Category Archives: Capsules

Capsules

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

Leave a comment

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

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

Recommended

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)

Leave a comment

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

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]

    New starting from: 140.00 $

    Go to Amazon
    Capsules

    CAPSULE: MOEBIUS (2013)

    1 Comment

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

    Recommended

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Cho Jae-Hyun, Seo Yeong-ju, Lee Na-ra

    PLOT: The wife of an adulterous husband takes revenge on their son.

    Still from Moebius (2013)

    COMMENTS: Families are dysfunctional in Asian Extreme Cinema. A typical example is‘s infamous Visitor Q (2001). There are even more transgressive movies to be found, however, like Moebius perhaps the most disturbing piece in Ki-duk Kim’s   provocative filmography. Here, the South Korean auteur further develops his pessimist worldview on human relationships and family dynamics. Let’s dare to take a closer look.

    The story is divided into three acts. The plot revolves around an archetypal family including the Mother, the  Father and the Son. When the Mother can’t stand the Father’s extramarital affair—with a woman played by the same actress—anymore, she takes revenge on their Son, castrating him. The events following this criminal act play out like a symbolic Freudian coming-of-age tale, showcasing the Son’s attempts to cope and the Father’s guilt and attempts to help.

    Kid-duk nods to Euripides’ “Medea” from the beginning: Mother uses her child to punish the husband. This is only the beginning, however, not the climax. The events of this perverted family saga and boyhood tale include gang rape, kinky sex, masturbation with rocks and knives, and even a bit of incest. Despite the surrounding chaos there are touching moments of tenderness to be found in the way the altruistic Father tries to support his Son. But the tragic finale cannot be avoided.

    Buddhist spirituality is portrayed as a means to redemption. In Ki-Duk’s masterpiece Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and… Spring (2003) an old monk dictates that lust is sinful because it brings jealousy and therefore crime, while a monk’s lifestyle brings comfort. Moebius further develops that thesis through a darker parable, and can be viewed as an origin story of sorts for a monk with similar convictions.

    This is Kim Ki- Duk’s boldest piece not only because of the grotuesqueries he presents, but also because of the way he directs the actors. There isn’t a line of dialogue in the whole film. Characters communicate physically, through violent or sexual acts, grunts of pain and pleasure—or both simultaneously—and tremors. They become wild animals and in the most intense moments. When the three characters confront each other, their positions recall sculpturess from the Hellenistic Period, like the famous Laocoön Group.

    All in all, this is a difficult film to recommend because of its graphic scenes and heavy subject matter. It is essential, however, for Kim Ki -Duk completionists, and perhaps the work from his late period that stands out the most.  Moreover, it will appeal to fans of film parables that aren’t afraid to confront the darker corners of the human psyche and sexuality, in the vein of ‘s Antichrist (2009).

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: 

    “Moebius is almost weird enough to be a creation myth, and that’s no small accomplishment.”–Sherilyn Connelly, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

    Moebius

    Moebius

    • Factory sealed DVD

    New starting from: 24.95 $

    Go to Amazon
    Capsules

    CAPSULE: TOUCH ME (2025)

    1 Comment

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

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Olivia Taylor Dudley, Jordan Gavaris, , Marlene Forte

    PLOT: 27-year old underachiever Joey and her troubled trust-fund baby pal Craig spend time at the retreat of an alien, becoming addicted to the heroin-like touch of his tentacles.

    Still from Touch Me (2025)

    COMMENTS: I don’t think Gen-Z’ers are really afraid of, or attracted to, alien tentacle sex. What the characters in Touch Me are deeply afraid of is a life devoid of purpose, or even of a reasonable infrastructure to be able to pursue their dreams. Joey is unable to advance her journalistic career, a slave to student debt and just-over-minimum-wage barrista and bartender gigs. Craig’s privileged background and philosophy degree put him no closer to finding dreams; in fact, they’ve left him depressed and unemployable. Meaningless sex, drinking, New Age-y spiritual exercises, and, eventually, the blissful, numbing touch only an alien can deliver offer them relief from their anxieties. Heck, even procrastinating alien Brian can’t get his act together to either take over the world, or to save it from itself. As the characters struggle to find a place in society, the alien’s euphoric touch serves a metaphor for the distractions and temptations of co-dependent romantic relationships and, more explicitly, drug addiction.

    The acting is remarkable for a low-budget indie horror. Olivia Taylor Dudley is a revelation: dreamy in a languid, damaged way, remaining likable even when engaging in vile drug-seeking behaviors. She begins the film with an 8-minute monologue about her first meeting with a track-suited, environmentally responsible alien with hair that’s the “good kind of wet.” It’s not quite a tour-de-force, but it is the kind of thing that makes you sit up and jot down the actress’ name. Veteran character actor Pucci is also sexy as the complicated, hip-hop dancing alien who might be a cosmic narcissist or might be a well-meaning but clueless visitor who can’t comprehend human relationships. Gavaris is believable, if mostly relegated to comic relief (although his friendship with Joey plays a crucial role in the movie’s emotional makeup), and Forte puts in fine work as Brian’s unappreciated human assistant resenting the presence of younger and more attractive visitors.

    On the other hand, director Addison Heinmann’s tonal shifts and unnecessary stylizations can pose a challenge. Joey’s panic attacks are accompanied by swarms of picture-in-picture popups, and a flashback is done as a Japanese silent movie but with spoken dialogue. These bits sometimes aren’t deployed purposefully, taking us out of the story. Furthermore, the attempts at comedy don’t always arise cleanly out of the more serious themes. Henimann throws a lot of absurdity at the screen, and not all of it works (one thing that does work are Brian’s dance scenes, which are both fun to watch and endearingly quirky). The hazy, neon-lit interspecies sex scenes are also a blast; they’re almost tasteful.

    Because of the undisciplined approach, this is an odd movie, as well as a weird one. That said, Touch Me is nowhere near as alienating as its miserable current 4.8 IMDb rating would suggest. Most of the negative sentiments seem to come from people who were hoping for a more straightforward live-action hentai sci-fi horror, and are along the lines of “this was a little too out there for me.” Regular readers of this site will likely find this on the low-to-average end of the weird scale, and uneven, but far from boring. You’re invited to Touch Me: you might enjoy it.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “The cherry on top of this admittedly weird cocktail is a strong streak of genuine sensuality – if it’s your first encounter with tentacle sex on screen, you might be surprised how appealing Heimann and his cast have managed to make it seem.”–Catherine Bray, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994)

    Leave a comment

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

    DIRECTED BY: Kevin Hull

    FEATURING: Kenji Sugimoto

    PLOT: A documentary account of a Japanese math professor who comes to America in search of his hero, Albert Einstein— specifically, the scientist’s brain, which was extracted during an autopsy and removed to points unknown.

    Still from "Relics: Einstein's Brain" (1994)

    COMMENTS: Among the most cherished books of my childhood were the three volumes that made up “The People’s Almanac,” a peculiar reference book that purported to comprise only the most interesting and widely unknown stories and facts from the span of recorded history. Where else would biographies of fictional characters who have become immortal through extended popularity sit comfortably alongside histories of some of the world’s leading news publications? A particularly memorable story was the one told in “People’s Almanac #3” by journalist Steven Levy about his successful search for Albert Einstein’s mind-meat, harvested (and possibly pilfered) by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey. Levy chronicled the strange afterlife of the physicist’s brain, culminating in his memorable description: “I had been granted a rare peek into an organic crystal ball. Swirling in formaldehyde was the power of the smashed atom, the mystery of the universe’s black holes, the utter miracle of human achievement.” So the result of screening a documentary about another person’s hunt for this very same organ 15 years after Levy’s article was a uniquely odd sensation for me specifically. For a film that proposes to solve a deep and thought-provoking mystery, I kept watching with a nagging question in my mind: “Didn’t we already figure this out?”

    Maybe Levy’s report was lost to history, or only the barest of information made it through time’s game of telephone to tickle the fancy of a Japanese math professor. In any event, Einstein’s Brain kicks off the search with a retroactive information deficit, armed with only the knowledge that the mind behind relativity was plucked from its braincase during an autopsy in Princeton in 1955. From there, we pick up the trail with Professor Kenji Sugimoto in hot pursuit as he crisscrosses the country in search of the wayward noggin-nugget, encountering a university professor in New York, a neuroscientist in California, a police officer in Missouri, a pile of redacted FBI records in Washington, DC, a biologist in New Jersey, William S. Burroughs (who plays him a clip from “The Day After” and provides directions to Harvey’s home), and even Einstein’s granddaughter, working our way ever closer to Albert Einstein’s cranial cortex.

    Einstein’s Brain has its origins in television, airing on the long-running BBC documentary program “Arena” as part of a series called “Relics” that purported to be about treasured artifacts but was really more interested in the people who sought them. That makes Prof. Sugimoto an intriguing subject, because the only thing we know Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994) →