It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TASHER DESH (2013)

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AKA The Land of Cards

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DIRECTED BY: Quashiq “Q” Mukherjee

FEATURING:, , Soumyak Kante De Biswas, , Tinu Verghese

PLOT: An exiled prince escapes from confinement, only to arrive in a strange land where all the residents dress as military regiments of playing cards; meanwhile, a writer struggles to imagine an screen adaptation of this story.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Tasher Desh is a fascinating example of a weird movie that manages to get weirder entirely through attitude. The land of the playing-card people and their lockstep behavior is plenty strange, but the movie treats their situation with a baroque intensity, a gravity that overwhelms everything that has preceded it. One kind of strange is replaced with another, and an emotional ache that completely changes the viewing experience.

Still from Tasher Desh (2013)

COMMENTS: When last we met up with Q, he was sharing the adventures of a Kolkata street rat turned hardcore rapper. His adventurous tale carved out a niche distinct from his colleagues in the Indian film industry, eschewing colorful dances and crowd-pleasing romance in favor of drugs, hardcore sex, and verses spat out with boundless anger. So when we begin Tasher Desh by meeting a screenwriter who has been tasked with adapting Rabindrath Tagore’s 80-year-old play about a fantastical land where the population paints their faces white and assumes the roles of a platoon of playing cards, the writer’s confusion would seem to be a conduit for that of Q himself. Is this really his kind of film? Can he make the pivot from raw vérité to classic adaptation? The answer is, of course. The man’s a professional. But rest assured, it will not look anything like you’d suspect. Q is gonna Q. 

Tasher Desh spends its first hour establishing a mood of expectation. We hang out with the Prince and his retinue in their large but sparse prison, a cage that would be gilded if it were not made of rock and decorated with only the barest of furnishings, for a remarkably long time. The Prince chats with his mother, ignores his bevy of female attendants, sits around with his aide-de-camp, and plays marathon games of table tennis. Whatever he has done to merit this punishment (and the film is wisely silent on the subject), it’s a dreary fate. That he will want to escape seems a foregone conclusion.

Juxtaposed with the Prince’s misery is that of the screenwriter, who seems to learn the story and script the film in real time. Both men search for something to make sense of everything: for the Prince, an encounter with an exotic fortune teller seals the deal, while the screenwriter similarly meets a mysterious woman who shows him the way.

Here, halfway through the film, it’s fair to wonder who is the dog and who is the tail. The Prince and his pal wash up on an unfamiliar shore, and we immediately encounter the squadron of card people, a live-action version of the Red Queen’s brigade. They are stripped of all identity: hair hidden under a cap, clad in red and black uniforms, eyes concealed behind thick goggles, with their faces painted white and suits painted upon their lips. Only the numbers on their epaulets distinguish them. Their speech is captioned onscreen in bold all-caps blocks that threaten to fill half the screen. They are strange, single-minded, and fiercely xenophobic as they prepare to execute the newly arrived Prince. It’ll take some fancy speechifying to get out of this mess. Luckily for the Prince, he’s got that arrow in his quiver. 

There’s something delightfully demented about the seriousness with which Q treats this absurd premise. It’s not clear why the Prince’s words are so motivating, but maybe he’s the first voice of opposition the card people have ever encountered. Regardless, the speech ushers in an awakening that shatters the worldview of everyone on the island. The Prince and his story are essentially done with at this point, and we’re left with the cards—especially the female cards—and the existential earthquake they face. For some, it is a sexual awakening, for others, a crisis of identity. It’s a huge pivot, and Q treats this shift with the solemnity and intensity that follows a long-drawn out war. 

With multiple inspirations from literature, stage, and screen, Tasher Desh could be called derivative. Yet the sources are so many and so disparate that trying to tease them out ends up feeling foolish. The Tempest meets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets Adaptation meets Lysistrata meets Pleasantville… trying to find a true antecedent is absurd. You’re better off with a different analogue altogether: it’s a Cobb salad, a track off Paul’s Boutique, a Rauschenberg montage. It synthesizes a diverse array of elements into something barely resembling its source material, something wholly new and strange. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…not just a movie, but a surreal fever dream that completely rewired my brain…  while it might look like a straightforward ‘weird’ movie, ‘The Land of Cards’ is smarter than that. It’s a full-blown political allegory that isn’t afraid to question conformity, social structures, and the power of art.” – Brittany Vincent, Tom’s Guide

(This movie was nominated for review by debasish dey. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: EGG (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Yukihiko Tsutsumi

FEATURING: Inuko Inuyama, Hye- yeong Jo, Megumi Ujiie

PLOT: A girl finds herself tormented by the image of a hatching egg whenever she closes her eyes.

Still from Egg (2005)

COMMENTS: A violent confrontation while introducing a narrative is a tried and tested way to grab the audience’s attention. This method is applied in Egg, and along with erratic editing, rough cuts, many close-ups and zoom-ins, it creates a certain tension. This will be a wild ride, as the story follows a young girl attempting to come to terms with a highly disturbing situation.

The plot revolves around the daily routine of a seemingly ordinary young woman. She has friends, works a nonsensical futuristic job (as in out of the popular TV show ” Severance”), and tries to live a normal life. However, whenever she closes her eyes, her inner world appears, and inside this world is an egg ready to hatch. Tsutsumi’s experience as a visual artist and music video director comes in handy here as he creates an oppressive, eerie, otherworldly inner landscape, with some truly grotesque monsters later on.

Our protagonist’s situation develops into a double confrontation: on the one hand, with the creature lurking inside the egg, and on the other, with a familial legacy of similar cases. The danger represented by the creature transforms into something concrete and physical, as it becomes apparent it doesn’t exist only in her mind, but inside her lower abdomen, as well. And like any baby, it attempts to get out, albeit in a messier than usual way. Light body horror is part of the deal here, but nothing too gruesome. Instead, the film works mostly as a suspense survival thriller, with rich allegorical undertones.

Underneath the lore and imagery is a commentary on female physiology, the nature of pregnancy, and the acceptance (or not) of this seemingly unavoidable reality. In this context, Egg also works as a coming-of-age tale. Early on, a doctor our heroine consults suggests she is still a child, at least mentally, hinting at an upcoming transformation. The use of body horror to comment on themes of pregnancy and female physiology brings to mind the work of , especially Evolution (2015).

Some light comedic elements are expressed here, mostly through exaggerated acting, but they remain underdeveloped. Ultimately Egg is not a black comedy as much as a deeply and earnestly symbolic J-horror with feminist implications, essential for fans of the art-house and the bizarre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:  

“…a bizarre tale and quite unlike anything else out there, but nevertheless a rather enjoyable one – Niina Doherty, HorrorNews.Net 

Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366, EP. 168: REX REED (R.I.P.) WOULD HAVE CALLED THIS THE WORST PODCAST EVER MADE

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Audio link (Spotify)

YouTube link

Discussed in this episode:

Decorado (2025): ‘ feature length expansion of his existential mouse short finally hits theaters. As usual with GKids releases, the film will be shown in your choice of dubbed or subtitled formats. Decorado official site (Spanish) and U.S. distributor site.

Fight Club (1999): Read the Canonically Weird entry! Includes numerous bonus features (none new) and a standard Blu-ray. Buy Fight Club [4K Steelbook].

Krakatit (1948): A man has distorted dreams and memories of having created a weapon of mass destruction. Deaf Crocodile unearths yet another odd-looking one we’d never heard of before, this one from Czechoslovakia’s pre-New Wave. Buy Krakatit.

Motel Hell (1980): Read Giles Edwards’ review. A 4K UHD steelbook upgrade of the cannibal comedy; standard Blu-ray included, recycled extras from previous discs presumed. Buy Motel Hell [4K Steelbook].

Mystics in Bali (1981): Read Pete Trbovich’s List Candidate review. Previously on DVD, Mondo Macabro’s new Blu-ray release includes an extended cut of the film with 40 more minutes of jungle fever madness. Buy Mystics in Bali.

RIP Rex Reed: Reed, one of the last of the celebrity film critics, had atrocious taste and relished making enemies, but was always a reliable indicator of a great weird movie (the more Reed hated a movie, the more of a classic it was). Here is a nice remembrance from a friend who knew and liked him.

Scarlet Warning 666 AKA It Happened One Weekend, Scarlet Love  (1974-1996): This legendary lost film from one Palmer Rockey (who claims to play 7 roles in the film), laughed off the screen at its premiere in Dallas, is an apparently incomprehensible tale of spy antics, twins, and Satanism.  Very few have seen this, but one of them was the Church of the Subgenius’ , who raved, “NO MAN can even barely begin to conceive of the PURITY OF PSYCHOSIS displayed by this  motion picture without actually seeing it.”  Buy Scarlet Warning 666.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

No guest scheduled for next week’s Pod 366, but we’ll be back to talk about all the weird movie news and new releases. In written content, Michael Diamades conceives the bizarre J-horror Egg (2005), Shane Wilson returns to the subcontinent for a look at the weirdie Tasher Desh [AKA The Land of Cards] (2012), Giles Edwards takes a crack at Krakatit (see above) and G. Smalley decides on the as Buffalo Bill spaghetti western Heads or Tails? (2025). Onward and weirdward!

Capsules

CAPSULE: ENDLESS COOKIE (2025)

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Endless Cookie is available to purchase on-demand.

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DIRECTED BY: Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

FEATURING: Voices of Seth Scriver, Peter Scriver

PLOT: A Canadian cartoonist interviews his half-Cree brother and his numerous nephews and nieces to make an animated documentary about their shared family history.

Still from Endless Cookie (2025)

COMMENTS: Animator Seth Scriver sets himself a difficult task. He thinks his half-brother, Pete (born to Seth’s father and an indigenous woman of the Cree tribe) is the greatest storyteller he’s ever known, and wants to document those tales. But Pete lives on the Shamattawa reservation in northern Manitoba, a location so remote that there are no roads and visitors must fly in. Pete’s large family has no experience with filmmaking, and the sound quality is so bad Steh frequently has to scrap recordings and start over. He’s excited to get a grant from Telefilm Canada, but his financial backers grow increasingly skeptical with the work-in-progress (“Is this what you’re doing with the money we gave you?” “Tell me, Seth, why is this pizza scene going on so long?”). A project that was supposed to take 7 months to complete stretches out to 9 years. But he crosses the finish line, and he and Pete finally deliver a heartfelt but oddball saga that sometimes approaches outsider art.

Seth’s lack of direction for the project becomes both a thesis and a running joke. His vague but lofty aspiration is to create a documentary that’s “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true.” Easygoing Pete is fine with the plan: “oh, okay.” The original idea is for Pete to tell seven stories, but his first attempt, a tale about the time he got his hand caught in a Conibear trap, is interrupted by the sound of a flushing toilet in the background. (Pete won’t finish this story until the end of the film.) Seth’s briefly-glimpsed flow chart for the movie is composed of irregular scribbled blobs representing scenes and looks like a bulbous, winding intestine instead of a straight arrow. The seven story structure is scrapped in favor of a laid-back method of just recording daily life and squeezing in stories as the come, an approach that better fits the documentarians’ personalities. While sitting around the table at Pete’s house—interrupted by Pete’s daughter Cookie offering to make sound effects for the film—Pete talks to his father on the phone, and Seth’s mother tells a story about a dream Pete told her, which leads the father to reminisce about a fishing trip where he encountered a strange glowing globe in the sky. And so it goes. As they slowly progress through each episode, with digressions aplenty and flashbacks nestled inside of flashbacks, a portrait emerges of Pete’s family and the way First Nations people live today: clinging to some traditions while jettisoning most for modern conveniences. This unforced, as-it-happens methodology allows the movie to touch on social topics like indigenous incarnation rates, lack of access to clean water and hunting lands, and historical injustices without seeming pedantic. Somehow, the movie ends after the apocalypse—although it eventually circles back to the present, because the past is an endless cookie.

The meandering style fits Scriver’s ADD animation style, which can best be described as “cute grotesque.” The brothers are drawn as clowns assembled from Mr. Potato Head parts, with plastic hats perched atop their rotund heads and big floppy noses; they wouldn’t look out of place in Yellow Submarine. Other characters become anthropomorphic trophies, slices of toast, right-angle rulers, or baby onions—not to mention the eponymous Cookie, who’s an actual talking chocolate chip cookie. Scriver puts enormous detail into every deceptively crude Flash animation frame, and indulges in surreal flights of fancy at every opportunity: coffee cups add commentary, real characters intrude on the stories (and vice versa), and a suicidal family member drives an eyeball motorcycle into a desert eternity. Endless Cookie is never visually dull, to say the least, and although some people can’t connect with the meandering storytelling, it resolves into a conversational format: one idea sparks another as stories wind their way through the tapestry of life, indifferent to temporal and physical laws. In the end, Scriver checks off his list of “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple, and true”; he just forgot to add “and kind of weird.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… the film… boasts so much mirth and good will that the strangeness becomes grounded in universal feelings of warmth and togetherness. The surreal becomes identifiable and relatable… It’s a weird kind of hang out movie where the door is always open, either to engage directly or to just let all the strangeness wash over the viewer.”–Andrew Parker, The Gate (festival screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by Sean Ramsdell. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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