thriller

Wild Beasts (1984)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

I have a bad habit of ordering Blu-rays every single time I see an advertisement for a boutique label sale.  It used to just be an occasional dip into the Criterion Collection during that prestige label’s regular Black Friday and Barnes & Nobles sales, but it has since escalated to include loving restorations of vintage genre trash from labels like Severin, Vinegar Syndrome, and Mélusine.  I’ve been watching a lot of button-pushing, amoral schlock recently as a result – the kind of outré bad-taste material that you can often only find on disc because streaming service curators don’t want to touch it.  It was a strange comfort, then, to recently discover that I’m not yet totally immune to that hazardous material.  My recently purchased copy of the when-animals-attack Italo horror Wild Beats managed to offend me early & often.  It’s less of a narrative feature than it is a document of real-life crimes against animals, children, and anonymous character actors.  By the end credits, I found myself hoping that one of the special features on the disc would be a montage of mugshots for everyone involved in the production.  And yet, I was also appreciative for each of those sweaty European bastards for teaching me how to feel again, even if most of what I was feeling was shock & disgust. 

I might have been better prepared for that shock had I paid attention to the credited director: Franco Prosperi, of Mondo Cane fame.  Prosperi brings the same misanthropic gusto to this outlandish story of a PCP-contaminated zoo that he brought to his earlier mondo “documentaries,” matching their unhinged, diabolical energy by again nudging the audience to question which onscreen atrocities are real and which are staged.  Set in “a Northern European city” (with signage that’s conspicuously, universally printed in German), Wild Beasts is a disaster film about escaped, drug-crazed wild animals that terrorize unsuspecting urbanites who are understandably unprepared for attacks from literal lions, tigers, and bears.  The initial shock of the premise is in the exotic varieties of animals that Prosperi sourced from circuses & zoos.  A wild cheetah stalks a woman in a speeding convertible; a polar bear peruses elementary school hallways like it’s visiting a buffet; a small gang of elephants take over airplane runways by stomping anyone who gets in their way.  It’s an impressive assemblage of animals that you’re not used to seeing in productions this cheap, but once the initial awe wears off you start to wonder how well those animals could possibly be cared for.  Then, there’s the sickening tension of trying to determine whether those animals’ onscreen terror & peril are genuine, real-life events, something that doesn’t seem out of the question for the Mondo Cane crew.

According to Severin’s bonus-feature interview on the production of Wild Beasts, Prosperi claims “We did not hurt any animals at all,” explaining that they shot the film entirely under the watchful eye of the World Wildlife Federation.  If so, I was fooled.  It’s not always easy to tell when the image alternates between live animal & furry prop, and I swear I saw some documentation of real-life cruelties somewhere in that mix: live rats on fire, cats of all sizes antagonized for dramatic effect, seizure-like responses to tranquilization, etc.  It’s like the grindhouse version of Roar in that way, with the fact & fiction narratives competing for the spotlight.  Prosperi isn’t all that much better with humans either.  Stunt actors are allowed to be jostled by large, dangerous animals for several beats too many, walking up to the line of becoming a snuff film.  Child actors are framed & vocally dubbed as if they were adults, which is intensely upsetting in scenes where they appear half-dressed.  It’s actually unclear that Prosperi even fully knows what a child is, since he increasingly dwells on their alien, indecipherable behavior as if they were just another breed of wild animal.  That thematic preoccupation does eventually pay off at the film’s jarring climax, but there’s no dramatic payoff great enough to forgive the transgression of endangering performers as vulnerable as children & animals for Z-grade genre entertainment.

Despite being deeply offended by nearly every scene in Wild Beasts, I cannot deny that I found the transgression thrilling.  Maybe it’s because the long-deceased Prosperi is no longer around to imperil children or animals that I feel somewhat comfortable to delight in the amoral mayhem he documented here.  Truthfully, though, I found his tasteless misanthropy & misothery to be a major aspect of the film’s entertainment value.  The opening sequence is a music video montage of urban filth, depicting a modern world so overfilling with drugs that PCP & lysergic acid (treated in-dialogue as the same substance) has collected as a visible scum in the municipal water supply, thus infecting animals at the city zoo.  One standout image of fried chicken leftovers and hypodermic needles littering the city’s public transit platforms spells out all you need to know about what Prosperi thought of humanity and the joys of being alive in modern times.  For all I know, he was a super sweet guy in his personal life, but the crude, cheap ways he exploited his performers for profit in his cinema betrays a deeply cynical worldview that leaves his audience feeling ill.  I can almost guarantee that if he were a current, working filmmaker I’d have a much more difficult time appreciating the effect of his work without fretting over the practicalities of its production, which is probably a compartmentalization I should work out privately in therapy instead of a public blog.

-Brandon Ledet

Strange Darling (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

The critical decorum for writing about the new high-style serial killer thriller Strange Darling is that you’re supposed to recommend audiences see the movie without reading a full description or review, which benefits the movie in two ways.  One, it preserves the surprise of discovery as the movie walks the audience through various What’s Really Going On plot twists like a puppy on a leash.  More importantly, it also saves the movie from having its themes & ideas discussed in any detail, so that critics are instead encouraged to gush over its candy-coated hyperviolence (“shot entirely on 35mm film”, as the first title card goofily boasts) without fretting about the meaning behind those striking images.  That second benefit is crucial, since the actual substance protected by Strange Darling‘s candy shell is rotted hollow.  There’s no color saturation level high enough nor any needle drop ironic enough to cover the taste of the misogyny molding at the core of this empty entertainment vessel, despite director JT Mollner & cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi (yes, that Giovanni Ribisi) trying their damnedest at every turn.  So, go ahead and swallow it down without reading the full ingredient list if you like, but be prepared to walk away feeling ill.

Kyle Gallner & Willa Fitzgerald star as a pair of beer-buzzed hedonists who meet in a roadside motel room for a kinky one-night stand.  Several false-start openings (to bookend the several fake-out conclusions) tease the audience with awareness that a serial killer is afoot, which casts Gallner in an unsavory light as a macho brute who gets off on strangling women.  But wait, it turns out the editor is not the only shameless tease warping the picture.  The more time we spend in the motel, the more Fitzgerald’s strangulation victim is revealed to be a huge tease herself, goading Gallner into playfully abusing her according to a roleplay script they agreed to before booking the room, then repeatedly pulling back the exact moments when the violent foreplay is about to naturally spill over into consensual sex.  There’s some hack Pulp Fiction chapter shuffling in how the story is ordered that maintains her innocence for as long as possible, at first characterizing her as a frustrating hookup who triggers misogynist violence in her date through unintentional sexual teasing.  Eventually, though, it can’t hold back its condemnation of her as a “crazy bitch” and a “cunt” who deserves any violence Gallner exacts upon her in revenge, since she uses the general assumed victimhood of women in heterosexual partnerships gone awry to her advantage, so that she can get away with murder.  The entire motel hookup kink scenario was a setup, you see, because you’re watching a Promising Young Woman remake that coddles Tarantino-obsessed MRAs.

Pushing the movie’s thoughts on consent, kink, and rape aside for as long as possible really does benefit its value as stylish entertainment.  Its pride in shooting on film is a little corny in presentation, but the colors are gorgeously rich enough to excuse the faux pas.  Ribisi has fun playing with his traditionalist camera equipment, delivering the kind of vintage genre throwback that’ll have movie nerds hooting & hollering at multiple split-diopter shots like salivating dogs.  Barbara Hershey & Ed Begley, Jr. briefly drop by to lend the production an air of credibility as aging sweetheart hippies who are unprepared for how violently the War of the Sexes has escalated since their heyday.  Car chases, shoot-outs, and intimate stabbings keep the adrenaline up once the motel tryst fully falls apart, spilling the intimate violence of that room into the 2-lane highways of rural America.  The whole thing is pretty exciting, excitingly pretty, and then pretty atrocious as soon as it starts rebutting cultural assumptions about who’s the real victim when men & women fight.  I’m usually not in the business of judging a movie entirely by its moral character—especially not as someone who regularly watches the vintage schlock this pulls direct visual inspiration from—but I couldn’t help but feeling like if Strange Darling were a person and not a feature film it would have some really specific, fucked up opinions about The Amber Heard Situation.  Its vibes are just as rancid as its visuals are immaculate.

-Brandon Ledet

The Rover (2014)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

It may seem like we’re not far enough past the 2010s for the decade’s distinguishing cultural markers to be fully clear in the rearview, but recently returning to pop media from that time has convinced me it’s been long enough.  They’re especially clear when watching episodes of reality TV shows from a decade ago, where the dated fashions & attitudes of the 2010s are already vividly distinct.  You don’t have to be a freak like me to find those cultural timestamps in old episodes of Top Chef or Total Divas, though.  Those shows are meant to be disposable fluff, not anthropological time capsules.  Look instead to the 2014 road-trip thriller The Rover, which was only released ten years ago and already feels like it was made on another planet.  A somber, stylish revenge mission set in Mad Max’s near-future Australia, The Rover should still feel like a relatively fresh take on a road-worn template, but it’s already coated with a thick layer of dust from the past decade of pop culture progress.  A lot’s changed since we first cracked open a new decade, which is surprising considering that most of us spent the first couple years of the 2020s in a state of domestic stasis, avoiding the outside world.

Following an intentionally vague global economic collapse, Guy Pearce solemnly spends his days in the Australian heat drinking hard liquor and neglecting to shave.  His lonely, self-destructive routine is disrupted when his car is stolen by a small gang of reprobates, giving him an excuse to be destructive towards someone else for a change.  The only lead on his stolen car is an injured member of the gang left to die in the road, played by Robert Pattinson.  The two men reluctantly bond on a road trip towards dual, parallel acts of revenge: one for stolen property, one for heartless abandonment.  The most readily apparent way the pop culture landscape has changed since The Rover‘s initial release is that this kind of relentless post-apocalyptic trudge is no longer as overly prevalent now as it was in the early 2010s, when it would have competed with titles like Take Shelter, Snowpiercer, These Final Hours, The Book of Eli, The Road, Mad Max: Fury Road, World War Z, The Walking Dead, and so on.  It had a hard time standing out in that crowded field even though it’s more committed than most to distinguish itself with bleak tones and off-kilter character quirks (including an extensive sequence of Pattinson mumbling “Pretty Girl Rock” to himself that felt custom-designed for a David Ehrlich countdown video).  That’s not the only thing that’s changed, though.

I assume The Rover was initially compared to the in-over-his-head antihero plot of Blue Ruin (since there’s a lot of crossover in the small group of movie obsessives who’d happen to catch both titles), given Pearce’s blatant lack of a Taken-style “set of skills” that would make him suitable to fight off a gang of thugs as a lone wolf.  He’s just an ordinary man who happens to be extraordinarily angry about the theft of his car.  At this point on the cultural timeline, though, no revenge mission movie can get by without being unfairly compared to John Wick, which was released just one year later.  It’s unlikely that The Rover & John Wick would’ve been directly compared at the time, but John Wick has since set a definitive template for modern revengers that The Rover happens to fit into: stories about ultra-violent heroes overcorrecting seemingly petty wrongs.  Usually that means slaughtered pets (the dog in John Wick, the pig in Pig, the bees in The Beekeeper, etc). In The Rover‘s case, it’s a stolen, unremarkable sedan that leads to a bloody body-count. Of course, there’s always a deeper well of Trauma hidden under those surface-level revenge missions, but the macho brutes at the center can only express themselves through Violence so it takes a while to gather the details.  When Pearce finally confesses what awful incident broke his moral compass halfway through the picture, it’s not so much a major dramatic reveal as it is one more grim detail passing by in an endless parade.

Something else that’s obviously changed in the past decade is A24’s brand identity as a film distributor. They were already making bold acquisitions like The Rover, Spring Breakers, and Under the Skin in their first year, but they didn’t really become a recognizable, dependable marketing machine until 2015’s The Witch.  It’s impossible to say whether The Rover might have been a hit if it had come out after A24 fully won over the hearts of the coveted Film Bro audience, but it is the exact kind of tough-exterior-soft-interior thriller that appeals to young men of that ilk, so it’s possible.  At the very least, it was better suited for a cult audience than the similarly somber post-apocalyptic tale It Comes At Night, which lucked into a higher level of name recognition by arriving later in the A24 film-bro ascendancy.  Releasing The Rover after Robert Pattinson’s recent turn as Batman couldn’t have hurt on that front either, considering that he was still mostly known as The Guy from Twilight in 2014.  By now, anyone paying attention knows that Pattinson is a talented actor with good taste for adventurous projects, but the combination of this & Cosmopolis were only the early signs that was the case (to the measly dozens of people who saw them in initial release).  The Rover is very much a film of its time, to its peril.  Its distinctive virtues are just as apparent to a 2020s set of eyes as the difference between the current Women’s Division of the WWE vs the Divas division of the 2010s, which you can now plainly see in any random episode of Total Divas but was a lot more difficult to parse in the thick of it.

-Brandon Ledet

Last Stop in Yuma County (2024)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

Heretofore a director of mostly short films and music videos, first-time feature director Francis Galluppi has burst onto the scene with something that’s both indebted to indie upstarts of the past and which feels like a breath of fresh air. Last Stop in Yuma County is a spare movie; it doesn’t look or feel cheap although you can definitely tell it was made on a marginal budget. It’s lean in just the right places to take this story to the next level. 

In the 1970s, an unnamed traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) stops for gas while en route to see his daughter, in the custody of his ex-wife, for her birthday. He arrives at a filling station only to learn from the attendant, Vernon (Faizon Love), that he’s waiting for the fuel truck to arrive, and that he’s welcome to wait in the attached diner. Since this is, as the title says, the last stop in Yuma, he has little choice. The diner’s waitress and possibly sole employee, Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue), is dropped off by her sheriff husband, Charlie, while the salesman hears on the radio about a bank robbery a few counties over. Once the diner opens, Charlotte and the salesman make pleasant chit-chat while trying to ignore the rising heat, as the diner’s air conditioner is no longer working. Before long, another car stops in for gas and gets the same bad news, and its occupants also choose to idle the time away in the diner. While Charlotte takes their order, the salesman notices that they are driving the same green Pinto described in the radio bulletin. The robbers, young hothead Travis (Nicholas Logan) and middle-aged, stone-cold Beau (Richard Brake), take note that the salesman and the waitress seem to be exchanging confidences, and cut the phone line when Charlotte tries to call Charlie, who takes too long to come to the phone. (Charlie’s assistant, Virginia, is played by the one and only Barbara Crampton.) Beau tells them to play nice and tasks Charlotte with grilling each customer who comes in about their fuel situation and, if any of them have gas, he’ll simply take that car and let everyone live. 

The diner starts to fill up as more and more people arrive at the fill-up station. An elderly couple from Texas (Robin Bartlett and Gene Jones, the latter of whom you may remember as the gas station attendant whose small talk infuriates Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) takes up residence at one table, and Charlie’s deputy Gavin (Connor Paolo) comes in for coffee, which sets Beau and Travis on edge. Charlotte almost manages to get a warning out, but Gavin’s careless collision with Travis costs her the opportunity. Two drifters, Miles (Ryan Masson) and Sybil (Sierra McCormick), also find their way to the diner, and Miles, who already idolized the criminals he heard about on the radio since he and Sybil have a whole anti-social folie-a-deux, attempts to steal the bank loot from the Pinto’s trunk before he’s spotted and they have to head into the diner to avoid being caught. It’s when local rancher Pete (Jon Proudstar) arrives, solely to have lunch since he filled up the day before, that things finally get out of hand. The meek salesman writes a note to his daughter and sticks it in his pocket and prepares to make a stand, but a standoff occurs when Beau takes Charlotte hostage, with Pete, the Texans, and Miles all pulling their guns on each other. Miles tries to bargain for part of the loot for helping Beau and Travis, and then things take a real turn for the worse. 

There are a couple of minor elements that spotlight Yuma as a first-time outing for a feature director. Throughout the film, one of its strengths is a beautiful, constant, yellow desert light coming in from the outside; it’s very atmospheric in a way that contributes to the tension. But when the salesman shows up at the diner around dawn (it’s specifically said that it opens at six o’clock, and he watches Charlotte enter and turn the “open” sign around), the light is already that same pallid yellow of noon. It’s unchanging, and it’s a minor detail, but one that I couldn’t help but notice. The scene in which Beau explains—calmly, coolly, and dispassionately—exactly why the salesman and Charlotte are still alive, it’s delivered as a monologue. It’s a strong one, and one that’s done in a single long take, which works great with the tone. However, there’s a moment in the speech when Beau says, “Do you understand?” [beat] “Good,” and then continues with his directions. We can assume, yes, that Charlotte and/or the salesman nodded their assent, but it feels weird not to see that response in the text, without a cutaway. You can’t cut the question from the monologue without cutting the long take, and you can’t cut to the other characters reacting without doing the same, but it nonetheless feels a little awkward. 

That’s all that there is to quibble about, though. This is a great piece of work, moody and tense. From the opening credits on, we know that the fuel truck isn’t coming, as the opening credits play out over its crash site, so we know that things can only go tragically (and boy do they). Cummings’ transformation from timidity to reluctant courage is fun to watch, and when his character starts to make selfish choices, we go into full Coen Brothers mode as he succumbs to his own personal greed, up to and including a moment where it seems like he will be forced to bury the cash beside the road like Jerry Lundegaard. Beau and Travis even superficially resemble other pairs of criminals that the Coens often conceive in their films, with Braker’s Beau in particular a welcome presence as his casual cruelty means the stakes are as high as possible, and the performance of base, blood simple (ha) meanness that Braker brings to the role is a highlight. The placement of the dominoes that create the narrative flow is excellent, with some really elegant foreshadowing and rhyming imagery. It’s hard to say more about this one without giving too much away (in fact, I may already have), but if you’re yearning for something in the vein of a less sprawling No Country in a tight ninety minutes, this is a perfect choice. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Parallax View (1974)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

It’s a well-known fact around these parts that I love a conspiracy thriller. I couldn’t have been more excited that my local arthouse theater programmed a month-long series of 1970s American thrillers, and I bought a ticket for almost every one of them. The first of these is a cornerstone of the genre, and one that was a sorely lacking blind spot in my checklist of canonical films of said phenotype. The Parallax View, a 1974 release from director Alan J. Pakula just two years before his second-best picture nomination for All the President’s Men (his first was for To Kill a Mockingbird), stars Warren Beatty. Beatty plays Joe Frady, a reporter in the Pacific Northwest, three years after he was present at the base of the Seattle Space Needle when a high-profile politician was assassinated in the restaurant above. He wasn’t in the room when it happened, but his ex-girlfriend Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) was, and she’s convinced that six of the other eyewitnesses who have died in the intervening time were the victims of foul play; Frady waves off her concerns as anxiety born of self-medicating, until she, too, turns up dead. Now convinced, Frady starts to pull at the frayed threads presented to him and discovers a conspiracy that permeates the fabric of the country’s leadership, one whose reach is far wider than he could have imagined. 

In the book upon which The Parallax View is based, the inciting assassination was that of JFK, making it a part of the subgenre of conspiracy media that specifically appeals to the Dale Gribble set. Here, the assassination that precedes the opening credits is that of a generic independent politician with an eye on the presidency, as the film was released too late to attach itself to the Kennedy assassination without making itself a period piece. That didn’t stop this one from becoming as locked into a certain time as a period piece would be in the intervening half century, however, while also remaining unfortunately (if not unsurprisingly) relevant to the current greased-by-blood American political machine. Sure, there’s a lot of culture shock upon seeing Frady purchase a plane ticket with cash after he’s already boarded the plane. On the other hand, the film seems almost prescient in its depiction of the abject terror of living in a society shaped by shadowy forces that can arrange car accidents for reporters, poison newspaper editors in a way that mimics a heart attack, and knock a passenger plane carrying a progressive candidate out of the sky. It’s not that hard to make a connection between the fictional conspiracy at play here and, for instance, the sudden death of a whistleblower who raised safety concerns about airplane manufacturing just six weeks ago. That’s not really prescience, really, any more than The Simpsons “predicted” any of the things it’s been credited with foreseeing in recent years; it’s just an indictment of the fact that we’ve made much less progress in the past sixty years than we would like to think. It’s all just the pageantry of empire. 

The Parallax View falls short of being a masterpiece. It has some really wonderful set pieces, and the picaresque nature of the narrative keeps things moving even when the story starts to feel a little slow. First, Frady goes to a tiny Oregon community where the political aide to the dead senator was last seen and where one of the witnesses was drowned while fishing when a dam was opened. This sequence is great, as you can feel the immense tension as the dam opens again while he’s investigating the area. This is preceded by an impressive fist fight between Frady and a local oaf, then followed by an exciting car chase that I would bet money was an inspiration to the future creators of The Dukes of Hazzard. Even after he manages not to drown, Frady’s editor Bill Rintels (Hume Cronyn) still isn’t convinced that there’s a conspiracy afoot, until Frady miraculously survives the assassination of in-hiding political insider Austin Tucker (William “Mr. Feeney” Daniels), at which point Rintels relents. In his investigation, Frady discovers that an organization known as The Parallax Corporation is using mail-in personality tests to find sociopaths and recruit them to become assassins. From here, we get to the film’s most famous sequence (and it, in and of itself, is a masterpiece): a five minute montage to which Frady (undercover after submitting a false test) is subjected to as a kind of orientation/brainwashing. You can see it here, and although it functions beautifully in isolation, it’s obviously much more effective in the film itself. 

In a lot of ways, this is the platonic ideal of a 1970s political thriller, disillusioned after a decade that saw the death of a beloved president, the murder of the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, the unmasking of another president’s illegal surveillance of the public. While the book was solely focused on the assassination of JFK, this one explicitly talks about the demoralization of an entire nation as there’s the murder of another public figure “every other week, it seems.” It’s also unrelentingly grim, as everyone turns out to be corruptible and already under Parallax’s sway despite initially seeming to be trustworthy, or genuinely good and invested in getting the truth out but very easy to kill and cover up, or less safe than they thought they were despite taking every precaution. No one is unreachable, no one is untouchable, no one is safe, and no number of civilian collaterals is considered too much, whether it be eighteen eyewitnesses, a plane full of people who were unlucky enough to be on the same flight as a senator, or an entire marching band that has the misfortune of having been selected to perform at a congressman’s campaign announcement. It’s bleak, but worth seeking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

White Room (1990)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Patricia Rozema’s sophomore feature White Room is about to get its first-ever Blu-ray release through Kino Lorber, along with Rozema’s lesser seen follow-up When Night is Falling and her calling-card debut I Heard the Mermaids Singing.  I’m sure that the 4K restoration of White Room will be a worthy purchase for any crate-digging home video collector who’s interested, considering the sensual immersion of its video art fantasy aesthetic and its dreamy pop music soundtrack.  At the same time, I’m happy to report that the still-in-print Canadian DVD I bought for a third of Kino Lorber’s list price is impressively crisp and a great cost-cutting alternative to the upcoming upgrade.  I’m also holding out hope that the Blu-ray release will lead to White Room‘s return to online streaming platforms, since it’s not currently available and it’s the kind of bizarre discovery that makes you want to recommend it to anyone who’ll listen.

Maurice Godin stars as a squeamish suburban nerd with a bad habit of peering into his neighbors’ windows as the world’s least pervy Peeping Tom.  Like a boyish, wholesome variation on a De Palma voyeur, he accidentally witnesses the rape & murder of a famous rockstar while watching her lounge around her secluded home and spends the rest of the movie beating himself up over his inaction at her death scene (literally whipping himself with thorny roses, in this instance).  Determined to become a more courageous, active participant in his own life, he moves out of his confectionary family home and into the big scary city of Toronto, where he quickly finds himself at the funeral of the murdered woman: a famous rockstar named Madeline X, played by Margot Kidder.  At the funeral, he falls for an older, mysterious woman (Kate Nelligan) who appears overly distraught at the musician’s passing, and by following her further down the rabbit hole he accidentally uncovers a larger music industry conspiracy he wishes he had just left alone. 

White Room is part romance novel, part noir, and full urban fairy tale.  Despite its contemporary fascination with MTV-era music video artistry, its narrative operates on the kind of traditionalist fairytale logic that always makes for great cinema, no matter the era.  None of the acting or character details are especially convincing as Real, but they’re in total harmony with the storybook narration track that refers to our cowardly hero as Norman the Gentle instead of just Norm. Its fictional rock numbers (partially credited to frequent Robert Eggers collaborator Mark Korven) play into that fairytale vibe as well, falling somewhere between the timeless literary songwriting of classic Kate Bush and the dreamy rock & roll of the Mary Timony album Mountains, which wouldn’t arrive for another decade.  Norm only travels from the suburbs to the urbs, but he might as well have journeyed across several cursed kingdoms to break his beloved free from the witch’s spell that kept her imprisoned in a daze (by which I mean her record company contract).

By her second feature, Rozema was already incredibly smart as a low-budget indie filmmaker, squeezing major visual impact out of meager resources.  As the film’s only celebrity get, Margot Kidder’s time on set appears to have been limited to only a few days, which Rozema stretches out across music video & interview clips to build genuine mystique around the murdered pop idol Madeline X.  The location shooting around Toronto manages to transform familiar city streets into a convincing fantasy world just by isolating the geometric lines of architecture & infrastructure in abstracted frames.  Most importantly, Rozema fully embraces the low-budget aesthetic of MTV-era video art in a way that frees her from restrictions of the real, physical world.  Besides the obvious music-video tangents afforded by the mysterious Madeline X, the film also finds excuses to indulge in video-art inserts via Norman’s POV, giving us glimpses of primal feelings that he’s too timid to express in words through video-warped images of seagulls, chess pieces, softcore pornography – whatever abstract flashes of imagery overwhelm his imagination then disappear before he can pick up a pen to jot them down.

Speaking of Norman’s imagination, he’s a difficult character to pin down: a voyeuristic man-boy who’s both driven & repelled by sex but is somehow not a threat to the women in his life.  If anything, he’s a pure object of desire for those women, modeling a romance paperback blouse through the second half of the runtime while women stare at his denim-clad ass.  He’s sometimes feminized in the edit, taking the place of the women he stalks in their most vulnerable moments and cast as the only actor who appears nude onscreen.  Godin’s performance can be a little frustrating in its boyish naivety, prompting you to imagine what more eccentric actors might have done with the role (Crispin Glover, Kyle MacLachlan, and Matt Farley all came to mind), but by the time the more hardened urbanites around him mock his earnestness with laughter it’s clear his blank-slate screen presence was more of an artistic choice than an oversight.  Norm is a fairytale prince defined by his desires & pursuits, and a lot of the joy in the film can be found in the small smirks of the women who find his naivety irresistibly cute.

If there’s anyone I’d most enthusiastically recommend White Room to besides hardcore Rozema Heads already won over by I Heard the Mermaids Singing, it would be to anyone who was charmed by the urban fantasy logic of this year’s kids-on-bikes comedy Riddle of Fire.  The narrator’s introduction of Norman the Gentle’s is just as amusingly verbose as the introduction of Petal Hollyhock, Princess of the Enchanted Blade in that more recent oddity.  Both films understand the rhythms & reasoning of fairytale storytelling on such a deep spiritual level that they can include video games & MTV parodies without their participation in the ancient traditions ever being questioned.  We instantly get the magical thinking of their narratives based on vibes alone.  The only acknowledgement of influences White Room has to get out of the way is in an end-credits dedication “with apologies to Emily Dickinson,” since the poet’s work was heavily referenced in the fictional pop-music lyrics of Madeline X.

-Brandon Ledet

Civil War (2024)

/ swampflix / 7 Comments

The first noises you hear in Alex Garland’s Civil War are surround-sound blasts of static bouncing around the room in unpredictable, disorienting patterns.  That discordance continues in the film’s crate-digging soundtrack, which includes songs from bands like Suicide & Silver Apples that disorient their audiences with off-rhythm oscillation for a near-psychedelic effect.  Likewise, a sunny, up-beat party track from De La Soul violently clashes against a scene of brutal militarism in a way that’s chillingly wrong to the ear and to the heart.  Civil War is cinema of discordance, a blockbuster art film that purports to take an apolitical view of inflammatory politics.  That discordance is evident in its main subject: the psychology behind war journalism & battlefield photography.  Even though the work itself is often noble, journalists’ personal impulses to participate in violence as up-close spectators can be disturbingly inhuman, and Garland’s main interest appears to be in the volatile disharmony between those two truths.  It’s a movie about professional neutrals who act against every survival instinct in their bodies that tell them to fight or flee, and that instinct that says what you’re observing is dangerous & wrong carries over to the filmmaking craft as well – something that only becomes more disturbing when you find yourself enjoying it.

Kirsten Dunst stars as a respected photojournalist who reluctantly passes her torch to a young upstart played by Cailee Spaeny, mirroring the actors’ real-life professional dynamic as Sofia Coppola muses.  Along with two similarly, generationally divided newspaper men (Wagner Moura & Stephen McKinley Henderson), they travel down the East Coast of a near-future America that’s devolved into chaos & bloodshed, hoping to document the final days of an illegitimate president who refuses to leave office (Nick Offerman) before he is executed by the combined military of defecting states.  Like in Garland’s screenplay for 28 Days Later, their journey is an episodic collection of interactions with survivors who’ve shed the final semblances of civility in the wreckage of a dying society (including a show-stopping performance from Jesse Plemons as a small-time, sociopathic tyrant), except instead of a zombie virus everyone’s just fighting to survive extremist politics.  The journalists look down on people who’ve consciously decided to stay out of the war—including their own parents—but in the almighty name of objectivity they attempt the same political avoidance, just from a much closer, more thrilling proximity.  They sometimes pontificate about the importance of allowing readers to decide on the issues for themselves based on the raw data they provide from the front-lines, but Garland makes it clear that their attraction to the profession can be something much more selfish than that.  Moments after watching & documenting real people bleed to death through a camera lens, they shout, “What a rush!” and compliment the artistic quality of each other’s pictures.  They’re essentially adrenaline addicts who’ve found a way to philosophically justify getting their fix.

There may be something amoral about picking at the ethics & psychology of front-line war journalism in this way, especially at a time when we’re relying on the bravery of on-the-ground documentation from Gaza to counteract & contradict official government narratives that downplay an ongoing genocide.  Civil War never makes any clear, overt statements about journalism as a discipline, though; it just dwells on how unnatural it is for journalists to be able to compartmentalize in real time during battle, even finding a perverse thrill in the excitement.  They are active participants in war without ever admitting it to themselves, and most of the emotional, character-based drama of the film is tied to the ability to maintain that emotional distance as the consequences of the war get increasingly personal.  As the lead, Dunst in particular struggles to stay protected in her compartmentalized headspace where nothing matters except getting “the money shot” of actual combatants being brutally killed just a few feet away from her camera.  It shuts off like a light switch when she sees her inhuman behavior reflected in the younger version of herself, played by Spaeny.  It also shuts off when reviewing her own artistically framed pictures of a dying colleague, which she deletes out of respect (and maybe out of self-disgust).  However, as soon as she finds herself in competition to capture a front-page photo before other nearby journalists beat her to the punch, it flips back on, and the movie doesn’t seem to have anything concrete to say about that switch except to note how deeply strange it is as a professional talent.  Nor does it really need to.

Like a lot of recent audience-dividers, it seems the major sticking point for most Civil War detractors is that Garland’s main thematic interests don’t match the themes of the movie they made up in their heads before arriving to the theater.  Any claims from either audience or filmmaker that the movie is apolitical ring false, given that Nick Offerman plays a 3rd-term president who declares “Some are calling it the greatest victory of all time” in press conferences about his obvious, disastrous failures.  If the allusions to Trump and the January 6 insurrection were any more blatant, the movie would be derided as an on-the-nose caricature.  The divide between artist & audience is just one of personal interests.  If you’re looking to Civil War for speculative fiction about where the current populist politics of our country may soon lead us, the movie is not interested enough in near-future worldbuilding to draw you a roadmap.  It’s much more interested in the psychology of the unbiased, objective spectators of this extremist political discord than in the politics of those actually, actively participating in it, which it takes more as a given.  Maybe that’s purely a statement about the nature of war journalism, or maybe it’s something that can be extrapolated as commentary on the consumption of horrific news footage as a subgenre of smartphone content, or as self-deprecating commentary on making fictional films about politics instead of directly participating in it.  Maybe even Garland himself doesn’t know exactly what he wants to say about the act of reducing the horrors of real-world violence into sensationalist words & images, but it’s at least clear that he feels something alienating & cold in that spectatorship, and that feeling is effectively conveyed through his choices behind the camera.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Tightrope (1984)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the New Orleans-set Clint Eastwood thriller Tightrope (1984).

00:00 Welcome

01:15 Columbo (1971 – 2003)
03:45 The Not-So-New 52
07:22 American Fiction (2023)
13:20 Stalker (1979)
24:45 Party Girl (1958)
29:55 White Heat (1949)

35:45 Tightrope (1984)

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

– The Podcast Crew

The Killer (2023)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

I would consider myself a David Fincher fan. I’ve long been a defender of Alien³, Se7en is a classic, and The Game is underrated. Although Fight Club is hyped to hell and back by the worst kind of people is not a negative for the film itself, in my opinion, because I think that Fincher is in on the joke that a lot of the film’s fanbase seems to have misunderstood. I also think that’s the case in his most recent work, The Killer, although several of the reviews I’ve read so far do not seem to agree. 

Michael Fassbender is The Killer, an assassin whose internal monologue is right up there with Christian Bale’s as Patrick Bateman or Ewan McGregor’s in Trainspotting, as he details the comings and goings in his day as he waits in an abandoned WeWork location in Paris for the right opportunity to slay a high-profile target. This includes a lot of unnecessary recitation of statistics about the world’s population, how his job as a professional killer has very little effect on these numbers and is therefore (to his mind) irrelevant, and how the clandestine nature of his work requires him to maintain the delicate balance between being intermittent garishness (because tourists are ignored in most big cities) and boringly invisible. In many ways, he’s not that different from Fincher’s previous unnamed protagonist in Fight Club, in that he is a disaffected man who believes he’s managed to concentrate all of life’s idiosyncrasies down into a series of mantras, but who isn’t really as smart, clever, or effective as he thinks he is. 

I watched the recent Sandman adaptation from Netflix with some trepidation, especially as it approached the adaptation of one of my favorite issues, “Men of Good Fortune.” That story comments about the constancy of human life despite the passage of what we perceive to be great periods of time in a way that I have always loved: when Dream enters a tavern in 1389, there are several overlapping, unattributed dialogue balloons that reveal little pieces of information about the people and the times in which they live: the “spirit of the working man” having died with the executed leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt, complaints about the mediocre restaurant fare and poll taxes, the need for the return of “law and order,” and how the general state of things means “the end of the world is soon.” When he returns to that same tavern in 1989, despite the change in the decor and the intervening centuries, the same talk is happening: “There’s going to be a revolution [over] Thatcher’s bloody poll tax,” “the labour movement died with the miners’ strike,” “no respect for law and order,” and, of course, “all the signs are there in the Bible[;] it’ll be the end of the world very soon.” There’s been so much superhero saturation in the last decade and a half, without much consideration of the fact that comic books and film/TV are very different media forms. That overlapping of dialogue balloons is something that the show tried to emulate but couldn’t capture.

When I was first getting into comics as a teenager, decompression comics were all the rage, as comics attempted to emulate filmic narrative, and as films continue to adapt and echo comics, some of the seams are showing. I didn’t know that this was based on a graphic novel before starting the movie, but as soon as a credit popped up at the film’s opening which stated that it was “based on The Killer by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent [and] Illustrated by Luc Jacamon,” I had an inkling of what I was in for, and it did not disappoint. While Fassbender delivered his character’s long internal monologue, I felt like I could see exactly how it would play out on the page. The Killer’s monologue in a series of rectangular boxes, with his repeated mantras of “Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise” (which appears five times) and “Fight only the battle you’re paid to fight” (four times) broken out as their own individual pieces of the monologue, trailing down the page. And in my mind’s eye, it totally worked, that decompression of the monologue over a series of still images as The Killer does his dirty work, presumably only repeating it to himself once per issue/chapter as he performs that segment’s murder. But when repeated like this over and over again in a film, its effect seems more silly than anything else. If you’ve ever read a collection of old Chris Claremont X-Men titles from the 80s and 90s, you’ll know what I’m talking about—it feels like every issue contains Wolverine repeating to himself that “[he’s] the best there is at what [he] do[es] … and what [he] do[es] isn’t very pretty,” and either Jean or Scott explaining their “psychic rapport,” or Cannonball expositing his powers by declaring “Ah’m nigh invulnerable when ah’m blasting!” If you’re only getting that month’s issue and reading it, then waiting until the next month, these things don’t stand out as much, but when you’re reading them all at once, it’s not only noticeable, but intrusive. That feels like it’s happening here in The Killer, but it somehow still manages to work in Fincher’s hands because he manages to make that repetition feel more like an indictment of the character and his ego, at least in my reading of the film. 

The Killer is often shown to be less adept at his profession than his internal monologue would imply, and the film’s humor (to me) lies in the irony between how good said Killer thinks that he is and his multiple bumbling failures. The whole thing feels like an indictment of the manosphere way of thinking; every few weeks, some guy will post something online like “My wife freaked out that I didn’t check my blindspots before changing lanes, and I explained to her that I have kept precise track of every single other vehicle on the interstate for the last hour,” and a bunch of other dudes will post “Hell yeah, brother” and their own stupid variation on “I too inflate my ego by LARPing as a hypervigilant hero.” The Killer feels like one of these guys, and it’s not lost on me that Fincher’s most famous work, the one that so many people fundamentally misunderstand, is one of the pieces of media that is a favorite of exactly this kind of person; this guy saw Fight Club and loved it for all the stupidest reasons. It’s not an out-and-out comedy; this isn’t the kind of movie where the Killer completes a monologue about how badass he is after field stripping and rebuilding a rifle only for a spring to pop out of somewhere accompanied by a sound effect. It is a movie, however, where the first twenty minutes are spent entirely in the head of our lead as he watches for his opportunity to take his shot while sharing his exercise and dietary regimen like it’s the opening of American Psycho, right down to listing the number of McDonald’s restaurants in France before reciting the protein content of his meals. And, after all of that … he doesn’t get the shot, instead killing the woman that his target is entertaining. He recites to himself that he must “Forbid empathy” as “Empathy is weakness,” but from the second chapter of the movie onward, his entire motivation is revenge because his girlfriend got roughed up because he screwed up his assignment (which he fouled up by … killing his target’s lover, a symmetry that he never recognizes or acknowledges because, again, he’s just not as smart as he thinks he is). Like a lot of manosphere grifters, he pretends that he has no emotions at all, but he only listens to his “work” playlists, and they’re all just The Smiths, which is the saddest of sadboy music ever committed to audiotape. 

I’ve really only focused on that first chapter for the most part. Chapter 2 features The Killer’s flight from Paris and return to his home in the Dominican Republic to find his home ransacked before tracking down his injured girlfriend to the hospital and gathering information about the people who were sent to kill him. Chapter 3 takes place in New Orleans, where The Killer was first recruited and where his handler lives (although not for long), as well as his steps to prepare for his revenge and further track down the people who tried to kill his girlfriend, and in Chapters 4 and 5 he travels to Florida and then New York to take out these two killers, one called the Brute and the other known as the Expert (Tilda Swinton). Finally, in Chapter 6, he confronts the man who contracted him in the first place. Through all of this, he experiences good luck much more than he demonstrates cleverness; it may make sense that European airline employees don’t find his sitcom aliases (which include Archie Bunker from All in the Family, Lou Grant from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and both Felix and Oscar from The Odd Couple) unusual, but once he’s back in The States, someone should at least make a joke about it. Most of the things that he manages to accomplish are things that just about anyone with access to the internet can do (like cloning a key card) or rely on other people to respond amicably to him (the garage owner who lets him use the washroom as if it were a public restroom, the taxi dispatcher allowing him entry after closing, the taxi driver agreeing to drive him despite the presence of other cabs and said driver’s impending smoke break), which is impossible to predict. 

The Killer sails through all of these interactions with ease and attributes it to his skill, but we rarely see anything that requires any actual skills. After missing that first shot, he does kill everyone else who crosses his path, but does so either by shooting from point blank range and thus making it impossible to miss, or breaking a middle-aged woman’s neck and pushing her down a flight of stairs, either of which are manageable feats of strength or skill for most able-bodied adults. His internal monologue frequently dips into smug assurances to an invisible audience that he knows what he’s doing by, for instance, predicting just how long it should take a person of a certain age and fitness to die from a particular attack, only to be instantly proven wrong when his victim doesn’t make it past thirty seconds. None of this ever makes The Killer question his self-assurance about how good he is at what he does, and while that’s a very annoying trait in the participants in the alpha male subculture that I feel is the target of the film’s mockery, it makes for a kind of tragicomic character that I found sufficiently amusing, if not precisely comedic. The most impressive thing that he does is fight off a much taller opponent, which relies more on his ability to take a beating than the memorization of little Snapple trivia facts. . 

What is funny about this is that, at least in my interpretation of the text, Fincher has made another movie that will see its proponents divided starkly along the lines of those who think that the machismo that the film is parodying is something to be unironically emulated and those who will read it as a satire of exactly that kind of person. It’s well-made and well-executed, but it honestly feels more like a mini-series than anything else, especially with its perfectly divided “chapters,” which I have no doubt is meant to invoke the nature of comic book storytelling if it isn’t directly lifted from the source material. Each one has something going for it, but taken altogether, the whole thing feels less than the sum of its parts, like when you binge a TV program and are suddenly taken aback at having reached the ending so suddenly and so quickly and are annoyed at yourself for not having savored the experience more. When it comes to staying power, it will likely find itself more in the lukewarm waters alongside Panic Room rather than Gone Girl, but it’s nonetheless solid, entertaining, and tongue-in-cheek. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Royal Hotel (2023)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the barebones, few-frills thriller The Royal Hotel is my favorite film of the year so far, given that I bought in early on director Kitty Green (Casting JonBenet) & actor Julia Garner (Electrick Children) back when stock prices were low.  Still, it clicked with me as both collaborators’ finest work to date, following their much more muted workplace chiller The Assistant in 2020.  The Royal Hotel explodes The Assistant‘s post-#MeToo themes of misogynist microaggressions & mundane labor exploitations into a much more immediate, visceral chokehold thriller – channeling 1990s psych thrillers like Dead Calm instead of the low-hum, methodical terror of Jeanne Dielman.  If it were even slightly dumber or trashier, it could pull off a sensationalist title like You In Danger, Girl: The Movie or The Male Gaze: A Horror Story, while The Assistant was much more careful to not be boxed in by expectations of genre.  It’s wildly entertaining as a result, while never losing sight of the political target in its crosshairs (a tactic also adopted by this year’s fellow sun-drenched indie drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline).

Garner costars besides Jessica Henwick as a pair of American tourists who find themselves flat broke while backpacking in Australia.  In an act of financial desperation (or, depending on the character, an act of self-immolation), the 20-somethings take a government-assigned temp job working as barmaids in the Australian Outback, serving beers to the roughneck workers of a remote mining town.  From there, the plot plays out like a slightly more grounded version of Alex Garland’s Men, with each of the blackout drunk brutes on the other side of the bar attempting slightly different angles on manufacturing sexual consent from the “fresh meat” working the register, whether with charm or with the threat of violence.  Like in Men, the customers are all essentially the same threat disguised in slightly different presentations, except this time they swarm their victims like George Romero zombie hordes, overwhelming the humble little pub in waves of drunken chaos.  The women are constantly told to smile & “take a joke” while struggling to interpret the thin line between flirting and bullying, like the difference between an Australian calling you “a cunt” vs. an Australian calling you “a sour cunt.”  Meanwhile, every social signal from every direction is telling them to get so drunk they don’t care what happens to them, since they’re powerless to stop it anyway – whether as self-protection or as willful self-destruction, depending on who’s drinking.

The premise of two outsider tourists being shipped off to an isolated mining-town bar specifically to serve as eye-candy for the sexually frustrated workers sounds like a screenplay contrivance looking to justify a metaphor, but Green & co-writer Oscar Redding were inspired to write The Royal Hotel by real life events, relying on the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie as shockingly direct source material.  The young tourists profiled in Hotel Coolgardie may be Finnish instead of American, but their stories are followed closely in The Royal Hotel to the point of exact images & phrases of dialogue being photocopied in direct adaptation.  Hotel Coolgardie is just as horrifying as Green’s movie, except it’s shot & presented more like a TLC reality show than a psychological thriller, which almost makes the women’s story more unnerving.  In either case, the premise makes for wickedly effective Service Industry Horror that’s deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a chaotic front-of-house job with rowdy, drunken customers, the same way The Assistant is relatable to anyone who’s ever worked a soul-draining office job for an evil corporate overlord (speaking as someone who’s done both).  They’re not just single-use metaphors about the horrors of “male attention” (a phrase used in both the doc and the narrative feature), since the generalized exploitations of modern labor and the women’s personal levels of desire to survive the ordeal complicate the central theme at every turn.

The Royal Hotel is a great film about misogyny, labor, social pressure, and alcoholic stupor.  And that’s not even getting into the racist power imbalance between the mostly white miners and the Indigenous workers who make up most of the service class (give or take a couple misplaced tourists).  Its Australian-set psych thriller credentials are cemented both by the appearances of a majestic kangaroo and the appearance of a menacing Hugo Weaving, near unrecognizable behind thick layers of sunburn and beard hairs.  It feels more immediate than nostalgic, though, distinctly a movie of its time.  Conceptually, it’s presented as Kitty Green’s simplest, most widely accessible work to date, but the nuances beyond its surface tensions & metaphors get remarkably complex the second you start to scratch at them – which is exactly what makes it her best.

-Brandon Ledet