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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ANYTHING THAT MOVES (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Alex Phillips

FEATURING: Hal Baum, , Nina Hartley, Ginger Lynn Allen, Jiana Nicole, Frank Ross

PLOT: Liam loves his job as a prostitute, but then his clients end up getting murdered.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Equal parts joyous, explicit sex and sinister, gory violence, Anything That Moves is a light romp with a heart of darkness.

COMMENTS: Who are these people? What does this title mean?  Where is this story going? Why am I both titillated and unnerved? And how can I hope to write about this fleshful oddity?

Having hit dizzying heights of strange with Jacked Up and Full of Worms, Alex Phillips strikes again with the twice-sold-out feature, Anything That Moves. Phillips and his team (including plenty held over from Worms) arrange the screen with cheerful workers, sympathetic clients, and glowing orgasms. There is love, sex, tenderness, sex, comradery, and sex. But there is also a malignant element advancing from the edges.

What does one do to “anything that moves”? To the best of my knowledge, one of two things: fuck it, or shoot it. Liam, our hero, does the former; he serves his clients very well indeed. The latter appears in the form of two questionable cops who are increasingly suspicious as mutilated bodies pile up. Cop One (he’s got a name, doesn’t really matter) makes no secret of wanting to pop caps in woke millennials. Cop Two, the “good cop,” is no less judgmental, but at least isn’t inclined toward drug-and-violence sprees like his partner.

This hero’s journey takes Liam from a life of lucrative sexual service into the alleyways that turn increasingly dark as the shadowy menace becomes increasingly choate. Bacchanalian bliss sours into bilious nihilism. Our sunshiny sex worker Liam never loses his sparkle, but he is forced to harden in a manner his clients don’t pay for. Shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm, Anything That Moves’ gauzy visual grittiness nicely complements the film’s tone. Ridiculous episodes accentuate the overarching cockeyed tone: the “smoking funeral” scene was quite touching. The movie itself, in its way, is also touching. No matter how dark the nights become for Liam, he remains defiantly innocent and awed by life’s elements and opportunities.

So perhaps there is a third reading of the title: it behooves us to find the beauty in anything that moves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Phillips leans into that absurdity, blending porn fantasy with grindhouse grime, and letting his characters operate in a version of Chicago that feels more like a fever dream than any reality-based urban landscape… Editing contributes to the film’s dreamlike quality, but also plays a part in its confusion. Jarring cuts and sudden tonal shifts give the film a surreal rhythm. Still, they also undercut any sense of pacing or escalation… For those who crave transgressive cinema and aren’t bothered by a messiness, this could find a cult following. However, for viewers seeking something coherent, satisfying, or emotionally resonant, this one is likely to fall short of expectations.”–Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (festival screening)

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: F*CKTOYS (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Annapurna Sriram

FEATURING: Annapurna Sriram, Sadie Scott, Damian Young, François Arnaud, Brandon Flynn

PLOT: A sex worker learns she’s under a curse, and must come by one-thousand dollars for a sacrificial ritual to banish the black magic.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Sure, sure, it’s got leather-bondage cops, ritual sacrifice, a golden phallus, and so on. But what truly makes F*cktoys an odd duck is that its dirty NC-17 veneer encloses a warm-hearted romantic comedy adventure that shines through from underneath the sleaze.

COMMENTS: Outside the cinema, an individual in a hazmat suit haphazardly scrubbed any and all surfaces with a cleaning brush. The doors opened, and the house was packed by jolly rowdies from all different walks of life. (Some of them rather different indeed.) Much scurrying to and fro, as Fantasia staff ushered key people to key places. A hush, and a roar, and the presenter intoned the title “F*cktoys!” (without the asterisk.) Enter Annapurna Sriram, beaming with excitement. Few could deny her her joy, for she was about to exhibit her film to a Fantasia audience—an audience that couldn’t have been a better fit for F*cktoys if it had been lab-grown for the purpose.

Our hero’s journey begins, ends, and never departs from the mystical alternate 1990s reality of “Trashtown.” There is plenty of trash, scattering the roadways, littering overgrown industrial facilities, and filling the sordid interiors. The plucky heroine, known only as AP, receives shocking news from a shockingly fabulous fortune teller: she must somehow gather a wad of cash (and a baby goat) to rid herself of ill fortune. With her good friend Danni in tow (unexpectedly, as AP was fairly sure this buddy had snuffed it), she rides, hustles, and endures many trials on her path to deliverance.

That path is strewn with odd sex, odd venues, and oddballs. Danni takes a gig catering to sexuo-philosophical celebrity James Francone (not to be confused with a similarly named individual), shutting him up about his water-coloring through use of a lubed fist. AP’s client-friend Robert apologizes for culminating so quickly (but then, “I’m, like, 90% gay”). A robbery (hah) goes awry, the screw turns, and AP is forced to cater to a mysterious gentleman known as “The Mechanic”: a true sweetheart, and loving to the core—apart from his penchant for sexual mutilation.

This all unfurls to the beat of a bouncy quest-comedy, with AP haplessly—but cheerily—sliding from one fun or strange or dangerous set piece to the next. Special note should be made of Sadie Scott’s performance as the best friend, Danni. Gender-ambiguous, rough-and-tumble, their energy and zeal makes them reminiscent of Toyah Willcox’s “Mad” character from Derek Jarman‘s Jubilee. Danni’s tragic fate is equaled in intensity only by their love of AP (and of donuts).

As befits a journey on a moped, F*cktoys is a bit of a bumpy ride. Most of its parts work, however—the extended Robert-ex-machina scene alone is worth the price of admission—and overall, the pieces fit together with cheerful clunk and whirl. It was made lovingly for our kinds of people,  kinds of people: joyful perverts, joyful outcasts, and joyful subversives. So if you want to smooth the corners of some square in your life, trick them into a F*cktoys screening and watch as they uncomfortably squirm their prudishness away.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story of a Southern sex worker’s bizarre adventures trying to reverse a curse remains witty and watchable for its entire running time, juggling an abundance of strange characters and story threads en route to a surreal and unexpectedly heartfelt ending.”–Murtada Elfadl, Variety (contemporaneous)

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DOG OF GOD (2025)

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Dieva suns

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DIRECTED BY: Lauris Abele, Raitis Abele

FEATURING: Voices of Armands Bergis, Agate Krista, Karelins Kristians, Madi Madara, Einars Repse, Jurgis Spulenieks, Regnars Vaivars

PLOT: A shamanistic traveler looms on the outskirts of town, while a local priest accuses a tavern owner of witchcraft.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Erotic parrot-mask dancing, cat-licking, distillate of priapism, a lascivious leech encounter, and parting Hell’s seas are among the weird things to devour in in this diabolical delicacy.

COMMENTS: Opening your movie with an aged warrior using a chain-loop to tear off Satan’s massive testicles as they rest below a massive upright phallus is a ballsy move. But by the close of Dog of God, it is clear that ballsy moves are just what this crew do. Brothers Lauris and Raitis Abele pull an ancient (?) trial from fastidiously transcribed historical documents and wrench it by the neck (and possibly elsewhere), squeezing it through a gritty, -cum- palette, setting the dirt and violence and hallucinations to a throbbing synth-metal soundtrack. Dog is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.

For your consideration: a guilt-ridden priest with masochistic tendencies; an female alchemist running a tavern; a crippled young monk pushed too far; an obese baron determined to sire an heir; and a tattooed dog man recently returned from the underworld with bad news. These characters, and others, are grimily brought to life through a somber palette daubed occasionally with the vibrant hues of blood, piss, and vomit. This is not a glamorous Middle Ages; this town seems to have almost nothing in it but drunkenness, poverty, guilt, and weeks of torrential rain.

The grimy atmosphere and morose characters could easily have acted as a drag, but elements enliven it. The film score is metal to the bone, with crashing blasts of evil notes underscoring the literal Hellscape as the story travels to the figurative Hell on Earth.  A pungent darkness infects nearly all the characters, with perversions never far from the surface, and cruelty never far from action. The priest’s obsession with a pathetic relic (a piece of straw, somehow “holy”) seems both to awe and arouse the evil pastor. The rotoscope treatment adds a haunting element of the uncanny, as these grotesques flirt with human form and motion. And the stifling atmosphere leaves the viewer forever checked into a nasty state of anticipation until the violent, mind-popping climax.

In short, this was amazing. A blast; I laughed, I gasped, I winced, and, once or twice, just about reeled. The Abele brothers were inspired by all the right people; and as they related in the Q&A session after the screening, “Latvia is very dark and cold most of the year, so you’ve got nothing to do but use your imagination.” Drinking some probably wouldn’t hurt, nor would white-spotted toadstools. However they distilled their multivarious inputs, the important thing is Dog of God emerges from the fetid haze of history and hopelessness — landing on the eye of the viewer like a cackling splat from the backside of an ill-omened bird.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Fans of midnight madness should look no further than Dog of God… a visually scrumptious 17th century trip somewhere between Witchfinder General and Mandy.“–Payton McCarty-Simas, Film Inquiry (festival screening)

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK (2025)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Kana Aoi, Daisuke Kasuya, Atsuko Nakata, Sayaka, Kei Taniguchi

PLOT: A missing-persons case steers Tamala and her friend into a world of corporate nefariousness, deep-time conspiracy, and staggering cosmic implications.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: To quote Fantasia programmer Rubert Bottenberg: “The Japanese kawaii paradigm of Hello Kitty and Hatsune Miku collides with cabalistic capitalism, cataclysmic prophecy, and the ruptured realities of , , and in… a deviously dreamlike, metaphysical mind-melt of high-fructose, retro-futuristic, paranoid pop-art brilliance.”

COMMENTS: Having your eyes bombarded at the end of a long day can be rather refreshing: something to wipe away the accumulated impressions, and leave your perception open to embrace the crazy world anew. This effect was indeed welcome, for as Tamala likes to say: “Another f*cking day is about to begin.” This line, delivered in a childlike, brat-girl, cutey pie kind of way, kicks off the (*deep breath*) Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in the Dark experience. An experience unlike any other I’ve witnessed on the big screen. An experience, if I may, whose existence hinges on the manifold developments of the past century and a half, and on the strange minds of the enigmatic t.o.L team.

For those unfamiliar with the Tamala phenomenon (as I was, until the screening), she was introduced to the world—at Fantasia, I believe—in 2010. Per her bio, she is “[a] young female cat, born in the Orion Constellation on the Odessa star; cute, but uses much foul language. She was genetically engineered in Cat Year 1869 to always remain a year and a half old, in order to be the immortal mascot of the mega-conglomerate CATTY & Co.” Which should give you the gist of things.

Where the gist may slip from your grasp may depend, but having missed the gist before the Tamala movie screening, I was still a happy viewer as Tamala 2030 washed over me like a wave of strange black and white purréed media. Tamala dances, Tamala curses, Tamala munches on pocky, and all the while the movie spools out impossible amounts of ambient details. Seven cities in seven different prefectures have seen simultaneous disappearances of seven different two-year-old cats. (The fact that one of them handsome spurs Tamala to join her boy-friend’s [?] investigation of the matter.) The specifics clatter on-screen at a blistering pace as Tamala, always boing-boinging in her steps, saunters fearlessly through class riots, cabalistic postal machinations, and onward to her empyrean duel amongst the stars.

t.o.L. manage the difficult hat-trick of fusing several graphic styles into a cohesive—albeit capital-“I”-Incredible—world. Tamala 2030 is a symphony of sight, walking a devilishly narrow through-line of technique where any slight variation would have catastrophically cacophonous results. Echoes of late ’90s screen-saver loops, mid-19th-century advertisement figures and fonts, flash™-y forms, and 3D-celestiality are all here, and all coexist. This film is a dizzying march through time and space, an appropriately epic-length adventure with pathos, frog-licking, reincarnation, cow spotted sports cars, intrigue, graffiti—and more than one explosion of Tamala into swarms of mini-Tamalas.

Oh yes, this will cleanse and flush your mind’s palette, and you’ll feel jumbled and pumped and ready to rock—’cause another f*cking day is about to begin.

Tamala‘s theatrical release date is uncertain, but Deaf Crocodile has acquired the physical media rights and plans to release the film in 2026.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other reviews were found at time of publication

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE DEVIL’S BRIDE (1974)

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Velnio nuotaka

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DIRECTED BY: Arunas Zebriunas

FEATURING: Gediminas Girdvainis, Vasyl Symchych, Regina Varnaite, Vaiva Mainelyte, Regimantas Adomaitis

PLOT: Cast down from Heaven, minor demon Pinchiukas tricks an Earthly miller into signing away his daughter.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Featuring a bumbling God, a prancy little devil, and non-stop rock and roll and orchestra, this Cold War relic bubbles over with breezy “what the Hell?” charm.

COMMENTS: I don’t always watch devil-summoned naiads pursue a hunky suitor, but when I do, I prefer them on horseback. At a slightly too-long seventy-five minutes, The Devil’s Bride catches the eye and raises the eyebrow from the start, commencing its cavalcade of song and dance with a gilded frame bounding the Lord and a host of singing cherubim. God dozes on and off, with the angels discovering the temptations of feasting, drinking, and smooching during their brief moments without supervision. Cue the music transition from the classic big blast hymnal choir. At one point, God’s thronal bell loses its clapper, and chaos ensues for just too long while he attempts to fix it. By the time he rings it to restore order, several of the Heavenly host are ripe for a fall: lady angels losing grace in go-go dance outfits, fellow angels done up in full 19th-century foppery. And we meet our anti-hero, Pinchiukas, fallen into a pond, depressed and ready to begin scheming.

Some of my confusion about the plot flow stems certainly from a regrettable lack of knowledge about Lithuanian folklore. (Some, too, doubtless from the punch-drunk mental state I was in after very little sleep the preceding night.) Are gay angels a recognized aspect of Soviet Lithuanian Catholic doctrine? Who is that incessantly aria-ing blonde on the boat who immediately falls for the homely miller? How is it the local swain so swiftly seduces—and is seduced by—the daughter? (Was it his manly-but-romantic chomping of a daisy flower head that clinched the deal)? What is up with that elaborate gold-carved window frame on the mill exterior? How about those disembodied black-elbow-gloved hands at the devil’s beck and call? And why is a devil, but not an angel or God, bound so scrupulously by legal contract verbiage?

This final question is one I have for supernatural folktales more broadly. Suffice to say, the questions raised are as superfluous as any answers that might be furnished by a more illuminated viewer.

Despite stalling out on occasion, and despite the repetitiveness of every one of the songs, The Devil’s Bride is a romp that borders on the madcap, particularly thanks to leading man Gediminas Girdvainis as the little devil. It was pleasant to observe that, confused though I was about the occult mechanics, the portrayal of “evil” was ultimately sympathetic. Ne’er shall I forget his pomp and ridiculousness on the day of his wedding, with fancy chapeau, hunting-red jacket, and his sheer, skin-tight white leggings. Comely daughters and swains the world over, beware the appeal of the devil in tights.

The Devil’s Bride is restored and presented by Deaf Crocodile, available now in a limited edition Blu-ray, with a standard edition scheduled for a mid-September release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a 78-minute audio-visual barrage of ideas, music, and chaotic storytelling that is not for the faint of heart… feels somehow both like an Eastern Bloc Babes in Toyland style fantasy and also as if Jodorowsky made a musical… I’ll be damned if I’ll ever forget it.”–J. Hurtado, Screen Anarchy (festival screening)