Welcome to Episode #221 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Britnee discuss a grab bag of movies about neurotic British biddies who work out their obsessions with younger woman through the written word, starting with the 2006 melodrama Notes on a Scandal.
I have a bad habit of ordering Blu-rays every single time I see an advertisement for a boutique label sale. It used to just be an occasional dip into the Criterion Collection during that prestige label’s regular Black Friday and Barnes & Nobles sales, but it has since escalated to include loving restorations of vintage genre trash from labels like Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, and Mélusine. I’ve been watching a lot of button-pushing, amoral schlock recently as a result – the kind of outré bad-taste material that you can often only find on disc because streaming service curators don’t want to touch it. It was a strange comfort, then, to recently discover that I’m not yet totally immune to that hazardous material. My recently purchased copy of the when-animals-attack Italo horror Wild Beats managed to offend me early & often. It’s less of a narrative feature than it is a document of real-life crimes against animals, children, and anonymous character actors. By the end credits, I found myself hoping that one of the special features on the disc would be a montage of mugshots for everyone involved in the production. And yet, I was also appreciative for each of those sweaty European bastards for teaching me how to feel again, even if most of what I was feeling was shock & disgust.
I might have been better prepared for that shock had I paid attention to the credited director: Franco Prosperi, of Mondo Cane fame. Prosperi brings the same misanthropic gusto to this outlandish story of a PCP-contaminated zoo that he brought to his earlier mondo “documentaries,” matching their unhinged, diabolical energy by again nudging the audience to question which onscreen atrocities are real and which are staged. Set in “a Northern European city” (with signage that’s conspicuously, universally printed in German), Wild Beasts is a disaster film about escaped, drug-crazed wild animals that terrorize unsuspecting urbanites who are understandably unprepared for attacks from literal lions, tigers, and bears. The initial shock of the premise is in the exotic varieties of animals that Prosperi sourced from circuses & zoos. A wild cheetah stalks a woman in a speeding convertible; a polar bear peruses elementary school hallways like it’s visiting a buffet; a small gang of elephants take over airplane runways by stomping anyone who gets in their way. It’s an impressive assemblage of animals that you’re not used to seeing in productions this cheap, but once the initial awe wears off you start to wonder how well those animals could possibly be cared for. Then, there’s the sickening tension of trying to determine whether those animals’ onscreen terror & peril are genuine, real-life events, something that doesn’t seem out of the question for the Mondo Cane crew.
According to Severin’s bonus-feature interview on the production of Wild Beasts, Prosperi claims “We did not hurt any animals at all,” explaining that they shot the film entirely under the watchful eye of the World Wildlife Federation. If so, I was fooled. It’s not always easy to tell when the image alternates between live animal & furry prop, and I swear I saw some documentation of real-life cruelties somewhere in that mix: live rats on fire, cats of all sizes antagonized for dramatic effect, seizure-like responses to tranquilization, etc. It’s like the grindhouse version of Roar in that way, with the fact & fiction narratives competing for the spotlight. Prosperi isn’t all that much better with humans either. Stunt actors are allowed to be jostled by large, dangerous animals for several beats too many, walking up to the line of becoming a snuff film. Child actors are framed & vocally dubbed as if they were adults, which is intensely upsetting in scenes where they appear half-dressed. It’s actually unclear that Prosperi even fully knows what a child is, since he increasingly dwells on their alien, indecipherable behavior as if they were just another breed of wild animal. That thematic preoccupation does eventually pay off at the film’s jarring climax, but there’s no dramatic payoff great enough to forgive the transgression of endangering performers as vulnerable as children & animals for Z-grade genre entertainment.
Despite being deeply offended by nearly every scene in Wild Beasts, I cannot deny that I found the transgression thrilling. Maybe it’s because the long-deceased Prosperi is no longer around to imperil children or animals that I feel somewhat comfortable to delight in the amoral mayhem he documented here. Truthfully, though, I found his tasteless misanthropy & misothery to be a major aspect of the film’s entertainment value. The opening sequence is a music video montage of urban filth, depicting a modern world so overfilling with drugs that PCP & lysergic acid (treated in-dialogue as the same substance) has collected as a visible scum in the municipal water supply, thus infecting animals at the city zoo. One standout image of fried chicken leftovers and hypodermic needles littering the city’s public transit platforms spells out all you need to know about what Prosperi thought of humanity and the joys of being alive in modern times. For all I know, he was a super sweet guy in his personal life, but the crude, cheap ways he exploited his performers for profit in his cinema betrays a deeply cynical worldview that leaves his audience feeling ill. I can almost guarantee that if he were a current, working filmmaker I’d have a much more difficult time appreciating the effect of his work without fretting over the practicalities of its production, which is probably a compartmentalization I should work out privately in therapy instead of a public blog.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the aquatic slapstick creature feature Lake Michigan Monster (2018), from the creative team behind Hundreds of Beavers (2024).
The critical decorum for writing about the new high-style serial killer thriller Strange Darling is that you’re supposed to recommend audiences see the movie without reading a full description or review, which benefits the movie in two ways. One, it preserves the surprise of discovery as the movie walks the audience through various What’s Really Going On plot twists like a puppy on a leash. More importantly, it also saves the movie from having its themes & ideas discussed in any detail, so that critics are instead encouraged to gush over its candy-coated hyperviolence (“shot entirely on 35mm film”, as the first title card goofily boasts) without fretting about the meaning behind those striking images. That second benefit is crucial, since the actual substance protected by Strange Darling‘s candy shell is rotted hollow. There’s no color saturation level high enough nor any needle drop ironic enough to cover the taste of the misogyny molding at the core of this empty entertainment vessel, despite director JT Mollner & cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi (yes, that Giovanni Ribisi) trying their damnedest at every turn. So, go ahead and swallow it down without reading the full ingredient list if you like, but be prepared to walk away feeling ill.
Kyle Gallner & Willa Fitzgerald star as a pair of beer-buzzed hedonists who meet in a roadside motel room for a kinky one-night stand. Several false-start openings (to bookend the several fake-out conclusions) tease the audience with awareness that a serial killer is afoot, which casts Gallner in an unsavory light as a macho brute who gets off on strangling women. But wait, it turns out the editor is not the only shameless tease warping the picture. The more time we spend in the motel, the more Fitzgerald’s strangulation victim is revealed to be a huge tease herself, goading Gallner into playfully abusing her according to a roleplay script they agreed to before booking the room, then repeatedly pulling back the exact moments when the violent foreplay is about to naturally spill over into consensual sex. There’s some hack Pulp Fiction chapter shuffling in how the story is ordered that maintains her innocence for as long as possible, at first characterizing her as a frustrating hookup who triggers misogynist violence in her date through unintentional sexual teasing. Eventually, though, it can’t hold back its condemnation of her as a “crazy bitch” and a “cunt” who deserves any violence Gallner exacts upon her in revenge, since she uses the general assumed victimhood of women in heterosexual partnerships gone awry to her advantage, so that she can get away with murder. The entire motel hookup kink scenario was a setup, you see, because you’re watching a Promising Young Woman remake that coddles Tarantino-obsessed MRAs.
Pushing the movie’s thoughts on consent, kink, and rape aside for as long as possible really does benefit its value as stylish entertainment. Its pride in shooting on film is a little corny in presentation, but the colors are gorgeously rich enough to excuse the faux pas. Ribisi has fun playing with his traditionalist camera equipment, delivering the kind of vintage genre throwback that’ll have movie nerds hooting & hollering at multiple split-diopter shots like salivating dogs. Barbara Hershey & Ed Begley, Jr. briefly drop by to lend the production an air of credibility as aging sweetheart hippies who are unprepared for how violently the War of the Sexes has escalated since their heyday. Car chases, shoot-outs, and intimate stabbings keep the adrenaline up once the motel tryst fully falls apart, spilling the intimate violence of that room into the 2-lane highways of rural America. The whole thing is pretty exciting, excitingly pretty, and then pretty atrocious as soon as it starts rebutting cultural assumptions about who’s the real victim when men & women fight. I’m usually not in the business of judging a movie entirely by its moral character—especially not as someone who regularly watches the vintage schlock this pulls direct visual inspiration from—but I couldn’t help but feeling like if Strange Darling were a person and not a feature film it would have some really specific, fucked up opinions about The Amber Heard Situation. Its vibes are just as rancid as its visuals are immaculate.
Welcome to Episode #220 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Nail Club‘s Sara Nicole Storm to discuss the 1998 self-trepanation documentary A Hole in the Head and the 2019 deep brain stimulation documentary Hunting for Hedonia.
00:00 Nail Club 08:18 A Hole in the Head (1998) 32:47 Hunting for Hedonia (2019)
At the end of this year, Swampflix will be celebrating its 10th anniversary as a movie review website. To celebrate, we’ve attempted to create something the world has never seen before: a definitive list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. Kidding, of course. This is well-trodden territory for any film criticism publication, most notably including the BFI’s Sight & Sound list dating back to the 1950s. The difference is that Sight & Sound polls over 1,000 professional film critics and filmmakers to compile their Top 100 list, whereas we only have six active contributors. Hopefully, this means our list reflects our personal tastes & passions among the more standard consensus picks for The Greatest Films of All Time, since less than 20% of our titles overlapped with Sight & Sound‘s most recent poll in 2022.
We created this list in two quick rounds of voting & ranking among our six active contributors in March of 2024, followed by a brief period of ensuring that every film listed had been covered on the site via either podcast or written review. You can find blurbs for every film listed on the new official landing page of The Swampflix Top 100, or you can find more fleshed-out reviews of each film by clicking the links below. We love movies, we love working on this website, and we hope that love shines through to anyone who follows along.
1. House(1977) – “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.”
2. The Night of the Hunter (1955) – “A classic tale of good versus evil, love versus hate. The black and white cinematography drives home the point with its sharp dynamic lighting. It’s chilling, uncanny and even ruthless at times, but it also has so many makings of a good fairy tale: lost children, evil stepparents, and even a fairy godmother in the end.”
3. The Wizard of Oz (1939) – “Blatant in its artificiality at every turn, yet through some kind of dark movie magic fools you into seeing beyond its closed sets into an endless, beautifully hellish realm. I’m sure there were plenty musicals released in 1939 that have been forgotten by time, but it’s no mystery why this is the one that has endured as an esteemed classic. Even when staring directly at the seams where the 3D set design meets the painted backdrop of an endless landscape, I see another world, not a mural on the wall. It’s the closest thing I can recall to lucid dreaming, an experience that can be accessed by the push of the play button.”
4. Videodrome(1983) – “‘The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: The Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.’
I lie awake at night wondering what Brian O’Blivion would make of TikTok.”
5. Tampopo(1985) – “Hailed as the first ‘ramen western’ (a play on the term ‘spaghetti Western’), Tampopo takes that designation to its most extremely literal end, focusing on the title character’s ramen shop as the location of metaphorical quick-draws and high noon showdowns, as well incorporating a variety of loosely connected comedy sketches about food.”
6. 3 Women (1977) – “This feels like a huge departure from what I’ve come to expect from a Robert Altman picture. I’m much more used to seeing him in his big cast/overlapping dialogue mode this is a much more insular, cerebral experience than that. I wish he had tackled this kind of eerie, dreamlike, horror-adjacent material more often (see also: Images, That Cold Day in the Park); he’s damn good at it.”
7. Moonstruck (1987) – “On a short list of classics that I can rewatch at any time no questions asked, especially if I’m feeling low. Come to think of it, Mermaids & The Witches of Eastwick are also on that list, so maybe I just seek comfort in Cher’s curls.”
8. The Red Shoes (1948) – “The centerpiece nightmare ballet is maybe the most gorgeous cinema has ever been. If nothing else, it’s unquestionably the most gorgeous that the color red has ever looked onscreen, which is appropriate since it’s right there in the title.”
9. Peeping Tom (1960) – “It’s near impossible to gauge just how shocking or morally incongruous this must’ve been in 1960, especially in the opening scenes where old men are shown purchasing pornography in the same corner stores where young girls buy themselves candy for comedic effect, and the protagonist/killer is introduced secretly filming a sex worker under his trench coat before moving in for his first kill. Premiering the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho and predating the birth of giallo & the slasher in 1962’s Blood & Black Lace, this was undeniably ahead of its time. A prescient ancestor to the countless slashers to follow, Powell’s classic is a sleek, beautifully crafted work that should’ve been met with accolades & rapturous applause instead of the prudish dismissal it sadly received.”
10. Sunset Boulevard (1950) – “Not sure why Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is universally cited as the kickstart to the psychobiddy genre while this is fabulously campy/draggy in almost the exact same way (love them both). Anyways, it’s a masterpiece, but you already knew that.”
26. Possession (1981) – “With a title like Possession and the heavy synths in the opening theme, it’d be reasonable to expect a straight-forward 80s zombie or vampire flick, but the film refuses to be pinned down so easily. If Possession were to be understood as a creature feature, the monster in question would be the coldness of romantic separation. When a character supposes early in the film, ‘Maybe all couples go through this’ it seems like a reasonable claim. The bitterness of divorce, loneliness, and adulterous desire then devolve into a supernatural ugliness. The main couple frantically move about Berlin as if drunk or suffering seizures, downright possessed by their romantic misery. Their own motion & inner turmoil is more of a violent threat than the film’s most menacing blood-soaked monsters or electric carving knives.”
51. Don’t Look Now (1973) – “A delectable head-scratcher. For a movie with such clear themes & purposeful imagery, it’s difficult to parse out exactly what it was getting at with its conclusion, which is definitely part of the charm. Reminded me of many great works of its era, but most of all Fulci’s The Psychic. Would gladly watch it a few more times to continue to puzzle at it, which I suppose is the highest praise you can lay on any film.”
76. Boogie Nights (1997) – “Even more so than Goodfellas, this has cinema’s clearest distinction between its story’s Fuck Around era (the 1970s) and his Find Out era (the 1980s), down to the minute.”
There are currently no fewer than four feature films that populate on Tubi when you search for the title “Vendetta“. That’s including longer titles like Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy but excluding partial matches like Midnight Vendetta or Vendetta Road. Honestly, I thought there’d be more. Vendetta is such a vague, generic title for the exact kind of cheap-o action revenge flicks that pad out Tubi’s vast library that I would not have been surprised if the results tallied to at least a dozen. Still, among the half-dozen or so Vendettas currently streaming on Tubi, it’s unlikely any are half as entertaining as the crown jewel of the collection, the one from 1986. A sleazy women-in-prison revenge thriller about a stuntwoman scorned, 1986’s Vendetta mixes two familiar genres into one surprisingly novel, volatile concoction. Just like there’s a long tradition of titling your generic revenge actioner Vendetta, there’s also a long tradition of highlighting behind-the-scenes stunt actors as real-life, authentic action heroes, from classic novelties like 1978’s Stunt Rock to this year’s big-screen adaptation of The Fall Guy. Likewise, there’s also a long tradition of leering exploitation films that offer a risqué peak at the intimate sex & violence of women’s prisons, often with more salacious titles like Caged Heat, The Naked Cage, Sex Hell, and Sadomania. As far as I can tell, though, Vendetta ’86 is the only film that’s thought to combine all of those genre tropes into a single 90min exploitation pic, and it deserves some respect for that efficiency.
Vendetta opens during a Fulci-style zombie stampede, inexplicably set in small-town 1980s America instead of 70s-sleaze Italy. After running from a rabid hoard of Italo zombies, our hero is shown collapsed and burning alive on city pavement. This, of course, turns out to be just another day on the job for the professional stuntwoman played by Karen Chase, who cheerfully pops up from this controlled burn shoot as soon as the fire-extinguishers cool her down. She doesn’t even bother to change out of her charred jumpsuit before speeding off to the wrap party, waving along her younger, even bubblier sister. Soon, it becomes apparent that the staged free-falls, car chases, and bare-knuckled brawls of the movie-within-the-movie aren’t nearly as dangerous as the small-town mentality of its shooting location. After downing a few brewskies at the local bar (while a band of new-wave punks play square-dance country schtick in the background), the younger sister sneaks out with the cutest roughneck she can find and immediately finds trouble. He sexually assaults her, she shoots him dead with his own pistol, and the local cops, judge, and jury unsurprisingly side with their hometown boy instead of the Hollywood outsider who killed him in self-defense. Worse yet, the local-yokel bullying continues once the teenager lands in prison, quickly getting her killed after she refuses the hard drugs and sexual advances of the top dog of the prison yard (It’s Always Sunny‘s Sandy Martin). It’s up to the stuntwoman, then, to seek true justice and avenge her sister’s murder, purposefully getting herself locked up so she can kill the women responsible one by one in a newfound, immoral use for her martial-arts skills.
Every plot point of Vendetta is pure exploitation, but it more often implies than it dwells on the grislier details. The instigating roadside rape that lands our hero behind bars is shocking but not eroticized. Admittedly, the prison-yard bullying that escalates that tragedy is eroticized, leaning into the lesbian leering of the wider women-in-prison genre. Still, there are no actual sex scenes to speak of, just some casual nudity as women hang around the showers and locker rooms as spectators to the violence. The contraband drug trade that fuels that violence gets pretty salacious too, with multiple scenes of forced heroin injection raising the dramatic stakes at every turn. All of this sensational material is softened by sincere scenes of intense melodrama scored by Lifetime music cues, affording Vendetta an oddly tender touch for a VHS-era exploitation picture. It’s also just as much an excuse for Karen Chase to road-test action stunts outside of a movie set as it is an excuse to position her in mildly salacious women’s prison scenarios. It’s essentially the soft-rock Skinemax version of Stunt Rock, complete with a climactic stage performance from a drag king Prince impersonator in the prison cafeteria to match the wizardly stadium rock act of its predecessor. It’s all very disjointed, but it’s also all very 80s, which you might expect from the only feature film directed by Bruce Logan, cinematographer for the original Tron. It’s also all exactly what you’d expect from a revenge picture titled Vendetta streaming on Tubi, except with maybe three or four Vendetta movies’ worth of plot & novelty for the price* of one.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer and Alli discuss Charlie Kaufman’s writer’s-block anxiety thriller Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage & Meryl Streep.
There are two things that can quickly win me over to enjoying an otherwise mediocre movie: a cool-looking monster and a go-for-broke ending. Thankfully, the new found-footage cryptid horror Frogman has both. Based on real-life legends of a half-human, half-frog mutant who wields a magic sparkler wand in the woods outside of Loveland, Ohio, Frogman gets away with a lot of time-wasting bullshit just by delivering on an adorable creature design, lovingly rendered as a rubber-suit monster. The titular Frogman appears early in flashback camcorder footage from the late-90s, assuring the audience that this is not exactly a Blair Witch Project or Willow Creek situation where the monster will go entirely unseen. He’s around, and he’s so dang cute that you can’t wait to spend more time with him. Unfortunately, the movie then makes you wait a full hour to return to the pleasure of the Loveland Frog’s company, but it does reward your patience by ending on 20 hectic minutes of over-the-top Frogman action, adding to the cryptid’s lore by dreaming up a frogperson death cult who worship the wizardly beast and offer up their bodies to be merged with his froggy DNA. It’s entirely possible to roll your eyes through a majority of the film’s runtime and still get excited by the concluding title card warning that “Frogman is still out there,” teasing a potential sequel. Any time spent with Frogman is time well spent.
While Frogman does not mimic Blair Witch & Willow Creek‘s withholding of an onscreen monster, it mimics everything else about their narrative structure, often reading like a copy of a copy. A struggling low-fi filmmaker who captured the late-90s camcorder footage of Frogman as a child (Nathan Tymoshuk) returns to Loveland to prove wrong all the haters & doubters of the “Hey guys” YouTube commentariat who mock the credibility of his sighting. He brings along two friends who also don’t take the existence of Frogman seriously but are still excited about the idea of making a movie (Chelsey Grant as an insufferably corny actress who’s road-testing a hack Southern Belle stock character named Norma Jean Wynette, and Benny Barrett as an aspiring cinematographer who constantly complains about “losing light” even though he shoots every single interaction backlit & out of focus on an ancient camcorder). The friend-dynamic drama between that central trio is autopilot found-footage filmmaking, but things pick up quick once they start interacting with the local yokels of Loveland. The amount of true believers who are deadly serious about Frogman give the wayward crew the creeps, then the wizardly Frogman’s “telekinetic interference” with the shoot throws the project into chaos, trapping them in a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a bloodthirsty frog cult. So, while Frogman is not always ribbeting, given enough time it is plenty ribbiculous.
If there’s anything new that Frogman brings to the found-footage horror canon, it’s all contained in its ending and in its monster. The titular rubber-suited Frogman looks great and—defying found-footage tradition—does not kill every single character who lays eyes on him, which means the movie has to find a new way to end its story that doesn’t just mindlessly echo the exact beats of Blair Witch. Otherwise, Frogman is most recommendable as regional cinema. Recalling Matt Farley’s modern small-town cryptid classic Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, there’s something charming about Frogman’s extremely local sensibilities in the quest to put Loveland, Ohio on the map by promoting the existence of its resident cryptid; the only shame is that nothing in the movie is half as funny nor as surprising as any random page of a Matt Farley script. Still, Frogman excels as a tourism ad for the city, which just adopted the Loveland Frog as its official mascot in 2023, after nearly seven decades of reported sightings. Even when I was bored with the interpersonal drama between the central mockumentary crew, I was still delighted by the Frogman merch they found in their interrogation of the Loveland citizenry: a sign that reads “Frog parking only; violators will be toad” and t-shirts with slogans like “Frog around and find out” or “M.I.L.F. (Man I Love Frogman)”. It made me want to travel to Loveland just to visit the gift shop.
Swampflix 