Tag Archives: Religious cult

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CAPSULE: WELCOME TO THE CIRCLE (2020)

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DIRECTED BY: David Fowler

FEATURING: Taylor Dianne Robinson, Ben Cotton, Matthew MacCaull, Hilary Jardine, Cindy Busby, Andrea Brooks, Michael Rogers

PLOT: After a bear mauling, a man and his daughter are rescued by a strange cult in the woods.

Still from Welcome To The Circle (2020)

COMMENTS: “The meaning is the message.” “And the message is the meaning.” “So what is the message?” “That is exactly the question.” “What is?” “We have to figure out what it is.” “What, the message?” “The meaning.”

No, that’s not a transcription of a first draft of a discarded sketch where Abbot and Costello meet the Dalai Lama; it’s a typical “circular” dialogue exchange in Welcome to the Circle.

To be fair, this cult’s dogma is supposed to be mumbo-jumbo; and given all the crazy things people believe in nowadays, it’s not too much to ask us the audience to take the seductiveness of this verbal jujitsu on faith. The decision to give the Circle’s philosophy no intellectual content whatsoever is deliberate; the movie’s thesis is that the things we believe can override reality, and so it’s important to focus not on the strings, but on who’s pulling them.

It’s a thoughtful idea rife with possibilities and potential allegories, but unfortunately the message gets lost under too much obfuscating trickery. It’s relatively straightforward horror ride through the first act, but then the plot loses its way with information overload (founder Percy Stevens’ strange and confusing backstory, in which a tiger shark plays a role) as it’s simultaneously diving into a rule-free, anything-can-happen abyss. It’s a nice touch that cult membership includes an unusually high number of creepy mannequins—most of the prop budget went to this small army—but other ideas don’t pay off. Too many sudden cutaways to stock footage montages (marionettes, chess moves), too many portals that pop characters from one location to another, too many ostentatiously delivered Zen warnings that “nothing has any meaning” and “the thing we have to do is nothing.” It’s tough for a movie founded on such a free-floating structure to work, unless it has the budget to pull off some majorly distracting special effects, or a long series of catchy/scary surrealist ideas consistently pitched on the level of a .

Needless to say, Welcome to the Circle can’t match these standards. There’s no one we strongly care about to interest us in entering this circular labyrinth. Greg, bear victim and loving father, should be the character we identify with, but there are a couple problems. He’s  too slow on the uptake: he leaves his daughter in the care of the winsome twenty-something females who put her in a creepy happy-face mask for a couple of days, before finally thinking to look for his cellphone to call for medical help after his mauling. And Greg is pushed to the sideline relatively early in favor of a new main character, a stoic cult deprogrammer (who talks, one character observes, like a “stoned robot”), headed into the Circle intent on rescuing one of the females. It’s a bold narrative gambit, but we would need to be much more invested in the overall stakes of this story than we are for this perspective shift to pay off.

Ultimately Welcome to the Circle lacks the budget and, unfortunately, the imagination to fulfill its lofty ambitions. The film’s meaning gets lost in its message—or maybe it’s the other way around.

David Fowler’s previous credits were mostly writing the narration for Disneynature documentaries like Elephant and Penguins. A low-budget surreal horror film was an unexpected choice for a directorial debut. Artsploitation Films picked it up and debuted it on VOD and physical media in late 2020.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…starts out as a familiar horror movie before descending into complete trippy nonsense.”–Josh Bell, Crooked Marquee (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE PASSION OF DARKLY NOON (1995)

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DIRECTED BY: Philip Ridley

FEATURING: , Ashley Judd, Viggo Mortensen

PLOT: Darkly Noon, a young member of a fringe religious sect, barely escapes a massacre and stumbles through the nearby woods to find an isolated woman in an isolated home; his confusion—and rumors that the woman is a witch—causes his fragile mind to unravel.

Still from The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA LIST: Depending upon how you sliced this one, it could have turned out normal. But Philip Ridley (who both wrote and directed) slices it so that The Passion of Darkly Noon is an ambiguous morality tale, a “Lifetime”-style melodrama, and a hellfire vengeance tract. Seeing a young Viggo Mortensen as a mute carpenter is odd; seeing a young Brendan Fraser as a meek religious zealot is odder; but by the time I saw the magical silver shoe encore at the finale, it was a done deal.

COMMENTS: A word of warning about this review: as I type this, I am not sure where I’m headed. This handily conveys the feelings I had throughout The Passion of Darkly Noon, which defies any easy categorization other than it could only have been made in the 1990s. I grew up with ’90s cinema on rented VHS cassettes, and there is a tone that’s there, if you’re looking for it: the inarticulate subversion of the 1980s morphed into something with a strange sheen that, while smoothing the effect, somehow also made it much more exaggerated. By the time the ’00s rolled around, the modern B- and cult-film visual vocabulary had been sorted out. Philip Ridley’s religious thriller is smooth and polished, but there’s a primordial heart beating savagely through the veneer.

The Passion of Darkly Noon concerns the titular character, “Darkly Noon” (Brendan Fraser), and his spiritual trials after escaping an implied massacre. From the few details provided, his family, and the other members of the sect, had their compound raided by the FBI, National Guard, or some such outfit, with the young man barely escaping, and then nearly being run over. Like many of the film’s lines, its opening one is portentous: “God, help me!,” Darkly mutters, before being carried off to a nearby homestead. What follows, over the course of twelve days, is best captured by Darkly’s confession to his dead parents, “…it’s just that it’s very difficult here. And there are a lot of things I don’t understand.”

This passion play is populated by a small group of allegorical characters. The man who finds Darkly, and who ultimately betrays him, is “Jude” (bringing to mind either Judas, or, also appropriately, the patron saint of hopeless causes). The woman who inadvertently seduces Darkly—and who is dubbed a “witch” by an embittered neighbor—is named “Callie,” traditionally short for “Caroline”, a name meaning free or happy; she represents the unreserved pursuit of joy that Darkly has been denied his entire life.

It wasn’t until the last five minutes that I felt Darkly had a shot at being named one of the weirdest movies of all time. Of course, there was that giant, glittering, red-soled shoe floating incongruously down the river. And there was the up-tempo plague and pestilence preach-ifying undertaker who seemed lifted straight from a 19th-century Revival tent. And there was Viggo Mortensen’s mute carpenter, Callie’s bae, who can’t talk so instead has developed an impressive sleight-of-hand repertoire. A final oddity emerged in the closing credits when I learned that this was a German production. Obviously this is only a minor point, but I wondered: is The Passion of Darkly Noon a European view of American religious fanaticism colliding with rugged individualism, exploding in a Hell-sent electrical fire of extermination?

Arrow Video’s “Special Edition” marks the first time Darkly Noon has graced Blu-ray. It’s a director-approved 2K restoration and it includes a new commentary track from Ridley among its many special features. First-pressing orders come with a commemorative booklet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… 1990’s The Reflecting Skin [was] the oddest, most obsessive and morbid rural fantasia ever made, at least until The Passion of Darkly Noon…  As in The Reflecting Skin, Ridley keeps tight control[;] it’s never just weirdness for its own sake.”–Rob Gonsalves, EFilmCritic

(This movie was nominated for review by “Mike.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: SEVEN STAGES TO ACHIEVE ETERNAL BLISS (2018)

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AKA Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss by Passing Through the Gateway Chosen by the Holy Storsh

DIRECTED BY: Vivieno Caldinelli

FEATURING: Kate Micucci, Sam Huntington, Dan Harmon, Taika Waititi

PLOT: Claire and Phil move to a spacious L.A. apartment with suspiciously low rent and discover it’s not a lucky find.

COMMENTS: Liberate yourself from the shackles of your thought.

Or so goes the opening tract from the Book of Storsh. An absurdist comedy that explores the space where “self-help” and “suicide cult” intersect, Seven Stages is another strange baby from the SpectreVision production company. They seem intent on bringing weirdness to the wider world of film, no matter how off-the-wall or bleak its progeny may prove to be. This movie’s relentless energy is to its credit; by the end, though, Seven Stages descends into a nihilistic abyss that papers over human despair with a folksy, up-tempo delivery.

For reasons explained during a bathtub vision, Paul (Sam Huntington) and Claire (Kate Micucci) find themselves in a suspiciously large apartment in downtown Los Angeles. Claire is doing her damnedest to get ahead in the advertising business; Paul is doing his damnedest to loaf around their new home and avoid reality. On their first night in their new home, a fanatic sporting a red spiral mark on his forehead breaks in and engages Paul in a bizarre quotation challenge (somehow involving esoteric civil infraction statutes from Iowa), then tap-dances to the bathroom and slices his own throat with a cake knife. When the police are summoned, Detective Cartwright (Dan Harmon, coming across to me as strangely familiar) explains that it’s just another case of a Storsh disciple knocking himself off (“Didn’t you read the lease?”) Slowly at first, and then dramatically, Claire and Paul embrace their circumstances, eventually becoming followers of Storsh’s teachings.

Seven Stages has the feel of an “Upright Citizen’s Brigade” sketch stretched out a bit too long and never quite hitting top gear. There were a number of laughs (often involving the detective who is hell-bent on pitching his screenplay to Wesley Snipes). And the moment when Paul and Claire decide to follow only the “good” parts of Storsh’s religion was a clear and succinct indictment of the whole self-improvement media complex. But when the final sections—Let the Tub Runneth Over and Change Your Story—begin to unravel, the often-silly, occasionally-funny tone plummets into something far more sinister.

I may be overreacting here, perhaps having mentally shifted into a wholly unintended direction, but the feeling I was left with afterwards was not one of comedic satisfaction (or disappointment, for that matter), but of emptiness. I have more of a fatalistic joie-de-vivre than many, but the lesson hammered home here–delivered glibly in the opening scene by Storsh himself, “That’s what death is: eating that ice-cream on your own terms”–suggest that this movie’s screwball antics merely mask a dark mind. But, I did see Elijah Wood‘s name in the credits, and I know from recent experience that SpectreVision will get up to whatever it wants to. I cannot recommend this movie, but I’ll admit I’m impressed that something so comedically hit-and-miss about something so staggeringly bleak got a green light from anyone.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The comedy flickers between playful and obscene, and the story bounces back and forth between strange and absolutely screwed up… if you like your humor with a side of WTF, then this is your film.”–Kristy Strouse, Film Inquiry (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK (1972)

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DIRECTED BY: Sergio Martino

FEATURING: , George Hilton, Ivan Rassimov, Nieves Navarro, Dominique Boschero, Carla Mancini

PLOT: Jane, a young lady haunted by her mother’s murder and her own traumatic miscarriage, seeks solace but ends up being sucked into a local Satanic cult; her problems then worsen.

Still from All the Colors of the Dark (1972)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While All the Colors of the Dark is a tasty ham of a thriller and peer to the top films in that genre, it doesn’t get any weirder than it has to be to tell its story—which is actually a straightforward story, right down to its dream sequences and some comparatively tame Satanic rituals. Other reviews of this movie confuse “psychedelic” with “using a diffraction camera filter for a couple scenes.” If anything, Colors apes Alfred Hitchcock at his most spartan. A great thriller, but we watch weirder Italian movies around here before our first Chianti of the day.

COMMENTS: Hi, I’m Giallo Man! I saw the Giallo Signal in the sky and got here as soon as I could. Gotta tell you, I am so heavy into the giallo, I mainline it off the nightstand. If one of those Twilight Zone episodes came along where a character gets to wish themselves into a movie forever, I’d probably pick a giallo. And what a choice plum we have here! All the Colors of the Dark comes with a keen pedigree, directed by Sergio Martino, whose name you may recognize from The Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978) or perhaps Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)(#WhatATitle). That latter movie also shares the lead actress Edwige Fenech, whom you might recognize from Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975). That’s before we get to garlic-bread-and-spaghetti western star George Hilton, a supporting cast which reads like a compilation of names from the best of Italian genre films, and filmed-in-England cinematography that could make the cover of an early Black Sabbath album. But best of all is the vintage year of 1972. The Exorcist came out in 1973, so that makes this one occult Euro-horror movie that’s guaranteed not to be a cheap Exorcist knockoff—because it wasn’t even released yet! It doesn’t even kiss much of the dirt that Rosemary’s Baby (1968) trod. I’m almost too excited to watch this.

After a lurid opening nightmare sequence with a blue-eyed stabbing killer in a beige trenchcoat—what, no black gloves?—we meet Jane, who has recently suffered a prematurely terminated pregnancy in a car crash. She lives in a London flat with her boyfriend Richard, who fusses over her while she is plagued by trauma from both this event and nightmares of her mother’s death when she was a child. Jane’s sister Barbara urges her to see a shrink, who is, you guessed it, not much help. The blue-eyed stabber from her nightmares stalks her every waking moment—but is she hallucinating? Jane, towing this head full of psychological baggage, meets her new neighbor, Mary, and the two become fast friends, while Richard and Barbara meet Continue reading CAPSULE: ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK (1972) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

328. ARISE! THE SUBGENIUS MOVIE (1992)

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AKA Arise! The Sub Genius Video;  Arise! SubGenius Recruitment Film #16

“Stand erect for your own abnormality, WISE UP! They’re out to get you. The ‘different’ are being silenced by a global conspiracy. WEIRD-MEN ARISE!”–The Book of the SubGenius : The Sacred Teachings of J.R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs

RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Rev. Cordt Holland, Rev. Ivan Stang

FEATURING: Dr. Howl (Hal Robbins), Rev. Ivan Stang (Douglass Smith), Pope David Meyer II, , Philo Drummond

PLOT: The video begins with five minutes of instructions (e.g., “do not operate a motor vehicle following viewing,” “the demons you may see during the initial hallucination sequence are not real.”) Then, we are introduced to the Church dogma, beginning with an alarmed news anchor who succinctly describes the Church as a cult led by J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, “a comic book character who speaks with aliens and worships money.” Amid mind-melting montages, taped sermons, country/punk “hymns,” and stock footage from old B-movies, the Church doctrine is gradually (if confusedly) revealed, including the concepts of “Slack,” “the Conspiracy,” “the Elder Gods,” and “X-day.”

Still from Arise! the Subgenius Movie (1992)

BACKGROUND:

  • The Church of the SubGenius is a long-running satirical cult, a multimedia performance art circus comprising radio broadcasts, books, associated musical acts (“Doktor bands”), happenings (called “devivals”), pop-surreal art collages, a website, and this movie (with more to come). It is said to have been founded in Dallas TX in 1979 by Rev. Ivan Stang (pseudonym for Douglass Smith), Philo Drummond, and “Dr. X.” Stang quickly became the dominant figure in the movement, and, now in his mid-sixties, is still active in the Church.
  • The Church of the SubGenius is an offshoot of another fake religion, Discordianism, founded in 1963 by Greg Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley. Discordianism’s most famous proponent is writer Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of the The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
  • Co-director/”editor in the spirit” Cordt Holland is a pop-art collagist whose work can be found here.
  • Much of the narration was taken from radio broadcasts from Stang’s “Hour of Slack” and text from The Book of the SubGenius. The environmentally-conscious Church continually recycles and remixes its material into new, mutated combinations.
  • The appearance of President George W. Bush in this 1992 movie was not a prophecy; the video was updated with new material in 2005. (VHS copies will have less material.)
  • Arise! was originally distributed by Polygram, until the Conspiracy caught on and squashed the plan. Reportedly, 800 rental copies were returned to the Church when Blockbuster video went “clean” and apparently deemed the videos deviant and offensive to Christians.
  • In 2017 a Kickstarter campaign to create a “serious” documentary about the history of the Church was successfully funded. Look for Slacking Towards Bethlehem: J.R. ‘Bob’ Dobbs and the Church of the SubGenius to appear sometime in 2018 (we’ll alert you when the time comes).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Obviously, it’s “Bob”‘s generic, white-bread, smug, pipe-sucking face, which is pixilated, melted, multilated, and pasted over other character’s heads throughout the movie.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Pipe-smoking sex god “Bob”; the world ended on July 5, 1998; video evidence of “Bob”‘s martyrdom?

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The world’s only absurdist recruitment video for the world’s largest absurdist cult, Arise! is too potent to play in Conspiracy theaters. It has circulated for over 25 years through that secret samizdat network known only as “the Internet.” Arise! will teach you about the genetic secret that makes you better than the “Normals” and about the long past/soon to come X-Day flying saucer apocalypse, puzzle you with the mysterious riddles posed by Old Testament alien JHVH-1, and give you the key to acquiring slack. All of this propaganda is scored to terribly annoying but hilarious music and illustrated with mind-melting psychedelic collages and subliminal images intended to put you into trance so that J.R. “Bob” Dobbs can insert the deeper, more esoteric meanings behind this lucrative cult directly into your forebrain and teach you to embrace your inner weirdness. Plus, live nude girls scattered throughout!


Excerpt from Arise! The SubGenius Movie

COMMENTS: I was lucky enough to discover the Church of the SubGenius near the very beginning. I’ve had Slack ever since. In 1986 I Continue reading 328. ARISE! THE SUBGENIUS MOVIE (1992) →