For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the stop-motion animated comedy Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2025).
After several false-starts in the build-up to this moment (most of them penned by backpack-rap dork Lin-Manuel Miranda), we have finally arrived at the official return of the mainstream movie musical. The monkey’s paw irony to that triumph is, of course, that neither of the awards-nominated musicals marking that return are any good. If anyone who isn’t already afflicted with a debilitating, life-long case of Oscar Fever is paying attention to this year’s Awards Race, it’s because they’re fans of the pop stars Selena Gomez or Ariana Grande, who are both competing for a Best Supporting Actress statue in their respective movie-musical projects. Gomez struggles to speak-sing Spanish in the operatic French musical Emilia Pérez, which is a strong Oscar frontrunner despite wide critical disdain for its ludicrous misrepresentations of transgender identity & Mexican criminality. For her part, Grande excels as the only successful element of the Wizard of Oz fanfic musical Wicked: Part One, which is a strong Oscar frontrunner despite playing like a color-desaturated Target commercial with exactly one redeemable performance. It’s baffling that either film is in Awards Contention at all, considering their shared artistic anemia, but their dual success is still a healthy sign for the movie industry at large – proving a wide-appeal audience interest in the movie musical format and activating sleeper-cell agents from the pop-girlies Stan Wars to draw wider attention to this year’s Oscars race.
In this world where two of the biggest Awards Season frontrunners are embarrassingly clunky musicals starring pop singers with rabid online fanbases, 2001’s Carmen: A Hip Hopera is a foundational text. Produced for broadcast on MTV, the hip-hop flavored reinterpretation of the classic opera Carmen was propelled entirely by the star power of a young Beyoncé Knowles. Before she tested the limitations of her Movie Star presence in her official debut Austin Powers in Goldmember and the limitations of her rapping skills in the albums leading up to Lemonade, Beyoncé was given the titular role in a made-for-TV feature that asked her to be a rapping Movie Star, hoping that her charm & beauty would overpower her unpreparedness. The gamble mostly worked, if not only because the MTV production team was able to surround her with a talented cast of actors (most significantly Mekhi Phifer) and rappers (most significantly Mos Def) for support. Like Emilia Pérez & Wicked, it was a film younger viewers watched solely for the star presence of their favorite pop singer and supported on principle, so as not to cede ground in the fight to cement their fav on Pop Music Mt. Rushmore. As a result, it’s aged into a fun novelty as an early-aughts time capsule, padded out with performances from names that would only mean something to children raised on daily broadcasts of TRL: Da Brat, Lil Bow Wow, Jermain Dupri, Rah Digga, etc.
Beyoncé enters Carmen wearing a sparkly red Jessica Rabbit gown, turning the head of every Philadelphia cop slamming brewskies in their department’s go-to dive bar (tended by blacksploitation legend Fred Williamson). Even the straightlaced family-man cop played by Mekhi Phifer can’t help but drool over her classic beauty, much to the indignation of his loving fiancé. Instead of seducing any of the already crooked cops on the force who’d sleep with her in a heartbeat, Carmen of course zeroes in on the above-board gentleman in the room as a kind of personal challenge. Phifer resists her advances at first, explaining in Seussian rap verses, “You’re too hot for a guy like me. You and me are unlikely.” They immediately bone anyway, which gives Phifer’s corrupt superior (Mos Def, giving the only genuinely good performance in the film) an excuse to lock the goody-two-shoes up and eventually chase the mismatched lovers out of town. A classic tragedy follows as Carmen gets bored with her new plaything and moves onto the next, as slowly spelled out in a prototype for R. Kelly’s “Tapped in the Closet” narrative style. There’s plenty of humor in the effort to reconfigure Carmen‘s narrative into modern hip-hop rhymes, like in Beyoncé’s warning that “Everything that glitters don’t bling,” or Phifer’s romantic declaration, “Let me tell you how much I care. Man, when I was locked up I couldn’t smell the piss, only the scent of your hair.” It’s all vintage early-aughts camp, as long as you don’t take the inevitable deaths in the final beat too seriously.
Carmen: A Hip Hopera is at its most enjoyable when it drops the pretense of respectability and fully leans into its MTV-flavored novelty. After a brief opening-credits music video wherein Da Brat explains the basic elevator pitch, the movie naturally slips into a kind of low-rent melodrama that happens to be set to a rap beat. Eventually, though, director Robert Townsend (B*A*P*S*, Eddie Murphy: Raw) loosens up and has fun with the premise, introducing green screen illustrations of the rap lyrics in pure music-video kitsch. The MTV branding is noticeable throughout in the choppy Pimp My Ride editing style and in-film references to shows like MTV Cribs, but it isn’t until the second half of the runtime that the music-video aesthetic fully takes over and Carmen becomes something sublimely silly instead of disastrously silly. I’m willing to admit that I am personally biased on this front, as it was produced in the exact era when I would have been glued to MTV myself, so that its vintage music-video touches trigger an easy nostalgia for me. I am also biased since, of all the singers currently vying for positions on Pop Music Mt. Rushmore, Beyoncé is the only one that most appeals to me. As a musician and a stage performer she’s consistently impeccable, so to see her try her hand at something in which she’s merely mediocre only makes her that much more adorable. So, maybe my dismissive opinions on Emilia Pérez & Wicked will cool over the next couple decades as they become cultural artifacts instead of poor excuses for Prestige Cinema, but it’s more likely that I will never warm up to them, since I have unknowingly chosen my own combatant in the War of the Pop Girlies and just hate to see the competition win.
Swampflix just hit its tenth anniversary as a movie blog, which was already a dead medium when we started posting reviews on the site in January of 2015. The longer I stick with this project the more I question what, exactly, I’m getting out of it, which is a question likely best left unanswered. There are some obvious, tangible benefits that come with time. I can look back to the earliest writing & illustrations published on this site ten years ago and have confidence that my basic skills have improved with practice (even though the early drawings are still in active rotations, like the camera pictured above). It’s also beneficial to have an ongoing log of the movies and thoughts that have passed through my brain in that time, since the majority of that memory would be lost otherwise. Not least of all, Swampflix has become a social ritual for me, especially as the entirety of the crew has been assimilated into weekly podcast recordings, so that my friends are routinely obligated to talk to me about my personal favorite small-talk subject: movies. The grand Swampflix project is one of self-fulfillment, operated entirely at a monetary loss, so the question is more about what I get out of publishing the site for public view and less about what I get out of it as a personal hobby.
That difference between internal and external fulfillment in a long-term amateur art project is one of the major tensions at the core of Patricia Rozema’s coming-of-middle-age drama I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Our aimless, thirtysomething protagonist, Polly, is unsure of who she is and what she wants out of life. She does not care about what she does for work, getting by on office temp jobs until she stumbles into a sweet regular gig assisting at a hip Toronto art gallery. She’s disconnected from her own sexual desire, just now discovering in her thirties that she’s attracted to women, thanks to the magnetic allure of that gallery’s erudite curator, Gabrielle. The only thing Polly knows for sure is that she loves taking photographs, and she’s transformed her one-bedroom apartment into an impromptu art gallery of its own, carpeting the walls with photos she’s taken of images that make her happy – mostly urban architecture & candid portraiture. Only, her heart is broken when she anonymously submits these photographs for her employer’s consideration and is eviscerated by dismissive critiques that the artist behind them represents “the trite made flesh.” Before that unknowing betrayal, her photography hobby was the one thing that Polly found personally fulfilling in life. Hearing a negative, outside opinion on her work breaks the spell, and she’s left with little to live for, especially since she’s betrayed by the one person she looks up to.
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing finds immense beauty in “the trite,” the twee, the quirky. Polly is a kind of Holy Fool archetype who makes great art (to the audience’s eye, anyway) simply by amusing herself with a camera. Gabrielle is her Art World foil: a cynical materialist who only values art based on its marketability and its relevance to hip New Yorkers’ tastes, which plays as a joke on Torontonian insecurities. Their ideological clash escalates when Gabrielle starts passing off widely beloved “golden” paintings created by her lover, Mary, as her own original work for marketing purposes, which causes Polly to lose even more respect for her idol. Meanwhile, Polly goes on fantastic mental adventures while developing prints in her dark room, living a true artist’s inner life in an over-imaginative dream space of her own making while the more successful Art World team of Gabrielle & Mary waste their time orchestrating much pettier, more lucrative schemes. It’s the same volatile mixture of authentic authorship debates and adventures in self-fulfilling sensuality that Rozema pushed to a further extreme in her follow-up film White Room, except this time it’s framed as a quirky indie romcom instead of a Hitchcockian voyeur thriller.
I’ve only seen a couple of Rozema’s films so far, but she has a distinct eye for fairy tale visuals and an ear for dreamworld tones that make for singular work that could’ve been made by no one else, despite the fact that she’s often shooting commercial-grade video art in a major Canadian city. Still, the major triumph of I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is Sheila McCarthy’s adorably insecure performance as Polly. McCarthy approximates what it would be like if the Jim Henson Creature Shop captured the spirit of Ann Magnuson & Pee-wee Herman in a single Muppet. She’s simultaneously a dorky, overgrown child who can’t get through a business lunch at a sushi restaurant without giving herself a milk mustache and the chicest person in every room she enters, largely thanks to her total lack of self-awareness. She might not know what to do with any appendage of her body in any social scenario, but she out-cools all of the Art World poseurs who turn their noses up at her. Polly is proof that the “Adulting!” brand of stunted maturity is not unique to Millennials as a generation, since Rozema’s film was produced when we were mere babies. It’s also evidence that the main reason so many of us are Like That (useless but adorably dorky) is that we’re only suited to be making art for our own pleasure but living in a world that requires us to make money for survival. I can say this for certain: Swampflix would improve greatly if I didn’t spend so much of my time working for a paycheck elsewhere. It would likely also improve if I turned this hobby into my paycheck, but I assume that would zap all of the fun & self-fulfillment out of it, so no thanks.
This hazy dead space between Christmas and the New Year finds the boundaries between this world and the next at its thinnest, even thinner than on All Hallows’ Eve. That’s why Yule season is the perfect time to read, watch, and share ghost stories. It’s a tradition most faithfully observed in annual retellings of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and in annual British television broadcasts that never fully cross over to the US. While most households are streaming Hallmark & Lifetime Christmas schlock in their pajamas, we Yuleheads light a few candles and invite ghosts into our home through short story collections and the television set. It’s become my favorite Yuletide tradition in recent years, and it’s one more traditionally Christmasy than a lot of people realize. So, in order to help spread the undead Yule spirit before the holiday passes, here are a few short-form reviews of the ghost stories I’ve been chilling myself with this week.
The Uninvited (1944)
1944’s The Uninvited is the least Christmas-related film of this batch, but it’s ghostly & cozy enough to justify a Yule-season viewing. More of a cutesy radio play than a tale of the macabre, it tells the story of a weirdly chummy brother & sister who purchase a dilapidated seaside home that’s been left empty for years because it’s very obviously haunted. One local woman (a sheltered twentysomething who acts like a pouty teen) is especially distraught by the purchase, since her mother died there under mysterious circumstances that her new adoptive family must uncover before the ghost tosses her off the backyard cliff. The answer to that mystery mostly plays out like a dinner-theatre staging of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, but it’s worth sticking it out to see the film’s gorgeous, ethereal visualization of its cursed-real-estate ghost. While its Criterion Collection packaging presents it as a kindred spirit of much chillier, statelier 1960s ghost stories like The Haunting or The Innocents, The Uninvited is much gentler & sillier than that. It’s a mildly spooky amusement, which is perfect for this time of year.
Beyond Tomorrow (1940)
1940’s Beyond Tomorrow is even gentler & sillier than The Uninvited, with more overt ties to Christmastime besides its seasonal apparitions. Often retitled as Beyond Christmas, this public domain B-movie is a cozy, zero-conflict ghost story about how there are still a few sweetie pies left in The Big City: some living, some dead but lingering. It starts with a trio of Scrooges of varying grumpiness who are working late hours on Christmas Eve, when one decides to play a Christmas game. They each toss a leather wallet onto the New York City sidewalk with their address and a $10 bill inside to see if there’s anyone left in the city honest enough to return them. Two adorably naive youngsters return the wallets they find on the snowy pavement and the old-fogey roommates/business partners treat them to a Christmas meal as thanks. Then they collectively play matchmaker for the young couple, mostly from beyond the grave. The improbable trio of businessmen die in a plane crash at the end of the first act, then spend the rest of the movie acting as a ghostly Greek chorus. They do everything together in life, in death, and beyond.
Nothing especially dramatic happens in Beyond Tomorrow until the last-minute appearance of a sultry Big City temptress who threatens to break the couple up with her hedonistic ways. From there, it’s a minutes-long morality play that ends in gunshots and emergency surgery, but by then we’ve already seen three grumpy but kindly old men pass on to the next world without much of a fuss. Dying is just not that big of a deal. Mostly, the film is an excuse to hang around a Christmas-decorated luxury apartment with a small collection of ghosts in hopes that one of them might remind you of your own grandfather; or maybe one will remind you of a wealthy benefactor who baited you off the street with a prop wallet, whichever speaks closer to the life you’ve lived.
All of Us Strangers (2023)
2023’s All of Us Strangers is a much more dramatic Christmastime ghost story, although even its own sense of melancholy settles into an overall cozy mood. Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott stars as a lonely Londoner who’s living in a brand-new apartment building that otherwise appears to be entirely empty . . . except for the tempting presence of Paul Mescal as his more outwardly social but equally depressive downstairs neighbor. He staves off some of his loneliness by fucking that younger, livelier neighbor, but he mostly suppresses it by visiting his childhood home outside of the city, where he finds domestic comfort with the ghosts of his parents who died in a car crash when he was 12. Being older than the ghostly couple who raised him is already a surreal enough experience, but things get even more complicated when he comes out to them as a gay man, having to explain that it’s not really such a big deal anymore to Conservative suburbanites who died at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Then, the whole thing falls apart when he attempts to introduce them to his new situationship boyfriend, throwing his entire home/romantic afterlife balance into chaos.
Andrew Haigh’s low-key supernatural melodrama delicately touches on a lot of traditional ghost story beats in its grace notes, but it also loudly echoes how the isolation of modern urban living is a kind of ghost story that we’re all living every day. Our protagonist is a quiet, reserved bloke with no chance of making meaningful human connection from the voluntary prison cell of his one-bedroom apartment. All he can do is spin vintage New Romantics records and reminisce about the last few warm memories of his childhood, unable to fully enjoy the ways the world has gotten easier for gay men like him in the decades since. As a prestige drama for adults, it’s a little too Subtle, Restrained, and Nuanced for my personal tastes, but I still felt swept up in its melancholy Yuletide mood.
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
1996’s The Long Kiss Goodnight is much louder, flashier Christmas fare than All of Us Strangers or any other title on this list. It’s also not strictly a ghost story, so its inclusion here is kind of a cheat. Geena Davis stars as a small-town middle school teacher who suffers from amnesia, unable to recall her life before her cookie-cutter Norman Rockwell thirties in the suburbs. Her past comes back to haunt her, literally, after she appears in local TV news coverage of her town’s Christmas parade, where she’s featured waving from a float in an adorable Mrs. Claus outfit. A subsequent head injury in a boozy Christmas Eve car accident shakes her past self loose in her mind, prompting it to appear to her in a dream, cliffside, with her red curls cut & dyed into an icy Basic Instinct blonde bob. That eerie green-screen dream is a confrontation with the ghost of her former life – a supernatural showdown reflected in a magic dressing mirror that allows the two versions of herself to negotiate for control of her body. While they fight it out, snarling supercriminals from her violent past—having seen her on television—invade her suburban home, and she goes on an emergency road trip with a sleazy private detective (Samuel L. Jackson, in a Shaft-era blacksploitation wardrobe) to retake control of her life.
It turns out that the blonde-bob Geena Davis of the past was a lethally trained CIA agent whose murderous skills come back to the red-curls Geena Davis of the present one at a time, scaring her but also arming her to fight back against her attackers. During her road trip with her private dick, her trained-assassin ghost fully takes possession of her body, reclaims her preferred hairstyle, and sets up a precarious either/or decision where the Geena Davis of the future will either emerge a tough badass or an adoring mom. The Long Kiss Goodnight was written by Shane Black, who is very likely the pinnacle of Tarantino-era post-modern edgelords, which means it’s overflowing with sarcastic quips and emptied gun clips. It’s also very likely the pinnacle of Black’s work as a screenwriter, right down to his “written by” credit appearing over a pile of Christmas ornaments, celebrating his tendency to set hyperviolent scripts during the holiday. 90s action-schlock director Renny Harlan doesn’t entirely know what to do with Black’s excess of overwritten, flippant dialogue, but he’s at least smart enough to fill the screen with enough explosions that you hardly have time to notice. As a result, the movie is most recommendable to audiences who are frustrated that Die Hard isn’t as Christmasy of Christmastime action-movie programming as annually advertised, more so than it is recognizable to audiences looking for a Yuletide ghost story. There is a ghost story lurking in its DNA, though, because a Christmas traditionalist like Shane Black can’t help but acknowledge that essential but overlooked aspect of the holiday.
1. She is Conann – My favorite working director reshaped the Conan the Barbarian myth into a lesbian fantasia built on ego death and the cruelty of having to make art in a decaying world. No one else alive has dared to hijack the movie-making dream machine for their own perverse pleasure in the way Bertrand Mandico has. He’s perfectly attuned to the medium’s ability to evoke powerful ideas & feelings out of pure, hand-crafted imagery. There are allusions to luminary provocateurs herethat indicate Mandico thinks of himself as the modern equivalent of a Kenneth Anger or a Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but he’s actually our modern Méliès: an illusionist who’s pushing a still-young artform to its most fantastic extremes.
2. I Saw the TV Glow – The melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon. It’s impossible not to read this VHS-warped dysphoria horror as a cautionary tale for would-be trans people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, but it hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, and community by disappearing into niche, obsessive media consumption instead. It made me so sad that I felt physically ill, and then I immediately retreated into another movie screening so I wouldn’t think about it for too long.
3. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – A three-hour Romanian art film about labor exploitation in the global gig economy . . . One that communicates through vulgar pranks & memes, setting aside good taste & subtlety in favor of making its political points directly, without pretension.
4. Mars Express – A great sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be animated & French. It’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood studios aren’t regularly making large-scale sci-fi like Minority Report & Terminator 2 anymore, but then its third act shoots for the stars in a way that distinguishes it from its obvious reference points through sheer dazzlement.
5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – George Miller’s action blockbuster sequel gives me the RRRtingles more often than it gives me the Fury Road tingles, which is honestly just as good. It’s large-scale, uncanny CG mythmaking from one of our finest working madmen.
6. The People’s Joker– This fair-use Joker parody is the kind of direct, rawly honest outsider art that hosts a guided tour of the inner sanctums of its director’s brain. It’s not Vera Drew’s fault that the secret batcaves of her particular brain are wallpapered with copyrighted corporate media. We’ve all been mentally poisoned by pop culture iconography in that way, but most artists are too timid to engage with it in their work with this level of fearless vulnerability. It’s an impressively funny, personal comedy framed within the grease stain that Batman comics have left on modern culture.
7. Last Things – Billed as “an experimental film about evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks,” the most exciting thing about this apocalyptic hybrid-doc is finally getting to experience what it’s like to be Björk for an hour: finding infinite significance, beauty, and terror in simple mineral formations.
8. Memoir of a Snail– A stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of Mary & Max: a stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness. There’s a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to Adam Elliot’s work that’s matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt, except Elliot thankfully borrows a little Jean-Pierre Jeunet whimsy to help cut the tension.
9. Cuckoo– Tilman Singer’s teen-angst freakout escalates the verbally conveyed psychedelia of his debut Luzto something more traditionally thrilling. He genre-hops from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintains the same screenwriting ambition of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools. It’s also a major triumph for audiences who’ve been waiting around for Dan Stevens & Hunter Schaeffer to be handed meatier material; our time is now.
10. Love Lies Bleeding – I went into this muscular erotic thriller expecting to swoon for its synths, sex, and biceps. I’m surprised to say that I was also emotionally invested in its central romance beyond those surface aesthetics, which was not as much of a given. Rose Glass amplifies everything that was exciting about her debut Saint Maud to grander effect, once again getting away with one of my least favorite genre filmmaking tropes (contextualizing all supernatural fantasy elements as dreams & delusions instead of them “really” happening), somehow making it feel like audacity rather than cowardice. It’s ripped, roided, and noided.
11. The Substance – There was a movie called Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo at Cannes a few years ago that got unanimously rotten reviews complaining that it’s just four relentless hours of young people’s gyrating butts. It never got US distribution, but Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror comedy is exactly what I imagined it looked like, except now with positive reviews and surrealistic gore effects from Screaming Mad George.
12. Aishiteru! (Safe Word) – A semi-pink mockumentary about a pro-wrestling pop idol who gets recruited as a dominatrix because she can’t stop playing heel. Whatever dramatic authenticity is lost in its sub-professional production values is made up for in its intense fixations on sexual power dynamics & subcultural detail. If you have any entry-level interest in wrestling, pop, or kink, this is a thrilling, endearing journey through their backrooms & dungeons.
13. Kinds of Kindness – The sinister absurdism of this New Orleans-set anthology drama convinced me that Yorgos Lanthimos would be just as effective as a playwright as he is as a filmmaker, which I can’t believe never occurred to me before. More urgently, a lot of it was shot in the immediate area where I work & live, which was uncomfortable because I don’t want any of the creeps he’s dreamed up anywhere near me.
14. A Different Man – Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction. Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role until Adam Pearson completely wrecks the whole thing in the funniest way possible. It’s a great dark comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity.
15. The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed – Joanna Arnow delivers the driest humor you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about an autofictional BDSM romcom where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.
16. Anora– This sex-work Cinderella story is the feel-good sweet counterbalance to the feel-bad sour notes of Sean Baker’s Red Rocket. Both films are equally funny & frantic, but Baker has clearly decided he wants audiences to love him again after his brief heel era, and it’s impressive to see him face-turn to this opposite tonal extreme of his work without losing his voice.
17. The Beast – A sci-fi fantasy horror about falling for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of your past & future lives, and all that changes is the temporal context in which he sucks. It’s one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure if you’re supposed to take entirely seriously, until director Bertrand Bonello tips his hand a little by making you watch pop-up ad clips from Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.
18. Nosferatu – Robert Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a grander, major-studio scale. As a result, this cracked costume drama doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date). It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way in a largely visual medium.
19. Longlegs – This supernatural serial killer thriller feels convincingly Evil and gives Nicolas Cage free rein to be erratically Intense. Call me a simple man, but that’s more than enough for me. The Oz Perkins directorial project continues an upward trend.
20. In a Violent Nature – A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing. It’s 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).
Usually, when a classic-period noir is singled out for praise, it’s because it’s lean, rapid-fire machine gun entertainment – a high-style, high-energy crime picture achieved on a low-rent budget. 1947’s Kiss of Death has none of those qualities. After opening on a botched Christmas Eve jewel heist in a tense, largely wordless sequence, the film’s urge to entertain goes dark. This is an oddly leisurely, somber noir about the jail-sweat struggles of one of those failed jewel thieves (played by the aptly named Victor Mature) as he’s pressured to rat on his accomplices who got away. At first, he refuses to squeal, but threats against his family change his tune, and he reluctantly becomes an undercover rat helping cops bust the crime rings that used to supply his income, much to his personal shame. Watching this family man squirm under police pressure in his jail cell is far from the perverse sex-and-violence pleasures audiences usually seek in classic noir, so most of Kiss of Death ends up feeling limp in its genre payoffs. It’s still worthy of all its praise & attention, though, thanks to a maniac villain by the name of Tommy Udo.
Richard Windmark’s performance as the sad-sack squealer’s charismatic, villainous foil heroically brings Kiss of Death back to life after the much more reserved Victor Mature drowns it in moralistic tedium. Windmark’s infamous gangster Tommy Udo is a murderous sociopath whom the D.A. wants the jewel thief to snitch on as a fellow convict, but he proves too dangerous to be around, even for a minute. Windmark is such an energizing lunatic in the role that he earned an unlikely Oscar nomination for it, presumably for being the only sign of life in an otherwise plodding picture. Along with the likes of James Cagney, Peter Lorre, and Ann Savage, he gives one of the all-time great unhinged noir-villain performances, often credited alongside Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs for inspiring the look & persona of The Joker. When a cop asks Udo if he has a minute to talk, he spits back “I wouldn’t give you the skin off a grape.” He condescendingly refers to his fellow gangsters by the uniform nickname “Squirt.” He pushes wheelchair-using biddies down the stairs just for rubbing him the wrong way. He is the entertaining volatility that most noirs exude in their filmmaking personified in a single movie-stealing character.
Besides the dark, revitalizing energy of Windmark’s performance, Kiss of Death is most commendable for its early use of location shooting around 1940s New York City, including prison scenes shot at Sing Sing. Shooting outside of a Los Angeles studio lot was atypical for a small-scale crime picture at the time, which you can tell as soon as an opening-credits title card brags about the novelty. It’s also unusual for a noir of this kind to be narrated by the doomed antihero’s love interest (and, weirdly, his kids’ former babysitter, played by Colleen Gray), but I can’t say her voice adds as much interest or texture to the picture as the location shooting, except maybe in softening the genre’s macho tendencies. Otherwise, Hollywood workman director Henry Hathaway (True Grit, Niagara, Call Northside 777) brings a controlled, level-headed approach to the production that keeps it from achieving anything especially flashy or memorable within its genre template. Only Tommy Udo breaks through that containment of Old Hollywood professionalism, transforming a cozy afternoon watch into a momentarily thrilling freak show. He is the spectacle worth seeking out here, the only reason the film is remembered at all.
Welcome to Episode #228 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the retro horror comedy Frankie Freako (2024) and the late-80s wave of Gremlins knockoffs that inspired it.
There are currently 8,867 films on my Letterboxd watchlist, and roughly 8,000 of them will remain unwatched for all eternity. Every time a movie looks interesting to me, I toss it into the bottomless watchpit, with no concrete plans to dig it up at any particular time. Either it’ll tumble out of the Shuffle button at the exact right moment or it will rot there forever, and I think that’s beautiful. What I’m much more dutiful about it is my physical media watchpile, which fits neatly into one humble box besides my television that I’m not “allowed” to let overfill before bringing home more discs. Having a physical Blu-ray or DVD in my home is a guarantee that a movie will be watched—soon!—if not only because it then enables me to buy more Blu-rays & DVDs. The watchbox has been getting a little tight lately, though, so it’s time to clear out a few lingering titles with some short-form reviews.
I’ve been having especially good luck finding used martial-arts DVDs at local thrift stores this year, so that feels like as good of a category to start this KonMari process with as any. Listed & reviewed below are four kung fu action flicks I purchased on used DVDs at two local Goodwill stores in 2024 (the one on Tulane Ave in MidCity and the new outlet “bins” location in New Orleans East, in case you’re on the hunt). They all roughly follow the same story template in which a young fighter is violently wronged, trains for violent revenge, and then takes that revenge against his oppressors in violent spectacle. Their individual emphases on the wronging, the training, and the avenging vary from film to film, though, as does their entertainment value as vintage martial-arts relics.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
By far, the best of this batch is the Shaw Brothers classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which mostly focuses on the training aspect of the kung-fu story template. While most kung-fu revengers include a martial-arts training montage in which a young fighter is taught fighting skills & Buddhist philosophy in a temple of violence, The 36th Chamber expands that 2nd-act rebirth to stretch over the majority of its runtime. Gordon Liu plays a young student whose schoolmates & teacher are slaughtered by a fascistic government who sees them as a rebellious threat. He retreats to a Shaolin temple to learn how to fight back against those government brutes and is reluctantly trained by the monks who live there to be a world-class combatant. Most of the film features Liu solving physically challenging puzzles while older monks nod in silent approval, and he grows frustrated to be learning discipline rather than vengeance. His impatience eventually fades as he matures into becoming a deadly weapon of great wisdom, which is a gift he then vows to spread to the common man outside the temple so they can fight their oppressors in great numbers instead of as individual rebels.
I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin in its ideal format: a thrifted Dragon Dynasty-label DVD with a 10min RZA interview reminiscing about marathoning Golden Age martial-arts & porno schlock as a kid in late-70s NYC. The film would be considered a classic of Hong Kong action cinema without RZA’s help, but his grindhouse cinephilia helped sew its name into the fabric of American culture, so that every time you hear the words “36th Chamber”, “Shaolin” or “Master Killer” (the film’s alternate American title), a Wu-Tang Clan beat automatically plays in your head. It’s a little silly to include a 2min “Wu-Tang concert video” as an additional special feature, but there’s still some thematic overlap there in how the dozen people performing on stage at once have found strength in numbers that they wouldn’t wield as individual rappers. In his interview, RZA attempts to contextualize why Hong Kong martial-arts films might have resonated so deeply with him as a young Black youth in America, citing “the underdog thing,” “the brotherhood thing,” and “the escapism” as resonant themes. The truth is he more likely cited this classic so often in Wu-Tang lyrics simply because it looked & sounded cool. Either way, he’s right.
The Iron Monkey (1977)
The title & thrills of the 1977 martial-arts revenger The Iron Monkey are so much more generic & forgettable than 36th Chamber‘s that it’s usually only brought up as a footnote to a much more popular 1993 film of the same name, to which it has no narrative relation. Chen Kuan-tai directs and stars as a frivolous, drunken gambler with a rebel father who is—you guessed it—assassinated by a fascist government. He cleans up his act at a Shaolin temple and trains for revenge, which he eventually gets hands-on against the General that killed his father at the movie’s climax. Given the stark-white backdrop of its pop-art opening credits and its genre-dutiful training sequences you might suspect that it was a cheap knockoff of The 36th Chamber . . . until you realize that it was released an entire year earlier.
The Iron Monkey is a standard-issue kung-fu revenger with nothing especially noteworthy about it except that the violence occasionally goes way overboard, especially in the opening sequence where an actual monkey & eagle are forced to fight as symbols of the “Monkey Fist” vs. “Eagle Claw” combat choreography of its central hero & villain. There’s also a scene where the bad guys show they mean business by choking a child to death, which makes for two pretty alarming choices on when to color outside the lines. My used DVD copy was a digital scan of a dubbed & scratched film print, which feels indicative of its significance in the larger kung-fu landscape. I couldn’t tell if the off-screen impact sounds of punches & kicks that are heard but not seen were added by an American distributor hoping to keep the audience’s pulse up or were included in the original mix as a cost-cutting ploy, but the choice was something I had never encountered in a movie before. I’d rather indulge in that kind of novelty than watching a stressed-out monkey fight an eagle for my entertainment.
Return of the Tiger (1977)
Just because a martial arts film is cheap doesn’t mean it’s worthless. I was much more enthused by the Brucesploitation novelty Return of Tiger, which starred “Bruce Li” as yet another wronged son avenging the murder of his father. Supposedly a sequel to a film called Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (which starred Li as an entirely different character), Return of the Tiger skips the hero’s training montage to instead detail the training of his enemies. Bruce Li and “special guest star” Angela Mao show up ready to do battle, but their Enemy No. 1 (Paul L. Smith, Altman’s Bluto) is continuously training a kung-fu army of underlings to protect his empire. As a result, the film has incredibly athletic martial arts sequences, but most of them are confined to the relatively drab setting of an Olympic training gym — including Li’s intro in the music video style opening credits. Mao’s intro is also literally gymnastic, in that she initially fights off the gang leader’s nameless goons while jumping on a trampoline and launching herself off a balance beam. As her special credit suggests, she steals the show.
While Return of the Tiger follows a familiar wronging-training-avenging story template, it does distinguish itself from the other films on this list in its contemporary setting. The main Bad Guy in the film is not some empirical warlord of the 18th Century; he’s a heroin dealer who runs a shipyard. My English-dub DVD copy (“digitally mastered” by the fine folks at Reel Entertainment in Digital, which cannot be a real company) not only overdubs the dialogue but also replaces the soundtrack with incredibly baffling song choices, including a nightclub scene set to Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music” while a lounge singer mouths lyrics to an entirely different song. It’s a nice change of setting for the genre, and the fights staged there are accomplished in their precision & brutality.
The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)
The first-act wronging of The One-Armed Swordsman is two-fold, which doubles the amount of training sequences the film gets to indulge in. First, a young child watches his father get slaughtered (go figure), then is raised by a kung-fu master to become the formidable Hong Kong action hero Jimmy Wang. Only, the fellow students at his temple are jealous of his skills and spiteful of having to be equals with the son of a (dead) servant, so in an overboard schoolyard bullying incident they cut off his sword-carrying arm. Wang survives, improbably, and then trains again to re-learn how to fight with just one arm before local bandits get out of hand and harm untrained villagers who need protection. Despite this doubling down on its training-for-revenge sequences, much of the runtime involves debates between our titular hero and his wife about whether he should relearn his fighting skills at all, since it’s a like he’s inviting violence into the family home — like how gun owners are statistically more likely to be killed by guns. The title & premise make it sound like a gimmicky wuxia novelty, but in practice it’s a surprisingly classy drama set inside of a series of illustrated postcards . . . with some occasional swordfight gore.
What I mostly learned from this loose group of titles is that the Dragon Dynasty-label DVDs of classic Shaw Brother titles are a sign of quality & class, and they’re worth picking up any time you stumble across one at a Goodwill. The best special feature included on this particular disc was a short career-retrospective documentary on its director, Chang Cheh, which added at least a dozen titles to my ever-expanding Letterboxd watchlist. I’ll likely never get to them all unless they fall into my lap as used media, where tangibility means accountability and quality varies wildly.
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