Welcome to Episode #232 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss the earlier works of this year’s Best Director Oscar nominees, starting with Sean Baker’s porn-industry buddy comedy Starlet (2012).
00:00 Apology/Goo 05:03 Kinda Pregnant (2025) 10:19 The Vietnam War (2017) 14:17 The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) 18:35 Rats! (2025)
23:39 Starlet (2012) 41:48 The Childhood of a Leader (2015) 58:30 A Prophet (2009) 1:13:22 Revenge (2017) 1:28:36 Cop Land (1997)
There are currently no fewer than four feature films that populate on Tubi when you search for the title “Vendetta“. That’s including longer titles like Vendetta: No Conscience, No Mercy but excluding partial matches like Midnight Vendetta or Vendetta Road. Honestly, I thought there’d be more. Vendetta is such a vague, generic title for the exact kind of cheap-o action revenge flicks that pad out Tubi’s vast library that I would not have been surprised if the results tallied to at least a dozen. Still, among the half-dozen or so Vendettas currently streaming on Tubi, it’s unlikely any are half as entertaining as the crown jewel of the collection, the one from 1986. A sleazy women-in-prison revenge thriller about a stuntwoman scorned, 1986’s Vendetta mixes two familiar genres into one surprisingly novel, volatile concoction. Just like there’s a long tradition of titling your generic revenge actioner Vendetta, there’s also a long tradition of highlighting behind-the-scenes stunt actors as real-life, authentic action heroes, from classic novelties like 1978’s Stunt Rock to this year’s big-screen adaptation of The Fall Guy. Likewise, there’s also a long tradition of leering exploitation films that offer a risqué peak at the intimate sex & violence of women’s prisons, often with more salacious titles like Caged Heat, The Naked Cage, Sex Hell, and Sadomania. As far as I can tell, though, Vendetta ’86 is the only film that’s thought to combine all of those genre tropes into a single 90min exploitation pic, and it deserves some respect for that efficiency.
Vendetta opens during a Fulci-style zombie stampede, inexplicably set in small-town 1980s America instead of 70s-sleaze Italy. After running from a rabid hoard of Italo zombies, our hero is shown collapsed and burning alive on city pavement. This, of course, turns out to be just another day on the job for the professional stuntwoman played by Karen Chase, who cheerfully pops up from this controlled burn shoot as soon as the fire-extinguishers cool her down. She doesn’t even bother to change out of her charred jumpsuit before speeding off to the wrap party, waving along her younger, even bubblier sister. Soon, it becomes apparent that the staged free-falls, car chases, and bare-knuckled brawls of the movie-within-the-movie aren’t nearly as dangerous as the small-town mentality of its shooting location. After downing a few brewskies at the local bar (while a band of new-wave punks play square-dance country schtick in the background), the younger sister sneaks out with the cutest roughneck she can find and immediately finds trouble. He sexually assaults her, she shoots him dead with his own pistol, and the local cops, judge, and jury unsurprisingly side with their hometown boy instead of the Hollywood outsider who killed him in self-defense. Worse yet, the local-yokel bullying continues once the teenager lands in prison, quickly getting her killed after she refuses the hard drugs and sexual advances of the top dog of the prison yard (It’s Always Sunny‘s Sandy Martin). It’s up to the stuntwoman, then, to seek true justice and avenge her sister’s murder, purposefully getting herself locked up so she can kill the women responsible one by one in a newfound, immoral use for her martial-arts skills.
Every plot point of Vendetta is pure exploitation, but it more often implies than it dwells on the grislier details. The instigating roadside rape that lands our hero behind bars is shocking but not eroticized. Admittedly, the prison-yard bullying that escalates that tragedy is eroticized, leaning into the lesbian leering of the wider women-in-prison genre. Still, there are no actual sex scenes to speak of, just some casual nudity as women hang around the showers and locker rooms as spectators to the violence. The contraband drug trade that fuels that violence gets pretty salacious too, with multiple scenes of forced heroin injection raising the dramatic stakes at every turn. All of this sensational material is softened by sincere scenes of intense melodrama scored by Lifetime music cues, affording Vendetta an oddly tender touch for a VHS-era exploitation picture. It’s also just as much an excuse for Karen Chase to road-test action stunts outside of a movie set as it is an excuse to position her in mildly salacious women’s prison scenarios. It’s essentially the soft-rock Skinemax version of Stunt Rock, complete with a climactic stage performance from a drag king Prince impersonator in the prison cafeteria to match the wizardly stadium rock act of its predecessor. It’s all very disjointed, but it’s also all very 80s, which you might expect from the only feature film directed by Bruce Logan, cinematographer for the original Tron. It’s also all exactly what you’d expect from a revenge picture titled Vendetta streaming on Tubi, except with maybe three or four Vendetta movies’ worth of plot & novelty for the price* of one.
It may seem like we’re not far enough past the 2010s for the decade’s distinguishing cultural markers to be fully clear in the rearview, but recently returning to pop media from that time has convinced me it’s been long enough. They’re especially clear when watching episodes of reality TV shows from a decade ago, where the dated fashions & attitudes of the 2010s are already vividly distinct. You don’t have to be a freak like me to find those cultural timestamps in old episodes of Top Chef or Total Divas, though. Those shows are meant to be disposable fluff, not anthropological time capsules. Look instead to the 2014 road-trip thriller The Rover, which was only released ten years ago and already feels like it was made on another planet. A somber, stylish revenge mission set in Mad Max’s near-future Australia, The Rover should still feel like a relatively fresh take on a road-worn template, but it’s already coated with a thick layer of dust from the past decade of pop culture progress. A lot’s changed since we first cracked open a new decade, which is surprising considering that most of us spent the first couple years of the 2020s in a state of domestic stasis, avoiding the outside world.
Following an intentionally vague global economic collapse, Guy Pearce solemnly spends his days in the Australian heat drinking hard liquor and neglecting to shave. His lonely, self-destructive routine is disrupted when his car is stolen by a small gang of reprobates, giving him an excuse to be destructive towards someone else for a change. The only lead on his stolen car is an injured member of the gang left to die in the road, played by Robert Pattinson. The two men reluctantly bond on a road trip towards dual, parallel acts of revenge: one for stolen property, one for heartless abandonment. The most readily apparent way the pop culture landscape has changed since The Rover‘s initial release is that this kind of relentless post-apocalyptic trudge is no longer as overly prevalent now as it was in the early 2010s, when it would have competed with titles like Take Shelter, Snowpiercer, These Final Hours, The Book of Eli, The Road,Mad Max: Fury Road,World War Z,The Walking Dead, and so on. It had a hard time standing out in that crowded field even though it’s more committed than most to distinguish itself with bleak tones and off-kilter character quirks (including an extensive sequence of Pattinson mumbling “Pretty Girl Rock” to himself that felt custom-designed for a David Ehrlich countdown video). That’s not the only thing that’s changed, though.
I assume The Rover was initially compared to the in-over-his-head antihero plot of Blue Ruin (since there’s a lot of crossover in the small group of movie obsessives who’d happen to catch both titles), given Pearce’s blatant lack of a Taken-style “set of skills” that would make him suitable to fight off a gang of thugs as a lone wolf. He’s just an ordinary man who happens to be extraordinarily angry about the theft of his car. At this point on the cultural timeline, though, no revenge mission movie can get by without being unfairly compared to John Wick, which was released just one year later. It’s unlikely that The Rover & John Wick would’ve been directly compared at the time, but John Wick has since set a definitive template for modern revengers that The Rover happens to fit into: stories about ultra-violent heroes overcorrecting seemingly petty wrongs. Usually that means slaughtered pets (the dog in John Wick, the pig in Pig, the bees in The Beekeeper, etc). In The Rover‘s case, it’s a stolen, unremarkable sedan that leads to a bloody body-count. Of course, there’s always a deeper well of Trauma hidden under those surface-level revenge missions, but the macho brutes at the center can only express themselves through Violence so it takes a while to gather the details. When Pearce finally confesses what awful incident broke his moral compass halfway through the picture, it’s not so much a major dramatic reveal as it is one more grim detail passing by in an endless parade.
Something else that’s obviously changed in the past decade is A24’s brand identity as a film distributor. They were already making bold acquisitions like The Rover, Spring Breakers, and Under the Skin in their first year, but they didn’t really become a recognizable, dependable marketing machine until 2015’s The Witch. It’s impossible to say whether The Rover might have been a hit if it had come out after A24 fully won over the hearts of the coveted Film Bro audience, but it is the exact kind of tough-exterior-soft-interior thriller that appeals to young men of that ilk, so it’s possible. At the very least, it was better suited for a cult audience than the similarly somber post-apocalyptic tale It Comes At Night, which lucked into a higher level of name recognition by arriving later in the A24 film-bro ascendancy. Releasing The Rover after Robert Pattinson’s recent turn as Batman couldn’t have hurt on that front either, considering that he was still mostly known as The Guy from Twilight in 2014. By now, anyone paying attention knows that Pattinson is a talented actor with good taste for adventurous projects, but the combination of this & Cosmopolis were only the early signs that was the case (to the measly dozens of people who saw them in initial release). The Rover is very much a film of its time, to its peril. Its distinctive virtues are just as apparent to a 2020s set of eyes as the difference between the current Women’s Division of the WWE vs the Divas division of the 2010s, which you can now plainly see in any random episode of Total Divas but was a lot more difficult to parse in the thick of it.
The streaming era has democratized film distribution in many ways, offering direct user-uploaded platforms like YouTube & Vimeo to publish your work for a worldwide audience alongside lower-tier streamers who are hungry to fill their libraries with cheap-to-license titles like Tubi, Hoopla, and PlutoTV. Good luck getting anyone to actually watch your work, though. Because there are so many platforms for low-budget productions, the likelihood that an audience will stumble across your particular no-budget movie in the endless #content wilderness shrinks every year. There are some ways that the scarcity of earlier eras was healthy for the independent filmmaking landscape, if not only because it was a lot more likely that your film would get noticed outside your local friend-circle bubble. For instance, a digi-SOV sci-fi novelty from Korea could break out of the genre film fest circuit to reach an international audience and land a belated review from luminary critic Jonathan Rosenbaum despite being shot on home video equipment in empty alleys & warehouses. The try-hard edginess of Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine tested my patience as soon as I read its title, but there was something about its “Let’s put on a show!” no-budget earnestness that made me weirdly nostalgic for a recent bygone era. Nowadays, you have to be Steven Soderbergh if you want your handheld digi-cam experiments to earn a sizable audience for anything longer than a TikTok clip. So, even when I was wincing at the grotesque ribaldry that Teenage Hooker wanted me to find humorous, I still found myself compelled to pour one out for the D.I.Y. cyberpunk gore hounds who’ve been left behind by the cruel march of time.
Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine is SOV genre trash about an underage sex worker who’s murdered by her schoolteacher then brought back to life by a mad scientist as a killer cyborg on a revenge mission. Because the movie is only an hour long (and bookended by at least ten minutes of opening & closing credits), there isn’t much else to divulge beyond that one-sentence premise. All I can really do here is spoil its one great idea: the strap-on machine gun our undead heroine uses to shoot her teacher dead from crotch level in the final scene. Everything before that final act of criminally horny violence is either a goofball non sequitur (like an impromptu dance break when the evil teacher first discovers his student turning tricks in an alley, disturbing his mother’s sleep) or a home movie level restaging of more substantial, professional work (including a cosplay version of the cyborg-construction imagery of Ghost in the Shell). Had the entire movie been a revenge rampage in which the main weapon of choice was a cyborg’s killer strap-on, this would still very likely be making the rounds as a must-see cult film for dorm room stoners everywhere. Instead, it’s just outrageous enough of a stunt that you can see how it briefly held audiences’ attention in the early 2000s. There’s little scene-to-scene cohesion in its hurried shaky-cam tours through the back alleys of Seoul, but every few scenes there’s a detail that’ll perk you up in your seat: nighttime sunglasses paired a schoolgirl uniform, sex set to Benny Hill-style novelty jazz, a bed that is also a lightbulb, etc. It’s the kind of movie where the protagonist is shot in the chest, exposing the wires inside, just so you can turn to your nearest bro and shout “Whoa, her tit exploded!” between bong rips.
I mostly had a good time with Teenage Hooker despite my dorm room days being decades behind me. Its humor is flat, its sex is sour, and its comic book stylization can be a little embarrassing for an adult audience … and yet, there’s something mesmerizing about its digi-cam cinematography that makes it a thrilling watch. The absurdly wide fish-eye lenses and the handheld jerkiness of its framing—combined with the late-90s record store staff-picks soundtrack—gives it the instant cool cred of a vintage skateboarding video, a relic of a time long gone. I dare say there’s even a Wong Kar Wai quality to the digital red, yellow, and green hazes of its fluorescent-lit color palette. There are dozens of Japanese genre titles from this era that I would recommend someone check out before prioritizing Teenage Hooker (the playful handheld camera work of Hideaki Anno’s Cutie Honey and the vicious, supernatural schoolgirl violence of Sion Sono’s Suicide Club both immediately come to mind), but the D.I.Y. production values and the Korean context of this specific title do make it tempting to root for as an underdog. Even now, while we’re living under the illusion that every movie ever made is affordable & accessible, I had to access Teenage Hooker Became Killing Machine through Archive.org, since it wasn’t commercially available through any official means. At least that low-quality, heavily pixelated transfer accentuated the early-2000s nostalgia of the presentation, recalling a time when it would take 20 hours to download no-budget schlock like this through a torrent tracker – a time when no-budget schlock like this was enough of a buzzy online attention-grabber to be worth that all-day wait.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the roughly prototypical high school slasher Massacre at Central High (1976).
Like many bored, frugal Americans, I recently dragged myself out of the house on National Cinema Day to take advantage of the newly invented corporate holiday’s adverised movie ticket price of $4. I very much appreciated the discount, just as I appreciate local theaters’ weekly $6 ticket deals on Tuesdays. On the audience’s end, it’s nice to feel like we’re scoring a bargain; on theaters’ end, it’s a smart ploy to lure us through the door to buy the popcorn & cocktails that actually drive profits. On both sides, it was just a great excuse to hide from the heat on what turned out to be the hottest day in the history of recorded temperatures in New Orleans (so far!). What I couldn’t get over while sweating my way through The Broad Theater’s parking lot, though, was the genius of stoking ticket sales during such a low tide of new, exciting releases. Besides the promise of central air-conditioning, there just wasn’t much on The Broad’s marquee that looked like it would pull in a huge crowd without the $4 ticket deal. Barbie & Black Beetle were the blockbusters on offer, neither of which were in their first-weekend rush; Passages& Landscape with Invisible Hand were their smaller, artsier counterbalance, neither of which are especially attention-grabby outside a small circle of media obsessives who know the names Cory Finley & Ira Sachs. And so that left room on the marquee for the true heroes of the day: a restoration of the four-hour French New Wave manboy autopsy The Mother and the Whore and an opportunistic re-release of Emma Seligman’s stress-nightmare comedy Shiva Baby, working up some enthusiasm for the following week’s follow-up Bottoms. Early this summer, when there was absolutely nothing of importance or interest to see in local theaters, IP-driven monstrosities like Fast X, Super Mario Bros, and The Little Mermaid clogged up local marquees for months, leaving us in a stagnant cultural dead zone. By National Cinema Day, theaters & distributors had figured out the perfect way to fill that cultural void: robust repertory programming.
Truth be told, August’s best repertory re-release had already left theaters by National Cinema Day, but I made time to catch it at The Broad earlier that week on a $6 Tuesday deal. A new digital restoration of Park Chan-wook’s international breakout Oldboy was re-released nationwide by the hip cinema distributor Neon last month, commemorating the film’s 20th anniversary. That’s two whole decades of college-freshmen edgelords daring each other to watch this Totally Badass, Totally Fucked Up revenge thriller over a case of the cheapest beer that’s ever been swallowed. And since I was a college freshman around when Oldboy first hit DVD myself, it’s incredible that I had never seen it before its prestigious victory lap this August, enjoying the afterglow of Park’s more refined, acclaimed works like The Handmaiden & Decision to Leave. My friend group just happened to get our grubby, beer-clutching hands on other edgelord starter-pack films of the 2000s instead: American Psycho, Requiem for a Dream, Suicide Club, Ichi the Killer, etc. However, I am a movie nerd with an internet connection, so I have absorbed plenty of the details & circumstances of the sex & violence in Oldboy over the past couple decades of “You’ve got to see this fucked up movie!” cultural osmosis, to the point where I wasn’t sure what was left to be discovered by finally watching it once its re-release arrived at my nearest theater. I mostly showed up to watch Oldboy out of solemn duty as a Cult Cinema enthusiast needing to mark a major 2000s title off my checklist. So, given how familiar I felt with its major bullet points (and hammer holes), I was shocked by how well the mystery aspect of the movie worked for me as a new viewer. Just like its reformed shitbag protagonist, I really wanted to know the whos & whys behind the elaborate torture schemes. Unlike the titular oldboy, though, I was fully aware of how much we’d have to suffer to get to those answers.
As a digital “restoration”, the new Oldboy release is not some revelatory visual experience; this is not Criterion cleaning up & hyper-saturating a Technicolor marvel like The Red Shoes. Neon’s Oldboy scan still looks stuck in the mid-00s, and it’s much more likely to impress a longtime devotee who’s used to screening it on a cathode-ray TV than a first-time viewer. Its overt aughtsiness is integral to its prominence in the pop culture canon, though, so it’s for the best that it still looks of its time. Its sickly fluorescent lighting is true to the aesthetics of American torture porn in that era—typified by Saw & Hostel—while its absurdly convoluted plot mechanics recall the grander, elevated European torture porn of the time: Martyrs, Calvaire, Inside, etc. Oh Dae-Su (Choi Min-sik) may have been imprisoned & tormented in a small cell outside of time for fifteen grueling years, but he’s allowed a window to the outside world in a small motel-style television, where he consumes early-aughts pop culture & news coverage like oxygen entering his lungs. Once “freed,” he’s equipped with a 2000s-vintage flip phone, a pay-by-the-hour internet cafe, and a rudimentary video chat platform that doesn’t yet stream audio. Of course, he hasn’t really been freed at all, as the mysterious tormenter behind his imprisonment uses these wicked tools of the early internet to imprison him in a slightly larger cell (the massive city of Seoul instead of just one room inside it). He’s trapped by the lack of reasoning behind his torment and the mysterious face responsible for it, given five days to solve the puzzle and secure his revenge before the punishment gets even more severe. The audience knows he’s being played with like a half-dead mouse, but it takes a while to find the cat who’s batting him around, and it takes even longer to figure out why that cat hasn’t gotten bored of him yet.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe all audiences everywhere already know every beat of Oldboy, and I was the last genre gobbler around who could enter the theater without knowing exactly where its twisty story is going. After so many years of dorm room canonization, it wouldn’t be surprising if there were no surprises left in Oldboy for the uninitiated. I hadn’t seen it, nor read its comic book source material, nor spoiled myself with its 2010s Spike Lee remake, and even I already felt like I had its iconic hallway fight scene and the grimiest details of the final villain’s speech committed to memory. It was a joy to squirm along with fellow in-the-flesh moviegoers during its scenes of covert incest & unflinching dental gore, though, and I was surprised by how much I cared about the motivation behind those grotesqueries beyond their shock-value novelty. In fact, I skipped out on seeing a personal-favorite cult classic I’ve seen many times before (but never in a proper theater) to make time for that first-time watch of Oldboy, and I left a satisfied customer; it was up against a 50-year anniversary restoration of the landmark folk horror The Wicker Man that same week. Neon’s re-release of Oldboy appeared to be a successful financial gamble too, surpassing the box office sales of the film’s original run in just a couple weeks. I can only hope that success means more nation-wide repertory programming is on the way, bolstering the couple regular local slots The Prytania clears in its schedule for its Wildwood & Classic Movies series. The Broad is pretty great about picking these releases up when they’re offered by distributors, which is how I’ve gotten to see other, obscurer cult classics like The Doom Generation,Funeral Parade of Roses, and The Last Movie for the first time in a proper theater. It’s a rare treat that’s getting a lot less rare, and I hope that it becomes the go-to move when padding out release schedules during the leaner months on the theatrical release calendar. It would certainly lure me in to buy more cocktails & popcorn, whatever keeps the projectors on.
It probably comes as no surprise that I am a man whose limited social media use includes following the Twitter accounts of several Buffy-related content producers. I used to follow the one and only Mrs. Sarah Michelle Gellar on Instagram until I got sad that her manager was making her do the same branded social media content that fame bottom feeders like Patreon-less YouTubers and people who make cakes that are 80% fondant are doing; I felt like Sideshow Bob shivering upon learning that “TV’s bottomless chum bucket [had] claimed Vanessa Redgrave.” No judgment on our adulated SMG, of course; I love her like Broadway queens love Patti LuPone. I’m just saying everybody needs to go stream BTVS on Hulu like, right now, so that she never has to do another one of those unless she actually wants to. So, of course when I heard that Her Excellency was going to be in a new movie that was being billed as the high school version of Strangers on a Train, and that I didn’t even have to leave the house to see it, well, of course I was going to.
At 28 minutes into Do Revenge, the traditionally attractive Drea (Camila Mendes, of Riverdale), having convinced gawkishly gorgeous Eleanor (Maya Hawke) to do revenge with her, gets excited:
Drea: First we have to fix (pulls Eleanor in front of a mirror) … this. We have to do—
Eleanor: Please don’t say “makeover.”
Drea: —a makeover! Yay! (jumps up and down)
Eleanor: (with vocal fry) Feels problematic.
Drea: It is, but it’s fun!
Do Revenge presents itself as a pretty conventional movie, and in many ways it is, despite its winking self-awareness that it’s trafficking in cliches. Prior to this scene, when Eleanor is offered a tour of her new high school, she responds “I mean, as a disciple of the ’90s teen movie, I would be offended if I didn’t get one.” It’s borrowing from a deep, deep well: high school-set literature adaptations, the sharp wit and ear for dialogue that permeates the mean girl movie canon, and revenge thrillers. The film opens with narration from Drea, who fills us in on how, from humble beginnings, she has clawed her way to the top of the social hierarchy at Rosewood Country Day, an elite private high school in the Miami area. “They all want me as a friend or a fuck,” she says. “I’m worshipped at Westerburg and I’m only a Junior.” Wait, no, shit, that’s Heather Chandler. The words are different, but the speech is the same: it’s the end of her junior year, and she’s done something or other with Teen Vogue. Her friends are mostly vapid hangers-on, and although she thinks of herself as a scrappy underdog, she’s just an Alpha Heather with good publicity. She’s also dating star student Max (Austin Abrams), a weaselly little rich boy who happens to be class president. Since they won’t be seeing each other, he asks her to send him a sexy video, which is then leaked to the whole school. She ends up painted as the aggressor when she punches Max in the quad, and it nearly costs her the scholarship she depends on.
Humiliated, Drea spends the summer friendless, working at a tennis camp for rich girls, a group that includes Eleanor. When the girls there also get their hands on the “leaked” video, Eleanor names Erica (Sophie Turner) as the distributor, and is impressed with how swiftly Drea ruins Erica’s life, planting cocaine on her and remaining calm in the face of Erica’s furious accusations. When Drea has car trouble at the end of the summer, Eleanor drives her back, and they bond, with Eleanor relating a particularly traumatizing story about being outed as queer by a girl she had a crush on, who also told gossipy lies about Eleanor being a predator. Eleanor also happens to be transferring to the same school as the girl who bullied her, which is also Rosewood Country Day. On the first day, Max gives a speech which appropriates the language of resistance in order to distance himself from accusations that he was the one who leaked Drea’s video, shames the people who shared and viewed the video, and humiliates Drea by making her stand up in the assembly. He also announces the formation of the new school club “The Cis Hetero Men Championing Female-Identifying Students League,” which is to be exclusively male and straight, for men to become better allies (I fear I’m underselling the intentional tastelessness and invoked odiousness here, but he’s just awful). Eleanor and Drea run into each other again in the bathroom, and agree to each do the other’s revenge: Drea will get close to and socially destroy Carissa (Ava Capri), the girl who outed and started rumors about Eleanor, and Eleanor will get close to Max and help Drea get her own vengeance, and then they act out the scene transcribed above.
You might be asking yourself where Sarah Michelle Gellar is in all of this; she’s the headmistress of the school who’s heavily invested in Drea’s academic success. Although her scenes are too few, too brief, and too infrequent (although every single entrance made me gasp and say “She looks amazing“), her presence is felt throughout the narrative, and that’s not just me singing her praises. All our favorites are here, blended into a pastel smoothie: one part Mean Girls if Janis Ian used to be Regina George; one part Jawbreaker if Vylette’s makeover was arranged by Julie in order to get back at Courtney; two parts Heathers if Veronica allied herself with Betty Finn instead of Jason Dean; there’s even a little zest of that scene in Cruel Intentions where Reese Witherspoon distributes copies of Ryan Phillipe’s catty little journal to the whole school, except this time it’s copies of Max’s data that proves he’s faking his apparent progressivism, from the top of his stupid earrings to the tips of his “masculinity reimagined” painted nails. And I’m not just projecting that; both movies use Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You,” for goodness’s sake. And that’s not even getting into the (frankly inspired) choice to have the school uniforms uniformly look like Cher Horowitz’s Martha’s Vineyard Easter attire (which gives the whole thing aD.E.B.S. flair). It’s like a greatest hits album, right up until the moment that it suddenly isn’t anymore: well-worn and funny until everything gets turned on its head. I won’t spoil the very Patricia Highsmith twist here, but it disrupts the complacency with the familiar into which the audience has been lulled in a clever way. You thought that just because there was a scene in this movie where someone gets a tour of all the school’s cliques like in She’s All That and Ten Things I Hate About You that it meant you were going to ride the whole thing out in your comfort zone, but there’s something fresh and new here, too.
I’m not really sure what demographic this movie is aiming for, but I’m in it. A few years back, I asked about the decade’s successor to the legacy of the Heathers -> Jawbreaker -> Mean Girls pipeline and nominated New Year, New You as the heir apparent, but there’s something new and fun here. This one is also theoretically aimed at the contemporary teen market, what with the inclusion of Riverdale‘s own Betty with Cabelo, Outer Banks hunk Jonathan Daviss, Alisha Boe from Thirteen Reasons Why, and Stranger Things actresses Hawke and Francesca Reale. (After the recent and dreadful He’s All That, I can only presume that the rest of the cast is filled with TikTokers and former Disney sitcom children.) At the same time, the soundtrack, like the films from which the narrative cribs, is very 90s focused. Aside from the aforementioned Fatboy Slim, the soundtrack also features tracks from The Cranberries, Meredith Brooks, Harvey Danger, the Symphonic Pops, and even The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, if you can believe it. Drea and Eleanor first bond while the dulcet tones of Third Eye Blind’s “How’s It Going To Be?”, and, because someone wanted to make me happy specifically, Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon.” And yet there’s also more contemporary music like Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish (although the simple fact that I, a man in my thirties, knows them could mean that they are no longer cool).
Rose Plays Julie is a subtle, well-made movie built on subtle, well-played performances. A psychological thriller about a young veterinary student’s increasingly dark mission to uncover her place in the world as an unwanted adopted child (and, more to the point, about the generational trauma of sexual assault), it has all the potential in the world to swerve into a sensationalist rape revenge tale with a violently heightened sense of style. Instead, it keeps its mood low-key & pained, allowing the Greek tragedy of its doomed characters’ downward trajectory to quietly unfold at its own pace. It’s one of those thoughtful, tasteful indie chillers that I appreciate in terms of intent & craft but only help clarify my personal disinterest in subtlety & restraint. I wish I could appreciate this quiet, finely calibrated psych-thriller on its own terms, but instead its coming-of-age fury & vet school setting just made me wish I was watching the explosive coming-of-age cannibal horror Raw instead. That’s just the kind of audience I am, to my shame.
It’s okay that Rose Plays Julie works better as an exercise in craft than as a cathartic, stylistically expressive genre film. It’s explicitly about performance in a lot of respects, which shines a direct spotlight on the actors in three central roles of Daughter (Ann Skelly), Mother (Orla Brady), and Rapist (Aiden Gillen). Gillen puts in the same raspy creep performance he’s been delivering as a manner of routine since he was cast in Game of Thrones, but the drama is more centralized on the women he’s hurt anyway. The mother is an actress by trade, shown avoiding her traumatic past by getting lost in her roles on period dramas & vampire movies. The daughter—the surviving result of a rape—is an actress by choice, taking on her imagined persona of the name on her birth certificate (paired with an unconvincing wig) as an undetectable alias while pursuing revenge against the mother’s assailant, her “father”. The tension between them is a feel-bad triangle of gloom that each actor ably performs through several layers of self-protective artifice. The avenging violence that breaks that tension is just as dejectedly sad, providing little emotional catharsis for the generations of hurt at the film’s core – presumably on purpose.
To wish Rose Plays Julie was more expressive or cathartic would be wishing for a more divisive, if not outright irresponsible kind of filmmaking that it’s just not interested in indulging. This is a very serious film about a very serious subject, and I’m sure there’s a larger audience out there who’d prefer that sober approach to genre storytelling over what’s usually offered. Personally, I could only appreciate the craft of its individual performances rather than the larger purpose they served. It’s a terrible thing to admit, but if it were even 10% trashier or flashier in its delivery, I’d probably be much more enthusiastic about where it fits in the modern revenge thriller canon.
I’ve been greatly enjoying my time with Gold Ninja Video‘s Pearl Chang boxset Wolf Devil Director over the past year, and I’m a little sad to have now officially run through all four of the Taiwanese martial artist’s feature films as star/director/producer. Maybe Pearl Chang was sad to see her career winding down in her own time too. Her final film, General Invincible, is more somber than her previous work. It boasts all of the gruesome bloodshed, fabulous costume changes, and low-budget psychedelia that make her films so delightful, but it lacks her slapstick humor that usually lightens their tone. Although it shares no narrative continuity with any of the other films in her modest catalog, it plays like the final episode of a long-running TV show or the third act of a 3-hour epic. It feels like a heartfelt goodbye to the low-budget wuxia auteur, who indeed did disappear from the public eye in the years following the film’s release.
Because all her work was rapidly produced in the same era & genre, it’s near impossible to discuss General Invincible on its own terms without comparing it to Pearl Chang’s other films. As with all the titles in the Wolf Devil Director boxset, Chang stars as a reclusive female warrior who reluctantly returns to society to avenge the slaughter of her family, guided by the mystical teachings of a retired kung fu master. In this particular instance she’s a war general named Sparrow, honor-bound to stop a wannabe emperor’s aspirations for the throne by laying waste to his mercenary assassins one by one. There are a few distinguishing details in General Invincible you won’t find elsewhere in Pearl Chang’s oeuvre: an uneasy romance with a sensitive warrior who believes himself her equal, a vicious rivalry with the other warrior-woman who pines after that same loverboy, the usurping emperor’s obsession with obtaining magical “crystal knives” as the ultimate weapon, etc. For the most part, though, this is the exact same rapidfire low-budget wuxia psychedelia Pearl Chang always delivers, just now with a somber tone.
As an unofficial, unintentional send-off for Pearl Chang’s career, you couldn’t ask much more out of General Invincible. Sparrow’s inner journey in the film is a meditative, self-reflective effort to “reach the state of Infinity and discover Emptiness”. She cannot become her most powerful warrior self until she “achieves Nothingness,” a state she doesn’t discover until she’s crucified and left for dead in the midday sun, recalling the blinding psychedelia of King Hu’s genre-defining wuxia epic A Touch of Zen. When watching her filmography in order, it’s as if Pearl Chang doesn’t retire into anonymity, but rather transcends this Earthly plane through total inner enlightenment (after indulging in a few flying-swordsmen beheadings along the way). It’s kind of sweet & touching, as long as you can distract yourself from the more unfair, practical limitations of her real-life career in an industry gatekept by men.
The Wolf Devil Director box set is a must-own, and Gold Ninja Video put a lot of care into contextualizing what makes the films within so unique to Pearl Chang as an auteur. Still, it feels like an audition for a much better-funded boutique label to pick up these same films for a proper restoration. I often found myself squinting through these public domain transfers imagining how much greater these same films would be with an HD clean-up. It’s easy to see why Wolf Devil Woman is Pearl Chang’s most popular film; it’s her best work. I believe that General Invincible & Matching Escort are pretty much on its level, though. The Dark Lady of Kung Fu is her weakest for being a little too goofy, but I dug that one too. All her films are good-to-great, and all of them deserve a higher genre-nerd profile with better-funded preservation & distribution. The Wolf Devil Director boxset is a great start, but there’s more work to do.
I thought I knew what to expect out of a Nicolas Cage revenge thriller about a disgruntled chef’s John Wick-style fight to recover his stolen truffle pig. Even now, I can picture exactly what that movie should look & feel like from start to end. Pig is not that film. It defies all expectations of its over-the-top genre premise & Cage’s late-career casting in its violence, performances, purpose, and tone. Just about the last thing I expected was that I would be struggling to see the screen for the final third of its runtime because crying into my mask was fogging up my glasses. It’s not any showier in its emotional beats than it is in its revenge-genre payoffs, but it still choked me up in ways I’m finding difficult to articulate. It’s a quietly powerful, surprisingly thoughtful film about Nic Cage’s stolen truffle pig.
Nicolas Cage makes dozens of movies every year—most of which are rightfully ignored straight-to-VOD action thrillers—but there are only two kinds that typically get any wider attention: muted actor-showcase dramas like Joe and mindfuck genre-flicks like Mandy. Pig can’t comfortably be sorted into either of those categories, since it continually flirts with being both. Cage plays his unwashed Oregonian wildman with a quiet dignity & deeply felt sense of hurt – both for loss of his pig and for a greater loss suffered in his mysterious past as a big-city hipster chef in Portland. His journey to recover the pig is an exaggerated, absurd caricature of the Portland culinary scene, though, complete with underground BOH fight clubs & violent mafioso food distributors. It’s an understated execution of a preposterous premise, refusing to behave either as a sober return-to-form showcase for the often-mocked actor or as fodder for his infinite supply of so-bad-its-good YouTube highlight reels. It’s its own uniquely beautiful, tenderly macho thing, with more to say about culinary arts than the peculiar flavors of Nic Cage’s screen presence.
Like in the high-fashion revenge Western The Dressmaker, the violence & cruelty suffered by our battered antihero in Pig is not avenged with more violence & cruelty; it is avenged with art. Nic Cage ends the film caked in blood, as he does in Mandy, but his weapon of choice in seeking revenge are his skills as a chef. His carefully-worded criticism of another chef’s menu choices or his own perfectly balanced, deliberately unpretentious cooking are delivered as skull-crushing blows to his enemies, undercutting the typical hyperviolence of the genre with food-culture commentary. Pig covers a lot of ground in its food-scene philosophizing, from the cutthroat competition of food trucks to the self-aggrandized pageantry of fine dining. I specifically got choked up by its focus on the ways passionate, authentic food preparation can trigger powerful sensory memories in us, an emotional effect deployed here like the detonation of a well-placed bomb. I started to sorely miss sharing luxuriant meals with people I care about, an experience that’s been in short supply over the past 17 months, and one I never expected to be weaponized in Nic Cage’s pig-themed John Wick knockoff.
Nic Cage is my favorite working actor. I know that bias makes me sound like an irony-poisoned hipster, but I genuinely find his choices in roles & performance ticks to be thrilling in a way few better-respected actors allow themselves to indugle. Even so, I admire how Pig breaks through the expectations and boundaries typical to the modern Nic Cage Film. At the very least, it’s his best work since Mandy, which Swampflix highlighted as our collective favorite film of the 2010s. It’s especially worth seeing for anyone who’s ever worked a BOH position in a commercial kitchen, since its draw as restaurant-culture commentary often overpowers Cage’s consciously muted performance. There’s a chance it’s both too restrained and too absurd to earn its place in the Nic Cage Hall of Fame, but it deserves that kind of recognition.
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