All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)

Gregory J. Smalley founded 366 Weird Movies in 2008 and has served as editor-in-chief since that time. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and his film writing has appeared online in Pop Matters and The Spool.
Capsules

CAPSULE: OMNI LOOP (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Bernardo Britto

FEATURING: Mary-Louise Parker, Ayo Edebiri

PLOT: A retired scientist uses pills that send her back exactly one week in time to try to find a (time travel-based) cure before the black hole growing in her chest kills her.

Still from omni loop (2024)

COMMENTS: Omni Loop wisely puts its best scene up front. In a hospital corridor, a doctor delivers a diagnosis worthy of : Zoya has an incurable black hole growing in her chest. As he delivers the news that she has only about a week to live to her stunned daughter and husband, a crowd of doctors, nurses and orderlies in the background erupt in shouts and applause.

Sadly, this may be the last time you laugh during Omni Loop, which teases itself as a fantastical comedy, then turns into a serious seep dramatic dive character study. The inexplicable black hole and a pill that enables time travel (rewinding the swallower’s life by exactly one week) is joined by one other worthy absurdist touch: the Nanoscopic Man, a victim of a scientific experiment (and a quantum 21st century update on a classic sci-fi B-movie hero).

Now, the black hole and the Nanoscopic Man are two elements worthy of a weird movie, but like the film’s flirtation with comedy, weirdness is not something Omni Loop is willing to lean into. In fact, these plot pieces are completely superfluous; if you just replace the black hole with cancer and the Nanoscopic Man with any sort of scientific gizmo that performs the same function, you will have essentially the same movie. And perhaps the movie would even better without its scintilla of surrealism, which distracts you from taking the characters and their world seriously. The science fiction angle, as well, is barely addressed—there is no transformative technology and no meaningful special effects, its just two women talking about arbitrary scientific theories necessary to advance the plot—but sci-fi at least supplies the film’s essential premise.

That’s not to say Omni Loop is a bad film. On the contrary, it’s cleverly constructed, even if the script seems bit padded at times. The performances are excellent. Mary-Louise Parker conveys the proper sense of a smart, driven woman who’s also understandably conflicted, at times sad, at times weary of living through the same week over and over for what could be several lifetimes worth of research. Edebiri does as well as possible with a less-developed character (a little time could have been taken away from Zoya and devoted to Paula’s personal trauma in order to raise the stakes of the story). The film even raises an interesting moral dilemma: what happens to all those alternate timelines when Zoya takes the pill and resets her personal history? In attempting to save a single version of herself, is she creating an unforgivable multitude of grieving families spread across multiple realities? In the end, the movie settles into a message that fits organically into Zoya’s persona as a high-achieving scientist who’s left it all behind to raise a family, and who’s struggling with regret over missed opportunities. The movie’s resolution is unambiguous, and the resolution of Zoya’s internal struggle feels a bit obvious, but the core message is a meaningful. It’s just a shame that the movie is intent on hopping about through distracting comedy, absurdism, and science fiction, instead of focusing on what really matters to it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The result, pleasant enough but frustratingly bland, exists in a soupy, ill-defined emotional middle ground—occasionally amusing but not quite funny, and unable (or unwilling) to substantively commit to thoughtful, penetrating melancholia…  Given the relative lack of absurdism present elsewhere, these [weird] bits aren’t so much whimsical background details as candy sprinkles on a savory casserole.”–Brent Simon, AV Club (contemporaneous)

Omni Loop [DVD]

Omni Loop [DVD]
  • "… a really well-done piece of Sci-fi story telling" - RogerEbert.com
  • 100% Rotten Tomatoes Score!
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Miscellanea

CAPSULE: TOMMY (2017)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Jordan Stowe-Merritt

FEATURING: Emma Hallinan, Marcel Jortzik

PLOT: A parent mourns the loss of her pinball-playing son—but has the kid returned as a ghost?

Still from Tommy (2017)

WHY IT WON’T JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: We had retired this section explaining why individual movies wouldn’t make the List after we completed the first 366 entries, but Tommy stirs us to revive it. What in the world are our readers thinking in constantly promoting this pedestrian British hokum for inclusion on our sacred List? Are you all a bunch of idiots who just don’t get the mission of this site? Our own correspondent even stated that Tommy was “like something out of a bad acid flashback” with a “non-stop assault of insane imagery” resulting in a film that was “bizarre to the point of self-parody.” I’d like to know what the hell movie he was watching! These complaints are not to impugn the movie itself, which is well-enough-acted and shot (if way too short for a feature presentation)—but it’s nowhere close to one of the weirdest films of all time.

COMMENTS: In 1969, the cacophonous British rock and roll band the Who dropped a double-album-length “rock opera” about a messianic deaf, dumb and blind kid who could miraculously play pinball. In 2017, a team of fellow Brits dumped this faithless adaptation in which (spoiler alert) you never even see the title character. That’s right, apparently this revisionist version of Tommy takes place after the deaf, dumb and blind kid has turned into a dead, dumb and blind kid. And there is no pinball in the film whatsoever! It comes from a no-name director and is performed by a (capable) cast of unknowns, but with no cameos from the Who or “rock ‘n’ roll” celebrities (which would have been a great idea.)

Instead, this time the story focuses on a couple who are grieving the death of the woman’s son in a new house that may be haunted. It’s a cut-rate affair,  with just two main actors, two main locations, and no vintage pinball machines in sight—they obviously blew their entire budget just getting the rights to the IP. And, at about 20 minutes in length, it’s actually less than a third of the length of the original album. There’s not even much weirdness to be found. Sure, there’s a de rigueur ambiguous horror movie ending that saves you the trouble of having to spend money on a spectral special effect. And there’s the fact that the couple here buy their bananas in bag form (thanks to sharp-eyed YouTube commenter grilledcheese2084 for picking up on this and commenting “WTF, who buys bagged bananas?”) An even more subtle dollop of surrealism occurs after Ryan leaves the pub and races home to check on Lucy: if you look closely, you’ll notice that he’s driving on the left side of the road. This was probably accomplished by reversing the film in post, but however they did it, it adds a subtle note of unease that was desperately needed.

And, of course, Tommy‘s weirdest choice is to use none of the Who’s original music at all. A bold gambit, for sure, but one I can’t say I entirely agree with.

Still, despite those meager surrealist touches, the entire thing is a slapdash slap in the face to Who fans. Who can believe Pete Townshed and (who made such an impression as Franz Liszt) would have allowed their psychedelic phantasmagoria to be turned into what is little more than a YouTube short, a “Tommy” adaptation in name only? The pinballcentric material is inherently strange enough that it could have produced a really weird movie, in the right hands. Maybe Hollywood can do a proper reboot someday? I’m not sure who would be capable of helming such an effort;  the late would have been perfect. But as it stands, this Tommy is not only deaf, dumb and blind—but also lame.

Tommy recently came out in a 4K UHD edition from Shout! Factory—are these guys desperate enough to release anything?—despite the fact that you can watch it for free (split into two parts) on YouTube (see below). I seriously doubt that you’ll see anything different on that disc, but if you’re foolish enough to spend good money on it, be our guest!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…doesn’t give a damn about the material he started with…”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Tommy - 50th Anniversary Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray [4K UHD]

Tommy - 50th Anniversary Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray [4K UHD]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: ASH (2025)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Aaron Paul

PLOT: An astronaut finds herself stranded on an outpost on an alien planet with the rest of the crew missing or dead, and no memory of what happened.

Still from Ash (2025)

COMMENTS: Eight years ago, when we first heard that trippy electrojazz musician Flying Lotus (AKA Steven Ellison) would be trying his hand out at filmmaking, we were excited for multiple reasons. His experimental Afrofuturist aesthetic made it unlikely he would go down a conventional cinematic path; we expected his movies to be as weird as his beats (and his cosmic album covers). There was the hope he would extend the psychedelic lineage of his great aunt Alice Coltrane. And another African-American presence on the weird movie scene would be welcome; it’s a bit embarrassing that weird is so white. So when the first trailer for his debut feature Kuso dropped—with its colorful fuzzy aliens with TV monitor faces, George Clinton as a hip physician, and what looked like an uncooked Thanksgiving turkey flying through the Los Angeles sky—anticipation ramped up into the stratosphere.

But Kuso, which turned out to be more with an NC-17 rating than with a ian spin, arrived as a major letdown. Juvenile, scatological, and borderline undistributable, it quickly and quietly sank out of most weirdophiles’ subconsciousnesses, despite a few collages and images that worked as standalone surrealist stills. An installment in the fifth installment of the long-spent V/H/S horror anthology franchise kept Lotus’ name alive as a filmmaker, but suggested little redemption. Still, when it was announced in 2022 that Neil Blomkamp was backing Lotus in making a relatively large budgeted sci-fi feature (originally to star Tessa Thompson and ), hope sprung up again that he would realize his promise.

The fact that I’ve opened this review by spending so much time on Lotus’ career, rather than his new movie, may clue you in to the main conclusion about Ash: it’s OK. It’s neither good enough nor bad enough to earn much in the way of analysis, or even to be the lede in its own review. Let’s stress this: Ash isn’t bad, and it has its own pleasures, entirely sensory rather than intellectual. The acting by the two leads is good. The ambiance is great: the spacecraft interiors have that fluorescent Alien light, but mostly served up through red (sometimes blue and green) filters. The expressionism in the lighting is influenced by Suspiria, and even more so , whom Lotus consulted for advice. The extraterrestrial planet’s design comes from the “Yes”-album-cover-come-to-life school of sci-fi mise en scène, complete with floating rocks in the sky and a swirling pink mandala. The film’s best sci-fi doodad is the Japanese-speaking medical bot that performs surgeries or autopsies with equal, and sometimes inappropriate, cheerfulness. The music, surprisingly, is generic science fiction ambiance, functional but tending to fade into the background. (It would be interesting to hear Lotus’ original score, which he wrote first and then discarded when he decided it didn’t fit with the movie’s tone.)

The script is, at best, a medium for the visuals. Astronaut alone in a planetary outpost with amnesia, rest of crew appear to be victims of foul play, another astronaut arrives to investigate… it pretty much writes itself. The opening is strong enough, but soon it bogs down, with a second act that fails to generate meaningful paranoia between Eiza’s character and Paul’s (or between Eiza’s character and herself), stumbling into a third act that’s overstuffed with violence and a complete explanation of the story’s rather mild mysteries. You’re unlikely to be surprised by the story’s resolution, but like most other things about the movie it’s… satisfactory.

In a post-Ash “Variety” interview, Flying Lotus says “I would love to do another film soon if the right thing happens, but I’m definitely not in a hurry to get back into it.” He remains a musician first; he doesn’t have a burning passion to make films. This feels like a film that was made by someone with skill, but without a burning passion.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film’s seductive and trippy aesthetics help mask the overall dullness of this two-person chamber drama.”–Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)