mark boomer redmond

Emeralds in the Attic, or Promising Young Petals

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Before I got a chance to see Emerald Fennell’s recent “adaptation” “Wuthering Heights,” I stumbled across this social media post in the wild: 

I had just recently completed my own most recent rewatch of 1987’s Flowers in the Attic, and I became fixated on this idea. I’ve been down the Flowers in the Attic rabbit hole more times than I’d care to remember, but at its core, I’ve always been fascinated by the connection between Emily Brontë’s and V.C. Andrews’s novels. I don’t know if there’s any academic discussion of this out there, but I have no doubt in my mind that Andrews drew inspiration from Wuthering Heights, from naming her protagonist “Cathy” to making the implied, sublimated incest of Heights (I’ve always subscribed to the theory that Heathcliff is Earnshaw’s bastard son, meaning he and Catherine are half-siblings) explicit and pervasive in Flowers in the Attic and its sequels. 

When I did get around to seeing “Wuthering Heights,” my major criticism of it ended up being that it doesn’t need to, and in fact shouldn’t, be Wuthering Heights at all. The most interesting characters in that film are Alison Oliver’s Isabella and Hong Chau’s Nelly, and one could have done a Rosaline style film about the former or even gone full-tilt into the “Nelly is the villain” concept and made a Cruella style picture about the latter, and either one of them would have been infinitely more interesting than watching “Wuthering Heights” bash two sexy Australian Barbie dolls at each other while reenacting a half-remembered SparkNote. In essence, both Flowers in the Attic and “Wuthering Heights” are both unfaithful mutations of the same source material, which means that Fennell might actually be the perfect person to make a Flowers in the Attic adaptation. Right? 

I don’t think so… however, I do think that she would be the ideal person to adapt the first follow-up novel, Petals on the Wind. It would be incorrect to say that Petals is an easier novel to read than Flowers. While it may eschew most of the more taboo elements that made Flowers so salacious, adult Cathy finds herself in just as dire straits in Petals, where she is constantly subject to sexual danger regardless of which of her husbands is exerting force over her. Based on the overall negative reaction to Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (which I didn’t share), I don’t think that she has the sensitivity needed to present Flowers. This is, after all, a director who looked at the same source text that Andrews did and, where Andrews saw both the tenderness and the danger of Heathcliff and Cathy together and the way that it would affect future generations, instead got horned up by imagining them getting off to voyeuristic observation of a couple of servants going at it in a barn. But also, don’t worry, in this version Cathy and Heathcliff definitely aren’t half-siblings, so don’t worry, it’s okay if you get aroused!

For those who are interested, Flowers in the Attic (the novel) doesn’t end in the same way that the ‘87 film does. The latter includes a hastily-shot death scene for Corrine Dollanganger after being confronted by her children during her wedding to Bart Winslow, her late father’s lawyer, as producers felt that the book’s ending, which occurs when the children simply escape the house after learning that their grandfather is dead and Bart and Corrine have been married for over a year. This big confrontation scene seems like it would be right up Fennell’s alley, and the equivalent scene, in which Cathy crashes the Winslow family’s Christmas party at Foxworth Hall to reveal to Corrine that she has (a) seduced Bart and (b) is pregnant by him, is the climax of Petals on the Wind. Of course, this is between her first marriage to an abusive narcissist and her second marriage to the doctor who fostered the children following their escape. Petals also borrows from Brontë, although it’s Charlotte this time, as Paul, the aforementioned doctor, initially pretends that his wife is dead before revealing that she’s actually in an institution, such that his initial overtures toward Cathy when she is of age are much like Rochester’s towards the title character in Jane Eyre. It’s all very, very messy, a true soap opera, and that’s the wheelhouse that Fennell would most bloom in if she took that opportunity. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

“Wuthering Heights” (2026)

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Brandon has already written about Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” and although I was forewarned, my own love for the source material meant that, sooner or later, I was going to have to check this hot mess out for myself. And what a mess it is! Not as hot as one would expect, though, given that the director’s stated intention with this adaptation has been to recreate the horniness that she presumes is the universal experience of all first time readers. The thing about ”Wuthering Heights” is that the text I found myself thinking about most often while watching it wasn’t the novel itself or any of the prior adaptations, but Wicked: For Good. In writing about that film, I posited that its greatest flaw is also its greatest weakness: it only exists as a commercial product because of its connection to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its offshoots, sequels, and adaptations as a brand. The first half of the play (and the earlier film that adapted only that opening half) is allowed to find all sorts of fun things to explore within the “canon” of Oz, since the only thing it carries over is the necessity that, at some point, the Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch must eventually become enemies, in the public eye if not in reality. Everything else is fair game. In the second half of the play, which became For Good, every action exists in service of putting the characters from Wizard of Oz into the positions that they will be when Dorothy meets them upon her arrival in the fairy land, so characters march lock-step toward their places in the canon regardless of whether that works on a narrative, character, or even emotionally meaningful level. “Wuthering Heights” has the same problem. I’m not going to say it’s a bad movie because it’s a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which it most certainly is, but it’s a bad movie because it’s an attempt at adapting Emily Brontë’s novel at all. 

Widower Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), the tenant of farmhouse Wuthering Heights, returns home from the city with a young boy in tow, whom he “rescued” from a life of being abused by a drunken father so that he can come to the Heights and be abused by a drunken stranger instead. He gives the boy to his daughter, Cathy, who names the child “Heathcliff, after my dead brother,” and the two form a fast friendship. Also present in the household is Nelly, who as the bastard daughter of a lord is not entitled to recognition or shelter, but is welcome to act as the formal companion to Cathy; this relationship is challenged by Cathy’s burgeoning devotion to Heathcliff, who absorbs some of Earnshaw’s parental abuse. Some years later, Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) watch as a procession of carriages deliver their new neighbors, The Lintons, to the manor of Thrushcross Grange. Cathy, who has been raised with no mother and is thus somewhat as wild and unmannered as her lowborn foster brother, sneaks up to spy on Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and his “ward” Isabella (Alison Oliver) and ends up injuring her ankle and being hosted at Thrushcross Grange for several weeks to recuperate. She returns to Wuthering Heights “quite the lady” and admits to Nelly (Hong Chau) that she has fallen in love with Linton and will marry him; she says aloud that she cannot marry Heathcliff because of their vast social class gap, and Nelly, knowing that Heathcliff has overheard this, keeps this information to herself. Linton and Catherine marry, Heathcliff leaves, Catherine becomes pregnant, and Heathcliff returns, at which point Catherine learns that Nelly allowed him to believe that Catherine didn’t love him. Heathcliff marries Isabella, but he and Catherine begin a brief, torrid affair that ends in tragedy. 

If you’re familiar with the novel (or any of its more faithful adaptations, although there are surprisingly few), then that synopsis undoubtedly feels strange to you. It’s like Brontë’s in some ways; the character names are the same and some of the larger events from the novel are present. The exclusion of Hindley, Cathy’s brother and Heathcliff’s primary tormentor (and thus also his wife and child), is very jarring, as is the complete absence of Mrs. Earnshaw. Earnshaw family employee Joseph has also been aged down and cast with a handsome actor (Ewan Mitchell), eschewing the novel Joseph’s characterization as a religious zealot and instead giving him the chance to engage in kinky, largely unseen BDSM with one of the housemaids so that Heathcliff and Cathy can observe them surreptitiously in a way that sets both characters’ sexual imaginations ablaze. Most adaptations focus solely on the Cathy/Heathcliff story and leave out the entire plot about the second generation that constitutes the entire second half of Wuthering Heights, so its excision here isn’t surprising, but knowing that it doesn’t need to take that into consideration, “Wuthering Heights” decides to instead have Cathy not only die, but miscarry her child with Linton, since there’s no reason to have a living child if the story isn’t going to continue. I also can’t fault the film for choosing to narratively manifest the “Nelly is the villain” theory. Although I have personally never accepted that in my reading of the text, it has become the prevailing literary lens for the novel’s academic criticism since James Hafley first posited this thesis in 1958. (If you have JSTOR access, his essay can be found here; it’s a good read even if you, like I, remain unconvinced.) 

If you’re not familiar with the novel, none of this may seem like it changes that much about the text, but I can assure you: it does. My distaste for the film could be said to be either (a) entirely predicated on, or (b) have nothing to do with my love of Wuthering Heights, by which I mean that I don’t particularly care that this is a bad adaptation of Wuthering Heights—in fact, the number of faithful adaptations is rare, and I prefer some of the less faithful adaptations over the more detail-oriented ones—I just don’t think this needed to be an adaptation of Wuthering Heights specifically. It almost feels as if Fennell responded to critics’ dismissal of Saltburn as a lesser Talented Mr. Ripley by deciding to take her Wuthering Heights-inspired erotic fiction and—in an inverse of E.L. James filing the serial numbers off of her Twilight fanfiction and publishing it as Fifty Shades of Grey—direct an adaptation of that and call it “Wuthering Heights.” I’m not frustrated with this movie as a fan of Brontë’s; I’m frustrated with it as a movie lover, the part of me that just wants to go to the movies and have a good time. Where this ties into Wicked: For Good is that like that film, “Wuthering Heights” goes awry in having to fall in line with the text that it is branded, meaning that the film is inexorably tied to the text from which it takes its name, when liberating it from that title would have allowed this to go in more interesting directions.

Robbie is very good as Cathy (Elordi is fine), but our two lead characters are so boring. In the film’s second act, we get to see some of the home life of Heathcliff and Isabella, and it’s the best stuff in the movie. Instead of being a victim of Heathcliff’s abuse, Isabella is all-in on his weird degradation play; she gets off on sending letters to Cathy and Nelly lying about how horrid Heathcliff is to her while also clearly enjoying being chained up and treated like a dog. We’ve already gotten a clear look into her bizarre psyche earlier in the film, in which we learn that she has an entire room devoted solely to her hair ribbons, and we get to see her create a fun murder scene in miniature by venting her frustrations at Cathy herself on the doll she made of the woman instead, with a dollhouse tableau that’s as funny as it is disturbing. While sitting in the theater, I couldn’t help but think about how much better a movie “Wuthering Heights” would be if it realized that its most interesting character was Isabella, and the movie had been made about her instead. I fantasized about the film taking a sudden turn into being about Heathcliff realizing that Isabella truly could match his freak and the two of them falling for each other. “Wuthering Heights” could never go in that direction because it’s called “Wuthering Heights,” rather than “[Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi].” The first time that we meet Isabella, she’s sitting in the garden and delivering an excruciatingly detailed recap of Romeo & Juliet to Linton. For a moment, I really was naive enough to think that Fennell was going to do something truly audacious, and that the mention of the play would draw attention to something crucial that Shakespeare’s play and Brontë’s novel share: they are decidedly tragic, non-romantic stories that the general public perceives as romantic. Alas, this was not to be the case, and the director’s much-vaunted “audacity” was once again constrained to the erotic consumption of another person’s bodily fluids (and occasionally egg yolks). Ho-hum.

Where Emerald Fennell does allow herself to get really freaky with things that she adds from outside the text are the moments where the film does actually shine. When she first arrives to live at Thrushcross Grange, Cathy is ushered into a room that Linton has prepared for her by having the place painted “the most beautiful color in the world, the color of [Cathy’s] flesh.” As we enter the room, it looks tasteful enough, but as the camera moves closer we get to see that Linton has had the decorators recreate not only her freckles but the light, almost imperceptible blue veins beneath. It’s delightfully grotesque. The film also occasionally goes for utter camp in a few fine moments, with the standout being the scene in which Mr. Earnshaw dies, surrounded by a physically impossible stack of empty wine and liquor bottles. The film also features very beautiful tableaux; there are several nearly-still chiaroscuro images of characters lit solely by the natural light streaming through a window, calling to mind Rembrandt’s Anna and the Blind Tobit or the Rembrandtian A Man seated reading at a Table in a Lofty Room. Evoking the imagery of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is an easy go-to for Heathcliff’s return, but it’s also an effective choice. Visually, the film’s depiction of Thrushcross Grange having strong juxtapositions of white and blood-red are striking, even if the choice doesn’t seem to have a deeper meaning other than the most superficial symbolism. Any one of those things would have been a delight to see in [Untitled Emerald Fennell Sexy Gothic Romance starring Jacob Elordi], in which Fennell wouldn’t have felt the need to remain bound to “adapting” Wuthering Heights and instead been able to go full bore into the story she really wanted to tell. Instead, we have this disappointment.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

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Brandon forewarned me that he didn’t much care for Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, but based on what he related about the film, I had a feeling that I would enjoy it more than he did. For the entirety of the its darkly comedic first half, I barely went more than five minutes without a hearty chuckle. Around the midpoint, however, even though the film’s comedic tone remained largely the same, the laughs became fewer and farther between. Immediately after leaving the theater having watched the film, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had been let down by the fairly conventional (as much as that descriptor can apply here) second half, and we are very much aligned on what works and what doesn’t. 

Good Luck opens with a purported time traveler (Sam Rockwell) arriving in a diner called Norm’s, where he informs the smartphone-addicted diners therein that he has arrived from the future to alter the upcoming AI quantum singularity — not by preventing its creation at the hands of a nine year old genius (as its genesis is supposedly inevitable) but by uploading a software patch that will result in the AI having a sense of ethics and benevolence. This is his 117th attempt to put right what once went wrong, as he is convinced that some combination of diners will result in the correct team to keep this apocalypse from kicking off. Using knowledge of the customers he’s gained in previous time loops, he gathers a small squad: ill-fated Boy Scout troop leader Bob, high school teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple), boisterous Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and offbeat loner Ingrid (The White Lotus season two’s Haley Lu Richardson). Together, they have to make it out of the diner and across the city so that the future man can plug in a USB that will prevent the apocalypse, all while avoiding trigger-happy police, mask-wearing assailants wielding automatic weapons, and eventually, a chimeric monster made of cats. 

Interspersed with this journey are the vignettes about the diners and their individual experiences with the various pieces of technology that will converge into our future overlord. While working as a substitute at the school where Janet is employed full time, Mark discovers that the students have become mindless automatons that—between verbalizing the occasional brand name—act as a horde at the direction of something within their phones. Susan loses her son in a school shooting but is presented with the opportunity to “resurrect” him, after a fashion. Ingrid suffers from a condition that makes her nose bleed in the presence of wireless signals, leaving her little opportunity to find gainful employment; for a time, she’s able to get by as a generic “princess” character for little girls’ birthday parties, but as the prevalence of children using smartphones increases, she finds even this avenue to be a dead end. Compounding things, her equally luddite boyfriend is eventually tempted to try on a set of VR goggles, which leads him to choosing to “transition” into the virtual world full time, leaving her completely alone. Finally, we also get to see what the time traveler’s life was like growing up, in a world in which half of the population lives “jacked in” to the AI’s perfect virtual world, while the other half has perished. 

You’ll notice that the first two backstories sound bleak, and while they are, the darkness within them is played for some great satirical humor. Mark and Janet’s story is a zombie pastiche that plays out like David Tennant-era Doctor Who attempting to do a Black Mirror plot, and although its “phones make you stupid” concept comes off as a bit of intergenerational youth-bashing at first, the blasé treatment of a school shooting is just observational enough to punch through the discomfort of the situation. Susan’s story is much more heart-breaking, as she learns that her son has been gunned down in another “unpreventable” school shooting, but that he can “come back” in a cloned form that is mostly subsidized by the government since he was the victim of campus-based gun violence. He’s not the same, of course, and she reluctantly accepts the delivery of a shallow shadow of her child who occasionally recites ad copy about a low-calorie peach tea. It’s very grim stuff, but this is also the funniest part, as the tragedy is treated with the same casual shoulder-shrugging that mass shootings in America are given in reality, and all of the bits within it land: the salesman who can hardly disguise his annoyance at being given a “first timer” or his boredom as he tries to speedrun Susan through her customization options, the vapid disregard for the tragedy that other moms who have already replaced their children before display, and the couple who have clearly succumbed to madness after going through the process four times and decided to do a “goofy one” this time around. This is also the more straightforward Black Mirror… let’s say “homage,” as this essentially smashes together the plots of “Common People” and “Be Right Back,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not effective unto itself. 

It’s here that the film takes a downward turn for me, as the flashbacks we get for both Ingrid and the man from the future are completely lacking in moments of levity, even of the extremely dark kind. Ingrid’s loss of the one person she thought she could trust, who was turned into an obedient slave to the machine after only the smallest temptation, isn’t fun to watch. It’s also where the film feels the most reactionary in a way that doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest of the film’s thesis. Ingrid’s boyfriend, after spending his days in the VR headset over the course of less than a week seems to become completely radicalized without any regard for how his lifestyle change affects his partner. She comes home one day to find him having prepared dinner for them, acting out of character, and it’s during this seeming return to their happy domesticity that he springs on her that he’s going to “transition,” which seems like a loaded term in this context. What he’s doing is essentially allowing himself to be voluntarily hooked into the nursing home equivalent of one of those goo vats from The Matrix and live the rest of his life in the perfected version of reality that the machine promises. If anything, he’s “uploading,” but the use of transition, in combination with other behaviors, feels like a regressive take. Perhaps this is best demonstrated in his frustration that Ingrid doesn’t understand the niche slang that he’s suddenly picked up from those people he’s meeting online, you know, the ones predatorily encouraging him to transition? It hews too close to right wing conspiracy signaling for me, and I didn’t like that. 

As one would imagine, the future man’s childhood is the most bleak, and as a result, when the back half of the film has to try and maintain a sense of comedic balance with the first half, it has to push its jokes out of the vignettes and into the framing device of the group trying to divert the quantum singularity before the timer on the traveler’s wrist finishes its countdown. This narrative has been jokey throughout, but the bits within it vary wildly in their success. Sam Rockwell yelling at a diner full of people? Goes on too long before he starts to demonstrate his knowledge of people gathered from previous loops, but once that starts, the jokes start to land better. Convincing Bob to draw the fire of the assembled police force outside? Decent enough, but barely consequential. In the second half, this has to escalate, so instead we get some exposition about the programmer’s access to both 3D printing tech and (presumably) the cloning potential from the company that “resurrected” Susan’s son and so we get a kaiju made of memes that didn’t work for me at all. It did get a 50% approval rating in my screening, since my viewing companion and I were alone and he enjoyed it, so it may work for others. The final showdown goes on for just a little too long and is, as noted in the intro, a bit of a conventional place for this narrative to go (its few “twists” will surprise no one but children). Bizarrely, the film concludes open-endedly; it’s not exactly calling for a sequel, but it’s clear that the ending is written with greater importance placed on that possibility than the importance of a satisfactory conclusion. Given that the film had plenty of things to say but had already run out of them by the time it ended, I think an ending that was either optimistic or nihilistic would have been a wiser way to go, rather than an unambitiously ambiguous one. It’s a little overcooked, but the highs of the first half carry it across the finish line despite the lows of the second, and it averages out to be pretty good overall. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Flowers in the Attic (1987)

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During a recent discussion with friends about the name of a book shop in our city and how we find it unwieldy and off-putting, one person in the group stated that if he ever opened a bookstore, he would call it “Flowers in the Attic.” I asked if he knew what Flowers in the Attic was about, and he admitted that he didn’t; he just liked the poetry of the phrase. To demonstrate why this would be, at best, a bad name for his future hypothetical business, I suggested that we watch the novel’s 1987 film adaptation, which (naturally) happened to be streaming on Tubi. [For those interested, the 2014 Lifetime adaptation of the novel is also on Tubi, but the service doesn’t seem to house the channel’s further adaptations of the three sequel novels for some reason.]

Cathy Dollanganger (Kristy Swanson) has the perfect life. The second eldest of the Dollanganger kids, a couple of years younger than older brother Christopher Jr. (Jeb Stuart Adams) and a half decade older than twins Cory and Carrie, she is doted upon most by her beloved father, Christopher Sr., a fact that her mother Corrine (Victoria Tennant) takes note of. On his thirty-sixth birthday, Chris Sr. dies in a car accident, and as the family’s savings dwindle and they lose their home, Corrine packs the family up and takes them to the home of her parents, known in this film only as “the grandmother” and “the grandfather.” Grandmother (Louise Fletcher) is a harsh and cruel woman who wastes no time laying down the house rules and her interpretation of religious doctrines, which are, to her, one and the same. Some of them are reasonable, like ensuring that the boys share one bed while the girls share the other, while others, like that the children are to be silent at all times, are more authoritarian. Corrine explains to her children that Grandfather is very old, and Corinne must keep the kids’ existence hidden from them until she “wins back [her] father’s love,” and that once she has, he’ll recant his previous disinheriting of her and the family will once again be financially secure. 

Of course, the most famous thing about Flowers in the Attic is that it’s a novel that deals with the taboo subject of incest. Notably, Cathy and the others have to be kept secret from Grandfather because they are the product of an incestuous relationship between their Corinne and Chris Sr. (Later books would overcomplicate this genealogy but Chris Sr. is stated to be the much younger half-brother of the Grandfather, making him Corinne’s half uncle.) This is also the stated reason that Grandmother is so monstrous to her own grandchildren, as she considers them abominations, despite their innocence. The 1979 novel on which the film was based, written by author V.C. Andrews, was derided upon publication for being utterly deranged but nonetheless proved to be shockingly popular, enough to warrant a few sequels during her lifetime (and some after that, but we won’t get into it). I read it years before I was even aware that there had been a film adaptation, and with that in mind, although this movie is difficult to defend from an objective standpoint, it’s the best way to enjoy this story with as little disgust as possible. Although the previous generation’s incest is kept intact as the inciting reason for the Dollanganger kids to be locked away in the attic, the film cuts out the relationship that develops between Cathy and Chris as the two enter puberty in complete isolation, which could be argued to both undercut the darkness of the narrative and make the more “young adult novel” elements of the original story blossom, no pun intended. It’s ultimately more toothless, but also more palatable. 

Flowers in the Attic is by no means a good movie, but it’s one that I can’t help but watch any time I’m presented the opportunity. Fletcher isn’t asked to do much here but retread the same beats that netted her Oscar win for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the film is wise to keep her out of frame with the child actors, who are universally dreadful. Swanson went on to have something of a career, albeit a brief one, but Adams appears to have mostly disappeared following Flowers, and the film world did not mourn his absence. He’s stilted, wooden, and clearly far too adult to convincingly portray a teenaged boy capable of being overpowered by Grandmother. Tennant’s portrayal is a mixed bag, as I think she subtly underplays Corinne’s financial panic and understandable horror at returning to Foxworth Hall but goes too broad later. I could almost buy that she is resentful of what she perceives as a lack of gratitude for her sacrifice on the part of her children, the film makes no time for her to have a meaningful aside glance, deep in troubled thought, as she reaps the benefits of her family wealth while her children grow emaciated and pale from lack of sunlight and exercise. There’s no evolution from the Corinne who genuinely loves her children but can’t provide for them and thus must accept a literal whipping from her parents in order to return home to the Corinne who coldly tells the remaining children that Cory has died in the hospital. It’s really on Fletcher to carry the whole thing, performance-wise, and she manages to make it work despite a role that she probably could have sleepwalked through. 

I’ve never been able to put my finger on why this film has had such staying power in my mind, and it might simply be that this is a weird tonal and narrative mish-mash. Wikipedia suggests that it could be considered part of the psycho-biddy genre, but the story mostly involves juvenile fiction elements in the form of its fantasy about adolescent self-sufficiency and competence as Chris and Cathy come to act as surrogate parents to the younger two. The novel is often considered to be a gothic text, which is fascinating to me as it clearly does align with the kinds of plots one would find in most European (specifically English) gothic stories—the old dark house, the unwanted relatives in the attic, subordinated passions, etc.—but Andrews was an American writer. American gothic lit usually eschews those elements, trading castles for caves and replacing the metaphorical representations of the horrors of the old world with the existential terror of the “wilderness” of the Western Hemisphere. Andrews’s novel, for better or worse, is probably the primary example of an American writer, specifically a Southern American writer, crafting a European style gothic story set in the American south. The first time I saw this film was when I was in grad school, broadcast over a local New Orleans affiliate that I could pick up with my rabbit ear antenna, and I was deep in the study of American gothic literature at the time—as my intended capstone thesis was originally going to be about the influence of Calvinism on the gothic traditions of the U.S.—so that’s probably why it got so solidly lodged in my mind. 

What’s fascinating about Andrews’s work is the fact that, deranged though the material itself may be, the author had a very distinct prose style. This was a trashy but popular novel that was adapted into a trashy and mostly forgotten movie, but when one thinks about contemporary literary output that would fall under the same subgenre now, the difference in actual literary quality is staggering. For all of its many, many faults, Flowers in the Attic isn’t slop. I say this as someone who is in the process of editing one of his own novel manuscripts right now, and I’ll freely admit that my own prose is not as good as Andrews’s. That carries over into the film adaptation as well. This is clearly a very cheaply made film ($3.5M) that spent most of its money on sets and (one hopes) Louise Fletcher, but even for mass-produced schlock of the late eighties, it still functions on a higher technical level than some theatrical releases I’ve seen in recent years, and it’s also fully committed to its bizarrely melodramatic tone. The periodic slow-motion shots of Grandmother unveiling the leather whip as she prepares to beat her daughter while Grandfather watches or her brushing Cathy’s treasured ballerina music box to the floor to shatter into dozens of pieces manage to somehow be both campy and utterly sincere, which is probably why it’s gone on to be a cult classic. That it never deviates from that tone even when Swanson is wearing perhaps the worst wig in the history of cinema is a testament to its staying power. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)

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We love Park Chan-Wook around here. We recently discussed Oldboy on the Lagniappe Podcast (and Stoker years before), there was strong support for No Other Choice around here last year (it ended up in the number eight spot for our collective top ten of 2025), and I was personally very fond of both Decision to Leave and Lady Vengeance. It seemed to me that his thrillers generally have more cultural penetration in the west than his comedies, and I was finally able to track down a copy of I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK, his 2006 romcom via my library. Alas, it is with a heavy heart that I report that I didn’t care for it. 

Young-goon (Im Soo-Jung) is a young woman working in a factory building transistor radios, when one day the instructions on the overhead loudspeaker tell her to slash open her wrist and insert connecting cords under her skin. Following what is presumed to be a suicide attempt, Young-goon’s mother admits to the psychiatric facility’s doctors that her own mother (Young-goon’s grandmother) had been admitted to a sanatorium in later years, after decades of her own delusions, including that she was actually a mouse. Before leaving Young-goon at the hospital, her mother advises her not to admit to anyone that she believes that she is a cyborg. On her first day, the seemingly catatonic Young-goon is observed by Il-soon (Rain, credited here as Jung Ji-hoon rather than under his stage name), a boy who is serving time after being diagnosed as an anti-social kleptomaniac, as Young-goon climbs out of bed after everyone else is asleep and puts in her grandmother’s dentures, seemingly in order to commune with the various machines around the facility. 

Il-soon’s supposed thievery around the hospital seems to revolve around other patients’ delusions that he is stealing some part of their essence, and he goes along with these ideas by pretending to “transfer” various neuroses between them. These stolen possessions are as ephemeral as one patient’s ability to play ping-pong or another’s neurotic “courtly behavior” of only walking backward. Within her own psychologically unwell self-storytelling, Young-goon believes that she must overcome the seven deadly sins for cyborgs, which include expressing gratitude, daydreaming, and having sympathy. She asks Il-soon to steal this from her, and he’s romantically fascinated enough with her that he attempts to work within the schema of her madness to try and nurse her back to health. Namely, Young-goon has been allowing another patient to eat all of her food because she believes that she gets all the energy that she needs from holding batteries, but knows that if she’s noticed not taking food during meal times, she’ll be forcefed, and if she stops eating altogether, she’s in for shock treatment. 

This movie comes at an important inflection point in Park’s filmography, coming right on the heels of his “Vengeance Trilogy” and before he experimented with more standard horror forms (2009’s vampire horror Thirst) and working in English (directing the aforementioned Stoker and producing Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, both in 2013). Bracketing Cyborg on both sides are films that Park wrote but did not direct: Boy Goes to Heaven, a fantasy romcom, in 2005, and 2008’s Cush and Blush, which is a more straightforward comedy but with clear romance elements. The Vengeance Trilogy is a set of dark, miserable films, and if I spent years of my life making them I would want to lighten up a little bit with my creative output for a while too, if for no other reason than to get the taste out of my mouth. Unfortunately, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK doesn’t work much as a romance (the tagline “She’s crazy; he’s crazy about her” is as accurate as it is awful) and the comedic elements mostly fail to land as well, since so much of it is dependent upon the viewer laughing at people with sufficiently severe mental illnesses to warrant medical intervention. 

One of the patients is a consummate liar, a pathological “mythomaniac,” whose constructed narratives are there to replace the memories that she’s lost as a result of application of ECT “therapy.” Another patient lives an entire life within a compact mirror in which she imagines herself as one of the von Trapp children, while the same overweight patient who eats all of Young-goon’s food believes that she is capable of flight by rubbing together two socks of her own creation that repel her from the ground via static electricity (the script is much meaner about her weight than it is about her madness). All of this becomes important because Il-soon is able to weave together all of their counter-factual beliefs into a series of stories that, theoretically, will draw Young-goon out of her own delirium. This doesn’t work, although it does reach a decent ending when Il-soon refashions his sole beloved possession into a “device” that will allow Young-goon’s cyborg form to allow her to convert food into energy instead, including a cute scene in which he pretends to put the mechanism into her back. Despite feeling like the natural conclusion to the story, the film goes on for another fifteen minutes of nonsense that doesn’t make the whole any more complete or enjoyable. 

As a fan of this director, I reached what felt like the halfway point of the film’s total runtime and was ready for it to deliver a big midpoint twist that would make everything prior to this point fall into place, but this was not to be the case. The two of them don’t escape from the psych hospital and find that their reality is as malleable as they believe it to be, nor is it revealed that all of these seemingly goofy hijinx surrounding our characters is reflective of a darker objective reality outside of either of their perceptions. There is a moment where it seems like the movie is going to really break out of the box and go in an interesting direction, as Young-goon’s “battery” reaches its full charge and she starts laying down automatic weapons fire out of every fingertip, massacring the staff of the place (whom she associates with the sanatorium employees to whom her grandmother was remanded). This proves to be another fantasy sequence, however, as Young-goon then faints from starvation and the forced feeding begins in earnest. 

It’s only in these fantasy fugues that Park really shows off his distinct style. So much of the film is shot in the sterile confines of the asylum that the breaks from reality feel like a breath of fresh air. The girl with the Sound of Music obsession who is only ever seen with her back to the camera and observing the world through her reflection allows for some impressive transitional trickery as it zooms in and out of her mirror, which is fun. Overall, however, this misses the mark for me, and it isn’t one that I would recommend. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: A Mighty Wind (2003)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Christopher Guest’s folk-music mockumentary A Mighty Wind (2003).

00:00 Welcome
03:21 “Wuthering Heights” (2026)
09:42 Flowers in the Attic (1987)
18:42 Casablanca (1942)
24:05 Scarlet (2026)
28:00 I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK (2006)
33:43 Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026)
39:50 Swallow (2019)
48:06 Possessor (2020)
56:16 Barb and Star Go to Vista Go to Vista del Mar (2021)

1:02:35 A Mighty Wind (2003)

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

Lagniappe Podcast: Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the classic tabloid noir Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

00:00 Welcome
03:09 Kill Bill – The Whole Bloody Affair (2025)
08:58 Blackmail (1929)
15:20 Gorgo (1961)
21:08 Bunny (2025)
25:00 Send Help (2026)
30:00 Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die (2026)
34:00 Bone Tomahawk (2015)
39:14 Obex (2026)
44:47 Crimson Peak (2015)
54:06 Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)
59:32 The Moment (2026)
1:05:15 Eighth Grade (2018)
1:10:10 Mandy (2018)
1:14:00 Lapsis (2021)
1:17:00 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Mutant Mayhem (2023)

1:24:12 Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

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

Boomer’s Best-of-the-Year Oversights, Part One (2015-2019)

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In one of our end-of-the-year podcast episodes last year that was partially inspired by my having finally been convinced to watch The Twentieth Century based on my delight in director Matt Rankin’s follow-up feature Universal Language (it was my favorite movie of last year!), Brandon read off a list of film titles that he asked me to identify as a kind of makeshift quiz. Those titles were all films that had been on the Swampflix Top Ten list for their eligible year, and which I had not seen at the time of the relevant list’s publication. I’m not a completionist, but with an upcoming collaborative project, I took that list as homework and got to work filling out these blind spots to determine if the listed films would have made my own end-of-the-year list if I had seen them in time. Come along with me for part one: 2015-2019.

2015: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Crimson Peak – Watched February 1, 2026

Upon review: Crimson Peak has all of the strengths of Guillermo del Toro’s recent Frankenstein adaptation with none of its weaknesses . . . although it admittedly has other weaknesses of its own, mostly in regards to casting. A gorgeous period film with beautiful costumes and sets that all act in service of a Victorian gothic romance that also happens to be a ghost story, this is del Toro at his best and also his most unabashed. As his main character, an aspiring novelist, says of her own work, “It’s not a ghost story; it’s a love story. The ghosts are metaphors for the past.” The film is almost cringe-inducing in the nakedness with which it comments upon itself, but that same open and unabashed sincerity is what makes it so meaningful and worthwhile. The casting of 2010s Tumblr’s favorite “woobie” it-boy Tom Hiddleston is a miss, and although there’s nothing wrong with Jessica Chastain’s performance, doesn’t it just feel like Eva Green should be playing Lucille? 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

Tangerine – Watched January 22, 2026

Upon review: I wouldn’t consider myself an Anora hater per se, but I certainly wasn’t enamored of it in the same way that others were. The overwhelmingly positive critical response to a film that I considered solid but not necessarily remarkable made me somewhat hesitant to revisit director Sean Baker’s earlier work, as I felt fairly certain that I would fail to connect with it in the same way that I had with Anora. I was pleasantly shocked by this one, a film that I remember mostly as part of the discourse for the fact that it was shot entirely on smartphones, a brand-new trick at the time. This story of two trans sex workers, Sin-Dee Rella (who recently completed a prison stay on behalf of her pimp/boyfriend Chester) and her best friend Alexandra is an absolutely hilarious, heartbreaking, and overwhelmingly humane piece of narrative cinema. A true slice of life in the day of two women struggling, not to “have it all,” but just to have some little thing, whether it be a sad Christmas Eve singalong that’s barely a step up from a private karaoke room or the pathetic human specimen of Chester (R.I.P., James Ransone). Anora may have had the budget, the big release, and the acclaim, but this earlier outing blows it out of the water. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2016: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Kubo And The Two Strings – Watched February 6, 2026

Upon review: I was a latecomer to appreciating the animation studio Laika, as I didn’t get around to seeing Coraline, arguably their most famous film, until 2021. I also remember the discourse that surrounded Kubo when it first came out, mostly in the form of criticism of the film’s casting of mostly white voice actors for a story set in and inspired by feudal Japan. While that’s definitely worthy of discussion, I also found Kubo to be an unexpected delight, a gorgeously animated stop-motion film about a boy with magical, musical powers who finds himself thrust into a conflict with his mother’s family following her apparent death, after years of raising the boy in secret. The quest Kubo finds himself upon isn’t the most novel one, but the film takes an interesting twist at the end by having the protagonist forsake the items acquired during his journey and find a more humane way to deal with his evil grandfather. Dark but not too dark, this is one that I would recommend for any child or adult. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

Tale Of Tales – Watched January 25, 2026

Upon review: A fantastic fantasy film! When Brandon and I discussed this one while recording our Beast Pageant episode, he mentioned that it had one of the highest hit rates for a horror anthology, and I can’t help but agree. I’ll always think of this one first and foremost as a fantasy/fairy tale picture (it is an adaptation of multiple stories by Italian fairy tale collector Giambattista Basile) before I think of it as a horror film, but don’t be fooled by the Italian poster that makes it look like a collection of episodes of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller; there’s plenty here that aligns more with horror as a genre. A queen (Salma Hayek) eats the massive heart of a giant sea dragon, a dye-maker finds a man who will flay her alive in the misguided belief that it will make her appear younger, a young princess is given to an ogre as a wife and is brutalized by him, and when the last of these escapes, the ogre hunts her down and kills her companions with the ferocity of a slasher. Good stuff. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2017: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Lure – Watched January 13, 2026

Upon review: I loved this movie. A bizarre horror musical fantasia, The Lure follows two sirens who are lured onto land by the songs of an eighties Polish pop band called Figs & Dates, then become part of the band’s act before turning into stars of their own. Their eel-like mermaid tales, which only appear when they get wet (Splash or, depending on your generation, H20: Just Add Water rules), don’t prove to be much of an imposition, but when one of the girls starts to fall in love with the Evan Peters-esque moptop bassist of F&D, her more worldly-wise sister tries to get her to break it off. If she doesn’t, she’s in for a Little Mermaid ending, of the Hans Christian Anderson variety, not the Disney one. Running the gamut from club music to pop to thrash, the soundtrack is excellent, and the moments of horror are genuinely chilling. Not to be missed. 5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes. 

2018: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Cam – Watched some time in 2019. 

Upon review: I have to admit that I don’t remember this one too well, although I do recall that I enjoyed it. It’s not possible to legally watch this film anywhere anymore, as it was a direct-to-Netflix feature that the platform no longer hosts and it never got a physical media release, so I don’t have the option to go back and review it again to get a fuller, clearer picture than the one in my head. I remember not caring for actress Madeline Brewer very much at the time, mostly based on her performance on Hemlock Grove; since then, I’ve come around on her, especially when I came to like her quite a bit as the protagonist of the final season of You. This was one that hit with a lot of the Swampflix group based on the predisposition toward internet-based horror, and it went over fairly well in my house with me and my roommate of the time. Too bad I can’t confirm that anymore. 4 stars.

Would it have made my list? 2018 had some clear leaders of the pack with Hereditary, Annihilation, and Black Panther, but the lower rankings on the list aren’t as solidly defensible. Verdict: Possibly, lean toward yes.

Mandy – Watched January 29, 2026

Upon review: Back when we watched Beyond the Black Rainbow as a Movie of the Month years back, I remember reading that as a child director Panos Cosmatos would walk down the horror aisle at the video store and imagine what a movie would be based on the poster alone. Looking back on that, I do wonder if the abyss didn’t gaze back a little, since he has a tendency to make movies that sometimes linger on a single image for extended periods of time, as if the film is the poster. That bothered me much less in Mandy than it did in Rainbow, possibly because it’s driven by yet another in a long history of butterfly fearless performances from Nicolas Cage, or because this one’s nostalgia for VHS-era horror is more textual than referential. The evil gang of demonic bikers who help a cult subdue and torment the titular Mandy are almost exactly what one might imagine from sneaking a peak at the horror aisle at age eight and seeing the cover of Hellbound: Hellraiser II while an overhead TV played Psychomania. The psychedelia and too-familiar narrative structure are unlikely to please plot essentialists, but as a chainsaw duel enthusiast and a King Crimson fan, I liked this despite the soporific nature of its back half. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? I think that I would have overlooked this one or taken it for granted during the year of its release, especially given my cool reception to Black Rainbow. So no, it would not have made my list, but that would have been an error on my part. 

Eighth Grade – Watched February 6, 2026

Upon Review: Most online sources would say that this is a coming-of-age dramedy, but that would be incorrect; this is a horror film. Our young protagonist Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is growing up during a time in which social media use is essentially compulsory, while she’s also trying to navigate a world that, to the adult viewer, is largely alien, all while her hormones surge amidst a peer group whose treatment of her ranges from cruel to apathetic. That strangeness of the world in which children reside “now” (given that the film itself is nearly a decade old at this point) is made manifest in a scene during which Kayla spends some time with an older girl and her high school friend group, all of whom seem infinitely older and wiser to Kayla than herself despite the fact that they themselves are still children (and not that their youth stops one of them from being a predator). These older teens marvel at the idea that Kayla had SnapChat, a messaging app that their contemporaries use almost solely for exchanging nudes, when she was in fifth grade, and it blows their minds in the same way that I often marvel that there are entire generations now that have grown up on YouTube, a site that launched the summer after I graduated from high school. Kayla’s entire life is inscribed by the age-old pubescent need to be seen and acknowledged, filtered through a world in which validation is a currency that exists entirely within one’s phone. Good stuff. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

In Fabric – Watched April 4, 2025

Upon Review: An absolute marvel of a movie, I just happened to miss this one when it appeared, despite the affection I already held for Peter Strickland’s earlier giallo-adjacent psychological thriller Berberian Sound Studio. Featuring an excellent turn from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, one of our greatest living performers, this spooky feature about a red dress that torments its owners is an absolute delight. Briefly discussed at the time of viewing in our Buddha’s Palm episode at about the seventy-two minute mark. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Absolutely.

The Wild Boys – Watched December 21 and 22, 2025

Upon Review: I was not looking forward to disappointing Brandon when I watched this one and did not care for it. So much so, in fact, that I watched it again the following day to see if there was something that I could connect with and care for. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case. A mostly monochrome fantasia about boys becoming women on an island full of erotic flora, I felt in my bones how strongly this would connect to Brandon, but it just didn’t with me. The moments I loved most were when the film would suddenly turn almost Technicolor, bright and vibrant, and then would be disappointed when we went back to black and white. There must have been a reason for not shooting the whole thing in glorious color, but I couldn’t pin down exactly what the reasons were despite two viewings. It is, as Brandon wrote in his review, “decidedly not-for-everyone-but-definitely-for-someone.” 2.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Alas, no.

2019: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Lighthouse – Watched January 11, 2026

Upon Review: I was a big fan of The VVitch, so much so that it was my number one movie of 2016. Despite that, I let both of director Robert Eggers’s following films, The Lighthouse and The Northman, slip past me in the stream. Perhaps it was simply a matter of not being up to grappling with the film and its presaging of the madness of isolation when the film came to home viewing in the early days of lockdown. Having now seen The Lighthouse, this was a huge miss on my part. An utterly captivating story about two men on an island together tasked with maintaining an apparatus that captivates them like it were an unknowable elder god, the film is as rich with symbolism as it is dense with the old-timey dialogue for which Eggers continues to demonstrate his uncanny ear. An unpleasant delight. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Absolutely; it would have hit the top 10.

The Beach Bum – Watched January 20, 2026

Upon Review: Matthew McConaughey plays the worst person in the world, a very famous (Florida specific) poet named “Moondog,” who floats through life on little more than military grade marijuana, beer that’s barely fit for swine, and a garden of sun-dried poontang. This life of luxury is not sustained by his poetry, but by the fortune of his wife Minnie, who loves no man but Moondog but has taken to shacking up with R&B artist Lingerie (Snoop Dogg) in the “civilization” of Miami during Moondog’s long hiatus in the Keys. When Minnie tragically dies, the plot, such as it is, kicks in, as Moondog must now finish his current writing project in order to get the inheritance that will continue to fund his degenerate hedonism. Along the way, McConaughey as Moondog gets to spout the occasional fragment of genuinely decent poetry broken up with narcissistic phallocentric drivel that believably charms whatever constitutes the literati of Jacksonville and, less convincingly, the Pulitzer board. It’s all good fun with great editing, delirious neon, and a practiced eye for composition, but I could see this turning into a red flag favorite long term in the same genus as Fight Club or Scarface. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Not this time.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Blackmail (1929)

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There’s an awkward transition period between silent and sound pictures, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail sits right in the middle of it. In fact, it straddles the line between the two. If you look up the film online and click the first streaming link that your search results present, you’ll find yourself watching the film in sound, but this was actually a late-breaking change made well into production. The Kino Lorber DVD release that my library has contains both the silent and the talkie versions of the film, and the silent one was actually more financially successful in its day than the other — largely due to the fact that most British cinemas didn’t have sound technology installed yet, reducing the talkie Blackmail’s overall box office. Blackmail stands at this crux in the leap in film technology, and so we must give it some grace for its issues. 

Flapper Alice White (Anny Ondra) is dating Scotland Yard detective Frank Webber (John Longden), although she finds him a bit of a bore. On the side, she’s also occasionally going on dates with a painter named Crewe (Cyril Ritchard). After an argument at a tea house, Frank storms out, allowing Crewe to offer to take Alice out, and Frank sees the two leaving together. Crewe takes Alice to his artist’s loft and the two flirt for a bit before Alice volunteers to wear a (for the time) racy dancing costume and model for Crewe; he hides her clothes while she’s changing and his personality drastically changes as he attempts to force himself on her. Alice manages to grab a nearby knife and kill Crewe in self-defense, but she goes home in a state of shock. The following day, reminders of Crewe’s death are all around her, and a gossipy neighbor standing about in her father’s newsstand recounting the grisly details doesn’t help. Frank visits the scene of the killing and finds one of Alice’s gloves, pocketing the evidence before anyone else sees it and bringing it to her, where she wants to tell him everything but can’t verbalize the horror of her situation the previous night. Unfortunately, Alice’s exit from Crewe’s building was witnessed by career criminal Tracy (Donald Calthrop), who arrives with Alice’s other glove and announces his intent to extort both Alice and Frank. 

I’m not entirely certain that calling this film a “thriller” accurately reflects the content. The title act of blackmail doesn’t really enter the narrative until quite late in the game, and although the film’s energy picks up in its final act, the first three quarters of its eighty-five-minute runtime is fairly slow-paced. If anything, the film is more of a character study of Alice White than anything else. The film follows her almost entirely and spends a great deal more time on extended examinations of her face as she reacts to things that happen around her. Ondra has the perfect features for this era of filmmaking, with the big eyes and pouty lips that were best suited to convey the outsized emotions that dialogue-free performance required. Her English was so accented, however, that Hitchcock had another actress (Joan Barry) say Alice’s lines off-camera while Ondra lip-synced the dialogue, and the result is a little uncanny. (This was a technological limitation of the time; in Murder!, released the following year, the main character’s internal monologue while listening to the radio was accomplished by having the actor record his lines and then act along to his own voice on the tape, all while a live orchestra played the music that was supposedly playing on his radio.) That slight awkwardness as a result of this method is a little strange, but it unintentionally adds another layer to the performance, as if Alice’s experiences have left her so out of sorts that she’s not entirely in sync with her own mind. 

This is Alice’s story: she’s just a girl wanting to have fun, and she’s bored of her cop boyfriend always taking her to the movies. Crewe, a mysterious artist, shows an interest in her and invites her back to his place, where he shows off his work and even lets Alice express herself on a canvas as well, and it’s all fun and games before he reveals his true intentions. She defends herself but kills him in the process and returns home to wash his blood out of her clothes. On the street, the positions of people at rest remind her too much of the state she left Crewe’s body in, and when she’s trying to have breakfast with her family, she can’t get any peace. Her boyfriend arrives with evidence that she’s been two-timing him and she can’t even speak about the kind of danger that she defended herself from. All of this is before Tracy even enters the picture. This isn’t a thriller, really; it’s a noir, one with an inciting incident that would appear in noirs for decades to come, at least into the fifties with titles like The Blue Gardenia. How much you’re going to be invested in the film depends on how much you like Alice, and although I did, I can see her characterization being a harder pill to swallow for others, even before getting into the strange lip syncing issue that may further turn some viewers off. In the end, Tracy is sought for questioning purely as a matter of having a criminal record and having been in the area, and he flees the police, leading to a chase that winds through the British Museum before he falls from the building’s roof to his death. This leads to Crewe’s death being pinned on Tracy and Alice being free to go, but the film lingers on her face in its final moments in a way that makes it plain that although she may be legally absolved, she’s been forever changed by having to slay a man in order to protect herself from his sexual assault. 

As to the elements that make the film memorable as a Hitchcock text, the final fourth of the film sees Tracy being chased by the police, presaging several images and ideas that would go on to be reliable tricks in the director’s bag. In the British Museum, Tracy descends a rope to escape his pursuers past a giant bust of presumably Egyptian origin. There’s a distinct visual genealogy between this and the finale of North by Northwest: 

The Mount Rushmore sequence is also part of another one of Hitchcock’s trademarks, which was to have the film’s final action scenes lead to a rooftop climax, most famously in Vertigo but also To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, and Foreign Correspondent, just to name a few (although for the last two of these Jimmy Stewart is dangled out of a window rather than off of a rooftop and the fall from Westminster Cathedral tower happens at the beginning of the third act rather than its end, respectively). The chase scene through the museum is also clearly echoed in the protracted sequence that concludes I Confess, although this one is stronger and Hitchcock is already demonstrating his strong eye for composition when it comes to setting up the most interesting version of a shot, sticking the camera in the vertices of an oddly shaped room or taking on an overhead view of a large reading area. He’s also already inserting his sly sense of humor into the proceedings. Despite the relative novelty of the art form, the characters within the film are already talking about movies as if the whole enterprise is old hat; Frank seemingly only wants to go to detective flicks which Alice finds boring and predictable, and Frank admits he’s still excited to see the latest one about Scotland Yard, even if “they’re bound to get most things wrong.” Hitchcock’s lack of respect for the institution of the police overall is on display as well, since the entirety of Scotland Yard does, in fact, get most things wrong; they latch onto Tracy based on circumstantial evidence and chase him to his death, unknowingly doing so in order to cover for a killing (albeit a legally defensible one) committed by the girlfriend of one of their own members. 

It’s all good stuff, but I doubt that Blackmail remains of much interest even to most film-lovers who don’t have an unhealthy interest in Hitchcock’s body of work. Narratively, it’s not in conversation with his other texts, at least not those we think of as the canonical forty thrillers. Insofar as it’s useful as an interpretative tool for his filmography as a whole, this film feels like an attempt at experimenting with techniques and images that he would perfect later and is fascinating in that right, but I once again fear that this fascination extends only to real Hitch-heads. The Lodger is a much more engaging film if you’re interested in what the director’s silent and silent-adjacent work was like, and for experiments with the artform that sound introduced into the medium, Murder! has more fascinating production trivia and smoother tone overall, although I’d go to bat for Blackmail’s value as a noir character study before I’d recommend the 1930 film. This is in the public domain, so hopefully it’s not too hard for you to find if I’ve sold you on it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Send Help (2026)

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Two decades after Red Eye, Rachel McAdams finally got back on a plane in a movie helmed by a horror director who already peaked decades earlier, and look what’s happened to her this time. Dowdy corporate strategist Linda Liddle (McAdams) is an incredibly valuable member of her team despite her social ineptitude, questionable hygiene, and lack of awareness about not having fish in the office. She’s so important, in fact, that her late employer promised her a vice presidency before he passed away, not that this piece of information is treated with any deference by the boss’s son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien) when he takes over. He’s the kind of trust fund kid for whom the idiom about rich boys “born on third base [who] think they invented baseball” was crafted; he wastes no time in giving Linda’s promised promotion to one of his frat brothers who steals credit for her work, using his c-suite position to sleaze it up by asking an attractive applicant “how far above and beyond [she’s] willing to go for [him]” despite having a devoted supermodel fiancée, and otherwise abusing the position of power that’s been dumped into his lap. To string Linda along a little further, he invites her on an overseas business trip that will give her time to iron out some final details, and everything changes when their plane goes down. Everyone else involved is killed, but Linda finds that Bradley has washed up on the same beach that she has, and she immediately uses the skills she learned as a Survivor hopeful (and superfan) to set up shelter and prevent Bradley from dying of shock or sunstroke. He remains an ungrateful ingrate and attempts to leverage his position as her boss into getting her to follow his orders, but there’s no HR-mandated slideshow about office dynamics that could prepare either of them for what lies ahead. 

Send Help writers Mark Swift and Damian Shannon have made their careers out of revisiting dependable intellectual property, having a hand in two incarnations of Jason Voorhees by writing both 2003’s Freddy vs. Jason and the 2009 Friday the 13th reboot, as well as penning the screenplay for the 2017 Dwayne Johnson vanity project/nineties nostalgia cash-in Baywatch. (Their other writing credit listed on Wikipedia, Shark Tale, credits Ice Age franchise creator Michael J. Wilson as screenwriter, with them having only a story credit for an earlier version of Shark Tale’s script.) It’s not a huge body of material to work with when inferring what appeals to them as writers, but it does trend toward sequels and reboots. Send Help is the first original screenplay of theirs to make it to production with their credit intact, but this doesn’t feel like the most “original” script. I must confess that I underestimated the cultural penetration that Triangle of Sadness had; I wasn’t surprised when Brandon texted me to say that the trailer for this film looked like someone had adapted the second half of Sadness as a Tubi original, but I was a bit taken aback by another friend stating upon exiting Send Help that they were also worried it would just be Sadness all over again. It’s possible 20th Century Studios also assumed Sadness had limited broad appeal; although these films don’t have exactly the same ending, it does feel like someone was looking over their fellow student’s shoulder during exam time. 

Which is not to say that this isn’t a fun ride in and of itself. It’s been a while since director Sam Raimi helmed a horror picture (2009’s Drag Me To Hell, although Multiverse of Madness gave him the chance to play around with some horror concepts, putting his Deadite action figures in Marvel’s limited sandbox) and even longer since he put out an R-rated picture (2000’s The Gift, for which I have a fondness that’s largely unshared by others). In the visuals shown in the film’s trailers, it’s hard to see Raimi’s unique cinematic playfulness on display, and the fact that he’s working with modern studio-driven color correction and saturation limits means those pre-release materials do nothing to differentiate this from your standard mass appeal cheapie like Primate. Once you’ve bought your ticket and you’re actually sitting in the theater for Send Help, that Raimi touch starts to come through. It may be ironic to say this after slightly teasing the film’s screenwriters about their tendency toward retrospection in their writing output in the last paragraph, but there was a warm familiarity to his return to his goofy, gooey theatrics. When it comes to Raimi’s legacy, those in the know will always think about The Evil Dead (or Army of Darkness) first, but in the mainstream, Raimi’s probably best remembered as “the Spider-Man guy,” and anyone under the age of twenty is not going to remember a time when he was a reliable splatter man, especially if they associate him with Oz the Great and Powerful or Doctor Strange. With that in mind, I’m not entirely certain just how well this one is going to go over with a general audience. I didn’t go into this film expecting to see a CGI boar get its eye popped out and then spend its death throes covering Rachel McAdams with snot, but when that did happen, I thought to myself “Oh, right, Sam Raimi.” Most people will be utterly agog when McAdams’s character, in the midst of dealing with being poisoned, gives O’Brien CPR while vomiting neon gunk on him, and I was too, and then: “Oh, right, Sam Raimi.” A vision of a dead woman stalking onto a beach before disappearing, then reappearing in a fake-out waking-up-from-a-nested-nightmare jump scare? Sam Raimi to the core. 

It’s comforting to see the old Raimi touch nestled in this film, even if he didn’t bother to bring Ted in for a cameo, but Send Help is also a movie that feels like it’s playing a little too safe. Perhaps his best trademark combination of humor and horror comes early in the film, when one of the c-suite dudebros is blown out of the crashing plane while attempting to force Linda to give him her seat, his tie catching on a snag and leaving him flailing outside of her window, which she closes as he expires. The film could have used a little bit more of this. Given the R-rating, there was a real opportunity here to push the envelope a little further, and the film doesn’t take that opportunity. McAdams and O’Brien both deliver solid performances, with the former excellently underplaying the moments in which the perkiness which has been her facade for so long that it’s become her reality slips and she grapples with her complicity in a death in her past, while the latter is so smarmy and obnoxious that no matter how exaggerated his karmic retribution technically may be, you never doubt that he deserves every bit of it. Send Help isn’t quite scary or mean enough, but you’ll laugh enough that you’ll enjoy yourself. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond