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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE THING WITH FEATHERS (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Dylan Southern

FEATURING: , Sam Sprueli,

PLOT: After the loss of his wife, a widowed man comes in contact with a mysterious human-sized crow.

Still from The Thing with Feathers (2025)

COMMENTS: Dimly-lit interiors and catatonic acting clarify from the beginning that this will be a grim watch. And it is, as we follow an unnamed man, dealing with complex emotions after the passing of his wife, struggling with denial while trying to care for his two sons and to find comfort in his work as a comic artist. This is not a realistic tale, but an allegorical and elliptical one, with gothic flourishes as a human-sized crow gradually makes his appearance.

The narrative, based on Max Porter’s novel “Grief is the Thing with Feathers,” is divided into four chapters, each dealing with a different perspective. The first, focusing on Dad, remains close to typical horror conventions, with its slow-burning atmosphere culminating in a series of violent confrontations with the aforementioned crow. The intensity of one of those encounters is underlined by an excellent 360°  shot. The aggressive, grotesque bird mocks our hero for his self-pity, and evens becomes physically violent, while calling him generic names like Sad Dad and English Widower. At the same time jump cuts bring us back into reality to create an ambiguity regarding the nature of the crow, which could just as well be a figment of the protagonist’s imagination.

The next chapters focus on the bird, the kids’ perception of the events, and a new demon plaguing the family’s home, seemingly an enemy of the crow. Events are open to interpretation as different monsters come to symbolize different aspects of the mourning process, drawing, through allegory, a distinction  between grief, as a healthy way of dealing with loss, and total nihilistic despair.

We don’t have the most original and unique premise here. The central metaphor isn’t exactly something we haven’t seen before. However, thanks to a competent main performance by Benedict Cumberbach and an emphasis on dimly-lit interiors, the execution doesn’t completely disappoint. For fans of art-house psychological horror, in the vein of The Babadook  and similar movies distributed by A24, this is an okay recommendation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the perfectly cast Cumberbatch effortlessly moves between fever dream, painful reality and apparent hallucination with every cell in his body present in the character… It’s a strangely beautiful, well paced and moving film…”–Annete Basile, Film Inc (contemporaneous)

The Thing With Feathers

The Thing With Feathers

  • Blu-ray and digital

List Price : 17.8 $

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CAPSULE: ELDORADO (2012)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Richard Driscoll

FEATURING: Richard Driscoll, Darren Morgan, , Jeff Fahey, , , , Brigitte Nielsen, , Rik Mayall, Sylvester McCoy, , David Carradine (archival footage)

PLOT: Oliver and Stanley Rosenblum, a Blues Brothers tribute act, accidentally find themselves in Eldorado, where the Sawyer-style family ruling the roost has big plans for the town’s 200th anniversary.

Still from Eldorado (2012)

COMMENTS: I can be very forgiving if a movie has competent sound design: balanced dialogue audio, fleshed-out aural background, and adequate-to-good music. Eldorado failed me here, and in many other ways. This makes sense when you know a bit of history behind the movie: writer / director / producer / &c. Richard Driscoll apparently hoped to succeed in a Producers-style gambit, claiming a big movie whilst making it on the cheap. Sound design, surely, suffers from this underinvestment—but what are Eldorado‘s merits?

These include, and are probably limited to, the following:

  • Darryl Hannah as “The Stranger”, and her delivery of the titular poem by
  • A surprisingly touching reunion of Vietnam veterans, from Jeff Fahey and Bill Moseley
  • An homage to a famous Laurel & Hardy bit
  • Michael Madsen’s face, ever over-reacting in that roguish Madsenian manner
  • Peter O’Toole proving that even in his don’t-give-a-damn super-annuation, his floor of quality is higher than many actors’ ceilings

The rest is, alas, little more than a tedious curio with occasional blasts of badly mixed sound, music, and FX. There’s plenty that’s gross (though well within the average 366er’s tolerance), plenty that’s derivative (the fine line here being that much of said spoofing is by design), and plenty of questions—the most looming of which is, “Why, oh why?”—and the answer comes back: for tax fraud.

It would be remiss of me to recommend this to anyone—ever—except for the most die-hard of Rik Mayall fans. A curious actor, to say the least, and woefully underused. His performance as Mario the Chef transcends the surrounding doofery; and that’s even bearing in mind it consists mostly of lip-synching to a couple of pop-opera tunes. Had Eldorado been put completely under his creative direction, we may have had one of the grandest monstrosities of the new century.

Instead we don’t.

We have Eldorado.

_________________________________________________

Reviewer’s Addendum: Apparently I watched the 90-minute “Director’s Cut”, which I feel is more than sufficient despite being half-an-hour shorter than an earlier release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To say that Eldorado’s cast is eclectic is more than somewhat of an understatement. Quite how Mr Driscoll coerced such a parade of (one-time) A-listers to appear in his ‘Mamma Mia for horror fans’ (the filmmaker’s description – not mine) is beyond me. Surely they didn’t all need the money?  But you certainly get more than you bargain for with this ‘B’ movie: Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and David Carradine (in his last albeit brief role) reuniting from ‘Kill Bill’. Jeff Fahey, Patrick Bergin and Brigitte Nielsen – who deserves a special mention for miming Ottis Redding’s ‘Respect’ in a hair salon whilst kitted out in stockings and suspenders. Throw a cameo by Caroline Munro into the melting pot and you sure have one big steaming pot of erm, surrealism.”–Paul Worts, Fleapits and Picture Palaces

(This movie was nominated for review by nc, who described it as “an incomprehensible mess, a hypnotically bad fever dream, a film so bad it’s hard to believe it even exists.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: TRAUMNOVELLE (2024)

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AKA Dream Story

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You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream. . .

– Edgar Allan Poe

DIRECTED BY: Florian Frerichs

FEATURING: Nikolai Kinski, Laurine Price, Nora Islei

PLOT: Disturbed by his wife’s fantasies of infidelity, a physician crashes a secret orgy.

Still from Traumnovelle (2024)

COMMENTS: “Wanna go. . . someplace else?”

Although not a Surrealist, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle tells the tale of a married man who, for twenty-hours, basically lives his life according to what André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, called “objective chance.”1 After arguing with his wife and losing a patient, Jakob (Kinski) wanders aimlessly around Berlin, ping-ponging from one chance encounter to another, searching for that elusive else, while preoccupied with thoughts of death and sex.

So, if Schnitzler’s story can be interpreted as a Surrealist tale, then what do we expect to see when it becomes a film? Is a Surrealist story necessarily a weird movie? Does it have to contain the cinematic equivalent of melting clocks, or can it treat dream reality in more varied and subtle ways?

Traumnovelle contains only one melting reality scene: when the wife, Amelia, describes her dream to her husband and an animated sequence takes over the narrative. The morphing visuals depict the couple in a variety of landscapes according to constantly shifting art styles. The rest of the film depicts a Berlin filtered through Jakob’s daydreams and imagination. Nothing in the live-action sequences is impossible in reality, but a build-up of eerie coincidences and uncanny repetitions create the slightly sinister atmosphere of a nightmare.

Viewers familiar with ‘s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), also based on Schnitzler’s story, will recognize the major plot points. During an evening at a nightclub, where Amelia dances with a masked man, a pair of women in domino masks tries to pick up Jakob. The question of escape, paired with the teasing offer to play with their VibrateApp, solicits only an echo from the stupefied Jakob: “Someplace else?”

Ultimately, he leaves the girls to their remote vibrator, rescues his wife from the masked man and takes her home. The couple have a heated discussion over whether or not they are both sexually attracted to other people. Amelia then thoroughly shocks Jakob by revealing she would have left him for a random officer, glimpsed in their hotel during their previous summer’s vacation.

To avoid her while he thinks this through, Jakob spends the night on the town. He’s awkwardly hit on by the daughter of his dead patient, follows a prostitute back to her room only to leave without enjoying her services, and eventually runs into a former classmate and medical school dropout, Nick Nightingale, now a shady nightclub performer.

During his strolls through the city, Jakob’s thoughts continually intrude into everyday life in genuinely startling moments. While listening to Verdi’s “A Masked Ball” he pictures himself as one of the Continue reading CAPSULE: TRAUMNOVELLE (2024) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: DRACULA (2025)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Adonis Tanta, Oana Maria Zaharia, Gabriel Spahiu

PLOT: A film director narrates the tale of a washed- up actor playing Dracula, while AI- crafted sketches inspired by the vampire myth play as interludes.

Still from Dracula (2025)

COMMENTS: When a movie starts with shots of the historical Dracula—also known as Vlad the Impaler—clearly made by AI, you know you are in for a treat. Romanian director Radu Jude, one of the most uncompromising voices in European cinema today, proves once again his willingness to be weird and sarcastic. Dracula is a spiritual successor to some of his most controversial works, especially the infamous Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021).

A film director narrates the tale of an actor performing Dracula through a structure somewhere in between sex-show and participatory theater. Jude intersperses a plethora of interludes among this story as the in-film director occasionally asks AI for inspiration and help in creating embedded narratives. This complex form of tales-within-tales recall everything from “The Arabian Nights” to ambitious cinematic projects like Mariano Llinás’ colossal La Flor (2018).

Dracula is a Frankenstein of a movie, a pastiche of vastly different genres and styles. There are adaptations of Romanian vampire tales, love stories set in different time periods, a hyper-stylized farce about a farmer harvesting cocks, a vulgar song, and ads inspired by Nosferatu (1922). Some sketches place Dracula in contemporary Romania to comment on the re-emergence of extreme right and nationalism, while another uses the vampire as an allegory for bloodsucking capitalism, in the vein of Julian Radlmaier’s Blutsauger (2021).  There is even a realistic slice-of-life episode towards the end.

Jude works here with a wide range of styles, from grim realism to surrealism. Some things remain constant, however. The acting is mostly over-the-top with rapid dialogues, as if we were watching a variety show. Jude applies Brechtian techniques, with fourth wall breaks reminding us of the artificiality of everything portrayed here. The theatrical props and AI shots further the theme. Dracula is Jude’s most ambitious work yet, a cinematic mammoth lasting almost three hours and an exemplary labyrinth of narrative complexity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Jude combines A.I., dark humor, tongue-in-cheek humor and unhinged zaniness that creates a surreal experience that might be enjoyed more while drunk or high.”–Avi Offer, The NYC Movie Guru (contemporaneous)

Dracula [Blu-ray]

Dracula [Blu-ray]

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CAPSULE: BARBECUE THEM (1981)

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Souvliste tous! Etsi tha paroume to kouradokastro

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DIRECTED BY: Nikos Zervos

FEATURING: Konstantinos Hristidis, Dimitris Poulikakos, Thekla Tselepi

PLOT: The daily escapades of a group of hippies, two men and two women, in 1980s Athens.

Copy Barbecue This! (1981)

COMMENTS: The tale begins after the clumsy introduction of our protagonists, each presented with a distinct musical theme. We follow a group of wannabe hippies with weird names like Daisy, Oratios and Kyros, as if taken out of Mickey Mouse comics.  This group, vagabonds in the eyes of society, live without regular jobs, indulging in free love, listening to rock and roll, and finding money mainly by asking their middle-class relatives. They wander through Athens and the surrounding countryside without clear purpose at first, but find one towards the end of the movie when they attempt to save a friend of theirs from a satanic psychiatrist. Yes, it is as silly as it sounds.

What we have here is a free-form, not exactly coherent, almost improvisational narrative portraying the underground rock music scene of 1980s Greece. Segments attack middle-class hypocrisy, from the pseudo-intellectual reporters who approach our characters pretending to be interested in the underground rock scene to portraits of traditional nuclear families hiding  wild instincts and a myriad of pathologies under a pretense of normalcy. This becomes the main focus of the second half of the film when one family’s daughter, Elenitsa, is put in a psychiatric hospital against her will. Our deadbeats attempt to save her.

This is not a movie that takes itself or its main characters too seriously, however. Daisy, Oratios, Kyros, and even Elenitsa claim to be idealists, but are proven hollow in the end, unable to bring about real social change. An alternative title of the movie roughly translates as “This is how we are waiting to take the castle made of shit?” This is exactly what one of group wonders about himself and his friends, underlining the hollowness of their rebellion. Their fight against the castle made of shit is in vain—because they do not really want to fight, they just want to have fun.

Dimitris Poulikakos, a well known rock musician in Greece, narrates the tale in voice-over. Polikakos also appears in Aldevaran (1975), an earlier Greek movie of a similar style portraying the underground art and music scene of the 1970s.  This movie also shares some DNA with other works of its director, Nikos Zervos, like Exoristos stin kentriki leoforo ( 1979). Not only are there common themes like the hollowness of the hippie lifestyle, but they share similar narrative approaches, defying traditional structures.

If it is not already clear, this is not exactly a surreal movie. It is a parody and deconstruction of middle-class morality and of counterculture idealism, but this only makes it slightly eccentric. It should be noted that technical aspects make it a difficult watch, as the audio quality is really bad. It will also be a real challenge for non-Greeks to find this one. Copies exist online—though not in well-known legit platforms—and some DVDs can be found, but without English subtitles.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other reviews found.