comedy

Child of Peach (1987)

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Although our discussion of The Maidens of Heavenly Mountains included ongoing discourse about whether the film was comprehensible, I have yet to be completely disappointed by any of the Wuxia films that was shared with the Swampflix crew by one of our listeners last year. I was excited to get back into the thick of it after loving Buddha’s Palm, and among the movie files I had downloaded to my phone to watch if I got bored while traveling was what I assumed was another Wuxia parody like Buddha’s Palm, titled Child of Peach. Upon completion, I can say that it almost certainly was, as it contains this image: 

However, unlike Buddha’s Palm, this movie is awful. 

Child of Peach is based on the story of Momotarō, a Japanese folk hero. The linked Wikipedia article gives a more detailed description, but the bare bones stations of the Momotarō canon are as follows . . . A boy is born from a giant peach found floating in a river by an elderly childless couple (in older versions the peach rejuvenates them to a younger age and they conceive of Momotarō more conventionally); he demonstrates essentially superhuman strength at a very early age; he leaves his parents in order to battle demonic Oni who are marauding the lands; and along the way he befriends a talking dog, monkey, and pheasant who join him in his quest to ultimately defeat the demons of Onigashimi, the demon island. This film adheres pretty closely to that schematic, adding in some additional villains, a backstory for our main character, some army shenanigans, and far, far too many puerile bathroom humor gags about piss. 

The film opens as every Wuxia film I’ve seen so far has, atop a misty mountaintop, where a master martial artist and his wife are raising their infant son while protecting the Sword of the Sun, attended by the master’s young apprentices who can shapeshift into the animal companions of the Momotarō legend. Here, their names are translated as Tiny-Dog, Tiny-Monkey and, um, “Tiny-Cock.” The mountaintop is invaded by an Oni whose name is translated as King Devil, who slays the couple, but not before the wife beseeches the giant magic peach that is the centerpiece of their cave home to save her child, which it does by taking the baby within itself and flying off of the mountain like a pod out of Krypton. The young animorphs are exiled from the mountain as well as King Demon emerges victorious. Below, an elderly couple argues “humorously” with one another before the wife goes to the river to wash clothes. The giant peach floats by and she gets into some tiresome slapstick shenanigans while trying to capture it. When she does, she plans to eat the peach, only to discover a human(?) child within. Also, before she does so, the big peach urinates on her from its peach crack. Comedy!

“Peach Kid,” as the subtitles refer to him, grows up quickly due to interference from a magic fairy who also used to reside on the mountain of the Sword of the Sun, as she is aware that King Devil has gone to the underworld and resurrected some evil warriors, and his hordes start to ravage the land. A local known as the Melon Knight holds a contest to gather together a group of warriors to fight off King Devil and his goofy minions, with one such event involving the wrestling of a bull. Peach Kid, now a magically aged adult (and very clearly played by a woman, Hsiao-Lao Lin), has already demonstrated super breath when an attempt to stoke the stove fire in his adopted parents’ home results in him blowing the thing apart and whom we have also already seen splitting firewood in half with his bare hands like Captain America in Age of Ultron, manages to flip the animal completely. The soldiers laugh him off, and his animal friends help him get revenge on Melon Knight and his vizier by peeing in their sake. Comedy! 

Eventually, all of this comes to a head. Peach Kid and his animal buddies form into a peach-themed Voltron kind of thing (as seen above) and defeat King Devil and all is right in the land. 

I really wanted to like this one, and went into it with the expectation that, even if it weren’t great, there would at least be some cool wizard fights, but it barely has any of that. A few of the lieutenant Oni have some cool things going for them; one has a big bag of mystical wind that he can use in fights to blow his opponents backwards, and “Granny” has a staff that shoots a stream of fire, but that’s really all that there is to speak of. It’s also worth noting that the version I saw referred to the windbag Oni as “Aeolus,” whom you may remember from The Odyssey as the god of the wind. I’m not sure that this allusion to Greek mythology is present in the original text, but I did fail to mention earlier that the mountain on which Peach Kid is first born is referred to in the subtitled dialogue as “Olympus.” I can’t tell if that’s just thematic naming on the part of the translator, but I would assume so. There’s very little information about this film online (in English, anyway), and the IMDb translations of the characters names make a lot more sense that what was present in the version I saw. I’ll also admit that the copy I saw had some of the worst subtitle quality control that I have ever seen, as there were large swathes of the dialogue that were rendered completely illegible by their placement on white portions of the screen. I may have understood the film better if a little more care had been put into it, but I don’t think that I would have liked it more. This was intended to be enjoyed only by children, as the preponderance of scat humor and lack of any comedy that would appeal to a more mature audience make clear. If you’re working your way through the Wuxia canon, skip this one. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Throw Momma from the Train (1988)

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I recently started a rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager (ding!), prompted because the person I’m dating expressed that this series was the most of interest because of their love of Kate Mulgrew, based solely on her performance in Orange is the New Black. We also recently watched Throw Momma from the Train, not because Kate Mulgrew was in it, but because it was on both of our lists, and it was a happy coincidence. 

Danny DeVito writes, directs, and co-stars in this late-80s comedy riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which appears in the film directly as the movie that DeVito’s character, Owen, sees at the behest of his beleaguered creative writing teacher. Said instructor is Larry, played by Billy Crystal, a man whose ex-wife Margaret (Mulgrew) stole the novel he wrote while they were together and is now seeing great success from it — interviews with Oprah, diamond earrings, a palatial Hawaiian estate, etc. Larry’s intense jealousy clouds his mind, and he’s stuck teaching a class of not-very-imaginative adult students who are trying to learn to write. Even among the students, Owen stands out as particularly unimaginative, although his daydreams about killing his overbearing, needy mother (Anne Ramsey) are colorful. When Owen starts to stalk Larry in order to get better insight into the creative process, he learns about Larry’s disastrous divorce and, when Larry suggests he go see a Hitchcock film to better understand how mysteries should be structured, Strangers on a Train just happens to be playing at the local cinema, he happens upon the idea of swapping murders. Misunderstanding Larry’s recommendations, he opts to fly straight to Hawaii and, seizing his opportunity, pushes Margaret overboard on a ferry while she dangles over the side to try and retrieve one of her earrings. Returning home, he now insists that Larry “fulfill” his end of their “bargain” and kill the titular momma, all while Larry tries to avoid being arrested for Margaret’s apparent murder. 

Throw Momma from the Train is a perfect little comedy, so tightly structured and so novel that it’s hard to imagine it being made today. Larry’s would-be relationship with colleague Beth (Kim Griest), who loves trains, allows for a lot of train imagery to be scattered throughout as foreshadowing of the film’s allusions as well as its finale. Ramsey is as perfectly loathsome here as she was just a couple of years prior in The Goonies, with her occasional moments of kindness implying a dementia that has rendered her this awful. Crystal is playing the same character that he always does, but when that character makes you the leading man for romcoms of an entire era, why deviate from the norm? Mulgrew’s character’s role in the story necessitates that she disappear fairly early in the runtime, but she makes a great meal out of her scenes, and it’s always fun to see her cut loose a little. It’s DeVito who’s absolutely wonderful here, playing Owen as someone so simple he’s utterly incapable of malice but is nonetheless too dim to be manipulated, at least intentionally. As an actor, his career has largely been made up of playing scoundrels and shitheels, and even though he is the antagonist of his film, you can never hate him. 

The film also gets a lot of mileage out of Larry’s class of wannabe writers. One of them is in the process of crafting a coffee table book entitled One Hundred Women I’d Like to Pork, which gets a nice payoff when we see the publication at Larry’s house in the film’s ending. My absolute favorite, however, has to be Mrs. Hazeltine, whose concluding paragraph to her story is, in its entirety: “‘Dive! Dive!’ yelled the Captain through the thing! So the man who makes it dive pressed a button, or a something, and it dove. And, the enemy was foiled again. ‘Looks like we foiled them again,’ said Dave. ‘Yeah,’ said the Captain. ‘We foiled those bastards again. Didn’t we, Dave.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Dave. The End.” If you’ve ever taken a short story class, it’s frighteningly familiar. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Twinless (2025)

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In Jay Neugeboren’s An Orphan’s Tale, the author writes “A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.” The line has been paraphrased in everything from Six Feet Under to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but Twinless takes it in a slightly different direction, when Lisa (Lauren Graham), the mother of twins Roman and Rocky (Dylan O’Brien in a dual role) comforts Dennis (James Sweeney) over the loss of his twin brother Dean, saying that outliving the person with whom one shared a womb may actually be worse. Unfortunately, it’s her living son Roman, who met Dennis in a talk therapy group focused on the survivors of a twin sibling’s death, who really needs to hear this, but the rift in their relationship is far too late at that point. 

That’s not the focus of this story, but it’s an important element of the way in which blanket grief can be misdirected and mangled. Twinless is a dark comedy vehicle for Sweeney, who directed and wrote the film in addition to performing in it. Of the two primary characters, we meet Roman first, as he prepares for the funeral for his deceased twin Rocky, who was recently killed in a car accident. As attendees of the funeral attempt to offer their condolences, their grief overwhelms them, as they each seem to have the same experience of looking at Roman and “seeing [Rocky’s] ghost.” At his mother’s urging, while she returns home to Moscow, Idaho (population 27000), he remains in the city for a time to attend the aforementioned surviving twin counseling group. It’s here that he meets Dennis, who tells him about his deceased twin Dean, and they get off to a good start despite Roman’s initial moderately homophobic question about whether Dennis gets carsick, as he always wondered if the deceased Rocky’s need to sit in the front seat to avoid motion sickness might have been on the same gene that made Rocky gay while Roman was straight. 

The two men grow closer as Dennis helps Roman navigate his grief, offering himself up to serve as Rocky’s proxy so that Roman can say all the things that he never got to say. It’s a powerful scene that shows that Yahoo! Movies was right to predict that O’Brien would be a breakout star all the way back in 2014; O’Brien acts the hell out of it, and it’s a showstopper. Up to this point, we’ve seen a Roman who is emotionally static. He lives in his mother’s basement back in Idaho, and when he decides to stay on in Portland in Rocky’s old apartment, it’s clear that he doesn’t understand the “rules” of social engagement in a densely populated urban environment. Although it’s clear to the audience that Dennis has a crush on him, Roman remains blissfully unaware, and it’s his rural guilelessness that makes him endearing even as he accidentally does some things that might lead Dennis on, like admit that he’s been using Rocky’s gym membership and allowed himself to be hit on by a guy there. But once Dennis gives Roman the space to unload and the other man breaks down into a refrain of “I don’t know what I am without you,” it’s clear that there’s a lot more going on inside Roman than he’s allowed to be seen by others. His brutal beating of a trio of mouthy teens who calls the men “faggots” after a hockey game also shows that there’s a storm brewing inside of him, the kind that comes from suppressing emotions and keeping them hidden away. 

For the first act of this film, our hearts go out to Dennis and Roman, for both for their shared grief in losing a twin, and to Dennis in particular as we see him develop a hopeless love for and devotion to a man that we know he is incompatible with, orientation-wise. Regardless of orientation, we’ve all had that unrequited pining for someone that can’t be with us for one reason or another, where we allow ourselves to be beaten by the waves against the rocks of emotionally hurtful rejection because that’s the price of swimming in the presence of the object of affection. I’m not saying it’s healthy, but it happens, and if you’ve never experienced that, I’m both sorry for and envious of you. The first sign that Dennis may not be all that he seems to be is when he and Roman go out one night and Dennis compliments Roman’s shirt, asking “Was it Rocky’s?” in a way that implies he already knows the answer to the question. Did Dennis know Rocky? 

I saw this the same weekend that I saw Lurker, and I didn’t expect that both of the new releases I would catch in theaters within a few days of one another would be flicks about creepy little gay stalkers who go Way Too Far but for whom we ultimately have some amount of sympathy. That this would be the core of Lurker was clear from its marketing, and I suppose that it might have been present in the trailer for Twinless, but I was able to go into this film completely blind, not having seen any advertising other than a leaked sex scene six months ago (if you haven’t seen it, don’t — it’s a total spoiler). If Sweeney hadn’t been the architect behind Twinless in its entirety, I’d be a little concerned that the sudden density of movies with obsessive gay men as an antagonizing (if not villainous) force might be another potential red flag on the descent-into-fascism meter (I don’t know anything about Alex Russell, who both wrote and directed Lurker, other than that he toned down Matt’s maliciousness in the transition from page to screen). As it stands, while that one was a softer version of an obsessive fan thriller, this is more of an examination of a 90s style romcom plot—Sandra Bullock falls in love with Bill Pullman while his brother is comatose in While You Were Sleeping under the guise of being said brother’s fiancee, Rikki Lake being taken in as a presumed widow in Mrs. Winterbourne and starting a romance with Brendan Fraser, etc.—wherein the premise rests upon a simple accidental misunderstanding that then becomes almost impossible to extricate oneself from, with a happy ending. Dennis’s actions are all entirely intentional, and although they’re not malicious, they are harmfully self-absorbed, and although this has precedent in something like Overboard, Mrs. Doubtfire, or even Never Been Kissed, it’s nonetheless a more realistic portrayal of how the people affected by the deception would react. It’s not as subversive as the TV series You, which went much darker in the presentation of how an obsessive romantic could behave, but there’s not really a happy ending here. That’s not what I go to the movies for, though; heartbreak really does feel good in a place like the theater. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)

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It’s been three decades since Toy Story diverted the animation industry towards computer animation instead of traditional hand-drawn & stop-motion techniques, and the world is mostly worse off for it. The CG animation era has largely been dispiriting, typified more by soulless corporate dreck like Bee Movie, Shrek, and The Secret Lives of Pets than more relatively artful corporate products like Across the Spider-Verse. It feels like the entire battlefield has been surrendered to lazy IP cash-ins so celebrities like Chris Pratt can collect easy voice-acting paychecks. I haven’t seen much genuine, personal art in the medium outside a few short films in festival showcases. The new debut feature from outsider 3D animator Julian Glander is a welcome glimpse of how that might change as the tools of the trade become more widely accessible outside the corporate offices of Disney & Pixar. Admittedly, Boys Go to Jupiter indulges in the same lazy celebrity voice-acting traditions of lesser, more expensive CG animated films, but this time the voice cast happens to be overpopulated with hip, talented people: Jeaneane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Cole Escola, Elsie Fisher, Joe Pera, Chris Fleming, Demi Adejuyigbe, Sarah Squirm, and the list goes on. It’s also got a distinct visual style, an understated tone, righteous politics, and an authentic sense of genuine humanity — all things that are difficult to find in the average computer-animated feature. It’s a vision of a better world, even if it’s one that satirizes the corporate hell world we currently live in.

In essence, Boys Go to Jupiter is cozy slacker art. It follows the daily toils of food-delivery-app worker Billy 5000 as he spends every waking minute scheming to earn the $5,000 fortune of his namesake. He scoots around his bumhole Florida town on a Segway, cramming in as many deliveries a day as he can to exploit a financial loophole in his delivery app before the bigwigs at Grubster catch onto the grift. Most of his interactions with fellow disaffected Floridians are exceedingly low-key, as he casually bumps into acquaintances like his dirtbag friends, his religious nut neighbor, an overly dedicated hotdog salesman, and his fellow Grubster drones while scooting from doorstep to doorstep. His coming-of-age Bummer Summer lifestyle is only effectively interrupted by the intrusion of two supernatural forces: an E.T.-type alien creature invading from beneath the Earth’s surface and a potential love interest who works at her mother’s science lab developing impossible varieties of semi-magical fruits. It turns out that even these fantastical players are weighed down by the daily mundanities of labor, however, as the older girl he crushes on struggles to accept her fate as her mother’s successor and the underground E.T. creature is revealed to belong to a family of social media food bloggers who have to transmit Grubster take-out reviews to their followers back home to justify their vacation on the surface. Many pointless hangouts and improvised junk food jingles ensue, with all of Billy 5000’s many trivialities revolving around one simple truth: having a job sucks.

The rounded edges, overemphasized light-sources, and blown-out haze of Glander’s visual style belong to the kind of 3D art renderings you’d only expect to see in indie comics and homemade videogames. Specifically, it plays like a D.I.Y. videogame set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, so much so that I’m amazed it’s screening in neighborhood arthouses like Zeitgeist and not personal Steam Deck consoles. Whether Glander effectively applies that softly psychedelic visual aesthetic to anything especially unique or useful is up for debate. I didn’t find it had anything new to observe about gig-economy exploitation that wasn’t more successfully satirized in fellow low-budget sci-fi whatsit Lapsis, but it’s relatable & satisfying enough as a slacker comedy that its political effectiveness is a moot point. All I know is that I liked the way it looked, its laidback novelty songs soothed my addled brain, and I laughed every time Billy 5000 concluded a Grubster delivery with the fictional company’s signature slogan, “Have a Grubby day!” I know a lot of people had their faith in computer-animated outsider art restored by last year’s feline adventure flick Flow, but I couldn’t feel that future promise of the medium myself until I “went to Jupiter” (i.e. ate some junk food and sang silly songs on the beach) with the boys.

-Brandon Ledet

One, Two, Three (1961)

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The morning after I saw The Roses in theaters, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had seen one of the least funny comedies of all time, but that I had followed that up with a screening of one of the most hilarious pieces of filmic art that I had ever been privileged to witness. Billy Wilder’s 1961 ruckus is entitled One, Two, Three, and by the end of it I was hoarse from laughter. Oddly enough, both this and The Roses contained a performance of the novelty song “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a coincidence that made me feel a little bit like I was going crazy. 

“Mac” MacNamara (James Cagney) is an American abroad, a Coca-Cola executive living in West Berlin and trying to further the cause of democracy by working to get the beverage behind the Iron Curtain, or rather, he’s trying to leverage that major success into becoming the head of the London office. He gets a call from the home office in Atlanta and is told that he’s going to be responsible for his boss’s teenaged daughter for a few weeks while she’s traveling. Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin) arrives drawling, dim, and charming, and her short time turns into two months, to the slight chagrin of Mrs. Phyllis MacNamara (Arlene Francis). Just as her parents are about to set out for Europe, Scarlett reveals that she’s spent the past six weeks sneaking over to East Berlin and meeting in secret with Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), a handsome young communist. Worse—they’ve gotten married. It falls to Mac to figure out how to split them up, which he does by getting the boy arrested by framing him for anti-Soviet leanings. Then, when it turns out that Scarlett is pregnant, he has to figure out how to not only spring the kid from an East German prison but also to make him a socially acceptable husband for the genteel Hazeltines before their plane lands. 

The comedy comes at a breakneck pace. Cagney is absolutely fantastic here, delivering some very witty dialogue like he’s got only minutes to live, and at other times bellowing orders at a successive list of underlings, Soviets, and haberdashers like he’s running the navy. The rest of the supporting cast is also a delight, with particularly great performances from Hanns Lothar as Mac’s assistant Schlemmer and Liselotte Pulver as his secretary Fräulein Ingeborg. The fräulein is great fun, as it’s clear from very early on that she and Mac are having an affair of some kind, and when he stops appearing for their “German lessons” (with “special attention to the umlaut”), she threatens to quit, and he must subtly rehire her by asking her to draft up an advertisement that includes “fringe benefits” that she immediately accepts. One of said benefits is an outfit that she saw earlier in the day, and when we see her join him in his misadventures in East Berlin to liberate Otto from the German police, she’s wearing exactly the dress and hat described; still later, when he gives his Soviet “allies” the slip to return Otto to West Germany, he leaves Schlemmer behind in her clothing as a decoy. Schlemmer himself has a habit of clicking his heels together, revealing his former involvement in his nation’s activities in the previous war (he first claims to have been part of the “underground” before it is later clarified that he worked on the literal subterranean trains). 

Lots of the best comedy bits revolve around the supposed lack of ingenuity and progress behind the Curtain, but they become timeless because the film doesn’t rely solely on them. For instance, when attempting to bribe Mac to give them Fräulein Ingeborg, one of the Soviets offers him a “brand new” car that he then admits is exactly the same as a 1937 Nash; later, when a car chase to the Brandenburg gate involves the Soviet crew in hot pursuit of Mac and company, Mac’s chauffeur is surprised to see them being followed by an obsolete car, saying “It looks like a ‘37 Nash!” Said vehicle completely falls apart long before Mac makes it to the border, losing fenders and tires and arriving at the Gate rolling on one of its exposed axles. They still almost catch up, however, as Mac is detained before crossing, only for it to be revealed that the guards want to return the (now empty) bottles of Coca-Cola he had brought as proof of his profession (i.e., a bribe), which calls back to the beginning of the film, where one Mac’s complaints wasn’t that the East Germans were buying Coca-Cola in West Berlin and taking it across the border, not because he doesn’t want to sell to them but because their failure to return/recycle the empties was driving up bottling costs. It’s all very perfectly constructed, which only makes it funnier. 

The film isn’t jingoistic in its devotion to finding comedy only in mocking the film’s communists, however. Some of the jokes, like Otto being tortured by being forced to listen to “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” over and over again, cut both ways, but there are plenty of jabs made at American foolishness, especially in Scarlett’s extreme naivete. When Mac tells her that she might be found guilty of spreading anti-American propaganda due to her possession of signage that says “Yankees Go Home!”, she’s insistent that it’s not anti-U.S. but anti-Yankee, drawling that, where she’s from, “everybody hates the Yankees.” She’s also adamant that she’s going with Otto to the U.S.S.R. (“That stands for ‘Russia’!”) and that she loves washing his shirts while “he broadens [her] mind.” There are also some great digs in at European aristocrat culture in general, as part of Mac’s attempts to make Otto appealing to an American parent involves getting Count Waldemar von Droste-Schattenburg to adopt the young man, as his title will give him prestige despite the fact that the count himself is working as a bathroom attendant. It’s all very, very good. 

Wilder considered this to be one of his lesser films; I read an interview with him later in life in which he expressed that he didn’t think it was actually all that funny or that it worked, but it’s just as much an overlooked classic in his canon as Ace in the Hole. People may remember him best for Sunset Boulevard or Some Like it Hot, but every time I dig further into his backlog, I love everything that I find. Track this one down if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Roses (2025)

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When we went to see Superman while I was in New Orleans in July, Brandon & I mentioned a couple of trailers that we were both sick of seeing and expressed our lack of interest in the films that they were promoting. One of them was Freakier Friday, which I ended up loving, and the other was The Roses. With apologies to my viewing companions who loved this, unlike with Freakier Friday, this one was just as awful as the trailer made it out to be. 

Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman) are at an inflection point in their marriage. It’s been ten years since they first met, when Theo escaped into the kitchen of a restaurant to cool off when another person took credit for his designs at a work dinner, meeting chef Ivy. The two moved to the U.S., where Theo’s just landed a major contract to design and build a maritime museum, and he uses the advance from the project to open Ivy’s dream restaurant, called “We’ve Got Crabs.” Unfortunately, the museum collapses during a storm as a result of his poor handiwork, but the same storm ends up stranding a huge crowd of people at Ivy’s usually-empty restaurant, including a notable film critic. As Theo’s career essentially comes to an end (not helped by his filmed reaction to the collapsing building going viral), Ivy’s suddenly explodes, and the two decide to let her be the breadwinner for a time while he raises their two children, Hattie and Roy. A few years later, the kids have transformed from fun-loving little moppets who ate sugar until they threw up to preteen athletes obsessed with performance and fitness, while Ivy’s empire has expanded through franchising of her restaurant. Although Theo was mollified for a time by Ivy’s funding of his design and construction of their (read: his) dream house, now that he’s done with that and ready to re-enter the workforce, their resentments toward one another eventually bubble over and the two start the process of a divorce, as acrimoniously as possible. 

This film was directed by Jay Roach, whose early-career comedy success with the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises eventually devolved into making things like the poorly received American remake of Le Dîner de Cons in 2010’s Dinner for Schmucks and the toothless political satire The Campaign starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galafianakis. Screenwriter Tony McNamara has a better reputation around these parts, having written Poor Things (and having a hand in writing The Favourite), but while this script is serviceable, it’s not up to par with either of those works. In McNamara’s defense, this feels like a film in which the attitude toward adlibbing was a bit too lenient, although given how clunkily some of the film’s supposed zingers thud to the ground it’s hard to believe that this was the best that this cast could come up with. Andy Samberg doesn’t pull out any of his trademark charm as he sleepwalks through his lines with an identical and static “Can you believe this?” smirking energy, but at least he’s not as out of place as Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of his wife, an oddball whose desire to get into Theo Rose’s pants is as obvious as it is offputting. She does deliver the film’s best line, however, when she admits that she’s thrown caution to the wind because she’s old, her face is melting, and she knows her body’s “working up a stage 4 something” so she might as well live a little. 

Both Samberg and McKinnon’s performances have the air of something that would have worked well if the film had been edited with a little more oomph. Their failure isn’t in the performance (at least not entirely) as much as it is in the pacing and the way that the camera lingers on them a little too long after they do a bit. The same cannot be said for Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou, who are bafflingly unfunny in ways that I didn’t imagine possible. If you don’t recognize Chao from her voice work on Creature Commandos or know Jamie Demetriou from Fleabag, you’ll know them from the trailer as the couple doing the “We love your witty banter” bit, which is even less funny in the film than it was in the marketing material. Ncuti Gatwa, who plays Ivy’s head waiter, has a couple of good lines, but he’s also playing his character a bit broad; as I’m currently catching up on Doctor Who after losing interest around 2019 and was just coming to the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, I was a bit concerned that this would bode poorly for his turn as the title character (having since watched his premier in “The Giggle,” I can say that I’m very looking forward to his time as the Doctor). 

I’ve never seen the Danny DeVito-directed original adaptation of this under the same name as the novel, The War of the Roses, but I can’t imagine that this improves on that one. For one thing, that film features DeVito as both a character (he’s a divorce lawyer) and narrator, and it also seems like that one gets into the actual conflict between the couple a lot earlier in the narrative than this one does. I suppose the omission of “war” from the title was actually a declaration that this movie wasn’t terribly interested in that conflict and would instead be a longer portrait of what is, for the first two acts, a fairly ordinary marriage. By the time Ivy’s making deepfakes of her husband confessing to intentionally botching the maritime museum in order to put the final nail in the coffin and Theo’s bashing the actual stove that belonged to Julia Child to pieces, there’s barely any runtime left. The film’s final moment is the most interesting and novel element, but it’s far too little and comes far too late to save this. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

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I had a very difficult time getting anyone interested enough in the new Naked Gun to go see it with me, so much so that Brandon beat me to the punch with his review of it. Suffice it to say, we are in agreement that it’s a delight. And man, Elon Musk sure is catching strays out there in theaters this year, isn’t he? Between very thinly veiled versions of him appearing as villains in The Naked Gun, M3GAN 2.0, Superman, Mountainhead, and LifeHack, and a stand-in for him realizing that his whole life has been wasted and he’s likely hellbound in The Phoenician Scheme, this really hasn’t been a good year for him, has it? I doubt we’re going to Hollywood Carol him into turning his life around, but it sure is nice to see him getting egg on his face. But let’s return to a simpler time, when a movie’s evil villain didn’t have to be the richest man in the world, and when simply being a high-level drug trafficker with designs on killing Queen Elizabeth II was enough. 

Lt. Frank Derbin (Leslie Nielsen) of LAPD’s special unit called Police Squad has just returned from a vacation overseas, where he had a bit of a busman’s holiday in the form of busting up a conference of the United States’ then-greatest enemies, including Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Idi Amin, and Mikhail Gorbachev (whose famous birthmark Derbin reveals to be a fake). Upon returning home, he learns that his girlfriend has left him and his partner, Officer Nordberg (O.J. Simpson), is in the hospital after attempting to bust a heroin operation aboard a ship in L.A. Harbor, where he was caught and shot by men who work for shipping magnate Vincent Ludwig (Ricardo Montalban). Nordberg’s wife begs Drebin to find the men responsible, but heroin found on Nordberg’s jacket points to him having been on the take; Drebin is given only 24 hours by Captain Ed Hocken (George Kennedy) to clear Nordberg’s name, as Police Squad has been authorized by Mayor Barkley (Nancy Marchand, aka Livia Soprano) to take charge of security operations for the impending visit of Liz II. Meanwhile, Ludwig instructs his unsuspecting secretary, Jane (Priscilla Presley), to get close to Drebin and learn what he knows under the guise of wanting to purge his company of any potential illegal activities. Jane and Frank immediately fall in love, but can he stop Ludwig’s plan to assassinate the queen, clear Nordberg’s name, and butcher the national anthem in 85 minutes? I mean 24 hours? 

I have pretty strong memories of watching The Naked Gun as a kid, but I think that I probably saw the film’s first sequel more often, given that it was likely cheaper to license for television. At the very least, very few of these gags were familiar to me (other than the scene in which Derbin accidentally drops Ludwig’s pen into a fish tank and ends up killing one of the prized tropical fish in the process of fishing it out). I think part of that might have been that child-me would have been a little bored by the film’s ending, as it spends a pretty long time at a baseball stadium, and as a reluctant little league player during the wave of Angels in the Outfield, Field of Dreams, Little Big League, and countless other family baseball movies, I would have tuned out. In fact, as much as I was enjoying this movie, the back half is largely eaten up by Frank attempting to stop an assassination attempt at Anaheim Stadium, and I started to feel my opinion of it waver. Luckily, the location allows for a lot of beats in which Nielsen gets to do something hilarious, which made up for the fact that the film parks itself there for so long. One of the best bits involves Frank faking his way onto the field by knocking out and taking the place of a famed international opera singer, which leads to him ending up on the mound, “singing” a half-remembered version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s a delight, as is all of the stadium nonsense during which the queen is subjected to the vagaries of a baseball game, like having to ask someone to get out of your seat or ingest “dugout dogs” (one of which Ludwig discovers, to his horror, contains the remains of one of his lackeys who fell into the vat while trying to kill Frank). 

Humor is subjective, and one of the difficult things about reviewing it, as we’ve said before, is that the issue with a lot of discussions of comedy is that they can often simply devolve into recapping the jokes or reciting the dialogue. What I will say about the friend that I was finally able to convince to go see the new Liam Neeson Naked Gun was that he was glad I talked him into it, and that although he didn’t enjoy the sight gags as much as I did, he found the dialogue very funny, and I think that’s a testament to what works about Naked Gun conceptually. I love all of the visual puns and the playing around with the language of film (there’s a particularly funny bit where the camera pans from one room to another, with most of the characters going through the set door while Frank merely steps around the edge of the set wall), but even if that’s not something that you’re going to enjoy as much as I did, you’ll probably still get a kick out of the cleverness of the dialogue. I’d still say that this one ranks below my personal favorite spoof flick, Top Secret!, but that’s a high bar to clear, and I’ll admit that it’s not without its flaws—in particular, that it spends several minutes doing a direct parody of The Blue Lagoon rather than the genre tropes that it traffics in for most of the runtime is arguably worse than the baseball digression that happens in Naked Gun. 

It’s also interesting to look back at this one and see how much the most recent film drew from it without needing an audience to be familiar with its specifics. There is, of course, the scene in which two characters’ innocent misadventures are mistaken for degeneracy by an observer, Frank’s horny clunkily inelegant internal monologue upon meeting his love interest, and the scenes in which Frank gets raked over the coals by his superior. More specifically, when John Huston was explaining his master plan to his cronies in this year’s sequel, I said aloud, to my companion, “Isn’t this the exact plot of Kingsman?” (It is.) But the “use technology to brainwash people into committing acts of violence” villain plan is actually taken directly from the original, albeit on a much larger scale. In this film, Ludwig is able to use a remote device to turn people into Manchurian assassins; it’s never explained in any detail, as we just get close-ups of the sleeper agents’ watches when he pushes the button, and that’s all that we need to know. Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. 

If you’re feeling a little nostalgic for an old school Naked Gun experience after seeing the new one, or need something to tide you over until you get the chance to check it out yourself, you really can’t go wrong with this one. Unusually for a comedy of its age, very few of the jokes have aged poorly, especially in comparison to some of “racial” comedy in the Hot Shots! movies; it’s possible that the film’s opening could come across as offensive if one wasn’t aware that the characters at the conference are specific world leaders/figures of the time, but that can’t be helped. If anything, the only thing that really dates this is the presence of the late (“alleged”) killer O.J. Simpson, but he’s not given much to do in this one other than be injured over and over again. That’s got to be worth it to somebody, right? 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Freakier Friday (2025)

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I am not immune to nostalgia bait. In fact, I’ve fallen for it in the past. I watched the entire first season of Girl Meets World based solely on my fondness for its 1990s predecessor (it’s terrible). I gave the 2016 Ghostbusters a pretty high rating that I’ve come to regret greatly over the years, and I genuinely love the Walt Disney personality-laundering Emma Thompson/Tom Hanks picture Saving Mr. Banks. Additionally, having babysat for younger cousins while I was in college and having a goddaughter born in 2009, I continued to be familiar with the larger Disney Channel oeuvre long after I aged out of their target demographic. I’m not going to argue that their work was ever especially great, but the pre-That’s So Raven era had a wider variety of original programming, with action series like The Famous Jett Jackson, for-kids supernatural spookfests like So Weird, and laugh track-free coming-of-age dramedies like Flash Forward (I know I’m really dating myself with the last one). As the channel grew more widely available at the basic cable level rather than at the premier price point, the popularity of Lizzie Mcguire was surpassed even by Raven, which people are quite fond of, but it’s Raven (and, to a lesser extent, Even Stevens) that committed what I would consider the network’s original sin: costuming became hypercolorful and quirky, characters were constantly delivering pithy one-liners and mugging to the audience, the laugh track became omnipresent, and everything became very same-y. It’s a generational curse, and one that I saw play out in many episodes of the shows that I was subjected to (or, as was the case with Girl Meets World, those shows to which I subjected myself). I’m almost 40 years old; I should not be burdened with so much knowledge of Austin & Ally or Wizards of Waverly Place or Suite Lifes on land and sea, and yet I am. (Good Luck Charlie is actually pretty good, though.) 

The waters that Freakier Friday is navigating are overcrowded. Legacy sequels to cash in on millennial nostalgia have flooded the market in the last decade, and while big budget genre franchise pictures like the Star Wars sequel trilogy and the ongoing Jurassic World debacle have been successful commercially with mixed critical reception, 90s/early-aughts family and romantic comedy follow-ups have generally been poorly received on both fronts. I think the biggest obstacle here is that the popularity of the Disney Channel School of Hyperactive Comedy Acting means that all sitcoms produced for children has to have all those hallmarks: aggressively cartoonish facial acting, forced quippiness, etc. I have a fondness for She’s All That despite it not being a very good movie, but then you graft the modern hyper style onto the recent He’s All That follow up and it just doesn’t work. People who grew up watching the Y2K Freaky Friday were going to turn out for Freakier Friday regardless, and the sequel could have easily and lazily taken the path of least resistance to churn out a low-effort, reference-heavy movie that mostly consisted of the teenage girls making goobery big-eyed faces over unimaginative puns and small cameos from returning stars Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis. I was particularly concerned when every trailer that appeared before my screening was for an animated kids movie, which didn’t bode well for how much the feature would care about the adult members of its audience, but I was pleasantly surprised. 

It’s been 20 years since psychologist Tess Coleman (Curtis) and her musician daughter Anna (Lohan) body-swapped on the eve of Tess’s marriage to Ryan (Mark Harmon) so that they could walk a mile in each other’s shoes and gain a better understanding of one another. Anna has since “chosen to be a single mother,” has a career in musical management, and has her own issues with understanding her teenage daughter: tomboy surfer Harper (Julia Butters). Harper’s conflict with a recent transfer student to her school, British fashion-conscious Lily (Sophia Hammons), results in both of their parents being called to a conference with the principal, and it’s here that Anna meets Lily’s widowed father Eric (Manny Jacinto), and sparks fly immediately. Six months later, it’s now the eve of Anna’s wedding, and Harper and Lily are no closer to getting along, with Harper fearing that the family will move to London and leave her California life behind, while Lily worries that her father will choose to settle full time in LA, preventing her from attending the fashion school that she wants and severing the connection she feels to her late mother. When the two instigate a food fight, they’re punished by being forced to have a sleepover at Tess’s the night after Anna’s bachelorette party. It’s there that both the reluctant soon-to-be-sisters as well as Anna and Tess meet palm reader Madame Jen (Vanessa Bayer), who channels something that results in all four of the women swapping bodies. Harper exchanges places with her mother while Lily and Tess are swapped, and your typical body-swap antics ensue. While Tess-in-Lily and Anna-in-Harper are forced to go to school and attend the detention that the teens got themselves into, Lily-in-Tess and Harper-in-Anna set out to make sure that the wedding never happens, essentially making this a kind of spiritual sequel to Lohan’s other big Disney remake, The Parent Trap. This connection is made even more clear when Elaine Hendrix, who played the undesirable potential stepmother in Trap, appears here as a fashion designer who’s tasked with styling Ella (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), Anna’s pop star client whose concert tour launch is the same weekend as the wedding. 

This is a solidly made little comedy with a surprising amount of heart. If the audience is meant to be teenagers, it refuses to talk down to them, and the film is just as interested in the stakes of Anna’s wedding as it is in the teenagers’ plots, and there’s even some time spent developing Tess’s stakes as well. Perhaps the intended target audience will be more emotionally invested in the points of view of Lily and Harper. I’m not really sure how having to finish high school in Los Angeles is going to affect Lily’s ability to attend a London fashion institute or that Harper having to move to London is going to be the end of the world, but it’s the kind of thing that kids and teens think are very high stakes (or, I could say, those are very Disney Channel Original Movie stakes), so it makes sense. That this is a text one will have different feelings about depending upon what age you are is a testament to how much more thoroughly thought-out this narrative is in comparison to more half-hearted attempts to go to the intellectual property well again. The plot between Anna and Eric is genuinely sweet; Harper has only ever seen Eric through the narrow lens of adolescence, as the father of her nemesis and an interloper who might upend her whole life, but she gets to see him through her mother’s eyes and witness how much he genuinely loves not only Anna but Harper as well. Eric’s love for Anna is clear (it doesn’t hurt that Manny Jacinto is perhaps the most beautiful man in the world), and we also get to see how much Anna loves him, and that insight into the adult world makes both of the girls see how selfishly they’ve behaved and hurt the people around them and try to stop their parents from calling off the wedding that they’ve spent most of the film trying to prevent. 

The film makes a very smart choice in passing off most of the heavy emotional lifting to its adult cast. Lily has a tear-filled breakdown near the end when she finally opens up about the fact that her homesickness for the UK is really just her missing her mother and that she knows she’s acted out very badly, and that her mother would be happy that her father found love again and would be disappointed in her for her actions, and the fact that Lily’s in Tess at the time means that Curtis gets to lean on decades of performing to sell the performance. Curtis is clearly having the time of her life in this movie, as she gets some great physical comedy work, crawling around on the floor, putting on a fashion show, and doing some good bits about what it’s like to  suddenly inhabit an ailing, aging body. Mark Harmon barely appears in the film, but in one of the scenes he makes an impression in, he and Tess have to compete in their Pickleball tournament, and Curtis is having so much fun that I had fun, too. Lohan isn’t called upon to do quite as much, since Jacinto’s “perfect husband material” material does most of the work in the scenes where Harper-in-Anna learns to think about someone other than herself, but she’s giving it her all in other areas. Part of the girls’ plan involves trying to get Anna’s high school boyfriend Jake (Chad Michael Murray) to fall back in love with Anna, and the directions that Lily gives Harper-in-Anna are comedically misinterpreted, and it’s a fun scene, made all the better by the fact that the teens are naturally completely blind to the fact that all these years later it’s Tess that Jake’s still horny for. It’s good comedy, and not what I was expecting from a decades-late sequel to a Disney remake I saw once twenty years ago because I was babysitting. (It even comes back around at the end when Jake’s date to Anna’s wedding is wearing the exact same dress that Curtis wore in Freaky Friday, sporting a similar haircut.) 

As for the actual teenage actresses, they both do good work with the material that they’re given, and most of their scenes are comedic. Butters merely has to play Anna-in-Harper as stressed out about making sure that Harper-in-Anna gets to her and Eric’s immigration interview and that Ella doesn’t psych herself out of her tour opening performance over her recent breakup. Hammons has a bit more meat to chew on, with one of her best scenes being Tess-in-Lily once again encountering Stephen Tobolowsky’s teacher character (he hasn’t been able to retire because the school put all of their retirement funds into cryptocurrency) and once again using her psychological skills to try and manipulate him. She also gets an emotional scene, too, and she pulls it off quite well. I hope that they had as much fun making this as Jamie Lee Curtis obviously did, and the end credits blooper reel lends itself to that conclusion. And hey, Rosalind Chao was there! I always love to see her. Perhaps the best sequence in the film is the aforementioned pickleball tournament, which sees an appearance from June Diane Raphael as an aggressive player named Veronica. That means, with her appearance in Weapons, she appeared in both of the movies that topped the box office last week (thanks to my buddy Zach for pointing this out). If it weren’t for the fact that shouting “It’s June August! It’s June August” from my porch would make sense to no one, I’d be doing it. 

Freakier Friday is surprisingly heartfelt and earnest, and it’s also candy for your brain. Why on earth do two adult women get in on Ella’s Rolling Stone shoot? Who cares? If you’ve been burned by this particular brand of nostalgic entrapment before, this one might heal that wound. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Naked Gun (2025)

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It’s generally bad practice to review a movie’s cultural context (or, worse, its tabloid press) instead of reviewing the movie itself, but I cannot resist the bait this time. The new genre-spoof legacyquel The Naked Gun is review-proof in the way most absurdly silly comedies are. Its plot, construction, and themes are all secondary to its efficiency in telling jokes, which are better experienced onscreen than in text. As a joke-delivery system, The Naked Gun may not hit the same rapid-fire rhythm as previous Police Squad! movies from the 80s & 90s, but it does hit the same success rate as previous Lonely Island-brand movies from director Akiva Shaffer (Popstar, Hot Rod); it’s very funny from start to end. The most surprising & rewarding aspect of the movie has occurred offscreen, however, playing out in the tabloid headlines of grocery store checkout lines. Regardless of whether you’ve seen the film, you’re likely already aware of the unexpected real-life romance that’s developing between its two stars, whom I can say with full confidence we are all rooting for. It was top of my mind watching the movie opening weekend, anyway, to the point where it was actively informing & enhancing the text instead of distracting from it. There is something innocently, infectiously sweet about Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson’s tabloid flirtations that makes this goof-a-second spoof feel more substantial & relevant than it possibly could otherwise – so much so that my everyday happiness is now directly tied to their still-developing romance. It’s already a generous enough gift that the new power couple gave me an opportunity to laugh all the way through an 85-minute comedy with my friends, but now I desperately need them to stay together until one of the three of us dies. They have made me their snowman.

If the significance of being Liam Neeson & Pamela Anderson’s snowman is lost on you, it’s because you have not yet seen The Naked Gun. I am citing the kind of absurdist, for-its-own-sake gag that can only be referenced through the vaguest terms without spoiling what makes it funny. The highest compliment I can pay to The Naked Gun is to report that it is tightly packed with those snowman gags, each of which had me laughing myself breathless in public: the owl dad, the heat-vision dog, the jazz club scat, the bodycam chili dogs, and so on. There is no shortage of deliriously silly nonsense. Of course, it gets away with indulging in that goofball free-for-all because it’s working within a familiar structure that doesn’t require set-up or explanation. Shaffer’s The Naked Gun continues the same detective-story spoofery as the ZAZ-era Naked Gun films, dusted off with a few updated cultural references. Liam Neeson stars as Frank Drebin, Jr., son of the deadpan dolt police detective Frank Drebin played by Leslie Neilson in the original series. In fact, Drebin’s entire LAPD station is staffed by the sons of former Police Squad! characters, allowing for metatextual jabs at both the film’s own preposterous participation in the legacyquel format and the real-life legacy of former Naked Gun actor O.J. Simpson. Neeson’s casting is smart beyond his name’s homophonic resemblance to Neilson’s. He’s similarly self-serious as an onscreen persona, having now starred in almost two solid decades of post-Taken thrillers worthy of goofy self-parody. He plays Frank Drebin, Jr. with the straightest face he can manage, which makes all of his overly literal, Amelia Bedelia misunderstandings of basic figures of speech consistently funny. The investigation in this specific episode also deals with a megalomaniac tech-bro Elon Musk stand-in (Danny Huston) to help bring the Naked Gun format up to date, and there are specific parodic references to recent thriller titles like Mission: Impossible – Fallout that do the rest of that work. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a modern-day Naked Gun movie, except with a few self-contained, sketch-comedy deviations specific to its director’s Lonely Island pedigree.

What I did not expect from a modern-day Naked Gun was to be emotionally moved by its central romance. Filling the role of previous series love interest Priscilla Presley, Pamela Anderson co-stars as Neeson’s buxom femme fatale Beth Davenport. An author of “true crime” novels based on stories that she “makes up” herself, Davenport becomes overly involved in the investigation of her software-engineer brother’s death, teaming up with Drebin to take down the Musky supervillain who killed him. After an initial noir-trope meeting in the Venetian-blinds shadows of Drebin’s office, the unlikely pair are caught off-guard by how immediately, intensely attracted they are to each other, which is impossible to fully differentiate from Neeson & Anderson’s publicity-cycle romance. Many of the broader noir tropes spoofed here ring true to their real-life relationship, especially when Drebin laments that he wakes up every day in his “lonely cop apartment” mourning his “dead cop wife,” echoing Neeson’s recent public perception as a perpetually grieving widower. Likewise, Davenport’s eagerness to get in on the action of the Police Squad investigation as a true-crime junkie recalls Anderson’s struggle to earn her way back onto the big screen after Hollywood discarded her as leftover 90s eye candy. I was happy to see her shine in a role worthy of her recent late-career makeover after that Delicate Betty Boop magnetism was wasted by last year’s Awards Season dud The Last Showgirl. I was also relieved to see Neeson back in the tabloids for something that wasn’t sexually objectifying or bizarrely racist. More so that I can ever remember, I am genuinely happy for this millionaire celebrity couple and emotionally invested in their long-term success. As for The Naked Gun, it’s difficult to guess what its own long-term success might be. It’s neither as densely packed with rewindable background visual gags as the original Naked Gun series nor as instantly rewatchable as the sing-along music video sketches of Shaffer’s Popstar, but it’s still dependably funny and—for at least as long as its real-life love affair lasts—romantically sweet.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #243: The Money Pit (1986) & Home Renovations

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Welcome to Episode #243 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movies about home-renovation woes, starting with the Tom Hanks comedy vehicle The Money Pit (1986).

00:00 Welcome

02:30 17 Again (2009)
05:41 Bully (2001)
09:40 The Leather Boys (1965)
13:01 Son of Godzilla (1967)
17:47 Cora Bora (2024)

21:11 The Money Pit (1986)
40:08 Of Unknown Origin (1983)
52:45 MouseHunt (1997)
1:06:41 Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)

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

– The Podcast Crew