Welcome to Episode #242 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2025, starting with Ryan Coogler’s Southern-fried vampire musical Sinners.
00:00 Welcome
01:37 Mike Flanagan 03:04 Disclosure(1994) 04:50 Brokeback Mountain (2005) 09:53 Smiley Face (2007) 13:15 A Room with a View (1985) 17:01 High Heels (1991) 21:07 Querelle (1982)
25:12 Sinners (2025) 45:04 Companion (2025) 57:57 The Actor (2025) 1:08:58 Dead Talents Society (2025)
Wolf is an oddity. I went on a little bit of a werewolf movie sidequest earlier this year viewing The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Wolfen, and when I borrowed the latter from the library, I thought Mike Nichols’s Wolf was what I was getting. I have very strong memories of the evocative movie poster for this one in at least one of the video stores of my youth, and I’ve always been curious about it. How can you not have some curiosity about a werewolf flick helmed by the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two years before he made The Birdcage? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and James Spader, no less. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly noteworthy one either, which is likely why it gets mistaken for Wolfen.
Will Randall (Nicholson) is the editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house, although he’s a relatively mild-mannered man—at least as mild-mannered as any Nicholson character can be—for someone of such prestige. He has a loving relationship with his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and the respect of his peers and subordinates (David Hyde Pierce, Eileen Atkins), as well as a strong affection for his protege Stewart (James Spader). While driving down a Vermont road one evening, he hits a large dark mammal with his car, and when he gets out to check on it, the beast bites him. Despite his doctor’s insistence that wolves are extinct in New England, Will is convinced that this is what bit him. At a party hosted by the owner of the company, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will is told that a new editor-in-chief has been appointed, and that Will can either transfer to an undesirable position manning the publisher’s office in Eastern Europe. Will immediately realizes that his “best friend” Stewart has stabbed him in the back, and he meets Alden’s daughter Laura (Pfeiffer) as he wanders the grounds, taking in the betrayal. Meanwhile, Will also starts to experience unusual physical changes, as the area around his wound sprouts long fur and his senses grow more enhanced, as he is able to smell tequila on the breath of a colleague, doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t need his glasses to read, and can hear conversations occurring in other parts of the office. Returning home one night, he smells something familiar on his wife’s clothing and confronts Stewart at the younger man’s front door before bounding up the stairs and animalistically and discovering his wife in Stewart’s bedroom, but not before snarling at (and perhaps biting) Stewart.
It’s a pretty rote werewolf story, all things considered, and one that would have entered a market that was already saturated with American Werewolves, Teen Wolves, and Howlings. The script was co-written by Wesley Strick and, bizarrely, poet and essayist James Harrison. It is not based on Harrison’s novel Wolf: A False Memoir as one might suspect, and Harrison seems to have been involved initially simply because he and Nicholson were friends. This was Harrison’s second (and last) attempt at working in Hollywood, as he quit the film in exasperation over creative differences with Nichols. “I wanted Dionysian, but he wanted Apollonian,” he was quoted as saying (in literature, Dionysian attributes are those of intoxication and thus ecstasy, emotion, and disorder, while Appolonian attributes are logical, clear, and harmonious). That makes a certain amount of sense, but in the same interview, he then said, “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua,” which is less clear as a complaint. Strick, for his part, had risen to some prominence as the co-screenwriter of horror comedy Arachnophobia and had recently penned the script for the similarly messy 1991 Martin Scorsese picture Cape Fear as well as uncredited rewrites on Batman Returns. After 1997s underrated Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, his credits take a steep nosedive, as his credits include the much-maligned 2005 video game adaptation Doom, the ill-fated and poorly conceived 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and the 2014 rotten erotic thriller The Loft. I want to say that some of the weakness was already present in the script here, but it’s really impossible to tell what parts came from him and which were from Harrison, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Elaine May was brought in for some uncredited punch-ups (although the fact that Wolf is two full hours long and meanders in the middle shows her fingerprints if nothing else).
Pfeiffer is excellent here as she always is, and it is interesting to see Nicholson play a more subdued character than he is normally known for. Spader is effective as the smarmy sycophant who turns out to be aiming for Will’s job (and bed), and it’s no surprise when he turns up late in the film undergoing his own lycanthrope transformation, although I couldn’t help but think about how much I would have enjoyed this film a little bit more if it had been Christian Slater in the role. The film’s supporting cast is quite good. Although Pierce gets very little to do, Eileen Atkins does very solid work as Will’s secretary. Richard Jenkins appears as the detective investigating the sudden death of Will’s wife Charlotte, and he’s paired with veteran TV actor Brian Markinson. Perhaps one of the biggest standouts is Om Puri, who appears as Dr. Vijay Alezais, the folklore specialist that Will tracks down in order to get a handle on all the changes that his body is going through. Alezais tells him that it’s less a transformation than it is a kind of possession, and that the wolf that now lives inside him isn’t evil, but will only make him “more” of whatever he currently is. He even gives Will an amulet that will keep the beast inside, and it does seem to be working until the moment that Will must remove it in order to gain the wolf-strength needed to save Laura from Stewart.
There’s simply nothing special about Wolf. If anything, it’s pretty rote. A perfectly serviceable mid-90s cable afternoon feature, but no staggeringly clever take on any of its component elements. Pfeiffer is serving looks in this one that are so 1994 Eddie Bauer coded that you’ll get something out of this if that’s of interest to you. There’s a lot of slow-motion werewolf leaping that gives the impression that Nichols has never seen a single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, because all that’s missing is that bionic sound effect to complete the tableau, and I’m afraid that’s not complimentary. The film does make good use of the Bradbury Building, most notable for being the place where the climax of Blade Runner takes place but I also recently saw in D.O.A., and it’s always a comfort to the eye to see it in use. Still, it’s telling that I’m closing out this review of a werewolf review by praising the architecture.
One of my most distinct moviegoing memories from my childhood was seeing the post-Scream teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer with my parents opening weekend. As an exclusive new track from my then-favorite band played over the end credits (“Proud,” by KoЯn), I was in 12-year-old nü-metal brat heaven, beaming in delight. That’s when my father leaned over and whispered in a firm, disappointed tone, “You never get to pick the movie again.” Three decades later, I’m older now than my father’s age was then, and I totally get it. This mildly violent teenage melodrama must be torturously tedious for any adult outside its very narrow target demographic (gloomy Millennials who were 12—and exactly 12—years old in 1997). In retrospect, I can’t believe that I dragged my parents to see it in a theater, regardless of how giddy it made me personally. Even more so, I can’t believe that some poor parent my age now is about to suffer the same fate via legacyquel. Must we forever be tormented by the sins of our mall-goth past? Can’t the world finally forgive & forget what we did that summer? Will there ever be peace in the suburbs?
All of your favorite late-90s teen stars are here: Sarah Michelle Gellar as a small-town beauty queen, Ryan Phillipe as her spoiled fuckboy sweetheart, Freddie Prinze Jr. as the townie interloper who’s desperate to earn his way into his friend group’s tax bracket, and Jennifer Love Hewitt as the only normal, well-adjusted youngster among them. The four bright young things get into trouble one night after partying on the beach outside their small fishing village, when they accidentally strike & kill a pedestrian crossing a dimly lit road and dump his body into a nearby bay to avoid hassle from the law. A year later, this act of semi-voluntary manslaughter haunts all four of the now-estranged kids involved, derailing their professional & educational ambitions as they quietly stew in the isolation of their own guilt & grief. The haunting becomes a lot more literal when a mysterious killer dressed in a fisherman slicker starts picking them off one by one via fish hook, seemingly avenging their hit-and-run victim from beyond the grave. If you’ve seen any formulaic teen slasher, you’ve seen it all before (doubly so if you’ve seen 1985’s The Mutilator); you just haven’t seen it performed by this era-specific cast.
I Know What You Did Last Summer splits the difference between an 80s teen slasher & a 50s road-to-ruin PSA about the perils of reckless driving, updated with a totally 90s cast & an astonishingly shitty 90s soundtrack (including, among other atrocities, covers of “Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative and “Hey Bulldog” by Toad the Wet Sprocket). It’s a little too squeamish about bloodshed to be an effective horror film, slaying most of its victims offscreen and keeping their corpses on ice like freshly caught fish so they don’t stink up the place. It is relatively compelling as an afterschool melodrama, however, with the two main girls’ increasingly grim home lives leading to a few memorable scenes that outperform the undead fisherman’s kills. Its lack of slasher-genre ingenuity is a little surprising given that the screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson one year after he penned the meta-horror hit Scream, which is much smarter about reshaping & reexamining the slasher formula from new angles. His trademark post-modernism enters the frame in an early scene where the teens in peril share campfire stories of the urban legend about a killer with a hook for a hand before suffering an updated version of it in real life, but the same idea was pushed much further in the next year’s Urban Legend, leaving this one effectively moot.
It’s easy to point out the ways in which I Know What You Did Last Summer falls short of 90s slasher greatness, but it’s by no means the worst of Kevin Williamson’s post-Scream teen horror scripts (that would be Teaching Mrs. Tingle). If nothing else, its coastal fishing village on the 4th of July setting affords it some occasional distinguishing novelty, not least of all in the multiple parade sequences featuring gigantic paper mâché fish on wheels. Thanks to Williamson’s previous commercial triumph, it was also made in a time when these teen bodycount movies were produced with robust Hollywood budgets behind them, so director Jim Gillespie (of Venom “fame”) gets to make frequent use of swooping crane shots to liven up the dialogue-heavy melodrama. Still, of all the 90s properties to continually get serialized & rebooted, it makes no sense that something this generic is still being kept alive as Horror Icon IP instead of, say, the more stylish & memorable Williamson-penned classic The Faculty. I pity the poor parents whose pre-teens are going to drag them to the theater for the latest legacyquel addition to the I Know What You Did franchise this summer because they have a crush on one of its famous-only-to-children stars. It’s a tradition that’s gone on for far too long, dragging on since the long-gone days of Soul Asylum, Our Lady Peace, and KoЯn.
I wasn’t expecting 28 Weeks Later to be as good as it was. It came out during a particularly academically rigorous (and financially unstable) year for me, and I’m not sure that I ever even saw any advertising for this one. Dismissal of the film by Alex Garland, who wrote both 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later, also never made me particularly interested in revisiting it, until I recently saw 28 Years and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ve also always loved Robert Carlyle’s work as an actor, and his involvement also appealed to me. Although a friend let me know that this one is streaming on Tubi—just in time for the sequel’s release—I was able to find a DVD copy at my local video store, and I was pleasantly surprised, even if it isn’t as emotionally fulfilling as either of the films that precede or follow it.
In the opening scene, Don Harris (Carlyle) is holed up in a rural farmhouse with his wife Alice and a few other survivors of the rage virus, sometime during the early days of the plague’s spread. An uninfected boy appears at the house and begs to be let in, and although they get him inside, the horde of infected who were chasing him then fall upon the house and kill/infect everyone inside. Only Don manages to escape, fleeing across the field to a small boat with an outboard motor and getting away, although not before he sees his wife at a window in the house, not yet dead or infected, as she pleads for help. Moments later, she’s gone from the window — too late. Some six or seven months (or 28 weeks, if you will) later, Don is now living in “District 1” of London, where British Isles residents who were out of the country when the outbreak occurred are being repatriated. The infected seem to have completely died out, having succumbed to starvation and exposure in the half a year since the Rage ravaged the population.
A NATO force overseen by Americans is assisting in the homecoming efforts and maintaining a military presence in order to protect the quarantine zone (epitomized in the form of Jeremy Renner’s sniper character, Doyle) and provide testing on the homebound travelers (represented by Scarlet, the chief medical officer played by Rose Byrne). Don’s two children, twelve-year-old Andy and teenaged Tammy (Imogen Poots) return home and are reunited with their father, who simplifies the story of their mother’s death by telling them only that she died. Their first night back, Andy confides in his sister that he worries he’ll forget his mother’s face, and the next morning the two of them slip through the NATO defenses and make their way to their old house to gather photos and other belongings. To their surprise, they find their mother there, albeit disoriented and confused, and she is immediately taken back to the base. Once there, Scarlet finds that Alice was bitten and that this means she is an asymptomatic carrier of the rage virus, and that her blood may even hold an answer to a potential vaccine or cure. Before she can convince General Stone (Idris Elba) of the potential, however, Alice has already Typhoid Mary-d the rage back into the safety zone, and it’s already too late to stop the spread.
Despite Alex Garland’s less-than-enthusiastic position, 28 Weeks Later is quite good. It lacks a lot of the more humanistic elements of the first film, which followed Cillian Murphy’s Jim as he, having slept through the downfall of society and thus is awakened into a changed world without witnessing the staggering amount of violence and life-altering horror that made it so, manages to be the vessel that carries some manner of hope from the world that was into the world that is. Further, while 28 Days Later presaged what a modern urban center experiencing massive devastation might look like (according to legend, they were shooting Jim’s newly-awakened wanderings of deserted post-rage London when the news broke about the Twin Towers), 28 Weeks Later is heavily informed by contemporary events. The uselessness of the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping role seems clearly inspired by the handling of the so-called “War on Terror” in which the States were actively involved, and the choice of a stadium as an evacuation area and the overreaction of armed authority to refugees and evacuees is evocative of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t stop the film’s treatment of the military from being a little “hoo-rah” in certain places, with Scarlet acting as the reasonable authority figure and Doyle evacuating survivors despite orders to kill on site, playing into tropes about good soldiers vs. morally questionable generals. Their ability to protect the citizens within seems doomed to failure from the start, based on the ease with which a couple of teenagers managed to slip out of the quarantine zone, so the criticism of the industrial complex holds. It’s also clever in its plotting, first showing us Alice’s heterochromia in the opening scene and then having Scarlet comment upon Andy having the same mutation during his intake to the quarantine zone, establishing that genetic adaptations like theirs are often inherited, slyly foreshadowing that Andy may have the same ability to be an asymptomatic carrier just like his mother. It’s not a movie that was simply slapped together because someone thought “there should be another one;” it’s genuinely a worthy, if different, successor to the first film.
It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, but back in 2017 I attended a screening of 28 Days Later at Terror Tuesday at the now-defunct original “Ritz” location of the Alamo Drafthouse (what occupies that space now I dare not name). For weeks after, I listened to “In the House, In a Heartbeat” on repeat, dozens if not hundreds of times. It was a weird time, and I was going through it, but it’s also a certified banger. It was only my second viewing of the movie after a high school rental of the DVD from the Blockbuster in Natchitoches, and in the intro, the programmer at the time talked about how that very DVD was already out of print and that 28 Days Later was unavailable to stream anywhere. That appears to still be the case, despite the release of this relatively high profile sequel, and the ease of access to the 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later on Tubi. (That Blockbuster is now a pawn shop, apparently, and they appear to have lots of DVDs in stock, so you might be able to find a copy of 28DL there, for what it’s worth.) That screening featured a rate 35MM print of the original film, large portions of which were shot on digital on the Canon XL1 and then were transferred to actual film stock, which resulted in 28DL’s novel visual qualities but also, I believe, makes it difficult to stream . . . or maybe too many people would think there was something wrong with the app rather than understand that the film’s supposed to look like that.
It’s been 23 years since the Rage Virus broke out on screen and half a decade longer since then in-universe. As the opening crawl tells us, the outbreak was contained in continental Europe but that the British Isles were turned into a quarantine zone. After an opening sequence that occurs early in the original outbreak which sees a young boy escaping from his home after his community is slaughtered by rage zombies, including his pastor father, who allows himself to be overrun in a fit of mad religious ecstasy, we cut to … 28 years later. Spike (Alfie Williams) is a twelve-year-old boy living in an island community with his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his mother Isla (Jodie Comer), who is all but bedridden with an affliction that also affects her concentration and memory. The island is kept safe due to tides in the region making it impossible to swim to, but an easily defendable natural causeway emerges at low tide and allows the islanders to go to the mainland to forage for food and firewood. Most boys are taken to the mainland for a rite of passage zombie hunting trip at fourteen or fifteen, but Jamie insists that Spike is ready, and the two set out with their bows to bag a few undead.
Spike is awed by the mainland, and he manages to get an impressive first kill on the hunt. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, the zombies have evolved, with slightly more intelligent and much more difficult to slay “alphas” emerging (one presumes that, without the internet, these folks never learned that the whole “alpha wolf” thing was bad science), who are strong enough to rip out the spinal column of its prey and also seem to be doing so almost ritualistically. Jamie and Spike are forced to take shelter in a dilapidated, abandoned farmhouse, where they also find the corpse of a man who was hung upside down and left for the zombies to find and feast upon, with the name “Jimmy” carved into his flesh. They manage to make it back to safety, barely, and Spike is celebrated at a ceremony that the town holds in his honor, but he finds his father’s tall tales of Spike’s supposed prowess dishonest and is even more disillusioned when he sees his drunken father sneak away from the party with a woman. When a family friend lets slip that a mysterious fire that Spike saw on the mainland may mark the home of a Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), which Jamie previously denied knowing anything about, Spike decides to sneak away with his mother and take her to find Kelson in the hope that he can diagnose and treat her. Along the way, they witness further changes to the infected and find themselves allied with shipwrecked Swedish sailor Erik (Edvin Ryding), the lone survivor of his downed quarantine patrol boat, who serves to give us insight into what the rest of the world is like.
Erik adds a wrinkle here that’s quite a lot of fun. After the first film trafficked heavily in images of desolate urban areas as Jim wandered through the empty husk of London, this one follows its day one prologue with a cut to a somewhat idyllic present day, where a close knit community tends sheep and fashions arrows. It doesn’t initially have the feel of a post-apocalyptic hellscape, as having bacon with breakfast is a lavish anomaly but not completely unheard of. The island itself is lush and green but has a bit of the uncanny about it as well, with the recurring appearance of an unremarked upon creepy mask that multiple characters wear implying that they’ve gotten a little weird with it out there, and it’s a dangling thread left to, no doubt, be developed in the next sequel. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has completely moved on from the whole “zombie plague” thing. People work as delivery drivers, they order packages online, and they have smartphones, all of which are alien concepts to Spike, who has never seen a photograph less than three decades old. When Erik shows him a picture of his girlfriend making a duck face in the moments before his battery dies, Spike has no frame of reference for that social media beauty standard and compares her appearance to a girl in the village whose allergy to shellfish causes her to swell up. Back in that same village hangs a portrait of a fairly young Queen Elizabeth II, because these people aren’t even aware that she’s dead (presuming she died in 2022 in their world as in ours and wasn’t afflicted with the Rage Virus, which I didn’t realize I needed to see until this very moment).
It’s almost unfathomable to think that the rest of the world could simply move on from locking down multiple nations and washing their hands of the whole situation while consigning the people living there to almost certain eventual violent death at the hands of sprinting, infected undead. But then again, we’re kind of living in that world, aren’t we? We’ve all lived through the rampant spread of a virus that killed millions of people, and once everybody got vaccinated (well…) and we reached a point of “well, most people won’t be at risk,” most of society simply did move on, and we’re still driving delivery trucks and ordering packages online and getting new smartphones. Disability advocates have talked for years about how our necropolitical institutions have decided that the wheels of commerce must turn, even if they must be greased by the blood of the chronically ill or otherwise highly susceptible. We also live in a society where horrible, awful, genocidal things are happening “over there,” out of sight and, for many, out of mind; “It’s awful that children are being burned alive by phosphorus ammunition and that huge numbers of people have been abandoned to certain, horrifying death by the rest of the world, but I don’t see what that has to do with me or my need for a frappuccino.” Erik shows us something about the world beyond these quarantined islands; it’s obvious that Spike has grown up never knowing a world before the Rage, but if Erik is even approximately the same age as the actor portraying him, so has he. In Erick’s world, the long term, hands off approach to dealing with the infected is baked into society as something that happens over there and is a simple, sad fact of life, and the wheels just keep turning.
Although he’s only a child and therefore gets billed in the credits after a man who’s on screen for mere moments, the MVP here is relative newcomer Alfie Williams. There’s a quiet resilience to him, and he carries a major, if understated, emotional journey that begins when he returns to the island from his hunting trip. He’s surrounded by the trappings of the village’s celebration of his hunt, including that weird mask thing, but as he watches his father carry on the time honored tradition of exaggerating their bravery and marksmanship, a crack in the foundation of his belief in both his father and his society begins to form. He already has his suspicions about his father’s denial of knowing what the fire in the hills on the mainland might be, and once he sees Jamie getting adulterous and learning that his father knows about Dr. Kelson (and then leaping to the conclusion that Jamie is refusing to get help for Isla from the mainlander), he resolves to put a seemingly doomed plan into motion. Williams pulls all of this off very well for a performer his age, and you never for a moment doubt that Spike is a kid who’s never seen a frisbee or an iPhone. That’s not to denigrate the performances of Comer, who is excellent as always, or Taylor-Johnson, who is very effective here as a husband and father maintaining a brave face despite the clearly imminent death of his ill wife while also living through the end of days. Fiennes is also great here as the broken Dr. Kelson, who makes a great deal out of what amounts to not much screen time.
This film ends on such an overt tonal shift that I think it’s turning off some people. A couple of friends of mine to whom I had been recommending the film happened to be coming out of a screening of 28 Years just as I was headed into a screening of The Materialists. They found the film messy, and although we didn’t get much of a chance to talk about where they felt that it failed, they mentioned that the sudden genre shift was unexpected and jarring. I would also wager that the brief jumpcuts at the beginning of the film that serve to set some of the tone will be off-putting to some, although I rather enjoyed it as a shorthand for the myth-building within the community of the island. Set to the 1915 Taylor Holmes recording of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots,” we get to see a little bit of the culture of the island: their use of archery as their primary method of hunting and anti-infected defense, their fortification of the island, and the training of their young to carry on, all of it interspliced with footage from monochrome war films, Technicolor Robins of Locksley, and other bits of film and video that pass by so quickly that some of the images are almost subliminal. The idea that these people have been reduced to a medieval level of technology in the modern era is an interesting one, and this gets it across in a great visual way but one that is definitely not going to be to everyone’s liking. That’s what makes Danny Boyle Danny Boyle, after all.
There are many ways in which the Louisiana education system is an embarrassing disaster. We often rank at the stank-ass bottom of US states in our education metrics, with a long history of political corruption, racial segregation, and religious privatization getting in the way of any progress towards improvement. So, I feel it’s totally legitimate to blame that system for the fact that I have been living in Louisiana for four decades and have never once seen the movie where Godzilla fights a giant crawfish. There should be annual screenings of Ebirah, Horror of the Deep in every local middle school. It should be as integral to Southeast Louisiana culture as The Blue Dog, “You Are My Sunshine,” and “They All Ask’d for You.” Godzilla fights a giant crawfish in it, for God’s sake. The school system has failed us yet again.
Part of the reason why Ebirah is missing from local syllabi is that the exact species of its titular crustaceous monster is up for debate. Most kaiju scholarship cites Ebirah as the middle ground between a shrimp and a lobster, citing that the “ebi” section of its name is interchangeable in reference to either shrimp or lobster in Japanese. It’s a compelling aural argument, but I also have eyes and, as a lifelong Louisiana resident, I know a crawfish when I see one. Ebirah enters Horror of the Deep claw first, smashing a fishing boat with its dominant limb to tease the mystery of what kind of giant crustacean it could possibly be: shrimp, crab, lobster, etc. As soon as its body emerges from the water to reveal its full form, however, the question is firmly, definitively answered. That’s a dang crawfish.
The kaiju saviors summoned to de-claw and dispense of this monster crawfish are Godzilla & Mothra, who spend most of the movie enjoying a nap. Returning to her winged moth form after spending a couple battles against King Ghidorah as a silk-spewing grub, Mothra is getting her beauty sleep on Infant Island, while the indigenous people she protects pray for her to wake up and save the day. Meanwhile, Godzilla is thought to be dead while he takes an angry-nap under a pile of rocks in a oceanside cave. He’s awoken Frankenstein-style via electric shock, channeling lightning through a sword and a trail of copper wire rigged to ruin his nap. Pissed, Godzilla immediately springs into action and destroys everything in striking distance, a rampage that includes ripping Ebirah’s claws off and kicking him back into the ocean depths.
Because the kaiju fights are delayed by siesta, Horror of the Deep leaves plenty of room for humans-on-the-ground drama, which it only takes semi-seriously. The story centers on a young man who’s desperate to reunite with a brother lost at sea, since he was told by a psychic that his brother is still alive. His schemes to engineer the family reunion improbably involve a televised dance contest, a stolen yacht, and a fugitive bank robber, only for both brothers to be shipwrecked on a small island overrun with militant fascists, thanks to Ebirah’s boat-smashing claw. You see, a vicious militia known as The Red Bamboo have forced the indigenous people of Infant Island to work as slaves in order to produce a fruit-based chemical that repels & controls the mighty Ebirah, and the only way to stop them is cause a little chaos by waking both Godzilla & Mothra — a scheme even more harebrained than saving the day via dance contest.
Once all of the skyscraper combatants are awake and engaged, Horror of the Deep proves to be one of the more fun, lively entries in the early Godzilla canon — the most playful since King Kong vs Godzilla. Director Jun Fukuda takes over from Godzilla mastermind Ishirō Honda here, and he loosens up the tone with some fun novelty additions to the format. Ebirah’s attacks are often filmed from a 1st-person perspective, shot in Crawvision. Godzilla also fights the crawbeast underwater, a precursor to the zombie vs shark fight of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2. His reluctant face-turn to heroism is jubilantly scored to surf rock, a soundtrack that seemingly inspires Godzilla to dance. The biggest laugh of the movie, however, is the dialogue exchange where our yacht-stealing hero answers the insult, “Your brother’s crazy!” with the deadpan retort, “Yeah, crazy about helping those in need.” That’s good stuff.
Regardless of your personal Louisiana residency status, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep lands as an especially fun, light-on-its-feet Godzilla outing. I was surprised to learn that its American dub, Godzilla vs The Sea Monster, was given the robo-heckling treatment on an early episode of MST3k, which means the show was ironically mocking a movie that was already clearly intended to be an unserious hoot. That’s not the only American institution that let the film down, though, or even the most egregious. It’s time that Louisianans write their senators to petition for Ebirah, Horror of the Deep to be screened in all local grade school classrooms (assuming that Louisiana schools can even still afford the AV carts of yesteryear). The kids need to know about the giant crawfish movie.
There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster in movie history. I mean that in the literal sense, since the supreme kaiju being is seemingly armored by a layer of gold scales, making his “heavy metal” designation as matter-of-fact as Mechagodzilla‘s. Of course, I also mean it in the colloquial sense. The three-headed dragon beast is loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. When Ghidorah flies into the frame to take down Godzilla and his fellow skyscraper flunkies, the image conjures the crushing sounds of heavy-metal guitar riffs in audiences’ brains, even in the 1960s pictures that were produced well before Black Sabbath had a record deal. Ghidorah is so metal, in fact, that it takes at least three other Toho-brand monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head. 🤘
The first time I encountered King Ghidorah was in the 1968 kaiju crossover picture Destroy All Monsters, in which the space-alien bio weapon was unleashed to union-bust a gang of kaiju that included Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan (among the less-famous monsters Minilla, Gorosaurus, Anguirus, Kumonga, and Varan). Seen out of order in my winding journey through Criterion’s Godzilla box set, this appeared to be an especially grand ego-boost for the giant beast, like when WWE puts over their biggest, brawniest wrestler by having them eliminate every other competitor on the roster during the Royal Rumble. As it turns out, that was Ghidora’s exact funciton from the very beginning, and his debut entrance into the Toho kaiju ring marked the very first time Godzilla felt compelled to team up with other monsters to fight on humanity’s behalf. That Godzilla face-turn was in 1963’s Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster, in which evil space aliens declare interplanetary warfare by launching Ghidorah at Planet Earth, threatening to take over. It’s then up to Mothra, in her squirming grub form, to convince Godzilla & the pterodactyl-like Rodan to stop throwing rocks at each other like schoolyard children and instead join forces to fight off this existential, heavy-metal threat. They’re both petty assholes about it, but they eventually relent and team up to repel the flying hell-beast before going their separate ways.
The reluctant tag team of Godzilla & Rodan reforms when King Ghidorah returns in 1965’s Invasion of the Astro-monster. Rebranded with his new wrestler gimmick as Monster Zero, Ghidorah is once again deployed as an interplanetary weapon of mass destruction, one that can only be disarmed by the collective power of multiple kaiju opponents. His inevitable 2-on-1 battle with Godzilla & Rodan is delayed until the climactic 15 minutes of the runtime, though, as the invading Xiliens from Planet X smartly abduct Godzilla & Rodan with UFO tractor beams and imprison them for as long as possible so Ghidorah can do maximum damage, unchecked. Without the large-scale monster battles to fill up the runtime, Invasion of the Astro-monster spins its wheels with lengthy indulgences in political espionage and The X From Outer Space-style extraterrestrial cocktail parties. It’s maybe not the most thrilling approach to making a monster movie, but it does lead to some gorgeous 60s-kitch imagery. It’s impossible to decide what the most striking image of the film is in retrospect, but I’ve narrowed it down to two options: literalizing the Cold War aspect of the Space Race by putting a gun in the flag-planting astronaut’s free hand or Godzilla being abducted by a UFO. Then, Ghidorah soars into the frame to battle Godzilla & Rodan once again, erasing such questions entirely with heavy-metal bursts of lightning.
If there’s one detail of Ghidorah’s design that makes his metal-as-fuck majesty immediately obvious, it’s that each of his individual dragon heads moves independently, which is especially impressive when combined with his suitmation power of flight. It’s a lot like watching Kermit the Frog ride a bicycle for the first time in The Muppet Movie, adding an entire new dimension to kaiju suitmation spectacle audiences previously did not dream was possible. The suit was reportedly exceedingly difficult to operate as a result, often leading to longer shooting schedules as his operators struggled to keep his long, golden necks from tangling like noodles. Like headbanging to thrash riffs, it was well worth the headache. Everything else that makes Ghidorah so thunderously badass is immediately, visually obvious. He is the essence of metal, skyborne and beautiful. Godzilla mastermind Ishirō Honda’s impulse to bulk up the monster’s reputation by making him undefeatable unless several other kaiju attack in unison was a smart one, but it was also necessary. Look at him. No one would buy into the kayfabe otherwise.
Watching all of those Final Destination movies in a single week must have rewired my brain, because I spent the first forty minutes of Drop waiting for a huge disaster to occur. After the film opens on a flashback to protagonist Violet (Meghann Fahy)’s final altercation with her violent, abusive husband as her infant watches, we cut forward to the present, where she is planning to go on her first date since then, leaving her now Pre-K aged son Toby with her sister, Jen (Violett Beane). This is the first time she and her son have been apart, and she’s understandably nervous. As we have all already seen this trailer (presumably many times), we know that on this date she is going to begin receiving airdropped directions to do something awful to her companion, we spend the first several minutes after her arrival to the (begging to be a Final Destination location) restaurant meeting all of the potential subjects. There’s Matt (Jeffrey Self), the UCB hopeful and waiter who’s on his first shift and whose oversharing about his sketch ideas may be either an actual annoying character trait or a cover for his activities; there’s pianist Phil (Ed Weeks), who attempts to hit on Violet sleazily before he’s warned off by bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), who seems very invested in Violet’s first date; there’s Richard (Reed Diamond), a nervous man who approaches Violet thinking that she might be the blind date he’s been set up with before meeting his actual date; there’s also Connor (Travis Nelson), a handsome man that Violet bumps into on two separate occasions, which may have given him access to clone her phone; and finally the hostess (Sarah McCormack), whose access to all of the security cameras gives her a bird’s eye view that may be what’s enabling Violet’s harassment. By the time her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), arrives, we’ve got quite the list of potential suspects to keep us guessing about who’s behind the home invasion that Violet witnesses on her phone via her home security cameras, with the threat against Jen and Toby used to force Violet to steal from Henry and potentially murder him.
The date starts casually enough, with Henry having the patience of multiple saints as Violet keeps checking her phone fairly constantly throughout the date, which she attributes to separation anxiety from her son. She shares the first couple of things that are airdropped to her with Henry; they’re mostly memes to get her attention, but quickly turn into threats and directions to destroy a memory card that Henry, who is the mayor’s photographer, has in his camera bag. This is the first clue that we get to the purpose of the unknown dropper’s motives, as we see there are photos of some documents which may point to corruption in Chicago’s upper echelons. Once this is complete, she’s directed to retrieve something from the paper towel dispenser in the ladies’ room, which turns out to be a vial of poison that she must use against Henry. It’s all a fairly tense affair, and it’s fun to watch Violet figure out reasons to keep going back to the washroom or direct Henry to help her look for her watch, while she also tries to figure out how to ask for help despite her every movement being monitored. The final climax of the film goes for a full-on action sequence as the identity of the dropper is revealed and Violet manages to get the upper hand, but not before they direct their accomplice to kill Jen and Toby, which means Violet has to race home and try to stop the assassin, in a mirror of her first scene in which her husband threatened her and baby Toby with a handgun.
This is a pretty decent premise, and one that’s followed through upon well. It bears mentioning that the narrative has a lot of the same plot beats as the 2005 Wes Craven picture Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. In that flick, McAdams’s character is a hotel manager who is blackmailed under threat of deadly violence against her father into moving a political appointee into a specific suite so that Murphy’s terrorist organization can complete an assassination. Like Violet, she too experienced a horrific event just a couple of years earlier that left her unwilling to give up, and the fury of which she channels into attacking her aggressor before rushing home to save her threatened family. Both films are very much of their era, as the earlier film explicitly labels Murphy a domestic terrorist and the object of his violence is associated with the Department of Homeland Security, making it a clear example of Bush era domestic terror politics. In this one, not only is the target of the killer’s ire someone who’s looking to expose corruption (and therefore automatically a hero), but the film’s entire gimmick centering around the whole “airdrop” smartphone element feels like a premise that should have been done a couple of years ago when that was a newer feature. One gets the feeling that this one will seem just as much like an unintentional period piece as Red Eye in just a few years, although I’m not certain it will have the same punch two decades from now that Red Eye still does today.
Fahy is great here, and it’s fun to see her again after her stellar run on the second season of White Lotus, especially since she was also in the much maligned The Unbreakable Boy earlier this year, which had the misfortune of shooting in 2022 and then being shelved until after Fahy gained more recognition. Sklenar is attractive as Henry and definitely fits the mold of a handsome leading man, but I couldn’t help but notice how much chemistry Violet and Cara had from the outset, and in between wondering when the penthouse restaurant was going to fall out of the sky like the opening scene of Final Destination: Bloodlines, I kept thinking that Violet should just skip her date and make out with Cara instead. Even when my suspicions fell on Cara as the airdropper (or a conspirator thereof), I was still kind of rooting for a sapphic resolution to the story.
This is exactly the kind of mid-budget thriller that movie studios used to churn out at a rate of a dozen a year, a quickly cobbled together script that took some recent tech news item and ran with it to craft a thriller around, usually relying on the audience’s general lack of tech savvy to be effective. I’ve never owned an iPhone and thus have never sent or received an airdrop (although they are careful to never use any of Apple’s branded products or tech names and even their use of the fiery Elmo meme replaces the Muppet with a generic stuffed animal), so I have no idea how plausible or implausible this is as a technological MacGuffin. I saw this with a few friends, some of whom are iPhone users, and they mentioned that this would have been more believable several years ago before everyone turned off the default airdrop “receive” setting, as most folks have stopped accepting airdrops as it largely became a method for pervs and other creeps to spam a given area with unsolicited dick pics. I have to take their word for it. For a nice, easy thriller that doesn’t require too much mental energy, Drop is decent, and fun enough for what it is.
I was in the minority of people who saw Talk to Me in 2022 and felt indifferent toward it. Most people either loved or hated it (Brandon enjoyed it), and while I thought the ending (and I do mean the very ending, like the last minute or so) was novel and fresh, I found the overall experience to be a fairly rote possession story with little to make it stand out. When I heard that the directors, twins Danny and Michael Philippou, had a new feature coming out, I didn’t pay much attention to it despite it getting the same kind of word-of-mouth hype that Talk to Me had. Brandon asked me if I was interested in this one and I didn’t even know what he was talking about, but it wasn’t until the movie got the approval of a couple who work at my local coffee shop (hi, Michael and Brandon P.!) that I gave this one any serious consideration. I bought the tickets for me and my viewing companions in person in advance (the only way to make sure that you both get the Tuesday discount and that the tickets don’t sell out), and the theater employee nervously asked me what I had heard about the film as I was paying. I told her I hadn’t really heard anything, and she said that people had been coming out of the film talking about how frightening and gory it was, and that she wasn’t sure she would see it. After those two incidents, I was pretty excited, and I can say I was definitely not disappointed.
Piper (Sora Wong) is the visually impaired younger stepsister of loving, caring Andy (Billy Barratt), and the apple of her father’s eye. Coming home one day, Andy discovers his father’s dead body lying on the bathroom floor, the shower still running, and although he tries to keep Piper away, his own shock prevents him from stopping her from touching the corpse. Andy’s not quite eighteen and thus can’t take guardianship of Piper, so child services places her with a woman named Laura (Sally Hawkins), who recently lost her own daughter, Cathy. Cathy shared Piper’s visual impairment, so her home is already set up with many of the accommodations that Piper would need, like taped-down rugs. Andy, afraid of losing Piper, begs social worker Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton) to convince Laura to take him in for the next few months until he can take guardianship of Piper on his birthday. Wendy cites that Laura has had bad experiences with other foster children with a past history of violence, obliquely alluding to something in Andy’s past, but is ultimately successful in keeping the step-siblings together with Laura for the time being. Upon arrival, however, Andy is immediately treated as extraneous and unwanted; Laura calls him “Anthony” and “Andrew,” and while Piper gets set up in Cathy’s untouched bedroom, Andy gets plopped in a room that’s mostly been used for storage, stuck on a mattress that’s too short for him, directly on the floor, and an accordion pocket door that neither closes nor locks. Laura is also fostering another child whom she introduces as Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who exhibits odd behavior that the audience initially dismisses as a response to trauma in whatever home he has been taken from, but which could be something more sinister.
This is a great set-up, and goes in some really great directions from there. Before we meet Piper and Andy, we are treated to a scene on a VHS tape in which various people speak Russian and there appears to be some kind of possession or exorcism ritual being performed, which includes one of the participants being “confined” within a white ring of some kind. When we see that there is a white line that Andy and Piper have to cross in order to approach Laura’s house, we’re immediately clued in that something fishy is afoot, even before we get to witness the discrepancy in the way that Laura treats her two new fosters. The gaslighting of Andy (and, to a lesser extent, Piper) begins almost immediately, as Laura deliberately ostracizes her new foster son, completely disregards his privacy by reading his text messages (above and beyond sticking him a room that he can’t even lock the door of), and even pouring her own urine on him while he sleeps heavily as a result of Laura drugging his workout powder so that he believes he’s wet the bed. It’s clear that she knows just how to manipulate a young person who doesn’t have the proper vocabulary to explain their situation to the authorities, and she uses her knowledge as a former social worker herself to goad him into aggressive behavior in order to plant the seed of the idea that he will be a poor guardian for Piper in the minds of both the girl herself and Wendy the social worker. Not simplifying matters is the fact that although Piper loved and adored her stepfather, Andy’s relationship was more complicated, as their father took his aggression out solely on his son while pampering his stepdaughter. When both were much younger, this resulted in Andy repeating that violence by physically striking Piper in an incident that she doesn’t remember but which he regrets and seeks to make amends for every day. Andy’s kindness and selflessness comes through in the way that he attempts to bond with Oliver when Laura takes Piper out for a “girls’ day,” although things go completely awry in a way that he couldn’t have foreseen, because he doesn’t yet realize that he’s in a supernatural horror story.
Skip to the next paragraph to avoid spoilers (although they were probably the same ones as in the trailer)! Unfortunately, Laura is simply too well trusted within the social services to fall under suspicion until it’s too late. I don’t want to give too much away here since this is such a recent release and one that I think people should seek out and see for themselves, but there is a demonic entity present in the house and trapped inside of Oliver that Laura intends to use as a conduit to resurrect her daughter in exchange for Piper. (At least one person who edited the TV Tropes page for the film is operating under the assumption that Oliver is possessed by Cathy, but there are several visual indicators about what’s really happening that they must have missed.) It’s not simply that Laura wants Piper around to act as a kind of replacement for Cathy, but that she has ulterior motives that require her to isolate Piper, and Andy is standing in her way.
This one is very effective, both in onscreen frights and in its somber tone. Expectations are effectively subverted. Throughout the film, much is made of Andy’s consistent workout routine and the bench presses that he does, but when the time comes that all of this would be most effective in saving him, he does not succeed. I got plenty of warnings about this one’s gruesome content, and I might be tipping my hand too much that I’ve been completely desensitized, but I will say that if you’re a horror fan, you’ll largely have seen much of this before, even if it’s still effective here. If you’re prone to gum/mouth/teeth nightmares, be forewarned that this one is going to set off some of those phobias. More important than all of that, however, is that this film effectively forges an emotional connection with the audience. There’s a little white lie that Andy tells Piper at the beginning of the movie to help her deal with her grief, and when that was called back to at the end of the film, I’m man enough to admit that I teared up. This one’s a real knockout.
Welcome to Episode #240 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss the few films that have been adapted from William S. Burroughs’s prose, starting with David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of Naked Lunch.
00:00 Welcome
01:20 Friendship (2025) 03:10 Bring Her Back (2025) 09:34 Premonition (2007) 13:37 Mulan (1998) 16:53 Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) 20:02 Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)
23:08 Naked Lunch (1991) 41:30 Burroughs – The Movie (1983) 55:41 The Junky’s Christmas (1993) 59:56 Ah Pook is Here (1994) 1:03:21 Queer (2024)
Swampflix 
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