mark boomer redmond

Spellbound (1945)

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Alfred Hitchcock’s fascination with psychoanalysis and the complex workings of the human mind inarguably peaked with Psycho, but fifteen years earlier, he made an initial foray into the inner lives of psychotherapists and the patients that they analyze with 1945’s Spellbound, starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck. Spellbound finds Dr. Constance Petersen (Bergman, in the first of three collaborations with the director) in residence at the Green Manors psychiatric facility, where she is the only woman on the staff, and as such often finds herself having to fend off the unwanted advances of her insufferable colleagues. The hospital is in the process of being handed over from long term head of staff Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carrol, in his third of four collaborations with Hitchcock) to the incoming Dr. Anthony Edwardes, following an event in which Murchison was found to be negligible, possibly as the result of the early stages of senility. Dr. Edwardes (Peck) arrives, and a romance blossoms between him and Constance almost immediately, although their early interactions are fraught with tension when he seems to change into a different kind of man altogether whenever he sees images of parallel lines against a white background: the tracing of fork tines in linen, the pinstripes in Constance’s white dressing gown, train tracks, etc. In short order, it becomes clear that “Edwardes” is an impostor, and he reveals to Constance that he is an amnesiac with the initials J.B., and he flees to New York from Green Manors just before the arrival of the police, who confirm that the real Dr. Edwardes is missing and his unknown travelling companion is suspected of killing him. 

Spellbound decidedly falls into the realm of Hitchcock’s domestic crime thrillers, as opposed to his espionage-oriented ones, but it’s also an example of one of his lesser-considered genre films: melodrama. One needs to look no further than the film’s opening to see this, as this is, to my knowledge, the director’s only film in which there is an overture. It’s certainly a much more successful one than a certain later Hitchcock/Bergman collaboration, however, as the film never quite loses its thriller edge. Although the picture occasionally flirts with going for a full-on soap opera plot, there are enough touches of malice and menace to carry it to the finish line, and the thrills of the second half more than make up for some of the occasionally plodding romance scenes in the first. Although the contemporary audience may not have been primed to view Peck as an actor who was consistently known for portraying characters of high moral fiber (To Kill A Mockingbird was still seventeen years away) to the same extent that a modern audience would be, they certainly would have been able to see the vulnerability, confusion, and occasional hints of danger in his handsome face. We trust that Constance knows the inner workings of the human mind but are less convinced that she’s a strong judge of character, especially as she falls in love for the first time in her life, blinding her to the pieces of evidence that J.B. may, in fact, be exactly the dangerous criminal that the police think him to be. He’s certainly capable of turning malicious in an instant, and when he begins to stalk about the home of Dr. Brulov (Michael Chekhov), in which they’ve found shelter, with a straight razor, we’re not certain that either Constance or Brulov is safe. As such, the film’s narrative structure is superficially similar to that of Suspicion, although Spellbound is a much stronger film. 

Often, when a Hitchcock film becomes hard to find or is somehow neglected, it’s because it contains some problematic element that has caused it to fall out of favor. Secret Agent, which sees Peter Lorre doing a racist caricature in brownface, seems to only exist on bargain bin DVDs with transfers that look like they were remastered by being thrown down the stairs. Even on the Criterion app, no one attempted to quality check the subtitles for Young and Innocent, and one can only conclude that it’s because whoever was working on captioning the thing saw the grotesque Blackface at the end and threw their hands in the air. Spellbound has fallen out of print and isn’t streaming online anywhere, and I wondered over the course of the film if this had anything to do with what could be perceived as pervasive sexism throughout the narrative, although I would argue that the prejudice is on the part of the characters, not the text, since all of the people who underestimate Constance are proven wrong. Her male colleagues at Green Manors all consider her frosty, cold, and unwomanly. When she makes her way to the Empire State Hotel, she is first harassed by a drunken man who propositions her before he’s turned away by the hotel’s staff detective, who incorrectly diagnoses Constance as either a schoolteacher or a librarian and credits himself as being “a bit of a psychologist.” Constance, who actually is, is able to prey on his hubris and play the part of the repentant wife looking for her husband, thus tricking him into revealing what room J.B. is staying in. Among her peers at Green Manors, she’s also the only one to spot the thread that reveals that someone there knew the real Edwardes and thus knew J.B. was an impostor all along, eventually resulting in the downfall of the true culprit and the liberation of J.B. from prison. It’s another example of Hitchcock’s messy relationship with women and feminism. He may have been a terror to women who worked on his sets, but he also never passed up an opportunity to show a woman’s mind was more than capable of matching wits with a man. I’m not sure why this one isn’t more easily accessible or well-remembered; I only managed to catch it the first time on TCM years ago, and was only able to rewatch it on the VHS tape that I used to record it, lo these many years ago now. 

Visually, this is also one of Hitchcock’s finest. The slow establishment of J.B.’s fugue states when he sees parallel lines leads to an utterly fantastic two-minute dream sequence that includes images that were created by Salvador Dalí, and they are utterly beautiful and surreal. When Dr. Brulov tricks J.B. into drinking drugged milk, we see the image from his point of view as he raises the glass and drinks from it, the creation of a pure white horizon foreshadowing the revelation that the traumatic incident that caused his amnesia took place on a ski slope. The entire film is in black and white, save for two frames of red when the camera takes on the point of view of the end of the barrel of a gun as it fires. It’s great stuff, and given that Hitch was feuding with Harry O. Selznick at the time and wasn’t as invested in this as he was in films he was more passionate about, it’s a great insight to just how good the man could be even when he was only half-assing it, at least at this point in his career (his half-assery in his later works does not compare). I’m not sure where you might be able to find this, dear reader, other than perhaps through your library or browsing the thrift stores, but when you do, you’re going to enjoy it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rope (1948)

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I was a little concerned that returning to Rope after not having seen it since I was a teenager would be a disappointing experience. The Jimmy Stewart version of The Man Who Knew Too Much was a dull, plodding slog, especially in comparison to Alfred Hitchcock’s earlier version starring Peter Lorre, and a recent viewing of Hitchcock’s other experiment in crafting an entire film out of long takes, Under Capricorn, was a similarly dour, unengaging experience. I was pleasantly delighted to find that not only does Rope hold up, it was even better than I remembered in many ways. 

The film opens with a murder. Brandon Shaw (John Dall) and his meeker “roommate” Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger) strangle their old prep school chum David Kentley as the ultimate expression of their Nietzschean philosophy that there are Übermensch and underlings, and that they are solidly members of the former. After they hide the body in a chest, Phillip seems to immediately regret their actions, but Brandon can hardly contain himself, and sets about reorganizing their prepared table, already set for that evening’s dinner party, to the top of the chest. One by one, their guests arrive: Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick), the fourth member of their school days quintet; Janet Walker (Joan Chandler), Kenneth’s former girlfriend and current fiancée of the now-deceased David; David’s father Mr. Kentley (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), who has come to look over a set of books that Brandon and Phillip have set out for him and is accompanied by his sister-in-law Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier), attending in place of her ill sister, David’s mother. The final guest, whom neither of the two boys is certain will actually appear until he does, is Rupert Cadell (Stewart), an eccentric philosopher and the former housemaster of the prep school that Brandon, Phillip, Kenneth, and David attended. 

Stewart is the nominal star here, and although he claimed in later years that this was his weakest performance in his Hitchcock collaborations (although I would disagree; see above about The Man Who Knew Too Much), it may be because he failed to fully understand Rupert, a character whose hypocrisy and high-handedness makes him more detestable than the actual murderers with whom he shares dinner. Brandon and Phillip’s belief that their membership in an intellectual elite class gives them the right to dole out death to their “inferiors” is entirely born out of being groomed to believe this by Rupert when he was an adult and they were children under his care. Despite the fact that everything the two younger men do is merely the ultimate enactment of Rupert’s own professed beliefs, which we see him expound upon at length during the dinner party, when he realizes what they have done, he accuses them of “twisting” his words. I can see how this would be a difficult thing for an actor to parse, because it’s not terribly believable, and it’s also the film’s primary weakness. In the present, we would call Rupert an “edgelord” who realizes too late that his rhetorical exercises have resulted in the death of a human being, but there was no real roadmap for that kind of character in 1948, and Stewart seems much more comfortable playing the amateur detective element of the Rupert character while struggling to play that opposite side.  

This also makes Rope one of Hitchcock’s more class conscious thrillers, if not the most class-aware. His thriller films generally fall into one of two categories: his domestic thrillers (like The Lodger, Rebecca, Suspicion, I Confess!, and, if one is being generous, Under Capricorn) and his espionage pictures (which are too numerous to name, but include Saboteur, The 39 Steps, Foreign Correspondent, and The Lady Vanishes), with some, like Sabotage and Notorious, straddling the line. All of them have some political statements to make, especially with regards to Hitch’s lifelong antipathy towards the police, his morally correct hatred of fascism, and the occasional jingoism of his wartime features, but he rarely bothers to tackle the inherent violence of a society that is divided into different economic classes. Although there are clear exceptions, like the middle-class focused Shadow of a Doubt, his domestic thrillers usually default to focusing on characters of wealth and status. I don’t think it was necessarily a conscious decision; rich people simply have large houses and estates that come with inherent, built-in gravitas and atmosphere. In Rope, however, the core of the film is about some rich boys thinking that they have the right to choose who lives and who dies, and although there’s much discussion of this being a reserved right of individuals whose intelligence raises them above the cattle of most of mankind, it’s very clear that this is purely a matter of wealth and social station. 

When Janet gets Brandon alone so that she can dress him down for inviting both her ex and her fiance, he teases her (incorrectly) that she had left Kenneth for David because the latter’s family was richer, but this is really only a matter of degrees of wealth. Neither Brandon nor Phillip is employed, but they occupy a multi-bedroom apartment, employ a domestic servant, Mrs. Wilson (Edith Evanson), and they’re all very young adults, given that David is (or rather was) an undergrad at Harvard and that all of the boys went to school together. Thus, we’re talking about a group of rich men, Rupert included, who were born into wealth and perceive themselves as elite because of their supposed brilliance, when in fact this is simply a case of the idle rich justifying their fantasies about having the freedom to murder the poor. It’s incisive stuff, and it’s all played subtextually, making the film all the richer. At the end of the day, Brandon is no more than a bully who kills a lifelong friend less for the thrill of the act itself and more so that he can delight in the positive attention he presumes he will receive for how “clever” he was, despite the fact that he’s not really that smart at all; even with all of his preening and innuendo, the duo would still likely have gotten away with it if he hadn’t forgotten about David’s hat. Phillip is a pushover who can’t hold his liquor and allows himself too many outbursts that arouse Rupert’s suspicions in the first place. As for Rupert himself, he’s quite insistent that he believes in his moral certainty that the brilliant elite should be allowed to commit murder (of the working class, of course — hotel clerks, waiters, and others who are all identified solely by their servile role in society), even when it upsets others, only to be shocked and appalled when the victim is someone he knows personally; he’s almost utterly lacking in empathy, and is no less monstrous than his former pupils. 

All of this discussion probably makes the film sound heady and dour, but it’s quite the opposite; it’s electric, and often very funny. The innuendoes I mentioned Brandon delivering above are often smirk-worthy, but the screen really comes to life the moment that Janet appears. Rope may be one of the shorter films in Hitchcock’s sound career, but that doesn’t mean that the beginning doesn’t sag a little under the weight of the exposition of both Phillip and Brandon’s motivations and their relationships with the dinner guests; as soon as Janet steps through the door and into the apartment, she’s delivering her own witty remarks, even as she pretends that she’s only funny when she’s not trying to be. She’s a breath of fresh air, and it’s a disappointment that the actress had such a brief career. Equally delightful is Mrs. Atwater, who would be an utterly exhausting visitor but is quite fun to watch. Watching her try to remember the names of movies and plays that she’s seen or reciting the astrological signs of the era’s biggest marquee names is very entertaining. It’s less engaging to Rupert than it is to me, but one of the better subtle jokes is the way that he steers this conversation into a topic of his own interest, which happens to be inventing The Purge out of whole cloth, as if her frivolity about Ingrid Bergman’s horoscope is more vacuous that his pomposity about killing for better theater tickets. It’s also fun to see the way that Hitchcock gets around the censors’ insistence on making the two killers seem less gay. One nice bit is that when Mrs. Wilson directs a guest to the telephone, she says it’s in “the first bedroom,” while Brandon directs a different guest to the same location later by saying it’s “in the bedroom” (emphasis added), indicating that there’s really only one room that they sleep in but that Mrs. Wilson remains blissfully unaware. It’s quite good stuff, and the picture moves with such speed that you almost miss it. 

Rope was not terribly well received in its time, only coming to be considered one of Hitchcock’s better pictures by later audiences. It’s worth checking out, or even revisiting if, like me, you’ve already seen it. At eighty minutes, it’s a breeze to get through, even if your eyes will glaze over a little at the beginning and ending faux-philosophy of the main three players. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the latest feature from director Jane Schoenbrun, following A Self-Induced Hallucination, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and I Saw the TV Glow. In the film, Hannah Einbinder plays Kris Williams, an indie darling director whose most recent project—the last third of which “remade Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain”—brought her to the attention of the studio in possession of the rights to the fictional Camp Miasma slasher franchise. Following the breakout commercial success of the first Camp Miasma flick, the film’s killer Little Death and their inexplicable air vent-shaped helmet became horror iconography on par with Freddy Krueger and his glove or Jason Voorhees and his machete. The drive to produce endless sequels led to creative rot (like the late sequel Little Death Takes Manhattan), gimmicks (like Camp Miasma 3-D), and diminishing monetary returns. Kris now finds herself at the helm of Camp Miasma reboot, which the studio wants to ensure is “elevated” in order to align with current horror film trends. The purpose is two-fold: the studio hopes to reinvigorate interest in a once-lucrative intellectual property while also redirecting attention away from the original film’s transphobia by hiring Kris, a queer woman. Supposedly seeking inspiration, Kris tracks down reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), Camp Miasma’s final girl, who invites Kris to meet with her at her home, which turns out to be the same abandoned campground where the first Miasma picture was filmed. Of course, Kris’s motivation to meet Billy has additional undercurrents that she herself isn’t fully cognizant of, stemming from an epiphanic experience she had while watching Camp Miasma as a child. 

The text within the film, the Camp Miasma franchise, is wonderfully detailed stuff: the mounting number of sequels on VHS that bear the distinct typeface of the Friday the 13th film series, from which Camp Miasma takes most of its aesthetic cues; the watering down of the genuinely menacing Little Death until they start to appear in 90s anti-drug campaigns; the moral outrage from concerned citizens’ groups, leading to picketing of the movie, resulting in even more attention from the public. It’s window dressing, but it’s so thoroughly realized that one can’t help but gawk in amazement at the level of attention to detail. It’s referential through reinterpretation and reinvention, rather than just recreation. Besides the Friday the 13th films, the most obvious inspiration is Sleepaway Camp. Instead of simply recreating that film’s twist ending, the original Camp Miasma’s Little Death (Jack Haven) was an avenging spirit of a genderfluid child who was killed by several other campers. This allows Schoenbrun to grapple with the transphobia of that film by using it as a vehicle to criticize the ignorance that led to its creation, while also playfully poking fun at the large amount of cinematic non-criticism that, instead of grappling with a text’s successes and failures, relies solely on pointing out older media’s flaws without anything more substantial to say. 

The meta-textual nature of the narrative draws comparison (even within the text itself!) to “Frightmaster Wes Craven’s New Nightmare,” but an equally applicable comparison would be to say that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a movie that loves horror of a bygone era the same way that Galaxy Quest loves Star Trek. Of course, what was lacking from those films was a character using their media obsession to examine their sexuality or the nature of desire. Camp Miasma reflects, I imagine, what it feels like to experience sexual arousal only when it’s part of a fantasy mediated by a screen, rather than being aroused by touch, sensation, or intimacy. Kris admits to Billy that she’s allowed herself to be coaxed into opening up her relationship with her partner because she’s unable to meet their sexual needs because, like Owen in TV Glow, she’s more interested in TV/movies than she is in real life, and more comfortable with experiencing sexuality through the distance that a lens creates. Where this differs from Schoenbrun’s previous film is that the ending of TV Glow is considered a bleak, downer ending by most audiences, while Miasma feels like a much more celebratory endeavor, like Schoenbrun got out all of their negative feelings in Glow so that they could tackle the inherent eroticism of the slasher genre in a more fun, positive way. Owen’s narrative is one about what happens when one consigns themself to a box, while Kris’s is one that teaches her that it’s totally okay to be obsessed with a one hit wonder scream queen and only get off through fantasy — even a violent one, because that’s the point of fantasy, it’s not real. As the advertisements for the home video release of the original Camp Miasma note, “if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” 

The major detriments largely come in the form of visuals. This is a film that is largely unconcerned with making sense of time. The on-screen date given in Roman numerals for the release of the original Camp Miasma is 1980, which would make Billy a solid decade older than she is said to be, and the area around the campground moves from winter to summer over the course of a single night. One can accept that as artistic license, and one must accept it when considering that, when we get to see Little Death’s rampage from the end of Camp Miasma, it’s set to “Long December” by Counting Crows, which was not released until 1996. One could even chalk that up to the idea that we’re not seeing that scene as it was in the film, but as Kris remembers it. What I can’t accept about that scene is how badly done the special effects imagery is. There’s a fun little homage to one of Jason Voorhees’s most famous kills, the sleeping bag scene from The New Blood, wherein Little Death picks up a camper and slams them against a tree, but the kill is farcical rather than sincere, because the victim flies apart and falls to pieces like a mannequin. This same “error” occurs throughout the Little Death massacre, and it’s distracting. I’m not sure if this is supposed to represent Kris’s point of view, as it’s made abundantly clear that she finds slasher film death arousing in a way that she doesn’t understand, but if it’s supposed to be funny, it falls apart. There are several special effects “failures” throughout that have intentionality and are open to interpretation (like the Thomas Kincaid-esque winter scenes, which also look awful but have narrative purpose), but this rampage feels as if it were generated using AI. I’ve searched high and low for confirmation of this and can only find minimal discussion of it from others who get the same feeling, but please bear in mind, dear reader, that if it eventually is revealed that this is the case, disregard the star rating above and consider this film radioactive, with a big thumbs down. With nothing proven at this time, it’s still a negative, as it looks like hot garbage, but it’s not enough to ruin what is otherwise a delightfully fun movie. 

Einbinder and Anderson have absolutely excellent chemistry. Anderson puts on a delightful Southern drawl for the character, and every one of her line reads is magical. During their first meeting, Billy intentionally gives Kris a tiny fright, and the following morning, she encourages Kris to enter a room where a Little Death costume is on display, cackling like a cartoon witch when her prank succeeds. What fun! I don’t eat fast food, but Schoenbrun’s choice to shoot Billy and Kris digging into KFC in pornographic, erotic close-up meant that I ended up getting some myself less than 48 hours later. I also had my biggest laugh of the year when Kris is word vomiting about the problematic elements of art from previous generations; when she mentions a Mickey Mouse racial caricature, Billy responds “Mickey did that?” and I laughed until I choked. When watching Camp Miasma together, Kris excitedly says “This part’s transphobic!”, prompting Billy to merely shush her, even though this is the scene that gave the film its macabre, thoughtless, hilarious tagline, “They killed him. They had to.” Sleepaway Camp has been derided in the intervening decades for its blatant transphobia, but like Rocky Horror Picture Show (as we have been reminded by the think pieces that have sprung up in the wake of the death of Tim Curry), it was also transgressive, and those who may be part of the demographic that has the right to be offended by dissonant values of older media are also capable of finding something meaningful within it. Rejection of art that was, intentionally or unintentionally, textually or subtextually, and positively or negatively queer in eras past prevents us from examining them within the context of their time, and how people lived in that time. It’s not a defense of antiquated portrayals, but it is an invitation to do something more than have a knee-jerk reaction to the past. Schoenbrun certainly has, and I was pleased to join them on their journey. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Player (1992)

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Every time I search for a particular review from At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on YouTube, for the next month, the algorithm suggests other episodes from the duo for me. And I love it! After checking in to see what the two late film critics had to say about Miami Blues (normally, when the two are not aligned, I side with Roger, but Siskel liked the film and Ebert didn’t, surprisingly), their “Best of 1992” episode popped up in my recommendations. As one would expect, both men loved Robert Altman’s The Player, a neo-noir inverted mystery set amongst the wheelings and dealings of high profile Hollywood studio bigwigs. Although the film is very much a product of the early 1990s, with stars who were household names at the time (playing characters or cameoing as themselves) and may or may not be recognizable to a modern audience, the story itself is still very accessible even if the culture is somewhat alien to us now, nearly thirty-five years later. 

Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is an executive who is respected at his studio for being the “writer’s guy,” liaising between upper management and the screenwriters who come into his office to pitch their ideas, preferably in twenty-five words or less. His long day of hearing concepts as scintillating as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” “Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate,” and a sequel about Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross’s daughter called The Graduate II (pitched by Buck Henry himself in a cameo) is interrupted by the latest in a series of threatening postcards from a writer who believes Griffin has blown him off. Sensing potential impending career troubles as the result of an up-and-coming exec, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher), abandoning ship at Fox, coupled with the unplanned visit of tacky junior executives from the bank that finances the studio, Griffin combs through his files to try and figure out who might be sending the poison pen notes. 

Concluding it must have been a writer named Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), Griffin visits the man’s house and calls from his cellphone, surreptitiously spying on Kahane’s girlfriend, a painter named June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), when she answers. He flirts with her, and she tells him that Kahane has gone to a repertory screening of The Bicycle Thief. Griffin then unconvincingly “accidentally” runs into Kahane there, and the normally teetotal Griffin agrees to talk business over drinks at a local karaoke place. There, Kahane grows increasingly frustrated with Griffin’s apparent condescension and the two part ways, but when they encounter one another on the street, a scuffle ensues, during which Griffin ends up killing the screenwriter. Coming to his senses, Griffin makes it look like a mugging and flees the scene. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Detective Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) tracks him down, and she’s clearly not convinced by his protestations of innocence. His girlfriend, story editor Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson), can also tell that something’s off, even before he goes to Kahane’s funeral and ends up beginning an affair with June. Perhaps worst of all, Griffin continues to receive threats from his stalker, which means he did it all for nothing. 

The film is, despite the presence of this murder, a fairly soft satire of the film industry. Mockery is made of the contemporary studio system’s flaws: an overreliance on test screening feedback, the inherent difficulties of trying to create art in a hypercapitalistic system, and the resultant way that catering to the sentiments of the lowest common denominator (especially with regards to demands for happy endings and uncomplicated morals) damages artistic integrity. It’s sharp, but it’s not necessarily cutting. As Altman himself noted, there’s not a single agent in the film, just actors, writers, executives, and the occasional director. Just like Griffin himself, he’s not “afraid of ‘political,’” only of “radically political [and] political politica.” Ultimately, it’s very cynical about the world that undergirds the movies that we all love so much, but it never quite becomes as mean spirited as it might have. Although he kills a man in a fit of paranoid, drunken rage, the most cutthroat things that Griffin does are cutting loose his the devoted, professional, and loyal Bonnie for the younger, more buxom, blonder June and deliberately allowing Larry Levy to take credit for signing on a film that Griffin recognizes is impossible, so that he can later swoop in and save the day, thus saving his own career. The most salient thing that the film does is have an intentionally absurd happy ending despite all that comes before, just as the film with the film, Habeas Corpus, originally a downer awards-baiter, ends with a one-liner and a kiss. 

The Player goes more for the darkly comic than the noirishly gritty, but what it sacrifices there it makes up for with its nearly constant stream of witticisms and dependably funny players. Fred Ward is a lot of fun as the studio’s fixer who also waxes poetic about the golden years of Hollywood; Richard E. Grant is as impeccable as ever as a director with a grand vision for an unworkable Oscar bait film (alongside a typically hyperactive Dean Stockwell as his manager); even country musician Lyle Lovett gets in on the action as the unsettling man following Griffin around the city in a role that feels like it was written for Crispin Glover. The only place where this really falls flat is in the performance of Whoopi Goldberg, who is not on her A-game in this picture. The actors who appear in cameo roles were encouraged to ad-lib their dialogue, which offers up great opportunities, like when an unprompted Malcolm McDowell insults Griffin, leading to real befuddlement on the part of Robbins, but Whoopi does several painfully unfunny bits that all seem to go on forever, especially the one about trying to find her tampons. It’s also worth noting that Greta Scacchi’s performance here is nothing to write home about either, but at least that’s potentially an intentional acting choice, as her general blank slate nature allows for Griffin to project whatever he wants onto her. In contrast to loyal, flat-chested Bonnie, June is forever dressed in silks and thin fabrics that do nothing to disguise her nipples. She is breasting boobily at all times, and she play-acts at having depth through her art. When speaking of her late boyfriend, she says that she never really thought of him as talented, ironically standing in the midst of several “artworks” that are composed of the word “ice” surrounded by cool colors. I might not be giving Scacchi enough credit for making her such an effective representation of a boring-but-hot woman trying to seem deeper than she is, but if it’s a deliberate choice, it’s relatively successful. 

In a modern context, the most off-putting thing that an audience may have trouble with isn’t the murder of Kahane, but getting lost in trying to keep up with the cavalcade of stars in the film, and tracking who’s playing themselves and who’s playing a character within the film itself. I’d also wager that an uninitiated viewer may find themselves distracted by the never-ending series of cameo appearances, especially for those whose stars have diminished in the intervening decades. Any audience would still know Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Burt Reynolds, and Cher, of course, but Sally Kirkland, David Alan Grier, and Robert Wagner? If you’re reading this, then those names are probably at least somewhat familiar to you at the very, very least, but to the under-thirty set? Probably not so much. The best advice I can give to someone coming to this film so long after the film’s release is to just go with the flow and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Harry and Tonto (1974)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Art Carney’s Oscar-winning performance as a roadtripping old grump in Harry and Tonto (1974)

00:00 Welcome

02:02 Marx Bros blind spots
10:41 Hitchcock blind spots
28:50 Coyote vs Acme (2026)
34:00 Still of the Night (1982)
41:42 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026)
50:23 Miami Blues (1990)
58:12 The Player (1992)
1:09:00 Sherman’s March (1985)
1:16:07 Maps to the Stars (2014)
1:25:05 The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)
1:33:44 The End of Oak Street (2026)

1:48:00 Harry and Tonto (1974)

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 End of Oak Street (2026)

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The best movies for kids are usually films that meet them where they’re at, movies which capture the feeling of childhood experientially and textually, and that tell a story that a child might imagine for themself. What if an alien were my best friend? What if my friends and I built a spaceship in our garage? What if I could enter a magical world by reading a book? What if I got shrunk to a tiny size in my backyard? What if an evil carnival came to town? What if I got taken by a UFO and came back eight years later? All of those were film plots from the 1980s; several were developed and distributed by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, while others were greenlit and produced by other companies that were seeking to capture the essence of what came to be known as “that Amblin feeling.” E.T. is the most memorable keystone for that entire genre, and the intervening decades have been spent trying to recapture it, with mixed success. One of the most obvious and blatant examples was J.J. Abrams’s Super 8 in 2011, which, despite technically being set in 1979, set the unfortunate trend going forward that all any media attempting to recapture the feeling of Amblin would get stuck as period pieces set in the eighties, and thus mostly end up recreating the texture of those films without the substance thereof, or understanding what made them special. 

Updating the narrative of Stephen King’s IT to be set in the 1980s and the 2010s instead of in the 1950s and the 1980s respectively is a logical choice, but one need look no further than the general public outcry about the downward spiral of Stranger Things and the fact that we’re now producing media about how an overly nostalgic generation has deprived contemporary youth of anything new to know that the well has been pulling up naught but dust for a while now.  As such, it’s a refreshing surprise that another film that is shameless in its evocation of the Amblin style, set (partially) in 1982, manages to pull off that feeling by just as shamelessly aping one of Spielberg’s biggest films of the 1990s, Jurassic Park. The End of Oak Street’s imaginary play catalyst is “What if my neighborhood got transported back to dinosaur times?”, which is as perfect a jumping off point as one could hope for in a film like this. Even the film’s eightiesness is understated. Other than a scene in which Audrey finds solace in Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” and another in which the opening credits for The Love Boat are playing on the family room TV, the predicament in which the Platts and their neighbors find themselves isn’t one that lends itself to the “Remember this?” pop culture references in which nostalgia slop normally traffics. I did appreciate that the art department stuck a Battlestar Galactica poster on Brian’s wall so that we would know his dog is named for Dirk Benedict rather than Herman Melville, but it’s reasonably subtle for this genre. 

The suburban Platt family is going through a rough patch. Patriarch Greg (Ewan McGregor) has recently been laid off and is keeping this a secret from his wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), who can sense that something is off and that he’s not being honest with her. At the very least, she’s frustrated with his inconsistency, like bailing on a promised family day at a neighborhood block party and undermining her by allowing their son Brian (Christian Convery) to bring his disruptive Blue Heeler, Starbuck, to the cookout. The family’s precarious monetary situation is already somewhat known to daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), a budding astronomer who longs to go to Cornell and study under Carl Sagan (relatable) but knows that her family can’t afford it. For his part, Brian is entering puberty and beginning to show signs of adolescent rebellion and is hiding from his parents that he was responsible for seriously injuring another boy in the neighborhood. Denise has a friendly relationship with elderly neighbor Mrs. Huddleston, who was the uncredited editor of her novelist husband, and the older woman has been giving Denise feedback on a manuscript that she’s been writing, through which Denise is working out her mixed feelings about her life as a suburban mother. All of this familiar domestic malaise is interrupted by bizarre phenomena, like the inexplicable presence of a plant that’s been extinct for millennia in Mrs. Huddleston’s yard, or the sudden appearance of a mound of animal dung in the yard of the Platts’ hostile neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrnes). It isn’t long before the family is awoken one night by thunderous noises and blinding lights and discover that everything within a one-mile radius of the center of their neighborhood has been moved to 200 million years in the past, and the area is being infiltrated by the hungry megafauna of yesteryear. Can their family survive this crisis? 

There are many things that are flawed about The End of Oak Street. The dialogue is frequently cheesy and often outright treacly; Anne Hathaway continues to prove that she has a generational talent for interpreting some of the hokiest lines imaginable with genuine pathos (see also: Interstellar). Several sequences in which the family talks about their situation feature increasingly unhinged framing choices that make extensive, inexplicable use of split diopters for no thematic reason that I can comprehend. There are editing choices that are likewise baffling. In an early scene in which Denise and Mrs. Huddleston are discussing the former’s writing, their conversation plays out with one character occupying the left third of the frame while the other two-thirds are filled with a bay window that looks out over the block party festivities, with hard cuts to an inverted ratio of the right third of the frame containing the party who’s speaking while the left-two thirds is taken up by the window. If what is being communicated thematically is that Denise sees a potential reflection of herself in Mrs. Huddleston, a woman who subsumed her life into caring for a man who expressed no gratitude, then that’s a shot that’s begging to be framed symmetrically with the women mirroring one another. If that’s not what’s being communicated cinematically, then why not take advantage of the talent and throw in some shot/reverse-shot close-ups to break it up? I also didn’t quite love the technobabble explanation for their general predicament, but it’s a necessary evil and is decently actualized from a visual effects standpoint. 

The film’s most glaring flaw, overall and narratively, is that it never lands on a solid understanding of who its audience is. I mentioned a lot of eighties kid flicks up at the top, but it’s worth noting that The End of Oak Street is not suitable for children despite the childlike imagination inherent in its premise. In some ways, this film bears a strong resemblance to nineties classic Jumanji, but the violence there is mostly fantastic in nature; you might see a child forcibly turned into a monkeyboy or be bloodlessly sedated by a mean-looking barbed plant, but you’re not going to see that film’s animals feeding on the viscera of corpses or a blood-stained roof where a neighbor unsuccessfully challenged winged predators. The film, as also cited above, takes inspiration from Jurassic Park, but the dino violence of that movie almost feels quaint in comparison to the computer-generated gruesomeness of Oak Street, in which we witness dozens of people being ripped to shreds by prehistoric beasts, all while fleeing and screaming, first from fear and then from pain. It’s decidedly not for kids, and even a little extreme for a PG-13 film, but the film’s overly pat, sentimental ending also means that any child over thirteen is going to find it corny. 

Although the script’s dialogue is laughable, it adheres to the specific structural guidelines of screenplay instruction so precisely that it’s impossible to fault in its construction. Writer/director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows) knows this formula like the back of his hand, and he never overlooks a chance to let the rule of threes play out. It’s most noticeable with regards to Brian’s toy bow and arrow, which he attempts to use twice without success before managing to finally get a good shot in when his home threatens to become the new lair of a white worm. Both parents are realistically flawed; Greg’s hesitancy to tell his wife about his newfound unemployment comes from a place of patriarchal pride, but it also prevents her from being able to pitch in and help out by finding work herself before their financial straits become any more dire, while Denise has realistic conflicting emotions as a midlife stay-at-home mom to two children who are finding their independence. The conflict arises from their lack of communication without either being a villain; the film mostly lacks one, other than the neighbor who threatens to shoot Starbuck if the Platts don’t become more responsible pet owners. 

The thing about all of the film’s issues is: who cares? This is a movie about what it would be like if your neighborhood got sucked through a wormhole to the Jurassic period. You get a (semi) modern family encountering every kind of Mesozoic monster you can imagine: chicken-sized raptors capable of taking down a family pet, a Spinosaurus capable of knocking a car through a house, aerial reptiles that don’t take kindly to being shot at, horse-sized feathered bipeds that are surprisingly fast and always hungry, and the obligatory visit from the perennial favorite T. Rex. There are also beasts in this movie that I hadn’t even contemplated before, with the standout being some kind of albinic, amphibious, limbless tetrapod thing that made my skin crawl. The family dog reappears in the climax to fight off a Pteranodon! What more could one ask for, really?

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Miami Blues (1990)

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What happens when a sociopathic California criminal flies to Miami to start a new series of con jobs and thefts and is surrounded by the most absurd people on earth (i.e., baseline Florida residents) in a film that proves 1990 was still basically the 1980s? You get Miami Blues, the second of four films adapted from Charles Willeford’s novels, and the only adaptation that came from his popular series of novels about hardboiled detective Hoke Mosely. Directed by the late George Armitage, one of Roger Corman’s many disciples, fourteen years after his last film (1976’s Vigilante Force) and seven years before his most famous (1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank), Miami Blues is a bizarre picture that combines elements of neo-noir, erotic thriller, dark comedy, crime drama, and action flicks into something fascinating, funny, and thrilling. 

A man calling himself “Junior Gottlieb” (Alec Baldwin) arrives in Miami, and he’s barely made it off the plane before he’s stolen a stranger’s suitcase and broken the finger of an obnoxious Hare Krishna. He slips onto a courtesy shuttle and checks into the luxurious hotel that it takes him to, where the lead bellhop offers to send up a prostitute, and Junior accepts. When the young woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) arrives, Junior reveals that he has no interest in her sexually, and that he was hoping to instead convince her to purchase some of the clothing in the luggage that he stole. Junior sees through her sex worker alias and tricks her into revealing that her real name is Susie, and the two end up sleeping together anyway, as the naive girl from Okeechobee falls for his dubious charms. Unbeknownst to Junior, the cultist that he assaulted at the airport died of shock, and the case falls into the lap of homicide detective Hoke Mosely (Fred Ward), a grizzled oaf of a man with terrible fashion sense, sharp observational skills that bely his slovenly appearance, and false teeth. He catches up with Junior at Susie’s apartment in less than 24 hours, implying that he knows the young man is guilty and highlighting the telltale signs in his behavior that indicate he’s served time, but also drinking up most of the young couple’s beer and (maybe) playing the dumb drunk in order to ingratiate himself. Junior sees through the act and tracks Hoke down to his residence, where he savagely beats the cop, stealing his badge, gun, and dentures, making him more dangerous than ever. 

It’s here that the film takes a fascinating turn. It’s very funny from its earliest moments; when Susie tries to beg off of spending the night together because she has a “lot” of homework that night—she has to write a haiku—Junior robs her neighbors while she takes a bath, all while extemporaneously composing several of them like “Breaking, entering / The dark and lonely places / Finding a big gun.” But once he has Hoke’s badge and gun, he opens up a whole new way to terrorize and rob people, which he gets away with for quite some time largely because he just … behaves like a cop. After shooting a would-be smash-and-grab thief at a dockside restaurant (only calling out “Freeze or I’ll shoot” after pulling the trigger) and realizing the power he wields, he tries to strongarm the bellboy/pimp who sent Susie to him by pretending that she was underage, at which point the man claims that he knows this isn’t true because her ID was checked by the cop he’s already bribing weekly. Junior interrupts several crimes in progress and takes advantage of the situation by “allowing” the perps to get away then making off with their loot, but what one notices the longer this goes on is that a violent psychopath is consistently responding to burglar alarms, purse-snatchings, and drug deals when the real police are nowhere to be found. At one point, Junior “busts” two musclehead drug smugglers and has them handcuff themselves to a metal bar, then he steals their product; Hoke’s soon-to-retire partner Henderson (Charles Napier) informs him that one of the two men was the killer in “The Dumbbell Murders,” a homicide that Hoke has been working for over a year, and jokes that maybe Hoke should let Junior close a couple more cases before apprehending him. 

The performances here are excellent. Jennifer Jason Leigh is almost unrecognizable, sporting a blonde pixie cut and an equally audacious southern accent, and although Susie’s under-written and dim-witted to a fault, Leigh still imbues her with a sense of pathos that demonstrates her understated abilities as an actor. Fred Ward is one of the great unsung character actors of his generation, and he is an absolute delight in this role. There were three more Hoke Mosely novels published after Miami Blues, and one gets the feeling that there was an attempted franchise in the making with this film that simply never continued, which is a shame; I would have loved to see him play this sleazeball a few more times. Perhaps the reason this never came to fruition is that Alec Baldwin simply steals the show here as the dangerous, deranged Junior. Miami Blues may be the best non-Jack Donaghy performance of his career, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that so effectively utilizes his icy, cold eyes as well as this one does. His ability to flip back and forth between dealing out unhinged violence and playing house with the beautiful young woman he’s conned into falling for his sob stories is truly something to behold, and he plays every scene with Leigh with a bizarre glee, as if he can’t believe he’s getting away with such an obvious farce. He thinks he’s hit the jackpot, but his cons mostly succeed because he’s facing off against deviants, simpletons, and deviant simpletons. It’s also worth noting that this is a film that isn’t hesitant to play on Baldwin’s contemporary sex appeal; he’s clad in nothing but his underwear or otherwise shirtless for long portions of the film, and the camera spends more time ogling his semi-nude form than it does Leigh’s. Fred Ward is also quite attractive (this was only two years after Big Business, after all), but the film keeps him covered up in tacky screen-printed silks and hospital neckbraces so as not to distract from the fact that this film is partially selling itself on Baldwin’s taut torso. 

The smaller roles here are also delightful. Charles Napier has a lot of fun playing off of Ward; their introductory scene finds them arguing about who has to break the news to the family of the deceased Hare Krishna, with Napier’s Henderson begging off even though it’s his turn because he took “the fat lady who sat on the kid,” which he claims “counts for two.” The exposition that he’s only one week away from retirement sets up the expectation that he’s going to die in the final reel, but he makes it to the end intact, firing off bon mots as he heads into the sunset. Nora Dunn gets less to do as Hoke’s new partner, Ellita Sánchez, but she’s memorable nonetheless, and it was probably more surprising to see her in a more serious role in 1990, fresh off of her five season run on SNL. Miami Blues is also a film that’s chock to the brim with one scene wonders. Paul Gleason, probably best remembered as the principal in The Breakfast Club, is a lot of fun playing against type as the vice cop who’s on the take with regards to the hotel prostitution ring, who finds and beats up the real Hoke after Junior tells the bellhop pimp to send money to him at Hoke’s apartment. The best minor performance, however, is probably the Honeymoon Killer herself, Shirley Stoler, as a no-nonsense pawn shop matron who sees through Junior’s act almost immediately and is one of the only characters who ever manages to get the better of him. 

Near the film’s end, there’s a scene in which vinegar pie, a nineteenth century custard pie that allowed for vinegar to be substituted as an acid for the more difficult to obtain lemon, plays a vital role. For contemporary critics, Miami Blues seems to have been a vinegar pie in and of itself, something that was almost unpalatable, too sweet and too sour at the same time, but it’s managed to become a bit of a cult classic, as indicated by its current presence on the Criterion streaming service. It’s definitely worth finding the time to enjoy.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Duck Soup (1933)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the classic Marx Bros war comedy Duck Soup (1933).

00:00 Welcome
02:26 Under Capricorn (1949)
09:50 The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)
19:45 The Others (2001)
25:21 Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)
29:12 Maniac Cop (1988)
35:58 Saccharine (2026)
50:05 Tony (2026)
59:16 Maddie’s Secret (2026)
1:15:39 Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

01:33:33 Duck Soup (1933)

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

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

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I made several mistakes before attending a screening of the latest MCU corporate product, Spider-Man Brand New Day. The first was re-watching Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that I gave 4.5 stars to upon my initial viewing, which was at a drive-in theater on top of a parking garage, continuing to observe COVID protocols in late 2021. In the years since its release, I’ve seen many people online attempt to revisit this film, only to discover that it fails to work at all outside of a theatrical experience, because the film has clear pauses for the audience to react to the return of characters from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films as well as those starring Andrew Garfield in the lead role. I never paid much attention to that criticism. After all, I hadn’t experienced it in a theater, and I found myself sufficiently pleased with the choices of who to include, and I was appropriately emotionally invested. Upon rewatch five years later, however, I could hardly believe how utterly bored I was. The first half hour meanders endlessly as we watch Peter Parker (Tom Holland) deal with the fallout of the exposure of his secret identity (and his being framed for the death of Mysterio) before the first returning villain, Arnold Vosloo’s Doc Ock, enters the narrative. I was still sufficiently moved by Garfield’s Peter’s emotional response to saving MJ (Zendaya) when he couldn’t save his own love, but otherwise, the stakes couldn’t have felt lower or more disinteresting; even the death of Aunt May lacked any kind of resonance this time around. No Way Home is nearly 2.5 hours of film-making so emotionally hollow that it did the opposite of making me excited for Brand New Day. 

My second mistake was probably the most common one for filmgoers, which was that I failed (or rather chose not) to do the homework. And the homework that I did do didn’t even help! Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is in this film, not as the “Smart Hulk” we last saw on the big screen in Endgame, but as his normal, collegiate professor self, with Hulk repressed via a wrist-worn device that exists solely so that it can be damaged later for dramatic purposes. I’m one of the dozens of people who watched She-Hulk through to its conclusion (there is nowhere on this earth that Tatiana Maslany can lead that I will not follow), and even I had completely forgotten about the inhibitor device being a plot point on that show. Even then, the last time we saw Hulk on screen, it was in the final episode, and he was still in his merged Smart Hulk form. So why are we back to a Banner/Hulk Jekyll/Hyde paradigm that hasn’t been the status quo since 2018? I don’t know, and the corporate overlords behind Brand New Day didn’t bother to make up a reason. They know you haven’t been able to keep up with all of this, and that as a result, you’re going to assume something happened on one of the shows you couldn’t be arsed to watch. If there really is a reason that I’m not aware of, please leave a comment on this post. 

The third, and perhaps biggest, mistake that I made was being an X-Men fan. The biggest comic book movie news heading into the weekend last week was the casting of Samara Weaving as the MCU’s Emma Frost, which was both (a) perfect casting and (b) incredibly awful optics at the very least, given that the announcement of the casting of “The White Queen” coincided with the quiet cancellation of both the long-delayed MCU Blade film starring Mahershalah Ali and the TV series Wonder Man, which also had a Black lead. The ongoing win-them-back campaign that the MCU corporate product machine has been working on over the past year has reeked of sweaty desperation for cultural relevance, from the return of Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr. in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday to the near-daily announcements of who’s-been-cast-as-who for the upcoming addition of the X-Men to the franchise. One of said announcements turned out to be something of a major spoiler for this movie, which really seems to indicate that the left and right hands of this greater enterprise aren’t entirely coordinated with one another. 

Enough preamble. It’s been almost five years since we last saw Peter Parker, who enlisted magical assistance in trying to reclaim his secret identity, ultimately requiring that he sacrifice all of his familial connections in order to save the multiverse. In the interim, he’s become New York’s beloved masked hero, taking on countless well-known villains and working with both NYPD detective DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), the head of the so-called “Department of Damage Control,” a former S.H.I.E.L.D. sub-unit created by Tony Stark for post-battle clean-up. Although his once-girlfriend MJ and former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) no longer remember him, Ned’s frequent social media posts have allowed Peter to keep up with their day-to-day lives. It’s a solitary existence, and it’s taking its toll on Peter, who begins to manifest black eyes and further mutation of his body (including the development of organic web shooters) even before he has a run-in with the film’s villain, a body-hopping consciousness that can move from person to person with ease but can’t possess Peter himself. Things come to a head when Peter learns that MJ and Ned have moved back to NYC after graduating from MIT, putting them in danger from the latest super-threat. 

If you thought that the pauses to allow audiences to whoop and holler when they recognized something that they saw on screen in No Way Home were distracting and unnecessary, you’ll really find yourself taken out of the moment when it happens here. Besides the aforementioned returning Hulk (who one must imagine is a deadbeat dad since there’s been no mention of his space son from She-Hulk in the last four years), there’s also new Black Widow Yelena (Florence Pugh) and Frank “Punisher” Castle (Jon Bernthal) in the mix. These amount to little more than cameos in which Pugh is given nothing to do but make unfunny jokes about the varying sizes of the metaphorical “potatoes” that she and Peter are tasked with (Bernthal is better integrated and better used). The reveal that the villain of the piece is someone that we know from other superhero media is also one of these moments, and although there was a gasp in my theater (second in volume only to the audible excitement at the appearance of Michael B. Jordan in the trailer for the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair), I had a much different experience with this revelation. 

I want to tread lightly around this subject, since this might come as a pleasant surprise twist to others, and who am I to steal that joy? This doesn’t appear to be a well-protected spoiler; my barista friend from whom I got coffee this morning already knew it and he’s going to see the film later this week. If you Google this movie, perhaps to see showtimes in your area, the performer and their character are the first result in the “cast” widget, even before Holland or Zendaya. Nevertheless, I’ll touch on this as lightly as I can. Early in the film, the villain’s ruthlessness and casual disregard for human life is made clear as they pilot a stolen tank through the streets of the city causing mass destruction and certain implied death, Peter’s last minute rescue of an awestruck child notwithstanding. After realizing Peter can’t be taken over, when surfing from body to body, the villain deliberately walks the person it’s possessing into the street to be hit by a car; later, the villain compels a possessed MJ to throw herself off a building. In the end, with the reveal that the obviously nefarious operation was unsurprisingly doing nefarious deeds (I’m sorry, what do you mean that the death cult works for you now?), we get a maudlin flashback that explains the character’s trite little origin story. In the moment that Peter turns his monitor around and says, “I’ve identified [them], [their] name is [major spoiler],” I didn’t get the little thrill that the interconnectedness of this universe used to inspire; my first thoughts were a simple “Really?” followed by an image of Don Corleone saying “Look at how they massacred my boy.” They made [redacted] a murderer right out of the gate! What are we doing here? In the same way that the promotional and productive arms of this behemoth don’t seem to be communicating with each other very much, the first and second halves of this film don’t cohere into a whole because our callous, murdering villain of part one is an innocent victim in part two, but you can’t have all that collateral damage early on and not grapple with it later. It’s maddening! 

With the rising tide of more, new Christopher Nolan discourse in the wake of The Odyssey, one of the talking points it appears we failed to leave in the past was whether or not Nolan was arguing for or against a fascist mass surveillance state in his Batman trilogy. The scenes in question revolve around Batman creating a network of cameras for tracking down criminals, and his trusted mentor Lucius telling him that this is a dangerous technology that should never be used. And he’s right! In this film, we get an “I didn’t hear that” reaction from Detective DeWolff when Peter admits that he’s created this very thing, and it’s just a passing joke. It’s not even plot-relevant, since that’s not how Peter manages to get an image of [redacted]’s face; he gets their photo with his goggles. I’m sorry if you thought that you could blissfully take a little excursion into the Marvel Cinematic Universe again and catch up with your old friends without getting soft Flock camera propaganda. Hey, look over here! Don’t think about how those cameras in your neighborhood are being used by cops to stalk women, misread license plates and create deadly situations as a result, or being used to monitor you with no reason and without a warrant. Get used to them being around all the time, because they’re not going anywhere (unless you do something)! They’re a totally normal thing that we’re joking about in your Spidertwunk adventure to normalize it, not a careful, constructed step into a full-blown surveillance state!

This movie is fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We’re fine. Peter saves the day by opening up his mind and letting the villain get a pep talk from a memory of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), because why not have the cake of milking the main character’s mother figure’s death for all it’s worth in the last movie and also eat it too by having her show up the very next outing. It cheapens the emotional stakes and impacts of both movies, but that’s fine. It’s fine. It would be nice if Peter had a few memories of May reminding him to eat a vegetable from time to time, but if I could subsist on nothing but label-to-camera Little Caesars and look like Tom Holland I wouldn’t bother with leafy greens either. Some extra iron might have helped with his spider-puberty, though.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Saccharine (2026)

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Saccharine is the latest supernatural horror film from Natalie Erika James, who previously directed Relic. Midori Francis stars as Hana, a queer medical student who struggles with her weight. While out one night with classmate Josie (Danielle Macdonald), Hana runs into her high school acquaintance Melissa (Annie Shapero), who was overweight in adolescence but has now slimmed down significantly. She offers Hana a couple of capsules of “Grey,” a new non-government-approved weight loss supplement that she says did wonders for her, although she warns her that the medication is extremely expensive. Hana, who has a crush on Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a personal trainer at the university gym, sees rapid progress in her weight loss journey after only one capsule, but when she learns that the price for Grey is five thousand dollars, she opens the second capsule and runs it through spectroanalysis, at which point she discovers that the miracle drug consists of human cremains. She sneaks back into the cadaver lab and retrieves some biowaste from her class group’s assigned corpse (cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha” by one of her groupmates because of the dead woman’s obesity), cremates it, and begins taking it. By the time she realizes that in so doing she has made herself the object of haunting by Bertha’s restless (and hungry) ghost, it might be too late for her. 

There was some discourse last year with the sudden appearance of Ozempic/GLP-1s on the market as a weight loss medication, with many relating the too-good-to-be-true results of the treatment and the abject horror of seeing perfectly healthy celebrities and athletes appearing in advertisements for it to the 2024 film The Substance. The Substance is a film about a culture that prioritizes aesthetic conformity to a Eurocentric beauty standard upheld by a porn-addled populace over real “health,” pre-saging Ozempic, and is about the kind of world that creates the “need” for GLP-1s. Saccharine is a film that lives in the post-Ozempic world, a character study into a person whose lack of control over their binging episodes leads them to sacrifice their health in more ways than one in order to have the body that they want. It’s indirectly grappling with GLP-1s, but it’s also casting a wide enough net that its central metaphor can also easily be seen as a parallel to a fad diet or bulimia. It’s not exactly breaking new ground, but it’s also well-studied in the way that it treats the characters who struggle with their weight, often as the results of coping mechanisms and self-destructive habits that they have very little conscious control over. 

Saccharine’s greatest weakness is in its pacing. At 112 minutes in length, it moves pretty quickly in its first and final acts, but the middle tends to drag, with the scenes of Bertha-possessed-Hana eating in a fugue state beginning to feel redundant. The storytelling in Act I is very economical, giving us a lot of story visually without any of it feeling expository. We learn that Hana’s a med student, that she has a crush on Alanya, that she struggles with her weight, that she has a tendency to binge eat, that she’s a lesbian, and that she over-identifies with the morbidly obese corpse she and her classmates are tasked with dissecting (they even wear the same nail polish) — all within the first ten minutes of the film. But after the half-hour mark, the pace slows to a bit of a crawl. There is also a mostly well-done subplot about her parents’ marriage from which we infer a lot about Hana’s childhood. Her mother Kimie (Showko Showfukutei) is a typically overbearing mother whose parental concern takes the form of constantly monitoring her daughter’s weight and food intake and providing unwanted housekeeping; her father remains completely offscreen except as a shambling cryptid-like presence in the periphery, a shut-in who has grown too fat to leave the house. In the one real scene with him, Hana visits him while her mother is out of country (perhaps having left him for good) and lambasts him for “giving up” and the way that this affected his family. As a “the monster is the metaphor” horror film, this one comes a little too close to reaching Smile’s “oops, too obvious” territory in these scenes, and can be particularly frustrating at this point since the narrative seems to be spinning its wheels, but the final act manages to get the energy back on track to reach an interesting conclusion. The film’s unwieldy length results in an epilogue scene which follows the climax feeling less like a well-considered final rug-pull and more like a tacked-on extension, which wouldn’t be the case in a film that was ten minutes shorter. In a film with this subject matter, it’s hard to resist the urge to make a joke about trimming some of the fat around the middle, but it really would have helped the film overall. 

One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed about Saccharine was that it also explores some largely uncovered ground by having its main character be a scientist, someone not only capable of finding out what’s in the miracle pills and replicating it but also who tackles her apparent haunting with scientific rigor; the film smartly explores this rigorousness as an almost pathological means for Hana to take some agency and control in her life, when she doesn’t have control over her body. That’s good stuff! One also initially gets the sense that Alanya will be more of an antagonistic presence: a hot, mean, physically attractive woman who will inevitably reject or otherwise hurt Hana. Instead, she becomes the film’s love interest, and she’s also both reasonable in her concerns that Hana is losing weight too quickly and compassionate about Hana’s compulsive night eating (which is actually Bertha acting through her, but Alanya can’t know that). I also really liked the relationship between Hana and her best friend Josie, who is a breath of fresh air every time that she appears. Although there are moments where her dialogue threatens to become a little too Afterschool Special, like when she tells Hana “You say ‘fat’ like it’s a bad word!”, she’s pretty well characterized throughout. Although the film wastes some time at other points, we don’t have to sit around waiting for Josie to believe Hana about the ghost that’s haunting her, since Bertha makes her presence known while Josie is there pretty immediately. All of that works, and works well. Perhaps most surprisingly, the film decides to suddenly become much funnier in the final act, which is a bit of tonal whiplash but which I appreciated, since it helped jump-start things again after the slothful midsection. 

This one is not quite as subtle or meaningful as Relic, and admittedly, I don’t think it’s trying to be. Moving away from the mostly single location setting of that film to the more varied environments of this one creates more opportunities for visual flourish. That’s mostly successful, as there are beautifully composed shots of triangular university stairwells and other fascinating images, and the more immediately apparent supernatural premise of this film means that we get to see some great ghost images early on. I also want to shout out the end credits, which are some of the coolest that I have seen in a long time. I’m not sure how I feel about some of the more regressive depictions of overeating, however. There are images of a mouth (presumably Hana’s) gorging in the opening, and many more throughout, and it feels very Shallow Hal to have the area around our lead actress’s mouth smeared with jelly and grease when she’s gorging herself during her “fat” period, slovenly and intentionally off-putting, then have her scarf just as much when she’s got her haunted metaphorical tapeworm taking the brunt of it in her “slimmed down” appearance. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth mentioning. All in all, this one isn’t quite as smart as some of the director’s previous work, but it’s making up for that by dialing up the style and expanding the scope of the lens. I look forward to her next one, and I hope it’s a little bit more concise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond