brandon ledet

Death Dancers (1993)

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It wasn’t until decades after the genre’s American heyday that French critics coined the term “film noir”.  Meanwhile, noir’s younger, hornier dipshit cousin the erotic thriller was immediately self-labeled as a real-time marketing term instead of as a posthumous critical marker.  The recent documentary We Kill for Love is an excellent, exhaustive rundown on the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s & 90s, with specific attention paid to the cheaper, direct-to-video end of the genre.  There are some great insights throughout the doc, from how the bulk of the genre takes direct inspiration from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill more than any of the more obvious Joe Eszterhas reference points to how its popularity was greatly aided by video rental stores’ desperate need to stock their shelves with off-brand substitutes for more popular studio titles that were in greater demand than supply.  For instance, someone who was disappointed that they could not rent a fresh copy of Basic Instinct might be tempted to take home the dominatrix-themed, Troma-distributed serial killer erotica Death Dancers instead until the shelves could be restocked.  There’s a vast difference in budget & quality between those two pictures, but the video store shelf was a great equalizer that presented them on the same level, with Death Dancers self-labeled as “An Erotic Thriller” on its cardboard sleeve to attract browsers’ attention.  That announced genre distinction might actually be somewhat of a misnomer, since Death Dancers shamelessly crosses the line from erotic thriller to softcore porno, featuring multiple scenes of fully nude actors grinding their pelvises together in rhythmic pantomime.  Given how gleefully vulgar mainstream players like Showgirls were at the time, though, I suppose the distinction is mostly meaningless.

Do you know what else is mostly meaningless?  Practically everything that happens in Death Dancers.  We open in the sunny, beachfront apartment of our central dominatrix figure (Deborah Dutch), as she wistfully whispers to the world outside her window about her past trauma, apparently eroticizing the memory of a forced miscarriage as she writhes in ecstasy on a kitchen chair.  She’s dressed in full goth drag in the middle of a sunny afternoon: black wig, black satin gloves, black stockings, black soul.  Despite the physical abuse she suffers in black & white flashbacks, her breathy narration is horny nonsense, including the titular tangent “Come dance with me. Come death dance with me.  Come, oh god, come death dance with me.”  Gradually, we gather enough info to piece together her M.O.  She’s the madame for a small army of female submissives whom she pimps out to male clients, luring in customers with phone-sex promises of total servitude.  Those customers quickly become victims, though, as her submissives are ordered to immediately murder anyone who physically harms them, even within a consensual kink scenario.  You see, our antiheroine dominatrix is fed up with the abuse she’s suffered from the men in her life, so she’s gotten into the serial-murder racket through the kink scene as a way to exact her revenge on the entire gender.  Meanwhile, an undercover cop who’s hot on her tail has similar flashbacks to trauma of his own. As images of the volatile pair’s pasts become increasingly entwined, the audience is eventually clued into how they found themselves locked into the never-ending death dance of their opposing professions in the first place.  It takes a minute to get there, but thankfully S&M strippers frequently mime group sex configurations in the background to help keep the energy up in the meantime.

Death Dancers is more music video than feature film.  Sleazy synth & sax numbers drone constantly as nude actors model whips, chains, sunglasses, breast implants, and high-waist panties under nightclub stage lights & bubble machines.  It’s just as much a relic of MTV-era music video artistry as it is a video store shelf-filler from the erotic thriller boom.  It’s pretty amusing as a Skinemax-flavored screensaver, especially once it pretends that it has a Hitchcockian mystery worth solving when it’s really just a horny mood piece.  I can’t claim to have seen all of the hundreds of titles referenced in We Kill for Love as the bulk of the direct-to-video erotic thriller genre (at least not until I clear them from my disgustingly overstuffed Letterboxd watchlist), but I still recognized this as an exceedingly generic entry in the canon despite the S&M angle of its premise.  Death Dancers only made an impression on me in that it had me thinking, “This is fun & all, but it’s no Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls” and then, naturally, “I need a new hobby.”

-Brandon Ledet

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2024)

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Calling an actor’s performance “vulnerable” is often just a delicate way of saying they appear nude on screen in sub-glamorous circumstances.  Actor-writer-director-editor Joanna Arnow appears to be acutely aware of this critical cliche, which she goes out of her way to mock & undercut in her sophomore feature The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed.  After spending a third of her screentime lounging around nude in a lover’s cramped, poorly lit New York City apartment, she bends over to spread her buttcheeks for the older man’s pleasure, and he dryly declares “Now that’s vulnerable!”  It’s one funny punchline among many in a movie that’s more like a comic strip diary than an autofictional novel.  Joanna Arnow’s vulnerability is essential to the text, as she plays a fictionalized version of herself (named Ann, for short) opposite her real-life parents and a small cast of suitors who illustrate real-life anecdotes of misadventures in kink-scene dating.  Given the fictional Ann’s extensive experience with BDSM, it’s tempting to read Joanna‘s “vulnerability” as a public humiliation kink, but the truth is it’s not any more extreme than most semi-autobiographical comedies about an indie filmmaker’s NYC dating life (see also: Flames, Pvt Chat, Appropriate Behavior, etc.).  Arnow’s just willing to make a joke at her own expense after indulging in that narcissistic ritual.  Now that’s vulnerable!

Almost every scene of The Feeling has a set-up and punchline rhythm to it in that way.  It’s a film made entirely of short clips of low-stakes, emotionless interactions in which the joke is just how banal it feels to be alive.  We bounce around the three tidy corners of Ann’s limited existence—work, family, sex—where she’s constantly being told what to do by elder micromanagers.  At work, she’s ordered around by corporate-speak bureaucrats; at home, by adorably sour parents.  At her on-again-off-again dom’s apartment, she’s ordered around by a middle-aged man who’s just as indifferent to her presence as everyone else in her life, except with an added layer of opt-in roleplay.  The only relief from this universal indifference is the sanctuary of Ann’s undecorated apartment, where there are no pets or hanged pieces of art personalizing her space.  She is a character defined by absence of characteristics, which is darkly hilarious in scenes where doms command her to tell them what she desires and she can’t come up with anything specific, defaulting instead to stock-character roles like Fuck Pig or furniture.  In most BDSM relationship dynamics, it’s the sub’s job to tell the dom what to tell them to do, so the heroic journey of our protagonist is all in learning how to assert herself and define her own personality against a world that’s so deeply, oppressively bland.  It feels incredibly good when she gets there (and incredibly terrible when she backslides).

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the driest comedy you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about a BDSM confessional where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.  Most of its filmic artistry is in Arnow’s tight control of the edit, which both trims completely static interactions down to concentrated bursts of social tension and tells a larger story of personal growth through selective sequencing.  The audience can always tell exactly how emotionally invested Ann is in her various romantic & sexual relationships by how long Arnow is willing to linger with them.  When she’s trying to branch out from her long-term dom/sub relationship, the movie takes on a speed-dating rhythm that cuts between the various doofus men of NYC in rapid-fire clips.  When she’s indulging in her very first genuine romantic partnership, it maintains its average short-burst scene length but shows fewer interactions outside that relationship, putting her workplace and homelife annoyances on the backburner for a stretch (much to the audience’s relief).  If you catch Ann squeezing a sad envelope of room-temperature beans into a microwaveable glass bowl to eat for dinner alone, you know that she’s not particularly invested in any of her current relationships. It’s all told in editorial curation, which is the only element of the film with a pronounced sense of style; everything else is contained in a purposefully flat, digital, Soderberghian void.

If Joanna Arnow is expressing anything about herself to the audience through the avatar of Ann, it’s a young person’s anxiety about not being especially good at anything.  Ann is bad at her job, bad at small talk, bad at roleplay, bad at folding laundry, bad at everything.  She’s super relatable in that way, especially for anyone who was socially suffocated by overbearing parents and then unleashed unto the world at 18 with the expectation that they’re a fully formed adult with their own defined personality & desires.  Those efforts to define herself might’ve lacked specificity without the BDSM angle of her love life, so it’s for the best that Arnow chose vulnerability instead of cowering from cliche.

-Brandon Ledet

Queendom (2024)

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After a softer-than-expected box office weekend for big-budget franchise extenders The Garfield Movie and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, my podcast playlist was flooded with mournful reports that movie theaters are dying and there’s nothing we can do to save them.  Spending a couple of days listening to these endless eulogies around the house had me grieving the loss of the only social & artistic outlet I can routinely afford, so I decided to say goodbye to my old friend by going to The Movies one final time.  At my neighborhood cinema that night, I was surprised to find that The Movies are still very much alive.  The Broad was playing three all-time classics on three separate screens—Tongues Untied, A Woman Under the Influence, and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure—while also hosting a pop-up sushi restaurant and a weekly pinball club.  Meanwhile, I and a few dozen other movie nerds showed up to watch a documentary about a queer Russian street performer who weaponizes drag as high-fashion political activism under the constant threat of arrest.  Despite reports to the contrary, I think we’re going to be alright.

Queendom & Tongues Untied played as a double bill in New Orleans Film Society’s inaugural LGBTQ+ Film Showcase (with the other half of the program filled out by The Watermelon Woman & Desire Lines).  It was a great pairing not only because of their shared themes of confrontational queer activism in the face of fascist governments, but also because of their low-budget D.I.Y. production values.  While Marlon Riggs made Tongues Untied with contemporary video-art equipment, a significant portion of Queendom was filmed on its modern equivalent: smartphones.  The documentary is a portrait of nonbinary Russian drag queen Gena Marvin, roughly in the stretch of time between Moscow street protests over the arrest of Alexei Navalny and Moscow street protests over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Marvin was a silent participant in both spontaneous rallies, appearing in genderfucked space-alien drag to both highlight the political topic at hand and to defy the Russian state’s hostility toward any public queer life.  For her participation in the Navalny protests, she was expelled from beauty school.  For her participation in the Russo-Ukrainian War protests, She was arrested off the street.  We were told in the pre-film intro that the documentary’s cinematographer had to wear roller-skates for most of the shoot so they wouldn’t also get arrested and lose that day’s footage, but there would’ve been surviving documentation of Marvin’s protests regardless, given that any time she steps out of the house in her fetishistic high heels, she’s constantly recorded by gawking smartphones (and threatened with vigilante beatings for her supposed transgressions against decency).

Outside those protests, most of Marvin’s activism is in her refusal to dampen her visibly queer characteristics while existing in public.  If anything, she intentionally amplifies her gender nonconformity both for aesthetic beauty and for easy visual provocation – maintaining an entirely bald, eyebrowless head while modeling stripper boots and ripped lingerie, even when grocery shopping.  Her photoshoots documenting her various “costumes” are all fashion magazine editorials done on spec, primarily posted on Instagram when they should be in legitimate publication.  In the film’s most satisfying sequence, we’re treated to a montage of Marvin’s Insta stories, getting a taste of both how great her artistry is and just how much of it is confined to a phone screen.  Meanwhile, in her rural hometown of Magadan, her loving but queerphobic grandparents push her to drop the act, butch up, and get a formal education (or at least demand to be paid for her labor, since publications like Vogue Russia will only “compensate” her with exposure).  Much of the film follows Marvin’s frustrated attempts to get her grandfather to not just love her but accept her on her own terms.  He obviously wants the best for his grandchild, but he’s also a brutish old-schooler who will say unforgivably cruel things to her in the heat an argument in a way that betrays just how bigoted he is at heart, with no sign of softening.  As a result, just as much of the runtime is spent with Marvin rolling her eyes on speakerphone with her semi-estranged grandfather grumbling on the other end as it is spent inside that phone, submerged in her otherworldly artistry.

Gena Marvin’s art is a gorgeous, emotional fuck-you to the state that would rather she be dead than click-clacking down a public sidewalk.  As a documentary, Queendom can’t help but feel a little safe & formulaic when compared to the striking visuals of its subject’s artistry, which wasn’t helped by having to share a double bill with the confrontational, idiosyncratic genius of Marlon Riggs.  It’s still risky filmmaking, though, and there’s a violent tension to even its most mundane, everyday public scenes.  It’s incredible that this footage not only exists but was exported to an excited audience half a world away, proving to me that there’s always going to be a place for cinema as a public, communal ritual (while also putting the petty capitalism of box-office handwringing into a larger perspective of what’s happening in the world right now).  Maybe it’ll be tough for $200mil popcorn-bucket sellers to get funded by corporate investors in the near future, but those were never the heart of the artform anyway.

-Brandon Ledet

Mind Game (2004)

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I’ve been incredibly lucky to see multiple movies by Japanese animator Masaaki Yuasa in a proper theater, where his vibrant free-for-all imagery shines in all its psychedelic glory.  While he mostly works as a showrunner for televised anime, Yuasa’s feature films Inu-Oh and Night is Short, Walk on Girl both played at local multiplexes in their initial run, and both made it clear why his expressive, imaginative visual style often gets him cited as a successor to the late Satoshi Kon.  It’s a shame I was either too young or too out of the loop to catch his debut feature Mind Game that way in 2004, but thankfully local repertory series WW Cinema recently filled in that gap.  I was instantly on board for the layered multimedia animation style of Mind Game, which quickly establishes Yuasa as a visual genius, even if only in flashes.  It took me much longer to warm up to the film’s immature nerd-boy sexuality, but I eventually got there once that got psychedelic too.  Mind Game likely would’ve been my favorite movie as a teenager had I caught it fresh, but now I can only see it as a crude prototype for Yuasa’s more recent masterworks like Inu-Oh.  Regardless, any time one of his films plays on a nearby screen is a cultural event, especially since I don’t watch nearly enough television to keep up with the bulk of his work.

Nishi is a young 20-somethings loser who’s still hung up on his childhood crush and his childhood dreams of becoming a famous manga artist but is too shy & cowardly to do anything about either.  When his crush is threatened with rape by two yakuza in her family’s diner, he fails to come to her defense, speaking up just forcefully enough to get himself shot instead of saving the day.  In the afterlife, his soul is confronted with video footage of his cowardice, then defies the orders of a shapeshifting God to fade into oblivion by instead returning to his body to fight off the rapist gangsters who killed him.  The gamble works, sending the yakuza’s victims on a wild car chase that lands them in the belly of a whale for the majority of the remaining runtime.  Then things get weird.  Inside the whale, Nishi gradually learns emotional maturity and how to genuinely connect with people instead of ogling them as a pervy outsider.  It’s character growth that somewhat helps soften the grotesque sexual assault depicted in the first half and the constant commentary on the cartoonish proportions of his love interest’s breasts – just not entirely.  The main point of the story is about learning to fully embrace life instead of cowering from it, but there is some tangible subtext in a young Yuasa beating himself up about his own social immaturity as an illustrator who’s used to living & thinking alone instead of healthily interacting with others.  The good news is that two decades later he’s demonstrated that personal maturity in Inu-Oh, which has all of the visual inventiveness of Mind Game (including gorgeous animation of mythical whales) without all the teen-boy sexual hangups souring the vibe.

As much as I’m downplaying Mind Game as one of Yuasa’s finest works, it is oddly the one I’d most readily return to for rewatch.  That’s mostly because it’s bookended by gorgeous, rapid-fire montages of isolated images that piece together a birth-to-death lifespan for its four central characters (the whale-belly captives) that I’m not sure I fully absorbed on first watch.  Yuasa gives you just enough visual information for your brain’s pattern-recognition software to piece everything together, but I’m not sure I fully trust the conclusions I reached in the theater.  For a movie that spends most of its time sitting around the belly of a whale, waiting for something to happen in existential angst, it really does throw a lot at you.  The representation of God as a kaleidoscopic collection of impossible bodies that changes shape every time you look directly at it is a major highlight, recalling Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.  There’s a funhouse mirror warping to most of the imagery that stretches through the screen to literally bend your mind, but there’s also a Tom Goes to the Mayor-esque use of crude photocopy printouts that grounds the whole thing in the rudimentary tools of its era.  All of Yuasa’s magic tricks are already proudly on display in Mind Game; it’s just a shame that his immaturity was just as loudly vibrant in this instance. Or maybe it’s just a shame that I had personally aged out of its grody nerd-boy charms before I caught up with it.

-Brandon Ledet

The Brain Eaters (1958)

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There are a lot of TikTok clips floating around out there that muddle the definition of the “POV” shot, to the point where it feels like the war to maintain its original meaning has already been lost.  Thankfully, the 1958 AIP creature feature The Brain Eaters offers a handy tool for any teens confused by the meaning of a camera’s POV.  Halfway through the hour-long horror cheapie, one of the titular brain eaters (parasitic dust bunnies with space-alien antennae) crawls across the carpet, up the bedframe, and over the mattress of a sleeping woman’s bedroom so the ceremonial brain eating can commence.  We watch this slow, low-to-the-ground attack in 1st-person, with the camera inching towards the soon-to-be-brain-eaten victim as she slumbers, unaware.  Now, listen to me carefully. When posting clips of this scene to your socials, do caption it “POV: When you’re about to eat some lady’s brain.”  Do not caption it “POV: When you’re asleep and about to get your brain ate.”  I hope this handy guide clears the matter up for today’s youths once and for all.

Of course, most teenagers are not scouring Tubi for vintage schlock with short enough runtimes to squeeze in before bed, but once upon a time that demographic would’ve been The Brain Eaters‘s exact audience.  The reason it’s so short is that it was specifically made to fill out a double bill at the local drive-in, so that teens had an appropriate place to make out in public while parked in the family car.  That kind of old-school B-movie filmmaking can lead to a lot of dead air between the monster attacks (all the better to make out to), but The Brain Eaters instead chooses to accept the challenge of cramming two hours of plot into one hour of celluloid.  It doesn’t waste a second of its audience’s time as it hops from brain buffet to brain buffet, speeding along its standard-issue body snatcher plot with a narration track that’s impatient to get to the second half of that night’s double bill (either Earth vs. the Spider or Terror from the Year 5000, depending on the city where you parked).  That’s why I was not at all shocked to learn that the late, great Roger Corman worked on the film as an uncredited executive producer, given that it was exemplary of the energy & efficiency desperately missing from most other contemporary drive-in fillers produced by anyone else.

I also was not shocked to learn that the film’s star, regular Corman player Ed Nelson (Bucket of Blood, Swamp Women, Attack of the Crab Monster, etc.), served as the on-set producer of the picture, since it’s essentially a vanity project about how handsome & cool he is.  Nelson plays a buff scientist who’s just as comfortable studying field-research specimens on Bunsen burners as he is knocking out alien zombies with his fists.  He’s a sophisticated brute with his heart worn proudly on his rolled-up sleeves, dragging along his lab-assistant fiancée (the sleeping woman from the film’s Brain-Eater-Cam POV shot, I’m sad to say) for each of his world-saving adventures.  The frame is filled out by plenty of other B-movie archetypes—the perpetually scared girlfriend of a naively brave cop, the hardened detective from Washington D.C. who just wants results damnit, the local old fogey who knows the entire history of the town under attack, and so on—but the only one who really matters is our smart, strapping, all-American hero.  That hero worship is obviously secondary to the brain-eating parasites that Nelson volunteers to thwart, but it’s still an adorable starring-role showcase for him anyway.

As for the brain eaters themselves, they’re not especially impressive as monster puppets.  Stuck somewhere between a throwaway Jim Henson design for a background mouse and a ball of pet hair vacuumed from under your couch, their physical characteristics are more cute than scary.  The movie leans heavily into the uncanniness of their origins & behavior in an entertaining way, though, starting with the arrival of a giant metal cone believed to be a spaceship.  As our impatient narrator explains, a mysterious, 50-foot-tall metal structure appeared without warning in the woods outside Riverdale, Illinois, immediately prompting investigation from Congress’s official UFO Committee (complete with sly match-cut from the silhouette of the cone to the silhouette of the Capitol Dome). The brain eaters appear to rise from the ground at the direction of the cone, attaching themselves to the backs of innocent victims’ necks through vampiric puncture wounds, and piloting them like body-snatched zombies.  The scariest the little scamps get is when they start body-snatching local street toughs, giving adults legitimate reasons to be scared of the youths of the day instead of just the normal, paranoid ones.  Really, the core horror of the film can be found in the question, “What is the secret of The Cone?”, since every new detail about the alien structure just makes its appearance & purpose more confusing.  It’s impervious to bullets, filled with Seussian tunnels to nowhere, and houses a godlike figure played by a young Leonard Nimoy (misspelled as “Nemoy” in the credits) whose plan for peaceful, global takeover via brain eaters actually doesn’t sound all that bad once you hear him out.

There’s a lot going on in this disposable horror-of-the-week novelty, especially considering that it only runs half the length of an average feature film.  It can be harsh (depicting dead dogs & suicide attempts), goofy (in its cutesy creature design), and genuinely baffling (adding continual complications to the mystery of The Cone), but it is never boring, not for a second.  Corman was notorious for establishing a rigid formula in his early monster movies that consistently gripped his audiences’ attention (for as long as they could stand to delay making out in the back seat) and for allowing his employees freedom to express themselves creatively as long as they adhered to that set structure.  The exaggerated Dutch angles, glowing specimen jars full of ready-to-attack brain eaters, and mystical visit from the otherworldly Nimoy all suggest that Corman-actor-turned-Corman-director Bruno VeSota had just as much fun with that freedom behind the camera as Corman-actor-turned-Corman-producer Ed Nelson had posing as a movie star in front of it.  I know it’s a little silly to mourn someone who lived 98 years and continued doing what he loved until the very end, but Corman could have lived for another 100 and it still wouldn’t be enough. 

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #213: Grey Gardens (1975) vs. Grey Gardens (2009)

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Welcome to Episode #213 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee and Brandon compare the iconic documentary Grey Gardens (1975) against its made-for-TV dramatization Grey Gardens (2009).

00:00 Welcome
02:17 Mother of the Bride (2024)
06:23 Buddies (1985)
11:55 Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970)

17:44 Grey Gardens (1975)
35:02 The Beales of Grey Gardens (2006)
42:06 That Summer (2017)
53:00 Grey Gardens (2009)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

White Room (1990)

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Patricia Rozema’s sophomore feature White Room is about to get its first-ever Blu-ray release through Kino Lorber, along with Rozema’s lesser seen follow-up When Night is Falling and her calling-card debut I Heard the Mermaids Singing.  I’m sure that the 4K restoration of White Room will be a worthy purchase for any crate-digging home video collector who’s interested, considering the sensual immersion of its video art fantasy aesthetic and its dreamy pop music soundtrack.  At the same time, I’m happy to report that the still-in-print Canadian DVD I bought for a third of Kino Lorber’s list price is impressively crisp and a great cost-cutting alternative to the upcoming upgrade.  I’m also holding out hope that the Blu-ray release will lead to White Room‘s return to online streaming platforms, since it’s not currently available and it’s the kind of bizarre discovery that makes you want to recommend it to anyone who’ll listen.

Maurice Godin stars as a squeamish suburban nerd with a bad habit of peering into his neighbors’ windows as the world’s least pervy Peeping Tom.  Like a boyish, wholesome variation on a De Palma voyeur, he accidentally witnesses the rape & murder of a famous rockstar while watching her lounge around her secluded home and spends the rest of the movie beating himself up over his inaction at her death scene (literally whipping himself with thorny roses, in this instance).  Determined to become a more courageous, active participant in his own life, he moves out of his confectionary family home and into the big scary city of Toronto, where he quickly finds himself at the funeral of the murdered woman: a famous rockstar named Madeline X, played by Margot Kidder.  At the funeral, he falls for an older, mysterious woman (Kate Nelligan) who appears overly distraught at the musician’s passing, and by following her further down the rabbit hole he accidentally uncovers a larger music industry conspiracy he wishes he had just left alone. 

White Room is part romance novel, part noir, and full urban fairy tale.  Despite its contemporary fascination with MTV-era music video artistry, its narrative operates on the kind of traditionalist fairytale logic that always makes for great cinema, no matter the era.  None of the acting or character details are especially convincing as Real, but they’re in total harmony with the storybook narration track that refers to our cowardly hero as Norman the Gentle instead of just Norm. Its fictional rock numbers (partially credited to frequent Robert Eggers collaborator Mark Korven) play into that fairytale vibe as well, falling somewhere between the timeless literary songwriting of classic Kate Bush and the dreamy rock & roll of the Mary Timony album Mountains, which wouldn’t arrive for another decade.  Norm only travels from the suburbs to the urbs, but he might as well have journeyed across several cursed kingdoms to break his beloved free from the witch’s spell that kept her imprisoned in a daze (by which I mean her record company contract).

By her second feature, Rozema was already incredibly smart as a low-budget indie filmmaker, squeezing major visual impact out of meager resources.  As the film’s only celebrity get, Margot Kidder’s time on set appears to have been limited to only a few days, which Rozema stretches out across music video & interview clips to build genuine mystique around the murdered pop idol Madeline X.  The location shooting around Toronto manages to transform familiar city streets into a convincing fantasy world just by isolating the geometric lines of architecture & infrastructure in abstracted frames.  Most importantly, Rozema fully embraces the low-budget aesthetic of MTV-era video art in a way that frees her from restrictions of the real, physical world.  Besides the obvious music-video tangents afforded by the mysterious Madeline X, the film also finds excuses to indulge in video-art inserts via Norman’s POV, giving us glimpses of primal feelings that he’s too timid to express in words through video-warped images of seagulls, chess pieces, softcore pornography – whatever abstract flashes of imagery overwhelm his imagination then disappear before he can pick up a pen to jot them down.

Speaking of Norman’s imagination, he’s a difficult character to pin down: a voyeuristic man-boy who’s both driven & repelled by sex but is somehow not a threat to the women in his life.  If anything, he’s a pure object of desire for those women, modeling a romance paperback blouse through the second half of the runtime while women stare at his denim-clad ass.  He’s sometimes feminized in the edit, taking the place of the women he stalks in their most vulnerable moments and cast as the only actor who appears nude onscreen.  Godin’s performance can be a little frustrating in its boyish naivety, prompting you to imagine what more eccentric actors might have done with the role (Crispin Glover, Kyle MacLachlan, and Matt Farley all came to mind), but by the time the more hardened urbanites around him mock his earnestness with laughter it’s clear his blank-slate screen presence was more of an artistic choice than an oversight.  Norm is a fairytale prince defined by his desires & pursuits, and a lot of the joy in the film can be found in the small smirks of the women who find his naivety irresistibly cute.

If there’s anyone I’d most enthusiastically recommend White Room to besides hardcore Rozema Heads already won over by I Heard the Mermaids Singing, it would be to anyone who was charmed by the urban fantasy logic of this year’s kids-on-bikes comedy Riddle of Fire.  The narrator’s introduction of Norman the Gentle’s is just as amusingly verbose as the introduction of Petal Hollyhock, Princess of the Enchanted Blade in that more recent oddity.  Both films understand the rhythms & reasoning of fairytale storytelling on such a deep spiritual level that they can include video games & MTV parodies without their participation in the ancient traditions ever being questioned.  We instantly get the magical thinking of their narratives based on vibes alone.  The only acknowledgement of influences White Room has to get out of the way is in an end-credits dedication “with apologies to Emily Dickinson,” since the poet’s work was heavily referenced in the fictional pop-music lyrics of Madeline X.

-Brandon Ledet

Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970)

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Picture it. You’re settling in for Movie Night, and you know exactly what you’re in the mood for: a film about a bisexual demon twink who moves into a family home to seduce & ruin everyone who lives there.  Teorema is sounding a little too challenging that evening, but you’re not quite in the mood for the empty calories of Saltburn either.  What can you do to scratch that specific itch?  Thankfully, there is a perfect middle ground in the 1970 stage-play adaptation Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which is a little more sophisticated than an Emerald Fennell music video but not, like, Pasolini sophisticated.  It’s got all of the bisexual lust & thrust you’re looking for but lightened up with a little vintage Benny Hill-era British humor to keep the mood light.  Everything is falling into place . . . except that Entertaining Mr. Sloane isn’t currently available for home video distribution in America.  All you can access from the couch is the trailer on YouTube (which at least helpfully includes the film’s plot-summarizing theme song so you can imagine the rest).

I was lucky to catch this horny, thorny farce at The Broad earlier this month, when it was presented by filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell for the weekly WW Cinema series, with particular attention paid to the original work’s playwright Joe Orton.  Mitchell specifically recommended the 1987 biopic Prick Up Your Ears as background context for Orton’s queer agitator sensibilities, but none of that place setting is really necessary for being entertained by Mr. Sloane.  The tricky part is just finding a copy.  This is a work of broad humor & caustic camp.  Its stage play origins and its early arrival on the queer-cinema timeline afford it a sophisticated air, but it’s played directly to the cheap seats so that everyone gets a laugh.  A precursor to similar broad-appeal outsider art from the likes of John Waters & Paul Bartel, it played well to a raucous crowd of hipster weirdos, but there’s nothing especially exclusionary or esoteric about it that would turn off a broad audience.  It’s like an old TV sitcom with a premise that’s in such bad taste that the network deliberately lost its archival tapes.

Peter McEnery stars as the murderous demon twink of the title: an unscrupulous drifter who’s invited into a middle-class family home after he’s caught sunbathing in a nearby cemetery.  He’s picked up by a lonely middle-aged biddy (Beryl Reid) as a thinly veiled act of charity that both parties winkingly acknowledge as transactional sex work.  It would be out of the question to offer him room & board in exchange for sexual favors, but while he’s there . . . Also, because she’s an upstanding lady, there’s no proper way to express her desire for the younger, eager man, but if he were so overcome with passion that he sexually ravished her . . . Unsurprisingly, the men around the house (a classist snob played by Harry Andrews and Alan Webb as his ancient, ornery father) are just as repressed in their attraction to the smooth-bodied scamp.  No one can state out loud that they want to sleep with Mr. Sloane, but everyone jealously conspires to keep him away from the young girls around town whom he’s actually attracted to, meanwhile finding excuses to touch his body.  No one can state out loud that he’s a wanted murderer either, but they all know it to be true.

As a cultural relic, this pitch-black comedy feels like a response to the moral rot of the Free Love era.  Mr. Sloane’s selfishness & violence might reflect the amorality of that era’s hedonistic youth culture, but he’s not the main target of the satire.  Really, the bulk of the movie’s satire is rooted in the older generation’s response to the moral looseness he represents.  Beryl Reid’s girlish view of sexuality is absurdly repressed for a woman of her age, which gets increasingly uncomfortable once she starts treating him as a baby she’s coddling mid-coitus, like a child playing Mommy to her dolly.  Her closeted brother is no better, framing all of his lust for the houseguest through the misogynist mindset of boarding school bunkmates playing rough house.  He also treats Mr. Sloane as a kind of doll, dressing him head to toe in a tailored, fetishistic leather get-up under the guise of hiring him as a uniformed chauffer.  No one can express what they want from Mr. Sloane or how they intend to compensate him for it, but there’s a constant power struggle for his physical time & attention between the siblings that makes for a vicious tug of war.  And then the doubly-repressed lust expressed by their father makes things even uglier.

There are a few production design and shot composition choices that elevate Entertaining Mr. Sloane above its TV sitcom trappings.  Reid’s frilly lingerie and stuffed-animal-decorated teen girl bedroom are especially gorgeous, along with the continually hilarious prop of Andrews’s gigantic pink Cadillac, which appears to be undulating without shocks to match his clownish persona.  Occasionally, director Douglas Hickox & cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky will also frame out an absurdly over-curated tableau, like disembodied lips wrapping around a phallic popsicle against the grey backdrop of gravestones, or like a makeshift wedding ceremony staged at the altar of a fresh corpse.  Mostly, though, it’s the comedic voice of Orton’s source material that shines through, just as John Cameron Mitchell’s introduction to the film suggested.  Orton’s version of “The Straights Are Not Okay” social commentary manages to feel ahead of its time but also ingratiating enough to not entirely lose his contemporary audience.  Instead, he lost the future audience that’s more accustomed to that line of combative queer humor simply through scarcity in distribution, thanks to the current, dire state of home distro for any film made before 1990.  Catch it when it inevitably hits one of the only two streaming services that matter: Criterion or Tubi, whoever gets there first.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Mulholland Drive (2001)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss David Lynch’s Hollywood psych thriller Mulholland Drive (2001).

00:00 Welcome

04:05 Dodgeball (2004)
08:57 My Lucky Stars (1985)
12:43 The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
15:14 Notorious (1946)
17:28 Ace in the Hole (1951)
24:52 Monkey Man (2024)
28:01 The Sweet East (2024)
35:58 Justice League vs Teen Titans (2016)
41:05 Mars Express (2024)
49:26 She is Conann (2024)

56:40 Mulholland Drive (2001)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

She is Conann (2024)

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Bertrand Mandico is the greatest filmmaker currently alive & working.  Across three features and dozens of shorts, he’s gradually established a cinematic language all of his own that feels simultaneously ancient & futuristic.  His debut feature The Wild Boys voyages into the past to obliterate gender for a more liberated, libertine future.  His follow-up After Blue sought alien worlds prophesized by the likes of James Bidgood & Kate Bush.  Now, his third feature reshapes 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 has dared to hijack the movie-making dream machine for their own perverse pleasure in the way 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 provocateur directors in She is Conann that 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 the form more than he’s subverting norms.

Specifically, the Anger & Fassbinder allusions are contained in a single leather jacket worn by Mandico’s longtime muse & collaborator Elina Löwensohn.  The jacket is modeled after the title-card fashion centerpiece of Anger’s Scorpio Rising, but instead spells “Rainer” in metal studs.  Löwensohn plays the jacket’s owner, Rainer, as an on-screen avatar for Mandico.  Rainer’s a photographer who orchestrates and documents the brutal violence around him, eventually shouting for his camera’s subjects to be “Sexier! Crazier! More barbaric!” out of frustration that he cannot reach the lofty artistic ideal envisioned in his head.  Löwensohn previously played a very similar role as the pornographer Joy D’Amato (a reference to real-life pornographer Joe D’Amato) in Mandico’s Apocalypse After, but this time she shakes it up by switching genders and hiding under a prosthetic dog mask.  Rainer’s houndish loyalty to the titular, similarly-genderflipped warrior Conann is both as an opportunist and as a hedonist.  Rainer adores Conann’s capability of bone-crunching, head-severing violence more than he adores her personally, and he’s eager to follow at her heels as she swings her sword through the gushing bodies of her enemies across centuries of reincarnation, translating her violence into art.

The role of Conann is filled by a lineage of six actresses, all of whom kill their predecessor to claim her sword & identity.  As a violent brute who lives in the moment, fueled by revenge against the ugly world that shaped her, Conann refuses to accept the normal patterns of aging & death.  Instead of growing and maturing naturally, she instead reaches into the past to assassinate her younger self in a ritualistically violent act of self-reinvention.  Her warpath leads the audience through the violence of Medieval fantasy realms, a 1980s music video interpretation of The Bronx, Europe’s crumbling under Nazi fascism, and a post-human future made almost entirely of glitter.  She’s briefly distracted along the way by love & romance, but her essential barbarism eventually takes over and the body count continues to pile.  Each generation’s bloodlust directly feeds into the next, until Mandico concludes the saga with a punchline about that human impulse transforming into art instead of violence.  He appears to believe that the long history of humanity’s selfishness & viciousness has been concentrated into the work of careerist, self-obsessed artists who do not realize they’re also barbarian brutes.  Or he at least thinks that’s a funny conclusion to make.

I could be totally wrong about Mandico’s thematic intent here.  He is foremost a visual stylist, pushing for imagistic extremes in every frame through outrageous fashion, rear projection, strobe lighting, practical gore, and more glitter than any production has seen since Ridley Scott’s Legend.  His allusions to previous works are all on the surface but oddly refracted through a postmodern lens, from the misspelling of the title to the leather Rainer jacket to the background billboard that simply reads “naked lunch” in lowercase letters for no discernible reason in particular.  Finding coherent meaning in Mandico’s work is a personal journey.  The only guarantee is that he will immerse you in a fanatically vicious world you’ve never seen before; what you make of that world while you visit is entirely up to you.  There just aren’t enough people around me who’ve seen his films to tell me I’m reading too much into his metatextual commentary on art & hedonism.  Maybe one day he’ll become widely beloved enough for me to finally see his work in a proper, packed cinema instead of subjecting a small batch of friends to it on my living room couch.  For now, I’m perfectly happy gazing into his glitter-slathered hellscapes at home, unchallenged about the immense passion & beauty I find in his horny tableaux.

-Brandon Ledet