Recently, the Library of Congress found and restored a copy of this early Georges Melies short, long believed lost, in which Gugusse beats an automaton clown to death with a hammer.
POD 366, EP. 158: THE 2025-26 WEIRDCADEMY AWARDS NOMINEES
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Discussed in this episode:
Wetiko (2025): Billed as a “psychedelic jungle thriller,” this low-budget Mexican trip movie is in theaters this week in New York, LA, and a few large hip cities, but will probably show up on VOD very soon. Wetiko at Dekanalog.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
Join next week’s Pod 366 as we interview Ryan Verrill and Billy Ray Brewton from new boutique distributor Antenna Releasing about the current state of cult film distribution. (Ryan also runs the Disc-Connected podcast and website.) In written content, Shane Wilson rummages through the reader-suggestion queue for the obscure Ukrainian action (?) film Overturn: Awakening of the Warrior (2013), Micheal Diamades also ventures into the queue for India’s “almost completely incomprehensible” Om Dar-B-Dar (1988), and Gregory J. Smalley joins the reader suggestion crowd to suffer through Visions of Suffering (2018). Onward and weirdward!
YOUR VOTE DETERMINES THE WINNER OF THE 16TH ANNUAL WEIRDCADEMY AWARDS
This year, Bugonia (and Emma Stone in Bugonia) marks the only overlap between the Weirdcademy Awards and Hollywood’s annual lipstick-on-a-pig hootenanny, the Most Conventional Movie Awards. This follows a trend dating back all the way to 2024-2025 of Hollywood recognizing one and exactly one (usually whatever Lanthimos directs in a given year) weird film for awards season. Sure, Arco, the story of a boy from the distant hippie future who time-travels to the distant past of 2075 using his magical rainbow cape, got a nomination in the animated film, but that’s only a marginal, weird-adjacent title. Aside from that, weird movies got about as far with the Academy as they normally do: nowhere. The Academy won’t even consider Baby Invasion, the first Harmony Korine movie based on a fake video game where all the armed assailants wear baby-face masks while invading SoCal McMansions and occasionally a white rabbit pops up for no reason, or Batman Ninja vs. Yakuza League, which is almost certainly one of the top five animated movies about Batman Ninja facing off against the yakuza ever made—just because neither ever played in real movie theaters.
Instead, the Academy wants to feed us movies about a ping pong speed freak who never actually takes speed, Shakespeare’s wife mourning the death of her kid for two hours, and Brad Pitt remaking Top Gun: Maverick with a race car. (Though to be fair, One Battle After Another and Sinners are really good.)
The Oscars are a joke, and everyone knows it. But you, my friend, you aren’t content with the same-old same-old. You want weird in your movies. The Weirdcademy Awards are for you, the moviegoer whose friends roll their eyes and sigh loudly when you suggest movie night should feature a low budget Greek flick about three brothers who smoke the talking flowers growing from their mother’s grave so they can perfect their time travel machine.
Although the editors of 366 Weird Movies select the nominees from the pool of available movies, the Awards themselves are a naked popularity contest, and do not necessarily reflect either the artistic merit or intrinsic weirdness of the films involved. The Weirdcademy Awards are tongue-in-cheek and for fun only. Ballot-stuffing is a frequent occurrence. Please, no wagering.
The Weirdcademy Awards are given to the Weirdest Movie, Actor, Actress and Scene of the previous year, as voted by the members of the Weirdcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Weirdness.
Who makes up the Weirdcademy? Membership is open to all readers of 366 Weird Movies. If you can figure out how to vote in the poll, you are qualified to join. You can not be turned down because of your age, sex, religious or political affiliation, immigration status, pronouns, or whether you still use “X.” There is no requirement that you’ve have to actually see any of the movies listed before voting. You can vote for any or all categories.
You can only vote once—so choose carefully. We’ll keep voting open until March 15, so we can announce our results before the Academy Awards and steal their thunder.
Be sure to also vote for Weirdest Short Film of 2025. To watch all five nominees and to cast your vote, please click here.
Your ballot for the 2025 edition of the Weirdcademy
Awards is below:
Continue reading YOUR VOTE DETERMINES THE WINNER OF THE 16TH ANNUAL WEIRDCADEMY AWARDS
VOTE FOR THE WEIRDEST SHORT FILM OF 2025
It’s time for the 2025 edition of the Weirdcademy Awards, the premier (only) awards contest exclusively focused on weird films, chosen by weird film fans. That means shorts as well as features. We’ve collected all five nominees for 2025′s Weirdest Short of the Year together in one place, for ease of voting. You can cast a vote for your favorite until March 15. Choose carefully, because you can only vote once. This year’s slate features the Agency for Defense against Hallucinatory Disruptions, lovers reunited inside a black hole inside a dream, little cosmic jokes, body-part stealing crows, and legendary big nights out.
You can watch all the nominees in full below before voting (shorts may contain A.I. generated images, advertisements, substance abuse, cartoon gore, and disturbing tiny flute-playing men):
“ADHD” (link) by Meat Dept.
“Dream Machine” (link) by Jimmy Marble
“Heroic Dose” (link) by Dugan Gundelfinger
“Salad Fingers 14: Crows” (link) by David Firth
“Yes I Didi” (link) by Jim Hosking
CAPSULE: A USEFUL GHOST (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke
FEATURING: Davika Hoorne, Witsarut Himmarat, Wanlop Rungkumjad, Wisarut Homhuan, Apasiri Nitibhon, Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit
PLOT: A man falls for a vacuum cleaner possessed by the ghost of his dead wife, despite his family’s insistence on exorcising the interloper.
COMMENTS: An exorcist stands mouth agape as a vacuum cleaner uses its spinning brush attachment on an ecstatic man’s nipples. In the context of A Useful Ghost, what is strange about this scene isn’t the human/machine coupling so much as the exorcist’s reaction. A night duty nurse is barely surprised when the same vacuum asks her for her husband’s room number; she tells it matter-of-factly that visiting hours are over and that, under hospital policy, ghosts cannot qualify as relatives. In this alternate version of contemporary Thailand, ghosts roaming among the populace are taken for granted. The central family’s spotless-but-haunted factory is shut down because, according to the inspector, “A ghost is even less hygienic than a speck of dust.”
The exorcist’s reaction is strange because it challenges the deadpan style first-time director Boonbunchachoke adopts for this tale. Characters in A Useful Ghost do not show any emotion unless and until it is absolutely necessary. Therefore, when this exorcist stands, mouth agape, he does so with no alteration for the duration of the scene, flanked by characters whose faces reveal less visible shock. At first, the anti-naturalistic acting seems contrived, but as the film goes on and the tone turns from ridiculous to sombre, its effect becomes hypnotic, evoking an elegiac, ghostly world where genuine feeling is slowly leeching away into a void.
You see, despite the fact that the premise suggests a whimsical romantic comedy, A Useful Ghost takes a darker turn in its second half after the ghost wife (Nan) proves her worth to her husband’s family though her spectral talent for entering others’ dreams and gathering intelligence about the reasons for their hauntings. This useful talent, and fortuitous connections, give Nan standing in society. Despite the legal impediments of ghosthood, she’s too valuable to be exorcised. But, although Nan is motivated solely by the noble desires of love and duty to family, her persistence in this world is predicated on her utility to those in power. The compromises she must make inevitably stresses her relationship with her principled husband. When the 2010 massacres become a major plot engine, the dynamic shifts from romantic comedy to political screed, and the film raises an unusual question: is it possible for a ghost to be a quisling?
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: