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Capsules

CAPSULE: MERMAID IN A MANHOLE (1988)

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Ginî piggu: Manhôru no naka no ningyo; AKA Guinea Pig 5: Mermaid in the Manhole

Beware

DIRECTED BY: Hideshi Hino

FEATURING: Shigeru Shaiki, Mari Somei, Masami Hisamoto

PLOT: An artist is inspired by an infected mermaid found in the sewers.

Still from Mermaid in a Manhole (1988)

COMMENTS: The “Guinea Pig” series is an infamous Japanese extreme gore franchise of the 1980s. The first two installments are pioneers of the torture porn subgenre, creating the tropes such films now rely on. Later installments become more conceptually creative, however, with Mermaid in a Manhole—the only entry with fantasy elements—-the prime example.

The story follows an unnamed, grief-stricken artist. After the loss of his wife, he finds solace by exploring the sewers, painting dismembered pieces of an idolized past he finds scattered around.  Among these broken mementos, he discovers a beautiful mermaid. He is shocked to notice she is infected with something,  so he decides to take her home to look after her. And an odyssey of blood and flesh begins.

Despite the lyrical set-up, this cinematic experience is as extreme and as nauseating as it can get.  “Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media” by Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp will prove useful in anatomizing the grotesqueries. As it often is with extreme horror,  parallels can be traced with pornography in the way the (female) body is depicted (and dissected).

Mermaid features a plethora of meat shots, with close-ups on the creature’s beautiful feminine body as it is gradually desecrated by a cancerous (if phantasmagorical) illness. The descent is accompanied by moaning. Everything culminates in a series of increasingly disturbing shots, as weird, multi-colored secretions ooze  from the tumors engulfing the mermaid’s body. This is truly body-horror at its most disgusting and depraved.

There are hints of artistic ambition under the monstrosity,  however. The film’s visual palette combines dark tones with more vibrant ones to reflect on nostalgia and the passage of time. Piano tunes create the necessary ambience and enhance the sense of dread.  And there is something of an allegorical meditation on sepsis and decay.

The movie could work better, however, with a more elliptical approach.  Mermaid unnecessarily indulges in brutal realism. Secondary characters add nothing substantial, except some clumsy exposition. And the finale is simplistic and out-of-place in its attempt to rationalize the events prior to it. Yes, the movie doesn’t provide certainty, but the way it blurs the lines between what is real and what is not is unnecessary in this context, looking like a banal gimmick out of a psychological thriller.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:  

“…repulses and intrigues at the same time, and feeds not only your appetite for onscreen weirdness, but also your brain.”–Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop! (“Guinea Pig” box set)

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COMING APART (1969)

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DIRECTED BY: Milton Moses Ginsberg

FEATURING: Rip Torn, Sally Kirkland, Viveca Lindfors

PLOT: A psychiatrist sets himself up in an apartment overlooking the East River where he beds a series of women, all the while heading steadily toward a complete mental breakdown.

Still from "Coming Apart" (1969)


COMMENTS: It’s hard to appreciate just how strange the conceit of Coming Apart must have felt to moviegoers in 1969. Here in the second quarter of the 21st century, when people document their lives frequently and extensively, the sheer strangeness of a man choosing to capture his illicit second life on film just doesn’t come across the same. Viewers at the time were surely perplexed by a film that seemed to be composed entirely a footage taken from a single vantage point. It must have seemed like nothing short of voyeurism, the worst kind of candid camera. Contemporary reviews of the film frequently flail about for the one point of comparison they have at hand: James McBride’s groundbreaking pseudo-documentary David Holzman’s Diary. But while this intentionally self-aware movie has similar vibes, Coming Apart is something very different. Ginsberg crafts a silver screen salute to a man who feels compelled to chronicle his life for a very compelling reason: self-loathing.

Torn’s erstwhile analyst has ditched his career and his pregnant wife, creating a new identity for himself by setting up shop in a Kips Bay love nest. He doesn’t seem at all clear as to why he’s doing this, and for reasons even he can’t begin to unpack, he decides to film everything, making this an early example of the found footage genre. The footage we find is largely his attempts at seduction, successful to varying degrees; but while this is a film with plenty of sex, it’s much more about the manipulations and deceptions that are perpetrated just to get to the act. The wayward Dr. Glaser is an easygoing seducer, but he gets no enjoyment out of it, neither the hunt nor the kill.  He’s like a man grazing at the buffet not because he’s hungry but because there’s food. Anyone approaching Coming Apart looking for sexytimes is likely to end up as disappointed as Glaser.

For anyone who knows Torn primarily from the lacerating deadpan he brings to later projects like Defending Your Life, Men in Black, or “The Larry Sanders Show,” his work here is revelatory. He deploys his gravelly baritone infrequently, communicating largely through the subtlest of expressions. It can feel like he’s hardly acting at all, until a crucial scene late in the movie when he goes nearly catatonic and you realize just how emotive he has been all along. Most of the women opposite him, such as Lois Markle’s aspiring fetish-lover or Lynn Swan’s mercenary young mom, are richly detailed, although they can feel melodramatic by comparison. The characters who avoid sex are the most grounded, like Viveca Lindfors’ ex-mistress who tells Torn to his face that his charms won’t work on her anymore. Standing out among the crowd is Sally Kirkland, whose growing mania is grounded by her shockingly total lack of vanity or guardedness. Her role could easily be viewed as “the crazy broad,” but she earns respect and sympathy by giving nothing less than her all. The idea that Torn’s hidden camera captures these people so authentically justifies the gimmick.

While the filming technique suggests gritty realism, the characters and situations we encounter feel forced, as most of Glaser’s sexual partners bring their own lunacy to the show. Were it not for the bad doctor’s slow-motion breakdown, it might be easy to interpret the film’s message as “women be wack.” It is interesting, though, to see documentary formalism deployed in an experimental manner. In the early hangover following the sexual revolution, Ginsberg’s daring feature has the smarts to get out of the way and let the stories of the shellshocked survivors speak for themselves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… almost every image is half real, half the reverse of reality, which is, I suppose, a legitimate cinematic equivalent of the way one automatically supplements reality with fantasy in conscious experience…  the screenplay, like the film, eventually drifts in a horizontal direction into a kind of foggy confusion.” – Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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

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Coming Apart [Blu-ray]

Coming Apart [Blu-ray]

  • Rip Torn (Men in Black) gives one of the great screen performances as a psychiatrist secretly filming his own mental breakdown in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s classic exploration of dark eroticism and self-referential cinematic form

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Capsules

2026 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: NOM NOM NOM, PART NOM NOM NOM

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Montréal 2026

An ace of diamonds signed by a cartoonist rests alongside its fifty-one unadorned companions.

7/30: Recluse

Henry Chaisson goes full tilt 1980s BBC spook story here, with his slow pacing matching the gloomy atmospherics. A sound engineer (a profession seemingly irrelevant to the goings-on) must return home to attend to her dying father, a famously troubled artist who suffers a nasty gasoline burn at the film’s beginning. The lead is, appropriately, a cipher, with costars carrying various degrees of mysterious weight (shouts-out to Fantasia regulars and ). If you can slip into the measured nature of the game, Recluse is a satisfying little spooker.

The Leader

Alternately funny, sinister, and unbelievable, The Leader chronicles the rise and devastating fall of Marshall Applewhite and his “Heaven’s Gate” cult. Members are harvested from the dejected and hopeless masses and molded into a helpless existence. positively shines in Michael Gallagher’s docudrama, but the real gem is Vera Farmiga as co-founder Bonnie Lu Nettles. Here down to earth seriousness gives weight to the experience, making Bonnie’s death in 1985 a preemptive death knell. Well-crafted and very unsettling.

Never After Dark

After the serious let-down of The Mouths, Dave Boyle’s J-Horror restored my faith in the phenomenon. There’s the expected blue-cold darkness, and a ghostly fellow with slashed mouth hunting for something at certain hours of the day, but there’s also warmth and fun. Airi is a ghost hunter with a sidekick in the form of her deceased older sister (appearing in mirrors as a young girl, having died many years prior) and a disinclination toward live people (her semi-flirtations with a new client’s skeptic son are delightfully awkward). Her rig to visit the other realm is a doozy, involving a zoetrope, a candle, and a receptacle to burn a lock of hair, and the mid-century Continue reading 2026 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: NOM NOM NOM, PART NOM NOM NOM →

Capsules

2026 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: NOM NOM NOM, PART NOM NOM

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Montréal 2026

Samuel de Champlain for my real friends and Samuel de Realplain for my sham friends.

7/23: Sekiro, No Defeat

Kenichi Kutsuna made an interesting choice here, though perhaps it’s explainable as being the less-expensive one. I have played the video game Sekiro, and managed to batter my way through a bit of the narrative; it’s a lush fantasy samurai epic, with supernatural doings throughout a long story featuring conspiracy, political machinations, betrayal, and so on. But the team behind the adaptation focused on something I did not expect. Sure, sure, there are some fights scenes of adequate quality, and the core NPCs are all there (special shout-out to the smirkingly tragic undying samurai mentor), but the film focuses on the father/son-esque relationship between Wolf and the Divine Heir, with sundry scenes of bonding between them—including making confectionaries for the townsfolk’s festival. (I do not remember this bit from the game, but again: I didn’t get far.) Curious soundtrack choices, too. Hm.

The Eyes

The rule of thumb for me at Fantasia is I should scale back my official reactions to films until I hear from my peers. I like to like movies, and this tendency can lead me to enjoy certain movies I possibly shouldn’t: like Yeom Ji-ho’s stalker/horror thingy, wherein the passing of one twin sister (both with a degenerative condition of the eyes) causes the other to suspect the circumstances and investigate the mystery—all while her own vision deteriorates. I got on board with the twists and tropes (“derivative” is a quick way to describe the film), but plenty here disagreed, and I have no arguments. Indeed, one famous film critic (and all-around horror afficionado) emerged from the screening with a look of abject bewilderment and an obvious need to get something off his chest. Being the nearest victim, I spent the next few minutes absorbing his incredulous disappointment.

7/24: We’re Nothing At All

The film opens with brief credits, then an overhead shot of a Hong Kong bus meandering the streets, and then an explosion. Cue closing credits. Herman Yau’s film begins again after this Continue reading 2026 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: NOM NOM NOM, PART NOM NOM →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE HOLE (1998)

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Dong, aka The Last Dance

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DIRECTED BY: Tsai Ming-Liang

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: In the face of a growing epidemic and environmental calamity, two of the only remaining occupants in an apartment building struggle to maintain their lives and find themselves inexorably drawn to each other through the hole in the ceiling that connects them.

Still from The Hole (1998)

COMMENTS: It never stops raining in The Hole’s Taipei. Condensation drips down every surface in the apartment building where we spend the entirety of the film, and its’ so humid that our two lead characters, the Man Upstairs and the Woman Downstairs, strip down to their sweat-soaked undergarments as soon as they get home. Wallpaper peels off the walls like it was held on by a Post-It note. For drinking, though, boiling is an absolute must. The world is becoming unlivable, and yet people still cling to the past. When an older man is unable to find a favorite bean paste, but learns that he can have the exact same product under a different brand name, he responds with devastated silence, unable to even consider a change of such magnitude. Even in the face of complete loss, the commitment to the world we think we know remains strong.

Created for the French television “2000, Seen By” project, which also counts such films as Don McKellar’s Last Night and Hal Hartley’s The Book of Life among its number, The Hole is a grim preview of the near future, featuring such highlights as environmental catastrophe, massive class inequality, and a rapidly spreading worldwide plague. For us pandemic fans, that last one hits like a prescient ton of bricks, even though though it’s the source of the most science fictional element of the film, as this particular plague curses the afflicted with cockroach-like behavior, crawling about the floor on all fours and retreating to dark, enclosed spaces. Yet despite this outwardly negative view of the new millennium, Tsai infuses The Hole with a hopeful streak, as the residents of this rundown apartment complex defiantly persevere in the face of adversity.

The titular aperture, which inadvertently connects the Man Upstairs and the Woman Downstairs, is appropriately the most emblematic show of humanity’s persistence. They go to their jobs, stock up on toilet paper, boil their water, and stare longingly at the incessant rain, but the hole forces them to cut through their routine and see each other. Initially a source of conflict, it wrecks their privacy, and they sometimes pick at each other out of humorous spite. It ultimately proves to be a means of connection, however, becoming increasingly important as things fall apart.

The movie’s most overt sign of optimism, and its most radical element, is the occasional shift into glitzy musical numbers, as Yang gets gussied up and leaves her apartment to dance and lip-sync to the tunes of Chinese chanteuse Grace Chang. In the best tradition of , the tunes are thematically appropriate and graft peppy dance numbers directly onto the dank, crumbling sets. Tsai actually dedicates the film to Chang, saluting her as a source of comfort in dark times, and she ultimately soundtracks the bittersweet coda. The film does not take a clear position on whether this is true cause for hope or bitter irony, but the cheery vocals and Yang’s joyfully amateurish dancing provide a strong endorsement for fiddling while Rome burns, and lift The Hole beyond its compatriots in the sad future brigade.

Look up any discussion of the filmography of Tsai Ming-Liang and you’ll inevitably stumble upon the term “slow cinema.” We’ve seen one of the most extreme examples of that genre on this very site. The Hole is unquestionably deliberately paced, but that is well-suited to a tale where life itself seems to be coming apart in slow motion. The rain is constant, the hole will never be repaired, so when change does come, it’s galvanizing. When we waited through our own pandemic, connection is what we were desperate to get back to at the end. The Hole knew that two decades earlier, and the waiting is what makes the payoff exquisite.

The Hole is now (if you’re reading this in summer 2026) in theatrical re-release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The premise is weird enough, but interrupting the metaphorical story with delightfully amateurish song and dance sequences… takes it still further into uncharted territory.”–Geoff Andrews, Time Out 

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

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