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CAPSULE: A BLIND BARGAIN (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Paul Bunnell

FEATURING: , , , Lucy Loken, Annalisa Cochrane

PLOT: A Vietnam veteran heroin addict gets hustled into a scheme where his aging ex-actress mother will be a test subject of Dr. Gruder, who promises to reverse aging with some highly unconventional treatments.

Still from A Blind Bargain (2025)

COMMENTS: Dominic Fontaine (Jake Horowitz) is a Vietnam veteran now residing in 1970s southern California, and he’s got a few problems. He’s down on his luck, caring for an aging mother, has a heroin addiction, and owes money to mobsters who regularly deliver a few kicks to his ribs to urge him to speed up his payment plan. That convergence of obstacles drives him through the lobby doors of the Gruder Institute and right into the care of one Dr. Gruder (Crispin Glover), with a stop to meet flirty intake nurse Ellie Bannister (Lucy Loken), who takes Dominic’s blood and signs him up for methadone treatments. Luckily, indie audiences are already familiar with heroin recovery practices thanks to Trainspotting. But A Blind Bargain is a quite different movie, where the drug addiction takes a back seat to the other kinds of weirdness going on. (It is also the second movie I can think of, after Naked Lunch, where bugs and drugs fit into the same plot.)

Turns out that analysis of Dominic’s sample shows that his mother’s blood would be valuable for research—valuable enough that the Gruder Institute offers $500 per pint (in 1980 dollars). Dominic’s mom, Joy (veteran actress Amy Wright), who thinks she’s going for spa treatments, happens to be a has-been actress who yearns for her old silent film days. She’s an easy sell for a treatment that restores her youth. From this set-up, we advance into an unpredictable labyrinth of character interactions and a typically gothic mad scientist story.

I should mention that A Blind Bargain is an attempt at remaking / reclaiming an infamously lost film of the same title, released in 1922 as a silent feature starring . Since I haven’t seen the original (and likely never will without a time machine), I can’t comment to how much of this is faithful to the original script and how much is invented this time around.

For weird movie fans, Glover alone could be enough of a reason to see it; he invests every line and gesture with his unique eccentricity like the master character actor he is. Jake Horowitz is notable as well; infinitely watchable with his steely blue eyes and Zig-Zag-man beard, he plays a convincingly desperate sad-sack without making him a sniveling wimp or a conniving scoundrel. Amy Wright came all the way from Synecdoche, New York to show she can still act circles around the best of them. The early pacing is perfect, with a tempo that takes just enough time with each scene to let us absorb the plot, such that you’re carried right past the odder scenes before you can ask too many questions. The editing, between eccentric old-school screen wipes and music that punctuates the playful quirkiness, hints that we’re in that humor-horror canyon where the movie can make a little fun of itself.

That said, despite a few drug-inspired hallucinations and some impressively off-kilter lines and even dashes of magical realism, the story never ramps up into truly weird territory. I sat waiting for a big shock, an alarming gross-out, a horrifying revelation, but all I got were mildly unexpected moments. The ending is upon us before we’ve quite digested act three, and a great deal is left unexplained,  especially romantic tensions that suddenly pop up between several characters. Mad science and body horror are frequent topics in our archives, with many movies that quaff a bigger shot of madness than this one does. Be that as it may, this film seems to be everything its creators intended. A Blind Bargain is comfort quirkiness for the film festival crowd, lovingly made with a zesty pace and a dedication to freaky medical practitioners everywhere.

A Blind Bargain is in limited release at the time of this review. We’ll let you know when it’s widely available.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Writer/director Paul Bunnell has made a trippy, bonkers and unconventional horror thriller with stylish cinematography, but it’s also tedious and exhausting.”–Avi Offer, “The NYC Movie Guru” (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE LAUGHING WOMAN (1969)

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Femina ridens, AKA The Frightened Woman

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This is the first in a limited series by Pete Trbovich entitled “Pete’s Perverted Pix,” examining the kinkier side of cinema.

DIRECTED BY: Piero Schivazappa

FEATURING: Philippe Leroy, Dagmar Lassander

PLOT: A wealthy aristocrat (and psychopathic sadist) kidnaps a woman and keeps her as his personal torture toy, until she turns the tables on him.

Still from The Laughing Woman (1969)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Even though the story is almost elementary, and 90% of the time it involves just two characters, you can’t take your eyes off the screen thanks to the psychedelic sets, ridiculous dialogue, and all-in committed performance from two very watchable actors. Far from typical Eurosleeze fare, by the end you know that The Laughing Woman has something to say, even if that message is just a harsh judgment on male-female politics dressed up in clown makeup.

COMMENTS: Every now and then, a movie throws you on first watch. The first time I saw The Laughing Woman, I dismissed it as exploitative Eurotrash aspiring to, but just missing out on, artistic redemption.  Act 1 left a sour taste in my mouth, which acts 2 and 3 tried, but failed, to wash away. Then I looked up what others thought, and to my surprise, I could hardly find one bad word that anyone has to say about this movie. But I did find reviews which breathlessly called it every kind of weird and a masterpiece. Some even drew comparisons to Death Laid an Egg.

So after a while, I gave it another try. Now that I knew where the film was ultimately going, I could appreciate little jokes I didn’t catch the first time, the mondo set pieces reminiscent of the village from TV’s “The Prisoner,” the deliberately turgid dialogue, and the sweet soundtrack tying it all together. While I still say this is a film with a nasty central idea, I have to admit that it is artistically framed and slyly dishes out a satire of sexual relations as it pulls the rug on the viewer. Perhaps the weirdest thing about this movie is how it forces you to admire it even while almost daring you to hate it.

Described variously as either an erotic thriller or a very dark comedy, the movies’ two titles (is the woman laughing, or frightened?) give you a hint that we’re in for an ambiguous time. Except for the bookending opening and closing scenes, the whole movie is focused solely on our lead characters. Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy) is a big shot rich guy with a powerful position in some organization, and Maria (Dagmar Lassander) is a reporter who needs to get in touch with him to research a story. They meet and immediately have an argument about the story she’s writing, but Sayer directs Maria to stop by his home anyway to pick up her research files. No sooner is she lured into his parlor to admire his art collection than the doctor drugs her drink. A Cosby-on-the-rocks knocks her out, and Maria awakes in Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE LAUGHING WOMAN (1969) →

Capsules

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: U-TURN (1997)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , , ,

PLOT: Bobby Cooper, a man missing two fingers and toting a suitcase full of money, gets stuck in a ramshackle desert community while fleeing mobsters.

Still from U-Turn (1997)

COMMENTS: About half a dozen times over the first third of U Turn, different people ask Bobby (Penn) what happened to his hand and then, upon hearing his repeated refrain of “an accident,” respond with the sage advice: “You should be more careful!” Bobby is indeed living the life of a careless man, as mobsters cut off two of his fingers after growing impatient with his failure to pay his debts. He’s now on the lam with a suitcase full of the mob’s money and a Ford Mustang. When he blows a radiator hose, he lands in the tiny desert town of Superior, Arizona.

Woe betide Bobby, who enters Superior like a mouse tossed into a rattlesnake terrarium. First, he’s ripped off by the town mechanic Darrell (Billy Bob Thornton as a bafflingly self-assured whacko who’s just bright enough to run a scam, but not a watt brighter). Then he loses his case of money in a store robbery. Next he follows local femme fatale Grace McKenna (Lopez) home and gets seduced right out of the shower, only to get punched by her husband, Jake (Nick Nolte), who makes things up to Bobby with a business proposal: help him kill his wife. (No worries, she’ll immediately flip the script.) But are Jake and Grace really lethal rivals trapped in a toxic marriage, or sadomasochist sickos who trick strangers into their badger games? How about the rest of the town, bristling with testy characters who want to start a fight with Bobby, or at least make him miserable? Sheriff Potter (lantern-jawed Boothe, sporting a five-thirty shadow) seems always on the verge of either saving Bobby from peril or locking him up, but one thing’s for sure: he knows more than he lets on.

What unfolds from all this is a pile-up of schemes and counter-schemes with Bobby trying (and mostly failing) to dodge incoming shots. All he wants is to get out of Superior in the worst way, yet an almost supernatural streak of bad luck thwarts him. The plot dutifully veers down a new hairpin twist every twenty minutes or so,  with a pacing that suggests on a Palm Springs vacation. The eccentric characters of Superior prompt Bobby to exclaim, “Is everybody in this town on drugs?” A blind old beggar (Voight) who panhandles on main street becomes Bobby’s personal Jiminy Cricket, offering him half-mad advice culled from a very rugged life. Can Bobby maneuver his way through this thorny desert maze of scheming reptiles and escape?

This is one well-crafted movie with memorable lines and characters, a sure treat for noir fans. Stone occasionally slips into a bit of cartoonish editing, but dwells longingly on the captivating desert scenery. The camera intermittently cuts to shots of vultures, snakes, coyotes, scorpions, and other deadly desert predators, drawing clear comparisons to Superior’s citizens. As a former southwest desert dweller myself, your humble author can verify that U-Turn perfectly gets small-town life there: the run-down businesses, the eccentric oddballs, the harsh environment, and the philosophy that you’d better have a good survival strategy or you have no business being here. The cast does an outstanding job all around. Penn is perfect as Bobby, because he’s a bit of an asshole anyway—so you don’t feel much sympathy for his plight, allowing the film to linger in comedy territory.

U-Turn had a budget of $19 million (clearly going to its all-star cast) and only made $6.6 million, a complete flop. That’s a shame, because it’s well-done and Stone obviously poured love into it. But this is a very lightweight, almost fluffy work, with the whole film amounting to little more than a shaggy dog story (albeit one with a body count). Some fans might compare it to a southwestern version of After Hours. But that’s the one problem with U-Turn: it feels like filler between bigger and better films. It’s good popcorn viewing while it lasts, but hours later it rolls out of your memory like the cinematic tumbleweed that it is.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The first two thirds of U-Turn is a rude, seductive head bender. But around the time it turns from day to night, the film begins to lose its tricky aura of borderline surreal mystery. It becomes another rigged, what-will-happen-next suspense game, and you begin to sense just how arbitrary the twists are. “–Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (contemporaneous)

U:Turn

U:Turn

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CAT SICK BLUES (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Dave Jackson

FEATURING: Matthew C. Vaughan, Shian Denovan, Meg Spencer, Jeni Bezuidenhout

PLOT: A former Internet celebrity whose life revolved around her cat’s  viral video performances and a fellow with a fetish for defiling and murdering women while dressed as a cat meet at a pet-loss support group. This is not a love story.

Still from Cat Sick Blues (2015)

COMMENTS: Within the first five minutes, Cat Sick Blues had already checked all my boxes for my favorite kinda horror movie: sick, dark humor on the /Full Moon spectrum (check), faithful adherence to horror movie protocol that the first two characters we meet die in minutes (check), a punk rock/screamo soundtrack that evokes the nihilist spirit of the story about to unfold (check), smirky social satire (check), a roller-coaster pace where you can’t possibly predict the next swerve (check), and a camera shot (pictured) with a head on a table, perfect to add to your decapitation scrapbook alongside Frankenhooker (check-a-roonie). By the time the first victim’s head had bounced gaily down the stairs, the movie had already bounced purring into my lap. Cat Sick Blues takes turns affectionately nuzzling your face and playfully clawing you hard enough to draw blood. Just when you think you can let your guard down, it bites your hand again, lest you get too comfortable. Many will be turned off by it, but for the rest of us horror/sicko freaks, this is our cup of catnip tea.

Claire (Shian Denovan) is the owner of Imelda, a fluffy white cat whose videos have taken on a viral life of their own. Sadly, Imelda’s fandom is a little too fanatic, as one obsessed fan shows up at her door and bluffs his way inside, only to summarily murder her cat and rape her. Broken, Claire ends up at a support group for bereaved pet owners (if you liked Fight Club’s satire of support-group culture, here’s another dose of that). There, she meets Ted (Matthew C. Vaughan), a towering and imposing fellow who’s also shy and antisocial. Ted is going through some things, to put it mildly. He has sought a support group way too late in life, having already converted himself by night into a serial killer in a cat mask. He even enlists the help of a local leather-crafter to fashion a set of sharp-clawed gloves, and a monster-sized strap-on spiked dildo to complete the ensemble. In this costume, he dispatches victims and, more than once, has a very dramatic orgasm while doing so, spasming on the floor in his cat mask and floppy dildo. All of this turns out to have a second purpose for Ted: he is collecting the blood of victims in a bucket in anticipation of re-animating his own dead black cat, Patrick. (Note to A Bucket of Blood: this is what a whole bucket of blood looks like!)

Claire and Ted hook up, after Ted makes a whirlwind cleaning tour of his apartment to hide the serial killer paraphernalia and trophies. So the question becomes, will Claire figure out that she’s dating a killer before Ted fulfills his body count? What happens from here becomes less clear as the story proceeds, until act three, where the director decides to let the story-logic slide into territory, with dream sequences and hallucinations clouding the narrative enough that we can pick our own ending. The one thing that’s clear is that this movie will have no shortage of indelible images right up to the end credits, including some genuine gross-outs.

For a small budget picture, it’s a pleasure seeing such attention to detail. The chaos is sharply filmed, framed, and hemmed in by a tight production all around. The set is filled with familiar cat-themed gift shop kitsch like cat mugs, cat T-shirts, and cat bongs. One scene has Claire sorting through her mail; the pile of envelopes has some custom-printed mailers relevant to the plot, with text you’ll want to freeze-frame so its carefully spread satire may be read and appreciated in full. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene has Ted visiting a rave where teenagers in glowing jewelry wave their phones in the air and the DJ raises a squirt-gun to his lips. Most impressive of all, Cat Sick Blues was released in 2015, and yet has not aged a single day. We’re still a culture obsessed with Internet fame and cats, wallowing in bizarre fetishes and shallow morals. Claire’s fans, adoring the content yet lacking empathy for its creator, flock to ridicule her situation, or steal clicks by posting reaction videos to her plight.

It’s remarkable that this film isn’t better known (or at least didn’t cross our radar sooner), but we can chalk that up to an Australian production by a director who seems to live entirely at film festivals down under. Reading the IMDB reviews, I see commenters practically coughing up hairballs as they remark how upsetting, offensive, and disturbing this movie is. Let the poor little kittens lap their safe milk. For us fans of feral film, Cat Sick Blues is the kitty that roars like a lion.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…sometimes movies just leave you completely confused and unsure of what it is that you just watched. That basically sums up how I felt once I had finished watching the bizarre Australian horror film, Cat Sick Blues.”–Chris Coffel, Bloody Disgusting (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by Bradley, who called it “one odd movie.”. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)

 

 

Cat Sick Blues

Cat Sick Blues

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