Welcome to Episode #55 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our fifty-fifth episode, we continue our recent 90s nostalgia streak as Brandon & Britnee discuss the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids franchise. Also, Brandon makes Britnee watch the big-bug monster movie Them! (1954) for the first time. Enjoy!
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-Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas
Every month one of us makes the rest of the crew watch a movie they’ve never seen before & we discuss it afterwards. This month Boomer made Brandon , Alli, and Britnee watch Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010).
Boomer: Cards on the table: Under the Red Hood is my favorite Batman movie. Obviously I prefer it over Zack Snyder’s take on the character, but I also find it superior to both Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan’s respective series, although there are elements of both that work well and that I quite enjoy. This may not be my favorite version of Batman (that honor always has been and presumably forever shall be the Bats of Batman: The Animated Series), but it’s the best self-contained feature that both feels like a true standalone while also addressing the character’s long history. There’s no origin story, no belabored backstory showing how and why Bruce Wayne came to be the Batman, no attempts to make the character feel like he fits in a modern context or make the gadgets and gizmos seem “realistic,” and no damned pearls in an alley (note, even Batman v Superman did this, two years after the linked video pointed out that it was a cliche). I said it two years ago and I’ll say it again: Batman has the second most famous origin story in the world, surpassed only by the birth of Christ; we don’t need to see it on screen ever again. Instead, this film jumps in at a point in time pretty far into the detective’s career.
Under the Red Hood opens in Sarajevo, where The Joker (John DiMaggio playing against type) has savagely beaten Jason Todd (Jensen Ackles), the second of Batman’s sidekicks/apprentices to bear the codename “Robin,” nearly to death with a crowbar. Batman (Bruce Greenwood) races to the scene, but arrives too late, as a bomb destroys the warehouse in which Jason was left behind. Years later, The Joker is safely locked away and the majority of Gotham City’s criminal element reports to the Black Mask (Wade Wilson), but the leaders of various crime families are confronted by a new player: The Red Hood. The Hood has knocked off several of the families’ top players to demonstrate his prowess, and his hijacking of a major weapon brings him to the attention of Batman and Dick Grayson/Nightwing (Neil Patrick Harris), the first Robin. Batman realizes early on that The Red Hood knows his true identity and is haunted by his past mistakes and failures, the worst of which was his inability to save Jason. The crime war between Red Hood and Black Mask escalates to the point that the Mask is so desperate he breaks The Joker out to take down his rival, leading to a confrontation that forces Batman to confront his mistakes, morality, and the nature of his war on crime.
This is a grim story, with a bleak ending that gives me chills every time. I’ll not bother with the spoiler alert as this movie is over ten years old and the comic on which it was based was published five years before that, and the film itself does little to disguise the reveal that The Red Hood is, in fact, Jason. This is a departure from the comic, which preserved this mystery for as long as possible, which makes for a richer story as it allows for a deeper rumination on the ways that devotion to an absolute moral code can have unforeseen consequences, and how a bad seed can take root in the soul despite the best attempts to provide a moral compass. As Bruce says in one of his introspective moments, the responsibility for the life and death of Jason Todd falls on his shoulders: “My partner. My soldier. My fault.” How Jason came to be The Red Hood and his motivations are instead the crux of the film’s mystery, and it’s all the more poignant for it. I find myself thinking about the emotional gut punch of the final scene fairly frequently: after the apparent death of Jason (again), violently and pointlessly, we return to the cave and a memory of Jason’s first day as Robin, as he excitedly dashes around with the kind of effortless exuberance that only a child can have, before declaring that it’s the “best day of [his] life.” And we fade out on that image of the hopeful, blindingly optimistic beginning of a journey that we as the audience have just seen come to a brutal, bitterly violent end; it’s a closed, nihilistic loop that gets me every single time.
Comparisons to Winter Soldier were common thirteen years ago when Judd Winick was writing the comic on which the film was based, titled simply Under the Hood. It was a common joke for decades that “no one in comics [stayed] dead except for Bucky (killed in action in 1945, as revealed in Avengers #4 in 1964), Jason Todd (killed in 1988’s Death in the Family storyline by Jim Starlin), and Uncle Ben (killed in the first appearance of Spider-Man, Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962).” Winick started building his mystery in late 2004; in early 2005, Ed Brubaker was helming the fifth volume of Captain America, and he, like Winick, introduced a new enemy who proved to be a long-dead supporting character brought back to life. Both have since been adapted, although 2014’s Captain America: Winter Soldier obviously has the higher profile, being a part of the MCU. In that film, however, directors Anthony and Joe Russo preserved the revelation that The Winter Soldier was Bucky until the end of the second act, although given the fact that Sebastian Stan has a memorable face and comic book fans already knew the identity of The Winter Soldier, your mileage may vary based as to how successful that reveal is. Brandon, given that you’ve seen both films and aren’t really a devotee of superhero comics, which approach do you think works better? My money is on Under the Red Hood, but I can’t quite imagine what it would be like to be a first time viewer of either film without the knowledge that comes from the source material. Is it better to not attempt to preserve the mystery? Do you think that one approach or the other is geared towards a different kind of fan?
Brandon: One of my very favorite aspects of Under the Red Hood was, indeed, that the reveal of Jason’s vigilante resurrection as The Red Hood was not saved for a last-minute shock. In my mind, there wasn’t anyone the Red Hood could have been but Jason that would have been satisfying, considering that the movie opens with a lengthy depiction of his murder at the hands of The Joker. Ebert even coined a name for that scenario in his Glossary of Movie Terms. He describes it as “The Law of Economy of Characters”, writing, “Movie budgets make it impossible for any film to contain unnecessary characters. Therefore, all characters in a movie are necessary to the story— even those who do not seem to be. Sophisticated viewers can use this Law to deduce the identity of a person being kept secret by the movie’s plot. This ‘mystery’ person is always the only character in the move who seems to be otherwise extraneous.” As a direct-to-video, animated feature, Under the Red Hood may have had more freedom to play around with extraneous characters than a megacorporate, every-minute-wasted-is-money-lost production like The Winter Soldier, but it would still be odd to waste so much screentime on Jason’s demise at the top of the film if it weren’t going to become significant to The Red Hood’s identity later.
I’d be lying if I said I could exactly remember how that relates to my reaction to the very similar Bucky reveal in The Winter Soldier, since we reviewed that film over two years and nine MCU entries ago. In our Agents of S.W.A.M.P.F.L.I.X. piece, I only mentioned Bucky once, saying that I had spoiled the mystery of his identity for myself by watching the MCU films late & out of order before we had started the project. I can say, though, that on principle I believe revealing the twist early was the smarter move, to Under the Red Hood’s credit. Ebert’s being a little snobbish when he says “sophisticated” viewers will be the ones to see through this kind of mystery before the reveal; I’d be more likely to use the word “seasoned.” I can’t speak for how shocking the Bucky or Red Hood reveals were in the comics, since those characters had ostensibly been dead for decades in the canon. However, anyone who’s seen more than a few movies, which require a much stricter storytelling economy, should see through the “mystery” almost right away. In a cinematic context, I’d say the Winter Soldier approach of withholding the character’s true identity until as late as possible will likely work best for younger fans who haven’t already puzzled their way through similar mystery plots in other works. By contrast, Under the Red Hood benefits seasoned vets who’ve been there too many times before and are eager to move onto the next story beat.
Part of what’s so wonderful about the early reveal of The Red Hood’s past life as Robin the Boy Wonder 2.0 is that it raises questions instead of answering one. Jason’s death at the start of the film is brutal, with a distinct finality to it. The Joker mercilessly beats the poor boy with a crowbar, splattering PG-13 blood & gore around the room. Jason is then subjected to a close-range bomb explosion, with Batman personally carrying his charred body from the rubble. The movie does a decent job of justifying his choice to reemerge as the Red Hood persona, which is explained to be a communal, anonymous part played by many villains in the past, including The Joker himself. It also uses The Red Hood’s predilection for gun violence (he’s essentially a less “Ain’t I a stinker?” version of Deadpool in tactics & design) to establish the classic vigilante conundrum that plagues most superheroes: How far is too far to keep citizens safe? What really separates these masked fighters from their violent opposition.? The questions that remain, then, are not why Robin 2.0 reemerged as The Red Hood, but how. He was established to be very, very dead— a mystery that confounded Batman himself, one of fiction’s great detectives, to the point that he excavates the unfortunate child’s grave for clues. Answering that question is much more complicated & dramatically fruitful than merely waiting for his hood to be pulled off in a climactic confrontation to reveal a character that other movies have trained us to expect.
In general, I agree with Boomer that more live-action adaptations of the Batman comics could learn from Under the Red Hood’s avoidance of an origin-story narrative in favor of a just-another-episode approach. Still, dropping into this particular scenario in medias res was especially jarring to me. There are not only a near-century of Batman comics I’m unfamiliar with, but now also decades of animated DC movies this entry could have been a part of in series that I would have been completely blind to. The Joker beating Robin to death at the top of the film felt like a “Previously on. . .” catch-up reel. Learning later that the dead Robin was actually the second Boy Wonder in a continued lineage was also news to me, since it has yet to come up in the live-action adaptations despite being what I assume is common knowledge to well-read comic book folks. In one way, constantly resetting the rotary dial back to Batman’s origin story is preventing the character’s live-action movies form moving onto fresh, lesser known storylines like Under the Red Hood’s. At the same time, though, the endless soap opera quality of comic book storytelling risks leaving the uninitiated behind by requiring too much knowledge of decades of backstory to get all viewers on the same page. Britnee, how do you feel about the balance Under the Red Hood strikes in giving comic book fans an opportunity to see something other than Batman’s origin story for a change and catching outsiders up on the info they need to understand its basic plot? Were you more baffled or delighted by being dropped midway into a Batman storyline you were wholly unfamiliar with?
Britnee: I don’t really watch many superhero movies or read many superhero comics (I stay within the Elf Quest realm for the most part), so I’m generally unfamiliar with the storylines of Batman, Superman, Captain America, etc. Straight-to-video animated superhero films like Under the Red Hood have always intimidated me a little, as it seems like they are made strictly for the super-fans. There are no big name actors or any substantial marketing behind them like with the live-action superhero films, so there’s really nothing to drive the non-superhero fans to grab a copy.
Under the Red Hood has disproved my assumptions of animated straight-to-video superhero films. It was fantastic! Initially, I felt like I was a little late to the party as the beginning of the film was so fast paced, but it turns out that I wasn’t. I got caught up in trying to figure everything out within the first 5 minutes because I assumed that this was specifically made for those with intense Batman knowledge, but it turns out that the beginning of the film would eventually be thoroughly explained later on. All I needed was a little patience. The film didn’t feel like a dumbed-down version of a Batman story either, as it wasn’t really focused on Batman all that much. This movie was about the origin of Red Hood, so it does offer something exciting to even the biggest Batman fans. It mustn’t have been easy to “get the balance right” *wink to Depeche Mode fans*, so I truly appreciate the thought and work that went into this story.
I love that Red Hood is an antivillain, so his story is much more complex than one of a hero or villain. It’s never obvious which side he’s on or if his next move will be good or bad. The mystery of it all is just so thrilling. Alli, I’m not sure if you’re a Batman fan or not, but do you consider Red Hood to be an antivillain, antihero, villain, or hero? And why?
Alli: I know just enough about Batman to know that I’m not a fan of his persona. I’ll get to that later.
I think of The Red Hood as a hero. I was rooting for him from the very beginning when he commanded that The Black Mask not sell drugs to children. He knew how to better the city of Gotham. He knew how to turn the true criminals against each other and how to control them in general. His plan to save the city was sophisticated, strategic, and effective. In a single crime spree, he totally changed the power structure of Gotham’s criminal element, got major drug lords off the street, and nearly killed The Joker. That’s more than Batman has ever done is his long, long life of “fighting crime.” Jason was a street kid with street-smarts saving his own streets, and he was doing a damn good job of it. The only thing that got in the way was his sentimental, burgeoning on codependent need for his father figure Bruce Wayne to accept his philosophy. Had The Red Hood kept going, crime would be down and there’d be an actual sense of community in this city plagued by extreme class disparity and fear.
On that note, let’s get right down to my dislike of Bruce Wayne. This is a rich, rich guy, rich enough to afford endless gadgets, cars, helicopters, and a literal man cave. Instead of using his money (inherited and presumably acquired through exploitation of underpaid workers) to help end poverty on a mass scale, he just finds an orphaned little boy here and there that just happens to remind him of his younger self, puts the kid in a costume, and trains him to fight crime too. Batman is the neoliberal of superheroes. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of these crooks who have chosen a life of crime are working class folks underpaid by one of Wayne Enterprise’s many ventures. He’s a rich guy who takes to streets he’s not even that familiar with to throw people into a prison system that seems even less effective and ethical than the real life American one. He approaches crime fighting like a man drunk with power playing god, which is probably exactly how the heads of his family before him conducted business. He may refuse to kill people or wield a gun, but that doesn’t mean he’s not also just constantly feeding into the cycle of crime. It’s no shocker to me that this capitalistic, neoliberal masked crusader is squared up against a foe of his own making under the moniker “The Red Hood,” a name that brings to mind “The Red Scare.”
Boomer, I’m going to admit upfront that I only have peripheral knowledge of Batman coming from a childhood of weekend cartoons and an adulthood being friends with comic book nerds. Is my characterization of Batman unfair? Do you think The Red Hood’s plan would have worked?
Boomer: I love this question! Your description pretty perfectly encapsulates my mixed feelings both about Batman as a character and as a cultural icon. It’s interesting to me, however, that you mention weekend cartoons; in my opinion at least, Batman: The Animated Series is the default Batman that I think of and is the best version of the character, even more than in the original comic texts. This is a Batman who was born of a perfect confluence of events: the popularity of a darker, more metatextually introspective Batman of the 1980s embodied by (for better or worse) Frank Miller’s 1986 opus The Dark Knight Returns and Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman theatrical release; the rise of merchandise-driven children’s television programming in the 1980s (think Transformers, G.I. Joe, and Rainbow Brite) after Reagan and his raging hard-on for so-called free-market capitalism abolished the regulations from the 1960s that were intended to decrease commercial interest and increase educational content in children’s programming; and the backlash against this deregulation. In 1990, Congress approved legislation to give TV industry officials an antitrust exemption to permit joint meetings to delineate guidelines on TV violence, confirmed in 1992 (the year that Batman TAS premiered). Violence must be “relevant to the development of character, or the advancement of theme or plot”, while it must not be glamorized, excessive, easily imitated by children, or used merely for shock value. As a result, we ended up with a perfect Batman adaptation, one in which the villains were psychologically complex and they were rarely defeated through violence. Instead, more often than not, Bats dealt with his nemeses through the revolutionary idea of talking to them, understanding their reasons for doing what they do (think of the Mad Hatter or Baby Doll) and talking them down from their activities before ensuring that they got the help they needed, not just breaking mentally ill people’s bones and then sticking them into the prison system.
Contrast this to my least favorite Batman adaptation: The Dark Knight Rises. I despise this movie, although not for the reasons that most people do. I think Batman Begins is good, and The Dark Knight is pretty great, but Rises feels like a personal affront. It came out at the height of the Occupy movement, and the first trailer made it seem like the film was poised to directly address the problem of Bruce’s millions, with Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle giving a pretty great little speech: “You think this [abundance] can last… there’s a storm coming, and you and your friends better batten down the hatches because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” I was pumped for this kind of deconstruction, because this was following a few years after my own realization that, as a character, Batman was kind of the worst. You are absolutely correct that there is something not-quite-right about idolizing a man who is the “World’s Greatest Detective” but also has a child’s understanding of crime and criminality. The question of why so much low-level crime exists (that is to say, economic inequality and the often insurmountable barriers to any kind of upward mobility) is rarely addressed in any kind of media, but Batman became a particularly problematic fave as I got older and became more socially aware. His adventures are, after all, those of a wealthy-beyond-measure man who takes to the streets and beats up poor people instead of, as Alli notes, investing in infrastructure or addressing the ways that intense stratification of wealth and the accumulation of great wealth in the hands of the elite are the primary factors in creating the inequality that breeds crime in the first place. And I really thought that Rises was going to tackle that conversation head on! How fucking naive of me.
Instead, Rises is a movie that not only treats the people associated with Occupy as simpletons who would willingly (and in fact gleefully) submit to the will of a terrorist because he gave them what they want, or rather what screenwriter David S. Goyer thought they wanted. Selina’s little friend is perfectly happy nearly starving in what is essentially post-apocalyptic Gotham in that film, content with having nothing, because no one has anything. No doubt Goyer is completely blind to the irony of the fact that, like Batman and his immature understanding of criminality, he outed himself as someone who not only had no clue what Occupy’s purpose and desire was and is while making himself come off as a smug jerk (his net worth is $12M, by the way). He’s not just an asshole, he’s a stupid asshole whose ego is so bloated he has no desire to entertain the possibility that those who disagree with him politically may have valid points; he’d rather just paint them as terrorist collaborators. This not only makes Rises a bad movie, but also morally reprehensible and socially dangerous.
So we have our great Batmen and our terrible Batmen, with decades of storytelling lying in between, with various men (and too few women) articulating a variety of worldviews using the dark knight as their mouthpiece. Sometimes there is a self-awareness of the problematic nature of the character and we end up with something like Batman TAS or even The Brave and the Bold (which is a delight), and sometimes you have an actual monster at the helm and end up with a blindingly ironic situation. Most of the stories fall somewhere in between, and some writers have actually addressed this directly (on more than one occasion, Bats deprived an enemy of his henchmen by referring all of them to Wayne Industries and promising them jobs), but Alli’s point of view is completely valid. I think that part of the appeal of Under the Red Hood for me, and I’m only just realizing this as I write it, is that Jason Todd represents my own personal journey as a Batfan. As I grew up I bucked more and more against his worldview, until part of me wanted nothing more to do with him, but he was still one of my first heroes and thus too important for me to let go of completely. And when I look back at the youngest version of myself, watching Batman TAS every day after school starting from kindergarten and going forward, I see that optimistic little Robin, ready for his first mission, with so, so far to fall ahead of him.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Red Hood’s plan would have done much to make Gotham a better place; by wiping out entire crime families and eliminating drug cartels, all that would be left would be a bunch of desperate people and a massive power vacuum. The first few days, when addicts wouldn’t be able to get their fix, would be madness as violence erupted across the city. On The Wire, there’s mention that one corner could pull in $5000 a day, and those slingers are selling heroin at $10 a pop, so that’s 100 people a neighborhood; conservatively, if there’s 500 junkies in just a few of Gotham’s neighborhoods all going through withdrawal at the same time, that’s going to be a disaster. Someone is going to swoop in and take advantage of that to build their own criminal empire. It might seem like a good plan in the short term, but the only real long-term solution is what you previously mentioned: infrastructure improvement. I cou moral quandry he presents feels so at hould be wrong, though.
Brandon, how do you feel that this film’s thesis holds up, especially in comparison to other Batman films, which are much less self-aware and critical of the hero? I’m pretty critical of The Dark Knight Rises, but are there other Batflicks that you’ve seen that you would argue have worse moral or ethical problems?
Brandon: I honestly didn’t dwell for too long on the political ethics at the heart of Under the Red Hood, because they didn’t stick out to me as especially unique within the superhero genre. Now that there are roughly a dozen major superhero releases annually, the stories are more varied, but for a while it felt as if the majority of them were hinged on the moral conflict of what, exactly, separates the masked vigilantes from the masked criminals. The Red Hood is an interesting foil because his Bad Guy status is a grey area, but the “What if Batman, but too much?” moral quandary he presents feels so at home in a superhero storytelling context it would be safe to call it a cliche. As for Batman’s own ethics, it was initially jarring to hear Alli describe him as a neoliberal fantasy figure, since I’m so used to his politics being criticized for their undertones of right-wing fascism. That subtext is likely a stain left on the Batman brand by the Christopher Nolan trilogy (which, as Boomer points out, really went out on a wet fart with The Dark Knight Rises). As perversely fun as Heath Leger’s performance as The Joker can be and as welcome as it was to see Anne Hathaway challenge her usual typecasting as Catwoman, that trilogy has left a sour taste in its wake, especially in the way its been adopted as gospel by the more Conservative, Reddit-flavored corners of the internet. I don’t think the political stance Batman takes in Under the Red Hood is nearly that well-defined and the movie’s moral dilemma is more about the opposing virtues between extremism & moderation than it is about arguing any specific ideology.
I personally don’t need a specific, clearly defined political ideology to enjoy my Batman media, though. My favorite interpretations of the character are when he’s defined mostly as the ringmaster werido at the center of a fetishistic freakshow. Tim Burton & Michael Keaton’s collaborations are the pinnacle of that horned-up werido-pervert version of Batman (which is why Batman Returns has long been my favorite episode in Caped Crusader cinema), but it’s something you can see echoed in plenty kinky Batman interpretations (and real life kink play) elsewhere. I suspect it’s partly why I enjoy the over-the-top Joel Schumacher monstrosity Batman & Robin so much, since it shifts that kinkiness closer to a queer spectrum (while also subversively doubling down on the Saturday morning cartoon kids’ fluff aspects of the material). I didn’t think much about the political quandary at the center of Under the Red Hood, since my own experience with Batman is more as a kinky psychosexual id. As such, I found myself instead fixating on the two former Robins’ relationships with Batman and how they resembled spurned romantic exes. It’s probably best to ignore the usual insinuations about Batman & Robin’s power dynamics as master & ward (though I will say that scenes of a teen Robin running around in little green panties did make me very uncomfortable), but the way the two Robins shed their former identities to don wholly new personas, Nightwing & The Red Hood respectively, felt like watching someone experiment with a drastic haircut or a cross-country move to shake themselves out of the emotional fallout of a nasty breakup. They both still desperately need Batman’s attention & approval, too, despite trying to appear aloof in his presence. There’s always an undercurrent of romantic & sexual power dynamics lurking under Batman’s interactions with other masked weridos, whether friend or foe, and I found his relationships with his ex-Robins here to be a more complex expression of that than most. The movie intends for their relationships to play as entirely paternal, but my growing up with Batman as a horned-up kinkster makes it impossible not to see it through that lens.
Britnee, feel free to ignore my fixation on Batman’s function as a romantic kink icon, but I am curious what you thought of the character’s relationships with his ex-Robins here. Is there anything especially unique about the Batman & Robin dynamic in Under the Red Hood, besides there being more Robins than usual? What do you make of Nightwing & Red Hood’s compulsion to continue to be around a crime-fighting loner weirdo who doesn’t seem to share that enthusiasm?
Britnee: I love that we were introduced to two Robins in this movie. Bringing in Nightwing added so much more to this short, action-packed animated flick. Even though Nightwing has a bigger personality than Batman, their crime fighting guidelines are quite similar. Catch the bad guy without killing him, and let the incompetent justice system take over at that point. Red Hood is the rebel in this unusual family. Sick and tired of the endless cycle of catching a bad guy only to have him escape his confinements, Red Hood kicks it up a notch when it comes to crime fighting. Nightwing and Red Hood have a relationship similar to siblings that are close in age. One always seems to be the goody two-shoes while the other is angsty and misunderstood.
Batman is meant to be seen as their paternal figure, but he comes off more as a “daddy” than an actual father. What I found interesting about Under the Red Hood‘s unconventional family dynamic was Nightwing’s and Red Hood’s need for Batman’s approval. Both were just waiting for a pat on the back or an “I’m proud of you” to come from Batman, but of course, that never happened. I’m not sure if this is a result of great mentorship or abuse. Speaking of abuse, I have to admit that I too was very disturbed by pre-teen/teen Robin running around in green panties in front of Batman, who does have a bit of a leather daddy vibe. Thankfully, Robin eventually earns a pair of tights to cover up his bare legs, but I’m not sure exactly what he had to do to earn them. This may all be innocent, but if we flip Robin’s gender for a minute, a young girl running around in the bat cave with green panties would 100% make Batman look like a pedophile. I know that this is just a cartoon, but I really disliked those young Robin scenes. This also makes me wonder why he gets a new Robin when one leaves the nest (or the cave). What’s preventing him from keeping a Robin around to assist him with fighting crime? It could be that Batman wants to work alone once his Robins are ready to fight crime on their own, which is ridiculous because two crime fighters working together is always better than one, or it could be that Batman wants to have a younger partner at his side.
Alli, why is it that Batman just can’t hold on to his Robins? Would you prefer a duo with Batman and one Robin until the end of time? Or do you enjoy the process of Robins becoming their own superheros and new Robins filling in their place?
Alli: Gosh, here we get into more of my dislike of Batman, but this time it’s his personality. (And I know the personal is political, but I’ll try to stay on-topic.)
Batman has got to be hard to live with. He broods all day in his batcave. He holds onto a decades-old trauma to the point of exacting revenge on criminals who weren’t responsible for it. He’s incapable of forming any personal bonds out of emotion or affection. And as you said, nothing is ever good enough to warrant praise from him. Of course, as a young sidekick gets older they’re going to figure out how messed up all of this is and, while it’s permanently changed their life, leave to be on their own.
I think this is a lot like the standard idea of parenthood in general. Batman may be a freak in a leather suit with a broody man cave, but by God, he’ll be portrayed as going through at least one of the normal processes of parenthood by having the kids move out. It seems to be a lesson to the audience, of children, that one day they too will have to move out, even if their parents have a massive mansion with more than enough room to accommodate their need for privacy.
Seeking out new Robbins seems like an another aspect of Batman dealing with his trauma. It’s what psychologists call “trauma compulsion,” which is when you repeat the traumatic circumstances over and over again. He relives secondhand the act of losing his parents through these kids over and over again, which explains his actions pushing them away once they become adults as well. He’s stuck in this stage, permanently stunted. Instead of growing and fixing himself, he just gets new boy toy after new boy toy, replaying his fears over and over again. That’s pretty messed up.
So yeah, I like the idea of all the various Robins going out on their own. I think they need to find a new path and learn to appreciate themselves & their own strengths unlike their surrogate father figure. Until Batman grows up, I don’t think he can properly work with anyone who is an independent adult. Two heroes are better than one, but no Batman is also better than one.
Lagniappe
Alli: I was super impressed with the quality of animation and how well this film was made! Usually your expectations of a cartoon Batman movie don’t include well-animated smoke plumes and amazing sound design. I was really blown away by that. This was a technically amazing piece of animation, and it bears being said since we didn’t get to it.
Britnee: Under the Red Hood has sparked my interest in animated superhero films and television series. In an episode of Superman: The Animated Series, Batman and The Joker are present for whatever reason, and there’s a scene where the Joker is hitchhiking and shows a little leg. That image is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Batman, and it’s one of my favorite things in the world. If that was just one scene from one episode, imagine all the other funky stuff that is just waiting for my discovery.
Boomer: I’m always curious how other people interpret the Batman/Robin relationship, especially with regards to the appropriateness (or not) of the Robin costume in general. In general, the Robins are young, generally getting started at the cusp of adolescence. For me, though, my first and still-primary image of Robin is of the character as played by Burt Ward in the classic, campy 1960s Adam West era. That costume was the classic, hot pants version, although Ward was given a pair of nude hose to wear, and it was an awakening for young Boomer. (It’s worth noting that Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl outfit was far slinkier and more intentionally titillating despite covering the entirety of her body.) The next Robin to come along was in Batman Forever, when I was eight years old, and that one also leaned hard into the “sexy Robin” template, and that was only more of an eye-opener. Robin was rarely present in the animated series when I watched it as a kid, and even his first appearance, in the episode “Fear of Victory” (aired 09/29/92), firmly established him as being a college student. Given that Ward was 21 in 1966 when he donned that cape and those ridiculous elf boots and that Chris O’Donnell was 25 in Forever, I never conceived of Robin as being all that young until I got older and started reading comics, at which point Dick Grayson was already active as Nightwing, Jason Todd was dead, and even Tim Drake was presented as being in his late teens; it wasn’t until Damian Wayne was retconned in that there was ever a child Robin in anything that I read. As such, I never read his costume (or relationship with Batman) as being exploitative until later in life, when thinkpieces about the inappropriateness of Robin went through a period of fad intensity. As someone trapped within the horizon of his experiences with the text, I have to admit that I can see how others would read the mentor/ward hero/sidekick relationship as inappropriate or exploitative, I prefer to reject that interpretation, although I admit that part of that is just to keep my Robin crush, developed in childhood toward older actors, intact— without it getting creepy or weird. On the other hand, if finding the subversiveness in everything is your cup of tea, the Venture Brothers episode “Handsome Ransom” inspects that issue with the creators’ trademark acerbic iconcolasm, with Batman TAS voice actor Kevin Conroy (my Batman) in the role of Captain Sunshine, a Superman expy with… questionable predilections.
Brandon: Alli’s criticism of Batman as “a rich guy who takes to streets he’s not even that familiar with to throw people into a prison system that seems even less effective and ethical than the real life American one.” immediately reminded me of a recent SNL sketch about Bruce Wayne being confronted by the community he supposedly protects. The sketch, titled “Wayne Thanksgiving,” is a quick, hilarious watch that feeds directly into the questions of Batman’s political ethics discussed in the conversation above. I highly recommend giving it a look:
Upcoming Movies of the Month
June: Alli presents Gates of Heaven (1978)
July: Brandon presents Born in Flames (1983)
August: Britnee presents Blood and Donuts (1995)
-The Swampflix Crew
It’s an exciting time to be a film nerd in New Orleans. It feels like our art cinema scene is finally bouncing back from when the AMC Palace megaplexes wiped out smaller independent venues in the 90s & 00s. The Broad Theater, The Prytania, and Chalmette Movies are keeping adventurous arts programming alive on local big screens on a weekly basis. Both New Orleans Film Fest and New Orleans French Film Fest are gaining steam in screening the most exciting films of any given year in a city that would have to wait to catch them on VOD otherwise. Joining this embarrassment of riches is the Overlook Film Festival, a nomadic horror film fest that originated in Oregon and has yet to find a permanent home. Over four beautiful late-April days in the French Quarter, the Overlook festival made its welcome New Orleans debut, making me question what we did to deserve such a magical, unprompted blessing from the indie cinema gods. Like WrestleMania’s recent return, the festival felt like a birthday present to the city on its 300th anniversary, one I very much appreciated even if we ultimately don’t get to keep it.
The tricky thing about holding onto Overlook Film Fest is that it’s young and looking to expand. A four-day festival that originated at Oregon’s Timberline Lodge (which was used for exterior shots in Kubrick’s The Shining, where the festival borrowed its name), Overlook quickly outgrew its original locale in both size & tone. Festival organizers noted in an interview with Indiewire that the theater space was too small to accommodate their planned expansion, but it also seems like their mission statement as “a summer camp for genre fans” was at odds with the hotel’s Shining-rejecting nature as “a family-oriented establishment.” This branding conflict forced the festival to shift its focus away from association with Kubrick’s shooting location to a wider range of “iconic locations that evoke the spirit of the Overlook hotel, horror’s most infamous haunted fictional location.” For its New Orleans debut, the fest landed itself in the Bourbon Orleans, which unlike the Timberline, leans into its spooky reputation by billing itself as “one of New Orleans’s top haunted hotels.” The brilliance of the move is that the Bourbon Orleans’s French Quarter locale opens the festival to several screening venues instead of one self-contained building. It transforms the French Quarter, an area crawling with “ghost tour” tourist traps, into a horror nerd’s playground the fest’s site describes as being “home to countless apparition sightings voodoo legends, and vampire curses.” They also propose that a ghost child spotted at the hotel was likely on influence on the creepy twins in The Shining, which sure, why not? Of course, the French Quarter is a limited space with its own set-in-stone boundaries and the Overlook’s arrival during peak festival season means it might have to fight for screening venues as it outgrows the mere two it reserved this year, but for now the events weren’t at all overcrowded and the city seemed to have the exact vibe they’re looking for. Let’s hope that lasts.
Speaking of gradual expansion, Swampflix was too small to secure a press pass for this year’s festival. I wanted to support Overlook as best as I could to welcome its return, though, so I bought tickets to a few individual screenings and signed up to volunteer for a shift helping organize the fest. By happenstance, my volunteer shift turned out to be a total joy, as I worked the door for live recordings of two podcasts I regularly listen to anyway: Shock Waves and The Canon. Outside taking tickets & headcounts and occasionally providing information to attendees, I mostly just listened in as guests Thomas Lennon gushed about The Exorcist III (and for a brief, glorious moment, my beloved Monster Trucks) and Barbara Crampton discussed the highs & lows of horror as a medium from the POV of a woman who’s lived them at both extremes. I got to have some brief exchanges with guests, like telling Blumhouse producer Ryan Turek how much I appreciate his podcast & wishing a panel-crashing Udo Kier a good morning (he, Lennon, and Crampton were all promoting the festival’s premiere of Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich). The whole event was staged inside the Bourbon’s Orleans’s “haunted ballroom,” the site of frequently reported ghost sightings and, thus, a wonderful podcasting venue. Basically, I’m sure the festival (or, more specifically, the New Orleans Film Society folks who organized the volunteers) appreciated the extra hands, but the whole event felt like something I would have attended for fun anyway.
Since I couldn’t afford an All Access Pass for the festival and couldn’t negotiate my way in as press, I had to be choosy in selecting movies to cover for the site. Major event screenings at the Le Petit Theatre of films I’ve been dying to see like Hereditary, Upgrade, and the Unfriended sequel were calling out to me like genre film Sirens, but I decided to seek out smaller films instead. I knew I’d be able to see Hereditary on the big screen if I could be patient for a couple more months, but the joy of film festivals is often seeing proper screenings of smaller films that you’ll otherwise only see distributed on VOD (if at all). As such, I watched three foreign language horror films directed by women that I’ve heard heavy buzz behind (on podcasts like Shock Waves) for months, but I suspect might not even make it to venues like The Broad: Blue My Mind, Tigers are Not Afraid, (and my personal favorite) Good Manners. All three films (all screened at Canal Place) were excellent, adventurous participations in & subversion of familiar genre tropes – the exact kind of programming you dream of for a horror-themed festival. The programming of Good Manners & Tigers Are Not Afraid as an effective double bill was especially harmonious, as both films operate on a similar post-del Toro dark fairy tale vibe while still varying wildly in visual & thematic material. The body horror transformations of Good Manners & Blue My Mind were also interesting reflections of each other, as discussing the very nature of their exact creature feature premises could constitute spoilers given their patient reveals (even though seasoned audiences know what monsters to expect long before they arrive). It was an incredibly small sampling of the two dozen features that screened at the festival, but I could not be happier with the titles I saw. At the very least, I expect to be evangelizing for Good Manners as one of the Top Films of 2018 for the remainder of the year.
It’s impossible to tell what the future holds for the Overlook Film Festival as it expands in size & ambition. I doubt even the festival organizers themselves have a clear idea of where they’re going. I can report, though, that the first year in New Orleans was an ooky-spooky delight, an experience I’ll gladly repeat for as many years as they’re willing & able to return. The crowds were simultaneously more laidback and more enthusiastic than what I’m used to seeing at our local film fests, which made for a wonderfully nerdy genre film environment. I hope everyone who traveled here had as rewarding of an experience as I did. I also hope they saw some ghosts.
-Brandon Ledet
I’ve come to think of Mystery Science Theater 3000 as my childhood “bad” movie training wheels. It’s a crutch I no longer need to enjoy my Z-grade schlock, thanks to years of training under the tutelage of the show. As much as I appreciate that schlocky schooling, it often bums me out that the show has become an unavoidable authority on many of the public domain B-pictures they’ve covered, to the point where if you google the picture most immediate results will be jokes the sarcastic robots made about it. The early Roger Corman directorial effort Swamp Women (also known as Cruel Swamp and, on MST3k, Swamp Diamonds) is one such picture, which is unfortunate because I find the movie interesting enough on its own terms to not need the distraction of MST3k’s commentary diluting it. It’s a difficult position to defend, though, since Swamp Women hits so many of my personal obsessions as a trash-gobbling movie nerd. A cheapo Roger Corman crime picture about cop-hating “bad girls” misbehaving in Louisiana swamps, Swamp Women hits about as close to home as possible to my specific cinematic interests without including drag, witchcraft, pro wrestling, or outer space. The film is far from a knockout, but it is very much my thing. It’s easy to see how someone who’s not a New Orleans-based trash hound could need a little extra help from MST3k to make its basic premise enticing, but those days are long behind me.
An undercover police woman conspires with a prison warden to infiltrate a locked-up girl gang. The plan is to trick the girls into exposing their stash of stolen diamonds. She helps the hardened criminals stage a jail break (with only performative resistance from the warden) and, in return, they allow her to tag along in recovering the diamonds from their deep swamp hiding pace. Along the way they capture an innocent couple touring the Louisiana wilderness, reducing the cast to five women and one tied-up man – an indication of the level of sleaze that persists throughout. Swamp Women is incredibly faithful to its “bad girls” crime template, entirely obedient to the tropes & rhythms of a genre that would be later perfected in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!. What it lacks in narrative innovation, though, it more than makes up for in how perfectly cool its central girl gang comes across onscreen. When they first break out of jail they have two immediate concerns: regret that they didn’t get a chance to shoot back at the cops and how soon they’ll be able to find “something decent to wear and some lipstick.” They look incredible even as they pick fights & trudge through the gator-infested swamp, sporting perfectly coiffed hair, razor sharp Joan Crawford eyebrows, and gigantic knives holstered in tight blue jeans. There’s nothing the film can manage to stage plot-wise that can match the pleasure of hanging out with these badass women, something that’s practically admitted aloud in an absurdly long sequence where they get drunk to brunch jazz and convert their tight jeans to cutoff hot pants with their comically large knives. Corman only barely pretends that out interests & sympathies aren’t supposed to lie with these degenerate women, but with the undercover cop who’s there to take them down. Why bother?
Because Swamp Women is so genre-faithful, its most distinguishing characteristic is its choice of locale, something even heavily referenced in its (unenthused) contemporary reviews. This was only Corman’s fifth directorial effort (in his second year of filmmaking, because he’s a beast), so he was still at a stage in his career when he was personally traveling the country selling his films directly to distributors. Around this time, New Orleans had just opened its first drive-in movie theaters, the owners of which were also interested in getting into film production. Corman gladly took their money, filming Swamp Women on location in Louisiana (and thanking New Orleans mayor deLesseps Morrison in the credits for the city’s cooperation). Because it was a Corman production, the actors were required to perform their own stunts in the actual Louisiana swamp, putting themselves in danger of the same gators & snakes the movie itself uses as thrilling threats to its misbehaving girl gag. I’m sure it was a miserable shoot, but the gator footage & moss-decorated trees really do make for a more interesting backdrop than a sound stage or urban environment ever could have (even if the live gators and their intended victims never do share a single frame). In my favorite example of the film padding its own runtime, Corman also opens this 70min feature with roughly ten minutes of touristy, people-watching Mardi Gras footage. Playing documentarian, Corman captures the 1950s Krewe of Rex rolling down Canal Street (in color!), followed by masked revelers—all looking exactly the same as they would in the 2010s (except with maybe fewer outright racist costumes, which are featured front & center here). Even if the movie’s bad-girls-gone-worse plot holds little interest for you, the footage of 1950s Louisiana might be enough to make the film worthwhile.
With or without the MST3k commentary, I cannot issue an open recommendation for Swamp Women, an exceedingly minor trifle of a picture. I can only report that I was personally charmed by its depictions of cop-hating “bad girls” on a swampy crime spree and fascinated by its inadvertently documentarian record of a 1950s Louisiana. Maybe this is the exact kind of minor pleasure that deserves to be remembered only through the MST3k lens, but I personally found enough to enjoy in the film on its own to not need the sarcastic robots to hold my hand through it. Other schlock-hungry reprobates with any personal affinity with Corman and/or New Orleans have a chance of feeling the same.
-Brandon Ledet
It’s sometimes difficult to recognize the value of a work done right when it’s been diluted by enough cheaper, sillier versions of its exact aesthetic. R.E.M. & Throwing Muses no longer sound like paradigm-shifting college rock innovators now that their sound has been assimilated & dispersed. John Carpenter’s Halloween will never again be as jarring as it was before it inspired an entire genre of immitators. We can never truly go back to the awe of the first appearance of the CG brontosaurus in Jurassic Park. Familiarity & normalization can be the worst enemy of a movie, especially a thriller that’s looking to shock you into a state of terror. The 1944 horror curio The Lady and the Monster is a blatant victim of over-familiarity. In the 1950s & 60s, sci-fi horror films boasting its exact plot structure & bleep-bloop future-machines were a dime a dozen (with They Saved Hitler’s Brain & The Brain that Wouldn’t Die being the most readily recognizable examples), but in the 1940s The Lady and the Monster would have been much more striking in its tone & brutality. A film this handsomely crafted & zeitgeist-predictive should stand out as a kind of innovator in its field, but I can’t help but take its achievements at least somewhat for granted. It’s just an aesthetic I’ve seen too many times before.
Underlit wealthy creeps occupy a dank gothic mansion, complete with a menacing science lab. The only female lab assistant (Czech figure skater-turned-actress Vera Ralston, who often boasted about the time she insulted Hitler to his face at the 1936 Olympics) finds herself in a love triangle with her fellow lab partner and their mad scientist boss (infamous Greed-director-turned-character-actor Eric von Strondheim). This tension is amplified when the stressed-out trio fall into a Dr. Frankenstein plot in an initially successful experiment to keep a human brain’s “electrical beat” intact after its host’s death, using only lab equipment. Said brain belongs to a millionaire reprobate who “survived” a plane crash and whose wife & lawyer are very interested in the circumstances of his supposed death. The brain has its own mysteries to solve as well, a task it completes by possessing the minds of the scientists who keep it alive and sending them sleuthing for clues. As much as the film resembles 1950s drive-in horrors that would follow, it’s also a low-end version of a 1940s noir— an intensely-lit investigation of a mysterious web of cheats & double-crossings. If it can be understood as idiosyncratic in any way, its peculiarity is in that hybrid of genres & temporal sensibilities.
One thing is for sure: if The Lady & the Monster were made in the 1950s or 60s, there would have been a much more explicit depiction of the mind-controlling millionaire brain itself. As is, the brain only appears as a loaf-shaped silhouette adorned with extraneous wires, which isn’t quite as satisfying as the cheaper thrill of actually getting a good look at it. I assume the the 1953 film Donovan’s Brain, adapted from the same novel as The Lady and the Monster, took an entirely different approach. At the same time, I doubt Donovan’s Brain is nearly as handsomely crafted as its sci-fi noir predecessor, as there are countless other 1950s sci-fi horrors with a near identical premise and yet very few of them, if any, actually look this good. The acting is superb. The exterior shot miniatures & impossibly tall ceilings recall German Expressionist silent horrors like Destiny & The Hands of Orlac. The attention to lighting is a wonderful split between that silent era & the noir pictures the film has a direct lineage from. Still, no matter how technically well-made The Lady and the Monster is in terms of craft, I can’t help but somewhat undervalue it, due almost entirely to overly familiar tropes that would not have been nearly as cliché in 1944. I feel as if we’re all susceptible to taking this one for granted, no matter how much we try not to.
-Brandon Ledet
How much innovation do you need from a genre movie for it to feel worthwhile? Your answer to that question is likely to determine your relationship with the Swiss coming of age body horror Blue My Mind. The embarrassment & horror of the changing body during teen pubescence being interpreted through the metaphor of creature feature transformations has been a genre trope going at least as far back as 1957’s I Was a Teenage Werewolf. In more recent years, it’s become an especially common conceit for femme coming of age horror movies, with titles like Raw, Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, Teeth, and too many others to name establishing a clear narrative pattern for how these stories are told. A young teen girl experiencing her earliest encounters with menstruation & sexual desire finds her appetites extending beyond sex to bloodlust and her body’s changes extending beyond normal pubescent growth to a supernatural horror she finds increasingly difficult to hide or contain. Outside maybe taking the metaphor more deadly-serious than most titles listed above, Blue My Mind is fairly well-behaved in its adherence to the rigid genre structure established by its predecessors, following the exact narrative pattern you’ve been trained to expect. The only variable is discovering which type of beast, exactly, the protagonist is transforming into and how many teenage transgressions she’ll manage to commit along the way. Where it distinguishes itself, then, is in the details of its visual craft & character work, which is often the case with strict genre pictures. Luckily for me, I very much enjoy the femme coming of age transformation horror genre Blue My Mind dutifully participates in and didn’t need many novel details to fall in love with its familiar rhythms & grooves. Your own mileage may vary based on your relationship with the same tropes.
Mia is a 15-year-old wannabe badass who immediately seeks asylum with the rebellious reprobates of her new high school. Her new friends drink, smoke, cut class, shoplift, watch pornography, and flirt with the idea of shedding their virginity. Mia fakes being tough & experienced with these teenage transgressions, barely hiding her anxiety as an undeveloped outsider. This barely concealed social shame is coupled with the shame of her changing body & increasingly monstrous appetites. Coinciding with her first period, the entire lower half of her body launches into open rebellion. At the same time, she finds herself compelled to eat raw, still-live fish directly out of her family’s fish tank (or wherever she can get it). Blue My Mind might not be innovative in the metaphor of its central transformation, but it is ambitious in its comprehensive collection of femme teenage crises. Self-harm, drug experimentation, bulimia, dangerous flirtation with older men, flashes of same sex attraction, and indulgences in petty crime sprees detail the boundary-testing exploits of a teen in crisis of both mind & body. This being primarily a body horror, it’s the crisis of the body that eventually overtakes much of the film’s energy as Mia spins completely out of control, but the movie does take plenty of time to establish conflicts in her personal relationships—particularly with her mother and her best friend—before it focuses on the consequences of her transformation. There are some gruesome moments of self-surgery & festering injury that provide shocking pangs of outright horror, but the transformation at the film’s center is mostly concerned with the grief & helplessness of a rebelling body and unruly hormones forcing physiological changes that cannot be reverted or suppressed.
Following Good Manners, Blue My Mind is the second title I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Fest where revealing the exact nature of its central creature feature transformation might constitute a spoiler, since it’s patiently doled out late into the runtime. Much like how the narrative’s adherence to genre tropes telegraphs exactly where the story is going, it’s clear to the audience exactly what Mia is transforming into long before her body gets here. Again, appreciating the movie as a genre exercise requires an attention to its aesthetic & character-specific details, rather than an examination of where it falls within the larger pubescent body horror picture. The washes of cold aquatic blues, the strained relationships with parents & friends, the freewheeling dance parties set to repetitive synthpop, and the grief of letting go of the body’s original shape against your will all hit with serious emotional impact even if the genre tropes they service are overly familiar. If you’re always a sucker for the femme coming of age transformation horror like I am, Blue My Mind is thoughtful & well-crafted enough to earn its place in the pantheon. If you need to see something innovative or novel in your genre narratives for them to feel at all remarkable, you’re going to have to look much closer to find those flashes in its minute details.
-Brandon Ledet
I admire the Mexican indie horror Tigers Are Not Afraid for laying all its cards on the table before it even displays its title. Onscreen text explains that drug cartel violence has effectively left many Mexican cities “ghost towns,” with countless orphaned children left behind by the abducted & the murdered. Then, a classroom of children are assigned to write their own fairy tales as a creative writing exercise, just before that classroom itself is disrupted by gang violence & gunfire. In these opening moments we’re introduced to nearly everything the film has on its mind as a post-del Toro dark fairy tale about young kids navigating the seemingly empty streets cleared out by oppressive drug cartels. The “ghost town” descriptor from the opening text is made literal as the vengeful spirits of the cartels’ victims haunt the orphaned children & their deteriorating urban environments to the point where drug wars feel like an ancient, eternal Evil with no perceptible beginning or end. Tigers Are Not Afraid announces this grim scenario upfront in clear terms, but that does little to demystify the moment-to-moment discoveries of its horrific details. Hearing about it & dwelling in its consequences are two entirely different experiences.
Children not only carelessly play near dead bodies in the streets, but are literally followed home by the resulting blood, which moves with intent & apparent sentience. Recalling the fend-for-yourselves childhood narratives of George Washington, Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Florida Project, and Nobody Knows, the parentless social structures established here sketch out a world where the only adults around are teachers & murderous drug dealers. Then the teachers disappear. The remaining kids are left alone in their own fight for survival against the villainous Huascas gang. Haunted by the ghosts of the dead (sometimes even the ghosts of their own families) as they call out for revenge, the kids find a balance between remaining under the killer cartel’s radar and re-establishing a semblance of justice in the world by striking back. Tales of cannibalism, Satanic rituals, magic wishes, and shapeshifting tigers complicate their understanding of the conflict, but their main concern is daily survival. An unorthodox domesticity emerges among the children in the rubble as they nomadically shift from one squat to the next, just outside the cartel’s reach. The ghosts of the dead call out for a climactic showdown between the warring factions, which is exceedingly dangerous, seeing how the children are outnumbered & outgunned.
While Tigers Are Not Afraid declares its entire dark fairy tale ghost story about drug cartels conceit upfront, it still leaves plenty of room to surprise in its details. Images of skateboards, rooftop dance parties, animated graffiti, pianos in flames, and ghosts seemingly made entirely of darkness establish an otherworldly urban aesthetic entirely unique to the picture. The film is also admirably committed to its own sense of brutality, threatening to destroy young children by bullet or by ghost without blinking an eye. Anyone especially in love with similar past works like The Devil’s Backbone or The City of Lost Children should find a lot worthwhile here, though there’s a specificity to the Mexican drug cartel context that saves the film from feeling strictly like an echo of former glories. The movie reveals few surprises in the execution of its initial premise except maybe the depths of its brutality, its willingness to incorporate conventional ghost movie scares into its fairy tale tone, and its commentary on how political corruption makes its grim world possible. I suppose its obedience to ghost story & dark fairy tale tropes elsewhere is what makes it a genre picture to begin with, but it finds plenty opportunity in its details to establish its own magical, nightmarish space.
-Brandon Ledet
A long, winding picture that’s shy to reveal its basic genre or intent to its audience, Good Manners is a strange, unexpected beast. It would be near impossible to define the film in terms of an overarching theme (outside the undercurrents of class & gender politics that flow throughout), since its two halves are clearly bifurcated in both tone & genre. It would also be reductive to frame Good Manners as a monster movie I caught at a horror film festival, as that context did little to set expectations for the patient, sincerely dramatic rhythms of a story that sprawls & shifts in mood as it explores the logical consequences of an illogical crisis. Descriptors like “queer,” “coming of age,” “romantic,” “body horror,” and “creature feature” can only describe the movie in spurts as it loses itself in the genre wilderness chasing down the details of its own nature & narrative. Minute to minute, Good Manners discovers its dramatic rewards in the emotional beats of a dark fairy tale that follows its own inherent progression instead of the command of a central metaphor. As a whole, it offers the welcome novelty of centuries-old, long-familiar stories about monstrous transformations recontextualized in a new, unpredictable package. That alone is a commendable achievement.
A financially strapped black woman takes on a position as a live-in nurse at the edge of São Paulo, Brazil. Recalling the economic power disparity in the art cinema classic Black Girl, she finds herself helplessly subordinate to her white, wealthy, pregnant employer’s whims as her nanny position expands to include cooking, cleaning, and emotional labor duties that far exceed her original job description. However, the power dynamic shifts drastically when the employer’s pregnancy brings on strange, unexplained stomach pangs and violent sleepwalking episodes. Her cravings for raw meat also push the pregnancy into menacing, supernatural territory, with only the nanny at hand to take the abnormalities seriously. This vulnerability lands the pair on more equal, even amorous footing as the dread of the approaching birth threatens to upend their little remaining stability. Eventually, the pregnancy-themed body horror of the first half reaches its inevitable, fever pitch climax. Halfway into the runtime, Good Manners outs itself as a lowkey monster movie with fairy tale rhythms to its narrative, only for the timeline to then jump seven years into the future to further explore the consequences of that disruption. The second half of the film is a sad, anxious echo of the first, with its own conflicted relationships & inevitable consequences building to a secondary, unavoidable monster movie climax.
It feels odd to tiptoe around the reveal of the central monster’s nature in the film, since it’s telegraphed to the audience long before it arrives onscreen or its name is spoken. There’s too much horror lore in the canon for the significance of the moon cycle or an ultrasound technician remarking what big eyes, mouth, and hands the unborn baby has to go unnoticed. The patience of the reveal is almost a sly joke, as the movie delivers the exact monster you expect, just in a different form than how you’re used to seeing it. Depicted through both CG & practical puppetry (when not restlessly shifting inside a pregnant belly), the monster in question is an adolescent beast—dangerous, but in need of parental care. The movie isn’t shy about delivering typical creature feature goods in later scenes set in traditional horror movie locales (like an after-hours shopping mall), but it mostly evokes a post-del Toro fairy tale take on adolescent monster narratives like The Girl with All the Gifts or Let the Right One In. It’s a film about motherhood & unconventional families first and a monster movie second, a declaration of priorities made explicitly clear by how long it takes for the monster to even appear.
Good Manners is distinctive in ways that stretch far beyond its narrative patience & temporal sprawl. Animated flashbacks, operatic musical tangents, and the visual precision of a Canadá music video push its take on the creature feature into totally unexpected territory that transcends any of its telegraphed genre tropes. On a horror movie spectrum, the film is more of a gradual, what-the-fuck mind melt than a haunted house carnival ride with gory payoffs & jump scares at every turn. It’s an unconventional story about unconventional families, one where romantic & parental anxieties are hard to put into words even if they’re painfully obvious onscreen. Anyone with a hunger for dark fairy tales and sincerely dramatic takes on familiar genre tropes are likely to find a peculiar fascination with the subtle, methodical ways it bares its soul for all to see. Just don’t expect the shock-a-minute payoffs of a typical monster movie here; those are entirely secondary, if they can be detected at all.
-Brandon Ledet
Despite the conventional wisdom, I believe the video game adaptation is a strong template for a deliriously fun B-picture. Much like how novellas & short stories often make for better literary adaptations than lengthy novels because they invite filmmakers to expand rather than condense, the video game medium (particularly in vintage examples) tends to only carry vaguely sketched-out lore & world-building that affords filmmakers a lot of freedom to create in extrapolation. In theory, the Rampage arcade game should have been a prime candidate for an entertainingly absurd action movie, since it’s basically a blank-slate, plot-wise. In the game, players assume the avatars of three cartoonish kaiju—a gorilla, a wolf, and a lizard—earning points by destroying buildings & eating helpless citizens one city at a time. There’s no progression to this initial setup, just more buildings & people to populate an eternally resettable scenario. Unlike the better examples of video game adaptations that use these blank-slate launching pads to create absurdly preposterous worlds, the film version of Rampage instead exhausts itself trying to imagine a plot where its resettable videogame scenario could be at least somewhat plausible. The Super Mario Bros., Mortal Kombat, and Resident Evil movies accept the over-the-top absurdism of their source material as a matter-of-fact conceit; Rampage instead goes out of its way to reduce its premise to the most unimaginative action vehicle possible, one it already feels like we’ve seen Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson star in before. A better-realized Rampage adaptation would have just started with the monster attacks destroying a major city and worried about the reasoning behind their origins after the fact (there are literally dozens of Godzilla pictures that teach that lesson). This adaptation instead dulls down its entertainment potential by laboriously working towards that payoff in a too-late third act turnaround.
The Rock stumbles into this picture wearing a khaki-colored composite costume of every single ex-military jungle adventurer character he’s played before. In this particular case, our impossibly handsome, charismatic hero is defined by his relationship with an albino gorilla named George. With a rapport established through sign language and sex jokes, this Buff Zoologist & Brilliant Gorilla supercouple are seemingly best-bros-for-life until a nearby satellite crash infects George (along with a wolf & an alligator) with a “genetic editing” pathogen. Designed by an Evil Corporation for military weapons purposes, this pathogen causes the three beasts in question to grow exponentially larger, more aggressive, and more resistant to harm. Teaming up with a rogue scientist (Naomie Harris) who helped develop the pathogen, The Rock must race to cure George with an antidote before the military strikes him down and to destroy the other two monsters before they destroy Chicago. And because the movie delusionally believes the monsters need a reason to work together to destroy Chicago, there’s also a broadcasted signal attracting them to the Evil Corporation’s headquarters that must be shut off before it’s too late. Beyond the too-few scenes of monsters destroying buildings (and a few villainously hammy performances from what-are-they-doing-here actors Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jake Lacy, and Joe Manganiello) there’s nothing distinctive about Rampage as a disaster epic, not even its deployment of three separate kaiju. The movie could have made better use of its satellite crash opening by taking its monster fight to outer space or used its inciting pathogen to create Dwayne “The Giant Boulder” Johnson or anything over-the-top enough to suggest that it fully embraces the absurdity of its central conceit. Instead, it almost outright apologizes for being built on a silly video game foundation by exhaustively explaining a scenario where a giant wolf, gorilla, and reptile might team up to destroy a major city as a team, when that should have been its first act starting point—no explanation necessary.
I was left exactly this cold by last year’s giant ape monster movie Kong: Skull Island, which also hosted just enough monster action & hammy performances to call into question how the sum of its parts could possibly be so aggressively bland. Rampage is a total MoviePass decision, an unenthused picture that’s only worth your attention if it has a convenient showtime in a directionless afternoon you’re looking to kill. No amount of helicopter-tackling wolf action or Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s cowboy cop quipping things like, “When science shits the bed, I’m the guy they call to clean the sheets,” can make up for the grey mush that surrounds them. Even the novelty of the glorious creature feature Alligator being blown up kaiju-size is only worth a fleeting smirk. The only moment of pure so-bad-it’s-great bliss at hand is a spectacularly awful Kid Cudi remix of “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” that the film unfortunately buries deep in its end credits, where it’s meant to not be heard. It’s ashamed of that cheese just as much as it’s ashamed of its video game roots. Cut the wolf out the the kaiju trio and there’s no point in passing this movie off as a Rampage adaptation at all; it might as well be San Andreas 2 or Journey 3 or a sequel to any number of The Rock’s disaster epics. The green screen/mocap animation, closely cropped shaky-cam action (which is a really weird choice for a film about giant monsters), and cornball stepdad humor are entirely indistinct & interchangeable within the context of the modern Rockbuster. It’s a total shame, because the gleefully trashy arcade game the film chose as a starting point should have been an easy layup in delivering something fun & memorably absurd. Instead, five no-name screenwriters ground it down into a shapeless, unremarkable orb carried on the back of a bored-looking Rock.
-Brandon Ledet
The most shocking revelation in our Movie of the Month discussion of the Charles Band-produced children’s fantasy film Magic in the Mirror was that I was the only member of the Swampflix crew who found the movie to be a total nightmare. While everyone else found the film’s villains— humanoid ducks who boil children alive to make delicious tea— to be amusingly quaint, I cowered in fear of their menacingly cheap presence. I stand by my description of those tea-slurping murder-ducks as resembling “a D.I.Y. production of the Howard the Duck movie as a stage play in an adult stranger’s basement” and believe a large portion of the movie’s appeal to be the discomfort of their design. Schlockmeister Charles Band’s production company Full Moon has long been fascinating to me for pumping out cheap, R-rated horror films that feel like they were intended for children. In the mid-90s, Band somehow made his aesthetic even more terrifying by deliberately making films for children’s media sensibilities, but still allowing his violent, horror impulses to shine through. If the cheap duck costumes from Magic in the Mirror are not a compelling enough argument that the Full Moon children’s media sublabel Moonbeam Entertainment was more horrifying than most of Band’s deliberately horrific productions, I’d like to submit 1998’s The Secret Kingdom as Exhibit B. The Secret Kingdom follows Magic in the Mirror’s exact formula of infusing a fairly innocuous down-the-rabbit-hole fantasy adventure with truly horrific character design, but its own childhood terrors are much more blatant & inarguable than the ducks that disturbed me so much in our Movie of the Month.
Mysteriously, neither Charles Band nor Moonbeam’s names are listed in the opening credits of The Secret Kingdom. IMDb lists Band as an “uncredited executive producer” on the film, though, and his fingerprints can be found all over the premise thanks to his seemingly lifelong obsession with miniature bullshit (see: Dolls, Demonic Toys, Ghoulies, Dollman, The Gingerdead Man, etc.). In this particular case, a pair of snotty siblings are transported to a miniature, war-torn kingdom located beneath their kitchen sink, due to a magical lightning storm (or some such nonsense). A world of miniature terrors awaits them there, thanks to a maniacal dictator’s obsession with achieving “perfection” through elective surgery. The Minister of Perfection barely fights back his Nazi undertones as he proudly shows off his favorite “perfected” creations: people with smoothed-over flesh instead of eyes, Nazi cops with metal places for faces, a creepy S&M dog-man who aids in hunting undesirables, etc. The Alice in Wonderland-riffing premise of The Secret Kingdom isn’t too far off from the basic plot of Magic in the Mirror. The only differences are in their Mad Libs-style details: instead of a fantasy kingdom the kids are transported to a steampunk metropolis; instead of traveling through a mirror their adventure is prompted by an ancient lighting rod; instead of negotiating a war between two queens they negotiate a war between a surgery-addicted bureaucrat & a band of woodland rebels. The only major difference between them is that the terror of the Minister’s creations are unambiguously horrific, while the menace of the humanoid ducks is vague enough to be debatable. Director David Schmoeller (who also helmed the horror oddities Tourist Trap & Puppet Master for Band) makes his blatant horror intentions clear in jump scares & references in the dialogue to titles like The Bad Seed & The Elephant Man. Charles Band’s stated vision for Moonbeam was to produce children’s sci-fi & fantasy films with “no hard hedge”, but by the time The Secret Kingdom arrived late in the sublabel’s run a glimmer of that hard Full Moon edge reemerged in the work and was all the more terrifying for its contrast with the safe children’s fantasy picture surrounding it.
It’s possible I find The Secret Kingdom more outright creepy than Magic in the Mirror because it hits closer to home. First of all, the non-sink portion of the film is conspicuously set in New Orleans and reminds its audience of that locale often with a slew of gratuitous local details: The St. Louis Cathedral, The Natchez, French Quarter street performers, Mardi Gras parade floats, above-ground cemeteries, street cars, issues of the Times Picayune, etc. More significantly, the tiny-world-under-the-kitchen-sink premise is very reminiscent of the (presumably problematic) film The Indian in the Cupboard, which was a VHS era staple in my childhood. It might seem odd that Band would produce an intentional knockoff of a flop that lost $10mil at the box office, but I suspect that it’s possible he may have felt like he could improve on the premise as the king of miniature bullshit. Even if their similarities are only an instance of parallel thinking, Band’s way of putting his own unique stamp on the premise was hiring a horror director responsible for one of the most disturbing Texas Chainsaw Massacre-modeled 70s slashers in charge of a children’s film and populating it with eyeless, dog-like, Nazi victims of state-ordered surgery. Band may have truly thought of Moonbeam as a way to produce Full Moon-style pictures “with no hard edge” for a younger demographic and that may have been the case with early Moonbeam pictures like Prehysteria!, which sweetly supposed “What if dinosaurs were miniature & danced to rock n’ roll?” By the time he got to the eyeless goons of The Secret Kingdom and the child-boiling duck-people of Magic in the Mirror, though, I believe he lost sight of that mission statement. The children’s film backdrops that clash with these nightmarish monstrosities only make them appear more horrific by contrast and the sensation that dynamic generates just feels plain wrong. I don’t think the Moonbeam catalog necessarily reflects the creative heights of the Charles Band aesthetic in terms of absurdism or novelty, but it did often generate the most legitimately creepy imagery of his schlocky oeuvre, if not only for those creations’ soft-edge context.
For more on April’s Movie of the Month, the Full Moon Entertainment fantasy piece Magic in the Mirror, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film this comparison to its direct-to-video sequel Fowl Play, and last week’s look back to Moonbeam’s premiere picture, Prehysteria!.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 