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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZOO ZÉRO (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: Alain Fleischer

FEATURING: , , , ,

PLOT: A singer spends a night trying to escape from her overbearing manager while pursued by one admirer who insists he heard her sing in a city she’s never been to, and another who claims he lost his voice when he heard she’d given up singing.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Have you ever thought to yourself, if only someone would make a Last Year at Marienbad/The Magic Flute mash-up, written according to the non-narrative principles of  Eden and After? They could have Catherine Jourdan in the lead as the “A” character, and Klaus Kinski as “M”. . . and why not set it in a grimy, late ’70s Paris overrun with rabid animals? Okay, you probably haven’t; but someone did, and that someone was Alain Fleischer. A director largely unknown in the English-speaking/Region A world, Fleischer moved in the same artistic circles as and . While he was clearly influenced by the same ideas as the better known Alains, Fleischer’s work is perhaps too weird to have been rescued from obscurity; all the more reason to give him some consideration.

COMMENTS: There are so many WTF elements in Zoo zéro I can’t possibly cover them all, but between the ventriloquist chauffeur who only speaks through his socialist revolutionary Donald Duck dummy, to a brothel where clients simply listen to prostitutes describing their actions from unlit rooms, practically every scene features someone, or something, inexplicable.

The opening credits sequence recall those of Eden and After‘s. The actors announce themselves by name, then begin reading texts featuring animals, including the biblical story of Noah and the Ark, and the French fairy tale about Reynaud the fox. Each actor keeps reading as another joins the chorus, until, by the end, the overlapping voices form an unintelligible cacophony. A fitting introduction to the experience of watching Zoo zéro: a movie so jam-packed with references and metaphors, its actual meaning becomes almost impossible to interpret.

Zoo begins at the Noah’s Ark nightclub on a rainy night. Eva (Jourdan), dressed like Liza Minelli in Cabaret, performs before an audience all wearing animal masks. A mysterious man later appears in Eva’s dressing room, saying she once knew him as Ivo (pronounced “Eevo”; all the characters have names beginning with vowel sounds and a majority begin with a long “e”.)

Ivo claims to have heard her performance in Salzburg, in The Magic Flute. Even though Eva says she’s never even been to Salzburg, Ivo has a recording to prove it. Uwe, Eva’s manager, takes possession of the tape and refuses to let her hear it.

The dialogue, while not as obscure as in Marienbad, never resolves Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZOO ZÉRO (1979) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Joseph M. Sonneborn, Jr.

FEATURING: Balloons, marching bands, parade floats, clowns, and more balloons

PLOT: During an especially drowsy storytime, a boy has dreams about large parade balloons that cavort and loom over him; we then see the balloons in their natural habitat, the 1964 Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, with play-by-play from a possibly inebriated narrator.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Exhibit A in the case for advertising’s malign influence, this hour-long promo for parade balloons is both horror show and monument to boredom. Viewed through the ironic shades of nostalgia, it’s gleefully ignorant, but as a relic of its era, it’s a searing indictment of the utterly misguided definition of “fun” among the City of Brotherly Love’s cultural elite.

Still from Fun in Balloonland (1965)

COMMENTS: Perhaps you started your day today with a viewing of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a hours-long march of giant helium balloons, high school bands, and uncomfortably cold Broadway performers hiking through the streets of Manhattan. They (and you) are partaking in a tradition that goes back to 1924, but that’s not even the oldest Thanksgiving street party there is. That crown is held by Philadelphia’s parade, created by Macy’s rival Gimbel’s back in 1920. So it’s more than appropriate to turn our gaze toward that venerable Turkey Day bastion, and see how it inadvertently spawned a turkey of a very different kind.

Fun in Balloon Land wastes no time in delivering off-putting weirdness with the shockingly atonal theme song, sung by a man backed by a group of faux-enthusiastic children and the world’s saddest roller-rink organ. Through slant rhymes and methodical destruction of meter, the “tune” previews attractions to come like the Marrying Turkey, suggests that a teddy bear has fallen arches, and just generally shreds the auditory nerve. Already, we’re off balance before we’ve even seen the opening credit for “Giant Balloon Parades Inc. Presents,” a declaration that doesn’t augur well for artistic achievement.

The film kicks off in earnest with the sleepytime dream of Sonny (whose name we won’t learn until the last 10 minutes of the film), who rises from bed to stand in the corner of a book of fairy tales like a punished child and starts imaging a series of locales that correspond perfectly with Giant Balloon Parades, Inc.’s product line, including an undersea kingdom, a farm, and a culturally insensitive Old West. Sometimes these scenes are accompanied by amateur dances, but occasionally the film gets ambitious and tries to tell a story, as when the boy dons a gold lamé diaper and blows off a couple of Philly-accented mermaids. The “magic” of the balloons is meant to be self-evident, so there’s no attempt to reference any actual fairy tales or stories of adventure; they’re just generic milieus. All of this Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BUGONIA (2025)

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

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Aidan Delbis

PLOT: Aided by his autistic cousin, a troubled man kidnaps a corporate executive, certain she is an Andromedan alien in disguise.

Still from Bugonia (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Since it improves on its canonically weird source material in every way (except ability to surprise), it has to be Apocrypha worthy, mathematically speaking.

COMMENTS: At first, Jesse Plemons’ Teddy seems like a relatively normal guy, even if his stringy, greasy red hair suggests a serious disinterest in hygiene. He is at least sympathetic in the way he takes care of his mentally-challenged cousin Don; that is, until he convinces Don to join him in undergoing chemical castration, so that the pair can resist temptation and better focus at the task at hand. Their goal? Nothing less than saving humanity from the machinations of our secret alien overlords. Their method? Kidnapping pharmaceutical CEO and “TIME” magazine covergirl Michelle Fuller. Teddy’s studies of subtle morphological clues have convinced him that Fuller is a high-ranking alien. After the abduction, the pair shave her head (to prevent her from using hair-based technology to signal for help) and slather her in antihistamine cream to dampen her psychic powers. The captured Michelle tries to use the powers of persuasion that serve her in the corporate world to threaten and cajole her way out of captivity, repeatedly asking to enter into a dialogue, ready to come to the bargaining table. But Teddy is prepared for her tricks; he’s anticipated every objection and rhetorical tactic she might try. If she tries to convince him he’s out of touch with reality… well, that’s exactly the tack an alien would take. He will accept nothing less than a full confession and an agreement to take Don and him with her on her spaceship at the lunar eclipse to meet her superiors and negotiate the Andromedans’ withdrawal from Earth. The canny Michelle adjusts her strategy to try to find a way to manipulate Teddy from inside his own warped reality. A clue suggesting a shared backstory between the two may provide the leverage she needs. A long second act of psychological cat and mouse games ensues, with the tension effectively relieved by laugh-out-loud moments from clueless Don.

The movie begins with the buzzing of bees from Teddy’s apiary, and the specter of extinction permeates the entire story. Chemicals from Michelle’s corporation may literally be responsible for a recent plague of colony collapse disorder. In Teddy’s view, aliens use humanity in the same way he uses his beehives to extract honey, with humanity no more conscious of their exploitation than his bees are. The problem, as he sees it, is that the aliens have no interest in the generational welfare of humans. As crazy he appears, Teddy ultimately has a point. Whether Michelle is an alien emissary or just a corporate overlord, she leeches off humanity; Andromedan or MBA, she’s a masterful manipulator who ultimately has only her own interests in mind. Teddy’s foil-on-the-windows paranoia may be misplaced, and may lead him to adopt inhumane methods, but his intuition about the imminent collapse of civilization strikes a chord.

Bugonia is Lanthimos’ most straightforward film since The Favourite. For most of the runtime, the story is grounded in reality, if reality of an extreme and outlandish flavor. He seems to have largely abandoned the affected, affectless acting that characterized The Lobster and Killing of a Sacred Deer: thankfully so, as it would have been a crime to hamper Plemons and Stone. (Aidan Delbis, an actor who is actually on the autism spectrum, does provide stilted line deliveries, but they are character-based and attributable to his neurological condition.) Lanthimos also restrains himself from adding the random ultra-wide fisheye lens shots that have proved distracting in his later films. Jerskin Fendrix’s score features the brief bursts of dissonant string quartet music the director is fond of, but the director mostly restricts himself to classical cinematic grammar here. He even uses needle drops from Chapell Roan and Green Day, pop flourishes that would have seemed unthinkably mainstream in his previous outings. He dabbles in some brief surrealism for two black and white flashbacks (that quote from ), and the production design in the final segment earns the appellation “bizarre,” but these pieces are not to really enough to brand the movie as obviously, stylistically weird. Rather, it’s the confluence of outrageous plotting and matter-of-fact adherence to the film’s psychotic worldview that creates the sense of strangeness here. Despite Lanthimos working in a stripped-down, more approachable mode, the material allows him to indulge his love of nihilistic plot twists. Parts will make you squirm, and parts will fill you with moral horror. The closing montage, scored to Marlene Dietrich singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” ends things on as beautifully bleak of a Lanthimosian note as could ever be imagined: a deep cynicism undercut by a yearning melancholy that testifies to the director’s genuine, bereaved humanism.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the characters might be demented, but Bugonia is a crueller, funnier, sharper proposition, more grounded and gritty than the wigged-out weirdness of the film on which it is based.”–Wendy Ide, The Observer (contemporaneous)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FRANKENHOOKER (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Frank Henenlotter

FEATURING: , Patty Mullen, Joseph Gonzalez, Shirley Stoler,

PLOT: When sweet Elizabeth dies in a terrible lawnmower accident, her grieving fiancé—power plant technician and amateur scientist Jeffrey Franken—sets out to restore her to life by assembling a new body made from the parts of prostitutes he kills with a new explosive strain of crack cocaine. 

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: If ever there were a film that could make our list just by wishing for it really hard, Frankenhooker is that film. Starting with the decent-enough premise to set Mary Shelley’s classic tale in the waning days of Times Square grunginess, it piles on characters who soar well past cartoonishness, ladles on strange behaviors and absurd reactions, and tops it off with enough coarse sexuality and Guignol-lite gore to make the whole confection gleefully repellent. It knows what it is, and it revels in it.

Still from Frankenhooker (1990)

COMMENTS: Frankenhooker makes me regret that we’ve never created a tag called “On-the-nose Titles.” We’ve talked before about movies where the title does the heavy lifting, and this is one such film. A Frankenstein’s monster made from hookers. Why even bother with a synopsis?

If you were to subject Frankenhooker’s screenplay to intense analysis, you’d find very little at its core. It’s not a one-joke movie, but probably no more than five: the Frankenstein myth set in New Jersey, the mad doctor is an overachieving electrician, his creation is built out of random hooker parts, the Bride is a murderous sex-starved brute, and New York City prostitutes react to crack like desperate parents at a Walmart on Black Friday. Fortunately, those jokes are merely the foundation for what Frankenhooker is really about: silly stereotypes and outrageous gore.  These are things that Frank Henenlotter knows how to deliver, and he doesn’t hold back.

The film has to overcome a significant demerit in the form of our hero himself. Lorinz is a black hole: even when he’s drilling a hole in his own head for a little light trepanning, he has the bland, conventional good looks of Andrew McCarthy and the placid demeanor of a low-energy standup comic. (His voice suggests teaching a yoga class.) He teases a bolder character than we get, which is surprising considering he’s a mad scientist from New Jersey. His refusal to go as over-the-top as the plot that surrounds him may be the strangest thing about Frankenhooker.

Former Penthouse Pet Mullen has a better handle on the material as the unfortunate Elizabeth. Following a brief pre-accident scene in which she dials up the tropes of the bland-but-adoring fiancée, she gets to go full monster, staggering about town with her jaw awkwardly jutting to the side and demanding “Want a date?” in a shrill Jersey accent. (I tried for ages to figure out who Mullen’s demented lady of the night reminded me of until I realized it was Rapunzel from this magnificent “Sesame Street” sketch.) If anything, she inspires the rest of the ensemble to go hard, from the gum-smacking ruffian ladies of the night to thinks-with-his-fists pimp Zorro to recognizable “That Guy” David Lipman’s cameo as Monster-Elizabeth’s overenthusiastic john. In a cast where everyone but the lead is playing to the cheap seats, Mullen is a stand-out.

Not every scene is this extreme, and in fact Henenlotter almost seems to be making a bid to become the genteel Lloyd Kaufman. Long scenes of Lorinz monologuing his plans drag things out, and often the movie opts to run headlong into insanity instead of giving it a minute or two to build. However, Frankenhooker absolutely nails the landing with two separate showcases of wildly inventive craziness in the final 15 minutes: first with a grotesque revenge on behalf of the murdered hookers who have inadvertently been reassembled into hilariously awful human meatballs, and then the ultimate comeuppance for the mad doctor as a repaired Elizabeth saves the day in a most amusing manner. As much as Frankenhooker is out to deliver exactly the eyes-covered, laughing-in-shock amusement you’re expecting, the movie genuinely surpasses itself in the finale. The title may be on the nose, but the tale it tells is a refreshing punch in the groin.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This film is…well, weird.  With a name like Frankenhooker, I suppose that you expected that.  Even beyond that though, it’s a weird, weird film. …  There’s no ‘normal’ way to do this story, but it still tries hard to be extra insane.  If you’re into the wacky side of Cinema, check this one out. It may blow your mind though..” – Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro         

(This movie was nominated for review by Brian Fahrion. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

Frankenhooker (Blu-ray)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SOUL TO SQUEEZE (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: W.M. Weikart

FEATURING: Michael Thomas Santos, Danielle Meyer

PLOT: Jacob signs up for a dangerous psychological treatment to overcome his anger issues and finds himself trapped within a small home.

Still from Soul to Squeeze (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Soul to Squeeze doesn’t wear its metaphor on its sleeve so much as encase the protagonist. This narrative framework allows for a psychological deep-dive which proffers as much ambiguity as it does clarity.

COMMENTS: A young fellow emerges from debris on the roadside. He’s bleary-eyed, but looks content—even happy. In fact, he’s doing so well that, when a kindly passerby offers help, he politely declines. The preceding ordeal nearly broke him, for this trash pile is the site of a rebirth. As he limps to the roadside, it is clear that our protagonist, Jacob, has had his soul squeezed, but not how you might think.

Certainly not how I thought, until some days after watching the movie when the title’s implications finally became clear. Weikart uses a number of tools to form the narrative, but a television documentary (which seems to be the only channel available where Jacob’s locked himself away for “treatment”) is nearly as omnipresent as the allegorical house the film was shot in. Alongside Jacob, we learn about the mysteries and wonders of the eye: its nerves, cones, strata, apertures, and, most importantly, the aqueous humour. You’ll develop an understanding and appreciation of this unlikely organ from watching Soul to Squeeze, if nothing else.

Jacob’s ordeal begins immediately upon signing the medical release for an unclear procedure—someone, or some force, locks the exit the moment he lifts the pen from the contract line. As Jacob angrily goes through his routines in confinement, he encounters an array of characters who probably aren’t there, though it’s difficult to be certain. (Surely there isn’t a kitchen game show titled “Don’t Fuck This Up!” lying in wait to pounce on the unsuspecting breakfaster.) As the story unfolds, and Jacob’s psychological journey dives deeper into the source of his omnipresent anger, the surrounding pressure of recollection and contemplation forces him (and us) to focus on his true ailment.

The documentary narrator explains: we know much about the hardware involved inside the eye, but there’s no concrete theory as to why it all works. As with the eye (a window to the soul, we’ve been told), so with the mind. Weikart’s one-set drama, putting actor Michael Thomas Santos through the wringer, features much that is obvious. But like an eye (which comes up as much in this review almost as much as in the film), it transcends the sum of its parts through an alchemical process that cannot be easily dissected into its constituent parts without destroying it. Apologies if I’ve veered too far into bio-philosophical rambling, but that’s just the kind of thing Soul to Squeeze catalyzes. With a little focus, life’s debris can be put into perspective, and you are free to move on in the world.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a haunting stillness to the production design—this is not a surrealist explosion of dream logic, but something more intimate and grounded… for those willing to surrender to its slow, aching rhythm and deeply personal approach, it offers something rare: a film that doesn’t just explore the mind—it mirrors it” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (contemporaneous)