mark boomer redmond

Maisie (1939)

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Last year, after watching The Blue Gardenia and being particularly taken with Ann Sothern in it, I looked her up and discovered that, over the course of eight years, she had starred in ten(!) films as a character named Maisie Ravier, a misadventuring showgirl. Those ten films are largely forgotten now, but I found all of them on Russia’s YouTube equivalent as uploaded VHS rips from Turner Classic Movies airings, and I dutifully archived them for this year with the intent of watching them all and writing about them for something I intended to call “Maisie May.” Then, almost halfway through this month, as a result of working on a fiction project, I realized I had spent almost half of May in writing mode instead of movie mode. Will I be able to finish all ten Maisie films before the end of the month? Let’s find out together. 

The film opens as Maisie (Sothern) arrives in Big Horn, Wyoming to discover that the stage show for which she left New York has folded after a single performance. With only a nickel to her name, she convinces a carny to let her work the shooting gallery, which sets up her meet cute with “Slim” Martin (Robert Young, a few years after his appearance in Hitchcock’s Secret Agent), the manager of Bar-O Ranch. When his wallet gets lifted, Maisie ends up arrested for the theft, and although she’s cleared of the charges, she stows away in the back of his pick-up truck to avoid being arrested again for vagrancy should she remain in town. Slim is less than enthused to discover this, but allows her to stay overnight with the intention of sending her off on the train the next morning, as one of the ranch hands is already going into town to pick up the ranch’s owner, Cliff Ames, and his wife Sybil (Ruth Hussey), whom he has spirited away from New York to put some distance between her and the man with whom she’s been carrying on an affair. Maisie again latches on to an opportunity and presents herself as a maid that Slim has hired for Sybil for the summer. She comes clean to Mr. Ames once they get back to the ranch, who is impressed with her gumption and allows her to stay. 

Sybil asks Slim to show her where the “old ranch house” is, and she latches onto it immediately as a place where she can have her lover come and meet her discreetly. Maisie also manages to break through Slim’s resistance and learn that his unfriendliness is the result of previous heartbreak; the two start to fall in love. One day, while touring the ranch in his car with Maisie, Mr. Ames gets into an accident and his arm is pinned in the overturned car. Maisie, believing that she will find Slim and the other ranch hands at the old ranch house because they are on a cattle drive, and instead finds Sybil in flagrante delicto with her lover. Once Mr. Ames is safely back at the ranch, Maisie gives Sybil a dressing down about her behavior and her treatment of her loving husband, and Sybil is able to manipulate her words in conversation with Slim to convince the ranchman that Maisie has spent the summer trying to lure Mr. Ames away. Slim sends Maisie away, and shortly thereafter, Mr. Ames sends a letter to his lawyers in New York and then kills himself. Unfortunately, as Slim discovers the body first and is found standing over the body with the gun Ames used, he is arrested for murder. When Maisie learns of this, she must make her way to the trial to try and save him. 

This is a fun enough little seventy-five minute romp, and it practically breezes by. It’s also a bit of a genre-bender, as it starts out as a contemporary Western romcom before the dark twist of Mr. Ames’s suicide and a final act that turns into a courtroom drama. It’s also fairly unconventional in the sense that it plays with certain character stereotypes. Maisie’s a big city showgirl, so one expects there to be some kind of culture clash between her and the simpler Wyoming ranch hands and their employer, but instead of her being brassy and bossy, it’s instead she who is almost immediately taken advantage of by the podunks and conmen of the west, although she manages to turn things around for herself by conning her way into a job at Bar-O Ranch. Once that development occurs, one then expects that there’s going to be some comic hijinks about her not being suited for rural living, but she actually adjusts fairly quickly and does quite well for herself, coming to be adored by both Mr. Ames and Slim’s right hand man, Shorty (musician Cliff Edwards, who would be immortalized the following year as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Disney’s Pinocchio). The conflicts aren’t at all what one would expect, and I appreciated that I never really knew where the plot was going to go next, even if the stakes are relatively low throughout, at least until Slim’s trial. 

As a movie of a bygone era, it has its detriments, most notably in its casual racism. Even our beloved hero refers to a Black train porter as “boy,” and there’s occasional fun being had at the expense of ranch cook Lee, who is referred to more than once as “the China boy.” It’s a relief that he’s played by an actual Chinese-American actor, Willie Fung, rather than a white actor in yellowface, but he’s also played as a “humorous” stereotype; it’s a mercy that his scenes are few and brief. This was, unfortunately, the exact role that Fung was often funneled into during this more (overtly and openly) racist period in Hollywood history. He has seven films in his 120+ feature filmography where he’s an uncredited “Chinese Cook,” six as “Chinese Waiter,” then “Chinese Bartender,” “Chinese Tailor,” “Chinese Laundryman,” and so on. It’s an unfortunate legacy for a man who came to the U.S. following the collapse of his uncle’s peanut business and made a name for himself as the owner and operator of East Hollywood’s New Moon Café in addition to appearing in 125 films. 

There is already trouble on the horizon for Maisie May. The very next film starring Sothern in one of her defining roles is the 1940 picture Congo Maisie, which from the title alone I expect is likely to be unconscionably racist (although I’ll eat crow if Maisie ends up communicating with a mountain gorilla). The synopsis for that one includes both mentions of a rubber plantation and Maisie having to save it from a “native attack.” This could be so awful it derails the entire thing. Stay tuned to find out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Gazer (2025)

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Gazer is a 2025 film  from first-time director Ryan J. Sloan, who shares writing credit with the film’s star, Ariella Mastroianni. Mastroianni portrays Frankie Rhodes, a woman with a progressive neurological disorder that distorts her memories, induces psychedelic dreams, and sends her into long blackout periods of lost time. She’s separated from her daughter Cynthia, whose current guardian is Diane, the mother of Frankie’s late husband, whose death was ruled a suicide but which Diane suspects Frankie had a hand in. Finding it difficult to hold down a job because of her degenerating condition, Frankie opens the movie being fired from her job as a gas station attendant due to perpetually zoning out in the middle of her shifts. The film takes its title from Frankie’s activities on the job, as she stares up at the building across the street, losing time while making up narratives about the people that she sees, Rear Window style. On the night that she’s fired, she sees an episode of violence happen in one of the windows. Frankie attends a grief group for people whose loved ones committed suicide, where a woman she saw leaving the building (Renee Gagner) approaches her. She introduces herself as Paige Foster and relates that her mother overdosed, and telling Frankie that her brother has since become overprotective, which prompted the domestic assault incident Frankie witnessed. Paige offers Frankie $3000 dollars to sneak into the apartment, get her car keys, and bring the car to her at a different location so she can flee her brother, and Frankie agrees. 

I’ve seen the film described as Hitchcockian, which is accurate. Beyond the shameless cribbing from Rear Window, the film takes on one of Alfred’s favorite elements, that of the wrongfully accused protagonist being pursued by the authorities while seeking to clear their name, and a Vertiginous series of mistaken identities. It’s also Lynchian, in that important information is revealed through surrealist dream sequences and characters that mirror one another or become confused with one another in esoteric, Mulhollandian ways, while psychedelic nightmare sequences pull from Twin Peaks for set and blocking inspiration. It’s also Cronenbergian, in that Frankie’s nightmares also often involve body horror imagery that’s directly taken from his catalog, and I do mean directly; there’s a shot of dream Frankie pulling an audiocassette out of a wound in her husband’s torso that’s so close to Videodrome that it might be legally actionable. 

If all of that sounds like this film is trafficking in too many ideas and lacks a cohesive creative vision, that’s because it is, and it does. It’s not a bad film at all, but it does have a lot of the hallmarks of being a freshman outing, and given that director Sloan has zero other credits on IMDb, it gives the impression that he emerged fully formed out of thin air as a filmmaker. Given that there’s no evidence of him getting any crew experience in the rest of his CV, this is even more impressive as a technical achievement, but its dependency on the use of other directors’ metaphorical color palettes means that, as a text, it fails to be more than the sum of its parts. There’s also a narrative device throughout the film in which Frankie listens to cassette tapes that she makes for herself, and the conceit never quite works, and it feels very much like a darling that the screenwriters couldn’t bring themselves to kill. It’s possible to excise the use of them in scenes like the one where Tape!Frankie is telling Present!Frankie not to linger too long in Paige’s apartment after getting her keys (a direction that Present! Frankie fails to follow, of course, and loses track of time) while also retaining the narrative throughline of Frankie recording journal entries for her daughter so that she can still communicate with her after her disorder takes her life as well as the scenes in which Frankie listens to previous recordings of Cynthia to keep herself company. As played in most scenes, however, the tapes are little more than a distraction in the scenes where Frankie listens to them “to focus,” and it feels like the hallmark of a director who’s too afraid to trust the audience as much as he should. 

That’s a shame, since the film has a lot going for it. The soundtrack is excellent, and perfectly meshes with the film’s overall sound design. There’s a really fantastic element in the visual design where all of the environments Frankie occupies while she’s dreaming are uncannily symmetrical, which is a nicely subtle way of playing with the narrative’s themes of mistaken identity and mirroring. I really sat up and paid attention when Dream!Frankie goes into her old house and opens a TV cabinet to find a one-eyed meat cube inside, the tongue of which Frankie pulls out like a magician’s endless string of handkerchiefs and then connects to her navel like a gross umbilical cord. Out of context, all of these dream sequences would work as their own individual horror shorts, and I appreciate that they don’t always mesh in a comprehensible way with Frankie’s real life decisions or memories, since it accurately reflects both her medical condition and the anxieties thereof. Mastroianni is also an odd but perfect choice for the lead. She’s quite petite, and the choice for Frankie to have a non-femme hair style renders her androgynous in a way that you rarely see in a main character unless it’s plot-mandated or narratively relevant. I found myself frequently frustrated with her choices in a way that threatened to make her impossible to root for, but not every lead has to be unchallenging. The film is also gorgeously photographed, with film grain artifacts and focus choices that make the film feel like it fell out of a time capsule from the New Hollywood era, so much so that when a newer version $100 bill or a cell phone pops up, you’re a little surprised. 

Where Gazer borrows too much from that New Hollywood era, however, is in its choice to be deliberately contemplative to an excessive degree. While in Paige’s apartment, Frankie looks down at the gas station where she used to work and we in the audience understand that this was the view that Paige and her attacker had the night of the assault; we don’t need to revisit this exact angle and reverse shot on Frankie on two additional occasions. I recently picked up a fun phrase from an old Siskel & Ebert episode that someone uploaded to YouTube, in which Roger criticized the performances in a certain film by saying that the actors were reciting their lines “like they had all day” to do it. I praised Mastroianni above, and while she’s usually quite good here, there are far too many scenes in which she enters and exits scenes with no energy at all, and it makes the film itself feel more sluggish, while Sloan leaves the camera running on some things like, as Roger would say, he had all to film it. Revelations about the central mystery happen quickly and get skipped over, while some scenes play out just shy of interminably, and I don’t think it’s quite the right choice. 

Gazer was recently added to Shudder, and you can find it there as of this writing. It allows its contemplation to get a little long in the tooth and the mystery itself is convoluted in a way that is going to leave a lot of viewers puzzled, but there are worse ways to spend an evening. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

On the Ethics of Piracy

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My local video store is run as a non-profit, and one of their ongoing community projects is to offer a window display residency. Artists submit their design concepts, and award recipients get the opportunity to actualize their ideas. Right now, that display is a testament to film piracy: 

Unless you’re a real cinemaniac, you’ve probably never seen Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a bizarre forty-three-minute cult film created in 1987 by Todd Haynes. In it, the strife between Karen Carpenter and her (according to the semi-biographical film) controlling brother Richard plays out, with all characters being portrayed by Barbie dolls. Memorably, Karen’s worsening health due to her anorexia is demonstrated by her doll being slowly whittled away. If you have seen Superstar, then the only reason you’ve ever had the opportunity to do so was through piracy. Whether because the use of Barbies does not fall under fair use, because of the presence of contemporary music that is unlicensed, or just because Richard Carpenter raised a big enough stink about it, there’s no way for you to watch this film legally. A copy exists at the Museum of Modern Art, but it is not exhibited. I personally have seen it, and the copy that I watched was on a burned bootleg Maxell DVD-R just like the one recreated in Maura Murnane’s display above. 

The question of the ethics of piracy arose recently when I texted Brandon about whether or not we (read: I) should cover the leaked film Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, a continuation of the animated 2005-2008 Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, following the show’s child characters into young adulthood (some of them had also appeared as elderly characters in continuation series The Legend of Korra). AATLA was set to be released theatrically this year, but Paramount opted to pull the film from its planned cinema release and drop it solely to their streaming service, Paramount+. This announced change ruffled some feathers. Fans who wanted to see the film on the big screen and would have happily paid to do so would now have to sign up for a subscription service to see it, and at a reduced scale than the creators intended; members of the crew and animation teams were likewise disappointed to learn that something that had been created to be visually stunning and grand in scope would not get the opportunity to reach the intended audience. Universally, the decision to paywall the film in the winter was met with criticism. Avatar fans who want to have access to that content are more likely to already be subscribed to Paramount+ in the first place, meaning that the addition of the film to the service would likely have a negligible effect on overall subscription numbers. The money was already spent, there would be no chance for the film to recoup its budget theatrically, and the hellscape that is the current streaming service subscription model grinds on. 

In general, although Swampflix and its contributors in no uncertain terms do not recommend piracy, as a legal disclaimer, I’m flexible about what this means for works that are inaccessible due to rights-holders’ choices and decisions. Consolidation of the ownership of all media into a few conglomerates is a bad thing. Even the least cinemanic among us have cottoned on to the fact that every streaming service is less functional, robust, and egalitarian they they once were, and the national government’s antipathy against monopoly prosecution in the death throes of our current economic era mean that it’s only going to get worse. The next inbound round of money-laundering square-dancing means that next year the guy who makes your toothpaste might also own The Little Rascals, or that every time you buy corn chips you’ll be adding a nickel to an account that will eventually fund a live-action Rocko’s Modern Life, or that some anarchocapitalist’s nepotistically inherited pyramid scheme will get to decide whether you can make Dorothy Gale’s slippers ruby or not. The back catalogs of films that are gatekept behind faceless entities are held back not so that said entities can do something with them, but just to keep others from having access. 

Or, more frequently in recent years, to cancel huge, completed projects because not releasing them to the public means that they can be written off for tax purposes. It’s far from the worst thing that most of the 1% has done, but like most of their unethical actions, it’s rooted in the seed of all evil: a love of money. A couple hundred internet malcontents with too much time on their hands managed to leverage a global pandemic into browbeating Warner Brothers into releasing a supposed “lost” film at a time when productions were shut down. This emboldened probably the worst people it could have, but it also means that nothing is really set in stone. Three years after its cancellation was announced, Coyote vs. Acme is finally being released this August; maybe there’s even some hope that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Batgirl might see the light of day someday. But as Brandon pointed out to me when I texted him, there wasn’t really a good reason to review the animated Avatar film when it had a real scheduled release date, even if its release was a downgrade. That’s a different story.

I won’t reveal the circumstances under which I viewed Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender. Maybe someone was screening it at a bar, a bar that has since closed down and therefore no one can be held responsible. Maybe I watched it through a storefront window like a kid in a corny Christmas commercial. Maybe someone burned a bunch of copies onto Memorex DVD-Rs and let them fall off of the back of a truck. A full review will come, when the film is legally available. I would recommend that, should the winds change and you get the chance to see it theatrically, it will be well worth the cost of the ticket. As to whether it will be worth the cost of the subscription to Paramount+, only you, dear reader, know if you’re responsible enough to cancel before the renewal date if Avatar Aang is all that you want to see. I’m not entirely sold on the new voice cast (in short, Toph is pretty good, Katara is acceptable, Aang is iffy but occasionally perfect, and—all love and respect to Steven Yeun—Zuko is completely wrong), but the film is absolutely gorgeous. I struggled to adjust to the cast changes and what I perceived as tonal changes, but by the time Aang was soaring around and having a good time, so was I. I had missed him, and it was good to spend time with him again. If anything, Paramount’s bungling of this whole debacle means that it’s unlikely that we’ll get the opportunity again (unless you count the Netflix live action series, which has its own host of problems). Only time will tell. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Universal’s silent-era adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), starring Lon Chaney as The Phantom.

00:00 Welcome
03:30 Forbidden Planet (1956)
11:34 The Drama (2026)
23:55 Blue Heron (2026)
30:08 Mother Mary (2026)
40:14 Erupcja (2026)
45:22 The Beekeeper (2024)
51:08 Ronin (1998)

58:15 The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

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

Mother Mary (2026)

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Mother Mary is a film that’s probably going to be a miss for a lot of people. It’s a bit messy, with a gossamer thin narrative that’s more gestural than structural, but it’s nonetheless very beautiful, a high concept two-hander that gives both of its leading ladies something to really sink their teeth into. The film takes place over the course of a single night when internationally famous pop diva Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) goes to the fashion house of her former best friend and stylist, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). For the first act, the film seems like it’s going to be a fairly straightforward drama, a kind of stage play about a woman seeking out the one person in all the world who despises her more than any others but who also has the most unique perspective to understand her. Sam’s resentment for Mary is clearly deep, while Mary’s public image has been tarnished by a very public embarrassment that there’s some evidence might have been a suicide attempt, and the first thirty minutes set up the promise that these events will be teased out over the rest of the runtime. 

I was perfectly content to watch the film that I thought I was going to get, watching two powerhouses bare their souls and their grief to one another and to those of us in the audience. The film caught me off guard when it took a turn toward the spooky as the second act opens, as each woman reveals that in the wake of their schism, both had an experience with something inexplicable. The same night that Sam realized she had come to be on the outside of Mary’s life, looking in from a distance, she witnessed some kind of phantasm that seemed to have left her body via an open wound; later, when Mary hires an occultist to do some sleepover witchcraft on the night of her birthday, that same ephemeral thing makes contact with her, setting her literal and metaphorical fall in motion. Visually, the film was beautifully shot and sumptuous from the beginning, but as Mary and Sam relate these anecdotes, things get a little more surreal and we get to see the imagery thereof elevated and re-enacted in real time. Sam opens the doors of her “Mrs. Haversham” barn/studio, and the camera pushes in to follow her into the crowd at Mary’s show; Mary and Sam walk over to a lavish hotel room that has appeared like a giant set in Sam’s space, and then the fourth wall closes around the action. It’s wonderful stuff, very stylish in a way that feels theatrical but effortless. 

David Lowery, who wrote and directed the film, has proven to have a masterful hand at this kind of thing. The final act of A Ghost Story (as much as that film could be said to have “acts”) was similar; as the point of view ghost loses touch with all his earthly ties, time “skips” so that he moves from the house we’ve been haunting with him to a lonely office building that eventually rises on the same place. Brandon wasn’t a fan, but I was; it remains to be seen whether the implementation of this same transitional environmental storytelling technique will be more effective this time around for other viewers. At the very least, Mother Mary is a film about dwelling in a way that doesn’t try one’s patience the way A Ghost Story did (for others). Where I expect this film to lose most general audience members is in just how literal the metaphorical ghost becomes while the film itself leaves the metaphor itself rather ambiguous. No one gets up and gives a big speech about what trauma the amorphous ghost represents; no one names “grief” or “resentment” as monsters that can be overcome with forgiveness and reconciliation. The film’s choice to leave one with questions and different potential interpretations is going to raise the dander of people who can’t abide ambiguity in their art and need something concrete and easy to grasp. Some of the people for whom that element is a feature and not a flaw may find the way that the metaphor becomes explicit off-putting. 

I was on board for all of that, utterly caught up in the whole thing. The only thing that didn’t quite work for me was the music. Thrillers centering around major pop acts have become a bit of a trend lately (see: Smile 2, Trap, Lurker), and I often find the musical acts therein to be virtually indistinguishable from the radio pop hits that I hear at the club (or, more common at my old age, the grocery store). We get to hear a few of Mother Mary’s hits, and none of them really have any staying power; there’s a not-quite-fully realized bit of religiosity to her music, as her stage name evokes Catholicism (as does Sam’s surname), one of her songs is called “Holy Spirit,” and she has a stigmata-like wound at one point, but it never comes together in a meaningful way. The connection I found myself thinking of most while watching this wasn’t Madonna or Lady Gaga, but last year’s The Testament of Ann Lee, because Mother Mary’s body of work was as monotonous and repetitive as that film’s hymnal remixing. When we talked about Lurker on the podcast last year, there was some dismissal of the film’s bedroom lo-fi tracks as forgettable, but I’ve found myself returning to “Snakes in the Garden” quite a lot since last September, and I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to revisit Mother Mary’s “Burial” or “Dark Cradle.” 

The songs were written by FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film) with some arrangements by celebrity producer Jack Antonoff. I’m ambivalent about FKA Twigs (if I’ve ever heard more than one of her songs to completion, I wasn’t aware of it) and generally positive about Antonoff’s work with his band Bleachers, and Hathaway has demonstrated a lovely singing voice in the past. Nevertheless, whatever their individual talents, what coalesced on screen was unremarkable. The scene in which Hathaway, in a modest space, performs the silent interpretive dance of her stage choreography for her newest song blows every one of the on-stage performances out of the water. What really makes this movie shine is Coel. She’s absolutely excellent here, delivering my favorite performance of the year so far. It’s nuanced and layered, and worth the price of admission alone. It won’t work for everyone, but will definitely resonate with some.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Married a Vampire (1987)

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You’re not going to get a lot of butts in seats for a movie in which a woman marries a vampire without titling that film I Married a Vampire, but that reveal would be a little more fun if you were able to go into a screening without that knowledge. Of course, the fact that marriage to a bloodsucker is the inevitable outcome of this story is made clear from the outset, when young Viola (Rachel Golden) picks up her parents from the airport in an unnamed city; they’ve arrived in town after learning secondhand from Viola’s sister that she’s gotten married, and are insistent on meeting her new husband. Of course, before she brings mom and dad home, she’s got to give them the whole story of how she met her undead husband …

Two months earlier, Viola lands in not-New York (the end credits thank the city of Boston, but no notable landmarks of any kind are seen in any of her exploration montages) and is ready to start her life anew, far from Iowa. Unfortunately, she falls victim to all of the various swindles that eighties metropoles had to offer; she ends up in a disgusting apartment after getting swindled by a shady landlord, is robbed and grifted by her supposed poet neighbor Portia, gets stiffed for a heavy retainer by a lawyer who promises to help her get her money back from the landlord, gets pressured into giving up her last bit of savings to the cult of Muhammad Buddha Christ, and can only find work as a night cleaner for a man who sexually assaults her. All of this finally starts to change when her co-worker Olivia introduces Viola to her “brother” Robespiere [sic] (Brendan Hickey). Viola, to her credit, immediately cottons on to the fact that they’re vampires, but she later laughs off her suspicions as the result of too much beer and the lingering effects of a horror movie double feature. When she returns to Robespiere when she’s run out of options, she finds herself a new woman, charged with the confidence she needs to get her savings back from the grifters, and if they put up a fight, her new beau can take them out. 

There are some genuinely wonderful performances and sequences in I Married a Vampire, even if the film gets off to a sluggish start. Viola’s parents, Morris and Doris, are an interesting pair, since they’re both grumps who are blind to their poor parenting in different ways. Morris, for his part, is quite funny, while Doris’s haranguing of her wayward daughter is less fun. The script is pretty sharp from the get-go, and one gets the impression that writer/director Jay Raskin had a vision that he came close to fulfilling here, but was ultimately restrained by the budget provided him as a result of this being a Troma-level production. Once we get the framing device set-up out of the way, the actual narrative gets underway, and we get to meet a fantastic cast of awful characters. First, Viola encounters Mr. Gluttonshire, who tries to pick her up under the impression that she’s a sex worker. Then, she meets Mr. Keeper, the landlord who tells her that she won’t be able to find a place for $300 a month, but sets her up with an infested shoebox studio for $400… plus a finder’s fee and the deposit ($1000 total, or about $3300 in 2026), eating up a third of the money she worked hard to save for her move. When night falls, she learns that her unit abuts a loud rock venue that also fills her entire apartment with flashing lights. 

It’s in this sequence that we meet Portia (Temple Aaron), who all but steals the show. She’s exactly the kind of street-savvy gutter-dweller that you’ve met before, in the movies if nowhere else. She tells Viola that she’s a poet, and that she writes song lyrics for rock bands, and that she can get Viola a great deal on a stereo, only $50! She also explains that the reason they have no water is because they’re connected to the club next door, and they only have water pressure when there’s a good band (when the music is good, no one’s using the bar bathroom, so they’re not competing with the constant flushing for water), which happens every two or three months. Only someone as naive as Viola would be capable of falling for Portia’s obvious bullshit, but it’s charming in its way, and Portia is a tragic figure in her own right. I genuinely believed that she was going to end up on the business end of Robespiere’s fangs once Viola gets her understated revenge later, but she’s the only one who gets off relatively easy, as the vampire merely hypnotizes her to stop lying to and stealing from her friends. 

It’s here, in this circumvention of the expectation of how violent this will be, that this stands out for a Troma release. They’re never classy movies, and this one certainly isn’t that, but it demonstrates restraint in areas that other Troma-branded flicks don’t. It’s notable in the quiet, non-bloody, non-gory story resolution that Portia gets, but also in the understated nature of the revenge Robespiere enacts for Viola. You hear “Troma” and think that you’re going to get some geysers of blood or at least some viscera, but most of the violence occurs offscreen, with no gross-out bits at all. Even more shockingly, although Viola is violated by Mr. Gluttonshire, there’s no titillation factor and the film doesn’t use it as an excuse to force the lead actress’s top off. I’m not saying that the N.O.W. should be giving Jay Raskin an award or anything, but for a flick from the studio that brought you Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator, it’s almost admirable. There’s no real violence, we don’t see any of it, and when it’s over, Viola is still fully clothed; it feels almost modest.

The romance between Viola and Robespiere is dreadfully dull, unfortunately, and the sequences wherein she goes to all of her antagonists and asks for her money back, is laughed at, and then gets her revenge via supernatural husband gets a little repetitive. The film runs out of steam once it stops being about all of the nasty urbanites who prey on naive farm girls and watching Viola tolerate it all like she’s the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Normally, the revenge portion of these films is supposed to be where all the fun happens, but I Married a Vampire is a little frontloaded with scuzzballs, which means that it doesn’t quite finish as strongly as it ought to, which is likely why it’s mostly forgotten. It’s still well worth checking out, however; just know you’re likely to get distracted in the back half. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Boomer’s Best-of-the-Year Oversights, Part Two (2020-2024)

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In one of our recent end-of-the-year podcast episodes 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 by nature, 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. Part One of that journey can be found here. Now, come along with me for part two: 2020-2024.

2020: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Deerskin – Watched March 27, 2024

Upon Review: I, like Brandon, consistently find myself drawn to the work of Quentin Dupieux. Rubber was heavily discussed in the pretentious collegiate film circles I ran with in my youth and I had an absolute hoot of a time with Smoking Causes Coughing, which was on my 2023 end of the year list. This one somehow just slipped past me when it came out, but I did finally watch it over a year ago, and it’s stuck with me. This film, about a jacket that compels its owner to go to increasingly violent lengths in order to ensure that it is the only jacket in the world (although whether this is actually an act by a conscious entity or merely the main character’s delusion is ambiguous), is a lot of fun. Dupieux could probably have made the whole film work on that premise alone, but the complication of a local woman who buys his story that he’s in town to make a documentary starts to cut together his murder footage into something coherent, the film really goes above and beyond. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes, absolutely.

The Wolf House – Watched March 18, 2026

Upon Review: A marvelous picture, top to bottom. Animation in styles I’ve never seen before or ever even considered were possible. The film is an in-universe propaganda piece about obeying your overseers in the form of a fairy tale that vacillates between stop motion, nontraditional versions of traditional animation styles in the form of time lapse painting directly onto a wall, filled with images both beautiful and grotesque. A masterpiece. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Swallow – Watched February 17, 2026

Upon Review: This film was released in March of 2020, which is why I didn’t see it. I was planning to, however, as I was anxiously anticipating its release after seeing trailers for it for a couple of months that led up to lockdown. Unlike a lot of people (who survived the pandemic), I was not someone who was suddenly blessed with an abundance of free time to make sourdough or practice guitar; my lockdown experience was a constant vacillation between twelve hour workdays and primal, rodent-like fear about the future. I don’t even remember learning that this one had ever come to streaming, and while that’s unfortunate, I also don’t think that I would have appreciated this one in its time. Perhaps it’s because Swallow, unlike The Lighthouse, is primarily concerned with the quiet, hidden, self-destructive habits that emerge from the unholy marriage of isolated boredom and previous traumas, while The Lighthouse’s frenetic madness was much more like what I experienced in quarantine. Haley Bennett is wonderful here in her understated feelings of inadequacy in the presence of her in-law social betters who are universally her moral inferiors, and I loved the performance from Elizabeth Marvel as her seemingly warm but ultimately villainous mother-in-law. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but for the wrong reasons. I wouldn’t have been in the headspace to appreciate this when I would have gotten the chance to see it. 

Possessor – Watched February 11, 2026

Upon Review: This one simply slipped past me in the stream. The Lagniappe Podcast crew watched 2012’s Antiviral in 2023, the same year that Infinity Pool released, and although I very much enjoyed the older film, I could only recognize Infinity Pool for its technical accomplishments as I could not connect with it in the least (Brandon was much more positive). A couple of years ago, I remembered that Possessor was well received at Swampflix, but I ended up watching Malignant (which I disliked but which, again, Brandon had more positive things to say about) instead due to some confusion and am only now working my way back to this one. What a ride! Possessor is an absolutely fantastic piece of art from start to finish. Andrea Riseborough plays a woman who, under guidance from Jennifer Jason Leigh, hijacks the bodies of innocent people through technological trickery and then uses them to assassinate targets. Her most recent possessee is Christopher Abbot, and as she starts to lose herself in more ways than one, she ends up fighting for domination of his body, while he manages to get a glimpse of her family and turns what shambles of a life she has upside down as he tries to figure out what’s happening to him. Gorgeously shot, masterfully performed, drenched in color, and featuring an appearance from Tiio Horn, one of my favorite underrated Canadian performers, this was a delight. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes, absolutely.

The Twentieth Century – Watched December 4, 2025

Upon Review: The viewing of this film for our 2025 retrospective on previous films by some of our favorite directors of that year precipitated the very project that you’re currently reading. Director Matthew Rankin’s 2025 feature Universal Language was my favorite film of the year, and The Twentieth Century is an even more delightful picture, an utterly demented look at the career of W.L.M. King, a not particularly well remembered Canadian Prime Minister, complete with visits to “The Flesh Pits of Winnipeg,” whack-a-mole seal clubbing as part of the candidacy for governance, and the future of our neighbors to the north being determined by an ice skating race through a mirrored labyrinth. One of the funniest movies that I have ever seen. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Absolutely; it would have hit the top 5.

2021: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar – Watched February 20, 2026

Upon Review: Part Josie and the Pussycats, part Romy and Michele, part SNL sketch, and just a dash of Muriel’s Wedding, this Kristen Wiig/Annie Mumolo North Dakota besties-on-vacation comedy is a delight. I love it when a comedy is so perfectly constructed that it scratches that same little itch in one’s brain that a cleverly crafted mystery story does. Everything pays off in the end: the sharp seashell bracelets, the seafood festival queen’s bizarre human cannonball tradition, and even an ocean spirit named Trish. All that, and Jamie Dornan sings to a seagull while flexing on a beach. What more could one ask for? 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Mandibles – Watched January 24, 2026

Upon Review: I didn’t have much fun with this one for its first half, which features two clinically brain dead losers stumbling upon a captive giant fly and coming up with a hairbrained scheme to teach it to rob banks on their behalf. Upon discovery of the beast, they spend some time trying to find a location to “train” it, eventually discovering a remote trailer home whose occupant they force out and which the slightly taller and dumber of the two almost immediately burns down in a cooking mishap. From there they set out on the road to refuel their (stolen) car, at which point they run into a woman who believes that the taller idiot is her high school athlete boyfriend, and invites the two of them to her parents’ home for a bit. This is where things started to become much funnier and more enjoyable, as there is a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos) there who can’t control her vocal volume, and the film never lets up on its comedy from there. At a breezy eighty minutes, this is worth sitting through the less exciting first half to get to the hilarious last forty. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Lapsis – Watched January 27, 2026

Upon Review: This one feels even more prescient now than it did five years ago. A man with limited employable skills takes a gig economy job as a “cabler,” which involves him going on physically demanding hikes to run miles and miles of electronic cord to connect quantum computers that appear to be used almost solely for financial transactions. The impetus for this is the ongoing chronic illness from which his younger brother seemingly suffers; on the trail, he meets a series of other cablers who fill him in on the backstory of the company, specifically the way that it gamifies obsolescence in the form of forcing the cablers to compete with automatons, and try to introduce him to the concept of collective action. In the past year, I’ve seen my city overrun with driverless cars operated by “Waymo,” and my antipathy toward them makes some people uncomfortable. For me, it was already morally and ethically wrong for rideshare companies to infiltrate urban markets, drive out any taxi/cab infrastructure already in place through lower pricing, then immediately raise those prices sky high the moment that they achieved market dominance. The only positive that came from it was the “agency” that these companies offered to drivers to “be [their] own boss” and “set [their] own hours,” which these new automated rideshares will likewise eventually displace, creating further shareholder value for people who are already rich enough and drive more gig workers into economic desperation. Lapsis, although it occasionally seems like it might be close to running out of steam, creates a dim-witted viewpoint character to try to recite all of the company lines about the positives of gig work and be educated otherwise. It sounds preachy, but the indie film budget, values, and casting of this one make it work. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

The Power of the Dog – Watched February 27, 2026

Upon Review: I’m not terribly familiar with Jane Campion’s filmography outside of The Piano and her TV work on the Elisabeth Moss series Top of the Lake (which I loved), but if you had asked me to describe what I thought her work was like, I probably would have described Power of the Dog. The film is very well made, featuring gorgeous cinematography of beautiful rural vistas, evocatively portraying the isolation of the Burbank house and its lands, and well-acted by all participants, even Benedict Cumberbatch, who I’m never excited to see on screen. It’s also a movie that left me fairly cold and uninvested despite all of its prestige and craftsmanship. Phil Burbank (Cumberbatch) is a deeply unpleasant man deeply in the closet who mistreats his brother George (Jesse Plemmons), and drives George’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst) to alcoholism via his psychological torment of both her and his new step-nephew, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who eventually bites back. It’s all very good, but it didn’t connect with me at all, unfortunately. 3.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No.

2022: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

RRR – Watched February 25, 2026

Upon Review: What an absolute thrill! I’ve been a strong proponent of director S. S. Rajamouli’s work for a long time, ever since I first saw Baahubali 2 on the big screen (for more about that, and for our Lagniappe discussion of both Baahubali films, click here). RRR simply slipped past me in the stream; if it got a theatrical release in my city, I either missed it or was hiding out from the latest COVID variant when it screened, and it came to Netflix after I had cancelled my subscription to that service. I’m terribly sorry to have missed this one, a film about two men who find themselves on seemingly opposite sides of the British Raj of the 1920s: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.), a man from the Gond tribe who comes to New Delhi to find a young girl who was stolen from their village by the wife of the British governor, and Rama Raju (Ram Charan), an Indian quisling working for the British occupiers who has been sent undercover to locate and root out the Gond tribe members who have come to the city. The two of them engage in the physics-defying rescue of a young boy from a train accident aboard a bridge, and the two of them immediately fall into passionate love with one another. This isn’t textual, of course; both have token lady love interests (the sweet English Jenny who sympathizes with the oppressed for Bheem and childhood sweetheart Sita for Raju), but let’s not kid ourselves. At the midpoint of the film, there’s a major twist that I won’t spoil, but it’s a very satisfying upending of all of the pieces on the board at this point, and I found myself coming close to cheering approximately every ten minutes for the film’s final act. Could not recommend more highly. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Funny Pages – Watched March 3, 2026

Upon Review: I first noticed actor Daniel Zolghadri in last year’s Lurker, and was pleasantly surprised to see him turn up again as one of Rose Byrne’s obsessed patients in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. He was so fresh-faced in his clean-shaven role as the would-be date rapist in Eighth Grade that it took quite a while to recognize him there, and that film used his youthful, innocent boyishness effectively by revealing the predatory nature behind his big, dark, trustworthy eyes. Funny Pages, which was sold to me as a Holdovers-esque misadventure between a high schooler and a crabby old man, likewise plays to the beardless Zolghadri’s juvenile naivete by casting him as an utterly irredeemable ingrate who seems to float by on nothing more than other people’s fondness for him. Zolghadri’s Robert is a seventeen year old who witnesses the tragic death of his beloved art teacher and decides to drop out of school to pursue his dream of being a cartoonist. To this end, he moves into a hellish basement apartment and takes a job working at the DA’s office as a floating office assistant, where he comes into contact with Wallace (Matthew Maher), a dangerous and unwell man who worked for Image Comics years ago, a fact that Robert latches onto. Here’s the thing—I didn’t find this to be funny at all. (I laughed precisely once, when Wallace claimed that “Rob Liefeld’s line work is industry standard.”) That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, but what spoke to me here wasn’t the film’s particular brand of dark comedy, which I noticed but didn’t respond to; to me, this is a story about a teenage boy who needs to perform creativity and imagination to give his life meaning, and how he seems to have been groomed to accept mistreatment by authority figures by his relationship with Mr. Katano, the art teacher. The one scene we get before he dies finds him stripping down in his office with Robert and having the boy draw him in a caricature style, and even if it’s not predatory, it’s sufficiently inappropriate that Katano follows Robert in order to elicit promises that the boy didn’t “think it was weird.” From there, Robert ends up moving into a hellish situation that brings Barton Fink to mind and where he finds his constantly sweating older roommates masturbating together over Robert’s vintage Tijuana bibles, and where he fixates on getting Wallace’s approval despite the older man’s anti-social violence, until it ends tragically. Grim stuff. 3 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No.

2023: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Priscilla – Watched January 10, 2026

Upon Review: I’m pretty ambivalent about Sofia Coppola, but a lot of that is probably just lingering apathy about her aughts output. Regardless, this is a solid movie that’s at turns poignant, funny, and stomach-churning. Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla Presley in an adaptation of her autobiography in which she detailed the years she was courted by Elvis, then the most famous man in the world. Starting when she was a vulnerable fourteen-year-old girl living in Germany at an army base, Priscilla was pursued by the musician and movie star who was a decade older than her. Jacob Elordi as Elvis was the perfect casting, since he towers over the much shorter Spaeny in a visual invocation of their inherent power imbalance. The script plays cleverly with the King; if you didn’t know anything about him, one could easily interpret him as closeted in this film, given that he adamantly denies affairs with his lady co-stars and rejects them as publicity ploys as well as his complete lack of sexual overtures toward Priscilla for years while dressing her up and installing her at Graceland like a doll. His predation is still creepy and unnerving, but it somehow feels less sinister, while allowing the narrative to focus on Priscilla’s boredom with being locked away in his chintzy tower. Good stuff; 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but it would have made honorable mention. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem – Watched January 31, 2026

Upon Review: I definitely watched the late eighties Ninja Turtles in syndication in the early nineties when I was a kid, and although I remember some core concepts about it, it never imprinted on me enough for me to remember the different turtles’ personalities despite them being recited in the opening theme song. I have a fondness, but I’m not invested. I overlooked this one during a really packed summer, and because I saw a trailer for it before Barbie and saw the MPA’s PG rating assumed it was for kids. And, I mean, it is, but it’s a movie about teenaged mutant ninja turtles; it should be. The roster for non-turtle characters here is populated by A-listers and Seth Rogen’s buddies to presumably draw in a periphery demographic, but the turtles themselves are played by actual teen actors who are unknowns (to me), and they bring an energetic freshness to dialogue that manages to stay just this side of overwritten. Visually, this one is quite a treat as well, with some of the most unique animated visuals I’ve seen since the CGI revolution. I made sure to watch this on a Saturday morning, and I’d recommend others do the same. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but it would have made honorable mention. 

2024: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Taste Of Things – Watched April 12, 2026

Upon Review: I put this one off for a long time. I had no doubt that I would enjoy it, but it’s got a whopper of a run time, and I simply kept finding myself in the mood for something different whenever the opportunity arose. All throughout this procrastination, Brandon repeatedly reminded me that this film would be a pure delight, and although I never doubted him, the time was never quite right. At long last, a perfectly overcast weekend came alone, rainy but not stormy, and I whiled away a perfect afternoon in the company of the always-perfect Juliette Binoche and the less familiar Benoît Magimel, but I was nonetheless perfectly and exquisitely transported to Eugenie’s kitchen. A marvel, worthy of all the accolades it received. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Love & Pop (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Hideaki Anno’s live-action debut, the coming-of-age sugar babies drama Love & Pop (1998).

00:00 Welcome
01:55 Exit 8 (2026)
14:25 Project Hail Mary (2026)
22:45 Crash (1996)
26:05 Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)
36:24 East of Eden (1955)
42:55 I Married a Vampire (1987)
48:35 Time of the Gypsies (1988)
52:55 The Taste of Things (2023)
56:30 ATX Short Film Showcase
59:36 Singles (1992)
1:06:26 The Bride Wore Black (1968)
1:09:33 Trekkies (1997)

1:10:55 Love & Pop (1998)

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

The Mummy (1999)

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Recently, Brandon wrote a piece about the unfortunate position of The Mummy as Universal’s most side-lined classic horror character, and how the general public’s association of the title The Mummy with the 1999 action-adventure film directed by Stephen Sommers rather than the Karl Freund original cements The Mummy as a second-tier hanger-on. During the umpteenth viewing of the trailer for the upcoming release of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a friend of mine leaned over to me in the theater and asked me a question about the frequency of these remakes, and I mentioned my own framework of the understanding about why The Mummy (the character) rarely works. Namely, you can make a movie about Wolfmen, Invisible Men, reanimated Promethei, and Dracula (et al) without the text being, necessitated by its nature, inherently racist. The Northern Hemisphere positively plundered Egypt and its historical sites, and the ongoing behavior of the British Museum acting in miniature on behalf of the colonialist experiment demonstrates that they are pathologically unable to comprehend the extent of the evil and shame inherent in their “expeditions.” Mummies were ground up into powder and used for paint pigmentation, medicine, and countless other things, again with Britain nationally acting as the microcosm of colonialist enterprise by rushing headlong into turning other people’s ancestors, a finite resource indeed, into a monetized enterprise. That’s why no big-budget mummy movie in the 21st century has actually been about a mummy; they’ve been about death gods creating avatars for themselves (the 2017 Tom Cruise film) or a child being possessed by something after spending some time in a sarcophagus (the new Lee Cronin film, at least based on the trailer). 

The last time that a Mummy was about a mummy was in 1999, when Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz memetically lit the libidos of bisexuals worldwide ablaze. Fraser plays Rick O’Connell, an American in interbellum Egypt for unknown reasons, whom we meet making a final stand against presumed locals while defending(?) some ruins. It’s a big guns-blazing action sequence that doesn’t really want you to ask questions about why Rick’s there, whose territory is rightfully whose, or other questions about the “veiled protectorate” period. Meanwhile in Cairo, Weisz’s Evelyn clumsily destroys a lot of priceless texts before her gadabout brother Jonathan (John Hannah) presents her with an artifact he pickpocketed that supposedly came from the lost city of Hamunaptra, a legendary treasure repository as well as “the city of the dead.” Evelyn, Rick, and Jonathan set out to find the city again, and find themselves in a race to the lost city with Beni (Kevin J. O’Connor), a cowardly man who was previously at Hamunaptra at the same time as Rick, and the American cowboys he’s guiding along the same path. Upon arrival, the Americans almost immediately release the undead ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), who was mummified alive as a punishment for touching the Pharaoh’s concubine, from his tomb, unleashing plagues and the potential to end the world. 

I used to love this movie. I was in middle school when both it and its sequel were released, and as a kid who had grown up obsessed with Indiana Jones and with an interest in Egyptology, this was an exciting mash-up of horror and action-adventure that really hit my sweet spot. It also didn’t hurt that there were large swathes of time when it was on cable almost constantly, so it really left a mark on me. Going back to it now, however, I can’t help but find it a little distasteful, and a product of its time. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the person of Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr), a character descended from a long line of secret defenders of the pharaonic order. Despite living a life that implies an ongoing belief in the Egyptian pantheon of old, Ardeth praises Allah, something that was uncommon but unremarkable among heroic characters in films of the period but would become contentious just a couple of years later during the era of kneejerk American Islamophobia. Ardeth is also not played by an Egyptian actor (Fehr was born in Tel Aviv), nor is Imhotep (Vosloo is white South African), nor are the pharaoh (Aharon Ipalé is Israeli) or his Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velásquez is Venezuelan). The casting of the roles in the film outside of our white leads is classic Hollywood “brown is brown” racism of a bygone era, and watching this as an adult who is fully conscious of all of the implications greatly dulls one’s enthusiasm for what is, otherwise, an adventurous romp. 

A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the upcoming release of the aforementioned Lee Cronin Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.) Preteens, like I was when I first saw it, are really the best demographic for this film, as its overwritten corny dialogue and telegraphed acting choices read like a throwback to old-timey pictures, until you’ve watched as many of them as I have and realize it’s more shallow parody than homage. Weisz and Fraser are sexy, yes, and they have great chemistry together, but Rick is much more of an asshole than I remember, and Evey, with her clumsy awkwardness and frustration at Cambridge’s rejection of her despite her outsized genius, feels like a fanfiction character, right down to her being a nepo baby. 

I wish that I could love this one as much as I did when I was younger, but most of the enjoyment that can be derived from it now comes at the film’s expense. If you have fond memories of it, let that sleeping dog lie; don’t go disturbing the sarcophagus of your memory.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Exit 8 (2026)

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I’ve been seeing a lot of advertising (or maybe just the same thumbnail from a singular YouTube video, over and over) for Exit 8 that refers to the film as “Cube meets Tokyo.” Despite the fact that we already had that, and it was bad, I was still intrigued enough by the trailer to want to give this one a shot. The premise is fairly simple. A lost man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself caught in a repeating loop of the same few sections of corridor in an underground subway tunnel. Initially spooked at finding himself completely alone and unable to locate an exit, he encounters increasingly unsettling visions before realizing that there are a set of instructions on the wall that boil down to “continue walking until you encounter an anomaly, then turn around and keep walking.” Said anomalies surface as things as relatively mundane as misplaced doorknobs and distant voices of crying babies to mutant rat creatures that resemble the experiments he barely noticed while scrolling through social media on the train. The lost man is in a state of turmoil, having learned that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant mere moments after he failed to confront a salaryman on the train for screaming at a mother with a cranky infant, then immediately finding himself in the infinitely-looping corridor. When he encounters a little boy (Naru Asanuma) and realizes that he’s not part of whatever purgatorial situation within which he’s been entrapped, he and the child try to get out together. If they can get through all eight levels without being deceived or overlooking an anomaly, they’ll find their way out. 

I’m going to make three points of comparison here to horror movies past, and Cube is not going to be one of them. First, in what I intend to be the most flattering comparison, Exit 8 has a great deal of similarities to one of my favorite horror films, Jacob’s Ladder. The 1990 Adrian Lyne film features Tim Robbins as a man potentially trapped in a reality he can’t be sure is real while experiencing subliminal visions of horrors beyond his comprehension, with a few memorable sequences set in the NYC subway system. Exit 8 dilates those underground set pieces to encompass the entire purgatorial situation, which is a neat trick, and it plays with the hypnotic monotony of depersonalized commuting in a series of seemingly identical hallways. Jacob’s Ladder finds Robbins’s character interacting with an almost angelic version of the deceased son he lost (a pre-Home Alone Macaulay Culkin), who helps him in a way that I can’t really talk about without spoiling that film, other than to say that Jacob’s journey, like The Lost Man’s, requires a certain level of acceptance. 

Secondly, in what I intend to be an unflattering comparison, Exit 8 has the distinction of being the second horror film I’ve seen so far this year that also happens to be, intentionally or not, pro-life propaganda. Concerning! Arguably, this one’s the worse of the two. At least in Undertone, the choice of whether or not to keep her baby was a decision that the mother was making; here, one of her only lines of dialogue, repeated almost as often as we see the “Exit 8” sign is, “Which is it?” Still, this is mitigated by the third point of previous film similarity, which is a neutral comparison at best. Exit 8 reminds me most of Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, in that they have the same (mildly spoilery) conceit, which is that the protagonist is guided by a specter of their as-yet-unborn child. In Dream Child, that takes the form of Alice’s fetus appearing to her as a young child in her dreams and helping her fight Freddy Krueger; here it’s The Boy, who responds to an apparition of The Lost Man’s girlfriend by calling for her as his mother, revealing that he is, somehow, the man’s son. 

From what I can tell by perusing some reviews and summaries of the video game this film adapts, the player character therein is an utterly blank canvas, and there’s no real “plot” to speak of: no unplanned pregnancy woes, no encounters with a non-anomaly character like The Boy, no shameful cowardice at failing to confront a raging asshole. It doesn’t even seem like The Lost Man’s asthma, which I assumed had to be a gameplay mechanic, originated there. All of this is newly written for the film, and while I understand that the film, being based upon a game that is all about the mechanics and the tension rather than any real narrative, had to come up with some stakes. I’m not sure why it had to be this narrative, but the other way that this most evokes Dream Child is that its pro-”keeping the baby” messaging is also so bizarrely incoherent that it utterly falls apart; Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” ends up being more effectively propagandistic in just a couple of minutes than Exit 8 and Dream Child combined. It’s not a defense of the film’s politics, but it’s so sloppy that it’s hard to grasp onto anything substantial enough to be annoyed by. 

I suppose, eventually, we do have to get around to examining this film in conversation with Cube. When we talked about that film on the podcast (as well as its sequel and prequel), Brandon’s primary complaint was that what Cube failed to deliver upon was the promise of cool death traps in the series of successive, identical, cubical rooms. As someone who saw those movies in earlier, more formative years, I already had an idea of the shape of the narrative, so I wasn’t set up to be underwhelmed by the ride in the same way that he was. I experienced my own great disappointment when we watched the 2021 version from Japan, which, among its many other faults, broke the cardinal rule of The Cube: we should never see what’s outside The Cube. I was very frustrated the first time that Exit 8 also showed us something that was happening outside of the liminal space in which our characters are trapped, as we see the woman on the other end of the phone call that The Lost Man receives while lost in the corridors. This does turn out to be an (obvious) misdirect, but there’s a sequence that comes later in which The Lost Man imagines himself on the beach with The Boy and his mother, and I can’t help but think that would feel more emotionally impactful if we didn’t have the earlier scene, and that conversation in itself would be more exciting if we only saw The Lost Man’s end of the line and stayed inside the spooky hallway. 

Further, the film’s decision to literalize the metaphor with The Boy, by making him actually be his future son rather than simply a reflection of what his future child could be. It’s a hat on a hat, lacking a subtle touch that would make the film more emotionally impactful. I’m grasping at straws trying to articulate it, but it’s almost as D.O.A. an idea as making Newt be Ripley’s actual daughter in Aliens rather than an objective correlative representing her guilt about outliving her actual child. Excise the scene in which The Boy recognizes The Lost Man’s ex as his mother and this is instantly a more thoughtful movie, even if you leave in the beach dream. That also lends more emotional heft to what we learn about The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who appears as part of the loop in The Lost Man’s journey, but whom we learn was himself a previous captive of the space who was trying to find his own way out. When he experiences frustration with having to start over after getting within spitting distance of level eight, he laments that he “was supposed to meet [his] son today.” As a manifestation of what The Lost Man could become, it’s admittedly a little on the nose, but it too would feel more nuanced if we just cut out the “mother” stuff. 

All of these quibbles having been laid out, it’s worth noting that this is a fun experiment and a masterful success on a technical level. The space itself is perfectly sterile and unsettlingly empty. The opening sequence, which is shot entirely in the first person, is an impressive feat, with the first shot we see of our main character being his reflection in the window of the subway car as he turns up his music to ignore the verbally abusive salaryman. I had a very immersive experience, as the only tickets still available were in the very front row, and I had a hell of a ride even as I found myself stumbling over the film’s slippery, amorphous thesis. I also appreciate that the film is open-ended; this is a mild spoiler, but after he manages to find Exit 8 and return to the real world, The Lost Man once again finds himself in a (presumably) metaphorical loop, as he experiences an identical situation as the one which opened the movie, as the same salaryman is screaming at the same young mother. The film cuts to credits with our lead once again staring into his own reflection. It seems that most reviewers infer that he will now confront this man and make up for his earlier bystander syndrome. I prefer to read the ambiguity of the ending from the other direction, and that for all he experienced in the liminal subway corridor he’s still essentially the same man, cowardice and all. It leaves some room for interpretation, that there may be some truth in his conviction that a person who stands idly by while someone is aggressively harassed may not be suited to parenthood. It’s not a mark in this film’s favor that I’ve spent so much time describing the film that I wish it was rather than the film that it is, but it’s still an excellently executed premise, and worth checking out for its design and camera movement if nothing else. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond