fantasy

Return to Oz (1985)

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My first obsession as a child was with Oz. The MGM musical has been a part of my life for so long that I can’t recall the first time I saw it, as its entrance into my life predates my earliest still-retained memories. I can recall the first time I saw any other Oz-related media, however, as I can still remember—even if distantly and vaguely—a Christmas that we spent at my grandparents’ cold New Jersey apartment when I was four years old. They had HBO, and in the early hours of the morning, with the scent of Community Coffee (which we always brought to my grandparents when travelling, as well as several containers of Tony Chachere’s, both of these being luxuries they couldn’t obtain in the north) and my grandmother’s Marlboro Reds in the air, I watched an episode of an animated series featuring Dorothy and company. This was a revelation to me, that there was more Oz to know, and I immediately started to devour as much of it as was available. I was reading by age five and although the early 20th century diction of the Oz books was somewhat difficult to parse, most of the versions available at my library were illustrated, and this was enough for the early years. But what affected me even more than the Judy Garland film was its long distant Fairuza Balk-starring sequel, Return to Oz, which was exactly the kind of proto-horror that my young brain was attuned to. 

Return to Oz opens in Kansas, where the reality of post-tornado living is dreary and dire (and, given the age that I was when I first saw it, likely felt familiar to me in the wake of Hurricane Andrew). It’s nearly winter and the new house isn’t complete, and while Dorothy excuses Uncle Henry’s tendency to stare into space with his feet up, Aunt Em knows that it’s PTSD, even if the terminology doesn’t exist yet. Still, she’s more concerned with young Dorothy’s mental state, given that the little girl no longer sleeps through the night (when she sleeps at all) and is insistent that her imaginary journey to fairyland and the friends she made there are real. Em’s desperation to do the right thing for her niece leads her to leave the girl in the care of a doctor named Worley (Nicol Williamson) and his severe-faced nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh) overnight, where they promise that the newly discovered “science” of electroshock therapy will cure all of Dorothy’s ills. A storm comes in the night that allows Dorothy an opportunity to escape, which she does, although she ends up falling into a river; climbing aboard some floating debris, she falls asleep, only to discover that she has awakened near Oz, and is in the company of Billina, one of her chickens, who has not laid an egg since the tornado. 

Dorothy quickly discovers an Oz in ruins. Although she finds the old house she first arrived to Oz in, there’s no Munchkin village nearby; the yellow brick road she travelled for much of the first film is in a state of advanced disrepair; the Emerald City’s brilliant gemstones have vanished as the city’s architecture lies in ruins. Worse, the city itself is ruled by the Wheelers, a pack of feral Klaus Kinski-looking men who travel on all fours on legs that end in squealing wheels. Hiding from them, she finds “the royal army of Oz,” which consists of a single individual, a mechanical man named Tik-Tok who is awakened via a series of wind-up keys. The inhabitants of the city have all been turned to stone by magic, with only Tik-Tok having survived this transformation unharmed by virtue of not quite truly being alive. He’s only the first of Oz’s inhabitants to join Dorothy’s new adventuring party, however, as she also soon collects Jack Pumpkinhead—a Jack o’ Lantern/scarecrow hybrid brought to life in order to scare the witch Mombi (Marsh again)—who governs the empty Emerald City as regent for the Nome King (Williamson again). The final member of the group is the “Gump,” a loathsome creature that Dorothy and company build out of old furniture and assorted attic garbage and bring to life via the same magic powder as Jack was in order to escape Mombi. Adventure awaits! 

Although it may not be the most valuable element of media made for children, I do think one of the things that makes a piece of kid-oriented art have some sense of staying power is the extent to which it encourages imaginary play. A kid who loves The Land Before Time will get just as much pleasure out of going to the playground and pretending to be Littlefoot with their friends as they would out of rewatching the movie. I vividly remember running around in my front yard with my mom as a kid, sometimes on all fours, shouting “To the meadow! To the meadow!” in recreation of a scene from Bambi; the Little Golden Book Scuffy the Tugboat encouraged me to get outside in the rain and play with my own toy boat, and my mother still uses “There’s enough to float Scuffy” as a descriptor of how much rainfall she gets when I call her. Even more so than The Wizard of Oz, The Return to Oz capitalizes on this inherent hunger that children have to create the magical out of the mundane, and it does so using the same extratextual decision that Wizard did—that Oz contains “echoes” of the real world—in a more deliberate way. In the earlier film, this was much more explicitly a way of telling the audience that Dorothy’s adventures were just a dream all along, that her companions were the farmhands and the witch was Mrs. Gulch, translated into her fantastical dreams. As an official sequel, Return follows that same narrative choice, but more subtly and arguably more fantastically. Besides the obvious correlation between Worley/the Nome King and Wilson/Mombi, we also see Dorothy’s “inspiration” for Tik-Tok in the form of the shock therapy device, and she’s given a tiny jack o’ lantern by another patient (who is the spitting image of the missing Ozma, princess of Oz, who also happened to be Jack Pumpkinhead’s “mother”). 

This is something that all children do, applying personality to toys and items and giving them voices and roles in their imaginary play. Even if kids don’t pick up on that being what’s happening in the film, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t unconsciously get absorbed and make their internal worlds just that much more magical. That’s not even counting the number of kids who realized that they could imagine returning to a fantasy land in disarray as a new adventure to play out, following the yellow brick road once more, but one that’s twisted and broken. What if I pretended I was in NeverNeverLand, but without Peter? What if Fantasia needed another Bastian to give the Empress a new name? What if Narnia fell? (Admittedly, Prince Caspian opens in the ruins of the Pevensie’s castle Cair Paravel and The Last Battle features the actual end of Narnia, but you get what I’m saying.) 

I’ve spent enough time praising the film for its potential to inspire imagination, which, while valid, isn’t praise for the film as a text unto itself. Every time I watch Return, I discover (or rediscover) something new to love about it. For one thing, this is a film that I never really thought of as being funny when I was a kid, but there are one-liners and jokes aplenty that will no doubt appeal to any adults in the audience (one of my favorite smirkers is Dorothy’s reply to Jack’s confusion that Tik-Tok might still be able to talk after his “thinking” spring had run out, which is to say that “It happens to people all the time”). My favorite thing about the film is the presence of the copper kettle-like Tik-Tok, who was always my favorite character in the books as well, with the eighth book in the series, Tik-Tok of Oz (specifically the one with this less-than-honest cover) being read no less than fifty times in my childhood. He’s just adorable. I love him. Billina is perhaps the second best non-human actor in the film, a Henson Company creation that’s such a perfect recreation of a Buff Cochin Bantam hen that there are moments where I know she’s a puppet and others where I know she’s a real chicken, but there are many more where I could not tell you if she’s “real” or not to save my life. 

If the general public remembers this one at all, it’s usually negatively in comparison to their memory of the MGM picture, or they remember this one specifically for being on the scary side. While Wizard’s Wicked Witch of the West scared generations of children, this film had multiple frights that play out over the course of the film. The escape from the sanatorium is notably frightening, as the nurse screams into the pouring thunderstorm for Dorothy and her benefactor to return before they fall into a river and nearly drown. The Wheelers are scary, with their squealing wheels (inspired by the squeaking gurneys in the Kansas portion, naturally), and several of them are turned to sand and desiccate before blowing away when they fall into the Deadly Desert while pursuing Dorothy and friends. The Nome King’s death as he becomes more rocklike before crumbling and melting away in a hellish fire, his stone skeleton frozen into a screaming death face before it eventually crumbles, is also noteworthy, as is much to do with the Nomes and their kingdom in the first place (their faces moving about in stop motion on various rock faces remains impressive to this day). But the most memorable scene is one that I would argue remains one of the most chilling in all of cinema, including horror made for adults. At one point in the film, Dorothy must sneak into the chambers of Princess Mombi, which she has already seen contains dozens of glass-fronted cabinets containing the detached (but still living) heads of various Ozian women, which she changes to suit her mood as easily as changing hats. She awakens Mombi’s original head, which then begins chanting her name in a guttural, almost unearthly voice, as all the heads around her scream and Mombi’s headless body rises from her bed to attack. It’s fantastic!

It’s only a matter of time before this film gets lumped in with its intro-to-horror brethren as fodder for slop content along the lines of “CaN yOu BeLiEvE they showed THIS MOVIe to KiDs!!?!” that I’ve started to see pop up online. (Newsflash: if you’re under a certain age, you may not realize this, but art used to be created for multiple groups to enjoy and get something different out of because we didn’t all have individual devices programmed to shovel unchallenging, hyper attuned, algorithmically-driven, intellectually incurious fodder into our brains every waking hour). Enjoy it now before the internet tries to ruin it for you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

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Let me tell you a story. A human boy comes into possession of a bladeless sword hilt that only he can control and which only has a blade at his command. He teams up with a rogue pilot whose rough exterior belies a heart of gold and, alongside a sassy computer intelligence, they meet a space princess. They visit exotic locales like the desert, a swamp, and a hive of wretched scum and villainy. Before the end, the boy learns that he is part of a long line of people who wield a mystical power and who can appear after death as spectral guides in this metaphysical art, and he defeats an ancient evil in a dark cloak. Sounds like Star Wars, right?

I really didn’t know that much about Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. I’m not even really sure exactly when I managed to acquire a digital copy, or when I transferred that file to my phone for a potential future viewing (I’m not an Apple user so I’ve had the same phone for 4 years without a forced upgrade occurring as a result of planned obsolescence). I’m traveling at present and I did foresee that while journeying I might grow weary of the beautiful but nonetheless antiquated and challenging prose of Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s 1922 novel The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, and had planned ahead by downloading a couple of episodes of Peacemaker while I was on Wi-Fi. I did not foresee that the HBO app would simply not load at all once I was in airplane mode, and thus after failing to simply sleep on the flight, looked at what I had in my videos folder, and there Starchaser was, waiting for me to finally give it my attention. Many worse things have happened on airplanes recently than watching Starchaser, but I still nonetheless failed to be engrossed. 

The eponymous Orin is an enslaved human miner living beneath the surface of the planet Trinia, where he and other humans toil with laser diggers for volatile crystals, which are then “fed” to a giant dragon-like face when the slaves are visited by their god, Zygon. One day, Orin finds a sword buried in the rock, and when he frees it, the grandfather of his girlfriend Elan tells him that it may be part of an ancient legend about a liberator, before the sword projects an image of an old man who speaks a muddled prophecy, then the blade disappears. Elan’s grandfather is killed, prompting Orin and Elan to take actions which eventually result in them climbing into a crystal shipment and travelling through the dragon’s mouth, where the scales fall from their eyes about the nature of their enslavement, and Elan is killed by Zygon. Orin manages to dig his way up to the surface, where he meets a smug smuggler named Dagg Dibrimi and his smart-mouthed ship’s AI Arthur, although Dagg doesn’t believe Orin’s claims that there are slaves beneath Trinia’s surface. Dagg completes a hijacking of some of the crystals from one of Zygon’s freighters, and in the ensuing firefight, ends up in possession of an administrative fembot named Silica, whom he reprograms (through a not-very-funny scene in which we learn that the relevant circuits are in her posterior, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch), causing her to immediately become devoted to him. 

Along the way, the travelers are occasionally annoyed by a sprite-like “starfly,” which eventually directs Orin to discover a bomb hidden within the payment that Dagg receives for his services, eliciting Dagg’s loyalty, and the two of them eventually meet Aviana, the daughter of the local interplanetary governor. She recognizes the hilt from her historical studies and accesses a library file that reveals that the hilt belonged to the “Kha-Khan,” a group of legendary heroes from eons past who vanquish threats to humankind, although the last of the Kha-Khan disappeared from history after defeating a robot intelligence known as Nexus who sought to enslave humanity, at which point the hilt disappeared. And wouldn’t you just know it, it turns out that Nexus wasn’t really defeated; he simply rebranded as Zygon and got a new job as the overseer of the robotic underground miners of Triana, although he quickly replaced his initial automaton workers with human slaves so he could then reprogram the mechanical miners into warriors, and uh-oh, here comes the invasion fleet! They’re defeated by the ragtag group, of course, and the starfly reveals itself to be the Force, um, I mean the spirit of the Kha-Khans past, who appear to Orin and the others as Force ghosts, I mean, uh, regular ghosts, I guess. 

Director Steven Hahn worked mostly as a production manager on animated TV shows, with eighties juggernaut DIC as well as other studios, after getting his start with Ralph Bakshi working on his seminal work Wizards. During the off season for the various TV series that he was working on (like the Mister T animated series, Care Bears, the anglicization of French series Clémentine, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Star Wars: Droids), Hahn wanted to keep his Vietnamese animators busy. If you just read the Wikipedia page for this film, you might think, “Oh, how thoughtful,” but the quotation that he provided to the now-defunct sci-fi blog Topless Robot reveals that he, like George Lucas, was a man with dollar signs in his eyes more than anything: “I’d been working in television animation and owned a rather huge facility in Korea. I’ll tell you why I came to direct and produce this film. It’s not something you might expect. During the off-season, I had nothing else to do! When you own and run a big studio, it’s difficult to sit around and pay everyone a salary when there’s no work. So, I had to do something, and I thought, why not make an animated film?” There’s nothing artful in that, so it’s not really all that surprising that there’s nothing artful in the final product, either. 

I’m being a little harsh. There’s not nothing worthwhile here. Although all of the character designs for the men are ugly as sin and Princess Aviana looks like she was traced from a He-Man episode, the ship designs are relatively cool, and the robots that we see are inoffensive even if they’re not particularly imaginative. The film also manages to have a couple of cool sequences when it manages to break free from its lockstep dedication to slightly misremembering Star Wars, with the most striking images from the whole film coming close to the beginning and the end. For the former, it’s the appearance of the decomposing “mandroids” living in the Trinian swamps, cyborg ghouls that are creepy and off-putting, and it’s unfortunate that they warrant mention only in the scene in which they appear. For the latter, there’s a moment during the climactic space battle in which Orin accidentally opens a bay door, unwittingly ejecting all of the robotic troops within the hangar into open space, which was a fun visual. The space battles are the most interesting things that we get to witness, and it’s worth noting that this is probably because the film was created to cash in on 3D movies, so it’s clear that all the budget that didn’t go into making Orin and Dagg not hideous to look at went into making Dagg’s ship look cool. Money not exactly well spent, but I suppose it was put where it needed to be the most. It certainly didn’t go into score composition, as there are moments where Luke Skywalker’s theme and the Imperial March are imitated so clearly that it’s shocking that Hahn didn’t get into legal trouble. Not for the faint of heart or short of attention span, this is to be viewed solely if your only alternative is unconsciousness and you can’t seem to sleep.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Legend of Ochi (2025)

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For decades, whenever someone cited the “uncanny valley” effect of modern filmmaking, they were referring to the off-putting resemblance of CGI to real-life humanity. As computer technology inches nearer to photographic accuracy, the ways in which the images are still just slightly off become monstrously horrific, especially when rendering human faces. As a result, movie nerds tend to fetishize the practical effects of yesteryear, preferring the blatant artifice of movie-magic techniques like stop-motion, animatronics, and latex makeup transformations to the uncanny computer effects of our current corporate hellscape. Ironically, that fetishism has recently led to an entirely new uncanny valley forming between advanced practical effects and the CG graphics they’re meant to counteract. For instance, when the stop-motion Wallace & Gromit shorts were mostly made by Nick Park’s hands in the early 90s, you could see the lumpy imperfections of his fingerprints in the characters’ clay bodies, unmistakably marking them with evidence of human touch. Now that Wallace & Gromit features like Vengeance Most Fowl are being produced by hundreds of collaborators for major studios like Netflix, those fingerprints have to be artificially applied, intentionally warping the clay so the machine-printed faces can’t be mistaken for computer animation. Likewise, the new children’s fantasy-adventure The Legend of Ochi features an animatronic puppet so perfect in construction & operation that it uncannily resembles its CGI equivalents in movies from less discerning filmmakers. Music video director Isaiah Saxon has spent years perfecting the puppetry & matte paintings of his feature-film debut to revive an industry overrun by computer-generated tedium with some old-world movie magic and old-fashioned awe. He didn’t think to artificially muck up the final product like Aardman Animations, though, and the result is so uncannily similar to CGI that you have to wonder why he even bothered.

The titular Ochi are magical creatures brought to life via animatronic puppetry. The species largely resembles the golden snub-nosed monkeys of China, except that its bites are poisonous and its children are adorned with Mogwai ears for maximum cuteness. The Ochi are introduced to the audience in a scientific text titled Carpathian Beasts & Demons to help distinguish them from the real-life primates they resemble. Their presence on the fictional, Romania-adjacent island of Carpathia is treated as vampiric & monstrous, with a crazed patriarch played by Willem Dafoe training a new generation of boys to hunt & kill the supposedly demonic beasts on sight. His daughter is not so convinced of the nobility in this mission, and she quickly befriends a baby Ochi left behind by one of her father’s hunts. The rest of the movie is an E.T.-inspired children’s adventure, in which the sullen teenager runs away from home to safely return the Ochi to his fleeing family in a coming-of-age act of rebellion. If there’s any modern update to that familiar formula, it’s in Dafoe’s mockery of Jordan Peterson-style manosphere philosophy, which he preaches to impressionable young boys while driving around his monster-truck chariot in antique battlefield armor. He has no particular interest in his daughter beyond her value as “a father’s greatest treasure,” while she rejects her extremely gendered role in the house by donning costume vampire fangs and cranking heavy metal tunes from the fictional band Hell Throne. The goodbye note she leaves when she runs away proudly declares, “I am strong and cool and don’t believe anything you say,” speaking for all teenage rebels everywhere in their universal language of sass. As a result, the movie should spiritually speak to any depressed loner children who resent their bloviating fathers—of which there is always an infinite supply—regardless of whether they’ve already seen an E.T. riff or three.

The Legend of Ochi evokes all of the childlike wonder and sarcastic teen humor needed to make this genre formula work, but neither of those elements are entirely convincing. Its teenage characters (Helena Zengel as the Ochi’s bestie and Finn Wolfhard as a burgeoning fuckboy who’s “only nice when no one’s looking”) mumble their lines under mops of greasy hair to the point of near indecipherability. They aim for deadpan comedy but overshoot to land at dead-eyed monotony instead. There are also long stretches of the adventure to Ochi territory that have no dialogue at all, which would test audiences’ patience at any age and suggests that Saxon isn’t used to filling up a feature-length runtime with his writing. The real disappointment is that the psychedelic magic of his past music video work for artists like Björk & Panda Bear fall short of inspiring awe here. His puppetry & matte-painting visual tricks, while admirably old-fashioned, are too technically perfect to convey their construction by human hands. When the trailer for the film first dropped, social media C.H.U.D.s baselessly accused Saxon of boosting his budget with A.I.-generated imagery, which had to be heartbreaking for an artist who spent multiple years fighting to render this passion-project fantasy world through the most practical, tactile methods possible. Still, the final result is a little too machine-perfect to inspire genuine awe, and you can easily see what stoked those accusations. There’s an uncanny valley effect in how close its state-of-the-art puppets resemble computer-generated images, leaving them a little off-putting & soulless despite the passionate craft behind them. Saxon technically did everything right here. The aesthetic is distinct; the puppets are cute and smoothly operated; the gender politics are pointed and relevant to the moment; the kids are authentically mopey & rebellious. That’s what makes it so frustrating that the movie never fully sings, even if it can demonstrably hit all the right notes in perfect pitch.

-Brandon Ledet

Gwen and the Book of Sand (1985)

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Gwen et le livre de sable (Gwen and the Book of Sand) is a 1985 animated feature directed by Jean-François Laguionie, with its illustrations and animations done in gouache, giving the whole film a very watercolor texture. The plot concerns Gwen, a teenage girl who is adopted into a nomadic tribe who live in a post-apocalyptic desert. One member of the tribe, Roseline, is identified as a witch, and is said to be over 170 years old, and it is through her we get what little knowledge we have of this world and how it came to be. She tells us that the gods destroyed the civilizations of the past, and that now the world is stalked by an Eldritch abomination called Makou, which periodically roams the desert and spews out reproductions of various household objects from the sky, usually of a gigantic variety. Of course, Roseline also believes that the walled city she and her people avoid and from which the Makou seems to originate is the afterlife and that those within it are spirits, but when we learn more about them later, it becomes clear that Roseline’s wisdom is incomplete and thus many of her concepts of the universe’s function are inaccurate. In Gwen, Roseline sees a girl who has never known fear and respects this about her, but when Gwen and Roseline’s grandson Nokmoon sneak out one night to make love and fall asleep in a giant chest of drawers, Nokmoon ends up taken by the Makou. As the rest of the tribe moves on, Roseline and Nokmoon journey to the “afterlife” to try and rescue him. 

This film, like The Tragedy of Man, is currently available in a remastered edition from boutique home video retailer Deaf Crocodile. I got to see it on the big screen at my local arthouse, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Although the motion of the animation is limited at times, that minimal movement lends the whole thing a storybook quality, rendering Gwen as a post-apocalyptic fairytale. It’s a fairly short feature, clocking in at under 70 minutes, but it feels no less fully realized than a film that was twice its length. The desert features fantastical creatures that feel like revisitations of earlier French animation experiments in design; there’s nothing as strange here as what you might see in La Planète sauvage or Les Maîtres du temps, but they are of a kind. The desert nomads live solely off of a diet of feathers harvested from a mutant ostrich, and the only light that they have at night comes from a bioluminescent scorpion. Where the film gets its most surreal visual elements is in the “gifts” of the Makou, as giant watering cans reign from the sky and Gwen and Roseline navigate a labyrinth of doors or summit a mountain range of clocks. We eventually learn that these items are generated by the Makou is response to religious supplication from the people who dwell within the walled city, where religion has dissolved into a unified cargo cult centered around the titular book of sand, which is in actuality a home goods catalogue from before the collapse of civilization. Their hymns consist of recitations of product descriptions, which then prompt the Makou into creating them. The leaders of this “faith” are two twin brothers who observe the captive Nokmoon’s psychically projected dreams and hope that this can help them to prompt the Makou to create something “alive” rather than the inanimate objects that it normally produces. 

The mechanics of all of this are mostly irrelevant. The world-building exists solely to allow for the visuals, and that’s where the film shines. Gwen is able to rescue Nokmoon because this is that kind of fable, and it’s mostly an accident. The twin priests observe that a spiral image in Nokmoon’s dream resembles the product image of a particular firework, and prompt their faithful throng into singing it into existence via the Makou, which backfires when the people below are terrified by the suddenly bright, loud heavens. Gwen’s presence in the climax has no real bearing on the events there, except that she is able to bring Nokmoon home. She knows a bit more about the world now than Roseline does, but she lets the old woman continue to believe as she always has. Even if that story is a little confusing for the audience (and there are certainly some things left up to interpretation and conjecture, which is why I would recommend watching this one with a friend), it’s the sumptuous use of a non-standard artistic technique that makes this one worth finding and checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Dreamchild (1985)

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Just one year after the classic fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood” got a post-modern feminist reexamination in The Company of Wolves, the classic children’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland got the same treatment in the less-seen, less-discussed Dreamchild. Both films juxtapose real-life sexual predation against its warped fantasy-realm mirror reflections, picking at the gender politics of their selected works to find surprising, uncomfortable nuance. For its part, The Company of Wolves asks how much tales like “Little Red Riding Hood” were meant to protect young women from the sexual predation of older men vs. how much they were meant to scare them off from participating in their own sexual development & pleasure. Likewise, Dreamchild revisits the sexual predation behind the writing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to question just how diabolical Lewis Carroll’s relationship with his young muse was, or if there’s room to find his fixation on her empathetically tragic. The main difference between these two literary autopsies is that “Little Red Riding Hood” is a stand-in for all young women everywhere, while “Alice” was a real-life victim with her own name and her own internal life, which makes for a much more delicate, dangerous balancing act.

Carol Browne stars as the real-life Alice Hargreaves in her twilight years, summoned to a Depression Era NYC to commemorate the 100th birthday of the deceased author who made her famous as a child. American journalists hound the prim & elderly English woman the second she hits the shore, desperate for whimsical pull-quotes from The Real Alice to fluff up their human-interest columns. The barrage of questions about her childhood family acquaintance Reverend Charles L. Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) sends her into a tailspin of repressed memories & demented hallucinations, effectively re-traumatizing the poor woman for the sake of a disposable puff piece. Preparing for an upcoming Columbia University speech to celebrate Dodgson’s birthday, she becomes unmoored in time, reliving both traumatic moments as her childhood self and fantastic moments as her famous literary avatar. It quickly becomes apparent in flashback that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was written as an elaborate grooming tactic, with the middle-aged Dodgson hoping to woo the 10-year-old Hargreaves into being his eventual bride. That toxic dynamic has soured her lifelong relationship with the Wonderland books in a way that the American press is entirely uninterested in interrogating, so she has to work through it isolated in her own dreams & memories. The nuance of that discomfort arises in recalling her own active participation & manipulation of the author-muse dynamic as a child, something she does not care to remember.

A less thoughtful version of this story might’ve characterized Alice Hargreaves as a victim first and a victim only, but Dreamchild puts a lot of work into fleshing her out as a thorny, complicated human being. She’s a hard-ass social tyrant in both her 80s & her adolescence, and she was too sharp as a child not to notice the unseemly power she had over Dodgson as her much-older admirer. Ian Holm does an incredible job invoking both menace and pity as the lonely, nerdy Dodgson, pining after a child in a way even he knows is wrong. The young Alice pretends not to catch on, but plays games with the older man’s heart in a way that recalls the cruelty of a school-age bully. Meanwhile, the 1930s NYC segments draw a parallel between their delicate power imbalance and the normal, socially accepted rhythms of heterosexual courtship, with a fuckboy reporter (played by Peter Gallagher) hounding the elderly Hargreaves’s teenage assistant for romantic connection so he can exploit her access for personal profit. The fully grown men are fully aware how vulnerable the younger women they pursue are to their gendered power & privilege, and they choose to cross the line anyway. What seems to haunt Hargreaves in her final days is how aware she was of that one-sided romantic dynamic as a child, and the ways in which manipulated it for her own amusement. It’s a difficult topic to discuss without slipping into blaming victims or excusing abuse, but the movie pulls it off.

Dreamchild was the brainchild of screenwriter Dennis Potter, whose name is all over the credits as a producer who self-funded the project. All of the visual panache of the fantasy sequences arrive courtesy of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, who illustrate several key characters from the Wonderland & Looking Glass canon as nightmarish ghouls who haunt Alice Hargreaves in her old age. Those sequences are relatively sparse, though, and most of the runtime reflects Potter’s background as a journalist and television writer, staging lengthy exchanges of dialogue in hotel rooms & press offices. In those conversations, Potter pokes at the differences between American & British cultures’ respective relationships with money and, more bravely, the differences between 19th & 20th Century cultures’ respective relationships with age-gap courtship. As depicted in the film, Alice Hargreaves suffered self-conflicted feelings on both subjects and her own personal participation in them. She is, undoubtedly, Lewis Carroll’s victim, in that her entire life is unfairly shaped by his immoral yearning for her as a child. However, Potter finds enough grey-area nuance in her victimhood to allow her to appear onscreen as a fully realized human being instead of a historic symbol of trauma and abuse. Lewis Carroll himself is even extended that grace, regardless of whether he deserves it.

-Brandon Ledet

Leila and the Wolves (1984)

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Leila and the Wolves is a 1984 docu-drama that took over half a decade to make, premiering at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in West Germany and then going underground for decades at a time. It got a re-release in the U.K. twenty-four years later at an event called “Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran” in 2008, then disappeared again for some time after that before popping up in various European festivals before getting proper stateside screenings this year with limited releases in the U.S. and Canada. Ten years prior to its first release, the film’s Lebanese director Heiny Srour (Leila has no credited writer, as many of the stories of which it is comprised were real experiences Srour collected) was the first Arab woman to have a film considered at Cannes, with her 1974 documentary The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. Leila tackles a similar subject matter, focusing on the forgotten/erased role of women in the liberation movements of Lebanon and Palestine in the twentieth century. 

The film isn’t invested in recounting the broader history prior to the 1920 British occupation, and some familiarity with the region is helpful. Prior to its dissolution in 1922, the Ottoman Empire controlled portions of the Middle East that are now occupied, in whole or in part, by Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Beginning in 1915, the government of the U.K., represented by Britain’s senior ambassador to Egypt, Henry McMahon, and Hussein bin Ali of the Kingdom of Hejaz (the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula which is now partitioned into parts of Saudi Arabia and Jordan) exchanged a series of letters. Called the McMahon–Hussein correspondence, this exchange committed Britain to recognition of an independent Arab state in the Middle East in exchange for assistance in fighting the Ottomans as part of the Middle Eastern theatre of WWI. This prompted the Arab Revolt (1916-1918), which ultimately led to the end of Ottoman control of the area; in combination with the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), the Ottoman Empire was, as they say, history. 

Britain, as it is wont to do, reneged on this promise, and secretly signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement with the French Third Republic, which set forth the terms under which Britain and France would partition the remains of the Ottoman Empire. This led to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, which placed Palestine (and an area called Transjordan which now comprises parts of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) under British rule, meaning that the Palestinians had essentially assisted in their liberation from one foreign power only to be stabbed in the back by their supposed allies, who became their new occupiers in 1920. “Mandatory Palestine” existed as a geopolitical extension of British rule for just shy of three decades, until 1948. If you’ve paid attention to the news at all during the time that you’ve been alive, then you know the rest. 

In Leila and the Wolves, Nabila Zeitouni is Leila, a modern Lebanese woman currently residing in London. Her friend, a man played by Rafik Ali Ahmad, is planning a showcase of photographs depicting various acts of resistance against Western occupying forces. Leila protests that all of the photographs depict only what the men of the region did to resist occupation, asking where the evidence of women’s contribution to the efforts are. Her friend laughs her off, saying that women “weren’t involved with politics at the time.” Following this, Leila goes on an extended out of body experience/astral journey through and into the photographs and the events depicted therein. After encountering a group of women in black burqas and niqab in a semicircle on a beach, watching men splash about in the surf without a care in the world, Leila moves through time, with mostly newly shot recreations but also incorporating archive footage where available. 

In a photo of men resisting British soldiers (in their ridiculous little imperial uniform shorts) and driving them down an alley, we pan out to see the women in the adjacent homes standing on their balconies, ready to pour boiling water down on the retreating occupiers. In a time of greater lockdown and restriction, the resistance takes advantage of the fact that women planning a wedding will be regarded as being beneath suspicion to use them as information couriers to organize activity (humorously, in this sequence, Ali Ahmad plays a quisling translator for the Brits, consciously intertwining this role with that of the dismissive curator). Later still, women are more actively engaged in the fighting, including participation in the exchange of gunfire. We also travel through Leila’s subconscious as well, as there are a few overt fantasy sequences. The first sees Leila as she might be if she accepts the narrative of female pacificity and political disengagement, a glimpse into an imagined future in which she sits in a room surrounded by her daughters and their daughters’ daughters. The questions that she asks of them are banal and concerned only about familial relations. Which daughter are you? Married? Kids yet? Only one? Are you my granddaughter? Are you married yet? Towards the film’s end, Leila finds herself in another fantasy sequence amidst the wreckage of ancient buildings, dancing with nearly a dozen skeletons in black garb. 

Across the spectrum of reviews I read, I don’t think I ever saw any of them connect the film to what stands out to me the most about it, which is its punk sensibility. Leila is clearly anti-establishment in its views, as there’s never a question about the film’s certitude of the morality of resisting foreign occupation, and it instead focuses on the necessity of remembering all the fallen. During my viewing, I was struck by the way that there was a disjointedness to the narrative; this is not entirely to its detriment, as this made the experience somewhat trancelike and thus all the more immersive, but it’s not what one would call seamless. In this way, it brought to mind one of Brandon’s favorites, Born in Flames, which can also be characterized by its piecemeal construction, but which, to quote him, is a “work of radical politics that transcends its jumbled narrative.” Because our discussion of it on the podcast was so fresh in my mind, I also kept thinking of how he described the punk ethos of Times Square as well; I think that it’s the DIY effect of the film’s use of recreations, although this one is also technically impressive in all that it accomplishes in ways that most punk films are not. Regardless, it’s an important and informative document of its past and our present, connected across time and as relevant as ever. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Doll (1919)

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There’s a naive impulse in modern audiences to look back to the early, silent days of cinema as harmless & quaint. Something about the stage-bound sets, for-the-back-rows vaudevillian performances, and hand-cranked camera speeds leads people to dismiss the early decades of cinema as being out of date to the point of total irrelevance. When you actually watch those movies in full, however, you’ll find they often deal in spectacle, politics, and humor with the same sharpness as any modern work (the good ones, anyway). For instance, one of the better Hollywood studio pictures of the year so far is the technophobic horror romcom Companion, starring Sophie Thatcher as an AI sexbot who’s unaware that she’s not a fully autonomous human being. Her artificiality is a major point of attraction for the tech-bro incel who purchased her (for selfish schemes not worth fully outlining here), raising questions about how the misogynist radicalization of young men has corrupted modern gender dynamics to the point where true, genuine love is a cultural impossibility. The political arguments & technological details of that premise may sound like they could only belong to a movie from the 2020s, but they’re also present in Ernst Lubitsch’s silent comedy The Doll, made in Germany over a century ago.

In The Doll, a pampered young man is pressured by his dying baron uncle to get married, so that he can properly claim his noble inheritance. The fop responds to this request with revulsion, as he is both afraid & spiteful of women. After being chased around his little German village—Scooby-Doo style—by every marriageable maiden in shouting distance, he finds sanctuary among monks in a local monastery, where finds the comforts of things he loves almost as much as he loathes women: meat, beer, and men. While in hiding he is handed an advertisement for a mad-scientist dollmaker (named Hilarius) who makes lifelike automatons resembling flesh-and-blood women, marketed to “bachelors, widows, and misogynists.” He answers the ad in a scheme to pass off the automaton as his fiancée and fool his uncle so that he doesn’t have to interact with any actual women. Things immediately go awry when the doll is broken before purchase and replaced with the dollmaker’s anarchically bratty daughter, who’s more prone to misbehave than any of the maidens he was in danger of marrying in the first place. As the dandy misogynist attempts to treat his new, control-operated bride like a piece of furniture, she finds ways to undermine his caddish behavior and stand up for herself as a fellow human being, with her own needs & desires, all while keeping up the ruse that she’s a wind-up doll.

It would be foolish to assume that Lubitsch was somehow unaware of the political or sexual implications in this antique relic, which is just as much of a high-style gender warfare comedy as Companion. True to the sex-positive mayhem of the more famous farces he’d later make in Hollywood (Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, To Be Or Not to Be, etc.), The Doll‘s human-posing-as-an-automaton conceit leads to a myriad of sex gags in which “the doll” is placed in men’s intimate spaces within the monastery where no proper woman would ever be allowed unsupervised. The comedian playing that doll, Ossi Oswalda, also starred in a Lubitsch picture the previous year titled I Don’t Want to be a Man! that features her in drag, drunkenly making out with a fellow man at an all-night ball in some proto-Victor/Victoria genderfuckery. In both cases, it’s clear to me that sneaking those sex jokes past moralistic censorship was Lubitsch’s primary goal, but he justified those jokes by couching them in the general political gender commentary that afford the films their social value (beyond just being funny). In I Don’t Want to be a Man, that commentary is mostly about how men’s societal privileges come with their own set of stressful societal pressures, while The Doll is about those privileged men’s bone-deep misogyny — identifying it as a rightful target for mockery.

I’m used to Lubitsch’s comedies being sexually & politically pointed in this way, but I’m not used to them being as outright fantastical as The Doll. He’s practically doing a George Méliès impersonation here, leaning into the illusionary magic of early, inventive cinema with color-tinted frames and hand-built fantasy sets. The very first scene features Lubitsch himself constructing a dollhouse set for the audience’s entertainment, which he then populates with two inanimate dolls. From there, we’re immersed inside that artificial dollhouse world, with the dolls from the opening replaced by real-life human actors. Cardboard cutouts of the sun, the moon, trees, and clouds decorate the backdrops of every exterior scene with hand-illustrated detail. Horses are never actually horses; they’re humans in a shared costume, complete with the tacked-on tail of a stuffed animal. This artificiality is wonderfully carried over to Oswalda’s performance as the non-automaton feminist, as she moves in jerky, robotic obedience whenever her husband is looking but immediately switches to wild, animalistic behavior whenever on her own. It’s a gorgeous, imaginative work of visual art that’s been echoed in modern films from directors like Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, and—in the case of Beau is Afraid—Ari Aster. Once you look past the technical markers of its era, there’s nothing outdated or quaint about it.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Buddha’s Palm (1982)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Shaw Brothers’ laser-wizards martial arts actioner Buddha’s Palm (1982).

00:00 Welcome

01:37 Eephus (2025)
04:45 Looney Tunes – The Day The Earth Blew Up (2025)
09:03 Black Bag (2025)
15:40 Misericordia (2025)
21:16 The Shrouds (2025)
27:47 Ash (2025)
34:32 The Premature Burial (1962)
39:38 The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
48:20 Dark Intruder (1965)
50:26 Imitation of Life (1959)
57:01 The Unbelievable Truth (1989)
1:00:43 Secret Mall Apartment (2025)
1:05:27 Perfect Blue (1997)
1:12:11 In Fabric (2019)

1:19:00 Buddha’s Palm (1982)

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

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

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The standout sequence in Juliet of the Spirits that dropped my jaw lowest in the theater was its ugliest & most mundane. The 2015 restoration of the 1960s Fellini classic is, for the most part, a gorgeous swirl of vibrant color. It’s a dark fantasy movie in which the Italian master invents the cinematic language for later texts as disparate & monumental as Lynch’s dream sequences, Jodorowsky’s circuses, and Friedkin’s exorcisms, all rendered in sinfully lurid Technicolor. That was all expected, though. What really caught me off guard is when Fellini pauses his gaudy reverie to also invent the cinematic language for the television program Cheaters. It happens in the sequence where his real-life wife & muse Giuletta Masina visits the private detective agency that’s been trailing her husband, and they play back to her a full week of documented adulterous behavior. The way the head dick in charge narrates the sepia-tone surveillance footage with time stamps and sneering innuendo is so specific to the Joey Greco era of Cheaters that I now understand that reality TV show to be a loving homage to the film’s legacy. Such is the power of Fellini.

Much like an episode of Cheaters, watching Juliet of the Spirits feels like intruding on a private domestic dispute that’s really none of our business. Our director is working through his real-life conflicts with his wife by illustrating his own adulterous behavior onscreen, through the avatar of actor Mario Pisu. Giuletta Masina stars as Giuletta Boldrini, a wealthy but lonely housewife who’s increasingly isolated by the extramarital indulgences of her husband Giorgio, played by Pisu. As Giorgio spends increasingly long stretches away with his latest fling, Giuletta seeks spiritual advice from the dark arts, meeting with a series of psychics & mystics in search of a calmer, wiser perspective on her broken marriage. This pursuit opens her mind to a loud circus of perverted spirits & ghosts that constantly parade through her head, pulling her out of her Catholic comfort zone towards a larger religious truth: pleasure is the true religion, and she should be cheating too. The whole thing plays like a plea from Fellini to his wife to start cheating on him to help balance things out and to take her mind off the marital injustice he initiated.

Unlearning Catholic guilt is easier said than done. The proto-Exorcist imagery results from a childhood memory in which Giuletta starred as a martyred saint in a church play, burned alive for the transgression of accepting Christ in her heart. Anytime the adult Giuletta considers indulging in an extramarital affair (with a handsome ghost, demon, or otherwise), her mind flashes back to this scarring memory, which has taught her to associate Earthly pleasure with guilt & pain. Everyone around her is fully enjoying what being alive has to offer—especially in the pleasures of the flesh—and yet Giuletta continues to fret, unable to let go and enjoy herself as much as her wandering husband. Buried somewhere in the film’s increasingly dreamlike imagery, there’s eventually a healing moment in which she frees her flaming inner child from her Catholic shackles and comforts her with a motherly embrace, but it’s still not enough to fully make up for what Giorgio has done to their marriage. Maybe Fellini’s admitting personal guilt there more than he’s attempting to shake his wife loose from her own self-limiting Catholic guilt. Again, it’s not really any of our business.

For all of its messy offscreen domestic drama and the deep psychological pain caused by religious repression, Juliet of the Spirits is often a light confection. Snazzy jazz scores the backyard wanderings of a mystic housecat and the Italo-fashion beachwear modeling of Giulietta’s fabulously amoral neighbor with no attempt to underline the dark-fantasy elements of the plot with any palpable menace. Fellini feels just as preoccupied with injecting eye-searing beauty into every frame of his first in-color picture as he is with working out his domestic issues with his wife. Even the candlesticks in the couple’s home are tinted lavender instead of the typical white, just to squeeze more color into the frame. It is, without question, the most gorgeous, surreal episode of Cheaters in the history of the show; and yes I am including the one where Joey Greco got stabbed on a boat.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (2024)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Belgian-French animated fantasy adventure Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (2024).

00:00 SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2024

07:49 Strangers on a Train (1951)
13:13 Laufey’s A Night at the Symphony (2024)
19:46 The Not-So-New 52
24:05 My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
30:09 Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024)
35:43 Nosferatu (2024)
40:14 Holding Back the Tide (2024)
43:45 Nickel Boys (2024)
48:50 Daaaaaalí! (2024)
52:04 Yannick (2024)
57:17 Wicked Part 1 (2024)
59:46 Flow (2024)

1:00:42 Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (2024)

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