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Capsules

CAPSULE: NADJA (1994)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , , Jared Harris

PLOT: Dracula’s estranged son and daughter reunite after his final death.

 

COMMENTS: A remix of Bram Stoker’s original text haunted by the influences of prior adaptations, Nadja is an atmospheric homage to the Universal monster flicks of the 1930s filtered through the East Village art scene with deadpan Brechtian cool. Bela Lugosi portrays Dracula through clips of old footage. For half the film, the image appears distorted by an aura of supernaturalism, thanks to a pixelating camera. The rest of the cinematography is crisp black and white, interiors cloaked in Expressionist shadows, exteriors swathed in shrouds of fog.

When André Breton met the woman who called herself “Nadja,” she had left behind one life and arrived in Paris seeking another. We meet Almereyda’s Nadja in a similar scene, on a date with a random guy who asks her the usual questions. “Do you work?” “No.” Her father provides for her. What does he do? He has money, family money – old money that goes back all the way to Romania. But she left Europe because it’s like a small village, whereas New York City is the world. She talks of how she wants to change her life. She can sense the potential for change but, as Renfield will remind her, changing your life is easier said than done, even when you’re undead.

The guy asks if she wants another drink. A dangerous question to ask a vampire but apparently the old Romanian money didn’t tip him off. He takes Nadja back to his place and she has that second drink, disappearing before he even knows what happened.

But then she feels it: her father is dead. Van Helsing has staked him, and Nadja knows immediately that Dracula is gone for good. She experiences a sense of relief, the impetus for change she’s been looking for. But first, she has to risk a reconciliation with her estranged brother, Edgar, who for unknown reasons, wants to kill her.

Nadja was one of a slew of existential vampire films released in the early to mid-1990s. It makes a perfect double feature with ‘s The Addiction (1995), which features a similarly impressive cast, set in New York City just before it drowned beneath a tide of Starbucks lattes. But while Ferrara focuses on gritty street reality, Almereyda’s style is more Pictorialist, providing impressions of a city that never seems quite real. It’s all about the atmosphere, the vampire as symbol, as philosopher, though these musings are delivered with tongue-in-cheek humor, preventing the tone from ever becoming too ponderous or heavy. The story follows the basic outline of Stoker’s plot, but Almereyda introduces additional entanglements and family secrets to a pared down cast of characters. Peter Fonda’s Van Helsing is the embarrassing drunk uncle of Jim (Donovan), a Harker-esque character whose marriage to Lucy is on the rocks. When Lucy catches Nadja’s eye in a bar, she unwittingly sets Van Helsing on the trail of Dracula’s children.

The ending sees the characters, somewhat improbably, whisked away to Transylvania, after some of them inexplicably survive an explosion, but don’t expect an action-packed, blood-soaked finale. The always lovely Suzy Amis delivers a moving monologue on humanity’s bereftness in the modern world, and Nadja finds the change she was looking for.

Nadja largely succeeds as arthouse horror through its unusual visual style and subtle surrealism, enhanced by the strengths of its cast. Löwensohn captivates as Nadja, and plentiful shots focus on her unique face framed by the dark folds of a hooded cloak. She and Martin Donovan were regulars in Hal Hartley’s early ’90s films, where both perfected the technique of delivering emotionally resonant lines with minimal modulation of voice and facial expression. Fonda provides much needed energy as a zany and eccentric Van Helsing. For fans of , his brief cameo as a morgue security guard is a nice little bonus.

Arbelos Films recently completed a 4K restoration of a director’s cut approved by Michael Almereyda, which has just finished its run in select theaters and will see by a physical media release in mid-October.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Stylish, eccentric and occasionally deliciously weird, it is a film for audiences who like their horror served with humour and their vampires with personality. With a runtime of under 90 minutes, for those willing to embrace its peculiar rhythms, Nadja reveals that even creatures of the night can have a sense of humour.”–Romney Norton, Dirty Movies (re-release)

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Nadja

Nadja

  • Director Michael Almereyda and Executive Producer David Lynch conjure a rare vampire film.

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Capsules

CAPSULE: CAMP (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Avalon Fast

FEATURING: Zola Grimmer

PLOT: A traumatized college girl reluctantly volunteers as a counselor at a camp for “damaged” kids, but when she gets there she finds the other female counselors are practicing homemade witchcraft.

Still from Camp (2025)

COMMENTS: Poor Emily has had it rough the past couple years. Already wracked with guilt for a fatal accident that wasn’t really her fault, she finds herself responsible for a second unintentional death, making her feel like a serial killer. She leans on her father for support, and when he suggests the depressed girl could benefit by serving as a counselor at a Christian-themed camp for “damaged” kids, she agrees. There, she finds herself eagerly embraced by her fellow counselors, who aren’t nearly as Christian as management would prefer: every night is an campfire bacchanalia of dancing, flirting, pot, and alcohol. But, just as the Christians warn, weed, booze, and dancing are inevitably a gateway to witchcraft—and, perhaps, to psychic healing as well.

Where Camp is good is in the dreamy cinematography and imagery. Fast’s movie is shot through with experimental impulses, from fuzzy montages underlaid by indie ballads to a red-midnight rendezvous to overlays of twinkling stars as females cavort (and levitate) in the moonlight. Although the Alberta forest is entrancing, occasionally, mountainous backdrops seen from out the window are obvious matte paintings instead of natural vistas. After the indie dramatics of the first two acts, things slide towards the surreal: there’s a pay phone that pops up in the middle of a sylvan glen in the late going at a moment of crucial decision for our protagonist. In terms of setting a dreamy mood, Camp hits the notes it aims at, and for some, that will be enough.

But where Camp is bad is, sadly, pretty much everything else. Not only does the plot wander around aimlessly for most of the film, the characters are unmemorable. Emily’s female confidants are hardly developed: there’s the ringleader, there’s the kinda sexy one, and there’s… two others. The male characters are even sketchier, with only the camp’s senior leader, a wait-until-marriage hymn-singing straight-arrow, receiving significant attention. (There’s another guy who’s positioned as a potentially darker influence, but his plotline seems to fall victim to the cutting room floor.) And, although other critics seem to disagree, Emily herself is too much of a cipher: a knot of guilt, and little more. (What are her interests and hobbies, besides self-medicating and moping?) It’s not the actress’ fault: Grimmer portrays all the appropriate emotions, but why (beyond the obvious) and, more specifically, how her tragedies makes her “damaged” remains something of a mystery.

The overall result is disappointing, because Fast’s visual sensibilities are so engaging and the story has such a weighty theme that you wish these virtues had been wedded to a more affecting narrative. Instead, we get an often lovely mood piece with sincere impulses that’s undone by draggy pacing. If you’re looking for fun at a late-summer Camp, book Miasma instead.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Surreal in a manner that evokes aspects of David Lynch by way of Jane Schoenbrun, Fast’s atmospheric film is more interested in embracing the protagonist’s emotional damage than presenting her with a tidy way out from under it.”–Josh Goller, Spectrum Culture (contemporaneous)

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Capsules

CAPSULE: HOT SPOT (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Andrzej Konopka, Reika Kirishima,

PLOT: A detective living in a city run by a totalitarian AI, surrounded by wastelands, investigates a murder at a refugee camp and a series of cyberattacks that are accelerating the rate at which citizen’s heads are exploding.

Still from Hot Spot (2026)

COMMENTS: Agnieszka Smoczynska‘s Hot Spot has been getting slaughtered at Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, but I’m happy to report that, while it’s no The Lure, it’s a perfectly enjoyable, if strenuously unserious, midnight movie, an experience sort of like getting heat stroke at drive-in triple feature of Mad Max, Ghost in the Shell, and ‘s version of Dune. Do not attempt to take it seriously as science fiction; just enjoy the unexpected insanity and oddball directorial decisions, and you should find it a perfectly acceptable meat-and-potatoes weird movie.

Hot Spot‘s world-building is impressive, if frequently frustrating in its refusal to follow up on details. It’s set in a wealthy city surrounded by an endless wasteland, whose residents depend on near-omnipotent AI “the Head” for their abundance. The Head requires its residents to eat a “jellybean” daily and hook themselves into its neural network in order to enjoy the benefits it brings, like telepathy and virtual reality surfing, and it strongly discourages voluntary disconnection (since disconnected citizens can engage in wasteful activities like free thought or masturbation). Aiding the city’s prosperity are a species of caterpillar-like creatures of various sizes, which feed on blood and recycle the dead into water and electricity. Oh, and every now and then citizen’s heads will spontaneously explode for unclear reasons (when not caused by cyberattacks on the Head’s infrastructure, it may to have something to do with mental hygiene, or possibly too much masturbation). The populace views random spontaneous decapitation as a small price to pay in exchange for the necessities of existence, though. It seems everyone is allowed to join the city as long as they submit to the Head and eat the jellybean, which may explain the large refugee camp outside the city gate. The plot begins when our hero, outrageously mulletted, Polish-accented detective Djonny, who married to a Japanese woman who can disconnect from the Head by singing, is assigned to investigate a murder at the refugee camp. There, he encounters a group of (mostly female) nomads who keep half their faces shrouded in hajib-like headdresses, refuse to connect to the Head, and have some kind of undefined, scarcely explored mystical powers. Djonny suspects one of the refugees, Rana (a second-billed but only marginally important Noomi Rapace), as the killer, and also suspects her of being a “cyber witch.” The real culprit will eventually be revealed (and will not be much of a surprise), but in the meantime Rana seems to put some sort of curse on Djonny, which, for reasons which are again entirely unexplained, results in him occasionally turning into a tiger.

There’s also an elf-eared assistant who hangs around in the background doing nothing, and a lot of gratuitous trippy stuff. For arbitrary reasons, the movie sports an 80s aesthetic, even beyond the star’s featured curly mullet, track suit, and smoked sunglasses. The soundtrack proudly features “The Final Countdown” and a cover of “Take My Breath Away,” and the rest of Marcin Macuk and Zuzanna Wrońska’s score oozes retro synth-pop. Overall, Hot Spot‘s post-apocalyptic vibe makes it seem like it was created according to Panos Cosmatos‘ “poisoned nostalgia” technique: a teenage boy’s flawed imagining of a story conveyed by a lurid 1981 VHS box cover.

Many complain that Hot Spot leaves genuinely promising sci-fi concepts by the wayside in favor of meaningless psychedelic trip sequences and showy nonsense. It’s a fair rap, and an easy case to make. But it seems like a serious examination of a dystopian AI-driven cyberfuture is not what Hot Spot aims at. This is still likely the most entertaining and unpredictable movie about a telepathic post-apocalyptic detective in a blond mullet slowly turning into a big cat after an encounter with a cyber witch that you will see all year, and that’s enough to justify a watch. It breezed through theaters like a sirocco, but should hit VOD/streaming soon.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If ‘Hot Spot’‘s first fifteen minutes are a delightfully idiosyncratic barrage of sci-fi ideas, spinning ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Dune’ and ‘Logan’s Run’ through the Eurotrash lens of ‘Valerian and Laureline,’ its remaining 90 grind through those ideas until the gears slowly screech to a halt. It’s a shame, too, because Smoczyńska managed such an interesting command of tonal strangeness in ‘The Lure’; as self-consciously weird as it was, you followed the emotional truth of what the characters were going through. Here, any thematic coherence gets a bit 404 error, right alongside its plot beats.”–Clint Worthington, RogerEbert.com (festival screening)

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CAPSULE: SAFE WORD (2022)

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Aishiteru!

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The sixth installment in the Pete’s Perverted Pix series

Safe Word is available for purchase or rental on-demand.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Kawase Chisako, Torinomi Nagisa

PLOT: Idol singer Misa is gets recruited by an adult club and becomes a professional dominatrix under the tutelage of a mistress.

Still from Safe Word (2002)

COMMENTS: Ladies and gentlemen, and everyone on the spectrum, your humble hedonist has returned from a veritable safari of sex exploring weird movies on the BDSM circuit. Today’s movie, together with “TFTtTfDSHP” and Antiporno, are among the three nakedest and kinkiest films I’ve ever seen. In my quest for the weirdest of erotic fetish cinema, I have hiked through the valley of boobies, twin peaks marching like sand dunes to the horizon. I have seen every body part smacked, licked, tied, or splattered with paint. I have explored enough daddy issues and mommy issues to make Sigmund Freud choke on his cocaine. I’ve witnessed acts not even documented in the Urban Dictionary. In particular, I’ve snorkeled through oceans of estrogen, because the points of view with these movies have been overwhelmingly female. Girls dominate this genre! So far, the kinkiest male-focused erotic film I’ve seen has been directed by Kenneth Anger. Boys, you need to catch up! I’ll say it again, the first director to make a serious film about a male/male S&M relationship will have a name that lives in film infamy. The Yaois alone will carve your likeness into the sides of granite cliffs.

Today’s film, Safe Word (named for the actual BDSM practice of having an emergency signal in case the bottom can’t take it anymore) is almost too on-the-nose for the current project. I picked it after the previous entry based on my interest in diving deeper into Japanese “pinku” and “Roman Porno” cinema subcultures: Antiporno was a send-up of the genre, so let’s see a serious entry. Safe Word is indeed as pink as a cartoon panther alright, with kinks o’plenty paraded and bountiful flesh ahoy. It just isn’t all that weird, though quirky bits and scenes do provide enough strangeness to at least make for an unusual entry. The plot is basic and unadorned with psychedelic fluff. Misa (Kawase Chisako), a singer/celebrity with a tepid career, gets recruited by a mysterious adult club. She’s offered the role of house dominatrix, to be employed on the business end of a whip for high-priced clientele. At first she’s repulsed, until she finds out she can take her aggression out on smiling and willing masochists. Then she dives into the deep end of kink. (It’s clear she was at least curious about this BDSM business to start with.) The story sort of follows the template of Buñuel’s Belle De Jour (1967), with mild commentary on contemporary social and sexual mores, but Japanese hentai style.

Not that Misa gets to crack the whip on clients from day one, oh no… she has to be trained. Wink wink, cue the oft-written BDSM scenario known as “boot camp” where a harsh master/mistress collars a new slave and puts them through an obstacle course of pulse-pounding, edgy fetish activities for a month until the bottom “graduates” to topping. In this case, Misa’s mentor is the scene-dominating Kanon (Torinomi Nagisa), a statuesque femme fatale who instantly snaps a psychological chain around Misa’s neck from their first meeting and leads her though a series of painful, humiliating, or just orgasm-inducing experiences. Later Misa takes on her own clients, whom are satisfied with a standard beating/tie-up/nipple clips routine, for the most part. But what of her former (ongoing?) idol career? What about her public reputation? What can she say to her friends when she’s being paraded around town by Kanon with a remote-controlled vibrator down her pants? And is Misa in a relationship with Kanon, or is she merely the latest in a succession of Kanon’s human playthings? Mild tensions are set up, but there’s really not a heavy plot here so much as a showcase of perversions.

As for those quirks I promised: Safe Word takes itself as a mild comedy. The main running gag is that it’s a mockumentary, which means (despite the cinematography being professional) the cameraman is randomly acknowledged in-scene, sometimes by characters mildly alarmed that their big sadomasochist session is about to be recorded, or sometimes by characters who take the opportunity for a selfie pose. Sporadically Misa live-blogs on social media about her thoughts on her career, stardom, and sexuality. Small details stand out, such as the decor inside the adult club where most of the action takes place: a baroque, elaborately painted parlor whose walls are crisscrossed with knotted rope, as if the walls themselves were bound. That’s honestly the weirdest it gets, if you don’t count the near-constant acts of hedonistic excess playing throughout.

Safe Word is a well-crafted film which serves as a serious treatment of alternative sexuality every bit as deep and respectful as Secretary (2002), while becoming a near-nirvana for hentai/Asian erotica fans. Note the difference: every culture has practiced bondage, but only the Japanese raise it to its own recognized art form, shibari. Who can help but admire such dedication? Safe Word is not for the vanilla viewer, and barely vouched for as a watch for weirdophiles, but for loud and proud deviants everywhere it’s highly recommended, a leather-and-rubber-clad valentine to the modern civilized sadomasochist.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film’s message is PERVERTS YAY!!! Take pride in yourself. Being gay, fat, handicapped, non-binary and indeed pretty much anything legal has been reclaimed as a badge of identity these days… but what about disturbing kinky weirdos? Their time should come. Embrace your tastes. Don’t be ashamed of what you love.”–Finn Clark, This Way Down

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Bruce McDonald

FEATURING: Elliot Page (as Ellen Page), Zie Souwand, , Slim Twig, Ari Cohen, ,

PLOT: A look inside the troubled mind of a teenage girl who is dealing with a hostile school atmosphere, emotionally hostile parents, a fixation on the cool new boy, a random drugged-out loser who may be the best friend she has, and the disappearance of her little brother.Still from "The Tracey Fragments" (2007)

COMMENTS: Split-screen photography has been a filmmaking tool almost since the beginning of the cinema. The technique took a giant leap, though, with the debut of filmmaker Christopher Chapman’s “A Place to Stand,” the groundbreaking short that he created as part of Canada’s Expo 67. Far from merely dividing the image in twain, Chapman developed a technique of isolating images and enabling them to move through the frame in concert with other images, like a moving mosaic. It was called “multi-dynamic image technique,” and it gained a foothold in popular culture a year later when deployed it in The Thomas Crown Affair.

Maybe it’s a Canadian thing, because Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments may boast the most splits any screen has ever seen. The story of a girl whose mind is shattered by disaffection and tragedy (a simile Tracey employs in her first monologue) is suitably embodied by a narrative and a screen image that is similarly fractured. Humans are notorious for holding multiple viewpoints and emotional states at the same time, and the mosaic method allows the film to display all of them at once. Unexpressed rage and undelivered ripostes share space with silent pain and vast landscapes, while grids of pictures give way to clouds of dozens of images, sometimes with a sharp triangle piercing the frame. One particularly memorable image features Tracey in a desperate run for freedom, perfectly overlaid with shots of a horse in full gallop while the score by Broken Social Scene lays down an appropriately desperate groove. Rarely has the complexity of the mind, especially that of a teenager, been captured with such fidelity. 

The Tracey Fragments is a technical marvel. The film supposedly took a month to film and nine more to assemble, and the work shows as McDonald, editors Jeremiah Munce and Gareth C. Scales, and sound designer Steve Munro create an impressively clear story out of a deliberately jumbled set of pieces. It’s frankly remarkable that it works as well as it does, given that Tracey’s story is pretty one-note. While her life does seem legitimately grim, the nonlinear approach represents her situation as an unchanging condition: disaffected teen girl, touched by tragedy, cast among the losers in high school, disdainful of her aggressively distant parents, and yearning for a bland boy who promises escape but evidently is a cruel, cavalier lover. (If we can believe what we see; our point of view is entirely Tracey’s.) It’s authentic, but it’s not dramatic.

This was Page’s first release following the starmaking breakthrough of Juno (although Tracey was shot first), and it solidifies the actor’s inclination toward challenging material. Page doesn’t always look as scruffy and homely as the character’s situation would suggest, and Tracey’s monologues sometimes feel inappropriately formal and clear-minded for a girl in such distress. The whole film rests on Page’s shoulders, though, and he carries it with confidence. Notably, some scenes have taken on a stranger veneer with the passage of time. One of Tracey’s tormentors verbally taunts her for her lack of perceived hot-girl femininity, calling her “It” and demanding, “Is It a boy or a girl?” Scenes with Tracey and her therapist are particularly odd, with the trans actor playing opposite Richings in drag in an ex post facto head-scratcher. 

Split-screen is hardly an obscure technique. If you’ve seen any heist movie, you’ve probably been treated to a collage of lasers, hands, and beads of sweat. What distinguishes The Tracey Fragments is the way it gives the split-screen a psychological dimension. Instead of delivering information, it delivers character and mood. It’s not an entirely successful effort, as that mood has little chance to develop and grow. It does serve as a valuable reminder that all the cool things we can do with image and sound have the potential to do much more, if we give them a shot.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film’s split screens create a hallucinatory ripple effect, jumping back and forward in time, in and out of synch, and alternating between emotional states of characters to create an oddly cohesive whole… the results are breathtaking and exquisite…and a real mind-bending trip… no matter how otherworldly and strange the film feels and looks, THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS breathes with poignant genuineness and contains yet another performance of staggering and guileless determination by Ellen Page… Its shockingly bizarre and virtuoso use of cutting edge split screen techniques may have many people fleeing for the theatre exits within the first few minutes. However, if you’re patient and stay with the film it’s even easier to see what an absolutely thankless work of painstaking filmmaking resourcefulness and originality it is.” – Craig J. Koban, Craiger’s Cinema Corner (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by H. E. Martin. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

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The Tracey Fragments

The Tracey Fragments

  • DVD
  • Multiple Formats, Color, Dolby
  • English (Original Language), English (Unknown)

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