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).
The easiest way for a low-budget horror movie to become a perennial classic is to stake its claim on a specific calendar date, so it has an annually recurring slot for ritual rewatches. This has been common knowledge since at least as far back as the first-wave slashers of the 1970s, with Black Christmas, Friday the 13th, and Halloween guaranteeing annual royalty checks from subsequent years’ cable TV broadcasts. Christmas & Halloween have proven to be popular seasonal settings in that scramble to claim a ritual calendar date, while other titles like April Fool’s Day, New Year’s Evil, and Mardi Gras Massacre have found much less competition in more casually celebrated holidays. 1981’s My Bloody Valentine staked its claim on Valentine’s Day relatively early, and has only been challenged by the occasional novelty like last year’s Heart Eyes or 2001’s Valentine in the decades since. It’s proven to be a difficult film to top for Valentine’s Day horror supremacy, since its killer’s method of ripping out victims’ hearts to stuff into heart-shaped Valentine chocolate boxes is the perfect balance of novelty & brutality needed to leave a mark on the genre. It also arrived early enough in the slasher cycle to participate in this Holiday Horror tradition with full sincerity, avoiding the Scream–era meta irony that ruins a good, silly scare with the distraction of self-awareness. If you want to celebrate Valentine’s Day with a classic horror title set on that holiday, there’s still really only one viable choice (give or take its relatively well-respected 2009 remake).
That’s what makes it so funny that My Bloody Valentine is a hat-on-a-hat situation. It would’ve been more than enough for it to stand out as a novelty slasher by delivering a killer who’s improbably activated by his home town’s Valentine’s Day celebrations. Instead, it adds the extra detail that its masked killer moonlights as a coalminer, inviting mine-specific tools & settings into each staged kill that have no direct association with the holiday in question. Yes, he uses his mining gear every kill, and yes, those kills are inspired by how much he hates his town’s annual Valentine’s Day dance. He’s a complicated guy with a lot going on. The more generic version of this slasher template can be found in the previous year’s Prom Night, in which a tragic childhood accident is avenged once those responsible are old enough to attend their senior prom. Shot in Canada but set in Anywhere, Small Town America, there’s nothing specific about the background details of Prom Night‘s setting — deliberately so. My Bloody Valentine was also shot in Canada (as frequently confirmed by the Canadian pronunciation of “sorry”), but you are unlikely to mistake it for the town you live in unless you happen to live in a cloistered coalmining community where every male person in your life has spent some time working in the mines. The inciting tragedy in this case was an accidental explosion that happened while the rest of the town was enjoying the local Valentine’s Day dance, carelessly leaving five workers to perish in the mines below. So, whenever the town decides it’s time to move on with their lives and bring back their Valentine’s Day traditions, masked killer Harry Warden returns to avenge his fallen coworkers (whom he unfortunately had to cannibalize to stay alive in the maddening days leading up to his own rescue). It’s two seemingly unrelated things—Valentine’s & coalmining—forever welded together in a single ludicrous screenplay.
My Bloody Valentine attempts to smooth over the discordance between its two competing novelty settings by focusing on the kind of love-triangle romance that typically springs up when you live in a small town where everyone knows each other from cradle to grave. You see, local golden boy T.J. (Paul Kelman) tried to leave small-town life behind by moving away to Los Angeles, but he quickly crashed & burned and shamefully found himself back in the mines. While T.J. was gone, his golden-haired girlfriend Sarah (Lori Hallier) started up a new relationship with his former bestie Axel (Neil Affleck), but now that he’s back in town he wants to default to their previous relationship. Will Sarah choose to reignite her white-hot passion for T.J., or will she stick with the stabler, nobler partnership she’s since built with Axel? Who gives a shit? The romantic melodrama at play here is necessary to justify the holiday setting, but it’s difficult to pay too close attention to its stakes when there’s also a crazed killer in town ripping out the trio’s friends’ hearts and plopping them into the hotdog waters, beer coolers, and chocolate boxes at their unsanctioned Valentine’s party, thrown behind the sheriff’s back. All that really matters is that the kills are consistently brutal and consistently afforded a mining-town specificity in the killer’s mask, weapons, and venues of attack. Shooting the majority of those kills down in the mines may darken the screen a little too much to reward modern home viewing, but they look great on the big screen, especially in the pop iconography of the opening scene, when a buxom blonde strokes the phallic hose of the killer’s mask mid-hookup before she’s penetrated with his pickaxe. Gnarly.
Speaking of horror-movie calendar watching, this year is especially apt for a My Bloody Valentine screening (an opportunity pounced upon by ScreamFest NOLA at The Broad earlier this week). That’s because Valentine’s Day happens to fall on a Saturday this year, the day after Friday the 13th. That’s also the case in the film itself, which we’re informed via title cards announcing both dates: Friday the 13th, then Saturday the 14th. It’s highly likely that My Bloody Valentine was greenlit as an attempt to capitalize on that calendrical coincidence in 1981, hoping to make Harry Warden as much of a household name as Jason Voorhees. The film did not succeed there, but it’s still the first title that comes to mind when someone thinks of Valentine’s Day horror and coalmining horror, which is an impressive double-dip success in its own right.
In Albert Birney’s debut feature The Beast Pageant, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines in his job & home is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to go on a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural upstate New York (where Birney was living at the time). In Birney’s breakout collaboration with Kentucker Audley, Strawberry Mansion, a lonely man who gets all of his social interaction through the machines on his jobsite visits to strangers’ homes is shaken out of his daily routine and forced to dream of a supernatural adventure in a Natural world that looks suspiciously like rural Maryland (where Birney has been living since). In his most recent directorial outing, OBEX, Albert Birney himself appears onscreen as a lonely man who . . . you get the picture. Birney has six feature films to his name, and the three I’ve happened to have seen all follow the same basic narrative structure, the same way that all Neil Gaiman stories I’ve read happen to rely on the same Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole plot device. The only thing that’s changed between these career checkpoints, really, is the nature of the sad-sack protagonist’s job, the types of machines that distract him from his mind-numbing daily labor, and the type of fantasy adventure that breaks him out of the routine. If you’ve already seen The Beast Pageant or Strawberry Mansion, you’re already familiar with the general vibe & shape of OBEX but, thankfully, Birney still finds plenty room for variation & novelty when coloring within those rigid lines.
In this iteration, Birney plays a 1980s computer whiz & agoraphobe who never steps outside his modest Baltimore apartment. His only true friend is a geriatric lapdog named Sandy that randomly wandered into his yard and has been spoiled like a baby ever since. Birney’s sad-sack loner makes a living by “drawing” computerized portraits of strangers on commission, recreating family photos with carefully arranged keystrokes on commercial-grade printer paper. When it’s time to relax, he entertains himself with the other screens arranged throughout his house, most notably a tower of cathode-ray TVs stacked in his living room as a kind of unintentional video art instillation. He often runs three different programs out-of-sync on this TV tower like a televised-media DJ, cuddling up with Sandy on the couch and cranking up the volume to drown out the roar of cicadas outside of the house. Things go awry when he purchases a PC computer game through mail catalog that promises to bring great adventure into his life — a promise made literal when the game invites a demon named Ixaroth to invade his home through the screen, directly importing Sandy into the game. To rescue Sandy, he must then go on a harrowing adventure outside of his apartment by willingly entering the game himself, represented as a live-action roleplay version of 8-bit era Zelda puzzle games. The story is not unfamiliar (especially not if you’ve seen Riddle of Fire in addition to Birney’s prior work), but its familiarity is ultimately, warmly sweet.
The most notable shift in craft here is Birney’s newfound interest in horror genre tropes, which is usually where most low-budget directors start. Some of his best couch time with Sandy in the first act is spent recording the entirety of A Nightmare on Elm Street Film from TV broadcast to VHS tape, so they can rewatch it together later, anytime they want. This allusion opens the film up to a wide range of surrealistic horror touches, including dozens of rubber-masked cicada mutants straight out of 1950s creature features, a couple Harryhausen-style skeleton soldiers and, most improbably, some spooky late-night drives inspired by Lynch’s Lost Highway. The treacherous demon Ixaroth obviously adds to the film’s horror bona-fides as well, represented onscreen as a beast made entirely out of TV static, with a tangible taxidermy skull. It’s an image that pairs well with Birney’s return to the Game Boy Camera-style black & white cinematography of The Beast Pageant, but more importantly it’s one that signals the themes he’s getting at with this latest stylistic experiment. The evil entity is composed of the glowing-screen filler that keeps his protagonist from venturing outside his apartment, making the film out to be a dire warning about the price of staring at screens all day instead of living a real life. Sure, you get some mind-melting psychedelic video art out of it, but at what cost? In comparison, I’m not sure that The Beast Pageant had a similar underlying message other than that having a job sucks. Maybe OBEX is Birney admitting that making & looking at niche art all day sucks too, especially if that’s the only thing you do.
After covering 2017’s Junk Headfor the podcast last year, I was anxiously awaiting the stateside release of follow up Junk World. One of the friends with whom I watched the film last year managed to get a copy of World, and even found subtitles for it. Within the first few minutes, the subtitles already appeared to be less-than-accurate, then the film went into a several minute sequence with no subtitles at all—one that (based on images alone) was establishing the film’s set-up—and I realized the problem. This sequence featured loud rock music that blended with the dialogue, and I realized I had this same problem just a couple of weeks ago when trying to watch Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder! on Plex; that service appeared to be using some kind of generative text-to-translation software that spat out captions that didn’t undergo any kind of quality check before being slapped onto the film haphazardly. The scene that I had been watching that made me realize subtitles were needed was one in which that film’s main character has an internal monologue while the radio plays, and I realized that the captioning software was insufficient to distinguish the orchestra from the dialogue and so simply had no subtitles at all. The same was true for the version of Junk World that we watched, and the translation algorithm was also not up to snuff. Sometimes, the protagonists’ intended destination of Carp Bar was spelled as such in the subtitles, and sometimes as Kallubaru, which was very confusing. Moreover, every time a character expressed disbelief, the subtitles translated their audible gasps as “Picture?” This would have been less of a problem for Junk Head, as that film was neither dialogue-focused nor terribly narrative in its approach, but Junk World is a different beast altogether, still driven by its visuals but possessing an intricate plot, and a lot of it (perhaps too much).
Most reviews of Junk World call it a prequel to Junk Head, and while there are parts of this where that seems like it could be true, I’m having a hard time reconciling that with the way that the story of Head played out. Here, the main thrust of the plot finds the titular cyborg in his Master Chief-esque military form, acting as bodyguard to a woman who’s overseeing some kind of peace talks between humans and the freed Marigans (or “Mulligans,” according to the subtitles) that are then interrupted by a group of sadomasochist Marigan separatists. Junk Head, here called “Robin,” then tries to lead the surviving humans, cyborgs, and Marigans to Carp Bar, dealing with attacks from more leatherbound separatists along the way as they seek the source of some anomalous readings. These readings lead to some kind of time bubble, which Robin enters after being rebuilt into his familiar Junk Head body, finding a species of primordial creatures who resemble the flocked Calico Critters toys of yesteryear and directing their evolution over generations so that he can re-emerge from the sphere at the same time that he left, but with better firepower. This then restarts the narrative back at the peace talks as we see them play out from a different character’s perspective, filling in some unanswered questions, even if the film doesn’t traffic in really resolving any of its bigger implications, which it’s presumably saving for the third and final film in the trilogy.
At least, that’s what I think is happening. I debated whether or not to write about this film at all after this viewing, given that I wasn’t sure I had fully followed the plot or the character motivations, as that the subtitles seemed to only be correct about 50% of the time. The rest of the time, the captions were, for lack of a better term, “loose,” and I felt like I could interpret the intent of certain lines even if the specifics were less clear. I was reminded of the version of Sirāt that I saw featuring words that felt literally translated without much cultural understanding; each time there was a shot of the mountain face with the sound of the wind playing loudly in the soundtrack, those subtitles read “rumours of wind,” as if the phrase “murmuring wind” had been translated too literally from a word with multiple meanings. Or, to paraphrase myself during this Junk World screening, I felt like I understood the narrative holistically if not completely. I feel like this is going to be a hard sell for people who don’t regularly engage with films that are narratively loose and that leave some room for interpretation. Looking at reviews of Junk Head online, I filtered down to negative reviews and found a lot of people already complaining that Head was “boring,” “too long,” or “didn’t justify its runtime” because, one presumes, they engage with film in only one way (I have seen this methodology referred to as being plotpilled online, which is a neologism that I don’t like but which is nonetheless a perfect descriptor). If that’s the case, then those people will likely find more to enjoy here but may (like my viewing companions) find the frequent revisitation of certain sequences as a result of time-traveling shenanigans to be too repetitive. I don’t jibe with those complaining about either film, however. I’m looking forward to getting the chance to rewatch this in a more official capacity, with captions made by a human being and checked for errors, and I can promise you that my opinion will only go up from here.
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.
I seem to remember seeing the heading “Dimension Extreme” on quite a few DVDs during that imprint’s heyday. The Wikipedia page that lists all of Dimensions’s releases includes over thirty films, which is still fewer than I would have thought, but it also doesn’t include Eden Lake, so who’s to really say. Their quality runs the gamut, from distant follow-ups to franchises whose sequelitis ran them into the ground (Children of the Corn: Genesis, Hellraiser: Revelations, Diary of the Dead), direct-to-video cash-ins on moderately successful theatrical features originally released by parent company Dimension (Feast II and III, Pulse 2 and 3), and the occasional standout like Teeth, Black Sheep, and La Terza madre (to me, at least). In my mind, I had always associated them with the glut of torture-focused horror films that were released during Dimension Extreme’s active period (2007-2011, although the onslaught began with Saw in 2004), but based on a review of their titles, that wasn’t really their bread and butter. It could certainly be argued that 2008’s Eden Lake falls into that category, however, as it’s an unrelentingly brutal movie in which people are burned alive, bleed out, and get impaled by spikes while fleeing their killers, and it’s also decidedly reactionary in the way of much horror of that time. I found myself checking how much more of this there would be to endure at less than halfway through the film and had to do so several more times before the credits rolled.
Jenny (Kelly Reilly) is a primary school teacher going on a weekend away to Eden Lake with her boyfriend, Steve (Michael Fassbender), where he plans to propose. He’s picked the location because he and some friends have taken diving trips there before, and it’s soon to be overrun with micromansions by a pending development. Upon arrival, they have to drive some distance around the construction site’s fencing, but park somewhere with a lovely view before making their way down to the beachfront and setting up for the day. After a brief encounter with a shy boy named Adam, they see him later being harassed by a gaggle of local teen hooligans. The leader, Brett (Jack O’Connell), allows his unruly dog to hassle Jenny, prompting Steve to confront them, to no avail. Eventually, the kids grow bored and leave, and Steve & Jenny spend the night on the beach, only to discover the following morning that their provisions are full of insects; their trip back to the local village for more is delayed by a bottle that’s propped up to puncture the jeep’s tire when put in reverse. After a quick breakfast in town that includes a minor altercation with a waitress who is defensive about the potential that her kids may have been involved, they settle back in at the beach for the afternoon, but just before Steve can propose, they realize that the beach bag containing the car keys is gone, and climb up to their parking spot to find the Jeep is missing as well. A later confrontation with the teens results in them pulling a knife on the adults and Brett’s dog is killed in a scuffle, setting him off on a rampage of revenge against Jenny & Steve that can only end one way.
For some time, I was hesitant to check out Jack O’Connell’s work because he had just been too good as the utterly detestable James Cook in Skins, and it wasn’t until his one-two punch in Sinners & 28 Years Later last year that I realized that it had been long enough and it was time to let go of my hatred for Cook. He was still a loathsome monster in this year’s Bone Temple, but despite his propensity to play villains that are of a certain type, he can access a broader range within that category. Here, he’s a budding sociopath who blooms into murder and torture, and it plays like a preview of what his career would largely consist of. This could just as easily be what might have happened to Jimmy Crystal if the U.K. hadn’t fallen to the Rage virus, right down to his merry band of little soldiers. There’s the committed criminal who’s handy with the box-cutter, the baby-faced kid who wants out and eventually gets beaten to death by Brett, the one with no characteristics, the hesitant one who throws up when forced to take part in torturing the captured Steve, and the girl who’s there to pull her phone out and film when Brett tells her to, to use as insurance against any of the other kids from going to the authorities once things have gotten to a point of no return. It’s brutal, but it’s also cliché, and it’s so unrelenting that one finds one’s self wondering how much more of this we’re going to be subjected to.
I found myself thinking of the recent Swampflix favoriteThe Plague, which was also about the cruelty of teenagers, and how subtle that film is in comparison to this one. It’s a more interesting story to tell about how boys can be cruel to one another within social environments that should protect them, how they manage to inflict physical and emotional damage while skirting adult surveillance. There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled over the years about the correlation between reactionary Western politics and the torture porn genre, whether it be as a reckoning with the guilt of War on Terror-era torture politics or the more cruel, xenophobic instinct to see harm inflicted on others in the wake of national tragedy (i.e., Hostel). Although there is some comparison to the American torture porn wave in the rise of New French Extremism, I hadn’t imagined that the British film industry had their own take on the genre, which also happens to be politically reactionary, and it can’t afford to be subtle. Our unfortunate protagonists are too perfect, a sweet, beautiful kindergarten teacher and her chiseled diver boyfriend, and as they leave the city, we hear the voices of different women calling into a radio show to complain about their unruly children and their positions on the contemporary discourse around “Broken Britain,” a phrase coined by Conservative Party member and future Prime Minister David Cameron. Before they can even make it out to the lake, Steve has already sneered at the locals for keeping their children out at the pub late at night, joking that one child “needs a—” before the boy’s mother appears to slap him, as if on cue; Jenny is horrified. Both of them have a sense of superiority over these poorer rural folk, be it on the level of mere elitism or moral outrage, and because this movie is, with intent or not, evoking fear of the lower class on behalf of the yuppie one, the film contrives to reinforce those interclass sentiments and resentments.
I’m not siding with the teenaged killers here, to be clear. Steve and Jenny had plenty of opportunities to hightail it before things went as far as they did, sure. I would have gotten out of town as soon as I had a new tire without stopping for breakfast, and I would never have confronted a group of car thieves in the woods on my own when I could get past them and into town for help from the authorities. That doesn’t mean that they deserved what happened to them, however; it simply means that the average viewer doesn’t project themselves onto Steve & Jenny because we don’t see ourselves getting into the situation in which they find themselves. We’re empathetic to their plight, but the “Deliverance but set in England” narrative and the “demonize the poor for creating cycles of violence through child abuse” themes don’t mesh into a cohesive hole. Brett and his group of bullies are chav stereotypes, and long before his gang of criminal miscreants start to mess with Steve and Jenny, the crew is already tormenting small animals as a group with seemingly no remorse. They’re evil, and they’re poor, and in Cameron’s England they’re evil because they’re poor, and rude, and morality is in decline, and so on and so forth. The so-called heroes are so thinly written and make such foolish choices that my viewing companion stated at the midpoint that he hoped Jenny didn’t make it out, just because she was a terrible final girl. I couldn’t fully disagree, and what this means is that you’re watching a propagandistic film in which two people are hunted down while being subjected to abject misery for the sake of the misery. It appears to have been reasonably well received in its time, so maybe its politics spoke to the contemporary masses, but this one could only really be of interest to hardcore slasher (or Dimension Extreme) enthusiasts or those with an academic interest in torture porn as a genre.
As often as it is reclaimed by the very people it others as monstrous villains, horror has always been a largely reactionary genre. You don’t have to scratch too hard at the surface of any classic horror title to find kneejerk fears of people with bodily, mental, gender, or sexual difference being expressed through metaphor. It’s a genre built on societal disgust with facial disfigurement, discomfort with ambiguous gender presentation, and paranoia over escaped mental patients, but it’s also one that’s routinely championed by the real-life targets of those societal phobias. Usually, it takes a couple decades for fans to reclaim blatantly homophobic films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as Queer, Actually but, given enough time, every major horror title eventually gets its due as a transgressive, funhouse mirror version of Representation. What’s funny about the new found-footage horror Dooba Dooba is that it encourages that reclamation to happen in real time. Textually, the film very directly preys on people’s suspicions that modern teens diagnosed with severe anxiety and other social disorders are just faking it to torture the rest of us. Subtextually, its flippant construction leaves room for younger audiences to celebrate that torture. It functions as a kind of power fantasy for socially anxious Zoomers to get their revenge on the Millennials & Gen-Xers who doubt the severity of their mental disabilities. From either perspective, it’s an act of generational warfare — a perversely amusing one.
If Dooba Dooba openly participates in any other long-running horror traditions, it’s in its modern interpretation of the classic babysitter slasher. A 20something aspiring singer takes on a babysitting gig to make ends meet, and the extent of her desperation for rent money is immediately tested. The child is 16 years old but too anxious to stay by herself because she once witnessed the murder of her young brother in the family home. Her overly horny, socially awkward parents explain that to alleviate the teen’s anxieties, the babysitter must sleep in the same bedroom as her, must constantly repeat the nonsense phrase “dooba dooba” whenever making noise elsewhere in the house, and must remain under constant surveillance via closed-circuit security cameras, stationed in every room. Although the story is set in 2022, the cameras are much older & lower-quality than modern tech, giving the entire film the feeling of a crime scene documented via stationary camcorder. Whenever the edit switches to a tight-zoom-in, you can practically count the grains on the screen. You never forget that you’re watching a contemporary story, though, because the way the Zoomer teen in the babysitter’s care weaponizes her social anxieties as a form of low-level torture is distinctly of-the-now. For instance, she mocks the poor babysitter’s Soundcloud tracks as facile novelties, then passes off the faux pas as an inability to read social cues. Then, the torture gets more literal & physical, once her malevolence is clearly established as intentional.
Where the film steps away from othering & mocking teens who struggle with anxiety or Autistic social disfunction is in handing its young villain the keys to the editing room. We are not watching raw security-camera footage of this babysitter’s torment, but rather a PowerPoint-style presentation of the night’s events as interpreted through a prankster teen’s online-troll sensibilities. The horrors documented in this suburban home are flippantly narrated in the lower-case, goofy-font text of a teen fucking around in an AIM chatroom, mocking the victim instead of her tormentor. They’re also frequently interrupted by stock footage of and “fun” factoids about past American presidents (such as their history as slave owners), as if the film were half snuff tape, half high school term paper assignment. All suburban-set horror tends to function as a stand-in for the horrors of America at large, but Dooba Dooba is smart to make that thematic connection explicit, so it’s clear that it isn’t only punching down at awkward teens on the spectrum. Our socially maladjusted villain, her gig-economy victim, and her alcoholic swinger parents all come together to represent something insidious about what’s going on behind the locked doors of the modern American suburban home, protected by the red-white-and-blue flags that wave above. Of course, some public domain horror clips and documents of surgical gore are also included in the mix, just to keep the genre exercise clearly defined.
Overall, Dooba Dooba may not be as ambitious nor as accomplished as other recent “analog” horrors like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Outwaters, or Skinamarink, but it’s got a real wicked streak to it, and it makes some impressively distinct visual & editing choices for something so obviously cheap. The cast is limited in both size and skill, but their awkwardness on camera only adds to the real-life social discomforts they’re supposed to evoke. The cathode-ray CCTV imagery is also limited in its texture & movement, but the sequencing of the edit maintains a perverse sense of humor & momentum throughout. Not for nothing, the film is also under 80 minutes long, making for a perfect January horror B-picture experience. BetweenPrimate, The Bone Temple, and Dooba Dooba, the year’s off to a great trashy start. Just be careful not to play a drinking game with this particular one’s title, since it’s repeated often enough to send you to the hospital.
In El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent), there is a scene in which indigenous river guide Karamakate revisits a former Catholic mission/residential school on the banks of the Amazon River. He first visited the place decades earlier, where he tried to teach the boys held captive there about their traditions, saying “Don’t believe their crazy tales about eating the body of their gods.” When he returns, he finds them long after the priest has died and they have devolved into an outright cannibalistic cult that quotes half-remembered bits of Christian scripture to support their current state of being. I wrote about this years ago (and proofread poorly, it seems), but Serpiente is a story about an apocalypse that has already happened, the total destruction of a wide swath of cultures and peoples under the heel of European colonialism. I found myself thinking about it a lot during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that one wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of as being in conversation with Serpiente, but which shares a common connection in that it spends a great deal of its runtime following a now-adult practitioner of extreme violence who was only a boy when the world as he knew it came to an end. They’re very different texts (with quite divergent intents), but I couldn’t help seeing something of the cannibalistic former wards of the church from Serpiente in Jack O’Connell’s here, and that enriched for me what was already a pretty great movie, especially for a January release.
Our protagonist from 28 Years Later, Spike (Alfie Williams) takes more of a backseat role in this sequel. At the end of the last film, we last saw him leave the healthy infant who was born of a woman afflicted with the Rage virus before returning to the British mainland, where he was rescued from a pack of infected by a group of knife-wielding weirdos. As this film opens, we find him in the midst of being inducted into their ranks; “Sir” Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) is the leader of their gang of seven “fingers,” all re-christened “Jimmy” in his honor. Sir Jimmy lords over the others, who have scarred the space between their eyes with an inverted cross like the one he wears, although we don’t see this forced on Spike when he manages to slay his assigned Jimmy despite his physical disadvantages. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work on his macabre memento mori memorial, the bone temple of the title, while also making the “alpha” infected a subject of study, trying to see if the Rage can be tempered even if it can’t be cured. He names the alpha “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry) and realizes that the seemingly mindless monster has become addicted to the drugs in his blow darts, so the two of them essentially start doing recreational morphine together and listening to Kelson’s record collection. When the Jimmies come upon some survivors, most of the fingers torture them slowly while Spike vomits and writhes in emotional agony and Sir Jimmy sends one of his deputies, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) scouting; she sees Kelson and Samson cavorting from afar and reports back to Sir Jimmy that she’s seen Old Nick, setting up a confrontation between the killers, Kelson, and his pet monster.
I have one complaint. Williams was given a wide range of emotions to play in the previous film as Spike entered an adulthood that was as alien to him as it was to us. He was sheltered from a changing world and trained to survive, but isolated in a way that meant that his first exposures to the hypocrisies and dishonesty of the adult world made him reject it and instead attempt the impossible and bring his mother to Kelson for treatment. Here, Williams only has one mode: utter, pants-soiling terror at being forced into the service of Sir Jimmy and his psychotic acolytes. This makes total sense narratively within the story that this film is telling, but it also means that Spike has no real arc, which is bizarre since the last time we were all here, he was the main character. Here, he’s static and secondary, as this film features a much larger role for Fiennes and alternates entirely between his activities and those of Jimmy and his fingers. There’s a lot of great stuff to be mined here. Kelson’s treatment of Samson is procedural, sure, but it also allows for some excellent music choices. It’s fascinating to watch a man who’s been isolated among the bones of the dead for so long essentially adopt a zombie onto whom he seems to be projecting a lot of intent and intelligence for no other reason than that he’s been lonely a long time, only for the film to surprise us by having these actions not have been in vain. Sir Jimmy’s self-mythologizing has a lot of flair, and he’s effectively menacing and depraved that the film had me on edge for most of it. I didn’t think anything would top the electricity between him and Kelson in their first scene together, but there that’s followed up by a sequence set to Iron Maiden that I expect to be the most talked-about element of the picture. Overall, however, straying so far from Spike as our central focus necessitated a realignment of the stakes that left me less emotionally invested in this outing.
Nia DaCosta is in the director’s chair this time around, and although I loved the way that Danny Boyle slipped back into this world effortlessly in 28YL, I had a higher opinion of 28 Weeks Later than the consensus, and that film was likewise helmed by a different creative team. Alex Garland still returned to pen this one, and although there’s a distinct stylistic difference between Boyle and DaCosta, I welcome her stamp on this overall enterprise. The zombies have never really been the point in this franchise, and (Samson excepted) the presence of the Rage-afflicted is the smallest here it has ever been, with the extreme gruesome violence on display here coming at the hands of survivors. The infected and the Jimmies have both lost their humanity, but the former did so because of the Rage, while the latter are monsters of Jimmy’s making. This has been the film series’ driving force for as long as it has existed, that man is always the real monster, going all the way back to Christopher Eccleston in the original 28 Days Later. As such, the film’s conflict is also ideological, with Jimmy and the mythology he has built around himself as Satan’s son and heir to dominion over his demons (the infected) inevitably coming to a head with Kelson’s rational atheism, within which he is able to provide some manner of salvation. That he manages to use Jimmy’s follower’s faith against them in the end is clever and satisfying, and I had a great time with the film overall.
Where I remain most excited to see this franchise continue to go is in its exploration of the way that a disease-ravaged, isolated Britain has, in the absence of a larger social structure, devolved into a series of cults. Sir Jimmy and his crew are an obvious example, as is Kelson’s non-religious (but creepy) solo project of building his elegy of human bones. It didn’t come up in this film, but the island community from which Spike hails seems to have developed some of its own creepy rituals involving a mask, and I expect that the next film in this franchise will see that community return in some form since they are completely absent from this one. Most intriguingly, Samson’s trophy-like acquisition of human heads with attached spines and the way that he displayed them in the woods also seems like a worshipful action, although deciphering the motivation for this is complicated by revelations from Bone Temple, so we shall see.
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.
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).
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