What is The Substance? It’s 5% Barbie, 5% Carrie, 5% Requiem for a Dream, 5% The Fly, 10% Akira, 10% just the old lady from Room 237 in The Shining, 25% Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video, 10% Jane Fonda workout tape, 5% Architectural Digest, and 20% sour lemon candy, and it’s all 100% fresh, new, and exciting. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, who bears some resemblance to Moore; both found commercial and critical success (including an Oscar) in the early parts of their career, but their star has faded somewhat in the intervening years. Elisabeth now hosts a morning workout program for an unidentified major network, or at least she did until her birthday, when executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—wink, wink—unceremoniously lets her go from the show, essentially simply for having turned fifty. A hurt and shocked Elisabeth is distracted while driving by the sight of a billboard of her being taken down and ends up in a horrific collision. Although she’s remarkably unharmed, she’s shaken by the experience, and an almost inhumanly attractive nurse slips something into her coat pocket: a thumb drive printed with a phone number on one side and “The Substance” on the other, along with a note stating simply “It changed my life.” She watches the surreal advertising campaign/pharmaceutical pitch on the drive—a promise that The Substance will create a younger, more idealized version of yourself—and tosses it in the trash, before ultimately caving in on both her curiosity and her wounded self-image and giving it a shot (literally, and it’s for single use and you really, really should dispose of it after).
Everyone has been talking about how much this movie is a return to form for body horror, but it’s more than just that. Sure, there’s mutating flesh, necrotic digits, and self surgery, but this is a movie that’s gross from the jump, long before people start erupting from each like molting salamanders. It’s mostly the most disgusting images you can imagine intercut with the occasional too-sterile environment or softcore aerobics so chock full of lingering shots of gyrating youthful glutes that they stop looking like flesh altogether. The first shot of the film, which gives us a demonstration of what The Substance does by showing it being injected into the yolk of an egg as it sits in its white on a countertop, before the yolk suddenly duplicates. Not long after, we are treated to an intense, almost fisheye closeup of Harvey’s face while he goes on a screaming, chauvinistic phone tirade while using a urinal before we cut to him grossly and messily slathering prawns in a yellow sauce and stuffing them messily in his face while he gives Elisabeth a series of backhanded compliments while performing the world’s worst exit interview; and we in the audience know he didn’t wash his hands. As Elisabeth leaves the hospital after her accident, an old classmate from before she was a star gives her his number on a piece of paper that’s then dropped into a puddle of some unknown liquid that’s murky and features a couple of floating cigarette butts. By the time the youthful version of Elisabeth, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), is stitching up the wound on Elisabeth’s back from which she just emerged like a hot bloody Pop-Tart, you’re already so full of bile from the general nastiness that the gore is almost a reprieve. Of course, that’s before Sue starts taking more time than the rules of The Substance allow, with her selfishness morphing Elisabeth slowly (and then very quickly) into a witch of the Roald Dahl variety.
That general grossness, as a departure from pure body horror, is also represented in the film’s use of yellows throughout, rather than (or at least in addition to) the reds that most flicks of this genre use. It’s omnipresent and I loved it, from the aforementioned yolks to the goldenrod color of Elisabeth’s coat to the neon yellow of The Substance itself and the fluids you may vomit as a result of its use. A ball of yellow clay is halved and reformed into two shapes in the demonstration video for The Substance to represent the “other” being formed from the “matrix.” The eggs reappear later when Elisabeth, in a fit of pique over Sue beginning to push the limits of their connection, starts cooking a large number of disgusting French dishes, which includes combining an ungodly number of eggs in a bowl and then beating them, splashing the yolks all over her. And, in the film’s final moments, a dandelion yellow sidewalk cleaner passes over Elisabeth’s Walk of Fame star, scrubbing up … well, that would be a spoiler. It’s a fun way to add a different kind of a splash of color; I’d go so far as to say yellow is used as effectively here as, say, red in Suspiria, and if you’ve been around here a while you know what high praise that is from me.
Moore is revelatory here, and it’s great to see her on screen again, especially after such a long absence. She grounds a lot of the more surreal elements that become a larger and larger part of the story as reality becomes more and more detached from what we’re watching. She looks amazing here, which further underlines just how depraved the culture in which she resides is. While Elisabeth is fifty, Moore is a little over a decade older than that, and her body is, pardon my French, fucking phenomenal. That this makes Elisabeth the perfect person for her ongoing aspirational position as the host of Sparkle Your Life is completely lost on Harvey and the vapid executives and shareholders of the network, who salivate like Tex Avery hounds over Sue and the befeathered dancers who are set to perform on a show that Sue is set to host. Moore plays her with a quiet dignity that’s clearly covering a deep loneliness, which is itself exacerbated by the blow to her ego and her self-worth that come as the result of losing her job solely because of ageism. Qualley is also fun here. So far, she has been in one of the worst movies I have seen this year as well as one of the best, but even in the latter she was not among the moving pieces that garnered my esteem. Although a lot of what she’s tasked with here is more about how she looks than about her acting abilities, when she’s called on to perform, she delivers a solid performance that endeared her to me more than anything else I’ve seen her in before.
Overall, this is one of the most fun movies I’ve seen all year. Gross when it needs to be, surreal when the narrative calls for it, and funny all the way through.
Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!
“Technically, the villain is Satan in a jar, but this belongs to a canon of oddball horrors where the real killer is just remarkably bad vibes: The Happening, Messiah of Evil, Annihilation, Final Destination, etc. You could call it ‘cosmic’ or ‘Lovecraftian’ or whatever, but it’s really just the horror of stumbling into a party where the mood’s already gone rancid (and people occasionally explode into goo).” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“The sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky that this has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development and emotional stakes. It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty-line in French housing projects, except with way more gigantic, pissed off spider beasts than usual.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Chances are, if the title of this film sounds familiar to you, you’re either too into the movies (in which case, pull up a chair and join us) or you’re a fan of either The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, as Robert Smith of the former and Steven Severin of the latter collaborated as a micro supergroup under the name The Glove, which released only one album that took its title from this film. That alone would probably qualify it as a cult classic for some, but what makes this one work is how campy it is in spite of its earnestness. […] I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of movies that are competently made but with no apparent reason to exist or want to see a (sort of) conspiracy thriller version of a campy slasher.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A sci-fi erotic thriller about a yuppie Reaganite with a computerized ocular implant that makes him partial witness to serial killings. It plays like if De Palma made a sarcastic, purposefully idiotic version of what his most vicious detractors accused his schtick of being. And you know what? It’s still a mostly fun watch; just as sleazy as it is silly.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The nightmare surrealism of the Elm Street series, restricted by the production values of a 16mm regional-horror cheapie but also much freer to disregard the boundary between its dream sequences & waking “reality.” A wonderful example of passion outweighing resources; A+ outsider art.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This sets itself up as the Floridian hippiesploitation version of Psycho, but instead delivers a domestic melodrama where everyone’s love language is belligerent screaming.” Currently streaming on Screambox and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Argentinian schlock that classes up Jesús Franco-style vampire smut with the blocking & scoring of a vintage telenovela. It’s great fun, and a great confirmation that you can still find blood & titties on Tubi despite reports otherwise.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“While most Hammer Horror relics are buttoned-up, single-idea affairs, this off-brand equivalent is overstuffed with nutty/gnarly ideas on how to update the Frankenstein myth for the Free Love crowd. Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee star as rival half-brother mad scientists competing for industry awards & press, using their own children & ancient proto-human skeletons as pawns in their sick game of one-upsmanship. It’s so stately & faux-literary that you hardly have any time to register that you’re watching a dismembered finger writhe around on a lab table like a sentient pickle, representing Evil Incarnate.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“This often gets singled out as Ingmar Bergman’s Only Horror Movie, but it’s really not all that different from trickier-to-classify titles like Persona& Through a Glass Darkly. Those happen to be my favorites of his I’ve seen, though, so I mean that as a compliment. The man knew how to craft a spooky mood; one of his greatest talents, really.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“An icy, cruelly funny Irish ghost story where the undead are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. It’s basically a series of super consistent fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting real quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“An artist-goes-mad horror about a stop-motion animator who channels her darkest thoughts into her increasingly disturbing work, which then comes alive and attacks her. There’s wonderfully grotesque, fucked up imagery & sound design here, offering a small taste of pure-Hell animation for audiences who don’t have the patience for more immersive titles like Violence Voyager,The Wolf House, and Mad God.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Had me thinking about how well it’s aged vs. fellow slick ’96 teen horror Scream, both of which I was the perfect age to look up to as a wannabe goth young’n. Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics to catch up with, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years. Picking an enduring fav out of the two mostly comes down to performances: Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic as Matthew Lillard but much better dressed; Naomi Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both; and Skeet Ulrich puts on the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell, slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret. The victory belongs to the coven, praise be to Manon.” Currently streaming on HBO Max.
“While Frankenstein might have the better direct sequel overall, this one at least has the generosity of affording its titular villain more than three minutes of screentime, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters. She’s so effortlessly, tragically cool, and it was great to make her ghoulish acquaintance” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“You gotta love The Wolf Man’s ‘Aw shucks, gee-whiz, just call me Larry’ routine. He’s an adorable oaf when he’s not a violently horny beast, making for a great horror film about post-nut clarity.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A triumph of high-artifice production design, among other triumphs. The painted-backdrop graveyard set is like the goth older sister to the Wizard of Oz designs; just as sinisterly magical but dreaming up a world where every day is Halloween, a world that’s always a pleasure to revisit (until a child enters the frame)” Currently streaming on Peacock and The Criterion Channel.
“Anytime a director of this stature says they’re making an ‘erotic nightmare,’ you know they’re cooking up a masterpiece. This is Francis Ford Coppola’s best work as a visual stylist, which since he’s in the business of moving pictures, means it’s his best work overall (with the caveat that I’ve only tried a couple of his wines).” Currently streaming on MGM+ (free with a 7-day trial subscription).
“I suspect the reason this stands out as Jodorowsky’s best work because of Claudio Argento’s heavy involvement in the writing & production. The imagery is just as gorgeous as anything in The Holy Mountain, but it’s all driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum. It’s a fine-art carnival sideshow.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The Old French Extremity; the kind of gross-out gore film you can pair with a cheese plate & bubbly.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing. Very funny in how it gives horror-convention gorehounds exactly what they want (the most annoying idiot youths to ever disgrace the screen being gruesomely dismembered) while also being stubbornly withholding (shooting the stillness of the woods with an Apichatpongian sense of patience).” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“It’s a hypnotic, immersive vision of paranormal menace, one that could easily play as outdated kitsch but instead triggers a nightmarish trance. It’s the same effect that’s achieved throughoutBeyond the Black Rainbow, especially in its Altered States-reminiscent LSD experiment flashback where its main antagonist ‘looks into the Eye of God.’ It’s an effect that returns full-force in Phase IV’s psychedelic, nihilistic conclusion as well, which describes a next stage in human evolution triggered by the paranormal ants’ attacks on mankind.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“The last time I saw this I was hung up on its obvious influences on Alien. A decade later, I’m hung up on its production design’s obvious influence on Bertrand Mandico. I can practically hear Elina Löwensohn whispering about Kate Bush & Conan the Barbarian in the background.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“Grand-scale destruction in miniature, matching the impossibility of processing the communal grief of nuclear fallout in a novelty sci-fi film with the impossible spectacle of its mixed-scale monster attacks. It’s just as deeply sad as it is colossally thrilling.” Currently streaming on HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body. Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere. ” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“More of a genuine mashup of classic Godzilla & King Kong sensibilities than any of those monsters’ actual onscreen clashes. Mostly just helped clarify what I love about the kaiju genre (the giant rubber creatures, the more the better) vs what I tolerate (the retro extoticized adventurism) to get to the good stuff.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“It used to be that time maxing meant brushing your teeth in the shower; now we save time by watching our Guy Maddin & Matt Farley movies at the same time.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The best thing about haunted house movies is the third-act release of tension where there are no rules and every feature of the house goes haywire all at once, not just the ghosts. The reason this is the height of the genre is that it doesn’t wait to get to the good stuff; it doesn’t even wait to get to the house. It’s all haywire all the time, totally unrestrained.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“Classic zombie splatstick of the Evil Dead & Dead Alive variety, updated with a 90s sense of apathetic cool and heavily distorted through the Italo-schlock dream machine. Loved every confounding minute of it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A gory cheapie about an ancient mask buried in Nostradamus’s tomb. We watch this story unfold twice removed, where movie-within-a-movie victims try on the cursed mask, which transforms them into demonic, flesh-eating demons who torment their companions. Meanwhile, the in-film audience of the movie squirms in their seats, noticing an alarming resemblance of the mysterious horror film’s violence to their own journeys to the screening. Mainly, the promotional mask prop displayed in the cinema’s lobby has cut one of their cheeks the same way it cut & infected characters in the film they’re watching, which of course leads to a demon-zombie breakout in the theater that matches the chaos of the movie within the movie. They’re all effectively Skinamarinked—unable to leave the theater thorough the doors they entered from—as they individually transform into cannibalistic monsters and tear each other to shreds.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“There’s something to love in every single frame of this, but nothing to love more deeply than Brad Dourif being given more free reign than ever to rave like a demonic lunatic.” Currently streaming on Peacock, Starz, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This trades in the grimy cruelty of the original for the visual sensibilities of a children’s film, from its exaggerated cartoon framing to its primary color palette to its bookend trips to the toy factory. Speaking of which, the climactic spectacle on the factory floor is some A+ mayhem, really leaning into the novelty of killer-doll gore at its purest. It’s one of those R-rated horrors that feels like it was specifically made for an audience of children sneaking the TV remote past their sleeping parents.” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“Perfect Halloween night programming; just the absolute worst teen dipshits to ever disgrace the screen getting torn to shreds by demons whenever they get too horny to live.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Shudder, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
The term “A24 horror” refers to such a wide range of the distributor’s festival acquisitions and in-house productions that it doesn’t accomplish much of anything as a genre distinction. The only thing you can be sure about with an A24 Horror movie, really, is that its marketing will be effective but misleading. Whatever quibbles you might have with the brand’s reputation as a taste signifier among the Letterboxd userbase, you have to at least appreciate its ability to always tell the exact right lie to get wide audiences in the door to watch movies with limited commercial appeal. At the start of the A24 Horror trend, that meant selling Robert Eggers’s calling-card debut feature The Witch as a scare-filled haunted hayride instead of what it actually is: a Häxan-style illustration of spooky academic research. A decade later, it means selling Eggers’s brothers Max & Sam’s debut The Front Room as a Get Out-style “social thriller” instead of what it actually is: a post-Farrelly Brothers toilet-humor comedy. Usually, that misleading marketing only upsets The Fans, who show up to movies like The Witch expecting jump scares and are annoyed that they’re instead prompted to think and interpret. This time, the marketing has seemingly upset The Critics, who have complained that The Front Room is more silly than it is scary, as if that wasn’t exactly its intent. I’d even go as far as to argue that The Front Room plays like a deliberate self-parody of the A24 Horror brand, like a Scary Movie update for the Elevated Horror era . . . but there just isn’t enough connective tissue between those modern metaphor-first-scares-second horrors for a genre spoof to land with any specifics or coherence.
To be fair to the naysayers, The Front Room‘s tonal misdirection extends beyond its extratextual marketing. For its opening 15 minutes, the film goes through the motions of pretending to be a middling post-Get Out horror about racist microaggressions, starring 90s popstar Brandy Norwood as a college professor whose career is stalled by her white colleagues. Then, the movie reveals its true colors as a Southern-friend psychobiddy gross-out comedy when it introduces its racist macroaggressions in the form of actress Kathryn Hunter. A in-tongues-speaking Evangelical Daughter of the Confederacy, Hunter is perfectly calibrated as the loud-mouthed comic foil to Brandy’s quietly dignified academic. The two women play emotional Tug of War for dominance over their shared home while Brandy’s hilariously ineffectual husband (Andrew Burnap) cowards from all responsibility to stand up to his demanding, demonic stepmother on his wife’s behalf. Like in most familial, generational battles, Hunter weaponizes her inherited wealth to shame her stepson and his wife into walking on eggshells around her while she gets to do & say whatever she wants, no matter how vile. When Brandy refuses to politely play along, Hunter weaponizes her own bodily fluids instead, smearing the house with piss, shit, and bile until she gets her way. This battle of wills is, of course, complicated by the birth of Brandy’s newborn baby, so that the stakes of who emerges from their flame war as the home’s true matriarch are about as high as they can get (and should be familiar to anyone who’s had a pushy parental figure tell them what to do with their own bodies & family planning).
The Front Room is very funny, very gross, and very, very misleading. I can see how critics might dismiss the film as a rote A24 Horror update to Rosemary’s Baby if they only stayed engaged for its opening few minutes, but as soon as Kathryn Hunter enters the frame it quickly evolves into an entirely different kind of beast. The way Hunter thuds around on her two wooden walking canes and intones all of her racist tirades in an evil Tree Trunks lilt is obviously comedic in intent. She might start her attacks on Brandy’s personal dignity with realistically offensive terminology like “you people” & “uppity”, but she comically escalates those attacks whenever called out by whining “I’m a racist baby! Goo goo, ga ga, wah wah!”. I laughed. I also laughed every time she yelled “I’m an M-E-Double-S mess!” while spreading her bodily filth all over Brandy’s house & possessions, but I understand that potty humor is an acquired taste. What I don’t understand is how audiences have been so stubbornly determined to take this movie seriously despite that outrageously exaggerated performance. It’s like studying Foghorn Leghorn speeches for sound parental advice and legal standing; of course you’re going to find them lacking. The racial tension in its central dynamic is genuinely tense, but it seeks its cathartic release in laughter, not scares. A lot more people would be having a lot more fun with it if they thought of it more as John Waters doing Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? than Jordan Peele doing Rosemary’s Baby, despite what the tone of the marketing (and the first act) leads you to expect.
I have a bad habit of ordering Blu-rays every single time I see an advertisement for a boutique label sale. It used to just be an occasional dip into the Criterion Collection during that prestige label’s regular Black Friday and Barnes & Nobles sales, but it has since escalated to include loving restorations of vintage genre trash from labels like Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, and Mélusine. I’ve been watching a lot of button-pushing, amoral schlock recently as a result – the kind of outré bad-taste material that you can often only find on disc because streaming service curators don’t want to touch it. It was a strange comfort, then, to recently discover that I’m not yet totally immune to that hazardous material. My recently purchased copy of the when-animals-attack Italo horror Wild Beats managed to offend me early & often. It’s less of a narrative feature than it is a document of real-life crimes against animals, children, and anonymous character actors. By the end credits, I found myself hoping that one of the special features on the disc would be a montage of mugshots for everyone involved in the production. And yet, I was also appreciative for each of those sweaty European bastards for teaching me how to feel again, even if most of what I was feeling was shock & disgust.
I might have been better prepared for that shock had I paid attention to the credited director: Franco Prosperi, of Mondo Cane fame. Prosperi brings the same misanthropic gusto to this outlandish story of a PCP-contaminated zoo that he brought to his earlier mondo “documentaries,” matching their unhinged, diabolical energy by again nudging the audience to question which onscreen atrocities are real and which are staged. Set in “a Northern European city” (with signage that’s conspicuously, universally printed in German), Wild Beasts is a disaster film about escaped, drug-crazed wild animals that terrorize unsuspecting urbanites who are understandably unprepared for attacks from literal lions, tigers, and bears. The initial shock of the premise is in the exotic varieties of animals that Prosperi sourced from circuses & zoos. A wild cheetah stalks a woman in a speeding convertible; a polar bear peruses elementary school hallways like it’s visiting a buffet; a small gang of elephants take over airplane runways by stomping anyone who gets in their way. It’s an impressive assemblage of animals that you’re not used to seeing in productions this cheap, but once the initial awe wears off you start to wonder how well those animals could possibly be cared for. Then, there’s the sickening tension of trying to determine whether those animals’ onscreen terror & peril are genuine, real-life events, something that doesn’t seem out of the question for the Mondo Cane crew.
According to Severin’s bonus-feature interview on the production of Wild Beasts, Prosperi claims “We did not hurt any animals at all,” explaining that they shot the film entirely under the watchful eye of the World Wildlife Federation. If so, I was fooled. It’s not always easy to tell when the image alternates between live animal & furry prop, and I swear I saw some documentation of real-life cruelties somewhere in that mix: live rats on fire, cats of all sizes antagonized for dramatic effect, seizure-like responses to tranquilization, etc. It’s like the grindhouse version of Roar in that way, with the fact & fiction narratives competing for the spotlight. Prosperi isn’t all that much better with humans either. Stunt actors are allowed to be jostled by large, dangerous animals for several beats too many, walking up to the line of becoming a snuff film. Child actors are framed & vocally dubbed as if they were adults, which is intensely upsetting in scenes where they appear half-dressed. It’s actually unclear that Prosperi even fully knows what a child is, since he increasingly dwells on their alien, indecipherable behavior as if they were just another breed of wild animal. That thematic preoccupation does eventually pay off at the film’s jarring climax, but there’s no dramatic payoff great enough to forgive the transgression of endangering performers as vulnerable as children & animals for Z-grade genre entertainment.
Despite being deeply offended by nearly every scene in Wild Beasts, I cannot deny that I found the transgression thrilling. Maybe it’s because the long-deceased Prosperi is no longer around to imperil children or animals that I feel somewhat comfortable to delight in the amoral mayhem he documented here. Truthfully, though, I found his tasteless misanthropy & misothery to be a major aspect of the film’s entertainment value. The opening sequence is a music video montage of urban filth, depicting a modern world so overfilling with drugs that PCP & lysergic acid (treated in-dialogue as the same substance) has collected as a visible scum in the municipal water supply, thus infecting animals at the city zoo. One standout image of fried chicken leftovers and hypodermic needles littering the city’s public transit platforms spells out all you need to know about what Prosperi thought of humanity and the joys of being alive in modern times. For all I know, he was a super sweet guy in his personal life, but the crude, cheap ways he exploited his performers for profit in his cinema betrays a deeply cynical worldview that leaves his audience feeling ill. I can almost guarantee that if he were a current, working filmmaker I’d have a much more difficult time appreciating the effect of his work without fretting over the practicalities of its production, which is probably a compartmentalization I should work out privately in therapy instead of a public blog.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the aquatic slapstick creature feature Lake Michigan Monster (2018), from the creative team behind Hundreds of Beavers (2024).
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
When one takes a look at the “released films” section of the Wikipedia article about these DC animated releases, The Death of Superman is listed as the 33rd film, with Reign of the Supermen coming in at number 34. But if you go to those two entries’ individual pages, Death is listed at number 33 while Reign is listed at the 35th. For anyone familiar with comics, this kind of inexact numbering is pretty standard; comic book publishers are constantly having to tread a thin line between giving longtime fans a feeling of legacy, which keeps them coming back for more, while also not wanting to frighten off new readers who might see Batman #338 and have too much of a sense of archive/continuity panic. As a result, there are constant reboots and rebrands (of which the New 52, from which this project draws its name, is merely one of dozens), re-numberings that take a PhD to understand, and ultimately, confusion. If you’re wondering what the missing 34th film in this franchise is, it’s this one, which began its life as a webseries that sort-of continued the story from the live action NBC Constantine series, before it was edited together into a single cohesive story. Of course, right around that same time, Matt Ryan’s portrayal of the character was imported whole cloth into the larger “Arrowverse” following a very well-received cameo in Arrow, ultimately becoming a recurring character in the season of Legends of Tomorrow that was airing when this “film” released, and became a main character from the next season onward. That series did a version of the classic Constantine origin story about the lost soul of a little girl, Astra, who was damned because of a young Johnny Constantine’s hubris, and it conflicts with this one, so it’s anyone’s guess if this is connected to anything else at this point, and whether that matters to anyone but me and the perhaps eight or nine other people who have seen both this and Legends. And that’s before you even consider if this is connected to Justice League Dark, considering that that Constantine is also voiced by Matt Ryan. To paraphrase Chinatown, forget it — it’s comic books.
We open in a flashback showing a young John Constantine (Ryan) being held in a mental institution following the “Newcastle Incident,” although we only later learn what this means. He’s visited by his childhood friend, Chas Chandler (Damian O’Hare), who is disappointed to discover that Constantine is still fiddling about with magic, even after what happened. Constantine then awakes in the present, where he faces off against a horde of tiny homunculi that share his face, albeit cast ghastly and demonic. He at first tries to fight them before realizing that as “his demons,” he has to let them back inside of him, and own his mistakes and regrets (subtle!). He is reunited with Chas, who begs him to come and check on his comatose daughter, saying that medical science can’t provide any answers about her condition and begging the beleaguered wizard to pursue a magical solution. Long story short, the girl’s spirit is being held captive by a demon that draws Constantine to Los Angeles; John does so, with Chas in tow, while leaving the girl’s body in the care of an inhuman spirit known as the “Night Nurse” (Laura Bailey). In L.A., he confronts Beroul, the demon who has Chas’s daughter captive; Beroul summoned Constantine because he wants to rule L.A., and he can’t do that with five other demons also jockeying for the same position. If Constantine gets rid of them, the girl will go free, and the film’s plot revolves around John trying to outthink Beroul and take down the beast himself as well as his enemies without killing Chas’s daughter, all while being both helped and hindered by a mysterious entity known as “Angela,” a kind of apotheotic representation of the city itself who can observe and communicate with him via possessing the metropolis’s citizens.
I had pretty high praise for the hellish grotesqueries that we got to see in Justice League vs. Teen Titans (and more muted appreciation for the same in the aforementioned Justice League Dark), and there are some really cool character designs here that help spruce up what is a noticeably more cheaply animated product than the norm. The version of Constantine’s backstory in this one is that John and Chas learned that their mentor was planning to use his daughter, Astra, in a spell that would cost the girl her life. John and Chas storm in and the former summons a real demon, Nergal, who kills their mentor and his gathered cultists, but who dragged Astra back to Hell with him when he disappeared. Nergal has a cool design: a kind of horned, winged serpent that stands upright as if his upper torso were the hood of a cobra. The designs of the five demons whom Beroul demands Constantine destroy, on the other hand, are pretty rote; my inner Miranda Priestly commented “Mouths for eyes? Groundbreaking.” Beroul himself is somewhere in the middle; he’s a pretty basic gluttony demon thing that you’ve seen a hundred times, but he inhabits the more atmospheric parts of the story. Beroul captures starry-eyed arrivals in the City of Angels (get it?) and then forces them into individual hells that take the form of different movie “eras,” where they are then tortured, eviscerated, etc. because that’s what demons do. It’s a fine enough conceit, and Beroul’s barbary is creepy even if his design is underwhelming (he’s working on filling an entire swimming pool with human viscera in which he will submerge himself, and he consumes human flesh with abandon). The Night Nurse is also fun, especially when she lets down her humanoid disguise as a sexy nurse with mummy-wrapped arms and shows off her real face. The best design by far is the Aztec death god Mictlāntēcutli, which is a real piece of art. The visual storytelling for him is strong, as you can see that he is decayed from years of being starved of worship (he is only able to survive by living beneath a slaughterhouse and feeding on the deaths of pigs and cattle) but that he was once strong. I won’t pretend that it doesn’t feel appropriative to use the death god of a colonized people (at present, most Nahua people practice Catholicism, another of Europe’s scars on the world), and I have no interest in making excuses for it, but I am obligated to tell you that he’s really cool here.
I liked the ending of this one. It’s pretty cliche to have the solution to a demonic possession be “love,” but it’s effective here because said love is a consumable resource. Constantine channeled Chas and his wife’s love for their daughter into his final spell, causing both of them to forget Chas, but that wasn’t enough; John had to use his and Chas’s fraternal love as well, costing him a bond that went all the way back to their boyhoods in Liverpool. For a man with so few emotional anchors to the world, losing one of his strongest is another awful thing happening to the world’s unluckiest magician. The tragedy of it resonates more than it has the right to, and that worked for me on an emotional level, especially as it comes on the heels of Constantine finally finding some redemption for the errors of his youth in refusing to be tempted to save Astra instead at the cost of Chas’s daughter. That the film ends with Constantine starting the journey back to London accompanied by one of his manifested homunculi demons is bittersweet; the day has been saved, for now, and Constantine seems to have found some solace in this, but he’s still a man with no one to keep him company but his own demons. Not too shabby for something that was produced for the CW Seed.
I don’t have strong feelings about the original Beetlejuice. I definitely saw it as a kid (although the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff was verboten in our God-fearing trailerhold), and, through the magic of channel surfing and intermittent cable access in my adult years, I’ve “rewatched” it a few times since. It’s a fun one, although most of that fun comes in the form of the underworld bureaucracy that the recently deceased Maitlands have to navigate and their great character work between themselves and teenaged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), with the title role of the chaos demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) being less a presence in the film proper than most people correctly recall. Upon the film’s great success as the most profitable movie that Geffen Film put out in the eighties, a sequel was immediately greenlit, but never came to pass. Until now, three and a half decades later. I wasn’t thrilled by initial promotional material, but the second theatrical trailer did manage to generate some interest in me, and my cautious optimism was rewarded.
It’s been a long time since Lydia Deetz was in Winter River, the town to which she moved as a teenager and first became aware of her ability to see through the veil that separates the living and the dead. Now, she’s a TV show host of Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, a hybrid talk show/ghost hunters program, produced by her current beau, Rory (Justin Theroux). She’s disrupted when she starts to see flashes of her old nemesis Beetlejuice in the crowd at her show, and her day only gets worse when she learns that her father, Charles, has been killed in a freak accident. Along with her still overly theatrical stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), she retrieves her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from boarding school to attend the funeral, which is to be held in Winter River. Astrid doesn’t believe in her mother’s abilities and is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother’s disingenuousness about why she can’t contact her deceased husband Richard, Astrid’s father. Some of the tension between them is eased when Astrid discovers some old photo albums in the attic of “the original ghost house,” but her mother’s apparent overreaction to her discovery of an ad for the services of “Betelgeuse” causes Astrid to put her guard up again. The situation is further exacerbated when Rory chooses Charles’s wake as the opportunity to compel Lydia publicly to set a date for their wedding; and why not Halloween, which is only a couple of days away. Repulsed, Astrid rides off on her bike, eventually crashing through a fence into the backyard of a cute boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), prompting a little romance. Rory’s insistence that Lydia confront her supposed repressed childhood trauma by repeating the name “Beetlejuice” three times opens the door for the old trickster to do his ghoulish Cat-in-the-Hat thing all over Winter River again.
I’m going to level with you: with this cast, it would be impossible for this movie to have no redeeming qualities. My house is a “Free Winona” house, now and forever, and this feels like the first time in a long time that I can tell she’s having a lot of fun. Although I’m sure Lydia is the first character that a lot of people think of when you invoke Winona’s name, that’s not the case for me. I’m team Veronica Sawyer all day every day, and after that I think of Mermaids, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then that moment in Strangers with Candy wherein she tosses out a cigarette and then pulls another lit cigarette from offscreen. With so much time having passed, Lydia Deetz could essentially be a completely different person, but there’s a consistency that I appreciated and that only Ryder could bring to the table. Apparently, Ryder’s sole condition for taking on her role in Stranger Things was that she had to be allowed time to play this character again if the opportunity arose, so you know it’s one that she’s invested in, and it shows. When it comes to Delia, I don’t really know what their relationship is like off-camera, but there’s a part of me that believes with every fiber of my being that O’Hara and Ryder are having the time of their lives reuniting here, as O’Hara is also clearly having a great time reprising her role as well. Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek is one of many refractions of a similar (but always distinct) archetype in the O’Hara oeuvre, and it’s one that’s found a way into this character. I have to think that’s somewhat textual, as we see that her current multimedia gallery space includes at least one screen showing a video of Delia in a white wig and gown with images of birds projected over her, and it has to be a visual reference to Moira’s in-universe memetic role in The Crows Have Eyes III.
When it comes to the film itself, there are ways that it writes around and includes the length of time since its predecessor, as well as elements that must be written around because of certain performers’ . . . unsavory lives. The elephant in the room here is that Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the first film, is a convicted sex offender now. To get around this, the film shows his unfortunate demise in the form of a claymation-esque sequence in which Charles’s plane goes down over the ocean when he is on his way back from a birdwatching expedition; he survives the crash but is then killed by a shark. This also allows for him to appear in the underworld with most of his upper torso missing, and thus allows the character to (sort of) continue to be a part of the narrative. There’s also some clever foreshadowing throughout, like the fact that Astrid notices Jeremy’s vinyl collection is very nineties-heavy and thinks that this is an affectation, but this sets up not one twist but two. Less cleverly, the Maitlands are simply written off as having been able to move on to the afterlife through a loophole that Lydia helped them find.
The biggest problem with the film is that it’s overstuffed. You might have read that synopsis above and thought to yourself, “Wait, isn’t Willem Dafoe in this movie? And Monica Belluci?” And yes, they are. In the thirty-six years since Beetlejuice was released, countless sequel ideas must have been proposed, and this film feels like it tries to contain all of them at once. What if Lydia had a television show about her powers? Topical! What about a sequel about Beetlejuice’s literally soul-sucking wife coming back to life (well, undeath) and seeking vengeance against him? Sounds good, throw it in. What about a sequel about an egotistical actor specializing in law enforcement action films who is inexplicably the head of the underworld police? Why not. What if the Deetz family’s teenage daughter falls for a ghost boy whose true intentions might be more sinister than it seems? Oh, sounds romantic! (This plot in particular feels like it was meant to be in a more immediate sequel to the original film with a still-teenaged Lydia.) What if Lydia’s daughter doesn’t believe her and has the same fraught relationship with her that Lydia once had with Delia? What if Lydia was going to marry a man who didn’t really love her, didn’t really believe in her abilities, and whose new age bullshit was a front to meet vulnerable women, and Beetlejuice gets her out of this marriage for his own selfish reasons? Check and check!
This means that the movie moves at a pretty frenetic pace, and I’m pleased to say that there was never a moment when I was bored or felt my mind wandering, although I did start to feel the length of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” by the time everyone was being Beetlejuice-puppeted to it in the film’s climax. It wears out its welcome a little, but the fact that this is the only scene that does so (other than the tedious scenes of Willem Dafoe as the not-a-cop hunting Beetlejuice’s undead Belluci wife, all of which could have been cut without anything being lost—and you know that if I’m saying this about Dafoe, they have to be very tedious) tells you something about this film’s overall energy, which is surprisingly high. I don’t think that I’ve appreciated a new Tim Burton film in twenty years (I’m a Big Fish defender), and this one works. There’s CGI, of course, but it’s largely used to imitate the cartoony stop-motion images of the original, and there’re still plenty of practical effects that I was pleased to see in action. Of all the legacy sequels we’ve seen in the past few years, this one is solid and fun. It’s a little more toothless than the original, but it’s not without its gory eccentricities (a well-delivered “spill my guts” bit in the trailer is what won me over). It seems to have become even more toned-down in the editing process as well, as Astrid snidely predicts the futures of the girls who bully her by joking about “driving carpool and banging Pilates instructors to fill the empty void” in the trailer, while in the film, the line is a tamer bit about “having [their] third children with [their] second husbands.” I have to think that the marketing push for this one and the need to make it more palatable for a wider audience is to blame, and that’s a shame. It’s still worth seeing, but I do think it could have been just a smidge meaner.
One of the oft-vaunted strengths of the original Alien is that, for most of the film, there’s no clear protagonist. The characters were (also infamously) written gender-blind, and for much of the film’s runtime, everyone gets equal attention, until Ripley is the only character left alive. The sequels that followed that center on Ripley permanently solidified her as the franchise’s final girl, but there’s no foreshadowing in the original text that she’s destined to be so. This is not the case with Alien: Romulus, which opens and closes on a singular woman. That’s not a complaint, or a weakness, but when we’re talking about a film that has largely been a subject of discussion because of what it borrows and homages, I figured I would start out by talking about one of its differences.
Orphaned Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) lives on a Weyland-Yutani mining colony on a planet that experiences no sunlight. She’s been, for all intents and purposes, an indentured servant on this rock for her entire life, but there’s a literal and metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Yvaga, an idyllic world that she intends to set out for as soon as she gets her release, which she has accumulated enough hours of labor to qualify for. Weyland-Yutani’s management, however, forcibly extends her contract citing a lack of additional labor forces. Thus, she’s more malleable than expected when her ex, Tyler (Archie Renaux), approaches her to ask for her help in getting aboard a W-Y spaceship that’s adrift in orbit; you see, Rain isn’t completely alone in the world, as she has an android “brother” named Andy (David Jonsson), whom her father dug out of a recycling heap and reprogrammed to be Rain’s companion and protector. Andy is the key to getting aboard, as he can interface with the ship’s systems and allow Tyler and his merry band aboard so that they can abscond with a set of cryobeds that they can then install aboard their own ship and make their way to Yvaga. Of course, they have no idea that the ship up there isn’t a ship at all, but a research station composed of modules Romulus and Remus, and that Romulus has an unexpected guest in the form of the xenomorph that Ripley ejected into space all the way back in 1979, resuscitated and ready to wreak some havoc. An Alien movie ensues.
Alien is one of our faves around here. We recently covered Planet of the Vampires on the Lagniappe Podcast specifically in preparation for the release of Romulus, we previously covered a documentary about the original Alien, Brandon has rated and ranked all the previous films in this franchise, I took an absurd amount of umbrage (really—3.5 stars isn’t a bad score) at his review of Covenant, and I wrote an impassioned defense of Covenant and a dismissal of Prometheus. We are freaks, is what I’m saying. I was cautiously optimistic about this one, having been a bigger fan of director Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe than Brandon was, although to my recollection neither of us was impressed by his Evil Dead remake. It’s taken eight years for him to direct another feature, but it was well worth the wait, and when we were talking about our mutual interest in Romulus in the weeks leading up to release, Brandon mentioned that he felt Álvarez’s particular talents were well-suited to an entry in this canon. Some friends and I saw the trailer for this one multiple times over the past few months and we were excited; I felt almost as excited for this one as I did for Prometheus lo these many years ago now. And hey, this one even made me appreciate something introduced in Prometheus for the first time, which is no small feat.
You may have noticed that I only identified three characters in the paragraph outlining the film’s premise, and although they aren’t the only ones here, this is a pretty sparsely populated movie than most of these, with only five major human characters and an android (or two…). Rain and Andy, as our protagonists, are given the most characterization, while the others are barely sketched out. They’re fodder for the alien, which is pretty standard fare for this franchise at this point, but whereas previous films managed to get away with giving the participants minimal dimension because there were more of them, it’s a flaw in a small cast of actors here. Other than Rain, Andy, and Tyler, we also have Kay’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced, of Madame Web); pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), and interstellar chav Bjorn (Spike Fearn). Jonsson’s performance as Andy is fantastic and is one of the highlights of the film, and Spaeny is at turns serviceable and pretty good. I’m torn in my feeling about Fearn, whose performance makes him feel like he’s in a season of Skins that I would get so annoyed by that I’d stop watching. There’s an attempt to make his hostility toward Andy a matter of anti-android prejudice based in personal tragedy (a synthetic made a judgment call to save a dozen people in a mining accident, sacrificing three others, including Bjorn’s family), but he’s still obnoxious and shortsighted. It’s his idiocy that costs most of the others their lives; it’s so satisfying to see the alien kill him that I’m led to believe we’re not supposed to like him, so I guess this makes it a “good” performance, but the CW-caliber of his and Merced’s performances is out of place here. Consider Aliens, in which the marines are all similarly thinly written, but there’s more of them and their oversimplified characteristics—the coward, the macho lady, the veteran, the one with ice water in his veins, the cigar-chomping tough—don’t feel as one-dimensional as Bjorn or Navarro. Here, it’s a detracting factor.
That’s the most glaring flaw for me in Romulus, and it isn’t enough to turn me against the film, which I really rather liked. The plot is very cleverly constructed, with the need for Andy to use a data chip from one of the androids on the station itself in order to access a part of the station that houses the fuel for the cryopods leading to his personality being corrupted into something more clever and devious. In a franchise where synthetic humanoids can be relied upon to be morally upstanding as much as their creators can (which is to say that they have just as much chance to be good or evil), it’s a refreshing change to have a character whose ethics are completely malleable, with that mercuriality being entirely outside of his control. I’m mixed on That Reprisal (I won’t spoil it here), although I am pleased that there was extensive use of puppetry in the portrayal of the character, even if there was a perhaps-inescapable amount of Uncanny Valley happening. Feelings about digital necromancy aside, it’s effective, and is one of many tethers between this film and the franchise at large that make this feel of a piece with what came before, paying reverent homage rather than performing mere lip service to the films it follows. The xenomorph is the scariest it’s been since the last millennia, and there’s a new monster here that’s also very frightening and creepy. I’ll try to talk around it as much as possible to avoid spoiling it as well, but the final monster (which comes about through application of reverse engineered black goo) is nauseating to look at, a perfect synthesis of H.R. Gieger’s designs for the alien and, well, something you’ll know when you see it.
All in all, this one is pretty solid. The action sequences are fantastic (there’s a particular standout zero gravity sequence) and build logically upon one another, the introduction of a ticking clock in the form of the station’s deteriorating orbit is well-done and ups the stakes at exactly the right time, and the characters who have characters are interesting. Their interactions feel at home in this universe of films in which the night is dark and full of monsters but in which humans (and maybe androids) can find a connection with each other that makes the dual horrors of late-stage space capitalism and acidic organisms that impregnate and kill seem surmountable, if at great cost. A worthy sequel in an uneven franchise.
There are two things that can quickly win me over to enjoying an otherwise mediocre movie: a cool-looking monster and a go-for-broke ending. Thankfully, the new found-footage cryptid horror Frogman has both. Based on real-life legends of a half-human, half-frog mutant who wields a magic sparkler wand in the woods outside of Loveland, Ohio, Frogman gets away with a lot of time-wasting bullshit just by delivering on an adorable creature design, lovingly rendered as a rubber-suit monster. The titular Frogman appears early in flashback camcorder footage from the late-90s, assuring the audience that this is not exactly a Blair Witch Project or Willow Creek situation where the monster will go entirely unseen. He’s around, and he’s so dang cute that you can’t wait to spend more time with him. Unfortunately, the movie then makes you wait a full hour to return to the pleasure of the Loveland Frog’s company, but it does reward your patience by ending on 20 hectic minutes of over-the-top Frogman action, adding to the cryptid’s lore by dreaming up a frogperson death cult who worship the wizardly beast and offer up their bodies to be merged with his froggy DNA. It’s entirely possible to roll your eyes through a majority of the film’s runtime and still get excited by the concluding title card warning that “Frogman is still out there,” teasing a potential sequel. Any time spent with Frogman is time well spent.
While Frogman does not mimic Blair Witch & Willow Creek‘s withholding of an onscreen monster, it mimics everything else about their narrative structure, often reading like a copy of a copy. A struggling low-fi filmmaker who captured the late-90s camcorder footage of Frogman as a child (Nathan Tymoshuk) returns to Loveland to prove wrong all the haters & doubters of the “Hey guys” YouTube commentariat who mock the credibility of his sighting. He brings along two friends who also don’t take the existence of Frogman seriously but are still excited about the idea of making a movie (Chelsey Grant as an insufferably corny actress who’s road-testing a hack Southern Belle stock character named Norma Jean Wynette, and Benny Barrett as an aspiring cinematographer who constantly complains about “losing light” even though he shoots every single interaction backlit & out of focus on an ancient camcorder). The friend-dynamic drama between that central trio is autopilot found-footage filmmaking, but things pick up quick once they start interacting with the local yokels of Loveland. The amount of true believers who are deadly serious about Frogman give the wayward crew the creeps, then the wizardly Frogman’s “telekinetic interference” with the shoot throws the project into chaos, trapping them in a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a bloodthirsty frog cult. So, while Frogman is not always ribbeting, given enough time it is plenty ribbiculous.
If there’s anything new that Frogman brings to the found-footage horror canon, it’s all contained in its ending and in its monster. The titular rubber-suited Frogman looks great and—defying found-footage tradition—does not kill every single character who lays eyes on him, which means the movie has to find a new way to end its story that doesn’t just mindlessly echo the exact beats of Blair Witch. Otherwise, Frogman is most recommendable as regional cinema. Recalling Matt Farley’s modern small-town cryptid classic Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, there’s something charming about Frogman’s extremely local sensibilities in the quest to put Loveland, Ohio on the map by promoting the existence of its resident cryptid; the only shame is that nothing in the movie is half as funny nor as surprising as any random page of a Matt Farley script. Still, Frogman excels as a tourism ad for the city, which just adopted the Loveland Frog as its official mascot in 2023, after nearly seven decades of reported sightings. Even when I was bored with the interpersonal drama between the central mockumentary crew, I was still delighted by the Frogman merch they found in their interrogation of the Loveland citizenry: a sign that reads “Frog parking only; violators will be toad” and t-shirts with slogans like “Frog around and find out” or “M.I.L.F. (Man I Love Frogman)”. It made me want to travel to Loveland just to visit the gift shop.
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