One essential quality I’m always looking for in horror movies during Halloween season is an essence that can only be described as “Slumber Party Appeal.” If you’re reading this blog, I hope that you’ve aged well past the point of attending slumber parties at a friend’s house under loose parental supervision, but you should still know what I mean. A horror movie with good Slumber Party Appeal is one with disgusting gore gags, gratuitous nudity, and an overall jovial atmosphere that keeps the mood light while you chomp on mediocre pizza delivery with your half-asleep buddies. The 1995 SOV horror Death Metal Zombies was made in the peak slumber party movie-watching era: back when video stores democratized film distribution so that micro-budget shock fests shared the same shelf space as major-studio productions. It immediately signals its Slumber Party Appeal in its crosscutting between intros of various metalhead characters as they get ready for the weekend by clocking out at work, headbanging to bedroom stereos and, most importantly, taking a steamy shower. Every time the camera cuts back to the showering babe in this metalhead friend group, she seems to only be concerned with the cleanliness of her breasts at the expense of the rest of her body. She’s shown soaping up her chest so many times in the first few minutes of character intros that it starts to play like a joke, setting a tone for the remarkably silly zombie picture to come. Death Metal Zombies has great Slumber Party Appeal, by which I mean it’s a harmless, cartoonish horror relic that most kids would still need to sneak past their disapproving parents. It’s got such a warm slumber party vibe that its recent screening at The Broad (presented by friend of the podcast Sara Nicole Storm, of Nail Club) wasn’t at all soured or interrupted by the one audience member who loudly snored through its back half; if anything, he added to the authenticity of the full slumber party experience.
You might expect that a backyard metalsploitation relic from the video store era would be overloaded with grotesque D.I.Y. gore gags, but Death Metal Zombies only delivers a few gross-out moments here or there: a severed hand squirting blood, an unsuspecting jogger disemboweled in a pool of blood, a stabbed anus spewing blood, a skeleton discarded in a victim’s bed — gooey with blood, of course. Overall, though, it’s way more interested in delivering quirky character comedy that is in setting up those gory payoffs. Todd Jason Cook wrote, directed, produced, starred, and bloodied up this regional horror picture in suburban Texas with his friends (including then-wife Lisa Cook, now Lisa DeWild) seemingly as an excuse to party. There’s a thin, single-sentence plot involving a radio contest and a cursed cassette tape, but most scenes involve suburban Texas metalheads sitting around in bedrooms, garages, and public parks, doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack blares tunes from then-current signees to Relapse Records. It’s just wall-to-wall metal jams playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media, foretelling Matt Farley’s career-long project of making creature features that care more about quirky side character’s meaningless conversations than they do about the monsters on the poster. The film’s heavy metal iconography promises a brutal face-melter of nonstop demonic gore, but in practice it’s a “Gee-willikers!,” Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom that just happens to feature metalheads turning into flesh-eating zombies. It’s a shockingly wholesome affair for a movie with a title card that announces “Music by Putrid Stench [et. al].” The current 30th Anniversary re-release even concludes with a blooper reel. In a just world, all Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads to be devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths would be forced to watch this film in its entirety, so they can see the truth: metalheads are just dorks in black t-shirts.
The metalhead friend group we meet during the opening credits find themselves in supernatural peril after they win a radio contest to own the only copy of an exclusive new single from their favorite death metal band, Living Corpse. When jamming out to that tape in their garage hangout spot, their headbanging choreography is interrupted by the band, who magically materialize and issue commands that they kill, kill, kill anyone in striking distance. The poor metalhead dorks are then “transformed” into ravenous zombies, which mostly manifests in dark circles of eye makeup and a slowed-down gait. Their friends who were lucky enough to not hear the cursed single are then tasked to find a way to play the cassette backwards in order to reverse the zombification process — something that proves difficult with commercial equipment. Meanwhile, a serial killer in a Nixon mask is also on the hunt to kill, kill, kill his fellow Texans in a B-plot that is ambiguously (if at all) connected to the central metalsploitation conceit. Even when the zombie & Nixon-mask violence escalates in the back half, the movie registers as deeply unserious. Every single blow is punctuated with a corresponding stock sound effect: video game foley for punches, squelches for stabs. When characters lob insults at their enemies, they read as more silly than vicious: “Dork,” “Pus-wad,” “The Baby Bunch,” etc. The ultimate heroic goal of the picture is not to destroy the zombie hoard so much as it is to reunite the disbanded friend group so they can rock out to metal tunes together once again. Todd Cook’s camcorder vision of true friendship persevering in an increasingly harsh world is a heartwarming one, even if it is best enjoyed when you’re 13-years-old and sneaking room-temperature beers past your sleeping parents while a buddy from school is spending the night.
In my previous dispatch covering this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, I previewed a few selections from the program before they premiered in-person, primarily focusing on documentaries about niche pop culture relics: the 80s house music scene in Chicago, the recurring 90s SNL character Pat!, and the bare-all story of the noise-rock circus act Butthole Surfers. Now that the festival’s in-person portion has concluded (with Virtual Cinema selections streaming online through Sunday, 11/2), I’m here to log some on-the-ground reporting to cover selections I caught on the big screen. The five titles reviewed below are all narrative features that screened during NOFF at various venues throughout the city (namely, The CAC, The Prytania, and The Broad) — some to ecstatic crowds, others to little fanfare. They’re loosely ranked from my personal favorites to my least favorites, but all are worth checking out if you have any interest in their reported style or subject. There will be one final dispatch covering this year’s NOFF in the form of a post-fest podcast with local critic Bill Arceneaux once the virtual portion has concluded in early November, and then the film festival department of the Swampflix newsroom will be furloughed until French Film Fest returns to The Prytania in the Spring, same as ever year.
The Plague
As NOFF coincides with my annual Halloween Season horror bingeing, I always find myself scanning the program for titles that fit both needs. This year, there were more horror-adjacent titles on offer than usual, including a few straight-up horror comedies about sex curses (see below), sexy zombies (see further below), and sex-obsessed Nice Guy puppets (Your Own Flavor). The scariest movie I’ve seen all month, however, was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a middle school-age water polo camp. I don’t know that Charlie Polinger’s debut feature The Plague fully qualifies as a proper Horror Film, but it neatly fits into a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. At the very least, it’s itchy & squirmy enough to register as a psychological thriller, and its lengthy scenes of slow-motion underwater cinematography offer it an otherworldly, nightmarish beauty that verges on the supernatural — a welcome break from the all-too-real dramatizations of school age bullying. A near-guaranteed moneymaker genre in recent years, horror offers up-and-coming directors the chance to take stylish risks audiences won’t sign on for otherwise, so it’s not especially surprising to learn that Polinger’s next project is going to be an adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” for A24, starring Mikey Madison (which was previously adapted by Roger Corman into what is comfortably one of the greatest horror films of all time).
The closest The Plague comes to having “a star” is Joel Edgerton in a supporting role as the water polo camp’s whistle-blowing sad sack coach, who’s scarcely present to supervise. The rest of the main cast are preteen boys who’ve been largely left alone to establish their own social hierarchy, with newcomer Everett Blunck playing Ben, the latest, gangliest addition to the crew. The title refers to a hazing ritual the boys have invented in which the most awkward kid among them has been socially diagnosed with a vaguely defined plague that manifests as a skin-shredding rash, banishing him from any direct interaction with the rest of the class. Ben is unsure how much he wants to participate in this ritual at first, but he’s ultimately willing to punch down as long as it means he’s not the lowest rung on the social ladder. That status doesn’t last forever, though, and the gradual, subtle ways he gets “infected” by the plague are horrifically familiar to anyone who remembers having an “awkward phase” at that age. The Plague hits especially hard for Millennials who suffered their worst social nightmares in the early 2000s, since its 2003 setting is consistently anchored by eerily accurate cultural markers like endless repetitions of the “Okayyy” Lil Jon punchlines from Chappelle’s Show, a forgotten mating call from the time. It’s remarkably well observed in depicting the gendered bullying that boys suffer at that age (with the neighboring girls synchronized-swimming camp being quarantined to a walled-off realm worthy of its own sister movie), with only the otherworld liminality of swimming underwater to offer any sense of relief. It’s an nerve-racking film about how all children are monsters, one that’ll make you glad you never have to be one again.
Fucktoys
The Plague will enjoy a Prestige Season theatrical rollout in hopes of landing on a few High Profile critics’ Best of the Year Lists, boosting its public profile. The future of Annapurna Sriram’s campy sex comedy Fucktoys is much hazier in the film-distro crystal ball, partly due to the expletive in its title (and the 100 minutes of depravity that ensues). Sriram herself stars as down-on-her-luck sex worker who learns in the opening scene that the reason she’s been going through it lately is that she’s been struck with a curse. When she asks her most trusted psychic (local legend Big Freedia, in a scene-stealing role) how this could’ve happened, the psychic shrugs it off with the explanation that sometimes “It be like that.” After consulting several other psychics around town for a second opinion the way cancer patients will desperately bounce from doctor to doctor, she quickly accepts that the curse is real, and starts working overtime to earn the money for a lamb-sacrificing ritual that will lift said curse, freeing her from the string of heartbreaks & rotten luck that has been derailing her life. Of course, this premise is mostly an excuse for Sriram to travel around town from john to john on her vintage moped as she gets her cash in order, providing the plot structure needed to justify flooding the screen with quirky side characters and one-off sex gags. Then, things get genuinely horrific as the threat shifts from vague supernatural curse magic to real-life john with drug & ego issues, consciously souring the mood in frank acknowledgement of the dangerous risks that come with regular sex work (i.e., men).
For a low-budget sex comedy filmed mostly on the industrial backroads of rural Louisiana, Fucktoys has an impressively stylish look to it. Shot on film and decorated with a self-driven dedication to Swinging 60s psychedelia, it looks like a dusty Polaroid found locked away in a box of antique sex toys. Sriram sets the film in a fictional, fantastic setting she calls Trashworld, made entirely out of what appears to be hand-built sets and thrifted vintage clothing. That setting and the over-the-top character work will likely earn Fucktoys a lot of convenient comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously bratty & garish. The film certainly has a lot of harsh political messaging behind its flippantly slutty comedic antics, constantly calling attention to how the wealthy live by different rules than the rest of us, putting the servant class at constant risk. Sriram just works hard to make sure she’s not portraying the sex-worker lifestyle as a nonstop misery parade, seeking out the pleasure & humor in every scenario where money & hexes aren’t ruining the vibe. It’s the kind of bongripping comedy where the protagonist owns a full Doug Funny wardrobe of the same uniform outfit in multiple copies, and if someone writes down a phone number in lipstick, it’s almost certain to be 555-666-0420.
Queens of the Dead
The joke-to-laugh ratio in Tina Romero’s debut zomcom Queens of the Dead is not nearly as successful as Fucktoys‘, but it’s got a similar, admirable sense of political flippancy. George Romero’s daughter builds off her family name here by staging a standard zombie siege picture in the exact style pioneered by her father; the location under siege by the zombie horde just happens to be a drag club. A queer cast of misfit characters (played by the likes of Love Lies Bleeding‘s Katy O’Brian, I Saw the TV Glow‘s Jack Haven, Drag Race‘s Nina West, Pose‘s Dominique Jackson, and comedy legend Margaret Cho) hole up in a Brooklyn gay bar during a cookie-cutter zombie breakout, with one straight-guy straight man on hand to play their comic foil (Quincy Dunn-Baker). All the crew has to do is survive long enough to ride a Pride Parade float out of town at dawn without turning on each other under the pressure of the nonstop zombie invasion. Petty grievances about past professional betrayals, disrespected identity markers, and refusal to adapt to the new rules of drag bubble to the surface as they pass time at the nightclub’s open bar, but they repeatedly revert to the assertion that they’re Family, and all they have is each other in a world that would gladly tear them apart.
Queens of the Dead is heavy on jokes and light on gore. Sure, a character might suffer a nasty rat bite or axe wound here or there, but Romero never goes for the obligatory horde-hands disemboweling spectacle of the Living Dead series, tastefully choosing to keep her characters’ organs on the insides of their bodies. Instead, she nods to her father’s legacy with winking one liners like “When there’s no more room in Hell . . . there’s an app for that.” To that end, it’s amusing that much of the undead ghouls the central Family has to protect themselves from are the drag-enthusiast public, who continue to scroll & post for Insta clout well after they’re infected by the zombie plague. You’d think they’d be fighting off undead MAGA instead, but I suppose that supply would be short in Brooklyn. The overall effect is less gnarly or politically savvy than it is, simply, cute. I don’t know that it would’ve been made or widely distributed (soon, through Shudder) without the director’s connection to the larger Romero legacy, but it’s got a good heart and it easily passes the Mark Kermode-patented Six Laughs Test for determining whether a comedy qualifies for a passing grade.
The Testament of Ann Lee
The only film on this list that isn’t a debut feature is, thus, the one that bears the greatest weight of expectation, so I suspect it’s one I might’ve ranked higher had I been totally blindsided by it. Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee arrived at the festival with pre-packaged Awards Season prestige, complete with its own security guards scanning the audiences for smartphone pirates who might dare to leak a camrip before the film’s official late-December release. Fastvold is most prominently discussed on the prestige cinema scene right now in the context of her careerlong professional collaboration with husband Brady Corbet (with whom she co-wrote last year’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist, as well as this immediate follow-up), but it’s her 2020 period drama The World to Come that most had me excited to see her back in the director’s chair. A historical lesbian romance with an unusually deep bleak streak, The World to Come set an expectation for dramatic heartbreak that The Testament of Ann Lee never comes close to achieving, despite the severity of its own story. Instead, Fastvold indulges in the stylistic experiment of making a deeply bleak movie musical, finding more fascination than resonation with her titular historical subject: the enigmatic founder of the American religious sect The Shakers. The most the two films have in common, really, is their casting’s assertion that Christopher Abbott would make a terrible husband.
In a way, The Shakers make perfect sense as the subject for a musical, given that their worship practices involve rhythmic dancing & chanting that could inspire captivating filmic spectacle. Think of the communal breathing/grieving ritual in Midsommar, repeated at feature length. The problem is that the Shaker hymns composer Daniel Blumberg extrapolates into full musical numbers don’t really go anywhere. When Shaker founder Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is imprisoned for her heretical beliefs, she sings repetitions of the phrase, “I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst” with no lyrical variation for minutes on end, to the point where the audience is more exhausted than the character. It’s her belief system itself that saves the film from total tedium, though. Ann Lee was persecuted for daring to ask whether society would be better off if we all agreed to sing & dance instead of having sex, ever. It turns out the answer depends on how bad the sex you’re having is (i.e., whether you’re married to Hollywood hunk Christopher Abbott). The Testament of Ann Lee is most impressive in how it works as both a sincere depiction of its subject’s religious ecstasy and as a harsh criticism of religion as a mechanism for making one person’s sexual hang-ups everyone else’s problem. I have a feeling that if Blumberg’s songs were better realized and if Fastvold’s name didn’t carry so much weight from previous projects, I’d be singing its praises instead of downplaying its successes. As is, it’s a memorably strange anomaly, an indulgence I suppose Fastvold has well earned by working on knockout titles like The World to Come, The Childhood of a Leader, The Brutalist, and my beloved Vox Lux.
Mad Bills to Pay
A more reasonable person wouldn’t have any pre-screening expectations for The Testament of Ann Lee, but I have been made unreasonable by the year-long attention I pay to movie podcasts with the budget & access to send critics to international film festivals. Maybe the Oscar Buzz generators of Awards Season podcasts like Prestige Junkie & The Big Picture that put movies like Ann Lee on the radar for large audiences are a reasonable thing to listen to; I dunno. What’s really shameful is the close attention I pay to festival-coverage episodes of the NYC cinephile podcasts Film Comment & The Last Thing I Saw, which often get me hyped up for microbudget oddities that have no name recognition outside a small circle of obscurity-obsessed pundits who trade deep-cut titles as a form of social currency half a country away from where I live. Sometimes, my nerdy notetaking during those conversations pays off wonderfully, as it prompted me to catch The Plague as soon as it was available, one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences I’ve had all year — festival or no. Often, it’ll lure me into making time for the kinds of underplayed, subtle-to-a-fault indie dramas I have no personal interest in beyond their value to The Discourse. Again, I acknowledge that it is shameful. I’ll also acknowledge that I had no business watching Mad Bills to Pay in particular, which seems to have spoken to that NYC cinephile crowd specifically because it’s set in The Bronx, a lesser-filmed borough of the city (as opposed to the more often-seen Brooklyn & Manhattan).
Mad Bills to Pay is a summer-bummer indie drama about ill-prepared parents-to-be in The Bronx. It’s a very quiet movie about very loud people, a paradox from the Sean Baker School of Character Studies. Newcomer Juan Collado stars as the 19-year-old Rico, who sells home-mixed cocktails called “Nutcrackers” to people partying on the beach, drawing attention with the constant sales pitch, “Nutties, nutties, nutties, nutties!” A macho brat in a domestic world entirely populated by women, most of his non-“nutties” vocabulary consists of variations of “Babe, babe, babe,” and “Bro, bro, bro” as he whines like a toddler who’s not getting enough attention (or, more often, not getting his way). After getting accustomed to Rico’s daily rounds of video games, bong rips, junk food, and public displays of alcoholism, we’re confronted with the out-of-nowhere revelation that he’s going to be a father, having impregnated the 16-year-old Destiny (fellow first-time actor Destiny Checho). The two children are very obviously not ready to have children of their own, which inspires endless shouting matches as they struggle & fail to assert their maturity to mothers who know better. Those frequent top-volume arguments are in direct contrast with the docudrama filmmaking style, framed with the cold, impartial distance of a security camera. Every single scene is another indication that the parents-to-be should seriously consider adoption or abortion instead of introducing a baby into their volatile relationship, all the way to the very end when it’s far too late. Meanwhile, a seemingly authentic portrait of Dominican American communal life in The Bronx is sketched out in background detail. First-time director Joel Alfonso Vargas delivers a confident, competent version of a kind of festival-circuit movie I always struggle to personally connect with, as my tastes tend to drift towards the more abstracted, dreamlike end of the medium. Since I’ve also failed to connect with recent years’ other festival darlings like Past Lives, Janet Planet, and Aftersun, I’m willing to chalk this one up to the go-to critical quality markers like Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint just not being my thing. Your own mileage may vary, especially if you have any affinity for day-drinking in The Bronx.
Between watching the infinite sequels to The Mummy & The Invisible Man and a few one-off Gothic horrors like 13 Ghosts and The Undying Monster, I’ve seen a lot of classic horror relics this month, mostly running from the 1930s through the early 1960s. There may be more exciting, grotesque monstrosities to be found in later decades like the splatter-fest 1980s or the neon-bathed horrors of the now, but there’s something about the black-and-white scare pictures of old that call to me every Halloween season. It’s purely a matter of decor. I love spending time in the old dark houses, spooky castles, and foggy moors of the classic horror milieu, the thicker the artificial fog the better. It’s simply the most Halloween-appropriate set decoration you can find in cinema, alternating between sound-stage surrealism and department-store deadstock. That’s at least what was on my mind while watching the 1957 vampire picture El Vampiro, which I purchased on DVD while traveling in Mexico. El Vampiro doesn’t achieve anything you haven’t seen before in a hundred other vampire pictures; it comfortably sits at the exact midpoint between first-wave Universal Monster movies and their later Hammer Horror echoes. And yet, because it’s so over-decorated with Spirit Halloween Store set decor, it’s exceptionally well suited to Halloween season programming. It’s the kind of movie where every surface is veiled behind a thick layer of cobwebs regardless of whether someone’s “living” in the space, with servants on staff. Every single object in the frame is stubbornly ooky-spooky, regardless of logic or necessity, which is exactly how horror cinema should be decorated this time year.
It’s not entirely fair to say El Vampiro lacks narrative or imagistic innovation. The film is often credited for a couple major contributions to the classic horror canon. Mainly, its financial success kickstarted the Mexican horror cinema boom of the 1960s that led to more memorably outlandish works like The Brainiac & Santos vs The Vampire Women. More improbably, it’s also credited for being the first vampire picture to feature the stereotypical elongated canine fangs, as the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula was fangless and the fanged Christopher Lee version had not yet materialized. Surprisingly, the film’s titular vampiro is not a version of Count Dracula, but rather an entirely new bloodsucking gentleghoul. Germán Robles stars as Count Lavud (Conde Karol de Lavud, to be more accurate), a Dracula Type who keeps his coffin in a spooky old Mexican estate, adorned with the aforementioned cobwebs. His screen presence is clearly inspired by the iconic Lugosi version of Dracula, as he hides his lower face under a lifted cape with the same dramatic mannerisms, inviting bright studio lights to illuminate his hypnotically handsome eyes. Like all versions of Dracula (and its copyright-infringing Nosferatu offshoots), his monstrous motivations are also mostly a matter of real estate: in this case wooing ownership of his new spooky castle abode away from a grieving niece who doesn’t yet know she was born into a vampire bloodline. All other traditional vampire lore is present here too. The vamps don’t appear in mirrors; they’re ill at the sight of a crucifix; they sleep through daylight in coffins lined with their home soil; etc. Amusingly, Lavud also frequently transforms into a flapping rubber bat that flies around the haunted house set in an effect you’d more likely see in Bela Lugosi’s poverty row pictures like Devil Bat or Return of the Vampire than anything produced by a major studio like Universal.
If there’s any notable variation on the old school vampire picture here, it’s in the way women play a central role in the story. Not only is most of the runtime ceded to the distraught niece’s gradual realization that she was born to a vampire clan, but her surviving aunt is a Count Lavud convert who works on the bloodsucker’s evil behalf while he lurks in the shadows offscreen. Every time Aunt Eloise (Carmen Montejo) appears, she’s accompanied by a howling wind that guarantees her a dramatic entrance, even if most of her job is gaslighting her niece into sticking around on a series of domestic sets fit for a televised soap opera. While those two women’s quiet power struggle takes up most of the runtime, however, Germán Robles is very clearly the star of the picture. After transforming into a bat and draining a sleeping woman of her blood beneath the opening credits, he then disappears until about halfway into the film, when he re-emerges from his coffin to great musical fanfare and makes direct, hypnotic eye contact with the audience. It’s Robles’s commanding screen presence as the handsome, clean-shaven vampire that is mostly credited for the film’s success, as well as the success of the many Mexican horror cheapies that followed in his wake. After reprising the Count Lavud role a year later in The Vampire’s Coffin, Robles continued to ride that wave in subsequent horror novelties like The Castle of the Monsters, The Blood of Nostradamus, and even my beloved The Brainiac. From the few titles I’ve seen in that 1960s Mexican horror wave (mostly ones starring world-famous luchador Santo), El Vampiro‘s garish sense of Halloween season decor also continued in the films to follow. It makes for a wonderfully spooky atmosphere, especially recommended if you’ve already exhausted all of the Universal & Hammer titles that routinely get a lot more international attention this time of year.
Welcome to Episode #250 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of sci-fi horror relics inspired by the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man, starting with James Whale’s classic 1933 adaptation for Universal, starring Claude Rains.
33:22 The Invisible Man (1933) 47:31 Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) 1:01:15 The Invisible Man vs The Human Fly (1957) 1:15:43 The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962)
Based on the commemorative toys, posters, and Blu-ray box sets that group him in with the rest of the riff raff, you might forget that The Gill-man is a latecomer addition to the Universal Monsters brand. 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon was made decades after the respective premieres of Universal’s A-Lister monsters Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man, who had already been wrung dry for all they were worth in now-forgotten sequels like Son of Dracula and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man long before The Gill-man first emerged. The initial 1930s run of the Universal Monsters brand under studio executive Carl Laemmle Jr. were all earnestly committed to a Gothic, German Expressionist mood that birthed some of the greatest horror iconography in the history of Hollywood filmmaking. Then, a successful repertory run for those pictures in the 1940s convinced the studio that there was more money to be made, especially among younger audiences, so the same monsters were rushed out (with their new friend The Wolf Man in tow) in a flood of by-the-numbers sequels aimed directly at children. By the 1950s, that second wave of Universal horror titles had long crested, detectable only in the scummy sea foam of the Famous Monsters’ team-ups with the comedy duo Abbott & Costello. It was during that post-boom lull that the studio gave life to The Gill-man, cashing in on an entirely different genre’s newfound popularity.
From the very first minute of Creature of the Black Lagoon, it’s immediately clear that the film was produced for its commercial value as Atomic Age sci-fi, not as a conscious contribution to Universal Monsters tradition. The film opens with a stereotypically 50s sci-fi monologue about the evolution of living organisms emerging from the sea to breathe air and walk on land, suggesting that the next logical evolutionary step would be for humanity to mutate again, adapting to life in outer space. Before we can leave this oxygenated prison planet behind to embrace our inevitable intergalactic future, however, we must take a step back to investigate how we got here. The Gill-man is a living, swimming specimen of the missing link between us and our amphibious forefathers: half-man/half-fish. He is discovered during an archeological dig in the upper Amazon, led by scientists who expect only to find ancient Gill-man bones in the mud beneath the Amazon River. As they scuba dive in The Gill-man’s home waters, he swims just outside their sight & reach, studying them in return (and demonstrating a particular fascination with the fashionably swimsuited Julie Adams). Once his presence is discovered, the scientists debate whether to shoot The Gill-man with cameras or with a harpoon, whether to treat him like a fellow man or like the catch of the day. Some see a monster, while the more enlightened see a mirror.
Universal was smart to hire Jack Arnold to direct The Gill-man’s debut, as other Arnold titles like The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Space Children, and It Came from Outer Space would go on to rank among the best that Atomic Age sci-fi had to offer. They were also smart to cash in on the 3D filmmaking craze of that era, allowing Arnold’s crew to perfect underwater 3D filmmaking months (months!) before James Cameron was even born. As gorgeous as the lengthy sequences of The Gill-man stalking his human prey underwater can be, however, the true wonder of the film is the creature’s design, the best of Universal’s monster creations since Jack Pierce transformed Boris Karloff into Frankenstein(‘s monster). Disney animator Milicent Patrick sketched a perfect aquatic-horror figure in The Gill-man, and her design remained remarkably intact as it came to life as the rubber-suited monster we see onscreen. The Gill-man was portrayed by two different actors depending on where he staged his attacks (Ricou Browning in the water, Ben Chapman on the land), alternating between lumbering beast and balletic swim-dancer. The rhythms & beats of the story are typical to Atomic Age creature features of its kind, but it’s the elegance of The Gill-man’s look and his underwater movements that earned him a place among the other grotesque icons of the Universal Monsters brand.
If The Gill-man shares anything in common with the elder statesman monsters of the Universal horror canon, it’s that he was also dragged back out of the water for needless cash-in sequels. Both 1955’s Revenge of the Creature and 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us spend the first half of their runtimes swimming in the exact waters of the original Black Lagoon, with scientists hunting the poor fish beast until he finally lashes out for vengeance . . . again & again. Only, in the respective second halves of those films’ ropey plots, the creature is relocated to new, novel locales so he can expand the scope of his out-of-water mayhem. In Revenge of the Creature, he’s trapped in a Sea World-style amusement park in Miami for public display, which inevitably leads to a creature-feature version of Blackfish in which one of the captive fish(men) gets violent revenge on his aquarium prison guards. The Creature Walks Among Us then returns to The Gill-man’s Atomic Age beginnings, with scientists forcibly mutating him into an air-breathing, clothes-wearing half-man as an experiment to determine whether humanity can rapidly adapt to living in outer space. Overall, neither sequels is especially essential or even memorable, but they do offer some novelty in depicting The Gill-man flipping cars and invading suburban homes instead of sinking boats. They also firmly establish the poor creature’s status as Universal’s most empathetic monster icon. Over the course of three films, The Gill-man is put through even more needless, inhuman suffering than Frankenstein’s creature. He’s hunted, drugged, harpooned, set on fire, imprisoned, forced to work as an underwater circus act, and then, as the final indignity, they make him wear pants. The only way it could’ve been worse is if they made him work a desk job.
The Gill-man’s sci-fi genre markers are not a total anomaly within the Universal Monsters canon. If nothing else, their adapted figures of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, and The Invisible Man helped define what the mad scientist trope would come to look like in cinema instead of on the page. It’s just that The Gill-man arrived so late to the party that his outings feel entirely separate from the heavily crossed-over run of Universal Monster sequels that preceded them by a decade or two. Truly, the only reason that The Gill-man is so heavily featured in the Universal Monsters branding is because he looks really, really cool. The visual stylings of Milicent Patrick’s creature design and the underwater camerawork of Jack Arnold’s second unit are what makes him such an enduring sci-fi horror figure despite being so obviously dated to 1950s sci-fi in particular. Creature from the Black Lagoon is an all-timer creature feature that’s very much rooted in its time.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss a double feature of high-style Gothic horror stories: John Brahm’s The Undying Monster (1942) and William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960).
Welcome to Episode #249 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss all things Toxie, the first superhero from New Jersey.
0:00 Welcome 05:50 Troma 19:50 The Toxic Avenger (1984, 2025) 1:11:50 The Toxic Avenger II-IV (1989-2000)
The 36th annual New Orleans Film Festival will be staged all across the city next week, hitting local venues like The CAC, The Broad, and both locations of The Prytania from October 23rd through the 27th (with virtual selections streaming through November 2nd). Usually, I recap highlights from the festival after it’s already concluded, but this year I’ve got a preview of a few selections from the program before they screen in person. The five titles listed below are movies worth seeking out during the festival, especially if you’re interested in catching smaller releases that won’t get the same wide theatrical distribution as NOFF’s flashier local premieres for new films by Rian Johnson, Bradley Cooper, Nia DaCosta, Noah Baumbach, and the like. It’s a rare chance to see them on a big screen with a packed, lively audience, which is the beauty of the local film fest experience.
I hope to catch more of what the festival has to offer in-person myself next week, with more reviews to come. I’ll also be joined by frequent podcast guest Bill Arceneaux for our annual festival recap once it’s all over, so there’s plenty more NOFF coverage to look forward to. In the meantime, here are a few select titles worth your time & attention, along with the corresponding venues & showtimes for their screenings. See you there!
We Are Pat
You might not expect that a three-decade old SNL sketch would be worthy of its own feature-length documentary, but the Julia Sweeney character Pat! proves to be a surprisingly rich cinematic subject precisely because it’s out of step with modern culture. Rowan Haber makes their directorial feature debut picking at the complicated legacy of vintage It’s Pat! sketches, in which the titular recurring character baffles everyone they meet by not conforming to an easily definable gender identity. Pat is more gender ambiguous than gender nonbinary, but they still offered some shred of representation for that specific queer community on mainstream television at a time when few others could be found anywhere in the wider public sphere. At the same time, the sketches’ punchlines often rely on a point-and-laugh derision of Pat as a freak of nature because they cannot be immediately categorized as a single gender based on traditional cultural markers, driving everyone in their immediate vicinity insane. A nonbinary artist who works almost exclusively in a community of trans collaborators, Haber uses this project as an opportunity to dwell in the tension between a childhood fascination with Pat as a mirror to their own burgeoning identity and an adult understanding of Pat as a public act of transphobic bullying. It’s the kind of movie that will admit in a single breath that, yes, Pat is a transphobic joke and, yes, Pat can also be very funny.
We Are Pat shamelessly commits a couple major modern-doc filmmaking sins (mainly, dragging the director and social media posts onscreen instead of sticking to the subject at hand), but it mostly gets away with it out of discourse-hijacking chutzpah. Haber assembles an impressive range of talking-head commentators on the Pat! phenomenon, ranging from gender-nonconforming indie musician JD Samson (who has no direct association with SNL or the larger comedy scene) to recent nonbinary SNL cast member Molly Kearney to Julia Sweeney herself, who extrapolates on how Pat helped her express frustrations with the social limitations of her own public gender expression. More importantly, they also assemble a writer’s room of trans & nonbinary comedians to write new, politically savvy Pat sketches that undo the harm of It’s Pat!‘s most egregious punchlines. The resulting sketch comedy that’s staged after those writing sessions is not especially funny, but the roundtable discussions of how to modernize Pat for a more expansive understanding of gender leads to fruitful discussions that help save the movie from becoming a simple I Love the 90s-style nostalgia fest. We Are Pat doesn’t attempt to reclaim Pat! as a gender-nonconforming queer icon so much as it uses Pat as an excuse to open a huge can of pop-culture worms just to watch them squirm. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 5:15pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
Butthole Surfers: The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt
Speaking of cultural relics that peaked in the 90s, NOFF will also include a screening of a new Butthole Surfers documentary, adorably subtitled The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt. The hole truth be told, I never really got the Butthole Surfers outside their one alt-radio hit “Pepper,” which is an undeniable Gen-X earworm. The musicianship on their records is impressive in an athletic sense, with complicated guitar riffs and punishing tribal drum patterns formulating a new kind of abrasive noise rock in a time when most underground music was a more simplistic, sped-up version of hardcore punk. I just could never find an in as a fan, an album that could be enjoyed from start to end. That is, until I saw them perform in a tent at Voodoo Fest sometime in the aughts, where their nonstop aural assault was matched with the bad-acid-trip visuals of film projectors, go-go-dancers, and clashing strobes. I finally understood the band’s appeal as a kind of circus side show after that performance, and this new documentary explains how that stage craft was constructed one component at a time. Butthole Surfers started as a few bored teenagers in Texan suburbia, naming themselves after an off-the-cuff quip that their brand of abrasive noise rock “sounds like surf music;” “Yeah, butthole surf music.” As they gradually added more musicians, light show technicians, and drugged-out stage performers, they toured the globe and crossed paths with people as famous as Richard Linklater, Johnny Depp, RuPaul, and their one-sided nemeses R.E.M., each of whom are featured in their own standalone anecdotes among testimony about their musical greatness from bands who I do regularly listen to: Fugazi, Melvins, Meat Puppets, Minutemen, etc.
Freaked! co-director Tom Stern breaks up the visual monotony of these talking-head testimonials by matching the band’s multimedia approach in his filmmaking style. The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt is a playful mishmash of stop-motion, crude zine animation, Crank Yankers-reminiscent puppetry, and warped VHS psychedelia, illustrating the band’s wilder, druggier exploits from the days before they could be captured on cellphone video. Like most party bands who continue nihilistic drug use past their early 20s, the vibe among members sours the longer the Butthole Surfers soldier on, and much of the back half of their story is mired in the hurt feelings between core contributors Gibby Haynes & Paul Leary, giving them room to grieve what’s been lost in their once-vibrant friendship. That getting-in-touch-with-your-feelings section of the third act might surprise longtime Butthole Surfers fans who fell in love with the band for mixing overly complicated noise rock with pre-recorded farts & burps, but hey, being a perpetually stoned, sarcastic prankster gets tiring after a while. Speaking of which, this film completes the unofficial trilogy of this year’s documentaries on the gods of sarcastic rock ‘n’ roll, after similar treatments for Pavement & DEVO. It’s time to place bets on whether the next one will be about Ween, The Dead Milkmen, or dark-horse choice (and apparently former Butthole Surfers collaborators) Bongwater. Screening Sun, Oct 26th, 6:45pm @ The Broad Theater
Move Ya Body: The Birth of House
For a documentary profile of a less scatological pop music phenomenon, check out Move Ya Body: The Birth of House, which presents an oral history of the early house music scene in 1980s Chicago. Much like with Butthole Surfers, I’ve always found house to be an especially difficult musical avenue to fully explore, since it’s a movement mostly built off DJ sets and mixtapes instead of a canon of must-listen albums. Move Ya Body doesn’t offer much of an explainer on the core texts to seek out when first getting into house, outside of its focus on the DJs signed to the Chicago-based D.I.Y. label Trax Records. Instead of getting nerdy about cataloging every notable track & DJ in the scene, it mostly digs into the cultural context of the racist & homophobic era that birthed the movement as a flashpoint of Black, queer political opposition. That story starts with the Disco Sucks! phenomenon, which peaked at a “Disco Demolition Night” rally in which a mostly white rock ‘n’ roll audience smashed & burned disco records on a Chicago baseball field before being dispersed by the cops, effectively turning into a race riot in the streets outside. The story eventually ends with the disco offshoot of house music becoming internationally popular due to the appropriation of the sound by major-label artists like Madonna, leading to the same white audiences joining in on the fun once it proved profitable. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least a tale as old as America.
Move Ya Body features some stock footage and dramatic recreations of nightclub life in 1980s Chicago, but it’s overall much more of a sit-down interview presentation than the Pat! or Butthole Surfers docs. The entire point of the picture is to offer the sidelined DJs of Trax’s early days to tell their side of the story after being overshadowed by major-label artists like Madonna & Beyoncé in the global exportation of house. It’s a story with clear heroes & villains too, not just a vague gesture toward the broad concept of Black queer joy as a form of political resistance. At the very least, the looming figure of Screamin’ Rachael emerges as a perfectly loathsome heel, self-proclaiming herself to be The Queen of House despite only being included in early recordings as a hired hand. It would be like if Deborah Harry continually claimed to be the Queen of Hip-Hop for her vocals on “Rapture.” She’s part of the story but miles from the center of it, and so her shameless self-aggrandizing as a white woman who happened to be invited to the party crosses a line that affords the movie some genuine dramatic tension (despite its images mostly being restricted to people sitting in chairs). Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 8:45pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center
Your Own Flavor
One of the highlight shorts blocks featured at this year’s NOFF is titled “Body Horror Shorts: Picking Scabs”, commemorating the festival’s proximity to Halloween. Within that collection, I found a subcategory of short films about the bodily embarrassments of sex & dating, which play more like comedy sketches about the follies of hookup culture than genuine body horror. The animated shorts Caries and Mambo No.2 fixate on the embarrassments of inopportune bowel movements and the stink of oral bacteria when would-be lovers are trying to get into the mood, and the standout short of the bunch, Your Own Flavor, goes a step further to make the acting of hooking up itself to be a source of grotesque horror. After being stood up on a date, a young twentysomething is lured into buying ice cream from a rolling-cart vendor in a public park. That vendor is Chompers, a magical hand puppet who owns & operates Ice Guys ice cream. Chompers uses some of his vaguely defined puppet magic to cheer up the jilted lover with a song & dance routine about how she will one day prove to be someone’s favorite flavor of ice cream, making the temporary embarrassments of online dating worthwhile. Then, Chompers’s demeanor takes a nasty turn, as all (n)ice guys’ temperaments inevitably do. In short, it’s a Wonder Showzen update for the Tinder era.
The brief runtime of a 10-minute short film typically demands a simple set-up and punchline structure, which Your Own Flavor satisfies by making sure its punchline hits hard and hits funny. It’s got a bright, cartoonish visual panache to it as well, especially in its follow-the-bouncing-ball singalong sequence, set against a handmade, 2D cardboard ice cream factory backdrop. Not all of the shorts included in that “Body Horror” block satisfy the “horror” portion of the descriptor, but they consistently deliver on the gross-out gags associated with the genre, appealing to audiences who miss getting stoned after midnight to peak-era Adult Swim. Within that gross-out alt-comedy context, Your Own Flavor is a standout. Screening Sat, Oct 25th, 9:00pm @ The Contemporary Arts Center (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
West of Greatness: The Story of the Weswego Muscle Boys
Of course, one of the major advantages of going to a local film festival is getting to see local films, so it’s my duty to recommend at least one selection from the program’s “Made in Louisiana” category. The narrative feature West of Greatness: The Story of the Westwego Muscle Boys is hyper local New Orleans cinéma verité, as if someone hired Sean Baker to direct a TV spot for a Westwego gym. It’s the story of two scrawny West Bankers who enter a bodybuilding competition despite their cartoonishly nerdy physiques. One is an aspiring actor who hopes the prize money will fund an escape from LA for a brighter future in L.A., while the other hopes it will pay to move out of his abusive home with his sibling in tow. Both are followed by a fictional documentary crew, and they become unlikely friends in the months leading up to the competition, mostly because they’re the only rail-thin nerds training in a gym packed to the walls with legitimate muscle boys.
West of Greatness is endearing enough as a hopeless underdog sports story, but its real achievement is in its verisimilitude. Director Jared LaRue and crew staged a real-life local bodybuilding competition to stand in for the fictional Greatest Gains competition of the narrative, so that all periphery players afford the low-budget production some impressive authenticity. The mise-en-scène’s gym rituals, protein shakes, posing coaches, and baby-faced bros bulk up the credibility of the documentary format and open the story up to larger themes of Alpha Male cultural trends outside the tiny lives of its scrawny leads. There’s also a semi-documentary aspect to those actors’ physical progress, pulling some solid sports-movie pathos out of the transformations of their bodies from string beans to disconcertingly jacked string beans. It’s a remarkably ambitious project given the obvious limitations of its budget, especially in its tension between manufactured drama and documented reality. Screening Fri, Oct 24th, 7:45pm @ Prytania Theatre & Mon, Oct 27th, 8:00pm @ The Broad Theater (and streaming online from Oct 23-Nov 2)
It may just be a marketing term coined by fans, but the existence of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” brand suggests that there must also be a Famous Monsters B-List. Every celebrity industry has its own power-rankings hierarchy, with public-figure colleagues competing amongst themselves for job opportunities and name recognition. Within Universal’s early horror successes from the 1930s through the 1950s, the C-List is easy to define, as it’s mostly made up of semi-literary characters who get excluded from the nostalgic posters and action figures celebrating the brand: Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, the bitchy little freaks Lugosi & Karloff play in The Black Cat, etc. Differentiating the B-List from the A-List is more of a case-by-case judgement call. To me, the official roster of Universal’s Famous Monsters can be cleanly split in half. The A-List celebrity monsters are Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. They’re the ones who most often cross-pollinate each other’s sequels, and they’re the ones whose likeness you’re most likely to see on generic Halloween decorations year after year. That leaves The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon as B-List celebrity monsters, the ones whose numerous sequels and knockoff plastic masks collect dust on the shelf while the A-List monsters get to run wild in the streets every October into perpetuity.
The most curious case of B-List monster celebrity has got to be The Mummy, since his first appearance in the lineup immediately followed the success of Universal’s Frankenstein & Dracula, a decade before The Wolf Man. The problem is that the poor walking corpse spent his entire career following Frankenstein & Dracula’s heavy footsteps, never truly becoming his own thing. 1932’s The Mummy was penned by John L. Balderson, who is most famous for writing the 1924 stage play version of Dracula that starred Bela Lugosi and was eventually adapted to the screen by Tod Browning, kicking off the Universal Monsters brand. Balderson was seemingly going through the motions in his secondary contribution to the canon, writing yet another story of a foreign-born romantic ghoul who uses his evil powers of hypnosis to woo a young woman he believes to be the reincarnation of his one true love. Only, that archetype is instead played here by Lugosi’s career-long professional rival Boris Karloff, whose monstrous figure is most closely associated with Frankenstein’s monster, further minimizing The Mummy as a Famous Monsters footnote. Stuck between the lecherous behavior of one A-List Famous Monster and the walking-corpse physicality of another, The Mummy was destined to be relegated to the horror celebrity B-List, to the point where his initial onscreen outing is often confused for details from its various sequels & spoofs.
The Mummy pictured in the Universal Monsters branding never appears onscreen in 1932’s The Mummy; that’s a mummy of a different name. At the start of the picture, Karloff’s mummified Egyptian sorcerer Imhotep does appear wrinkled & bandaged as another monster creation from legendary make-up artist Jack Pierce, who also crafted the actor’s more famous look in Frankenstein. We just never see him moving outside the confines of his sarcophagus while wearing that get-up. After dismissing ancient curses warning against it as Egyptian “mumbo jumbo,” some naive archeologists invade Imhotep’s tomb to pilfer cultural artifacts for career-making museum exhibits, mistakenly activating the long-dormant loverboy’s corpse by reading the forbidden scrolls he was buried with aloud. Once awakened, Imhotep immediately leaves his tomb & rags behind to work on reclaiming his lost love through ancient magic spells, transforming from a dried up corpse to a mildly disconcerting gentleman with sun-damaged skin and glowing, hypnotic eyes. We never get to witness this bodily transformation, nor is there any shot of Karloff schlepping around in the famous mummy rags before putting on a more respectable fez-and-robe ensemble. The mummy’s walk out of his tomb is left mostly to the audience’s imagination, as the movie is more of a classy mood-setter than it is a proper creature feature. It leaves that cheap business to its many sequels, headlined by an entirely different mummy.
Although its many sequels frequently repurpose footage from the flashbacks to the undead Imhotep’s days as a living priest and self-proclaimed King of the Gods, they immediately swap him out for a new mummy named Kharis. Since the first of Universal’s Mummy films only has a couple shots of its titular monster in the iconic bandages, the sequels have to start over and dream up something more recognizable (i.e., more marketable) without relying on the familiarity of Boris Karloff’s mug. Weirdly, that leaves the 1940 follow-up The Mummy’s Hand both more archetypal and lesser seen than the original film it was tasked to rework. Getting ahead of the next decade’s trend of pairing Universal’s Famous Monsters with Abbott & Costello, The Mummy’s Hand already stars two over-their-heads Brooklyn goofballs who get into a scrape with the famous monster. The out-of-place American archeologists are desperate for a big score while shopping the markets of Egypt, where they again ignore locals’ warnings & curses and pry open the tomb of a long-dormant mummy, in this case Kharis. Again, that mummy is liberated from his sarcophagus and immediately seeks to reconnect with his supposedly reincarnated soul mate, but this time he never ditches the rags. This is where the image of The Mummy skulking around in full uniform is born, finally becoming his own thing (even if actor Tom Tyler plays him like Karloff’s Frankenstein with a bum leg).
Once Universal found a mummy they could market in Kharis, the rest of the sequels can only work to boost his stats to match the more formidable figures of Dracula, Frankenstein, and newcomer hotshot The Wolf Man. 1942’s The Mummy’s Tomb further legitimizes The Mummy by dressing up Lon Chaney, Jr. in the make-up for an otherwise pointless sequel, which is essential to the brand (see also: Son of Dracula, The Ghost of Frankenstein, and the many appearances of Lawrence Talbot, a.k.a. The Wolf Man). Then, it proceeds to delegitimize the Mummy by further developing him into a blurry photocopy of Frankenstein’s monster; Kharis giveth, Kharis taketh away. Not only does Kharis start to carry around his unconscious, reincarnated loves with the exact posture of Karloff’s Frankenstein, but he’s also brought to a fiery end by an angry mob at the film’s climax, directly alluding to James Whale’s visual iconography. 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost continues that work by finally giving Kharis an official Bride of Mummy counterpart, complete with the white streaks of hair at the temples in the unmistakable style of Elsa Lanchester. At this point in the series, the perils of reckless archeology are no longer a concern. Once Kharis reaches American soil in Tomb & Ghost, the series fixates on red-blooded American men protecting their women from the corrupting forces of seductive foreigners. The most impressive thing about Ghost is that it commits to the bit in a shocker ending, finally allowing The Mummy to successfully steal away his reincarnated love, sinking into the swamp with her dangling in his arms as her body rapidly ages to close their centuries-scale age gap in mere seconds.
There’s some incredibly shameless runtime padding in The Mummy’s Tomb, starting off an hour-long sequel with over ten minutes of “Previously on . . .” recapping before setting The Mummy loose on American soil. It’s an instructive reminder that these sequels were produced before the invention of home video and, subsequently, VHS rental stores. Since audiences couldn’t easily rewatch a classic movie on a whim, the studios would just remake that same movie again and again to scratch that itch, as a matter of routine. The later Mummy sequels have no interest in being their own thing; they just take the same old Mummy out for a walk. Even the choice to relocate Kharis to Cajun swamp country in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse affords the series little novelty outside the amusement of hearing Old Hollywood’s goofy misinterpretations of the Cajun-French accent. The Mummy started as Egyptian Dracula in his first outing. Then, he gradually, improbably became New England Frankenstein. For his last trick, he emerges as Cajun Swamp Thing. He’s a true international playboy, seducing a new woman at each stop along the way, including a choice to leave The Bride of Mummy behind here in favor of a new The Mummy’s Princess love interest (future Folgers Coffee spokeswoman Virginia Christie, who looks incredibly hip here with some Bettie Page bangs). Even the novelty of seeing The Mummy trudge along in a swampy locale isn’t especially distinct to this famous monster, though, considering that Lon Chaney, Jr. had already appeared there in the previous year’s Son of Dracula (under the hilarious pseudonym Count Alucard). That’s not even getting into the obvious concerns of what would happen if you dragged your dried-out mummy through a humid swamp. The whole enterprise is one big afterthought.
Of course, the final indignity for all of Universal’s Famous Monsters is to officially sanction Lou Costello’s buffoonery, which The Mummy was tasked to do in 1955’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. It’s here that the Mummy, forever following in Frankenstein & Dracula’s footsteps, has finally Made It. Even so, he’s way late to the party, taking his turn with the comedy duo after they already met Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll & Mister Hyde, and “The Killer, Boris Karloff” in similarly titled comedies. Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was the very last of the comedians’ onscreen run-ins with Universal’s Famous Monsters, as it also marked the end of their overall contract with Universal Pictures. There are a few stray laughs scattered throughout the picture—mostly catering to fans of “mummy”/”mommy” puns—but the bit had very obviously been exhausted before The Mummy’s number was called, and it feels like just as much of a tired exercise as proper Mummy sequels like The Mummy’s Curse. None of the later Mummy films are especially great, but they are all mercifully short, and by the time you meet up with anyone for the sixth or seventh time they start to become your friend, so it’s fun to see him goof around in this final outing. It’s just that The Mummy is more like your work friend, whereas Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man are true buds you look forward to seeing on the weekend.
Like most horror franchises that stumble past their obvious expiration date, The Mummy’s initial outing is a great film in its own right, and its numerous, goofy follow-ups are only made endearing by their familiarity and nostalgic value. There’s nothing iconic about The Mummy’s lore, really. His tana-leaves medicine regimen, crime-scene contaminating mold, and smoky flashback pool have all been forgotten to time, as opposed to other Universal-specific details like Dracula’s hypnotic hand gestures or the bolts on Frankenstein’s neck. The Famous Monsters roster would feel thin & incomplete without him, but he’s mostly a background player. The biggest claim to modern fame for The Mummy is that its 1999 remake is by far the most success Universal has had in its attempts to revitalize its Famous Monsters brand for new generations. It succeeded where fellow studio titles like Renfield, Van Helsing, and Dracula Untold have failed. Even so, that accomplishment only further cements the original Mummy in a B-List status. When someone references the movie The Mummy in conversation, most people immediately picture Brendan Fraser, not Boris Karloff. The audience who remembers any of the Kharis titles in the series—Hand, Tomb, Ghost, Curse—is shrinking every year, despite that version of the monster being the one that appears on all of the throwback posters & Funko Pop boxes. Meanwhile, cinematic references to Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man immediately conjure the likeness of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, and Lon Chaney, Jr., which is what makes them official Famous Monster A-Listers. Everyone else is just lucky to be on the guest list.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the alien-invasion conspiracy comedy Save the Green Planet! (2003), recently remade by Yorgos Lanthimos.
Swampflix 