altered innocence

Queens of Drama (2025)

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I am a white, childless nerd rapidly nearing 40 years of age, so please take my trend-watching analysis of what’s cool & hip among the kids right now with a mountainous grain of salt. I do have the same 24/7 internet service and all-consuming social media addiction as every other doomed soul with the misfortune of living through these Uncertain Times, though, so I believe I am entitled to a little Youth Culture observation, however distanced. One clear theme so far this decade is that the fashions and pop iconography of the early 2000s are just as fetishized now as the 1980s were when I was a teen in those aughts. Everything crass & classless about the 2000s is now subject to ironic kitsch: middle-part hairdos, low-rise jeans, tramp stamps, belly rings, nu-metal, bejeweled & vajazzled everything. Since even I—an old man, a proverbial “Unc”—am aware of this current aughts-worship trend, I assume the moment is soon to pass, so I must act quickly in recommending a movie that fits the fad.

The new Altered Innocence release Queens of Drama is the perfect French musical for the supposed Y2K Indie Sleaze renaissance. It’s a knowing throwback to the vintage tastes of yore, drowning the audience in cathode-TV screens, compact disc rainbow sheen, and blinged-out nipple rings. The logline says it’s a sapphic romance between early-aughts pop & punk songstresses, so it makes sense the result of their union is pure electroclash. Imagine, if you will, a fanfic in which Kelly Clarkson and Peaches had a secret, decades-spanning love affair, and the only public record of its existence was a deep-dive YouTube video hosted by the “Leave Britney alone!” guy. Queens of Drama is Velvet Goldmine by way of Glitter, a self-aware attempt to give the pop culture runoff of the early aughts the epic rock-opera treatment that’s usually reserved for movements like punk, glam, and metal.

We start in the 2050s, with a squealing makeup-tutorial YouTuber getting the audience hyped to hear the lurid details of a secret love affair between their closeted pop-idol fav and her butch punk-scene girlfriend. The two women meet backstage during open auditions for an American Idol-style competition show called Starlets Factory. One is a formally trained singer whose mother has engineered her to be the next Maria Callas, while she’d personally much rather be the next Mariah Carey. The other is a self-proclaimed punk singer whose electroclash group Slit has built a small following in local lesbian bars singing outrageously filthy pop tunes about fisting & cunnilingus. Their attraction is mutual & ferocious, but the resulting love affair is quickly corrupted by their clashing levels of fame and their clashing comfort levels with their sexuality (as the pop singer stubbornly remains closeted to maximize the longevity of her career). Meanwhile, they discover another secret love affair conspiracy between their own favorite pop singers of the 1980s (think Madonna & Kate Bush) through breadcrumb trail hints left in vintage music videos, making their own story a part of a larger lesbian pop continuum.

At the risk of sounding like the twentysomething cinephiles who treat distributors like A24, Neon, and Criterion as if they were auteurs instead of corporations, Queens of Drama is perfectly in tune with the Altered Innocence brand. First-time filmmaker Alexis Langlois brings their own sensibilities to the screen here, especially in their fetishistic focus on the fashion iconography of the early aughts. At the same time, the film clearly belongs to the same queer fantasia realm as the work of Altered Innocence mainstays Yann Gonzalez & Bertrand Mandico. If nothing else, there’s a shot of the electroclash singer riding a miniature motorcycle that’s straight out of Gonzalez’s own debut You and the Night. As a result, the movie is much more easily recommendable to anyone who loves The Wild Boys & Knife+Heart than to anyone who loves Crossroads & Glitter, but surely there’s enough of a Venn Diagram overlap there for this title to find a dedicated cult audience. They just have to act quickly before the youth inevitably move on to indulging in 2010s kitsch instead.

-Brandon Ledet

Apocalypse After: Films by Bertrand Mandico (1998 – 2018)

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Only two feature films into his career, I’m already comfortable thinking of Bertrand Mandico as my favorite working director, even though only his debut was a total stunner.  Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released within my lifetime – a Bidgoodian wet nightmare about gender dysphoria and, ultimately, gender obliteration.  His follow-up, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is more of a flippant prank, using the same sensory intoxication & erotic menace for a much sillier purpose: worshipping the almighty Kate Bush in the rubble of our fallen civilization.  Although it’s seemingly shot in a muted black & white that sidesteps the cosmic blues & purples that make his other features so vivid & vibrant, I’m dying to see his third feature, Conann, which appears to be a gender-subverted riff on the pulp fantasy character Conan the Barbarian. It’s going to take a while for that latest dispatch from Mandico’s id to reach American screens (it just premiered at Cannes this summer), so I decided to placate my curiosity as best as I could by digging into his back catalog of short films.  Altered Innocence has consistently been Mandico’s home distributor since the company’s inception; it’s even arguable that Mandico’s films have been a brand-defining cornerstone for the Vinegar Syndrome partner label, along with the similar dreamlike genre throwbacks of Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalez.  Given that close affiliation, their publishing a collection of Mandico’s short films on a single Blu-ray disc, titled Apocalypse After, was a total no-brainer.  Given my own personal obsession with The Wild Boys, the only surprising thing is that I didn’t jump on this disc the second it was released last year.  I guess I needed to get worked up about a new feature from Mandico dangling just outside my reach to seek out his already-available shorts I hadn’t yet seen.  Well, that and if I immediately jumped on every new Altered Innocence release I wanted to see I’d struggle to pay my energy bill, and I wouldn’t be able to watch them anyway.

The titular short on this disc, “Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe)”, is a calling-card submersion in the subliminal perversions of cinema, consciously transforming “science fiction” into “science titillation” while shouting in frustration that the images still aren’t erotic enough for the director’s liking.  Longtime Mandico collaborator & muse Elina Löwensohn stars as the director’s avatar, an arthouse pornographer named Joy d’Amato (in cheeky reference to real-life pornographer Joe d’Amato).  Mandico’s films are full of sarcastic allusions to real-life artists he admires in this way: Kate Bush, Henry Darger, Jean Cocteau, Walerian Borowczyk, etc.  Curiously, he has yet to name-drop the three filmmakers he most reminds me of—Kenneth Anger, Guy Maddin, and James Bidgood—likely because their influence is already blatantly apparent in the text.  Joy d’Amato is more Bertrand Mandico than she is Joe d’Amato, though, shooting a live-action version of paperback sci-fi cover art with the same vintage porno sensibility you can find in all of Mandico’s recent work.  In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform.  Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art.  No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them.  Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough.  Nothing ever could be.

The “Apocalypse After” short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics – gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc.  The presentation of Mandico’s previous shorts on the Apocalypse After disc is strictly chronological, so you can watch the director arrive at that personal aesthetic over decades of obsessive tinkering.  Over three full hours of his two decades of short-form experiments, Mandico Heads get to watch the filth maestro develop his cosmic visual language in ten preceding works.  In that context, “After Apocalypse” is less of a jumbled collection of Mandico pet obsessions than it is a natural crescendo of a clear pattern in methodology.  His seemingly weird-for-weird’s sake indulgences become more recognizably thoughtful & designed in retrospect, the same way the “Magick Lantern Cycle” packaging of Kenneth Anger’s shorts makes “Lucifer Rising” feel like the most obvious place his art could lead him, not an out-of-nowhere novelty.  The Apocalypse After disc starts with Mandico imitating Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion nightmares in antiqued sepia tone, then seeking the same ancient artifice in short-form magical realist dramas.  He hits a breakthrough mid-career with the mid-length film “Boro in the Box”, which playfully reimagines filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s life in the style of Au Hazard Balthazar (a prototype for the more recent Balthazar riff EO).  By the time Mandico returns to stop-motion in his post-“Boro” short “Living Still Life” (this time animating taxidermized animals), his style is distinctly of his own.  As a result, all of the essential Mandico bangers arrive late on the disc, after he finds his distinct voice as a filmmaker: the Cronenbergian colonoscopy sideshow act “Prehistoric Cabaret,” the fairy tale creature feature “Our Lady of Hormones,” the unlikely Enys Men sister film “Depressive Cop” and, of course, the aforementioned self-portrait in heat “Apocalypse After.”

There are certainly other current filmmakers whose every feature I anticipate with the same gusto as Mandico’s, namely Peter Strickland and Amanda Kramer. None in that unholy trio of perverts gets the critical respect they deserve as playful subverters of the artform.  The academic interest critics used to have in similarly perverse, cerebral genre filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, and Jodorowsky has more recently shifted to formally muted & restrained works of slow cinema auteurs instead.  A lot of the leeway we used to give venerated genre freaks of the past hasn’t trickled down to the unvenerated genre freaks of today, at least not for anyone who hasn’t struck a distribution deal with A24.  Altered Innocence appears to be committed to the cause at least, offering a step-by-step study of Mandico’s work for anyone who cares to learn how he arrived at something as wildly baffling as The Wild Boys.  The only other comparable presentation of a current director’s shorts that I can name is the The Islands of Yann Gonzalez, which I will leave to your imagination what is covered and who handled the distro.

-Brandon Ledet

Casa Azul

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I have an ambivalent relationship with my gender identity, which I tend to label with “cis enough” and “cis-by-default” so I don’t have to think about it too hard in concrete terms.  Part of that ambivalence is in figuring out where a mostly-straight male crossdresser fits in the current gender studies zeitgeist, which is righteously (and rightfully) focused on ensuring that trans people have a right to exist in public.  Any personal irresolution I carry around as a man who’s both attracted to women and to wearing “women’s” clothing feels at best secondary to that political activism, especially in recent years when Conservative pundits have turned the basic daily existence of transgender people into an easy Culture War target for fascists & bullies.  My interest in trans narratives in cinema is two-fold, then: admiration for the societal transgression of decidedly rejecting your assigned gender identity and belief in the necessity to reinforce that trans and gender non-conforming people have always been part of the human social fabric.  There have been at least two great recent releases that speak to that dual interest, two documentaries on vintage trans life that allow their subjects to tell their own stories at length without editorial interruption.  And since this is the most I’ve ever overshared in a single paragraph on this blog, I will report that I recently watched them both in a comforting afternoon double feature while recovering from a vasectomy.

The most recent film in this pairing is the new documentary Casa Susanna, which was plucked from its festival run for television & streaming broadcast in PBS’s American Experience series.  The titular Casa Susanna was an American getaway camp for covert crossdressers in the 1950s & 60s, established as a Catskills meeting place for a larger attempt to build “a national sorority of crossdressers” who organized through backpages in the era’s fetish magazines.  Documenting a time when public crossdressing was against the law outside “female impersonator” nightclub performances to entertain the straights, Casa Susanna is a heartfelt tribute to the value of “safe space” havens in a rigidly moralistic world.  Two elder trans women who met at the getaway camp in their youth reunite at the historic site and trade stories with the daughter of an attendee who documented his own time there in a book titled A Year Among the Girls.  The director only intrudes on these oral histories through inclusion of archival footage that establishes the general mood of the era, from anonymous home videos of the scenery to news reels of Christine Jorgensen reluctantly announcing her historic, headline-grabbing sex change.  Mostly, the history of American transgender identity in the era is recounted by two women who lived it, whose full stories are told in long takes with no contextual chyrons or talking-head punditry.  They talk about how some crossdressers (including their younger selves) used the societal isolation & like-minded camaraderie of Casa Susanna as a trial run for full-time public trans identity, while others used it as a temporary break from “playing the game” of straight, cisgender life.  In the film’s most vivid sequences, they narrate a breathtaking slideshow of vintage glamour photos taken at Casa Susanna in its heyday, invaluable evidence of authentic American life that the American majority seeks to extinguish & forget.  It’s a small, intimate film that only covers the personal stories of the few remaining women who were still around to tell them, but it does so with immense care & warmth.

1983’s Vestida de Azul (Dressed in Blue) is a much more substantial, confrontational work.  Restored & re-released this year by MVP queer cinema distributor Altered Innocence, it’s a Spanish documentary about trans sex workers in the country’s post-Franco years.  Those women’s stories are likewise told directly by the subjects in question, but in this case they are supplemented by dramatic re-enactments of their most cinematic anecdotes.  The women meet at an artificially staged Sex and the City-style brunch to gab about the ups & downs of their collective lives as a social class, then are each allowed command of the narrative to invite audiences into their individual worlds.  There’s a consistent class consciousness to their self-advocacy, explaining that they only participate in sex work en masse because no other profession has made room for their public existence, and because they need to eat.  Lines like “Crimes are always committed by the poor” resonate just as sharply and vividly as the women’s stunning early-80s fashion, typified by black-lace lingerie worn directly under a fur coat.  Where Casa Susanna is gentle & warm, Dressed in Blue is aggressively candid, documenting estrogen injections, breast surgery, and sex-trade price negotiations with a confrontationally matter-of-fact candor.  The entire picture is thorny, sexy, and cool – instantly recognizable as a Paris is Burning-level cinematic landmark, except about the art of hooking instead of the art of voguing.   It’s essential viewing for anyone with affection for queer resilience stories or, more generally, for documentary filmmaking as an artform.  You can practically hear a young Pedro Almodóvar frantically scribbling details in his notebook in the background and, as much as I love his early work, there’s something invaluable about directly hearing these women’s stories without the filter of his well-represented perspective.

It’s occurred to me in writing this that I’ve committed the exact mistake I’m praising these two documentaries for avoiding: pointlessly imposing my own voice on these women’s stories.  The impact & importance of Casa Susanna & Vestida de Azul rely on their shared cultural value as oral histories.  The amount of time their subjects are allowed to talk without interruption is remarkable in both cases, even if the earlier film allows room for more traditionally, transcendently cinematic indulgences.  At the same time, their dual effect triggers an unavoidable moment of self-reflection in the audience – both in assessing our own personal relationships with gender and in political rage against the systems that make those relationships so needlessly strained & unnatural.  That’s what I was thinking about while icing my testicles with frozen peas last month, anyway, in an unrelated private struggle with my body.

-Brandon Ledet

Altered Docs

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My happy place is the Altered Innocence logo card.  When I close my eyes, I’m often transported to that James Bidgoodian terrarium, which is just as often tacked to the front of the best films on the modern media landscape.  Not everything the high-style, queer distributor releases can be as transcendent as all-star titles like The Wild Boys, Knife+Heart, Arrebato, and Equation to an Unknown, though.  Like all small-operation film labels, they’re also in the business of releasing minor, low-budget festival acquisitions that would otherwise drift into the great distribution abyss.  And if you’ve ever been to a film festival, you know that distro model is going to include a lot of documentaries – a medium that’s cheap to produce but difficult to market.  I’ve run across a couple Altered Innocence documentaries before on both ends of that distribution path: I caught their couture culture documentary House of Cardin at New Orleans French Film Fest before it was certain to land proper distro, and I sought out the personal coming-out essay film Madame because it already had the Altered Innocence stamp of approval.  I love Altered Innocence most for its proud, consistent platforming of arthouse weirdos Yann Gonzalez & Bertrand Mandico, but I also respect that their stated mission to release “LGBTQ & Coming-of-Age films with an artistic edge” extends to smaller, no-name directors whose work would otherwise screen once at venues like Outfest, then fade into oblivion.  In that spirit, I’d like to highlight two recent queer-culture documentaries distributed by Altered Innocence that might not have as flashy of a premise as phantasmagorical fiction titles like After Blue: Dirty Paradise (a sci-fi acid Western in which a lesbian orgy planet cowers in fear of a demonic assassin named Kate Bush) but still deserve wide attention & distribution anyway.

The more innocuous title of this pair is 2019’s Queer Japan, a densely packed, low-budget documentary about contemporary queer culture in—you guessed it—Japan.  I’m calling it innocuous because it’s relatively soft in its political advocacy, over-explaining basic concepts that are common to most queer subcultures regardless of region.  It argues that drag is art, bisexuality is real, and lesbian spaces are too often trans-exclusionary, all while scrolling through a never-ending glossary of basic terms in onscreen text & Instagram graphics.  It’s somewhat illuminating as an update to the semi-fictional, half-century-old street interviews in Funeral Parade of Roses but, overall, the film’s queer politics are largely understated & unspecific.  Thankfully, its region-specific details are much more prominent in the “artistic edge” Altered Innocence seeks to platform.  At its best, Queer Japan is an extensive catalog of beautiful queer visual artists, ranging from avant garde drag performers to gay manga illustrators to high-fashion latex & puppy play fetishists.  It also doubles as a tourist roadmap to popular queer nightclubs & pride events in its titular country, which I suppose might be of use to travelers using the doc as a quick crash-course primer.  There’s a wide enough range of vibrant pop art footage that it’s instantly clear why director Graham Kobeins decided they had enough raw material to justify a feature length documentary here; it must’ve been daunting to edit.  If anything, though, that overabundance of subject material is almost too wide of a scope for one documentary.   I would have been a lot more enthusiastic about it as a whole if it dropped its onscreen dictionary of political terms and instead focused entirely on profiling queer Japanese artists in particular, since that’s where its heart appeared to be.

By contrast, the 2017 punk scene documentary Queer Core: How to Punk a Revolution did pull off the trick of tackling both queer art & queer politics without overextending itself.  A talking-heads nostalgia trip into the queer zine culture of punk’s hardcore & riot grrrl eras, there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the film in terms of form, but its revolutionary content more than makes up for it.  It has plenty furious things to say about assimilation politics that continue to resonate beyond its vintage punk scene infighting & self-mythology, loudly decrying assimilation a “death trap”.  It also has a stylistic upper hand over Queer Japan in its archival footage’s vintage zine aesthetics, cobbling together a loose art scene between such disparate artists as Bruce LaBruce, Vaginal Davis, Team Dresch, Tribe 8, and Bikini Kill (citing earlier provocateurs like Quentin Crisp, John Waters, and William S. Burroughs as their queer elders).  Somehow, though, its political advocacy comes across as much sharper & more specific than its corollary in Queer Japan.  It throws punches at supposed counterculture movements like hippies & punks for continuing the retrograde sexual politics of their Right Wing enemies, pointing out “punk”‘s origins as an explicitly queer term and pushing back against the macho hardcore scene & AIDS paranoia of the Reagan Era.  As soon as Queer Core opens with a cumshot title card, its goal to make straight-boy punks uncomfortable is loud & clear, and all of its hagiographic interviews of queercore, homocore, and riot grrrl artists are filtered through that viscus lens.  Director Yony Leyser’s only real misstep is an early narration track that’s quickly dropped to instead let the subjects speak for themselves, since they’re all loudly, politically opinionated enough to carry the movie on their own.  The art cataloged in Queer Japan is on par with the art cataloged in Queer Core, but only one movie makes great use of the political meaning behind its creation.

You don’t have to be a physical media collector to access these titles.  Queer Japan is currently streaming for free (with a library membership) on Kanopy, and Queer Core is streaming for free (with ad breaks) on Tubi.  As strongly as I preferred Queer Core out of the two, they’re both worth your time if you have any interest in their respective subjects.  I’d even extend that to say that I’ve yet to see an Altered Innocence release that isn’t worth your time.  They’re the best distributor of “LGBTQ & Coming-of-Age films with an artistic edge” that I can name, give or take a Strand Releasing.

-Brandon Ledet

Madame (2021)

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It’s difficult to make a documentary about yourself without coming across as a narcissistic bore.  Every now and then, there’s an Agnès Varda level genius who can turn their personal travel journals into god-tier masterpieces like The Gleaners and I or a celebrity with long-buried familial skeletons in the closet to unearth for cathartic entertainment, as in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell.  For the most part, though, it’s difficult for an audience to match a filmmaker’s fascination with their own everyday lives & relationships.  The recent documentary/essay Madame somehow clears that hurdle with ease even without a flashy editing style or a grandly traumatic familial mystery to unearth.  It’s a quiet, intimate documentary about a gay filmmaker’s loving but distanced relationship with his own grandmother, nothing more.  And yet it has a lot of genuinely fascinating things to say that reach far beyond the expected navel-gazing of that subject.

Stéphane Riethauser structures Madame as a posthumous conversation with his deceased grandmother, mostly filling her in on all the things he didn’t get to say or convey in the years when they were most estranged.  Those were the years when Riethauser was a closeted homosexual (at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s & 90s, no less), afraid to come out to even his most loving family members in fear that they would reject him for being himself.  He starts by promising a frank discussion about gender, love, and sexuality from his own perspective, but the more he attempts to meet his grandmother on equal footing, he realizes that she was an iconoclast in her own time in a near-identical way.  Ostracized by her Catholic family for divorcing young and making her own way as a businesswoman decades before Riethauser was born, his grandmother was no stranger to the alienation of being Different in a world that values conservatism & conformity.  By recounting their respective, rigidly gendered upbringings, Madame sketches out a wide range of microscopic ways sexism & homophobia are reinforced in modern social structures, and how that can obstruct meaningful human connections – including the one between a loving grandmother & grandson with a shared defiant spirit. 

Even beyond its prodding at larger social & philosophical ills, Madame is also just a wonderful looking film.  Riethauser sequences tons of beautiful archival footage from his childhood into a gloomy diary-in-motion, with constant narration pointing out what’s rotting just under the surface of a seemingly happy family life.  That molded photo album aesthetic wouldn’t be enough to fully engage an audience outside his immediate family circle, though.  What really makes the film special is its exploration of homophobia as the “offspring” of sexism.  It directly links the ways he & his grandmother were suppressed by their conservative, religious upbringings, and how rigid gender expectations created entirely unnecessary boundaries between them even after they broke free of those social shackles.  It’s a long stare in the mirror in the way a lot of tedious, navel-gazing self-portraits can be, but it’s one of the few examples that transcends the expected limitations of that choice by making the personal universal.  We all suffer under social expectations of traditional gender performance, and we’re all worse off for it.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Equation to an Unknown (1980)

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the vintage, oddly melancholic French porno Equation to an Unknown (1980), which is cited as partial inspiration for the recent giallo throwback Knife+Heart (2019).

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

– Brandon Ledet & Mark “Boomer” Redmond

 

Rapture in Blue (2020)

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It would be easy to dismiss Rapture in Blue outright for the blunt cheapness of its production values. Directed by an 18-year-old film nerd who just discovered David Lynch, it looks & feels like countless other D.I.Y. shorts that help pad out film fest schedules (and film festival rejection piles). However, to ignore the film’s merits based on its amateur quality alone calls into question who, exactly, is permitted to make movies in the first place. If Ryder Houston was the teenage progeny of an established millionaire filmmaker—like, say, Sofia Coppola, Oz Perkins, Brandon Cronenberg, or Jennifer Lynch—he might have the means to create something of “professional quality.” Instead, Rapture in Blue was partially funded through ad revenue from Houston’s own YouTube Channel and filmed on borrowed equipment. It’s incredibly cool that a teenager in Texas was able to complete a professionally distributed movie (recently picked up by the provocative queer media label Altered Innocence) outside the usual Industry channels of funding & production. To dismiss it outright based on its production values alone would only reinforce the financial gatekeeping that ensures this outsider-filmmaking miracle doesn’t happen more often.

In a way, Rapture in Blue‘s budgetary restrictions almost make its Lynch-on-the-cheap indulgences more bizarrely surreal – the very same quality that made last year’s Knives and Skin such a memorable oddity. This is a medium-length supernatural horror about the anxieties & pressures of being closeted. A straight-passing teenager becomes increasingly frayed as his girlfriend pressures him into having sex for the first time. Meanwhile, he finds himself hopelessly drawn to the bedside of a mysterious stranger who’s moved into his childhood home. Like in the unlikely queer cult classic Freddy’s Revenge, every near-sexual encounter he has with his girlfriend is punctuated by the emergence of a grotesque demon, a physical manifestation of his anxieties about being closeted. Likewise, his genuine attraction to the teenage enigma who occupies his childhood bedroom inevitably comes to its own violent crescendo, one of his own cowardly making. There’s a nightmarish menace to the story that’s constantly on the verge of breaking away from reality to fully commit to a supernatural phantasmagoria. Whether because of budgetary restrictions or first-film timidity, that full-bonkers payoff never really arrives, but the film’s off-kilter mood lingers despite that disappointment.

The most obvious signifiers that this was directed by a teenager is the film’s nostalgia for cultural touchstones Ryder was not even alive for: classic Lynch, 80s goth soundtrack cues, early 2000s flip phones, Polaroid cameras, a strategically placed Watcher in the Woods poster, etc. The overall effect is a 90s film festival mood presented in 2010s digi, which works in its favor in terms of its old-school genre payoffs and maybe works against it in its commitment to a traditional straight vs. gay binary in its exploration of closeted sexuality. The movie can feel a little rough around the edges and frustratingly inert, but there’s also something really exciting about its D.I.Y. arthouse horror tone. If this were a professionally crewed Hollywood production starring Andrew Garfield & Caleb Landry Jones as its sexually conflicted leads, people would be creaming their jeans over The New Face of Horror. Since that’s not the case, let’s at least hope that it does its job as a calling card for Ryder’s developing talents, leading to better funded and more fully bonkers queer horror oddities in the near future.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #87 of The Swampflix Podcast: Knife+Heart (2019) & Fictional Porno

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Welcome to Episode #87 of The Swampflix Podcast. For our eighty-seventh episode, we discuss provocative cinema set in the seedy underworld of the porno industry. Brandon makes James watch the queer giallo throwback Knife+Heart (2019) for the first time, then they discuss two more fictional films about the production of pornography: Hardcore (1979) & The Misandrists (2018). Enjoy, ya buncha pervs!

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

-Brandon Ledet & James Cohn