comedy

Fresh Kill (1994)

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Taiwanese-born director Shu Lea Cheang has never stopped making experimental cinema since she first made a splash on the 1990s New York indie scene.  You just wouldn’t know it based on the scope of her reputation & distribution.  Just last year, Cheang directed a video game-inspired animated sequel to her early-2000s cyberpunk porno I.K.U., the very first pornographic film to screen at Sundance.  That kind of provocation should be making indie publication headlines, but she doesn’t get the same festival-coverage attention as other post-cinema shockteurs like Gaspar Noe or Harmony Korine.  At least, she hasn’t since her 1994 breakout Fresh Kill, which got positive reviews out of TIFF and has lived on as an early-internet cult classic, reaching Cheang’s widest audience to date.  Even so, it’s a challenging work with niche appeal, and as far as I can tell it never landed any form of official distribution on tape, disc, or streaming.  Smartly, Cheang is currently taking a break from continuing to push her art in current work to instead return to that early-career triumph, touring the country with newly restored 35mm prints of Fresh Kill for a 30th Anniversary victory lap.  The only legal way to watch the film in 2024 is to meet Cheang herself at the cinema, so that you can see with your own eyes that she is still active, engaged, and ready to share her Digital Age outsider art with the public.

The title “Fresh Kill” refers to a massive landfill that was located near Staten Island when Cheang made the film in the early 90s but has since closed.  At the time, Fresh Kills was the largest landfill in the world, which Cheang extrapolates to imagine a world that’s all one big landfill where half the waste is televised media babble.  The movie has characters and events but no real narrative to speak of.  It’s mostly a simulation of channel-surfing through our post-modern apocalypse, sandwiched between hipster lesbian hackers and dipshit Wall Street bros on the couch.  The lesbian couple get by salvaging and reselling junk from the landfill and working waitress shifts at an upscale sushi restaurant.  They go from politically aware to politically active when their daughter eats a can of contaminated fish from the evil, global GX Corporation, which causes her to glow green and then mysteriously disappear.  In retaliation, they recruit fellow sushi shop employees to hack GX’s databases over dial-up connection and expose their food-supply pollution to the world via public access TV editorials (in one of the earliest onscreen depictions of “hacktivism”).  The Wall Street bros are also poisoned with GX’s green-glow pollution via their trendy love of sushi, but they react in a different way; they try to rebrand as eco-friendly businessmen so they can make a quick profit off the public’s newfound interest in environmentalism (in an early onscreen depictions of corporate “greenwashing”).

One of the first images in Fresh Kill is a TV art-installation piece erected at the titular landfill – a wall of cathode-ray screens that seemingly only receive broadcasts of infomercials and public access call-in shows.  It’s easy to reimagine the entire film as a video-art installation piece, as its narrative doesn’t progress so much as it alternates perspectives.  The central couple’s home & sex life vaguely adheres to typical 90s indie drama structure, but it’s frequently interrupted by nonsense chatter from the sushi restaurant that keeps their lights on as well as the TV broadcasts that keep them addled, including friendly, heartfelt commercials from GX.  There’s a total breakdown of language across these alternating, post-modern windows into 1990s NYC living, recalling William S. Burroughs’s cut-ups experiments and subsequent declarations that “Language is a virus from outer space.”  Lizzie Borden’s no-wave classic Born in Flames took a similarly kaleidoscopic approach in its editing, and I was happy to hear Cheang mention it is a contemporary work in her post-film Q&A.  Fresh Kill is just as politically enraged as Born in Flames, but it’s also not nearly as serious, allowing its characters to goof off in go-nowhere skits about lipsticked fish lips, orgasmic accordionists, and supermarket dance parties without worrying about diluting the seriousness of its messaging.  Cheang tries something new every scene, confident that it’ll all amount to something meaningful when considered in total.

The political activism angle of Fresh Kill made it a no-brainer programming choice for Patois Film Fest, who thankfully booked a Shu Lea Cheang tour stop in New Orleans.  The venue choice of The Broad makes a little less sense, since they do not have the capability to project celluloid like The Prytania.  The newly restored print of the film was shown as a digital scan, then, which occasionally led to unintended freezing as the laptop struggled to process the video file without lag.  It was a fitting format choice in its own way, though, since the miscommunication of the machinery projecting the film matched the miscommunication of the multicultural characters who all speak in different languages and idioms throughout, often simultaneously.  Fresh Kill imagines a world overwhelmed by waste.  A lot of that waste is physical but just as much is cultural, calling into question what value there could possibly be in filling our world and brains with so much disposable media & jargon.  Since Cheang has since gone on to experiment with the visual textures of pornography & video games, I have to assume it’s a question that’s continued to occupy her own mind, and I’d love to see the result of that tinkering.  Hopefully this victory-lap restoration of Fresh Kill will lead to those works being more accessible for people who missed their festival runs, like the recent Criterion box sets celebrating the similarly overlooked, underdistributed, politically furious films of Greg Araki & Marlon Riggs.

-Brandon Ledet

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

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Hundreds of Beavers is a film that doesn’t seem like it would be able to sustain its premise or its vision for the entirety of its 108 minute runtime, but it somehow manages to do so. This movie made me laugh aloud, on average, about every thirty seconds all the way through. I don’t know that it will work for everyone, but it certainly did for me. Shot in black and white, this is a Looney Tunes sketch stretched to feature length, about a man named Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews), a successful applejacker who loses everything in a fire after imbibing a bit too much one night and finds himself alone and cold in the Canadian wilderness. After several unsuccessful attempts at catching wild game, he finally manages to put together a few Wile E. Coyote-esque traps (without any assistance from ACME at all) and sustain himself. Eventually, he stumbles upon a fur trader (Doug Mancheski) and his lovely daughter (Olivia Graves), decides to become a fur trapper himself in order to win her hand, and sets out to acquire the furs of the titular hundreds of beavers. Oh, and did we mention that every animal in this film is portrayed via high-quality mascot costumes? 

Our generation (and those bracketing it, so don’t think you’re not included in this, dear reader) usually encounter the animated shorts of the past at such a young age that their surreality is lost on us. The language of it is simple and straightforward in a way that we understand, even when we’re still piloting safety scissors with mushy, mushy brains. In Wackiki Wabbit, when Bugs Bunny ends up on an island with two castaways who look at him and see not a cartoon rabbit but a piping hot, meaty entree, we don’t give it a second thought. Seeing that gag translated to live action, and then grow more bizarrely envisioned and strangely realized each time the increasingly starved Kayak fails to gather eggs or catch a fish, one comes face to face with just how surreal the cartoon world is, and that makes it all the funnier as these man-sized fursuit beavers start to demonstrate a human-like complexity of thought. They go from animals that are slightly too clever to be caught by Kayak’s first attempts at traps to full on rocket scientists as the film moves along, and it happens so gradually that you find yourself trying to remember where everything went off the rails before you remember this happened moments after you started the movie. 

I recently had some trouble trying to figure out what to say about Spirited Away for similar reasons. It was hard to explain what works so well about Spirited Away because you find yourself simply recapping the movie, which undersells what makes it so special. It’s really best for you to discover all the things that it has in store for you by watching it, because no description of any of the film’s gags will do justice to taking it in with your own (presumably two) eyeballs. But, since you’re already here, I might as well list some of my favorites, right? At one point in the film, Kayak is taken under the wing of an older, wiser fur trapper (Wes Tank), who teaches him how to master the art; said trapper uses a dog-driven sled, and each night, the dogs (remember, every animal is a person in a mascot suit) play a card game. As they camp in a wolf-ridden forest, the dogs are slowly taken in the night, so that we go from a full table of dogs in the iconic “dogs playing poker” mold to a single, shivering dog playing solitaire alone. It’s a gag on top of a gag on top of a gag, and that’s Hundreds of Beavers to the core: gags all the way down. I was also particularly taken with a very droopy, stoned-looking frog puppet and was delighted when it reappeared later in the film, and the commitment to the humans-as-animals bit extends all the way to having the horses in the film be that stereotypical sitcom get-up of two people acting as the front and rear of a mare. It never gets old, and that’s the real treasure here. The film never lets you catch your breath long enough to get tired of its schtick, and that kind of sustained humor is a rarity. 

You (yes, you!) can watch Hundreds of Beavers, for free, right now, as long as you have your library card, and you’re stateside. As of this writing, the film is still streaming for free on Hoopla, the service that provides you with four free borrows a month via your local library. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wicked Little Letters (2024)

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They may not be respected as taste-arbiters or as models of good theater etiquette, but the elderly moviegoers of America are the core customer base that keep cinemas running.  While movie studios are flailing in their courtship of a teenage audience that would rather be playing videogames or watching influencer ads at home, the Senior Discount crowd is keeping the industry afloat with only minimal pandering.  Every local film fest, repertory series, and daytime matinee in the nation owes a significant chunk of its cashflow to geriatric retirees, who generally have a much more adventurous approach to art-film programming than younger audiences, who tend to save their trips to the cinema for major Event Films instead of taking a chance on whatever happens to be out from week to week.  It’s a shame, then, that most movies that are cynically marketed to the 65+ age demographic are so … safe, so toothless.  Senior Citizen Comedies like Book Club and 80 for Brady mostly function as feature-length advertisements (for 50 Shades of Gray and the NFL, respectively), relying on the excess charm of their all-star casts without actually giving those actors much to do.  There’s a hint towards sexual naughtiness in their playfully saucy humor, but the movies are afraid to follow through on anything genuinely risqué, in fear of offending or alienating the morals of its target audience.  They take their customers’ attendance & amusement for granted.

Within that context, Wicked Little Letters is essentially a John Waters comedy for the senior set.  A 1920s period piece about women’s changing roles in public life post-WWI, it looks & feels like a routine BBC Films production that packs cinemas for weeks without ever attracting a single attendee under 30.  It doesn’t sound like those movies, though, since its dialogue features long strings of profane, nonsensical insults referring to various characters as “mangy old titless turnips”, “bloody fucking old saggy sacks of chicken piss”, and “fucking old steaming bags of wet leaking shit.”  I know Mrs. Harris was met with an icy response when she went to Paris, but I don’t remember it being that extreme.  Wicked Little Letters is about a pre-Internet shitposting campaign in which a not-so-mysterious letter writer bombards her otherwise wholesome British community with handwritten outbursts of extreme profanity.  Set against the backdrop of women “losing their decorum” after taking on traditionally masculine roles in public life during the war, it’s a comedic overcorrection wherein one especially peculiar woman takes a little too much delight in being able to express herself through cuss for the first time in her pious life.  It played very funny at home, but I imagine its pottymouth punchlines got even bigger laughs in the theater among its target demographic, considering the uproarious response to Mr. Molesley laying out the wrong silverware or whatever in the Downtown Abbey movies.  Its biggest swing is that it does not baby its very much grown-up audience, which is a rarity in this style of comedy.

As a gumshoe mystery and subsequent courtroom drama, Wicked Little Letters is less of a whodunnit than it is a howcatchem.  Olivia Colman & Jessie Buckley star as next-door neighbors with unlikely mutual admiration.  Buckley is a loudmouth, hard-drinking Irish lass who says & does exactly what she wants at all times, unburdened by any filters of ladylike public behavior.  Colman is Buckley’s older, more socially restrained frenemy, mostly as a result of the strictly religious, emotionally abusive oppression of her father (Timothy Spall).  Colman is also the sole recipient of the first barrage of pottymouth hate mail, which is immediately blamed on Buckley, given her public disregard for decorum.  Unconvinced that a woman that brazen would hide behind the anonymity of a pen, a local policewoman (Ladyparts guitarist Anjana Vasan) launches an off-the-books investigation of who’s really behind the transgression, which quickly escalates beyond a neighborly spat to instead terrorize an entire community.  It’s immediately obvious who is guilty, and a lot of the early comedic tension is in watching her barely contained amusement with her own naughtiness give herself away.  The fun of the investigation is in watching a small group of women join the effort to expose the truth and vindicate their foul-mouth lush of a friend.  Like with John Waters’s classic suburban invasion comedies, the movie pits the hypocrisy of the upstanding Christian majority against the winning charm of “queers and drunkards” in the court of public opinion and declares a clear, populist victor.  It’s delightful.

Of course, you won’t find any singing buttholes, cannibalized cops, or drag queens eating dog shit in Wicked Little Letters.  All of its naughty profanity is purely verbal, but when contrasted against the typically safe, toothless comedies of manners in this milieu, it’s more than enough to earn its laughs.  I’m sure the real-life gossip column story that inspired the movie is much grimmer & more complicated than how it’s presented onscreen, but I don’t know that there’s any way to depict morally uptight Brits reading the words “You’re a sad stinky bitch” without inviting an audience to laugh.  This audience deserves that laugh, too.  They’ve been drawn to the theater with the promise of naughty, risqué comedies so many times that it’s nice one finally decided to deliver the goods. 

-Brandon Ledet

But I’m a Bootlegger

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1999 was an incredible year for the high school comedy.  It was the year of Drop Dead Gorgeous, 10 Things I Hate About You, Drive Me Crazy, Cruel Intentions, Jawbreaker, Election, and the lesbian conversion-therapy satire But I’m a Cheerleader.  Only, I didn’t immediately see But I’m a Cheerleader the year it was released, nor did I find a copy at my local video store in the years that followed.  Jamie Babbit’s calling-card comedy was just as revered as its better-distributed contemporaries among my friends in the early aughts, but as someone who relied on the limited, sanitized selection of the Meraux branch of Blockbuster Video in those days, it just never made its way into my bedroom VCR.  So, But I’m a Cheerleader fell under a distinctly 90s category of movies that I saw for the first time after listening to their CD soundtracks for years.  See also: Clueless, Romeo+Juliet, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; all bangers.  I eventually fell in love with the candy-coated production design and post-John Waters queer irreverence of the film proper when I finally had access to it on DVD in the 2010s, but it already occupied a pastel-painted corner of my mind by then thanks to the familiar sounds of Dressy Bessy, Wanda Jackson, and soundtrack-MVP April March (whose anglicized cover of “Chick Habit” fully conveys the movie’s tone & aesthetic before you’ve made it through the opening credits).

Imagine my shock, then, to recently learn that But I’m a Cheerleader never had an official soundtrack release.  To me, its pop music soundscape is just as iconic as any teen movies’ you could name – Fast Times, Breakfast Club, Dirty Dancing, whatever.  And yet, there was apparently no legal way to access that soundtrack outside watching the movie start to end, straining to hear the songs past the spoken dialogue and VHS tape hiss.  In retrospect, the copy of the soundtrack I owned in high school must have been a burned CD traded with a friend, which was some truly heroic mixtape work that I never fully appreciated until now.  Come to think of it, I remember that CD having more April March tracks than the one that’s actually associated with the film, so I’m not even fully sure what was on it anymore.  It was a one-of-a-kind bootleg put together by an obsessive fan who was frustrated that they couldn’t access an official release, passed around as an act of public service thanks to the modern miracle of the CD-R drive. It may not have been accurate to the track list of the songs as they were sequenced in the film, but it was accurate enough to the cheeky humor, swooning romance, and cult enthusiasm of But I’m a Cheerleader that it kept the movie fresh in my mind for as long as it took to find it.  It’s yet another reminder “bootlegger” is just a dirty word for D.I.Y. archivist.

I didn’t know about this outrageous distribution oversight until a recent screening of But I’m a Cheerleader at a neighborhood bar, hosted by Future Shock Video.  A kind of bootleg revival of the vintage video store experience, Future Shock has been screening VHS-era classics around the city in recent months, mostly to promote the opening of their new weekends-only storefront.  This particular screening was a special one, though.  As a Pride Month event and a fundraiser for the Covenant House homeless shelter, Future Shock not only projected But I’m a Cheerleader for a packed barroom, but they also dubbed a small batch of unofficial But I’m a Cheerleader soundtracks on audio cassette.  By now, the movie itself has unquestionably been canonized among the Queer Cinema greats, but I was still delighted that the event was designed as a celebration of its all-timer of a soundtrack in particular.  I was also shocked to learn that the practice of distributing that soundtrack has always been a mixtape-only endeavor, when it should have been in just as many record stores as the official tie-in soundtracks for Clueless or Can’t Hardly Wait.  It turns out that passing around copies of the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack was just as much of a public service in the early 2000s as it is now in the mid-2020s.  My Sharpie-labeled CD copy then was not as pretty as the cassette I picked up the other night, though, so I’m including pictures of Future Shock’s version below.

It’s not too late for an official release of the But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack.  If anything, the time is ripe.  Not only is the film more widely seen and beloved than ever, but its exclusivity as a first-time release would also play directly into physical media obsessives’ debilitating FOMO.  I just watched a bar full of young, queer movie nerds crowd around a humble tripod projector screen to watch this movie with their friends on a Wednesday night; there’s an audience for it.  Until that historical wrong is corrected and the soundtrack receives its first official release, all you can really do is make your own mixtape version based on the track list compiled below.  That can be a little tricky for the more independent artists on the soundtrack like Tattle Tale, who do not have the same far-reaching distribution as a Wanda Jackson or a RuPaul.  Speaking from experience, though, you could probably just sub out a similar-sounding track from the Tattle Tale-adjacent act Bonfire Madigan and no one would really know the difference.  Thankfully, Future Shock did not cut any corners in their own unofficial But I’m a Cheerleader soundtrack, but it would have been okay if they did. The off-brand, inaccurate version I had on CD in high school still did the trick.

  1. “Chick Habit (Laisse tomber les filles)” by April March
  2. “Just Like Henry” by Dressy Bessy
  3. “If You Should Try and Kiss Her” by Dressy Bessy
  4. “Trailer Song” by Sissy Bar
  5. “All or Nothing” by Miisa
  6. “We’re in the City” by Saint Etienne
  7. “The Swisher” by Summer’s Eve
  8. “Funnel of Love” by Wanda Jackson
  9. “Ray of Sunshine” by Go Sailor
  10. “Glass Vase Cello Case” by Tattle Tale
  11. “Party Train” by RuPaul
  12. “Evening in Paris” Lois Maffeo
  13. “Together Forever in Love” by Go Sailor

-Brandon Ledet

The Sweetest Thing (2002)

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The Sweetest Thing is a major-studio comedy starring Cameron Diaz as a lovelorn socialite who’s become disenchanted with the nightclub hookup scene.  Having matured to the point where she’s ready to seek Mr. Right instead of Mr. Right Now, she drops everything going on in her busy life to crash a wedding in the suburbs where she knows she’ll run into Thomas Jane, the kind of cute guy whom she would normally bed & ghost instead of genuinely getting to know.  She’s joined on this impulsive road trip by her high-powered businesswoman bestie, Christina Applegate, who gently pushes Diaz out of her comfort zone as she gives being romantically vulnerable a shot for the first time in her life.  Meanwhile, they both support their good mutual friend, Selma Blair, as she recovers from a recent traumatic breakup by letting loose with a few low-stakes, short-term flings for comic relief.  It’s a story of three self-determined women supporting each other through the final years of their twenties in the cutthroat world of San Francisco dating.  Heck, they might even find true love along the way.

That plot description fits the version of The Sweetest Thing sold in its contemporary trailers & advertising: a cookie-cutter romcom the whole girl squad can enjoy.  It’s also technically accurate to the events of the story told in the film itself, and yet it is still a lie.  Many gaggles of gal pals were deceived by it in the dark days of 2002, when they lined up for a wholesome Girls Night Out and were instead taken on a road trip through the dankest pits of Hell.  The Sweetest Thing imagines an alternate reality where Romy & Michele are evil, high-functioning, and lethally overdosed on episodes of Sex and the City.  Diaz & Applegate play deeply awful people – the most selfish, morally repugnant women to ever disgrace a martini bar.  Blair plays a dead-eyed hedonist who continually stumbles into Rube Goldbergian sexual scenarios that expose her private bedroom indulgences to the wider San Francisco public, including nearby priests & schoolchildren.  By the time her luckier-in-love besties tease her by playing keep-away with her cum-stained laundry on a city sidewalk, it’s clear what kind of romcom this truly is: a demonic one.  Funny too.

While The Sweetest Thing may look like a classic Hollywood romcom from a safe distance, up close it’s clearly rooted in the tragically chintzy days of the post-9/11 2000s. It does not shy away from potential association with the most prominent “Women get horny too” media of its era, Sex and the City; it even opens with man-on-the-street interviews about Diaz’s heartbreaker behavior with her previous sexual partners, a device heavily relied on in early seasons of that landmark HBO sitcom.  There’s a lingering Farrelly Brothers stench to its over-the-top raunch, however, which includes gags involving exploding urinals, maggoty backseat leftovers, and an ocular glory hole injury everyone sees coming except the woman who suffers it.  Even just the casting of Cameron Diaz alone feels like a nod to that Something About Mary tradition of mainstream raunch, which brought a hetero brand of John Waters gross-out humor to the corporate multiplex.  The “Unrated” DVD version of the film also includes an impromptu electroclash flash mob, wherein our three hedonistic heroines lead an entire restaurant of strangers in an extended dance number about the joys of giant cocks.  What a trashy time to be alive.

Cruel Intentions director Roger Kumble brings little of note to the table here besides his working relationship with Selma Blair, apparently having gotten at least two all-timer comedic performances out of her to date.  If you want an auteurist read on The Sweetest Thing, you have to look to screenwriter Nancy Pimental instead, whose credits mostly consist of TV episodes for bad-taste comedies like Shameless, The Mick and, most importantly in this context, early seasons of South Park.  Critics, audiences, studio execs, and advertisers all seemed baffled by what Pimental was up to in her big-screen debut, but she was clear-eyed in her mission.  She wanted to make a girly version of the kinds of gross-out, reprehensible comedies that boys got to make all the time, dressed up in the surface aesthetic markers of the safer, sanitized material that’s more routinely marketed to women.  The biggest tip-off of her self-awareness is in the requisite dress-up montage before the climactic wedding-crash, in which Diaz & Applegate try on costumes from popular Hollywood comedies of previous decades.  When they dress up as characters from Pretty Woman, Grease, and Desperately Seeking Susan, they’re giving studio executives exactly what Pimental was contracted to deliver.  When they dress up in the pastel tuxedos from Dumb & Dumber, Pimental is signaling something entirely different to the audience.  She wanted to make something chaotic, evil and, above all else, dumb.  She succeeded greatly, and it’s a shame she hasn’t been given this much room to play around with genre expectations since.

-Brandon Ledet

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam (1985)

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Much like nu-metal, Crocs, and exposed-thong whale tail, it appears that VHS tapes are hip again.  There’s already been widespread aesthetic nostalgia for the tape-warp wear & tear of vintage VHS tapes in horror cinema from the past decade or so, as evidenced in titles like Late Night with the Devil, WNUF Halloween Special, Rent-a-Pal, Beyond the Gates, Censor, V/H/S, and VHYes.  But now I’m starting to see more appreciation for the physical tapes themselves, not just digital simulation of their degradation.  Soon after the old-school video store Future Shock opened in Mid-City, renting both VHS tapes and VCR players, I attended an unrelated screening of the classic 1987 slasher The Stepfather at The Mudlark Theatre, projected from VHS to a hanging bedsheet.  At the start of the movie, the audience warmly chuckled at the tape’s brief tracking issues and the projector’s struggle to calibrate its fuzzy image quality, but that attention to format eventually gave way to sincere tension & unease.  It was a genuine 1990s sleepover atmosphere, as if we had snuck an R-rated movie past our sleeping parents.  It was also very likely the first time I’ve watched a movie on VHS in almost a decade (specifically, since we covered Highway to Hell for Movie of the Month in 2015), since that’s around the time I gave away my VCRs because they all kept eating my tapes.

You don’t have to go to bootleg repertory screenings at Marigny puppet theatres to get in on the VHS nostalgia wave, though.  While the collection & exhibition of physical VHS tapes is the domain of only a few true sickos, plenty movie nerds are exposed to VHS scans on a regular basis without intentionally looking for them.  Anyone who regularly spends time searching YouTube, Tubi, Archive.org, and thrift-store DVD stacks for cheap-access cinema has been subjected to a deluge of sub-professional digi scans of VHS tapes, which are just as rampant now in the golden age of boutique Blu-ray restorations as they ever have been.  Consider the curious case of Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, a 1985 comedy that had an initial theatrical release on celluloid, but is unavailable for streaming in HD.  All official, legal uploads of the film to sites like Tubi, Freevee, and PlutoTV are the same scan of a vintage VHS cassette, since the film was a much bigger hit as a video store rental than it was as a theatrical release.  That’s likely because the VHS cover dared to advertise the appearance of the popular character Ernest P. Worrell, despite the fact that his last-minute inclusion in the film is essentially a celebrity cameo.  In theaters, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam was an anonymous, immediately forgotten comedy starring some nobody named Jim Varney.  In video stores, it lingered on the shelves for years, boosted its official branding as An Ernest Movie.  Even now, it’s still a kind of VHS rental, just one that’s untethered from a physical presence.

Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam officially marks the first big-screen appearance of Ernest P. Worrell, the fast-talking Southern fool who’s always mugging directly to the camera and addressing the audience as his good friend “Vern”.  Before he was camping, slam-dunking, saving Christmas, going to jail, and getting scared stupid in his career-making star vehicles, Ernest was a recurring character in a series of 1980s television commercials directed by John Cherry, starring rubber-faced comedian Jim Varney.  Cherry (from Nashville) & Varney (from Kentucky) mostly sold their Ernest ads to the Louisiana & Mississippi at first, but the popularity of the character spread wide enough nationally that they figured they could cash in with a legitimate feature film.  Ernest was only one of Varney’s many stock characters, though; longtime Varney Heads will surely recall fellow ad-break mainstay Auntie Nelda, Varney’s old-biddy drag act with a perpetually sprained neck.  Instead of capitalizing on the popularity of Ernest in particular, Cherry & Varney chose to use The Riddle of the Gloom Beam as a showcase for every character Varney had in his comedic repertoire, giving the actor room to test-run a bunch of vague, go-nowhere archetypes like Evil German Scientist, Australian Militia Maniac, Filthy Pirate, and Literal Trash Monster, along with playing the hits.  It’s less comedically specific than the official Ernest movies as a result, working more like a sketch comedy revue than a feature film.

The titular Dr. Otto is, of course, a Varney creation: a broad mad-scientist character costumed with a living human hand for a hat.  The evil lair where he regularly attempts world domination looks like what might happen if Rita Repulsa couldn’t afford to pay the light bill, but it’s lavishly decorated with a wide range of evildoer machines that don’t do any evil thing in particular except light up & smoke.  His first plan of attack is fairly agreeable, using his “gloom beam” machine to erase all official records of debt, throwing banks & credit card companies into chaos, to the point where CEOs are putting revolvers in their mouths onscreen in what’s ostensibly a children’s film.  Later, he threatens to use the gloom beam to kill all the world’s first-born children like a Biblical plague, but let’s not focus too much on that plot point.  Instead, let’s all boo & hiss at the hero that the banks & government nominate to take Dr. Otto down: a square-jawed American patriot named Lance Sterling (Myke Mueller), Dr. Otto’s childhood rival.  In flashback, we witness the disturbing difference between Lance’s privileged, WASPy upbringing and Dr. Otto’s miserable life in the gutter, which only encourages us to root for the mad scientist as he seeks revenge on the planet.  That’s what makes it okay to cheer on the many disguises he takes in the present—including crowd favorites Ernest & Nelda—as they do objectively evil things to prevent the squeaky-clean hero from saving the day.

None of the individual jokes or visual gags in The Riddle of the Gloom Beam are especially funny, but the movie is charming anyway.  It’s high-energy, low-budget independent filmmaking, making up for a lot of the dead air between failed bits with aggressive music-video editing tactics and handmade arts & crafts ingenuity.  It’s also incredibly dark considering the average age of its target audience.  If nothing else, it’s got to be the only children’s film I’ve ever seen include a minutes-long Deer Hunter parody, making for two visual references to suicide by gun.  When I was a kid, television and the video store were cultural democratizers.  Jim Carrey & Robin Williams may have had more legitimate, widespread distribution in brick & mortar movie theaters, but Varney was their professional equal in my mind at the time, thanks to then-lifelong exposure to Ernest ads & videos in the Southern market where he hit heaviest.  If The Riddle of the Gloom Beam had any chance of earning cult-classic status, it would’ve needed a lot more Ernest content instead of flooding the screen with Varney’s lesser-known comedic personae (despite those characters’ later appearances on his short-lived CBS sketch show Hey Vern, It’s Ernest!).  Cherry & Varney soon figured that out in better-remembered titles like Ernest Goes to Jail & Ernest Scared Stupid, which have a much more distinct comedic personality than this early outing even if they don’t match its creative, try-anything energy.  Thus, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam is the exact kind of title that belongs on VHS; it would feel sacrilegious to watch it in any updated format, since it’s such a relic of its era.  And in a way, that makes Tubi just as hip and plugged-in to The Moment as your local underground video stores and D.I.Y. neighborhood rep screenings (as long as you politely ignore the fact that the company is owned by Rupert Murdoch).

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #215: Look Who’s Talking (1989) & Deciphering Heckerling

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Welcome to Episode #214 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss the arc of Amy Heckerling’s art & career as a Hollywood auteur, starting with her biggest commercial hit: the talking-baby comedy Look Who’s Talking (1989).

00:00 Welcome

02:28 Der Fan (1982)
05:36 Miller’s Girl (2024)
09:35 Blue Collar (1978)
11:20 Adam Resurrected (2008)
21:28 The Sweetest Thing (2002)

26:46 Look Who’s Talking (1989)
57:50 Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982)
1:12:09 Clueless (1995)
1:20:47 I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)

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

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

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When I saw Don Hertzfeldt’s latest animated short at this year’s Overlook, there was an hour-long line of giddy nerds queued up to squeeze in for a specialty screening and Q&A.  A few months later, ME was paired with a victory-lap roadshow exhibition of Hertzfeldt’s 2012 feature It’s Such a Beautiful Day, which I attended with a smattering of fellow introverts avoiding eye contact and the afternoon sun in the complimentary AC.  Both experiences were immaculate.  The hustle & bustle of the film festival environment made ME feel like a burning-hot ticket, especially since fans could corner the animator in the flesh to force such intimate experiences as asking questions during a moderated panel, showing him the tattoos he inspired, asking for autographs and, in my case, catching a glimpse of him wolfing down Shake Shack between screenings like a regular Joe.  The theatrical rollout was obviously less intimate, but Hertzfeldt did his best to make it feel personal.  As an intermission between the short & feature, he FaceTimes the audience with a pre-recorded message to explain the ways in which It’s Such a Beautiful Day was a breakthrough formal experiment for his art and to also apologize for exhaustion of watching it so soon after ME.  It still felt like a one-of-a-kind presentation for a work that was once streaming without context or personalization on Netflix, even though this exact Cinematic Event is currently touring dozens of international cities.

I’ve never thought of Hertzfeldt as a public figure before this recent tour.  Since he largely works alone on self-taught animation techniques that take years to calibrate, I’ve always imagined him as a reclusive outsider artist, the exact kind of quiet introvert that his movies attract to the theater.  Early works like Billy’s Balloon, Rejected, and Beautiful Day all had a word-of-mouth quality to their cultural awareness, and if his widest critical breakout World of Tomorrow screened anywhere near where I live with this level of fanfare, I totally missed it.  Unsurprisingly, it turns out Hertzfeldt does carry himself with a quiet, shy, apologetic demeanor, seemingly surprised by the continued cult enthusiasm for his animated stick figure abstractions.  It also turns out that his public personality was a lot more integral to the tone & narrative of It’s Such a Beautiful Day than I remembered, since his gentle voice is a constant hum on its soundtrack as the film’s scene-by-scene narrator.  There’s an observational comic-strip humor to It’s Such a Beautiful Day that makes it feel a hand-drawn diary, especially considering the direct, intimate rapport the director establishes with his audience through narration.  That’s what makes it so horrifying when it develops into a diary of personal anxieties rather than a diary of personal experiences as its story escalates, given that if any of this happened to Hertzfeldt himself, he would be either institutionalized or, more likely, dead.

Hertzfeldt narrates the daily, mundane thoughts & experiences of a middle-aged stick figure named Bill.  Our milquetoast protagonist starts his journey suffering the same nagging indignities that plague us all: awkwardly waiting for buses, awkwardly chatting with strangers, awkwardly navigating urban hellscapes, etc.  Bill’s suffering takes on increasing specificity as his mental health declines, though, due largely to a brain tumor that distorts his ability to think clearly (and inevitably kills him).  Although told in third-person, the narration is filtered entirely through Bill’s increasingly warped perception of reality, and the imagery warps to match it.  The white copy-paper backdrop of Hertzfeldt’s early works give way to photographic mixed-media textures that Bill stumbles through in non-linear time loops, untethered from logic.  His observations occasionally become crass & offensive as his POV is compromised by his tumor, making this one of the great illustrations of intrusive thoughts, mental illness, and unreliable narration.  Like all of Hertzfeldt’s work, it’s also a great illustration of Millennial humor, from its grim death-wish nihilism to its LOL-so-random internet cringe.  There’s even a literal bacon joke that anchors the picture to the Epic Bacon humor of the 2010s, which only makes it more impressive that the film manages to sketch out an earnest, authentic big-picture demonstration of what it feels like to think & function with a brain distorted by anxiety, depression, and physical malady.  For a small, devoted audience, no film has ever felt truer.

When Hertzfeldt refers to It’s Such a Beautiful Day as experimental, he means it more in terms of process than in terms of genre.  He filmed the animation cells for the project using a bulky 1940s camera, experimenting with how to segment the frame through multiple exposures by blocking the lens, sometimes mixing traditional animation with stock footage.  Even so, there are some aesthetic touches to the film that do recall Experimental Cinema in the Stan Brakhage/Maya Deren sense, with flashes of pure color overtaking the screen to tell the story through emotion & mood rather than through figure & voice.  It was a drastic evolution for an animator who used to work exclusively in black & white line drawings, with only a few pops of color adding visual excitement to the frame – an evolution that’s since only gotten more extreme through multi-media layering in The World of Tomorrow & ME.  The one thing that hasn’t changed, really, is Hertzfeldt’s unique sense of comic timing, which mines dark humor out of the mundane absurdism of being alive.  His ability to perfectly time a punchline made him a cult figure long before he fully distinguished his craft as a visual artist, so it’s been wonderful to spend so much time hearing those jokes in his own voice this year, whether in his heavily-narrated cult classic or in his Q&A tour promoting his new, dialogue-free short.  It’s fitting, then, that the only way to access these films (if they aren’t physically traveling to your neighborhood theater) is to purchase them directly from the artist’s website.  I imagine he personally packages each shipment by hand and includes a scribbled note of apology for making your brain a little darker with his harsh approach to life & art.

-Brandon Ledet

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2024)

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Calling an actor’s performance “vulnerable” is often just a delicate way of saying they appear nude on screen in sub-glamorous circumstances.  Actor-writer-director-editor Joanna Arnow appears to be acutely aware of this critical cliche, which she goes out of her way to mock & undercut in her sophomore feature The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed.  After spending a third of her screentime lounging around nude in a lover’s cramped, poorly lit New York City apartment, she bends over to spread her buttcheeks for the older man’s pleasure, and he dryly declares “Now that’s vulnerable!”  It’s one funny punchline among many in a movie that’s more like a comic strip diary than an autofictional novel.  Joanna Arnow’s vulnerability is essential to the text, as she plays a fictionalized version of herself (named Ann, for short) opposite her real-life parents and a small cast of suitors who illustrate real-life anecdotes of misadventures in kink-scene dating.  Given the fictional Ann’s extensive experience with BDSM, it’s tempting to read Joanna‘s “vulnerability” as a public humiliation kink, but the truth is it’s not any more extreme than most semi-autobiographical comedies about an indie filmmaker’s NYC dating life (see also: Flames, Pvt Chat, Appropriate Behavior, etc.).  Arnow’s just willing to make a joke at her own expense after indulging in that narcissistic ritual.  Now that’s vulnerable!

Almost every scene of The Feeling has a set-up and punchline rhythm to it in that way.  It’s a film made entirely of short clips of low-stakes, emotionless interactions in which the joke is just how banal it feels to be alive.  We bounce around the three tidy corners of Ann’s limited existence—work, family, sex—where she’s constantly being told what to do by elder micromanagers.  At work, she’s ordered around by corporate-speak bureaucrats; at home, by adorably sour parents.  At her on-again-off-again dom’s apartment, she’s ordered around by a middle-aged man who’s just as indifferent to her presence as everyone else in her life, except with an added layer of opt-in roleplay.  The only relief from this universal indifference is the sanctuary of Ann’s undecorated apartment, where there are no pets or hanged pieces of art personalizing her space.  She is a character defined by absence of characteristics, which is darkly hilarious in scenes where doms command her to tell them what she desires and she can’t come up with anything specific, defaulting instead to stock-character roles like Fuck Pig or furniture.  In most BDSM relationship dynamics, it’s the sub’s job to tell the dom what to tell them to do, so the heroic journey of our protagonist is all in learning how to assert herself and define her own personality against a world that’s so deeply, oppressively bland.  It feels incredibly good when she gets there (and incredibly terrible when she backslides).

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the driest comedy you’ll find outside a Roy Andersson film, which is funny to say about a BDSM confessional where no single scene lasts longer than a minute.  Most of its filmic artistry is in Arnow’s tight control of the edit, which both trims completely static interactions down to concentrated bursts of social tension and tells a larger story of personal growth through selective sequencing.  The audience can always tell exactly how emotionally invested Ann is in her various romantic & sexual relationships by how long Arnow is willing to linger with them.  When she’s trying to branch out from her long-term dom/sub relationship, the movie takes on a speed-dating rhythm that cuts between the various doofus men of NYC in rapid-fire clips.  When she’s indulging in her very first genuine romantic partnership, it maintains its average short-burst scene length but shows fewer interactions outside that relationship, putting her workplace and homelife annoyances on the backburner for a stretch (much to the audience’s relief).  If you catch Ann squeezing a sad envelope of room-temperature beans into a microwaveable glass bowl to eat for dinner alone, you know that she’s not particularly invested in any of her current relationships. It’s all told in editorial curation, which is the only element of the film with a pronounced sense of style; everything else is contained in a purposefully flat, digital, Soderberghian void.

If Joanna Arnow is expressing anything about herself to the audience through the avatar of Ann, it’s a young person’s anxiety about not being especially good at anything.  Ann is bad at her job, bad at small talk, bad at roleplay, bad at folding laundry, bad at everything.  She’s super relatable in that way, especially for anyone who was socially suffocated by overbearing parents and then unleashed unto the world at 18 with the expectation that they’re a fully formed adult with their own defined personality & desires.  Those efforts to define herself might’ve lacked specificity without the BDSM angle of her love life, so it’s for the best that Arnow chose vulnerability instead of cowering from cliche.

-Brandon Ledet

Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970)

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Picture it. You’re settling in for Movie Night, and you know exactly what you’re in the mood for: a film about a bisexual demon twink who moves into a family home to seduce & ruin everyone who lives there.  Teorema is sounding a little too challenging that evening, but you’re not quite in the mood for the empty calories of Saltburn either.  What can you do to scratch that specific itch?  Thankfully, there is a perfect middle ground in the 1970 stage-play adaptation Entertaining Mr. Sloane, which is a little more sophisticated than an Emerald Fennell music video but not, like, Pasolini sophisticated.  It’s got all of the bisexual lust & thrust you’re looking for but lightened up with a little vintage Benny Hill-era British humor to keep the mood light.  Everything is falling into place . . . except that Entertaining Mr. Sloane isn’t currently available for home video distribution in America.  All you can access from the couch is the trailer on YouTube (which at least helpfully includes the film’s plot-summarizing theme song so you can imagine the rest).

I was lucky to catch this horny, thorny farce at The Broad earlier this month, when it was presented by filmmaker John Cameron Mitchell for the weekly WW Cinema series, with particular attention paid to the original work’s playwright Joe Orton.  Mitchell specifically recommended the 1987 biopic Prick Up Your Ears as background context for Orton’s queer agitator sensibilities, but none of that place setting is really necessary for being entertained by Mr. Sloane.  The tricky part is just finding a copy.  This is a work of broad humor & caustic camp.  Its stage play origins and its early arrival on the queer-cinema timeline afford it a sophisticated air, but it’s played directly to the cheap seats so that everyone gets a laugh.  A precursor to similar broad-appeal outsider art from the likes of John Waters & Paul Bartel, it played well to a raucous crowd of hipster weirdos, but there’s nothing especially exclusionary or esoteric about it that would turn off a broad audience.  It’s like an old TV sitcom with a premise that’s in such bad taste that the network deliberately lost its archival tapes.

Peter McEnery stars as the murderous demon twink of the title: an unscrupulous drifter who’s invited into a middle-class family home after he’s caught sunbathing in a nearby cemetery.  He’s picked up by a lonely middle-aged biddy (Beryl Reid) as a thinly veiled act of charity that both parties winkingly acknowledge as transactional sex work.  It would be out of the question to offer him room & board in exchange for sexual favors, but while he’s there . . . Also, because she’s an upstanding lady, there’s no proper way to express her desire for the younger, eager man, but if he were so overcome with passion that he sexually ravished her . . . Unsurprisingly, the men around the house (a classist snob played by Harry Andrews and Alan Webb as his ancient, ornery father) are just as repressed in their attraction to the smooth-bodied scamp.  No one can state out loud that they want to sleep with Mr. Sloane, but everyone jealously conspires to keep him away from the young girls around town whom he’s actually attracted to, meanwhile finding excuses to touch his body.  No one can state out loud that he’s a wanted murderer either, but they all know it to be true.

As a cultural relic, this pitch-black comedy feels like a response to the moral rot of the Free Love era.  Mr. Sloane’s selfishness & violence might reflect the amorality of that era’s hedonistic youth culture, but he’s not the main target of the satire.  Really, the bulk of the movie’s satire is rooted in the older generation’s response to the moral looseness he represents.  Beryl Reid’s girlish view of sexuality is absurdly repressed for a woman of her age, which gets increasingly uncomfortable once she starts treating him as a baby she’s coddling mid-coitus, like a child playing Mommy to her dolly.  Her closeted brother is no better, framing all of his lust for the houseguest through the misogynist mindset of boarding school bunkmates playing rough house.  He also treats Mr. Sloane as a kind of doll, dressing him head to toe in a tailored, fetishistic leather get-up under the guise of hiring him as a uniformed chauffer.  No one can express what they want from Mr. Sloane or how they intend to compensate him for it, but there’s a constant power struggle for his physical time & attention between the siblings that makes for a vicious tug of war.  And then the doubly-repressed lust expressed by their father makes things even uglier.

There are a few production design and shot composition choices that elevate Entertaining Mr. Sloane above its TV sitcom trappings.  Reid’s frilly lingerie and stuffed-animal-decorated teen girl bedroom are especially gorgeous, along with the continually hilarious prop of Andrews’s gigantic pink Cadillac, which appears to be undulating without shocks to match his clownish persona.  Occasionally, director Douglas Hickox & cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky will also frame out an absurdly over-curated tableau, like disembodied lips wrapping around a phallic popsicle against the grey backdrop of gravestones, or like a makeshift wedding ceremony staged at the altar of a fresh corpse.  Mostly, though, it’s the comedic voice of Orton’s source material that shines through, just as John Cameron Mitchell’s introduction to the film suggested.  Orton’s version of “The Straights Are Not Okay” social commentary manages to feel ahead of its time but also ingratiating enough to not entirely lose his contemporary audience.  Instead, he lost the future audience that’s more accustomed to that line of combative queer humor simply through scarcity in distribution, thanks to the current, dire state of home distro for any film made before 1990.  Catch it when it inevitably hits one of the only two streaming services that matter: Criterion or Tubi, whoever gets there first.

-Brandon Ledet