creature feature

Lagniappe Podcast: Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the genre-mashing creature feature Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989).

00:00 Welcome
01:28 Nicole Kidman Magic at Barrett’s Too
03:10 Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026)
10:00 The Trouble with Harry (1955)
14:35 The Lodger (1927)
20:25 Chronovisor (2026)
26:27 The History of Concrete (2026)
34:33 Primetime (2026)
47:33 Burst City (1982)
54:45 Hope (2026)
1:01:45 Resident Evil (2026)
1:11:43 They Will Kill You (2026)
1:14:23 Digger (2026)

1:20:43 Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Hope (2026)

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Hope is the latest film from The Wailing director Na Hong-jin. Early reactions were fairly mixed, and now having seen the film myself, I can understand why. For much of its run, Hope is an exciting action thriller, with thrilling chase scenes, suspenseful sequences, and quiet moments of humanity. All of this works quite well, especially when we see less of the monster(s) that are running around and causing trouble, but once we do see them, it takes a downhill turn before ending on a truly bizarre note, one that comes after a film that’s a little too long for its own good.

Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is the police chief of Hope Harbor, a South Korean village that abuts the Demilitarized Zone, the population of which is made up largely of elderly people and supermodel-hot younger folks. He’s summoned by his cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to the site of a mutilated cow that Sung-ki and his fellow hunters discovered in the middle of the road. The cow’s corpse shows evidence of being attacked by some large animal with razor-sharp claws, which the hunters convince Bum-seok a tiger must have been responsible for despite the unlikelihood that a large cat would have been able to cross the minefields that lie between them and the rest of the continent. Upon returning to town, Bum-seok learns that several other locals have been killed, and his attempts to call in additional manpower are rebuffed due to wildfires that are raging elsewhere, prompting him to ally with a retired colonel named Ahn Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee), whom he finds hiding in a culvert after his own encounter with the monster. Out of sight, the monster rages on, as it leaves a trail of broken bodies and buildings in its wake. After Bum-seok accidentally shoots and kills a local who was hiding from the monster, he ends up facing the creature itself and narrowly escapes only because of assistance from his rocket launcher-toting rookie, Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon). After a long and costly conflict, the monster is killed, and its body turned over to a local surgeon to perform an autopsy, although she’s not able to cut through the creature’s hide with anything less than a chainsaw. Sung-ae assists with triage in a makeshift hospital, where she learns from one of the locals that he had seen several of the creatures in the woods, indicating that the danger is far from over. Elsewhere, Sung-ki and his hunting buddies are still looking for the tiger that threatens the village when they stumble upon a crashed spaceship in the forest, one that has a control room that features seating and buttons for very, very large crewmembers.

The creatures here are the film’s weakest point, in multiple ways. The alien designs are unique, and it’s a mark in the film’s favor that they’re individually designed with distinctive textures and faces, but that does not necessarily mean that they’re good. Western actors like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Lost in Space’s Taylor Russell are credited here, and I suppose you can see the resemblance between them and the aliens that they voice (in an alien language) if you look hard enough, but I’m at a loss to understand what they bring to the film other than marquee appeal outside of Korea. The quality with which they are rendered on screen varies wildly from scene to scene, with some sequences looking like they were built for a PS2 game while others are smoother and more convincing. They’re a much more threatening presence when they’re not onscreen, when dismembered bodies are discovered in collapsing buildings or the only evidence of their presence is the far-off sounds of gunfire cut short by screaming. Characters can see over rooftops that cars are being thrown around like toys, and it’s quite effective.

I can concede that it’s likely that we’re meant to find the aliens uncannily human but off-putting considering the revelation that they are intelligent creatures seeking a lost child, who has already been killed by a hillbilly taxidermist named Yang-bae (Eum Moon-suk, a handsome former K-pop star who’s saddled with goofy teeth). The intention is to induce fear and then humanize them; I get that. I just don’t feel that it’s very successful, and it’s not all entirely down to the design. For one thing, this isn’t exactly new ground, given that the “man is the real monster” isn’t a novel monster-movie concept at this point, and the reason it’s so well-worn is because it forces the audience to look inward at their own prejudices. Here, however, the blame for the interspecies conflict falls solely in the lap of a trigger-happy bumpkin. No one is going to look at this man onscreen and see themselves, and it’s a change from the formula that demonstrates why the trope exists in the first place. There’s also a lot of sudden and unexpected lore that ends up being shoehorned in during the film’s final act, belabored exposition that largely comes via the form of not-very-interesting dialogue between Vikander and Fassbender (I mean, um … let me check my notes here … “J’aur” and “Ma’veyyo”). Some of it re-establishes what we’ve already gleaned from the scenes with our human characters, including their search for the missing alien child, but it also drops several extra-terrestrial proper nouns that are a lot to try and take in after two hours of runtime that was mostly a humans-versus-monsters movie. 

This is a film that feels incomplete, and it’s not just the cliffhanger ending that gives it that quality. Hope doesn’t feel like half of a narrative; it feels like a 95% complete monster film and a 35% complete sci-fi epic. That adds up to more than 100%, of course, which is reflected in the film’s whopping 156 minute runtime. That should be more than enough to tell a complete story, but it doesn’t. There are dangling plot threads on the human side that are left to be resolved in a sequel if one is made, most notably the fallout of Bum-seok’s shooting of a non-combatant, but it’s almost all the way there. The alien side of things is just getting started, with the sudden crashing of another, larger spaceship into a mountain on the horizon near the film’s conclusion, and all of the political machinations that are implied by the too-late info dump, which isn’t of interest to me in the slightest. Given that Na is known for releasing films at a glacial pace (the aforementioned The Wailing was his last picture, and it was released in 2016), it’s strange to me that he would create a film so open-ended and demanding of a sequel. Worse, Hope features such great action sequences that it demands to be seen on a big screen, but the ultimate experience is so taxing that it is a film that will work best when you’re at home and can take bathroom breaks, where the horseback battle with a galloping alien creature isn’t going to hit as hard. 

All of this sounds pretty negative, but I’m not trying to talk you out of experiencing the film. Reports that it is the best monster movie in years are no more an exaggeration than critical responses that the film is an overlong, narratively confused beast. Going in with that knowledge, I think you’ll still find plenty to enjoy; just caffeinate beforehand and feel free to run to the restroom when the aliens start talking to one another.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Au Revoir, Godzilla, Mon Amour

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It’s been three years since Criterion’s towering box set of Shōwa era Godzilla films arrived on my doorstep, and I’ve been madly in love ever since. Anytime I’m unsure what movie to watch, I’ll toss on a Godzilla disc to pass the time, the same way an old Beatles record is always there for me whenever I’m indecisive on what to listen to. It’s been lovely, but all affairs eventually run their course, and I’ve officially run out of new-to-me Godzilla movies to watch in that 15-film set. I recently ran through my last two remaining Godzilla titles in rapid succession—1972’s Godzilla vs. Gigan and 1975’s Terror of Mechagodzilla—and found that the romantic spark was still very much alive. Together, they reminded me of two entirely different reasons why I first fell in love with my giant lizard friend, and why it’s so sad I’ll now only be able to revisit that loving feeling in nostalgic rewatches instead of experiencing the seductive rush of a brand-new romance. Of course, the Criterion box set only accounts for half of Godzilla’s ginormous cinematic footprint, and there’s plenty other movies left out there to discover, but I’m still granting myself a little space here to mourn the end of my relationship with the atomic monster’s original run from the 1950s to the 1970s.

By the time Godzilla faced off against Gigan in the early 1970s, he had already fully transformed from harrowing nuclear fallout metaphor to superhero protector of children everywhere. Much of the back half of Godzilla’s Shōwa era finds the skyscraper kaiju beast mugging for the kids in the cheap seats while performing pro wrestling moves on his fellow rubber-suited monsters. In the case of Godzilla vs. Gigan, that means facing off against an especially goofy looking combatant: a cycloptic mechachicken with a whirring buzzsaw in its belly, the creature-design equivalent of when Homer Simpson designed his ideal car. There’s nothing especially novel about the film’s plot, which is yet another alien-invasion story among many in the set, with recycled footage from previous monster attacks and recycled grumblings about how pollution has turned Earth into “a toxic world, a radioactive wasteland.” Still, though, the latter kiddie-fluff Godzilla pics can often surprise you with a novelty in style, in this case a comic book-inspired sensibility that makes the formula feel fresh again. The monster attacks are centered around an amusement park that features a Godzilla-shaped observation tower, and the alien invasion plot (involving cockroach humanoids from another planet) is uncovered by a manga artist who exclusively pitches kid-friendly monster designs like “The Homework Monster” and “The Strict Mom Monster”. That’s not to say that the kaiju action can’t get brutally violent; the climactic fight between Godzilla & Gigan is staged in an exploding oil refinery field and feels like a vision of Hell, leaving Godzilla visibly bleeding onscreen for the first time in the franchise. It’s just that the pronounced comic book sensibility leads to its biggest surprises in terms of novelty. When Godzilla starts chatting to his giant pet armadillo Anguirus in comic-panel speech bubbles, it feels like there are still endless possibilities for what this series can do, despite this entry relying so heavily on pre-existing images the audience has already seen before.

As much fun as the alien cockroaches and comic book speech bubbles of Godzilla vs. Gigan can be, I’m glad that the series toned down its kid-friendly hijinks for its final entry (before the monster’s return in the 80-90s Heisei era), Terror of Mechagodzilla. Original Godzilla director Ishirō Honda returned to conclude the Shōwa era on a serious note, keeping all of the space alien invaders and remote-controlled kaiju puppets that had crept into the go-to formula over the years but deciding to play them straight instead of goofy. The opening credits play out over a “Previously on . . .” recap of Godzilla’s first tussle with his “space-titanium” doppelganger Mechagodzilla, then the humans-on-the-ground plot introduces a new combatant to the ring in the underwater dinosaur creature Titanosaurus. Earth is once again characterized as a “polluted & chaotic” nuclear wasteland primed for takeover from mad scientists & alien invaders, but those stock villains’ lives are given more room to develop dramatic tension in this go-round. When the human hero holds the mad scientist’s robot daughter’s dying body in his arms and declares, “You may be a cyborg, but I still love you,” the emotions of the moment actually mean something, against all odds. Ishirō Honda seemed stubbornly determined to reclaim the Godzilla series as more than just kiddie stuff here, aging up the onscreen action with more Godzilla blood in the kaiju battles and cyborg nudity in the sci-fi machinations of the humans-on-the-ground subplot. He even manages to make the recycling of previous Godzilla films’ footage surprisingly elegant, playing highlights from previous monster attacks back in a 4-way splitscreen layout. Honda’s sincerity continually made for Godzilla’s most compelling non-kaiju drama in the monster’s original run, to the point where you forget he also directed a couple of the monster’s silliest, flimsiest outings (namely King Kong vs. Godzilla and All Monsters Attack). The Shōwa era started with Honda’s national heartbreaker Godzilla (1954), and it ended with the director reasserting that the increasingly goofy series still has a beating heart at its core.

Godzilla vs. Gigan was stunt actor Haruo Nakajima’s twelfth & final outing playing Godzilla onscreen, and Terror of Mechagodzilla was Ishirō Honda’s ninth & final Godzilla film as director. Together, they rounded out my personal years-long romance with the 8-disc, 15-film Criterion box set, which only helped underline the finality of Nakajima & Honda’s contributions to the series. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with classic, first-run Godzilla, to the point where I’m questioning whether I was ever properly critical or analytical about any individual entries in the series. When a Godzilla movie isn’t especially great, I’m still always grateful to spend more time with my good friend Godzilla, even having written lengthy apologia about his off-brand American outings. So, when you catch me saying glowing things about Adam Wingard’s King Kong crossovers, Criterion’s new restoration of Godzilla vs. Biollante, or the upcoming Reiwa era update Godzilla Minus Zero, please know that I am grading on a curve because I have nothing but love for Godzilla in my heart. Still, I feel compelled to recap my time spent with the Shōwa era box set by ranking the included films and linking to our reviews across a half-decade of website posts, despite the fact that I love them all and I’m sad to realize that our time together is over.

  1. Godzilla (1954)
  2. Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)
  3. Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)
  4. Destroy All Monsters (1966)
  5. Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)
  6. Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)
  7. King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)
  8. Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
  9. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)
  10. Invasion of the Astro-Monster (1965)
  11. Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972)
  12. Son of Godzilla (1967)
  13. Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)
  14. All Monsters Attack (1969)
  15. Godzilla Raids Again (1955)

-Brandon Ledet

Demonwarp (1988)

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Most low-budget genre movies I tend to recommend on this blog make up for their lack of resources with an excess of style. I love a scrappy production that strives to impress its audience in every frame, distracting us from the shoddiness of the acting, sets, and props with an extravagance of over-the-top images & ideas. A major problem with those kinds of high-style, low budget oddities, though, is that the initial novelty can wear off in the first or second act, around the time when they’re done establishing a world or mood and have to start telling a compelling story within it, or else fall flat. In contrast, the 1988 creature feature Demonwarp flips that trajectory around, starting with a going-through-the-motions plot trudge in its first hour before attempting to wow its audience with over-the-top, go-for-broke novelty in its final act. It’s a major risk to operate that way, since most of the audience might doze off or wander away before they get to the goods, but for those too stoned to get off the couch and swap out the VHS tape for something more exciting, the movie leaves you on a high note. I guess in some ways it’s better to finish strong than to start strong, if it’s going to be an either/or choice.

Demonwarp is a bugnuts alien invasion movie hiding in plain sight as a mediocre sasquatch movie. A mysterious space egg crashes in the American woodlands in the opening scene, setting expectations for a far-out mutant creature feature. Instead, that opening leads to a lazy procession of sasquatch attacks, mostly thinning out the ranks of a college-age Reaganite polycule. Those young dolts have no discernible chemistry to speak of, as if they all just met minutes before camera arrived, despite the scripts’ insistence that they’re all longtime friends & lovers. The only saving grace in the cast is the movie star charisma of Academy Award winner (and Naked Gun alum) George Kennedy, who babysits the dopey duds as they’re all throttled to death one sasquatch attack after another. Then, the dwindling group of survivors arrive at the sasquatch’s hidden cave lair, and the movie suddenly decides to get interesting, throwing everything it can at the screen at the last minute to pass itself off as a latent cult classic: zombies, occultists, scorpion-tailed alien beasts, bare breasts, you name it. It’s your reward for putting up with the boring, going-through-the-motions presentation that precedes it, like sitting through a timeshare sales pitch for the “free” gift.

Before Demonwarp finally gets interesting in its final minutes, it at least has the decency to be laughably incoherent. It treats its woodland setting as a boundaryless otherworld with no spatial rules or logic. The edit constantly alternates between different factions of sasquatch victims fearfully running in arbitrary directions, with no clear sense of which group the monster is actively hunting. Occasionally, they’ll stop to trade half-hearted quips or take their tops off (with those duties rigidly assigned along gender lines), but for the most part they run and yell and ineffectually point guns in the sasquatch’s general direction. The only memorable paragraph of dialogue in the entire picture is a brief monologue in which George Kennedy explains the backstory of why he’s wearing a yellow hat. It’s all just barely entertaining enough to drain beers to with your closest buddies until it shifts gears in the final minutes, to the point where entering the sasquatch’s cave feels like entering an entirely different film. I almost feel bad for ruining the surprise that the sasquatch’s space-alien antics extend beyond the opening crash, but I also suspect most audiences wouldn’t make it to the end credits without dangling that proverbial carrot.

-Brandon Ledet

All Monsters Attack (1969)

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“Why is Earth such a hard place to live?” That’s the question at the core of the greater Godzilla filmography, in which the King of the Monsters is episodically attacked by lesser kaiju that individually represent Earth-life’s many challenges: war, pollution, overfishing, techno modernization, etc. It’s also a question directly asked in the opening-credits theme song to the kaiju monster-mash picture All Monsters Attack (1969), which is essentially a clip show featuring highlights from those metaphorical battles. While previews of those clips flash and freeze as title cards, the song “Monster March” tosses out a few sing-along catchphrases like “Wham! Bang! Crash!” and “Go-go-Godzilla!” to invite the children in the audience to join in on the fun. All Monsters Attack is, undeniably, kiddie stuff. Just in case its target audience is a little too young to have caught onto the kaiju-as-metaphor themes of the greater Godzilla project, the song goes on to spell it out, accompanying images of an industrialized, overcrowded Tokyo with the lyrics, “Megaton smog and exhaust fumes […] are the real monsters!” So, it’s a little surprising, then, that the story that follows such a direct opening statement isn’t about modern urban pollution at all, despite the proto-Hedorah themes suggested by those images & lyrics. Instead, All Monsters Attack is about how Earth is a hard place to live for children in particular, whose only reprieve from the planet’s cruelties is to keep watching Godzilla movies.

Our hero is a young, lonely latchkey kid, left unsupervised for hours on end while his mother works hard to pay the rent. He’s bullied daily by other kids in his industrial neighborhood, a routine that escalates when he stumbles into the lives of two adult bank-robbers who happen to choose his private hiding spot for their own and bully him even harder. Without the familial love & attention and the personal resilience he needs to survive modern urbanity, the poor little tyke only has one coping mechanism that makes his life worth living: dreaming about Godzilla. Whenever life gets too tough to handle, he rushes to a homemade computer that hypnotizes him into dreaming he’s on Monster Island, where he makes fast friends with Godzilla’s useless, hideous son, Minilla. The two interspecies buddies mostly just watch recycled footage of previous Godzilla battles from the sidelines, cheering their favorite monster on as he beats up Ebirah, Anguirus, and The Kamacuras, among other skyscraper creatures. A brand-new monster then enters the picture in form of Gabara, the kaiju equivalent of the bullies that our hero has been avoiding fighting back against in real life. While Minilla learns the confidence to fight his own battles without Godzilla’s help against the obnoxious Gabara in the dreamworld, his new human bestie does the same in the real world, even though he’d rather be napping and dreaming of his favorite Godzilla clips. If it weren’t for all the rubber-suited wrestling matches and the aggressively swanky jazz soundtrack keeping the mood lively, it would be a sad little story about the world’s loneliest boy.

The title All Monsters Attack promises a repeat sequel to the battle-royale kaiju showcase of Destroy All Monsters, so it’s kind of a letdown that so much of its monster action is recycled from previous Godzilla outings. That disappointment is then compounded by the dorky, unintimidating design of the bully Gabara, who looks like a geriatric housecat with an elongated neck and a Donald Trump wig. Still, I found myself charmed by the psychic space it affords Monster Island as an escapist fantasy for young Godzilla fans. The idea of astral projecting yourself all the way there just to hang out with Minilla, of all monsters, is a hilarious indignity. Here, the laughably ugly little thing has somehow mastered human speech but still brays like a donkey when he gets nervous, which happens a lot as he’s mercilessly bullied by Gabara. Our hero seems fond of the pitiful mutant, though, which is sweet, even if it’s an indication of why he’s the kind of nerd who might get bullied around the schoolyard. It’s easy to imagine kids his age enjoying All Monsters Attack in the sequences where it turns into a clip show of Godzilla’s greatest hits (or, more accurately, his then-recent hits), so I can’t fault the movie too much for playing directly to that age group’s corny sensibilities. The worst I can say about it is that it has since been made obsolete by the invention of home video & YouTube, which would allow children to rewatch their favorite Godzilla battles without having to suffer through Minilla’s buffoonery or the afterschool special messaging to get there. Being a lonely, unsupervised nerd has never been more fun.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #258: Harvest Brood (2025) & Joe Meredith

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Welcome to Episode #254 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Aaron & Peter of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the analog sci-fi horrors of Joe Meredith’s YouTube channel, starting with his true-crime creature feature Harvest Brood (2025).

00:00 We Love to Watch
05:31 Joe Meredith
27:21 Harvest Brood (2025)
55:20 Ataraxia (2025)
1:10:09 Other works

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

Gorgo (1961)

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Every country deserves its own trademark kaiju, just like every high school deserves its own sports mascot and every state deserves its own flower & song. Japan has Godzilla, of course, who continues his decades-long reign as King of the Monsters even though he has more local competition than most. America has King Kong, the only national delegate who’s been worthy enough to travel to Japan to meet Godzilla in-person for official kaiju business. Things get a little less impressive from there, since most other countries can only claim ownership of Godzilla & King Kong knockoffs instead of doing their own thing. On the Godzilla knockoff front, North Korea famously has Pulgasari and Denmark less famously has Reptilicus, while Hong Kong has its own resident King Kong knockoff in The Mighty Peking Man. If there’s anything especially daring about England’s national kaiju Gorgo is that it splits the difference, borrowing liberally from Godzilla and King Kong instead of showing preference for one over the other. Gorgo’s lobby posters promise kaiju mayhem “UNLIKE ANYTHING YOU’VE EVER SEEN BEFORE,” but its monster design looks exactly like Godzilla (now with ears) and its opening credits shamelessly borrow the King Kong font, followed quickly by its on-the-ground characters reliving the King Kong plot. I want better than that for our international neighbors’ kaiju mascot legacies, but any & all classic movie monsters are welcome here, regardless of originality.

The most boneheaded aspect of Gorgo producers’ decision to rip off Godzilla & King Kong is that the United Kingdom already had a perfectly well-suited kaiju cryptid the monster could’ve been modeled from instead. Scotland’s Loch Ness Monster had been world-famous for several decades before Gorgo was produced, but instead of capitalizing on that with a creature feature called Nessie’s Revenge, producers sailed to Dublin instead. The plot is exactly what you’d imagine. Two professional sailors discover an underwater dino creature (the titular Gorgo) while deep-sea diving off the shores of Ireland, so they capture it in a giant net and drag it back to England as a kind of freak-show circus act — King Kong style. After parading the subdued creature through downtown London on a float helpfully labeled “Gorgo”, they start selling tickets for local blokes to point & laugh at its misfortunes as an Eighth Wonder of the World circus attraction. The good times don’t last long, though, since it turns out they’ve only captured a baby Gorgo, and the creature’s much larger, violently protective mother quickly storms London to break her baby free. The film’s only major deviation from the King Kong set-up and Godzilla punchline is that both Mama Gorgo and Baby Gorgo get away at the end, fucking off back into the ocean, safe once again from the monstrous actions of men. Meanwhile, human survivors pontificate empty platitudes about the nature of Nature or whatever, having accomplished nothing but disturbing an underwater monster family by invading its habitat.

What Gorgo lacks in originality it makes up for in the scale & duration of its climactic kaiju mayhem. For the record, both Mama Gorgo and Baby Gorgo are represented by the exact same rubber suit, and their respective sizes (boat-size and skyscraper size) are only differentiated by the scale of the miniature sets they inhabit. Baby Gorgo’s half of the movie is a little slow-moving, overloaded with sub-Black Lagoon underwater photography as he’s abducted & transported by mercenary sailors and their circus-promoter clientele. Once Mama Gorgo crashes the scene, however, the movie becomes a nonstop special effects showcase, with Godzilla’s big-eared cousin tearing her way across The Big City while huge crowds of nameless extras run for their lives below. Her most important moment is when she gets her Empire State Building shot by smashing Big Ben, marking her as Britain’s #1 kaiju mascot. Her bridge-crushing, bus-stomping, baby-avenging tour of London eats up a significant chunk of the 78min runtime, making up for lost time. There’s some surreal shoddiness in the offset green-screen composite photography, but for the most part the scale & relentlessness of Gorgo‘s urban destruction is genuinely impressive. The movie looks especially great in its current form, having recently been given the 4K Blu-ray restoration treatment by genre-cinema heroes Vinegar Syndrome. In the early stretch, you can tell why it was once featured on MST3K, since there’s plenty of dead air for the sarcastic robots to fill with mockery, but the energy picks up if you stick with it. Personally, I’m glad that this kind of vintage schlock is treated with more sincerely loving archival reverence these days, especially given Gorgo’s historical significance as a foreign dignitary of great British significance.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Beast Pageant (2010)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the industrial fantasy adventure The Beast Pageant (2010).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 Murder! (1930)
09:00 Tromeo & Juliet (1996)
13:00 Eden Lake (2008)
21:00 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)
31:00 Dooba Dooba (2026)
37:07 The Testament of Ann Lee (2025)
45:13 The Plague (2025)
52:46 All You Need is Kill (2026)
57:30 Tangerine (2015)
1:01:22 Tale of Tales (2016)
1:06:00 Mandibles (2021)
1:10:15 The Beach Bum (2019)
1:16:16 The Lure (2017)
1:18:50 Mississippi Masala (1991)
1:22:37 Two Sleepy People (2026)

1:26:00 The Beast Pageant (2010)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Host (2006)

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When we discussed our conflicting feelings about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Brandon likened it to how Spanish critics have had to explain to English-speaking audiences that Pedro Almodóvar’s work in his native language has always been purposefully arch & overly theatrical. Specifically, the discourse revolved around allegations that English speakers perceive Almodóvar’s Spanish language works through a kind of veil of European exoticism while accurately identifying the more over-the-top and camp sensibilities in his recent films for audiences in the Western Hemisphere, which may also be the case with del Toro’s filmography. I’ve occasionally wondered about this in relation to last year’s Mickey 17, which was an overall disappointment to me as a Bong Joon-Ho fan, and which I dismissed as an example of his tendency to talk down to Western audiences that didn’t work for me this time, as it had in Snowpiercer. Was it possible that I was viewing Bong’s works in his native tongue through some kind of reverential veil and that Memories of Murder and Parasite were also over the top (outside of the moments of levity that were obvious across cultures) and I wasn’t picking up on it because I don’t speak Korean? Luckily, a viewing of Bong’s 2006 film The Host assuaged these doubts; when he’s going over the top, there’s no way to miss it. 

Half a decade after an American pathologist orders his Korean assistant to circumvent safety regulations about the disposal of toxic chemicals by directing him to pour (hundreds of bottles of) formaldehyde into a drain that eventually empties into the Han River, a mutant river beast emerges, killing dozens of people and abducting others. One of the abducted (and presumed deceased) is Park Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), the daughter of single father Gang-du (frequent Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho), a lazy manchild with bleached hair. Gang-du assists his father Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong) in the operation of a riverside snack bar that they occupy as well, but his “assistance” is hampered by his apparent laziness and frequent napping, and his overall flaws are further communicated by his ill-advised choice to give his daughter a beer. The two of them are excited to watch Nam-joo (Bae Doona), Gang-du’s sister and Hyun-seo’s aunt, in the Olympic archery competition, but her primary character traits of being extremely proficient but hesitant and timid are telegraphed by her receipt of “only” the bronze medal as she allowed her time clock to run out. Hee-bong’s third child, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is the only one to have gone to college, but his academic achievement has not netted him a job offer, and he’s taken refuge in the bottle. 

When the monster first emerges from the river, Gang-du manages to put up a pretty good effort, assisting a nearby American soldier who charges into the fray. He grabs Hyun-seo by the hand to flee and makes it some distance before falling, grabbing her again, and continuing to run, only to look down and see that he’s grabbed the wrong child in the fracas and is forced to watch helplessly as the monster brings her to the other side of the river and disappears. The Park family comes together in the wake of this tragedy, but during a mass memorial for the victims, a disease control team arrives in hazmat suits and advises that American scientists have theorized that some of the wounds left behind on survivors may indicate that the animal is a carrier for an unknown virus, and all present are shuttled off to a hospital for quarantine. Gang-du gets a call from Hyun-seo that indicates she’s still alive, and the Parks have to escape quarantine and work together to try and find the beast’s lair in the sewers before it’s too late. 

This is an unusual turn for Song Kang-ho as this is the first time I found it difficult to like him (at least in Bong’s filmography; he’s had a few effective villainous turns when working with Park Chan-Wook). It’s not his fault that his entire generation of the Park clan seems to be afflicted with narcolepsy, but his frequent sleepiness aside, he still does a lot of things that make him seem like a goofy old stoner in an American film about a guy who’s refused to grow up, even after having a child. That did not endear him to me as a character, especially when he later tries to explain to the authorities that he received a phone call from his presumed dead daughter and can’t hold it together long enough to explain this clearly. Instead he simply insists that “She’s deceased, but she’s not dead,” which doesn’t do him any favors, and not even the presence of his famous Olympian sister is enough to get anyone to listen to him. It’s in all of this that Bong is going very broad with the comedy, if it wasn’t already clear from the awkwardly long sequence in which Gang-du causes such a scene at the memorial that the rest of the Park family get involved in the bawl/brawl and security has to step in. It’s as campy as his movies for a Western audience, which comes through at the end when a forced lobotomy seems to suddenly make him hypercompetent. It’s not subtle, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief and rest assured I’m not simply elevating his Korean language films out of ignorance. 

There are other hallmarks of Bong’s work here, of course. It wouldn’t be a Bong Joon-Ho feature without some political commentary; it’s no surprise that American interference is the initial cause of the problem. On the cover of the DVD for the film is a pull-quote that says The Host “is on par with Jaws!” and while that’s a decent point of comparison, the film is much more like the original Godzilla in that it’s about an amphibious kaiju awakened (or in this case mutated) by American negligence, with tragic consequences for the respective coastal/island Asian nation states. Here, American interventionism continues throughout as a narrative thread, from the appearance of U.S. soldier Donald White at the first emergence of the beast from the river, to the American C.D.C. getting involved in quarantine and containment, eventually taking over the assault on the creature with a chemical weapon called Agent Yellow. That this deployment does virtually no long term damage to the creature (it’s up to Nam-il dousing it in gasoline, Nam-joo setting it ablaze with a burning arrow, and Gang-du stabbing it with a broken traffic post to bring it down) while harming if not killing the dozens of protestors who are opposed to the release of dangerous chemicals is, as always, a fun insight into Bong’s politics. Even when he’s doing a silly one, he’s still unmistakably at the helm. It’s worth noting as well that Gang-du’s aforementioned lobotomy was performed when he understood enough English to overhear a conversation in which an American scientist admits that there’s been no additional evidence of a virus and that they’re all in over their heads. 

In 2006 when the film was released, it was undoubtedly a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of his other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Primate (2026)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the first major theatrical release of the year: Johannes Roberts’s killer-chimp horror pic Primate (2026).

00:00 Welcome
03:06 The Islands of Yann Gonzalez (2006 – 2017)
07:51 The Wild Boys (2017)
12:10 Café Flesh (1982)
17:26 Star Trek – Section 31 (2025)
19:59 Rachel Getting Married (2008)
26:00 The Housemaid (2025)
32:00 Paris, Texas (1984)
36:10 The Host (2006)
42:04 Soul Survivors (2001)
47:46 The Lord of the Rings (2001 – 2003)
53:46 Looper (2012)
57:54 Bean (1997)
1:00:43 Eve’s Bayou (1997)
1:05:48 Peeping Tom (1960)
1:09:38 Sleeping Beauty (1959)
1:14:52 The Age of Innocence (1993)
1:18:46 Breakdown (1997)
1:20:38 Shakedown (1988)
1:24:35 Dressed to Kill (1980)
1:28:55 Priscilla (2023)
1:31:07 Megadoc (2025)
1:34:20 Holes (2003)
1:38:29 THX-1138 (1971)
1:43:41 The Lighthouse (2019)

1:46:00 Primate (2026)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew