Arnold begins to believe his world of amorous monsters, ghosts, mermaids, down-on-their-luck duck actors, and ACME coffee is nothing but a set. Now a feature film. In Spanish, so turn on closed captions if you don’t speak the language.
CONTENT WARNING: Sexuality, adult topics, and hot reverse mermaids.
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Discussed in this episode:
Decorado (2025): Alberto Vázquez‘ 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’ Rev. Ivan Stang, 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 John C. Reilly as Buffalo Bill spaghetti western Heads or Tails? (2025). Onward and weirdward!
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Endless Cookie is available to purchase on-demand.
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.
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:
(This movie was nominated for review by Sean Ramsdell. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
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The second installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.
DIRECTED BY: Steven Shainberg
FEATURING: James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Davies
Plot: A tightly wound, obsessive, repressed lawyer meets a meek, neurotic typist who suffers from low self esteem and a compulsion to cut herself.
COMMENTS: Let it never be said that 366 Weird Movies turns its back on plain old love stories. We treasure lopsided romances such as Harold and Maude, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It goes to show, you can still have a weird movie even if it’s just a boy-meets-girl story. This time around we have more of a “boy beats girl” scenario, and that becomes our weird angle. The only reason not to recommend this movie for the Apocrypha is because everything weird about it is done even weirder in other movies. Secretary (2002) stands alone as a truly frank examination of the phenomenon of kink relationships, the one which even the self-identifying “leather community” points to as the movie that gets BDSM relationships closest to right. That, in itself, is an incredible rarity—but it should be less rare.
It’s not like we get into the floggers and spreader bars right away. It’s a slow-burn progress, starting with Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) being released from a mental institution. She attempts to re-adjust to normal life, hampered by a dysfunctional family including an overpowering mother and by her own neuroses that manifest in a compulsion to secretly cut and stab herself. Lee is mousy and anxious, seeming like she’d shatter at a harsh word, and usually far too intimidated to express herself. She applies for a job in the title profession, at the law office of one E. Edward Grey (James Spader, eight years before the Fifty Shades of Grey books came out). Grey is a demanding and controlling boss, so much so that he apparently needs a custom-made sign to advertise for help. Lee gets the job, since Grey assures her that it’s dull work and Lee responds that she sincerely likes dull work.
Soon their dynamic spins off-center from standard employer-employee. Grey is a stickler for detail who takes special delight in catching every typo in Lee’s work, amassing a collection of red markers for highlighting flaws and lining them up on his desk in OCD fashion. One day while rummaging around the office he discovers Lee’s secret box of self-harm toys and confronts her about it. When he paternally orders her never to engage in such behavior again, the two start to show some magnetism. She is more drawn to him with every new demand he makes and every scolding he gives her, while he is spellbound by her unquestioning obedience to his every whim. It’s obvious that neither of these people ever expected to encounter anyone quite like the other. Finally the tension breaks when Grey gambles on smacking Lee on the rear while she hunches over a desk proofreading, and Lee—instead of running off to file a sexual harassment lawsuit—is totally cool with it. Once the lid is off this boiling pot of kinky sexual tension, the two enter an awkward dance, escalating games of domination and submission, and alternately retreating in fright from their mutually acknowledged dark sides.
Some of their play is point-blank role-playing, such as when he dictates that she take her dinner in tiny portions, while more involved games have her prancing about the office in restrictive bondage gear with a spreader bar holding her arms out like a cross, still handling her secretarial work. Even sillier scenes flash by in montage, most notably Lee on a desk on her hands and knees saddled like a pony. Eventually Grey suffers a classic case of “top drop,” the point where every out-of-the-closet sadist asks themselves for the first time “what kinda sick monster enjoys this?” Even though he tries to break things off, Lee is single-minded. She is deaf to the pleas of her vanilla boyfriend on the sidelines, a sweetheart of a guy who nevertheless just can’t handle Lee with the firm hand she seeks. Will our star-crossed lovers ever be able to relax and enjoy their attraction without judging it?
The amazing thing about Secretary is the poise and balance it maintains while deconstructing a taboo relationship between two little-understood personalities. This could easily have been gross-out schlock, seedy porn, or silly camp, but the characters themselves are treated with dignity, and the relationship is presented as a positive thing for them. The humor is gentle and cherishes the human, flaws and all. As two ostracized, repressed weirdos both attracted and repelled by this energy between them, Gyllenhaal and Spader are downright cute and fun to watch. Finally, we viewers have to accept that, while this relationship wouldn’t work for most of us, it works for these two, and more power to them. As Woody Allen observed in Annie Hall, “we need the eggs.” Secretary may not be the weirdest depiction of the leather lover in the wild, but it is likely to be the most respectful and heart-warming one for many decades yet.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
Secretary
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Go to AmazonLet me share some statistics with you:
The success of Fifty Shades, printed upon trees tragically killed for the purpose, exposed something very odd in our culture. Apparently a lot more people than we’d imagined were starving for kink smut.
You don’t hear about kink relationships every day. You do hear about LGBTQ+ relationships. A 2025 Gallop poll says 9.3% of Americans identify as LGBTQ+. That’s the whole rainbow flag there, trans and non-binary and genderqueer and all.
It’s amazing how much time we spend fighting a worthless culture war about less than a tenth of the population. I look forward to the day of pansexual acceptance. Not because I’m a bleeding-heart liberal; I just want the dumb war over. People like different things, let’s get over it.
With that said: Go to the back of the gender spectrum closet and knock at the hidden door there, and you’ll find the BDSM closet. Gays and lesbians fight to have their lifestyle normalized, but the scary, kinky people have still years to go before they can glimpse sunlight—even though the overwhelming majority of the kinksters are straight. It’s equally amazing how at least a third of the population partakes of the exotic thrills of sadomasochism, and yet it’s an even bigger taboo to talk about.
I love taboos. They’re like sore pressure points you can lean on just a little and make everybody squirm. Sure, we’ve made some progress in pansexual acceptance, but the fact that we can’t handle a simple fetish without ridiculing it (or eroticizing it) shows we have a way to go, even as moral crusaders blow their big bazoos about men holding hands in public, before returning to their Fifty Shades copy dog-eared to the part where Christian pees on Anastasia.
Isn’t that weird in and of itself? It got me wondering, since the BDSM people mobilize for kink-lifestyle acceptance on Fetlife and have their own pride flag and everything, where is the normalized depiction of a dominant/submissive relationship in media? My quest for such a film is documented in my Medium essay “BDSM in Mainstream Cinema | Will Kink Ever Get Any Respect?”
There, Secretary (2002) wins my award for “most down-to-earth depiction of power exchange relationships.” A runner-up happens to be a weirdie reviewed here as well, The Duke of Burgundy. Yes, as bizarre as that film is, it’s still a pretty even-handed depiction of a domestic role-playing household, and a lesbian one at that—two alternative lifestyles for the price of one!
So now I might as well finish my quest and review the other half of the BDSM-genre films, the highly abnormal depictions. The weirdest possible, of course. I’ll document my thoughts here, and we’ll re-huddle at the end to inventory our new insights into the freakiest, most broken, most perverted, most inhibited species on Earth: people.
Join me on my safari into the weird Leather Underground!
Movies reviewed in the series: