stephen king

Lagniappe Podcast: The Dead Zone (1983)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the psychic-visions thriller The Dead Zone (1983), a Stephen King adaptation directed by David Cronenberg.

00:00 Halloween
06:00 Halloweentown (1998)
11:50 Nicole Kidman Magic at Barrett’s Too
15:15 Dracula’s Dog (1977)
19:00 The Werewolf of Washington (1973)
22:35 It Ends (2026)
29:11 Dead and Buried (1981)
33:23 Shatter Dead (1994)
35:37 Wicker (2026)
42:47 Natalie Erika James
49:00 Wildwood (2026)
54:35 Begotten (1989)
58:30 A Talent for Murder (2026)
1:03:40 Dressed to Kill (1980)
1:09:24 The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (2026)
1:16:45 The Oldest Person in the World (2026)
1:21:55 You Can See Everything (2026)

1:40:00 The Dead Zone (1983)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Cujo (1983)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Sipping a late-night beer while flipping through trash TV channels in an overly air-conditioned hotel room is one of the great luxuries of modern living. It doesn’t matter the quality of the hotel, the beer, or what’s on the TV; it always feels indulgent in the exact right way. I recently found myself enjoying this modern luxury while vacationing in Hot Springs, Arkansas, during a time when basic-cable TV channels were deep in their Halloween season programming. Every night, I would flip between the available movie channels to catch brief, out-of-context glimpses of crowd-favorite horror titles between commercial breaks, hopping from one movie to the next the second an ad would interrupt the spook show. From night to night, it seemed the same movies were playing in rotation while also hopping from channel to channel, establishing a moment-in-time canon of horror classics that are both famous enough to draw ad sales and currently cheap enough to license: Aliens, Beetlejuice, Bride of Chucky, Seed of Chucky, Stephen King’s IT, Jaws II, Halloween II, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Lake Placid, The Mummy Returns, and several other titles I’ve already seen plenty of times before. Somewhere in that mix, I also caught glimpses of the 1983 Stephen King adaptation Cujo, which I was surprised to discover I hadn’t seen all the way through before, despite its obvious cultural familiarity. It seems to me that if a horror movie was famous enough to be included in that rotation of well-worn classics, I should probably make time to properly watch it, which I dutifully followed through on as soon as we returned home. Vacation is over, and I am no longer watching movies in out-of-context snippets; this blog is serious business.

Cujo stars Dee Wallace as the mother of a young child, caught between her duties as a housewife and her desires as a lonely, frustrated woman. Her husband (Daniel Hugh-Kelly) is a total drip whose high-pressure advertising job has him ceaselessly babbling on the phone about breakfast cereal commercials, so she instead seeks sexual release with their rough-handed handyman (Christopher Stone), who’s too much of a brute for the tryst to last long-term. While this peak-divorce-era adultery drama plays out in the suburbs, a junkyard St. Bernard named Cujo is suffering his own personal crisis on the rural outskirts of town, where the family employs an off-the-books mechanic. Cujo is usually a very sweet, good boy, but he sticks his snout where it doesn’t belong and gets bitten on the face by a rabid bat, transforming him from loving family dog to giant, froth-mouthed monster. When the jilted husband leaves for a work trip after discovering his wife’s infidelity, mother & son bring the family car to Cujo’s junkyard for repair, where they find that the dog has already started a vicious murder spree, and they’re next on the menu. The film becomes intensely claustrophobic from there, with Wallace’s distraught & dehydrated mother fighting to keep her son alive in a broken car that Cujo guards like a prison warden, viciously attacking the duo any time they attempt escape. Through the struggle, she proves her worth to herself as a familial protector who’ll do anything to keep her son alive and her family intact, whereas she starts the film listlessly detached. She also gets in a paw-to-paw fight with a gigantic, rabid dog, whose supernatural relentlessness is comparable to a Freddy, a Jason, a Michael, or a Chucky.

At its start, Cujo doesn’t appear to be in much of a rush to terrorize its audience. The first half of the film is pure domestic drama, with its horror elements only hinted at in the young child Tad’s insistence that there is a monster under his bed that will eat him as soon as the lights are switched off. His otherwise absent father gets all the glory as the family protector in those scenes, scaring the make-believe monster away while his mother does the less glamorous work of actually raising him at home from day to day. That is, until the rabid dog attacks start halfway through, when she has to go to battle with the very real monster lurking under the family car instead of the fake one hiding under the bed. Once mother & son are isolated in that automotive prison, Cujo is legitimately terrifying. It’s the most I’ve been unnerved by a scary movie since I first saw the home-invasion thriller The Strangers a few years ago, likely because—like senseless home break-ins—an angry, barking dog covered in blood is a more probable threat in my life than ghosts or ghouls or goblins or the other go-to monsters I usually seek out in classic horror movies. Even so, Cujo does transform from a common dog to a supernatural monster somewhere in the process of his mental decline. Early in the movie, Tad makes a jokey reference to the movie Jaws at the family dinner table, which places this firmly in the canon of cross-species Jaws knockoffs from its era: Jaws, except it’s an octopus in Orca; Jaws, except it’s a bear in Grizzly; Jaws, except it’s a boar in Razorback; and so on. Appropriately enough, the director of Cujo made one of the finest specimens of that subgenre in the 1980 Jaws, except it’s an alligator banger Alligator.

It’s easy to see how Alligator landed Lewis Teague the job of adapting King’s novel — big creature, big chompers, etc. Along with frequent Verhoeven cinematographer Jan De Bont, Teague finds infinite angles on the car-imprisonment scenario of the second half to exploit for effective scares. The camera spins on a 360º swivel inside the car, searching for an unseen Cujo. The rabid dog’s own POV is shown in first-person Cujo Cam during his more slasher-inspired attacks. In the smartest production move, the dog is often portrayed by a man in a costume during his attacks, allowing him to get physical with his costars in a way more traditional animal-attack creature features can’t achieve. It’s a convincingly tactile tactic that helped clarify why I found Primate to be one of this year’s most satisfying horror titles, despite its muted reputations among more high-concept hits like Backrooms, Obsession, and Camp Miasma. It turns out that a freaked-out actor wrestling with a rabid, enraged animal is enough of a hook to carry an otherwise middling family drama, as long as you can sell the viciousness & physicality of that interspecies clash. I doubt that Cujo was ranked near the top of many critics’ Best of the Year lists back in 1983 either, but the scariness of its back half has proven to be enough to solidify it as a lasting horror classic . . . if the metric of continual basic-cable broadcast means anything in establishing that canon. It’s unlikely that Primate will experience the same long-term vindication over the decades, considering the current absence of a legitimate monoculture, but I would be just as happy to see out-of-context clips of it while surfing channels in a hotel room over a beer in the 2060s, God willing.

-Brandon Ledet

The Long Walk (2025)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

I’ve been hearing nothing but good things about The Long Walk, so it was a surprise to me that, among the five-person group with whom I attended the movie, it only got a 20% approval rate (and the one who liked it was me). Among the complaints that I collected in the post-screening debrief was that it felt like torture porn to one, was too violent for others, that the character development was underbaked, and the film was denounced as largely predictable. For the more personally subjective takes, I can say that the film is definitely one of the more gruesomely violent that I’ve seen this year (bar something like Final Destination: Bloodlines, where the violence is more fantastical and cartoonish). For the critiques of structure, I also can’t provide evidence that the film didn’t follow a fairly straightforward narrative throughline or that every character felt fully fleshed out. To the latter, I would argue that the confinement of the narrative to a dwindling band of fifty teenaged boys walking on a road necessitates that backstory and character be revealed through dialogue, which can run counter to what one expects from film as a medium. For the former, I would make a very similar argument; containment of the premise makes the eventuality of the stations of the plot inevitable, but that alone is not inherently a negative. 

Although this wasn’t the first of Stephen King’s novels to be published, it is the first that he wrote, only seeing publication several years after Carrie under King’s pen name Richard Bachman. He began writing it as a college student in the mid-sixties, and I think that these facts are obvious from the text itself — both that it’s highly influenced by the Vietnam War (a time during which widespread media allowed for Americans to see drafted boys get blown to bits on the nightly news for the first time) and that it’s the writing of a young, not-yet-fully-developed author. That’s not entirely a bad thing, however, as it allows for this update of the material (sort of; it’s set in a dystopian future but has all the trappings of this bad future having happened due to something awful in the 1970s, not Next Sunday, AD) to speak to a different social crisis, our contemporary one in which society relegates its youth to die horribly for the viewing pleasure of the masses. If anything, it was perhaps too early, as it feels like an answer to the dystopian YA literature adaptation glut of a decade ago, a commentary on The Hunger Games and its imitators while being a darker, meaner, grislier concept that plays out under a different regime. 

The main character of the film is Ray Garraway (Cooper Hoffman), who submitted himself to a lottery in which there is a 98% certainty that he will die, on the one chance that he will be the survivor of the fifty “Walkers” who wins a massive cash prize as well as the opportunity to make one “wish.” This is over the wishes of his mother (Judy Greer), who has already lost her husband, a victim of state violence after teaching outlawed ideas to his son post-societal collapse. The competition itself is annual and features one boy from every state, all of whom set out to travel down Route 1 on foot, with the caveat that they must maintain a speed greater than three miles per hour, with a system of warnings issued for falling below that threshold before the boy’s “ticket gets punched”—that is, shot in the face by the accompanying military guard, led by “The Major” (Mark Hammil). Other competitors that we spend some time with and get to know include: Richard Harkness (Jordan Gonzalez), the one with big glasses who’s hoping to write a book about what it’s like to participate in the Long Walk; Collie Parker (Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation actor Joshua Odjick), a tough jock; athlete and apparent ringer Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing); religious Arthur Baker (Tut Nyuot) of Baton Rouge (represent!); yapper Hank Olson (Ben Wang); and your garden variety Stephen King long-haired antisocial shit-stirrer Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer). The person that Ray grows closest to, however, is Peter McVries (David Jonsson), an orphaned young man with a striking scar on the side of his face. A few of these doomed boys dub themselves “the Musketeers,” but their boisterous false optimism is immediately challenged by the death of the first of their number, a kid named Curley who had clearly lied about his age in order to enter the Walk. Alliances are formed and fall apart, friendships are made and then tragically cut short at the hands of carbine-wielding death squads, and the mental and physical anguish and turmoil play out as the boys’ numbers dwindle. 

The movie I most thought of while watching this film was actually Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 opus mother!, in that I can’t remember any film other than that or The Long Walk that could accurately be described, as Lindsay Ellis did, as “Oops, All Metaphor.” There’s nothing subtle about The Long Walk, from the opening moments to the final seconds, and it’s perhaps that lack of subtlety that lends itself to an interpretation that this film was perhaps too predictable to be fully appreciated. I’d still argue that this is more a function of the premise and its constraints than it is an issue with the film itself, but as always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There’s no attempt to parse any of the suffering that the boys are going through, and there’s no chance that they’re going to be able to have two winners at the end or really that the “winner” will survive very long after they reach the end of their Walk. Characters say to one another that entering the lottery pool for the Long Walk is technically a choice, but if literally everyone enters because it’s the only chance for any kind of economic movement out of poverty, then it’s not really a choice at all, is it? The movie can get away with wearing its message on its sleeve because all of the characters are teenage boys, so it’s not terribly out of place for them to have these not-that-staggering revelations and feel that they’ve stumbled upon some great wisdom, but I also understand if that feels preachy to certain audiences who are already aligned with the movie’s moral. I would venture that, given the state of media literacy (and actual literacy, for that matter) we’re currently grappling with out here in the real world, I’d warrant that this kind of declarative, undisguised thesis statement may be necessary to get it to stick, but that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. 

There are some themes for which the film reaches but which fall outside of its grasp. When Ray reveals his true motivation for entering the Walk to Peter, Peter tries to caution him against vengeance, but it’s arguable that Ray’s desire to kill one of the heads of the evil government is actually an excellent way to try and right some of society’s wrongs, if he’s given the chance. We never get a clear idea of just what society’s current shape is, as the narrative simply isn’t as invested in world building as much as it is in exploring the miseries of a life in which you have no choice but to walk (or work) yourself to death; it’s one possible inference now that the entire U.S. is now under the control of the Major as a military despot like Gaddafi or Idi Amin, that slaying the head of that dragon if given the opportunity is a moral imperative. It reminds me a bit of the finale of King’s novel The Dead Zone, in which psychic protagonist Johnny Smith ultimately realizes that he has to end, by any means necessary, the rising political career of a man named Greg Stillson, who will end the world in a nuclear holocaust if he is allowed to ascend to the presidency. The protestations against revenge as a factor are where the film slips into a kind of navel-gazing that isn’t fully tonally consistent with the rest of the text, but when that’s the biggest complaint you can get from me, then you should know that this is a recommendation. 

I do think that it was an interesting choice on the part of the producers to choose Francis Lawrence to direct, considering that he helmed three of the four Hunger Games films as well as prequel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and the upcoming release Sunrise on the Reaping. He was also the man responsible for Constantine and I Am Legend, which is probably why the latter film seems to be on TV multiple times a week right now: for synergy purposes. The film’s writer is JT Mollner, who wrote and directed last year’s divisive nonchronological Kyle Gallner vehicle Strange Darling, and I’m hoping based on a text conversation with Brandon that his skill here is starting to win our dear editor back over. I wouldn’t have imagined this as a team that would be able to bring this source material to life so well, but it gets a recommendation from me.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Reality, TV, Violence, Pornography

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

I have owned the same used copy of the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi actioner The Running Man for as long as I can remember. It’s been so long that the DVD itself has become just as kitsch as the cheesy 80s movie it stores. Between its standard-definition transfer, its double-disc presentation of both wide & full-screen formats, and its 3D-animated menu transitions, it’s a time capsule of physical media’s ancient past. What really dates that Special Edition DVD set, however, is its special features menu, which includes two short-form documentaries explaining The Running Man‘s continued cultural relevance into the early 2000s. One disc includes a featurette titled “Lockdown on Main Street,” which links the film’s themes of totalitarian government surveillance to the privacy-violating overreach of the Bush Administration post-9/11. Topical! The other disc’s featurette “Game Theory” covers the prescience of the film’s game-show premise in predicting the dystopian state of reality TV in the early aughts, which had then recently mutated from early human-interest documentaries PBS’s An American Family & MTV’s The Real World to more preposterous, sadistic programs like Survivor & Fear Factor. The titular, fictional TV game show The Running Man is a government-sanctioned crime & punishment program in which prisoners fight for their freedom against homicidal American Gladiator types with deadly weapons & pro wrestler gimmicks. The real-world state of reality TV hadn’t gotten quite that malicious by the early 2000s, but the other fictional programs advertised during its fictional television broadcasts—Paul Verhoeven-style—weren’t too much of an exaggeration. For instance, the commercial for a show titled Climbing for Dollars, in which contestants climb a rope over a pit of barbed wire & rabid dogs, no longer felt all that outlandish in a world that had already produced Fear Factor or the Japanese game show “A Life in Prizes” (as documented in last year’s The Contestant). Even when that Special Edition DVD was produced in 2004, the film’s dystopian game show America still seemed plausibly achievable by its far-away future setting of 2019.

The Running Man‘s quirks & charms have not changed much over the years. As a pun-heavy action showcase for a spandex-clad Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s just as amusing now as it was four decades ago. The worst you can say about the way it has aged is that it’s been outshone by its Verhoeven-directed contemporaries RoboCop & Total Recall, which make for much sharper & more vicious satire. Oddly, the short-doc featurette “Game Theory: An Examination of Reality TV” feels much more out of date, since it speaks to current trends of reality TV production in the early 2000s instead of predicting what the format might evolve into in the future. There’s something surreal about watching talking heads explain the basic components of reality television after decades of drowning in household-name series like Real Housewives, Below Deck, Love Is Blind, The Bachelor, etc. Everything from those shows’ reduced production costs to the way they’re cast for conflict to the way their semi-scripted & heavily edited version of “reality” is a far cry from pure documentary filmmaking is spelled out as if the audience is considering those factors for the very first time. Even if obvious to a modern audience, there is still something validating about hearing former Survivor contestants and Fear Factor showrunners explain that what they’re attempting to capture is a genuine reaction to artificial scenarios — a conscious mix of reality & artifice. Sometimes, it does help to hear an everyday concept defined in simple terms like that, even if in this case it feels like explaining the existence of water to a fish. The fictional TV program The Running Man could not be more artificial; it has a pro-wrestling promotion’s relationship to Reality. The pain, shame, and death that contestants suffer on the show is real, though, which is why it’s totally plausible that massive audiences would tune into its bread-and-circuses entertainment spectacle as nightly appointment viewing. It’s the same sadistic impulse that recently inspired Netflix executives to greenlight a “real” version of The Squid Games to cash in on the popularity of the fictional one, with predictably inhumane results.

This early-2000s “Game Theory” understanding & definition of reality TV is both accurate & incomplete. It gets across the reality TV audience’s bottomless sadism, but it largely ignores the sexual voyeurism that also makes the format so enduringly popular. The success of Survivor & Fear Factor may have made it seem like society was headed towards more physically violent & punitive television programming in an impending Running Man dystopia, but it’s arguable that the format has veered towards a more sexually pornographic impulse instead. While early reality-TV breakouts like The Real World & Big Brother offered brief, night-vision glimpses into its contestants’ private sex lives, more recent shows like Love Island, Temptation Island, FBoy Island, MILF Manor, and Naked Attraction have disposed of any pretense that the audience cares about anything else but sex. While The Running Man & “Game Theory” only acknowledge the format’s sex appeal in context of casting hottie hunks & babes as eye candy, there were other early examinations of the format that fully understood its reliance on sexual voyeurism. For instance, No Wave filmmaker Beth B’s 1996 documentary Visiting Desire plays like a direct response to & escalation of the sexual voyeurism of MTV’s The Real World. Triangulating the middle ground between Annie Sprinkle, Marlon Riggs, and the street interview segments of HBO Real Sex, Visiting Desire is a social experiment shot in the cultural dead zone between reality TV & amateur pornography. It starts with a sequence of therapists & psychologists explaining the function of Fantasy in healthy adult sexuality, staged in a black-box void to look like an especially risqué episode of Charlie Rose. Then, Beth B points her camera at a series of NYC pedestrians, who ruminate on what fantasy they would want to play out if they could share a bedroom with a stranger for 30 minutes, no boundaries. Finally, she puts that scenario to a live test, bringing two strangers at a time into a sparse set decorated with only a bed, a chair, and a box of Kleenex, with 30 minutes to act out a fantasy of their choosing. It looks & feels like the set-up to an amateur porno, but the bridge from fantasy to reality becomes too intimidating in the moment for most participants to cross, and it ends up playing like an art-gallery video loop instead.

Already a few years into the initial run of The Real World, Visiting Desire totally understands the basic appeal of reality television. Beth B has set up an intensely artificial scenario (30 minutes of filmed fantasy play with a total stranger) hoping to illicit & capture a genuine human reaction (sex, or something like it). It’s not accurate to call it a failed experiment, exactly, but the range of genuine human behavior captured in the film isn’t as sexy nor as gratifying as its premise promises. Some participants are committed to the semi-scripted fantasy of their choosing: trading spankings, swapping clothes & gender roles, instructing a stranger to masturbate, etc. Unsurprisingly, NYC punk scene legend Lydia Lunch is especially game to lean into her dominatrix persona for the camera, fully playing out each fantasy prompt she’s confronted with regardless of whether she shares any attraction with her scene partner. Most participants completely chicken out, though, shying away from the fantasy they entered the room ready to perform and, in several instances, breaking down crying. That fear and that emotional release still count as unexpected genuine reaction to the artificial “reality” of the project, but they also so obviously miss the mark of what Beth B initially proposed that the cast often apologizes to the camera for not giving her what she wants. While the Running Man “Game Theory” undersells the pornographic aspect of reality TV, Beth B’s take on the format also misunderstands an essential component of what makes it work in the first place. 30 minutes is simply not enough time for her cast to adjust to her artificial environment or, more importantly, to her camera. In “Game Theory”, a former Survivor contestant describes how awkward she felt during her initial hours in front of the cameras, but then she became a more natural version of herself a few days into the shoot as she adjusted to their presence. All Visiting Desire has time to capture is that initial, awkward awareness of the camera without breaking through to the comfort that allows for genuine human response to its artificial scenario. If it were a multi-episode TV show instead of academic video art, it might’ve gotten somewhere genuinely interesting (and genuinely sexy). Instead, it’s a mixed-results experiment that’s neither pure documentary nor pure pornography.

If there’s anything instructive about this early reality-TV academia, it’s that Edgar Wright’s upcoming Running Man adaptation is unlikely to have much new to say about the violent or pornographic extremes that make the format popular. The Running Man-style violence of game shows like Survivor & Fear Factor peaked twenty years ago, while the pornographic avenues the genre has recently taken instead have no relation to the film’s Stephen King-penned source material. It’s difficult to imagine a new Running Man could even be dated in the fun way, not without Arnold Schwarzenegger quipping, “I’ll live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist, because I’m going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!” in his trademark Austrian accent. The cartoonish action cinema of the original Running Man movie was already outdated by the 1990s, and the American game-show dystopia it predicts was already in full swing by the 2000s, long before its 2019 setting. So, what’s even left for a new movie adaptation to accomplish? Based on current trends, the future of reality TV looks a lot more like the semi-pornographic artifice of Beth B’s Visiting Desire, flaws & all. Maybe that’s what we should be remaking instead, now that TV producers know exactly how to manipulate game show contestants into fucking on camera. It would likely make for some very popular major-network primetime porn, à la Love Island UK (or whatever happens to be your island-themed softcore game show of choice).

-Brandon Ledet

The Monkey (2025)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

I was looking forward to The Monkey with great anticipation. Longlegs was one of my favorite movies of last year, and although I’m colder on The Blackcoat’s Daughter than Brandon is, I’m mostly positive about Osgood Perkins’s overall body of work, so it’s unfortunate that The Monkey didn’t live up to my expectations. Extrapolated from a Stephen King short story about a toy monkey who visits unexplained and supernatural death whenever he clangs his cymbals together, Perkins has reworked the story into one about twin brothers (Christian Convery in the past and Theo James in the present) who find among their long-disappeared father’s belongings a “like life” toy organ grinder monkey. All too quickly, they learn that winding the monkey up by turning its key sets in motion its little drum routine (the cymbal monkey is now under copyright to Disney, for Toy Story reasons), and when it plays its final drumbeat, someone dies. When their mother dies as a result of the monkey’s machinations, they resolve to get rid of it by throwing it down an abandoned well, only for it to resurface twenty-five years later and start to kill the innocent again. 

There’s a lot to like here. This is the first of Perkins’s works to fully commit to being funny for most of its run time, and when it is funny, it’s hilarious. The deaths here are as comically over the top as they come, and not without a bit of Final Destination-esque Rube Goldbergian overdesign that lends them even more humor. The death of Sarah Levy’s character Aunt Ida is a particularly gratuitous one, as she first falls through the basement stairs and gets a face full of fishing hooks for her trouble; but after she painstakingly removes the tackle and sanitizes the wounds with rubbing alcohol, she accidentally lights her face on fire, which sends her running screaming into the night and impaling her head on the real estate post outside of her house. It’s slapstick horror comedy at its best, and when the film focuses on comedic violence, it shines. A woman dives into a swimming pool that has been electrified by a fallen air conditioning unit and, instead of simply being shocked or fried by the current, completely explodes like a water balloon full of human viscera; Uncle Chip gets reduced to little more than ground meat when he’s trampled to death in his sleeping bed by a stampede while out camping. And it’s a delight! 

What doesn’t work and what ends up dragging the film down is the semblance of narrative consistency that it tries to maintain. Adult Hal (the nerdy one) is now divorced and working in a supermarket, and he only sees his son once a year on the kid’s birthday. Upon arriving at the home of his ex-wife’s much more successful new husband, parenthood advice author Ted (Elijah Wood), he learns that Ted plans to adopt Hal’s son Petey (Colin O’Brien) outright, and Hal will lose all custody and visitation rites. His attempts to give his son one last fond memory by taking him to a horror theme park go awry when he learns of the death of his Aunt Ida, who took the boys in as children when their mother (Tatiana Maslany) was killed by the monkey. Believing that the monkey has returned, he goes back to the home and tries to find the monkey so that he can keep it out of the hands of anyone who would use it maliciously, and hilarity ensues as people continue to die—gloriously and gorily—all around him, while he works to keep his son safe from what he believes to be the family’s curse. Elsewhere, Adult Bill (who was the worst kind of piece of shit as a kid) is up to his own schemes, which include seeking the monkey through his own means, including a longstanding reward on the thing, which is claimed by local punk Ricky (Rohan Campbell), who develops his own fascination with the object. 

This is a film that’s front-loaded with all of the best parts, as its opening, set in 1999, follows Bill and Hal as kids and their relationship with their single mother. In the prologue, we learn that their father (Adam Scott) had attempted to return the monkey to a pawn shop, only for the monkey to start its drumbeat, with disastrous results. He does see a flamethrower in the store, however, and uses it on the monkey; this is the last that we see of him, and when the kids ask about their father, their mother reveals that he literally went out for the proverbial pack of smokes and never returned. The relationship between the boys and their mother is a fun one, and while Theo James is a fine enough actor, he cannot help but be unfavorably compared to Maslany, who imbues every one of her Act I scenes with enough charisma, charm, and comedic timing to fill most films. She’s a delight here, especially playing off of Convery, who effectively conveys two very different boys who happened to have shared a womb. Even with a general lack of comedic violence in that opening, there’s still a warmth and a charm that Maslany brings to life (her constant reference to Annie the babysitter as “Babysitter Annie” as if that were her full name is particularly cute). Young Bill is effective as an unrepentant bully who makes Hal’s life hell at home and in school, as he shares embarrassing details about Hal with a gaggle of mean girls that leads to them stealing his pants and pelting him with bananas (because of the monkey). 

Once we move into the present day, things get off to a pretty strong start. I mentioned Aunt Ida’s ignominious death above, and it turns out that the monkey is currently working overtime as the residents of his old hometown are dropping left and right in horrible accidents: real estate agents blown to bolognese bits by poorly maintained firearms, guys falling victim to their own lawn mowers (a possible reference to King’s Maximum Overdrive, as the film is peppered with others, like the fact that Babysitter Annie’s full name is Annie Wilkes), that sort of thing. Where the whole thing falls apart is when it attempts to be sincere, or (more charitably) when its mockery of sincerity is insufficiently dissimilar from the real thing. The relationship between Hal and Petey is one that we have very little investment in, as it’s clear that Hal is all but completely absent from his son’s life, and although it’s made clear that Ted is a strange man, there’s no reason to think that this change in the legal structure of Petey’s family will have much of an impact on him (or Hal) at all. Hal’s constant monologued fears about the potential for the monkey to be a curse on his bloodline didn’t stop him from getting married and having a son in the first place, and that even further precludes us from thinking that he cares about Petey all that much. I’m even less invested in the relationship between the estranged adults Bill and Hal, especially as the more antagonistic of the pair is played much more broadly than the other; it should be either campier or reined in a bit to better match Hal’s energy. Even if the film is trying to mock these relationships, the way that it attempts to rationalize and figure out rules for how the monkey works ground everything to a halt for me, after I was riding pretty high on the comedy of the first half. It’s not that the back half is without its fun moments. An earlier reference to skydiving weddings pays off hilariously and gruesomely in the climax, and the last minute before the credits roll provides another fun payoff that feels like something out of the VHS horror comedy era, and I got a kick out of both. It’s just too uneven and the back half too dull to live up to my expectations. When it’s funny, it’s wickedly funny, but when it’s not, it drags. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Carrie (1976)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Running this movie blog for the past decade has rotted my brain to the point where I can’t even vacation without planning my day around cinematic artifacts.  Thankfully, I recently found plenty cinema history to visit in Washington D.C.: a superb selection of used film-criticism texts for sale at Second Story Books, a few gorgeous art objects on display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History (including a foam face-hugger egg from Aliens) and, of course, the infamous Exorcist Steps at Georgetown.  That part was easy.  What was a little more difficult to pin down was a local screening of a D.C.-specific film to commemorate the trip, like when I caught the Bay Area Blaxploitation relic Solomon King at The Roxie in San Francisco.  Visiting D.C. during an election year, I expected there to be some local rep series of 70s-political-paranoia classics screening somewhere, but what I mostly found was the usual suspects that clog up most corporate cinema calendars: Harry Potter, Hitchcock, the rest.  Weirdly, though, I did discover a D.C.-specific tidbit when The Angelika Pop-up at Union Market listed a couple screenings of the classic 1976 adaptation of the Stephen King novel Carrie.  Although King’s work is generally associated with Maine, the movie version of Carrie neither premiered there nor in more traditional first-run cities like Los Angeles or New York.  For its first couple weeks in theaters, Carrie played exclusively in the D.C. and Baltimore distribution markets before expanding nationwide, for no other reason that I could identify besides giving this humble movie blogger something regionally specific to do on a Monday afternoon while vacationing there a half-century later, where I comprised exactly 50% of the attending audience.

Even without knowing its bizarre distribution history, Carrie has always been a kind of orphaned anomaly to me.  The problem is that it’s almost too perfect as a literary adaptation, vividly capturing everything I remember about King’s most powerful, most succinct work.  It’s so vivid, in fact, that I had remembered looking up the definition of the word “telekinesis” in my high school library while reading it for the first time, only to rediscover on this viewing that my supposed research was actually just a scene from the novel & film.  Given that narrative loyalty to its source text and given its looming stature in the larger canon of All-Timer Horror, it’s easy to forget that Carrie is also a great Brian De Palma film, maybe even one of the director’s personal best.  While not as wildly chaotic as a Sisters or a Body Double, Carrie does not find De Palma tempering his stylistic flourishes for wide-audience appeal.  The man never met a lens he didn’t want to split or a Hitchcock trope he didn’t want to reinterpret, and those personality ticks are present all over Carrie if you’re looking for them.  Every time he doubles the frame or imports notes from the Psycho score, the film’s placement in his personal canon becomes just as clear as its placement in the larger Horror canon.  Carrie is just so self-evidently great on its own terms that I never think of it as a De Palma film first and foremost.  Maybe it’s just not sleazy or ludicrous enough to register among his more idiosyncratic titles like Dressed to Kill or Femme Fatale.  Either way, I can’t name another time when a De Palma film has made me cry in public, whether those tears were earned by the director or by his lead actor, Sissy Spacek.

Spacek stars as the titular Carrie White, a cowering teenage recluse whose abusive homelife (at the hands of her religious zealot mother, played by Piper Laurie) makes her an easy target for high school bullies (including improbable castings of Nancy Allen, John Travolta, and P.J. Soles as cackling teenage demons).  What Carrie’s wicked parents & peers don’t know is that she has a powerful mind that can violently lash out if provoked, like a goth Matilda.  Because this is a high school movie, this all comes to a head at prom, when Carrie is taken on a pity date by one of her former bullies and then grotesquely pranked by the rest of the knuckleheads, who pour days-old pig’s blood on her homemade gown so that everyone can point and laugh at the freak.  In an act of moody teen-outsider wish-fulfillment, she snaps and effectively burns the entire town to the ground with her immense, supernatural intellect, taking revenge on world that was cruel to her for no other reason than the fact that she was born Different.  Carrie is bookended by bloodshed, but not in the way you’d expect a classic horror movie to be.  It ends with the pig-blood prank and begins with Carrie getting her first period in a high school locker room, having had no previous sex-ed training to prepare her for the shocking experience, much to her peers’ cruel delight.  That inciting menstruation is exactly what makes it one of the core texts of the Puberty as Monstrous Transformation canon, with especially thunderous echoes in later horror titles like Ginger Snaps, Teeth, and Raw.  It’s a perfect, self-contained text in that way, when the other heights of De Palma’s filmography tend to be defined by ecstatic messiness and directorial indulgence.

This theatrical revisit of Carrie is the first viewing that both made me cry (when Carrie finally enjoys herself for ten minutes of her otherwise miserable life at prom) and made me jump out of my seat (when Carrie’s undead hand reaches out from the rubble of her home, post-revenge).  Those strong emotional reactions directly resulted from De Palma’s deliberately Hitchcockian use of tension.  His filmmaking hero famously demonstrated how to build cinematic suspense through the “Bomb Under the Table” analogy, explaining that the best way to keep the audience on edge is to show us the bomb minutes before it goes off rather than to surprise us with it at the moment of detonation.  Ever dutifully faithful to the Master of Suspense, De Palma literally translates the Bomb Under the Table tension of that analogy to the Bucket in the Rafters totem of King’s novel.  He allows us to be swept up in the momentary fantasy of Carrie White’s prom night romance, but not without repeatedly cutting to the bucket of pig’s blood that hovers over her, waiting to tip over at the most painful moment possible.  The way he draws out that tension can be knowingly absurd at times, especially when the camera trails up & down the string that controls it in long, unbroken tracking shots that tease its precarious position above our poor, murderous heroine’s head.  It’s incredibly effective, though, and its obvious adherence to Hitchcock tradition is just as much a De Palma calling card as the countless shots framed with a dual-focus split-diopter lens (as well as the leering girls’ locker room opening that crams in as many naked actresses as the script would possibly allow, the pervert).

I don’t know that I discovered anything new about Carrie by watching it in the unlikely city where it premiered in its initial theatrical run, but I did rediscover a lot of what made it feel so powerful when I first saw it in my own moody, poorly socialized high school years.  Back then, I would’ve watched the movie alone in my bedroom on a rented VHS tape.  Now, I watched it alone with an afternoon beer in a city where I didn’t know anyone and didn’t have anything especially urgent to do.  Its story of religious resentments and teenage revenge felt empowering when I was still a Catholic school grump, but this time I didn’t feel invigorated by it the same way I did revisiting The Craft at The Prytania last year.  I mostly just felt sad, unnerved, and coldly alienated from the rest of humanity by the time the end credits rolled – all reassuring signs that it’s an all-timer of a horror movie.

-Brandon Ledet

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Considering its appeal as a vintage novelty horror about the evils of virtual reality, I had no choice but to enjoy The Lawnmower Man.  The film opens with a gravely sincere title card warning that virtual reality will be “in widespread use” by “the turn of the millennium”, which despite its “millions of positive uses” could lead to “a new form of mind control.”  It’s the exact kind of instantly dated cash-in on fad technology that’s dismissed for being embarrassingly obsolete in the years following in its initial release, but then ages wonderfully as a cultural time capsule of its era as the decades roll on.  Listening to the radical computer programmers of The Lawnmower Man pontificate about how virtual reality is “a new electric dimension” that “holds the key to the next evolution of the human mind” is hilariously goofy in hindsight, especially when paired with the cutting-edge CG graphics of its early-90s video game VR.  It’s also a great snapshot of how far-out & psychedelic the concept of immersive gaming was at that time, so that the film has just as much value as an anthropological record as it does as an accidental comedy.  I had just as much fun revisiting it in the 2020s as a cultural relic as I had watching it as a totally normal cable-broadcast horror flick as a 90s kid.  Still, it really pushed the outer limits of how much bullshit I’m willing to put up with to indulge in the precious Outdated Vintage Tech goofballery I love to see in my killer-computer genre movies.  It turns out the answer is “way too much”.

Pierce Brosnan stars as a put-upon research scientist for the sinister corporation Virtual Space Industries, working to expand the capabilities of the human mind through experiments in virtual reality.  He goes rogue when the company perverts his research to develop weapons instead of developing the human mind, leaving him jobless and bored.  From there, The Lawnmower Man turns into a mad scientist story, with Brosnan continuing the VR experiments in his basement on an unwitting human subject.  He establishes a Frankenstein-and-monster relationship with his neighborhood’s landscaper, a “born-dumb” “halfwit” played by Jeff Fahey.  Luckily, Fahey plays the mentally disabled test subject as more of an overgrown child than a broad-strokes exaggeration of real-life neurodivergent tics; or at least it helped that I watched Will Sasso completely biff the same type of role in Drop Dead Gorgeous the night before.  It’s still embarrassing to watch, though, and the only true saving grace is that his humble beginnings as a “poor idiot” don’t last long.  The mad scientist’s VR research works way too well, in fact.  The titular lawnmower man goes full galaxy-brain at an alarming speed, zooming right past neurotypical adult mental functions to becoming a self-declared “CyberChrist” with godlike powers over all minds and computers in his immediate vicinity.  In his early kills as a virtual reality god, he uses telekinesis to launch his lawnmower at his former bullies’ bigoted faces.  Later, he obliterates his enemies by pixelating them to death, erasing them from existence as if he were just deleting them from a hard drive.  I don’t know that I could describe it any better than Letterboxd user LauraJacoves, who succinctly declared it “Flowers for AlgeTron“.

Of course, the ickiness of Jeff Fahey being asked to play mentally disabled is a huge hurdle to enjoying The Lawnmower Man, and most of the film’s problems are rooted in its depictions of reality-reality.  If you can get past that discomfort, though, the movie is a hoot.  It’s overloaded with one-of-a-kind vintage CGI sequences that attempt to blow the audience’s mind with the endless possibilities of VR but instead feel like a hokey tour of mid-90s screensavers.  In one sequence, two virtual figures engage in literal cybersex then morph into a single dragonfly that soars over matrix-grid mountains.  In another, the mad scientist crams physical illustrations of human knowledge directly into his pet project’s brain, which rumbles with brainstorms & brainquakes in stressed-out overload.  It’s a true wonder, one that can only be described by the fake 90s slang the youngest member of the cast roadtests while playing the mildly psychedelic video games: “Sketched!” “Dudical!”  It’s a shame that The Lawnmower Man couldn’t have been more immersed in its totally dudical virtual world, like a 1990s update to Tron.  At the very least, it could have sidestepped the queasiness of the Jeff Fahey performance by sticking to Brosnan’s initial test subjects: chimpanzees.  There’s an early sequence where militarized chimps are navigating the mad-sketched VR landscapes while armed with assault rifles as if this were a high-concept first-person shooter.  I understand the Big City Tech vs. Rural Bumpkins dynamic the movie was aiming for, but it could’ve easily kept all of its best images if Brosnan had stuck to experimenting on himself and his chimps (minus the cybersex).

What’s really funny is that if The Lawnmower Man had dropped its titular lawnmower man test subject, it also would’ve sidestepped a lot of unnecessary legal trouble.  Horror legend Stephen King successfully sued to have his name removed from the film’s promotional materials and home video products, since it bares essentially no likeness to his original short story (about an occultist landscaper who answers to a new boss, Pan).  If the film were instead about Killer CyberChimps or if the mad scientist character had become the killer CyberChrist himself the movie would almost certainly be a more widely beloved cult classic – one with fewer legal fees added to its production & distribution budget and, let’s face it, one with a much better title for a novelty sci-fi horror of its era.  As is, it’s a lot of over-the-top vintage fun; you just have to put up with some totally unnecessary bullshit to enjoy it.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Doctor Sleep (2019)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Boomer and Brandon discuss Mike Flanagan’s epic The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep, which strives to bridge the gap between Stephen King & Stanley Kubrick’s disparate versions of the original.

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Mark “Boomer” Redmond & Brandon Ledet

Bonus Features: Passion Fish (1992)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Our current Movie of the Month, John Sayles’s 1992 comfort-watch Passion Fish, is a Southern-fried melodrama about a Rude soap opera star whose career comes to a halt after a paralyzing car accident. It looks & acts like a Normie heartwarmer about a proud woman overcoming sudden adversity, but pulls it off with an unusually direct, vulgar bitterness that cuts through the bullshit. In particular, the way the film depicts its lead’s discomfort, rage, and gradual acceptance of her newfound disability & reliance on a wheelchair feels refreshingly honest & relatably human for a 90s-era VHS rental. As a result, most recommendations of further viewing for anyone who enjoyed Passion Fish probably should touch on its unusually frank depiction of newfound physical disability, which really does set it apart from other, more maudlin works in its genre.

Here are a few recommended titles if you loved our Movie of the Month and want to experience similar depictions of recognizably Real people venting relatable frustrations over their own physical disabilities.

Never Fear (1949)

You might be tempted to ask for a better directorial debut from actor-turned-auteur Ida Lupino than the 1949 sudden-illness weepie Never Fear, but it would be tough to ask for a more personal one. Lupino’s first credit as a director is a well-behaved but harrowing melodrama about polio, a disease that Lupino herself suffered early in her career as a young actor. In fact, it was being bedridden with polio (and losing some mobility in her leg and hand) that inspired Lupino to develop skills as a writer & a filmmaker in the first place, as it was a harsh realization that her career as an onscreen beauty was limited & impermanent. She explained in an interview, “I realized that my life and my courage and my hopes did not lie in my body. If that body was paralyzed, my brain could still work industriously . . . If I weren’t able to act, I would be able to write. Even if I weren’t able to use a pencil or typewriter, I could dictate.” Polio was too sensitive of a subject at the time of Never Fear‘s release and, thus, failed to make a splash at the box office, but Lupino fearlessly tackled it head on from a place of personal frustration & anguish that affords it cultural significance anyway.

A young dancer (Lupino regular Sally Forrest) has her career cut short by a rapidly onset case of polio that leaves her paralyzed. She gradually earns her mobility back through painful months of physical & emotional therapy, but in the meantime struggles to maintain the romance, career, and independence she knew before the disease left her unable to dance. There are about twenty minutes of puppy-love bliss shared between the dancer and her partner/choreographer before polio cuts their ambitions short. The remaining hour is a pitch-black tearjerker that threatens to break that blissful romance apart, both through the introduction of potential love interests inside & outside the hospital and through the protagonist’s self-pity that makes her believe she’s no longer worthy of her former beau’s love & devotion. The resulting film illustrates a complex, nuanced psychological portrait of someone bedridden with polio, one that arrived in theaters while the country was still suffering the darkest days of the epidemic.

Never Fear is a romantic melodrama in which Ida Lupino pulls from her personal experience with polio to illustrate just how isolating & embittering the disease could be. It’s more or less a standard sudden-illness weepie, but it’s emotionally fearless in directly tackling its subject in a way that can be impressively horrific in flashes. It isn’t Lupino’s best work in the director’s chair, but it is a film with surprising emotional depth in her expressions of personal, professional anguish, which makes it a worthy watch for anyone interested in her one-of-a-kind career as one of the most substantial female directors in the Old Hollywood system. It’s also one of the few melodramas of its kind that matches Passion Fish‘s bullshit-free depictions of personal, internal conflicts over sudden physical disability.

Misery (1990)

If the bitter disability journeys of Passion Fish & Never Fear are too subtle or gentle for your liking, there’s always the Kathy Bates psychobiddy classic Misery. According to Steven King, Misery was written as a metaphor for his debilitating addiction to cocaine, which figuratively held him captive and forced him to write pulpy dreck far beneath his dignity as a Serious Artist. There’s likely some truth to that, but I do suspect King brandishes that anecdote at least somewhat to cover up the novel’s more obvious expressions of his open, seething contempt for his most enthusiastic fans. In the 1990 adaptation, Kathy Bates stars as a disgraced nurse who kidnaps her favorite pulp author after a blizzard-incited car crash and forces him to write novels that fit her headcanon instead of his own imagination. It’s a wonderfully blatant, literal depiction of the increasingly hostile relationships between artists & their audiences in recent years, where fans’ demands are too often allowed to dictate the work. It’s also, on the surface, a torturous body horror about a man held captive by a deranged medical professional who violently hobbles him to delay his recovery instead of working in his own interest.

In the opening sequence of Passion Fish, May-Alice is a big-city Soap Opera Star who’s frustrated that she relies on the whims & the capabilities of the small-town nurses hired to help her navigate her Louisiana bayou home. Things calm down once she finds an unlikely friendship with a nurse on her own wavelength, but that frustration over her reliance on another human being to accomplish mundane, daily tasks never really goes away. In Misery, a big-city Celebrity Author finds himself at the mercy of a small-town nurse who cares more about the fictional characters he creates than she does about his physical health (to put it mildly). Both films traffic in a warmly familiar 1990s mainstream filmmaking sensibility that sets expectations for a wholesome, safe viewing experience. Passion Fish cuts through that expectation with an unexpected vulgarity & bitterness as May-Alice becomes increasingly frustrated with her newly disabled body. James Caan goes through the same struggle as the Celebrity Author in Misery, except with a pronounced layer of traumatizingly gruesome body horror that even more drastically contradicts director Rob Reiner’s wholesome, mainstream sensibilities.

Weirdly, Misery also happens to employ an overqualified cinematographer in Barry Sonnenfeld, which mirrors Passion Fish‘s employment of industry legend Roger Deakins as its own DP.

The Intouchables (2011)

Maybe Misery‘s gory hyperviolence & Never Fear‘s Old Hollywood prestige are too fringe for a proper Passion Fish pairing. Maybe you just want to watch another by-the-books tearjerker that only strays from melodrama conventions by indulging in some occasional vulgarity. 2011’s The Intouchables isn’t exactly a great film the way Passion Fish is, but it does share some of its recognizable humanity that’s often missing from similar sudden-disability melodramas.

Based on a true story, The Intouchables chronicles an unlikely friendship between a paraplegic French aristocrat (who recently suffered a paragliding accident as part of his adrenaline seeking interest in X-Treme Sports) and the underqualified Senegalese ex-con he hires as his live-in caretaker (who only applied for the job as a ploy to remain on welfare). Although it arrived in theaters two decades after Passion Fish, it stumbles a lot more frequently in its own depiction of a budding friendship across race & class barriers (the Senegalese man is a pothead horndog criminal with no sense of public decorum, an often embarrassing line of humor). Still, there is a core sense of mutual respect & playfulness in their relationship that’s surprisingly endearing, especially in contrast to the long line of unsuitable, uptight, white caretakers who also interview for the job. The live-in caretaker is hired because he doesn’t look at his employer’s disability with any sense of pity or patronizing caution. His vulgar, casual demeanor cuts through the bullshit to allow them to meet on equal terms as human beings, even though one needs the other to accomplish most mundane tasks. The central friendship in Passion Fish is a lot more nuanced (and a lot less problematic in its race & class politics), but both movies share that vulgar, humanistic core.

I feel a little conflicted recommending a film I don’t wholly appreciate myself. The Intouchables alternates between charm & cringe so erratically that it’s difficult to be too enthusiastic about the positives when the whole ordeal is through. For perspective, then, it’s a good idea to follow up the film by watching the trailer for its recent American remake, starring Kevin Hart. It’s a quick way to appreciate how much worse the material could have been (and apparently was!) in even cruder hands.

-Brandon Ledet

IT: Chapter 2 (2019)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

So there I am, trying to put together my end of the year list, and I’m trying to find the Swampflix review of IT: Chapter 2 so that I can link back to it, and to my surprise, it’s nowhere to be found. Somehow, this one managed to fly completely under everyone’s radar, even though I went and saw it opening weekend, and was a bit more fond of it than the majority of filmgoers, it seems. And then I figured, well, sometimes you just have to do it yourself.

IT: Chapter 2 continues the story of the Losers Club: Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher in 1989, James McAvoy in the present*) is now a semi-successful horror writer who’s bad at writing endings; Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard in 1989, Bill Hader in the present) is a well-known stand-up comedian; Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis in 1989, Jessica Chastain in the present) is a fashion designer saddled to an abusive husband; Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor in 1989, Jay Ryan in the present) is a chiseled, handsome architect who runs his own firm; Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer in 1989, James Ransone in the present) is a risk assessment specialist for an insurance firm and is married to a woman just like his mother; Stanley Uris (Wyatt Olef in 1989, Andy Bean in the present) is an accountant who loves puzzles; and Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs in 1989, Isaiah Mustafa in the present) is the librarian of Derry. It’s been 27 years since the Losers Club first did battle with the ancient evil being known alternatively as Pennywise the clown or the titular IT (a returning Bill Skarsgård), and IT has returned from its cycle of hibernation to spread terror anew. Mike, as the only person to have remained in Derry and thus the only one who still remembers the particulars of what happened in the summer of 1989, recognizes the rising tide of general inhumanity and indecency in Derry that portends Pennywise’s return and calls on his old friends to do battle with IT once more.

Man, people really, really hated this one, didn’t they? I guess I can see why, but I’m also not really sure what anyone was expecting. IT is a novel that could be adapted a dozen times, and there’s always going to be one shining (no pun intended) truth about it: the Losers Club is always going to be more interesting when the constituents are children, and the “adult” half of the narrative is always going to pale in comparison. There’s just no way around it; it’s baked into the narrative’s very structure. That’s even kind of the point: the extradimensional entity we call Pennywise feeds on fear, and it prefers the fear of kids because children’s fears (killer clowns, abusive parents, monsters) are specific and easy to manipulate, while adult fears (not being able to provide for a family, dying alone, being trapped in a loveless relationship) are abstract and amorphous. Director Andy Muschietti made the right call here by opting to forego the pants-soiling horror of the first film and channel more comedy into this one, although how effective you found that to be does seem to vary from person to person. There’s verisimilitude in that, though: as a child, you’re powerless against the monsters you perceive in the world, and your best hope is to hide under your bed until the “monsters” go away; as an adult, one of the only real ways to defend against one’s anxieties and fears is to minimize and trivialize them, to turn them into jokes. Unlike everyone else, I thought that the Juice Newton needle drop was a delight! Whether or not the humor of that lands for you as a viewer is subjective, of course, but to make the defanging of horror through comedy part of the film’s actual text is fairly clever.

There are legitimate issues here. My first thought after exiting the theater was “Wow, that was a really good Nightmare on Elm Street movie.” Given that Freddy Krueger first appeared on screens in 1984 and Stephen King first started work on IT in 1981 and finished it four years later, it’s unlikely that the film was an influence on the book, but the potential for NOES to affect IT 2 is left up to the interpretation. Both boogeyman primarily prey on adolescents and children, and both can be defeated by their respective victims by refusing to give in to their fear (although a longer series of films means that successive filmmakers have had to create new methods of disposing of Freddy). This isn’t a bad thing, but it does mean that the climax and ending of this film is pretty similar to the ending of the first one, especially given that the adaptations of IT (wisely) choose to exise any references to Maturin the extradimensional turtle and reinterprets the Ritual Of Chüd as the tradition of a (fictional) First Nations group called the Shokopiwah. So, at the end of 2017’s IT, the kids overcome their fears and defeat Pennywise. And then at the end of IT: Chapter 2, they, uh, do the same thing again. But, like, more this time.

But here’s something that a lot of people may not like to hear: that’s okay. This movie has a distinct Dream Warriors feel to it, and given that both Dream Warriors and Dream Child feature the return of Amanda Krueger to assist in the defeat of her evil son (spoilers, I guess), there’s precedent for this kind of thing. I understand that when people go back to a franchise, what they want is more of the same—that’s the reason that over half of the Marvel movies feature villains that are just dark reflections of the hero, no matter how varied the individual films might be. Your audience is going to experience a series of diminishing returns if you’re not able to put forth something new over a long period of time, but when we’re looking at two films that exist purely as a diptych, it’s not a crime for them to metaphorically “rhyme” with one another. I’ve seen a lot of complaints that this film turns too episodic in its middle point, when each surviving member of the Losers Club goes off on their own individual talismans for their fight against IT, but I like that each thing that the characters seek out is a kind of anti-MacGuffin, in that they are ultimately irrelevant to the plot but are significant to the characters. The individual moments that we return to the kids we got to know in the first film and see them through the eyes of the adult selves do a lot more character work than the film is given credit for. These are people who have worked so hard to put their childhood traumas in the rearview, to distance themselves from their miserable and deadly youth both physically and mentally, that they let those traumas control them still. Beverly marries a man who is abusive, like her father; Eddie marries a woman who seems identically overbearing and over-attentive to his mother (down to the fact that they’re played by the same actress); Mike has literally never moved on. One could even interpret Bill’s inability to satisfactorily conclude a novel as a metaphor for the lack of closure he has surrounding the death of his younger brother Georgie. Even if the ritual that requires these talismans is ultimately useless, the act of finding them and remembering what happened to the Losers Club in 1989 is integral to their ability to fight back as adults and finally destroy IT. I found the plot sufficiently engaging that I was never bored; others may have felt the film’s length, but I was along for the ride from start to finish. There wasn’t a single other movie this year where I saw myself as much as in the scene with young Richie asks another boy, on whom he clearly has a crush, to play another arcade game with him, only for the other boy’s interest turn immediately to false disgust and name-calling when bully Henry Bowers shows up.

There are some complaints with which I can agree, however. The monster living in Bev’s old house isn’t very convincing when it moves from shadowed elderly woman to CGI beast; in fact, much of the CGI here is slightly substandard, although Spider-Pennywise looks pretty great in the finale. The way that the film dealt with Stanley’s fateful decision leaves a bit to be desired as well, given that the film not only forgives him for the choice that he makes but ultimately exalts it, which is capital-b Bad. Finally, although I’m never opposed to a Peter Bogdanovich cameo, I’m not sure what the point of including a scene at the beginning with Bill’s wife Audra was if (unlike the novel) she was never going to appear again. But other than those few quibbles, this is a pretty solid sequel, with some truly standout scenes. In particular, both the scenes in which we see Pennywise murder children are spectacularly well done, and don’t shy away from how horrible a thing it is when a child dies (it’s worth noting that Doctor Sleep also did this). The gay hate crime that starts the film is also a perfect reintroduction to the idea that when IT rises, it does so at least in part through the complicity of others and the bystander effect; compare it to the moment in the first film in which an elderly neighbor looks down to the street where poor Georgie was just standing, sees a huge amount of blood, and then goes about her business without questioning it. The same thing happens here to the couple who are bashed, and reminds us that in the years since 1989, hatred for and violence against LGBTQIA individuals may have decreased and support for queer causes and individuals may have ostensibly increased, that kind of freedom isn’t experienced by a large portion of queer people living in huge swaths of America outside of the coasts and other urban areas.

So yeah. Don’t believe the hype backlash.

*The “present” of the film is apparently late summer/early autumn 2016, just to be clear. I assume this is because there’s only room for one monstrous clown to be in power at a time.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond