Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter only made films together over a couple of years in the early 1970s. A few of their documentary shorts aired on the syndicated PBS series The Great American Dream Machine, which was simpatico with their collaborations’ wryly humorous portrait of the nation. Otherwise, their catalog of shorts remained unseen by a wide public audience until their recent exhibitions in New York City, now collected under the anthology title America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. Because of that spotty history of distribution & scholarship, there wasn’t much context for what Gap Tooth‘s weekly repertory audience would be seeing when the collection premiered in New Orleans last week, besides the films being rare. It was a packed room anyway. The ten Ganz & Streeter shorts that make up America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of were met with shocks of laughter and stretches of stunned silence, depending on the mood of the moment. The individual films weren’t produced with a unifying theme or intent in mind, but since they were made with such a small, consistent crew in such a short period of time, they end up forming a singular mosaic picture of 1970s America — especially the white parts, the very white parts.
America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of is at its strongest when its shorts are hitting on a common theme, illustrating a postcard advertisement for The American Dream as a prepackaged plastic commodity. The opening short “The Best of Your Life (a.k.a. Sun City)” plays like an early prototype for the recent surreal retirement community doc Some Kind of Heaven, inviting the audience into a 3D brochure to gawk at all the uncanny weirdos who reside within. The other standout shorts in the set also work as ironic advertisements for the kitschiest corners of American monoculture: a novelty sex resort in “Honeymoon Hotel,” a Christian Nationalist death cult in “Risen Indeed (a.k.a. Campus Crusade for Christ)”, an elevator music studio in “A Better Day in Every Way (a.k.a. Muzak)”, a finishing school for adults in “Woman Unlimited”, and a billboard advertisement painters’ studio in “Sign Painters (a.k.a. Signs)”. It’s in these ironic snapshots of microwave-dinner America that Ganz & Streeter land their biggest laughs, likening retirees’ synchronized workout routines to soldiers Sieg Heiling their Fuhrer and infiltrating anti-hippie Christian activist circles who believe Communists to be Satanists engaged in a literal holy war. At the same time, they find a way to mock institutions instead of laughing at individual interview subjects. Later documentaries like Grey Gardens & Gates of Heaven would soon take on a similar project to much wider attention & acclaim: recording sweetly humanist interviews with ordinary, everyday weirdos like you & me, who happened to have gotten wrapped up in fascinatingly unreal scenarios.
Any one of those on-topic shorts could land as someone’s personal favorite in the collection. Personally, I laughed the hardest at the robotic corporate speak of the “Muzak” and “Sign Painters” docs, as straightlaced business suits passionlessly explained how they’ve turned once artistic mediums into uniform, sellable products. The candy-colored splendor of the “Sun City” retirement home tour and the women’s-mag “Honeymoon Hotel” ad is also undeniably enticing, making for the most visually striking and spatially disorienting selections in the bunch. It’s the other, “off-topic” shorts in the collection that really make those works stand out, though. You don’t get a full sense of just how uncanny & inhuman the collection’s portrait of American culture is until they cut away from the Norman Rockwell postcards to black & white snapshots of real people struggling with real problems in real environments. In “Help-Line” & “Y.E.S.,” desperately lonely people on the verge of making life-ending decisions re-establish tenuous human connections via phone call. In “Bowery Men’s Shelter,” New York City alcoholics and discharged mental patients find a temporary place to sleep between psychotic episodes & binges, barely limping along to the next day. The furthest-afield inclusion is “Hoi: Village Life in Tonga,” which leaves America entirely for a quiet anthropological study of indigenous Tongan social life. It was the very first film that Ganz & Streeter shot together and, while it doesn’t fit in tonally or thematically with the other shorts in the collection, it does help contextualize their countercultural-outsider approach to American anthropology in the more idiosyncratic shorts. Not for nothing, but “Hoi” & “Bowery Men’s Shelter” are also the only films in the collection in which non-white subjects are interviewed, making for some politically productive tension in their contrast with other subjects, like the prayer-warrior fascists of “Campus Crusade for Christ”.
If there’s anything especially remarkable that Ganz & Streeter achieved with these short-form American anthropologies (besides conveying a clever editorial eye for selecting environments & industries worth documenting in the first place), it’s in their avoidance of outright condescension. The uncanny, hyper-American scenarios they captured on film range from conceptually funny to outright evil, but the people who are trapped within them are consistently charming regardless of their participation. The nation’s cultureless rituals have made fools of us all, and so we can only feel warm comradery with our fellow fools who’ve fallen into its strangest crevices. That warm humanism is especially apparent in the closing short, “A Trip Through the Brooks Home,” which expands on an interview with a married couple who live in the Sun City retirement community profiled in “The Best of Your Life.” It’s very simply a guided home tour, but there’s a pervasively sweet awkwardness to the husband & wife at the center of it, recalling the Mitch & Micky folk singer duo of Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind. It’s that generosity towards its subjects that makes America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of such great theatrical programming, as you can hear individual members of the audience being delighted by one isolated character quirk at a time. Hopefully, it’ll be more widely available soon, both in theaters and at home, since it’s both a useful historical document of vintage American kitsch (especially when juxtaposed with genuine American suffering) and a godsend for cult cinema freaks who’ve already rewatched similar human-interest docs like American Movie, Vernon, Florida, and Heavy Metal Parking Lot too many times to count.
Last year, legendary animator Don Hertzfeldt self-distributed a traveling roadshow release for his latest short film ME in a double-feature package with his 2012 masterpiece It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Encouraged by the expediency of that release after decades of struggling to get his work into wide distribution, Hertzfeldt has now put together a new roadshow collection of weirdo experiments in animation, reportedly as a theatrical-only release. With this year’s Animation Mixtape, Hertzfeldt has collected a chaotic assemblage of animated outsider art that he personally finds amusing, ranging in decade of production from the 1980s to the 2020s, in medium from stop-motion to computer graphics, and in runtime from a few seconds to 18 minutes. The individual shorts don’t speak to each other except in how they might inform or reflect Hertzfeldt’s own artistic sensibilities. Maks Rzontkowki’s “Martyr’s Guidebook” is a dispirited diary entry from our current digital wasteland, rendered in video game ones & zeroes. Mark Baker’s “The Hill Farm” is a self-amused relic of hippie slacker sentiments from decades in the past, illustrated in traditional pencil sketches. Jesse Moynihan’s “Jesus 2” is a prophetic vision of our singularity hell future, regurgitated from the psychedelic fantasia of Adventure Time-era children’s cartoons. The other ten or so shorts fall somewhere between those aesthetic & temporal markers, each with their own distinct tones & styles. The only discernible reason they’ve been grouped together is because Don Hertzfeldt likes them and wants to use his cinephile-approved name brand to offer them wider public attention.
Beyond his curational oversight of this mixtape project, Hertzfeldt contributed two short wraparound segments to bookend the program, hosted by the little whooping “My anus is bleeding!” cloud puffs from his infamous Rejected cartoons. Between their fits of inane “Whoo!” and “Yayyy!” cheerleading, the little cloud puffs explain that the main purpose of the project is make money for the filmmakers involved, confessing that they are all broke and desperate. Our whooping hosts then warn that because of lack of funding for this kind of work, portions of the program had to be created with generative A.I. technology in order to cut corners. Hertzfeldt then proceeds to flippantly mock the A.I. slop that’s threatening to put this kind of personal, handmade animation out of business, transforming his beloved bleeding-anus puffballs into machine-like A.I. monstrosities that continually shapeshift and puke their digital guts out in an aggressively meaningless display. Given these bookends’ open hostility towards A.I. as a substitute for personable, handcrafted art, it’s likely that they were animated by Hertzfeldt and not created using the very plagiarism engines he intended to mock. I hope so, anyway. In either case, these brief anti-A.I. segments are useful as a contrast to the genuinely imaginative work Hertzfeldt highlights in the mixtape playlist, effectively issued as a threat illustrating what the state of art will soon become if actual, real-life artists can no longer afford to make a living. Even the trippy Takeshi Murata short “Larry”—in which infinite computer renderings of a dog dunking a basketball devolve into digital slop—has a more personable quality to it than its generative A.I. equivalents.
Hertzfeldt credibly names generative A.I. as the biggest threat to these artists’ livelihood, but I found another throughline in the shorts’ credits to be just as alarming. Almost every film in this mixtape includes a title card acknowledging funding from national arts foundations like the National Film Board of Canada and the Polish Film Institute. While A.I.-addicted corporations are working to replace artists with computer programs in the private sphere, The Man is also working to eliminate that kind of public funding for the arts in order to shave a few measly bucks off of governments’ ledgers. The inevitable result of that financial restriction is that most modern animation is a computer-generated corporate product — an opportunity for brazenly lazy celebrities like Chris Pratt to collect easy paychecks voicing talking animals and famous video game characters. Besides the better-funded anime from Japan’s robust filmmaking industry, there are only occasional gems like the recent slacker comedy Boys Go to Jupiter that make it past animators’ personal YouTube & Vimeo accounts into proper theaters. The only venue I can think of where animation this diversely, playfully daring is exhibited in public is at local film festivals like NOFF, which will be programming ten or so animated shorts later this month. As Hertzfeldt acknowledges in the press notes for this year’s Animation Mixtape, however, “While over 10,000 short films are made every year by filmmakers at various stages of their career, only a fraction make it into film festivals and are able to be seen in a classic theatrical setting.” He decided to increase that fraction as best he could with this limited-release roadshow, which is admirable considering how little support these animators are getting from other established institutions.
Welcome to Episode #245 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of Roald Dahl adaptations, starting with the Wes Anderson anthology film The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024).
0:00 Welcome 02:45 Beavis and Butthead Do America (1996) 07:12 Napoleon Dynamite (2004) 13:52 Peter Pan (1960) 16:55 The Legend of Ochi (2025)
24:04 The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More (2024) 49:09 The Witches (1990) 1:10:12 James and the Giant Peach (1996) 1:23:35 Matilda (1996)
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomeris watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
When I first started this project, I knew that I would eventually have to watch these shorts in addition to the features in order to hit that magic number, 52. At that time, the streaming service formerly known as HBO Max still hosted just about every DC project ever made, as a result of Warner Bros. folding the DC Universe service into HBO. All of these shorts were available there, until they were slowly offboarded from the service. Never forget what they, and by “they” I mean David Zaslav, took from you. Most of these were only released as special additions to the DVDs of the feature films, which meant that tracking them all down proved no small feat. Ironically, although I have no issue with the wider internet at large knowing that I will soon have watched all of these films, I’m not exactly hot to expose this side of myself to the ubercool clerks at my local video rental. Somehow, we got there.
This short film, clocking in at just twelve minutes, is a strong start for this project. The Spectre features the voice of Gary Cole in the role of Jim Corrigan, an LAPD detective who inserts himself into the investigation into the death of a film producer. It’s not his case, as the assigned detectives and his chief remind him, but he has a vested interest in the case as the producer’s daughter Aimee (Alyssa Milano) is an old flame of his. His boss tells him to instead investigate the strange deaths of the suspects in the case of the producer’s death. The list of enemies is fairly long, but the potential motive of a few of them relates to not being hired for the guy’s most recent production. The first of these is a special effects man whose own macabre creations are animated by a spectral (naturally) being called The Spectre, an avenging spirit. The second suspect is killed while trying to flee to Mexico, as The Spectre forces him to flip his vehicle and, when he miraculously lives, repairs the vehicle supernaturally and has it run down its owner, Christine style. Finally, Corrigan confronts Aimee directly and accuses her of involvement in her father’s death, and when she manages to distract him long enough to pull out a gun, her shots pass through him without effect. Corrigan reveals that he is The Spectre, before avenging Aimee’s father by surrounding her with a cyclone composed of the money she was paid by the two dead men in order to give them the security code so that they could slip in and kill her father, killing her with a thousand cuts before the police arrive on the scene as Corrigan departs, unnoticed by the living people whom he passes by (and through) before driving away.
This is a neat one! A sly little horror story/renegade cop pastiche that features seventies style funk music and some genuinely creepy sequences. The Spectre himself is effectively scary, and his sense of punishment-by-irony is fun. The sequence set in the special effects warehouse allows the animators to go wild, as the SFX guy gets attacked by Dracula, the Wolfman, and even a (similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from) possessed Reagan animatronic, which dutifully vomits on him. The sequence in the desert in which the second suspect meets his fate is also a lot of fun, calling to mind the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker” as The Spectre’s sudden appearance in the car in the guilty man’s rearview mirror, and he proves an unshakeable avenging force. Even the death of Aimee is brutal, even if it’s mostly offscreen, as she screams to her dying breath before the windows of her father’s sleek Beverly Hills MCM mansion are coated in her blood. This short form really allows the animation team to go all in on something that would be unsustainable for a feature length film (even one that only clocks in at around only 80 minutes like most of these do) and focus on a character who would be a hard sell for a solo outing. Of these movies, over a third of them are Batman flicks, and it’s not because there were simply so many of these stories that demanded to be told; it’s purely a matter of marketing, because the Batbrand sells. The Spectre … not so much. This is the perfect bite-size story for the character and to give the team the chance to work on something different and weird. You can probably trace a clear line from this one to the darker, more horror-oriented flavor of later outings like Justice League Dark and City of Demons. Worth a watch.
Another strong early showing for these shorts. There’s not a huge demand for a full-length Jonah Hex animated film (hell, there wasn’t a market for the live action feature, which came out the same year), so one of these shorts was the right call to tell a little western story. In the animation, an outlaw named Red Doc shows up to a saloon, drunken and boisterous, and claims that he can outdraw any man in the place. The saloon’s proprietor, Madame Lorraine (Linda Hamilton) invites him up to her bedroom, and once he’s comfortable, she kills him, robs his corpse, and has two henchmen dispose of the body. The next day, bounty hunter Jonah Hex arrives in town on the trail of Red Doc, but the bartender at the saloon claims to have never seen the man when presented with his “wanted” poster. A bar girl (Michelle Trachtenberg) tells him that Madame Lorraine sometimes takes men up to her parlor, men who are never seen again; Hex allows Lorraine to see his billfold so that she invites him to her boudoir as well, but he knocks her out and takes care of her henchmen. When she awakes, Hex forces her to take him to the abandoned mine that she and her flunkies have turned into a mass grave pit, and Hex retrieves Red’s body to collect his bounty and leaves Lorraine in the hole with the evidence of her crime.
Jane is doing great voice work here with Hex. He’s such a passionate fan of the character that he petitioned to play the lead in the ill-fated live action adaptation by getting a make-up artist to give him Hex’s trademark scarred face to audition for the role, losing out to Josh Brolin, so he’s bringing his A-game here to make up for it, and it shows. Hamilton’s aged rasp lends a lot of gravitas to her frontier serial killer character, and our innate association as an audience of her voice with Sarah Connor means that her world-weariness comes naturally to mind. Although this one lacks the overt horror elements of The Spectre, there’s a creep factor to it that makes this more of a “weird west” than a standard saddle-and-spurs bounty hunter story. The final images that we see of Lorraine, surrounded by the rotting corpses of her victims as her lamp slowly dies, is chilling, and it’s interesting to note that the animation team behind this studio was willing to put in such good work on something that was destined to be seen by very few people (I’ve had Under the Red Hood on DVD for years and never even considered watching this short, which was bundled with it, until this project). I might be giving too much away about when I’m writing about this, but alongside The Spectre, this one would make a great addition to a playlist of spooky season shorts.
It’s very strange to hear Green Arrow voiced by Neal McDonough. The first piece of his work that comes to mind (after this role in Star Trek: First Contact, of course) is his longtime role as DC villain Damien Darhk in the CW TV series universe, where he first appeared as the primary antagonist on Arrow in that show’s fourth season before becoming an antagonist on Legends of Tomorrow. It’s also interesting that this one, which is a little lackluster in comparison to the previous two, is directed by the same person, Joaquim Dos Santos. After this, he mostly spent time focused on TV projects (notably working on every episode of Legend of Korra in some capacity) before he went on to become one of the co-directors of Across the Spider-Verse last year.
This short features Oliver “Green Arrow” Queen trying to get to the airport to pick up his girlfriend, Dinah “Black Canary” Lance, fiddling with an engagement ring in his pocket. He faces some difficulty in getting there on time as he’s fighting traffic that’s the result of a visit from royalty, the child princess of Vlatava, Perdita (Ariel Winter). It’s fortunate for her that he’s there, as he assists in the foiling of an assassination attempt, but the sheer number of snipers and goons forces him to protect her as they try to escape from them. As it turns out, Perdita’s father died the night before, making her the heir apparent to the throne and the only thing preventing her uncle, Count Vertigo, from ascending instead. Vertigo has hired the villainous archer Merlyn (Malcolm McDowell) to take out Perdita, and although Arrow has faced him before and been bested by him every time, he’s been practicing.
This one is serviceable, but nothing to get too excited about. I wouldn’t be surprised if Dos Santos was simply spread too thin, having to get all three of these first few shorts out, all for release in one calendar year. This one was penned by Greg Weisman, who I wrote about more extensively in my review of Catwoman: Hunted, and if you’re a Young Justice fan, Weisman has stated that this short is (essentially) in the same canon, so that may make it worth your while.
Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam (2010), released only in the DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection
This one is pretty rote. Orphan boy Billy Batson (Zach Callison, of Steven Universe fame) is living in a rundown slum after being kicked out of his foster home by his abusive parents, and he’s the runtiest of the street kids so he’s a target for bullies. The closest thing he has to a friend is Clark Kent (George Newbern), who is writing a series of articles about the boy’s struggles. When Billy is attacked by the supervillain Black Adam (Arnold Vosloo), Superman is thus close at hand to rescue him. From there, he gets an infodump from a mysterious wizard who tells him that Black Adam was once the wizard’s champion and had then been corrupted, forcing the wizard to banish him to a distant place, so far that he has spent the last 5000 years returning for his revenge. The wizard bestows his powers on Billy and tells him to speak the name “Shazam,” and you know how this goes from here. Billy turns into the adult superhero Shazam, he and Superman team up and defeat Black Adam, and he chooses to turn back into his human form and age into dust instantly rather than be banished again. And, of course, Billy gets to turn the tables on his bullies as Shazam, much in the vein of Bastian at the end of The NeverEnding Story.
There’s nothing special about this one, I’m afraid. It’s serviceable, but not special. The only thing interesting about it is, perhaps, that this features both a previous Superman voice actor reprising the role (Newbern had previously voiced the role on Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, and would later reprise the role further in Superman vs. The Elite and Justice League vs. The Fatal Five) and one who would play the character in the future (Jerry O’Connell, who voices Batson’s superheroic alter ego Shazam, would portray him in all of the so-called DCAMU movies). The animation is up to par, and the narrative is sufficient. Not exactly high praise, but this one may set the tone of the exact median of quality of this whole franchise overall. Perfectly balanced, not that interesting.
This one is unusual in that, unlike the others on this list, it was intended to be a tie-in to the film with which it was released. Eliza Dushku reprises her role as Selina “Catwoman” Kyle from Year One, this time on the trail of a Gotham heavy with diamond teeth called Rough Cut (John DiMaggio). After his thugs, trying to kill a cat, chase the poor thing over the edge of a bridge, it’s revealed that the cat was rescued by Selena, who recognizes the ornate collar the cat is wearing. She tracks Rough Cut down to a strip club, where a dancer named Buttermilk Skye (Tara Strong), who gets a diamond from Rough Cut as a tip, is warned by fellow stripper Lily (Cree Summer) that another girl got the same tip the week before, and no one has seen her recently. Catwoman appears through the back door and convinces the ladies to take a break, whereupon she takes the stage in her latex get-up, to much enthusiasm. Even her whip-cracking is appreciated, at least until she starts taking out Rough Cut’s lackeys. He escapes her, leading to a prolonged chase sequence that ultimately ends with the gangster driving off of Gotham pier in a hook truck, taking out the ship that was arriving to take on his latest shipment: trafficked women. One of them is a friend of Selena’s who returns her bracelet to her as the rescued women are tended by paramedics.
Catwoman is … weird. It’s not bad, per se, but much of it feels more like late night 90s softcore than anything else. Lauren Montgomery was the director on this one, having previously directed First Flight and Crisis on Two Earths, and having been a storyboard artist on Under the Red Hood and All Star-Superman, so she’d worked on pretty much all of these projects that I enjoyed until she left this franchise in 2016. It’s an unusually cheesecake-y product for her, although given that she’s spent so much of her career working on these superhero franchises, maybe she just wanted to direct a short film that’s twenty-five percent stripping. The work is impressive; Buttermilk and Selena both move with lithe, athletic grace, which I assume is pretty difficult to capture in a short that was budgeted as the add-on to a DVD that was already destined to haunt CVSes all over the country for the next fifteen years. But it’s also intended to capture sexiness for an audience that I am not a part of, so I mostly spent that time waiting for the scene to move on. At least when Tony Soprano and the boys are at the Bada Bing, there’s some narrative happening. I recently put on a David DeCoteau film in the background for some housework (it was Brotherhood II: Young Warlocks, if you must know, because of Sean Faris), and there were so many lingering scenes of swimming pools, locker rooms, and shirtless football tossing in that one. Those sequences exist solely because those movies are just material that you can fap to but also have on the shelf in your mid-aughts dorm room without having to come out to your roommate. Maybe the problem is just that I’ve never understood erotic animation, which this very much is, but I’ve honestly dwelt on it for so long that it’s starting to feel strange, so I’ll just say: to each their own. The chase sequence that follows is pretty good, and the dock setpiece works, but overall, this one didn’t leave much of an impression.
This was the hardest one of these to find. Most of them were available online to stream or download on the grey market, but for Sgt. Rock I had to go out and find a physical copy of Hush to watch this on. Luckily, there was a blockwide pop-up shopping experience going on outside of my local rental shop this weekend, so I was able to get in and get out with the movie without anyone paying too much mind to my renting of something so embarrassing. And, since I was only able to rent a BluRay copy, that also meant fighting with my extremely finicky machine just to get it to play (tweezers were involved).
This short stars Karl Urban as the titular army sergeant, who awakens in a hospital after his squad is killed in the line of duty in WWII. A superior officer tasks him with taking leadership over a small group of “unusual” soldiers to take out a Nazi base that intelligence reports indicate houses a facility that is in the middle of creating a doomsday device. Said group turns out to be the “Creature Commandos,” a trio of monster dudes: a wolfman, a Nosferatu-esque vampire named Velcoro, and a reanimated Frankenstein(’s monster). On the mission, they manage to enter the facility and discover a full Frankensteinian reanimation set-up, which the re-alived private sets out to destroy. As it turns out, this is the final weapon: undead, reanimated troops made up of the fallen enemy, with the first successes having been Rock’s previous squad, who attack their former leader and his current crew. Rock’s current forces emerge victorious, and when the Nazi major on-site teases Rock that he knows that they must be taken as captives as Rock must have been ordered to bring them in alive so that the U.S. could incorporate this research into their own war effort, Rock allows Velcoro to drain the Nazi scientists dry: “Bottoms up.”
Again, I might be giving away too much about how far in advance I am working on this project, but this strikes me as a perfect little Halloween short, and would work great in a mini-screening with The Spectre and Jonah Hex, although it beats the hell out of me how you’re going to get ahold of this short and somehow get it onto a playlist for you and your friends. I had no idea what I was going into with this one, and when it started, I was immediately bored by yet another scene of soldiers engaged in infantry fighting, but this is really only the prologue until we get to the good stuff, like a wolfman devouring Nazi soldiers and a vampire turning into a bat so that he can fly over a wall and open the reinforced door from the other side. This is the first of these shorts that I think would have really benefited from being extended to a feature length, as this was a pretty fun little ride.
Another little spooky short, this one both sweet and near and dear to my heart. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is my favorite comic book series of all time, and my favorite character within it (after Delirium) is Death, a personification of the concept and a member of “The Endless.” The Endless are not gods; they existed before mankind dreamt of gods, and are as old as the universe itself. First came Destiny, who was born alongside existence, as existence required Destiny to, well, exist. With the first living things came Destiny’s sister Death, as life does not exist without Death; she was followed by Sandman’s title character Dream, whose existence was necessitated when the first living thing to dream did so. (And so on and so forth.) Death was presented in Sandman as a perky goth lady, which has become a huge influence on the idea in pop culture and in real life, and some of my favorite stories from that series revolve around her (notably issues #43, “Brief Lives pt. 3,” and #20, “Façade,” which is my favorite Sandman story of all). It’s weird to see her being written by someone other than Gaiman, but this one was penned by J.M. DeMatteis, who had written the screenplays for Justice League Dark and City of Demons at this point, so his spooky DC credentials were already demonstrated.
Death follows a man named Vincent Omata (Leonardo Nam), a painter who never made it. Despite his love for making art from his youth, he was discouraged by his father as well as his art school professors —one of whom told him that he had no real talent for art and should consider transferring to the university’s dental school program. As an adult, he now finds himself unable to keep a job painting gates, as in, covering the entrance gate to Arkham Asylum in a new coat of paint rather than painting landscapes with such fixtures within them. His various personal demons appear to him in the guise of fiery specters that take the shape of people who have discouraged him, speaking the harsh words to him once again. After a chance encounter with a cute goth girl who gives him her top hat, she reappears later when he sparks up a cigarette to warn him that “Those things will kill [him],” and he offers to show her his artwork. He asks if he can paint her portrait, and he does; however, even realizing that he must have worked all through the night and it should be morning, he notices that the sun has not yet risen. In reality, Vincent has died, having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette, and that the woman he has painted, Death, has shown him a kind of tenderness by stopping the night from passing until he could complete one last work of art, one that he can be proud of. He begs her not to let the painting burn, and as she takes his hand to lead him to the door that opens into whatever comes after life, she does ensure that the portrait he painted of her survives, leaving it behind in the charred ruins of his apartment like that viral Stanley cup that survived the Kia Sorento fire.
This is another entry in the horror-adjacent shorts that form this sub-franchise, but one that focuses less on fright than on the only thing that all humans share: the inevitability of death. Like Sandman before it, the short chooses to imagine Death not as an end, but a transition, and not as something to fear, but as something to accept. It’s a lovely little story, and, if you’re only ever going to see one of these, this is the one to catch.
Only two feature films into his career, I’m already comfortable thinking of Bertrand Mandico as my favorite working director, even though only his debut was a total stunner. Mandico’s The Wild Boys is my favorite film released within my lifetime – a Bidgoodian wet nightmare about gender dysphoria and, ultimately, gender obliteration. His follow-up, After Blue (Dirty Paradise), is more of a flippant prank, using the same sensory intoxication & erotic menace for a much sillier purpose: worshipping the almighty Kate Bush in the rubble of our fallen civilization. Although it’s seemingly shot in a muted black & white that sidesteps the cosmic blues & purples that make his other features so vivid & vibrant, I’m dying to see his third feature, Conann, which appears to be a gender-subverted riff on the pulp fantasy character Conan the Barbarian. It’s going to take a while for that latest dispatch from Mandico’s id to reach American screens (it just premiered at Cannes this summer), so I decided to placate my curiosity as best as I could by digging into his back catalog of short films. Altered Innocence has consistently been Mandico’s home distributor since the company’s inception; it’s even arguable that Mandico’s films have been a brand-defining cornerstone for the Vinegar Syndrome partner label, along with the similar dreamlike genre throwbacks of Knife+Heart director Yann Gonzalez. Given that close affiliation, their publishing a collection of Mandico’s short films on a single Blu-ray disc, titled Apocalypse After, was a total no-brainer. Given my own personal obsession with The Wild Boys, the only surprising thing is that I didn’t jump on this disc the second it was released last year. I guess I needed to get worked up about a new feature from Mandico dangling just outside my reach to seek out his already-available shorts I hadn’t yet seen. Well, that and if I immediately jumped on every new Altered Innocence release I wanted to see I’d struggle to pay my energy bill, and I wouldn’t be able to watch them anyway.
The titular short on this disc, “Apocalypse After (Ultra Pulpe)”, is a calling-card submersion in the subliminal perversions of cinema, consciously transforming “science fiction” into “science titillation” while shouting in frustration that the images still aren’t erotic enough for the director’s liking. Longtime Mandico collaborator & muse Elina Löwensohn stars as the director’s avatar, an arthouse pornographer named Joy d’Amato (in cheeky reference to real-life pornographer Joe d’Amato). Mandico’s films are full of sarcastic allusions to real-life artists he admires in this way: Kate Bush, Henry Darger, Jean Cocteau, Walerian Borowczyk, etc. Curiously, he has yet to name-drop the three filmmakers he most reminds me of—Kenneth Anger, Guy Maddin, and James Bidgood—likely because their influence is already blatantly apparent in the text. Joy d’Amato is more Bertrand Mandico than she is Joe d’Amato, though, shooting a live-action version of paperback sci-fi cover art with the same vintage porno sensibility you can find in all of Mandico’s recent work. In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform. Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art. No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them. Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough. Nothing ever could be.
The “Apocalypse After” short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics – gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc. The presentation of Mandico’s previous shorts on the Apocalypse After disc is strictly chronological, so you can watch the director arrive at that personal aesthetic over decades of obsessive tinkering. Over three full hours of his two decades of short-form experiments, Mandico Heads get to watch the filth maestro develop his cosmic visual language in ten preceding works. In that context, “After Apocalypse” is less of a jumbled collection of Mandico pet obsessions than it is a natural crescendo of a clear pattern in methodology. His seemingly weird-for-weird’s sake indulgences become more recognizably thoughtful & designed in retrospect, the same way the “Magick Lantern Cycle” packaging of Kenneth Anger’s shorts makes “Lucifer Rising” feel like the most obvious place his art could lead him, not an out-of-nowhere novelty. The Apocalypse After disc starts with Mandico imitating Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion nightmares in antiqued sepia tone, then seeking the same ancient artifice in short-form magical realist dramas. He hits a breakthrough mid-career with the mid-length film “Boro in the Box”, which playfully reimagines filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk’s life in the style of Au Hazard Balthazar (a prototype for the more recent Balthazar riff EO). By the time Mandico returns to stop-motion in his post-“Boro” short “Living Still Life” (this time animating taxidermized animals), his style is distinctly of his own. As a result, all of the essential Mandico bangers arrive late on the disc, after he finds his distinct voice as a filmmaker: the Cronenbergian colonoscopy sideshow act “Prehistoric Cabaret,” the fairy tale creature feature “Our Lady of Hormones,” the unlikely Enys Men sister film “Depressive Cop” and, of course, the aforementioned self-portrait in heat “Apocalypse After.”
There are certainly other current filmmakers whose every feature I anticipate with the same gusto as Mandico’s, namely Peter Strickland and Amanda Kramer. None in that unholy trio of perverts gets the critical respect they deserve as playful subverters of the artform. The academic interest critics used to have in similarly perverse, cerebral genre filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, and Jodorowsky has more recently shifted to formally muted & restrained works of slow cinema auteurs instead. A lot of the leeway we used to give venerated genre freaks of the past hasn’t trickled down to the unvenerated genre freaks of today, at least not for anyone who hasn’t struck a distribution deal with A24. Altered Innocence appears to be committed to the cause at least, offering a step-by-step study of Mandico’s work for anyone who cares to learn how he arrived at something as wildly baffling as The Wild Boys. The only other comparable presentation of a current director’s shorts that I can name is the The Islands of Yann Gonzalez, which I will leave to your imagination what is covered and who handled the distro.
Welcome to Episode #150 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, Brandon, and Hanna discuss the often-ignored art of the short film, starting with the existential nightmare La Cabina (1972).
26:45 A Trip to the Moon (1902) 36:16 The Dancing Pig (1907) 41:00 Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) 52:00 The Red Balloon (1956) 1:08:08 The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011) 1:22:22 Money + Love (2018) 1:38:55 Opal (2020)
PBS programming was apparently a lot more adventurous in the 80s & 90s than I remember it being as a kid, even though I watched it religiously as a pretentious nerd without cable access. Or maybe it’s that local PBS affiliates in Louisiana weren’t broadcasting The Good Stuff (the gay stuff) that aired in less morally regressive areas of the country. Whatever the case, a few weeks ago I learned that PBS broadcast the radically queer video art flamethrower Tongues Untied the year of its initial release (admittedly to some national controversy in the press), and now I’m just finding out that the publicly funded network also broadcast a 30-minute Todd Haynes short about a child’s sexual awakening as a burgeoning kinkster. Made between Poison& Safe, Dottie Gets Spanked was a dispatch from the earliest, most abrasive period of Haynes’s career, when his voice was such an anomaly on the indie film scene that critics had to coin a new term for it: New Queer Cinema. And PBS was there to push that outsider-art queerness in front of a larger audience, risking morally righteous pushback from the Conservative pundits who are always on the hunt for excuses to defund the network. I think that’s beautiful, and it’s very different from the super-safe (although still incredibly helpful & informative) version of PBS I remember from my own childhood.
In Dottie Gets Spanked, a small suburban child in the 1960s becomes fetishistically obsessed with a spanking scene in an I Love Lucy type sitcom, much to the horror of his super straight parents. True to the messy multimedia style of Haynes’s early work, this simple story is told in a deliriously fractured, layered narrative that’s spread across three tiers of reality: the real world, the sitcom world, and the dream world. In the real world, the young boy is terrified of his emotionally distant father, a cold brute who mostly looms in doorways & watches football while his wife takes care of the actual parenting. The child escapes this tension by sitting inches away from the television and disappearing into the sitcom world, a black & white spoof of I Love Lucy era comedies (a fan-favorite of girls his age, which makes him out to be an outsider at school). In turn, this sitcom world informs the boy’s fantasies: surrealist De Chirico dreamscapes that become intensely erotic once a spanking episode of The Dottie Show introduces a burgeoning fetish into his nightly repertoire. It’s an uncomfortable but deeply relatable portrait of a young child discovering their first sexual impulses in a household where anything that’s not married heteros in the missionary position is considered an abomination & a personal moral failure. Because Haynes is behind the wheel, it’s implied that the young child is gay but unaware of that predilection, but the story is universal enough to hit home for anyone who’s ever discovered their queer identity or unexpected kink obsession while growing up in a conservative household.
Personally, I identified with this on a cellular level. It reminded me of recording sitcom episodes & other random television ephemera that overlapped with my own emerging kinks onto homemade VHS tapes in the 90s. It’s a shame those tapes were lost to flood waters in Hurricane Katrina; I imagine they might play with the same feverishly horny delirium that’s established in this film’s spanking dreams (or maybe the found footage video diary of a serial killer, if I’m being more honest with myself). A lot of those clips were likely pulled from PBS, appropriately enough, even though I don’t remember my local station’s programming being as boldly daring as the psychosexual overtones of Dottie Gets Spanked. But the whole point of this movie is that the content we fixate on while we’re mapping out our own erotic imaginations does not have to be direct or overt to be effective. Even when locked away from the broader spectrum of sexual play & identity in a morally buttoned-up household, we still find a way to indulge ourselves in what turns us on. That searching-for-scraps-of-kink scavenging may now be a relic of a pre-Internet world, considering how much access most children have to information outside their parents’ control, but it is perfectly captured in this playfully naughty Todd Haynes short from the 90s. Knowing that the movie’s production & distribution was at least partially publicly funded only makes its existence more perversely amusing.
We don’t often review short films here, outside occasional film fest coverage on the podcast. That’s not a bias against the format per se, but rather a result of shorts being remarkably difficult to market. I personally love catching a well-curated slate of shorts at a film festival or being surprised by one as a programmed appetizer before a theatrically-screened feature, but outside those contexts it’s not something I actively seek out. After festival circulation, most short films are hung out to dry on their directors’ YouTube or Vimeo pages, largely unwatched by the general public (who somehow have time to binge-watch an entire Netflix dating competition show in three days, but no ten-minute blocks of free time to spare for bite-size cinema). I imagine the fate of most shorts were even worse before the days of the D.I.Y. internet distribution too; without platforms like Vimeo they’d effectively just disappear.
It makes sense, then, that someone who would declare themselves to be “Queen of the Underground Film” in the 1990s would deal mostly in shorts, perhaps the most underground film medium of all. Bay Area D.I.Y. filmmaker Sarah Jacobson did manage to pull together resources for one feature in her (tragically short) lifetime: Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, a no-budget teen melodrama that subversively aimed to provide healthy sex education to unsuspecting 90s punx. The recent AGFA Blu-ray restoration of Mary Jane includes a small collection of shorts from Jacobson’s forgotten catalog in its bonus features, though, loosely sketching out a portrait of a truly independent filmmaker who was never afforded the resources needed to break out of the underground even if she wanted to. As a collection, these assembled works register as lost, no-budget cinema artifacts of the riot grrrl era. Individually, they serve as the diary entries of an underground filmmaker doing her best to create personal art within a system stacked against her.
The most significant short included on the AGFA disc is Jacobson’s landmark, calling-card work I Was a Teenage Serial Killer. An iconic riot grrrl time capsule from the dingiest days of 90s punk’s feminist uprising, I Was a Teenage Serial Killer is not nearly as accomplished nor as polished as Mary Jane, but it persists as Jacobson’s most recognizable work to this day. Its premise is unapologetically, confrontationally simple. A 19-year-old West Coast punk is sick of men’s rampant sexism, so she murders as many of them as she can. One man drunkenly inundates her with a misogynist rant, so she poisons his beer. Another catcalls her on the street, so she pushes him into oncoming traffic. Another removes his condom during sex without her consent, so she chokes him to death while continuing to ride his body to achieve her own orgasm. As the title suggests by calling back to 1950s B-pictures like I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, there’s a playful sense of humor to this misandrist bloodbath. For instance, there’s a sickly-sweet dating montage our protagonist shares with a fellow serial killer while they cutely bond over cannibalism & genital mutilation. There’s also a seething, long-simmering sense of anger behind that playful façade, however, which mostly spills out in a final monologue where the teenage serial killer explains her motives to her last would-be victim. It’s the same anger that fueled most of the zines & records of the riot grrrl movement, a communal feminist frustration that rarely made it to the screen in any genuine form.
I Was a Teenage Serial Killer might very well be the only movie that feels fully, authentically submerged in riot grrrl aesthetics & ideology. Its black & white chocolate syrup gore and its cut & paste block text collages directly echo the visual patina of the Xeroxed zines that sparked the movement and gave it a name. Its misandrist serial killer premise that lashes back at the misogyny of its own punk community plays like a faithful adaptation of the Bikini Kill track “White Boy.” It even has bonafide riot grrrl cred on its soundtrack, which includes contributions from the seminal band Heavens to Betsy (which featured Corin Tucker, later of Sleater-Kinney). It’s not a perfect film, but it is a perfect time capsule of the exact frustrations & aesthetics that fueled the feminist punk movements of its era.
Unfortunately, none of the other shorts included on the AGFA disc are as essential nor as substantial as either Teenage Serial Killer or Mary Jane. The only one that comes close is an early-2000s documentary short about the bungled release of Ladies and Gentlemen … The Fabulous Stains(a movie that was highly influential on 90s feminist punks, thanks to a few scattered cable TV broadcasts). The rest of the shorts are a smattering of scraps: a student film about a road trip, a comedy sketch about disco fever, a home movie about Jacobson bra shopping with her mom, and music videos for 90s bands Man or Astro-Man? & Fluffy. Jacobson’s D.I.Y. filmmaking brand Station Wagon Productions could only do so much on its own volition without major financial support pulling the cart. I’m not sure if the films collected on this AGFA release comprise the entirety of what she managed to complete while alive (her IMDb page only lists Mary Jane, Serial Killer, and the Fabulous Stains doc), but their collective nature as discarded scraps indicate that there can’t be much left out there waiting to be recovered.
It’s undeniably sad that Jacobson wasn’t afforded more opportunities to break through with completed, long-form projects while she was alive & working (you can hear her frustration with being broke in the bra-shopping short, where she relies on her mother’s pity to get by), but that doesn’t mean her career wasn’t an overall success. Managing to fire off two subculture-defining works within one lifetime is more than most filmmakers on any financial level can hope for. I Was a Teenage Serial Killer managed to fully, authentically encapsulate the moods & aesthetics of riot grrrl punk within the span of a short, which is no small feat for a cinematic medium no audience seems to want. Her claim for the crown as the Queen of the Underground Film is questionable, but her impact of her short reign remains undeniable.
Welcome to Episode #106 of The Swampflix Podcast! For this episode, CC & Brandon tackle Kenneth Anger’s decades-spanning short film series “The Magick Lantern Cycle” – from Fireworks (1947) to Lucifer Rising (1972). Expect occultist rituals, leather bondage regalia, LSD freak-outs, and good old-fashioned homoeroticism. Enjoy!
Swampflix 