Before becoming an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Rodney Ascher collaborated on this Jack Chick tract brought to life as an After Effects collage in which a young man discovers he has eternally goofed by not accepting Jesus Christ.
POD 366, EP. 170: SO MANY MOVIES WE STILL CAN’T COVER CANNES
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Discussed in this episode:
7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964): Read Theodore Davis’ List Candidate review. George Pal’s dated mythological fantasy arrives on Blu-ray from Warner Archive for the first time. Buy 7 Faces of Dr. Lao.
Backrooms (2026): A24 backed Kane Parsons‘ feature debut about mysterious logic-defying trans-dimensional rooms discovered in a retail establishment, and got Chiwetal Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve to sign on. It’s based on a webseries, whose inaugural episode won the Weirdcademy Award for Weirdest short in 2022. Finally in theaters! Backrooms official site.
Dracula (2025): Read Michael Diamades’ review. Radu Jude‘s transgressive and unapologetically AI-enhanced Dracula anthology arrives on Blu-ray with a few extras (Jude interviews and an essay booklet). Buy Dracula.
Faust (1994): Read Alex Kittle’s review. Jan Svankmajer‘s stop-motion + live action + puppetry adaptation of Faust has been out of print (along with most of his startling features); let’s hope that this Blu-ray from Kimstim is the first salvo in re-releasing the Czech’s seminal surrealist classics. Buy Faust.
Holy Trinity (2019): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s Apocrypha Candidate review. Holy Trinity. A paint-huffing dominatrix finds she can see the dead; this queer outsider film finally arrives on Blu-ray with a director’s commentary track, a short film, and a “making of” documentary that’s almost twice as long as the feature. Buy Holy Trinity.
House of Dreams (1963): An author has recurring nightmares about a house in this low-budget Indiana indie. Bleeding Skull rediscovered it and presents it alone, with director’s commentary, and in a “VHS mix” along with spiritual soulmates Carnival of Souls, Meshes of the Afternoon, and vintage commercials. Buy House of Dreams.
Lucid (2025): Listen to Giles Edwards’ interview with the Lucid crew. An art student abuses a lucid dreaming drug and becomes trapped in a dreamworld. Now playing in limited release. Lucid official site.
She Loved Blossoms More (2024): Read Enar Clarke’s Apocrypha Candidate review. One of the strangest underseen movies of the past two years, the scenario involves three brothers who take a lot of drugs and attempt to bring back their deceased mom by accessing another dimension through a machine they’ve built in a cabinet. Now on Blu-ray with director’s commentary and other features. Buy She Loved Blossoms More.
Tekkonkinkreet (2006): Read the Canonically Weird entry! The visually inventive, Canonically Weird anime about a teen assassin and his prophetic child charge fighting the yakuza in pan-Asian “Treasure Town” gets a 4K restoration and a theatrical re-release on May 31 and June 1 only. Mark your calendars. Tekkonkinkreet re-release official site (for venues).
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest scheduled on next week’s Pod 366, but the gang will be back with all the weird movie news that’s fit to pod. It’s a packed week in written content: Pete Trbovich will cover something (either a Perverted Pick or a semi-perverted pic), Michael Diamades breezes through the Japanese children’s Ovid adaptation Winds of Change, Shane Wilson breaks down the triple-B-movie Blood, Bullets, Buffoons (1996), Giles Edwards dances with the underground’s Matador Bolero (2026), and Gregory J. Smalley plans to visit the mysterious Backrooms (see above). Onward and weirdward!
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: I LOVE BOOSTERS (2026)
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DIRECTED BY: Boots Riley
FEATURING: Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige, Naomi Ackie, Demi Moore, Lakeith Stanfield, Poppy Liu, Will Poulter, Eiza González
PLOT: A gang of shoplifters develop a vendetta against an arrogant billionaire fashion designer and determine to ruin her.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: For his sophomore feature, Boots Riley takes everything that worked in Sorry to Bother You—absurdist comedy that builds until it approaches surrealism, Oakland grit, an insane third act sci-fi twist, and casually shoehorned-in communist propaganda—and piles it on even thicker. It’s arguable that he piles it so high that the story totters by the climax, but then again, that’s not exactly a disqualifier for a weird movie.
COMMENTS: Fashion—which, as Oscar Wilde quipped, is a form of ugliness so intolerable that it must be altered every six months—is an easy subject for satire. Boots Riley uses haute couture as an entry point to criticize the wider world of capitalism, though he doesn’t skimp on the cheap jokes afforded by crazy attention-getting getups and pretentious gits who value high thread counts more than high IQs. The three (later four) members of the shoplifting consortium known as “the Velvet Gang” are just scraping by financially; Corvette squats in an abandoned chicken shack, and frequently sees herself chased by a giant ball formed from bills and eviction notices. Their crimes aren’t excused so much as minimized compared to the legally-enabled theft practiced by the fashion industry. You root for them like you would for any outsiders fighting against the Man (or, in this case, the Woman).
Everyone in the expansive cast pulls their weight, with Demi Moore’s megalomaniacal fashionista and Will Poulter’s aggressively shallow middle-manager emerging as standouts. But best of all is Lakeith Stanfield, a dreamboat male model who isn’t even given a name in the movie. He’s a left-field oddball in a cast that includes skinwalkers, moguls who work in slanted skyscrapers, and pyramid-scheme cult leaders, and he’s so sexy that whenever the camera tries to focus on him it visibly starts to swoon.
Boots has a message, but he wraps it in laughter and awe. When Eiza González gives a lecture on dialectical materialism in the middle of the movie, it’s integrated into the film’s comic fabric so that it doesn’t seems out-of-place or preachy. You don’t have to buy into the ideology to enjoy the unfolding madness, but Boots wouldn’t be Boots if he didn’t take time out to testify. And just give costume designer Shirley Kurata her Oscar right now; from Poulter’s color-matched hair and glasses to the swollen with booty shoplifting sweats to outrageous outfits that André 3000 would pass on for being “too much,” she matches Boots’ mania for satire and spectacle. It’s entirely fair to argue that the plot completely loses its bearings by the time the climax at Christie Smith’s eyeball-themed runway gala arrives—some of the details of the capacities of the technology at the center of the plot are so rushed through so that you’re not sure what it’s capable of, and it even gets hard to figure out where the characters are in relation to each other during a chase scene—but that’s a small price to pay to enjoy this explosion of creative spleen. I Love Boosters goes over the top early on, then just keeps soaring higher.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Josh Johnson, Grayson Tyler Johnson
FEATURING: Hope Stansbury, Gerald Jacuzzo, John Borske, Jimmy McDonough, Alex DiSanto, Stephen Thrower
PLOT: The Degenerate recounts the life and film career of “gutter auteur” Andy Milligan through the reminiscences of his collaborators and friends, and insights from film historians.
COMMENTS: The Degenerate aims to answer the question: how did a man with a promising career as a television actor in the 1950s, who then played a pivotal role in New York’s Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, end up directing low budget exploitation and horror films for the rest of his life? The short answer seems to be a lack of business acumen and a difficult personality, but the long answer provides a genuinely fascinating and entertaining dive into Andy Milligan‘s uniquely nihilistic world.
Milligan has been dubbed “the Fassbinder of 42nd Street.” This documentary explores just how he earned that dubious distinction. Born in 1929, Milligan’s life spanned all the major innovations in the American media landscape of the 20th century. He acted in live television in the early ’50s when the medium was brand new, appearing in Kraft Theater and Armstrong Circle Theater productions that also featured Leslie Nielsen and James Dean. He was an instrumental part of the theater community centered around the off-Broadway institutions Caffe Cino and La Mama, writing, directing, and acting in plays, as well as designing stage sets, lighting, and costuming. He would make at least twenty-nine low-budget feature-length films until his death in 1991.
His creative life changed in the mid-1960s, when he bought a portable Auricon motion picture camera, a model mostly used by news reporters, which records poor quality sound. But Milligan was determined to try his hand at filmmaking, even with second rate equipment. His second film, Vapors, directed in 1965 and originally written as a stage play by friend and fellow Caffe Cino member Hope Stansbury, remains a groundbreaking work of queer cinema.
Though Vapors portrays the gay bathhouse culture of New York in a sympathetic light, given the subject matter (and a very brief shot of full-frontal male nudity) it also became Milligan’s first exploitation film, playing in the burgeoning grindhouses of NYC and LA. Since most of these theaters were open all night, they were desperate for films to fill the hours and would screen anything considered even remotely racy. This debut was both Milligan’s triumph and tragedy. He would go on to make grindhouse fare for the next twenty years.
The Degenerate provides a mostly positive view of Milligan’s determination, his creativity, and his sheer chutzpah, while never shying away from the difficulties he faced—many arising from his own surly personality. He developed a method of cranking out elaborate films quickly and on the cheap. With an average budget of ten thousand Continue reading CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025)
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018)
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DIRECTED BY: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
FEATURING: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Harry Melling, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Tyne Daly, Brendan Gleeson, Saul Rubinek
PLOT: Six tales of the Old West, including a singing cowboy, an unlucky bank robber, an impresario and his hobbled talent, a tenacious gold prospector, a prospective bride, and a stagecoach full of tired travelers.
COMMENTS: The Coen Brothers have made a remarkable cinematic career out of a body of work that careens from grim realism to wild stylization, often making unexpected stops along that spectrum. Sometimes, their push in one direction has alienated fans of the other; if you like the harsh satire of Fargo, you probably won’t enjoy the heightened mannerisms of The Hudsucker Proxy, and the metaphysical mysteries of A Serious Man might feel impenetrable to lovers of the stoner wisdom of The Big Lebowski. When they turned their attention to Westerns, it seemed like the demands of the genre pushed them toward a more sober, realistic approach, as typified by the neo-noir charnel house of No Country for Old Men and the gritty pastoral (not to mention corrective) remake of True Grit. For the final film (to date) of their storied collaboration, Joel and Ethan returned to the Old West, but found a way to hit nearly every possible take on the genre along the way.
At first glance, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs appears to have all the elements to please fans of traditional Westerns: a showdown in an empty street, a wagon train weaving across the plains, a lone man doing battle with an entire tribe of Indian savages, panning for gold, stagecoaches, poker games, and a hangman’s noose. Far from playing to the crowd, however, these six vignettes are haunted by death and regret. There’s at least one fatality in each story, and the survivors come to a reckoning with the actions that have kept them alive. To the extent that any of these needed to be Westerns in the first place, it’s to highlight the harshness and swift cruelty of this place and time. There is a moral code, it’s unforgiving, and it is strictly enforced.
The opening chapter, which gives the film its name, is by far the most stylized of the set. Nelson does not merely play a cowboy but an archetype, wearing a suit of brilliant white, strumming a guitar and speaking directly to us of his philosophy. It’s cloyingly familiar, until he wields his pistol and reveals himself to be a whirlwind of brutality. What ensues is essentially one joke, but it’s a good one told very well: the fella in the white hat is extremely violent, morally repugnant, and dies quickly and without a trace of heroism. It’s a nose thumbed at Gene Autry and Tom Mix and every Hollywood fantasy of the West. In that regard, it perfectly sets the table for what is to come.
The next two stories demonstrate a dark humor that suggests sometimes you can’t win for losing. James Franco’s thief immediately finds himself in over his head in what should be a simple bank Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018)