reviews

Masters of the Universe (2026)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

The objectively, morally correct thing to do is to reject all generative AI slop in artistic spaces, which of course means rejecting all movies wholly or partially generated by AI prompts. Generative AI may be attractive for movie studios looking to avoid employing human artists by plagiarizing their pre-existing work, but what the audience gets on the other end is a clinical amalgamation of things we’ve already seen, a systematically averaged-out, artless mediocrity. Of course we should resist that. I would argue, then, that our resistance to AI slop should extend to rejecting corporate studio schlock that just happens to look & feel like generative AI, even if it was technically made by human hands. The new Masters of the Universe adaptation, for example, is spiritually AI: a soulless averaging out of recent decades’ IP action blockbusters into a meaningless mush indistinguishable from what an AI prompt to generate “a live action He-Man movie” would produce. There is no discernible artistic impulse behind its creation beyond using vintage 80s pop culture nostalgia as a vehicle to deliver product placements for companies like Coca-Cola and Amazon. As a result, the only useful service something like Masters of the Universe can provide is to offer a summation of everything that’s currently wrong with big-budget corporate filmmaking in one convenient, insultingly middling package. It’s just as dispiriting as it sounds.

The #1 issue with modern blockbuster filmmaking, as exemplified by Masters of the Universe, is bloat. This is a movie adaptation of a cartoon that was designed to sell toys to children in the 1980s. There is no possible justification for its production costing over $200 million, for its runtime stretching beyond 140 minutes, or for its screenplay saving its source material’s most exciting ideas for a promised sequel (which, thanks to the disastrous first-weekend box office results, is never coming). A lot of that bloat is a result of Masters of the Universe suffering a lethal case of the Surf Draculas, indulging in a full hour of narrative place-setting before He-Man fully becomes He-Man, needlessly having him tread water on Earth as a displaced Prince Adam for the entire first act. If this movie is Mattel’s attempt to create a Barbie for Boys opportunity with one of its other signature toy brands, the company could’ve learned a lot by paying its four(!) credited screenwriters to study Gerwig & Baumbach’s Barbie screenplay, which has the good sense to start with a fully formed Barbie living her daily life in Barbieland. Instead, we meet Prince Adam as a young whiny child, then watch him travel via magical portal to Oklahoma City and waste fifteen years’ worth of the audience’s time growing into an even whinier adult (Nicholas Galitzine), who has to work a desk job and sit in on conflict-resolution meetings while biding his time until he can find his back to the faraway planet of Eternia. No one on Earth nor Eternia could possibly give a shit. The idiotic beauty of the original Masters of the Universe series is that it’s all surface and no backstory, so simple that even a toddler could instantly understand its appeal. It’s a cartoon universe populated by literal action figures come to life, so why delay the joy of seeing those absurd characters in action?

A major issue with the film’s bloated, years-long production is that its multiple screenplay drafts have left it thematically & politically incoherent, dangerously so. While wasting his youth at an Earthbound desk job, Adam’s potential as the muscled-up master of the universe is held at bay by wimpy HR types and visibly queer-nonbinary coworkers. His cubicle’s nameplate includes “he/him” pronouns, which is intended to read as a joke about his destined transformation into the redundantly named He-Man, but also opens the movie up to political interpretation as a right-wing screed about how masculinity is in crisis because of the pervasive wokeness of modern office culture. Adam’s muscles are just aching to burst out of his baby pink button down, but the fascist feminazis who employ him are weighing him down too much to flex. Was there an early draft of Masters of the Universe that borrowed Barbie‘s fish-out-of-water gender commentary by contrasting the fully roided-out He-Man of the cartoons against the post-“toxic masculinity” culture of the modern era? It certainly feels like some scraps from that draft have been scattered throughout this final product’s opening act, which the rest of the movie leaves thematically & politically unresolved. So, it just takes as a given that the audience finds the sinisterly feminizing forces of modern life to be a grave social ill, encouraging us to cheer on He-Man’s journey back home to the Manosphere of the 1980s as a small victory for macho men everywhere.

While the final screenplay seemingly lacked attention to revision in theme & intent, it clearly was submitted for several drafts of Joss Whedon-style joke punchups meant to lighten the mood. Masters of the Universe is so jokey, in fact, that it’s outright apologetic about its own existence — fully crossing over from self-deprecation to self-hatred. The basic concept of He-Man as a sword-wielding space prince who fights against the tyranny of skull-faced Bad Guy with an army of action figure cartoon mutants is already ridiculous enough at face value. There’s no need to constantly nudge the audience in the ribs with “What the???” and “That just happened!” jokes pointing out the absurdity of the scenario. Say what you will about the live-action Golan Globus adaptation of Masters of the Universe from the 1980s (another notorious box office flop), but at least that version was sincere in its over-the-top goofballery. This modern reboot shamefully shields itself from any potential accusations of sincerity, pointing out how stupid and dated every character design is while actively hiding their most absurd details from public view. He-Man’s trademark Prince Valiant haircut has been reworked into a feathered blow-out; the Sorceress’s trademark eagle headdress is simplified to a vaguely birdlike cowl. The cowardly green tiger Cringer’s transformation into the courageous, armored Battlecat is largely kept offscreen and treated as a throwaway punchline. The floating smartass wizard Orko is saved for an end credits gag, in hopes that most of the audience would’ve already made a hasty exit without ever seeing him. He-Man’s brothers in arms against Skeletor are also deployed mostly for sex jokes about fisting (Fisto), giving head (Ram Man), and penis size (Power Sword) which, along with the constant violent murders of the back half, undercuts the movie’s potential marketability to the only audience who could possibly find any of this remotely entertaining: 10-year-old boys. In short, everything’s a joke, and nothing’s funny.

I won’t even get into the ugly intangibility of the film’s green-screen CGI effects, which places actors you know & love (most embarrassingly, Idris Elba & Alison Brie) in a soundstage otherwold where they look entirely disconnected from their environment and from each other. You’ve seen a Marvel movie before; you get the picture. Crucially, that general cultural familiarity with the past couple decades of corporate superhero filmmaking means that you can close your eyes and picture Masters of the Universe without ever watching a frame of it. It’s exactly what a computer would regurgitate onscreen if you prompted it to “imagine” He-Man in the MCU. The only glimmer of hope that this project might have produced something more substantial than that was the hiring of Laika figurehead Travis Knight to direct, as he had previously done the impossible by delivering a watchable, likeable Transformers movie a decade into that toy-marketing movie franchise (2018’s Bumblebee). There is no personal, authorial stamp to be found on this material, though. It is the exact amalgamated median of modern blockbuster aesthetics, with He-Man plugged into its predetermined proper-noun slots like a Mad Libs template. By the time it attempts to borrow some Guardians of the Galaxy charm in its mid-battle Queen needledrops and Brian May guitar work (hoping that the audience might misremember the 80s Masters of the Universe movie as having the Flash Gordon soundtrack), you might as well take a nap in the theater and watch the rest of the movie play out in your dream. You know exactly where it’s going because you’ve already seen everywhere movies of this type have been. It may not technically qualify as generative AI slop, but that’s a distinction without a difference. The only positive thing to come of it that some below-the-line workers got a paycheck instead of being plagiarized by a computer program.

-Brandon Ledet

Blue Film (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

The single location two-hander Blue Film is the kind of low budget, high stakes drama that compensates for its smallness in scale by asking big, provocative questions. Questions like, “How was this not adapted from a stage play?”, and “Do we think Dylan ‘Happiness‘ Baker was the first choice to play the pedophile?”, and “Was the working title Trade, Lies, and Videotape?”

I kid. Blue Film‘s open-ended provocations are all questions of intimacy, spirituality, sexual perversion, and therapeutic rehabilitation. Its stage play nature is not so much a result of its limitations as a story told by two actors talking in a room, but rather a reflection of its commitment to exploring abstract, philosophical subjects through ordinary means. Our two players are a beefy, overcompensating camboy who wears his chest hair & tighty-whities as a kind of emotionally distancing armor (Kieron Moore) and a lonely, elderly client who pays him $50,000 for a one-on-one house visit (Reed Birney). This contracted tryst starts with a Soderberghian interview sequence wherein the camboy is propped up on a couch and interviewed on video camera about his earliest sexual experiences, asking him to access a level of personal vulnerability that he didn’t agree to before arriving to the McMansion locale. The interviewer starts their conversation masked & guarded himself, but eventually reveals his connection to the camboy’s past, from before he reinvented his persona as an online Los Angeles dom. The older client resembles Dylan Baker’s Happiness performance both in his physicality and in his matter-of-fact confession of pedophilic attraction to children. Once his identity and his connection to his rented camboy’s small-town upbringing are revealed, the rest of their night together is spent picking through the rubble of their confused sexual dynamic, desperately searching for something salvageable, functional, and worthy of further exploration.

A more typical movie about an adult sex worker’s unexpected reunion with his hometown’s local pedophile would resolve that conflict with revenge-thriller genre tropes, seeking emotional catharsis in physical violence. Blue Film instead chooses a therapeutic tack, like a darker, gayer version of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. The geriatric pedophile never physically abused the self-reinvented camboy at a young age, although he did have intimate access to him as a schoolteacher in their secluded hometown. He did lust after the kid, though, and he feels terrible about it. The entire reason he’s staged this nonconsensual reunion is to test his own nature as a decrepit pervert. Was he attracted to the young boy because of his personality or because of his age? If it was the former, he might be able to redeem himself as a functional member of society, but if it was the latter he would have to accept his fate as a worthless lecher of the lowest order. In order to properly assess his compatibility with the now all-growed-up youngster, he asks the camboy to remove several layers of hyper macho social armor: shaving his body hair, dropping his “Aaron Eagle” online persona, and communicating a wider range of emotions than his usual “fuck,” “shit,” “fuckin’ shit” vocabulary allows. The two men also directly assess their compatibility by attempting to have sex, a night-long process of frustrated stops & starts as the uneasy vulnerability of the evening starts to weigh heavily on their respective psyches.

There’s not too much to Blue Film as a visual piece that couldn’t be replicated on the stage. The film opens with its most cinematic imagery in the first couple scenes, most notably in the camboy’s introduction as he performs for digital tips by ordering his “pay pig” clientele to sniff poppers & stroke themselves to his chiseled physique. The first barrier between him and his estranged schoolteacher is a generational one, as expressed by the technological jump from that laptop-framed introduction to the pedophile’s preference for the tripod camcorders of old. Once they take their attraction-repulsion sexual dynamic to the bedroom, the title becomes somewhat literal as their nude bodies are bathed in monochrome blue light, a stage-craft version of moonlight achieved through cinematic artifice. For the most part, though, Blue Film is a movie of ideas rather than one of images. Its initial question of whether therapeutic intimacy with an adult sex worker can cure a pedophile is only the start of what ends up becoming a double-pronged character study. Their mismatched camboy-client dynamic gets much more abstract from there, at one point linking the solitary nature of religious practice with the solitary nature of sexual kink. They pontificate about the spirituality in loneliness and the purity in perversion, which are much loftier subjects than you might expect from the opening laptop-framed performance exclusively communicated in BDSM-themed commands & grunts. The movie does eventually go places; those places just aren’t in any way visual or physical.

-Brandon Ledet

Demonwarp (1988)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Most low-budget genre movies I tend to recommend on this blog make up for their lack of resources with an excess of style. I love a scrappy production that strives to impress its audience in every frame, distracting us from the shoddiness of the acting, sets, and props with an extravagance of over-the-top images & ideas. A major problem with those kinds of high-style, low budget oddities, though, is that the initial novelty can wear off in the first or second act, around the time when they’re done establishing a world or mood and have to start telling a compelling story within it, or else fall flat. In contrast, the 1988 creature feature Demonwarp flips that trajectory around, starting with a going-through-the-motions plot trudge in its first hour before attempting to wow its audience with over-the-top, go-for-broke novelty in its final act. It’s a major risk to operate that way, since most of the audience might doze off or wander away before they get to the goods, but for those too stoned to get off the couch and swap out the VHS tape for something more exciting, the movie leaves you on a high note. I guess in some ways it’s better to finish strong than to start strong, if it’s going to be an either/or choice.

Demonwarp is a bugnuts alien invasion movie hiding in plain sight as a mediocre sasquatch movie. A mysterious space egg crashes in the American woodlands in the opening scene, setting expectations for a far-out mutant creature feature. Instead, that opening leads to a lazy procession of sasquatch attacks, mostly thinning out the ranks of a college-age Reaganite polycule. Those young dolts have no discernible chemistry to speak of, as if they all just met minutes before camera arrived, despite the scripts’ insistence that they’re all longtime friends & lovers. The only saving grace in the cast is the movie star charisma of Academy Award winner (and Naked Gun alum) George Kennedy, who babysits the dopey duds as they’re all throttled to death one sasquatch attack after another. Then, the dwindling group of survivors arrive at the sasquatch’s hidden cave lair, and the movie suddenly decides to get interesting, throwing everything it can at the screen at the last minute to pass itself off as a latent cult classic: zombies, occultists, scorpion-tailed alien beasts, bare breasts, you name it. It’s your reward for putting up with the boring, going-through-the-motions presentation that precedes it, like sitting through a timeshare sales pitch for the “free” gift.

Before Demonwarp finally gets interesting in its final minutes, it at least has the decency to be laughably incoherent. It treats its woodland setting as a boundaryless otherworld with no spatial rules or logic. The edit constantly alternates between different factions of sasquatch victims fearfully running in arbitrary directions, with no clear sense of which group the monster is actively hunting. Occasionally, they’ll stop to trade half-hearted quips or take their tops off (with those duties rigidly assigned along gender lines), but for the most part they run and yell and ineffectually point guns in the sasquatch’s general direction. The only memorable paragraph of dialogue in the entire picture is a brief monologue in which George Kennedy explains the backstory of why he’s wearing a yellow hat. It’s all just barely entertaining enough to drain beers to with your closest buddies until it shifts gears in the final minutes, to the point where entering the sasquatch’s cave feels like entering an entirely different film. I almost feel bad for ruining the surprise that the sasquatch’s space-alien antics extend beyond the opening crash, but I also suspect most audiences wouldn’t make it to the end credits without dangling that proverbial carrot.

-Brandon Ledet

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later, they’re now both understood to be historic landmarks in the slasher subgenre, with little need to distinguish which arrived first. I’m sure the first couple body horrors of the 80s gore era were dismissed as shameless knockoffs by Cronenberg devotees, just as the found footage wave was first met with Blair Witchy skepticism and the giant-turtle creature feature Gamera was understood solely as a Godzilla copycat before there were other kaiju to compare it against. Likewise, when the killer-animatronics horrors Willys Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie were first released a few years ago, they were initially understood to be shameless knockoffs of the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series (albeit more successful movie adaptations of that series than its officially licensed ones). Since then, there have been enough Five Nights-riffing “What if the Chuck E. Cheese band tried to kill you?” variations that the subgenre has been legitimized with its own name: mascot horror. Write it down, commit it to memory; mascot horror is officially a thing.  There will likely be college courses about it at some point, so yes there will be a quiz.

Mere days after Casper Kelly’s “What if Barney was evil?” mascot horror Buddy screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I saw an online advertisement for the straight-to-Screambox “What if Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was evil?” mascot horror Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, signaling to me that this newly coined subgenre is having a real moment. If I weren’t aware of Five Nights at Freddy’s or the previously mentioned mascot horrors that beat it to the big screen, I might’ve mistaken Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round as a rushed-to-market mockbuster of Kelly’s Sundance-premiered oddity. They are remarkably similar in narrative structure and production design, framing their mascots-gone-wild horror stories within the rules & rhythms of vintage children’s TV shows. For its part, Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round starts as a direct parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with a kindly, sweatered TV host explaining simple concepts like mailboxes, welcome mats, and memories to the children at home. That last concept proves to be a sticking point for the poor TV host, who discovers that he has lost access to his own memories outisde the pocket universe where he’s stuck hanging out with sock-puppet animals on a fenced-in playground set made entirely out of cardboard. His chipper animal friends needle him about his lost memory in increasingly hostile, passive-aggressive ways until his concept of reality breaks down entirely, and he starts begging the audience through the camera to set him free from his play-pretend prison cell. Instead, his imaginary-friend playground adventure turns into a televised blood bath.

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round suffers a lot of the same structural issues as Casper Kelly’s Buddy. Both movies are at their most compelling in the earliest stretch when they play as uncanny parodies of vintage children’s TV shows that are just slightly, menacingly off. Once that hyperartificial reality is broken and the ultraviolence starts in earnest, they become much more conventional horror stories, testing the audience’s patience as they meander towards their inevitable, genre-mandated conclusions. Admittedly, the highs are higher in Buddy, while Mr. Monkey‘s lows are much, much lower, which makes for a no-brainer choice if you’re only going to watch one mascot horror this year and skip the other. If there’s anything that makes Mr. Monkey worth a look it’s in the extremity of its ultraviolence, featuring lengthy, torturous scenes of surgical gore as our semi-demented TV host is strapped down to the titular merry-go-round and tormented by the sock-puppet avatars of his own subconscious. Once the mood lighting shifts from bright & bubbly children’s show cartoonery to dingy torture porn grit & grime, the novelty appeal of the picture falls apart, and it starts to resemble the mascot-adjacent slashers of the public-domainsploitation “Poohniverse.” I very much preferred hanging out with the dead-eyed, cheery puppets in their children’s playhouse before it becomes an adult flayhouse, when the scares are centered on odd details like Mr. Monkey‘s dirty human fingernails instead of maniacal screaming & disembowelings, which you can find in pretty much any horror subgenre. The most illuminating thing about the picture overall was how it makes apparent just how ahead of the curve pro wrestler Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse gimmick was on the current “mascot horror” trend, not to mention the even earlier genre prototype in Wonder Showzen, which predates Five Nights at Freddy’s by a full decade. In that long mascot-horror continuum there isn’t much room for Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round to stand out as anything special in particular, but it’s at least a convenient bite-sized appetizer of what Buddy will offer once it hits theaters later this year.

-Brandon Ledet

Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

John Waters’s Desperate Living is, for all practical purposes, my favorite movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times — twice theatrically. This week, I learned something new about one of its most outrageous scenes: the babysitter on acid vignette. It’s a minutes-long gag wherein one of the citizens of Mortville explains that their expulsion from proper society resulted from brutally murdering their teenage babysitter, as retribution for cooking her baby in the oven while high on LSD (presumably mistaking it for a roast chicken or turkey). When I first saw this scene as a teen, I correctly assumed it was based on an urban legend, because its story was already familiar to me as a fan of the Lunachicks’ punk-rock novelty song “Babysitters on Acid,” which gives a full play-by-play of the same absurd scenario. While the “Baby-Roast” story did prove to be an urban legend after all, the recent documentary Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks added a new wrinkle to its pop-culture history by explaining that the band’s most recognizable song was directly inspired by that scene in Desperate Living, not by the legend itself. Curiously, Wikipedia cites the Lunachicks track as a retelling of the urban legend but omits any reference to John Waters’s film, instead referencing Rudy Ray Moore’s Disco Godfather (another personal high school favorite) as its most prominent cinematic depiction of note. This information is very important to me, specifically, but I doubt it means much to anyone else.

The question of “Does this mean anything to anyone?” constantly nags at the heart of Pretty Ugly. The original members of Lunachicks are all alive and eager to wax nostalgic about their punk-rock glory days, but they also seem a little baffled why anyone would want to listen. If anything, the project appears to be the result of peer pressure, collectively willed into existence by other recent documentaries of culturally dormant bands like DEVO, Pavement, Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Sparks, and Judas Priest. Pretty Ugly lays out a clear path that these revivals are supposed to take: a written biography, then some reunion concert dates, and then a documentary promoting & encapsulating the entire project. This band seems especially reluctant to go through any of it—especially the concert reunions—but they eventually drag their feet across the finish line anyway. As an artistic project, Lunachicks represents a moment that has passed, with each member moving on to adult jobs & responsibilities after spending the entirety of the 1990s touring & recording without ever fully “making it” on the same level as their peers. There’s something personally embarrassing about picking their instruments back up to play decades-old novelty songs about the junk food, junk movies, and junk TV they consumed as young snotty punks, no matter how loudly or how often they’re encouraged by loyal fans. They still eventually go through with it, though, because that’s what 90s nostalgia acts are now required to do under the law of mob rule.

Personally, I’m grateful for the result of that peer pressure campaign. Unlike the more famous bands referenced above, I never really knew much about Lunachicks despite owning every single album they released on CD. A lot of the revelations in this documentary are things I would’ve assumed just by looking at their still images in those CDs’ liner notes. Of course they were heavily inspired by John Waters movies; of course most of their interpersonal issues were the result of drug abuse; of course they never broke through to major-label success. However, a lot of my assumptions about their place in the punk-rock ecosystem were heavily distorted by the era when I caught up with them as a teen. By the time I first heard Lunachicks, they were making a modedty living on the Vans Warped Tour mall-punk circuit; what I didn’t know is that they had earned decades of NYC punk-scene bona fides long before that cultural moment, initially “discovered” & promoted by members of Sonic Youth before working as contemporaries of better-remembered acts like L7, Luscious Jackson, and The Go-Go’s. I had never seen footage of them playing to rowdy barroom crowds, provided in excess here via camcorder-quality VHS footage (but mercifully synced to the cleaner studio recordings of their most popular songs). They were, by every measure, a real band. They just never broke through to a wider audience the way their peers did, as most brutally illustrated here by having to trade opening-headliner slots with The Offspring on successive tours, after the lesser band won the war of the charts.

It’s difficult to not blame the entirety of the Lunachicks’ failure to break through to industry misogyny. As young, hip NYC brats with a professional fashion model for a lead singer (Theo Kogan), they were actively resistant to being sexualized in their art, choosing to purposefully ugly themselves up in Waters-inspired drag instead of playing pretty for the camera. I loved that about them as a teenager, but I can also see how that could limit their marketability — as opposed to, say, The Donnas, who eventually had to go full glam to earn a full paycheck. Even in the 2020s, the punk rock marketing machine is a little squeamish about fully promoting their act. The documentary opens with band members encountering a NYC subway ad featuring a vintage Lunachicks concert photo that has edited out the stage-makeup menstruate running down their legs in the original still, leaving only the image of hot girls playing guitar. That squeamishness says a lot in the context of the recent nontroversy over Olivia Rodrigo’s adoption of the 90s kinderwhore aesthetic, wherein she dresses in the babydoll gear once perverted by grunge-era acts like Hole & Babes in Toyland but doesn’t have the grit & grime to pull it off, so she just looks like an actual baby. Everyone wants to profit off the 90s rocker aesthetic but no one wants the 90s rocker attitude that comes with it, which apparently has been true since the Lunachicks were helping define that aesthetic in the 1990s, to little lasting acclaim.

At the same time, the Lunachicks’ missed opportunities as a great band that could’ve been are also somewhat a result of happenstance. They put in the work, producing five fun, rockin’ records packed with memorable hooks and genuinely funny lyrics. They toured relentlessly, living in vans & RVs for a decade solid while some of their peers were arbitrarily called up to millionaires’ lives touring in a megabus instead. In the long run, time has flattened out the difference; each of those 90s acts are assigned their own reunion tour and nostalgia doc regardless of their achieved level of fame, each cherished by loyal fans and forgotten to time by the rest of the masses. In a way, this band-validating documentary is the reward for all that work, something I’m sure every Lunachick would happily trade for a regular royalty check from an Offspring-level radio hit they never got to enjoy.

-Brandon Ledet

I Love Boosters (2026)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I Love Boosters is many things. It’s a heist movie that takes a sharp left turn into science fiction territory. It’s a jeremiad about the life-destroying conditions of the sweat shops in which most of our clothing is manufactured. It’s a meditation on the material conditions of entry level retail work, and it’s a barely exaggerated take on C-suite self-aggrandization, and it’s a satire that takes the concept of “crisis actors” to an absurd extreme. It’s a parable about the way that consent is manufactured across multiple social tiers, and a slumber party movie for fashion girlies, and a call for unionization and collective action. It’s also a Scooby Doo cartoon where Keke Palmer peels out, legs cycling, as she tries to get her footing in a slanted room. What a delight! 

Corvette (Palmer) is the ringleader of a group of Bay Area “boosters,” people who steal merchandise, specifically quasi-high end retail fashion in this case, and resell it. She and friends Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) have been dubbed “The Velvet Gang” by the media, and their primary target is Metro Designers, a chain of shops owned and operated by fashion “genius” Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whom Corvette admires and despises in equal measure. Corvette has dreams of becoming a designer herself, and they’re not hampered by the fact that her current living conditions find her squatting in a defunct fast-food restaurant, although she’s beginning to lose hope. While casually fending off the flirtatious advances of an unnamed bargain fashion model (LaKeith Stanfield), Corvette also finds herself plagued with visions about a giant rolling ball of trash. When Corvette finds herself offered a job at Metro Designs by authoritarian store manager Grayson (Will Poulter) during an interview that’s only meant to be a distraction, the trio decides to infiltrate the store and clean it out completely. Then things go really sideways. 

Most of us can only wish we had half the imagination and vision that Boots Riley does. This movie is as vibrantly beautiful as it is chaotic and bizarre. At times, the entire frame is completely dominated by a single color, either through the use of saturation from red lights or because each Metro Designers location is monochromatic (as Christie says on the in-store displays, “If you want it in a different color, go to another location!”) on a monthly rotating basis. At other times, through their coordinated-to-clash outfits, the frame is filled with so many candy colors that once can’t help but be lost in the fantasia of it all. There is stop motion animation and there are car chases that appear to be done in Number Seventeen-esque miniature, alongside low-tech old school cinematic techniques like having a character shapeshift by having one performer sink out of frame while the other rises into it and having an entire set built at an angle to emulate a crooked building. The film is a feast for the eyes and an utter delight. 

Lest you think that the director of Sorry to Bother You has decided to make a film that’s all style and no substance, let me allay your fears. The film is entirely about the methods by which every individual is kept disenfranchised exist at every level, and it’s insidious everywhere it goes. Workers die from unsafe working conditions and CEOs respond to collective action with violence and retribution. Local “guru” Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle) is the head of a very successful “friends being friendly” con that is a literal pyramid scheme. Metro Designers employee Violeta (Eiza González)’s paycheck is less than $40, with Christie’s rotating monochromatic color scheme forcing the store clerks to update their workwear every month with the cost of their new outfits deducted from their pay. Christie’s office features a photo of her with Barack Obama next to the awards documenting her involvement with “Democracy Forge,” which sounds like the handle of blue check Twitter Lib and is just as sinister; this ultimately connects with the “man on the street” style interviews we see throughout the film with chyron-identified characters like Based Young Dude, Crying Black Mother, and Upstanding Community Member, but I won’t spoil the surprise of how. 

Just do yourself a favor, and see this one on the biggest screen you can. You won’t be disappointed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Backrooms (2026)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

At last! A freshman feature from a filmmaker who made their bones on YouTube that I actually enjoyed! When I walked out of Obsession, I texted Brandon to let him know that, alas, I had hated it. He replied that this meant that “the Talk to Me curse has not lifted,” and I responded that I had loved Bring Her Back, and he astutely noted that this was a different thing: “That one’s elevated Grief Is The Monster horror; the other two are YouTube pranks for the children.” At long last, Backrooms feels like an appropriate synthesis of the two; it clearly takes inspiration from the recent horror trend of using monsters as metaphors but isn’t completely preoccupied with that conceit, while its use of jumpscares, muffled voices from distant rooms, and eerie imagery taken straight from internet creepypasta means it has an appeal for viewers of a younger generation. 

It’s June of 1990, and failed architect Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is living in his struggling furniture store after being kicked out of his house by his wife following a nasty, drunken argument. He’s seeing Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a therapist, about his drinking problems and his belief that he’s “wired” to be confrontational and unpleasant. In one session, they role play the night of the marriage-threatening argument, which reveals that Clark is resentful of having to manage Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire while his wife fumbles her way through law school. When an electrician is unable to find the source of issues that are causing the store’s bills to skyrocket, he and Clark discover a couple of extra switches haphazardly added to the store’s breaker box. Investigating the box again late one night, he finds an invisible portal through the wall of the store’s basement into a seemingly infinite series of fluorescent-lit, white-walled, beige-carpeted rooms. When he tries to tell Mary about this discovery, he can tell that she doesn’t believe him, so he sets out to get proof, enlisting store employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett), who has access to recording equipment via his college. They enter the titular backrooms to document their discovery, only to find that they’re not alone down there. 

While having coffee with a friend recently, the topic of the upcoming X-Files reboot came up. We each agreed that it’s hard to imagine a functional version of that franchise in a post-9/11 world, specifically that the concept of mostly-for-fun conspiracy theories is difficult to play with in a world where fringe lunatics run our government. There already is a functional post-9/11 X-Files, and it’s called Fringe, and we briefly discussed what that meant on a level beyond the textual. Specifically, the strange and paranormal encounters that the various innocents on The X-Files always occur in remote areas: deep in the woods, out in the desert, or in vast fields of crops that seem to have no end. On Fringe, the horrible things that happen to people mostly occur in urban environments: diners, downtown Boston, and, fairly often, on airplanes. The safety of a metropolis is not a given after 9/11, and Fringe took that to a logical end. I thought about that a lot during Backrooms, specifically in how it managed to feel as fresh and new to me as The Blair Witch Project must have seemed in 1999, and that with time and distance, we no longer need to send Heather and her crew out to the woods to find something spooky. The backrooms are already here, in urban environments that contain them and camouflage them to the naked eye. You can make sure you never encounter the Blair Witch by making sure that you avoid her forest; but you might wander into the backrooms completely unaware, which is more immediate and spookier. 

I’m not really that into the current state of creepypasta. Jenny Nicholson made a Patreon video last year in which she effectively delineated something that had occurred to me conceptually but hadn’t put into words: things are usually creepier the less defined they are, and because creepypasta and SCP appeal to a very specific kind of online nerd, what used to be a story about some evil, inexplicable stairs in a state park or a basketball that caused psychic nosebleeds started to get more and more lore, to the point that the premise of the object or place becomes more important than the mystery. The concept of liminal spaces has become a matter of no small niche internet interest in recent years, as the prevalence of computer imagery rendering software has given rise to the ability to easily make creepy, Escherian office spaces for internet consumption. (I also think that there’s an argument to be made that omnipresent GPS mapping has made people generally less able to orient themselves without outside assistance, which makes labyrinthine spaces more frightening to people who have poor directional sense.)That influence has already leaked into the film world at large, as it inspired the creator of the game on which Exit 8 was based, and that’s what director Kane Parsons has been up to online. The film’s opening sequence appears to have been made entirely in Blender, and even though that means that some of the seams show through (there’s an audiocassette on a desk that’s as thin as a 3.5 inch floppy disk), it’s still effective. 

For a film set in the nineties, the fact that this was made by a director who’s only just barely able to legally drink means that it eschews a lot of the nostalgia factor that one would expect to be a huge part of a film set decades earlier. Artifacts of the time period are limited to the use of a camcorder for the documentation of the backrooms themselves, inexpensively produced local commercials, and self-help audiocassettes, and the only direct nostalgia bait is that we find a mysterious researcher at home with his family watching The Neverending Story on TV (the finale also features audio lifted directly from Star Trek IV, but I don’t think that will be noticed by many). The VHS camcorder quality of the found footage style segments of the film is extremely well done and effective at creating a feeling of the nineties without needing to rely on cheap “I remember that!” moments. After several years of nostalgia-poisoned period pieces like Stranger Things, this is a welcome relief. 

The performances here are very strong as well. One would think that a young director would take an easier route and focus his storytelling on characters closer to his own age, but either he or screenwriter Will Soodik made the wise choice to instead focus the film on characters of a more mature age. Ejiofor and Reinsve are two extremely competent performers, with multiple Oscar and BAFTA nominations between them, and there are several powerful scenes between the two of them that have no bearing on the eldritch location in Clark’s store at all. Reinsve’s Mary is haunted by a childhood raised by a mother who slowly lost her battle with schizophrenia, and Ejiofor’s Clark is a man whose psychology leads him to deflect all blame for his life and circumstances onto others. The latter of these two is a little weaker than the other; we only get Clark’s side of the story, but if he gave up his career for something more stable in order to support his wife through an extended education, and she really did quit for no real reason and still isn’t working, his resentment isn’t entirely unfounded. Still, whether one feels that Clark is an awful man before the backrooms start to exert their influence over him or if it’s only their evil that pushes him to a point where we can no longer sympathize, Ejiofor manages to play it well. Still, neither of these past griefs is so predominant in the film’s narrative that this feels like a retread of similar elevated horrors of recent years. The backrooms recreate things that it “remembers,” with each recreation becoming less and less like the thing that it’s supposed to represent, and in that way it’s like the imperfection of memory, but this works perfectly well as a variation on a haunted house as conceived in a digital age without needing to use “the apparition is a metaphor” as a crutch. 

This is probably the best straightforward horror that I’ve seen so far this year. It’s creepy, effective, disorienting, well-directed, and nicely acted. Finally!

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Ramekin (2018)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

The abundance of praise for Obsession is making me feel like I’m losing my mind. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it, well, obsessively. Was I, as my friend Jeb has suggested, simply in the wrong mood when I saw it? Am I simply getting too old and out of touch with, as Brandon has suggested to me, youthful prankster horror? I feel like it was fine, but I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and gore-heavy shockers before, so I don’t understand how anyone can figure this is the best movie of the year. To me, the extremely high Letterboxd reviews tell a story not about the film’s overall quality but about the filmmaker’s popularity with an online generation. 

Perhaps the greatest signifier that I may simply be losing my grip on what makes a movie good or bad is what a great time I had with $0 budget indie Ramekin, a 70-minute single location horror thriller with a main cast of three unknown actors that’s currently floating around on Tubi. College student Emily (Jamie Saunders) is living in an awful sublet situation when she gets a call from her mother letting her know that her reclusive grandmother on the other side of NYC has died. Emily takes up residence in her late grandmother’s home and becomes immediately fascinated with a very normal looking ramekin, which then starts to appear in random parts of the apartment. Emily comes to realize there’s something supernatural going on when she is physically unable to throw the thing out of a window, and when it prevents her from leaving. The two manage to communicate somewhat via Emily’s questions and the ramekin’s slight movements, which eventually leads to an altercation over the ramekin’s insistence on watching the shy, self-conscious Emily shower. As an apology, the ramekin begins to offer her gifts in the form of cupcakes and cash which it manifests within itself, and plays music for her, all of which allow the ramekin to slowly infiltrate her mind. 

Under the ramekin’s influence, Emily devotes all of her time to composing poetry, most of it containing violent imagery about blood and death. In fugue states, she holds a knife to her own throat and destroys upholstery. She also becomes utterly narcissistic, continuously praising her beauty, her body, and her creative work. This leads to a schism between her and her best friend, a lovely but dim-witted girl named Jane (Renee Adrienne Vito) who speaks with a Valley Girl’s vernacular. At the same time, Emily befriends Mark (Adriano La Rocca), the neighbor who had previously brought Emily’s grandmother her mail and took out her trash for her, who somehow overlooks all of Emily’s strange behaviors because of his interest in her. When Emily finally goes too far, Mark breaks off contact, but is lured back inside for a final visit, during which Emily kills him, pouring his blood into the ramekin, which seems to drink it. Things only get stranger from there. 

Ramekin is an odd duck. If Julio Torres and Quentin Dupieux were to collaborate on a project (with no budget), this would probably be the result. The ramekin, like the tire in Rubber, is a menacing figure despite being a faceless, inanimate object, but its ordinariness is what makes it so strange. Even at seventy minutes, it threatens to get repetitive at times, especially in the sequence in which Emily continuously moves the ramekin to the dish drying rack only for it to reappear on the kitchen table; despite this, I never grew bored with it. I can only assume that the ramekin itself was moved around with magnets, and all of its other special abilities, like manifesting money and sweets, occur between cuts. I can see this easily being a film that other people will find boring or dull, but the performances by its nonprofessional actors are utterly compelling. I love that the actor portraying Mark has bad skin, and that I can’t tell if Jane’s overreliance on “like” as a placeholder word is a scripting choice or just something that came from the performer. Jamie Saunders is tasked with carrying this entire narrative with only an Ikea dish as her scene partner, and she manages to do it with aplomb. The jokes here land, and although one is never truly frightened by the ramekin, it’s still effectively creepy when it needs to be. My only real problem with the film overall is that it ends with an “all just a dream” fakeout, which I think was unnecessary. Just let it end on the bummer ending! I feel completely alone in my apathetic-to-negative reaction to Obsession, but if you’re like me, you may find more to love in this genuinely original oddball cheapie about obsessive behavior.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Sheep Detectives (2026)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I had zero interest in seeing The Sheep Detectives. Any film that advertises itself as being “from the director of Minions and Despicable Me 3” knows that it is both reaching out to its intended audience as well as forewarning those, like me, who are not part of that number. I also don’t normally bother with family films; I have no children and know almost none, but I got to meet my partner’s family last weekend and, since our choices were either Obsession, Passenger, or The Sheep Detectives, we packed into two cars and drove to the AMC in Deerfield, Illinois (birthplace of Kitty Pryde!) to watch Hugh Jackman get murdered, in a PG way. 

George Hardy (Jackman) is a vegetarian shepherd who is adored by his flock and either ignored or disliked by most of the human residents of the village of Denbrook. He has a deep and abiding dislike for both butcher Ham Gilyard (who, for his part, says he can tolerate vegetarianism in women but finds it distasteful in men) and a fellow shepherd named Caleb (Tosin Cole) who leases meadowland from George. There’s also some amount of friction between him and local innkeeper Beth (Hong Chau) and Reverend Hillcoate (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), although the nature of their beef is part of the mystery. His flock, however, adores him as their caregiver. Notable members of the herd include a mysterious recent addition named Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) with a dark and troubled past, the elderly and stentorious contagious ecthyma sufferer Sir Richfield (Patrick Stewart), the beautiful diva Cloud (Regina Hall), and oddball Mopple (Chris O’Dowd). George’s pride and joy, however, is Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss), who is named for George’s late wife and who is, by the other sheep’s reckoning, the smartest sheep in the world. After all, she’s the only one who always figures out who the killer is in the mystery novels that George reads to the flock nightly. 

Shortly after the arrival of Elliott Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine), an obituary reporter who has come to Denbrook to cover their “heritage festival” only to discover it consists of three folding tables behind the inn, George is murdered. Local constable Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) is a clumsy oaf who has little hope of solving the killing and enlists Elliott to assist him. Further complicating matters is the arrival of George’s fancy lawyer Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), who reveals that George’s home-brewed remedy for contagious ecthyma has been sold to a major farm pharmaceutical company, and that she has brought George’s long-lost daughter Rebecca (Molly Gordon) to Denbrook for the reading of the will. 

When I texted Brandon about the film, he mentioned that he had seen it reviewed elsewhere as “Knives Out meets Babe,” and I’ve seen it referred to that way in other places as well. That’s fairly accurate, but what’s most striking about the film is the way that it handles the internal lives of the sheep who make up most of its cast. They have a cosmological theology, namely that they believe sheep eventually turn into clouds at the end of their lives, the same clouds which rain down and nourish the grass of future generations. They also have the ability to willfully forget any information which bothers them or gives them anxiety, which means that even though Lily herself witnessed the death of her parents, she has Men in Blacked herself into hanging onto her beliefs. Only Mopple, who is treated as somewhat disabled by the other sheep for his inability to intentionally forget, understands the reality of the world, and has to bear this alone. This also means that the sheep have no real concept of “death,” thinking of murder as a literary device only, not something that could happen to their beloved shepherd. And, instinctively, they reject a lamb born in the winter rather than the spring (a behavior of real sheep) for being “wrong” in ways that they never articulate and probably couldn’t if they tried. 

It’s all fascinating stuff, but given that this is a family feature, it’s only explored insofar as it relates to the main mystery. Although there were a couple of scenes that were frightening for our nine-year-old viewing companion (most notably a fight between some frightening guard dogs and Sebastian), this is a movie where the biggest clue to the murderer’s identity requires no more sophisticated knowledge than blue + yellow = green. It’s the kind of film that you see and think to yourself that now you know what you should watch with your parents the next time you can’t agree on something during the holidays. I’m a huge fan of cozy mysteries, but the actual mystery here is on par with a slightly below average episode of Murder, She Wrote, succeeding mostly in getting into the alien minds of the sheep characters more than it does as a whodunnit. Still, there’s a place in this world for films like this, and if this sounds like something you’d like, you probably will. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

How to Make a Killing (2026)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I was intrigued by the initial trailers for John Patton Ford’s modern update on Kind Hearts and Coronets, How to Make a Killing. Glen Powell as the disenfranchised heir to a massive fortune who has to pick off his awful relatives one by one, what’s not to love? Unfortunately, a better question would have been “What’s there to love?”, and the answer is “Not very much.” 

The extravagantly wealthy Redfellow clan exiles daughter Mary when she gets pregnant with the child of a commoner and refuses to abort it. The father of said child, whom Mary names Becket, dies on the day of his birth, and Mary spends the first several years of his life indoctrinating Becket into the belief that he “deserves” “the right kind of life.” Despite being a lowly civil servant, Mary ensures that Becket gets archery lessons and all of the other hallmarks of an upper class upbringing, which brings him into contact with Julia, an upper class girl with whom he falls in love. Becket shares with Julia that the Redfellow patriarch stipulated in his will that the last surviving member of the Redfellow clan inherits the entire $28M fortune, even those who were previously disinherited. As an adult, Becket (Powell) has a chance run-in with recently married Julia (Margaret Qualley) at the Manhattan haberdasherie where he works, where he’s reminded that she’s upper class and awful; it’s all very Kate Beaton’s Wuthering Heights.

When he is demoted from salesman to warehouse work at his job because the owner’s son is being slotted into Becket’s position, Becket decides to look into the whole “Let’s kill off my cousins so I can inherit everything” option. He starts with tech money halfwit Taylor (Jude Law’s son Raff), and his attendance of Taylor’s funeral brings him in contact with his uncle Warren (Bill Camp), who confesses that he always felt guilty about what happened to Mary but was powerless to stand up to current family head Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris); Warren offers Taylor’s old job to Becket, who accepts. Becket sets sights on his second victim/cousin, Noah (Zach Woods), a pretentious Brooklyn hipster in the mold of Pulp’s “Common People,” whose girlfriend Ruth (Jessica Fenwick) falls for Becket after Noah’s death. Now that he has the love of a paternal figure, a job that he excels in and which nets him enough money to rent a luxurious NY apartment, and a down-to-earth girlfriend, Becket has the life he “deserves,” but it’s still not quite enough. In quick succession, he knocks off his megachurch money laundering cousin (Topher Grace), aviation obsessed uncle McArthur, and faux-humanitarian mega-adopter aunt Cassandra, leaving only Becket, Uncle Warren, and Grandpa Whitelaw in the Redfellow clan’s tontine, at which point Becket takes a pause to decide if he wants to continue with his murder spree. This is complicated by Julia’s re-entry to Becket’s life, begging for a loan for her in-over-his-head husband, and despite Becket’s “careful” alibi-creation for all of the deaths of his relatives, Julia has the evidence that would put him away if he refuses to bail her and her husband out. When Warren dies of natural causes, it all comes down to a showdown with Whitelaw, which we assume can only end one way, since we’ve been told this entire story via flashback that is set in a framing device of Becket in prison awaiting his execution. 

This film has no idea what it wants to be. It’s not quite funny enough to be a true comedy and instead takes a sharp turn into knockoff noir territory, especially when it comes to Julia’s late-film-twist transformation into the femme fatale to serve as a foil to Ruth’s good girl. Qualley is horribly miscast in this role; I’ve been an advocate for her based on her performances in The Substance and Kinds of Kindness despite seeing her plumb the depths with Drive Away Dolls, but it might be time to throw in the towel on defending her against the accusations that she’s just not a very good actor. That may not entirely be her fault, though; this is just a bad movie, and no one comes off well here. I’m generally charmed by Powell and adore Fenwick, but both are underwhelming here, and even Powell’s charisma isn’t enough to make Becket someone in whom we can become emotionally invested. This is a movie about nepotism, explicitly and textually, and I can’t tell if Qualley and Law were cast with a sense of irony or not, but no one “deserves” the kind of life that a multimillion-dollar fortune provides. The only performance that I genuinely loved was Topher Grace’s, who appears in a single scene. Most of the pruning of the Redfellow family tree is done almost perfunctorily, when spending a little more time with them and their awfulness would lend at least some sense of justice to Becket’s actions. Instead, one gets the sense that we’re supposed to find them loathsome despite the fact that their sins are enjoying their wealth in the same way that we see Becket enjoy his when he starts to have his own folding money. A more sincere effort to inspect that would have been more effective, but then that wouldn’t leave enough room for the “comedy” that the film was sold on. It’s messy and inconsistent. How to Make a Killing is too many things and nothing at all: a noir with all of its grit sanded off, a comedy that isn’t very funny, good and bad actors alike having no charisma with one another, and all of it shot with flat, featureless Netflix lighting. No wonder it had no staying power in cinemas.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond