Café Flesh (1982)

January 13, 2026January 13, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

The most infamous critical assessment of pornographic filmmaking was penned by a judge, not by a professional film critic. During a 1964 obscenity case, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was forced to legally define the dividing line where sexually explicit art becomes hardcore pornography, and the best he could come up with was “I know it when I see it.” At the time, he was ruling on what kinds of material would be legally approved for public exhibition in the US, participating in a long tradition of governmental censorship of pornographic art, but it was such a rarely honest, human moment within that tradition that it’s continued to reverberate in the half-century since. That “I know it when I see it” ruling even continues to resonate in how modern film critics write about pornographic cinema, as the Porno Chic moment of the 1970s & 80s has once again become a fascination for film-nerd tastemakers. There’s an attraction among hip genre-film aesthetes to treat vintage hardcore pornography as the next taboo cult-cinema frontier to be conquered, now that every last slasher, giallo, erotic thriller, and noir pic of any interest has already been given the loving 4K Blu-Ray restoration treatment. How far does that renewed critical interest in hardcore porno go, though? If a vintage porno like Bijou or Blonde Ambition is worthy of critical re-appraisal through a modern lens, why aren’t more recent best-seller titles like Visiting My Anal In-Laws 2 or POV Juggfuckers 8 also afforded that same critical consideration? I’ve personally reviewed feature-length porno parodies of films as wide-ranging as Batman, West World, The Exorcist, and Repulsion on this very website, so why haven’t I also made the time for Pulp Friction, American Whore Story, or Back to the Cooter? Part of that decision making is that all movies become more interesting and culturally significant with time, so the better-funded, better plotted pornos made in the Golden Age of Porno Chic are going to be inherently more attractive for critical analysis than the straight-to-VOD porno of today. But where is the dividing line? Is there a definitive temporal or budgetary cutoff that cleanly divides the art from the schlock? The simple answer is no; I just know it when I see it.

Of course, this fussy self-analysis over what forms of hardcore pornography I consider worth covering on this sub-professional film blog doesn’t carry much big-picture significance. I’m no Supreme Court Justice. It was just on my mind after I looked up the 1982 dystopian sci-fi porno Café Flesh on the social media website Letterboxd: this generation’s online hub for cinematic discourse. I had just watched Café Flesh for the first time after purchasing a nice, newly restored scan of it on Blu-ray from the niche genre-cinema label Mondo Macabre. As if it wasn’t already embarrassing enough that I was curious what my fellow Letterboxd users had to say about the artistic merits of a 40-year-old porno, my search also dug up three titles in the Café Flesh series, not just the infamous one from director Stephen Sayadian. Apparently there was a Café Flesh 2 produced in 1997 and a Café Flesh 3 in 2003, long after the Porno Chic wave had crested. While the original film maintains a small, niche place in genre-filmmaking history (and on the boutique Blu-ray market), those two direct-to-video sequels are the kind of long-abandoned porno schlock you’ll only find on copyright-infringing streaming sites with names like SpankBang & TNAFlix. Based on their release dates, screengrabs, and slipcover art, I totally get it. They appear to be purely, crassly commercial products that conform to the respective industry standards of their times, produced entirely with the intent of arousing a few orgasms and, more importantly, selling a few video tapes. Meanwhile, Sayadian’s original Café Flesh is a bizarre cultural oddity: a hardcore porno that routinely, deliberately makes creative decisions that undermine its commercial, erotic potential. A post-apocalyptic sci-fi parable about a near-future dystopia where most nuclear-fallout survivors can’t stomach sexual contact without wanting to vomit, the film is stubbornly silly, depressing, and gross. Maybe that’s the dividing line between pornographic art and porno schlock: the willingness to undermine any possible titillation to be found in visual depictions of penetrative sex with so much extraneous bullshit that the audience can only walk away wondering, “Who was this for? Why was it made?”

Set in “a world destroyed, a mutant universe” left over after our impending nuclear holocaust, Café Flesh imagines a future society in which 99% of surviving humans become insurmountably nauseated when they attempt to have sexual intercourse. So, a fascistic government agency has been created to force the remaining 1% of sexually viable survivors to perform for the majority population’s entertainment, as a kind of addictive surrogate for sexual release. The titular “café” is a nightclub in which large groups of Sex Negatives gather to watch a small celebrity class of Sex Positives get it on in public, performing on a small stage as if they were singing karaoke. Think it of it as the de-evolution porno, a series of novelty sex acts staged through music video choreo in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone’s horny but (almost) nobody fucks. Stephen Sayadian puts his personal stamp on the material as a name-brand reprobate auteur (under the porn-industry pseudonym Rinse Dream). Here, he develops a lot of the sound-stage surrealism imagery he would later push to ecstatic German Expressionist extremes in his career-high achievement Dr. Caligari, to much sillier results. In the opening sex number, a milkman in a humanoid rat mask fucks a bored housewife while her three overgrown man-babies watch from their high-chair perches in the background, dancing in place to the beat. Then, a giant sports-mascot pencil in a business suit fucks an office worker on his desk while his secretary types notes in rhythm, giving new meaning to the phrase “pencil dick.” Even when these cartoonish exhibitions are replaced with more traditional sex acts, Sayadian continues to undermine all potential for sincere arousal in his audience, such as in a lesbian orgy that is scored with maniacal male laughter and the droning bomb sirens of an oncoming air raid. These theatrical novelty acts are broken up by the recursive reaction shots and petty domestic squabbles of the Sex Negative audience watching from the floor, occasionally interrupted by a Steve Martin-impersonating MC who ads an air of state-sanctioned menace to the proceedings. The only genuine moments of eroticism are found in the taboo of crossing the threshold from observer to participant. When someone officially designated as Sex Negative is found out to be a Sex Positive in hiding and pressured into exhibitionism, the movie allows for genuine erotic tension to hang in the air; everything else is grotesque mockery of Reagan’s America and its inevitable toxic fallout.

While Dr. Caligari is Stephen Sayadian’s greater artistic achievement overall, Café Flesh holds its own cultural significance as the definitive 80s movie. It expresses all of the artistic & sexual neuroses of a generation rattled by Porno Chic, MTV, and nuclear bombing drills through a funhouse mirror reflection of the times. I’ve seen lowlier, crasser versions of this exact 80s-specific porno aesthetic in contemporary titles like New Wave Hookers, but I’ve yet to see it achieved with such an active disinterest in the erotic potential of the depicted sex. Even in making that distinction, I’m attempting to draw a line between the commercially minded pornographic filmmaking of Gregory Dark and the for-their-own-sake poetic indulgences of Stephen Sayadian, once again relying on a “I know it when I see it” system of assigning artistic merit to one version of pornography over another. Sometimes you just have to admit that there’s nothing new or novel left to say about film as a medium that wasn’t already better worded decades before you were born; it’s just that we’re more used to those short-hand critical wisdoms coming from a Roger Ebert or a Pauline Kael, not a judge on the Supreme Court.

-Brandon Ledet

The Islands of Yann Gonzalez (2006 – 2017)

January 12, 2026January 12, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

I’ve long had an uneasy relationship with French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez’s work. His most recent feature, Knife+Heart, is one of the defining genre films of the 2010s and placed him side by side with my personal favorite filmmaker currently working, Bertrand Mandico, as one of Altered Innocence’s strongest pervert warriors. I just don’t know how to square the divine status of that porno-chic erotic thriller with the fact that I gave his previous feature a 2-star review in the first few months of writing for this website. I was frustrated with Gonzalez’s stage-play orgy You and the Night the first time I watched it in 2015, but I had hoped that the following decade of cherishing & championing what his home label Altered Innocence brings to the modern cinema scene would’ve turned me around on it. Unfortunately, I still found it to be a limp bore on a recent rewatch, a whiplash-inducing reaction after the intensely horny thrills of Knife+Heart. It turns out that the key to understanding how Gonzalez arrived at the intoxicating sensory pleasures of his god-tier Cruising riff cannot be found in the cock-tease stasis of his debut feature. To track his aesthetic development in the years before making Knife+Heart, you have to look to his extensive collection of short films, since that’s the medium he most often works in.

The Islands of Yann Gonzalez is an omnibus collection of “7 short films and other works” (mostly music videos) that Gonzalez made in the years leading up to Knife+Heart, published on Blu-ray by Altered Innocence in 2022. As an artist’s portfolio, it’s a much more coherent collection than the sprawling, anything-goes Bertrand Mandico catalog Apocalypse After, published that same year. The auteurist vision of The Islands of Yann Gonzalez is so consistent that it practically functions as an overlong anthology film, especially since the director has so consistently collaborated with his actor/muse of choice Kate Moran (similar to the way Mandico repeatedly deploys Elina Löwensohn as his own on-screen avatar). It’s in this collection of shorts that you get to know Gonzalez as one of the most exciting, hedonistic filmmakers currently working, not just as the out-of-nowhere director of Knife+Heart (and the less-famous brother of hipster musician M83). The only trick is to resist the urge to Shazam every French synthpop needle drop peppered throughout the collection, since it could quickly become a second-screen viewing experience, distracting from his visual artistry. The dream of electroclash is alive & well in Paris, apparently — at least according to these shorts (and to fellow Altered Innocence release Queens of Drama).

The opening short “You Will Never Be Alone Again” is an indie sleaze dance party filmed long before that aughts-era aesthetic was more widely, nostalgically revived. It imagines a French reboot of Skins that, of course, would be a silent arthouse short shot on black & white 16mm film stock. Sweaty teenagers maniacally dance until dawn in a semi-religious, semi-drug-induced frenzy, pausing for brief moments of melancholy mid-party while Gonzalez lights everything with a single flashlight, like he’s documenting a crime scene. It’s more of a mood than a narrative, echoing the extensive music video work that pads out his filmography. We then get a taste of his narrative filmmaking sensibilities in “I Hate You Little Girls,” his first substantial collaboration with his favorite actor (Moran) and his first film about his favorite pet subject: the erotic tension between sex & death. Moran stars as a synthpop punk singer who spends half of her time singing gothy dance tunes in front of porn projectors and the other half mourning her recently deceased, bad-boy boyfriend. It’s a definitive piece for Gonzalez, as it hones in on the exact tone of tragic horniness that would persist throughout his following major works. It’s also got a few unforgettable images, including Moran passed out in the street with a Polaroid of her dead lover stuffed into her see-through mesh panties and a fellow local musician performing a BDSM stage act while costumed as a “Whip It”-era member of DEVO.

The two shorts leading up to “I Hate You Little Girls” were effectively just screen tests for Moran as a cinematic image. “By the Kiss” wordlessly pictures her making out with various scene partners, as if Gonzalez was obsessively playing with his new favorite doll on camera. “Intermission” is a more illuminating text, in which Moran and fellow Gonzalez regular Pierre Vincent Chapus lean against a brick wall and wonder aloud what they could do “to avoid being bored, to avoid being boring.” It’s here that Gonzalez announces his adherence to the principles later codified by Bertrand Mandico’s “Incoherence Manifesto,” defining cinema as a mechanism that allows the audience “to forget time, to get lost in images.” “I Hate You Little Girls” ends on a supernatural image that breaks from reality to instead traffic in pure dream logic, but that guiding principle to not bore audiences with real-world logic only continues to escalate in subsequent shorts. “Three Celestial Bodies” finds lost souls having a melancholic threeway with a kind of Sex Christ on a music video set, while He bleeds out of a wound just above a tattoo of Marcel Duchamp’s autograph. Gonzalez’s signature short “Islands” is a fully supernatural fantasia composed of increasingly perverted, despondent sex acts, blurring the line between fantasy & reality with grotesque monster movie makeup. Even my initial, disappointed review of You and the Night acknowledged the intoxicating potency of its dream logic imagery, citing “a green screen motorcycle ride, an Alice in Wonderland style ballet, and a trip to a phantom movie theater” as welcome breaks from the listless swingers’ party segments that drag down the energy. And, of course, Knife+Heart had that mystic twink character who was inexplicably part bird, whatever that means.

Of Altered Innocence’s two trademark filmmakers, I’m still overall more convinced of Bertrand Mandico’s genius as a perverted surrealist, an illusionist unafraid to break away from the boring confines of real-world logic to drown his audience in the sensory pleasures of a hedonistic otherworld. Look to any stray frame of The Wild Boys or She is Conann to see a more ecstatic, less restrained version of what Gonzalez is doing in his most extreme moments of fantasy. However, this collection of shorts has totally reshaped my big-picture view of Gonzalez’s work, which is typically more focused on creating a sweaty dance party atmosphere than getting lost in the poetry of the artform. His synthpop sex romps are grimy, decadent searches for pleasure in a world haunted by dead & violent lovers. No good orgiastic dance party is complete without an It Girl at the center of the room, of course, so it’s a godsend he found the effortlessly hip, chic Moran so early in his career to help set the tone. The only thing I still can’t figure out is why the energy was so low in his debut feature, which has all the right reprobates, tunes, and costumes to make for a classic Gonzalez sex party but ends up feeling like the first hour of a middle school dance instead, the hour when everyone in the gymnasium is afraid to look at or touch each other. No matter; he’s delivered heaps of hedonistic ecstasy and classic French melancholy in every project before & since, so it’s easy to forgive the misstep.

-Brandon Ledet

Eve’s Bayou (1997)

January 11, 2026January 11, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

“All I know is, there must be a divine point to it all, and it’s just over my head. That when we die, it will all come clear. And then we’ll say, ‘So that was the damn point.’ And sometimes, I think there’s no point at all, and maybe that’s the point. All I know is most people’s lives are a great disappointment to them and no one leaves this earth without feeling terrible pain. And if there is no divine explanation at the end of it all, well … that’s sad.”

Debbi Morgan performs that speech in Eve’s Bayou while staring blank-eyed into the Louisiana nightscape. She then catches herself, realizing that she’s been talking to a small child instead of just pontificating into the night air. That intergenerational relationship is the core of this 1997 supernatural melodrama, in which a 10-year-old mystic-in-training (Full House‘s Jurnee Smollett) learns how to make sense of her psychic visions and magic intuitions under the guidance of her Aunt Mozelle (Morgan). Its plot synopsis sounds like it could belong to a Teen Witch-style coming-of-age comedy for kids, but Eve’s Bayou instead frames a decidedly adult world through a child’s eyes. Its witchcraft isn’t used to present playful wish fulfillment for youngsters, but to dredge up heaps of generational pain from the murky bottom of Louisiana swamps so it can finally rot in the sun. The film opens with an adult Eve Batiste recounting her small, Black community’s history as a slave plantation, then announcing that she’s going to tell the story about the summer she killed her father, in 1962. Naturally, most of the story that follows involves a young Eve observing & reacting to her father’s adult (and adulterous) behavior as the audience anticipates that foretold act of violence, but the heart of the story is more about her characterization as the next-generation mystic learning the ways of the world from her Aunt Mozelle.

Writer-director Kasi Lemmons describes her debut feature as autofictional, characterizing the young Eve as “a little bit me, a little bit Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.” Although raised in St. Louis, Lemmons has vivid memories of visiting relatives in the Deep South (Alabama, not Louisiana) that she felt compelled to illustrate onscreen here, mixed with fictional stories of a philandering town doctor she created for a proof-of-concept short film titled “Dr. Hugo”. Lemmons’s biggest champion, Samuel L. Jackson, stars as that town doctor and town bicycle: little Eve’s doomed-to-die father. Lynn Whitfield plays the matriarch, frequently and credibly described as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” suffering silently as her husband makes his professional & romantic rounds around town while she raises his three kids at home. Eve’s teenage sister Cicely (Meagan Good) takes after their mother’s practiced poise, but the younger Eve is much more resistant to being tamed and instead learns how to interact with the world from her Hoodoo-practicing aunt. The world is split in two between the sibling sets of both generations: a world of magic vs. a world of rational thought. It doesn’t matter which of those worldviews eventually wins out, though, since the end result is a foregone conclusion by the opening narration. Her father will die, and the painful familial secrets hidden by social niceties will eventually come to light.

The mysticism of Eve’s Bayou is more about subjective perception than about supernatural action. Eve and her aunt cannot change the world through supernatural means, but they can see parts of it that others are blind to. Their psychic visions are illustrated in surrealist black-and-white montage, with standalone images of spiders, clocks, and dirty needles superimposed onto the swamps just outside their homes. Lemmons positions the act of conjuring this imagery through cinema as a form of witchcraft, explaining in dialogue that memory is itself “a selection of images” and that the modern world is “haunted by the past.” In the Southern ghost story tradition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she invites the ghosts of the past to enter the story through the technological conduits of cameras, mirrors, and word processors. Every individual character’s memory, no matter how rationally minded, is positioned as a kind of supernatural realm in that context, and she does her best not to exclude any one version of the truth in her ambiguous telling of the circumstances behind the doctor’s death. The only character who doesn’t get their say is a disabled uncle who cannot speak due to his cerebral palsy symptoms, so his own memories and accounts of the truth are confined to his own mind. Like the audience, he can only observe, but he’s got a much more direct vantage point in seeing What Really Happened in the lead-up to the tragedy.

Speaking of memory, you might not remember that Eve had a disabled family member in her home, since a producer asked to have him removed from the original 1990s theatrical release, thinking that he would jeopardize the film’s commercial appeal by making audiences “uncomfortable.” The uncle’s place in the story was then later restored in a “Director’s Cut” released in the 2010s, also restoring the film’s core theme of the magical subjectivity of perception & memory. The initial choice to remove him is indicative of the many ways in which the film’s commercial appeal was misunderstood in its initial 90s release. Besides Samuel L. Jackson backing the film as a producer & star, critic Roger Ebert was likely its most vocal champion in the industry, concluding his 1997 review with the declaration that, “If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the academy is not paying attention. For the viewer, it is a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams.” Eve’s Bayou was not nominated for any Academy Awards. It made enough money to register as an indie-level hit, but it still didn’t lead to much of a professional windfall for Lemmons, who spent the most of her remaining career as a director-for-hire in the impersonal world of studio biopics. It’s easy to guess why this movie didn’t attract major studio backing, why Lemmons didn’t become a blank-check auteur, why Lynn “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Whitfield didn’t become a Hollywood superstar, and why Ebert’s Oscars predictions went nowhere: in a word, racism. Still, it continues to shine as a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams without straying from mainstream filmmaking sensibilities, even when working outside mainstream filmmaking funding.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #255: The Top 12 Films of 2025

January 9, 2026January 9, 2026 / swampflix / 2 Comments

Welcome to Episode #255 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss their favorite films of 2025.

0:00 Welcome
04:00 Honorable mentions
29:30 KPop Demon Hunters
39:00 Rats!
46:00 Weapons
53:00 Misericordia
1:02:08 The Ugly Stepsister
1:10:00 The Plague
1:22:00 Eephus
1:28:40 Marty Supreme
1:44:55 When Fall Is Coming
1:52:22 No Other Choice
2:04:22 The Phoenician Scheme
2:13:25 One Battle After Another
2:38:08 Box office

Hanna’s Top 20 Films of 2025

James’s Top 20 Films of 2025

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

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

January 4, 2026January 4, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Once upon a dream, Disney was in the business of producing world-class visual art. Now they’re just in the business of business — corporate acquisitions and such. The dream is over. So it goes.

That corporate culture shift didn’t happen overnight. At minimum, it happened over a decade. The 1950s saw Disney’s earliest, mightiest strides to diversify its portfolio, expanding into television and amusement parks after spending its first couple decades focused on its core mission: overworking & union-busting animators. Still alive, engaged, and at the helm, Walt Disney himself was conscious of the ways his company’s corporate expansion could dilute the quality of its feature films, so he made a point to reaffirm dominance in the field through technically accomplished pictures like Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Fittingly, the studio closed out the decade with the most back-to-basics title of the batch, 1959’s fairy tale romance Sleeping Beauty.

This feature-length adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s thinly plotted ballet is, above all else, a formal flex. Narratively speaking, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t accomplish anything that wasn’t already covered by Snow White or Cinderella. It’s yet another princess-in-distress fairy tale of a fair maiden being rescued from a jealous hag’s curse by a macho hero’s kiss. Only, it’s stripped of any defining characteristics that would make its doomed lovers lastingly memorable. Nothing about Princess Aurora is especially iconic, to the point where she’s more often referred to nowadays by the film’s title than by her proper name. All memorable character quirks are instead reserved for the women in charge of her fate: the three goofball fairies who protect her from Evil (Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather) and the villainous Mistress of All Evil (Maleficent, the only character here deemed worthy of her own spinoff franchise).

Without any of the usual pesky plotting or character concerns getting in their way, Disney’s team of technicians could focus entirely on the animation’s visual majesty. Afforded an extreme “Technirama” aspect ratio to paint his elaborate backdrops within, artist Eymind Earle crafts an extravagantly detailed tableau in every frame. Walt Disney tasked his crew with evoking Medieval tapestries in the film’s design, and Earle goes so overboard in his traditionalist craftsmanship that he upstages the characters that populate his backdrops. In turn, his collaborators create an incredible depth of field through cell animation techniques, especially in early sequences where the wicked witch Maleficent and her fairy foes bless & curse the newborn baby Aurora through a series of magic spells. Roses, specters, lightning, and other abstract premonitions swirl in psychedelic montage as Aurora’s fate is decided at the foot of her royal crib. It’s a divine intersection of the fairy tale traditionalism of Snow White and the pure orchestral illustration of Fantasia — two mighty Disney triumphs from decades past, the best animation money can buy.

I have no interest in recounting Aurora’s troubled path to womanhood here. She’s cursed to die on her 16th birthday but is saved by a good nap and a classic case of puppy love. The rest is all arranged royal marriages, goofy sidekick antics, and sitcom-level mistaken identity hijinks. Even the mighty Maleficent is more memorable for her visual design than for her words or actions. We love the drag queen pageantry of her devil-horned headpiece. We love the green-on-black color scheme of her magic spells. We love her climactic transformation into a purple, fire-breathing dragon — another grand achievement in classic, hand-drawn animation. When the evil witch is defeated and Aurora is saved by the kiss of her sweetheart prince, the picture ends with the young couple dancing in the clouds. That’s also where the audience’s heads are supposed to be, not sweating the details of the storytelling on the ground.

When was the last time Disney was more focused on the visual majesty of it’s animation than on the marketability of its characters? Every in-house Disney production is now shrewdly designed to stock some toy shelf, amusement park attraction, or T-shirt screen press with fresh, sellable IP. It’s difficult to imagine an instance where they’d set aside character quirks & catchphrases to wow an audience with a return to classic, elegant animation. At this point, the company’s animation wing is a product delivery mechanism, like an assembly line conveyor belt. It used to be their entire raison d’être.

-Brandon Ledet

Eternity (2025)

January 3, 2026January 3, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Do movies ever premiere on airplanes? I’ve occasionally seen ads from airlines proudly declaring that they are the exclusive in-flight entertainment home for a recent theatrical release, as if there’s a customer base out there willing to book a flight on Delta instead of Southwest specifically so they can watch Predator: Badlands on the back of a headrest. Has that kind of competitive bidding on fresh in-flight content created enough of a market to support direct-to-headrest film productions, though? Could it possibly be lucrative for a traditional Hollywood movie to skip theaters entirely and instead exclusively premiere as in-flight entertainment? I ask this having just watched the supernatural romcom Eternity, which drifted quietly through American multiplexes without much fanfare but will soon make for a major crowd-pleaser as an in-flight movie selection. It’s cute, harmless, weightless, and just overall pleasant enough to make a long fight go down smooth, already evaporating from you brain by the time you walk to baggage claim.

Miles Teller & Elizabeth Olsen star as an elderly suburban couple who die within a week of each other, rematerializing as their younger, happier selves in a Limbo-like eternity. Their decades of functional but unexciting marriage are threatened to be undermined by the return intrusion of Olsen’s first husband: a noble war hero hunk played by Callum Turner, who died tragically young. Now, she has a short span of time to choose between which of her two deceased beaus to spend her eternity with, essentially choosing between bright romantic spark and long-term marital comfort. Despite all of the supernatural shenanigans that distract from the competition between her two love interests, it’s a fairly straightforward romcom dynamic, which the movie openly acknowledges by having one of the two competing husbands rush to the train station to stop her from leaving at the climax. There isn’t even much tension in guessing which of the two men she’ll ultimately choose, not if you keep in mind that hot people don’t write movies; they just star in them. Of course the more nebbish Teller is inevitably going to be selected as Olsen’s prize; no hunky Turners were invited to the writers’ room.

If Eternity has any major flaws that keep it from rising above standard-issue romcom fluff, it’s all in the casting. Miles Teller simply isn’t enough of a certified uggo to contrast Callum Turner, whose main selling point appears to be that he is tall. We’re told by the script that Turner is as handsome as Montgomery Clift, but we can clearly see that is not the case, so he plays the stand-in idea of Montgomery Clift instead of the real deal. Olsen is also a kind of symbolic stand-in, playing the torn-between-two-hunks heroine with just enough blank-slate blandness that anyone watching from home (or, ideally, from the plane) can imagine themselves in her place without being distracted by the distinguishing specifics of her character. The only signs of life among the main cast are in the comic-relief pair of “Afterlife Coordinators” played by Jon Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who are employed by the unseen corporate gods of Limbo to talk this trio of lost souls into one afterlife or another as if they’re hurriedly selling timeshares out of a brochure. They’re funny, but not too funny. Nothing about the movie is too anything, presumably by design.

A24 is reportedly looking to upscale their in-studio productions to reach a wider market, recently trying their hands at the big-budget war thriller with Warfare, the movie-star sports drama with The Smashing Machine, and the period-piece Oscar player with Marty Supreme, with other mainstream audience ploys to come. I have to wonder how much the greenlighting of Eternity was influenced by that boardroom conversation. Was its marketing potential as a surefire in-flight entertainment favorite part of the justification behind that decision? The movie largely feels like it’s set in the liminal corporate spaces of an airport lounge & bar, with Early & Randolph’s afterlife realtors costumed as retro flight attendants. My only other theory on the initial pitch for the film’s commercial appeal is that it would make a great backdoor sitcom pilot, since Olsen gets to briefly taste-test different afterlives with her potential forever-husbands as she debates which eternity to settle into. There’s some brief magical twee whimsy in her climactic sprint between those worlds as she defies the laws of Limbo to reunite with her true love that recalls previous work from hipster auteurs in the A24 mold: Michel Gondry, Julio Torres, Girl Asleep‘s Rosemary Myers, etc. There just isn’t enough budget to fully flesh out the idea, though, so it ends up being a proof-of-concept sketch for a potential Good Place-style supernatural sitcom, coming soon to an Apple TV console near you. In the meantime, enjoy this low-stakes, low-emotions romcom set at the edges of those infinite-possibility worlds, for now boiled down to simple-concept settings: mountains, beach, train station, etc. And if you can, go ahead and pair it with a complementary ginger ale and a single-serving pack of pretzels — the way it was clearly meant to be seen.

-Brandon Ledet

Shakedown (1988)

December 30, 2025December 30, 2025 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Midway through the 1988 police-corruption thriller Shakedown, Sam Elliott’s undercover cop hands a revolver to Peter Weller’s disheveled lawyer and asks, “You know how to use one of these?,” and Weller responds in his default, deadeyed deadpan, “Fuckin A, bubba. I’m from New York City.” It’s a throwaway action-movie one liner, but the entire picture is framed within that assumption that anyone who’s tough enough to survive 1980s NYC street life is always a half-second’s notice away from engaging in some good, old-fashioned gun violence. The movie opens with Law & Order veteran Richard Brooks minding his own business smoking crack in Central Park, when he’s approached by an undercover “blue jean cop” who reaches into his jacket for a concealed weapon. By the time the ambulance arrives, both men are bleeding to death on the ground from gunshot wounds, with no witnesses having seen who shot whom first. To determine whether the crack dealer (Brooks) fired his gun in self defense, the public defender assigned to his case (Weller) has to team up with the only blue jean cop he trusts (Eliot) to shoot even more guns at even more cops & drug dealers across the city’s seedy underbelly. They start shootouts in the backroom brothels above 42nd Street porno theaters; they pistol-whip perps during fistfights on Coney Island roller coasters; they chase stolen cop cars through homeless encampments and set fire to the resulting wreckage. Fuckin A, bubba, welcome to New York City.

Shakedown doesn’t have the same lost-and-found mystique as the recently restored Night of the Juggler, but it emerged from the same vintage gutter sludge. Narratively, it’s a by-the-books buddy cop thriller, except one of the cops happens to be a lawyer . . . and maybe also a robot. Peter Weller is as glaringly inhuman as always in the lead role of a long-suffering public defense attorney who’s tempted to leave the street-level grime behind in favor of a cushy yuppie lifestyle at a private firm. He says he’s tired of having to defend the “the scumbags, the jerkoffs, the sex freaks, and the killers” of NYC in court, but anyone who knows him sees right through the facade. When he’s assigned to defend the Central Park dealer who killed an undercover cop in self-defense, you can tell he loves the job far too much to ever walk away. In order to prove his client’s innocence, he has to team up with the only non-corrupt cop left in the city: Sam Elliott, a humble Texan expat. We meet Elliot in a grindhouse cinema, watching an absurd downhill skiing shootout from director James Glickenhaus’s previous feature The Soldier, teasing the insane action spectacle to come once he & Weller hit the streets and turn up the heat. The movie quickly delivers on that promise, scoring its whirlwind tour through pre-Giuliani New York City with the infinite supply of “ghetto blaster” boomboxes that used to decorate every street corner, along with the dealers & sex workers who operated them.

Shakedown is classic NYC sleaze with a stacked cast of always-welcome reprobates. Honeymoon Killers legend Shirley Stoler briefly pops in as a takes-no-shit security guard. Corman veteran Paul Bartel plays a night court judge in a single scene. David “Richie from Sopranos” Proval plays the corrupt cop who mans the evidence desk at the local precinct, stubbornly blocking Weller from the evidence that proves his client’s innocence. It’s a never-ending parade of celebrity cameos for anyone who happens to be the kind of person who would be watching a 1980s corrupt-cop thriller named Shakedown. After recently seeing Weller in Of Unknown Origin & Naked Lunch, Stoler in Frankenhooker, and Bartel in Basquiat & Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, it felt like a kind of season finale for my personal year in trash movie watching. So, I’ve come up with a quick, arbitrary metric to see how it ranks against other vintage New York schlock thrillers I’ve watched this year: determining its production crew overlap with my two most recently watched TV shows. According to the IMDb “Advanced collaboration” search, Shakedown shares 50 collaborators with Law & Order and 27 with The Sopranos. That’s ahead of Night of the Juggler (28 Law & Order, 6 Sopranos) but behind Cop Land (an impressive 75 Law & Order, 73 Sopranos). Of course, that’s more raw data than it is analysis, but all you really need to know about this movie anyway is that it’s aggressively grimy and Glickenhaus blows shit up real good. The rest is just character actors & mise-en-scène.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Secret Agent & SEFCA Awards 2025

December 29, 2025December 29, 2025 / swampflix / 1 Comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Southeastern Film Critic Association’s awarded films of 2025, starting with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s period-piece political thriller The Secret Agent.

00:00 SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2025
15:30 The Secret Agent (2025)
43:35 Best Actor
57:33 Best Actress
1:10:13 Best Supporting Actor
1:16:52 Best Supporting Actress
1:25:06 Best Ensemble
1:29:41 Best Director
1:35:54 Best Original Screenplay
1:42:27 Best Adapted Screenplay
1:50:26 Best Animated Film
1:56:53 Best Documentary
2:13:46 Best Foreign-Language Film
2:23:00 Best Cinematography
2:34:45 Best Score
2:39:52 Best Editing
2:45:07 Best Costuming
2:49:34 Best Young Performer

Boomer’s Ballot

Best Actor:
1. David Jonsson, The Long Walk
2. Josh O’Connor, Wake Up Dead Man
3. Benicio Del Toro, The Phoenician Scheme
Best Actress:
1. Wunmi Mosaku, Sinners
2. Rose Byrne, If I Had Leg’s I’d Kick You
3. Sally Hawkins, Bring Her Back
Best Supporting Actor:
1. Miles Caron, Sinners
2. Aidan Delbis, Bugonia
3. Michael Stuhlbarg, After the Hunt
Best Supporting Actress:
1. Judy Greer, The Long Walk
2. Amy Madigan, Weapons
3. Jodie Comer, 28 Years Later
Best Ensemble:
1. Sinners
2. Eephus
3. Sirat
Best Director:
1. Ryan Coogler, Sinners
2. Rungano Nyoni, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
3. Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Best Original Screenplay:
1. Weapons
2. Twinless
3. Lurker
Best Adapted Screenplay:
1. Bugonia
2. No Other Choice
3. The Long Walk
Best Animated Film:
1. The Colors Within
2. Boys Go to Jupiter
3. Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Best Documentary:
1. No Other Land
2. Secret Mall Apartment
3. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
Best Foreign-Language Film:
1. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
2. Sister Midnight
3. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
Best Cinematography:
1. Die My Love
2. After the Hunt
3. Mastermind
Best Score:
1. Rabbit Trap
2. Sinners
3. Ash
Best Film Editing
1. Die My Love
2. No Other Choice
3. Wake Up Dead Man
Best Costuming
1. Frankenstein
2. Ugly Stepsister
3. Wicked: For Good
Promising Young Performer
1. Billy Barratt, Bring Her Back
2. Alfie Williams, 28 Years Later
3. Cary Christopher, Weapons
Best Picture:
1. Universal Language
2. Sinners
3. Bring Her Back
4. Twinless
5. The Phoenician Scheme
6. Eephus
7. No Other Choice
8. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
9. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
10. Bugonia

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

Bean (1997)

December 24, 2025December 24, 2025 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Cinema is a democratizing artform. While the average family might not be able to afford a trip to see an opera or a ballet in-person, anyone with a library card can get a taste of those highbrow artforms by borrowing Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann from the library for free. Moviegoers regularly get exposed to great works of literature, far-off gorgeous vistas, and heady academic pursuits just by keeping our eyes on the screen, distracted from the financial inequalities that separate us from enjoying those experiences in real life. For instance, as a small child growing up in Chalmette, Louisiana, there was no chance I was ever going to travel to Paris to see the iconic American painting Whistler’s Mother in person, but thanks to the British culture-clash comedy Bean, I was educated on the piece’s historical importance anyway. Thanks to Bean, I was also exposed at an early age to the refined tastes of dry British wit, as embodied by the titular rubber-faced goon, Mr. Bean.

The basic premise of Bean hinges on Americans’ assumption that because Mr. Bean is British, he is therefore an erudite sophisticate. In reality, he is a working-class dolt who can barely keep his job as an art museum security guard, which mostly entails sitting quietly in a chair. Bean is such a disastrous embarrassment that his employer ships him off to America as the unlikely shepherd for the aforementioned James McNeill Whistler painting, risking major lawsuits & profit loss just to be rid of him for a while. It takes a few days for the Los Angeles clout chasers who are purchasing that famous painting to catch on that Mr. Bean is not the art-history expert Dr. Bean they made up in their heads when they heard he works for a British art museum. By then, he has already destroyed the multi-million-dollar painting through a series of escalating slapstick pratfalls, threatening to take down the life & reputation of an American museum curator with him (played Ghostbusters II‘s Peter MacNicol). And so, Whistler’s Mother was never the same again, in the film or out.

Rowan Atkinson is hilarious as Mr. Bean. That’s just a fact. It’s easy to brush off his style of humor as a haphazard collection of silly face contortions, but I believe there’s a genuine, traditional elegance to his sub-verbal shenanigans. He brought some classic Charlie Chaplin & Harpo Marx silent-comedy clowning to the 1990s video market, whereas American equivalents like Jim Carrey & Robin Williams were more focused on shouting t-shirt worthy catchphrases. When we first meet Bean in the opening scene, he breaks his ceramic mug while running late to work, so he resolves to mix his entire instant coffee concoction in his mouth to not waste time: coffee powder, sugar, cream, and boiling water straight from the kettle — swished around like mouthwash before painfully swallowed. While traveling by plane to America, he manages to explode a barf bag all over his fellow first-class clientele. The movie’s most infamous gag involves losing his wristwatch while stuffing a turkey. When he looks inside to find it, he ends up wearing the entire bird on his head, suffocating to death while stumbling around like a buffoon. Every room he enters is a potential disaster zone. Characters beg him to understand that, “If you do nothing, nothing can go wrong,” but he persists in fucking up everything he touches anyway. Children everywhere love him for it, as do the smartest of adults.

I was only being partially sarcastic in that opening paragraph. Bean really was my first exposure to Whistler’s Mother as a 10-year-old Chalmatian, and most of the movie’s plot revolves around showing that painting respect as one of the most important works of American art, positioning it as the nation’s Mona Lisa. Of course, the comedy’s art museum setting is mostly an excuse to shoehorn Mr. Bean into a quiet, stuffy atmosphere where his goofball theatrics can do the most damage, but it made an impression on me at that age nonetheless. Its jokes about the crass commercialization of fine art in the wide range of Whistler’s Mother merch designed for the LA museum’s gift shops is the kind of low-level satire that kids can feel smart for catching onto. It’s mixed with for-their-own-sake gags like Mr. Bean ironing his tighty-whiteys—which are funny to kids for reasons unknown—but the satire’s there all the same. One slapstick gag involves Bean getting smacked in the head by giant Alexander Calder mobile in the museum’s driveway, which is the perfect meeting point between its high-culture setting and its dumb-as-rocks humor. We’re always going to make idiotic slapstick comedies for kids as long as we’re making movies at all, so we might as well smack the little tikes over the head with some great works of art while we’re at it. It’s a public service, an investment in our future.

-Brandon Ledet

Brandon’s Top 20 Films of 2025

December 23, 2025December 23, 2025 / swampflix / 1 Comment

1. The Phoenician Scheme — The violence is Looney Tunes, the business negotiations are Three Stooges, the religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of this for any other director’s work. Another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.

2. Eephus — A slow-paced, aimless movie that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game in real time … except that every single dialogue exchange & character detail is either deeply charming, riotously funny, or both.

3. The Plague — The scariest movie I watched all October was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a water polo summer camp. I don’t know if it qualifies as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Kids are monsters, man; be thankful you never have to be one again.

4. Weapons — Semi-functional alcoholism, conspiracy theory paranoia, Ring camera surveillance, cops harassing the homeless, mob justice vigilantism, institutional scapegoats for abuses at home … Oh yeah, we’re rockin’ the suburbs.

5. One Battle After Another— 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline felt like a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before being chopped up and sold for parts). I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio action spectacle at this point in my life, but it’s encouraging to know the genre can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.

6. Sinners — A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. It’s funny & sexy too, improbably.

7. Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. He may be an annoying twerp, but lil Timmy Chalmette really is going places.

8. The Ugly Stepsister — A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the neverending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. Sometimes “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process.

9. The Shrouds — Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only David Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.

10. Dead Lover— Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Dead Lover pairs some of the most gorgeous, perverted images of the year with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates each punchline with ADR’d fart noises.

11. Fucktoys — A low-budget, high-concept horror comedy about a sex worker struggling to earn the cash needed for a ceremony to lift the mysterious curse that’s constantly derailing her life. The fantastical Trashtown setting will likely earn this a lot of comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously, garishly bratty.

12. Rats!— A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but I don’t know that any other post-Linklater buttscratchers have ever been this exceedingly gross or this truly anarchic. It’s a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens.

13. The Surfer — An Ozploitation throwback in which a workaholic yuppie drives himself mad trying to prove his manliness to a beachful of toxic, brainwashed bullies. As the Aussie sun wears him down, it gradually transforms into Nicolas Cage’s version of The Swimmer, retracing Burt Lancaster’s surreal heat-stroke journey into his own macho psyche and hating everything he sees.

14. Sirāt — When it’s time to party*, we will always party hard.

*distract ourselves from impending apocalypse and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke

15. Sister Midnight— A Mumbai-set horror story about what happens when a live firecracker gets married off to a dud, quickly going insane with the boredoms & frustrations of isolation as a housewife. It would make a great pairing with Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love in that respect, although I dare say it’s got a cooler look and its story takes more surprising turns.

16. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man— A microbudget, based-on-a-true-story comedy about a fecal terrorist who dumped buckets of piss & shit on his fellow Torontonians in 2019, seemingly at random. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is surprisingly sincere about the severe mental illness that would inspire someone to attack strangers like that. What’s even more surprising is that it’s not necessarily the piss & shit itself that earns all the biggest laughs; it’s the custom-made parody songs about piss & shit, all of them comedy gold.

17. The Naked Gun— There was something infectiously sweet about Liam Neeson & Pam Anderson’s tabloid romance that made this goof-a-second spoof feel more substantial & relevant than it possibly could otherwise. It was already a generous enough gift that the PR power couple gave me an opportunity to laugh all the way through an 85min comedy with my friends, but it was also fun to get worked by their kayfabe love affair in the headlines outside the theater. They made me their snowman.

18. Grand Theft Hamlet — Starts as a document of an absurd, highly specific art project (staging a community-theatre production of Hamlet entirely inside GTA Online), then quickly becomes a broader story about how hard it is to complete any collaborative art project. The circumstances are always stacked against your success, in this case literalized by people firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to rehearse.

19. Boys Go to Jupiter — Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City. I’m still amazed that it screened in neighborhood art houses instead of premiering on Steam Deck consoles.

20. The Colors Within— Exceptionally quiet for a story about the formation of a rock ‘n’ roll synth pop band, and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. When all that restraint melts away during the final performance, though, it feels good enough to make you cry.

HM. Mr. Melvin — A new edit of Toxic Avengers II &III, (both initially released in 1989), now Frankensteined together into one unholy monstrosity. Objectively, the best Toxic Avenger film is likely either the bad-taste original from 1984 or Macon Blair’s punching-up revision that was also released this year, but I can’t help but admire this one as a completionist’s timesaver. It’s all the best parts of the official Toxie sequels (the Japanese travelogue from II, the Toxie-goes-yuppie satire of III, not a single frame from IV) with at least 70 minutes of time-wasting junk erased from the public record. Mathematically speaking, it’s the most efficiently entertaining Toxic Avenger film to date, which technically qualifies it as public service — something to be considered by Lloyd Kaufman’s parole board.

-Brandon Ledet

Swampflix

New Orleans film blog & podcast

brandon ledet

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Bean (1997)

Brandon’s Top 20 Films of 2025