Brynn Adams is alone. She doesn’t seem to be all that troubled by it, at least most of the time. She wiles away the hours in the sumptuous country home that she occupies by herself like a woman unstuck in time: she learns decades-old dance steps from numbered diagrams while listening to Ruby Murray’s “Knock On Any Door” from 1956; she designs and creates her own dresses; she’s even recreated the entire town of Mill River in miniature in her living room. When she ventures into the real town, she ducks to avoid certain people, and when she attempts to interact with others, all she gets in return are sneers and frigid shoulders. The closest thing she seems to have to human contact is a mailman who intentionally damages her packages. Brynn’s been alone for a long time, but she’s about to have … visitors.
Kaitlyn Dever, who I really liked in last year’s Rosaline, both stars in and executive produces for No One Will Save You, the sophomore directorial effort from Brian Duffield, who is perhaps best known around these parts for writing The Babysitter. I first became aware of the movie after a screenshot of Stephen King calling the film “Brilliant, daring, involving, [and] scary” as well as “Truly unique,” and I went into it blind, which allowed for me to be pleasantly surprised not only by all of the film’s tiny reveals but also its big one; namely, No One is almost entirely dialogue free. Dever is the only performer who ever gets to speak, and it’s telling that her single impactful line is spoken to no one, or at least to no one who can hear her. That’s not to say that she’s not well developed; in fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this becomes one of those films that achieves cult status through its use as a teaching tool via its masterful adherence to the timeless axion of “Show, don’t tell.” Everything important about Brynn is captured by the filmic eye: the regretful letters she composes to her childhood best friend Maud, her awkward attempts to practice waving and greeting others, her abject terror at the prospect of interacting with a middle-aged couple we later learn are Maud’s parents. The story moves clearly and cleanly without the need for dialogue, as the film cuts seamlessly and smartly between Brynn encountering a situation and her resolution of the same. For instance, in one simple sequence, we watch as Brynn rides her bike into town for help after being unable to start her car, experiencing an extremely unpleasant but nonetheless wordless encounter with Maud’s mother and father (the latter of whom is the chief of police) that reminds her that—as the title tells us—no one will help her, and then immediately cuts to her at a bus station, ticket in hand. There’s no spoon-feeding and there’s no need for it, either.
We eventually learn what happened between Brynn and Maud that left Brynn a pariah in Mill River, and it’s devastating. Outside of the flashbacks that fill this in, however, the film takes place over a brief time frame of only three days and two nights. The first of these nights sees Brynn (sort of) fend off a home invader, who just so happens to be an extraterrestrial. When she finds herself unable to gather assistance or successfully escape town the following day, she prepares to defend herself for a second night, only for the film to perform a little sleight of hand with its genre, transitioning from the home-invasion-with-an-outer-space-twist narrative to a more introspective form of psychological horror, as the aliens attempt to assimilate Brynn into a pod-people collective. Their means to do so involve tempting her to give up her mind and body through visions of a reality where she is no longer bound by the tragedy of her past and no longer missing the things which have been lost to her. When that doesn’t work, the snare she’s in just gets tighter.
This movie lives and/or dies on Kaitlyn Dever’s performance, and it’s a testament to her ability that it soars. The camerawork here is likewise deft in the way that the language of pans and zooms keeps us in Brynn’s headspace so effectively; the touch is so lightweight as to make its capture of all the moving parts appear almost effortless. The visual effects work is also top notch; the aliens feel appropriately otherworldly even if the CGI seams are unavoidable, while the film wisely chooses clever takes on familiar ways of visualizing standard abduction phenomena, borrowing heavily from The X-Files and its use of blinding beams of white light (the abductions of Duane Barry in the second season and Max Fenig in season four come to mind), although it also includes occasional pervasive red lighting that calls to mind the opening of Fire in the Sky. The film moves in novel and exciting ways, and it’s well worth checking out.
Hoo boy is this one a lot of fun, and it’s free, Jack! (Sorry.) Crackerjack racecar star Alex Furlong (Emilio Estevez) is looking forward to marrying sweetheart Julie Redlund (Rene Russo) once he gets all of his ducks in a row. Unfortunately, this crisp November 1991 day is the day that he crashes his racer in a deadly fireball, leaving behind a heartbroken Julie. Meanwhile, in the distant future of 2009, Vacendak (Mick Jagger) and his crew of “bonejackers” cruise through a hellish dystopia in order to line up their machinery with Furlong’s past accident and teleport (or “freejack”) him into the future. See, scientists have figured out how to transfer consciousness from one body to another, gifting immortality to (the wealthiest 1% of) humankind; however, since everyone in 2009 has lived with such intense and prolonged pollution and suffering, the rich don’t want their bodies. Instead, people like Vacendak are bounty hunters for people who can be plucked out of the stream of time like a fish without causing any time-snarling shenanigans — that is, moments before their death and only if they wouldn’t leave identifiable remains anyway. When the bonejacker caravan is knocked out of commission, Furlong escapes.
After making his way home and finding that Julie no longer lives there, Furlong stumbles into a church, where an atypical nun (Amanda Plummer) fills in the background of the new world order. She explains the concept of freejacking, the immortality machine, and why it looks so much like Class of 1999 outside. She is unable to find Julie online but is able to connect Furlong with his old manager Brad (David Johansen of New York Dolls), who promises to get him in contact with Julie. Elsewhere, Julie has done rather well for herself, rising to an executive position at a major corporation headed by Ian McCandless (Anthony Hopkins), where she works alongside the CEO’s right-hand man Michelette (Jonathan Banks). She, along with the other elites, lives in one of a series of skyscrapers in a gated part of the city, far from the hoarse cries of any yearning masses longing to be free. Furlong must convince her that he is who he says he is—not some guy who freejacked her lost love—and avoid capture by Vacendak, Michelette, or any other interested party for 36 hours, at which point the mind of the mysterious rich person who wants to take over his body will be too degraded to be redownloaded.
This is exactly the kind of movie that the camp stamp was made for. Normally, a low-brow, high-concept movie like this requires the invention of some kind of fantastical breakthrough or discovery, but this film requires two miraculous feats of science (mind transference and time trafficking), which should push the envelope to the point of being too unbelievable. And, yeah, it is, but once you see the series of casual leather outfits that Jagger gets to parade around in, the minitanks that the bonejackers drive (one of them is indigo with pink detailing and the name Sheila emblazoned in neon green script), the hideously eighties stone offices, and what the creators believed passenger cars would look like in 2009, then it’s impossible not to just give in and have a good time. In a way, Freejack presages companion Rip-Van-Winkle-but-as-a-nineties-action-flick film Demolition Man, but while that film is, in many ways, a conservative’s worst nightmare about a future ruled by political correctness, Freejack is movie that recognizes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and that corporate interests and wealth hoarders’ desperation to prolong their lives are the things that will/do dominate the 21st century. Both films, however, spend a lot of time exploring the fish-out-of-temporal-water nature of the protagonist after just a couple of decades while also demonstrating technological and social leaps that are completely impossible during such a short time frame. And, because Furlong is a racer, Freejack is also chock full of chase scenes and races against time, which create the illusion of plot progression even when it spins its wheels from time to time.
If anything, this is the result of being overstuffed. Production problems on the film were rife (YouTube channel GoodBadFlicks released a pretty extensive overview a few months ago), and although it doesn’t seem to have had much of a cultural impact, it’s strange that this one hasn’t had its day in the limelight as a wrongly maligned, misunderstood classic. This was released just at the start of Estevez’s star renaissance, as The Mighty Ducks released later that year, and came right on the heels of Hopkins’s career-defining role in Silence of the Lambs. A lot of major performers meet at this crossroads, but it’s been all but forgotten in the wake of their other successes, but in spite of all of the studio interference, I think that there’s actually a pretty great nineties action flick here. This would be the decade that, in the wake of the eighties sci-fi action hat trick of Terminator, Predator, and Aliens, speculative fiction would become a dominating factor in action film before reaching its apotheosis in 1999 with The Matrix; Freejack, with its “spiritual switchboard” technology and the hijacking of people’s bodies, is a part of that cyberpunk evolution. It’s somehow more than the sum of its parts; there’s a sequence near the end where Furlong confronts the person responsible for his freejacking in a spherical room that projects a series of holograms that represent the mind of the stored villain. Images fade in and out, and although I think it probably is not the exact effect that the filmmakers were trying to convey and a modern audience may reject them as “bad FX,” but I find their dreamlike gaussiness and the way that things appear and reappear to be a very effective visualization of the ever-changing thoughts and mental landscape of the antagonist. There’s so much attention to detail in so many places that are a true testament to Geoff Murphy’s work that, in spite of the production hell, this movie not only is more than functional but is in fact exceptional. It’s not perfect, but it is a lot of fun. And hey — it’s available for free right now on YouTube (with commercials). Why not?
“Aporia” refers to a declaration of one’s doubt in something, often a statement which does not actually reflect the speaker’s actual belief. Within the Socratic method, it was the state in which Socrates left his verbal sparring partners after he picked apart their definitions of a concept through a series of questions that ultimately revealed his opponent’s lack of solid philosophical standing. More recently, it’s become largely synonymous with the word “paradox,” which was likely the reason that the word was chosen as this film’s title; however, if one perceives the word as reference to a statement that does not match the belief of the speaker, it actually makes for a fairly decent joke about this film’s overall lack of self-reflection.
Sophie (Judy Greer) is deep in mourning over the loss of her physicist husband Mal (Edi Gathegi) eight months ago. Their soon-to-be-twelve daughter Riley, who shared her father’s love of rocketry and astronomy, is likewise adrift, withdrawing from her mother, skipping school, and preparing to sell the model rockets she and her father built together. After Sophie is forced to call on Mal’s friend Jabir (Peyman Moaadi) to help her out by collecting Riley from school when she is suspended, Jabir lets her in on a quantum physics project that he and Mal were tinkering around with before the latter’s death. It’s a time machine, essentially, although not of the normal transportation variety; instead, it’s capable of sending a single particle back in time to a certain place, meaning that it’s functionally a gun that kills someone in the past. Jabir originally started working on the idea because he could never get over the massacre of his family, the tragedy which drove him to immigrate to the U.S. in the first place; affecting the past that far back will require a great deal of power, but a shorter time frame might work. It’s untested, but he can no longer sit on the sidelines of Sophie’s life and watch her drown in her grief without offering her the opportunity to “rescue” Mal by “taking out” the drunk driver who killed him before the accident ever occurred.
Mal’s inevitable return to life needs to happen ten minutes sooner (with less hemming and hawing about the moral implications and fewer, denser scenes of Riley acting out); this would also open up some room in Act II for more interesting discussion about the consequences of Sophie and Jabir’s action. There’s something very interesting that happens in here, as those who are protected from the memory ripple effect slowly become more disconnected from the world because they remember it differently. It would have been fun to explore with more butterflies getting squashed, so to speak, but since there are just a few changes to the timeline, we go from Timeline B, where the changes are limited to work schedules and furniture arrangements, to Timelines C (with no apparent ripple effects that our characters notice) and then D, where the changes are so extreme that Mal and Sophie’s lives are barely recognizable.
The removal of Mal’s killer leaves his wife Kara (Whitney Morgan Cox) a single mother in dire financial straits, exacerbated by her daughter Aggie’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis and the medical costs thereof. Feeling responsible for the other woman’s situation and seeing her own grief reflected in Kara, Sophie invites her to dinner, and Aggie & Riley strike up a friendship after some initial friction. When Aggie’s symptoms worsen and she ends up in the hospital, Mal, Sophie, and Jabir debate whether or not to kill a man who, a decade prior, embezzled Kara’s money from her successful bakery, leaving her unable to afford to both keep her house and care for Aggie. Although the trio is reasonably convinced that the death of “the Bernie Madoff of Arizona” just a few months earlier than his natural death will have no effect on their life situations, they emerge from the room where they shot the man through time only to discover that they are impostors in their own lives: unknown to old friends, greeted with warmth by unknown faces, and, for Sophie and Mal, faced with a child who is a stranger to them.
There’s a lot of promise here that simply isn’t lived up to. If nothing else, this is a showcase for Judy Greer to do some more dramatic work, and she sells it. The writing here is often good, although its highlights are interspersed with a lot of dialogue that is fairly workmanlike. I won’t bother getting into the minutia about fictional temporal mechanics either as that’s a hobby for pedants and bores, but I will say that anyone who’s ever seen a movie with time travel (or time murder, as is the case here) in it knows that Jabir can’t go back to his youth and save his family from being killed. If he does, he never comes to America, he never builds the time rifle, so he never goes back in time, bake at 350° F for 22 minutes and you’ve got a paradox, which in this narrative means a reset. Of course, this also means that anyone who’s ever seen one of these knows that this will come into play once our heroes decide they’ve mucked up the timeline badly enough that they have no choice but to nuke the whole thing and hope that whatever versions of themselves exist in the new timeline land on their feet. It’s to the film’s credit that it ultimately embraces ambiguity in its ending, but it’s not enough for me to give this one a recommendation. It’s a shame, too; there are so many potentially potent building blocks in play that are undercut by the film’s handheld camerawork, which is a common choice for these cheapy sci-fi time travel flicks, but one which is at odds with the attempts at nuanced storytelling, discussions of ethics, and Greer leaving it all out on the field. The film is simply working against itself in too many places to come together into a cohesive whole, and in the end, it seems to lack the very conviction that one definition of “aporia” implies.
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!
“Sunshine, wine, swimming, antiquing, ambient acoustic strumming … If it weren’t for all of the violent hallucinations & vampiric ghouls this would be a pleasant little getaway” Currently streaming on Paramount+, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on PlutoTV.
“I braced myself for it to be far more needlessly vicious than it was, given the New French Extremity’s fetish for grisly details. Calvaire does a good job of implying instead of dwelling and, more importantly, of cutting its unbearable tension with gallows humor so it’s not all misery & pain. Part of my amusement might have been enhanced by the two main characters being assigned names I associate with comedy: Marc Stevens (who shares a name with John Early’s grifter villain on Los Espookys) and Paul Bartel (who shares a name with one of the greatest comedic directors to ever do it). Regardless, director Fabrice du Welz also amuses himself by framing this grim & grueling torture session as ‘the best Christmas ever’ in its sicko villain’s mind, contrasting the hyperviolent hostage crisis the audience is watching with the delusional family reunion of his imagination in a bleakly hilarious clash of realities. I don’t mean to imply that Calvaire‘s not also a nonstop misery parade, though. It’s that too.” Currently streaming on Shudder.
“A very cool, loose hangout dramedy about truck stop sex workers that gradually turns into a rigidly formulaic grindhouse slasher to pay the bills. Not everyone gets to be Sean Baker; sometimes you gotta cosplay as Rob Zombie to land your funding.” Currently streaming for free (with a library card) on Hoopla and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“What I mean when I say ‘kids are scary’ is that being around other people’s children naturally makes people anxious and nervous, or at least that’s my experience. What if they trip and fall while running past my table at a cafe? Do I suddenly become responsible for their wellbeing? What if the parent thinks I tripped them? What if the kid thinks I tripped them and blames me? Kids are tiny, vulnerable people, but they also have a capability for pure, unfiltered malice that can be creepy as well, and since they’re only just learning how to regulate their emotions and communicate their thoughts, interaction with them can be a minefield. There’s Something Wrong with the Children is probably the first film that I’ve ever seen that captures that particular unease.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.
“In which a pair of drunkard ghosts coach a child who’s been scared bald on how to grow his hair back, only for their advice to work way too well for his own good. Little-kid nightmare logic that you can only find in German fairy tales and Canadian B-movies, pinpointing the middle ground between Hansel & Gretel and The Pit. Wonderfully deranged.” Currently streaming for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“I was starving for a genuinely over-the-top animal attack movie after being let down by Cocaine Bear, and this hit the spot. It’s basically the same faintly sketched-out story, but its tactility & sincerity go a long way in making its attack scenes much worthier of the ambling journey. There’s something especially unnerving about the way the animals appear to leap out of stock footage, as if they’re crossing a forbidden barrier into reality to tear into the character actors (and, more often, the stunt doubles). Incredible that it wasn’t directed by Larry Cohen.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“As trippy as it can be in its Skinamarinkian disorientation, it’s anchored to a concise, recognizable premise that could neatly be categorized as The Blair Witch Project Part IV: Blair Witch Goes to Hanging Rock. It strikes a nice balance between the slow-moving quiet of its bedroom art brethren and mainstream horror’s return to big, bold, bloody haunted house scares. Maybe that makes it a less artistically daring film than World’s Fair or Skinamarink, but it also makes it a more overtly entertaining one.”. Currently streamingon Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Hoopla, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Seeing a lot of grossed-out responses from unsuspecting audiences wishing this was more of a straightforward road trip love story. I’m coming from the opposite direction, wishing it weren’t so tenderly underplayed & remorseful about its hunger pangs for gore. It’s kinda nice to have something that drifts between those two magnetic pulls, though, especially since it’s so unusual to see a Near Dark-style genre blender positioned as a prestigious Awards Contender.” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime and MGM+.
“Feels like Lynch twisting himself in knots to make the James from Twin Peaks archetype genuinely compelling … and he eventually gets there. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how noir antiheroes are mostly just sad sack losers who make their own shit luck by feeling sorry for themselves, and this one turns their mopey interchangeability into a kind of existential horror.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“In The Lawnmower Man, director Brett Leonard justifies testing the limitations of stage-of-the-art 90s CG animation by inventing convoluted science lab experiments that create a VR cyberworld. Here, he takes a bold step forward by suggesting that exact CG cyberworld is where our souls go when our bodies die, treating his Windows 95 screensaver graphics as if they were the most typical, durable approach to visual effects available. Stunning, even if extraordinarily goofy.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“Brandon Cronenberg’s deeply unnerving debut is a sickly TMZ geek show. I need to stop hanging out online, because I keep reading flippant dismissals about how unimpressive he is as body horror’s premier nepo baby, then still really enjoying each of his movies when I get to see them for myself.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“In which a madman plastic surgeon transforms an injured go-to dancer into his missing daughter’s doppelganger, in order to claim her inheritance in her absence. Technically, this is a PG-rated comedy, but it feels like it should have been bumped to the top of the video nasties list. Delicious, deep-fried Southern sleaze.” Currently streaming on Screambox.
“Hideous gore, gratuitous male & female nudity, and a babyfaced Udo Kier soaring miles over the top as a camped-up villainous lead. What more could you want?” Currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and AMC+.
“Like all other Amicus anthology horrors I’ve seen, this is consistently entertaining throughout but never exactly surprising nor even thrilling. It’s horror comfort viewing, best enjoyed under a blanket with a humongous mug of tea.” Currently streaming on Screambox, for free (with a library card) on Kanopy, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“The greatest British portmanteau horror of all time, trading in the rigid stage-play traditionalism of classic Amicus anthologies for a more fluid, music video era dream logic.” Currently streaming on Shudder and for free (with a library card) on Kanopy.
“A pure psychedelic meltdown of id at the bottom of a deep well of communal grief. Restructures the seaside ghost story of Carpenter’s The Fog through the methodical unraveling of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, dredging up something that’s at once eerily familiar & wholly unique.” Currently streaming on Hulu.
“A pensive motherhood horror about the pain of trading in youthful passion & rebellion for familial comfort & ease. Lots of thematic overlap with The Five Devils in that way, even if they’re nothing alike aesthetically. Besides landing every one of its scares and dramatic beats, this just has some truly world-class hand acting. Cracking knuckles and spatchcocking chickens will never feel the same again.” Currently streamingon Shudder and AMC+.
“Without question, the greatest evil-stepparent horror of all time, a superlative indicated by its definitive title. Terry O’Quinn is the stepfather, a sociopathic serial killer who cycles through families like he’s updating his wardrobe, killing the old batch in cold blood instead of dropping it off at Goodwill. O’Quinn is an explosive volcano of white-man rage, barely suppressing his violent outbursts under a thin facade of Ward Cleaver, Father Knows Best-style suburban Family Values. It is one of the all-time great villain performances, regardless of genre. There was already a bland, forgettable remake in the aughts, but the only other actor who could maybe pull this performance off is Will Forte, whose comedic version of bottled-up fury is a direct echo of the terror in O’Quinn’s piercing, hateful eyes.” Currently streamingon Peacock, Screambox, for free (with ads) on Tubi, and for free (with a librarby card) on Kanopy & Hoopla.
“A tense domestic thriller about a pushy, macho plumber who walks all over a married couple of uptight academics; directed for television by a young Peter Weir. Cuts to the core of liberal urbanites’ fear of the working-class brutes they invite into their home for routine repairs; a home invasion thriller where the menace is politely welcomed inside.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“As absurd as this prototypical slasher can be tonally, it feels true to how I remember high school: a conformity cult led by fascist jocks, lording over poorly socialized losers who would’ve been just as awful if we were given the opportunity. Our jocks never offered to take us hang-gliding, though, so now I feel like I missed out on something.” Currently streamingon The Criterion Channel.
“A strong sequel in a very strong franchise, possibly the horror franchise with the best hit to miss ration (5:1, in my book, and even the dud has Parker Posey to liven it up, so that’s something). Even though there are moments that are questionable (some of the people we see attacked should not have survived what happened to them), there are more than enough great sequences, character beats, and thrills to make up for them.” Currently streaming on Paramount+.
“It wasn’t until after the viewing that I realized the director, Gerard Johnstone, was also the man behind Housebound, a film we loved so much that we made it into content for Swampflix twice: first with a very positive 2015 review and again five years later as the topic on one of our earliest episodes of the Lagniappe podcast. That actually explains the comedic sensibility; it’s not omnipresent, but it’s almost funnier that the jokes are paced with some distance between them, allowing them to break the tension when they reappear, and the emotional whiplash of it all is part of the fun. ” Currently streaming on Amazon Prime.
“A young, baby-faced Clint Howard stars as a military academy misfit who summons Satan to smite his bullies using the Latin translation software on the school computer. It’s a dual-novelty horror that cashes in on the personal desktop computer & Satanic Panic trends of its era, combining badass practical gore spectacles with proto-Lawnmower Man computer graphics. It isn’t long before the prematurely bald Baby Clint graduates from translating Latin phrases from a Satanic priest’s diary to asking the computer dangerous questions like ‘“’What elements do I need for a Black Mass?’”’ and ‘“’What are the keys to Satan’s magic?’”’, stoking parents’ technological and religious fears with full aggression. And the third-act gore spectacle he unleashes with those questions is gorgeously disgusting.” Currently streamingon Shudder.
“Some fun, fucked-up Discomfort Horror that Malignantizes the post-torture porn cruelty of titles like Don’t Breathe into something new & exciting. It also has the best end-credits needle drop since You Were Never Really Here, leaving the audience in a perversely upbeat mood despite the Hell we just squirmed through.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Max.
“Simultaneously a familiar experience and an alien one, mixing generic horror tropes with an experimental sensibility – like a Poltergeist remake guided by the spirit of Un Chien Andalou. It’s the kind of loosely plotted, bad-vibes-only, liminal-space horror that requires the audience to meet it halfway both in emotional impact and in logical interpretation. In the best-case scenario, audiences will find traces of their own childhood nightmares in its darkened hallways & Lego-piece art instillations. Personally, I was more hung up on the way it evokes two entirely separate eras of my youth: my alone-time online as a sleep-starved teen and my alone-time in front of cathode TVs as a sleep-starved tyke a decade earlier.” Currently streaming on Hulu and Shudder.
“Before pressing play I was skeptical this would be enough of a Horror Film to work as proper Halloween season viewing. One of the first shots is a newspaper headline that reads ‘STRANGLER STILL AT LARGE!'” Currently streamingon Amazon Prime and The Criterion Channel.
“Super scary, both as a traditional Gothic ghost story and as a worst-case-scenario vision of Daniel Radcliffe’s career path as a bland leading man instead of an eccentric weirdo millionaire.” Currently streamingon Paramount+ and for free (with a library card) on Hoopla.
“The surprisingly goofy midway point between Poltergeist and Jacob’s Ladder. Can’t quite match the euphoric highs of either comparison, but it’s still a fun dark-ride attraction of its own merit. The rubber-mask monsters are adorably grotesque, and they pop out of the most surprising places.” Currently streaming on Shudder, Amazon Prime, and for free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A deliciously trashy VHS slasher where every single kill comes with its own punny quip. You hardly have time to question why they call him Dr. Giggles before he’s performing involuntary open-heart surgery while giggling like a madman and proclaiming ‘”‘Laughter is the best medicine.'”‘ It has no idea how to fill the time between the kill gags, but it really delivers the goods where it counts.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“A kind of anti-choice, pro-environmentalist creature feature where an aborted, toxically mutated fetus gets its revenge on the brothel-clinic that brought it into this sick, sad world. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s a perfect This Kind Of Movie, delivering everything you could possibly want to see out schlock of its ilk: a wide range of rubber monster puppets, over-the-top character work, stop-motion buffoonery, and multiple opportunities to feel greatly offended while never being able to exactly pinpoint its politics. Wonderfully fucked up stuff.” Currently streamingfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
“I always assumed we didn’t have basements in Louisiana because we’re built on mushy swampland. Turns out it’s because we’re built on seven gateways to Hell. Honestly makes a lot more sense.” Currently streamingon Shudder, Peacock, andfor free (with ads) on Tubi.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the roughly prototypical high school slasher Massacre at Central High (1976).
You know I love a pastiche, and I was bummed when I wasn’t able to catch this one in its blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run. Despite the inherently sci-fi nature of the title, I wasn’t expecting just how far into that genre the film would lean, and I was delighted.
In the Glen, an area that federal and state funding has not so much forgotten as forsaken, Fontaine (John Boyega) is the dealer at the top of the food chain. Far from the exciting life of danger that one would expect, it’s a monotonous routine; he gets a bottle of alcohol and a lottery scratch-off from the corner store, pours some out into the extended cup of elderly, conspiracy-spouting Frog (Leon Lamar), pumps some iron, mournfully contemplates the “In Remembrance” clipping for his younger brother on the fridge, knocks on his mother’s door to see if she wants anything (she never does), and receives delivery of the day’s cash intake. On the day that the film opens, two out-of-the-ordinary things happen. The first is that he gets word from elementary aged Junebug (Trayce Malachi) that a pusher for rival dealer Issac (J. Alphonse Nicholson) has been spotted in Fontaine’s territory, leading Fontaine to kneecap said pusher. The second is that local pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) has failed to pay up, so Fontaine tracks him down to his hotel, which leaves the younger man vulnerable to a drive-by at the hands of a retaliating Isaac. Then he wakes up. Dismissing the shooting as a dream, Fontaine resumes his quotidian: scratch-off, Frog, iron, Remembrance, mother. Only when he once again goes to confront Slick Charles, who tells him that he watched Fontaine die, a fact which is corroborated by sex worker Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). Following a suspicious black SUV, the unlikely trio discovers that there’s much more going on than meets the eye.
There are a few different misdirections in the film that lure the savvy audience member into thinking that they know where the film is headed. Fontaine’s day(s) has all the trappings of a time loop narrative, which wasn’t uncommon prior to COVID, but which has really blossomed as a story device since lockdown, during which many people began to see something of their own quarantined routine in these stories. This theory is blown out of the water when other characters recall Fontaine’s death. Further complicating matters is the widespread lack of specificity about the time period in which the film takes place. Older model cars line the streets and Charles dresses like Willie Dynamite, which would date the film to the 1970s, but Junebug talks excitedly about SpongeBob SquarePants, which moves the setting closer to our own, but given that the show premiered in 1999, that still jives with the omnipresence of CRT model televisions. That is, until Yo-Yo mentions blockchain, which means that this must take place in the present (or future), but a present dotted with anachronistic technology. Of course, given that this is an extremely tightly constructed script, it’s no surprise that there’s a reason for all of this, but revealing any more than that would spoil too much.
Speaking of which, this is one of those movies with a plot that’s all but impossible to talk about without revealing too much. Luckily, the performances give us more than enough text to dig through. Jamie Foxx stays working, which means that he’s forever ending up in projects that fail to really use him to his greatest potential; here, he’s utterly fantastic as the has-been Charles, whose bygone primacy is a point of pride (he boasts that he won Pimp of the Year at the Player’s Ball in 1996), undermined by his current washed-up status. There’s a bit of the Cowardly Lion in him, but he comes through when needed, and, just like the other characters rounding out the trio, he’s savvier than appearances would suggest. Boyega is also on top of this game here, and there’s a bit of his performance as Moses in Attack the Block that bleeds through here, perhaps intentionally. The breakout is Parris, who is having quite the year, given that she’s co-headlining the upcoming Marvel feature The Marvels after her character was introduced to the MCU via WandaVision, where she was easily one of the best things about the program. Every character’s hidden depths are important, as they bely the cluelessness and patronizing shallow-mindedness of the antagonists, but Yo-Yo’s fascination with Nancy Drew is particularly endearing to me, as is her ambition.
I’m not really sure that I have superhero fatigue. Scratch that; I definitely do, but I also have superhero fatigue fatigue. We’ve been hearing about how the general population is growing tired of superhero movies for over half a decade now, and yet, there’s still no real end in sight. Marvel is keeping its slate full while DC is getting ready to reboot everything again (which, to be fair, if you’ve ever been a fan of DC Comics, you know that this is DC’s modus operandi when things start to get complicated). Paul Rudd’s inherent charm couldn’t save the dreadfulAnt-Man: Quantumania, Ezra Miller’s extracurricular activities didn’t help The Flash reach an audience, and there’s a non-zero chance that this paragraph is the first that you’re hearing about Shazam: Fury of the Gods. It feels like being a corporate shill to call any comic book adaptation that’s hot off the presses a breath of fresh air, but Blue Beetle has a surprising amount of heart, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña) just finished his pre-law undergrad—at Gotham University, naturally—and is returning to his Florida home to reunite with his family. Unbeknownst to him, the rest of the Reyes clan has undergone some shake-ups that threaten their home; his father (Damián Alcázar) suffered a heart attack, with the medical bills costing him his mechanic business, and worse, their landlord has sold their family home to the Kord Corporation, which intends to raze the property to build more luxury condominiums. Kord Industries, currently headed by Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) in the wake of the disappearance of her CEO brother Ted, is quickly becoming the only game in town, and they also employ Jaime’s younger sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) as part of the cleaning crew at the Kord estate. While working with her one day, Jaime witnesses a verbal altercation between Victoria and her niece, Jenny (Bruna Marquezine), over Victoria’s planned direction for the company, turning their attention back to the machinery of war after her father purged weapon research and development when he was CEO. Both Jaime and Milagro end up fired, but Jenny tells Jaime to come to Kord HQ the following day so that she can find gainful employment for him there. Unfortunately, her attempts at corporate espionage—in the form of the theft of something called “the scarab”—that same day are discovered fairly quickly, and she entrusts her stolen goods to Jaime, who is able to abscond with them.
Back home, Jaime’s family insist that he open the box Jenny gave him and look inside, and the piece of alien tech within immediately bonds to him and takes him on a familiar Greatest American Hero/Raimi Spider-Man style “learning to control newfound powers” sequence. It’s pretty rote stuff all things considered, but the bog standard narrative is elevated by novelty in the performances of both the lead and the supporting cast. Sarandon lends the whole thing a sense of gravitas that the film proper doesn’t fully earn, but the real standout is George Lopez, who plays Jaime’s Uncle Rudy. A dyed-in-the-wool conspiracy theorist, Rudy acts as occasional expositor, such as in the scenes where he explains the legacy of the heretofore unmentioned previous crime-fighting Blue Beetle, unlikely gadgeteer, and comic relief. He’s clearly having a lot of fun in the role, and although the comedy of the first half of the film felt a little limp and forced, the second half makes up for it.
Look, I’m no fool. I know that there’s no profound moral reason that any company seeks to diversify its staff or output. Faced with outcry in the midst of the June 2020 protests, several major studios hired dozens of DEI employees and strategists and then, as soon as things got quite, those hires were first on the chopping block when “trimming the fat.” Your dad or your cousin or your old college roommate can repeat “Go woke, go broke” until they’re blue in the face, but the truth of the matter is that no megacorp is putting funding toward creating more diverse content out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s all about money, and it always is. Disney’s casting of Halle Berry in The Little Mermaid isn’t part of some grand conspiracy to obliterate “white culture,” they cast her because now they can sell a white Ariel doll and a Black Ariel doll. It’s really as simple as that. There may have been a time when I could have appreciated Blue Beetle more for its pure representation, but things have changed a lot since we could all rest on such neoliberal laurels. Warner Brothers didn’t release this film to theaters because of strong convictions about the treatment of Latine populations in the U.S. or concerns about gentrification of non-white neighborhoods or to take a stand against corporate overreach; in fact, the fact that it touches on these issues while being part of a giant corporate conglomerate is almost insulting.
With that in mind, it’s kind of a big deal that the reins of this movie were handed over to Angel Manuel Soto, whose larger body of work has been concerned with American imperialism in Puerto Rico, as well as the rise of American fascism. His C.V. includes the feature La Granja, a set of interconnecting stories about people from various walks of life struggling with PR’s economic collapse, as well as the short docs I Struggle Where You Vacation and Inside Trump’s America, which focus on the lives of ordinary Puerto Ricans as they struggle with Washington’s sluggishness in the fact of PR’s debt crisis and the terrifying reality of the merging of cult and mob mentalities, respectively. Soto doesn’t leave his past or his beliefs behind in making Blue Beetle, which makes for a bizarre melding, as Rudy (accurately) calls Batman a fascist and Jaime’s grandmother flashes back to her revolutionary days in Mexico while wielding a giant gun and shouting (in Spanish) “Death to the Imperialists!” The irony of this is thick: Batman is DC’s most lucrative cash cow, and there’s no separating the gorged tick that is Warner Brothers from American capitalistic imperialism’s hide. Audre Lorde reminds us that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” but Soto is giving it a shot. It may not make the movie better, but it certainly doesn’t make it worse.
La vaca que cantó una canción hacia el futuro (The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future) is a beautiful, entrancing film, the first feature from writer-director Francisca Alegria. Although most reviews of the film that I have seen draw attention to the film’s environmental themes and magical-realist atmosphere, I’ve seen very little discussion about the film’s presentation of family. One of the film’s inciting incidents is the dumping of industrial waste from a paper factory into the Cruces River, but what stands out the most to me is the way that the movie focuses on a different kind of toxic waste, and the way that it can pollute the very thing that gives us life.
Magdalena (Mía Maestro) is a doctor living in a cold urban home, having put as much distance between herself and her rural upbringing as possible. When she receives a call from her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) telling her that their dairy farmer father Enrique (Alfredo Castro) has suffered from a heart attack, she returns home with her two daughters, including teenaged Tomás (Enzo Ferrada), whose gender identity she does not respect. Upon arriving and performing her own medical inspection of her father, she is told that he did not have a standard heart attack, but that it was a sudden stress-induced health issue. Enrique, for his part, tells his children that he passed out after seeing their long-dead mother Cecilia (Leonor Varela) outside of a cell phone store. Magdalena does not believe him, of course, since she was the one who watched her mother commit suicide by tying herself to her motorcycle and driving into the river when she was a mere seven years old, but he’s absolutely correct; we in the audience saw Cecilia climb out of that same river, accompanied by a mournful him that seems to come from the dead fish surrounding her, in the film’s opening moments. But what brought her back, and why?
As a character study, this is a piece about a woman who has long embodied the worst aspects of her father but learns to represent the best parts of her mother. As with many texts containing magical realism, much is left up to the interpretation, but we first see her being harsh and cold with the people closest to her, first telling Tomás that, as long as she lives in Magdalena’s house, she is her “son.” Her brother’s feelings about her are clear from their first onscreen interaction; although Bernardo lovingly embraces his nieces, when Magdalena moves in to hug him, he waves her off, citing that he has been working and is too filthy to be touched. When they arrive at the farm, Magdalena sends Bernardo off to take care of the dairy “for once” while she attends to their father. In comparison to the lush verdancy of the countryside, her home in the city is sterile, and when nature intrudes (in the form of a spider in her bathroom window), she doesn’t attempt to coax it outside and close the window, but instead runs off for a can of insecticide, which she sprays into the air futilely when she returns to find that the spider is nowhere to be seen.
All of these are elements that tie Magdalena to Enrique, who is likewise queerphobic, dismissive of his child, and sees the natural world as something that exists only to benefit human beings, diametrically opposed by civilization. Enrique also chides Bernardo for failing to take care of the dairy, even blaming him when their cows die despite their death being the direct result of Enrique’s refusal to listen to his son; his reaction to Bernardo’s insistence that they dig a new well for the cows shows that this is a recurring argument, but it’s that very lack of forethought that leads to the herd drinking from the poisoned river when they are overcome with thirst, essentially damning the dairy farm to close. When the tearful Bernardo brings this to his father’s attention, the older man calls his son a homophobic slur and degrades him. Magdalena has spent her life seeing things through her father’s myopic, cruel vision of the world, and her own family has suffered from his polluting influence as a result. That this traces itself back to her childhood is no surprise. Like her father, she has long seen her mother’s suicide as a sign of weakness due to not wanting to be a mother, as evidenced by all the times in her memory that her mother was absent while still alive. In truth, those absences were the fault of her father, who had Cecilia institutionalized multiple times because he could not control her. Luckily for her, learning this is epiphanic, and even if she is limited in her ability to heal the world, it’s not too late to heal her relationship with Tomás.
If you were wondering if there is an actual singing cow in this movie, then I regret to inform you that there is not … there are several. At the start of the film, what appears to be non-diegetic music plays as the shores of the Cruces give up hundreds of dead fish, with these images soundtracked by a mournful elegy about dying. After there are news reports that the toxic waste in the water has killed not only the fish but also the various water grasses and insects that sustain other animals in the ecosystem, which leave the area in search of other food resources. Finally, the cows drink the waters of the river and themselves succumb to the poison, but before they pass, they join their voices in a chorus, grieving for the calves that were taken from them so that they would continuously produce milk for the farm, and rejoicing that the pain that came from that separation, which they consider to be worse than death, will end soon. This has the potential to be unintentionally funny, especially in the odd occasional moment in which one of the cow “actors” is chewing cud almost in time to the song like something out of Mister Ed, but the sincerity of the moment manages to make it work despite the potential to be undermined.
That separation between mother and child stands as a metaphor not just for the relationship between Magdalena and the long-dead mother whom she unconsciously resents, but also between Magdalena and her own elder daughter. When we first meet Tomás, she is in her bedroom, showing her beau an online newspaper clipping about Cecilia’s death, asking if the boy sees the resemblance between Tomás and her grandmother. Her self-actualization is blocked not only by her mother’s bigotry but also her disconnection from her roots, and her hunger for a connection drives her to seek out her resurrected grandmother and the two bond. The revived Cecilia is mute throughout the film, but there’s a magic to the way that these two women who share a familial bond but who have never met are able to form a connection without the need for words. A love that transcends speech reappears again at the end, when Tomás and her mother reunite, and even without words, it’s clear that the two of them have gained a better understanding of each other, in unvoiced acceptance.
This is certainly one of the most moving films I’ve seen this year, as well as one of the most lyrical, beautifully composed, and haunting. It sets its mood and never alters course, hypnotic in its commitment to its themes. It should not be missed.
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