Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

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It’s no secret that, when it comes to director Robert Aldrich’s collaborations with Bette Davis, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the film that everyone remembers and talks about, while Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is normally regarded as a bit of an afterthought. After all, the former has Davis up against Joan Crawford, an onscreen tour de force that captures the energy of their offscreen antipathy, a rivalry with such a legacy that it’s been turned into entertainment several times itself. It’s a well-known piece of trivia that the role of cousin Miriam in Charlotte, which was ultimately played by Olivia de Havilland as a favor to Davis, was to have been Crawford’s. Although I love de Havilland in this role, I can’t help but think that the Davis/Crawford second feature would have reversed this, with Charlotte as the preeminent psychobiddy picture and Baby Jane as the footnote. 

At a roaring party at Big Sam Hollis (Victor Buono, who had also appeared in Baby Jane)’s plantation home in the 1920s, the man himself warns John Mayhew (Bruce Dern) that he is aware that John has been carrying on an affair with Sam’s daughter Charlotte (Davis) and intends to run off with her and abandon his wife Jewel (Mary Astor), and that he will not allow this to happen. John goes to the grounds’ gazebo to break things off, only to be murdered, with his head decapitated and one of his hands lopped off. We then cut to the present of 1964, which finds Charlotte now a shut-in living in a dilapidated mansion with only the company of sourpuss maid Velma Cruther (Agnes Moorhead) and the occasional visits from childhood friend Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten), a doctor. Charlotte’s house is set to be torn down by the highway commission, but her repeated deferral of the impending date comes to a head when she hot-temperedly pushes a large stone planter off of her balcony, coming close to killing the demolition foreman, and she’s been given ten days to vacate. Charlotte’s recluse status is reiterated by the fact that there’s a persistent urban legend that Charlotte killed John Mayhew and got away with it because she was rich, with children daring each other to go up to the nearly abandoned house as if an old witch lived there. For her part, Charlotte believes that her father killed John, but in spite of this she blames Jewel Mayhew for exposing the affair and causing everything to fall apart, and part of her stated aversion to moving away is because she doesn’t want Jewel Mayhew to “win,” since her house isn’t in the way of the highway. Despite Velma’s doubts, Charlotte’s attempts to get her businesswoman cousin Miriam (de Havilland) to come to the old house are successful, although Miriam knows that she’s there to get Charlotte out, not stop the bulldozers. Her arrival in town comes at the same time as a British insurance agent’s, who has a special interest in the Mayhew case. 

I programmed this movie for the third of five “spooky season” Friday screenings for Austin’s Double Trouble, a North Loop spot that I frequent and adore (the first two were Rosemary’s Baby and Ginger Snaps, with Paprika coming up on the 24th and Cherry Falls on Halloween night, both at 8 PM). In my ad copy for Charlotte, I described it as “Grey Gardens meets Gaslight,” and given that it had been a little while since I last saw it, I forgot just how much that latter film this one liberally cribs from. I’d go so far as to argue that, if the play and film Gaslight had never been produced, the psychological term that we take from it would instead be called “Sweet Charlotting” or “Hush Hushing.” Poor Charlotte Hollis really gets put through the wringer in this one, blaming her father for John Mayhew’s death for decades and hating Jewel Mayhew for exposing the affair, when neither of those things are really true, and that’s before she finds herself psychologically terrorized by phantoms of John and discovering evidence of a potential haunting. Davis is doing some of the most truly compelling work of her career here, and I’ve been haunted by this performance ever since my first viewing of this movie when I was a teenager. Maybe I’m biased and the Louisiana setting and the frequent mentions of Baton Rouge endear this one to me more than Baby Jane, but I really do find the Southern Gothic feel of this one makes it more special (even if the script occasionally flubs and mentions a “county commissioner,” as counties are something that Louisiana does not have). That having been said, I can’t pretend that Baby Jane isn’t a tighter film; although their individual runtimes are within minutes of one another (133 minutes for Charlotte and 134 for Baby Jane), Charlotte feels longer, as there’s a little too much denouement going on after the film’s villains are revealed. This allows for Davis to continue to act her ass off, but it’s not terribly exciting, even if it also gives some time for one or two more twists. 

Although the film is decades old, I’ll give the standard warning here that I’ve got to delve into spoilers to discuss it further. This gets a big enough recommendation from me that I used a platform I was given to show movies to the public to make this one more visible, so that’s all you really need at this juncture if you want to go in unspoiled. Ok? Ok. I love seeing Joseph Cotten and Olivia de Havilland really play against type in this one. I think I remember reading somewhere once that it was only in this film and Dark Mirror in which she portrayed a villain, and in that earlier role she was playing a set of good and evil twins, so that’s a net zero, really. She’s fantastic here, and even though some audience members may find themselves fatigued by the film’s long ending, I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to see de Havilland relish delivering Miriam’s backstory for a shorter run time (even if I would trade it to see Crawford tear into this monologue). Miriam reveals that her resentment toward Charlotte was born the day that she was first brought to the Hollis House to be raised by her uncle following her father’s death, and that old Sam Hollis’s perfunctory hospitality to his niece while he doted on his daughter drove her into a jealous rage. It was Miriam who exposed Charlotte and John Mayhew’s affair, and when Jewel Mayhew killed her husband in a jealous rage, it was Miriam who blackmailed Jewel about it for decades while allowing Charlotte to blame her father, destroying their once close relationship. Miriam’s envy took everything from Charlotte except her house, and now Miriam has come back for that, too (or at least whatever money Charlotte’s entitled to via eminent domain reimbursement), with Dr. Drew as her confidante. His motivation is merely money, which is less interesting, but it’s still nice to see the hero of Gaslight take on the role of accessory gaslighter in this film. 

I’ve barely mentioned her, but I also want to draw attention to the fantastic performance of Agnes Moorhead as Velma. The moment that something spooky seems to be happening, the audience’s initial suspicion must fall on Velma, as the person with the most access to the house and the one who seems most antagonistic toward Miriam, who has yet to be revealed as the villain and seems to truly desire to help. Velma is irascible and her ability to maintain the great old house alone is minimal at best, but she’s also a true and faithful companion for Charlotte despite the fact that she seems to be going feral (when her murdered body is left in her backyard, the authorities say of her place that “I’d hardly call it a home,” which makes it sound like she’s living in a shack). Moorhead really was one of the greats, and she’s just as fantastic here as Davis is. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

After the Hunt (2025)

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Back when I saw Anatomy of a Fall in theaters a couple of years ago, I was struck by the strangeness of the prestige picture having an advertised URL that encouraged audience members to vote on whether the main character was guilty of killing her husband or not. At the time, about two-thirds of viewers believed in her innocence, which has increased slightly to 70% innocent/30% guilty in the two years since release. That film, as well as Tár, was at the forefront of my mind for most of the runtime of After the Hunt, the newest film from director Luca Guadagnino (and a freshman writing effort from Nora Garrett, heretofore a mostly unknown actress). I’m surprised to see that this one has been faring so poorly critically at this juncture (as of this writing, the Google review aggregator is showing a 2.1 rating out of 5 — admittedly only out of 110 reviews. More damningly, both the critical and audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are hovering in the range between 35 and 40%), and I can’t help but think that some large portion of this critical laceration comes from the fact that the modern audience has lost the ability to appreciate ambiguity, let alone accept it or see its value in the context of a piece of art. That, or some are simply too turned off by its approach to its sexpolitik.

After the Hunt is a character study of Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts), a professor of ethics and philosophy at Yale, detailing the relationships she has with three primary players in her life. There’s her queer grad student and PhD candidate Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a young Black woman who nonetheless comes from a wealthy, privileged background; alongside Alma in the department is fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield), a flirtatious libertine who’s poorly hiding his attraction to Alma; and finally, Alma’s husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a psychiatrist with a tendency toward dramatic flair and culinary spectacle, who is the only one aware that she’s suffering in silence over a painful physical ailment. After a party at the Imhoffs’ one night, Alma watches as Hank and Maggie depart together so that he can walk her home. The following day, she arrives to campus to find Maggie absent and unresponsive. After a quick drink with Hank during which he demonstrates himself to clearly be horny for her, she returns home to find Maggie on her doorstep, where she tells Alma that Hank sexually assaulted her the previous evening. By the next morning, Hank has already set up a lunch with her at a local Indian restaurant where he explains his side to Alma: that he had caught Maggie plagiarizing some of her work a couple of weeks prior and found her doing it again in her PhD dissertation, and that he had wanted to give her the chance to explain herself and offer her the opportunity to come clean before he was forced to rat her out to Alma. In all of this, Frederik tries to support Alma as best as he can, but she keeps him both at arm’s length and uninformed (he learns about the allegations against Hank in the newspaper), possibly because she unconsciously recognizes that he sees all the sides more clearly than she can. 

The performances here are stunning. Edebiri in particular stands out, as the overall complex ambiguity of her performance is an absolute stunner. When Maggie meets Alma to tell her about what happened with Hank the night before, there’s an imprecision to her language that seems to be deliberate, but it’s unclear if the ambiguity is deliberate on the part of Maggie or the screenplay. When Alma asks for concrete details, Maggie talks around the events of the previous night, with vague statements like “He crossed a line” and “When he left, I took a shower,” then lashing out when asked for more details. Is this a natural, understandable reaction to being asked to recount details of a traumatic experience when one is attempting to navigate describing that event without reliving its every moment, or is Maggie trying to compartmentalize a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation for some future leverage without overtly “lying”? Before Hank is fired, there’s a scene in which Maggie and Alma meet each other in the foyer of a rectory/lecture hall, when Alma asks Maggie if she went to a clinic after the incident so that any forensic evidence could be collected, and Maggie tells her that she walked to an off-campus clinic but never made it inside because she felt threatened by some men who were hanging around the place, but that she did see that there was a security camera that would have shown footage of her approaching, and that this, in combination with the fact that she went there immediately after seeing Alma, should be enough to establish a timeline of sorts that would indicate her intention to seek medical services even if she couldn’t go through with it. The statement veers between being completely understandable, as it’s become increasingly popular for men to hang around outside of women’s clinics to harass them, but also seems almost too-practiced, as Maggie “realizes” that she can put together some “evidence.” Edebiri’s ability to straddle this line, to where a reading that she’s a manipulative nepo baby playing on what Hank calls “a shallow cultural moment” is just as valid as a reading that she is telling the whole and complete truth from the beginning. There’s certainly the implication that Maggie was already getting some amount of special treatment before; when she doesn’t come to campus the morning following the Imhoffs’ party, Alma says something offhand about having already given her “too much rope.” 

Garfield is quite good at playing against type here as well, and the extent to which we can believe anything about his version of events is circumspect but also plausible. Even when he’s admitting (or “admitting”) to the singular error (or “singular error”) of going to a student’s home alone in the evening, he never slows down in devouring his lunch, which lends itself to an interpretation that the accusation is trivial. When he loses his job, he goes on a ranting tirade about having had to work three jobs to put himself through school and now that he’s on the precipice of tenure, he may lose everything because of an unverifiable accusation. It’s here that we hit on what is likely the greatest stumbling block about the movie, in that we live in a world in which any text that treats a false accusation of rape is problematic due to the negligible instances of this in reality, in comparison to the ocean of sexual assaults that remain unreported (and, when reported, handled indelicately, incorrectly, and with greater deference to the accused than the accuser). We live in a sexually violent society, and anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that is lying or living in denial, and there’s an argument to be made that predicating a piece of media on something which does not happen, especially when the characters stand to benefit from a false accusation in just the way that detractors of the reality of rape culture often claim they do, is dangerous. I can’t say that this is an unreasonable reason to take a stand against this film, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for taking the same issues with After the Hunt that many took with last year’s Strange Darling, even if the potential to infer misogyny is less textual here. Regardless, we never find out if Hank did it, or if he did how far things went, or if he did just enough to leave himself open to accusation. For my viewing companion, what clinched his guilt was a later scene in which Alma goes to a spare waterfront apartment she keeps as an academic retreat and finds Hank there, hiding out and using a spare key she forgot he had. He makes a move on her, and although it’s clear that a mutual attraction exists, Alma doesn’t give in, and it takes several declarations of “no” and a final violent shove before Hank leaves (exiting the film altogether, in fact). 

For Alma, all of this is colored by her own experience. This is a bit of a spoiler so skip ahead to the next paragraph if you would prefer not to know . . . We learn late in the film that Alma was herself a statutory victim when she was only fifteen years old. Her recollection of the “relationship” is itself warped, as she recalls the youthful crush that she had on a friend of her father’s, one that culminated in an ongoing sexual relationship that she recalls as having been sought and initiated by her, not the older man. She protests to her husband, who rightly points out that she was a child and that it is the responsibility of any adult who finds themselves pursued by a minor to—at a minimum—not acquiesce, that she threw herself at the man until he “relented,” and that she exposed him out of vengeance and spite when he entered a relationship with a woman his own age, and that this scandal led him to commit suicide three years later. She recanted her story publicly, but the guilt of his death is still something that she carries with her, and which over time has metamorphosed into a kind of emotional cancer, no doubt contributing to the perforated ulcers with which she struggles throughout the film. Regardless of whether Maggie is telling the truth or not, Alma’s statement to her that although what Maggie tells herself she’s seeking is restorative justice, what she’s actually attempting is revenge is about Alma, not Maggie; Maggie’s honesty about what happened the night of Alma’s party is immaterial because Alma perceives Maggie as repeating her own mistake, which has itself compounded and been sanitized and mythologized into a Herculan burden for Alma to bear alone to the point where it doesn’t reflect reality. 

Beyond the performances, the camera work and editing here are magnificent. There’s a lot of hand work, as Guadagnino frequently allows the camera to drift from close-ups (most in some kind of profile but frequently with direct-to-camera delivery, which created a kind of intimate space as if we in the audience were in conversation directly with Alma or Maggie) to focusing on the characters’ hands. It’s almost a joke, but it would take an Italian director to not only recognize the intrinsic value of talking with one’s hands but also to invoke the way that the eye tends to naturally drift away from eye contact during difficult conversations. It’s good stuff, and although I can see how it would easily get tiresome for a lot of moviegoers, this is a slow cinema allowance that I’m more than willing to make. The sound design is spectacular, with particular attention to a scene in which Frederik is catty to his wife because of how much he perceives that Maggie is using her, as he is as-yet unaware of the plot-driving accusation. He first interrogates Maggie about her primary PhD interest and, when she becomes defensive, he passive aggressively leaves the room and starts to play loud music from another part of the apartment, with the muffling of the sound provided by the swinging kitchen door intermittently allowing for blasts of electronica to interrupt the proceedings as he wordlessly enters and exits multiple times. It’s another scene that’s multi-layered, as we’re once again led to believe that Hank was telling some part of the truth, as Maggie can’t offer up a single reason why she’s so interested in her particular field of study or even an interesting fact for conversation. Is this because she’s still too traumatized and has come to Alma for comfort and understanding and can’t process Frederik’s question, or is she a mediocre student coasting on privilege and plagiarism? 

There’s extensive discussion of intergenerational practices of ethical philosophy here, and I’m not sure that all of the heady ideas land, but it’s a fascinating conversation that the film has with you. Chloë Sevigny is also present, as Dr. Kim Sayers, Alma’s friend and a practicing psychiatrist. Although Kim vocally objects to a man at Alma’s party saying that if the university decides to hand out only one tenureship between Hank and Alma, it will go to the latter because of “the current moment” regardless of either professor’s individual accolades or achievements, she also agrees with Hank’s sentiments that the current generation of students are too coddled and soft. Elsewhere, that relationship between the two different generations is manifested in Alma’s acceptance of Maggie’s “lesbianism” (Maggie never calls herself that and is in a relationship with a transmasc nonbinary person) but has to be continuously reminded that Maggie’s partner uses they/them pronouns; Alma’s accusation that Maggie’s relationship is more about gaining clout in the current political environment than love clearly hits close to home. This shows that Alma agrees with Hank and Kim to an extent, as when she confronts Maggie late in the film, she criticizes the younger woman for faking her way through academia, crossing a line when she says that Maggie’s phoniness (including her relationship) is what makes it so easy for people to think that women are crying wolf in these situations. It’s a sweeping generalization about an entire generation, but more to the point, it’s once again Alma projecting all of her own trauma onto Maggie, as Alma, at least in the narrative of her life that she tells herself, did in fact “cry wolf,” and it’s those words from the German newspaper article Maggie found in Alma’s home that are the first to be translated for us on screen. 

I’m not surprised that this one is divisive, and I can’t pretend that I’m all-in on this particular narrative device given its real-world ramifications, but this is a marvelous work from a directorial maestro. Challengers left me pretty cold, and I completely missed Queer so I can’t speak to it, but this one has me back on board. I have no doubt that we will soon be inundated with think pieces about how Guadagnino’s usage of Stuhlbarg to deliver a monologue about how what happened to Alma in her youth was not her fault and that she was used by an older man regardless of whether she initiated it or not is a commentary on the changing cultural reception and perception of Call Me By Your Name in the intervening years since the film was released. I’m not particularly looking forward to those days, and the derisive reaction from most of the general public to this one means that we won’t see it become as memetic as Challengers was (not to mention that the subject matter does not lend itself to that here), so this may simply sink without much attention. I think that would be a shame. I’ve already sung Edebiri and Garfield’s praises, but this is a terrific and nuanced performance from Roberts, at turns inhuman and too human, often unsure of herself but with a mask of confidence, projecting confusion when she’s certain of herself. She’s terrific, and so is the film. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Undying Monster (1942) & 13 Ghosts (1960)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss a double feature of high-style Gothic horror stories: John Brahm’s The Undying Monster (1942) and William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960).

00:00 Freaky Fridays at Double Trouble
10:00 Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
16:53 Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)
23:45 Dial M for Murder (1954)

32:12 The Undying Monster (1942)
55:35 13 Ghosts (1960)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Get Excited! Swampflix is Tabling at This Year’s ACAB Zine Fest

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Attention, Swampflix readers in the New Orleans area! Swampflix will be selling zines this weekend (October 25-26) at the fourth annual ACAB Zine Fest along with a bunch of other super cool Arts, Crafts, And Books exhibitors, hosted by Burn Barrel Press. We will be selling the print versions of six Swampflix zines, including a new illustrated version of our Swampflix Top 100 list.

ACAB Zine Fest will take place Saturday, October 25, from 11am-5pm at The Fred Hampton Free Store (5523 St Claude Ave, New Orleans, LA 70117) in the 9th Ward, and Sunday, October 26, from 11am-5pm at Gasa Gasa (4920 Freret St, New Orleans, LA 70115) Uptown.

We hope to see y’all there!

-The Swampflix Crew

Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)

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I recently attended a screening of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark at my local coffeeshop in Austin, Double Trouble (I’m screening Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte and Cherry Falls there on 10/17 and 10/31, and there will be a presentation of Paprika on 10/24 despite my absence; all screenings are at 8 PM, but get there early so you can get drinks and food!), and attached to the beginning of the film was a trailer for another New World Video release, Transylvania 6-5000. I’ve been curious about this one for a long time, since a horror comedy starring Jeff Goldblum and Ed Begley, Jr., with a supporting role for Carol Kane, seemed right up my alley. Unfortunately, this movie is one of the least funny things that I have ever seen. 

Transylvania 6-5000 opens on Jack Harrison (Goldblum) and Gil Turner (Begley) being given instructions by their tabloid editor, who is also Gil’s father, to go to Transylvania and investigate the story behind a homemade videotape of two European men fleeing in terror from an unseen (except from the waist down) “Frankenstein” [‘s monster]. Harrison bristles at this, claiming that he was brought onto the paper to increase their journalistic integrity, to which the editor replies he was brought on to increase their vocabulary. Upon arrival in Transylvania, Gil makes himself the laughingstock of the village by outright asking a local if they have heard of any Frankenstein sightings, and Harrison takes particular umbrage at this because it might reduce his chances of hooking up with an American tourist, Elizabeth (Teresa Ganzel), who is traveling with her young daughter. The two “journalists” find themselves lodged at a creepy castle whose manager also happens to be the town’s mayor (convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones), who tells them that he plans to turn the place into a kind of Disney park for Transylvanian history. Every member of the staff is obnoxious, from butler Radu (John Byner) who calls everyone “master,” his unrelentingly irritating wife Lipi (Kane), and the film’s worst character by many miles, a bellboy/servant named Fejos (Michael “Kramer” Richards). Also, there’s a vampire lady in the castle, too, played by Geena Davis. 

You can imagine my excitement at reading all of those names in the opening credits (except for the obvious one), which was greatly outmatched by the utter disappointment that followed. After his second scene, every time that Richards appeared on screen, I would groan aloud. His character’s schtick is 50% incomplete pratfalls and the other half is prop comedy, like delivering a telegram to our tabloid boys clutched in a fake hand, so that when they take it, they pull the hand out of his sleeve. It’s shockingly unfunny. I’ve read that a lot of the film was improvised, with the notation that the overlong scene in which Radu and Lupi attempt to prepare a grapefruit having only the script direction “cut and serve fruit,” and that’s apparent in the finished product. Richards’s Fejos character constantly repeats “Come here, I want to show you something” or some variation thereof during virtually every moment that he’s on screen, and it has much the same energy of a child trying to prank their parent before they’ve developed any stage patter. At the end of the film it’s revealed that Radu and Lupi were supposed to be posing as people with hunched backs for the entire film, but when this was mentioned, it came as a complete surprise to everyone watching this in my apartment. One of the better comedic elements in that it manages to land some of the time is the instant conversion of “Dr. Malavaqua” from sincere and gentlemanly to unhinged and diabolical (Jekyll and Hyde style) upon crossing the threshold into his lab. But for every time this resulted in a polite chuckle, there was Fejos slipping on a banana peel or appearing from behind a painting. 

One of the friends who attended this viewing said that a lot of the conversation about the film online is from people who remembered loving the movie as children and returning to it as adults and being greatly disappointed. This was only my first viewing, but I can understand that as their experience. The film’s final act reveals that the mayor and the chief of police have been keeping Dr. Malavaqua sequestered because the coincidental similarities between his patients and classic Hammer Horror icons are ruining their attempts to revamp the town’s image for the purposes of non-monster tourism. The vampiress stalking Gil in the castle is merely a nymphomaniac wearing Halloween fangs because she was convinced that no man could ever love her (hence her getting a nosejob from the good doctor); the wolfman is only a man afflicted with severe hypertrichosis and Malavaqua is giving him electrolysis; and so on and so forth. This is probably the scene that most people remember from their youth, as it’s one of the few in which something interesting is happening. I also infer from the film’s continuous presence on Tubi that it’s been a cheap and easy license for basic cable filler since the mid-nineties, and if you tune in only to the second half, you’d probably have fewer memories of Harrison’s agonizing pursuit of Elizabeth and thus fonder memories overall. 

I cannot in good conscience recommend this one. Goldblum’s character’s smug arrogance and the underbaked concept that his greater journalistic prowess is demonstrated by his repeated skepticism about Gil’s experiences make him unlikable to a degree that Goldblum’s normal, effortless charm is unable to surmount it. Kane has no chemistry with Byner, and her entire character is the same joke over and over again—trying to help uselessly and refusing to get out of the way—and I know you’re telling yourself that it sounds like something that would be well within Kane’s wheelhouse but she is seriously off of her game here. If you have fond memories of this one, save yourself the heartbreak of losing them. If you haven’t seen it, then spare yourself the trouble. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #249: The Toxic Avenger (1984 – 2025)

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Welcome to Episode #249 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss all things Toxie, the first superhero from New Jersey.

0:00 Welcome
05:50 Troma
19:50 The Toxic Avenger (1984, 2025)
1:11:50 The Toxic Avenger II-IV (1989-2000)

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

– The Podcast Crew

2025 New Orleans Film Festival Preview

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The 36th annual New Orleans Film Festival will be staged all across the city next week, hitting local venues like The CAC, The Broad, and both locations of The Prytania from October 23rd through the 27th (with virtual selections streaming through November 2nd). Usually, I recap highlights from the festival after it’s already concluded, but this year I’ve got a preview of a few selections from the program before they screen in person. The five titles listed below are movies worth seeking out during the festival, especially if you’re interested in catching smaller releases that won’t get the same wide theatrical distribution as NOFF’s flashier local premieres for new films by Rian Johnson, Bradley Cooper, Nia DaCosta, Noah Baumbach, and the like. It’s a rare chance to see them on a big screen with a packed, lively audience, which is the beauty of the local film fest experience.

I hope to catch more of what the festival has to offer in-person myself next week, with more reviews to come. I’ll also be joined by frequent podcast guest Bill Arceneaux for our annual festival recap once it’s all over, so there’s plenty more NOFF coverage to look forward to. In the meantime, here are a few select titles worth your time & attention, along with the corresponding venues & showtimes for their screenings. See you there!

We Are Pat

You might not expect that a three-decade old SNL sketch would be worthy of its own feature-length documentary, but the Julia Sweeney character Pat! proves to be a surprisingly rich cinematic subject precisely because it’s out of step with modern culture. Rowan Haber makes their directorial feature debut picking at the complicated legacy of vintage It’s Pat! sketches, in which the titular recurring character baffles everyone they meet by not conforming to an easily definable gender identity. Pat is more gender ambiguous than gender nonbinary, but they still offered some shred of representation for that specific queer community on mainstream television at a time when few others could be found anywhere in the wider public sphere. At the same time, the sketches’ punchlines often rely on a point-and-laugh derision of Pat as a freak of nature because they cannot be immediately categorized as a single gender based on traditional cultural markers, driving everyone in their immediate vicinity insane. A nonbinary artist who works almost exclusively in a community of trans collaborators, Haber uses this project as an opportunity to dwell in the tension between a childhood fascination with Pat as a mirror to their own burgeoning identity and an adult understanding of Pat as a public act of transphobic bullying. It’s the kind of movie that will admit in a single breath that, yes, Pat is a transphobic joke and, yes, Pat can also be very funny.

We Are Pat shamelessly commits a couple major modern-doc filmmaking sins (mainly, dragging the director and social media posts onscreen instead of sticking to the subject at hand), but it mostly gets away with it out of discourse-hijacking chutzpah. Haber assembles an impressive range of talking-head commentators on the Pat! phenomenon, ranging from gender-nonconforming indie musician JD Samson (who has no direct association with SNL or the larger comedy scene) to recent nonbinary SNL cast member Molly Kearney to Julia Sweeney herself, who extrapolates on how Pat helped her express frustrations with the social limitations of her own public gender expression. More importantly, they also assemble a writer’s room of trans & nonbinary comedians to write new, politically savvy Pat sketches that undo the harm of It’s Pat!‘s most egregious punchlines. The resulting sketch comedy that’s staged after those writing sessions is not especially funny, but the roundtable discussions of how to modernize Pat for a more expansive understanding of gender leads to fruitful discussions that help save the movie from becoming a simple I Love the 90s-style nostalgia fest. We Are Pat doesn’t attempt to reclaim Pat! as a gender-nonconforming queer icon so much as it uses Pat as an excuse to open a huge can of pop-culture worms just to watch them squirm. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 5:15pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)

Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt

Speaking of cultural relics that peaked in the 90s, NOFF will also include a screening of a new Butthole Surfers documentary, adorably subtitled The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt. The hole truth be told, I never really got the Butthole Surfers outside their one alt-radio hit “Pepper,” which is an undeniable Gen-X earworm. The musicianship on their records is impressive in an athletic sense, with complicated guitar riffs and punishing tribal drum patterns formulating a new kind of abrasive noise rock in a time when most underground music was a more simplistic, sped-up version of hardcore punk. I just could never find an in as a fan, an album that could be enjoyed from start to end. That is, until I saw them perform in a tent at Voodoo Fest sometime in the aughts, where their nonstop aural assault was matched with the bad-acid-trip visuals of film projectors, go-go-dancers, and clashing strobes. I finally understood the band’s appeal as a kind of circus side show after that performance, and this new documentary explains how that stage craft was constructed one component at a time. Butthole Surfers started as a few bored teenagers in Texan suburbia, naming themselves after an off-the-cuff quip that their brand of abrasive noise rock “sounds like surf music;” “Yeah, butthole surf music.” As they gradually added more musicians, light show technicians, and drugged-out stage performers, they toured the globe and crossed paths with people as famous as Richard Linklater, Johnny Depp, RuPaul, and their one-sided nemeses R.E.M., each of whom are featured in their own standalone anecdotes among testimony about their musical greatness from bands who I do regularly listen to: Fugazi, Melvins, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, etc.

Freaked! co-director Tom Stern breaks up the visual monotony of these talking-head testimonials by matching the band’s multimedia approach in his filmmaking style. The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt is a playful mishmash of stop-motion, crude zine animation, Crank Yankers-reminiscent puppetry, and warped VHS psychedelia, illustrating the band’s wilder, druggier exploits from the days before they could be captured on cellphone video. Like most party bands who continue nihilistic drug use past their early 20s, the vibe among members sours the longer the Butthole Surfers soldier on, and much of the back half of their story is mired in the hurt feelings between core contributors Gibby Haynes & Paul Leary, giving them room to grieve what’s been lost in their once-vibrant friendship. That getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings section of the third act might surprise longtime Butthole Surfers fans who fell in love with the band for mixing overly complicated noise rock with pre-recorded farts & burps, but hey, being a perpetually stoned, sarcastic prankster gets tiring after a while. Speaking of which, this film completes the unofficial trilogy of this year’s documentaries on the gods of sarcastic rock ‘n’ roll, after similar treatments for Pavement & DEVO. It’s time to place bets on whether the next one will be about Ween, The Dead Milkmen, or dark-horse choice (and apparently former Butthole Surfers collaborators) Bongwater. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 6:45pm @ The Broad Theater

Move Ya Body: The Birth of House

For a documentary profile of a less scatological pop music phenomenon, check out Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, which presents an oral history of the early house music scene in 1980s Chicago. Much like with Butthole Surfers, I’ve always found house to be an especially difficult musical avenue to fully explore, since it’s a movement mostly built off DJ sets and mixtapes instead of a canon of must-listen albums. Move Ya Body doesn’t offer much of an explainer on the core texts to seek out when first getting into house, outside of its focus on the DJs signed to the Chicago-based D.I.Y. label Trax Records. Instead of getting nerdy about cataloging every notable track & DJ in the scene, it mostly digs into the cultural context of the racist & homophobic era that birthed the movement as a flashpoint of Black, queer political opposition. That story starts with the Disco Sucks! phenomenon, which peaked at a “Disco Demolition Night” rally in which a mostly white rock ‘n’ roll audience smashed & burned disco records on a Chicago baseball field before being dispersed by the cops, effectively turning into a race riot in the streets outside. The story eventually ends with the disco offshoot of house music becoming internationally popular due to the appropriation of the sound by major-label artists like Madonna, leading to the same white audiences joining in on the fun once it proved profitable. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least a tale as old as America.

Move Ya Body features some stock footage and dramatic recreations of nightclub life in 1980s Chicago, but it’s overall much more of a sit-down interview presentation than the Pat! or Butthole Surfers docs. The entire point of the picture is to offer the sidelined DJs of Trax’s early days to tell their side of the story after being overshadowed by major-label artists like Madonna & Beyoncé in the global exportation of house. It’s a story with clear heroes & villains too, not just a vague gesture toward the broad concept of Black queer joy as a form of political resistance. At the very least, the looming figure of Screamin’ Rachael emerges as a perfectly loathsome heel, self-proclaiming herself to be The Queen of House despite only being included in early recordings as a hired hand. It would be like if Deborah Harry continually claimed to be the Queen of Hip-Hop for her vocals on “Rapture.” She’s part of the story but miles from the center of it, and so her shameless self-aggrandizing as a white woman who happened to be invited to the party crosses a line that affords the movie some genuine dramatic tension (despite its images mostly being restricted to people sitting in chairs). Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 8:45pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center

Your Own Flavor

One of the highlight shorts blocks featured at this year’s NOFF is titled “Body Horror Shorts: Picking Scabs”, commemorating the festival’s proximity to Halloween. Within that collection, I found a subcategory of short films about the bodily embarrassments of sex & dating, which play more like comedy sketches about the follies of hookup culture than genuine body horror. The animated shorts Caries and Mambo No.2 fixate on the embarrassments of inopportune bowel movements and the stink of oral bacteria when would-be lovers are trying to get into the mood, and the standout short of the bunch, Your Own Flavor, goes a step further to make the acting of hooking up itself to be a source of grotesque horror. After being stood up on a date, a young twentysomething is lured into buying ice cream from a rolling-cart vendor in a public park. That vendor is Chompers, a magical hand puppet who owns & operates Ice Guys ice cream. Chompers uses some of his vaguely defined puppet magic to cheer up the jilted lover with a song & dance routine about how she will one day prove to be someone’s favorite flavor of ice cream, making the temporary embarrassments of online dating worthwhile. Then, Chompers’s demeanor takes a nasty turn, as all (n)ice guys’ temperaments inevitably do. In short, it’s a Wonder Showzen update for the Tinder era.

The brief runtime of a 10-minute short film typically demands a simple set-up and punchline structure, which Your Own Flavor satisfies by making sure its punchline hits hard and hits funny. It’s got a bright, cartoonish visual panache to it as well, especially in its follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong sequence, set against a handmade, 2D cardboard ice cream factory backdrop. Not all of the shorts included in that “Body Horror” block satisfy the “horror” portion of the descriptor, but they consistently deliver on the gross-out gags associated with the genre, appealing to audiences who miss getting stoned after midnight to peak-era Adult Swim. Within that gross-out alt-comedy context, Your Own Flavor is a standout. Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 9:00pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)

West of Greatness: The Story of the Weswego Muscle Boys

Of course, one of the major advantages of going to a local film festival is getting to see local films, so it’s my duty to recommend at least one selection from the program’s “Made in Louisiana” category. The narrative feature West of Greatness: The Story of the Westwego Muscle Boys is hyper local New Orleans cinéma verité, as if someone hired Sean Baker to direct a TV spot for a Westwego gym. It’s the story of two scrawny West Bankers who enter a bodybuilding competition despite their cartoonishly nerdy physiques. One is an aspiring actor who hopes the prize money will fund an escape from LA for a brighter future in L.A., while the other hopes it will pay to move out of his abusive home with his sibling in tow. Both are followed by a fictional documentary crew, and they become unlikely friends in the months leading up to the competition, mostly because they’re the only rail-thin nerds training in a gym packed to the walls with legitimate muscle boys.

West of Greatness is endearing enough as a hopeless underdog sports story, but its real achievement is in its verisimilitude. Director Jared LaRue and crew staged a real-life local bodybuilding competition to stand in for the fictional Greatest Gains competition of the narrative, so that all periphery players afford the low-budget production some impressive authenticity. The mise-en-scène’s gym rituals, protein shakes, posing coaches, and baby-faced bros bulk up the credibility of the documentary format and open the story up to larger themes of Alpha Male cultural trends outside the tiny lives of its scrawny leads. There’s also a semi-documentary aspect to those actors’ physical progress, pulling some solid sports-movie pathos out of the transformations of their bodies from string beans to disconcertingly jacked string beans. It’s a remarkably ambitious project given the obvious limitations of its budget, especially in its tension between manufactured drama and documented reality. Screening Fri, Oct 24th, 7:45pm @ Prytania Theatre & Mon, Oct 27th, 8:00pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)

Check out more details about the upcoming festival here.

-Brandon Ledet

Famous Monster B-Lister: The Mummy

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It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.

The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.

The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.

Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).

Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.

There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil.  It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.

Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.

Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Save the Green Planet! (2003)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the alien-invasion conspiracy comedy Save the Green Planet! (2003), recently remade by Yorgos Lanthimos.

00:00 Freaky Fridays at Double Trouble
09:33 Starchaser (1985)
14:15 Child of Peach (1987)
20:24 Nothing But Trouble (1991)
25:01 Linda Linda Linda (2005)
34:31 Him (2025)
38:28 The Smashing Machine (2025)
45:56 Animation Mixtape (2025)
50:22 One Battle After Another (2025)
56:45 Move Ya Body (2025)
1:00:24 Butthole Surfers – The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt (2025)
1:04:52 We Are Pat (2025)

1:10:40 Save the Green Planet! (2003)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Video Diary of a Lost Girl (2012)

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It never pays off to be the first person to do something. Lindsay Denniberg’s 2012 feature debut Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a prescient collection of everything that’s hip & trending in genre filmmaking circles right now: VHS tapes as fetish-object collectibles, the burgeoning nostalgia for shot-on-video slasher textures, the black-box theatricality of Grace Glowicki’s Gothic horror throwback Dead Lover, the green-screen psychedelia of Vera Drew’s copyright-testing personal essay The People’s Joker, etc. If Video Diary of a Lost Girl were currently making the theatrical rounds in our new warped-VHS genre nerd dystopia, it would be humming with film nerd buzz, and Denniberg would be enjoying the same kind of Extremely Online microcelebrity of current cult directors like Matt Farley, Amanda Kramer, and Jennifer Reeder. Hopefully, its recent Blu-ray release through AGFA will help correct that oversight, as Denniberg’s time is very much now, after spending a decade tapping her foot in the horror schlock waiting room.

Pris McEver stars as the relatively young, immortal succubus Louise, self-named after the silent movie star Louise Brooks (who also inspired the name of Denniberg’s production company, Pandora’s Talk Box). Louise first saw the Old Hollywood star of the original Diary of a Lost Girl in the initial 1929 theatrical run for Pandora’s Box, when she was first starting out as a succubus and a cinephile. Nearly a century later, her cinephilia has continued through her slacker job as a VHS rental clerk, and her supernatural function as a succubus has continued through her routine acts of rape revenge. In this movie’s lore, all succubi are descendants of the Biblical figure Lilith, and they need to kill once a month by fucking a man to death in order to prevent bleeding out in the “unending bloodshed” of a lethal menstruation cycle. Louise has no drive to kill, really, but she does get horny and does want to keep on living (if not only to make time to watch more vintage horror movies), so she targets the neverending supply of street rapists who seemingly lurk in every alley between her job & home. The trouble is that she eventually falls in love with a boy she genuinely wants to fuck without hurting, and he may be the very same lover she first fell for and lost in her early silent cinema days, reincarnated.

At its heart, Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a supernatural romcom that just happens to be decorated with classic horror references. Not only is Louise’s apartment wallpapered with posters for cinematic provocations like Liquid Sky, American Psycho, and Anatomy of Hell, but she also spends most of her time on the clock watching public-domain horror classics like Carnival of Souls, Nosferatu, and Night of the Living Dead instead of, you know, actually working. Stylistically, Denniberg splits the difference between the German Expressionist fantasia of old and the straight-to-Tubi horror schlock of now. The whole thing is gloriously, grotesquely cheap, playing like what might happen if Annie Sprinkle directed a vampire movie. Every surface is bathed in blacklight fluorescents. Onscreen menstruate glows like red-glitter TV static. All exterior spaces are set in a greenscreen version of Stephen Sayaidan’s Dr. Caligari sets. Characters often sit around doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack is overpowered by spooky goth bedroom pop. It’s all just an excuse to watch video store occultists surf the channels of public-domain horror relics and scrambled-cable porno while, against all odds, falling in love.

Within the opening few seconds of psychedelic video-art color swirls and tongue-in-cheek gratuitous nudity, audiences should know whether Video Diary of a Lost Girl is a friend or foe to their sensibilities. There are plenty of buzzy, hip counterculture touchstones of recent years that indicate the movie has a sizeable cult audience waiting out there, though, however dormant. The problem is that those touchstones didn’t yet exist in 2012, so Denniberg was essentially shouting into the digital void. That’s a common story for underground filmmakers & outsider artists, most of whom don’t get this kind of decade-late victory lap, no matter how deserved.

-Brandon Ledet