aliens

Touch Me (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Touch Me had its Shudder premiere this week, and I went into it completely blind, which I recommend for anyone who is interested. This is a color-soaked fever dream of a movie, an erotic thriller wrapped in a science fiction plot that doesn’t shy away from turning a titillating moment into one of pure body horror, then following that up with a joke that underlines the tone without undercutting it. It’s fresh, fun, and something decidedly new, although it’s obviously not going to be for everyone. 

The film opens on a therapy session with Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley) detailing an experience she had with a charismatic man five years earlier. She ran into him at two separate events wearing an out-of-place track suit, and mockingly (and correctly) dismissed him as an alien. When he revealed that this was true and that he came from another world devastated by climate change to save the earth from falling victim to the same fate, she allowed him to share his psychic touch with her, which had a euphoric effect that effectively combatted her psychological issues. She hasn’t seen him since a sexual encounter between the two of them turned into an assault when he wouldn’t stop despite her asking him to, running straight to the home of her gay best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris), where she has remained ever since. For reasons that are revealed later, the two are able to live comfortably in Craig’s home, despite neither having a job, but when an unexpected and costly plumbing emergency occurs, Joey starts looking for work. This brings her back into contact with Brian (Lou Taylor Pucci), her alien ex, and she ultimately accepts his invitation for her and Craig to spend some time in his modern mansion in the hills. There’s some friction between the two and Brian’s human assistant Laura (Marlene Forte), but after a few sessions of alien group therapy, things are going well, until they suddenly aren’t. 

One of the barriers that I think some viewers will have with this one will come down to its playful zaniness. Touch Me isn’t trying to be taken at face value and as such calls attention to its filmic and fictional nature constantly. After Joey witnesses video evidence that there’s something more sinister going on than she’s been led to believe, the film shows us the backstory of the person she’s just seen die in a black and white segment; the victim was lured in via hookup app, with the telltale sounds of Grindr notifications going off but those messages appearing on screen like silent picture intertitles. It’s quirky, but not overly so. When Joey considers applying to work at the coffee shop she frequents, the “help wanted” sign on the counter appears and reappears in multiple floating bubbles that frame her face. It’s cartoonish, and the tone of the film supports it, but I can see a lot of the film-going audience growing frustrated with Touch Me because of this visual playfulness in a film that spends much of its time dealing with sexual assault and its psychological impacts. Those scenes are never played for laughs and are treated with appropriate weight, and we’re never subjected to it and only witness the victims recount them in therapeutic sessions, both legitimate and manipulative. That tonal whiplash is part of what makes the film special, however, and I don’t think that I would have it any other way.

Brian turns out to want “cross-species intercourse” with both of his hot young houseguests (and as many others as possible), and the film is very good at capturing what makes him both desirable and uncannily, repulsively inhuman. Pucci is an attractive man who has clearly put a lot of work into maintaining his physique, but he also has very impressive control over his facial muscles in a way that, in combination with his unnatural dark hair, allows him to look eerie and not entirely trustworthy. When characters are aroused by him, either through psychic manipulation or basic human lust, the film communicates this through erotic, almost pornographic close ups of his bouncing pectoral muscles or undulating abs, but then intersplices this with off-putting close-ups that feature his creepy stare and libido-shriveling Gary-Oldman-in-Bram Stoker’s Dracula grooming. It’s very effective at being both arousing and off-putting, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a film that captures that line so well. Both Taylor Dudley and Gavaris are familiar to me as a viewer who soaked up a lot of 2010s Vancouver-based genre television; the former portrayed divisive character Alice in The Magicians and the latter was the universally beloved Felix on Orphan Black. I was delighted to see both of them in this film, and they not only have great chemistry with one another but are also putting in performances that are so distinct that, despite having spent dozens of hours with them as their familiar-to-me characters, I never found myself slipping into thinking about Alice or Felix at all. Joey’s grief is completely different from Alice’s, as is her expression thereof; Craig is easier to differentiate from Felix since he doesn’t share that character’s accent, but Craig also lacks Felix’s motivation, integrity, and unrelenting self-love. When it comes to Gavaris, his dedication to picking up the weights as he aged out of his Orphan Black era twinkiness was a cause of some concern for me; I started following him on social media some years ago when he led a short-lived comedy series called The Lake in which Julia Stiles played his conniving step-sister, and the way that he would post about his workouts and the way he felt about his body was troubling. One hopes that he’s come to terms with that since then, and that Craig’s body dysmorphia here is him taking some agency over Gavaris’s own, since Craig calls himself “fat” and “hideous” despite being neither. 

Of course, it’s also an equally valid interpretation that Craig doesn’t actually think that he’s either of those things, and that it is instead his way of fishing for compliments from Joey. It’s a sign of their co-dependency; we eventually learn that they were both victims of childhood sexual assault, but that Joey has kept this from Craig, which has allowed for him to weaponize his victimhood against her in a way that she feels she can’t counter without either being forced to relitigate her trauma or risk her living situation. It’s not ideal for either of them, and demonstrates how this betrayal during their vulnerable years has led them to dismiss those traumas flippantly, through dismissive humor, or through total suppression, and this makes them easy prey for Brian. It’s good stuff, and although the film draws attention to its artificiality through overt stylism, it doesn’t feel the need to broadcast that it’s tackling “elevated” horror themes. 

I’ve had mixed feelings about a lot of the horror that’s come out this year. I was personally underwhelmed by Obsession because of the familiarity of its narrative structure, but I was also quite taken with Leviticus despite the fact that it traffics in images and ideas that are not necessarily novel either, just viewed through a new lens. Touch Me is fresh, irreverent, exciting, and sexy, despite also owing major debts in its visual inspiration to Neon Demon, Ex Machina, and Mandy. It won’t be for everyone, but will be thoroughly enjoyed by those for whom it does work. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Disclosure Day (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I remember reading an interview with Steven Spielberg years ago in which he talked about how having children had changed his point of view as an artist. Specifically, he mentioned that Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film that sees its protagonist abandon his family to go with the aliens, would have had a different ending if he had been a father when he made it, as this was a choice he couldn’t conceive of having a character make after he himself became a parent. There’s a lot to unpack there about the way that a person’s real life can impact their art. Roland Barthes’s delineation of the concept of the death of the author has largely been the North Star of my critical approach, but it’s also an imperfect guide.  The man who made 2005’s War of the Worlds is not the same man who made Close Encounters; as an auteur, Spielberg had changed too much in three decades, and his stamp on both is very different as a result. Close Encounters would not be a better movie if Richard Dreyfuss stayed behind with Teri Garr at the end. With even such a minor change, it wouldn’t even be the same film. Unfortunately, Disclosure Day is a weak effort that shows that Uncle Steven may be getting a little too out of touch. 

While WWIII threatens to break out in the background of the film, two people find themselves inexplicably and inextricably drawn to one another: Kansas City meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) and cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). The former is a rootless tumbleweed, dragging boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell) from one metro market to another while trying to find her niche, citing that she’ll know where she’s supposed to be when she gets there. Kellner is a fugitive on the run from the sinister intelligence organization Wardex and its overseer Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) while receiving directions from Wardex defector Hugo (Colman Domingo) about how to stay ahead of Scanlon long enough to get the classified data that Kellner stole into his hands so they can reveal an earth-shattering truth to the masses. Kellner is accompanied by his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former novitiate whose past connection to the church helps them briefly find shelter in the convent where she was raised under Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel). 

Spielberg will turn eighty at the end of this year, and I think that’s vital to understanding this film and its intentions, and where those intentions fail or otherwise fall short in this text from one of our most respected living directors. The marketing for this film almost seemed to promise a return to form for the man: government agents in pursuit of something inexplicable but perhaps wondrous, as in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; the potential to find beautiful meaning in something beyond ourselves as in Close Encounters; the promise of something spectacular and never before seen as in Jurassic Park. And credit where credit is due: the man knows how to shoot some stunning images. There are several exquisitely choreographed car chases, a daredevil train stunt, and numerous impressive tracking shots that follow characters narrowly escaping apprehension. But those are all technical achievements, not emotional ones, and as such fail to be cinematic ones. This does not feel like the Spielberg classic that the advertising would have you believe that it is; this is Spielberg recursively making an Amblin-inspired JJ Abrams movie, right down to the unnecessarily complicated mystery box at the center. 

Screenwriter David Koepp has had some misfires over the years, but he’s also the man who wrote or co-wrote Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Presence, and Black Bag. This script attempts to tackle the concept of faith and belief and what effect the proof of aliens may have on either; it’s not only terribly misguided while simultaneously being overwrought and undercooked, it’s also facile to the point of ridicule. Here, the dialogue is stilted and unnatural, if not downright corny. Josh O’Connor is an actor I’ve come to like quite a lot, and it’s unclear if his delivery of every line of dialogue as if he’s not sure what the next word he’s going to say will be is a result of an acting choice, an attempt to breathe some life into this flat screenplay, or a directorial mandate, but it’s not doing no favors for Koepp, Spielberg, or O’Connor. Margaret Fairchild is woefully undercharacterized, so that in one scene she’s almost messianically beneficent, then swinging into a broad tantrum about not wanting to become a religious figure, then weeping uncontrollably. It gives Blunt the opportunity to play a range of audition reel-ready emotional states, but they don’t flow into one another with any kind of plausibility or humanity. Domingo and Firth are probably my favorite out of the bunch. Domingo brings a beautiful empathy to most of the characters he plays, and Hugo is no different; his dialogue is some of the corniest, but it feels the most true when delivered by him. Firth rarely gets to play such one-dimensional villains, so it’s nice to see him do something different for once and menace someone, even if it doesn’t add up to much in the grand scheme of it all. 

What really makes Disclosure Day old-headed is its belief in humanity. That’s probably a very cynical way of looking at things, but it’s also the most honest one. If you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading here. The “disclosure” of the title is the broadcasting of data that the U.S. government has, via proxy management of a private corporation, spent eight decades covered up evidence of extraterrestrial organic life, both in the form of corpses discovered in crashes and living beings kept imprisoned (and tortured) for years. This sudden revelation stops the entire world dead in its tracks, as every person with a cell phone or near a television watches with rapt attention as Kellner uploads classified video footage of the recovery of alien bodies, “interrogations” of living ETs, and so on. It’s implied that this is so universally life-changing that it brings mankind back from the brink of its final, extinction-level war. That’s a story that might have worked when Spielberg was a younger director, an optimism of an earlier age. All the protagonist has to do is get the truth out there, and the world will be saved! In 2026, it has the odor of neoliberal Boomerism—a West Wing-esque belief that we live in a world where the work of making societies as a whole empathetic again—is as simple and clean as making everyone watch videos of atrocities. Everyone already does that, every single day. It’s not helping! 

Most of the atrocities that Wardex have committed aren’t shown to us directly. We see the beginnings of videos, and then we watch the characters within the movie react to them with alarm, disgust, fear, and distress. We hear more than we see. But some of the images that the audience does get to witness are eerily familiar, especially as the aliens in most of the videos appear to be very small, like children. In the Roswell video that we see part of, we watch as government officials pick up their tiny, frail, broken bodies with shovels; they’re piled into body bags together en masse, evoking the imagery of mass graves. It’s distressing, yes, but it’s also virtually identical to the images of the broken bodies of children in Gaza, Darfur, and Uvalde, images that people see and then scroll past immediately, ignored background radiation of modern living. Large portions of the West have been brainwashed into not caring about these kids because they don’t have the same skin color as the observer, and the idea that showing childlike beings of a different planetary origin undergoing mistreatment would somehow bring everyone together is patently false. It’s only sweet, hopeful, and optimistic if you are completely out of touch with reality. I’m all for optimistic media, but when it’s this tone deaf, it comes off as irredeemably ignorant. 

This is a clumsy, clumsy movie. Technical proficiency does not in and of itself an excellent film make. Pair it with a flimsy, trite, facile look at religion, add in a purely Amerocentric view (what, has every UFO only ever landed in the U.S.?), and have actors of vastly different calibers deliver faux philosophical dialogue, and you’ve got the makings of a film that serves as a reminder that the cost of being the voice of a generation is that, if you allow yourself to be defined by your generation, eventually your art will stop having any real world relevance.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Project Hail Mary (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I thought I was too cynical to be charmed by the sci-fi adventure film Project Hail Mary, and with good reason. Just this week, I was looking at news reports about the progress of the real-life space adventures of Artemis II, which in its first few days produced photographic documentation of the dark side of the Moon while traveling further from Earth than any astronauts have previously gone, and my first thought was “Wow, what a waste of resources.” Why are we spending so much money on space travel and moon colonization research when those same funds could be used to immediately house, feed, and medicate people who are struggling on the planet we already inhabit? Basically, I had a full Gil Scott-Heron moment, too knee-jerk cynical to appreciate the wonders of “Whitey” orbiting the Moon. So, how could I hope to be charmed by the outer space adventurism of Project Hail Mary, which spends its entire 156min runtime forcibly cramming that same sense of wonder into its audience’s skulls? Well, it’s helpful that it’s a work fiction, one that can create immediate, dire stakes that make an exploratory mission into outer space immediately necessary to save human lives back on Earth. Even more helpfully, its heaping helping of Hollywood schmaltz is delivered via one of the most charming actors of our time, so that it doesn’t matter how cynical you are about the exorbitant expense of space travel; it just matters whether you personally find Ryan Gosling funny.

Gosling stars as an unassuming middle school science teacher who wakes up dazed & alone on a long-distance space mission, unsure how he became an astronaut. In a dual timeline structure, we learn the history of how he got there and the future of what he can achieve, both related to a mysterious substance that is threatening the continuation of life on Earth by dimming the Sun. In both timelines, he teams up with a hard-to-read scientific genius that he must learn how to communicate with in order to functionally collaborate: an Earthbound human played by Sandra Hüller and a fellow space-traveling alien creature played by a puppet, shaped like a collection of rocks. In both timelines, the plot is entirely constructed of problem-solving scientific experiments, breaking down the grand mission of returning home safely after saving the Sun into a series of simpler, less daunting puzzles. The scientific specifics of these sequential experiments seemingly don’t mean much to directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller, who find more inspiration in the source novel’s broader themes of the bravery that ordinary people can find in the grimmest of times, as long as they have a reason to hope & dream. If that sounds a little hokey, it’s because it is, and composer Daniel Pemberton frequently scores the film like he’s working on an allergy medicine commercial about a stuffed-up suburban mom who can finally enjoy life because she can breathe again. However, just because it’s hokey doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, which is something I should probably keep in mind the next time the world goes gaga over a rocket launch.

The space-exploration adventurism of Project Hail Mary is ultimately secondary to its person-to-person social interactions, charting Gosling’s transformation from an isolated misanthrope to humanity’s bravest soldier. He starts the film wary of people as an abstract idea, but he’s continually won over by his fellow scientists on a one-on-one basis, and it’s consistently charming to watch him warm up to the concept. He’s an overly chatty fella for someone who doesn’t like attention, and the movie essentially asks him to put on a one-man show against screen partners figuratively or literally made of stone. Gosling makes warmth & humor look effortless, getting so cozy in his oversized sweaters that his eyeglasses eventually hang entirely off his face as he pleads his case. Meanwhile, Sandra Hüller is expertly humorless, playing icy straight man to his charming schlub shenanigans. It’s a shame that the narrative’s dual timeline structure limits how much of their onscreen chemistry we get to see here; they’d kill in an Old Hollywood screwball throwback where their warm-and-icy dynamic clashed at feature length. Thankfully, though, Gosling also has a great rapport with the rock puppet, conveying a genuine enough sense of friendship that I was occasionally moved to tears by their mutual kindness (despite the fact that there’s technically only one actor onscreen during their scenes). In short, Ryan Gosling can charm anyone, no matter how tightly our arms are crossed at the start.

I should be clear that I don’t actually believe that exploratory space missions like Artemis II are a waste of public resources (at least not compared to even more egregious wastes on police & military weaponry). There are plenty of online articles around explaining how past space missions have led to scientific developments like solar power, water purification, prosthetic limbs, heart pumps, and various other technologies that benefit humans back on Earth. Even in Project Hail Mary‘s all-important mission to save our dying Sun, Gosling’s ship is equipped with smaller experiments in the background studying plant growth and other mundane processes. My initial animal-brain response to these far-reaching space missions just happens to be a cynical one, and then I have to be reminded why they matter in the bigger picture. Project Hail Mary‘s success is in the way it translates that bigger-picture space research through more intimate, humanist concerns. Ryan Gosling’s unremarkable schoolteacher protagonist is on a mission to save all of humanity, but all of the emotional beats in that story are narrowed down to how he interacts with the person immediately in front of him, whether they’re from Germany or from an alien planet. It’s practically a workplace comedy in that way, a sitcom where Gosling’s job is doing science and his favorite coworker is a talking pile of rocks.

-Brandon Ledet

Enter King Ghidorah

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster in movie history. I mean that in the literal sense, since the supreme kaiju being is seemingly armored by a layer of gold scales, making his “heavy metal” designation as matter-of-fact as Mechagodzilla‘s. Of course, I also mean it in the colloquial sense. The three-headed dragon beast is loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. When Ghidorah flies into the frame to take down Godzilla and his fellow skyscraper flunkies, the image conjures the crushing sounds of heavy-metal guitar riffs in audiences’ brains, even in the 1960s pictures that were produced well before Black Sabbath had a record deal. Ghidorah is so metal, in fact, that it takes at least three other Toho-brand monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head. 🤘

The first time I encountered King Ghidorah was in the 1968 kaiju crossover picture Destroy All Monsters, in which the space-alien bio weapon was unleashed to union-bust a gang of kaiju that included Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan (among the less-famous monsters Minilla, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, and Varan). Seen out of order in my winding journey through Criterion’s Godzilla box set, this appeared to be an especially grand ego-boost for the giant beast, like when WWE puts over their biggest, brawniest wrestler by having them eliminate every other competitor on the roster during the Royal Rumble. As it turns out, that was Ghidora’s exact funciton from the very beginning, and his debut entrance into the Toho kaiju ring marked the very first time Godzilla felt compelled to team up with other monsters to fight on humanity’s behalf. That Godzilla face-turn was in 1963’s Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, in which evil space aliens declare interplanetary warfare by launching Ghidorah at Planet Earth, threatening to take over. It’s then up to Mothra, in her squirming grub form, to convince Godzilla & the pterodactyl-like Rodan to stop throwing rocks at each other like schoolyard children and instead join forces to fight off this existential, heavy-metal threat. They’re both petty assholes about it, but they eventually relent and team up to repel the flying hell-beast before going their separate ways.

The reluctant tag team of Godzilla & Rodan reforms when King Ghidorah returns in 1965’s Invasion of the Astro-monster. Rebranded with his new wrestler gimmick as Monster Zero, Ghidorah is once again deployed as an interplanetary weapon of mass destruction, one that can only be disarmed by the collective power of multiple kaiju opponents. His inevitable 2-on-1 battle with Godzilla & Rodan is delayed until the climactic 15 minutes of the runtime, though, as the invading Xiliens from Planet X smartly abduct Godzilla & Rodan with UFO tractor beams and imprison them for as long as possible so Ghidorah can do maximum damage, unchecked. Without the large-scale monster battles to fill up the runtime, Invasion of the Astro-monster spins its wheels with lengthy indulgences in political espionage and The X From Outer Space-style extraterrestrial cocktail parties. It’s maybe not the most thrilling approach to making a monster movie, but it does lead to some gorgeous 60s-kitch imagery. It’s impossible to decide what the most striking image of the film is in retrospect, but I’ve narrowed it down to two options: literalizing the Cold War aspect of the Space Race by putting a gun in the flag-planting astronaut’s free hand or Godzilla being abducted by a UFO. Then, Ghidorah soars into the frame to battle Godzilla & Rodan once again, erasing such questions entirely with heavy-metal bursts of lightning.

If there’s one detail of Ghidorah’s design that makes his metal-as-fuck majesty immediately obvious, it’s that each of his individual dragon heads moves independently, which is especially impressive when combined with his suitmation power of flight. It’s a lot like watching Kermit the Frog ride a bicycle for the first time in The Muppet Movie, adding an entire new dimension to kaiju suitmation spectacle audiences previously did not dream was possible. The suit was reportedly exceedingly difficult to operate as a result, often leading to longer shooting schedules as his operators struggled to keep his long, golden necks from tangling like noodles. Like headbanging to thrash riffs, it was well worth the headache. Everything else that makes Ghidorah so thunderously badass is immediately, visually obvious. He is the essence of metal, skyborne and beautiful. Godzilla mastermind Ishirō Honda’s impulse to bulk up the monster’s reputation by making him undefeatable unless several other kaiju attack in unison was a smart one, but it was also necessary. Look at him. No one would buy into the kayfabe otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #223: Communion (1989) & Alien Abductions

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Welcome to Episode #223 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, and Brandon discuss a grab bag of movies about uncanny alien encounters, starting with the Christopher Walken alien abduction horror Communion (1989).

00:00 Welcome

01:43 Pulse (2001)
07:56 Alan Resnick
18:41 The Exorcist Steps
24:41 Carrie (1976)

29:36 Communion (1989)
51:19 Fire in the Sky (1993)
1:05:27 Xtro (1982)
1:21:47 The Arrival (1980)
1:38:02 Love & Saucers (2017)

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

Lagniappe Podcast: Starship Troopers (1997)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation of the Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi military novel Starship Troopers.

00:00 Welcome

06:15 Contact (1997)
13:15 Monkey Man (2024)
19:48 Detective Pikachu (2019)
30:19 Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)
33:27 Kinds of Kindness (2024)
48:30 Queer Futures (2023–2024)
55:54 Santo vs The Martian Invasion (1967)
1:02:23 The Movie Orgy (1968)

1:12:08 Starship Troopers (1997)

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

Santo vs The Martian Invasion (1967)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Most genre movie freaks may have moved on to shiny new boutique Blu-rays and moldy old VHS tapes, but I still collect most of my movies at the tried-and-true distribution hub of the thrift store DVD rack.  You don’t always find rare gems at the thrift store, but you often find movies cheaper than they cost to rent on streaming, with the added bonus of a Special Features menu that most streamers don’t bother to upload.  My recent pickup of the 1960s sci-fi lucha libre classic Santo vs. The Martian Invasion felt like a blessing by both metrics; it’s rare enough that it’s not currently available to stream at home with English subtitles, and the disc includes several Bonus Features, including full-length commentaries and a 30-minute interview with Santo’s heir, Son of Santo.  It felt like even more of a blessing when those subtitles turned out to be a variation of Comic Sans, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen outside of an ironic lyrics-only music video on YouTube. I don’t know that reporting on these details is useful to anyone who didn’t happen to be shopping at the Thrift City USA on the West Bank last weekend, but I still want to advertise that the dream is still alive in the thrift store DVD racks of New Orleans in general. I suppose I also want to report that the home distribution label Kit Parker Films is surprisingly generous with their bargain-bin DVDs’ bonus content, so look out for those discs in particular while you’re digging through the stacks.

Billed on its title card as Santo the Silver Mask vs The Invasion of the Martians, this specific bargain-bin discovery is a fairly typical Atomic Age sci-fi cheapie about an alien invasion of planet Earth; its hero just happens to be the masked luchador Santo, protector of “the weak and the defenseless.”  The alien-invasion plot is a little confused, with the Martians announcing their presence to the citizens of Mexico via multiple television broadcasts and having their evil deeds widely reported in local newspapers, then later being treated as a conspiratorial government secret hidden from the public.  Instead of getting that story straight, the movie intensely focuses on the physical abilities & vulnerabilities of the Martians.  Much attention is paid to the fact that they frequently take “oxygen pills” to be able to withstand Earth’s atmosphere, among other needless explanations of their uncanny ability to speak Spanish.  There’s also an intense fixation on their cube-shaped helmets’ Astral Eye, a glowing eyeball that allows them to either hypnotize or disintegrate nearby Earthlings, depending on the demands of the day.  They can also wrestle fairly well, which makes them the perfect opponent for Santo, the greatest & bravest wrestler who ever lived.  Santo repeatedly grapples with the blonde-wigged beefcake models from planet Mars, eternally flustered by their ability to teleport back to the safety of their spaceship every time the impromptu matches don’t go their way.  He eventually wins by stealing one of their teleportation devices to infiltrate and explode that ship himself, like a wrestler claiming a championship belt (literally; the device is belt-shaped).

The Martian Invasion loses a little steam once these intergalactic lucha libre matches return to a proper wrestling ring instead of being staged in exterior locations on the streets of Mexico, but most of its vintage sci-fi hijinks remain adorable & fun.  Instead of brooding in the bootleg Gothic atmosphere of horror pictures like Santo vs The Vampire Women or Santo and the Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, a lot of the runtime is filled with insane, rapid-fire dialogue about the peculiarities of the Martian species.  There’s also some fun 60s kitsch to the cheesecake Martian women in particular, who hypnotize & seduce the major players of Mexican patriarchy with the laziest futuristic go-go dancing you’ve ever seen.  Between that half-hearted eroticism and the absurd over-reliance on stock footage to pad out the budget, I was often reminded of some of my favorite Atomic Age sci-fi novelties: Nude on the Moon, Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Blood, The Astounding She-Monster, etc.  None of those comparison points feature extensive wrestling matches, though, which gives this an extra layer of novelty the same way the Santo horror films feel novel compared to their classic Universal Horror equivalents. 

Something I don’t have context for is how much of an anomaly The Martian Invasion is within the larger Santo canon.  It felt a little zippier & goofier than the couple horror films I’ve seen starring the masked luchador, which rely heavily on classic haunted-house mood & dread.  I don’t have enough evidence to say how typical that is to Santo’s filmography, though, because I’ve only seen three of what Wikipedia lists as “at least 54” titles in his catalog.  Given the pace at which I’m finding notable Santo movies on used discs or streaming, it’s likely I’ll never get the complete picture of his big-screen work before I run out of time and die. Honestly, I still can’t even pin down the exact list of titles that make up that catalog.  Wikipedia, IMDb, and Letterboxd all have conflicting lists of what count as an official Santo film, and the “Filmografia” Special Feature on my Martian Invasion disc only includes 52 of his “at least 54” titles.  To help illustrate the immensity & inconsistency of that catalog, I have transcribed the entire “Filmografia” feature of the Kit Parker DVD below.  It’s the kind of list that has made me accept that I will only see whichever films I happen to pick up at local thrift stores, completionism be damned.  May they all be as fun & loaded with bonus features as Santo vs The Martian Invasion.

Filmografia

1958

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL
aka El Cerebro del Mal
Santo vs The Evil Brain

SANTO CONTRA LOS HOMBRES INFERNALES
Santo vs The Infernal Men aka White Cargo

1961

SANTO CONTRA LOS ZOMBIES
Santo vs The Zombies
Released in the U.S. as Invasion of the Zombies

SANTO CONTRA EL RED DEL CRIMEN
Santo vs The King of Crime

SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE
Santo in The Hotel of Death

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DIABOLICO
Santo vs The Diabolical Brain

1962

SANTO CONTRA LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS
Santo vs The Vampire Women
Released in the U.S. as Samson vs The Vampire Women

1963

SANTO EN EL MUSEO DE CERA
Santo in The Wax Museum
Released in the U.S. as Samson in the Wax Museum

SANTO CONTRA EL ESTRANGULADOR
Santo vs The Strangler

SANTO CONTRA EL ESPECTRO DEL ESTRANGULADOR
Santo vs The Ghost of the Strangler

1964

SANTO EN ATACAN LAS BRUJAS
aka Santo En La Casa De Las Brujas
Santo in The Witches Attack

BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL PODER SATANICO
Blue Demon vs The Satanic Power
Cameo appearance

SANTO CONTRA EL HACHA DIABOLICA
Santo vs The Diabolical Ax

1965

SANTO EN LOS PROFANADORES DE TUMBAS
aka Los Traficantes De La Muerte
Santo in The Grave Robbers

SANTO EN EL BARON BRAKOLA
Santo in Baron Brakola

1966

SANTO CONTRA LA INVASION DE LOS MARCIANOS
Santo vs The Martian Invasion

SANTO CONTRA LOS VILLANOS DEL RING
Santo vs The Villains of The Ring

SANTO EN OPERACION 67
Santo in Operation 67

1967

SANTO EN EL TESORO DE MOCTEZUMA
Santo in The Treasure of Moctezuma

1968

SANTO EN EL TESORO DE DRACULA
Santo in Dracula’s Treasure
aka EL Vampiro y El Sexo

SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA
Santo vs Capulina

1969

SANTO CONTRA BLUE DEMON EN LA ATLANTIDA
Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS
Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON EN EL MUNDO DE LOS MUERTOS
Santo & Blue Demon in The World of the Dead

SANTO CONTRA LOS CAZADORES DE CABEZAS
Santo vs The Headhunters

SANTO FRENTE A LA MUERTE
Santo Faces Death
aka Santo vs The Mafia Killers

1970

SANTO CONTRA LOS JINETES DEL TERROR
Santo vs The Terror Riders
aka The Lepers and Sex

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS
Santo in The Revenge of the Vampire Women

SANTO CONTRA LA MAFIA DEL VICIO
Santo vs The Mafia of Vice
aka Mission Sabotage

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA MOMIA
Santo in The Revenge of the Mummy

LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO
The Mummies of Guanajuato
Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras

1971

SANTO CONTRA LA HIJA DE FRANKENSTEIN
Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter

SANTO CONTRA LOS ASESINOS DE OTROS MUNDOS
Santo vs The Killers from Other Worlds
aka Santo vs The Living Atom

SANTO Y EL AGUILA REAL
Santo and The Royal Eagle
aka Santo and The Tigress in The Royal Eagle

SANTO EN MISION SUICIDA
Santo in Suicide Mission

SANTO EN EL MISTERIO DE LA PERLA NEGRA
Santo in The Mystery of The Black Pearl
aka Santo in The Caribbean Connection
Released in Spain in 1971 and in Mexico in 1974

1972

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA DRACULA Y EL HOMBRE LOBO
Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & The Wolfman

SANTO CONTRA LOS SECUESTRADORES
Santo vs The Kidnappers

SANTO CONTRA LA MAGIA NEGRA
Santo vs Black Magic

SANTO & BLUE DEMON EN LAS BESTIAS DEL TERROR
Santo & Blue Demon in The Beasts of Terror

SANTO EN LAS LOBAS
Santo in The She-Wolves

SANTO EN ANONIMO MORTAL
Santo in Anonymous Death Threat

1973

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL DR. FRANKENSTEIN
Santo & Blue Demon vs Dr. Frankenstein

SANTO CONTRA EL DR. MURERTE
Santo vs Dr. Death
aka Santo Strikes Again

1974

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA LLORONA
Santo in The Revenge of The Crying Woman

1975

SANTO EN ORO NEGRO
aka La Noche De San Juan
Santo in Black Gold

1977

MISTERIO EN LAS BERMUDAS
Mystery in Bermuda
Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras

1979

SANTO EN LA FRONTERA DEL TERROR
Santo at the Border of Terror
aka Santo vs The White Shadow

1981

SANTO CONTRA EL ASESINO DE LA TELEVISION
Santo vs The Television Killer

CHANOC Y EL HIJO DEL SANTO VS LOS VAMPIROS ASESINOS
Chanoc & The Son of Santo vs The Killer Vampires
Cameo appearance

1982

SANTO EN EL PUNO DE LA MUERTE
Santo in The Fist of Death

SANTO EN LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS
Santo in The Fury of the Karate Experts

-Brandon Ledet

Fire in the Sky (1993)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

After checking out recent release No One Will Save You, my appetite for extraterrestrial abduction content was whet, and the streaming service formerly known as HBOMax was there with a cleanup hitter in the form of 1993’s Fire in the Sky. The movie is based upon a book written by an Arizona logger named Travis Walton that purports to recount his encounter with aliens in 1975. Walton’s is one of the more noteworthy cases in that his alleged abduction was witnessed by five other men who were with him when they all saw the same strange phenomena, the standard light/energy/noise “emanations” that are common for UFO witnesses. Walton himself remained missing despite a few search parties before reemerging from the wilderness some five days later — starved, dehydrated, and seemingly traumatized to near-catatonia. 

The film plays with committing to the reality of Walton’s claims from the outset and does so rather cleverly, as it opens with the other five men arriving at the local watering hole disheveled and rattled and talking amongst themselves about the importance of getting their stories straight and other pieces of dialogue that maintain ambiguity about their relative guilt/innocence. From there, an out-of-town lawman named Watters (James Garner) arrives at the scene to assist in what’s being treated as a missing persons case. The foreman of the crew, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), recounts the events of the day, up to and including his future brother-in-law Travis (D. B. Sweeney) getting out of the truck to investigate an inexplicable light show and being struck by something invisible. The other loggers in the truck insist on fleeing whatever is out there, but Mike eventually insists that they go back for Travis; when they return to the spot where he collapsed, there’s no sign of him. 

For most of Act II, the film plays out more like a small town drama about people’s lives collapsing under the collective weight of the presumption of guilt heaped upon them by their community, with some investigative procedural elements thrown in for good measure. Watters believes that Travis was killed by one of the other loggers, Dallis (Craig Sheffer), a “drifter” who didn’t get along with Travis, and that the rest of the crew were helping to cover it up. Desperate to prove his innocence, Mike commits himself and his crew to polygraph tests, all of which seem to indicate that the men are telling the truth with the possible exception of Dallis, whose test is inconclusive. Suddenly,Travis reappears, and from this point, the film no longer plays coy with whether or not the abduction story is true within the film. Even as Watters adjusts his hypothesis to include the men pulling a publicity stunt that wasted time and resources, Travis is tormented by the remembrance of the events of his abduction as they slowly resurface. 

This is one of those movies that got significant airplay on Sci-Fi Channel in my youth, although I had never actually seen it; the commercials advertising its upcoming airings always included the iconic image of Travis Walton cling-wrapped to an alien operating table, which frankly scared the shit out of me. It was one of those childhood terrors that remained tantalizingly unresolved until this first viewing, and as such I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Unfortunately, the opening credits spoil some of the ambiguity pretty early on, given that there’s a huge wall of text declaring that the film is “Based on the book The Walton Experience by Travis Walton,” dulling the impact of the question of whether Walton was murdered by his co-workers. Still, a lot of pathos is wrung out of the disappearance, and that’s something that you don’t normally see in this kind of media, so it was a pleasant surprise. If alien abductions are your personal horror preference, this one might not exactly live up to every expectation, given that there’s less of that in the finished product than what trailers and clips might imply, but what is present is harrowing and memorable. Give it a shot. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

No One Will Save You (2023)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Brynn Adams is alone. She doesn’t seem to be all that troubled by it, at least most of the time. She wiles away the hours in the sumptuous country home that she occupies by herself like a woman unstuck in time: she learns decades-old dance steps from numbered diagrams while listening to Ruby Murray’s “Knock On Any Door” from 1956; she designs and creates her own dresses; she’s even recreated the entire town of Mill River in miniature in her living room. When she ventures into the real town, she ducks to avoid certain people, and when she attempts to interact with others, all she gets in return are sneers and frigid shoulders. The closest thing she seems to have to human contact is a mailman who intentionally damages her packages. Brynn’s been alone for a long time, but she’s about to have … visitors. 

Kaitlyn Dever, who I really liked in last year’s Rosaline, both stars in and executive produces for No One Will Save You, the sophomore directorial effort from Brian Duffield, who is perhaps best known around these parts for writing The Babysitter. I first became aware of the movie after a screenshot of Stephen King calling the film “Brilliant, daring, involving, [and] scary” as well as “Truly unique,” and I went into it blind, which allowed for me to be pleasantly surprised not only by all of the film’s tiny reveals but also its big one; namely, No One is almost entirely dialogue free. Dever is the only performer who ever gets to speak, and it’s telling that her single impactful line is spoken to no one, or at least to no one who can hear her. That’s not to say that she’s not well developed; in fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this becomes one of those films that achieves cult status through its use as a teaching tool via its masterful adherence to the timeless axion of “Show, don’t tell.” Everything important about Brynn is captured by the filmic eye: the regretful letters she composes to her childhood best friend Maud, her awkward attempts to practice waving and greeting others, her abject terror at the prospect of interacting with a middle-aged couple we later learn are Maud’s parents. The story moves clearly and cleanly without the need for dialogue, as the film cuts seamlessly and smartly between Brynn encountering a situation and her resolution of the same. For instance, in one simple sequence, we watch as Brynn rides her bike into town for help after being unable to start her car, experiencing an extremely unpleasant but nonetheless wordless encounter with Maud’s mother and father (the latter of whom is the chief of police) that reminds her that—as the title tells us—no one will help her, and then immediately cuts to her at a bus station, ticket in hand. There’s no spoon-feeding and there’s no need for it, either. 

We eventually learn what happened between Brynn and Maud that left Brynn a pariah in Mill River, and it’s devastating. Outside of the flashbacks that fill this in, however, the film takes place over a brief time frame of only three days and two nights. The first of these nights sees Brynn (sort of) fend off a home invader, who just so happens to be an extraterrestrial. When she finds herself unable to gather assistance or successfully escape town the following day, she prepares to defend herself for a second night, only for the film to perform a little sleight of hand with its genre, transitioning from the home-invasion-with-an-outer-space-twist narrative to a more introspective form of psychological horror, as the aliens attempt to assimilate Brynn into a pod-people collective. Their means to do so involve tempting her to give up her mind and body through visions of a reality where she is no longer bound by the tragedy of her past and no longer missing the things which have been lost to her. When that doesn’t work, the snare she’s in just gets tighter. 

This movie lives and/or dies on Kaitlyn Dever’s performance, and it’s a testament to her ability that it soars. The camerawork here is likewise deft in the way that the language of pans and zooms keeps us in Brynn’s headspace so effectively; the touch is so lightweight as to make its capture of all the moving parts appear almost effortless. The visual effects work is also top notch; the aliens feel appropriately otherworldly even if the CGI seams are unavoidable, while the film wisely chooses clever takes on familiar ways of visualizing standard abduction phenomena, borrowing heavily from The X-Files and its use of blinding beams of white light (the abductions of Duane Barry in the second season and Max Fenig in season four come to mind), although it also includes occasional pervasive red lighting that calls to mind the opening of Fire in the Sky. The film moves in novel and exciting ways, and it’s well worth checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond