mark boomer redmond

I Married a Vampire (1987)

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You’re not going to get a lot of butts in seats for a movie in which a woman marries a vampire without titling that film I Married a Vampire, but that reveal would be a little more fun if you were able to go into a screening without that knowledge. Of course, the fact that marriage to a bloodsucker is the inevitable outcome of this story is made clear from the outset, when young Viola (Rachel Golden) picks up her parents from the airport in an unnamed city; they’ve arrived in town after learning secondhand from Viola’s sister that she’s gotten married, and are insistent on meeting her new husband. Of course, before she brings mom and dad home, she’s got to give them the whole story of how she met her undead husband …

Two months earlier, Viola lands in not-New York (the end credits thank the city of Boston, but no notable landmarks of any kind are seen in any of her exploration montages) and is ready to start her life anew, far from Iowa. Unfortunately, she falls victim to all of the various swindles that eighties metropoles had to offer; she ends up in a disgusting apartment after getting swindled by a shady landlord, is robbed and grifted by her supposed poet neighbor Portia, gets stiffed for a heavy retainer by a lawyer who promises to help her get her money back from the landlord, gets pressured into giving up her last bit of savings to the cult of Muhammad Buddha Christ, and can only find work as a night cleaner for a man who sexually assaults her. All of this finally starts to change when her co-worker Olivia introduces Viola to her “brother” Robespiere [sic] (Brendan Hickey). Viola, to her credit, immediately cottons on to the fact that they’re vampires, but she later laughs off her suspicions as the result of too much beer and the lingering effects of a horror movie double feature. When she returns to Robespiere when she’s run out of options, she finds herself a new woman, charged with the confidence she needs to get her savings back from the grifters, and if they put up a fight, her new beau can take them out. 

There are some genuinely wonderful performances and sequences in I Married a Vampire, even if the film gets off to a sluggish start. Viola’s parents, Morris and Doris, are an interesting pair, since they’re both grumps who are blind to their poor parenting in different ways. Morris, for his part, is quite funny, while Doris’s haranguing of her wayward daughter is less fun. The script is pretty sharp from the get-go, and one gets the impression that writer/director Jay Raskin had a vision that he came close to fulfilling here, but was ultimately restrained by the budget provided him as a result of this being a Troma-level production. Once we get the framing device set-up out of the way, the actual narrative gets underway, and we get to meet a fantastic cast of awful characters. First, Viola encounters Mr. Gluttonshire, who tries to pick her up under the impression that she’s a sex worker. Then, she meets Mr. Keeper, the landlord who tells her that she won’t be able to find a place for $300 a month, but sets her up with an infested shoebox studio for $400… plus a finder’s fee and the deposit ($1000 total, or about $3300 in 2026), eating up a third of the money she worked hard to save for her move. When night falls, she learns that her unit abuts a loud rock venue that also fills her entire apartment with flashing lights. 

It’s in this sequence that we meet Portia (Temple Aaron), who all but steals the show. She’s exactly the kind of street-savvy gutter-dweller that you’ve met before, in the movies if nowhere else. She tells Viola that she’s a poet, and that she writes song lyrics for rock bands, and that she can get Viola a great deal on a stereo, only $50! She also explains that the reason they have no water is because they’re connected to the club next door, and they only have water pressure when there’s a good band (when the music is good, no one’s using the bar bathroom, so they’re not competing with the constant flushing for water), which happens every two or three months. Only someone as naive as Viola would be capable of falling for Portia’s obvious bullshit, but it’s charming in its way, and Portia is a tragic figure in her own right. I genuinely believed that she was going to end up on the business end of Robespiere’s fangs once Viola gets her understated revenge later, but she’s the only one who gets off relatively easy, as the vampire merely hypnotizes her to stop lying to and stealing from her friends. 

It’s here, in this circumvention of the expectation of how violent this will be, that this stands out for a Troma release. They’re never classy movies, and this one certainly isn’t that, but it demonstrates restraint in areas that other Troma-branded flicks don’t. It’s notable in the quiet, non-bloody, non-gory story resolution that Portia gets, but also in the understated nature of the revenge Robespiere enacts for Viola. You hear “Troma” and think that you’re going to get some geysers of blood or at least some viscera, but most of the violence occurs offscreen, with no gross-out bits at all. Even more shockingly, although Viola is violated by Mr. Gluttonshire, there’s no titillation factor and the film doesn’t use it as an excuse to force the lead actress’s top off. I’m not saying that the N.O.W. should be giving Jay Raskin an award or anything, but for a flick from the studio that brought you Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator, it’s almost admirable. There’s no real violence, we don’t see any of it, and when it’s over, Viola is still fully clothed; it feels almost modest.

The romance between Viola and Robespiere is dreadfully dull, unfortunately, and the sequences wherein she goes to all of her antagonists and asks for her money back, is laughed at, and then gets her revenge via supernatural husband gets a little repetitive. The film runs out of steam once it stops being about all of the nasty urbanites who prey on naive farm girls and watching Viola tolerate it all like she’s the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Normally, the revenge portion of these films is supposed to be where all the fun happens, but I Married a Vampire is a little frontloaded with scuzzballs, which means that it doesn’t quite finish as strongly as it ought to, which is likely why it’s mostly forgotten. It’s still well worth checking out, however; just know you’re likely to get distracted in the back half. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Boomer’s Best-of-the-Year Oversights, Part Two (2020-2024)

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In one of our recent end-of-the-year podcast episodes that was partially inspired by my having finally been convinced to watch The Twentieth Century based on my delight in director Matt Rankin’s follow-up feature Universal Language (it was my favorite movie of last year!), Brandon read off a list of film titles that he asked me to identify as a kind of makeshift quiz. Those titles were all films that had been on the Swampflix Top Ten list for their eligible year, and which I had not seen at the time of the relevant list’s publication. I’m not a completionist by nature, but with an upcoming collaborative project, I took that list as homework and got to work filling out these blind spots to determine if the listed films would have made my own end-of-the-year list if I had seen them in time. Part One of that journey can be found here. Now, come along with me for part two: 2020-2024.

2020: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Deerskin – Watched March 27, 2024

Upon Review: I, like Brandon, consistently find myself drawn to the work of Quentin Dupieux. Rubber was heavily discussed in the pretentious collegiate film circles I ran with in my youth and I had an absolute hoot of a time with Smoking Causes Coughing, which was on my 2023 end of the year list. This one somehow just slipped past me when it came out, but I did finally watch it over a year ago, and it’s stuck with me. This film, about a jacket that compels its owner to go to increasingly violent lengths in order to ensure that it is the only jacket in the world (although whether this is actually an act by a conscious entity or merely the main character’s delusion is ambiguous), is a lot of fun. Dupieux could probably have made the whole film work on that premise alone, but the complication of a local woman who buys his story that he’s in town to make a documentary starts to cut together his murder footage into something coherent, the film really goes above and beyond. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes, absolutely.

The Wolf House – Watched March 18, 2026

Upon Review: A marvelous picture, top to bottom. Animation in styles I’ve never seen before or ever even considered were possible. The film is an in-universe propaganda piece about obeying your overseers in the form of a fairy tale that vacillates between stop motion, nontraditional versions of traditional animation styles in the form of time lapse painting directly onto a wall, filled with images both beautiful and grotesque. A masterpiece. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Swallow – Watched February 17, 2026

Upon Review: This film was released in March of 2020, which is why I didn’t see it. I was planning to, however, as I was anxiously anticipating its release after seeing trailers for it for a couple of months that led up to lockdown. Unlike a lot of people (who survived the pandemic), I was not someone who was suddenly blessed with an abundance of free time to make sourdough or practice guitar; my lockdown experience was a constant vacillation between twelve hour workdays and primal, rodent-like fear about the future. I don’t even remember learning that this one had ever come to streaming, and while that’s unfortunate, I also don’t think that I would have appreciated this one in its time. Perhaps it’s because Swallow, unlike The Lighthouse, is primarily concerned with the quiet, hidden, self-destructive habits that emerge from the unholy marriage of isolated boredom and previous traumas, while The Lighthouse’s frenetic madness was much more like what I experienced in quarantine. Haley Bennett is wonderful here in her understated feelings of inadequacy in the presence of her in-law social betters who are universally her moral inferiors, and I loved the performance from Elizabeth Marvel as her seemingly warm but ultimately villainous mother-in-law. 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but for the wrong reasons. I wouldn’t have been in the headspace to appreciate this when I would have gotten the chance to see it. 

Possessor – Watched February 11, 2026

Upon Review: This one simply slipped past me in the stream. The Lagniappe Podcast crew watched 2012’s Antiviral in 2023, the same year that Infinity Pool released, and although I very much enjoyed the older film, I could only recognize Infinity Pool for its technical accomplishments as I could not connect with it in the least (Brandon was much more positive). A couple of years ago, I remembered that Possessor was well received at Swampflix, but I ended up watching Malignant (which I disliked but which, again, Brandon had more positive things to say about) instead due to some confusion and am only now working my way back to this one. What a ride! Possessor is an absolutely fantastic piece of art from start to finish. Andrea Riseborough plays a woman who, under guidance from Jennifer Jason Leigh, hijacks the bodies of innocent people through technological trickery and then uses them to assassinate targets. Her most recent possessee is Christopher Abbot, and as she starts to lose herself in more ways than one, she ends up fighting for domination of his body, while he manages to get a glimpse of her family and turns what shambles of a life she has upside down as he tries to figure out what’s happening to him. Gorgeously shot, masterfully performed, drenched in color, and featuring an appearance from Tiio Horn, one of my favorite underrated Canadian performers, this was a delight. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes, absolutely.

The Twentieth Century – Watched December 4, 2025

Upon Review: The viewing of this film for our 2025 retrospective on previous films by some of our favorite directors of that year precipitated the very project that you’re currently reading. Director Matthew Rankin’s 2025 feature Universal Language was my favorite film of the year, and The Twentieth Century is an even more delightful picture, an utterly demented look at the career of W.L.M. King, a not particularly well remembered Canadian Prime Minister, complete with visits to “The Flesh Pits of Winnipeg,” whack-a-mole seal clubbing as part of the candidacy for governance, and the future of our neighbors to the north being determined by an ice skating race through a mirrored labyrinth. One of the funniest movies that I have ever seen. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Absolutely; it would have hit the top 5.

2021: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar – Watched February 20, 2026

Upon Review: Part Josie and the Pussycats, part Romy and Michele, part SNL sketch, and just a dash of Muriel’s Wedding, this Kristen Wiig/Annie Mumolo North Dakota besties-on-vacation comedy is a delight. I love it when a comedy is so perfectly constructed that it scratches that same little itch in one’s brain that a cleverly crafted mystery story does. Everything pays off in the end: the sharp seashell bracelets, the seafood festival queen’s bizarre human cannonball tradition, and even an ocean spirit named Trish. All that, and Jamie Dornan sings to a seagull while flexing on a beach. What more could one ask for? 4.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Mandibles – Watched January 24, 2026

Upon Review: I didn’t have much fun with this one for its first half, which features two clinically brain dead losers stumbling upon a captive giant fly and coming up with a hairbrained scheme to teach it to rob banks on their behalf. Upon discovery of the beast, they spend some time trying to find a location to “train” it, eventually discovering a remote trailer home whose occupant they force out and which the slightly taller and dumber of the two almost immediately burns down in a cooking mishap. From there they set out on the road to refuel their (stolen) car, at which point they run into a woman who believes that the taller idiot is her high school athlete boyfriend, and invites the two of them to her parents’ home for a bit. This is where things started to become much funnier and more enjoyable, as there is a woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos) there who can’t control her vocal volume, and the film never lets up on its comedy from there. At a breezy eighty minutes, this is worth sitting through the less exciting first half to get to the hilarious last forty. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Lapsis – Watched January 27, 2026

Upon Review: This one feels even more prescient now than it did five years ago. A man with limited employable skills takes a gig economy job as a “cabler,” which involves him going on physically demanding hikes to run miles and miles of electronic cord to connect quantum computers that appear to be used almost solely for financial transactions. The impetus for this is the ongoing chronic illness from which his younger brother seemingly suffers; on the trail, he meets a series of other cablers who fill him in on the backstory of the company, specifically the way that it gamifies obsolescence in the form of forcing the cablers to compete with automatons, and try to introduce him to the concept of collective action. In the past year, I’ve seen my city overrun with driverless cars operated by “Waymo,” and my antipathy toward them makes some people uncomfortable. For me, it was already morally and ethically wrong for rideshare companies to infiltrate urban markets, drive out any taxi/cab infrastructure already in place through lower pricing, then immediately raise those prices sky high the moment that they achieved market dominance. The only positive that came from it was the “agency” that these companies offered to drivers to “be [their] own boss” and “set [their] own hours,” which these new automated rideshares will likewise eventually displace, creating further shareholder value for people who are already rich enough and drive more gig workers into economic desperation. Lapsis, although it occasionally seems like it might be close to running out of steam, creates a dim-witted viewpoint character to try to recite all of the company lines about the positives of gig work and be educated otherwise. It sounds preachy, but the indie film budget, values, and casting of this one make it work. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

The Power of the Dog – Watched February 27, 2026

Upon Review: I’m not terribly familiar with Jane Campion’s filmography outside of The Piano and her TV work on the Elisabeth Moss series Top of the Lake (which I loved), but if you had asked me to describe what I thought her work was like, I probably would have described Power of the Dog. The film is very well made, featuring gorgeous cinematography of beautiful rural vistas, evocatively portraying the isolation of the Burbank house and its lands, and well-acted by all participants, even Benedict Cumberbatch, who I’m never excited to see on screen. It’s also a movie that left me fairly cold and uninvested despite all of its prestige and craftsmanship. Phil Burbank (Cumberbatch) is a deeply unpleasant man deeply in the closet who mistreats his brother George (Jesse Plemmons), and drives George’s new wife (Kirsten Dunst) to alcoholism via his psychological torment of both her and his new step-nephew, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who eventually bites back. It’s all very good, but it didn’t connect with me at all, unfortunately. 3.5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No.

2022: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

RRR – Watched February 25, 2026

Upon Review: What an absolute thrill! I’ve been a strong proponent of director S. S. Rajamouli’s work for a long time, ever since I first saw Baahubali 2 on the big screen (for more about that, and for our Lagniappe discussion of both Baahubali films, click here). RRR simply slipped past me in the stream; if it got a theatrical release in my city, I either missed it or was hiding out from the latest COVID variant when it screened, and it came to Netflix after I had cancelled my subscription to that service. I’m terribly sorry to have missed this one, a film about two men who find themselves on seemingly opposite sides of the British Raj of the 1920s: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.), a man from the Gond tribe who comes to New Delhi to find a young girl who was stolen from their village by the wife of the British governor, and Rama Raju (Ram Charan), an Indian quisling working for the British occupiers who has been sent undercover to locate and root out the Gond tribe members who have come to the city. The two of them engage in the physics-defying rescue of a young boy from a train accident aboard a bridge, and the two of them immediately fall into passionate love with one another. This isn’t textual, of course; both have token lady love interests (the sweet English Jenny who sympathizes with the oppressed for Bheem and childhood sweetheart Sita for Raju), but let’s not kid ourselves. At the midpoint of the film, there’s a major twist that I won’t spoil, but it’s a very satisfying upending of all of the pieces on the board at this point, and I found myself coming close to cheering approximately every ten minutes for the film’s final act. Could not recommend more highly. 5 stars. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Funny Pages – Watched March 3, 2026

Upon Review: I first noticed actor Daniel Zolghadri in last year’s Lurker, and was pleasantly surprised to see him turn up again as one of Rose Byrne’s obsessed patients in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. He was so fresh-faced in his clean-shaven role as the would-be date rapist in Eighth Grade that it took quite a while to recognize him there, and that film used his youthful, innocent boyishness effectively by revealing the predatory nature behind his big, dark, trustworthy eyes. Funny Pages, which was sold to me as a Holdovers-esque misadventure between a high schooler and a crabby old man, likewise plays to the beardless Zolghadri’s juvenile naivete by casting him as an utterly irredeemable ingrate who seems to float by on nothing more than other people’s fondness for him. Zolghadri’s Robert is a seventeen year old who witnesses the tragic death of his beloved art teacher and decides to drop out of school to pursue his dream of being a cartoonist. To this end, he moves into a hellish basement apartment and takes a job working at the DA’s office as a floating office assistant, where he comes into contact with Wallace (Matthew Maher), a dangerous and unwell man who worked for Image Comics years ago, a fact that Robert latches onto. Here’s the thing—I didn’t find this to be funny at all. (I laughed precisely once, when Wallace claimed that “Rob Liefeld’s line work is industry standard.”) That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like it, but what spoke to me here wasn’t the film’s particular brand of dark comedy, which I noticed but didn’t respond to; to me, this is a story about a teenage boy who needs to perform creativity and imagination to give his life meaning, and how he seems to have been groomed to accept mistreatment by authority figures by his relationship with Mr. Katano, the art teacher. The one scene we get before he dies finds him stripping down in his office with Robert and having the boy draw him in a caricature style, and even if it’s not predatory, it’s sufficiently inappropriate that Katano follows Robert in order to elicit promises that the boy didn’t “think it was weird.” From there, Robert ends up moving into a hellish situation that brings Barton Fink to mind and where he finds his constantly sweating older roommates masturbating together over Robert’s vintage Tijuana bibles, and where he fixates on getting Wallace’s approval despite the older man’s anti-social violence, until it ends tragically. Grim stuff. 3 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No.

2023: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Priscilla – Watched January 10, 2026

Upon Review: I’m pretty ambivalent about Sofia Coppola, but a lot of that is probably just lingering apathy about her aughts output. Regardless, this is a solid movie that’s at turns poignant, funny, and stomach-churning. Cailee Spaeny plays Priscilla Presley in an adaptation of her autobiography in which she detailed the years she was courted by Elvis, then the most famous man in the world. Starting when she was a vulnerable fourteen-year-old girl living in Germany at an army base, Priscilla was pursued by the musician and movie star who was a decade older than her. Jacob Elordi as Elvis was the perfect casting, since he towers over the much shorter Spaeny in a visual invocation of their inherent power imbalance. The script plays cleverly with the King; if you didn’t know anything about him, one could easily interpret him as closeted in this film, given that he adamantly denies affairs with his lady co-stars and rejects them as publicity ploys as well as his complete lack of sexual overtures toward Priscilla for years while dressing her up and installing her at Graceland like a doll. His predation is still creepy and unnerving, but it somehow feels less sinister, while allowing the narrative to focus on Priscilla’s boredom with being locked away in his chintzy tower. Good stuff; 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but it would have made honorable mention. 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem – Watched January 31, 2026

Upon Review: I definitely watched the late eighties Ninja Turtles in syndication in the early nineties when I was a kid, and although I remember some core concepts about it, it never imprinted on me enough for me to remember the different turtles’ personalities despite them being recited in the opening theme song. I have a fondness, but I’m not invested. I overlooked this one during a really packed summer, and because I saw a trailer for it before Barbie and saw the MPA’s PG rating assumed it was for kids. And, I mean, it is, but it’s a movie about teenaged mutant ninja turtles; it should be. The roster for non-turtle characters here is populated by A-listers and Seth Rogen’s buddies to presumably draw in a periphery demographic, but the turtles themselves are played by actual teen actors who are unknowns (to me), and they bring an energetic freshness to dialogue that manages to stay just this side of overwritten. Visually, this one is quite a treat as well, with some of the most unique animated visuals I’ve seen since the CGI revolution. I made sure to watch this on a Saturday morning, and I’d recommend others do the same. 4 stars. 

Would it have made my list? No, but it would have made honorable mention. 

2024: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Taste Of Things – Watched April 12, 2026

Upon Review: I put this one off for a long time. I had no doubt that I would enjoy it, but it’s got a whopper of a run time, and I simply kept finding myself in the mood for something different whenever the opportunity arose. All throughout this procrastination, Brandon repeatedly reminded me that this film would be a pure delight, and although I never doubted him, the time was never quite right. At long last, a perfectly overcast weekend came alone, rainy but not stormy, and I whiled away a perfect afternoon in the company of the always-perfect Juliette Binoche and the less familiar Benoît Magimel, but I was nonetheless perfectly and exquisitely transported to Eugenie’s kitchen. A marvel, worthy of all the accolades it received. 

Would it have made my list? Yes.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Love & Pop (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Hideaki Anno’s live-action debut, the coming-of-age sugar babies drama Love & Pop (1998).

00:00 Welcome
01:55 Exit 8 (2026)
14:25 Project Hail Mary (2026)
22:45 Crash (1996)
26:05 Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)
36:24 East of Eden (1955)
42:55 I Married a Vampire (1987)
48:35 Time of the Gypsies (1988)
52:55 The Taste of Things (2023)
56:30 ATX Short Film Showcase
59:36 Singles (1992)
1:06:26 The Bride Wore Black (1968)
1:09:33 Trekkies (1997)

1:10:55 Love & Pop (1998)

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 Mummy (1999)

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Recently, Brandon wrote a piece about the unfortunate position of The Mummy as Universal’s most side-lined classic horror character, and how the general public’s association of the title The Mummy with the 1999 action-adventure film directed by Stephen Sommers rather than the Karl Freund original cements The Mummy as a second-tier hanger-on. During the umpteenth viewing of the trailer for the upcoming release of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a friend of mine leaned over to me in the theater and asked me a question about the frequency of these remakes, and I mentioned my own framework of the understanding about why The Mummy (the character) rarely works. Namely, you can make a movie about Wolfmen, Invisible Men, reanimated Promethei, and Dracula (et al) without the text being, necessitated by its nature, inherently racist. The Northern Hemisphere positively plundered Egypt and its historical sites, and the ongoing behavior of the British Museum acting in miniature on behalf of the colonialist experiment demonstrates that they are pathologically unable to comprehend the extent of the evil and shame inherent in their “expeditions.” Mummies were ground up into powder and used for paint pigmentation, medicine, and countless other things, again with Britain nationally acting as the microcosm of colonialist enterprise by rushing headlong into turning other people’s ancestors, a finite resource indeed, into a monetized enterprise. That’s why no big-budget mummy movie in the 21st century has actually been about a mummy; they’ve been about death gods creating avatars for themselves (the 2017 Tom Cruise film) or a child being possessed by something after spending some time in a sarcophagus (the new Lee Cronin film, at least based on the trailer). 

The last time that a Mummy was about a mummy was in 1999, when Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz memetically lit the libidos of bisexuals worldwide ablaze. Fraser plays Rick O’Connell, an American in interbellum Egypt for unknown reasons, whom we meet making a final stand against presumed locals while defending(?) some ruins. It’s a big guns-blazing action sequence that doesn’t really want you to ask questions about why Rick’s there, whose territory is rightfully whose, or other questions about the “veiled protectorate” period. Meanwhile in Cairo, Weisz’s Evelyn clumsily destroys a lot of priceless texts before her gadabout brother Jonathan (John Hannah) presents her with an artifact he pickpocketed that supposedly came from the lost city of Hamunaptra, a legendary treasure repository as well as “the city of the dead.” Evelyn, Rick, and Jonathan set out to find the city again, and find themselves in a race to the lost city with Beni (Kevin J. O’Connor), a cowardly man who was previously at Hamunaptra at the same time as Rick, and the American cowboys he’s guiding along the same path. Upon arrival, the Americans almost immediately release the undead ancient Egyptian priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), who was mummified alive as a punishment for touching the Pharaoh’s concubine, from his tomb, unleashing plagues and the potential to end the world. 

I used to love this movie. I was in middle school when both it and its sequel were released, and as a kid who had grown up obsessed with Indiana Jones and with an interest in Egyptology, this was an exciting mash-up of horror and action-adventure that really hit my sweet spot. It also didn’t hurt that there were large swathes of time when it was on cable almost constantly, so it really left a mark on me. Going back to it now, however, I can’t help but find it a little distasteful, and a product of its time. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the person of Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr), a character descended from a long line of secret defenders of the pharaonic order. Despite living a life that implies an ongoing belief in the Egyptian pantheon of old, Ardeth praises Allah, something that was uncommon but unremarkable among heroic characters in films of the period but would become contentious just a couple of years later during the era of kneejerk American Islamophobia. Ardeth is also not played by an Egyptian actor (Fehr was born in Tel Aviv), nor is Imhotep (Vosloo is white South African), nor are the pharaoh (Aharon Ipalé is Israeli) or his Anck-su-namun (Patricia Velásquez is Venezuelan). The casting of the roles in the film outside of our white leads is classic Hollywood “brown is brown” racism of a bygone era, and watching this as an adult who is fully conscious of all of the implications greatly dulls one’s enthusiasm for what is, otherwise, an adventurous romp. 

A lot of the CGI here will look dated to the modern eye, even to those of us who remember this as being an extravaganza of realist effects. A lot of it still works because its uncanniness can be excused as a matter of course for a horror flick, but the CGI Thebes stands out as particularly video game-esque. The rewatch of this was prompted by the upcoming release of the aforementioned Lee Cronin Mummy, but the timing happened to align with Passover having recently happened, and I realized I had always thought of this as a kind of Passover movie, a secular alternative to The Ten Commandments that also happened to contain the plagues. (Toads and frogs are one of the ones that are left out, presumably because every amphibian wrangler in Hollywood was working on Magnolia at the time.) Preteens, like I was when I first saw it, are really the best demographic for this film, as its overwritten corny dialogue and telegraphed acting choices read like a throwback to old-timey pictures, until you’ve watched as many of them as I have and realize it’s more shallow parody than homage. Weisz and Fraser are sexy, yes, and they have great chemistry together, but Rick is much more of an asshole than I remember, and Evey, with her clumsy awkwardness and frustration at Cambridge’s rejection of her despite her outsized genius, feels like a fanfiction character, right down to her being a nepo baby. 

I wish that I could love this one as much as I did when I was younger, but most of the enjoyment that can be derived from it now comes at the film’s expense. If you have fond memories of it, let that sleeping dog lie; don’t go disturbing the sarcophagus of your memory.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Exit 8 (2026)

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I’ve been seeing a lot of advertising (or maybe just the same thumbnail from a singular YouTube video, over and over) for Exit 8 that refers to the film as “Cube meets Tokyo.” Despite the fact that we already had that, and it was bad, I was still intrigued enough by the trailer to want to give this one a shot. The premise is fairly simple. A lost man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself caught in a repeating loop of the same few sections of corridor in an underground subway tunnel. Initially spooked at finding himself completely alone and unable to locate an exit, he encounters increasingly unsettling visions before realizing that there are a set of instructions on the wall that boil down to “continue walking until you encounter an anomaly, then turn around and keep walking.” Said anomalies surface as things as relatively mundane as misplaced doorknobs and distant voices of crying babies to mutant rat creatures that resemble the experiments he barely noticed while scrolling through social media on the train. The lost man is in a state of turmoil, having learned that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant mere moments after he failed to confront a salaryman on the train for screaming at a mother with a cranky infant, then immediately finding himself in the infinitely-looping corridor. When he encounters a little boy (Naru Asanuma) and realizes that he’s not part of whatever purgatorial situation within which he’s been entrapped, he and the child try to get out together. If they can get through all eight levels without being deceived or overlooking an anomaly, they’ll find their way out. 

I’m going to make three points of comparison here to horror movies past, and Cube is not going to be one of them. First, in what I intend to be the most flattering comparison, Exit 8 has a great deal of similarities to one of my favorite horror films, Jacob’s Ladder. The 1990 Adrian Lyne film features Tim Robbins as a man potentially trapped in a reality he can’t be sure is real while experiencing subliminal visions of horrors beyond his comprehension, with a few memorable sequences set in the NYC subway system. Exit 8 dilates those underground set pieces to encompass the entire purgatorial situation, which is a neat trick, and it plays with the hypnotic monotony of depersonalized commuting in a series of seemingly identical hallways. Jacob’s Ladder finds Robbins’s character interacting with an almost angelic version of the deceased son he lost (a pre-Home Alone Macaulay Culkin), who helps him in a way that I can’t really talk about without spoiling that film, other than to say that Jacob’s journey, like The Lost Man’s, requires a certain level of acceptance. 

Secondly, in what I intend to be an unflattering comparison, Exit 8 has the distinction of being the second horror film I’ve seen so far this year that also happens to be, intentionally or not, pro-life propaganda. Concerning! Arguably, this one’s the worse of the two. At least in Undertone, the choice of whether or not to keep her baby was a decision that the mother was making; here, one of her only lines of dialogue, repeated almost as often as we see the “Exit 8” sign is, “Which is it?” Still, this is mitigated by the third point of previous film similarity, which is a neutral comparison at best. Exit 8 reminds me most of Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, in that they have the same (mildly spoilery) conceit, which is that the protagonist is guided by a specter of their as-yet-unborn child. In Dream Child, that takes the form of Alice’s fetus appearing to her as a young child in her dreams and helping her fight Freddy Krueger; here it’s The Boy, who responds to an apparition of The Lost Man’s girlfriend by calling for her as his mother, revealing that he is, somehow, the man’s son. 

From what I can tell by perusing some reviews and summaries of the video game this film adapts, the player character therein is an utterly blank canvas, and there’s no real “plot” to speak of: no unplanned pregnancy woes, no encounters with a non-anomaly character like The Boy, no shameful cowardice at failing to confront a raging asshole. It doesn’t even seem like The Lost Man’s asthma, which I assumed had to be a gameplay mechanic, originated there. All of this is newly written for the film, and while I understand that the film, being based upon a game that is all about the mechanics and the tension rather than any real narrative, had to come up with some stakes. I’m not sure why it had to be this narrative, but the other way that this most evokes Dream Child is that its pro-”keeping the baby” messaging is also so bizarrely incoherent that it utterly falls apart; Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” ends up being more effectively propagandistic in just a couple of minutes than Exit 8 and Dream Child combined. It’s not a defense of the film’s politics, but it’s so sloppy that it’s hard to grasp onto anything substantial enough to be annoyed by. 

I suppose, eventually, we do have to get around to examining this film in conversation with Cube. When we talked about that film on the podcast (as well as its sequel and prequel), Brandon’s primary complaint was that what Cube failed to deliver upon was the promise of cool death traps in the series of successive, identical, cubical rooms. As someone who saw those movies in earlier, more formative years, I already had an idea of the shape of the narrative, so I wasn’t set up to be underwhelmed by the ride in the same way that he was. I experienced my own great disappointment when we watched the 2021 version from Japan, which, among its many other faults, broke the cardinal rule of The Cube: we should never see what’s outside The Cube. I was very frustrated the first time that Exit 8 also showed us something that was happening outside of the liminal space in which our characters are trapped, as we see the woman on the other end of the phone call that The Lost Man receives while lost in the corridors. This does turn out to be an (obvious) misdirect, but there’s a sequence that comes later in which The Lost Man imagines himself on the beach with The Boy and his mother, and I can’t help but think that would feel more emotionally impactful if we didn’t have the earlier scene, and that conversation in itself would be more exciting if we only saw The Lost Man’s end of the line and stayed inside the spooky hallway. 

Further, the film’s decision to literalize the metaphor with The Boy, by making him actually be his future son rather than simply a reflection of what his future child could be. It’s a hat on a hat, lacking a subtle touch that would make the film more emotionally impactful. I’m grasping at straws trying to articulate it, but it’s almost as D.O.A. an idea as making Newt be Ripley’s actual daughter in Aliens rather than an objective correlative representing her guilt about outliving her actual child. Excise the scene in which The Boy recognizes The Lost Man’s ex as his mother and this is instantly a more thoughtful movie, even if you leave in the beach dream. That also lends more emotional heft to what we learn about The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who appears as part of the loop in The Lost Man’s journey, but whom we learn was himself a previous captive of the space who was trying to find his own way out. When he experiences frustration with having to start over after getting within spitting distance of level eight, he laments that he “was supposed to meet [his] son today.” As a manifestation of what The Lost Man could become, it’s admittedly a little on the nose, but it too would feel more nuanced if we just cut out the “mother” stuff. 

All of these quibbles having been laid out, it’s worth noting that this is a fun experiment and a masterful success on a technical level. The space itself is perfectly sterile and unsettlingly empty. The opening sequence, which is shot entirely in the first person, is an impressive feat, with the first shot we see of our main character being his reflection in the window of the subway car as he turns up his music to ignore the verbally abusive salaryman. I had a very immersive experience, as the only tickets still available were in the very front row, and I had a hell of a ride even as I found myself stumbling over the film’s slippery, amorphous thesis. I also appreciate that the film is open-ended; this is a mild spoiler, but after he manages to find Exit 8 and return to the real world, The Lost Man once again finds himself in a (presumably) metaphorical loop, as he experiences an identical situation as the one which opened the movie, as the same salaryman is screaming at the same young mother. The film cuts to credits with our lead once again staring into his own reflection. It seems that most reviewers infer that he will now confront this man and make up for his earlier bystander syndrome. I prefer to read the ambiguity of the ending from the other direction, and that for all he experienced in the liminal subway corridor he’s still essentially the same man, cowardice and all. It leaves some room for interpretation, that there may be some truth in his conviction that a person who stands idly by while someone is aggressively harassed may not be suited to parenthood. It’s not a mark in this film’s favor that I’ve spent so much time describing the film that I wish it was rather than the film that it is, but it’s still an excellently executed premise, and worth checking out for its design and camera movement if nothing else. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

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Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, despite the seven years that have passed since the first Ready or Not was released, picks up right where it left off. Grace Le Domas née MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) has just survived until dawn while being hunted by her new husband’s family on her wedding night. As the paramedics and EMS arrive, she’s asked what happened, to which she just replies “in-laws.” While this was the punchline capper on the end of that film, here, an offscreen voice asks her what this means, moments before she faints from exhaustion and is taken to the hospital, complete with an ambulance ride that allows for her to have flashbacks to the first film each time she is defibrillated. When she awakens, she’s greeted by the local sheriff, who has handcuffed her to the bed so that he can explain clearly and plainly that she’s in a lot of trouble. Her sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), arrives; despite their estrangement, Grace never bothered to remove Faith as her emergency contact. Grace also gets to recap the first film for the benefit of both her sister and the audience, which was, frankly, needed after such a long time between films. We witness some very basic signs of past conflict between them that the film will later belabor but, luckily, we move past that fairly quickly upon the arrival of Mr. Le Bail (aka Satan)’s lawyer (Elijah Wood). 

From here, we get introduced to the overall plot of this sequel. Grace’s survival of the Le Domas’ game of hide and seek means that the current “high seat” of the council of families who rule the world is up for grabs. Grace, along with Faith, will now be hunted across the grounds of a resort owned by the Danforths, twins named Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), who are fighting to keep the Danforth family in the high chair. Also gathered for the occasion are Wan Chen Xing (Olivia Cheng), Viraj Rajan (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), and Ignacio (Néstor Carbonell) as well as his two children, the elder of whom was engaged to Grace’s late husband before he abandoned her for Grace. Ready, set, go. 

It’s not uncommon for horror sequels to follow the past of least resistance when crafting a follow up to a film that was never intended to be more than a one-and-done. Ready or Not 2, for as enjoyable as it was, seems to have chosen the easiest option for all of its story beats. The basic premise—girl must survive the night while being hunted by rich assholes—is essentially the same, and the expansive resort on which the most dangerous game is being pursued is little more than the Le Domas mansion and its grounds magnified. Other than the presence of an industrial washing machine and a wedding-decorated ballroom that allows for a bride-on-bride brawl, it’s functionally identical to the previous film’s locale. When there’s nothing fresh in the setting or the logline, the only places where you can shake things up a little are in the characters and the mythology, and Here I Come takes a stab at each of these, with mixed results. 

Character-wise, there’s nothing that Kathryn Newton’s Faith contributes to the narrative here. If you remove her from the film completely, you would have to come up with a different motivation for a couple of Grace’s choices, but nothing that would fundamentally change the narrative or the climax. Weaving carried Ready or Not with her performance, and I don’t buy that the sequel needed her to have a scene partner in order to make it work. It’s not that Newton’s a bad performer, but she’s completely superfluous here. Further, there’s a sense that this film wanted to, for lack of a better term, “go international,” but instead of taking that opportunity to shoot Here I Come in a substantially visually different location, it’s mostly just an excuse to gather a cast of actors of color to act as cannon fodder for the hunt before the finale focuses solely on the MacCaullays versus the Danforths. You’re not going to catch me complaining about getting to see Gellar for so much of this film (she looks great, by the way), but it is to its detriment that so many of its non-white characters read as caricatures who die hilariously while the white villains get more nuance and screen time. Other than Ursula and the lawyer, none of these new characters are particularly memorable. 

That leaves the lore and the mythology to do most of the heavy lifting in the novelty department, and boy, there sure is a lot of it. Remember how the rules of the world of assassins in the John Wick films just kept getting bigger and more consequential, to the point where it was bogging down what we were all here for? Here I Come does much the same. Woods is very charming as Le Bail’s advocate, and the elaborate bylaws of the various Satanic covenants and their attendant loopholes do push us through to a visually dynamic conclusion that sees Grace get to don a cool, new, evil wedding dress. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the elaboration of Le Bail’s big scary book of infernal torts and nefarious estate dispersal regulations makes for exciting viewing, however. No one ever even seems to consider suggesting an alternative to Grace marrying Titus to save her and her sister’s life, namely, why don’t Grace and Ursula just get married? Does Mr. Le Bail not recognize marriage equality? This is the devil we’re talking about; are we supposed to believe that he has the same views on marriage that Kim Davis does? (Wait, actually, strike that; it actually does hold water that they would both be evil.) We do get to see a series of load-bearing evil statutes collapse in a series of dominos, but it starts to feel a bit like edutainment aimed at assisting the viewer in studying for the bar exam in hell. 

All of those negatives having been said, this is still a fair bit of fun. It’s going to suffer in comparison to its spiritual sibling They Will Kill You, and that’s going to be warranted; that film does the whole “one woman fights evil cultists to save her sister” plot with more style and flair, even if the sister subplot in both is mere window dressing. But while that was primarily a film focused on its visual dynamism and elaborate fight choreography, this one is more interested in playing the hits from its predecessor, with an additional layer of familial conflict that gets run into the ground long before the film resolves it. In the meantime, though, the gore is still delightful and fun, and the script is peppered with some pretty good jokes. The best fight sequence finds Grace fighting Ignacio’s daughter in their dual wedding dresses, ineffectually flailing at one another after both are doused with pepper spray. Ignacio and his daughter’s incompetence with their weapons in comparison to his hypercompetent young son is a good bit, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome. An early use of the aforementioned industrial washer leads to one gruesome early kill of the MacCaullay women’s assailants, even if very few that follow are as inventive or funny. Weaving also continues to shine here, as she does in everything she appears in. If you’re going to choose only one movie about rich Satanists getting taken out by a girl from an abusive home who’s only involved in the events of the film because of a threat to her sister in theaters this month, They Will Kill You is the better choice, but if you’re going to do a double feature, these will pair well with one another . . . if you watch Here I Come first.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

They Will Kill You (2026)

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I had mixed feelings upon first seeing the trailer for They Will Kill You, the first English feature from Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who previously directed two Russian language films that, based on their trailers, appear to have a similar tone and style as this one. At first, I was very excited for the film, since it looked like a lot of fun, but I was also annoyed that its advertising felt like it gave away too much of the movie’s plot. Although that’s true to a certain extent, I was pleasantly surprised that there were still many more twists and turns to come in the feature itself than the promotional materials let on. 

Ten years after nonfatally shooting their abusive father and failing to rescue her younger sister from his clutches, a woman calling herself Isabella (Zazie Beetz) appears at The Virgil, an extremely upscale Manhattan hotel, introducing herself as the new maid. After she’s given a brief tour of the maids’ floor by head of housekeeping Lily (Patricia Arquette), she’s ushered into her room, where she immediately barricades the door. In the night, several cloaked figures (including Heather Graham and Tom Felton) manage to enter her room a different way and attempt to kill her, alternately calling her a “sacrifice” and an “offering.” They quickly realize, however, that their latest lamb to be led to the slaughter is more than she appears, and that she’s not trapped in The Virgil with them; they’re trapped inside with her. 

“Isabella,” who reveals her name is Asia, has a motivation that’s pretty straightforward. After being paroled from prison, where she was incarcerated for the attempted murder of her father, she went to the place where her younger sister was last seen, in the hopes of saving her from whatever shenanigans were happening in the place. Some of the set up is a little flimsy, but it’s all just window dressing to get to the film’s purpose: showing Zazie Beetz going utterly feral against hordes of cultists with axes, machetes, shotguns, and any and every weapon she can get her hands on. It’s a gory splatterfest of decapitations, crushed eyeballs, impaled hands, exploding heads, screwdriver stabbings, and flaming hatchets, and it’s an objective success in the glorious violence department. 

The action choreography is extremely competent. After more than two decades of Bourne Identity-inspired shake cams and excessive editing, it’s refreshing to see that the dedication to craft that John Wick reminded everyone was possible continues to inspire successive action filmmakers. It’s that franchise that this film seems to draw a lot of inspiration from, especially with regards to the lead character’s virtually god-mode fighting prowess and the setting of a specialized hotel that comes preloaded with mythology, lore, and rules of engagement. Its other major inspiration seems to be the filmography of disgraced director Quentin Tarantino, most especially Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill; its order isn’t necessarily anachronic in the same way that those films are, but the chronology of the story often stops for a scene or two to reveal some past event that informs the current scene, and there are certain moments where Asia’s movements and poses seem to be styled directly on Uma Thurman’s The Bride. 

Visually, the film has a lot of style. Although the film foregoes the Bourne Identity style, that doesn’t mean that the audience is watching these excellent action sequences play out statically. The camera is constantly moving, following characters around hotel corners and through crawlspaces and ducts on a moving track. There’s one really excellent oner that follows Asia and Lily facing off in a hallway that moves toward Lily, gives Arquette a moment to deliver one of her trademark bits of visceral vitriol, and then tracks back to the other end of the hallway to complete an orbital shot around battle-poised Asia before continuing back into the room she just exited. It’s really good stuff. The film also makes excellent use of empty/black space, as the film will sometimes “zoom out” to show only a hallway or a vertical tunnel so that we can track where every party is in The Virgil’s labyrinthine structure, and it looks fantastic. 

I don’t want to reveal too much about the multiple directions that this one takes narratively. I thought that the trailer gave away too much, but unlike recent spoiled-by-the-trailer films that come to mind like Abigail and Speak No Evil, this one makes you think you know too much about it, before pulling the rug from under you. It’s not that this is a plot that you’ve never seen before; you almost certainly have, but it’s worth remembering that the reason you’re here is to see Zazie Beetz bludgeon some Satanists into pulp, not to get caught up on loopholes and infernal contract law. That having been said, there are some things that it’s really worth keeping a secret until one can see the film themselves. This one probably won’t be in theaters too much longer, based on its current box office performance, but it’s worth seeing with others in a group setting to get the maximum fun factor out of it. Then again, I don’t blame you if you’d rather wait til it hits streaming so you don’t have to see the same jokes from The Devil Wears Prada 2 twice in both the film’s trailer and the “silence your phones” ad before the feature starts. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Fury (1936)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Fritz Lang’s mob-justice noir Fury (1936).

00:00 Welcome
01:34 Nadja (1994)
05:07 Queen Margot (1994)
07:47 Number Seventeen (1932)
12:32 Miroirs No. 3 (2026)
15:57 Ernst Lubitsch
24:33 Fat Girl (2001)
30:34 Mad Love (1935)
36:11 Ruthie the Duck Girl (1999)
43:53 The Wolf House (2018)
47:49 A Body to Live In (2026)
53:22 Undertone (2026)
1:03:07 The Chronology of Water (2026)
1:07:17 Alpha (2026)
1:17:27 OBEX (2026)
1:22:37 The Bride! (2026)
1:26:42 They Will Kill You (2026)
1:30:55 The Drama (2026)
1:36:26 Forbidden Fruits (2026)

1:44:42 Fury (1936)

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

Nadja (1994)

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In 1987, Fisher Price introduced the PXL2000, a toy black and white camera that used audio cassettes to capture video images. It didn’t go over well initially, but 90s indie filmmakers apparently liked to futz about with them. After directing Twister—not the one that you’re thinking of, a movie released by Vestron and which I have seen the trailer for across dozens of their VHS tapes without ever stumbling across a cassette of the film itself—director Michael Almereyda made a fifty-six-minute feature using the PXL2000 in its entirety. For his third feature, Nadja, Almereyda decided to use the toy camera only intermittently. Theoretically, it was only for the shots that were supposed to represent the point of view of the title character, but in practice, I don’t think that’s the case. 

Nadja is, naturally, the story of Nadja (Elina Löwensohn), Dracula’s daughter via a serf somewhere “in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains.” When her father dies, having been killed at long last by Van Helsing (Peter Fonda, with grey hair almost down to his waist), she, alongside her attendant, Renfield (Karl Geary), claims his body and ensures that he will not rise again. Van Helsing, inexplicably released from prison despite being caught in the act of murdering someone, impresses upon his disbelieving nephew Jim (longtime Hal Hartley collaborator Martin Donovan) that Dracula’s daughter may still be at large in their unnamed American city; meanwhile, Nadja is in the process of seducing Jim’s wife Lucy (Galaxy Craze) into joining her in the darkness. Nadja’s other primary goal is to reunite with her twin brother, Edgar (Jared Harris), who has seemingly allowed himself to slip into virtual catatonia as a result of refusing to feed on humans, leaving him bedridden and attended to by his beloved Cassandra (Suzy Amis), who also happens to be Van Helsing’s daughter. 

Those parts of the film that are shot on film are gorgeous, and sumptuous. The periodic intrusion of “footage” from the PXL2000 is incredibly off-putting, even as a stylistic choice. It doesn’t hold weight conceptually, either, as it at first appears that it is supposed to be in use to indicate when a character is being affected by Nadja’s psychic powers, but it also seems to be used randomly at other points. In essence, the effect it creates is one that presages what it’s like to watch a high quality video online only for it to randomly buffer from 1080p to 120p for the duration of a scene, then cut back to crystal clarity. My neck was actually stiff from the contortions I made sitting in the arthouse theatre trying to clearly understand what was happening when Almereyda suddenly switched recording devices. It looked almost as bad as the version of Hitchcock’s Secret Agent that’s currently available on Hoopla, which is really saying something. When it would cut back to the actual film, it was a wave of relief, and I can only imagine that may have been the intention, but it did not make for a pleasant viewing experience. 

Narratively, there’s not much to the film. Fonda’s Van Helsing is bizarrely fascinating as he wanders into scenes full of energy that his younger co-stars don’t really seem to match, either because this was too far outside of Donovan’s wheelhouse or because Craze’s character was simply in the midst of one of her many dull sequences of being a mindless thrall. For most of the film, characters simply stand around and deliver exposition to one another, and while it’s nice that the screen is full of pretty people (and Jared Harris) when that’s happening, there’s very little plot to speak of. I’d have been much more entertained if the film had been more full of deadpan humor, but the really fun bits of dialogue are few and far between. After a brief cameo from David Lynch as the morgue attendant who falls under Nadja’s spell, the laughs are hard to come by, and one can never be sure just how much of the film one is laughing with instead of at. This was a packed screening, and I still often found myself the only one chuckling during scenes which I was certain were being played for humor. Surely, the idea of calling the communication between Edgar and Nadja a “psychic fax” was a joke, right? This also sets up the biggest laugh of the film for me, when Edgar puts his fingertips to his temple and says “I’m getting a psychic fax… [Nadja’s] on a plane… she’s dying. For a cigarette.” This did manage to get a guffaw from most of the audience, but I’m not sure that we were all aware just what we were in for. I can see this one developing a cult audience in the 90s, especially when it has a soundtrack that features both The Verve and Portishead, but it’s also a puzzling little oddity that I’m not sure I’ll remember much about in the months to come.  

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Forbidden Fruits (2026)

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A new contender for this generation’s Heathers has emerged, and it has the strongest claim to that championship belt of any movie that I’ve seen in the two decades since Mean Girls. We love Heathers around here (it claimed the #19 spot on the Swampflix top 100), and I have a fondness for it that is, perhaps, not entirely normal (I went to NYC in 2014 to see the off-Broadway musical adaptation in its original staging at a time when I was vehement that I hated musicals). We also reference it a lot; I used it as a plot reference when writing about 2022’s Do Revenge, Brandon discussed it in conversation with spiritual successor Jawbreaker, and both he and I have nominated a couple of potential options for the crown in recent years, with me throwing my weight behind Sophia Takal’s anthologized New Year, New You and Brandon offering up (the first half of) Spontaneous as a potential candidate. It’s time for all other nominees to pack their bags and go home, though, because Forbidden Fruits is here, and I think it’s here to stay. While we’re at it, we can knock off the search for this generation’s The Craft as well, since Fruits is just as suitable for that designation, too.

Apple (Lili Reinhart) is the most powerful person in all of the Dallas Highland Mall. She’s the highest ranking of the “forbidden fruits,” a trio of gorgeous women who run free eden, an Anthropologie-esque boutique, despite the shop nominally being managed by an unseen (until the epilogue) woman named Sharon. Under Apple’s perfectly manicured thumbs are Cherry (Victoria Pedretti), a beautiful blonde airhead who dresses like Sabrina Carpenter, and Fig (Alexandra Shipp), the more “alternative” one, which means that she’s just as supermodel-hot as the other two but dresses a little more glam-goth. Dallas newcomer Pumpkin (Lola Tung) initially finds herself completely beneath their notice, but Fig takes a liking to her and convinces Heather Chandler—um, I mean Apple—to give Pumpkin a chance. The three Free Eden employees bring her on board and invite her to join them for “Paradise,” which is what they call the coven meetings that they hold in the upstairs changing area of the store. After some light hazing, Pumpkin finds herself part of the inner circle, and from there she begins to work toward the ultimate goal of dethroning Apple for something she did in their past. Unfortunately, despite the new age hippery-dippery of their beliefs and “ceremonies,” there may be some actual magic afoot, as a former member of the Free Eden crew, Pickle, seems to be suffering actual effects from a “hex” that the others placed on her for breaking Apple’s sacred rules. 

Forbidden Fruits wears its pop culture genealogy on its sleeves, just as openly and blatantly as it does its Biblical allegories. Pickle’s pre-breakdown beauty is described by calling her “Gorge-ina George.” During Pumpkin’s induction rite, each of the girls names the plant from which her fruit name grows (branch, vine, bush, etc.) and the season in which it ripens. With the addition of Pumpkin, whose fruit is harvested in autumn, they excitedly note that they now have all four seasons in their quartet, just as the witches of The Craft were delighted that the appearance of Robin Tunney’s Sarah meant that they finally had enough girls to “call the corners.” Although the Heathers influences are the strongest here, it’s not all a one-to-one comparison. Pumpkin is very much the Veronica of the narrative, but her being a member of the group with an ulterior motive to infiltrate and upend it is more like Lindsay Lohan’s Cady from Mean Girls. Apple is both Regina George and Heather Chandler, as the HBIC of the group who’s casually cruel and exerts undue influence over her underlings’ lives, but there’s no real analog to Heather Duke here, as neither of Apple’s flunkies is lying in wait to become the next queen bee should she be dethroned. Cherry is more like Amanda Seyfried’s Karen, although her ditziness is taken to such an extreme that Tara Reid’s Melody in Josie and the Pussycats is another clear, strong influence. 

That almost makes it seem like the character dynamics are more rooted in emulating Mean Girls than Heathers, but we can also pretty closely align them with the characters from The Craft: Apple is the Nancy, the biggest believer and the one with the nastiest traits buried underneath; Pumpkin is the Sarah, as previously mentioned; and Fig is the Rochelle, in that she’s fully capable of having a rich, full, fulfilling life if she just stopped hanging out with these troublemaking white girls. There’s even a little bit of a reverse Wizard of Oz happening here, as the film’s climax takes place in the mall while a tornado tears the building apart, and ironically it’s the wicked witch who survives that particular event (it’s not a spoiler if I don’t mention if anyone else was even around!). I won’t bother you with a complete recapitulation of the film’s use of Genesis-based iconography, as it’s pretty much all there on the surface: the store is Eden, Apple offers temptation, the coven’s enemies are “snakes,” etc., but the film keeps a light touch here as it does in its other homages, so it’s not distracting or heavy-handed.

All of this is to say that when I read that this was based on a play, I wasn’t surprised, as it had all of the telltale density of a story that was originally written for the stage. The play, which has the poetic and unwieldy title of Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die (a slogan which is later emblazoned on a t-shirt that one of the characters wears throughout the third act), was penned by playwright Lily Houghton, who co-wrote the screenplay for Fruits with director Meredith Alloway. Both of them appear to be quite young, and I found the breathless wittiness of it all jubilant and refreshing, even when some of the darker elements start to intrude on this bubblegum world. Cinematographer Karim Hussain is doing great work here as well; a longtime collaborator of Brandon Cronenberg (serving as either D.P. or cinematographer on all three of his features), every shot here is perfectly composed and sumptuously photographed. Some of that energy can also be attributed to editor Hanna Park, who also worked on fellow Heathers descendent Bottoms. When it comes to the cast, everyone is a delight; I’m one of the dozens of people who saw Riverdale through to its conclusion, and although I was charmed enough by Reinhard’s brief appearance in Hustlers, her performance as Betty Cooper really undersold her potential to be the sexiest, scariest woman in her domain. Shipp’s Fig is the character we all wish we could be, the sweetheart in the bitter clique, and she’s warmly inviting and fun to be around. The person having the most fun, though, is Pedretti, who’s mostly developed a reputation as a scream queen following her leading roles in both of Mike Flanagan’s Haunting shows as well as the thriller series You. She really gets to let her hair down here and get into the flow of her character’s naive vapidity, and it’s such a delight that she essentially steals the show. 

This will soon see its streaming premiere on Shudder, but I went and saw it in a theater, and I would recommend that experience over trying to watch it at home by yourself. This was a very responsive audience, the perfect strangers & companions that you want to watch a comedy with because the jokes land on different levels for different people. Failing that, invite your coven over, make up a little chant about pressed juice and cowboy boots, and have a good time. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond