mark boomer redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Brick (2005) vs Poker Face

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two detective stories from the earliest and latest extremes of Rian Johnson’s career: the 2005 high school noir Brick and the ongoing human-lie-detector TV series Poker Face.

00:00 Foreign Correspondent (1940)
04:14 Topaz (1969)
11:00 Play It as it Lays (1972)
15:11 Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
16:56 Pink Narcissus (1971)
30:23 A History of Violence (2005)
37:05 Eddington (2025)
47:52 The Saragossa Manuscript (1965)
50:41 Fellini Satyricon (1969)
54:49 The Tragedy of Man (2011)
1:01:44 I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025)

1:11:11 Brick (2005) vs Poker Face

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

Play It as It Lays (1972)

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Eight summers ago, I attended nearly every screening of the Alamo Drafthouse’s summer series in my favorite genre, “Women on the Verge.” Two of those films, An Unmarried Woman and Puzzle of a Downfall Child, were such instant favorites of mine that they ended up as Movies of the Month the following year. I missed a screening of the difficult-to-find Joan Didion adaptation Play It as It Lays and have spent the intervening years cursing myself for the loss of this opportunity and eagerly anticipating another chance to check it out. Maybe it’s all that self-hype that left me cold upon finally getting the opportunity, or maybe it’s really not that great of a film, but I was not as captivated by this one as I was by the films alongside which it was initially brought to my attention. 

The film version of Play It as It Lays was directed by Frank Perry, who also helmed a couple of previous Movies of the Month, having directed 1968’s The Swimmer (a Brandon pick) and Britnee’s pick Hello Again (1987), and the film’s failures may have something to do with his vision, but not with his style. Play It as It Lays is a film that can charitably be described as incoherent, and while that incoherence is, as it was in the aforementioned Puzzle, a filmic tool used to demonstrate the internal life and fractured psyche of the film’s point of view character, it ends up making the film a bit too messy to fully understand. When reading the film’s summary on its Wikipedia page, the plot seems relatively straightforward, but it also seems like it’s relying on extratextual information (in this case, the plot of the novel on which it is based) to contextualize the narrative into something comprehensible; that’s cheating a bit, in my opinion. 

Tuesday Weld plays Maria Lang (nee Wyeth), an actress in her early thirties who narrates the film while walking the gardens of the institution in which she currently resides. In the flashbacks, she describes her early life, in which her parents moved from Las Vegas to a former mining town in rural Nevada that her father had won via gambling, a tiny nothing with a population of 28 which, by the time of the present narrative, no longer exists. She fell in love with and married Carter Lang (Adam Roarke), a respected independent director who cast her in his first film; he’s described as “a cult director with an eye for commerce” by one of his peers, and by the time the film’s proper narrative begins in the flashback, he and Maria are separated. There’s some implication that their falling out revolved around the decision to institutionalize their young daughter Kate, whose behavioral issues are on display when Maria visits her boarding school and witnesses her attack another child, which appears to be habitual. Maria’s only real friend is B.Z. Mendenhall (Anthony Perkins), a film industry friend of her husband’s with a family history of suicide and mental illness. Even if he weren’t already predisposed toward depression, his life situation, which sees him forced into a beard marriage to Helene (Tammy Grimes) at the behest of his controlling mother Carlotta (Ruth Ford), would make him miserable. Maria, who hasn’t acted in a while after damaging her career by walking off of a set a few years earlier, is convinced that Carter is having an affair with his new actress muse, Susannah (Diana Ewing), and she pursues a few lovers of her own, including a long term fling with widowed actor Les Goodwin (Richard Anderson) that results in a pregnancy, a brief affair with mob lawyer Larry Kulik (Paul Lambert) that ends unceremoniously, and an afternoon hook-up with TV actor Johnny Waters (Tony Young) that highlights just how self-destructive her behavior has become. 

Again, this all probably sounds fairly coherent, and not all that dissimilar from movies like Puzzle and other “Women on the Verge” pictures. Like those, where this does succeed most is in the strong performances from its leads. Maria isn’t inherently unlikable, but her generally nihilistic outlook makes it hard to root for her, since it’s all but impossible to imagine a better world or life for her; even her dream of living somewhere quiet and pastoral with Kate is clearly delusional. That Weld is able to imbue Maria with a sense of the personality-that-was when current Maria is disempowered and passive to the point of lethargy is a testament to the malleability of her talent, and when this film works it’s because she and Perkins make their characters feel like real, tangible people. Perkins’s B.Z. is an even more tragic figure than Maria, even if the film spends less time on his personal life. Of all of the men on screen, only B.Z. sees Maria for who she really is and the situation in which she finds herself because their dual alienation makes them kindred spirits. For Carter, Maria is a burden; for Kulik she’s just some good-looking company while he spreads money around Las Vegas; for Goodwin she’s the stand-in for the wife who committed suicide; for Johnny Waters she’s just a receptacle for his expression of sexual egotism. B.Z.’s relationship with her could be seen as just as selfish, as he sees her as a mirror for his own demons, but that projection isn’t incorrect and they really are birds of a feather. When he finally decides to end his life, as his father and grandfather did before him, he offers Maria the chance to follow him into the dark, holding out the pills he intends to consume to share with her, and although she declines, she holds his hand as he slips away. This the final straw that ends with her being institutionalized by Helene and Carter, but it’s also the purest expression of love that any two people show each other here. 

I have little love for the late film critic John Simon (to quote Roger Ebert, “I feel repugnance for [him]”), but he wasn’t wrong when he called Play It “a very bad movie.” Ebert himself gave the film his highest possible rating, but even he criticized the film’s material as thin in comparison to its smart direction and entrancing performances. That seems to be the consistent criticism of the film in reviews that I have found: praise for Weld and Perkins as performers and Perry for his directorial eye, with failures across every other metric. I won’t be breaking free of that paradigm, personally, since I feel the same way. This one might pair well with any of other films mentioned above as a foil or a conversation piece, but its narrative scaffolding wouldn’t hold up to a breeze, and it won’t stand up on its own. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A History of Violence (2005)

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Last month, The New York Times published a list of what their contributors deemed to be the best films of the 21st century. I don’t subscribe to the NYT (their contribution to the regression of the Overton Window on the issue of trans rights is morally and ethically reprehensible), so I’ve only seen it in bits and pieces as screenshots and commentary made their way onto other platforms. A friend who’s more interested in the discourse than I am mentioned that the 2005 film A History of Violence was garnering a lot of late-blooming praise, and I said that I hadn’t really been all that interested in director David Cronenberg’s mid-career pivot from body horror to drama, but that I was willing to check it out (despite my overall apathy for The Shrouds, Crimes of the Future was excellent enough that I’m very pleased he’s returned to his roots). This particular friend and I do not always align on our feelings about films (he was the one who really hated Roger Corman’s The Raven), but by the time the credits rolled on this one, we were united in our bafflement over A History of Violence’s critical acclaim. 

Small town diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson) has a peaceful life with his lawyer wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two children, teenaged Jack (Ashton Holmes) and young Sarah (Heidi Haynes). In the film’s prologue, two hardened spree killers, Leland and Billy (Stephen McHattie and Greg Bryk), murder everyone they encounter at a rural hotel; when they make their way to Millbrook, Indiana, where the Stalls live, they make the mistake of attempting to rob Stall’s Diner and learn the hard way that Tom Stall is more than capable of defending himself and his customers. Tom’s heroic defense of his staff garners national media attention, prompting the arrival of mobster Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) in Millbrook, claiming that he recognizes Tom as low-level Philadelphia thug Joey Cusack, with whom he shares a violent history (naturally). Tom holds to his declaration that he has no idea what Fogarty’s talking about for as long as he can as he finds his life closing in around him: the revelation of his capacity for violence has led his bullied son to fight back against his tormentors, placing them in the hospital; his daughter is threatened by Fogarty and his men; the friendly local sheriff he’s known for decades no longer trusts him; Edie doesn’t even know who he is anymore and is shattered that her life, up to and including the name she took from her husband, is a lie. As “Tom Stall” begins to fade while “Joey” reasserts himself, the loving husband and father begins to be subsumed by the hair-trigger, foul-tempered thug, who finds himself on a headlong collision course with his brother, mafioso Richie Cusack (William Hurt). 

When this movie came to an end, my friend turned to me and asked why it was that so many film critics were taken with what he characterized as a “RedBox movie,” and I can’t say that I disagree. Although this film predates No Country for Old Men by a couple of years, its opening scene reflects an attempt by Cronenberg to echo the Coen Brothers’ western/neo-noir fusion as exemplified in 1984’s Blood Simple. This was happening at the nadir of the Coens’ career, in the wake of 2003’s fine-but-unremarkable Intolerable Cruelty and 2004’s atrocious The Ladykillers, and it almost feels like the Coens saw Cronenberg’s movie and were inspired to create a better version of this, spawning their resurgence that began with No Country. Additionally, while this film’s opening felt very much like “Cronenberg makes a Coen Bros movie,” the rest of the film settled into a “Cronenberg does Clint Eastwood” feeling. There’s a part of me that wants to give the very Canadian Cronenberg credit for attempting to tackle an inherently American genre and do so through an imitation of the viewpoint/lens of one of the most outspokenly “American” filmmakers, and while I think that’s at play here, that context doesn’t materially improve the film itself. I’ve never thought of Mortensen as being a good or bad actor, really, as I (like most people) think of him as Aragorn first and foremost, and he’s neither the strongest or weakest part of the Lord of the Rings films; at his worst, he’s still serviceable, and his very brief appearance as Lucifer in 1995’s The Prophecy is one of that film’s strongest parts. As much as I love large portions of Cronenberg’s CV, he’s never been an actor’s director, and the performances that he elicits from his actors has never been any of his films’ most interesting elements. No one is surprised by the depth of Stephen Lack’s characterization in Scanners or Oliver Reed’s in The Brood, and as he moved into the eighties the audience’s investment in Johnny in The Dead Zone and Brendel in The Fly comes from the natural charisma of Christopher Walken and Jeff Goldblum, respectively. If we’re being charitable, we could say that Mortensen’s portrayal of Tom/Joey here improves as he moves from one persona to the other, but he’s not the only person here giving a performance that doesn’t measure up to what we as an audience know these actors are capable of. Harris and Bello are the only people who seem to understand what the film requires of them, while Hurt is playing his role like he’s in a MadTV sketch mocking The Sopranos. 

It’s perhaps not altogether fair to compare this film to others that followed it in this genre. The easiest points of comparison would be films like John Wick and Nobody, which also see a man who’s buried his assassin past (or his history of violence, if you will) beneath a new life and is drawn back into it when his old life reasserts itself. Those films are more concerned with their action elements than with emotional resonance or the effect on the protagonists’ family life (the Wick films circumvent this almost completely by having John’s wife already having died before the first movie opens) so it may not be a very fair comparison, but that’s all that this film has going for it when held up alongside other films of equivalent narrative shape, and it’s not a very strong argument in favor of History. It’s a pale preamble to the more emotionally effective neo-westerns that followed shortly on its heels like No Country and There Will Be Blood, a weaker film when compared to the director’s previous works as it forsakes his strengths as a director (eliciting fascination and disgust in equal measure) and highlights his weaknesses (a lack of character depth), and is ultimately an unsatisfying experience. I’m not sure what it is that I’m missing that others are seeing as so praiseworthy. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Topaz (1969)

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Topaz is the answer to the question, “What if Alfred Hitchcock made a James Bond movie?” Admittedly, Hitchcock had already been making spy movies for literal decades at this point, with this one premiering nearly thirty years after Foreign Correspondent. One of Topaz’s detractors, Pauline Kael, went so far as to write that the film was “the same damned spy picture he’s been making since the thirties, and it’s getting longer, slower, and duller.” I don’t know that I agree with her about the first part, as this one feels quite different in approach to his other spy films that I’ve seen, but it certainly feels longer, moves more slowly, and doesn’t have the same panache. I watched it just a couple of days after seeing Foreign Correspondent at The Prytania, and although that film had a few moments where it started to slow down a little, it was also enlivened by the excellent mid-film car chase and windmill infiltration as well as ending on a high note with the spectacular climax in which a commercial airliner is shot down by German U-boats. In comparison, there’s nary a moment of spectacle in Topaz, with the suspense arising from the tension of international conflict and potential violence. On a more granular level, both films feature a scene in which someone is killed via being thrown out of a window and the audience is kept in suspense about the identity of the victim. In Correspondent, we watch the body being flung from a cathedral and it’s possible that our protagonist may be the one in danger, while in Topaz the body is merely found after the fact by the main character, and we’re initially led to believe it may be his son in law. It’s still excellently filmed and aesthetically pleasing, but it’s also not very special. 

The film is based on a novel by Leon Uris that was inspired by a real French-Soviet conspiracy that Uris’s friend had helped to foil, although the book took many liberties from reality and the film takes many from the novel. After an opening sequence in which a defecting KGB Colonel and his wife and daughter evade recapture by his countrymen in Amsterdam, he’s escorted to the U.S. in care of American secret agent Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe). None of these people are our main character, however. That’s André Devereaux (Frederick Stafford), a French intelligence officer who operates under the guise of civilian business ventures. Before we even meet him, his colleagues confirm that they agree he is too close to the Americans, and he proves them right almost immediately by agreeing to help Nordstrom get pictures of a secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba on behalf of the U.S., without looping in his own government. He hires a fellow French expat named Philippe (Rosco Lee Browne) to bribe the secretary of General Rico Parra (John Vernon) of Cuba to get this access, and he immediately sets out to Cuba himself following this, much to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife Nicole (Dany Robin). Nicole has heard gossip that Devereaux’s frequent trips to Cuba may have more to do with an affair he’s having with a woman named Juanita de Cordoba than with his duties to France and the free world, and although Devereaux denies it, we see that he goes straight to Juanita (Karin Dor)’s house the moment his plane lands. Some subterfuge happens on the island and Devereaux returns to the states to learn that his wife has left him and returned to Paris, that “Topaz” is the codename of a secret cabal of Soviet sympathizers within the French government, and that he’s being recalled to France to stand before a council regarding his extracurricular activities. With Nordstrom’s intelligence, he has to figure out who the leader of Topaz is before he’s called to stand trial. 

Does that seem like it should take nearly two and a half hours? I’m not sure. Just two years prior, 1967 saw the release of You Only Live Twice (my personal favorite Bond, albeit one of the more problematic ones), which clocked in at 106 minutes, and it certainly seems like a lot more happened in that film than in Topaz. And if that comparison seems like I’m leaping, bear in mind that one of the Bond girls in You Only Live Twice is Karin Dor, who’s one of the best parts of this film as Juanita. There’s a very clear attempt to ape the Bond house style here, with Devereaux having two love interests in the film, the focus on infiltration via impersonation, and most clearly in the prevalence of the gadgetry of spycraft, which the film spends a decent amount of time focusing on. When Devereaux arrives in Cuba, he brings along some cutting-edge photographic equipment along with long distance lenses and remote-control cameras with a range of half a mile. When he gets the information that he needs, information gets stored in a microdot disguised as a period on one of the keys of his typewriter, negatives are stored in the disposable razor blade cartridges, and film is hidden inside the spool of his typewriter ribbon. None of it is as outlandish as some of Q’s later gadgets, but it’s still neat to me, although I could imagine this kind of detail being tedious to others. Again, Kael wasn’t wrong when she said that Hitch’s spy flicks were getting slower. 

That’s not the real weak element here, however, as the major problem is just how uninteresting Devereaux is. One of the more exciting sequences in the whole film happens as he literally watches from across the street, as Philippe poses as a reporter for Ebony (he would prefer to pretend to be from Playboy, and when Devereaux refuses, Philippe teases him for his lack of imagination) and infiltrates the hotel where Rico Parra is staying in Harlem as a show of solidarity with the Black community in America. Philippe lures Parra out onto the balcony to take photos of him waving to the throng that has gathered below so that Parra’s secretary can slink away with the case containing the Cuba-Russia memo. There are several tense moments in which it seems like Parra is going to notice the missing briefcase, and he always seems just on the verge of discovery, until Philippe has just enough time to get the information and deliver it to Devereaux. It’s fantastically tense and the performance from Browne is terrific, and it’s made all the better as this may be the only time I’ve ever seen a Hitchcock film in which a Black actor has been given so much to do. Vernon’s Parra is also an incredibly sympathetic character, all things considered, as Vernon very effectively conveys the internal turmoil that Parra feels when he realizes that Juanita, whom he considers above reproach as she is a “widow of a hero of the revolution,” has been involved with Devereaux’s activities. There’s an entire world happening behind his eyes when he kills her upon discovery of her assistance in Devereaux’s espionage, ensuring that she will not be forced to undergo the same tortures that he has overseen enacted on others. In short, despite this being a cast of less well-known actors than the caliber usually on display in a Hitchcock film, everyone is doing excellent work except for the lead, who’s about as interesting as a block of wood.

If you can get past that protagonist-shaped void of charisma, there’s still a lot to enjoy here. The conspiracy itself is effectively convoluted, and there are a lot of individual moments that stand out. Juanita’s death scene, shot from above as her purple dress spreads around her like a flower or a pool of blood as she falls to the floor, is beautiful. There’s actual archival footage of both Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in a sequence in which Devereaux attends a rally in Cuba, and that’s a lot of fun. The opening sequence, featuring Colonel Kusenov’s flight from the KGB, is marvelously tense, and although it doesn’t live up to the spectacle that we may have come to expect from the master of suspense, it certainly measures up in the suspense department. It seems that the presence of Devereaux’s daughter Michele (Claude Jade) and her husband Francois (Michel Subor) early on is merely incidental, only for them to come back in a major way in the film’s finale, with Francois’s remarkable skill at sketching portraits playing a huge role in the revelation of the identity of Topaz’s ringleader, “Columbine.” As a spy thriller, it’s constructed well, it just lacks the overall oomph that one expects from the director.

(Note: this review is of the 143 minute version of the film widely available in the U.S. and the U.K., rather than the 127-minute theatrical edition which doesn’t seem to have seen home video release in English-speaking markets since the 1987 laserdisc.)

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

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I was recently in New Orleans for GalaxyCon 2025, so Brandon and I took advantage of being in the same place to go see the new James Gunn Superman and recorded a podcast about both it and M3GAN 2.0. Before we parted ways, he asked if I would be interested in joining him for The Prytania’s Sunday morning screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic Foreign Correspondent, and I’m glad that I was able to check it out. This isn’t the Master of Suspense at the very top of his game, but it’s damn near it. 

It’s 1939, the final days before WWII, and crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) has been rechristened as “Huntley Haverstock” by the editor of the New York Morning Globe and sent to Europe to report on conditions there as well as interview a Dutch diplomat named Van Meer (Albert Basserman). Upon arrival, Jones/Haverstock immediately becomes smitten with the beautiful Carol (Laraine Day), but not before accidentally insulting her and her father Stephen Fisher (Herbert Marshall), the leader of the Universal Peace Party. Carol ultimately steps in as a speaker at the event where Jones planned to interview Van Meer, as the statesman is stated to have taken ill. When Jones meets him again in Amsterdam at the next stop on his tour, Van Meer seems not to recognize him and is gunned down by an assassin posing as a photographer moments later. A chase ensues as the car Jones commandeers to pursue the killer is driven by British reporter Scott ffolliott (George Sanders, of All About Eve) and he is accompanied by none other than Carol Fisher. The car bearing the murderer away seems to suddenly disappear when the group enters a stretch of road that crosses a vast field, unoccupied save for abandoned windmills. Jones decides to search about on foot while Scott and Carol attempt to catch up to the police, and although he discovers the hidden car and that Van Meer has actually been spirited away for interrogation while a duplicate was killed in his stead, by the time the police arrive, all evidence is gone. 

After recently watching the rather dour Frenzy (and following up this screening with a viewing of another dry Hitch picture, Topaz), the comedy in this one is refreshing. There’s a lot of hay made about the spelling of Scott’s last name, which is deliberately left un-capitalized. This is apparently a real English gentry practice, as the lack of consistent usage of capital letters across large swathes of British history meant that some documents utilized a double letter at the beginning of a name to indicate that it was a proper noun. When a more standardized capitalization scheme came about, some families worried that if their names were updated they might lose some deed or other if they were named “Folliott” and not “ffolliott.” Sanders is playing a wonderfully unconcerned dandy of a man who’s having a lot of fun with all of this espionage rigamarole, and although he’s serious when the moment demands it, he brings a light energy to the proceedings that is much appreciated given the subject matter. There’s also a delightful appearance from Edmund Gwenn (who would appear as Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street seven years later) as a babbling, inept would-be assassin who’s sicced on Jones by the film’s twist villain. Rowley is theoretically supposed to act as Jones’s bodyguard but instead plans to lead him to his death, in a sequence that culminates in the steeple of a towering church, where Rowley’s attempts to push Jones to his doom are repeatedly interrupted by other sightseers and tourists. Jones and Carol are also quite charming together, even if it takes a while to move them past her initial antipathy toward him and their courtship, once this is surmounted, moves a bit too fast. 

The tension here is excellently done as well. The scene in which Jones sneaks around in the windmill and discovers the real Van Meer is very tautly directed, as is the scene in which Jones must sneak from one upper-story hotel room on an elevated floor to another in order to escape being silenced. Both are spectacular, but nothing can top the film’s climax, when Carol, Scott, Jones, and the apprehended antagonist/instigator are en route back to the United States just as WWII breaks out in Europe. Their commercial airliner is almost immediately shot at by a German U-boat and goes down, and the sequence is utterly marvelous, like something out of Final Destination. One unfortunate woman stands to voice her distress at the situation and her intent to contact the British consulate as soon as the plane lands, only to be shot to death by bullets that pierce the fuselage mid-sentence. Aside from a potentially improbable number of survivors, the plane crash is frighteningly realistic, and it put me slightly on edge given that I had a flight out of MSY that same day. At the film’s climax, Jones delivers an impassioned plea over the radio that resonates just as much now as it did then, even if no one ever uses the word “fascism” outright. 

The romance in this one is decent. It lacks the passion of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief or the slow smolder between Kelly and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. There are elements of Notorious here in the parallels between Carol here and Ingmar Bergman’s Alicia in that film, but to say more would spoil a major plot point. This one is pretty close in the Hitchcock timeline to his 1938 picture The Lady Vanishes, and the romance here plays out at the same accelerated pace as Lady, with the major difference being that the romantic couple in that film spent most of their screentime together investigating and their natural chemistry was a strong factor in selling the breakneck romance. McCrea is fantastic as a leading man, even if he was Hitchcock’s second choice (after Gary Cooper), and he’s great in all of his scenes, while Laraine Day is absolutely delightful as Carol Fisher, but the two spend just a touch too little time together on screen to sell it completely, and as such they never quite mesh despite each individual actor’s excellence. Sanders’s ffolliott is also very fun here, and is the perfect comedic relief that the film occasionally needs, when that role isn’t being fulfilled by Rowley falling out of a steeple. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

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I was absolutely, utterly, desperately sick of seeing trailers for M3GAN 2.0 — months ago. I couldn’t wait for the movie to hit theaters not because I had any real interest in it, but because that would mean that I would finally be able to go to the theater safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to see that ad again. No more audio clips from Boyz II Men or Brittney Spears, no more “Hold on to your vaginas,” no more M3GAN in a wingsuit, no more “You threatened to pull out my tongue and put me in a wheelchair,” “I was upset!”, no more “She’s a smoking hot warrior princess.” The trailer is imprinted into my brain now to the point where I feel like I could quote it in the same vein as Jenny Nicholson’s full cover of the China Beach season one Time Warner DVD set. But after returning from a nice international holiday, despite nearly a full day of flight, I was too wired to sleep, and I happened to get back on a $5 Tuesday, so … why not? 

Since we’re already on the subject of the film’s marketing, it’s worth noting up top that the trailer for M3GAN 2.0 is very misleading. The “smoking hot warrior princess” line and all of the attendant implications thereof—that M3GAN has fans, that there’s a culture of weird online creeps who fetishize her, etc.—are completely absent here. M3GAN never offers Gemma (Allison Williams) up as a sacrifice in order to save Cady (Violet McGraw), and other lines that do appear in the film occur in completely different contexts. I’ve known people in the past who would consider this kind of trailer-to-film discrepancy to be a form of false advertising, and to whom no amount of explanation that trailers are often created months in advance of a movie’s final cut will mollify them. This instance, however, is a clear case of that misdirection working in the film’s favor, as the advertising undersold the final product, which itself overdelivered. The only real plot point that appears in the trailer that’s accurate to the film is that the sequel is going the Terminator 2 route by making the first film’s villain a protagonist in the second, defending the previous film’s survivors against a more advanced version of themself. It’s not at all what one would expect in a sequel to the unexpectedly successful first film, but I would argue that it manages to find its footing, at least insofar as a film this campy and over-the-top can. 

It’s been a couple of years since young Cady came to live with her Aunt Gemma following the death of her parents, and Gemma’s creation of a robotic “friend” for her troubled niece as a prototype for a toy line ending in disaster when M3GAN turned homicidal and killed four people. In the interim, Gemma has served a brief stint in prison and emerged from the other side as a passionate advocate for oversight in the tech industry, delivering (similar to but legally distinct) TED Talks, releasing a book about the dangers of AI, and partnering (perhaps even romantically) with a former cyber security guru named Christian Bradley (Aristotle Athari) to work on potential legal regulation. In all of this, she also seeks to highlight that what M3GAN represented: a potential opportunity for guardians to outsource many of the duties of parenting to technology as part of a greater social movement toward automating and alienating the things that make us human. Ironically, throwing herself into this new passion project with such fervor causes her to be less present for Cady in exactly the same way that her robotics work did in the first film. On a greater scope, Colonel Tim Sattler (Timm Sharp) has loaned out an android soldier based on M3GAN’s original specs to a foreign government to demonstrate its proficiency, only for AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) to go rogue almost immediately. After killing the hostage that she was supposed to liberate, she begins systematically tracking down and killing everyone involved with her creation, including the arms dealer who brokered her sale to the government and the technocrat Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement) whose shady activities related to his products means that he is the only one who could shut her down remotely. When armed men show up in the middle of the night, M3GAN reveals that she’s actually been staying close in a technologically ethereal form this whole time, and offers to help stop AMELIA, in exchange for a new body. 

I saw this in an empty theater. Sure, it was a 10:15 PM screening, but it was also $5 movie night, which is usually packed. As I waited to buy my ticket, I watched as a couple of families with elementary aged children brought in blankets and other cozy accoutrement to settle in for a late screening of the new Jurassic Park World movie. No one was there for M3GAN 2.0 but me. One of my quirks is that I rarely laugh out loud when I’m watching a movie by myself. It’s not because I feel the need to perform enjoyment in the presence of others so much as it is that I think there’s an element to comedy that’s social. It might just have been the travel exhaustion, but I found myself laughing aloud at multiple points in this film, especially in the back half. Of all the horror flick classic killers the easiest comparison would be to compare M3GAN to Chucky, since they’re both killer dolls, but when it comes to character, M3GAN has a bit of the Freddy Krueger about her. She’s sarcastic, quippy, and often just plain mean, with only one overriding and eternal imperative: protect Cady. What doesn’t take the edge off of her character is the character growth she’s undergone between the first two films as a result of watching Gemma and Cady as a kind of techno omniscience, to the point that her Cady-based directives have evolved into genuine affection and care, or she’s gotten quite good at pretending this is the case. She’s still M3GAN, and I still enjoyed her presence, even if she’s in a completely different movie. What’s not to love? 

(Listen to me and Brandon discuss M3GAN 2.0 more here.)

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: M3GAN v Superman – Dusk of Justice

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two superhero movies currently in wide theatrical release: M3GAN 2.0 (2025) & Superman (2025).

00:00 Welcome

04:17 I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
15:10 The Age of Innocence (1993)
21:57 Misericordia (2025)
28:50 Looney Tunes – The Day the Earth Blew Up (2025)
34:24 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

38:24 Megan 2.0 (2025) vs. Superman (2025)

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

Gwen and the Book of Sand (1985)

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Gwen et le livre de sable (Gwen and the Book of Sand) is a 1985 animated feature directed by Jean-François Laguionie, with its illustrations and animations done in gouache, giving the whole film a very watercolor texture. The plot concerns Gwen, a teenage girl who is adopted into a nomadic tribe who live in a post-apocalyptic desert. One member of the tribe, Roseline, is identified as a witch, and is said to be over 170 years old, and it is through her we get what little knowledge we have of this world and how it came to be. She tells us that the gods destroyed the civilizations of the past, and that now the world is stalked by an Eldritch abomination called Makou, which periodically roams the desert and spews out reproductions of various household objects from the sky, usually of a gigantic variety. Of course, Roseline also believes that the walled city she and her people avoid and from which the Makou seems to originate is the afterlife and that those within it are spirits, but when we learn more about them later, it becomes clear that Roseline’s wisdom is incomplete and thus many of her concepts of the universe’s function are inaccurate. In Gwen, Roseline sees a girl who has never known fear and respects this about her, but when Gwen and Roseline’s grandson Nokmoon sneak out one night to make love and fall asleep in a giant chest of drawers, Nokmoon ends up taken by the Makou. As the rest of the tribe moves on, Roseline and Nokmoon journey to the “afterlife” to try and rescue him. 

This film, like The Tragedy of Man, is currently available in a remastered edition from boutique home video retailer Deaf Crocodile. I got to see it on the big screen at my local arthouse, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Although the motion of the animation is limited at times, that minimal movement lends the whole thing a storybook quality, rendering Gwen as a post-apocalyptic fairytale. It’s a fairly short feature, clocking in at under 70 minutes, but it feels no less fully realized than a film that was twice its length. The desert features fantastical creatures that feel like revisitations of earlier French animation experiments in design; there’s nothing as strange here as what you might see in La Planète sauvage or Les Maîtres du temps, but they are of a kind. The desert nomads live solely off of a diet of feathers harvested from a mutant ostrich, and the only light that they have at night comes from a bioluminescent scorpion. Where the film gets its most surreal visual elements is in the “gifts” of the Makou, as giant watering cans reign from the sky and Gwen and Roseline navigate a labyrinth of doors or summit a mountain range of clocks. We eventually learn that these items are generated by the Makou is response to religious supplication from the people who dwell within the walled city, where religion has dissolved into a unified cargo cult centered around the titular book of sand, which is in actuality a home goods catalogue from before the collapse of civilization. Their hymns consist of recitations of product descriptions, which then prompt the Makou into creating them. The leaders of this “faith” are two twin brothers who observe the captive Nokmoon’s psychically projected dreams and hope that this can help them to prompt the Makou to create something “alive” rather than the inanimate objects that it normally produces. 

The mechanics of all of this are mostly irrelevant. The world-building exists solely to allow for the visuals, and that’s where the film shines. Gwen is able to rescue Nokmoon because this is that kind of fable, and it’s mostly an accident. The twin priests observe that a spiral image in Nokmoon’s dream resembles the product image of a particular firework, and prompt their faithful throng into singing it into existence via the Makou, which backfires when the people below are terrified by the suddenly bright, loud heavens. Gwen’s presence in the climax has no real bearing on the events there, except that she is able to bring Nokmoon home. She knows a bit more about the world now than Roseline does, but she lets the old woman continue to believe as she always has. Even if that story is a little confusing for the audience (and there are certainly some things left up to interpretation and conjecture, which is why I would recommend watching this one with a friend), it’s the sumptuous use of a non-standard artistic technique that makes this one worth finding and checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wolf (1994)

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Wolf is an oddity. I went on a little bit of a werewolf movie sidequest earlier this year viewing The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Wolfen, and when I borrowed the latter from the library, I thought Mike Nichols’s Wolf was what I was getting. I have very strong memories of the evocative movie poster for this one in at least one of the video stores of my youth, and I’ve always been curious about it. How can you not have some curiosity about a werewolf flick helmed by the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two years before he made The Birdcage? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and James Spader, no less. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly noteworthy one either, which is likely why it gets mistaken for Wolfen. 

Will Randall (Nicholson) is the editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house, although he’s a relatively mild-mannered man—at least as mild-mannered as any Nicholson character can be—for someone of such prestige. He has a loving relationship with his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and the respect of his peers and subordinates (David Hyde Pierce, Eileen Atkins), as well as a strong affection for his protege Stewart (James Spader). While driving down a Vermont road one evening, he hits a large dark mammal with his car, and when he gets out to check on it, the beast bites him. Despite his doctor’s insistence that wolves are extinct in New England, Will is convinced that this is what bit him. At a party hosted by the owner of the company, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will is told that a new editor-in-chief has been appointed, and that Will can either transfer to an undesirable position manning the publisher’s office in Eastern Europe. Will immediately realizes that his “best friend” Stewart has stabbed him in the back, and he meets Alden’s daughter Laura (Pfeiffer) as he wanders the grounds, taking in the betrayal. Meanwhile, Will also starts to experience unusual physical changes, as the area around his wound sprouts long fur and his senses grow more enhanced, as he is able to smell tequila on the breath of a colleague, doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t need his glasses to read, and can hear conversations occurring in other parts of the office. Returning home one night, he smells something familiar on his wife’s clothing and confronts Stewart at the younger man’s front door before bounding up the stairs and animalistically and discovering his wife in Stewart’s bedroom, but not before snarling at (and perhaps biting) Stewart. 

It’s a pretty rote werewolf story, all things considered, and one that would have entered a market that was already saturated with American Werewolves, Teen Wolves, and Howlings. The script was co-written by Wesley Strick and, bizarrely, poet and essayist James Harrison. It is not based on Harrison’s novel Wolf: A False Memoir as one might suspect, and Harrison seems to have been involved initially simply because he and Nicholson were friends. This was Harrison’s second (and last) attempt at working in Hollywood, as he quit the film in exasperation over creative differences with Nichols. “I wanted Dionysian, but he wanted Apollonian,” he was quoted as saying (in literature, Dionysian attributes are those of intoxication and thus ecstasy, emotion, and disorder, while Appolonian attributes are logical, clear, and harmonious). That makes a certain amount of sense, but in the same interview, he then said, “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua,” which is less clear as a complaint. Strick, for his part, had risen to some prominence as the co-screenwriter of horror comedy Arachnophobia and had recently penned the script for the similarly messy 1991 Martin Scorsese picture Cape Fear as well as uncredited rewrites on Batman Returns. After 1997s underrated Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, his credits take a steep nosedive, as his credits include the much-maligned 2005 video game adaptation Doom, the ill-fated and poorly conceived 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and the 2014 rotten erotic thriller The Loft. I want to say that some of the weakness was already present in the script here, but it’s really impossible to tell what parts came from him and which were from Harrison, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Elaine May was brought in for some uncredited punch-ups (although the fact that Wolf is two full hours long and meanders in the middle shows her fingerprints if nothing else). 

Pfeiffer is excellent here as she always is, and it is interesting to see Nicholson play a more subdued character than he is normally known for. Spader is effective as the smarmy sycophant who turns out to be aiming for Will’s job (and bed), and it’s no surprise when he turns up late in the film undergoing his own lycanthrope transformation, although I couldn’t help but think about how much I would have enjoyed this film a little bit more if it had been Christian Slater in the role. The film’s supporting cast is quite good. Although Pierce gets very little to do, Eileen Atkins does very solid work as Will’s secretary. Richard Jenkins appears as the detective investigating the sudden death of Will’s wife Charlotte, and he’s paired with veteran TV actor Brian Markinson. Perhaps one of the biggest standouts is Om Puri, who appears as Dr. Vijay Alezais, the folklore specialist that Will tracks down in order to get a handle on all the changes that his body is going through. Alezais tells him that it’s less a transformation than it is a kind of possession, and that the wolf that now lives inside him isn’t evil, but will only make him “more” of whatever he currently is. He even gives Will an amulet that will keep the beast inside, and it does seem to be working until the moment that Will must remove it in order to gain the wolf-strength needed to save Laura from Stewart. 

There’s simply nothing special about Wolf. If anything, it’s pretty rote. A perfectly serviceable mid-90s cable afternoon feature, but no staggeringly clever take on any of its component elements. Pfeiffer is serving looks in this one that are so 1994 Eddie Bauer coded that you’ll get something out of this if that’s of interest to you. There’s a lot of slow-motion werewolf leaping that gives the impression that Nichols has never seen a single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, because all that’s missing is that bionic sound effect to complete the tableau, and I’m afraid that’s not complimentary. The film does make good use of the Bradbury Building, most notable for being the place where the climax of Blade Runner takes place but I also recently saw in D.O.A., and it’s always a comfort to the eye to see it in use. Still, it’s telling that I’m closing out this review of a werewolf review by praising the architecture. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cape Fear (1991)

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As the final moments of Cape Fear came to a close with a zoom-in on Juliette Lewis’s eyes and a half-heartedly delivered epilogue about how she and her family never spoke about what happened with Max Cady with one another, I turned to my viewing companion and asked, “Wait, was this a bad movie?” to which he replied “I think it might have been.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

It came up months ago in a discussion about Goodfellas in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Nowhere, but I have a pretty big Martin Scorsese gap in my film knowledge. Until this year, I thought I had seen only one of his films, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (which was discussed in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Richard III), although further review of his filmography revealed that I had also seen two movies that I didn’t realize were his: the concert film The Last Waltz and Shutter Island, neither of which I initially connect to him because, in the case of the former, it’s not very much like his primary body of work, and in the case of the latter, it wasn’t a very good movie. Since then, I’ve also seen Casino (discussed in our Junk Head episode) and Taxi Driver (discussed in our Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie episode), and now we can add Cape Fear to the list, although I had kind of already seen it given that it forms the basis of the Simpsons episode “Cape Feare,” which I would conservatively estimate that I have seen one hundred times. 

A remake of the 1962 film directed by J. Lee Thompson starring Gregory Peck as a lawyer stalked and harassed by a recently released felon played by Robert Mitchum, Scorsese’s Cape Fear casts Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden, a former Atlanta public defender now living in North Carolina. His wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) is a graphic designer and their daughter Danielle (Lewis) is a high school student whom they have enrolled in summer school to punish her for smoking pot. Bowden is also carrying on an emotional (but not physical—yet) affair with a county clerk employee named Lori (Ileana Douglas). It isn’t his flirtation with infidelity that turns his life upside down, however, but the release of Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a man Sam dismissively refers to as a “Pentecostal hillbilly,” the scion of a family of snake-handling whom Sam unsuccessfully defended against a charge of aggravated rape of a sixteen-year-old girl. During the trial, Sam followed his personal ethics while simultaneously committing dereliction of his duty as Cady’s appointed advocate by burying evidence that Cady’s victim was characterized as “promiscuous,” which would have allowed Cady to argue down to a lesser sentence. Sam assumed that this would never come to light since Cady was illiterate, but in the fourteen years that he spent in prison, Cady has not only learned to read but has studied philosophy, theology, and the law. Using his new knowledge, Cady sets about tormenting the Bowden family while always remaining just within the allowance of legal statutes and using Sam’s defensiveness and hot temper against him by goading him into starting altercations. When Cady assaults Lori after taking her home from a bar because he knows that she, with her knowledge of how her sexual and personal history will be dragged out in front of a courtroom full of her co-workers, will refuse to press charges, things take a turn for the violent, and things get worse for the Bowdens and their allies from there. 

It’s impossible to talk about this film in 2025 without taking it into consideration with the indelible pop cultural impression that its Simpsons adaptation left on the greater consciousness. “Marge on the Lam” will never be more famous than Thelma & Louise; “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(d’oh)cious” will never be better remembered than Mary Poppins; and “Rosebud” will never touch the widespread cultural importance of Citizen Kane. But Cape Fear? It may be less famous than “Cape Feare.” It doesn’t hurt that it’s widely considered one of the series’ best episodes, usually appearing in various top ten lists, and it’s a personal favorite of mine. When it comes to Sideshow Bob episodes, I think that I would give the edge to “Sideshow Bob Roberts” by just a hair because of that installment’s biting political edge, but “Cape Feare” is the funniest by a wide margin. Even if you’re someone who’s never seen the show, the omnipresence of memes that originate from it mean that it’s given us some of the longest lasting Simpsons jokes and images, like Homer’s extreme stupidity rendering him unable to respond to the name of his witness protection identity, Homer’s frightening offer of brownies and brandishing of a chainsaw on the “Thompson” family’s houseboat, and, of course, Bob and the rakes. It’s with this in mind that I offer the possibility that this movie was not intended to be as comedic as I found it, which contributed to a feeling of overall tonal whiplash and inconsistency that made it a strange text to interact with. That, combined with some experimental filmmaking choices that range from the interesting to the absurd, make for a film that is overall less than the sum of its parts. 

Despite the main conflict of the film happening between Nolte’s Sam and De Niro’s Cady, the most powerful scenes in this film are those that feature the film’s talented roster of actresses acting against one of them. Cady’s semi-seduction of Danielle by calling her the night before summer school starts to pose as her new drama teacher and direct her to the theatre in the film’s basement for “class” the next day, where he preys upon the fifteen-year-old’s desire to be treated more maturely, is skin-crawling, and Lewis plays Danielle perfectly in this scene —  disturbed but intrigued, flattered in spite of herself, and frighteningly naive. Lange gets two big scenes. While her big monologue in the finale, in which she attempts to redirect Cady’s imminent sexual violence against Danielle back onto herself by flattering him and lying about an emotional connection, is quite good, it’s the earlier scene in which she accuses Sam of sleeping with Lori after hearing him sounding overly concerned on the phone that is her powerhouse moment. She’s a tornado of fury, and it’s fantastic to witness. In Ileana Douglas’s penultimate scene, Sam comes to her in the hospital after Cady has beaten and sexually assaulted her, and we get our first glimpse of just how dangerous and vile a man Cady is; Lori has been brutalized. Douglas gives what may be a career-best performance delivering a harrowing monologue about what it’s like to be a woman who’s witnessed the justice system act as a secondary violating entity in the way that it forces the events to be revisited and picked over, examined and re-examined and cross-examined, and how often justice fails to be served in spite of all of it. 

It’s a gut-punch of a scene (genuinely the film’s greatest), one that’s immediately followed by one in which the furious Sam demands takes his anger out verbally upon sympathetic police lieutenant Elgart (Robert Mitchum, who previously portrayed Cady in 1962), who ends the scene with the uproariously funny line “Well, pardon me all over the place.” He’s not the only returning actor from the earlier film to appear in a scene that borders on camp in tone, either, as Peck portrays Lee Heller, an attorney that Cady engages to file a restraining order against Sam when Sam’s private investigator Kersek (Joe Don Baker) hires some goons to rough Cady up, in which Cady manages to get the upper hand. Heller appears in court wearing a suit that’s several sizes too big for him while Peck affects a Southern accent, to the effect that he feels like he’s a simple hyper chicken from a backwoods asteroid costumed by David Byrne. Cady himself is an interesting case, as De Niro plays him as a truly terrifying man, driven and determined and focused, with nothing but hatred and revenge in his heart. On the other hand, Cady is a clownish figure, dressing in garish clothing of various bold prints (notably, Cady also continues to wear bellbottoms in several scenes, which would have been the style at the time that he was sentenced in 1977), and his menace is undercut by some of De Niro’s choices to go a little “broad.” Or am I just too Simpsons-pilled? Do I read the scene in which a severely dirtied Cady detaches himself from the bottom of the Bowden’s Jeep Cherokee after they’ve driven out to Cape Fear as campy and funny because I’ve seen Sideshow Bob do it countless times? Am I not supposed to be laughing when Cady finally dies, being dragged beneath the surging waters of Cape Fear when he starts speaking in tongues before singing a hymn about the River Jordan? It feels like I shouldn’t be given that mere moments before this Leigh and Danielle were in harrowing sexual danger, but I also can’t imagine that the film could expect me to take Cady’s dying glossolalia seriously either. “Cape Feare” is in such a rhetorical conversation with Cape Fear that it’s essentially paratext, so I have to consider that I’m biased not to take the film’s drama seriously, but I also don’t think that the shadow of “Cape Feare” is entirely to blame for a Cape Fear’s tonal failings either. 

One of the things that is most praiseworthy in the film is the moral dilemma that it posits. Sam unequivocally betrayed his oath and broke the law by suppressing evidence that would have reduced Cady’s sentence; there’s no argument about that. But Cady had already bragged to him about beating two previous aggravated sexual assault charges and when Sam witnessed the extent of his brutality toward his teenaged victim, he made what is a reasonable moral and ethical choice to ensure that Cady could not continue his reign of terror. Justice failed, and justice was served. This is ultimately what Cady discovered and what set him off on his violent revenge campaign, and it turns out that Sam did it all in vain, anyway. Cady insists he would have served the seven years he would have gotten with his reduced charges and considered it just, but by the time he had spent that amount of time incarcerated, he had already murdered another inmate and made it look like an accident. This open secret meant that the parole board never even considered his early release. If Sam hadn’t hidden the “exonerating” evidence, Cady would still have served the same amount of time. Violence simply begets; that’s its nature. If the film had spent a little bit more time on this topic, I think it might have been able to pull these disparate threads together, but it never really comes to the forefront. As it is, this one is composed of some great elements, but they don’t work together. You can’t take it as seriously as it sometimes demands because it’s a little too campy in certain places, but you can’t take it as a fully straightforward campy thriller-comedy not because it’s often too frightening but because the omnipresent threat of sexual violence makes it too dark to comfortably enjoy on that level. Less worthy as a whole than the combined value of its individual parts.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond