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Capsules

54*. FANDO AND LIS (1968)

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Fando y Lis

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“…tragedy and Grand-Guignol, poetry and vulgarity, comedy and melodrama, love and eroticism, happenings and set theory, bad taste and aesthetic refinement, the sacrilegious and the sacred, ritual death and the exaltation of life, the sordid and the sublime…”–‘s recipe for Panic drama

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sergio Kleiner, Diana Mariscal

PLOT: Sometime after an apocalypse, Fando and the paraplegic Lis leave a ruins to search for the legendary city of Tar, wheeling Lis on a cart along with their only possessions, a phonograph and a drum. They meet many strange characters on the road, including an androgynous Pope and a doctor who drinks Lis’ blood. Finally, Fando gets fed up with carting Lis about and kills her.

Still from Fando y Lis (1968)

BACKGROUND:

  • Alejandro Jodorowsky directed the movie without a script, just a one page outline, working from his memory of fellow Panic society member Fernando Arrabal‘s play of the same title (which Jodorowsky had previously directed many times).
  • The movie’s premier at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival caused a scandal: viewers rioted, and Mexican director Emilio Fernandez swore he would kill Jodorowsky. After one more screening in Mexico City, the film was banned in Mexico, and had only a few unsuccessful international screenings thereafter.
  • Never released on VHS, Fando y Lis remained virtually unknown until ABKCO restored and re-released it in 2009 as part of their major Jodorowsky revival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Fando and Lis painting their names on each others’ half-naked bodies, and then on the bare white walls of their dwelling, before dousing everything in sight (including each other) in buckets of black ink. It’s hippies having a blast, a groovy south-of-the-border happening, Panic-style.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Flaming piano; syringe-using vampire

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If you’ve ever seen a Jodorowsky movie before, you know what to expect. Fando y Lis is a parade of fantastical, shocking imagery, including snakes that penetrate a baby doll and a man who begs for blood (he extracts a donation with a syringe and drinks it from a brandy snifter). It’s not as polished and conceptually grand as later Jodorowosky masterpieces, but the basis of his style and major preoccupations can be seen along the dusty road to Tar.


Restoration trailer for Fando y Lis (1968)

COMMENTS: Fando y Lis is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most Surrealist movie (the black and white cinematography reinforces the connection)—although not necessarily his most surreal movie Continue reading 54*. FANDO AND LIS (1968) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THEODORE REX (1995)

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DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Betuel

FEATURING: Whoopi Goldberg, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Juliet Landau, Bud Cort, Stephen McHattie, voice of George Newbern

PLOT: A cybernetically enhanced cop and a genetically restored dinosaur are paired up to solve a murder, but their investigation uncovers a larger plot to destroy humankind and bring about a new ice age.

Still from Theordore Rex (1995)

COMMENTS: Once upon a time, the high concept of a cop paired with another, weirder cop had been efficiently reduced to its purest form by including the signifier “Heat” in the title. There was a run of movies with titles like Red Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is from the Soviet Union), Dead Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is deceased), and very nearly Outer Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is an alien) until some studio executive realized that “Heat” wasn’t moving any tickets and switched the name to Alien Nation. That one word did all the work of summing up the premise while warning savvy filmgoers to avoid it at all cost. What I’m saying is, the producers of Theodore Rex had Jurassic Heat sitting there, ready to go, and they passed. Cowards. It wouldn’t have helped the movie, mind you. It just would have saved us all a lot of time.

A mostly forgotten bomb today, if Theodore Rex has any reputation at all, it’s either as the most expensive film of its time to be released direct-to-video or as the movie that Whoopi Goldberg only agreed to appear in after the producers sued her for trying to bail on the project. This is unfair, because Theodore Rex ought to be remembered as terrible on its own merits. It’s always a delight to find a diamond in the rough, a gem that the masses were too closed-minded to appreciate, but sometimes the masses are right, and a bad movie gets the public raspberry it deserves. 

The premise is so aggressively high concept that its overall illogic barely qualifies as an afterthought. You have to take a lot on faith from the outset: dinosaurs have been resurrected via hand-wavey DNA science as human-sized, English-speaking, long-armed, ghettoized cartoonish weirdos. (They are all animatronic caricatures, bumpkin cousins to the stars of the sitcom “Dinosaurs.”) The city is a Dick Tracy-style candy-colored series of backlot alleys. Whoopi Goldberg wears a skintight Lycra catsuit. If you can accept all of these ideas into your heart, then you’ve achieved the bare minimum of scrutability to get you into the plot. 

About that plot. It’s already a shopworn premise — initial crime leads to bigger conspiracy — that is drained of all suspense by the inexplicable decision to reveal the identity of the villain and his elaborate scheme in the opening narration. Aside from killing the little bit of mystery the film might have, it forces the story to become a character study of two completely empty shells: Goldberg’s cop, who is so devoid of personality that she plays both by-the-book and screw-the-rules without any seeming contradiction, and Teddy the dinosaur, who combines an endless display of neuroses with the vibe Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THEODORE REX (1995) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: ED AND ROOSTER’S GREAT ADVENTURE (2025)

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AKA Ed and Rooster’s Big Adventure

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DIRECTED BY: Lucy Fazely

FEATURING: Voice of Bryan Crespo

PLOT: Two seagulls discover a laptop containing a spell that allows them to access alternate realities.

Still from ed and rooster's great adventure (2025)

COMMENTS: Sometimes I wonder whether there is a point to reviewing movies that no one else will ever see. I’ve concluded that the value to the reader is the same as when they encounter any description of a thing they will never experience directly: they get to add one more item to their mental catalog of things of which they are aware. So, if you’ve read this far, your life has been enriched (although perhaps imperceptibly)  by your knowledge that Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure exists.

Still reading? Then you are not content to simply know that a thing called Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure exists, and wish to learn what it actually is. I applaud your curiosity. Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure consists of footage of seagulls on the beach, with voice actors dubbing in fanciful and humorous conversations between the elder (Ed, with a faux British accent) and the younger (teenager Rooster, who’s slightly dumber than birdbrained Ed). The two feathered friends find a portal to alternate realities and get lost in a dimensional vortex, moving from a universe where they are suddenly avian Lotharios to one where humans have set up free feeders to one where gulls are completely unknown species, and so on. Usually the alternative reality seems immediately superior but then reveals some major flaw: e.g., in the world where the female gulls are all attracted to Ed and Rooster, Ed’s favorite snack, cheese puffs, do not exist. Therefore, the pair continually try to get back to their own universe, but instead end up in another slightly novel variant.

My goodness, you’re still here? Well, I’m guano drop some more knowledge to make you a certified expert on Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure. The voiceovers can be mildly amusing, but hardly drip with wit (“wanna flock?,” an amorous female gull asks Ed). There are a lot of shots of seagulls pooping, and in fact pooping, or more precisely, the inability to do so, becomes a major plot point in the second new reality the pair visit. Unless you’re a fan of seagulls pooping, though, the film is visually dull—the same local birds pooping on the same local beaches for over an hour. Perhaps bird-watching hobbyists would find it tolerable. There are a few moments of Adobe After Effects-style visuals—the green spiral inter-dimensional portals, animated flapping bird silhouettes, a snapshot of a child that gets sucked into a portal—which are tossed out with an impish disregard for realism. In the best effect, they simply reverse the film to show fish and shrimp shooting out of a bird feeder; it’s completely goofy, in the best sense of the term. But overall, the entirety of Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure is like a feature film version of a 20-watch YouTube that never showed up in your feed. The movie is available for rental on YouTube or Google Play, but the filmmakers will probably never make back the $50 they spent on it. That’s OK; you get the feeling that getting rich is not the motivation for the team behind Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure. They wanted to have a fun time making a cheap movie, and they did so. And now you know they did it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No reviews other than this one currently exist

Capsules

CAPSULE: LONGLEGS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Osgood Perkins

FEATURING: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood

PLOT: The FBI assigns Special Agent Harker to a 20-year-old serial murder case, triggering a serious of unsettling breakthroughs.

Still from Longlegs (2024)

COMMENTS: What’s that expression—Longlegs, short review? Some thirty-dozen reviews for this Cage-y bit of strange are out there, so let us dive quickly, and deeply, into the merits of Osgood Perkins’ latest outing. Be warned: we shall be heading far away into lands of the Pacific Northwest, and back in time to a magical period known as “the ’90s”.

The sights and sounds will be familiar to some; but none will be more familiar than the sight of Nicolas Cage being crazy-go-nuts. But come to think of it, he is rendered somewhat unrecognizable: invariably coated in off-white makeup, and buried beneath a chubbed-out face. Whenever Longlegs goes off on a spiel, though, we hear Nic busting out of this cage. Much of this film’s appeal manifests during the (shrewdly) intermittent dosing of this titular oddity.

What Longlegs gets up to is where the nostalgia comes in. (And—if I may editorialize a moment—not that tedious kind on display from a more famous filmmaker.) That special time, The ’90s, oozes from every pore—and wrapped within the main throw-back are bursts of the ’70s, as our baddy loves T. Rex, Lou Reed, and Duran Duran. Our heroine, Special Agent Harker (a spectacularly spectrometric Maika Monroe), lives up to her namesake: an eye for detail, quiet courage, a a pull toward the supernatural, and a fate that can best be described as “mixed.”

Satanic Panic, alas, can only be taken so lightly: in this corner of the US, Satan appears altogether too real. How does Longlegs do their thing? (I emphasize that pronoun: it’s not altogether clear just how Cage’s character views themselves.) However they do it, they perform their deadly spree amongst stark snow-lighting, cool-as-thriller interiors, and, one of my favorite flourishes, inside a house with twin-point front roofing which forms—you guessed it—the shape of longlegs legs.

So, bust out the Shark Bites, pop a straw in your Capri Sun, and take a dangerous walk through a valley of diabolic dolls.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Perkins combines the grisly realism of a crime-scene photograph with the startling surreality of a nightmare… Cage does his version of warbly-voiced weirdo crooner Tiny Tim – an affectation that would be bonkers coming from anyone else, but is just another day at work for Cage.”–Katie Rife, IGN (contemporaneous)

Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]

Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]
  • Longlegs [4K UHD]
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