For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Planet of the Vampires (1965), Mario Bava’s atmospheric Italo sci-fi precursor to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).
00:00 Sarah Squirm: Live + In the Flesh 05:40 Video rental stores
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Paul Verhoeven’s satirical adaptation of the Robert A. Heinlein sci-fi military novel Starship Troopers.
Most genre movie freaks may have moved on to shiny new boutique Blu-rays and moldy old VHS tapes, but I still collect most of my movies at the tried-and-true distribution hub of the thrift store DVD rack. You don’t always find rare gems at the thrift store, but you often find movies cheaper than they cost to rent on streaming, with the added bonus of a Special Features menu that most streamers don’t bother to upload. My recent pickup of the 1960s sci-fi lucha libre classic Santo vs. The Martian Invasion felt like a blessing by both metrics; it’s rare enough that it’s not currently available to stream at home with English subtitles, and the disc includes several Bonus Features, including full-length commentaries and a 30-minute interview with Santo’s heir, Son of Santo. It felt like even more of a blessing when those subtitles turned out to be a variation of Comic Sans, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen outside of an ironic lyrics-only music video on YouTube. I don’t know that reporting on these details is useful to anyone who didn’t happen to be shopping at the Thrift City USA on the West Bank last weekend, but I still want to advertise that the dream is still alive in the thrift store DVD racks of New Orleans in general. I suppose I also want to report that the home distribution label Kit Parker Films is surprisingly generous with their bargain-bin DVDs’ bonus content, so look out for those discs in particular while you’re digging through the stacks.
Billed on its title card as Santo the Silver Mask vs The Invasion of the Martians, this specific bargain-bin discovery is a fairly typical Atomic Age sci-fi cheapie about an alien invasion of planet Earth; its hero just happens to be the masked luchador Santo, protector of “the weak and the defenseless.” The alien-invasion plot is a little confused, with the Martians announcing their presence to the citizens of Mexico via multiple television broadcasts and having their evil deeds widely reported in local newspapers, then later being treated as a conspiratorial government secret hidden from the public. Instead of getting that story straight, the movie intensely focuses on the physical abilities & vulnerabilities of the Martians. Much attention is paid to the fact that they frequently take “oxygen pills” to be able to withstand Earth’s atmosphere, among other needless explanations of their uncanny ability to speak Spanish. There’s also an intense fixation on their cube-shaped helmets’ Astral Eye, a glowing eyeball that allows them to either hypnotize or disintegrate nearby Earthlings, depending on the demands of the day. They can also wrestle fairly well, which makes them the perfect opponent for Santo, the greatest & bravest wrestler who ever lived. Santo repeatedly grapples with the blonde-wigged beefcake models from planet Mars, eternally flustered by their ability to teleport back to the safety of their spaceship every time the impromptu matches don’t go their way. He eventually wins by stealing one of their teleportation devices to infiltrate and explode that ship himself, like a wrestler claiming a championship belt (literally; the device is belt-shaped).
The Martian Invasion loses a little steam once these intergalactic lucha libre matches return to a proper wrestling ring instead of being staged in exterior locations on the streets of Mexico, but most of its vintage sci-fi hijinks remain adorable & fun. Instead of brooding in the bootleg Gothic atmosphere of horror pictures like Santo vs The Vampire Women or Santo and the Blue Demon vs Dracula and the Wolf Man, a lot of the runtime is filled with insane, rapid-fire dialogue about the peculiarities of the Martian species. There’s also some fun 60s kitsch to the cheesecake Martian women in particular, who hypnotize & seduce the major players of Mexican patriarchy with the laziest futuristic go-go dancing you’ve ever seen. Between that half-hearted eroticism and the absurd over-reliance on stock footage to pad out the budget, I was often reminded of some of my favorite Atomic Age sci-fi novelties: Nude on the Moon, Cat-Women of the Moon, Queen of Blood, The Astounding She-Monster, etc. None of those comparison points feature extensive wrestling matches, though, which gives this an extra layer of novelty the same way the Santo horror films feel novel compared to their classic Universal Horror equivalents.
Something I don’t have context for is how much of an anomaly The Martian Invasion is within the larger Santo canon. It felt a little zippier & goofier than the couple horror films I’ve seen starring the masked luchador, which rely heavily on classic haunted-house mood & dread. I don’t have enough evidence to say how typical that is to Santo’s filmography, though, because I’ve only seen three of what Wikipedia lists as “at least 54” titles in his catalog. Given the pace at which I’m finding notable Santo movies on used discs or streaming, it’s likely I’ll never get the complete picture of his big-screen work before I run out of time and die. Honestly, I still can’t even pin down the exact list of titles that make up that catalog. Wikipedia, IMDb, and Letterboxd all have conflicting lists of what count as an official Santo film, and the “Filmografia” Special Feature on my Martian Invasion disc only includes 52 of his “at least 54” titles. To help illustrate the immensity & inconsistency of that catalog, I have transcribed the entire “Filmografia” feature of the Kit Parker DVD below. It’s the kind of list that has made me accept that I will only see whichever films I happen to pick up at local thrift stores, completionism be damned. May they all be as fun & loaded with bonus features as Santo vs The Martian Invasion.
Filmografia
1958
SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DEL MAL aka El Cerebro del Mal Santo vs The Evil Brain
SANTO CONTRA LOS HOMBRES INFERNALES Santo vs The Infernal Men aka White Cargo
1961
SANTO CONTRA LOS ZOMBIES Santo vs The Zombies Released in the U.S. as Invasion of the Zombies
SANTO CONTRA EL RED DEL CRIMEN Santo vs The King of Crime
SANTO EN EL HOTEL DE LA MUERTE Santo in The Hotel of Death
SANTO CONTRA EL CEREBRO DIABOLICO Santo vs The Diabolical Brain
1962
SANTO CONTRA LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS Santo vs The Vampire Women Released in the U.S. as Samson vs The Vampire Women
1963
SANTO EN EL MUSEO DE CERA Santo in The Wax Museum Released in the U.S. as Samson in the Wax Museum
SANTO CONTRA EL ESTRANGULADOR Santo vs The Strangler
SANTO CONTRA EL ESPECTRO DEL ESTRANGULADOR Santo vs The Ghost of the Strangler
1964
SANTO EN ATACAN LAS BRUJAS aka Santo En La Casa De Las Brujas Santo in The Witches Attack
BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL PODER SATANICO Blue Demon vs The Satanic Power Cameo appearance
SANTO CONTRA EL HACHA DIABOLICA Santo vs The Diabolical Ax
1965
SANTO EN LOS PROFANADORES DE TUMBAS aka Los Traficantes De La Muerte Santo in The Grave Robbers
SANTO EN EL BARON BRAKOLA Santo in Baron Brakola
1966
SANTO CONTRA LA INVASION DE LOS MARCIANOS Santo vs The Martian Invasion
SANTO CONTRA LOS VILLANOS DEL RING Santo vs The Villains of The Ring
SANTO EN OPERACION 67 Santo in Operation 67
1967
SANTO EN EL TESORO DE MOCTEZUMA Santo in The Treasure of Moctezuma
1968
SANTO EN EL TESORO DE DRACULA Santo in Dracula’s Treasure aka EL Vampiro y El Sexo
SANTO CONTRA CAPULINA Santo vs Capulina
1969
SANTO CONTRA BLUE DEMON EN LA ATLANTIDA Santo vs Blue Demon in Atlantis
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA LOS MONSTRUOS Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON EN EL MUNDO DE LOS MUERTOS Santo & Blue Demon in The World of the Dead
SANTO CONTRA LOS CAZADORES DE CABEZAS Santo vs The Headhunters
SANTO FRENTE A LA MUERTE Santo Faces Death aka Santo vs The Mafia Killers
1970
SANTO CONTRA LOS JINETES DEL TERROR Santo vs The Terror Riders aka The Lepers and Sex
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LAS MUJERES VAMPIRAS Santo in The Revenge of the Vampire Women
SANTO CONTRA LA MAFIA DEL VICIO Santo vs The Mafia of Vice aka Mission Sabotage
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA MOMIA Santo in The Revenge of the Mummy
LAS MOMIAS DE GUANAJUATO The Mummies of Guanajuato Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras
1971
SANTO CONTRA LA HIJA DE FRANKENSTEIN Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter
SANTO CONTRA LOS ASESINOS DE OTROS MUNDOS Santo vs The Killers from Other Worlds aka Santo vs The Living Atom
SANTO Y EL AGUILA REAL Santo and The Royal Eagle aka Santo and The Tigress in The Royal Eagle
SANTO EN MISION SUICIDA Santo in Suicide Mission
SANTO EN EL MISTERIO DE LA PERLA NEGRA Santo in The Mystery of The Black Pearl aka Santo in The Caribbean Connection Released in Spain in 1971 and in Mexico in 1974
1972
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA DRACULA Y EL HOMBRE LOBO Santo & Blue Demon vs Dracula & The Wolfman
SANTO CONTRA LOS SECUESTRADORES Santo vs The Kidnappers
SANTO CONTRA LA MAGIA NEGRA Santo vs Black Magic
SANTO & BLUE DEMON EN LAS BESTIAS DEL TERROR Santo & Blue Demon in The Beasts of Terror
SANTO EN LAS LOBAS Santo in The She-Wolves
SANTO EN ANONIMO MORTAL Santo in Anonymous Death Threat
1973
SANTO Y BLUE DEMON CONTRA EL DR. FRANKENSTEIN Santo & Blue Demon vs Dr. Frankenstein
SANTO CONTRA EL DR. MURERTE Santo vs Dr. Death aka Santo Strikes Again
1974
SANTO EN LA VENGANZA DE LA LLORONA Santo in The Revenge of The Crying Woman
1975
SANTO EN ORO NEGRO aka La Noche De San Juan Santo in Black Gold
1977
MISTERIO EN LAS BERMUDAS Mystery in Bermuda Co-starring Blue Demon and Mil Mascaras
1979
SANTO EN LA FRONTERA DEL TERROR Santo at the Border of Terror aka Santo vs The White Shadow
1981
SANTO CONTRA EL ASESINO DE LA TELEVISION Santo vs The Television Killer
CHANOC Y EL HIJO DEL SANTO VS LOS VAMPIROS ASESINOS Chanoc & The Son of Santo vs The Killer Vampires Cameo appearance
1982
SANTO EN EL PUNO DE LA MUERTE Santo in The Fist of Death
SANTO EN LA FURIA DE LOS KARATECAS Santo in The Fury of the Karate Experts
Sometimes, a movie can be so aggressively derivative that it crosses a threshold into becoming thrillingly unique. Recently, Vera Drew’s copyright-skirting The People’s Joker melted eight decades of Batman comics & movies into a shockingly personal, vulnerable self-portrait. One of this year’s buzziest horror films, In a Violent Nature, is a novelty slasher that simulates the sensation of watching a Friday the 13th sequel on an overdose of cough syrup. Further back, vintage Hong Kong action schlock like The Seventh Curse and The Dragon Lives Again “borrowed” familiar icons from better-funded American productions for their own absurd purposes, theorizing what it might be like if Indiana Jones had to fight off Xenomorphs or if “Bruce Lee” teamed up with “Popeye” to beat up “Dracula” in Hell. Lucio Fulci might not have been doing his most personal, innovative work when making an unsanctioned sequel to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but without Italian producers’ complete disregard for American copyright, we never would have gotten the underwater zombie-on-shark fight scene of Zombi 2. Genuinely transcendent, imaginative art can result from filmmakers being shamelessly derivative, as long as they fully embrace the practice and push it to its extreme. Just call it “post-modern” and all is forgiven.
That’s why I was pleased to discover that the big-budget South Indian sci-fi film Kalki 2828 AD is even more derivative than I initially expected. All of the promotional materials for the film led me to believe it was a mockbuster version of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, distinguished only from a Syfy Channel knockoff of that series by the fact that it boasts the biggest budget of any Indian production to date. It turns out that Kalki 2898 is less of an overly expensive Dune bootleg than it is a more general sampler of any & every big-budget sci-fi property you can name: Dune, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Fury Road, Guardians of the Galaxy, everything. As a result, the movie it ended up reminding me most of was The Fifth Element: a mostly goofy genre derivative with a few genuinely transcendent moments all of its own making. By the time a flashback reveals that its wisecracking anti-hero was trained by his mentor using laser-swords, it’s clear that the movie is uninterested in hiding its artistic debts to pre-existing material. When it climaxes with a giant wizard figure doing Gandalf’s “You shall not pass!” routine during a bridge-fight with said anti-hero in a Transformers-styled mech suit, it’s also clear that those obvious debts do not matter. Kalki 2898 may be derivative, but it’s also deliriously, deliciously entertaining.
Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan stars as the Gandalf-like wizard of that bridge fight: a wizened but weary warrior who has been cursed with immortality for a past sin but eventually uses his extended centuries on earth for good. Tollywood action star Prabhas (of Baahubali fame) pilots the smart-car mech suit in that fight as a Han Solo type: a mercenary bad-boy who only does good when it fits his selfish needs. They’re fighting over possession of a pregnant damsel in distress (Deepika Padukone, of last year’s Pathaan), who’s believed to be carrying a reincarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. There’s, of course, a prophecy going around that her child could be The One: a warrior savior who will bring light to a desert hell planet that has been suffering in greed & darkness. Throw in a fascistic Empire who exploits the labor of the many to pamper the lives of the privileged few, and you’ve got the basic building blocks of a standard Dune or Star Wars knockoff, except maybe one with a concerning amount of attention paid to the Empire’s search for “fertile females.” Kalki 2898 constantly refers to major events of Hindu mythology in flashbacks that can be disorienting for uninformed Western viewers, but so much of its story is borrowed from a universal source of worship (corporate pop-culture IP) that the knowledge gap doesn’t matter all too much.
If there’s any way that Kalki 2898 closely adheres to its Dune inspiration in particular, it’s that it abruptly ends after three hours with only half a story told. One of the final images is a title card promising that the adventure will continue in the “Kalki Cinematic Universe,” and it’s been a while since I was excited instead of annoyed by that serialized approach to cinematic storytelling. That’s not the only hack move it pulls that would’ve annoyed me in most American blockbusters either. It includes many for-their-own sake cameos that wink to an insider audience (including one for Baahubali director S.S. Rajamouli); it follows up its “until next time . . .” title card with a mid-credits post-script that promises an evolution for the big bad villain. Worse, early flashbacks include horrendous de-aging CGI effects for Bachchan that betray the fact that the film was rushed to market before it was fully completed, with production having wrapped only a month before release. None of those usual red flags bothered me here, though, no more than I was bothered by watching it play around with the pre-fabricated action figures of more famous sci-fi properties. Kalki 2898 AD is playful & extreme enough in its scene-to-scene action that any questions of artistic integrity or originality feel beside the point.
Much like nu-metal, Crocs, and exposed-thong whale tail, it appears that VHS tapes are hip again. There’s already been widespread aesthetic nostalgia for the tape-warp wear & tear of vintage VHS tapes in horror cinema from the past decade or so, as evidenced in titles like Late Night with the Devil, WNUF Halloween Special, Rent-a-Pal, Beyond the Gates, Censor,V/H/S, and VHYes. But now I’m starting to see more appreciation for the physical tapes themselves, not just digital simulation of their degradation. Soon after the old-school video store Future Shock opened in Mid-City, renting both VHS tapes and VCR players, I attended an unrelated screening of the classic 1987 slasher The Stepfather at The Mudlark Theatre, projected from VHS to a hanging bedsheet. At the start of the movie, the audience warmly chuckled at the tape’s brief tracking issues and the projector’s struggle to calibrate its fuzzy image quality, but that attention to format eventually gave way to sincere tension & unease. It was a genuine 1990s sleepover atmosphere, as if we had snuck an R-rated movie past our sleeping parents. It was also very likely the first time I’ve watched a movie on VHS in almost a decade (specifically, since we covered Highway to Hell for Movie of the Month in 2015), since that’s around the time I gave away my VCRs because they all kept eating my tapes.
You don’t have to go to bootleg repertory screenings at Marigny puppet theatres to get in on the VHS nostalgia wave, though. While the collection & exhibition of physical VHS tapes is the domain of only a few true sickos, plenty movie nerds are exposed to VHS scans on a regular basis without intentionally looking for them. Anyone who regularly spends time searching YouTube, Tubi, Archive.org, and thrift-store DVD stacks for cheap-access cinema has been subjected to a deluge of sub-professional digi scans of VHS tapes, which are just as rampant now in the golden age of boutique Blu-ray restorations as they ever have been. Consider the curious case of Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam, a 1985 comedy that had an initial theatrical release on celluloid, but is unavailable for streaming in HD. All official, legal uploads of the film to sites like Tubi, Freevee, and PlutoTV are the same scan of a vintage VHS cassette, since the film was a much bigger hit as a video store rental than it was as a theatrical release. That’s likely because the VHS cover dared to advertise the appearance of the popular character Ernest P. Worrell, despite the fact that his last-minute inclusion in the film is essentially a celebrity cameo. In theaters, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam was an anonymous, immediately forgotten comedy starring some nobody named Jim Varney. In video stores, it lingered on the shelves for years, boosted its official branding as An Ernest Movie. Even now, it’s still a kind of VHS rental, just one that’s untethered from a physical presence.
Dr. Otto and the Riddle of the Gloom Beam officially marks the first big-screen appearance of Ernest P. Worrell, the fast-talking Southern fool who’s always mugging directly to the camera and addressing the audience as his good friend “Vern”. Before he was camping, slam-dunking, saving Christmas, going to jail, and getting scared stupid in his career-making star vehicles, Ernest was a recurring character in a series of 1980s television commercials directed by John Cherry, starring rubber-faced comedian Jim Varney. Cherry (from Nashville) & Varney (from Kentucky) mostly sold their Ernest ads to the Louisiana & Mississippi at first, but the popularity of the character spread wide enough nationally that they figured they could cash in with a legitimate feature film. Ernest was only one of Varney’s many stock characters, though; longtime Varney Heads will surely recall fellow ad-break mainstay Auntie Nelda, Varney’s old-biddy drag act with a perpetually sprained neck. Instead of capitalizing on the popularity of Ernest in particular, Cherry & Varney chose to use The Riddle of the Gloom Beam as a showcase for every character Varney had in his comedic repertoire, giving the actor room to test-run a bunch of vague, go-nowhere archetypes like Evil German Scientist, Australian Militia Maniac, Filthy Pirate, and Literal Trash Monster, along with playing the hits. It’s less comedically specific than the official Ernest movies as a result, working more like a sketch comedy revue than a feature film.
The titular Dr. Otto is, of course, a Varney creation: a broad mad-scientist character costumed with a living human hand for a hat. The evil lair where he regularly attempts world domination looks like what might happen if Rita Repulsa couldn’t afford to pay the light bill, but it’s lavishly decorated with a wide range of evildoer machines that don’t do any evil thing in particular except light up & smoke. His first plan of attack is fairly agreeable, using his “gloom beam” machine to erase all official records of debt, throwing banks & credit card companies into chaos, to the point where CEOs are putting revolvers in their mouths onscreen in what’s ostensibly a children’s film. Later, he threatens to use the gloom beam to kill all the world’s first-born children like a Biblical plague, but let’s not focus too much on that plot point. Instead, let’s all boo & hiss at the hero that the banks & government nominate to take Dr. Otto down: a square-jawed American patriot named Lance Sterling (Myke Mueller), Dr. Otto’s childhood rival. In flashback, we witness the disturbing difference between Lance’s privileged, WASPy upbringing and Dr. Otto’s miserable life in the gutter, which only encourages us to root for the mad scientist as he seeks revenge on the planet. That’s what makes it okay to cheer on the many disguises he takes in the present—including crowd favorites Ernest & Nelda—as they do objectively evil things to prevent the squeaky-clean hero from saving the day.
None of the individual jokes or visual gags in The Riddle of the Gloom Beam are especially funny, but the movie is charming anyway. It’s high-energy, low-budget independent filmmaking, making up for a lot of the dead air between failed bits with aggressive music-video editing tactics and handmade arts & crafts ingenuity. It’s also incredibly dark considering the average age of its target audience. If nothing else, it’s got to be the only children’s film I’ve ever seen include a minutes-long Deer Hunter parody, making for two visual references to suicide by gun. When I was a kid, television and the video store were cultural democratizers. Jim Carrey & Robin Williams may have had more legitimate, widespread distribution in brick & mortar movie theaters, but Varney was their professional equal in my mind at the time, thanks to then-lifelong exposure to Ernest ads & videos in the Southern market where he hit heaviest. If The Riddle of the Gloom Beam had any chance of earning cult-classic status, it would’ve needed a lot more Ernest content instead of flooding the screen with Varney’s lesser-known comedic personae (despite those characters’ later appearances on his short-lived CBS sketch show Hey Vern, It’s Ernest!). Cherry & Varney soon figured that out in better-remembered titles like Ernest Goes to Jail & Ernest Scared Stupid, which have a much more distinct comedic personality than this early outing even if they don’t match its creative, try-anything energy. Thus, The Riddle of the Gloom Beam is the exact kind of title that belongs on VHS; it would feel sacrilegious to watch it in any updated format, since it’s such a relic of its era. And in a way, that makes Tubi just as hip and plugged-in to The Moment as your local underground video stores and D.I.Y. neighborhood rep screenings (as long as you politely ignore the fact that the company is owned by Rupert Murdoch).
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss Fritz Lang’s German expressionist sci-fi landmark Metropolis (1927).
I recently saw Guitar Wolf perform at a crowded, raucous dive bar and was impressed by the band’s continued ferocity. The Japanese garage-rock trio has been around for as long as I have been alive, but they’re rocking and rolling as hard as ever, shredding & crowdsurfing through neighborhood venues the size of living rooms. Meanwhile, it took me two full days to recover from just one of their shows, suffering both headbanger’s whiplash and tinnitus from standing too few feet away from their overcranked amps. I am convinced that a single week of touring with Guitar Wolf would literally kill me, especially since they insist on continuing to wear their black leather pants & jackets (the official Jet Rock n’ Roll uniform) in the Gulf South heat. I left the show with a reignited excitement for the band, though, so I spent more time with them by revisiting their most prominent cinematic showcase to date: the late-90s splatstick horror comedy Wild Zero, in which they fight off a local breakout of astrozombies between playing gigs. Despite only currently being accessible via YouTube, Wild Zero has a sizable cult following—partially due to Guitar Wolf’s Ramones-style rock n’ roll superheroes presence in the film, partially due to its surprisingly progressive queer themes—and it was without question my first introduction to the band. That cult doesn’t account for all of Guitar Wolf’s audience, though, as evidenced by a recent failed Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a sequel titled Wild Zero 2: The Strongest Blood of Humanity. There’s apparently a disparity between the ecstatic enthusiasm of rock n’ roll maniacs who show up to see Guitar Wolf in concert (basically anyone who’s familiar with the phrase “Goner Records”) and the dimmed enthusiasm of schlock gobblers who’d show up to see Guitar Wolf onscreen again (aged internet nerds who used to trade zombie schlock recommendations on long-defunct message boards). There’s obviously plenty of overlap between those two groups; there’s just not enough.
Fear not, Jet Rockers! There’s already another Guitar Wolf movie out there waiting for anyone who’s seen Wild Zero a few too many times but wants to spend more time with the band while the buzzsaw feedback from their most recent tour fades from your eardrums. The 1997 indie cheapie The Sore Losers featured a small onscreen role for Guitar Wolf years before Wild Zero entered the chatroom. The band appears as The Men in Black (Leather): a mysterious trio of villainous space aliens who frame a rival alien gang for intergalactic murders. They’re introduced chugging beers in a Mississippi graveyard about halfway into the film, then randomly materialize at arbitrary points in the plot to wield swords, ogle strippers, and shoot CGI laser beams out of their eyes. They’re very much like the Guitar Wolf of Wild Zero, except they have yet to learn how to use their powers for good. The Sore Losers traffics in that kind of continued-adventures comic book storytelling throughout, directly referencing EC horror comics in its guiding iconography just as often as it references 1950s drive-in B-movies. Guitar Wolf is only one faction of local garage-rock royalty who parade across the screen. Members of The Gories, Oblivians, and New Orleans’s own The Royal Pendletons appear alongside them to make it clear this is the document of a specific, contemporary scene just as much as it is a nostalgia piece about vintage schlock media. Specifically, The Sore Losers is scuzzy, D.I.Y. exploitation trash starring hyper-local celebrities of the Memphis garage punk scene – a lost broadcast from the non-existent film division of Goner Records. Given that Goner was initially established as a means to book & distribute Guitar Wolf in America just a few years before this film’s production, it fully has the credentials to back that up (even if competing garage label Sympathy for the Record Industry initially released the tie-in soundtrack, as advertised in the credits).
Like Wild Zero, The Sore Losers opens with CGI UFOs invading planet Earth, except in this case the UFO transforms into a hotrod the second it lands. We’re told in voiceover that our antihero alien lead (Jack Oblivion) has been in exile from Earth for the past 42 years, punished for failing his 1950s mission to kill a dozen Northern Mississippi beatniks. He immediately picks his mission back up again in a scheme to get back into the good graces of his alien overlords on The Invisible Wavelength, finding it much easier to locate & kill hippies in 1990s Mississippi than it was to locate & kill beatniks there four decades prior. There are a lot of convoluted negotiations around hitting the exact dead-hippie metric that would earn his freedom, but narrative coherence isn’t among the movie’s priorities anyway. Really, the hippie hunt is just an excuse for the intergalactic assassin to go on a short road trip to Memphis, so he can pose in vintage rock n’ roll gear along the way with redneck farmers, astrozombies, heavy-leather dominatrixes, and Betty Page pin-up girls. The cinematic influences on this episodic adventure are clear: John Waters, David Freidman, Gregg Araki, Russ Meyer, etc. The vintage sexploitation bent to that reference material leads to a lot of onscreen nudity, but not a lot of genuine horniness, giving the whole thing the feel of a rockabilly-themed Suicide Girls strip show. It’s all mugging & posing, which is perfectly fine for a movie that’s clearly designed for an insular group of musician friends to celebrate how cool the scene they created together is by mimicking the cool the vintage media they grew up with. It feels appropriate, then, that the end credits scroll includes the organizers of The Sore Losers Bash, since the local premiere & party for the film was almost more important than anything that actually happens in it. As of yet, you cannot time travel back to that party to experience it for yourself, but you can order a reissue of the accompanying garage-rock soundtrack from Goner and blow out your eardrums in an attempt to recreate it.
It says something that the reissued Sore Losers soundtrack currently has a better at-home presentation than the film it promotes. I rented The Sore Losers for $2 on VOD and was shocked by how gorgeous the digital restoration of its 16mm footage looked streaming at home. The cranked-up color saturation vividly highlighted the vintage comic book influence of its guiding aesthetic, whereas just a few years later it likely would’ve been filmed in a grim, grey DV format. However, the version I rented via Amazon had sound mixing issues that made the garage-rock soundtrack barely audible as a background whisper, as if those tracks were accidentally muted in export. There are much fuzzier copies of the movie uploaded to YouTube where you can hear that the songs are supposed to be much louder in the mix, but a lot of the visual & aural details are lost in the lower quality of those transfers, so it’s really a matter of picking your poison. The reason it’s worth mentioning is that the entire draw of the movie is watching cool people model outrageous leather outfits to loud rock n’ roll music (especially if you know those people personally), so a major component of that is experiencing missing if you can barely hear the rockin’ tunes. The best way to view the movie, then, is likely to buy a physical copy on disc. Better yet, don’t watch it at all. Just go to the next garage rock show at your local dive bar and do some covert people-watching while the amplifiers cause irreparable brain damage. From what I can tell, not much has changed on the scene fashion or personality-wise since the 90s. You’re just likely to see more people wearing earplugs now, and I wish I was smart enough to be one of them.
There are a lot of TikTok clips floating around out there that muddle the definition of the “POV” shot, to the point where it feels like the war to maintain its original meaning has already been lost. Thankfully, the 1958 AIP creature feature The Brain Eaters offers a handy tool for any teens confused by the meaning of a camera’s POV. Halfway through the hour-long horror cheapie, one of the titular brain eaters (parasitic dust bunnies with space-alien antennae) crawls across the carpet, up the bedframe, and over the mattress of a sleeping woman’s bedroom so the ceremonial brain eating can commence. We watch this slow, low-to-the-ground attack in 1st-person, with the camera inching towards the soon-to-be-brain-eaten victim as she slumbers, unaware. Now, listen to me carefully. When posting clips of this scene to your socials, do caption it “POV: When you’re about to eat some lady’s brain.” Do not caption it “POV: When you’re asleep and about to get your brain ate.” I hope this handy guide clears the matter up for today’s youths once and for all.
Of course, most teenagers are not scouring Tubi for vintage schlock with short enough runtimes to squeeze in before bed, but once upon a time that demographic would’ve been The Brain Eaters‘s exact audience. The reason it’s so short is that it was specifically made to fill out a double bill at the local drive-in, so that teens had an appropriate place to make out in public while parked in the family car. That kind of old-school B-movie filmmaking can lead to a lot of dead air between the monster attacks (all the better to make out to), but The Brain Eaters instead chooses to accept the challenge of cramming two hours of plot into one hour of celluloid. It doesn’t waste a second of its audience’s time as it hops from brain buffet to brain buffet, speeding along its standard-issue body snatcher plot with a narration track that’s impatient to get to the second half of that night’s double bill (either Earth vs. the Spider or Terror from the Year 5000, depending on the city where you parked). That’s why I was not at all shocked to learn that the late, great Roger Corman worked on the film as an uncredited executive producer, given that it was exemplary of the energy & efficiency desperately missing from most other contemporary drive-in fillers produced by anyone else.
I also was not shocked to learn that the film’s star, regular Corman player Ed Nelson (Bucket of Blood, Swamp Women, Attack of the Crab Monster, etc.), served as the on-set producer of the picture, since it’s essentially a vanity project about how handsome & cool he is. Nelson plays a buff scientist who’s just as comfortable studying field-research specimens on Bunsen burners as he is knocking out alien zombies with his fists. He’s a sophisticated brute with his heart worn proudly on his rolled-up sleeves, dragging along his lab-assistant fiancée (the sleeping woman from the film’s Brain-Eater-Cam POV shot, I’m sad to say) for each of his world-saving adventures. The frame is filled out by plenty of other B-movie archetypes—the perpetually scared girlfriend of a naively brave cop, the hardened detective from Washington D.C. who just wants results damnit, the local old fogey who knows the entire history of the town under attack, and so on—but the only one who really matters is our smart, strapping, all-American hero. That hero worship is obviously secondary to the brain-eating parasites that Nelson volunteers to thwart, but it’s still an adorable starring-role showcase for him anyway.
As for the brain eaters themselves, they’re not especially impressive as monster puppets. Stuck somewhere between a throwaway Jim Henson design for a background mouse and a ball of pet hair vacuumed from under your couch, their physical characteristics are more cute than scary. The movie leans heavily into the uncanniness of their origins & behavior in an entertaining way, though, starting with the arrival of a giant metal cone believed to be a spaceship. As our impatient narrator explains, a mysterious, 50-foot-tall metal structure appeared without warning in the woods outside Riverdale, Illinois, immediately prompting investigation from Congress’s official UFO Committee (complete with sly match-cut from the silhouette of the cone to the silhouette of the Capitol Dome). The brain eaters appear to rise from the ground at the direction of the cone, attaching themselves to the backs of innocent victims’ necks through vampiric puncture wounds, and piloting them like body-snatched zombies. The scariest the little scamps get is when they start body-snatching local street toughs, giving adults legitimate reasons to be scared of the youths of the day instead of just the normal, paranoid ones. Really, the core horror of the film can be found in the question, “What is the secret of The Cone?”, since every new detail about the alien structure just makes its appearance & purpose more confusing. It’s impervious to bullets, filled with Seussian tunnels to nowhere, and houses a godlike figure played by a young Leonard Nimoy (misspelled as “Nemoy” in the credits) whose plan for peaceful, global takeover via brain eaters actually doesn’t sound all that bad once you hear him out.
There’s a lot going on in this disposable horror-of-the-week novelty, especially considering that it only runs half the length of an average feature film. It can be harsh (depicting dead dogs & suicide attempts), goofy (in its cutesy creature design), and genuinely baffling (adding continual complications to the mystery of The Cone), but it is never boring, not for a second. Corman was notorious for establishing a rigid formula in his early monster movies that consistently gripped his audiences’ attention (for as long as they could stand to delay making out in the back seat) and for allowing his employees freedom to express themselves creatively as long as they adhered to that set structure. The exaggerated Dutch angles, glowing specimen jars full of ready-to-attack brain eaters, and mystical visit from the otherworldly Nimoy all suggest that Corman-actor-turned-Corman-director Bruno VeSota had just as much fun with that freedom behind the camera as Corman-actor-turned-Corman-producer Ed Nelson had posing as a movie star in front of it. I know it’s a little silly to mourn someone who lived 98 years and continued doing what he loved until the very end, but Corman could have lived for another 100 and it still wouldn’t be enough.
So far this year, I have seen two French science fiction films set in a future dominated by A.I. In Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, our inevitable A.I. dystopia is mostly a just a framing device for a cyclically doomed love affair that spans multiple lifetimes, beginning in period piece romance and ending in sci-fi futurism. The less-discussed Mars Express is much more typical to what you’d expect from sci-fi, sketching out a near-future technocracy in which humans & machines struggle to co-exist now that the machines are gaining sentience. Whereas The Beast aims to alienate viewers with the uncanny, Mars Express‘s genre familiarity is a warm nostalgia bath, recalling vintage VHS era sci-fi titles like Blade Runner, Robocop, Minority Report, and T2: Judgement Day. Although it premiered at Cannes, Mars Express is not some stuffy festival-circuit art film; it’s a populist sci-fi action blockbuster that happens to be an independent French production. It’s just familiar enough to make you wonder why Hollywood studios aren’t regularly making large-scale, immersive sci-fi anymore, and then its ambitious third act shoots for the stars in a way that clearly distinguishes it from its most obvious reference points.
The story follows the expected path of a cyberpunk noir, trailing an alcoholic detective with a traumatic past as she struggles to sober up just long enough to solve the political conspiracy that unfolds before her bleary eyes. She starts by investigating the isolated crimes of small-scale hackers who have been “jailbreaking” (i.e., liberating) the A.I. workers who operate alongside humans, opening their programming to dangerous, illegal abilities like independent thought & free will. When one of those hackers is reported murdered on a college campus, her investigation gets much jucier, eventually leading her up the food chain to suspect the corporation behind the future’s most exciting tech of an upcoming power grab that could leave society in shambles. The detective is more of a misdirect than a proper protagonist, though, as the inner lives of her A.I. partner and his synthetic brethren gradually take over the narrative until the central mystery means much less to the audience than their search for a sense of personal identity. It turns out that most jailbroken robots just like to have sex & get high with each other all day—which should be their right—but they eventually reach for a greater, cosmic purpose beyond those momentary pleasures that gives the movie something transcendent to build towards between the chase scenes & gunfights.
I have intentionally buried the lede here by not mentioning that Mars Express is animated, since its medium feels secondary to what it wants to accomplish. The animation can be visually exciting, but it generally stays true to what a live-action version of this same story would look like with a Hollywood-scale budget. It’s much more likely to simulate a split-diopter shot than it is to bend the rules of physics for the sake of artistic expression, making it questionable why it was animated in the first place. The choice appears to be a primarily financial one, as if the entire feature were a storyboard for an R-rated sci-fi film for adults that’s still yet to be made. Regardless, it is beautiful, with only a slight hint of computer-smoothed effects distracting from its elaborate 2D-animation artistry. Animation frees up Mars Express to dream big, creating A.I. characters with holographic heads floating over their physical bodies, setting high-energy chase scenes through packed nightclubs, and filling the screen with intricate production-design detail that likely would have been scrapped by budgetary restraints if it were staged in live action. As long as these kinds of films aren’t being produced in traditional form, we have no choice but to celebrate their animated bootlegs.
If you like your French films challenging & inscrutable, turn to Bertrand Bonello. If you miss the robust American sci-fi blockbusters that have been woefully absent the past couple decades, hop onboard the Mars Express. It saves all of its narrative abstraction & existential pondering for the final minutes of its runtime, and by then your vintage genre filmmaking nostalgia has been so carefully catered to that you’re ready to see something new.
All of David Cronenberg’s children are now out there making Cronenberg movies. Eldest daughter Cassandra has several assistant-director credits that include the Cronenberg classic eXistenZ, and a slow trickle of high-style, high-concept sci-fi horrors have established son Brandon as a buzzy provocateur of his own right over the past decade. Now, Caitlin Cronenberg has entered the family business with her debut feature Humane. Set in a near-future America that’s struggling to keep its remaining citizens alive after Climate Change disaster, Humane‘s central hook relies on a government program that incentivizes voluntary euthanasia as a means of population control. The government has rebranded suicide as a heroic act of “enlisting” in “the war” against humanity’s extinction, littering the streets with propaganda posters that valorize impoverished parents who sacrifice themselves to brighten their children’s future with a hefty payout. It’s the kind of post-Twilight Zone thought experiment where the characters are more symbols than people, representing various social ills and grotesque points of view that help flesh out the central thesis more than flesh out their internal lives. In that way, Humane is maybe more indebted to the Canadian horror tradition of the Cube series than it is to the Cronenberg family legacy, give or take a couple last-minute indulgences in dental & bodily gore that cater to the true Cronheads out there. However, the film is surprisingly juicy if you’re invested in the larger Cronenberg nepo baby project, given that one of its major driving forces is catty, extratextual humor about spoiled brats who live in their famous father’s shadow.
Because it is a relatively cheap, made-for-streaming production, Humane cannot afford to depict the wide-scale Climate Crisis devastation that has accelerated America’s violent disdain for its own citizens. Instead, the movie shoehorns all of the political hot topics its premise touches on (class, racism, immigration, MAGA populism, COVID denialism, environmental collapse) into rushed conversations during a single-family dinner, only hinting at the wider scale misery of the world outside their home in gestural images (UV-deflecting umbrellas, bureaucratic death squads, newscasts warning of an imminent draft for the “war”). Peter Gallagher stars as the family figurehead: a retired, wealthy news anchor who invites his children to his home for dinner, where he announces that he and his wife plan to enlist as an act of self-sacrifice. His children loudly rebel, squabbling with their father about the narcissism of his decision as an act of familial PR and squabbling amongst each other about who deserves what share of their imminent inheritance. The movie takes a fun turn at the top of the second act that further isolates & escalates the fervor of that familial argument, and I refuse to spoil that twist here even though it arrives fairly early in the runtime. What’s much more important is the obliviousness & selfishness of the nepo babies who both loathe and profit from their father’s legacy, weaponizing phrases like “What would Dad think?” to knock each other down in their vicious fight for dominance. It’s darkly funny enough on its own merits to make Humane worth seeking out when it hits Shudder this summer, but it feels even more essential once you start extrapolating what it indicates about Caitlin Cronenberg’s home life (as filtered through collaboration with producer & screenwriter Michael Sparaga).
Not everyone will be interested in watching a feature-length subtweet about Cronenberg family gatherings, but I appreciated how Humane‘s rich-people-problems humor lightened up its political speculation about our planet’s grim future. I felt similarly about Brandon Cronenberg’s latest film Infinity Pool, which balanced out its broader satirical sci-fi premise about wealth-class privilege with the director’s extratextual nepo baby handwringing about imposter syndrome and writer’s block. Cronenberg’s kids could be making exact photocopies of their father’s legendary body horrors, but they’re instead undercutting that impulse with some acknowledgement & self-interrogation of their own creative, privileged circumstances. They’re also just having fun. I found Infinity Pool perversely hilarious and Humane surprisingly playful, especially in scenes featuring Enrico Colantoni as a bloodthirsty bureaucrat who interrupts the family dinner with plans to collect the bodies the government was promised. It’s a small film with big ideas, not allowing its Canadian TV production values to get in the way of its thematic ambitions. It’s also self-consciously silly, though, affording comedic actors Jay Baruchel & Emily Hampshire equal opportunity to play morbid court jesters alongside Colantoni as Gallagher’s rotten, ungrateful children. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I hope Caitlin Cronenberg gets to leverage her last name for more high-concept satires in the near future. The only shame, really, is that we weren’t privy to the real-life dinner conversations that likely resulted after her family saw an early cut. They’re fun to imagine, at least.
Swampflix 