Virtual Combat (1995)

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It’s well established by now that Tubi is the people’s streaming service – the only platform offering a century’s worth of high-brow cinema & cheap-thrills entertainment at an affordable price point: free with ads.  Even the bigger players in the business want what Tubi has, with more robust services like Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, and Peacock now dabbling in an ads-supported model the industry has been resisting for years (but without matching the immense depth of Tubi’s streaming library).  I can’t say I’m totally happy about that development.  I appreciate Tubi for being one of the few streamers with a historical view that extends past the 2010s, something you’ll usually only find in hoitier, toitier art cinema streamers like Criterion, Kanopy, and Mubi.  Still, there’s something deflating about watching a New Hollywood classic or an avant-garde Euro art piece with out-of-nowhere ad breaks where the State Farm hunk or the Geico lizard interrupt the flow of the picture.  Tubi is arriving to the scene well after the Netflixes of the world have fully “disrupted” traditional modes of at-home film distribution and, like with all tech industry “disrupters,” the only thing streaming has really accomplished is replacing a perfectly functional industry with a near-exact, buggier copy.  What I mean to say is that Tubi provides the 2020s equivalent of the TV movie, and as a stubborn old man I need my TV movies to be cheap & trashy enough to justify being downgraded to that platform.  Tubi is great for watching Lifetime thrillers, DTV action schlock, and ancient re-runs of Project Runway.  For anything more artistically substantial than that, I usually put in the effort to pay for a VOD rental or drive to the library for an SD transfer on DVD.  Anything to avoid watching the Charmin bears wipe their asses in the middle of a movie I genuinely care about.

By that standard, 1995’s Virtual Combat is quintessential late-night Tubi programming.  Half a VR-themed Mortal Kombat mockbuster and half a VR-themed softcore porno, it’s the exact kind of video store shelf-filler that would be forgotten to time (and to jumps in physical media formats) if it weren’t for the archival diligence of the basement-dwelling genre freaks who upload this stuff to platforms like Tubi, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.  It’s a movie that marvels at the vague concept of Virtual Reality video gaming with the same naïve awe as The Lawnmower Man, at least three years past the novelty’s expiration date.  It’s a movie where a 30-second gag featuring Rip Taylor as a virtual carnival barker in the shape of a Zordon-style floating head counts as a celebrity cameo.  It’s a movie that treats a Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation of a video game as if it were as major of a Hollywood player as a Stephen Spielberg blockbuster starring animatronic dinosaurs, ripe for a rip-off. To be fair, Mortal Kombat was the biggest hit of Anderson’s career, making $120 million on a $20 million budget.  There was clearly a market for Virtual Combat‘s video game fight tournament premise among young men in videoland, especially if you could rush it to Blockbuster shelves for the brief time when every local VHS copy of Mortal Kombat was already checked out.  Adding gratuitous shots of naked breasts could only juice those sale & rental numbers too, as softcore-director-turned-action-schlockteur Andrew Stephens surely knew in his bones.  Every creative decision in Virtual Combat is driven by either production budget desperation or mockbuster market exploitation.  Therefore, it’s perfectly suited for crass commercial breaks in a way a Godard or Buñuel classic could never be (although I’m sure both appreciators of the crass & the absurd would’ve been fascinated by the random intrusions on their work).

Don “The Dragon” Wilson, World Kickboxing Champion (as he’s credited in the end scroll), stars as a Nevada border cop in the far-off future of 2025.  No lazy pig, his physical training regimen involves fighting a series of increasingly formidable, entirely digital martial artists in a virtual gaming realm.  Virtual Combat goes a step further than Mortal Kombat by setting its video game fighting tournament inside an actual video game, represented onscreen in weirdly artificial sound stages decorated by smoke machines & laser lights.  Because the nearby city of Las Vegas that houses this immersive fighting game is itself an artificial sin pit, that same VR tech is also used for simulated, legalized sex work that allows tourists to have “cybersex” with virtual hunks & pixelated babes.  The future’s looking pretty bright at first, until an overreaching scientist develops a way to “clone” the AI cybersex workers into physical real-world bodies, taking the technology a step too far.  Things go immediately awry when the invincible Final Boss of the cop’s favorite fighting game escapes into the real world too and uses his robotic voiceover hypnosis to recruit all the other newly birthed VR clones into his own personal digi militia, hell bent on Las Vegas (and perhaps world) domination.  Because this is a severely cheap, limited production, there are really only two other major AI players besides the fighting game’s Final Boss: a nudie mag Babe Next Door and a viciously militant dominatrix, whip in manicured hand.  These digi facsimiles of human beings are obviously no match for the real-world street smarts and world-class kickboxing skills of Don “The Dragon” Wilson, and so his face-kicking road to victory is not all that exciting or surprising. Most of the film’s novelty is in the absurdity of its first-act set up and in its weirdly fetishistic detail.

There’s not much on Virtual Combat‘s mind, thematically speaking.  Its vapid sci-fi pondering of AI technology never goes too far beyond the frustration of defeating a soulless enemy that you’ve trained yourself through pattern recognition as a user, kind of like how corporations are currently attempting to put writers & visual artists out of work by mining their previously published art through algorithmic synthesis.  I get the sense that it was a lot more interested in the sex trade end of that AI conundrum, though, especially by the time it gets to the sequence where Don “The Dragon” Wilson teaches a buxom VR clone about autonomy & consent so that she can immediately consent to having sex with him – of her own free will of course.  Everything else is action movie novelty and fetishistic titillation.  There’s no particular reason, really, why the corporate bad guys had to control their VR sex clones via shock collar, except the obvious reasons why men would write that detail into the script.  The sexual politics are just as quaintly dated as the real-world simulation of video game fighting (boosted by cheapo CGI credited onscreen to Motion Opticals), a novelty that demands the hero declare “Game Over” to the inevitably defeated Final Boss.  Surprisingly, there are a few fun smash-cut edits too, like when a poor victim’s snapped neck is immediately mirrored by the swing of a kicked-open door, or when cybersex being insulted as “sex with a machine” is immediately followed by the tacky casino lights of Las Vegas in montage – a city-size sex machine.  There’s nothing especially memorable or substantive about Virtual Combat beyond those minute-to-minute novelties, though, and its relative anonymity is exactly what makes it such a perfect candidate for streaming on Tubi.  In fact, Tubi goes out of its way to emphasize its anonymity by suggesting you watch an identical-looking movie titled Virtual Assassin as soon as the credits roll.  I’m sure it’s a hoot, just as I’m sure it’s better suitable to commercial breaks than the last movie I remember watching on the platform – Un Chien Andelou.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Demonlover (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Olivier Assayas’s early-aughts hentai thriller Demonlover (2002).

00:00 Welcome

02:45 X (2022)
07:45 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
11:45 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)
15:25 Past Lives (2023)
24:08 Asteroid City (2023)
37:10 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1979)

41:55 Demonlover (2002)

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

Oink (2023)

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I don’t watch enough modern children’s animation to know what adults are supposed to get out of it, but whatever it is I do know that it’s missing from Oink.  The recent farm animal morality tale is billed as the first stop-motion feature ever produced in the Netherlands and, if true, that’s the only remarkable thing about it.  I assume that all most parents want out of children’s films is amusing flashes of vibrant colors to babysit the kiddos for a couple hours, accompanied by metaphorical messaging that’s wholesome & innocuous enough that it won’t poison their little developing brains (i.e., “Believe in yourself,” “Don’t be selfish,” “Obey your parents, your teachers, and the police state,” etc.).  Oink is passable on both counts, at least in my estimation.  It’s got an adorable hand-animated stop-motion technique akin to the recent French film My Life as a Zucchini, which offers a welcome, tactile counterbalance to our post-Pixar CG animation landscape.  Its messaging is a little more daring than its visuals, deliberately teaching kids vegan & vegetarian values in opposition to the evils of the meat industry.  Some parents will object to that blatant political advocacy, but only because there isn’t much else happening onscreen to distract from it.  There’s plenty of anti-capitalist, pro-environmentalist messaging in modern children’s media, but it’s often buried under distracting, for-the-parents pandering like Shrek parodying The Matrix, or the Angry Birds dabbing, or the Minions twerking, or whatever.  Oink does feature a cute cartoon animal doing goofy physical comedy for the whole family’s amusement, but all of its drama is centered on children’s desire to not see that animal butchered for sausage meat, so that there isn’t much to it beyond its overt politics.  Essentially, it’s moralistic propaganda for children with a cute piglet mascot.  So, if you’re not a child who needs the moral conundrum of industrialized meat consumption explained to you in simple, black & white terms, there just isn’t much happening onscreen worth engaging with.

As you can tell by the title, the animal in peril is an adorable piglet named Oink.  The cutesy baby pig is adopted by a misfit Dutch girl with uptight vegetarian parents who cannot abide the chaos an untrained pet brings into their household, but they relent to their daughter’s infatuation with the animal almost instantly.  The pig is accompanied by an estranged grandfather figure from the United States, who’s reluctantly invited back into the family home despite past selfishness & cruelty to his own daughter.  It’s immediately clear that the grandfather encourages the protagonist’s affection for the pig because he wants to fatten & butcher it for an upcoming sausage-grilling competition, one he narrowly lost the trophy for decades ago.  There’s no twist or nuance to this foreshadowed villainy.  As the competition approaches, he kidnaps the pig and attempts to feed it directly into the meat grinder.  All butchers & meat eaters are monstrous in this shameless vegetarian propaganda.  They’re intimidating old men who lie to their families, sneak rat tails into sausage links, and chase children down the street, yelling “I’ll put you in the meat grinder!” at the helpless tykes.  Oink‘s anti-meat messaging makes Okja look subtle by comparison, but that wouldn’t be much of a problem if there were literally any other moral or dramatic tension in the film.  I wasn’t especially shocked or offended by its vegetarian righteousness as an occasional meat-eater myself.  Although, I did object to a last-minute claim that vegetarian sausages taste better than pork; that’s just a lie.  It’s just that I’ve already weighed out the grey-area nuances of how my personal meat consumption affects my fellow animals and the planet we share, and I’ve ultimately decided for myself that meat is a sometimes treat instead of a dietary cornerstone (after a few sporadic years of cutting out beef & pork entirely, most recently inspired by the aforementioned Okja).  Most adults watching Oink have likely already wrestled with the nuanced morality of that personal decision, and so the film’s naked vegetarian messaging is only really useful to adults if they’re looking to convert children to a specific side of that internal debate.

Oink is at its best when it functions as pure visual comedy.  There’s something classically funny about calm family gatherings being disrupted by a rambunctious pet, especially when that pet is as small & cute as Oink.  The film even goes a step further by disrupting that prissy decorum with scatological mayhem.  Oink shits everywhere, smearing long streaks of brown clay all over his hapless owner’s once-pristine family home.  He also continually farts stop-motion clouds of cotton and, eventually, saves the day with his overactive colon.  The film’s scatology is funny, but it’s never as shockingly over the top as the recent stop-motion gross-out The Old Man Movie, which was similarly billed as the first stop-motion feature from Estonia.  Its depressive outcast protagonist is adorable & relatable, but the movie doesn’t dig nearly as deep into her emotional turmoil as My Life as a Zucchini does with its cast of melancholy orphans.  The Netherlands may be lacking in stop-motion feature films to be gushing over, but the world at large is not, with plenty more novelty & nuance to be found in recent titles like Mad God, Wendell & Wild, Marcel the Shell, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, and the still-not-released-in-the-US Little Nicholas, to name a few.  Everything that happens in Oink is meant to underline how cute pigs are and how despicable it is that Texan barbeque enthusiasts like to kill & eat them.  That dynamic is just far too morally & thematically simplistic for the film to amount to much, at least not for adults.  The best I can say in its favor is that it’s got an adorable visual aesthetic and I got a few solid chuckles out of the stop-motion pig farts.  Well, that, and at least it’s not another Shrek.

-Brandon Ledet

Will-o’-the-Wisp (2023)

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Is there a sizable audience out there still steaming mad that the erotic firefighter sequences of Titane weren’t even gayer?  João Pedro Rodrigues appears to believe so, as evidenced by his pornographic firefighter musical Will-o’-the-Wisp, which is being pitched at the dwindling crowd of arthouse shut-ins who remember that Titane even exists (i.e., losers like me who pay attention to “the news out of Cannes”).  Or rather, its indulgence firefighter fantasia is shiny packaging meant to lure those art snobs into the theater.  Once ensnared, Rodrigues sits us down for abstract academic pontification about climate change, racial justice, and outdated governmental power structures, which helps give the film a sense of political purpose beyond its initial novelty.  Boiling Will-o’-the-Wisp down to any one genre or tone is a fool’s game; the arthouse curio is a one-stop-shop for art history lectures, environmentalist theory, gay pornography, rage-bait trolling, sitcom schtick, and interpretive dance – all in an hour’s time.   I’m something of a fool, though, so I’ll do my best to condense & summarize by declaring the Titane stage musical sequence at its center to be is its most attention-grabbing tangent, which makes it an effective Trojan horse for the million other things on Rodrigues’s mind.

In the year 2069, an ineffective Portuguese king waits out his last few days of hospice before death, wistfully watching his great grandnephew play with a toy firetruck.  The toy evokes the king’s most cherished memory: a time when he was a young, idealistic prince who abandoned his royal duties to join the local fire brigade.  This decision is partly influenced by his royal parents’ indifference to the global disaster of climate change, listening to news reports of wildfires and their son’s recitation of Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You” speech as mild annoyances instead of immediate crises.  It’s also influenced by his childlike naivete, which approaches firefighter iconography and a mythical royal pine tree forest with the same awestruck fascination as the young grandnephew playing with the toy.  Once in training, the prince grows up quick.  He learns real-life, adult responsibilities & passions on the job, both physically combating the immediate effects of climate change and physically making love to his hot fireman instructor, a commoner hunk with impeccable abs.  The prince’s ferocious joy for his new, meaningful life is expressed through song & dance in the film’s erotic centerpiece, which is why it’s such a betrayal when he quickly throws it away the second his meaningless “royal duties” call him back to the throne – where he gradually dies a pointless life.

The most important thing to understand about Will-o’-the-Wisp is that it’s a total troll job, a flippant provocation aimed at post-irony academics.  It’s politically furious, eager to throw intellectual bombs at institutional failures to address climate change and at the roles race & class play in the romance between the white prince and his Black fireman hunk.  It’s also seemingly resigned to the futility of attempting institutional change, throwing those bombs for self-amusement as the world burns to the ground regardless.  Its indulgence in incendiary race-play kink and coronavirus death feel no more serious than its erotic CPR training, its gay-porno restagings of classical art, or the absurdly fake ejaculating dildos featured in its climactic 69 set piece.  The Thunbergian urgency of its climate change activism is the only genuine impulse in its arsenal; it just also sees any response to the crisis beyond large-scale institutional disruption or intervention to be useless, amounting only to academic infighting.  Maybe the idea behind the Titane musical sequence is a nihilist one, trying to find a little novelty & levity in the world before it melts away.  A more generous reading is that it’s a novel attempt to draw attention to the urgency of a political issue that will kill billions of people if the wealth class who can afford to travel to Cannes don’t wake up and take charge.

-Brandon Ledet

Past Lives (2023)

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There’s a little piece of quotational wisdom that’s never far from my mind: “Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” That it comes from The Muppet Christmas Carol and is recited by Kermit the Frog does not make it less poignant, or less true. Sometimes, when those words resurface in my mind, I also recall illustrator Olivia de Recat’s simple line drawings of closeness lines over time, which depict how two individual lives intersect (or don’t) based on the way that relationships change over time. They’re minimalistic, with only two lines in each image, but they resonate: the gentle curves of “first love” speak volumes, the angular intersection of “one night stand” has a kind of vivacious energy that I love, and the “friends with benefits” lines, where one party starts to move away from the other and the second party tries to follow before separating in a way that can only be described as dejected, is my personal favorite. I recently acted it out (or had it enacted upon me), actually, and I walked away from that schism having taken some real psychic damage. Past Lives has come along at exactly the right moment to make sense of everything by envisioning meetings and partings in a way that breathes meaning and beauty into our sadnesses, our joys, and our presumed certainties. 

Twenty-four years ago, Na Young and Hae Sung were classmates, competitors, best friends, and potentially more. When we meet them, at age 12, Na Young is trying not to cry over the fact that Hae Sung has bested her academically, perhaps for the first time. Unfortunately, their halcyon days of walking home together from school and playing among public sculptuary are cut short by Na Young’s family’s immigration to Canada. Twelve years pass, and Na Young, now going by her Anglicized name of Nora Moon (Greta Lee), is a student playwright in NYC. While on the phone with her mother, she decides to look Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) up on Facebook and discovers that he has tried to reach out to her. The two reconnect and share the maximum level of emotional intimacy that two people on opposite sides of the planet communicating via a glitchy Skype connection can. Unable to meet in person for a prolonged period of time because of their individual studies, the two take a temporary break that lasts a lot longer than either intended. Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro) at a writing residency, and she tells him about the concept of in-yun, a concept relating to fate that paints the serendipitous connections of life as predestined. Twelve years later, Nora and Arthur are married and still in NYC, and Hae Sung comes to visit, supposedly on vacation, but really to reunite. The immediate and intense magnetism between the two is palpable, but their paths have been going in opposite directions for so long that their destinies may be forever parted. 

Early in the film, Na Young’s mother explains to Hae Sung’s that she and her husband have chosen to immigrate despite having good careers and social networks because, to paraphrase, when you let go of something, you also gain something. It’s a very simple idea in a sparse text, but it’s nonetheless true. Nora and Hae Sung both recognize this, but in different ways and at different points in their lives, and they realize the opposite as well, that hanging onto something means the death (at least in this life) of all the things that might have been. Nora meets Arthur when she lets Hae Sung go, and Hae Sung meets his unnamed girlfriend at about the same time. Hae Sung, at 24, is insistent that he hang onto the blueprint of his planned career by going to Shanghai to learn Mandarin instead of taking the option to learn English in NYC and be near Nora instead, and in so doing ensures that there is only one path this life will take — one without her, even if he doesn’t realize it at the time. In the film, as in life, there are a million little moments where the choices of holding fast or letting go have an effect that echoes throughout one’s lifetime (or lifetimes), and in every single one, I felt the intensity of each of those tiny, almost imperceptible forks in the road. When Nora and Hae Sung start talking to each other again at 24, there’s a sense of such  in every wording choice that feels immense in the way that every exchange of words with a crush or someone you feel an intense connection to but aren’t intimately familiar with always feels … portentous. That blending of the feeling of getting to know one another (again, or for the first time) and that sense of something so much bigger taking form on the horizon, it’s effervescent and light and yet so big, so bold, so beautiful. 

Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor. 

Nora is a fascinating character, and Greta Lee is an astonishing performer. This is a sparse movie, with very little non-diegetic sound and music sprinkled in only very occasionally, and that aesthetic plays out on screen as well, with a lot of the performance of Nora coming down to the smallest of facial movements on both Lee and Teo’s parts, the tiniest wrinkling of doubt, the smallest twinge of hope at the edge of the lip, the almost imperceptible brow tightening of longing deferred. It’s pure magic, and it wouldn’t work if we didn’t spend so much time with these two people, learning them. In a different world, there’s a version of this narrative where we love Nora a little less, find her dismissal of Hae Sung in 2012 cold and heartless, or find her honesty with her husband and her reassurances to him hollow and false, but Lee imbues Nora with an almost impossible level of likability. We see ourselves in her. She papers over the things that she can’t control by making blanket statements of agency that are questionably true: when her parents choose to immigrate to Canada, she tells her friends that she wants to go, supposedly so that she can one day win the Nobel Prize (at age 24, this dream has changed to winning the Pulitzer, and at 36, when prompted by Hae Sung, she jokes that she’s now aiming for a Tony). When realizing that she and Hae Sung will not see each other for at least a year when they reconnect in 2012, she tells him that she needs a break to focus on her life in New York, but we know that this isn’t completely true because she begins dating Arthur very shortly thereafter. Lee deftly navigates all of this, and I can’t wait to see more of her.  

I’m hesitant to make a comparison between this film and one with a white person at the directorial helm and starring an entirely white European cast, but I feel I must; when I walked out of the theater, I felt much the same as I did when I left my screening of Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It wasn’t just the sparsity of intrusions from more filmic elements, or that both filmmakers were named Celine, but in the way that both works are about loves which are so vast that they fill up every space that presents itself and thus feel certain and immovable, but which are ultimately all-too-fragile. There’s a scene in Past Lives in which Nora walks through the empty house that will be her home for the duration of her writing residency and we get to hear every footstep as she crosses the space, just as every footfall in Portrait was likewise audible and meaningful; later, there’s a loud metallic thump when Nora walks over a metal grate on the sidewalk. It’s human, it’s real, it’s tangible. That doesn’t always mean that some alchemical process of “art” is happening, but in a movie so intimate and so suffused with longing as Past Lives, the magic is there. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

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Is nostalgia a disease? If you ask the internet (which one should rarely or, perhaps, never do), there are vigorous discussions about whether the fact that the term “nostalgia” was created to describe a disease of the mind is relevant or not. To wit: “a psychopathological condition affecting individuals who are uprooted, whose social contacts are fragmented, who are isolated and who feel totally frustrated and alienated” (source). I think that, depending upon its gravity, it can be either a harmless diversion or a sign of actual disordered thinking. There should never be any confusion about certain things, and one of them is this: within the narrative of Western history, our current host of problems are generally better than they have ever been in the past. We’ve tainted every bit of progress with nonsense, of course — what benefit is it to a society that can save lives a hundredfold more successfully than three centuries ago if the law allows for the use of such lifesaving measures to act as a middle-class bankruptcy manufacturing system? What good has it done to raise generations to see the consumption of meat at every meal as a sign of financial security and an unquestioned right, when it means that we’ve sausaged ourselves into a climate collapse? Still, in general, things are better than they were one, two, and three hundred years ago (at least until the last few years, jeez). Cutting your foot on a rock in a river isn’t a death sentence, and even though your dumb relatives who think climate change is a hoax think that crime is out of control because of shoplifting, crime is actually going down, with violent crime on a decline for a while now — with stories as far back as 2000 citing constant decline year after year that we’ve only seen more of since. 

Nostalgia for a time when things were “simpler” is a normal part of the human experience, because people (who didn’t experience daily and consistent traumas as a child) look back on that period of their life as having a simplicity that they do not recognize as false. Failing to acknowledge the inaccuracies of their recollection is the danger; in so doing, one fails to recall the banal wickednesses of the past and learn from them. Each generation remembers the simplicity of their childhood when the time period about which they reminisce saw the AIDS crisis in full bloom, or the quotidian threat of nuclear death sending an entire generation of kids cowering for cover underneath their desks, or every class had several kids who had lost relatives in Vietnam or Korea or Normandy, or undisguised bigotry was 9/10ths of the law, or people were trapped in abusive relationships because of the draconic nature of divorce laws, or … you get the picture. The difference between that kind of nostalgia, which leaves one open to being manipulated into thinking that reversion to the values of a bygone era simply because of coercive aesthetic or ideation (while ignoring its attendant prejudices), and the kind that pumps out something like, I don’t know, Turbo Kid, can be imperceptible when you’re caught up in the moment. Recent years have shown us that appealing to the nostalgia of the masses in order to draw them to the banner of political hatred in the name of their lionization of a false past can be effective. The algorithm can take your dad from watching reruns of Barney Miller straight into Kyle Rittenhouse apologism pretty damn fast, so there’s not not a reason to be concerned about, say, a 15-years-later sequel to a 19-years-later sequel to a trilogy of classics (your mileage may vary). Of course, when that nostalgia trip has the cathartic element of watching Nazis get absolutely fucking wrecked for two and a half hours, who am I to say that it’s wrong? 

It’s summer 1969, and the now elderly Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is a professor of archaeology at Hunter College in New York. His days of dashing adventures against the footsoldiers of the Third Reich and defying death in search of ancient treasures to unearth are long over, and in a world whose focus is on the future (embodied in the presence of a ticker tape parade for the returning Apollo 11 astronauts and counterposed by the apathy of his students for his historical lectures), he’s a man stuck in the past. His personal life is also rocky, as he’s estranged from wife Marion (Karen Allen) for reasons that become clear later, and his seemingly forced retirement from Hunter College means he will no longer have academia to fill his empty days. Enter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Indy’s godchild and daughter of heretofore unmentioned friend Basil Shaw (Tobey Jones). At the tail end of WWII, the elder Shaw and a digitally de-aged Indy had an encounter with Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) during which they came into possession of half of Archimedes’s Antikythera, a kind of orrery that was theorized to be capable of charting rifts in time. Helena’s reappearance in Jones’s life is to acquire the artifact, and hot on her trail is the still-living Voller, having presumably made his way to the U.S. as a part of Operation Paperclip. Thus ensues several multi-party chases and races against time to reach the other half of the dial before Voller and his henchmen (Olivier Richters and Boyd Holbrook) can use it to change the outcome of WWII. Indy is aided in this by help from old friends that we know like Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) and those we don’t like Renaldo (Antonio Banderas), while Helena has her own Short Round-style sidekick in Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidore), and all are pursued by CIA agent Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson). 

I was looking forward to a real treat when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out. I grew up watching the original movies, but some of my earliest memories are also of watching not only the now largely forgotten Young Indiana Jones Chronicles but also the enduring image of Kermit as Indiana Jones in The Muppet Babies. When that Crystal Skull trailer came out, I was naively exhilarated for what I thought was to come, and when I went to see it, on my birthday, it was perhaps one of the great media-related disappointments of my life. (I know that film has had some late-stage revisionist reappraisal in recent years, but not from me.) Having been burned on that stove before, I was more reticent about this one, especially with septuagenarian Ford being called back into service to perform a duty in which, from all appearances in Crystal Skull, he had no interest. There were no weeks of anticipation, just a realization that it had been released and a midday holiday weekend expectation of a moderate amount of thrills. Perhaps this says more about how low my expectations were than about the quality of the film overall, but I was pleasantly surprised overall. The opening sequence in 1944 is a bit prolonged, but I was less put-off by the uncanny nature of the de-aged Ford to play a younger Jones than by other recent abominations, and I appreciated the grafting of Waller-Bridge’s character into the story quite a lot. I’m sure that many of the reviews popping up online are already spouting all the usual aphorisms and cliches that every manchild says about a self-possessed woman in a movie (here’s a tip: if you hear someone say that she’s annoying and that person is also the most annoying person you know, those things are not as disconnected as they may seem). I find her rather likable, and she adds a bit of flair to the proceedings as someone who is solely concerned with opportunities to cash in on her father’s research and no regard for history as anything other than a means to an economic end. This could go too far, but the inclusion of Teddy humanizes her and makes her seem more impishly roguish than her initial monetary focus makes her seem. Even the child actor is pretty good, and that’s rare praise from me. 

If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like “too much” being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun. I don’t know that you need to rush out and see it since the current timeline of theater-to-home-release is so short now, but if you need to get out of the heat and into a cold, air-conditioned vehicle for a while, at 154 minutes that never get boring, this one’s a pretty solid choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #190: Picnic (1955) & Summer Heat

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Welcome to Episode #190 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of sweaty films set in summer heat, starting with the sordid beefcake melodrama Picnic (1955).

00:00 Welcome

02:45 Her (2013)
07:40 V.C. Andrews’ Heaven (2019)
13:45 Will-o’-the-Wisp (2023)
17:07 Falling Down (1993)

23:33 Picnic (1955)
46:22 Baby Doll (1956)
1:07:40 The Beach (2000)
1:23:55 Call Me By Your Name (2017)

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

Rhinestone (1984)

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Dolly Parton owes her half-century of success & popularity to two specific talents.  First & foremost, she’s a songwriting machine.  Parton’s distinctive, meticulously crafted image & voice would’ve only taken her career so far if it weren’t for her uncanny ability to crank out a hit song in an afternoon as if it were as easy as washing the dishes.  Over 3,000 titles into her songbook, her career is overflowing with anecdotes about writing “Jolene” & “I Will Always Love You” in a single session or tapping out the rhythm for “9 to 5” while she was bored between takes in her trailer.  She also owes her longevity to her talent for the business end of show business, always knowing exactly what moves to make at what time to expand her brand far beyond the typical boundaries of a Nashville singer-songwriter career.  When she started performing as a side act on The Porter Wagoner Show in the 1960s, she was able to reach a much wider audience than she would’ve just cutting records.  Once she had thoroughly charmed every country music fan in the US through their television sets, she left the show to become a main attraction elsewhere, aiming to charm the rest of America as a big-screen movie star.  Parton quickly accomplished that goal in her first couple roles, finding a perfect vehicle for her talents in the legalized-prostitution musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and stealing the show from legendary comedian Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5.  The only problem is that most Hollywood executives don’t share Dolly’s creative or business talents, and they weren’t entirely sure how to package her as a comedic lead without the ensemble-cast support of hits like 9 to 5 or Steel Magnolias.  Her awkwardly chaste chemistry with Burt Reynolds in Whorehouse was cute and a huge part of the film’s Broadway musical appeal, but by the time she was romantically paired with the eternal asshole cynic James Woods in 1992’s Straight Talk, it was clear casting directors & boardroom executives weren’t sure how to balance Dolly’s country-fried warmth with a proper love-interest leading man.  This disconnect, of course, was never more glaring than it is in her pairing with Sylvester Stallone in the 1984 romcom Rhinestone, the most notorious flop of Dolly’s career – at no fault of her own.

Rhinestone finds Dolly & Stallone at their Dolliest & Stalloniest, clashing their respective rural sweetness & urban gruff in cultural combat instead of romantic entanglement.  They fire incoherent line readings at each other for two schticky, jittery hours without ever once having an actual conversation, not even for a second.  Intentionally or not, it’s America in a nutshell, capturing the great, wide cultural divide between small-town hospitality & big-city living.  If that either/or cultural binary were a contest for moral & intellectual high ground, Dolly clearly wins the debate, sassing Stallone with the zinger “There are two kinds of people in the world, and you ain’t one of them.”  She’s correct.   Her costar is an Italian NYC cabbie & proud knuckledragger, navigating modern urban life like a drunk toddler who missed naptime.  Nothing he does or says makes a lick of sense, which makes Dolly’s simplified country livin’ sensibilities seem like the only reasonable way to live.  She did move to the big city herself to become a famous singer, though, which is how she gets involved in a classic Cinderella bet that she can turn the lughead city-dweller into a popular country musician in just a few weeks’ time.  When agreeing to the bet, she failed to take into account that she was working with subhuman raw material, which becomes apparent by the time Stallone is screaming half-remembered lyrics to “Tutti Frutti” while banging on random piano keys at his helpless parents’ family-owned funeral parlor (mid-service, of course, for full comedic effect).  Thanks to the touring Acrocats band, I have literally seen cats & chickens play musical instruments with a clearer sense of rhythm & song structure.  Dolly’s helpless country star-to-be also didn’t take into account matters of the heart, which catches her off-guard when the mismatched pair’s discordant rapport suddenly turns romantic without warning.  The first time they kiss & make love is a scarier plot development than anything you’ll see in director Bob Clark’s landmark slasher Black Christmas; it’s so wrong it’s haunting.  And yet there’s something sweet about watching these two crazy kids get together, if not only because the heart & social fabric of America itself hangs in the balance of their volatile dynamic.

As bizarre as Dolly’s chemistry with Stallone can be, she does have clear, coherent chemistry with New York City at large.  Although the song never actually plays in the movie, Rhinestone is “adapted” from the Glen Campbell novelty hit “Rhinestone Cowboy,” which it essentially boils down to the clash of big-city glam vs. simple country livin’.  If there’s anything about the film that “works” the way it’s intended to, it’s the fish-out-of-water humor of sending Dolly to the bright lights & mean streets of NYC.  In an opening song (penned by Dolly herself, naturally), she yodels over helicopter footage of the Statue of Liberty and complains “Life ain’t as simple as it used to be, since the Big Apple took a bite out of me.”  The Big Apple of Rhinestone is defined by discos, pizza, room service, and casual racism. Meanwhile, small-town America is all front-porch concerts, farm animals, and Christian sweethearts who are willing to teach a city boy how to honky tonk even though the city is way less inviting when the cultural exchange flows the other way.  Stallone’s fish-out-of-water humor as a boneheaded, punch-drunk cabbie who can’t walk ten feet in the country without slipping and falling in pig shit is much less convincing, but only because he’s much less convincing as a human being.  Dolly also wrote Stallone his own song to define his struggles in life, a novelty tune about black-out alcoholism called “Drinkenstein” that he barks & howls more than sings.  It’s difficult to tell how much of the film’s baffling, uncanny humor is a result of the miscasting of Dolly & Stallone as a romantic pairing vs how much is just a result of Stallone going off the rails in a Nic Cagian freakshow that disrupts the flow of the picture around him.  In Straight Talk, there is absolutely no chemistry between Dolly & Woods, who might as well have filmed their shot-reverse-shot “conversations” on entirely different shooting schedules.  In Rhinestone, by contrast, there is disastrously explosive chemistry between Dolly & Stallone – like, the poorly homemade pipe bomb kind of chemistry, the chemistry of an oil spill disrupting freshwater pH. 

In the short term, Rhinestone may have been a professional embarrassment for Parton, but everything that makes it so off-putting & ill-fitting for her rests on Stallone’s shoulders.  In the long term, it’s endured as one of her strangest, most memorable movie projects, one that inadvertently exemplified how refreshingly out of place she was in Big City show business outside her Nashville songwriting roots (and how bizarrely inhuman the show business urbanites could be on the other side of the table).  Or, at least, it could endure that way if those Big City lugheads hadn’t allowed it to slip into distribution limbo after its decades-old DVD went out of print.

-Brandon Ledet

Johnny Handsome (1989)

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I just finished reading the deceptively dense travel guide San Francisco Noir by essayist Nathaniel Rich, which doubles as both a guided tour of San Francisco’s many character-defining landmarks and a critical history of “the city in film noir from 1940 to the present.”  There are so many noirs set in San Francisco that Rich is able to map out all of the city’s disparate moods & neighborhoods by cataloging how they’ve been portrayed onscreen in that one specific genre, frequently stopping the tour for incisive, short-form reviews of the dozens of noirs set in and around The Bay.  As a movie nerd, the book was a great way to familiarize myself with a city I love to visit but never get to stay long enough to feel submerged below its touristy surface.  As a New Orleanian, it made me jealous.  Besides the impracticality of its distance from Los Angeles, why is it that so few classic noirs were set in New Orleans compared to the seemingly infinite noirs of San Francisco?  Reading through Rich’s illustrated history of his port city’s deep well of art, music, crime, sex, and scandal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all of the hallmarks that made San Francisco such a perfect setting for noir are echoed in my own city’s alluringly sordid history.  And yet I can only name a few classic noir titles I’ve seen set on New Orleans streets: New Orleans Uncensored, Swamp Women, and Panic in the Streets.  That’s a relatively puny list when compared to such formidable San Francisco noir titles as The Maltese Falcon, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past, and Vertigo.

It turns out I’m not the only person convinced of New Orleans’s hospitality to noir moods & tropes, as I found Roger Ebert entertaining the same thought in his 1989 review of the Walter Hill neo-noir Johnny Handsome.  Ebert wrote, “Johnny Handsome comes out of the film noir atmosphere of the 1940s, out of movies with dark streets and bitter laughter, with characters who live in cold-water flats and treat saloons as their living rooms.  It is set in New Orleans, a city with a film noir soul, and it stars Mickey Rourke as a weary loser who has just about given up on himself.”  Struck by Ebert’s assessment of New Orleans’s “film noir soul,” I dug into his other contemporary reviews of New Orleans-set thrillers starring the leads of Johnny Handsome.  The results were mostly silly, including a thumbs-down dismissal of Hard Target (featuring Johnny Handsome villain Lance Henriksen) as being “not very smart and not very original” and a positive review of Angel Heart (also starring Mickey Rourke) that describes the West Bank neighborhood of Algiers as a “town across from New Orleans that makes the fleshpots of Bourbon Street look like Disneyland.”  Sure, Roger.  I’m glad I kept digging, though, because his 1987 review of the neo-noir erotic thriller The Big Easy (which shares a star with Johnny Handsome‘s secondary villain, Ellen Barkin), captures the city’s “film noir soul” perfectly in the paragraph, “The movie takes place in New Orleans, that most mysterious of American cities, a city where you can have the feeling you never will really know what goes down on those shadowy passages into those green and humid courtyards so guarded from the street.”  That’s some good poetry.

As you can likely tell by my stalling to discuss this film directly by recapping the works of more talented & prestigious film critics, Johnny Dangerously is not especially interesting, at least not when compared to the rest of its era’s New Orleans crime pictures.  It’s not as scuzzy as Angel Heart, nor as steamy as The Big Easy, nor as deliriously over-the-top as Hard Target.  Its one claim to novelty among the other 80s New Orleans crime thrillers starring its central trio of volatile performers is that it’s the most faithful to the genre’s classic noir roots.  Johnny Handsome evokes the drunken, downtrodden storytelling logic of vintage crime story paperbacks, ones written decades before its actual 1970s source material.  Walter Hill reportedly dragged his feet on adapting that novel for years despite multiple offers, but his eventual decision to move its setting from New Jersey to New Orleans and to frame it within a traditionalist noir sensibility makes perfect sense for the material.  The results just aren’t particularly exciting.  Johnny Handsome is bookended by two heists: an early one in which Rourke’s titular disfigured anti-hero is abandoned by his gangster cohorts (Barkin & Henriksen) while looting a French Quarter jewelry store, and a climactic one in which he pays them back by trapping them in a doomed robbery of a shipyard construction site.  Both sequences are fantastic, but there’s a lot of dead air between, which Hill mostly fills with achingly sincere melodrama about a supposedly reformed criminal who can’t seem to get out of the game.  It’s the same level of heightened pastiche he brought to his 50s greaser throwback Streets of Fire, but something about it feels weirdly subdued & unenthused this go-round.

There are actually two old-school genre tributes at play in Johnny Handsome, both of which are signaled to the audience in black & white flashback.  While the film’s classic noir tropes are introduced in an early flashback washed in an aged sepia tone, its simultaneous echo of German Expressionist horror is presented in a starker Xerox contrast.  We’re told that Johnny Handsome was born with a monstrous, mutated face, even though he honestly doesn’t look too out of place in the context of The French Quarter – a circus without tents.  His disfigurement is important to the plot, though, so much so that Hill allowed Rourke to mumble his lines under heavy prosthetics to achieve the effect.  After getting busted during the first botched heist and before plotting to launch the second, Rourke finds himself imprisoned in Angola, where a kind mad scientist (Forest Whitaker) offers to lessen his sentence if he agrees to experimental facial reconstruction surgery.  The surgery goes so well that Rourke is able to insert himself into his old, leather-clad cohorts’ lives incognito, luring them into participating in their own demise with the second heist.  That sci-fi aspect of the plot has a distinct Hands of Orlac feel to it, which was also echoed in contemporary thrillers like Scalpel & Body Parts to much greater effect.  At least Johnny Handsome switches up the formula by combining its German Expressionist patina with classic noir tropes.  It’s a unique genre hybrid, even if subtly played, and it all comes together beautifully by the time the semi-reformed Rourke’s new girlfriend is practically screeching at his old frenemies, “No! No, don’t cut up Johnny’s beautiful face!”

All of the classic New Orleans noirs I’ve seen are fairly mediocre pictures.  Most of the San Francisco noirs covered in Nathaniel Rich’s book are mediocre too, which is true of most movie genres and of all art everywhere.  By the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s (which was essentially just neo-noir with an emphasis on video store sleaze), the movie industry had caught up with New Orleans’s noir potential and set some pretty great crime thrillers here: The Big Easy, Angel Heart, Tightrope, Cat People, Down By Law, etc.  Johnny Dangerously is far from the best example of that wave of locally set 80s thrillers, but it’s the one that best evokes the city’s classic-period noir past that never was.  I enjoyed the movie less as a sincere, in-the-moment thriller than I appreciated it as a what-could’ve-been simulation of what New Orleans’s “film noir soul” might’ve looked like if given the same amount of screentime as San Francisco noir in the genre’s heyday. 

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Richard III (1995)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Ian McKellen’s 1995 anachronization of Shakespeare’s Richard III, set in an alternate-history fascist Britain.

00:00 Welcome

02:00 Stephen King miniseries
08:28 There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)
10:00 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
15:15 Asteroid City (2023)
18:03 Oink (2023)
21:00 65 (2023)
27:30 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

32:12 Richard III (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 Lagniappe Podcast Crew