Sweded films are usually made by amateurs working with no budget; in this one, a major director working with no budget gives us his offbeat take on the form.
POD 366, EP. 106: LOVE ME, VAMP – IN THE MOUTH OF UNIVERSE 25’S ICE TOWER
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Discussed in this episode:
ame pippin Studio: Masaaki Yuasa has formed a new animation studio. Collaborators/partners include Asmik Ace (Tekkonkinkreet, “Paranoia Agent”), Aniplex (“Demon Slayer”), and CoMix Wave Films (Your Name.). We’re hopeful this team will produce some weird stuff. Variety has the details.
The Ice Tower [La Tour de Glace] (2025): A teenage runaway lands at a film set for an adaptation of “The Snow Queen.” From fairy tale specialist Lucile Hadzihalilovic, starring Marion Cotillard and Gaspar Noé as the in-film director, it just debuted at the Berlin Film Festival, with future distribution plans unknown at this time. The Ice Tower at Berlin Film Festival.
Kizumonogatari – Koyomi Vamp (2024): Read Giles Edwards’ Apocrypha Candidate review. This vampiric anime feature gets a very special limited edition release exclusively from Crunchyroll, including a Blu-ray, the soundtrack CD, and a booklet with art from the film. Buy Kizumonogatari – Koyomi Vamp.
Love Me (2024): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. The experimental sci-fi romance with big-name stars comes to VOD this week. Rent or buy Love Me.
Slamdance: Sundance’s smaller, punkier cousin has gone mainly online in recent years, a trend that’s only likely to accelerate when Sundance relocates from Park City, UT to a larger city in 2027. (In fact, Slamdance itself has already pulled up stakes and physically moved to L.A., which may help its overall visibility in the circuit.) Slamdance is probably the largest festival for microbudget cinema, which means we can frequently find weirder offerings willing to take more chances than their pricier brethren, but with the downside that wider distribution is far from a certainty (and is, in fact, a rare proposition). Here are two films we’ll be keeping an eye on:
- In the Mouth – An agoraphobic man and his mysterious roommate can’t leave the house because of a giant doppelganger head in the front yard.
- Universe 25 – A postman seeks to deliver a lost letter allegedly sent by an angel from the future.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest currently scheduled for next week’s Pod 366, although that could change. In any event, Greg and Giles will discuss the week’s weird news and releases. In written reviews,Giles Edwards plans to deliver the scoop on the two Slamdance features mentioned above, and possibly more from the festival; Shane Wilson covers the reader-suggested beat with an inquest into the Whoopi Goldberg/animatronic dinosaur buddy-cop flop Theodore Rex; new contributor checks in with a report on the 1965 Italian rarity The Possessed; and Gregory J. Smalley takes a belated look at Flying Lotus’ weirdofest Kuso (2017). Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: ED AND ROOSTER’S GREAT ADVENTURE (2025)
AKA Ed and Rooster’s Big Adventure
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DIRECTED BY: Lucy Fazely
FEATURING: Voice of Bryan Crespo
PLOT: Two seagulls discover a laptop containing a spell that allows them to access alternate realities.
COMMENTS: Sometimes I wonder whether there is a point to reviewing movies that no one else will ever see. I’ve concluded that the value to the reader is the same as when they encounter any description of a thing they will never experience directly: they get to add one more item to their mental catalog of things of which they are aware. So, if you’ve read this far, your life has been enriched (although perhaps imperceptibly) by your knowledge that Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure exists.
Still reading? Then you are not content to simply know that a thing called Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure exists, and wish to learn what it actually is. I applaud your curiosity. Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure consists of footage of seagulls on the beach, with voice actors dubbing in fanciful and humorous conversations between the elder (Ed, with a faux British accent) and the younger (teenager Rooster, who’s slightly dumber than birdbrained Ed). The two feathered friends find a portal to alternate realities and get lost in a dimensional vortex, moving from a universe where they are suddenly avian Lotharios to one where humans have set up free feeders to one where gulls are completely unknown species, and so on. Usually the alternative reality seems immediately superior but then reveals some major flaw: e.g., in the world where the female gulls are all attracted to Ed and Rooster, Ed’s favorite snack, cheese puffs, do not exist. Therefore, the pair continually try to get back to their own universe, but instead end up in another slightly novel variant.
My goodness, you’re still here? Well, I’m guano drop some more knowledge to make you a certified expert on Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure. The voiceovers can be mildly amusing, but hardly drip with wit (“wanna flock?,” an amorous female gull asks Ed). There are a lot of shots of seagulls pooping, and in fact pooping, or more precisely, the inability to do so, becomes a major plot point in the second new reality the pair visit. Unless you’re a fan of seagulls pooping, though, the film is visually dull—the same local birds pooping on the same local beaches for over an hour. Perhaps bird-watching hobbyists would find it tolerable. There are a few moments of Adobe After Effects-style visuals—the green spiral inter-dimensional portals, animated flapping bird silhouettes, a snapshot of a child that gets sucked into a portal—which are tossed out with an impish disregard for realism. In the best effect, they simply reverse the film to show fish and shrimp shooting out of a bird feeder; it’s completely goofy, in the best sense of the term. But overall, the entirety of Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure is like a feature film version of a 20-watch YouTube that never showed up in your feed. The movie is available for rental on YouTube or Google Play, but the filmmakers will probably never make back the $50 they spent on it. That’s OK; you get the feeling that getting rich is not the motivation for the team behind Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure. They wanted to have a fun time making a cheap movie, and they did so. And now you know they did it.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
No reviews other than this one currently exist
CAPSULE: LONGLEGS (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Osgood Perkins
FEATURING: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood
PLOT: The FBI assigns Special Agent Harker to a 20-year-old serial murder case, triggering a serious of unsettling breakthroughs.
COMMENTS: What’s that expression—Longlegs, short review? Some thirty-dozen reviews for this Cage-y bit of strange are out there, so let us dive quickly, and deeply, into the merits of Osgood Perkins’ latest outing. Be warned: we shall be heading far away into lands of the Pacific Northwest, and back in time to a magical period known as “the ’90s”.
The sights and sounds will be familiar to some; but none will be more familiar than the sight of Nicolas Cage being crazy-go-nuts. But come to think of it, he is rendered somewhat unrecognizable: invariably coated in off-white makeup, and buried beneath a chubbed-out face. Whenever Longlegs goes off on a spiel, though, we hear Nic busting out of this cage. Much of this film’s appeal manifests during the (shrewdly) intermittent dosing of this titular oddity.
What Longlegs gets up to is where the nostalgia comes in. (And—if I may editorialize a moment—not that tedious kind on display from a more famous filmmaker.) That special time, The ’90s, oozes from every pore—and wrapped within the main throw-back are bursts of the ’70s, as our baddy loves T. Rex, Lou Reed, and Duran Duran. Our heroine, Special Agent Harker (a spectacularly spectrometric Maika Monroe), lives up to her namesake: an eye for detail, quiet courage, a a pull toward the supernatural, and a fate that can best be described as “mixed.”
Satanic Panic, alas, can only be taken so lightly: in this corner of the US, Satan appears altogether too real. How does Longlegs do their thing? (I emphasize that pronoun: it’s not altogether clear just how Cage’s character views themselves.) However they do it, they perform their deadly spree amongst stark snow-lighting, cool-as-thriller interiors, and, one of my favorite flourishes, inside a house with twin-point front roofing which forms—you guessed it—the shape of longlegs legs.
So, bust out the Shark Bites, pop a straw in your Capri Sun, and take a dangerous walk through a valley of diabolic dolls.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/410arzS6veL._SL500_.jpg)
- Longlegs [4K UHD]
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: STRANGERS IN PARADISE (1984)
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DIRECTED BY: Ulli Lommel
FEATURING: Ulli Lommel, Ken Letner, Thom Jones, Geoffrey Barker, Ann Price, Galyn Görg
PLOT: A mentalist has himself cryogenically frozen to escape the Nazi regime, only to be thawed out amidst another fascist regime: suburban America in 1984, where hyper-conservative parents hope to use his talents to undo the rock-and-roll perversions of their children.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A deeply earnest musical that isn’t afraid to look silly—and does, quite often. Strangers in Paradise wants to speak to the young while addressing hot-button issues, a formula that is catnip for us because there are so many ways for it to go wrong, none of which come anywhere close to “normal.” In that respect, Strangers in Paradise really can’t miss, with its direct comparisons of Nazis to Reagan Republicans. But there’s also real talent here: a surprisingly strong set of songs, excellent choreography, and enough good ideas to give the bad ideas competition.
COMMENTS: If you read any biographical information about Ulli Lommel, you might be fooled into thinking that you’ve gleaned a little insight into how he might have developed his highly unusual career. Born in the waning months of World War II in part of Germany now located inside Poland, his parents purportedly smuggled baby Ulli out of the city wrapped up in a rug. As a teenager, it’s said that he played music with Elvis Presley during the King’s tenure in the Army. His early acting career included a role in a Russ Meyer adaptation of Fanny Hill. He appeared in Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s debut feature and became a regular in that director’s company, with roles in Whitty and World on a Wire. When one of his own directorial efforts attracted the attention of Andy Warhol, Lommel came to America, where he became particularly attracted to films with music, such as Jack Palance’s rock western Cocaine Cowboys, and punk pioneer Richard Hell’s Blank Generation. So there you have it: a historical fear of Nazis, a strong relationship with the avant-garde, and an affinity for a rockin’ beat.
I provide you with all of this background to tell you that none of it adequately explains the path that might lead a person to make Strangers in Paradise. The end product is such a wild tonal mishmash, such a startling blend of amateur and professional skills, such an earnest and serious-minded piece of cheese, that it’s remarkable to think that it all spawns from the mind of one man. Instead of developing a singular voice, it simultaneously adopts multiples.
Strangers in Paradise lets you know just what kind of intestinal fortitude it has right from the beginning, when we meet our hero, the renowned mentalist Jonathan Sage (played by Lommel himself), telling Adolf Hitler (also Lommel) that he won’t work for him. To his face! You can’t get much more principled than that! While Sage can make a dedicated German soldier forsake the cause, he can’t do the Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: STRANGERS IN PARADISE (1984)