sci-fi

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

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Let me tell you a story. A human boy comes into possession of a bladeless sword hilt that only he can control and which only has a blade at his command. He teams up with a rogue pilot whose rough exterior belies a heart of gold and, alongside a sassy computer intelligence, they meet a space princess. They visit exotic locales like the desert, a swamp, and a hive of wretched scum and villainy. Before the end, the boy learns that he is part of a long line of people who wield a mystical power and who can appear after death as spectral guides in this metaphysical art, and he defeats an ancient evil in a dark cloak. Sounds like Star Wars, right?

I really didn’t know that much about Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. I’m not even really sure exactly when I managed to acquire a digital copy, or when I transferred that file to my phone for a potential future viewing (I’m not an Apple user so I’ve had the same phone for 4 years without a forced upgrade occurring as a result of planned obsolescence). I’m traveling at present and I did foresee that while journeying I might grow weary of the beautiful but nonetheless antiquated and challenging prose of Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s 1922 novel The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, and had planned ahead by downloading a couple of episodes of Peacemaker while I was on Wi-Fi. I did not foresee that the HBO app would simply not load at all once I was in airplane mode, and thus after failing to simply sleep on the flight, looked at what I had in my videos folder, and there Starchaser was, waiting for me to finally give it my attention. Many worse things have happened on airplanes recently than watching Starchaser, but I still nonetheless failed to be engrossed. 

The eponymous Orin is an enslaved human miner living beneath the surface of the planet Trinia, where he and other humans toil with laser diggers for volatile crystals, which are then “fed” to a giant dragon-like face when the slaves are visited by their god, Zygon. One day, Orin finds a sword buried in the rock, and when he frees it, the grandfather of his girlfriend Elan tells him that it may be part of an ancient legend about a liberator, before the sword projects an image of an old man who speaks a muddled prophecy, then the blade disappears. Elan’s grandfather is killed, prompting Orin and Elan to take actions which eventually result in them climbing into a crystal shipment and travelling through the dragon’s mouth, where the scales fall from their eyes about the nature of their enslavement, and Elan is killed by Zygon. Orin manages to dig his way up to the surface, where he meets a smug smuggler named Dagg Dibrimi and his smart-mouthed ship’s AI Arthur, although Dagg doesn’t believe Orin’s claims that there are slaves beneath Trinia’s surface. Dagg completes a hijacking of some of the crystals from one of Zygon’s freighters, and in the ensuing firefight, ends up in possession of an administrative fembot named Silica, whom he reprograms (through a not-very-funny scene in which we learn that the relevant circuits are in her posterior, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch), causing her to immediately become devoted to him. 

Along the way, the travelers are occasionally annoyed by a sprite-like “starfly,” which eventually directs Orin to discover a bomb hidden within the payment that Dagg receives for his services, eliciting Dagg’s loyalty, and the two of them eventually meet Aviana, the daughter of the local interplanetary governor. She recognizes the hilt from her historical studies and accesses a library file that reveals that the hilt belonged to the “Kha-Khan,” a group of legendary heroes from eons past who vanquish threats to humankind, although the last of the Kha-Khan disappeared from history after defeating a robot intelligence known as Nexus who sought to enslave humanity, at which point the hilt disappeared. And wouldn’t you just know it, it turns out that Nexus wasn’t really defeated; he simply rebranded as Zygon and got a new job as the overseer of the robotic underground miners of Triana, although he quickly replaced his initial automaton workers with human slaves so he could then reprogram the mechanical miners into warriors, and uh-oh, here comes the invasion fleet! They’re defeated by the ragtag group, of course, and the starfly reveals itself to be the Force, um, I mean the spirit of the Kha-Khans past, who appear to Orin and the others as Force ghosts, I mean, uh, regular ghosts, I guess. 

Director Steven Hahn worked mostly as a production manager on animated TV shows, with eighties juggernaut DIC as well as other studios, after getting his start with Ralph Bakshi working on his seminal work Wizards. During the off season for the various TV series that he was working on (like the Mister T animated series, Care Bears, the anglicization of French series Clémentine, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Star Wars: Droids), Hahn wanted to keep his Vietnamese animators busy. If you just read the Wikipedia page for this film, you might think, “Oh, how thoughtful,” but the quotation that he provided to the now-defunct sci-fi blog Topless Robot reveals that he, like George Lucas, was a man with dollar signs in his eyes more than anything: “I’d been working in television animation and owned a rather huge facility in Korea. I’ll tell you why I came to direct and produce this film. It’s not something you might expect. During the off-season, I had nothing else to do! When you own and run a big studio, it’s difficult to sit around and pay everyone a salary when there’s no work. So, I had to do something, and I thought, why not make an animated film?” There’s nothing artful in that, so it’s not really all that surprising that there’s nothing artful in the final product, either. 

I’m being a little harsh. There’s not nothing worthwhile here. Although all of the character designs for the men are ugly as sin and Princess Aviana looks like she was traced from a He-Man episode, the ship designs are relatively cool, and the robots that we see are inoffensive even if they’re not particularly imaginative. The film also manages to have a couple of cool sequences when it manages to break free from its lockstep dedication to slightly misremembering Star Wars, with the most striking images from the whole film coming close to the beginning and the end. For the former, it’s the appearance of the decomposing “mandroids” living in the Trinian swamps, cyborg ghouls that are creepy and off-putting, and it’s unfortunate that they warrant mention only in the scene in which they appear. For the latter, there’s a moment during the climactic space battle in which Orin accidentally opens a bay door, unwittingly ejecting all of the robotic troops within the hangar into open space, which was a fun visual. The space battles are the most interesting things that we get to witness, and it’s worth noting that this is probably because the film was created to cash in on 3D movies, so it’s clear that all the budget that didn’t go into making Orin and Dagg not hideous to look at went into making Dagg’s ship look cool. Money not exactly well spent, but I suppose it was put where it needed to be the most. It certainly didn’t go into score composition, as there are moments where Luke Skywalker’s theme and the Imperial March are imitated so clearly that it’s shocking that Hahn didn’t get into legal trouble. Not for the faint of heart or short of attention span, this is to be viewed solely if your only alternative is unconsciousness and you can’t seem to sleep.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

M3GAN 2.0 (2025)

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I was absolutely, utterly, desperately sick of seeing trailers for M3GAN 2.0 — months ago. I couldn’t wait for the movie to hit theaters not because I had any real interest in it, but because that would mean that I would finally be able to go to the theater safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to see that ad again. No more audio clips from Boyz II Men or Brittney Spears, no more “Hold on to your vaginas,” no more M3GAN in a wingsuit, no more “You threatened to pull out my tongue and put me in a wheelchair,” “I was upset!”, no more “She’s a smoking hot warrior princess.” The trailer is imprinted into my brain now to the point where I feel like I could quote it in the same vein as Jenny Nicholson’s full cover of the China Beach season one Time Warner DVD set. But after returning from a nice international holiday, despite nearly a full day of flight, I was too wired to sleep, and I happened to get back on a $5 Tuesday, so … why not? 

Since we’re already on the subject of the film’s marketing, it’s worth noting up top that the trailer for M3GAN 2.0 is very misleading. The “smoking hot warrior princess” line and all of the attendant implications thereof—that M3GAN has fans, that there’s a culture of weird online creeps who fetishize her, etc.—are completely absent here. M3GAN never offers Gemma (Allison Williams) up as a sacrifice in order to save Cady (Violet McGraw), and other lines that do appear in the film occur in completely different contexts. I’ve known people in the past who would consider this kind of trailer-to-film discrepancy to be a form of false advertising, and to whom no amount of explanation that trailers are often created months in advance of a movie’s final cut will mollify them. This instance, however, is a clear case of that misdirection working in the film’s favor, as the advertising undersold the final product, which itself overdelivered. The only real plot point that appears in the trailer that’s accurate to the film is that the sequel is going the Terminator 2 route by making the first film’s villain a protagonist in the second, defending the previous film’s survivors against a more advanced version of themself. It’s not at all what one would expect in a sequel to the unexpectedly successful first film, but I would argue that it manages to find its footing, at least insofar as a film this campy and over-the-top can. 

It’s been a couple of years since young Cady came to live with her Aunt Gemma following the death of her parents, and Gemma’s creation of a robotic “friend” for her troubled niece as a prototype for a toy line ending in disaster when M3GAN turned homicidal and killed four people. In the interim, Gemma has served a brief stint in prison and emerged from the other side as a passionate advocate for oversight in the tech industry, delivering (similar to but legally distinct) TED Talks, releasing a book about the dangers of AI, and partnering (perhaps even romantically) with a former cyber security guru named Christian Bradley (Aristotle Athari) to work on potential legal regulation. In all of this, she also seeks to highlight that what M3GAN represented: a potential opportunity for guardians to outsource many of the duties of parenting to technology as part of a greater social movement toward automating and alienating the things that make us human. Ironically, throwing herself into this new passion project with such fervor causes her to be less present for Cady in exactly the same way that her robotics work did in the first film. On a greater scope, Colonel Tim Sattler (Timm Sharp) has loaned out an android soldier based on M3GAN’s original specs to a foreign government to demonstrate its proficiency, only for AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) to go rogue almost immediately. After killing the hostage that she was supposed to liberate, she begins systematically tracking down and killing everyone involved with her creation, including the arms dealer who brokered her sale to the government and the technocrat Alton Appleton (Jemaine Clement) whose shady activities related to his products means that he is the only one who could shut her down remotely. When armed men show up in the middle of the night, M3GAN reveals that she’s actually been staying close in a technologically ethereal form this whole time, and offers to help stop AMELIA, in exchange for a new body. 

I saw this in an empty theater. Sure, it was a 10:15 PM screening, but it was also $5 movie night, which is usually packed. As I waited to buy my ticket, I watched as a couple of families with elementary aged children brought in blankets and other cozy accoutrement to settle in for a late screening of the new Jurassic Park World movie. No one was there for M3GAN 2.0 but me. One of my quirks is that I rarely laugh out loud when I’m watching a movie by myself. It’s not because I feel the need to perform enjoyment in the presence of others so much as it is that I think there’s an element to comedy that’s social. It might just have been the travel exhaustion, but I found myself laughing aloud at multiple points in this film, especially in the back half. Of all the horror flick classic killers the easiest comparison would be to compare M3GAN to Chucky, since they’re both killer dolls, but when it comes to character, M3GAN has a bit of the Freddy Krueger about her. She’s sarcastic, quippy, and often just plain mean, with only one overriding and eternal imperative: protect Cady. What doesn’t take the edge off of her character is the character growth she’s undergone between the first two films as a result of watching Gemma and Cady as a kind of techno omniscience, to the point that her Cady-based directives have evolved into genuine affection and care, or she’s gotten quite good at pretending this is the case. She’s still M3GAN, and I still enjoyed her presence, even if she’s in a completely different movie. What’s not to love? 

(Listen to me and Brandon discuss M3GAN 2.0 more here.)

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Son of Godzilla (1967)

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Godzilla’s titular offspring in the 1967 kaiju comedy Son of Godzilla doesn’t officially have a name, or at least he didn’t yet. Between the film’s release and the character’s return in the following year’s Destroy All Monsters, Toho held a contest for Godzilla fans to name the reptilian tyke, and the world settled on the name “Minilla,” a portmanteau of “Mini” and “Godzilla”. In his initial appearance, however, he’s only referred to as “Baby Godzilla” by the humans on the ground gazing up at his towering, toddling glory. Minilla has gone on to become a viciously hated name within the larger, ongoing Godzilla fandom. He’s cited in online sources as Godzilla’s “adopted son,” but I’m not sure that his initial appearance backs that detail up either. In Son of Godzilla, Baby Godzilla is prematurely hatched from a mysterious egg when his nest is discovered by gigantic mantises (Kamakuras) looking for an easy meal. Before he can gather the strength to flee, he is immediately rescued by Godzilla, who is summoned by his pathetic cries for help. There is no appearance or mention of a mother figure who might have laid that egg, but the scientists & freelance reporter watching from the ground all immediately refer to Godzilla as the pitiful creature’s father. The King of Monsters takes on that responsibility with enough gusto that the question of their biological relation is beside the point. Godzilla teaches Baby Godzilla how to breathe fire and how to rule over the giant bugs that infest the small island where he hatched, like a dad teaching his son how to play catch or how to change a car’s engine oil. It’s all very cute, assuming that you can stand looking directly at the mini-Godzilla’s craggly face.

Baby Godzilla is cute in the exact way that a pathetically ugly rescue dog is cute. Every bumbling minute spent with him is a gift, since it’s a miracle he wasn’t immediately put down. When the giant mantises poke at his freshly hatched body, all he can do is roll around in the dirt like a waterlogged roast turkey that fell off the kitchen table. Minilla has neither a name nor a neck in his first appearance, the latter of which presumably develops during puberty for his species. He falls down constantly, he squawks like an injured donkey, and his every movement is scored as if he were an overweight clown trying to squeeze himself into an impossibly tiny car. I love him. The great thing about Godzilla movies is that they are, at their very least, 2-for-1 creature features that double the number of rubber-suited monsters you’d expect to see in an equivalent Roger Corman cheapie. Whether Godzilla’s fighting a three-headed hell beast, a giant crawfish, or a sentient pile of trash, you’re getting at least two monsters for the price of one. For its part, Son of Godzilla offers you four giant beasts: Godzilla himself (who graciously appears less than a minute into the opening scene), the aforementioned glowing-eyed Kamakura mantises, a giant spider named Kumonga and, the most unholy abomination of all, Baby Godzilla. That’s a lot of bang for your buck, so it’s a little silly that dedicated fans of the series waste so much energy complaining about this outing just because they have to babysit Godzilla’s uggo offspring to get to the good stuff. Not even Godzilla bodyslamming Kamakuras to death and then lighting their mantis corpses on fire is enough to overcome the film’s reputation as Kiddie Junk, à la Godzilla vs Megalon. Pity.

As always, the human drama in the periphery of these kaiju battles is mostly an afterthought. Director Jun Fukuda continues the fun island hangout vibe he previously established in Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, putting in a bare-minimum effort to connect the kaiju shenanigans to an obligatory environmental message. A secret collective of environmental scientists has taken over a small island off the Japanese coast to conduct experiments in controlling the weather, in preparation for future climate change & overpopulation crises. Mysterious machines whir in the background while the scientists float balloons full of experimental chemical compounds into the atmosphere that can adjust the local temperature on demand. A freelance journalist crashes the party but ultimately doesn’t find these experiments nefarious, so he casually joins the crew as a cook (and a potential lover for the island’s sole resident, who lurks in the nearby jungle). The weather machine business does eventually come in handy in two ways, though. It offers Godzilla some miniature structures to knock down, as is his wont, and it sets up a graphically beautiful conclusion in which the scientists trigger a snowstorm that freezes Godzilla & Baby Godzilla into forced hibernation. The final image is of the parent & child huddling for warmth as they’re buried alive in snow, while the scientists escape the island via raft and congratulate themselves on a humane resolution to the monster attacks. Admittedly, they do find a way to escape without killing Godzilla’s baby, but I still found the image to be hauntingly sad. Baby Godzilla has a fucked up little face that only a parent could love, and Son of Godzilla vividly illustrates that cold isolation from an otherwise unkind world in its final minute. It’s almost enough to make you cry.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: M3GAN v Superman – Dusk of Justice

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two superhero movies currently in wide theatrical release: M3GAN 2.0 (2025) & Superman (2025).

00:00 Welcome

04:17 I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
15:10 The Age of Innocence (1993)
21:57 Misericordia (2025)
28:50 Looney Tunes – The Day the Earth Blew Up (2025)
34:24 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

38:24 Megan 2.0 (2025) vs. Superman (2025)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: X – The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Roger Corman’s psychedelic sci-fi crime thriller X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963).

00:00 Sinners (2025)
08:48 Secret Mall Apartment (2025)
13:50 The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
19:15 Beau Travail (1999)
25:28 Strawberry Mansion (2022)
33:01 The Haunted Palace (1963)

37:20 X – The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Lagniappe Podcast: Junk Head (2017)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Takahide Hori’s stop-motion-animated nightmare comedy Junk Head (2017).

00:00 Welcome

03:55 Vampire Hunter D (1985)
07:07 Casino (1995)
15:31 Deadwood – The Movie (2019)
22:30 The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
38:17 The Conformist (1970)
42:32 Times Square (1980)
48:56 Devil Fetus (1982)
55:38 Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

1:01:21 Junk Head (2017)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Ash (2025)

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It is a truth non-universally acknowledged that all art is political, but Ash, from director Steven Ellison (better known under his musical moniker Flying Lotus), may be the first film I’ve ever seen that has no identifiable thesis and thus appears to be completely apolitical. This isn’t a criticism so much as an observation of the fact that this movie, despite how much I enjoyed it, seems to be all but completely theme-less. Riya (Eiza González) wakes up, amnesiac, inside of what appears to be crew quarters, surrounded by dead bodies, all of which demonstrate extreme violence done against them. She experiences horrifying flashes of such violence: a head bashed in by a rock, a face melting away as it decomposes, smiles turning from friendly and warm to malevolent and menacing. She walks outside and discovers that she was inside of some kind of station or base on an alien world, as something snowlike drifts down from a sky that is dominated by a radial design that resembles the iris of a great eye, pulsing and pulsating. She sees something vaguely humanoid at a distance, obscured by the harsh atmosphere, although it remains unclear if there is someone or something out there, or if it is perhaps a mirror image of herself (as it mimics her movements) or even a mirage or hallucination. She manages to make it back inside before the atmosphere suffocates her, only to hear a knock at the door. It’s Brion (Aaron Paul), the sixth member of their expedition team, who has left his post in orbit in response to a distress call from the surface, saying that Riya himself had told him that Clarke (Kate Elliott), the only person not accounted for between the two of them and the corpses, had undergone some kind of psychotic break and attacked the others. Riya attempts to recover her memories and advocates for finding and rescuing Clarke, but their time is limited; they have to return to the main spaceship the next time that it completes its orbit in just a few hours, as damage to the base means that they have insufficient atmosphere to wait for it to come around again. 

In writing about Lotus’s previous film, Kuso, Brandon noted that the gross out comedy (with heavy focus on the “gross out” part) was of a kind with Adult-Swim-to-feature pipeline films that “tend[ed] to push attention spans to the limit at full length.” I can confirm that this was an issue for one of my viewing companion, who admitted in the car ride on the way home that some of the gaps in his understanding of the film could be attributed to dozing off a couple of times, but this is also a film with an intentionally dense plot that lends itself to few easy answers. The amnesiac protagonist character is not necessarily a new one, but the film initially sets itself up as a bit of a science fiction mystery with an anachronic order: Who killed everyone? Can Brion be trusted? Can Riya, for that matter? As characterization and events are doled out in flashes of recovered memory as well as exploration footage that Riya manages to recover from a drone, we learn more about what happened, and it becomes apparent that this movie is little more than a remix of other films from this genre — an excellently photographed, perfectly soundtracked, and gorgeously colored, to be sure, but a remix nonetheless. That does not detract from the film, but that all of these elements come with a bit of a pacing issue does. 

In the opening minutes, as Riya makes her way outside of the base and sees a figure in the distance mimicking her movement, one thinks of the finale of Annihilation. The quick cross-cutting of horrific images in Riya’s mind—be they memories, hallucinations, nightmares, or some combination thereof—calls to mind Event Horizon, which famously tucked all of the visuals that pushed the film into the NC-17 rating into mere blips on screen in order to secure an R, so that the viewer isn’t sure what they’re seeing but are nonetheless disturbed. As Riya watches the video captured by one of the mission’s drones and we intercut between the footage itself and the memories that it awakens within her, one is reminded of the crew of the Nostromo as they approach the downed ship on LV-426 in Alien (that the planet “Ash,” from which the film takes its title, also has a very similar designation is but one of the smallest of many allusions to that franchise). Their discovery of an alien artifact of their own and the realization that this is the first domino that falls before the tragedy we entered in media res at the start of the film is likewise very Alien-like, and then the film pushes further and becomes a bit like Prometheus in the study of organic matter taken from it, which becomes an orifice-invading life form that is ultimately responsible for everything. There’s even a little The Thing in there, as this is an isolated place in a desolate environment where no one can be trusted, as well as a really great Rob Bottin/Stanley Winston style mutant human at the end. 

One Alien film it doesn’t borrow from is Alien3, but it does crib from another of director David Fincher’s films, but to say more on that would stray too far into spoiler territory, and I think this is a film that should be gone into with as little foreknowledge as possible. I certainly did; it just happened to be $5 Tuesday (well, $5.75 now) and a friend finally had some time off after having to work an extended stretch of days during and around SXSW. The arthouse was doing repertory screenings of things I had already seen, and Brandon had written about Black Bag and the new Looney Tunes picture, so with nothing more to go on than the tiny icon of the film’s poster in the MoviePass app, I went to the film with a couple of friends. As soon as the characteristic “heartbeat” sound and logo card that accompanies the opening of the Shudder app and precedes the films it distributes, I realized that I had accidentally duped myself into paying for a movie that I could watch at home. That having been said, when the film’s opening fifteen minutes or so felt very much like the beginning of a Syfy Channel original (albeit an extremely elevated and gory one), I was glad that I was watching this in a theater instead of at home, where the film’s pacing would have been a greater challenge on my attention span. This is a film that is introspective, but temporally, not tonally. There’s a lovely dream sequence in the middle that I rather liked, but the purposeful use of long scenes in which very little is happening and we are left to merely contemplate the tableau is something that I can see turning off certain audiences (my two viewing companions, for example, had polar opposite reactions).

Even if you, like me, are more tolerant of those contemplative moments, you may still find that what’s most critically missing here is a lack of theme. Alien is positively (and often literally) dripping with concepts of motherhood, gestation, and birth; The Thing captures a quiet paranoia and isolation that’s universally emotionally applicable; Event Horizon is a parable about madness through the consequences of what happens when science pierces the veil of reality. All of these are existential horrors in what are normally considered environments of speculative fiction, and all of them feature terrifying results of encounters with beings so unlike us that moral concepts of “good” and “evil” don’t really apply. So is Ash. But as to what Ash is about … I’m not really sure that I could tell you. The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a “purpose” or a “point,” meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its “purpose” is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its “point” is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner. It won’t be for everyone, but if you have the inclination after this review to see it, I’d see it on the big screen if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Mickey 17 (2025)

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When we recently did our podcast episode about The Big Sleep, Brandon mentioned that he had already seen Mickey 17 and briefly shared his thoughts about it. One of the things that he noted was that when Bong Joon Ho makes a movie that is primarily for a Western audience, he foregoes a lot of the subtlety that is maintained in the films that he makes with his homeland in mind. Which is to say that I think he thinks we’re all a little stupid over here (and he’s not wrong). Memories of Murder and Parasite are films with lots of subtext and subtlety (although the latter doesn’t hold back with its themes), while Snowpiercer and Okja are—and I mean this in the most affectionate and respectful way possible—a little obvious. When I think about Bong’s body of work, the scene that comes to my mind most often and the one that stands out most clearly is the sequence from Snowpiercer in which Tilda Swinton’s androgynous Minister Mason delivers a speech to disruptive back-of-train passengers. “A hat belongs on the head,” they say, “And the shoe belongs on the foot. I am a hat; you are a shoe.” Mason’s voice drips with disdain and hatred. Theirs is a demonstration of not just their slavish, religious devotion to class distinction, but just how furiously angry power can be when it reinforces itself, how the veil of civility (barely) conceals a snarling dog. 

So when you hear mixed things about Mickey 17, and people talking about how the film is obvious, well, they’re not lying to you. Mickey 17 is an obvious movie. It lacks subtlety, and I can see how people may feel that they’re being talked down to, or how the film’s lack of nuance in its themes could make it feel like a Disney Channel Original version of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, if you’re feeling extremely uncharitable. I would never go that far, but I will say that my expectations were not exceeded. 

Three decades from now, dimwitted Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has run into some trouble with a mafia-connected loan shark, alongside his friend Timo (Steven Yeun). The two decide the best solution to their problem would be to escape the dying planet aboard a corporate ship bound for worlds that humans seek to colonize. Timo is able to talk himself into a pilot position immediately, while Mickey signs up to be an “expendable,” a person whose primary role is to take on dangerous jobs during the long spaceflight. Sometime between the present and the not-too-distant future, scientists figured out how to 3-D print cloned human bodies and how to transfer memories between them, allowing for people to essentially create backup versions of themselves in case of death. When the technology was virtually immediately used for criminal (and homicidal) purposes, its use was banned on earth, but due to the dangerous nature of starfaring, one “expendable” is allowed per starship. Aboard, Mickey meets and falls into immediately reciprocated love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer. The ship on which they are travelling is commanded not by a seasoned space veteran but by manchild former (read: failed) politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a character who exists to be an amalgamation of celebrities cum “leaders” but whose details make him a very (read: not at all) thinly veiled parody of the current U.S. president. Along for the ride is his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose rather thin characterization—she’s obsessed with sauce—goes largely unnoticed as Collette gives another fantastically over the top performance. 

Over the course of their journey, Mickey isn’t just given dangerous jobs to do, he becomes the subject of outright inhumane laboratory tests. His brain gets backed up onto a hard drive every week and then he gets printed out again when he dies. He’s put outside in a spacesuit in order to be exposed to cosmic radiation; he’s used to collect spores from the new planet’s atmosphere so that a vaccination to the diseases present on the planet can be created; he’s exposed to an ongoing series of nerve gas exposures in order to develop new biological weapons. One would also have to assume that, as his rations keep being halved over and over again, one of the Mickeys must have starved to death. It’s not a charmed life, but Mickey is so in love with Nasha that he doesn’t mind dying over and over again as long as they are together. Things go sideways, however, when he’s left to die after falling into a crevasse. He’s rescued by the tardigrade-like aliens that are native to the planet and brought back to the surface, and when he manages to get back aboard the ship, he learns that his replacement, Mickey 18, has already been printed. If anyone learns that there are two of them, they’ll both be killed and the brain backup deleted in accordance with law, and Sen. and Mrs. Marshal are all too happy to kill both Mickey and the tardigrade aliens (whom they dub “Creepers”) despite the indigenous life form’s apparent sentience. 

It’s a small detail, but one of the things that I liked at the beginning was that we see Mickey and Timo wearing the shirts for their failed macaron business, which features the slogan “macarons are not a sin.” It’s an unusual slogan but one that makes some modicum of sense since desserts and sweets are often considered an indulgence. However, we later learn in the film that “multiples are not a sin” was a rallying cry for a certain perspective on the question of the legality of the human backup-and-restore program. This all leads us to see how short-sighted Mickey is, as he clearly would have to know enough about the cloning process to see this as a reasonable macaron peddling tagline, but he also isn’t paying enough attention to know what he’s signing up for when he first enlists as an Expendable. Further, his taking inspiration (or willingness to go along with Timo’s inspiration) from a complicated legal and social issue for a myopic macaron business is more insight into Mickey’s doofiness. There is a charm in that, though, and the way that Nasha is instantly smitten with this dumb, lost puppy is endearing, as is her ongoing devotion to him despite the personality changes—some almost imperceptible, some quite obvious—that come with each rebirth. 

Shortly after Mickey 17 returns to the ship and discovers that Mickey 18 is already up and about, Mickey 18 takes it upon himself to assassinate Marshall. 17 is able to stop him in time, but this action reveals their existence as multiples and also ends in the death of one of two baby Creepers who came aboard the ship inside of a rock sample. There’s some slapstick, Ruffalo bellows as Marshall, the little cat-sized alien beings run around, then one of them is gunned to pieces. My viewing companion leaned over to me and said “I hated that,” the moment that the sequence ended. I didn’t agree, but I also understand that Mickey 17 isn’t going to win over as many people as Bong’s previous works have; it’s a familiar theme of his in a new environment and with different sci-fi trappings, but for some, it just doesn’t have that same “wow” factor. Unfortunately, I find myself completely sympathizing with the underwhelmed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Steel and Lace (1991)

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Do you remember that scene in RoboCop where RoboCop shoots a rapist in the dick?  RoboCop nails the guy perfectly through the thighs and skirt of a would-be victim, doubly traumatizing her before ineffectively referring her to a rape-crisis center so he can swiftly move on to enacting more police-state violence elsewhere on the streets of Detroit.  The straight-to-video sci-fi slasher Steel and Lace is essentially a feature-length remake of that scene, except with both the rape victim and the avenging cyborg embodied by one character.  Curiously, it plays that violent rape-revenge scenario with the softer, melodramatic tones of a Lifetime movie instead of the tongue-in-cheek humor of Verhoeven’s classic satire.  It’s no less violent than RoboCop, though.  Directed by special-effects artist Ernest D. Farino—who cut his teeth staging kill gags for the likes of Charles Band, Roger Corman, and Fred Olen Ray—its revenge robot’s body-destroying gadgets vary from scene to scene, depending on the momentary whims of the gore department.  As the title suggests, it’s a wild mix of hard & soft tones, a volatile sentiment that’s echoed by its original tagline: “She’s tough. She’s tender. She’s all woman. And all machine.”

Originally scripted under the title Lady Lazarus, Steel and Lace stars New Orleans local Clare Wren as a victim of sexual assault who loses her court case against her gang of business-bro attackers.  While the ponytailed yuppie scum celebrate their legal victory, she leaps from the courthouse roof to her death, becoming a victim of suicide as well as rape.  Devastated, her techie brother (Bruce Davison) brings her back to life as a rape-revenge Terminator that hunts down each of her Reaganite attackers one-by-one.  She bores holes in chests, she sets men aflame, she decapitates; she even sucks one deserving “victim” dry during penetrative sex, using his dick like a plastic straw.  She’s also a master of disguise, often appearing as single-scene characters before removing her face Mission Impossible-style to reveal the robo-woman beneath.  That shapeshifting ability lends a fun air of mystery to the film, as the audience is never fully sure which minor character is going to be revealed to be the Lady Lazarus robot next: the hot secretary, the hot lady at the bar, the male FBI agent who’s supposedly investigating the murders, etc.  The cops on her trail actually solving that mystery don’t add much to the movie (least of all David Naughton as Detective “Clippy”), but the inventiveness of the robo-murders more than make up for their bland asides.

Much like the dick-shooting scene in RoboCop, there’s an unshakeable sadness that settles on Steel and Lace once the novelty of its over-the-top violence wears off.  Wren recites the mantra “Pretty, very pretty” to each of the investor-bro villains before disposing of them, righteously spitting their own words from her attack back at them.  It’s a cathartic reversal of violence during the first couple of kills, but it gets increasingly sad the longer she’s forced to dwell on it, especially when her brother makes her replay each act of revenge on video so he can obsessively salivate over them like homemade pornography.  Worse yet, she doesn’t really seem to know who she was when she was alive and attacked, asking haunting questions like, “Who was I? Did I have friends? Was I happy?”  The only other woman of the note is the courtroom reporter who sketched her throughout her trial (Stacy Haiduk), whom she frequently locks robo-eyes with in an attempt to make a genuine social connection that has nothing to do with her former self’s rape or her brother’s revenge.  It’s likely silly to seek genuine pathos in this straight-to-video rape revenge RoboCop knockoff, but the fine folks at Vinegar Syndrome did such a wonderful job restoring it to a Fine Art quality that I can’t help myself.  It’s just as visually crisp & thematically meaningful to me as the time RoboCop shot that dude in the dick.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #224: Pitch Black (2000) & The Riddick Chronicles

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Welcome to Episode #224 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the many chronicles of Richard B. Riddick, starting with the sci-fi creature feature Pitch Black (2000).

00:00 We Love to Watch

06:53 Vin Diesel
21:30 Pitch Black (2000)
48:52 The Riddick Cinematic Universe

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-The Podcast Crew