Welcome to Episode #188 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss the glamorously adulterous romcoms of Old Hollywood legend Ernst Lubitsch, starting with Trouble in Paradise (1932)
00:00 Welcome
03:03 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) 05:48 Sorcerer (1977) 07:50 Reality (2023) 12:45 Savage Grace (2007) 16:55 You Hurt My Feelings (2023) 23:03 Rimini (2023) 28:08 Sanctuary (2023)
30:51 Ernst Lubitsch 39:35 Trouble in Paradise (1932) 55:55 Design for Living (1933) 1:13:43 The Shop Around the Corner (1940) 1:28:10 That Lady in Ermine (1948)
It’s easy to be flippant about superhero fatigue right now, since the MCU & DCEU filmmaking behemoths are both dozens of titles into their decade-long stranglehold on Hollywood, with all possible surprise & novelty long squeezed out of the genre’s lungs. Still, my exhaustion with superhero blockbusters has less to do with the genre at large than it has to do with those two franchises in particular. There’s still plenty of surprise & novelty to be found elsewhere in superhero media, especially if you’re willing to stray outside the US. I was recently tickled by the anti-fascist Italo circus superhero flick Freaks vs. The Reich, for instance, which happened to include similar touches of laboratory torture & Radiohead song placements as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, just in a much more interesting context (time-traveling ether-addict Nazis vs. Totally 90s™ mixtape aesthetics). I’ve also been enamored with Neon Genesis Evangelion mastermind Hideaki Anno’s years-long project of building an MCU style interconnected universe out of pre-existing Japanese tokusatsu properties – first in Shin Godzilla, then in Shin Ultraman, and most recently in Shin Kamen Rider. The project shamelessly leans into the commercial end of filmmaking instead of the artistic, collecting all of Anno’s superpowered freaks in action figure toy commercials instead of a crossover feature film. It’s also, just three titles in, the most exciting big-scale superhero media on the market. Anno’s Godzilla film was more of a governmental bureaucracy satire than a superhero picture, subbing in the titular kaiju god for any number of natural disasters that the timid, rules-obsessed humans on the ground were ill-equipped to respond to with any speed or efficiency. By contrast, his Ultraman movie (which he wrote, produced, edited, and mo-capped but did not direct) is pure retro superhero fluff, throwing back to its titular space alien’s vintage TV roots. It’s such an infectiously wholesome, psychedelic superhero story that I didn’t even care that I was missing a half-century of contextual Ultraman lore that would help explain its scene-to-scene idiosyncrasies. It did convince me to dip my toe deeper into the back catalog of Ultraman cinema, though, finding a movie specifically made for people who grew up steeped in Ultraman Awareness the same way that most current teens aren’t old enough to remember a world before the MCU. It was a baffling experience but also a delightful one.
I should have known from the longform title Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy Legends The Movie that the 2009 sequel to the TV show Ultraman Mebius was not going to be as welcoming of an entry point as the series-reset Shin Ultraman (in which “Shin” is commonly translated as meaning “New”). According to my half-assed Wikipedia research after stumbling into Mega Monster Battle blind on Tubi, Ultraman Mebius is “the 20th TV series and 40th anniversary production in the Ultra Series.” Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy is the second sequel to that show, “preceded by Ultraman Mebius Side Story: Ghost Reverse, a direct-to-video special from Ultraman Mebius.” As someone who recently rolled his eyes at the news that the latest Guardians of the Galaxy movie included plot details set up by a straight-to-Disney+ holiday special outside the 30+ movies of prerequisite homework, you’d think I’d also find this overwhelming mountain of contextual backstory to be an automatic deal breaker. Instead, I found it freeing. The infinite supply of Ultraman lore means that there isn’t enough time in my scatterbrained life to possibly watch it all, so the pressure is off. Walking into Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy having only seen Shin Ultraman before it is kinda like watching Avengers: Endgame after having only seen Captain America: The First Avenger, an out-of-the-loop disorientation that the TV-series recap in its first few minutes does little to soften. The narrative continuity of the Ultra Series only matters so much, though. It’s relatively easy to shut your brain off and accept statements like “The Planet of Ultra will perish unless we retrieve the Energy Core” at face value without worrying about what the Energy Core is, or who’s threatening the Planet Ultra with mass destruction to begin with. If anything, Ultra Galaxy overloads the screen with so many Ultramen, Ultrawomen, and Ultrathems that it’s clear there’s no need or even possibility of getting fully caught up with Ultraman lore as a newcomer. To put it in American superhero media terms, it’s the Ultraman equivalent of the Spider-Verse, wherein almost every character—good or evil—is some kind of Ultraman variant. One Ultraman has horns; one red-eyed Ultraman is evil; one pigtailed Ultraman is a girl. It doesn’t actually matter what their names or histories are, just that it’s wonderfully surreal to see them all share the screen as they collectively beat down an equally infinite supply of resurrected rubber-suit monsters from the Ultra Series’ past. I may not fully understand all of the characters relationships & insular worlds of Ultra Galaxy, but I do fully understand the joys it finds in excess – flooding the screen with all the Ultramen and all the kaiju all at once.
If anything, this is exactly how I remember watching superhero media in a pre-MCU world. As a child, I didn’t tune into episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, or Batman: The Animated Series with decades of comic book history or even weekly episodic continuity informing the battles of the day. I just knew that Shredder, Rita Repulsa, and The Joker were “Bad Guy” villains that had to be constantly, violently be beaten back from victory for the sake of peace on Earth. It used to be possible to drop into the continued adventures of an intergalactic superhero at any point of their cyclical journey the same way you can tune into a single match of a months-long pro wrestling program and instantly get the gist. In this particular instance, the evil Ultraman Belial plans to dominate Planet Ultra (where all Ultramen originate, apparently) by resurrecting the ghosts of famous dead kaiju on the meteor that serves as their graveyard. A collective of elite Ultramen led by Ultraman Mebius, Ultraseven, and the original Ultraman form a Power Rangers-style superhero team to beat back Ultraman Belial and his own evil team of undead kaiju before it’s too late. There’s also some human Earthling involvement and the aforementioned Energy Core McGuffin jumbled up in that plot, but they’re insignificant to what makes the movie entertaining: the nonstop superheroic martial arts. Mega Monster Battle: Ultra Galaxy is a surreal mix of tactile fight choreography and green screen sci-fi effects. It is pure excess in its relentless Ultraman-on-kaiju mayhem, leaving very little room in the runtime for the audience to ponder the lore before the next rubber-suited monster attacks the superpowered citizens of Planet Ultra. Lacking any other context, I can only compare Ultra Galaxy to Shin Ultraman in terms of filmmaking craft, and Anno’s film appears to be a cut above other modern Ultraman media in that side-by-side. Shin Ultraman still comes across as a lumbering, slow-to-act superhero origin story in that comparison, though, as Ultra Galaxy assumes you’ve already done the homework and immediately launches into constant Ultraman battles until you’re well past satisfied. Maybe if I had already seen 30 other movies in the Ultra Series that bombardment would have left me as numb as the MCU has left me post-Endgame, but there’s still plenty of surprise & novelty left in this particular superhero franchise for me. In fact, I understood so little about the background lore of Planet Ultra and its infinite Ultramen that the next time I watch one of these out-of-sequence Ultra Sequels I’ll likely be just as baffled (and delighted) as I was this round. I’m looking forward to it.
As omnipresent as superhero media feels in pop culture right now, I honestly don’t think it’s much more prevalent than it was when I was a child in the 80s & 90s. It may be more aggressively marketed to adults now, but it’s always been around. The major difference between post-MCU, post-Dark Knight comic book adaptations and the Saturday morning superhero schlock I grew up with is that adults are now expected to take them seriously as meaningful art, each with their own decades of backstory worthy of literary study. As a child I was aware that characters like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and the X-Men had long-running, epic scale stories that stretched beyond the thirty-minute episodes of their respective animated series. I would tune into those episodes sporadically, though, and I didn’t really need to know their larger stories to enjoy the simple pleasures of their violent Good Guys vs. Bad Guys morality tales. In contrast, now you have to watch Batman learn ninja skills for an entire origin saga before he can start Batmanning in earnest. You have to watch 30 feature films, several streaming series, and a non-denominational holiday special to fully appreciate a talking raccoon whooping ass in space. Context & lore used to matter way less in our long-running superhero epics, or at least they used to be secondary to novelty & iconography. That’s why it was so thrilling to return to that vintage style of Saturday morning superhero storytelling in Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider, which hurls you directly into the continued adventures of its titular cyborg superhero without any expectation that you’ll have done your decades of televised homework before arriving at the theater. Its approach to lore is confusing the same way the subtextual meanings of an abstract art film can be; you’re not expected to know the answer, and it’s freeing to admit you’re lost and just enjoy the ride.
Yes, Shin Kamen Rider is technically connected to a network of other Anno-revived tokusatsu franchises—Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and the latest Neon Genesis Evangelion reboot—all bundled under the banner of the “Shin Japan Heroes Universe.” Unlike with the MCU, however, each title in the SJHU is designed to work as a standalone project, only crossing over in action figure toy commercials instead of Cultural Event double features like Infinity War & Endgame. Shin Kamen Rider‘s connection to Anno’s other two “Shin” tokusatsu titles is more one of method than one of narrative. It carries over all of the retro kitsch of Shin Ultraman and the volatile brutality of Shin Godzilla, now streamlined into one unfathomably efficient superhero saga. All you really need to know is that our titular hero is a grasshopper-hybrid cyborg man who escapes the evil laboratory that augmented his body and vows to destroy it before they augment the rest of humanity. Anno doesn’t bother with Kamen Rider’s origin story, nor even his escape from the lab. He invites the audience to join in three or four episodes into a Kamen Rider TV series, then zips through the next half-century’s weekly storylines so quickly there’s no time to care whether you have any idea what’s going on. You just do your best to tag along for the high-speed motorcycle rides & insectoid hyperviolence or you miss a season’s worth of plot reveals in a single blink. And if you blink, so what? There’s still plenty for-its-own-sake pleasure in watching the heroic grasshopper cyborg man beat up the evil cyborg spider man, the evil cyborg bat man, the evil cyborg mantis man, and so on, regardless of why he’s doing it. I didn’t grow up with the Kamen Rider TV series as a kid, but I did have a very similar experience watching the Americanized tokusatsu series Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, where I would enjoy whatever random, out-of-order episodes I happened to catch on a schedule I was too young to control, continuity be damned.
The paradox here is that while Anno is not taking the longform lore of superhero storytelling all that seriously, his SJHU movies are much more emotionally earnest than the jokey, sarcastic heroes of The MCU. While all modern Marvel heroes have borrowed a touch of self-satirical Deadpool snark, Anno takes the emotional stakes of his outlandish superhero premises 100% seriously. Shin Godzilla is a scathing political satire about the inefficiency of bureaucratic government in the face of genuine public crisis. Shin Ultraman is a loving tribute to humanity’s go-getter resiliency despite that governmental failure to unite & protect. Shin Kamen Rider is more of a brooding, Upgrade-style tale of a hero horrified by the violence he’s capable of, isolated & alienated by the biological weaponry of his augmented body. Despite its jabs of soulful remorse between fight scenes, though, it still indulges in the retro kitsch of reviving a 1970s children’s TV show for its 50th anniversary – mimicking the cheap-o action cinema style of its source material for modern audiences’ semi-ironic amusement. Anno frames every establishing shot and character movement with the attention to visual detail he brought to anime, so that a leather glove casually falling to the floor is afforded the same heft of a building crumbling or a world ending. He carries over the extreme wide-angle camera work of Shin Ultraman but frees it from that film’s drab office spaces, so it feels less like Soderbergh doing anime and more like the first-person-POV of a bug. There’s an inherent visual absurdity to following a cyborg grasshopper man on a motorcycle from one insectoid enemy to another that Anno never shies away from, but he also takes that heroic bug man’s self-conflicted emotions seriously as he stares at the blood dripping from his leather-gloved hands. It’s a tricky tonal balance to achieve, no matter how easy Anno makes it look.
You do not have to be specifically nostalgic for the original Kamen Rider TV series to enjoy the Shin Kamen Rider film. It does help to be generally nostalgic for the episodic superhero media of yesteryear, though, assuming you’re old enough to remember a time when you were only expected to vaguely know what Batman’s deal was to enjoy a Batman film. Before the streaming era, it took a lot of effort, time, and money to be a nerd-culture completist, and it was okay to dip your toe into this kind of thing mid-adventure – encouraged, even. All that really mattered was whether you were enticed to buy the action figures.
Welcome to Episode #187 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss Terrence Malick’s signature works, starting with the brief-history-of-time family drama The Tree of Life (2011).
00:00 Welcome
01:14 Missing (2023) 03:44 The Little Mermaid (2023) 10:55 The Last Laugh (1924) 14:50 Breakdown (1997) 18:30 Sibling Rivalry (1990) 21:03 Stripper (1986) 22:52 Flashdance (1983)
28:28 The Tree of Life (2011) 55:22 Badlands (1973) 1:09:35 Days of Heaven (1978) 1:23:30 The New World (2005)
If you follow enough fired-up cynics on Twitter, you’d think that queer youth culture is suddenly going soft after decades of consistent, unified radical politics. There are surely some fruitful debates to be had about the ways corporate & police presence have been welcomed into Pride celebrations recently, especially when it comes at the expense of freer, kinkier expressions of queer sexuality. However, I’m a little more skeptical about the recent in-house dogpiling on “tenderqueer” Zoomers for their generational desire to see wholesome, conflict-free Gay Representation onscreen, as if that impulse is anything new. Politically edgier queer audiences have been debating Gay Assimilationists about the value of presenting “the right kind of representation” to the public at large since at least as far back as Stonewall, which has led to much controversy over “the wrong kind of representation” in movies like Basic Instinct, Cruising, and The Boys in the Band for presenting their queer characters as flawed & villainous when they had no wholesome mainstream counterbalance. I have to wonder how much that eternal controversy has dulled the career & reputation of queer provocateur Gregg Araki, whose signature works have been left to rot in censored, out-of-print obscurity since he first made a splash in the New Queer Cinema era of the 1990s. All those decades ago, Araki got enough pushback for making hyperviolent, oversexed queer art he describes as “too punk rock for gay people” that he thought it’d be easier to sneak his edgier, more outrageous ideas into his version of a straight film. Araki’s breakout 1995 road trip flick The Doom Generation is even subtitled “A heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki,” a cheeky in-joke about how it’s easier to get away with making his provocative, overtly queer outsider art within a heterosexual dynamic, since there’s much less pressure to deliver “the right kind of representation” in that context. Or, as Araki put it in a recent interview, “I made this heterosexual movie, but in a very punk rock bratty way, made it so gay.”
That hetero cosplay may have landed Araki easier production funding, but the prudish straights in charge of mainstream movie distribution were not fooled. The Doom Generation has been heavily, viciously censored since it first premiered at Sundance, with its various R-rated home video cuts removing up to 20 minutes of footage so that what’s left onscreen is borderline incoherent. Although some of those Blockbuster Video-friendly edits removed scenes of cartoonish ultraviolence, you will not be surprised to learn that a majority of what has been removed is its queer sexual content, which drives most of the relationship dynamics between its trio of disaffected Gen-X leads. So, it’s a huge deal that The Doom Generation has been recently restored to fit Araki’s original vision nearly three decades after its film festival premiere, re-released into a post-She-Ra, post-Steven Universe tenderqueer world that’s just as squeamish about the wrong kinds of representation as it’s always been. Its theatrical victory lap is a bittersweet blessing for me personally, in that I wish it was around in my life when I was a John Waters-obsessed edgelord teen, but I also cherished getting to see it for the first time with a rowdy crowd of queer weirdos who hooted & hollered the entire screening. Laughing along with like-minded genre freaks made every horned-up, airheaded line reading hit way harder than it would have if I watched it alone on VHS in the 90s, with or without the prudish MPAA censorship. There was something heartwarming about sharing that experience with multiple generations of in-the-flesh human weirdos who might be inclined to snipe at each other for minor political differences online but can’t help but cackle & gasp in unison at campy, radical queer art when it’s presented IRL. It’s just not that often that boundary-pushing queer art survives the controversy cycle to reach queer audiences in the first place, and it turns out that costuming itself as “heterosexual” can only help it get so far.
Internal gay debates about positive representation in American media may have not changed much in the past few decades, but to be fair neither has America at large. If The Doom Generation lives up to its “heterosexual” subtitle in any authentic way, it’s in its depiction of an apocalyptic USA in cultural decline. It’s one the best movies out there about how boring, rotten, and beautifully cheap life in America can be, defining US culture as a putrid pile of junk food, junk television, fundamentalist Christians, and Nazi right-wingers. Set in an America where everything costs $6.66 and is protected by loaded gun, the film responds to the nation’s final moments before Rapture with pure Gen-X apathy, shrugging off every grotesque fascist afront with a Valley Girl “Whatever!” worthy of Cher Horowitz herself. Rose McGowan & James Duvall star as a pair of aimless, politically numb punks whose teenage puppylove is disrupted by the intrusion of Johnathon Schaech, a leather-clad agent of chaos. After the third-wheel interloper makes them accomplices in the brutal (and somewhat accidental) murder of a gas station clerk, the trio go on a cross-country, Natural Born Killers crime spree touring the nation’s cheapest fast-food joints & honeymoon motels. The reluctant throuple’s initial sexual dynamic starts as adulterous betrayal, but quickly devolves into a bisexual free-for-all that edges the audience to desperately want to see the two male leads kiss (and more). Only, Araki interrupts the gay male tension in that central threesome with a violent reminder of just how broken & violent life in America can be, concluding their road trip with a shock of strobelit Nazi brutality that fucks everything up just when it things are starting to get properly heated. The Doom Generation might feature characters exploring the boundaries of their emerging queer sexual identities, but it’s also honest about how horrific it can feel to do so among the straight Christian psychopaths who run the USA – something all generations of queer audiences can relate to, no matter how sensitive they are to onscreen sex & violence.
I could go on all day about how sexually, politically transgressive The Doom Generation is in both its modern & retro American contexts, but really its greatest strength is that it’s extremely cool. McGowan’s Gen-X punk uniform of plastic gas station sunglasses, see-through plastic raincoat, and blunt, dyed goth bob looks just as hip now as it ever did. Every motel room & dive bar interior is a gorgeously cheap fantasy realm of D.I.Y. decor & artifice, so much so that I mistook the out-of-context screengrabs I’ve seen over the years for a momentary dream sequence instead of the overall art design. Decades before anyone would think to tweet “Give Parker Posey a sword,” Gregg Araki gave Parker Posey a sword, casting her as a crazed lesbian stalker in a cheap drag queen wig. And yet Duvall’s performance stands out as the coolest detail of all, nailing the kind of puppydog himbo humor that would have made him a beloved Keanu Reeves-level cult figure if this film were given the proper, uncensored distribution it deserved. It’s not often you see a movie combine the finer points of Heathers, Freeway, Blood Diner, and Terminal U.S.A. into one toxic Gen-X gumbo, even if it’s one that crassly force-feeds the concoction to its audience through an unwashed beer funnel. I was overjoyed to gulp down The Doom Generation unfiltered with a full crowd of fellow filth-hungry weirdos, if not only for the reminder that radical queer art has always been controversial by nature, and America has always been an apocalyptic cesspool. At the same time, I also left the theater angry that the film hadn’t been funneled into my brain sooner, and that so much of Araki’s back catalog of bad-representation punk provocations are still not readily accessible to the modern public. Here’s to hoping that titles like Nowhere, Splendor, and Totally Fucked Up get this same digital-restoration victory lap soon—theatrical re-release and all—before Christian America gets the Rapture it so desperately wants.
I’ve been struggling to find much to get excited about in theaters lately, now that “Summer” Blockbuster Season has encroached well into Spring, and multiplex marquees are once again all superheroes all of the time. The general vibe among moviegoing audiences is that the superhero era is winding down post-Endgame, but it’s going to take a long time for Hollywood studios to adjust to that dwindling enthusiasm, since these billion-dollar behemoths take years to produce & market. Personally, I’m so deeply, incurably bored by American superhero media that I’m avoiding all four-quadrant crowd-pleasers out there, not just the usual suspects like the new Guardians, the new Ant-Man, and the new Shazam. If I stare at the poster or trailer for any tentpole blockbuster above a 6-figure production budget for long enough, they all appear to follow the same MCU superhero action template. Super Mario Bros, Dungeons & Dragons, and Fast X are all essentially superhero movies to me, each with their own invincible, quippy gods among men who save the day by extending their IP. I can’t hide from the new release calendar forever, though, so I need to re-learn how to enjoy a superhero movie or two until Hollywood fully moves onto the next money-printing fad. Given that there are already dozens of Marvel & DC movies slated for release over the next few summers, it’s likely going to take a long time for this lumbering industry to correct course. So, it’s somewhat fortuitous that the Italian supernatural action epic Freaks vs. The Reich finally landed a US release in this dire time of need, after years of stumbling over international distribution hurdles. It’s the most convincing evidence I’ve seen in a while that there is still some juice left in the superhero genre, despite Hollywood’s determination to squeeze it dry and pummel the rind.
If there’s anything more frustratingly slow than Hollywood’s response to public appetite, it’s the distribution of international art films, which often fall into a years-long limbo between their initial festival runs and their wide US premieres. I’ve been waiting to see Freaks vs. The Reich for so long that its earliest roadblocks were COVID related, and its original title has since been changed to give it a fresher, more recognizable appeal. I suppose rebranding the film from Freaks Out to its new, more descriptive title is a useful warning for the shocking amount of Nazi imagery you’ll find in this supernatural circus sideshow fantasy. It also helps explain why it’s so easy to cheer on the titular, superpowered freaks who take those Nazis down. I wonder if some of its distribution delays had to do with clearing song rights, since the main Nazi supervillain in question abuses ether to mentally time-travel into the future, returning to the battlefields of WWII with visions of smartphones, video game controllers, and old-timey renditions of Radiohead’s “Creep” & Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” The inclusion of “Creep” is important to note there, since the song also happens to be featured in the more traditional, straightforward superhero epic Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, which is currently eating up a grotesque amount of American screen space. Whether you think it’s more interesting to hear that song played on a Spotify algorithm mixtape to evoke easy nostalgia points or performed by a drugged-out, time-traveling Nazi supervillain is a question of taste, but I can at least personally attest to appreciating a sense of variety within this oppressively omnipresent genre template.
Freaks vs. The Reich opens with a full circus sideshow act, introducing our Italian superhero freaks one at a time as they show off their individual talents – a magnetic dwarf, an electric ballerina, a real-life wolf-man, etc. Before they can bow for audience applause, however, their tent is blown to shreds by Nazi warplanes, and they spend the rest of the movie rebuilding the team so they can end the war themselves. Caught up in concentration camp processing, Italian militia resistance, and general wartime disorientation, they are all eventually reunited by the ether-huffing, time-travelling Nazi who’s convinced he can win the war for Hitler if he assembles the freaks to fight for Deutschland. This all culminates in a grand superpowers battle in an open field (the way most superhero epics do), and I will admit that the journey to get to that predetermined conclusion can be a little overlong & draining (the way most superhero epics are). There’s at least some novelty in the film’s antique circus sideshow aesthetic and WWII historical contexts, though, and novelty is a precious commodity for a genre that’s been so prevalent over the past decade. It’s like watching the cast of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children act out the plot of Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio on the leftover sets of Matteo Garrone’s live-action Pinocchio – an antique Italo horror show. You won’t find that kind of aesthetic deviance in the upcoming Flash or Captain Marvel sequels, which you can pretty much already picture start to end in your head sight-unseen. These superhero freaks are flawed, messy, and they fuck, including the wolfman archetype in what has to be the hairiest sex scene since The Howling Part II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. Meanwhile, Marvel & DC are still stubbornly stuck in a chaste, sanitized universe where “everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.” They also murder Nazis, a universally agreeable target that hasn’t been attacked with such sincere patriotism since Marvel peaked in 2011 with Captain America: The First Avenger.
I’m probably doing this movie no favors by comparing it against American superhero media, since everyone’s starting to feel the same way about the genre as we felt about zombie media 17 seasons into The Walking Dead: numbly apathetic. Within that context, though, it’s a breath of fresh ether – one of the strangest, most upsetting superhero stories since James Gunn made Super, at least five James Gunn superhero movies ago. Maybe Freaks vs. The Reich would have fared better before our culture-wide superhero fatigue fully settled (it was initially set to be released less than a year after Endgame), but I personally needed it now more than ever, just so something in this genre didn’t look like a total snooze.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Derek Jarman’s playfully, defiantly anachronistic adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe play Edward II.
Whether it’s to avoid dating itself with the rapidly evolving technology of smartphones & social media or if it’s to avoid the practical problem-solving that modern tech offers, a lot of contemporary horror drags its settings back to earlier, grimier eras of the genre’s past. Personally, I’m getting bored with how much current horror product is an echo of 1970s grindhouse & 1980s neon sleaze. That nostalgic impulse is getting really shortsighted in its avoidance of documenting & processing the world we actually live in now, if not outright cowardly & lazy. So, if most contemporary horror has to live in the past for narrative convenience, I’m going to be more excited to see movies set outside that genre heyday of the first slasher wave. For instance, the recent slasher prequel Pearl is inherently more interesting than its grimy sister film X, since its own tongue-in-cheek genre pastiche of Technicolor melodramas is way less familiar & less overmined than the grindhouse Texas Chainsaw riff it followed. The same goes for the truck stop sex worker slasher Candy Land, which is set in the grunge & grime of the mid-1990s, after the first slasher wave crested and the second, meta-comedic wave began post-Scream. As soon as the film opens with a montage of transactional sex scenes set to Porno for Pyros’ “Pets,” it already feels like a much-needed break from the digitally added 1970s grain and the Carpenter-nostalgic 1980s synths of its fellow low-budget festival horrors, which have long been a matter of routine.
What endears me most to Candy Land‘s grunge-90s setting is that it doesn’t appear to be nostalgic about past horror trends at all. It’s instead nostalgic for the film festival boom of the Sundance era that made names like Soderbergh, Araki, and Haynes stars of the indie scene. Candy Land starts as a very cool, loose hangout dramedy about the daily rituals of truck stop sex workers (or “lot lizards” in CB radio lingo) before it gradually turns into a rigidly formulaic slasher to pay the bills. The true glory days of independent filmmaking are over, and most low-budget productions that want to score wide distribution have to resort to flashy genre gimmicks to earn streaming sales on the festival market. And so, we have a workplace drama that opens with sex work and ends with murder, holding back the necessary kill rhythms of a body count slasher as long as it can until it’s time to deliver the goods. Unlike most slashers that dive headfirst into the bloodbath, that delayed payoff allows you space to care about the characters in peril: a good-girl-gone-bad played by The Deuce‘s Olivia Luccardi, a sweetheart hedonist gigolo played by X‘s Owen Campbell, a shit-heel sheriff played by Sliver‘s Billy Baldwin, etc. There’s a built-in tension & danger in the main characters’ profession that makes for a great horror setting (something it’s most frank about in an extensive, brutal scene of male-on-male rape), but writer-director John Swab appears to be more interested in making a truck stop Working Girls than a truck stop Friday the 13th. I admire his practicality. Not everyone gets to be Sean Baker; sometimes you gotta cosplay as Rob Zombie to land your funding.
Candy Land excels more in its minor character observations than in the tension release of its cathartic violence. It’s set in an insular world where all sex is transactional, all sexuality is fluid, and all cops are bastards. The truck stop brothel has a grunge-fashionista uniform of leather jackets, acrylic nails, booty shorts, and heavy metal t-shirts. The girls shower, menstruate, and parade puffs of pubic & armpit hair in defiantly casual, thoughtless exhibitionism. There’s a pronounced overlap in the rules & rituals of working the truck stop and the rules & rituals of the fundamentalist Christian cult Luccardi’s newbie abandoned to get there, both with their own built-in, complex lingo. There’s also some unmistakable political commentary in which of those two insular cults proves to be harmful to the community at large – first to the johns, then to the workers. Its Christmastime setting underlines the tension between those two warring worlds with a bitter irony that’s been present in the slasher genre as far back as its pre-Halloween landmark Black Christmas. The movie might have been more rewarding if it didn’t have to sweep aside its observations of social minutia to make room for bloody hyperviolence, but I doubt it could’ve been widely distributed or even made at all without that genre hook. At least Swab didn’t default to the industry’s current go-to setting for that horror hook; he instead recalls a brighter time in indie filmmaking when you could make a notable, low-key sex worker drama without having to hit a specific body count metric.
Welcome to Episode #186 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Hanna, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of passion projects from one-and-done directors, starting with Ester Krumbachová’s The Murder of Mr. Devil (1970).
00:00 Welcome
02:02 The Doom Generation (1995) 07:13 The Black Tower (1987) 08:45 The House is Black (1963) 11:25 The Year Between (2023) 14:40 The Canyons (2013) 20:47 White Palace (1990)
25:37 The Murder of Mr. Devil (1970) 44:45 Wanda (1970) 1:03:42 Harlem Nights (1989) 1:19:25 The Evil Within (2017)
Swampflix 