New Orleans is currently enjoying the best repertory cinema programming it’s had in my lifetime. I may have missed the healthy art-cinema scene that was obliterated by the arrival of the AMC “Palace” multiplexes in the city’s suburbs in the 1990s, but something beautiful & exciting has sprouted from that rubble in the 2020s. Looking back at the older movies we’ve covered on the blog over the past ten years because they happened to be screening locally, it’s immediately clear that local programmers are getting more adventurous & esoteric in their tastes. It used to be that you could only catch rep screenings of Hitchcock classics like To Catch a Thief & Strangers on a Train on Sunday mornings at The Prytania’s ongoing Classic Movies series. Now every Wednesday night is a head-to-head battle to see who can screen the hipper, edgier title between the Gap Tooth Cinema series at The Broad (formerly known as Wildwood) and the Prytania Cinema Club at Canal Place (former host of Wildwood). That competitive battle has resulted in a robust local slate including hard-to-see titles like Entertaining Mr. Sloane, On the Silver Globe, and Coonskin as well as celebratory screenings of true cult classics like Pink Flamingos, Blue Velvet, and House. And that’s not including the one-off barroom & coffee shop screenings and the week-long restoration runs of other weirdo classics around town. The New Orleans repertory scene is still nowhere near matching the behemoth breadth of a New York, a Los Angeles, or even an Austin, but it’s at least better now than it was when we first started this blog ten years ago, and you can clearly see that progress charted on this Letterboxd list of what we’ve been able to cover because of it.
According to that list, the 100th local repertory screening I’ve attended in the first ten years of Swampflix was the hypnotic Japanese horror film Cure, thanks to the aforementioned Prytania Cinema Club. An early calling card film for the still-working, still-thriving Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Cure arrived during the serial killer thriller era of the post-Silence of the Lambs 1990s. Kōji Yakusho stars as a Tokyo police detective working to connect a series of vicious murders in which victims’ throats are slashed in the same meticulous “X” pattern but were executed by different killers, found dazed at the scene of the crime. The common link between these parallel domestic killings is an amnesiac drifter and former psychology student played by Masato Hagiwara, who appears to be weaponizing an old-fashioned form of Mesmerism to incite the murders. While the detective struggles to pin these surrogate acts of violence on a man who can barely remember information told to him earlier in a single conversation, let alone his own life story or name, the mesmerism starts to infect the cop’s intrusive thoughts, interrupting the normal flow of a serial killer movie. His mentally ill wife mutates from a patient in his care to the obvious next victim in the hypnosis-induced murder spree, and all he can really do to stop it is to feebly threaten violence against a dazed, checked-out slacker who only offers middle-distance stares and vague philosophical questions in response. It’s a horror movie about an infectious idea, which is always a creepier enemy to fight against since there can be no physical, decisive victory. Attempts to diminish or punish the killer mesmerist only bring him into the presence of even more dangerous men higher up the law-enforcement food chain, spreading the threat instead of squashing it.
I loved getting the chance to see Cure for the first time in a proper theater, fully submerged in its eerie, icy mood without the trivial distractions of home viewing. It’s the kind of movie that asks you to pay attention to the roaring hums of machines—fluorescent lights, car engines, washing machines, ocean tide—and the jarring silence of their sudden absence. The blink-and-miss-them flashes of the unreliable detective-protagonist’s hypnotic visions of his own domestic violence could easily be missed with a cell phone or a house pet or passing traffic competing for your momentary attention at home. It’s an extraordinarily creepy film but also a subtle one. At the same time, it made me question whether this entire enterprise of lauding repertory programming can be detrimental to the way we watch and think about contemporary releases. At least, I left Cure a little skeptical about why so many movie nerds are willing to give into the pure-evil vibes of vintage Japanese horrors like this, Suicide Club, and Perfect Blue but get hung up on the supposed plot incoherence of their modern American equivalent in Longlegs. All four of those works warp the familiar beats of the traditional serial killer thriller into new, grotesque configurations by dredging up the supernatural menace lurking just under the genre’s real-world surface. Only Longlegs hasn’t had the benefit of multiple decades of critical analysis and cultural context lending additional meaning & significance to the events of its supernatural plot, so that discerning cinephile audiences get tripped up on whether its story makes practical sense instead of focusing on what really matters: its atmospheric sense, its evil vibes. Cure has long since let go of that baggage. It’s been canonized as a great work, so its ambiguity is taken as an asset instead of an oversight.
What I’m really celebrating here is the gift of access. To date, I had only seen one other Kurosawa film: his atypical sci-fi comedy-thriller Doppelgänger, which has largely been forgotten as a lesser work. That film’s DVD just happened to fall into my lap at my local Goodwill, which is how I find a lot of older movies outside the taste-making curation of streamers like The Criterion Channel, Mubi, and Tubi. Having that curation spill out of my living room and into proper cinemas in recent years has been a wonderful, welcome change of pace. I might’ve kept Cure on the watchlist backburner for another decade or two if it weren’t screening a couple bus stops away from my office cubicle. I also likely would have missed one of its eerie, intrusive flashes of violence had I watched it alone at home, where I’m always one phone notification away from zapping a movie of all its sensory magic. I hope The Prytania Cinema Club and Gap Tooth Cinema keep competing for my patronage every Wednesday into eternity to keep that magic alive. Or, better yet, I hope one of them gives up their Wednesday slot for a different night so I don’t have to make an either/or choice every week. I missed a screening of the Rowlands-Cassavetes collab Opening Night so I could finally check out Cure instead, even though it would have been a lovely way to commemorate the recent passing of an all-timer of a powerhouse actor. Having that either/or choice is a privilege that I didn’t have just a few years ago, when the majority of local rep screenings were our weekly Sunday morning visits with Rene Brunet.
I’m a sucker for genre movies about the supernatural power of dreams, since it frees filmmakers up to visualize just about anything they want onscreen. From obscure oddities like Paperhouse & Beyond Dream’s Doorto beloved horror-nerd classics like the Nightmares on Elm Street to artsy-fartsy pioneers like Un Chien Andalou, some of the most powerfully surreal images ever achieved in cinema have resulted from dreamworld genre fare. That’s why it’s a little disappointing when a dream-logic horror movie lacks that ambition to astonish, instead relying on more pedestrian thrills like, say, rubber monsters and naked breasts. The early Full Moon feature Shadowzone is one such disappointment: a low-budget, straight-to-VHS sci-fi horror about an Extended Deep Sleep trial in which the power of the dream-state human brain unlocks a doorway to an alternate dimension . . . and all that comes through that doorway is tits & monsters. In any other context, tits & monsters would be a satisfying payoff for renting VHS-horror schlock, but here they’re a little bit of a letdown, especially considering how much more expensive and less expressive Shadowzone is compared to its fellow sleep-study-horror Beyond Dream’s Door.
Louise Fletcher revives her role as the low-energy sleep study doctor she plays in The Exorcist II: The Heretic, except now with a mad scientist bent. Along with a fellow drowsy mad scientist played by James Wong, she conducts Extended Deep Sleep studies on naked models in the low-rent version of the hypersleep pods from Alien. Just as they’re starting to discover the awesome, supernatural power the human mind can unlock when submerged in Deep Sleep for days on end, their work is suddenly scrutinized by a military investigator because one of their test subjects inconveniently popped like a balloon. The flayed corpse of that experiment gone wrong promises a level of gore the movie will not match again until the very end. Instead, the still-sleeping subjects’ powerful minds let an interdimensional monster through the doorway between worlds that the remaining survivors in the lab (and the audience at home) cannot actually see. It’s only visible to the lab-equipment monitors, not to the naked eye. Still, it kills them off one by one in their sealed underground bunker, like an invisible version of The Thing . . . until it finally reveals its admittedly fantastic creature design in a strobe-lit ending borrowed from Altered States.
There’s a meta-element to Shadowzone, where it’s so boring between its mutant creature attacks that you can’t tell whether you actually saw them or you dreamed them during an unplanned mid-film nap. It’s possible that my unenthused experience with it was a result of presentation, since the version currently streaming on Amazon Prime is a half-hour longer than its normal listed runtime of 80min, and none of the additional footage includes the tits & monsters that provide its only sources of entertainment value. What’s left is just empty space that could have easily been filled by whatever surreal, outlandish images the fine folks at Full Moon could dare to imagine, and instead is just long stretches of nothing. The good news is that you’re likely in no danger of being bored or let down by the film yourself, since the only scenario when any reasonable person would have sought this out would be if it were still 1990 and your local video store had already rented out every VHS of the better titles it visually references: Alien, Altered States, and The Thing. Now, you can just stream Beyond Dream’s Door instead without worrying that Tubi is going to run out of copies.
There will be countless reviews of Coralie Fargeat’s high-style gross-out The Substance that point to the body horror titles of the 1980s & 90s that influenced its over-the-top, surrealistic practical effects. Instead of echoing those shoutouts to Yuzna, Cronenberg, and Hennenlotter—the gross-out greats—I’d like to instead highlight a different VHS-era relic that telegraphs The Substance‘s peculiar brand of horror filmmaking. While Fargeat’s most memorable images result from the squelchy practical-effects mutations of star Demi Moore’s body as she takes extreme measures to reverse the toll that aging has taken on her career, long stretches of the film are less body horror than they are 1980s workout video. Moore’s aging body is her entire livelihood, given that she hosts a retro, Jane Fonda-style morning workout show in a leotard, stripping & exercising on America’s television screens. When she gives monstrous birth to her youthful replacement in Margaret Qualley through Yuznian transformation, the show zooms in even tighter on the workout host’s body – featuring aggressively repetitive closeups on Qualley’s gyrating, lycra-clad ass. At least half of The Substance is essentially a horror-themed workout video, so any recommendations of vintage schlock primers for what it’s achieving should include horror movies that cashed in on the 1980s gym culture craze. There are a few standout workout-horror novelties to choose from there, most prominently Death Spa and Killer Workout. However, there’s only one horror novelty that matches The Substance‘s full-assed commitment to spoofing 80s workout video aesthetics: a VHS collectible titled Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout.
Linnea Quigley was only in her early 30s in the early 90s, but her workout video spoof already finds her panicking about the encroaching expiration date for her onscreen career as an object of desire, like Moore’s gorgeous 50-something protagonist in The Substance. Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is ostensibly a Jane Fonda workout video parody in which the titular scream queen leads slumber-party-massacre victims & poolside zombies in low-energy, high-sleaze workout routines. It’s more cheesecake than it is instructional, starting & ending with a nude Quigley screaming directly at camera during her pre-workout shower. Having hit the nude scene quota that would satisfy horror-convention attendees who need to buy something for the perpetually topless actress to autograph, Quigley then takes the time to satisfy her own needs. Much of the hour-long runtime is a highlight reel of her most outrageous performances, including clips from schlock titles like Nightmare Sisters, Creepozoids, Assault of the Party Nerds, and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama. Her most iconic scene as a punk stripper on the graveyard set of Return of The Living Dead is only shown in still images, sidestepping expensive licensing fees, so that most clips are pulled from her collaborations with David DeCoteau. She’s directly making an argument to her salivating fans that she’s just as much of a scream queen icon as a Jamie Lee Curtis or a Heather Langenkamp, even if her filmography is laughably low-rent by comparison.
Smartly, Quigley constantly invites you to laugh at both that filmography and the workout video wraparound, preemptively mocking the entire exercise with her own shamelessly corny Elvira quips. During a slideshow of her double-chainsaw striptease in Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, she complains, “Ginger Rogers had Fred Astaire . . . and I get Black & Decker?!” Later, when she breathily encourages the audience at home to sweat with her during a workout, she jokes “That’s right, stretch those muscles . . . Not THAT muscle!” Of course, most of the self-deprecating jokes are at the expense of the workout video’s dual function as softcore pornography, making it a kind of proto-J.O.I. porno. Her first, solo workout routine finds her doing absurdly erotic poses in a metal-plated bra and black fishnet stockings, an outrageously inappropriate sweatsuit alternative that Quigley herself mocks while making the most of its prurient benefits. She looks great, she proves she’s self-aware about where she’s positioned in the grand cinematic spectrum of respectability, and she does a good job promoting her legacy as a horror legend while maintaining a sense of humor about it all. The only sequence of the video that doesn’t quite work is her instructional “zombiecise” routine where she leads a small hoard of graveyard zombies through limp choreography at the edge of a backyard pool. It’s a visual gag that doesn’t really go anywhere once the initial novelty wears off, but it does eventually drone on long enough that it achieves a kind of deliberate anti-comedy, so all is forgiven. It’s also followed by a much more successful speed-run through a tropey slumber party slasher and a mid-credits blooper reel, guaranteeing that the video leaves you with a smile.
Linnea Quigley’s Horror Workout is beautifully, aggressively vapid, much like the repetitive Pump It Up with Sue dance video sequences in The Substance. Whether it qualifies as a proper feature like The Substance is debatable. At times, it’s essentially the horny horror nerd equivalent of those looping Yule Log videos people throw on the TV around Christmas, a connection it acknowledges with occasional, lingering shots of an actual fireplace (presumably lit to keep the half-dressed Quigley warm). It’s just as much of an appropriate double-feature pairing with Fargeat’s film as the more commonly cited titles like Society, The Fly, and Basket Case, though, as The Substance is just as much a horror-themed workout video as it is a comedic body horror, and there’s only one previous horror-themed workout video that truly matters.
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.
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