Category Archives: 366 Underground

366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DAYMAKER (2007)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Joe LiTrenta

FEATURING: Joe LiTrenta, Michael Nathanson, Cristina Marie Proctor, Myla Pitt, Sakura Sugihara, Carrie Terraccino, Sara Weibel

PLOT: On a clear day in New Jersey, twentysomethings meet up, chat, drink and take drugs, dream, and reconvene in new combinations.

Still from Daymaker (2007)

COMMENTS: Not too long ago, we talked about the options available to the no-budget filmmaker. They can go for taboo. They can go for shock value. They can try for goofball comedy. They can aim at surrealistic nonsense. They can go for flat-out absurdism. Whatever the approach, the goal is to demonstrate what an aspiring filmmaker can do even without all the bells and whistles and the fancy equipment and the support of a whole industry. And if there’s an important message about the human condition to convey in the process, then that’s just gravy.

Which brings us to Daymaker, a DIY debut from writer/director Joe LiTrenta that is about drugs. It’s not about the drug trade, or drug abuse, or drug profiteering. It’s not a hard-hitting exposé or a harrowing descent into addiction or even a psychedelic celebration. It’s just about drugs. We know this because it’s the only thing anyone in the film talks about. Any other topics—work, relationships, a movie someone saw—are filtered through the ongoing use of drugs, like a benzo-laced Bechdel Test that the film cannot pass. No one wants to leave it to chance that you might miss this reading of the text, so characters come out and say it at every opportunity. “I’m addicted to cocaine.” “Janice has a drinking problem.” “We did a bunch of molly.” “That’s right, no more acid for me.” “I’m supposed to have been sober for a month now and I can’t even stop my hands from shaking.” This feature is most amusing/bananas when a woman tells her daughter, “Mommy has an illness,” and the girl replies, “Because you like beer?” Daymaker is not a coy film.

Having laid its cards on the table, it has precious little to say about the subject. There’s a slot machine-approach to scenes, with characters from previous scenes coming together to start a new one. This hints at a La Ronde-esque format in which each new pairing reflects on the interactions we’ve seen before, or where a single character or object leads us on a picaresque journey, but there’s nothing so orderly. The unpleasantly rude boyfriend we meet at the very beginning of the film hasn’t gone any further emotionally or geographically when he returns halfway through to proposition a girl for her pink motorcycle helmet, nor has his now-ex-girlfriend when she turns up as the subject of a hastily staffed photo shoot with cigarettes and highway flares. People just come together willy-nilly, and there’s a good chance that when they do, they’ll be drinking or snorting or talking about having drank or snorted.

After a while, you start to get the sensation that it’s not the characters that have done drugs, but that the movie itself is high. It has that drifting lope to it, that sense of being in a conversation with someone who can’t hold the plot and who seems to be way too into whatever distraction comes up next. The comparison that kept coming to mind, unfavorably, was A Scanner Darkly, a film legendarily successful at putting the viewer inside the minds of its aimless, drug-addled protagonists while revealing their world for the hollow dead end that it is. Daymaker has some of those same moves, with significantly less plot to interfere. Drugs are certainly not glorified—people are either being told they need to get off that stuff or are admitting themselves that they need to get off that stuff—but there are no consequences. The most devastating impact of their addictions is that they are dreadfully boring. At more than two hours, Daymaker really needs to have something to say to justify itself, and it decidedly does not.

Daymaker is bad, but often in intriguing, surprising ways. The actors—you might assume they were all amateurs doing the director a solid until you see the surprising number of them with more than one credit to their name—deliver their dialogue with the desperate hopefulness of amateurs who have been asked to improvise, but the words they speak are so carefully assembled that they leave no room for an ad-lib. (At least one performer stumbles on her lines and they just leave it in.) Repeatedly, characters tell each other that they’ve just said something funny, and their word is all we have. Locations bounce between the basement of a rec center, a cellar decorated with cinder blocks and unpainted drywall, a series of sparsely decorated bedrooms and living rooms. These spaces are meant to suggest how low these people have fallen, but in fact scream “a friend loaned us their house for a day.” Twice, the film breaks into a dance number. You want it all to mean something, to add up to a message that has been lurking amidst the randomness, but it never does—and it doesn’t seem to want to.

There is at least one moment that I can take to the bank. It’s a dream sequence where a girl walks through a field of perfect green, leaving behind her the faintest trace as she cuts through the tall grass, while a boy stares after her clutching a childish mash note. The image is genuinely captivating. The guy who shot it must have some talent; somebody ought to throw a few bucks at him and see what he can do.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other critics have published reviews of this movie.

(This movie was nominated for review by Desmond, who said it was “damn weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: YOUR LIFE IS ON THE LINE! A JOE CHRIST ANTHOLOGY, VOL. 1

1 Comment
Beware

You have to feel sympathy for the poor microbudget filmmaker. There is almost nothing they can do that the Hollywood filmmaker cannot do better. The easiest option to stand out is to give viewers something that Hollywood can’t. This could be a non-clichéd storyline or avant-garde aesthetics; but those paths require hard work and talent. There is one fairly easy avenue to notoriety open to anyone brave and shameless enough to take it: show the audience something taboo. This path probably won’t get you rich, but it may at least get you noticed.

has repeatedly said, “It’s easy to be shocking. It is much harder to be witty at the same time.” Generations of underground filmmakers have been proving that adage true ever since Pink Flamingos spat in America’s face with its vision of smug, gleefully villainous drag queen coprophagia. Waters’ outcasts and gays weren’t sissies to be kicked around: they were powerful, they would cut you. And they would make you laugh, often against your better judgement. But ever since Waters blazed the path, punks, outsiders, and weirdos everywhere have spat out their own attempts at scandalizing the bourgeois, aping Waters’ shocks despite not possessing his wit or purpose, to diminishing returns. Few returns are as diminished as the 1980s-90s direct-to-VHS atrocities of one Joe Christ, punk musician turned garbage auteur. Now, VHS and early DVD revivalists Saturn’s Core have shoveled the collected refuse of Christ’s movie attempts from 1988-1995—God forbid, there’s a volume 2 coming!— into a trash bin of a Blu-ray. Here are the 5 short films included:

“Communion in Room 410” (1988): Joe literally cuts a woman with a razor on the arm and breasts, then he and another woman drink the blood. They also eat Wonder bread dipped in blood in mockery of communion. Joe’s irritating, badly recorded music plays in the background. This goes on for 20 minutes, with all the artistry of “2 Girls, 1 Cup.” Hard to watch; I suggest not watching it.

“Speed Freaks with Guns” (1991): Joe delivers a paranoid, methed-up monologue, then shows some home videos of him and 2 female cronies murdering random women, then steals a car and leaves New York. This mess does contain one interesting scene: a priest randomly pukes communion wafers on Joe as he passes by. It’s the one of a very few attempts at humor on the entire disc. It’s also, revealingly, the only scene where Christ depicts himself as a victim rather than the bully.

Still from Crippled

“Crippled”: A paralyzed woman is cruelly abused by her caretakers. This is actually a surprisingly trenchant critique of… naw, just kidding, it’s more crap.

Still from acid is groovy kill the pigs

“Acid is Groovy Kill the Pigs”: A meth addict buys acid because his dealer has no meth, eats the entire blotter, then goes on a killing spree and interviews the numerous other acid-chewing serial killers he knows. The “pigs” of the title aren’t cops; they’re everyone who isn’t a serial killer themselves. The only halfway good scene is death by puppy, another rare attempt at comedy. “Acid” shows improvement over the last 3 Christ films, in little details like title cards and music that’s properly recorded, but it’s still the cinematic equivalent of soap scum you find clinging to the grout in your shower.

Continue reading 366 UNDERGROUND: YOUR LIFE IS ON THE LINE! A JOE CHRIST ANTHOLOGY, VOL. 1 →
366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: INCORPOREAL MAN (2025)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Beware

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: None (completely generated by AI)

PLOT: A delusional bum with supernatural abilities tries to fight crime and save democracy.

Still from Incorporeal Man (2025)

COMMENTS: From the beginning, something feels off. Characters move clumsily and the imagery alternates between photorealistic and animated with no consistency at all. Then it becomes clear. This is a feature length film completely constructed with the help of Artificial Intelligence. But let’s not be negatively predisposed, assuming it will be the product of laziness and lack of talent, just because it doesn’t use real cameras and actors. Let’s soberly examine it for what it is, or at least attempts to be.

Director Haradon has a background in AI-made films: The Epic of Gilgamesh (2024) is a feature-length A.I. adaptation of the world-famous poem. Now, with Incorporeal Man, he works on an abandoned script of his own from 2004, bringing it for the first time ever on the “big screen.” The plot revolves around Jim, a disheveled drunkard (partly modeled on Haradon’s physical appearance) coming to town to catch the infamous serial killer “The North Butcher.” Jim develops a friendship with Roger, a cartoonish egg-shaped figure working at the Shit Factory—don’t ask–and through their conversations the protagonist’s background and special traits (like his superpower that allows him to travel through walls) are revealed. Pretty basic exposition, but it works.

Through Roger, Jim finds a job at the Shit Factory, too, studying kung fu in his spare time in hopes of saving the city from criminals and sickos. He mostly goes around talking about himself, though, getting trapped gradually in a series of destructive and self-destructive delusions. It all plays out like a dark comedy, with a protagonist who’s an exaggerated combination of two well known archetypes: half superhero, and half deadbeat detective out of a classic noir. Everything is archetypal, in fact, and mostly plays by the rules of classic narrative, with only the somewhat anticlimactic and ironic finale really making a difference.

If this movie wasn’t made by AI it would be basic, forgettable work. Here it has a distinct grotesque aesthetic, with decomposition and degradation imbued almost in every shot, not only in our low-life characters but in their environments, too. There’s also a nod to classic ian thrillers towards the climax.

For sure, there are some WTF elements along the way, such as the Shit Factory. The factory works mostly as an allegory, though, recalling shitty, alienating work environments most of us can relate to. The sound department is also AI software; it works okay, incorporating realistic voices and some classical tunes. There are some weird sound effects, however, like the farting noise heard whenever our character turns incorporeal to pass through walls.

All in all, this movie may appeal to a certain kind of audience that loves bad cinema. It is a Z-movie that might entertain for how outrageously silly it is. We do have to recognize the passion here. The movie is also available for free—legally—on YouTube, so you can check it out if the concept intrigues you. But a final warning: Incorporeal Man is in essence feature-length AI slop, nothing more.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The spirit of the late poet Bukowski becomes a ghost in the machine in the AI-tooled unconventional superhero feature The Incorporeal Man… Fans of Tim and Eric will like it, as this is way stranger and less irritating than the Tim and Eric feature movie.“–Michael-Talbot Haynes, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I NEVER LEFT THE WHITE ROOM (2000)

Leave a comment

AKA My Crepitus

Beware

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Michael Todd Schneider

FEATURING: Michael Todd Schneider, Eric Boring, Tom Colbert, Amy Beth Deford

PLOT: Hospital patient Jeffrey has violent, bloody dreams revolving around his life as a sex criminal and murderer.

Still from I Never Left the White Room (2000)

COMMENTS: The general tenor of I Never Left the White Room is established not in the first act, not even in the first minutes, but in the vanity card of the production company. The Maggot Films banner boasts stabs, screams, and gore to assure the viewer can expect only the most unpleasant, blood-curdling material. By that standard, I Never Left the White Room is an honest production indeed.

Schneider expands on a short film, and while one is inclined to salute him for deftly hiding the seams between old and new, the patchwork nature of the movie makes that faint praise. While there’s the suggestion of a narrative spine, I Never Left the White Room is really just a collection of disparate images, scenes whose common thread is their origin inside Jeffrey’s mixed-up brain. The title turns out to be a description of our mise en scene. 

Those visions are largely troubled, and Schneider distinguishes them with varying degrees of stylization. The most compelling is a dialogue set on a railroad trestle that warps the video image with posterization and color correction to suggest the demons inside our protagonist’s mind. Sometimes the beasts are literal, like a monster whose features can be smeared away like shaving cream. Other times, the horror has only the barest pretension to metaphor, like an absurdly lengthy scene in which a man spies on a woman taking a shower, each pleasuring themselves until the woman begins to bleed profusely. If the same central character weren’t involved, you would never know one thing had anything to do with the other. 

What Schneider is going for, other than checking items off a list, is not clear. There’s murder of women, already an infuriating trope but even more so when shorn of any motivation. There’s gore but, aside from the occasional jump scare, nothing that’s truly inventive. The acting and bare minimum of scripted dialogue don’t help, and there’s neither a hint of disgust nor irony. I think it’s supposed to be chilling, not funny, when the psychiatrist (who might also be a cop?) tells his patient, “I should be straight with you: my wife and daughters were raped and murdered last night.” As delivered, though, it’s not momentous; it’s ridiculous. 

I Never Left the White Room is trash. There’s a market for trash, of course, as evidenced by Schneider’s later association with Fred Vogel and the August Underground series. But this isn’t even good trash. Schneider has an hour of video to reveal the depths of his imagination; it proves to be shallow and aimless. Leave the white room. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the main aspect of this 70-minute piece of headache-inducing insanity is the endless stream of spliced together nightmarish visuals, surreal dreamy encounters, gory visions, bizarre symbolic imagery, lustful masturbatory fantasies sometimes including violence, grating sound effects, eye-slicing color filters, grainy post-editing effects, and so on…. mostly tedious…”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White Room) [Blu-ray]

  • Region Free Blu-Ray

List Price : 36.97

Offer: 22.99

Go to Amazon
Today on sale with a special price!
Take advantage of this special offer now!

 

(This movie was nominated for review by Kenshin, who described it as “very insane, very trippy, very surreal and extremely creepy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

366 Underground

CAPSULE: HOWLER (2025)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Howler is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Richard Bailey

FEATURING: , , Abel Flores, Blake Hackler, Laura Martinez

PLOT: A grisly hunter threatens the woods as Leni, an attuned poet, prepares to accept a life-changing award.

Still from Howler (2025)

COMMENTS:

“Your life is going to change.”

—”How do you mean that?”

“Oh, not in the sense you might hope.”

This exchange is intended more as a kindly tip-off than as a threat, but, as with most wisdom, it is not well received. The words here are talismanic; but then, in a way—and especially to a poet—all words are. Words are simultaneously weighty and evanescent. They are everywhere, and nowhere. And, from my vague understanding, one primary task of a poet is to nail them down and convey them—at least in their fleeting significance.

Howler is another meditation from director Richard Bailey on the nature of communication, perception, and the intersection of reality and unreality. Two earthly plot lines anchor the discourse: one concerning a poet, the other concerning the “grisly hunter” mentioned prior. But as per usual form, Richard Bailey the (word) poet and Richard Bailey the (image) poet are inseparable. Time and again the screen is just non-human sound and natural imagery. A triptych of floating blossoms recurs throughout as punctuation between conversational musings on vengeance, serenity, annihilation, and regrowth.

A poet’s lot is often an unhappy one,  toiling away at building spiritual insight using words, punctuation, and line breaks. But the joy it can bring, even to just one witness, makes their ordeal worth the sacrifices. Bailey dissects his vocation and that of his peers, through the lens of natural and human friction and coexistence. The ominous figure of the hunter is, I’d wager, symbolic: though I could not commit as to what. Perhaps he is our path toward ruination of self and surroundings; perhaps he is more tragic than malevolent.

There is much to misunderstand about humans and humanity. With Howler, Bailey takes another stab at capturing truth essence through the primitive tools of language, image, and sound.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Howler is not a horror film, despite what the opening 3 minutes suggest. While that will undoubtedly disappoint horror hounds, stick with it. The story is interesting, the characters engaging, and the direction dreamy.” — Bobby LePire, Film Threat (contemporaneous)