced by corporate pop media products, to the point where they become kitsch and, ultimately, targets of satire.  It’s just that women had to wait an additional three decades to get a Last Action Hero equivalent specifically marketed to them, to Hollywood’s shame.

The funny thing about Barbie & Last Action Hero‘s shared purpose is that in both cases the call is coming from inside the house.  There is potential, legitimate criticism to find in Gerwig’s decision to make a crowd-pleasing commercial for a Mattel product, even if her script (written with partner Noah Baumbach) includes direct, damaging punches to the Mattel brand.  She’s participating in the same Art Vs. Commerce tug of war that all mainstream Hollywood movies wrestle with, but she makes that struggle a blatant feature of the text, even casting the Mattel execs toying with her script behind the scenes as on-screen buffoons and comic relief (led by Will Ferrell).  Likewise, Last Action Hero was initially conceived as a spoof of excessively violent, comically tropey action movies of its era: films like Rambo & Commando.  Hilariously, the project was written & directed by two of the filmmakers most directly responsible for the exact tropes it mocks: director John McTiernan (Die Hard, Predator, The Hunt for Red October) and screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon[s] 1 – 3).  When Barbie features a TV commercial for Depression Barbie or when Last Action Hero features a trailer for a shoot-em-up version of Hamlet, the movies are mocking the exact pop media tropes and real-world social ills the industry behind them helped create in the first place.  They’re self-conflicted, but in a way that adds authenticity to their parodic intent.  Last Action Hero‘s goofball ZAZ gags are much funnier in the visual context of a typical John McTiernan action flick, just as Barbie‘s intrusive existential thoughts and feminist rants are much sharper in the visual context of a legitimate Mattel toy commercial.

The truth is that you don’t have to look far to find direct comparison points for Last Action Hero.  It wasn’t even the only self-spoofing action hero meta comedy of 1993, since Schwarzenegger’s fellow Planet Hollywood investor Sylvester Stallone had his own macho-fish-out-of-water satire in Demolition Man that same year.  And that’s not even counting the more generalized action genre spoofs of the era like Hot Shots & Naked Gun, nor their more recent smartass superhero equivalents in the Deadpool series.  Meanwhile, most of the aesthetic & tonal touchstones I can think to compare the new Barbie movie to are all relics of the VHS rental era: Josie and the Pussycats, The Brady Bunch Movie, Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion, Spice World, the aforementioned Legally Blonde, etc.  Those titles have all stood the test of time as obsessive-rewatch classics not only because they’re all sharp-witted and visually vibrant, but also because Hollywood hasn’t bothered to offer up-to-date replacements in the same high-femme register in the decades since.  The instant, participatory enthusiasm for Barbie is reflective of an audience starved for a kind of women-marketed satire that Hollywood doesn’t regularly make anymore.  Meanwhile, Last Action Hero bombed in its time, failing to take on its opening weekend rival Jurassic Park the same way Barbie trounced Oppenheimer.  It still has its own dedicated-to-the-cause cult audience, though, mostly among lifelong Schwarzenegger super-obsessives like me who grew up with it as a childhood favorite.  There’s just so much other self-mocking action schlock out there that it’s a little more difficult to immediately recognize it as something special.

-Brandon Ledet

Weapons of Mass Distraction

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Like most other bored, overheated Americans, I spent the third Friday of July hiding from the sun in my neighborhood movie theater, watching an all-day double feature.  I didn’t directly participate in the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, though, partly due to scheduling inconvenience and partly out of general bafflement with the incongruous pairing.  As a longtime movie obsessive, it was wonderful to see more casual audiences out in full force, dressed up to participate in a double feature program; or it was at least a more endearing moviegoing meme than its recent “Gentleminions” predecessor.  I still like to program my double features with a little more consideration to tone & theme, though, and I can’t imagine that either Nolan’s or Gerwig’s latest were served well by the pairing – which was essentially a joke about how ill-suited they were for back-to-back binging in the first place.  However, I’m not immune to pop culture FOMO, which is how I wound up watching Oppenheimer in the first place.  Nothing about the film’s subject, genre, or marketing screamed out to me as essential viewing, other than the assumption that it was going to be a frequent subject of movie nerd discourse until at least next year’s Oscars ceremony.  So, I dragged my old, tired body to the theater at 10am on a weekday to sit down with Christopher Nolan’s three-hour rumination on the placid evils of nuclear war, and then paired it with a movie I suspected I would like just to sweeten the deal – the ludicrously titled Mission: Impossible 7, Part 1 – Dead Reckoning.  It was essentially the same dessert-after-dinner double feature approach most participating audiences took with Barbenheimer (which, considering that sequence, likely should’ve just been called “Oppie”), except applied to two feature films on a single subject: the abstract weaponry of modern war.

As you surely already know, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the titular nuclear physicist, credited for leading the development of the atom bomb at the end of WWII.  His story is told in two conflicting, alternating perspectives: his own version of events in full color (as told to a military security-clearance review board) and a black-and-white version recounted by a professional rival (as told years later in a Congressional hearing).  It’s an abrasively dry approach to such an explosive, emotional subject, even if Nolan does everything possible to win over Dad Movie heretics like me in the story’s framing & editing – breaking up the pedestrian men-talking-in-rooms rhythms of an Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin screenplay with his own flashier, in-house Nolanisms.  Oppenheimer strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a “Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!” rhythm.  After so many years of tinkering with the cold, technical machinery of cinema, Nolan at least seems willing to allow a new sense of looseness & abstraction into the picture to disrupt his usual visual clockwork (starting most clearly in Tenet).  Young Oppenheimer’s visit to an art museum as a student suggests that this new, abstracted style is inspired by the Cubist art movement of the setting’s era, but the editing feels purely Malickian to me, especially when covering the scientist’s early years.  My favorite moments were his visions of cosmos—micro and macro—while puzzling through the paradoxes of nuclear science, as well as his wife’s intrusive visions of his sexual affair while defending himself to a military panel.  These are still small, momentary distractions from the real business at hand: illustrating the biggest moral fuck-up of human history in all its daily office-work drudgery.  Most of the movie is outright boring in its “What have we done?” contemplations of bureaucratic weaponry-development evil, no matter how much timeline jumping it does in its character-actor table reads of real-life historical documents.

In all honesty, the most I got out of Oppenheimer was an appreciation for it table-setting the mood for the much more entertaining Mission: Impossible 7.  To paraphrase Logan Roy, I am not a serious person.  The great tragedy of Nolan’s piece is watching a Jewish, Leftist man’s attempts to stop his people’s genocide get exploited by the American military’s bottomless hunger for bigger, deadlier bombs – ultimately resulting in a new, inconceivable weapon that will likely lead to the end of humanity’s life on planet Earth (if other forms of industrial pollution don’t kill us first).  Oppenheimer doesn’t realize until it’s too late that his team’s invention did not end WWII; it instead created a new, infinite war built on the looming international threat of mutual self-destruction.  The immediate consequences of the atom bomb were the devastation of two Japanese cities, leaving figurative blood on the haunted man’s hands, which he attempts to clean in the final hour of runtime by ineffectively maneuvering for world peace within the system he helped arm.  The long-term consequences are much more difficult to define, leaving a lingering atmospheric menace on the world outside the theater after the credits roll.  Instead of sweetening that menace with the pink-frosted confectionary of Barbie, I followed up Oppenheimer with a much vapider novelty: the latest Tom Cruise vanity project.  Speaking of history’s greatest monsters, I was also feeling a little uneasy about watching the latest Tom Cruise stunt fest (especially after suffering through last year’s insipid Top Gun rebootquel), but credit where it’s due: Dead Reckoning was a great time at the movies.  Unlike Oppenheimer, M:I 7 is built of full, robust scenes and complete exchanges of dialogue instead of the de-constructed Malickian snippets of a three-hour trailer.  It’s a three-hour frivolity in its own right, but it’s an intensely entertaining one, and it immediately restored my faith that I can still appreciate mainstream, big-budget cinema right after Nolan shook it.  Also, there was something perverse about it doing so by toying around on the exact Cold War playground Oppenheimer mistakenly created.

If there’s a modern equivalent to the abstract, unfathomable power of the atom bomb (besides, you know, the still-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in many countries’ arsenals), it’s likely in the arena of digital espionage and the development of A.I. technology.  The seventh Mission: Impossible film runs with the zeitgeisty relevance of killer-A.I. weaponry at full speed, creating an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everything-everywhere A.I. villain that looks like a vintage iTunes visualizer.  It’s about as well defined as the young Oppenheimer’s intrusive visions of nuclear particles, but neither Cruise nor his in-house workman director Christopher McQuarrie are especially interested in figuring out the scientific logic behind it.  Dead Reckoning‘s A.I. villain—referred to simply (and frequently) as The Entity—is mostly just an excuse for the creepy millionaire auteur behind it to stage a series of increasingly outlandish stunts.  By some miracle, the new Mission: Impossible nearly matches the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-A.I. combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it the most entertaining American action blockbuster of the year by default.  Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie, ending on a literal cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until a three-hour Part 2 conclusion of the miniseries reaches theaters in a couple years.  Since that double feature isn’t currently screening in its entirety, I had to settle for pairing it with Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which at least helped give its over-the-top A.I. espionage theatrics a sense of real-world consequence.  The only recognizable threat behind The Entity’s abstract swirl of LED lights is that it’s smart enough to fool & manipulate nuclear-capable governments.  It could bring the world to an end with the weaponry we’ve already created ourselves, and it wouldn’t be too surprising if Dead Reckoning, Part 2 includes a gag where Cruise diffuses an actual, active nuclear warhead while riding it in the sky like Slim Pickens before him.

My disparate reactions to Oppenheimer and Dead Reckoning likely have more to do with personal taste & disposition than the movies’ objective qualities.  Whereas self-serious lines of dialogue like “How can this man, who saw so much, be so blind?” and “Is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what’s happening here?” had me rolling my eyes at Oppenheimer, I was delighted by Mission: Impossible’s equally phony line reading of “Ethan, you are playing 4D chess with an algorithm,” delivered by Ving Rhames with the same unearned gravitas.  Maybe it’s because I don’t expect much out of the big-budget end of mainstream filmmaking except for its value as in-the-moment entertainment.  I don’t think Oppenheimer‘s internal wrestling with its protagonist’s guilt over inventing The Bomb or our government’s mistreatment of his professional reputation in The McCarthy Era amounts to all that much, except maybe as a reminder that the threat of Nuclear Apocalypse is an ongoing Important Issue.  It obviously can’t solve that issue in any meaningful way, though, unless you put a lot of personal meaning into Hollywood’s ability to convert Important Issues into Awards Statues.  It’s a movie, not a systemic political policy.  I personally see more immediate value in Mission: Impossible‘s ability to delight & distract (both from the real-world horrors of nuclear war and, more maliciously, the real-world horrors of its star), since that’s using the tools of mainstream filmmaking for what they’re actually apt to accomplish.  Oppenheimer is a three-hour montage of Important Men played by “That guy!” character actors exchanging tight smirks & knowing glances in alternating boardroom readings of historical testimony.  Dead Reckoning, Part 1 is a three-hour Evil Knievel stuntman roadshow punctuated by abstract info-dumps about the immense, unfathomable power of A.I. technology.  The closest Nolan comes to matching Cruise in this head-to-head battle in terms of pure entertainment value is the visual gag of a doddering Albert Einstein repeatedly dropping his hat. 

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: 2046 (2004)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Wong Kar-wai’s indirect, sci-fi tinged sequel to In the Mood for Love, 2046 (2004).

00:00 Welcome

06:06 The Hairy Bird (1998)
08:22 Leonor Will Never Die (2023)
13:00 Smoking Causes Coughing (2023)
17:50 The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005 – 2012)
26:56 Nimona (2023)
31:36 The First Wives Club (1996)
38:48 Oppenheimer (2023)
47:00 Touch of Evil (1958)
53:10 Talk to Me (2023)

57:27 2046 (2004)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Movie of the Month: A Night in Heaven (1983)

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Boomer: I first saw A Night in Heaven on my 31st birthday, at Weird Wednesday in May of 2018, with a couple of friends. Jazmyne Moreno, who had programmed the film for that week, looked out over the audience and said, and I paraphrase, that she was surprised to see so few women and so many “burly men” in the audience (“bears” is the term she was looking for). Normally, when I tell this story, I follow that part up with a joke that this was followed by chants of “Show us the twink! Give us the twink!” from those in attendance, but that part’s purely fiction. Or is it? 

A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama that isn’t really all that romantic, or maybe it’s an erotic thriller that’s not quite thrilling, but either way, it’s … unique. Directed by John G. Avidsen seven years after he helmed Rocky and one year before the release of his next hit, 1984’s The Karate Kid (and as unlike either of those movies as you can imagine), the film tells the story of Faye Hanlon (Lesley Ann Warren), a teacher at Titusville Community College in Florida, one hour from Orlando. Her husband Whitney (Robert Logan) is a NASA rocket scientist and amateur recumbent bicycle designer at a career crossroads, finding himself being tasked with ballistic missile design instead of the astronomic rocketry about which he is passionate. Forming the third leg—no pun intended—of the love triangle at the center of the film is Rick Monroe (Christopher Atkins), a student in Faye’s speech class whose flippant attitude toward his final presentation leads her to give him a failing grade for the semester. That night, Faye and Rick’s paths cross outside of the classroom when her vacationing sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) drags her out to a male strip revue called Heaven, where she discovers that her student is an exotic dancer under the name “Ricky Rocket,” and they experience an intimate moment when he gives her a personal dance. 

Faye returns home horned up, and attempts to initiate sex with her husband, who turns her down and tells her that he’s been fired, leading Faye to wonder if there is a future for their relationship. Her feelings are further complicated by Rick’s ongoing flirtations with her as he tries to convince her to let him retake his final exam, and since her sister is staying at the hotel where Rick’s mother and sister work, they keep running into each other. She tries to avoid admitting her attraction to the younger man, but when Patsy has to go home a day early because her daughter is ill, she convinces Faye to stay the night in the paid-for hotel room rather than try to drive back late. Faye spends most of the night trying to reach her husband at home but there’s no answer (we see him reconnecting with a recently-divorced old flame that he runs into), and she ultimately ends up spending the night with Rick. An unwise phone call from Patsy, now back home in Chicago, leads Whitney to realize that his jealousy isn’t baseless, and he travels to the hotel. Faye realizes that she’s been used when she catches Rick in the shower with his girlfriend Slick (Sandra Beall), and it all comes to a head when Rick and Whitney have a confrontation. 

I don’t always feel the need to provide such a thorough recapitulation of a plot when we discuss a movie for this feature, but I did this time, since the Wikipedia plot summary is confused, to say the least. It cites that “Faye is going through a slump in her marriage to Whitney Hanlon, a rocket scientist who has just been laid off,” and that this is the reason that Patsy takes her out to Heaven to cheer her up, but that’s not the case. For one thing, it skips a few plot points ahead, given that there’s no real indication that the Hanlons’ marriage is on rocky ground at the outset, other than that Whitney’s been working nights and he can’t convince Faye to play hooky with him when she has finals to perform. The first indication of strife happens when Whitney isn’t interested in intimacy because of his firing, which Faye only learns about after coming back from the club. I’m not sure it’s the fault of the editor of that wiki page, however, as the film does seem to be missing a few plot points of its own – a fairly common issue with low budget films of this era. This is one of those movies that I feel probably had a more thoughtful script, since there are the vague outlines of something more nuanced and deeper going on at the edges.  Patsy’s description of the failures in her own marriage read like they’re supposed to echo something that’s happening in Faye’s marriage, but Faye’s issues are so vague that they don’t track. It also feels like we’re supposed to track that Whitney’s experiencing something of a crisis because he fears replacement in his relationship with his wife by a younger, sexier man while also confronting failure in finding a new job, citing “they hired a 14-year-old instead,” but again, it’s lacking. It’s not that the movie is just playing coy and being subtle, it’s more that there are gaps in the story, and that would be frustrating, if you come to the movie for that. Most people aren’t though; they’re here for the flesh. 

As thin and threadbare as the movie may be in other areas, one thing that it really has going for it is a striking soundtrack, which far outshines the film itself and has remained in the public consciousness for far longer. There are three undeniable bangers that were written specifically for this film, two of which are still pop culture touchstones while the third is (unfairly, in my opinion) largely forgotten. The first is the title track, which happens to be “Heaven” by Canadian singer-songwriter Bryan Adams, which plays in its entirety while Whitney rides his recumbent bike home after a night shift, creating some unintentional bathos. The song hit #9 on the Billboard charts with that release, and it also ended up on Adams’s album Reckless later that year, putting it back on the Billboard as the third single from the album, reaching #1 in April of 1985, completely eclipsing A Night in Heaven as far as cultural cachet and longevity. Perhaps almost as notable was the track “Obsession,” which was written and performed by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, and which was covered the following year by LA-based synth-pop band Animotion, becoming the biggest single of that band’s career, ensuring a pop culture legacy that’s more fondly (and more often) remembered than the film from which it spawned. Finally, I have a real fondness for “Like What You See,” which was composed by the film’s music supervisor Jan Hammer, a Czech-American composer with a long history of collaboration with a variety of household names like Mick Jagger and Carlos Santana. The track, performed by Hammer and the band Next, is a real treat, a peculiar blend of sultry and yacht rock-adjacent synths, and it’s undeniably sexy, even when it’s not paired with erotic dancing. 

What did you think? Did you like the soundtrack or was there a dissonance caused by the presence of much more famous music? Would you call this a romantic drama, an erotic thriller, or something completely different? 

Brandon: If I was at all distracted by the pop tunes plugged into the soundtrack, it was only in the immense difference in quality between the aforementioned “Heaven” & “Obsession” – respectfully, one of the all-time worst and one of the all-time best pop songs of all time.  Personal taste aside, as a pair they do exemplify what is so jarring about the movie’s volatile sense of tone, which alternates wildly from scene to scene.  “Heaven” represents its penchant for soft romantic melodrama, in which a troubled couple negotiates a rough patch in their marriage through teary-eyed phone calls and kitchen table heart-to-hearts.  By contrast, “Obsession” amplifies the erotically thrilling hedonism of the wife’s trips to the strip bar and her cuckolded husband’s parallel trips to the shooting range, an explosive recipe for sex & violence that thankfully only pays off on the sex end.  The way the film alternates between those two opposing tones can be a little clumsy, but the tension between them is also what makes the story so compelling.  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 tedious complications and relative 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 such a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his college professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter so I guess it all evens out. 

In a way, it’s incredible that a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper cinema, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print curio 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 nor raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front.  Still, it’s shocking to see a retro movie sincerely marketed to stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.  There’s a detectable relishment over the film’s financial & artistic missteps in its contemporary reviews (including a New York Times writer declaring it “Flashdunce”) that’s typical to most media that dares to market directly to women.  Hell, maybe even my aversion to Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” is a result of that extremely gendered form of cringe, which rejects feminine artistic aesthetics as automatically lesser-than.  It’s a tough habit to shake.  In hindsight, though, it’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club 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 male stripper shows.  The early exchange “I just flunked that kid,” “You did WHAT?” between girlfriends would have still been a mainstream-media novelty when Sex and the City was a zeitgeist changer two decades later, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that America wasn’t ready to spend a night in Heaven when Reagan was still president.

Britnee: I am so grateful for being introduced to A Night in Heaven. This confusing mess of a movie is extremely entertaining, and I’ve already put rare DVD copies on my eBay and Mercari watchlists. I need this in my collection to watch over and over again. First off, I adore Leslie Anne Warren. Her performances in two of my favorite films, Victor/Victoria and Clue, are iconic, and she killed it as Susan Mayer’s mother, Sophie, in the Desperate Housewives series. She was perfect in the role of Faye, the conservatively dressed academic with a suppressed wild side. 

The question Boomer asked is the same question I had when I finished watching the film: “What genre is this?” It’s not romantic enough to be a romance. It’s also not purposefully funny, and not really erotic either. It’s a slightly sexy wholesome drama? I really don’t know the answer. All I know is that it’s a mystery that makes for a damn good time. The extended, pointless Bryan Adams bike ride really set the tone for what was to come! I laughed so much while singing along to “Heaven”. Yes, I’m a Bryan Adams fan, so I really enjoyed the soundtrack, especially the early original version of “Obsession”. That song is on just about every 80s mixed CD I’ve ever made. The soundtrack itself is a mixed tape that encapsulates everything the film does or is trying to do, and I think that’s wonderful.

What I wanted so badly was for Faye and Ricky Rocket to have multiple trysts and a stronger sexual connection with each other. The initial Ricky Rocket dance scene was insanely hot (and I watched it multiple times), but that was as strong as the tension between the two got. I wanted this to be more of a genuine age-gap romance like White Palace rather than a douche bag trying to get a passing grade by flirting with his professor. Why couldn’t Faye unleash her inner cougar with a young stud who was legitimately attracted to her? And then leave her boring husband for her new lover? I wanted this to be trashier, dammit!

Alli: Wow, maybe it’s my recent interest in trashy romance novels, or maybe it’s just from identifying strongly as a woman for most of my life, but I had a lot of fun with this. There’s a kitsch quality to it that directly hits my brain’s pleasure center: the straight laced, tight bunned school marm who’s secretly a hotty if she would only let down her hair; the nerdy husband who will do anything for her; the temptation, some kind of snake (wink wink, nudge nudge). It’s a parade of archetypes that just work. I can’t believe that this movie has somehow slid into obscurity, regardless of its pop songs. It just highlights the lack of cultural hype around movies about women’s pleasure and desires. (From what I’ve experienced on romance-novel-internet, books are not suffering from the same treatment somehow despite being far more numerous.) I hope that this Swampflix feature at least partly helps rectify that obscurity.

Something that really hit me, in terms of kitsch and lush texture, was the art direction and lighting. Yes, the changes in costumes mark shifts in character. Okay, now she’s the hot teacher because she let her hair down and put on a “racy dress.” Okay, look at these stripper outfits and how they differ from regular day to day. The night-time versus the daytime. Yeah, these shifts are obvious, but I love it. It’s so rare to see such blatant shifts outside teen make-over comedies. And the lighting here is perfect for it, especially the contrast between the regular classroom, office, daytime, household lighting versus the lighting in Heaven, where Ricky Rocket at one point literally has a Byzantine halo made of the colored lights above as he’s giving a lap dance. I was absolutely living for it.

As far as whether or not this is a romantic thriller or drama, it feels much more like a drama to me. Yeah, eventually a gun is involved, but it feels so minor compared to the switches between boring wife-dom and the straight woman paradise of Heaven. It plays so much more like a fantasy than a drama. Faye gets to have her cake (sleeping with Ricky when her marriage feels stagnant) and eat it too (going back to her husband with better communication and knowledge of her needs). The fact that she’s not punished for desiring a younger man is so refreshing. 

Lagniappe

Britnee:  I was surprised to see so much exposed man pubes here. Truly, A Night in Heaven walked so Magic Mike could run.

Alli: In a world full of male fantasies about big men hoarding guns, setting off explosions, and saving the world, we need more counter programming like this. We need more soft fantasies about young (of legal age) men desiring school teachers. Or, you know, just generally about women getting to explore their sexuality without drastic consequences. There’s a reason this is such a HUGE genre of literary fiction.

Brandon: I would like to personally welcome Jerri Blank’s stepmother, Deborah Rush, back to the Movie of the Month family after such a long hiatus following her early appearances in the screwball comedy Big Business and the cosmic horror The Box.  As a Strangers with Candy obsessive, I am so used to Rush being an ice-cold suburban terminator who “drinks to kill the pain” that I was shocked & delighted to see her bubblier 80s side as the sassy, squeaky sidekick here.  If y’all ever want to pivot this feature into a Deborah Rush Movie of the Month ritual instead, I am totally down.

Boomer: I’m very pleased that this one went over so well. This movie is disjointed—there’s no denying it—and its tonal inconsistencies could be a turn off, but I knew this would be this gaggle of freaks and weirdos to appreciate it. 

-The Swampflix Crew