FEATURING: Delaney Quinn, Cristin Milioti, Tristan Borders, Madison Skyy Polan, and the voice of Keegan-Michael Key
PLOT: A group of children’s-show friends attempt to escape from the increasingly homicidal titular unicorn.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Buddy’s lair is carved directly into the sheer walls of the uncanny valley, sure, but the denouement’s dreamy poignancy secures Kelly’s caper a place in our weird hearts.
COMMENTS: You may not know it, but Buddy wants to be your friend. And even though he’s just met you, he loves you very much. But unless you want to spend the remainder of your existence (or perhaps longer) cycling through an endless series of singing, dancing, frolicking bromides, do not extend your hand to this beastly television host. Watch out for your family, too, because once they’ve gone Buddy, there’s no going back.
Buddy will appeal to a number of audiences: horror fans seeking something candy-coated and full of carnage; adventurous viewers yearning for the sinister side of wacky; drug aficionados who have themselves tasted of the butterscotch psychotropic flower petal; and especially anthropologists studying television culture of the late second millennium. This film is a simulacrum of excesses that, in hindsight, feel almost barbaric.
I am not referring to the creepy gore found in Buddy, no. I speak of the bombardment of treacly songs and horrific performance foisted on the youth of yesteryear—and, regrettably, today as well. Strip away Buddy’s murderous rampages, and there’s still an ever-pulsating technicolor blob of repulsiveness. When we root for Freddy and her liberated buddies, we’re not just invested in their physical safety: we want them to escape to live a well-adjusted life, with all its surprises and misfortunes.
Casper Kelly leaps out of the fire and into the impossibly vibrant world of 1990s children’s programs with his latest film, and the product of his imagination both sears the eyes and slashes the mind, all while also capturing the heart. During Kelly’s introduction to his movie, he commented on his own children’s viewing of the various late-20th-century “children’s classics.” I can only hope and pray that those days are gone, that the memories fade, and that in years to come we can look upon Buddy as a totem of daytime horrors past.
PLOT: Ricky works on writing projects until memory lapses begin plaguing him after a grocery run.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: When men lick the road with abandon, and small fish appear in your pocket, and boom mics come alive, things ain’t quite right.
COMMENTS: “Really? You don’t find that disturbing?” Tepper has just been scrolling through his phone, landing on a picture of an ornamental plant growing from a raised stone urn. Roommate Ricky doesn’t share Tepper’s discomfort about this image and the benign object within. But by this point in Sour Minnows, it is already difficult to tell what may and may not be ominous, as the narrative has already proven as slippery as a fish.
The point of view slides around between the three main characters, screenwriter Ricky, his somewhat-girlfriend Aura, and the distracted Tepper. Each character becomes progressively compromised as they find themselves in situations they can’t control and awaken with only a hazy recollection of the events. Aura slathers a department-store evening gown with a rotted bird corpse, in order to astrally-project her hand into Ricky’s car to smear his headrest with the goo; Tepper’s mind wanders into a nearby window, either removing his television from the room or removing his own self; and Ricky attends a fancy media event where he receives a cryptic note before traveling through a tunnel connecting the men’s room to his home, frightening his sleeping doppelganger as he looms at his bedroom door.
If you’re comfortable with a lack of clarity and semi-detached performances (“Are you doing a ‘bit’?”), Sour Minnows is quite a treat. I saw it once, at its second screening, when the festival programmer introduced the movie with his remark that this would be the fourth time he’s watched it. Subsequent viewings probably unlock coherency, but even my one-time visit to the odd world Harrison Atkins has crafted and confettied proved satisfying. Not unlike the Tepper’s reaction to the urn, Sour Minnows is a bit disturbing, and more than a little absurd.
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DIRECTED BY: Stefano Bertelli
FEATURING: None credited
PLOT: Fred is a student whose attempts to resolve his various encounters—particularly his rendezvous with Hana in Japan—regularly land him in a cosmic inner space.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Papercraft stop-motion meets 4th-dimensional musings in Bertelli’s film, whose protagonist just cannot seem to wrap up events in his life. And there’s a talking cat.
COMMENTS: We are in a classroom, and Fred asks to be excused. He hoofs the school corridors to the bathroom, and makes it in time to spew forth a tidal quantity of ecto-green vomit, overflowing the toilet, overflowing the restroom, ultimately washing down the school hallway in a viscous wave. A cat asks what that was all about, and Fred replies, “That was just a memory.” Like all of us, Fred has countless memories; unlike us, Fred experiences his own mind space as a hangar-sized chamber, with a starlit background, a growing gyre spurting cubes, and, of course, an enigmatic talking cat providing comments and advice.
Stefano Bertelli pursues two grand ambitions with his feature debut. The first is long-form animation with paper stock. All motion and effects are achieved the hard way, as paper Fred interacts with other paper people and navigates a three-dimensional space made up of a paper sky with paper clouds above, and paper buildings and paper vehicles below. This vibrant aesthetic easily catches the eye and is a perfect vehicle for the odd sense of humor which runs throughout. Pratfalls in the cosmic mind, recurring encounters with a bully, paper Fred playing a paper rendered first-person shooter on a paper television: the playfully absurd mingles freely with temporal philosophy.
The last is the crux of the Bertelli’s second ambition, for Spacetime Chronicles has a great deal to say about happenstance, decision making, and fate. Fred wants to follow up his meet-cute with Hana, whom he encounters on a tram. But each step is interrupted by increasingly unlikely tripwires (indeed, what are the odds he’d end up in room number four on the fourth floor of the hotel just after learning that numeral is borderline dangerous?). The cat does its best to tidy his subconscious and tip him towards his desired fate, even tossing aside one of its nine lives in the effort. But it’s all quite confusing for Fred, and us as well; we’re told that to manipulate our lives is as simple as choosing to perceive our preferred fate. We learn alongside Fred, however, that that may be an impossible task, and we may all just be doomed to be reduced to a heap of memory boxes beneath a heap of rubble.
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DIRECTED BY: Svetlana Baskova
FEATURING: Sergey Pakhomov, Vladimir Epifantsev, Aleksandr Maslaev
PLOT: Two ex-military officers are thrown into a prison cell.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Not only does it contain extreme grotesqueries, but it is in essence a comedy of the absurd, and a highly disturbing one.
COMMENTS: Let’s start with a bit of context. A “parallel cinema” emerged In the late Soviet Union of the 80s 1. Within this cinematic landscape an even smaller underground movement was formed, known as necrorealism. With a name parodying the dominant social realism of its country, this alternative cinema showcased decomposition as a metaphor for social decay. Yevgeny Yufit is considered its main representative. Necrorealism’s aesthetic legacy continued into succeeding years through the works of two deeply subversive auteurs: Svetlana Bascova and Oleg Mavromatti2.This work is pivotal for a comprehensive understanding of their style, as Bascova and Mavromati’s worldviews and creative talent merge: Svetlana directs and Oleg produces. Let’s examine the monster they have created.
The plot revolves around two unnamed ex-military officers thrown into prison for indeterminate reasons. The first act observes them in their claustrophobic cell, as the more loquacious annoys the other with his constant blabber. The stories become increasingly disgusting, hinting at what it may come.
Their prison reveals itself as a hellscape where bodily fluids, excrement, and secretions subvert our characters’ dignity until their total mental and physical annihilation. The deteriorating walls of their cell, the broken pipes, and a dirty toilet bowl mirror their decline. the depravities begin, as in a comedy of the absurd, without a clear reason. The first forty minutes aren’t disturbing in terms of graphic content (yet), but scenes of coprophilia and coprophagia will trigger more than a few gag reflexes.
The second act leaves the dirty cell behind for a similarly dimly- lit room with a sewer-like open trapdoor in the middle. The supervisors bring in the trapdoor to humiliate the prisoners even further. But nobody is really in control here. The dynamic shifts unexpectedly, chaos ensues (violence, gore, rape, necrophilia) and everyone is exposed as equally doomed as this tragic fable comes to its conclusion. If the first half disgusts, the second half is dizzying. This is visceral cinema at its wildest.
This movie doesn’t just attack our senses; it also to deconstructs ideals regarding the military complex and the people that service it. it becomes clear later on that we are in the Soviet Union of the 80s, a few years before its collapse. However, even if the sociopoitical background is specific, the commentary extends to a wider critique against militarism.
From a technical standpoint, this work is amateurish, albeit expressive. The snuff film quality of the shots, along with realistic—for the most part—special effects are discomforting. The extensive use of enclosed spaces creates a certain theatricality.
Of course, despite its political undertones, this movie is not for everyone. If you are a fan of extreme cinema, though, able to stomach Marian Dora‘s cinema of sepsis, then perhaps it is for you. This bizarre movie has become a cult phenomenon in Russia, inspiring a talk of a sequel, a video game adaptation, and memes. Perhaps it speaks to the Russian psyche.
Mavromatti directs weird movies till today by the way, having released a hilarious series of vlog-spoofs (in Russian, of course) throughout the last decade. ↩︎
PLOT: A mysterious stranger gradually infiltrates the home and family of a missing man.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA:The Man Who Lies suffers from doppelgänger syndrome, both the title character and the film as a whole. A second shadow protagonist haunts the main character, who defends his own existence and reality by repeatedly telling the same story over and over again. But with each telling the details change, until the final version becomes the exact opposite of the first. Where reality ends and the lies begin is impossible to untangle. Every scene of the film negates its own double and even the dual protagonists swap identities by the end.
COMMENTS: In the opening narration, Trintignant introduces himself as “Jean Robin” but then backpeddles and admits he’s actually called “Boris Varissa.” And people sometimes call him “The Ukrainian,” though he doesn’t know why. As the film progresses, it becomes obvious none of these names actually belong to him, and we never find out who he really is. In one meta-moment, he even describes himself as an actor rehearsing a role. Robbe-Grillet covers much the same territory as Last Year at Marienbad but in a more comedic tone, closer to the literal winking at the camera of Trans-Europ Express.
“Boris” enters a small rural town after escaping from a brigade of soldiers. He describes how he anonymously disappears into the crowd, though we see him walking alone down deserted streets. He enters a pub, which he describes as empty, though it’s so full of patrons he has difficulty finding a seat. Here the townspeople discuss the unknown fate of local hero Jean Robin, whose portrait adorns every building in town.
The details of Robin’s disappearance are sketchy and inconsistent. No one is quite sure where he is, how long he’s been away, or when he will return. Some believe he will definitely come back, others declare him dead. His poor lovely wife and sister remain in their crumbling ancestral chateau awaiting his return, though no one has actually seen them in years.
Boris immediately begins telling everyone he was great friends with Jean Robin during the war. In fact, he personally helped Jean escape their enemies. No one is particularly inclined to hear this tale, and many, like the pub’s proprietor, treat the interloper with outright contempt. Others act like he isn’t even there.
After this inauspicious debut, Boris heads to the Robin chateau. There, Jean’s wife, Laura, his sister, Sylvia, and their maid, Maria, amuse themselves playing Blind Man’s Bluff and other obscure games involving blindfolds and medieval weapons. Boris first insinuates himself into the affections of Maria. He regales her with long tales of Jean’s heroism in the Resistance. But cracks quickly develop in his facade. He doesn’t recognize his dear friend’s elderly father? And who is this Dr Mueller he speaks of? There is no doctor of that name in town.
In one scene, where he meets with Jean’s sister, Trintignant poses before a grave in a cemetery marked with the name “Boris Varissa,” which he quickly moves to hide from her. In another scene, he re-enacts his own near-death experience for Maria, telling her dramatically of how he suffered a near-fatal head wound. As he collapses, he pours a bottle of fake blood onto his chest. “But wasn’t it a head wound?” she asks him.
Even with the humor, the repetition of Jean/Boris story gets a little tiresome. The viewer may find themselves thinking, like the film’s characters, there he goes again—the war, the war—whenever Boris launches into yet another version of the narrative. Though he initially lauds Jean as a valiant hero, Boris eventually claims he was actually a treacherous traitor. But since Boris is a liar, the identities of both men remain questionable and unstable.
After a while, it’s the women who fascinate, though they hardly say a word. They play their strange games in an abandoned attic full of forgotten heirlooms and family portraits. Here Robbe-Grillet displays all his classic fetishes: the nape of the neck, the suspended gesture, bound wrists. Though Maria and Sylvia succumb to Boris’ advances, Laura remains spectral and aloof. She drifts through the house in a long white nightgown, appearing to give no credence whatsoever to anything Boris says. Indeed, she barely acknowledges his existence.
Unable to crack her, Boris starts to lose it. When Jean’s father dies in a sudden accident and a “Dr Mueller” shows up to write the death certificate, Boris looks genuinely spooked. Though he makes headway in removing his detractors, his success in taking Jean’s place at the chateau is far from secure, as the subject of his lies keeps coming back to haunt him.
In his quasi-autobiographical “romanesque,” Ghosts in the Mirror, Robbe-Grillet credits the mysterious figure of Count Henri de Corinthe with providing the inspiration for the screenplay. In Robbe-Grillet’s telling, Corinthe comes across as a Ripley-esque character, who may have disappeared one of his own friends in order to “borrow” his military exploits. Of course, we must take this explanation with a grain of salt for, as Robbe-Grillet admits, in writing the book he deliberately took on the role of the man who lies for himself. Any viewer looking to discern the “truth” here will inevitably be frustrated—by design.
