These days, rip-offs & retreads of The Exorcist are all the same grim-grey trudges through tired Catholic iconography. They’re so dutifully routine that I can close my eyes and picture the entirety of titles like The Exorcism, The Last Exorcism, The Pope’s Exorcist, and The Exorcism of Emily Rose without having seen so much as a trailer; the only novelty left in the genre is Russell Crowe occasionally doing an outrageous Italian accent. That wasn’t always the case. While William Friedkin’s original Exorcist was a relatively reserved, grounded horror film that tried to make a supernatural phenomenon feel like a genuine real-world threat, a lot of its immediate echoes were bonkers, wildly unpredictable novelties (not least of all its own sequel The Exorcist III). We used to live in a world where an Exorcist riff could be a Blacksploitation sex romp like Abby, a Turkish copyright violator like Şeytan or, apparently, a hardcore gay porno like 1975’s Sex Demon. To be clear, Sex Demon is not a porno parody of The Exorcist. It’s a strangely serious, sinister knockoff of the original – a psychedelic story about a cursed medallion, nightmare-realm Satanic orgies, and a couple who’s normal, milquetoast life together is violently disrupted by demonic possession . . . and ejaculating erections. It would take a lot of footage of Russell Crowe riding a Vespa to match that kind of novelty.
To celebrate their anniversary, a gay male couple have morning sex and then venture out of the apartment to buy each other gifts. Some misguiding antiquing leads to the purchase of a cursed medallion (helpfully accompanied by a note that explains “This medallion is cursed”), which the older man buys for his younger lover as an affectionate gesture. Since there’s less than an hour’s worth of celluloid to fill, the medallion makes quick work of transforming the younger boyfriend from gentle lover to demonic rapist, sending him on a manic quest to fist, piss on, and cum inside as many men as he can before either the spell wears off or his body expires. The movie skips all of the science vs. religion diagnoses of its source text and gets right to the bed-rattling goods, but it somehow doesn’t lose an ounce of the feel-bad domestic horror in the process. By mirroring specific objects & moments from the original Exorcist, it invites a parent-child reading on the main couple’s age gap relationship, which is a kind of 40-something/20-something affair. Having given his younger boyfriend a cursed anniversary present, the older man is worried that he’s psychologically fucked the kid up for life, and a lot of the same helpless exasperation Reagan’s mother feels in the original carries over here. It’s a feel-bad porno where even the sex scenes are set to a somber, menacing orchestral score, leaving you to wonder exactly what audience this was intended to please.
Sex Demon‘s specific allusions to moments & totems from The Exorcist are relatively sparse beyond a brief recreation of the Catholic, climactic bedside ritual meant to cast the demon out of its host body. It might not have clearly been presented as an Exorcist knockoff at all if it weren’t for the final scene’s violent tumble down a flight of apartment stairs or the marketing tagline declaring “Not even an exorcist could help!” It’s only in retrospect that some moments stand out as allusions to The Exorcist, like Reagan’s masturbation with a crucifix being reworked as the possessed man stabbing a hookup in the anus with a screwdriver. A lot of Sex Demon‘s horror is of its own making, including a ritualistic Satanic orgy that signals halfway through the runtime that the demonic possession has begun (a move that feels more inspired by Rosemary’s Baby than anything Friedkin directed). The real creative centerpiece is a concluding montage that chaotically remixes all of the preceding film’s imagery into a violent, dizzying meltdown. Sex scenes, antiques, dive bar strippers, candles, skulls, kitchen cabinets, and wobbly lamps rapidly flash over a menacing orchestral soundtrack, as if every frame snipped onto the editing room floor was randomly stitched together in lieu of filming something new for the climax. That nauseating montage feels legitimately evil by the time it reaches its fever pitch, and for the first time you almost forget you’re watching something otherwise dutifully derivative.
Sex Demon was a lost film for nearly four decades, recently rediscovered and restored through the archival diligence of Ask Any Buddy‘s Elizabeth Purchell. This was a much more substantial preservation of a lost porno parody than the infamous Bat Pussy reels uncovered by Something Weird in the 1990s. It’s a battered, seemingly incomplete print, but it gets across the film’s artistic significance as an independent queer cinema mutation of a now-canonized horror classic. Bat Pussy is much too silly of a comparison point, since Sex Demon takes its dramatic, romantic tension seriously enough to match other vintage porno outliers like Both Ways, Equation to an Unknown, and Pandora’s Mirror. If you’re looking for a goofy parody of The Exorcist, you’re looking for the 1990 Leslie Nielsen comedy Repossessed. Sex Demon is much more concerned with echoing the evil, supernatural horrors of the original, which is a pretty lofty goal for low-budget pornography.
One of the great joys of Italo zombie schlock is the genre’s chaotic, anything-goes unpredictability. In Zombi, a zombie has an underwater fist fight with a shark. In Cemetery Man, a zombie’s severed head becomes a gravedigger’s loving bride. In Demons, the zombies emerge through the silver screen to infect a horror-movie audience in their theater seats. In the most preposterous scenario of all, The Beyond imagines a New Orleans home with a basement (which, of course, opens a portal to Hell for the zombies to crawl through). 1981’s Burial Ground features none of that chaotic energy. Narratively, it’s a by-the-numbers zombie invasion story that’s only extraordinary in its efficiency. The film opens with an archeologist disturbing the ancient burial ground of the title and awakening the flesh-hungry zombies within. This inciting incident is immediately followed by the arrival of several romantic couples at the estate who don’t seem terribly concerned about their missing archeologist friend. They waste a little time exploring the musty mansion grounds (mostly looking for places to have sex, naturally), but it’s not long before the disturbed zombies arrive on the scene to eat them alive. There isn’t much story to speak of from there – just an army of the undead slowly hunting down their soon-to-be-disemboweled victims one at a time. It’s more commendable for its excess and its expediency than it is for its delivery of weirdo Italo-horror anomalies.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There is one anomaly worth singling out in Burial Ground: a little boy named Michael. Since most of the houseguests at the zombie-infested estate are adult couples, Michael stands out as the only child on the premises, which the movie frequently exploits by putting the vulnerable little chap in grave danger. What really makes him stand out, though, is the casting of the 25-year-old actor Peter Bark in the role, playing a small child with an adult’s face. The idea was to get around child labor laws that would have limited daily shooting schedules by casting an adult who could work more grueling production hours, but it’s a decision that adds an intensely absurd layer of menace on top of everything Michael does & says. When he complains that the estate “smells of death” or suggests that his mother light an encroaching zombie on fire, his adult facial features undercut his childlike vocal dub with pure, ancient sadism. Burial Ground intentionally leans into that discomfort too, spending a lot of time detailing Michael’s childlike curiosity about the adults’ sexual habits – at first as a Peeping Tom, then as an incestuous suitor for his freaked-out mother. He is undoubtedly the star of the show, and once he inevitably joins the ranks of the zombie hoard you can’t help but leap out of your seat to cheer on his uncanny reign of terror like your favorite football team just scored a 100-yard touchdown.
I’m convinced that Burial Ground would still be recommendable as a late-night zombie horror even without the Michael weirdness. It’s an all-killer-no-filler affair, not wasting any time explaining why zombies are attacking these horny couples or even why those couples gathered in the first place. Instead, it invests that energy into making its zombies as grotesque as possible on a tight budget. Tons of care went into costuming the ambling ghouls with a wide range of gnarly latex masks so that they all have distinct personalities. Their faces drip with hanging worms and maggots. Their victims bleed lipstick red as zombie hands tear out their guts in retro Romero fashion. Not as much care went into making those zombie hands look gross enough to match the latex masks, though, leaving most of them fleshy and intact so it appears as if they’ve never worked a day in their undead zombie lives. And yet, they clearly have a strong work ethic. They tirelessly invade the palatial vacation home in search of gross-out gore gags to entertain the audience watching at home, each set piece scored in droning, arrhythmic 80s synths. Peter Bark’s jarring performance as little Michael is an anomalous element of the film that makes it a must-see entry in the Italo zombie canon, but it’s not entirely reliant on his eerie novelty for its entertainment value. I don’t know that I could say the same about a scenario where Zombi didn’t depict a zombie fighting a shark.
New Orleans is currently enjoying the best repertory cinema programming it’s had in my lifetime. I may have missed the healthy art-cinema scene that was obliterated by the arrival of the AMC “Palace” multiplexes in the city’s suburbs in the 1990s, but something beautiful & exciting has sprouted from that rubble in the 2020s. Looking back at the older movies we’ve covered on the blog over the past ten years because they happened to be screening locally, it’s immediately clear that local programmers are getting more adventurous & esoteric in their tastes. It used to be that you could only catch rep screenings of Hitchcock classics like To Catch a Thief & Strangers on a Train on Sunday mornings at The Prytania’s ongoing Classic Movies series. Now every Wednesday night is a head-to-head battle to see who can screen the hipper, edgier title between the Gap Tooth Cinema series at The Broad (formerly known as Wildwood) and the Prytania Cinema Club at Canal Place (former host of Wildwood). That competitive battle has resulted in a robust local slate including hard-to-see titles like Entertaining Mr. Sloane, On the Silver Globe, and Coonskin as well as celebratory screenings of true cult classics like Pink Flamingos, Blue Velvet, and House. And that’s not including the one-off barroom & coffee shop screenings and the week-long restoration runs of other weirdo classics around town. The New Orleans repertory scene is still nowhere near matching the behemoth breadth of a New York, a Los Angeles, or even an Austin, but it’s at least better now than it was when we first started this blog ten years ago, and you can clearly see that progress charted on this Letterboxd list of what we’ve been able to cover because of it.
According to that list, the 100th local repertory screening I’ve attended in the first ten years of Swampflix was the hypnotic Japanese horror film Cure, thanks to the aforementioned Prytania Cinema Club. An early calling card film for the still-working, still-thriving Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cure arrived during the serial killer thriller era of the post-Silence of the Lambs 1990s. Kōji Yakusho stars as a Tokyo police detective working to connect a series of vicious murders in which victims’ throats are slashed in the same meticulous “X” pattern but were executed by different killers, found dazed at the scene of the crime. The common link between these parallel domestic killings is an amnesiac drifter and former psychology student played by Masato Hagiwara, who appears to be weaponizing an old-fashioned form of Mesmerism to incite the murders. While the detective struggles to pin these surrogate acts of violence on a man who can barely remember information told to him earlier in a single conversation, let alone his own life story or name, the mesmerism starts to infect the cop’s intrusive thoughts, interrupting the normal flow of a serial killer movie. His mentally ill wife mutates from a patient in his care to the obvious next victim in the hypnosis-induced murder spree, and all he can really do to stop it is to feebly threaten violence against a dazed, checked-out slacker who only offers middle-distance stares and vague philosophical questions in response. It’s a horror movie about an infectious idea, which is always a creepier enemy to fight against since there can be no physical, decisive victory. Attempts to diminish or punish the killer mesmerist only bring him into the presence of even more dangerous men higher up the law-enforcement food chain, spreading the threat instead of squashing it.
I loved getting the chance to see Cure for the first time in a proper theater, fully submerged in its eerie, icy mood without the trivial distractions of home viewing. It’s the kind of movie that asks you to pay attention to the roaring hums of machines—fluorescent lights, car engines, washing machines, ocean tide—and the jarring silence of their sudden absence. The blink-and-miss-them flashes of the unreliable detective-protagonist’s hypnotic visions of his own domestic violence could easily be missed with a cell phone or a house pet or passing traffic competing for your momentary attention at home. It’s an extraordinarily creepy film but also a subtle one. At the same time, it made me question whether this entire enterprise of lauding repertory programming can be detrimental to the way we watch and think about contemporary releases. At least, I left Cure a little skeptical about why so many movie nerds are willing to give into the pure-evil vibes of vintage Japanese horrors like this, Suicide Club, and Perfect Blue but get hung up on the supposed plot incoherence of their modern American equivalent in Longlegs. All four of those works warp the familiar beats of the traditional serial killer thriller into new, grotesque configurations by dredging up the supernatural menace lurking just under the genre’s real-world surface. Only Longlegs hasn’t had the benefit of multiple decades of critical analysis and cultural context lending additional meaning & significance to the events of its supernatural plot, so that discerning cinephile audiences get tripped up on whether its story makes practical sense instead of focusing on what really matters: its atmospheric sense, its evil vibes. Cure has long since let go of that baggage. It’s been canonized as a great work, so its ambiguity is taken as an asset instead of an oversight.
What I’m really celebrating here is the gift of access. To date, I had only seen one other Kurosawa film: his atypical sci-fi comedy-thriller Doppelgänger, which has largely been forgotten as a lesser work. That film’s DVD just happened to fall into my lap at my local Goodwill, which is how I find a lot of older movies outside the taste-making curation of streamers like The Criterion Channel, Mubi, and Tubi. Having that curation spill out of my living room and into proper cinemas in recent years has been a wonderful, welcome change of pace. I might’ve kept Cure on the watchlist backburner for another decade or two if it weren’t screening a couple bus stops away from my office cubicle. I also likely would have missed one of its eerie, intrusive flashes of violence had I watched it alone at home, where I’m always one phone notification away from zapping a movie of all its sensory magic. I hope The Prytania Cinema Club and Gap Tooth Cinema keep competing for my patronage every Wednesday into eternity to keep that magic alive. Or, better yet, I hope one of them gives up their Wednesday slot for a different night so I don’t have to make an either/or choice every week. I missed a screening of the Rowlands-Cassavetes collab Opening Night so I could finally check out Cure instead, even though it would have been a lovely way to commemorate the recent passing of an all-timer of a powerhouse actor. Having that either/or choice is a privilege that I didn’t have just a few years ago, when the majority of local rep screenings were our weekly Sunday morning visits with Rene Brunet.
I’m a sucker for genre movies about the supernatural power of dreams, since it frees filmmakers up to visualize just about anything they want onscreen. From obscure oddities like Paperhouse & Beyond Dream’s Doorto beloved horror-nerd classics like the Nightmares on Elm Street to artsy-fartsy pioneers like Un Chien Andalou, some of the most powerfully surreal images ever achieved in cinema have resulted from dreamworld genre fare. That’s why it’s a little disappointing when a dream-logic horror movie lacks that ambition to astonish, instead relying on more pedestrian thrills like, say, rubber monsters and naked breasts. The early Full Moon feature Shadowzone is one such disappointment: a low-budget, straight-to-VHS sci-fi horror about an Extended Deep Sleep trial in which the power of the dream-state human brain unlocks a doorway to an alternate dimension . . . and all that comes through that doorway is tits & monsters. In any other context, tits & monsters would be a satisfying payoff for renting VHS-horror schlock, but here they’re a little bit of a letdown, especially considering how much more expensive and less expressive Shadowzone is compared to its fellow sleep-study-horror Beyond Dream’s Door.
Louise Fletcher revives her role as the low-energy sleep study doctor she plays in The Exorcist II: The Heretic, except now with a mad scientist bent. Along with a fellow drowsy mad scientist played by James Wong, she conducts Extended Deep Sleep studies on naked models in the low-rent version of the hypersleep pods from Alien. Just as they’re starting to discover the awesome, supernatural power the human mind can unlock when submerged in Deep Sleep for days on end, their work is suddenly scrutinized by a military investigator because one of their test subjects inconveniently popped like a balloon. The flayed corpse of that experiment gone wrong promises a level of gore the movie will not match again until the very end. Instead, the still-sleeping subjects’ powerful minds let an interdimensional monster through the doorway between worlds that the remaining survivors in the lab (and the audience at home) cannot actually see. It’s only visible to the lab-equipment monitors, not to the naked eye. Still, it kills them off one by one in their sealed underground bunker, like an invisible version of The Thing . . . until it finally reveals its admittedly fantastic creature design in a strobe-lit ending borrowed from Altered States.
There’s a meta-element to Shadowzone, where it’s so boring between its mutant creature attacks that you can’t tell whether you actually saw them or you dreamed them during an unplanned mid-film nap. It’s possible that my unenthused experience with it was a result of presentation, since the version currently streaming on Amazon Prime is a half-hour longer than its normal listed runtime of 80min, and none of the additional footage includes the tits & monsters that provide its only sources of entertainment value. What’s left is just empty space that could have easily been filled by whatever surreal, outlandish images the fine folks at Full Moon could dare to imagine, and instead is just long stretches of nothing. The good news is that you’re likely in no danger of being bored or let down by the film yourself, since the only scenario when any reasonable person would have sought this out would be if it were still 1990 and your local video store had already rented out every VHS of the better titles it visually references: Alien, Altered States, and The Thing. Now, you can just stream Beyond Dream’s Door instead without worrying that Tubi is going to run out of copies.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Star Trek fandom documentary Trekkies, presented by Next Generation actor Denise “Tasha Yar” Crosby.
There will be countless reviews of Coralie Fargeat’s high-style gross-out The Substance that point to the body horror titles of the 1980s & 90s that influenced its over-the-top, surrealistic practical effects. Instead of echoing those shoutouts to Yuzna, Cronenberg, and Hennenlotter—the gross-out greats—I’d like to instead highlight a different VHS-era relic that telegraphs The Substance‘s peculiar brand of horror filmmaking. While Fargeat’s most memorable images result from the squelchy practical-effects mutations of star Demi Moore’s body as she takes extreme measures to reverse the toll that aging has taken on her career, long stretches of the film are less body horror than they are 1980s workout video. Moore’s aging body is her entire livelihood, given that she hosts a retro, Jane Fonda-style morning workout show in a leotard, stripping & exercising on America’s television screens. When she gives monstrous birth to her youthful replacement in Margaret Qualley through Yuznian transformation, the show zooms in even tighter on the workout host’s body – featuring aggressively repetitive closeups on Qualley’s gyrating, lycra-clad ass. At least half of The Substance is essentially a horror-themed workout video, so any recommendations of vintage schlock primers for what it’s achieving should include horror movies that cashed in on the 1980s gym culture craze. There are a few standout workout-horror novelties to choose from there, most prominently Death Spa and Killer Workout. However, there’s only one horror novelty that matches The Substance‘s full-assed commitment to spoofing 80s workout video aesthetics: a VHS collectible titled Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout.
Linnea Quigley was only in her early 30s in the early 90s, but her workout video spoof already finds her panicking about the encroaching expiration date for her onscreen career as an object of desire, like Moore’s gorgeous 50-something protagonist in The Substance. Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is ostensibly a Jane Fonda workout video parody in which the titular scream queen leads slumber-party-massacre victims & poolside zombies in low-energy, high-sleaze workout routines. It’s more cheesecake than it is instructional, starting & ending with a nude Quigley screaming directly at camera during her pre-workout shower. Having hit the nude scene quota that would satisfy horror-convention attendees who need to buy something for the perpetually topless actress to autograph, Quigley then takes the time to satisfy her own needs. Much of the hour-long runtime is a highlight reel of her most outrageous performances, including clips from schlock titles like Nightmare Sisters, Creepozoids, Assault of the Party Nerds, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama. Her most iconic scene as a punk stripper on the graveyard set of Return of The Living Dead is only shown in still images, sidestepping expensive licensing fees, so that most clips are pulled from her collaborations with David DeCoteau. She’s directly making an argument to her salivating fans that she’s just as much of a scream queen icon as a Jamie Lee Curtis or a Heather Langenkamp, even if her filmography is laughably low-rent by comparison.
Smartly, Quigley constantly invites you to laugh at both that filmography and the workout video wraparound, preemptively mocking the entire exercise with her own shamelessly corny Elvira quips. During a slideshow of her double-chainsaw striptease in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, she complains, “Ginger Rogers had Fred Astaire . . . and I get Black & Decker?!” Later, when she breathily encourages the audience at home to sweat with her during a workout, she jokes “That’s right, stretch those muscles . . . Not THAT muscle!” Of course, most of the self-deprecating jokes are at the expense of the workout video’s dual function as softcore pornography, making it a kind of proto-J.O.I. porno. Her first, solo workout routine finds her doing absurdly erotic poses in a metal-plated bra and black fishnet stockings, an outrageously inappropriate sweatsuit alternative that Quigley herself mocks while making the most of its prurient benefits. She looks great, she proves she’s self-aware about where she’s positioned in the grand cinematic spectrum of respectability, and she does a good job promoting her legacy as a horror legend while maintaining a sense of humor about it all. The only sequence of the video that doesn’t quite work is her instructional “zombiecise” routine where she leads a small hoard of graveyard zombies through limp choreography at the edge of a backyard pool. It’s a visual gag that doesn’t really go anywhere once the initial novelty wears off, but it does eventually drone on long enough that it achieves a kind of deliberate anti-comedy, so all is forgiven. It’s also followed by a much more successful speed-run through a tropey slumber party slasher and a mid-credits blooper reel, guaranteeing that the video leaves you with a smile.
Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is beautifully, aggressively vapid, much like the repetitive Pump It Up with Sue dance video sequences in The Substance. Whether it qualifies as a proper feature like The Substance is debatable. At times, it’s essentially the horny horror nerd equivalent of those looping Yule Log videos people throw on the TV around Christmas, a connection it acknowledges with occasional, lingering shots of an actual fireplace (presumably lit to keep the half-dressed Quigley warm). It’s just as much of an appropriate double-feature pairing with Fargeat’s film as the more commonly cited titles like Society, The Fly, and Basket Case, though, as The Substance is just as much a horror-themed workout video as it is a comedic body horror, and there’s only one previous horror-themed workout video that truly matters.
In an early scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis that attempts to introduce all its major players at once, Adam Driver recites the entirety of Prince Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy at a cacophonous press conference. It’s a classic-theatre intrusion on an aesthetic that’s already precariously imbalanced between the antique Art Deco sci-fi of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the uncanny green screen CGI of our post-MCU future. Old-timey newspaper reporters with “PRESS” badges tucked into the ribbons of their fedoras meet Driver’s recitation of Shakespeare with adoring, rapt attention, but the rest of the main cast is visibly unsure how to play the scene. A wide range of talented, sought-after actors (i.e., Aubrey Plaza, Giancarlo Esposito), cancelled has-beens (i.e., Dustin Hoffman, Shia LeBouef), and unproven upstarts who don’t yet have full control of their craft (i.e., Chloe Fineman, Nathalie Emmanuel) circle around Driver, individually calibrating their plans of attack. Every single person in the scene has a different idea of what kind of movie they’re in, so that the world’s most frequently quoted soliloquy is the only anchor that provides the bizarre exchange any sense of structure. Megalopolis appreciators will tell you that this teetering, unfocused tone is the sign of a genius director at work, exploring new cinematic territory by disregarding minor concerns like coherence or purpose. In my eyes, it’s a sign that the film isn’t directed at all; it’s a gathering of immense resources and disparate ideas into a single frame to accomplish nothing in particular, just an awkward dissonance. Coppola may have had a clear picture of Megalopolis envisioned in his mind, but he did a piss-poor job of communicating that vision to his collaborators and his audience.
This is a sprawling, extravagantly expensive movie with exactly two ideas. The first is that America is currently experiencing its own Fall of Rome, an idea that was popular among academics and media types about two decades ago. The second is that Francis Ford Coppola is an underappreciated genius, an idea that was popular among academics and media types about four decades ago. The America-in-decline angle of the story is at least well suited to the past-his-own-prime auteur’s current mindset as a bitter old man. It not only affords Megalopolis an easy aesthetic mashup of Roman & Manhattan architecture on which to build its chintzy CG future-world, but it also gives Coppola a platform to complain about the newfangled things that bother him as a geriatric grump, like cancel culture, queer people, and Taylor Swift. The signs that America has lost its way in amoral decadence include public lesbian smooching, pop music hags like Swift masquerading as teenage virgins, journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes, and mouth-breathing masses finding their bread-and-circuses entertainment value in the lowly artform of professional wrestling. This, of course, could all be turned around if great men like Coppola were handed the reins of culture & governance, as represented in Adam Driver’s genius architect inventor who’s held back by small-minded bureaucrats. Driver’s Caesar Catalina has discovered & commodified a miraculous fix-all substance called Megalon that will transform society into a golden utopia through better housing, better fashion, better medicine, and better artistic inspiration . . . if only the evil government figures and conniving women in his life would just get out of the way. He discovered this substance by loving his wife very much, as the main supernatural conceit of the film is that it’s set in a world where all women are either villainous sluts or virtuous spouses, and the only way to save America from becoming the next Rome is by returning to old-fashioned family values. It looks & talks like a movie that cares about the future, but all of its actual ideas & attitudes long for the past.
Megalopolis is the ultimate vanity project, Coppola’s tribute to his own genius. It’s debatable whether he sees himself more as the outside-the-box architect of the future (Driver) or the wealthy but fading uncle who will ensure that future’s existence by keeping his money in the family (Jon Voight), but the movie is astonishingly masturbatory either way. I can’t get over his cowardice in not casting himself as an actor in one of those two roles, as is tradition with smaller-scale vanity projects like The Room, The Astrologer, and the Neil Breen oeuvre. Even more so, I can’t get over the hubris of making this $120 mediocrity about how his world-changing genius is held back by small-minded money men, when those same resources could have funded a dozen projects from younger visionaries who actually do have something new to say but no capital behind them. Coppola somehow doesn’t see that he’s the villain of his own piece. He’s the old-fashioned conservative mayor (Esposito) getting in the way of young, iconoclastic talent (Driver). If you look at the films produced by his company American Zoetrope, it’s essentially a nepo baby slush fund, investing mostly in properties that bear the Coppola family name (with occasional exceptions for sex-pest friends who can’t find funding elsewhere). Compare that to Martin Scorsese lending his name recognition as a producer to filmmakers like Joanna Hogg, Josephine Decker, and The Safdie Brothers. Both New Hollywood legends have benefited from the critical scam of “late style” forgiving some of the looser, lazier touches of their recent works, but only one has been investing in the future of filmmaking beyond his own mortality. Coppola has no moral obligation to spend his production money outside the bounds of his vanity or his family, but it’s a little rich to watch this self-funded self-portrait of misunderstood, cock-blocked genius projected on an IMAX screen at a corporate multiplex and not scoff at the lack of self-awareness.
There are fleeting moments of pleasure to be found in Megalopolis‘s 140min runtime. While most of the cast appears to be totally lost in terms of intent or tone, Adam Driver gives a commanding, compelling performance that vibrates at just the right frequency to match the uncanniness of the material (a skill put to much better use in the similarly bizarre Annette). Audrey Plaza & Shia LeBeouf gradually establish menacing chemistry together as a semi-incestuous duo of schemers who attempt a coup on Driver & Voight’s empire. Their softly kinky aunt-on-nephew sex scene together is maybe the one moment that genuinely works on a dramatic level, and the downfall of their failed plot to seize power is the one moment of genuinely successful humor: a visual gag involving John Voight’s lethal boner. However, even the punchline conclusion to their saga is a nasty, hateful lashing out at power-hungry women and gender-nonconformers that immediately sours the movie’s sole moment of levity. Visually & thematically, it’s all very limited and uninspired, but there are enough talented performers on the cast list to make sure something lands. Even the casting feels like a grotesque hoarding of misused resources, though, with formidable players like Laurence Fishburne, Kathryn Hunter, Dustin Hoffman, and Jason Schwarzman being given nothing to do except stand around and support or thwart Driver’s world-changing genius as humanity’s Savior Artist. After seeing Megalopolis, I’m less convinced than ever that any single man’s singular genius could possibly be the savior of anything. It’s a lot more likely that the resources earned by the world’s Great Men will be locked away in trophy cases, only to be passed down to family members as heirlooms & inherited wealth. There’s no real future here, just mawkish glorification of the past.
Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!
“Technically, the villain is Satan in a jar, but this belongs to a canon of oddball horrors where the real killer is just remarkably bad vibes: The Happening, Messiah of Evil, Annihilation, Final Destination, etc. You could call it ‘cosmic’ or ‘Lovecraftian’ or whatever, but it’s really just the horror of stumbling into a party where the mood’s already gone rancid (and people occasionally explode into goo).” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“The sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky that this has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development and emotional stakes. It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty-line in French housing projects, except with way more gigantic, pissed off spider beasts than usual.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Chances are, if the title of this film sounds familiar to you, you’re either too into the movies (in which case, pull up a chair and join us) or you’re a fan of either The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, as Robert Smith of the former and Steven Severin of the latter collaborated as a micro supergroup under the name The Glove, which released only one album that took its title from this film. That alone would probably qualify it as a cult classic for some, but what makes this one work is how campy it is in spite of its earnestness. […] I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of movies that are competently made but with no apparent reason to exist or want to see a (sort of) conspiracy thriller version of a campy slasher.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A sci-fi erotic thriller about a yuppie Reaganite with a computerized ocular implant that makes him partial witness to serial killings. It plays like if De Palma made a sarcastic, purposefully idiotic version of what his most vicious detractors accused his schtick of being. And you know what? It’s still a mostly fun watch; just as sleazy as it is silly.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The nightmare surrealism of the Elm Street series, restricted by the production values of a 16mm regional-horror cheapie but also much freer to disregard the boundary between its dream sequences & waking “reality.” A wonderful example of passion outweighing resources; A+ outsider art.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This sets itself up as the Floridian hippiesploitation version of Psycho, but instead delivers a domestic melodrama where everyone’s love language is belligerent screaming.” Currently streaming on Screambox and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Argentinian schlock that classes up Jesús Franco-style vampire smut with the blocking & scoring of a vintage telenovela. It’s great fun, and a great confirmation that you can still find blood & titties on Tubi despite reports otherwise.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“While most Hammer Horror relics are buttoned-up, single-idea affairs, this off-brand equivalent is overstuffed with nutty/gnarly ideas on how to update the Frankenstein myth for the Free Love crowd. Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee star as rival half-brother mad scientists competing for industry awards & press, using their own children & ancient proto-human skeletons as pawns in their sick game of one-upsmanship. It’s so stately & faux-literary that you hardly have any time to register that you’re watching a dismembered finger writhe around on a lab table like a sentient pickle, representing Evil Incarnate.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“This often gets singled out as Ingmar Bergman’s Only Horror Movie, but it’s really not all that different from trickier-to-classify titles like Persona& Through a Glass Darkly. Those happen to be my favorites of his I’ve seen, though, so I mean that as a compliment. The man knew how to craft a spooky mood; one of his greatest talents, really.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“An icy, cruelly funny Irish ghost story where the undead are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. It’s basically a series of super consistent fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting real quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“An artist-goes-mad horror about a stop-motion animator who channels her darkest thoughts into her increasingly disturbing work, which then comes alive and attacks her. There’s wonderfully grotesque, fucked up imagery & sound design here, offering a small taste of pure-Hell animation for audiences who don’t have the patience for more immersive titles like Violence Voyager,The Wolf House, and Mad God.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Had me thinking about how well it’s aged vs. fellow slick ’96 teen horror Scream, both of which I was the perfect age to look up to as a wannabe goth young’n. Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics to catch up with, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years. Picking an enduring fav out of the two mostly comes down to performances: Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic as Matthew Lillard but much better dressed; Naomi Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both; and Skeet Ulrich puts on the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell, slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret. The victory belongs to the coven, praise be to Manon.” Currently streaming on HBO Max.
“While Frankenstein might have the better direct sequel overall, this one at least has the generosity of affording its titular villain more than three minutes of screentime, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters. She’s so effortlessly, tragically cool, and it was great to make her ghoulish acquaintance” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“You gotta love The Wolf Man’s ‘Aw shucks, gee-whiz, just call me Larry’ routine. He’s an adorable oaf when he’s not a violently horny beast, making for a great horror film about post-nut clarity.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A triumph of high-artifice production design, among other triumphs. The painted-backdrop graveyard set is like the goth older sister to the Wizard of Oz designs; just as sinisterly magical but dreaming up a world where every day is Halloween, a world that’s always a pleasure to revisit (until a child enters the frame)” Currently streaming on Peacock and The Criterion Channel.
“Anytime a director of this stature says they’re making an ‘erotic nightmare,’ you know they’re cooking up a masterpiece. This is Francis Ford Coppola’s best work as a visual stylist, which since he’s in the business of moving pictures, means it’s his best work overall (with the caveat that I’ve only tried a couple of his wines).” Currently streaming on MGM+ (free with a 7-day trial subscription).
“I suspect the reason this stands out as Jodorowsky’s best work because of Claudio Argento’s heavy involvement in the writing & production. The imagery is just as gorgeous as anything in The Holy Mountain, but it’s all driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum. It’s a fine-art carnival sideshow.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The Old French Extremity; the kind of gross-out gore film you can pair with a cheese plate & bubbly.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing. Very funny in how it gives horror-convention gorehounds exactly what they want (the most annoying idiot youths to ever disgrace the screen being gruesomely dismembered) while also being stubbornly withholding (shooting the stillness of the woods with an Apichatpongian sense of patience).” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“It’s a hypnotic, immersive vision of paranormal menace, one that could easily play as outdated kitsch but instead triggers a nightmarish trance. It’s the same effect that’s achieved throughoutBeyond the Black Rainbow, especially in its Altered States-reminiscent LSD experiment flashback where its main antagonist ‘looks into the Eye of God.’ It’s an effect that returns full-force in Phase IV’s psychedelic, nihilistic conclusion as well, which describes a next stage in human evolution triggered by the paranormal ants’ attacks on mankind.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“The last time I saw this I was hung up on its obvious influences on Alien. A decade later, I’m hung up on its production design’s obvious influence on Bertrand Mandico. I can practically hear Elina Löwensohn whispering about Kate Bush & Conan the Barbarian in the background.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“Grand-scale destruction in miniature, matching the impossibility of processing the communal grief of nuclear fallout in a novelty sci-fi film with the impossible spectacle of its mixed-scale monster attacks. It’s just as deeply sad as it is colossally thrilling.” Currently streaming on HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body. Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere. ” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“More of a genuine mashup of classic Godzilla & King Kong sensibilities than any of those monsters’ actual onscreen clashes. Mostly just helped clarify what I love about the kaiju genre (the giant rubber creatures, the more the better) vs what I tolerate (the retro extoticized adventurism) to get to the good stuff.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“It used to be that time maxing meant brushing your teeth in the shower; now we save time by watching our Guy Maddin & Matt Farley movies at the same time.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The best thing about haunted house movies is the third-act release of tension where there are no rules and every feature of the house goes haywire all at once, not just the ghosts. The reason this is the height of the genre is that it doesn’t wait to get to the good stuff; it doesn’t even wait to get to the house. It’s all haywire all the time, totally unrestrained.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“Classic zombie splatstick of the Evil Dead & Dead Alive variety, updated with a 90s sense of apathetic cool and heavily distorted through the Italo-schlock dream machine. Loved every confounding minute of it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A gory cheapie about an ancient mask buried in Nostradamus’s tomb. We watch this story unfold twice removed, where movie-within-a-movie victims try on the cursed mask, which transforms them into demonic, flesh-eating demons who torment their companions. Meanwhile, the in-film audience of the movie squirms in their seats, noticing an alarming resemblance of the mysterious horror film’s violence to their own journeys to the screening. Mainly, the promotional mask prop displayed in the cinema’s lobby has cut one of their cheeks the same way it cut & infected characters in the film they’re watching, which of course leads to a demon-zombie breakout in the theater that matches the chaos of the movie within the movie. They’re all effectively Skinamarinked—unable to leave the theater thorough the doors they entered from—as they individually transform into cannibalistic monsters and tear each other to shreds.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“There’s something to love in every single frame of this, but nothing to love more deeply than Brad Dourif being given more free reign than ever to rave like a demonic lunatic.” Currently streaming on Peacock, Starz, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This trades in the grimy cruelty of the original for the visual sensibilities of a children’s film, from its exaggerated cartoon framing to its primary color palette to its bookend trips to the toy factory. Speaking of which, the climactic spectacle on the factory floor is some A+ mayhem, really leaning into the novelty of killer-doll gore at its purest. It’s one of those R-rated horrors that feels like it was specifically made for an audience of children sneaking the TV remote past their sleeping parents.” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“Perfect Halloween night programming; just the absolute worst teen dipshits to ever disgrace the screen getting torn to shreds by demons whenever they get too horny to live.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Shudder, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
Welcome to Episode #222 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of documentaries about metalheads, starting with the anthropological Judas Priest fan doc Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986).
00:00 Welcome 02:45 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) 06:00 Baby Cat (2023) 11:41 Hearts of Darkness – A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) 17:22 Tokyo Pop (1988)
21:40 Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986) 31:22 Kittie – Spit in Your Eye (2002) 43:47 The Decline of Western Civilization Pt II – The Metal Years (1987) 1:06:34 Last Days Here (2011) 1:18:35 March of the Gods – Botswana Metalheads (2014)
Taiwanese-born director Shu Lea Cheang has never stopped making experimental cinema since she first made a splash on the 1990s New York indie scene. You just wouldn’t know it based on the scope of her reputation & distribution. Just last year, Cheang directed a video game-inspired animated sequel to her early-2000s cyberpunk porno I.K.U., the very first pornographic film to screen at Sundance. That kind of provocation should be making indie publication headlines, but she doesn’t get the same festival-coverage attention as other post-cinema shockteurs like Gaspar Noe or Harmony Korine. At least, she hasn’t since her 1994 breakout Fresh Kill, which got positive reviews out of TIFF and has lived on as an early-internet cult classic, reaching Cheang’s widest audience to date. Even so, it’s a challenging work with niche appeal, and as far as I can tell it never landed any form of official distribution on tape, disc, or streaming. Smartly, Cheang is currently taking a break from continuing to push her art in current work to instead return to that early-career triumph, touring the country with newly restored 35mm prints of Fresh Kill for a 30th Anniversary victory lap. The only legal way to watch the film in 2024 is to meet Cheang herself at the cinema, so that you can see with your own eyes that she is still active, engaged, and ready to share her Digital Age outsider art with the public.
The title “Fresh Kill” refers to a massive landfill that was located near Staten Island when Cheang made the film in the early 90s but has since closed. At the time, Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world, which Cheang extrapolates to imagine a world that’s all one big landfill where half the waste is televised media babble. The movie has characters and events but no real narrative to speak of. It’s mostly a simulation of channel-surfing through our post-modern apocalypse, sandwiched between hipster lesbian hackers and dipshit Wall Street bros on the couch. The lesbian couple get by salvaging and reselling junk from the landfill and working waitress shifts at an upscale sushi restaurant. They go from politically aware to politically active when their daughter eats a can of contaminated fish from the evil, global GX Corporation, which causes her to glow green and then mysteriously disappear. In retaliation, they recruit fellow sushi shop employees to hack GX’s databases over dial-up connection and expose their food-supply pollution to the world via public access TV editorials (in one of the earliest onscreen depictions of “hacktivism”). The Wall Street bros are also poisoned with GX’s green-glow pollution via their trendy love of sushi, but they react in a different way; they try to rebrand as eco-friendly businessmen so they can make a quick profit off the public’s newfound interest in environmentalism (in an early onscreen depictions of corporate “greenwashing”).
One of the first images in Fresh Kill is a TV art-installation piece erected at the titular landfill – a wall of cathode-ray screens that seemingly only receive broadcasts of infomercials and public access call-in shows. It’s easy to reimagine the entire film as a video-art installation piece, as its narrative doesn’t progress so much as it alternates perspectives. The central couple’s home & sex life vaguely adheres to typical 90s indie drama structure, but it’s frequently interrupted by nonsense chatter from the sushi restaurant that keeps their lights on as well as the TV broadcasts that keep them addled, including friendly, heartfelt commercials from GX. There’s a total breakdown of language across these alternating, post-modern windows into 1990s NYC living, recalling William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups experiments and subsequent declarations that “Language is a virus from outer space.” Lizzie Borden’s no-wave classic Born in Flames took a similarly kaleidoscopic approach in its editing, and I was happy to hear Cheang mention it is a contemporary work in her post-film Q&A. Fresh Kill is just as politically enraged as Born in Flames, but it’s also not nearly as serious, allowing its characters to goof off in go-nowhere skits about lipsticked fish lips, orgasmic accordionists, and supermarket dance parties without worrying about diluting the seriousness of its messaging. Cheang tries something new every scene, confident that it’ll all amount to something meaningful when considered in total.
The political activism angle of Fresh Kill made it a no-brainer programming choice for Patois Film Fest, who thankfully booked a Shu Lea Cheang tour stop in New Orleans. The venue choice of The Broad makes a little less sense, since they do not have the capability to project celluloid like The Prytania. The newly restored print of the film was shown as a digital scan, then, which occasionally led to unintended freezing as the laptop struggled to process the video file without lag. It was a fitting format choice in its own way, though, since the miscommunication of the machinery projecting the film matched the miscommunication of the multicultural characters who all speak in different languages and idioms throughout, often simultaneously. Fresh Kill imagines a world overwhelmed by waste. A lot of that waste is physical but just as much is cultural, calling into question what value there could possibly be in filling our world and brains with so much disposable media & jargon. Since Cheang has since gone on to experiment with the visual textures of pornography & video games, I have to assume it’s a question that’s continued to occupy her own mind, and I’d love to see the result of that tinkering. Hopefully this victory-lap restoration of Fresh Kill will lead to those works being more accessible for people who missed their festival runs, like the recent Criterion box sets celebrating the similarly overlooked, underdistributed, politically furious films of Greg Araki & Marlon Riggs.
Swampflix 