Welcome to Episode #167 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of political propaganda films, starting with Dinesh D’Souza’s anti-Democrat screed Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016).
00:00 Welcome
02:00 Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) 06:23 Switch (1991) 11:11 Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) 14:00 Inu-Oh (2022) 17:30 A Kiss Before Dying (1956)
Earlier this year, there were a couple low-budget, high-ambition throwbacks to the handcrafted twee fantasies Michel Gondry was making when I was in high school & college in the aughts. There’s a proto-Etsy craftiness to the visual effects & heart-on-sleeve sentimentality of both Strawberry Mansion & Everything EverywhereAll at Once that sent me time-traveling back to the twee era. In their wake, I even revisited Gondry’s divisive dreamscape drama The Science of Sleep to confront what an emotionally inept dipshit I was at the time. It was an era when film festival titans like Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Wes Anderson ruled the land . . . at least in my mildewed apartment where Belle & Sebastian blared while half-formed semi-adults got stoned and doodled in coloring books. I didn’t even know the term “twee” was a pejorative. That label was slapped on so much art I loved in my formative years that it registered as the name of a movement rather than a critical insult. So, I’ve been heartened to see Gondry’s influence creep up in recent films like Sorry to Bother You, Girl Asleep, and Dave Made a Maze. I’m even more heartened to see a new generation of college-age weirdos embrace the small crafts & big emotions of Everything Everywhere the same way I did when twee was the go-to alt aesthetic. I imagine Strawberry Mansion would also be a hit with that crowd, if it had a big enough marketing push for them to know it exists. I’m getting to the age now when my generation is old enough to make mass-distributed art, and there’s apparently still a lot of affection for twee whimsy out there, despite early critical rejection of the (loosely defined) genre’s cutesy sentimentality. I’m also encouraged to see directors like the Daniels, Kentucker Audley, and Albert Birney pushing twee aesthetics to new, modern extremes. Both Strawberry Mansion & Everything Everywhere recall vintage twee cinema, but neither could not be mistaken for being made in the aughts.
One of the signs that twee aesthetics are back in vogue is the wealth of recent stop-motion animation. The dreamworld stop-motion effects of Strawberry Mansion account for a lot of that film’s Gondry-throwback appeal; the film-nerd celebration of Phil Tippett’s Mad God hints at a culture-wide appreciation for handcrafted art; and the heavily textured surfaces of the horror anthology The House feel like they were lifted directly from a Wes Anderson moodboard. None of these recent stop-motion novelties could claim to be quite as twee as the Marcel the Shellwith Shoes On movie, though, which is so aggressively cutesy it’s outright daring cynics to call it cloying & twee. The titular Marcel is a thimble-sized seashell with a googly eye (speaking of Everything Everywhere) and a titular pair of sneakers. Voiced by Jenny Slate in the creakiest, Joanna Newsomiest voice she can manage, Marcel’s entire existence is a celebration of how cute things are in miniature. I remember the original series of Marcel the Shell shorts functioning as a rapidfire joke delivery system where every punchline is “So small!”, as Marcel shows off what he uses as a hat (a lentil), a hang glider (a Dorito), and skis (toenails from a man), etc. That relentless setup/punchline rhythm carries over to the movie brilliantly, but Slate & director Dean Fleisher-Camp triple down on the twee whimsy of the shorts by expanding them into a feature film about loneliness, community, and loss. Whenever cynics decry twee art for being overly cutesy on its fussy, manicured surface, I always feel like they’re deliberately overlooking how much deeply felt hurt & sadness is lurking just beyond that aesthetic armor. With the Marcel the Shell movie, Slate & Fleisher-Camp are a real-life divorced couple collaborating on a heartfelt story about loss of community and the difficulties of friendship by revisiting a long-dead project they created when there were still together. There’s some sincere love & heartbreak to be found in this stop-motion fantasy adventure, as long as you can get over your initial, cynical reaction to its overdose of tiny-things cuteness.
There’s a similar morbid-cute balance at play in the recent nature documentary Fire of Love, with even higher stakes in its real-life story of a doomed romance. Fire of Love is essentially a twee revision of Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, a connection made even more explicit by Herzog’s competing documentary on the same subject – The Fire Within. Katia & Maurice Krafft were world-famous volcanologists, a married couple who studied volcanic eruptions up-close for decades until they were killed by one in the early 1990s. In a way, the twee-ification of their volcanic nature footage is unavoidable. Fire of Love is the story of two talented filmmakers just as much as it’s the story of two doomed scientists; the Kraffts were seemingly just as inspired by the French New Wave as they were by the immense power of Nature. They dress like Steve Zissou’s crew members in The Life Aquatic, and they shoot quirky, fussed-over self-portraits in front of volcanic eruptions as if they were Wes Anderson’s college film professors. Even so, the choice to hire Miranda July as the film’s narrator amplifies the twee undertones of the Kraffts’ film archives to an explosive extreme. July records her vocal track as if she’s hiding in the back of a bedroom closet, shaking with the same cracked-glass vulnerability she brought to early projects like Me and You and Everyone We Know and her spoken-word records for Kill Rock Stars in the pre-twee 90s. Anyone who already struggles to get onboard with Slate’s pipsqueak voice in Marcel the Shell is far too weak for the twee-poetry monologues July delivers in Fire of Love. Honestly, I love how alienating that choice is; it would’ve been an over-the-plate pop doc without her. The Kraffts’ romantic fearlessness in the face of exploding lava, combined with their keen eye for vivid cinematic framing, calls for twee filmmaking conventions like no other documentary subject I can name. Anyone too cynical for Miranda July’s trembling anxiety & wide-eyed awe will certainly have a much easier go with Herzog’s take on the same couple’s life, but that’s a shame. Distaste for twee art is often just distaste for full-hearted sincerity.
I’ve seen enough darksided tweets about stomping on Marcel the Shell or shooting Paddington Bear dead to know that anti-twee cynicism is still alive and well out there. I like to think that there’s a genuine, growing appreciation for aughts-era twee among the moviegoing public, though. Audiences who don’t get their dopamine hits by dunking on overly earnest art on Twitter have more twee-throwback movies influenced by Gondry & Anderson to choose from than ever before; some of those films are even pushing that vintage aesthetic to new extremes. And hey, there’s nothing cynics love to do more than complain on the internet so, in a way, everyone wins.
Our current Movie of the Month, Donald Cammell’s 1987 sunlit thriller White of the Eye, is a real weird one. Our first Movie of the Month produced by the Canon Group (improbable but true), it’s a violent clash between high & low art aesthetics. Whether it’s a result of the sun-blazed setting or the Golan-Globus production funds, there’s a daytime TV cheapness to the look of White of the Eye that cannot be overcome through Cammell’s . . . unusual choice of imagery. So, he mostly overcomes that cheapness in the editing. The images look like excerpts from a Walker, Texas Ranger episode, but they’re assembled into a dreamlike, Lynchian tone. The whole movie borders on looking & feeling mundane, and yet it’s electrifying in its off-kilter presentation.
It’d be easy to write off White of the Eye‘s uneasy, unwieldy tone as a result of incompetence if it weren’t for Cammell’s larger catalog of unwieldy genre oddities. White of the Eye plays like a knockoff giallo that gets lost in the American desert for a while, then emerges as a sun-dazed erotic thriller. The kicker is that it gets lost on purpose. Cammell’s tragically short career as a filmmaker is comprised entirely of loosely edited, borderline incoherent genre exercises that reach past the storytelling expectations of his audience’s bloodlust to prod the outer limits of the human psyche. He teetered between being a mad genius & a total hack, and the tension between those extremes made for constantly exciting work. To that end, here’s a rundown of the other three feature films directed by Donald Cammell, in case you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and are curious about the rest of his off-kilter catalog.
Performance (1970)
Cammell’s most vivid extremes of brilliance & incoherence are on full display in his genre-defying debut, Performance. A collaboration between fellow inscrutable artist Nicolas Roeg, Performance starts as a chaotically edited gangster picture before emerging from an intense mushroom trip as a macho echo of Bergman’s Persona. James Fox stars as a bigoted, close-minded gangster with a seething hatred for “females” & “foreigners”. When he defies the orders of his mobster employer, he finds himself in need of a proper hideout, so he disguises himself as a free-spirited bohemian rocker and takes refuge in a rented room owned by Mick Jagger, essentially playing himself. Through the power of marijuana, psilocybin, and polyamory, Jagger’s libertine landlord breaks down the rigid boundaries of his gangster tenant’s psyche, turning him into a genuine, genderless version of the free-spirit archetype he disguised himself as to escape his fate – all on a harem-style crash pad set that looks like it was decorated by Kenneth Anger.
That’s the most concise, straight-forward recap of Performance I can provide, since it’s a film that’s deliberately, defiantly loose in both its scene-to-scene details and its overall meaning. Because Roeg has touched on similar territory elsewhere—otherworldly rock star personae in The Man Who Fell to Earth) & extraordinarily intimate sex scenes in Don’t Look Now—it’s tempting to attribute a lot of the film’s high-art pretensions to his influence, but the dreamy surrealism of this debut collab echoes throughout the rest of Cammell’s work as well. As soon as the long establishing shots of rain-slicked London exteriors are intercut with flashes of a genderfucked threesome between Jagger & his groupies in the very first scene, it’s clear this is pure Cammell, for better and for worse. The only thing that’s really out of place here is the film’s setting, since the rest of his work feels magnetically drawn to the American West. If you’re looking for more of the untethered weirdness of White of the Eye without all the hyperviolent genre tropes grounding its story, Performance is all filler & no killer – often transcendently so.
Demon Seed (1977)
Although Performance & White of the Eye have their own vocal cults, Demon Seed is Cammell’s most popular, iconic work among the general moviegoing public. It belongs to a very special subcategory of classic horror: I saw it parodied on The Simpsons decades before I saw the movie itself. In some ways, it’s the most well behaved of Cammell’s films, telling a coherent story with an almost made-for-TV level decipherability. Except for maybe some lingering exterior shots of the American desert, and some deeply strange War of the Sexes philosophical tensions, you might not even be able to clock it as a Cammell film at all. Despite its tightened-up editing & storytelling style, though, Demon Seed is just as strange as Cammell’s most out-there works. It’s not every day you see a movie where Julie Christy plays a lonely housewife who’s imprisoned & impregnated by her husband’s automated-home A.I. technology – a rapist HAL9000 on the fritz.
I’ve been putting off watching this film for decades, since its premise is so sleazy (and that particular subject matter was rarely handled well in the grindhouse days of the 1970s), but thankfully it’s less focused on the physical act of impregnation than I feared and instead finds a kind of wretched transcendence through retro computer graphics & technophobic rambling. Adapting a novel from paperback titan Dean Koontz, Cammell prods at his usual War of the Sexes tensions here, pitting “male” logic-brain against “female” emotion-brain in a sinister, physical manifestation of a violent divorce. Its woman vs. machine gender battle spirals out from there to hit on a galaxy of button-pushing hot topics, though, ranging from technocratic fascism to the patriarchal surveillance state to blocked abortion access. It’s a movie about the misogyny & assault I was worried it was going to indulge, and it’s one that telegraphs the strange proto-MRA violence of Cammell’s next picture, White of the Eye, except with an iTunes visualizer mystique.
Wild Side (1995)
Because Performance & Demon Seed are his most out-there, genre-defiant works (and, frankly, his classiest), the closest companion piece to Cammell’s White of the Eye was his follow-up erotic thriller, Wild Side. Wild Side feels like watching Tommy Wiseau remake the Wachowski sisters’ Bound. It’s about how cops are rapists, lesbians are rad, and Christopher Walken is an absolute madman. Walken’s performance is completely unpredictable in its cadence & internal illogic, pushing the third-act villain turn from White of the Eye into a feature-length character study of an unhinged gangster freak. If it were a Nicolas Cage performance, Wild Side might be Cammell’s most celebrated cult classic; as is, it’s rotting in 360p on YouTube, which might be exactly what it deserves.
The quick-cut edits of mundane images that make White of the Eye such a disorienting head-trip continue in full force here, now accompanied with similarly scrambled Christopher Walken syntax in lines like “Women: with them, without them, who can live?” Anne Heche stars as Walken’s romantic foil – a banker by day, prostitute by night, who’s hellbent on stealing the heart of his hottest moll (Joan Chen, Josie from Twin Peaks). If Performance is the purest version of Cammell’s choppy, dreamlike editing style, Wild Side might be the purest form of his sleazy War of the Sexes gender conflicts, which teeter wildly from thoughtful critique of societal misogyny to horned-up participation in that very thing. As chaotic as White of the Eye can feel in other ways, it does find a neutralized balance between those extremes of Cammell’s debut & his final work before his suicide. Demon Seed might be the furthest outlier in that career trajectory, but let’s be real, every Donald Cammell movie is an outlier. He was a deeply strange dude, and it’s a tragedy he didn’t leave us with a deeper mind-fuck filmography to puzzle over.
For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss George Romero’s Monkey Shines, a psychological horror about a super-intelligent, super-murderous service monkey.
00:00 Welcome
10:30 Jawbreaker (1999) 19:45 The Coen Brothers 23:55 Nope (2022) 33:45 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) 38:15 Fire of Love (2022)
Every year I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself. It’s a small, often private ritual that I hold sacred, and it’s one I plan months in advance. Which version of Arnold am I going to celebrate with – the one who gets in gunfights with alligators?, the one who gives birth to a baby with his own adult face?, or maybe a double-trouble combo of Arnie clones? The possibilities are endless. This year, the decision was easy. I happened to find a used DVD copy of the nü-metal Schwarzenegger relic End of Days on a thrift store shelf a few months before my birthday, making my selection obvious. Then, just a couple days before this year’s Big Event, a tabloid new story came out about Schwarzenegger’s abhorrent behavior on the set of End of Days. Specifically, he was accused of deliberately farting in the face of his co-star Miriam Margoles during their fight scene. And did he apologize for this workplace transgression? No, dear reader, he laughed. Beyond confirming yet again that all millionaires are assholes, it was kind of a nothing news item, worthy only of a chuckle while scrolling though headlines on the old Twitter feed. It was the easily most press End of Days has gotten in this century, though, and its timing meant that this year I was celebrating my birthday with The Fart Movie.
Anyway, the Nü-Metal Arnöld movie holds up fairly well. There was once a time in my life where any vaguely gothy movie with a prominent KoRn single on its tie-in soundtrack was an instant 5-star classic in my eyes, so I can’t say I enjoyed it as much now as I did when it was a Blockbuster rental, but it’s still a hoot. End of Days is a product that only could have been made in that exact spiked-collars-and-wallet-chains era, marketing itself specifically as Y2k horror. Set “three nights before every computer fails,” the film dreads the approach of the year 2000 with the same dread Christian doomsayers approach the birth of antichrist. In fact, it directly links the two strands of paranoia. You see, the Mark of the Beast has been misinterpreted in modern translations of the Bible. That “666” has been flipped by mistake, making 1999 the Year of the Beast, when Satan would return to Earth to choose his bride and the mother of his world-destroying son. The oncoming worldwide computer crashes of Y2k appear to be coincidental, but they’re frequently cited by radio DJs in the background as a parallel end-of-the-world scenario. In case you don’t remember, Y2k never happened the way its biggest doomsayers promised, but Gabriel Byrne sure does arrive on Earth as a father-to-be Satan in this film, and there’s only one Austrian-accented supercop in all of NYC who can stop him before it’s too late: Jericho Cane.
End of Days takes the genre mashup “action horror” about as literally as it possibly can. Satan’s quest to become a father before the Times Square ball drops on Y2k positions the film as the 90s blockbuster version of Rosemary’s Baby, but it’s the 90s version of Rosemary’s Baby that would’ve been produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Sure, there are spooky Catholic ceremonies behind every locked door in every NYC church, as the city’s priests wage a secret Good vs Evil battle with the Prince of Darkness. And there are plenty of CG demons, back-alley crucifixions, and Satanic orgies to keep the teenage edgelord KoRn fans in the audience drooling on their JNCOs. None of it is supposed to be especially scary, though. It’s all just badass, gothy set dressing for a standard-issue Arnie action flick, complete with helicopter chases and storefront explosions. Schwarzenegger plays such a cliché version of an action-hero cop that he borders on parody, especially in an early scene when he’s introduced pouring coffee, pizza, Pepto, and Chinese leftovers into a blender as a makeshift hangover cure – like a noir goblin. Luckily, that approach means he still gets to land some of his standard action hero one-liners despite the oppressive gloominess of the setting, like in a scene where he tells Satan, “I want you to go to Hell,” and Satan shoots back, “You see, the problem is sometimes Hell goes to you.” That’s some beautiful late-90s cheese, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
End of Days has a lot of problems. Its 2-hour runtime is super bloated for a movie with so few ideas. Its female lead, Robin Tunney, doesn’t have much to do besides wait around as a damsel in Satanic distress (and to vaguely resemble Brittany Murphy). Worst yet, Kevin Pollak was brought in as sarcastic comic relief, as if the producers weren’t convinced Arnie wasn’t funny enough on his own (despite being, hands down, the funniest action lead of all time) and somehow thought Kevin Frickin Pollak was the solution to that non-problem. Still, it feels like an essential artifact in both nü-metal & Y2k genre cinema, bridging the gap between two really dumb things I cared way too much about when I was 12 years old, with my all-time favorite action star at the helm (and sometimes on the cross). It has an interesting production history too. Both Sam Raimi & Guillermo del Toro turned down the chance to direct before it fell in the lap of anonymous workman Peter Hyams. It was also written with Tom Cruise in mind to star, which would’ve changed the entire tone & meaning of the project. It’s the kind of what-could’ve-been scenario that really fires up your imagination . . . until the conversation is dominated by the fact that Schwarzenegger is a bully who farted in the face of Miriam Margoles. Oh well, at least he didn’t fart into an open flame, since flames & explosives were such a prominent aspect of its Satanic set decoration. A lot more people could’ve been hurt.
I once found half of a Criterion Collection boxset at a West Bank thrift store, and it felt like stumbling across gold on the sidewalk. Two of the four titles in Criterion’s “When Horror Came to Shochiku” set were collecting dust on the shelves at Thrift City USA, where I’m used to finding Hangover sequels and Season 3 discs of The O.C. Neither were the title I was most excited to watch from the Shochiku set, but it still felt like winning the schlock bin lottery.
“When Horror Came to Shochiku” collects four horror films produced by the Japanese studio Shochiku in the late 1960s, when they were best known for producing melodramas by the likes of Kurosawa & Ozu. The Living Skeleton is the only film of the batch that doesn’t feel like a market response to the supernatural disaster template established by Godzilla, so it’s the one that maybe hits closest to the studio’s usual tone. It’s also the one that’s seemed to earn the most critical praise since the set was released a decade ago. The Living Skeleton is a lot more subdued than the other three films on the set, telling an eerie, seaside ghost story in a literary whisper. Personally, I was a lot more excited by the vivid, volatile pleasures of the rest of the set, but I’m generally a more enthusiastic audience for that wildly expressive end of genre filmmaking than the average online film nerd. If you’re more likely to enjoy a respectful, traditional ghost story from a movie studio best suited for respectful, traditional melodramas, of course The Living Skeleton would be your favorite of the batch.
The X from Outer Space has the most adorably dorky monster in the kaiju canon. Genocide & Goke have an unpredictable, chaotic approach to narrative that gets to the heart of the cultural heartbreak of post-War Japan. The Living Skeleton is the only film in the set shot in black & white, which I think is an indicator of the more traditional, subdued version of horror it offers. It’s a very typical ghost-revenge story, with violent rape & murder committed by pirates in the first scene avenged by the arrival of a ghost in the same seaside village years later. Some of the black & white haunted house effects call back to the Poverty Row knockoffs of Universal’s “Famous Monsters” era, including toy bats bobbing on strings against a black background. Others are morbidly gorgeous, including an underwater garden of skeletons anchored to the seafloor and a dreamworld burlesque show worthy of David Lynch. It’s all well-crafted & effectively creepy, but none of it feels as memorably idiosyncratic as the other horror novelties made by Shochiku at the time – apparently to its benefit in the modern discourse.
If I’m only describing The Living Skeleton through its comparisons to the rest of the Shochiku boxset, it’s because I don’t have much to say about it any other context. There’s an antique quality to its visual patina that puts the more recent seaside horror The Lighthouse to shame, but there’s not much about it that you can’t find elsewhere in traditionalist ghost stories of its kind. Maybe I’m shallow for prioritizing novelty in this boxset of effects-heavy horror films, but novelty is exactly what makes the set so great as an overall group. In a time when so many Japanese filmmakers were rushing to replicate the exact zeitgeist-torching formula that made Godzilla so immensely popular, Shochiku took that inspiration into some far-out, unpredictable directions. With The Living Skeleton, they strayed the least far from their home turf, which makes its relative payoffs the most timid & contained. It’s still a solidly eerie ghost story on its own terms, though, and there isn’t one stinker in the entire collection.
Ranking the Criterion “When Horror Came to Shochiku” box set, just for fun:
I recently returned as a guest on the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the adorably jazzy kaiju space adventure The X from Outer Space, as part of the show’s ongoing “Size Does Matter” theme month.
Aaron & Peter were kind to invite me back after previous discussions of Brigsby Bear (2017), Dagon (2001), The Fly (1958), and Xanadu (1980). It’s always a blast to guest on their podcast, since I also listen as a fan. Their show is wonderfully in sync with the enthusiasm & sincerity we try to maintain on this site (especially when covering so-called “bad movies”), so I highly recommend digging through old episodes & clips on the We Love to Watch blog if you haven’t already. And, of course, please start by giving a listen to their episode on The X from Outer Space below.
Three cheers for the American Genre Film Archive, who are doing the heroic work of preserving & distributing vintage outsider art in an age when practically every movie over a decade old is being snuffed out of existence, no matter how mainstream. AGFA platforms works as essential as the coming-of-age riot grrrl sex comedy Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore and as disposable as the home-movie porn parody Bat Pussy, always with respect. My latest discovery in their catalog was, as always, a real doozy. Terminal USA is less of a feature film than it is a Cali punk’s cracked plastic ash tray that was kicked under a mildewed couch, then given a quick spit shine after decades of nihilistic neglect. It’s shot in a sound-stage suburban home seemingly constructed out of cardboard. Every pronunciation of letters “s” & “t” tops out its rickety mics. The cast aren’t acting so much as they’re talk-shouting while modeling history’s cheapest wigs. Its cheapness is its greatest asset, a juvenile middle finger shoved in the face of the American public, who were outraged that tax money paid for its production and broadcast on PBS. Personally, I can’t think of anything worthier of public funding than weirdo D.I.Y. art projects like this. It would almost make me patriotic, if the film weren’t specifically about the moral, cultural rot in this nation’s arrhythmic heart. We likely won’t ever see public funding for abrasive outsider cinema like Tongues Untied, Dottie Gets Spanked, or Terminal USA ever again, thanks to Reagan-era efforts to gut the National Endowment for the Arts. At least niche distributors like AGFA are around to preserve the truly American art we got when the getting was good, though. That history is always under threat of being erased from the record.
It’s worth talking broadly about mainstream America here, because Terminal USA makes such a mockery of the nation’s cultural decline, as indicated by the title. While most satirical takes on the wounds festering just below suburbia’s manicured surface tend to come from white filmmakers (think John Waters, David Lynch, Tim Burton, etc.), Jon Moritsugu offers their lesser seen, lesser discussed Asian-American counterbalance, a grainy broadcast from the immigrant communities of the West Coast. Moritsugu “stars” in dual roles as a snotty Cali mall punk who spits in the face of his parents’ desire to assimilate and as their better-behaved son, who fits more cleanly in the Asian-American stereotype of a model student with no social life. It quickly turns out, of course, that the bookworm brother is the more depraved of the two, jacking off to Nazi muscle mags in his bedroom when he’s pretending to be studying math. Their sister is a bratty cheerleader who’s desperate to sleep with the family lawyer. Their mother is addicted to their bedridden grandfather’s prescription morphine; and the most depraved of all is their stand-up citizen father figure who’s oblivious to all his family’s barely concealed sins, frequently slipping into deranged monologues about Faith, purity, and The American Dream. Despite all its gunshots, space aliens, and leaked porno tapes, there isn’t much of a plot to Terminal USA. It’s a moldy family portrait, where every bizarre resident of a bland suburban home de-evolve into their worst possible selves over the course of one wretched night. Oh yeah, and a young Gregg Turkington shows up as a local skinhead.
This is the kind of microbudget, limited-location production where the background graffiti artists get their own production design credit (attributed to Twist & Reminisce, in case you’re wondering). Moritsugu & crew spruce up their sparse, flimsy sets with neon lights and the kinds of plastic gems you’d expect to see glued to a middle-schooler’s make-up kit. It’s all so beautifully ugly. The performances are just as preposterous & cheap; my biggest laugh (of many) was when Moritsugu’s dirtbag mall punk is shot in the kneecap and complains “This sucks!”. His fingerprints & personality are highly visible all over every inch of the production, making him a true trash auteur. And he’s accomplished a lot since he first started making 16mm punk films in the late 80s, cranking out attention-grabbing titles like Mod Fuck Explosion, Hippy Porn, and My Degeneration to consistently muted acclaim. Terminal USA is a great introduction to his catalog, both as a snapshot of how he feels his work & persona fit in American pop culture and as proof that he’s a genuine provocateur, pissing off a lot of uptight conservatives with a seething hatred for The Arts. I have no clue how easily accessible the rest of his titles are, but I doubt many have been as lovingly restored & presented as this AGFA scan of that trashteur calling card – a pristine image of a hideous nation.
Welcome to Episode #166 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movie remakes, starting with the 1981 erotic thriller version of the classic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice.
00:00 Welcome
01:31 Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) 07:17 Menace II Society (1993) 12:45 Mad God (2022) 18:25 Gigli (2003)
25:25 The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) 47:05 Scarface (1983) 1:05:00 Father of the Bride (2022) 1:28:00 The Blob (1988)
A few weeks ago, there was a lot of journalistic handwringing over the Twitter bots behind the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut “movement”, following reports that at least 13% of the accounts behind that online uproar were 100% fake. I’m not sure what part of that revelation was supposed to be a shock, except that maybe 13% feels like a low-end estimate. Anyone who’s ever been tortured by a Twitter-feed algorithm should be well used to seeing a nonstop flood of automated, incoherent “opinions” posted by fake accounts. That’s especially true when it comes to superhero movie discourse, which I’m convinced alone accounts for at least 13% of all non-pornographic internet traffic. It’s much more shocking when that kind of organized bot-posting swells up around something that doesn’t involve superheroes, like the out-of-nowhere outrage over 2020’s Cuties or the more recent, even more preposterous outrage over the Jane Austen adaptation Persuasion. When the trailer for Netflix’s cheeky, modernized version of Persuasion was released, there were plenty of sincere (even if hyperbolic) complaints about how it bungled the tone of the source material, marketing one of Austen’s most heartbreaking dramas as a Clueless-style comedy for Zoomers. That Austen Fan Club outrage must’ve “done some numbers,” because every third post on my Twitter feed for weeks was labeled “Trending: Dakota Johnson”, with hundreds of accounts named “AustenFreak347492947” complaining that Austen didn’t know what a playlist was, so she would not have written that screenplay. I’m not going to weigh in on whether Johnson’s flippant zingers about playlists & exes are appropriately respectful to the source material, since I have neither seen the film nor read the novel. I just think it’s bizarre that any Austen adaptation could generate the same kind of widespread, automated online outrage as a $300mil superhero epic, much less something as insubstantial as a Netflix Original.
If there’s anything to be learned from the Austen & Snyder debacles—both real & fake—it’s that creators do not need to listen to The Fans. Maybe the hardcore Persuasionheads out there had a genuine point about how that specific work was inappropriate for a playfully modern, Fleabag-style update. That sentiment quickly backslid into inane, astroturfed discourse about how any straying from the tone & text of any movie’s source material is somehow shameful. It’s the same pedantic, close-minded thinking that sends comic book nerds into belligerent rages about “faithfulness”, except this time it’s dressed up in lacy bodices instead of spandex & capes. Worse, it leads to boring, unimaginative movies. I happened to watch the 2015 adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel Far from the Madding Crowd around the time of the Austen Bot invasion, and it was heavily weighed down by faithfulness. Determined to hit every plot point of the novel, Thomas Vinterberg plows through the events of the text like a video game speed run, cramming decades of love & loss into what appears to be two page turns of a calendar. It’s a prolonged, episodic storytelling style that feels more at home in a BBC miniseries than a mid-budget Oscar contender. Bot outrage over movie adaptations taking creative liberties with their source texts feels just as juvenile as complaints about sex scenes that don’t “advance the plot”. If that kind of indulgence bothers you, I promise you’d be much happier just watching TV instead of movies. At its best, cinema is streamlined & poetically expressive; it also says just as much about the time when it’s made as it does about the time when it’s set. Maybe the new Persuasion movie didn’t update & reinterpret Austen’s novel especially well, but the attempt to do so shouldn’t be an offense in itself. At least, I found myself wishing Vinterberg had shaken up Hardy’s novel a little himself, instead of carefully coloring within the lines drawn out a century earlier.
All that said, the central conflict of Far from the Madding Crowd is compelling even without embellishment, and it’s obvious enough why it’s been adapted several times over the decades. Usually, in these literary costume dramas our heroine has to choose between two potential beaus: one that looks good on paper and one that feels right in her heart. Hardy explodes that template by throwing in a third wild card option that fucks everything up for everyone involved. Carey Mulligan stars as an independently wealthy landowner who’s reluctant to become “some man’s property” through marriage. Michael Sheen plays her potential mate who looks best on paper, proposing to merge their two adjacent estates into one enormous, profitable empire. Matthias Schoenaerts is the beau who feels right in her heart – a once-independent farmer who falls on hard times and dedicates the rest of his life in service of her success instead of his own, patiently waiting for her to admit to herself that she loves him. And then there’s Tom Sturridge as the toxic fuckboy military man who breaks up that classic love triangle with a sudden rush of sex & chaos, challenging Mulligan’s self-image as a strong, independent thinker by directly appealing to her libido. It’s all very well performed and narratively engaging (especially if you aren’t already familiar with where it’s going), but it doesn’t offer much in the way of interpretation or personalization. If anything, Vinterberg is outright stubborn in his refusal to modernize, shooting this traditionally lit & costumed drama through a modern digital grain that feels like a tug of war between form & content. The 2015 version of Far from the Madding Crowd is perfectly serviceable if you’re looking for any old costume drama to fill up your Sunday afternoon, but there’s nothing especially urgent or unique about what it has to offer within that genre outside illustrating the scene-to-scene events of its source text.
Of course, the two most exciting elements of Vinterberg’s Far from the Madding Crowd are the ones where he does modernize the novel. There’s something thrilling about Mulligan’s wardrobe in particular, which conveys her badass girlboss independence by toughening up her 19th Century fashions with leather, denim, and pants. The hypegirl sidekick she adopts when she first starts running her own farm is also a distinctly modern thrill, played with flippant Gen-Z sass by The End of the Fucking World‘s Jessica Barden. Hardy’s novel is already packed with enough sex, death, and cruelty to feel freshly modern in comparison to buttoned-up costume dramas of the past, but Mulligan’s heavy denim dress and Barden’s aggressive brattiness are really what brings the film up to date. Personally, I’m a sucker for that kind of modern intrusion into historical settings. When Sofia Coppola snuck some Chucks into Marie Antoinette’s shoe closet, I was cheering while the most boring nerds in the room were rolling their eyes. The very best Austen adaptations of my lifetime have all been cheekily modern, like Autumn De Wild’s Emma., Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and, of course, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless. I’m sure there are plenty of very real people who had very legitimate reasons for balking at that Persuasion trailer, but I would also like to think, for my own sanity, that most of the ones complaining that Jane Austen didn’t know about playlists were the softer side of Snyder bots. There has to be more to movies than just faithfully illustrating the literal events of their source texts as they were written. Otherwise, we’ve completely lost the dividing line between art & content, a thought too grim to bear.
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