A puppet sheriff investigates a missing-puppets case in this music video for jazz saxophonist Tamoaki Baba’s single “Prime.” Thanks to reader Brett Cranford for bringing this to our attention.
POD 366, EP. 154: WITH EMERGENCY FILL-IN CO-HOST AND PERSONALLY-PROCLAIMED PERV PENGUIN PETE
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Discussed in this episode:
Iron Lung (2026): A surprise hit in theaters about a convict sent to explore a mysterious ocean on an interstellar moon in a ramshackle submarine. We ignored this video-game adaptation when it came out last week, but a loyal reader has since tipped us off that they think it’s weird. Iron Lung official site.
Mag Mag (2025): A woman swears revenge on the ghost (the titular Mag Mag) who slew her beloved. A subversive first feature from Japanese comic Yuriyan Retriever that has earned some comparisons to the work of Junjo Ito and Takashi Miike; Mag Mag is apparently playing in theaters somewhere (we were not able to find any venues in America). Mag Mag official site (in Japanese).
Nadja (1994): Michael Almereyda‘s experimental vampire movie, executive produced by David Lynch (who also has a cameo), is sort of a loose remake of Dracula’s Daughter (1936). Debuting this week at Brooklyn Academy of Music (with 2 Q&A’s with the director); more screenings to be found at the link to follow. We predict a Blu-ray in late 2026, early 2027 at the latest. Nadja restoration at Arbelos Films.
OBEX (2025): Read Giles Edwards’ review. You can now easily see Albert Birney‘s crypto-fantasia about a man entering a video game to save his demon-kidnapped dog on VOD. Rent OBEX on VOD.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
Tatu Heikkinen and Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen of Haunters of the Silence are our scheduled guests on Pod 366 next week. Greg is feeling better, and wouldn’t miss the chance to ask them some questions about this visually stunning movie, even if he was on his deathbed (Giles will be along, too). In written content, Micheal Diamades gives you a primer on Greek Weird cinema before Lanthimos (the Old Greek Weird Wave), Shane Wilson eliminates Takeshi Kitano‘s bleak yakuza film Sonatine (1993) from the reader-suggestion queue, and Gregory J. Smalley ventures into The Kingdom of Crooked Mirrors (1963, Soviet Union). Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: RETURN TO SILENT HILL (2026)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Christophe Gans
FEATURING: Jeremy Irvine, Hannah Emily Anderson
PLOT: A painter’s drunken dreams and a mysterious note lead him to the ghost town of Silent Hill, where he searches for his lost ex-lover amidst the eternally smoldering ruins.
COMMENTS: Aficionados will tell you that “Silent Hill 2” is one of the greatest video game stories ever told. I trust them, but this adaptation by Christophe Gans, returning to the Silent Hill series after a highly disappointing middle installment from another director, does nothing to support their claim. (Evidence of it faithfully recapturing the look of the game, on the other hand, is much stronger.) What we get here is a gilded but mediocre psychological horror that never explains why it needs to be set in the rapidly deteriorating “Silent Hill” universe—except for the fact that it’s a spooky locale.
And indeed, the film is at its best when it’s merely prowling about the town, encountering swarms of beetle-like insects, headless zombies squirting acid from a torso orifice, and spider-like corpses. It’s fun just sightseeing: the ashy gray streets and the eerie hallways of the town’s dilapidated tenements have a bleak beauty. But even Silent Hill’s essential hauntedness is starting to have diminishing returns. The series’ signature monster, Pyramid Head, is scary—terrifying, in fact—the first time you see him. Three movies in, he doesn’t have the same impact. Unlike in a game, this lumbering behemoth is never a threat to catch a protagonist.
Irvine and Anderson are competent leads whose main virtue is that they’re easy on the eyes. The supporting cast does not stand out, and it seems that most of their characters have been cut for time (Eddie serves no purpose in this plot, and could have been left out entirely). Akira Yamaoka’s evocative music again features. The star, such as it is, is the production design and visual effects.
The plot is the biggest issue. Yes, the movie will get weird, but only in that tired “the borders between reality and hallucination start to blur” approach that now seems to animate 5-10% of low and mid-budget horrors. The info drops explaining James and Mary’s generic love affair hardly create a strong emotional rooting interest, and the backstory of the mysterious cult isn’t developed enough to create a meaningful plot engine. In a nod to the video game’s multiple possible resolutions, the movie has conflicting, contradictory endings. The technique doesn’t work at all in the context of a movie adaptation, particularly for people who’ve never played the game. Don’t Return to Silent Hill in theaters. If you do, don’t say you weren’t warned.
Walkout note: the only other people in my theater, a couple, walked out with fifteen minutes left to go.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: LUTHER THE GEEK (1989)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Carlton J. Albright
FEATURING: Edward Terry, Joan Roth, Stacy Haiduk
PLOT: Imprisoned as a juvenile for a murder spree, Luther is released on parole and terrorizes a family in a remote Illinois farmhouse.
COMMENTS: What is the goal of imprisonment? Some argue deterrence. Others rehabilitation. A few would make the case for vengeance. Or perhaps it’s some combination of these. Carlton J. Albright and his team put these socio-philosophical concerns aside in their chronicle of Luther the Geek: a madman who began as a mad lad, murdering three people after a formative encounter with a circus performer who ripped open the necks of chickens for the amusement of the crowds (and to earn his much-needed liquor).
Amongst that crowd, Young Luther is thrown to the floor in a scuffle—smashing out his front teeth in the process. Fast-forward twenty years (all of them in prison), and his parole is reviewed by five prison officials, among them a “bleeding-heart” female who notes Luther’s commendable behavior prison, his lack of speech notwithstanding. Luther, you see, merely clucks. By a vote of three-to-two, he’s set loose, and the inevitable ensues.
Albright lucked out finding a performer like Edward Terry, since to whatever degree it may be argued that Luther the Geek works, it could not work without Terry’s all-in performance. His Luther is not fit for society, and quickly murders again. An hour or so of this eighty-minute movie takes place in an out of the way farm, during which—through a series of commendably paced, shot, and edited chase, scuffle & violence set-pieces—various victims are bloodily dispatched by the titular geek.
Why are we here, though? The pay-offs will interest slasher fans. Titillation seekers get their thrills from the buxom daughter. The rest of us may find Luther the Geek an oddity (if not a weird-ity) worth checking out. Through much of the dialogue-free performance from Terry, I was reminded of 183’s Angst. Luther the Geek sort of plays out like that German film’s American hick cousin. Indeed, one weakness I found in Angst is not present in Luther: there is no inner monologue. We have no real idea why this nut is doing what he’s doing; and Luther is all the more terrible and, perhaps, sympathetic for this lack of elucidation. As a violence picture that goes for the throat, there’s a strange undercurrent of pathos—and a remarkable finale that doesn’t chicken out.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Luther The Geek (Tromatic Special Edition)
- A young country boy is plunged into the depths of homicidal madness after witnessing the strange exploits of a carnival “geek.”
List Price :
Offer: 13.97
Go to AmazonAPOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGAN’S WAKE (1966)
AKA Finnegan’s Wake
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Mary Ellen Bute
FEATURING: Martin J. Kelley, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell, Page Johnson
PLOT: In a series of disconnected scenes, memories, and dreams, the passing of Finnegan, AKA Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, AKA HCE (and there may be many other names not yet known) is the occasion of a wake, an event which the deceased keeps attempting to attend despite his survivors’ reluctance for him to participate—or perhaps none of that happens.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The next time you hear someone complain that their favorite book was adapted for the cinema and the filmmakers weren’t “faithful to the original text,” just plop them down and make them watch this ridiculously successful effort to burnish the original medium through adaptation into a new one. Passages never claims to be a literalization of Joyce’s book, instead recognizing that its greatest advantage is the power of its twisted language and putting that front and center.
COMMENTS: “When is a pun not a pun?” the jolly bartender asks. It’s an unexpectedly galling question, considering that he’s inside a story that consists almost entirely of plays-on-words, that exists solely to celebrate the flexibility and incomprehensibility of language. The nerve of this guy.
James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the novel he spent 15 of the last 17 years of his life composing, is enshrined in history as, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “arguably one of the most complex works of 20th-century English-language fiction.” It makes pretensions to having a narrative, but if it is about anything, it’s about words, words, words, and their notorious malleability. Joyce gives nearly every sentence at least two meanings, exploiting meter and importing similar words from other languages and playing with time to such a degree that the last words of the book form a complete sentence with the first words of the book. It’s a 628-page fairground ride of a novel, and it regularly tops lists like “The 10 Most Difficult Books to Read” and features in stories like “This book club finally finished ‘Finnegans Wake.’ It only took them 28 years.” It’s a monument to inaccessibility. I haven’t read the whole thing. Have you?
So there is enormous praise to be extended to Mary Ellen Bute’s ambitiously foolhardy decision to actually try and visualize Joyce’s wandering scenarios, because it makes the effort of reading the book seem both achievable and desirable. Her film uses an adaptation created by Mary Manning in 1955 staged by the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but while all the language comes directly from Joyce’s text, she makes two key innovations that neither book nor stage could offer. The first is the use of tools of cinema; framing, closeups, and editing keep the language moving and prevent the focus from wandering away, while visuals can create a level of surrealism commensurate with the text. A film that looks like it will be stuck in the hall of the titular funeral party can transform unexpectedly into a burlesque show, while what has been a stagebound production through the halfway point suddenly steps out into nature.
Bute’s second contribution may be even more important: most of the film is subtitled with Joyce’s text, giving the viewer a unique opportunity to both hear and read the language and appreciate the multiple meanings and sneaky substitutions that Joyce has peppered 
throughout the book. (Here, “throughout” should be taken to mean “in every damn sentence.”) You know who would agree? Joyce’s countryman Samuel Beckett, who said of the original book, “You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” The film version honors this fact, dramatizing Joyce’s maddening doggerel and giving sound and shape to the words so that you cannot miss his fantastical leaps of rhyme and oronym.
It’s nice of Beckett to show up, because in reviewing a pair of films based on the works of this fellow son of the Emerald Isle, I twice made the observation that there was nothing weird about the films that wasn’t already weird in the original plays. One might expect the same to be true of these excerpts from Joyce’s novel, given that scenes have been adapted as faithfully as possible. However, the transition from prose to moving image puts the absurdism into a wholly new context. Film doesn’t just repeat the weirdness of the original; it highlights it. By the end, as HCE marches off into the sun to the strains of composer Elliot Kaplan’s oddly emotion-drenched score, I don’t have any more of an idea of what’s going on than I did at the start, but the urge to explore the puzzle further is invigorating.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review, in a small bit of wordplay, by “Finnegans Cake”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)