FEATURING: Bill Weeden, Kansas Bowling, Floyd Cashio
PLOT: During the trial of Psycho Ape, the filmmakers make a sequel to Psycho Ape.
COMMENTS:
Good afternoon, reader, we now take you to the Psycho Ape Part II -the Wrath of Kongreview, already in progress:
…and that moment when the presenter is challenged to a staring contest with the camera lens and proceeds to gaze at the viewer for several minutes—all while clips of this, that, and particularly the other spool out on the in-frame—it’s clear that these jokers (by which I mean Binek and Deliso) are really just doing whatever they want. The scattershot approach to this compelling nonsense keeps you on your toes, because who knows what will happen next? Will it be flashback? Complaints from Psycho Ape actors about not being in the sequel? More courtroom shenanigans? Or maybe it will just be a long segment featuring Bill “Doctor ZOOmis” Weeden getting his right ear pierced after avoiding this for decades?
This mash-up of Damon Packard, Stan Brakhage, and Jean-Luc Godard has everything to say, virtually all of it about how this is a sequel to a film, set twenty-five years before, during, or after the original, an original which…
I’m going to have to ask you to hold that thought as we have just received a live-breaking report from our man in the field, Giles Edwards.
Shocking, if true. We now return to Giles in the studio.
…so I’m not sure what more to say. From the nonsensical trial of Psycho Ape, to the odd nod to prey-predator polyamory, to the direct re-creations of classic film scenes (Titanic, The Dark Knight, and The Temple of Doom, among others), to the regular blasts of product placement, this is goofy, meandering, and defiantly pointless—with a degree of self-awareness not usually becoming for a feature film. But it’s always lively, and wraps up well before interest might wane. The talent gathered for this (presumably from a deep well of friends and acquaintances), though mixed in proficiency, is invariably cheerful, with a deep, deep, deep awareness that while they probably shouldn’t bother with this thing of a movie, they Can, and so, boldly, they Do.
FEATURING: Chris Alex, Nick Alex, Robert Benfer, Jennifer Alex
PLOT: A documentarian decides to devote an entire film to capturing a typical day in the life of unremarkable Nick, but an acquaintance of Nick’s named Chris shows up and proceeds to derail the project with his own demands, attention-stealing actions, and demonstrations of self-proclaimed genius.
COMMENTS: Jason Steele made his name in 2005 with a Flash animation called “Charlie the Unicorn” that unexpectedly went viral. He followed this breakthrough a sequel, and eventually three more, and further a series parodying the first series, and before you knew it, Steele had inadvertently stumbled into a career. His FilmCow studio has been pumping out material ever since. Somewhere along the way, Steele branched out into live-action, creating a second YouTube channel to showcase his collaborations with brothers Chris and Nick Alex. These are mostly shorts, but our subject today is the time they tried to go for more.
Reportedly, the film was improvised and shot in an entire day. This checks out. The sketches that comprise Nick: The Feature Film display a similar pattern: Fawning documentarian Robert asks Nick to demonstrate some aspect of his plebeian existence, but before Nick can get too far, insane egotist Chris swoops in to tout his superior inventiveness, break some stuff, and leave irritation in his wake. Chris displays all the hallmarks of an improv nightmare, denying the choices of others, hamming it up for the audience to the exclusion of his castmates, and repeating flop jokes under the notion that the funny is in the callback. To be fair, his scene partners are letting him do this, so they clearly believe he’s on to some comic gold.
So let’s talk about our comic star. Chris presents himself as a genius; he undercuts this assessment every time he opens his mouth. He’s particularly adept at ruining existing things by attempting to “plus” them, such as his self-serving takes on Battle Monopoly or Double Badminton. He invites cult figures into Nick’s house, he tries to fix a car with a shovel, and just generally wanders around Titusville with a bracing and unearned self-confidence. It’s a fully committed performance, but it sucks up all the air in the room. This may be Nick: The Feature Film, but it’s really Chris: The Nonstop Antics.
The Monopoly scene shows the limits of this kind of thing as improv: Chris makes up rules at random, like a newfangled version of fizzbin. Nick blithely goes along with whatever Chris says, while Robert’s role is to question the logic like a proper straight man. We don’t learn anything we didn’t already know—Chris is a consummate BS artist, Nick and Robert are different varieties of pushover—and the scene runs for several minutes through its heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenario, at which point it just ends with Chris declaring victory and everyone else shrugging their shoulders. To be blunt: if only one character gets the chance to do anything, you don’t have a scene.
I have to confess that I’m immediately taken out of the concept of Nick: The Feature Film long before Chris arrives. There is absolutely nothing compelling about Nick. Inoffensive but bland to the point of invisibility, he has nothing to show and nothing to say. This renders the smitten Robert as either insightful beyond typical human understanding or flatly stupid, which explains why the narrative is interspersed with interludes that tell extraordinary tales of Nick’s rich life. They are sketched out on chalkboards, with only a photograph of Nick’s face to connect with anything real. The Nick of these stories bears zero relation to the one we see in live-action. In illustration, Nick is a near-superhero, saving lives. In person, he’s a bland doofus who has barely prepared for an entry-level job interview. The gleefully absurd tales of Nick’s exploits stand in stark relief to the passive, featureless nobody whom we see onscreen, so you can either try to take the film at face value or you can accept it as an absurd platform for the comic stylings of the FilmCow collective. Neither approach works entirely.
For a home movie shot on the fly, Nick looks pretty good, and there are small pleasures to be had, like the neo-evangelist who shows up at Nick’s door and proceeds to quietly follow Robert around way too closely. (She’s played by another member of the Alex clan, Jennifer.) And it’s fairly amusing that the film ends with Robert refusing to accept the finale that’s right in front of him—Chris finally earns his chops by standing up to a blowhard who insults his friend —instead creating his own take in which Chris receives a series of increasingly giant swords falling from the sky and lodging up his rectum. But these amusements take a back seat to a conundrum and a frustration: the empty shirt we’re supposed to be interested in and the irritating loon who demands our attention instead.
PLOT: A mysterious milkman helps a grieving mother deal with the loss of her child.
COMMENTS: I could give The Absence of Mil k in the Mouths of the Lost a “Beware” tag, because the average viewer will immediately want to flee during the opening scene of a cow giving birth in real time. But, if you are reading this, chances are you are not the average viewer. Instead, I’ll just remind you that when you brave Milk, you are venturing into the strange and treacherous world of microbudget DIY surrealism—so calibrate your expectations accordingly.
A milkman (when exactly is this supposed to be set?) delivers glass bottles to a house where a young woman bathes in filthy black liquid with a blank expression; she doesn’t answer the bell when he rings. The milkman lives in a dingy basement decorated with pictures of missing children cut out from milk cartons—and a breast hanging on his wall that drips white liquid into a bowl. Meanwhile, in an alternate plane of reality, mute, cigar-smoking, boxer-wearing devils covered head-to-toe in white greasepaint plot mischief against a trio of masked children. The milkman has buzzy schizophrenic hallucinations where he sees a masked woman knitting and delivering electronically altered monologues while walled in by Brakhage-style “paint-on-the-film” moving canvases. A few dramatic sequences, and much moping about the dilapidated house, advance the woman’s story, until she and the milkman finally meet for an exposition dump to tie (some of) the plot strands together. The children find it almost shockingly easy to best the middle-aged demons that beset them.
Milk clearly suffers from its low budget. The visuals often display thrift-store ingenuity, but the sound can be a serious issue: many sections were filmed without any, and there are several moments when what might be meaningful dialogue is muffled. At other times, the dialogue is both nearly inaudible and digitally altered. It’s needlessly frustrating. It’s also a pity that so much of the middle of the film has such poor sound quality, when in the opening and closing, where Esparos’ musician friends contribute songs (including a deranged cover of the gospel standard “I’ll Fly Away”), the sound mix is crucial and well-executed.
There’s a difference between having a lot of creativity on display and everything clicking. If you can focus on the former, Milk has a lot to offer. Some of the imagery is arresting: the cigar-smoking demons are as brilliantly conceived as they are easily achieved, and sequences like the woman who pierces her milk-bag bra (!) with a knife are hard to forget. And although some of the imagery is shocking, its always purposeful and empathetic. The movie has a good heart. It helps to love cows.
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DIRECTED BY: Tom Lee Rutter
FEATURING: Voice of The Shend
PLOT: A narrator elucidates various superstitions whilst they are presented on-screen, with both live actors and animation.
COMMENTS: Crank the understated cheek to eleven and put your brain pan in the oven set to “Regulo Brittania,” because here’s a documentary that’s so quirkily English it could pass as a scone-geared Big Ben clock crowning Queen Victoria. Squeezing Häxan through a blue filter and making heavy use of its “toffee” toned narrator, Tom Lee Rutter assembles a light-minded diversion covering all manner of mankind’s nonsenseries. Why does a bride want “something blue” on her wedding day? Where is the best place to look for faeries? And just what is “Devil’s Nutting Day”? All these questions, and more, are answered here.
You can come and go from this film, as it is broken into easy, bite-sized bits of trivia (and I mean that in the classical sense of the term), and it’s so compact it fits in your pocket for quick and easy consultation. This Pocket Film, by and large, is a documentary, or perhaps more accurately, a primer; but since its subject matter is nonsensical pre- and post-cautions for irrational dangers, it may best be viewed as an anthropological study. A silly anthropological study. The narrator guides the viewer throughout, offering both advice to the viewer and observations of the actions on-screen, these performed in grand early-cinema style by a large cast (including cameos from horror legends Caroline Munro andLynn Lowry.)
Having a fairly thorough personal knowledge superstitious troubles and solutions, the cinematic interludes—and the sage counsel from Shend, narrator-extraordinaire—all ring true. Most pertain to the Death and the Devil, and their various agents. Saint Agnes was new to me—along with her ritual of the “dumb cake” (Shend is silenced by an on-screen lady as he is about to explain; and for good reason: it is a dumb ritual, after all); and while I always know to cover my mouth when I yawn, I know now that it’s to block off my “soul hole,” thus preventing the Devil from sneaking inside of me. Around a third of the way in we meet a new font of information, the “Hand Maiden,” who gives a five-minute refresher on various hand gestures and their purpose (“Whenever in doubt, you can always use Jazz Hands!”)
With old and new “information,” The Pocket Film of Superstitions never bores, often tickles, and is always very, very British. It closes on the declaration, “we leave you to ponder the great weirdness of man,” having provided a good many explanations, of sorts, pertaining to some couple dozen irrational behaviors, reactions, and practices. Not a terribly long film—running for a sensible hour and a half—its breeziness wafts gently, and winkingly, over the viewer. And while it occasionally risks sailing into twee territory, Rutter holds the rudder just firmly enough to prevent Pocket Film from inducing true groans of regret.
The Pocket Film of Superstitions is currently on the festival circuit, and is expected to debut on streaming (and physical media?) by the end of the year or in early 2025. It next screens at the BUT (B-movie, Underground and Trash) Festival in Breda, the Netherlands, on August 29, followed by a date at the Amazing Fantasy Fest in Buffalo, New York in September. You can keep up with the schedule at The Pocket Film of Superstitions‘s official Facebook page.
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DIRECTED BY: Fabio Salerno
FEATURING: Francesco Rinaldi, Maddalena Vadacca; Luigi Sgroi, Nadia Rebeccato, Piero Belloto; Marco Monzani, Giorgia Chezzi
PLOT: In this horror anthology, a man plots abduction of the woman who’s left him, another plots possession of a woman who’s leaving him, and a third plots incorporation of a woman who’s no longer living.
COMMENTS: Three short films await us, projected in a dingy, dark room. Dust-covered sound equipment, cobwebbed film reels, and a menacing tinge of green fill the narrow screen, as an unseen entity inquires, “How many of you have found yourself the subject of incredible stories?” The Other Dimension spools out like miniature theater event: two shorts preceding a near-feature.
Salerno kicks off with “Delirium”, a fun variant of the “Bluebeard” folktale. Simply constructed, the segment features clever lighting, with the unearthly sparkles of the protagonist’s whiskey and glass capturing the titular condition, and giallo greens exuding organic menace. The film’s frame is put to compelling use as our angular stalker’s and victim’s fates collide. Most troublingly, Salerno manages an abstract, and impressively brief visual metaphor for rape, whose beauty left me quite unnerved. Closing with a shot of three heads by a bottle of Pepsi, Salerno wraps up the action and we are quickly brought to the squabbling exes of “Mortal Instinct.” The title is a bit heavy-handed, but the second short (the weakest of the three) goes by quickly enough. But not before it makes some remarks on machismo by way of Black Magic—with a bodily destruction sequence that may not appear realistic, but somehow manages to be ickily convincing nevertheless.
The main course of The Other Dimension, “Eros e Thanatos (Love & Death)”, shows off Salerno’s talents about as far as his means could allow. Some fifty minutes in length, its story of decayed love rotting into aberrant obsession left me, against considerable odds, wishing for a happy ending to fall upon the quiet protagonist. Judicious montage, narration, and, once again, a keen eye for lighting simultaneously showed how cleverly this was made—and how inexpensively. The lead actor, Marco Monzani, never plays a note wrong, whether he’s awkwardly paying the cabbie to get his ex-girlfriend moving on her way, or taking her by the hand as she emerges from the grave. “Eros e Thanatos” lies somewhere between Angstand After Hours, and its action, though scant, floats by on gusts of a sickly-sweet breeze.
Stumbling into this experience with no information beyond “low budget”, “Italian”, “horror”, and the IMDb filmmaker overview’s sole blurb, “Died 1993 · Milan, Italy (suicide)”, I really didn’t know what to expect from this, but it was certainly not that The Other Dimensions would have such impressive flashes of on-screen poetry. To the best of my knowledge, Fabio Salerno is a name known only to a small subsection of horror buffs. This final offering, completed not long before his death at the age of thirty-one, clearly shows that the world of cinema lost a promising voice far too soon.
…and that moment when the presenter is challenged to a staring contest with the camera lens and proceeds to gaze at the viewer for several minutes—all while clips of this, that, and particularly the other spool out on the in-frame—it’s clear that these jokers (by which I mean Binek and Deliso) are really just doing whatever they want. The scattershot approach to this compelling nonsense keeps you on your toes, because who knows what will happen next? Will it be flashback? Complaints from Psycho Ape actors about not being in the sequel? More courtroom shenanigans? Or maybe it will just be a long segment featuring Bill “Doctor ZOOmis” Weeden getting his right ear pierced after avoiding this for decades?
I’m going to have to ask you to hold that thought as we have just received a live-breaking report from our man in the field, Giles Edwards.
…so I’m not sure what more to say. From the nonsensical trial of Psycho Ape, to the odd nod to prey-predator polyamory, to the direct re-creations of classic film scenes (Titanic, The Dark Knight, and The Temple of Doom, among others), to the regular blasts of product placement, this is goofy, meandering, and defiantly pointless—with a degree of self-awareness not usually becoming for a feature film. But it’s always lively, and wraps up well before interest might wane. The talent gathered for this (presumably from a deep well of friends and acquaintances), though mixed in proficiency, is invariably cheerful, with a deep, deep, deep awareness that while they probably shouldn’t bother with this thing of a movie, they Can, and so, boldly, they Do.
![The Absence of Milk In the Mouths of the Lost [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41ka8UflTYL._SL500_.jpg)
![The Other Dimension and the Films of Fabio Salerno [Blu-ray Set]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61RdJgdJN6L._SL500_.jpg)