brandon ledet

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2025)

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2004’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was the first—and to this day—only movie I’ve ever watched on a bootlegged camrip. I was a senior in high school at the time, and there was something still novel about torrenting a movie online before it was officially released in theaters, no matter the quality. A friend smuggled a copy of the movie on two CD-Rs into our high school art class, where we cheered & squealed over Quentin Tarantino’s newly achieved levels of cartoonish bloodshed & overwritten dialogue. I’m sure I also saw the movie in theaters that same week, but I don’t remember that experience. I do remember Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 being in constant rotation as second-hand Blockbuster liquidation DVDs during my college years though, casually thrown on the living room TV when no one’s sure what to watch (the same way Boomers in no particular mood end up listening to the Beatles as an automatic default). Vol. 1 was always The Fun One, Vol. 2 was always The Boring One, and they were always buried behind a layer of standard-definition fuzz and only half-paid attention to, like animated dorm room wallpaper. So, twenty years later, I might have just experienced The Kill Bill Saga the way it was meant to be seen for the very first time, despite having been in the same room with “Tarantino’s 4th Film” untold dozens of times. Only, not exactly.

The Whole Bloody Affair is a new, seemingly finalized edit of the two Kill Bill movies, now smashed together to create one monstrously ginormous butt-number. Tarantino has been casually playing around with this project since 2006, undoing the Weinsteins’ work of splitting his mid-career epic into two separate parts by occasionally trotting out this one-long-cut version into prestigious venues like the Cannes Film Festival and his own vanity movie theater The New Beverly Cinema. The original uptown location of The Prytania recently secured a 70mm print of the film and has been running it on loop for the past few weeks, giving its local New Orleans rollout a prestigious feel it wasn’t afforded when DCPs were screening out at the Metairie AMC Palaces last December. So, it’s funny that I still left the theater feeling like I’ve only seen Kill Bill in a compromised, mucked up form. It seems that in Tarantino’s current, meaningless pursuit to land the “Perfect Ten” filmography, he’s gotten distracted by some George Lucas-style tinkering with the original texts. I’m willing to forgive the new silly title cards underlining that both halves of this picture technically count as “The 4th Film” in the Tarantino oeuvre, since the original project was split into two parts by meddling producers. Still, though, I’m skeptical that his original intention was to make a 5-hour movie with a Fortnite cutscene epilogue (“Yuki’s Revenge”), which is what The Whole Bloody Affair ultimately amounts to. I’m also unsure why he felt the need to extend the original films’ anime segment with newly commissioned footage, other than that no one is around to tell him “No” anymore because his most looming collaborator is currently, rightfully imprisoned. All of the newly printed material inserted into the Kill Bills of old are a waste of time & resources, but if putting up with those distractions is what it takes to revisit these films on celluloid with a savvy crowd I’m willing to go along with this fussy nerd’s legacy-curation bullshit just a little bit. At least he didn’t retroactively add a CGI Bruce Lee into the picture, Jabba the Hutt style.

Just as Kill Bill has changed over the years (through newly added animation, alternate takes, and a self-imposed intermission), so have I. It’s difficult to say anything about how this project’s place in the larger cultural zeitgeist has shifted, since it’s been so long since I’ve engaged with it and, more importantly, I’m no longer a teenager. I hadn’t personally seen much anime, wuxia, or kung-fu cinema when Kill Bill first came out, so the film’s stylistic flourishes are no longer as impressive to me now having seen The Original Texts like Lady Snowblood or The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Like all Tarantino pictures to date, there’s nothing in Kill Bill that represents the best of any genre he liberally borrows from, but he has admittedly remixed them all into something undeniably entertaining & cool — like a video store DJ. Allow me, then, to play overly-opinionated video store clerk for a moment myself and talk about where this outing ranks in Tarantino’s filmography. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 has always been Jackie Brown‘s strongest competition for the best of his best, and the newly restored cartoonish violence of the Crazy 88s fight sequence (previously censored for MPAA approval) only strengthens that case. It succeeds through the same method that Jackie Brown does, by employing real-life participants from the vintage genres he’s riffing on: Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier & Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, respectively. If The Whole Bloody Affair does Kill Bill any favors in the greater Tarantino rankings, it does so by elevating Vol. II, integrating it more smoothly with its better half by dropping the “Until next time …” teaser that once divided them. And yet, the newly, needlessly extended anime sequence drags the first half down a little, so who knows (or cares). Everything else that’s changed about these movies is a jumbled mix of passing time and personal maturity. The choppy bangs, flip phones, and low-rise jeans scattered throughout the revenge epic have marked the passing of time since it first premiered in the early aughts, when all those props & fashion accessories felt as natural as oxygen. I’ve also found a new appreciation for Lucy Liu’s performance as the unlikely assassin turned yakuza figurehead O-Ren Ishii, with her Big Speech about her gender & heritage bringing unexpected tears to my eyes through sheer fierceness. I’m sure that in 2004 I was just happy to watch her decapitate an underling in the following seconds. It was a simpler time; I was a simpler man.

You will find no plot summary here, as I’m already embarrassed to have added this much text to the server space reserved for discussing Tarantino’s filmography. All I can muster the energy for is observations about how the passage of time can dull or distort a movie that means a lot to you when you’re a teenager. For instance, it’s much easier to be dazzled by a live-action Hollywood film indulging a brief diversion into anime when you’re not as hyper aware that there’s much better anime out there; extending that sequence with five additional minutes of footage doesn’t help either. It’s also much easier to enjoy Tarantino’s work in a vacuum without decades of hearing him say things that range from idiotically petty (taking out-of-nowhere potshots at Paul Dano as “the worst actor in SAG”) to outright evil (showing support to IDF soldiers during the ongoing genocide in Gaza). Even if you want to engage with the movies themselves and ignore the man behind them, he’s now stuck in a navel-gazing thought loop that makes the task impossible. Tarantino is currently terrified of directing another feature film because he might mess up his self-assigned “Perfect Ten” filmography, so he’s turned himself into a lowly film podcaster instead, and his niche topic of discussion is his own work. It’s shameful. There are two unqualified positive things I can say about Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair: 1. Its theatrical release is the only good thing to have come out of Tarantino’s current self-analysis era, and 2. It was smart of him to bury his newly commissioned Fortnite animation sequence after the 20 minutes of end credits, where few people are likely to see it. Otherwise, everything that I like about The Whole Bloody Affair I already liked about Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2: two solidly, separately entertaining pieces of post-modern pop art from one of Hollywood’s sweatiest loudmouth bozos.

-Brandon Ledet

My Bloody Valentine (1981)

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The easiest way for a low-budget horror movie to become a perennial classic is to stake its claim on a specific calendar date, so it has an annually recurring slot for ritual rewatches. This has been common knowledge since at least as far back as the first-wave slashers of the 1970s, with Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, and Halloween guaranteeing annual royalty checks from subsequent years’ cable TV broadcasts. Christmas & Halloween have proven to be popular seasonal settings in that scramble to claim a ritual calendar date, while other titles like April Fool’s Day, New Year’s Evil, and Mardi Gras Massacre have found much less competition in more casually celebrated holidays. 1981’s My Bloody Valentine staked its claim on Valentine’s Day relatively early, and has only been challenged by the occasional novelty like last year’s Heart Eyes or 2001’s Valentine in the decades since. It’s proven to be a difficult film to top for Valentine’s Day horror supremacy, since its killer’s method of ripping out victims’ hearts to stuff into heart-shaped Valentine chocolate boxes is the perfect balance of novelty & brutality needed to leave a mark on the genre. It also arrived early enough in the slasher cycle to participate in this Holiday Horror tradition with full sincerity, avoiding the Scream–era meta irony that ruins a good, silly scare with the distraction of self-awareness. If you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a classic horror title set on that holiday, there’s still really only one viable choice (give or take its relatively well-respected 2009 remake).

That’s what makes it so funny that My Bloody Valentine is a hat-on-a-hat situation. It would’ve been more than enough for it to stand out as a novelty slasher by delivering a killer who’s improbably activated by his home town’s Valentine’s Day celebrations. Instead, it adds the extra detail that its masked killer moonlights as a coalminer, inviting mine-specific tools & settings into each staged kill that have no direct association with the holiday in question. Yes, he uses his mining gear every kill, and yes, those kills are inspired by how much he hates his town’s annual Valentine’s Day dance. He’s a complicated guy with a lot going on. The more generic version of this slasher template can be found in the previous year’s Prom Night, in which a tragic childhood accident is avenged once those responsible are old enough to attend their senior prom. Shot in Canada but set in Anywhere, Small Town America, there’s nothing specific about the background details of Prom Night‘s setting — deliberately so. My Bloody Valentine was also shot in Canada (as frequently confirmed by the Canadian pronunciation of “sorry”), but you are unlikely to mistake it for the town you live in unless you happen to live in a cloistered coalmining community where every male person in your life has spent some time working in the mines. The inciting tragedy in this case was an accidental explosion that happened while the rest of the town was enjoying the local Valentine’s Day dance, carelessly leaving five workers to perish in the mines below. So, whenever the town decides it’s time to move on with their lives and bring back their Valentine’s Day traditions, masked killer Harry Warden returns to avenge his fallen coworkers (whom he unfortunately had to cannibalize to stay alive in the maddening days leading up to his own rescue). It’s two seemingly unrelated things—Valentine’s & coalmining—forever welded together in a single ludicrous screenplay.

My Bloody Valentine attempts to smooth over the discordance between its two competing novelty settings by focusing on the kind of love-triangle romance that typically springs up when you live in a small town where everyone knows each other from cradle to grave. You see, local golden boy T.J. (Paul Kelman) tried to leave small-town life behind by moving away to Los Angeles, but he quickly crashed & burned and shamefully found himself back in the mines. While T.J. was gone, his golden-haired girlfriend Sarah (Lori Hallier) started up a new relationship with his former bestie Axel (Neil Affleck), but now that he’s back in town he wants to default to their previous relationship. Will Sarah choose to reignite her white-hot passion for T.J., or will she stick with the stabler, nobler partnership she’s since built with Axel? Who gives a shit? The romantic melodrama at play here is necessary to justify the holiday setting, but it’s difficult to pay too close attention to its stakes when there’s also a crazed killer in town ripping out the trio’s friends’ hearts and plopping them into the hotdog waters, beer coolers, and chocolate boxes at their unsanctioned Valentine’s party, thrown behind the sheriff’s back. All that really matters is that the kills are consistently brutal and consistently afforded a mining-town specificity in the killer’s mask, weapons, and venues of attack. Shooting the majority of those kills down in the mines may darken the screen a little too much to reward modern home viewing, but they look great on the big screen, especially in the pop iconography of the opening scene, when a buxom blonde strokes the phallic hose of the killer’s mask mid-hookup before she’s penetrated with his pickaxe. Gnarly.

Speaking of horror-movie calendar watching, this year is especially apt for a My Bloody Valentine screening (an opportunity pounced upon by ScreamFest NOLA at The Broad earlier this week). That’s because Valentine’s Day happens to fall on a Saturday this year, the day after Friday the 13th. That’s also the case in the film itself, which we’re informed via title cards announcing both dates: Friday the 13th, then Saturday the 14th. It’s highly likely that My Bloody Valentine was greenlit as an attempt to capitalize on that calendrical coincidence in 1981, hoping to make Harry Warden as much of a household name as Jason Voorhees. The film did not succeed there, but it’s still the first title that comes to mind when someone thinks of Valentine’s Day horror and coalmining horror, which is an impressive double-dip success in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

OBEX (2026)

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In Albert Birney’s debut feature The Beast Pageant, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines in his job & home is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to go on a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural upstate New York (where Birney was living at the time). In Birney’s breakout collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines on his jobsite visits to strangers’ homes is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to dream of a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural Maryland (where Birney has been living since). In his most recent directorial outing, OBEX, Albert Birney himself appears onscreen as a lonely man who . . . you get the picture. Birney has six feature films to his name, and the three I’ve happened to have seen all follow the same basic narrative structure, the same way that all Neil Gaiman stories I’ve read happen to rely on the same Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole plot device. The only thing that’s changed between these career checkpoints, really, is the nature of the sad-sack protagonist’s job, the types of machines that distract him from his mind-numbing daily labor, and the type of fantasy adventure that breaks him out of the routine. If you’ve already seen The Beast Pageant or Strawberry Mansion, you’re already familiar with the general vibe & shape of OBEX but, thankfully, Birney still finds plenty room for variation & novelty when coloring within those rigid lines.

In this iteration, Birney plays a 1980s computer whiz & agoraphobe who never steps outside his modest Baltimore apartment. His only true friend is a geriatric lapdog named Sandy that randomly wandered into his yard and has been spoiled like a baby ever since. Birney’s sad-sack loner makes a living by “drawing” computerized portraits of strangers on commission, recreating family photos with carefully arranged keystrokes on commercial-grade printer paper. When it’s time to relax, he entertains himself with the other screens arranged throughout his house, most notably a tower of cathode-ray TVs stacked in his living room as a kind of unintentional video art instillation. He often runs three different programs out-of-sync on this TV tower like a televised-media DJ, cuddling up with Sandy on the couch and cranking up the volume to drown out the roar of cicadas outside of the house. Things go awry when he purchases a PC computer game through mail catalog that promises to bring great adventure into his life — a promise made literal when the game invites a demon named Ixaroth to invade his home through the screen, directly importing Sandy into the game. To rescue Sandy, he must then go on a harrowing adventure outside of his apartment by willingly entering the game himself, represented as a live-action roleplay version of 8-bit era Zelda puzzle games. The story is not unfamiliar (especially not if you’ve seen Riddle of Fire in addition to Birney’s prior work), but its familiarity is ultimately, warmly sweet.

The most notable shift in craft here is Birney’s newfound interest in horror genre tropes, which is usually where most low-budget directors start. Some of his best couch time with Sandy in the first act is spent recording the entirety of A Nightmare on Elm Street Film from TV broadcast to VHS tape, so they can rewatch it together later, anytime they want. This allusion opens the film up to a wide range of surrealistic horror touches, including dozens of rubber-masked cicada mutants straight out of 1950s creature features, a couple Harryhausen-style skeleton soldiers and, most improbably, some spooky late-night drives inspired by Lynch’s Lost Highway. The treacherous demon Ixaroth obviously adds to the film’s horror bona-fides as well, represented onscreen as a beast made entirely out of TV static, with a tangible taxidermy skull. It’s an image that pairs well with Birney’s return to the Game Boy Camera-style black & white cinematography of The Beast Pageant, but more importantly it’s one that signals the themes he’s getting at with this latest stylistic experiment. The evil entity is composed of the glowing-screen filler that keeps his protagonist from venturing outside his apartment, making the film out to be a dire warning about the price of staring at screens all day instead of living a real life. Sure, you get some mind-melting psychedelic video art out of it, but at what cost? In comparison, I’m not sure that The Beast Pageant had a similar underlying message other than that having a job sucks. Maybe OBEX is Birney admitting that making & looking at niche art all day sucks too, especially if that’s the only thing you do.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the classic tabloid noir Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

00:00 Welcome
03:09 Kill Bill – The Whole Bloody Affair (2025)
08:58 Blackmail (1929)
15:20 Gorgo (1961)
21:08 Bunny (2025)
25:00 Send Help (2026)
30:00 Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die (2026)
34:00 Bone Tomahawk (2015)
39:14 Obex (2026)
44:47 Crimson Peak (2015)
54:06 Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
59:32 The Moment (2026)
1:05:15 Eighth Grade (2018)
1:10:10 Mandy (2018)
1:14:00 Lapsis (2021)
1:17:00 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Mutant Mayhem (2023)

1:24:12 Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Bunny (2025)

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2025’s Bunny is the directorial debut of Ben Jacobson, who also plays one of the lead roles alongside first-billed actor Mo Stark, who is also credited with Jacobson and Stefan Marolachakis for writing the film’s screenplay. Stark plays the titular Bunny, a sex worker who provides for his wife Bobbie (Liza Colby) by hustling, and who also acts as the de facto leader of his apartment building and its array of kooks. He looks after the elderly Ian, who lost most of the use of one of his arms in a youthful motorcycle accident, and Ian in turn looks after the voluntarily bedbound Franklin, who spends all of his waking hours watching his VHS recordings of the David Carradine series Kung Fu. There’s also Linda (Linda Rong Mei Chen), the landlady who’s part of the fun, Bunny’s somewhat dimwitted friend Dino (Jacobson), a trio of partying girls who live downstairs, and a couple of douchey young bros who round out the rest of the cramped, claustrophobic tenement that they all inhabit. On Bunny’s birthday, he runs home in a heightened state and covered in blood, which he attempts to hide from his wife, and into this chaos several other characters enter: their short term rental guest Chana (Genevieve Hudson-Price), a rabbi (Henry Czerny) Chana summons to ensure that her temporary occupancy is in compliance with her extremely orthodox requirements, Bobbie’s estranged father Loren (Anthony Drazan), and two cops called in by Linda, who struggles through her limited English to explain to them that she fears one of her tenants has died in his apartment. These two cops (Ajay Naidu and Liz Caribel Sierra) end up spending much of the day lurking around Bunny’s front door, which complicates things when the employee of a spurned john appears and tries to murder him, forcing Bunny to kill him in self-defense. 

In our recent discussion of The Beast Pageant, Brandon and I talked about how there are two ways to respond to a cheaply made but nonetheless impressive piece of independent film: “I could make this” (derogatory, denigrating), and “I could make this!” (appreciative, inspired). Jacobson feels like a filmmaker who saw the works of directors like Sean Baker and had the latter reaction. In particular, the choice of making the film’s protagonist a sex worker, setting the film over a single day-long period, handheld guerilla shooting in cramped, real world locations, and focusing on a few intersectional stories with a small cast of mostly unknowns all call Tangerine to mind. The other things that the film feels like it’s borrowing from are both genre products of the nineties: stoner comedies and post-Pulp Fiction dialogue-driven crime capers. For the former, the film is mostly populated with potheads — Dino most obviously, as he smokes incessantly and also gets Bobbie’s father Loren high when he arrives unannounced while Bobbie and Bunny are away. For the latter, the film is a constant wirewalk of trying to figure out how to deal with the body in the hallway and the various lengths that the characters must go to in order to keep the police from finding a pretense to come inside. Where these two ideas intersect is in the constant poor decisions that Bunny and Dino make; when a second dead body is found inside (the tenant Linda was concerned about did, in fact, overdose in his bedroom), the gang quickly comes up with the idea to get rid of that body rather than the man Bunny killed, resulting in a lot of wacky hijinks surrounding getting the corpse into a suitcase and outside. There’s absolutely no reason to get involved with the neighbor’s body, but everyone’s so intoxicant-addled and dim-witted that they just keep making things worse for themselves. 

The film keeps itself from feeling too monotonous despite its single-location setting by threading in a parade of fun characters and letting them bounce off of one another. I was particularly fond of Chana, who defiantly notes that she must be called either “Happy Chana” or by her full name, “never just ‘Chana,’” and whose orthodoxy considerations throw a wrench into the already malfunctioning machine that is Linda’s tenement house. Bobbie leaves the apartment in a huff before Chana arrives, meaning that when their guest arrives to find that she is “alone” with Bunny, she demands that either Bunny leave his own home or that there be at least two other women present since “two women equals one wife.” It’s good stuff, reminiscent of the “Ski Lift” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and her presence is a fun complication when having to navigate keeping the cops outside while keeping her from discovering the body (later bodies) that are moved from apartment to apartment. I also appreciated the presence of Loren, whose absurdly self-serving nature is made apparent when he admits that he’s found himself at a loss when his wife finally leaves him—he’s left her before, of course, many times, but now that he’s on the other end of it he feels remorse for ditching his daughter. Loren is on a different journey, like he’s entered this picture from a completely different film in which he’s a deadbeat dad finally trying to make good, but everyone here finds him to be an eye-rolling dick until he actually comes in handy. In a lesser (and more racist) movie, Linda would be used as a comedic punching bag, but here she gets to be a part of the fun, which I enjoyed immensely after some initial skepticism about how respectfully she would be treated. 

With a necessary content warning for this film and its (respectful) treatment of sexual violence, I’d recommend it for anyone looking for something to scratch that Sean Baker-ish itch.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Broken (1993)

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The industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails is playing a concert in New Orleans this week, and I’ve been relistening to their records in anticipation of the event. This is a band I find easy to take for granted, as I’ve been listening to them since I was a teenager, so I’m always surprised by how consistently great they are whenever I give them my full attention. The few times I’ve seen Nine Inch Nails in concert before, they were always the secondary reason I’ve shown up (whether because they’re headlining a festival I’m already attending anyway or because they’re touring with an opening act I’m excited to see for the first time), and then midway through their set I have yet another epiphanic revelation that, oh yeah, this is one of the greatest bands of all time. I’ve been going through that cycle again this week revisiting Trent Reznor’s early output under the Nine Inch Nails banner, reviving my appreciation for their 80s & 90s album run especially — from Pretty Hate Machine through The Fragile, all impeccable. It’s such an obvious, redundant observation that I feel silly even repeating it, but every now and then a track like “Terrible Lie” or “The Becoming” will hit my ear in a way that cuts through my decades-long familiarity with the band and sound entirely new again. This week, I’ve been especially attentive to their early EP release Broken, which still sounds fresh to my ears since it’s a CD I didn’t have in high school, when I would’ve been endlessly looping their other discs on my no-skip Walkman.

As an album, Broken is a transition piece between the gothy synthpop of Pretty Hate Machine and the more abrasive noise of The Downward Spiral, going a little overboard in reaching for a harsher, heavier sound. At the very least, even Reznor would admit that he went overboard in the promotional videos that accompanied it, which are shockingly brutal to the point of simulating a snuff film. The NIN short film Broken has never been given an official commercial release, but it’s been floating around in tape-trading and online filesharing circles for three decades now, gathering a kind of mystique as “The fucked-up movie that that The Man didn’t want you to see.” In this case, “The Man” in question is Trent Reznor himself, who found the visual album version of Broken tasteless after spending a couple years of his life recording music in the Los Angeles home where Sharon Tate was murdered by The Manson Family. The film is so graphically violent that it was obviously never intended for wide commercial distribution through corporate hubs like MTV, but partway through his recording sessions at the Tate house, Reznor grew a conscience and asked whether it should be distributed at all. So, it was initially only passed around among friends as an insiders-only art project before inevitably being copied and spread through the tape-trading pipeline as an illegal object, effectively giving it the same mystique as a legitimate, real-life snuff tape. And now you can watch it in HD online anytime, no underground distro required.

Broken starts with camcorder-documented drives through a California neighborhood, recalling the icy true-crime landmark Landscape Suicide. Instead of merely documenting the landscape, however, the camera’s operator is in search of a victim to abduct & torture, which he seemingly finds with ease. The suburban abductee is next shown bound and gagged in a mysterious basement, where his torture initially consists of being forced to watch violent Nine Inch Nails music videos on a small television. The videos are demarcated by a switch to black & white film stock and an emphasis on literally industrial images of various pipes, wires, and gears. Reznor & co. perform “Wish” to a riotous crowd who threatens to tear at their flesh the second they break into the band’s cage. A bald businessman enjoys a steak-and-wine dinner swarming with flies while “Help Me I Am in Hell” plays, occasionally changing into S&M gear in a much more pleasant, padded cell. In the most famous standalone video, “Happiness in Slavery,” performance artist Bob Flanagan (of Sick fame) is sexually prodded and destroyed by a menacing fuck machine that doubles as a meat grinder. Meanwhile, each video is frequently interrupted by camcorder interstitials of our hostage in crisis being ritually raped & killed by his captor in a series of stunts that include castration, coprophagy, and amateur dentistry. There isn’t much of a narrative arc to it as a short film, but as video art it does convey something deeply, cathartically evil about the music Reznor sought to make at the time.

Something I like to say about my favorite working band, Xiu Xiu, is that the sound of their synths simulate the sensation of being stabbed. Broken literalizes that idea, interjecting camcorder footage of blades penetrating skin every time Reznor whips out the harshest noises in his tool bag. Those violent impulses have softened in the decades since, with a large portion of his modern output being ambient movie soundtrack work instead of the most evil rock songs ever recorded. I expect to hear tracks from recent films like Challengers & Tron: Ares at this week’s concert, but I’d be shocked to hear a selection from Reznor’s earliest cinematic output, a movie he’s morally & artistically outgrown. Its shock-value imagery remains remarkably, effectively upsetting, though, and it’s especially worthwhile to return to in the current moment when vintage SOV slashers and modern “analog horror” throwbacks are having A Moment in genre filmmaking circles. Just as when it was an underground cult object in 1993, it would work perfectly well as a “Hey, wanna see something fucked up?” dare among the maladjusted teens of today. It also doesn’t hurt that, like everything else Reznor recorded in the 80s & 90s, every track is still killer, which is not something I could say about most of the other metal-adjacent pop music I was obsessed with as a teenager.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #257: Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972) & Pre-Giuliani NYC

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Welcome to Episode #257 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movies made on the grimy streets of pre-Giuliani New York City, starting with the queer musical comedy Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972).

00:00 Krewe du Goo
03:53 While We’re Young (2014)
10:00 Lost in America (1985)
14:20 Another Woman’s Husband (2000)
21:03 Sudden Fury (1993)
25:23 Broken (1993)

36:00 Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972)
1:02:00 Klute (1971)
1:21:00 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
1:36:00 The Exterminator (1980)

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

Tromeo & Juliet (1996)

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There are two minor miracles to be found in the 1996 Shakespeare schlockification Tromeo & Juliet. The first is that it’s an unusually sweet, tender romance for the Troma brand (in the moments between its company-mandated fart & boner jokes). The second is that it helped launch a successful filmmaking career outside the Troma trenches, despite being just as obnoxious & grotesque as the worst offenders in the company’s catalog. These miracles are directly related to each other, of course, as Tromeo & Juliet‘s out-of-character sentimentality is the work of young screenwriter James Gunn, who has found an exponentially successful career grossing audiences out with goopy grotesqueries while remaining a soft-hearted cornball. The only difference is that Gunn used to write those cornball grossouts for the home video market under Lloyd Kauffman’s sleazy supervision, and now he directs $200mil superhero movies for major Hollywood studios. You can take the troll out of Tromaville, but you can you really take the Troma out of the troll?

Forgive me for my lack of interest in recapping the interfamilial beef between the Montegues & Capulets here; I really do try my best not to treat this blog like a high school book report. Tromeo & Juliet is relatively faithful to its literary source text, as signaled by hiring a half-drunk Lemmy (of Motörhead) to narrate the opening prologue in mumbled iambic pentameter. The central joke of the project is to transport the play’s action to the modern, grimy streets of New York City, making the source of its familial feud a dispute over ownership of an NYC porno studio. Every event from the play is “reinterpreted” (i.e., mucked up) in that way, shoehorning monster puppets, lesbian make-outs, and ADR’d fart noises into the tragic romance we all know & love. The tagline on the poster says it all, promising to deliver “all the body-piercing, kinky sex, and car crashes that Shakespeare wanted but never had!” The final image it leaves you on is the populist playwright chuckling in delighted approval, reassuring the audience that Shakespeare would love Troma-brand juvenilia if he were alive to see it.

James Gunn’s auteurism shows in the screenplay’s unexpected touches of romantic sincerity. When Juliet has steamy lesbian sex with her handmaiden, there’s surprising romantic chemistry there, playing like a genuine bodice-ripper instead of a half-hearted Playboy shoot. When Tromeo jerks off to interactive CD-ROM pornography, his go-to kink category is revealed to be “true love,” with an onscreen nude model professing her devotion to him in bridal gear. The biggest deviation from the Shakespeare play is that Tromeo & Juliet is ultimately not a tragedy at all. Instead of committing a double suicide at the climax, our young teens in love procure a potion that temporarily makes Juliet so monstrous to the eye that only Tromeo could continue to love her, scaring off her family’s chosen suitor. In true Troma fashion, it’s then revealed that Tromeo & Juliet are long lost siblings—a secret long guarded by their feuding parents—and their romantic union would be an unholy act of incest. They decide to marry & procreate anyway; their love is just that strong, and the screenwriter is just that much of a softie, despite his alarming edgelord tendencies.

I don’t mean to undermine director Lloyd Kaufman’s own auteurism in this project. Considering that the Yale graduate & Troma kingpin’s most recent feature is a Troma’d up version of The Tempest titled Shakespeare Shitstorm, I have to assume that much of the creative direction behind the camera originated with him. The young Gunn was hired to overhaul an early version of the screenplay that Kauffman was unsatisfied with, and it seems that the final product was a true collaboration between them. You can hear them mind-melding as two mutually respected sleazebags on the Blu-ray’s commentary track, indulging in some boys-will-be-boys locker room talk about all the hot chicks they got to see naked while working together. It’s gross, but their rapport is also oddly sweet, which carries over to the final product on the screen. In the scene where Tromeo flips through his stash of interactive porno CD-ROMs, we get a taste of all the other reparatory Troma stagings of Shakespeare works we could’ve been treated to over the decades, in titles like Et Tu Blowjob, The Merchant of Penis, As You Lick It, and Much Ado about Humping. It’s unlikely that James Gunn wishes he were still writing those shock-value frivolities instead of directing Superman spinoffs in the big leagues, but I dare say he was making more honest, personal work in his early Troma days — equally, extremely sappy & revolting.

-Brandon Ledet

Gorgo (1961)

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Every country deserves its own trademark kaiju, just like every high school deserves its own sports mascot and every state deserves its own flower & song. Japan has Godzilla, of course, who continues his decades-long reign as King of the Monsters even though he has more local competition than most. America has King Kong, the only national delegate who’s been worthy enough to travel to Japan to meet Godzilla in-person for official kaiju business. Things get a little less impressive from there, since most other countries can only claim ownership of Godzilla & King Kong knockoffs instead of doing their own thing. On the Godzilla knockoff front, North Korea famously has Pulgasari and Denmark less famously has Reptilicus, while Hong Kong has its own resident King Kong knockoff in The Mighty Peking Man. If there’s anything especially daring about England’s national kaiju Gorgo is that it splits the difference, borrowing liberally from Godzilla and King Kong instead of showing preference for one over the other. Gorgo’s lobby posters promise kaiju mayhem “UNLIKE ANYTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN BEFORE,” but its monster design looks exactly like Godzilla (now with ears) and its opening credits shamelessly borrow the King Kong font, followed quickly by its on-the-ground characters reliving the King Kong plot. I want better than that for our international neighbors’ kaiju mascot legacies, but any & all classic movie monsters are welcome here, regardless of originality.

The most boneheaded aspect of Gorgo producers’ decision to rip off Godzilla & King Kong is that the United Kingdom already had a perfectly well-suited kaiju cryptid the monster could’ve been modeled from instead. Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster had been world-famous for several decades before Gorgo was produced, but instead of capitalizing on that with a creature feature called Nessie’s Revenge, producers sailed to Dublin instead. The plot is exactly what you’d imagine. Two professional sailors discover an underwater dino creature (the titular Gorgo) while deep-sea diving off the shores of Ireland, so they capture it in a giant net and drag it back to England as a kind of freak-show circus act — King Kong style. After parading the subdued creature through downtown London on a float helpfully labeled “Gorgo”, they start selling tickets for local blokes to point & laugh at its misfortunes as an Eighth Wonder of the World circus attraction. The good times don’t last long, though, since it turns out they’ve only captured a baby Gorgo, and the creature’s much larger, violently protective mother quickly storms London to break her baby free. The film’s only major deviation from the King Kong set-up and Godzilla punchline is that both Mama Gorgo and Baby Gorgo get away at the end, fucking off back into the ocean, safe once again from the monstrous actions of men. Meanwhile, human survivors pontificate empty platitudes about the nature of Nature or whatever, having accomplished nothing but disturbing an underwater monster family by invading its habitat.

What Gorgo lacks in originality it makes up for in the scale & duration of its climactic kaiju mayhem. For the record, both Mama Gorgo and Baby Gorgo are represented by the exact same rubber suit, and their respective sizes (boat-size and skyscraper size) are only differentiated by the scale of the miniature sets they inhabit. Baby Gorgo’s half of the movie is a little slow-moving, overloaded with sub-Black Lagoon underwater photography as he’s abducted & transported by mercenary sailors and their circus-promoter clientele. Once Mama Gorgo crashes the scene, however, the movie becomes a nonstop special effects showcase, with Godzilla’s big-eared cousin tearing her way across The Big City while huge crowds of nameless extras run for their lives below. Her most important moment is when she gets her Empire State Building shot by smashing Big Ben, marking her as Britain’s #1 kaiju mascot. Her bridge-crushing, bus-stomping, baby-avenging tour of London eats up a significant chunk of the 78min runtime, making up for lost time. There’s some surreal shoddiness in the offset green-screen composite photography, but for the most part the scale & relentlessness of Gorgo‘s urban destruction is genuinely impressive. The movie looks especially great in its current form, having recently been given the 4K Blu-ray restoration treatment by genre-cinema heroes Vinegar Syndrome. In the early stretch, you can tell why it was once featured on MST3K, since there’s plenty of dead air for the sarcastic robots to fill with mockery, but the energy picks up if you stick with it. Personally, I’m glad that this kind of vintage schlock is treated with more sincerely loving archival reverence these days, especially given Gorgo’s historical significance as a foreign dignitary of great British significance.

-Brandon Ledet

Project X (2012)

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Most documentary-style narrative filmmaking tends to fall in one of two categories: the mockumentary comedy or the found-footage horror. 2012’s Project X is most interesting for its Rorschach Test ability to fall into either category, depending on the audience. It’s got a Spring Breakers or The Real Cancun quality about it, in that you either see it as a simulation of a fun party or a simulation of Hell, mostly depending on whether you’re still a teenager when you watch it. It’s unquestionable that producer Todd Phipps set out to make a modernized 2010s boner comedy—filtering some of his Hangover-era bro humor with Jackass-style physical stunts—but the result is so monstrously grotesque that he instead ended up delivering the nightmare version of Superbad, by way of The Blair Witch Project.

Thomas Mann (of Me and Earl and The Dying Girl infamy) stars as a high school nerd whose parents are leaving town in the week leading up to his 17th birthday. His two mouthbreathing besties decide that this is the perfect opportunity to climb the social ladder by throwing a once-in-a-lifetime rager, hoping of course to get laid in the process. Notice and notoriety of the party quickly spreads outside of the school, however, to the point where anyone & everyone who chugs liquor & pills in Pasadena, CA shows up at the overwhelmed teen’s home, effectively destroying it in a party gone way out of bounds. The vibe is fun enough at the start, with all the DJs, skinny-dippers, and beer-shotgunners needed to make for a memorable night in these otherwise sheltered kids’ lives. A baby-faced Miles Teller even makes an appearance as the party’s celebrity guest. Then, the vibe sours. The family car is driven into the swimming pool. The family dog is ritually tortured by drunken goons. Fireworks are set off indoors. The neighborhood drug dealer shows up with a military-grade flamethrower. News helicopters circle the chaos. By the end of the night, it’s not a party at all; it’s a riot.

Project X is less interesting for its narrative than it is for its technique. Before the party starts, you can already guess exactly what’s going to happen to Thomas & his goons, right down to his “It isn’t what it looks like” romantic crisis when his lifelong crush catches him losing his virginity to an anonymous hottie. The picture’s dark, anarchic energy is mostly due to the experiment of its shooting style, in which Phillips & crew built a small replica of a Pasadena neighborhood so they could shoot an actual rager party across multiple homes, handing digicams, smartphones, and Blackberries to attendees to document the chaos from as many angles as possible. It’s like an evil mutation of what Jonathan Demme accomplished in Rachel Getting Married: staging an intimate melodrama within the raucous, spontaneous atmosphere of a real-life party. Only, I doubt the Rachel Getting Married set reeked so heavily of Taaka vodka & Axe body spray. The simple kids-getting-laid story Project X tells, then, is less of the main focus than it is an excuse for endless montages of flashlit hedonism, straining at every moment to make it seem fun to make out with a stranger you just watched throw up on the lawn.

If there’s any continued cultural significance to Project X that’s lasted past its contemporary inspiration for similar out-of-control block parties IRL (despite Warner Bros. slapping a Jackass-style “Do not try this at home” message on the opening title card), it’s in its time-capsule document of the so-called “Indie Sleaze” aesthetic. You’d think its location on the wrong coast and the wrong decade would exclude it from an official Indie Sleaze designation, but that’s only because it took a decade for that scene’s influence to trickle out far enough into a mainstream to make it into a major motion picture from a big-name Hollywood producer. Despite the LFMAO-bro atmosphere of the party they soundtrack, the DJs pepper in hits from LCD Soundsystem, Animal Collective, The XX, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs to establish an unearned sense of indie-scene cool, which combines with the crime-scene lighting of the digi-era cinematography to approximate an authentic Indie Sleaze aesthetic. It just falls heavy on the “sleaze” end of that cultural marker, turning your stomach with the bro’d-out, gross-out behavior of every dipshit involved.

If you want to see the Lawful Good version of this same experiment, check out the Beastie Boys concert film Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, in which the beloved-by-all rap trio distributed digicams to random members of their audience to capture the good-vibes party they put on in Madison Square Garden from every angle possible. Project X is more of a bad-vibes-only Chaotic Evil proposition, like chugging Everclear in the parking lot outside a Kanye West concert. Just try not to splash puke on your own shoes.

-Brandon Ledet