jeffrey donovan

Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.

Now that we’re over two-thirds of the way through this project, while watching the first fifteen minutes or so of Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, I started to think about how I would be ranking all of these once I’ve seen and completed my reviews of all of them (a day that I dream about like Maximus hovering his hand over a field of wheat in his dreams in Gladiator, as I will at last know peace). The number of these films and their groupings of stratified quality mean that I can’t simply sit down and write a top-to-bottom list like I recently did of the Coen Brothers’ films, so I started to think of them as existing in more of a tiered list. I broke it down into five groups, from worst to best: (1) Garbage; (2) Fine, I Guess; (3) Solid But Unexceptional; (4) Possesses Some Notable Quality or Sophistication; (5) Cinema, Baby. During the opening scenes of this film, which are set an uncertain number of years before the primary body of the narrative, we get a condensed version of the Wonder Woman origin story. Pilot Steve Trevor (Jeffrey Donovan) crashes into the ocean near Themyscira, an island full of warrior Amazons, and is rescued by the island’s princess, Diana (Rosario Dawson). She opts to return him to “man’s world,” and in this version, she does so in rebellion against her mother, Queen Hippolyta (Cree Summer), who tells her daughter that she no longer recognizes her and, while she can take Trevor home, her treasonous actions mean that she can never return.

Stateside, Diana meets Etta Candy (Adrienne C. Moore), Trevor’s boss (I think?), who helps her get set up in a new home with an archaeologist, Professor Julia Kapatelis (Nia Vardalos), and her daughter Vanessa (Marie Avgeropoulos). Vanessa is entering that part of adolescence where the youth forsake their native tongues and speak only in sarcasm, and she is at first miffed that there’s suddenly a new woman in their home (and a princess to boot), but she and Diana start to bond over their shared backgrounds as the daughters of demanding mothers. Unfortunately, Julia is an academic of ancient times who suddenly has a demigoddess who is steeped in myth and legend under her roof, and we see in montage that she becomes inattentive to her daughter’s needs, causing Vanessa to grow resentful of both her mother and their guest, acting out by going goth and shaving half of her head, as one does. Diana, in all of this, tries to remain supportive of and give comfort to Vanessa, never realizing that her constant presence is one of the roots of the problem. This culminates in Diana becoming a public figure as Wonder Woman and moving out of the Kapatelis home before we skip to the film’s “present,” wherein Diana is working with Candy and a now-bearded Trevor when she is approached by Julia again; she’s discovered that Vanessa has stolen from her employer, pharmaceutical magnate Veronica Cale, and is planning to sell a pilfered artifact to villainous Dr. Poison. Wanting to help, Diana goes to try and stop the sale, which is (of course) happening in a warehouse and there are (of course) minions with machine guns, and although her intervention probably saves Vanessa’s life, Julia is killed. Vanessa, furious that about the death of a mother who should not have been there, blames Diana solely for this, and aligns herself with Dr. Poison and her partner, Dr. Cyber, to get revenge.

During that montage sequence mentioned above, there’s a lot of storytelling that happens purely through visuals, which is a nice touch that many of these films lack. We get a clear idea of what Vanessa’s childhood bedroom looks like before her goth-punk phase, and it’s a normal teenage girl’s bedroom: glowing stars on the ceiling, artwork of flowers and butterflies, books about teen vampire romance. At the midpoint of her transition to half-shaved rebel, her room changes, too, with her wooden headboard replaced with a wrought iron one that resembles the arch of a gothic church window, there’s a bust of a dragon on top of her dresser, and her wall features at least one poster with a skull on it. It’s not the most elaborate form of visual storytelling, but demonstrates an attention to detail that’s noteworthy here. I also find this dynamic between Diana, Julia, and Vanessa to be one of the more compelling and unusually sophisticated ones. While Vanessa’s blind lashing out at Diana following Julia’s death is hypocritical, as the only reason that the entire situation occurred was because Vanessa—manipulated or not—was willing to commit corporate espionage, but she’s also not wrong that Julia should not have been present at the scene, and it was a bad idea to bring her there. You can see all of the resentment and rage that built up inside of her over the past decade, as Diana’s attempts to extend an olive branch to Vanessa as she becomes more bitter about it only make the situation worse.

When it comes to emotional complications in these movies, it’s rare to see one that isn’t a de facto part of the genre — questioning if and when to reveal one’s secret identity to a loved one, the extent of responsibility that a vigilante figure possesses when they inspire counteractivity in the form of escalating violence, etc. This emotional conflict is unique in these films, and that the movie is able to further complicate this by making it about the relationship between mothers and daughters, not only between Diana and Hippolyta as well as Vanessa and Julia, but also the bond that forms between Diana and Julia, one that falls outside of the title-referent “bloodlines.” That interruption and supplanting of the maternal relationship between Vanessa and Julia is the impetus for everything that transpires, and it’s nice that the conflict is born out of something so human and familiar rather than an alien invasion, a plot by a secretive cabal of socialites, warlords of the distant future, or the nefarious activities of an island of ninjas. Even though this one devolves into the same old battle at the end (one which is fine but suffers in comparison to the dynamic and interesting fluid action of Reign of the Supermen), that core human conflict makes it rise above the “Solid But Unexceptional” category into “Possessed a Notable Sophistication.”

-Brandon Ledet

It can’t have come to this, can it? Kyra Sedgwick isn’t old enough to play a psychobiddy. Right? Our eternally youthful Madam Sedgwick is a respectable 54 last year. How old was Bette Davis when Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was released in 1962? According to Wikipedia she was born in 1908, so … 54.

Well, shit.

Villains is a 2019 comedy thriller about spacy, star-crossed stick-up artists Mickey (Bill Skarsgård) and Jules (Maika Monroe), whose getaway car runs out of gas at the worst possible moment. Happening upon a house, they break in with no real plan before realizing that they can siphon the gas in the car in the house’s garage, get back to their alleged vehicle, and then be on their way to Florida, where Mickey has designs on selling seashells down by the seashore. They stumble across something in the basement (I’ll come back to that in a minute), and before they can get out with their hides intact, homeowners George (Jeffrey Donovan) and Gloria (Sedgwick) come home with their infant, Ethan. Although the younger couple start from a position of power—they have a gun, after all—their elders quickly get the upper hand and before you know it, Mickey and Julia are handcuffed to a pole in the basement while George and Gloria try to decide what to do with them.

All of the film’s marketing, such as it is, really hypes up the something in the house, and that was what originally drew me to the flick. Here’s Hulu’s synopsis: “A pair of amateur criminals break into a suburban home and stumble upon a dark secret that two sadistic homeowners will do anything to keep from getting out” (emphasis mine). IMDb’s description is virtually identical, but the reveal of what’s in the basement comes very early in the film’s runtime, less than halfway through Act I, and is the reason that the rest of the plot exists. If you want to check this one out with absolutely no spoilers, then turn around now and come back later (or don’t; it’s still a free country*). Here’s what’s in the basement:

A little girl named Sweetiepie (Blake Baumgartner).

And the “dark secret”? Gloria and George could never have children. Ethan’s just a doll (we learn this later but long after Gloria says, in roundabout religious language, that either she or George is infertile) that Gloria got from her mother before the latter died of cancer in the former’s childhood. George kidnapped Sweetiepie as a replacement for the child that Gloria could never have, but it didn’t work out, and so instead of just killing her they’ve locked her up in the basement. Which is obviously messed up, but I was expecting a twist that was less Room and more in the vein of Fright Night, or at the very least something in the ballpark of Apt Pupil.

That having been said, this is a fun little romp. I’m forever saying that there are far too few thrillers set during the daylight hours, and if we’re all being honest here, many of those which do exist look cheap. Not so here, as dual neophyte directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, who are also each credited as co-writer, craft a dynamically shot feature with an eye for depth of field and a couple of fascinating framing choices and shots that I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever seen before. Monroe is clearly having a lot of fun here, and it’s nice to see her getting to have a good time and let loose after great-but-understated performances in The Guest and It Follows. I know Donovan only from Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (I have a soft spot) and somewhere in the neighborhood of 786 commercials for Burn Notice during my final semester of grad school while watching Criminal Minds in syndication for six hours a day. While his is the weakest performance of the leading quartet, it’s only because George and Gloria are characters on the more exaggerated end of the scale, having a wholesome folksiness that lacks the edge of malice that the character requires, and Donovan doesn’t get to showcase the range that his screen partner does. There’s a fun bit toward the beginning when he attempts to ingratiate himself with Mickey and Jules, without success, and it’s fun, but each scene thereafter is a variation on delivery. I was surprised by Skarsgård here as well, as I know him almost solely from Hemlock Grove, in which he rose to the level of the material (not very high) and the IT films, in which he was fantastic. He’s magnetic here in a way that I haven’t seen before, as a man who isn’t terribly book smart, or street smart, but is charming and has a certain brightness about him that surfaces when it’s needed most.

Sedgwick is great here, hamming it up with an erotic dance and over-the-top seduction in one scene, then doing a perversely quick spin to sympathetic as she cuts the skin of her hands to shreds grasping at the porcelain shards of Ethan’s shattered head, then to threatening, then maternal. I saw Singles when I was sixteen and absolutely fell in love with Sedgwick, and even further back than that, for some reason, every time I watched Amazing Stories when I was a kid, it was always the episode where she sends food down that well in the desert. That scene in Singles when she delivers the monologue about garage door openers is peak cinema to me. Unlike other films in the psychobiddy genre, the camp here is undeniably intentional, and although this hurts the film a little on the whole, it also gives Sedgwick the opportunity to play things a little broadly and to the cheap seats in some scenes as she babbles about her past and Ethan, and to bring everything around her into sharp focus when she reminisces about her childhood and George’s courtship of her.

Standout scenes include a painful tongue stud removal, the repetition of the “carwash,” which is a unique and sweet act of intimacy in which Jules waves her hair back and forth over Mickey’s face like an automated car wash mop, a reverse laundry chute escape, and Gloria pantomiming. Check it out. Or don’t; again, I’m not your boss. It’s on Hulu.

*Void where prohibited, and your mileage will vary.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Swampflix

New Orleans film blog & podcast

The Not-So-New 52: Wonder Woman – Bloodlines (2019)

Villains (2019)