brandon ledet

Tokyo Pop (1988)

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The names behind the production & restoration of the international 80s punk romcom Tokyo Pop can be a little jarring at first, but you quickly get used to it.  Kino Lorber’s recent Blu-ray release of the movie states that its restoration was made possible by the Jane Fonda Fund for Women Directors.  I did not previously know that fund existed, but it does track with Fonda’s keen, career-long political awareness within the Hollywood system.  The statement goes on to say that funding was supported by contributions from Dolly Parton & Carol Burnett, who aren’t regularly in the business of film preservation & distribution.  The Dolly Parton donation makes the most immediate sense, given both her collaboration with Fonda on the classic workplace-politics comedy 9 to 5 and her philanthropic contributions to other worthy causes, like developing a viable vaccine for COVID-19.  Burnett’s involvement only makes sense once you learn that her late daughter, Carrie Hamilton, stars in the film in her biggest role outside of her TV credits.  So, the only collaborator here that I can’t fully make sense of is the namesake of the Woman Director in question who’s being supported by Fonda’s fund.  Tokyo Pop was Fran Rubel Kuzui’s debut feature as a director and earned great accolades after its premiere at Cannes.  What I can’t fully wrap my mind around is the fact that Kuzui’s only other directorial credit is the 1992 movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, another high-style cult classic with great sleepover VHS rental appeal.  Why didn’t she get an opportunity to direct more movies?  It’s the kind of sexist Hollywood funding disparity that requires activist intervention, say, from a Jane Fonda type.

Hamilton stars as an NYC rock ‘n’ roller who moves to Japan on a whim and becomes an unlikely popstar.  Arriving without a plan or much pocket change, she’s saved from going destitute by a soul-crushing job playing hostess to drunk businessmen at a karaoke bar and by a fortuitous hookup with the singer of a rock ‘n’ roll band who’s looking for a gaijin (foreigner) vocalist.  She’s reluctant to take the singing job at first, since part of the reason she fled New York in the first place was that she was tired of “singing backup for creeps.”  She eventually gives in, though, and the band quickly becomes a kind of Japanese novelty act, performing karaoke-style covers of pop tunes like “Do You Believe in Magic?” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”.  The songs are admittedly corny, but Hamilton is admirably thorny in a Smithereens kind of way, playing the sour counterbalance to romantic co-lead Yutaka “Diamond Yukai” Tadokoro’s childlike sweetness.  In one standout sequence, he teaches her Japanese as sexual foreplay, but then she stops the session short once he mounts her with boyish over-enthusiasm.  The movie constantly undercuts its romcom beats in that way, ultimately deciding that it’s even more romantic if its central players don’t end up together in the end – prioritizing personal triumph over interpersonal connection.  As far as white-women-soul-searching-in-Tokyo stories go, it’s at least as effective as Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winning Lost in Translation, with the added benefit of not taking itself nearly as seriously.  Incredibly, Diamond Yukai also appears in that film, but that time without his band Red Warriors in tow.

As smartly balanced as its romantic-comedy notes are, Tokyo Pop is most remarkable as a documentary time capsule of 80s Japanese pop kitsch.  It gawks at the pop-art iconography of Tokyo from every angle it can manage, taking the audience on a tour of psychedelic rock clubs, karaoke bars, fast food restaurants, kaiju-scale advertisements, pro wrestler locker rooms, unlicensed Disney-themed hostels, and pay-by-the-hour sex motels.  Our lead has no defined persona of her own, imitating famous American singers in her stage performances and advertising her availability to any band who’ll take her, regardless of genre.  Tokyo’s cultural persona more than makes up for that deficiency, overwhelming the screen with the bright, cartoonish colors of a city-size arcade.  It’s entirely possible that Fran Rubel Kuzui never directed much after this debut because she never wanted to leave that arcade.  Most of her non-Buffy career highlights after Tokyo Pop are tied to the Japanese entertainment industry rather than Hollywood or the NYC indie scene, mostly exporting low-budget American films and seasons of South Park there.  Tokyo Pop ends with Hamilton bravely deciding not to allow Tokyo to swallow her up, so that she gives up a loving relationship with a fellow rock ‘n’ roller so she can be her own person instead.  Maybe Kuzui gave into the candy-coated mania of that city instead, allowing herself to get fully lost in translation.  Or, just as likely, she just wasn’t given many worthwhile opportunities by the money men of American film studios so she created her own career path outside the US instead, refusing to play “backup for creeps.” 

-Brandon Ledet

Privilege (1967)

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I’m sure the millions of dollars help ease the tension a little, but being a popstar really does sound miserable.  Between recent reports of Ice Spice twerking with joyless dead-eyed monotony, Taylor Swift cancelling tours dates under credible terrorist threats, and Chappell Roan tearfully begging her own fans to back the fuck off and let her breathe a little, it appears that the all the Pop Girlies aren’t enjoying fame so much as they’re Going Through It.  This isn’t some recent phenomenon of the social media era either, which has encouraged obsessed fans to stand out in a global crowd by either viciously “defending” their Fav online or by hurling water bottles at that Fav in person, depending on which attracts the most momentary attention.  Being miserable has been a core fixture of modern pop stardom from the very beginning, which you can mostly clearly track over the course of The Beatles’ transformation in the 1960s from four goofball lads looking for a laugh to four miserable hippie chain-smokers who could no longer stand to be in a room with one another.  Culture scholars will point to earlier celebrities like Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby or Louis Armstrong as the first true popstars, but there’s something hyper-specific and extensively documented about the Beatles saga in particular that makes them feel like the Big Bang event of the modern pop landscape.  The scale & ferocity of Beatlemania will likely never be matched again in our post-monoculture era, but whenever I see how drained & defeated modern stars are by their own rabid fanbases, I always think about the Beatles cancelling all future live performances mid-career because the crowds simply did not know how to behave.

That symbolic, definitive role of The Beatles as the poster boys for popstar misery was already apparent when the band was still active.  At least, Peter Watkins saw great importance in the band’s dehumanizing level of international fame.  His 1967 film Privilege is a grim satire of Beatlemania, extrapolating a dystopian trajectory for “the youth of the future” based on how they treated the popstars of their day.  The film is set in the “near future” but only could have been made in the Swinging 60s UK, indulging in the far-out, psychedelic fashions & designs of its era while simultaneously diagnosing Beatlemania as a symptom of widespread cultural rot.  Real-life Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones stars as the fictional rock singer Steven Shorter (a lateral move in terms of flashy stage name recognition).  As the most beloved and most hassled pop singer of all time, Steven’s unremarkability as a name and as a presence is slyly mocked in the opening scenes where an endless sea of screaming teens hold up signs that simply read “STEVE!” in perfect banality.  Steve’s parade procession leads to a music video-style performance in a church, where he is handcuffed inside an onstage cage and physically rattled by his audience of orgasmic fans.  A narrator helpfully explains that the popstar’s violent stage act is designed by his handlers (more of a government propaganda agency than a mere record label) as a public service, a necessary release of tension for the attendees.  Basically, Steve is thrown to the wolves, who ravenously pick at his bones in staged concert footage that could easily double for a document of an early Beatles show if it weren’t for the jail-cell prop.  Despite being the most famous and most loved man in the world, he does not look happy to be there.

Not everything about Privilege‘s skepticism of pop music stardom still rings true.  The more we get to know Steve through the semi-romantic, semi-journalistic prying of an artist paid to paint his portrait (Swinging 60s supermodel Jean Shrimpton), the more we get to know the apparatus that puppets his cardboard-cutout personality.  The governmental project of Steven Shorter is revealed to be a long-term scheme to harness counterculture sensibilities and shepherd the youth into ultimately embracing a doctrine of Conformity.  He’s the propaganda mouthpiece for Church & State, a bread-and-circuses distraction for the masses who don’t realize they’re being manipulated by unseen councils & boardrooms.  It’s a pretty basic take on the music industry, all things considered, recalling more over-the-top productions of its era like The Apple or Lisztomania in its Free Love counterculture vs. fascistic conformity politics.  That cynicism feels increasingly reductive & dismissive in a post-Poptimism world, where disregard for mass-marketed art that appeals to teenage girls has been deemed largely misogynistic.  It’s Paul Jones’s dead-eyed, dutiful performance as Steve that adds a layer of nuance to that rote social commentary.  His abject joylessness as a non-person who’s been designated as the in-the-flesh embodiment of every living consumer’s desires & fantasies still rings true to how Top 40s pop stars interact with their public today.  The critical class may have found a way to appreciate & legitimize pop music as an artform, but pop fandoms & factions have yet to find a way to engage with their chosen Favs without draining all of the life & joy out of those popstars’ bodies.

While its intensely 60s fashions and intensely cynical thoughts on the music industry may feel extremely dated (in good ways and bad), Privilege was ahead of its time in terms of filmmaking aesthetics.  Watkins tells the tragic story of Steve the millionaire pop singer as if it were a documentary of a future event that had not yet arrived.  It’s narrated like a nature film, as if Steve’s alien characteristics are worthy of zoological study rather than human psychoanalysis.  Much of the camera work is handheld, following the fictional popstar through crowded parties and bumping into the drunken attendees, who in turn stare directly into the lens in awkward awareness of the audience on the other side.  It’s a psychedelic pop-music mockumentary version of The Truman Show, profiling a character who already knows he’s living in an artificial environment beyond his control and has grimly resigned himself to that fate without protest.  Bringing a documentarian feel into that intensely fake, plastic, semi-futuristic world makes for some great tension the movie might feel thin without, and it’s a choice that has only gotten more effective as it’s aged into a Swinging 60s time capsule in the half-century since initial release.  Steve’s visible misery as the Near-Future King of Pop has also helped preserve Privilege as something continually current & relevant, much more so than it would be if Steve actually enjoyed his job and his money as the world’s #1 idol.

Brandon Ledet

Podcast #221: Notes on a Scandal (2006) & Poison Pens

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Welcome to Episode #221 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Britnee discuss a grab bag of movies about neurotic British biddies who work out their obsessions with younger woman through the written word, starting with the 2006 melodrama Notes on a Scandal.

00:00 GoFundMe for Britnee’s breast cancer recovery
03:53 GoFundMe for Nash the Slash documentary

07:55 Notes on a Scandal (2006)
29:30 Swimming Pool (2003)
47:57 Wicked Little Letters (2024)

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

Wild Beasts (1984)

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I have a bad habit of ordering Blu-rays every single time I see an advertisement for a boutique label sale.  It used to just be an occasional dip into the Criterion Collection during that prestige label’s regular Black Friday and Barnes & Nobles sales, but it has since escalated to include loving restorations of vintage genre trash from labels like Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, and Mélusine.  I’ve been watching a lot of button-pushing, amoral schlock recently as a result – the kind of outré bad-taste material that you can often only find on disc because streaming service curators don’t want to touch it.  It was a strange comfort, then, to recently discover that I’m not yet totally immune to that hazardous material.  My recently purchased copy of the when-animals-attack Italo horror Wild Beats managed to offend me early & often.  It’s less of a narrative feature than it is a document of real-life crimes against animals, children, and anonymous character actors.  By the end credits, I found myself hoping that one of the special features on the disc would be a montage of mugshots for everyone involved in the production.  And yet, I was also appreciative for each of those sweaty European bastards for teaching me how to feel again, even if most of what I was feeling was shock & disgust. 

I might have been better prepared for that shock had I paid attention to the credited director: Franco Prosperi, of Mondo Cane fame.  Prosperi brings the same misanthropic gusto to this outlandish story of a PCP-contaminated zoo that he brought to his earlier mondo “documentaries,” matching their unhinged, diabolical energy by again nudging the audience to question which onscreen atrocities are real and which are staged.  Set in “a Northern European city” (with signage that’s conspicuously, universally printed in German), Wild Beasts is a disaster film about escaped, drug-crazed wild animals that terrorize unsuspecting urbanites who are understandably unprepared for attacks from literal lions, tigers, and bears.  The initial shock of the premise is in the exotic varieties of animals that Prosperi sourced from circuses & zoos.  A wild cheetah stalks a woman in a speeding convertible; a polar bear peruses elementary school hallways like it’s visiting a buffet; a small gang of elephants take over airplane runways by stomping anyone who gets in their way.  It’s an impressive assemblage of animals that you’re not used to seeing in productions this cheap, but once the initial awe wears off you start to wonder how well those animals could possibly be cared for.  Then, there’s the sickening tension of trying to determine whether those animals’ onscreen terror & peril are genuine, real-life events, something that doesn’t seem out of the question for the Mondo Cane crew.

According to Severin’s bonus-feature interview on the production of Wild Beasts, Prosperi claims “We did not hurt any animals at all,” explaining that they shot the film entirely under the watchful eye of the World Wildlife Federation.  If so, I was fooled.  It’s not always easy to tell when the image alternates between live animal & furry prop, and I swear I saw some documentation of real-life cruelties somewhere in that mix: live rats on fire, cats of all sizes antagonized for dramatic effect, seizure-like responses to tranquilization, etc.  It’s like the grindhouse version of Roar in that way, with the fact & fiction narratives competing for the spotlight.  Prosperi isn’t all that much better with humans either.  Stunt actors are allowed to be jostled by large, dangerous animals for several beats too many, walking up to the line of becoming a snuff film.  Child actors are framed & vocally dubbed as if they were adults, which is intensely upsetting in scenes where they appear half-dressed.  It’s actually unclear that Prosperi even fully knows what a child is, since he increasingly dwells on their alien, indecipherable behavior as if they were just another breed of wild animal.  That thematic preoccupation does eventually pay off at the film’s jarring climax, but there’s no dramatic payoff great enough to forgive the transgression of endangering performers as vulnerable as children & animals for Z-grade genre entertainment.

Despite being deeply offended by nearly every scene in Wild Beasts, I cannot deny that I found the transgression thrilling.  Maybe it’s because the long-deceased Prosperi is no longer around to imperil children or animals that I feel somewhat comfortable to delight in the amoral mayhem he documented here.  Truthfully, though, I found his tasteless misanthropy & misothery to be a major aspect of the film’s entertainment value.  The opening sequence is a music video montage of urban filth, depicting a modern world so overfilling with drugs that PCP & lysergic acid (treated in-dialogue as the same substance) has collected as a visible scum in the municipal water supply, thus infecting animals at the city zoo.  One standout image of fried chicken leftovers and hypodermic needles littering the city’s public transit platforms spells out all you need to know about what Prosperi thought of humanity and the joys of being alive in modern times.  For all I know, he was a super sweet guy in his personal life, but the crude, cheap ways he exploited his performers for profit in his cinema betrays a deeply cynical worldview that leaves his audience feeling ill.  I can almost guarantee that if he were a current, working filmmaker I’d have a much more difficult time appreciating the effect of his work without fretting over the practicalities of its production, which is probably a compartmentalization I should work out privately in therapy instead of a public blog.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Lake Michigan Monster (2018)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the aquatic slapstick creature feature Lake Michigan Monster (2018), from the creative team behind Hundreds of Beavers (2024).

00:00 The Swampflix Top 100

09:16 Metropolis (2001)
13:56 Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
18:30 The Store (1983)
24:37 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
29:18 The Deliverance (2024)
33:15 Strange Darling (2024)
40:10 Alien Romulus (2024)
47:48 Last Things (2024)
51:24 Frogman (2024)

55:27 Lake Michigan Monster (2018)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Strange Darling (2024)

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The critical decorum for writing about the new high-style serial killer thriller Strange Darling is that you’re supposed to recommend audiences see the movie without reading a full description or review, which benefits the movie in two ways.  One, it preserves the surprise of discovery as the movie walks the audience through various What’s Really Going On plot twists like a puppy on a leash.  More importantly, it also saves the movie from having its themes & ideas discussed in any detail, so that critics are instead encouraged to gush over its candy-coated hyperviolence (“shot entirely on 35mm film”, as the first title card goofily boasts) without fretting about the meaning behind those striking images.  That second benefit is crucial, since the actual substance protected by Strange Darling‘s candy shell is rotted hollow.  There’s no color saturation level high enough nor any needle drop ironic enough to cover the taste of the misogyny molding at the core of this empty entertainment vessel, despite director JT Mollner & cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi (yes, that Giovanni Ribisi) trying their damnedest at every turn.  So, go ahead and swallow it down without reading the full ingredient list if you like, but be prepared to walk away feeling ill.

Kyle Gallner & Willa Fitzgerald star as a pair of beer-buzzed hedonists who meet in a roadside motel room for a kinky one-night stand.  Several false-start openings (to bookend the several fake-out conclusions) tease the audience with awareness that a serial killer is afoot, which casts Gallner in an unsavory light as a macho brute who gets off on strangling women.  But wait, it turns out the editor is not the only shameless tease warping the picture.  The more time we spend in the motel, the more Fitzgerald’s strangulation victim is revealed to be a huge tease herself, goading Gallner into playfully abusing her according to a roleplay script they agreed to before booking the room, then repeatedly pulling back the exact moments when the violent foreplay is about to naturally spill over into consensual sex.  There’s some hack Pulp Fiction chapter shuffling in how the story is ordered that maintains her innocence for as long as possible, at first characterizing her as a frustrating hookup who triggers misogynist violence in her date through unintentional sexual teasing.  Eventually, though, it can’t hold back its condemnation of her as a “crazy bitch” and a “cunt” who deserves any violence Gallner exacts upon her in revenge, since she uses the general assumed victimhood of women in heterosexual partnerships gone awry to her advantage, so that she can get away with murder.  The entire motel hookup kink scenario was a setup, you see, because you’re watching a Promising Young Woman remake that coddles Tarantino-obsessed MRAs.

Pushing the movie’s thoughts on consent, kink, and rape aside for as long as possible really does benefit its value as stylish entertainment.  Its pride in shooting on film is a little corny in presentation, but the colors are gorgeously rich enough to excuse the faux pas.  Ribisi has fun playing with his traditionalist camera equipment, delivering the kind of vintage genre throwback that’ll have movie nerds hooting & hollering at multiple split-diopter shots like salivating dogs.  Barbara Hershey & Ed Begley, Jr. briefly drop by to lend the production an air of credibility as aging sweetheart hippies who are unprepared for how violently the War of the Sexes has escalated since their heyday.  Car chases, shoot-outs, and intimate stabbings keep the adrenaline up once the motel tryst fully falls apart, spilling the intimate violence of that room into the 2-lane highways of rural America.  The whole thing is pretty exciting, excitingly pretty, and then pretty atrocious as soon as it starts rebutting cultural assumptions about who’s the real victim when men & women fight.  I’m usually not in the business of judging a movie entirely by its moral character—especially not as someone who regularly watches the vintage schlock this pulls direct visual inspiration from—but I couldn’t help but feeling like if Strange Darling were a person and not a feature film it would have some really specific, fucked up opinions about The Amber Heard Situation.  Its vibes are just as rancid as its visuals are immaculate.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #220: A Hole in the Head (1998) & Hunting for Hedonia (2019)

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Welcome to Episode #220 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Nail Club‘s Sara Nicole Storm to discuss the 1998 self-trepanation documentary A Hole in the Head and the 2019 deep brain stimulation documentary Hunting for Hedonia.

00:00 Nail Club
08:18 A Hole in the Head (1998)
32:47 Hunting for Hedonia (2019)

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

Swamp & Sand: The Swampflix Top 100

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At the end of this year, Swampflix will be celebrating its 10th anniversary as a movie review website.  To celebrate, we’ve attempted to create something the world has never seen before: a definitive list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.  Kidding, of course.  This is well-trodden territory for any film criticism publication, most notably including the BFI’s Sight & Sound list dating back to the 1950s.  The difference is that Sight & Sound polls over 1,000 professional film critics and filmmakers to compile their Top 100 list, whereas we only have six active contributors.  Hopefully, this means our list reflects our personal tastes & passions among the more standard consensus picks for The Greatest Films of All Time, since less than 20% of our titles overlapped with Sight & Sound‘s most recent poll in 2022. 

We created this list in two quick rounds of voting & ranking among our six active contributors in March of 2024, followed by a brief period of ensuring that every film listed had been covered on the site via either podcast or written review.  You can find blurbs for every film listed on the new official landing page of The Swampflix Top 100, or you can find more fleshed-out reviews of each film by clicking the links below.  We love movies, we love working on this website, and we hope that love shines through to anyone who follows along. 

1. House (1977) – “The best thing about haunted house movies is the third-act release of tension where there are no rules and every feature of the house goes haywire all at once, not just the ghosts. The reason this is the height of the genre is that it doesn’t wait to get to the good stuff; it doesn’t even wait to get to the house. It’s all haywire all the time, totally unrestrained.”

2. The Night of the Hunter (1955) – “A classic tale of good versus evil, love versus hate. The black and white cinematography drives home the point with its sharp dynamic lighting. It’s chilling, uncanny and even ruthless at times, but it also has so many makings of a good fairy tale: lost children, evil stepparents, and even a fairy godmother in the end.”

3. The Wizard of Oz (1939) – “Blatant in its artificiality at every turn, yet through some kind of dark movie magic fools you into seeing beyond its closed sets into an endless, beautifully hellish realm. I’m sure there were plenty musicals released in 1939 that have been forgotten by time, but it’s no mystery why this is the one that has endured as an esteemed classic. Even when staring directly at the seams where the 3D set design meets the painted backdrop of an endless landscape, I see another world, not a mural on the wall. It’s the closest thing I can recall to lucid dreaming, an experience that can be accessed by the push of the play button.”

4. Videodrome (1983) – “‘The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: The Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.’

I lie awake at night wondering what Brian O’Blivion would make of TikTok.”

5. Tampopo (1985) – “Hailed as the first ‘ramen western’ (a play on the term ‘spaghetti Western’), Tampopo takes that designation to its most extremely literal end, focusing on the title character’s ramen shop as the location of metaphorical quick-draws and high noon showdowns, as well incorporating a variety of loosely connected comedy sketches about food.”

6. 3 Women (1977) – “This feels like a huge departure from what I’ve come to expect from a Robert Altman picture. I’m much more used to seeing him in his big cast/overlapping dialogue mode this is a much more insular, cerebral experience than that. I wish he had tackled this kind of eerie, dreamlike, horror-adjacent material more often (see also: Images, That Cold Day in the Park); he’s damn good at it.”

7. Moonstruck (1987) – “On a short list of classics that I can rewatch at any time no questions asked, especially if I’m feeling low. Come to think of it, Mermaids & The Witches of Eastwick are also on that list, so maybe I just seek comfort in Cher’s curls.”

8. The Red Shoes (1948) – “The centerpiece nightmare ballet is maybe the most gorgeous cinema has ever been. If nothing else, it’s unquestionably the most gorgeous that the color red has ever looked onscreen, which is appropriate since it’s right there in the title.”

9. Peeping Tom (1960) – “It’s near impossible to gauge just how shocking or morally incongruous this must’ve been in 1960, especially in the opening scenes where old men are shown purchasing pornography in the same corner stores where young girls buy themselves candy for comedic effect, and the protagonist/killer is introduced secretly filming a sex worker under his trench coat before moving in for his first kill. Premiering the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho and predating the birth of giallo & the slasher in 1962’s Blood & Black Lace, this was undeniably ahead of its time. A prescient ancestor to the countless slashers to follow, Powell’s classic is a sleek, beautifully crafted work that should’ve been met with accolades & rapturous applause instead of the prudish dismissal it sadly received.”

10. Sunset Boulevard (1950) – “Not sure why Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is universally cited as the kickstart to the psychobiddy genre while this is fabulously campy/draggy in almost the exact same way (love them both). Anyways, it’s a masterpiece, but you already knew that.”

11. Grey Gardens (1975)
12. Vertigo (1958)
13. Akira (1988)
14. Polyester (1981)
15. Alien (1979)
16. Persona (1966)
17. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
18. Spirited Away (2001)
19. Heathers (1988)
20. Suspiria (1977)
21. Daisies (1966)
22. The Thing (1982)
23. Blue Velvet (1986)
24. All That Heaven Allows (1955)
25. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

26. Possession (1981) – “With a title like Possession and the heavy synths in the opening theme, it’d be reasonable to expect a straight-forward 80s zombie or vampire flick, but the film refuses to be pinned down so easily. If Possession were to be understood as a creature feature, the monster in question would be the coldness of romantic separation. When a character supposes early in the film, ‘Maybe all couples go through this’ it seems like a reasonable claim. The bitterness of divorce, loneliness, and adulterous desire then devolve into a supernatural ugliness. The main couple frantically move about Berlin as if drunk or suffering seizures, downright possessed by their romantic misery. Their own motion & inner turmoil is more of a violent threat than the film’s most menacing blood-soaked monsters or electric carving knives.”

27. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
28. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
29. Princess Mononoke (1997)
30. Crimes of Passion (1984)
31. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
32. Psycho (1960)
33. Robocop (1987)
34. Citizen Kane (1941)
35. My Winnipeg (2007)
36. Santa Sangre (1989)
37. Blow Out (1981)
38. The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
39. Cruising (1980)
40. Female Trouble (1974)
41. The VVitch (2015)
42. Hard Boiled (1992)
43. The Shining (1980)
44. Paprika (2006)
45. Fargo (1996)
46. Poor Things (2023)
47. The Seventh Seal (1957)
48. Serial Mom (1994)
49. Jackie Brown (1997)
50. Eyes Without a Face (1960)

51. Don’t Look Now (1973) – “A delectable head-scratcher. For a movie with such clear themes & purposeful imagery, it’s difficult to parse out exactly what it was getting at with its conclusion, which is definitely part of the charm. Reminded me of many great works of its era, but most of all Fulci’s The Psychic. Would gladly watch it a few more times to continue to puzzle at it, which I suppose is the highest praise you can lay on any film.”

52. Paris is Burning (1990)
53. Mulholland Drive (2001)
54. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
55. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
56. Midsommar (2019)
57. Basic Instinct (1992)
58. Parasite (2019)
59. Beauty and the Beast (1946)
60. Metropolis (1927)
61. Starship Troopers (1997)
62. True Stories (1986)
63. Some Like It Hot (1959)
64. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
65. Birth (2004)
66. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
67. Wild at Heart (1990)
68. Body Double (1984)
69. Amelie (2001)
70. Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
71. Brief Encounter (1945)
72. All About My Mother (1999)
73. Diabolique (1955)
74. M (1931)
75. Knife+Heart (2018)

76. Boogie Nights (1997) – “Even more so than Goodfellas, this has cinema’s clearest distinction between its story’s Fuck Around era (the 1970s) and his Find Out era (the 1980s), down to the minute.”

77. Rear Window (1954)
78. Adaptation (2002)
79. Jurassic Park (1993)
80. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
81. Clueless (1995)
82. Opera (1987)
83. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
84. Labyrinth (1986)
85. In the Mood for Love (2000)
86. Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
87. Dogtooth (2009)
88. All About Eve (1950)
89. Theorem (1968)
90. mother! (2017)
91. After Hours (1985)
92. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
93. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
94. What Happened Was … (1994)
95. Altered States (1980)
96. Gaslight (1944)
97. Raw (2016)
98. Halloween (1978)
99. The Exterminating Angel (1962)
100. The Doom Generation (1995)

Scroll through the full list here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Vendetta (1986)

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There are currently no fewer than four feature films that populate on Tubi when you search for the title “Vendetta“.  That’s including longer titles like Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy but excluding partial matches like Midnight Vendetta or Vendetta Road.  Honestly, I thought there’d be more.  Vendetta is such a vague, generic title for the exact kind of cheap-o action revenge flicks that pad out Tubi’s vast library that I would not have been surprised if the results tallied to at least a dozen.  Still, among the half-dozen or so Vendettas currently streaming on Tubi, it’s unlikely any are half as entertaining as the crown jewel of the collection, the one from 1986.  A sleazy women-in-prison revenge thriller about a stuntwoman scorned, 1986’s Vendetta mixes two familiar genres into one surprisingly novel, volatile concoction.  Just like there’s a long tradition of titling your generic revenge actioner Vendetta, there’s also a long tradition of highlighting behind-the-scenes stunt actors as real-life, authentic action heroes, from classic novelties like 1978’s Stunt Rock to this year’s big-screen adaptation of The Fall Guy.  Likewise, there’s also a long tradition of leering exploitation films that offer a risqué peak at the intimate sex & violence of women’s prisons, often with more salacious titles like Caged Heat, The Naked Cage, Sex Hell, and Sadomania.  As far as I can tell, though, Vendetta ’86 is the only film that’s thought to combine all of those genre tropes into a single 90min exploitation pic, and it deserves some respect for that efficiency.

Vendetta opens during a Fulci-style zombie stampede, inexplicably set in small-town 1980s America instead of 70s-sleaze Italy.  After running from a rabid hoard of Italo zombies, our hero is shown collapsed and burning alive on city pavement.  This, of course, turns out to be just another day on the job for the professional stuntwoman played by Karen Chase, who cheerfully pops up from this controlled burn shoot as soon as the fire-extinguishers cool her down.  She doesn’t even bother to change out of her charred jumpsuit before speeding off to the wrap party, waving along her younger, even bubblier sister.  Soon, it becomes apparent that the staged free-falls, car chases, and bare-knuckled brawls of the movie-within-the-movie aren’t nearly as dangerous as the small-town mentality of its shooting location.  After downing a few brewskies at the local bar (while a band of new-wave punks play square-dance country schtick in the background), the younger sister sneaks out with the cutest roughneck she can find and immediately finds trouble.  He sexually assaults her, she shoots him dead with his own pistol, and the local cops, judge, and jury unsurprisingly side with their hometown boy instead of the Hollywood outsider who killed him in self-defense.  Worse yet, the local-yokel bullying continues once the teenager lands in prison, quickly getting her killed after she refuses the hard drugs and sexual advances of the top dog of the prison yard (It’s Always Sunny‘s Sandy Martin).  It’s up to the stuntwoman, then, to seek true justice and avenge her sister’s murder, purposefully getting herself locked up so she can kill the women responsible one by one in a newfound, immoral use for her martial-arts skills.

Every plot point of Vendetta is pure exploitation, but it more often implies than it dwells on the grislier details.  The instigating roadside rape that lands our hero behind bars is shocking but not eroticized.  Admittedly, the prison-yard bullying that escalates that tragedy is eroticized, leaning into the lesbian leering of the wider women-in-prison genre.  Still, there are no actual sex scenes to speak of, just some casual nudity as women hang around the showers and locker rooms as spectators to the violence.  The contraband drug trade that fuels that violence gets pretty salacious too, with multiple scenes of forced heroin injection raising the dramatic stakes at every turn.  All of this sensational material is softened by sincere scenes of intense melodrama scored by Lifetime music cues, affording Vendetta an oddly tender touch for a VHS-era exploitation picture.  It’s also just as much an excuse for Karen Chase to road-test action stunts outside of a movie set as it is an excuse to position her in mildly salacious women’s prison scenarios.  It’s essentially the soft-rock Skinemax version of Stunt Rock, complete with a climactic stage performance from a drag king Prince impersonator in the prison cafeteria to match the wizardly stadium rock act of its predecessor.  It’s all very disjointed, but it’s also all very 80s, which you might expect from the only feature film directed by Bruce Logan, cinematographer for the original Tron.  It’s also all exactly what you’d expect from a revenge picture titled Vendetta streaming on Tubi, except with maybe three or four Vendetta movies’ worth of plot & novelty for the price* of one.

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-Brandon Ledet