For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Lance Oppenheim’s compulsive sperm donorship documentary Spermworld (2024).
00:00 Welcome 01:31 Elevator to the Gallows (1958) 10:29 Double Indemnity (1944) 18:10 Black God, White Devil (1964) 27:15 Lifeboat (1944) 37:00 Spellbound (1945) 47:00 The Paradine Case (1947) 1:02:13 Rope (1948) 1:08:39 It Ends (2026) 1:13:10 Coyote vs Acme (2026) 1:21:33 Jason and the Argonauts (1963) 1:24:32 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
Do people rank their favorite Marx Bros the way they rank their favorite Beatles? There are some clear parallels between the two groups. Zeppo, of course, is the Ringo of the Marx family, putting in steady background work that catches all of the mockery and none of the credit. Groucho & Chico are the Marx Bros’ Lennon-McCartney songwriting duo: legendary lyrical talents who could craft a joke so brilliantly, beautifully simple that it appears effortless. That leaves Harpo as the Marx equivalent to George: the abstraction, the artist, the connoisseur’s favorite. Groucho & Chico might have the most widely remembered Marx bits thanks to the eternal quotability of their rapidfire wordplay, but Harpo is the unpredictable, undefinable element that makes the vaudeville group’s cinematic output for Paramount convincingly, enduringly rank among the greatest comedies every made. If Groucho’s 4th-wall-breaking smartassery was the inspiration for Bugs Bunny’s wascally, wisecracking persona, Harpo’s schtick was the blueprint for the zanier, more surreal touches of Looney Tunes slapstick – crafting all-timer sight gags out of nonstop chaos & violence. He’s just as deserving of celebration as a screen comedy icon, selling curly blonde wigs on costume store shelves right next to Groucho’s famous “beaglepuss” glasses.
The one time Harpo might’ve been properly appreciated as the best of the Marx Bros was in the group’s film debut, 1929’s Cocoanauts. Adapted from a stage musical at a time when Hollywood productions were still learning how to incorporate sound recording equipment, Cocoanauts finds Groucho & Chico struggling to get their puns & dirty jokes across with their usual clarity & machine-gun rhythms. Meanwhile, Harpo is just as funny as he ever was, acting as the rickety bridge from Chaplin-style silent comedy to the early sound era that the Marx Bros would soon collectively master. He is a mute little tramp, and a scoundrel. While Groucho plays the wisecracking manager of a failing Florida resort, Harpo tears into the scene like a human tornado, causing nonstop chaos for a business that’s already got enough problems without him. Within seconds of arriving, he’s eating jacket buttons off Groucho’s bellboys, tearing up guests’ mail into confetti, and stealing money directly from the concierge’s cash register. Much of Cocoanauts is a cutesy, well-behaved stage musical romance that happens to add in dashes of Marx Bros humor for flavor, and Harpo’s the one spice note that comes through the strongest. It’s no one’s favorite Marx Bros movie, but he makes sure it’s no one’s least favorite either.
It’s at the start of the brothers’ follow-up film, 1930’s Animal Crackers, where Harpo goes toe-to-toe with Groucho in direct competition for group MVP. The movie starts with Groucho being introduced to a society party as Captain Spaulding, an African explorer returning from safari with heroic tales to recount to anyone who’ll listen. Of course, Groucho immediately undercuts this ostentatious introduction by firing off a long string of hypersexual, self-deprecating one-liners that reveal his true nature as a pervert and a coward, much to his host’s embarrassment. Then, Harpo is given a similar grand introduction as The Professor, an erudite academic who is meant to impress the same captive audience with his expertise in fine art. Harpo looks unusually well put-together during this entrance, wearing a high-quality top hat & coat combo that doesn’t match his go-to scrappy pickpocket persona. When a servant removes his coat, however, the rest of his clothes come off with it, shocking the mansion’s welcome party with his underwear-clad body. Then, he immediately grabs a gun from Groucho’s safari arsenal and starts firing randomly at guests, clearing the room with a purposeless escalation of violence. Those two introductions are about as direct of a one-to-one comparison between Groucho & Harpo’s comedic styles as you’ll find and, while both are funny, it’s the latter one that earns the bigger laughs.
The Marx Bros didn’t only charm the masses with slapstick violence & punny wordplay; they also carried over vaudeville variety show tradition to the screen by playing beautiful music. Groucho would sing bright & bubbly show tunes with absurd in-character lyrics; Chico played a mean piano, often showing off by tapping keys with finger guns; and Harpo, of course, played the harp. Originally inspired by an advertisement’s illustration of a cherub, Harpo was a self-taught harpist who leaned heavily into the angelic softness of his chosen instrument, while also repurposing the childlike curly wig of a cherub to instead recall a circus clown. While he would spend the majority of his screentime performing manic prop comedy, chasing young women around the set like Benny Hill, and indulging in some sleight of hand pickpocketry, Harpo would always put his sadistic clown antics aside for a minute to treat his audience with the heavenly sounds of the harp. Imagine if Tom Green paused in the middle of Freddy Got Fingered to sincerely play the cello; it’s quite the switcheroo. The in-universe logic of whatever character Harpo’s playing never gets in the way of that indulgence, either. In 1932’s Horse Feathers, he plays a barfly dogcatcher who shows surprising talent as a harpist but no aptitude whatsoever for playing football with the boys; go figure.
There’s obviously no need to rank the Marx Bros against each other, since the fraternal goofballs work best as a full set. Groucho’s filthy wordplay, Chico’s circular logic, and Harpo’s madcap sadism would all get exhausting in isolation without their brothers balancing out the rhythms of their act; that’s mainly why Zeppo hangs around, acting as the group’s only calming presence. It’s just notable that Harpo is an impossible act to follow and is thus consistently slotted last in rotation, if not only because he’ll clear a room with a pistol or an industrial size bottle of chloroform when given the chance. There’s a famous bit in 1931’s Monkey Business where all four brothers, essentially playing themselves, take turns impersonating heartthrob crooner Maurice Chevalier as a way of getting one over on shipboard immigration cops. Zeppo’s got a handsome-enough look that he thinks he can get away with the deception but immediately fails; Groucho & Chico, of course, think they can talk their way out of the crisis but they don’t get very far either. Then, Harpo stomps onto the scene, tearing up the immigration authorities’ paperwork and causing his usual maddening chaos before then launching into an eerily perfect Maurice Chevalier impersonation . . . which is revealed to be a drag routine lip-sync act involving a phonograph player hidden behind his back. It’s such a perfectly, deliriously absurd escalation of the bit that no one can follow it. Harpo’s is always the ultimate punchline, which makes for a credible argument that he is the funniest person who ever lived, especially since his only true competition is his own brother Groucho.
Welcome to Episode #272 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & James discuss the films they caught at the second annual Baton Rouge Underground Film Festival, starting with the menstrual creature feature Cramps! A Period Piece.
00:00 BRUFF 04:47 Cramps! A Period Piece 14:22 Public Access 28:04 The Knight 32:53 Pu Ekaw Tnod 35:21 West of Greatness 38:44 Unseen Olympiad
The 1991 novelty slasher Popcorn has a fairly straightforward premise: What if William Castle was a serial killer? That setup makesfora much meaner, zanier William Castle homage than Joe Dante’s Matinee, one where Castle’s signature theatrical gimmicks get directly involved in increasingly silly kills instead of being deployed as mood-setting kitsch. The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen stars as a film school weirdo whose struggling department decides to raise production funds by hosting an all-night horror marathon in a traditional single-screen theater. They figure they can charge extra for tickets by bringing back the original theatrical gimmicks from the 1950s creature features they’re screening, like ziplining a giant mosquito prop over the audience during the atomic-age sci-fi parody Mosquito (an effect they call “Projectovision”, modeled after Castle’s “Emergo!” gimmick) or zapping the audience in their seats during key shocks of The Amazing Electrified Man (“Shockoscope”, modeled after Castle’s “Percepto!” gimmick). Only, a mysterious killer is loose in the theater and is picking off the film school students & staff one by one. The mosquito is rigged to crush an unsuspecting victim; the seat buzzers are cranked to lethally high voltage; the “Aromarama” gas deployed during The Stench is, of course, poisoned. While Schoelen’s softspoken auteur-to-be should be worried about what ridiculous retro-schlock gimmick is going to eventually be wielded against her, she’s instead perversely excited by the deaths’ potential as inspiration for her next screamplay, keeping the mood defiantly light despite all of the violence. Popcorn is a wonderfully silly 90s slasher with a wide range of imaginative kills and a fun all-night-party atmosphere, one that panders so shamelessly to its target audience that it’s an easy instant favorite for any genre-literate horror nerds.
Popcorn is pretty blatant about its William Castle homages, which range from the more obvious go-to references (like hiring a uniformed nurse to issue life insurance policies in the lobby, in case the audience dies of fright) to the deeper cuts (like its “Shock Clock” prop referencing the “Fright Break” countdown in Castle’s Homicidal). That’s what makes it so strange that Castle’s name isn’t mentioned once during the hours of bonus features on the film’s recent Synapse Blu-ray release. The retro horror parodies that fill out the movie theater’s all-night schlock marathon are referred to as broad homages to 1940s & 50s horror classics on the disc’s commentary track and in the accompanying feature-length “Making Of” documentary, without ever specifically mentioning Castle’s legendary gimmickry as an influence on the text. That concept-to-screen disconnect is likely a result of the film’s tortured history of authorship, with its final cut encompassing the work of three different directors working towards three different ends. The story goes that Popcorn‘s first hired director Alan Ormsby was really into shooting the 1950s creature feature parodies, at the expense of shooting the 1990s wraparound slasher that contains them. When he was fired from the project, Ormsby was drastically behind schedule but had delivered a group of highly detailed, reverential homages to vintage horror schlock. Producer Bob Clark (who had collaborated on Dead of Night with Ormsby, a friend he lost to that business decision) was reluctant to put his name on another horror project after becoming a more mainstream commercial director, so he hired one of his trusted actors from Porky‘s, Mark Herrier, to take the reins. Cast & crew have since confirmed that Clark essentially shadowdirected the picture, guiding a lot of Herrier’s day-to-day decisions and shooting substantial amounts of B-unit footage to get the project back on schedule. You can feel Clark’s influence throughout, especially in scenes where he voices threatening phone calls from the anonymous serial killer villain, just as he had in his breakout slasher Black Christmas. You can also feel the film’s divided authorship in how its obvious original intent as a William Castle homage has been lost in the handovers, like a game of telephone.
Luckily, the William Castle throwback gimmicks aren’t the only thing Popcorn has going on. The killer who weaponizes those gags is suspected to be a filmmaker of an entirely different era: a hippie freak who made ritualistic art films of the Kenneth Anger & Anton Lavey variety. Our hippie Satanist first appears to Jill Schoelen in a sweaty, Ken Russell-inspired nightmare sequence, calling out to her through the psychedelic afterlife. The second she wakes up, she starts scribbling details from that nightmare into her journal, insistent that it would make a great film. It turns out what she was dreaming was already a film, a scratchy 16mm short from the 1970s titled Possessor, which its director Lanyard Gates concluded by committing in-the-flesh murders during its climax at its premiere. Gates was apparently radicalized by audiences’ tepid reaction to his art films, deciding to get violent revenge on crowds who would rather watch goofy genre fluff instead of real, meaningful cinema. That hostile artist-audience dynamic continues from beyond the grave, when the film school’s all-night horror marathon is interrupted by a renegade screening of Possessor, which the captive crowd boos off the screen. The question of whether the long-dead Gates has supernaturally returned to this mortal plane to get his violent revenge on that audience or if his work is being continued by a more plausible, in-the-flesh suspect is answered in such a bizarre, spectacularly convoluted way that I wouldn’t dare spoil it here. What’s more important than who’s doing Gates’s work is what that work represents. Years before Wes Craven was interrogating horror audiences’ disconnection with the meaning behind their go-to genre’s violence & narrative tropes in New Nightmare & Scream, Clark & co. were already calling out the horror-hungry masses for not sincerely engaging with the art behind their entertainment. The art of cinema and the cheap thrills of horror gimmickry are directly opposed here, with open resentment expressed over how the former needs a little of the latter to earn its funding. That’s what makes reading Bob Clark’s authorship into the text its most satisfying angle, even if the truth is more of a three-way compromise.
Popcorn is not only disjointed in its directorial vision and its art-vs-schlock sentiments, but it’s also disjointed in its setting. The story is set in the suburbs of Smalltown, America, but the production was shot entirely in Kingston, Jamaica, making extensive use of an abandoned old-style movie theater located there. Some of the Jamaican touches to the production are subtly underplayed, like how the majority Black cast of extras are made to appear more diverse by wearing Halloween costumes to the horror marathon. Others are less subtle, like how this is the rare slasher that features an all-reggae soundtrack (including a movie-themed reggae parody of “Under the Boardwalk”). The illusion really breaks down when the power goes out during the marathon and a local reggae band is invited on stage to entertain the crowd by flashlight, turning the theatrical audience into a dancehall dance party. Like the rest of Popcorn‘s behind-the-scenes production anomalies, the chaotic relationship between its setting and its shooting location is just part of the fun. This is a pizza-and-beer VHS rental to be enjoyed with your nerdiest horror-loving friends, so you can all be poked fun at by a movie that doesn’t take you or your preferred genre seriously. As lovingly recreated as the vintage William Castle segments feel in Ormsby’s movies-within-the-movie vignettes, there’s something genuinely heartfelt in Clark’s overall hostility to the fun-loving, novelty-seeking horror audience who wouldn’t turn up or fund more serious art. If nothing else, Clark’s reluctance to put his name on the project betrays some kind of lingering, Gates-style resentment for the artistic limitations of the genre. He doesn’t let that professional bitterness get in the way of throwing a good party, though, just like he doesn’t sweat the logical details of how that party should be soundtracked.
If there’s any one Ross McElwee documentary that’s essential viewing for all cinephiles, it’s his 1985 breakout Sherman’s March, which is returning to streaming platforms in a spiffy new 4k restoration early September. Its re-release is timed to coincide with the streaming premiere of McElwee’s latest doc, titled Remake, which revisits scenes from Sherman’s March four decades later, reflecting on how it established and defined his directorial career. Except, not exactly. McElwee’s approach to documentary filmmaking is a gentle bait-and-switch game, with logline premises that promise an easily marketable, digestible picture that then gets slowly eroded & replaced with what’s actually on his mind — something more personal than sellable. Sherman’s March is the foremost example of this bait-and-switch technique, pitched as a dry educational film on the history of “Sherman’s March to the Sea”, a famous Civil War military campaign that financially devastated the American South. That Ken Burnsian academia only lasts for a few wry minutes before McElwee reveals his true mission, though, as indicated in the film’s verbose subtitle “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Proliferation”. After securing funding to revisit famous sites from General Sherman’s warpath in what’s meant to be a much more traditional doc, McElwee quickly makes the project all about himself and his romantic struggles in a time of global political doom. He still makes a point to stop by some key historical sites from Sherman’s March to the Sea, but only when they’re conveniently close to his social calls or when they’re convenient for giving his film a vague sense of narrative structure. Likewise, his latest work is not exactly a “remake” of Sherman’s March in particular, as its title suggests, so much as it is a broad overview of McElwee’s filmography to date, using the act of reviewing old footage as an access point to grieve the loss of his son, who had appeared in many of McElwee’s films over the decades since Sherman’s March. What Remake makes clear about McElwee’s career is that he is first & foremost a diarist, one whose body of work only becomes more meaningful as you spend more time with him and his loved ones, as captured on film. His first and his most recent pictures are only bookends on a much larger library of communal self-portraits.
Considered in isolation, Sherman’s March is an Odyssean epic for people with “Wait, was she flirting with me or not?” social anxiety. McElwee spends the film’s sprawling three-hour runtime hopping from one situationship to another, filming his awkward flirtations and semi-romantic entanglements with a casual parade of Southern women his parents would love to see him settle down with. The movie’s framing within the historical echoes of a Civil War military campaign, the ongoing threat of nuclear holocaust, and a cheekily imagined romantic rivalry with Hollywood sex symbol Burt Reynolds is all just novel set dressing for the real business at hand: observing Southern womanhood in the 1980s. McElwee’s softspoken narration is a constant aural presence in the film, but he rarely appears onscreen himself. Most of the runtime is populated by the women he’s lazily pursuing, allowing the audience just enough time to fall in love with each of them before some universal obstacle gets in the way of a genuine romantic connection. The camera itself is one of those obstacles, since it would’ve been much less common for everyday social interactions to be documented in the 1980s than it would be now, in the smartphone era. McElwee had to sell Sherman’s March as a historical revisit to key Civil War sites at the time, since this kind of diaristic record of personal canon events and romantic self-lore was on the more experimental end of pre-camcorder 1980s filmmaking, long before the influencer vlog was invented as a medium. On revisit, its 16mm filmstock greatly helps the picture feel more artistically substantial than it would as a modern digital object. Firstly, the depth of color in the new 4k scan of that celluloid is gorgeous, emphasizing both the geographic beauty of the South and the film’s value as a document of a recently bygone era. Not for nothing, the limitations of 16mm film reels also helps maintain a steady rhythm so that no individual moment lingers past its welcome. The overall runtime may be nearly three hours in length, but the shortened film reels keep the pace moving along at such a brisk clip that the audience hardly has time to notice. It’s like tubing down a lazy river with a gaggle of chatty strangers, each just as alluring as they are peculiar and each sending mixed signals about their romantic intentions.
Remake‘s title suggests that it might find McElwee physically retracing his steps at old Sherman’s March shooting locations by catching up with the surviving subjects of that film whom he’s still friendly with. However, that’s only a small part of an infinitely more absurd attempt to remake his name-making doc. The larger project of remaking Sherman’s March was in the hands of mainstream comedy filmmaker Steve Carr, most famous for directing Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Once Carr approached McElwee with the outlandish idea of adapting Sherman’s March into a narrative comedy feature for the wider moviegoing public, McElwee instinctively started documenting the process via digi camcorder, tracking the Quixotic project as it mutated from theatrically-released comedy to prestige TV streaming series to goofball network sitcom to nothing at all. Like the initial pitch of Sherman’s March, that Hollywood project-development campaign only serves as a convenient entryway for allowing McElwee to continue documenting his familial life through cinema; the framing, however amusing, is incidental. The real project here is in revisiting footage McElwee recorded of his son, who died tragically young of a drug overdose after years of struggling with addiction. The prospect of developing Sherman’s March into a mainstream crowdpleaser was an obvious fool’s mission from the start, but McElwee used it as a chance to get his son acclimated to the mechanics of professional filmmaking after he showed interest in it as a potential career. They spend a significant amount of time together during the development process collaborating as documentarians of each other’s professional lives, unsure of what the near future holds. As news about the Sherman’s March adaptation fizzles out and fades away, so does the professional ambitions of McElwee’s son, who appears to be more interested in the hedonism of an artist’s lifestyle than in the tedious act of making art. The tragedy of his death takes Remake into much darker, more painful territory than where Sherman’s March goes, despite the relative lightness & frivolity of its framing. It also opens McElwee up to a larger exploration of how his documentary career has both preserved and distorted his familial life. McElwee’s time in Hollywood humorously draws a distinction between documentaries and “real movies,” but things get much more serious when he then has to ponder the distinctions between documentaries and “real life”.
If there’s any major deviation in McElwee’s filmmaking methodology between Sherman’s March and its in-name-only remake, it’s that he started his career documenting life as it happened in real time but now views cinema as a record of the past. Remake finds the filmmaker reviewing footage from several major titles in his personal catalog, often in a pained attempt to spend more time with his son, whom he’s preserved a record of through decades of happenstantial film diaries. It’s just as personal and self-justifiable as any of McElwee’s other projects, but it also makes the case that his work is more effective in total than it is in individual titles. As indicated by its significance in Remake as the movie that defines McElwee’s professional career, Sherman’s March is likely the one title that could be wholly understood and appreciated as a standalone movie outside his larger body of work. Watching it alongside Remake only makes it a richer text, though, recontextualizing it as the first diary entry among many, all gently narrated by McElwee and all populated with recurring characters he deeply, truly loves: his takes-no-guff sister Dede, his boisterous poetry teacher Charleen, his son Adrian, and everyone else who’s politely suffered him pointing a camera in their direction for decades on end.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Art Carney’s Oscar-winning performance as a roadtripping old grump in Harry and Tonto (1974)
Welcome to Episode #271 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of summer camp slashers, starting with Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988).
00:00 Welcome 02:30 The End of Oak Street (2026) 05:55 I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998) 09:11 Sequels of the Blind Dead 13:15 Popcorn (1991) 17:00 Nightborn (2026)
24:31 Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988) 40:43 Madman (1981) 57:50 The Burning (1981) 1:09:00 Cheerleader Camp (1988)
Horror nerds have thoroughly mined every last golden nugget of vintage Italo horror schlock. We’ve already seen & celebrated every Bava, Argento, and Fulci worth a damn, and Vinegar Syndrome is now approaching its dozenth volume of “Forgotten Gialli” Blu-ray box sets, having scraped past the bottom of the barrel into the mud underneath. There’s nothing left. One solution to this new scarcity of hidden 70s & 80s Euro horror gems is to look instead to the contemporary genre cinema of Spain, which boasts all of the same stylistic & cultural points of interest as their Italian equivalents, just dubbed in a different out-of-sync language. For your next giallo fix, for instance, you can look to the sleazy Spanish murder mystery The Corruption of Chris Miller, and for your next late night zombi flick, you can explore the Tombs of the Blind Dead, a Spanish graveyard whatsit with multiple deliriously plotted sequels and a decidedly Fulcistic vibe. There were, in fact, other countries in Europe besides Italy making their own high-style, low-logic horror movies throughout the 1970s & 80s, and Spain is as good of a place to start digging as any.
The titular blind dead of this series are the decrepit remains of the medieval Knights Templar, who made a Monkey’s Paw deal with Satan during the Crusades to live forever without thinking through the continual, natural decay of their ancient bodies. They haunt the crumbling ruins of rural Spain, occasionally rising from their graves as sword-wielding Harryhausen skeletons. The main attraction of the Blind Dead series is watching these skeletal knights ride their ghostly horses in slow-motion, making a show of waving around their swords as if posing for a heavy metal album cover. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, their blindness is a result of their eyes having been pecked out by birds while hanging for their crimes against living locals, while in Return of the Blind Dead, their eyes were intentionally burned out of their skulls by those angry locals. In either case, they cyclically rise for revenge, searching for hot young hippie babes to sacrifice to Satan for further supernatural favors (by eating those babes’ beating hearts fresh out of their exposed chests). They’re total jerks who cause great harm to their neighbors, but they look really cool doing so.
Like in their zombi Italo equivalents, the scene-to-scene logic of the Blind Dead films don’t matter as much as their overall mood, which relies heavily on the temporal contrast between the medieval knights of Old Europe and the sexually liberated youth of contemporary modernity. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, the knights are awoken when a young bikinied hippie breaks away from an awkward beach vacation where she’s being hounded for sex by both her current boyfriend and a lesbian boarding school chum from her past. Once alone, she makes the mistake of enjoying a cigarette while listening to swanky jazz at the burial site of the Knights Templar and is cosmically punished for her moral crimes by being violently swarmed and then gently nibbled alive. Once free from their graves, the knights are seemingly able to roam freely, and the movie finds great novelty in having the ancient ghouls invade distinctly urban spaces like the local mannequin factory and the nearby city morgue. We’re eventually treated to a flashback to the living knights’ heyday sacrificing an earlier generation of hot babes to Satan during the Crusades, but those medieval tapestries are just a brief reprieve from the knights’ oddly modern hijinks.
Blind Dead mastermind Amando de Ossorio was apparently very proud of his staging of the knights’ initial rising from the grave, since that exact footage from the first film is repeated in the following year’s Return of the Blind Dead and then again in 1975’s Night of the Seagulls. As you can likely tell by that latter title, the knights take an unexpected nautical detour halfway into the series, which further confuses its internal narrative logic. Return of the Blind Dead is a straightforward repeat & escalation of the original, while its immediate follow-up The Ghost Galleon (1974) leaves the graveyard behind to set sail. You see, the undead knights are now anchored to a gigantic ghost ship that exists in an alternate nightmare dimension that can only crossover into ours through the conduit of cosmic fog. Once that ship inevitably sinks, they go underwater, emerging from a nearby beach in Night of the Seagulls to once again gently cannibalize buxom women’s beating hearts. Those women’s spirits then return to this mortal plane as seagulls so they can scream in pain, which the townfolk can distinguish from the cries of regular seagulls because regular seagulls cannot fly at night. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but at least it’s poetic.
While the Knights Templar’s nautical side adventures in The Ghost Galleon & Night of the Seagulls sound wonderfully delirious on paper, Amando de Ossorio never again reached the artistic highs he achieved in the original Tombs of the Blind Dead. It’s impractical, but the blind dead really should be wielding swords on horseback in every picture regardless of whether they’re traveling by ghost ship. They’re severely less metal when they’re on-foot & swordless. The original film also has surprisingly surreal visual touches, like the intrusion of present-day train steam into the hippies’ boarding school flashbacks. Meanwhile, the most surreal aspect of Night of the Seagulls is how absurdly inept it is at the “day for night” illusion, completely disorienting its audience’s sense of time. Multiple scenes appear to take place both at midnight and at high-noon, simultaneously. The beachside locale is put to good use when local crabs are invited to join in on the knight’s oddly delicate flesh-eating, though, so it’s got its own minor points of visual interest here or there.
One way you can tell Tombs of the Blind Dead and its progressively ropy sequels belong to the same vintage Euro horror lineage as their Italo contemporaries is by puzzling through the confused history of their distribution. Upon initial release, they were each globally exported under different titles and different edits, with little care paid to artistic integrity or series continuity. Oddly, Tombs of the Blind Dead was rebranded for a US theatrical run as Revenge from Planet Ape, as if it were more directly inspired by Planet of the Apes than by the more obvious point of reference Night of the Living Dead. The Ghost Galleon was marketed as Horror of the Zombies, Ship of Zombies and, in Germany, The Ghost Ship of Swimming Corpses, while Night of the Seagulls was marketed as Don’t Go Out at Night and Night of the Death Cult, each title distancing these sequels from belonging to a larger Blind Dead franchise. Even within Spain, the “blind dead” became the “eyeless dead” in the series’ second outing, jumbling the brand. Nowadays, all four films are stuck between two extremely different modes of distribution: pristinely restored to their original form by boutique Blu-ray companies like Synapse, Vinegar Syndrome, and Shout Factory, or clumsily edited & dubbed as English-language bastardizations on Tubi, nothing inbetween. Movies don’t get much more vintage Italo horror than that.
After venturing further into the neon-lit abyss of his own imagination with Her Private Hell (a self-referencing mashup of The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives), Nicolas Winding Refn is reportedly outsourcing pitches for his next planned project: a remake of the 1988 novelty slasher Maniac Cop. It’s easy to see the appeal. Like most of Refn’s work, Maniac Cop has a great look and a great hook but is in no rush to pay off the promise of its premise. Screenwriter Larry Cohen turns cops into the same abstract, high-concept source of terror as he would an inanimate object (like the killer yogurt in The Stuff and the killer ambulance in The Ambulance) or a prehistoric beast (like Quetzalcoatl in Q: The Winged Serpent and the voice of God in God Told Me To). Whereas Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, “What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?”, his script for Maniac Cop asks, “What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?” It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable. VHS era schlockteur James Glickenhaus (Shakedown, The Exterminator) offers some credibility to the film’s action cinema bona fides, and Blue Underground founder William Lustig does a cromulent job in the director’s chair making sure its visual style is up to snuff with other slicked-up slashers of its era. So why doesn’t it move? So much work went into the basic look, premise, and car-chase trailer clips of Maniac Cop that no one thought to put those individual pieces in motion in any convincing way. Its genre elements sit still onscreen purely to be admired, not to accomplish anything tangible or measurable, just like in a Nicolas Winding Refn film.
One reason for Maniac Cop‘s stubborn inertia is that there’s no clear, continuous lead character anchoring its narrative. For a while, Tom Atkins is heavily featured as a detective on the case of a mysterious series of randomized slayings, each attributed to an abnormally large, uniformed police officer. Richard “Shaft” Roundtree phones it in as Atkinson’s flagrantly corrupt higher-up, acting as the film’s extended celebrity cameo. An unusually subdued Bruce Campbell eventually steps in as the lead suspect in the case, a tall-enough cop who’s caught having an affair with a coworker just before his wife is violently murdered. Campbell is just one of many mutant freaks with badges working at his local station, and the movie continues character hopping until every butt-chinned cop who disgraces the screen is a credible suspect; every cop is a maniac until proven innocent. That investigation is mostly a distraction from the movie’s main mission, though, which is making high-concept horror tropes out of the everyday fear of being alone with an armed police officer. Despite its urban setting and all of its police-force paraphernalia, Maniac Cop is largely a by-the-books slasher, with a towering, undead killer stumbling from one slaying to the next in a series of isolated novelty set pieces. The initial shock of these killings is that the mutant cop is specifically targeting innocent people, committing random acts of violence simply because he has the authority to do so. A concerned citizen tells a TV news reporter, “I tell my kids, you see a cop, you cross to the other side of the street.” Another shoots a cop in the face after being pulled over in a routine traffic stop. The movie may not progress past that basic premise in a satisfying way, but it is shockingly honest about real-life cops’ fascistic relationship with the citizens they supposedly serve & protect.
Maniac Cop eventually has to deliver on its title by narrowing its field of potential suspects down to one specific maniacal police officer, no longer shielding his identity behind backlighting & shadowy silhouettes. The legend of the undead maniac Matthew Cordell is what roots this movie firmly in the slasher genre, in a naked attempt to establish a Jason Voorhees figure of its very own. Cordell wasn’t always a maniac. When alive, he played the mythical figure of the Good Cop on city streets, much to the annoyance of the Bad Cops on the force and the corrupt politicians in City Hall, whom he threatened to expose by being an uptight rule follower. As punishment, he was framed for fictional acts of police brutality and sentenced to prison, where he was promptly murdered by rabid criminals happy to kill any cop they could get their hands on. It’s upon resurrection that Cordell becomes a homicidal maniac himself, having been corrupted and mutated by an unjust legal system. He’s a ginormous, unignorable manifestation of all cops’ corruption & brutality, and he spends the first half of the movie representing all cops as one shadowy figure before his rotting, zombified face is revealed to the audience. Also like the Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Angela Bakers of slasher tradition, his original thematic purpose is immediately distorted & diluted in his return sequels. In Maniac Cop II, Matt Cordell joins forces with a local serial killer to seek personal revenge against the cops & prisoners who initially wronged him, no longer attacking random innocent citizens on city streets. In Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, he attacks sleazy TV journalists who sensationalize false accounts of police brutality for ratings, effectively letting cops off the hook for their everyday villainy by exposing it as fake news.
In the limited capacity that anyone discusses Maniac Cop in recent years, the film’s legacy has developed into a kind of Alien/Terminator situation, where its louder, flashier sequel Maniac Cop II gets praised as the best of its series for featuring more & better action scenes, while the original remains superior on a purely artistic level. And, like with Alien & Terminator, its sequels are so fun to watch you can’t even complain about it without sounding like a dweeb who doesn’t know how to party. Maniac Cop II is delightfully over-the-top, throwing as many car chases, chainsaws, strip routines, and explosions at the screen as it can in the name of VHS-warped entertainment. Maniac Cop III is a little more subdued at first, but it gradually builds to an elaborate high speed car chase where Matt Cordell is fully on fire for the final third of the runtime, driving a stolen cop car towards the proverbial gates of Hell. Both sequels feature extensive body burn stunts that are guaranteed to drop an audience’s jaws, while the audacity of the first film is purely conceptual. It’s extremely rare to find an American motion picture about daily police work that doesn’t make heroes out of monsters or at least excuse cops’ monstrous behavior as the work of a few bad apples. Even as a franchise, Maniac Cop can’t avoid backsliding into copaganda by its final outing, and its only clear, coherent commentary about the corruptive nature of the system can be found in the original Larry Cohen screenplay (despite the fact that Cohen also penned the sequels). There’s a good chance that Refn’s take on the material will return to the core, simple idea that everyday cops are terrifying alien monsters akin to a Jason Voorhees or a Michael Myers or Her Private Hell‘s The Leather Man. The longer he dwells on that point without distraction or relief, the better, but I guess an explosion or two wouldn’t hurt too much.
I’ve been going through a Marx Bros phase for the past week or so, which again has me thinking about how many Old Hollywood icons & archetypes were introduced to me via Looney Tunes as a child, long before I would’ve been exposed to their originating sources of inspiration. The wisecracking Groucho Marx is, of course, Bugs Bunny in human form. Bugs also borrowed his trademark carrot-munching technique from Clark Gable and would occasionally dip into Humphrey Bogart parody, in addition to his more overt Marxisms. Caricatures of Frank Sinatra, James Cagney, Cary Grant and Mice & Men-era Lon Chaney Jr. would frequently pop up in Looney Tunes shorts as well, as would, most famously, a beautifully warped caricature of Peter Lorre. There’s something especially subversive about Saturday morning cartoons exposing young children to Peter Lorre long before they’d have any personal interest in seeking out his iconic villain roles in M, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and titles otherwise alphabetized. Once Lorre was introduced as an in-universe character among other Old Hollywood celebrities, Looney Tunes animators had a ton of fun slapping his distinct mug on a wide range of characters: a Casablancan Tweety Bird, a fish with disconcertingly fleshy lips, and a mad scientist named Dr. Lorre, whom I was happy to discover plays a major role in the latest Looney Tunes feature Coyote vs. Acme, continuing the tradition into a new millennium.
Dr. Lorre serves as the Maltese Falcon-like MacGuffin of Coyote vs. Acme, a missing scientist who was violently disappeared by the insidious Acme corporation in a covert coverup effort. Finding Dr. Lorre means uncovering Acme’s crimes against the cartoon citizens who purchase its products, treating them like disposable animal test subjects despite their overt anthropomorphisms. The corporation’s most frequent victim, of course, is Wile E. Coyote, who is addicted to purchasing & deploying faulty Acme products in his deranged, single-minded pursuit to capture & devour the Road Runner. Sick of all the backfiring rockets, misleading magnets, and trickster dynamite fuses that have mangled his body over the decades, Wile E. Coyote finally decides to sue Acme for personal damages, employing an overwhelmed underachiever lawyer to plead his case, as portrayed by a live & in-the-flesh Will Forte. While researching Acme’s culpability in the cartoon coyote’s never-ending marathon of Sisyphean failures, Forte’s personal injury law firm accidentally undercovers a larger corporate conspiracy involving Dr. Lorre’s disappearance and the second-class citizen treatment of all toons everywhere. The resulting fight for truth & justice makes for the goofiest X-Files conspiracy thriller sendup since Disclosure Day, with Bugs Bunny putting in a crucial cameo appearance as the firm’s shadowy Deep Throat informant (in another classic movie reference to All the President’s Men, which was similarly parodied by fellow introducing-the-kids-to-the-classics cartoon series The Simpsons).
While Coyote vs. Acme goes out of its way to continue the Looney Tunes shorts’ caricatural celebrations of classic Hollywood iconography, it’s clear that Hollywood does not love the movie back. The film’s years-long struggles to reach theatrical distribution has been oddly storied & public. The initial blow was an announcement that Warner Bros was going to scrap the completed picture entirely, finding more value in recategorizing it as a tax write-off than in marketing it as populist entertainment. The upstart indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment then came to the rescue, buying the film out of oblivion so it can enjoy a full life outside a cyclical tax audit. That extratextual backstory is only relevant, really, because Coyote vs. Acme happens to be about shady corporate machinations that value profits over people, so that when Will Forte and his coyote client take Acme to court, it plays as if Warner Bros is also on trial for its crimes against its own IP. Screenwriter Samy Burch (May December) finds great inspiration & pathos in Wile E. Coyote’s stubborn persistence while taking on both Acme in court and the Road Runner on the road despite his repeated, hopeless failures, which brings the twinkle back to his schmuck lawyer’s long-dead eyes. It’s something worth keeping in mind if and when reports of the movie’s box office disappointments hit national headlines; just getting the picture out to the public is a victory in itself, regardless of the result.
As admirable as I find Coyote vs. Acme‘s anti-corporate sentiments, and as charming as I find its classically minded participation in conspiracy thriller tropes, it’s difficult to claim that the movie ever rises above being, simply, cute. The jokes are consistently cute but never convincingly zany, with even Wile E. Coyote’s classic comedy-duo partnership with the Road Runner transitioning from violent to cute. Will Forte’s admiring relationship with his Sisyphean client is cute but never believably real nor tangible. Decades after Who Framed Roger Rabbit? mastered the form, there has yet to be another human-cartoon team up where the drawn & photographed characters share a physical space with the same movie-magic credibility. The textureless flatness of Coyote vs. Acme‘s computer animation does it no favors in that effort, nor does the choice to team Forte up with a mute character who can only communicate through exasperated grimaces & hand-written signs. We’re always aware that we’re watching a human actor speaking to no one but the camera, with his imaginary costar added later in post. More damningly, the film also struggles to replicate the madcap momentum of classic Looney Tunes shorts in its more stoic, procedural courtroom drama plotting. Just last year, Ketchup Entertainment distributed a much zanier, much more classically loony Looney Tunes revival in the fully animated The Day the Earth Blew Up, proving that it can still be done and making this secondary effort to keep the brand alive feel somewhat superfluous. It’s difficult to get too fired up about Coyote vs. Acme’s glaring shortcomings, though, since its very existence is an artistic fight against corporate greed and its overall effect is, not for nothing, cute.
