Welcome to Episode #268 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2026, starting with the gross-out clip show Jackass: Best and Last.
00:00 Welcome 01:30 Sleepaway Camp (1983) 09:47 Annie Sprinkle 16:00 Disney animation 25:36 Undertone (2026) 27:47 How to Make a Killing (2026) 29:44 Straight to Hell (1987)
When it first hit theaters and scooped up a few Oscars half a century ago, the 1976 political thriller All the President’s Men was most impressive for its immediacy. Adapted from the eponymous book written by famed Washington Post journalists Woodward & Bernstein, All the President’s Men details the political fallout from the Watergate espionage scandal that eventually resulted in the resignation of President Richard Nixon just two years earlier. The movie depicts the hourly grind of newspaper reporters chasing leads and verifying sources as being largely unglamorous, with most of the story’s action taking place over phone calls, house visits, and silent copywriting sessions at desktop typewriters. Because Woodward & Bernstein’s rigorous beat journalism efforts resulted in such an usually spectacular political crashout, however, their hard work was rewarded by being retroactively glamorized by big-name Hollywood movie stars, performed onscreen by Robert Redford & Dustin Hoffman. The movie concludes with the two men hammering away at their respective typewriters while their coworkers are distracted by history being made in real time on the television as Nixon was being sworn into office. In real life, they turned out to be two of the few journalists to ever become household names, partly because it was a phenomenon to see such recent history make the jump from newspaper headlines to movie theater marquees.
Revisiting All the President’s Men all these decades later is an entirely different experience now that the newsprint ink has long dried. The film retroactively plays like a time-capsuled token of Boomer nostalgia, no longer reflecting the immediate, current state of US politics. A younger audience that has spent their entire cognizant political lives post-Trump would find the scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation laughably mundane (something that even Vice President JD Vance has recently bragged about to the press). In a modern context, All the President’s Men is set in a preposterous fantasy world where exposed political corruption actually leads to legal & professional consequences, as opposed to a few gotcha headlines and a culture-wide shrug. It’s treated like a major revelation when one journalistic source explains, “Forget the myths. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things get out of hand.” Today’s political corruption is even more blatant & boorish with no discernible consequences, and anyone who mistakes Trump’s lackeys as “bright guys” simply isn’t paying attention. Likewise, revisiting a time when professional publications employed legitimate copy editors to revise & strengthen their staff writers’ work feels like visiting an alien planet for a modern viewer. Print media is dead, political shame is even deader, and so everything that once felt fresh & sharp about All the President’s Men now plays as cute & quaint. It has somehow, shamefully transformed from 70s paranoid conspiracy thriller to modern comfort watch.
Speaking as a Millennial whose entire relationship with recent history & culture was shaped by second-hand references made on The Simpsons, All the President’s Men can’t help but play as vintage nostalgia. The 1994 Simpsons episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts” features a lengthy homage to the 70s classic, while telling the story of a Springfield mayoral election rigged by the nefarious clown Sideshow Bob. Bart & Lisa are tipped off to Bob’s corruption by an anonymous source who only appears in the shadows of a parking garage in hopes to maintain anonymity. Before his cover is blown by Homer’s trademark buffoonery, Smithers appears as a Simpsonized parody of the anonymous government source Woodward & Bernstein use to crack the Watergate scandal in All the President’s Men, interchangeably referred to in that film as “Deep Throat” and “Garage Freak.” While following Smithers’s “anonymous” tips, the kids pour over voter records in the Springfield public library, and the daunting monotony of their work is emphasized in a top-down aerial shot that dwarfs them in the frame, once again visually referencing All the President’s Men. I have no doubt that these cartoon images were my first exposure to the Woodward & Bernstein legend, as immortalized in All the President’s Men. In fact, I was exposed to the collective name “Woodward & Bernstein” through Lisa Simpson’s voice at such a young age that I couldn’t distinguish them from the naming convention of comedic stage acts like Abbott & Costello, Cheech & Chong, or Nichols & May. I assume the original intent of Deep Throat’s shadowy figure was to invoke conspiratorial paranoia & danger (as frequently aped by another childhood TV obsession, The X-Files), but it mostly just reminded me of my old friend Mr. Smithers.
As much as the real-life story told in All the President’s Men has been gradually diluted through declining political standards and pop culture mimicry, the film itself is still remarkably impressive in terms of basic craft. The Oscar-winning sound design still hits incredibly hard, to the point where the very first clack of a typewriter caught me off guard like a cheap-shot horror movie jump scare. There are split diopter shots galore throughout the Washington Post‘s office floor, even if they’re mostly deployed to capture the nail-biting excitement of two journalists making simultaneous phone calls in nearby cubicles. The seedy backlit compositions of Deep Throat’s parking garage confessionals are also legitimately stunning, fully justifying cinematographer Gordon Willis’s badass moniker “The Prince of Darkness”; it’s no wonder The Simpsons‘ direct homages to the film are almost entirely visual. Director Alan J. Pakula is largely remembered for his unofficial “Paranoia Trilogy”, which includes All the President’s Men alongside Klute & The Parallax View. While those earlier titles leaned into the cocaine & pot addled paranoia of the post-hippie 1970s, All the President’s Men is specifically paranoid in the jittery way that follows an evening spent chugging coffee & chain-smoking cigarettes while pushing through to meet a publication deadline. This is a writer’s movie first & foremost, so it’s not especially surprising that it won a Best Screenplay Oscar that year as well (the only statue it didn’t have to compete against fellow 1976 all-timer Network for, mercifully, due to that category’s original/adapted divide). It remains, by all metrics, a great film. It’s just a shame that its contemporary political cynicism now reads as modern political optimism — may God have mercy on our nation’s soul.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the paranoid 70s espionage thriller Three Days of the Condor, starring Robert Redford as the CIA’s biggest nerd.
There was a round of headlines earlier this month announcing that George Miller is looking to complete his ongoing Mad Max saga with a new TV show & movie, which is impressively ambitious for an 81-year-old filmmaker nearing the end of his career. To his credit, Miller’s advanced age didn’t affect his ability to deliver high-octane action spectacle in his last Mad Max chapter, Furiosa, which found the octogenarian still experimenting with new ways to wow his audience with comic book mythmaking in every brutal frame. Even so, it appears Warner Bros is reluctant to allow Miller another spin behind the wheel of the war rig, so it might be a while before we see what Furiosaand the gang are up to in the proposed final chapter (if we ever see it at all). In the meantime, Miller was on the top of my mind while watching a different over-the-top action spectacle from an aging auteur, 80-year-old Yuen Woo-Ping’s big budget comic book adaptation Blades of the Guardians: Wind Rises in the Desert. Yuen’s flying-swordsmen action epic recalls Miller’s work both in its CGI sandstorm surrealism and in its shockingly elaborate brutality for a man of Yuen’s age. His name may not be as readily familiar to American audiences as Miller’s, but rest assured you are already a fan of his work, and you owe it to yourself to see how far he’s still pushing his craft while major movie studios are still allowing him to do so.
As a director, Yuen Woo-Ping is most famous for making Jackie Chan a household name in 1978’s Drunken Master, half a century ago. However, he’s most revered by martial arts fans in the West for his work as the fight choreographer for 1990s & 2000s actioners as formidable as Kill Bill & The Matrix. He effectively brought authentic wuxia action to the America for the first time, notably choreographing the flying-swordsmen spectacle of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which still defines the wuxia genre for most Western audiences. So, even if you are not familiar with the comic-book source material for Blades of the Guardians, you likely have some expectation for what a top-of-his-game Yuen Woo-Ping can bring to big-screen fight choreo. He exceeds expectations by the end of the first fight, much like Miller wowing audiences with the late-in-the-game ferocity he brought to the nonstop chase scenes of Fury Road. Yuen’s camera gets inches away from the hand-to-hand street brawls that break out at the opening locale, then pull away to catch a top-down aerial view of the same ongoing action. A nameless goon is pantsed & humiliated mid-fight by our vagabond hero in that opening bout, recalling the anything-goes tonal shifts of Hong Kong’s action filmmaking heyday. Later, two assassins battle each other with flaming swords in an oil field setting worthy of a heavy metal album cover. Arrows fly all the way through horse riders’ skulls mid-gallop, throwing them lifeless to the ground. An epic one-on-one assassin battle is staged during a world-ending sandstorm of Fury Road proportions. Blades of the Guardians travels across the desert from one action set piece to another like a true big-budget blockbuster, far from the philosophical sparseness of King Hu-style wuxia titles like A Touch of Zen. It’s a big-canvas crowdpleaser designed to keep your heart rate up and your fist in the air, held there by a seasoned elder of its genre.
Wu Jing (Wolf Warrior) stars as a 1st Century transient bounty hunter who’s constantly dodging offers to settle down as a government official (training troops in sword fighting) or as a small-village family man (raising the adorable young child he’s seemingly adopted Grogu-style). His skills as the #2 fugitive of the empire are put to the test when he’s hired to transport the empire’s #1 fugitive—the enigmatic leader of The Flower Revolution—to safety at the opposite end of the desert. The revolutionary in his care does not help make this task easy in any way, both wearing a conspicuous cat mask that broadcasts his identity to all onlookers and being so feebly averse to conflict that he makes each fight harder just by hanging around. Meanwhile, every assassin in the game is eager to collect the bounty on the revolutionary’s head, and the protector’s unwanted road companions land him in larger crises of political intrigue that complicate the mission at every stop. Like most wuxia actioners, Blades of the Guardians is adapted from popular lit that presumes familiarity from its audience and only offers rapid-fire exposition dumps and character-intro title cards for narrative bearings. If you can let go of needing to know the political & historical alignment of every character beyond their obvious designations as “good” or “evil,” however, it’s follows a fairly familiar action blockbuster path, wherein a seemingly stoic warrior gradually warms up to his found family of traveling companions after initially taking on a mission for selfish personal gain. The rest is all communicated in the broad strokes of horseback battles, head-chopping sword fights, and unexpected whirlwind romance — each depicted with an incredible amount of elaborate detail and technical precision from a Hong Kong industry legend who doesn’t get the opportunities to flex his muscles nearly as often as he used to.
I don’t think it’s inappropriate to dwell so much on the long-spanning legacy Yuen Woo-Ping represents in the director’s chair. Blades of the Guardians very deliberately acts as a passing of the cultural torch from older generations of Chinese action blockbuster filmmakers to youthful up-and-comers. While Wu Jing might headline the film after two solid decades of onscreen martial arts spectacle, he has costars so young & fresh to the game that their cast listing on Wikipedia links to a K-pop boy band instead of their own designated page (namely, Dong Sicheng of NCT, among other boy banders in the cast). It’s a movie that goes out of its way to pay respect to the industry’s old-timers, though, including small roles for Jet Li & “Big Tony” Leung Ka-fai and a last-minute cameo from Yuen Woo-Ping himself. You just wouldn’t know that if you saw any of the film’s elaborately choreographed fight scenes out of context, since they each convey a relentless eagerness to wow the audience that’s usually associated with younger filmmakers who feel they have something to prove. The stylized fights of Blades of the Guardians are unmistakably aligned with Yuen Woo-Ping’s most iconic work (especially recalling The Matrix in its hand-to-hand closeups and Crouching Tiger in its fantastic swordfights), but I still found myself thinking of George Miller as he staged those fights across the vastness of the landscape’s whirling sands. The two old-timers share a demonstrated hunger & ferocity you wouldn’t typically expect from filmmakers’ their age, putting to shame all of the other auteurs of their generation who get generously graded on a curve for the sloppiness of their own “Late Style” missives.
Usually, when someone describes a movie as “torture porn,” they’re not being literal. The term is largely pejorative, wielded to shame & insult a crop of aughts-era horror thrillers that found pornographic satisfaction in torturing buxom young women under grimy fluorescent lights. The genre’s tone is decidedly unsexy, as it has been gradually understood as a subconscious expression of culture-wide discomfort with the US’s torturous interrogation tactics in the post-9/11 days of the War on Terror. It’s important, then, to distinguish 1994’s A Chinese Torture Chamber Story and its 1998 sequel as literal torture porn: overt attempts to titillate their audience through leering depictions of traditional Chinese torture techniques, repackaged into the sleek production values of 90s-era erotic thrillers. Unlike the accidental torture porn of the following decade, the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories are also very direct in their expression of horror with the governmental interrogation tactics of mainland China, voiced from the somewhat safe distance of British-ruled Hong Kong. So, while the cowardly Saw & Hostel hid their own queasy arousal with real-life torture victims of the American justice system under several layers of artificial, dramatic remove, A Chinese Torture Chamber I & II were bravely upfront about being simultaneously icked out & turned on by their own nation’s cruel & unusual tactics for beating “the truth” out of the accused.
The first Chinese Torture Chamber Story is structured like an especially crass episode of Law & Order, with a pair of accused adulterers standing trial under the duress of an arcane legal system. Before the 19th Century court, a poor chamber maid (Yvonne Yung) pleads for a panel of judges to believe that she did not sleep with her wealthy employer (Lawrence Ng) behind his wife’s back, nor did she conspire to kill her own husband (Tommy Wong) so that she could run away with said master in full adulterous sin. In flashbacks, we discover that she is telling the truth. In fact, she has been a victim all her life, from being effectively sold into sexual slavery as a potential concubine for her master, to being married off to a potentially violent husband as punishment for supposedly tempting said master, to being punished by a panel of judges for acts of adultery & murder she never actually committed. In the eyes of the law, however, she is guilty until proven innocent, so the audience is subjected to watching her get spanked, beaten, and lacerated in the present, between dramatic scenes proving her innocence in the past. This archaic interrogation might be interpreted as a political statement against the effectiveness of torture as a method of extracting a truthful confession out the accused, who mostly just wants the pain to stop, but in practice it’s played as an excuse to stage nonconsensual S&M acts for a disturbed, horny audience — starting with a bare-bottomed public spanking to set the tone.
What you might not gather from that plot recap is that A Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a largely goofy slapstick comedy. The husband our poor handmaiden is married off to is introduced as another punishment for her supposed adultery, because he’s known to have a comically oversized penis that would physically harm any woman who attempts intercourse with him. When his timid bride finds him to be a tender soul and lovingly jacks him off from behind in a show of good will, the scene is played as a ZAZ-style parody of the pottery wheel scene from Ghost, complete with an Easternized remix of “Unchained Melody.” Her master also gets into over-the-top sexual mishaps while traveling away from home, most notably in a sequence where he meets a married pair of wuxia warriors, who perform violently athletic acts of wizard sex while flying through the treetops the same way most wuxia movies stage their sword fights. Any tonal seriousness elsewhere is a result of the extremity in the gore, which simulates historically accurate torture tactics involving chopped legs, pulled fingernails, crushed breasts, castration, and ritualistic penetration. Even those gross-out gore gags can be oddly humorous despite their heinous cruelty, though, never more so than in the opening credits sequence, which deploys the stock Wilhelm Scream sound effect a good dozen times before we even get to the title card. The movie wants you to squirm in discomfort, to squirm even harder in arousal, and to have a good laugh at its cartoon antics, all at the same time. It’s an all-timer cinematic feat in cognitive dissonance.
The 1998 sequel A Chinese Torture Chamber Story II falls much more solidly in-line with what an audience would expect from literal torture porn of this sort. Again, we are bearing witness to the ritualistic torture of a young woman accused of adultery & murder (Yolinda Yam), but in this case, she is guilty of the crime. In flashback, we learn the ways that her murder of an empire official (Mark Ho-nam Cheng)—whose entire job appears to be ritualistic torture of political dissidents—is morally justified. We meet her in a peasant village where her fiancée is hoping to earn enough money to one day make their marriage official, which opens the young couple up to a dangerous love triangle with a traveling warrior they find impressive in skill & social stature. The warrior’s potential to cuckold every small-town yokel who admires him is initially treated as a source of erotic intrigue, playing out like a mildly naughty Skinemax thriller with sweaty bouts of marital copulation relieving the tension. That hero worship quickly sours, however, when the noble warrior gets his puppy-dog devotees jobs in the local torture chamber, where they are horrified by the violent acts he emotionlessly performs as if he’s filing paperwork. Once his cold, villainous soul is revealed to the audience, he is free to commit horrific acts of sexual violence against his new employee’s wives, plunging the audience into a tonal ice bath that couldn’t differ further from the goofball boner comedy of the first movie in the series. We’re happy to see him killed.
The second Chinese Torture Chamber Story is a lot less playfully zany then the first one, which makes it difficult to recommend even to most schlock genre nerds. It’s strictly for freaks only. Still, it’s got such a psychologically fucked up villain that’s it proves to be a compelling watch in its own grimy way. At the very least, it’s the movie of the pair that more convincingly delivers on the “torture” qualifier of the “torture porn” designation, which is meaningful in a genre where the “porn” can never go past softcore. As exceedingly violent as Category III Hong Kong sex thrillers can be, their onscreen sexual activity is relatively tame compared to the hardcore pornos of America’s golden age. Characters will connect at the pelvis in sexual bliss, but there is no visible thrusting in that lower hemisphere; they can only heave their chests to simulate sexual motion. The screen can be overloaded with boobs & butts, but penises are only represented in veiled silhouette, except in nonsexual scenarios where they are separated from the body in elaborately violent acts of castration. The most onscreen sexual activity you’ll find in the Chinese Torture Chamber Stories is when the sex is at its most violence, as in when a comically gigantic penis literally explodes in a geyser of blood or when a character mimes forced fellatio on a magically invisible man. As literal torture porn, these movies are decidedly in bad taste, but they are also gorgeously staged acts of bad taste with surprising jolts of juvenile humor frequently interrupting their act of extreme sadism. The same cannot be said for American torture porn of the early aughts, which is just as dull tonally as it is visually & artistically.
Q: What would it look like if Robert Eggers made a Robin Hood movie? A: It would look a lot like The Death of Robin Hood, a new grim take on the titular folk hero, set on the windy moors of 13th Century England. Aesthetically, the film is near indistinguishable from the brutal battle sequences of Eggers’s own folk-tale adaptation The Northman, immersing its audience in the mud & blood of a distant, heartless past. Whereas The Northman gets sweetly romantic as it goes along, however, The Death of Robin Hood is determined to remain stubbornly bleak throughout — opening with epic, bone crunching battle scenes in its first act and then slowing down to a mournful crawl of self-reflection for the remainder of the runtime. A bearded, grizzled Hugh Jackman stars as the titular Robin Hood, presented to the audience as an aging thief with countless enemies eager to slit his throat for past crimes. He complains that he is tired of killing & looting every waking minute, but he still manages to sling a few arrows and crush a few skulls with his old friend Little John (Bill Skarsgård) before the toll of his final battles leaves him infirmed and under the care of a kinder, gentler soul who pities his decrepit state (Jodie Comer, costumed in a Maya Hawke wig). There’s an intriguing genre exercise buried somewhere in that premise, once you dig past the familiarity of seeing Jackman give a beloved hero the same tired & broken-bodied sendoff that he once gave Wolverine in Logan (complete with adopting a young, dangerous protégé in his final days). In effect, though, it mostly just amounts to plugging a few recognizable Robin Hood character traits into the Robert Eggers playbook, without much imagination involved.
Q: What would it mean if Robin Hood were a scoundrel instead of a hero? A:The Death of Robin Hood never convincingly answers that one. The reason Jackson’s aging thief is so remorseful and so frequently attacked is that he has spent his life robbing & killing with no moral discernment, all for his own personal pleasure. Somehow, it’s explained to us, only the stories of the few instances when he happened to steal from the rich made it into the legends of his exploits, spreading fake news of his supposed heroics throughout the kingdom. Everyone who knows Robin Hood personally wants him dead, while everyone who’s only heard of him through literature regards him as a populist saint. Through that dissonance, the movie appears to be gesturing towards some abstract point about the selective, reductive nature of mythmaking, which boils down a morally complicated human life to a few convenient talking points. In doing so, however, it comes across as a conservative screed against leftist hero worship, aiming to condemn violent action against the oppressive powers that be simply because it is violent. The only thing most people know about Robin Hood—more of a literary figure that a historical one—is that he broke the law in order to redistribute wealth. By asking the audience to reconsider whether he was ever a hero in the first place, the movie acts as a kind of political demoralizer, warning against violent populist action that might topple the status quo because it will lead to debilitating, lifelong personal regret. Stranger yet, it barely bothers to be about Robin Hood at all, since its subject is only identifiable by his name and his weapon of choice. The resulting picture is conceptually murky at best and, at worst, conceptually vacuous.
Q: Is Michael Sarnoski still an up-and-coming director of note? A: Those waters are murky too. Sarnoski’s feature debut Pig (a preposterous culinary thriller in which Nicolas Cage avenges the desolation of his family by cooking delicious meals) was a real stunner, but it was also five years and two projects ago. Since then, he has directed a so-so Quiet Place prequel and a so-so Robert Eggers knockoff, both of which are only commendable for their whole-hearted dedication to a quietly somber mood. There are more children murdered onscreen in the opening thirty minutes of The Death of Robin Hood than I have seen in the last thirty years of wide-release Hollywood pictures combined. When the film is violent, it is monstrously violent. Then, when the aspect ratio tightens for Robin Hood’s mournful final days thinking about all of the people he’s cheated & violated in his wretched life, Sarnoski is equally fervent about stewing in quiet melancholy. It feels wrong calling The Death of Robin Hood a comforting movie, but once you push past our bruised & broken antihero’s wicked deeds, the Medieval hospice care he receives is oddly pleasant & calming. Likewise, Lupita Nyong’o’s repeatedly stated desire to die made for an impressively morbid hero figure in A Quiet Place: Day One, despite the other ways that film felt like a paint-by-numbers creature feature. Sarnoski has yet to repeat the emotional & thematic clarity that made Pig such an unexpectedly exciting debut, but he’s at least held onto his gloomy worldview while scaling up to adaptations of bigger, broader IP. Reportedly, he’s currently developing an adaptation of Death Stranding for A24, cashing in on video games’ current Hollywood greenlighting spree. I hope it’ll be something special, but I’m starting to have my doubts.
As much as I enjoyed the disorienting dream-logic set designs of Kane Parson’s buzzy “liminal horror” debut Backrooms, I did struggle to find its corporate-void setting especially scary or unsettling, and I have to question how much of that disconnect is generational. On its opening day, I left my beige-cubicled office job to watch Backrooms in a downtown shopping mall with clearance signs hanging over the front entrance, so it felt a little like having my average workday regurgitated back at me through a digi camcorder filter. Even long before COVID lockdowns and the subsequent recession left behind that hollowed-out corporate world, I’ve always had daily interactions with those kinds of unused or depopulated “liminal spaces,” left to rot after they outlast their intended function. They’re familiar to the point of being oddly comforting, since as an adult they offer a quiet, momentary getaway from the social chaos of city life and as a suburban teen they offered a private place to sneak alcohol and other consumable vices outside the supervision of grownups. For a younger generation who spent formative teen years in the era of “social distancing,” however, I can see how Liminal Spaces might represent a much more horrific aspect of modern life, as remnants of a dead, emptied world with nothing left to offer the poor souls inheriting it. Compare the differing generational relationships with Liminal Spaces in the Gen Z horror of Backrooms against the hopeful Millennial art projects of last year’s Secret Mall Apartment, for instance, and you’ll find two starkly distinct worldviews (one which sees them as the physical manifestation of a culture-wide nightmare and one which sees them as an opportunity to have flagrantly illegal fun with your friends).
Actually, you can save some time by just watching Stolen Kingdom instead, which combines both of those generational relationships with Liminal Spaces in one concise 75min picture. Stolen Kingdom presents itself as a documentary about the high-risk theft of a specific animatronic prop from a retired Disney World attraction — namely, Buzzy, from the “Cranium Command” exhibit of Epcot’s “Wonders of Life Pavilion.” Buzzy’s mysterious kidnapping offers this unassuming documentary a great dramatic hook, allowing it to dress up its talking-head interviews with an endless parade of theme park dorks in the conspiracy-thriller costuming of a true crime doc. In practice, though, Buzzy’s theft is only a small part of the story told here, which proves to be a much broader portrait of an urban exploration subculture that spans multiple generations of interaction with Liminal Spaces. As described by various talking heads (who almost all have been banned from entering Disney theme parks at one point in their lives), the transgressive act of breaking into off-limits areas of theme park attractions has changed drastically in meaning over the years. In the earliest instances of urban exploration at Disney World, teenagers under anonymous pseudonyms like “Hoot” & “Chief” would trespass backstage on dark rides to take up-close pictures of attractions usually kept distant from the public, both as a juvenile act of thrill-seeking vandalism and as a genuine appreciation of theme park artistry. Later, the urban exploration itself became the main attraction to these stunts, with YouTubers like Matt Swonsa making a modest career out of bragging on camera about their petty crimes in action, shifting the cultural focus from art to narcissism. By that time, most of what was being produced was about how eerie & spooky Disney’s abandoned attractions had become in corporate rot, all shot in crime-scene flashlight like a real-life version of Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Regardless of whether they find the craftsmanship of vintage Disney attractions cool or creepy, the majority of Stolen Kingdom‘s interviewees at least agree that there’s a great moral chasm between exploring them and looting them. As a closed-off subculture with isolated online fiefdoms, urban exploration has developed its own heroes & villains and internal debates over ethics & integrity. That’s where the theft of Buzzy comes in. The indisputable villain of this piece is former urban explorer Patrick Spikes, who was arrested for conspicuously stealing & selling off props from retired Disney attractions instead of merely documenting them for his YouTube followers. No one has ever proven that Spikes stole the missing animatronic from Epcot, but filmmaker Joshua Bailey does sit him down for a lengthy, self-incriminating interview here, where he comes across about as innocent as Robert Durst in The Jinx. As a cultural artifact, Buzzy is effectively valueless; it’s not like someone stole the Ursula animatronic from the still-active Little Mermaid dark ride. As a symbol of moral crisis within the urban exploration community, however, the missing robot means a lot to the world profiled in Stolen Kingdom, equipping the movie with a narrative engine it would be totally inert without. Personally, I most appreciate this documentary as an illustrative timeline of how young people’s relationships with Liminal Spaces has evolved over the past few decades, as well as a dirtbag counterpoint to the more earnest hopecore sentiments of Secret Mall Apartment. Regardless of our varied generational allegiances in the cultural meaning of Liminal Spaces, I also find it comforting to know that most people are still in agreement that personal profit is a repugnant motive for doing pretty much anything, while sharing art is a morally righteous one. The kids are still alright.
Welcome to Episode #267 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of films set in the afterlife, starting with the 1998 Robin Williams vehicle What Dreams May Come.
Sara Dosa’s latest nature doc Time and Water is the frosty yin to her previous doc’s fiery yang. All of the grand romance & scale of Dosa’s 2022 documentary Fire of Love is on full display in this year’s Sundance-premiered follow up, except the temperature has plummeted to new, icy depths. In Fire of Love, Dosa profiled the love life and scientific research of famed volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft, all the way up to their tragic end during an especially violent volcanic eruption. In Time and Water, she instead profiles the life and work of glacier observer Andri Snær Magnason, which allows her to capture the same scale of natural phenomenon while still exploring new territory. The iciness of the subject isn’t entirely literal, either. Magnason’s personal relationship with glaciers is much more mournful than the Krafts’ relationship with volcanoes, as he is most famous for having written the first ever obituary for a dying glacier, not for his passionate love for the living ones. As a result, Time and Water is a chilling ice bath intended to shock its audience into realizing how quickly & permanently we’re losing glaciers to climate change, as communicated through the personal archives & heartbreak of those natural wonders’ volunteer spokesman.
An Icelandic literary luminary, Magnason’s advocacy for glacier preservation is more poetic than scientific. He descends from a lineage of natural explorers with a long history of first-hand scientific observation of Icelandic glaciers’ declining health, but his own professional work on the subject is much more abstract. In somber voiceover, he conveys local folktales about glaciers’ role in creating & shaping his homeland. He defines the mountainous ice blocks as “ice that has come alive,” which I doubt meets the criteria for a scientific designation. Glaciers are “alive” in the sense that they are cyclically melted & rebuilt by Arctic temperatures, though, which technically means that they can also “die.” Magnason first used his literary notoriety to draw attention to glaciers’ terminal health condition in the new climate change paradigm by writing an obituary for the first fallen glacier in 2019, immortalizing in bronze, “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” Following that logic, this cinematic adaptation of that obituary does not spend much time explaining the capitalistic profit motives that are accelerating climate change year by year, but instead quietly mourns what’s already been lost while hoping to preserve its loving memory for a distant future.
For all of his cultural concerns as an Icelandic literary voice, Magnason’s investment in the future is largely familial. He narrates this eulogy as if it were a family photo slideshow, which Dosa punctuates with the clicks & whirs of a photo slide carousel. Alternating between the 16mm footage of his ancestor’s glacial explorations and his own digicam records of modern Icelandic homelife, Magnason hopes to visually represent the dramatic before & after of how the local natural landscape has changed while vocally apologizing to his future-adult children about the half-dead world that has been left for them to inherit. The focus on his family’s archival photography is thematically linked to the glaciers’ own natural archive, in the way they can trap vocalic ash and other particulates in ice as a record of passing time. Magnason sees that ice melting away as a kind of environmental dementia, which he’s watched creep into his own aging parents & grandparents as the years pile up on tape. It’s unavoidable to point out how tonally glacial that familial history plays out onscreen — both cold in its mournfulness and slow-moving in its monotony. As a time-elapse portrait of Iceland’s recent decades in environmental crisis, however, it lands a dramatic gut punch that leaves the audience doubled over, breathless.
If Dosa wanted to repeat Fire of Love‘s critical & commercial success, she could have hired Björk to cryptically narrate Magnason’s story the same way Miranda July narrated the Krafts’. Dosa did hire Dan Deacon to echo her previous film’s synth-abstracted score (provided by Air), but Deacon is usually restrained & icy in his own way here — only flashy in momentary flourishes of tape-warp sound effects. The overall mood of the piece is substantially more subdued than Dosa’s previous outing, which is entirely appropriate for a profile of a writer who’s most famous for issuing death certificates to glaciers with the official cause of death listed as “extreme summer heat.” As hard as Magnason works to convey how much his homeland’s beauty is in peril, that subdued mood and the Planet Earth-style nature footage of Iceland’s surviving glaciers does ironically function as a kind of travel ad for the nation, which is likely counterproductive if the end goal is to slow the effects of climate change. It says a lot that National Geographic picked up its distribution out of Sundance; if you caught it on a muted television, you might mistake it for a standard doc about how cool & beautiful glaciers are and not a heartbroken eulogy predicting their certain, mass, impending deaths. Magnason’s voice might not be the most exciting element at play here, but it’s what gives the picture meaning beyond its surface-level beauty, and Dosa was right to cede him so much room to speak from the heart.
American sex education is in such shambles that queer filmmakers have found the need to make D.I.Y. classroom tools to teach each other how to have safe, healthy sex, despite the fact that no legitimized classrooms would ever actually show them. From the PBS-special textures of Marlon Riggs’s AIDS epidemic screed Tongues Untied to the green screen psychedelia of Annie Sprinkle’s how-to guides like the Sluts & Goddesses Video Workshop, there’s a 101 classroom lecture quality to a lot of queer video art, spreading the good news about good sex one VHS cassette at a time. Take, for instance, 1995’s BloodSisters: Leather, Dykes, and Sadomasochism, a D.I.Y. camcorder documentary about the San Francisco lesbian kink scene. Ostensibly, that doc is meant to serve as a collection of oral histories from local kinksters about their personal relationships with BDSM, but the longer the interviewees pontificate about the subject the more instructive and abstract their testimonials get. It plays less like a direct-to-camera confessional from heavy-leather subculturistas than it does the orientation video you’re forced to watch before you can be issued a membership card to your local sex club.
We get a glimpse of why this kind of educational video might be necessary in an early sequence of HBO Real Sex-style street interviews, asking anonymous passersby how they feel about sado-masochistic sex. Most recoil in embarrassment, expressing a knee-jerk disgust with the subject and visible regret for having agreed to appear on camera. Then, heavy leather lesbians with stage names like Skeeter, Rainbeau, Peggy Sue, and Queen Cougar sit down for lengthy confessionals about their personal experiences on the kink scene, intentionally working to legitimize & destigmatize the practice of inflicting & receiving pain during sexual roleplay, all in the name of “cumsent.” While they explain BDSM’s political & therapeutic applications in casual, laidback chatter, graphic documents of the sexual acts being described (mostly of the spanking, whipping, and nipple torture variety) intercut & overlay their interview footage. As serious as BloodSisters is about conveying the legitimacy & ethicality of kinky sex, it also openly acknowledges that the scene profiled is mostly populated by nerds having fun playing dress-up. Everyone interviewed dons intentionally intimidating leather costumes, but they’re also reasonable, approachable people. If anything, they’re directly encouraging you to approach them at the leather bar as soon as the tape runs out and you pass the prerequisite vocabulary quiz for glossary terms like “soft butch,” “pushy bottom”, and “topping from the bottom.”
Kink education isn’t as niche of a field as it used to be. The kind of work BloodSisters was attempting to accomplish in the 90s has long had a brick-and-mortar institutional hub in The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago. Its 101 classroom lecturing has continued on in recent docs like A Body to Live In, which explains the spirituality of body modification, and Rebel Dykes, which offers a similar collection of oral histories detailing heavy-leather lesbianism in London. The film was massively important for arriving early and aggressively to that conversation, though, and thus its most vital details are in the datedness of its vintage stylistic touches: its animated punk zine credits, its cracked whip screen wipes, its rainbow colored tints, its Greek chorus of kink novelty songs from Bay Area punk band Frightwig, etc. The movie is unmistakably of the 1990s, which underlines just how important its political advocacy was both inside and outside the lesbian community. When subs & doms in an especially heavy scene start playing with bloodletting & needles, it means something different knowing what conversations about AIDS were happening offscreen in the background. Likewise, knowing what conversations about what kinds of lesbian sex do or do not reinforce the patriarchy in nearby feminist circles informs a lot of what’s said onscreen, even though that side of the “debate” is thankfully denied equal time. So, the concluding all-caps battle cry “FIST FUCK THE SYSTEM” wasn’t just included as a cheeky punchline; it was a timely, literal call to arms. Given how dated some of its defensiveness about kink feels today, it seems to have done some good.
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