A man walks across New York City in a perfectly straight line (while watching out for wizards).
CONTENT WARNING: Adult language.
POD 366, EP. 147: RESURRECTION OF THE SPLENDID, MYSTERIOUS ANGEL TRAP LIST
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Discussed in this episode:
Angel’s Egg (1985): Read Simon Hyslop’s original List Candidate review! In a desolate city, an angelic young girl cherishes an egg. We have been waiting for this one to be re-issued since the day this site first came into existence; that day is finally here. Umbrella’s Blu-ray/4K includes a commentary track, two video appreciations, and a Q&A with director Mamoru Oshii from a festival screening. Buy Angel’s Egg.
Kill List (2011): Read Jesse Miksic’s review. Ben Wheatley‘s breakthrough sophomore feature, a hitman tale with echoes of The Wicker Man, Rosemary’s Baby, and Angel Heart, gets the 4K UHD treatment. Buy Kill List.
The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025): A Chilean feature about a young girl raised by a commune of drag queens which comes under suspicion when a disease arises which is spread by the male gaze. Opening in NYC this week with a few screenings across North America until early February (see following link for venues). The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo U.S. distributor site.
Rabbit Trap (2025): Married musicians accidentally make a field recording of a mysterious forbidden sound in Wales. This slow-paced surreal folk horror left most viewers equally bored and baffled. Buy Rabbit Trap.
Resurrection (2025): Bi Gan‘s latest involves a woman trapped in a dreamscape while undergoing a medical procedure who tells stories to an android corpse. In limited release right now from Janus, which means Criterion will release it in physical formats, probably in 2026. Resurrection at Janus Films.
Splendid Outing (1978): A Korean CEO (in the early days of feminism) is kidnapped and swept away to an island where a fisherman insists she is his wife. The scenario of this overlooked South Korean arthouse feature, now rediscovered by Radiance on Blu-ray, sounds a little like a gender-switched version of The Woman in the Dunes . Buy Splendid Outing.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest on Pod 366 next week, but Greg and Giles will return to catch-up on the final new releases of 2025. In written reviews, new writer Michael Diamades volunteers to venture In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Shane Wilson revisits Citizen Dog (2004), Giles Edwards makes some noise about the underground Haunters of the Silence (2025), and Gregory J. Smalley looks at The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025, see above). Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Toby Jones (II)
FEATURING: AJ Thompson, Crystal Cossette Knight
PLOT: Mild-mannered AJ’s life is thrown into disorder when Fargo’s mayor changes his beloved dog park into a dog-free “blog park,” so he decides to run for mayor himself.
COMMENTS: Comedy is subjective. Surreal comedy is even more subjective. AJ Goes to the Dog Park bills itself as “a surreal and gag-driven comedy.” I suppose the jokes are “surreal,” if you consider The Naked Gun “surreal.”
OK, so I guess the part where AJ’s dogs randomly turn into stuffed animals for some scenes is mildly surreal. But mostly, the gags are like the one where AJ and his future elbow-wrestling coach stand in the library perusing an old dusty tome together; when they leave, it is revealed that the book is not being held by the coach but by a pair of disembodied hands supplied by an extra crouching out of frame. This visual pun is unexpected, sure, but like 90% of AJ‘s jokes, it’s straight out of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker playbook.
Not that that’s a bad thing. The jokes mostly didn’t land for me, but when you fire off 2 or 3 gags a minute, it’s inevitable that a few are going to get through. And this Fargo, North Dakota-based project, while cheaply done—it looks like an extended YouTube sketch, with uniformly amateur actors and self-consciously bad CGI/practical effects—is entirely earnest and refreshingly unafraid to fail. (AJ also takes a soupçon of spiritual inspiration from fellow Midwestern comedy indie Hundreds of Beavers, although it’s nowhere near as relentlessly original, witty, or—yes—as surreal as that cult hit.) AJ himself is a pleasantly bland slacker with no ill-will in his soul who just wants to walk his lapdogs and follow his daily routine, and it’s impossible to root against him. The plot, at least the first section, is brisk and easy to follow, with AJ tasked with completing a sequential set of challenges to wrest the Fargo mayoralty away from its arrogant, dog-unfriendly current occupant, helped along by the aforementioned elbow coach, a freshwater pirate, and a pair of turncoat civil servants. With regular surprises thrown into the mix, this makes for an easy and pleasant watch through the first 50 minutes or so. After (mild spoiler) AJ achieves his goal, however, the movie sort of continues on with far less direction, indulging a big flash forward as it segues into a sort of wistful reverie about losing track of its own plot that doesn’t entirely jibe with the movie’s first part—then ending with an apocalyptic finale with helicopter gunships fighting a D&D demon and his army of haunted skeletons that really doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie, but will at least wake you up. Well, maybe that last part does hit the “surreal” note they were bragging about…
Director Toby Jones must not be confused with the top-rank actor of the same name. This Toby Jones is a writer best known for his work on the Cartoon Network’s “The Regular Show.” This is actually the third (and most ambitious) “AJ” movie: the Jones/Thompson pair had made two shorter films (one was animated) starring the AJ character, and apparently have since they were teenagers in Fargo. Dog Park debuted as a “secret screening” mystery movie in some markets, where audiences felt ambushed by a way-off-center low-budget offering that many felt didn’t constitute a “real movie.” That unfortunate marketing ploy resulted in a barrage of angry 1-star IMDb ratings. AJ is probably not a movie meant for the big screen, but if you go into it knowing what to expect, there shouldn’t be anything here to offend your cinematic sensibilities. It’s juvenile, but not crude, like a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon; something your inner 10-year old might enjoy. “Modest-but-zany” is the keyword here.
AJ Goes to the Dog Park can be streamed on multiple services (some free); there is also a Blu-ray with director’s commentary and other extras,
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MAGUS (1968)
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DIRECTED BY: Guy Green
FEATURING: Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, Anna Karina
PLOT: Commitment-phobic English teacher Nicholas Urfe escapes his girlfriend by traveling to Greece to take a job vacated by his predecessor’s suicide and meets a wealthy eccentric whose activities seem to center around Nico himself.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: When babe-in-the-woods Anne tells her wayward boyfriend, “Oh, Nico, this is life, not an existentialist novel,” it’s not a self-own. She’s having a go at all of us for trying to apply the tenets of reality to a tale that’s really half-philosophical treatise, half-rejection of conventional storytelling. It’s gleefully existentialist, leveraging a traditional leading man and spectacular Mediterranean vistas in service of a full-throated mockery of expectations. The Magus is aggressively weird—even hostile—to anyone who would try to make sense of it.
COMMENTS: “You have entered the Meta-Theater!” declares Anthony Quinn. How utterly baffling that must have been to mainstream audiences in 1968, long before the idea of a metaverse was common parlance and entertainment made a regular habit of sledgehammering the fourth wall into oblivion. Here they are, expecting to see a film about Michael Caine playing fast and loose with the affections of beautiful young women, and this intervening plotline keeps showing up in which Quinn alternately casts Caine in the role of confidant, spy, and test subject. If viewers were confused, that was apparently echoed by the actors themselves: Bergen complained that she never knew what she was supposed to play, while Caine reportedly has named The Magus as one of the worst movies he has ever made (a fantastic claim, especially to any of us who have seen Jaws: The Revenge). If the people making the movie don’t know what’s going on, that’s not going to make it easy on the rest of us.
Toying with structure seems to have been author John Fowles’ whole thing, utilizing tools like split narratives and multiple endings to heighten the uncertainty of existence. Given that Fowles insisted on adapting his own novel (having been unhappy with the previous adaptation of his work, The Collector), we can assume that everything is playing out exactly as he intends. So when protagonist Nico takes a walk through the Greek countryside that just happens to end up at the palatial estate of Conchis (Quinn, styled after Picasso, right down to the bald head and striped shirt), that’s all part of Fowles’ plan. There’s something amusing about the way Conchis changes his story, including his name and profession, every time we meet him. What boring people we must be to try and tie him down to a single identity.
Caine initially seems ideally cast as Nico. After all, it would take someone with his reputation for playing distinctly chilly characters like the brutal spy Harry Palmer or the caddish Alfie to be so cruelly dismissive of the beautiful and adoring flight attendant Anne (a fetching Karina). From that perspective, he seems ideal to portray a man so disdainful of commitment that when his girlfriend asks him to take a later flight to spend more time with her, he promptly books an earlier one. But as he becomes more enmeshed with Conchis’ machinations, which seem to revolve around the hapless beauty Lily (an airless, seemingly dubbed Bergen) but are really more of an indictment of Nico himself, Caine’s aloofness becomes a poor fit. Even when he’s tied up and confronted by the entire populace of the town (and a goofy computer), Caine feels far too confident, too safe to be genuinely threatened by the existential crisis that’s landed upon him.
Ironically, it’s the most straightforward, unadorned scene that retroactively justifies all the metaphysical tricks we’ve seen at play. Conchis’ flashback to his days as the puppet administrator during the Nazi occupation, when he was asked to make a Trolley Problem decision about the fate of the townspeople in the wake of a Resistance action, is a perfectly pitched as a tense, straightforward piece of drama, and its exposure of the cruelty of man. We know enough about both Nico and Conchis to understand how they’ve reached this point, and it makes sense that Quinn would reject the absurd limitations of logic. He’s got the more compelling case, so the ensuing lunacy he perpetrates seems only right.
Unfortunately for Fowles, he cannot quash the natural impulse of film to present even the most ridiculous situations in the stark light of reality. As Nico is left to reflect on his experience, we’re asked to judge what we’ve seen. Was it all just a dream? Has Nico been punished for his infractions? Is this an elaborate revenge on Anne’s part? Philosophy thrives in the uncertainty, but film demands an answer. That’s the paradox of The Magus: after two hours rejecting the tedium and pointlessness of reason, it just can’t quite give it up.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“The Magus is one of the weirdest films of the late 60’s… those anticipating the standard fare will no doubt be left scratching their head in disquieted belief – their expectations tossed down a well.” – Gary W. Tooze, DVD Beaver
(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
APOCRYHA CANDIDATE: SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE (2024)
Agapouse ta louloudia perissotero
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She Loved Blossoms More is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Yannis Veslemes
FEATURING: Panos Papadopoulos, Aris Balis, Julio Katsis, Dominique Pinon
PLOT: Three brothers try to cope with their mother’s untimely death.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Hallucinating your dead mom as a talking vaginal flower, complete with glowing clitoris, might be a totally natural Oedipal response for a son still processing grief and loss. But when Hedgehog then makes a psychedelic drug from said flower so he can hold a séance with a transdimensional severed head to perfect his time travel experiments, things get pretty weird.
COMMENTS: You can tell life just hasn’t been the same for Dummy, Japan, and Hedgehog since their mother passed away. They try to maintain some semblance of normalcy, coming together for meals and decorating their house for the holidays as Christmas rolls around. But they inevitably drift apart into their own mournful rhythms. Dummy, a failed scientist, spends all his time making and taking pharmaceuticals, then sleeping in the family car with his hands tied to the steering wheel. Japan, the computer nerd, prefers to play chess online before getting drunk on cognac and passing out in the bathtub. Only Hedgehog feels seriously devoted to their family and their ongoing project: he even sleeps in their mother’s Art Deco armoire, the very piece of furniture the brothers are converting into a time machine so they can bring her back from the dead.
After a series of experiments, with variable success (one results in a chicken with its head in another dimension), Mom’s garden has become a pet cemetery (where she also lies buried). Her sons need more money for additional equipment, but Hedgehog avoids taking calls from Logo, their mysterious Parisian funder. Logo (Pinon, in an excellent cameo) has set a daunting deadline, and seems to have questionable motives of his own for pursuing time travel.
When Dummy brings his dealer/girlfriend Samantha to join the party, an increasingly desperate Hedgehog begins hearing his mother’s voice, begging him to bring her back. During a heavy trip she urges him to “try it” with the girl. Needless to say, Hedgehog doesn’t interpret “it” the way most people would; but do his subsequent actions disrupt the time-space continuum. Or is everyone still high on grave flowers?
Like Panos Cosmatos, Yannis Veslemes clearly has a deep love of late seventies to early eighties cinema. A sensuous trippy vibe pervades Blossoms from beginning to end, but this is lo-fi sci-fi: a blend of neon light filters enhanced by distorted sound and visuals with the bluish static of cathode-ray televisions and glowing green text on early computer monitors. The strategic use of animatronics ups the weirdness factor as the plot veers into an uncanny valley. Veslemes may be the only contemporary director to have not only seen, but taken inspiration from the obscure films of Alain Fleischer (a close examination of the computer screen in the opening sequence reveals the user’s handle: “zoozero79”.)
Veslemes composed scores for films before turning to directing and, also like Cosmatos, he displays a interest a soundtrack that adds to the film’s unique ambiance. She Loved Blossoms More features mainly neoclassical compositions, with some electronics, but avoids clichéd over-reliance on imitating the stereotypical sounds of ’80s movies. The music always complements the visuals without trying to overpower the imagery’s otherworldliness.
The story provides no plausible explanation for how hooking electrodes up to a closet could create a time machine. Blossoms requires a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief, or perhaps outright cynicism. The characters’ plight generates sympathy; the retro technology on display leaves the viewer wondering whether we’re actually witnessing groundbreaking DIY research, or a family caught up in a collective delusion. As the identity of Logo and the backstory of Mom’s tragic death are gradually revealed, it only adds another layer to an already ambiguous reality.
As Hedgehog, Papadopoulos gives an understated performance that sometimes recalls Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, displaying a similarly creepy dead-eyed intensity. It’s an interesting point of comparison, given that both films explore ’80s nostalgia, weird physics, and altered states of consciousness, though in entirely different ways.
As with most time travel narratives, the story loops around on itself, but the ending is not quite the same as the beginning. You can’t travel through the back of the wardrobe and come out unchanged.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: