swampflix

[swampflix]

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966)

There are many ways in which the Louisiana education system is an embarrassing disaster. We often rank at the stank-ass bottom of US states in our education metrics, with a long history of political corruption, racial segregation, and religious privatization getting in the way of any progress towards improvement. So, I feel it’s totally legitimate to blame that system for the fact that I have…

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Enter King Ghidorah

There’s just no way around it; King Ghidorah is the most heavy metal monster in movie history. I mean that in the literal sense, since the supreme kaiju being is seemingly armored by a layer of gold scales, making his “heavy metal” designation as matter-of-fact as Mechagodzilla‘s. Of course, I also mean it in the colloquial sense. The three-headed dragon beast is loudly & proudly metal as fuck on…

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The Tragedy of Man (2011)

The Tragedy of Man is one of the most triumphant pieces of art that I have ever seen. Functionally eternal in scope, limitless in imagination, and infinitely evolving and revolving, it’s no wonder that the 160-minute film took 23 years to complete. It’s lavish in the extreme, inventive in ways that I hadn’t even imagined that an animated film (or any film) could be, and is a fantastically layered…

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D.O.A. (1949)

D.O.A. is a tight little noir thriller (#89 in Douglas Brode’s list in Edge of Your Seat, for those of you playing along at home) that’s one of the most perfect encapsulations of the genre. At 82 minutes, there’s almost no fat to be trimmed, and since it lapsed into the public domain years ago because of failure to renew the copyright, it’s accessible pretty much anywhere. Director Rudolph Maté,…

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Ballerina (2025)

While viewing the recent political satire Mountainhead, I kept thinking about that frequent online refrain that people use as a response whenever someone posts something conspiracy-addled or which otherwise blows the mind of the poster: “This must hit so hard if you’re stupid.” Mountainhead itself is not one of those movies, as for whatever issues one may have with it, it’s certainly not meant to…

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Pavements (2025)

The 90s alt-rock band Pavement is, undoubtedly, one of “the most important and influential” bands of their time. There’s just no way to point that out without betraying their relationship with artistic sincerity & professional ambition. So, the new career-retrospective documentary Pavements has to hide that sentiment behind several layers of self-protective sarcasm & ironic remove, declaring…

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Lagniappe Podcast: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

Boomer & Brandon discuss Luis Buñuel’s surrealist satire The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), in which a small party of upper-class snobs are repeatedly deprived of their dinner. 00:00 Welcome 01:27 Batman Ninja vs Yakuza League (2025)06:25 Vulcanizadora (2025)09:52 Pavements (2025)19:52 Ernest Cole – Lost and Found (2025)25:51 Mountainhead (2025)33:23 Ballerina (2025)34:15 Drop…

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Mountainhead (2025)

I’ve never seen Succession, so I wasn’t terribly interested when I heard that the show’s creator had written and directed a new direct-to-HBO feature, but I found myself on a couch watching it with friends on a lazy Sunday afternoon after a dip in a municipal pool. Of the five of us, two of them had already watched it within the past couple of days and were excited to watch it again, one of whom…

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The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

After getting out of my afternoon screening of The Phoenician Scheme, I texted Brandon that it might have hit my top three Wes Anderson films right out of the gate (although on later reflection it’s more safely in the top five), and he replied that it had been largely dismissed out of Cannes as a minor work from him. Within days, I stumbled upon this tweet and sent it to Brandon; in case it…

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Drop (2025)

Watching all of those Final Destination movies in a single week must have rewired my brain, because I spent the first forty minutes of Drop waiting for a huge disaster to occur. After the film opens on a flashback to protagonist Violet (Meghann Fahy)’s final altercation with her violent, abusive husband as her infant watches, we cut forward to the present, where she is planning to go on her first…

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Bring Her Back (2025)

I was in the minority of people who saw Talk to Me in 2022 and felt indifferent toward it. Most people either loved or hated it (Brandon enjoyed it), and while I thought the ending (and I do mean the very ending, like the last minute or so) was novel and fresh, I found the overall experience to be a fairly rote possession story with little to make it stand out. When I heard that the directors,…

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Podcast #240: Naked Lunch (1991) & Adapting Burroughs

Welcome to Episode #240 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Hanna discuss the few films that have been adapted from William S. Burroughs’s prose, starting with David Cronenberg’s 1991 adaptation of Naked Lunch. 00:00 Welcome 01:20 Friendship (2025)03:10 Bring Her Back (2025)09:34 Premonition (2007)13:37 Mulan (1998)16:53 Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964)20:02…

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Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

I went into my viewing of Final Destination: Bloodlines not having seen a single frame of any of the franchise entries in over twenty years, only being familiar with the first one from early high school sleepovers and having seen the opening (and only the opening) of the first sequel when it first hit Blockbuster shelves. Watching this one prompted me to go down a rabbit hole of watching the…

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The Final Destination Saga

Brandon texted me a couple of weeks ago to ask if I would be interested in writing about Final Destination: Bloodlines, and I admitted that I hadn’t even planned on seeing it, as I had only seen the first movie years and years ago at a sleepover and hadn’t seen any of them since (although I, like almost everyone on Earth, was familiar with the log-truck opening of the first sequel). This…

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Tres cines de la CDMX

I recently enjoyed a weeklong vacation in Mexico City with my family, my first time traveling abroad. It was an indulgent trip that mostly consisted of visiting art museums, shopping for vintage clothes, and eating piles of delicious food. Those may not sound like especially strenuous activities, but they did require long hours strolling in the sunshine, which meant a lot of afternoon downtime…

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Friendship (2025)

I was delighted to be able to request “Two tickets to Friendship, please!” at my local box office last weekend, which may have been the most fun I’ve had ordering movie tickets since requesting “Two tickets to the Moon, please!” in 2009. Part of the fun in this case was seeing the movie with my own best friend, as part of a leisurely Saturday afternoon enjoying movies & cocktails in the French…

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The Story of Adele H. (1975)

As recently as a few years ago, the gold standard for an actress performing a full mental breakdown onscreen was the late, great Gena Rowlands’s starring role in Cassavettes’s A Woman Under the Influence. It has since been surpassed—at least in terms of press-junket citations—by Isabelle Adjani’s equally astonishing turn in Żuławski’s Possession. Whether it’s due to the overall cultural warming…