What is The Substance? It’s 5% Barbie, 5% Carrie, 5% Requiem for a Dream, 5% The Fly, 10% Akira, 10% just the old lady from Room 237 in The Shining, 25% Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video, 10% Jane Fonda workout tape, 5% Architectural Digest, and 20% sour lemon candy, and it’s all 100% fresh, new, and exciting. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, who bears some resemblance to Moore; both found commercial and critical success (including an Oscar) in the early parts of their career, but their star has faded somewhat in the intervening years. Elisabeth now hosts a morning workout program for an unidentified major network, or at least she did until her birthday, when executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—wink, wink—unceremoniously lets her go from the show, essentially simply for having turned fifty. A hurt and shocked Elisabeth is distracted while driving by the sight of a billboard of her being taken down and ends up in a horrific collision. Although she’s remarkably unharmed, she’s shaken by the experience, and an almost inhumanly attractive nurse slips something into her coat pocket: a thumb drive printed with a phone number on one side and “The Substance” on the other, along with a note stating simply “It changed my life.” She watches the surreal advertising campaign/pharmaceutical pitch on the drive—a promise that The Substance will create a younger, more idealized version of yourself—and tosses it in the trash, before ultimately caving in on both her curiosity and her wounded self-image and giving it a shot (literally, and it’s for single use and you really, really should dispose of it after).
Everyone has been talking about how much this movie is a return to form for body horror, but it’s more than just that. Sure, there’s mutating flesh, necrotic digits, and self surgery, but this is a movie that’s gross from the jump, long before people start erupting from each like molting salamanders. It’s mostly the most disgusting images you can imagine intercut with the occasional too-sterile environment or softcore aerobics so chock full of lingering shots of gyrating youthful glutes that they stop looking like flesh altogether. The first shot of the film, which gives us a demonstration of what The Substance does by showing it being injected into the yolk of an egg as it sits in its white on a countertop, before the yolk suddenly duplicates. Not long after, we are treated to an intense, almost fisheye closeup of Harvey’s face while he goes on a screaming, chauvinistic phone tirade while using a urinal before we cut to him grossly and messily slathering prawns in a yellow sauce and stuffing them messily in his face while he gives Elisabeth a series of backhanded compliments while performing the world’s worst exit interview; and we in the audience know he didn’t wash his hands. As Elisabeth leaves the hospital after her accident, an old classmate from before she was a star gives her his number on a piece of paper that’s then dropped into a puddle of some unknown liquid that’s murky and features a couple of floating cigarette butts. By the time the youthful version of Elisabeth, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), is stitching up the wound on Elisabeth’s back from which she just emerged like a hot bloody Pop-Tart, you’re already so full of bile from the general nastiness that the gore is almost a reprieve. Of course, that’s before Sue starts taking more time than the rules of The Substance allow, with her selfishness morphing Elisabeth slowly (and then very quickly) into a witch of the Roald Dahl variety.
That general grossness, as a departure from pure body horror, is also represented in the film’s use of yellows throughout, rather than (or at least in addition to) the reds that most flicks of this genre use. It’s omnipresent and I loved it, from the aforementioned yolks to the goldenrod color of Elisabeth’s coat to the neon yellow of The Substance itself and the fluids you may vomit as a result of its use. A ball of yellow clay is halved and reformed into two shapes in the demonstration video for The Substance to represent the “other” being formed from the “matrix.” The eggs reappear later when Elisabeth, in a fit of pique over Sue beginning to push the limits of their connection, starts cooking a large number of disgusting French dishes, which includes combining an ungodly number of eggs in a bowl and then beating them, splashing the yolks all over her. And, in the film’s final moments, a dandelion yellow sidewalk cleaner passes over Elisabeth’s Walk of Fame star, scrubbing up … well, that would be a spoiler. It’s a fun way to add a different kind of a splash of color; I’d go so far as to say yellow is used as effectively here as, say, red in Suspiria, and if you’ve been around here a while you know what high praise that is from me.
Moore is revelatory here, and it’s great to see her on screen again, especially after such a long absence. She grounds a lot of the more surreal elements that become a larger and larger part of the story as reality becomes more and more detached from what we’re watching. She looks amazing here, which further underlines just how depraved the culture in which she resides is. While Elisabeth is fifty, Moore is a little over a decade older than that, and her body is, pardon my French, fucking phenomenal. That this makes Elisabeth the perfect person for her ongoing aspirational position as the host of Sparkle Your Life is completely lost on Harvey and the vapid executives and shareholders of the network, who salivate like Tex Avery hounds over Sue and the befeathered dancers who are set to perform on a show that Sue is set to host. Moore plays her with a quiet dignity that’s clearly covering a deep loneliness, which is itself exacerbated by the blow to her ego and her self-worth that come as the result of losing her job solely because of ageism. Qualley is also fun here. So far, she has been in one of the worst movies I have seen this year as well as one of the best, but even in the latter she was not among the moving pieces that garnered my esteem. Although a lot of what she’s tasked with here is more about how she looks than about her acting abilities, when she’s called on to perform, she delivers a solid performance that endeared her to me more than anything else I’ve seen her in before.
Overall, this is one of the most fun movies I’ve seen all year. Gross when it needs to be, surreal when the narrative calls for it, and funny all the way through.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
With this film, a new subfranchise was born, entitled the “Tomorrowverse,” inspired by the title Superman: Man of Tomorrow. It’s yet another origin story for our old pal Superman: raised by simple farmers, aware of his extraterrestrial origin but with no knowledge of his people or culture; starting out as a flying vigilante in street clothes before Ma Kent creates his iconic outfit out of the clothing in which he was swaddled as a baby; meeting Lois Lane as the newest member of the Daily Planet; debuting as a public figure by saving a launched vehicle from plummeting into Metropolis; believing that he may have found an ally in Lex Luthor coming to trust him before the inevitable betrayal. If that all sounds a little rote, it’s because it is. Sure, there are some novel elements. Here, the big blue Boy Scout learns about his origins from Martian Manhunter, and the creation of longtime Superman villain Parasite is because of an attack from the interstellar bounty hunter Lobo. Even with that in mind, few of these films have plated it as safe as Man of Tomorrow. As a result, the end product is fine – 82 minutes of palatable, safe Superman stuff, but not something that you could call special or interesting.
After an opening sequence in which an elementary-aged Clark has to go home from a sleepover at another boy’s house; he’s disquieted by his peer’s reaction to an old horror movie in which the villainous alien invader reveals his true face. Flashing forward, the now adult Clark Kent (Darren Criss) is an intern at The Daily Planet, which mostly means that he’s fetching coffee for people with bylines. Delivering the staff’s orders to an event where Lex Luthor (Zachary Quinto, an inspired choice) is planning to launch his latest doohickey into space, Luthor is confronted by a grad student named Lois Lane (Alexandra Daddario), who exposes his unconcerned-to-the-point-of-malice negligence about the people living near the launch site. Clark, in the middle of a quick conversation with a janitor at the facility that serves to establish said janitor’s humanity before exposure to space technobabble turns him into one of the film’s antagonistic forces, leaps into action to stop everyone from being reduced to ashes by the falling debris. After this is done, he’s now a public figure. Ma Kent gives him the suit, he congratulates Lois on her scoop while learning that she’s got her sights on taking down the so-called “Superman” now, and he continues to find himself pursued by a shadowy figure. Said figure eventually reveals himself to be the shapeshifting J’onn J’onzz, aka Martian Manhunter (Ike Amadi), and establishes that they are both the last of their kind. When he first came to Earth, he sought out others like him and briefly touched the mind of the infant Kal-El, and in so doing was able to retain the baby’s earliest memories and can share the images of Clark’s birth parents with him, as well as learn the truth about his home planet’s destruction. This sets up the appearance of Lobo (Ryan Hurst), a bounty hunter from space who has been sent by parties unknown to “collect” the last Kryptonian. The initial conflict with Lobo results in one of the alien’s devices going off near that poor doomed janitor (Brett Dalton), interacting with the lab equipment around him to turn him into “Parasite,” a purple monster that absorbs energy, growing stronger with each encounter, becoming another threat to Metropolis that the freshman Superman must juggle.
Where there are highlights, they come mostly at the beginning and end of the film. The opening, in which a young Clark is disturbed by his friend’s innocent statements about scary aliens, sets up a story element that does return later, when a now-adult Superman tells a gathered mob that the monster attacking the power plant is human while he himself is extraterrestrial. It ends up a bit underdeveloped, and it’s a shame that the opening scene is the strongest one. When we first meet the man who will become Parasite, we learn about his home life (wife, elementary aged daughter, another one on the way), his past (two tours in Iraq), and that he has his suspicions about what’s going on at the laboratory that employs him. When he gets turned into a monster, I thought to myself, “Gee, this sure is a lot like Spider-Man 3’s Sandman plot,” and damned if the film didn’t follow through. We see him visit his daughter, he contemplates the monster he becomes, and he ultimately sacrifices himself when forced to consider his humanity. It’s a little cheap to go back to “the villain is defeated by love” as a climax after so recently (and more cynically and satisfactorily) going to that well in Constantine: City of Demons. Nothing is really new here, and everything that happens between the beginning and the end is such a mishmash that I had to go back and see if the satellite falling and Lobo encounter were part of the same set piece or not (they’re separate events, but I can’t separate them in my mind). Quinto’s Luthor is fresh; he’s really bringing back a lot of that old Sylar energy, and that’s fun. Lois and Clark have little in the way of chemistry at this point, but there is something that’s at least thoughtful in the way that she reveals to Clark that she plans to reschedule her Superman interview last minute as a power play, which allows him to pull a reverse Uno on her by doing the same as Superman.
As of this writing, this is the final Superman solo animated outing from this outfit, other than something called “Batman and Superman: Battle of the Super Sons,” which looks like shit. That may end up saving this from being the worst of the Supes films, since it’s otherwise the most banal and flavorless of the bunch. Doomsday was pretty average but was elevated by a voice performance from Anne Heche that made it something more special than it really had the right to be. All-Star Superman has been one of the real highlights of this watch-through; Superman vs. The Elite was less than the sum of its parts, but the highs in did have were more than anything that was on display here; Unbound was characterized by more complex interpersonal dynamics. Even when these films have seemed immature or as if they were catering to an audience that it didn’t want to get “too cerebral” for, none of them have felt more like a Saturday morning cartoon than this one. The new artistic design is, to give it credit, very evocative of the thick ink lines that comic books are known for, and perhaps I’ll get used to it, but I was not won over. In truth, that makes this not only the least interesting Superman solo film, it’s also the ugliest (until Super Sons—shudder). It feels like a real slap to give a movie that’s as inoffensive and wispy as this one such a low star rating since there’s really nothing wrong with it; there’s just nothing really there.
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!
“Technically, the villain is Satan in a jar, but this belongs to a canon of oddball horrors where the real killer is just remarkably bad vibes: The Happening, Messiah of Evil, Annihilation, Final Destination, etc. You could call it ‘cosmic’ or ‘Lovecraftian’ or whatever, but it’s really just the horror of stumbling into a party where the mood’s already gone rancid (and people occasionally explode into goo).” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“The sensation of venomous spiders crawling all over your body and hatching eggs inside it is so automatically, reflexively freaky that this has a lot of free time for bonus details like character development and emotional stakes. It’s like one of those semi-documentary film festival dramas about life on the poverty-line in French housing projects, except with way more gigantic, pissed off spider beasts than usual.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Chances are, if the title of this film sounds familiar to you, you’re either too into the movies (in which case, pull up a chair and join us) or you’re a fan of either The Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees, as Robert Smith of the former and Steven Severin of the latter collaborated as a micro supergroup under the name The Glove, which released only one album that took its title from this film. That alone would probably qualify it as a cult classic for some, but what makes this one work is how campy it is in spite of its earnestness. […] I recommend it, especially if you’re a fan of movies that are competently made but with no apparent reason to exist or want to see a (sort of) conspiracy thriller version of a campy slasher.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A sci-fi erotic thriller about a yuppie Reaganite with a computerized ocular implant that makes him partial witness to serial killings. It plays like if De Palma made a sarcastic, purposefully idiotic version of what his most vicious detractors accused his schtick of being. And you know what? It’s still a mostly fun watch; just as sleazy as it is silly.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The nightmare surrealism of the Elm Street series, restricted by the production values of a 16mm regional-horror cheapie but also much freer to disregard the boundary between its dream sequences & waking “reality.” A wonderful example of passion outweighing resources; A+ outsider art.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This sets itself up as the Floridian hippiesploitation version of Psycho, but instead delivers a domestic melodrama where everyone’s love language is belligerent screaming.” Currently streaming on Screambox and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Argentinian schlock that classes up Jesús Franco-style vampire smut with the blocking & scoring of a vintage telenovela. It’s great fun, and a great confirmation that you can still find blood & titties on Tubi despite reports otherwise.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“While most Hammer Horror relics are buttoned-up, single-idea affairs, this off-brand equivalent is overstuffed with nutty/gnarly ideas on how to update the Frankenstein myth for the Free Love crowd. Peter Cushing & Christopher Lee star as rival half-brother mad scientists competing for industry awards & press, using their own children & ancient proto-human skeletons as pawns in their sick game of one-upsmanship. It’s so stately & faux-literary that you hardly have any time to register that you’re watching a dismembered finger writhe around on a lab table like a sentient pickle, representing Evil Incarnate.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“This often gets singled out as Ingmar Bergman’s Only Horror Movie, but it’s really not all that different from trickier-to-classify titles like Persona& Through a Glass Darkly. Those happen to be my favorites of his I’ve seen, though, so I mean that as a compliment. The man knew how to craft a spooky mood; one of his greatest talents, really.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“An icy, cruelly funny Irish ghost story where the undead are weaponized for revenge amongst the living. It’s basically a series of super consistent fright gags that follow a rigid pattern of getting real quiet right before cutting to a ghost with a loud soundtrack stinger, and yet it made me jump every single time.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“An artist-goes-mad horror about a stop-motion animator who channels her darkest thoughts into her increasingly disturbing work, which then comes alive and attacks her. There’s wonderfully grotesque, fucked up imagery & sound design here, offering a small taste of pure-Hell animation for audiences who don’t have the patience for more immersive titles like Violence Voyager,The Wolf House, and Mad God.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“Had me thinking about how well it’s aged vs. fellow slick ’96 teen horror Scream, both of which I was the perfect age to look up to as a wannabe goth young’n. Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics to catch up with, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years. Picking an enduring fav out of the two mostly comes down to performances: Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic as Matthew Lillard but much better dressed; Naomi Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both; and Skeet Ulrich puts on the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell, slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret. The victory belongs to the coven, praise be to Manon.” Currently streaming on HBO Max.
“While Frankenstein might have the better direct sequel overall, this one at least has the generosity of affording its titular villain more than three minutes of screentime, which is invaluable in the Boys Club of Universal’s Famous Monsters. She’s so effortlessly, tragically cool, and it was great to make her ghoulish acquaintance” Currently streaming on Peacock.
“You gotta love The Wolf Man’s ‘Aw shucks, gee-whiz, just call me Larry’ routine. He’s an adorable oaf when he’s not a violently horny beast, making for a great horror film about post-nut clarity.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A triumph of high-artifice production design, among other triumphs. The painted-backdrop graveyard set is like the goth older sister to the Wizard of Oz designs; just as sinisterly magical but dreaming up a world where every day is Halloween, a world that’s always a pleasure to revisit (until a child enters the frame)” Currently streaming on Peacock and The Criterion Channel.
“Anytime a director of this stature says they’re making an ‘erotic nightmare,’ you know they’re cooking up a masterpiece. This is Francis Ford Coppola’s best work as a visual stylist, which since he’s in the business of moving pictures, means it’s his best work overall (with the caveat that I’ve only tried a couple of his wines).” Currently streaming on MGM+ (free with a 7-day trial subscription).
“I suspect the reason this stands out as Jodorowsky’s best work because of Claudio Argento’s heavy involvement in the writing & production. The imagery is just as gorgeous as anything in The Holy Mountain, but it’s all driven by a feverishly perverse Italo horror sensibility that gives it a much more satisfying sense of momentum. It’s a fine-art carnival sideshow.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The Old French Extremity; the kind of gross-out gore film you can pair with a cheese plate & bubbly.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“A corny 80s bodycount slasher shot & edited with modern slow-cinema arthouse distancing. Very funny in how it gives horror-convention gorehounds exactly what they want (the most annoying idiot youths to ever disgrace the screen being gruesomely dismembered) while also being stubbornly withholding (shooting the stillness of the woods with an Apichatpongian sense of patience).” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“It’s a hypnotic, immersive vision of paranormal menace, one that could easily play as outdated kitsch but instead triggers a nightmarish trance. It’s the same effect that’s achieved throughoutBeyond the Black Rainbow, especially in its Altered States-reminiscent LSD experiment flashback where its main antagonist ‘looks into the Eye of God.’ It’s an effect that returns full-force in Phase IV’s psychedelic, nihilistic conclusion as well, which describes a next stage in human evolution triggered by the paranormal ants’ attacks on mankind.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“The last time I saw this I was hung up on its obvious influences on Alien. A decade later, I’m hung up on its production design’s obvious influence on Bertrand Mandico. I can practically hear Elina Löwensohn whispering about Kate Bush & Conan the Barbarian in the background.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“Grand-scale destruction in miniature, matching the impossibility of processing the communal grief of nuclear fallout in a novelty sci-fi film with the impossible spectacle of its mixed-scale monster attacks. It’s just as deeply sad as it is colossally thrilling.” Currently streaming on HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The film’s limited budget means that Godzilla gets limited screentime, but the monster is deployed wisely as an unstoppable, unfathomable horror whose atomic power is so great that it burns away the flesh of its own towering body. Godzilla is scary again, more of a harrowing extension of war survivors’ PTSD than a rollicking hero to children everywhere. ” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“More of a genuine mashup of classic Godzilla & King Kong sensibilities than any of those monsters’ actual onscreen clashes. Mostly just helped clarify what I love about the kaiju genre (the giant rubber creatures, the more the better) vs what I tolerate (the retro extoticized adventurism) to get to the good stuff.” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.
“It used to be that time maxing meant brushing your teeth in the shower; now we save time by watching our Guy Maddin & Matt Farley movies at the same time.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The best thing about haunted house movies is the third-act release of tension where there are no rules and every feature of the house goes haywire all at once, not just the ghosts. The reason this is the height of the genre is that it doesn’t wait to get to the good stuff; it doesn’t even wait to get to the house. It’s all haywire all the time, totally unrestrained.” Currently streaming on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.
“Classic zombie splatstick of the Evil Dead & Dead Alive variety, updated with a 90s sense of apathetic cool and heavily distorted through the Italo-schlock dream machine. Loved every confounding minute of it.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A gory cheapie about an ancient mask buried in Nostradamus’s tomb. We watch this story unfold twice removed, where movie-within-a-movie victims try on the cursed mask, which transforms them into demonic, flesh-eating demons who torment their companions. Meanwhile, the in-film audience of the movie squirms in their seats, noticing an alarming resemblance of the mysterious horror film’s violence to their own journeys to the screening. Mainly, the promotional mask prop displayed in the cinema’s lobby has cut one of their cheeks the same way it cut & infected characters in the film they’re watching, which of course leads to a demon-zombie breakout in the theater that matches the chaos of the movie within the movie. They’re all effectively Skinamarinked—unable to leave the theater thorough the doors they entered from—as they individually transform into cannibalistic monsters and tear each other to shreds.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“There’s something to love in every single frame of this, but nothing to love more deeply than Brad Dourif being given more free reign than ever to rave like a demonic lunatic.” Currently streaming on Peacock, Starz, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“This trades in the grimy cruelty of the original for the visual sensibilities of a children’s film, from its exaggerated cartoon framing to its primary color palette to its bookend trips to the toy factory. Speaking of which, the climactic spectacle on the factory floor is some A+ mayhem, really leaning into the novelty of killer-doll gore at its purest. It’s one of those R-rated horrors that feels like it was specifically made for an audience of children sneaking the TV remote past their sleeping parents.” Currently streaming on Netflix.
“Perfect Halloween night programming; just the absolute worst teen dipshits to ever disgrace the screen getting torn to shreds by demons whenever they get too horny to live.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Shudder, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
Ever since the beginning of the so-called “DC Animated Movie Universe” subfranchise, most of them have been serviceable, and there have been a few stinkers, but I’ve rarely been “wowed” with any of the films so far. Justice League vs. Teen Titans and its follow up Teen Titans: Judas Contract were noteworthy, and Justice League Dark and Wonder Woman: Bloodlines both had something special going for them, but none of them have reached the level of exceptional. Here, in the grand finale of the DCAMU, however, they managed to pull off something really special, and even though I have lukewarm feelings about the continuity overall, I really liked this one.
As Justice League Dark: Apokolips War opens, Superman (Jerry O’Connell) has gathered several groups together to discuss a pre-emptive strike against Darkseid (Tony Todd), the ruler of the hellish planet Apokolips. After his most recent unsuccessful attempt to conquer Earth, the Justice League has observed new activity from Apokolips that are interpreted as a prelude to invasion. Leaving the Teen Titans behind to act as security while they’re away, the League sets off to stop Darkseid on his home turf. However, as exit the wormhole-like “boom tube” near Apokolips’s orbit, they are attacked by Darkseid’s newest forces, hybrids of his previously-encountered Parademons and Doomsday (who previously—if temporarily—killed Superman), and the League goes down as the titles roll. We then cut to two years later, where John Constantine (Matt Ryan) and his demon buddy Etrigan (Ray Chase) are drinking themselves through one of the few remaining pubs in London, alphabetically. Constantine, who was in the assault team on Apokolips two years earlier, is particularly ashamed of his cowardice, as he left his lover Zatanna behind on the planet to be ripped to shreds by “Paradooms” while he fled through a portal. Two hooded figures emerge from the darkness to interrupt their well-earned pity party: Raven (Taissa Farmiga) and Superman, upon whom Darkseid tattooed the man’s “S” crest with kryptonite ink, rendering him powerless and forcing him to watch his adopted planet fall under occupation and resource strip-mining.
We get an update on the new status quo. Most of our heroes are dead, and I do mean dead. We see some of them taking major injuries in flashbacks and who are presumed dead for much of the run time; Shazam gets his leg ripped off, Wonder Woman loses an arm, and Cyborg gets torn to pieces. Some of them die utterly horribly during the time skip; many heroes (including Zatanna) are overwhelmed with Paradooms and we only see their blood spray from amidst the gathered horde, while Atlantean Mera gets half her face ripped off, and Martian Manhunter is burned alive. When Damian tells the others what it was like on Earth on the day that the war began, we see our girl Starfire in two separate pieces, her viscera lying on the ground. As the film continues in the present, still more people die; Green Lanterns get skewered by giant claws and burned to crisps down to their skeleton like the poor souls in Sarah Connor’s dreams, Cheetah gets shot to death by quisling mercenaries, and Batgirl gets eaten alive, or at least that’s what I think happened. Even those who are still alive are in bad shape; Nightwing died during the invasion and was resurrected via Lazarus Pit, but he came back soulless, while Batman has been completely assimilated and is now under Darkseid’s thrall, using his intellect to plot the despot’s next moves, and Raven’s ability to keep her extradimensional demon father, Trigon, trapped in the gem on her forehead is starting to slip. Things are bad.
Superman’s plan is to try and find Damian Wayne (Stuart Allan) and see if Bruce’s love for his son can break through Darkseid’s conditioning, and to distract the Apokoliptan forces by diverting their attention to the sites of several giant “reaper” mining devices via attacking them, while taking a small group to Apokolips while Darkseid’s forces are away and destroy Apokolips itself. Snags get hit, of course. Forces aren’t initially diverted to the “reaper” machines because only two of three are under attack, prompting John Constantine to seek help from Swamp Thing (Roger Cross) to take down the third platform. The resultant action sequence, in which Swamp Thing wrecks shit, it one of the coolest things in all forty-ish of these movies so far. Although the League gets back-up from the remnants of the Titans and the Suicide Squad, they lose more people than expected in the siege on the portal tower, and when they get to Apokolips, they have to face off against the cybernetically reanimated corpses of some of their fallen friends. Worse still, the appeal to Batman’s humanity doesn’t go as planned, and their plan to destroy the planet’s energy core turn out to be for nothing when they discover that the whole planet is being powered by an enslaved Flash on a treadmill, so there’s no reactor to blow. As things fall apart, Trigon is unleashed, adding a further unstable element to the fray.
I like big finales like this; they really rev the easily-pleased engine of my heart. And I also enjoy a grand conclusion that feels genuinely conclusive. This is essentially this continuity’s Endgame, a chance to establish real stakes with life hanging in the balance and demonstrate that even our favorites (alas, Starfire) aren’t guaranteed to make it out alive (R.I.P., Zatanna). It feels like there’s a lot on the line, and the tone is consistent while also still offering opportunities for levity and the franchise’s trademark humor; apparently, the scene in which there’s a bait-and-switch joke about Constantine’s ex turning out not to be Harley Quinn but the anthropomorphic King Shark was heavily memed upon release. Shark even winks! The crossover nature of the film also means that we get to see interactions between characters that we haven’t seen on screen together before, and those character moments are always what I enjoy most in these movies (Lois Lane gets Harley’s Suicide Squad to join the resistance by beating her in an MMA match, of all things). Apparently, the ending of this one causes some minor furor online. I won’t get into the specifics, but the ending caps this narrative while also setting the stage for a new continuity to begin. I don’t know what to say about that other than that this is superhero media, babes; I don’t know what you were expecting. That another continuity might happen now—in fact, given that these were/are still making a profit, that another continuity will begin is inevitable—doesn’t make my appreciation of the tone of finality and melancholy in this one less palpable or meaningful.
Wrapping up my thoughts on this, I think that it’s funny how much of this subfranchise was taken up with Batman (and Batfamily) media, for virtually none of those associated characters and relationships to have an impact on this capstone, other than the obvious one between Bruce and Damian. One of the reaping platforms is attacked by the minor leaguer Batfolk we met once before, but those roles could have been filled by anyone. The two Teen Titans movies ended up having more of an impact on the final chapter, and I love that. Despite his oversaturation in these animated movies in general, all those Batflicks wound up mattering almost not at all here. In fact, this movie could almost be watched completely out of context, and you’d still be able to follow the plot of this one pretty well, and the exposition to get you there doesn’t slow anything down. I don’t know that it would be as meaningful, but it would still be a hell of a lot of fun.
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
In my recent write-up of Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, I posited my overall ranking system of these films outside of just a star rating. Superman: Red Son falls solidly in the “Fine, I Guess” tier. Taking its name and general plot outline from a 2003 comic that I once owned and read many times, the film posits the question of what would have happened if the Kryptonian pod bearing Kal-El to Earth had landed in the Soviet Union instead of the American breadbasket? In the comic, we get to see this landing in a Ukrainian collective farm, but the film opens with the extraterrestrial boy already aged four or five, as he runs from bullies through a crop field. His friend, Svetlana (as in Lana Lang) tells him that he should stand up for himself, but he demonstrates that he doesn’t fight out of cowardice, but out of compassion, as he lifts a tractor over his head. We then cut to the now adult Superman, the hammer and sickle in place of the “S” in his crest, as he wears a black and red version of the iconic look. He is the ultimate piece of Soviet propaganda: an invincible symbol of triumph. In the West, President Eisenhower tasks Lex Luthor with developing a means to combat this “Soviet Superman,” both physically and in public perception.
I have no complaints about the animation or the performances here. For the former, there’s nothing really noteworthy one way or the other; it’s serviceable, but nothing exciting. To be fair, that’s largely true of the original comic, as well. Unlike Gotham by Gaslight, which forsook the atmosphere of the source text for animated ease, the original Red Son comic had four different pencillers, so there’s a requisite lack of individualistic flourish to maintain uniformity across the whole thing, which leads to not-very-detailed art. For the latter, Jason Isaacs donning a Russian accent is fun and fine, and I can actually imagine it working a little better in live action, where one can emote for the camera, but I think having to layer that patois over the performance comes at the cost of pathos when we’re talking about animation that’s more utilitarian than expressive. It’s also a strange experience to hear Lex Luthor as voiced by Diedrich Bader, given that I associate that voice with his portrayal of the title character on Batman: The Brave and the Bold (after The Drew Carey Show, of course). Once again, my favorite performance comes from the actor portraying Lois Lane; in this case, it’s Amy Acker, better known as Fred from Angel (not to pigeonhole her). What I’ve always liked about Acker’s work is that she can move back and forth between vulnerability and tenacity over the course of a single line, or even a single word, and that’s such an obvious choice for Lois Lane that I’m surprised it took this long to make it happen. Of course, this world’s Lois isn’t romantically associated with Superman, but with Lex, eventually becoming Secretary of the Press once Luthor ascends to the presidency.
The story, however, is a little lacking. It’s structured suitably, with events falling as they must when they must, but there’s no real sense of escalation even as the stakes theoretically get higher. Luthor gets permission to attempt to crash a U.S. satellite into Metropolis, drawing out Superman in order to save the city and—in the short term—make Superman more appealing but also allow Lex access to his DNA via shed epithelial cells on the salvaged satellite. This in turn allows Lex to create a clone of him in the form of “Superior Man,” which of course flies around spitting out Manifest Destiny jargon and ultimately dies when Lex pushes him too hard. The most interesting thing that happens occurs when Lois gives Superman a U.S. intelligence file about gulags that Stalin has hidden from Superman by concealing them underground beneath lead shielding; he goes to one and discovers his childhood friend, Svetlana, who has been worked to near death for the sole crime of having known the Kryptonian “before,” that is, before he became a tool of the state whose every historical detail is treated as a matter of national security. When she dies in his arms, he goes directly to Stalin’s palace, where he confronts the man and then executes him for betraying Soviet values, becoming the new leader of the U.S.S.R.
So much could have been done with this, but there’s not enough room in this film to go anywhere interesting with it while also making sure to shove in all those DC Comics Cameos™. Of course Superman doesn’t get to the aforementioned gulag and liberate it in time to prevent the death of the parents of a young boy, now orphaned and seeking revenge (and who at one point is obscured by a flock of bats, just so that you’re not confused later). Of course Lex Luthor somehow captured the downed ship and biological remains of a Green Lantern in the desert and was able to reverse engineer the technology to create a squad of jingoistic G.I.-Lanterns. Of course we’ve got to have Wonder Woman offering to act as liaison between the U.S.S.R. and the West. It’s the last of these that gets the most focus and is the most worthwhile, but she’s also largely extraneous, as we don’t actually see her do anything in this capacity. In fact, she’s the column upon which two other extraneous, vestigial plot lines rest; the Batman the anarcho-terrorist plot serves only to disillusion her that the Soviet Union is as utopian as she believed, and the Green Lantern thing only exists so that she can show up and play cavalry to save Superman when Lex sets out to kill him. You scoop out all the fanservice and there’s almost nothing to this one, narratively, and that’s a shame when you have the potential to actually tell an interesting, multifaceted story about an alternate history in which the West is in decline while a communism that does not fail internally because of human nature continues to ascend precisely because of the inhumanity of its leader.
That’s not what this movie (or any of these movies) set out to do. As much as this franchise interacts with the pageantry and theater of politics at all, it does so only in the most broad strokes and confined almost solely to “Lex Luthor is a bad president,” “Not all cops,” “Government hit squads made up of convicts are bad … and badass.” It’s no secret that I’m much more invested in these films when they’re about character relationships and dynamics, so those are the ones that stick with me, but these movies have never set out to be Big or Important in the way that some people think that the live action versions of these characters are envisioned to be. Maybe it’s not fair for me to look at this film, which has so much potential to tell a story with some meaning rather than create a parade of answers to the question “What would [X] be like in this world?”, and demand that it be more than the corporate product based on brand name recognition that it is. But, if we’re not here to demand more from our art than that, what are we even doing here? After nearly forty of these movies, this is the first time that I really feel like what dragged this one down is that it just doesn’t live up to its potential. Instead, all we get is that Superman respects Luthor’s penchant for propaganda, and then the finale is all about an external influence that forces the hand of both sides rather than imagining any other kind of resolution to their ideological differences (I’ll save you the time of checking Wikipedia: it’s Brainiac; it’s always Brainiac). An unremarkable version of a more interesting comic and a disappointingly lackluster one at that. It’s … fine, I guess.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the aquatic slapstick creature feature Lake Michigan Monster (2018), from the creative team behind Hundreds of Beavers (2024).
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
When one takes a look at the “released films” section of the Wikipedia article about these DC animated releases, The Death of Superman is listed as the 33rd film, with Reign of the Supermen coming in at number 34. But if you go to those two entries’ individual pages, Death is listed at number 33 while Reign is listed at the 35th. For anyone familiar with comics, this kind of inexact numbering is pretty standard; comic book publishers are constantly having to tread a thin line between giving longtime fans a feeling of legacy, which keeps them coming back for more, while also not wanting to frighten off new readers who might see Batman #338 and have too much of a sense of archive/continuity panic. As a result, there are constant reboots and rebrands (of which the New 52, from which this project draws its name, is merely one of dozens), re-numberings that take a PhD to understand, and ultimately, confusion. If you’re wondering what the missing 34th film in this franchise is, it’s this one, which began its life as a webseries that sort-of continued the story from the live action NBC Constantine series, before it was edited together into a single cohesive story. Of course, right around that same time, Matt Ryan’s portrayal of the character was imported whole cloth into the larger “Arrowverse” following a very well-received cameo in Arrow, ultimately becoming a recurring character in the season of Legends of Tomorrow that was airing when this “film” released, and became a main character from the next season onward. That series did a version of the classic Constantine origin story about the lost soul of a little girl, Astra, who was damned because of a young Johnny Constantine’s hubris, and it conflicts with this one, so it’s anyone’s guess if this is connected to anything else at this point, and whether that matters to anyone but me and the perhaps eight or nine other people who have seen both this and Legends. And that’s before you even consider if this is connected to Justice League Dark, considering that that Constantine is also voiced by Matt Ryan. To paraphrase Chinatown, forget it — it’s comic books.
We open in a flashback showing a young John Constantine (Ryan) being held in a mental institution following the “Newcastle Incident,” although we only later learn what this means. He’s visited by his childhood friend, Chas Chandler (Damian O’Hare), who is disappointed to discover that Constantine is still fiddling about with magic, even after what happened. Constantine then awakes in the present, where he faces off against a horde of tiny homunculi that share his face, albeit cast ghastly and demonic. He at first tries to fight them before realizing that as “his demons,” he has to let them back inside of him, and own his mistakes and regrets (subtle!). He is reunited with Chas, who begs him to come and check on his comatose daughter, saying that medical science can’t provide any answers about her condition and begging the beleaguered wizard to pursue a magical solution. Long story short, the girl’s spirit is being held captive by a demon that draws Constantine to Los Angeles; John does so, with Chas in tow, while leaving the girl’s body in the care of an inhuman spirit known as the “Night Nurse” (Laura Bailey). In L.A., he confronts Beroul, the demon who has Chas’s daughter captive; Beroul summoned Constantine because he wants to rule L.A., and he can’t do that with five other demons also jockeying for the same position. If Constantine gets rid of them, the girl will go free, and the film’s plot revolves around John trying to outthink Beroul and take down the beast himself as well as his enemies without killing Chas’s daughter, all while being both helped and hindered by a mysterious entity known as “Angela,” a kind of apotheotic representation of the city itself who can observe and communicate with him via possessing the metropolis’s citizens.
I had pretty high praise for the hellish grotesqueries that we got to see in Justice League vs. Teen Titans (and more muted appreciation for the same in the aforementioned Justice League Dark), and there are some really cool character designs here that help spruce up what is a noticeably more cheaply animated product than the norm. The version of Constantine’s backstory in this one is that John and Chas learned that their mentor was planning to use his daughter, Astra, in a spell that would cost the girl her life. John and Chas storm in and the former summons a real demon, Nergal, who kills their mentor and his gathered cultists, but who dragged Astra back to Hell with him when he disappeared. Nergal has a cool design: a kind of horned, winged serpent that stands upright as if his upper torso were the hood of a cobra. The designs of the five demons whom Beroul demands Constantine destroy, on the other hand, are pretty rote; my inner Miranda Priestly commented “Mouths for eyes? Groundbreaking.” Beroul himself is somewhere in the middle; he’s a pretty basic gluttony demon thing that you’ve seen a hundred times, but he inhabits the more atmospheric parts of the story. Beroul captures starry-eyed arrivals in the City of Angels (get it?) and then forces them into individual hells that take the form of different movie “eras,” where they are then tortured, eviscerated, etc. because that’s what demons do. It’s a fine enough conceit, and Beroul’s barbary is creepy even if his design is underwhelming (he’s working on filling an entire swimming pool with human viscera in which he will submerge himself, and he consumes human flesh with abandon). The Night Nurse is also fun, especially when she lets down her humanoid disguise as a sexy nurse with mummy-wrapped arms and shows off her real face. The best design by far is the Aztec death god Mictlāntēcutli, which is a real piece of art. The visual storytelling for him is strong, as you can see that he is decayed from years of being starved of worship (he is only able to survive by living beneath a slaughterhouse and feeding on the deaths of pigs and cattle) but that he was once strong. I won’t pretend that it doesn’t feel appropriative to use the death god of a colonized people (at present, most Nahua people practice Catholicism, another of Europe’s scars on the world), and I have no interest in making excuses for it, but I am obligated to tell you that he’s really cool here.
I liked the ending of this one. It’s pretty cliche to have the solution to a demonic possession be “love,” but it’s effective here because said love is a consumable resource. Constantine channeled Chas and his wife’s love for their daughter into his final spell, causing both of them to forget Chas, but that wasn’t enough; John had to use his and Chas’s fraternal love as well, costing him a bond that went all the way back to their boyhoods in Liverpool. For a man with so few emotional anchors to the world, losing one of his strongest is another awful thing happening to the world’s unluckiest magician. The tragedy of it resonates more than it has the right to, and that worked for me on an emotional level, especially as it comes on the heels of Constantine finally finding some redemption for the errors of his youth in refusing to be tempted to save Astra instead at the cost of Chas’s daughter. That the film ends with Constantine starting the journey back to London accompanied by one of his manifested homunculi demons is bittersweet; the day has been saved, for now, and Constantine seems to have found some solace in this, but he’s still a man with no one to keep him company but his own demons. Not too shabby for something that was produced for the CW Seed.
I don’t have strong feelings about the original Beetlejuice. I definitely saw it as a kid (although the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff was verboten in our God-fearing trailerhold), and, through the magic of channel surfing and intermittent cable access in my adult years, I’ve “rewatched” it a few times since. It’s a fun one, although most of that fun comes in the form of the underworld bureaucracy that the recently deceased Maitlands have to navigate and their great character work between themselves and teenaged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), with the title role of the chaos demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) being less a presence in the film proper than most people correctly recall. Upon the film’s great success as the most profitable movie that Geffen Film put out in the eighties, a sequel was immediately greenlit, but never came to pass. Until now, three and a half decades later. I wasn’t thrilled by initial promotional material, but the second theatrical trailer did manage to generate some interest in me, and my cautious optimism was rewarded.
It’s been a long time since Lydia Deetz was in Winter River, the town to which she moved as a teenager and first became aware of her ability to see through the veil that separates the living and the dead. Now, she’s a TV show host of Ghost House with Lydia Deetz, a hybrid talk show/ghost hunters program, produced by her current beau, Rory (Justin Theroux). She’s disrupted when she starts to see flashes of her old nemesis Beetlejuice in the crowd at her show, and her day only gets worse when she learns that her father, Charles, has been killed in a freak accident. Along with her still overly theatrical stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), she retrieves her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) from boarding school to attend the funeral, which is to be held in Winter River. Astrid doesn’t believe in her mother’s abilities and is disgusted by what she perceives as her mother’s disingenuousness about why she can’t contact her deceased husband Richard, Astrid’s father. Some of the tension between them is eased when Astrid discovers some old photo albums in the attic of “the original ghost house,” but her mother’s apparent overreaction to her discovery of an ad for the services of “Betelgeuse” causes Astrid to put her guard up again. The situation is further exacerbated when Rory chooses Charles’s wake as the opportunity to compel Lydia publicly to set a date for their wedding; and why not Halloween, which is only a couple of days away. Repulsed, Astrid rides off on her bike, eventually crashing through a fence into the backyard of a cute boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), prompting a little romance. Rory’s insistence that Lydia confront her supposed repressed childhood trauma by repeating the name “Beetlejuice” three times opens the door for the old trickster to do his ghoulish Cat-in-the-Hat thing all over Winter River again.
I’m going to level with you: with this cast, it would be impossible for this movie to have no redeeming qualities. My house is a “Free Winona” house, now and forever, and this feels like the first time in a long time that I can tell she’s having a lot of fun. Although I’m sure Lydia is the first character that a lot of people think of when you invoke Winona’s name, that’s not the case for me. I’m team Veronica Sawyer all day every day, and after that I think of Mermaids, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and then that moment in Strangers with Candy wherein she tosses out a cigarette and then pulls another lit cigarette from offscreen. With so much time having passed, Lydia Deetz could essentially be a completely different person, but there’s a consistency that I appreciated and that only Ryder could bring to the table. Apparently, Ryder’s sole condition for taking on her role in Stranger Things was that she had to be allowed time to play this character again if the opportunity arose, so you know it’s one that she’s invested in, and it shows. When it comes to Delia, I don’t really know what their relationship is like off-camera, but there’s a part of me that believes with every fiber of my being that O’Hara and Ryder are having the time of their lives reuniting here, as O’Hara is also clearly having a great time reprising her role as well. Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek is one of many refractions of a similar (but always distinct) archetype in the O’Hara oeuvre, and it’s one that’s found a way into this character. I have to think that’s somewhat textual, as we see that her current multimedia gallery space includes at least one screen showing a video of Delia in a white wig and gown with images of birds projected over her, and it has to be a visual reference to Moira’s in-universe memetic role in The Crows Have Eyes III.
When it comes to the film itself, there are ways that it writes around and includes the length of time since its predecessor, as well as elements that must be written around because of certain performers’ . . . unsavory lives. The elephant in the room here is that Jeffrey Jones, who played Charles in the first film, is a convicted sex offender now. To get around this, the film shows his unfortunate demise in the form of a claymation-esque sequence in which Charles’s plane goes down over the ocean when he is on his way back from a birdwatching expedition; he survives the crash but is then killed by a shark. This also allows for him to appear in the underworld with most of his upper torso missing, and thus allows the character to (sort of) continue to be a part of the narrative. There’s also some clever foreshadowing throughout, like the fact that Astrid notices Jeremy’s vinyl collection is very nineties-heavy and thinks that this is an affectation, but this sets up not one twist but two. Less cleverly, the Maitlands are simply written off as having been able to move on to the afterlife through a loophole that Lydia helped them find.
The biggest problem with the film is that it’s overstuffed. You might have read that synopsis above and thought to yourself, “Wait, isn’t Willem Dafoe in this movie? And Monica Belluci?” And yes, they are. In the thirty-six years since Beetlejuice was released, countless sequel ideas must have been proposed, and this film feels like it tries to contain all of them at once. What if Lydia had a television show about her powers? Topical! What about a sequel about Beetlejuice’s literally soul-sucking wife coming back to life (well, undeath) and seeking vengeance against him? Sounds good, throw it in. What about a sequel about an egotistical actor specializing in law enforcement action films who is inexplicably the head of the underworld police? Why not. What if the Deetz family’s teenage daughter falls for a ghost boy whose true intentions might be more sinister than it seems? Oh, sounds romantic! (This plot in particular feels like it was meant to be in a more immediate sequel to the original film with a still-teenaged Lydia.) What if Lydia’s daughter doesn’t believe her and has the same fraught relationship with her that Lydia once had with Delia? What if Lydia was going to marry a man who didn’t really love her, didn’t really believe in her abilities, and whose new age bullshit was a front to meet vulnerable women, and Beetlejuice gets her out of this marriage for his own selfish reasons? Check and check!
This means that the movie moves at a pretty frenetic pace, and I’m pleased to say that there was never a moment when I was bored or felt my mind wandering, although I did start to feel the length of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park” by the time everyone was being Beetlejuice-puppeted to it in the film’s climax. It wears out its welcome a little, but the fact that this is the only scene that does so (other than the tedious scenes of Willem Dafoe as the not-a-cop hunting Beetlejuice’s undead Belluci wife, all of which could have been cut without anything being lost—and you know that if I’m saying this about Dafoe, they have to be very tedious) tells you something about this film’s overall energy, which is surprisingly high. I don’t think that I’ve appreciated a new Tim Burton film in twenty years (I’m a Big Fish defender), and this one works. There’s CGI, of course, but it’s largely used to imitate the cartoony stop-motion images of the original, and there’re still plenty of practical effects that I was pleased to see in action. Of all the legacy sequels we’ve seen in the past few years, this one is solid and fun. It’s a little more toothless than the original, but it’s not without its gory eccentricities (a well-delivered “spill my guts” bit in the trailer is what won me over). It seems to have become even more toned-down in the editing process as well, as Astrid snidely predicts the futures of the girls who bully her by joking about “driving carpool and banging Pilates instructors to fill the empty void” in the trailer, while in the film, the line is a tamer bit about “having [their] third children with [their] second husbands.” I have to think that the marketing push for this one and the need to make it more palatable for a wider audience is to blame, and that’s a shame. It’s still worth seeing, but I do think it could have been just a smidge meaner.
One of the oft-vaunted strengths of the original Alien is that, for most of the film, there’s no clear protagonist. The characters were (also infamously) written gender-blind, and for much of the film’s runtime, everyone gets equal attention, until Ripley is the only character left alive. The sequels that followed that center on Ripley permanently solidified her as the franchise’s final girl, but there’s no foreshadowing in the original text that she’s destined to be so. This is not the case with Alien: Romulus, which opens and closes on a singular woman. That’s not a complaint, or a weakness, but when we’re talking about a film that has largely been a subject of discussion because of what it borrows and homages, I figured I would start out by talking about one of its differences.
Orphaned Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) lives on a Weyland-Yutani mining colony on a planet that experiences no sunlight. She’s been, for all intents and purposes, an indentured servant on this rock for her entire life, but there’s a literal and metaphorical light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Yvaga, an idyllic world that she intends to set out for as soon as she gets her release, which she has accumulated enough hours of labor to qualify for. Weyland-Yutani’s management, however, forcibly extends her contract citing a lack of additional labor forces. Thus, she’s more malleable than expected when her ex, Tyler (Archie Renaux), approaches her to ask for her help in getting aboard a W-Y spaceship that’s adrift in orbit; you see, Rain isn’t completely alone in the world, as she has an android “brother” named Andy (David Jonsson), whom her father dug out of a recycling heap and reprogrammed to be Rain’s companion and protector. Andy is the key to getting aboard, as he can interface with the ship’s systems and allow Tyler and his merry band aboard so that they can abscond with a set of cryobeds that they can then install aboard their own ship and make their way to Yvaga. Of course, they have no idea that the ship up there isn’t a ship at all, but a research station composed of modules Romulus and Remus, and that Romulus has an unexpected guest in the form of the xenomorph that Ripley ejected into space all the way back in 1979, resuscitated and ready to wreak some havoc. An Alien movie ensues.
Alien is one of our faves around here. We recently covered Planet of the Vampires on the Lagniappe Podcast specifically in preparation for the release of Romulus, we previously covered a documentary about the original Alien, Brandon has rated and ranked all the previous films in this franchise, I took an absurd amount of umbrage (really—3.5 stars isn’t a bad score) at his review of Covenant, and I wrote an impassioned defense of Covenant and a dismissal of Prometheus. We are freaks, is what I’m saying. I was cautiously optimistic about this one, having been a bigger fan of director Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe than Brandon was, although to my recollection neither of us was impressed by his Evil Dead remake. It’s taken eight years for him to direct another feature, but it was well worth the wait, and when we were talking about our mutual interest in Romulus in the weeks leading up to release, Brandon mentioned that he felt Álvarez’s particular talents were well-suited to an entry in this canon. Some friends and I saw the trailer for this one multiple times over the past few months and we were excited; I felt almost as excited for this one as I did for Prometheus lo these many years ago now. And hey, this one even made me appreciate something introduced in Prometheus for the first time, which is no small feat.
You may have noticed that I only identified three characters in the paragraph outlining the film’s premise, and although they aren’t the only ones here, this is a pretty sparsely populated movie than most of these, with only five major human characters and an android (or two…). Rain and Andy, as our protagonists, are given the most characterization, while the others are barely sketched out. They’re fodder for the alien, which is pretty standard fare for this franchise at this point, but whereas previous films managed to get away with giving the participants minimal dimension because there were more of them, it’s a flaw in a small cast of actors here. Other than Rain, Andy, and Tyler, we also have Kay’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced, of Madame Web); pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), and interstellar chav Bjorn (Spike Fearn). Jonsson’s performance as Andy is fantastic and is one of the highlights of the film, and Spaeny is at turns serviceable and pretty good. I’m torn in my feeling about Fearn, whose performance makes him feel like he’s in a season of Skins that I would get so annoyed by that I’d stop watching. There’s an attempt to make his hostility toward Andy a matter of anti-android prejudice based in personal tragedy (a synthetic made a judgment call to save a dozen people in a mining accident, sacrificing three others, including Bjorn’s family), but he’s still obnoxious and shortsighted. It’s his idiocy that costs most of the others their lives; it’s so satisfying to see the alien kill him that I’m led to believe we’re not supposed to like him, so I guess this makes it a “good” performance, but the CW-caliber of his and Merced’s performances is out of place here. Consider Aliens, in which the marines are all similarly thinly written, but there’s more of them and their oversimplified characteristics—the coward, the macho lady, the veteran, the one with ice water in his veins, the cigar-chomping tough—don’t feel as one-dimensional as Bjorn or Navarro. Here, it’s a detracting factor.
That’s the most glaring flaw for me in Romulus, and it isn’t enough to turn me against the film, which I really rather liked. The plot is very cleverly constructed, with the need for Andy to use a data chip from one of the androids on the station itself in order to access a part of the station that houses the fuel for the cryopods leading to his personality being corrupted into something more clever and devious. In a franchise where synthetic humanoids can be relied upon to be morally upstanding as much as their creators can (which is to say that they have just as much chance to be good or evil), it’s a refreshing change to have a character whose ethics are completely malleable, with that mercuriality being entirely outside of his control. I’m mixed on That Reprisal (I won’t spoil it here), although I am pleased that there was extensive use of puppetry in the portrayal of the character, even if there was a perhaps-inescapable amount of Uncanny Valley happening. Feelings about digital necromancy aside, it’s effective, and is one of many tethers between this film and the franchise at large that make this feel of a piece with what came before, paying reverent homage rather than performing mere lip service to the films it follows. The xenomorph is the scariest it’s been since the last millennia, and there’s a new monster here that’s also very frightening and creepy. I’ll try to talk around it as much as possible to avoid spoiling it as well, but the final monster (which comes about through application of reverse engineered black goo) is nauseating to look at, a perfect synthesis of H.R. Gieger’s designs for the alien and, well, something you’ll know when you see it.
All in all, this one is pretty solid. The action sequences are fantastic (there’s a particular standout zero gravity sequence) and build logically upon one another, the introduction of a ticking clock in the form of the station’s deteriorating orbit is well-done and ups the stakes at exactly the right time, and the characters who have characters are interesting. Their interactions feel at home in this universe of films in which the night is dark and full of monsters but in which humans (and maybe androids) can find a connection with each other that makes the dual horrors of late-stage space capitalism and acidic organisms that impregnate and kill seem surmountable, if at great cost. A worthy sequel in an uneven franchise.
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