Interviews, Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366, EP. 191: ANDREW RAKICH & VERONIKA PAYTON, THE VAMPIRES OF NEW ORLEANS

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Discussed in this episode:

The Vampires of New Orleans: Atun-Shei Films’ documentary/narrative hybrid delivers a story of vampires in modern New Orleans wrapped around interviews exploring the city’s horrific folklore.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987): Read Giles Edwards’ festival capsule. A tax collector encounters ghosts (and a rapping swordsman) in ancient China in this wild Hong Kong New Wave classic. Buy A Chinese Ghost Story.

“The Complete Kubrick”: Everything directed—including Canonically Weird entries 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange—in one glorious 4K UHD/Blu-ray box set from the . It goes without saying this ain’t cheap, but well worth it if you can swing it. Buy “The Complete Kubrick.”

“Fantastique: The Dreams and Nightmares of French Cinema”: A box set of obscure fantastique French films spanning the 1930s to the 90s: Dans la nuit, La nuit fantastique, Le Diable souffle, The Golem, The Woman with Red Boots, and Three Lives and Only One Death. While the movies themselves may be unknown, familiar names like , , , , and ‘s son Jean Luis pop up throughout. (This is a pre-order for a November 10 release). Buy “Fantastique: The Dreams and Nightmares of French Cinema.”

I Want Your Sex (2026): A sociopathic artist seduces her naive young assistant into an dangerously inappropriate sexual relationship. This unconventional (but not quite weird) B&D rom-com from appears on 4K UHD + Blu-ray with no extras. Buy I Want Your Sex.

Visitor Q (2001): Read the Canonically Weird review! Surprisingly (or maybe not, considering its straight-to-DVD origins) Takashi Miike‘s transgressive assault on the traditional family has never appeared on Blu-ray until now; Radiance to the rescue! Buy Visitor Q.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

No guest is scheduled on next week’s Halloween edition of Pod 366, but Greg, Giles and Pete will be there to discuss the week’s weird news and new releases. In written content, Michael Diamades gets weird for Halloween with the tale of Pere Portabella’s alternate cut of ‘s Count Dracula, Cuadecuc Vampire (1971); Enar Clarke investigates the new documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office; Shane Wilson finishes up his Halloween-themed reader-suggestion‘s by attending Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973), and Gregory J. Smalley looks at Ben Rivers’ experimental all-kid art film Mare’s Nest. Onward and weirdward!

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KUNG FU FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1982)

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DIRECTED BY: Chiu Lee

FEATURING: Billy Chong, Lo Lieh, Chin-Lai Sung

PLOT: When martial artist Chung Sing learns that his father was murdered by the sinister Kam Tai Fu, the young man seeks revenge, but he’ll need a book of magic and the help of ghost warriors to defeat his enemy.

Still from Kung Fu from Beyond the Grave (1982)

COMMENTS: Part of the glory of late 70s/early 80s low-budget martial arts cinema is its joyful lack of seriousness. Sure, there may be people fighting each other in a brutal death match, but the whole thing just feels so darn lighthearted. We’re here to enjoy ourselves, not to worry about life and death. So why should we expect anything less when the subject turns to horror? The narrator of Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave informs us that, once a year, the dead return to roam the Earth. And how does this manifest itself? A bunch of silly whooping and fruit invisibly pilfered from dinner tables. Put away your heart pills; this is not serious stuff.        

The absence of gravity is mostly an advantage for a film like Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave, which only wants to have some fun, like a haunted house that also has a judo match set up on the front lawn. When Chung’s father’s ghost (who sounds in the English dub almost exactly like Krusty the Clown) shows up to demand that his son avenge him, you might pick up some Hamlet vibes, but the allusion is undercut slightly when Chung is so surprised that he kicks his ghostly father’s apparition in the face. Screenwriter Fung Lu seems allergic to anything that would approach genuine horror. Warriors returning from the dead bicker about whether to accept their summons, and then float through fight scenes like shirts on the carousel at a dry cleaner. Bodies that rise from their graves and are more annoyed than vengeful. If it weren’t for Lo’s resourceful evil sorcerer, you might start to wonder if anyone in this film knew they were in a movie about the supernatural.

This unsteady mix of martial arts tropes and disdain for scares leads to some of director Lee’s most off-balance impulses. The evil Kam Tai Fu is desperate to achieve invincibility, but his Achilles heel turns out to be his breasts, which resist the shield treatment. The formula for said impenetrability is some obscure dark magic, specifically requiring a pair of hearts stolen from victims at the moment of orgasm, a requirement of such specificity that it feels reverse-engineered to justify the associated sex scene. In the most unexpected and delightfully strange moment, the beleaguered sorcerer escapes Chung and his battalion of ghosts by throwing a wad of cash into their air and yelling, “Count Dracula! Come to my aid!” Sure enough, a pasty European with fangs suddenly appears and flits about, flummoxing his opponents but also not really coming to anyone’s aid. It’s a genuinely bonkers moment, and knowing they had this one up their sleeve, the filmmakers could have used more of them.

Kung Fu From Beyond the Grave is serviceable martial arts action, slightly ridiculous horror, and surface-level weirdness. It lacks the will to be no-holds-barred nutty, but it does make for a nice twist on familiar genre fare. If nothing else, this will always be remembered as the film that taught us how to summon Dracula to our aid. Use that knowledge wisely.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The weirdness never lets up in this one, what with the ghosts, zombies, vampires (Dracula himself!) and black magicians all engaging in martial arts mayhem, which consists of (as usual) a frenetic combination of gymnastics, dance choreography and sound-enhanced gesturing.” – Dave Sindelar, Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings

(This movie was nominated for review by daustin. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

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Kung Fu from Beyond the Grave is streaming on Prime Video.

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

CAPSULE: AAAAAAAAH! (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Steve Oram

FEATURING: Steve Oram, Tom Meeten, Julian Rhind-Tutt

PLOT: In an alternative society where people behave like primates, an exiled alpha male, along with his beta companion, attempts to return home and reestablish his dominance.

Still from Aaaaaaaah (2015)

COMMENTS: Is the entirety of human civilization nothing but a facade, camouflage for our authentically animalistic behavior? That’s what Steve Oram’s  low-budget DIY feature debut seems to suggest. Aaaaaaah strips humans of their cultural wrappings.

Our story starts in an archaic and archetypal manner, recalling Odysseus ‘s return to Ithaca. An alpha male, exiled in a forest along with his companion/follower, attempts to find his way back home and regain his former position as the dominant male of the pack. This is a narrative of power plays in their most basic and primal form. Dialogue is absent and behavior is totally unfiltered. Wild instincts govern everyone’s actions. You can expect crude violence, with B-movie special effects, and a few disgusting segments immersed in bodily fluids and secretions. It stays focused on the main plot, for the most part, though introducing some twists later on and employing a few flashbacks in the process. Once it strays from our protagonists, following the younger of the pack’s females in a short escapade to showcase similarly barbaric social dynamics in other aspects of this society.

Oram gives special emphasis to the types of media these monkey-people consume. The media landscape portrayed in Idiocracy is sophisticated in comparison. The film mirrors our own world in a distorted way, revealing how entertainment services our lizard brains: in other words, the animals within us.

The soundtrack is comprised of accordingly simple melodic tunes, and a few more nostalgic, sensual or playful ones, creating a dissonance with the depraved segments usually accompanying them.

All in all, despite its extravagance and over-the-top moments, this movie doesn’t revel in shock value, but honestly strives to underline the way archaic instincts hide behind even the most civilized social dynamics.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Steve Oram’s deeply British feature debut is the kind of mesmerizing cult oddity whose fan base will be limited but passionate… [it] has a very specific audience in mind: those with an appetite for somewhat abstract and otherworldly art-house satire combined with midnight movie scatological humor and gore. In other words, if your DVD collection makes room for the work of both Luis Buñuel and Troma Entertainment, you’ll want to track it down”–Catherine Bray, Variety

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Aaaaaaaah!

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    366 Underground

    366 UNDERGROUND: THE VAMPIRES OF NEW ORLEANS (2026)

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    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Courtnee Carter, , Andrew Rakich, , Monica R. Harris, Mekhai Lee, , Carl Sailor, ,

    PLOT: When Brigitte Jackson’s sister is found dead under mysterious circumstances on the streets of New Orleans, she begins an investigation which leads her to a trinity of vampires; interspersed with this story is documentary footage exploring the city’s vampire heritage.

    COMMENTS: “Y’all believe in vampires?”

    It begins with the clap of a slate and an interview with “Sanguinarian Vampire” couple “Louis De Pointe Du Lac” and “Lestat De Lioncourt,” who found each other and moved to New Orleans’ French Quarter, in their words, “to live authentically regardless of society.” Then comes a series of interviews with various experts on “lifestyle vampires,” people self-identifying as vampires. This phenomenon appears to have started in the 1970s –80s in the NYC occult scene and grown in the1990s, with the Internet allowing more people to connect and converge on New Orleans to “live the Life.”

    America has a love affair with vampires. They’re almost inescapable, everywhere you look.

    Atun-Shei Film’s The Vampires Of New Orleans, a follow-up to their independent debut feature The Sudbury Devil, brings that same energy and cheek to a survey of tortured Americana that promises to be “the final word on the New Orleans Vampire as a pop culture figure.” It’s a big swing for an experimental docudrama. An epic one, in fact, clocking in at 159 minutes (including an Overture and Entr’acte, like a Hollywood roadshow picture). It will be interesting to see how audiences receive it.

    The main narrative which hits the expected tropes of a vampire tale. Shania Jackson (Unique) is abducted by Nate Debney (Guiness), the human familiar for Jean-Louis D’Hemecourt (Rakich). D’Hemecourt has two sires: Josephine Macarti (Gregg) a Southern Belle turned vampire after her husband’s death in the Civil War, and the Axeman of New Orleans (Sailor), a (real) serial killer who preyed on Italian immigrants in 1918–19. This trio has been hunting and feeding in New Orleans for some time, with D’Hemecourt stressing that he “does not kill humans”—“humans” defined as “Whites.” Shania’s sister, Brigitte (Carter) crosses the path of the vamps while looking into the death, and with the assistance of her aunt Saffron (Harris) and street hustler/Voudon priest Dr. Tom (Lee) attempts to avenge her sister. It doesn’t play out as easily as they may hope.

    It’s a straightforward narrative, but it’s all interspersed with those “expert” interviews—historians, tour guides, vampires (Sanguinarian and psychic)—who provide context and  commentary on vampire folklore, specifically that which involves New Orleans: the LaLaurie Mansion, the Casquette (casket) Girls, Jacques St. Germain, and the Axeman. They also provide a critique. While there proves to be rich and horrific historical lore in New Orleans, most, if not all, pertaining to vampires stems from a single source: Anne Rice’s “Interview With The Vampire,” published in the early to mid 70s, which fed the fantasies of self-identifying vamps and their acolytes and created a cottage industry of ghost tourism goosing up dry historical facts with the hook of the lurid supernatural. As one interviewee states, they’re “very grateful to Anne Rice for the tourism she brought.” “Interview” also helped sanitize the image of the vampire from the bloated, pestilent corpse depicted in European lore into a dark romantic figure, the aristocrat of Southern Gothic tales.

    The real history became superseded by fictional legend: “a form of cultural amnesia, because Americans don’t like to face their real history; fictional stories drag us away from facing reality,” as one interviewee states. Vampires uses the fiction of D’Hemecourt to tell the actual stories it wants to impart about the metaphorical vampires of  New Orleans: corporate tourism replacing the soul of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; incarcerated labor as modern slavery, multi-generational poor communities turned into modern plantations. It may throw audiences expecting a more conventional vampire tale, but it’s rewarding for those willing to set expectations aside and go with the flow. The performances are good (most of the cast are veterans of Sudbury Devil). The length might be an issue for some, but the film doesn’t drag, helped immensely by Dillon Derosa’s score, which is as epic as the scope of the film.

    The Vampires Of New Orleans is available to rent or buy via Atun-Shei Films’ website, and will drop on YouTube on 10/31: Halloween.

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    Capsules, Essays

    SITGES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 RECAP

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    As a lifelong fan of horror, I’d been longing to attend the Sitges Film Festival for a few years, but  for one reason or another I never had the chance. At last, with my best friend in tow, this year I jumped at the opportunity to experience the 59th edition of the festival and secured seats for five screenings. While the festival started on October 8 and ended on October 18, I spent the long weekend of October 9-12 there, coinciding with Spanish regional and national festivities.

    Sitges itself is a quaint coastal town with peaceful white streets that, in line with the film festival, were decorated with skeletons or monsters. Main streets were crowded with both locals and foreigners, and posters along the street announced the festival. This year, the main focus was the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Carrie, alongside the recent rise of religious horror. A festive atmosphere hung over these streets, and T-shirts reflected a love of horror and fantasy cinema.

    My friend and I stayed in a  hotel close to the three main venues premiering movies: Auditori Melià, Casino Prado Suburense, and L’Escorxador. Melià is the largest venue, L’Escorxador the smallest—it’s a former slaughterhouse, which feels appropriate for the festival. These venues are only a 10-minute walk away from each other, and you can enjoy nice views of the beach and sea on your way to Auditori Melià, and stop at stands selling merchandise, meeting points for fans, or just have a drink. There’s a street food area on a hill where food trucks sell expensive—albeit somewhat healthy—fast food, both salty and sweet.

    Having familiarized ourselves with the area, we went to our first movie at Auditori Melià at 11pm: Joshua Giuliano’s River, starring Jany Levy and Jessica Rothe. Naturally, such iconic names and an intriguing premise—three siblings grieving over their dad’s death are stalked by a faceless killer on a river—had us hyped up in advance. Unfortunately, this first film was the greatest disappointment of our festival experience, but at least it made us hopeful that the next four movies would be an improvement! The problem lies not in the acting, which is great, as one would expect from the cast, but in the many plot holes and unexplored links. Scenes honoring previous classics can be easily detected, but River struggles to get its own story right in this mix of references, leaving viewers with many questions as to what the movie was about. It felt like it was trying to communicate something about trauma and the passing down of harmful Continue reading SITGES FILM FESTIVAL 2026 RECAP →

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