Welcome to Episode #275 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of lesser-seen giallo flicks, starting with 1974’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974).
24:30 The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974) 45:48 The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971) 55:15 What Have You Done to Solange? (1972) 1:13:34 Footprints on the Moon (1975)
What is there left to say about Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I got into the franchise after the TV series had ended, but only just, in a roundabout manner. In short, there was a demo for the video game adaptation of the show on a disc that came with the Official XBox Magazine, the subscription to which was bundled with the system when I got it for my fifteenth birthday. This led to obtaining the movie on VHS at a flea market within the following year and finding the DVDs of the first few seasons at the GameStop on Essen Lane shortly thereafter, starting a lifelong love for the slayer and her pals. I’m currently in the midst of a rewatch of the show right now, and even under great duress I could not calculate the number of rewatches I’ve had. Normally, people who enjoy the show don’t care much for the movie (or vice versa), but I love them both; I couldn’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve watched this film any more than I could tell you how many times I’ve watched the show.
We get a brief intro set in “Europe” in “The Dark Ages” that establishes the lore that vampires walk among us and that the only one with the strength and skill to face them is a girl called to be the Slayer, who is guided in her craft by the Watcher. We cross-cut from the medieval Slayer lifting an ornate stake into the air to a pom-pom held aloft by airheaded cheerleader Buffy (Swanson). We find ourselves in Southern California in “The Lite Ages,” where Buffy and her clique are a softer version of the Heathers, whose only concerns are shopping, dances, boyfriends, and curfews. After a chance encounter with a couple of broke mechanics named Benny (David Arquette) and Pike (Luke Perry), Buffy meets Merrick (Donald Sutherland), who introduces himself as her Watcher and tells her of her destiny, much to her “eww.” Elsewhere, sensing that the Slayer has come into her powers, the elder vampire Lothos (Rutger Hauer) arrives in Los Angeles with his flunky Amilyn (Paul Reubens) in tow to begin rebuilding his vampire coven. Amilyn attacks Pike and Benny one night; Pike is rescued by Merrick, but Benny isn’t so lucky, showing up at Pike’s place the following night floating around and attempting to convince Pike to join him, Salem’s Lot style. Meanwhile, Buffy is convinced to accompany Merrick to a graveyard when he knows details of her dreams, which he reveals to be memories of past Slayers. When a vampire emerges from the ground, her instincts kick in and she defeats it with ease. The two begin training, with Merrick warning her that she must keep her identity a secret from the vampires, and Buffy also strikes up an unlikely romance with Pike. Finally being challenged by a father figure while also finding something to love in a man she would have previously been too vapid to consider because of his working class background, Buffy grows as a person without losing the things that make her unique, and it may be just enough to give her the edge over Lothos despite so many previous Slayers dying at his hands.
In writing about the film as a companion piece to All Cheerleaders Die, Brandon identified Buffy as “Cluelessbefore Clueless, if Clueless were a Hammer Horror,” and that’s spot on. Buffy, like Cher after her, is the perfect 90s heroine: an archetypically ditzy girl with seemingly nothing going on upstairs whose apparent vapidity and cluelessness obscure a kind heart and a healthy intelligence that simply doesn’t present in a traditional, measurable way. When given the chance to see beyond the rim of the literal and metaphorical valley, they demonstrate a wealth of character. Buffy’s relationship with Merrick is quite charming, especially in contrast to the apathetic neglect that her parents demonstrate, and Pike serves as a nice contrast to Buffy’s boyfriend Jeffrey, who, instead of defending Buffy against a sexist remark from one of his friends when he asks to “borrow” her, declines on the grounds that he’d “get her dirty.”
Although the film and the series are narratively aligned in the broad strokes (the events of the film are basically canon, with the one major change being that the film’s screenplay featured Buffy burning the gym down during her final fight, which was cut from the movie for budget reasons but treated as canonical in the show), they’re very different tonally. Buffy the series is funny, but it’s a supernatural drama first and foremost, with the comedy being an innate part of its charm but not what first comes to mind when one thinks about it. Buffy the film is a comedy from the ground up, starting with the gag that a Valley Girl with a name like “Buffy” might have a serious destiny, fated to slay the vampires that start to spring up all over Los Angeles. This gives the film the chance to tell jokes on several levels, from the lowbrow comedy Buffy cutting the hot dog that Benny uses as a phallus to mock her, to the more conceptual humor that arises from someone like Buffy having a special destiny, to the slapstick of Paul Reubens being staked and dying very, very slowly. One of my favorite jokes features the vapid teens trying to come up with a dance theme that’s socially aware, deciding on environmentalism but having trouble with landing it conceptually, coming up with the catchphrase “don’t tread on me” before realizing that you “kind of have to” tread on the earth. Later, the banner at the dance reads “Hug the World,” which is so comically meaningless that it’s hard not to snort. It’s good stuff all around.
It’s hard to watch the film now knowing how mentally unwell Swanson has become in recent years, not to mention that a film that’s barely thirty years old has also lost so many members of its cast, with Perry and Hauer passing in 2019, Reubens in 2023, and Donald Sutherland in 2024. I don’t think that any of them were defined by their roles in this film, all having greater success elsewhere, but I still think of Sutherland’s role in this when I picture him in my mind, and I may be the only person on earth who thinks about Amilyn before Pee-Wee Herman when Reubens is mentioned. Nonetheless, that’s not what makes this movie an unintentional period piece, as this is a perfect little time capsule of the 1990s, a snapshot of a time when “Buffy, the vampire slayer” was a conceptual novelty and not a far-reaching media empire (this year’s failed reboot notwithstanding). The film is full of cameos from actors who would go on to have a much bigger cultural footprint: Stephen Root as the principal of Hemery High, Hilary Swank as the scheming Heather Duke to Buffy’s (sweet) Heather Chandler, and even a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance from babyfaced Ben Affleck as a member of a rival school’s basketball team. The best time to have seen this movie was when you were a kid or a teenager and you watched it three times a day for two weeks during summer vacation, but the second-best time to watch it is now.
In case you haven’t already met him, Shaun is a claymation sheep, one who’s too smart and too independent for his own good. Initially introduced as a side character in Aardman’s flagship Wallace & Gromit shorts, Shaun the Sheep has since gone on to become a name brand of his own, headlining an eponymous stop-motion TV show in which his mischievous schemes cause great episodic trouble for the farmer & dog that are supposed to be keeping him fenced in. The show is subverbal, with characters exclusively communicating in expressive grunts instead of using their words, which levels the intellectual playing field between the humans and farm animals in the cast. It’s a consistently, cozily delightful set-up for some classic silent comedy gags, and it’s proven to be popular enough to inspire a series of feature-film sequels outside the confines of television. 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie played as an action-spectacle escalation of the Shaun the Sheep TV show, dragging Shaun and his fellow barnyard animals off the farm and to The Big City in the George Miller tradition. Then, the series temporarily lost its way in its attempt at Atomic Age sci-fi pastiche in 2019’s Farmageddon, which disrupted the calming simplicity of its silent-comedy-farm-life premise by allowing a cutesy, hyperactive space alien to invade the scene, dragging the whole enterprise down to the low-attention-span antics of a Trolls sequel. Thankfully, while shifting genres to horror pastiche in the newest addition, the Shaun the Sheep franchise has retreated to the warmer tone and core character dynamics that separate Aardman Animations from the lesser, computer-animated DreamWorks of the world. Shaun is back causing covertly anthropomorphic mischief, the farmer gets into exponentially absurd mishaps through no fault of his own, and all the other people & animals hanging around have a sweetly silly time watching their hijinks ensue — this time while hanging Halloween decorations to help each other get into the seasonal mood.
The Beast of Mossy Bottom opens with the farmer and his animals waking at dawn with the creaky mobility of zombies rising from their graves. Once they’re alert and going about their separate days, both halves of the farm set about getting their Halloween plans in order; the farmer works on mustering up the courage to invite the local vet to his town’s annual Halloween Hoedown, while Shaun works on growing a secret pumpkin patch that would allow his fellow sheep to carve traditional jack-o-lanterns behind the farmer’s back. After a gruesome mishap massacres Shaun’s precious pumpkins in a blood-orgy of gourd guts, the determined sheep decides to play mad scientist and invent a growth serum that will rapidly develop new full-size pumpkins from seed in a couple days’ time, so they’ll be ready by Halloween. Only, his mad science experiment works too well, and the pumpkins never stop growing. Naturally, the serum is also mistaken for hair-growth gel by the balding farmer, who thinks he has a better shot at landing a Halloween Hoedown date if he can regrow the luscious locks of his youth. So, Shaun lives out the classic sci-fi horror plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein while the farmer finds himself in more of a Peanut Butter Solution rapid-hair-growth situation, of which it’s unclear whether the homage was at all intentional; it’s more important to know that his new hirsute look gets him mistaken for an errant sasquatch monster by freaked-out townsfolk. Certainly, there are blatant, unmistakable callbacks to more famous horror iconography elsewhere, including onscreen references toPsycho, Thriller, Dracula, Night of the Living Dead, and Friday the 13th. Those references are all likely to go over the heads of the children in the target audience, though, the same way that the first Shaun the Sheep movie got away with referencing Taxi Driver, The Terminator, and Silence of the Lambs without offending overly protective parents. It’s the kind of horror-movie-reference starter pack that can acclimate younger viewers to a lifelong genre fandom without immediately scaring them off with the macabre.
This latest Shaun the Sheep outing is Halloween-season kids’ fluff; it also might be the best movie in the series to date. The closest it gets to actively scaring children is in its climactic introduction of a kaiju-scale jack-o-lantern monster, but even that gag is quickly revealed to be all in good fun. Mostly, the scene-to-scene scares are character based, keeping the farm-life silent comedy of the series as simple as possible. For instance, when the town vet visits the farm, everyone is scared for entirely personal reasons: the farmer because he is scared of women, the animals because they’re scared of vaccinations. When the farmer’s Gromit-like hound is tasked to retrieve his missing, sasquatched owner, he visualizes the farmer’s scent as a ghost made of green vaporous stench. The Halloweeny quality of the picture is mostly due to seasonal decor. Jack-o-lanterns, rubber bats, mad-scientist lab equipment, and mysterious monster footprints decorate every set piece, while it’s continually clear that no one is in danger of suffering anything worse than a pratfall. The only real sour note is the film’s department-store pop music soundtrack, which has been a consistent earsore throughout this series. Only, this time the end credits play over a delightfully corny plot-summarizing rap song in Halloween goof-off tradition, so it’s difficult to get too angered up about it. Is The Beast of Mossy Bottom legitimately just as good as the first Shaun the Sheep movie or is its Spirit Halloween Store set decor just an especially pleasant backdrop for its old-school silent comedy gags? It’s difficult to say for sure, but The Beast of Mossy Bottom is unmistakably more successful as a Shaun the Sheep horror pastiche than Farmageddon was as the Shaun the Sheep take on alien-invasion sci-fi. It manages to naturally integrate the holiday into Shaun’s farm-disrupting antics without distracting from the show’s streamlined sitcom premise, and as a result it might incidentally inspire some future monster-movie fandom in impressionable youngsters along the way.
Hope is the latest film from The Wailing director Na Hong-jin. Early reactions were fairly mixed, and now having seen the film myself, I can understand why. For much of its run, Hope is an exciting action thriller, with thrilling chase scenes, suspenseful sequences, and quiet moments of humanity. All of this works quite well, especially when we see less of the monster(s) that are running around and causing trouble, but once we do see them, it takes a downhill turn before ending on a truly bizarre note, one that comes after a film that’s a little too long for its own good.
Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is the police chief of Hope Harbor, a South Korean village that abuts the Demilitarized Zone, the population of which is made up largely of elderly people and supermodel-hot younger folks. He’s summoned by his cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to the site of a mutilated cow that Sung-ki and his fellow hunters discovered in the middle of the road. The cow’s corpse shows evidence of being attacked by some large animal with razor-sharp claws, which the hunters convince Bum-seok a tiger must have been responsible for despite the unlikelihood that a large cat would have been able to cross the minefields that lie between them and the rest of the continent. Upon returning to town, Bum-seok learns that several other locals have been killed, and his attempts to call in additional manpower are rebuffed due to wildfires that are raging elsewhere, prompting him to ally with a retired colonel named Ahn Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee), whom he finds hiding in a culvert after his own encounter with the monster. Out of sight, the monster rages on, as it leaves a trail of broken bodies and buildings in its wake. After Bum-seok accidentally shoots and kills a local who was hiding from the monster, he ends up facing the creature itself and narrowly escapes only because of assistance from his rocket launcher-toting rookie, Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon). After a long and costly conflict, the monster is killed, and its body turned over to a local surgeon to perform an autopsy, although she’s not able to cut through the creature’s hide with anything less than a chainsaw. Sung-ae assists with triage in a makeshift hospital, where she learns from one of the locals that he had seen several of the creatures in the woods, indicating that the danger is far from over. Elsewhere, Sung-ki and his hunting buddies are still looking for the tiger that threatens the village when they stumble upon a crashed spaceship in the forest, one that has a control room that features seating and buttons for very, very large crewmembers.
The creatures here are the film’s weakest point, in multiple ways. The alien designs are unique, and it’s a mark in the film’s favor that they’re individually designed with distinctive textures and faces, but that does not necessarily mean that they’re good. Western actors like Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Lost in Space’s Taylor Russell are credited here, and I suppose you can see the resemblance between them and the aliens that they voice (in an alien language) if you look hard enough, but I’m at a loss to understand what they bring to the film other than marquee appeal outside of Korea. The quality with which they are rendered on screen varies wildly from scene to scene, with some sequences looking like they were built for a PS2 game while others are smoother and more convincing. They’re a much more threatening presence when they’re not onscreen, when dismembered bodies are discovered in collapsing buildings or the only evidence of their presence is the far-off sounds of gunfire cut short by screaming. Characters can see over rooftops that cars are being thrown around like toys, and it’s quite effective.
I can concede that it’s likely that we’re meant to find the aliens uncannily human but off-putting considering the revelation that they are intelligent creatures seeking a lost child, who has already been killed by a hillbilly taxidermist named Yang-bae (Eum Moon-suk, a handsome former K-pop star who’s saddled with goofy teeth). The intention is to induce fear and then humanize them; I get that. I just don’t feel that it’s very successful, and it’s not all entirely down to the design. For one thing, this isn’t exactly new ground, given that the “man is the real monster” isn’t a novel monster-movie concept at this point, and the reason it’s so well-worn is because it forces the audience to look inward at their own prejudices. Here, however, the blame for the interspecies conflict falls solely in the lap of a trigger-happy bumpkin. No one is going to look at this man onscreen and see themselves, and it’s a change from the formula that demonstrates why the trope exists in the first place. There’s also a lot of sudden and unexpected lore that ends up being shoehorned in during the film’s final act, belabored exposition that largely comes via the form of not-very-interesting dialogue between Vikander and Fassbender (I mean, um … let me check my notes here … “J’aur” and “Ma’veyyo”). Some of it re-establishes what we’ve already gleaned from the scenes with our human characters, including their search for the missing alien child, but it also drops several extra-terrestrial proper nouns that are a lot to try and take in after two hours of runtime that was mostly a humans-versus-monsters movie.
This is a film that feels incomplete, and it’s not just the cliffhanger ending that gives it that quality. Hope doesn’t feel like half of a narrative; it feels like a 95% complete monster film and a 35% complete sci-fi epic. That adds up to more than 100%, of course, which is reflected in the film’s whopping 156 minute runtime. That should be more than enough to tell a complete story, but it doesn’t. There are dangling plot threads on the human side that are left to be resolved in a sequel if one is made, most notably the fallout of Bum-seok’s shooting of a non-combatant, but it’s almost all the way there. The alien side of things is just getting started, with the sudden crashing of another, larger spaceship into a mountain on the horizon near the film’s conclusion, and all of the political machinations that are implied by the too-late info dump, which isn’t of interest to me in the slightest. Given that Na is known for releasing films at a glacial pace (the aforementioned The Wailing was his last picture, and it was released in 2016), it’s strange to me that he would create a film so open-ended and demanding of a sequel. Worse, Hope features such great action sequences that it demands to be seen on a big screen, but the ultimate experience is so taxing that it is a film that will work best when you’re at home and can take bathroom breaks, where the horseback battle with a galloping alien creature isn’t going to hit as hard.
All of this sounds pretty negative, but I’m not trying to talk you out of experiencing the film. Reports that it is the best monster movie in years are no more an exaggeration than critical responses that the film is an overlong, narratively confused beast. Going in with that knowledge, I think you’ll still find plenty to enjoy; just caffeinate beforehand and feel free to run to the restroom when the aliens start talking to one another.
Screaming Mad George passed away this year, and there hasn’t been nearly enough public mourning over that loss for my taste. The 80s gore wizard was so uniquely talented as a visual artist (as especially evident in his collaborations with director Bryan Yuzna) that he would get special title card credits like “surrealistic make-up effects by Screaming Mad George” or “surrealistic visual design by Screaming Mad George,” each well earned by the mutant freak shows that would follow in all-timer gross-outs like Society, The Guyver, and Freaked!. The recent announcement of George’s passing was quietly received by the general movie-loving public, so it was nice to see him finally, properly honored by the surrealistic gore effects of Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil adaptation, even if the homage was unintentional or indirect. The snowbound setting, mutated dogs, and tentacled humanoids of Resident Evil are naturally drawing a lot of comparisons to Rob Bottin’s legendary creature effects for The Thing, but I still felt the presence of George’s screaming-mad spirit in the theater opening weekend. There’s something about the anything-goes nightmare reconfigurations of the human form in Resident Evil‘s creature designs that can’t help but recall Screaming Mad George’s calling-card works in addition to Bottin’s, and I think it’s beautiful that you can now find the fucked-up surrealistic ideas he developed in a major studio adaptation of a video game playing in every multiplex across America. It used to be that you had to go to the video store to rent disreputable schlock like Silent Night Deadly Night 4: Initiation to see what screaming-mad stuff George was cooking up; now it’s being projected on thousands of screens nationwide.
It probably says something about the current moment in mainstream filmmaking that a splatter-gore horror comedy based on a video game feels like a no-brainer sure thing for a major studio to produce, when a few decades ago it would’ve been budgeted as a direct-to-video B-picture. Zach Cregger cashed in his industry clout after the unlikely success of his Oscar-winning whatsit Weapons to make the grossest, gnarliest horror comedy he could manage, timed perfectly to the industry’s current shift away from superhero actioners to memeable horrors and video game IP. There are no discernible themes or metaphors behind most of the imagery in Resident Evil. Instead of playing into the “elevated” trauma-metaphor horror trends of the past decade, it operates on pure video game logic. Weapons favorite Austin Abrams stars as a gig-economy worker who’s tasked to deliver a medical cooler to the zombie shoot-em-up game’s infamous Raccoon City headquarters, where a science lab is desperately awaiting his arrival. Along the way, it becomes clear that Raccoon City is ground zero for some kind of body-transforming virus breakout, making the delivery comically impossible as Abrams is attacked by one undead mutant freak after another. Structurally, it’s an all-in-one-night story built on crisis-to-crisis problem solving, like an absurdly gory redux of After Hours or Miracle Mile. Experientially, it feels like playing a video game as an unskilled novice, with Abrams’s in-over-his-head delivery driver voicing the audience’s overwhelmed, underprepared reactions to each unholy tentacled beast that lunges at him as if he were operating a game console controller instead of a real-world human body. Everything that happens to him is a nightmare, but it’s all for our low-stakes, time-passing entertainment.
It may sound like I’m downplaying Resident Evil‘s artistic merits by characterizing it as a themeless video game playthrough, but that is not my intent. It took Paul W.S. Anderson and Mila Jovovich fiveResident Evil adaptations before they realized that this premise plays best as a playthrough spookshow in 2012’s Retribution, whereas Cregger’s vision for the property is immediately, sharply clear-eyed. Video-game storytelling tropes are a major asset to making sure this latest adaptation feels fresh and of-the-moment. In most instances, a CGI-animated throwback to practical gore effects of the Screaming Mad George era would feel disappointingly stale, but Resident Evil is just inventive enough in its constantly mutating creature designs and just modern enough in its video game puzzle-solving narrative to dig itself out of that 80s nostalgia pit. In a time when most directors are afraid to set their horror stories in the current moment because of the intrusive presence of smartphones, Cregger is one of the few who understands how those phones can add to his movie’s scares instead of detracting from them. The cold, isolated beam of the flashlight app on Abrams’s phone as he navigates the haunted house setting of each video-game-level sequence is essential to the movie’s visual palette and, by extension, to its modernity. Likewise, there’s something of-the-moment in the delivery dude’s under-his-breath jokiness as he’s assaulted by one brain-breaking mutant monstrosity after another, since that’s just what it feels like to leave the house to accomplish any basic task in recent years. All public life is an anxiety-inducing horror video game, but you do have to play along (if not only to make a little money), so the only option, really, is to joke to yourself along the way. I won’t claim that Resident Evil is the first or the best movie to modernize that screaming-mad 80s splatterfest sensibility to the current moment; it’s got titles like Deadstream, The Substance, and Cregger’s own Barbarian to compete with for those superlatives. It is super impressive to see that sensibility blown up to this major-studio scale, though, and it’s a hoot to holler at with first-weekend horror crowds instead of quietly watching it alone on a rented VHS tape.
The microbudget indie horror It Ends has been simmering on the theatrical distribution backburner since at least as far back as spring of 2025, when it locally premiered at the Overlook Film Festival. By the time Neon picked it up, it had already seen a brief streaming run on the Letterboxd “Video Store” platform as an undistributed work that had fallen through the cracks of the festival circuit and been left for dead on the side of the proverbial road. A lot can change in a year, though, and the current horror cinema landscape is a lot more hospitable to It Ends now than it might have been in 2025, before Backrooms brought liminal-space horror to national headlines and Obsession became a surprise mega-hit for Zoomers who delighted in finally seeing their own generational neuroses projected on the big screen. It’s much easier to see a clear path for It Ends‘s marketability now that we live in a post-Backrooms, post-Obsession world, even if its payoffs are much quieter than those potential comps’. It may be set in a supernaturally liminal space like the backrooms, but it’s only interested in functioning as a horror film in its cold-open segment, all wrapped up before the opening credits. Likewise, its interpersonal Gen-Z drama refuses to escalate to flashy, cathartic extremes, sticking much closer to the depressive mood of Leviticus than the violent hysteria of Obsession. If the current moment of youthful indie breakouts only applies to the horror genre, then It Ends just barely falls inside the outer boundary of benefiting. It offers a version of liminal-space horror where the liminal space is adolescence and the hell is other people.
Four childhood friends take a post-college road trip into the unknown, each struggling to come up with a plan for what to do with their lives now that they’re technically adults. Once outside the city, they find themselves on a mysterious woodland highway that has no turns and no end, existing in an alternate reality where cars never run out of gas and bellies never get hungry and no one is ever horny and every hour is the same and nothing ever changes. When they step outside the Jeep to investigate their new tree-lined prison, they are swarmed by a screaming mob of strangers who auto-populate in the wilderness, chasing them back onto the infinite road. This nightmare scenario is initially played like a high-concept horror film, complete with periodic jump scares and Cube-like ponderings about possible ways to escape the limbo of the highway. Eventually, though, the adrenaline wears off and the monotonous nature of the road trip leaves the Jeep-bound teens more bored than scared. They essentially take turns giving up, finding little satisfaction in the search for meaning or camaraderie or escape in their supernatural predicament. Even the zombie-like strangers lurking in the woods gradually lose interest in the game, collectively going comatose instead of going berserk. The horror of the back half, if there is any, is all philosophical instead of physical. The teens individually become just as indifferent to their survival as the highway is, each choosing their own personal moment to leave the Jeep forever and join the soulless, dead-eyed adults in the woods. Then, as the title promises, it ends.
There’s clearly some broad metaphor about the human condition at play here but, to the movie’s credit, it’s difficult to define. The never-ending highway certainly gets one thing right about life: it’s boring as fuck, with each day’s monotonous routine blurring into the next. When this Jeep full of freaked-out teens pull onto that highway, they have vague but grand ambitions about what they’re going to do with their newfound adulthood, so it’s depressing to watch them slowly resign themselves to the repetitive nothingness of an adult reality. The thesis, if you’re going to put it into words, appears to be that growing up is giving up, but what else are you going to do? Life is a highway, and even after you ride it all night long there’s nowhere else to go; there’s just more highway. The meaning behind individual details of the characters’ world within the Jeep and even the Jeep itself can mean different things to different audiences, though, which is where the movie finds its stickiest philosophical talking points. Personally, I found myself thinking of the Jeep as a metaphor for the way I treat this very movie review website: a stubbornly childish project that I’ll continue to drive into the infinite void until all my friends who came along on the drive gradually lose interest one by one, leaving me alone at the wheel of my juvenile journey to nowhere. Your own self-identification may vary. Maybe your Jeep is a weekends-only cover band or a college clique or an actual vintage Jeep you plan to get running one day — whatever project is stubbornly carrying over your youthful ambition and idealism into the soul-numbing monotony of adulthood. Or maybe it’ll represent something else to you entirely. Whatever the case, the monster that’s loose in this particular horror story is of the personal & philosophical variety, nothing like the manic pixie nightmare girlfriend of Obsession nor the memetic mutants of Backrooms. In the current Gen-Z horror moment, It Ends offers an opportunity to quietly sit & reflect in the dark, which is not an especially sexy marketing pitch for a low-budget, high-concept teen horror flick (and might explain its so-far muted reception).
Welcome to Episode #272 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & James discuss the films they caught at the second annual Baton Rouge Underground Film Festival, starting with the menstrual creature feature Cramps! A Period Piece.
00:00 BRUFF 04:47 Cramps! A Period Piece 14:22 Public Access 28:04 The Knight 32:53 Pu Ekaw Tnod 35:21 West of Greatness 38:44 Unseen Olympiad
The 1991 novelty slasher Popcorn has a fairly straightforward premise: What if William Castle was a serial killer? That setup makesfora much meaner, zanier William Castle homage than Joe Dante’s Matinee, one where Castle’s signature theatrical gimmicks get directly involved in increasingly silly kills instead of being deployed as mood-setting kitsch. The Stepfather‘s Jill Schoelen stars as a film school weirdo whose struggling department decides to raise production funds by hosting an all-night horror marathon in a traditional single-screen theater. They figure they can charge extra for tickets by bringing back the original theatrical gimmicks from the 1950s creature features they’re screening, like ziplining a giant mosquito prop over the audience during the atomic-age sci-fi parody Mosquito (an effect they call “Projectovision”, modeled after Castle’s “Emergo!” gimmick) or zapping the audience in their seats during key shocks of The Amazing Electrified Man (“Shockoscope”, modeled after Castle’s “Percepto!” gimmick). Only, a mysterious killer is loose in the theater and is picking off the film school students & staff one by one. The mosquito is rigged to crush an unsuspecting victim; the seat buzzers are cranked to lethally high voltage; the “Aromarama” gas deployed during The Stench is, of course, poisoned. While Schoelen’s softspoken auteur-to-be should be worried about what ridiculous retro-schlock gimmick is going to eventually be wielded against her, she’s instead perversely excited by the deaths’ potential as inspiration for her next screamplay, keeping the mood defiantly light despite all of the violence. Popcorn is a wonderfully silly 90s slasher with a wide range of imaginative kills and a fun all-night-party atmosphere, one that panders so shamelessly to its target audience that it’s an easy instant favorite for any genre-literate horror nerds.
Popcorn is pretty blatant about its William Castle homages, which range from the more obvious go-to references (like hiring a uniformed nurse to issue life insurance policies in the lobby, in case the audience dies of fright) to the deeper cuts (like its “Shock Clock” prop referencing the “Fright Break” countdown in Castle’s Homicidal). That’s what makes it so strange that Castle’s name isn’t mentioned once during the hours of bonus features on the film’s recent Synapse Blu-ray release. The retro horror parodies that fill out the movie theater’s all-night schlock marathon are referred to as broad homages to 1940s & 50s horror classics on the disc’s commentary track and in the accompanying feature-length “Making Of” documentary, without ever specifically mentioning Castle’s legendary gimmickry as an influence on the text. That concept-to-screen disconnect is likely a result of the film’s tortured history of authorship, with its final cut encompassing the work of three different directors working towards three different ends. The story goes that Popcorn‘s first hired director Alan Ormsby was really into shooting the 1950s creature feature parodies, at the expense of shooting the 1990s wraparound slasher that contains them. When he was fired from the project, Ormsby was drastically behind schedule but had delivered a group of highly detailed, reverential homages to vintage horror schlock. Producer Bob Clark (who had collaborated on Dead of Night with Ormsby, a friend he lost to that business decision) was reluctant to put his name on another horror project after becoming a more mainstream commercial director, so he hired one of his trusted actors from Porky‘s, Mark Herrier, to take the reins. Cast & crew have since confirmed that Clark essentially shadowdirected the picture, guiding a lot of Herrier’s day-to-day decisions and shooting substantial amounts of B-unit footage to get the project back on schedule. You can feel Clark’s influence throughout, especially in scenes where he voices threatening phone calls from the anonymous serial killer villain, just as he had in his breakout slasher Black Christmas. You can also feel the film’s divided authorship in how its obvious original intent as a William Castle homage has been lost in the handovers, like a game of telephone.
Luckily, the William Castle throwback gimmicks aren’t the only thing Popcorn has going on. The killer who weaponizes those gags is suspected to be a filmmaker of an entirely different era: a hippie freak who made ritualistic art films of the Kenneth Anger & Anton Lavey variety. Our hippie Satanist first appears to Jill Schoelen in a sweaty, Ken Russell-inspired nightmare sequence, calling out to her through the psychedelic afterlife. The second she wakes up, she starts scribbling details from that nightmare into her journal, insistent that it would make a great film. It turns out what she was dreaming was already a film, a scratchy 16mm short from the 1970s titled Possessor, which its director Lanyard Gates concluded by committing in-the-flesh murders during its climax at its premiere. Gates was apparently radicalized by audiences’ tepid reaction to his art films, deciding to get violent revenge on crowds who would rather watch goofy genre fluff instead of real, meaningful cinema. That hostile artist-audience dynamic continues from beyond the grave, when the film school’s all-night horror marathon is interrupted by a renegade screening of Possessor, which the captive crowd boos off the screen. The question of whether the long-dead Gates has supernaturally returned to this mortal plane to get his violent revenge on that audience or if his work is being continued by a more plausible, in-the-flesh suspect is answered in such a bizarre, spectacularly convoluted way that I wouldn’t dare spoil it here. What’s more important than who’s doing Gates’s work is what that work represents. Years before Wes Craven was interrogating horror audiences’ disconnection with the meaning behind their go-to genre’s violence & narrative tropes in New Nightmare & Scream, Clark & co. were already calling out the horror-hungry masses for not sincerely engaging with the art behind their entertainment. The art of cinema and the cheap thrills of horror gimmickry are directly opposed here, with open resentment expressed over how the former needs a little of the latter to earn its funding. That’s what makes reading Bob Clark’s authorship into the text its most satisfying angle, even if the truth is more of a three-way compromise.
Popcorn is not only disjointed in its directorial vision and its art-vs-schlock sentiments, but it’s also disjointed in its setting. The story is set in the suburbs of Smalltown, America, but the production was shot entirely in Kingston, Jamaica, making extensive use of an abandoned old-style movie theater located there. Some of the Jamaican touches to the production are subtly underplayed, like how the majority Black cast of extras are made to appear more diverse by wearing Halloween costumes to the horror marathon. Others are less subtle, like how this is the rare slasher that features an all-reggae soundtrack (including a movie-themed reggae parody of “Under the Boardwalk”). The illusion really breaks down when the power goes out during the marathon and a local reggae band is invited on stage to entertain the crowd by flashlight, turning the theatrical audience into a dancehall dance party. Like the rest of Popcorn‘s behind-the-scenes production anomalies, the chaotic relationship between its setting and its shooting location is just part of the fun. This is a pizza-and-beer VHS rental to be enjoyed with your nerdiest horror-loving friends, so you can all be poked fun at by a movie that doesn’t take you or your preferred genre seriously. As lovingly recreated as the vintage William Castle segments feel in Ormsby’s movies-within-the-movie vignettes, there’s something genuinely heartfelt in Clark’s overall hostility to the fun-loving, novelty-seeking horror audience who wouldn’t turn up or fund more serious art. If nothing else, Clark’s reluctance to put his name on the project betrays some kind of lingering, Gates-style resentment for the artistic limitations of the genre. He doesn’t let that professional bitterness get in the way of throwing a good party, though, just like he doesn’t sweat the logical details of how that party should be soundtracked.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the latest feature from director Jane Schoenbrun, following A Self-Induced Hallucination, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and I Saw the TV Glow. In the film, Hannah Einbinder plays Kris Williams, an indie darling director whose most recent project—the last third of which “remade Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”—brought her to the attention of the studio in possession of the rights to the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise. Following the breakout commercial success of the first Camp Miasma flick, the film’s killer Little Death and their inexplicable air vent-shaped helmet became horror iconography on par with Freddy Krueger and his glove or Jason Voorhees and his machete. The drive to produce endless sequels led to creative rot (like the late sequel Little DeathTakes Manhattan), gimmicks (like Camp Miasma 3-D), and diminishing monetary returns. Kris now finds herself at the helm of Camp Miasma reboot, which the studio wants to ensure is “elevated” in order to align with current horror film trends. The purpose is two-fold: the studio hopes to reinvigorate interest in a once-lucrative intellectual property while also redirecting attention away from the original film’s transphobia by hiring Kris, a queer woman. Supposedly seeking inspiration, Kris tracks down reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), Camp Miasma’s final girl, who invites Kris to meet with her at her home, which turns out to be the same abandoned campground where the first Miasma picture was filmed. Of course, Kris’s motivation to meet Billy has additional undercurrents that she herself isn’t fully cognizant of, stemming from an epiphanic experience she had while watching Camp Miasma as a child.
The text within the film, the Camp Miasma franchise, is wonderfully detailed stuff: the mounting number of sequels on VHS that bear the distinct typeface of the Friday the 13th film series, from which Camp Miasma takes most of its aesthetic cues; the watering down of the genuinely menacing Little Death until they start to appear in 90s anti-drug campaigns; the moral outrage from concerned citizens’ groups, leading to picketing of the movie, resulting in even more attention from the public. It’s window dressing, but it’s so thoroughly realized that one can’t help but gawk in amazement at the level of attention to detail. It’s referential through reinterpretation and reinvention, rather than just recreation. Besides the Friday the 13th films, the most obvious inspiration is Sleepaway Camp. Instead of simply recreating that film’s twist ending, the original Camp Miasma’s Little Death (Jack Haven) was an avenging spirit of a genderfluid child who was killed by several other campers. This allows Schoenbrun to grapple with the transphobia of that film by using it as a vehicle to criticize the ignorance that led to its creation, while also playfully poking fun at the large amount of cinematic non-criticism that, instead of grappling with a text’s successes and failures, relies solely on pointing out older media’s flaws without anything more substantial to say.
The meta-textual nature of the narrative draws comparison (even within the text itself!) to “Frightmaster Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” but an equally applicable comparison would be to say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie that loves horror of a bygone era the same way that Galaxy Quest loves Star Trek. Of course, what was lacking from those films was a character using their media obsession to examine their sexuality or the nature of desire. Camp Miasma reflects, I imagine, what it feels like to experience sexual arousal only when it’s part of a fantasy mediated by a screen, rather than being aroused by touch, sensation, or intimacy. Kris admits to Billy that she’s allowed herself to be coaxed into opening up her relationship with her partner because she’s unable to meet their sexual needs because, like Owen in TV Glow, she’s more interested in TV/movies than she is in real life, and more comfortable with experiencing sexuality through the distance that a lens creates. Where this differs from Schoenbrun’s previous film is that the ending of TV Glow is considered a bleak, downer ending by most audiences, while Miasma feels like a much more celebratory endeavor, like Schoenbrun got out all of their negative feelings in Glow so that they could tackle the inherent eroticism of the slasher genre in a more fun, positive way. Owen’s narrative is one about what happens when one consigns themself to a box, while Kris’s is one that teaches her that it’s totally okay to be obsessed with a one hit wonder scream queen and only get off through fantasy — even a violent one, because that’s the point of fantasy, it’s not real. As the advertisements for the home video release of the original Camp Miasma note, “if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.”
The major detriments largely come in the form of visuals. This is a film that is largely unconcerned with making sense of time. The on-screen date given in Roman numerals for the release of the original Camp Miasma is 1980, which would make Billy a solid decade older than she is said to be, and the area around the campground moves from winter to summer over the course of a single night. One can accept that as artistic license, and one must accept it when considering that, when we get to see Little Death’s rampage from the end of Camp Miasma, it’s set to “Long December” by Counting Crows, which was not released until 1996. One could even chalk that up to the idea that we’re not seeing that scene as it was in the film, but as Kris remembers it. What I can’t accept about that scene is how badly done the special effects imagery is. There’s a fun little homage to one of Jason Voorhees’s most famous kills, the sleeping bag scene from The New Blood, wherein Little Death picks up a camper and slams them against a tree, but the kill is farcical rather than sincere, because the victim flies apart and falls to pieces like a mannequin. This same “error” occurs throughout the Little Death massacre, and it’s distracting. I’m not sure if this is supposed to represent Kris’s point of view, as it’s made abundantly clear that she finds slasher film death arousing in a way that she doesn’t understand, but if it’s supposed to be funny, it falls apart. There are several special effects “failures” throughout that have intentionality and are open to interpretation (like the Thomas Kincaid-esque winter scenes, which also look awful but have narrative purpose), but this rampage feels as if it were generated using AI. I’ve searched high and low for confirmation of this and can only find minimal discussion of it from others who get the same feeling, but please bear in mind, dear reader, that if it eventually is revealed that this is the case, disregard the star rating above and consider this film radioactive, with a big thumbs down. With nothing proven at this time, it’s still a negative, as it looks like hot garbage, but it’s not enough to ruin what is otherwise a delightfully fun movie.
Einbinder and Anderson have absolutely excellent chemistry. Anderson puts on a delightful Southern drawl for the character, and every one of her line reads is magical. During their first meeting, Billy intentionally gives Kris a tiny fright, and the following morning, she encourages Kris to enter a room where a Little Death costume is on display, cackling like a cartoon witch when her prank succeeds. What fun! I don’t eat fast food, but Schoenbrun’s choice to shoot Billy and Kris digging into KFC in pornographic, erotic close-up meant that I ended up getting some myself less than 48 hours later. I also had my biggest laugh of the year when Kris is word vomiting about the problematic elements of art from previous generations; when she mentions a Mickey Mouse racial caricature, Billy responds “Mickey did that?” and I laughed until I choked. When watching Camp Miasma together, Kris excitedly says “This part’s transphobic!”, prompting Billy to merely shush her, even though this is the scene that gave the film its macabre, thoughtless, hilarious tagline, “They killed him. They had to.” Sleepaway Camp has been derided in the intervening decades for its blatant transphobia, but like Rocky Horror Picture Show (as we have been reminded by the think pieces that have sprung up in the wake of the death of Tim Curry), it was also transgressive, and those who may be part of the demographic that has the right to be offended by dissonant values of older media are also capable of finding something meaningful within it. Rejection of art that was, intentionally or unintentionally, textually or subtextually, and positively or negatively queer in eras past prevents us from examining them within the context of their time, and how people lived in that time. It’s not a defense of antiquated portrayals, but it is an invitation to do something more than have a knee-jerk reaction to the past. Schoenbrun certainly has, and I was pleased to join them on their journey.
