horror

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

I don’t have strong feelings about the original Beetlejuice. I definitely saw it as a kid (although the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff was verboten in our God-fearing trailerhold), and, through the magic of channel surfing and intermittent cable access in my adult years, I’ve “rewatched” it a few times since. It’s a fun one, although most of that fun comes in the form of the underworld bureaucracy that the recently deceased Maitlands have to navigate and their great character work between themselves and teenaged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), with the title role of the chaos demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) being less a presence in the film proper than most people correctly recall. Upon the film’s great success as the most profitable movie that Geffen Film put out in the eighties, a sequel was immediately greenlit, but never came to pass. Until now, three and a half decades later. I wasn’t thrilled by initial promotional material, but the second theatrical trailer did manage to generate some interest in me, and my cautious optimism was rewarded. 

It’s been a long time since Lydia Deetz was in Winter River, the town to which she moved as a teenager and first became aware of her ability to see through the veil that separates the living and the dead. Now, she’s a TV show host of Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, a hybrid talk show/ghost hunters program, produced by her current beau, Rory (Justin Theroux). She’s disrupted when she starts to see flashes of her old nemesis Beetlejuice in the crowd at her show, and her day only gets worse when she learns that her father, Charles, has been killed in a freak accident. Along with her still overly theatrical stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), she retrieves her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from boarding school to attend the funeral, which is to be held in Winter River. Astrid doesn’t believe in her mother’s abilities and is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother’s disingenuousness about why she can’t contact her deceased husband Richard, Astrid’s father. Some of the tension between them is eased when Astrid discovers some old photo albums in the attic of “the original ghost house,” but her mother’s apparent overreaction to her discovery of an ad for the services of “Betelgeuse” causes Astrid to put her guard up again. The situation is further exacerbated when Rory chooses Charles’s wake as the opportunity to compel Lydia publicly to set a date for their wedding; and why not Halloween, which is only a couple of days away. Repulsed, Astrid rides off on her bike, eventually crashing through a fence into the backyard of a cute boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), prompting a little romance. Rory’s insistence that Lydia confront her supposed repressed childhood trauma by repeating the name “Beetlejuice” three times opens the door for the old trickster to do his ghoulish Cat-in-the-Hat thing all over Winter River again. 

I’m going to level with you: with this cast, it would be impossible for this movie to have no redeeming qualities. My house is a “Free Winona” house, now and forever, and this feels like the first time in a long time that I can tell she’s having a lot of fun. Although I’m sure Lydia is the first character that a lot of people think of when you invoke Winona’s name, that’s not the case for me. I’m team Veronica Sawyer all day every day, and after that I think of Mermaids, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then that moment in Strangers with Candy wherein she tosses out a cigarette and then pulls another lit cigarette from offscreen. With so much time having passed, Lydia Deetz could essentially be a completely different person, but there’s a consistency that I appreciated and that only Ryder could bring to the table. Apparently, Ryder’s sole condition for taking on her role in Stranger Things was that she had to be allowed time to play this character again if the opportunity arose, so you know it’s one that she’s invested in, and it shows. When it comes to Delia, I don’t really know what their relationship is like off-camera, but there’s a part of me that believes with every fiber of my being that O’Hara and Ryder are having the time of their lives reuniting here, as O’Hara is also clearly having a great time reprising her role as well. Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek is one of many refractions of a similar (but always distinct) archetype in the O’Hara oeuvre, and it’s one that’s found a way into this character. I have to think that’s somewhat textual, as we see that her current multimedia gallery space includes at least one screen showing a video of Delia in a white wig and gown with images of birds projected over her, and it has to be a visual reference to Moira’s in-universe memetic role in The Crows Have Eyes III. 

When it comes to the film itself, there are ways that it writes around and includes the length of time since its predecessor, as well as elements that must be written around because of certain performers’ . . . unsavory lives. The elephant in the room here is that Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the first film, is a convicted sex offender now. To get around this, the film shows his unfortunate demise in the form of a claymation-esque sequence in which Charles’s plane goes down over the ocean when he is on his way back from a birdwatching expedition; he survives the crash but is then killed by a shark. This also allows for him to appear in the underworld with most of his upper torso missing, and thus allows the character to (sort of) continue to be a part of the narrative. There’s also some clever foreshadowing throughout, like the fact that Astrid notices Jeremy’s vinyl collection is very nineties-heavy and thinks that this is an affectation, but this sets up not one twist but two. Less cleverly, the Maitlands are simply written off as having been able to move on to the afterlife through a loophole that Lydia helped them find. 

The biggest problem with the film is that it’s overstuffed. You might have read that synopsis above and thought to yourself, “Wait, isn’t Willem Dafoe in this movie? And Monica Belluci?” And yes, they are. In the thirty-six years since Beetlejuice was released, countless sequel ideas must have been proposed, and this film feels like it tries to contain all of them at once. What if Lydia had a television show about her powers? Topical! What about a sequel about Beetlejuice’s literally soul-sucking wife coming back to life (well, undeath) and seeking vengeance against him? Sounds good, throw it in. What about a sequel about an egotistical actor specializing in law enforcement action films who is inexplicably the head of the underworld police? Why not. What if the Deetz family’s teenage daughter falls for a ghost boy whose true intentions might be more sinister than it seems? Oh, sounds romantic! (This plot in particular feels like it was meant to be in a more immediate sequel to the original film with a still-teenaged Lydia.) What if Lydia’s daughter doesn’t believe her and has the same fraught relationship with her that Lydia once had with Delia? What if Lydia was going to marry a man who didn’t really love her, didn’t really believe in her abilities, and whose new age bullshit was a front to meet vulnerable women, and Beetlejuice gets her out of this marriage for his own selfish reasons? Check and check! 

This means that the movie moves at a pretty frenetic pace, and I’m pleased to say that there was never a moment when I was bored or felt my mind wandering, although I did start to feel the length of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” by the time everyone was being Beetlejuice-puppeted to it in the film’s climax. It wears out its welcome a little, but the fact that this is the only scene that does so (other than the tedious scenes of Willem Dafoe as the not-a-cop hunting Beetlejuice’s undead Belluci wife, all of which could have been cut without anything being lost—and you know that if I’m saying this about Dafoe, they have to be very tedious) tells you something about this film’s overall energy, which is surprisingly high. I don’t think that I’ve appreciated a new Tim Burton film in twenty years (I’m a Big Fish defender), and this one works. There’s CGI, of course, but it’s largely used to imitate the cartoony stop-motion images of the original, and there’re still plenty of practical effects that I was pleased to see in action. Of all the legacy sequels we’ve seen in the past few years, this one is solid and fun. It’s a little more toothless than the original, but it’s not without its gory eccentricities (a well-delivered “spill my guts” bit in the trailer is what won me over). It seems to have become even more toned-down in the editing process as well, as Astrid snidely predicts the futures of the girls who bully her by joking about “driving carpool and banging Pilates instructors to fill the empty void” in the trailer, while in the film, the line is a tamer bit about “having [their] third children with [their] second husbands.” I have to think that the marketing push for this one and the need to make it more palatable for a wider audience is to blame, and that’s a shame. It’s still worth seeing, but I do think it could have been just a smidge meaner. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Alien: Romulus (2024)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

One of the oft-vaunted strengths of the original Alien is that, for most of the film, there’s no clear protagonist. The characters were (also infamously) written gender-blind, and for much of the film’s runtime, everyone gets equal attention, until Ripley is the only character left alive. The sequels that followed that center on Ripley permanently solidified her as the franchise’s final girl, but there’s no foreshadowing in the original text that she’s destined to be so. This is not the case with Alien: Romulus, which opens and closes on a singular woman. That’s not a complaint, or a weakness, but when we’re talking about a film that has largely been a subject of discussion because of what it borrows and homages, I figured I would start out by talking about one of its differences. 

Orphaned Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) lives on a Weyland-Yutani mining colony on a planet that experiences no sunlight. She’s been, for all intents and purposes, an indentured servant on this rock for her entire life, but there’s a literal and metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Yvaga, an idyllic world that she intends to set out for as soon as she gets her release, which she has accumulated enough hours of labor to qualify for. Weyland-Yutani’s management, however, forcibly extends her contract citing a lack of additional labor forces. Thus, she’s more malleable than expected when her ex, Tyler (Archie Renaux), approaches her to ask for her help in getting aboard a W-Y spaceship that’s adrift in orbit; you see, Rain isn’t completely alone in the world, as she has an android “brother” named Andy (David Jonsson), whom her father dug out of a recycling heap and reprogrammed to be Rain’s companion and protector. Andy is the key to getting aboard, as he can interface with the ship’s systems and allow Tyler and his merry band aboard so that they can abscond with a set of cryobeds that they can then install aboard their own ship and make their way to Yvaga. Of course, they have no idea that the ship up there isn’t a ship at all, but a research station composed of modules Romulus and Remus, and that Romulus has an unexpected guest in the form of the xenomorph that Ripley ejected into space all the way back in 1979, resuscitated and ready to wreak some havoc. An Alien movie ensues. 

Alien is one of our faves around here. We recently covered Planet of the Vampires on the Lagniappe Podcast specifically in preparation for the release of Romulus, we previously covered a documentary about the original Alien, Brandon has rated and ranked all the previous films in this franchise, I took an absurd amount of umbrage (really—3.5 stars isn’t a bad score) at his review of Covenant, and I wrote an impassioned defense of Covenant and a dismissal of Prometheus. We are freaks, is what I’m saying. I was cautiously optimistic about this one, having been a bigger fan of director Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe than Brandon was, although to my recollection neither of us was impressed by his Evil Dead remake. It’s taken eight years for him to direct another feature, but it was well worth the wait, and when we were talking about our mutual interest in Romulus in the weeks leading up to release, Brandon mentioned that he felt Álvarez’s particular talents were well-suited to an entry in this canon. Some friends and I saw the trailer for this one multiple times over the past few months and we were excited; I felt almost as excited for this one as I did for Prometheus lo these many years ago now. And hey, this one even made me appreciate something introduced in Prometheus for the first time, which is no small feat. 

You may have noticed that I only identified three characters in the paragraph outlining the film’s premise, and although they aren’t the only ones here, this is a pretty sparsely populated movie than most of these, with only five major human characters and an android (or two…). Rain and Andy, as our protagonists, are given the most characterization, while the others are barely sketched out. They’re fodder for the alien, which is pretty standard fare for this franchise at this point, but whereas previous films managed to get away with giving the participants minimal dimension because there were more of them, it’s a flaw in a small cast of actors here. Other than Rain, Andy, and Tyler, we also have Kay’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced, of Madame Web); pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), and interstellar chav Bjorn (Spike Fearn). Jonsson’s performance as Andy is fantastic and is one of the highlights of the film, and Spaeny is at turns serviceable and pretty good. I’m torn in my feeling about Fearn, whose performance makes him feel like he’s in a season of Skins that I would get so annoyed by that I’d stop watching. There’s an attempt to make his hostility toward Andy a matter of anti-android prejudice based in personal tragedy (a synthetic made a judgment call to save a dozen people in a mining accident, sacrificing three others, including Bjorn’s family), but he’s still obnoxious and shortsighted. It’s his idiocy that costs most of the others their lives; it’s so satisfying to see the alien kill him that I’m led to believe we’re not supposed to like him, so I guess this makes it a “good” performance, but the CW-caliber of his and Merced’s performances is out of place here. Consider Aliens, in which the marines are all similarly thinly written, but there’s more of them and their oversimplified characteristics—the coward, the macho lady, the veteran, the one with ice water in his veins, the cigar-chomping tough—don’t feel as one-dimensional as Bjorn or Navarro. Here, it’s a detracting factor. 

That’s the most glaring flaw for me in Romulus, and it isn’t enough to turn me against the film, which I really rather liked. The plot is very cleverly constructed, with the need for Andy to use a data chip from one of the androids on the station itself in order to access a part of the station that houses the fuel for the cryopods leading to his personality being corrupted into something more clever and devious. In a franchise where synthetic humanoids can be relied upon to be morally upstanding as much as their creators can (which is to say that they have just as much chance to be good or evil), it’s a refreshing change to have a character whose ethics are completely malleable, with that mercuriality being entirely outside of his control. I’m mixed on That Reprisal (I won’t spoil it here), although I am pleased that there was extensive use of puppetry in the portrayal of the character, even if there was a perhaps-inescapable amount of Uncanny Valley happening. Feelings about digital necromancy aside, it’s effective, and is one of many tethers between this film and the franchise at large that make this feel of a piece with what came before, paying reverent homage rather than performing mere lip service to the films it follows. The xenomorph is the scariest it’s been since the last millennia, and there’s a new monster here that’s also very frightening and creepy. I’ll try to talk around it as much as possible to avoid spoiling it as well, but the final monster (which comes about through application of reverse engineered black goo) is nauseating to look at, a perfect synthesis of H.R. Gieger’s designs for the alien and, well, something you’ll know when you see it. 

All in all, this one is pretty solid. The action sequences are fantastic (there’s a particular standout zero gravity sequence) and build logically upon one another, the introduction of a ticking clock in the form of the station’s deteriorating orbit is well-done and ups the stakes at exactly the right time, and the characters who have characters are interesting. Their interactions feel at home in this universe of films in which the night is dark and full of monsters but in which humans (and maybe androids) can find a connection with each other that makes the dual horrors of late-stage space capitalism and acidic organisms that impregnate and kill seem surmountable, if at great cost. A worthy sequel in an uneven franchise. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Frogman (2024)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

There are two things that can quickly win me over to enjoying an otherwise mediocre movie: a cool-looking monster and a go-for-broke ending.  Thankfully, the new found-footage cryptid horror Frogman has both.  Based on real-life legends of a half-human, half-frog mutant who wields a magic sparkler wand in the woods outside of Loveland, Ohio, Frogman gets away with a lot of time-wasting bullshit just by delivering on an adorable creature design, lovingly rendered as a rubber-suit monster.  The titular Frogman appears early in flashback camcorder footage from the late-90s, assuring the audience that this is not exactly a Blair Witch Project or Willow Creek situation where the monster will go entirely unseen.  He’s around, and he’s so dang cute that you can’t wait to spend more time with him.  Unfortunately, the movie then makes you wait a full hour to return to the pleasure of the Loveland Frog’s company, but it does reward your patience by ending on 20 hectic minutes of over-the-top Frogman action, adding to the cryptid’s lore by dreaming up a frogperson death cult who worship the wizardly beast and offer up their bodies to be merged with his froggy DNA.  It’s entirely possible to roll your eyes through a majority of the film’s runtime and still get excited by the concluding title card warning that “Frogman is still out there,” teasing a potential sequel.  Any time spent with Frogman is time well spent.

While Frogman does not mimic Blair Witch & Willow Creek‘s withholding of an onscreen monster, it mimics everything else about their narrative structure, often reading like a copy of a copy.  A struggling low-fi filmmaker who captured the late-90s camcorder footage of Frogman as a child (Nathan Tymoshuk) returns to Loveland to prove wrong all the haters & doubters of the “Hey guys” YouTube commentariat who mock the credibility of his sighting.  He brings along two friends who also don’t take the existence of Frogman seriously but are still excited about the idea of making a movie (Chelsey Grant as an insufferably corny actress who’s road-testing a hack Southern Belle stock character named Norma Jean Wynette, and Benny Barrett as an aspiring cinematographer who constantly complains about “losing light” even though he shoots every single interaction backlit & out of focus on an ancient camcorder).  The friend-dynamic drama between that central trio is autopilot found-footage filmmaking, but things pick up quick once they start interacting with the local yokels of Loveland.  The amount of true believers who are deadly serious about Frogman give the wayward crew the creeps, then the wizardly Frogman’s “telekinetic interference” with the shoot throws the project into chaos, trapping them in a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a bloodthirsty frog cult.  So, while Frogman is not always ribbeting, given enough time it is plenty ribbiculous.

If there’s anything new that Frogman brings to the found-footage horror canon, it’s all contained in its ending and in its monster.  The titular rubber-suited Frogman looks great and—defying found-footage tradition—does not kill every single character who lays eyes on him, which means the movie has to find a new way to end its story that doesn’t just mindlessly echo the exact beats of Blair Witch.  Otherwise, Frogman is most recommendable as regional cinema.  Recalling Matt Farley’s modern small-town cryptid classic Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, there’s something charming about Frogman’s extremely local sensibilities in the quest to put Loveland, Ohio on the map by promoting the existence of its resident cryptid; the only shame is that nothing in the movie is half as funny nor as surprising as any random page of a Matt Farley script.  Still, Frogman excels as a tourism ad for the city, which just adopted the Loveland Frog as its official mascot in 2023, after nearly seven decades of reported sightings.  Even when I was bored with the interpersonal drama between the central mockumentary crew, I was still delighted by the Frogman merch they found in their interrogation of the Loveland citizenry: a sign that reads “Frog parking only; violators will be toad” and t-shirts with slogans like “Frog around and find out” or “M.I.L.F. (Man I Love Frogman)”.  It made me want to travel to Loveland just to visit the gift shop.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #219: Phase IV (1974) & Creepy Crawlies

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Welcome to Episode #219 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Hanna, James, Britnee and Brandon discuss a grab bag of horror movies about bugs & slugs, starting with Saul Bass’s psychedelic killer-ants freakout Phase IV (1974).

00:00 Welcome

01:29 When the Wind Blows (1986)
07:09 Set It Off (1996)
13:16 True Crime (1995)
16:17 Television
20:50 Blonde Ambition (1981)

27:47 Bugs
36:19 Phase IV (1974)
52:34 Slugs (1988)
1:09:00 The Nest (1988)
1:15:28 Mimic (1997)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Eyes Without a Face (1960)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Georges Franju’s surgical horror classic Eyes Without a Face (1960).

00:00 Welcome

03:50 Abigail (2024)
13:00 Twisters (2024)
22:04 Happy Together (1997)
26:01 The Swimmer (1968)
29:27 The Red Shoes (1948)
36:35 She is Conann (2024)
43:34 Kim’s Video (2024)
53:08 Wicked Little Letters (2024)
57:07 Kneecap (2024)

1:00:11 Eyes Without a Face (1960)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Longlegs (2024)

/ swampflix / 11 Comments

We’re Oz Perkins fans around these parts. Brandon gave both The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Gretel and Hansel four-star reviews. While the director’s first feature, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, got a cooler reaction from him, it remains my favorite of his works. (Admittedly, part of that might be the fact that I find Ruth Wilson to be one of the most utterly watchable and magnetic performers currently working). Or it was my favorite … until Longlegs came along. 

Set in Oregon sometime during the Clinton administration, Longlegs is the story of Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a young FBI field agent whose preternatural hunches catch the attention of her superiors, resulting in her reassignment to a decades-long hunt for a serial killer known as “Longlegs” (Nicolas Cage) based upon Zodiac-like notes that he leaves behind at the scenes of brutal murders of entire families. As she spends time working on the case, she concludes that Longlegs’ targeting of families of young girls whose birthdays all fall on the fourteenth of the month is Satanic in nature, and that when plotted out on a calendar, it becomes clear that Longlegs is creating an image of an inverted triangle, which Harker finds in occult literature. Her boss, Carter (Blair Underwood), is impressed by her initiative and insight, and after a night of bonding, he gets drunk and asks Harker to drive him home, where she meets his family: wife Anna (Carmel Amit) and precocious daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders). Their relationship is slightly complicated when Carter discovers that on Harker’s ninth birthday, her mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) filed a police report about a strange man approaching the young Lee when she was home alone. Ruth, with whom Lee is in frequent contact, lives in a dilapidated farmhouse that is choked with hoarder ephemera, and when she directs her daughter to take a look through some Polaroids that are still in a box in her childhood bedroom, Lee suddenly remembers the day that she—barely—managed to avoid becoming one of Longlegs’ victims. Of course, why that is the case turns out to be much more complex (not to mention sinister) than is immediately apparent. 

The biggest influence on the film, and the one that is most often cited in criticism, is The Silence of the Lambs. That much is apparent, from the setting to the choice of a young female FBI agent as the lead, all the way down to Longlegs’ not-quite-Buffalo-Bill basement lair, where instead of making suits out of women’s flesh he crafts lovingly faithful doll reproductions of the young girls who, along with their family, are killed at his hands. There’s also a bit of other Thomas Harris Lecter-containing media in play here; the walk-through of one of the crime scenes is straight out of Manhunter (or Red Dragon, if you prefer), and Underwood seems to be channeling a bit of Laurence Fishburne’s portrayal of Jack Crawford from the Hannibal TV series. 

Outside of that franchise, what I was most reminded of while watching the film were two separate novels by South African writer Lauren Beukes: The Shining Girls and Broken Monsters. The former is about an early twentieth century serial killer and drifter who happens upon a house that is itself a nexus of evil, allowing him to exit into any time between 1929 and 1993 and directing him to seek out and murder certain women (the titular “shining girls”) for unknown purposes. When he brutally stabs a teenage girl named Kirby Mizrachi in 1989, he leaves her for dead, but she survives and, years later, she seeks her still unidentified attempted murderer. That 1990s setting, a killer who targets specific young women based on direction from a malevolent entity, and a main character has an encounter with her would-be killer in her youth and becomes the impetus behind his demise in her adulthood are all details that Longlegs shares, although the stories are markedly different in almost every other way. 

The connection to Broken Monsters is a little more oblique, as the narrative of that novel features an ambitiously (and fruitfully) large net of point of view characters, but of whom one is a serial killer who creates “art” out of body parts of humans and animals alike, not unlike several of the killers from the aforementioned Hannibal series. When with other characters, the narrative is alternatively a straightforward urban crime drama (the homicide detective), a little bit Hard Candy (her daughter), an ironically voiced view of Detroit’s art scene that provides important context for the killer’s motivation (the aging hipster journalist), etc. When we are in the killer’s point-of-view chapters, their point of view includes being forced/inspired by an ominous force that the reader assumes is a manifestation of the killer’s broken mind … until the same thing appears in a chapter that’s focused on one of their victims, revealing that the demonic entity is, in fact, very real. That happens here as well, as Longlegs shifts from an unconventional homage to Silence of the Lambs with the slightly supernatural narrative conceit that the lead character has preternatural insight into a horror that all-but-literally goes to hell.

I haven’t really engaged with the discourse about the movie, so I’m not sure whether this is being cited elsewhere, but it’s worth noting that this film was very funny. Underwood is a natural charmer, so Carter’s interactions with the stoic, reserved, and frankly spooky Harker are fun to watch, and this moved into outright laughter for me when Harker meets young Ruby and she asks her parents if she can show Harker her room. As the two awkwardly sit next to one another, Harker notes that Ruby has one those canopies that some kids have and asks her, stiltedly, “Do you … go … in it?” I saw this with a very responsive audience, and this got a big laugh. There’s also a great scene with the flamboyant administrator of a mental facility where the sole survivor of one of Longlegs’ family slayings resides, and a forensics nerd who gets far too excited about a strange doll that’s found hidden at one of the previous murder sites. I’ve heard reports that some screenings have had people laughing in response to Nicolas Cage, but I’m happy to say that this didn’t happen at my screening, and I found his performance terrifying. It’s the overcorrection to Harker’s stoicism, which I think is played for laughs at certain points; I can see people finding it too much, but it worked for me. I’ll also say that Alicia Witt is phenomenal here; as a longtime defender of Urban Legend, she’s one of my favorites that I feel like we never get to see enough of. I did spend a chunk of the movie thinking that Ruth was being played by Samantha Sloyan, but I’ll let you Google that yourself and tell me if you think I’m that far off the mark. 

Over on the podcast, we often talk about when a film “Does That Thing I Like,” which is when a horror movie features up a deliberately ambiguous premise that could conclude with either a rational explanation for events or a supernatural one, and, instead of going the well-worn route of concluding with “[the devil/witchcraft/possession/ghosts/whatever] [is/are] real!” (I’ll admit that if the ratio of demonic-to-scientific rationales were reversed, movies would be both a lot more boring and most of them would end exactly like an episode of Scooby-Doo, but I still appreciate it when it happens.) Unfortunately, there are so few of these movies that mentioning any of them would spoil them, especially given how often the twist is simply that there’s a boy living in the walls. Longlegs is like the platonic ideal of how to “Do the Thing I Think Is Tired” but make it fresh, new, exciting, and scary. I am a person who has lived alone for most of his adult life and who can count the number of nightmares he has had in that time on just two hands, but the night after I saw this movie, I got up and went to the bathroom in the night, I had to turn the light on, not because I needed it to find my way, but because I needed it to dispel the shadows before I could get out of bed. The reason why The Thing I Like is The Thing I Like is because I live in the real world; I’m not afraid of ghosts or demons or swamp monsters (other than alligators, obviously), so they don’t scare me in the movies, either. Your Ghostfaces, your various Thomas Harris serial killers like Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill, even that home invasion scene in Fargo—slapstick as it is—those are things that get my anxiety up; those are the reason that I occasionally have to pull the shower curtain back or check my closets. When we briefly discussed the film on our recent podcast episode about Planet of the Vampires, Brandon noted that Longlegs is a movie that feels evil. And that’s as succinctly as I can put it. Nothing in this film is something that I am afraid of in real life, but its evil is so palpable and real that I had to turn on the lights in the middle of the night. I don’t know that I can give a movie higher praise than that. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Planet of the Vampires (1965)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Planet of the Vampires (1965), Mario Bava’s atmospheric Italo sci-fi precursor to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

00:00 Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh
05:40 Video rental stores

08:11 Fright Night (1985)
13:35 Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
20:07 Pumping Iron II: The Women (1985)
22:49 Spirited Away (2001)
27:01 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
30:48 But I’m a Cheerleader (1999)
33:48 Blade Runner (1982)
37:02 Am I Okay? (2024)
42:13 Longlegs (2024)
55:26 MaXXXine (2024)
1:00:00 A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)
1:03:13 Twisters (2024)

1:06:36 Planet of the Vampires (1965)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Horror’s Summer Blockbuster Era

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

The tongue-in-cheek superhero team-up Deadpool & Wolverine releases wide this week, and its box office performance is sure to attract a lot of scrutiny from online pundits who specialize in that kind of thing.  That’s because the once-dependable genre of live-action superhero blockbusters has largely retreated from suburban multiplexes to instead play it safe on streaming platforms like Disney+, leaving a massive void on movie theater marquees the past couple summers.  I’m sure much will be written about what the Deadpool sequel’s box office receipts indicate about the future of live-action superhero media in particular, as well as the future of theatrical exhibition for big-budget movies in general, but that’s not the story that’s got my attention right now.  What’s fascinated me in this summer’s superhero drought is the genre that’s swooped in to replace those traditional blockbusters with an entirely different kind of corporate IP: the horror franchise.  Instead of saving anticipated horror sequels for the Halloween pre-gaming of Fall, studios have found open space in the summer release calendar to position them as the big-ticket Movie of the Week, to easy financial success.  It helps that horror movies typically cost 1/100th of a superhero blockbuster budget, making them better suited to turn a profit with the current, shrunken moviegoing public, but it’s still an interesting shift.

There are two original, non-franchise horror movies of note in theaters right now that are easily the scariest I’ve seen all year: the Irish ghost story Oddity and the Satanic serial killer thriller Longlegs.  Those standalone creep-outs are not the kind of horror blockbuster I’m describing here.  When I recently had a couple days off work to spend at The Movies, most of what was accessible to me were IP-extenders for already-established horrors & thrillers, all released this summer.  I felt the same way watching that triple feature of MaXXXine (a sequel), A Quiet Place: Day One (a prequel), and Twisters (a rebootquel) that I usually feel watching sequels, prequels, and reboots to big-budget action movies this time of year: mild, momentary amusement that quickly faded from my memory the further away I got from the theater.  Longlegs & Oddity are designed to unnerve the audience by dragging us through previously unseen corners of Hell, guided by the Twisted Minds of their respective auteurs (Oz Perkins & Damian Mc Carthy).  The horror sequels & prequels they’re up against are too warmly familiar to unnerve anyone.  They were designed to remind us of movies we already like, providing a pleasantly violent atmosphere where we can purchase & consume popcorn.  They’re essentially the MCU for nerds in black t-shirts who already have definite Halloween plans months in advance.

In that context, this trio of movies were adequately entertaining.  Like X, MaXXXine is mostly a work of pastiche, updating the 70s Texas Porn Star Massacre grime of the original to the New Wave Hookers grime of the warped-VHS 1980s.  That 80s aesthetic may not be as novel for a modern slasher as the Old Hollywood melodrama of the X prequel Pearl, but it at least panders enough to my personal tastes to give the movie a pass.  For all of MaXXXine‘s vintage horror & porno references, though, the thing it reminded me of most was Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Red Riding Hood arc on the third season of The Deuce, which only places it about 5 years deep into the archives instead of the 40 it aimed for.  It’s fun, but it’s fluff.  Mia Goth is notably subdued as the porn-star-victim on the run after she got to play unhinged villain in the franchise’s last outing, which is something I could also say about director Michael Sarnoski’s presence in Day One, his prequel to A Quiet Place.  Sarnoski’s debut feature Pig was an emotionally devastating riff on the John Wick revenge pic, sending a wounded Nicolas Cage on a culinary warpath that established the director as a name to watch.  It’s a shame, then, that Sarnoski’s follow-up is just . . . another Quiet Place.  There’s a little novelty in the franchise’s move to an urban setting at the exact moment of alien invasion, but otherwise Day One is just more of the same – similar to MaXXXine‘s shift to an 80s horror-porno aesthetic only slightly shaking up the X status quo.

The most successful film of this trio is the decades-later rebootquel Twisters, which updates the storm-chasing hijinks of the 90s Jan De Bont blockbuster Twister with small touches of dramatic restraint from Minari director Lee Isaac Chung (joining Sarnoski in the one-for-them check cashing line at the bank).  Some might balk at the idea of labeling either Twister movie as Horror, but they’re both essentially monster-attack movies wherein the the monster happens to be bad weather.  Both films climax at small-town horror screenings (The Shining in Twister and Frankenstein in Twisters) where the tornado rips through the screen as a direct, literal replacement for horror icons being projected from the past.  The reason I’m pushing to include Twisters here is that it exemplifies what the future of horror blockbuster filmmaking might become.  I’m shocked to report that I enjoyed the tornado movie more than the apocalyptic monster movie or the retro porno-horror, likely because it’s the one that’s most honest about the familiar, unchallenging entertainment it aims to deliver.  Twisters is an emotionally satisfying pick-up truck commercial—complete with country-rock soundtrack—that occasionally takes breaks from promoting Dodge Ram products to indulge in thunderous kaiju horror action.  Chung asserts his tastefulness as a serious artist by cutting out two traditional summer blockbuster payoffs that would’ve mapped it directly to a 90s template: the movie’s Big Bad being sucked into a tornado and a Big Kiss being shared between the leads.  Otherwise, he’s making an anonymous, IP-driven action movie, and that shamelessness mostly works in his favor.  It’s the kind of summertime fun you want to eat mozzarella sticks to.

Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here.  It was cute & relatable for Lupita Nyong’o’s doomed hero in A Quiet Place: Day One to seek one last comfort before death at a neighborhood pizzeria, but the success of Twisters suggests a better way.  Maybe Sarnoski & company should have capitalized on the Blooming Onion facial design on the Quiet Place monsters and scored a tie-in promotional deal with Outback Steakhouse, sending Nyong’o to seek comfort there instead.  A24 certainly understands the value of that kind of old-school hucksterism, and you can currently purchase a commemorative MaXXXine thong from their online giftshop, among other X-branded wares.  All they need is some Universal Pictures-scale monetary backing to reach their full horror blockbuster potential.  Or maybe this is all just a fluke.  It’s possible that the lucrative return of Deadpool or The Joker or The Avengers will convince Hollywood to exclusively get back into the superhero movie business, putting this summer’s horror blockbuster era to a swift end.  Personally, I hope not.  I didn’t necessarily appreciate these horror sequels & prequels on any deeper level than I appreciate a Marvel or Star Wars or Fast & Furious picture, but I do prefer to spend my time in their stylistic milieu.  Any excuse to hide from the New Orleans heat in the darkened, air-conditioned rooms of my neighborhood theater is welcome, but the more monsters we can cram into those rooms the better.

-Brandon Ledet

Santo vs The Martian Invasion (1967)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Most genre movie freaks may have moved on to shiny new boutique Blu-rays and moldy old VHS tapes, but I still collect most of my movies at the tried-and-true distribution hub of the thrift store DVD rack.  You don’t always find rare gems at the thrift store, but you often find movies cheaper than they cost to rent on streaming, with the added bonus of a Special Features menu that most streamers don’t bother to upload.  My recent pickup of the 1960s sci-fi lucha libre classic Santo vs. The Martian Invasion felt like a blessing by both metrics; it’s rare enough that it’s not currently available to stream at home with English subtitles, and the disc includes several Bonus Features, including full-length commentaries and a 30-minute interview with Santo’s heir, Son of Santo.  It felt like even more of a blessing when those subtitles turned out to be a variation of Comic Sans, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen outside of an ironic lyrics-only music video on YouTube. I don’t know that reporting on these details is useful to anyone who didn’t happen to be shopping at the Thrift City USA on the West Bank last weekend, but I still want to advertise that the dream is still alive in the thrift store DVD racks of New Orleans in general. I suppose I also want to report that the home distribution label Kit Parker Films is surprisingly generous with their bargain-bin DVDs’ bonus content, so look out for those discs in particular while you’re digging through the stacks.

Billed on its title card as Santo the Silver Mask vs The Invasion of the Martians, this specific bargain-bin discovery is a fairly typical Atomic Age sci-fi cheapie about an alien invasion of planet Earth; its hero just happens to be the masked luchador Santo, protector of “the weak and the defenseless.”  The alien-invasion plot is a little confused, with the Martians announcing their presence to the citizens of Mexico via multiple television broadcasts and having their evil deeds widely reported in local newspapers, then later being treated as a conspiratorial government secret hidden from the public.  Instead of getting that story straight, the movie intensely focuses on the physical abilities & vulnerabilities of the Martians.  Much attention is paid to the fact that they frequently take “oxygen pills” to be able to withstand Earth’s atmosphere, among other needless explanations of their uncanny ability to speak Spanish.  There’s also an intense fixation on their cube-shaped helmets’ Astral Eye, a glowing eyeball that allows them to either hypnotize or disintegrate nearby Earthlings, depending on the demands of the day.  They can also wrestle fairly well, which makes them the perfect opponent for Santo, the greatest & bravest wrestler who ever lived.  Santo repeatedly grapples with the blonde-wigged beefcake models from planet Mars, eternally flustered by their ability to teleport back to the safety of their spaceship every time the impromptu matches don’t go their way.  He eventually wins by stealing one of their teleportation devices to infiltrate and explode that ship himself, like a wrestler claiming a championship belt (literally; the device is belt-shaped).

The Martian Invasion loses a little steam once these intergalactic lucha libre matches return to a proper wrestling ring instead of being staged in exterior locations on the streets of Mexico, but most of its vintage sci-fi hijinks remain adorable & fun.  Instead of brooding in the bootleg Gothic atmosphere of horror pictures like Santo vs The Vampire Women or Santo and the Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, a lot of the runtime is filled with insane, rapid-fire dialogue about the peculiarities of the Martian species.  There’s also some fun 60s kitsch to the cheesecake Martian women in particular, who hypnotize & seduce the major players of Mexican patriarchy with the laziest futuristic go-go dancing you’ve ever seen.  Between that half-hearted eroticism and the absurd over-reliance on stock footage to pad out the budget, I was often reminded of some of my favorite Atomic Age sci-fi novelties: Nude on the Moon, Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Blood, The Astounding She-Monster, etc.  None of those comparison points feature extensive wrestling matches, though, which gives this an extra layer of novelty the same way the Santo horror films feel novel compared to their classic Universal Horror equivalents. 

Something I don’t have context for is how much of an anomaly The Martian Invasion is within the larger Santo canon.  It felt a little zippier & goofier than the couple horror films I’ve seen starring the masked luchador, which rely heavily on classic haunted-house mood & dread.  I don’t have enough evidence to say how typical that is to Santo’s filmography, though, because I’ve only seen three of what Wikipedia lists as “at least 54” titles in his catalog.  Given the pace at which I’m finding notable Santo movies on used discs or streaming, it’s likely I’ll never get the complete picture of his big-screen work before I run out of time and die. Honestly, I still can’t even pin down the exact list of titles that make up that catalog.  Wikipedia, IMDb, and Letterboxd all have conflicting lists of what count as an official Santo film, and the “Filmografia” Special Feature on my Martian Invasion disc only includes 52 of his “at least 54” titles.  To help illustrate the immensity & inconsistency of that catalog, I have transcribed the entire “Filmografia” feature of the Kit Parker DVD below.  It’s the kind of list that has made me accept that I will only see whichever films I happen to pick up at local thrift stores, completionism be damned.  May they all be as fun & loaded with bonus features as Santo vs The Martian Invasion.

Filmografia

1958

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL
aka El Cerebro del Mal
Santo vs The Evil Brain

SANTO CONTRA LOS HOMBRES INFERNALES
Santo vs The Infernal Men aka White Cargo

1961

SANTO CONTRA LOS ZOMBIES
Santo vs The Zombies
Released in the U.S. as Invasion of the Zombies

SANTO CONTRA EL RED DEL CRIMEN
Santo vs The King of Crime

SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE
Santo in The Hotel of Death

SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DIABOLICO
Santo vs The Diabolical Brain

1962

SANTO CONTRA LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS
Santo vs The Vampire Women
Released in the U.S. as Samson vs The Vampire Women

1963

SANTO EN EL MUSEO DE CERA
Santo in The Wax Museum
Released in the U.S. as Samson in the Wax Museum

SANTO CONTRA EL ESTRANGULADOR
Santo vs The Strangler

SANTO CONTRA EL ESPECTRO DEL ESTRANGULADOR
Santo vs The Ghost of the Strangler

1964

SANTO EN ATACAN LAS BRUJAS
aka Santo En La Casa De Las Brujas
Santo in The Witches Attack

BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL PODER SATANICO
Blue Demon vs The Satanic Power
Cameo appearance

SANTO CONTRA EL HACHA DIABOLICA
Santo vs The Diabolical Ax

1965

SANTO EN LOS PROFANADORES DE TUMBAS
aka Los Traficantes De La Muerte
Santo in The Grave Robbers

SANTO EN EL BARON BRAKOLA
Santo in Baron Brakola

1966

SANTO CONTRA LA INVASION DE LOS MARCIANOS
Santo vs The Martian Invasion

SANTO CONTRA LOS VILLANOS DEL RING
Santo vs The Villains of The Ring

SANTO EN OPERACION 67
Santo in Operation 67

1967

SANTO EN EL TESORO DE MOCTEZUMA
Santo in The Treasure of Moctezuma

1968

SANTO EN EL TESORO DE DRACULA
Santo in Dracula’s Treasure
aka EL Vampiro y El Sexo

SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA
Santo vs Capulina

1969

SANTO CONTRA BLUE DEMON EN LA ATLANTIDA
Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS
Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON EN EL MUNDO DE LOS MUERTOS
Santo & Blue Demon in The World of the Dead

SANTO CONTRA LOS CAZADORES DE CABEZAS
Santo vs The Headhunters

SANTO FRENTE A LA MUERTE
Santo Faces Death
aka Santo vs The Mafia Killers

1970

SANTO CONTRA LOS JINETES DEL TERROR
Santo vs The Terror Riders
aka The Lepers and Sex

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS
Santo in The Revenge of the Vampire Women

SANTO CONTRA LA MAFIA DEL VICIO
Santo vs The Mafia of Vice
aka Mission Sabotage

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA MOMIA
Santo in The Revenge of the Mummy

LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO
The Mummies of Guanajuato
Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras

1971

SANTO CONTRA LA HIJA DE FRANKENSTEIN
Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter

SANTO CONTRA LOS ASESINOS DE OTROS MUNDOS
Santo vs The Killers from Other Worlds
aka Santo vs The Living Atom

SANTO Y EL AGUILA REAL
Santo and The Royal Eagle
aka Santo and The Tigress in The Royal Eagle

SANTO EN MISION SUICIDA
Santo in Suicide Mission

SANTO EN EL MISTERIO DE LA PERLA NEGRA
Santo in The Mystery of The Black Pearl
aka Santo in The Caribbean Connection
Released in Spain in 1971 and in Mexico in 1974

1972

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA DRACULA Y EL HOMBRE LOBO
Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & The Wolfman

SANTO CONTRA LOS SECUESTRADORES
Santo vs The Kidnappers

SANTO CONTRA LA MAGIA NEGRA
Santo vs Black Magic

SANTO & BLUE DEMON EN LAS BESTIAS DEL TERROR
Santo & Blue Demon in The Beasts of Terror

SANTO EN LAS LOBAS
Santo in The She-Wolves

SANTO EN ANONIMO MORTAL
Santo in Anonymous Death Threat

1973

SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL DR. FRANKENSTEIN
Santo & Blue Demon vs Dr. Frankenstein

SANTO CONTRA EL DR. MURERTE
Santo vs Dr. Death
aka Santo Strikes Again

1974

SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA LLORONA
Santo in The Revenge of The Crying Woman

1975

SANTO EN ORO NEGRO
aka La Noche De San Juan
Santo in Black Gold

1977

MISTERIO EN LAS BERMUDAS
Mystery in Bermuda
Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras

1979

SANTO EN LA FRONTERA DEL TERROR
Santo at the Border of Terror
aka Santo vs The White Shadow

1981

SANTO CONTRA EL ASESINO DE LA TELEVISION
Santo vs The Television Killer

CHANOC Y EL HIJO DEL SANTO VS LOS VAMPIROS ASESINOS
Chanoc & The Son of Santo vs The Killer Vampires
Cameo appearance

1982

SANTO EN EL PUNO DE LA MUERTE
Santo in The Fist of Death

SANTO EN LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS
Santo in The Fury of the Karate Experts

-Brandon Ledet

Blue Sunshine (1977)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

There’s something charming about the way that Blue Sunshine features several pans up to a full moon between snippets of action in the lead up to and following the title reveal. Every time you think “Surely I’ve seen the last of these goofy ass moon pan shots,” as we cut to a domestic scene in a kitchen, but then, nope, here comes another one. This film, like The Parallax View, was programmed for my local arthouse theater’s “The Paranoid Style in American Cinema” signature program, but unlike that film (or Lumet’s Network, which is coming up later in the month), this one treads into slightly campier territory. Weirdly, it seems to blend elements from movies that actually came after it, with the paranoid, on-the-run everyman at the center of events in which people lose control of themselves seeming to presage the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while the way that past casual drug experimentation comes back to haunt people years after their college days reminded me quite a bit of Firestarter, the original novel version of which wouldn’t be published until 1980. Even the mall setting of the finale seemed to presciently “borrow” from Dawn of the Dead. 

Blue Sunshine opens at a party, where a group of friends gather around one of their friends, Frannie, as he does a bit of a crooner act. As part of the bit, he pretends to kiss one of the ladies present, and in their playful tussle, his hair is revealed to be a wig when it comes off in her hands. He has a psychotic break and flees into the woods. While a few of the partygoers go into town to see if Frannie found his way there, Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) remains behind to search the woods, sending his girlfriend Alicia (Deborah Winters) into town with the others so that she can get a calmative for her nausea. Searching the woods, Zipkin hears the other women who were left behind at the house scream, and rushes in to discover that Frannie has returned and murdered them, throwing their bodies into a fireplace. Frannie reappears and the two struggle, making their way to the road as Zipkin tries to flee, finally pushing the seemingly superhuman Frannie into the path of an oncoming truck. The truck’s occupants, thinking that Zipkin has murdered an innocent man, attempt to apprehend him and even manage to shoot him in the arm. Back at the location of the party, the police have put all the pieces together and come to the conclusion that Zipkin is a murderer. 

I’m going to skip ahead a little to the conspiracy here, because the film takes its sweet time getting to it. Frannie is not alone in his condition; all over the city, there are people losing their hair completely and then flying into psychotic, murderous rages. As it turns out, this is all owing to a particular batch of LSD, the titular Blue Sunshine, that all of the affected people tried ten years previously when they were all at Stanford. Zipkin, on the run and trying to prove his innocence, is forced to put this together, and it’s in this that the film really tips its hand vis-a-vis how unbaked an idea this is. Unlike Beatty’s reporter character in The Parallax View, Zipkin doesn’t seem particularly well suited for investigation, and comes to some of his conclusions with all the logic of a quick wrap-up at the end of an episode of Adam West’s Batman. He’s bumbling and sweaty, and King is very, very earnest in the role. And unlike other movies in which an innocent bystander is targeted because they photographed (Blow Up, Cat o’ Nine Tails), recorded (Blow Out, The Conversation), overheard, or otherwise became aware of something that someone wants to cover up, our hero isn’t fleeing the conspiracy or the killer, but the police. 

You’d think that this would put an interesting spin on it, but what it means is that the conspiracy proper happens so far outside of the context of Zipkin’s story that the fact that the man behind the coverup is an up-and-coming politician is completely ancillary to the narrative. It doesn’t contribute anything to the film, and instead seems to have been included solely to cash in on the production decade’s general antipathy toward governmental figures in the national psychological wake of Watergate. That questioning of authority seems to run counterintuitive to the film’s Reefer Madness-like propaganda about the dangers of taking LSD in college, and long-time fears from self-appointed moral guardians that dropping acid would have severe deleterious effects in the long term (in this case, turning people into homicidal maniacs with instantaneous alopecia). That tonal whiplash is present throughout this thing, which is the exact kind of camp that ends up turning a movie like this into a cult classic. For instance, one of the opening scenes we see involves a woman confiding in her neighbor that her husband has been behaving strangely lately and losing his hair, and in the course of the scene there are a few fun character moments that wouldn’t be out of place in a John Waters film, as she screams at her son to stop eating chocolate pudding while her other son parades around the room with a parrot on his shoulder that’s nearly half his size. The next time we’re in that same location, Zipkin is rummaging through the house after reading about the family’s slaying in the newspaper and connecting some of the details to what happened with Frannie, and the soundtrack is filled with the family’s dying screams as Zipkin stumbles upon child-sized body outlines on the floor, complete with bloodstains of horrific proportions; it’s like something out of the early scenes of Manhunter, and it’s truly gruesome stuff. But then the next scene is a goofy bit where Zipkin Bat-deduces that he can get some information out of Senator Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard), or a scene wherein Flemming’s ex-wife (Ann Cooper) suddenly snaps and starts to attack the children that she’s babysitting with a knife, but the kids clearly find the bald cap on the actress hilarious, so they’re laughing as they recite their “frightened child” dialogue. 

Granted, I would say that there aren’t any scenes of shocking violence so much as shocking images of the aftermath of violence, like the murder scene noted above. For the most part, the scenes in which the acid-activated killers feature them going about their sprees with very little energy, falling somewhere between Romero’s zombies and Karloff’s Creature on the scale of vitality. I have to wonder if this was, in part, a utilitarian choice; bald prosthetic technology wasn’t exactly at its peak in the mid-seventies, and there are many shots in the film in which the plasticky material the bald caps are composed of visibly wrinkles in ways that flesh does not. Further, the killers’ eyes also all turn black when their sprees begin, and the contacts used for the effect might have made it difficult to navigate the soundstage. When the former Mrs. Fleming is brandishing a prop knife at the not-actually-scared children in her apartment, she’s certainly moving with a sluggishness that suggests she’s just repeating a (barely) choreographed motion, and the fact that her gaze is focused directly in front of her (as opposed to down at the children) seems to indicate she also couldn’t see for shit. The only maniac that’s truly scary is the first one, Frannie, since he manages to get in a couple of good jump scares and his attack on the three partying women is the most shocking since it’s the first act of violence that we see. The showdown at the end between Zipkin and Flemming’s security man Mulligan—whom we are repeatedly reminded is a former football player—is delightful to watch, but Mulligan is so lumbering and slow that there’s never any real sense of danger. Normally, the tension that we get in a paranoid thriller like this one is whether our protagonist can escape the clutches of the shadowy cabal and get the truth out to the people, but here, it’s just a matter of being able to speed walk and hide; and you don’t even have to be that good at it either. When Mulligan starts his rampage, Alicia manages to escape from him by closing herself up in a very flimsy-looking plexiglass DJ booth, and she’s completely safe, even as he impotently pounds his fists against it. 

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. Writer and director Jeff Lieberman (perhaps best known for Squirm) really thought he was cooking with this plot, but that didn’t stop him from allowing (or perhaps encouraging) some of Zalman King’s acting choices here. I’m not familiar enough with any of the actor’s other work to say whether or not he’s capable of playing “anxious” with his face, but he’s certainly capable of doing it with his body language, even if the ways that this is displayed are comical. Late in the film, Zipkin meets with a doctor friend (Robert Walden, who turns in the most magnetic performance here, with Winters a close second) in a park to acquire tranquilizers, as part of his scheme to apprehend one of the Blue Sunshine killers without killing them, so that he can have them tested for chromosomal abnormalities that would prove his innocence. They convene discreetly in a public park, and the doctor has to tell Zipkin multiple times to just shake his hand and take the drugs. When he spots a cop, he tells Zipkin to walk away calmly, only to watch as he climbs up an embankment, swinging his arms and legs with Rowan Atkinson level gusto in the most conspicuous getaway possible. 

This movie is also chock full of imminently quotable lines. The police are puzzled why a man who quit his last job because they wouldn’t hire enough women would suddenly turn around and barbecue three of them, but never consider that maybe their first guess isn’t actually correct. A woman consoles another woman about the upcoming anniversary of her divorce by telling her that the worst thing that “Nothing affected [her] more than when The Beatles broke up,” and that “[Her] divorce was nothing compared to that.” And, because watching an hour of Designing Women every day from 1997 to 1999 broke my brain in ways that have never healed, I instantly recognized the woman who tells Zipkin about one of the killings that happened to her neighbor as Bernice (Alice Ghostley), which made that scene even funnier, although I think that it’s being played for comedy intentionally (although you can never be too sure here). The finale of the film takes place in an unoccupied department store that’s part of the mall where Flemming is holding a rally, and everything about the whole sequence is hilarious: the fact that Alicia arranges to meet Mulligan (so he can be arrested) at a discotheque called “Big Daddy’s” inside a mall, the fact that she doesn’t let the fact that she’s technically on a stakeout stop her from getting drunk on martinis, the delivery of the line “There’s a bald maniac in there and he’s going bat shit!,” and even the way that Zipkin recites the entire spiel he was given by a gun shop employee like it’s the Bene Gesserit “fear is the mind killer” speech before he can shoot Mulligan with a tranq dart. 

This one seems to be relatively hard to find; there was a DVD release twenty years ago, but it appears to be long out of print, and there wasn’t a copy of it anywhere in my vast municipal library system. If you get the chance to see it, 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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond