Peter Jackson packs two-and-a-half movies worth of plot into one movie with this horror/comedy about psychic investigators that plays like a Coen Brothers adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story.
![The Frighteners [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51UyjOp8geL._SL500_.jpg)
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Quick links/Discussed in this episode:
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
The Birthday (2004): Corey Feldman (!) stars in this overlooked indie about a man who sneaks into a birthday party where a cult is also making preparations for the end of the world. Alamo Drafthouse restored it and is releasing it to select theaters, but more significantly, it’s now available on VOD. The Birthday official site.
Blonde on a Bum Trip (1968): A blonde chemistry student is manipulated into manufacturing (and indulging in) LSD. This reputedly incoherent drug scare sexploitationer has been surprisingly hard to find on video in the post-VHS era; Vinegar Syndrome and Something Weird put it out on Blu-ray. Buy Blonde on a Bum Trip.
Dogra Magra (1988): A man awakes in a mental asylum with no memory and is informed he killed his wife on his wedding night. Toshio Matsumoto‘s final film was an adaptation of an “unfilmable” novel; a commentator once suggested the film is like a Japanese mashup of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with Last Year at Marienbad. This is the film’s North American debut, on Blu-ray from the good folks at Radiance. Buy Dogra Magra.
The Other Laurens [L’autre Laurens] (2023): The official plot description reads, “A private detective [is] forced to face the ghosts of his past when his niece asks him to investigate her father’s death.” Sounds conventional, yet it catches our attention because Yellow Veil is releasing it, and one reviewer called it “Lynchian” and “a strange film” while The Hollywood Reporter referred to “bits of dark comedy and weirdness.” Previously on VOD, now on Blu-ray with director and crew commentary and a bonus short film. Buy The Other Laurens.
Shanks (1974): Read the Canonically Weird entry! William Castle‘s last movie, featuring Marcel Marceau as a mute puppeteer who controls corpses with a remote control, was his strangest. Vinegar Syndrome puts it out in an limited 4K UHD+Blu edition with a commentary track (by critic/historians Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw), new and archival interviews, a video essay, and a hardbound book of stills and essays. Available exclusively from Vinegar Syndrome.
The Substance (2024): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s Apocrypha Candidate review. This bizarro beauty satire was a surprise hit in theaters and with critics, despite its wacko third act. It streams exclusively on Mubi (subscription required) starting this week, with other venues sure to follow. Also showing exclusively on Mubi: “Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection,” a new short from David Cronenberg that features Renaissance sculpture. Watch The Substance on Mubi.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
We might have surprise guest(s) on next week’s Pod 366, but regardless, we will keep you up to date on the week’s weird news and releases. In written content, Shane Wilson takes on another that Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue as he ventures into The Killing Room (2009); Giles Edwards drills into Australia’s Petrol (2022); and Gregory J. Smalley takes on Bertrand Bonello’s not-a-remake sci-fantasy The Beast (2023). Onward and weirdward!
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DIRECTED BY: Phillip J. Cook
FEATURING: Mark Redfield, Doug Brown, Gage Sheridan, Frank Smith, Michael Weitz, Tara Bilkins, Mark Hyde
PLOT: A near-death experience pulls a down-on-his-luck artist into Purgatory, where a rag-tag team are waging a losing battle against the Despiser.
COMMENTS: Phillip Cook loves action: gunfights and explosions abound. He also loves metaphysics: purgatory is real. He loves, too, hearty doses of ambiguity: is this death-world really purgatory, or just another dimension? Most of all, though, he loves his CGI: its delineations, its vibrancy, its rudimentality—its ubiquity. Despiser will cater to any number of genre enthusiasts, but if you’re not on board with his late ’90s, classic-Windows era aesthetic, you should just keep walking.
Personally, I was fully on board with watching the action-machinations of a gang of do-gooders, who exhaust any amount of bullets, burn any amount of tire tread, and quip any amount of one-liners, as they careen through an uncanny world of angular churches, Day-Glo lava, and boxy sports cars. Despiser‘s backdrop is an odd and exciting one, contrasting greatly with the humdrum doings in the living world of our reluctant hero, Gordon: unmotivated painter, failed graphic designer, and, in the end, savior. His dreams—and a near-death experience or two—may be a flashy, dark, and stripped-down nigh Hellscape, but that sure beats his (and our) ho-hum, beige existence. The visual clash is bold, as observed by Gordon himself: “This place doesn’t look real”, he muses upon arrival. And no, it does not. Thank goodness.
The plot twitches along from action set-piece to action set-piece, with religious overtones not quite saturating the atmosphere. The gun-toting team of righteous actioneers who take Gordon into their fold is led by a wisecracking, scripture-quoting Army Ranger from the turn of the 20th century: Carl Nimbus, who never met a Bible passage he couldn’t twist into a badass threat. Despiser almost comes across as something of a gotta-be-cool Christian movie, but Phillip Cook has it both ways (indeed, he has it several ways). Just when the God-and-Thunder motifs threaten to show their hand, Cook deflates them, most notably when Carl quotes, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—Psalms: 23”. Gordon rejoins, “We’re on a highway to Hell. AC/DC: 1980.” This is not a movie to take entirely seriously.
But the characters do, and that’s key for us being on board with the imaginative nonsense which unravels, re-ravels, and ultimately ends up as an entertaining crochet of in-your-face foolishness, bullet-flying fantasy, and desperate characters going to desperate measures to thwart the titular Despiser. (A being so evil, it could only have been properly voiced by author/producer/director Phillip Cook.) I spent two bucks renting this diversion, but golly if I’m not tempted to buy the modestly priced super-duper Blu-ray. Not to sound too religious here, but it’s a small blessing that this singular cinematic extravaganza (made for video though it was) came around the first time, but also to be released in tip-top form on a disc featuring all the great love for the material that makes Despiser the funtime oddity it is.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Despiser [Visual Vengeance Collector's Edition]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51yeXdPAegL._SL500_.jpg)
How much blood is really in A Bucket of Blood? Pete Trbovich blows the lid off another Roger Corman scam.
“Penguin” Pete Trbovich looks at the unrealized potential of 1984’s Dreamscape, a dream-assassin flick that anticipated Inception by four decades—although Christopher Nolan put a novel twist on the concept by making his movie good and entertaining. You could watch Dreamscape on Halloween, or you could just head off to the Village Pub for a generic beer.