The J-horror classic Battle Royale is one those high-concept movies with such a clear, concise premise that it’s a convenient cultural reference point even if you’ve never seen the full picture yourself. Like Gaslight, Catfish, and The Bucket List, it’s the kind of clarifying text that defines a simple idea that’s since been extrapolated & mutated beyond the point of attribution. I had never seen Battle Royale before this year, but I’ve long-known its logline premise thanks to its lineage of dystopian YA descendants in major studio titles like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner and, most recently, The Long Walk, each of which have been likened to it. Any movie wherein a group of teenagers in a fascistic near-future are pitted against each other in a lethal game of survival is going to be reflexively likened to Battle Royale, and it was starting to get embarrassing that I had not seen that film myself despite it being such a consistent reference point in that genre. Sometimes, though, procrastination pays off. This year’s 25th anniversary of the film inspired a theatrical re-release, where I got to see it for the first time big & loud, in all its gory, sadistic glory.
Having only known this film as a point of inspiration for the Hollywood YA thrillers to follow, I wasn’t especially shocked by its preference for melodrama over bloodshed – only spraying the screen with teen blood as dramatic punctuation between long scenes of heart-to-heart confessions & betrayals. As a species, teens tend to have Big Feelings about anything & everything, so it makes sense that they’d spend more time getting teary eyed about having to tear each other apart for survival than actually doing the tearing. Even the recent Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk reads more like the teen-boy melodrama Stand by Me that it does a bodycount horror flick, and it’s got a reputation for being the more brutal version of The Hunger Games series (with which it shares a director in Francis Lawrence). Where Battle Royale gets more vicious than its Hollywood derivatives is not so much in its escalated gore, but in its prologue’s establishment that these kids already know & love each other before they’re forced to kill. Like The Long Walk, it’s an unlikely story about the value of true friendship instead of the expected story about selfish teenage violence. However, the young men of The Long Walk become fast friends after they’ve already been locked into their own respective survival game, starting off as strangers. In Battle Royale, the friendships & alliances go back for years before the story starts, which makes each lethal betrayal all the more sickening.
A class of Japanese high schoolers are mysteriously gassed while riding a school bus, waking on a small island wearing identical metal collars. Disoriented, they receive a crash-course orientation from a former aggrieved teacher (genre cinema heavyweight Beat Takeshi) and a kawaii pop idol, who appears only on a rolling AV Cart. The ultimate goal of the game is simple; the high schoolers must kill each other within 72 hours until only one survivor is left. The rules of how to accomplish that goal get a little trickier, involving explosive collars to punish conscientious objectors, volunteer players who appear to be violent gangsters from outside the class, rotating areas of the map that are temporarily forbidden to discourage stationary hiding, etc. The singular weapon that each student is provided varies wildly in effectiveness, ranging from knife to gun to binoculars to pot lid. That arbitrarily assigned hierarchy and the rules of combat appear designed entirely to keep the game moving & entertaining, as if the film were being broadcast on national Japanese television instead of closed-circuit security monitors. Every kill is even punctuated with an onscreen rolling body count that feels as if it were made for a live-feed audience, not the dweebs in the theater. That one change in broadcast scope might be the only place that later works like The Hunger Games might’ve improved on the Battle Royale premise, even if they pulled that detail from Stephen King novels like The Long Walk &The Running Man. The most Battle Royale touches on the entertainment media of its time is during the AV-cart orientation scene, in which a cutesy pop idol directs her audience to log onto http://www.br.com.
As with all films in this genre, this is primarily a story about a younger generation suffering the violent fallout of mistakes made before they were born. Beat Takeshi’s failed, disgruntled teacher is a pitch-perfect villain, seething with resentment for his young, captive victims while also reaching out to them for his one chance at genuine human connection. His hard exterior crumbles in a spectacularly pathetic display when the kids storm his compound to find his amateur, Henry Darger-esque painting of his favorite student winning the games – a nauseating tribute to her childish innocence, to which he no longer relates. Meanwhile, most of the kids in the game do their best to get by sharing resources and scheming a way off the island. They pass around food, medicine, and hacking skills when they’re supposed to be passing around bullets & live grenades. The rules of the game are unfairly stacked against them, though, and all it takes is a few trigger-happy outliers to set the mass murder in motion. The kills in Battle Royale are frequent and comically graphic, setting a dizzying rhythm in its Grand Guignol grotesqueries that propels the scene-to-scene momentum well after the rules & players are fully established. A few off-island flashbacks distract from the gore & drama at hand, but the biggest break in format is saved for the finale, when the surviving teens escape to the streets of modern Tokyo and have to live in the larger world adults have made for them, which feels equally as bleak as the game it parallels. Given how frequently this same story template has been repeated in the 25 years since Battle Royale was first released, it’s likely fair to say the generation that followed didn’t leave the world much better off for their own children either. Take care of each other out there, while you still have a choice.
A late-70s Japanese folk horror about a demonic dragon that lurks underwater, threatening to drown a nearby village that won’t do its bidding, sounds like film bro catnip — the kind of zany, go-for-broke genre freak-out that the smelliest twentysomething in your life makes their entire personality for a couple years before moving on (see: 1977’s House). In practice, 1979’s Demon Pond is much more delicate than that. Its titular demon is a whispered-about, metaphorical presence that never graces the screen. Its vintage Moog score lilts and swells instead of hammering the audience with analog synth coolness. Its heroic fights against the otherworldly spirits that haunt the human world are staged as the ceremonial ringing of a bell. It yearns more than it burns, getting more wrapped up in doomed romance than doomed society. If you want the zany, go-for-broke genre freakout version of Demon Pond, check out something like Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare. Here, the yokai are quiet observers of human longing & misery, their supernatural antics held at bay by calm waters & a ringing bell. The film gingerly holds the audience in its palm like a flower petal, until it crushes us in the vengeful fist of its climax.
Although adapted from a traditionalist kabuki stage play, Demon Pond structurally mimics the basic story template of folk horror cinema like The Wicker Man, The Wailing, and The Last Wave. These are stories in which a Big City outsider stumbles into a rural town with its own mysterious, supernatural traditions that ultimately leads to his demise (and often to the wide-scale destruction of everyone around him). In this case, a schoolteacher on vacation pretends to be studying the small village he’s visiting as a casual tourist, when he’s in fact searching for a dear friend who disappeared from his life three years prior. He finds that friend married to an alarmingly delicate, ethereal woman who’s so childlike in her innocence that she seems alien to the human world. Indeed, her earthly presence is reflected in a magic-realm doppelganger that only the audience can see: a spiritual priestess who lords over the local yokai, bound to an ancient agreement that they will not flood the nearby village as long as the humans on-site ring the temple’s ceremonial bell three times a day. An academic collector of local folk tales, the teacher’s lost friend has taken up the lifelong duty of ringing said bell to save the thousands of villagers who would drown if the area floods. Meanwhile, the villagers have long dismissed the bell business as ancient superstition, but they’re starting to suspect that the strangers at the edge of town are the reason they’re suffering the unreasonably long drought that’s threatening their livelihoods. The race to see which superstition will win out (i.e., whether continuing to ring the bell or slaughtering the outsiders will fix the village’s water woes) is a one-track race to doom, inevitably leading to the village being sunk to the bottom of the titular pond.
Part of Demond Pond‘s delicate nature is due to its queer angle on gender & romance, resulting from the casting of stage actor Bandō Tamasaburō in the dual role of Yuri/Yuki, bell-tender/princess. Tamasaburō was specifically trained in the kabuki art of onnagata: male actors who play overly dramatic female roles. He performs the fragile softness of Yuri and the all-powerful romantic fury of Yuki with a heightened, drag-like attention to gender cues that adds to the stagecraft artifice of the film’s fantasy realm. It also adds a subversive texture to the central romance between the ringers of the temple bell, something the movie leans into heaviest when it draws out the couple’s intimate mouth-to-mouth kiss into elaborate choreography & blocking worthy of an early-MTV music video. Meanwhile the aquatic-yokai princess Yuki is most pained by her bell-bound agreement to not flood the village because it keeps her apart from a neighboring prince she yearns to marry. She eventually comes to welcome the flood, as it would free her to love as she pleases, making poetic proclamations like, “How blissful to dissolve in the stream of affection. Let my body be crushed to pieces. Still my spirit will yearn for him.” That’s some high-quality yearning right there, especially since its cinematic adoption of kabuki theatricality drags it into the realm of tragic queer love.
For most of its runtime, Demon Pond floats somewhere between the isolationist folk-tradition dread of The Wicker Man and the garish high-artifice spectacle of The Wizard of Oz. Then, it’ll swerve into a special effects showcase sequence here or there unlike anything you’ve seen anywhere else. When the yokai “creatures of mud” (humanoid catfish, crabs, frogs, etc.) emerge from the pond grounds to summon the fabled flood, they’re represented in costuming befitting of community theatre or a well-attended Halloween soiree. When their bell-bound princess emerges, however, her otherworldly magic is represented in purely cinematic double-exposure techniques truly befitting of an underwater spirit. When the village inevitably fails to ring her bell and floods in the consequences of its own inaction, director Masahiro Shinoda (and special effects wizard Nobuo Yajima) go full tokusatsu spectacle, crushing the village under a heavy flow of water with the same might & scale of a Godzilla rampage. Whereas most later Godzillapictures would indulge in kid-friendly pro wrestling drama, however, Demon Pond‘s spectacle is instead a tragic expression of nuanced, adult conflicts. Its superstitious villagers are paradoxically desperate for water but afraid of a pond. Its doomed-lover outsiders are paradoxically resentful of those villagers but feel responsible for keeping them alive, undrowned. The entire local structure at the edge of the Demon Pond hangs on a precarious balance, one so delicate it can be thrown off by a single bell tone. When it all comes crashing down, you feel the weight of that tragedy pressing directly on your heart. It hurts.
Without question, the local MVP this Halloween season has been the original uptown location of The Prytania, which has provided the bulk of local repertory horror programming in the lead-up to today’s spooky holiday. Not only was the single-screen theater’s regular Classic Movie Sunday slot repurposed to feature Halloween fare this month (Dial M for Murder, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Haunting, 13 Ghosts, The Bride of Frankenstein, and Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein — all Swampflix favorites), but The Prytania also doubled down on its Spooky Season Content by staging a week-long film festival of classic horror titles. In collaboration with local MVP horror fest The Overlook, The Prytania launched a “Kill-O-Rama” lineup midway through the month, making up for the relatively anemic output of exciting new horror releases currently making the rounds. This year’s Kill-O-Rama lineup included perennial Spooky Season classics The Exorcist & Halloween, a 30th anniversary screening of George Romero’s Day of the Dead, multiple alternate-ending variants of the murder-mystery crowdpleaser Clue, and a victory-lap rerun of their 70mm print of Sinners (which they’ve been heroically exhibiting all year). It was the exact kind of Halloween-season programming I’m on the hunt for every October, conveniently gathered in one neighborhood theater. Although I was unable to give this year’s Kill-O-Rama the full mind-melting marathon treatment I tend to give other festivals, I was able to catch a few screenings from the program, reviewed below. Here’s hoping that this festival format returns to The Prytania next Halloween season, when I can plan ahead to live in the theater for a week solid — ignoring all non-scary-movie obligations in my schedule until All Hallows’ Eve has passed.
Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Sometimes, procrastination pays off. It’s likely shameful that I hadn’t seen the 1994 adaptation of Anne Rice’s vampire saga Interview with the Vampire until this year, especially since I lived here through the 90s era when the French Quarter was overrun with gothy vampire cosplay inspired by Rice’s local cachet. It was especially fun to watch with a New Orleans audience, though, so I’m glad I didn’t spoil the experience by diluting it with ad breaks on cable. There’s a moment late in the runtime when Brad Pitt’s woe-is-me vampire Louis announces that he is traveling to reunite with his jilted master (Tom Cruise, as the dastardly Lestat) on Prytania Street, and the crowd erupted into titters. It’s the most firmly I’ve felt rooted in The Prytania’s geographical location since catching an early screening of Happy Death Day there (which was filmed on a college campus a few blocks away, with students filling out most of the audience). Interview with the Vampire is not entirely anchored to New Orleans, but instead globetrots between three international cities: New Orleans, Paris, and San Francisco — great company to be in. Still, its locality is undeniable in that New Orleans is the chosen home of its most infamous vampire, Lestat, who attempts to break away from the restrictions of his European coven to establish a new afterlife on American soil, starting his new family by turning the sad-eyed Louis into one of his own. There’s only trouble once that family becomes nuclear, when Louis gives into vampiric temptation by feeding on a small child, damning her to an eternal adolescence as her new two dads’ doll-like daughter. After about thirty years of faux-domestic stasis, she rebels in spectacularly violent fashion, burning their shared home to the ground in a righteous rage.
For all of the A-lister hunks in the cast (Cruise, Pitt, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas), I was most impressed with Interview with the Vampire as The First Great Kirsten Dunst Movie. Dunst has been a wonderfully talented screen actor for as long as I can remember watching the screen, but it’s still incredible to watch her out-perform her more famous, better-paid adult co-stars in a role filmed when she was only 10 years old. Dunst’s embodiment of Claudia, the eternally dollish vampire, conveys a world-weariness and vengeful fury far beyond the age of the actor behind it. Part of the reason she stands out so much is that all of the male leads are such sad sack yearners, all fitting neatly into the somber tone typical of director Neil Jordan’s work. Jordan’s interpretation of Rice’s text is more melancholy than it is sensual, finding its hunky, mutually obsessed vampire men jaded beyond repair long after they’ve lost their lust for sex & blood. As the latest addition to that damned clan, Claudia is the only character who’s going through a major emotional upheaval, so that the story’s most violent, extravagant turns rest on her little shoulders. Given the specificity of locale and the name-brand talent elsewhere in the cast, it’s likely the movie would remain undead in annual Halloween-season circulation with or without Dunst’s involvement, but it’s her performance that actually earns that cultural longevity. She’s eternally great.
Corpse Bride (2005)
I was drawn to Kill-O-Rama’s 20th-anniversary screenings of Tim Burton’s stop-motion musical Corpse Bride for a few reasons, not least of all because it felt like a rarer anomaly in the schedule than more frequent go-tos like The Exorcist & Bride of Frankenstein. That’s assumedly because it’s a lesser loved title among the rest of the heavy hitters on the schedule, despite it being a perfectly charming seasonal novelty. When it was first released, Corpse Bride was treated like the microwaved leftovers from earlier Tim Burton/Henry Selick productions like The Nightmare Before Christmas & James and the Giant Peach, but 20 years later it now plays like a precursor for later Laika productions like ParaNorman & Coraline, which have since become the go-to primers for lifelong horror nerd obsession among youngsters. Time has mostly been kind to it, give or take the biggest star in its voice cast (the wine-tasting spit bucket Johnny Depp), but I’ve personally always had a soft spot for it. It’s hard not to adore a movie that fantasy-casts Peter Lorre as a talking brain maggot with kissable lips and takes breaks from advancing its plot to animate a band of stop-motion skeletons playing saxobones against Mario Bava crosslighting. I missed the film during its initial theatrical run, though, so I had only ever seen it on a 2nd-hand DVD copy, which made this repertory screening a must-attend event.
In short, Corpse Bride looks great. All of the visual artistry that distinguishes The Nightmare Before Christmas as a holiday classic is echoed here without any lost integrity. The worst you could say about it is that Burton borrows a little too freely from former collaborator Henry Selick in the production design, to the point where the underworld afterlife setting appears to be pulled from the live-action sets of Selick’s Monkeybone, entirely separate from the film’s production overlap with Nightmare. If I were Selick, I might be complaining, but as an audience member, I’m more than happy to spend time with the cartoon gals & ghouls in that underground otherworld where every day is Halloween. Much like in earlier auteurist works like Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Ed Wood, Burton conveys a yearning desire to party with the undead freaks of the underworld instead of being stuck with the drab drips of the living flesh. Johnny Depp & Emily Watson voice a soon-to-be-married couple of awkward strangers who’ve had all the joy of life strangled out of them by their uptight, aristocratic parents. They seem to be instantly, genuinely fond of one another despite the grim-grey world they sulk in together, but tragedy strikes when the groom accidentally marries an animated corpse instead while practicing his vows in the spooky woods outside town. The titular undead bride (Helena Bonham Carter, duh) drags the poor, nervous lad down to her Halloweentown underworld where he’s forced to party with the lively dead instead of moping among the dead-eyed living. Song & dance and comedic antics ensue, ultimately resulting in a tender-hearted reunion for the rightful bride & groom and a cosmic comeuppance for the dastardly cad who sent the Corpse Bride underground in the first place. It’s wonderful kids-horror fare, especially if your particular kid has already re-run Coraline & ParaNorman so many times that you’ve become numb to their Laika-proper charms.
Frankenstein (2025)
The concluding event on the Kill-O-Rama schedule was a double feature presentation of James Whale’s iconic 1931 adaptation of Frankensteinand the latest interpretation of that text, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Besides the double-feature format of that programming, the most exciting aspect of the new Frankenstein film’s presentation during Kill-O-Rama is that The Prytania continued to run it weeks after the fest concluded on a 35mm print, the only venue in town to see the film on celluloid before it is shuffled off into the digital void of Netflix. After similar runs for titles like Sinners, Tenet, and One Battle After Another, The Prytania is making a reputation for themselves as the premiere film venue in town by default, since they’re the only place that can actually project film. Given the massive crowds that have been swarming The Prytania every night in the past week to catch Frankenstein in that format, it’s clear that the public yearns for tangible, physical cinema and are willing to pay extra for it. My screening even started with an audience member loudly booing the Netflix logo in the opening credits, to the rest of the crowd’s delight. Netflix’s omnipresence in urban & suburban homes indicates that most of these crowds could’ve waited a couple weeks to see Frankenstein at home for “free,” but they instead chose to attend a big-screen presentation with richer, deeper colors in projection and visible scratches on the print. It was a classic theatrical experience befitting such a classic literary adaptation.
As for the movie itself, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Guillermo del Toro adaptation of the Mary Shelley source text. It’s pretty, it’s moody, and it’s got a surprisingly sensitive heart for a movie in which a mad scientist stitches together leftover corpse parts to create a monster and then proceeds to abuse that monster. The biggest surprises in Frankenstein lurk in the intensity of the performances, given that the actors could have easily gone through the motions and let the exquisite sets & costumes do all of the work. Mia Goth conveys a defiant ferocity as Dr. Frankenstein’s uninterested love interest, matching his creative intensity but swatting down his god-scale ego in what feels like an onscreen avatar for Mary Shelley’s literary jam sessions with Percy Shelley & Lord Byron. Jacob Elordi plays Dr. Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as a big scary baby who’s convincingly dangerous when provoked but angelic when properly nurtured. Oscar Isaac is feverishly manic as Dr. Frankenstein himself, so fixated on his mission to bring dead flesh back to life that he doesn’t consider what kind of father he’ll be once he succeeds (having only Charles Dance’s physically abusive patriarch as a default example to follow once the creature is in his care). It’s in that cautionary tale of what happens when you single-mindedly dedicate yourself to a passion project at the expense of your own humanity that del Toro’s Frankenstein starts to feel personal to the director beyond its surface aesthetics. This is a project he’s been fighting to complete for decades and, thus, it has partially mutated into a story about the madness of its director’s own grand-scale, solitary ambition. The result is not one of del Toro’s best works, but it’s at least a more heartfelt, refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life when he adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1994. After three or so decades of book-faithful Frankenstein adaptations, I’m excited that we’re approaching the point when Jack Pierce’s creature design will enter the public domain (in 2027) so that every new repetition of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but del Toro’s version still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk. I appreciated seeing it big & loud with a full horror nerd crowd, instead of alone on my couch the way Netflix intended.
One essential quality I’m always looking for in horror movies during Halloween season is an essence that can only be described as “Slumber Party Appeal.” If you’re reading this blog, I hope that you’ve aged well past the point of attending slumber parties at a friend’s house under loose parental supervision, but you should still know what I mean. A horror movie with good Slumber Party Appeal is one with disgusting gore gags, gratuitous nudity, and an overall jovial atmosphere that keeps the mood light while you chomp on mediocre pizza delivery with your half-asleep buddies. The 1995 SOV horror Death Metal Zombies was made in the peak slumber party movie-watching era: back when video stores democratized film distribution so that micro-budget shock fests shared the same shelf space as major-studio productions. It immediately signals its Slumber Party Appeal in its crosscutting between intros of various metalhead characters as they get ready for the weekend by clocking out at work, headbanging to bedroom stereos and, most importantly, taking a steamy shower. Every time the camera cuts back to the showering babe in this metalhead friend group, she seems to only be concerned with the cleanliness of her breasts at the expense of the rest of her body. She’s shown soaping up her chest so many times in the first few minutes of character intros that it starts to play like a joke, setting a tone for the remarkably silly zombie picture to come. Death Metal Zombies has great Slumber Party Appeal, by which I mean it’s a harmless, cartoonish horror relic that most kids would still need to sneak past their disapproving parents. It’s got such a warm slumber party vibe that its recent screening at The Broad (presented by friend of the podcast Sara Nicole Storm, of Nail Club) wasn’t at all soured or interrupted by the one audience member who loudly snored through its back half; if anything, he added to the authenticity of the full slumber party experience.
You might expect that a backyard metalsploitation relic from the video store era would be overloaded with grotesque D.I.Y. gore gags, but Death Metal Zombies only delivers a few gross-out moments here or there: a severed hand squirting blood, an unsuspecting jogger disemboweled in a pool of blood, a stabbed anus spewing blood, a skeleton discarded in a victim’s bed — gooey with blood, of course. Overall, though, it’s way more interested in delivering quirky character comedy that is in setting up those gory payoffs. Todd Jason Cook wrote, directed, produced, starred, and bloodied up this regional horror picture in suburban Texas with his friends (including then-wife Lisa Cook, now Lisa DeWild) seemingly as an excuse to party. There’s a thin, single-sentence plot involving a radio contest and a cursed cassette tape, but most scenes involve suburban Texas metalheads sitting around in bedrooms, garages, and public parks, doing nothing in particular while the soundtrack blares tunes from then-current signees to Relapse Records. It’s just wall-to-wall metal jams playing over the goofiest line readings this side of Motern Media, foretelling Matt Farley’s career-long project of making creature features that care more about quirky side character’s meaningless conversations than they do about the monsters on the poster. The film’s heavy metal iconography promises a brutal face-melter of nonstop demonic gore, but in practice it’s a “Gee-willikers!,” Leave It to Beaver-style sitcom that just happens to feature metalheads turning into flesh-eating zombies. It’s a shockingly wholesome affair for a movie with a title card that announces “Music by Putrid Stench [et. al].” The current 30th Anniversary re-release even concludes with a blooper reel. In a just world, all Evangelical Christians who believe metalheads to be devil worshipping, child murdering psychopaths would be forced to watch this film in its entirety, so they can see the truth: metalheads are just dorks in black t-shirts.
The metalhead friend group we meet during the opening credits find themselves in supernatural peril after they win a radio contest to own the only copy of an exclusive new single from their favorite death metal band, Living Corpse. When jamming out to that tape in their garage hangout spot, their headbanging choreography is interrupted by the band, who magically materialize and issue commands that they kill, kill, kill anyone in striking distance. The poor metalhead dorks are then “transformed” into ravenous zombies, which mostly manifests in dark circles of eye makeup and a slowed-down gait. Their friends who were lucky enough to not hear the cursed single are then tasked to find a way to play the cassette backwards in order to reverse the zombification process — something that proves difficult with commercial equipment. Meanwhile, a serial killer in a Nixon mask is also on the hunt to kill, kill, kill his fellow Texans in a B-plot that is ambiguously (if at all) connected to the central metalsploitation conceit. Even when the zombie & Nixon-mask violence escalates in the back half, the movie registers as deeply unserious. Every single blow is punctuated with a corresponding stock sound effect: video game foley for punches, squelches for stabs. When characters lob insults at their enemies, they read as more silly than vicious: “Dork,” “Pus-wad,” “The Baby Bunch,” etc. The ultimate heroic goal of the picture is not to destroy the zombie hoard so much as it is to reunite the disbanded friend group so they can rock out to metal tunes together once again. Todd Cook’s camcorder vision of true friendship persevering in an increasingly harsh world is a heartwarming one, even if it is best enjoyed when you’re 13-years-old and sneaking room-temperature beers past your sleeping parents while a buddy from school is spending the night.
In my previous dispatch covering this year’s New Orleans Film Fest, I previewed a few selections from the program before they premiered in-person, primarily focusing on documentaries about niche pop culture relics: the 80s house music scene in Chicago, the recurring 90s SNL character Pat!, and the bare-all story of the noise-rock circus act Butthole Surfers. Now that the festival’s in-person portion has concluded (with Virtual Cinema selections streaming online through Sunday, 11/2), I’m here to log some on-the-ground reporting to cover selections I caught on the big screen. The five titles reviewed below are all narrative features that screened during NOFF at various venues throughout the city (namely, The CAC, The Prytania, and The Broad) — some to ecstatic crowds, others to little fanfare. They’re loosely ranked from my personal favorites to my least favorites, but all are worth checking out if you have any interest in their reported style or subject. There will be one final dispatch covering this year’s NOFF in the form of a post-fest podcast with local critic Bill Arceneaux once the virtual portion has concluded in early November, and then the film festival department of the Swampflix newsroom will be furloughed until French Film Fest returns to The Prytania in the Spring, same as ever year.
The Plague
As NOFF coincides with my annual Halloween Season horror bingeing, I always find myself scanning the program for titles that fit both needs. This year, there were more horror-adjacent titles on offer than usual, including a few straight-up horror comedies about sex curses (see below), sexy zombies (see further below), and sex-obsessed Nice Guy puppets (Your Own Flavor). The scariest movie I’ve seen all month, however, was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a middle school-age water polo camp. I don’t know that Charlie Polinger’s debut feature The Plague fully qualifies as a proper Horror Film, but it neatly fits into a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. At the very least, it’s itchy & squirmy enough to register as a psychological thriller, and its lengthy scenes of slow-motion underwater cinematography offer it an otherworldly, nightmarish beauty that verges on the supernatural — a welcome break from the all-too-real dramatizations of school age bullying. A near-guaranteed moneymaker genre in recent years, horror offers up-and-coming directors the chance to take stylish risks audiences won’t sign on for otherwise, so it’s not especially surprising to learn that Polinger’s next project is going to be an adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” for A24, starring Mikey Madison (which was previously adapted by Roger Corman into what is comfortably one of the greatest horror films of all time).
The closest The Plague comes to having “a star” is Joel Edgerton in a supporting role as the water polo camp’s whistle-blowing sad sack coach, who’s scarcely present to supervise. The rest of the main cast are preteen boys who’ve been largely left alone to establish their own social hierarchy, with newcomer Everett Blunck playing Ben, the latest, gangliest addition to the crew. The title refers to a hazing ritual the boys have invented in which the most awkward kid among them has been socially diagnosed with a vaguely defined plague that manifests as a skin-shredding rash, banishing him from any direct interaction with the rest of the class. Ben is unsure how much he wants to participate in this ritual at first, but he’s ultimately willing to punch down as long as it means he’s not the lowest rung on the social ladder. That status doesn’t last forever, though, and the gradual, subtle ways he gets “infected” by the plague are horrifically familiar to anyone who remembers having an “awkward phase” at that age. The Plague hits especially hard for Millennials who suffered their worst social nightmares in the early 2000s, since its 2003 setting is consistently anchored by eerily accurate cultural markers like endless repetitions of the “Okayyy” Lil Jon punchlines from Chappelle’s Show, a forgotten mating call from the time. It’s remarkably well observed in depicting the gendered bullying that boys suffer at that age (with the neighboring girls synchronized-swimming camp being quarantined to a walled-off realm worthy of its own sister movie), with only the otherworld liminality of swimming underwater to offer any sense of relief. It’s an nerve-racking film about how all children are monsters, one that’ll make you glad you never have to be one again.
Fucktoys
The Plague will enjoy a Prestige Season theatrical rollout in hopes of landing on a few High Profile critics’ Best of the Year Lists, boosting its public profile. The future of Annapurna Sriram’s campy sex comedy Fucktoys is much hazier in the film-distro crystal ball, partly due to the expletive in its title (and the 100 minutes of depravity that ensues). Sriram herself stars as down-on-her-luck sex worker who learns in the opening scene that the reason she’s been going through it lately is that she’s been struck with a curse. When she asks her most trusted psychic (local legend Big Freedia, in a scene-stealing role) how this could’ve happened, the psychic shrugs it off with the explanation that sometimes “It be like that.” After consulting several other psychics around town for a second opinion the way cancer patients will desperately bounce from doctor to doctor, she quickly accepts that the curse is real, and starts working overtime to earn the money for a lamb-sacrificing ritual that will lift said curse, freeing her from the string of heartbreaks & rotten luck that has been derailing her life. Of course, this premise is mostly an excuse for Sriram to travel around town from john to john on her vintage moped as she gets her cash in order, providing the plot structure needed to justify flooding the screen with quirky side characters and one-off sex gags. Then, things get genuinely horrific as the threat shifts from vague supernatural curse magic to real-life john with drug & ego issues, consciously souring the mood in frank acknowledgement of the dangerous risks that come with regular sex work (i.e., men).
For a low-budget sex comedy filmed mostly on the industrial backroads of rural Louisiana, Fucktoys has an impressively stylish look to it. Shot on film and decorated with a self-driven dedication to Swinging 60s psychedelia, it looks like a dusty Polaroid found locked away in a box of antique sex toys. Sriram sets the film in a fictional, fantastic setting she calls Trashworld, made entirely out of what appears to be hand-built sets and thrifted vintage clothing. That setting and the over-the-top character work will likely earn Fucktoys a lot of convenient 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 bratty & garish. The film certainly has a lot of harsh political messaging behind its flippantly slutty comedic antics, constantly calling attention to how the wealthy live by different rules than the rest of us, putting the servant class at constant risk. Sriram just works hard to make sure she’s not portraying the sex-worker lifestyle as a nonstop misery parade, seeking out the pleasure & humor in every scenario where money & hexes aren’t ruining the vibe. It’s the kind of bongripping comedy where the protagonist owns a full Doug Funny wardrobe of the same uniform outfit in multiple copies, and if someone writes down a phone number in lipstick, it’s almost certain to be 555-666-0420.
Queens of the Dead
The joke-to-laugh ratio in Tina Romero’s debut zomcom Queens of the Dead is not nearly as successful as Fucktoys‘, but it’s got a similar, admirable sense of political flippancy. George Romero’s daughter builds off her family name here by staging a standard zombie siege picture in the exact style pioneered by her father; the location under siege by the zombie horde just happens to be a drag club. A queer cast of misfit characters (played by the likes of Love Lies Bleeding‘s Katy O’Brian, I Saw the TV Glow‘s Jack Haven, Drag Race‘s Nina West, Pose‘s Dominique Jackson, and comedy legend Margaret Cho) hole up in a Brooklyn gay bar during a cookie-cutter zombie breakout, with one straight-guy straight man on hand to play their comic foil (Quincy Dunn-Baker). All the crew has to do is survive long enough to ride a Pride Parade float out of town at dawn without turning on each other under the pressure of the nonstop zombie invasion. Petty grievances about past professional betrayals, disrespected identity markers, and refusal to adapt to the new rules of drag bubble to the surface as they pass time at the nightclub’s open bar, but they repeatedly revert to the assertion that they’re Family, and all they have is each other in a world that would gladly tear them apart.
Queens of the Dead is heavy on jokes and light on gore. Sure, a character might suffer a nasty rat bite or axe wound here or there, but Romero never goes for the obligatory horde-hands disemboweling spectacle of the Living Dead series, tastefully choosing to keep her characters’ organs on the insides of their bodies. Instead, she nods to her father’s legacy with winking one liners like “When there’s no more room in Hell . . . there’s an app for that.” To that end, it’s amusing that much of the undead ghouls the central Family has to protect themselves from are the drag-enthusiast public, who continue to scroll & post for Insta clout well after they’re infected by the zombie plague. You’d think they’d be fighting off undead MAGA instead, but I suppose that supply would be short in Brooklyn. The overall effect is less gnarly or politically savvy than it is, simply, cute. I don’t know that it would’ve been made or widely distributed (soon, through Shudder) without the director’s connection to the larger Romero legacy, but it’s got a good heart and it easily passes the Mark Kermode-patented Six Laughs Test for determining whether a comedy qualifies for a passing grade.
The Testament of Ann Lee
The only film on this list that isn’t a debut feature is, thus, the one that bears the greatest weight of expectation, so I suspect it’s one I might’ve ranked higher had I been totally blindsided by it. Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee arrived at the festival with pre-packaged Awards Season prestige, complete with its own security guards scanning the audiences for smartphone pirates who might dare to leak a camrip before the film’s official late-December release. Fastvold is most prominently discussed on the prestige cinema scene right now in the context of her careerlong professional collaboration with husband Brady Corbet (with whom she co-wrote last year’s Oscar-nominated The Brutalist, as well as this immediate follow-up), but it’s her 2020 period drama The World to Come that most had me excited to see her back in the director’s chair. A historical lesbian romance with an unusually deep bleak streak, The World to Come set an expectation for dramatic heartbreak that The Testament of Ann Lee never comes close to achieving, despite the severity of its own story. Instead, Fastvold indulges in the stylistic experiment of making a deeply bleak movie musical, finding more fascination than resonation with her titular historical subject: the enigmatic founder of the American religious sect The Shakers. The most the two films have in common, really, is their casting’s assertion that Christopher Abbott would make a terrible husband.
In a way, The Shakers make perfect sense as the subject for a musical, given that their worship practices involve rhythmic dancing & chanting that could inspire captivating filmic spectacle. Think of the communal breathing/grieving ritual in Midsommar, repeated at feature length. The problem is that the Shaker hymns composer Daniel Blumberg extrapolates into full musical numbers don’t really go anywhere. When Shaker founder Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is imprisoned for her heretical beliefs, she sings repetitions of the phrase, “I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst, I hunger and thirst” with no lyrical variation for minutes on end, to the point where the audience is more exhausted than the character. It’s her belief system itself that saves the film from total tedium, though. Ann Lee was persecuted for daring to ask whether society would be better off if we all agreed to sing & dance instead of having sex, ever. It turns out the answer depends on how bad the sex you’re having is (i.e., whether you’re married to Hollywood hunk Christopher Abbott). The Testament of Ann Lee is most impressive in how it works as both a sincere depiction of its subject’s religious ecstasy and as a harsh criticism of religion as a mechanism for making one person’s sexual hang-ups everyone else’s problem. I have a feeling that if Blumberg’s songs were better realized and if Fastvold’s name didn’t carry so much weight from previous projects, I’d be singing its praises instead of downplaying its successes. As is, it’s a memorably strange anomaly, an indulgence I suppose Fastvold has well earned by working on knockout titles like The World to Come, The Childhood of a Leader, The Brutalist, and my beloved Vox Lux.
Mad Bills to Pay
A more reasonable person wouldn’t have any pre-screening expectations for The Testament of Ann Lee, but I have been made unreasonable by the year-long attention I pay to movie podcasts with the budget & access to send critics to international film festivals. Maybe the Oscar Buzz generators of Awards Season podcasts like Prestige Junkie & The Big Picture that put movies like Ann Lee on the radar for large audiences are a reasonable thing to listen to; I dunno. What’s really shameful is the close attention I pay to festival-coverage episodes of the NYC cinephile podcasts Film Comment & The Last Thing I Saw, which often get me hyped up for microbudget oddities that have no name recognition outside a small circle of obscurity-obsessed pundits who trade deep-cut titles as a form of social currency half a country away from where I live. Sometimes, my nerdy notetaking during those conversations pays off wonderfully, as it prompted me to catch The Plague as soon as it was available, one of the most rewarding theatrical experiences I’ve had all year — festival or no. Often, it’ll lure me into making time for the kinds of underplayed, subtle-to-a-fault indie dramas I have no personal interest in beyond their value to The Discourse. Again, I acknowledge that it is shameful. I’ll also acknowledge that I had no business watching Mad Bills to Pay in particular, which seems to have spoken to that NYC cinephile crowd specifically because it’s set in The Bronx, a lesser-filmed borough of the city (as opposed to the more often-seen Brooklyn & Manhattan).
Mad Bills to Pay is a summer-bummer indie drama about ill-prepared parents-to-be in The Bronx. It’s a very quiet movie about very loud people, a paradox from the Sean Baker School of Character Studies. Newcomer Juan Collado stars as the 19-year-old Rico, who sells home-mixed cocktails called “Nutcrackers” to people partying on the beach, drawing attention with the constant sales pitch, “Nutties, nutties, nutties, nutties!” A macho brat in a domestic world entirely populated by women, most of his non-“nutties” vocabulary consists of variations of “Babe, babe, babe,” and “Bro, bro, bro” as he whines like a toddler who’s not getting enough attention (or, more often, not getting his way). After getting accustomed to Rico’s daily rounds of video games, bong rips, junk food, and public displays of alcoholism, we’re confronted with the out-of-nowhere revelation that he’s going to be a father, having impregnated the 16-year-old Destiny (fellow first-time actor Destiny Checho). The two children are very obviously not ready to have children of their own, which inspires endless shouting matches as they struggle & fail to assert their maturity to mothers who know better. Those frequent top-volume arguments are in direct contrast with the docudrama filmmaking style, framed with the cold, impartial distance of a security camera. Every single scene is another indication that the parents-to-be should seriously consider adoption or abortion instead of introducing a baby into their volatile relationship, all the way to the very end when it’s far too late. Meanwhile, a seemingly authentic portrait of Dominican American communal life in The Bronx is sketched out in background detail. First-time director Joel Alfonso Vargas delivers a confident, competent version of a kind of festival-circuit movie I always struggle to personally connect with, as my tastes tend to drift towards the more abstracted, dreamlike end of the medium. Since I’ve also failed to connect with recent years’ other festival darlings like Past Lives, Janet Planet, and Aftersun, I’m willing to chalk this one up to the go-to critical quality markers like Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint just not being my thing. Your own mileage may vary, especially if you have any affinity for day-drinking in The Bronx.
Between watching the infinite sequels to The Mummy & The Invisible Man and a few one-off Gothic horrors like 13 Ghosts and The Undying Monster, I’ve seen a lot of classic horror relics this month, mostly running from the 1930s through the early 1960s. There may be more exciting, grotesque monstrosities to be found in later decades like the splatter-fest 1980s or the neon-bathed horrors of the now, but there’s something about the black-and-white scare pictures of old that call to me every Halloween season. It’s purely a matter of decor. I love spending time in the old dark houses, spooky castles, and foggy moors of the classic horror milieu, the thicker the artificial fog the better. It’s simply the most Halloween-appropriate set decoration you can find in cinema, alternating between sound-stage surrealism and department-store deadstock. That’s at least what was on my mind while watching the 1957 vampire picture El Vampiro, which I purchased on DVD while traveling in Mexico. El Vampiro doesn’t achieve anything you haven’t seen before in a hundred other vampire pictures; it comfortably sits at the exact midpoint between first-wave Universal Monster movies and their later Hammer Horror echoes. And yet, because it’s so over-decorated with Spirit Halloween Store set decor, it’s exceptionally well suited to Halloween season programming. It’s the kind of movie where every surface is veiled behind a thick layer of cobwebs regardless of whether someone’s “living” in the space, with servants on staff. Every single object in the frame is stubbornly ooky-spooky, regardless of logic or necessity, which is exactly how horror cinema should be decorated this time year.
It’s not entirely fair to say El Vampiro lacks narrative or imagistic innovation. The film is often credited for a couple major contributions to the classic horror canon. Mainly, its financial success kickstarted the Mexican horror cinema boom of the 1960s that led to more memorably outlandish works like The Brainiac & Santos vs The Vampire Women. More improbably, it’s also credited for being the first vampire picture to feature the stereotypical elongated canine fangs, as the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula was fangless and the fanged Christopher Lee version had not yet materialized. Surprisingly, the film’s titular vampiro is not a version of Count Dracula, but rather an entirely new bloodsucking gentleghoul. Germán Robles stars as Count Lavud (Conde Karol de Lavud, to be more accurate), a Dracula Type who keeps his coffin in a spooky old Mexican estate, adorned with the aforementioned cobwebs. His screen presence is clearly inspired by the iconic Lugosi version of Dracula, as he hides his lower face under a lifted cape with the same dramatic mannerisms, inviting bright studio lights to illuminate his hypnotically handsome eyes. Like all versions of Dracula (and its copyright-infringing Nosferatu offshoots), his monstrous motivations are also mostly a matter of real estate: in this case wooing ownership of his new spooky castle abode away from a grieving niece who doesn’t yet know she was born into a vampire bloodline. All other traditional vampire lore is present here too. The vamps don’t appear in mirrors; they’re ill at the sight of a crucifix; they sleep through daylight in coffins lined with their home soil; etc. Amusingly, Lavud also frequently transforms into a flapping rubber bat that flies around the haunted house set in an effect you’d more likely see in Bela Lugosi’s poverty row pictures like Devil Bat or Return of the Vampire than anything produced by a major studio like Universal.
If there’s any notable variation on the old school vampire picture here, it’s in the way women play a central role in the story. Not only is most of the runtime ceded to the distraught niece’s gradual realization that she was born to a vampire clan, but her surviving aunt is a Count Lavud convert who works on the bloodsucker’s evil behalf while he lurks in the shadows offscreen. Every time Aunt Eloise (Carmen Montejo) appears, she’s accompanied by a howling wind that guarantees her a dramatic entrance, even if most of her job is gaslighting her niece into sticking around on a series of domestic sets fit for a televised soap opera. While those two women’s quiet power struggle takes up most of the runtime, however, Germán Robles is very clearly the star of the picture. After transforming into a bat and draining a sleeping woman of her blood beneath the opening credits, he then disappears until about halfway into the film, when he re-emerges from his coffin to great musical fanfare and makes direct, hypnotic eye contact with the audience. It’s Robles’s commanding screen presence as the handsome, clean-shaven vampire that is mostly credited for the film’s success, as well as the success of the many Mexican horror cheapies that followed in his wake. After reprising the Count Lavud role a year later in The Vampire’s Coffin, Robles continued to ride that wave in subsequent horror novelties like The Castle of the Monsters, The Blood of Nostradamus, and even my beloved The Brainiac. From the few titles I’ve seen in that 1960s Mexican horror wave (mostly ones starring world-famous luchador Santo), El Vampiro‘s garish sense of Halloween season decor also continued in the films to follow. It makes for a wonderfully spooky atmosphere, especially recommended if you’ve already exhausted all of the Universal & Hammer titles that routinely get a lot more international attention this time of year.
Welcome to Episode #250 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of sci-fi horror relics inspired by the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man, starting with James Whale’s classic 1933 adaptation for Universal, starring Claude Rains.
33:22 The Invisible Man (1933) 47:31 Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) 1:01:15 The Invisible Man vs The Human Fly (1957) 1:15:43 The Invisible Dr. Mabuse (1962)
Based on the commemorative toys, posters, and Blu-ray box sets that group him in with the rest of the riff raff, you might forget that The Gill-man is a latecomer addition to the Universal Monsters brand. 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon was made decades after the respective premieres of Universal’s A-Lister monsters Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man, who had already been wrung dry for all they were worth in now-forgotten sequels like Son of Dracula and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man long before The Gill-man first emerged. The initial 1930s run of the Universal Monsters brand under studio executive Carl Laemmle Jr. were all earnestly committed to a Gothic, German Expressionist mood that birthed some of the greatest horror iconography in the history of Hollywood filmmaking. Then, a successful repertory run for those pictures in the 1940s convinced the studio that there was more money to be made, especially among younger audiences, so the same monsters were rushed out (with their new friend The Wolf Man in tow) in a flood of by-the-numbers sequels aimed directly at children. By the 1950s, that second wave of Universal horror titles had long crested, detectable only in the scummy sea foam of the Famous Monsters’ team-ups with the comedy duo Abbott & Costello. It was during that post-boom lull that the studio gave life to The Gill-man, cashing in on an entirely different genre’s newfound popularity.
From the very first minute of Creature of the Black Lagoon, it’s immediately clear that the film was produced for its commercial value as Atomic Age sci-fi, not as a conscious contribution to Universal Monsters tradition. The film opens with a stereotypically 50s sci-fi monologue about the evolution of living organisms emerging from the sea to breathe air and walk on land, suggesting that the next logical evolutionary step would be for humanity to mutate again, adapting to life in outer space. Before we can leave this oxygenated prison planet behind to embrace our inevitable intergalactic future, however, we must take a step back to investigate how we got here. The Gill-man is a living, swimming specimen of the missing link between us and our amphibious forefathers: half-man/half-fish. He is discovered during an archeological dig in the upper Amazon, led by scientists who expect only to find ancient Gill-man bones in the mud beneath the Amazon River. As they scuba dive in The Gill-man’s home waters, he swims just outside their sight & reach, studying them in return (and demonstrating a particular fascination with the fashionably swimsuited Julie Adams). Once his presence is discovered, the scientists debate whether to shoot The Gill-man with cameras or with a harpoon, whether to treat him like a fellow man or like the catch of the day. Some see a monster, while the more enlightened see a mirror.
Universal was smart to hire Jack Arnold to direct The Gill-man’s debut, as other Arnold titles like The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Space Children, and It Came from Outer Space would go on to rank among the best that Atomic Age sci-fi had to offer. They were also smart to cash in on the 3D filmmaking craze of that era, allowing Arnold’s crew to perfect underwater 3D filmmaking months (months!) before James Cameron was even born. As gorgeous as the lengthy sequences of The Gill-man stalking his human prey underwater can be, however, the true wonder of the film is the creature’s design, the best of Universal’s monster creations since Jack Pierce transformed Boris Karloff into Frankenstein(‘s monster). Disney animator Milicent Patrick sketched a perfect aquatic-horror figure in The Gill-man, and her design remained remarkably intact as it came to life as the rubber-suited monster we see onscreen. The Gill-man was portrayed by two different actors depending on where he staged his attacks (Ricou Browning in the water, Ben Chapman on the land), alternating between lumbering beast and balletic swim-dancer. The rhythms & beats of the story are typical to Atomic Age creature features of its kind, but it’s the elegance of The Gill-man’s look and his underwater movements that earned him a place among the other grotesque icons of the Universal Monsters brand.
If The Gill-man shares anything in common with the elder statesman monsters of the Universal horror canon, it’s that he was also dragged back out of the water for needless cash-in sequels. Both 1955’s Revenge of the Creature and 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us spend the first half of their runtimes swimming in the exact waters of the original Black Lagoon, with scientists hunting the poor fish beast until he finally lashes out for vengeance . . . again & again. Only, in the respective second halves of those films’ ropey plots, the creature is relocated to new, novel locales so he can expand the scope of his out-of-water mayhem. In Revenge of the Creature, he’s trapped in a Sea World-style amusement park in Miami for public display, which inevitably leads to a creature-feature version of Blackfish in which one of the captive fish(men) gets violent revenge on his aquarium prison guards. The Creature Walks Among Us then returns to The Gill-man’s Atomic Age beginnings, with scientists forcibly mutating him into an air-breathing, clothes-wearing half-man as an experiment to determine whether humanity can rapidly adapt to living in outer space. Overall, neither sequels is especially essential or even memorable, but they do offer some novelty in depicting The Gill-man flipping cars and invading suburban homes instead of sinking boats. They also firmly establish the poor creature’s status as Universal’s most empathetic monster icon. Over the course of three films, The Gill-man is put through even more needless, inhuman suffering than Frankenstein’s creature. He’s hunted, drugged, harpooned, set on fire, imprisoned, forced to work as an underwater circus act, and then, as the final indignity, they make him wear pants. The only way it could’ve been worse is if they made him work a desk job.
The Gill-man’s sci-fi genre markers are not a total anomaly within the Universal Monsters canon. If nothing else, their adapted figures of Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, and The Invisible Man helped define what the mad scientist trope would come to look like in cinema instead of on the page. It’s just that The Gill-man arrived so late to the party that his outings feel entirely separate from the heavily crossed-over run of Universal Monster sequels that preceded them by a decade or two. Truly, the only reason that The Gill-man is so heavily featured in the Universal Monsters branding is because he looks really, really cool. The visual stylings of Milicent Patrick’s creature design and the underwater camerawork of Jack Arnold’s second unit are what makes him such an enduring sci-fi horror figure despite being so obviously dated to 1950s sci-fi in particular. Creature from the Black Lagoon is an all-timer creature feature that’s very much rooted in its time.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss a double feature of high-style Gothic horror stories: John Brahm’s The Undying Monster (1942) and William Castle’s 13 Ghosts (1960).
Welcome to Episode #249 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss all things Toxie, the first superhero from New Jersey.
0:00 Welcome 05:50 Troma 19:50 The Toxic Avenger (1984, 2025) 1:11:50 The Toxic Avenger II-IV (1989-2000)
Swampflix 