For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Alli discuss the first two seasons of the Star Trek prequel series Strange New Worlds.
00:00 Welcome
03:09 Overview
16:36 Episodes
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew
Our current Movie of the Month, 1983’s A Night in Heaven is an oddly forgotten studio drama about a bored Floridian college professor who cheats on her husband with a young student, who happens to moonlight as a male stripper. Yes, a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype before I was born, and it’s somehow not a certified cult classic (yet), even though it helped popularize the eternal synthpop banger “Obsession”. Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the complications & safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess. In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter, so I guess it all evens out.
A Night in Heaven was released decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper movies, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print obscurity instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite. However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful. There’s nothing especially vulgar or raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to stripper Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front. Still, it’s still shocking to see a retro movie so sincerely stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for Hollywood filmmaking. It’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club movie with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales. Unfortunately, there aren’t many other high-profile male stripper movies to recommend alongside A Night in Heaven as a result, but there are plenty of other contemporary movies set in 1980s strip clubs that match & complement its vintage sleaze aesthetic. To that end, here are a few recommended titles if you enjoyed our Movie of the Month and want to see more 80s stripper movies that share in its distinctly retro grime & glamour.
Flashdance (1983)
A Night in Heaven’s biggest hurdle to earning long-term cult status might have been its short-term battle with Flashdance. Adrian Lyne’s aspirational welder-by-day-stripper-by-night story of a wannabe ballerina making her way in The Big City overshadowed A Night in Heaven so completely that People Magazine dubbed the latter film “Flashdunce” in its review. It’s not hard to see why. While A Night in Heaven is charming in its internal identity crisis, swinging wildly in genre & tone from scene to scene, Flashdance knows exactly what movie it wants to be and leaps gams first towards that goal. Flashdance is just as manically ambitious as its 18-year-old-with-three-jobs protagonist, hammering away at its early MTV fantasy aesthetic so hard in every scene that it’s practically a feature length music video. When Jennifer Beals welds, she’s surrounded by fantastical splashes of sparks & purple smoke. When she strips, the physical stage disappears to allow her (and her wig-wearing body doubles) to bounce around impossible otherworldly voids. When she practices ballet, she doesn’t really. She reinvents the artform of dance entirely, giving physical expression to a hip cassette tape soundtrack you’re directed to buy on your trip home from the theatre. A Night in Heaven can’t help but look small & dorky next to the biggest strip club fantasy movie of 1983, partly because Flashdance is one of the coolest-looking movies ever made.
I’m saying all this as a general skeptic of Adrian Lyne’s signature works, too. Flashdance delivers all of the messy, sweaty erotica of Lyne’s trademark sex thrillers, except with the bitter misogyny swapped out for high-style MTV escapism. It’s unquestionably his best film, challenged only by Jacob’s Ladder. It’s also very likely the best strip club movie of the 1980s, even if it has to pause mid-film to contrast its impossible high-art erotic dance gallery space against a much more realistic, grubby strip club where women actually take their clothes off for money.
Stripper (1986)
There aren’t many 80s stripper movies that demand to be taken as seriously as Stripper. The semi-staged hangout documentary was directed by Pumping Iron producer Jerome Gary, presenting a sincere portrait of North American strippers as artists & craftswomen doing their best to make a living. The six women profiled on camera are all seemingly genuine & passionate in their explanations of why they strip for money, interviewed in front of a blank Sears family photo backdrop to help dampen the subject’s inherent salaciousness. At the same time, the documentary is structured around a stripper convention’s fictional Golden G-String competition that’s inorganically staged for the camera, so that the women have a goal to achieve beyond day-to-day survival. That in-film kayfabe likely mattered a lot more to serious film critics of the 1980s, which is likely why it isn’t as widely canonized as its bodybuilding equivalents in the Pumping Iron series. Its flagrant dishonesty matters less & less in a post-reality TV world, though, where its mixture of high artifice & subcultural anthropology feels distinctly ahead of its time. Modern audiences are well used to parsing out what’s real and what’s kayfabe in semi-documentary television, and it’s fascinating to see that format pioneered in such a distinct subcultural context at such a distinct era in the stripping profession.
Stripper is just as self-conflicted in its tone as A Night in Heaven. It wants to present its titular profession as just another working-class side job, providing a borderline wholesome public service that’s been an American pastime since the old-timey saloon days of its sepia tone photographs. It can’t help but lean into the glam & smut of its 80s strip club milieu, though, and the only inclusion of male strippers among its hot-babe interviewees are the drunk oglers who join them onstage in sarcastic pantomime. On a documentary level, it’s about as academically rigorous as any random episode of HBO Real Sex, but it still makes for great peoplewatching & anthropological texture if you’re willing to peer beyond the sheer veil of fantasy in its onstage strip routines.
Vamp (1986)
It’s a shame that there aren’t many other male-stripper movies of the era to lump in with A Night in Heaven, since that’s the major detail that makes the film special. A Night in Heaven was released in an era when light-hearted erotica was defined by frat bro boner comedies like Animal House, Porky’s, and Revenge of the Nerds, when most sex objects depicted onscreen were women, not student-by-day-gigolo-by-night college age twinks. So, if you’re going to pair A Night in Heaven with one post-Porky’s boner comedy about strippers, you might as well watch Vamp: the one where a gang of neon-lit vampire strippers led by Grace Jones torture the horndog frat boy protagonists. Often cited as a prototype for From Dusk til Dawn the way A Night in Heaven is a prototype for Magic Mike, Vamp is a cutesy horror comedy that can only ogle women’s bodies for so long before those bodies transform into bloodsucking ghouls and turn the tables of power. In a way, it’s got the same older women preying on younger men sexual dynamic of our Movie of the Month, but the “preying” just happens to be a lot more literal & monstrous.
There’s nothing especially innovative or unique about Vamp, at least not once you get past Grace Jones’s centerpiece strip routine (which features set & body paint designs by legendary artist Keith Haring). It’s basically a David DeCoteau movie with a proper budget, a pure-80s novelty. As a vibe check of what audiences most stripper media served in that era, though, it’s at least a pleasant novelty – not least of all because that audience’s frat boy avatars are punished for their sins by one of the coolest, most powerful women to ever grace the stage.
-Brandon Ledet
Welcome to Episode #192 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss Jackie Chan’s early career as a Hong Kong action star, starting with Drunken Master (1978).
00:00 Welcome
03:06 San Soleil (1983)
06:15 Talk to Me (2023)
09:53 The Outlaws (2023)
12:49 Grizzly II: Revenge (2020)
16:09 Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (2023)
20:52 Sink or Swim (1990)
27:27 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)
33:20 Drunken Master (1978)
54:15 Police Story (1985)
1:15:45 Police Story 3: Supercop (1993)
1:25:15 Rumble in the Bronx (1995)
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
-The Podcast Crew
Every year, I watch an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie on my birthday as a gift to myself. This year, that personal celebration happened to coincide with the national celebration of Barbenheimer: our newest, most sacred federal holiday. I didn’t participate in the full Barbenheimer meme myself, largely because I didn’t understand the value in cramming Gerwig’s & Nolan’s latest into an incongruous double feature simply for the LOLs. Instead, I paired Oppenheimer with fellow unfathomable-weaponry-of-war “Dad movie” Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, and I sought out an appropriate Schwarzenegger classic to watch with family the same day as Barbie. Luckily, Last Action Hero happens to be celebrating a 30th birthday milestone of its own this year, and it proved to have a surprising amount of thematic overlap with the summer’s biggest hit. In a way, Last Action Hero is Barbie for Boys™, which is to say that its fictional character’s real-world existential crisis at the opposite extreme of the gender spectrum made for a surprisingly rewarding double feature – much more so than I suspect I would’ve found in the all-day Barbenheimer mind melter.
Margot Robbie stars in her own existential meta comedy as Stereotypical Barbie, a plastic ideal of girl-power pop feminism whose insular dollhouse world is shaken when she’s introduced to real-life human problems, emotions, and politics. Barbie is both a delirious celebration and a pointed critique of the world-famous Mattel toy brand – combining the bubbly pop feminism of sleepover classics like Legally Blonde with the menacing, high-artifice movie magic of Old Hollywood nightmares like The Wizard of Oz. It’s fantastic, an instant classic. Last Action Hero is more of a cult curio that had to gradually earn its cultural footing over time, but it approaches Schwarzenegger as a household brand the same way Gerwig’s film approaches Barbie. Schwarzenegger stars as both himself and as a typical Schwarzenegger action hero, Jack Slade, who does not initially realize he is a fictional character sidestepping the harsher consequences of life in the Real World. When a magical golden movie ticket frees him from the silver screen and he gets a taste of reality, Slade is confronted with the limitations of his once indestructible body and his insatiable addiction to macho hyperviolence, sending him into an existential tailspin. There are few things more hack than assigning movies a strict placement on the gender binary in the year of our Dark Lord 2023, but both of these meta comedies are specifically about the ways gender stereotypes are established & reinforced by corporate pop media products, to the point where they become kitsch and, ultimately, targets of satire. It’s just that women had to wait an additional three decades to get a Last Action Hero equivalent specifically marketed to them, to Hollywood’s shame.
The funny thing about Barbie & Last Action Hero‘s shared purpose is that in both cases the call is coming from inside the house. There is potential, legitimate criticism to find in Gerwig’s decision to make a crowd-pleasing commercial for a Mattel product, even if her script (written with partner Noah Baumbach) includes direct, damaging punches to the Mattel brand. She’s participating in the same Art Vs. Commerce tug of war that all mainstream Hollywood movies wrestle with, but she makes that struggle a blatant feature of the text, even casting the Mattel execs toying with her script behind the scenes as on-screen buffoons and comic relief (led by Will Ferrell). Likewise, Last Action Hero was initially conceived as a spoof of excessively violent, comically tropey action movies of its era: films like Rambo & Commando. Hilariously, the project was written & directed by two of the filmmakers most directly responsible for the exact tropes it mocks: director John McTiernan (Die Hard, Predator, The Hunt for Red October) and screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon[s] 1 – 3). When Barbie features a TV commercial for Depression Barbie or when Last Action Hero features a trailer for a shoot-em-up version of Hamlet, the movies are mocking the exact pop media tropes and real-world social ills the industry behind them helped create in the first place. They’re self-conflicted, but in a way that adds authenticity to their parodic intent. Last Action Hero‘s goofball ZAZ gags are much funnier in the visual context of a typical John McTiernan action flick, just as Barbie‘s intrusive existential thoughts and feminist rants are much sharper in the visual context of a legitimate Mattel toy commercial.
The truth is that you don’t have to look far to find direct comparison points for Last Action Hero. It wasn’t even the only self-spoofing action hero meta comedy of 1993, since Schwarzenegger’s fellow Planet Hollywood investor Sylvester Stallone had his own macho-fish-out-of-water satire in Demolition Man that same year. And that’s not even counting the more generalized action genre spoofs of the era like Hot Shots & Naked Gun, nor their more recent smartass superhero equivalents in the Deadpool series. Meanwhile, most of the aesthetic & tonal touchstones I can think to compare the new Barbie movie to are all relics of the VHS rental era: Josie and the Pussycats, The Brady Bunch Movie, Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion, Spice World, the aforementioned Legally Blonde, etc. Those titles have all stood the test of time as obsessive-rewatch classics not only because they’re all sharp-witted and visually vibrant, but also because Hollywood hasn’t bothered to offer up-to-date replacements in the same high-femme register in the decades since. The instant, participatory enthusiasm for Barbie is reflective of an audience starved for a kind of women-marketed satire that Hollywood doesn’t regularly make anymore. Meanwhile, Last Action Hero bombed in its time, failing to take on its opening weekend rival Jurassic Park the same way Barbie trounced Oppenheimer. It still has its own dedicated-to-the-cause cult audience, though, mostly among lifelong Schwarzenegger super-obsessives like me who grew up with it as a childhood favorite. There’s just so much other self-mocking action schlock out there that it’s a little more difficult to immediately recognize it as something special.
-Brandon Ledet
Like most other bored, overheated Americans, I spent the third Friday of July hiding from the sun in my neighborhood movie theater, watching an all-day double feature. I didn’t directly participate in the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, though, partly due to scheduling inconvenience and partly out of general bafflement with the incongruous pairing. As a longtime movie obsessive, it was wonderful to see more casual audiences out in full force, dressed up to participate in a double feature program; or it was at least a more endearing moviegoing meme than its recent “Gentleminions” predecessor. I still like to program my double features with a little more consideration to tone & theme, though, and I can’t imagine that either Nolan’s or Gerwig’s latest were served well by the pairing – which was essentially a joke about how ill-suited they were for back-to-back binging in the first place. However, I’m not immune to pop culture FOMO, which is how I wound up watching Oppenheimer in the first place. Nothing about the film’s subject, genre, or marketing screamed out to me as essential viewing, other than the assumption that it was going to be a frequent subject of movie nerd discourse until at least next year’s Oscars ceremony. So, I dragged my old, tired body to the theater at 10am on a weekday to sit down with Christopher Nolan’s three-hour rumination on the placid evils of nuclear war, and then paired it with a movie I suspected I would like just to sweeten the deal – the ludicrously titled Mission: Impossible 7, Part 1 – Dead Reckoning. It was essentially the same dessert-after-dinner double feature approach most participating audiences took with Barbenheimer (which, considering that sequence, likely should’ve just been called “Oppie”), except applied to two feature films on a single subject: the abstract weaponry of modern war.
As you surely already know, Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the titular nuclear physicist, credited for leading the development of the atom bomb at the end of WWII. His story is told in two conflicting, alternating perspectives: his own version of events in full color (as told to a military security-clearance review board) and a black-and-white version recounted by a professional rival (as told years later in a Congressional hearing). It’s an abrasively dry approach to such an explosive, emotional subject, even if Nolan does everything possible to win over Dad Movie heretics like me in the story’s framing & editing – breaking up the pedestrian men-talking-in-rooms rhythms of an Oliver Stone or Aaron Sorkin screenplay with his own flashier, in-house Nolanisms. Oppenheimer strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a “Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo!” rhythm. After so many years of tinkering with the cold, technical machinery of cinema, Nolan at least seems willing to allow a new sense of looseness & abstraction into the picture to disrupt his usual visual clockwork (starting most clearly in Tenet). Young Oppenheimer’s visit to an art museum as a student suggests that this new, abstracted style is inspired by the Cubist art movement of the setting’s era, but the editing feels purely Malickian to me, especially when covering the scientist’s early years. My favorite moments were his visions of cosmos—micro and macro—while puzzling through the paradoxes of nuclear science, as well as his wife’s intrusive visions of his sexual affair while defending himself to a military panel. These are still small, momentary distractions from the real business at hand: illustrating the biggest moral fuck-up of human history in all its daily office-work drudgery. Most of the movie is outright boring in its “What have we done?” contemplations of bureaucratic weaponry-development evil, no matter how much timeline jumping it does in its character-actor table reads of real-life historical documents.
In all honesty, the most I got out of Oppenheimer was an appreciation for it table-setting the mood for the much more entertaining Mission: Impossible 7. To paraphrase Logan Roy, I am not a serious person. The great tragedy of Nolan’s piece is watching a Jewish, Leftist man’s attempts to stop his people’s genocide get exploited by the American military’s bottomless hunger for bigger, deadlier bombs – ultimately resulting in a new, inconceivable weapon that will likely lead to the end of humanity’s life on planet Earth (if other forms of industrial pollution don’t kill us first). Oppenheimer doesn’t realize until it’s too late that his team’s invention did not end WWII; it instead created a new, infinite war built on the looming international threat of mutual self-destruction. The immediate consequences of the atom bomb were the devastation of two Japanese cities, leaving figurative blood on the haunted man’s hands, which he attempts to clean in the final hour of runtime by ineffectively maneuvering for world peace within the system he helped arm. The long-term consequences are much more difficult to define, leaving a lingering atmospheric menace on the world outside the theater after the credits roll. Instead of sweetening that menace with the pink-frosted confectionary of Barbie, I followed up Oppenheimer with a much vapider novelty: the latest Tom Cruise vanity project. Speaking of history’s greatest monsters, I was also feeling a little uneasy about watching the latest Tom Cruise stunt fest (especially after suffering through last year’s insipid Top Gun rebootquel), but credit where it’s due: Dead Reckoning was a great time at the movies. Unlike Oppenheimer, M:I 7 is built of full, robust scenes and complete exchanges of dialogue instead of the de-constructed Malickian snippets of a three-hour trailer. It’s a three-hour frivolity in its own right, but it’s an intensely entertaining one, and it immediately restored my faith that I can still appreciate mainstream, big-budget cinema right after Nolan shook it. Also, there was something perverse about it doing so by toying around on the exact Cold War playground Oppenheimer mistakenly created.
If there’s a modern equivalent to the abstract, unfathomable power of the atom bomb (besides, you know, the still-growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons in many countries’ arsenals), it’s likely in the arena of digital espionage and the development of A.I. technology. The seventh Mission: Impossible film runs with the zeitgeisty relevance of killer-A.I. weaponry at full speed, creating an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everything-everywhere A.I. villain that looks like a vintage iTunes visualizer. It’s about as well defined as the young Oppenheimer’s intrusive visions of nuclear particles, but neither Cruise nor his in-house workman director Christopher McQuarrie are especially interested in figuring out the scientific logic behind it. Dead Reckoning‘s A.I. villain—referred to simply (and frequently) as The Entity—is mostly just an excuse for the creepy millionaire auteur behind it to stage a series of increasingly outlandish stunts. By some miracle, the new Mission: Impossible nearly matches the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-A.I. combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it the most entertaining American action blockbuster of the year by default. Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie, ending on a literal cliff-hanger that won’t be resolved until a three-hour Part 2 conclusion of the miniseries reaches theaters in a couple years. Since that double feature isn’t currently screening in its entirety, I had to settle for pairing it with Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which at least helped give its over-the-top A.I. espionage theatrics a sense of real-world consequence. The only recognizable threat behind The Entity’s abstract swirl of LED lights is that it’s smart enough to fool & manipulate nuclear-capable governments. It could bring the world to an end with the weaponry we’ve already created ourselves, and it wouldn’t be too surprising if Dead Reckoning, Part 2 includes a gag where Cruise diffuses an actual, active nuclear warhead while riding it in the sky like Slim Pickens before him.
My disparate reactions to Oppenheimer and Dead Reckoning likely have more to do with personal taste & disposition than the movies’ objective qualities. Whereas self-serious lines of dialogue like “How can this man, who saw so much, be so blind?” and “Is anyone ever going to tell the truth about what’s happening here?” had me rolling my eyes at Oppenheimer, I was delighted by Mission: Impossible’s equally phony line reading of “Ethan, you are playing 4D chess with an algorithm,” delivered by Ving Rhames with the same unearned gravitas. Maybe it’s because I don’t expect much out of the big-budget end of mainstream filmmaking except for its value as in-the-moment entertainment. I don’t think Oppenheimer‘s internal wrestling with its protagonist’s guilt over inventing The Bomb or our government’s mistreatment of his professional reputation in The McCarthy Era amounts to all that much, except maybe as a reminder that the threat of Nuclear Apocalypse is an ongoing Important Issue. It obviously can’t solve that issue in any meaningful way, though, unless you put a lot of personal meaning into Hollywood’s ability to convert Important Issues into Awards Statues. It’s a movie, not a systemic political policy. I personally see more immediate value in Mission: Impossible‘s ability to delight & distract (both from the real-world horrors of nuclear war and, more maliciously, the real-world horrors of its star), since that’s using the tools of mainstream filmmaking for what they’re actually apt to accomplish. Oppenheimer is a three-hour montage of Important Men played by “That guy!” character actors exchanging tight smirks & knowing glances in alternating boardroom readings of historical testimony. Dead Reckoning, Part 1 is a three-hour Evil Knievel stuntman roadshow punctuated by abstract info-dumps about the immense, unfathomable power of A.I. technology. The closest Nolan comes to matching Cruise in this head-to-head battle in terms of pure entertainment value is the visual gag of a doddering Albert Einstein repeatedly dropping his hat.
-Brandon Ledet
Boomer: I first saw A Night in Heaven on my 31st birthday, at Weird Wednesday in May of 2018, with a couple of friends. Jazmyne Moreno, who had programmed the film for that week, looked out over the audience and said, and I paraphrase, that she was surprised to see so few women and so many “burly men” in the audience (“bears” is the term she was looking for). Normally, when I tell this story, I follow that part up with a joke that this was followed by chants of “Show us the twink! Give us the twink!” from those in attendance, but that part’s purely fiction. Or is it?
A Night in Heaven is a romantic drama that isn’t really all that romantic, or maybe it’s an erotic thriller that’s not quite thrilling, but either way, it’s … unique. Directed by John G. Avidsen seven years after he helmed Rocky and one year before the release of his next hit, 1984’s The Karate Kid (and as unlike either of those movies as you can imagine), the film tells the story of Faye Hanlon (Lesley Ann Warren), a teacher at Titusville Community College in Florida, one hour from Orlando. Her husband Whitney (Robert Logan) is a NASA rocket scientist and amateur recumbent bicycle designer at a career crossroads, finding himself being tasked with ballistic missile design instead of the astronomic rocketry about which he is passionate. Forming the third leg—no pun intended—of the love triangle at the center of the film is Rick Monroe (Christopher Atkins), a student in Faye’s speech class whose flippant attitude toward his final presentation leads her to give him a failing grade for the semester. That night, Faye and Rick’s paths cross outside of the classroom when her vacationing sister Patsy (Deborah Rush) drags her out to a male strip revue called Heaven, where she discovers that her student is an exotic dancer under the name “Ricky Rocket,” and they experience an intimate moment when he gives her a personal dance.
Faye returns home horned up, and attempts to initiate sex with her husband, who turns her down and tells her that he’s been fired, leading Faye to wonder if there is a future for their relationship. Her feelings are further complicated by Rick’s ongoing flirtations with her as he tries to convince her to let him retake his final exam, and since her sister is staying at the hotel where Rick’s mother and sister work, they keep running into each other. She tries to avoid admitting her attraction to the younger man, but when Patsy has to go home a day early because her daughter is ill, she convinces Faye to stay the night in the paid-for hotel room rather than try to drive back late. Faye spends most of the night trying to reach her husband at home but there’s no answer (we see him reconnecting with a recently-divorced old flame that he runs into), and she ultimately ends up spending the night with Rick. An unwise phone call from Patsy, now back home in Chicago, leads Whitney to realize that his jealousy isn’t baseless, and he travels to the hotel. Faye realizes that she’s been used when she catches Rick in the shower with his girlfriend Slick (Sandra Beall), and it all comes to a head when Rick and Whitney have a confrontation.
I don’t always feel the need to provide such a thorough recapitulation of a plot when we discuss a movie for this feature, but I did this time, since the Wikipedia plot summary is confused, to say the least. It cites that “Faye is going through a slump in her marriage to Whitney Hanlon, a rocket scientist who has just been laid off,” and that this is the reason that Patsy takes her out to Heaven to cheer her up, but that’s not the case. For one thing, it skips a few plot points ahead, given that there’s no real indication that the Hanlons’ marriage is on rocky ground at the outset, other than that Whitney’s been working nights and he can’t convince Faye to play hooky with him when she has finals to perform. The first indication of strife happens when Whitney isn’t interested in intimacy because of his firing, which Faye only learns about after coming back from the club. I’m not sure it’s the fault of the editor of that wiki page, however, as the film does seem to be missing a few plot points of its own – a fairly common issue with low budget films of this era. This is one of those movies that I feel probably had a more thoughtful script, since there are the vague outlines of something more nuanced and deeper going on at the edges. Patsy’s description of the failures in her own marriage read like they’re supposed to echo something that’s happening in Faye’s marriage, but Faye’s issues are so vague that they don’t track. It also feels like we’re supposed to track that Whitney’s experiencing something of a crisis because he fears replacement in his relationship with his wife by a younger, sexier man while also confronting failure in finding a new job, citing “they hired a 14-year-old instead,” but again, it’s lacking. It’s not that the movie is just playing coy and being subtle, it’s more that there are gaps in the story, and that would be frustrating, if you come to the movie for that. Most people aren’t though; they’re here for the flesh.
As thin and threadbare as the movie may be in other areas, one thing that it really has going for it is a striking soundtrack, which far outshines the film itself and has remained in the public consciousness for far longer. There are three undeniable bangers that were written specifically for this film, two of which are still pop culture touchstones while the third is (unfairly, in my opinion) largely forgotten. The first is the title track, which happens to be “Heaven” by Canadian singer-songwriter Bryan Adams, which plays in its entirety while Whitney rides his recumbent bike home after a night shift, creating some unintentional bathos. The song hit #9 on the Billboard charts with that release, and it also ended up on Adams’s album Reckless later that year, putting it back on the Billboard as the third single from the album, reaching #1 in April of 1985, completely eclipsing A Night in Heaven as far as cultural cachet and longevity. Perhaps almost as notable was the track “Obsession,” which was written and performed by Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, and which was covered the following year by LA-based synth-pop band Animotion, becoming the biggest single of that band’s career, ensuring a pop culture legacy that’s more fondly (and more often) remembered than the film from which it spawned. Finally, I have a real fondness for “Like What You See,” which was composed by the film’s music supervisor Jan Hammer, a Czech-American composer with a long history of collaboration with a variety of household names like Mick Jagger and Carlos Santana. The track, performed by Hammer and the band Next, is a real treat, a peculiar blend of sultry and yacht rock-adjacent synths, and it’s undeniably sexy, even when it’s not paired with erotic dancing.
What did you think? Did you like the soundtrack or was there a dissonance caused by the presence of much more famous music? Would you call this a romantic drama, an erotic thriller, or something completely different?
Brandon: If I was at all distracted by the pop tunes plugged into the soundtrack, it was only in the immense difference in quality between the aforementioned “Heaven” & “Obsession” – respectfully, one of the all-time worst and one of the all-time best pop songs of all time. Personal taste aside, as a pair they do exemplify what is so jarring about the movie’s volatile sense of tone, which alternates wildly from scene to scene. “Heaven” represents its penchant for soft romantic melodrama, in which a troubled couple negotiates a rough patch in their marriage through teary-eyed phone calls and kitchen table heart-to-hearts. By contrast, “Obsession” amplifies the erotically thrilling hedonism of the wife’s trips to the strip bar and her cuckolded husband’s parallel trips to the shooting range, an explosive recipe for sex & violence that thankfully only pays off on the sex end. The way the film alternates between those two opposing tones can be a little clumsy, but the tension between them is also what makes the story so compelling. Here we have the rare mainstream picture that sincerely engages with and markets to female sexual desire, tempting its timid protagonist to step outside the tedious complications and relative safety of her suburban marriage to enter a more dangerous, thrilling world of hedonistic excess. In some ways, it softens the danger of her transgressions by making the object of her desire such a boyish, twinky goofball that she has immediate power over as his college professor, but by indulging her urges she also turns her husband into a potential mass shooter so I guess it all evens out.
In a way, it’s incredible that a major Hollywood studio distributed a Magic Mike prototype decades before Soderbergh cornered the market on male stripper cinema, and it’s somehow become an out-of-print curio instead of a regular rowdy-screening cult favorite. However, considering that Disney now owns the 20th Century Fox repertory catalog and there are several shots of the hot twink’s exposed peen, maybe it’s less incredible than it is just shameful. There’s nothing especially vulgar nor raunchy about A Night in Heaven outside those brief flashes of male nudity and the fact that the zipper to Ricky Rocket’s pants is centered in the back instead of the front. Still, it’s shocking to see a retro movie sincerely marketed to stoke women’s libidos, since that’s such a rare mode for mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. There’s a detectable relishment over the film’s financial & artistic missteps in its contemporary reviews (including a New York Times writer declaring it “Flashdunce”) that’s typical to most media that dares to market directly to women. Hell, maybe even my aversion to Bryan Adams’s “Heaven” is a result of that extremely gendered form of cringe, which rejects feminine artistic aesthetics as automatically lesser-than. It’s a tough habit to shake. In hindsight, though, it’s wonderfully endearing to see that a sexy strip club with a softcore porno title was marketed to that eternally underserved audience, even if only as a fluke inspired by the fad popularity of Chippendales male stripper shows. The early exchange “I just flunked that kid,” “You did WHAT?” between girlfriends would have still been a mainstream-media novelty when Sex and the City was a zeitgeist changer two decades later, so it probably shouldn’t be surprising that America wasn’t ready to spend a night in Heaven when Reagan was still president.
Britnee: I am so grateful for being introduced to A Night in Heaven. This confusing mess of a movie is extremely entertaining, and I’ve already put rare DVD copies on my eBay and Mercari watchlists. I need this in my collection to watch over and over again. First off, I adore Leslie Anne Warren. Her performances in two of my favorite films, Victor/Victoria and Clue, are iconic, and she killed it as Susan Mayer’s mother, Sophie, in the Desperate Housewives series. She was perfect in the role of Faye, the conservatively dressed academic with a suppressed wild side.
The question Boomer asked is the same question I had when I finished watching the film: “What genre is this?” It’s not romantic enough to be a romance. It’s also not purposefully funny, and not really erotic either. It’s a slightly sexy wholesome drama? I really don’t know the answer. All I know is that it’s a mystery that makes for a damn good time. The extended, pointless Bryan Adams bike ride really set the tone for what was to come! I laughed so much while singing along to “Heaven”. Yes, I’m a Bryan Adams fan, so I really enjoyed the soundtrack, especially the early original version of “Obsession”. That song is on just about every 80s mixed CD I’ve ever made. The soundtrack itself is a mixed tape that encapsulates everything the film does or is trying to do, and I think that’s wonderful.
What I wanted so badly was for Faye and Ricky Rocket to have multiple trysts and a stronger sexual connection with each other. The initial Ricky Rocket dance scene was insanely hot (and I watched it multiple times), but that was as strong as the tension between the two got. I wanted this to be more of a genuine age-gap romance like White Palace rather than a douche bag trying to get a passing grade by flirting with his professor. Why couldn’t Faye unleash her inner cougar with a young stud who was legitimately attracted to her? And then leave her boring husband for her new lover? I wanted this to be trashier, dammit!
Alli: Wow, maybe it’s my recent interest in trashy romance novels, or maybe it’s just from identifying strongly as a woman for most of my life, but I had a lot of fun with this. There’s a kitsch quality to it that directly hits my brain’s pleasure center: the straight laced, tight bunned school marm who’s secretly a hotty if she would only let down her hair; the nerdy husband who will do anything for her; the temptation, some kind of snake (wink wink, nudge nudge). It’s a parade of archetypes that just work. I can’t believe that this movie has somehow slid into obscurity, regardless of its pop songs. It just highlights the lack of cultural hype around movies about women’s pleasure and desires. (From what I’ve experienced on romance-novel-internet, books are not suffering from the same treatment somehow despite being far more numerous.) I hope that this Swampflix feature at least partly helps rectify that obscurity.
Something that really hit me, in terms of kitsch and lush texture, was the art direction and lighting. Yes, the changes in costumes mark shifts in character. Okay, now she’s the hot teacher because she let her hair down and put on a “racy dress.” Okay, look at these stripper outfits and how they differ from regular day to day. The night-time versus the daytime. Yeah, these shifts are obvious, but I love it. It’s so rare to see such blatant shifts outside teen make-over comedies. And the lighting here is perfect for it, especially the contrast between the regular classroom, office, daytime, household lighting versus the lighting in Heaven, where Ricky Rocket at one point literally has a Byzantine halo made of the colored lights above as he’s giving a lap dance. I was absolutely living for it.
As far as whether or not this is a romantic thriller or drama, it feels much more like a drama to me. Yeah, eventually a gun is involved, but it feels so minor compared to the switches between boring wife-dom and the straight woman paradise of Heaven. It plays so much more like a fantasy than a drama. Faye gets to have her cake (sleeping with Ricky when her marriage feels stagnant) and eat it too (going back to her husband with better communication and knowledge of her needs). The fact that she’s not punished for desiring a younger man is so refreshing.
Lagniappe
Britnee: I was surprised to see so much exposed man pubes here. Truly, A Night in Heaven walked so Magic Mike could run.
Alli: In a world full of male fantasies about big men hoarding guns, setting off explosions, and saving the world, we need more counter programming like this. We need more soft fantasies about young (of legal age) men desiring school teachers. Or, you know, just generally about women getting to explore their sexuality without drastic consequences. There’s a reason this is such a HUGE genre of literary fiction.
Brandon: I would like to personally welcome Jerri Blank’s stepmother, Deborah Rush, back to the Movie of the Month family after such a long hiatus following her early appearances in the screwball comedy Big Business and the cosmic horror The Box. As a Strangers with Candy obsessive, I am so used to Rush being an ice-cold suburban terminator who “drinks to kill the pain” that I was shocked & delighted to see her bubblier 80s side as the sassy, squeaky sidekick here. If y’all ever want to pivot this feature into a Deborah Rush Movie of the Month ritual instead, I am totally down.
Boomer: I’m very pleased that this one went over so well. This movie is disjointed—there’s no denying it—and its tonal inconsistencies could be a turn off, but I knew this would be this gaggle of freaks and weirdos to appreciate it.
-The Swampflix Crew
I am no longer a true believer in the oft-repeated Ebert quote, “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy.” Or, I at least no longer believe that empathy is the most interesting or noble thing the movies machine can generate. The more I’ve succumbed to incurable cinephilia in recent years the less interested I’ve become in the movies’ ability to document or reflect objective reality back at the audience, as if we don’t get more than enough real-life tedium outside the theater walls. Even if there’s value to learning and vicariously experiencing the intimate details of each other’s lives through cinema, reducing the artform to its ability to generate empathy feels small & unimaginative, especially if that’s the only thing on a movie’s mind. Subtlety, restraint, and adherence to real-world logic are boring, self-imposed restrictions for a medium that’s so apt for dreams & poetry. It’s just as much of a well-worn cliché, but I’ve come to the point where cinema’s function as a machine that generates shared, communal dreams is its primary cultural value to me. Empathy is a useful byproduct of the movie dream machine, but it’s at best secondary to the way cinema can deeply submerge us in the subconscious id of the artists behind it. If a filmmaker is using the art of the moving image to achieve anything other than full sensory intoxication or communal mesmerism, they might as well write prose or record a podcast instead. There’s so much more to the medium than farming empathy in the documentation or dramatic retelling of each other’s daily drudgery.
At least, that’s what I was thinking about while watching a double feature of this summer’s most critically lauded works: Wes Anderson’s ensemble cast sci-fi comedy Asteroid City and Celine Song’s long-distance relationship breakdown Past Lives. I likely shouldn’t have bothered seeing Past Lives at all, since subtle, tastefully underplayed dramas aren’t really my thing. I do allow myself to get talked into seeing a few gloomy exercises in real-world restraint every year, though, if not just to see what everyone else is gushing about while I’m seeking out high-style histrionics & novelty. I had about the same experience with Past Lives as I had with last year’s similarly lauded & restrained Aftersun: respect for its craft but bafflement over its ecstatic praise, since practically every film festival is overflowing with similarly subtle, underplayed titles just like it (most of which never land proper distribution). In contrast, I watched Asteroid City for the second time in 24 hours on that double bill and found its dreamlike artifice much more emotionally rewarding than Past Lives‘s real-world resignation. In The French Dispatch, Wes Anderson self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment; in Asteroid City, the self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. I found the former funnier but the latter more affecting, sinking several layers of framing-devices deeper into his subconscious to pick at the same somber tones of yearning & heartbreak as Past Lives with less of a literal, straight-forward approach. It likely says less about the merits of the movies than it says about my facilities as an audience that I needed to puzzle at the complex narrative structure & fussy visual craft of Asteroid City (a movie within a stage play within a television special) to enjoy its small, intimate character moments for their own pleasure, while Past Lives was willing to serve those pleasures to me directly. Apparently, to fully appreciate the small things I need them buried under a crushing excess of style & artifice; I need to feel like they came to me in a dream.
The pattern repeated with my library DVD haul that same week, which happened to include two coming-of-age stories about young women: the 70s-set Judy Blume adaptation Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and the French dirt-bike crime thriller Rodeo. One was a critically-lauded empathy machine that documents and validates the awkwardness & inner turmoil of puberty in all young American girls who are impatient to become young American women. The other alternates between the quiet restraint of a crime world docudrama and the sensory free-for-all of a legitimate art piece, submerging the audience in the dreams & volatile emotions of one particular teenage reprobate with an ecstatic passion for racing stolen dirt bikes. You can likely guess which one I preferred. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is less extraordinary than it is warmly familiar. It reminded me of a lot of classic comfort watches that I grew up with in the 1990s: Mermaids, My Girl, Now & Then, etc. It’s a pleasant movie about pleasant people, one that directly asks you to empathize with common, everyday rites of passage. Rodeo is a much thornier picture. It documents the experiences of real-world dirt bike stunt racers by casting them as their own fictional avatars and—in the case of its disgruntled antiheroine—inviting you into their prophetic nightmares of self-destruction & immolation. There’s no reason to contrast & compare the two movies other than that my public library requests for them happened to be fulfilled on the same day; they’re as structurally & aesthetically distinct from each other as the vintage postcard artifice of Asteroid City and the real-world melancholy of Past Lives. The same questions of which film was making better, more purposeful use of their shared medium were rattling around in my empty skull, though, and I again came down in favor of the dream machine over the empathy machine.
I’ve been writing reviews for this humble movie blog for eight years now, which is a long enough duration that I can’t help but reflect on what I value in this artform I’ve spent so much time admiring & picking apart. Wes Anderson’s spent at least three decades admiring & picking apart the artform himself, and Asteroid City appears to find him arriving at similar conclusions. Throughout the film, performers within his multi-layered narrative break character to question the meaning behind their dialogue & actions as written, as well as their place within specific framing devices at specific times. The Anderson avatar who wrote the piece they’re performing has no clear answers for the reasoning behind his words, only that they work to express subconscious emotion. In a climactic scene that lovingly parodies The Twilight Zone, the performers stare at the camera directly and chant “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” in a rhythmic, zombified monotone, reinforcing that to experience & share in that subconscious emotion the audience must give into the artifice of the work and forget the reasoning behind it. We have to dream. As thoughtful & empathetic as they are, neither Past Lives nor Are You There God? ever fully fall asleep; they are awake to the logical restrictions of the real world. Rodeo drifts along in that in-between state you feel just before you fall asleep, purposefully confusing a documentation of reality with the shared-dream intoxication of cinema, only fully letting go of the handlebars in its emotional climax. Of this group, only Asteroid City fully falls asleep, and I found its emotional provocations the most effective among them because they were allowed to be as indirect and inexplicable as our own internal responses to the world outside our heads. It would be foolish to expect every movie to interact with (or entirely ignore) reality in that way, but the ones that do so are the ones that are most fully engaging with the tools, methods, and uses of the artform.
-Brandon Ledet
Welcome to Episode #191 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss feature films that advertise junk food brands, starting with the McDonald’s-sponsored E.T. rip-off Mac and Me (1988).
00:00 Welcome
04:25 Dear Evan Hansen (2021)
06:25 Stutz (2022)
08:25 They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
11:25 Miracle Mile (1988)
14:37 Barbie (2023)
16:44 Last Action Hero (1993)
20:18 Mystery Men (1999)
26:06 Mac and Me (1988)
56:53 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)
1:22:07 Demolition Man (1993)
1:45:34 Flamin’ Hot (2023)
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
-The Podcast Crew
Welcome to Episode #190 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of sweaty films set in summer heat, starting with the sordid beefcake melodrama Picnic (1955).
00:00 Welcome
02:45 Her (2013)
07:40 V.C. Andrews’ Heaven (2019)
13:45 Will-o’-the-Wisp (2023)
17:07 Falling Down (1993)
23:33 Picnic (1955)
46:22 Baby Doll (1956)
1:07:40 The Beach (2000)
1:23:55 Call Me By Your Name (2017)
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
-The Podcast Crew
Welcome to Episode #189 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of new releases from the first half of 2023, starting with Give Me Pity!, Amanda Kramer’s feature length spoof of one-woman TV specials in the disco era.
00:00 Mozzarella sticks
04:25 Past Lives (2023)
11:45 There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2023)
17:00 Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2023)
20:12 Stalking Laura (1993)
29:18 Give Me Pity! (2023)
51:00 Polite Society (2023)
1:03:25 How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023)
1:19:40 Huesera: The Bone Woman (2023)
1:45:35 Best of 2023 so far
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
-The Podcast Crew
Swampflix 