black comedy

The Drama (2026)

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In Kristoffer Borgli’s international breakout Sick of Myself, a woman becomes jealous of her boyfriend’s sudden art-world fame, so she fakes a disfiguring medical condition to one-up the attention he’s been getting online. In the funniest scene, she worries that her CT scan results at the hospital will expose this fraud, imagining an official medical diagnosis that she is “a liar” with “a bad personality,” which is legally punishable by death. Borgli’s first American film, Dream Scenario, follows the foibles of a schlubby college professor who becomes a living meme when he inexplicably starts appearing in people’s dreams across the world, a phenomenon that quickly sours once the novelty wears off and everyone’s sick of seeing his uninvited face. Borgli’s latest, The Drama, smartly continues the understated fantasy-sequence playfulness of those two previous pictures, often illustrating its characters’ intrusive thoughts as they occur in real time, then doubling back to show those characters as they actually are: unremarkable in their social anguish. Like Borgli’s previous films, The Drama also presents an absurd scenario that can easily be read as a moving think-piece on the nature of “cancel culture” but somehow never fully tips into reactionary apologia. His flippant engagement with hot-button topics in The Cancel Culture Era teeters dangerously close to a kind of online edgelord conservatism but, so far, he’s always landed somewhere on the safe side of good taste. His interest appears to be in exploring the ways that our internal thoughts—however momentary—might betray our external politics, and he finds an endless wealth of humor in that tension.

The Drama starts with a young couple’s fairy-tale love story, sprinting through the full romcom meet-cute, first-date, romantic-proposal cycle in rapid montage. Borgli very quickly maps out what a crowd-pleaser romance between stars Robert Pattinson & Zendaya might look like (if Hollywood was still interested in producing such a thing) before he announces the stakes of his latest prank. Days before the couple’s wedding, they engage in a dinner-party game where everyone at the table confesses the worst thing they’ve ever done. It’s an uneasy but revelatory ritual that pushes through some of the awkward shame of the “getting to know you” phase in a young romance, until Zendaya’s character gets her turn. Her confession crosses an invisible social boundary that she doesn’t realize exists until it’s too late, and everyone else present is so shocked that it threatens to derail the wedding they’re supposed to be celebrating. Notably, what she confesses is technically a thought crime, an ugly impulse that she did not ultimately act on but very seriously considered. It’s also something I won’t dare to spoil in this review, since it is the bait on the film’s proverbial hook, something that is meant to be discovered and digested in real time with the bride-to-be’s immediate social circle. All I can say, really, is that this first-act reveal positions The Drama as a throwback to a kind of classic water cooler romcom, however bleak, with certified movie stars on their worst behavior. You’re supposed to ask yourself how you would react to it while you watch Robert Pattinson go through the same hypothetical turmoil, and you’re supposed to find your own sense of morality lacking in the process.

There’s plenty of ammunition here for the offended to dismiss Borgli as a shock-value provocateur, but I don’t think that’s the case. Once it gets past the initial shock of its first-act confession, The Drama finds some genuinely productive provocation in asking how much modern outrage is personal, as opposed to communal. This is not a typical “How much can you truly know a person?” thought exercise. It instead asks whether modern moral outrage is driven less by the thought, “Am I okay with this?” than it is by the thought, “What would other people think of me if I were okay with this?” Very little of the central conflict is mediated through phone & computer screens like in Borgli’s previous pictures, but it still feels like it’s depicting a moral crisis specific to a post-social media world. Pattinson’s protagonist is not allowed time to internally process what he’s learned about his fiancée’s past; he’s pressured to immediately take a moral stance on it as a kind of performative social spectacle, causing great anxiety as he attempts to keep his shit together for the ultimate social spectacle: an expensive wedding. The pressure of publicly responding to this moral crisis makes for great comedic tension as the wedding deadline approaches, and it inspires anxious daydreams & nightmares that recall the low-level surrealism of Borgli’s previous works. It’s neither his meanest nor his most expressive film to date, but it does manage to throttle its audience with various social & moral crises while most of its imagery ultimately amounts to People Talking in Rooms — an increasingly rare feat at the American cineplex.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Sister Midnight (2025)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the deadpan arranged-marriage horror comedy Sister Midnight (2025).

00:00 New Orleans Bookfair
02:40 Star Trek
06:06 Went the Day Well? (1942)
09:00 Black Angel (1946)
11:04 Angel’s Egg (1985)
15:00 Universal Language (2025)
23:00 Wicked: For Good (2025)
29:45 Friendship (2025)
34:11 The Running Man (2025)
40:30 Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)
46:06 Die My Love (2025)
50:35 Wake Up Dead Man (2025)
58:17 No Other Choice (2025)
1:08:22 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025)
1:10:51 Keeper (2025)
1:15:27 Sentimental Value (2025)
1:19:10 Alpha (2025)
1:24:46 Dracula (2025)
1:28:20 Arco (2025)
1:32:07 Lurker (2025)
1:38:48 If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

1:44:22 Sister Midnight (2025)

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

Throw Momma from the Train (1988)

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I recently started a rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager (ding!), prompted because the person I’m dating expressed that this series was the most of interest because of their love of Kate Mulgrew, based solely on her performance in Orange is the New Black. We also recently watched Throw Momma from the Train, not because Kate Mulgrew was in it, but because it was on both of our lists, and it was a happy coincidence. 

Danny DeVito writes, directs, and co-stars in this late-80s comedy riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which appears in the film directly as the movie that DeVito’s character, Owen, sees at the behest of his beleaguered creative writing teacher. Said instructor is Larry, played by Billy Crystal, a man whose ex-wife Margaret (Mulgrew) stole the novel he wrote while they were together and is now seeing great success from it — interviews with Oprah, diamond earrings, a palatial Hawaiian estate, etc. Larry’s intense jealousy clouds his mind, and he’s stuck teaching a class of not-very-imaginative adult students who are trying to learn to write. Even among the students, Owen stands out as particularly unimaginative, although his daydreams about killing his overbearing, needy mother (Anne Ramsey) are colorful. When Owen starts to stalk Larry in order to get better insight into the creative process, he learns about Larry’s disastrous divorce and, when Larry suggests he go see a Hitchcock film to better understand how mysteries should be structured, Strangers on a Train just happens to be playing at the local cinema, he happens upon the idea of swapping murders. Misunderstanding Larry’s recommendations, he opts to fly straight to Hawaii and, seizing his opportunity, pushes Margaret overboard on a ferry while she dangles over the side to try and retrieve one of her earrings. Returning home, he now insists that Larry “fulfill” his end of their “bargain” and kill the titular momma, all while Larry tries to avoid being arrested for Margaret’s apparent murder. 

Throw Momma from the Train is a perfect little comedy, so tightly structured and so novel that it’s hard to imagine it being made today. Larry’s would-be relationship with colleague Beth (Kim Griest), who loves trains, allows for a lot of train imagery to be scattered throughout as foreshadowing of the film’s allusions as well as its finale. Ramsey is as perfectly loathsome here as she was just a couple of years prior in The Goonies, with her occasional moments of kindness implying a dementia that has rendered her this awful. Crystal is playing the same character that he always does, but when that character makes you the leading man for romcoms of an entire era, why deviate from the norm? Mulgrew’s character’s role in the story necessitates that she disappear fairly early in the runtime, but she makes a great meal out of her scenes, and it’s always fun to see her cut loose a little. It’s DeVito who’s absolutely wonderful here, playing Owen as someone so simple he’s utterly incapable of malice but is nonetheless too dim to be manipulated, at least intentionally. As an actor, his career has largely been made up of playing scoundrels and shitheels, and even though he is the antagonist of his film, you can never hate him. 

The film also gets a lot of mileage out of Larry’s class of wannabe writers. One of them is in the process of crafting a coffee table book entitled One Hundred Women I’d Like to Pork, which gets a nice payoff when we see the publication at Larry’s house in the film’s ending. My absolute favorite, however, has to be Mrs. Hazeltine, whose concluding paragraph to her story is, in its entirety: “‘Dive! Dive!’ yelled the Captain through the thing! So the man who makes it dive pressed a button, or a something, and it dove. And, the enemy was foiled again. ‘Looks like we foiled them again,’ said Dave. ‘Yeah,’ said the Captain. ‘We foiled those bastards again. Didn’t we, Dave.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Dave. The End.” If you’ve ever taken a short story class, it’s frighteningly familiar. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Twinless (2025)

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In Jay Neugeboren’s An Orphan’s Tale, the author writes “A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.” The line has been paraphrased in everything from Six Feet Under to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but Twinless takes it in a slightly different direction, when Lisa (Lauren Graham), the mother of twins Roman and Rocky (Dylan O’Brien in a dual role) comforts Dennis (James Sweeney) over the loss of his twin brother Dean, saying that outliving the person with whom one shared a womb may actually be worse. Unfortunately, it’s her living son Roman, who met Dennis in a talk therapy group focused on the survivors of a twin sibling’s death, who really needs to hear this, but the rift in their relationship is far too late at that point. 

That’s not the focus of this story, but it’s an important element of the way in which blanket grief can be misdirected and mangled. Twinless is a dark comedy vehicle for Sweeney, who directed and wrote the film in addition to performing in it. Of the two primary characters, we meet Roman first, as he prepares for the funeral for his deceased twin Rocky, who was recently killed in a car accident. As attendees of the funeral attempt to offer their condolences, their grief overwhelms them, as they each seem to have the same experience of looking at Roman and “seeing [Rocky’s] ghost.” At his mother’s urging, while she returns home to Moscow, Idaho (population 27000), he remains in the city for a time to attend the aforementioned surviving twin counseling group. It’s here that he meets Dennis, who tells him about his deceased twin Dean, and they get off to a good start despite Roman’s initial moderately homophobic question about whether Dennis gets carsick, as he always wondered if the deceased Rocky’s need to sit in the front seat to avoid motion sickness might have been on the same gene that made Rocky gay while Roman was straight. 

The two men grow closer as Dennis helps Roman navigate his grief, offering himself up to serve as Rocky’s proxy so that Roman can say all the things that he never got to say. It’s a powerful scene that shows that Yahoo! Movies was right to predict that O’Brien would be a breakout star all the way back in 2014; O’Brien acts the hell out of it, and it’s a showstopper. Up to this point, we’ve seen a Roman who is emotionally static. He lives in his mother’s basement back in Idaho, and when he decides to stay on in Portland in Rocky’s old apartment, it’s clear that he doesn’t understand the “rules” of social engagement in a densely populated urban environment. Although it’s clear to the audience that Dennis has a crush on him, Roman remains blissfully unaware, and it’s his rural guilelessness that makes him endearing even as he accidentally does some things that might lead Dennis on, like admit that he’s been using Rocky’s gym membership and allowed himself to be hit on by a guy there. But once Dennis gives Roman the space to unload and the other man breaks down into a refrain of “I don’t know what I am without you,” it’s clear that there’s a lot more going on inside Roman than he’s allowed to be seen by others. His brutal beating of a trio of mouthy teens who calls the men “faggots” after a hockey game also shows that there’s a storm brewing inside of him, the kind that comes from suppressing emotions and keeping them hidden away. 

For the first act of this film, our hearts go out to Dennis and Roman, for both for their shared grief in losing a twin, and to Dennis in particular as we see him develop a hopeless love for and devotion to a man that we know he is incompatible with, orientation-wise. Regardless of orientation, we’ve all had that unrequited pining for someone that can’t be with us for one reason or another, where we allow ourselves to be beaten by the waves against the rocks of emotionally hurtful rejection because that’s the price of swimming in the presence of the object of affection. I’m not saying it’s healthy, but it happens, and if you’ve never experienced that, I’m both sorry for and envious of you. The first sign that Dennis may not be all that he seems to be is when he and Roman go out one night and Dennis compliments Roman’s shirt, asking “Was it Rocky’s?” in a way that implies he already knows the answer to the question. Did Dennis know Rocky? 

I saw this the same weekend that I saw Lurker, and I didn’t expect that both of the new releases I would catch in theaters within a few days of one another would be flicks about creepy little gay stalkers who go Way Too Far but for whom we ultimately have some amount of sympathy. That this would be the core of Lurker was clear from its marketing, and I suppose that it might have been present in the trailer for Twinless, but I was able to go into this film completely blind, not having seen any advertising other than a leaked sex scene six months ago (if you haven’t seen it, don’t — it’s a total spoiler). If Sweeney hadn’t been the architect behind Twinless in its entirety, I’d be a little concerned that the sudden density of movies with obsessive gay men as an antagonizing (if not villainous) force might be another potential red flag on the descent-into-fascism meter (I don’t know anything about Alex Russell, who both wrote and directed Lurker, other than that he toned down Matt’s maliciousness in the transition from page to screen). As it stands, while that one was a softer version of an obsessive fan thriller, this is more of an examination of a 90s style romcom plot—Sandra Bullock falls in love with Bill Pullman while his brother is comatose in While You Were Sleeping under the guise of being said brother’s fiancee, Rikki Lake being taken in as a presumed widow in Mrs. Winterbourne and starting a romance with Brendan Fraser, etc.—wherein the premise rests upon a simple accidental misunderstanding that then becomes almost impossible to extricate oneself from, with a happy ending. Dennis’s actions are all entirely intentional, and although they’re not malicious, they are harmfully self-absorbed, and although this has precedent in something like Overboard, Mrs. Doubtfire, or even Never Been Kissed, it’s nonetheless a more realistic portrayal of how the people affected by the deception would react. It’s not as subversive as the TV series You, which went much darker in the presentation of how an obsessive romantic could behave, but there’s not really a happy ending here. That’s not what I go to the movies for, though; heartbreak really does feel good in a place like the theater. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Idiots (1998)

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It is with great disgust and disappointment I must observe that “the R-word” has somehow slid back into the American lexicon. Yes, basic human decency has died another casual death in the public discourse, as a term recently considered to be a cruel slur against mentally disabled people has once again become something young C.H.U.D.s playfully throw around as a jocular insult among friends. It’s an unfathomable moral backsliding for someone in my age range, who remembers that particular slur being an unspeakable taboo way back in the 1990s, when “wokeism” (i.e., empathy) was still called “P.C. Culture.” Mocking mentally disabled people for hack schoolyard-bully comedy was such a taboo, in fact, that tireless provocateur Lars von Trier built an entire feature film about the social discomfort of the act. His 1998 feature The Idiots is an abrasive black comedy about a small clique of wealthy suburbanite edgelords who squat in an empty Copenhagen estate, pretending to be mentally disabled as a grand social experiment. In private, the experiment is purported to be a way to access the supposedly sublime aloofness of someone with limited mental functions, freeing members of the idiot cult from the petty bourgeois concerns of modern living. In public, it allows them to prankishly disrupt the daily lives of other bourgeois squares without fear of repercussion, since they are posing as innocent psychiatric patients on field trip excursions. Like with most of von Trier’s provocations, the exercise mostly proves to be bleakly nihilistic, acting as a precursor to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers that’s more philosophical about its trash and more pornographically literal about its humping.

Before von Trier has time to dig into the philosophical peculiarities of this idiot prankster cult, the audience has to adjust to the crass commercial quality of his camcorder footage. The Idiots was produced as a contribution to the Dogme 95 experiment that von Trier cooked up with Thomas Vinterberg, an exercise in formal restraint that was meant to strip cinema down to its barest essentials. The rules laid out in the Dogme 95 Manifesto included stipulations that the camera must be handheld, that all shooting must be done on-location with no outside props or special effects, and that all included music must be incidental & diegetic. As a result, The Idiots plays more like a backyard movie than the work of a festival-circuit auteur, especially since the manifesto also stipulated that Dogme 95 films must not credit their directors. Von Trier makes no effort to crop out any boom mics or camera operators that wander into the frame. He frequently interrupts the narrative flow of his story with documentary interviews with the fictional cult members, reflecting on their time as “idiots” in a reality-TV confessional format. The Idiots recently played at The Broad as part of the weekly repertory Gap Tooth series, and I could practically count the individual grains on the screen; its image quality was just as aggressively off-putting as its characters’ behavior, which I suppose I mean as a compliment. I could also count the individual laughs in that room, since every response to every provocation felt like personal litmus test for basic decency. Von Trier finds great comedic timing in his editing that got some big laughs out of me, especially when cutting to outsiders’ responses to the idiot cult’s behavior. Sometimes, though, when members of my own audience laughed at that exact same behavior, I found myself getting offended by their response. I suppose that’s a good sign that the movie is genuinely provocative instead of merely gesturing at provocation.

If there’s anything von Trier is doing here that’s worthy of respect, it’s in his thoroughness. He examines the cult’s meditative search for their “inner idiot” from every possible angle, at first gleefully indulging in the social chaos of their field-trip pranks around Copenhagen, then digging into the selfish & therapeutic motivations individual members had for joining in the first place. When the idiots stage a food fight, it’s initially played as an Exterminating Angel-style breakdown of bourgeois social norms until all that’s left is primal animal response. Then, members snap out of it mid-fight to realize how disgusting it is to be smearing themselves with expensive caviar while elsewhere homeless people are starving to death. When the idiots have sex, it’s initially played as orgiastic hedonism with the same pointless for-its-own-sake chaos of the food fight. Then, a pair of true lovers break off to show how tender & heartfelt blank-minded, present-in-the-moment sex can be. These upheavals of the group dynamic occur most often when their conclave is outnumbered by outsiders. Whenever they are confronted with scrutiny from family members, coworkers, bikers and, most uncomfortable of all, real-life people with Down syndrome, the bit suddenly isn’t funny anymore, and their inner cowards quickly overtake their inner idiots. Von Trier constantly goads the audience into getting upset by the movie’s basic premise, which could very easily play as the cinematic equivalent of throwing around “the R-word” as a goof. In practice, however, The Idiots proves to be much more introspective & socially critical than what is initially conveyed. You wouldn’t know that if you had encountered the film’s advertising during its original theatrical run in the Anti-PC days of the late 1990s, though, since the trailers sell it as a prankish boner comedy along the lines of a Jackass movie or an American Pie — an act of false advertising so egregious it almost feels criminally liable.

-Brandon Ledet

Vulcanizadora (2025)

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Are there still Godsmack fans in 2025? What kind of weirdo buries porno mags in the woods? Is it important to enjoy the company of the other person in your suicide pact? There’s lots to ponder in the latest feel-bad slacker comedy from director Joel Potrykus. Continuing his career-long collaboration with actor Joshua Burge, Vulcanizadora is yet another aimless indulgence in stasis & rot along the same lines as their previous breakouts Buzzard & Relaxer. The deep well of sadness beneath that surface layer of rot has never been as complexly layered, though, and Potrykus is almost starting to give off the impression that he actually cares about what he’s saying with his proudly low-effort art. The message he’s communicating has not evolved beyond “Life sucks shit, dude,” but there’s no reason that it has to. It’s worth repeating, because it’s true.

The real evolution in Potrykus & Burge’s collaboration here is that it has moved from behind the camera to the screen. The actor-director duo star in Vulcanizadora as two nu-metal wastoids on a camping trip in the Michigan woods, seemingly working towards opposite purposes. For his part, Potrykus’s Derek is hell-bent on making lifelong bro-trip memories with his camcorder & a small arsenal of fireworks, filming an amateur video he models after Faces of Death (but registers more as a 12-year-old’s backyard homage to Jackass). Meanwhile, Burge’s Marty has brought along some homemade fireworks of his own, and he is visibly annoyed by every one of Derek’s stunts that delays their ultimate purpose: exploding the two dirtbags’ skulls in a beachside double suicide. As with all of their work together, however, it’s ultimately a trip to nowhere, and the second half of the film drops all plot momentum to instead sit in the personal & familial disappointments that inspired the suicide pact in the first place. The laughs gradually fade, and all that’s left is the depression, isolation, and impotent aggression.

If Potrykus’s darkly comic portrayals of leftover late-90s metalhead machismo have dulled over the years, it’s because he now has more competition in similar comedic voices like Tim Robinson, Conner O’Malley, and Kyle Mooney. Still, there’s an attention to detail here in the collected paraphernalia of the archetype that feels freshly observed: gas station snack piles, vintage porno mags, broken glow sticks, ditch weed, Audioslave karaoke, etc. Like the Freddy Krueger Power Glove prop in Buzzard, he also creates a uniquely upsetting object of his own design here: a piece of BDSM head gear designed to house the suicide-mission explosives in the wearers’ mouths. He also finds some novelty in airing his metalhead slacker routine out in the sunshine, leaving the Relaxer couch behind for a stroll in the woods. His creative dynamic with Burge otherwise hasn’t changed much, and that personal stasis is somewhat the point. Their pointlessly destructive pranks are even less becoming now that they’re the age when fatherhood & male pattern baldness have made their adult responsibilities more immediately apparent. Now their corrosive aimlessness has actual consequences, each remarkably bleak.

– Brandon Ledet 

Good Boy (2023)

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Scandinavian cinema has a distinctly fucked up sense of humor to it, so it’s not surprising that two of the year’s best black comedies have been released out of Norway.  Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature Sick of Myself (in which an art-world narcissist medically self-harms for media attention) is the higher profile of the two, already landing the director a buzzy follow-up starring Nic Cage (in Dream Scenario).  By contrast, the darkly comic Tinder thriller Good Boy is a much smaller, limited production – restricted to just four characters shooting in four sparse locales.  Despite earning a few key critical accolades on the festival circuit (including a coveted spot-on John Waters’s Best Films of the Year list), Sick of Myself is hardly an MCU-scale cultural behemoth worth rooting against in favor of its underfunded underdog.  Still, running only 75 minutes and released to zero fanfare, Good Boy is a fucked up little Norwegian romance drama worth championing for its minor, muted victories, at least so director Viljar Bøe might be able to torture audiences on a much bigger scale in his next production.  There’s plenty of dark Norwegian humor to go around.

Good Boy might not have a professional-level budget, but it does have a killer hook.  It’s a story of unethical puppy play, pulling some uneasy laughs and genuine chills out of the basic discomfort of stumbling into someone else’s elaborate kink scene without context or warning.  After scoring a successful Tinder date with a legitimate millionaire, an unsuspecting Psychology student is introduced to her new beau’s unconventional pet: a human man who spends 24/7 in a dog costume.  Any cautious probing about the weirdness of keeping a human being as a house pet is outright dismissed by the Norwegian Psycho; he responds to reasonable questions like “What’s his deal?” with “He’s a dog.”  Of course, because this is a movie, it turns out the dog’s deal is much sicker than that, and his loving captivity within the millionaire’s household turns out to be less voluntary & consensual than initially let on.  Much less.  The story gradually devolves into full-on torture porn from there, but much in the way that the equivalent American dating-app thriller Fresh did last year: maintaining a wicked sense of humor throughout.  It’s all one big joke about dating a total control freak; he just happens to be a very specific kind of freak.

For all of its kink-scene iconography, Good Boy is less about the degenerate amorality of real-life puppy players than it is about the violent amorality of stubbornly Conservative thinkers, recalling the sickly domesticity of recent titles like Swallow & Hatching.  It dodges a lot of the kink-shaming implications of its premise by doubling down on something we can all agree on: the ultra-wealthy are the world’s true degenerate freaks.  It undeniably banks on the viewer’s kneejerk discomfort with other people’s private kink play scenarios, though, drawing just as much terror out of the human-dog’s elaborate furry costuming (his mask has a hinged jaw!) as it does out of the violence that keeps him living the fantasy.  Speaking personally, the movie didn’t change the way I think about narcissist millionaires, trad homesteaders, or proudly kinky puppy players.  However, it did change how I interacted with my dog for the next couple days, causing me to pause while feeding her, pilling her, and getting her ready for bed to consider just how strange of a relationship we have on either side of the pet-owner divide.  It may not be an especially deep movie, thematically, but it still made something familiar & routine feel totally alien & horrific in its immediate afterglow, which is all I can really ask for out of a prankish, low-budget horror movie.

-Brandon Ledet

Bottoms (2023)

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It’s a disconcertingly popular pastime among Millennial & Gen-X film nerds to ponder “What’s the next Heathers?” every time the discourse turns its evil eye towards the high school comedy genre.  Maybe it’s because we’re old enough to remember a time when Heathers had legitimate pretenders to the throne: that bitchy late-90s malaise that birthed such vicious teen girl high school comedies as Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, and Sugar & Spice.  Maybe it’s because we’re too old to take full delight in those films’ recent, toned-down equivalents in titles like The Edge of Seventeen, Do Revenge, The DUFF, and Spontaneous.  If any films have earned enough cultural capital to compare to Heathers‘s sickly, surrealist take on high school culture in the decades since 1988, only Clueless & Mean Girls could claim to share in its enduring popularity and, although both are very funny in their own way, neither are nearly cruel enough to match the acidity of Daniel Waters’s influential screenplay (or its deliciously evil late-90s echoes).  Whatever the case, it’s not surprising that most professional reviews of Emma Seligman’s high school black comedy Bottoms mention its place in the Heathers lineage, despite there being infinite other heightened high school satires to choose from for easy points of comparison: Better Off Dead, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Clone High, Daria, and the list goes on.  I won’t go as far as to say declaring every successful high school dark comedy “the next Heathers” is a hack move (despite being a certifiable hack who’s guilty of that behavior myself), but I at least want to note that the search for The Next Heathers is becoming a time-honored tradition among an aging generation of media critics.

So, in the interest of mixing things up, I’d like to compare Bottoms to a different heightened high school comedy that I love dearly: Strangers with Candy.  Specific events and characters in Seligman & co-writer Rachel Sennott’s screenplay might have more direct correlations in Heathers (especially in the comedic approach to a potential school bomber), but the tone of the humor is much more closely aligned with the vintage Amy Sedaris sitcom.  The surrealism of Heathers has a dreamlike, soft-focus quality you will not find in Bottoms, which instead repurposes the rotten dirtbag energy of Sedaris’s cult show.  Sennott co-stars with Ayo Edebiri as the film’s Jerri Blank equivalents: two adult actors in hideously slovenly high school drag who relentlessly proposition their classmates for sex while everyone around them obliviously focuses on normal high school media conflicts like homework and the upcoming football game.  In both works, teachers and school staff match the teenage deviants’ dirtbag mentality with equally monstrous comebacks, sidestepping the decorum of professional, adult behavior.  No one acts like a real human being at any time, reflecting the collective, horned-up mania of American high schools’ insular worlds.  The filmmaking is deceptively commercial in both cases (mocking 1970s afterschool specials in Strangers with Candy and mocking 1990s high school boner comedies in Bottoms), delivering pitch-black narcissist line readings with the cheery poptimism of a well-behaved mainstream sitcom.  If you deeply miss the mixture of high-femme costume designs with high-artifice teen cruelty in Heathers, there are plenty of modern movies willing to offer a facsimile.  Meanwhile, if you deeply miss watching Jerri Blank hit on a comically naive Tammi Littlenut (“Pee on me.”) or trade vicious barbs with Principle Onyx Blackman (“You must be about as worn out as a hooker on VJ Day.”), Bottoms is your only viable modern substitute.

The only reason it’s so tempting to compare Bottoms to previously existing works—Strangers with Candy, Heathers, or otherwise—is because Seligman & Sennott’s screenplay is so referentially rooted in teen sex comedy tradition.  Its basic premise, in which two unpopular, unfashionable high school lesbians start an afterschool “defense class” in a misguided attempt to bed cheerleaders, functions as a basic-bullet-points mashup of Fight Club and Revenge of the Nerds.  Sennott & Edebiri are obviously not the typical protagonists of the genre’s losing-your-virginity crisis template, but there have already been plenty other post-Porky’s, post-Superbad correctives to make it clear that high school girls get desperately horny too: The To Do List, Blockers, Booksmart, Never Have I Ever, Plan B, Slut in a Good Way, etc.  None have quite matched the shameless selfishness of Sennott & Edebiri’s manic libidos, though, at least not since Jerri Blank described the way high school football makes her “damp as a cellar down there – all mildewy.”  There are two basic placement tests that will determine your relationship with Bottoms as an audience: whether you find the jokes funny and whether it speaks meaningfully to your personal, pre-loaded high school comedy reference points.  The former can’t be helped, but I would at least like to encourage people to look beyond Heathers to better support the latter.  In general, we could all stand to look past Heathers more often when considering the genre’s darkest subversions; there are plenty other titles to choose from, to the point where the exercise of identifying The Next Heathers is getting a little silly.  Really, what’s most encouraging about Bottoms is how little comparison it supports against Seligman & Sennott’s previous collaboration, Shiva Baby, despite both being queer nightmare comedies starring Sennott.  It’s nice to still feel surprised even while also feeling as if you’ve seen it all before.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Man on Campus (1998)

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TW: Suicide, throughout

When recently writing about middling campus thriller The Curve, several people commented that they thought that film was called Dead Man on Campus; in fact, The Curve was previously titled Dead Man’s Curve and its title was changed to avoid just that confusion. Both came out in 1998, both feature a serious scholarship student paired with a perpetually manic roommate, and both feature plots that are predicated on the urban legend that the roommate(s) of any college student who commits suicide automatically passes their classes that semester. Whereas The Curve was rarely intentionally funny and attempted a kind of campus noir that fails to be compelling, Dead Man on Campus is an outright comedy, from the creative team that would four years later release a personal favorite, Pumpkin. Pumpkin director Anthony Abrams is on the writing side this time, co-penning this one with future Pumpkin co-writer Adam Larson Broder and Michael Traeger. This one errs a little broader than Pumpkin‘s melodrama satire but has a lot of the same semi-sequitur one-liners, slapstick treated with unblinking stoicism, and invoked tonal whiplash. 

Josh (Tom Everett Scott) is an incoming student attending a prestigious northeastern university on a scholarship, on a pre-med track with a heavy, difficult course load. In the dorms, he’s placed into a suite with non-stop party machine Cooper (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) and hair-trigger Catholic rage jock Kyle (Jason Segel). Kyle pairs off with a girl he meets at a party (Linda Cardellini) and moves in with her, leaving Josh and Cooper with a spare room. Josh loses some of his academic focus when Cooper introduces him to Rachel (Poppy Montgomery), a creative writing student with whom he hits it off, and Cooper’s lackadaisical attitude rubs off on Josh a little too hard. By midterms, both are failing, with doomed prospects on the horizon: Josh will lose his scholarship and drop out of school, and Cooper’s father will stop paying his tuition and force him to start at an entry level position in the family custodial business. Cooper, upon hearing the urban legend about automatic A grades for the roommates of students who take their own life, forces Josh to accompany him to break into the library and review the school charter to see if this rule actually exists, and, upon learning that it does, hatches a scheme to use Josh’s student job at the housing office to file paperwork to move a suicidal person into the vacant room and wait things out, possibly even pushing over a domino or two. Josh is initially horrified, but is ultimately convinced to join in, and they set their sights on a few prospects: untameable frat moron Cliff (Lochlyn Munro), paranoid Unabomber-esque Buckley (Randy Pearlstein), and depressed British goth rocker Matt (Corey Page). 

Like Pumpkin, Dead Man on Campus is a tasteless movie, but I have an appetite for tasteless movies, especially ones that are as willing to go all in like this one does. Through a modern lens, it’s insensitive (and may even have been so for the time), but its insensitivity reads more as irreverence than edginess, and at times it verges on prescience … for the most part. The film’s weakest link is the first contender that the boys select; he’s loud, brash, oversexed, dim-witted, and within the already wacky reality of the film, he stands out as a particularly poorly placed element, like he dropped in from National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. It’s a pretty small role, but Alyson Hannigan is here as one of Rachel’s roommates, and Cliff immediately asks “Which one is for [him]?” from among the women, getting so amped up to share a bong with her that he lights her hair on fire (Hannigan has her longer ‘do from Buffy seasons 1 and 2 here), and it feels like it’s presaging some of the indignities that she’ll experience over the course of the American Pie movies, but less funny (or that she’ll find herself in in Date Movie, but funnier). In a film that’s mostly raucous and only occasionally raunchy, Cliff’s scenes are the weakest. Gosselaar toes the line with Cooper; he’s also obnoxious, but it’s more moderate. It’s as if Gosselaar is aping the title character of Parker Lewis Can’t Lose but can’t quite break free from Saved by the Bell‘s Zack and ends up annoying, but there’s a certain Bugs Bunny-esque playfulness to his frenetic energy that keeps him from crossing the line into being too annoying. 

The second and third contenders that the boys select are much better suited to the film’s tone. Conspiracy theorist Buckley is a lot of fun, down to the choices in set dressing (his dorm room is adorned with black and white posters of … himself). Even though this film is from the pre-9/11 time when conspiracy theories were just some nonsense that your older stoner friend would prattle on about and not matters of legislation in a crumbling empire, Buckley manages to spout some ideas that wouldn’t be unreasonable to hear (from morons) in this day and age; notably, he believes that he is being stalked by Bill Gates, who wants to steal the rest of his brain (having already stolen half of it when Buckley fell asleep in a Gateway store). The way that Josh and Cooper convince him to move in with them, which includes Josh dressing up in a hazmat suit and spraying water on the plants outside of Buckley’s first dorm building, hits the right level of absurdity, and it’s a welcome change after suffering through the Cliff portions. All of the boys’ interactions with third contender Matt are even funnier once it’s revealed that his suicidal ideology is all an act to seem more mysterious as a tragic musician, and I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of making fun of self-flagellating college-aged artists. Some sample lyrics for Kiss My Ass, Matt’s band, include the utterly self-satisfied lines “My words are my sperm/Spewing forth my tragic germ/I’m dying to kiss you/I soil the tissue.” That’s art, baby. 

The movie is not without other weaknesses outside of Cliff. Things get a little saccharine at the climax, and it’s not handled as deftly as it would be later in Pumpkin; just compare any of the maudlin-to-the-point-of-ridicule scenes that make up that film’s finale with the mostly-played-straight conclusion to this one. The romance between Josh and Rachel also feels a bit tacked-on, and Poppy Montgomery is largely wasted in a shallow role. That Josh could fall into drinking and partying without the temptation to spend time with her makes it so that she could largely be excised from the plot, especially as her later actions—giving Josh a copy of her short story to read and then being disappointed that he didn’t—do nothing to put more pressure on Josh than he is already under. It’s ridiculous that she’s third billed and is less memorable than Hannigan, who at least has a later role in the film when she arrives at a party in a ridiculous wig. Still, if you saw The Curve and thought it would work better as an irreverent comedy, or if you’re itching for something in the vein of Pumpkin and are willing to accept the diet cola version, this one’s out there waiting for you. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #178: On the Count of Three & 2022’s Honorable Mentions

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Welcome to Episode #178 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna continue our discussion of the Top Films of 2022 with some honorable mentions, starting with the Jerrod Carmichael suicide comedy On the Count of Three.

00:00 Welcome

02:00 M3GAN (2023)
03:20 Shin Ultraman (2023)
05:25 Sick (2023)
07:25 Skinamarink (2023)

16:05 On the Count of Three (2022)
35:53 Aline (2022)
55:40 Lux Æterna (2022)
1:10:13 We Met in Virtual Reality (2022)

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew