horror

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

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I saw I Saw the TV Glow at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, a five-day horror marathon that’s held in New Orleans every Spring.  In an attempt to put my festival pass to full use, I crammed my schedule with new releases, spending noon to midnight at a downtown shopping mall for a four-day stretch of the fest.  I skipped sleep, meals, and parties so I could disappear into The Movies, only seeing friends in passing if they happened to catch me in line for a screening.  It’s likely no coincidence, then, that the Overlook title that has stuck with me most was the one about the self-destructive distraction of niche media obsession.  Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to the isolation-of-the-internet drama We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about the corrosive isolation of obsessively watching television instead of living a real, authentic life.  It felt absurd to immediately get in line for another movie right after its credits rolled, but I found myself doing it anyway, refusing to wake up from my self-induced screen rot stupor.  It didn’t exactly change my life, but it did make me sincerely question some things about how I’m living it.

Justice Smith stars as a socially petrified suburban nerd who’s afraid to fully express himself to anyone, including himself.  The closest he gets to breaking out of his shell is in watching The Pink Opaque, a 90s kids’ fantasy show about two psychically linked summer camp friends who are geographically separated but still fight supernatural evil as a team.  Styled after retro Nickelodeon programming like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Pink Opaque is the kind of deceptively complex children’s programming that roots itself in a young audience’s brains for a lifetime, immediately triggering dormant memories & feelings with just a couple still images or a few notes of a theme song.  It’s also a show specifically marketed to girls, so our timid protagonist is afraid to be caught watching it, both out of fear of his homophobic brute father (an unrecognizable, terrifying Fred Durst) and out of fear of what it might awaken in his own psychology.  He finds refuge in an older, lesbian student at his school (Brigette Lundy-Paine) who sneaks taped episodes of The Pink Opaque into his possession, so that their real-life relationship mirrors the psychic link between the distanced besties of their favorite show.  When his only friend asks him to join her in breaking out of the oppressive social & familial ruts of the suburbs, he’s too scared to go.  The show is then abruptly cancelled, reality breaks, and the parts of himself he refuses to confront devour his soul while he suffocates in isolation.

I Saw the TV Glow is the melancholy dark side of the Brigsby Bear moon.  It’s specifically targeted at Millennial nostalgia for vintage, tape-warped 90s media, but like Brigsby Bear it’s clear-eyed in its messaging that disappearing into that media is not a healthy substitute for a real-world social life.  It’s impossible not to read this particular version of that story as a cautionary tale for would-be transgender people who are too afraid to come out to themselves, to the point where Shoenbrun practically reaches through the screen to shake that specific audience awake with the handwritten message “There is still time.”  Even if you don’t need to be encouraged to embrace your true, hidden gender identity, the movie still hits home for anyone who’s ever avoided authentically engaging with their life, body, or community by disappearing into niche media consumption instead.  Like World’s Fair, it’s an emotionally heavy film that touches on themes of suicide, loneliness, and parental abuse.  No amount of Pete & Pete visual references or prop Fruitopia vending machines can ease the pain weighing on its heart.  If anything, its nostalgia for vintage 90s media only gets more sinister the more it’s used as an emotional crutch; the Trip to the Moon-styled villain of The Pink Opaque becomes a stand-in for suicidal depression and his on-the-ground moon minions become gender dysphoria demons who go away if you stop thinking about them but never die if you never confront them. 

The most frequent complaint about We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was that it was mismarketed as a horror film when really it’s just a melancholy drama about a terminally-online teenager who’s so lonely she deliberately loses her grip on reality.  It was bold of Overlook to screen Schoenbrun’s next film alongside the program’s more recognizable ghouls, ghosts, and ballerina vampires, then, since their customer base can be vocally opinionated about what does or does not count as Horror; I can still hear echoes of bros in black t-shirts grumbling after their 2019 screening of Jennifer Reader’s Knives & Skin.  I Saw the TV Glow has a much stronger case for being programmed in a horror genre context than World’s Fair, though, since it depicts a full supernatural breakdown of reality after the cancellation of The Pink Opaque.  Tape warp TV static and monster-of-the-week villains invade the real world of our emotionally-closed-off protagonist with escalating violence the longer he ignores who he really is.  The static even invades his body, literalizing the dysphoric sensation he describes of having his insides dug out with a shovel.  Maybe it’s more of a nightmare drama in the way Ari Aster pitched Beau is Afraid as “a nightmare comedy,” but it’s a goddamned nightmare either way – one that the volatile combination of rigid social norms and insurmountable personal anxiety make countless people suffer every day.   It made me so sad I felt physically ill, and then I immediately disappeared into another horror movie so I didn’t have to think about it for too long.

-Brandon Ledet

Azrael (2024)

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Do you think becoming known as a scream queen is a blessing or a curse?  Both?  Australian actress Samara Weaving is only a household name among horror nerds, but she’s been a must-see performer for that tattoos-and-black-t-shirts contingent since she starred in Ready or Not & The Babysitter a half-decade ago.  Watching her latest star vehicle Azrael at Overlook Film Festival this weekend, I wondered whether her career was stalling there rather than starting.  Watching Weaving go on another one-woman revenge mission that soaks her gorgeous face & blonde hair in buckets of her enemies’ blood & viscera made me question how satisfying it is for her as an actor to return to the exact same beats that have already made her horror-convention-famous.  It’s likely comforting to know she can always fall back on consistent paychecks by starring gimmicky, gory horror flicks, but she shows just enough talent in them that you have to wonder why no one is sending her scripts for anything else (give or take a metatextual gag in Babylon that jokes about her striking resemblance to Margot Robbie).

At least Azrael offers Weaving an acting challenge to maintain her scream queen status in a role where she’s technically not allowed to scream at all.  Set in an apocalyptic future where Rapture cults have renounced the sin of Speech (whatever that means), Weaving’s mute protagonist attempts to live a quiet, domestic life in the woods outside society with her doting romantic partner.  The nearby cult has other ideas, kidnapping those lovers with plans to feed them to the charred-flesh Rapture zombies who hunt left-behind humans whenever the wind blows the wrong way.  There are vague gestures towards explaining the mythology behind this convoluted set up, mostly spelled out in the cult’s crude finger paintings and in the rhythmic breathing rituals that summon the woodland demons.  However, writer Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest, Blair Witch) has said in interviews that the idea for the film came to him in a recurring dream, so let’s just assume you’re supposed to feel it more than understand it.  It’s all just background dressing for an adorable Samara Weaving to descend into hideous, cathartic violence, something she’s now proven she can do credibly while not uttering a sound. Next time, she’ll do it with her eyes closed, and then backwards in heels.

Between this film, last year’s No One Will Save You, and the ongoing Quiet Place series, it appears horror filmmakers are now actively combating the second-screen viewing habits of the streaming era, stubbornly making sure the audience watching along at home has to put down their phones to fully follow the plot.  Azrael director E.L. Katz doesn’t bring much new to the table within that burgeoning Hey Pay Attention horror subgenre, except maybe in the extremity of the scene-to-scene violence (something he already proved cruel enough to deliver in the pitch-black comedy Cheap Thrills).  Elderly and pregnant women are vulnerable targets; Weaving’s final showdown with the evil cult leader is a machete vs. meat cleaver fight; and the camera is always willing to linger on the painful aftermath of a fresh wound.  Still, there’s nothing especially novel about the doomsday-survival cult setting or the burn-victim zombies who lurk at its edges.  The movie’s main hook is for horror nerds who want to watch Weaving go through it one more time in their own perverse cult ritual.  Admittedly, I am one of those nerds, but I’m still hopeful that she’ll soon break free from our captivity.

-Brandon Ledet

Arcadian (2024)

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Like most hopeless, depraved movie nerds, I’ll watch pretty much anything with Nicolas Cage in it, since he’s a reliably entertaining performer no mattery the quality of the project signing that week’s paycheck.  That means I’ve seen a lot of mediocre DTV action movies over the years, often ones where Cage’s prominence on the poster is outright dishonest about his prominence in the picture advertised.  I had somehow deluded myself into believing this slumming-it phase of Cage’s career was coming to a close, though, since recent projects like Mandy, Pig, and Dream Scenario were starting to reveal a light at the end of that particular sewer tunnel.  Cage’s latest made-for-streaming action horror Arcadian—which locally premiered at Overlook Film Festival last weekend—was a reality check on that delusion.  Between its post-apocalyptic setting, its grim-grey lighting, and Nicolas Cage dutifully showing up just along enough to earn a sizeable payment to the IRS, Arcadian feels as if it’s about five to ten years behind the times, even when it’s trying its hardest to show you something new.

Cage stars as a single, grieving father who moves his surviving family to remote farmland at the start of The Apocalypse.  His twin boys get increasingly difficult to manage when they age into teenage grumps, which makes it even more difficult to survive the nightly attacks of the mutant creatures who ended modern civilization in the first place.  Since there is no shortage of reference points for this kind of doomsday prepper action-horror, Arcadian doesn’t put much effort into explaining the details of the world Cage & his boys are fighting to survive.  Whether it’s the artsy abstraction of It Comes at Night or the weekly soap opera of The Walking Dead, you’ve seen this exact setup before.  What you haven’t seen is the peculiar biological details of these exact monsters: hairy ostrich-wolves who clap their jaws like chattering-teeth novelty toys and travel as a pack in a rolling Ferris wheel formation.  There’s plenty of intrigue there for anyone drawn in by Cage’s name & face on the poster, which does a lot to make up for him spending half of the runtime offscreen, comatose.  When he suddenly perks up for the climactic fight against the impossible wolf-beasts, you can practically see him flipping on his It Factor movie star presence like a light switch.  It’s only a few seconds of screentime, but it’s exactly what you paid to see.

Arcadian is decently entertaining for a Shudder-brand creature feature, by which I mean its monsters’ design is inventive & upsetting enough to hold your attention despite the banality of their surroundings.  Director Benjamin Brewer’s most prominent IMDb credit to date is as the lead visual effects artist for Everything Everywhere All at Once, which shows here in the ambition & absurdity of the wolf-beasts’ hideous biology.  The dark, muddled color palette and handheld cinematography style are more befitting of a war drama than a creature feature, but again it’s worth pushing through that tedium to get a better look at the monsters.  And hey, there’s still making popular, big-budget Quiet Place sequels long after that series has maintained any purpose or novelty, so I can’t say this film is entirely out of date.  Brewer leveraged Cage’s image on a poster and piggybacked off a familiar mainstream horror template to show off his prowess for inventive, impressive visual effects.  I can’t be mad at that kind of Roger Corman marketing hustle, especially since Cage has lent this likeness to far, far worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Cuckoo (2024)

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Tilman Singer has quickly become the most exciting new voice in cosmic horror.  His debut feature Luz started as a film school thesis project but was so strangely, psychically powerful that it broke out into wide release as one of the very best films of 2019 (according to me, anyway).  I watched Luz as a quietly buzzy horror curio that reached my living room via VOD rental, and I was blown away by the volatile imbalance between its cosmic-scale ambitions and its dirt-cheap budget.  His follow-up sophomore feature Cuckoo arrived in New Orleans with much louder fanfare.  Backed by Neon’s hip-cred marketing machine and starring one of the few non-influencer celebrities that teens care about (Hunter Schafer, of Euphoria fame), Cuckoo is a much hotter ticket than Luz was just a few years ago.  Its recent local premiere at Overlook Film Fest was packed to the walls with horror-hungry eyeballs, and although the enthusiasm in the room sounded mixed, anyone familiar with Luz knew exactly what kind of a surreal mindfuck we were in for.  Cuckoo escalates the verbal psychedelia of Luz to something more traditionally thrilling, hopping genres from demonic possession to creepy asylum horror but maintaining the same screenwriting ambitions of pulling brain-melting ideas out of simple, stripped-down tools.

Hunter Schafer stars as a grieving teen who joins her estranged, emotionally distant, German father’s new family after her mother’s death.  That new, uneasy family unit moves into a seasonally unoccupied resort in the Alps so the father & stepmother can work for the site’s enigmatic owner, played by a cartoonishly evil Dan Stevens.  Of course, the resort doubles as a mad scientist laboratory for Stevens’s Dr. Caligari-style medical experiments, which somehow involve strange shrieking sounds in the woods outside the cabins and the strange woman who makes them.  The movie explains exactly what’s going on in due time, but it’s the kind of explanation that only further twists your brain in knots with every new detail.  What’s important is that Singer effectively squeezes unnerving scares out of simple, straightforward methods, somehow crafting one of modern cinema’s creepiest cryptids by dressing one of his actresses in a trench coat, wig, and sunglasses.  I suppose it’s also important that Schafer’s teen brattiness is what ultimately saves the day, since her resolve to drown out the world with comically large, loud headphones until she’s old enough to move out on her own is exactly what protects her from the wigged cryptid’s aural violence.  She also eventually learns how to love at least one member of her new family, but it’s a perilous road getting there, one with many pitstops on hospital beds.

Cuckoo slowly builds its own unique mythology instead of leaning on traditional creature-feature or mad scientist payoffs.  It’s an impressive mix of sly humor & unnerving psychedelia, one that gets genuinely nightmarish in its forced pregnancy threats but also allows Dan Stevens to goof off with an exaggerated German accent & a magical flute, as if he were a recurring SNL character instead of a villainous fascist.  It’s a great theatrical experience, less so for its visual eccentricities (which mostly amount to time-loop editing & a vibrating frame) than for its aural ones (constant shrieks & gunshots that are best heard loud). I get the sense that all the central collaborators are getting away with something here.  Schafer recently said in a GQ interview that she’s no longer interested in playing roles that center her transgender identity, and this movie doesn’t care about that at all; it just cares how cool she looks wielding a butterfly knife: very.  Stevens also gets plenty of room to go big as an absolute maniac, something it feels like he hasn’t gotten to do on this scale since The Guest a full decade ago.  Then there’s Singer, who’s now found a much bigger canvas and a much bigger audience for his cosmic horror oddities.  I hope his work continues to escalate this way, since he has a lot of potential to become one of the all-time greats in the genre, if not only in his power to bewilder.

-Brandon Ledet

Immaculate (2024)

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There’s an emerging form of mainstream horror movie that appears to be generic & mediocre for most of its runtime, then springs a bonkers third act on its audience that retroactively makes it a Must-See Event Film through last-minute chutzpah.  Let’s call it Grower-Not-Shower Horror, a genre that’s typified by titles like Malignant, The Boy, Orphan, Barbarian, The Empty Man, etc.  Let’s also throw the recent Sydney Sweeney vehicle Immaculate on that list, as it’s a seemingly typical, unremarkable horror film set at a spooky convent that eventually becomes uniquely, explosively entertaining through the sheer audacity of its conclusion.  It may be the least remarkable of the Grower-Not-Shower titles that I’ve listed, but it’s still bonkers enough in its third-act resolution to make the cut, and that accomplishment is entirely owed to Sweeney’s performance.

In the story’s grim-grey, mediocre beginnings, Sweeney arrives at the remote Italian convent Our Lady of Sorrows mumbling like a socially inept teenager, totally unsure of herself.  There’s a plug-and-play spooky atmosphere to any Catholic setting in a horror film, as The Church is essentially just a well-funded cult with a bottomless supply of haunted fetish objects – in this case particularly obsessing over a rusty nail said to have been pried from Jesus’s cross.  All of the conspiratorial whispering, jump-scare nightmares, and crucifix-shaped blood stains that rattle Sweeney in the early stretch could just as easily have been recycled footage from the Conjuring spin-off The Nun without anyone really taking notice.  It isn’t until she starts fighting back against the Catholic cult in the back half that the movie comes alive.  That’s when her performance finally kicks into the melodramatic overdrive of Cassie from Season 2 of Euphoria, rather than recalling the sleepwalking-for-a-paycheck mumblings of her more recent role in Madame Web.

As the setting & title indicate, this is the story of an “immaculate” conception of child, meaning Sweeney’s nun-in-training unexpectedly finds herself a pregnant virgin.  The religious superiors around her declare the pregnancy a miracle, but both the reluctant mother and the genre-savvy audience immediately know better.  Segmented into three Trimester chapter breaks, the rest of the movie from there is all about the lengths she must go to escape her convent-prison before she gives birth to the antichrist abomination that’s been planted inside her body.  It’s in the third trimester where the movie earns the audience’s attention, but there’s nothing especially surprising about the particular events or character details that are saved for that gruesome finale.  Mostly, it’s just surprising how far Sweeney is willing to push her craft into extreme, bloody mania – reaching for a cathartically violent release for all of the ready-made, cookie-cutter tension of the first couple chapters.

There’s been some quibbling debate about whether Immaculate should be classified as nunsploitation, given that it does not lean into the seedier, sexier hallmarks of the subgenre.  There’s enough communal bathing & intimate touching between the nuns to at least count as acknowledgement of the subgenre’s sexploitative past, but it does appear to be much more interested in the bodily violation of unwanted pregnancy than it is interested in the bodily sacrilege of lesbian sex behind convent walls.  In a way, that topic is a perfect metatextual fit for Sweeney, whose body has been a constant, baffling source of culture-war discourse in recent months.  It makes sense to me, then, that she believed enough in the project to ensure its completion as a producer, bringing in former collaborator Michael Mohan (The Voyeurs) to direct.  When the Catholic pregnancy cult refers to the poor nun’s body as “the perfect fertile vessel” it doesn’t sound any more unhinged than Conservative internet pundits firing off think pieces about the political significance of her large breasts.  It’s just that here she gets to violently fight back, with surprising gusto.

If I had to speculate about why Grower-Not-Shower Horror has become a popular narrative template for mainstream studios in recent years, it’s that they’re afraid of losing audiences in the opening act.  There’s no reason why Malignant could not have been a nonstop bonkers action horror from start to end in throwback Hong Kong filmmaking tradition, except that it would’ve immediately lost the audience who were looking for more typical horror payoffs.  By pretending to be a much more normal, forgettable horror for most of its runtime, it holds onto its respectability just long enough to hook a wide audience, and then it’s allowed to let loose what’s actually on its mind.  Immaculate likewise gets by as a generic Catholic-setting horror for as long as possible before it unleashes Sweeney to seek bloody catharsis against the men who treat her like breeding cattle.  Personally, I’d rather watch a movie that feels unrestrained from start to end, but Showers-Not-Growers are much harder to come by these days, so I’ll take what I can get.

-Brandon Ledet

Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (2024)

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The current run of American Godzilla movies so badly, nakedly want what Marvel Studios had in its Avengers era that they’re often referred to as The MonsterVerse, named of course after the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  We’re now at a point where the MCU’s glory days are quickly fading in the rearview, but the Marvelification of Godzilla has just been completed.  After a few standalone stylistic experiments that mired Godzilla in grim-grey CGI drudgery and drafted his longtime frenemy King Kong into the Vietnam War, the two towering kaiju have been teamed up by their own Avengers Initiative in a couple dumb-fun action blockbusters designed to sell some opening-weekend popcorn and to tease the next popcorn-seller down the line, whenever another one inevitably arrives.  2021’s Godzilla vs Kong at least maintained some of the colorful cartoon spectacle of classic kaiju battles like 1963’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, arriving as a much-needed return to grand-scale filmmaking in those early years of COVID precautions.  In their second shared title, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, that classic Toho spirit has instead been completely replaced by the quippy, zippy action comedy of a Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  Immensely talented actors Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens, and Brian Tyree Henry stand around spewing exposition and inane “Well, that just happened” punchlines while CGI gods fight to start or stop the apocalypse in the sky above.  1980s pop tunes loop continuously on old school tape decks as contrast to the rest of the film’s future tech (including a giant mechanical arm built to enhance King Kong’s already mighty super-strength).  All that’s missing, really, is a talking raccoon, but hey you gotta leave something on the table for the next one.

The New Empire is much more flattering as a King Kong sequel than it is as a Godzilla one, mostly because that series has so many fewer, lower points of comparison.  Godzilla currently has 38 films to his name, while Kong only has 12 – most of which are not tied to the 1933 original.  Within that lineage, The New Empire works best as a stealth remake of 1933’s rushed-to-market Son of Kong.  Most of the best scenes involve Kong taking a young, violent, childlike ape under his tutelage as a mentor.  In an early fight, Kong uses him as a weapon, beating back other, meaner apes with the bitey little bastard’s limp body.  Later, they fully team up as a makeshift father-son duo to take down a Richard III-style mad king and free the enslaved apes who live in the even hollower Earth beneath Kong’s Hollow Earth stomping grounds.  By contrast, Godzilla doesn’t get nearly as much to do.  He mostly just swims to an underwater gender clinic to charge up from blue to pink, emerges to join the fight against the mad king in the final act, and then takes an angry cat nap once everything calms down.  Other surprise kaiju combatants join the battle in the back half, but none are as surprising as the Mechagodzilla reveal in the previous picture.  Mostly, the monsters just follow the same patterns of CGI superheroics we’ve already seen countless times in the past decade, just scaled up to skyscraper size for a false sense of escalation.  Meanwhile, the humans on the ground hang out in CSI-style tech labs, narrating the action like WWE announcers.  Director Adam Wingard does his best to add some style & personality to the proceedings, flinging fluorescent goop at the non-existent camera’s “lens” every time a monster is defeated, but style & personality is mostly just window-dressing when it comes to this kind of four-quadrant blockbuster filmmaking.

If there’s any clear artistic path forward for the American Godzilla picture, it might be in more sincerely tackling the POV of the fictional Indigenous tribes who worship & manage the kaiju of Hollow Earth.  So far in the MonsterVerse, the Indigenous peoples associated with each creature have been exoticized with the same old-school Indiana Jones adventurism that’s persisted in both the King Kong & Godzilla series since their respective 1930s & 50s origins.  There’s an unexplored angle in telling a story from their perspective instead of framing it through outsiders’ eyes, an approach already forged by the recent Predator prequel Prey. Of course, despite including the word “new” in its title, The New Empire isn’t much interested in new ideas or in unexplored angles on old ones.  It’s content to repeat what’s worked previously for another easy payout, whether repeating the cartoonish CGI smash-em-ups of Godzilla vs Kong or repeating the crossover superhero team-ups of the Avengers films.  There isn’t much awe or novelty in that approach to sure-thing, big-budget filmmaking, but there is some joy to be found in its familiarity – however minor.

-Brandon Ledet

King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962)

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There’s a new Godzilla & King Kong wrestling match in multiplexes right now: a tag team formation of the legendary monsters just three years after their last onscreen battle in the American production Godzilla vs Kong.  Do you know what’s never reached American theaters, though?  The original 1962 crossover film King Kong vs Godzilla – at least not in any wholly intact, wholly legal form.  It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the 1954 Japanese cut of the original Godzilla officially reached American audiences, with the only widely available version being a warped American edit featuring awkward post-production inserts of actor Raymond Burr.  Twenty years later, that film’s second sequel, King Kong vs Godzilla, has still not yet been made wholly available for American audiences … but we’ve gotten damn close.  In 2019, The Criterion Collection released a gorgeous box set of digitally restored Showa Era Godzilla films, with every title dutifully de-Americanized except for King Kong vs Godzilla.  The original Japanese edit of that film is included in the set, but it’s stashed away among the supplementary Bonus Features on the final disc, not listed in sequence.  It’s also not fully restored to the image quality standards of the rest of the set; only the scenes left untouched by the American edit are in Blu-ray quality, while the reintegrated Japanese-only scenes switch to a jarring standard-definition DVD scan.  The reason for this choppy, half-complete restoration is somewhat mysterious to anyone who’s not an employee of Criterion, Toho, or Warner Bros, but I can at least say I’m grateful that it was included in the set at all, compromised or not.

The only reason King Kong vs Godzilla‘s muddled distribution history is worth noting in the first place is that the film was a significant creative swerve for both of its overlapping franchises.  If nothing else, it marks the first time either Kong or Godzilla were featured in color or in widescreen, three entries into both respective series.  The monsters’ onscreen crossover match being billed like a boxing PPV was a big deal, as it set the template for dozens of sequels to come: Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Godzilla vs. Mothra, Mothra vs. Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Megalon, Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla … all the way to the aforementioned Godzilla vs. Kong.  More importantly, it was a major change in course for its titular monsters in terms of its intent & tone.  The original Godzilla film has obvious, deep roots in the cultural & historical contexts of 1950s Japan, but it also pulled a lot of narrative influence from the monster-movie template established by the 1930s American classic King Kong.  Kong’s second outing in 1933’s Son of Kong and Godzilla’s second outing in 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again—both rushed to market mere months after the success of their predecessors—were mostly just pathetic cash-in imitators of former glories.  Of the pair, Godzilla Raids Again feels especially superfluous, since it can only offer the novelty of seeing the pro-wrestling style kaiju battles of later Godzilla sequels filtered through the relatively elegant aesthetics of the original (through Godzilla’s fights with the dinosaur-like Anguirus, again recalling plot details from the original King Kong) with no other notable deviations.  Son of Kong is likewise shameless in its willingness to repeat the exact tones & events of its predecessor, but it at least introduces the adorably useless Little Kong of its title to keep the rote proceedings novel.  Together, they make for convincing evidence that both series would have to get goofy to keep going, which is where King Kong vs. Godzilla comes to the rescue.

1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla is a wonderfully goofy corporate satire that feels like it has less in common with previous Kong or Godzilla pictures than it has in common with more cartoonish titles like Giants & Toys and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?.  A lot of the early stirrings of my beloved Godzilla vs Hedorah seem to have originated here, from the psychedelic pop-art color palette to the tangential indulgences in Looney Tunes goofballery.  Our two skyscraper combatants are unleashed upon the modern world in ways that feel true to their origin stories but are heightened for comedic effect.  When an American nuclear submarine gets wedged on an iceberg in Japanese waters, a slumbering Godzilla explodes out of the ice to attack the crew onboard.  Meanwhile, Kong is once again collected from his island home to participate in low-brow vaudevillian entertainment, but this time it’s to boost the ratings for a television program that promotes the Japanese company Pacific Pharmaceuticals.  Shockingly, the island extraction sequence that sets Kong loose somehow feels even more racist than the 1930s film that inspired it (a sequence the original Godzilla copied with much more tact & grace), but if you can stomach the blackface humor long enough to get past it, the rewards are worthwhile.  Pacific Pharmaceuticals quickly establishes itself as the villain of the piece, exploiting their bungled extraction of Kong and the simultaneous emergence of Godzilla to craft the ultimate ratings booster: the world’s first televised kaiju battle.  Instead of nuclear proliferation or the exploitation of Nature, a novelty television program advertising Big Pharma drives the horror of the plot, damning capitalistic greed and bloodthirsty quests for increased ratings.  That theme can’t help but feel a little silly by comparison, and the movie smartly leans into the humor of its villains being incompetently evil in their selfishness instead of being knowingly evil in some grand mastermind scheme.  The world suffers for their folly regardless.

Of course, all of this plot detail and background context ceases to matter during the final act, when Godzilla & Kong finally start going at it in earnest.  I won’t spoil who wins that fight, but I will say that the result is bullshit.  There’s some great monster action throughout, though, including a sequence where a lightning-powered Kong fights an especially slimy octopus and one where Godzilla survives miniature missile fire from an army of toy tanks.  The most notable dynamic to the monsters’ one-on-one match-up is the difference in the care put into their respective looks.  Godzilla looks just as great as ever here, while Kong looks like his costume was left to melt on some forgetful production assistant’s dashboard on a summer afternoon.  I could not get over the bizarre, lumpy proportions of Kong’s hairy, apish body; it felt like I was standing naked in front of a full-length mirror, my exact body type finally represented onscreen.  The half-SD, half-HD lumpiness of the movie’s presentation had a similar kind of misshapen charm to it as well.  In truth, it was no worse than watching a movie on a streaming platform that frequently buffered down to a lower quality due to internet bandwidth constraints, which isn’t ideal for a Blu-ray purchase but also isn’t a total deal breaker.  However, it did have the unintended benefit of highlighting just how much of the original Japanese version of the film had been removed from its American cut, denoted by alternatingly crisped & blurred visual details.  It’s obviously a wonderful thing that Criterion was able to officially present King Kong vs Godzilla to an American audience for the first time in the half-century since it premiered in Japan, regardless of lumpiness.  It’s been so long since the film first came out that its titular combatants have since become tag team partners in fights against other, lesser monsters, so it’s somewhat embarrassing that their original outing together is still partially stuck in a distribution limbo.  King Kong vs. Godzilla is a deeply silly film, but it’s also a historically important one, and it should be treated as such.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Godzilla (1954)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli celebrate Godzilla’s 70th birthday (and first Oscar win) by looking back to the monster’s 1954 debut.

00:00 SXSW

04:31 How to Build a Truth Engine (2024)
06:42 Last Things (2024)
09:30 Bottoms (2023)
11:11 Dune: Part Two (2024)
14:52 Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
21:30 Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
29:07 Theodore Rex (1994)
32:42 Brief Encounter (1945)
37:44 Throw Momma from the Train (1987)
40:43 Twins (1988)
43:31 Wise Guys (1986)

45:43 Godzilla (1954)

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– The Podcast Crew

Blood of the Virgins (1967)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

There’s been a lot of recent online conjecture & debate about the future of Tubi. Following the streamer’s rebrand with a uglier, bubblier logo, rumors spread that Tubi has been requesting that distributors upload censored versions of their films, with all graphic depictions of sex & violence obscured from public view.  It’s unclear whether this is true for the entirety of Tubi’s streaming library—which is miles deeper than any of its fellow competitors’—or if it’s just true for the movies that play on its “Live TV” channels that simulate pre-streaming movie broadcasts.  Or maybe it isn’t true at all.  There’s more speculation than evidence out there so far, so the only thing that’s really resulted from this scrutiny over Tubi’s supposed swerve into puritanism has been the constant reminder of who owns the company: the same Murdoch family who owns Fox News.  It’s not out of the question, then, that Tubi might go squeaky clean in the near future, which makes it my solemn duty as a film journalist to watch the most degenerate smut I can find on the platform just to keep an eye on the evolving facts of the situation.

You have to search for 1967’s Blood of the Virgins by its original Spanish-language title “Sangre de Virgenes” for it to populate on Tubi, but I can confirm that it has not yet been censored or removed.  The dream is still alive; tits & gore are still welcome on The People’s Streaming Service.  This apparently includes movies where tits & gore are the only thing on the filmmakers’ minds, as is the case with this sub-Jesús Franco vampire smut – a genre the poster specifies as “Erotomania”.  Blood of the Virgins is an oddball novelty even within the context of dirt-cheap, horned-up vampire schlock.  If nothing else, I’ve never seen a vampire movie try to pass off stock footage of seagulls as if they were its vampires’ bat form, aided only by a red color filter and some unconvincing squeaks on the soundtrack.  I’ve also never seen a vampire movie produced in Argentina, an unusual cultural perspective that shows in the film’s vintage telenovela blocking & scoring and in its central location of a vampire-infested log cabin instead of a vampire-infested Gothic castle.  Of course, these cultural & aesthetic details are all secondary to the film’s main goal: dousing beautiful naked bodies in artificial stage blood.

If you cannot tell from its listed 72-minute runtime, Blood of the Virgins was designed to pad out a double feature for drive-in make-out sessions, not to scare.  It’s closer to softcore pornography than it is to horror, especially in its best, earliest stretch where it chronicles a Swinging 60s ski cabin trip taken by its doomed hippie victims, who eventually break into the wrong cabin to their own peril.  After a period-piece vignette establishes the existence of vampires in centuries past, the audience is bombarded with an energetic Russ Meyer-style nudie cutie montage in which hippie freaks indulge in dive-bar go-go dancing between bouts of road trip heavy petting and wholesome downhill skiing.  It’s an invigorating, titillating start to what’s ultimately a low-energy Hammer Horror knockoff.  Once the vampires isolate & drain those hippies (who, I must note, are very much not virgins), the movie slows way down and loses both its momentum and its overall sense of purpose.  By then, it has outlived its function as background noise for drive-in canoodling, and it’s really your fault if you’re still paying attention to see how the story plays out.

There are a lot of fun little touches to this Argentinian oddity for anyone familiar with this genre.  Its hand-drawn credits, its soap opera zoom-ins, its seagull shaped “bats”, and its main vampire’s predilections as more of a titty sucker than a neck biter all make it an amusing novelty for anyone who can stay awake long enough to gawk at those details.  Blood of the Virgins is just slightly off in its bargain-bin approximation of Jesús Franco vampire erotica, making it a fascinating outlier for anyone who knows how these things are supposed to play out.  For instance, it’s weirdly sheepish about depicting lesbian acts between the hippies & vampires, but eager to gesture at male-hippie-on-female-vampire cunnilingus, which is a much rarer treat.  The Russ Meyer-style hippie montage at the beginning is also remarkably energetic for a genre that’s usually so sluggish & unrushed, and this might have been a bonafide cult classic if had sustained that rhythm throughout.  As is, it’s still great fun and great confirmation that you can still find boobies on Tubi despite recent reports otherwise.

-Brandon Ledet