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Capsules

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1969)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Michael Sarrazin, ,

PLOT: In Depression-era America, people take part in an exhausting dance contest for a big prize of $1500.

Still from They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969)

COMMENTS: Long before the pop phenomenon “Squid Game” and contemporary reality shows, one New Hollywood flick used contests and challenges as the perfect metaphor for a materialistic and overly competitive society. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, based on the 1935 Horace McCoy novel, is the product of a specific Hollywood period characterized by creativity and vision. In the late 1960s and 1970s, American mainstream cinema, inspired by the French New Wave and theories regarding auteurist cinema, produced a series of socially-conscious, well-regarded masterpieces. Horses happens to be one of them.

The setting is the poverty-stricken America of the 1930s. The plot revolves around a group of people taking part in a dance competition for couples, which promises a big prize of $1500 for the winners. Jane Fonda plays the cynical, hardened Gloria. By happenstance she meets Robert (Michael Sarrazin) and chooses him as her dance partner for the competition. These two are the protagonists of our tale, and by following them in their struggle we get to know some other couples from the dance floor as well.

Each participant carries their own misfortunes and desperation, and, at least for a while, the competition seems like an escape from their burdens. Not only does it promise rewards, but it conceals everyone’s misery in beautiful costumes and an elegant, festive atmosphere. The question is, is the contest really exploiting them? Their struggle for survival becomes a show for the masses, while the event gradually reveals its face as a deeply humiliating farce. Mental and physical breakdown is part of the program here, and in the end, that failure is what the paying audience wants desperately to consume.

Despite the absence of graphic imagery, within such a competitive and oppressive environment there is a certain dynamic that recalls  the microcosm of ‘s Salo, the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Contestants try to appeal to the authorities—the event’s producers—through implied sexual favors. At the same time, the relationship between Gloria and Robert hints at a typical Hollywood romance, only to wildly subvert it by revealing its the fakeness and the process behind its construction. The uncommon narrative technique of flash-forwards suggests a tragic finale that only reveals itself fully towards the end.

All in all, this is a solid recommendation for everyone interested in classic cinema and movies with strong elements of social critique. It reveals the exploitative mechanisms at work behind the star system, and the show business, attacking even its own home, Hollywood. And although it takes the form of a tragic fable, it doesn’t lose its realism. It may not be a weird movie, but it is a subversive one for sure.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A sordid spectacle of hard times, a kind of existentialist allegory of life.”–Variety Staff, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Brett Warwick, who said “I’m a little surprised that Sydney Pollack’s 1969 fever-dream masterpiece… wasn’t mentioned.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

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    Capsules, Essays

    REPORT: BACKROOMS: EVERYTHING MUST GO EDITION (2026) REVEALS TENSION IN THE FRANCHISE

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    Backrooms  is available to purchase or rent on-demand (without the “Everything Must Go” bonus content).

    In 2019, A24 briefly released an extended director’s cut of the unexpected horror hit Midsommar to theaters between its regular run and its home video debut. This year, the even more surprising success of the YouTube “liminal horror” adaptation Backrooms—which has, shockingly, become the studio’s highest grossing film of all time—inspired them to take a similar marketing tack. This time around, however, the offering was not a true extended cut, but rather the original theatrical release with a 15-minute bonus short set in the Backrooms universe playing after the credits rolled. In the theater I saw it in, less than half the audience stayed for the bonus film (presumably because they didn’t know it was coming—without researching it, you would not expect the extra content).

    backrooms everything must go edition (2026) promotional stillYou likely missed Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition in its one-week theatrical run (which is already over). The good news is that, although there was originally some question as to whether this short would be a theatrical exclusive, we now know that it will (soon) appear on director Kane Parsons’ YouTube channel. The other good news for those with Backrooms FOMO is that “Everything Must Go” is as inessential as inessential can be: it chronologically and temporally links the web series to the feature film, but it offers little excitement on its own.

    The “Everything Must Go” edition exists only because of Backrooms’ strange journey to theaters. To recap quickly for those out of the loop: it began as a “creepypasta” digital legend about a man who discovers an endless labyrinth of rooms. Other users picked up the story and elaborated on it—most notably, a 16-year old named , whose original liminal space found-footage “Backrooms” YouTube short picked up 90 million views (and a Weirdcademy Award) before being further expanded into a 24-episode webseries. The series eventually centered around the corporation ASYNC’s exploration of the Backrooms—an endless series of rooms with improbable geometries, surreally anomalous items, and dimly glimpsed monstrous entities. In yet another surprise in this constantly astonishing phenomenon, in 2023 art-house/elevated horror studio A24, fresh off a best picture nomination for Everything Everywhere All at Once, announced that they would sign then 17-year-old Parsons to direct a Backrooms feature film, with the backing of ‘s Atomic Monster productions. Again defying the odds, the Backrooms feature film was a blockbuster.

    And thus we come to the present. The purpose of the “Everything Must Go” edition—besides the obvious cash grab—is, as noted, to Continue reading REPORT: BACKROOMS: EVERYTHING MUST GO EDITION (2026) REVEALS TENSION IN THE FRANCHISE →

    Capsules

    CAPSULE: CITY WIDE FEVER (2026)

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    DIRECTED BY: Josh Heaps

    FEATURING: Diletta Giuglielmi, Nancy Kimball, Hugo Alexander-Rose, Angelica Kim

    PLOT: A film student discovers evidence of a forgotten Italian director and, in the course of making a documentary about him, gradually loses touch with reality.

    Still from City Wide Fever (2026)

     

    COMMENTS: Initial reports on City Wide Fever described it variously as a , a giallo tribute, and definitely not a giallo nor a tribute. The film’s strange tone must account for this confusion. IMDB classifies it as a horror comedy; though if there’s humor here, I suspect I’m not interpreting it as the director intended. The script attempts to walk the line between genuinely engaging with giallo tropes and simultaneously condemning them for offending contemporary sensibilities. Whether City Wide Fever is a send-up of the giallo resurgence or an honest homage (or both), it liberally takes from the genre its trademark ambiguity, stylization, and mood.

    While wandering around New York City, Sam happens upon a USB drive in a gutter. She takes it home and finds a trove of files relating to Saturnino Barresi, who just happens to have directed a slew of giallo films, one of her favorite genres. Barresi apparently went missing, or stopped making films, under mysterious circumstances in the 1970s. His final film, City Wide Fever, was never completed. Though she’s never heard of him before, nor actually seen any of his movies, Sam decides to track him down and make a documentary about her search (a very film student thing to do, as the movie self-reflexively acknowledges).

    Her quest takes her to the home of a creepy film professor, a creepy Times Square porn shop (where appears in a brief cameo), and a creepy Gowanus warehouse filled with mannequins (what else?), until she reaches the creepy house of a former giallo actress, before it all culminates in—her mother’s uptown apartment (?). Along the way, a masked knife-wielding killer (who else?) shows up to off Sam’s contacts and friends. Or is she just having nightmares, having succumbed to “the fever”?

    The killer wears a variety of masks, many of them knit ski masks in bright colors, similar to Pussy Riot, also recalling masked serial killers from classic horror films. Red and blue lighting appears whenever Sam’s delusions and reality merge or fracture. Despite this, City Wide Fever never gets really weird. Even though Sam may be hallucinating some of the events depicted, they never stray too far from typical giallo violence, and only a few frames are outright surreal.

    Perhaps it’s weirdest feature is the portrayal of Sam by two different actors, for reasons that remain unclear; this conceit could use the aid of more character development. All we know about Sam is her obsession with giallo. So, is she an American who imagines herself as Italian due to her fixation? Is she an Italian who imagines herself in the role of the amateur investigator, who is often a foreigner in Italian films? Or is this simply emblematic of the lack of narrative logic that’s repeatedly emphasized as a defining characteristic of these films (or maybe a nod to )?

    Obviously limited by a low budget, the scenes shot with a cell phone actually look higher quality than the rest, which is shot on video. The documentary aspect of the narrative makes the visuals somewhat excusable. It looks exactly like the type of student film it purports to be.

    Similar films from earlier in the century, like The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears and Berberian Sound Studio, interrogated giallo’s complexities through sophisticated dissections of imagery and sound. For those interested in a very 2020s take on the giallo, City Wide Fever may do the trick, though it really can’t compare to those earlier films. As other reviewers have noted, ‘s producer credit seems to be more an endorsement of Heaps’ directorial potential than anything else. Here’s hoping Heaps gets thrown more money for his next picture, and keeps heading off the beaten path.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a real oddity. On the surface, it’s a small DIY thriller that looks shot on the cheap, which already narrows down its appeal. But if you get on its wavelength over the course of its very brief 70 minutes (sans credits), you might even start to feel a small twinge of nostalgia. . . this movie tries to go for a surreal, artsy vibe that makes the protagonist question her own reality, though the attempt is hampered by a limited budget. “–Ernesto Zelaya Miñano, Screen Anarchy (contemporaneous)

    City Wide Fever [Blu-ray]

    City Wide Fever [Blu-ray]

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    Capsules

    CAPSULE: THE FEELING THAT THE TIME FOR DOING SOMETHING HAS PASSED (2023)

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    The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something is Gone is available to purchase or rent on-demand.

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    The fourth installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.

    DIRECTED BY: Joanna Arnow

    FEATURING: Joanna Arnow, , Babak Tafti

    PLOT: Ann, a middle-aged single woman, has an unsatisfied lust for dominant men, but most of the men in her life are dispassionate duds.

    Still from The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed (2023)

    COMMENTS: The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed ties with Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key for the film I have reviewed with the most cumbersome title. “TFTtTfDSHP” will serve as the abbreviation.

    TFTtTfDSHP is a deadpan comedy and a character study that’s almost too candid in dissecting the mind of the frustrated kinkster in the wild, driven to settle for the nearest thing to warmth in a cold world. Can a film be considered weird based on one performance? Writer/director/lead actress Joanna Arnow bares all in a story that’s at least a bit autobiographical (right down to having her real-life parents play her parents), while acting out a study in frustrated feminine sexuality. Her performance is so fearlessly open that it’s nothing less than heroic. This is one of the most honest portrayals not only of real-life alternative lifestyles and sexual expressions, but of 21st-century cultural frustrations in general. At the same time, Arnow, even while casually fingering herself while naked at the breakfast table or costumed as a pig-slave, keeps a firm grasp on her character’s humanity and dignity. She makes it clear that her Ann is actively the agent in her own world, seeking something better for herself. Her definition of better just happens to be different from most of ours.

    For those of you who wonder “why do people want BDSM in the first place?”, films like this and Secretary provide clear answers. Secretary’s Lee has a psychologically damaged background and deals with it by engaging in thrilling, edgy fantasies so spicy that an ordinary relationship won’t cut it. In TFTtTfDSHP, Ann lives in a millennial-gray world of trivial humiliations and disrespect. She’s the black sheep of her family, her coworkers take sadistic joy in making her work life miserable, and she lives a lonely, friendless existence in a threadbare apartment in an indifferent city. A couple of hours of bedroom role-play is her only chance to feel like a whole person, to be the focus of somebody else’s attention for awhile. Her character comes off as a whiff anhedonic, hitting like MTV’s Daria all grown up to discover that adult life is just as miserable and unfulfilling as she expected it to be. Feeling intentionally humiliated, degraded, or objectified at least gives her the chance to feel something.

    Even in gratifying this small pleasure, Ann is frustrated. We start with her ongoing nine-years-long relationship that amounts to being the booty call for Allen (Scott Cohen), an aloof, uncaring galoot who treats her like a piece of furniture. She’s desperate to mold Allen’s indifference into deliberate sadistic intent, but Allen is a man so devoid of imagination that he can’t even think up good scenarios when Continue reading CAPSULE: THE FEELING THAT THE TIME FOR DOING SOMETHING HAS PASSED (2023) →

    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: NEWSBOYS: DOWN UNDER THE BIG TOP (1996)

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    DIRECTED BY: Steve Taylor

    FEATURING: Newsboys (John James, Peter Furler, Jody Davis, Duncan Phillips, Jeff Frankenstein, Phil Joel), Phil Madeira, Greg Menza

    PLOT: A popular contemporary Christian pop band takes a break from their tour to try and organize a grand finale for a dying circus.

    Still from "Newsboys: Down Under the Big Top" (1996)

    COMMENTS: In the fall of 1967, the Beatles were experiencing the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Their newest album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was already being recognized as a landmark in the history of pop music, and their worldwide broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” had reached more than a billion people in the heart of the Summer of Love. On the other hand, they had abandoned the grueling work of touring, and their manager Brian Epstein had just died, leaving the band without anyone to advise them or act as a buffer for their wildest ideas. In the face of this adversity, and with the confidence that comes from being the biggest rock band in the entire world, the Beatles moved forward with a Christmas TV special, Magical Mystery Tour, that would go down in history as their first mammoth flop. The program, a hodgepodge of proto-music videos, improvised sketches, and random clips slammed together in hopes of achieving comedy via cognitive dissonance, is actually the kind of thing we like around here, being that it is so wildly ungoverned by factors such as logic, restraint, or taste. Despite that, and the fact that other Beatles projects like the “Get Back” sessions have been rehabilitated through the passage of time, the Magical Mystery Tour remains a hard watch.

    So if the Beatles couldn’t do it, what on earth made Newsboys think they could pull it off? This 90s-era Australian-American pop band that brought a Savage Garden-Barenaked Ladies-Gin Blossoms musical sensibility to the upper echelons of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) charts does not immediately seem like a good match for a personality-driven medium like film. And they’re not. Their songs are mildly catchy, their vibe is low-key amiable, and their humor is mainly of the dad variety. We’re not exactly looking to Newsboys to let their freak flag fly, and the banner they end up hoisting is pretty benign.

    (A necessary sidenote: Newsboys are still around, like the Temptations having gone through numerous personnel changes . A recent lead singer for the group was accused of heinous sexual misconduct, but at this stage he and his collaborators are years away from joining the band. So you won’t see any known offenders in this film.)

    There is something exceptionally odd about the whole production, but it’s the kind of strangeness rooted in inexplicable choices. Why choose a circus theme and then not have any of the trappings of a circus? Beyond the big tent itself and a couple clowns, the circus is mostly talked about, not shown. Why spend so much time demonstrating the lameness of the slate of performers? Not catastrophic awfulness, mind you, but just categorically bland and weak. Why give characters elaborate quirks and then not commit to them? Twins Carlene and Darlene never get into lockstep, and while we can be grateful that the presence of little people as mob enforcers is not played for the stereotypical cheap laughs that you might expect, the result feels less like trope subversion and more like virtue signaling. The film doesn’t even know what kind of joke it wants to tell. It’s not as over-the-top loony as Spice World, only dips its toe into the waters of Spinal Tap-style mockumentary, and definitely has no interest in the subversiveness of Head. I supposed they’re too Christian to get no-holds-barred weird on us, although they even soft-pedal the evangelism: a prayer is cut short by hijinks, while a copy of the Bible is revealed to have been stolen from a hotel. (Um… commandment?) It seems like someone in the Newsboys camp wanted to get outrageous, while somebody else kept a tight grip on the leash.

    So if the story’s not the thing, then their best option would seem to be to appeal to the mass of diehard, rabid Newsboys fans. Big Top doesn’t really do that, either. The filmmakers seem to recognize that none of the band members has a grain of personality, but resting what little plot exists on the shoulders of lead singer John and bassist Phil only highlights how threadbare the story is. The movie can’t even work up enough interest to see Newsboys being Newsboys, aside from snippets of a concert and two full music videos clumsily dropped in during the last ten minutes (a fact the director helpfully lampshades). Of course, this turns out to be the right move, since those videos contain exponentially more wit than anything that has come before.

    Down Under the Big Top is definitely a strange object, baffling in that it does nothing to satiate rabid Newsboys fans, and also doesn’t go far out enough to draw in curious outsiders or connoisseurs of weirdness. It just sits there, without so much as an “I Am the Walrus” to justify the effort.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “It truly is a weird little movie that, on the surface, seems worthy of derision. However, it really depends on the angle from which you want to critique it… Is it terrible from a cinematic perspective? Absolutely. Does it have storytelling issues? Without question. However, it possesses an awkward, oddball charm that is kind of fun.” – Nicole Pramik, Sci-fi Fantasy Lit Chick

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

    Newsboys: Down Under The Big Top [VHS]

    Newsboys: Down Under The Big Top [VHS]

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