And so, with all of the festival buzz surrounding Yorgos Lanthimos’s upcoming vulgar Frankenstein riff Poor Things, we have lived to suffer yet another round of online Sex Scenes Discourse. It’s only been a month since the young Evangelicals of the American suburbs were traumatized by brief flashes of Florence Pugh’s breasts in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer the last round, and now we’re hearing from international YA fiction nerds who claim that “Most actors and many viewers don’t particularly like or miss [sex scenes in movies]. Only film critics and some directors seem to want them.” Like everyone else who’s addicted to online outrage bait, I always find myself scrolling through the replies to these Sex Scene diatribes in stunned disbelief of the support they receive, convincing myself that Zoomer prudes are itching to bring back The Hays Code. Also like everyone else who’s addicted to this monthly ritual, I’d be a lot better off just putting down my phone and watching a dirty movie instead. It’s worth reminding ourselves that these anti-sex scene freaks don’t speak for an entire generation of moviegoers; they’re isolated cases of puritanical mania, most of whom get their steady stream of chaste content through Disney+ and romance paperbacks written for teens, only to be scandalized by intimate moments of nudity & bodily contact the one or two times a year they accidentally watch a movie for adults. For the rest of us—audiences who believe sex is a common aspect of human life worth interpreting onscreen—there are still a few cinematic holdouts that haven’t given up the culture war to The Prudes, despite constant online chatter decrying their existence. The very best way to combat Sex Scene Discourse is to log off and go see a dirty movie in public, the filthier the better, which is exactly what I did the week Poor Things kicked off another round of puriteen grumbling online. Actually, I saw two.
Because America is a nation founded by Puritans, my best bet finding graphic depictions of sex at my local multiplex is catching up with the few adult dramas that happen to land domestic distribution at international film festivals. Memphis-born American director Ira Sachs seems to understand this conundrum, which is likely how he ended up making his messy bisexual love triangle drama Passages in France instead of the US. Here, Passages was threatened with an “NC-17” rating for its frank, onscreen depictions of queer sex, the modern equivalent of an “X.” In Europe, it’s a standard-issue adult drama, acted out by a small cast of Euro film fest regulars familiar to mildly risqué dramas just like it: Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Rogowski stars as a temperamental, narcissistic German filmmaker living in Paris with his much stabler, milder-mannered English husband (Whishaw). At the end of a typically tense film shoot (of a fictional movie also titled Passages), Rogowski feels the communal attention to his control-freak antics & directorial authority plummeting, so he acts out by sleeping with a French woman on the film’s crew (Exarchopoulos), seemingly on a first-time bisexual whim. Addicted to the thrill of stirring up drama in his marriage and in the romantic life of his new sexual partner, the film follows his desperate, darkly hilarious stunts for attention as he plays his two lovers against each other for his own momentary amusement, until he pushes both relationships past their breaking point, leaving him inevitably, permanently alone. It’s basically Poly Under Duress: The Movie, as anyone who makes the mistake of finding Rogowski attractive is sucked (literally and figuratively) into his hedonistic little orbit. There’s nothing especially deep or revelatory about Passages as a character study of a horned-up narcissist, but it is always encouraging to see that someone is still out there making complicated dramas about messy adult relationships, and Sachs goes the extra mile by centering this particular story on The Messiest Bitch in Paris.
Sachs also dared to directly engage with the Sex Scene Discourse in his response to the MPAA’s decision to slap this would-be R-rated drama with a higher, penalizing NC-17 rating – yet another data point in the organization’s long history of homophobia (see also: their egregious R-rating for M Knight Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin earlier this year). The main sticking point with most sex scene haters is that they’re “unnecessary” because they “do not advance the plot.” Personally, I think anyone who’s watching movies for The Plot above all else are already lost causes and would be better off reading an airport novel than engaging with cinema as an artform, but I appreciate the way Sachs pushes back on this notion anyway. In Passages, all advances in plot & characterization are achieved through sex scenes. We learn more about these characters in their private moments of intimacy than we do in their more guarded public lives, and there’s something especially pointed about the way Rogowski’s character deliberately creates drama in the bedroom to make his weekly schedule more interesting now that he doesn’t have a film project to work on. In explaining his refusal to edit Passages to meet the MPAA’s criteria for an R-rating, Sachs stated, “It is a film that is very open about the place of sexual experience in our lives. And to shift that now would be to create a very different movie. To make an interesting sex scene is not easy. Each of the sex scenes to me is a chapter in the film. It has a story. And I wanted each one to have its own relevance and have its own details and be interesting to the audience. I think making interesting sex scenes is the hardest thing . . . What I tried to track here was not to look at sex, but to look at intimacy, not constructed through editing and avoidance.” That sounds like an artist who’s committed to the cause, and we’re lucky to have him fighting on the frontlines of the online Sex Scene Wars.
All that said, I don’t know that treating sex as a normal, natural human behavior onscreen is enough anymore. It might be time to escalate the weaponry of war and make our dirty movies even dirtier, officially adopting a scorched Earth policy. That’s why it’s always important to go see a John Waters repertory screening whenever it’s offered to you, and I’m fairly sure The Prytania’s recent screening of 1977’s Desperate Living was the first time a Waters film has played here since NOMA’s retrospective of his work in 2017. It’s been even longer since I watched Desperate Living in particular with a crowd, and it was projected off the same ancient DVD scan of the film both times, well over a decade apart, because there’s no better version available – a damn dirty shame. Partly a hand-constructed dystopia about a community of crust-punk murderess outcasts and partly a storybook fairytale about a lesbian uprising that topples an unjust monarchy, Desperate Living is my personal favorite John Waters film and, thus, my favorite work of art. About halfway through this most recent screening, I was thinking that this little D.I.Y. geek show manages to touch on every single cinematic subject I’m passionate about except witchcraft, and then I had the joy of rediscovering Mink Stole cooking up a magic rabies potion in a giant cauldron, completing the full set. I was also delighted to see more graphic queer sex on the big screen for all the same reasons detailed above, including its unexpected contributions to the almighty Plot. Yes, Waters includes plenty of his signature pure-shock-value sex & violence in Desperate Living, most notably in scenes where Edith Massey’s evil-queen villain expresses a distinctly Gay Male sexuality purely for the audience’s delight: spanking her army of leather-clad twink underlings, huffing their jock straps, and cheerfully exclaiming “Look at those balls!” at their naked, writhing bodies. However, there’s also a surprising tenderness in the sex scenes between the various lesbian couples of Mortville, most significantly in how Mink Stole’s relationship with fellow fugitive Jean Hill evolves from employer-employee to partners-in-crime to mutually-betrayed-lovers, all tracked through their onscreen sexual contact.
Waters has also been roped into commenting on the state of Gen-Z puriteens and Sex Scene discourse, because he’s the kind of interview subject that regularly gets roped into commenting on the state of everything. An interviewer from the Los Angeles Review of Books writes, “From the rosary job in Multiple Maniacs, to Divine playing both participants in a filthy roadside fuck in Female Trouble, to penetration via chicken in Pink Flamingos, Waters’s films are chock-full of sexual debauchery. I elicit his take on a recent opinion, seemingly held among a younger, online generation that sex scenes in films are unnecessary. Waters scoffs: ‘I haven’t heard that one. That’s a good one. Young people don’t want to see sex in movies? Jesus Christ.” Honestly, I appreciate that complete dismissal of Sex Scene Discourse as a worthwhile topic of discussion even more so than Sachs’s earnest attempts to combat it through his art. It’s laughable that an entire generation of young people would be disinterested in sex as a cinematic subject; we just happen to live in a time when that outlier opinion gets amplified online for outrage engagement, making the voice of a few sound like the voice of the many. I can report from the ground that there were plenty of young people (presumably ones with internet access) present at that recent screening of Desperate Living, and they were hooting & hollering just as loud as the elder perverts in the room, myself included. There was something righteous & defiant about watching such a filthy movie in public (screened as a weekend kickstarter for this year’s Southern Decadence festivities), as if we were protesting for our Constitutional right to watch graphic sex at the multiplex. Meanwhile, my mid-afternoon screening of Passages at The Broad that same week was much more subdued, as it’s a movie that treats sex as a normal, healthy aspect of daily life instead of a nuclear weapon to wield against Evangelical suburbanites.
In summary, the answer to the supposed problem of Sex Scene Discourse is the same answer to most problems in the Internet Era: go outside. It helps to live in a sizeable city with adventurously programmed cinemas like The Prytania and The Broad, of course, but according to the easily spooked adult YA readers of the world, you can’t seem to go see any movie without being accosted with an “unnecessary” sex scene these days, so any theater will do. And if there is absolutely no public access to adult-targeted movies where you live, it is your solemn duty to invite friends over to watch the filthiest movies you own with popcorn at home. Having recently invited friends over to watch Rinse Dream’s semi-pornographic take on Dr. Caligari, I can proudly say that I am doing my part. It is imperative that the puriteens do not win this particular battle in the culture war, even though I’m starting to think there aren’t enough puriteens in the world to register as a genuine threat in the first place.
It’s a disconcertingly popular pastime among Millennial & Gen-X film nerds to ponder “What’s the next Heathers?” every time the discourse turns its evil eye towards the high school comedy genre. Maybe it’s because we’re old enough to remember a time when Heathers had legitimate pretenders to the throne: that bitchy late-90s malaise that birthed such vicious teen girl high school comedies as Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Sugar & Spice. Maybe it’s because we’re too old to take full delight in those films’ recent, toned-down equivalents in titles like The Edge of Seventeen, Do Revenge,The DUFF, and Spontaneous. If any films have earned enough cultural capital to compare to Heathers‘s sickly, surrealist take on high school culture in the decades since 1988, only Clueless & Mean Girls could claim to share in its enduring popularity and, although both are very funny in their own way, neither are nearly cruel enough to match the acidity of Daniel Waters’s influential screenplay (or its deliciously evil late-90s echoes). Whatever the case, it’s not surprising that most professional reviews of Emma Seligman’s high school black comedy Bottoms mention its place in the Heathers lineage, despite there being infinite other heightened high school satires to choose from for easy points of comparison: Better Off Dead,Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Clone High, Daria, and the list goes on. I won’t go as far as to say declaring every successful high school dark comedy “the next Heathers” is a hack move (despite being a certifiable hack who’s guilty of that behavior myself), but I at least want to note that the search for The Next Heathers is becoming a time-honored tradition among an aging generation of media critics.
So, in the interest of mixing things up, I’d like to compare Bottoms to a different heightened high school comedy that I love dearly: Strangers with Candy. Specific events and characters in Seligman & co-writer Rachel Sennott’s screenplay might have more direct correlations in Heathers (especially in the comedic approach to a potential school bomber), but the tone of the humor is much more closely aligned with the vintage Amy Sedaris sitcom. The surrealism of Heathers has a dreamlike, soft-focus quality you will not find in Bottoms, which instead repurposes the rotten dirtbag energy of Sedaris’s cult show. Sennott co-stars with Ayo Edebiri as the film’s Jerri Blank equivalents: two adult actors in hideously slovenly high school drag who relentlessly proposition their classmates for sex while everyone around them obliviously focuses on normal high school media conflicts like homework and the upcoming football game. In both works, teachers and school staff match the teenage deviants’ dirtbag mentality with equally monstrous comebacks, sidestepping the decorum of professional, adult behavior. No one acts like a real human being at any time, reflecting the collective, horned-up mania of American high schools’ insular worlds. The filmmaking is deceptively commercial in both cases (mocking 1970s afterschool specials in Strangers with Candy and mocking 1990s high school boner comedies in Bottoms), delivering pitch-black narcissist line readings with the cheery poptimism of a well-behaved mainstream sitcom. If you deeply miss the mixture of high-femme costume designs with high-artifice teen cruelty in Heathers, there are plenty of modern movies willing to offer a facsimile. Meanwhile, if you deeply miss watching Jerri Blank hit on a comically naive Tammi Littlenut (“Pee on me.”) or trade vicious barbs with Principle Onyx Blackman (“You must be about as worn out as a hooker on VJ Day.”), Bottoms is your only viable modern substitute.
The only reason it’s so tempting to compare Bottoms to previously existing works—Strangers with Candy, Heathers, or otherwise—is because Seligman & Sennott’s screenplay is so referentially rooted in teen sex comedy tradition. Its basic premise, in which two unpopular, unfashionable high school lesbians start an afterschool “defense class” in a misguided attempt to bed cheerleaders, functions as a basic-bullet-points mashup of Fight Club and Revenge of the Nerds. Sennott & Edebiri are obviously not the typical protagonists of the genre’s losing-your-virginity crisis template, but there have already been plenty other post-Porky’s, post-Superbad correctives to make it clear that high school girls get desperately horny too: The To Do List, Blockers, Booksmart, Never Have I Ever, Plan B, Slut in a Good Way, etc. None have quite matched the shameless selfishness of Sennott & Edebiri’s manic libidos, though, at least not since Jerri Blank described the way high school football makes her “damp as a cellar down there – all mildewy.” There are two basic placement tests that will determine your relationship with Bottoms as an audience: whether you find the jokes funny and whether it speaks meaningfully to your personal, pre-loaded high school comedy reference points. The former can’t be helped, but I would at least like to encourage people to look beyond Heathers to better support the latter. In general, we could all stand to look past Heathers more often when considering the genre’s darkest subversions; there are plenty other titles to choose from, to the point where the exercise of identifying The Next Heathers is getting a little silly. Really, what’s most encouraging about Bottoms is how little comparison it supports against Seligman & Sennott’s previous collaboration, Shiva Baby, despite both being queer nightmare comedies starring Sennott. It’s nice to still feel surprised even while also feeling as if you’ve seen it all before.
Welcome to Episode #194 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four made-for-TV biopics about tabloid-magnet celebrities, starting with 1990’s messy real estate drama Leona Helmsley:The Queen of Mean.
01:00 Desperate Living (1977) 10:00 Where is the Friend’s House? (1987) 13:55 Beau is Afraid (2023) 17:55 Summer Heat (1987) 19:45 Fallen Angel (1981) 22:45 Passages (2023) 24:54 Bottoms (2023)
27:45 Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean (1990) 48:22 The Late Shift (1996) 1:05:10 Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B (2014) 1:18:05 Wendy Williams: The Movie (2021)
You know I love a pastiche, and I was bummed when I wasn’t able to catch this one in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run. Despite the inherently sci-fi nature of the title, I wasn’t expecting just how far into that genre the film would lean, and I was delighted.
In the Glen, an area that federal and state funding has not so much forgotten as forsaken, Fontaine (John Boyega) is the dealer at the top of the food chain. Far from the exciting life of danger that one would expect, it’s a monotonous routine; he gets a bottle of alcohol and a lottery scratch-off from the corner store, pours some out into the extended cup of elderly, conspiracy-spouting Frog (Leon Lamar), pumps some iron, mournfully contemplates the “In Remembrance” clipping for his younger brother on the fridge, knocks on his mother’s door to see if she wants anything (she never does), and receives delivery of the day’s cash intake. On the day that the film opens, two out-of-the-ordinary things happen. The first is that he gets word from elementary aged Junebug (Trayce Malachi) that a pusher for rival dealer Issac (J. Alphonse Nicholson) has been spotted in Fontaine’s territory, leading Fontaine to kneecap said pusher. The second is that local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) has failed to pay up, so Fontaine tracks him down to his hotel, which leaves the younger man vulnerable to a drive-by at the hands of a retaliating Isaac. Then he wakes up. Dismissing the shooting as a dream, Fontaine resumes his quotidian: scratch-off, Frog, iron, Remembrance, mother. Only when he once again goes to confront Slick Charles, who tells him that he watched Fontaine die, a fact which is corroborated by sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). Following a suspicious black SUV, the unlikely trio discovers that there’s much more going on than meets the eye.
There are a few different misdirections in the film that lure the savvy audience member into thinking that they know where the film is headed. Fontaine’s day(s) has all the trappings of a time loop narrative, which wasn’t uncommon prior to COVID, but which has really blossomed as a story device since lockdown, during which many people began to see something of their own quarantined routine in these stories. This theory is blown out of the water when other characters recall Fontaine’s death. Further complicating matters is the widespread lack of specificity about the time period in which the film takes place. Older model cars line the streets and Charles dresses like Willie Dynamite, which would date the film to the 1970s, but Junebug talks excitedly about SpongeBob SquarePants, which moves the setting closer to our own, but given that the show premiered in 1999, that still jives with the omnipresence of CRT model televisions. That is, until Yo-Yo mentions blockchain, which means that this must take place in the present (or future), but a present dotted with anachronistic technology. Of course, given that this is an extremely tightly constructed script, it’s no surprise that there’s a reason for all of this, but revealing any more than that would spoil too much.
Speaking of which, this is one of those movies with a plot that’s all but impossible to talk about without revealing too much. Luckily, the performances give us more than enough text to dig through. Jamie Foxx stays working, which means that he’s forever ending up in projects that fail to really use him to his greatest potential; here, he’s utterly fantastic as the has-been Charles, whose bygone primacy is a point of pride (he boasts that he won Pimp of the Year at the Player’s Ball in 1996), undermined by his current washed-up status. There’s a bit of the Cowardly Lion in him, but he comes through when needed, and, just like the other characters rounding out the trio, he’s savvier than appearances would suggest. Boyega is also on top of this game here, and there’s a bit of his performance as Moses in Attack the Block that bleeds through here, perhaps intentionally. The breakout is Parris, who is having quite the year, given that she’s co-headlining the upcoming Marvel feature The Marvels after her character was introduced to the MCU via WandaVision, where she was easily one of the best things about the program. Every character’s hidden depths are important, as they bely the cluelessness and patronizing shallow-mindedness of the antagonists, but Yo-Yo’s fascination with Nancy Drew is particularly endearing to me, as is her ambition.
Just like when I rated & ranked the Alien franchise, the original Ninja Turtles movie remains an easy favorite. It’s not only a priceless time capusle of bodacious 90s kitsch, but it also exemplifies how attention to visual craft can make a classic out of potentially disastrous material. Without the Jim Henson Creature Shop’s involvement the first live-action Ninja Turtles film would be ranked on the same worst-of-all-time lists as Howard the Duck, Troll 2, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and Mac & Me. All those titles have their own mesmeric movie magic to them, but this one needs much less good will & forgiveness from the audience to legitimize it. It’s a legitimately great children’s film, one with a surprising amount of grit & gravitas considering the inherent goofiness of the source material.
The franchise’s most recent theatrical outing (and, obviously, the inspiration for this ranked list) is not only the best Ninja Turtles movie in the three decades since the original, but it’s also generally the best mutation of the breakthrough Spider-Verse CG animation aesthetic to date and the most a Trent Reznor score has actually sounded like Trent Reznor’s band. It’s particularly delightful to see a TMNT movie focus on the “teenage” portion of the acronym by making everything as gross as possible and by making the young, crimefighting turtles’ ultimate goal to save prom from being cancelled. In all other Ninja Turtles movies, the titular heroes’ “teenage” status is an aspirational quality for younger viewers, who look up to them as skateboarders, pizza-chompers, and users of obscure slang (“Cowabunga!”, “Radical!”, “Tubular!”, etc.); in this one, being teens means they’re charmingly awkward dorks still figuring out their place in the world, which feels more accurate as an adult looking back on those years.
Turtles Forever (2009)
This genuinely funny fish-out-of-water comedy imports the deliriously goofy Ninja Turtles from the 1980s cartoon series into the (slightly) more realistic world of the 2000s Ninja Turtles cartoon (and then eventually imports both crews into the even grittier world of the original underground comics, sans sarcasm). It has aged remarkably well, both as a loving nostalgia piece commemorating both TV shows and as an early predictor of the superhero genre’s current, implosive addiction to multiverse team-ups. I can’t wait to see the Mutant Mayhem turts repeat the gimmick in their own inevitable multiverse sequel.
It’s easy to work up nostalgia for 1990s pop culture all these decades later, but it takes a real trash connoisseur to look back fondly on the crass commercialism of the recent past. Michael Bay’s CGI Ninja Turtles film is bad-taste 2010s filmmaking in a nutshell or, if you will, on the half shell. It encapsulates everything “wrong” with the mainstream schlock of its era: lens flairs, found footage, product placement, fascination with viral videos, over-reliance on CGI, shaky cam, action confused by quick cuts, large-scale destruction of a major city, a phony third act death crisis, and a dubstep beat for the obligatory, plot-summarizing rap song that plays over the credits. The film itself is even an example our greatest, most frequent sin of the decade: the reboot. More specifically, it’s a gritty reboot, the most ludicrous gritty reboot of the post-Dark Knight era, considering the inherent goofiness of the source material. To top it all off, it boasts an above-it-all sense of irony that compels the movie to periodically point out how inherently silly that source material is. Characters poke fun at one another for “doing the Batman voice” and frequently mock the basic idea of talking humanoid turtles. The further we get away from a time when those qualities were our grotesque norm, the more endearing it will become as a cultural relic.
Instead of pushing the brooding grit of the Dark Knight era’s needless reboots to their most ludicrous extreme like its hilariously hideous predecessor, Out of the Shadows calls back to the light, fun, cartoonish energy that made the original live-action Ninja Turtles trilogy such a nostalgia-inducing relic of the 1990s. I guess you could ague that banking on 90s nostalgia is in itself a snapshot of modern blockbuster filmmaking, but that’s not what makes Out of the Shadows special. Here’s what does make it special: a manhole-shooting garbage truck modeled after the franchise’s infamous pizza van toy; a pro wrestler that plays a tank-operating rhinoceros; a perfectly hideous realization of the villainous mech suit-operating alien brain Krang; etc. Given enough time, this is a film both silly & visually memorable (read: deeply ugly) enough to generate its own future nostalgia entirely separate from that of a previous generation’s (not that it was above playing the 90s cartoon’s theme song over the end credits).
Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)
This direct-to-video crossover event is shockingly violent for an animated Ninja Turtles movie, frequently interrupting Michaelangelo’s teen-boy tomfoolery (voiced by a perfectly cast Kyle Mooney) with Raphael & Batman drawing blood from various outmatched combatants. I suppose that tonal imbalance makes sense, since the target audience has to be old enough to be nostalgic for both the Ninja Turtles’ & the Batman’s respective animated series but also immature enough to be watching a Batman vs Ninja Turtles movie in the first place. Luckily, I qualify, so I got treated to the once-in-a-lifetime phrase “Jokerfied ooze”.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)
This rushed-to-market sequel replaces the grit & gravitas of the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie with nonstop catchphrase recitals, hack comedy routines, Vanilla Ice product placement, and Looney Tunes sound effects. Those indulgences are still “turte-rific” in their own way, though, and it all amounts to a “max-amundo” action comedy that inspired an entire generation of Millennial children to “Go, ninja, go” to the polls to vote for environmental protection laws.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Turtles in Time (1993)
In which the turtles time-travel to feudal Japan, a setting that separates them from their most essential accoutrements (pizza, skateboards, urban grime, etc.), so it’s not surprising it killed the momentum of the original live-action franchise. This does make sense as toned-down course correction after the nonstop catchphrase goofballery of Secret of the Ooze, and I guess it’s nice to have official confirmation that the Jim Henson costume designs look like kappa. It just also feels like the least ninja-turtley Ninja Turtles movie, verifiable by the fact that there isn’t a single pizza delivery in either of its dual timelines.
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (2022)
This series finale Event Film (wrapping up an animated TV show I had never heard of before starting this project) is pleasant enough but entirely disposable, by which I mean it’s a Netflix movie. There’s some novelty in it plugging Ninja Turtles characters into the plot of The Terminator, but if you are not currently 7 years old and would rather just be watching The Terminator, that novelty can also be a huge hindrance. The animation itself is vibrant & colorful but also flat & unremarkable. The most remarkable thing about it, really, is that Ben Schwartz’s vocal work manages to make Leonardo more annoying than any previous movie version of Michaelangelo – a true miracle.
TMNT (2007)
The Michael Bay Ninja Turtle movies get a lot of shit for their hideous computer animation, which is probably deserved, but at least they have personality & texture to them, however grotesque. This room-temperature CG gruel is lifelessly, insipidly hideous, as if it were a proof-of-concept storyboard for a potential Ninja Turtles movie instead of the final product. I can’t believe it was released in theaters and not on an interactive CD-ROM. It’s also way too self-serious, both for a kids’ movies about pizza-addict turtle ninjas and for a reptilian joy ride on The Polar Express.
I’m not really sure that I have superhero fatigue. Scratch that; I definitely do, but I also have superhero fatigue fatigue. We’ve been hearing about how the general population is growing tired of superhero movies for over half a decade now, and yet, there’s still no real end in sight. Marvel is keeping its slate full while DC is getting ready to reboot everything again (which, to be fair, if you’ve ever been a fan of DC Comics, you know that this is DC’s modus operandi when things start to get complicated). Paul Rudd’s inherent charm couldn’t save the dreadfulAnt-Man: Quantumania, Ezra Miller’s extracurricular activities didn’t help The Flash reach an audience, and there’s a non-zero chance that this paragraph is the first that you’re hearing about Shazam: Fury of the Gods. It feels like being a corporate shill to call any comic book adaptation that’s hot off the presses a breath of fresh air, but Blue Beetle has a surprising amount of heart, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) just finished his pre-law undergrad—at Gotham University, naturally—and is returning to his Florida home to reunite with his family. Unbeknownst to him, the rest of the Reyes clan has undergone some shake-ups that threaten their home; his father (Damián Alcázar) suffered a heart attack, with the medical bills costing him his mechanic business, and worse, their landlord has sold their family home to the Kord Corporation, which intends to raze the property to build more luxury condominiums. Kord Industries, currently headed by Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) in the wake of the disappearance of her CEO brother Ted, is quickly becoming the only game in town, and they also employ Jaime’s younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) as part of the cleaning crew at the Kord estate. While working with her one day, Jaime witnesses a verbal altercation between Victoria and her niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), over Victoria’s planned direction for the company, turning their attention back to the machinery of war after her father purged weapon research and development when he was CEO. Both Jaime and Milagro end up fired, but Jenny tells Jaime to come to Kord HQ the following day so that she can find gainful employment for him there. Unfortunately, her attempts at corporate espionage—in the form of the theft of something called “the scarab”—that same day are discovered fairly quickly, and she entrusts her stolen goods to Jaime, who is able to abscond with them.
Back home, Jaime’s family insist that he open the box Jenny gave him and look inside, and the piece of alien tech within immediately bonds to him and takes him on a familiar Greatest American Hero/Raimi Spider-Man style “learning to control newfound powers” sequence. It’s pretty rote stuff all things considered, but the bog standard narrative is elevated by novelty in the performances of both the lead and the supporting cast. Sarandon lends the whole thing a sense of gravitas that the film proper doesn’t fully earn, but the real standout is George Lopez, who plays Jaime’s Uncle Rudy. A dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, Rudy acts as occasional expositor, such as in the scenes where he explains the legacy of the heretofore unmentioned previous crime-fighting Blue Beetle, unlikely gadgeteer, and comic relief. He’s clearly having a lot of fun in the role, and although the comedy of the first half of the film felt a little limp and forced, the second half makes up for it.
Look, I’m no fool. I know that there’s no profound moral reason that any company seeks to diversify its staff or output. Faced with outcry in the midst of the June 2020 protests, several major studios hired dozens of DEI employees and strategists and then, as soon as things got quite, those hires were first on the chopping block when “trimming the fat.” Your dad or your cousin or your old college roommate can repeat “Go woke, go broke” until they’re blue in the face, but the truth of the matter is that no megacorp is putting funding toward creating more diverse content out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s all about money, and it always is. Disney’s casting of Halle Berry in The Little Mermaid isn’t part of some grand conspiracy to obliterate “white culture,” they cast her because now they can sell a white Ariel doll and a Black Ariel doll. It’s really as simple as that. There may have been a time when I could have appreciated Blue Beetle more for its pure representation, but things have changed a lot since we could all rest on such neoliberal laurels. Warner Brothers didn’t release this film to theaters because of strong convictions about the treatment of Latine populations in the U.S. or concerns about gentrification of non-white neighborhoods or to take a stand against corporate overreach; in fact, the fact that it touches on these issues while being part of a giant corporate conglomerate is almost insulting.
With that in mind, it’s kind of a big deal that the reins of this movie were handed over to Angel Manuel Soto, whose larger body of work has been concerned with American imperialism in Puerto Rico, as well as the rise of American fascism. His C.V. includes the feature La Granja, a set of interconnecting stories about people from various walks of life struggling with PR’s economic collapse, as well as the short docs I Struggle Where You Vacation and Inside Trump’s America, which focus on the lives of ordinary Puerto Ricans as they struggle with Washington’s sluggishness in the fact of PR’s debt crisis and the terrifying reality of the merging of cult and mob mentalities, respectively. Soto doesn’t leave his past or his beliefs behind in making Blue Beetle, which makes for a bizarre melding, as Rudy (accurately) calls Batman a fascist and Jaime’s grandmother flashes back to her revolutionary days in Mexico while wielding a giant gun and shouting (in Spanish) “Death to the Imperialists!” The irony of this is thick: Batman is DC’s most lucrative cash cow, and there’s no separating the gorged tick that is Warner Brothers from American capitalistic imperialism’s hide. Audre Lorde reminds us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but Soto is giving it a shot. It may not make the movie better, but it certainly doesn’t make it worse.
The Criterion Channel has been spoiling me like a little brat all year, handfeeding me cult cinema curios I’ve been desperate to see forever but could never get my hands on through official channels: The Doom Generation, Kamikaze Hearts, Demonlover, Flaming Ears, and the list goes on. The pummeling rhythm of those dopamine hits have slowed to a trickle in recent months, though, so I’m seeking out my cult classic wishlist items in other venues. Thankfully, there are a thousand vintage genre-film Blu-ray labels happy to take money from an addict, and I recently scored another notoriously hard-to-find schlock relic off of the trash-hero distro Mondo Macabre. Their recent 4k restoration of the 1989 absurdist horror sequel Dr. Caligari did not disappoint. It’s less of a New Wave update of the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari than it is a guided tour of the inside of my mind, hosted by a vintage dominatrix with an academic appreciation of Camp. The second major Caligari revision after the 1920 original (following a Hitchcockian psychodrama version from 1962), this Totally 80s™ take on the story reimagines German Expressionist tropes & aesthetics as MTV era sleaze. Not to damn it with hyperbole, but it is cinema perfected.
Given the resume of director Stephen “Rinse Dream” Sayadian (Cafe Flesh, Nightdreams), it might be more appropriate to compare Dr. Caligari‘s spare sets & heightened aesthetics to video store pornography rather than music video artistry. The handbuilt, absurdly geometric art design and smoke-machine clouded sound stages are pure MTV movie magic, though, imagining a world where Devo scored an adults-only episode of Pee-wee’s Fuckhouse. Any list of its nearest stylistic comparison points could also be found scribbled in a late-80s art school weirdo’s discarded notebook: the Elfman brothers’ live-action cartoon playground Forbidden Zone; Tim Burton’s higher-budget refinement of Ed Woodian artifice; John Waters’s purposefully overwritten, underperformed brays of dialogue; David Lynch’s eerie atmospheric dissonance. The angular, poised performances resemble voguing more than acting, preceding Madonna’s appropriation of the trend by at least a year. There’s even a Cronenbergian flesh wall that kisses its victims back with full tongue. All of this up-to-date 80s Weirdo posturing is at least anchored to overt references to ancient filmmaking aesthetics, including the fellation of a Wizard of Oz scarecrow, a villainous combination of Marlene Dietrich & Ethyl Merman, and the obvious German Expressionist touches referenced in its title. It could have only been made in the glory days of early MTV, but its secret weapon is tying that moment to a larger continuum of wet-nightmare cinema – a long, throbbing history of populist art for perverts.
Still, Dr. Caligari‘s plot is befitting of a Rinse Dream porno, and its hyperfixation on women’s orgasms and bare breasts pushes it to the fuzzy borders of softcore. It’s not a porno parody of the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari so much as it’s a long-gestating sequel. The titular villain is the granddaughter of the original Caligari, running his legacy insane asylum with newly radical, perverted tactics more befitting of a dominatrix than a psychiatrist. Her most treasured patient is an oversexed suburban housewife whose Reaganite husband fears his spouse’s “diseased libido.” Caligari feigns to cure the monstrously horny woman by experimenting with “hormonal interfacing,” but in truth she’s tinkering with ways to weaponize her patient’s sex drive against the men who cower from it. Caligari’s true lab work involves “hypothalamus injections” that allow her to directly transplant brain fluid—and, thus, character traits—from one patient/victim to another. It’s a two-part plan that would allow her to fully claim power over her psych ward fiefdom: first by transplanting the horned-up housewife sex drive of her star patient into the minds of all of her professional nemeses, then by injecting the incredible mental powers of her legendary grandfather into her own mind, becoming unstoppable amidst the chaos. Things do not go according to plan, and her various injections from a “nympholepsy” poisoned mind into her enemies’ hypothalamuses eventually tears down the walls of the Caligari Insane Asylum for good, simply because everyone around her is too horny to control.
If Dr. Caligari is sincerely “about” anything, it’s about Reagan Era suburban fears of sex, particularly of women’s desire & pleasure. In that context, its spare, post-Apocalyptic set design appears to be a nuked-to-oblivion wasteland rather than a rented LA soundstage. The nuclear family unit has died from the slow radiation poisoning of the Cold War, leaving the men in charge terrified that the women below them will climb the ladder of chaos in the rubble. Transplanting those women’s scary libidos into the men’s fragile, fearful minds induces a distinct gender dysphoria horror, erasing their power at the top of the Patriarchy by erasing their manhood altogether. There’s always a question of whether this is pointed political commentary, an indulgence in softcore forced feminization pornography or, most likely, a purely aesthetic provocation with no guiding sense of purpose. Every line reading is an act of sarcastic poetry & performance art, putting each overt political statement and subconscious expression of sexual id in gigantic square quotes. It’s a very specific brand of jaded, ironic, hedonistic fashionista posturing that will test the patience of the sound of mind and pure of heart. However, if you are impure of heart & libido, you’re likely to fall in love with it, especially in its new, crisp presentation from Mondo Macabre.
Our current Movie of the Month, 1983’s A Night in Heaven is an oddly forgotten studio drama about a bored Floridian college professor who cheats on her husband with a young student, who happens to moonlight as a male stripper. Yes, a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype before I was born, and it’s somehow not a certified cult classic (yet), even though it helped popularize the eternal synthpop banger “Obsession”. Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the complications & safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess. In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter, so I guess it all evens out.
A Night in Heaven was released decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper movies, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print obscurity instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite. However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful. There’s nothing especially vulgar or raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to stripper Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front. Still, it’s still shocking to see a retro movie so sincerely stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for Hollywood filmmaking. It’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club movie with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales. Unfortunately, there aren’t many other high-profile male stripper movies to recommend alongside A Night in Heaven as a result, but there are plenty of other contemporary movies set in 1980s strip clubs that match & complement its vintage sleaze aesthetic. To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more 80s stripper movies that share in its distinctly retro grime & glamour.
Flashdance (1983)
A Night in Heaven’s biggest hurdle to earning long-term cult status might have been its short-term battle with Flashdance. Adrian Lyne’s aspirational welder-by-day-stripper-by-night story of a wannabe ballerina making her way in The Big City overshadowed A Night in Heaven so completely that People Magazine dubbed the latter film “Flashdunce” in its review. It’s not hard to see why. While A Night in Heaven is charming in its internal identity crisis, swinging wildly in genre & tone from scene to scene, Flashdance knows exactly what movie it wants to be and leaps gams first towards that goal. Flashdance is just as manically ambitious as its 18-year-old-with-three-jobs protagonist, hammering away at its early MTV fantasy aesthetic so hard in every scene that it’s practically a feature length music video. When Jennifer Beals welds, she’s surrounded by fantastical splashes of sparks & purple smoke. When she strips, the physical stage disappears to allow her (and her wig-wearing body doubles) to bounce around impossible otherworldly voids. When she practices ballet, she doesn’t really. She reinvents the artform of dance entirely, giving physical expression to a hip cassette tape soundtrack you’re directed to buy on your trip home from the theatre. A Night in Heaven can’t help but look small & dorky next to the biggest strip club fantasy movie of 1983, partly because Flashdance is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made.
I’m saying all this as a general skeptic of Adrian Lyne’s signature works, too. Flashdance delivers all of the messy, sweaty erotica of Lyne’s trademark sex thrillers, except with the bitter misogyny swapped out for high-style MTV escapism. It’s unquestionably his best film, challenged only by Jacob’s Ladder. It’s also very likely the best strip club movie of the 1980s, even if it has to pause mid-film to contrast its impossible high-art erotic dance gallery space against a much more realistic, grubby strip club where women actually take their clothes off for money.
Stripper (1986)
There aren’t many 80s stripper movies that demand to be taken as seriously as Stripper. The semi-staged hangout documentary was directed by Pumping Iron producer Jerome Gary, presenting a sincere portrait of North American strippers as artists & craftswomen doing their best to make a living. The six women profiled on camera are all seemingly genuine & passionate in their explanations of why they strip for money, interviewed in front of a blank Sears family photo backdrop to help dampen the subject’s inherent salaciousness. At the same time, the documentary is structured around a stripper convention’s fictional Golden G-String competition that’s inorganically staged for the camera, so that the women have a goal to achieve beyond day-to-day survival. That in-film kayfabe likely mattered a lot more to serious film critics of the 1980s, which is likely why it isn’t as widely canonized as its bodybuilding equivalents in the Pumping Iron series. Its flagrant dishonesty matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, though, where its mixture of high artifice & subcultural anthropology feels distinctly ahead of its time. Modern audiences are well used to parsing out what’s real and what’s kayfabe in semi-documentary television, and it’s fascinating to see that format pioneered in such a distinct subcultural context at such a distinct era in the stripping profession.
Stripper is just as self-conflicted in its tone as A Night in Heaven. It wants to present its titular profession as just another working-class side job, providing a borderline wholesome public service that’s been an American pastime since the old-timey saloon days of its sepia tone photographs. It can’t help but lean into the glam & smut of its 80s strip club milieu, though, and the only inclusion of male strippers among its hot-babe interviewees are the drunk oglers who join them onstage in sarcastic pantomime. On a documentary level, it’s about as academically rigorous as any random episode of HBO Real Sex, but it still makes for great peoplewatching & anthropological texture if you’re willing to peer beyond the sheer veil of fantasy in its onstage strip routines.
Vamp (1986)
It’s a shame that there aren’t many other male-stripper movies of the era to lump in with A Night in Heaven, since that’s the major detail that makes the film special. A Night in Heaven was released in an era when light-hearted erotica was defined by frat bro boner comedies like Animal House, Porky’s, and Revenge of the Nerds, when most sex objects depicted onscreen were women, not student-by-day-gigolo-by-night college age twinks. So, if you’re going to pair A Night in Heaven with one post-Porky’s boner comedy about strippers, you might as well watch Vamp: the one where a gang of neon-lit vampire strippers led by Grace Jones torture the horndog frat boy protagonists. Often cited as a prototype for From Dusk til Dawn the way A Night in Heaven is a prototype for Magic Mike, Vamp is a cutesy horror comedy that can only ogle women’s bodies for so long before those bodies transform into bloodsucking ghouls and turn the tables of power. In a way, it’s got the same older women preying on younger men sexual dynamic of our Movie of the Month, but the “preying” just happens to be a lot more literal & monstrous.
There’s nothing especially innovative or unique about Vamp, at least not once you get past Grace Jones’s centerpiece strip routine (which features set & body paint designs by legendary artist Keith Haring). It’s basically a David DeCoteau movie with a proper budget, a pure-80s novelty. As a vibe check of what audiences most stripper media served in that era, though, it’s at least a pleasant novelty – not least of all because that audience’s frat boy avatars are punished for their sins by one of the coolest, most powerful women to ever grace the stage.
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