mark boomer redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Constantine – City of Demons (2018)

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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, Boomer is 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.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

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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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Alien: Romulus (2024)

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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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Wonder Woman – Bloodlines (2019)

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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, Boomer is 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. 

Now that we’re over two-thirds of the way through this project, while watching the first fifteen minutes or so of Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, I started to think about how I would be ranking all of these once I’ve seen and completed my reviews of all of them (a day that I dream about like Maximus hovering his hand over a field of wheat in his dreams in Gladiator, as I will at last know peace). The number of these films and their groupings of stratified quality mean that I can’t simply sit down and write a top-to-bottom list like I recently did of the Coen Brothers’ films, so I started to think of them as existing in more of a tiered list. I broke it down into five groups, from worst to best: (1) Garbage; (2) Fine, I Guess; (3) Solid But Unexceptional; (4) Possesses Some Notable Quality or Sophistication; (5) Cinema, Baby. During the opening scenes of this film, which are set an uncertain number of years before the primary body of the narrative, we get a condensed version of the Wonder Woman origin story. Pilot Steve Trevor (Jeffrey Donovan) crashes into the ocean near Themyscira, an island full of warrior Amazons, and is rescued by the island’s princess, Diana (Rosario Dawson). She opts to return him to “man’s world,” and in this version, she does so in rebellion against her mother, Queen Hippolyta (Cree Summer), who tells her daughter that she no longer recognizes her and, while she can take Trevor home, her treasonous actions mean that she can never return. 

Stateside, Diana meets Etta Candy (Adrienne C. Moore), Trevor’s boss (I think?), who helps her get set up in a new home with an archaeologist, Professor Julia Kapatelis (Nia Vardalos), and her daughter Vanessa (Marie Avgeropoulos). Vanessa is entering that part of adolescence where the youth forsake their native tongues and speak only in sarcasm, and she is at first miffed that there’s suddenly a new woman in their home (and a princess to boot), but she and Diana start to bond over their shared backgrounds as the daughters of demanding mothers. Unfortunately, Julia is an academic of ancient times who suddenly has a demigoddess who is steeped in myth and legend under her roof, and we see in montage that she becomes inattentive to her daughter’s needs, causing Vanessa to grow resentful of both her mother and their guest, acting out by going goth and shaving half of her head, as one does. Diana, in all of this, tries to remain supportive of and give comfort to Vanessa, never realizing that her constant presence is one of the roots of the problem. This culminates in Diana becoming a public figure as Wonder Woman and moving out of the Kapatelis home before we skip to the film’s “present,” wherein Diana is working with Candy and a now-bearded Trevor when she is approached by Julia again; she’s discovered that Vanessa has stolen from her employer, pharmaceutical magnate Veronica Cale, and is planning to sell a pilfered artifact to villainous Dr. Poison. Wanting to help, Diana goes to try and stop the sale, which is (of course) happening in a warehouse and there are (of course) minions with machine guns, and although her intervention probably saves Vanessa’s life, Julia is killed. Vanessa, furious that about the death of a mother who should not have been there, blames Diana solely for this, and aligns herself with Dr. Poison and her partner, Dr. Cyber, to get revenge. 

During that montage sequence mentioned above, there’s a lot of storytelling that happens purely through visuals, which is a nice touch that many of these films lack. We get a clear idea of what Vanessa’s childhood bedroom looks like before her goth-punk phase, and it’s a normal teenage girl’s bedroom: glowing stars on the ceiling, artwork of flowers and butterflies, books about teen vampire romance. At the midpoint of her transition to half-shaved rebel, her room changes, too, with her wooden headboard replaced with a wrought iron one that resembles the arch of a gothic church window, there’s a bust of a dragon on top of her dresser, and her wall features at least one poster with a skull on it. It’s not the most elaborate form of visual storytelling, but demonstrates an attention to detail that’s noteworthy here. I also find this dynamic between Diana, Julia, and Vanessa to be one of the more compelling and unusually sophisticated ones. While Vanessa’s blind lashing out at Diana following Julia’s death is hypocritical, as the only reason that the entire situation occurred was because Vanessa—manipulated or not—was willing to commit corporate espionage, but she’s also not wrong that Julia should not have been present at the scene, and it was a bad idea to bring her there. You can see all of the resentment and rage that built up inside of her over the past decade, as Diana’s attempts to extend an olive branch to Vanessa as she becomes more bitter about it only make the situation worse. 

When it comes to emotional complications in these movies, it’s rare to see one that isn’t a de facto part of the genre — questioning if and when to reveal one’s secret identity to a loved one, the extent of responsibility that a vigilante figure possesses when they inspire counteractivity in the form of escalating violence, etc. This emotional conflict is unique in these films, and that the movie is able to further complicate this by making it about the relationship between mothers and daughters, not only between Diana and Hippolyta as well as Vanessa and Julia, but also the bond that forms between Diana and Julia, one that falls outside of the title-referent “bloodlines.” That interruption and supplanting of the maternal relationship between Vanessa and Julia is the impetus for everything that transpires, and it’s nice that the conflict is born out of something so human and familiar rather than an alien invasion, a plot by a secretive cabal of socialites, warlords of the distant future, or the nefarious activities of an island of ninjas. Even though this one devolves into the same old battle at the end (one which is fine but suffers in comparison to the dynamic and interesting fluid action of Reign of the Supermen), that core human conflict makes it rise above the “Solid But Unexceptional” category into “Possessed a Notable Sophistication.” 

-Brandon Ledet

Swamp & Sand: The Swampflix Top 100

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At the end of this year, Swampflix will be celebrating its 10th anniversary as a movie review website.  To celebrate, we’ve attempted to create something the world has never seen before: a definitive list of the 100 greatest movies of all time.  Kidding, of course.  This is well-trodden territory for any film criticism publication, most notably including the BFI’s Sight & Sound list dating back to the 1950s.  The difference is that Sight & Sound polls over 1,000 professional film critics and filmmakers to compile their Top 100 list, whereas we only have six active contributors.  Hopefully, this means our list reflects our personal tastes & passions among the more standard consensus picks for The Greatest Films of All Time, since less than 20% of our titles overlapped with Sight & Sound‘s most recent poll in 2022. 

We created this list in two quick rounds of voting & ranking among our six active contributors in March of 2024, followed by a brief period of ensuring that every film listed had been covered on the site via either podcast or written review.  You can find blurbs for every film listed on the new official landing page of The Swampflix Top 100, or you can find more fleshed-out reviews of each film by clicking the links below.  We love movies, we love working on this website, and we hope that love shines through to anyone who follows along. 

1. House (1977) – “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.”

2. The Night of the Hunter (1955) – “A classic tale of good versus evil, love versus hate. The black and white cinematography drives home the point with its sharp dynamic lighting. It’s chilling, uncanny and even ruthless at times, but it also has so many makings of a good fairy tale: lost children, evil stepparents, and even a fairy godmother in the end.”

3. The Wizard of Oz (1939) – “Blatant in its artificiality at every turn, yet through some kind of dark movie magic fools you into seeing beyond its closed sets into an endless, beautifully hellish realm. I’m sure there were plenty musicals released in 1939 that have been forgotten by time, but it’s no mystery why this is the one that has endured as an esteemed classic. Even when staring directly at the seams where the 3D set design meets the painted backdrop of an endless landscape, I see another world, not a mural on the wall. It’s the closest thing I can recall to lucid dreaming, an experience that can be accessed by the push of the play button.”

4. Videodrome (1983) – “‘The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: The Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television.’

I lie awake at night wondering what Brian O’Blivion would make of TikTok.”

5. Tampopo (1985) – “Hailed as the first ‘ramen western’ (a play on the term ‘spaghetti Western’), Tampopo takes that designation to its most extremely literal end, focusing on the title character’s ramen shop as the location of metaphorical quick-draws and high noon showdowns, as well incorporating a variety of loosely connected comedy sketches about food.”

6. 3 Women (1977) – “This feels like a huge departure from what I’ve come to expect from a Robert Altman picture. I’m much more used to seeing him in his big cast/overlapping dialogue mode this is a much more insular, cerebral experience than that. I wish he had tackled this kind of eerie, dreamlike, horror-adjacent material more often (see also: Images, That Cold Day in the Park); he’s damn good at it.”

7. Moonstruck (1987) – “On a short list of classics that I can rewatch at any time no questions asked, especially if I’m feeling low. Come to think of it, Mermaids & The Witches of Eastwick are also on that list, so maybe I just seek comfort in Cher’s curls.”

8. The Red Shoes (1948) – “The centerpiece nightmare ballet is maybe the most gorgeous cinema has ever been. If nothing else, it’s unquestionably the most gorgeous that the color red has ever looked onscreen, which is appropriate since it’s right there in the title.”

9. Peeping Tom (1960) – “It’s near impossible to gauge just how shocking or morally incongruous this must’ve been in 1960, especially in the opening scenes where old men are shown purchasing pornography in the same corner stores where young girls buy themselves candy for comedic effect, and the protagonist/killer is introduced secretly filming a sex worker under his trench coat before moving in for his first kill. Premiering the same year as Hitchcock’s Psycho and predating the birth of giallo & the slasher in 1962’s Blood & Black Lace, this was undeniably ahead of its time. A prescient ancestor to the countless slashers to follow, Powell’s classic is a sleek, beautifully crafted work that should’ve been met with accolades & rapturous applause instead of the prudish dismissal it sadly received.”

10. Sunset Boulevard (1950) – “Not sure why Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is universally cited as the kickstart to the psychobiddy genre while this is fabulously campy/draggy in almost the exact same way (love them both). Anyways, it’s a masterpiece, but you already knew that.”

11. Grey Gardens (1975)
12. Vertigo (1958)
13. Akira (1988)
14. Polyester (1981)
15. Alien (1979)
16. Persona (1966)
17. Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
18. Spirited Away (2001)
19. Heathers (1988)
20. Suspiria (1977)
21. Daisies (1966)
22. The Thing (1982)
23. Blue Velvet (1986)
24. All That Heaven Allows (1955)
25. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

26. Possession (1981) – “With a title like Possession and the heavy synths in the opening theme, it’d be reasonable to expect a straight-forward 80s zombie or vampire flick, but the film refuses to be pinned down so easily. If Possession were to be understood as a creature feature, the monster in question would be the coldness of romantic separation. When a character supposes early in the film, ‘Maybe all couples go through this’ it seems like a reasonable claim. The bitterness of divorce, loneliness, and adulterous desire then devolve into a supernatural ugliness. The main couple frantically move about Berlin as if drunk or suffering seizures, downright possessed by their romantic misery. Their own motion & inner turmoil is more of a violent threat than the film’s most menacing blood-soaked monsters or electric carving knives.”

27. Heavenly Creatures (1994)
28. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
29. Princess Mononoke (1997)
30. Crimes of Passion (1984)
31. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)
32. Psycho (1960)
33. Robocop (1987)
34. Citizen Kane (1941)
35. My Winnipeg (2007)
36. Santa Sangre (1989)
37. Blow Out (1981)
38. The Cook the Thief His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
39. Cruising (1980)
40. Female Trouble (1974)
41. The VVitch (2015)
42. Hard Boiled (1992)
43. The Shining (1980)
44. Paprika (2006)
45. Fargo (1996)
46. Poor Things (2023)
47. The Seventh Seal (1957)
48. Serial Mom (1994)
49. Jackie Brown (1997)
50. Eyes Without a Face (1960)

51. Don’t Look Now (1973) – “A delectable head-scratcher. For a movie with such clear themes & purposeful imagery, it’s difficult to parse out exactly what it was getting at with its conclusion, which is definitely part of the charm. Reminded me of many great works of its era, but most of all Fulci’s The Psychic. Would gladly watch it a few more times to continue to puzzle at it, which I suppose is the highest praise you can lay on any film.”

52. Paris is Burning (1990)
53. Mulholland Drive (2001)
54. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
55. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
56. Midsommar (2019)
57. Basic Instinct (1992)
58. Parasite (2019)
59. Beauty and the Beast (1946)
60. Metropolis (1927)
61. Starship Troopers (1997)
62. True Stories (1986)
63. Some Like It Hot (1959)
64. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
65. Birth (2004)
66. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
67. Wild at Heart (1990)
68. Body Double (1984)
69. Amelie (2001)
70. Muriel’s Wedding (1994)
71. Brief Encounter (1945)
72. All About My Mother (1999)
73. Diabolique (1955)
74. M (1931)
75. Knife+Heart (2018)

76. Boogie Nights (1997) – “Even more so than Goodfellas, this has cinema’s clearest distinction between its story’s Fuck Around era (the 1970s) and his Find Out era (the 1980s), down to the minute.”

77. Rear Window (1954)
78. Adaptation (2002)
79. Jurassic Park (1993)
80. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
81. Clueless (1995)
82. Opera (1987)
83. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
84. Labyrinth (1986)
85. In the Mood for Love (2000)
86. Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
87. Dogtooth (2009)
88. All About Eve (1950)
89. Theorem (1968)
90. mother! (2017)
91. After Hours (1985)
92. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
93. The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)
94. What Happened Was … (1994)
95. Altered States (1980)
96. Gaslight (1944)
97. Raw (2016)
98. Halloween (1978)
99. The Exterminating Angel (1962)
100. The Doom Generation (1995)

Scroll through the full list here.

-The Swampflix Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Adaptation (2002)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer and Alli discuss Charlie Kaufman’s writer’s-block anxiety thriller Adaptation (2002), starring Nicolas Cage & Meryl Streep.

00:00 Welcome

01:05 Immaculate (2024)
07:57 Time Masters (1982)
11:37 Trap (2024)
13:06 In the Mood for Love (2000)
19:56 Cuckoo (2024)
25:43 Wicked Little Letters (2024)

27:48 Adaptation (2002)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Not-So-New 52: Batman – Hush (2019)

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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, Boomer is 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. 

Jeph Loeb is an interesting figure in comics. After a couple of notable writing credits in the 80s (including the script of the original Michael J. Fox Teen Wolf and a “story by” credit for the Schwarzenegger vehicle Commando), he went on to pen some of the best mainstream comic book material that the medium had to offer in the decade before and after the turn of the millennium. Batman: The Long Halloween was a particularly seminal work that had a profound impact on the public’s relationship with the character in both the short term (as it was very popular in its day) and the long term (as an influence on the Nolan films about the character, which created a world that we’re all still living in the fallout of). Like today’s topic, Long Halloween also got an adaptation in one of these movies and thus will get its own discussion in the coming months, don’t you worry. He also wrote the Superman/Batman arcs that Public Enemies and Apocalypse are based upon, and he was the driving narrative force for the Supergirl series that comic spun off in 2005, about which I have spoken positively in the past. Outside of DC, he’s fairly well known for his work on X-Men projects as well as stories related to the Hulk, including the creation of Red Hulk, and he still worked on TV and film projects, including involvement with the first season of Heroes at the same time that he was writing Supergirl; he ended up co-executive producing 56 episodes of that, 12 episodes of Lost, and 66 episodes of Smallville. That’s before you get into the fact that he was one of the creative forces behind the pre-Disney+ era of Marvel’s TV wing; he exec-produced 18 episodes of Agent Carter, 26 episodes of Luke Cage, 23 episodes of Iron Fist, 24 episodes of The Punisher, 39 episodes each of Jessica Jones and Daredevil, and 136 episodes of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 

Hush was released in 2002, and was a smash hit at the time, critically and commercially. Penned by Loeb and with art from Batman superstar Jim Lee, the comic was a nice bit of mystery, playing with the introduction of a new villain—the titular Hush—whose machinations to take on the Dark Knight involved manipulation of several other longtime Bat-antagonists. This gave the new villain some instant credibility for a late addition to the rogues gallery. All this is to say that, for many, Loeb is a sacred cow. This is a man who has had a foot in each of the worlds of four color and Technicolor for decades, and who has shaped what that medium and its associated adaptations have meant, quite a lot. For that reason, there are people who can be a bit … let’s say “precious” about his work and its adaptations, and this film adaptation of Hush was no exception. Of course, as someone who read Marvel’s Ultimates 3 (2008) and Ultimatum (2009) as they were published, the two comics that, alongside DC’s Final Crisis (2008) and the one-two punch of Marvel’s Civil War (2007) and Secret Invasion (2008), were the reason that I stopped reading comics, I’m not going to die on any hills for him. 

The film opens with Bruce Wayne (Jason O’Mara) headed for a black-tie function, where he encounters Selina Kyle (Jennifer Morrison), with whom he has some romantic tension in both his identities, although she remains unaware that Bruce and Batman are one and the same. It’s been a few years since she last was involved with any criminal activity and, perhaps because the Bruce of this continuity was privy to the internal conflict Clark experienced about telling Lois his secret in Death of Superman, Bruce considers whether it’s time for his own confession. Their flirtation is twice interrupted, first by the sudden appearance of Bruce’s childhood friend, a nationally renowned neurosurgeon named Thomas Eliot (Maury Sterling), then by a call from Alfred regarding the kidnapping of a child by Bane; the latter of these prompts Bruce to depart. He confronts Bane and saves the boy, but he sees Catwoman escaping with the missing ransom and pursues her, with interference from an unknown third party wrapped in bandages and wearing a trenchcoat resulting in Batman falling to the streets and being badly injured. After Alfred and Nightwing (Sean Maher) craft a cover story involving playboy Bruce Wayne getting involved in a car accident (and sending Batgirl off to wrap one of the Wayne estate’s many expensive cars around a tree), they take him to see Dr. Thomas Eliot, who manages to stabilize him. When he awakes, Bruce commits to being a better friend to Thomas in a tender scene, while the doctor remains wryly amused at the situation, notably mentioning that Bruce isn’t even the most notorious patient he’s had; he exits the room with a smirk. Gee, I wonder who this new villain could be under all that mummy wrap? 

Except … Thomas Eliot is not Hush (as we will soon learn that this new criminal mastermind is named), as was the case in the comic. Here, the man behind all of these actions is someone else entirely. We’ll come back to that, but first, one of the other major status quo changes that the 2002 comic ushered in was that, from that point forward, Catwoman would be aware that Bruce was Batman. This happens in the film as in the comic as Bruce reveals himself to Selina, following on the heels of the revelation that Catwoman (as well as others, including Bane) have been made unwitting pawns via applied use of Poison Ivy’s mind control pheromones. Bruce decides to bring her in on everything, and she becomes an effective, if less selfless, member of the Bat team. The way that we see this play out initially is a nice bit of foreshadowing, as the duo of Batman and Catwoman follow Ivy’s trail to Metropolis, which results in them having to face off against an Ivy-puppeted Superman. Batman is convinced that, even under pheromone control, some semblance of the person being controlled is able to use their willpower to mitigate what they are being forced to do; he has Selina kidnap Lois Lane and take her to the top of the Daily Planet building in the hopes that this will break through Clark’s mind control. When it doesn’t, Selina throws Lois off, which does finally cause Clark to break free and save her, and while Bruce takes the heat for this from Clark, his later conversation with Selina confirms that he told her explicitly not to let Lois fall. 

Selena’s lack of the same (perhaps self destructive) moral code that compels Bruce to attempt to save the lives of his foes even at the risk of his own comes back around in the end. In the climax, Bruce manages to catch Hush with one of his infamous grappling lines before the latter can fall to his fiery death, but the building is coming apart around them and Selina isn’t willing to put herself or her lover to the test to save a killer. She performs the cold calculus of cutting a rope and letting Hush fall so that they can escape certain death rather than complete a performative pyrrhic moral victory. Ultimately, this is what prevents the couple from remaining together, and this shifting of assumptions makes for a more interesting story than if things had been perfect for them, even if you (like me) kinda ship it. This is a slightly more sophisticated story than a lot of these others, because the relationship dynamics are more mature than what normally comes down this pipeline. It’s not Hitchcock’s Notorious or anything, but it’s noteworthy, even if it’s not breaking any molds. 

That breakup happens at the end of Loeb’s Hush as well, albeit with the slightest of differences, The big departure, as noted above, is that Thomas Eliot is revealed not to be Hush, although this Hush was a patient of his, and Eliot ends up suffering the consequences of not being able to live up to his reputation as a miracle worker with this person. I won’t spoil who this turns out to be (if you must be spoiled, Wikipedia can do that for you, but I would suggest going in blind even if I’ve already revealed that it doesn’t stick to the source material’s choice), but it’s an interesting and fun choice, even if you’re already familiar with the comic. This was, of course, something that people got up in arms about, but I’m pleased with it. The impulse for a mystery to be solved exactly the same way in an adaptation as in the original text is a boring one, and a preference for strict adherence to canon rather than pleasant surprise at a novel addition to the experience reflects a shallowness of imagination, if you ask me. 

I’m reasonably certain that I gave this a sort of half-assed watch sometime during the early days of quarantine, which lines up with the timeline of when it would have hit streaming. As such, and not really thinking about it at the time as a part of an ongoing story, I thought at the time that this one functioned suitably as a standalone adaptation of Hush, as I didn’t even realize it as being of a piece with a larger continuity. Watching it now, I’m surprised that I didn’t find it odd that we had a handful of check-ins with minor characters who feel completely extraneous without some foundational knowledge about this subfranchise. I’m reasonably pleased that we had a final check-in with, for instance, Damian, as I don’t expect him to play much of a role in the upcoming Wonder Woman: Bloodlines or the “series finale” of Justice League Dark: Apocalypse War, but it also feels like a stumbling block for anyone who might see this in a Redbox without context and decide to rent it. Like the comics themselves, this “DCAMU” (I’m so looking forward to no longer taking psychic damage every time I type that acronym) has gotten too self-referential to grow its audience, which is why we’re headed for that inevitable reboot after just two more installments. Although these movies have risen above the median a few times, there’s a lack of richness in the storytelling that elevates the rare number of these DTV animated products to be anything more than cynically driven cash-ins here. Damian’s scene is just a cute little cameo with a couple of quips thrown in, but with the knowledge that these halcyon days coming to an end, I can’t help but think that it’s annoying they made yet another Batman movie when it might have been nice to see another Justice League movie, or checked in on the Teen Titans one last time; they keep being mentioned as doing something offscreen, but are never involved. 

I suppose that’s why this one is a bit of a mixed bag critically, especially in comparison to the original comic. For people who are interested in the larger storyline of this universe, this is a fine story, but nothing to write home about, while those who are interested in the film as an adaptation are largely represented in the discourse by people who were dissatisfied with the extent of its faithfulness. I appreciated that this one did something that this series hadn’t really done before and fully committed to making a film that could be slotted into “romance” as a genre, but it’s not one that I foresee myself giving much thought in the future.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Justice League vs. The Fatal Five (2019)

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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, Boomer is 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. 

At the end of my review of Reign of the Supermen, I mentioned that, given DC’s tendency to milk every udder until it bleeds, it’s possible that the “DCAMU” may one day return following the yet-to-be-reviewed Justice League Dark: Apokalips War that serves as the mini-franchise’s finale. After all, who would have thought that, nearly thirteen years after the 2006 finale of Justice League Unlimited, there would be another installment in the DC Animated Universe that we all knew and loved (I have decided that I must align myself with the camp that does not count that other thing). In 2019, Warner Animation released Justice League vs. The Fatal Five, a continuation of sorts from JLU, and honestly? I love it. 

We open in the 31st Century, where some members of the Legion of Superheroes attempt to hold off several villains as they attempt to steal a bubble-shaped time machine. A future, heroic version of Brainiac attempts to upload a virus to the time craft so that even if they fail to stop the bad guys, they won’t be able to get aboard and get up to their temporal shenanigans. The trio of villains gets past him just as the upload hits 99%, and they are able to get away, although not without a stowaway, Thomas “Star Boy” Kallor (Elyes Gabel), who travels on the outside of the time sphere and manages to get the upload complete, imprisoning the villains within as the sphere falls to earth in the 21st Century, as does Star Boy. While Superman (George Newbern) and Wonder Woman (Susan Eisenberg) save civilians from the falling ship, Star Boy lands and realizes that his supply of medication, which he needs to take periodically to stabilize his thoughts and clear his mind, has been destroyed. He goes in search of a replacement at a nearby pharmacy only to realize too late that there is no equivalent in this time period; in the process of attempting to get help, he disrobes because he thinks that the pharmacist is frightened by his costume. As one would expect when a naked man appears in a pharmacy in the middle of the night demanding a medication that does not exist and talking about being from a different time, the authorities become involved, and Batman (Kevin Conroy) ultimately appears on the scene, too, taking the temporally displaced babbler to Arkham, while the locked sphere is taken to Justice League headquarters for analysis. 

After a ten month time jump, we meet our new additions to the League since we last saw them, lo these many years ago. At JL HQ, Mr. Terrific (Kevin Michael Richardson), a supergenius gadgeteer hero is working to unlock the mysterious sphere. In the field, Batman is training/testing Miss Martian (Daniela Bobadilla), niece of team member Martian Manhunter, to see if she’s ready to join the team. Finally and most interestingly, we meet Jessica Cruz (Diane Guerrero), a woman who, while hiking with some friends in the Pacific Northwest, stumbled upon a mafia burial; her friends were executed in front of her and she managed to escape, but now suffers from extreme agoraphobia. She also happens to be Earth’s most recent recruit into the Green Lantern Corps, and it’s her that the villains from the future are after. You see, the titular Fatal Five were defeated in their own time, ten centuries hence, and the heroes of the future could think of no way to properly incarcerate their most powerful member except to send her into the past, when the Green Lantern Corps still existed, so that they could lock her up there. When Terrific and Superman finally crack the enigma of the time sphere, the three freed villains can now seek out Jessica to use her as the key to free their incarcerated companions and become the Fatal Five once more. 

Within the first five minutes of the movie, as I mentioned above, we get to see the power trio of the Justice League again, and I have to tell you, I was not expecting to have the emotional reaction to this that I did. I imprinted on the nineties animated Batman at a very young age (I have very distinct memories of running down our very long driveway from the bus after kindergarten to watch it on Baton Rouge’s FOX affiliate, WGMB, and can even remember specific images and episodes), and I grew up with that franchise and its associated media like Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. I was nineteen when JLU ended, so this version of these characters were very formative for me. When Superman saves a child from being obliterated by the falling time ship and commends the kid for his courage but tells him that it’s okay to run sometimes, and then Wonder Woman appears next to him, and they play that electric guitar riff (you know, the one from like fifteen seconds into the JLU opening theme), I actually got a little verklempt. 

I also really like that the group we know and love is still together, and still gaining new members, and that this expanded runtime allows the story to center in on Jessica, to deal straightforwardly with her PTSD and her agoraphobia, and to allow her to bond with this timelost hero of the future over their dual psychological issues. Although it would have been nice to see Flash, Manhunter, or some of the other characters that we haven’t seen in a long time, the absence of John Stewart, the Green Lantern from the TV show (an absence that is explained by the fact that Lanterns are dealing with a major issue in deep space, which also handily explains why the prison break on their headquarters world meets such little resistance) means that we get to spend a lot of time with Jessica, and I really liked her. She’s ultimately this film’s main character, as she is the one who undergoes dynamic change and growth over the course of the narrative, up to and including facing her fears in her darkest hour and ultimately forging herself into something stronger as a result. To a lesser extent, we get to spend some time with Miss Martian, a character who was still largely unknown at the time that JLU went off the air (she would become more prominent after the character was one of the main cast in Young Justice), and it’s fun to see her in this animation style; she’s very cute, and I like her characterization in this narrative. 

On an extratextual note, this one is also special because it’s the last time that the late Kevin Conroy voiced his iconic role. After JLU’s conclusion, he voiced the character in several of these animated releases: Gotham Knight, Public Enemies, Apocalypse, Doom, Flashpoint Paradox, Assault on Arkham, and The Killing Joke, but this was the first time that he was reprising this Batman, with this design, the one that I grew up with and the one that I love most. Conroy passed away in 2022 after a private battle with cancer, and although archive audio (I assume) was used in one of these animated films that was released just this year, this 2019 release is the last time that he really got to play this part. It’s made all the more touching that there is a sequence in which Batman, Jessica, and Miss Martian enter Star Boy’s mind and see the future there, which includes a museum dedicated to the founders of the Justice League (and in which Jessica sees a statue of herself, which helps her to understand her place in all of this and gives her the confidence that she needs to keep picking herself up again). Here, Batman gazes upon a memorial to himself, some hundred decades into the future, and although there’s no change in his attitude, it’s a loving (if coincidental) tribute to Conroy as well, who will forever be my Batman. May he rest in peace. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Trap (2024)

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My best friend constantly teases me about how I rate and rank movies, and how sometimes I’ll describe what seems to her to be the worst movie she’s ever heard of, but which I’ll find something to praise about and then wind up giving it 3.5 stars. For weeks in advance of the premiere of Trap, while she predicted (accurately) that I’d give this one that rating, we speculated about what the major twist would be. I put my money on the premise being that Josh Hartnett’s character was actually kidnapping people because his daughter was some kind of vampire creature, which may simply have been because I saw the trailer for this in conjunction with the one for Abigail so many times that it incepted me a little. In reality, there’s no “big twist” in this one, with the portioned revelations coming not in the form of a huge rug pull but like actual ongoing narrative reveals. I know that what I’m describing is just “a movie” but when you’re talking about a director whose early career was so defined by his whiplash endings that, (A) if you remember Robot Chicken mocking him with the quote “What a twist!”, then congratulations, it’s time to schedule that colonoscopy—that episode aired in 2005—and (B) something this relatively straightforward seems like a novelty. 

Tweenage Riley (Ariel Donoghue) has been having a tough time at school lately, entering that period of adolescence where friend groups start to change and ostracization can be at its most emotionally damaging. She still got good grades this semester, so, as promised, her father Cooper (Josh Hartnett) is taking her to see her favorite pop star, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). Upon arrival, however, he starts to note that there’s a massive police presence at the arena where the concert is being held, and he discovers that the police learned that a serial killer known as “The Butcher” would be attendance that evening and have turned the entire place into a, well, Trap in order to put an end to his reign of terror. That’s bad news for Cooper, since The Butcher is him. Of course, if you saw the trailer, then you already know that, and you might even assume that this will be the film’s entire premise (I did), but this reveal comes very early in the film and the movie eventually spills out of the arena and into the streets, with quite a lot of plot left to go. I was delighted to see Alison Pill’s name in the credits, and flabbergasted to see the name “Hayley Mills” appear before my eyes. She’s in far less of the movie than one would want, as she plays the FBI profiler who has helped to create the titular trap; the film does play with this, however, as she frequently explains over the radio (one of which Cooper has pilfered) what the Butcher’s next most likely action will be while Cooper is doing it, forcing him to have to reverse and rethink his actions on the fly. Although her role is small, it’s omnipresent and pervasive, and that was fun. 

This feels like M. Night Shyamalan doing his version of a Hitchcock plot. We’ve got a dangerous man stuck in a situation that was devised specifically to entrap him and use his own psychology against him, using his quick thinking (and a lot of luck) to stay one step ahead of his pursuers. It’s as if Roger Thornhill from North by Northwest actually was George Kaplan, and Kaplan was a murderer. Like Norman Bates, Cooper is a man that we know is guilty, and for whom we can’t help but hope that his plan succeeds, because we’re with him every moment — trying to get away from the overly apologetic and invested mother of one of Riley’s friends-turned-mean-girls, watching nervously as other men are pulled out of the crowd for questioning, and being directly questioned by an officer after having learned the codeword taught to stadium staff, but not realizing that he would need to present additional documentation. All through it, Hartnett’s choice to play Cooper as ever-so-slightly off is incredibly effective; he seems superficially charming, and Josh Hartnett’s natural good looks go a long way to explaining why no one seems to notice that there’s something wrong. There’s a real juggling act going on in this performance, as Cooper’s mannerisms seem practiced and artificial every time that he has to interact with another person, like he’s spent a long time imitating human behavior but still hasn’t quite gotten it down, like he’s fluent in being normal, but it’s unmistakably accented. The only time he seems to be himself and not putting on the character of “Cooper” is when he’s alone and calculating his escape route, or when he’s with Riley, which does a lot of work humanizing him. 

One really noteworthy thing here is that this empathy we naturally have for our primary viewpoint character takes a strange turn at about the midpoint, when Lady Raven becomes aware that Cooper is The Butcher and thinks quickly and cleverly in order to stick with him in a way that he can’t prevent without revealing himself. She briefly becomes the heroine of the story, as she manages to get Cooper’s phone away from him and use it to get more information about where his latest victim is being held and then going on Instagram live to ask her massive group of fans to help her find and save the man. The trailers would lead you to believe that the pop superstar arena show is just set dressing, or a means to justify having all of the action take place in a stadium for the novelty of the location, but Lady Raven actually ends up being central to the plot and even emanates a bit of Final Girl energy. Surprisingly, I also found Raven’s music, which Saleka Shyamalan composed and performed herself, to be a lot of fun. Not every one of the tracks that she performs hits the same, but there were a few legitimate bops in there; not since Josie and the Pussycats or Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping have I enjoyed a movie’s representation of in-universe popular music as much as this, and both of those were comedies. If this movie was a backdoor into springboarding a larger music career for her, I’d say she has a decent chance, and it got me out of the house and into a place where I witnessed shirtless Josh Hartnett (he’s still got it, in case you were wondering) get tased by Hayley Mills (she does too), larger than life. 

There are, of course, some issues. The fact that all of Cooper/The Butcher’s victims are talked about in glowing terms about what great parents/teachers/children/community members they were got a bit of an eyeroll out of me; I don’t need the victims of a serial murderer to be paragons of heteronormative virtue in order to think that their deaths are tragic. If anything, heaping that much praise on them early in the film made me think that the big Shyamalan Twist™ was going to be that Cooper was some kind of vigilante picking off people whose apparent moral perfection belied their true, evil natures. Further, nitpickers will find a lot to complain about here, as there are a number of instances in which Cooper eludes the law’s grasp through pure luck rather than through any ingenuity. This starts first when he manages to find himself in the good graces of an arena employee (Jonathan Langdon) mostly because of his handling of a situation in which Riley and another girl have conflict over the last tour shirt in their shared size, which feels like a reach. Later, however, Cooper dons an apron to pose as staff while attempting to escape to the roof and is stopped by security, who ask him to present a card in conjunction with the codeword, and he just so happens to have grabbed an apron in which the real employee left their wallet, “I’m not The Butcher” card and all. It’s a narrative necessity, but you already know how the people who treat the enjoyment of the cinematic art as some kind of argument to win are going to beat this talking point to death whenever the social media algorithm figures out how to spin Trap discourse into your timeline. I hate to side with them at all, but by the time that Riley gets pulled on-stage to dance with Lady Raven, I had to concede that there were some “conveniences” that might have been spackled over with just one more draft of the script. The fact that Cooper has OCD and that this is something that is only barely hinted at (when he folds his napkin very precisely when he and Riley grab food at the concert) before it becomes a major part of his profile, which ends up seeming a little underbaked, but otherwise, the planting and payoff is effective. 

This is a pretty good time. Nepotism aside, Saleka Shyamalan is a welcome screen presence with musical talent that makes this one work in a way that it absolutely wouldn’t if the concert that the characters were attending felt as artificial as they often do in movies and TV. (There’s actually a cute moment in the early part of the film wherein Riley is singing along to Lady Raven in the car and missing many of the notes, then says to her father that she might want to be a singer one day, and he politely goes along with this dream, which is very funny in the context of said singer being the director’s daughter.) Hartnett is always a welcome addition to any cast, and although seeing the heartthrob of The Faculty and Halloween H20 playing the father of a middle schooler aged me like I had just stepped onto the beach that makes you old, he was great here. I honestly didn’t really realize that Hayley Mills was alive, but seeing her here made me realize how much I’ve missed her, and I hope that this emergence from retirement is long lived and that I get to see her again soon (she also really classes up the joint). It may not be worth running out to the theater to see, but this is one I’d recommend checking out for a nice, low stakes movie night when it comes to home video. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Not-So-New 52: Reign of the Supermen (2019)

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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, Boomer is 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. 

Following on the heels of The Death of Superman, this film picks up six months later. Despite the appearance of four heirs apparent to the mantle of the Man of Steel, crime in Metropolis is on the rise. Who are these mystery men? There’s the youthful “Metropolis Kid” (who insists he is the new Superman but is nicknamed “Superboy”), a teen with Superman’s powers; there’s the more “energy projection” less “physical punching” Last Son of Krypton (who is later dubbed “The Eradicator” because of his catchphrase that “[X] must be eradicated”), who practices a less nuanced view of morality and justice than the Superman we knew and loved; there’s a new Man of Steel as embodied by super-scientist John Henry Irons in a mech suit (you know him as “Steel”); and finally, claiming to be the real Superman reanimated and undergoing ongoing repair by Kryptonian technology, there’s a half-mechanical Man of Tomorrow, a “Cyborg Superman,” if you will. In the midst of all of this, Lois and the Kents are forced to veil their grief, as “Clark” is simply “missing,” while they alone know that Superman and Clark were buried in the same coffin, although that resting place has been disturbed and the body of the late Kryptonian is missing . . .

I was surprised how much I ended up enjoying this one. The last film was little more than set-up for this one, and to be honest, there was more foreshadowing in that one that paid off here than even I realized. For instance, I did mention that there was a tour that Lois took of the lab where Kal-El’s ship was being stored and that there were holograms that were part of that ship’s records, but I didn’t imagine at the time that this was laying the groundwork for one of the false heirs, Eradicator, to actually be a hologram from the ship, one that we got to see in the first film. It had also been a while since we saw Kal-El and Diana dating, so the reminder in Death that they had a past not only contributed to the reality of their close friendship in that film, but also laid groundwork for some really nice interaction between Diana and Lois. That’s a level of detail I didn’t expect to see, and was pleasantly surprised by. These movies usually run half the length of their MCU “counterparts,” so there’s a lot less of the casual hanging out that characterizes those films and which were such an important component in that series becoming as popular as it did at its height. They run leaner and sparser, but the decision to split this overarching story into two films serves both but does this one a lot of good (that this one is 87 minutes, one of the longer of these animated features, also helps). There’s room to breathe, and there came a moment in the film where I thought to myself “Wow, a lot sure has happened in this one,” which is not something that often crosses my mind during these screenings. 

There are a lot of touches here that I really like. Superboy is initially pretty obnoxious, but the revelation that he picks up his cringeworthy slang from nineties sitcoms makes it a little more tolerable, and there’s an unusually subtle animation choice that works as a nice piece of foreshadowing; the supposed clone of Superman does not share the hero’s blue eyes, and his eyes are instead grey, like Luthor’s, which makes sense when we later learn that Lex’s DNA was added to the mix. That’s an uncommon level of attention to detail for these movies, and it did not go unnoticed in this household. The misdirect regarding the Fortress of Solitude caretaker robots referring to “Kal-El” absorbing energy while the camera pans past Eradicator is a nice one too; although we in the audience know that he’s not the real Superman, it still creates an air of mystery as to why his robots would think that Eradicator was, until it’s revealed that this was the audience’s confusion, not theirs. The scenes between Lois and Irons are also a lot of fun as she, a woman infamous for not seeing through the thinnest of disguises, says that his civilian cover isn’t very good. As the most straightforwardly heroic of the potential new Supermen, he feels like a good addition to this universe, alongside Superboy, who is a lot more fun once the narrative stops making him such a horndog. 

Within the narrative, there’s a really nice escalation of stakes when a visit from the president (who bears a marked resemblance to Hillary Clinton, which, um) to the site of the launch of the Justice League’s new Watchtower satellite. The Cyborg Superman, who has just spent some time trying to convince Lois that he’s the real Supes—just with really extensive prosthetics and some memory loss—mostly stands by when a boom tube portal opens and several of Darkseid’s minions, called “parademons,” exit and start to attack the site. Although the combined forces of the League and the Supermen are enough to fight off the parademons, the portal through which they arrived “falls” to the earth and appears to kill the League, leaving only a crater. From there, it’s revealed that the Cyborg Superman is none other than Hank Henshaw, the presumed dead astronaut from part one, who was “rescued” by Darkseid so that he could be an emissary. He begins to hand out devices that give normal people superpowers, although this is a feint intended to use the newly empowered individuals to help bring Darkseid’s forces to earth. And, of course, the real Superman, who has been slowly recovering inside of his pod, emerges just in time to resume the fight, although he’s initially too weak to do much fighting, until the Watchtower is launched and the sun rises, and … well, the rest is history. 

Everyone gets a moment to shine here, which is nice. I was surprised by how emotionally invested I had become by the time of this film’s climax, and the moment when Steel and Superboy team up to distract the assimilated Darkseid army was surprisingly potent; I didn’t pump my fist in the air, but I did get a big smile on my face, despite the fact that the fight scenes in these movies are rarely that exciting to me. Lois gets to have her face-off with the man who claimed to be her dead lover, and even Lex gets a rare moment of heroism when he manages to activate a portal that allows the Justice League to return from the purgatory dimension they were stuck in and act as the cavalry in the final battle. The fight scenes themselves are some of the best that these movies have had to offer, too, with more fluid and dynamic motion than these films have mustered, giving a slightly anime-esque feel that I appreciated. I was ultimately pretty taken aback at just how well this one worked, both as a film unto itself and as a part of this subfranchise, and it really stands out. If I had to make a complaint, it’s that there’s an extratextual piece of information that makes this feel somewhat abortive. There are only three of these “DCAMU” films left, one of which is a Batman feature (of course), one of which is a Wonder Woman movie (the first since 2009’s Wonder Woman, ten years and thirty-three films prior), and a Justice League Dark sequel to serve as the finale. It doesn’t really feel like there’s going to be another chance to check in on Superboy and Steel, which is a bit of a bummer, as they really helped with the feeling that this franchise still had a lot of room to grow and expand, and they were fun characters with the potential for some really fascinating storytelling. Of course, if there’s anything about DC that’s proven to be true over the years, it’s that they will squeeze every last drop out of their IP and then grind the dust to make break if they can, so it’s possible that these last three won’t be the last three, but I won’t be holding my breath. This is a high note for one of the last few installments, and I’d give it a chance, especially if you can combine it as a double feature with its predecessor. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond