Very early on in the first year of Swampflix, I reviewed a bad-on-purpose horror comedy called WolfCop, about a werewolf who’s “half man, half wolf, and all cop”. I remember having fun with the absurd novelty of that film’s premise and throwback 80s aesthetic, but I also remember finding the plot-heavy journey to those pleasures to be frustratingly tedious. A decade later, not much has changed. WolfCop director Lowell Dean has a new straight-to-Shudder horror film called Dark Match that repeats all the exact highs and lows of his werewolf-cop movie, except now mapped to the milieu of 1980s regional pro wrestling circuits. Infinity Pool & Possessor cinematographer Karim Hussain makes great use of Dark Match‘s late-80s setting by submerging its hyperviolent pro wrestling matches under a thick layer of VHS haze, often shooting its actors in uncomfortable, drunken close-ups like an unexperienced videographer operating the era’s bulky cameras for the very first time. The story also works its way up to a fun, bloody bar-napkin premise once it lures its minor pro wrestling promotion out to a backwoods cult compound for untelevised death matches, which turn out to be a Satanic ritual involving novelty weapons themed to Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water. The problem is that it’s a long, trudging journey to the over-the-top joys of that core premise, repeating all of the sins and virtues of WolfCop along the way.
If there’s anything that’s improved about Lowell Dean’s high-premise genre exercises in the past decade, it’s in Dark Match‘s tonal progression towards sincerity. Wrestling hall-of-famer Chris Jericho hams it up as the rural cult leader who’s engineered the death matches that liven up the third act, but he’s mostly included as a prop. Aisha Issa stars as our POV wrestler, Miss Behave, who’s the most talented grappler on her promotion’s roster but has to play heel due to the small-town racism of the venues they entertain. A stunted career spent putting over bubbly blonde white women leaves the Trinidadian cynic in an eternally rotten mood, which makes her sharply aware of the sour vibes at the Satanic cult’s pro wrestling sleepaway camp long before the death matches’ decapitations & disembowelings. The resulting tension falls somewhere between a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Get Out and a straight-to-streaming knockoff of Green Room, paling in comparison to either overt reference point. Thankfully, the four killer wrestling bouts at the center of the film liven things up with some true, gruesome novelty, and the sincerity of Miss Behave’s journey to that violent escalation prevent it from devolving into winking, smug irony. Unfortunately, those matches make up less than a third of the total runtime, and the remaining scenes of sincere drama are effectively dead air.
For a much more efficient, satisfying version of what Dark Match is going for, check out the 2011 novelty horror Monster Brawl, which simulates a feature-length pro wrestling Pay-Per-View where all of the combatants are Famous Monster archetypes: a werewolf, a mummy, a zombie, a Frankenstein, etc. However, please keep in mind that everyone I recommend that movie to absolutely hates it. Dark Match only truly comes alive during its gore-gimmicked pro wrestling bouts, having obvious fun with the visual textures of vintage TV broadcasts of the sport (despite the implications of its title). Monster Brawl maintains kayfabe for its entire runtime, never breaking from its TV broadcast premise for jags of dramatic tedium. That fully committed format leaves a lot more room for supernaturally violent in-ring action, which is the only reason an audience would stream one of these novelty horrors in the first place. Given that Monster Brawl is loved by seemingly no one but me, maybe it doesn’t matter that Dark Match falls short of its fully-fleshed-out ideal. Maybe all that matters is that, like Lowell Dean, I’m still wasting my time on disposable trivialities like this ten years since our last passing moment together. Regardless of whether the movies that bond us are any good, we are brothers in schlock.
Most genre movie freaks may have moved on to shiny new boutique Blu-rays and moldy old VHS tapes, but I still collect most of my movies at the tried-and-true distribution hub of the thrift store DVD rack. You don’t always find rare gems at the thrift store, but you often find movies cheaper than they cost to rent on streaming, with the added bonus of a Special Features menu that most streamers don’t bother to upload. My recent pickup of the 1960s sci-fi lucha libre classic Santo vs. The Martian Invasion felt like a blessing by both metrics; it’s rare enough that it’s not currently available to stream at home with English subtitles, and the disc includes several Bonus Features, including full-length commentaries and a 30-minute interview with Santo’s heir, Son of Santo. It felt like even more of a blessing when those subtitles turned out to be a variation of Comic Sans, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen outside of an ironic lyrics-only music video on YouTube. I don’t know that reporting on these details is useful to anyone who didn’t happen to be shopping at the Thrift City USA on the West Bank last weekend, but I still want to advertise that the dream is still alive in the thrift store DVD racks of New Orleans in general. I suppose I also want to report that the home distribution label Kit Parker Films is surprisingly generous with their bargain-bin DVDs’ bonus content, so look out for those discs in particular while you’re digging through the stacks.
Billed on its title card as Santo the Silver Mask vs The Invasion of the Martians, this specific bargain-bin discovery is a fairly typical Atomic Age sci-fi cheapie about an alien invasion of planet Earth; its hero just happens to be the masked luchador Santo, protector of “the weak and the defenseless.” The alien-invasion plot is a little confused, with the Martians announcing their presence to the citizens of Mexico via multiple television broadcasts and having their evil deeds widely reported in local newspapers, then later being treated as a conspiratorial government secret hidden from the public. Instead of getting that story straight, the movie intensely focuses on the physical abilities & vulnerabilities of the Martians. Much attention is paid to the fact that they frequently take “oxygen pills” to be able to withstand Earth’s atmosphere, among other needless explanations of their uncanny ability to speak Spanish. There’s also an intense fixation on their cube-shaped helmets’ Astral Eye, a glowing eyeball that allows them to either hypnotize or disintegrate nearby Earthlings, depending on the demands of the day. They can also wrestle fairly well, which makes them the perfect opponent for Santo, the greatest & bravest wrestler who ever lived. Santo repeatedly grapples with the blonde-wigged beefcake models from planet Mars, eternally flustered by their ability to teleport back to the safety of their spaceship every time the impromptu matches don’t go their way. He eventually wins by stealing one of their teleportation devices to infiltrate and explode that ship himself, like a wrestler claiming a championship belt (literally; the device is belt-shaped).
The Martian Invasion loses a little steam once these intergalactic lucha libre matches return to a proper wrestling ring instead of being staged in exterior locations on the streets of Mexico, but most of its vintage sci-fi hijinks remain adorable & fun. Instead of brooding in the bootleg Gothic atmosphere of horror pictures like Santo vs The Vampire Women or Santo and the Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, a lot of the runtime is filled with insane, rapid-fire dialogue about the peculiarities of the Martian species. There’s also some fun 60s kitsch to the cheesecake Martian women in particular, who hypnotize & seduce the major players of Mexican patriarchy with the laziest futuristic go-go dancing you’ve ever seen. Between that half-hearted eroticism and the absurd over-reliance on stock footage to pad out the budget, I was often reminded of some of my favorite Atomic Age sci-fi novelties: Nude on the Moon, Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Blood, The Astounding She-Monster, etc. None of those comparison points feature extensive wrestling matches, though, which gives this an extra layer of novelty the same way the Santo horror films feel novel compared to their classic Universal Horror equivalents.
Something I don’t have context for is how much of an anomaly The Martian Invasion is within the larger Santo canon. It felt a little zippier & goofier than the couple horror films I’ve seen starring the masked luchador, which rely heavily on classic haunted-house mood & dread. I don’t have enough evidence to say how typical that is to Santo’s filmography, though, because I’ve only seen three of what Wikipedia lists as “at least 54” titles in his catalog. Given the pace at which I’m finding notable Santo movies on used discs or streaming, it’s likely I’ll never get the complete picture of his big-screen work before I run out of time and die. Honestly, I still can’t even pin down the exact list of titles that make up that catalog. Wikipedia, IMDb, and Letterboxd all have conflicting lists of what count as an official Santo film, and the “Filmografia” Special Feature on my Martian Invasion disc only includes 52 of his “at least 54” titles. To help illustrate the immensity & inconsistency of that catalog, I have transcribed the entire “Filmografia” feature of the Kit Parker DVD below. It’s the kind of list that has made me accept that I will only see whichever films I happen to pick up at local thrift stores, completionism be damned. May they all be as fun & loaded with bonus features as Santo vs The Martian Invasion.
Filmografia
1958
SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL aka El Cerebro del Mal Santo vs The Evil Brain
SANTO CONTRA LOS HOMBRES INFERNALES Santo vs The Infernal Men aka White Cargo
1961
SANTO CONTRA LOS ZOMBIES Santo vs The Zombies Released in the U.S. as Invasion of the Zombies
SANTO CONTRA EL RED DEL CRIMEN Santo vs The King of Crime
SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE Santo in The Hotel of Death
SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DIABOLICO Santo vs The Diabolical Brain
1962
SANTO CONTRA LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS Santo vs The Vampire Women Released in the U.S. as Samson vs The Vampire Women
1963
SANTO EN EL MUSEO DE CERA Santo in The Wax Museum Released in the U.S. as Samson in the Wax Museum
SANTO CONTRA EL ESTRANGULADOR Santo vs The Strangler
SANTO CONTRA EL ESPECTRO DEL ESTRANGULADOR Santo vs The Ghost of the Strangler
1964
SANTO EN ATACAN LAS BRUJAS aka Santo En La Casa De Las Brujas Santo in The Witches Attack
BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL PODER SATANICO Blue Demon vs The Satanic Power Cameo appearance
SANTO CONTRA EL HACHA DIABOLICA Santo vs The Diabolical Ax
1965
SANTO EN LOS PROFANADORES DE TUMBAS aka Los Traficantes De La Muerte Santo in The Grave Robbers
SANTO EN EL BARON BRAKOLA Santo in Baron Brakola
1966
SANTO CONTRA LA INVASION DE LOS MARCIANOS Santo vs The Martian Invasion
SANTO CONTRA LOS VILLANOS DEL RING Santo vs The Villains of The Ring
SANTO EN OPERACION 67 Santo in Operation 67
1967
SANTO EN EL TESORO DE MOCTEZUMA Santo in The Treasure of Moctezuma
1968
SANTO EN EL TESORO DE DRACULA Santo in Dracula’s Treasure aka EL Vampiro y El Sexo
SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA Santo vs Capulina
1969
SANTO CONTRA BLUE DEMON EN LA ATLANTIDA Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON EN EL MUNDO DE LOS MUERTOS Santo & Blue Demon in The World of the Dead
SANTO CONTRA LOS CAZADORES DE CABEZAS Santo vs The Headhunters
SANTO FRENTE A LA MUERTE Santo Faces Death aka Santo vs The Mafia Killers
1970
SANTO CONTRA LOS JINETES DEL TERROR Santo vs The Terror Riders aka The Lepers and Sex
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS Santo in The Revenge of the Vampire Women
SANTO CONTRA LA MAFIA DEL VICIO Santo vs The Mafia of Vice aka Mission Sabotage
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA MOMIA Santo in The Revenge of the Mummy
LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO The Mummies of Guanajuato Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras
1971
SANTO CONTRA LA HIJA DE FRANKENSTEIN Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter
SANTO CONTRA LOS ASESINOS DE OTROS MUNDOS Santo vs The Killers from Other Worlds aka Santo vs The Living Atom
SANTO Y EL AGUILA REAL Santo and The Royal Eagle aka Santo and The Tigress in The Royal Eagle
SANTO EN MISION SUICIDA Santo in Suicide Mission
SANTO EN EL MISTERIO DE LA PERLA NEGRA Santo in The Mystery of The Black Pearl aka Santo in The Caribbean Connection Released in Spain in 1971 and in Mexico in 1974
1972
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA DRACULA Y EL HOMBRE LOBO Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & The Wolfman
SANTO CONTRA LOS SECUESTRADORES Santo vs The Kidnappers
SANTO CONTRA LA MAGIA NEGRA Santo vs Black Magic
SANTO & BLUE DEMON EN LAS BESTIAS DEL TERROR Santo & Blue Demon in The Beasts of Terror
SANTO EN LAS LOBAS Santo in The She-Wolves
SANTO EN ANONIMO MORTAL Santo in Anonymous Death Threat
1973
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL DR. FRANKENSTEIN Santo & Blue Demon vs Dr. Frankenstein
SANTO CONTRA EL DR. MURERTE Santo vs Dr. Death aka Santo Strikes Again
1974
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA LLORONA Santo in The Revenge of The Crying Woman
1975
SANTO EN ORO NEGRO aka La Noche De San Juan Santo in Black Gold
1977
MISTERIO EN LAS BERMUDAS Mystery in Bermuda Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras
1979
SANTO EN LA FRONTERA DEL TERROR Santo at the Border of Terror aka Santo vs The White Shadow
1981
SANTO CONTRA EL ASESINO DE LA TELEVISION Santo vs The Television Killer
CHANOC Y EL HIJO DEL SANTO VS LOS VAMPIROS ASESINOS Chanoc & The Son of Santo vs The Killer Vampires Cameo appearance
1982
SANTO EN EL PUNO DE LA MUERTE Santo in The Fist of Death
SANTO EN LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS Santo in The Fury of the Karate Experts
There are plenty of legitimate things to complain about in the modern streaming era, from the exorbitant cost of subscribing to multiple services to the illusion of availability, which obscures the fact that most movies from before the 1990s are not currently available on any of those platforms. Those complaints do not apply to The People’s Streaming Service™, though. Tubi is the one beacon of hope in our streaming-era dystopia, offering a library of titles deep enough to rival cinema freaks’ fondly remembered video store days at the universally affordable price point of Free. All you have to put up with to access that library is frequent ad breaks, which can be jarring when watching high-brow classics like Un Chien Andalou but feels warmly familiar when watching the kind of schlock that pad out the late-night schedules of broadcast TV. For instance, I have a distinct memory of catching the final half-hour of the forgotten pro wrestling drama Below the Belt on a broadcast channel like MeTV after working a graveyard shift at a pub kitchen. I had no idea what I was watching or how I would ever get to see the rest of the picture, so I stayed awake through a few commercial breaks to soak up whatever scraps I could. About a decade later, Below the Belt is just sitting there on Tubi, out in the open, with fewer commercials and the same lack of fanfare. I can watch it start to end at any time. Our new streaming paradigm might be discouraging for people who grew up in households that could afford cable, but for those of us raised on service industry tips and antenna rods, there are some ways in which things have clearly gotten better.
It turns out watching Below the Belt in out-of-context scraps on broadcast TV was surprisingly true to how the movie plays in full. Filmed in 1974 but delayed for release until 1980, it has a similar troubled production history as the punk road trip drama Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, which was also mostly remembered & rediscovered as a staple of late-night TV broadcasts. The same way The Fabulous Stains was shelved until it could be retooled for a post-MTV cash-in, Below the Belt was shelved until it could be marketed as a pro-wrestling knockoff of the massively popular Rocky series. It’s likely no coincidence that these two specific films were treated as low priorities for distributing & marketing, since they’re both women’s underdog stories set in creative industries run by men. The Fabulous Stains is about an all-girl punk band; Below the Belt is about women wrestlers working the regional circuit in the American South. The difference is that TheFabulous Stains‘ compromised form only becomes apparent in a last-second time jump that was clearly tacked on to cash-in on the rise of MTV. Below the Belt is an absolute mess throughout. This rise-to-regional-fame pro wrestling story has a convincing flair for low-budget melodrama, but it suffers from a crippling addiction to plot-summarizing montages that betrays its scrappy production history. There are tons of great raw footage & isolated scenes to work with (and many years of stagnation to work with them), but it still feels like the product of a panicked editing room. It’s as if they had a week to edit after five years of forgetting what they shot.
Actor-turned-psychologist Regina Baff stars as an unlikely recruit for the wrasslin’ business. She starts the film as a scrawny NYC diner waitress drowning under a mop of red curls, but she’s quickly scouted for her talent for brutality when she knees a coworker in the balls for sexually harassing her mid-shift. In the erotic thriller curio White Palace, that take-no-shit diner waitress scrappiness is rewarded with a months-long fuckfest with James Spader. In Below the Belt, it’s rewarded with a road trip to the American South, where she learns “the ropes” of the wrestling trade with a collection of jaded colleagues who’ve already seen it all. The story was “suggested by” the novel To Smithereens by Rosalyn Drexler who, appropriately enough, went on to write the novelization of Rocky under the pseudonym Julia Sorel. To Smithereens is a personal account of Drexler’s brief career as a wrestler in the 1950s, which helps explain the movie’s episodic, disconnected assemblage of wrasslin’ anecdotes. It’s not a story so much as it’s a collection of interesting characters, some of whom are played by real-life wrestlers, and the most memorable of whom is played by cult-cinema legend Shirley Stoler. Stoler only has a minor part as a road-weary wrassler with a handgun fetish, but she makes the most of it, screeching “Give me my gun back, you bitch!” in perfect camp pitch. The other MVP on the crew is R&B musician Billy Preston, whose increasingly loopy lyrics in his constant musical montage narration makes the whole movie feel maddeningly incomplete . . . in a mostly endearing way.
By the time the dozenth montage masks unintelligible wide-shot dialogue with song lyrics about “alligators in the chitlin trees,” “burly Birmingbama ham,” “taking baths in the sweet magnolia blossoms with the possums,” or whatever other Southern cliches Preston cooked up in a half-hour of studio time, it’s clear that Below the Belt was a compromised production. By the time the decreasingly credible, increasingly repetitive stock footage of the wrasslin’ crowds starts looking like it was shot on handheld super-8 cameras instead of professional equipment, the illusion of competence is fully broken. I was just as fascinated by the film in its full, fractured form as I was catching parts of it out of context on TV broadcast, though, simply because the retro fashions, characters, and mise-en-scène were so specific to a bygone era of regional professional wrestling. In that way, Below the Belt is more satisfying as a makeshift documentary than it is as a scene-to-scene drama, which means that I should make reading Drexler’s To Smithereens memoir a high priority this year. It’s perfect Tubi programming in either context, though, since the intrusion of commercial breaks can’t disrupt what’s already a chaotic narrative flow, and since the film is such an obscure curio that you’re grateful someone cared to host it in the first place (in HD, no less).
Unsurprisingly, a lot of this year’s major Awards Frontrunners are solemn biopics of men who committed some of the worst sins in human history: the invention of the atom bomb, the daily operation of concentration camps, the genocide of an Indigenous nation. As much as The Academy has attempted to reconfigure what qualifies as an Oscar-Worthy movie, it’s clear that the Oscar-friendly template of Important Men directing history lessons about Important Men is still an effective one; all that’s really changed is that those portraits of Important Men have become more critical than celebratory. Further down the power rankings of this FYC season’s major players, there’s also a curious pair of historical biopics about Important Men who operated in a much smaller arena than the frontrunners’ global politics stomping grounds: the regional pro wrestling circuit of 1980s Texas. The men depicted in these pro wrasslin’ biopics are of much smaller historical importance than a J. Robert Oppenheimer or a Rudolf Höss; the tearjerking melodrama of their lives is less about the moral sins of their own actions than it is about how cruelly unfair the world was to them, and whether they survived the trauma. However, in a big picture sense, they echo the same criticism of the rigid machismo and the hypocrisy in Family Values conservatism that drove the Important Men of Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flowers Moon, and The Zone of Interest to commit humanity’s greatest. They just work through that cultural tragedy within the walls of their small family homes and within the rubber-padded ropes of the wrestling ring. It’s more contained.
If this season’s pro wrestling dramas are being contextualized as awards-hopefuls, they’re most overtly engineering FYC attention for their male stars. In that way, pro wrestling is the perfect cinematic subject, since it offers such a familiar, convenient storytelling template to help get male performers over with the crowd. Even when a wrasslin’ pictures’s in-movie drama feels minor in comparison to more historically important works, their in-ring drama carries the audience through, highlighting an actors’ talents with the emotional histrionics of a soap opera or a Greek tragedy. Nobody benefits from that dramatic bolstering this year more than Gabriel García Bernal, who stars as the titular lead in the lucha libre history lesson Cassandro. This by-the-numbers biopic isn’t half as stylistically daring as the Cassandro, el Exótico! documentary on the same subject, nor as fabulously glamorous as the luchador himself, but it’s an inherently cinematic story and García Bernal shines in the central role. The real-life Cassandro is credited for changing the artform of lucha libre by subverting the homophobic trope of the “exótico.” When he entered the business wrestling on both sides of the Texas-Mexico border, exóticos were a purely homophobic stereotype: heels who would earn cheap heat by flirting with their more traditionally macho opponents, then get immediately crushed in the ring to the crowd’s enthusiastic cheers. It was gaybashing as ceremonial pageantry. Cassandro flipped the script by genuinely getting over with the crowd through the artistry of his wrestling, to the point where promoters saw potential profits in letting an exótico win for a change; or, that’s at least how the story goes, according to kayfabe. The beyond-the-mat drama of his struggles with a loving but homophobic mother and with sex-partner colleagues who are willing to fuck him in private but renounce him in public can feel a little phony & cliche to anyone who’s seen their share of queer indie dramas in the past few decades. The nonstop montage of Cassandro’s career in the ring is still emotionally compelling in a succinct, celebratory, wrasslin’-specific way that makes up for those broad cliches, though, and by the time the credits roll it’s hard to tell whether you’re rooting for Cassandro or rooting for García Bernal – an FYC publicist’s dream.
The Von Erich family drama The Iron Claw spreads the FYC wealth to many more potential nominees than Cassandro‘s fixed spotlight on Gabriel García Bernal. The improbable true story of the supposedly “cursed” family of professional wrestlers has plenty of star-making tragedy to spread around its four central brothers: Zac Efron as Kevin Von Erich, Jeremy Allen White as Kerry Von Erich, Harris Dickinson as David Von Erich, and Stanley Simons as David Von Erich. Efron is the most obvious awards play of the group, transforming himself into a human He-Man action figure for the role in a grotesque way that awards bodies love to celebrate. Each of the Von Erich brothers get their moment to bring the audience to tears, though, as they’re each pushed to the brink of what their hearts and bodies can handle by their toxically macho father Fritz Von Erich, played with monstrous villainy by Holt McCallany. The first half of the movie recalls the laidback nostalgic cool of Dazed and Confused as the four central brothers lean on each other for warmth & validation in the happiest times of their lives, working together as up & coming wrestlers who have yet to be fully poisoned by their father’s insistence they compete amongst themselves for his scraps of praise. The second half disrupts that momentary bliss with the heightened violence of a Greek tragedy, with each brother meeting improbably horrific ends in a rapid, relentless procession. The Iron Claw‘s reliance on the in-ring drama of pro wrestling is heaviest in the early stretch, as the Von Erichs’ prominence in pre-WWF regional wrasslin’ circuits is mapped out in montage & dramatic recreations of select, pivotal matches. The back half is a much more straightforward drama that could have befallen any sports-family household, since cataloging the parade of traumas that crushed the Von Erichs leaves very little time to show them actually doing the work. Besides, the movie isn’t really about their wrestling careers anyway; it’s more about the love they shared as brothers, and how important that bond was in a home run by a man incapable of expressing affection. If it were any less successful as a sincere family drama, the men’s frequent repetition of the word “Brother” would play as a joke, the same way audiences now laugh every time Vin Diesel says “Family” in the Fast & Furious movies.
If this were a one-on-one, three-count fight, it would be a squash match. Cassandro is dramatically and stylistically outperformed by The Iron Claw by practically every metric – except, maybe, in the vintage-glam detail of Cassandro’s gemstoned ring gear. Neither film is an exceptional work of great artistic importance, though; they’re both just FYC acting showcases for their above-the-line talents, who utilize pro-wrestling’s played-to-the-cheap-seats pageantry to add some emotional heft to otherwise traditional sports dramas. If they have any standing in discussion with the Oscar-hopefuls who’ve risen to the top of the Vegas-odds rankings over the course of this FYC season, it’s in their shared skepticism over the effects of stoic masculinity and conservative Family Values in recent generational history. Cassandro finds a way to offer a triumphant rejection of those traditional values, while The Iron Claw drags our battered hearts through their most miserable consequences. In either case, their performers are never more powerful nor more beautiful than they are on the wrestling mat, and both films are excellent examples of acting as full-body physical artistry. If I have to watch straightforward, mediocre melodramas to keep up with the buzziest titles in the Oscars Cycle every year, I’d be more than happy if they’d continually return to the wrestling ring for easy crowd work and promotion. It gives us something easy to root for, which is honestly something I’d rather put myself through than yet another war atrocity drama about the worst things that have ever happened in the history of the human species.
“Why do I watch WrestleMania? My answer is that the poet must not avert his eyes from what’s going on in the world. In order to understand, you have to face it.”
“Our sense of the real world today is massively challenged; I include here reality television, breast enhancement, and the carefully choreographed, fake drama of WrestleMania, populated by larger-than-life characters with muscles that nature doesn’t normally provide us with and who take pleasure in telling everyone how unbelievably evil they are.”
“What is fascinating about WrestleMania is the stories around it: the dramas between the owner of the whole show and his son, who are feuding, and his wife in the wheelchair who is blind, and he is then showing up in the ring with girls who have huge, fake boobs, and he is fondling them. This is almost sort of an ancient Greek drama – evil uninterrupted by commercials.”
These are just a choice few Werner Herzog quotes about the cultural & literary virtues of professional wrestling, pulled from the 2019 GQ listicle “Werner Herzog Cannot Stop Talking About WrestleMania” – a masterpiece of modern clickbait publication that I return to often. Herzog was promoting his work as an actor on the Star Wars television series The Mandalorian around the time those various press junket quotes were assembled, a time when his familiarity as a household name was bridging the gap between art cinema snobs and their sworn enemies, “Disney Adults.” His public perception has since been bifurcated in recent years, split between his well-earned designation as a world-class auteur and his more recent evolution into a Nic Cagian human meme who pontificates about supposedly low-brow subjects like WrestleMania & Ana Nicole Smith in a severe German accent. Unlike Nic Cage, though, Herzog has not allowed his YouTube Era reputation as a human meme affect the tone or content of his work as a serious filmmaker, give or take a few over-the-top scenes in his collaboration with Cage in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans. As often as you hear Herzog explain the grotesque poetry of reality TV & pro wrestling in interviews, it’s difficult to detect their influence on his actual work. That is, unless you happen to be one of the few people who remember his 2001 historical fantasy drama Invincible, which presents an academic-level understanding of the historic origins of wrasslin’, as well as its modern mutation into mass, crass populist entertainment.
Invincible stars real-life strongman Jouko Ahola as historical strongman Zishe Breitbart, a young Jewish blacksmith from a small Polish village who grew to fame as “The Strongest Man in the World” in 1920s Germany. Herzog takes a pro wrestling-style truthiness approach to the material, moving Breitbart’s story to the early stirrings of Nazi Germany a decade later, playing up the significance of his Jewish heritage in a heightened, more satisfying kayfabe version of his life’s story. In the film, Breitbart enters the entertainment industry through the strongman circus acts that sparked pro wrestling as an artform. He challenges a traveling strongman for prize money in what is supposed to be a rigged wrestling bout and easily defeats the brute in a Goliath vs Goliath matchup. Word of his incredible strength quickly spreads, and he’s summoned to work as a regular stage act in a Berlin cabaret, ringmastered by a Nazi-friendly psychic played by Tim Roth. Roth’s conman mystic is quick to use Breitbart’s Jewish heritage as a race-baiting point of division between the Nazi officers and Jewish citizens in the cabaret audience, which is perfectly in tune with how hot-topic political divisions are exploited for cheap heat in modern pro wrestling programs. Breitbart is the underdog hero for the Jewish people, who feel increasingly hopeless as the Nazis rise to political power. The carnie mystic MC is a hero to the Nazis, pretending to summon supernatural strength from The Dark Arts to overpower the strongman’s brute force (a “skill” he can sell as a war-winning weapon for Hitler’s army). In truth, they’re working together as a scripted act, putting on a show to stoke their divided audience’s Us vs Them bloodlust; it’s wrestling in a nutshell.
Aesthetically, Invincible is worlds away from the reality-TV crassness of what Herzog refers to as “WrestleMania”. In its best moments, there’s an ancient cinematic quality to the director’s visual storytelling, effectively remaking Bob Fosse’s Cabaret as if he were Tod Browning adapting a fairy tale. In its worst moments, it plays like standard-issue Oscar bait of its era, bolstered by a prestige-desperate Hans Zimmer score that tells the audience exactly how to feel at every second of runtime. Its Oscar chances were self-sabotaged by Herzog’s choice to have his European actors speak phonetic English in post-production dubs instead of performing naturally in their various native languages. That might have been a deliberate attempt to evoke a Bressonian style of performance, but it just comes across as bizarre & confused, and only the established professional actors Tim Roth & Udo Kier come across as capable performers. The camerawork can come across as bizarre & confused as well, alternating between a handheld documentary style and a Hollywood-schmaltz fantasy & artifice that attempts to (in Ross’s showman wording) “[articulate the audience’s] collective dreams”. Its moments of visual lyricism make sense to me as a historically set fairy tale about Nazi obsession with mysticism clashing against a Freaks vs. The Reich style superhero. They’re especially effective when Herzog gazes at the sea-life bodies of jellyfish & crabs as if he were a space alien considering their otherworldly beauty for the very first time. He’s really good at articulating the uncanniness of everyday life & pop media in that way, which is how he’s gotten famous as an interviewee outside of art cinema circles. It’s amusing, then, that he can’t convincingly translate that wonder with the world into an Oscar-friendly movie for normies; he’s too much of a genuine weirdo.
Around the time of Invincible, Herzog was essentially directing one feature film a year at a consistent pace, and he’s only gotten more prolific in the two decades since. While some of his 2000s titles like Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and the aforementioned Bad Lieutenant have endured with a certain cultural cachet, many like Invincible have fallen through the cultural cracks; they can’t all be stunners. If you’re going to excavate this one Herzog title out of relative obscurity within that massive catalog, I do think it’s worth considering as a bizarre, failed attempt to reach for Awards Season prestige beyond the usual, routine boundaries of his critical accolades. He has found wider public recognition in the years since, but mostly as a weirdo public persona (an extension of the first-person narration style he developed in his 2000s-era documentaries). Invincible does recall one very specific aspect of that public persona, at least: his inability to stop talking about WrestleMania. Whether that’s enough of a reason to dig this one particular discarded Herzog DVD out of the Goodwill pile is up to your completionist interest in his career, I guess, as well as your personal fascination with the Greek tragedy & grotesque poetry of wrasslin’ as an artform.
I remember Jennifer Reeder’s surrealist high school melodrama Knives & Skin harshly dividing the audience at Overlook Film Fest in 2019, with the more macho Horror Bros in the crowd grumbling that it was the worst film they’d seen all fest and with other scattered weirdos gushing that it was the best. Personally, I dug it, especially for the way it warped the teen-friendly Lynchian melodrama of early Riverdale by submerging it in a hallucinatory Robotrip aesthetic. I wasn’t especially surprised that Knives & Skin confused the more rigidly horror-minded section of the crowd, though, since it’s a Laura Palmer-style murder mystery that doesn’t care as much about the murder as it cares about teen-girl bedroom decor and eerie vocal choir renditions of 80s pop tunes. Hell, even my own reaction was confused. I left the theater thinking I had watched a messy but ambitious debut feature from a boldly stylistic genre nerd. I was wrong. Reeder had not only made a name for herself as a prolific short filmmaker on the festival circuit, but she also had already completed her first feature in 2017’s Signature Move. And now having caught up with that debut, I’m as confused as ever. After the slow-motion, high-style freakout of Knives & Skin, I was expecting a lot more visual panache out of the straightforward, Sundancey romcom that preceded it. I still don’t have a clear answer to the question “Who is Jennifer Reeder?” Maybe I never will.
Signature Move stars Fawzia Mirza as a closeted, thirtysomething Chicagoan who hides her lesbian social life from her first-generation mother, an agoraphobic shut-in who spends all her time watching Pakistani soap operas and needling her daughter about marriage. As an act of private rebellion and stress relief, Mirza secretly trains as a professional wrestler between dull dayshifts working the desk at a law office. She also sneaks around the city’s lesbian bar scene, where she meets a much more out-and-proud love interest played by Sari Sanchez. Her new girlfriend lives a freer, more honest lesbian life, having grown up with an actual professional wrestler as her mother – an open-minded luchadora named Luna Peligrosa. As one woman struggles to reveal her true self to her conservative parent and the other refuses to regress into the closet, conflict ensues. From there, there isn’t much to Signature Move that you can’t find in any 90s festival-circuit romcom or, more recently, any streaming-era sitcom. Even the lesbian-scene setting isn’t especially distinctive amongst similar, superior titles like Saving Face, Appropriate Behavior, The Watermelon Woman, or whatever was the first queer romcom you happened to catch on IFC before Netflix “disrupted” (i.e., gutted) the original purpose of cable. I suppose there’s some value in documenting the food, fabrics, art, jewelry, and bootleg DVDs of Chicago’s Muslim & Latinx neighborhoods as our two mismatched-but-perfectly-matched lovers negotiate their new relationship, but in some ways those moments of cultural window dressing almost make the film more anonymous among similar low-budget comedies that pad out the programs at Sundance & Outfest every single year.
If there’s any detectable trace of Jennifer Reeder auteurism in Signature Move, it’s in the inevitable climax where Mirza’s shut-in mother bravely ventures out of their shared apartment to witness her daughter’s pro wrestling debut at what appears to be a lucha-drag hybrid event akin to our local Choke Hole drag-wrasslin’ promotion. There’s a heightened artificiality to that queer-dream-realm wrestling venue that Reeder would later intensify & expand in Knives & Skin until it consumed an entire fictional suburb. Otherwise, I can’t say I found much to either praise or pick apart with any fervor in Signature Move, which is just as straightforward & unassuming as Knives & Skin is uncanny & confounding. It’s a cute enough movie on its own terms, though, and there can never be enough media celebrating how gay wrestling is as a microculture. Otherwise, it appears that I time-traveled in the wrong direction when trying to get a firmer handle on Jennifer Reeder’s signature aesthetics as a director. Her two follow-up features after Knives & Skin—last year’s Night’s End and the upcoming Perpetrator—are both supernatural horrors that promise a lot more room for the high-style, low-logic playfulness that caught my attention at Overlook than this cookie-cutter indie romcom was ever going to deliver.
It’s impossible to distinguish which version of Ed Wood I think of as a personal hero: the alcoholic crossdresser who lived a tough life as an underappreciated outsider artist or the much sunnier, apocryphal version of him presented in Tim Burton’s 1994 biopic. Either way, Ed Wood is undeniably a great film (despite how some of its casting choices may have aged), second only toPee-wee’s Big Adventure as Burton’s career best. It was surely my first exposure to Wood’s art & legacy, priming me for a genuine appreciation of the kind of enthusiastic D.I.Y. filmmaking most modern audiences mock as “so bad it’s good” schlock. Before Burton’s loving, reformative biopic polished up Ed Wood’s reputation, his biggest claim to fame was being posthumously burdened with a Golden Turkey “Award” for The Worst Director of All Time in the 1980s – mainly for his career-defining opus Plan 9 from Outer Space. Personally, I don’t believe Wood was capable of making The Worst Film of All Time. Wherever his work may have suffered from improper funding or technical ineptitude, Wood vastly overcompensated with a chaotic, personal passion for the artform. Despite being locked out of proper studio filmmaking channels, Wood’s stream-of-consciousness writing style and delirious sense of self-confidence led to some of the most spectacularly bizarre self-financed genre pictures of his era. The actual worst movies of all time are dispassionate, impersonal, unmemorable bores – movies Ed Wood was incapable of making. Whether I only believe that because of his myth-making biopic is something I’ll never be able to fully decipher; I happened to be born late enough in the game that Burton’s hagiographic version of Wood reached me before the dweebs at The Gold Turkey Awards could poison my brain.
Plan 9 from Outer Space was never my personal favorite Ed Wood flick (that meager honorific belongs to Glen or Glenda), but it’s easy enough to understand how it became his most widely known. If nothing else, its gleeful genre-nerd mashup of Atomic Age sci-fi tropes, celebrity vampires, graveyard-set zombie attacks, and pro wrestling monsters is enough of a pop media overload to distract from what it lacks in financing or technical skill (as if those weren’t also a highlight in their own way). Whereas Glen or Glenda was a self-portrait of his life as a closeted crossdresser, Plan 9 is a self-portrait of his life as a genre movie fanboy. Both films were written in a manic, straight-from-the-id haste due to their budget constrictions, exposing the bargain bin auteur’s naked psyche without petty concerns like narrative logic or good taste blocking the view. Originally titled Graverobbers from Outer Space, the film’s basic concept of space aliens commanding an army of Earth’s undead was always going to be a mash-up of Atomic Age sci-fi & zombie movie tropes. It’s the way Wood crammed his social circle of Hollywood “weirdies” into that basic genre mash-up that really explodes the film into post-modern delirium. Without explanation or internal justification, this aliens-and-zombies novelty picture suddenly involves celebrity vampires Bela Lugosi & Vampira, a guest segment of the locally televised astrology program Criswell Predicts, and the gargantuan pro wrestler Tor Johnson – all essentially playing themselves with no real relation to the alien graverobber plot. The film was pitched to independent investors as a way to cash-in on then-recent newspaper reports of UFO sightings in Hollywood. Instead, it mutated into a collection of all the assorted pop culture ephemera that made Ed Wood fall in love with Hollywood as an aspiring, underfunded filmmaker; all that was missing was a few cowboys airlifted from a serial Western.
Besides its genre-melding collection of aliens, zombies, vampires, and pro wrestlers on a single graveyard set, I think the main reason Plan 9 is more popular than Glen or Glenda is that it moves at a slower, quieter pace. It’s perfectly calibrated for MST3k-style live commentary in that way, making it a much likelier candidate for drunken Midnight Movie screenings and “so-bad-it’s-good” mockery. Glen or Glenda pummels the audience with a scatterbrained editing style & an overbearing narration track that leave little room for any individual image or idea to be scrutinized before it moves on to the next. By contrast, Plan 9 is in no rush to get anywhere, feeling more like a Halloween-themed hangout film than a proper creature feature. There’s plenty of time for audiences to point & laugh at the visible strings that hold up its model-kit UFOs, or the cardboard cut-out gravestones that tip over whenever bumped into, or the lighting’s alternation between night-day-night settings within a single scene. It’s the kind of “bad movie” that invites the audience to feel superior to the material at hand, which is especially attractive to teenage cynics who are first starting to get into low-budget schlock. I’m getting to the point in my life where that above-it-all MST3k mockery no longer appeals to me. These types of unskilled, underfunded novelty films read more to me as quirky Outsider Art than they do some kind of subprofessional embarrassment. By that standard, Ed Wood is truly one of the greats, having made several D.I.Y. messterpieces that were personal to his interests as an artist & as a Hollywood weirdo but still endure as crowd-pleasing party films a half-century later. The experience of watching Plan 9from Outer Space is too fun for it to be “the worst” of anything, no matter how clumsy Wood was in his rush to get something on celluloid before his budget ran dry.
I’m grateful to the Tim Burton biopic for introducing me to Ed Wood as a filmmaker and a personality. I’m even more grateful to Rhino’s mid-90s Deluxe Ed Wood Boxset of the films covered in the Burton version of his story, collecting Glen or Glenda, Bride of the Monster, and Plan 9 from Outer Space on three VHS tapes bound in a fuzzy pink angora slip case. I lost track of my copy of that boxset years ago, as I let go of the tape-eating VCRs that were collecting dust on my TV stand. It’s been easy enough to buy those films individually on DVD in the decades since, but they’re long overdue for the cleaned-up HD restoration treatment that so many low-budget genre films are lavished with on the niche Blu Ray market these days. The pink angora slip case is optional, but it gets stranger every year that the unholy trinity of American schlockteurs—Wood, Wishman, and Meyer—are all missing from the vintage media restoration market. I wonder if my genuine appreciation of Ed Wood’s art is solely a result of growing up in the exact 1990s sweet spot: after Burton rehabilitated his earlier reputation as The Worst Director of All Time and Rhino had released his Greatest Hits as an easily accessible boxset presented in an up-to-date format. That was almost three decades ago; we’re long overdue for another Ed Wood career refresher, starting with a proper physical media release for the movie that made him infamous.
The last time WrestleMania came through New Orleans, I indulged in a few of the smaller satellite shows that popped up around the city, including one put on by an extremely nerdy promotion out of NYC called Kaiju Big Battel. Sitting in a brightly lit auditorium after midnight, watching a kaiju-themed wrestling show with a shockingly sober, wholesome crowd, was a one-of-a-kind delight — an experience I doubt I’ll ever be able to fully replicate. The wrestlers were mostly costumed in giant plush outfits—dressed as hamburgers, 1950s robots, literal dust bunnies, and cans of soup—smashing each other into the cardboard cities that decorated the ring they used as a goofball playground. I guess it’s possible to take an unfavorable view of an American company boiling down the kaiju genre to such broadly silly terms, considering its heartbreaking origins as an expression of post-nuclear Japanese national grief in the original Godzilla. However, the further I dig into the Godzilla canon in recent months, the more I’m starting to realize just how faithful the Kaiju Big Battel brand of novelty wrestling is to its Godzilla roots; it’s just calling back to a later, decidedly kid-friendly era of Godzilla filmmaking detached from the giant lizard’s grim-as-fuck origins.
If there’s any one Godzilla movie that could be blamed for cheapening the monster’s brand with broadly silly slapstick comedy, it’s likely Godzilla vs Megalon. Thanks to an ugly pan-and-scan transfer with an English dub that was allowed to temporarily slip into the public domain, it’s the Shōwa era Godzilla film that was most widely available to the American public for decades — lurking in creature-of-the-week television broadcasts, gas station DVD bargain bins, and MST3k target practice. Godzilla vs Megalon appears to have a dire reputation as a result, diluting the larger Godzilla brand with misconceptions that the series was always dirt-cheap and aimed at little kids’ sensibilities. I can’t personally attest to the quality of that much-seen pan-and-scan edit of Godzilla vs Megalon, but the Criterion restoration that’s currently steaming online is both beautifully colorful and wonderfully goofy. It was obviously a rushed, cheap production, but the kaiju battles have a distinct pro wrestling charm to them that makes for great late-night viewing, transporting me back to that Kaiju Big Battel show in the best way possible. I can’t say the movie doesn’t deserve its reputation as the bottom of the kaiju media barrel, but now that the more important, prestigious Godzilla films are widely available in their original form, I think there’s a lot more room for audiences to appreciate the film’s delirious, Saturday Morning Cartoon silliness for what it is.
The humans-on-the-ground plot of Godzilla vs Megalon feels like repurposed scenes from a 1970s live-action Disney espionage comedy, by which I mean they’re not very memorable or worthy of discussion. What’s really worth paying attention to here is the pro wrestling booking of the monster fights. The film is a tag team match. In one corner, we have the debut (and final) match of Megalon, a profoundly idiotic beetle worshiped by the underwater occultists of Seatopia. In the other corner, we have the movie’s face: Jet Jaguar, an Ultraman rip-off robot with an insanely wide grin — also appearing in his debut (and final) match. Neither contender is enough of a draw to carry the movie on their own, so they’re paired with charismatic tag team partners to help get them over with the crowd. Megalon is paired with Gigan, a much lesser robo-Godzilla derivative than Mechagodzilla, whose non-presence essentially turns this into a squash match. Jet Jaguar, of course, is paired with Godzilla, a legitimizing tag team partner whose popularity should have been able to forever endear his new robo-friend to children everywhere. That proved to be an unsuccessful gamble in the long run (Jet Jaguar was never seen or heard from again), but Godzilla appears to have fun trying. He performs here with the broadly expressive physical language of a wrestler playing to the backseats in a packed auditorium, aiming for big laughs and even bigger wrestling maneuvers that any kid should be delighted cheer on from the crowd.
To its credit, Godzilla vs Megalon does vaguely motion towards the eco-conscious concerns of larger Godzilla lore in its early goings, pitting both the kaiju and the underwater sea cult against us surface humans after our nuclear tests pollute the atmosphere. The film isn’t earnestly about those themes, though, no more than it’s earnestly about Godzilla or Megalon. This is Jet Jaguar’s show through & through, as evidenced by the grinning robot closing out the show with his own badass theme song — the same way pro wrestlers replay their entrance music while they lift newly-won championship belts in victory. Jet Jaguar was created specifically for the film as contest entry from a small child (explaining the not-so-vague resemblance to Ultraman), which is a pretty blatant excuse to sell new kaiju toys & merch. Because the production was rushed, underfunded, and marketed specifically at little kids’ sensibilities, there isn’t much destruction of towns or cities (outside some crudely inserted stock footage from better-funded Godzilla films), so most of the monster action is staged in an open field, away from the necessity of expensive miniatures. The result is basically the movie version of Kaiju Big Battel: dudes in goofy costumes body slamming each other in fits of broad, slapstick humor. It sucks that the kaiju genre was once only associated with that kind of silly novelty entertainment, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t entertaining, especially now that the more serious end of the genre is more widely respected and readily accessible.
Welcome to Episode #122 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee revisit actor David Arquette’s two-week reign as WCW World Heavyweight Champion, a bizarre real-life story bookended by two disparate feature films: Ready to Rumble (2000) & You Cannot Kill David Arquette (2020). Enjoy!
Our current Movie of the Month, the low-budget horror comedy Monster Brawl, might be the absolute worst movie that I wholeheartedly love. That’s partly because it mimics the structure & rhythms of a pro wrestling Pay-Per-View instead of a traditional Movie, which requires the audience to adjust expectations to the payoffs of that format. A one-time-only deathmatch tournament between famous monster archetypes in a haunted graveyard to determine “The Most Powerful Ghoul of All Time”, it’s staged as if it were a real-time Pay-Per-View broadcast of an actual pro wrestling event. Monster Brawl‘s feature-length commitment to that structure can be alienating if you’re not immediately tickled by its absurdity, which proved true for most of The Swampflix Crew. This turned out to be an extremely self-indulgent Movie of the Month selection on my part, as no one else in this polluted swamp seemed to have a good time with it. Whoops.
As a result, recommending further viewing to anyone who enjoyed Monster Brawl and wants to see more movies on its shamelessly trashy wavelength is somewhat of an empty exercise. It appears that no one enjoys Monster Brawl, outside maybe appreciating the creature design for the bayou-dwelling eco terrorist wrestler Swamp Gut. Regardless, here are a few recommended titles if you—improbably—loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience similar goofball horror comedies that traffic in the same grey area between creature feature & pro wrestling PPV.
Santo vs. The Vampire Women (1962)
No discussion of the intersection between pro wrestling & cheap-o horror would be complete without the masked luchador Santo. A wrestler so beloved in Mexico that he was practically a folk hero, Santo’s in-ring celebrity was exported to the big screen in over 50 feature films, many of them within the horror genre. I can’t speak to the quality of the majority of Santo’s cinematic output (much of which was never translated to English), but I can heartily recommend his most financially & culturally successful picture: Santo vs. The Vampire Women. It’s a film that’s most well recognized in the US for being featured on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it’s a fun pro wrestling-themed Halloween Season watch even without that ironic mockery (especially without, honestly).
Amusingly, Santo vs. The Vampire Women mostly keeps its horror & its wrestling separated in the plot. Santo is hired by a worried father as a kind of bodyguard to protect his vulnerable daughter who is being actively recruited by a vampire coven, as the luchador comes from a long line of ancestors who are sworn “to eliminate evil of all kinds.” Unfortunately, the professional demands of being a popular sports entertainer means that Santo is often too “busy” to help keep the daughter-stealing vampire women at bay, as he’s often tied up with a wrestling match he can’t get out of. The novelty of the film’s wrestling angle exists almost entirely independently from the main action, which means that the story has to stop dead still to make room for the on-screen luchador matches the same way a porno’s story stalls for lengthy depictions of sex.
Even so, the Satanic ritual imagery & buxom vampire coven are so Cool on their own that this would be a solid horror cheapie even without the novelty of the wrestling angle. Anyone with an appreciation for pro wrestling pageantry and Poverty Row knockoffs of Universal Horror classics should have blast with the spooky-campy atmosphere established here. And maybe it’s for the best that it kept its wrestling & its plot separate, since Monster Brawl synthesized those two elements into a single structure-defining gimmick and practically no one enjoys it.
Mortal Kombat (1995)
Monster Brawl is not the only gimmicky fight tournament movie that I love more than I likely should. I also have a huge (likely nostalgic) soft spot for Paul WS Anderson’s big-screen adaptation of the gory button-masher Mortal Kombat. Much like how Monster Brawl structures its story around a Pro Wrestling Pay-Per-View, the Mortal Kombat movie goes out of its way to maintain the tiered tournament structure of its video game source material. It’s a little better funded than Monster Brawl and a little less committed to their shared gimmick (the official fights don’t start until 40min into the film in this case), so in comparison it stands out as a slicker, more accessible variation on the same deathmatch tournament theme.
Instead of fighting to determine “The Most Powerful Ghoul of All Time”, the combatants of Mortal Kombat compete “to defend the realm of Earth” from an “emperor sorcerer demon” who seeks to subjugate & steal the souls of every living being. The humans who enter this interdimensional deathmatch tournament (Mortal Kombat all-stars Sonya Blade, Johnny Cage, and Liu Kang) face off against evil creatures much less culturally overfamiliar than the Universal Monster knockoffs featured in Monster Brawl — mostly demonic ninjas with black magic control over elements like fire, ice, and … shapeshifting reptiles? Much like how Monster Brawl has its clear stand-out monster with Swamp Gut, however, the real star of Mortal Kombat is the four-armed mutant freakshow Goro — a beautiful blend of clunky animatronics and shitty mid-90s CGI.
The best argument for Mortal Kombat being a superior precursor to Monster Brawl is the way it keeps the audience’s energy up throughout, mostly by periodically re-playing its insanely high-BPM techno theme song as a constant pep-up. A hissing Christopher Lambert also hams it up for the camera as the wise “lightning god” Raiden in a way that stands out more than any single performance in Monster Brawl, which is more about playing on familiar archetypes than establishing anything novel or nuanced. If you found yourself amused by the premise of Monster Brawl but frustrated by the execution, Mortal Kombat might be the slicked-up, smoothed-out version of the film you were looking for.
Septic Man (2013)
Monster Brawl is not the first time director Jesse T. Cook has let down a member of The Swampflix Crew. In the earliest months of the blog, James published a two-star review of Cook’s feces-themed creature feature Septic Man, in which a sewer worker is trapped in a contaminated septic tank and subsequently transforms into a hideous turd monster. James wrote, “Watching a filth-covered man roll around in a septic tank for an hour and a half didn’t turn out to be as fun as I expected. […] Septic Man had the potential to be like a darker Toxic Avenger but instead has none of Troma’s charms and ends up being every bit as bad as its premise would imply.” He goes on to call the film “drab”, “ugly”, “depressing”, “boring” and, most bluntly, “crap.” Naturally, after subjecting everyone to what turned out to be a miserable experience watching Cook’s previous film, I felt that it was my turn to suffer Septic Man myself as penance.
James was right and wrong. Septic Man is only 80 minutes long; it’s also crap. It’s like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Troma got into the gritty Eli Roth-era torture porn game. I dare say I was charmed by it, though. The way the grunt sewer worker is financially pressured to keep working during a water contamination pandemic only to be transformed into a hideous Poo Beast just happened to hit me at the right time, considering the parallel labor exploitations of the COVID age. The gradual Turd Monster transformation was also surprisingly solid as a practical effects throwback (although he’s obviously nowhere near as loveable as our beloved Swamp Gut; no one is).
If I’ve learned anything from this exercise it’s that I have terrible taste and cannot be trusted, especially when it comes to the oeuvre of Jesse T. Cook. This blog is a septic tank of bad takes, and I am but the filth-mutated man trapped inside it.
Swampflix 