A butterfly teaches Michael about a mysterious force called “love,” but thankfully, it’s just a dream.
All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)
CAPSULE: ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL (2024)
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On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.
DIRECTED BY: Rungano Nyoni
FEATURING: Susan Chardy, Elizabeth Chisela, Doris Naulapwa, Esther Singini
PLOT: A middle-class Zambian woman finds her uncle’s dead body lying in the road, and then is reluctantly tasked with hosting his funeral arrangements.
COMMENTS: Returning late at night from a costume party (in a bizarre rhinestone mask and trash-bag jumper that looks weird but turns out to have a perfectly logical explanation: the outfit’s from a popular Missy Elliot music video), Shula comes across her Uncle Fred’s dead body lying in the road. She immediately puts on the same grim expression she will wear throughout the rest of the film: the look of a woman who is intensely annoyed that she will now be obligated to pretend to care. After reporting the body, she has to put her career on pause for a drawn-out funeral that involves housing dozens of mourners, enduring a lot of crawling and wailing from the women of the family, cooking and serving meals to the men, observing complicated and inconvenient taboos and obligations, and trying to keep quiet about the terrible secret about Uncle Fred that everyone knows (and which will be revealed early on even if you don’t guess it).
Guinea Fowl has a few easy-to-identify dream sequences, and occasional odd touches (the partially flooded rooms of Bupe’s college dorm.) It features an indifferent, collage-like timeline: there’s little to orient you, as Shula changes location from house to hospital room without much explanation, and the nights seem to stretch on forever so you can’t tell how much time really passes. It’s the kind of “surrealism” mainstream critics eat up: mild, restrained, tasteful, and purely decorative. What’s more interesting here than either the base drama or the absurdist accoutrements, at least to outsiders, are the funeral procedures themselves, which mix Christianity with older traditions and culminate in a trial-like meeting between Fred and his wife’s families where they angrily argue over dividing up his possessions (without any visible concern for the many orphans he leaves behind).
I’m a tiny bit baffled by the universal critical acclaim Guinea Fowl has received; I’m not surprised that most critics loved it, but I am surprised that every critic on Rotten Tomatoes loved it (not a single reviewer found themselves the slightest bit bored at times?) It’s an aggressively niche movie; as a female-centered art-house drama from Africa, it couldn’t force it’s way into many stateside theaters even with A24’s marketing muscle behind it. It sports hallmarks mainstream critics love: realist drama, feminist and ethnographic themes, an uncontroversially important subject. But, while undoubtedly well-made, it strikes me as too obvious and uneventful, with the advertised surrealism and absurdity insufficiently fierce to raise it above similarly themed dramas. But I’m clearly in a minority in confessing only a distant, cool admiration for Nyoni’s sophomore film.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
SATURDAY SHORT: ADHD (2025)
The Agency for Defense against Hallucinatory Disruptions claims to be on the case, but we’re not so sure.
57*. HALLUCINATIONS OF A DERANGED MIND (1978)
Delírios de um Anormal
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“…there’s this spiritist center in Bahia that summons an Exu, or Zé do Caixão spirit. I’ve been to these places, incognito of course, wearing sunglasses, hiding my nails, the whole deal. And then someone channels Zé do Caixão, claiming it’s me. There’s this narrative that Zé do Caixão was already a spirit and I just summoned him. I pay them homage in this film. I leave it up to the viewers to decide for themselves. Is he real?”–José Mojica Marins on the commentary track to Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind
DIRECTED BY: José Mojica Marins
FEATURING: José Mojica Marins, Jorge Peres, Magna Miller
PLOT: Psychiatrist Hamilton has terrible nightmares where he believes Coffin Joe is coming to take his wife away to use her to breed his offspring. His concerned colleagues call in José Mojica Marins, the creator of the Coffin Joe character, to convince him that the character is fictional and all in his imagination. The cure works; or does it?
BACKGROUND:
- Zé do Caixão (Anglicized as “Coffin Joe”) was a character created and portrayed by low-budget Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins. Beginning in the late 60s, Coffin Joe appeared in a trilogy of canonical feature films, also appearing in Marins’ work in dream sequences, host segments, personal appearances, his own line of comic books, and so on. The character is sadistic, but ultimately more amoral than evil; he disdains religion and the supernatural, and quests eternally to find the perfect “superior” woman to breed with so he can sire superhuman progeny. Joe was known for his black top hat and cloak, his monobrow, and, most notably, for his uncut fingernails, which Marins grew to over 9 inches in length. Though nearly unknown outside of Brazil during the height of his popularity, within that country Coffin Joe was a homegrown bogeyman of superstar status, roughly equivalent to Freddy Kruger.
- Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind was created from repurposed and unused footage from This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, The Strange World of Coffin Joe, The Awakening of the Beast, and others, mixed with newly shot scenes (there is approximately 35 minutes of new footage in the 86-minute movie). Some of the reused scenes had previously been nixed by censors.
- The Bloody Exorcism of Coffin Joe (1974) used a similar premise of director Marins facing off against his own character.
- Marins says that the inspiration for this film came from a real life request from a psychiatrist. The doctor’s wife was obsessed with Marins’ Coffin Joe character, and seemed to believe he existed independently. Marins visited the couple and watched one of his films with them on a midnight TV broadcast; during the screening, he reminisced how he suffered from diarrhea and painful corns during the shooting of certain scenes. The spell was broken and the woman no longer believed in Coffin Joe.
- Editor Nilcemar Leyart estimates that the final film contains more than 4,700 cuts.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many garage-surrealist possibilities here it boggles the mind—the woman-headed spider, the magic-markered buttocks, the human staircase—but ultimately the dominating figure is, appropriately, Coffin Joe himself: the dark, dagger-fingered nightmare undertaker who orchestrates this parade of Boschian delights.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Faces on asses; multi-headed torture blob
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A circus of the damned crawling out of a cinematic scrapheap, Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind is the distilled essence of Coffin Joe at his most irrational and insistent.
Clip from Hallucinations of a Deranged Mind
COMMENTS: A man circles a bikini babe while beating a bongo; after each circuit he stops and a new set of female legs pop into the Continue reading 57*. HALLUCINATIONS OF A DERANGED MIND (1978)
SATURDAY SHORT: JIMMY NEUTRON HAPPY FAMILY HAPPY HOUR (2013)
Jimmy’s father kills his mother, then orders a pizza that turns out to be too aggressive.