mark boomer redmond

Halloween Streaming Report 2025

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Halloween is rapidly approaching, which means many cinephiles & genre nerds out there are currently planning to cram in as many scary movies as we can over the next month. In that spirit, here’s a horror movie recommendation for every day in October from the Swampflix crew. Each title was positively reviewed on the blog or podcast in the past year and is currently available on a substantial streaming service. Hopefully this helps anyone looking to add some titles to their annual horror binge. Happy hauntings!

Oct 1: Presence (2025)

“Presence leans into the improbability of the found footage horror genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so you don’t question why the camera continues rolling; you only question why it’s choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The answer to that question gave me a goosebumpy shock and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way the best ghost stories do.” Currently streaming on Hulu

Oct 2: The Shrouds (2025)

“Grief has been the major theme of horror cinema for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 3: The Rule of Jenny Pen (2025)

“John Lithgow is always at his best when he’s playing inhuman villain, which in this case involves him performing a Punch & Judy puppet show that went so far off-script it became elder abuse.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 4: Cure (1997)

“A little skeptical of why so many movie nerds are willing to give into the pure-evil vibes of vintage Japanese horrors like this, Suicide Club, and Perfect Blue but get hung up on the plot incoherence of their modern American equivalent in Longlegs. Doesn’t really matter though; all are self-evidently great.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 5: The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

“This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

Oct 6: Sinners (2025)

“A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Funny & sexy too, improbably.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 7: Day of the Dead (1985)

“A brains vs brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse.  Hard to buy a premise in which scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population have their research derailed by meathead fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work.  Not really sure what Romero was on about there.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Peacock, and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 8: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

“The uselessness of the U.S. Army in a peacekeeping role seems clearly inspired by the handling of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ in which the States were actively involved, and the choice of a stadium as an evacuation area and the overreaction of armed authority to refugees and evacuees is evocative of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. That doesn’t stop the film’s treatment of the military from being a little “hoo-rah” in certain places, with Scarlet acting as the reasonable authority figure and Doyle evacuating survivors despite orders to kill on site, playing into tropes about good soldiers vs. morally questionable generals. Still, their ability to protect the citizens within seems doomed to failure from the start, based on the ease with which a couple of teenagers managed to slip out of the quarantine zone, so the criticism of the industrial complex holds.” Currently streaming on Hulu & Shudder

Oct 9: 28 Years Later (2025)

“It’s almost unfathomable to think that the rest of the world could simply move on from locking down multiple nations and washing their hands of the whole situation while consigning the people living there to almost certain eventual violent death at the hands of sprinting, infected undead. But then again, we’re kind of living in that world, aren’t we?” Currently streaming on Netflix

Oct 10: Tomie (1998)

“A perfect example of an understated horror film that, despite being an adaptation of a longer, serialized work, functions as a singular text unto itself. Nakamura’s Tsukiko is a character who should be more widely recognized as an archetypical, textbook-perfect final girl. I appreciated the attention to detail that a woman with amnesia might find herself drawn to photography, perhaps the most documentarian method of artistic expression, as an art form, even if she’s not very good at it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

Oct 11: Audition (1999)

“I love how the perspective and basic reality of the ending doesn’t fit into any one tidy interpretation. A shame that the wave of American torture porn that followed didn’t pick up on that note and instead just echoed the gore” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy

Oct 12: Carrie (1976)

“One of the core texts of the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, with especially thunderous echoes in titles like Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and Raw. This is the first time I’ve watched it that made me both cry (when Carrie is enjoying herself at the prom) and jump out of my seat (when Carrie’s hand reaches out from the rubble of her home). It’s so self-evidently great on its own terms that it’s easy to forget that it’s also a great De Palma film . . . until he starts splitting the screen and importing notes from the Psycho score. That’s our guy.” Currently streaming on MGM+ and AMC+

Oct 13: The Rage – Carrie 2 (1999)

“I haven’t wanted to see shitheel teens die in a movie this badly since, well, since I rewatched Carrie a few weeks ago . . . Except their deaths felt like an actual victory this time instead of just small & sad.” Currently streaming on MGM+

Oct 14: Companion (2025)

“It’s no surprise that this is advertised by association with producer Zach Creggers’s previous film Barbarian, as there’s a lot of fun being had by mixing an inconsistent light tone with a genuinely tense horror atmosphere, bending what could otherwise be pretty straightforward genre fare into something novel.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 15: The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

“A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. Sometimes “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process.” Currently streaming on Shudder

Oct 16: The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)

“Shameless ‘Aren’t old people scary?’ exploitation, but super effective nonetheless.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and Shudder

Oct 17: Communion (1989)

“The problem with casting Christopher Walken in your alien-encounter horror is that nothing you dream up could possibly be a convincingly alien as Christopher Walken. Full honesty, though, the first alien contact scene is 100% accurate to an uncanny experience I had in New Mexico about a decade ago, which is an embarrassing thing to say about a movie that’s otherwise so aggressively goofy.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 18: Tesis (1996)

“Often feels like the made-for-TV version of Red Rooms in its aesthetics, but it’s effectively eerie nonetheless. Does a great job playing with home-video audiences’ attraction/repulsion relationship with extremely violent images (and hetero women’s attraction/repulsion relationship with violent men), even if its own academic interest in the subject is self-admittedly superficial ” Currently streaming on Shudder & AMC+

Oct 19: Fade to Black (1980)

“An uncomfortably prescient film about how everyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 20: Deadline (1980)

“Canuxploitation meta-horror that puts itself on trial during the tax shelter era, belligerently presenting academic arguments that horror allows artists to process societal ills through metaphor while frequently interrupting itself with vignettes of low-brow, for-their-own-sake gore gags of dubious artistic merit. Just about as narratively flimsy as Lucio Fulci’s Cat in the Brain, and just about as unpredictably entertaining too.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi

Oct 21: The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

“I didn’t expect to be expressing this, but this is easily the equal of Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Masque drew its production value from its elaborate sets and huge crowds of revelers, Corman knew what he had on his hands when he got the opportunity to film Ligeia at Castle Acre Priory, some of the best-preserved monastic ruins following the dissolution of most monasteries in the 1500s by Henry VIII. As a shooting location, this place lends this an immediate sense of gravitas. There are no in-studio “moors” full of machined fog and spindly little trees here, but a real, tangible sense of something manmade being reclaimed by nature, something historical but decayed.” Currently streaming on MGM+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 22: Nosferatu (2024)

“Wouldst thou like to live maliciously? It’s becoming apparent that Eggers has softened his alienating approach to narrative structure so that he can escalate his exquisite, traditionalist images to a larger studio-budget scale. As a result, this doesn’t add much to the ongoing ritual of restaging Dracula (except for accidentally making the argument that Coppola’s version is the best to date). It’s a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, though, which obviously goes a long way.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime

Oct 23: Alucarda (1977)

“A Satanic blood orgy between Carmilla, Carrie, The Devils, and The Exorcist, staged entirely on leftover sets from Kate Bush music videos. Impossible not to oversell it” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel

Oct 24: Burial Ground (1981)

“So much care went into creating a wide range of gnarly latex zombie masks for this that it’s hilarious they left so many of the performers’ hands fleshy and relatively in-tact. It looks like they’ve never worked a day in their undead zombie lives.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla

Oct 25: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

“More like The Texas Sledgehammer Massacre amirite? Honestly, this probably wouldn’t rank in my top 5 Tobe Hooper movies, since I’m more of an 80s splatstick guy than a 70s grindhouse guy, but I do respect that it is the 70s grindhouse movie: the one that everything in its wake has sweatily scrambled to emulate.” Currently streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Peacock, Screambox, and for free (with ads) on Pluto TV

Oct 26: Final Destination Bloodlines (2025)

“All the things that you want from a Final Destination movie are present: a harrowing opening scene, a bunch of people being snuffed out via Death’s contrived coincidences, an appearance from Tony Todd to explain the rules, a last-minute aversion of death that lulls the remaining survivors into a false sense of security, and a mean ending. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Currently streaming on HBO Max

Oct 27: Dead Talents Society (2025)

“Last year, this wonderful influencer-era update to Beetlejuice earned gradual acclaim & notoriety on the festival circuit only to be dumped on Netflix with no fanfare to speak of long after the word of mouth had cooled. Meanwhile, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice got the red-carpet festival premiere treatment at Venice before immediately cashing in on easy nostalgia money across every multiplex screen in America, despite not being half as charming or inspired. ‘I hate this world’ indeed” Currently streaming on Netflix

Oct 28: Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster (1964)

“There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster design of all time. Loudly & proudly metal as fuck on a cellular level. It’s so metal that it takes three other skyscraper monsters to muscle him out of the pit, one for each lightning-spewing head 🤘” Currently streaming on HBO and The Criterion Channel

Oct 29: Ash (2025)

“The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a ‘purpose’ or a ‘point,’ meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its ‘purpose’ is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its ‘point’ is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

Oct 30: Junk Head (2017)

“If this stop-motion nightmare comedy were made a decade or so earlier, it could’ve sold so many Hot Topic t-shirts. The world would’ve had no need for Salad Fingers. We’d be in a much better place.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and Kanopy

Oct 31: Frankie Freako (2024)

“Entirely accurate to the Gremlinsploitation genre it’s spoofing, in that for the first 20 minutes or so I was clawing my eyes out in fear they were never going to get around to setting loose the little monster on the poster. Once Frankie’s fully unleashed, however, it’s time to party. Shabadoo.” Currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+

-The Swampflix Crew

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

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Let me tell you a story. A human boy comes into possession of a bladeless sword hilt that only he can control and which only has a blade at his command. He teams up with a rogue pilot whose rough exterior belies a heart of gold and, alongside a sassy computer intelligence, they meet a space princess. They visit exotic locales like the desert, a swamp, and a hive of wretched scum and villainy. Before the end, the boy learns that he is part of a long line of people who wield a mystical power and who can appear after death as spectral guides in this metaphysical art, and he defeats an ancient evil in a dark cloak. Sounds like Star Wars, right?

I really didn’t know that much about Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. I’m not even really sure exactly when I managed to acquire a digital copy, or when I transferred that file to my phone for a potential future viewing (I’m not an Apple user so I’ve had the same phone for 4 years without a forced upgrade occurring as a result of planned obsolescence). I’m traveling at present and I did foresee that while journeying I might grow weary of the beautiful but nonetheless antiquated and challenging prose of Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s 1922 novel The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, and had planned ahead by downloading a couple of episodes of Peacemaker while I was on Wi-Fi. I did not foresee that the HBO app would simply not load at all once I was in airplane mode, and thus after failing to simply sleep on the flight, looked at what I had in my videos folder, and there Starchaser was, waiting for me to finally give it my attention. Many worse things have happened on airplanes recently than watching Starchaser, but I still nonetheless failed to be engrossed. 

The eponymous Orin is an enslaved human miner living beneath the surface of the planet Trinia, where he and other humans toil with laser diggers for volatile crystals, which are then “fed” to a giant dragon-like face when the slaves are visited by their god, Zygon. One day, Orin finds a sword buried in the rock, and when he frees it, the grandfather of his girlfriend Elan tells him that it may be part of an ancient legend about a liberator, before the sword projects an image of an old man who speaks a muddled prophecy, then the blade disappears. Elan’s grandfather is killed, prompting Orin and Elan to take actions which eventually result in them climbing into a crystal shipment and travelling through the dragon’s mouth, where the scales fall from their eyes about the nature of their enslavement, and Elan is killed by Zygon. Orin manages to dig his way up to the surface, where he meets a smug smuggler named Dagg Dibrimi and his smart-mouthed ship’s AI Arthur, although Dagg doesn’t believe Orin’s claims that there are slaves beneath Trinia’s surface. Dagg completes a hijacking of some of the crystals from one of Zygon’s freighters, and in the ensuing firefight, ends up in possession of an administrative fembot named Silica, whom he reprograms (through a not-very-funny scene in which we learn that the relevant circuits are in her posterior, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch), causing her to immediately become devoted to him. 

Along the way, the travelers are occasionally annoyed by a sprite-like “starfly,” which eventually directs Orin to discover a bomb hidden within the payment that Dagg receives for his services, eliciting Dagg’s loyalty, and the two of them eventually meet Aviana, the daughter of the local interplanetary governor. She recognizes the hilt from her historical studies and accesses a library file that reveals that the hilt belonged to the “Kha-Khan,” a group of legendary heroes from eons past who vanquish threats to humankind, although the last of the Kha-Khan disappeared from history after defeating a robot intelligence known as Nexus who sought to enslave humanity, at which point the hilt disappeared. And wouldn’t you just know it, it turns out that Nexus wasn’t really defeated; he simply rebranded as Zygon and got a new job as the overseer of the robotic underground miners of Triana, although he quickly replaced his initial automaton workers with human slaves so he could then reprogram the mechanical miners into warriors, and uh-oh, here comes the invasion fleet! They’re defeated by the ragtag group, of course, and the starfly reveals itself to be the Force, um, I mean the spirit of the Kha-Khans past, who appear to Orin and the others as Force ghosts, I mean, uh, regular ghosts, I guess. 

Director Steven Hahn worked mostly as a production manager on animated TV shows, with eighties juggernaut DIC as well as other studios, after getting his start with Ralph Bakshi working on his seminal work Wizards. During the off season for the various TV series that he was working on (like the Mister T animated series, Care Bears, the anglicization of French series Clémentine, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Star Wars: Droids), Hahn wanted to keep his Vietnamese animators busy. If you just read the Wikipedia page for this film, you might think, “Oh, how thoughtful,” but the quotation that he provided to the now-defunct sci-fi blog Topless Robot reveals that he, like George Lucas, was a man with dollar signs in his eyes more than anything: “I’d been working in television animation and owned a rather huge facility in Korea. I’ll tell you why I came to direct and produce this film. It’s not something you might expect. During the off-season, I had nothing else to do! When you own and run a big studio, it’s difficult to sit around and pay everyone a salary when there’s no work. So, I had to do something, and I thought, why not make an animated film?” There’s nothing artful in that, so it’s not really all that surprising that there’s nothing artful in the final product, either. 

I’m being a little harsh. There’s not nothing worthwhile here. Although all of the character designs for the men are ugly as sin and Princess Aviana looks like she was traced from a He-Man episode, the ship designs are relatively cool, and the robots that we see are inoffensive even if they’re not particularly imaginative. The film also manages to have a couple of cool sequences when it manages to break free from its lockstep dedication to slightly misremembering Star Wars, with the most striking images from the whole film coming close to the beginning and the end. For the former, it’s the appearance of the decomposing “mandroids” living in the Trinian swamps, cyborg ghouls that are creepy and off-putting, and it’s unfortunate that they warrant mention only in the scene in which they appear. For the latter, there’s a moment during the climactic space battle in which Orin accidentally opens a bay door, unwittingly ejecting all of the robotic troops within the hangar into open space, which was a fun visual. The space battles are the most interesting things that we get to witness, and it’s worth noting that this is probably because the film was created to cash in on 3D movies, so it’s clear that all the budget that didn’t go into making Orin and Dagg not hideous to look at went into making Dagg’s ship look cool. Money not exactly well spent, but I suppose it was put where it needed to be the most. It certainly didn’t go into score composition, as there are moments where Luke Skywalker’s theme and the Imperial March are imitated so clearly that it’s shocking that Hahn didn’t get into legal trouble. Not for the faint of heart or short of attention span, this is to be viewed solely if your only alternative is unconsciousness and you can’t seem to sleep.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Throw Momma from the Train (1988)

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I recently started a rewatch of Star Trek: Voyager (ding!), prompted because the person I’m dating expressed that this series was the most of interest because of their love of Kate Mulgrew, based solely on her performance in Orange is the New Black. We also recently watched Throw Momma from the Train, not because Kate Mulgrew was in it, but because it was on both of our lists, and it was a happy coincidence. 

Danny DeVito writes, directs, and co-stars in this late-80s comedy riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which appears in the film directly as the movie that DeVito’s character, Owen, sees at the behest of his beleaguered creative writing teacher. Said instructor is Larry, played by Billy Crystal, a man whose ex-wife Margaret (Mulgrew) stole the novel he wrote while they were together and is now seeing great success from it — interviews with Oprah, diamond earrings, a palatial Hawaiian estate, etc. Larry’s intense jealousy clouds his mind, and he’s stuck teaching a class of not-very-imaginative adult students who are trying to learn to write. Even among the students, Owen stands out as particularly unimaginative, although his daydreams about killing his overbearing, needy mother (Anne Ramsey) are colorful. When Owen starts to stalk Larry in order to get better insight into the creative process, he learns about Larry’s disastrous divorce and, when Larry suggests he go see a Hitchcock film to better understand how mysteries should be structured, Strangers on a Train just happens to be playing at the local cinema, he happens upon the idea of swapping murders. Misunderstanding Larry’s recommendations, he opts to fly straight to Hawaii and, seizing his opportunity, pushes Margaret overboard on a ferry while she dangles over the side to try and retrieve one of her earrings. Returning home, he now insists that Larry “fulfill” his end of their “bargain” and kill the titular momma, all while Larry tries to avoid being arrested for Margaret’s apparent murder. 

Throw Momma from the Train is a perfect little comedy, so tightly structured and so novel that it’s hard to imagine it being made today. Larry’s would-be relationship with colleague Beth (Kim Griest), who loves trains, allows for a lot of train imagery to be scattered throughout as foreshadowing of the film’s allusions as well as its finale. Ramsey is as perfectly loathsome here as she was just a couple of years prior in The Goonies, with her occasional moments of kindness implying a dementia that has rendered her this awful. Crystal is playing the same character that he always does, but when that character makes you the leading man for romcoms of an entire era, why deviate from the norm? Mulgrew’s character’s role in the story necessitates that she disappear fairly early in the runtime, but she makes a great meal out of her scenes, and it’s always fun to see her cut loose a little. It’s DeVito who’s absolutely wonderful here, playing Owen as someone so simple he’s utterly incapable of malice but is nonetheless too dim to be manipulated, at least intentionally. As an actor, his career has largely been made up of playing scoundrels and shitheels, and even though he is the antagonist of his film, you can never hate him. 

The film also gets a lot of mileage out of Larry’s class of wannabe writers. One of them is in the process of crafting a coffee table book entitled One Hundred Women I’d Like to Pork, which gets a nice payoff when we see the publication at Larry’s house in the film’s ending. My absolute favorite, however, has to be Mrs. Hazeltine, whose concluding paragraph to her story is, in its entirety: “‘Dive! Dive!’ yelled the Captain through the thing! So the man who makes it dive pressed a button, or a something, and it dove. And, the enemy was foiled again. ‘Looks like we foiled them again,’ said Dave. ‘Yeah,’ said the Captain. ‘We foiled those bastards again. Didn’t we, Dave.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Dave. The End.” If you’ve ever taken a short story class, it’s frighteningly familiar. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Purple Noon (1960)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Alain Delon’s star-making crime thriller Purple Noon (1960), adapted from the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley.

00:00 Welcome
06:30 Day of the Dead (1985)
14:24 The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)
21:58 Leila and the Wolves (1984)
27:35 A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 – Dream Warriors (1987)
35:39 The Long Walk (2025)
48:20 Twinless (2025)
55:52 Lurker (2025)

1:04:41 Purple Noon (1960)

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

Twinless (2025)

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In Jay Neugeboren’s An Orphan’s Tale, the author writes “A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.” The line has been paraphrased in everything from Six Feet Under to The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but Twinless takes it in a slightly different direction, when Lisa (Lauren Graham), the mother of twins Roman and Rocky (Dylan O’Brien in a dual role) comforts Dennis (James Sweeney) over the loss of his twin brother Dean, saying that outliving the person with whom one shared a womb may actually be worse. Unfortunately, it’s her living son Roman, who met Dennis in a talk therapy group focused on the survivors of a twin sibling’s death, who really needs to hear this, but the rift in their relationship is far too late at that point. 

That’s not the focus of this story, but it’s an important element of the way in which blanket grief can be misdirected and mangled. Twinless is a dark comedy vehicle for Sweeney, who directed and wrote the film in addition to performing in it. Of the two primary characters, we meet Roman first, as he prepares for the funeral for his deceased twin Rocky, who was recently killed in a car accident. As attendees of the funeral attempt to offer their condolences, their grief overwhelms them, as they each seem to have the same experience of looking at Roman and “seeing [Rocky’s] ghost.” At his mother’s urging, while she returns home to Moscow, Idaho (population 27000), he remains in the city for a time to attend the aforementioned surviving twin counseling group. It’s here that he meets Dennis, who tells him about his deceased twin Dean, and they get off to a good start despite Roman’s initial moderately homophobic question about whether Dennis gets carsick, as he always wondered if the deceased Rocky’s need to sit in the front seat to avoid motion sickness might have been on the same gene that made Rocky gay while Roman was straight. 

The two men grow closer as Dennis helps Roman navigate his grief, offering himself up to serve as Rocky’s proxy so that Roman can say all the things that he never got to say. It’s a powerful scene that shows that Yahoo! Movies was right to predict that O’Brien would be a breakout star all the way back in 2014; O’Brien acts the hell out of it, and it’s a showstopper. Up to this point, we’ve seen a Roman who is emotionally static. He lives in his mother’s basement back in Idaho, and when he decides to stay on in Portland in Rocky’s old apartment, it’s clear that he doesn’t understand the “rules” of social engagement in a densely populated urban environment. Although it’s clear to the audience that Dennis has a crush on him, Roman remains blissfully unaware, and it’s his rural guilelessness that makes him endearing even as he accidentally does some things that might lead Dennis on, like admit that he’s been using Rocky’s gym membership and allowed himself to be hit on by a guy there. But once Dennis gives Roman the space to unload and the other man breaks down into a refrain of “I don’t know what I am without you,” it’s clear that there’s a lot more going on inside Roman than he’s allowed to be seen by others. His brutal beating of a trio of mouthy teens who calls the men “faggots” after a hockey game also shows that there’s a storm brewing inside of him, the kind that comes from suppressing emotions and keeping them hidden away. 

For the first act of this film, our hearts go out to Dennis and Roman, for both for their shared grief in losing a twin, and to Dennis in particular as we see him develop a hopeless love for and devotion to a man that we know he is incompatible with, orientation-wise. Regardless of orientation, we’ve all had that unrequited pining for someone that can’t be with us for one reason or another, where we allow ourselves to be beaten by the waves against the rocks of emotionally hurtful rejection because that’s the price of swimming in the presence of the object of affection. I’m not saying it’s healthy, but it happens, and if you’ve never experienced that, I’m both sorry for and envious of you. The first sign that Dennis may not be all that he seems to be is when he and Roman go out one night and Dennis compliments Roman’s shirt, asking “Was it Rocky’s?” in a way that implies he already knows the answer to the question. Did Dennis know Rocky? 

I saw this the same weekend that I saw Lurker, and I didn’t expect that both of the new releases I would catch in theaters within a few days of one another would be flicks about creepy little gay stalkers who go Way Too Far but for whom we ultimately have some amount of sympathy. That this would be the core of Lurker was clear from its marketing, and I suppose that it might have been present in the trailer for Twinless, but I was able to go into this film completely blind, not having seen any advertising other than a leaked sex scene six months ago (if you haven’t seen it, don’t — it’s a total spoiler). If Sweeney hadn’t been the architect behind Twinless in its entirety, I’d be a little concerned that the sudden density of movies with obsessive gay men as an antagonizing (if not villainous) force might be another potential red flag on the descent-into-fascism meter (I don’t know anything about Alex Russell, who both wrote and directed Lurker, other than that he toned down Matt’s maliciousness in the transition from page to screen). As it stands, while that one was a softer version of an obsessive fan thriller, this is more of an examination of a 90s style romcom plot—Sandra Bullock falls in love with Bill Pullman while his brother is comatose in While You Were Sleeping under the guise of being said brother’s fiancee, Rikki Lake being taken in as a presumed widow in Mrs. Winterbourne and starting a romance with Brendan Fraser, etc.—wherein the premise rests upon a simple accidental misunderstanding that then becomes almost impossible to extricate oneself from, with a happy ending. Dennis’s actions are all entirely intentional, and although they’re not malicious, they are harmfully self-absorbed, and although this has precedent in something like Overboard, Mrs. Doubtfire, or even Never Been Kissed, it’s nonetheless a more realistic portrayal of how the people affected by the deception would react. It’s not as subversive as the TV series You, which went much darker in the presentation of how an obsessive romantic could behave, but there’s not really a happy ending here. That’s not what I go to the movies for, though; heartbreak really does feel good in a place like the theater. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lurker (2025)

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Lurker is All About Eve by way of Nightcrawler, with a little bit of The Talented Mr. Ripley thrown in for good measure. Or is it a love story, albeit a bit of a fucked up one? 

Matthew Morning (Théodore Pellerin) is working retail alongside Jamie (Sunny Suljic) at an LA boutique clothing store when mononymous musician Oliver (Archie Madekwe) comes in one day. Matthew quickly puts “My Love Song for You” by Nile Rodgers  on the shop’s sound system, and Oliver is impressed by the man’s musical taste, resulting in Matthew being invited to hang backstage at Oliver’s show that night. Oliver’s entourage member Swett (Zack Fox) and producer Bowen (Wale Onayemi) haze him a bit by making him drop his pants, but when he goes one further and loses his underpants as well, it endears him to them immediately. Matt notices a quiet member of the posse, Noah (Daniel Zolghadri) lurking in the back of the green room before he meets Oliver’s manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu), who takes note of Matty’s apparent infatuation with Oliver and recommends that he find a way to make himself useful if he wants to stick around. When he’s invited to hang out the next day at Oliver’s luxurious home, he finds himself stuck doing menial house chores like taking out the garbage and washing dishes while Bowen and Swett play Call of Duty and watch nature documentaries and Oliver largely seems apathetic to his presence. When he captures some candid footage on a low-res Sony commercial video camcorder of Oliver goofing around in the driveway on a BMX, Oliver lights on the idea of having Matty hang around and work on “the documentary,” which creates friction with Noah, who is the crew’s “official” documentarian. When Matty’s former co-worker Jamie also starts to work his way into Matty’s new social circle, Matty goes to increasingly harmful lengths to ensure that his place in the hierarchy remains unchallenged. 

Lurker is about many things. Matt’s behavior is nebulous; although he’s willing to escalate to physical harm and extortion to remain close to Oliver, the exact reasons are ambiguous enough to offer multiple interpretations. The most straightforward possibility is that Matty is simply obsessively in love with Oliver, and although Oliver himself is only ever clearly seen in the sexual company of women, Matty’s reaction to Oliver’s physical (but most likely platonic) affection demonstrates that the singer is the object of his desire. It’s clear that Shai sees Matt’s desire to be in Oliver’s orbit and may even see that attraction to Oliver as she encourages it initially, while his male friends tease Matt for “sounding like one of [Oliver’s] bitches.” Matty is clearly affected by Oliver’s attention to him, with the bits of fraternal physical affection that Oli gives him acting as an emotional drug, and Oliver’s candid vulnerability with the newest member of his entourage is perhaps too encouraging to the unstable videographer. At one point late in the film, Oliver asks Matty why he’s even around, and Matt tells him that he’s there for the same reason that everyone else around Oliver is, it’s just that he’s more driven and “better at it,” in his own words. It’s not stated explicitly, but the implication is that Oliver’s group, which he previously compared to a family of his own choosing, is made up of clingers-on and sycophants trying to ride his coattails into a life of glamour. As an audience, I don’t think we’re meant to fully believe him and his stated motivations, as this supposed reasoning aligns with some of the things we’ve seen (Matty pretends not to know who Oliver is when he first appears in the store while clearly actually being invested in impressing him with his obscure musical knowledge, which wins him a bid at the golden ring of being in Oli’s crew) but also fails to explain the more psychosexual desire that Matt clearly has. 

The latter of these reasons is on fullest display in two scenes in the film. After Matt has successfully created a situation that allows him to blackmail himself back into Oliver’s home (if not his good graces), Oliver makes an attempt to steal the evidence from Matt’s room while he sleeps, but when Matt wakes up, Oliver lies that he wanted to check in on Matt and see if there is some way to get them back to being friends. Matt seems to accept the sincerity and immediately demands that they wrestle, tangling his limbs with the musician and rolling around with him, over the latter’s protests. Still later, when Oliver is on tour, Matt shows up with a girl to the hotel room where Oliver is hooking up with a woman and the two have their sexual encounters next to one another, Matt staring intensely and lovingly at Oliver the whole time. It’s this last that finally pushes Oliver too far, but for his part, Oliver seems to enjoy the attention at times, as there’s a bit of narcissism inherent to his entire career. Early on in the film, Matt tells him that he thinks Oliver has the potential to be the biggest star in the world, and for a moment it seems like he’s pushed his own apparent sycophancy too far to be believed, but after a beat, Oliver excitedly admits that he thinks the same and that the other members of his crew aren’t pushing him hard enough. Matt feeds into Oliver’s ego and the fact that it comes with a side helping of intense yearning doesn’t set off any alarm bells for Oliver until it’s too late. 

The basic scaffolding of this narrative is, as noted above, very much like All About Eve, with Oliver as the Bette Davis/Margo Channing of the feature, a widely known star, and Matty as Anne Baxter’s Eve Harrington who seeks that same level of fame and adoration. Although he does ultimately see success, the film ends at the premiere of the documentary, and when a fan expresses admiration and inspiration, it’s like the finale of Eve in which a young girl comes to Eve’s hotel room in much the same way she once appeared at Margo’s stage door. Matty takes it further, pushing Jamie off of a ladder (after already trying to separate him from the group at the airport) when he gets jealous of Oliver’s preference for Jamie’s ideas for the album cover over Matt’s. Where Patricia Highsmith’s Ripleyness comes from is in the nature of unstated queer obsession that runs as an undercurrent throughout the whole thing. Matt’s “in love” (read: obsessed) with Oliver, wanting to be with him but also to be him, and it’s all conveyed with great attention to detail. Aside from the use of outdated camera equipment to genuinely create an aesthetic that is so desirable that it’s often recreated digitally, what Matt’s bringing to the table with his old Sony camcorder is something that could easily be accomplished through Instagram style filters, but there’s a true commitment to the essence of truth that Oliver wants to convey with his art, and there’s something to be said for that. 

What I found to be one of the most interesting things about the film is the way that it explores the nature of what it feels like to utterly hate someone who sees you better than anyone else. Although Swett and Bowen treat Matt like a pariah once he blackmails his way back into being part of the crew, he either ignores this or is completely apathetic about it, as all he really wants is what he has: access to Oliver, even if the vibe has shifted completely. Everyone’s mistrust of him and their overt hatred for him is covered by Oliver’s having to keep playing Matt’s game, and even if it feels insincere to us in the audience, it’s sufficient to feed Matt’s internal need for Oliver’s attention and validation. In the end, however, after all that Matt puts Oliver through as part of a creative vision for Oliver’s next album, when Oliver sees the resulting footage for himself, he realizes that Matt has accomplished what he said he would: push Oli when the others would let him rest on his laurels with the fame that he already has. It doesn’t hurt that Oliver himself has dubious ethics; when Matt arrives for his first show, the musician is canoodling with a woman that Swett and Bowen picked out of the crowd for him, and the fact that this is a habit for Oliver is something that Matt is able to use against him. Exactly what Oliver did that Matt has footage of is ambiguous enough that we don’t necessarily turn on him, but allows room for doubt as to how honest any of his interactions are, up to and including his claims to Matt that he can be more honest with him than any of the others. What is it in Oliver that only Matt can see and capture? Is it a genuine (if criminally obsessive and jealous) love that Matt has? Is it a consuming desire to see Oliver become the best that he can be because of that love, or because he, Nightcrawlery, wants to ride the rising waters in Oliver’s wake? It’s unclear. 

This film was on the Black List (in 2020), meaning that it was relatively easy to find the screenplay. Matt is notably less evil in the final film, as the script that I found included him treating his grandmother much more coldly and cruelly, including getting her to pay for his flight back to the US after he gets stranded in London but ignoring her at the airport and taking an Uber (in the film she picks him up without incident). All that really remains of this in the final film is a brief scene in which he yells at her when she tries to talk to him while he’s on the phone with Oliver. There’s also an entire subplot about Oliver’s elderly neighbor, whom Matt (possibly accidentally) kills and then (definitely intentionally) moves into his garage so that he can continue to spy on Oliver’s group which is left out of the film. In the final release, the most violence that occurs is when Matt pushes Jamie off of a ladder (we see him later and, other than a broken nose, he’s fine) and when Oliver’s group beats Matty after they’ve finally had enough. It’s a choice that makes for a more interesting movie to make Matty less of an out and out serial killer and inject a bit more ambiguity, despite the fact that I went into this hoping to see just that kind of obsessive violence. Well worth it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Long Walk (2025)

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I’ve been hearing nothing but good things about The Long Walk, so it was a surprise to me that, among the five-person group with whom I attended the movie, it only got a 20% approval rate (and the one who liked it was me). Among the complaints that I collected in the post-screening debrief was that it felt like torture porn to one, was too violent for others, that the character development was underbaked, and the film was denounced as largely predictable. For the more personally subjective takes, I can say that the film is definitely one of the more gruesomely violent that I’ve seen this year (bar something like Final Destination: Bloodlines, where the violence is more fantastical and cartoonish). For the critiques of structure, I also can’t provide evidence that the film didn’t follow a fairly straightforward narrative throughline or that every character felt fully fleshed out. To the latter, I would argue that the confinement of the narrative to a dwindling band of fifty teenaged boys walking on a road necessitates that backstory and character be revealed through dialogue, which can run counter to what one expects from film as a medium. For the former, I would make a very similar argument; containment of the premise makes the eventuality of the stations of the plot inevitable, but that alone is not inherently a negative. 

Although this wasn’t the first of Stephen King’s novels to be published, it is the first that he wrote, only seeing publication several years after Carrie under King’s pen name Richard Bachman. He began writing it as a college student in the mid-sixties, and I think that these facts are obvious from the text itself — both that it’s highly influenced by the Vietnam War (a time during which widespread media allowed for Americans to see drafted boys get blown to bits on the nightly news for the first time) and that it’s the writing of a young, not-yet-fully-developed author. That’s not entirely a bad thing, however, as it allows for this update of the material (sort of; it’s set in a dystopian future but has all the trappings of this bad future having happened due to something awful in the 1970s, not Next Sunday, AD) to speak to a different social crisis, our contemporary one in which society relegates its youth to die horribly for the viewing pleasure of the masses. If anything, it was perhaps too early, as it feels like an answer to the dystopian YA literature adaptation glut of a decade ago, a commentary on The Hunger Games and its imitators while being a darker, meaner, grislier concept that plays out under a different regime. 

The main character of the film is Ray Garraway (Cooper Hoffman), who submitted himself to a lottery in which there is a 98% certainty that he will die, on the one chance that he will be the survivor of the fifty “Walkers” who wins a massive cash prize as well as the opportunity to make one “wish.” This is over the wishes of his mother (Judy Greer), who has already lost her husband, a victim of state violence after teaching outlawed ideas to his son post-societal collapse. The competition itself is annual and features one boy from every state, all of whom set out to travel down Route 1 on foot, with the caveat that they must maintain a speed greater than three miles per hour, with a system of warnings issued for falling below that threshold before the boy’s “ticket gets punched”—that is, shot in the face by the accompanying military guard, led by “The Major” (Mark Hammil). Other competitors that we spend some time with and get to know include: Richard Harkness (Jordan Gonzalez), the one with big glasses who’s hoping to write a book about what it’s like to participate in the Long Walk; Collie Parker (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation actor Joshua Odjick), a tough jock; athlete and apparent ringer Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing); religious Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot) of Baton Rouge (represent!); yapper Hank Olson (Ben Wang); and your garden variety Stephen King long-haired antisocial shit-stirrer Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer). The person that Ray grows closest to, however, is Peter McVries (David Jonsson), an orphaned young man with a striking scar on the side of his face. A few of these doomed boys dub themselves “the Musketeers,” but their boisterous false optimism is immediately challenged by the death of the first of their number, a kid named Curley who had clearly lied about his age in order to enter the Walk. Alliances are formed and fall apart, friendships are made and then tragically cut short at the hands of carbine-wielding death squads, and the mental and physical anguish and turmoil play out as the boys’ numbers dwindle. 

The movie I most thought of while watching this film was actually Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 opus mother!, in that I can’t remember any film other than that or The Long Walk that could accurately be described, as Lindsay Ellis did, as “Oops, All Metaphor.” There’s nothing subtle about The Long Walk, from the opening moments to the final seconds, and it’s perhaps that lack of subtlety that lends itself to an interpretation that this film was perhaps too predictable to be fully appreciated. I’d still argue that this is more a function of the premise and its constraints than it is an issue with the film itself, but as always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There’s no attempt to parse any of the suffering that the boys are going through, and there’s no chance that they’re going to be able to have two winners at the end or really that the “winner” will survive very long after they reach the end of their Walk. Characters say to one another that entering the lottery pool for the Long Walk is technically a choice, but if literally everyone enters because it’s the only chance for any kind of economic movement out of poverty, then it’s not really a choice at all, is it? The movie can get away with wearing its message on its sleeve because all of the characters are teenage boys, so it’s not terribly out of place for them to have these not-that-staggering revelations and feel that they’ve stumbled upon some great wisdom, but I also understand if that feels preachy to certain audiences who are already aligned with the movie’s moral. I would venture that, given the state of media literacy (and actual literacy, for that matter) we’re currently grappling with out here in the real world, I’d warrant that this kind of declarative, undisguised thesis statement may be necessary to get it to stick, but that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. 

There are some themes for which the film reaches but which fall outside of its grasp. When Ray reveals his true motivation for entering the Walk to Peter, Peter tries to caution him against vengeance, but it’s arguable that Ray’s desire to kill one of the heads of the evil government is actually an excellent way to try and right some of society’s wrongs, if he’s given the chance. We never get a clear idea of just what society’s current shape is, as the narrative simply isn’t as invested in world building as much as it is in exploring the miseries of a life in which you have no choice but to walk (or work) yourself to death; it’s one possible inference now that the entire U.S. is now under the control of the Major as a military despot like Gaddafi or Idi Amin, that slaying the head of that dragon if given the opportunity is a moral imperative. It reminds me a bit of the finale of King’s novel The Dead Zone, in which psychic protagonist Johnny Smith ultimately realizes that he has to end, by any means necessary, the rising political career of a man named Greg Stillson, who will end the world in a nuclear holocaust if he is allowed to ascend to the presidency. The protestations against revenge as a factor are where the film slips into a kind of navel-gazing that isn’t fully tonally consistent with the rest of the text, but when that’s the biggest complaint you can get from me, then you should know that this is a recommendation. 

I do think that it was an interesting choice on the part of the producers to choose Francis Lawrence to direct, considering that he helmed three of the four Hunger Games films as well as prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and the upcoming release Sunrise on the Reaping. He was also the man responsible for Constantine and I Am Legend, which is probably why the latter film seems to be on TV multiple times a week right now: for synergy purposes. The film’s writer is JT Mollner, who wrote and directed last year’s divisive nonchronological Kyle Gallner vehicle Strange Darling, and I’m hoping based on a text conversation with Brandon that his skill here is starting to win our dear editor back over. I wouldn’t have imagined this as a team that would be able to bring this source material to life so well, but it gets a recommendation from me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Inherent Vice (2014)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Paul Thomas Anderson’s laidback stoner noir Inherent Vice (2014), adapted from the novel by Thomas Pynchon.

00:00 Welcome

04:56 The Roses (2025)
12:58 Throw Momma from the Train (1987)
18:36 The Fantastic Four – First Steps (2025)
27:27 A Room with a View (1985)
41:13 One, Two, Three (1961)
49:11 Lady Vengeance (2005)
54:22 Night of the Juggler (1980)
58:28 High and Low (1963)
1:05:29 The Idiots (1998)

1:11:00 Inherent Vice (2014)

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

One, Two, Three (1961)

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The morning after I saw The Roses in theaters, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had seen one of the least funny comedies of all time, but that I had followed that up with a screening of one of the most hilarious pieces of filmic art that I had ever been privileged to witness. Billy Wilder’s 1961 ruckus is entitled One, Two, Three, and by the end of it I was hoarse from laughter. Oddly enough, both this and The Roses contained a performance of the novelty song “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a coincidence that made me feel a little bit like I was going crazy. 

“Mac” MacNamara (James Cagney) is an American abroad, a Coca-Cola executive living in West Berlin and trying to further the cause of democracy by working to get the beverage behind the Iron Curtain, or rather, he’s trying to leverage that major success into becoming the head of the London office. He gets a call from the home office in Atlanta and is told that he’s going to be responsible for his boss’s teenaged daughter for a few weeks while she’s traveling. Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin) arrives drawling, dim, and charming, and her short time turns into two months, to the slight chagrin of Mrs. Phyllis MacNamara (Arlene Francis). Just as her parents are about to set out for Europe, Scarlett reveals that she’s spent the past six weeks sneaking over to East Berlin and meeting in secret with Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), a handsome young communist. Worse—they’ve gotten married. It falls to Mac to figure out how to split them up, which he does by getting the boy arrested by framing him for anti-Soviet leanings. Then, when it turns out that Scarlett is pregnant, he has to figure out how to not only spring the kid from an East German prison but also to make him a socially acceptable husband for the genteel Hazeltines before their plane lands. 

The comedy comes at a breakneck pace. Cagney is absolutely fantastic here, delivering some very witty dialogue like he’s got only minutes to live, and at other times bellowing orders at a successive list of underlings, Soviets, and haberdashers like he’s running the navy. The rest of the supporting cast is also a delight, with particularly great performances from Hanns Lothar as Mac’s assistant Schlemmer and Liselotte Pulver as his secretary Fräulein Ingeborg. The fräulein is great fun, as it’s clear from very early on that she and Mac are having an affair of some kind, and when he stops appearing for their “German lessons” (with “special attention to the umlaut”), she threatens to quit, and he must subtly rehire her by asking her to draft up an advertisement that includes “fringe benefits” that she immediately accepts. One of said benefits is an outfit that she saw earlier in the day, and when we see her join him in his misadventures in East Berlin to liberate Otto from the German police, she’s wearing exactly the dress and hat described; still later, when he gives his Soviet “allies” the slip to return Otto to West Germany, he leaves Schlemmer behind in her clothing as a decoy. Schlemmer himself has a habit of clicking his heels together, revealing his former involvement in his nation’s activities in the previous war (he first claims to have been part of the “underground” before it is later clarified that he worked on the literal subterranean trains). 

Lots of the best comedy bits revolve around the supposed lack of ingenuity and progress behind the Curtain, but they become timeless because the film doesn’t rely solely on them. For instance, when attempting to bribe Mac to give them Fräulein Ingeborg, one of the Soviets offers him a “brand new” car that he then admits is exactly the same as a 1937 Nash; later, when a car chase to the Brandenburg gate involves the Soviet crew in hot pursuit of Mac and company, Mac’s chauffeur is surprised to see them being followed by an obsolete car, saying “It looks like a ‘37 Nash!” Said vehicle completely falls apart long before Mac makes it to the border, losing fenders and tires and arriving at the Gate rolling on one of its exposed axles. They still almost catch up, however, as Mac is detained before crossing, only for it to be revealed that the guards want to return the (now empty) bottles of Coca-Cola he had brought as proof of his profession (i.e., a bribe), which calls back to the beginning of the film, where one Mac’s complaints wasn’t that the East Germans were buying Coca-Cola in West Berlin and taking it across the border, not because he doesn’t want to sell to them but because their failure to return/recycle the empties was driving up bottling costs. It’s all very perfectly constructed, which only makes it funnier. 

The film isn’t jingoistic in its devotion to finding comedy only in mocking the film’s communists, however. Some of the jokes, like Otto being tortured by being forced to listen to “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” over and over again, cut both ways, but there are plenty of jabs made at American foolishness, especially in Scarlett’s extreme naivete. When Mac tells her that she might be found guilty of spreading anti-American propaganda due to her possession of signage that says “Yankees Go Home!”, she’s insistent that it’s not anti-U.S. but anti-Yankee, drawling that, where she’s from, “everybody hates the Yankees.” She’s also adamant that she’s going with Otto to the U.S.S.R. (“That stands for ‘Russia’!”) and that she loves washing his shirts while “he broadens [her] mind.” There are also some great digs in at European aristocrat culture in general, as part of Mac’s attempts to make Otto appealing to an American parent involves getting Count Waldemar von Droste-Schattenburg to adopt the young man, as his title will give him prestige despite the fact that the count himself is working as a bathroom attendant. It’s all very, very good. 

Wilder considered this to be one of his lesser films; I read an interview with him later in life in which he expressed that he didn’t think it was actually all that funny or that it worked, but it’s just as much an overlooked classic in his canon as Ace in the Hole. People may remember him best for Sunset Boulevard or Some Like it Hot, but every time I dig further into his backlog, I love everything that I find. Track this one down if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Roses (2025)

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When we went to see Superman while I was in New Orleans in July, Brandon & I mentioned a couple of trailers that we were both sick of seeing and expressed our lack of interest in the films that they were promoting. One of them was Freakier Friday, which I ended up loving, and the other was The Roses. With apologies to my viewing companions who loved this, unlike with Freakier Friday, this one was just as awful as the trailer made it out to be. 

Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman) are at an inflection point in their marriage. It’s been ten years since they first met, when Theo escaped into the kitchen of a restaurant to cool off when another person took credit for his designs at a work dinner, meeting chef Ivy. The two moved to the U.S., where Theo’s just landed a major contract to design and build a maritime museum, and he uses the advance from the project to open Ivy’s dream restaurant, called “We’ve Got Crabs.” Unfortunately, the museum collapses during a storm as a result of his poor handiwork, but the same storm ends up stranding a huge crowd of people at Ivy’s usually-empty restaurant, including a notable film critic. As Theo’s career essentially comes to an end (not helped by his filmed reaction to the collapsing building going viral), Ivy’s suddenly explodes, and the two decide to let her be the breadwinner for a time while he raises their two children, Hattie and Roy. A few years later, the kids have transformed from fun-loving little moppets who ate sugar until they threw up to preteen athletes obsessed with performance and fitness, while Ivy’s empire has expanded through franchising of her restaurant. Although Theo was mollified for a time by Ivy’s funding of his design and construction of their (read: his) dream house, now that he’s done with that and ready to re-enter the workforce, their resentments toward one another eventually bubble over and the two start the process of a divorce, as acrimoniously as possible. 

This film was directed by Jay Roach, whose early-career comedy success with the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises eventually devolved into making things like the poorly received American remake of Le Dîner de Cons in 2010’s Dinner for Schmucks and the toothless political satire The Campaign starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galafianakis. Screenwriter Tony McNamara has a better reputation around these parts, having written Poor Things (and having a hand in writing The Favourite), but while this script is serviceable, it’s not up to par with either of those works. In McNamara’s defense, this feels like a film in which the attitude toward adlibbing was a bit too lenient, although given how clunkily some of the film’s supposed zingers thud to the ground it’s hard to believe that this was the best that this cast could come up with. Andy Samberg doesn’t pull out any of his trademark charm as he sleepwalks through his lines with an identical and static “Can you believe this?” smirking energy, but at least he’s not as out of place as Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of his wife, an oddball whose desire to get into Theo Rose’s pants is as obvious as it is offputting. She does deliver the film’s best line, however, when she admits that she’s thrown caution to the wind because she’s old, her face is melting, and she knows her body’s “working up a stage 4 something” so she might as well live a little. 

Both Samberg and McKinnon’s performances have the air of something that would have worked well if the film had been edited with a little more oomph. Their failure isn’t in the performance (at least not entirely) as much as it is in the pacing and the way that the camera lingers on them a little too long after they do a bit. The same cannot be said for Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou, who are bafflingly unfunny in ways that I didn’t imagine possible. If you don’t recognize Chao from her voice work on Creature Commandos or know Jamie Demetriou from Fleabag, you’ll know them from the trailer as the couple doing the “We love your witty banter” bit, which is even less funny in the film than it was in the marketing material. Ncuti Gatwa, who plays Ivy’s head waiter, has a couple of good lines, but he’s also playing his character a bit broad; as I’m currently catching up on Doctor Who after losing interest around 2019 and was just coming to the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, I was a bit concerned that this would bode poorly for his turn as the title character (having since watched his premier in “The Giggle,” I can say that I’m very looking forward to his time as the Doctor). 

I’ve never seen the Danny DeVito-directed original adaptation of this under the same name as the novel, The War of the Roses, but I can’t imagine that this improves on that one. For one thing, that film features DeVito as both a character (he’s a divorce lawyer) and narrator, and it also seems like that one gets into the actual conflict between the couple a lot earlier in the narrative than this one does. I suppose the omission of “war” from the title was actually a declaration that this movie wasn’t terribly interested in that conflict and would instead be a longer portrait of what is, for the first two acts, a fairly ordinary marriage. By the time Ivy’s making deepfakes of her husband confessing to intentionally botching the maritime museum in order to put the final nail in the coffin and Theo’s bashing the actual stove that belonged to Julia Child to pieces, there’s barely any runtime left. The film’s final moment is the most interesting and novel element, but it’s far too little and comes far too late to save this. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond