brandon ledet

Tromeo & Juliet (1996)

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There are two minor miracles to be found in the 1996 Shakespeare schlockification Tromeo & Juliet. The first is that it’s an unusually sweet, tender romance for the Troma brand (in the moments between its company-mandated fart & boner jokes). The second is that it helped launch a successful filmmaking career outside the Troma trenches, despite being just as obnoxious & grotesque as the worst offenders in the company’s catalog. These miracles are directly related to each other, of course, as Tromeo & Juliet‘s out-of-character sentimentality is the work of young screenwriter James Gunn, who has found an exponentially successful career grossing audiences out with goopy grotesqueries while remaining a soft-hearted cornball. The only difference is that Gunn used to write those cornball grossouts for the home video market under Lloyd Kauffman’s sleazy supervision, and now he directs $200mil superhero movies for major Hollywood studios. You can take the troll out of Tromaville, but you can you really take the Troma out of the troll?

Forgive me for my lack of interest in recapping the interfamilial beef between the Montegues & Capulets here; I really do try my best not to treat this blog like a high school book report. Tromeo & Juliet is relatively faithful to its literary source text, as signaled by hiring a half-drunk Lemmy (of Motörhead) to narrate the opening prologue in mumbled iambic pentameter. The central joke of the project is to transport the play’s action to the modern, grimy streets of New York City, making the source of its familial feud a dispute over ownership of an NYC porno studio. Every event from the play is “reinterpreted” (i.e., mucked up) in that way, shoehorning monster puppets, lesbian make-outs, and ADR’d fart noises into the tragic romance we all know & love. The tagline on the poster says it all, promising to deliver “all the body-piercing, kinky sex, and car crashes that Shakespeare wanted but never had!” The final image it leaves you on is the populist playwright chuckling in delighted approval, reassuring the audience that Shakespeare would love Troma-brand juvenilia if he were alive to see it.

James Gunn’s auteurism shows in the screenplay’s unexpected touches of romantic sincerity. When Juliet has steamy lesbian sex with her handmaiden, there’s surprising romantic chemistry there, playing like a genuine bodice-ripper instead of a half-hearted Playboy shoot. When Tromeo jerks off to interactive CD-ROM pornography, his go-to kink category is revealed to be “true love,” with an onscreen nude model professing her devotion to him in bridal gear. The biggest deviation from the Shakespeare play is that Tromeo & Juliet is ultimately not a tragedy at all. Instead of committing a double suicide at the climax, our young teens in love procure a potion that temporarily makes Juliet so monstrous to the eye that only Tromeo could continue to love her, scaring off her family’s chosen suitor. In true Troma fashion, it’s then revealed that Tromeo & Juliet are long lost siblings—a secret long guarded by their feuding parents—and their romantic union would be an unholy act of incest. They decide to marry & procreate anyway; their love is just that strong, and the screenwriter is just that much of a softie, despite his alarming edgelord tendencies.

I don’t mean to undermine director Lloyd Kaufman’s own auteurism in this project. Considering that the Yale graduate & Troma kingpin’s most recent feature is a Troma’d up version of The Tempest titled Shakespeare Shitstorm, I have to assume that much of the creative direction behind the camera originated with him. The young Gunn was hired to overhaul an early version of the screenplay that Kauffman was unsatisfied with, and it seems that the final product was a true collaboration between them. You can hear them mind-melding as two mutually respected sleazebags on the Blu-ray’s commentary track, indulging in some boys-will-be-boys locker room talk about all the hot chicks they got to see naked while working together. It’s gross, but their rapport is also oddly sweet, which carries over to the final product on the screen. In the scene where Tromeo flips through his stash of interactive porno CD-ROMs, we get a taste of all the other reparatory Troma stagings of Shakespeare works we could’ve been treated to over the decades, in titles like Et Tu Blowjob, The Merchant of Penis, As You Lick It, and Much Ado about Humping. It’s unlikely that James Gunn wishes he were still writing those shock-value frivolities instead of directing Superman spinoffs in the big leagues, but I dare say he was making more honest, personal work in his early Troma days — equally, extremely sappy & revolting.

-Brandon Ledet

Gorgo (1961)

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Every country deserves its own trademark kaiju, just like every high school deserves its own sports mascot and every state deserves its own flower & song. Japan has Godzilla, of course, who continues his decades-long reign as King of the Monsters even though he has more local competition than most. America has King Kong, the only national delegate who’s been worthy enough to travel to Japan to meet Godzilla in-person for official kaiju business. Things get a little less impressive from there, since most other countries can only claim ownership of Godzilla & King Kong knockoffs instead of doing their own thing. On the Godzilla knockoff front, North Korea famously has Pulgasari and Denmark less famously has Reptilicus, while Hong Kong has its own resident King Kong knockoff in The Mighty Peking Man. If there’s anything especially daring about England’s national kaiju Gorgo is that it splits the difference, borrowing liberally from Godzilla and King Kong instead of showing preference for one over the other. Gorgo’s lobby posters promise kaiju mayhem “UNLIKE ANYTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN BEFORE,” but its monster design looks exactly like Godzilla (now with ears) and its opening credits shamelessly borrow the King Kong font, followed quickly by its on-the-ground characters reliving the King Kong plot. I want better than that for our international neighbors’ kaiju mascot legacies, but any & all classic movie monsters are welcome here, regardless of originality.

The most boneheaded aspect of Gorgo producers’ decision to rip off Godzilla & King Kong is that the United Kingdom already had a perfectly well-suited kaiju cryptid the monster could’ve been modeled from instead. Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster had been world-famous for several decades before Gorgo was produced, but instead of capitalizing on that with a creature feature called Nessie’s Revenge, producers sailed to Dublin instead. The plot is exactly what you’d imagine. Two professional sailors discover an underwater dino creature (the titular Gorgo) while deep-sea diving off the shores of Ireland, so they capture it in a giant net and drag it back to England as a kind of freak-show circus act — King Kong style. After parading the subdued creature through downtown London on a float helpfully labeled “Gorgo”, they start selling tickets for local blokes to point & laugh at its misfortunes as an Eighth Wonder of the World circus attraction. The good times don’t last long, though, since it turns out they’ve only captured a baby Gorgo, and the creature’s much larger, violently protective mother quickly storms London to break her baby free. The film’s only major deviation from the King Kong set-up and Godzilla punchline is that both Mama Gorgo and Baby Gorgo get away at the end, fucking off back into the ocean, safe once again from the monstrous actions of men. Meanwhile, human survivors pontificate empty platitudes about the nature of Nature or whatever, having accomplished nothing but disturbing an underwater monster family by invading its habitat.

What Gorgo lacks in originality it makes up for in the scale & duration of its climactic kaiju mayhem. For the record, both Mama Gorgo and Baby Gorgo are represented by the exact same rubber suit, and their respective sizes (boat-size and skyscraper size) are only differentiated by the scale of the miniature sets they inhabit. Baby Gorgo’s half of the movie is a little slow-moving, overloaded with sub-Black Lagoon underwater photography as he’s abducted & transported by mercenary sailors and their circus-promoter clientele. Once Mama Gorgo crashes the scene, however, the movie becomes a nonstop special effects showcase, with Godzilla’s big-eared cousin tearing her way across The Big City while huge crowds of nameless extras run for their lives below. Her most important moment is when she gets her Empire State Building shot by smashing Big Ben, marking her as Britain’s #1 kaiju mascot. Her bridge-crushing, bus-stomping, baby-avenging tour of London eats up a significant chunk of the 78min runtime, making up for lost time. There’s some surreal shoddiness in the offset green-screen composite photography, but for the most part the scale & relentlessness of Gorgo‘s urban destruction is genuinely impressive. The movie looks especially great in its current form, having recently been given the 4K Blu-ray restoration treatment by genre-cinema heroes Vinegar Syndrome. In the early stretch, you can tell why it was once featured on MST3K, since there’s plenty of dead air for the sarcastic robots to fill with mockery, but the energy picks up if you stick with it. Personally, I’m glad that this kind of vintage schlock is treated with more sincerely loving archival reverence these days, especially given Gorgo’s historical significance as a foreign dignitary of great British significance.

-Brandon Ledet

Project X (2012)

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Most documentary-style narrative filmmaking tends to fall in one of two categories: the mockumentary comedy or the found-footage horror. 2012’s Project X is most interesting for its Rorschach Test ability to fall into either category, depending on the audience. It’s got a Spring Breakers or The Real Cancun quality about it, in that you either see it as a simulation of a fun party or a simulation of Hell, mostly depending on whether you’re still a teenager when you watch it. It’s unquestionable that producer Todd Phipps set out to make a modernized 2010s boner comedy—filtering some of his Hangover-era bro humor with Jackass-style physical stunts—but the result is so monstrously grotesque that he instead ended up delivering the nightmare version of Superbad, by way of The Blair Witch Project.

Thomas Mann (of Me and Earl and The Dying Girl infamy) stars as a high school nerd whose parents are leaving town in the week leading up to his 17th birthday. His two mouthbreathing besties decide that this is the perfect opportunity to climb the social ladder by throwing a once-in-a-lifetime rager, hoping of course to get laid in the process. Notice and notoriety of the party quickly spreads outside of the school, however, to the point where anyone & everyone who chugs liquor & pills in Pasadena, CA shows up at the overwhelmed teen’s home, effectively destroying it in a party gone way out of bounds. The vibe is fun enough at the start, with all the DJs, skinny-dippers, and beer-shotgunners needed to make for a memorable night in these otherwise sheltered kids’ lives. A baby-faced Miles Teller even makes an appearance as the party’s celebrity guest. Then, the vibe sours. The family car is driven into the swimming pool. The family dog is ritually tortured by drunken goons. Fireworks are set off indoors. The neighborhood drug dealer shows up with a military-grade flamethrower. News helicopters circle the chaos. By the end of the night, it’s not a party at all; it’s a riot.

Project X is less interesting for its narrative than it is for its technique. Before the party starts, you can already guess exactly what’s going to happen to Thomas & his goons, right down to his “It isn’t what it looks like” romantic crisis when his lifelong crush catches him losing his virginity to an anonymous hottie. The picture’s dark, anarchic energy is mostly due to the experiment of its shooting style, in which Phillips & crew built a small replica of a Pasadena neighborhood so they could shoot an actual rager party across multiple homes, handing digicams, smartphones, and Blackberries to attendees to document the chaos from as many angles as possible. It’s like an evil mutation of what Jonathan Demme accomplished in Rachel Getting Married: staging an intimate melodrama within the raucous, spontaneous atmosphere of a real-life party. Only, I doubt the Rachel Getting Married set reeked so heavily of Taaka vodka & Axe body spray. The simple kids-getting-laid story Project X tells, then, is less of the main focus than it is an excuse for endless montages of flashlit hedonism, straining at every moment to make it seem fun to make out with a stranger you just watched throw up on the lawn.

If there’s any continued cultural significance to Project X that’s lasted past its contemporary inspiration for similar out-of-control block parties IRL (despite Warner Bros. slapping a Jackass-style “Do not try this at home” message on the opening title card), it’s in its time-capsule document of the so-called “Indie Sleaze” aesthetic. You’d think its location on the wrong coast and the wrong decade would exclude it from an official Indie Sleaze designation, but that’s only because it took a decade for that scene’s influence to trickle out far enough into a mainstream to make it into a major motion picture from a big-name Hollywood producer. Despite the LFMAO-bro atmosphere of the party they soundtrack, the DJs pepper in hits from LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective, The XX, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to establish an unearned sense of indie-scene cool, which combines with the crime-scene lighting of the digi-era cinematography to approximate an authentic Indie Sleaze aesthetic. It just falls heavy on the “sleaze” end of that cultural marker, turning your stomach with the bro’d-out, gross-out behavior of every dipshit involved.

If you want to see the Lawful Good version of this same experiment, check out the Beastie Boys concert film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, in which the beloved-by-all rap trio distributed digicams to random members of their audience to capture the good-vibes party they put on in Madison Square Garden from every angle possible. Project X is more of a bad-vibes-only Chaotic Evil proposition, like chugging Everclear in the parking lot outside a Kanye West concert. Just try not to splash puke on your own shoes.

-Brandon Ledet

All You Need is Kill (2026)

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The only manga I’ve ever read was an adaptation of the 2004 sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill, and that’s because it was a gift. A family member who lives his life much deeper in the anime trenches bought it for me as a Christmas present after the novel was also adapted into the 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow (and famously retitled a second time under its tagline “Live, Die, Repeat” once it hit DVD). When I heard that there’s a new, Japanese adaptation of the same source text, then, my assumption was that someone had set out to illustrate a more faithful version of either the manga or the original semi-illustrated novel, undoing all of Hollywood’s work to center an action hero that Tom Cruise could credibly play instead of the novel’s heroine (sidelined as a supporting role in the live-action version, played by Emily Blunt). That’s not the case at all. The new version of All You Need is Kill doesn’t simply set the comic book illustrations of its source novel in motion; it redesigns them, introduces an overwhelming wealth of color to a world that was once entirely black & white, and once again makes major changes to the two main characters’ personae & dynamics. It’s less of a manga-faithful rebuke of Edge of Tomorrow than it is a fellow attempt at rogue reinterpretation, this time marketed to the cloistered nerds who actually read manga instead of the wider world of people who’ve heard of Tom Cruise.

That’s not to say that the new anime version of All You Need Is Kill is entirely novel in its reinterpretation. Edge of Tomorrow is not the only pre-existing work it evokes. It plays with the oil-slick color palette of Annihilation, echoes the YA mech-suit therapy sessions of Neon Genesis Evangelion, recalls the vintage sketchbook psychedelia of Mind Game, and touches on some parallel thinking with last year’s sci-fi adaptation Mickey 17. What I mean to say is that it pulls from so many varied sources that it eventually becomes its own thing, a stylish genre remix of its own unique flavor — however mild. For every inspired choice it makes (like redesigning its time-looping monster spawn to look like killer houseplants instead of meatballs with teeth), it also defaults to disappointingly basic choices elsewhere. It’s especially disappointing that the film ages down its two leads from near-future adult supersoldiers to near-future awkward teens. I don’t personally watch too much anime, but most of what I do see ends up being about shy teens who don’t know how to express their feelings to each other, which I suppose is a case of modern movie studios knowing their audience. There’s something absurd about shoehorning that shy-teen dynamic into this story about mech-suited futuresoldiers hunting alien beasts, but that choice does at least give it a different perspective than Tom Cruise’s action-hero-in-training role in the Hollywood version.

If I’m avoiding my plot recap duties here, it’s because talking about time-loop movies feels like its own kind of endless loop at this point. All You Need Is Kill‘s addition to the time-loop canon is that it’s set during a future space alien invasion, where the loop is started by infection with monster blood. The two infected soldiers stuck in this endless loop wake up every time they’re killed by the alien beasts, as if they discovered a video game cheat code for unlimited lives. In this version of the story, one of the characters even finds himself waking up to a video game prompt asking him if he wishes to continue playing, presumably having fallen asleep with a controller in hand. So, what you have is a militaristic sci-fi premise borrowed from an older text like Starship Troopers or The Forever War and made bizarrely existential through the recursive plot structure of Groundhog Day. If you regularly watch movies, you’ve seen more than a few variations of this story in recent titles like Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, Timecrimes, Triangle, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow (duh), and so on. So, all that’ll be new to you here is the visual splendor of its psychedelic animation style, which is very much worth the price of admission. And if you haven’t seen any of those movies before, I’m going to assume that you’re a teenager just getting into the medium, in which case the shy, nerdy leads of this version have something to offer you too: a mirror.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Beast Pageant (2010)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the industrial fantasy adventure The Beast Pageant (2010).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 Murder! (1930)
09:00 Tromeo & Juliet (1996)
13:00 Eden Lake (2008)
21:00 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
31:00 Dooba Dooba (2026)
37:07 The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
45:13 The Plague (2025)
52:46 All You Need is Kill (2026)
57:30 Tangerine (2015)
1:01:22 Tale of Tales (2016)
1:06:00 Mandibles (2021)
1:10:15 The Beach Bum (2019)
1:16:16 The Lure (2017)
1:18:50 Mississippi Masala (1991)
1:22:37 Two Sleepy People (2026)

1:26:00 The Beast Pageant (2010)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Two Sleepy People (2026)

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Someone alert Ned Flanders; they’ve finally found a way for you to watch Woody Allen movies without Woody Allen in them. Last year, there were two prestige dramas that borrowed The Woody Allen Font to billboard their discussions of sexual assault within the university system: Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. Those allusions to Allen’s past reign as the neurotic king of overly talky indie cinema were presumably semi-ironic—given Allen’s more recent association with sexual abuse outside of the cinema—but they’re at least honest about Allen’s continued influence on the Sundance drama as a medium. There are tons of recent options to check out if, like Ned Flanders, you like Woodsy Allen movies but don’t like that nervous fella that’s always in ’em: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, James Sweeney’s Straight Up, Matt Farley’s Local Legends, and now Baron Ryan’s Two Sleepy People. There’s a whole new crop nervous fellas to choose from if you don’t care for the last one.

First-time writer/director Baron Ryan stars as a scrawny, neurotic office worker who’s trapped in an endless loop of pointless couple’s therapy with a wife he doesn’t love. His co-writer Caroline Grossman co-stars as a new coworker who catches his eye during awkward pitch meetings for a marketing campaign to sell melatonin pills. They both quickly latch onto melatonin’s natural occurrence in breast milk, inappropriately blurting out ad pitches focusing on “mommy milkers” during team meetings. Whatever Mommy Issues inspire those outbursts then echo in their melatonin-fueled dreams, which they start to inexplicably share as a married couple in a psychic common-space, vaguely remembering their nightly otherworld trysts the next day at work. It’s a clever way to literalize a workplace emotional affair by staging it in a psychic space separate from everyday reality, and it allows the two lonely souls to safely pair up & confront childhood traumas they’ve suppressed in artificial stage play environments. It’s also a clever way to interrogate big-picture concepts through limited cast & locations, revealing more about the writers’ hang-ups with the way they were raised as children than their fictional avatars’ phony struggles with intimacy.

Two Sleepy People starts with a consciously equal balance between the two leads’ leftover Mommy Issues and subsequent young-adult neuroses. We get to know them in their respective real-world living spaces where they’ve trapped themselves in prisons of their own design, with jailcell bars made of unpacked moving boxes or compulsively purchased houseplants depending on the apartment. Things are much more pleasant in their emotional-cheating dreamscape apartment, give or take the Lynchian theatre stage just outside the front door that forces them to relive memories of the mommies who failed them. While those memories also start off equally balanced between the two characters, Baron Ryan’s Woodsy Alleny protagonist eventually takes the literal spotlight, and the back half of the film largely becomes about his impending, unavoidable divorce. The film is most enjoyable in its first half, while it’s unsure how to define the rules of its Sleep Life/Real Life divide and the audience is still learning to love the characters and their worlds. Once their in-the-moment romantic issues have to actually mean something to move the plot along, it loses a lot of steam, and the nervous fella at the center of it all unfortunately outlives his welcome by at least a few overly chatty minutes of runtime.

The miracle of this microbudget indie project is that it’s ever funny or charming at all. Clicking around online, I gather that Baron Ryan is usually billed as a “creator” instead of a filmmaker, which means he already has a small following from making short-form videos on platforms like Instagram & TikTok. For the most part, his Very Online sense of humor translates relatively well to a feature film format, landing punchlines that work just fine out of context (such as a short story pitch about a fetus who is issued an eviction notice from its mother’s womb) and jokes that only make sense in this high-concept scenario (such as the double meaning of a coworker’s accusation that “Everyone knows you’re sleeping together”). There’s a timidity in just how emotionally or psychologically vulnerable he & Grossman are willing to get in their script, though, which especially shows in their fear of broaching the subject of sex. Their characters never physically cheat in their shared psychic space; when the subject of sexual needs or kinks comes up in conversation, they brush it aside to instead embarrass themselves with reenacted childhood memories and read-aloud diary entries. Compare that guardedness with the open-book neuroses of Joanna Arnow’s similarly themed & budgeted The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, and you get a sense of just how careful Ryan & Grossman are to not fully Go There. To their credit, though, Woody Allen revealed way too much about himself in his own pioneering versions of this neurotic romcom subgenre, and we all now wish we knew way less. They may be sparing us in the long run.

-Brandon Ledet

Mississippi Masala (1991)

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The 1991 romantic dramedy Mississippi Masala is, to put it simply, a story about two incredibly hot people falling in love despite increasingly thorny circumstances. What Hollywood studios don’t want you to know is that every movie used to be like that, that life was once great. It turns out that all you need to make a lastingly beloved motion picture is to cast a couple nuclear-hot actors with nuclear-meltdown chemistry and then throw a few puny obstacles in the way of their union. It sounds like a simple formula, looking back, but from what I gather studio executives forgot to write it down, and it’s since been lost to time.

Sarita Choudhury & Denzel Washington star as the incredibly hot people in question: the daughter of motel workers in small-town Mississippi and a self-employed carpet cleaner who also does business at local motels, just outside of her periphery. The Indian immigrant & Black American communities they belong to are remarkably similar when compared in parallel, as the young couple angles for alone time between constant obligations to their aging parents. They’re also rigidly separate communities, to the point where it’s just as much of a transgression for them to date as it would be for a Montague to date a Capulet. Only, their worlds are separated by racial & xenophobic bigotry instead of interfamilial beef, which makes it even easier for the audience to root for their success.

The thorny circumstances that keep our incredibly hot would-be couple apart are given more political thought & attention than most by-the-numbers romances of the period. The story starts twenty years earlier in the Indian immigrant communities of 1970s Uganda, just as those communities are being forcibly ejected from the country by dictator Idi Amin. Roshan Seth plays a Ugandan-patriotic lawyer who’s heartbroken by his home country’s sudden rejection of his presence for not being “a real African,” which of course colors his opinions on mixed-race relationships twenty years later when his daughter dares to date a Mississippi local. Interracial bigotry is obviously not an uncommon source of conflict in romance dramas, but it is rare for a mainstream picture to dwell so thoughtfully on the historical, intersectional context of that conflict, let alone to tell a story with no white characters of consequence.

Director Mina Nair was very clear-headed in her mission to Trojan Horse political text into her traditionalist romance, doing on-the-ground research in Uganda while preparing the project. Nowadays, if you want to make a mainstream picture about geopolitical conflict, you have to sneak it into a $100mil superhero action spectacle; if you want to tell a story about small-town racial bigotry, you have to shroud it behind “elevated horror” metaphor. That is, if you want an audience to actually see your movie, as opposed to scrolling past its thumbnail on Netflix. In the 90s, the formula was much simpler. Side-by-side shots of Choudhury & Washington sharing a steamy phone call in their respective bedrooms was more than enough to justify the political substance of the larger text. I didn’t cry when that couple finally beats the odds, signing their romantic contract with a kiss at a highway gas station. I did, however, cry when Rashaan Seth finally returns to Uganda, fully reckoning with his lost home and his lost solidarity with fellow Africans. No one would finance a movie about the latter without indulging a little of the former, though, and Nair played the system perfectly to tell the story she wanted to tell to as many people as possible.

-Brandon Ledet

The Swampflix Oscars Guide 2026

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There are 35 feature films nominated for the 2026 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix have only reviewed half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the selection with any authority. We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including 40% of our own Top 10 Films of 2025 list. The fact that most top prizes are likely to go to one of two titles in that overlap (Sinners or One Battle After Another, both scoring high numbers of nominations) is also an encouraging sign of improving tastes within The Academy, validating this year’s list of nominees as a decent sample of what 2025 cinema had to offer.

Listed below are the 18 Oscar-Nominated films from 2025 that we’ve covered on the site, loosely ranked based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and the listed awards the films were nominated for.

Sinners

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Best Supporting Actress (Wunmi Mosaku), Best Supporting Actor (Delroy Lindo), Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song (“I Lied to You”)

“A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.”

Marty Supreme

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Timothée Chalamet), Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design

“Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.”

One Battle After Another

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actress (Teyana Taylor), Best Supporting Actor (Benicio del Toro), Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Sound, and Best Original Score

“2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.”

The Ugly Stepsister

Nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

“A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous ‘villain’ who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how ‘changing your outside to match your insides’ isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).”

Weapons

Nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Amy Madigan)

“Semi-functional alcoholism, conspiracy theory paranoia, Ring camera surveillance, cops harassing the homeless, mob justice vigilantism, institutional scapegoats for abuses at home … Oh yeah, we’re rockin’ the suburbs.”

Sirāt 

Nominated for Best Sound and Best International Feature

“When it’s time to party*, we will always party hard.

*distract ourselves from impending apocalypse and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Nominated for Best Actress (Rose Byrne)

“A portrait of parenthood as being cursed with an imaginary friend that demands your constant attention 24/7.”

Bugonia

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score

“Our corporate-speak overlords are literal demons on Earth and all we can do about it is conspire & seethe online. No action, just endless talk talk talk until the biggest lunatic among us ineffectively lashes out. Weirdly, if this inspires any been-there-seen-that jadedness, it’s coming from Kinds of Kindness, not Save the Green Planet!; would’ve fit right in as another vignette in the anthology, if condensed.”

KPop Demon Hunters

Nominated for Best Original Song (“Golden”) and Best Animated Feature

“The people yearn for the return of the music video.”

The Secret Agent

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), Best Casting, and Best International Feature

“I witnessed two verifiable miracles that night: the scale & period detail afforded by this movie’s budget, and an earthly visit from an angel (Udo Kier).”

Hamnet

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Score

“I expected this to exclusively be about one historically famous couple’s version of art therapy, but it hits on much broader themes about how we’ve all lost a genuine, Pagan relationship with the natural world and how making art can be a form of witchcraft that brings us back to it. It’s powerful stuff; cut right through my knee-jerk cynicism (except during one disastrously phony reading of ‘To be or not to be’ that temporarily broke the spell).”

It Was Just an Accident

Nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature

“A surprisingly straightforward thriller, considering what’s usually publicized about Panahi’s recent work. The urgency of its politics hangs heavy on each plot beat & morbid punchline, though, which makes for interesting comparison points as a contemporary of One Battle After Another.”

The Perfect Neighbor

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature

“A nightmare dispatch from the suburban US surveillance state. Probably amoral of me to say this about a documentary of a real-life tragedy, but this would be a helpful answer for anyone who was asking what Weapons is ‘about’. This country is terminally ill.”

Arco

Nominated for Best Animated Feature

“Between this, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, and Mars Express, it feels like there’s nice little new wave of sci-fi/fantasy films forming in French animation studios right now. Mars Express is a little more Blade Runner than Arco & Sirocco, which skew a little more Ghibli (making them less distinct in the process) but they’re all pleasant & enchanting enough in their own way.”

Sentimental Value

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Renate Reinsve), Best Supporting Actresses (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas & Elle Fanning), Best Supporting Actor (Stelan Skarsgard), Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best International Feature

“At times, a nice movie about a nice house; at other times, a sad movie about making a sad movie.”

Frankenstein

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Jacob Elordi), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Sound, and Best Original Score

“A more refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life. I’m excited to get to the point where Jack Pierce’s creature design is in the public domain so that every new version of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but this still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk.”

The Smashing Machine

Nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

“The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it was impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career. I don’t know that there’s much else to the movie besides giving him the opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, but he puts the spotlight to good use.”

Train Dreams

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song (“Train Dreams”)

“More of an illustrated audiobook than a movie. Specifically, it’s illustrated with the visual language of a macho, all-American TV commercial for a whiskey brand (which at least makes it interesting for how vocally pro-worker & anti-ICE it is in its politics).

I would be curious to know how many people dug this but didn’t vibe with Hamnet, which hits on a lot of the same themes (re: Old World Nature, familial grief) but actually makes an effort to adapt its source material instead of just reciting it. Personally, I found Hamnet powerful and this one hokey, but I’m sure that’s exactly flipped for a lot of people.”

-The Swampflix Crew

Dooba Dooba (2026)

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As often as it is reclaimed by the very people it others as monstrous villains, horror has always been a largely reactionary genre. You don’t have to scratch too hard at the surface of any classic horror title to find kneejerk fears of people with bodily, mental, gender, or sexual difference being expressed through metaphor. It’s a genre built on societal disgust with facial disfigurement, discomfort with ambiguous gender presentation, and paranoia over escaped mental patients, but it’s also one that’s routinely championed by the real-life targets of those societal phobias. Usually, it takes a couple decades for fans to reclaim blatantly homophobic films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as Queer, Actually but, given enough time, every major horror title eventually gets its due as a transgressive, funhouse mirror version of Representation. What’s funny about the new found-footage horror Dooba Dooba is that it encourages that reclamation to happen in real time. Textually, the film very directly preys on people’s suspicions that modern teens diagnosed with severe anxiety and other social disorders are just faking it to torture the rest of us. Subtextually, its flippant construction leaves room for younger audiences to celebrate that torture. It functions as a kind of power fantasy for socially anxious Zoomers to get their revenge on the Millennials & Gen-Xers who doubt the severity of their mental disabilities. From either perspective, it’s an act of generational warfare — a perversely amusing one.

If Dooba Dooba openly participates in any other long-running horror traditions, it’s in its modern interpretation of the classic babysitter slasher. A 20something aspiring singer takes on a babysitting gig to make ends meet, and the extent of her desperation for rent money is immediately tested. The child is 16 years old but too anxious to stay by herself because she once witnessed the murder of her young brother in the family home. Her overly horny, socially awkward parents explain that to alleviate the teen’s anxieties, the babysitter must sleep in the same bedroom as her, must constantly repeat the nonsense phrase “dooba dooba” whenever making noise elsewhere in the house, and must remain under constant surveillance via closed-circuit security cameras, stationed in every room. Although the story is set in 2022, the cameras are much older & lower-quality than modern tech, giving the entire film the feeling of a crime scene documented via stationary camcorder. Whenever the edit switches to a tight-zoom-in, you can practically count the grains on the screen. You never forget that you’re watching a contemporary story, though, because the way the Zoomer teen in the babysitter’s care weaponizes her social anxieties as a form of low-level torture is distinctly of-the-now. For instance, she mocks the poor babysitter’s Soundcloud tracks as facile novelties, then passes off the faux pas as an inability to read social cues. Then, the torture gets more literal & physical, once her malevolence is clearly established as intentional.

Where the film steps away from othering & mocking teens who struggle with anxiety or Autistic social disfunction is in handing its young villain the keys to the editing room. We are not watching raw security-camera footage of this babysitter’s torment, but rather a PowerPoint-style presentation of the night’s events as interpreted through a prankster teen’s online-troll sensibilities. The horrors documented in this suburban home are flippantly narrated in the lower-case, goofy-font text of a teen fucking around in an AIM chatroom, mocking the victim instead of her tormentor. They’re also frequently interrupted by stock footage of and “fun” factoids about past American presidents (such as their history as slave owners), as if the film were half snuff tape, half high school term paper assignment. All suburban-set horror tends to function as a stand-in for the horrors of America at large, but Dooba Dooba is smart to make that thematic connection explicit, so it’s clear that it isn’t only punching down at awkward teens on the spectrum. Our socially maladjusted villain, her gig-economy victim, and her alcoholic swinger parents all come together to represent something insidious about what’s going on behind the locked doors of the modern American suburban home, protected by the red-white-and-blue flags that wave above. Of course, some public domain horror clips and documents of surgical gore are also included in the mix, just to keep the genre exercise clearly defined.

Overall, Dooba Dooba may not be as ambitious nor as accomplished as other recent “analog” horrors like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Outwaters, or Skinamarink, but it’s got a real wicked streak to it, and it makes some impressively distinct visual & editing choices for something so obviously cheap. The cast is limited in both size and skill, but their awkwardness on camera only adds to the real-life social discomforts they’re supposed to evoke. The cathode-ray CCTV imagery is also limited in its texture & movement, but the sequencing of the edit maintains a perverse sense of humor & momentum throughout. Not for nothing, the film is also under 80 minutes long, making for a perfect January horror B-picture experience. Between Primate, The Bone Temple, and Dooba Dooba, the year’s off to a great trashy start. Just be careful not to play a drinking game with this particular one’s title, since it’s repeated often enough to send you to the hospital.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #256: Landscape Suicide (1987) & Elevated True Crime

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Welcome to Episode #256 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of high-concept true crime documentaries, starting with 1987’s Landscape Suicide.

0:00 Welcome
02:50 Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025
04:17 F.A.R.T. The Movie (1991)
07:52 Amish Stud – The Eli Weaver Story (2023)
11:13 Project X (2012)
15:02 January horror
18:45 Atom Egoyan
30:20 The Roottrees are Dead

33:37 Landscape Suicide (1987)
1:01:38 Zodiac Killer Project (2025)
1:26:00 Casting JonBenet (2017)
1:45:00 Voyeur (2017)

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

– The Podcast Crew