horror

It Ends (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

The microbudget indie horror It Ends has been simmering on the theatrical distribution backburner since at least as far back as spring of 2025, when it locally premiered at the Overlook Film Festival. By the time Neon picked it up, it had already seen a brief streaming run on the Letterboxd “Video Store” platform as an undistributed work that had fallen through the cracks of the festival circuit and been left for dead on the side of the proverbial road. A lot can change in a year, though, and the current horror cinema landscape is a lot more hospitable to It Ends now than it might have been in 2025, before Backrooms brought liminal-space horror to national headlines and Obsession became a surprise mega-hit for Zoomers who delighted in finally seeing their own generational neuroses projected on the big screen. It’s much easier to see a clear path for It Ends‘s marketability now that we live in a post-Backrooms, post-Obsession world, even if its payoffs are much quieter than those potential comps’. It may be set in a supernaturally liminal space like the backrooms, but it’s only interested in functioning as a horror film in its cold-open segment, all wrapped up before the opening credits. Likewise, its interpersonal Gen-Z drama refuses to escalate to flashy, cathartic extremes, sticking much closer to the depressive mood of Leviticus than the violent hysteria of Obsession. If the current moment of youthful indie breakouts only applies to the horror genre, then It Ends just barely falls inside the outer boundary of benefiting. It offers a version of liminal-space horror where the liminal space is adolescence and the hell is other people.

Four childhood friends take a post-college road trip into the unknown, each struggling to come up with a plan for what to do with their lives now that they’re technically adults. Once outside the city, they find themselves on a mysterious woodland highway that has no turns and no end, existing in an alternate reality where cars never run out of gas and bellies never get hungry and no one is ever horny and every hour is the same and nothing ever changes. When they step outside the Jeep to investigate their new tree-lined prison, they are swarmed by a screaming mob of strangers who auto-populate in the wilderness, chasing them back onto the infinite road. This nightmare scenario is initially played like a high-concept horror film, complete with periodic jump scares and Cube-like ponderings about possible ways to escape the limbo of the highway. Eventually, though, the adrenaline wears off and the monotonous nature of the road trip leaves the Jeep-bound teens more bored than scared. They essentially take turns giving up, finding little satisfaction in the search for meaning or camaraderie or escape in their supernatural predicament. Even the zombie-like strangers lurking in the woods gradually lose interest in the game, collectively going comatose instead of going berserk. The horror of the back half, if there is any, is all philosophical instead of physical. The teens individually become just as indifferent to their survival as the highway is, each choosing their own personal moment to leave the Jeep forever and join the soulless, dead-eyed adults in the woods. Then, as the title promises, it ends.

There’s clearly some broad metaphor about the human condition at play here but, to the movie’s credit, it’s difficult to define. The never-ending highway certainly gets one thing right about life: it’s boring as fuck, with each day’s monotonous routine blurring into the next. When this Jeep full of freaked-out teens pull onto that highway, they have vague but grand ambitions about what they’re going to do with their newfound adulthood, so it’s depressing to watch them slowly resign themselves to the repetitive nothingness of an adult reality. The thesis, if you’re going to put it into words, appears to be that growing up is giving up, but what else are you going to do? Life is a highway, and even after you ride it all night long there’s nowhere else to go; there’s just more highway. The meaning behind individual details of the characters’ world within the Jeep and even the Jeep itself can mean different things to different audiences, though, which is where the movie finds its stickiest philosophical talking points. Personally, I found myself thinking of the Jeep as a metaphor for the way I treat this very movie review website: a stubbornly childish project that I’ll continue to drive into the infinite void until all my friends who came along on the drive gradually lose interest one by one, leaving me alone at the wheel of my juvenile journey to nowhere. Your own self-identification may vary. Maybe your Jeep is a weekends-only cover band or a college clique or an actual vintage Jeep you plan to get running one day — whatever project is stubbornly carrying over your youthful ambition and idealism into the soul-numbing monotony of adulthood. Or maybe it’ll represent something else to you entirely. Whatever the case, the monster that’s loose in this particular horror story is of the personal & philosophical variety, nothing like the manic pixie nightmare girlfriend of Obsession nor the memetic mutants of Backrooms. In the current Gen-Z horror moment, It Ends offers an opportunity to quietly sit & reflect in the dark, which is not an especially sexy marketing pitch for a low-budget, high-concept teen horror flick (and might explain its so-far muted reception).

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #272: Cramps! A Period Piece & BRUFF 2026

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #272 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & James discuss the films they caught at the second annual Baton Rouge Underground Film Festival, starting with the menstrual creature feature Cramps! A Period Piece.

00:00 BRUFF
04:47 Cramps! A Period Piece
14:22 Public Access
28:04 The Knight
32:53 Pu Ekaw Tnod
35:21 West of Greatness
38:44 Unseen Olympiad

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

– The Podcast Crew

Popcorn (1991)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

The 1991 novelty slasher Popcorn has a fairly straightforward premise: What if William Castle was a serial killer? That setup makes for a much meaner, zanier William Castle homage than Joe Dante’s Matinee, one where Castle’s signature theatrical gimmicks get directly involved in increasingly silly kills instead of being deployed as mood-setting kitsch. The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen stars as a film school weirdo whose struggling department decides to raise production funds by hosting an all-night horror marathon in a traditional single-screen theater. They figure they can charge extra for tickets by bringing back the original theatrical gimmicks from the 1950s creature features they’re screening, like ziplining a giant mosquito prop over the audience during the atomic-age sci-fi parody Mosquito (an effect they call “Projectovision”, modeled after Castle’s “Emergo!” gimmick) or zapping the audience in their seats during key shocks of The Amazing Electrified Man (“Shockoscope”, modeled after Castle’s “Percepto!” gimmick). Only, a mysterious killer is loose in the theater and is picking off the film school students & staff one by one. The mosquito is rigged to crush an unsuspecting victim; the seat buzzers are cranked to lethally high voltage; the “Aromarama” gas deployed during The Stench is, of course, poisoned. While Schoelen’s softspoken auteur-to-be should be worried about what ridiculous retro-schlock gimmick is going to eventually be wielded against her, she’s instead perversely excited by the deaths’ potential as inspiration for her next screamplay, keeping the mood defiantly light despite all of the violence. Popcorn is a wonderfully silly 90s slasher with a wide range of imaginative kills and a fun all-night-party atmosphere, one that panders so shamelessly to its target audience that it’s an easy instant favorite for any genre-literate horror nerds.

Popcorn is pretty blatant about its William Castle homages, which range from the more obvious go-to references (like hiring a uniformed nurse to issue life insurance policies in the lobby, in case the audience dies of fright) to the deeper cuts (like its “Shock Clock” prop referencing the “Fright Break” countdown in Castle’s Homicidal). That’s what makes it so strange that Castle’s name isn’t mentioned once during the hours of bonus features on the film’s recent Synapse Blu-ray release. The retro horror parodies that fill out the movie theater’s all-night schlock marathon are referred to as broad homages to 1940s & 50s horror classics on the disc’s commentary track and in the accompanying feature-length “Making Of” documentary, without ever specifically mentioning Castle’s legendary gimmickry as an influence on the text. That concept-to-screen disconnect is likely a result of the film’s tortured history of authorship, with its final cut encompassing the work of three different directors working towards three different ends. The story goes that Popcorn‘s first hired director Alan Ormsby was really into shooting the 1950s creature feature parodies, at the expense of shooting the 1990s wraparound slasher that contains them. When he was fired from the project, Ormsby was drastically behind schedule but had delivered a group of highly detailed, reverential homages to vintage horror schlock. Producer Bob Clark (who had collaborated on Dead of Night with Ormsby, a friend he lost to that business decision) was reluctant to put his name on another horror project after becoming a more mainstream commercial director, so he hired one of his trusted actors from Porky‘s, Mark Herrier, to take the reins. Cast & crew have since confirmed that Clark essentially shadowdirected the picture, guiding a lot of Herrier’s day-to-day decisions and shooting substantial amounts of B-unit footage to get the project back on schedule. You can feel Clark’s influence throughout, especially in scenes where he voices threatening phone calls from the anonymous serial killer villain, just as he had in his breakout slasher Black Christmas. You can also feel the film’s divided authorship in how its obvious original intent as a William Castle homage has been lost in the handovers, like a game of telephone.

Luckily, the William Castle throwback gimmicks aren’t the only thing Popcorn has going on. The killer who weaponizes those gags is suspected to be a filmmaker of an entirely different era: a hippie freak who made ritualistic art films of the Kenneth Anger & Anton Lavey variety. Our hippie Satanist first appears to Jill Schoelen in a sweaty, Ken Russell-inspired nightmare sequence, calling out to her through the psychedelic afterlife. The second she wakes up, she starts scribbling details from that nightmare into her journal, insistent that it would make a great film. It turns out what she was dreaming was already a film, a scratchy 16mm short from the 1970s titled Possessor, which its director Lanyard Gates concluded by committing in-the-flesh murders during its climax at its premiere. Gates was apparently radicalized by audiences’ tepid reaction to his art films, deciding to get violent revenge on crowds who would rather watch goofy genre fluff instead of real, meaningful cinema. That hostile artist-audience dynamic continues from beyond the grave, when the film school’s all-night horror marathon is interrupted by a renegade screening of Possessor, which the captive crowd boos off the screen. The question of whether the long-dead Gates has supernaturally returned to this mortal plane to get his violent revenge on that audience or if his work is being continued by a more plausible, in-the-flesh suspect is answered in such a bizarre, spectacularly convoluted way that I wouldn’t dare spoil it here. What’s more important than who’s doing Gates’s work is what that work represents. Years before Wes Craven was interrogating horror audiences’ disconnection with the meaning behind their go-to genre’s violence & narrative tropes in New Nightmare & Scream, Clark & co. were already calling out the horror-hungry masses for not sincerely engaging with the art behind their entertainment. The art of cinema and the cheap thrills of horror gimmickry are directly opposed here, with open resentment expressed over how the former needs a little of the latter to earn its funding. That’s what makes reading Bob Clark’s authorship into the text its most satisfying angle, even if the truth is more of a three-way compromise.

Popcorn is not only disjointed in its directorial vision and its art-vs-schlock sentiments, but it’s also disjointed in its setting. The story is set in the suburbs of Smalltown, America, but the production was shot entirely in Kingston, Jamaica, making extensive use of an abandoned old-style movie theater located there. Some of the Jamaican touches to the production are subtly underplayed, like how the majority Black cast of extras are made to appear more diverse by wearing Halloween costumes to the horror marathon. Others are less subtle, like how this is the rare slasher that features an all-reggae soundtrack (including a movie-themed reggae parody of “Under the Boardwalk”). The illusion really breaks down when the power goes out during the marathon and a local reggae band is invited on stage to entertain the crowd by flashlight, turning the theatrical audience into a dancehall dance party. Like the rest of Popcorn‘s behind-the-scenes production anomalies, the chaotic relationship between its setting and its shooting location is just part of the fun. This is a pizza-and-beer VHS rental to be enjoyed with your nerdiest horror-loving friends, so you can all be poked fun at by a movie that doesn’t take you or your preferred genre seriously. As lovingly recreated as the vintage William Castle segments feel in Ormsby’s movies-within-the-movie vignettes, there’s something genuinely heartfelt in Clark’s overall hostility to the fun-loving, novelty-seeking horror audience who wouldn’t turn up or fund more serious art. If nothing else, Clark’s reluctance to put his name on the project betrays some kind of lingering, Gates-style resentment for the artistic limitations of the genre. He doesn’t let that professional bitterness get in the way of throwing a good party, though, just like he doesn’t sweat the logical details of how that party should be soundtracked.

-Brandon Ledet

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the latest feature from director Jane Schoenbrun, following A Self-Induced Hallucination, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and I Saw the TV Glow. In the film, Hannah Einbinder plays Kris Williams, an indie darling director whose most recent project—the last third of which “remade Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”—brought her to the attention of the studio in possession of the rights to the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise. Following the breakout commercial success of the first Camp Miasma flick, the film’s killer Little Death and their inexplicable air vent-shaped helmet became horror iconography on par with Freddy Krueger and his glove or Jason Voorhees and his machete. The drive to produce endless sequels led to creative rot (like the late sequel Little Death Takes Manhattan), gimmicks (like Camp Miasma 3-D), and diminishing monetary returns. Kris now finds herself at the helm of Camp Miasma reboot, which the studio wants to ensure is “elevated” in order to align with current horror film trends. The purpose is two-fold: the studio hopes to reinvigorate interest in a once-lucrative intellectual property while also redirecting attention away from the original film’s transphobia by hiring Kris, a queer woman. Supposedly seeking inspiration, Kris tracks down reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), Camp Miasma’s final girl, who invites Kris to meet with her at her home, which turns out to be the same abandoned campground where the first Miasma picture was filmed. Of course, Kris’s motivation to meet Billy has additional undercurrents that she herself isn’t fully cognizant of, stemming from an epiphanic experience she had while watching Camp Miasma as a child. 

The text within the film, the Camp Miasma franchise, is wonderfully detailed stuff: the mounting number of sequels on VHS that bear the distinct typeface of the Friday the 13th film series, from which Camp Miasma takes most of its aesthetic cues; the watering down of the genuinely menacing Little Death until they start to appear in 90s anti-drug campaigns; the moral outrage from concerned citizens’ groups, leading to picketing of the movie, resulting in even more attention from the public. It’s window dressing, but it’s so thoroughly realized that one can’t help but gawk in amazement at the level of attention to detail. It’s referential through reinterpretation and reinvention, rather than just recreation. Besides the Friday the 13th films, the most obvious inspiration is Sleepaway Camp. Instead of simply recreating that film’s twist ending, the original Camp Miasma’s Little Death (Jack Haven) was an avenging spirit of a genderfluid child who was killed by several other campers. This allows Schoenbrun to grapple with the transphobia of that film by using it as a vehicle to criticize the ignorance that led to its creation, while also playfully poking fun at the large amount of cinematic non-criticism that, instead of grappling with a text’s successes and failures, relies solely on pointing out older media’s flaws without anything more substantial to say. 

The meta-textual nature of the narrative draws comparison (even within the text itself!) to “Frightmaster Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” but an equally applicable comparison would be to say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie that loves horror of a bygone era the same way that Galaxy Quest loves Star Trek. Of course, what was lacking from those films was a character using their media obsession to examine their sexuality or the nature of desire. Camp Miasma reflects, I imagine, what it feels like to experience sexual arousal only when it’s part of a fantasy mediated by a screen, rather than being aroused by touch, sensation, or intimacy. Kris admits to Billy that she’s allowed herself to be coaxed into opening up her relationship with her partner because she’s unable to meet their sexual needs because, like Owen in TV Glow, she’s more interested in TV/movies than she is in real life, and more comfortable with experiencing sexuality through the distance that a lens creates. Where this differs from Schoenbrun’s previous film is that the ending of TV Glow is considered a bleak, downer ending by most audiences, while Miasma feels like a much more celebratory endeavor, like Schoenbrun got out all of their negative feelings in Glow so that they could tackle the inherent eroticism of the slasher genre in a more fun, positive way. Owen’s narrative is one about what happens when one consigns themself to a box, while Kris’s is one that teaches her that it’s totally okay to be obsessed with a one hit wonder scream queen and only get off through fantasy — even a violent one, because that’s the point of fantasy, it’s not real. As the advertisements for the home video release of the original Camp Miasma note, “if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” 

The major detriments largely come in the form of visuals. This is a film that is largely unconcerned with making sense of time. The on-screen date given in Roman numerals for the release of the original Camp Miasma is 1980, which would make Billy a solid decade older than she is said to be, and the area around the campground moves from winter to summer over the course of a single night. One can accept that as artistic license, and one must accept it when considering that, when we get to see Little Death’s rampage from the end of Camp Miasma, it’s set to “Long December” by Counting Crows, which was not released until 1996. One could even chalk that up to the idea that we’re not seeing that scene as it was in the film, but as Kris remembers it. What I can’t accept about that scene is how badly done the special effects imagery is. There’s a fun little homage to one of Jason Voorhees’s most famous kills, the sleeping bag scene from The New Blood, wherein Little Death picks up a camper and slams them against a tree, but the kill is farcical rather than sincere, because the victim flies apart and falls to pieces like a mannequin. This same “error” occurs throughout the Little Death massacre, and it’s distracting. I’m not sure if this is supposed to represent Kris’s point of view, as it’s made abundantly clear that she finds slasher film death arousing in a way that she doesn’t understand, but if it’s supposed to be funny, it falls apart. There are several special effects “failures” throughout that have intentionality and are open to interpretation (like the Thomas Kincaid-esque winter scenes, which also look awful but have narrative purpose), but this rampage feels as if it were generated using AI. I’ve searched high and low for confirmation of this and can only find minimal discussion of it from others who get the same feeling, but please bear in mind, dear reader, that if it eventually is revealed that this is the case, disregard the star rating above and consider this film radioactive, with a big thumbs down. With nothing proven at this time, it’s still a negative, as it looks like hot garbage, but it’s not enough to ruin what is otherwise a delightfully fun movie. 

Einbinder and Anderson have absolutely excellent chemistry. Anderson puts on a delightful Southern drawl for the character, and every one of her line reads is magical. During their first meeting, Billy intentionally gives Kris a tiny fright, and the following morning, she encourages Kris to enter a room where a Little Death costume is on display, cackling like a cartoon witch when her prank succeeds. What fun! I don’t eat fast food, but Schoenbrun’s choice to shoot Billy and Kris digging into KFC in pornographic, erotic close-up meant that I ended up getting some myself less than 48 hours later. I also had my biggest laugh of the year when Kris is word vomiting about the problematic elements of art from previous generations; when she mentions a Mickey Mouse racial caricature, Billy responds “Mickey did that?” and I laughed until I choked. When watching Camp Miasma together, Kris excitedly says “This part’s transphobic!”, prompting Billy to merely shush her, even though this is the scene that gave the film its macabre, thoughtless, hilarious tagline, “They killed him. They had to.” Sleepaway Camp has been derided in the intervening decades for its blatant transphobia, but like Rocky Horror Picture Show (as we have been reminded by the think pieces that have sprung up in the wake of the death of Tim Curry), it was also transgressive, and those who may be part of the demographic that has the right to be offended by dissonant values of older media are also capable of finding something meaningful within it. Rejection of art that was, intentionally or unintentionally, textually or subtextually, and positively or negatively queer in eras past prevents us from examining them within the context of their time, and how people lived in that time. It’s not a defense of antiquated portrayals, but it is an invitation to do something more than have a knee-jerk reaction to the past. Schoenbrun certainly has, and I was pleased to join them on their journey. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The End of Oak Street (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The best movies for kids are usually films that meet them where they’re at, movies which capture the feeling of childhood experientially and textually, and that tell a story that a child might imagine for themself. What if an alien were my best friend? What if my friends and I built a spaceship in our garage? What if I could enter a magical world by reading a book? What if I got shrunk to a tiny size in my backyard? What if an evil carnival came to town? What if I got taken by a UFO and came back eight years later? All of those were film plots from the 1980s; several were developed and distributed by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, while others were greenlit and produced by other companies that were seeking to capture the essence of what came to be known as “that Amblin feeling.” E.T. is the most memorable keystone for that entire genre, and the intervening decades have been spent trying to recapture it, with mixed success. One of the most obvious and blatant examples was J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 in 2011, which, despite technically being set in 1979, set the unfortunate trend going forward that all any media attempting to recapture the feeling of Amblin would get stuck as period pieces set in the eighties, and thus mostly end up recreating the texture of those films without the substance thereof, or understanding what made them special. 

Updating the narrative of Stephen King’s IT to be set in the 1980s and the 2010s instead of in the 1950s and the 1980s respectively is a logical choice, but one need look no further than the general public outcry about the downward spiral of Stranger Things and the fact that we’re now producing media about how an overly nostalgic generation has deprived contemporary youth of anything new to know that the well has been pulling up naught but dust for a while now.  As such, it’s a refreshing surprise that another film that is shameless in its evocation of the Amblin style, set (partially) in 1982, manages to pull off that feeling by just as shamelessly aping one of Spielberg’s biggest films of the 1990s, Jurassic Park. The End of Oak Street’s imaginary play catalyst is “What if my neighborhood got transported back to dinosaur times?”, which is as perfect a jumping off point as one could hope for in a film like this. Even the film’s eightiesness is understated. Other than a scene in which Audrey finds solace in Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” and another in which the opening credits for The Love Boat are playing on the family room TV, the predicament in which the Platts and their neighbors find themselves isn’t one that lends itself to the “Remember this?” pop culture references in which nostalgia slop normally traffics. I did appreciate that the art department stuck a Battlestar Galactica poster on Brian’s wall so that we would know his dog is named for Dirk Benedict rather than Herman Melville, but it’s reasonably subtle for this genre. 

The suburban Platt family is going through a rough patch. Patriarch Greg (Ewan McGregor) has recently been laid off and is keeping this a secret from his wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), who can sense that something is off and that he’s not being honest with her. At the very least, she’s frustrated with his inconsistency, like bailing on a promised family day at a neighborhood block party and undermining her by allowing their son Brian (Christian Convery) to bring his disruptive Blue Heeler, Starbuck, to the cookout. The family’s precarious monetary situation is already somewhat known to daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), a budding astronomer who longs to go to Cornell and study under Carl Sagan (relatable) but knows that her family can’t afford it. For his part, Brian is entering puberty and beginning to show signs of adolescent rebellion and is hiding from his parents that he was responsible for seriously injuring another boy in the neighborhood. Denise has a friendly relationship with elderly neighbor Mrs. Huddleston, who was the uncredited editor of her novelist husband, and the older woman has been giving Denise feedback on a manuscript that she’s been writing, through which Denise is working out her mixed feelings about her life as a suburban mother. All of this familiar domestic malaise is interrupted by bizarre phenomena, like the inexplicable presence of a plant that’s been extinct for millennia in Mrs. Huddleston’s yard, or the sudden appearance of a mound of animal dung in the yard of the Platts’ hostile neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrnes). It isn’t long before the family is awoken one night by thunderous noises and blinding lights and discover that everything within a one-mile radius of the center of their neighborhood has been moved to 200 million years in the past, and the area is being infiltrated by the hungry megafauna of yesteryear. Can their family survive this crisis? 

There are many things that are flawed about The End of Oak Street. The dialogue is frequently cheesy and often outright treacly; Anne Hathaway continues to prove that she has a generational talent for interpreting some of the hokiest lines imaginable with genuine pathos (see also: Interstellar). Several sequences in which the family talks about their situation feature increasingly unhinged framing choices that make extensive, inexplicable use of split diopters for no thematic reason that I can comprehend. There are editing choices that are likewise baffling. In an early scene in which Denise and Mrs. Huddleston are discussing the former’s writing, their conversation plays out with one character occupying the left third of the frame while the other two-thirds are filled with a bay window that looks out over the block party festivities, with hard cuts to an inverted ratio of the right third of the frame containing the party who’s speaking while the left-two thirds is taken up by the window. If what is being communicated thematically is that Denise sees a potential reflection of herself in Mrs. Huddleston, a woman who subsumed her life into caring for a man who expressed no gratitude, then that’s a shot that’s begging to be framed symmetrically with the women mirroring one another. If that’s not what’s being communicated cinematically, then why not take advantage of the talent and throw in some shot/reverse-shot close-ups to break it up? I also didn’t quite love the technobabble explanation for their general predicament, but it’s a necessary evil and is decently actualized from a visual effects standpoint. 

The film’s most glaring flaw, overall and narratively, is that it never lands on a solid understanding of who its audience is. I mentioned a lot of eighties kid flicks up at the top, but it’s worth noting that The End of Oak Street is not suitable for children despite the childlike imagination inherent in its premise. In some ways, this film bears a strong resemblance to nineties classic Jumanji, but the violence there is mostly fantastic in nature; you might see a child forcibly turned into a monkeyboy or be bloodlessly sedated by a mean-looking barbed plant, but you’re not going to see that film’s animals feeding on the viscera of corpses or a blood-stained roof where a neighbor unsuccessfully challenged winged predators. The film, as also cited above, takes inspiration from Jurassic Park, but the dino violence of that movie almost feels quaint in comparison to the computer-generated gruesomeness of Oak Street, in which we witness dozens of people being ripped to shreds by prehistoric beasts, all while fleeing and screaming, first from fear and then from pain. It’s decidedly not for kids, and even a little extreme for a PG-13 film, but the film’s overly pat, sentimental ending also means that any child over thirteen is going to find it corny. 

Although the script’s dialogue is laughable, it adheres to the specific structural guidelines of screenplay instruction so precisely that it’s impossible to fault in its construction. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) knows this formula like the back of his hand, and he never overlooks a chance to let the rule of threes play out. It’s most noticeable with regards to Brian’s toy bow and arrow, which he attempts to use twice without success before managing to finally get a good shot in when his home threatens to become the new lair of a white worm. Both parents are realistically flawed; Greg’s hesitancy to tell his wife about his newfound unemployment comes from a place of patriarchal pride, but it also prevents her from being able to pitch in and help out by finding work herself before their financial straits become any more dire, while Denise has realistic conflicting emotions as a midlife stay-at-home mom to two children who are finding their independence. The conflict arises from their lack of communication without either being a villain; the film mostly lacks one, other than the neighbor who threatens to shoot Starbuck if the Platts don’t become more responsible pet owners. 

The thing about all of the film’s issues is: who cares? This is a movie about what it would be like if your neighborhood got sucked through a wormhole to the Jurassic period. You get a (semi) modern family encountering every kind of Mesozoic monster you can imagine: chicken-sized raptors capable of taking down a family pet, a Spinosaurus capable of knocking a car through a house, aerial reptiles that don’t take kindly to being shot at, horse-sized feathered bipeds that are surprisingly fast and always hungry, and the obligatory visit from the perennial favorite T. Rex. There are also beasts in this movie that I hadn’t even contemplated before, with the standout being some kind of albinic, amphibious, limbless tetrapod thing that made my skin crawl. The family dog reappears in the climax to fight off a Pteranodon! What more could one ask for, really?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #271: Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988) & Summer Camp Slashers

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Welcome to Episode #271 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss a grab bag of summer camp slashers, starting with Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers (1988).

00:00 Welcome
02:30 The End of Oak Street (2026)
05:55 I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1998)
09:11 Sequels of the Blind Dead
13:15 Popcorn (1991)
17:00 Nightborn (2026)

24:31 Sleepaway Camp II – Unhappy Campers (1988)
40:43 Madman (1981)
57:50 The Burning (1981)
1:09:00 Cheerleader Camp (1988)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Horror nerds have thoroughly mined every last golden nugget of vintage Italo horror schlock. We’ve already seen & celebrated every Bava, Argento, and Fulci worth a damn, and Vinegar Syndrome is now approaching its dozenth volume of “Forgotten Gialli” Blu-ray box sets, having scraped past the bottom of the barrel into the mud underneath. There’s nothing left. One solution to this new scarcity of hidden 70s & 80s Euro horror gems is to look instead to the contemporary genre cinema of Spain, which boasts all of the same stylistic & cultural points of interest as their Italian equivalents, just dubbed in a different out-of-sync language. For your next giallo fix, for instance, you can look to the sleazy Spanish murder mystery The Corruption of Chris Miller, and for your next late night zombi flick, you can explore the Tombs of the Blind Dead, a Spanish graveyard whatsit with multiple deliriously plotted sequels and a decidedly Fulcistic vibe. There were, in fact, other countries in Europe besides Italy making their own high-style, low-logic horror movies throughout the 1970s & 80s, and Spain is as good of a place to start digging as any.

The titular blind dead of this series are the decrepit remains of the medieval Knights Templar, who made a Monkey’s Paw deal with Satan during the Crusades to live forever without thinking through the continual, natural decay of their ancient bodies. They haunt the crumbling ruins of rural Spain, occasionally rising from their graves as sword-wielding Harryhausen skeletons. The main attraction of the Blind Dead series is watching these skeletal knights ride their ghostly horses in slow-motion, making a show of waving around their swords as if posing for a heavy metal album cover. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, their blindness is a result of their eyes having been pecked out by birds while hanging for their crimes against living locals, while in Return of the Blind Dead, their eyes were intentionally burned out of their skulls by those angry locals. In either case, they cyclically rise for revenge, searching for hot young hippie babes to sacrifice to Satan for further supernatural favors (by eating those babes’ beating hearts fresh out of their exposed chests). They’re total jerks who cause great harm to their neighbors, but they look really cool doing so.

Like in their zombi Italo equivalents, the scene-to-scene logic of the Blind Dead films don’t matter as much as their overall mood, which relies heavily on the temporal contrast between the medieval knights of Old Europe and the sexually liberated youth of contemporary modernity. In Tombs of the Blind Dead, the knights are awoken when a young bikinied hippie breaks away from an awkward beach vacation where she’s being hounded for sex by both her current boyfriend and a lesbian boarding school chum from her past. Once alone, she makes the mistake of enjoying a cigarette while listening to swanky jazz at the burial site of the Knights Templar and is cosmically punished for her moral crimes by being violently swarmed and then gently nibbled alive. Once free from their graves, the knights are seemingly able to roam freely, and the movie finds great novelty in having the ancient ghouls invade distinctly urban spaces like the local mannequin factory and the nearby city morgue. We’re eventually treated to a flashback to the living knights’ heyday sacrificing an earlier generation of hot babes to Satan during the Crusades, but those medieval tapestries are just a brief reprieve from the knights’ oddly modern hijinks.

Blind Dead mastermind Amando de Ossorio was apparently very proud of his staging of the knights’ initial rising from the grave, since that exact footage from the first film is repeated in the following year’s Return of the Blind Dead and then again in 1975’s Night of the Seagulls. As you can likely tell by that latter title, the knights take an unexpected nautical detour halfway into the series, which further confuses its internal narrative logic. Return of the Blind Dead is a straightforward repeat & escalation of the original, while its immediate follow-up The Ghost Galleon (1974) leaves the graveyard behind to set sail. You see, the undead knights are now anchored to a gigantic ghost ship that exists in an alternate nightmare dimension that can only crossover into ours through the conduit of cosmic fog. Once that ship inevitably sinks, they go underwater, emerging from a nearby beach in Night of the Seagulls to once again gently cannibalize buxom women’s beating hearts. Those women’s spirits then return to this mortal plane as seagulls so they can scream in pain, which the townfolk can distinguish from the cries of regular seagulls because regular seagulls cannot fly at night. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but at least it’s poetic.

While the Knights Templar’s nautical side adventures in The Ghost Galleon & Night of the Seagulls sound wonderfully delirious on paper, Amando de Ossorio never again reached the artistic highs he achieved in the original Tombs of the Blind Dead. It’s impractical, but the blind dead really should be wielding swords on horseback in every picture regardless of whether they’re traveling by ghost ship. They’re severely less metal when they’re on-foot & swordless. The original film also has surprisingly surreal visual touches, like the intrusion of present-day train steam into the hippies’ boarding school flashbacks. Meanwhile, the most surreal aspect of Night of the Seagulls is how absurdly inept it is at the “day for night” illusion, completely disorienting its audience’s sense of time. Multiple scenes appear to take place both at midnight and at high-noon, simultaneously. The beachside locale is put to good use when local crabs are invited to join in on the knight’s oddly delicate flesh-eating, though, so it’s got its own minor points of visual interest here or there.

One way you can tell Tombs of the Blind Dead and its progressively ropy sequels belong to the same vintage Euro horror lineage as their Italo contemporaries is by puzzling through the confused history of their distribution. Upon initial release, they were each globally exported under different titles and different edits, with little care paid to artistic integrity or series continuity. Oddly, Tombs of the Blind Dead was rebranded for a US theatrical run as Revenge from Planet Ape, as if it were more directly inspired by Planet of the Apes than by the more obvious point of reference Night of the Living Dead. The Ghost Galleon was marketed as Horror of the Zombies, Ship of Zombies and, in Germany, The Ghost Ship of Swimming Corpses, while Night of the Seagulls was marketed as Don’t Go Out at Night and Night of the Death Cult, each title distancing these sequels from belonging to a larger Blind Dead franchise. Even within Spain, the “blind dead” became the “eyeless dead” in the series’ second outing, jumbling the brand. Nowadays, all four films are stuck between two extremely different modes of distribution: pristinely restored to their original form by boutique Blu-ray companies like Synapse, Vinegar Syndrome, and Shout Factory, or clumsily edited & dubbed as English-language bastardizations on Tubi, nothing inbetween. Movies don’t get much more vintage Italo horror than that.

-Brandon Ledet

Maniac Cop (1988)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

After venturing further into the neon-lit abyss of his own imagination with Her Private Hell (a self-referencing mashup of The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives), Nicolas Winding Refn is reportedly outsourcing pitches for his next planned project: a remake of the 1988 novelty slasher Maniac Cop. It’s easy to see the appeal. Like most of Refn’s work, Maniac Cop has a great look and a great hook but is in no rush to pay off the promise of its premise. Screenwriter Larry Cohen turns cops into the same abstract, high-concept source of terror as he would an inanimate object (like the killer yogurt in The Stuff and the killer ambulance in The Ambulance) or a prehistoric beast (like Quetzalcoatl in Q: The Winged Serpent and the voice of God in God Told Me To). Whereas Cohen’s It’s Alive asks, “What if there was a baby who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?”, his script for Maniac Cop asks, “What if there was a cop who was an ugly, homicidal maniac?” It’s a surprisingly effective venture since, as you know, all cops are ugly, homicidal maniacs, which makes its source of fear lastingly relatable. VHS era schlockteur James Glickenhaus (Shakedown, The Exterminator) offers some credibility to the film’s action cinema bona fides, and Blue Underground founder William Lustig does a cromulent job in the director’s chair making sure its visual style is up to snuff with other slicked-up slashers of its era. So why doesn’t it move? So much work went into the basic look, premise, and car-chase trailer clips of Maniac Cop that no one thought to put those individual pieces in motion in any convincing way. Its genre elements sit still onscreen purely to be admired, not to accomplish anything tangible or measurable, just like in a Nicolas Winding Refn film.

One reason for Maniac Cop‘s stubborn inertia is that there’s no clear, continuous lead character anchoring its narrative. For a while, Tom Atkins is heavily featured as a detective on the case of a mysterious series of randomized slayings, each attributed to an abnormally large, uniformed police officer. Richard “Shaft” Roundtree phones it in as Atkinson’s flagrantly corrupt higher-up, acting as the film’s extended celebrity cameo. An unusually subdued Bruce Campbell eventually steps in as the lead suspect in the case, a tall-enough cop who’s caught having an affair with a coworker just before his wife is violently murdered. Campbell is just one of many mutant freaks with badges working at his local station, and the movie continues character hopping until every butt-chinned cop who disgraces the screen is a credible suspect; every cop is a maniac until proven innocent. That investigation is mostly a distraction from the movie’s main mission, though, which is making high-concept horror tropes out of the everyday fear of being alone with an armed police officer. Despite its urban setting and all of its police-force paraphernalia, Maniac Cop is largely a by-the-books slasher, with a towering, undead killer stumbling from one slaying to the next in a series of isolated novelty set pieces. The initial shock of these killings is that the mutant cop is specifically targeting innocent people, committing random acts of violence simply because he has the authority to do so. A concerned citizen tells a TV news reporter, “I tell my kids, you see a cop, you cross to the other side of the street.” Another shoots a cop in the face after being pulled over in a routine traffic stop. The movie may not progress past that basic premise in a satisfying way, but it is shockingly honest about real-life cops’ fascistic relationship with the citizens they supposedly serve & protect.

Maniac Cop eventually has to deliver on its title by narrowing its field of potential suspects down to one specific maniacal police officer, no longer shielding his identity behind backlighting & shadowy silhouettes. The legend of the undead maniac Matthew Cordell is what roots this movie firmly in the slasher genre, in a naked attempt to establish a Jason Voorhees figure of its very own. Cordell wasn’t always a maniac. When alive, he played the mythical figure of the Good Cop on city streets, much to the annoyance of the Bad Cops on the force and the corrupt politicians in City Hall, whom he threatened to expose by being an uptight rule follower. As punishment, he was framed for fictional acts of police brutality and sentenced to prison, where he was promptly murdered by rabid criminals happy to kill any cop they could get their hands on. It’s upon resurrection that Cordell becomes a homicidal maniac himself, having been corrupted and mutated by an unjust legal system. He’s a ginormous, unignorable manifestation of all cops’ corruption & brutality, and he spends the first half of the movie representing all cops as one shadowy figure before his rotting, zombified face is revealed to the audience. Also like the Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Angela Bakers of slasher tradition, his original thematic purpose is immediately distorted & diluted in his return sequels. In Maniac Cop II, Matt Cordell joins forces with a local serial killer to seek personal revenge against the cops & prisoners who initially wronged him, no longer attacking random innocent citizens on city streets. In Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, he attacks sleazy TV journalists who sensationalize false accounts of police brutality for ratings, effectively letting cops off the hook for their everyday villainy by exposing it as fake news.

In the limited capacity that anyone discusses Maniac Cop in recent years, the film’s legacy has developed into a kind of Alien/Terminator situation, where its louder, flashier sequel Maniac Cop II gets praised as the best of its series for featuring more & better action scenes, while the original remains superior on a purely artistic level. And, like with Alien & Terminator, its sequels are so fun to watch you can’t even complain about it without sounding like a dweeb who doesn’t know how to party. Maniac Cop II is delightfully over-the-top, throwing as many car chases, chainsaws, strip routines, and explosions at the screen as it can in the name of VHS-warped entertainment. Maniac Cop III is a little more subdued at first, but it gradually builds to an elaborate high speed car chase where Matt Cordell is fully on fire for the final third of the runtime, driving a stolen cop car towards the proverbial gates of Hell. Both sequels feature extensive body burn stunts that are guaranteed to drop an audience’s jaws, while the audacity of the first film is purely conceptual. It’s extremely rare to find an American motion picture about daily police work that doesn’t make heroes out of monsters or at least excuse cops’ monstrous behavior as the work of a few bad apples. Even as a franchise, Maniac Cop can’t avoid backsliding into copaganda by its final outing, and its only clear, coherent commentary about the corruptive nature of the system can be found in the original Larry Cohen screenplay (despite the fact that Cohen also penned the sequels). There’s a good chance that Refn’s take on the material will return to the core, simple idea that everyday cops are terrifying alien monsters akin to a Jason Voorhees or a Michael Myers or Her Private Hell‘s The Leather Man. The longer he dwells on that point without distraction or relief, the better, but I guess an explosion or two wouldn’t hurt too much.

-Brandon Ledet

Saccharine (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Saccharine is the latest supernatural horror film from Natalie Erika James, who previously directed Relic. Midori Francis stars as Hana, a queer medical student who struggles with her weight. While out one night with classmate Josie (Danielle Macdonald), Hana runs into her high school acquaintance Melissa (Annie Shapero), who was overweight in adolescence but has now slimmed down significantly. She offers Hana a couple of capsules of “Grey,” a new non-government-approved weight loss supplement that she says did wonders for her, although she warns her that the medication is extremely expensive. Hana, who has a crush on Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a personal trainer at the university gym, sees rapid progress in her weight loss journey after only one capsule, but when she learns that the price for Grey is five thousand dollars, she opens the second capsule and runs it through spectroanalysis, at which point she discovers that the miracle drug consists of human cremains. She sneaks back into the cadaver lab and retrieves some biowaste from her class group’s assigned corpse (cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha” by one of her groupmates because of the dead woman’s obesity), cremates it, and begins taking it. By the time she realizes that in so doing she has made herself the object of haunting by Bertha’s restless (and hungry) ghost, it might be too late for her. 

There was some discourse last year with the sudden appearance of Ozempic/GLP-1s on the market as a weight loss medication, with many relating the too-good-to-be-true results of the treatment and the abject horror of seeing perfectly healthy celebrities and athletes appearing in advertisements for it to the 2024 film The Substance. The Substance is a film about a culture that prioritizes aesthetic conformity to a Eurocentric beauty standard upheld by a porn-addled populace over real “health,” pre-saging Ozempic, and is about the kind of world that creates the “need” for GLP-1s. Saccharine is a film that lives in the post-Ozempic world, a character study into a person whose lack of control over their binging episodes leads them to sacrifice their health in more ways than one in order to have the body that they want. It’s indirectly grappling with GLP-1s, but it’s also casting a wide enough net that its central metaphor can also easily be seen as a parallel to a fad diet or bulimia. It’s not exactly breaking new ground, but it’s also well-studied in the way that it treats the characters who struggle with their weight, often as the results of coping mechanisms and self-destructive habits that they have very little conscious control over. 

Saccharine’s greatest weakness is in its pacing. At 112 minutes in length, it moves pretty quickly in its first and final acts, but the middle tends to drag, with the scenes of Bertha-possessed-Hana eating in a fugue state beginning to feel redundant. The storytelling in Act I is very economical, giving us a lot of story visually without any of it feeling expository. We learn that Hana’s a med student, that she has a crush on Alanya, that she struggles with her weight, that she has a tendency to binge eat, that she’s a lesbian, and that she over-identifies with the morbidly obese corpse she and her classmates are tasked with dissecting (they even wear the same nail polish) — all within the first ten minutes of the film. But after the half-hour mark, the pace slows to a bit of a crawl. There is also a mostly well-done subplot about her parents’ marriage from which we infer a lot about Hana’s childhood. Her mother Kimie (Showko Showfukutei) is a typically overbearing mother whose parental concern takes the form of constantly monitoring her daughter’s weight and food intake and providing unwanted housekeeping; her father remains completely offscreen except as a shambling cryptid-like presence in the periphery, a shut-in who has grown too fat to leave the house. In the one real scene with him, Hana visits him while her mother is out of country (perhaps having left him for good) and lambasts him for “giving up” and the way that this affected his family. As a “the monster is the metaphor” horror film, this one comes a little too close to reaching Smile’s “oops, too obvious” territory in these scenes, and can be particularly frustrating at this point since the narrative seems to be spinning its wheels, but the final act manages to get the energy back on track to reach an interesting conclusion. The film’s unwieldy length results in an epilogue scene which follows the climax feeling less like a well-considered final rug-pull and more like a tacked-on extension, which wouldn’t be the case in a film that was ten minutes shorter. In a film with this subject matter, it’s hard to resist the urge to make a joke about trimming some of the fat around the middle, but it really would have helped the film overall. 

One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed about Saccharine was that it also explores some largely uncovered ground by having its main character be a scientist, someone not only capable of finding out what’s in the miracle pills and replicating it but also who tackles her apparent haunting with scientific rigor; the film smartly explores this rigorousness as an almost pathological means for Hana to take some agency and control in her life, when she doesn’t have control over her body. That’s good stuff! One also initially gets the sense that Alanya will be more of an antagonistic presence: a hot, mean, physically attractive woman who will inevitably reject or otherwise hurt Hana. Instead, she becomes the film’s love interest, and she’s also both reasonable in her concerns that Hana is losing weight too quickly and compassionate about Hana’s compulsive night eating (which is actually Bertha acting through her, but Alanya can’t know that). I also really liked the relationship between Hana and her best friend Josie, who is a breath of fresh air every time that she appears. Although there are moments where her dialogue threatens to become a little too Afterschool Special, like when she tells Hana “You say ‘fat’ like it’s a bad word!”, she’s pretty well characterized throughout. Although the film wastes some time at other points, we don’t have to sit around waiting for Josie to believe Hana about the ghost that’s haunting her, since Bertha makes her presence known while Josie is there pretty immediately. All of that works, and works well. Perhaps most surprisingly, the film decides to suddenly become much funnier in the final act, which is a bit of tonal whiplash but which I appreciated, since it helped jump-start things again after the slothful midsection. 

This one is not quite as subtle or meaningful as Relic, and admittedly, I don’t think it’s trying to be. Moving away from the mostly single location setting of that film to the more varied environments of this one creates more opportunities for visual flourish. That’s mostly successful, as there are beautifully composed shots of triangular university stairwells and other fascinating images, and the more immediately apparent supernatural premise of this film means that we get to see some great ghost images early on. I also want to shout out the end credits, which are some of the coolest that I have seen in a long time. I’m not sure how I feel about some of the more regressive depictions of overeating, however. There are images of a mouth (presumably Hana’s) gorging in the opening, and many more throughout, and it feels very Shallow Hal to have the area around our lead actress’s mouth smeared with jelly and grease when she’s gorging herself during her “fat” period, slovenly and intentionally off-putting, then have her scarf just as much when she’s got her haunted metaphorical tapeworm taking the brunt of it in her “slimmed down” appearance. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth mentioning. All in all, this one isn’t quite as smart as some of the director’s previous work, but it’s making up for that by dialing up the style and expanding the scope of the lens. I look forward to her next one, and I hope it’s a little bit more concise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Her Private Hell (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Anytime I catch myself wondering “Where have they been?” about a specific actor or director, the answer is always television. Nicolas Winding Refn has produced two high-end TV series since he last graced cinemas with the best film of 2016, which from my limited perspective means he’s spent the last decade enjoying an early retirement. Then, out of nowhere, he premiered his new film Her Private Hell at this year’s Cannes, once again baffling & frustrating fans & critics alike with another slow-motion adventure into his own neon-lit subconscious. Her Private Hell presented an opportunity for a grand Refn comeback tour, dragging the acquired-taste auteur out of the hazy obscurity of luxury TV streaming series and back into the glamorous spotlight of festival-circuit red carpets. Instead, he chose to double down on the prickliest, most alienating aspects of his work with no apparent urge to gain new fans or win over old haters. It’s like the 50-something filmmaker skipped the middle period of his career so he could rush directly into his “late style” era. Imagine if Coppola had fucked off for ten years after making The Godfather and then immediately came back with Megalopolis, or if David Lynch had jumped straight into Inland Empire after Blue Velvet, without laying the decades of artistic & thematic groundwork that earns an audience’s trust & good will. Older, venerated filmmakers of that stature are given a lot of leeway to go big and go vague without guiding the audience along the way with the usual handholding tactics of Narrative, Structure, Entertainment, and Taste. There’s something extremely bratty about Refn acting as if he’s entitled to that same reverence & grace at such a relatively young age, and so long since he last pleased a crowd with his jacket-and-soundtrack-selling hit Drive. As always, I admire the audacity.

Structurally, Her Private Hell combines the two most alienating titles from Refn’s back catalog—The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives—into a crude, volatile mash-up where they never quite gel into a new singular work. Sophie Thatcher stars in the Neon Demon half, playing a jaded, sneering actress in a sci-fi dystopia who gets back at her emotionally checked-out father by sexually pursuing his wife (and her former bestie, played by Havana Rose Liu). Charles Melton headlines the Only God Forgives half, playing an American bruiser in post-WWII Tokyo, who’s willing to crush infinite skulls and suffer infinite tortures in his pursuit to get his daughter back from gangster kidnappers. How these two temporally dissonant stories are related is anyone’s guess; they share a thematic impulse to reunite broken families, but they’re otherwise rigidly segregated. Certain sequences of the edit suggest that Melton’s buff, shirtless soldier of a forgotten neon-noir past has been entirely dreamed up by Thatcher’s lonely, horny actress from our neon-melodrama future, as the story often shifts to his perspective at the exact moment that her head hits a pillow. More directly, they are connected by a mysterious mist that hangs heavy over both of their rotten cities, physicalizing the ambiguity of the temporal & geographical settings Refn sketches out here. Another figure who emerges from that mist is an entity known only as The Leather Man: a hulking presence dressed head to toe in black leather, studded with diamonds, who occasionally rips women’s chests open with his bare hands as if he’s spatchcocking a turkey. If the mist is a physical manifestation of the film’s ambiguity, The Leather Man is a physical manifestation of its dread – a walking, stalking avatar of Bad Vibes. All three of these central figures are really just isolated figments of Refn’s imagination, relegated to their own distinct movie realms, only accessed by dreams, only connected by mist.

While Her Private Hell mostly operates on post-giallo dream logic, it announces itself as a futuristic fairy tale with a wry Hans Christian Andersen name-drop in its very first scene. Instead of the usual driving synths that provide a sense of momentum in Refn’s otherwise static tableaus, this outing is scored by old-timer Pino Donaggio with the fluttering harps & strings that usually accompany bedtime fairy tales, marking the exact moment that a character falls asleep and drifts into a magical other-realm. Thatcher’s attention-starved protagonist makes that framing clear in her direct references to her love interest (and familial rival) as her “Wicked Stepmother,” while debating whether to fuck or kill her as retribution for the betrayal of marrying her father. If Her Private Hell is a bedtime storybook, though, it’s one that’s only suitable for overly patient perverts who’ve already flipped through all of the available Bertrand Mandico, Yann Gonzales, Jane Schoenbrun, Amanda Kramer, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani titles on the shelf and are looking to add one just more neon spotlight to their oncoming dream. When The Neon Demon first hit theaters a decade ago, there was a “What am I even looking at?” quality to it that has since faded as so many other, hungrier auteurs have made names for themselves playing Refn’s game. The diamond & leather studded killer and the characters who are named after punk icons like Johnny Thunders & Nico can’t help but recall Mandico’s work in particular, even if Refn was already doing his thing well before The Wild Boys. Appreciation of Her Private Hell requires an appreciation of all beautifully lit, eerily empty film genres, as exemplified by Thatcher & company seemingly working on a Planet of the Vampires remake in-between their semi-incestuous sexual rivalries and inert fashion magazine editorials, adding 60s sci-fi kitsch to the already sky-high pile of retro genre references. Refn is in some ways very giving here, offering the audience a whole lot of everything while, paradoxically, lulling us to sleep with a cold, mystifying sparseness. Everything he loves is carefully arranged on the screen but rarely set in motion, with little care for whether there’s an audience out there who loves him back.

-Brandon Ledet