troma

Quick Takes: New Orleans Rep Scene Update

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Excluding the AMC multiplexes out in the suburbs, the Zeitgeist outpost in Arabi, and the backroom microcinemas in-between, there are exactly two regularly operational cinema hubs in Orleans Parish: The Prytania and The Broad. Both of these cultural epicenters work hard to make full use of their relatively limited screen space, finding the right balance between the arthouse titles that keep their die-hard regulars hooked and the big-ticket Disney products that actually keep the lights on. The most noble service The Prytania and The Broad provide is making room for regular, weekly repertory programming in the schedule gaps between new releases. Not too long ago, the Sunday morning Classic Movies slot at The Prytania Uptown was the only reliable spot to catch older titles in a proper theater around here, but the New Orleans repertory scene has gradually bulked up in recent years. The Broad has a classic horror movie slot every Monday night through ScreamFest NOLA (who’ve recently screened classics like Ginger Snaps, Frankenhooker, and Day of the Dead), an arthouse repertory slot every Wednesday night via Gap Tooth Cinema (who’ve recently screened once-in-a-lifetime obscurities like The Idiots, Supervixens, and Adua and Her Friends), and frequent specialty screenings at their neighboring outdoor venue The Broadside. Meanwhile, Rene Brunet’s Classic Movie Series is still going strong at The Prytania (recent standout titles: The Conversation, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, and 13 Ghosts in Illusion-O), and they’ve recently collaborated with the folks at Overlook Film Fest to program classic horror titles as well (Frankenstein, The Exorcist, and Interview with the Vampire, among others, during this year’s in-house “Kill-O-Rama” festival). Between these two businesses’ four locations, you can also routinely find specialty one-off screenings & re-releases on the weekly schedules (recently, Battle Royale & Linda Linda Linda at The Prytania’s Canal Place theaters and Night of the Juggler & Leila and the Wolves at The Broad).

All in all, our local rep scene is still too small to compete with larger cities like Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, and San Francisco, where audiences seemingly get to see an older “new-to-you” title projected on the big screen every day of the week. New Orleans rep screenings are out there, though, and they are easily accessible if you know where to look. As evidence that this scene exists, here are a few quick short-form reviews of the repertory screenings I happened to catch around the city over the past couple weeks, along with notes on where I found them. I’ve also recently started a Letterboxd list to track what classic titles we’ve been able to cover on Swampflix over the years thanks to this growing scene, which seems to have only gotten more robust since I last filed one of these reports in 2023.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

The original Uptown location of The Prytania is still the most consistent local venue for seeing repertory titles on the big screen, as it has been for as long as I can remember. The only catch is that their Classic Movies program is almost entirely restricted to Hollywood productions, the kinds of titles you expect to see on TCM’s weekly broadcast schedule. As limited in range as that may sound, it’s an excellent resource for catching up with the works of luminary greats like Kubrick, Welles, and Hitchcock that you might’ve missed (especially Hitchcock, their house-favorite auteur), big & loud in an environment where you’re unlikely to get distracted by your phone. To that end, I recently saw John Huston’s foundational diamond-heist thriller The Asphalt Jungle for the first time as part of that series, after having previously seen Huston’s foundational noir The Maltese Falcon there several years earlier. Within the heist-thriller genre, there’s nothing especially surprising about The Asphalt Jungle‘s scene-to-scene plot beats, as it is an immeasurably influential work that helped establish that genre’s basic story structure in the first place. Where it does manage to surprise is in the little details of the character quirks, as it gradually becomes a story about the unlikely friendship between the elderly mastermind and the young hooligan muscle at opposite ends of the criminal hierarchy, both of whom are equally doomed. The framing compositions are also top-notch; that John Huston kid is a name to watch, I tell you what.

It would be disingenuous to call The Asphalt Jungle a hangout film, as there is plenty of urgent thriller tension in its textbook bank heist plot. The four factions vying for victory are clearly defined: the heist crew hastily assembled by a recently-paroled criminal mastermind (Sam Jaffe), the crooked lawyer who intends to steal away that crew’s loot for himself (Louis Calhern), the corrupt cop who pretends to be on their case while taking bribes beneath the table (Barry Kelley), and the by-the-books police commissioner who still believes in the nobility of obeying the law (John McIntire). The cops’ involvement in the diamond-heist fallout is mostly present as a background inevitability, something that makes the crooked lawyer sweat as he schemes to rip off his own accomplices. The real heart of the story is in the way the bank robbers pass their time between the heist and getting caught, recalling the crime-thriller hangouts of Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre. There’s something sweet in the simple, pleasure-seeking worldviews of the mastermind and the hothead muscle (Sterling Hayden) in particular — one of whom meets his end while taking the time to watch a teen girl dance to a roadside diner jukebox and the other meeting his own end while indulging in homesick nostalgia, feebly returning to his family farm while he slowly bleeds to death from a gunshot wound. A baby-faced Marilyn Monroe also makes a huge impression in the couple scenes afforded to her as the crooked lawyer’s age-gap mistress, exclaiming “Yipe!” whenever she gets excited, and referring to her much older lover by pet names like “Uncle” and “Banana Head.” The editing rhythms of The Asphalt Jungle are not especially hurried or thrilling, but Huston arranges his performers in the Academy-ratio frame with consistently adept blocking, and he constantly feeds them all-timer lines of dialogue like, “Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit.” It’s a great mood to sit in, especially once its noir-archetype characters start making unlikely friends & foes in the hours after the plot-catalyst heist.

Black Narcissus (1947)

Curiously, my most recent dip into the Gap Tooth Cinema program at The Broad was also a classic title you could expect to catch in TCM’s broadcast line-up, whereas the series is generally more unique for its “Where else would you ever see this?” selections (On the Silver Globe, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Coonskin, etc.). 1947’s Black Narcissus is as core of a text to nuns-in-crisis cinema as The Asphalt Jungle is to bank heist thrillers. If it’s not the most often seen & referenced convent drama, that’s only because The Sound of Music has a more iconic sing-a-long soundtrack, whereas most of the sound design in Black Narcissus is overpowered by howling, ominous winds. It was hearing those winds in immersive theatrical surround sound that made this first-time watch so memorably intense for me, though, whereas Powell & Pressburger’s follow-up ballet industry melodrama The Red Shoes is more striking for its three-strip Technicolor fantasia. While there are flashes of Technicolor brilliance throughout Black Narcissus, the combination of its doomed nuns’ white habits & skin is so uniformly pale the film often registers as monochrome. It’s the constant roar of the cold winds that gradually break those nuns’ minds along with the audience’s, eventually triggering the passionate, color-saturated violence of the third act. I know it’s gauche to describe anything as “Lynchian” these days, but those howling winds are maddening in a distinctly Lynchian way, and it turns out the production was filmed the same year Lynch himself was born. Coincidence? I think not.

The sinful evil those winds summon is mostly the seduction of nostalgia & memory. Deborah Kerr stars as a remarkably young Mother Superior who’s assigned to start a new convent in a former cliffside harem in the Himalayas, offering medicine and education to the Indian locals who don’t need or want the nuns’ presence. The isolation of the newly repurposed “house of women” on that mountaintop weighs on the sisters who are assigned there, as the ominous winds and dizzying altitude invite their minds to drift to memories from before they took their holy vows. Since it’s a British studio picture made in the 1940s, the nuns never express the transgression directly, but they specifically start to doubt their commitment to Christ because they’ve become desperately horny & lonely, to the point of madness. The burly presence of a blowhard macho handyman onsite is especially tempting for the women, and their repressed desire for him explodes into expressionistically violent acts that can only lead to death, never actual sex. It’s in those climactic violent acts that Black Narcissus most directly recalls the dark fantasy gestures of The Red Shoes, especially in the sisters’ extreme, wild-eyed close-ups. The winds that push them towards the matte-painting cliffsides outside the convent are much more consistently surreal throughout, however, recalling much later, freer works like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return or Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes.

Mr. Melvin (1989, 2025)

While The Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth series are dependable workhorse repertory programs, you have to walk next door from The Broad to their outdoor sister venue The Broadside to catch the more extravagant specialty screenings. For instance, it’s where I caught Lamberto Bava’s classic Italo meta-horror Demons with a live score from Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti and, more recently, it’s where I caught the new remix of The Toxic Avenger Parts II & III (1989), now Frankensteined together and retitled as Mr. Melvin (2025). That Mr. Melvin screening was supposed to be accompanied with a Lloyd Kaufman meet & greet, but the recently injured Kaufman couldn’t travel so he appeared only via video message, sending Troma regular Lisa Gaye to act as his brand ambassador instead. The movie was also accompanied with an opening punk rock set from The Pallbearers, making for a much rowdier setting than is typical for movie-nerd rep screenings around the city. The general party atmosphere at The Broadside can be distracting if you’ve never seen the film they’re screening before (I remember being especially distracted by the circus-act antics of Gap Tooth’s showing of Carny there), but it’s perfect for celebrating a VHS-era classic that you’re used to watching alone at home. The timing of this Mr. Melvin cut was personally serendipitous for me, then, as I had just watched every Toxic Avenger film for a podcast episode the previous month.

Since I had already exorcised all my demonic opinions about Toxie’s big-screen journey so recently on the podcast, I don’t have much new to say about Mr. Melvin except in pinpointing where it ranks among other titles in the series. Objectively, the best Toxic Avenger film is likely either the bad-taste original from 1984 or Macon Blair’s punching-up revision that was also released this year, and yet I can’t help but admire Mr. Melvin as a completionist’s timesaver. It’s all the best parts of the official Toxie sequels (the Japanese travelogue from Toxic Avenger II, the Toxie-goes-yuppie satire of Toxic Avenger III, not a single frame from Toxic Avenger IV) with at least 70 minutes of time-wasting junk erased from the public record. Mathematically speaking, it’s the most efficiently entertaining Toxic Avenger film to date, which technically qualifies it as public service — something to be considered by Lloyd Kaufman’s parole board. And since the original, in-tact sequels were rotting so close to the forefront of my mind, I was able to step away during the screening to grab another beer without missing anything, which is essential to appreciating any Troma release. You go to The Prytania to watch Old Hollywood classics in a historic setting, sipping morning coffee to the vintage Looney Tunes shorts that precede the feature. You go to Gap Tooth screenings at The Broad to challenge yourself with some daringly curated arthouse obscurities, chatting with friends afterwards to parse through complex feelings & ideas. In contrast, the repertory programming next door at The Broadside is for pounding beers and whooping along to a personal fav you’ve already seen a couple dozen times with likeminded freaks. Plan your repertory outings accordingly.

-Brandon Ledet

Podcast #249: The Toxic Avenger (1984 – 2025)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

Welcome to Episode #249 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss all things Toxie, the first superhero from New Jersey.

0:00 Welcome
05:50 Troma
19:50 The Toxic Avenger (1984, 2025)
1:11:50 The Toxic Avenger II-IV (1989-2000)

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

Death Dancers (1993)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

It wasn’t until decades after the genre’s American heyday that French critics coined the term “film noir”.  Meanwhile, noir’s younger, hornier dipshit cousin the erotic thriller was immediately self-labeled as a real-time marketing term instead of as a posthumous critical marker.  The recent documentary We Kill for Love is an excellent, exhaustive rundown on the erotic thriller boom of the 1980s & 90s, with specific attention paid to the cheaper, direct-to-video end of the genre.  There are some great insights throughout the doc, from how the bulk of the genre takes direct inspiration from Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill more than any of the more obvious Joe Eszterhas reference points to how its popularity was greatly aided by video rental stores’ desperate need to stock their shelves with off-brand substitutes for more popular studio titles that were in greater demand than supply.  For instance, someone who was disappointed that they could not rent a fresh copy of Basic Instinct might be tempted to take home the dominatrix-themed, Troma-distributed serial killer erotica Death Dancers instead until the shelves could be restocked.  There’s a vast difference in budget & quality between those two pictures, but the video store shelf was a great equalizer that presented them on the same level, with Death Dancers self-labeled as “An Erotic Thriller” on its cardboard sleeve to attract browsers’ attention.  That announced genre distinction might actually be somewhat of a misnomer, since Death Dancers shamelessly crosses the line from erotic thriller to softcore porno, featuring multiple scenes of fully nude actors grinding their pelvises together in rhythmic pantomime.  Given how gleefully vulgar mainstream players like Showgirls were at the time, though, I suppose the distinction is mostly meaningless.

Do you know what else is mostly meaningless?  Practically everything that happens in Death Dancers.  We open in the sunny, beachfront apartment of our central dominatrix figure (Deborah Dutch), as she wistfully whispers to the world outside her window about her past trauma, apparently eroticizing the memory of a forced miscarriage as she writhes in ecstasy on a kitchen chair.  She’s dressed in full goth drag in the middle of a sunny afternoon: black wig, black satin gloves, black stockings, black soul.  Despite the physical abuse she suffers in black & white flashbacks, her breathy narration is horny nonsense, including the titular tangent “Come dance with me. Come death dance with me.  Come, oh god, come death dance with me.”  Gradually, we gather enough info to piece together her M.O.  She’s the madame for a small army of female submissives whom she pimps out to male clients, luring in customers with phone-sex promises of total servitude.  Those customers quickly become victims, though, as her submissives are ordered to immediately murder anyone who physically harms them, even within a consensual kink scenario.  You see, our antiheroine dominatrix is fed up with the abuse she’s suffered from the men in her life, so she’s gotten into the serial-murder racket through the kink scene as a way to exact her revenge on the entire gender.  Meanwhile, an undercover cop who’s hot on her tail has similar flashbacks to trauma of his own. As images of the volatile pair’s pasts become increasingly entwined, the audience is eventually clued into how they found themselves locked into the never-ending death dance of their opposing professions in the first place.  It takes a minute to get there, but thankfully S&M strippers frequently mime group sex configurations in the background to help keep the energy up in the meantime.

Death Dancers is more music video than feature film.  Sleazy synth & sax numbers drone constantly as nude actors model whips, chains, sunglasses, breast implants, and high-waist panties under nightclub stage lights & bubble machines.  It’s just as much a relic of MTV-era music video artistry as it is a video store shelf-filler from the erotic thriller boom.  It’s pretty amusing as a Skinemax-flavored screensaver, especially once it pretends that it has a Hitchcockian mystery worth solving when it’s really just a horny mood piece.  I can’t claim to have seen all of the hundreds of titles referenced in We Kill for Love as the bulk of the direct-to-video erotic thriller genre (at least not until I clear them from my disgustingly overstuffed Letterboxd watchlist), but I still recognized this as an exceedingly generic entry in the canon despite the S&M angle of its premise.  Death Dancers only made an impression on me in that it had me thinking, “This is fun & all, but it’s no Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls” and then, naturally, “I need a new hobby.”

-Brandon Ledet

Psycho Ape! (2020)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

The mini-DV backyard horror comedy Psycho Ape! proudly promises to be the “dumbest, cheapest” ape movie of all time, and then it delivers exactly that.  In case the audience dare question the scope of that mission statement, the movie is careful to catalog as many dumb-and-cheap ape movies as it can for context.  It treats retro ape-movie ephemera as sacred relics: an official Congo boardgame, a pristine Blu-ray restoration of Schlock, a store-bought gorilla suit you’d expect to see in a Bowery Boys comedy, etc.  Single-scene characters debate their personal rankings of famous primate franchises like King Kong, Planet of the Apes, and Mighty Joe Young as background-noise hangout banter.  When it devolves into a traditional bodycount slasher (with a gorilla-suit murderer instead of a kitchen-knife killer, naturally), the psych expert on the monster’s trail is Dr. Zoomis: a cheeky portmanteau of Dr. Zaius & Dr. Loomis.  Psycho Ape! goes absurdly overboard proving its credentials in dumb-and-cheap ape cinema scholarship, so that when it claims to be the “dumbest, cheapest” ape movie of all time, you have no choice but to take its word for it.  I’m probably supposed to be aging out of this kind of bad-on-purpose, Troma-tinged schlock at this point in my life, but it’s impossible not to be charmed by something so lovingly reverent of such a disreputable, outdated subgenre – especially since it cites my personal favorite title, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, as one of the all-time greats.

On a dark & eerie night “25 years ago” (so, say, 1995), a “teenage girl slumber party” is crashed by a violent gorilla with an unquenchable bloodlust.  His weapon of choice is a standard-issue Chiquita banana, but it wreaks the same bloody havoc as kitchen knives & meat cleavers in traditional slashers.  Although most of the slumber-party teens are bludgeoned, stabbed, and choked to death by the phallic fruit, the titular psychotic primate does leave behind one anointed final girl: the obsessive ape-movie cineaste Nancy Banana (played by Kansas Bowling, director of the similar retro-schlock throwback B.C. Butcher).  In the following decades, the gorilla continues to kill at random, while Nancy Banana pines for the love that could’ve been, dedicating her life to becoming “the next Jane Goodall” (by which she means she really wants to fuck that ape).  They inevitably re-unite, and the film takes wild detours from its initial slasher template into retro romcom & beach party tropes.  If you’re at all familiar with the history of ape-falls-in-love-with-platinum-blonde cinema, you know that their cutesy romantic bond can only end in tragedy – complete with an obligatory spoof of the genre’s iconic “Twas beauty killed the beast” stinger.  The main difference is that this example also starts with tragedy and is careful to intersperse as many bloody banana stabbings it can afford in-between its cutesy romcom gags.

I just put more effort into pulling a coherent plot out of Psycho Ape! than director Addison Binek intended his audience to bother with.  Structurally, it’s more of a loose sketch comedy than it is a linear narrative.  Binek raised $7,500 in production funds through Kickstarter, then spent it all on goofing off with a gorilla costume, a camera, and as many friends as he could gather (seemingly including a ton of Troma alumni).  It’s basically a hangout movie for sickos, Motern for edgelords.  As proudly dumb & cheap as Psycho Ape! is, though, it’s anything but lazy.  Most hodgepodge horror comedies shot in this scatterbrained, tangential style are infuriatingly lazy (see: Da Hip Hop Witch), but Psycho Ape! establishes a distinctive internal logic that transcends any need for plot or scene-to-scene logic.  It’s a temporal mash-up of schlock ephemera from the past half-century: 50s Benny Hill grabassery, 60s lava lamp psychedelia, 70s first-wave slashings, 80s splatstick gore, post-Kevin Williamson 90s meta horror, 2000s digi-cam backyard movies, 2010s YouTube pranks, sub-Sarah Squirm 2020s gross-outs, and timeless scat & murder gags to tie them all together.  Some of the most sublime moments of the entire picture are just throwaway transition shots of Nancy Banana dancing with her gorilla beau in a vintage yellow bikini, with everyone involved openly laughing at how idiotic the project is on a conceptual level.  The fun they’re having on-“set” is infectious.  It’s a reckless party movie dressed up like a bodycount horror, but it’s oddly sincere in its dedication to having a good time and to honoring the ape-horror comedies that came before it.  I had a blast.

-Brandon Ledet

B.C. Butcher (2016)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

It’s generally not the best policy to judge a movie based on its context instead of its content, but it’s nearly impossible to avoid doing so while discussing B.C. Butcher. Written by a 15 year old and directed in her dad’s (beautiful) backyard when she was 17, B.C. Butcher has a distinct teens-goofing-off vibe that makes a huge impact on its production value limitations and reasonable audience expectations. As young as she was, filmmaker Kansas Bowling did talk a big game in her promotional interviews for the film, citing names like Doris Wishman, Herschell Gordon Lewis, and Lloyd Kaufman (who distributed the film under his Troma brand) among her influences, names I didn’t know or care about until I was well into my 20s. Growing up in L.A. will do that for you, I guess, and Bowling is equipped with enough ingrained schlock history to know how to turn a small, unassuming camp film into a minor success. Shot on 16mm and coming in under an hour in length, B.C. Butcher looks & feels authentic to its trashy drive-in roots. This vibe carries over to the advertising’s David Friedman-esque claim that it’s the “world’s first prehistoric slasher film.” This isn’t the type of work that would normally bowl people over with excitement, but given the context of its production its’ difficult to shake the feeling that we may have another budding Anna Biller on our hands in Bowling: a young schlock historian looking back to old modes of B-picture filmmaking for new, interesting takes on since-stale genres.

In the year 1 million B.C., “before dinosaurs took to the skies,” a tribe of young prehistoric women are terrorized by two outside threats: a gross caveman who individually seduces members of the tribe only to cheat on them & an even somehow less gross monster that murders them one by one, slasher film style. The B.C. Butcher at least has a motive for his crimes against the tribe. He kills the girls as retribution for the slaying of his undead bride, who torments his nightmares with commands to kill! kill! kill! The caveman Casanova has no such excuse, driving the girls apart with his grotesque, predatory seduction merely for his own pleasure. The film boasts two “big name” actors: Kato Kaelin of O.J. fame plays the pantsless caveman loverboy and Kadeem Hardison, best known for portraying Dwayne Wayne on A Different World, is the off-screen narrator. The “plot” doesn’t get much more complicated from there, except maybe in the climactic moment where The B.C. Butcher sheds a magical tear, which was one of the film’s biggest laughs. That kind of slight, straightforward storytelling again feels true to Bowling’s schlocky roots and one of the smartest decisions she makes as a filmmaker is in limiting the runtime so that the story never really outwears its welcome. If it were actually released in the 60s or 70s it would’ve been the exact kind of throwaway junk that padded out a double bill at the drive-in. I mean that with love.

As something that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s seen a modern teen’s Tumblr or Instagram account, what B.C. Butcher excels at most is aesthetic. In the opening credits, girls pose in leopard print dresses, furs, and boas to a Coasters-type novelty song. In-between the film’s lightly gory kills, the same kids goof off while a punk soundtrack that sounds like it was provided by Burger Records, with band names like Vicky and the Vengents and The Ugly Kids, provides a pleasant aural backdrop for a mildly horrific version of playing dress up. These are, honestly, the best moments in the film. My favorite scene overall might be the mid-movie music video where The Ugly Kids mime one of their tunes on watermelon instruments. Bowling has a great eye for pure aesthetic, a saving grace that elevates her debut high above similar micro-budget horrors like Shark Exorcist & Desperate Teenage Lovedolls. She stumbles a little in a few stray decisions (it’s a little alarming that the only to black characters in the film are a killer ogre and a blind mystic), but there’s more than enough solid humor to be found in her gleefully schlocky details: character names like Anna Conda & Neandra, stock footage dream sequences, casual inclusion of plastic water bottles disrupting the prehistoric setting, etc. B.C. Butcher is a delightfully silly debut with a fascinating pedigree and even if the film itself doesn’t wholly satisfy every trash-gobbling viewer, it’s hard to imagine anyone walking away incurious about where its teenage director is headed next.

-Brandon Ledet

Vegas in Space (1991)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

EPSON MFP image

threehalfstar

campstamp

Vegas in Space is an early 90s sci-fi cheapie distributed by Troma in which all characters are played by either drag queens or women. It took almost a decade to complete, was partially fueled by sex work & meth, and was filmed entirely in its star performer’s San Francisco apartment. You can feel all of those qualities in every shoddy fiber of what’s essentially a glorified home movie and, yet, there’s enough artistry in the film’s set & costume design and its central B-movie sendup gimmick to make for a fun, fascinating watch. Filmed in full glory Glamourama & staged on entirely hand-built sets, Vegas in Space looks the way a B-52s song sounds (“Planet Claire”, especially) & recalls a drag routine version of either Corman’s unreleased Fantastic Four adaptation or the cult television series Pee-wee’s Playhouse. It’s very rough around the edges, but it has style to spare as it lives by its pronounced motto “Glamour first, glamour last, glamor always!”

An all-male (including women in male drag) crew fly their space ship to the Planet Clitoris in The Beaver System in order to help solve a diamond heist caper. This proves to be a dangerous mission since “No males are allowed to touch down on Clitoris”, so the men disguise their gender by taking sex change pills, a transformation process that looks & sounds a lot like the female orgasm. Newly feminized & disguised as 20th Century showgirls, the men infiltrate the city of Vegas on the Planet Clitoris, “an oasis of glamor in a Universe of mediocrity.” They set themselves on saving the planet by entertaining for a slumber party and keeping their eyes peeled for a jewel thief who has stolen a precious object that keeps Clitoris from suffering dangerous earthquakes. The whole plot feels like something out of erotic fiction, but does serve as a loving tribute to real-life titles of 1950s space epics like Cat-Women of the Moon. There’s no sexual energy to its women-only “pleasure planet’ premise, despite what you might expect from a film written & performed by drag queens & there’s really no point to the space crew starting the film as men at all, really, except for pointing to its own central drag queen gimmick, since they readily adapt to the change & suffer no conflict because of it. For the most part, even the sci-fi aspect of the story doesn’t feel all-that necessary or fully-explored. Outside some cardboard spaceship & a few goofy ideas (like swapping out the term “warp speed” for “ultra space jumps”), the sci-fi setting is mostly an excuse for the film’s true bread & butter: outrageous costume & set design. Those aspects far outweigh any petty concerns like plot structure or a command of pacing, so you have to love their charms to ignore the film’s blindspots & land yourself on its wavelength.

Obviously, it would help if you love drag as an artform for you to appreciate Vegas in Space as art. Starring San Francisco personalities like Doris Fish, Miss X, and Ginger Quest, the film is billed as being “based on the party by Ginger Quest” in its opening credits and “the first ever all-drag queen sci-fi musical” in its liner notes. Now that latter point is up for debate, not only because it might not be the first ever, but because it features cis women among its many drag performers and doesn’t feel at all like a musical besides the fact that it does feature some music (as most films do), most notably the deliciously cheesy lounge number “Love Theme from Vegas in Space.” It may very well be, however, the first film adapted from a drag queen’s party theme (can you name another?), which is much more of an accomplishment in my book anyway. Vegas in Space mostly serves as a Doris Fish showcase, as the performer wrote, co-produced, starred, built the sets (including the miniature outer space cityscapes), did the makeup for her fellow crew members, and (if director Phillip R Ford is to be believed) partially funding the picture by turning tricks. Fish is a delightful personality to helm the picture as the once-male space crew’s captain, but I actually think she’s upstaged by fellow drag queen Miss X, who boasts a kind a gothy, bitchy, Violet Chachki vibe as the film’s would-be villain, The Queen of Police. Miss X‘s cruelty in forcing imprisoned shoplifters to harvest cotton candy and her palace on ”The dark side of the planet” show in glorious black & white) a choice that feels truer to the film’s drive-in era source of inspiration) are where Vegas in Space finds its groove, even if those moments were birthed by Fish’s work on the page. The film features some classic moments of painfully corny drag queen humor, like when The Queen of Police answers the question “Are there crimes here?” with a deadpan “Only crimes of fashion,” or when Doris Fish comments on the mission at hand “sounds like a cinch.” The all-female pleasure planet setting also affords the film plenty of opportunities to do what drag does best in the first place (besides showcasing killer costuming & makeup): poke fun at femininity as a social construct. In this particular case, it helps that here are “real” woman there who are in on the joke, too, especially at sillier moments like when the crew war using their “feminine intuition” to navigate their ship. In some ways Vegas in Space plays its premise a little too, for lack of a better word, straight, (I really cannot believe there is no lesbianism or any sexuality at all in this film), but it’s still delightfully corny & transgressive in the way most drag performances are by nature.

In a lot of ways Vegas in Space feels like what might happen if I tried to make a movie, from its dedication to bad taste to its overwhelming cheapness to its painfully troubled production history. Even if the film sounds exhausting to you or just not really your thing, I’d still encourage you to read director Phillip R. Ford’s lengthy making-of account of this film’s production, because it’s a fascinating mess. Vegas in Space required two years of filming & seven years of post-production, meaning Ford & his drag scene buddies more or less worked on the film for the entirety of the 1980s. Besides the behind-the scenes meth & sex work that color the film’s already plenty colorful aesthetic, there’s also a tragic air to its history as many of the performers involved didn’t live to see the final product due to its lengthy post-production period & the horror of the AIDS crisis in the gay community of that era. As a director, Ford brings a few interesting ideas to the table I especially appreciated: an opening credits scroll that mixed B-movie worthy shots of outer space with Vegas strip light bulbs, a psychedelic dream sequence that intentionally evokes the early stirrings of MTV, and his inclusion of earthquakes in the film’s central crisis that reflected the San Francisco scene where the film was produced (although I suspect that Doris Fish had enough input on all three points to deserve a co-director credit among her endless list of other duties). However, I think Ford’s greatest accomplishment here is in completing the project in the first place. As indicated in his account of the film’s production, this was a sprawling mess of a collaboration that’s nothing short of miracle to ever have been released at all (even if it means suffering through a disturbingly transphobic “bit” from Troma madman/cretin Lloyd Kaufman in its intro). I could see Vegas in Space maybe gaining traction as a cult-adored object or maybe a RuPauls’ Drag Race runway category (Vegas in Space Realness does have certain ring to it), but I think the film’s greatest accomplishment might be that it simply exists in the first place. Well, that and the glorious makeup & costume designs, especially the ones sported by one Miss X. They’re the film’s true artistry, as it should be in what’s essentially a drag queen’s unusually expensive home movie.

-Brandon Ledet

The Subtle Terror of Babe 2: Pig in the City vs the Straightforward Terror of Pigs (1972)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

EPSON MFP image

Although the idea of talking pigs in children’s media is not at all uncommon, Babe 2: Pig in the City is distinctive from its verbal swine brethren at the very least in its eagerness to terrify its pintsized audience. The only live-action talking-pig children’s movie that even comes close to Pig in the City on the terror scale is the 1999 made-for-TV adaptation of Animal Farm & even that horror show is softened a bit by the kindly wise voice of Kelsey Grammar. For more true pig-themed terror you have to look beyond Pig in the City‘s kids’ movie genre & venture into the seedy world of adult horror cinema. Horror flicks like Razorback & Chaw typically look for menace in the wild boar instead of the domesticated pig, which is a little besides the point here. 1972’s Pigs (alternately titled Daddy’s Deadly Darling) is about as literal you can get in the quest for pig-themed horror, delivering exactly what you’d expect, for better or worse, from a grindhouse exploitation film about flesh-eating pigs distributed on home video by infamous schlock-peddlers Troma.

There are of course innumerable, immediate differences in what you’ll find in these two wildly different features. The pigs in Pigs don’t talk (or think much for that matter). They’re also the main source of the movie’s terror, whereas in Pig in the City Babe is a unifying force that helps a hodgepodge gang of animals buck against the terrors of the outside world. Also, while Babe 2 is an adventurous film that explores expansive, otherworldly landscapes, Pigs rarely leaves the disgusting slop of its sty. That’s not to say, however, that they’re entirely separate form one another, at the very least thematically speaking.

Pigs is entirely faithful to its 70s schlock format, perhaps even painfully so. In its opening minutes, for instance, it powers through the rape-revenge plot of typical 70s exploitation fare in a (thankfully) breezy bout of exposition that does little more than get the requirement out of the way early. The Horror Movie Victim, Lynn, stabs her father to death after an attempted rape and is committed to a mental institution when she fails to cope with what happened. Thus completes her brisk transformation into an Escaped Horror Movie Crazy. Once on the lam, Lynn finds herself vulnerably alone in a seedy small town (much like how Babe is abandoned among reprobates in The Big City) where she quickly takes up a waitressing job at a bar owned by a fellow Horror Movie Crazy, who happens to have the curious hobby of murdering people & feeding their corpses to his pigs. There is an occasional subversion of schlock tropes here in that his flesh-eating pig farm is treated like no mystery & that instead of sizing Lynn up as a potential victim, he forms a makeshift family with her, essentially becoming her new father figure. Other than that, Pigs plays out almost exactly as you’d expect based on its genre & date of release.

Reading between the lines, there’s a surprising amount of connective tissue here. Both Pig in the City & Pigs have a strangely psychedelic quality to them that disorients their audiences. Pig in the City is, of course, more graceful in this effect, using a wide-angle lens POV of a child’s eye to overwhelm the screen with clowns, fires, confetti, and Nazi-esque dogcatchers. Pigs is much cruder in its psychedelia, assembling bizarre montages of pigs squealing while the heroine-murderess Lynn loses her mind. As the pigs feed on human corpses, their mouths soaked in blood, quick jump cuts & strange sound collages throw the viewer off-balance in unexpected ways, especially considering how cheap (in every meaning of the word) the film can be.

What’s even more surprising is the two films’ shared narrative focus on how familial bonds can be formed from the unlikeliest of sources, whether they be a roving gang of starving animals or a pair of mentally unhinged sociopaths who feed anyone they consider a threat to their pet pigs. The focus on familial bonds may be a result of the pig’s historical role as a farm animal & the farm’s domestic tradition (it’s a theme that’s certainly echoed in all of the non-Babe, pig-themed children’s media I’ve seen as well) or it could just be a simple coincidence. Either way it’s a theme that connects seemingly unreconcilable films otherwise related only through their live action pig subjects & the fact that they’re terrifying. If there’s ever a remake of Pigs (and anything’s possible in today’s remake market, mind you) it could up that terror factor even more by giving its flesh-eating pigs the power of speech. Especially if it keeps the squeal-laden freakout montages. There’s a lot a film like Pigs could learn from Babe 2, but a talking pig that also eats human flesh really sounds over the top in a way that I can get behind.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, George Miller’s Babe 2: Pig in the City, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film & last week’s exploration of how it serves as a key to understanding Miller’s strange oeuvre.

-Brandon Ledet

Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator (1989)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

EPSON MFP image

three star

campstamp

Something is ever so appealing about films that have extra-long, descriptive titles. When I sat down to view Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator, I assumed someone named Stephanie was going to be burned alive in an incinerator. I’ve seen a few films that involve murder evidence being burned in an incinerator, but never an entire body. Needless to say, I was bouncing off the walls when I got my hands on this movie, especially since it is a Troma film. Unfortunately, my expectations were a bit too high. It wasn’t a horrible film, it was just so confusing and not in the good way.

I began to lost interest halfway through the film, but the beginning of Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator was amazing. It starts off with two strangers, Paul and Stephanie, who are prisoners in a mansion. The owner of this mansion, Roberta, is obviously a man crossdressed as an elderly socialite, and she wants to watch Paul and Stephanie have sex. Of course, the two “lovebirds” are opposed to the idea of having forced sexual intercourse for Roberta’s viewing pleasure, so they attempt to escape her evil clutches only to find themselves back in her hell house. Then, all of a sudden, the film takes an unexpected turn for the worst. Roberta takes off her wig to reveal herself as Robert, an actor paid by Stephanie and Paul (whose real names are Casey and Jared) to participate in their over-the-top role-playing. As the film goes on, it’s obvious that Casey is not too keen on the role-playing and desperately wants to leave Jared because he is absolutely insane and obsessed with doing one role-play after another.  The rest of the film is filled with twist after twist, and ends with a very surprising conclusion.

I enjoy a twist or two in a film, but this was just too much.  Every time I took my eyes off the screen for more than a second, there was a major change in the plot. The constant shift from one story to another became annoying, and I had to rewind the film a few times to figure out what was going on. Also, there is an incinerator scene, but it’s not as cool as I thought it was going to be, so that was another disappointment. Aside from all the negative comments, Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator honestly wasn’t all that bad. It was entertaining and full of all kinds of stupid fun. I just really wish it would have been about a perverted old woman and her sex prisoners.

-Britnee Lombas