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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE CATHEDRAL OF NEW EMOTIONS (2006)

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Die kathedrale der neuen gefühle

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DIRECTED BY: Helmut Herbst

PLOT: Members of a Seventies Berlin commune travel through space aimlessly in a shipping container clutched in a giant fist, until an amnesiac stowaway divulges information on the location of the commune’s founder.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even in the world of animated psychedelic European science-fiction—a small niche, admittedly—there aren’t many projects that open with a naked figure trampolining on a small patch of bell peppers as the titles scroll by in the background. That turns out to be practically the baseline of “normal,” in light of what follows.

COMMENTS:  Various members of the commune/spaceship frequently repeat the phrase “My eyes are cast down in awe,” and it’s a fitting description of the experience of watching The Cathedral of New Emotions. Expanded from director/co-writer Herbst’s 1971 short, Cathedral follows the antics of a 1970s commune repurposed as soft 1970s sci-fi in the vein of or Samuel Delany. It’s like an animated Dark Star with sex and drugs, with a slight element of The Final Programme in the mix. When the spaceship is contained in a fist, hard science is not going to be a primary element, especially when the spacecraft has windshield wipers that sweep off detritus such as bugs and a Hawkman from “Flash Gordon.” The journey through space isn’t just physical. The main space of concern is the metaphysical: one character remarks that “he lives in his head,” and upon his rediscovery of commune founder Madson, a self-described “merchant of images,” he tells another that they are “also just fiction.” There’s a political element, with May ’68 and the Vietnam War referenced both directly and indirectly through the disaffected and somewhat aimless behavior of the “crew.”

Cathedral comes across as a smarter and hornier version of an offering made for stoners with brains. There is a lot of sexual imagery and content, both hetero and homo (a cocooned threeway, a visual pun regarding “blowjob”). If it’s still not clear, the lyrics of the Krautrock-styled theme song at the beginning and end of the film feature the chorus “You’re inside of me/Deep, deep inside of me, ohhh.” In keeping with the Adult Swim comparison, the closest  (watered-down) equivalent might be “Superjail!” (although that show features more grotesque cruelty and violence than sex.) Cathedral even has a pair of indeterminately gendered twins who serve roughly the same function as similar “Superjail!” pair, providing a mocking chorus and running commentary on the action. The TV cartoon’s design is also more grotesque than Cathedral‘s, although Herbst includes an element of grotesquerie related to sexual body horror.

Cathedral made its home video premiere courtesy of Deaf Crocodile as a (now sold-out) limited deluxe edition with a booklet including essays from Walter Chaw and Alexander McDonald and slipcover. The standard edition includes a commentary by German film historian Rolf Giesen that is as much a history of German animation as a discussion of this film (description is somewhat pointless because the film is experimental, Giesen says upfront, but he does talk about Cathedral and Herbst in the latter part of the commentary); a visual essay by filmmaker Stephen Broomer; “Container Interstellar,” the 7-minute short that was expanded into Cathedral; a 25-minute documentary examining Herbst’s work (mainly television shorts and an acclaimed documentary on the DADA movement); and an interview with Herbst, who died in 2021.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Defying any kind of logical description, the animated German sci-fi fever dream The Cathedral of New Emotions can proudly stand as the trippiest title released to date by Deaf Crocodile — and that’s saying something!”–Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital (Blu-ray)

The Cathedral Of New Emotions [Blu-ray]

The Cathedral Of New Emotions [Blu-ray]
  • German director Helmut Herbst's long-lost animated sci-fi feature, a true hallucinogenic Space Freakout
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SURFER (2024)

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

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim

PLOT: A divorced father (Nicolas Cage) plans to buy the Australian beachside house he grew up in and teach his son to surf the waves like he did as a boy, but local “surf gangsters” torment him, insisting the beach is for “locals only.”

The Surfer (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The metaphor is obvious, but apt: this is a movie where you just catch Cage’s wave and ride it where it takes you, relishing the lack of control.

COMMENTS: As we open, Nicolas Cage (whose character is never named, merely credited as “The Surfer”) merely wants to take his kid (credited as “The Kid”) surfing on the beach where he grew up. He promises, in a bit of ironic foreshadowing, that catching a particularly gnarly wave is nothing short of a “short sharp shock of violence on the shore.” His dreams are dashed when a self-appointed surf cop in a Santa hat informs him that this public beach is for “locals only.” Outnumbered by the surf-gangsters (“Bay Boys”), Cage retreats to the overlook-cum-rest stop where he will spend most of the rest of the movie, anxiously attempting to contact his associate Mike to raise the additional $100,000 he needs posthaste to purchase his father’s old homestead on a cliff overlooking the beach. The Bay Boys’ bullying continues, however. First, Cage loses his surfboard; then, after his car battery and cell battery die, he finds himself stranded and subjected to increasing harassment. All the while, more details emerge suggesting that he may not be the completely together businessman he presents himself as, while golden-hued flashbacks suggest a youth that might not have been as carefree as he remembers.

What follows for Cage is a complete breakdown, as the script strips the bourgeoisie accoutrements of civilization away from him one by one, leaving him—at least temporarily—destitute. Accumulating a series of small wounds and suffering from short-term malnutrition and dehydration as he bakes in the Christmas sun, Cage drifts into a second-act fever dream where his very identity comes into question. About the only local who isn’t outright hostile to him is a scraggly beach bum (credited only as “The Bum”) who bunks in a discarded car in the same parking lot, and who has been bullied by the Bay Boys for decades now. Cage seems doomed to follow in his footsteps.

Theater patrons are advised to wear sunscreen, as the bright cinematography might give you sunburn, and when the screen starts wavering like high tide has briefly crested over the film, you might wonder if you’re experiencing heat stroke yourself. Francois Tetaz’s ultracool score, full of harp arpeggios and wordless vocals, takes its nostalgic period cues more from exotica than surf music, giving it a grandiose moodiness that constantly threatens to teeter into psychedelia. Finnegan’s visuals cross that line in the third act.

Cage himself is relatively restrained, more in Pig than Mandy mode; but of course, restrained for Cage can involve him force feeding a dead rat to a battered enemy. The fact that we expect, and accept, craziness from Cage makes him the perfect actor for this exercise in masculine delusionalism. Research confirmed my suspicions that this script about an upper middle-class man undergoing a midlife crisis explored via a water sport was explicitly inspired by another famous The S____er (among other sources). The Surfer, naturally, doesn’t quite reach its predecessor’s heights; it’s far more scattered, lacking its forebear’s intense focus on a single character, bringing a manospherish cult and hallucinatory red herrings into the equation. But The Surfer (suggested alternate title: The Sufferer) has a similar empathetic effect that hits home for men of a certain age and marital status.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘The Surfer’ is weird and wily, and while it doesn’t always connect, it maintains a strange presence that’s intriguing.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MUTANT ALIENS (2001)

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DIRECTED BY: Bill Plympton

FEATURING: Voices of Francine Lobis, Dan McComas, George Casden, Matthew Brown, Jay Cavanaugh

PLOT: Josie has kept her eyes on the skies for twenty years hoping to witness her father’s return from space; but on his re-entry, he is not alone.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA:

“The president’s being eaten by a nose!”

Check the regulations.

COMMENTS: Early on in Mutant Aliens, we observe a young woman’s inner dialogue about whether or not to bang her beau. As a right-shoulder nun and left-shoulder slut exchange arguments, insults, and blows, her beau stands eagerly nearby, stretching out the front of his underpants’ waistband. Within said pants, Plympton manifests a series of metaphors: a launching missile, a locomotive, a hammer-and-anvil, etc. The scene culminates with voracious lovemaking over the woman’s observation console, the thrustful energy knocking her boob into a control lever. On the display screen, she observes an unidentified object as it comes crashing through Earth’s atmosphere.

In many ways, this vignette encapsulates not merely the building blocks of Space Mutants, but perhaps the animation-auteur’s modus operandi: Plympton suffers an insatiable desire to play with shapes and lines, and has spent his career developing plotlines sturdy enough to support his lively doodling. Mutant Aliens is an absurd narrative—Earth astronaut returns after twenty years with a mad yarn about about love and war with space noses and finger-riding space eyeballs—that features every strange curvy-cue, heaving bio-mass, and ultra-violent encounter his fan base has come to expect. Advertisement goons drool and thrust over the prospect of orbitally projected commercials; a bored secretary devises elaborate fornicatory scenarios between her left and right hands; and mutant aliens reign gross-but-cute terror on the various government suits desperately attempting to contain their menace.

Also, there’s Jesus drag racing—in song. Plympton has several axes to grind: against religion (I’m guessing he had to endure plenty of “Satanic Panic” and TV evangelism during his formative years), against Big Media (see also The Tune), against the military-industrial complex (see also I Married a Strange Person), and so on. And though he’s considerably heavy-handed—a lot of throbbing linework and delightfully icky sound effects go into his screeding—it’s hard to object. The cartoonish excess adds up to cartoonish dismissiveness, and his films feel more like jolly, middle finger Fuck Yous! than like some mopey killjoy whingeing through a megaphone.

Sure, sure, bits sag here and there (not unlike the occasional swinging breast or phallus), but by the time you notice a lull, Plympton’s wonderfully distracted pen moves on to another blast of ridiculousness. And this is the biggest draw for Plympton fans: in a way, he does the same thing over and over, within each narrative framework as well as from movie to movie. However, this “same thing” is playing around with his medium as hard as he can while poking the prudish, the pompous, and the otherwise powerful.

And that’s just peachy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Juxtaposing the sentimental and the bizarre comes naturally to Plympton, whose films are truly singular — surreal, lovably crude, and sweet-natured but grosser than heck, with blown-up heads and bitten-off fingers galore. Mutant Aliens is no exception… Weird stuff, I tell you, but it’s terribly cute and good-natured somehow.”–Marrit Ingman, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

Mutant Aliens

Mutant Aliens
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SHROUDS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: An entrepreneur who’s obsessed with his dead wife invents a graveyard which allows the bereaved to watch their deceased love ones’ bodies decompose in real time; when some of the graves are vandalized, he’s led to investigate a mysterious conspiracy.

Still from The Shrouds (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Starting from a typically Cronenbergian premise–straddling the line that separates the just barely plausible from the utterly implausible, but presented as if it were perfectly natural—the august director takes a deep dive into human depravity and loss, accompanied by plentiful hallucinations. (Walkout report: there was one other person in the theater with me when the film started; I was alone when the end credits rolled, although I didn’t notice when the other guy left.)

COMMENTS: “How dark are you willing to go?,” asks the improbably named Karsh of a first date, before taking the at-first-game lady on a walk to see a live feed of his wife’s decomposing corpse. Needless to say, he doesn’t get a second date.

When vandals attack Karsh’s hi-tech necrovoyeur cemetery, his business model is jeopardized. He seeks out the culprits with the help of his nerdy ex-brother-in-law and an A.I. assistant who looks suspiciously like his deceased wife, with paranoid suggestions offered by a sister-in-law who also looks suspiciously like his late wife. His investigations suggest abnormal growths on dead tissue, and the possibility that a cabal of international hackers are behind the whole thing. Meanwhile, Karsh has disturbing erotic dreams—all the more disturbing because he finds them comforting—about his deceased love. While probing into the mystery, Karsh also revives his sex life, after years of post-marital celibacy. More impossible, or nearly impossible, events follow, the plot becomes muddled, and The Shrouds wraps on a hallucinatory note.

Now an octogenarian, Cronenberg, who lost his own wife eight years ago, is still able to invent delicious perversities—Karsh’s sexy amputation nightmares, conspiracy theories as aphrodisiacs—even as he seems less and less interested in conclusive narratives. The conspiracies of The Brood (1979) or Videodrome (1983), as bizarrely unlikely as they may be, at least gave you a sense of who the enemy is and their motivation. In Shrouds and Crimes of the Future (2022), the menace is inconclusive, leading to a situation where the audience gets involved in the mystery only to be left hanging at the end. It is clear enough that the thematic enemy here is grief, jealousy, and death itself; but on the narrative side, the antagonist remains murky to the end.

Cronenberg leaves us with plenty to think about, however, including the question of why all of Karsh’s precious memories of his wife revolve exclusively around her body. Is this a personal flaw of Karsh’s, or an honest philosophical recognition that the ultimate reality is the material? Like the motives and identity of The Shrouds’ antagonists, it’s left to you to decide.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Watching The Shrouds dribble its way through a third act that’s as anticlimactic as it is knotty, we can only lament all the weird, intrepid endings Cronenberg might have found for a story about the destiny of flesh – none of which, alas, he actually chose.”–Tim Robey, The Telegraph (festival review)

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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)