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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

CAPSULE: INVENTION (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Courtney Stephens

FEATURING: , Sahm McGlynn, James N. Kienitz Wilkins

PLOT: Actress Callie Hernandez comes to terms with her eccentric father’s death, while portraying the character Carrie Fernandez who inherits her father’s patent for an “electromagnetic healing device.”

COMMENTS: Brought to our attention by a reader who noticed some uncanny similarities to Certified Weird curiosity  After Last Season, Invention tells a story of death and medical experimentation. Both films are low-budget explorations of weird science, but the comparison ends there—in Invention‘s favor, as the more coherent and watchable film (although After Last Season earns the award for weirdness).

In real life, actor-writer Hernandez is the daughter of Dr. John Hernandez, an alternative medical guru who hosted a program on local television. Six months after his death, Hernandez began collaborating with director Stephens on a script inspired by her mourning experiences. Actual footage from her father’s VHS archives made its way into the film. The story becomes a dual narrative about Hernandez and her fictional counterpart, “Carrie Fernandez,” the daughter of elusive “Dr. J.” When she unexpectedly inherits a patent discovers upon his death, she discovers her father secretly invented a “vibronic” machine.

Dr. J’s story is reminiscent of Wilhelm Reich, another traditionally educated medical professional whose career took a strange turn when he began developing outré theories (whom readers may recall from the Certified Weird film WR: Mysteries of the Organism). Dr. J’s device isn’t sexual, but Carrie finds out the FDA recalled it for its dubious medical value.

People of a certain age will remember seeing television personalities like Dr. J on public access, programs that were a bewildering mix of actual facts, bizarre theories, and advertising for various New Age products and therapies. I distinctly remember flipping past these types of shows on PBS back in the 1980s and ’90s (to a kid, they were incredibly boring). I can only imagine what it must have been like growing up with someone like Dr J for a father. Invention gives the viewer a pretty good idea, though the film mostly focuses on the absurdities of dealing with the loss of a parent in a death-phobic country like the United States.

Invention excels at black humor, maintaining a consistent tone of deadpan awkwardness as Callie/Carrie endures stilted conversations with funeral parlor staff and estate executors, while navigating the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of corporate bereavement policies. As Callie encounters the various people connected to her father’s mysterious machine, she tries to learn more about it, but conflicting stories emerge. Some of Dr J’s friends and patients remain convinced of his misunderstood genius; others politely refrain from calling him a crackpot to his grieving daughter.

Brief scenes of intensely colored video and animation emphasize Carrie’s descent into this psychedelically-tinged world of alternative medicine, as does a tea party in an “Alice in Wonderland”-themed corn maze. The intertwined narratives of Callie and Carrie, united by archival television footage, blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, as Dr. Hernandez essentially plays himself in both. But aside from the animated sequences, the film’s style remains realist. It hovers at the edge of the rabbit hole without ever tumbling in.

Many viewers will probably leave this film wanting to know more about the mysterious machine, but it remains cryptic. A series of cathode-ray tubes connected by a ring of coiled wire and staged in a red-walled room, it looks suitably science-fictional, and its main champions are a little too “woo” to be believed. Callie references Nikola Tesla’s theories when trying to defend to father’s vision, but she doesn’t seem entirely convinced. Even after she begins using the machine, she never reveals whatever effect it may or may not be having on her.

Hernandez looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t remember what else I had seen her in—probably because she was buried under layers of mascara in Under the Silver Lake (as Millicent Sevence, another daughter in mourning for her eccentric father). She also co-starred in Benson and Moorhead’s The Endless. Which is  to say, Hernandez has some fledgling weird credentials. Courtney Stephens has been assistant director on a number of pictures. I’ll be curious to see how both their careers develop. Invention has weird potential; perhaps someday we’ll see something full blown weird from its creators.

Invention is currently playing in limited cities across North America, with a wider release planned for Summer 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This strange, personal movie is a mind meld between the experimental filmmaker Courtney Stephens (‘Terra Femme’) and the actress Callie Hernandez (‘Alien: Covenant’)… ‘Invention’ is committed to finding its own wavelength.”–Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan, who suggested “If After Last Season left an impact on anyone, it would probably have to be Courtney Stephens and her film Invention from 2024. The trailer is a pretty strong homage: minimalist keyboard music, cardboard in the background, CGI dreams, questions that go nowhere, and shot on film.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

 

 

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PINK NARCISSUS (1971)

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“Narcissus now had reached his sixteenth year
And seemed both man and boy; and many a youth
And many a girl desired him, but hard pride
Ruled in that delicate frame, and never a youth
And never a girl could touch his haughty heart.”

— Ovid, Metamorphoses

DIRECTED BY: James Bidgood

FEATURING: Bobby Kendall

PLOT: A modern-day Narcissus, alone in a New York City apartment, imagines himself as characters in a series of homoerotic fantasies while gazing upon his own reflection in a mirror.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: There’s nothing particularly weird about a teenage boy imagining himself as a matador bedecked in gold embroidery with red silk cape, but when the camera pulls back to reveal the “bull” in this corrida—a biker who looks like he rode right out of an illustration by Tom of Finland—we enter another level of surreal and sensual fantasy.

COMMENTS: In this silent modern-day retelling of the myth of Narcissus, first-time director and cinematographer James Bidgood creates an otherworldly dreamscape with a nightmarish edge. A young hustler falls into a series of sexual reveries in his bedroom while the lewd antics of a darkly Expressionist city parade outside his window. Mirrors take the place of the original’s pond, and as his dreams become increasingly self-obsessed, the lines between the worlds on either side of the glass blur, leading to a phantasmagoric conclusion.

Upon entering the apartment, awash in a warm pink glow, and decorated with multiple photographs of himself, Narcissus (Kendall) gradually strips off his tight white clothes. As he ripples his shirt before a wall of mirrors, it transforms into a red cape and a motorcycle engine revs, its handlebars cleverly framed as the bull’s two horns (aimed at the bull-fighter’s shapely rear end). A bathhouse hook-up intercuts this vision where Narcissus and the biker end up in a tub frothing with soap bubbles, the action occasionally interrupted by blank white frames.

For a first film by an amateur film maker, Pink Narcissus displays an impressive command of cinematic techniques. The inner life of the protagonist, in which he travels through time and around the world, when juxtaposed with extreme close-ups of his body—slow shots of fingers being licked, swelling nipples, belly button tickled with a blade of grass—underscore his absorption into solipsistic desires. When he gazes into the mirror, the camera flips to the perspective of his own reflection gazing back at him. Often shot from below, Kendall strides through the film with the camera staring up at his monumental form. Sometimes half-dressed, sometimes nude, the angle emphasizes his youthful and muscular physique but also the character’s revelry in his own power as he wields his physical attractions like a lure and a weapon.

In Classical Rome, he takes on the roles of both a cruel emperor and a powerless prisoner whom the emperor condemns. In an Orientalist tableau, he’s both a harem boy and a stern bearded sultan. A dancer draped with semi-sheer silk and strands of pearls performs for them in an extended sequence of images variously distorted, stretched and abstracted. The choreography, in which the movements of male anatomy form flowing patterns in the gauzy silk, recalls the Serpentine dances of Loie Fuller. The frames dissolve between the dancer’s body, close-ups of the pearls and Narcissus grasping the beaded strands in his hand. As the harem boy Narcissus enjoys the performance, but the sultan demands the dancer’s execution. Carried out with shocking rapidity, this death sentence marks the film’s most potently violent and sexual moment.

Unabashedly gay and erotic, daringly so for having been made in the pre-Stonewall era, Pink Narcissus take its stylistic cues from ’60s pinup art. Bidgood was a photographer for the men’s health and fitness magazines which featured coded gay imagery at the time. He once explained in an interview that when he grew bored with the typical images of beefcake models wearing g-strings, “I thought there should be something more.”

With his astute eye for composition and color, he began to design richly decorated tableau for his photographs, beginning with underwater scenes inspired by Esther Williams films and the glamour of Old Hollywood. Pink Narcissus blossomed out of a photoshoot for a Valentine’s Day issue of The Young Physique magazine. Bidgood created the pink-hued bedroom interior with the heart-shaped swan headboard for the cover in his own tiny NYC apartment. As the shoot with model Bobby Kendall progressed, a story began to take shape and Bidgood started to film the scenes. Over the course of seven years, he painstakingly crafted this journey into a mythic realm highly charged with sensuality yet strikingly beautiful, an example of DIY film making like no other.

Note: The executor of Bidgood’s estate has said that Blu-ray and VOD releases of Pink Narcissus are planned for Summer 2025.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a fragile antique, a passive, tackily decorated surreal fantasy out of that pre‐Gay‐Activist era when homosexuals hid in closets and read novels about sensitive young men who committed suicide because they could not go on.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

 

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE LICKERISH QUARTET (1970)

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DIRECTED BY: Radley Metzger

FEATURING: Frank Wolff, Erika Remberg, Silvana Venturelli, Paolo Turco

PLOT: A bourgeois family invites a carnival performer back to their castle, convinced they recognize her from a stag film.

Still from The Lickerish Quartet (1970)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The Lickerish Quartet questions the very nature of reality through a series of breezy sex romps. If that’s not enough in itself, there’s a library floor paved with bawdy vocabulary, a magic act that disappears the lead actress from the film within the film, and the fact that every line of dialogue sounds like a riddle.

COMMENTS: In The Lickerish Quartet, softcore pron peddler Radley Metzger steals the Teorema scenario with a healthy dose of inspiration from playwright-philosopher Luigi Pirandello. Throughout his directing career Metzger remained aware of his roots as an editor. He preferred to adapt well-known literary works for his films so he wouldn’t have to worry about plot. The Lickerish Quartet loosely adapts Pirandello’s play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” first performed in 1921. At the premier, audiences revolted in protest of the fourth-wall breaking metanarrative structure. Here, Metzger constantly reminds us we’re watching a movie through all the tricks of the editor’s trade. The film changes between color and black and white, between past and present, with playful disregard for continuity, and the film within the film and the core story switch places in diagetic reality, along with both sets of cast members.

After growing bored with watching a stag loop together, a middle-aged man (Wolff), his wife (Remberg), and her young adult son (Turco) decide to visit the carnival. They see a girl (Venturelli) in a white catsuit riding the Wall of Death on a motorcycle, and when she takes a bow and removes her helmet she’s revealed to be the spitting image of an actress in the blue movie the family just watched. The father decides to invite her back to their castle to show her the film. The son wishes he wouldn’t, but the mother thinks it will be fun.

The carnival girl accepts the invitation. From the moment she sets foot inside the castle, flashbacks suggest she somehow remembers it. A brief shot shows a man being killed before he falls through a doorway and down a flight of stairs, prompting the carnival girl to ask, “Who has the gun? To do the shooting?”

What they expected to be a fun flirty lark has already taken an ominous turn for the family. “There isn’t going to be any shooting,” the father says; “but of course there is,” the girl replies. Before they show her the stag film, the son performs a magic act and the carnival girl disappears. When the reel begins to play, her doppelgänger’s face is no longer visible on screen. On a third viewing, the blonde girl in the film is an entirely different actress. The mother and father are confused and disappointed, but they convince the girl to spend the night.

In ‘s Teorema a mysterious stranger visits a bourgeois family and seduces each of them in turn. The results of the seductions vary, but in the end the total effect is devastating. Quartet runs this plot backward. Metzger rewinds the bickering family back to their beginnings, to World War II, the source of their conflicts and tensions.

A look into the source text reveals Metzger hews pretty closely to Pirandello’s scenario. The “Six Characters in Search of an Author” are identified only by their roles within a step-family, the result of a woman’s affair sanctioned by her husband. The plot centers around the complexities of their relationships and the impact of transgressive sexuality. In the metanarrative, their stories were left uncompleted by their original creator, so they seek an author in order to achieve resolution.

In updating it to the present day and paring down the family to four members, Metzger makes the material more accessible to contemporary audiences and a society still coming to terms with the legacy of WWII. The carnival girl becomes “The Author” who literally fleshes out the characters’ memories, personalities, and desires.

Pirandello believed reality is an illusion and everyone should be aware of it; he also believed this awareness would lead only to unhappiness. Metzger is far less pessimistic. The carnival girl makes the family members whole people through their sexual encounters with her. Far from tearing them apart, this shared experience brings the family closer together and makes them capable of seeing each other’s different perspectives.

In creating an avant-garde skin flick with philosophical underpinnings, Metzger confused and frustrated critics, who struggled with how to classify Quartet when they didn’t outright dismiss it. Featuring Metzger’s usual attention to the details of production design, Quartet straddles the ditch between low- and high-brow with ease. Ultramodern décor artfully situated within an actual medieval castle mirrors the characters’ inner journeys from the present to their pasts. Despite frequent syncopated cuts to enigmatic scenes (a close-up of a reclining woman’s crossed ankles and magenta high-heeled shoes; the dying man falling down the stairs), a mood of dreamy sensuality prevails.

With its dual focus on subjectivity and sexual mores, it’s no surprise Pirandello’s play spoke to Metzger as a film maker. Metzger learned editing during his military service while working on propaganda films for the United States government. He knew better than most people how movies shape reality, and vice versa.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[Metzger and co-writer Michael de Forrest] must have dreamed up the story line late at night, for it’s a weirdo of the first order, a confusing blend of fantasy, reality, and illusion…”–Thomas Blakely, The Pittsburgh Press (contemporaneous)

The Lickerish Quartet [Blu-ray]

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CAPSULE: ARCANA (1972)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Lucia Bosé, Maurizio Degli Esposti, Tina Aumont

PLOT: An enterprising widow and her son try to make their living practicing witchcraft.

Still from Arcana (1972)

COMMENTS: Arcana begins with a message “[t]o the spectators: this movie is not a story, but a game of cards. Both the beginning and the ending are not to be believed. You are the players. Play well and you will win.”

We open onto a busy city street; a figure emerges from a manhole cover then a group of men quickly construct a blanket fort around the hole, in which they all huddle together to observe the passers-by. I won’t spoil the ending (unbelievable as it is), because seeking out this unique movie proves to be worth the effort.

For all intents and purposes, Arcana is basically a lost film. After distributing only five prints, the production company went bankrupt and the film never made it into theaters in any major cities. Attempts to find a workable print for restoration have so far been unsuccessful. At the end of his life, even Questi himself was apparently trying to locate a copy. It’s a real shame, as Arcana reveals the obscure auteur in fine form, working again with frequent collaborator, editor and co-writer Franco ‘Kim’ Arcalli. There’s donkey levitation, frog regurgitation, and Questi’s trademark obsession with chickens and eggs, but this isn’t your typical Satanic horror film. The narrative unfolds in two parts, but as we’ve been warned, the beginning and the end are not to be believed. Is there a middle? What does it all mean? Let’s consult the cards, shall we?

Imagine I’m handing you a tarot deck – shuffle the cards thoroughly, then cut the deck into thirds. First we’ll examine the card to my left, representing the past: Death, a skeletal figure brandishing a scythe. A man known only as Tarantino has died, leaving behind his wife and son in straightened financial circumstances. Vague insinuations imply he may have been the victim of a bizarre scam. His widow (Bosé) never confirms nor denies this. She simply complains of how he left them in poverty and declares the pension checks hardly worth claiming.

The middle card reveals to us the present: mother and son riding The Wheel of Fortune, eking out their living in what at first appears as a phony psychic con, a la Nightmare Alley. Mrs. Tarantino desperately seeks wealthy clients to pay top dollar for their new-age therapy. Her son (Degli Esposti), a young man in his late teens or early twenties, grows increasingly disgusted with both his mother’s money-grubbing ways and the petty pathetic lives of their clients. He possesses actual psychic ability, but completely lacks compassion and pity. Mother agree that many of their clients are unpleasant and stupid people, but they’re also rich, so she begs her son not to frighten them away.

As the film progresses, various seekers of arcane advice consult with Mrs. Tarantino in a series of subtly surreal scenes. Red velvet curtains surround her psychic parlor, aglow with crimson lampshades in what would today be called a “ian” style. The son continues to rebel against her, interfering in their client’s lives in ever more disturbing and intrusive ways. His mother repeatedly warns him that he risks the wrath of Hell, but part one ends with a violent confrontation in which the son demands his mother reveal all her secret wisdom.

A classic Arcalli montage follows, an extended dialogue-free trance in which the mother dances with a multi-generational family all solemnly dressed in black. They move from side-to-side in unison, in slow shuffling steps, to the mesmerizing tune of a lone fiddler traversing a landscape of barren dunes. Elsewhere curious onlookers watch men with a rope pulley hoisting a donkey onto the roof of a church.

And now, the card to my right, a possible future: The Tower, a teetering structure ready to topple. Groups of armed soldiers roam the city arresting people at random. Subway laborers revolt over unsafe work conditions. An overbearing patriarch concerned with the respectability of his family, wakes in the middle of the night to find his relatives all making out with each other while the grandmother feeds upon the baby’s blood. “We make a good team,” the son tells his mother after orchestrating this last escapade, “they’re all scared shitless.” She laughs in reply.

As the two leads, Bosé and Degli Esposito both give equally intense performances despite the threadbare storyline. Aumont, as their gullible client, harbors a secret she’s afraid her fiancé will discover. As she demands to know what will happen in her future, Mrs. Tarantino becomes more and more reluctant to tell her. Her entanglement with both mother and son soon leads to tragedy.

So, what does all this Arcana mean? Have we played the game well? We may not believe in the beginning or the end, though they both present more gritty realism than the surreally fanciful middle. Or perhaps, as the mother tells the nervous young bride, there is nothing more the cards can tell us. Re-shuffle them and return them to their box, for we should prefer not to know everything.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Very weird supernatural horror movie by the maker of Death Laid an Egg.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1972)

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La mansión de la locura; AKA Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon

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DIRECTED BY: Juan Lopez Moctezuma

FEATURING: , Arthur Hansel, Ellen Sherman

PLOT: A journalist visits a celebrated mental health asylum in this loose adaptation of ‘s 1845 short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.”

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A surrealist exploration of insanity from within the walls of a 19th century asylum should be a shoo-in for us. Add to this premise Panic Group-style theatrics, trippy sequences blurring the line between delusion and reality, and low-budget constraints which up the surrealism factor, and it becomes an even stronger contender.

COMMENTS: Poe’s satiric tale “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether” begins in Gothic style: “Through this dank and gloomy wood we rode some two miles, when the Maison de Santé came in view. It was a fantastic chateau, much dilapidated, and indeed scarcely tenantable through age and neglect. Its aspect inspired me with absolute dread. . .” The Mansion of Madness begins with a horse-drawn carriage swallowed up by fog. The image then solarizes into contrasting pale blue light and blood red shadows, plunging the viewer into a psychedelic journey.

American journalist Gaston (Hansel) has finagled an assignment to report on the innovative methods of treating mental illness developed by renowned Dr Maillard. After a disturbing encounter at the mansion’s gate with armed guards dressed as rejects from Napoleon’s army, Gaston’s traveling companions desert him. His friend Couvier has an abhorrence of the mentally ill and his female cousin is near to fainting. He assures Gaston his card will serve as an introduction; their carriage turns around and the intrepid reporter proceeds on his own.

While Gaston meets the distinguished Maillard (Brook), and his charming young niece Eugénie (Sherman), Couvier’s carriage succumbs to a violent attack by the “guards” before it can leave the forest. With his coachman overpowered, Couvier proves himself comically useless in a fight; after commanding his cousin to flee, he leaves her to save herself. The trio end up being taken captive, while Maillard takes Gaston on a tour of the sanitarium while explaining his “system of soothing.”

Sensory overload best describes the experience of entering The Mansion of Madness. Artfully arranged actors and still-life accumulations of everyday objects fill every frame. We never see a single establishing shot. Gaston appears to enter the maison through its boiler room, passing through a maze of industrial piping and blazing furnaces as curious faces stare out of the machinery. The “soothing system,” as Maillard explains, allows the inmates their freedom; there are no straight jackets here.

Moctezuma studied art in college before turning to film making (which he called “painting at 24 frames per second”). He began his directing career in television. On one of his shows none other than destroyed a piano as a musical performance; Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1972) →