Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE WRETCHES ARE STILL SINGING (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: Nikos Nikolaidis

FEATURING: Alkis Panagiotidis, Konstantinos Tzoumas, Rita Bensousan

PLOT: A group of washed-out wretches reunite.

Still from "The Wretches Are Still Singing" (1979)

COMMENTS: Nikos Nikolaidis is perhaps the Greek director most closely associated with the “Surrealist” label. His works often merge dreams with noir elements and social critique.  ” Singapore Sling” (1990) may be his most extreme movie, in terms of graphic scenes and fetish content, and is the most well-recognized internationally. However, in his own country he is most appreciated for his trilogy “The  Years of Cholera,” about people in the margins of society. Wretches, the trilogy’s first installment, has gained cult status, thanks to its witty dialogue and absurdism.

The opening scene sets the tone accordingly, giving a sense of ultimate doom. The plot that follows, revolving around the reunion a band of people in their late 30s- early 40s, develops retrospectively.   Alkis, a faded musician, calls for this gathering. He spends his time in his mansion reminiscing about Vera, his so-called ex-wife, attempting unsuccessfully to find her again through a plethora of liaisons with other women. His method is the epitome of nihilism, though. Nightly, he kidnaps, rapes, and then murders women reminding him of Vera, burying them in his garden right after. But perhaps, as a phantom of one of his victims claims, “Vera never existed, it is just the name of an era lost forever.”

As his friends gradually appear, we get to know their eccentric personalities. Kostas, with his cold demeanor, adds an element of deadpan humor to the table. Short, fat Christos is the “funny guy” of the group. And then there is Rita, the girl with the enigmatic past and a history of confinement in psychiatric hospitals.

Alkis now has companions for his savageries. The group proceeds to indulge in a variety of anti-social behaviors, always culminating in sex and death. There is a melancholy on the air for friends lost along the way, and a feeling of having lost control over their own lives. As Christos states while proposing a toast, “They took me in the university without asking me, they took me in the army without asking me, and without understanding how, I found myself married.” Their degenerate acts seem like a desperate attempt to reassert control over their fates.

Rita is the most marginalized character, not feeling at home even within the group. She feels used, in more ways than one; she stoically endures sexual assaults from her “friends” while asking desperately, in vain, for them to listen to her, even for a bit. She emerges as a complex, abused personality, full of contradictions.

Acting is a big part of the appeal here. Each character recites their lines with a musicality. The rich accompanying soundtrack, full of old blues, jazz, and rock and roll, also enhances the sense of nostalgia and regret, while the many night shots and blurry visual effects give the film a noirish, almost dreamlike feel.

The narrative is straightforward at times, yet has its surreal moments. A dead girl occasionally appears in the mansion, checking on the group and looking after Alkis. Everyone is apathetic, even after the most outrageous or bizarre occurrences.  Add a grim finale fully immersed in hopelessness, and you have an exquisite example of nihilistic cinema.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other English language reviews found for this film.

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

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: “HEN, HIS WIFE” (1990) / “PÂTÉ” (2001)

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The penny drops. The scales fall from the eyes. The curtain is pulled back. In any deception, there comes that moment when the delusion must be abandoned and the consequences of prevarication must finally be faced. Today we visit a pair of short films that live in that pivotal moment, and we find that exposing one truth can sometime bring another even darker truth to the surface.

The couple in Igor Kovalyov’s “Hen, His Wife” has a secret, although neither partner seems to know it. They seem quite settled and content: the wife runs about the house, cooking and cleaning, tending to their pet giant human-headed tardigrade, and generally seeing to all her blue-faced husband’s needs while he sits slumped in an easy chair. Not a well-balanced relationship, to be sure, but everyone seems quite happy. So it’s quite a spanner in the works when a traveling salesman drops by and, in the course of making his pitch to the sedentary man, feels compelled to whisper the awful truth: the wife is actually an enormous chicken. And wouldn’t you know, it’s kind of obvious when you actually stop and look at her. Evidently, the husband never has, and he suffers a complete meltdown, throwing her out and plunging into an emotional doom spiral. Why, the whole thing is enough to make him forget about the ladybugs crawling all over his face.

Kovalyov’s figures are uniformly grotesque, with misshapen features, huge folds of undulating skin, and unnatural colors. (It turns out to have been perfect training for his later role as co-director of The Rugrats Movie.) In that context, a 6-foot tall hen doesn’t seem such a bad thing to be, and she certainly isn’t the weirdest thing in the apartment. There’s a bitter humor in the way the husband views this whole situation as a terrible betrayal, even though there seems to have been no attempt whatsoever at concealment. That this of all things would be the breaking point is an intriguing conundrum.

It’s reasonable to view “Hen, His Wife” as an unsubtle metaphor for bigotry, as the husband’s outsized reaction would feel just as harsh if she had been outed as Jewish or an escaped criminal or a fan of Nickelback. Indeed, the salesman doesn’t so much leave as vanish in a puff of smoke, like a pernicious rumor. That might be too much to put on the shoulders of this slight, one-joke cartoon. That said, the wife’s return to see the fate of her beloved husband is authentically sad, and reminds us that love might conquer all, but only if we let it.

The truth in “Pâté” is obvious to anyone who cares to see it: the world is destroyed. That much is clear to children Otto and Vera ((Ty Arnold and Samantha Browne-Walters), who are dispatched into the wasteland wearing adult-sized environmental suits to harvest cockroaches as the only available food source. Unfortunately for them, their deeply damaged mother (Jane Culley) is living in a fantastical past where she remains the belle of the ball in costumes borrowed from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet production. Her selfishness is such that she will do anything to win the favor of the only man left alive. She’ll genuflect, she’ll dance, and if there aren’t any cockroaches left to serve for dinner, something else—or someone else—will have to do.

“Pâté” is an accomplished student film, with excellent production values and a well-earned sense of dread. (The short earned attention at Sundance, proving to be the calling card that earned director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo her sole feature credit, the psychological horror film After.Life.) It doesn’t really rise above its premise, though. For a film set in a future apocalyptic wasteland, there’s surprisingly little satire in “Pâté.” It’s about the dark twist that is foreshadowed early on, but even if you don’t discern where the story will be going (as the quietly grim Otto surely does), you’ll be waiting for that shoe to drop. The vibe is that of a particularly baroque episode of “Tales From the Crypt.” Still, it’s hard to deny that a story about adults reveling in their ill-gotten luxuries while handing the consequences of their sins to their children retains its cultural relevance. You just have to take that walk yourself.

Like the stubborn bigotry of the hen’s husband, the Mother’s selfish complicity in the ongoing cruelty of the world is troubling to behold. The state of denial will always be a suitable subject for drama, because a truth delayed is never a truth dispatched. It will always be waiting to surface, to pay back the damage with interest.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hen, His Wife”: “This 13-minute animation, while engaging, is disquieting enough that one looks forward to its end even as one remains transfixed by what transpires. We would not advise watching it on acid, for though beautifully drawn and narratively intriguing, it is also queerly disturbing on the visual, emotional, and intellectual levels.” – Abraham, A Wasted Life

“Pâté”: “…a visual tour de force with its no-budget evocation of a once opulent future world.” – Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker Magazine

(“Hen, His Wife” was nominated for review by Jenn; “Paté” was nominated for review by Eric Smith. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)

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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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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THREE… EXTREMES (2004)

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DIRECTED BY: ,,

FEATURING: , , , Im Won-hee, Kyôko Hasegawa,

PLOT: A woman resorts to extreme measures to regain her youth, an intruder torments a film director and his wife, a young girl is haunted by a traumatic past.

Still from Three... Extremes (2004)

COMMENTS:  Three… Extremes started as a franchise of pan-Asian horror anthologies with 2002’s Three. A collection of short films from Peter Ho-Sun Chan, Kim Jee-woon, and , Three offered a panorama of horror from China, South Korea and Thailand. It never reached the popularity of its sequel, however, remaining obscure while the second and final installment, widely known as Three… Extremes, attained a cult status, largely thanks to a selection of contributors that included a couple of major names in  contemporary  cinema.

Hong Kong’s Fruit Chan offers the first dish, Dumplings. It is perhaps the most infamous of the trilogy, and Chan quickly adapted it into a feature film. The plot revolves around a rich middle-aged woman attempting to regain her youth ( and her husband’s love)  by eating special dumplings that promise to rejuvenate her skin, provided by an unconventional chef. Ethical issues come to the forefront as the stuffing’s origin is revealed. Our heroine’s disgust and second thoughts give easily their way to self-destructive obsession, however. “Dumplings” is a Faustian morality play about the price of narcissism. Like Elizabeth Báthory, the countess who bathed in the blood of virgin women to remain young, our protagonist engages in grotesque acts for selfish reasons. An industrial soundscape enhances the sense of something ominous and disturbing lurking in the background.

After the appetizer, South Korean visionary Park-Chan Wook  presents “Cut.” His story focuses on a successful film director and his wife on the night that an intruder captures them and proceeds with a series of mental and physical tortures. There is no moral justification here; this is no Saw. Instead, the explanation given is brutally honest, making the events following even more shocking. This is a revenge tale, albeit one with elements of social commentary. If you love contemporary socially-conscious genre cinema from South Korea, like Bong Joon Ho‘s Oscar-nominated Parasite (2019), this will be right up your alley (as long as you have a strong stomach for gore). At the same time, the narrative plays masterfully with the nature of reality, blurring the lines between the authentic and the staged, culminating in a series of over-the-top twists and reveals.

The third piece, by far the most haunting, comes from Japan. Takashi Miike’s “Box” is a surreal psychosexual narrative following a young woman ridden by guilt and repressed lust. It alternates between present and past; Miike depicts the former in a cold color palette expressing grief, while warmer tones in the present hint at catastrophic passions. The flashbacks have a carnivalesque aesthetic that, along with the taboo subject matter, recalls ‘s Strange Circus (2005). The hints of supernatural horror and the morbid symbolic imagery are guaranteed to make you shudder.

More often than not, compilation films are uneven. That’s not the case here. A strong thematic link creates coherence, as each tale is a deeply meditative take on human envy. This is thoughtful horror with a psychological aspect, essential viewing for fans of the genre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Miike’s ‘Box’ is the best of the bunch – a disturbing, dreamlike tale of a woman novelist haunted by dreams of her twin sister who died long ago…  The film may well live up to its title: it is perhaps too extreme for some viewers, perhaps even in bad taste at times, but you have to give all the episodes credit for being bizarre and effective.”–Steve Biodrowski, Cinefantastique

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Three / Three... Extremes [Limited Edition] [Blu-ray]

Three / Three… Extremes [Limited Edition] [Blu-ray]

  • Two anthology films, six ghostly tales of terror, acclaimed directors from Hong Kong, Korea, Thailand and Japan. The ultimate omnibus of horror.

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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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