Welcome to Episode #238 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of dramas about wartime traitors, treasonists, quislings, and collaborators, starting with the Czech New Wave classic The Cremator (1969).
00:00 Welcome
04:40 The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man (2025) 07:56 Children of a Lesser God (1986) 11:51 The Passionate Friends (1949) 13:05 Hobson’s Choice (1954) 17:08 Date Movie (2006) 23:15 Bull Durham(1988) 26:36 Vision Quest (1985)
32:30 The Cremator (1969) 52:16 The Ascent (1977) 1:11:41 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) 1:26:47 The Good German (2006)
There was a brief, glorious time a couple years back when AGFA’s scan of Jon Moritsugu’s 1993 trash-art classic Terminal USA was streaming on The Criterion Channel. Not only did that ungodly godsend set distorted expectations of Moritsugu’s working being legally & conveniently available for home viewing, but it also distorted my expectations of the director’s political themes. In Terminal USA, Moritsugu reached through the TV sets of suburban America (via highly improbable PBS broadcast) to mock & torment the suburbanites on the other side, offering a grotesque reflection of the nuclear family unit as performed by a punk-rot regional theatre troupe straight out of Mortville. Having not seen his other work, I assumed that John Waters-style strain of freaking-out-the-normies antagonism echoed throughout the rest of Moritsugu’s catalog, but it turns out he generally could not care less what suburbanites are up to. I recently lucked into purchasing a trio of lesser-seen Moritsugu films second-hand on DVD, which together painted a picture of a much more insular, flippant director concerned more with petty punk-culture preoccupations than any of the ideals those punks supposedly buck against. These are movies about young wannabe iconoclasts who are desperate to stand out, look cool, get famous, and be celebrated for doing nothing in particular, all while enjoying the street-cred status of never “selling out.” This trio finds Moritsugu mocking his own people rather than mocking the off-screen suburbanite conservatives whose phoniness is taken for granted, which in a way makes them more personal works than the bigger-picture political statement of Terminal USA.
Moritsugu’s first feature film was funded by a settlement from a factory-work accident that nearly tore off his arm. The only reason it qualifies as feature-length is that he stretched it past the 1-hour runtime mark on a dare from a friend who was tired of seeing him waste his time on shorts. The resulting ramshackle, barely held-together energy of 1990’s My Degeneration is about as D.I.Y. punk as cinema gets. It perfectly captures the editing style, snotty sarcasm, and punk-scene snobbery of a vintage Xerox’d zine . . . now in motion on the big screen! “A story of Greed, Scum, and Filth,” it follows a trio of California teens (despite being filmed in Rhode Island) whose punk band Bunny Love is co-opted by The American Beef Institute to promote meat consumption among disaffected, MTV-era youth. The movie opens with Bunny Love’s lead singer praying to portraits of Jesus Christ & Madonna in her bathroom mirror to make her famous – a prayer that’s immediately answered by an evil corporation that purchases her band, renames it Fetish, and starts landing her national headlines like “Is Meat Art? Fetish Thinks So!” The girls are quickly corrupted by “the stench of stardom,” but selling out their punk ideals registers as a small price to pay in exchange for national fame. Even the inevitable burnout & breakup part of the rock ‘n’ roll rise-to-fame cliché seems to be a career goal for them, rather than a dire warning. They want it all. Meanwhile, Moritsugu teases this short-film premise to feature length by filling the screen with hideous video-art footage of mimed punk performances and meat-industry waste, with detours featuring a talking pig head that romances the lead singer of Fetish in her spare time between gigs. It’s the much rougher, meaner version of proto-riot-grrrl classics like Times Square & The Fabulous Stains, with an incredibly cynical worldview about what punk iconoclasts really want to achieve with their music.
1994’s Mod Fuck Explosion is much more realistic about the kind of fame most teenage urbanite punks can achieve. It’s the story of one girl’s quest to earn her own leather jacket, so she can look as tough & cool as the motorcycle gangs who regularly clash in her neighborhood. Most reviews of Mod Fuck Explosion cite it as Moritsugu’s dirt-cheap remake of West Side Story, but really it’s his dirt-cheap remake of Quadrophenia: a gang warfare drama about a pathetic, meaningless clash between traditional rock ‘n’ roll bikers and nerdy scooter-riding Mods. It goes one step beyond Quadrophenia by graciously extending Kenneth Anger biker-gang fetishism to include moto-scooters, making that fetish much more financially accessible to its cast of terminally bored teenage wastoids. Otherwise, it allows that turf war to fade into a background hum while Amy Davis (Bunny Love’s fictional drummer & Moritsugu’s real-life spouse) frets about where she fits into the world of street-toughs as a teenage brat who doesn’t even have her own leather jacket. Despite all of Moritsugu’s snotty flippancy elsewhere, Davis gets genuinely introspective here in her frustrated teenage boredom. While roaming an industrial art-instillation piece, she worries in voiceover that she’ll never truly fight, never truly fuck, and never truly be cool. It’s later revealed that she’s mostly been comparing herself to her much cooler older sister, who has retired from local punk-scene notoriety to enjoy a static life consuming “schizophrenic painters, tortured writers, fashion designers, low & vulgar literature, porno movies, video games, punk music, motorcycles, tattoo artwork, homo poetry, disaster & murder magazines, and horoscopes.” Even though she no longer needs it herself, her sister still won’t hand over her own leather jacket, which sits in the closet unworn as a symbol of her past teen-years fame on the local scene.
While My Degenration & Mod Fuck Explosion are the much cooler and more recognizable Moritsugu titles in this trio, 1997’s Fame Whore is by far the funniest. That superlative is mostly earned by Amy Davis’s robotically verbose performance as a socialite sycophant who will not stop monotonously bragging about her accomplishments in her 27 simultaneous careers as a “video artist, fashion designer, painter, actress, photographer, producer, art director, image consultant, playwright, performance artist,” and the list goes on. That NYC wannabe fashionista splits the runtime with two other titular fame whores: a hothead tennis pro who brags about his insatiable libido in the third person and an animal-rights activist who’s reluctant to share his do-gooder cred with any coworkers at his New Jersey dog shelter, so he spends his work hours talking to an imaginary sports-mascot dog instead. They’re all pathetic losers, just like the rest of us. As with Terminal USA, there’s something especially heightened & subversive about Moritsugu’s freak-show characters escaping punk-scene containment and doing decidedly un-punk things like, in this case, filing their taxes & negotiating endorsement deals. It’s like when John Waters left the trailer park & Mortville behind to instead terrorize the normies in his own suburban-invasion comedies post-Polyester. Shot on a grainy, degraded 16mm film stock just like the rest of his punk-zine-in-motion features, Fame Whore would never be mistaken for a mainstream studio comedy, but it does find Moritsugu pretending that he has “made it” as a filmmaker. If he had included a sarcastic live-studio-audience soundtrack, it would’ve played exactly like a primetime multi-cam sitcom — complete with a goofball sidekick character in the imaginary Mr. Peepers, whose smartass quips follow in a long tradition of Great Gazoos, Alfs, and Mister Eds.
The only bonus feature to speak of on any of these mid-2000s discs is a feature-length commentary track for My Degeneration, but it does offer major insight into the bigger-picture ethos of Moritsugu & Davis’s film company Apathy Productions. They basically act as their own Beavis & Butthead-style stoner hecklers, complete with vocalized guitar noises and bored digressions from anything happening on the screen. The entire exercise is meant to mock anyone who’d take this work seriously as academic fodder (i.e., me) instead of what it truly was: a group of friends playing around with camera equipment in a quest to make something Cool. The way Moritsugu scratches up the celluloid for shots that didn’t come out right, films television sets at incompatible frame rates, and frequently fills the screen with punk-show-poster block text of phrases like “THE SHIT GENERATION” & “TEEN SUICIDE EXPLOSION” is all D.I.Y. formal experimentation to make art that visually appeals to his scuzzy friends (who’d assumedly rather be pounding beers than watching art films, if asked). There’s a tension between his own punk-rock credibility and his desire to reach a wide audience as a Famous Artist, then, as evidenced by his films being submitted to international film festivals instead of just being screened as opening acts at basement punk shows. In that context, his career highlight likely wasn’t hijacking PBS’s public funds to make Terminal USA. It was when Roger Ebert made a show out of walking out of My Degeneration seven minutes into its premiere at Sundance. That way, he became famous (on the independent film scene, anyway) without becoming marketable, so his films couldn’t be used to promote beef sales or tennis shoes.
Welcome to Episode #237 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of vintage genre films about Vietnam War vets suffering from PTSD, starting with the violent exploitation thriller Combat Shock (1986).
00:00 The Pope of Trash 08:50 Bastard Out of Carolina (1996) 13:00 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) 17:12 Under the Sand (2000) 24:15 Warfare (2025)
33:00 Combat Shock (1986) 52:15 Dead of Night (1974) 1:03:42 Backfire (1988) 1:17:10 Savage Dawn (1985)
Self-described as “a summer camp for genre fans,” The Overlook Film Festival has quickly become the best of New Orleans’s local film fests . . . as long as you’re a total sicko. I consistently catch a wide selection of the year’s most stylish, violent, and memorable horror films & thrillers in the festival’s lineup, many of which don’t otherwise reach local big screens before they get siphoned off to the cultural void of streaming platforms. In recent years, all films programmed have been corralled to the two locations of The Prytania Theatres, which allows you to form a weekend-long bond with fellow movie nerds you continually run into while lining up for the next fucked-up delight. Everyone’s watching too much, sleeping too little, and loving every horrific minute. It really does capture the summer camp or sleepover feeling of staying up all night watching scary movies with your friends after the adults fell asleep and can no longer police what’s playing on the living room TV.
This was the first year of the festival where I made some time in my schedule for a couple repertory screenings: the Corman-Poe classic The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and a block of David Lynch’s early short films (namely “Sick Men Getting Sick,” “The Grandmother, “The Amputee,” and “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed”). The Vincent Price campiness and costume drama fussiness of House of Usher made for a classically wonderful trip to the Prytania’s original location uptown, but the Lynch shorts made a much more significant impression on me. As a collective, they offered a glimpse into an alternate dimension where Lynch might have stuck to a full career as a Don Hertzfeldt-style outsider animator. More importantly, they also projected most of the scariest images I saw at this year’s festival, especially in the domestic blackbox-theatre artificiality of “The Grandmother.” There’s always something novel about watching challenging art films in a downtown shopping mall like Canal Place, and that Lynch block may have been the most abstract & challenging films ever screened there. It says a lot about Overlook’s sharp, thoughtful curation that they made room for films that academically rigorous alongside feature-length sex-and-fart-joke comedies like Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover (which, I might as well admit, was my favorite of the fest).
I see no point in rating or raking the works of recently fallen legends like Corman & Lynch here, since their contributions to the festival are so deeply engrained in genre cinema history, they’re beyond critique. Instead, I’m listing below the ten new-release feature films I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, ranked in the order that I appreciated them, each with a blurb and a link to a corresponding review. For a more detailed recap of the Swampflix Crew’s festival experience beyond these reviews, check out the most recent episode of The Swampflix Podcast.
Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Some of the most gorgeous, perverted images you’ll see all year paired with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates its punchlines with ADR’d fart noises. If Glowicki’s filmmaking career doesn’t work out, she can always pivot to becoming the world’s first drag king Crispin Glover impersonator, bless her putrid heart.
Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only 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.
An all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. Extremely satisfying for anyone who loves to watch Rosamund Pike act her way through a crisis.
A self-deprecating meta doc about a true crime dramatization that fell apart in pre-production. Reminded me of a couple postmodern television series of my youth: Breaking the Magician’s Code – Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed (for spoiling the magic of how the true-crime genre works) and The Soup (for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to Get It).
The new Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no not that one, the other one) asks a really scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? Turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic.
Screenlife cinema that abandons horror in favor of the heist thriller, following the small-scale, laptop-bound schemes of four teens who steal a Bitcoin fortune from an Elon Musk-type dipshit. I personally preferred when this still-burgeoning subgenre was fully supernatural, but it’s nice to see a version of it where teens are actually having fun being online (even when in peril).
A documentary about To Catch a Predator as an aughts-era reality TV phenomenon. Felt like I was going to throw up for the first 40 minutes or so, because I had never seen the show before and wasn’t fully prepared for how deeply evil it is.
You’ve seen a haunted house movie from the POV of a ghost. Now, line up for a haunted house movie kinda-sorta from the POV of a dog! What a time to be alive.
A WWII-set creature feature stranded somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Continues a long tradition of unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas, now with a Roger Corman rubber-suited monster as lagniappe.
A sci-fi revenge thriller about a grieving mother who gets addicted to killing her child’s murderer in multiple alternate dimensions. It brings me no pleasure to act as the logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of this one make no sense. It’s like they wrote 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. The violence is effectively nasty, though, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the quibbles.
I recently caught a double feature at my local multiplex of high-style, high-tension thrillers about American soldiers under siege in claustrophobic locations. The stories told in Alex Garland’s Warfare & Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are separated by entire genres, decades, and oceans, and yet they both trap American soldiers in tight-space locales by surrounding them with enemy combatants, whittling down their ranks one corpse at a time. That shared Americans-under-siege dynamic puts them in unlikely conversation with each other as two feature films currently in wide release, but what really makes that conversation interesting is the films’ respective relationships with the cultural & historical context around their sieges. Warfare is so hostile to providing context that it borders on experimentation in narrative form, while Sinners is entirely about context, explaining its own supernatural siege’s relation to America’s past, present, and future. Together, they represent the two extremes of contextual explanation in cinematic storytelling, to the point where considering them together is something that would only occur to you if you happen to write movie reviews and catch them both at the same theatre in a single evening.
Assigning Warfare‘s authorship entirely to Alex Garland is a bit misleading, since he shares directorial credit with former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. In fact, the real-time, true-story siege thriller is most interesting for the battle between its two directors: one who wants to honor the soldiers depicted “for always answering the call” (Mendoza) and one who wants to examine them & pluck their limbs off like bugs he caught in a jar (Garland). An opening title card explains that the film’s reenactment of a failed 2006 American military mission during the Iraq War was made “using only the memories” of Mendoza’s platoon, who experienced the violent episode first-hand. After the reenactment concludes, surviving members of that platoon are shown visiting the film’s set mid-production to provide their insight, contextualizing the movie as an honorable commemoration of their service & sacrifice during the harshest conditions of war. Only, that final moment is undercut by inclusion of a portrait of the Iraqi family who were also present that day and whose home was invaded & destroyed to fit the American military’s needs & whims. Earlier, when the surviving American soldiers have safely escaped the real-time gunfight in rescue tanks, the camera then lingers on that family appearing puzzled & shellshocked in the rubble of their home, as if they were just invaded by space aliens and not fellow human beings.
Garland & Mendoza’s choice to reenact this one specific mission without explaining the larger context of the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq (under false pretenses of seeking weapons of mass destruction) has been hotly debated as a disingenuous, amoral screenwriting choice among the film’s detractors. From the Iraqi family’s perspective, however, that absence of context only makes the unlawful intrusion even more terrifying & cruel. The family is sleeping in their cozy duplex when Americans kick down their doors and sledgehammer their walls in the middle of the night, inviting enemy fire into the home as a makeshift military base while they’re gathered to huddle on a single bed, powerless. There is no warning or preparation for this invasion, nor is their any communication once the fighting ceases. There’s no context whatsoever, neither for that family nor for the audience. All that’s offered is a dramatic reenactment of the gunfight from the surviving American soldiers’ perspective, with the flattering casting of young Hollywood hunks like Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai to help sweeten the deal for those who “answered the call.” The absence of testimony from the Iraqi citizens invaded, shot at, and displaced by those soldiers’ mission becomes glaring by the final credits, though, and the questions that absence raises hang heavy in the air. I like to think that unease was Garland’s main contribution to the picture but, without context, I can only guess.
The political & historical context behind the all-in-one-day siege plot of Sinners is much easier to parse, since Ryan Coogler is much more upfront about what he’s saying through his art. The director’s fifth feature film (all starring career-long collaborator Michael B. Jordan) and his first not adapted from either pre-existing IP or real-life events, Sinners is set in a 1930s Mississippi overrun with bloodsucking vampires. You wouldn’t guess the vampire part in its first hour, though, which is mostly a getting-the-gang-back-together drama about two former soldiers and current booze-runners (twins, both played by Jordan) who return to their hometown to set up a juke joint for Black patrons during Prohibition. After a long stretch of friendly “Look what the cat dragged in” reunions (featuring consistently dependable character actors like Delroy Lindo & Wunmi Mosaku), the juke joint proves to be a communal success, if not a financial one. Unfortunately, the party gets to be a little too lively, which attracts the attention of white, vampiric interlopers (led by the consistently intense Jack O’Connell). The vampires are particularly attracted to the transcendently beautiful blues music played by the juke joint’s youngest employee, Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton), which introduces an unignorable cultural appropriation metaphor to the vampires’ violent desire to be let inside the party. More practically, it also sours the vibe of the evening by trapping the partygoers in a single location, waiting to be drained of their blood and assimilated into the vampire cult.
Sinners is a truly American horror story, a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Every detail of the story that isn’t character-based drama registers as commentary on American identity: the illusion of freedom, the fixation on money, the compulsory Christianity, the lingering infrastructures of slavery & The Klan. The only positive touchstones of American culture are, in fact, Black culture, as represented in a fish-fry dance party that offers a Mississippi farming community a few hours to cut loose before returning to a life of poverty & backbreaking labor . . . until the party attracts vampiric outsiders who want to claim that culture as their own. In one standout sequence, Coogler extrapolates on this idea to visually & aurally lay out how the Delta blues that Preacher Boy is playing in the juke joint is foundational for all fundamentally American music & pop culture, illustrating its connections to funk, rock, hip-hop, bounce, and beyond in a physical, impossible embodiment of the story’s context. It’s a moment that not only accomplishes everything Baz Lurhman’s Elvis picture failed to do across 150 extra minutes of runtime, but it also positions Sinners as one of the most distinctly American vampire stories ever told on screen (among which I suppose its closest competition is Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark).
The only dramatic context Warfare provides before kicking off its real-time siege sequence is a brief moment where all soldiers involved are watching a pop music video on a shared laptop, laughing at its over-the-top sexuality & pelvic thrusts. There’s just enough time allowed to that scene for the audience to discern a few key soldiers’ personalities through body language & facial expressions, before they’re immediately shown breaking into and destroying a sleeping family’s home. In contrast, Sinners spends the first half of its 140min runtime getting to know the gangsters, players, and partiers it eventually puts under vampiric siege, so that they feel like real people instead of walking, talking metaphors. It’s through that sprawling attention to context that we learn that the booze-running twins who open the Mississippi juke joint were WWI soldiers before they became gangster contemporaries of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Even after the siege story is officially over, Coogler can’t help but pile on more context about cultural vampires & the blues, dragging the setting into contemporary times with a surprise guest appearance by blues legend Buddy Guy. Normally, I would say less is more when it comes to a movie explaining its own themes & context, but Coogler overcommits to those explanations to the point of academic scholarship, while still managing to deliver a fun & sexy vampire movie in the process. Meanwhile, Warfare‘s deliberate aversion to context threatens to implode the entire project, with only a few stray shots of Americans viewed from an outsider’s perspective affording it any sense of artistic or political purpose.
The scariest films I saw at this year’s Overlook Film Festival featured none of the ghouls, ghosts, goblins, demons, and vampires that typically populate the screen at the horror-leaning genre fest. I was mostly scared by the dark-sided media consumption habits of my fellow human beings, some of whom were in the audience of the very same theater as me. Personally, I can watch supernatural evil illustrated on the screen all day without being emotionally affected by the darkness & cruelty depicted, but when it comes to turning true-crime documentation of real-world evil into passive, consumptive entertainment, my heart sinks in my chest. True crime documentaries have recently become a hugely popular micro-industry, with a massive audience second-screening 10-hour miniseries about heinous murder sprees while eating dinner & folding laundry, as if they were half-listening to episodes of The Office or Friends. Something about that passive, disaffected viewing habit is even more disturbing than the crimes being dramatized for mass entertainment (and for easy, routine streaming-service profit). So, it’s appropriate that two of the documentary selections at this year’s Overlook focused on general audiences’ insatiable true-crime appetite from a critical distance, asking how, exactly, did we allow our formulaic background entertainment to get this fucked up?
Sometimes, you need a little distance to recognize just how rotted things have gotten. David Osit’s documentary Predators profiles the aughts-era true crime series To Catch a Predator as a reality-TV phenomenon in which Dateline NBC anchor Chris Hansen baited online child-molesters from behind their keyboards to stage sensational on-camera confrontations in the meat space, to great financial success. Deploying “decoy” actors who pretended to be underage, the show would then interview the titular predators in the lowest moment of their lives, watching them to beg for mercy & therapy before promptly being arrested by local cops. I remember finding this premise and the show’s success too grotesque to stomach as a teenager when it first aired, so I spent the first 40 minutes or so of Predators fighting back the urge to vomit, confronted with how deeply evil it was in practice after only being aware of it in the abstract. No one in the To Catch a Predator production—Chris Hansen included—cared about the children they were supposedly protecting by luring these men to a bait house. The show is a seasons-long ratings stunt meant to hook & shock an audience by tapping into our animalistic impulses for violent vengeance. Its legacy is not in making the streets safer; it’s in prompting one of its targets to commit suicide during a taping and in inspiring dipshit influencers to stage their own D.I.Y. versions of the show on YouTube & TikTok, each with their own brand-conscious catchphrases & subscription models. Osit eventually wrestles with his personal connection to the show and how his young mind was shaped by it while it initially aired, but I mostly walked away disgusted with the broader, mainstream audience that made it a hit in the first place.
Charlie Shackleton’s self-deprecating meta documentary Zodiac Killer Project is much more current and much more conceptual in its own examination of true-crime cinema’s popularity. Shackleton’s original pitch was to adapt a book about an unprovable theory on the identity of the titular serial killer into a generic true-crime miniseries, but the rights for the adaptation were pulled at the last minute before production, so he couldn’t legally complete it. Instead, he’s made a movie about what he would have done if he had maintained those rights, breaking down the tropes, rhythms, and attention-grabbing tactics of a formulaic true-crime documentary as he outlines the incomplete project. He illustrates this game plan through four rigidly segmented visual approaches that afford the film a kind of academic distance from the typical straight-to-streaming docs it satirizes. In one approach, he narrates the scenes he cannot legally film over celluloid images of empty Californian landscapes, slowly zooming in on minor background details whenever he gets wrapped up in the heat of the story. In another, he illustrates individual images from that story with “evocative B-roll” in a purposefully artificial sound stage environment, mimicking Errol Morris’s pioneering true-crime doc The Thin Blue Line as it’s been diluted through countless reiterations. He’s also often shown in the recording booth as he’s being interviewed by an off-screen collaborator, making all of this observation & deconstruction of the true crime genre sound casually improvised, as if it’s occurring to him in real time. In the most important approach, he proves his point by inserting scenes from the made-for-Netflix true crime docs he’s describing in a YouTube video essay presentation, demonstrating that he clearly knows what he’s talking about as a self-critical fan of the genre.
Zodiac Killer Project reminded me of a couple post-modern television series I did watch in the early 2000s, while avoiding the amoral cultural rot of shows like To Catch a Predator. I’m thinking of Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed—for how it spoils the magic of how the true crime genre works its audience—and The Soup, for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to get it. Even when breaking down the laziest & evilest aspects of the genre in real time, however, you get the sense that Charlie Shackleton is still a little bummed that he didn’t get to complete his formulaic streaming-service doc as originally conceived. His mourning the loss of that work is even tied to his realization that so many fewer people are going to watch this artful, academic documentary than the audience that would have auto-played his formulaic Netflix slop, if completed. Indeed, only a miniscule fraction of the audience who watched To Catch a Predator as it originally aired are going to reckon with the moral implications of that mass-entertainment character blemish as examined in its post-mortem doc Predators. Hell, I’m sure David Osit would even settle for a fraction of the still-watching audience commanded by micro YouTube celebrity Skeet Hansen, who lamely punctuates his Chris Hansen-impersonating predator exposures with the catchphrase “You’ve just been Skeeted.” The scariest aspect of all of this is how little anyone gives a shit about the exploitation of real-life violence, suffering, and abuse that provides the background noise to our absent-minded chores & scrolling; it’s all comfort watching. The monsters are the audience.
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.
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
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Shaw Brothers’ laser-wizards martial arts actioner Buddha’s Palm (1982).
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)
Swampflix 