For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss the supernatural horror sequel The Exorcist III (1990), written & directed by the author of the original Exorcist‘s source novel.
Brynn Adams is alone. She doesn’t seem to be all that troubled by it, at least most of the time. She wiles away the hours in the sumptuous country home that she occupies by herself like a woman unstuck in time: she learns decades-old dance steps from numbered diagrams while listening to Ruby Murray’s “Knock On Any Door” from 1956; she designs and creates her own dresses; she’s even recreated the entire town of Mill River in miniature in her living room. When she ventures into the real town, she ducks to avoid certain people, and when she attempts to interact with others, all she gets in return are sneers and frigid shoulders. The closest thing she seems to have to human contact is a mailman who intentionally damages her packages. Brynn’s been alone for a long time, but she’s about to have … visitors.
Kaitlyn Dever, who I really liked in last year’s Rosaline, both stars in and executive produces for No One Will Save You, the sophomore directorial effort from Brian Duffield, who is perhaps best known around these parts for writing The Babysitter. I first became aware of the movie after a screenshot of Stephen King calling the film “Brilliant, daring, involving, [and] scary” as well as “Truly unique,” and I went into it blind, which allowed for me to be pleasantly surprised not only by all of the film’s tiny reveals but also its big one; namely, No One is almost entirely dialogue free. Dever is the only performer who ever gets to speak, and it’s telling that her single impactful line is spoken to no one, or at least to no one who can hear her. That’s not to say that she’s not well developed; in fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this becomes one of those films that achieves cult status through its use as a teaching tool via its masterful adherence to the timeless axion of “Show, don’t tell.” Everything important about Brynn is captured by the filmic eye: the regretful letters she composes to her childhood best friend Maud, her awkward attempts to practice waving and greeting others, her abject terror at the prospect of interacting with a middle-aged couple we later learn are Maud’s parents. The story moves clearly and cleanly without the need for dialogue, as the film cuts seamlessly and smartly between Brynn encountering a situation and her resolution of the same. For instance, in one simple sequence, we watch as Brynn rides her bike into town for help after being unable to start her car, experiencing an extremely unpleasant but nonetheless wordless encounter with Maud’s mother and father (the latter of whom is the chief of police) that reminds her that—as the title tells us—no one will help her, and then immediately cuts to her at a bus station, ticket in hand. There’s no spoon-feeding and there’s no need for it, either.
We eventually learn what happened between Brynn and Maud that left Brynn a pariah in Mill River, and it’s devastating. Outside of the flashbacks that fill this in, however, the film takes place over a brief time frame of only three days and two nights. The first of these nights sees Brynn (sort of) fend off a home invader, who just so happens to be an extraterrestrial. When she finds herself unable to gather assistance or successfully escape town the following day, she prepares to defend herself for a second night, only for the film to perform a little sleight of hand with its genre, transitioning from the home-invasion-with-an-outer-space-twist narrative to a more introspective form of psychological horror, as the aliens attempt to assimilate Brynn into a pod-people collective. Their means to do so involve tempting her to give up her mind and body through visions of a reality where she is no longer bound by the tragedy of her past and no longer missing the things which have been lost to her. When that doesn’t work, the snare she’s in just gets tighter.
This movie lives and/or dies on Kaitlyn Dever’s performance, and it’s a testament to her ability that it soars. The camerawork here is likewise deft in the way that the language of pans and zooms keeps us in Brynn’s headspace so effectively; the touch is so lightweight as to make its capture of all the moving parts appear almost effortless. The visual effects work is also top notch; the aliens feel appropriately otherworldly even if the CGI seams are unavoidable, while the film wisely chooses clever takes on familiar ways of visualizing standard abduction phenomena, borrowing heavily from The X-Files and its use of blinding beams of white light (the abductions of Duane Barry in the second season and Max Fenig in season four come to mind), although it also includes occasional pervasive red lighting that calls to mind the opening of Fire in the Sky. The film moves in novel and exciting ways, and it’s well worth checking out.
Scandinavian cinema has a distinctly fucked up sense of humor to it, so it’s not surprising that two of the year’s best black comedies have been released out of Norway. Kristoffer Borgli’s debut feature Sick of Myself (in which an art-world narcissist medically self-harms for media attention) is the higher profile of the two, already landing the director a buzzy follow-up starring Nic Cage (in Dream Scenario). By contrast, the darkly comic Tinder thriller Good Boy is a much smaller, limited production – restricted to just four characters shooting in four sparse locales. Despite earning a few key critical accolades on the festival circuit (including a coveted spot-on John Waters’s Best Films of the Year list), Sick of Myself is hardly an MCU-scale cultural behemoth worth rooting against in favor of its underfunded underdog. Still, running only 75 minutes and released to zero fanfare, Good Boy is a fucked up little Norwegian romance drama worth championing for its minor, muted victories, at least so director Viljar Bøe might be able to torture audiences on a much bigger scale in his next production. There’s plenty of dark Norwegian humor to go around.
Good Boy might not have a professional-level budget, but it does have a killer hook. It’s a story of unethical puppy play, pulling some uneasy laughs and genuine chills out of the basic discomfort of stumbling into someone else’s elaborate kink scene without context or warning. After scoring a successful Tinder date with a legitimate millionaire, an unsuspecting Psychology student is introduced to her new beau’s unconventional pet: a human man who spends 24/7 in a dog costume. Any cautious probing about the weirdness of keeping a human being as a house pet is outright dismissed by the Norwegian Psycho; he responds to reasonable questions like “What’s his deal?” with “He’s a dog.” Of course, because this is a movie, it turns out the dog’s deal is much sicker than that, and his loving captivity within the millionaire’s household turns out to be less voluntary & consensual than initially let on. Much less. The story gradually devolves into full-on torture porn from there, but much in the way that the equivalent American dating-app thriller Fresh did last year: maintaining a wicked sense of humor throughout. It’s all one big joke about dating a total control freak; he just happens to be a very specific kind of freak.
For all of its kink-scene iconography, Good Boy is less about the degenerate amorality of real-life puppy players than it is about the violent amorality of stubbornly Conservative thinkers, recalling the sickly domesticity of recent titles like Swallow & Hatching. It dodges a lot of the kink-shaming implications of its premise by doubling down on something we can all agree on: the ultra-wealthy are the world’s true degenerate freaks. It undeniably banks on the viewer’s kneejerk discomfort with other people’s private kink play scenarios, though, drawing just as much terror out of the human-dog’s elaborate furry costuming (his mask has a hinged jaw!) as it does out of the violence that keeps him living the fantasy. Speaking personally, the movie didn’t change the way I think about narcissist millionaires, trad homesteaders, or proudly kinky puppy players. However, it did change how I interacted with my dog for the next couple days, causing me to pause while feeding her, pilling her, and getting her ready for bed to consider just how strange of a relationship we have on either side of the pet-owner divide. It may not be an especially deep movie, thematically, but it still made something familiar & routine feel totally alien & horrific in its immediate afterglow, which is all I can really ask for out of a prankish, low-budget horror movie.
I’ve watched a few disparate adaptations & reinterpretations of Beauty and the Beast in recent years, each with their own unique window into the dark magic of the fairy tale: the intensely sensual surrealism of the French version from 1946, the tactile storybook atmospherics of the Czech version from 1979, the Internet Age psychedelia of the animated Japanese version from 2021. All of these retellings of the “tale as old as time” have, of course, touched on the hesitant attraction of an innocent young woman to a wounded, mysterious brute, but they also all ultimately focus more on the brute’s troubled past & cursed homelife than the inner life of the vulnerable beauty who loves him. That’s where Walerian Borowczyk’s take on Beauty and the Beast finds new, forbidden territory worthy to explore (as a French adaptation from a Polish director, as long as we’re tracking geography). A profane masterpiece of erotic menace & goofball social satire, Borowczyk’s perversion of the Beauty of the Beast template delves deeper into the monstrous extremes of women’s desire & pleasure than any other retelling I can name, to the point where the titular beast is merely a prop, a piece of furniture. And wait until you see what the women do to the furniture! The Beast is also singular its smutty eagerness to roll around in its own filth, an instinct that eventually pushes past the absurd into the sublime. It’s the only version of this story I’ve seen that reasonably compares to the 1940s Cocteau film that defines so many adaptations’ basic visual language, mostly because both works were clearly made for abject perverts.
Technically, The Beast is not an adaptation of the 18th century fairy tale at all, at least not in terms of plot. Like the recent anime version in Belle, Borowczyk’s film assumes the audience’s overfamiliarity with the source material, using its basic iconography for shorthand to push & warp its broader themes to new extremes. This is still a story where a young, naive woman is married off to a cursed, wretched beast as a desperate financial ploy, with the deep sadness of their newly shared castle’s faded glory haunting their tentative romance. And just in case you don’t catch his allusions to the fairy tale, Borowczyk hands the beast’s would-be bride a single red rose as a symbol of their delicate union. It’s just that this is the kind of film where the young beauty mashes that rose into her clitoris as an unconventional masturbation tool, destroying it in lustful mania while entertaining a zoological ravishment fantasy that would make even the most jaded cinephile blush. You’d think there’s nothing left that a Beauty and the Beast tale could do to surprise an audience, considering how many times it’s been retold & reshaped over the past few centuries. The Beast dropped my jaw in shock in its very first frame, which zooms in on the textbook veterinary details of equine genital arousal. The movie opens with relentless, repetitive images of erect horse cocks, fairly warning the audience that if you stick around long enough you will watch beasts fuck in intense biological detail. You won’t find that kind of novelty in either of Disney’s retellings of the tale, but Borowczyk’s version has a way of distilling it down to its most essential, throbbing parts.
The beastly beau in this picture is the poorly socialized nephew of a decrepit French baron, living in a Grey Gardens style faded estate in the rot of long-lost wealth. Hoping that a traditional Christian marriage will bring the mysteriously disgraced family back into the royal fold, they arrange for the ancient nobleman’s brother, a highly reputable Cardinal, to ordain his weirdo nephew’s union with a spritely British heiress. Only, the heir to the estate is a hopeless loser, spending every waking moment in the stables overseeing an intensive horse-breeding program with a fervor that pushes beyond the practical to the disturbed. Luckily, his wife-to-be is just as much of a shameless pervert, immediately matching the unholy, decadent vibe of the chateau with her own morbid sexual curiosity. Since her beau is too socially obtuse to understand or reciprocate her enthusiasm, he leaves her sexually frustrated in the absurdly long wait for the Cardinal’s arrival, dead time that she fills with wet dreams of the estate’s sordid history. There are superstitious rumors that a former lady of the house had mated with a cryptid beast who cyclically haunts the grounds every couple centuries, which is supposedly how the family was excommunicated from the Church in the first place. The beauty sweatily reimagines this human-bestial coupling in extensive, graphic detail while furiously masturbating in her bridal nightgown until the poor cloth is ripped to shreds. The horny, mythical beast of the past and the shy, grotesque beast of the present are eventually linked in a last-minute twist, but their connection is far less important than the perverted pleasures of the women who desire their touch (and thrusts).
Before The Beast devolves into full-on cryptid erotica, its value as a unique work gets lost among its many literary parallels, which extend far beyond the fairy tale it most overtly alludes to. The long, pointless wait for the Cardinal’s arrival at the castle plays out as an existential joke, recalling surrealist works like The Exterminating Angel & Waiting for Godot. There are also overt Buñuel parallels in its blasphemous mockery of the wealthy & religious ruling class as degenerate brutes, pushing its satire to de Sadist extremes but never fully matching the heightened Buñuelian humor at hand. The centerpiece of the work really is the pornographic depictions of bestial fucking, then – starting with the horses, working up to more traditional onscreen heterosexual couplings, and then climaxing with the historical ravishment fantasy that swallows up most of the third act. “Climax” is the only word you could really use to describe that payoff, too, since the humanoid wolverine who couples with an actual human being spurts semen by the bucketload for minutes on end as their tryst pushes beyond taste & reason. A faux-classy harpsichord soundtrack keeps the mood lightly comical throughout this absurd display, and it concludes with a punchline in which the Cardinal, finally arrived, performs a grand, fingerwagging speech about the evils of bestiality & women’s libidos as if he were reading from a pre-prepared pamphlet. In the end, it’s the women’s arousal & search for pleasure that registers as the film’s most blasphemous acts, even more so than its extensive depictions of their monstrous ravishment fantasies. They’re greatly enjoying themselves, much to everyone else’s disgust & confusion, which remains a global movie censorship taboo to this day.
Borowczyk finds his own fairy tale visual language here with images that have no obvious connection to the Beauty and the Beast tale: a snail sliming its way across a lady’s sky-blue shoe; lurid flashes of red paint through hallway doors that slyly recall aroused genitals: pornographic close-ups on actual aroused genitals; etc. As soon as his equivalent of Belle arrives on the estate taking dozens of dirty Polaroids of every perverted detail she can collect, it’s clear that he’s taking the story to new, distinct places. Most Belles cower in fear of the erotic menace lurking in their new home castles, gradually warming up to the beast who stalks the grounds. In this version, she’s so immediately fired up by the ugly erotic charge of the central pairing that it freaks out everyone around her, including the audience. A half-century later, it remains a bold, hilarious, intensely alienating take on a story that’s continued to be told countless times since, but rarely with such gleeful prurience.
Welcome to Episode #196 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss four horror films directed by auteurs who only dabbled in the genre once, starting with Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968).
00:00 Welcome
03:07 The Beast (1975) 08:31 No One Will Save You (2023) 10:22 Death of a Cheerleader (2019) 12:18 Night Tide (1961) 16:12 Anchorman (2004) 22:08 Good Boy (2023) 24:19 The Severing (2023)
28:47 Hour of the Wolf (1968) 50:54 Peeping Tom (1960) 1:10:25 Near Dark (1987) 1:27:22 Willow Creek (2013)
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!
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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+.
“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.
“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.
“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 streamingon Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“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+.
“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 streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“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 streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“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 streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“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.
“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+.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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 streamingon Shudder and AMC+.
“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 streamingon Peacock, Screambox, for free (with ads) on Tubi, and for free (with a librarby card) on Kanopy & Hoopla.
“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 streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“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 streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“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+.
“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.
“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 streamingon Shudder.
“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.
“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.
“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 streamingon Amazon Prime and The Criterion Channel.
“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 streamingon Paramount+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“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.
“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 streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“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 streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“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 streamingon Shudder, Peacock, andfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the roughly prototypical high school slasher Massacre at Central High (1976).
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.
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.
