brandon ledet

Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)

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John Waters’s Desperate Living is, for all practical purposes, my favorite movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times — twice theatrically. This week, I learned something new about one of its most outrageous scenes: the babysitter on acid vignette. It’s a minutes-long gag wherein one of the citizens of Mortville explains that their expulsion from proper society resulted from brutally murdering their teenage babysitter, as retribution for cooking her baby in the oven while high on LSD (presumably mistaking it for a roast chicken or turkey). When I first saw this scene as a teen, I correctly assumed it was based on an urban legend, because its story was already familiar to me as a fan of the Lunachicks’ punk-rock novelty song “Babysitters on Acid,” which gives a full play-by-play of the same absurd scenario. While the “Baby-Roast” story did prove to be an urban legend after all, the recent documentary Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks added a new wrinkle to its pop-culture history by explaining that the band’s most recognizable song was directly inspired by that scene in Desperate Living, not by the legend itself. Curiously, Wikipedia cites the Lunachicks track as a retelling of the urban legend but omits any reference to John Waters’s film, instead referencing Rudy Ray Moore’s Disco Godfather (another personal high school favorite) as its most prominent cinematic depiction of note. This information is very important to me, specifically, but I doubt it means much to anyone else.

The question of “Does this mean anything to anyone?” constantly nags at the heart of Pretty Ugly. The original members of Lunachicks are all alive and eager to wax nostalgic about their punk-rock glory days, but they also seem a little baffled why anyone would want to listen. If anything, the project appears to be the result of peer pressure, collectively willed into existence by other recent documentaries of culturally dormant bands like DEVO, Pavement, Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Sparks, and Judas Priest. Pretty Ugly lays out a clear path that these revivals are supposed to take: a written biography, then some reunion concert dates, and then a documentary promoting & encapsulating the entire project. This band seems especially reluctant to go through any of it—especially the concert reunions—but they eventually drag their feet across the finish line anyway. As an artistic project, Lunachicks represents a moment that has passed, with each member moving on to adult jobs & responsibilities after spending the entirety of the 1990s touring & recording without ever fully “making it” on the same level as their peers. There’s something personally embarrassing about picking their instruments back up to play decades-old novelty songs about the junk food, junk movies, and junk TV they consumed as young snotty punks, no matter how loudly or how often they’re encouraged by loyal fans. They still eventually go through with it, though, because that’s what 90s nostalgia acts are now required to do under the law of mob rule.

Personally, I’m grateful for the result of that peer pressure campaign. Unlike the more famous bands referenced above, I never really knew much about Lunachicks despite owning every single album they released on CD. A lot of the revelations in this documentary are things I would’ve assumed just by looking at their still images in those CDs’ liner notes. Of course they were heavily inspired by John Waters movies; of course most of their interpersonal issues were the result of drug abuse; of course they never broke through to major-label success. However, a lot of my assumptions about their place in the punk-rock ecosystem were heavily distorted by the era when I caught up with them as a teen. By the time I first heard Lunachicks, they were making a modedty living on the Vans Warped Tour mall-punk circuit; what I didn’t know is that they had earned decades of NYC punk-scene bona fides long before that cultural moment, initially “discovered” & promoted by members of Sonic Youth before working as contemporaries of better-remembered acts like L7, Luscious Jackson, and The Go-Go’s. I had never seen footage of them playing to rowdy barroom crowds, provided in excess here via camcorder-quality VHS footage (but mercifully synced to the cleaner studio recordings of their most popular songs). They were, by every measure, a real band. They just never broke through to a wider audience the way their peers did, as most brutally illustrated here by having to trade opening-headliner slots with The Offspring on successive tours, after the lesser band won the war of the charts.

It’s difficult to not blame the entirety of the Lunachicks’ failure to break through to industry misogyny. As young, hip NYC brats with a professional fashion model for a lead singer (Theo Kogan), they were actively resistant to being sexualized in their art, choosing to purposefully ugly themselves up in Waters-inspired drag instead of playing pretty for the camera. I loved that about them as a teenager, but I can also see how that could limit their marketability — as opposed to, say, The Donnas, who eventually had to go full glam to earn a full paycheck. Even in the 2020s, the punk rock marketing machine is a little squeamish about fully promoting their act. The documentary opens with band members encountering a NYC subway ad featuring a vintage Lunachicks concert photo that has edited out the stage-makeup menstruate running down their legs in the original still, leaving only the image of hot girls playing guitar. That squeamishness says a lot in the context of the recent nontroversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s adoption of the 90s kinderwhore aesthetic, wherein she dresses in the babydoll gear once perverted by grunge-era acts like Hole & Babes in Toyland but doesn’t have the grit & grime to pull it off, so she just looks like an actual baby. Everyone wants to profit off the 90s rocker aesthetic but no one wants the 90s rocker attitude that comes with it, which apparently has been true since the Lunachicks were helping define that aesthetic in the 1990s, to little lasting acclaim.

At the same time, the Lunachicks’ missed opportunities as a great band that could’ve been are also somewhat a result of happenstance. They put in the work, producing five fun, rockin’ records packed with memorable hooks and genuinely funny lyrics. They toured relentlessly, living in vans & RVs for a decade solid while some of their peers were arbitrarily called up to millionaires’ lives touring in a megabus instead. In the long run, time has flattened out the difference; each of those 90s acts are assigned their own reunion tour and nostalgia doc regardless of their achieved level of fame, each cherished by loyal fans and forgotten to time by the rest of the masses. In a way, this band-validating documentary is the reward for all that work, something I’m sure every Lunachick would happily trade for a regular royalty check from an Offspring-level radio hit they never got to enjoy.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Turksploitation sci-fi parody Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973).

00:00 Welcome
02:37 Maisie Was a Lady (1941)
06:47 Ringside Maisie (1941)
10:56 Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)
15:32 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)
18:58 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
20:15 The Man Who Laughs (1928)
25:11 Die Nibelungen (1924)
35:15 All Monsters Attack (1969)
38:53 Happiness (1998)
46:13 Chungking Express (1994)
50:05 Obsession (2026)
1:00:45 Blue Film (2026)
1:06:16 How to Make a Killing (2026)
1:11:10 Scream 7 (2026)
1:16:44 Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)
1:21:26 I Love Boosters (2026)
1:35:00 Is God Is (2026)
1:39:28 Backrooms (2026)

2:01:45 Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

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

Is God Is (2026)

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I live in a majority Black neighborhood in a majority Black city with its very own four-screen cinema just a few bus stops away from my front porch. In the decade or so since that theater has opened, this week is the first instance I’ve ever noticed that the majority of the movies on that cinema’s marquee were helmed by Black directors and Black leads, which suggests that we’re currently experiencing a notable cultural moment in film distribution, at least partially encouraged by last year’s box office success for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Of the three Black-led, Black-directed films screening at The Broad this week, Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is lands the closest to Sinners territory, at least in comparison to Antoine Fuqua’s amoral nostalgia-bait biopic Michael and Boots Riley’s lefty heist comedy I Love Boosters. Is God Is is a dusty, Southern-fried genre flick shot on location on the rural backroads of Louisiana, and thus the project of the trio that most likely benefited from Sinners‘s success. Much like Sinners, it’s also a film that’s more satisfying when it’s setting the stage for its violent climactic showdown than it is when actually depicting that violence, when its tension is supposed to be relieved through cathartic action. In both cases, it’s a fun ride getting there, regardless of the payoffs found at their predetermined destinations.

Aleshea Harris’s feature film debut feels like a natural evolution from her background as a playwright. It’s packed with compelling characters staging a series of standalone showdowns in single-location scenes, each linked via road trip montage. This structure allows formidable actors like Sterling K. Brown, Vivica A. Fox, Janelle Monáe, and (fresh off her hilarious turn in The Rise & Fall of Reggie Dinkins) Erika Alexander to make major impact with just a few minutes of screentime, rigidly sectioned off in their own hermetic realms. Each of those name-brand performers go toe-to-toe with the film’s up-and-comer leads: Kara Young & Mallori Johnson as telepathically linked twins on a familial revenge mission across the American South. After having essentially raised each other from foster home to foster home, the two young adults are enlisted by their estranged mother (Fox) to kill their even more estranged, abusive father (Brown) in retaliation for heartlessly setting his family on fire, leaving all three women horribly scarred & disfigured. The feistier twin (Young) is excited to be offered a path to tangible retribution & closure, while the kinder twin (Johnson) struggles to hold her sister on a leash, hoping to resolve the violence of the past without exacting further violence in the present. Because this is a revenge thriller, neither kindness nor forgiveness prevail.

Is God Is is funny, stylish, and cool in surprising ways. The twins’ lifelong social isolation resulting from their visible disfigurement has left them intensely strange & mutually obsessed, like a couple of Nells (or, more appropriately, like Letitia Wright’s titular dual role in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Silent Twins). Harris’s stage theatre background shows in the screenplay’s more allegorical touches, categorizing the twins’ oppositional parents as a small-town showdown between God (Fox) and The Devil (Brown) in a temporally ambiguous, sepiatone version of The South. Between the leads’ volatile sisterly chemistry and the anything-goes chaos of the otherworldly setting, the movie quickly establishes a distinct style & mood despite the familiarity of its road-trip revenge mission genre template. The major letdown, then, is that it doesn’t also deliver on the built-in genre payoffs of that template. Harris proves to be just as weary to get her hands dirty in the film’s violent action as the softer of her two protagonists. We know her characters are doing violent things; they are brutally killing each other with lit matches, rusty gardening sheers, and Biblically-accurate rocks. The movie is just disappointingly squeamish about actually depicting that ultraviolence onscreen instead of just hinting at it. We almost always see the aftermath instead of the point of impact, as if the producers were seeking a PG-13 rating that the crasser lines of Harris’s dialogue were never going to allow.

The most convincingly violent Is God Is gets is in the ice-cold tone of Sterling K. Brown’s villainous performance, suggesting a sociopathic level of cruelty the onscreen action is too timid to match. This is ultimately a very warm, sentimental story about two socially isolated women who only have each other in this otherwise cruel world; it hides all of the nastier business of smashed skulls, burnt flesh, and pierced lungs behind visual obstacles, shielding the audience from the full brunt of impact. This disparity between the level of violence demanded by the genre and the level of violence depicted on the screen calls into question whether Harris was actually interested in making a revenge thriller in particular, or if that screenplay was just the easiest to fundraise production funds for, as opposed to a dialogue-heavy drama. Then again, the last time I remember complaining about this kind of violence-averse squeamishness was in Nia DaCosta’s (otherwise compelling) Candyman reboot, and she later doubled down on horror’s mandatory violent catharsis in the excellent 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Maybe Harris is working her way up to soaking in the bloodbaths demanded by her scripts’ chosen genres. Maybe she’ll be able to leverage the attention earned by this flashy debut to instead pivot away from genre requirements entirely. Either way, this is an undeniably cool calling-card introduction of an exciting authorial voice to the moviegoing audience, and its wide theatrical distribution is an encouraging sign for where the industry is headed.

-Brandon Ledet

The Currents (2026)

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Everyone knows what you mean when you describe a film as “a character study,” but I’d like to expand on that genre descriptor to include a new subcategory: the character mystery. Many festival-circuit dramas operate as alienating character studies of inscrutable people—especially women—that the audience must puzzle through only to vaguely understand. The first time this occurred to me was during the local premiere of Red Rooms at the Overlook Film Festival; the film has since been heralded as an era-defining digi voyeurism thriller, but I spent the entire runtime thinking, “Okay what is this woman’s deal???” while each of the protagonist’s peculiar character traits were revealed one scene at a time. Since then, it has occurred to me that there are many great films of the “What is this woman’s deal???” variety, including such classics as Todd Haynes’s Safe, Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar, Christian Petzoldt’s Undine, and the majority of Isabelle Huppert’s filmography. Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents is just the latest addition to that character-mystery canon, an Argentinian variation in the national tradition of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman.

We meet our mystery character outside of her usual environment. Isabel Aimé González Sola plays an Argentinian artist accepting an industry award while abroad in Switzerland, then immediately jumping off the nearest bridge in a shockingly nonchalant suicide attempt. When describing this incident to her sister back in Argentina, she confesses, “I fell into the water,” absolving herself of cause or intent. What we’ve come to learn about her by that point is that she feels fully disconnected from her body and her life, stuck in a constant dissociative state that alienates her from friends, family, and colleagues. A new wrinkle to that feeling is that the bridge “accident” has left her terrified of any & all contact with water, associating the flow of a river’s currents with the ceaseless allure of The Void. She describes her current state as existing in “suspended time,” as she lives out the lyrics of DEVO’s “Out of Syc” while drifting from one social or professional obligation to another. Seemingly, the only thing keeping her from jumping back into The Void is concern for her young daughter, and even that earthly tether is wearing thin.

In one of the most intriguing sequences, our dazed mystery woman is hypnotized by a lighthouse bulb and dissociates for several minutes while imagining the urban domestic scenarios playing out on the city streets below. We might as well assume that she’s under hypnosis for the entire runtime, as every mundane activity that fills her day registers an out-of-body experience, from bath time with the kiddo to passive-aggressive squabbles with the mother-in-law. As a result, we have a less solid sense of who she is than we have of the fluid state she finds herself drowning in. She is, herself, the mystery; all the audience can relate to or repel from is the familiarity of the undefined feeling she’s suffering through. I may have set expectations a little too high in that opening paragraph by likening The Currents to so many cinephile-approved masterworks, since its scene-to-scene payoffs are decidedly quiet & lowkey. It’s a strangely calming experience for what’s effectively a psychological thriller, often pausing its story beats for a quiet stroll through an art museum or a couture photo shoot or a VR headset rainstorm. It’s a mystery without a resolution, designed with the clean lines & jewel tones of a fashion catalog spread instead of more typical psych-thriller mise-en-scène. In that sense, it’s best recommended to fashion-forward fans of The Headless Woman; just because you’re a headless enigma doesn’t mean you can’t pull off a lewk.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #265: Chess of the Wind (1976) & The World Cinema Project

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Welcome to Episode #265 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that have been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, starting with the Iranian familial thriller Chess of the Wind (1976).

00:00 Welcome
02:11 Obsession (2026)
09:09 Microcosmos (1996)
18:42 The Housemaid (2025)
25:55 Maya Deren

32:54 The World Cinema Project
41:09 Chess of the Wind (1976)
1:09:39 Lucía (1968)
1:33:58 The Night of Counting the Years (1969)
1:51:01 Manila in the Claws of Light (1975)

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

Microcosmos (1996)

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Back in my college days, the go-to TV series to get stoned & zone out to was the BBC’s Planet Earth, a soothing nature doc series shot in then-astonishing HD clarity. I couldn’t afford cable back then, though, so I only caught snippets of it while drifting through friends’ & strangers’ living rooms, occasionally mesmerized by a glimpse of the Northern Lights or an insect-destroying fungus before moving on to the next mindless activity. My own personal Planet Earth back then was a much-rented DVD stocked at the off-campus Blockbuster, a 2005 French documentary titled Genesis. In it, an African mystic stirs a bucket of water to create a small whirlpool, which he then uses to explain the history of the planet and the evolution of all the life it hosts. Much like David Attenborough’s dry script-reads in Planet Earth, the narration never stops, with the mystic constantly explaining the subsequent nature footage that illustrates the evolution of Earth life in astonishingly gorgeous close-up photography. Genesis is a little hokey, but it’s less than 80 minutes long (as opposed to Planet Earth‘s 500+), and it gets the job done. As I’ve since come to learn, it’s also always functioned as a bargain-bin alternative to a superior work, even though it predates Planet Earth by a couple years. Long before they made Genesis, directors Claude Nuridsany & Marie Pérennou had scored major acclaim with their 1996 masterwork Microcosmos, which offers an up-close, Planet Earth-style profile of insect life never before seen in such beautiful cinematic detail. Genesis is the watered-down version of their earlier success, which makes it a pity that’s the one I had access to on the nearest video store shelf.

The key to Microcosmos‘s success as a monumental work of art rather than a standard-issue nature doc is its almost complete lack of narration. While Genesis overexplains in metaphor and Planet Earth instructs in classroom lecture, Microcosmos includes only a small touch of narration to get the audience thinking about how insects, snails, and other miniature creatures live small lives that we rarely take the time to observe. Even those couple paragraphs of narration feel a little redundant, given that its opening theme song already explains it perfectly in a child’s falsetto, instructing “Look at your feet/this funny world/full of insane small creatures/and listen to/this buzzing chord/who keenly spreads such strange murmurs/The sound’s buzzing, swarming, sliding beetles, snails, and ladybirds.” Besides functioning as a presciently pitch-perfect parody of Björk’s career to come, that tune encapsulates the entire project in just a few simple words. Gazing at Microcomsos means pausing your busy brain to observe a world smaller than yours, the one just below your feet — where the bugs live. Nuridsany & Pérennou worked with state-of-the-art microscopic cameras to immerse their audience in that world, shrinking our moment-to-moment concerns down to the insectoid impulses to feed, breed, and shelter. It’s not a mode of observation & wonderment that can be explained in narration; it’s a practice that the movie teaches you by forcibly diverting your attention to the smallest things in life. I also have to assume that its lessons’ most accomplished students are 20-year-old stoners who’d rather focus on just about anything other than their actual homework, the same as with Genesis & Planet Earth one decade later.

The cast of Microcosmos is large & varied. You’ve got all of your classic microspecies here: your ants, your spiders, your ladybugs, your tadpoles, your moths, your butterflies. And then you’ve got a never-ending supply of esoteric creepy crawlies I couldn’t even begin to identify, as if they were found under a rock on an alien planet instead of the one we occupy. Even more mysterious is the moment-to-moment actions of these micro creatures, which Nuridsany & Pérennou playfully assign meaning through cheeky music & editing choices. It’s easy to read into insects’ intention & emotions while they’re mating, hunting, and organizing in groups, but when those acts all inevitably lead to no specified goal or result, the audience snaps out of the trance and remembers, oh yeah, they’re bugs. We’ll often watch the up-close struggles of a frog being pummeled with rain drops, a dung beetle struggling to push its self-assigned Sisyphean bolder, or a group of caterpillars lining up in military formation. We get emotionally involved in their toils, only for the edit to then switch to a wide shot that contextualizes these epic battles as the meaningless busywork of insects who have no idea what they’re doing or what’s happening around them. It’s an effect that says just as much about the manipulative nature of filmic storytelling as it does about the minute-to-minute meaninglessness of our own upscaled human lives. Nothing you’re working on right now matters all that much in the bigger picture of things, so you might as well take some time out of your day to look at some cool bugs doing cool bug shit. There’s a whole world down there, and it can be just as breathtakingly beautiful (snails having sex) as it is hilariously pitiful (ladybugs having sex).

Microcosmos recently screened at The Broad as part of their weekly Gap Tooth repertory series, with a fully engaged audience making their own audible insectoid rustlings in reaction to every microstruggle depicted onscreen. After a clueless dung beetle spent minutes freeing its little bolder from an errant stick in the mud, the room burst into spontaneous applause. Personally, I only spent half the screening marveling at the majesty of nature’s smallest wonders; I spent the other half thinking about how every species of insect deserves to be blown up to kaiju scale in its own standalone creature feature, an experience the packed house was already gifting to the latecomers in the front row. Access to such a beautiful communal event in my own neighborhood was also a blessing in its own way. It’s funny how access can affect your relationship with cinema. What we’re able to see can be severely limited by cable subscriptions, video store libraries, and geographic proximity, like how I spent repeated nights watching Genesis while most of my friends were watching Planet Earth and we all should have been watching Microcosmos.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Kirlian Witness (1979)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychotronic ’70s oddity The Kirlian Witness, a murder mystery in which the only witness to the crime is an ordinary house plant.

00:00 Welcome
01:41 Take One (1977)
09:20 Maisie (1939)
24:35 Camille 2000 (1969)
31:28 Heaven Can Wait (1943)
36:47 The Invisible Boy (1957)
41:39 Gazer (2025)
51:26 New Rose Hotel (1998)
56:50 The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)
1:16:26 The Puffy Chair (2005)
1:20:47 Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021)
1:27:20 Demonwarp (1988)

1:30:05 The Kirlian Witness (1979)

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

Take One (1977)

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They say all pornography, no matter how scripted, is partially documentary. You’ll find the phoniest characters, dialogue, and scenarios cinema has to offer in porno, and yet the physical sexual contact between performers is more real than all other cinematic action — unstimulated, often documented by the camera in medical detail. It’s easy to look back to vintage titles of the Porno Chic era and retroactively impose anthropological meaning on them, citing them as a document of a bygone era, since their unpermitted street shoots and nonexistent costume budgets often captured the people of the time as they were in daily life. Pornography is also immediately documentary, though, caught between the extremes of both staged cinematic fantasy and the documented reality of the performers within that fantasy. This is not a new observation. One of Porno Chic’s earliest auteurs was playing around with the tension between those extremes a half-century ago, coining the term “docufantasy” to describe his chosen artform’s dual, self-conflicting nature. Wakefield Poole’s 1977 “docufantasy” Take One opens by warning the audience that trying to parse out what’s fiction and what’s reality is a fool’s errand, announcing, “For your enjoyment, do not try to understand this film: there is nothing to understand. It is only real people doing reel things and making them real together.” That distinction between the “real” and the “reel” sums it all up more concisely than I ever could.

Take One finds Wakefield Poole on the opposite coast than his crown jewel Bijou, now docu-fantasizing about the gay men in 1970s San Francisco. In an early precursor to Beth B’s reality-TV prototype Visiting Desire, Poole invites eight men from the local scene to confess their fantasies in videotaped interviews, then act them out in front of 16mm cameras. Unlike in Visiting Desire, this experiment reliably results in onscreen fucking, with each performer given a spotlight fantasy sequence before they all gather for a climactic orgy in the theater where the movie they’re participating in premieres mid-runtime. Some fantasies are more abstract than others, such as an early sequence where a young man gets so revved up thinking about his muscle car that he finds a way to passionately penetrate its hood ornament, à la Julia Ducournau’s Titane or Kenneth Anger’s Kustom Kar Kommandos. In another, a domestic couple has semi-public sex on the sunny roof of their isolated desert home, leaning heavily into the soft psychedelia of the film’s post-hippie era. The most shocking sequence is the one in which two real-life brothers have sex on camera, fulfilling an incest fantasy most pornos only playfully hint at to capitalize on a convenient taboo. Here, the siblings’ lovemaking is warmly tender to an almost disconcerting degree, as if the audience has been invited to witness an intimate moment that no one outside their unusual relationship was ever meant to see. That sequence is more “real” than it is “reel,” alarmingly so.

If Take One falls short on either side of the real/reel divide, it’s in the supposedly documentary interview sequences that justify their resulting fantasies. For the most part, the initial video interviews that inspired the film aren’t incorporated into the final cut and are instead restaged and scripted in a more traditional pornographic narrative style. So, like Bijou, the film is at its best when it goes full fantasy mode, staging the abstract sex acts inspired by those interviews in an endless black void. The best scenes in the film are pure jack-off material, with men narrating their fantasies to the audience while masturbating in a featureless room decorated only with slideshow projections of momentary illustrations, as described in their horned-up ramblings. It’s a surprisingly poetic approach to pornography that’s introduced as soon as the opening scene, wherein a nude ballet dancer performs a full routine for the audience after emerging from the silver screen like a cryptid hatching from an egg. That poetic approach to the genre is later echoed in Poole’s liberal use of color gels, as he bathes his performers in fantastic colored lights that untether them from this earthly realm. The film’s incidentally documentary glimpses of vintage gay San Francisco are cool & all, but we spend most of the runtime indoors, so Poole is smart to attempt to document their internal lives instead. We learn about them by finding out what gets them off.

Because this project is so dependent on Wakefield Poole’s distinctions between the “real” and the “reel,” the filmmaker himself inevitably becomes part of the story. Take One is a meta-porno, including footage of Poole & crew recruiting performers, conducting interviews, operating cameras, and exhibiting film prints between the purer sensory immersions of the full-on fantasy sequences. The reality of the movie being made & projected in-film fully breaks down by the mid-premiere orgy sequence, which gets so out of control that even the projectionist gets in on the action, receiving a surprise blowjob in his hermetic booth above the fray. Having already fulfilled all of his obligations as a documentarian and a pornographer, Poole fully lets loose in that sequence, playing around with as many color gels and camera angles he can afford to shoot while his performers shoot all over each other. He becomes especially enamored with repurposing a glory hole as a peephole in that sequence, viewing the action from a self-imposed distance on the other side of a faux patrician. For all of the semi-documentary elements that make Take One interesting as a consciously academic object from porno’s distant past, it’s still most useful and most remarkable when it drops the bullshit and gets down to the task at hand: filming unstimulated sex acts in the most aesthetically pleasing light possible. Poole didn’t need to go out of his way to stage a “docufantasy”; that’s already the business he was working in.

-Brandon Ledet

Camille 2000 (1969)

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Radley Metzger’s late-60s romance Camille 2000 slips through the cracks of most marketable genre definitions. Its title suggests a Swingin’ 60s sci-fi futurism, but its story is set in contemporary Rome; the only thing futuristic about it is its see-through inflatable furniture. Its fashionable Italian production design and scene-to-scene dramatic sensibilities recall the post-Hitchcock stylings of a giallo, but there’s no murder nor mystery to be found in its plot. Its director’s reputation as an unusually stylish hardcore pornographer sets the mood for lewd on-screen sex, but its historical timing as pre-Deep Throat erotica means it can only deliver softcore posing of nude bodies, with no genital contact nor thrusting. So, what exactly is a sci-fi title without science fiction, a giallo without murder, a porno without penetration? Like with many artsy Euro dramas, it’s all just a vibe. In this case, the vibe happens to be a Pierre Cardin magazine layout inspired by Valley of the Dolls. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The titular Camille is a wealthy Roman socialite who’s living a dangerously fast life of pure, high-fashion hedonism. She spends her careless days drunk & stoned, shopping for dresses, and party-hopping from orgy to opera to orgy. The only thing she needs to do to sustain this fabulous lifestyle is to marry rich, an obligation that stresses her out as she half-heartedly attempts to placate an aging sugar-daddy fiancée while continually humping the more age-appropriate fuckboys whom she actually desires. She warns the latest fuckboy not to fall in love with her, since that life-dependent need to marry rich will certainly break his heart in the long run, but the young Frenchman can’t help but fall for her anyway. He swears that even if he sleeps with 2,000 other women, he still won’t be able to get over her (thus the futuristic-sounding title). He copes by draining his modest bank account trying to keep her clothed and happy until she can’t help but move on and officially marry, securing her place in life. She copes by popping pills in-between her nonstop parade of orgiastic cocktail parties, too numb to feel the full brunt of her burgeoning love for the dolt. Their toxic dynamic inevitably leaves him drunk and her dead. It takes 131 long minutes to arrive at that predetermined destination, like a train that takes lengthy breaks at every station.

Camille 2000 is not a movie you watch for its drama or its action; you watch it for its production design. Its social conflicts and stoney-baloney fuck sessions are frustratingly inert, but they’re at least staged inside an Italo fashion magazine layout, where it’s appropriate to wear see-through swimsuits to an afternoon cocktail party and no bedroom is complete without at least a dozen strategically angled mirrors. It’s less actual pornography than it is lifestyle pornography, inviting the audience to hang out with emptyheaded European socialites whose only immediate concern in life is finding the chicest place to smoke their dope and get their rocks off. Metzger can’t go full-hardcore here the way he does in later, more famous pictures like The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but he has plenty of opportunity to leer & drool over his actors’ carefully arranged nude bodies. In the most stylish scene, Camille is being eaten out by her favorite Frenchman in the background while a vase of camelias is framed close-up in the foreground, with Metzger’s lens alternating focus between the two displays to the rhythm of her orgasmic breaths. Like everything else in the picture, it’s gorgeous, it’s indulgent, and it lasts for several more minutes than you expect it to, so it’s best not to be in a rush to get off and get over to the next swanky locale.

Roger Ebert wrote a 1-star review of Camille 2000 for the Chicago Sun-Times, frustrated by the excess of mirrored nude modeling and the total lack of actual phonographic thrusting. That review was published in October of 1969, and I am dying to know if that was before or after Ebert wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyers’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls that same year. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls resembles Camille 2000 in its garish look and its erotic sensibilities far more closely than it recalls the original Valley of the Dolls it was supposedly a sequel to, almost to the point where it feels like a direct parody of Metzger’s film. Camille even has a gay fashionista bestie that stands in as the film’s very own Z-Man, whom I fully expected to transform into Superwoman during the film’s climactic, prison-themed S&M orgy. I must admit that a large part of my enjoyment of Camille 2000 is in its resemblance to Russ Meyer’s much crasser, much more exciting follow-up, since it was a joy to spend more time luxuriating in mise-en-scène that so closely recalled one of my all-time favorite films. Meanwhile, Ebert would’ve been confronted with it as a routine work assignment that tested his patience & forgiveness as its drama refused to progress and its nude models refused to hump. All I can say is that all movies become more interesting with time, which tends to flatten their differences and accentuate their shared value as cultural snapshots of a bygone era.

-Brandon Ledet

All Monsters Attack (1969)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

“Why is Earth such a hard place to live?” That’s the question at the core of the greater Godzilla filmography, in which the King of the Monsters is episodically attacked by lesser kaiju that individually represent Earth-life’s many challenges: war, pollution, overfishing, techno modernization, etc. It’s also a question directly asked in the opening-credits theme song to the kaiju monster-mash picture All Monsters Attack (1969), which is essentially a clip show featuring highlights from those metaphorical battles. While previews of those clips flash and freeze as title cards, the song “Monster March” tosses out a few sing-along catchphrases like “Wham! Bang! Crash!” and “Go-go-Godzilla!” to invite the children in the audience to join in on the fun. All Monsters Attack is, undeniably, kiddie stuff. Just in case its target audience is a little too young to have caught onto the kaiju-as-metaphor themes of the greater Godzilla project, the song goes on to spell it out, accompanying images of an industrialized, overcrowded Tokyo with the lyrics, “Megaton smog and exhaust fumes […] are the real monsters!” So, it’s a little surprising, then, that the story that follows such a direct opening statement isn’t about modern urban pollution at all, despite the proto-Hedorah themes suggested by those images & lyrics. Instead, All Monsters Attack is about how Earth is a hard place to live for children in particular, whose only reprieve from the planet’s cruelties is to keep watching Godzilla movies.

Our hero is a young, lonely latchkey kid, left unsupervised for hours on end while his mother works hard to pay the rent. He’s bullied daily by other kids in his industrial neighborhood, a routine that escalates when he stumbles into the lives of two adult bank-robbers who happen to choose his private hiding spot for their own and bully him even harder. Without the familial love & attention and the personal resilience he needs to survive modern urbanity, the poor little tyke only has one coping mechanism that makes his life worth living: dreaming about Godzilla. Whenever life gets too tough to handle, he rushes to a homemade computer that hypnotizes him into dreaming he’s on Monster Island, where he makes fast friends with Godzilla’s useless, hideous son, Minilla. The two interspecies buddies mostly just watch recycled footage of previous Godzilla battles from the sidelines, cheering their favorite monster on as he beats up Ebirah, Anguirus, and The Kamacuras, among other skyscraper creatures. A brand-new monster then enters the picture in form of Gabara, the kaiju equivalent of the bullies that our hero has been avoiding fighting back against in real life. While Minilla learns the confidence to fight his own battles without Godzilla’s help against the obnoxious Gabara in the dreamworld, his new human bestie does the same in the real world, even though he’d rather be napping and dreaming of his favorite Godzilla clips. If it weren’t for all the rubber-suited wrestling matches and the aggressively swanky jazz soundtrack keeping the mood lively, it would be a sad little story about the world’s loneliest boy.

The title All Monsters Attack promises a repeat sequel to the battle-royale kaiju showcase of Destroy All Monsters, so it’s kind of a letdown that so much of its monster action is recycled from previous Godzilla outings. That disappointment is then compounded by the dorky, unintimidating design of the bully Gabara, who looks like a geriatric housecat with an elongated neck and a Donald Trump wig. Still, I found myself charmed by the psychic space it affords Monster Island as an escapist fantasy for young Godzilla fans. The idea of astral projecting yourself all the way there just to hang out with Minilla, of all monsters, is a hilarious indignity. Here, the laughably ugly little thing has somehow mastered human speech but still brays like a donkey when he gets nervous, which happens a lot as he’s mercilessly bullied by Gabara. Our hero seems fond of the pitiful mutant, though, which is sweet, even if it’s an indication of why he’s the kind of nerd who might get bullied around the schoolyard. It’s easy to imagine kids his age enjoying All Monsters Attack in the sequences where it turns into a clip show of Godzilla’s greatest hits (or, more accurately, his then-recent hits), so I can’t fault the movie too much for playing directly to that age group’s corny sensibilities. The worst I can say about it is that it has since been made obsolete by the invention of home video & YouTube, which would allow children to rewatch their favorite Godzilla battles without having to suffer through Minilla’s buffoonery or the afterschool special messaging to get there. Being a lonely, unsupervised nerd has never been more fun.

-Brandon Ledet