All posts by Giles Edwards

Film major & would-be writer. 6'3". @gilesforyou (TwT)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DARKTOWN STRUTTERS (1975)

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: William Witney

FEATURING: Trina Parks, Roger E. Mosley, Norman Bartold

PLOT: Syreena must overcome a series of obstacles in order to track down her missing mother.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If a Blaxploitation-cum-slapstick comedy with motorbike klansmen, racist keystone cops, and a glorious soul song-and-dance behind dungeon bars doesn’t fit our bill, perhaps we’ve gone too jive.

COMMENTS: My reaction to the Darktown Strutters experience immediately runs the risk of banging out a long, long list of “What the…?” reactions. Beyond those listed immediately above, there are countless others, but will try to be strong—strong like Syreena as she thwarts institutional evil, playboy chicanery, and one of the strangest, and most racist, conspiracies ever committed to celluloid. Looking back at the hour-and-a-half of sights and sounds that flew past my eyes, two things stand out strongly.

The first is that director William Witney, alongside screenwriter George Armitage and a ready and willing cast, must have had the time of his life. The movie’s overall quality is, to put it diplomatically, uneven. Maybe. It’s difficult to say, since the whole shebang varies in energy between 9 and 11 on the dial, with some points suggesting the selector knob fell off as the cast and crew tried cranking it even higher. It’s never boring, and any misfires quickly become distant memories. Starting out as something of a traditional vengeance-and-music bit, Darktown Strutters eventually staggers its giddy way into a socio-science-fiction that, though troublingly dark on reflection, is presented to the viewer in such a candy-crazy way that it comes off as Benny Hill meets “Outer Limits”.

The second notable feature is Strutters‘ serious side, which compels me to respect it as a “serious film” (well, no—but at least a serious commentary) despite the gag-a-minute presentation. I’d do well to have years of cultural study to appreciate the fuller implications, but my cursory knowledge of history and cinema lets me appreciate how searing this movie’s satire is. Watermelon, ribs, subservience, and defiance—while one of the most cracker-assed of crackers gripes about not feeling appreciated—this script hits a lot of spots that’d be sore if there weren’t such a fuck-the-Man sense of frolicry going on.

Because this is entertainment! A vengeance and music picture. And there is much to cheer as Syreena and her biker gals rally the town, the dastardly villain gets tarred and feathered, and funk and soul goodness delights the ear.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the idea of an allgirl black motorcycle gang taking on a Col. Sanders surrogate has a nice incongruous absurdity. The performances are so mired down in the endlessly confused situations that it’s hard to judge them, but everyone seems to be having fun, and if the movie leaves you wondering what it was all supposed to be about, maybe it leaves you with half of a silly grin, too.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: STREET TRASH (2024)

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Ryan Kruger

FEATURING: Sean Cameron Michael, Donna Cormack-Thomson, Joe Vaz, Warrick Grier,

PLOT: The year is 2050, in the city of Cape Town, and it’s up to Ronald and his posse of paupers to thwart the mayor’s evil plan to liquidate the homeless.

Still from Street Trash (2024)
Street Trash (2024)

COMMENTS: You can’t choose your own dystopian-bum name, but I reckon I’d go by “Cardigan.” I might rub elbows with the likes of Chef, Wors, Pap, or Two-Bit, and meet up with Society whenever I wanted to score some designer drugs. Yessir, a whimsical existence of survival interspersed with skirmishes with police and memorial services for fallen comrades goo-ified by a deadly chemical administered by government drones.

So goes this re-imagining of 2987’s Street Trash, wherein our casually-charismatic heroes do their best amidst poverty and the threat of annihilation, preserving through brotherhood and cunning japes against the well-heeled. In the movie’s world, the middle classes (and, indeed, the working classes) have been eliminated—economically, mind you. You’ve either got more money than you could possibly know what to do with ( I’ve heard good things about “SoyCoin”, the first vegan cryptocurrency), or no money at all. The message sent, again, and again, is that wealth disparity is a grim and growing issue.

Commendably, though, Street Trash doesn’t come across as sermonizing despite its inherent preachiness. The characters are fun—particularly Chef, with his dissections of age-old children’s classics as creepy sex parables. For those hungry for practical effects, they burst from nearly every pore. Some dozen or more characters ooze DayGlo™ liquids, slough skin from hands and head, grow pustulant goiters which pop, and much more. Also to Street Trash ’24’s credit is the presence of Gary Green, unearthly star from Kruger’s feature debut Fried Barry. Green is a fascination in every shot, coming across as half a wavelength removed from his surroundings. Appropriately, Green’s character has an imaginary friend (voiced by Kruger) who is altogether blue and bizarre.

As remakes go, this isn’t quite one. Kruger’s sophomore feature belongs to a genre I’m stumbling across more often these days, in perhaps a sign of the times: a hybrid of post-apocalyptic and cutesy playfulness, taking the edges off the grim reality descending upon humanity like a sack of awful. Or, maybe a sack of offal—considering the vast quantities of sludge to be found in Street Trash.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s a cacophony of fever-dream nonsense that comes together without reason beyond Mayor Mostert’s hatred of the underprivileged. Kruger’s illustrating Cape Town as Tromaville, but even then, obscenities and oddball goofiness are scattershot head-scratchers… It wants to be a pure midnight movie like Mutant Blast, a government-dragging mutation comedy where anything can and does happen, but lacks consistency and command.”–Matt Donato, Daily Dead

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947)

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Hans Richter

FEATURING: Jack Bittner

PLOT: Once Joe develops the power to observe his inner self and secures a lease for an office—not in that order, mind—he enters the dream-selling business.

Still from Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: With the era’s avant-garde luminaries assembled here, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting all of them as they worked on the set. One room, a mountain of oddball talent, and dreams, dreams, dreams.

COMMENTS: The title, the talent, not to mention the where…: Dreams That Money Can Buy is one of the most American movies out there. It’s behind its time—it’s ahead of its time; it bounces gaily, and turns on a dime. Calder and Cage, and , and Man Ray: devising the dreams for the money you’ll pay. Three years, seven dreams, one Manhattan loft—and anchored by Joe, with his Cagney-esque coif.

Of all the random titles I’ve stumbled across, Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy stands out like flower-child noir; like a Seussian corporate video; like… perhaps nothing I’ve seen before. The opening credits clued me in to the fact that this motion picture (from 1947? sure, sure) was going to be more than a little out there. It was a pleasant surprise—again, from the start—to find it such a jolly jaunt through the deep subconscious up into the luminescently tactile, with the occasional staccato of life in the ’40s.

Meet Joe: “Look at yourself: a real mess, you’re all mixed up; snap out of it! Get yourself fixed up. Even if poets misbehave, they always remember to shave. Say, what’s the matter, Joe? Something gone wrong? Is your head on wrong? No! It’s terrific! Here’s something on which you can really pride yourself: you’ve discovered you can look inside yourself. You know what that means? You’re promoted! You’re no longer a bum—you’re an artist!” And a businessman. He sells dreams of desire, techno-futurism, and identity. We meet a pamphleteer offering membership to the Society for the Abolition of Abolition, or Daughters of American Grandfathers. On-screen audiences mimic on-screen-on-screen performances. A full-wire tabletop circus delights and astounds. Glittering mobiles tickle light across the camera lens. Our hero disappears, briefly, after receiving a wallop from a thug demanding a lead on the races. But while you may have recovered, Joe, beware the poker-chip’s probing eye…

Dreams That Money Can Buy is jam-packed with surrealism and lightheartedness: always sprightly, but never saccharine. The sights and sounds evoke the dreamy past, and the hazy future. (The closing track, composed for this mid-’40s feature, sounds like an obscure B-side from the late ’60s.) More fun-house than art-house, Richter and his team gaily crash the dour columns of haute couture and build a wonder-world from the freshly minted tumble of rubble.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

…Hans Richter, nothing daunted, has plunged into the realm of the abstract, the subconscious and the immaterial for his ‘Dreams That Money Can Buy,’ a frankly experimental picture… A critical dismissal of this picture would be unfair, since it is a professed experiment and there are some things about it that are good. Many of the image constructions, while obscure, are surprisingly adroit, and the musical score by Louis Applebaum is often more eloquent than the screen. Obviously ‘arty’ in nature, it still tries for new ways to frame ideas. For that it is to be commended.”–Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

366 UNDERGROUND: IRISH CATHOLIC (2023)

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Katie Madonna Lee, A Great Male Artist

FEATURING: Avalon Rayne and assorted misfit Catholics

PLOT: Shavon rebels against her Irish-Catholic family only to find herself similarly repressed by the gaggle of punks she moves in with.

Still from Irish Catholic (2023)

COMMENTS: Katie Madonna Lee and A Great Male Artist [sic] really hit the nail on the head with this one. Indeed, they hit so many nails on the head that, once her baseball bat has been bolstered by the nails, it’s ready for them to truly wallop something—and boy-howdy do they wallop it. All of it: Catholicism, sisterhood, hypocrisy, the patriarchy, inflexible feminism, shame, conformity, and all manner of other injustices and annoyances of life. Irish Catholic is appropriately staged and shot like a morality play—with tunes!—with young Shavon navigating adversity as she frantically paddles toward self assuredness.

The lights come up, and we open on a bedraggled, middle aged mother praying for a parking space. Her makeup is slapdash, her eyes as keen as an irritated hawk, and her hair is festooned with a bouquet of infant dolls. Shavon and her siblings are crammed in the vehicle space; her sisters pray along, in song, with the mother, and Shavon tries to silence her demanding stomach (which has its own voice credit), ultimately bowing to the temptation of the bag of potato chips being brought to the soup kitchen. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The family serves the poor with guilt, and they sit through a guilt-themed sermon which ends on the hymn line, “Guilty, Forever Guilty.”

Oddly enough, Irish Catholic is also a rather fun, sometimes whimsical experience. Sure, Shavon’s brother is molested by the hot priest, but that’s offset by the smirk-inducing machinations of the sisters as they attempt to out-pray to God (the competition here being just how many starving Africans they hope to save when they grow up). Shavon’s slide from her miserable lower middle class Irish Catholic family existence to bohemian life with a quatro of questionably punk “enlightened” types is tempered by various visitations from (the appropriately credited) Hot Jesus, who at various times pines for Arby’s and is stoned out of his mind. There’s also the special celebrity guest, “the Poop Bucket” (with it’s own musical number), but I won’t get into that.

All told, Irish Catholic has quite a bit to say; much of it about religion. Greenaway came to mind more than once, despite his comparative grisliness; this skewering is far more of a  romp, despite claims of how very dark (very dark) the film is. Young person hates her life, falls in with a seemingly carefree crowd who ultimately prove to be just as controlling and image-conscious as the ostensibly more repressive traditional life she has fled. I’ve seen this, but I was happy to see this spin on it. Life can be frustrating and much too difficult. But as Jesus famously preached, “Your life’s gonna get worse, so you might as well learn to sing and dance. …it worked for the gays.”

At the time of this writing Irish Catholic is available for free on YouTube, courtesy of co-writer/director Lee.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This peculiar film blends satire and drama in a quest to unravel the complexities of faith and the timeless human yearning for acceptance… [it] exemplifies avant-garde filmmaking.” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (contemporaneous)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ALABAMA’S GHOST (1973)

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Peggy Browne, , , Ken Grantham

PLOT: A janitor-turned-magician gets more than he bargains for after signing up with a mysterious impresario, as a conspiracy unfolds around the greatest magic show ever.

Still from Alabama's Ghost (1973)

COMMENTS: When you see a credit for “Go-Go Dancers,” you know you’re in for a good time. Especially when those credits are front-loaded, and an array of oddities is laid out before the movie hits you. Especially especially when there’s a jaunty Dixieland jazz tune dancing through the speakers while the promises unspool (Doctor Caligula? Mama-Bama? Marilyn Midnight?). Alabama’s Ghost segues into a live performance of that opening tune—with an establishing shot of a foreshortened trombone sliding uncannily toward and away from the camera. Yessir, ma’am, there’s jivin’ style to spare in this extravaganza from the inimitable Fredric Hobbs, dealing out countless exciting genres in this slice of wonderment.

Navigating this variety show is the titular Alabama (who, despite what that title implies, is very much alive), leaning back at a bar, high on something (“it’s like a hundred yellow-haired cats, dancing on jade”) but whose mellow is about to harshed by the boss-man. Alabama’s gotta pack up the band’s gear, and stack it nice. After bringing the gear to the basement, he drives his loaded forklift through a false wall, revealing the collected possessions of Carter, a legendary magician who disappeared in Delhi in 1935. So begins the rise of Alabama: King of the Cosmos!

Hobbs pulls out the genre stops like they were going out of style, and so Alabama’s Ghost has something for everyone. Do you like magic? Got it in spades. Questionable ’70s sci-fi science? Let me tell you about the powers—and dangers—of transmitting raw zeta waves (not to mention the atomically adjacent deadly zeta waves). Is music your thing? A Scottish-accented impresario who goes by Otto Max (well illustrated by the steel business card, with his name stamped in the metal) will ensure there’s plenty of grooviness, man. Vampires? Comely Nazi scientists? Doomsday? An elephant?

Frickin’-A. These far-out goodies hop around the plotline like horseflies at a cosmic rodeo. Otto Max, with all his Puritan fop garb swagger, pitches his vision of a giant magic show to Alabama: “Surrealism’s in—surrealism’s where it’s at.” He might as well be pitching this very movie. Fredric Hobbs gave the film world far too few gifts, but his Godmonster/Ghost double-shot is pam-jacked with strange sights to see, peculiar paths to take, and, in the case of his sophomore feature, a vampire so full of ham that the Go-Go Dancers might gorge on pig flesh for weeks.

(As it stands, they gorge on people. Add “cannibalism” to that earlier mix. Peace out.)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Whatever you can say about the movie, it does appear that director Fredric Hobbs had a vision of sorts… Believe me, low-budget horror doesn’t come much stranger than this one.” — David Sindelar, Fantastic Movie Musings