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SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: IN THE MOUTH (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Cory Santilli

FEATURING: Colin Burgess, Paul Michael

PLOT: Merl, a shut-in forced to take in a roommate to cover the rent, fears his giant head that slumbers on the front lawn.

Still from In the Mouth (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The central premise, as explained above, is enough to make this an easy in; but Santilli’s one-set comedy also lays on plenty of quirky flourishes on top of this (massive) conceit.

COMMENTS: Merl lives in a world of his own. This world is made up of an undefined number of rooms, and a narrow hallway just long enough for him to scooter around through it—kind of. Making the corners is a little tough. Merl cannot leave his home, relying on a pulley system to retrieve his mail, and a dino-head bite grip to pull in the larger parcels which do not fit in his mailbox. His world ends at his front door. Beyond that door is our world, peopled by complicated types demanding rent, and inhabited by a head that’s roughly one story tall. It usually slumbers, but intermittently reminds Merl of its presence with booming yawns.

Writer/director Cory Santilli builds a narrative terrarium for his protagonist. Merl lives a highly unscheduled life: puttering around, arranging objets, and avoiding the invader, Margaret, who owns the property in question. Informed both by classic “creature features”—see credit’s title font and hear the title music—and noir—jazz music flairs and crisp, black and white cinematography pleases the eye—Santilli bends these livelier genres to his own quiet ends, and then upends the tone and action by introducing a criminal on the run. Interloper Larry is both a lens to view our subject anew and a means of creating empathy for the odd protagonist. He calls Merl “brother”, and insists that Merl do please call him “Lah”—because it’s easier. (Merl matter-of-factly inquires, “Is it?”)

Whether or not Merl’s rent gets paid is something of a moot point. Santilli takes his viewers on an up-close journey through the daily struggles and joys of an agoraphobic, choosing a delightfully apt metaphor to do so. It’s a funny film, too, with ’90s nostalgia (how many people have AskedJeeves™ how to dispose of a corpse?) and genre-twisting (this first time I’ve witnessed the Good Cop / Deaf Cop trope). Complications leave Merl with a bag of cash and a body to dispose of. This, despite all the “baby cameras” (not cameras for babies, mind, but cameras hidden in the creepy little baby-headed figurines Merl accumulates) secreted about the house. So, where else to put the corpse, but…

In The Mouth is a strange little character study kept under the watchful eye of an absurd premise: this head in the front lawn. Merl’s head. It is Merl’s keeper, and in true form of a domineering partner, his protector.  While Merl’s world appears to be large enough, we know—and he knows—that a paradigm shift must eventually come to a head.

In the Mouth debuted at Slamdance Film Festival in February 2025. We’ll keep you abreast of any distribution plans when we know more.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…such a bold, weird, creative film…”–Shane Conto, Wasteland Reviews (festival screening)

Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

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: 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 , starring 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!

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CAPSULE: ED AND ROOSTER’S GREAT ADVENTURE (2025)

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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.

Still from ed and rooster's great adventure (2025)

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

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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.

Still from Longlegs (2024)

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:

“Perkins combines the grisly realism of a crime-scene photograph with the startling surreality of a nightmare… Cage does his version of warbly-voiced weirdo crooner Tiny Tim – an affectation that would be bonkers coming from anyone else, but is just another day at work for Cage.”–Katie Rife, IGN (contemporaneous)

Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]

Longlegs [4K UHD + Blu-Ray]
  • Longlegs [4K UHD]
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