mark boomer redmond

Keeper (2025)

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Osgood Perkins has become a contentious figure of late, as he’s really only become a figure of theatrical release interest in recent years. His first directorial features, The Blackcoat’s Daughter & I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, premiered after their festival screenings to streaming on DirecTV and Netflix respectively (although Blackcoat’s Daughter got a limited theatrical release after its streaming premiere, presumably for award nomination qualification purposes). Gretel & Hansel got dumped into theaters in the January wastelands and was on streaming within nine weeks. Then came Longlegs, which was boosted by a far-reaching and powerful advertising campaign that none of his previous work had. Longlegs garnered a fair amount of praise and attention, but with the greater visibility that a wider audience provided also came backlash from viewers who didn’t connect with (or outright rejected) his nontraditional narrative & stylistic choices and eccentricities. I loved Longlegs, but I really didn’t care for The Monkey, and for at least some portion of the general movie-going public, those two movies constitute the entirety of Perkins’s body of work because that’s all that’s gotten any widespread attention. Although out of Perkins’s catalog this one is most similar to Gretel & Hansel—a film that I was fairly lukewarm about—Keeper managed to work for me, although I don’t expect it to win back over anyone who’s already disinterested in his work. 

Liz (Tatiana Maslany!), after a lifetime as a “subway dwelling city-rat” for whom a relationship that lasts a whole year is a record, is taking an anniversary trip to the countryside cabin of her beau, Dr. Malcolm Westbridge (Rossif Sutherland). It’s a beautiful, secluded place, and although she seems happy to be going on the trip when talking about it with her friend Maggie, the vibes aren’t all that she had hoped they would be once they get there. There’s not a door in the place other than the one to the bathroom, and it’s all giant windows with no blinds or shades, so although there are gorgeous views of verdant forest available from every vantage point, Liz feels exposed. As Malcolm hangs one of Liz’s paintings in the house, she discovers a cake that was supposedly left behind by the property caretaker, the box containing it having smudged in a way that renders it off-putting. Their peaceful, serene dinner is interrupted by Malcolm’s cousin Darren (Kett Turton), who lives in the neighboring “cabin,” and his date for the weekend, a model named Minka (Eden Weiss) he claims doesn’t speak English, although when she and Liz are alone, she ominously tells Liz that the cake “tastes like shit.” 

Strange things are already afoot. While taking a relaxing bath, Liz begins to have visions of women in period dress from across a couple of centuries, as if they are spirits of the dead come to warn her away from the house. Behind her and out of her sight, something unseen mimics her by drawing a heart in the condensation on the window, as she had mere hours before. In the night, she finds herself drawn to the remainder of the suspicious cake and finishes the whole thing, despite finding what appear to be bloody fingers inside of it, and she is drawn to the nearby babbling brook, where she finds a locket that she begins wearing. There’s something about the way that Malcolm hangs her painting that, intentional or not, signaled a kind of “My Last Duchess” element, which felt like it was being borne out by the Bluebeard-y vibes that Malcolm puts out, especially when he leaves her alone in the house, but we also witness (even if we do not clearly see) Minka meet her death outside in the woods at the hands of an unseen force that doesn’t appear to have any human attributes at all. Liz begins to lose time, waking up with her clothes on backwards despite being alone in the house while Malcolm is supposedly attending to his medical practice back in the city (lending further circumstantial evidence to Maggie’s belief that Liz, despite her protests to the contrary, is being used as Malcolm’s unwitting mistress). But is he? Whatever is happening to Liz is clearly outside of the realm of natural and the real, and the unflattering portrait we get of Darren makes it clear that he may be a real scumbag, but he’s definitely human, and so must Malcolm presumably be. What is happening in these woods? 

Perkins’s work is overwhelmingly fabular, whether he’s adapting an actual fairy tale, as he did with Gretel, or when he’s telling a story that merely has those overtones of spooky campfire stories, or of the pre-sanitization, pre-Disneyfication of older, darker folk stories. That’s what The Blackcoat’s Daughter feels most like to me, a kind of warped “Cinderella” with the all girls boarding school where our first main character is bullied by upperclassmen instead of wicked stepsisters, until she is visited by the darkest version of a fairy godmother one could imagine, with tragic consequences. Setting Longlegs in the 1990s does some of the work that an opening line of, “Once upon a time …” would bring, and the fact that one of the narrative threads revolves around a woman promising her firstborn to an intercessor for spiritual evil bears similarities to several fairy tales. One could even imagine it as a postmodernist take on “What if Rumplestiltskin never really went away?” in the vein of reimaginings like the ones found in the Kate Bernheimer-edited My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me anthology. Ultimately, Keeper is “Bluebeard;” even if Malcolm never warns Liz not to go looking in the basement, we do learn that, if she had, she would have found evidence that she was not the first “keeper” he had brought home, even if her ultimate fate would have been unchanged. 

A couple things of note … We can add Tatiana Maslany to the list of performers in dual roles this year that was first mentioned in our Predator: Badlands review, as one of the women in her visions is an 18th Century witch who looked exactly like her. Why this is the case is never revealed; we never get to learn if, perhaps, she is this same woman reincarnated or if this apparent identicality is a trick of perception or degraded memory over time, and while it is important to some characters’ motivations and the overall narrative, it’s not something that needed to be answered in order to enjoy this one, if you’re going to be someone who does enjoy it. It’s worth noting that Perkins only directed this one, from a script by Nick Lepard, whose sole other credit to date was this year’s sharksploitation survival horror Dangerous Animals. The only other instance to date of Perkins directing a film that he didn’t pen was Gretel & Hansel, which was written by Rob Hayes. That might explain why this script doesn’t quite feel like him, as despite its frequent usage of tranquil nature shots to establish the tranquility of the setting as a counterbalance to the film’s unsettling, trepidatious feeling. It’s still full to the brim with slow burns, but it still feels like it’s moving at a pretty good clip, which I appreciated. I hate to reveal too much, but there are some creature designs at the end of this film that are so good, I was disgusted. Nice work, everyone. Let’s hope this one wins some people back over, even if I doubt it will. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Blue Gardenia (1953)

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With the spooky season having come to a close (as much as it does for year-round horror sickos such as we), it’s officially Noir-vember in my house, and to my delight, Criterion recently added a collection of some underseen ones. Scrolling through, none of the directors’ names jumped out at me initially, until suddenly the name “Fritz Lang” appeared, and the decision was made. The Blue Gardenia comes rather late in the storied director’s prolific career; after this one, he would only release a half dozen more films, one of which saw him returning to the Dr. Mabuse well. Based on a novella by Vera Caspary (who had previously written the novel Laura), the film features a screenplay by Charles Hoffman, who spent no small part of the last decade of his life writing 22 episodes of the Adam West Batman series, not that any of that series’ tone is present here. There’s a certain sense of lightness for a story that revolves around something so depraved, but it’s not campy, and is a true noir through and through. And it’s got a special appearance from Nat King Cole playing the title tune! 

Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter, three years after her star-making role as the title character in All About Eve) is a switchboard operator who’s been saving the latest letter from her fiancé, a soldier in the Korean War, to read it on the night of her birthday, so she can pretend that he’s really there. Earlier in the day, she watches as Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr), an advertising artist who specializes in pastels of women for pin-up calendars, semi-successfully flirts with Norah’s roommate Crystal (Anne Sothern), getting her phone number. Crystal’s in an on-again, off-again relationship with her ex-husband Homer (Ray Walker), and their third flatmate Sally (Jeff Donnell) runs down to the store when the latest trashy dime-store novel from a Mickey Spillane-style writer, so Norah has the apartment to herself when she reads her fiancé’s letter … in which he tells her that he’s fallen in love with a nurse he met while recovering in a Japanese hospital. Hurt, she receives a call from Prebble, who’s looking to meet up with Crystal; he doesn’t give her the chance to explain that he’s mistaken and decides, in her vulnerable state, to meet him at the Blue Gardenia restaurant. There, he plies her with several Pearl Diver cocktails and, once she’s good and drunk, he takes her to his place, where he spikes the coffee, she requests with something else. Confused and thinking that she’s in the company of her lost fiancé, she initially returns his kisses, but when she attempts to reject his overtures once she realizes herself, he becomes aggressive and attempts to assault her. She fends him off with a fireplace poker and, fearing that she’s killed him, runs home without her shoes, in the rain. 

When Norah awakes the next morning, she hears about the incident and, having no memory of what happened after the first round of drinks, fears that she is the murderer. This is where the film gets a little fuzzy, narratively. We in the audience have no reason to believe that she’s not the killer, and we also have no reason not to want her to “get away with it,” even if what she’d be getting away with is a pretty clear-cut case of self-defense. As we see her turn to more and more desperate methods to try and ensure that she’s never caught, we’re entirely sympathetic to her plight; the scene in which she burns her dress after hours and is caught by a policeman who merely gives her a warning about using her incinerator during hours outside those permitted by law is particularly fraught. She’s wracked by intense and escalating feelings of guilt as she watches her co-workers be called in for questioning by the police while ignoring her, since she and Prebble have no connection that anyone knows of, and he wasn’t even trying to contact her when he called her shared apartment. Eventually, she calls a tip line set up by seemingly sympathetic (but ultimately sensationalistic) journalist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte), and even meets him in person while claiming she’s doing so “for [her] friend,” whom the press—specifically Casey—has dubbed the Blue Gardenia Murderess. She’s ultimately arrested, but Conte discovers a contradiction that might set her free.

As a mystery, I found this one a little underwhelming. I always prefer when a crime picture like this one gives the audience the chance to solve the mystery alone with the characters; I am a devoted fan of Murder, She Wrote, after all. I expressed to my viewing companions this disappointment in this aspect of the film in our post-screening debrief and it’s worth noting that although the real killer is identified at the end and confesses (because, unexpectedly, Norah didn’t kill him), none of us recognized them. As it turns out, they did appear in an earlier scene, but it came so close to the beginning that the character was unrecognizable when reappearing at the end, and if I had seen this in isolation and missed that clue I would accept it as a personal failure to pay sufficient attention, but that this missed in triplicate tells me that this is a problem of the film, not of my attentiveness. That having been said, that the film needs someone other than Norah to be the killer is, for lack of a better term, perfunctory. We know she’s not a murderer, and I was never convinced that the police were ever really going to catch her; it was more of a matter of when her roommates would put two and two together regarding Norah’s skittishness and defensiveness. I expected them to figure it out earlier and help Norah cover it up, and that would have been a perfectly acceptable noir concept, but instead we have a bit of a forced romance between Norah and Casey, one which ultimately feels kind of insulting to her (after she’s discharged, she glares at and rebuffs him for his part in her initial arrest, but this is merely a ploy to seem hard to get). 

The most fun parts of the film are when we get to see the three women roommates interact with one another, and it’s a rare look into a slice of life of a bygone era, of domesticity between three single(ish) women sharing a tiny apartment. On the night after her birthday, Norah is awakened by Crystal as the mother hen of their little group. As her alarm goes off, she refers to it as “the mine whistle” to the other women, and sends Sally off to make the orange juice (condensed and out of a can — yeesh) while she gets the bathroom first that morning, as she directs the understandable groggy Norah to coffee and toast duty. Crystal is the most delightful character overall, and learning that Ann Sothern, whom I had only previously seen in Lady in a Cage, starred in a ten-film series as an underworked show girl named Maisie inspired me to track down those films for a future marathon (they were only available on the Russian equivalent of YouTube, uploaded from VHS rips from TCM, so pray for me). It’s too bad that her ultimate role in the story (as well as Sally’s) is pretty minor, since she’s full of quips and various other character choices that give the film a lot of life. 

Not necessarily the most interesting noir that I’ve ever seen, but with great performances from Sothern and Baxter and an effectively menacing villain in Burr, this one is worth checking out if you’ve got a noir itch and you’ve already seen all the classics. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Predator: Badlands (2025)

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Following his successful first entry into the Predator franchise in 2022 with Prey (a fresh take on the concept that featured an 18th Century Comanche woman taking on a member of the Yautja, better known to us as Predators), Dan Trachtenberg has returned to the big screen with Predator: Badlands. This time, we’re back in the far future, in days when the Weyland-Yutani corporation (of the Alien franchise) is extending its tendrils of power into the depths of space. It’s a fun action flick that takes place on a fully-realized alien death world, featuring minimal characters, and it’s a great ride. 

The film opens on Yautja Prime, as young warrior Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) prepares for the hunt that will prove his worthiness to be given the Predators’ famous cloaking device. His brother Kwei appears to help him prepare, and the two engage in a duel that Dek is unable to win, but he proves his fighting spirit by refusing to yield. The two warriors’ father, Njohrr, appears on the scene and derides Kwei for failing to kill Dek, the runt of the clan, as he was ordered. Kwei is slain by their father as Dek, aboard his ship, is auto-launched to the “death planet” of Genna, where the unkillable beast Kalisk resides, with Dek intending to bring back the Kalisk’s head as his trophy and prove his father wrong, ensuring that Kwei’s death was not in vain. Dek crashes on the planet and soon meets a polite, personable Weyland-Yutani android named Thia (Elle Fanning). Although he initially refuses her assistance in navigating the treacherous flora and fauna of Genna as the Yautja code requires them to hunt alone, he is able to compartmentalize her as a “tool” and self-justify accepting her help. Attaching Thia’s upper half to his back to act as guide (her lower half was previously torn off by the Kalisk), the two set out to take down the great beast, all while Thia’s twin “sister” Tessa (Fanning again) reboots and resumes her mission of capturing the Kalisk for the company’s bio-weapons research division. 

There’s a lot to like here. Thia and Dek make for a really fun pair of characters, with her (uncharacteristic for a W-Y synth) helpful, bubbly, and jovial attitude playing against his brusque, narrow-minded, laser-focused mentality to comedic success. For a character whose face is entirely prosthetic, Dek also conveys a fair amount of emotion, expressing vulnerability, surprise, and grief, and that this works despite the fact that this is a Predator we’re talking about is a strong mark in the film’s favor. Fanning, as the person with a human face (even if there are no humans at all in the movie overall), has to do most of the emotional heavy lifting, but she carries it off, and her performance here has me pretty excited to see her again later this year in Sentimental Value, even if that’s going to be a very different film from this one tonally. She gets to join the ever-growing ranks of 2025 features that happen to be about twins or otherwise feature dual performances: twice the Michael B. Jordan in Sinners, double Dylan O’Briens in Twinless, Robert Pattinson as Mickeys 17 and 18 in Mickey 17, Theo James as “good” and evil twins in The Monkey, the Mias Goth in Frankenstein, and [redacted spoiler] in Superman. Fanning’s turn as the less-likable android Tessa is fun to see, especially given that Thia’s dialogue about her “sister” is praiseworthy and ebullient because of Thia’s personality, and we expect that Tessa will be like her, but when we do finally meet her, she’s ruthless, tactical, and efficient.

It’s a real change of pace to move the point of view from that of the human characters—who are always potentially prey to the Predators that give the franchise its name—to one of the Yautja instead, and that choice brings with it an interesting perspective flip on both them and the W-Y androids. Dek and Kwei’s father Njohrr is representative of a fairly bog standard “alien warrior race” archetype: shows preference among his brood for his strongest offspring, toxically belittles his weaker offspring to the point of attempting to cull said child from the bloodline, spends most of his screentime talking about “honor,” clans, rites of passage, etc. Despite this upbringing, Kwei sees the inner strength in Dek, and has never forgotten that Dek saved his life when they were younger, and in so doing breaks through his familial and cultural programming, rebelling against their father in order to give Dek the chance to prove himself. Thia and Tessa are specifically noted to have been designed and manufactured to be more “sensitive” than most synths, but despite this, Tessa is ultimately completely loyal to the corporation, once again represented in the form of an interface with “MU/TH/UR.” Humans are special because we have the ability to unlearn the ideologies that we receive, passively and actively, from our guardians and our environments; many people never slip out of these bonds, but many more do, and becoming more empathetic and kind is growth. Kwei, as the brother of the Yautja half of our protagonist duo, exceeded his programming; Tessa, as the sister of the synth half, never does, even though it’s clear that Thia is capable of (and undergoes) this evolution. The creations of humanity, made in the image of humanity, demonstrate less of that humanity in comparison to the scaly, scary menace with mandibles. 

This is a well constructed screenplay. In addition to the movie being about two beings exceeding and transcending their programming (both literal and cultural), it’s also worth noting that the parallels between the two sibling pairs extend to both of them being threatened by a parental figure. Kwei dies defending Dek from Njhorr, as failure to perform up to their father’s standards is a death sentence. The same is true for Tessa, who is threatened by MU/TH/UR (say it out loud if you haven’t seen an Alien movie in a while) with “decommissioning” if she fails to secure the Kalisk sample. Beyond that, it’s structured pretty similarly to Prey in that we get just the right amount of planting and payoff for all of the things that Dek learns during the course of his hunt and how he uses the resources around him to achieve his goals. That skeletal symmetry in each of Trachtenberg’s outings belies the vast aesthetic and environment differences that make Badlands feel fresh and new. The creature (and malevolent flora) designs are a lot of fun, and the whole thing feels very real and immersive. There are some moments of summer blockbuster cheese (despite the film’s autumn release), with the most groanworthy element for my viewing companion being the appearance of Dek’s mother in the film’s final sequel bait moment, while I think I was most distracted by the way that Dek tames an acid-spitting snake to sit on his shoulder like the typical Predator gun. It’s goofy, but the movie takes itself mostly seriously, with positive results. It still includes an Aliens-inspired mech-on-monster fight, but it refrains from reusing (read: misusing) that sequence’s pivotal line, which is more restraint than a certain other movie I could mention. Worth seeing on the big screen! 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Mastermind (2025)

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It seems like I’ve seen almost no marketing for The Mastermind, which is odd considering that I remember seeing the trailer for its director’s previous film, First Cow, approximately a thousand times (likely because it was released during the height of MoviePass). This does seem to be a personal experience, however, as every person to whom I mention Kelly Reichardt’s name has no idea what I’m talking about, even when I quote Toby Jones’s wistful “I taste London in this cake” line from the First Cow trailer (which, as stated before, I saw too many times to count). The little advertising that I have seen for The Mastermind led me to believe that this film would be a little more active than Reichardt’s other films have a reputation for being. When he wrote about Certain Women, Brandon noted that Reichardt’s films have “the impact of an encroaching tide, not a crashing tidal wave,” and that’s a succinct description of the way that her films creep up on you while she allows the camera to run long on every single action, which one wouldn’t think would pair well with a heist film. So, of course, that’s not exactly what this is. 

James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor) is a feckless man, an art student who dropped out of school to become a carpenter, as much as one can “become a carpenter” if he’s chronically unemployed and relying on his wife (Alana Haim) as the sole breadwinner, with the occasional cash injection from his mother. J.B.’s father William (Bill Camp) is a judge of a certain stature who can’t fathom why J.B. has failed to become the success that his brother, who owns his own business, has. J.B.’s protestations that pushing around paperwork is a “stupid way to spend [one’s] time” fall as hollowly on his father’s ears as they do on ours. After he successfully manages to steal a small figurine from a display case at the Framingham Museum of Art, he hatches a plan to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from the same location. The heist itself goes off relatively easily despite some setbacks, but one of the men he hired reveals details about the theft when he’s apprehended while robbing a bank, and J.B. goes on the run, although that terminology is somewhat meaningless when we’re talking about a film with a pace like this. 

The Mastermind becomes a series of vignettes as J.B. interacts with interested parties, law enforcement, and old friends who have a variety of reactions to him showing up at their doorstep. Of particular note are the performances from Sterling and Jasper Thompson, who play the Mooney boys Carl and Tommy, respectively; they feel like the more down-to-earth versions of Ben Stiller’s Minis-Me in The Royal Tenenbaums, and both boys are pretty reliable sources of humor. From the film’s opening, Tommy plays an unknowing part in his father’s museum theft practice run, as his seemingly endless recitation of a stock logic puzzle, complete with starting and stopping as he corrects himself or forgets where he was going, and one can’t help but laugh. Tommy also ends up being in the car with his father when one of the thieves, Guy Hickey (Eli Gelb), lures him to meet with a few jovial gangsters, one of whom even gives J.B. some decent advice about how to be a better criminal in the future. Of course, J.B. doesn’t really accept any advice from anyone, or he wouldn’t have ended up in this situation. 

I’m curious to see how other people will react to the titular mastermind as a character as this film sees a wider release (if it does). It’s fascinating to watch Josh O’Connor play a role that’s so quietly despicable, and the fact that it’s him in the part makes you feel some measure of sympathy for J.B., despite him being objectively awful. He lies to his mother to get seed money to hire his heist associates under the guise of needing it to rent a space and tools for a carpentry project that will get him back into a good financial situation; he steals for no other reason than that he’s the worst kind of lazy person — one who will waste ten times the amount of energy needed to do something on avoiding doing that thing instead; and the last thing he does before the credits roll is rob an old lady (Amanda Plummer!) to get bus fare to continue his rambles. All around him are the signs of the anti-war protests of 1970, with every television set that appears in the film existing solely to provide more news about campus rebels and retaliatory police action. God-fearing American Patriots™ like his father (who criticizes the art thieves in front of J.B. for their having stolen modern art rather than something that he considers to be of value) surround J.B., and each time they appear they jab their fingers in the direction of  hippies and jeer, calling them cowardly and lazy for their pacifism, while the most cowardly, lazy degenerate one could imagine sits in their midst, the son of a judge, invisible. 

Haim isn’t given much to do in this one other than to quietly express disappointment at her husband from a distance; she’s a pair of feet on the stairs down to the basement where the heist is being planned, or she’s a blurred figure in the distance of the frame, arms folded. That’s somewhat to be expected, as the film is really O’Connor’s vehicle, but there are other characters who are quite a lot of fun. There’s a small group of teenage girls who hang in and around the museum, and two of them are held at gunpoint and give delightful interviews on TV later, and Gelb is very funny as the eternal failure Hickey. There’s a great sequence once J.B. is on the road where he ends up at the home of his now-married college friends Fred (John Magaro) and Maude (Gaby Hoffman) in which Fred is kind, friendly, and happy to see his friend, while Maude—who it’s implied may have had a thing with J.B. in the past—sees straight through all of the charm and “Aw, shucks” that O’Connor is bringing to the table. She’s the highlight of the film; I’ve never seen such great passive aggressive hospitality in the form of understatedly hostile egg frying, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. 

The Mastermind is kind of like Inside Llewyn Davis if it had a jazz soundtrack instead of being a folk musical. It’s also a bit of a look into what Tom Ripley would be like if he was all ideas and no follow-through; he even does a little bit of passport fakery, although we never get to see if he would have made it past border patrol. It’s not a tidal wave (if that’s what you’re looking for, what you seek is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You). It’s barely a current, but if you’re in the mood for something that’s decompressed, there are worse choices to be made.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

KPop Demon Hunters (2025)

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At the beginning of the recent Merchant Ivory discussion episode of the main podcast, most of the crew expressed great admiration for the recent Netflix original KPop Demon Hunters, and I must now add my own voice to that chorus. I resisted for as long as I could, but after the overwhelming number of Halloween costumes I saw and heard about this year, I was finally curious enough to give it a shot, and it’s quite cute. 

HUNTR/X is an all-girl K-pop trio who also happen to be demon slayers, with their musical talent being an integral part of their spirit-busting arsenal. For generations, different trios of women have spent their lives fighting the infernal forces while also building and reinforcing the “Hanmoon,” a kind of psychic forcefield that keeps the armies of evil from entering our world. The most recent incarnation is set to complete/permanently reinforce the Hanmoon, visually represented by it turning golden, which will permanently sever the demon ruler Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun) and his minions from our realm and prevent his influence from spreading. HUNTR/X’s lead singer is Rumi (Arden Cho!), an orphan whose mother was a demon hunter/musical idol and who was raised by her mother’s bandmate/co-slayer Celine (Yunjin Kim). Rounding out the trio are Mira, the snarky dancer who is the black sheep of her wealthy family, and Zoey, a Korean-American lyricist and rapper from Burbank; both were also trained by Celine in demon slaying/pop idol branding. 

In the underworld, Gwi-Ma accepts the proposal of an underling named Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop) to think outside the box and, instead of sending wave after wave of minions against HUNTR/X, interfere with the psychic power that they get from their fans to weaken the Hanmoon instead. To that end, Juni appears in our realm, accompanied by four other disguised demons, as the newest boy band, Saja. Like any perfectly crafted group of that genre, each member is designed to appeal to a certain demographic: there’s the innocent and adorable Baby Saja; the pink-haired pretty boy Romance Saja; the aptly named Mystery Saja whose hair obscures almost his entire face; and Abby, whose personality is … having abs (he’s my favorite). Just as HUNTR/X is poised to release their new single, “Golden,” which will solidify their idol status and let them turn the Hanmoon gold, Saja immediately starts to overtake HUNTR/X in popularity, undermining the power needed to complete the ritual. Worse still, unbeknownst to her bandmates, Rumi is finding it increasingly difficult to hide her “patterns,” the telltale markings that betray her heritage as the child of a demon and a hunter, which Celine has forced her to keep hidden for her entire life. Jinu notices this in their first fight, and with a budding potential romance between them, now she has two secrets to keep. And she’s losing her voice! 

KPop Demon Hunters has been an enormous success, and is currently sitting at the top of Netflix’s most viewed original film list. It’s easy to see why; this is an easily-digestible animated musical with a distinctive style and catchy music. It’s clearly for children but is a bit of a throwback among kiddoe media in that it understands that its target demographic is not going to be its only audience, and thus makes the effort to include humor that appeals to the whole family, not just its smallest members who need to be babysat by a screen for 90 minutes. Other than this summer’s Freakier Friday (which was also PG), I’m hard pressed to remember the last time a movie that was made for a primarily young audience bothered to create something that older siblings and parents might enjoy, rather than merely tolerate. This kind of pop music has never really been my thing, I’m afraid, and I don’t really see that changing; the film’s Big Song “Golden” recently played at my gym and I would not have known it from any of the other pop music that passes by me in the stream if it hadn’t been pointed out to me. That’s not a mark against the film at all, just an observation that I’m a tertiary demographic here, and the music was consistently good throughout, even if my comparatively elderly ears couldn’t quite discern what I was hearing some of the time. (I first heard the lyric “Now I’m shinin’ like I’m born to be” as “Now I’m shining like a butterbean,” which I knew could not be correct but got stuck in my head.) Even more than that, I really appreciated that the film allowed itself to go a little hard on the violence and horror elements, and this is a movie that I could see being an effective introduction to the thrill of cinematic fright for a younger audience, of the kind that I was fortunate enough to benefit from.

An urban fantasy musical is a great idea, and I can’t imagine a better execution of it than this film, especially in its ineffable lightheartedness that manages to keep the film in the family-friendly realm despite some of the more challenging subject matter. As someone with no expertise in this genre, my two main points of comparison are admittedly very Western™, but I kept thinking of Josie and the Pussycats and Buffy. The similarities between HUNTR/X and the Pussycats are mostly visual, with them being a musical trio whose lounging around in their Avengers-style penthouse mirrors the royal treatment that the ‘Cats get in their film. When it comes to Buffy, I can’t help but think about that first season storyline—Buffy/Rumi falls for a much older demon with a soul (Angel/Jinu) and has to keep this from her excitable, borderline autistic-coded (Willow/Zoey) and snarky (Xander/Mira, although Mira is way cooler) friends, all while keeping secrets from her mother/mentor. There’s also the sixth season, where a resurrected Buffy fears that she’s “come back wrong” and is now part demon, and she covertly starts seeing Spike while keeping both her relationship and her condition from her friends. If you’re starting to worry that I’m going to say something negative about this, fret not; a comparison to Buffy is a high honor in my home, and I loved seeing the echoes. I was also delighted to hear Arden Cho’s voice, as I’ve been a fan of hers since her Teen Wolf days and I’m excited for the career possibilities that this success will bring her.

I didn’t touch much on the themes of the piece, but suffice it to say that they’re a bit deeper than the standard fare. It’s not a recent trend for animated and otherwise child-oriented film to be about self-acceptance, but even something like the recent Nimona (which I quite liked) has a tendency to have a slight twinge of the performative, while the complexities of self-identity and prejudices are handled with a little more nuance here. The exhilarating action sequences and the peppy music break the film up so much that it feels like you’re at a concert even when the film is giving you something to chew on, narratively, and I appreciate that. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s not a bad choice for a fun movie night.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Frankenstein (2025)

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In the Iliad, Patroclus gives a speech about the two jars that sit before Zeus, and from them he dispenses upon humans either gifts or detriments. I like to imagine Guillermo del Toro sitting in one of the enviable throne-like pieces of film memorabilia that fill his home (which he calls “The Bleak House”) and sitting with two jars before him from which he makes his films. One is labelled “Cool,” and it is from this vessel that he dispenses all of his clever ideas, slick visuals, and fascinating character work. From the other, which is labelled “Corny,” he pours in many of the things that his deriders cite as his weaknesses, which is unfair; the resultant cocktail between the two is what matters, and sometimes the stuff that makes it corny is the stuff that makes it great. Not this time, though. 

When I texted Brandon (who has a more positive take that you can read here) after leaving the theater with a message that was, essentially, “Oh no, I didn’t like it,” that thread continued into the next day as we discussed that eternal del Toro combination of Corny vs. Cool. Brandon likened it to native English-speaking critics have taken note of actors’ tendencies to go broader in Pedro Almodóvar’s films “of late,” whereas Spanish-speaking critics have stated that this is a matter of perception and that all of his films are like that, it’s just not clear when it’s not in English. And he’s not wrong; we had a similar discussion about Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 being a more “obvious” and less subtle picture than Parasite and how we may simply be viewing them through different lenses unintentionally. For me, however, nothing in any of the performances here is a problem, as they’re all appropriately grave. Of special note are Charles Dance and David Bradley, the former essentially playing Tywin Lannister again (and it’s pitch perfect as always) and the latter playing very strongly against type as a kindly old man, rather successfully. For me, it’s the other choices that make this one feel too tonally inconsistent to be as immersive as it ought to be. 

The film is structured as the novel is, with a wraparound story in the glacial north in which a ship captain finds Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) on the ice and takes him aboard, where the dying man tells his story. Raised by a mostly absent surgeon father (Dance) who was domineering and abusive when he was present, young Victor doted on and was doted upon by his mother (Mia Goth), whose dark hair and eyes she shared with her son and which Victor knew his father despised. When Mrs. Frankenstein dies giving birth to a boy, William, Victor quickly gets relegated to second favorite child, and there’s an abyss between silver and gold, which is exacerbated by Victor’s belief that his father allowed his mother to die; the boys are split up as children following the death of their father and don’t see one another again until adulthood. Victor takes his name literally and seeks to find victory over death, and when we see him as an adult, he is before a hearing at medical school regarding his ghoulish and grisly reanimation attempts. In attendance is Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), whose niece Elizabeth (Goth again) is engaged to William (Felix Kammerer), and who uses this as an excuse to see Victor and offer the virtually limitless resources his war profiteering has given him to fund Victor’s experiments. In all of this, Victor meets Elizabeth and is utterly taken with her, and he begins to engineer reasons to keep her and William apart, and although she is interested in his friendship, she rejects him utterly when he confesses. Amidst this, Victor has been preparing his lab and his patchwork specimen. 

Once the monster (Jacob Elordi) is brought to life, Victor at first seems interested in teaching his creation life, but when the being only manages to learn the word “Victor,” Frankenstein becomes impatient and starts to abuse him. After a chance meeting between the creation and Elizabeth and William, Victor floods his laboratory tower with kerosene and destroys it, his last minute regret and attempt to save his “son” leaving him mangled and in need of prosthetic limbs. Interspersed throughout this narrative, we’re also checking in with the ship that Victor is aboard and where he is recounting this story; although the captain believes that they are safe due to the monster having disappeared beneath the ice following a prolonged attack sequence, he reappears and eventually makes his way aboard, where he begins to tell the story from his perspective, and how he sought his vengeance. 

There was a little too much of this film that feels like it was shot on The Volume, and I was disappointed by that. This makes sense for the opening sequence, wherein a mass of sailors are attempting to break the ice which has frozen their ship to the surface, only to be set upon by an apparently unkillable monster who goes down hard (and not permanently). It makes less sense when we’re talking about the courtyard outside of Frankenstein’s tower, which sees enough use that it would be a great practical location. Get some styrofoam, carve out some clefts, age it to look like stone, and get a little atmosphere up in this place. Worse still is the tower’s entryway/foyer, which would have looked so good if it had been done practically, but instead kind of looks like someone tried to recreate the Valkenheiser mansion from Nothing But Trouble using the software that rendered the barrel sequence from The Hobbit: Whichever One That Was. The reason for this, of course, is that we need to be able to fill that space with dozens, if not hundreds, of kerosene canisters so we can have our big explosion; that is to say, it has to be disposable, and it looks like it. 

It wouldn’t be so out of place if the attention to detail in other places, like Victor’s laboratory filled with previous experiments, which looks like a del Toro dream workshop. The dungeon in which the creation is held is also strikingly imagined, and I like that quite a bit, and we spend enough time in the captain’s quarters that we get to get a real sense of it, and it feels real. Beyond set design (when they bothered), the costume designer went to town on crafting a series of elegant gowns for Mia Goth to wear. They’re all hoop skirts and several have relatively simple sewing designs, but they’re all composed of shimmering fabrics in beautiful patterns like peacock feathers, all in a green hue. Each one is utterly sumptuous, and if there is to be awards buzz about Frankenstein, I hope it’s for this if nothing else. 

Thematically, the film’s structure holds up. The biggest throughline within the film is fatherhood, as one would expect. Victor’s father is a cruel man who thinks himself fair; he married his wife for her dowry and estate and never really thought through what he would do once this was accomplished, other than to attempt to mold his son in his own image through a childhood that is all stick and no carrot. He’s successful, as Victor himself never seems to have given a moment’s thought to what to do with his creation once he bestows it with life, and when his “son” learns slowly, he beats the poor thing just as he was beaten, except with a rage in place of his own father’s placid disappointment. Both sons demonstrate their defiance in exactly the same way, by taking the instrument of “discipline,” Victor taking up the riding crop his father uses while challenging his father to admit to either being fallible or killing his wife, and the creation taking the bar that Victor holds and bending it with his superhuman strength. That’s all well and good, and it works. But what doesn’t are some of the more spectacle-oriented elements. When Victor destroys the tower, there’s a legitimately tense scene of his terrified big baby boy trying to escape, but once he’s out of his chains, it’s all CGI fire and Avatar bodies flying down a 480p chute. It made me think of the “sleigh ride of friendship” that the human lead and the Predator have at the end of Alien vs. Predator (derogatory). Why does it look like this? 

That mixture of corny versus slick is hard to get right. Sometimes, you can get it right in the wrong amounts and make something like Pacific Rim, which gets a mixed response from the general public but becomes an utterly pivotal Defining Work for a subset of diehard fans. Sometimes, you get it right in the right amounts and you get something that’s cheesy but beloved by most, like The Shape of Water. Sometimes you just get it absolutely perfectly right, and Pan’s Labyrinth emerges. Look, I made a (highly subjective and admittedly corny) chart:

This one just didn’t work for me. That doesn’t mean it won’t work for you, though, or that there’s anything wrong with it, objectively. At its length, it might actually function perfectly as a two-part miniseries, split down the middle between Victor and the creature’s stories; it might give you a chance to savor it a little and feel less browbeat by it. It certainly isn’t going to stop me from seeing whichever concoction del Toro mixes next. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bugonia (2025)

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Just a few short weeks back, Brandon and I covered the 2003 Korean sci-fi comedy Save the Green Planet! on the podcast, mostly because of our interest in the then-upcoming remake directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, Bugonia. At the conclusion of our discussion, I remarked that I was curious to see what Lanthimos would change for his version, and whether he would keep the film’s epilogue twist as it was in the earlier film, forgo it altogether, or tweak it in some small way. Ultimately, if you have seen Save the Green Planet!, then you’re not going to be surprised by the roads that Bugonia takes, but if you’re like me, you’re still going to enjoy the ride quite a bit. 

Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone) is a high profile female pharmaceutical executive that we first meet as she introduces “a new era” at work, one in which an “incident” (which remains unelaborated upon but about which we can make certain assumptions) has led to a “friendlier” face for the company. What this boils down to, mostly, is that she wants it made explicit to the workers in the office that they should take it for granted that they are allowed to go home at the end of their work day … as long as quotas are met, and people should obviously stay at the office if they have work to do. It’s typical corporate double speak, where a corporation wants to harvest the positive associations that come with a “kinder, gentler” approach to work-life balance in the wake of a public relations backlash, but still expects business to proceed as usual with no real change. It’s not a particularly flattering portrait, but it’s a familiar one. Outside of work, she has an extensive (and expensive) “reverse aging” routine that includes supplements, red-light masks, and extensive martial arts self defense training. 

Teddy (Jesse Plemmons) works for Michelle’s company, Auxolith, packing boxes. He’s so far down the ladder that his team—which includes a woman who’s continuing to work despite injuring her hand and is clearly too aware of how easy it is to get rid of a squeaky wheel who might file a comp claim—doesn’t warrant even the most perfunctory of pep talks about quotas and staying late. Following a diagnosis that has rendered his mother (Alicia Silverstone) comatose, he has fallen down a rabbit hole of online conspiracy theories that have led him to one conclusion: aliens from Andromeda have infiltrated human organizations with the intent of enslaving the human race, and his boss is one of them. To this end, he enlists the help of his intellectually-disabled cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in abducting Michelle when she arrives home from work one day. From there, he locks her in the basement, shaves her head so that she can’t use her hair to contact her mothership, and proceeds to demand that she prepare a message to tell her fellow Andromedans to expect Teddy’s arrival as advocate for the human race against their invasion. Michelle, naturally, has no idea what he’s talking about. Or does she? 

If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, or even just saw the trailer, most of this is familiar to you. Teddy and his Korean counterpart, Lee Byeong-gu, even share the same backstory that their characters’ mothers are both hospitalized long term, and they share beekeeping as a hobby, with colony collapse disorder forming an integral part of both men’s alien-invasion hypotheses. The differences are pretty minor. Byeong-gu’s girlfriend in Planet! is replaced here by Teddy’s cousin; the plot point in which the captive CEO convinces the former to leave Byeong-gu by claiming that he doesn’t truly love her is replaced by a scene in which Michelle tells Don that the imminent arrival of the police puts him in serious danger. The biggest narrative change is probably the total excision of Planet!‘s subplot about two police officers, one an experienced but disgraced renegade and the other a young fast-tracked hot shot who circumvents his chain of command to consult the outsider. Although there is a police officer in this film, he’s unlike either of the two detectives, as he’s instead a socially awkward local police officer who is implied to have molested Teddy when he was the younger man’s teenage babysitter. If you’ve seen Planet!, you’ll likely recall that the two detectives therein had little bearing on the narrative and seemed to simply exist in order to give the film somewhere else to check in every once in a while and break up the monotony of spending the entire film solely in Byeong-gu’s basement. Here, those opportunities to give the audience a break come largely in the form of Teddy’s flashbacks to the time when his mother’s illness first began to affect her and his time having to still go into work while having his missing boss locked up in the basement, covered in antihistamine lotion (to numb her—or rather “its”—psychic powers). It’s a small difference, but by always keeping us in the same room as one of the two opposing forces at the movie’s core Lanthimos manages to ensure that the tension is always rising. 

Of course, the most interesting and notable difference here is that the kidnapped executive in Planet! was a man named Kang Man-shik, while Bugonia has Stone playing a girlboss CEO, and that one small change has a big impact. Because of the difference in the optics and the gendered dynamics alone, watching Byeong-gu and his short girlfriend abduct Kang is a very different experience from watching two burly men attack Emma Stone, one of America’s Sweethearts. The fact that we see her practicing for just such a possibility as one of her first defining character traits reminds us of the bleak truth that there’s no amount of power, wealth, or status that a woman can amass to guarantee her protection from a very determined crazy man, and even as a member of the executive class she’s still prepared for the possibility that she’ll have to fight for her life just like more conventionally vulnerable women. Stone plays Michelle with a quiet strength and dignity that she only allows to slip when she’s alone, and it’s a performance that’s so potent and visceral that it’s easy to forget that—regardless of the seemingly batshit nonsense Teddy picked up on the internet—she is nonetheless a banal force of evil, a stakeholder in the enforcement of a power structure that Teddy (and we) have every right to resent and pray for the downfall of. There’s no need to go overcomplicating it with aliens (or any other brain-rotted conspiracies); Auxolith made Teddy’s mother sick and faced no consequences, and that’s enough to make him hate Michelle, with all the rest of it being a hat on a hat. Still, in seeing a woman chained to a mattress in the basement of a man with demonstrable tendency to fly into a rage, we can’t help but sympathize with her, more than we ever did with Kang. 

There are a lot of little ideas and concepts to find within this text and pick over. I find it fascinating that Teddy ultimately does the same thing that Auxolith does with regards to reckless human testing, as he chemically castrated himself prior to the movie’s events and gives his unfortunate cousin the same injection prior to their taking of Michelle. Later in the film, Don tries to explain to Teddy that he’s having side effects from the drug, possibly even a sudden onset of chemical depression, which ultimately has tragic consequences. His kidnapping of Michelle in and of itself is an abduction of the kind that he believes aliens are guilty of. Like a lot of people who fall into these traps of conspiracies that engineer a more comprehensible world out of unconnected events, Teddy is a hypocrite, and that makes him and Michelle the same. And then, of course, there’s that ending. As one would probably expect from a remake helmed by Lanthimos, this is not merely a reheated dish, but a fresh take, even if you already know what all of the ingredients are. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (2025)

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A little over ten years ago, I went to the beach with a friend and their family. Their older brother had two children at the time: a baby and a toddler, the latter of whom was just starting to express herself in fun and interesting ways. It was her first time at the beach, and she grew frustrated with the ceaselessness of the waves as they knocked her down while she tried to remain upright, at one point turning to the water and saying “Stop!” This caused the girl’s father to chuckle, saying, “The ocean’s not going to stop, baby.” The imagery of waves and water is everywhere in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, from the instigating factor of the plot being a flood in therapist Linda (Rose Byrne)’s apartment, prompting her to move herself and her daughter to move into a seaside motel, to at least one Hokusai print appearing on Linda’s wall, and a midcentury modern wave-shaped lamp standing behind Linda late in the film, as if threatening to overtake her. Later in the film, one of her patients, a woman named Caroline (Daniel Macdonald) who abandoned her baby in Linda’s office, sprints off along the beach; it’s unclear if Caroline is planning to end her own life or if she’s just continuing to run from her problems, but the action does seem to inspire Linda to at least consider releasing herself from her mortal coil and letting the sea take her. After all, the waves are never going to stop. 

The tides that batter Linda for most of the film are largely metaphorical. Linda’s daughter is afflicted with some kind of illness that makes her extremely averse to consuming food, and her dietary intake is supplemented by a subcutaneous feeding tube on which Linda believes the girl has become overreliant. The pediatrician overseeing the daughter’s care needs the girl to hit a certain milestone weight by a specific date in order for discussions about removing the feeding tube, and when the two butt heads over treatment the doctor is less than sympathetic as Linda has been missing important group sessions. Linda’s already drowning in all of this as her husband is away for months at a time, and he drastically underestimates the extent to which being the sole caretaker for their chronically ill daughter while also maintaining her own psychiatry practice is absolutely drowning Linda, even before she’s forced to move into a motel. She’s feuding with her daughter’s doctor, she’s fighting with the parking attendant at the clinic, and once she gets to the motel, there’s immediate beef between her and an unsympathetic Gen-Z clerk (Ivy Wolk) who trolls her for seemingly no reason. It’s here that she also meets James (A$AP Rocky), the motel’s superintendent, who is the only person in her life who seems willing to cut her a break, even if Linda has been so engulfed by an endless odyssey of conflict and misery that she’s too prickly to accept his overtures of friendship. 

James is the only man in this movie who isn’t awful. We spend some time in a few of Linda’s own sessions with her therapist (Conan O’Brien), and although it’s clear that she’s exceeded some important clinical boundaries—notably, it’s an utterly bizarre choice to select one of your office colleagues as your clinician—he’s clearly completely checked out and offers little to no support despite his willingness to accept her money. Disinterested as he may be, he’s a mirror for Linda in relationship to one of her own patients (Lurker’s Daniel Zolghardi), who is clearly sexually and romantically fixated on her; he communicates his desires for her, “I dreamed that you and I kissed,” in almost the exact same way that she floats her own inappropriate affection for her therapist to him, couching it in a story about how she dreamt about the two of them. It’s these two characters and the aforementioned parking lot attendant who appear on screen, but some of the most revealing characters are the ones who exist solely or primarily as disembodied voices. 

We watch as Linda struggles with trying to compel her landlord to get his shit together and repair the hole in her ceiling, a job that ends up being much less time-consuming than expected once things finally start moving, the landlord offering excuses over the phone. Another phone-only character is the husband of Caroline; when Linda calls him as Caroline’s emergency contact when the baby is intentionally left in her office while Caroline escapes, he’s confrontational in a way that’s clearly born not out of concern for his wife or child and purely about the fact that he’s having to deal with the situation at all, stating over and over again “I am at work.” This echoes through to Linda’s husband, who is an off-screen presence for most of the film’s runtime. He checks in only periodically to obliviously sling more guilt at his wife in an escalated tone; her exhaustion is his exasperation. He ineffectively attempts to micromanage the wrong things from afar when what Linda needs is actual assistance and support in the here and now. When he finally appears on screen at the end, he manages to pin up all of the loose ends that Linda couldn’t rather efficiently, especially in regards to getting the hole in their apartment’s ceiling repaired. In that moment, I personally felt the wave of anxiety forsaging the inevitable conversation of See, now was that so hard? and You really needed me to do all of this for you? that Linda would be subjected to. Her husband actually being present for a single day managed to help get things back on track would be proof not that what she needed was actual support but proof that she was just not trying hard enough, when in fact she is worked to the bone. 

Beyond the discussion of the metaphorical (and potentially literal) engulfment that Linda endures, this is a fantastically shot film. We are never more than a few feet from Byrne for the entire film, sometimes swaying back and forth with her as she totters about, as if we’re on these late night pot-smoking escapades with her (she smokes copiously). The movement of the camera itself is part of the feeling of this headlong rush into wave after wave of setbacks. That commitment to verisimilitude doesn’t stop the film from leaning into some slight potential magical realism as Linda occasionally perceives something metaphysical happening within and around the hole in her ceiling when she checks in on the (lack of) progress. Much of this is left up to individual interpretation, of course; there’s a single moment in which Linda raises her hand to touch some motes of dust or light and asks, softly, “Mom?”, and that alone is something that everyone in the audience is going to interpret differently. There are other great framing choices that are made about what we are allowed to see and what’s kept out of the camera’s field of vision, beyond just the choice to make several characters angry men on the phone. The most notable of these is that Linda’s daughter’s face is concealed from the camera, existing as kicking feet in a carseat or hands that crumble toast so that it never reaches her mouth. It’s an interesting choice, and one I look forward to hearing different interpretations of in the discourse to come. 

Byrne is absolutely stellar here, and it’s not to be missed. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Species (1995)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the erotic alien-invasion horror Species (1995), starring Natasha Henstridge.

00:00 Welcome

04:20 Bugonia (2025)
17:08 Battle Royale (2000)
22:55 Death Metal Zombies (1995)
27:11 Interview with the Vampire (1994)
30:27 Corpse Bride (2005)
33:55 Frankenstein (2025)
36:00 The Plague (2025)
39:56 Frank Henenlotter
42:41 Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)
44:21 Return to Oz (1985)
48:41 Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
49:48 The Watcher in the Woods (1980)
52:17 After the Hunt (2025)
54:22 If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You (2025)
57:25 The Seventh Victim (1943)
59:02 Friday the 13th Part VIII – Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)

1:09:00 Species (1995)
1:38:06 Species II – IV (1998 – 2007)

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

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

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It’s been over eight years since I first saw Something Wicked This Way Comes, the 1983 Disney Pictures adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel, when we covered it for “Movie of the Month” in July of 2017. In looking back over what I wrote, it seems that at the time I was most interested in communicating how the film differed from the novel and allowing my cohort to get more into the meat of what the film meant to them. In that discussion, there’s mention of the fact that this film works best on VHS, but I recently got to see the digital, full screen version that was just added to streaming at the beginning of this month, and it was virtually a brand-new experience for me. I’m not sure if it was because the tape I had was substandard or I was suffering with some kind of mind-numbing flu at the time of my initial viewing, but this felt like a brand new movie to me, as if I had never seen it before, and I felt the need to revisit it in writing as well. 

I’ve been toying around with creating a bit of an “80s kid horror syllabus” lately, which has involved a first-time watch or a rewatch of some of the mini-genre’s greatest hits: The Watcher in the Woods, Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Paperhouse, The Dark Crystal, and, regrettably, Transylvania 6-5000. I remember being somewhat less than impressed with Something Wicked upon first viewing, but this time around, I found myself utterly captivated by it. The film is told from the point of view of an adult Will Halloway, about the final days leading up to his fourteenth birthday on Halloween, sometime in the 1950s. The young Will (Vidal Peterson) tells us early on that this is really the story of his father, Charles (Jason Robards), and the way that his father saved Will and his best friend Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) from a dark and mysterious force that appeared in their small midwestern town of Green Town. This evil is mostly represented in the forms of carnival proprietor Mr. Dark (a delightfully malevolent Jonathan Pryce), his brutal right hand man Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fisher), and the enigmatic “dust witch” (Pam Grier) who charms men to their doom. 

I mentioned it way back when, but Something Wicked (the novel) undoubtedly had an effect on Stephen King’s Needful Things, so much so that the latter work bears as much similarity to this film as, say, Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass does to King’s own work. What I was struck by on this watch was how much it must have also influenced IT, given that the narratives both revolve around young children on the cusp of adolescence who resist the machinations of an intangible force of evil to which adults are blind (or blinded). The difference is that in IT, Pennywise seeks to consume the fear of children because their fears are much more concrete than those of adults and thus are something it can manifest while its supernatural powers make it nearly imperceptible to adults while, in Something Wicked, Mr. Dark’s mystical offers to the adults of Green Town are specifically aimed at the regrets that age has wrought on them. It’s telling that his offers are mostly lost on Will, a boy with two loving parents (even if his father is in poor health) and who has experienced only one traumatic event, while Jim, a boy living with a single mother because his father disappeared years ago and who can’t wait to grow up, is much more susceptible to Dark’s machinations. Jim and Will represent the two sides of fantasy; while Will still has the childlike imagination that inspires play, Jim’s daydreaming is maladaptive and, thus, makes him more vulnerable to being taken advantage of by Dark (and darkness). 

In that above-linked “Movie of the Month” discussion, there was a general consensus that Mr. Dark and his legion were preying upon people’s selfishness, but I see something different in it now. For some, their temptation may be related to something that we could call weakness—Miss Foley, once the town’s greatest beauty and now an old spinster, desires her youthful grace vainly; Mr. Tetley the cigar-peddler has piddled away his money on lottery tickets greedily; Mr. Crosetti the barber desires the company of a woman as apparently the only single man in a town of married women lasciviously (although I think the last of these is arguable). But I think maybe we were all operating under our own youthful blindness back then, because we failed to identify that what Dark was offering wasn’t the opportunity to indulge in a variety of selfish, carnal desires but to overturn the regrets of the past. This is made most manifest in two characters: Mr. Halloway (naturally, as the main character), but more blatantly in the form of the town’s bartender, Ed, played by real life amputee James Stacy. Ed is a strange figure, as he still wears his old football jersey around the town and can’t stop talking about the good old days, and if he were still an able-bodied man, we would pity him for being the kind of guy who peaked in high school and never shuts up about it. As it is, since he has lost an arm and a leg, we are sympathetic both to his fond remembrances of the past as well as the ease with which he is seduced by Dark’s promise of making him “whole” again. This reveals that there’s more than mere selfishness (or vanity, greed, or lust) at the heart of Dark’s bargains, but the false promise of a life without regret, and sets up the offer that he makes to Mr. Halloway. 

This is a wonderfully clever bit of narrative misdirection. Mr. Halloway’s greatest regret isn’t that he’s not wealthier or younger, but that his being a relatively older father and thus not being strong enough to save Will when he was swept up in a current at a riverside picnic means that he failed his son. Halloway’s regret lives outside of him; it’s in the way that his son panics and tries to run from the adult conversation about what happened that day at the river. Dark can only perceive that Halloway desires to be young and strong again, and his offer to return his youth to him fails not just because Halloway isn’t calloused and heartless enough to give up his child for a few more decades but because Dark can’t see that Halloway’s heartache exists in relation to another person. Turning the clock back for the elder Halloway won’t magically erase his failure to save Will from drowning (allowing the drunken and long-disappeared Mr. Nightshade the opportunity to be the unsung hero), and won’t mystically restore what fractured between father and son that day on the riverbank. The irony is that what Dark offers and what defeats him is the same: regression. He can only offer Halloway the chance for mystical rejuvenation by regressing him to an earlier age, but it’s Halloway’s regression to the state of childlike optimism that starves the carnival, since it feeds on negative emotions, allowing a chance for Dark to hoist his own petard aboard the aging/de-aging carousel. 

This film is also a visual marvel. Now that it is widely available again, it’s entering The Discourse, and I’ve seen several neutral(ish) criticisms that the film is wonderful “despite” that the “visuals don’t hold up.” I would disagree wholeheartedly, as I don’t think that the representations that we see on screen were ever meant to fully evoke “reality.” As the malevolent train rolls into town, eerie wisps of smoke are drawn over the frames, and this same smoke attempts to capture the two boys later in the film, but it was never really meant to be smoke, it was “smoke” in a more ephemeral sense. Several vistas are clearly matte paintings with the occasional distant, twinkling light in them, but it’s only “unconvincing” if you expect the film to perfectly reproduce a landscape, and I feel that the film informs us that we shouldn’t be expecting that from the first moments, when the adult Will tells us via narration “This is really the story of my father and that strange, leaf-whispery autumn when his heart was suddenly too old and tired and too full of yearning and regrets, and he didn’t know what to do about it.” This is the old home town through the eyes of a child, and what most modern viewers mistake as the “fakeness” of the images used to convey this narrative is an externalization of the mysteriousness of the world to a boy on the cusp of young adulthood, inevitably putting him on the path to being a man whose regrets will crystallize into something manipulable. It’s expressionistic, like Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or Metropolis, or the non-narrative “fictional” interludes in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. To hold Something Wicked to a standard of photorealism is to miss the point utterly, and the film’s visual beauty lies in the way that it plays with this self-mythologizing of one’s own childhood, the way that the real becomes the surreal in mind and memory. 

I can’t recommend a revisit (or a first-time watch) of this one more highly, especially in these twilight hours of the spooky season (or, depending on when this goes live, in the dawning days that follow it). Even if you, like me, watched this one once upon a time and weren’t entranced by it, give it another shot. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond