The band Xiu Xiu creates an experimental film collage of ants, pop art comics, and masked figures for their music video to “In Heaven,” the lead single from their upcoming (July 2026) album paying tribute to Eraserhead (the band had previously released an album inspired by the world of Twin Peaks).
POD 366, EP. 169: LOVING BOOSTERS, OBSCURE UNDERGROUND FILMS, AND RE-RELEASES
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Discussed in this episode:
Arco (2025): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. The UHD/Blu-ray release of the animated film about a rainbow-suited boy who travels from the distant future to the less-distant future includes numerous featurettes (but, despite what the box claims, a soundtrack in the original language is not a bonus feature.) Buy Arco.
The Bride! (2026): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. Warner Bros. won’t recoup their investment on Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s bonkers flop Frankenstein’s bride movie with this UHD/Blu-ray/DVD offering (careful: each sold separately), but its nice that they did release it, and with meaningful documentary extras. Buy The Bride!.
The Dark Backward (1991): Read the Canonically Weird entry! Since the DVD went out of print, even a bare-bones release of the corpse-licking dark comedy is a welcome development. Buy The Dark Backward.
The Demoniacs (1974): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. Is there any Jean Rollin left for Indicator to 4K up after this minor nautical horror? Buy The Demoniacs.
Fresh Kill (1994): A lesbian couple uncover a conspiracy involving toxic waste in a dystopian New York City. Never heard of this underground lesbian punk experiment before, but if the Criterion collection is going to bat for it, that means something. Buy Fresh Kill.
I Love Boosters (2026): Boots Riley‘s latest eat-the-rich manifesto finally arrives in theaters. IMDB users who hate boosters, but probably haven’t seen the movie, have been bombing it with anonymous 1-star reviews. I Love Boosters official site.
Matador Bolero (2026): The plot involves murder, cults, A.I., and an “elusive being living outside the realms of time and space,” and stars an experimental musician we’re unfamiliar with (Yves Tumor). So little information on this one, but the minimalist website (brought to us by something called “Surreal U.S.A.”) and the trailer pique our interest. Matador Bolero official site?
The Napa Boys (2025): A group called “The Napa Boys” go on a “wine-sloshed” comedy adventure in which they say the words “Napa Boys” a lot in this fourth installment of a long-running comedy series with no previous installments. In reviews, the words “inside joke” recur more frequently than other others, although one critic did use the acronym “WTF” and another calls it “bizarre.” Buy The Napa Boys.
Speed Racer (2008): Read Giles Edwards’ Apocrypha Candidate review. This offering of the campy, flashy popcorn feature is UHD only (no Blu-ray) and steelbooked. Also available, if you hate steel, in non-steelbook format at (currently) the same price. Buy Speed Racer [4K Steelbook].
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest scheduled on next week’s Pod 366, but the gang will be back to discuss the week’s weird movie news and new releases. In written content, Michael Diamades pays respects to Fernando Arrabal‘s Car Cemetery (1983), Shane Wilson relates The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), Enar Clarke profiles The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (2025), and Gregory J. Smalley predicts whether you will love I Love Boosters (see above). Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: HEADS OR TAILS? (2025)
Testa o croce?
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Heads or Tails? is available to purchase on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Alessio Rigo de Righi, Matteo Zoppis
FEATURING: Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Alessandro Borghi, John C. Reilly
PLOT: An Italian cowboy and the wife of a brutal army captain flee into the wilderness after an incident during a bronco-riding contest between Italians and Buffalo Bill’s traveling wild west show, and the captain’s father hires Buffalo Bill himself to track down the refugees.
COMMENTS: If you’re excited to see a Western with beloved character actor John C. Reilly portraying Buffalo Bill Cody—which is how Heads or Tails? pitches itself—prepare for some mild disappointment. Cody does feature in the story, which takes its impetus from a real-life incident where local Italian cowboys (butteri) trounced Bill’s wild west show in an impromptu rodeo. But soon after the results are in, Bill nearly disappears from the story, which instead follows blue-eyed buttero Santino and the intensely-freckled French Rosa as they flee into the wilderness, accused of a terrible crime. Eventually tracked by Bill and others, the pair have mildly diverting adventures that include meeting up with a band of anarchists who want to make Santino into a revolutionary hero.
More Buffalo Bill would have been great, because the two leads, while attractive (both have piercing blue eyes), lack the chemistry and passion needed to get us invested in their outlaw escapades. The plot moves slowly, with too many scenes involving nothing more than the pair hiking through a swamp or camping out, and contains few true surprises. Their lovemaking looks like they know the camera is watching. Even a jailbreak offers little thrill. About all that we know about Rosa is that wants to move to America to rebuild her life, and stoic Santino has little character at all. Bill, played by Reilly with a showman’s panache, is far too interesting a character to sit on the sidelines for most of the movie while we watch these dull lovebirds instead.
Stylistically, the film is an appropriate recreation of a 60s-70s Italian western, complete with melodramatic acting (Bill, in particular, seems like he’s always performing even when he’s not on stage) and some humorously obvious dubbing. The Tuscan locations—which include a cool seaside grotto—don’t recreate the American west, but do look appropriately primal on their own. The “surreal” twist hinted at in some reviews is misleading; it’s more of a brief magical-realist bit, attributable to the heroine’s traumatized psyche (although it does suggest an even more feverish take on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia—more of this, and we might really have had something here). Heads or Tails? also includes a few jabs at colonialism (the expressions on the Indians’ faces as the genocidal Bill brags about their noble culture are priceless) and nods to feminism (Rosa is the central figure and the toughest hombre in the film). But it’s not self-consciously revisionist so much as dedicated to the setting’s historical accuracy. Heads or Tails? comes up as a spaghetti western retread with modest art-house ambitions. But it never really decides which way it wants to go: full-throttle homage or sly postmodern parody. It probably should have settled on either heads or tails, and left out the question mark.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: KRAKATIT (1948)
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DIRECTED BY: Otakar Vávra
FEATURING: Karel Höger, Florence Marly, Florence Marly, Eduard Linkers, František Smolík, Jiří Plachý
PLOT: Prokop, a chemistry genius, invents a deadly compound which attracts the attention of shady consortiums hell-bent on world domination.
COMMENTS: Science aids life. We learn this at the start, as a doctor and his able nurse spare an unidentified man from a febrile, clenching death. This man, however, is a different kind of scientist than his saviors. He is Prokop, a genius in the field “destructive chemistry,” and tucked away in his burning mind is the secret to Krakatit, a deadly compound capable of ending the lives of millions. His fate is not only in the hands of the healers, but his own: as he writhes and dreams on the clinic cot, his life story and personal character are scorched in a crucible, tested by demons both psychological and supernatural.
Krakatit slots itself into an ill-defined position in a number of ways. Heavily influenced by German Expressionism, it was made on the heels of two nuclear explosions. It concerns the lives of calculating scientists and (differently) calculating politicos, but it also has romance, both simple and complicated. Krakatit is a deadly serious meditation on man’s capacity for annihilation of self and others—and yet it has one of the best wisecracking cads in the history of the silver screen. (Eduard Linkers’ Carson is cut from the same shady cloth as Claude Rains’ Renault.) The chemistry is ubiquitous; but upon the introduction of a minor character and then a major one, so too becomes religion—old and new. Keep an eye out for a carriage-driver and a suspiciously named aristocrat.
Director Otakar Vávra, along with the stellar performances and glorious noir-dream cinematography by Václav Hanuš, ably walks the many tightropes laid down in Karel Capek’s source novel. Krakatit maintains its moments of ambiguity long enough to pique the curiosity, but never teases the viewer with outright incomprehensibility. It is mostly a dream, but liberally interspersed with stretches of dreamier dreaming. I am reminded here of several odd elements that only make sense later: student Prokop in an infinite amphitheater amongst innumerable photorealistic cut-outs of his classmates, the looming mystery of the Krakatit canister—why doesn’t that explode? And just how did all these Wehrmacht hold-overs end up in post-war Czechoslavokia?
The films lands on an ill-defined plane, too. Vávra opts for a nebulous non-ending which still leaves the viewer optimistic that science must—nay, shall—be harnessed to aid all mankind to live better lives. Despite the the ever-looming dangers of annihilation.
Gregory J. Smalley adds:
I have no issues with Giles’ appraisal, other than his omission of the following section:
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The muddled memories of a guilt-ridden “destructive chemist” provide the perfect substrate for exploring nascent anxieties about the apocalyptic potential of 20th century weaponry, told through a dreamy mix of Expressionism, film noir, and hallucinatory interludes out of the surrealist playbook.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Krakatit [4k UHD + Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41VaLAhhHJL._SL500_.jpg)
Krakatit [4k UHD + Blu-ray]
- Czech director Otakar Vávra’s astonishing mix of Film Noir, Thriller and Atomic Bomb Sci-Fi
List Price :
Offer: 27.99 $
Go to AmazonAPOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TASHER DESH (2013)
AKA The Land of Cards
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DIRECTED BY: Quashiq “Q” Mukherjee
FEATURING:Joyraj Bhattacharya, Rii Sen, Soumyak Kante De Biswas, Anubrata Basu, 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.
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:
(This movie was nominated for review by debasish dey. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)