horror

Halloween Streaming Recommendations 2023

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

“Sunshine, wine, swimming, antiquing, ambient acoustic strumming … If it weren’t for all of the violent hallucinations & vampiric ghouls this would be a pleasant little getaway” Currently streaming on Paramount+, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on PlutoTV.

Oct 2: Calvaire (2004)

“I braced myself for it to be far more needlessly vicious than it was, given the New French Extremity’s fetish for grisly details.  Calvaire does a good job of implying instead of dwelling and, more importantly, of cutting its unbearable tension with gallows humor so it’s not all misery & pain.  Part of my amusement might have been enhanced by the two main characters being assigned names I associate with comedy: Marc Stevens (who shares a name with John Early’s grifter villain on Los Espookys) and Paul Bartel (who shares a name with one of the greatest comedic directors to ever do it).  Regardless, director Fabrice du Welz also amuses himself by framing this grim & grueling torture session as ‘the best Christmas ever’ in its sicko villain’s mind, contrasting the hyperviolent hostage crisis the audience is watching with the delusional family reunion of his imagination in a bleakly hilarious clash of realities.  I don’t mean to imply that Calvaire‘s not also a nonstop misery parade, though.  It’s that too.” Currently streaming on Shudder.

Oct 3: Candy Land (2023)

“A very cool, loose hangout dramedy about truck stop sex workers that gradually turns into a rigidly formulaic grindhouse slasher to pay the bills. Not everyone gets to be Sean Baker; sometimes you gotta cosplay as Rob Zombie to land your funding.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 4: There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)

“What I mean when I say ‘kids are scary’ is that being around other people’s children naturally makes people anxious and nervous, or at least that’s my experience. What if they trip and fall while running past my table at a cafe? Do I suddenly become responsible for their wellbeing? What if the parent thinks I tripped them? What if the kid thinks I tripped them and blames me? Kids are tiny, vulnerable people, but they also have a capability for pure, unfiltered malice that can be creepy as well, and since they’re only just learning how to regulate their emotions and communicate their thoughts, interaction with them can be a minefield. There’s Something Wrong with the Children is probably the first film that I’ve ever seen that captures that particular unease.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.

Oct 5: The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)

“In which a pair of drunkard ghosts coach a child who’s been scared bald on how to grow his hair back, only for their advice to work way too well for his own good. Little-kid nightmare logic that you can only find in German fairy tales and Canadian B-movies, pinpointing the middle ground between Hansel & Gretel and The Pit. Wonderfully deranged.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 6: Day of the Animals (1977)

“I was starving for a genuinely over-the-top animal attack movie after being let down by Cocaine Bear, and this hit the spot. It’s basically the same faintly sketched-out story, but its tactility & sincerity go a long way in making its attack scenes much worthier of the ambling journey. There’s something especially unnerving about the way the animals appear to leap out of stock footage, as if they’re crossing a forbidden barrier into reality to tear into the character actors (and, more often, the stunt doubles). Incredible that it wasn’t directed by Larry Cohen.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 7: The Outwaters (2023)

“As trippy as it can be in its Skinamarinkian disorientation, it’s anchored to a concise, recognizable premise that could neatly be categorized as The Blair Witch Project Part IV: Blair Witch Goes to Hanging Rock.  It strikes a nice balance between the slow-moving quiet of its bedroom art brethren and mainstream horror’s return to big, bold, bloody haunted house scares.  Maybe that makes it a less artistically daring film than World’s Fair or Skinamarink, but it also makes it a more overtly entertaining one.”. Currently streaming on Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 8: Bones and All (2022)

“Seeing a lot of grossed-out responses from unsuspecting audiences wishing this was more of a straightforward road trip love story. I’m coming from the opposite direction, wishing it weren’t so tenderly underplayed & remorseful about its hunger pangs for gore. It’s kinda nice to have something that drifts between those two magnetic pulls, though, especially since it’s so unusual to see a Near Dark-style genre blender positioned as a prestigious Awards Contender.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.

Oct 9: Lost Highway (1997)

“Feels like Lynch twisting himself in knots to make the James from Twin Peaks archetype genuinely compelling … and he eventually gets there. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how noir antiheroes are mostly just sad sack losers who make their own shit luck by feeling sorry for themselves, and this one turns their mopey interchangeability into a kind of existential horror.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Oct 10: Hideaway (1995)

“In The Lawnmower Man, director Brett Leonard justifies testing the limitations of stage-of-the-art 90s CG animation by inventing convoluted science lab experiments that create a VR cyberworld.  Here, he takes a bold step forward by suggesting that exact CG cyberworld is where our souls go when our bodies die, treating his Windows 95 screensaver graphics as if they were the most typical, durable approach to visual effects available.  Stunning, even if extraordinarily goofy.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 11: Antiviral (2012)

“Brandon Cronenberg’s deeply unnerving debut is a sickly TMZ geek show. I need to stop hanging out online, because I keep reading flippant dismissals about how unimpressive he is as body horror’s premier nepo baby, then still really enjoying each of his movies when I get to see them for myself.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 12: Scalpel (1977)

“In which a madman plastic surgeon transforms an injured go-to dancer into his missing daughter’s doppelganger, in order to claim her inheritance in her absence. Technically, this is a PG-rated comedy, but it feels like it should have been bumped to the top of the video nasties list. Delicious, deep-fried Southern sleaze.” Currently streaming on Screambox.

Oct 13: Flesh for Frankenstein (1974)

“Hideous gore, gratuitous male & female nudity, and a babyfaced Udo Kier soaring miles over the top as a camped-up villainous lead. What more could you want?” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and AMC+.

Oct 14: The House that Dripped Blood (1971)

“Like all other Amicus anthology horrors I’ve seen, this is consistently entertaining throughout but never exactly surprising nor even thrilling.  It’s horror comfort viewing, best enjoyed under a blanket with a humongous mug of tea.” Currently streaming on Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 15: The Company of Wolves (1984)

“The greatest British portmanteau horror of all time, trading in the rigid stage-play traditionalism of classic Amicus anthologies for a more fluid, music video era dream logic.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.

Oct 16: Enys Men (2023)

“A pure psychedelic meltdown of id at the bottom of a deep well of communal grief. Restructures the seaside ghost story of Carpenter’s The Fog through the methodical unraveling of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, dredging up something that’s at once eerily familiar & wholly unique.” Currently streaming on Hulu.

Oct 17: Huesera: The Bone Woman (2023)

“A pensive motherhood horror about the pain of trading in youthful passion & rebellion for familial comfort & ease. Lots of thematic overlap with The Five Devils in that way, even if they’re nothing alike aesthetically. Besides landing every one of its scares and dramatic beats, this just has some truly world-class hand acting. Cracking knuckles and spatchcocking chickens will never feel the same again.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+.

Oct 18: The Stepfather (1987)

“Without question, the greatest evil-stepparent horror of all time, a superlative indicated by its definitive title.  Terry O’Quinn is the stepfather, a sociopathic serial killer who cycles through families like he’s updating his wardrobe, killing the old batch in cold blood instead of dropping it off at Goodwill.  O’Quinn is an explosive volcano of white-man rage, barely suppressing his violent outbursts under a thin facade of Ward Cleaver, Father Knows Best-style suburban Family Values.  It is one of the all-time great villain performances, regardless of genre.  There was already a bland, forgettable remake in the aughts, but the only other actor who could maybe pull this performance off is Will Forte, whose comedic version of bottled-up fury is a direct echo of the terror in O’Quinn’s piercing, hateful eyes.” Currently streaming on Peacock, Screambox, for free (with ads) on Tubi, and for free (with a librarby card) on Kanopy & Hoopla.

Oct 19: The Plumber (1979)

“A tense domestic thriller about a pushy, macho plumber who walks all over a married couple of uptight academics; directed for television by a young Peter Weir.  Cuts to the core of liberal urbanites’ fear of the working-class brutes they invite into their home for routine repairs; a home invasion thriller where the menace is politely welcomed inside.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Oct 20: Massacre at Central High (1976)

“As absurd as this prototypical slasher can be tonally, it feels true to how I remember high school: a conformity cult led by fascist jocks, lording over poorly socialized losers who would’ve been just as awful if we were given the opportunity. Our jocks never offered to take us hang-gliding, though, so now I feel like I missed out on something.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

Oct 21: Scream VI (2023)

“A strong sequel in a very strong franchise, possibly the horror franchise with the best hit to miss ration (5:1, in my book, and even the dud has Parker Posey to liven it up, so that’s something). Even though there are moments that are questionable (some of the people we see attacked should not have survived what happened to them), there are more than enough great sequences, character beats, and thrills to make up for them.” Currently streaming on Paramount+.

Oct 22: M3GAN (2023)

“It wasn’t until after the viewing that I realized the director, Gerard Johnstone, was also the man behind Housebound, a film we loved so much that we made it into content for Swampflix twice: first with a very positive 2015 review and again five years later as the topic on one of our earliest episodes of the Lagniappe podcast. That actually explains the comedic sensibility; it’s not omnipresent, but it’s almost funnier that the jokes are paced with some distance between them, allowing them to break the tension when they reappear, and the emotional whiplash of it all is part of the fun. ” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Oct 23: Evilspeak (1981)

“A young, baby-faced Clint Howard stars as a military academy misfit who summons Satan to smite his bullies using the Latin translation software on the school computer.  It’s a dual-novelty horror that cashes in on the personal desktop computer & Satanic Panic trends of its era, combining badass practical gore spectacles with proto-Lawnmower Man computer graphics.  It isn’t long before the prematurely bald Baby Clint graduates from translating Latin phrases from a Satanic priest’s diary to asking the computer dangerous questions like ‘“’What elements do I need for a Black Mass?’”’ and ‘“’What are the keys to Satan’s magic?’”’, stoking parents’ technological and religious fears with full aggression.  And the third-act gore spectacle he unleashes with those questions is gorgeously disgusting.” Currently streaming on Shudder.

Oct 24: Barbarian (2022)

“Some fun, fucked-up Discomfort Horror that Malignantizes the post-torture porn cruelty of titles like Don’t Breathe into something new & exciting.  It also has the best end-credits needle drop since You Were Never Really Here, leaving the audience in a perversely upbeat mood despite the Hell we just squirmed through.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Max.

Oct 25: Skinamarink (2023)

“Simultaneously a familiar experience and an alien one, mixing generic horror tropes with an experimental sensibility – like a Poltergeist remake guided by the spirit of Un Chien Andalou.  It’s the kind of loosely plotted, bad-vibes-only, liminal-space horror that requires the audience to meet it halfway both in emotional impact and in logical interpretation.  In the best-case scenario, audiences will find traces of their own childhood nightmares in its darkened hallways & Lego-piece art instillations.  Personally, I was more hung up on the way it evokes two entirely separate eras of my youth: my alone-time online as a sleep-starved teen and my alone-time in front of cathode TVs as a sleep-starved tyke a decade earlier.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Shudder.

Oct 26: Gaslight (1944)

“Before pressing play I was skeptical this would be enough of a Horror Film to work as proper Halloween season viewing. One of the first shots is a newspaper headline that reads ‘STRANGLER STILL AT LARGE!'” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and The Criterion Channel.

Oct 27: The Woman in Black (2012)

“Super scary, both as a traditional Gothic ghost story and as a worst-case-scenario vision of Daniel Radcliffe’s career path as a bland leading man instead of an eccentric weirdo millionaire.” Currently streaming on Paramount+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.

Oct 28: House (1986)

“The surprisingly goofy midway point between Poltergeist and Jacob’s Ladder. Can’t quite match the euphoric highs of either comparison, but it’s still a fun dark-ride attraction of its own merit. The rubber-mask monsters are adorably grotesque, and they pop out of the most surprising places.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Amazon Prime, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.

OCT 29: Dr. Giggles (1992)

“A deliciously trashy VHS slasher where every single kill comes with its own punny quip.  You hardly have time to question why they call him Dr. Giggles before he’s performing involuntary open-heart surgery while giggling like a madman and proclaiming ‘”‘Laughter is the best medicine.'”‘ It has no idea how to fill the time between the kill gags, but it really delivers the goods where it counts.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 30: The Suckling (1990)

“A kind of anti-choice, pro-environmentalist creature feature where an aborted, toxically mutated fetus gets its revenge on the brothel-clinic that brought it into this sick, sad world.  It’s not a perfect movie but it’s a perfect This Kind Of Movie, delivering everything you could possibly want to see out schlock of its ilk: a wide range of rubber monster puppets, over-the-top character work, stop-motion buffoonery, and multiple opportunities to feel greatly offended while never being able to exactly pinpoint its politics. Wonderfully fucked up stuff.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.

Oct 31: The Beyond (1981)

“I always assumed we didn’t have basements in Louisiana because we’re built on mushy swampland. Turns out it’s because we’re built on seven gateways to Hell. Honestly makes a lot more sense.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Peacock, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.

-The Swampflix Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Massacre at Central High (1976)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the roughly prototypical high school slasher Massacre at Central High (1976).

00:00 Welcome

03:23 Hot Shots! (1991)
11:22 A Haunting in Venice (2023)
19:11 Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
26:55 They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
32:55 Curse of Chucky (2013)

38:55 Massacre at Central High (1976)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Enys Men (2023)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Mark Jenkin’s psychedelic, seaside folk horror Enys Men (2023).

00:00 Welcome
00:36 GalaxyCon Austin 2023

09:38 Missions: Impossible 1 – 4 (2000 – 2011)
17:15 Barbie (2023)
21:53 Triangle of Sadness (2022)
30:23 Turtles Forever (2009)
35:35 Oldboy (2003)

46:35 Enys Men (2023)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Dr. Caligari (1989)

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The Criterion Channel has been spoiling me like a little brat all year, handfeeding me cult cinema curios I’ve been desperate to see forever but could never get my hands on through official channels: The Doom Generation, Kamikaze Hearts, Demonlover, Flaming Ears, and the list goes on.  The pummeling rhythm of those dopamine hits have slowed to a trickle in recent months, though, so I’m seeking out my cult classic wishlist items in other venues.  Thankfully, there are a thousand vintage genre-film Blu-ray labels happy to take money from an addict, and I recently scored another notoriously hard-to-find schlock relic off of the trash-hero distro Mondo Macabre.  Their recent 4k restoration of the 1989 absurdist horror sequel Dr. Caligari did not disappoint.  It’s less of a New Wave update of the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari than it is a guided tour of the inside of my mind, hosted by a vintage dominatrix with an academic appreciation of Camp.  The second major Caligari revision after the 1920 original (following a Hitchcockian psychodrama version from 1962), this Totally 80s™ take on the story reimagines German Expressionist tropes & aesthetics as MTV era sleaze.  Not to damn it with hyperbole, but it is cinema perfected. 

Given the resume of director Stephen “Rinse Dream” Sayadian (Cafe Flesh, Nightdreams), it might be more appropriate to compare Dr. Caligari‘s spare sets & heightened aesthetics to video store pornography rather than music video artistry.  The handbuilt, absurdly geometric art design and smoke-machine clouded sound stages are pure MTV movie magic, though, imagining a world where Devo scored an adults-only episode of Pee-wee’s Fuckhouse.  Any list of its nearest stylistic comparison points could also be found scribbled in a late-80s art school weirdo’s discarded notebook: the Elfman brothers’ live-action cartoon playground Forbidden Zone; Tim Burton’s higher-budget refinement of Ed Woodian artifice; John Waters’s purposefully overwritten, underperformed brays of dialogue; David Lynch’s eerie atmospheric dissonance.  The angular, poised performances resemble voguing more than acting, preceding Madonna’s appropriation of the trend by at least a year.  There’s even a Cronenbergian flesh wall that kisses its victims back with full tongue.  All of this up-to-date 80s Weirdo posturing is at least anchored to overt references to ancient filmmaking aesthetics, including the fellation of a Wizard of Oz scarecrow, a villainous combination of Marlene Dietrich & Ethyl Merman, and the obvious German Expressionist touches referenced in its title.  It could have only been made in the glory days of early MTV, but its secret weapon is tying that moment to a larger continuum of wet-nightmare cinema – a long, throbbing history of populist art for perverts.

Still, Dr. Caligari‘s plot is befitting of a Rinse Dream porno, and its hyperfixation on women’s orgasms and bare breasts pushes it to the fuzzy borders of softcore.  It’s not a porno parody of the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari so much as it’s a long-gestating sequel.  The titular villain is the granddaughter of the original Caligari, running his legacy insane asylum with newly radical, perverted tactics more befitting of a dominatrix than a psychiatrist.  Her most treasured patient is an oversexed suburban housewife whose Reaganite husband fears his spouse’s “diseased libido.”  Caligari feigns to cure the monstrously horny woman by experimenting with “hormonal interfacing,” but in truth she’s tinkering with ways to weaponize her patient’s sex drive against the men who cower from it.  Caligari’s true lab work involves “hypothalamus injections” that allow her to directly transplant brain fluid—and, thus, character traits—from one patient/victim to another.  It’s a two-part plan that would allow her to fully claim power over her psych ward fiefdom: first by transplanting the horned-up housewife sex drive of her star patient into the minds of all of her professional nemeses, then by injecting the incredible mental powers of her legendary grandfather into her own mind, becoming unstoppable amidst the chaos.  Things do not go according to plan, and her various injections from a “nympholepsy” poisoned mind into her enemies’ hypothalamuses eventually tears down the walls of the Caligari Insane Asylum for good, simply because everyone around her is too horny to control.

If Dr. Caligari is sincerely “about” anything, it’s about Reagan Era suburban fears of sex, particularly of women’s desire & pleasure.  In that context, its spare, post-Apocalyptic set design appears to be a nuked-to-oblivion wasteland rather than a rented LA soundstage.  The nuclear family unit has died from the slow radiation poisoning of the Cold War, leaving the men in charge terrified that the women below them will climb the ladder of chaos in the rubble.  Transplanting those women’s scary libidos into the men’s fragile, fearful minds induces a distinct gender dysphoria horror, erasing their power at the top of the Patriarchy by erasing their manhood altogether.  There’s always a question of whether this is pointed political commentary, an indulgence in softcore forced feminization pornography or, most likely, a purely aesthetic provocation with no guiding sense of purpose.  Every line reading is an act of sarcastic poetry & performance art, putting each overt political statement and subconscious expression of sexual id in gigantic square quotes.  It’s a very specific brand of jaded, ironic, hedonistic fashionista posturing that will test the patience of the sound of mind and pure of heart.  However, if you are impure of heart & libido, you’re likely to fall in love with it, especially in its new, crisp presentation from Mondo Macabre. 

-Brandon Ledet

Cuddly Toys (2023)

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They grow up so fast!  It seems like just yesterday Kansas Bowling was a teenage backyard filmmaker making horror-blog headlines with her debut feature B.C. Butcher, like the Tromaville equivalent of Lights Camera Jackson.   Now she’s an all-growed-up twentysomething edgelord, touring the country with her mondo genre throwback Cuddly Toys – officially graduating from enfant to enfant terrible.  Bowling’s recent visit to New Orleans felt like a mandatory cultural event even though I generally hate the retro mondo movies Cuddly Toys spoofs & subverts; I just had to see what other local schlock gobblers are excited about her work, since the things I knew her from felt so obscure: the aforementioned caveman slasher comedy B.C. Butcher, the Jackass style gorilla-on-the-loose slasher comedy Psycho Ape, and an excellent, years-old episode of the sorely missed Switchblade Sisters podcast in which she eloquently praises the psychedelic Monkees vehicle Head.  That curiosity led me somewhat astray, trapping me in a small theater with boisterous horror-bro laughter at some of the cruelest, gnarliest violence in Cuddly Toys, then forcing me to confront the possibility that some of that sour humor was intentional on the director’s end – given that she seems to have a genuine appreciation for the mondo schlock of olde.  You could even feel her genuine mondo appreciation in the film’s traveling road show presentation, which was likely inspired by mainstream distributors being weary of touching such sordid material but also feels true to the regional exhibition of the genre’s grindhouse heyday.

To be fair, Cuddly Toys isn’t as purely exploitative as vintage mondo schlock like Mondo Cane, Faces of Death, or whatever obscure, racist cannibalsploitation relic your friend’s scuzzy older brother dared you to watch at an unsupervised sleepover.  Bowling appears onscreen as “Professor Kansas Bowling”, recent graduate of teen-life university, narrating a feature-length slideshow with the same faux-educational tone of vintage mondo.  Her presentation includes references to distinctly 2010s teen life but is shot on 16mm film stock to match the look of her satirical target.  Her “academic” lecture to the clueless parents of America is pitched as a scare film about their teen daughter’s delinquent behavior when they leave the relative safety of home.  In practice, she’s “documenting” the horrific daily life of the typical teenage girl by mixing real-life interviews about rape & misogynist abuse with comically exaggerated depictions of rape & misogynist abuse. Like in true mondo tradition, it’s difficult to parse out what authentic snippets of real life are lurking in the exploitation sleaze bucket that swallows it, except now you also have to parse out what’s intended as irony vs what’s sincere.  Also in true mondo tradition, I often hated the experience of watching it, even though I’m hopelessly attracted to vintage sexploitation of its ilk (of which only Russ Meyer’s Mondo Topless is innocent).  Every time I watch a 70s grindhouse relic for the first time, I always brace myself for sexual assault imagery that lingers a couple beats past making its point, and Cuddly Toys is queasily accurate to that tradition, even if its point is nobler than the vintage films it mimics.

And yet, I can’t totally dismiss the bratty outsider-art feminism of this D.I.Y. bombthrower.  Cuddly Toys makes admirable gestures to link the sexual violence of subcultural teen life in the 1970s with subcultural teen life now, even directly referencing Marilyn Manson’s despicable revival of the stadium-rock groupie era.  Despite ostensibly being structured as an academic lecture, it also does a good job of avoiding direct moralist instruction, both by muddling its Feminism 101 talking points with shocks of edgelord irony and by intercutting its testimonials and re-enactments in a deliberately messy, experimental editing style.  Somewhere in all its shock-value leering of underage sex & misogynist violence, there’s an earnest, soul-deep interest in the inner lives of American teen girls, recalling Lauren Greenfield’s portraiture of Californian teens in the 1990s.  It can be outright beautiful in individual, intimate moments, often straying from the mondo genre send-up at hand to promote Bowling’s side hustle as a prolific music video director.  In general, I found Cuddly Toys much more compelling as a sketchbook-in-motion for Bowling’s loose assemblage of Movie Ideas than as a satirical mondo throwback.  It appeared to be shot over several years in cities as far-spanning as LA, NYC, Vegas, and Mexico City, automatically making it a much denser & more personal work than B.C. Butcher, which was shot in a single week just outside Bowling’s childhood home.  In its best form, it functions as a kind of avant-garde travel diary, which is fitting for a movie in which a loose collection of wayward teens read semi-fictional selections from their own personal diaries, documented in their densely over-decorated bedrooms.

All of my self-conflicted handwringing about this film’s various failures & successes results from watching a director I find fascinating dabble in a genre I find distasteful.  Distastefulness appears to be a personal interest of Bowling’s, though, so I can’t fault her for trying to mine something politically powerful out of the vintage schlock she watches for fun.  For my sake, I hope her revival of kitsch genre relics leads her to make something more akin to nudie cuties than roughies in the future, but that’s an entirely selfish impulse.  Judging by the alternation between howling laughter and stunned silence in that Cuddly Toys audience, it’s apparent she has plenty enthusiastic devotees to what she’s already accomplishing – way more than I thought to expect.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the psychedelic daylight horror Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), a New England ghost story.

00:00 Welcome

02:14 The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982)
08:50 Dr. Strangelove (1964)
15:45 The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future (2023)
25:30 Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)
35:55 Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol 3 (2023)
44:50 Invincible (2001)

51:20 Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

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

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Talk to Me (2023)

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The buzzy Aussie horror Talk to Me is being marketed & distributed by A24 in the US, which is likely setting misguided expectations for it as an “A24 Horror” film.  The independently produced demonic possession flick does dabble in themes typical to A24 Metaphor Horror, but its scares are much more direct, brutal, and ultimately conventional than the atmospheric slow-burn creepouts audiences have come to expect from the studio.  In truth, Talk to Me builds a solid bridge between two prominent horror trends of the moment: Grief Metaphor horror (Hereditary, The Babadook, The Blackcoat’s Daughter, etc.) and social media peer pressure horror (Unfriended, Truth or Dare, Host, Ma, etc.).  It falls somewhere between the artsy atmospherics of A24’s tastes as a curator and the trashier gimmickry of the Blumhouse brand, with the only apt comparison point on the former’s roster being last year’s bloody Gen-Z satire Bodies Bodies Bodies – another tonal outlier.  In either case, Talk to Me is novel enough in its mythology and brutal enough in its unflinching violence to earn a spot somewhere in the modern horror canon, even if it treads in the liminal waters between the genre’s artsiest & trashiest contemporary impulses.

Talk to Me‘s take on the horrors of social media is much more sharply defined than its demonic possession tropes or its ruminations on grief.  It’s effectively a “TikTok challenge” horror, except instead of doing a silly dance or chomping on a Tide pod, teens pressure each other to communicate with the dead.  Their doorway to the spiritual world is a ceramic hand: an instantly iconic prop that summons wayward ghouls when you shake it in greeting and say, “Talk to me.”  Going a step further, the teens invite those ghouls to possess their bodies for the LOLs, with all of their friends and casual acquaintances filming their freaky behavior for short-term video content.  So, the demons that sneak into the real world through this open doorway aren’t directly tied to the cultural menace of social media, but the youthful desire for attention from peers on social media is what keeps the door open long enough for things to get out of hand (literally).  The way those house party seances are lit by the searing, hungry eyes of smart phone cameras is often way more chilling & upsetting than the grotesque gore gags that result from the teens encouraging each other to play with powers they don’t comprehend.  There are much tighter stomach knots tied by the embarrassment of what the ghouls make the teens’ bodies do on camera than by the lethal torment they devise in private.

The social media peer pressure scares of Talk to Me are bookended by much more expected, routine methods of modern horror.  On the front end, our doomed lead (Sophie Wilde) is given a standard-issue reason to push her communication with the dead a little too far, to her friends’ demise; she’s grieving the death of her suicidal mother.  On the back end, the demons that grief unleashes act in the exact way you’d expect in a modern losing-grip-with-reality metaphor horror, give or take one standout hallucinatory vision inspired by The Shunt.  There’s no reason to hold it against any horror film for following the pre-set beats of its genre, though, especially not when the central mythology is this concisely clever and the violence is this excruciatingly cruel.  Talk to Me is clearly a step above recent by-the-numbers mainstream horrors about mental health crises like Smile or Lights Out, even if it’s not typical to the glacial abstractions synonymous with A24 branding.  At the very least, director-brothers Danny & Michael Phillipou’s shared background as shock value YouTube pranksters shows in the film’s sharp eye for social media menace, and their commitment to making sure that menace results in some truly gnarly on-screen violence is exactly what makes this the feel-bad movie of the summer.

-Brandon Ledet

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)

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Kids are scary. I say this as a reformed “I hate kids” person (thanks for helping me see the ignorance of my ways, Tara Mooknee), just to make it clear that I don’t mean it that way, and I don’t mean it in the way that most single-income-no-kids people intend either. Not that I think kids are great, either; I moved into a small multi-household complex of single bedroom units intentionally because it greatly reduces the chance that I will have to see or interact with children, or that I will have to deal with the building’s pool being filled with the shrill sound of kids’ joy all summer long. I also have been heard to bemoan the fact that many places my friends and I used to hang out are now more family-dense; my favorite cafe, once a place of refuge and Sunday morning recovery over greasy breakfast tacos, now hosts a kids band (in the Wiggles sense, not the Jackson 5 sense) on some Sundays. If you’re unlucky enough that you pick the wrong time to go to one of my favorite outdoor watering holes that happens to have a great burger truck, pupal humans range freely and run around in the gravel despite the placards at each table asking patrons to mind their children, with the reminder “We are still technically a bar!” But, considering how few of these kids are going to get the chance to grow up, either because they’ve got a date with gun violence destiny or because we’ve got maybe ten years left before widespread crop failure from climate change starves most of us, I have much more pity and sympathy in my heart than disgust these days. What I mean when I say “kids are scary” is that being around other people’s children naturally makes people anxious and nervous, or at least that’s my experience. What if they trip and fall while running past my table at a cafe? Do I suddenly become responsible for their well being? What if the parent thinks I tripped them? What if the kid thinks I tripped them and blames me? Kids are tiny, vulnerable people, but they also have a capability for pure, unfiltered malice that can be creepy as well, and since they’re only just learning how to regulate their emotions and communicate their thoughts, interaction with them can be a minefield. 

There’s Something Wrong with the Children is probably the first film that I’ve ever seen that captures that particular unease. Childless couple Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) and Ben (Zach Gilford) are on a glamping trip with Margaret’s best friend Ellie (Amanda Crew), her husband Thomas (Carlos Santos), and their children, upper elementary aged Lucy (Briella Guiza) and younger boy Spencer (David Mattle). Each couple has their own issues; a recent experimentation with swinging has rendered Ellie and Thomas emotionally raw, and while Margaret remains supportive of her husband despite his ongoing struggles with his mental health, that very issue makes her hesitant to start a family with him, especially as it recently cost him a job. The scenes in which we spend time with these characters, to bear witness to their chemistry and the way that they feel comfortable with and play off of one another, is time well spent, unlike in many such films where such exposition feels forced and long-winded. There’s something very natural about the casual, easy way that they all interact that lends the film a level of verisimilitude that makes what comes next that much more wrenching. On a hike, the sextet finds some ruins which they enter and explore, eventually stumbling upon a circular pit that descends so deep into the earth that the bottom is invisible, and even a rock dropped into it never seems to hit bottom. The two kids are immediately entranced by it, with Spencer even calling it the place where light comes from, despite the fact that there’s no light inside of it, and Ben has to catch the boy before he falls/steps into the hole. That night, Margaret offers to let the kids spend the night in the cabin she and Ben are occupying, so that Thomas and Ellie can have some romantic time, and the latter couple accepts. Although the kids exhibit some odd behavior (at one point, Spencer hisses at Ben like some kind of animal when the latter refuses to take the boy back to the ruins that night), it’s chalked up to their age and dismissed pleasantly enough. The next morning, the kids aren’t in the bedroom, and Margaret and Ben both begin looking for them, with Ben jogging back up the previous day’s hike path to the ruins to see if the kids are there; he finds them standing at the precipice, and to his dismay, they leap into its maw. Horror-stricken, he returns to the camp in shock, unsure of how to tell the others the awful truth… only for the kids to come running out of their parents’ cabin, seemingly perfectly healthy. 

Ben’s discomfort and, later, terror throughout Act II is palpable, and felt very real to me. Being responsible for someone else’s child, especially for those of us who don’t have a lot of experience with children (I didn’t even “get” other kids when I was a kid), can create a real sense of dread, especially when there’s a possibility of danger. I never had any younger siblings but when I was a teenager, I would babysit my younger twin cousins, who were 7 or 8 at the time. Both of them were much more energetic and rebellious than I could really handle (one of them I found riding her bike down the street during her nap, having climbed out of her window in a tantrum). Although many of my friends have had children in the intervening years and I’ve spent lots of time with those kids and even been a godparent, I’ve still never really gotten the hang of kids; it’s my great hope that my goddaughter sees me like Daria’s cool aunt, but I get the feeling that my discomfort with children comes through and I’m just like Seven of Nine with every child that I encounter. The only thing I do seem well-suited for that some real parents struggle with is understanding where the things that they verbalize may come from. I’ve seen countless listicles over the years that gather various “creepy” things that kids have said to their parents, and I can see how a child talking about an imaginary friend in an unclear way can make people who grew up reading Scary Stories to Read in the Dark interpret their child’s imaginative play as being spooky or ghostly. Although I think a basic understanding of child psychology explains these little creepy tidbits away, I understand the knee-jerk fright response as well. Children are pure id, have no filter, possess limited language skills, and are learning about the world, so they can say shit that sounds like it’s coming out of the mouth of the devil himself while looking like innocence incarnate, but that’s not really uncommon or even abnormal. This also contributes to the paranoia at the heart of Ben’s narrative arc: he never doubts that what he’s experiencing is objectively real, but everyone around him does and we in the audience must as well. Maybe the kids are possessed, or he could just as easily be having a psychological break that is making the common (but not not creepy) behavior of children seem like malicious supernatural evil. 

Of course, being a Blumhouse movie, the children are possessed. Both child actors do quite well in their roles, with Spencer as the more impulsive of the two while Lucy’s malevolence is more restrained; their evil rictus grins are very effective, and the way that they can turn from tauntingly wicked to simpering victims depending upon the audience is very scary. Working in tandem, they first make Ben appear to be losing his self-control and sense of reality, then they frame him for violent behavior. There’s a midstream protagonist swap here as the story then moves to focus more on Margaret, as she watches her husband (seemingly) lose his mind and attack her best friend’s kids, and then the film becomes a more standard cabin-in-the-woods scare flick as the adults are separated and picked off one by one until only Margaret is left standing to try and escape. Surprisingly, this tonal shift actually worked rather well for me; up to that point, I was definitely experiencing Ben’s discomfort with the situation, but wasn’t fully won over by the film. Normally the psychological elements are what are more fascinating to me, but once the ball gets rolling with more traditional horror scares, my estimation of the movie was kicked up a notch or two, and Margaret makes for a compelling final girl, especially once Ben becomes fairly catatonic from the horrors of what he’s witnessed. 

This is director Roxanne Benjamin’s sophomore feature, but if her name sounds familiar to you, you may remember her segment Don’t Fall from the anthology film XX. There’s Something Wrong with the Children feels like a more successful attempt at telling that story, which also featured a group of campers stumbling across something otherworldly and one of them becoming inhabited by something evil and then killing the others, but that’s not a criticism. Don’t Fall, because of its brevity, was naturally more scant on characterization, which is one of this film’s strengths; when the relationships between the adults start to fall apart because of the deceptive activity of whatever has a hold on the children. I also really like the choice to have the ruins in this film be something constructed relatively recently; the hikers don’t come upon a sacred burial ground or (as in Don’t Fall) an ancient cave painting warning of some primordial evil. This is a post-colonial structure built from familiar brick and mortar, which the adults theorize may have been a factory that was part of the fur trapper trade or a decommissioned and abandoned military site. There’s a symmetry between the way that the building has been grown over with plants and vegetation and the way that this bottomless pit seems to have wormed its way up into this building, like a long-buried secret that forced its way up in the same way that weeds pop up through cracks in sidewalk. The mystery of the pit’s origin is never explained, nor are we given solid information about what exactly Lucy and Spencer brought back with them. There’s something vaguely insectoid about the kids after their transformation, as sometimes their shadows exhibit Caelifera like wings and heads, and the “secret language” that the two use with each other from that point forward sounds like cicada song, but they’re also clearly demonic in nature as well. There’s some fun foreshadowing of that in all of this as well, from a metal shirt that Ellie wears with the word “devil” on it, to Spencer and Lucy’s fascination with some kind of customizable card game and especially Lucy’s mention of her favorite card, which depicts a serpentine god that devours souls, to Ben’s gift to Spencer of the juggling sticks colloquially referred to as “devil sticks,” to the cartoony triangular cat ears on the hood of Lucy’s red jacket, which also resemble horns. Yellow mountain pansies also play a role somehow, but it’s left mysterious as well. 

Of course, this is yet another one of those films which has seen a huge backlash of 1-star, complaint-filled, repetitive negative reviews. I’m almost to the point in my life where I feel like the blurb reviews from the general public are an algorithmically-driven outrage manufacturing experiment to make me hate young people by exaggerating the stereotypes about their expectations and attention spans. One reviewer really had the gall to say “The movie had a lot of unnecessary conversations and plot points,” which is an almost perfect distillation of the addle-brained post-“Why didn’t the eagles just fly the ring to Mordor?” discourse that’s so common now. That’s what the movie is, my guy. The conversations aren’t unnecessary; they’re the point. “Money would of [sic] been better off going to the homeless,” another person wrote, while another review reads “It absolutely didn’t explain the whole reason of [sic] the children being Psycho about holes [sic] at all.” A slightly more positive review reads “Nothing is [sic] this movie is explained to the viewer that gives us knowledge [sic] to know why things are happening.” This unwillingness to accept ambiguity feels like a bigger issue than just some bad reviews on the internet, to be honest; this feels like some real “decline of empire” shit. For me, the well-like shape of the pit and the supposed glow within it called to mind Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, so in my mind I’m like “Oh, it’s inexplicable and eldritch,” and then I just enjoy the movie. Even if you don’t subscribe to that interpretation, there’s plenty of devilish symbolism, but you’re not going to catch Ellie’s t-shirt or Lucy’s jacket or the dialogue about the card game if you’re only half-watching the movie with your fucking phone in your hand. The movie is only “boring” to you because you’ve been taking psychic damage from a commercially corrupted, consumption driven internet for the past fifteen years. 

Diatribe over (for now). I’ve had this one on the backburner for a little while now, and when a friend’s birthday night swim was called off because of severe thunderstorms, it was the perfect atmosphere for this viewing. If you can’t recreate that exactly, I recommend getting as close to it as you can, put your phone on the charger in the other room, and enjoy.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Candy Land (2023)

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Whether it’s to avoid dating itself with the rapidly evolving technology of smartphones & social media or if it’s to avoid the practical problem-solving that modern tech offers, a lot of contemporary horror drags its settings back to earlier, grimier eras of the genre’s past.  Personally, I’m getting bored with how much current horror product is an echo of 1970s grindhouse & 1980s neon sleaze. That nostalgic impulse is getting really shortsighted in its avoidance of documenting & processing the world we actually live in now, if not outright cowardly & lazy.  So, if most contemporary horror has to live in the past for narrative convenience, I’m going to be more excited to see movies set outside that genre heyday of the first slasher wave.  For instance, the recent slasher prequel Pearl is inherently more interesting than its grimy sister film X, since its own tongue-in-cheek genre pastiche of Technicolor melodramas is way less familiar & less overmined than the grindhouse Texas Chainsaw riff it followed.  The same goes for the truck stop sex worker slasher Candy Land, which is set in the grunge & grime of the mid-1990s, after the first slasher wave crested and the second, meta-comedic wave began post-Scream.  As soon as the film opens with a montage of transactional sex scenes set to Porno for Pyros’ “Pets,” it already feels like a much-needed break from the digitally added 1970s grain and the Carpenter-nostalgic 1980s synths of its fellow low-budget festival horrors, which have long been a matter of routine.

What endears me most to Candy Land‘s grunge-90s setting is that it doesn’t appear to be nostalgic about past horror trends at all.  It’s instead nostalgic for the film festival boom of the Sundance era that made names like Soderbergh, Araki, and Haynes stars of the indie scene.  Candy Land starts as a very cool, loose hangout dramedy about the daily rituals of truck stop sex workers (or “lot lizards” in CB radio lingo) before it gradually turns into a rigidly formulaic slasher to pay the bills.  The true glory days of independent filmmaking are over, and most low-budget productions that want to score wide distribution have to resort to flashy genre gimmicks to earn streaming sales on the festival market.  And so, we have a workplace drama that opens with sex work and ends with murder, holding back the necessary kill rhythms of a body count slasher as long as it can until it’s time to deliver the goods.  Unlike most slashers that dive headfirst into the bloodbath, that delayed payoff allows you space to care about the characters in peril: a good-girl-gone-bad played by The Deuce‘s Olivia Luccardi, a sweetheart hedonist gigolo played by X‘s Owen Campbell, a shit-heel sheriff played by Sliver‘s Billy Baldwin, etc.  There’s a built-in tension & danger in the main characters’ profession that makes for a great horror setting (something it’s most frank about in an extensive, brutal scene of male-on-male rape), but writer-director John Swab appears to be more interested in making a truck stop Working Girls than a truck stop Friday the 13th.  I admire his practicality.  Not everyone gets to be Sean Baker; sometimes you gotta cosplay as Rob Zombie to land your funding. 

Candy Land excels more in its minor character observations than in the tension release of its cathartic violence.  It’s set in an insular world where all sex is transactional, all sexuality is fluid, and all cops are bastards.  The truck stop brothel has a grunge-fashionista uniform of leather jackets, acrylic nails, booty shorts, and heavy metal t-shirts.  The girls shower, menstruate, and parade puffs of pubic & armpit hair in defiantly casual, thoughtless exhibitionism.  There’s a pronounced overlap in the rules & rituals of working the truck stop and the rules & rituals of the fundamentalist Christian cult Luccardi’s newbie abandoned to get there, both with their own built-in, complex lingo.  There’s also some unmistakable political commentary in which of those two insular cults proves to be harmful to the community at large – first to the johns, then to the workers.  Its Christmastime setting underlines the tension between those two warring worlds with a bitter irony that’s been present in the slasher genre as far back as its pre-Halloween landmark Black Christmas.  The movie might have been more rewarding if it didn’t have to sweep aside its observations of social minutia to make room for bloody hyperviolence, but I doubt it could’ve been widely distributed or even made at all without that genre hook.  At least Swab didn’t default to the industry’s current go-to setting for that horror hook; he instead recalls a brighter time in indie filmmaking when you could make a notable, low-key sex worker drama without having to hit a specific body count metric.

-Brandon Ledet

The Suckling (1990)

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One of the things I look forward to most every Overlook Film Fest is their vendor partnership with Vinegar Syndrome, who usually bring a table of pervy, schlocky products to peddle in the festival’s shopping mall lobby.  There are certainly cheaper ways to shop for Vinegar Syndrome titles; the boutique Blu-ray label is infamous in genre-nerd circles for their generous Black Friday sales.  Still, that annual trip to the Vinegar Syndrome table at Overlook is the closest feeling I still get to browsing the Cult section at long-defunct video rental stores like Major Video. There’s just no beating the physical touch of physical media. The staff always points me to titles I would’ve overlooked if I were just scrolling on their website, too, which is how I got around to seeing gems like Nightbeast & Fleshpot on 42nd Street in the past.  Sidestepping the shipping costs doesn’t hurt either.  Vinegar Syndrome has never before complimented my Overlook experience quite as decisively nor directly as it did this year, though, when the vendor rep nudged me into picking up a copy of the early-90s creature feature The Suckling.  It was perfect timing, since I had just wandered from a screening of the couture-culture body horror Appendage, which featured a great rubber monster puppet but had no real grit or texture to it elsewhere.  You could feel the audience pop every time the retro, gurgling monster appeared onscreen, which unfortunately becomes less frequent as the film chases down mental health metaphors instead of practical-effects gore gags.  I liked Appendage okay, but I left it starving for more rubber monster mayhem, which that Blu-ray restoration of The Suckling immediately supplied in grotesque HD excess.  God bless Vinegar Syndrome for coming through that night and, for balance, Hail Satan too.

While The Suckling may have a major advantage over Appendage in its commitment to rubber-monster puppetry, it’s an extremely inferior product in terms of political rhetoric.  Instead of pursuing a thoughtful, responsible representation of women’s bottled-up familial, romantic, and professional frustrations in the modern world, The Suckling pursues a politically reckless subversion of women’s right to choose.  Only, I don’t get the sense that it meant to say anything coherently political at all.  This is a kind of anti-choice, pro-environmentalist creature feature where an aborted, toxically mutated fetus gets its revenge on the brothel-clinic that brought it into this sick, sad world.  It knows that abortion is enough of a hot-button political issue to grab jaded, seen-it-all horror audiences’ attention, but it doesn’t know what to do with that thorny subject except to milk it for easy shock value.  The illegal dumping of toxic waste that mutates the aborted fetus into the titular monster is just as much of underbaked political messaging, a boneheaded matter of course that got no more thoughtful consideration than its knock-off John Carpenter score.  The Suckling uses abortion as lazy rage-bait marketing, even going as far as to hand out fake, miniature aborted fetuses in jars as mementos during its original New Jersey grindhouse run.  Personally, I found being offended by the movie’s amorphous politics part of its grimy charm. It’s not a full-on Troma style edgelord comedy at pregnant women’s expense, but it’s still playing with thematic heft that’s way out of its depth as a dumb-as-rocks monster flick.  By contrast, Appendage is way more coherent & agreeable politically but loses a lot of texture by prioritizing that agreeability over its titular monster, and The Suckling is way more memorable in its commitment to political tastelessness.

Set in 1970s Brooklyn to make its indulgence in post-Halloween slasher tedium feel relevant to the plot, The Suckling follows a young, timid couple’s visit to a seedy brothel that doubles as an illegal abortion clinic.  Once their fetus is flushed down the toilet by the clinic’s nursetitutes, it’s greeted by illegally dumped toxic waste in Brooklyn’s sewers, then rapidly evolves like a flesh-hungry Pokémon until it becomes a Xenomorphic killing machine.  Its fetal killing powers are supernatural and vaguely defined, turning the brothel-clinic into a womblike prison by covering all the doors & windows with fleshy membrane so it can hunt down its freaked-out prisoners one at a time.  Once Skinamrinked in this liminal space for days on end, the Suckling’s victims turn on one another in violent fits of cabin fever, to the point where their infighting has a higher kill count than the monster attacks.  The sex workers are, of course, the highlights among the cast, especially the mafiosa madame Big Mama and her world-weary star employee Candy, who frequently fires off nihilistic zingers like “I hope we die in this fucking sewer” as if she were telling knock-knock jokes.  The only time we see them at work is before the Suckling gets loose in the house’s plumbing, in a scene where a teenage dominatrix pegs a jackass businessman with a vibrator wand while rolling her eyes in boredom.  Otherwise, they’re just killing time between Suckling attacks, to the point where the film becomes a kind of perverse hangout comedy in which every joke is punctuated by a violent character death.  The longer they’re trapped in the house the looser the logic gets, taking on a dream-within-a-dream abstraction that had me worried it would end with the abortion-patient mother waking up in the brothel-clinic waiting room and fleeing from the procedure.  Thankfully, the ending goes for something much grander & stranger that I will not do the disservice of describing in text.

The Suckling is not a perfect movie, but it is a perfect This Kind Of Movie, delivering everything you could possibly want to see out of schlock of its ilk: a wide range of rubber monster puppets, over-the-top character work, stop-motion buffoonery, and opportunities to feel offended without ever being able to exactly pinpoint its politics.  It’s New Jersey outsider art, the only directorial credit for local no-namer Francis Teri.  You can feel Teri’s enthusiasm in every frame, just as often resonating in the film’s off-kilter compositions as in its rubber-puppet monster attacks.  I don’t know if it’s the cleaned-up Blu-ray image talking, but The Suckling does feel like it belongs to a higher caliber than most made-on-the-weekends subprofessional horrors of the video store era, turning its cheapness & limited scope into an eerie, self-contained dreamworld instead of an excuse for laziness.  The only place where the film is lazy is in its political messaging, which makes the entire medical practice of abortion look as grotesquely fucked up as how the Texas Chainsaw family runs their slaughterhouse.  And I haven’t even gotten into its hackneyed depiction of mental institutions.  Whether you can overlook that political bonheadedness to enjoy the boneheaded monster action it sets the stage for is a matter of personal taste but, given how hungry the Appendage audience was for more rubber monster puppetry, I assume this movie has plenty potential fans out there who need to seek it out ASAP – whether on Blu-ray or on Tubi.  If anything, there should’ve been a long line in the Overlook lobby leading to the Vinegar Syndrome table where the entire Appendage audience queued up to buy a copy.  It’s wonderfully fucked up stuff, and exactly what I was looking for that night.

-Brandon Ledet