Category Archives: Capsules

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: OVERTURN: AWAKENING OF THE WARRIOR (2013)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Ivan Doan

FEATURING: Ivan Doan, Maria Glazunova, Konstantin Gerasimyuk, Eric R. Gilliatt, Bill Konstantinidis, Philippa Peter

PLOT: Christopher Gabriel emerges from a dream to find himself a pawn in an international game of geopolitical warfare, and attempts to uncover the meaning of his role and explore his newly discovered abilities.

Still from OVERTURN: AWAKENING OF THE WARRIOR (2013)

COMMENTS: “What do you mean?” It’s easily the most common line of dialogue in Overturn: Awakening of the Warrior. A character unleashes a complex metaphysical monologue with a raised eyebrow and a self-satisfied smile, smug in their superior  knowledge. Their conversational partner invariably responds with narrowed eyes and the tone of someone with a well-used BS detector, “What do you mean?”

It’s a crucial question for the film itself, which tries to fake importance by spouting a lot of dialogue that doesn’t “mean” anything at all. The barest scraps of a plot revolve around a young man’s discovery of a titanic battle between good and evil, but neither the scale of the conflict nor the stakes of the outcome are ever articulated. His interactions aren’t with characters so much as with signifiers with names like The Servant, The Judge, or The Informer: all portent, no content. Every other scene is one of those dialogues where characters say big words with great conviction, broken up with occasional martial arts demonstrations and—most oddly—vlog posts where Christopher alludes to all the crazy stuff going on. (Said crazy stuff is never detailed with any specificity.) What passes for tension is mostly bluster, and what passes for conflict is merely pronouncement.

At this point, I should note that, while researching this film, I discovered that it’s a continuation of a webseries called “Overturn” featuring several of the same actors and characters. Is it a direct sequel, or a re-imagining of the same premise, à la Adolescence of Utena? That’s not really clear, and while I could try speedrunning the series, I don’t think there’s much value in doing so, because the film is so lacking in anything concrete that it honestly doesn’t matter what the connection is. There’s nothing in the feature that would suddenly become more explicit with the background provided by a 3-minute episode. It’s just bigger.

The thing is, Overturn: Awakening… is actually a pretty good-looking film. Cinematographer Sergey Kachanov stages attractive vistas in and around the lively parks and gardens of Kyiv circa 2013. (Given current events, seeing the city in this way is bittersweet.) And the cast looks the part, from the pretty Glazunova to the ominously grizzled Gerasimyuk. Given that exactly one actor in the film can call English their first language, they deliver their word-salad speeches with reasonable skill overall. In particular, I strongly suspect Gerasimyuk is delivering all his English dialogue phonetically, but with no discernible decrease in menace. Doan, a strikingly handsome lead who sports the film’s best American accent and demonstrates decent martial arts skills, anchors the film. (It’s often obvious when punches are being pulled, and the faceless ninjas he fights do that thing where they gang up on Doan but then attack him one-by-one. Let’s give the fight scenes a B-.) Parts of Overturn et al pass themselves off quite effectively as a new addition to the spy canon.

Unfortunately, Doan the actor is significantly hamstrung by Doan the screenwriter, Doan the director, and Doan the editor. Aside from the frustrating lack of anything actually happening, Overturn: AOTW has absolutely no pacing whatsoever. Scenes slam into each other with no regard for logical development, intriguing ideas are quickly dropped and forgotten, and rhythms repeat without variation to the point of tedium. There are almost no scenes with more than two people, and an excessive number of them take place on park benches and riverwalks. What’s ultimately weirdest about the movie is that its perception of itself is so wildly different from what it actually presents. It thinks it’s a deep exploration of the psychology of self. It’s mainly people talking in circles.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…certainly takes the worlds of martial arts action and philosophical pondering to a different place… a straight-forward, thinking man’s amalgamation of philosophy, action, and science fiction rolled into an independent film effort that feels like a story only getting started.” – Kirk Fernwood, OneFilmFan

(This movie was nominated for review by Dick, who described it as “Bruce Lee meets Andrey Tarkovsky.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)       

Capsules

CAPSULE: A USEFUL GHOST (2025)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

FEATURING: Davika Hoorne, Witsarut Himmarat, Wanlop Rungkumjad, Wisarut Homhuan, Apasiri Nitibhon, Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit

PLOT: A man falls for a vacuum cleaner possessed by the ghost of his dead wife, despite his family’s insistence on exorcising the interloper.

Still from A Useful Ghost (2025)

COMMENTS: An exorcist stands mouth agape as a vacuum cleaner uses its spinning brush attachment on an ecstatic man’s nipples. In the context of A Useful Ghost, what is strange about this scene isn’t the human/machine coupling so much as the exorcist’s reaction. A night duty nurse is barely surprised when the same vacuum asks her for her husband’s room number; she tells it matter-of-factly that visiting hours are over and that, under hospital policy, ghosts cannot qualify as relatives. In this alternate version of contemporary Thailand, ghosts roaming among the populace are taken for granted. The central family’s spotless-but-haunted factory is shut down because, according to the inspector, “A ghost is even less hygienic than a speck of dust.”

The exorcist’s reaction is strange because it challenges the deadpan style first-time director Boonbunchachoke adopts for this tale. Characters in A Useful Ghost do not show any emotion unless and until it is absolutely necessary. Therefore, when this exorcist stands, mouth agape, he does so with no alteration for the duration of the scene, flanked by characters whose faces reveal less visible shock. At first, the anti-naturalistic acting seems contrived, but as the film goes on and the tone turns from ridiculous to sombre, its effect becomes hypnotic, evoking an elegiac, ghostly world where genuine feeling is slowly leeching away into a void.

You see, despite the fact that the premise suggests a whimsical romantic comedy, A Useful Ghost takes a darker turn in its second half after the ghost wife (Nan) proves her worth to her husband’s family though her spectral talent for entering others’ dreams and gathering intelligence about the reasons for their hauntings. This useful talent, and fortuitous connections, give Nan standing in society. Despite the legal impediments of ghosthood, she’s too valuable to be exorcised. But, although Nan is motivated solely by the noble desires of love and duty to family, her persistence in this world is predicated on her utility to those in power. The compromises she must make inevitably stresses her relationship with her principled husband. When the 2010 massacres become a major plot engine, the dynamic shifts from romantic comedy to political screed, and the film raises an unusual question: is it possible for a ghost to be a quisling?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Transcending novelty is only possible when you convince us to stop saying ‘wow, that’s so weird’ and begin genuinely investing in the characters. Boonbunchachoke does an immaculate job of threading that needle…”–Christian Zilko, Indiewire (festival screening)

Capsules, Miscellanea

“KRAZEE KIDZ VIDEO PARTY”

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Let’s get this out of the way first: despite containing five “films” (although one is only 25 minutes long and two others are under an hour), “Krazee Kidz Video Party” is not a box set. There’s no box. There’s no booklet. There are no meaningful special features: a few drive-in “snipes,” ads and intermission notices, serve as the sole extra, unless you consider the option to watch all the features end-to-end in “slumber party mode” a bonus. And—get this—all this content—301 minutes—is crammed onto one (1) disc. Forget 4K transfers: these VHS-y resolutions hover closer to the quarter-K level.

Needless to say, this collaborative release from Something Weird and American Genre Film Archives isn’t exactly Criterion Collection quality. That does not mean, however, that it is not recommended—highly recommended, in fact, to the right oddballs, many of whom are regular readers of this site. That is because of the quality (can that be the right word?) of the curiosities on display here. True to the title, it’s children’s entertainment at its most deranged: a treasure trove of the cynical subgenre that has come to be known as children’s grindhouse. Well, at least some of it is. The rest of it is just, well, kinda weird—with one legitimate exotic egg hidden inside this dime-store Easter basket.

Still from The big bad wolf (1957)

That crackerjack isn’t the set’s first offering, 1957’s The Big Bad Wolf [Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geißlein, AKA The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats], although this opener sports the highest uncanny valley quotient—which is really saying something in this collection. From the first time Mother Goat appears in her Satanist-adjacent horned mask as a talking crow demands the unseen narrator recite the names of her ritual sacrifices cute kids, you’ll wonder if you’ve stumbled into a badly deteriorated, repurposed short. Ultimately, this German movie (the dubbing was unobtrusive, thanks to the masks worn by 90% of the cast) is more of a live-action cartoon, of the kind Hanna-Barbera would have executed in a crisp 5 minutes, but stretched out to almost an hour’s running time. Still, there is something endearing about this material being played earnestly by adults in inarticulate fuzzy masks. The cast really commits to the bits: the wolf’s involuntary plummet in a wheelbarrow down a very slight incline, for example, goes hard. There are also a couple of memorable moments where the lupine-headed monster interacts with live actors, ruthlessly bullying a grocer and a flour merchant (who fights back with his trademark good). And it ends with a note of genuine horrifying folk surrealism straight from the Grimm Brothers’ source material: the wolf eats six of the seven kids, then, as he sleeps off his meal, the lone survivor slices open his belly (with scissors, but without anesthetic) to save his kin. Overall, it’s a highly watchable oddity, and a nice way to start your marathon of Continue reading “KRAZEE KIDZ VIDEO PARTY” →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LFO (2013)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Antonio Tublen

FEATURING: Patrik Karlson, Izabella Jo Tschig, , Ahnna Rasch

PLOT: An acoustical engineer discovers a technology to implant hypnotic suggestion and tests out his new-found skills on his neighbors.Still from LFO (2013)

COMMENTS: Fundamental to science fiction is not only its ability to predict the future, but to anticipate the otherwise unforeseen consequences that the future will bring. As Isaac Asimov noted, “It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem.” So it goes with LFO, which starts with a tried-and-true premise—what if we could bend others to our will?—and then dives into the havoc that could be wreaked if someone with highly questionable morals wielded this ability. It could easily be a “Black Mirror” episode, but writer/director/composer Tublen has something more specific in mind. Beyond the dangers of trying to control other people’s minds, he’s interested in the kind of person who would be inclined to misuse this power.

It’s hardly accidental that the camera never leaves the tiny, cramped house of Robert, the quiet loner who immediately applies his discovery to manipulating the couple that just moved in across the street. While Robert’s ambitions might be large (he practices an anticipated Nobel Prize acceptance speech), he’s a very small man, and his home serves as a mirror for his chaotic mind. He is insular both by fate and by choice, choosing to interact only with those whose responses he can predict. A spiritual descendant of The Conversation’s Harry Caul, Robert is mystified and frightened by others’ emotional needs. Unlike Harry, though, Robert finds a way to interact with others on his own terms, which is how he can embark on a manipulative and even cruel path without an ounce of malevolence in his heart.

There’s an unsettling humor to how Robert pursues his research. We don’t know much about Linn and Simon, the new neighbors, and Robert doesn’t really care about them except for how he can use them (Linn as a mindless sex object, Simon to wash his windows and rob banks). When we do learn something about the couple’s personal life, Robert feeds that back through his own personal filter, inserting himself as an ersatz therapist and finding new ways to maneuver their lives for his benefit. There’s even an element of screwball comedy as more interlopers—a rival acoustician, a dogged investigator, even Robert’s ex-wife—show up to turn the screws and threaten the world he has made for himself, forcing him to use his mind-control tactics more widely and urgently. But Tublen never loses sight of the essential horror at the story’s foundation: people are having their freedom destroyed by someone only interested in himself.

Karlson expertly taps into the confident ignorance of Robert, who follows in the great tradition of cinematic nerds whose buttoned-up exterior conceals black motives. Even if he weren’t using his technological breakthrough to manipulate others for personal interest, we’d be wary of him. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved dress shirts with neckties that invariably have a mustard stain somewhere on them, rocking a perpetual 10 o’clock shadow, and radiating an uncomfortable intensity, he’s off-putting before he’s even said a word. We’re not surprised to see his home in a state of disarray, nor are we taken aback by the dark, equipment-littered basement in which he squirrels himself away. He’s the Dangerous Nerd, the dark Dilbert scorned by society, whose intelligence will only be magnify his revenge.

LFO is a simple but smart little piece of sci-fi horror, a worthy companion piece to other low-budget successes like Coherence that pack a lot of ideas into a compact space. Even its whirlwind final minutes, when the global scope of Robert’s terrible ambition is revealed, it stays focused on his sadly isolated, blithely arrogant mind. The traffic was never the fault of the cars, but of the people driving them.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a quirky and altogether memorable adventure that maintains a sense of mystery far longer than one might expect… Most movies have one unique idea that the filmmaker hopes will help set their project apart from their competition. LFO actually has a number of crazy ideas at work at any given time… In all my years of writing about films I can honestly say I have never seen anything quite like this film.”–James Shotwell, Under the Gun

(This movie was nominated for review by WithoutTheA, who said “there was a fair amount going on that was strange throughout the entire movie. The ending was pretty bizarre too.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

LFO

LFO

  • Factory sealed DVD

New starting from: 34.95 $

Go to Amazon