There is less bear footage here than you might expect.
CONTENT WARNING: Violence.
POD 366, EP. 172: MATADOR BOLERO’S JONATHAN ROSADO (AND A LITTLE SMOKING)
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Discussed in this episode:
Matador Bolero (2026): An underground movie done in the style of a 1960s Super-8 experimental film, about the murder of an actress and possible links to a cult worshiping a super-intelligent computer. Now in theaters.
The Cell (2000): Read Giles Edwards’ review. The 4K UHD (+ Blu-ray) standard edition release from Arrow (so lots of extras) of the psychological thriller where Jennifer Lopez enters the mind of a serial killer. Buy The Cell.
Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (1979): Read Shane Wilson’s review. Deaf Crocodile releases the standard Blu-ray + UHD for the Soviet sci-fi mystery, previously available only in a limited edition. Buy Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel.
The Holy Mountain rescore: Alternate scores of existing movies are a cool thing, and have moved on from silents to alternate versions of existing talkie scores. For The Holy Mountain, the Cue Northwest Music Residency held a contest to rescore the film, which was won by the avant-rock group Zen Mother. The band will play the score live at a screening at Northwest Film Forum in Seattle sometime in 2027, and hopefully their version will also be available elsewhere. Read the announcement at The Stranger.
The Trouble with Terkel (2010): A bullied 6th grader turns to booze to deal with the guilt caused by his being responsible for the suicide of a classmate. Pixar passed on remaking this transgressive Danish animated comedy. Buy The Trouble with Terkel.
Wetiko (2026): Billed as a “psychedelic jungle thriller,” this feature addresses the phenomenon of “shamanic tourism.” Now on VOD after a brief run in theaters. Wetiko on VOD.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest on next week’s Pod 366. Gregory J. Smalley will be on vacation, but Giles Edwards and Pete Trbovich will talk about two canonically weird classics (Audition and Perfect Blue, if you want to do your homework), among other topics. In written content, Enar Clarke fills out our Jean Rollin coverage with The Living Dead Girl (1982), Michael Diamades takes on the AI-generated feature film Brainstare (2025), and Shane Wilson surveys the entire run of the Muppet-style existential horror show for kids “Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared”. Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: IRON LUNG (2026)
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DIRECTED BY: Mark Fischbach
FEATURING: Mark Fischbach
PLOT: In the far future, when humanity is dying off, a convict is sent to the bottom of an ocean of blood on a distant moon in search of… something or other.
COMMENTS: If you’ve heard the rags-to-riches DIY success story of the fan video game adaptation Iron Lung, which played in 4,160 theaters worldwide in early 2026 based purely on a grassroots campaign where fans of YouTuber-turned-feature-film-director markiplier (Mark Fischback) begged cinemas to show it on the big screen, and are wondering whether the non-initiate will enjoy this, my answer is a firm “no.” While the film is a phenomenal success story on its own terms, it was made for a narrow niche audience, and unless you’ve played the video game or count yourself among markiplier’s 38 million YouTube channel subscribers, you ain’t it.
At least 90% of Iron Lung takes place inside a cramped submarine the size of a living room, crowded with metal apparatus and sensors. Convict pilot Simon (Fischback) is alone for almost the entire film, with occasional conversations over intercoms with bad connections to break his solitude. The craft is rickety, has no portals to see the outside world (which would just be a wall of opaque red anyway), has frequent blood leaks, and lunches a lot. You get to know every sharp corner and blinking light in the sub in the film’s 2-hour runtime; you almost feel like you could pilot this tub yourself. The detailed set conveys the feeling of a metal prison, and the sound design is superlative: drips, scrapes, static, echoes, thumps, all sorts of dreadful alarming noises to remind you that you are in a tin can surrounded by certain death. Based on the editing in the climax, I think that Fischback could direct a thrilling action scene—assuming you knew who, what, and where the antagonist was and what the hell was going on.
But as impressive as the film’s technicals may be, the script is simultaneously boring and confusing. I mentioned that the film was 2 hours long, and it makes sure you feel every minute. Reports suggest the game itself can be finished in under and hour—an hour and a half if you dwaddle—so there is a lot of padding added here to convey the combination of tedium and dread the protagonist would experience. Watching the movie, you get the sense that the game is nothing but a long test of your ability to press buttons, flip switches, and turn knobs, because this mostly what Fischback does on screen. There is a part where he accidentally irradiates some of his handlers, which has no payoff. There is a tormented personal backstory delivered in monologue, meant to humanize the an anonymous explorer. But mainly, it’s Fischback flipping switches, turning knobs, and bemoaning his fate.
The mystery of this abandoned moon is where the film’s claim to weirdness comes from. The premise itself is absurd: supposedly all the stars and planets have suddenly disappeared except for a single moon with an ocean of blood. Although the technology here comes from hard science fiction, the scenario is entirely mystical. The ocean floor contains mysterious artifacts (which I won’t spoil) and something that might be an entity—or, it could all be an oxygen-deprivation hallucination. There is some body horror, some monstrous visions, a blood-soaked cosmic climax, and no clear resolution. The lack of explanations would not be a problem if we cared about the protagonist in more than a theoretical sense, but it’s hard to become engaged with the convict’s plight. We root for humanity to survive more out of a sense of general obligation to the species than because the movie has caused us to care about this particular band of plucky survivors. So, in short: play the game first. If you want more, see the movie. Don’t reverse the process.
Iron Lung is currently available for rental or purchase solely on YouTube.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Anonymous,” who suggested it “[h]as enough questions about what f***ed up stuff we’re seeing is real or not, and ends with one of the goriest climaxes in all of film with a battle with a sentient ocean of radioactive human blood..” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
69*. FLAMING EARS (1992)
Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche
“In the year 2700, the year of the toads, ‘Asche’ was a burnt-out city.
Too big for its souls who banded together in dark basements.
It was an unrestrained wild animal,
ready to pee in Death’s face at any time.
And its residents were equal to it in every way.
Highly unlikely for a pure heart to survive.”–Flaming Ears introductory narration
DIRECTED BY: Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek
FEATURING: Susanna Heilmayr, Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl
PLOT: The lives of a comic book artist, a serial arsonist, and an extraterrestrial converge when Volley burns down the comix press. The artist, Spy, goes in search of vengeance, only to be beaten up by the bouncers at the club where Volley performs; Nun, Volley’s alien girlfriend, then finds Spy lying unconscious in the gutter and falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Volley develops the hots for her chauffeur, and a young girl graffitis the city with the image of a flower vase.
BACKGROUND:
- Scheirl and Pürrer became lovers in the 1980s and started making “lesbian punk home movies” in Pürrer’s Vienna apartment with a Super 8 camera and homemade props. They would later form the band Sta-Prestto make their own film soundtracks.
- The Catholic symbolism in the film reflects the predominant conservatism of Viennese society at the time, in contrast to its very small punk scene of musicians and artists.
- The soundtrack features the music of local punk bands, sometimes even capturing live performances. None of the music was formally licensed.
- When Scheirl and Pürrer’s films toured women’s and feminist film festivals in the 1990s, the S&M content often proved controversial and sometimes led to walkouts.
- The then-contemporary popularity of Fluxus theater led some viewers to assume Flaming Ears‘ outrageous style was a deliberate mockery of their performance art. This was not the intention of the filmmakers, who were simply expressing their punk aesthetic.
- A. Hans Shceirl (Nun), also credited as Angela Hans Scheirl, is a transgender man who transitioned with testosterone in 1996. He later directed the infamous Dandy Dust (1998) and became a painter and professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s a lot of eye-catching and provocative imagery throughout Flaming Ears, with a plethora of unusual proclivities on display. But one of its most mysterious moments occurs when the otherwise unknown Blood suddenly shows up out of the blue to grant Spy’s rotting corpse the kiss of life. It’s confusing, oddly touching yet revolting, and emblematic of Flaming Ears‘ fairy tale combination of enchantment and grotesquerie. It’s also a major pivot point in the splintered narrative.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Erotic arson; the healing power of alien saliva
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: What isn’t weird about this movie? The two items listed above are only the very weirdest elements. There’s also furniture humping (with lighter fluid used as lube), an immortal alien whose severed limbs come back to life, and an oddly suggestive conversation about gardening cacti. With a rough and ready DIY aesthetic, Flaming Ears is art-house done No Wave-style. At any moment the live action can be interrupted by a stop-motion animated sequence, a prop, or a painting. In one memorable scene a cardboard cutout, with a cartoonish line-drawn face, replaces one of the actors. The dialogue is obscurely poetic and the futuristic setting thinly sketched, leaving the viewer on their own to figure out what exactly is going on, like an alien crash-landed on an unknown planet.
Flaming Ears re-release trailer
COMMENTS: Usually, films that take place in a future dystopia explain the reasons behind societal collapse, but Flaming Ears ignores Continue reading 69*. FLAMING EARS (1992)
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ALLEGRO (2005)
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DIRECTED BY: Christoffer Boe
FEATURING: Ulrich Thomsen, Helena Christensen, Henning Moritzen
PLOT: An acclaimed pianist returns to Copenhagen in response to the appearance of an impassable no-man’s land that was created when the musician broke up with his girlfriend a decade prior.
COMMENTS: Allegro is a musical term, an instruction to performers to maintain a fast and bright tempo in the range of 120-156 beats per minute. The first movement of Vivaldi’s “Spring” is allegro, as is “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” by Mozart. (Also at allegro tempo: this.) It establishes a bright, bouncy feel, and while allegro tunes don’t have to be happy, there’s something wickedly perverse about lending the term to the title of this slow, methodical look at a musical artist who has removed all flair and personality from his performances, and indeed from himself. Surely “Adagio” was sitting right there.
Writer/director Boe hints at the outset that we’re about to be treated to a modern fairy tale. Through recurring sketchbook-style animation, we learn about the early life of our hero, an aspiring concert pianist we will only know by his last name, Zetterstrøm, who grows up to become a technically perfect but emotionally flat musician. This seems like it might change when he has a charming meet-cute with a lovely woman named Andrea. They progress to a relationship, despite his clear reservations, and his wariness seems justified when they break up a while later because of his commitment to his career. Leaving Andrea behind, he becomes a performer whose interpretations hit all their marks perfectly but are devoid of emotional engagement. He is so completely devoted to the purity of his work and so determined to extricate any trace of personality that he does Glenn Gould one better by refusing to be seen as he performs. As one music expert tells us, “He is an excellent pianist, technically… but where is his passion?”
Turns out his passion is in Denmark. I mean, that’s literally where he has deposited all of the distracting impulses that he has purged from his system because they harsh his chill. What Zetterstrøm has done, unbeknownst to him, is compartmentalize all his memories and feelings of the intense relationship into a section of Copenhagen that becomes a closed-off, inaccessible disaster area called “The Zone.” (Locals bounce things off the invisible force field that surrounds The Zone for their amusement.) In short, Allegro is a clever piece of magical realism, making manifest the consequences of locking one’s emotions away.
The idea is compelling when described, but less so in execution. The premise is fantastical, but Boe is so committed to the reality of the situation that he devotes much time to the uninteresting business of getting Zetterstrøm to Copenhagen, getting him into The Zone, and finally getting him to understand the implications of his careless soul-ectomy. Yes, Zetterstrøm has intentionally extracted his heartbroken soul, but as played by Thomsen, he’s a pretty emotionally vacant fellow already. It ends up feeling like the function is following the form, and that rather than exploring this broken psyche by viewing it through the prism of an “Outer Limits”-style no-man’s land, Allegro seems to have come up with the strange storytelling twist and retrofitted a story to occupy it.
It is frustrating how much of Allegro is told and not shown. Zetterstrøm is spoon-fed every clue to unlock his stolen past by Moritzen’s ill-defined narrator/journalist/ringmaster, like the minder overseeing an escape room. Zetterstrøm’s performing ability is delivered to us second-hand. His relationship with Andrea is conveyed quickly through a crafty piece of editing that takes the couple’s relationship from its earliest moments to its sad end, but the technique denies us the opportunity to see the relationship for ourselves. Most tellingly, the film’s final revelation resolving the ramifications of his experience in The Zone, tying together the pianist’s emotional turmoil and his professional acumen, is delivered in voiceover.
Allegro goes hard on its unusual premise, and there are some intriguing camera and set design choices that reflect the scattered and troubled nature of Zetterstrøm’s memories. It’s also to the film’s credit that we invest in his relationship with Andrea (the film debut for former supermodel Christensen) despite how little we see of it. Ultimately, however, an appropriately weird idea does not alone make a weird film, and Allegro never quite makes good on what it promises. Contrary to its title, Allegro doesn’t go fast, and it doesn’t get where it wants to go.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Gustaf Ottosson. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)