All posts by Enar Clarke

Apocryphally Weird

69*. FLAMING EARS (1992)

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Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche

Weirdest!

“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.

Still from Flaming Ears (1992)

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) →

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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.

Still from The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (2025)

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 ‘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) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SENSUELA (1973)

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DIRECTED BY: Teuvo Tulio

FEATURING: Marianne Mardi, Ossi Elstelä, Mauritz Åkerman, Ismo Saario

PLOT: A young Sámi woman abandons her life of reindeer herding for the big city when she falls in love with a Nazi pilot/photographer.

Still from Sensuela (1973)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Sensuela is a difficult film to describe. A remake of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio’s own melodrama Cross of Love (1946), which itself was inspired by Alexander Pushkin’s 1830 short story “The Stationmaster,”  though neither film closely follows the text. In his updated version of a prodigal daughter’s journey, Tulio mashes together the modes of ethnographic documentary, commercial advertising, and softcore porn. All incongruously set to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, the result is ultimately unclassifiable.

COMMENTS: Did you know the Sámi geld reindeer by biting off their testicles? Neither did I, until I watched this movie. I don’t know if this is actually true in the real world, but in the world of Tulio it’s a fact, and one which proves shockingly relevant to Sensuela‘s loosely plotted narrative. Like and other low-budget outsider auteurs, Tulio clearly pursued his own cinematic vision, with relentless disregard for prevailing taste or convention.

Sensuela opens during WWII with three fighter pilots in the midst of battle, but this isn’t war as seen in any other movie. Painted backdrops of snowy mountains provide the landscape and cartoonishly simple sets, barely recognizable, represent the plane cockpits. To the sound of gunfire, two of the pilots collapse on their instrument panels, but the third survives.

Hans parachutes out of his damaged plane into the Arctic landscape below. Laila, a Sámi girl, crossing the tundra in her reindeer sled, discovers him and brings him back to her father’s yurt. While she nurses him back to health, they fall in love, but the war forces Hans to flee Finland once he recovers.

In the first of many confusing transitions, the characters reunite after what must be about twenty years (though neither one has visibly aged). Hans whisks Laila away to Helsinki where he works as a photographer and she becomes his hottest model. The novelty of the relationship wears off when Laila refuses to swing with the ’60s. They break up, but she continues telling her father she and Hans intend to get married.

What seems like a harmless white lie proves to be Laila’s undoing. After many trials and tribulations, she takes a job in a warehouse, falls in love again, and becomes engaged to one of her co-workers. Meanwhile, Laila’s father happens across her nude photographs and sets off for the city in a rage. After roughing up her roommate, he decides to go after Hans. The roommate warns Laila, who manages to reach Hans just before her father’s arrival.

Happy to see Laila again, Hans, surprisingly, agrees to go along with the deception. They’ll tell her father they’re still planning to marry, thinking he’ll leave once they calm his indignation. Instead, dad insists on remaining in the city for the wedding.

Laila and Hans decide to hold a fake marriage ceremony. They almost pull it off—until Laila’s actual fiancé crashes the “wedding” party and all hell breaks loose. In a classic over-the-top Tulio climax, emotions run hard and fast, and love turns to hate in the blink of an eye. Her fiancé renounces Laila, but Hans suffers the brunt of her father’s anger.

Unfortunately, it’s not all sex, drugs, and castration. Sensuela is honestly a train wreck, but it’s difficult to look away, as one can’t help but wonder what randomness will happen next. Stock footage pads the already overlong 104 minute runtime with gratuitous scenes of carnival lights, saunas, and loudly chirping birds. Even more -esque moments appear, with conversations taking place over static close-ups of a coffee table.

Tulio frames sex scenes from such awkward angles they detract from the sensuality implied by the title. Other scenes have such a contrived, stagey feel they can hardly be taken seriously. In a scene of Sámi watching a reindeer race, the crowd jumps and applauds in unison (especially unsettling because they also dress identically). The editing of the fight choreography has a strange, staccato rhythm, like the skips between comic book panels. This would work in an actual comic book adaptation, but in the context of Sensuela, it just adds to the film’s erratic quality.

Some film scholars categorize Sensuela as camp, citing Tulio as a forerunner of , Pedro Almodovar, and even . Others stress the director’s distinct lack of humor and jouissance, which work against his camp aesthetics. Sensuela echoes the grim morality of Tulio’s earlier melodramas, despite the hippy orgies. Laila’s look always retains an out-of-place 1940s glamour. With her buttoned up trench coat, high-heels and red lips, she looks like she wandered onto the wrong set from a film noir. This speaks to the film’s deep weirdness: Sensuela exists in its own world, without any concern for linear time or standard genres.

It’s interesting to note that Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a film that would help make “Swedish” a byword for sexploitation, was released in the same year. No such trend occurred in Finland. Sensuela would be Tulio’s last movie; after it bombed, the director retired into seclusion, rarely granting interviews about his life or forty-year career. Finnish cineastes continued to value realism and restraint, and Tulio’s films were always, very consciously, the exact opposite.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…best described as a psychedelic, Alice in Wonderland-like journey that has ample amounts of Brechtian melodrama. – Michael Den Boer, 10K Bullets [Blu-ry]

3 X Teuvo Tulio: Sensuela + Cross

3 X Teuvo Tulio: Sensuela + Cross Of Love + Restless Blood

  • A trio of surreal melodramas from Finnish director Teuvo Tulio including CROSS OF LOVE, RESTLESS BLOOD and the notorious SENSUELA

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CAPSULE: SPLENDID OUTING (1978)

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Hwaryeohan wichul, AKA Brilliant Outing

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DIRECTED BY: Kim Soo-yong

FEATURING: Yoon Jeong-hee, Lee Dae-keun, Lee Yeong-ha

PLOT: A corporate executive travels in search of her dead twin sister’s spirit, and her journey descends into a surreal nightmare.

Still from Splendid Outing (1978)

COMMENTS: “I had read the original script. . . and I expected that once Splendid Outing was made into a film, then surely its ambiguous meaning would take on some clarity—so I watched it with that hope. But again, I still couldn’t clearly grasp what its meaning was supposed to be. In the end, I began to wonder if this film was meant to be some kind of puzzle: ‘Here’s the question, now you try to solve it.’” – Im Yeong, Film: Theory and Practice (March/April, 1978) (essay included in the booklet that comes with the Blu-ray)

Gong Doo-hee embodies the stereotypical woman who “has it all”: president of the appropriately named Royal Group, she presides over multinational business deals with the regal grandeur of a queen. When she isn’t expanding her company’s territory into far-flung parts of the globe, she lectures at a local women’s association, gives television interviews about feminism, and supports a charity for disabled children. But when she goes home to her own kids in her suburban mansion, she sleeps alone and dreams of a mysterious girl performing a ritualistic dance.

A widow, the one thing lacking in Gong’s life is a husband. We gradually learn, through voiceovers, how this troubles her; she’s clearly conflicted on whether or not to sacrifice her position in order to remarry. Whenever Gong is alone and we’re privy to her inner thoughts, a male voice narrates them. Are the men in her life still telling this liberated woman what to do? Or has she adopted a male internal monologue in order to increase her own sense of command and authority? This is but one of many fascinating ambiguities peppering the narrative, each of which reveals the complexity of Gong’s character, to the point of completely destabilizing her identity. When Gong consults a shaman about her repeating dream, she learns she had a twin sister who didn’t survive birth. The girl’s spirit still exists, but Gong needs to revisit the seaside community where she was born in order to communicate with her.

Just the thought of the seashore gives President Gong a headache, but she dutifully drives herself out of Seoul, leaving behind her chauffeur and her pampered existence. Upon arrival, she’s immediately recognized by the villagers who, in a disturbingly strange scene, surround her car and attack her. In the first of many sudden outbursts of violence against her, Gong’s “splendid outing” quickly takes a very dark turn. Mistaken for the runaway wife of a local islander, fishermen promptly catch her in a fishnet. After a beautifully noir-ish sequence where she’s suspended in a shadowy space by blood-red netting, a crew of female divers deliver Gong to her “husband.”

The rest of the film leaves the viewer wondering if this is a case of mistaken identity. Is Gong, the illustrious head of a corporation, now cruelly kidnapped and held hostage by a lawless populace? Or is she the village runaway, who abandoned her abusive husband five years ago to live an alternate life in the city? Or have she and her unborn twin somehow traded places in an act of cosmic reversal?

The plot hints variously at all these possibilities by selectively surfacing the protagonist’s memories. Day-dream (1964), a seriously weird film also about a woman undergoing a harrowing ordeal at the hands of a man with whom she has an ambiguous relationship, apparently influenced Splendid Outing‘s fractured structure. The quick edits recall Franco Arcalli’s work with , as does the color symbolism of contrasting reds and blues. The soundtrack features a mix of traditional music and then-contemporary electronics, also similar to Day-dream‘s even more disorienting score. The changes in tone heighten the contrast between the past and the present, the rural and urban, but also underline moments of idealized femininity.

Director Kim intended the film as a political allegory, one so skillfully hidden within a modernist narrative that government censors failed to notice it. While knowledge of South Korea’s Yushin Era history adds even more layers to President Gong’s story, that background isn’t necessary to appreciate the film’s sense of style and mystery. Even though the ending provides a concrete answer for Gong’s surreal experiences, a profound uneasiness still lingers even after the outing’s over.

Splendid Outing initially found few screenings outside of its native South Korea. In 2026 Radiance rediscovered it and released it on Blu-ray. Unfortunately, it is not currently available for streaming.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…quite an unusual film that blends modernism with a touch of realism. It reminded me a little of the work of Luis Buñuel, in its mix of biting social commentary with surreal flourishes…  whilst Splendid Outing didn’t grip me as tightly as I’d have liked, I did admire its peculiar, dream-like approach and can’t deny it’s an intriguing and beautifully made film. I’d suggest you give it a watch and make up your own mind.”–David Brook, Blueprint: Review (Blu-ray)

Splendid Outing

Splendid Outing

  • Following an eerie dream a successful tycoon takes a drive to the seaside but her outing becomes a nightmare as she is kidnapped.

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CAPSULE: TRAUMNOVELLE (2024)

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AKA Dream Story

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You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream. . .

– Edgar Allan Poe

DIRECTED BY: Florian Frerichs

FEATURING: Nikolai Kinski, Laurine Price, Nora Islei

PLOT: Disturbed by his wife’s fantasies of infidelity, a physician crashes a secret orgy.

Still from Traumnovelle (2024)

COMMENTS: “Wanna go. . . someplace else?”

Although not a Surrealist, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle tells the tale of a married man who, for twenty-hours, basically lives his life according to what André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, called “objective chance.”1 After arguing with his wife and losing a patient, Jakob (Kinski) wanders aimlessly around Berlin, ping-ponging from one chance encounter to another, searching for that elusive else, while preoccupied with thoughts of death and sex.

So, if Schnitzler’s story can be interpreted as a Surrealist tale, then what do we expect to see when it becomes a film? Is a Surrealist story necessarily a weird movie? Does it have to contain the cinematic equivalent of melting clocks, or can it treat dream reality in more varied and subtle ways?

Traumnovelle contains only one melting reality scene: when the wife, Amelia, describes her dream to her husband and an animated sequence takes over the narrative. The morphing visuals depict the couple in a variety of landscapes according to constantly shifting art styles. The rest of the film depicts a Berlin filtered through Jakob’s daydreams and imagination. Nothing in the live-action sequences is impossible in reality, but a build-up of eerie coincidences and uncanny repetitions create the slightly sinister atmosphere of a nightmare.

Viewers familiar with ‘s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), also based on Schnitzler’s story, will recognize the major plot points. During an evening at a nightclub, where Amelia dances with a masked man, a pair of women in domino masks tries to pick up Jakob. The question of escape, paired with the teasing offer to play with their VibrateApp, solicits only an echo from the stupefied Jakob: “Someplace else?”

Ultimately, he leaves the girls to their remote vibrator, rescues his wife from the masked man and takes her home. The couple have a heated discussion over whether or not they are both sexually attracted to other people. Amelia then thoroughly shocks Jakob by revealing she would have left him for a random officer, glimpsed in their hotel during their previous summer’s vacation.

To avoid her while he thinks this through, Jakob spends the night on the town. He’s awkwardly hit on by the daughter of his dead patient, follows a prostitute back to her room only to leave without enjoying her services, and eventually runs into a former classmate and medical school dropout, Nick Nightingale, now a shady nightclub performer.

During his strolls through the city, Jakob’s thoughts continually intrude into everyday life in genuinely startling moments. While listening to Verdi’s “A Masked Ball” he pictures himself as one of the Continue reading CAPSULE: TRAUMNOVELLE (2024) →