horror

Parental Hell at The Overlook Film Festival

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When I think of how the horrors of parenting are usually represented in genre cinema, I picture cruel, demonic children. In most horrors & thrillers that prompt you to think twice about having kids, the prompt is a warning that the kids themselves can be absolute nightmares, typified by titles like The Bad Seed, The Omen, Orphan, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. I was treated to an entirely different flavor of parental Hell at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, however, one that torments parents even when their kids are total angels. Both of the high-concept thrillers Redux Redux & Hallow Road ask what if the true horror of parenting is your own potential for failure? What if you fail to keep your children alive or, worse yet, fail to prepare them to keep themselves alive once your part of the job is done? The lifelong responsibility to raise, protect, and prepare another human being for the Hell of everyday living leaves parents incredibly vulnerable to the heightened pain of genre storytelling. It’s just unusual for the source of that pain to be a long, hard look in the mirror.

In Redux Redux, the major failure of the mother figure played by Michaela McManus (sister of co-directors Kevin & Matthew McManus) has already happened before the story begins. We meet her nursing her grief over the loss of her daughter with a weak cup of coffee in a roadside diner. She wordlessly trails the diner’s short-order cook back to his shitty apartment, then stabs him to death in his bedroom. Then, the scenario repeats: the same diner, the same doomed cook, the same violent end. The only thing that changes is the color of the coffee mug. Redux Redux is a revenge-thriller version of the television program Sliders, wherein our grieving-mother antihero jumps from alternate universe to alternate universe to murder her daughter’s killer in thousands of temporarily satisfying ways. Of course, these empty acts of revenge do nothing to bring her daughter back to life; it’s more of a multiversal addiction story than anything, where she hides from her pain by violently acting out against a convenient effigy of the man who ruined everything. The main tension of the movie is whether she can break this violent pattern of addiction to do better by her new, reluctantly adopted daughter figure: a street-smart wiseass teen (Stella Marcus) who’s in danger of becoming the spitting image of her worst self. The horrors of parenting are apparently inescapable, even when you have a magic microwave coffin that allows you to slide into an alternate dimension at a moment’s notice.

In Hallow Road, there’s still plenty of time to do the right thing, but the parents fail anyway. Rosamund Pike & Matthew Rhys star as a middle-aged yuppie couple who are woken in the middle of the night by a panicked phone-call from their college-age daughter. It seems that after a passionate fight with her parents, she decided to go do some drugs in the woods about it, and accidentally struck a stranger with her car on the drive back home. Panicked, the couple start racing to their daughter in their own vehicle, where most of the film is confined for the remainder of the runtime. With only their voices & wisdom to guide their child through this life-changing (and life-ending crisis), they find themselves at a moral crossroads. Do they instruct her to alert the authorities of the accident and face jailtime, potentially saving her stoned-driving victim’s life, or do they help her escape responsibility for her actions, taking a blame for the hit & run themselves to preserve her post-collegiate future? The resulting story is an all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. The further the couple drive into the woods to “rescue” (i.e., corrupt) their child, the more illogical and darkly magical the rules of their world become, and the the entire film functions as a kind of artificial stage-play examination of parents’ most harmful, regrettable impulses.

Personally, I was much more pleased with the genre payoffs of Hallow Road than I was with Redux Redux, mostly because its internal logic felt more purposeful & thoroughly considered. Because Hallow Road opens itself up to Old World supernatural magic, it’s a lot easier to accept its high-concept premise than the more grounded, sci-fi theorizing of Redux Redux. It brings me no pleasure to act as the screenwriting logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of Redux Redux made no sense to me, especially once I started counting up the untold thousands of weeks the mother figure claims to have been murdering her daughter’s killer for and noticed that she is not, in fact, 100 years old. It’s like the McManus family started writing it as a time-loop movie and subbed in the word “multi-verse” instead at the last minute without cleaning up the implications of how time passes differently in that genre. Meanwhile, director Babak Anvari is in total control of just how much information to reveal to the audience about the logic of his hermetic, supernatural world to keep us on the hook — very little. While Redux Redux plays like an audition for a bigger-budget Hollywood actioner for the McManus clan (if you squint hard enough, you can see Betty Gilpin & Jenny Ortega headlining this one as the makeshift mother-daughter avenger duo), Hallow Road is more realistic about what it can achieve on its car-bound scale, using its confinement & limited resources to increase the attention, rather than distracting from them. Its local premiere at this year’s Overlook was also a nice kind of homecoming for Anvari, whose previous picture Wounds is one of the best New Orleans-set horror movies in recent memory (despite what its general critical response will tell you).

Speaking even more personally, I will never know the full horrors of parental failure illustrated here, because I will never be a parent myself. Maybe the unthinkable nightmare of having lost a child and the resulting addictive, self-destructive coping mechanisms that inevitably follow that kind of tragedy stir up powerful enough emotions in a parental audience that the basic temporal logic of its conceit doesn’t matter much. The violence is effectively nasty at least, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the conceptual quibbles (and from the nagging feeling that you’re watching the DTV version of Midnight Special). Meanwhile, the violence of Hallow Road is more verbal & conceptual, as the entire narrative is teased out over the course of a feature-length phone call. I still found it to be the more rattling picture of the two, thanks to the aural jump scares of the sound design and the bigger, crueler questions it asks about what it means to truly be a Good Parent. In either case, I’m happy to have my suspicions that being a parent is a nonstop nightmare confirmed, even if it’s not the kids themselves who are the terror. Apparently, it’s the personal responsibilities & shortcomings that really haunt you.

-Brandon Ledet

The Shrouds (2025)

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Grief has been the major theme of horror cinema for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought.  Only David Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.
Vincent Cassel stars in The Shrouds as a David Cronenberg type: a silver-haired Torontonian millionaire named Karsh, whose grief over the recent passing of his wife has made it impossible to enjoy his life’s refinement & luxury. Only, that onscreen avatar has fully given into the modern evils that have tormented Cronenberg’s consciousness throughout his career as a public figure: the menacing intersection of technology & sex. Karsh drives around a near-future Toronto in his Tesla-brand electric car, enjoying the occasional indulgence in fine-dining extravagance while mostly spending his alone time obsessing over digital images of his dead wife. His most intimate relationship is with a cartoon A.I. assistant named Honey, and he’s struggling to suppress his sexual desire for his wife’s surviving sister — both of whom are played by Diane Kruger, the same actor who represents his wife in memories & photographs. If I were to therapize what the director is doing with Cassel’s aimlessly selfish protagonist, I’d say he’s confronting the worst-faith version of himself as a way of processing the real-life loss of his own wife. None of that is really my or anybody else’s business, though, and it’s just as likely he’s satirizing a societal malady as he is expressing a personal one.

Conceptually, The Shrouds is designed to question the fetishism & alien rituals of how we grieve our loved ones, calling attention to them in the same way that the sensation of our tongues being housed inside our own mouths doesn’t feel bizarre until the moment their presence is singled out. If it’s socially acceptable for Karsh to eroticize and mourn the loss of his wife’s physical body, how specific is he allowed to be?  If it’s romantic to miss touching his favorite of her breasts, then what is so strange about eroticizing & mourning her teeth? Would it be any stranger for him to browse .jpegs of his wife’s dental scans than it would to occasionally flip through her nude Polaroids? If all he has to remember her by is images of her body while she was still alive, would it be so strange to extend that keepsake collection to images of her body in death? Neither set of images represents her, exactly. They’re just records of the physical traits that housed her essence, which left the flesh as soon as she passed. And what of the ritual where a surviving spouse plans & purchases their funeral-lot burial directly next to their deceased lover for whenever they happen to die themselves? Why wait until death to join your spouse in your shared marital cemetery bed? What if you could stay with them every minute until your own body expires, through the portable convenience of a smartphone app?

Cassel’s Karsh is a tech-bro innovator who has disrupted the funeral service game by investing in technology that allows you to connect with your deceased loved one’s grave at any time, via app. You no longer have to fight the impulse to jump into the coffin to be buried with them, not since there are live 3D images of their corpse rotting in real time, thanks to the visual sensors of the titular future-tech shrouds. That lingering impulse to stick by his wife after her body expires commands what’s left of his erotic life: his growing tensions with the wife’s conspiracy-theorist sister, his uncomfortably flirtatious relationship with his A.I. digital assistant, and his nightly visits from the ghostly memory of his wife in declining health, which he remembers as a series of experimental surgeries he considers a form of medical adultery. Cut off from physical access to his wife’s body, he looks for its closest surviving substitutes and finds only terror, alienation, and betrayal in the pursuit. Meanwhile, the proof-of-concept graveyard showroom for his shrouds tech is vandalized, while international protestors threaten to take down his entire personal empire in a far-reaching conspiracy of circular logic & capitalist sin.

There’s no dramatic resolution or clarifying statement that ties all of these cold, alienating concepts together. Expressing unease with how technology & sex are integrated into the grief process is the entire point of the project, so it would be self-defeating to alleviate any of it. Instead, Karsh becomes increasingly paranoid & isolated in his quest to reclaim his wife’s body as a physical presence in his life, despite the impossibility of that happening, as she is dead & buried before the movie begins. The seemingly conspiratorial efforts to keep him separated from that body are their own source of erotic terror rather than a source of narrative structure, which makes for just about the strangest way this story could possibly be told. It’s a cold, philosophical rumination on the inhumanity of modern living — one that prompts you to laugh at the deadpan absurdity of its delivery before you realize just how chilling you find the implications of its bigger-picture ideas. In other words, it’s a David Cronenberg film.

-Brandon Ledet

Dead Lover (2025)

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Grace Glowicki’s directorial career debuted in the genderfucked stoner-comedy freak show Tito, which might very well have been the world’s first Crispin Glover drag king act. The fuckery continues in her sophomore film Dead Lover, which locally premiered at this year’s Overlook Film Festival (and, to my eye, was the best of the fest). Dead Lover perfectly exemplifies the Overlook brand of horror-themed genre films that skew more artsy than scary, delivering a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback that filters the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Glowicki has focused her eye in the years since Tito, crafting some of cinema’s most gorgeous, perverted images in recent memory. Her sense of humor has remained decidedly prankish & juvenile, though, punctuating punchlines with ADR’d fart noises and ejaculations of vomit. It’s a masterclass lesson in the refinement of bad taste.

Glowicki stars as a 19th Century gravedigger who has become lonely in her continuation of the family business, as she stinks too badly of rotting corpses for any other locals to socialize with her. Her pursuit of sexual partners despite that putrid stench does eventually prove fruitful, drawing the eye (and nose) of a nearby wealthy pervert who’s grieving the loss of his sister but still makes time to fetishize the gravedigger’s offense to the senses. They fall in love and bone like mad, but tragedy soon strikes when, as the title promises, her long-awaited lover dies by sea. She refuses to give up on her one shot at genuine romance, though, so she attempts to reconstitute her dead lover using the one remaining body part that was recovered from the shipwreck (his severed finger) . . . with a little help from the stockpile of corpses that happen to be buried around the cemetery where she works & lives.

The tension between Dead Lover‘s high-art visual style and low-trash sense of humor is also echoed in its bifurcated tone, which alternates between the extremities of camp & sincerity in erratic mood swings. Much of the gravedigger’s dialogue is addressed to a gigantic arts-and-crafts rendering of the moon, recalling the operatic poetry of Kenneth Anger’s experimental short “Rabbit’s Moon.” She confesses all of her most vulnerable yearnings to Mr. Moon, but those thoughts are frequently interrupted by hissing, selfish jags of animalistic horniness & greed. Combined with her insultingly inaccurate Cockney accent, this internal romantic/vicious struggle estimates what it might be like if Lily Sullivan’s unhinged impersonation of Bridgette Jones on Comedy Bang Bang suffered the same fate as Gollum from Lord of the Rings. My apologies if that CBB reference means nothing to you, but it really is the only accurate point of comparison.

There’s a sound-stage artificiality to Dead Lover that recalls both the perverted visual poetry of Stephen Sayadian’s Dr. Caligari and the low-budget carelessness of the graveyard set in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. It’s a picture overflowing with bad wigs and even worse accents, as its four main players alternate through multiple sets of characters with the ramshackle energy of a sketch comedy revue. Still, there’s a lot of heart to its romantic yearning in which characters love one another for their quirks & stench rather than in spite of it. It also has surprisingly provocative ideas about the physical embodiment of gender, as the gravedigger rebuilds her male lover with indiscriminate concern for whether the corpses she sources spare parts from are male or female (or, even more strangely, whether they are related to her lover by blood). All she cares about is still being able to orgasm by the thrust of his finger; how romantic.

I was greatly amused by the strangeness of Glowicki’s debut, but this follow-up exceeded my expectations even so. In my mind, she’s now joined an elite class of high-style, low-budget filmmakers who are pushing the outer limits of how sex, gender, and desire can be represented on screen while also just goofing off with their friends: namely Cole Escola, Amanda Kramer, and Betrand Mandico. At times, it really does feel like some of the most exciting, immediate art being made right now, even though it’s an outdated genre throwback featuring a severed finger that stretches to the length of a broomstick and a potential suitor professing his love by declaring he wants to eat one of the gravedigger’s turds longways, “like a banana.”

-Brandon Ledet

Dark Intruder (1964)

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Recently, Brandon texted me to let me know that Puzzle of a Downfall Child—one of my favorite films that I have ever seen and which, when we covered it for Movie of the Month in June of 2019, was almost impossible to find save for a (now deleted) YouTube upload—was on sale from Koni Lorber on Blu-ray for only $10. (We are not sponsored, but I would gratefully accept a free copy if the traffic on the above link is in any way influential.) Brandon mentioned that he thought Dark Intruder would be up my alley, and I realized that I had already acquired a copy of this in a lot of Alfred Hitchcock items some years ago. Dark Intruder is not actually a Hitchcock affiliated project, as it was shot as the pilot for a proposed series to be called Black Cloak, but the crew of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series did shoot it, so it makes sense that the aficionado whose estate sale I attended would have lumped it in there. 

Clocking in at a hair shy of a full hour, Dark Intruder has several points in its favor. Leslie Nielsen plays the lead: a socialite playboy named Brett Kingsford, whose persona belies a fascination with (and some talent for handling) the occult. He has a little person manservant/butler named Nikola (Charles Bolender) who assists him, and he’s friends with Police Commissioner Harvey Misbach (Gilbert Green). If you’re someone like me whose brain has been completely rotted by too many comic book movies, then you probably recognize a very Batman-like pattern in there, simply replacing the “cowardly and superstitious lot” that our apparent layabout aristocrat faces with investigations into the arcane and the mystical. It’s also a period piece, being set in late 19th Century San Francisco, so there’s plenty of handsom cabs, gaslights, and fog to establish the mood. The plot kicks off when Kingsford is visited by his friend Evelyn (Judi Meredith), who asks him to check in on her fiance Robert (Mark Richman), as he has started to become sullen and withdrawn. Kingsford is also summoned by Commissioner Gordon, um, I mean Misbach, to consult on a series of murders. There’s no apparent connection between the victims, but it is clearly the work of a serial killer based on both the modus operandi and that there is a ceramic statuette left behind; the sculptures depict a man with a gargoyle on the back of his head, with each successive totem showing the gargoyle emerging further and further. 

There’s some investigative rigamarole, and it’s moderately engaging. Kingsford goes to consult an Asian mystic (if the film was more specific, I could be too) who burns some incense with him and reveals, in a roundabout way, that there will be seven murders and then the creature will fully emerge. If you’re interested in this, it’s a fairly short time commitment (even if it’s one that I wouldn’t say is particularly worth the effort), so be forewarned that I’m about to spoil the reveal of this sixty-year-old failed TV pilot, if that’s something you can bring yourself to care about. Everybody still reading fine with the reveal? Ok. See, Dark Intruder throws out a lot of ideas, including talking about Lovecraftian concepts and name-dropping Dagon, but what this ultimately boils down to is a bit of a Basket Case situation. Evelyn’s fiance Robert was born with a malformed twin that all believed had died save for the family nurse who kept and raised him, and the murdered people were all party to this in some way or another. If the creature can kill all seven intended victims by a certain night (which also happens to be the night of Eliza and Robert’s wedding rehearsal … or something — this was very difficult to pay attention to) then he and Robert will swap bodies, and he will no longer be a monster. 

There’s nothing wrong with that premise, but I have to admit that as much as I love Nielsen, he does not feel right in this role. He’s playing the character a bit too modernly, with a bit too much of a sneer. This might be a long reach, but the thing it reminded me of the most was the early-aughts Bruce Campbell TV vehicle Jack of all Trades, a campy pleasure of mine in which Campbell plays an American spy named Jack Stiles, stationed on a South Pacific Island in the early 1800s, and doing a bit of a Scarlet Pimpernel thing in his alter ego as the Daring Dragoon. A part of the comedy comes from the fact that Bruce Campbell is playing the Jack no differently than he would play a modern part; the charm comes from how much you enjoy Bruce Campbell saying something pithy and then making a face at the camera, which is not for everyone (more for me!). It feels strange to call Leslie Nielsen’s performance something that feels “too modern” when we’re talking about something that predates the moon landing, but that’s precisely what’s happening. This isn’t the sincere, stoic Nielsen that you get in Forbidden Planet or any number of his appearances across Columbo & Murder She Wrote, nor is it the all-gas no-brakes tomfoolery of his later career. Instead, it’s just a little subtle smugness to him, where he’s a little too above it all and snarky about it, and it’s the same energy that he had in Airplane! It feels wrong, and that permeates the entire piece. 

The design of Robert’s Belial is a mixed bag. The face is appropriately harrowing to look at but is little different from a wolfman design. Dark Intruder is smart to keep this from us for as long as it does, instead showing only the monster’s impressive (and scary) hawklike talons for most of the runtime. Its best sequence involves Kingsford, Robert, and Evelyn having been drawn to meet a reclusive medium, who speaks from beneath a dark cowl with an eerie, distorted voice, and when the protagonistic group leaves, the reveal of those talons from beneath the psychic’s robes is effective. For much of the rest of it, however, wheels are spinning. I was reminded of the last few seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, when the program was retitled as the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the stories ran for an entire hour block instead of a thirty-minute one. Almost all of those that I have seen suffer a great deal from being expanded to that length, in comparison to the better-paced segments from when the show was half the runtime. Everyone besides Nielsen completists can leave this one off their watchlists, unless you’re merely drawn in by the oddity’s novel mechanical qualities. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Orang Ikan (Monster Island, 2025)

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I can’t remember the last time I saw a rubber-suit monster movie at the theater.  The modern monster movie has fully outsourced its creature effects to animatronics & computer graphics nerds, so that the traditional guy-in-a-suit Roger Corman creature feature is effectively an antique relic (outside the occasional tongue-in-cheek throwback like Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!).  There’s something refreshingly sincere about the new straight-to-Shudder monster picture Orang Ikan, then, which recently had its local theatrical premiere at The Overlook Film Festival.  It’s a fully traditional rubber-suit Corman creeper, even padding out its 80-minute runtime with a plot-recapping clip show to help it crawl into feature length — a classic Corman tactic.

The Western-market title Monster Island sets expectations for kaiju-scale creatures here, as does the early-40s WWII setting.  Two soldiers from opposing sides of the Japanese-British divide are shipwrecked together on a mysterious island in the Pacific Ocean, suddenly dependent on each other for survival instead of working towards each other’s destruction.  The search for food, shelter, and dry cigarettes is alone enough to make their time on the island lethally miserable, but then they also have to contend with the island’s native inhabitants: a creature from The Black Lagoon, or at least that famous monster’s distant relative.  In the earliest creature attacks, the monster is obscured in dark shadows, quick edits, and up-close angles that threaten to hide all of the money shots out of embarrassment for the production’s scale & budget.  Thankfully, the creature is soon displayed in a full-body wide shot in beachside daylight, proudly showing off all its classic rubber-suited glory.

If there’s any thematic justification behind importing a rubber-suited monster into what’s effectively a battlefield drama, it’s in how war transforms enemy combatants into The Other.  An international co-production, Orang Ikan is evenly split between Japanese & English dialogue, with its two stranded, chained-together soldiers attempting to find common ground despite the language barrier and their opposing military orders.  Likewise, when the creature first appears on the island, it’s likened to the instinctual violence of a territorial crocodile hunting for its next meal.  Then, the humanoid monster fights that croc to the death in a desperate bid for its own survival, mirroring the soldiers’ struggle with the local elements.  When the soldiers inevitably have to kill the monster anyway, there’s a tinge of sadness to the act, with the camera lingering on the death of the creature’s unborn fetus on a cave-room floor.  War makes monsters of us all, and so on, and so forth.

There seems to be something about aquatic creatures in particular that have made them the last refuge for the practical-effects monster movie.  Between the fish-men of The Shape of Water & Cold Skin, the killer mermaids of The Lure, and the aquatic goofballs of Lake Michigan Monster & Riverbeast!, they’re keeping the humanoid monster dream alive & wet.  In that context, I suppose that if Orang Ikan had gone full kaiju-scale “suitmation” in its rubber-suit monster mayhem, it might have registered as a more daring genre outlier, but I’m happy with the classic Roger Corman creature feature payoffs as delivered.  Funnily enough, the most daring aspect of the film was likely unintentional, as its push for wordless male bonding between its stranded soldiers reads as electrically homoerotic in moments.  It’s not like the soldiers smooch or anything, but they do lovingly call out each other’s names and light each other’s cigarettes. Of course, unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas is its own long-running cinematic tradition; it’s just one that usually doesn’t make room for a crocodile-murdering fish beast in the frame.

-Brandon Ledet

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

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The Masque of the Red Death may have already been discussed to death on Swampflix. It was Movie of the Month in February 2015 (so slightly before my time), was reviewed in conversation with its 1989 remake (Adrian Paul?!), and served as inspiration for a Mardi Gras costume as immortalized here. But I just saw it for the first time and was completely blown away by it. It’s the exact flip side of Premature Burial, figuratively, and—since they were released together on a double sided MGM Midnite Movies DVD—literally. I couldn’t believe just how cool it was, especially since Roger Corman, despite how dearly I hold him in my heart, does not have a reputation for being a good filmmaker. The set & costume designs were really terrific, and Vincent Price is an absolute great in this role, treating the whole thing as if he’s doing Shakespeare at The Globe. 

Price plays Prince Prospero, whom I always imagined from the original Edgar Allan Poe short story as being a much younger man, possessed of a kind of haughtiness of youthful royalty. Here, he is instead portrayed by the fifty-three-year-old Price, and his indifference towards the suffering of his subjects is not an aristocratic apathy toward the suffering of the poor as he and his sexy friends (as I always imagined them based on their descriptions as being “hale and light-hearted”) wait out an epidemic. Prospero is instead an out-and-out worshipper of the devil who takes delight in committing acts of evil and depravity and who spends much of the film trying to undermine the faith of a peasant girl named Francesca (Jane Asher). As the film opens, Prospero and his men ride carelessly through a village in his domain, narrowly avoiding trampling a child to death in the thoroughfare through the quick intervention of Gino (David Weston). When the prince stops in the village, he takes umbrage at the underhanded things being said about him, and he plans to kill both Gino and another man named Ludovico (Nigel Green), but Francesca intervenes on their behalf and Prospero humors her; he tells her to choose which one will die, but she cannot choose between her beloved and her father (the former and the latter, respectively). When Prospero learns that there is plague in the village, he cuts his visit short and takes all three back to his castle to deal with them later, and orders the village burnt to the ground. 

I mentioned before that Corman wasn’t known for being one of the greats, but what he was known for in his time and beyond is that he was a very economical filmmaker. When writing about Targets years ago, I mentioned an anecdote in which Corman said that he had managed to shoot entire movies in two days; the Corman interview that is the only special feature to speak of on this home video release is pretty illuminating about his process. When talking about American International Pictures’ higher-ups, he says that they learned about a special tax credit that the UK was offering for films shot there. Feeling that they were leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of it, AIP relocated Corman from his normal filming environs and sent him to Associated British Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, England (where Jamaica Inn was filmed!). Corman praises this decision, as it allowed him to hire actor Patrick Magee, whose performance as Prospero’s friend Alfredo conveys both vulnerability and menace in a way that Corman highlighted when meditating on the making of the film. 

Also here in the castle is Julianna (Hazel Court, who was also in Premature Burial), Prospero’s mistress who has heretofore enjoyed the fruits of being Prospero’s concubine without having to commit to marriage. The presence of Francesca (and Julianna’s eviction from her own suite to make way for her) complicates these matters, prompting Julianna to commit to going “all the way” in her dark studies and present herself to the devil as his willing bride. She goes through with the final ceremony and then the film goes into a weird psychedelic dream in which she’s attacked by an entire United Colors of Benetton ad’s worth of international stereotypes before she gets pecked to death by one of Prospero’s birds. This might be part of what makes this one so memorable and novel, as the film has all of the trappings of being a very different, Shakespeare-for-the-BBC, self-serious film, but because Roger’s at the helm, he brings a little bit of that Hollywood flavor to it so we also get to have a series of excitingly violent sequences, including the burning of Francesca’s village, Prospero murdering a guest who arrives late to the party with a crossbow, dungeon-based sword-fighting, a man being burned alive in a gorilla costume, and the aforementioned death-by-bird. What’s also impressive is the scale of this one, as production was completed in a mere four weeks, and yet there are many impressive camera movements around the ballroom where the festivities largely take place while the dancers in the background never lose a single step in their choreography. In fact, Corman said that he considers it to be a 3.5-week picture that just happened to take four weeks to complete because of what he considered to be a slower pace. (James Cameron is still sour about British crew’s slow pace making Aliens, and Stanley Kubrick was likewise vexed by the high number of tea breaks taken during the making of Full Metal Jacket, which is not bad company for Corman to find himself, to be honest.)

I had quite a good time with this one. It’s very well made, has extremely high production values, and is never dull for a single moment. The only really puzzling thing about it is the casting of Esmerelda; without watching the Corman interview that explained it, I would never have known that the child actress was supposed to be portraying an adult little person, especially as they had her in the same scenes with Hop-Toad, who was portrayed by an actual little person (Skip Martin). This confusion works in the context in the first scene in which she appears, as we see that Alfredo talks about her with a kind of lust that helps to illuminate the depths of the depravity that Prosper’s boon companions are filled with. In her only other scene, when Hop-Toad is preparing for his vengeance on Alfredo for striking Esmerelda, he warns her to be ready to flee the castle, and she speaks with an adult voice, which didn’t make sense until Corman admitted in the interview that he couldn’t find a little person actress for the role in England and cast her with eight-year-old Verina Greenlaw instead. Just have that in mind when you check this one out. And you should! 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #236: Good Boy (2025) & The Overlook Film Festival

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Welcome to Episode #236 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss a selection of genre films that screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, starting with Good Boy (2025), a haunted house story as seen from a dog’s POV.

00:00 Welcome

04:36 Good Boy
17:00 The Ugly Stepsister
30:00 It Ends
36:26 Predators
49:43 Zodiac Killer Project
1:00:53 Dead Lover
1:05:00 The Shrouds
1:16:05 LifeHack
1:20:20 Cloud
1:38:17 Hallow Road

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

– The Podcast Crew

The Premature Burial (1962)

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The Premature Burial is, unfortunately, not very good. The third Roger Corman film based (very loosely, in this case) on an Edgar Allan Poe short story, this was the only film of the eight that the director made which did not star Vincent Price. The story is that while Corman was in dispute with American International Pictures about what project to film next, he was approached by a film printing lab that wanted to get into the production business. They put up half the funding and Corman provided the other half out of his own pocket, but Price was unavailable due to being under contract with AIP. On the first day of shooting for Premature Burial, the two heads of AIP showed up and said that they were excited to be working with Corman again, because they had just that very morning bought out the film lab that Corman had partnered with. As a result, this one ended up being released by American International as well, but it was too late in the process to change horses, and instead of Price, we get Ray Milland in the leading role. Interestingly, the night that my friend and I ended up renting Goodfellas (as discussed recently on the podcast), we were seeking out Corman’s Masque of the Red Death at the video store and were unable to locate it. It was supposed to be in the “double features” section, as it’s paired with Premature Burial on one of those “MGM’s Midnite Movies” DVDs. It wasn’t there, under “P” for “Premature” or “M” for “Masque,” nor could it be found in the general horror section. When I returned Goodfellas the following week, I decided to check again, and there it was, filed correctly. The weird thing was that the person working that day thanked me for finding it, since the person who had assisted me before had marked it as missing in the system. It’s not a very interesting story, but it is more than you’re going to get from Premature Burial. 

After an opening sequence in which a gaggle of grave robbers are digging up a body only to discover the inside of the coffin lid streaked with blood and tattered from scratching, we open on Emily Gault (Hazel Court). She’s arrived at the manor house—on a perpetually misty soundstage moor, of course—of her beloved, Guy (Milland), and although Guy’s sister Kate (Heather Angel) attempts to send her away, Emily insists that if Guy won’t receive her, he must tell her to her face. Kate relents, and we learn that Guy is a pupil of her father, Dr. Gault (Alan Napier), and that Dr. Gault and Guy were present at the desecration of the coffin in the pre-title opening, with Guy feeling so embarrassed about having fainted that he’s ready to end their engagement rather than admit the truth. He reveals that his family has a predilection toward catalepsy, that is to say that they enter into a comatose state that so closely mimics death that he believes his father was buried alive, as he recalls hearing him screaming within his tomb in the catacombs beneath the manor. As a result, he also possesses a paralyzing fear that he will be entombed while still alive, a fear that seeing the corpse that had tried to dig its way out triggered. Emily convinces him that they can work through it together, and he agrees to proceed with their wedding. 

At the ceremony, we meet Miles Archer (Richard Ney), whose repeated insistence that he’s truly happy for Emily telegraphs that he and Emily were once in love but that he has lost her. Emily sits at the pianoforte and plays the song “Molly Malone,” which causes Guy to spiral further, as this was the same tune that was hummed by the gravediggers on the night that he went out with Dr. Gault and saw the man who had clawed at the inside of the coffin. Guy then builds an elaborate freestanding tomb with layer upon layer of failsafes that would allow him to escape if he were entombed there prematurely, including a rope ladder that appears at the pull of a sash, digging tools (and tools for the repair of digging tools), and even a couple of sticks of dynamite. The final safeguard, of course, is a dose of poison, so that he could kill himself quickly rather than die slowly. Emily convinces him to get out of this morbid place and go for a walk on the moors, but when he hears “Molly Malone” being whistled, he and Emily are parted, so that she does not see the grave robbers who appear out of the fog (or do they?) to torment Guy. 

It’s at this point in the film that my already taxed investment hit an all time low. Guy passes out, and then he has an extended dream sequence in which he is locked in his fancy foolproof tomb, only for all of his various and sundry plans to fall apart. The rope ladder falls from the ceiling, unanchored. The dynamite has dry rotted and crumbles under his touch. When Guy was showing all of his contraptions to Emily and Miles (and thus to the audience), this was already tedious enough, but now we have to go through essentially the same motions and at the same speed, just watching everything not work. It’s the scene that serves as a microcosm of just how much this whole film simply doesn’t work, as Guy runs through the same cycles of depression and paranoia in a way that may be meant to evoke a descent into madness but which ultimately feels repetitive and tiresome. Milland is trying here, I suppose, but there’s never a point before his obsession that we get to meet him and know him as a mentally healthy person, so there’s not that far for him to fall from the person we meet in the first scene to the person he becomes when he actually does get buried alive and then wreaks havoc on those who have wronged him. It’s a short trip between those two mental states, but it takes over an hour to get there. 

The pace does quicken a bit around the middle. Emily gives a fairly well written and delivered speech in which she tells Guy that his obsessive fear of being buried alive has made him functionally do exactly that, as he spends his days fully within his tomb. There’s also a bit of fun to be had when someone sneaks down to the family basement and messes around with Guy’s father’s crypt, so that when Kate seeks to prove that their father died peacefully by opening his tomb, Guy’s fears seem to come to life, as it appears his father tried to escape. Things quickly peter out by the end, however, and the reveal of the architect of this attempt to drive Guy mad is hardly surprising. Even if you’re a Poe or a Corman completist, this is one that I can recommend that you skip. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #235: Étoile (1989) & Ballet Schlock

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Welcome to Episode #235 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of low-budget horror films about ballerinas in crisis, starting with the 1989 Supsiria knockoff Étoile, starring Jennifer Connelly.

00:00 Concerts
07:21 Two English Girls (1971)
10:32 Adolescence (2025)
15:37 Down with Love (2003)
19:20 Chocolate Babies (1996)

25:03 Étoile (1989)
47:53 Dance Macabre (1992)
1:04:16 The Line, The Cross & The Curve (1993)
1:20:18 Wishing Stairs (2003)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Ash (2025)

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It is a truth non-universally acknowledged that all art is political, but Ash, from director Steven Ellison (better known under his musical moniker Flying Lotus), may be the first film I’ve ever seen that has no identifiable thesis and thus appears to be completely apolitical. This isn’t a criticism so much as an observation of the fact that this movie, despite how much I enjoyed it, seems to be all but completely theme-less. Riya (Eiza González) wakes up, amnesiac, inside of what appears to be crew quarters, surrounded by dead bodies, all of which demonstrate extreme violence done against them. She experiences horrifying flashes of such violence: a head bashed in by a rock, a face melting away as it decomposes, smiles turning from friendly and warm to malevolent and menacing. She walks outside and discovers that she was inside of some kind of station or base on an alien world, as something snowlike drifts down from a sky that is dominated by a radial design that resembles the iris of a great eye, pulsing and pulsating. She sees something vaguely humanoid at a distance, obscured by the harsh atmosphere, although it remains unclear if there is someone or something out there, or if it is perhaps a mirror image of herself (as it mimics her movements) or even a mirage or hallucination. She manages to make it back inside before the atmosphere suffocates her, only to hear a knock at the door. It’s Brion (Aaron Paul), the sixth member of their expedition team, who has left his post in orbit in response to a distress call from the surface, saying that Riya himself had told him that Clarke (Kate Elliott), the only person not accounted for between the two of them and the corpses, had undergone some kind of psychotic break and attacked the others. Riya attempts to recover her memories and advocates for finding and rescuing Clarke, but their time is limited; they have to return to the main spaceship the next time that it completes its orbit in just a few hours, as damage to the base means that they have insufficient atmosphere to wait for it to come around again. 

In writing about Lotus’s previous film, Kuso, Brandon noted that the gross out comedy (with heavy focus on the “gross out” part) was of a kind with Adult-Swim-to-feature pipeline films that “tend[ed] to push attention spans to the limit at full length.” I can confirm that this was an issue for one of my viewing companion, who admitted in the car ride on the way home that some of the gaps in his understanding of the film could be attributed to dozing off a couple of times, but this is also a film with an intentionally dense plot that lends itself to few easy answers. The amnesiac protagonist character is not necessarily a new one, but the film initially sets itself up as a bit of a science fiction mystery with an anachronic order: Who killed everyone? Can Brion be trusted? Can Riya, for that matter? As characterization and events are doled out in flashes of recovered memory as well as exploration footage that Riya manages to recover from a drone, we learn more about what happened, and it becomes apparent that this movie is little more than a remix of other films from this genre — an excellently photographed, perfectly soundtracked, and gorgeously colored, to be sure, but a remix nonetheless. That does not detract from the film, but that all of these elements come with a bit of a pacing issue does. 

In the opening minutes, as Riya makes her way outside of the base and sees a figure in the distance mimicking her movement, one thinks of the finale of Annihilation. The quick cross-cutting of horrific images in Riya’s mind—be they memories, hallucinations, nightmares, or some combination thereof—calls to mind Event Horizon, which famously tucked all of the visuals that pushed the film into the NC-17 rating into mere blips on screen in order to secure an R, so that the viewer isn’t sure what they’re seeing but are nonetheless disturbed. As Riya watches the video captured by one of the mission’s drones and we intercut between the footage itself and the memories that it awakens within her, one is reminded of the crew of the Nostromo as they approach the downed ship on LV-426 in Alien (that the planet “Ash,” from which the film takes its title, also has a very similar designation is but one of the smallest of many allusions to that franchise). Their discovery of an alien artifact of their own and the realization that this is the first domino that falls before the tragedy we entered in media res at the start of the film is likewise very Alien-like, and then the film pushes further and becomes a bit like Prometheus in the study of organic matter taken from it, which becomes an orifice-invading life form that is ultimately responsible for everything. There’s even a little The Thing in there, as this is an isolated place in a desolate environment where no one can be trusted, as well as a really great Rob Bottin/Stanley Winston style mutant human at the end. 

One Alien film it doesn’t borrow from is Alien3, but it does crib from another of director David Fincher’s films, but to say more on that would stray too far into spoiler territory, and I think this is a film that should be gone into with as little foreknowledge as possible. I certainly did; it just happened to be $5 Tuesday (well, $5.75 now) and a friend finally had some time off after having to work an extended stretch of days during and around SXSW. The arthouse was doing repertory screenings of things I had already seen, and Brandon had written about Black Bag and the new Looney Tunes picture, so with nothing more to go on than the tiny icon of the film’s poster in the MoviePass app, I went to the film with a couple of friends. As soon as the characteristic “heartbeat” sound and logo card that accompanies the opening of the Shudder app and precedes the films it distributes, I realized that I had accidentally duped myself into paying for a movie that I could watch at home. That having been said, when the film’s opening fifteen minutes or so felt very much like the beginning of a Syfy Channel original (albeit an extremely elevated and gory one), I was glad that I was watching this in a theater instead of at home, where the film’s pacing would have been a greater challenge on my attention span. This is a film that is introspective, but temporally, not tonally. There’s a lovely dream sequence in the middle that I rather liked, but the purposeful use of long scenes in which very little is happening and we are left to merely contemplate the tableau is something that I can see turning off certain audiences (my two viewing companions, for example, had polar opposite reactions).

Even if you, like me, are more tolerant of those contemplative moments, you may still find that what’s most critically missing here is a lack of theme. Alien is positively (and often literally) dripping with concepts of motherhood, gestation, and birth; The Thing captures a quiet paranoia and isolation that’s universally emotionally applicable; Event Horizon is a parable about madness through the consequences of what happens when science pierces the veil of reality. All of these are existential horrors in what are normally considered environments of speculative fiction, and all of them feature terrifying results of encounters with beings so unlike us that moral concepts of “good” and “evil” don’t really apply. So is Ash. But as to what Ash is about … I’m not really sure that I could tell you. The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a “purpose” or a “point,” meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its “purpose” is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its “point” is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner. It won’t be for everyone, but if you have the inclination after this review to see it, I’d see it on the big screen if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond