For Carnival 2017, a few members of the Swampflix crew joined forces to pray at the altar of the almighty Divine. The greatest drag queen of all time, Divine was the frequent collaborator & long-time muse of our favorite filmmaker, John Waters. Her influence on the pop culture landscape extends far beyond the Pope of Trash’s Dreamlanders era, however, emanating to as far-reaching places as the San Franciscan performers The Cockettes, the punkification of disco, and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Our intent was to honor the Queen of Filth in all her fabulously fucked-up glory by maintaining a new Mardi Gras tradition in Krewe Divine, a costuming krewe meant to masquerade in the French Quarter on every Fat Tuesday into perpetuity.
There’s no telling how Krewe Divine will expand or evolve from here as we do our best to honor the Queen of Filth in the future, but for now, enjoy some pictures from our 2026 excursion, our seventh outing as Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe:
Welcome to Episode #254 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Aaron & Peter of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the analog sci-fi horrors of Joe Meredith’s YouTube channel, starting with his true-crime creature feature Harvest Brood (2025).
It feels trite to say this right now, given that America is currently squirming under the boot of an openly fascist presidential regime, but the escalating omnipresence of corporate advertising in every aspect of daily life is starting to feel outright apocalyptic. It was already demoralizing enough when corporations convinced us to advertise brand names on our clothes, so that we’re paying to display billboard space on our own bodies, but once they caught up with the fact that we spend most of our time looking at each other through screens instead of in person, things have only gotten worse. Yes, the internet is a convenient access point to a wider world of art and social interaction, but it’s also an easy access point to funnel nonstop advertisement into our eyeballs. Every streaming service is just a variation of the Tubi model now, inserting commercial breaks into shows & movies we’re already paying to watch. Those old-guard artforms are also gradually being replaced with social-media microcelebrities, who skip the middleman and deliver shameless sponcon as the main source of entertainment instead of an occasional annoyance. Credit card companies control what we can do & see online via what kinds of content they allow to be monetized, stepping in as the internet equivalent of the MPAA to determine what does and does not qualify as pornography, and what forms of pornography are “allowed”. I could go on, but you have a phone, so you’re already well aware of mainstream culture’s slow-motion landslide into a corporate-sponsored Hell pit. It’s a pervasive menace that darkens & distorts every aspect of modern human life, and it’s willing to choke what’s left of that life out of us as long as it can also squeeze out our last few pennies with it, as indicated by the current advertising push for the resource-draining evils of generative A.I. So, I was pleased to discover two new movies in theaters right now that treat the exponential relentlessness of corporate advertising as the existential threat that it truly is — both of which were packaged with trailers advertising other new movies to check out while they’re in theaters, of course.
In her self-satirizing mockumentary The Moment, pop singer Charli XCX treats corporate advertising as an existential threat to art. Set during her Big Moment following the blow-up of her album Brat last summer, The Moment imagines what would happen if Charli made the same corporate business deals that took other pop stars like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber to “the next level” during their own respective Big Moments. Her in-film record label scores two major (fictional) deals on her behalf: a credit card marketed exclusively to queer clientele and a production of a Disney+ style concert film documenting the Brat world tour. The Brat credit card deal makes for an easy, funny punchline mocking the crass commodification of identity politics and is deployed in the film as a form of recurring prop comedy. The production of the Brat concert film is a more nuanced debacle, with Alexander Skarsgård stepping in as a corporate-stooge movie director determined to sand off all of Charli’s roughest edges so she can be marketable to a more Family Friendly audience. Instead of sticking around to fight the good fight with her longtime creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), Charli folds under the pressure and allows Skarsgård to take over, turning the coked-out club classics nightlife vibe of the Brat album into a cigarette-themed version of The Eras Tour. It’s an oddly vulnerable PR move, in that it can be read as Charli satirizing herself as indecisive to the point of having no artistic convictions at all, portraying her as being personally incapable of maintaining a clear creative ethos once corporations step in to promote her art to a wider audience. The more generous reading, of course, is that she’s saying that no one can stand up to that kind of corporate pressure, and that’s why all corporate-sponsored art sucks. Whether she’s the butt of her own joke or she’s throwing punches at peers, it’s at least clear that the real villains are the credit card companies and the assembly-line hack directors who are willing to sacrifice art to the almighty altar of Advertising.
In the new sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, director Gore Verbinski (along with screenwriter Matthew Robsinson) treats corporate advertising as an existential threat to human dignity. Sam Rockwell stars as a time-traveler from a near-future dystopia that has been overrun by A.I. In order to stop his grim timeline from coming to pass, he must quickly recruit random customers from a Los Angeles diner to put a stop to that A.I.’s creation over one long, zany night before it’s too late. This A-plot premise is broadly generic in both its LOL So Random style of humor (think “hotdog fingers” and you get the gist) and in its observations on smartphone addiction, in which all teenagers are portrayed as George Romero zombies who aimlessly wander through the city while staring at their screens. There is some biting satire scattered throughout the film’s Black Mirror-inspired vignettes, however, once the focus shifts away from Rockwell’s all-in-one-night mission to profile the daily lives of the diners he takes hostage. Juno Temple’s screentime as a single mom who loses her teenage son to a school shooting is especially fruitful, both in how it portrays America’s treatment of those shootings as being as unavoidable of a natural occurrence as bad weather, and in how the tragedy invites advertising into her family home. After her son is killed, the grieving mother is sold on purchasing a cloned version of him, but she can’t afford the luxury model, so her subscription comes with ads. A corporation has smoothed out all of the details of her son’s personality until he is a generic non-entity, and they’ve doubled that indignity by making him a mouthpiece for IRL sponcon, spouted as if it were casual conversation. Likewise, the Romero zombie teens elsewhere in the film speak entirely in ad placements when not staring blankly at their screens, satirizing the ways in which modern online discourse has turned us all into uncompensated employees of marketing companies. With or without an inevitable A.I. takeover, we are already doomed.
Unfortunately, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die far exceeds its LOL So Random allowance by the end, and it’s ultimately just not very good. Gore Verbinski has made exactly one fully satisfying film to date (Mouse Hunt, duh), and ever since then he can only manage to stage extravagant disappointments that almost kinda-sorta work if you squint at them from the right angle, among which Good Luck is no exception. He has a very Baz Luhrmann-coded career in that way (Strictly Ballroom, duh). Charli XCX’s movie is much less ambitious and, thus, has a much easier path to success. One of The Moment‘s more reliably successful gags is the way luxury brands, hotel chains, and sponsorship deals are announced in the strobe-lit block text that has accompanied all of Charli’s recent concert performances, very directly using her art to advertise corporate products. Most of the film is shot in the grainy, low-lighting texture of modern fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and most of the humor registers as similarly low-key. That makes for a much less ambitious source of comedy than the anything-can-happen-at-any-moment zaniness of Good Luck, which works up an excess of flop sweat while scrambling across Los Angeles in search of the next randomized Mad Libs punchline. For all of the ways Verbinksi’s latest might disappoint as a comedy, however, it’s easy enough to get behind its resentful messaging about how our culture-wide smartphone addiction has “robbed us all of our dignity and turned us into children.” Despite all of its cutesy visual gags, dirt-cheap guitar riffs, and Deadpool-level ultra sarcasm, it’s at least pointing its finger at the right cultural boogeyman. Corporate advertising is going to kill us all, and we’re inviting more of it into our brains every second we spend looking at our phones. Now excuse me while I check every local cinema’s website to plan what showtimes I will purchase tickets for next.
2004’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was the first—and to this day—only movie I’ve ever watched on a bootlegged camrip. I was a senior in high school at the time, and there was something still novel about torrenting a movie online before it was officially released in theaters, no matter the quality. A friend smuggled a copy of the movie on two CD-Rs into our high school art class, where we cheered & squealed over Quentin Tarantino’s newly achieved levels of cartoonish bloodshed & overwritten dialogue. I’m sure I also saw the movie in theaters that same week, but I don’t remember that experience. I do remember Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 being in constant rotation as second-hand Blockbuster liquidation DVDs during my college years though, casually thrown on the living room TV when no one’s sure what to watch (the same way Boomers in no particular mood end up listening to the Beatles as an automatic default). Vol. 1 was always The Fun One, Vol. 2 was always The Boring One, and they were always buried behind a layer of standard-definition fuzz and only half-paid attention to, like animated dorm room wallpaper. So, twenty years later, I might have just experienced The Kill Bill Saga the way it was meant to be seen for the very first time, despite having been in the same room with “Tarantino’s 4th Film” untold dozens of times. Only, not exactly.
The Whole Bloody Affair is a new, seemingly finalized edit of the two Kill Bill movies, now smashed together to create one monstrously ginormous butt-number. Tarantino has been casually playing around with this project since 2006, undoing the Weinsteins’ work of splitting his mid-career epic into two separate parts by occasionally trotting out this one-long-cut version into prestigious venues like the Cannes Film Festival and his own vanity movie theater The New Beverly Cinema. The original uptown location of The Prytania recently secured a 70mm print of the film and has been running it on loop for the past few weeks, giving its local New Orleans rollout a prestigious feel it wasn’t afforded when DCPs were screening out at the Metairie AMC Palaces last December. So, it’s funny that I still left the theater feeling like I’ve only seen Kill Bill in a compromised, mucked up form. It seems that in Tarantino’s current, meaningless pursuit to land the “Perfect Ten” filmography, he’s gotten distracted by some George Lucas-style tinkering with the original texts. I’m willing to forgive the new silly title cards underlining that both halves of this picture technically count as “The 4th Film” in the Tarantino oeuvre, since the original project was split into two parts by meddling producers. Still, though, I’m skeptical that his original intention was to make a 5-hour movie with a Fortnite cutscene epilogue (“Yuki’s Revenge”), which is what The Whole Bloody Affair ultimately amounts to. I’m also unsure why he felt the need to extend the original films’ anime segment with newly commissioned footage, other than that no one is around to tell him “No” anymore because his most looming collaborator is currently, rightfully imprisoned. All of the newly printed material inserted into the Kill Bills of old are a waste of time & resources, but if putting up with those distractions is what it takes to revisit these films on celluloid with a savvy crowd I’m willing to go along with this fussy nerd’s legacy-curation bullshit just a little bit. At least he didn’t retroactively add a CGI Bruce Lee into the picture, Jabba the Hutt style.
Just as Kill Bill has changed over the years (through newly added animation, alternate takes, and a self-imposed intermission), so have I. It’s difficult to say anything about how this project’s place in the larger cultural zeitgeist has shifted, since it’s been so long since I’ve engaged with it and, more importantly, I’m no longer a teenager. I hadn’t personally seen much anime, wuxia, or kung-fu cinema when Kill Bill first came out, so the film’s stylistic flourishes are no longer as impressive to me now having seen The Original Texts like Lady Snowblood or The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Like all Tarantino pictures to date, there’s nothing in Kill Bill that represents the best of any genre he liberally borrows from, but he has admittedly remixed them all into something undeniably entertaining & cool — like a video store DJ. Allow me, then, to play overly-opinionated video store clerk for a moment myself and talk about where this outing ranks in Tarantino’s filmography. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 has always been Jackie Brown‘s strongest competition for the best of his best, and the newly restored cartoonish violence of the Crazy 88s fight sequence (previously censored for MPAA approval) only strengthens that case. It succeeds through the same method that Jackie Brown does, by employing real-life participants from the vintage genres he’s riffing on: Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier & Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, respectively. If The Whole Bloody Affair does Kill Bill any favors in the greater Tarantino rankings, it does so by elevating Vol. II, integrating it more smoothly with its better half by dropping the “Until next time …” teaser that once divided them. And yet, the newly, needlessly extended anime sequence drags the first half down a little, so who knows (or cares). Everything else that’s changed about these movies is a jumbled mix of passing time and personal maturity. The choppy bangs, flip phones, and low-rise jeans scattered throughout the revenge epic have marked the passing of time since it first premiered in the early aughts, when all those props & fashion accessories felt as natural as oxygen. I’ve also found a new appreciation for Lucy Liu’s performance as the unlikely assassin turned yakuza figurehead O-Ren Ishii, with her Big Speech about her gender & heritage bringing unexpected tears to my eyes through sheer fierceness. I’m sure that in 2004 I was just happy to watch her decapitate an underling in the following seconds. It was a simpler time; I was a simpler man.
You will find no plot summary here, as I’m already embarrassed to have added this much text to the server space reserved for discussing Tarantino’s filmography. All I can muster the energy for is observations about how the passage of time can dull or distort a movie that means a lot to you when you’re a teenager. For instance, it’s much easier to be dazzled by a live-action Hollywood film indulging a brief diversion into anime when you’re not as hyper aware that there’s much better anime out there; extending that sequence with five additional minutes of footage doesn’t help either. It’s also much easier to enjoy Tarantino’s work in a vacuum without decades of hearing him say things that range from idiotically petty (taking out-of-nowhere potshots at Paul Dano as “the worst actor in SAG”) to outright evil (showing support to IDF soldiers during the ongoing genocide in Gaza). Even if you want to engage with the movies themselves and ignore the man behind them, he’s now stuck in a navel-gazing thought loop that makes the task impossible. Tarantino is currently terrified of directing another feature film because he might mess up his self-assigned “Perfect Ten” filmography, so he’s turned himself into a lowly film podcaster instead, and his niche topic of discussion is his own work. It’s shameful. There are two unqualified positive things I can say about Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair: 1. Its theatrical release is the only good thing to have come out of Tarantino’s current self-analysis era, and 2. It was smart of him to bury his newly commissioned Fortnite animation sequence after the 20 minutes of end credits, where few people are likely to see it. Otherwise, everything that I like about The Whole Bloody Affair I already liked about Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2: two solidly, separately entertaining pieces of post-modern pop art from one of Hollywood’s sweatiest loudmouth bozos.
The easiest way for a low-budget horror movie to become a perennial classic is to stake its claim on a specific calendar date, so it has an annually recurring slot for ritual rewatches. This has been common knowledge since at least as far back as the first-wave slashers of the 1970s, with Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, and Halloween guaranteeing annual royalty checks from subsequent years’ cable TV broadcasts. Christmas & Halloween have proven to be popular seasonal settings in that scramble to claim a ritual calendar date, while other titles like April Fool’s Day, New Year’s Evil, and Mardi Gras Massacre have found much less competition in more casually celebrated holidays. 1981’s My Bloody Valentine staked its claim on Valentine’s Day relatively early, and has only been challenged by the occasional novelty like last year’s Heart Eyes or 2001’s Valentine in the decades since. It’s proven to be a difficult film to top for Valentine’s Day horror supremacy, since its killer’s method of ripping out victims’ hearts to stuff into heart-shaped Valentine chocolate boxes is the perfect balance of novelty & brutality needed to leave a mark on the genre. It also arrived early enough in the slasher cycle to participate in this Holiday Horror tradition with full sincerity, avoiding the Scream–era meta irony that ruins a good, silly scare with the distraction of self-awareness. If you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a classic horror title set on that holiday, there’s still really only one viable choice (give or take its relatively well-respected 2009 remake).
That’s what makes it so funny that My Bloody Valentine is a hat-on-a-hat situation. It would’ve been more than enough for it to stand out as a novelty slasher by delivering a killer who’s improbably activated by his home town’s Valentine’s Day celebrations. Instead, it adds the extra detail that its masked killer moonlights as a coalminer, inviting mine-specific tools & settings into each staged kill that have no direct association with the holiday in question. Yes, he uses his mining gear every kill, and yes, those kills are inspired by how much he hates his town’s annual Valentine’s Day dance. He’s a complicated guy with a lot going on. The more generic version of this slasher template can be found in the previous year’s Prom Night, in which a tragic childhood accident is avenged once those responsible are old enough to attend their senior prom. Shot in Canada but set in Anywhere, Small Town America, there’s nothing specific about the background details of Prom Night‘s setting — deliberately so. My Bloody Valentine was also shot in Canada (as frequently confirmed by the Canadian pronunciation of “sorry”), but you are unlikely to mistake it for the town you live in unless you happen to live in a cloistered coalmining community where every male person in your life has spent some time working in the mines. The inciting tragedy in this case was an accidental explosion that happened while the rest of the town was enjoying the local Valentine’s Day dance, carelessly leaving five workers to perish in the mines below. So, whenever the town decides it’s time to move on with their lives and bring back their Valentine’s Day traditions, masked killer Harry Warden returns to avenge his fallen coworkers (whom he unfortunately had to cannibalize to stay alive in the maddening days leading up to his own rescue). It’s two seemingly unrelated things—Valentine’s & coalmining—forever welded together in a single ludicrous screenplay.
My Bloody Valentine attempts to smooth over the discordance between its two competing novelty settings by focusing on the kind of love-triangle romance that typically springs up when you live in a small town where everyone knows each other from cradle to grave. You see, local golden boy T.J. (Paul Kelman) tried to leave small-town life behind by moving away to Los Angeles, but he quickly crashed & burned and shamefully found himself back in the mines. While T.J. was gone, his golden-haired girlfriend Sarah (Lori Hallier) started up a new relationship with his former bestie Axel (Neil Affleck), but now that he’s back in town he wants to default to their previous relationship. Will Sarah choose to reignite her white-hot passion for T.J., or will she stick with the stabler, nobler partnership she’s since built with Axel? Who gives a shit? The romantic melodrama at play here is necessary to justify the holiday setting, but it’s difficult to pay too close attention to its stakes when there’s also a crazed killer in town ripping out the trio’s friends’ hearts and plopping them into the hotdog waters, beer coolers, and chocolate boxes at their unsanctioned Valentine’s party, thrown behind the sheriff’s back. All that really matters is that the kills are consistently brutal and consistently afforded a mining-town specificity in the killer’s mask, weapons, and venues of attack. Shooting the majority of those kills down in the mines may darken the screen a little too much to reward modern home viewing, but they look great on the big screen, especially in the pop iconography of the opening scene, when a buxom blonde strokes the phallic hose of the killer’s mask mid-hookup before she’s penetrated with his pickaxe. Gnarly.
Speaking of horror-movie calendar watching, this year is especially apt for a My Bloody Valentine screening (an opportunity pounced upon by ScreamFest NOLA at The Broad earlier this week). That’s because Valentine’s Day happens to fall on a Saturday this year, the day after Friday the 13th. That’s also the case in the film itself, which we’re informed via title cards announcing both dates: Friday the 13th, then Saturday the 14th. It’s highly likely that My Bloody Valentine was greenlit as an attempt to capitalize on that calendrical coincidence in 1981, hoping to make Harry Warden as much of a household name as Jason Voorhees. The film did not succeed there, but it’s still the first title that comes to mind when someone thinks of Valentine’s Day horror and coalmining horror, which is an impressive double-dip success in its own right.
In Albert Birney’s debut feature The Beast Pageant, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines in his job & home is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to go on a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural upstate New York (where Birney was living at the time). In Birney’s breakout collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines on his jobsite visits to strangers’ homes is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to dream of a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural Maryland (where Birney has been living since). In his most recent directorial outing, OBEX, Albert Birney himself appears onscreen as a lonely man who . . . you get the picture. Birney has six feature films to his name, and the three I’ve happened to have seen all follow the same basic narrative structure, the same way that all Neil Gaiman stories I’ve read happen to rely on the same Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole plot device. The only thing that’s changed between these career checkpoints, really, is the nature of the sad-sack protagonist’s job, the types of machines that distract him from his mind-numbing daily labor, and the type of fantasy adventure that breaks him out of the routine. If you’ve already seen The Beast Pageant or Strawberry Mansion, you’re already familiar with the general vibe & shape of OBEX but, thankfully, Birney still finds plenty room for variation & novelty when coloring within those rigid lines.
In this iteration, Birney plays a 1980s computer whiz & agoraphobe who never steps outside his modest Baltimore apartment. His only true friend is a geriatric lapdog named Sandy that randomly wandered into his yard and has been spoiled like a baby ever since. Birney’s sad-sack loner makes a living by “drawing” computerized portraits of strangers on commission, recreating family photos with carefully arranged keystrokes on commercial-grade printer paper. When it’s time to relax, he entertains himself with the other screens arranged throughout his house, most notably a tower of cathode-ray TVs stacked in his living room as a kind of unintentional video art instillation. He often runs three different programs out-of-sync on this TV tower like a televised-media DJ, cuddling up with Sandy on the couch and cranking up the volume to drown out the roar of cicadas outside of the house. Things go awry when he purchases a PC computer game through mail catalog that promises to bring great adventure into his life — a promise made literal when the game invites a demon named Ixaroth to invade his home through the screen, directly importing Sandy into the game. To rescue Sandy, he must then go on a harrowing adventure outside of his apartment by willingly entering the game himself, represented as a live-action roleplay version of 8-bit era Zelda puzzle games. The story is not unfamiliar (especially not if you’ve seen Riddle of Fire in addition to Birney’s prior work), but its familiarity is ultimately, warmly sweet.
The most notable shift in craft here is Birney’s newfound interest in horror genre tropes, which is usually where most low-budget directors start. Some of his best couch time with Sandy in the first act is spent recording the entirety of A Nightmare on Elm Street Film from TV broadcast to VHS tape, so they can rewatch it together later, anytime they want. This allusion opens the film up to a wide range of surrealistic horror touches, including dozens of rubber-masked cicada mutants straight out of 1950s creature features, a couple Harryhausen-style skeleton soldiers and, most improbably, some spooky late-night drives inspired by Lynch’s Lost Highway. The treacherous demon Ixaroth obviously adds to the film’s horror bona-fides as well, represented onscreen as a beast made entirely out of TV static, with a tangible taxidermy skull. It’s an image that pairs well with Birney’s return to the Game Boy Camera-style black & white cinematography of The Beast Pageant, but more importantly it’s one that signals the themes he’s getting at with this latest stylistic experiment. The evil entity is composed of the glowing-screen filler that keeps his protagonist from venturing outside his apartment, making the film out to be a dire warning about the price of staring at screens all day instead of living a real life. Sure, you get some mind-melting psychedelic video art out of it, but at what cost? In comparison, I’m not sure that The Beast Pageant had a similar underlying message other than that having a job sucks. Maybe OBEX is Birney admitting that making & looking at niche art all day sucks too, especially if that’s the only thing you do.
2025’s Bunny is the directorial debut of Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the lead roles alongside first-billed actor Mo Stark, who is also credited with Jacobson and Stefan Marolachakis for writing the film’s screenplay. Stark plays the titular Bunny, a sex worker who provides for his wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) by hustling, and who also acts as the de facto leader of his apartment building and its array of kooks. He looks after the elderly Ian, who lost most of the use of one of his arms in a youthful motorcycle accident, and Ian in turn looks after the voluntarily bedbound Franklin, who spends all of his waking hours watching his VHS recordings of the David Carradine series Kung Fu. There’s also Linda (Linda Rong Mei Chen), the landlady who’s part of the fun, Bunny’s somewhat dimwitted friend Dino (Jacobson), a trio of partying girls who live downstairs, and a couple of douchey young bros who round out the rest of the cramped, claustrophobic tenement that they all inhabit. On Bunny’s birthday, he runs home in a heightened state and covered in blood, which he attempts to hide from his wife, and into this chaos several other characters enter: their short term rental guest Chana (Genevieve Hudson-Price), a rabbi (Henry Czerny) Chana summons to ensure that her temporary occupancy is in compliance with her extremely orthodox requirements, Bobbie’s estranged father Loren (Anthony Drazan), and two cops called in by Linda, who struggles through her limited English to explain to them that she fears one of her tenants has died in his apartment. These two cops (Ajay Naidu and Liz Caribel Sierra) end up spending much of the day lurking around Bunny’s front door, which complicates things when the employee of a spurned john appears and tries to murder him, forcing Bunny to kill him in self-defense.
In our recent discussion of The Beast Pageant, Brandon and I talked about how there are two ways to respond to a cheaply made but nonetheless impressive piece of independent film: “I could make this” (derogatory, denigrating), and “I could make this!” (appreciative, inspired). Jacobson feels like a filmmaker who saw the works of directors like Sean Baker and had the latter reaction. In particular, the choice of making the film’s protagonist a sex worker, setting the film over a single day-long period, handheld guerilla shooting in cramped, real world locations, and focusing on a few intersectional stories with a small cast of mostly unknowns all call Tangerine to mind. The other things that the film feels like it’s borrowing from are both genre products of the nineties: stoner comedies and post-Pulp Fiction dialogue-driven crime capers. For the former, the film is mostly populated with potheads — Dino most obviously, as he smokes incessantly and also gets Bobbie’s father Loren high when he arrives unannounced while Bobbie and Bunny are away. For the latter, the film is a constant wirewalk of trying to figure out how to deal with the body in the hallway and the various lengths that the characters must go to in order to keep the police from finding a pretense to come inside. Where these two ideas intersect is in the constant poor decisions that Bunny and Dino make; when a second dead body is found inside (the tenant Linda was concerned about did, in fact, overdose in his bedroom), the gang quickly comes up with the idea to get rid of that body rather than the man Bunny killed, resulting in a lot of wacky hijinks surrounding getting the corpse into a suitcase and outside. There’s absolutely no reason to get involved with the neighbor’s body, but everyone’s so intoxicant-addled and dim-witted that they just keep making things worse for themselves.
The film keeps itself from feeling too monotonous despite its single-location setting by threading in a parade of fun characters and letting them bounce off of one another. I was particularly fond of Chana, who defiantly notes that she must be called either “Happy Chana” or by her full name, “never just ‘Chana,’” and whose orthodoxy considerations throw a wrench into the already malfunctioning machine that is Linda’s tenement house. Bobbie leaves the apartment in a huff before Chana arrives, meaning that when their guest arrives to find that she is “alone” with Bunny, she demands that either Bunny leave his own home or that there be at least two other women present since “two women equals one wife.” It’s good stuff, reminiscent of the “Ski Lift” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and her presence is a fun complication when having to navigate keeping the cops outside while keeping her from discovering the body (later bodies) that are moved from apartment to apartment. I also appreciated the presence of Loren, whose absurdly self-serving nature is made apparent when he admits that he’s found himself at a loss when his wife finally leaves him—he’s left her before, of course, many times, but now that he’s on the other end of it he feels remorse for ditching his daughter. Loren is on a different journey, like he’s entered this picture from a completely different film in which he’s a deadbeat dad finally trying to make good, but everyone here finds him to be an eye-rolling dick until he actually comes in handy. In a lesser (and more racist) movie, Linda would be used as a comedic punching bag, but here she gets to be a part of the fun, which I enjoyed immensely after some initial skepticism about how respectfully she would be treated.
With a necessary content warning for this film and its (respectful) treatment of sexual violence, I’d recommend it for anyone looking for something to scratch that Sean Baker-ish itch.
The industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails is playing a concert in New Orleans this week, and I’ve been relistening to their records in anticipation of the event. This is a band I find easy to take for granted, as I’ve been listening to them since I was a teenager, so I’m always surprised by how consistently great they are whenever I give them my full attention. The few times I’ve seen Nine Inch Nails in concert before, they were always the secondary reason I’ve shown up (whether because they’re headlining a festival I’m already attending anyway or because they’re touring with an opening act I’m excited to see for the first time), and then midway through their set I have yet another epiphanic revelation that, oh yeah, this is one of the greatest bands of all time. I’ve been going through that cycle again this week revisiting Trent Reznor’s early output under the Nine Inch Nails banner, reviving my appreciation for their 80s & 90s album run especially — from Pretty Hate Machine through The Fragile, all impeccable. It’s such an obvious, redundant observation that I feel silly even repeating it, but every now and then a track like “Terrible Lie” or “The Becoming” will hit my ear in a way that cuts through my decades-long familiarity with the band and sound entirely new again. This week, I’ve been especially attentive to their early EP release Broken, which still sounds fresh to my ears since it’s a CD I didn’t have in high school, when I would’ve been endlessly looping their other discs on my no-skip Walkman.
As an album, Broken is a transition piece between the gothy synthpop of Pretty Hate Machine and the more abrasive noise of The Downward Spiral, going a little overboard in reaching for a harsher, heavier sound. At the very least, even Reznor would admit that he went overboard in the promotional videos that accompanied it, which are shockingly brutal to the point of simulating a snuff film. The NIN short film Broken has never been given an official commercial release, but it’s been floating around in tape-trading and online filesharing circles for three decades now, gathering a kind of mystique as “The fucked-up movie that that The Man didn’t want you to see.” In this case, “The Man” in question is Trent Reznor himself, who found the visual album version of Broken tasteless after spending a couple years of his life recording music in the Los Angeles home where Sharon Tate was murdered by The Manson Family. The film is so graphically violent that it was obviously never intended for wide commercial distribution through corporate hubs like MTV, but partway through his recording sessions at the Tate house, Reznor grew a conscience and asked whether it should be distributed at all. So, it was initially only passed around among friends as an insiders-only art project before inevitably being copied and spread through the tape-trading pipeline as an illegal object, effectively giving it the same mystique as a legitimate, real-life snuff tape. And now you can watch it in HD online anytime, no underground distro required.
Broken starts with camcorder-documented drives through a California neighborhood, recalling the icy true-crime landmark Landscape Suicide. Instead of merely documenting the landscape, however, the camera’s operator is in search of a victim to abduct & torture, which he seemingly finds with ease. The suburban abductee is next shown bound and gagged in a mysterious basement, where his torture initially consists of being forced to watch violent Nine Inch Nails music videos on a small television. The videos are demarcated by a switch to black & white film stock and an emphasis on literally industrial images of various pipes, wires, and gears. Reznor & co. perform “Wish” to a riotous crowd who threatens to tear at their flesh the second they break into the band’s cage. A bald businessman enjoys a steak-and-wine dinner swarming with flies while “Help Me I Am in Hell” plays, occasionally changing into S&M gear in a much more pleasant, padded cell. In the most famous standalone video, “Happiness in Slavery,” performance artist Bob Flanagan (of Sick fame) is sexually prodded and destroyed by a menacing fuck machine that doubles as a meat grinder. Meanwhile, each video is frequently interrupted by camcorder interstitials of our hostage in crisis being ritually raped & killed by his captor in a series of stunts that include castration, coprophagy, and amateur dentistry. There isn’t much of a narrative arc to it as a short film, but as video art it does convey something deeply, cathartically evil about the music Reznor sought to make at the time.
Something I like to say about my favorite working band, Xiu Xiu, is that the sound of their synths simulate the sensation of being stabbed. Broken literalizes that idea, interjecting camcorder footage of blades penetrating skin every time Reznor whips out the harshest noises in his tool bag. Those violent impulses have softened in the decades since, with a large portion of his modern output being ambient movie soundtrack work instead of the most evil rock songs ever recorded. I expect to hear tracks from recent films like Challengers & Tron: Ares at this week’s concert, but I’d be shocked to hear a selection from Reznor’s earliest cinematic output, a movie he’s morally & artistically outgrown. Its shock-value imagery remains remarkably, effectively upsetting, though, and it’s especially worthwhile to return to in the current moment when vintage SOV slashers and modern “analog horror” throwbacks are having A Moment in genre filmmaking circles. Just as when it was an underground cult object in 1993, it would work perfectly well as a “Hey, wanna see something fucked up?” dare among the maladjusted teens of today. It also doesn’t hurt that, like everything else Reznor recorded in the 80s & 90s, every track is still killer, which is not something I could say about most of the other metal-adjacent pop music I was obsessed with as a teenager.
Welcome to Episode #257 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movies made on the grimy streets of pre-Giuliani New York City, starting with the queer musical comedy Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972).
00:00 Krewe du Goo 03:53 While We’re Young (2014) 10:00 Lost in America (1985) 14:20 Another Woman’s Husband (2000) 21:03 Sudden Fury (1993) 25:23 Broken (1993)
36:00 Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972) 1:02:00 Klute (1971) 1:21:00 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) 1:36:00 The Exterminator (1980)
Swampflix 