Welcome to Episode #247 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of nunsploitation thrillers from around the globe, starting with the Mexican production Alucarda (1977).
00:00 Welcome 02:19 Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera (1963) 07:31 The Idiots (1998) 15:20 Ariel (1988) 22:11 Troop Beverly Hills (1989)
28:26 Alucarda (1977) 56:30 School of the Holy Beast (1974) 1:14:33 Killer Nun (1979) 1:25:48 Dark Habits (1983)
When preparing my review for Eddington, I couldn’t remember the bizarrely specific Pokémon-themed name that was going to be given to the AI data center being built outside of the titular town. In searching for a script for it online in order to get this name, I stumbled across a Reddit post that contained the screenplay for both that film and Weapons, and I inadvertently read a spoiler about Weapons in the beginning of the post before I could click away. To be honest, I didn’t believe it when I read it. It seemed like too much of a departure from what the advertising had presented, and I couldn’t reconcile the images that were already rattling around in my head from the trailers with the spoiler, let alone with the discourse already surrounding the film, all of which had firmly already centered itself around (pre)reading the “disappeared kids” narrative as being a school shooting metaphor. The spoiler didn’t ruin the overall experience for me, but it did mean that I knew what the motivation was behind the film’s events before the film revealed itself, and I wish that I could have experienced this for the first time without that foreknowledge.
The film’s poster tagline is also part of its opening narration: “[One] night, at 2:17 am, [almost] every child from Mrs. Gandy’s class woke up, got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door, walked into the dark … and never came back.” We see this first school day with most of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner)’s class having failed to show up, all except for timid Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher). A month later, there are still no clues as to the children’s location, and the community is still in a state of perpetual outcry, with particularly outspoken local contractor Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) calling for Justine’s arrest until she can explain what happened, a conflict that Principal Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong) attempts to prevent from escalating. We learn that Justine has had previous trouble with alcoholism and that this event has led her to drowning her sorrows once again, which leads her to have a one-night stand with an old ex, police officer Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). Based on the pre-release information we had, one would assume that Justine would be our sole main character as we follow her along her investigation into the disappearance of her students (or that perhaps she is responsible and that the film will focus on Archer’s discovery of the extent of her involvement), but the film takes a different narrative approach, instead breaking its story into multiple sections that each focus on one character.
Justine’s is first, of course, so that we can watch her struggle with facing the community of Maybrook while having no more answers to the children’s disappearance than they do, up to the point when she’s attacked by an apparently possessed friend, at which point the film then switches points of view to follow Archer. We see him waking up in the bed of his missing son, apparently regretting all the love he failed to show the boy when he had the chance (as we see later in Alex’s point of view section, Archer’s son Matthew is an outright bully, perhaps because of this lack of affection). He’s losing track of things at work, placing wrong orders and forgetting others entirely, and this scattered thinking can only refocus on one target: Justine. He’s frustrated with what he feels is insufficient investigation on the part of police captain Ed (Toby Huss), so he begins to follow Justine and vandalizes her car, but he comes to see that she’s just as lost in all of this as he is. I don’t want to get into all of the ins and outs of what we learn from each of these intersections between the character-focused sections because they’re much more interesting to see play out non-linearly, almost Magnolia style (which director Zach Cregger has admitted is an inspiration), before they weave into one another. It makes the whole thing feel grounded, filling in little realistic details through naturalistic dialogue — conversations about the excitement of coming home early from a business trip because it means that you’ll be home when you’re ovulating, Archer’s wife’s exasperated “I’m going to work” when she finds him asleep in missing Matthew’s room yet again, and the way that homeless addict James (Austin Abrams) spins a threadbare web of transparent but plausible lies to try and extort tiny bits of cash from friends still willing to take a call from him. There are large swathes of the film where you’ll completely forget that there’s a potentially supernatural mystery at play here because you’ll be more invested in the lives of the characters. That’s good filmmaking, baby.
Weapons is doing pretty well on the discourse circuit. The film’s barely been out for a couple of days as I write this (on the Monday after the film’s release, having seen it in a packed theater Friday evening), and there are already many different takes on the film’s themes. I barely looked at social media today and saw more than a dozen memes about the meal that Marcus and his husband have prepared for their TV time (it includes seven hot dogs, ruffled potato chips, baby carrots, an ungodly amount of what I presume is ranch dressing, and chocolate chip cookies — iconic), and YouTuber Ryan Hollinger has already put out a video in which he claims that the film’s overall thesis is about alcoholism (even though I don’t completely agree with his analysis). Although alcoholism and addiction in general are running themes through the film, I think that the presence of these diseases is more about showing character through the ways that addiction can compel people to be the worst version of themselves. That compulsion isn’t limited to drinking or shooting up, though, as we see with Archer and how his vandalism and lack of focus are the result of his grief. If anything, the film is about parasitism and the way that parasites can compel their hosts, with addictive compulsion (i.e. the proverbial monkey on one’s back), sexual impulsivity, and grief themselves acting as metaphors for having a parasite that controls you, as the film’s villainous force does. I won’t say more than that to save you from being spoiled the way that I was.
In discussion about the film over the weekend, a friend brought up that one critic’s complaint was that Cregger will always opt to go for a joke rather than a scare, and while I think that’s an oversimplification of the director’s style, I also don’t think it’s inaccurate, and even if it were, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. This is a movie about children disappearing, parents bereft of answers, communities in mourning, leaders navigating grief and expectations, and finding solace in feeding one’s diseases while also being very, very funny. Sometimes, Cregger will just throw in a little piece of weirdness just for the hell of it (the giant floating AR-15 with 2:17 shining out of it in LED alarm clock letters being the most obvious example), and that’s also a delight. It’s a rich vein for evaluation and re-evaluation, and I could possibly be enticed to see this one a second time while it’s in theaters. Recapitulating the jokes would be just as bad as giving away the ending (which is itself very cathartic and bloodily hilarious), so I’ll just give this one a whole-hearted recommendation and send you on your way, dear reader.
I remember waiting at the bus stop at Republic Square in Austin in early 2020 when a friend texted me about the controversy surrounding Alison Brie’s Horse Girl, and the alleged plagiarism that the film committed against a smaller indie title, The God Inside My Ear. He said that it looked very bad for Brie, and when I read the list of supposed direct lifts that Horse Girl took from God Inside, it did seem pretty damning. Months later, Brandon nominated Horse Girl as a topic for the podcast, and I mentioned that I had read it was heavily plagiaristic, but when I tried to follow up on it at that time, it seemed like those allegations had been dropped (although I can’t seem to find an article confirming that anymore, since Google is essentially useless now). I remember reading through all of the comments on a message board where people had taken the opportunity to take potshots at Brie and how assured everyone had been that she had definitely stolen some valor, only for a post to come up a year later with screenshots that seemed to disprove every contention that the creator of God Inside had made, and what a turnaround there had been on what people thought she had done. I remember the satisfaction that came with Brie’s vindication, that I could rest assured that she hadn’t done anything wrong. Not my Annie Edison! Not my Trudy Campbell!
I hadn’t heard of Together at all when Brandon mentioned that he was trying to find a screening of it in New Orleans. Coincidentally, a friend in town sent a message in one of our group chats that a friend of his had highly recommended Together and organized an outing, although when we got to the theater he realized that he had spent all of that time confused and thinking about the upcoming Weapons instead. Somehow, I missed all of the marketing for this one, and when I mentioned it to another friend, he said that there was again a plagiarism scandal circling around it. I read the article from The Wrap summarizing the similarities between Together and a 2023 indie script titled Better Half; both texts are about a heterosexual couple who end up beginning to physically merge with one another, featuring “two central couples […] composed of one codependent partner and a commitment-phobic artist,” and the use of the Spice Girls song “2 Become 1.” And that does seem kind of damning, doesn’t it? I’m of two minds about this, because the last time this happened, it became clear that the director of God Inside was grasping at straws and whether they were doing so to get more attention for their film or their efforts were earnest and in good faith, Horse Girl was very much its own bizarre, beautiful thing. Any similarities were superficial at best.
As for the points of comparison between Better Half and Together, I’m not at all convinced that a low angle reverse shot on two actors with their heads tilted toward one another constitutes plagiarizing an image, and if you’re a millennial making a movie about two people merging together (an uncommon but not unique concept) then the use of “2 Become 1” seems like a perfectly natural creative choice for multiple creators from the same generation to make. And why the vague language around “commitment-phobic artist”? Franco’s character is a musician who’s having issues with intimacy because he’s haunted by having discovered his parents’ decomposing bodies and has his doubts about uprooting from a life spent entirely in the city and relocating to a wooded rural area. The “artist” in Better Half could be anything—a painter, a sculptor, a playwright—whose commitment issues could be characterized in a completely different manner. On the other hand … it’s weird that this has happened twice, right? That Wrap article indicates that the producers of Better Half intentionally sought out Franco and Brie’s involvement with their production, which does paint everything in a slightly different light. I’m not really sure what to think at this point, other than to say that I absolutely lovedTogether.
The film opens on an homage to The Thing, as two dogs assisting a man in a woodland search for a couple of missing hikers drink from the same underground well and begin behaving strangely, then begin to merge into a single horrifying dogthing that night in their kennel. Elsewhere, Tim (Franco) is rummaging around in some boxes of records when he comes across some photos of his parents, which rattle him. Girlfriend Millie (Brie) has gotten a teaching job in a small town, and she asks him to come back to the going away party that their friends are holding for them, mentioning that people think that it’s cute that the two are in matching outfits; when Tim returns to the party, he’s changed clothes. Millie performs a (not so) mock proposal to Tim at the party which goes poorly, and the air is still thick with tension when they’re settling into their new home, as the change of scenery hasn’t alleviated Tim of the horrifying image of his rotting parents, and Millie’s increased frustration with his resultant impotence, combined with his poor reaction to the proposal, make her doubt their ability to go the distance. The two get caught in a rainstorm on an intended romantic hike and end up collapsing into the same underground space that we saw the dogs exploring in the film’s opening, and the two of them end up reluctantly drinking the water. When they uncouple the next morning, they seem to be sticking together, and things only get worse from there.
There’s a lot to be grossed out by here, certainly, but it’s not nearly as gross as other recent genre entries like The Substance or The Ugly Stepsister, and, like those films, the “horror” part of the body horror genre is the least important part. Stepsister’s examination of the presumed protagonistic gaze of the fairy tale as a genre is the destination while the lengths to which the title character is physically molded and the resultant revulsion thereof is merely the vessel to take us there. As for The Substance, I have a hard time calling that one “body horror” at all because it’s not a “horror” movie, but a comedy that happens to use self-mutilation, unwashed hands molesting shrimp, and pulsating tumors as comedic beats. Together is the same body horror* with an asterisk because the point here isn’t to make your stomach churn; it’s to tell a love story, with the fact that the way that the characters “come together” is nauseating being much less relevant than the emotional core of Tim and Millie’s relationship. To reach back further for a different example, David Cronenberg’s The Brood was created in the wake of his acrimonious divorce from Margaret Hindson, and that subtext is present in the film in the way that Cronenberg’s marriage is reflected in Frank and Nola Carveth’s, but it never feels like The Brood is about that. The film rushes headlong toward the harrowing body horror images of its final act, with the Carveth family’s dissolution serving as the scaffolding on which the meat of the film, its imagery, hangs. The narrative is merely the means to the film’s haunting visuals’ end. The reverse is true in Together, where the scenes in which Tim nearly chokes to death on Millie’s hair in their sleep or the two wake up to find that their sharing a single forearm are the set dressing that surrounds the primary focus, which is what it really means to take “the plunge” with someone.
What a lot of people don’t seem to be talking about is just how funny Together is; it got a lot of laughs out of me. In a scene following the first time that Tim’s separation anxiety from Millie is made physically manifest, he sees a doctor who prescribes him valium (“It’s called diazepam now,” the doc says, which Tim repeats later to Millie in one of the film’s many repeated dialogue gags) and tells him about a hiker couple who went missing in the woods near Tim and Millie’s house, calling it “big news” at the time. Tim, snobbishly, asks if it was bigger news than “Local man waters garden”; later, when reading an article on the local newspaper’s website about the missing hikers, the side-pane article on the website has that exact phrase as its headline. (Admittedly, I was the only person in my screening who laughed at this bit.) There’s an insightfulness about relationships and their awkward moments that are cleverly captured in the dialogue and make for some quality humor. That same cleverness carries over into the way that certain lines are repeated between the film’s first and second halves, like “If we don’t split now, it’ll be much harder down the line,” and the changing context of that screenplay symmetry.
This was a crowd pleaser, as well as a crowd grosser-outer. All of the group with whom I saw Together were delighted by it, and no one seemed particularly excited about hugging one another as we went our separate ways. Although it has a couple of instances of all out shunting, it’s pretty palatable for anyone who wouldn’t identify themselves as squeamish. If nothing else, I’m making damn certain that I take my LifeStraw with me the next time I go on a romantic hike.
There is something both inevitable and unfathomable about there being a new I Know What You Did Last Summer legacyquel in wide theatrical release right now. Sure, the combination of Hollywood executives’ unquenchable thirst for name-brand IP and the relative dependability of horror cheapies to turn a tidy profit makes it seem like a no-brainer that this vintage 90s title would get the modern rebootquel treatment. It was pretty low on the priority list too, following a long parade of legacy horror sequels of varying quality in recent years, like Scream,Halloween, Candyman, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Final Destination: Bloodlines. Even so, the I Know What You Did Last Summer brand had already been downgraded to straight-to-streaming schlock in its little seen third & fourth entries, so it’s a little surprising to see the title claw its way back onto multiplex marquees. It’s especially surprising when you consider how little there is to the property beyond the recognizability of its title, which makes for easy, memorable parody in Scary Movie-type yuck-em-ups. The first I Know What You Did Last Summer film is a by-the-numbers teen slasher with little bloodshed and little novelty. Its setting in a North Carolina fishing village provides some nice background texture for its otherwise indisticntive murder spree, justifying its hook-handed fisherman killer’s costuming beyond its connection to a timeless urban legend. By the second film in the series, it was already apparent that those details weren’t enough to keep the party going, since I Still Know What You Did Last Summer immediately jumped the shark by sending its teens-in-peril on the kind of Bahamas beach trip that usually arrives multiple seasons into a hokey sitcom like Saved by the Bell. That tropical island locale does little to distract from the fact that the series’ killer isn’t iconic enough to have earned a recognizable moniker by his second outing. You can’t even joke about I Still Know being subtitled The Fisherman’s Tropical Vacay or The Hook Man’s Island Getaway because no one would know what you’re talking about. When the killer’s teenage victims refer to him as “The Slicker Guy” deep into the third act, you can feel the whole brand falling apart from under you . . . and yet here we are, two more sequels and a televised series later.
The benefit of contributing to a legacy this bland is that it sets expectations low. No army of black t-shirted horror bros are going to be outraged about the blasphemous desecration of I Know What You Did Last Summer as a sacred object, not the way they were with more disastrous franchise refreshers like The Exorcist: Believer or the 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street. That gives director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson free rein to be playful & flippant with the material, even if the exercise requires her to be absurdly reverent to the fabled events of 1997. Through reluctant re-unions, nightmare visitations, and a presumptuous sequel set-up stinger, the main casts of the first two I Know What You Did features return here for unearned moments of horror-icon spotlight: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar and, briefly, Brandy. As is now legacyquel tradition, they help fill in a younger cast of imperiled teens on their initial bouts with the slicker killer, adding gravitas to previous outings by constantly referencing Trauma in therapy speak (in this case through classroom lecture and conversational references to The Body Keeps The Score). The 4th of July celebrations, fish-themed parade floats, department store mannequins, and town-hall beauty pageant stage of the original film are all treated with sacred reverence as if anyone would remember those details without having recently rewatched it as homework. Robinson undercuts that reverence with metatextual jokes about how “Nostalgia’s overrated” or how it’s not a viable plan to “fuck off to the Bahamas” to escape this particular killer, but those one-liners only go so far. Her bolder choice is to double down on the sassy, aggressive girliness of her straight-to-Netflix comedy thriller Do Revenge here, aiming her I Know What You Did sequel at teen-girl sensibilities instead of trying to please those teens’ aging Millennial parents. Considering that the first Last Summer movie excelled more as a teen melodrama than as a bodycount slasher anyway, it makes sense that this cutesy reboot would be rigorously engineered specifically “for the girlies and the gays.” What’s impressive is that it pulls off that girlish tone while still being the most violent entry in its series to date.
As with the original cast, the new I Know What You Did Last Summer crew is populated by young twentysomethings who are likely only famous to children (give or take whatever die-hard fans Chase Sui Wonders might have picked up from her turn as the least recognizable actor in Bodies Bodies Bodies). As with the original cast, they spend a reckless night partying on a public road by the fishing-village coast, leading to an anonymous stranger’s vehicular death. They do nothing to rescue or report in that moment of crisis, which seemingly leads to vengeance from beyond the grave the following summer, when a hook-handed killer in a fisherman slicker threatens them with notecards & puncture wounds. This reboot does not deviate from the narrative formula of the original, but it does deviate in tone & extremity. While the 1997 film kept most of its kills offscreen and cleanly preserved on fishing-boat ice, the new one leans into its R rating and throws in some additional fishing-themed tools of death to expand the killer’s arsenal: boning knife, anchor rope, harpoon gun, etc. Robinson also expands the horror-nostalgia scope to include allusions to other famous properties, borrowing the Jaws mayor’s refusal to postpone his town’s 4th of July celebrations, the Scream killer’s kitchen-island voyeurism, and some horror-nerd cred from references to podcasts like Colors of the Dark & This Ends at Prom. She balances out all of this genre-fan pandering by keeping the mood light, sassy, and gay. Same-sex couples, bisexual hookups, and a self-satisfied coining of the term “gentrifislaytion” align the film with other recent reclaimed-for-the-girlies horror titles like Do Revenge, Clown in a Cornfield, and 2021’s Slumber Party Massacre remake than traditionally macho horror-convention-bro fare. I don’t believe any of those titles are remarkably great films, but I also recognize that I am not their primary target audience. I was 12 years old when I watched the first I Know What You Did Last Summer in a suburban movie theater, duped into enjoying an afterschool-special melodrama about reckless driving because it was dressed up in the rain-soaked clothes of a post-Scream slasher. Today’s 12-year-olds now have a mediocre-to-everyone-else slasher of their very own here, just as lacking in distinct iconography but now doubly violent, fun, and queer-friendly. I think that’s beautiful.
Godzilla’s titular offspring in the 1967 kaiju comedy Son of Godzilla doesn’t officially have a name, or at least he didn’t yet. Between the film’s release and the character’s return in the following year’s Destroy All Monsters, Toho held a contest for Godzilla fans to name the reptilian tyke, and the world settled on the name “Minilla,” a portmanteau of “Mini” and “Godzilla”. In his initial appearance, however, he’s only referred to as “Baby Godzilla” by the humans on the ground gazing up at his towering, toddling glory. Minilla has gone on to become a viciously hated name within the larger, ongoing Godzilla fandom. He’s cited in online sources as Godzilla’s “adopted son,” but I’m not sure that his initial appearance backs that detail up either. In Son of Godzilla, Baby Godzilla is prematurely hatched from a mysterious egg when his nest is discovered by gigantic mantises (Kamakuras) looking for an easy meal. Before he can gather the strength to flee, he is immediately rescued by Godzilla, who is summoned by his pathetic cries for help. There is no appearance or mention of a mother figure who might have laid that egg, but the scientists & freelance reporter watching from the ground all immediately refer to Godzilla as the pitiful creature’s father. The King of Monsters takes on that responsibility with enough gusto that the question of their biological relation is beside the point. Godzilla teaches Baby Godzilla how to breathe fire and how to rule over the giant bugs that infest the small island where he hatched, like a dad teaching his son how to play catch or how to change a car’s engine oil. It’s all very cute, assuming that you can stand looking directly at the mini-Godzilla’s craggly face.
Baby Godzilla is cute in the exact way that a pathetically ugly rescue dog is cute. Every bumbling minute spent with him is a gift, since it’s a miracle he wasn’t immediately put down. When the giant mantises poke at his freshly hatched body, all he can do is roll around in the dirt like a waterlogged roast turkey that fell off the kitchen table. Minilla has neither a name nor a neck in his first appearance, the latter of which presumably develops during puberty for his species. He falls down constantly, he squawks like an injured donkey, and his every movement is scored as if he were an overweight clown trying to squeeze himself into an impossibly tiny car. I love him. The great thing about Godzilla movies is that they are, at their very least, 2-for-1 creature features that double the number of rubber-suited monsters you’d expect to see in an equivalent Roger Corman cheapie. Whether Godzilla’s fighting a three-headed hell beast, a giant crawfish, or a sentient pile of trash, you’re getting at least two monsters for the price of one. For its part, Son of Godzilla offers you four giant beasts: Godzilla himself (who graciously appears less than a minute into the opening scene), the aforementioned glowing-eyed Kamakura mantises, a giant spider named Kumonga and, the most unholy abomination of all, Baby Godzilla. That’s a lot of bang for your buck, so it’s a little silly that dedicated fans of the series waste so much energy complaining about this outing just because they have to babysit Godzilla’s uggo offspring to get to the good stuff. Not even Godzilla bodyslamming Kamakuras to death and then lighting their mantis corpses on fire is enough to overcome the film’s reputation as Kiddie Junk, à la Godzilla vs Megalon. Pity.
As always, the human drama in the periphery of these kaiju battles is mostly an afterthought. Director Jun Fukuda continues the fun island hangout vibe he previously established in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, putting in a bare-minimum effort to connect the kaiju shenanigans to an obligatory environmental message. A secret collective of environmental scientists has taken over a small island off the Japanese coast to conduct experiments in controlling the weather, in preparation for future climate change & overpopulation crises. Mysterious machines whir in the background while the scientists float balloons full of experimental chemical compounds into the atmosphere that can adjust the local temperature on demand. A freelance journalist crashes the party but ultimately doesn’t find these experiments nefarious, so he casually joins the crew as a cook (and a potential lover for the island’s sole resident, who lurks in the nearby jungle). The weather machine business does eventually come in handy in two ways, though. It offers Godzilla some miniature structures to knock down, as is his wont, and it sets up a graphically beautiful conclusion in which the scientists trigger a snowstorm that freezes Godzilla & Baby Godzilla into forced hibernation. The final image is of the parent & child huddling for warmth as they’re buried alive in snow, while the scientists escape the island via raft and congratulate themselves on a humane resolution to the monster attacks. Admittedly, they do find a way to escape without killing Godzilla’s baby, but I still found the image to be hauntingly sad. Baby Godzilla has a fucked up little face that only a parent could love, and Son of Godzilla vividly illustrates that cold isolation from an otherwise unkind world in its final minute. It’s almost enough to make you cry.
Welcome to Episode #242 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2025, starting with Ryan Coogler’s Southern-fried vampire musical Sinners.
00:00 Welcome
01:37 Mike Flanagan 03:04 Disclosure(1994) 04:50 Brokeback Mountain (2005) 09:53 Smiley Face (2007) 13:15 A Room with a View (1985) 17:01 High Heels (1991) 21:07 Querelle (1982)
25:12 Sinners (2025) 45:04 Companion (2025) 57:57 The Actor (2025) 1:08:58 Dead Talents Society (2025)
Wolf is an oddity. I went on a little bit of a werewolf movie sidequest earlier this year viewing The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Wolfen, and when I borrowed the latter from the library, I thought Mike Nichols’s Wolf was what I was getting. I have very strong memories of the evocative movie poster for this one in at least one of the video stores of my youth, and I’ve always been curious about it. How can you not have some curiosity about a werewolf flick helmed by the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two years before he made The Birdcage? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and James Spader, no less. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly noteworthy one either, which is likely why it gets mistaken for Wolfen.
Will Randall (Nicholson) is the editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house, although he’s a relatively mild-mannered man—at least as mild-mannered as any Nicholson character can be—for someone of such prestige. He has a loving relationship with his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and the respect of his peers and subordinates (David Hyde Pierce, Eileen Atkins), as well as a strong affection for his protege Stewart (James Spader). While driving down a Vermont road one evening, he hits a large dark mammal with his car, and when he gets out to check on it, the beast bites him. Despite his doctor’s insistence that wolves are extinct in New England, Will is convinced that this is what bit him. At a party hosted by the owner of the company, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will is told that a new editor-in-chief has been appointed, and that Will can either transfer to an undesirable position manning the publisher’s office in Eastern Europe. Will immediately realizes that his “best friend” Stewart has stabbed him in the back, and he meets Alden’s daughter Laura (Pfeiffer) as he wanders the grounds, taking in the betrayal. Meanwhile, Will also starts to experience unusual physical changes, as the area around his wound sprouts long fur and his senses grow more enhanced, as he is able to smell tequila on the breath of a colleague, doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t need his glasses to read, and can hear conversations occurring in other parts of the office. Returning home one night, he smells something familiar on his wife’s clothing and confronts Stewart at the younger man’s front door before bounding up the stairs and animalistically and discovering his wife in Stewart’s bedroom, but not before snarling at (and perhaps biting) Stewart.
It’s a pretty rote werewolf story, all things considered, and one that would have entered a market that was already saturated with American Werewolves, Teen Wolves, and Howlings. The script was co-written by Wesley Strick and, bizarrely, poet and essayist James Harrison. It is not based on Harrison’s novel Wolf: A False Memoir as one might suspect, and Harrison seems to have been involved initially simply because he and Nicholson were friends. This was Harrison’s second (and last) attempt at working in Hollywood, as he quit the film in exasperation over creative differences with Nichols. “I wanted Dionysian, but he wanted Apollonian,” he was quoted as saying (in literature, Dionysian attributes are those of intoxication and thus ecstasy, emotion, and disorder, while Appolonian attributes are logical, clear, and harmonious). That makes a certain amount of sense, but in the same interview, he then said, “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua,” which is less clear as a complaint. Strick, for his part, had risen to some prominence as the co-screenwriter of horror comedy Arachnophobia and had recently penned the script for the similarly messy 1991 Martin Scorsese picture Cape Fear as well as uncredited rewrites on Batman Returns. After 1997s underrated Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, his credits take a steep nosedive, as his credits include the much-maligned 2005 video game adaptation Doom, the ill-fated and poorly conceived 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and the 2014 rotten erotic thriller The Loft. I want to say that some of the weakness was already present in the script here, but it’s really impossible to tell what parts came from him and which were from Harrison, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Elaine May was brought in for some uncredited punch-ups (although the fact that Wolf is two full hours long and meanders in the middle shows her fingerprints if nothing else).
Pfeiffer is excellent here as she always is, and it is interesting to see Nicholson play a more subdued character than he is normally known for. Spader is effective as the smarmy sycophant who turns out to be aiming for Will’s job (and bed), and it’s no surprise when he turns up late in the film undergoing his own lycanthrope transformation, although I couldn’t help but think about how much I would have enjoyed this film a little bit more if it had been Christian Slater in the role. The film’s supporting cast is quite good. Although Pierce gets very little to do, Eileen Atkins does very solid work as Will’s secretary. Richard Jenkins appears as the detective investigating the sudden death of Will’s wife Charlotte, and he’s paired with veteran TV actor Brian Markinson. Perhaps one of the biggest standouts is Om Puri, who appears as Dr. Vijay Alezais, the folklore specialist that Will tracks down in order to get a handle on all the changes that his body is going through. Alezais tells him that it’s less a transformation than it is a kind of possession, and that the wolf that now lives inside him isn’t evil, but will only make him “more” of whatever he currently is. He even gives Will an amulet that will keep the beast inside, and it does seem to be working until the moment that Will must remove it in order to gain the wolf-strength needed to save Laura from Stewart.
There’s simply nothing special about Wolf. If anything, it’s pretty rote. A perfectly serviceable mid-90s cable afternoon feature, but no staggeringly clever take on any of its component elements. Pfeiffer is serving looks in this one that are so 1994 Eddie Bauer coded that you’ll get something out of this if that’s of interest to you. There’s a lot of slow-motion werewolf leaping that gives the impression that Nichols has never seen a single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, because all that’s missing is that bionic sound effect to complete the tableau, and I’m afraid that’s not complimentary. The film does make good use of the Bradbury Building, most notable for being the place where the climax of Blade Runner takes place but I also recently saw in D.O.A., and it’s always a comfort to the eye to see it in use. Still, it’s telling that I’m closing out this review of a werewolf review by praising the architecture.
One of my most distinct moviegoing memories from my childhood was seeing the post-Scream teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer with my parents opening weekend. As an exclusive new track from my then-favorite band played over the end credits (“Proud,” by KoЯn), I was in 12-year-old nü-metal brat heaven, beaming in delight. That’s when my father leaned over and whispered in a firm, disappointed tone, “You never get to pick the movie again.” Three decades later, I’m older now than my father’s age was then, and I totally get it. This mildly violent teenage melodrama must be torturously tedious for any adult outside its very narrow target demographic (gloomy Millennials who were 12—and exactly 12—years old in 1997). In retrospect, I can’t believe that I dragged my parents to see it in a theater, regardless of how giddy it made me personally. Even more so, I can’t believe that some poor parent my age now is about to suffer the same fate via legacyquel. Must we forever be tormented by the sins of our mall-goth past? Can’t the world finally forgive & forget what we did that summer? Will there ever be peace in the suburbs?
All of your favorite late-90s teen stars are here: Sarah Michelle Gellar as a small-town beauty queen, Ryan Phillipe as her spoiled fuckboy sweetheart, Freddie Prinze Jr. as the townie interloper who’s desperate to earn his way into his friend group’s tax bracket, and Jennifer Love Hewitt as the only normal, well-adjusted youngster among them. The four bright young things get into trouble one night after partying on the beach outside their small fishing village, when they accidentally strike & kill a pedestrian crossing a dimly lit road and dump his body into a nearby bay to avoid hassle from the law. A year later, this act of semi-voluntary manslaughter haunts all four of the now-estranged kids involved, derailing their professional & educational ambitions as they quietly stew in the isolation of their own guilt & grief. The haunting becomes a lot more literal when a mysterious killer dressed in a fisherman slicker starts picking them off one by one via fish hook, seemingly avenging their hit-and-run victim from beyond the grave. If you’ve seen any formulaic teen slasher, you’ve seen it all before (doubly so if you’ve seen 1985’s The Mutilator); you just haven’t seen it performed by this era-specific cast.
I Know What You Did Last Summer splits the difference between an 80s teen slasher & a 50s road-to-ruin PSA about the perils of reckless driving, updated with a totally 90s cast & an astonishingly shitty 90s soundtrack (including, among other atrocities, covers of “Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative and “Hey Bulldog” by Toad the Wet Sprocket). It’s a little too squeamish about bloodshed to be an effective horror film, slaying most of its victims offscreen and keeping their corpses on ice like freshly caught fish so they don’t stink up the place. It is relatively compelling as an afterschool melodrama, however, with the two main girls’ increasingly grim home lives leading to a few memorable scenes that outperform the undead fisherman’s kills. Its lack of slasher-genre ingenuity is a little surprising given that the screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson one year after he penned the meta-horror hit Scream, which is much smarter about reshaping & reexamining the slasher formula from new angles. His trademark post-modernism enters the frame in an early scene where the teens in peril share campfire stories of the urban legend about a killer with a hook for a hand before suffering an updated version of it in real life, but the same idea was pushed much further in the next year’s Urban Legend, leaving this one effectively moot.
It’s easy to point out the ways in which I Know What You Did Last Summer falls short of 90s slasher greatness, but it’s by no means the worst of Kevin Williamson’s post-Scream teen horror scripts (that would be Teaching Mrs. Tingle). If nothing else, its coastal fishing village on the 4th of July setting affords it some occasional distinguishing novelty, not least of all in the multiple parade sequences featuring gigantic paper mâché fish on wheels. Thanks to Williamson’s previous commercial triumph, it was also made in a time when these teen bodycount movies were produced with robust Hollywood budgets behind them, so director Jim Gillespie (of Venom “fame”) gets to make frequent use of swooping crane shots to liven up the dialogue-heavy melodrama. Still, of all the 90s properties to continually get serialized & rebooted, it makes no sense that something this generic is still being kept alive as Horror Icon IP instead of, say, the more stylish & memorable Williamson-penned classic The Faculty. I pity the poor parents whose pre-teens are going to drag them to the theater for the latest legacyquel addition to the I Know What You Did franchise this summer because they have a crush on one of its famous-only-to-children stars. It’s a tradition that’s gone on for far too long, dragging on since the long-gone days of Soul Asylum, Our Lady Peace, and KoЯn.
I wasn’t expecting 28 Weeks Later to be as good as it was. It came out during a particularly academically rigorous (and financially unstable) year for me, and I’m not sure that I ever even saw any advertising for this one. Dismissal of the film by Alex Garland, who wrote both 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later, also never made me particularly interested in revisiting it, until I recently saw 28 Years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve also always loved Robert Carlyle’s work as an actor, and his involvement also appealed to me. Although a friend let me know that this one is streaming on Tubi—just in time for the sequel’s release—I was able to find a DVD copy at my local video store, and I was pleasantly surprised, even if it isn’t as emotionally fulfilling as either of the films that precede or follow it.
In the opening scene, Don Harris (Carlyle) is holed up in a rural farmhouse with his wife Alice and a few other survivors of the rage virus, sometime during the early days of the plague’s spread. An uninfected boy appears at the house and begs to be let in, and although they get him inside, the horde of infected who were chasing him then fall upon the house and kill/infect everyone inside. Only Don manages to escape, fleeing across the field to a small boat with an outboard motor and getting away, although not before he sees his wife at a window in the house, not yet dead or infected, as she pleads for help. Moments later, she’s gone from the window — too late. Some six or seven months (or 28 weeks, if you will) later, Don is now living in “District 1” of London, where British Isles residents who were out of the country when the outbreak occurred are being repatriated. The infected seem to have completely died out, having succumbed to starvation and exposure in the half a year since the Rage ravaged the population.
A NATO force overseen by Americans is assisting in the homecoming efforts and maintaining a military presence in order to protect the quarantine zone (epitomized in the form of Jeremy Renner’s sniper character, Doyle) and provide testing on the homebound travelers (represented by Scarlet, the chief medical officer played by Rose Byrne). Don’s two children, twelve-year-old Andy and teenaged Tammy (Imogen Poots) return home and are reunited with their father, who simplifies the story of their mother’s death by telling them only that she died. Their first night back, Andy confides in his sister that he worries he’ll forget his mother’s face, and the next morning the two of them slip through the NATO defenses and make their way to their old house to gather photos and other belongings. To their surprise, they find their mother there, albeit disoriented and confused, and she is immediately taken back to the base. Once there, Scarlet finds that Alice was bitten and that this means she is an asymptomatic carrier of the rage virus, and that her blood may even hold an answer to a potential vaccine or cure. Before she can convince General Stone (Idris Elba) of the potential, however, Alice has already Typhoid Mary-d the rage back into the safety zone, and it’s already too late to stop the spread.
Despite Alex Garland’s less-than-enthusiastic position, 28 Weeks Later is quite good. It lacks a lot of the more humanistic elements of the first film, which followed Cillian Murphy’s Jim as he, having slept through the downfall of society and thus is awakened into a changed world without witnessing the staggering amount of violence and life-altering horror that made it so, manages to be the vessel that carries some manner of hope from the world that was into the world that is. Further, while 28 Days Later presaged what a modern urban center experiencing massive devastation might look like (according to legend, they were shooting Jim’s newly-awakened wanderings of deserted post-rage London when the news broke about the Twin Towers), 28 Weeks Later is heavily informed by contemporary events. The uselessness of the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping role seems clearly inspired by the handling of the so-called “War on Terror” in which the States were actively involved, and the choice of a stadium as an evacuation area and the overreaction of armed authority to refugees and evacuees is evocative of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t stop the film’s treatment of the military from being a little “hoo-rah” in certain places, with Scarlet acting as the reasonable authority figure and Doyle evacuating survivors despite orders to kill on site, playing into tropes about good soldiers vs. morally questionable generals. Their ability to protect the citizens within seems doomed to failure from the start, based on the ease with which a couple of teenagers managed to slip out of the quarantine zone, so the criticism of the industrial complex holds. It’s also clever in its plotting, first showing us Alice’s heterochromia in the opening scene and then having Scarlet comment upon Andy having the same mutation during his intake to the quarantine zone, establishing that genetic adaptations like theirs are often inherited, slyly foreshadowing that Andy may have the same ability to be an asymptomatic carrier just like his mother. It’s not a movie that was simply slapped together because someone thought “there should be another one;” it’s genuinely a worthy, if different, successor to the first film.
It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but back in 2017 I attended a screening of 28 Days Later at Terror Tuesday at the now-defunct original “Ritz” location of the Alamo Drafthouse (what occupies that space now I dare not name). For weeks after, I listened to “In the House, In a Heartbeat” on repeat, dozens if not hundreds of times. It was a weird time, and I was going through it, but it’s also a certified banger. It was only my second viewing of the movie after a high school rental of the DVD from the Blockbuster in Natchitoches, and in the intro, the programmer at the time talked about how that very DVD was already out of print and that 28 Days Later was unavailable to stream anywhere. That appears to still be the case, despite the release of this relatively high profile sequel, and the ease of access to the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later on Tubi. (That Blockbuster is now a pawn shop, apparently, and they appear to have lots of DVDs in stock, so you might be able to find a copy of 28DL there, for what it’s worth.) That screening featured a rate 35MM print of the original film, large portions of which were shot on digital on the Canon XL1 and then were transferred to actual film stock, which resulted in 28DL’s novel visual qualities but also, I believe, makes it difficult to stream . . . or maybe too many people would think there was something wrong with the app rather than understand that the film’s supposed to look like that.
It’s been 23 years since the Rage Virus broke out on screen and half a decade longer since then in-universe. As the opening crawl tells us, the outbreak was contained in continental Europe but that the British Isles were turned into a quarantine zone. After an opening sequence that occurs early in the original outbreak which sees a young boy escaping from his home after his community is slaughtered by rage zombies, including his pastor father, who allows himself to be overrun in a fit of mad religious ecstasy, we cut to … 28 years later. Spike (Alfie Williams) is a twelve-year-old boy living in an island community with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who is all but bedridden with an affliction that also affects her concentration and memory. The island is kept safe due to tides in the region making it impossible to swim to, but an easily defendable natural causeway emerges at low tide and allows the islanders to go to the mainland to forage for food and firewood. Most boys are taken to the mainland for a rite of passage zombie hunting trip at fourteen or fifteen, but Jamie insists that Spike is ready, and the two set out with their bows to bag a few undead.
Spike is awed by the mainland, and he manages to get an impressive first kill on the hunt. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the zombies have evolved, with slightly more intelligent and much more difficult to slay “alphas” emerging (one presumes that, without the internet, these folks never learned that the whole “alpha wolf” thing was bad science), who are strong enough to rip out the spinal column of its prey and also seem to be doing so almost ritualistically. Jamie and Spike are forced to take shelter in a dilapidated, abandoned farmhouse, where they also find the corpse of a man who was hung upside down and left for the zombies to find and feast upon, with the name “Jimmy” carved into his flesh. They manage to make it back to safety, barely, and Spike is celebrated at a ceremony that the town holds in his honor, but he finds his father’s tall tales of Spike’s supposed prowess dishonest and is even more disillusioned when he sees his drunken father sneak away from the party with a woman. When a family friend lets slip that a mysterious fire that Spike saw on the mainland may mark the home of a Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), which Jamie previously denied knowing anything about, Spike decides to sneak away with his mother and take her to find Kelson in the hope that he can diagnose and treat her. Along the way, they witness further changes to the infected and find themselves allied with shipwrecked Swedish sailor Erik (Edvin Ryding), the lone survivor of his downed quarantine patrol boat, who serves to give us insight into what the rest of the world is like.
Erik adds a wrinkle here that’s quite a lot of fun. After the first film trafficked heavily in images of desolate urban areas as Jim wandered through the empty husk of London, this one follows its day one prologue with a cut to a somewhat idyllic present day, where a close knit community tends sheep and fashions arrows. It doesn’t initially have the feel of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, as having bacon with breakfast is a lavish anomaly but not completely unheard of. The island itself is lush and green but has a bit of the uncanny about it as well, with the recurring appearance of an unremarked upon creepy mask that multiple characters wear implying that they’ve gotten a little weird with it out there, and it’s a dangling thread left to, no doubt, be developed in the next sequel. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has completely moved on from the whole “zombie plague” thing. People work as delivery drivers, they order packages online, and they have smartphones, all of which are alien concepts to Spike, who has never seen a photograph less than three decades old. When Erik shows him a picture of his girlfriend making a duck face in the moments before his battery dies, Spike has no frame of reference for that social media beauty standard and compares her appearance to a girl in the village whose allergy to shellfish causes her to swell up. Back in that same village hangs a portrait of a fairly young Queen Elizabeth II, because these people aren’t even aware that she’s dead (presuming she died in 2022 in their world as in ours and wasn’t afflicted with the Rage Virus, which I didn’t realize I needed to see until this very moment).
It’s almost unfathomable to think that the rest of the world could simply move on from locking down multiple nations and washing their hands of the whole situation while consigning the people living there to almost certain eventual violent death at the hands of sprinting, infected undead. But then again, we’re kind of living in that world, aren’t we? We’ve all lived through the rampant spread of a virus that killed millions of people, and once everybody got vaccinated (well…) and we reached a point of “well, most people won’t be at risk,” most of society simply did move on, and we’re still driving delivery trucks and ordering packages online and getting new smartphones. Disability advocates have talked for years about how our necropolitical institutions have decided that the wheels of commerce must turn, even if they must be greased by the blood of the chronically ill or otherwise highly susceptible. We also live in a society where horrible, awful, genocidal things are happening “over there,” out of sight and, for many, out of mind; “It’s awful that children are being burned alive by phosphorus ammunition and that huge numbers of people have been abandoned to certain, horrifying death by the rest of the world, but I don’t see what that has to do with me or my need for a frappuccino.” Erik shows us something about the world beyond these quarantined islands; it’s obvious that Spike has grown up never knowing a world before the Rage, but if Erik is even approximately the same age as the actor portraying him, so has he. In Erick’s world, the long term, hands off approach to dealing with the infected is baked into society as something that happens over there and is a simple, sad fact of life, and the wheels just keep turning.
Although he’s only a child and therefore gets billed in the credits after a man who’s on screen for mere moments, the MVP here is relative newcomer Alfie Williams. There’s a quiet resilience to him, and he carries a major, if understated, emotional journey that begins when he returns to the island from his hunting trip. He’s surrounded by the trappings of the village’s celebration of his hunt, including that weird mask thing, but as he watches his father carry on the time honored tradition of exaggerating their bravery and marksmanship, a crack in the foundation of his belief in both his father and his society begins to form. He already has his suspicions about his father’s denial of knowing what the fire in the hills on the mainland might be, and once he sees Jamie getting adulterous and learning that his father knows about Dr. Kelson (and then leaping to the conclusion that Jamie is refusing to get help for Isla from the mainlander), he resolves to put a seemingly doomed plan into motion. Williams pulls all of this off very well for a performer his age, and you never for a moment doubt that Spike is a kid who’s never seen a frisbee or an iPhone. That’s not to denigrate the performances of Comer, who is excellent as always, or Taylor-Johnson, who is very effective here as a husband and father maintaining a brave face despite the clearly imminent death of his ill wife while also living through the end of days. Fiennes is also great here as the broken Dr. Kelson, who makes a great deal out of what amounts to not much screen time.
This film ends on such an overt tonal shift that I think it’s turning off some people. A couple of friends of mine to whom I had been recommending the film happened to be coming out of a screening of 28 Years just as I was headed into a screening of The Materialists. They found the film messy, and although we didn’t get much of a chance to talk about where they felt that it failed, they mentioned that the sudden genre shift was unexpected and jarring. I would also wager that the brief jumpcuts at the beginning of the film that serve to set some of the tone will be off-putting to some, although I rather enjoyed it as a shorthand for the myth-building within the community of the island. Set to the 1915 Taylor Holmes recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots,” we get to see a little bit of the culture of the island: their use of archery as their primary method of hunting and anti-infected defense, their fortification of the island, and the training of their young to carry on, all of it interspliced with footage from monochrome war films, Technicolor Robins of Locksley, and other bits of film and video that pass by so quickly that some of the images are almost subliminal. The idea that these people have been reduced to a medieval level of technology in the modern era is an interesting one, and this gets it across in a great visual way but one that is definitely not going to be to everyone’s liking. That’s what makes Danny Boyle Danny Boyle, after all.
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