brandon ledet

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026)

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In case you haven’t already met him, Shaun is a claymation sheep, one who’s too smart and too independent for his own good. Initially introduced as a side character in Aardman’s flagship Wallace & Gromit shorts, Shaun the Sheep has since gone on to become a name brand of his own, headlining an eponymous stop-motion TV show in which his mischievous schemes cause great episodic trouble for the farmer & dog that are supposed to be keeping him fenced in. The show is subverbal, with characters exclusively communicating in expressive grunts instead of using their words, which levels the intellectual playing field between the humans and farm animals in the cast. It’s a consistently, cozily delightful set-up for some classic silent comedy gags, and it’s proven to be popular enough to inspire a series of feature-film sequels outside the confines of television. 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie played as an action-spectacle escalation of the Shaun the Sheep TV show, dragging Shaun and his fellow barnyard animals off the farm and to The Big City in the George Miller tradition. Then, the series temporarily lost its way in its attempt at Atomic Age sci-fi pastiche in 2019’s Farmageddon, which disrupted the calming simplicity of its silent-comedy-farm-life premise by allowing a cutesy, hyperactive space alien to invade the scene, dragging the whole enterprise down to the low-attention-span antics of a Trolls sequel. Thankfully, while shifting genres to horror pastiche in the newest addition, the Shaun the Sheep franchise has retreated to the warmer tone and core character dynamics that separate Aardman Animations from the lesser, computer-animated DreamWorks of the world. Shaun is back causing covertly anthropomorphic mischief, the farmer gets into exponentially absurd mishaps through no fault of his own, and all the other people & animals hanging around have a sweetly silly time watching their hijinks ensue — this time while hanging Halloween decorations to help each other get into the seasonal mood.

The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens with the farmer and his animals waking at dawn with the creaky mobility of zombies rising from their graves. Once they’re alert and going about their separate days, both halves of the farm set about getting their Halloween plans in order; the farmer works on mustering up the courage to invite the local vet to his town’s annual Halloween Hoedown, while Shaun works on growing a secret pumpkin patch that would allow his fellow sheep to carve traditional jack-o-lanterns behind the farmer’s back. After a gruesome mishap massacres Shaun’s precious pumpkins in a blood-orgy of gourd guts, the determined sheep decides to play mad scientist and invent a growth serum that will rapidly develop new full-size pumpkins from seed in a couple days’ time, so they’ll be ready by Halloween. Only, his mad science experiment works too well, and the pumpkins never stop growing. Naturally, the serum is also mistaken for hair-growth gel by the balding farmer, who thinks he has a better shot at landing a Halloween Hoedown date if he can regrow the luscious locks of his youth. So, Shaun lives out the classic sci-fi horror plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein while the farmer finds himself in more of a Peanut Butter Solution rapid-hair-growth situation, of which it’s unclear whether the homage was at all intentional; it’s more important to know that his new hirsute look gets him mistaken for an errant sasquatch monster by freaked-out townsfolk. Certainly, there are blatant, unmistakable callbacks to more famous horror iconography elsewhere, including onscreen references to Psycho, Thriller, Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, and Friday the 13th. Those references are all likely to go over the heads of the children in the target audience, though, the same way that the first Shaun the Sheep movie got away with referencing Taxi Driver, The Terminator, and Silence of the Lambs without offending overly protective parents. It’s the kind of horror-movie-reference starter pack that can acclimate younger viewers to a lifelong genre fandom without immediately scaring them off with the macabre.

This latest Shaun the Sheep outing is Halloween-season kids’ fluff; it also might be the best movie in the series to date. The closest it gets to actively scaring children is in its climactic introduction of a kaiju-scale jack-o-lantern monster, but even that gag is quickly revealed to be all in good fun. Mostly, the scene-to-scene scares are character based, keeping the farm-life silent comedy of the series as simple as possible. For instance, when the town vet visits the farm, everyone is scared for entirely personal reasons: the farmer because he is scared of women, the animals because they’re scared of vaccinations. When the farmer’s Gromit-like hound is tasked to retrieve his missing, sasquatched owner, he visualizes the farmer’s scent as a ghost made of green vaporous stench. The Halloweeny quality of the picture is mostly due to seasonal decor. Jack-o-lanterns, rubber bats, mad-scientist lab equipment, and mysterious monster footprints decorate every set piece, while it’s continually clear that no one is in danger of suffering anything worse than a pratfall. The only real sour note is the film’s department-store pop music soundtrack, which has been a consistent earsore throughout this series. Only, this time the end credits play over a delightfully corny plot-summarizing rap song in Halloween goof-off tradition, so it’s difficult to get too angered up about it. Is The Beast of Mossy Bottom legitimately just as good as the first Shaun the Sheep movie or is its Spirit Halloween Store set decor just an especially pleasant backdrop for its old-school silent comedy gags? It’s difficult to say for sure, but The Beast of Mossy Bottom is unmistakably more successful as a Shaun the Sheep horror pastiche than Farmageddon was as the Shaun the Sheep take on alien-invasion sci-fi. It manages to naturally integrate the holiday into Shaun’s farm-disrupting antics without distracting from the show’s streamlined sitcom premise, and as a result it might incidentally inspire some future monster-movie fandom in impressionable youngsters along the way.

-Brandon Ledet

Resident Evil (2026)

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Screaming Mad George passed away this year, and there hasn’t been nearly enough public mourning over that loss for my taste. The 80s gore wizard was so uniquely talented as a visual artist (as especially evident in his collaborations with director Bryan Yuzna) that he would get special title card credits like “surrealistic make-up effects by Screaming Mad George” or “surrealistic visual design by Screaming Mad George,” each well earned by the mutant freak shows that would follow in all-timer gross-outs like Society, The Guyver, and Freaked!. The recent announcement of George’s passing was quietly received by the general movie-loving public, so it was nice to see him finally, properly honored by the surrealistic gore effects of Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil adaptation, even if the homage was unintentional or indirect. The snowbound setting, mutated dogs, and tentacled humanoids of Resident Evil are naturally drawing a lot of comparisons to Rob Bottin’s legendary creature effects for The Thing, but I still felt the presence of George’s screaming-mad spirit in the theater opening weekend. There’s something about the anything-goes nightmare reconfigurations of the human form in Resident Evil‘s creature designs that can’t help but recall Screaming Mad George’s calling-card works in addition to Bottin’s, and I think it’s beautiful that you can now find the fucked-up surrealistic ideas he developed in a major studio adaptation of a video game playing in every multiplex across America. It used to be that you had to go to the video store to rent disreputable schlock like Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation to see what screaming-mad stuff George was cooking up; now it’s being projected on thousands of screens nationwide.

It probably says something about the current moment in mainstream filmmaking that a splatter-gore horror comedy based on a video game feels like a no-brainer sure thing for a major studio to produce, when a few decades ago it would’ve been budgeted as a direct-to-video B-picture. Zach Cregger cashed in his industry clout after the unlikely success of his Oscar-winning whatsit Weapons to make the grossest, gnarliest horror comedy he could manage, timed perfectly to the industry’s current shift away from superhero actioners to memeable horrors and video game IP. There are no discernible themes or metaphors behind most of the imagery in Resident Evil. Instead of playing into the “elevated” trauma-metaphor horror trends of the past decade, it operates on pure video game logic. Weapons favorite Austin Abrams stars as a gig-economy worker who’s tasked to deliver a medical cooler to the zombie shoot-em-up game’s infamous Raccoon City headquarters, where a science lab is desperately awaiting his arrival. Along the way, it becomes clear that Raccoon City is ground zero for some kind of body-transforming virus breakout, making the delivery comically impossible as Abrams is attacked by one undead mutant freak after another. Structurally, it’s an all-in-one-night story built on crisis-to-crisis problem solving, like an absurdly gory redux of After Hours or Miracle Mile. Experientially, it feels like playing a video game as an unskilled novice, with Abrams’s in-over-his-head delivery driver voicing the audience’s overwhelmed, underprepared reactions to each unholy tentacled beast that lunges at him as if he were operating a game console controller instead of a real-world human body. Everything that happens to him is a nightmare, but it’s all for our low-stakes, time-passing entertainment.

It may sound like I’m downplaying Resident Evil‘s artistic merits by characterizing it as a themeless video game playthrough, but that is not my intent. It took Paul W.S. Anderson and Mila Jovovich five Resident Evil adaptations before they realized that this premise plays best as a playthrough spookshow in 2012’s Retribution, whereas Cregger’s vision for the property is immediately, sharply clear-eyed. Video-game storytelling tropes are a major asset to making sure this latest adaptation feels fresh and of-the-moment. In most instances, a CGI-animated throwback to practical gore effects of the Screaming Mad George era would feel disappointingly stale, but Resident Evil is just inventive enough in its constantly mutating creature designs and just modern enough in its video game puzzle-solving narrative to dig itself out of that 80s nostalgia pit. In a time when most directors are afraid to set their horror stories in the current moment because of the intrusive presence of smartphones, Cregger is one of the few who understands how those phones can add to his movie’s scares instead of detracting from them. The cold, isolated beam of the flashlight app on Abrams’s phone as he navigates the haunted house setting of each video-game-level sequence is essential to the movie’s visual palette and, by extension, to its modernity. Likewise, there’s something of-the-moment in the delivery dude’s under-his-breath jokiness as he’s assaulted by one brain-breaking mutant monstrosity after another, since that’s just what it feels like to leave the house to accomplish any basic task in recent years. All public life is an anxiety-inducing horror video game, but you do have to play along (if not only to make a little money), so the only option, really, is to joke to yourself along the way. I won’t claim that Resident Evil is the first or the best movie to modernize that screaming-mad 80s splatterfest sensibility to the current moment; it’s got titles like Deadstream, The Substance, and Cregger’s own Barbarian to compete with for those superlatives. It is super impressive to see that sensibility blown up to this major-studio scale, though, and it’s a hoot to holler at with first-weekend horror crowds instead of quietly watching it alone on a rented VHS tape.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Trial (1962)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Orson Welles’s surreal legal-thriller Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962), starring Anthony Perkins as Josef K.

00:00 Welcome
04:50 Fan Fiction: A Mem-Noir (2021) by Brent Spiner
12:02 Deathtrap (1982)
23:46 Slacker (1990)

36:08 The Trial (1962)

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

Cigarettes in Paradise

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How Many Cigarettes? is the dirtbag slacker equivalent of fellow movie-metric website Does the Dog Die?. Instead of measuring movies by their tally of potential trauma-triggers (such as gratuitous canine deaths), How Many Cigarettes? tallies the number of cigarettes smoked onscreen. If its characters rip enough cigs to reach a one-smoke-every-5-minutes runtime ratio, a movie automatically qualifies as “A Real Smoker Movie,” since its audience could conceivably chainsmoke throughout it without ever having to smoke alone. How Many Cigarettes? is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek project, one my friend Leigh started as an ex-smoker who still recognizes the allure of a cinematic cigarette and a life-pausing smoke break. The project is even more thorough than it is silly, though, capturing dozens of screengrabs each from hundreds of movies so people can get a quick glimpse of how many cigarettes are smoked in classics like Jurassic Park (7), GoodFellas (53), Mulholland Drive (7), and Casablanca (124!). As arbitrary as that metric may seem at first, it has forever altered how I watch movies. Once you start looking for cigarettes, it’s hard to stop. I remember sitting next to Leigh at a local screening of Almodóvar’s High Heels and had to ask if the pregnant woman smoking onscreeen counted as two cigarettes, since she was technically smoking for two. He seemed amused by the question, but my guess is that the hardline answer is it only counted as one cig. When you’re collecting raw data for “Real Smoker Movie” metrics, these distinctions really matter.

The How Many Cigarettes? project reached its natural zenith this week when Leigh presented a Gap Tooth screening of Aki Kaurismäki’s dead-eyed 1986 romcom Shadows in Paradise at The Broad. He introduced the film—Kaurismäki’s finest work, from what I’ve seen—as a core title in the Real Smoker Movie canon, citing it as the movie that first inspired him to start counting cigs in the first place. There are 71 cigarettes smoked in Shadows in Paradise, which is impressive for a film only 74 minutes in length. In the hand-illustrated zine he produced to accompany the screening, Leigh writes, “The number of cigarettes smoked here seems like a joke. Almost every scene has between 1 and 9 people smoking cigarettes.” He’s right. Once you start counting, the rate of cigarettes being lit from scene to scene becomes outright comical. Every single conversation is punctuated with the flick of a lighter, pulls on a filter, and the stamping of a cherry. And yet, it’s honestly something I didn’t notice the first time I watched the film back in 2021, alongside the other Kaurismäki classics The Match Factory Girl, The Man Without a Past, and The Other Side of Hope. Growing up in the 80s & 90s, chainsmoking just seemed like a normal, everyday part of adulthood, back when my dad would smoke entire packs of Marlboro Golds indoors, as if he were enjoying a snack or a soda. So, watching the despondent, lovelorn characters of Kaurismäki’s Helsinki chat over a constant procession of smoke breaks just felt natural to the movie’s time & place. Rewatching the movie through the How Many Cigarettes? filter, though, some of the cigarette-specific images do feel intentionally comical, like when Matti Pellonpää appears smoking while wearing sunglasses indoors, hiding his romantic heartbreak behind a costumey idea of vintage rock ‘n’ roll cool. The cigarettes are both artificial movie props and natural urban decor. They are essential to the movie’s mise-en-scène.

Something I did notice about Shadows in Paradise the first time I watched it was all the trash. There are enough standalone shots of wet garbage in the film to inspire a How Many Cigarettes? sister site that measures movies by their literal trashiness, per-pound. Pellonpää stars as a lonely garbage man who slowly, carefully sparks a romance with a jaded grocery store clerk, played by fellow Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen. In genre terms, it’s an awkwardly stilted romcom, delivered in a proto-Wes Anderson flat affect as the blue-collar pair gradually earn equal footing in each other’s esteem one smoke break at a time. From a broader view, it offers stray documentary glimpses into 1980 Finnish waste treatment processes, trailing Pellonpää from dumpster to dumpster as he hauls away endless heaps of trash. His social status as a garbage man directly plays into his dateability too, as his only viable romantic foil is a middle-manager yuppie dipshit who lords over a trendy clothing store. Outinen seems a little embarrassed to be dating a garbage collector, but it’s still instantly obvious that she won’t be able to make it last with the yuppie, because it’s impossible to picture her sharing a cigarette with him behind a grocery store dumpster. Pellonpää knows his way around an ashtray, though, and his social status as a trash-hauling beer guzzler can be adorable in its own way, once you get past the smell. There’s a pitch-black urban despair to Shadows in Paradise that echoes throughout Kaurismäki’s other works, but it’s mostly one of set dressing & social circumstance, as typified by its empty beer bottles and crushed cigarette butts. It’s ultimately a very sweet love story, though, a romcom that deals exclusively in deadpan whimsy.

If there’s anything direct Kaurismäki was attempting to signal to his audience through all of the onscreen trash & cigarettes, it’s that Shadows in Paradise is meant to be a love story for The People. He even went as far as to group it with The Match Factory Girl & Ariel as his official “Proletariat Trilogy.” It probably means something, for instance, that when Pellonpää & Outinen exit the film via cruise ship for a makeshift honeymoon, the vessel is decorated with the Communist hammer & sickle. Likewise, How Many Cigarettes? is a movie database for The People, decidedly unpretentious in its selections and open for collaboration with its patrons. Leigh has opened the database up for volunteer contributions, which you can find information about on the site’s About page. Even more generously, he has uploaded a printable copy of the “Every Cigarette Smoked in Aki Kaurismäki’s Shadows in Paradise” zine, which includes a brush-pen illustration of every cigarette smoked in the movie, along with a leaderboard of some Real Smoker Movie heavy-hitters like The Bikeriders (104), Road House (71), The French Dispatch (86), and Smithereens (37). Print yourself a copy and poke around the website the next time you’re bored on a smoke break or just looking for your next Movie Night selection, to be determined by one absurdly specific metric.

-Brandon Ledet

Nuclear Missed Connections

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Ross McElwee’s landmark 1985 documentary Sherman’s March is now back in circulation, pristinely restored and streaming VOD for anyone who’s already watched every episode of How To with John Wilson and is searching for their next softspoken doomsayer fix. At first glance, Sherman’s March appears to be wryly narcissistic, with McElwee spending nearly three hours overanalyzing his own trivial romantic foibles instead of directly tackling the historical topic he was granted money to document. It’s not so much the Civil War military campaign of Sherman March‘s title that has been lingering with me in the weeks since I first saw the film, though. I’ve instead found myself dwelling on the significance of its subtitle, A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation. Like everyone else raised during the existential uncertainty of the Cold War, McElwee can’t help but filter his personal decisions and worldview through the lens of imminent nuclear annihilation. What, ultimately, would be the point making a romantic connection in the end times of the 1980s, given that the push of a few buttons could end all human existence the entire planet over at any given minute? In practice, the potential for nuclear war doesn’t directly affect McElwee’s love life all that much in Sherman’s March, except during the stretch where he romantically pursues a nuclear disarmament activist. The threat of nuclear holocaust does quietly hum in the background throughout the picture, though, as intentionally provoked by its subtitle. It was, presumably, a constant hum in the background of everything in that era, as I’ve continued to hear it humming in the couple other late-80s, early-90s titles that I’ve happened to catch in the past couple weeks since writing about Sherman’s March.

I mostly threw on 1988’s Miracle Mile because it offered a rare opportunity to see Anthony Edwards in a lead role outside the television show I’m currently binge-watching: ER. Even better, Edwards’s love interest in the film is played by Mare Winningham, who had a brief run as Edwards’s maniacally obsessed stalker on ER and who also recently married him in real life after a long-simmering infatuation. That odd, bittersweet connection between the two actors is only amplified by Miracle Mile, which initially plays like a video store-era romcom before it blows up into a nuclear disaster epic. Edwards stars as a bitterly sarcastic Los Angeleno who finally finds a woman he vibes with in the desperately lonely, phony West Coast city — a devil-may-care free spirit played by Winningham. Unfortunately, they only go on one sweetheart date before Edwards receives the payphone call that ruins everything.  A stranger on the other end of the line tells him that the world is about to end and the bombs are already on their way, so Edwards scrambles to recruit a crew of fellow survivors from an all-night diner to escape the fallout, in a prototype for Gore Verbinki’s recent apocalyptic satire Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Only, no one can manage to catch the first helicopter out of town because everyone has someone in their life they want to take with them to safety, delaying departure to disastrous results. For Edwards’s sadsack lead, that special someone is a girl he just met, which would be sweetly romantic if it weren’t for the fact that both of their faces will likely be melted off by a nuclear blast before they get a chance to properly smooch. If it weren’t for Miracle Miles‘s moody synth score from Tangerine Dream, you could mistake its opening half for an old-school Hollywood romcom. Once the bombs are on their way, though, things get increasingly bleak, and the “possibility of romantic love in […] an era of nuclear proliferation” only gets bleaker by the minute until the story abruptly ends at the bleakest moment imaginable.

In the broadest terms, Miracle Mile does function as a comedy, but it’s also a city-wide portrait of a Cold War community in distress. Tonally, it’s the Los Angeles version of Scorsese’s After Hours, just as funny as it is stressful. The geographic specificity of its setting and the maniacally episodic nature of Edwards’s interactions with his fellow freaked-out Los Angelenos also reminded me a lot of McElwee’s romantic missed connections in Sherman’s March in ways I didn’t expect, given the disparity in the two films’ chosen genres. Likewise, I didn’t expect to be dwelling on that same topic yet again while watching Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut Slacker, which recently screened at The Broad’s repertory Gap Tooth series. Linklater himself appears on camera in the opening scene of Slacker to lay out the film’s episodic structure. He plays an aimless Gen-X slacker who’s too overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of life to make any significant choice about what to do with himself, since every path he could take is just as valid and justifiable as the other. This apparently extends to his indecision on what story to tell, as Slacker spends an entire day hopping from one conversation to another down the sun-damaged streets of Austin, Texas, eavesdropping on a nonstop parade of absurdly verbose underachievers as they ramble about whatever’s on their empty minds, one thought at a time. Like the regional South of Sherman’s March and the late-night Los Angeles of Miracle Mile, the Austin of Slacker is revealed to the audience through broad communal portraiture, with every chatty loser who crosses the screen just as worthy of their own day-in-the-life portrait as the next. Like in the other two movies, Slacker also finds its community psychologically fucked up by the constant threat of nuclear obliteration, as expressed in random characters’ paranoid political rants and in one specific weirdo’s video-art instillation that loops nuclear test footage across a haphazard collection of cathode-ray TVs. Only, Linklater’s proudly unambitious characters appear to be preemptively operating as if the world has already ended, without waiting for the bombs to actually go off. It’s long been over, and everyone who’s left hanging around after our undetected apocalypse has their own crackpot theories on how it happened and how humanity can best spend our time toiling in the rubble.

I was a lot more charmed by Slacker than I usually am by Linklater’s low-effort Gen-X posturings, if not only because its turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out hipsterdom spoke to a larger political sentiment within its contemporary moment (something his later, bigger-budgeted works would repeatedly attempt to recreate with no discernible thematic point at all). As one Austinite slacker puts it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy.” Admittedly, I also enjoyed the movie simply because I enjoyed hanging around the late-80s Austin scene populated by its various losers & eccentrics. Sure, it’s overrun with twentysomething stoner philosophers who are way too confident that they understand How the World Works for kids who haven’t yet lived a real life, but there’s something undeniably charming about their zen-like collective naivete. I also found myself getting excited by minor details specific to that exact Austin moment, like the deranged conman rant from Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa or the brief sound of Daniel Johnston’s chord organ playing in a passing car (or, even more particularly, the appearance of Johnston’s one-time girlfriend Kathy McCarty, who gives extensive interviews about his life & art in The Devil and Daniel Johnston). It’s impossible to love every crazed Austinite who spouts their own personal conspiracy theories about our post-apocalyptic planet in Slacker, but it’s easy to love the city that allows them blow around in the Texas breeze like human tumbleweeds, jobless and relatively carefree. The same goes for the late-night diner patrons of Miracle Mile and the genteel, Southern-accented women of Sherman’s March. As individuals, they can be grating or alarming, but as broader communities, they’re a joy to spend time with. That’s why it’s so tragic that time is running out for them, that the doomsday clock is tirelessly ticking away. Each of these Cold War communal portraits find their doomed citizens scrambling to make meaningful connections with each other while the threat of nuclear apocalypse looms outside the frame. They all make a point to portray a version of humanity that is worth saving while also acknowledging that it’s likely too late to stop the bombs from going off anyway. Thank your lucky stars that it’s not the 1980s anymore, and it no longer feels like we’re living pointless lives in the earliest hours of the apocalypse. It might be difficult to fully enjoy each other’s company knowing that we’ve already reached the beginning of the end.

-Brandon Ledet

Welcome Space Brothers (2026)

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It’s been a good year for new documentaries about vintage public access television. The succinctly titled Public Access offered a broad retrospective of public access TV in NYC’s punk & hippie days, the Robin Byrd profile Bang My Box took a deep dive into the pornier waters of those NYC TV shows, and now the UFO cult profile Welcome Space Brothers has jumped coasts to cover the Californian public-access cinema of the Unarius Academy of Science. Well, calling Welcome Space Brothers “new” is somewhat of a stretch. It has spent several years in distribution limbo since its initial festival premieres (the same limbo where Public Access now lingers), but the warm-hearted UFO cult documentary is currently enjoying a city-by-city road tour and recently screened at The Broad. Like this year’s other public access TV docs, it introduces an alluring archive of outsider-art filmmaking from America’s recent weirdo past: a series of indoctrination videos from a Californian cult who believe space aliens are arriving soon to free mankind from the intergalactic trauma echoing from our past lives. It might be the most useful of the trio for audiences who like to do their own exploring, though, since some of the psychotronic “psychodrama” movies it covers are accessible on The Internet Archive instead of being trapped on a private collector’s moldy VHS tapes. You can easily go learn the “science fact” of Unarius’s science fiction UFO-landing movies anytime you’re bored enough to open your heart to another world.

From the outside, Welcome Space Brothers might appear to be a true crime exposé of a shadowy cult organization with a nefarious leader and brainwashed membership, but it’s immediately apparent that Unarius is largely harmless as a collective. It says a lot that the cult itself has been promoting this documentary’s various screening dates through their mailing lists, which I know first-hand as a subscriber who was auto-enrolled after buying a copy of their most notorious production, 1980’s The Arrival, from their archaic website. To the cult, Welcome Space Brothers is a potential recruitment tool, amplifying the reach of their cosmic message far beyond the puny broadcasting capabilities of San Diego-era public access channels, where they started. To most audiences, it reads as a true crime picture without the crime, exposing a secluded community of mysterious cultists as a kind of eccentric art collective. Instead of blowing the doors off Unarius headquarters to reveal abuses of power hidden inside, it mostly just finds a collection of lonely dorks making psychotronic video art together about their favorite subjects: the trauma of their own past lives and the space aliens who are soon to liberate us from those recursive shackles. They’re mostly playing arts & crafts, developing their own unique house style of gawdy drag revue sci-fi kitsch, as beautifully captured in their 70s & 80s heyday of backyard communal filmmaking. As the title suggests, they have nothing to hide. They’re welcoming you in.

Welcome Space Brothers is most useful as a guided tour of Unarius’s pre-existing cinematic output, which can be bewildering to outsiders. It’s not especially substantial as a standalone piece, but it does a great job chronicling the various inner-circle power struggles that shaped Unarius’s golden years, which is essential insight for fully comprehending the communal therapy aspects of the group’s psychotronic theatre. It’s an insular scene with its own designated faces & heels, as lorded over by the cosmic fairy godmother Ruth “Uriel” Norman, whose space-alien drag queen persona was in itself a communal art project. It’s clear when you spend some time with Unarius’s cinematic output that The Arrival is their most fully realized grand-scale art project, reaching delirious heights of video art sci-fi psychedelia the group never achieved before or since; it’s just not clear why until you better understand the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the various weirdos who made these pictures, since everyone but Uriel was stripped of personal attribution in the credits. Welcome Space Brothers explains the real human drama behind the major Unarius titles, which initially earned their ironic so-bad-it’s-good notoriety from local stoners who caught them out of context on late night public-access broadcasts. You could even feel that shift happening in real time at The Broad, where the crowd’s initial titters & jeers at the cult’s absurdity slowly quieted down as we got to know the eccentric characters as individuals, each worthy of intergalactic love & empathy. They’re the only cult I’ve ever trusted with my home address, and I’m excited to be further indoctrinated by their psychodrama videos now that I better understand them as communal diaries rather than as pure aesthetic objects.

-Brandon Ledet

Onslaught (2026)

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How much of a purist are you about Halloween? Do you wait until October 1st to start your annual horror movie binge, or does Spooky Season start in your household the second summer ends? Regardless of your personal timetable, the new Adam Wingard actioner Onslaught has already officially fired the starting pistol for this year’s Halloween season. The genre-ambiguous John Carpenter homage opens with actress Adria Arjona aiming automatic assault rifles at her backyard collection of Halloween-branded jack-o-lanterns, spraying the desert landscape with pumpkin guts and bullet casings. It’s an image that calls into question whether Onslaught will be veering more towards action, horror, horror-action, or action-horror, then declares, “Who cares? Let’s get out there and smash some pumpkins!”

Wingard reteams with screenwriter Simon Barrett to indulge in the same action-horror mixture they played with in previous cult breakouts You’re Next & The Guest, this time applied to a limited-location siege picture set in a rural trailer park. After a nearby top-secret government science lab (headed by Dan Stevens as a Nazi mad scientist) loses track of its collection of undead supersoldier mutants in an experiment gone horribly wrong, a single mother (Arjona) finds herself defending her modest trailer park fiefdom and the poor innocent souls who reside there (most importantly, Eric Warheim as the local deputy drunk and Reginald VelJohnson as the war vet with a heart of tarnished gold). The world of Onslaught is sparse and underpopulated, but the personalities who fill it are cartoonishly big, especially the Nazi mutant killing machines that attack innocent civilians with a chainsaw, meat cleaver, and guns galore. It’s a military thriller shot and edited like a monster movie, with constant stylistic references to Carpenter’s oeuvre in its synths, text, and squibs.

Onslaught makes some vague onscreen gestures towards contemporary political commentary, but they’re more implied than explored. The opening credits play over a chaotic crash course in the past few decades of American military evils, catching the audience up to the exact fascistic moment we’re currently suffering: the one where the government has deployed a heavily armed, morally unscrupulous army of subhuman freaks against its own everyday civilians. The roided-out zombie mutants that escape containment in the first act are mostly hidden from view as shadowy silhouettes, presented as a force of supernatural evil devoid of any discernible humanity. Once we get a good look at them, though, it’s clear they’ve been costumed to recall federal ICE agents, with makeshift face coverings continuing to obscure their personhood and only the pinhole lights of their inhuman eyes left visible to the public. They make for legitimately scary movie monsters, and they directly echo imagery recently broadcast on the national news.

Politically, I don’t think Onslaught has any more to say about ICE’s state-sanctioned public executions than the vintage VHS title Maniac Cop had to say about maniac cops; it just recognizes that these militarized mutant C.H.U.D.s are scary to the average everyday citizen and exploits that fear to spin an entertaining yarn. Emotionally, there isn’t much to latch onto in the film either. Our gun-nut heroine’s hyperviolent efforts to protect her daughter and her tenants get the heart pumping by injecting it with adrenaline, not by pulling at the strings. This is largely a for-its-own-sake stylistic exercise designed to stoke easy nostalgia for action-horror-loving mouthbreathers, pitched at a DTV-tolerant audience but performed by grossly overqualified cast & crew (including brief glimpses of Rebecca Hall as the Nazi scientist’s wife/dominatrix). It is delicious, though, like a piece of Halloween candy unwrapped a month early in overeager giddiness for the holiday.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #273: Woodstock (1970) & Hippie Concert Docs

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Welcome to Episode #273 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of concert films documenting classic hippie rock festivals, starting with the 4-hour Oscar winner Woodstock (1970).

00:00 Welcome
01:17 Nothing But Trouble (1991)
04:18 Antz (1998)
08:40 Heel (2026)
12:40 Slanted (2026)
16:38 Welcome Space Brothers (2026)

24:05 Woodstock (1970)
57:15 Monterey Pop (1968)
1:09:40 Gimme Shelter (1970)
1:24:09 Festival Express (2003)

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

Rep Report: Back to (Film) School

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The New Orleans social calendar never feels emptier than it does in the summer, when it’s too hot to do much outside the house and anyone with real money leaves town to cool off anyway. As a result, I haven’t been catching many repertory screenings in recent months, as there haven’t been many enticing opportunities on offer. Smaller series like ScreamFest NOLA and Gap Tooth Cinema have been on summer hiatus, and the legacy institution of the Rene Brunet Classic Movies series has been on TCM-programming autopilot. Now that summer is officially over, though, the city is coming back to life, and the local classic-movies scene is waking up along with it. After only catching three rep screenings all summer (one-off showings of All the President’s Men, Under the Cherry Moon, and Sleepaway Camp), I’m once again hitting up my regular rotation of classic-movies hot spots. It’s like the fall semester of film school just started, with a randomized syllabus of vintage movie titles worth experiencing big & loud with a studious crowd. To that end, here are a few quick reviews of the local repertory screenings I happened to catch over the past couple weeks, now that school is back in session.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
@ Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies (The Prytania)

One of the biggest new releases of the summer—both in production scale and in box office returns—was Christopher Nolan’s ensemble-cast adaptation of The Odyssey, which The Prytania tirelessly ran on a 70mm film print every night for a solid month. The Odyssey also seemingly inspired a recent selection for their Classic Movies series: 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, another sword-and-sandal action epic inspired by Greek myth & poetry. The two behemoth actioners made for an instructive contrast-and-compare exercise, illustrating how Hollywood spectacle has changed over the years. Jason and the Argonauts boasts all of the island-hopping special effects showcases of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey without any of the procedural justification weighing down the bookends. Nolan makes you spend a tedious amount of time farting around a banquet hall with Tom Holland & John Leguizamo before he rewards your patience with the monsters, witches, and goddesses that liven up the middle stretch of The Odyssey, while older modes of Hollywood action filmmaking don’t feel the need to justify the indulgence. Jason and the Argonauts throws giants, harpies, and hydra heads at its audience as quickly as it can, only pulling away from the action to show the gods watching it unfold in amusement on their divine television. Once Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeleton army is defeated at the climax, the movie ends abruptly, knowing better than to bore its audience with the journey home. You’ve already gotten what you paid to see, now be on your merry way.

Black God, White Devil (1964)
@ Gap Tooth Cinema (The Broad)

One movie that’s in less of a rush to satisfy or entertain is the 1964 arthouse Western whatsit Black God, White Devil, which played to an unusually quiet crowd at its recent Gap Tooth screening. In Western terms, it’s helpful to think of it more in parallel with Jodorowsky than with Eastwood, since it’s more interested in the mood & iconography of the Western than any of the genre’s narrative payoffs. Black God, White Devil is not a proper Western so much as it is a Brazilian class-politics screed melted down in the midday sun and then loosely remolded into the vague shape of a Western. Landlords, cult leaders, outlaws, and bandits roam the draught-stricken 1940s Brazilian backcountry (the sertão), establishing a make-it-up-as-you-go version of justice as they murder each other for one personal wrong after another. Its violence can be shockingly gnarly, including acts of genital mutilation, flesh flaying, and ritualistic sacrifice of a newborn baby. At other times, its violence is pure genre pastiche, with individual episodes of religious or capitalist injustice being interrupted by unseen six-shooter gunfire while the camera waves around wildly and everyone scrambles for cover. For the most part, though, the movie is interested in talking out its violence in barely coherent mumblings about life’s many cruelties, each player in its wasteland crime saga dehydrated to the point of raving delirium. Its scene-to-scene logic is difficult to follow, and its donkey-trot pacing is brutally slow, but its political anger is clearly communicated through every frame all the same.

Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
@ Films on the Green (Alliance Française)

As the temperature cools in early fall, people start hosting free outdoor screenings of cinematic classics around New Orleans’s various social hubs, usually marketed as family-friendly movie nights showing recent animated favorites. On the more daring end of that fall-semester ritual, the French cultural hub Alliance Française is hosting a series called Films on the Green this month, which they kicked off with 1958’s Elevator to the Gallows. Their introduction to the film claimed that Louis Malle’s first narrative feature was also the first film of the French New Wave, which feels a little historically dubious but spiritually true. Elevator to the Gallows opens with an amoral yuppie executing a fairly convincing plan to kill his boss and run away with that boss’s widow but then gets stuck in an elevator car mid-escape, leaving him vulnerable to discovery & arrest. Meanwhile, his mistress (the effortlessly chic Jeanne Moreau) and the neighboring flower shop girl are left distraught by his unexplained absence, going mad in the late-night hours waiting for his return. The lovelorn teenager and her reprobate boyfriend steal the amateur assassin’s car and commit other crimes under his alias, while Moreau listlessly wanders the rainy streets of Paris to an improvised jazz score from none other than Miles Davis. Elevator to the Gallows truly is a perfect encapsulation of the French New Wave project in the way it uses noirish American crime thriller tropes as an excuse for high-style, street-level renegade filmmaking, even if Malle’s name is far from the first to come to mind when citing the pioneers on the inside of the movement: Varda, Godard, Truffaut, etc.

Pandora’s Box (1929)
@ David Bradley’s Classic Silent Films (Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge)

If the jazzy arthouse noir flourishes of Elevator to the Gallows trumpeted the earliest notes of the French New Wave, then 1929’s Pandora’s Box signaled the arrival of an even earlier icon of cinematic cool. There’s something undeniably foundational about Louise Brooks’s gothy flapper vibe in this silent-era German classic, to the point where it’s almost Biblical. If I could quote Genesis, “On the eight day, G.W. Pabst said let there be a party girl with a blunt bob, and there was a party girl with a blunt bob. And people saw the bob and saw that it was cool as fuck.” Of course, no pleasure-seeking woman of the silver screen gets by without being punished for her hedonism, so Brooks’s iconic character Lulu is inevitably put through the ringer in the second half of Pandora’s Box, after the audience gets plenty of time to celebrate her for being the coolest woman who ever lived in the first. She drinks, she dances, she parties, she sleeps around, and then she temporarily lucks into marrying a wealthy man before being forced to shoot him dead. On the run from the law, her fabulous party girl lifestyle quickly falls apart, and the “Fucking Around” opening half of the film is equally balanced out by the unavoidable “Finding Out” concluding half. You can always tell that these classic road-to-ruin cautionary tales never really believe their own bullshit; they have way too much fun indulging in hedonistic excess for the audience to fully believe the tragic cosmic punishments that follow in moral rebuke. That aspect of Pandora’s Box was only underlined by its live-piano scoring at the Zeitgeist, which had to compete with the booming sound of bounce DJ sets from the party venue next door. Even when the mood got somber in the more dramatic back half, the first-half party still persistently echoed in the room. No matter what happens to her, Lulu remains aspirationally cool and fun to be around – poor thing.

-Brandon Ledet

It Ends (2026)

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The microbudget indie horror It Ends has been simmering on the theatrical distribution backburner since at least as far back as spring of 2025, when it locally premiered at the Overlook Film Festival. By the time Neon picked it up, it had already seen a brief streaming run on the Letterboxd “Video Store” platform as an undistributed work that had fallen through the cracks of the festival circuit and been left for dead on the side of the proverbial road. A lot can change in a year, though, and the current horror cinema landscape is a lot more hospitable to It Ends now than it might have been in 2025, before Backrooms brought liminal-space horror to national headlines and Obsession became a surprise mega-hit for Zoomers who delighted in finally seeing their own generational neuroses projected on the big screen. It’s much easier to see a clear path for It Ends‘s marketability now that we live in a post-Backrooms, post-Obsession world, even if its payoffs are much quieter than those potential comps’. It may be set in a supernaturally liminal space like the backrooms, but it’s only interested in functioning as a horror film in its cold-open segment, all wrapped up before the opening credits. Likewise, its interpersonal Gen-Z drama refuses to escalate to flashy, cathartic extremes, sticking much closer to the depressive mood of Leviticus than the violent hysteria of Obsession. If the current moment of youthful indie breakouts only applies to the horror genre, then It Ends just barely falls inside the outer boundary of benefiting. It offers a version of liminal-space horror where the liminal space is adolescence and the hell is other people.

Four childhood friends take a post-college road trip into the unknown, each struggling to come up with a plan for what to do with their lives now that they’re technically adults. Once outside the city, they find themselves on a mysterious woodland highway that has no turns and no end, existing in an alternate reality where cars never run out of gas and bellies never get hungry and no one is ever horny and every hour is the same and nothing ever changes. When they step outside the Jeep to investigate their new tree-lined prison, they are swarmed by a screaming mob of strangers who auto-populate in the wilderness, chasing them back onto the infinite road. This nightmare scenario is initially played like a high-concept horror film, complete with periodic jump scares and Cube-like ponderings about possible ways to escape the limbo of the highway. Eventually, though, the adrenaline wears off and the monotonous nature of the road trip leaves the Jeep-bound teens more bored than scared. They essentially take turns giving up, finding little satisfaction in the search for meaning or camaraderie or escape in their supernatural predicament. Even the zombie-like strangers lurking in the woods gradually lose interest in the game, collectively going comatose instead of going berserk. The horror of the back half, if there is any, is all philosophical instead of physical. The teens individually become just as indifferent to their survival as the highway is, each choosing their own personal moment to leave the Jeep forever and join the soulless, dead-eyed adults in the woods. Then, as the title promises, it ends.

There’s clearly some broad metaphor about the human condition at play here but, to the movie’s credit, it’s difficult to define. The never-ending highway certainly gets one thing right about life: it’s boring as fuck, with each day’s monotonous routine blurring into the next. When this Jeep full of freaked-out teens pull onto that highway, they have vague but grand ambitions about what they’re going to do with their newfound adulthood, so it’s depressing to watch them slowly resign themselves to the repetitive nothingness of an adult reality. The thesis, if you’re going to put it into words, appears to be that growing up is giving up, but what else are you going to do? Life is a highway, and even after you ride it all night long there’s nowhere else to go; there’s just more highway. The meaning behind individual details of the characters’ world within the Jeep and even the Jeep itself can mean different things to different audiences, though, which is where the movie finds its stickiest philosophical talking points. Personally, I found myself thinking of the Jeep as a metaphor for the way I treat this very movie review website: a stubbornly childish project that I’ll continue to drive into the infinite void until all my friends who came along on the drive gradually lose interest one by one, leaving me alone at the wheel of my juvenile journey to nowhere. Your own self-identification may vary. Maybe your Jeep is a weekends-only cover band or a college clique or an actual vintage Jeep you plan to get running one day — whatever project is stubbornly carrying over your youthful ambition and idealism into the soul-numbing monotony of adulthood. Or maybe it’ll represent something else to you entirely. Whatever the case, the monster that’s loose in this particular horror story is of the personal & philosophical variety, nothing like the manic pixie nightmare girlfriend of Obsession nor the memetic mutants of Backrooms. In the current Gen-Z horror moment, It Ends offers an opportunity to quietly sit & reflect in the dark, which is not an especially sexy marketing pitch for a low-budget, high-concept teen horror flick (and might explain its so-far muted reception).

-Brandon Ledet