brandon ledet

Humane (2024)

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All of David Cronenberg’s children are now out there making Cronenberg movies.  Eldest daughter Cassandra has several assistant-director credits that include the Cronenberg classic eXistenZ, and a slow trickle of high-style, high-concept sci-fi horrors have established son Brandon as a buzzy provocateur of his own right over the past decade.  Now, Caitlin Cronenberg has entered the family business with her debut feature Humane.  Set in a near-future America that’s struggling to keep its remaining citizens alive after Climate Change disaster, Humane‘s central hook relies on a government program that incentivizes voluntary euthanasia as a means of population control.  The government has rebranded suicide as a heroic act of “enlisting” in “the war” against humanity’s extinction, littering the streets with propaganda posters that valorize impoverished parents who sacrifice themselves to brighten their children’s future with a hefty payout.  It’s the kind of post-Twilight Zone thought experiment where the characters are more symbols than people, representing various social ills and grotesque points of view that help flesh out the central thesis more than flesh out their internal lives.  In that way, Humane is maybe more indebted to the Canadian horror tradition of the Cube series than it is to the Cronenberg family legacy, give or take a couple last-minute indulgences in dental & bodily gore that cater to the true Cronheads out there.  However, the film is surprisingly juicy if you’re invested in the larger Cronenberg nepo baby project, given that one of its major driving forces is catty, extratextual humor about spoiled brats who live in their famous father’s shadow.

Because it is a relatively cheap, made-for-streaming production, Humane cannot afford to depict the wide-scale Climate Crisis devastation that has accelerated America’s violent disdain for its own citizens.  Instead, the movie shoehorns all of the political hot topics its premise touches on (class, racism, immigration, MAGA populism, COVID denialism, environmental collapse) into rushed conversations during a single-family dinner, only hinting at the wider scale misery of the world outside their home in gestural images (UV-deflecting umbrellas, bureaucratic death squads, newscasts warning of an imminent draft for the “war”).  Peter Gallagher stars as the family figurehead: a retired, wealthy news anchor who invites his children to his home for dinner, where he announces that he and his wife plan to enlist as an act of self-sacrifice.  His children loudly rebel, squabbling with their father about the narcissism of his decision as an act of familial PR and squabbling amongst each other about who deserves what share of their imminent inheritance.  The movie takes a fun turn at the top of the second act that further isolates & escalates the fervor of that familial argument, and I refuse to spoil that twist here even though it arrives fairly early in the runtime.  What’s much more important is the obliviousness & selfishness of the nepo babies who both loathe and profit from their father’s legacy, weaponizing phrases like “What would Dad think?” to knock each other down in their vicious fight for dominance.  It’s darkly funny enough on its own merits to make Humane worth seeking out when it hits Shudder this summer, but it feels even more essential once you start extrapolating what it indicates about Caitlin Cronenberg’s home life (as filtered through collaboration with producer & screenwriter Michael Sparaga).

Not everyone will be interested in watching a feature-length subtweet about Cronenberg family gatherings, but I appreciated how Humane‘s rich-people-problems humor lightened up its political speculation about our planet’s grim future.  I felt similarly about Brandon Cronenberg’s latest film Infinity Pool, which balanced out its broader satirical sci-fi premise about wealth-class privilege with the director’s extratextual nepo baby handwringing about imposter syndrome and writer’s block.  Cronenberg’s kids could be making exact photocopies of their father’s legendary body horrors, but they’re instead undercutting that impulse with some acknowledgement & self-interrogation of their own creative, privileged circumstances.  They’re also just having fun.  I found Infinity Pool perversely hilarious and Humane surprisingly playful, especially in scenes featuring Enrico Colantoni as a bloodthirsty bureaucrat who interrupts the family dinner with plans to collect the bodies the government was promised.  It’s a small film with big ideas, not allowing its Canadian TV production values to get in the way of its thematic ambitions.  It’s also self-consciously silly, though, affording comedic actors Jay Baruchel & Emily Hampshire equal opportunity to play morbid court jesters alongside Colantoni as Gallagher’s rotten, ungrateful children.  There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I hope Caitlin Cronenberg gets to leverage her last name for more high-concept satires in the near future.  The only shame, really, is that we weren’t privy to the real-life dinner conversations that likely resulted after her family saw an early cut.  They’re fun to imagine, at least.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beast (2024)

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There’s something warmly familiar about the premise of two destined-to-be-together characters cyclically falling in love across past & future lives through reincarnation, but I can’t immediately name many concrete examples.  There’s a somber melodrama version of it in The Fountain, a cartoony alternate-universe version in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and a bodice-ripping romance version in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I’m certain there’s a much longer list of titles I’m forgetting.  However, I’m also certain that I’ve never seen that dramatic template distorted in the way Bertrand Bonello distorts it in The Beast, the same way he distorts the terrorism thriller template in Nocturama and the zombie outbreak template in Zombi Child.  The Beast is a sci-fi fantasy horror about a woman who falls for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of her past & future lives, and all that changes across them is the temporal context in which he sucks.  During the Great Paris Flood of 1910, she is seduced out of a loving marriage by the horny, handsome pest.  In the 2010s, he stalks her as a creepy incel with a low-follower-count YouTube Channel, planning to make an example out of her as revenge on all the women who’ve sexually rejected him despite being a Nice Guy.  In the 2040s, the specifics of how he sucks are mysterious until the final moments, as the doomed couple are estranged by an isolating, unemotional society dominated by A.I.  She does fall for it again, though, and the cycle continues.  Usually, when you say a couple was “meant for each other,” you don’t mean it in a Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote kind of way, but there’s something darkly, humorously true to life about that romantic dynamic that makes for a refreshingly novel use of a familiar story template.

Léa Seydoux stars as the Wile E. Coyote of the relationship, helpless to find her puppy-eyes suitor attractive in every timeline even though he consistently destroys each of her lives.  George MacKay is her Roadrunner tempter: an arrogant nerd who pursues her across centuries even though he’s cursed to “only have sex in his dreams.”  Their centuries-spanning relationships qualify both as science fiction and as fantasy.  The 2040s timeline is used as a framing device in which our future A.I. overlords offer to “cleanse our DNA” of residual trauma to make us more efficient, emotionless workers; it’s through this cleansing procedure that Seydoux relives her past flings with MacKay and learns no lessons through the process.  The crossover between timelines is also confirmed by multiple psychics, though, both of whom warn Seydoux to steer clear of the fuckboy loser to no avail.  They also explain that their mystic practices are only considered supernatural because science has not yet caught up with the real-world logic behind their effectiveness – a gap that has presumably been closed by the A.I. machines of the 2040s.  In every version of her life, Seydoux is plagued by an overbearing sense of dread that something catastrophically awful is going to happen (in an allusion to the Henry James novel The Beast in the Jungle), and she is always right.  After all, in order to live multiple lives you have to die multiple deaths.  Whether that premonition is related to the natural disasters that coincide with MacKay re-entering her lives or simply to MacKay himself is up for interpretation, but either way he’s physically attractive enough that she never learns the lesson that his physical presence is bad news.  It’s like a cosmic joke about how someone always falls for the same loser guys despite knowing better, taken literally.

The Beast is one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure is intended to be taken entirely seriously until the second act, when Bonello tips his hand by making you watch clips from Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.  Its closest reference points are crowd-displeaser genre exercises from esteemed film festival alumni: Assayas’s Demonlover, Petzold’s Undine, Wong’s 2046, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, etc.  It builds its own micro mythology through visual motifs of pigeons, babydolls, and seances that can feel meaningful & sinister in the moment but read like generative A.I. Mad Libs screenwriting when considered as a whole.  Bonello is clearly genuine in the ambition of his scale, crafting a story that requires him to convincingly pull off costume drama, home invasion, and sci-fi genre markers all in the same picture, depending on the timeline.  He’s also constantly poking fun at his own project, though, something that’s indicated as soon as the film opens in a chroma-key green screen environment as if he were directing a superhero film in the MCU.  Sometimes the dolls are creepy; sometimes they’re M3GAN-style jokes about uncanny robotics.  The pigeons foretell the immediate arrival of Death, but it’s also hard not to laugh when one attacking Seydoux is scored as if it were a flying hellbeast.  Like all of Bonello’s previous provocations, The Beast was designed to split opinions, but I thought it was a hoot.  It can be funny, scary, sexy, or alienating depending on the filmmaker’s momentary moods; the only constant is the male entitlement of the central fuckboy villain, which is only effective because he’s such a handsome devil.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #211: Funny Girl (1968) & Babsapalooza

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Welcome to Episode #211 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Britnee, and Brandon discuss a wide range of Barbra Streisand films, from her Oscar-winning breakout role in Funny Girl (1968) to her Oscar-nominated directorial effort The Prince of Tides (1991).

00:00 Welcome

02:53 The People’s Joker (2024)
07:47 Civil War (2024)
19:23 American Psycho (2000)
25:09 Keeping the Faith (2000)
30:19 Singapore Sling (1990)

34:07 Funny Girl (1968)
57:39 The Owl and the Pussycat (1970)
1:06:02 What’s Up Doc? (1972)
1:16:39 The Prince of Tides (1991)

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

Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine (2000)

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The streaming era has democratized film distribution in many ways, offering direct user-uploaded platforms like YouTube & Vimeo to publish your work for a worldwide audience alongside lower-tier streamers who are hungry to fill their libraries with cheap-to-license titles like Tubi, Hoopla, and PlutoTV.  Good luck getting anyone to actually watch your work, though.  Because there are so many platforms for low-budget productions, the likelihood that an audience will stumble across your particular no-budget movie in the endless #content wilderness shrinks every year.  There are some ways that the scarcity of earlier eras was healthy for the independent filmmaking landscape, if not only because it was a lot more likely that your film would get noticed outside your local friend-circle bubble.  For instance, a digi-SOV sci-fi novelty from Korea could break out of the genre film fest circuit to reach an international audience and land a belated review from luminary critic Jonathan Rosenbaum despite being shot on home video equipment in empty alleys & warehouses.  The try-hard edginess of Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine tested my patience as soon as I read its title, but there was something about its “Let’s put on a show!” no-budget earnestness that made me weirdly nostalgic for a recent bygone era.  Nowadays, you have to be Steven Soderbergh if you want your handheld digi-cam experiments to earn a sizable audience for anything longer than a TikTok clip.  So, even when I was wincing at the grotesque ribaldry that Teenage Hooker wanted me to find humorous, I still found myself compelled to pour one out for the D.I.Y. cyberpunk gore hounds who’ve been left behind by the cruel march of time. 

Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine is SOV genre trash about an underage sex worker who’s murdered by her schoolteacher then brought back to life by a mad scientist as a killer cyborg on a revenge mission.  Because the movie is only an hour long (and bookended by at least ten minutes of opening & closing credits), there isn’t much else to divulge beyond that one-sentence premise.  All I can really do here is spoil its one great idea: the strap-on machine gun our undead heroine uses to shoot her teacher dead from crotch level in the final scene.  Everything before that final act of criminally horny violence is either a goofball non sequitur (like an impromptu dance break when the evil teacher first discovers his student turning tricks in an alley, disturbing his mother’s sleep) or a home movie level restaging of more substantial, professional work (including a cosplay version of the cyborg-construction imagery of Ghost in the Shell).  Had the entire movie been a revenge rampage in which the main weapon of choice was a cyborg’s killer strap-on, this would still very likely be making the rounds as a must-see cult film for dorm room stoners everywhere.  Instead, it’s just outrageous enough of a stunt that you can see how it briefly held audiences’ attention in the early 2000s.  There’s little scene-to-scene cohesion in its hurried shaky-cam tours through the back alleys of Seoul, but every few scenes there’s a detail that’ll perk you up in your seat: nighttime sunglasses paired a schoolgirl uniform, sex set to Benny Hill-style novelty jazz, a bed that is also a lightbulb, etc.  It’s the kind of movie where the protagonist is shot in the chest, exposing the wires inside, just so you can turn to your nearest bro and shout “Whoa, her tit exploded!” between bong rips.

I mostly had a good time with Teenage Hooker despite my dorm room days being decades behind me.  Its humor is flat, its sex is sour, and its comic book stylization can be a little embarrassing for an adult audience … and yet, there’s something mesmerizing about its digi-cam cinematography that makes it a thrilling watch.  The absurdly wide fish-eye lenses and the handheld jerkiness of its framing—combined with the late-90s record store staff-picks soundtrack—gives it the instant cool cred of a vintage skateboarding video, a relic of a time long gone.  I dare say there’s even a Wong Kar Wai quality to the digital red, yellow, and green hazes of its fluorescent-lit color palette.  There are dozens of Japanese genre titles from this era that I would recommend someone check out before prioritizing Teenage Hooker (the playful handheld camera work of Hideaki Anno’s Cutie Honey and the vicious, supernatural schoolgirl violence of Sion Sono’s Suicide Club both immediately come to mind), but the D.I.Y. production values and the Korean context of this specific title do make it tempting to root for as an underdog.  Even now, while we’re living under the illusion that every movie ever made is affordable & accessible, I had to access Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine through Archive.org, since it wasn’t commercially available through any official means.  At least that low-quality, heavily pixelated transfer accentuated the early-2000s nostalgia of the presentation, recalling a time when it would take 20 hours to download no-budget schlock like this through a torrent tracker – a time when no-budget schlock like this was enough of a buzzy online attention-grabber to be worth that all-day wait.

-Brandon Ledet

Singapore Sling (1990)

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It took a couple weeks of diligent blog posts & podcast recordings to review all thirteen screenings I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, of which the major highlights were local premieres of Don Hertzfeldt’s Me, Tilman Singer’s Cuckoo, and Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow.  Overlook recaps are never complete if you only cover what movies you saw at the fest, though; it’s just as important to report on the movies you took home from the fest, thanks to the consistent, essential presence of boutique Blu-ray distributor Vinegar Syndrome as an on-site vendor.  I pick up killer genre obscurities from the Vinegar Syndrome table every year, mostly because I’m prompted to select titles I’ve never heard of before by their striking cover art and by the curational nudging of a knowledgeable sales rep.  I’ve left past Overlooks with blind-buy purchases of Nightbeast, The Suckling, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street – all bangers.  This year’s highlight purchase was a recent in-house restoration of the 1990 Greek sexploitation thriller Singapore Sling, a movie that jumped out at me through the striking black-and-white S&M iconography on its slipcover and that over-delivered on the debauchery that graphic promises.  Equal parts horror, noir, and pornography, it’s gorgeous high-art smut: the exact qualities Vinegar Syndrome regulars search for in the label’s extensive catalog.  It’s almost unbelievable that it’s a new release for the company, since it feels just as perfectly calibrated to their brand as early, signature VS titles like The Telephone Book.

There are three separate narrators in this sordid domestic drama, all of whom directly address the audience in stage-play soliloquy.  One is the titular Singapore Sling (named after a cocktail recipe, the only scrap of identification that can be found on his person); he’s a macho noir archetype who’s taken hard to alcoholism as his years-long search for his beloved, vanished Laura has proven fruitless. Tracking Laura’s ghost to a mysterious, remote mansion, he meets our other two narrators: the dominatrix owner of the estate and her childlike nympho daughter – a mother-daughter duo who are introduced to the audience roleplaying as the missing Laura and engaging in incestuous, fetishistic sex with the aid of a strap-on dildo.  You see, they most definitely killed the missing woman, along with dozens of unnamed servants buried in a mass grave under their home’s flower garden, because they are wealthy and thus depraved.  Like all noir protagonists, our POV character is doomed as soon as he stumbles into the web of these femmes fatales.  They immediately beat him into concussion, tie him to a bedframe with ropes & leather straps, and take turns raping him while teasing out whether he’s aware of their similar abuse of the mysterious Laura.  Speaking of which, the name “Laura” is repeated by all three players with feverish, orgasmic frequency, and it eventually proves to be a direct allusion to the classic 1940s Otto Preminger noir, complete with out-of-context references to Laura’s broken lake house radio.  Whether you ever thought the noir genre could use a little sprucing up with proto-torture-porn sensibilities is dependent on your personal interests as an audience, but I can at least say I’ve never seen that exact combination before.

Singapore Sling is incestuous femdom erotica filtered through the filmmaking aesthetics of classic Universal monster movies.  The father figure of the family home is dressed up like the Boris Karloff version of The Mummy and stored in the attic as an artifactual sex object.  The women of the house keep some traditional BDSM restraints & tools lying around, but they also incorporate perplexing electrical equipment seemingly borrowed from the set of James Wale’s Frankenstein into their “play” (i.e., rape & torture).  Its black-and-white horror sensibilities are warmly familiar, but its rape-fantasy logic feels genuinely dangerous outside the context of privately read erotic fiction, which is only slightly eased by it being played as a taboo freak-out instead of a pure turn-on.  I haven’t felt this shameful while falling in love with a movie since I first watched The Skin I Live In, and its cheeky provocations don’t feel all that out of line with Almodóvar’s general schtick.  I haven’t yet seen any other features from director Nikos Nikolaidis, but it appears that shock & provocation are constant in his work, evidenced by the 2011 documentary of the Vinegar Syndrome disc that features a montage of his actresses pissing & vomiting in a wide range of violent, sexual scenarios.  Here, pissing & vomiting are their versions of cumshots, and their concussed captive has no choice but to lie back and take it until there is a chance to escape.  I have no reference for where Nikolaidis was positioned in the Greek cinematic imagination in his time, but I do see direct evidence here that he was at least influential on currently ascending Greek provocateur Yorgos Lanthimos, from the outlandish incest of Dogtooth to the fruit-flavored masturbation and classic-monster visual cues of Poor Things.

There’s almost no way to recommend Singapore Sling without sounding like a carnival barker luring rubes into a geek show.  Indeed, the film does have a Spider Baby quality to its “Get a load of these freaks!” premise, which never expands beyond hanging around a decrepit mansion with sexual deviants until everyone involved is fucked to death.  For all of its kink & gore, though, it’s a strangely calm, quietly eerie affair, mostly scored by the soft meditation-app rain patter of the “sick and sad” world outside the mansion walls.  It’s not the kind of kill-a-minute splatstick horror that punctuates every sequence with an active disemboweling; it’s the kind of off-putting, degenerate horror that collects the organs from a disemboweling to arrange into sensual tableaux, decorated with victims’ jewelry for perverse beauty.  That stomach-turning disorientation is better experienced than described, which makes this an ideal blind-buy home video experience.  It’s easily my favorite film I’ve picked up from Vinegar Syndrome’s merch table at Overlook, where I consistently gamble on titles without the hive-mind knowledge of the internet informing my purchases.  Relying only on the box-cover artwork and the guidance of Staff Picks at that table is the closest I get to the vintage video store experience in this post-Blockbuster Video world (at least until Future Shock Video gets a storefront going in the not-too-distant future, many many bus rides away). I look forward to it every year almost as much as I look forward to the official selections on the Overlook program. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Telephone Book (1971)

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I don’t know that most people decide what podcasts to listen to based on which are most “useful” to them, but I still want to report that Justin LaLiberty’s guest episodes on Brian Saur’s Just the Discs Podcast are the most useful the medium has ever been to me.  Shortly before every Vinegar Syndrome flash sale, Saur will interview LaLiberty (longtime Letterboxd champion and current Director of Operations for VS partner label OCN Distribution) about what titles Blu-ray collectors should scoop up while prices are low.  These conversations are always overflowing with great recommendations for high-style, low-profile genre films I would have never heard of otherwise, and it’s the kind of podcast I listen to with a notepad on hand.  To that point, one title LaLiberty has repeatedly promoted on these Just the Discs eps is the 1971 sexploitation comedy The Telephone Book, to the point where purchasing it felt mandatory (especially since its softcore lewdness pretty much guarantees it’ll never land on a major streaming service).  In general, Vinegar Syndrome has been particularly proud of this discovery & release, using it as a touchstone representative of the distro’s brand: vintage schlock & porno that has more cultural & artistic value than its reputation would suggest.  Having now finally seen it, I totally get it.  It’s a masterpiece of messy, sweaty, independent filmmaking – the exact kind of forgotten curio movie nerds are always hoping to rescue out of the bargain bin.

The Telephone Book is a freewheeling, semi-pornographic arthouse comedy about the divine art of dirty phone calls.  It’s grimy, street-level New York City filmmaking at its most playfully absurd.  Sarah Kennedy stars as an impossibly bubbly 18-year-old nymphomaniac who wastes away horny afternoons sweating alone in her NYC apartment.  Her bedroom boredom routine is violently disrupted at the start of the film by an anonymous dirty phone call from a man in a nearby photobooth, who announces himself under the alias John Smith.  Shocked that the call is the most satisfying sexual experience of her young life, she’s determined to track down the mysterious John Smith in the phone book listings, which guides her through a series of decreasingly satisfying sexual escapades around the city.  The film quickly devolves into a sketch comedy format from there, with isolated performances from 1970s theatre powerhouses William Hickey & Jill Clayburgh standing out among the more generic perverts of NYC.  Then, the momentum of the search for the phonebooth John Smith comes to an abrupt stop when he physically shows up at the scene of the crime, entering our nympho heroine’s apartment disguised in a pig mask.  Most of the rest of the runtime is comprised of his explanation of how he got so good at making dirty phone calls, playing out like the killer’s confession at the end of a slasher.  Then, he repeats the act that drove his victim insanely horny in the first place, melting down what remains of reality with the filthy sound of his voice.

The climactic dirty phone call is so ecstatically perfect that it cannot be convincingly depicted onscreen.  Instead, scenes of the second phonebooth call are intercut with the pornographic images bouncing around in Kennedy’s head, illustrated as crude bathroom-graffiti sex cartoons and explosive warzone audio.  The entire movie plays like a filthy collage in this way, right down to the graphic decor of our heroine’s bedroom, which looks like if the cut-and-paste wallpaper of Daisies was made entirely of porno mags (matching the general vibe of watching Věra Chytilová adapt articles out of Screw magazine).  War photography stock footage illustrates John Smith’s confession of power & guilt as his demented madman ravings get lost in the weeds of fascist American militarism and simulated space madness.  Cutaway interviews asking men why they make dirty phone calls to strangers recall the candid street interviews of Funeral Parade of Roses in their frequent plot disruption.  I’ve seen a few American titles that share DNA with The Telephone Book‘s oversexed, anarchic satire (and I really mean just a few – particularly Bone, Putney Swope, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?), but it’s all played with a tone & visual style that would feel much more at home in an artsy European film fest environment.  I don’t know that anyone’s out there dying to see Al Goldstein’s cheesecake sexuality filtered through the collagey French New Wave sensibilities of Agnès Varda, but if you’re out there, there is exactly one movie that might hit the spot.

As a vintage sexploitation time capsule, The Telephone Book is most illustrative in how it turns phonebooths and phone books into fetish objects of its era, splashing them with the cold water of a dial-a-prayer 900 number service for counterbalance.  Sarah Kennedy’s performance as a Sexy Baby archetype with a girlish voice & body but a monstrously voracious sexual appetite is also a marker of its time.  At one point, she watches then participates in the filming of an orgy as if she were a child observing then entering a petting zoo, fascinated by but detached from the action.  It’s difficult to say whether that characteristic was intended as pure macho fantasy or a pointed satire thereof, but it is undercut by the inclusion of Clayburgh’s more mature, jaded performance as her sultry bestie.  Clayburgh exists only in phone calls with Kennedy, never bothering to take off her sleeping mask while receiving head or loading her revolver in bed, only removing it once the phone sex with John Smith heats her up to an unbearable degree.  John Smith himself (a masked Norman Rose) is where the political satire of the picture creeps in and dismantles the entire illusion of the cutesy nudie cutie it could’ve been without him.  His confession and repeated phone call in the back half are so brilliantly staged that they make you want to immediately start the movie over again to reexamine sillier elements you might have dismissed as smut & fluff in the opening stretch.  That’s partly what makes it such an ideal movie to own on disc, the same way its psychedelic porno breakdown makes it an ideal Vinegar Syndrome disc in particular.

-Brandon Ledet

Both Ways (1975)

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Long before New Queer Cinema directors like Derek Jarman, Todd Haynes, and Gregg Araki were praised for their confrontational depiction of queer sexuality onscreen in the 1990s, there was already a strong, decades-long independent filmmaking tradition of doing just that in hardcore gay pornography.  At least, that was the central thesis of Liz Purchell’s archival work in the Ask Any Buddy project, which is where I first heard of Jerry Douglas’s 1975 bisexual romance thriller Both Ways.  Although the review of Both Ways on the Ask Any Buddy podcast was less than glowing, it still felt like a necessary purchase when I ran across a used DVD copy of the film in a Minneapolis record store, since its X-rated onscreen sex meant I’d unlikely be able to access it on any mainstream streaming service in the near future (which is the exact kind of false scarcity logic that’s led me to collect a modest stack of vintage porno titles like Pink Narcissus, SexWorld, Bijou, and Fleshpot on 42nd Street).  On its surface, Both Ways is a fairly straightforward—pun unintended—porno drama about a closeted bisexual man living a double life, but between the director’s commentary track on the Vinegar Syndrome disc, the supplementary insight from the Ask Any Buddy pod, and the plot’s last-minute swerve into Hickcockian violence—okay, pun obviously intended that time—it ends up feeling like a surprisingly substantial work of outsider art.

The first sounds you hear in this Golden Age porno is a child giggling as his father tickles him on a carnival Ferris wheel.  Gerald Grant stars as a straight-laced family man: a Harvard graduate (which he’ll remind you of frequently) who’s built a tidy suburban life for himself as a high-powered lawyer and a loving father of a young son.  All is not well in the bedroom, though, as his sexually neglected wife, played by Andrea True (likely the most famous member of the cast, due to her disco hit “More More More”), confronts him for being distracted by a secret affair outside the house that she can’t quite figure out.  She’s correct, of course, as her husband has been sneaking around with—shocker of all shockers—a Yale student played by Dean Tait.  Now, you might expect that vintage pornography about a closeted bi man’s infidelity would mean double the variety of onscreen sex, but it really just doubles the amount of couples bickering.  This is the kind of porno-chic relic that speeds through rapid edits of sex scenes so it can really dig into its domestic melodrama, making for a shockingly sincere representation of male bisexuality for its era … until it takes a wild swerve into psychological thriller territory.  After all of its cheeky humor about collegiate rivalry between Harvard & Yale and all of its sentimental homelife drama in which the father figure constantly buys his cavity-sweet son handfuls of balloons, Both Ways gets really dark in its final twenty minutes, making for a chilling ending to something that’s ostensibly supposed to heat couples up on a naughty date night.

In filmmaking terms, Both Ways is surprisingly playful for a hardcore porno.  Douglas does a lot to mirror the domestic scenes in both of our antihero’s competing relationships, even going as far as to symmetrically pose his actors in front of wall-hung mirrors to drive the point home.  During early domestic squabbles where both couples recount how they first met and during a later pornographic montage of the cheating husband alternating between his two partners in two separate beds, the threesome’s body language is exactly copied in direct contrast to underline how little meaningful, physical difference there is between the two relationships.  Douglas also plays around with insert shots of artificial exteriors to simulate intimate dialogue when characters are navigating the world outside their bedrooms, shooting his actors against a surreal blue-void “sky”.  He also tries his best to ground this tale of extramarital romance within the context of Free Love looseness, setting a major couple’s spat at a swingers’ wife-swap orgy and meticulously framing a lit joint at the center of a male performer’s buttcheeks.  Other visual details & directorial choices are more inscrutable, such as the frequent cutaways to a frumpy housekeeper during the aforementioned wife-swap, the repetitive focus on yellowed copies of New York Times headlines to mark the timeline of the couples’ pasts, and the Ivy Leaguers’ obsession with ceramic beer steins – which only become more noticeably bizarre the more they become directly involved in the scene-to-scene plot.  It’s all baffling in its distraction from the presupposed purpose of hardcore pornography, but it also all adds to the feeling that this is a personal, thoughtful, creative project for Douglas instead of a quick cash grab between writing his off-Broadway stage plays.

I’m fond of Both Ways despite all of its lopsided plotting and its confused representation of Normal male bisexuality.  Even after the domestic melodrama gives way to crime-thriller psychology, the movie still has an oddly light tone to it, present both in the generic funk-guitar background music and in the nosy investigations of a local antiques dealer who mistakes the husband’s sneaking around for living a double life as an undercover Commie spy.  It may not be the artistic pinnacle of Golden Age pornography, but it does function as a clear, standalone example of how porn from that era has unique cultural value as independent filmmaking.  If nothing else, it’s difficult to imagine any mainstream Hollywood studio dramas of that time depicting male bisexuality with so much candor (even if it is easy to imagine a Hollywood version of this film choosing to conclude with the exact same act of domestic violence).  I got the sense that the reason the Ask Any Buddy crew were less enthused about Both Ways in their much better-informed review is that Jerry Douglas had previously contributed to a much more accomplished bisexual porno as the writer of Radley Metzger’s Score, which makes this one suffer by comparison.  I cannot personally speak to that comparison, as I have not yet scored a copy of Score while killing time in second-hand media stores on vacation, but I also never expected to find Both Ways through that method either, so never say never.

-Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: A Place in the Sun (1951)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1951’s A Place in the Sun, is a high-emotions noir about a desperate social climber who drowns his pregnant girlfriend so she doesn’t get in the way of his wealthier, prettier romantic prospect.  In essence, it’s an epic-fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor.  She was the most marriageable woman of all time, after all, apparently lethally so.  At the time, Taylor was just starting to make the transition from child star to adult romantic lead, and A Place in the Sun doesn’t ask her to do much other than to look elegant while modeling classic gowns designed by Edith Head.  Most of the film’s more serious brooding is left to Taylor’s costars Montgomery Clift & Shelley Winters as the factory-worker couple who’re undone by her natural glamor. 

Elizabeth Taylor’s onscreen transformation into a convincingly mature actress did not begin & end with A Place in the Sun.  It was a gradual rebranding over several projects under her studio-system contract with MGM.  If you’re curious to track her progress through this transitional era, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Conspirator (1949)

Elizabeth Taylor’s first role as an adult character was co-lead of the Cold War espionage thriller Conspirator, starring opposite Robert Taylor.  Elizabeth plays Robert’s 18-year-old bride but was only 16 at the time of shooting, while her co-star was more than double her age, in his late 30s.  That might sound like a gross, old-fashioned approach to Old Hollywood romance—and maybe it is—but it’s at least acknowledged & addressed in the text.  Elizabeth plays a young, bratty teenager who has no business getting married, while Robert plays a Soviet spy posing as a British officer who’s attracted to her because she’s naive and easy to manipulate.  There’s some sly humor to the way the pair star in entirely separate movies for the first half of Conspirator.  Elizabeth is playing girlish, flirty games while Robert is plotting to subvert the Western Bloc, often undermined by his young wife’s immature antics.  That tension slowly deflates once the bride is fully clued into her husband’s true allegiances, but the path to that reveal is more fun than you might expect.

Of course, the teenage Taylor radiates pure movie star glamor in this otherwise mediocre Red Scare noir — the same natural glamor that she echoes in the soon-to-come A Place in the Sun.  There’s something incredibly charming about her character’s insistence on being treated like an adult, while also being too scared to sleep alone during thunderstorms and waiting around like a puppy for her crush to call on the telephone.  Conspirator is far from her best onscreen work, but it is a clear marker of her transition into being seen as an adult by her audience, almost to the point of it being her character’s arc.  In a third-act argument with her Filthy Commie husband, he remarks, “You’ve grown up, haven’t you?”, and she spits back “You can’t lie to me anymore, if that’s what you mean.”  The couple’s age gap may make for an uncomfortable pairing, but the movie clearly knows what it’s doing with it; the paranoid anti-Communist politics on the other hand . . .

Father of the Bride (1950)

Vincent Minnelli’s original adaptation of the 1949 novel Father of the Bride is just as bubbly & fluffy as its later adaptations in Norah Ephron’s 1991 version and the most recent straight-to-HBO-Max remake.  Like in A Place in the Sun, Taylor isn’t asked to do much in the picture besides look elegant in her couture gowns, this time including an iconic wedding dress (that ironically telegraphs of her many tabloid-covered weddings decades down the line).  Most of the film’s psychological grit defaults to the titular father (Spencer Tracy), who narrates his neurotic breakdown as he watches Daddy’s Little Girl prepare to walk down the wedding aisle, struggling to reconcile how he sees her vs her actual, adult autonomy.  In that way, it’s a perfect role for the teenaged Taylor, who was asking audiences to stop looking at her like a little girl and start seeing her as an adult.  It’s also a strange, upsetting reflection of macho insecurities lurking just under the surface of every American dad’s Neanderthalic skull.

The 1950 Father of the Bride might be light-hearted fluff, but it’s still high-quality fluff when compared to the mawkish sentimentality of its two remakes.  At the very least, its surrealistic nightmare sequence in which Tracy sinks into the floor while walking Taylor down the aisle is the high-water mark for the series as visual art.  More importantly, there’s something about the promo shots of Tracy spanking Taylor in her wedding dress that gets to the core of this series’ Suburban Dad Psychosis more than anything that happens in the actual films.  This is fundamentally a comedy about how fathers infantilize their daughters for as long as they can get away with it, so there’s something apt about casting a young actor who was pleading to no longer be infantilized by her audience as a child star.

Giant (1956)

Taylor didn’t fully come into her own as a lead actor playing adult characters until she reunited with A Place in the Sun director George Stevens for the sprawling Texas family drama Giant.  Specifically, it happens about halfway into the epic melodrama, just when my borrowed library DVD prompted me to flip the disc over to Side B.  In the first 100 minutes on Side A, Taylor plays a defiant but romantic teenager who’s swept off her feet by a Texas cattle rancher (Rock Hudson), only to discover that her handsome, charming husband is also a raging racist & misogynist in most social settings, as is the way of his home state.  At the start of Side B, she’s shown knitting in the family parlor, her hair pasted grey for an unconvincing geriatric stage-drama effect.  Decades into her marriage to an old-fashioned, uptight cowboy, she’s still a progressive do-gooder who challenges his Conservative views on women and the Mexican servant class every chance she gets, which means she has a lot more to chew on here than she has in Conspirator, Father of the Bride, or even A Place in the Sun.  Giant is the kind of well-meaning, anti-racist drama that’s just old & creaky enough to undercut its point by casting white actors in brownface for the minor roles, but it’s still surprisingly left of center for a studio production of this epic scale, and Taylor is the main mouthpiece for its political messaging.

I’m tempted to pitch Giant as what might happen if Douglas Sirk guest-directed a season of Yellowstone, but the existence of Sirk’s Written on the Wind (released the same year, also starring Hudson) makes that comparison somewhat redundant.  Stevens was a formidable contemporary of Sirk’s, but there’s nothing especially stylish or personal about his filmmaking craft that makes Giant more essential viewing than Written on the Wind or Imitation of Life, which combine to cover a lot of the same thematic territory.  He was a talented workman director within the studio system, most reliable for his ability to manage large-scale productions without them spiraling out of control.  It’s not a flashy, auteurist approach to directing, but it does allow for the Old Hollywood dream factory to do its work at peak efficiency.  If nothing else, Giant is worth seeing for the spectacle of its cast.  It almost seems impossible that a single movie could gather Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper and Sal Mineo all in one picture, but when you stretch your runtime out 3.5 hours and your setting over multiple decades, you have the space for that kind of feat.  Taylor & Hudson are the white-hot center of the drama, though, and they’re the main reason to clear an evening to watch it in full.  When Hudson first spots a teenage Taylor on her family farm, she’s riding a wild, misbehaved horse and he absentmindedly calls her a “beautiful animal” in a way that equates the two.  Years into their marriage, that wild streak never fades, and the adult version of Taylor’s character is given plenty open land to run free and buck Texas social conventions, to her husband’s fury & frustration.  It was a career-making role for her, one that cleared a path to the even juicier roles in Tennessee Williams & Edward Albee adaptations that were just over the horizon. 

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Heathers (1989)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the influential high school mean-girl comedy Heathers (1989).

00:00 The Big Texan Steak Ranch

09:00 Lured (1947)
11:10 Eraserhead (1977)
16:19 The House on Telegraph Hill (1951)
20:50 Drive-Away Dolls (2024)
24:18 Sasquatch Sunset (2024)
28:06 The Beast (2024)

34:57 Heathers (1989)

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

Deep Cover (1992)

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There was a period of time in my childhood when I was convinced that Laurence Fishburne is the greatest actor alive.  Decades later, I’m once again being swayed to believe that superlative, except now my supporting evidence has less to do with his work in the high-premise sci-fi films The Matrix & Event Horizon than it has to do with his more complex character work in Bill Duke’s Deep Cover & John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood.  Fishburne was well rewarded in his 1990s heyday, including an Oscar nomination for his brutish portrayal of Ike Turner in What’s Love Got to With It? and an Independent Sprit Award for Best Male Lead in Deep Cover.  To my knowledge, Event Horizon earned no Oscar buzz to speak of in 1997, which would have disappointed me to know at age 11.  Since then, Fishburne has slipped into the Great Actor void, mostly working in TV and in IP extenders when studios should be churning out a new Awards Bait star vehicle for him every year the same way we pamper other living greats like Glenn Close, Annette Benning, and Meryl Streep.  It’s a shame, especially once you get cynical about how other Black legends like Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, and even Deep Cover director Bill Duke have been left to simmer on the same Hollywood backburner.

It might seem naive to discuss an undercover cop thriller like Deep Cover in these prestige-acting terms, but it really does give Fishburne a lot of room to show off.  If nothing else, it somehow finds an entire new layer of self-conflict to the moral dilemma of a cop having to commit crimes to stop them, despite the already long-bald tires on that trope.  We open with a flashback to the cop’s childhood trauma on A Very Shane Black Christmas, when his addict father was gunned down in front of him while robbing a liquor store for gift & drug money.  The rest of the movie is set in the New Jack City 1990s, where Fishburne’s childhood trauma under the violence & desperation of addiction has curdled into furious disgust with the crack epidemic that has rattled Los Angeles.  In order to take down the white ghouls at the top of the ladder who supply drugs to the Black community, Fishburne allows himself to be recruited to go undercover as one of their business partners.  In the process, he gets especially close to a scummy yuppie lawyer played by Jeff Goldblum, whose “condescending infatuation with everything Black” makes their already volatile workplace relationship even more explosively tense.  Most of Fishburne’s conflict is internal, though.  He is handling, selling, and profiting off the one evil he has dedicated his life to avoiding, and every moment of that hypocritical turmoil weighs heavy in his angry, self-hating eyes.

Deep Cover is currently in print as a Criterion Collection Blu-ray, but it entered my house as a 20-year-old thrift store DVD.  That dichotomy is a perfect snapshot of where it lands on the prestige/trash spectrum, stealthily operating as a high-style art film that’s gone undercover as a thriller-of-the-week marquee filler.  Bill Duke’s directorial instincts deserve just as much credit for its impact as Fishburne’s acting chops, updating classic noir tropes for Spike Lee’s America.  Fishburne’s overly verbose narration track is classic noir at least, and Duke’s vision of Los Angeles is one where every alley spews a volcano of mysterious urban steam into an atmospheric haze of neon reds & blues (often alternating from the tops of passing cop cars).  The editing rhythms are chopped into jerky stops & jumps, feeling more DJ’d than traditionally spliced.  Its aesthetic indulgence in post-MTV style only gets more intense from there the further its characters lose themselves in the momentum of cocaine psychosis – a style that eventually came full circle when the movie was marketed with a tie-in music video featuring Snoop Dogg & Dr. Dre.  It’s a cool video promoting a very cool movie, but what I ended up cherishing most about Deep Cover was the amount of screenpsace it reserved for watching one our greatest living actors be great at acting.  It’s shocking how few other movies afford Fishburne the same generosity.

-Brandon Ledet