Giles and Greg talk to independent animator Julian Glander about his critical hit Boys Go to Jupiter, about math prodigy / high school dropout / Grubster drone Billy 5000 and his encounters with customers, experimental citrus farms, and aliens. We talk about blender animation, baby ducklings, hammer entrepreneurship, and how to get a free deep-fried taco in Tampa, FL. And what’s up with the hot dog guy?
CAREER BED (1968)/SEX BY ADVERTISEMENT (1968) AND SATAN’S BED (1965)/SCARE THEIR PANTS OFF (1968)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Joel Reed (Career Bed, Sex by Advertisement); Michael Findlay (Satan’s Bed); John Maddox (Scare Their Pants Off)
FEATURING: Georgina Spelvin (Career Bed, Sex by Advertisement); Yoko Ono (Satan’s Bed)
PLOT: An overbearing stage mother pimps out her daughter to sleazy producers and unscrupulous talent agents (Career Bed); Dr. Joanne Richfield investigates Sex by Advertisement in the swinging sixties; sex traffickers kidnap a Japanese mail-order bride (Satan’s Bed); a pair of creeps kidnap women off the street and subject them to oddball role-playing scenarios (Scare Their Pants Off).
COMMENTS: For those looking to (re-)experience the freewheeling world of ’60s sexploitation cinema, you could do worse than the latest Blu-ray re-releases by Distribpix and Something Weird. But you could also do better. These double features of impeccably restored films provide a sampling of what resulted when low budgets, rushed production schedules, and varying degrees of creativity and talent combined to churn out roughies for the Time Square theaters of old. The moments of weirdness glimpsed in this archive are sprinkled among nonsensical plots, long stretches of repetitive interiors, and New York City street footage with post-sync dialogue performed by bad actors.
In Career Bed, a conventional telling of a well-worn tale, a widow takes her daughter to New York, determined to make her a big star. Susan Potter just wants to marry her sweetheart from back home, but when her beau shows up in the city, Mrs. Potter seduces him, then tells Susan she’ll be better off pursuing an acting career. Through this Mrs. Robinson sideline, Mrs. Potter continues to get a piece of the action as she sets up dates for Susan with supposed entertainment industry bigwigs.
Future Devil in Miss Jones star Georgina Spelvin appears in a minor role as a talent agent who gets Susan to spend the night with her, after telling Mrs. Potter she has no interest in her daughter’s virginity “in the classical sense” (though she’s certainly interested in the “Classical” sense, if you know what I mean). This all leads to depressingly predictable results, though in the end, Susan thwarts her mother by marrying a producer. Mrs. Potter then sets herself up as a talent agent so she can continue exploiting naïve young women in search of fame and fortune.
Sex by Advertisement attempts the white-coater format, in which a medical professional discourses on the vices rampant in society. Unfortunately, Dr. Richfield (Spelvin again) is no Krafft-Ebing, and the narrative focuses more on condemning the pervasive advertising culture of the “Mad Men” era than in elucidating its sexual mores. Our narrator begins by describing how fetishists used to discreetly seek partners through coded ads (“Babysitter, for OLDER difficult children/Sitter supplies equipment”), but nowadays, with far more explicit language, everyone’s getting in on the game.
Within this vaguely constructed frame narrative, the few notable vignettes include an “art studio” where nude models serve as canvases Continue reading CAREER BED (1968)/SEX BY ADVERTISEMENT (1968) AND SATAN’S BED (1965)/SCARE THEIR PANTS OFF (1968)
63*: WE ARE THE STRANGE (2007)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
“We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.”–Douglas Adams
DIRECTED BY: M dot Strange
FEATURING: Voices of Halleh Seddighzadeh, David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Chaylon Blancett, M dot Strange
PLOT: In the phantasmagorical metropolis of Stopmo City, two outcasts—eMMM, a boy with the head of a doll, and Blue, an ethereal, suffering young woman—search for a cherished ice cream parlor. Ongoing battles between grotesque monsters make their journey perilous. An avenging hero, Rain, defeats many of the monsters, but when the ultimate evil is revealed to be a harlequin-faced beast of a man called HIM, eMMM and Blue will have to confront the menace themselves.
BACKGROUND:
- M dot Strange is the nom de cinema of San Jose-based Michael Belmont, who in addition to dappling in animation is a web designer, musician, and video game creator.
- Demonstrating multiple animation styles, the film was created on multiple platforms of varying sophistication and complexity, ranging from Adobe After Effects to Mario Paint.
- M dot chronicled the making of the film in a series of videos (like this one) that built a fan base of more than a million YouTube followers. Upon its release, the trailer for We Are the Strange racked up 500,000 views in its first four days.
- The film received the Golden Prize for Most Groundbreaking Film and the Silver Prize for Best Animated Film at the 2007 Fantasia Film Festival.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: So it is foretold: “He will return and strike down evil with a fist made of aluminum foil. Then, we will celebrate with many scoops of iced cream.” And so it comes to pass, when a bubble-shaped automaton emerges to face off against the big bad, and the hellscape Power Ranger at the controls is revealed to be our diminutive dollboy with the M on his forehead. For a film that devotes itself to style over substance and a pervasive gloom, it’s an unexpected flourish of feel-good storytelling and a nifty summation of the director’s particular blend of high-tech and lo-fi animation techniques. Alas, the promised ice cream is not in evidence.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Living, hungering arcade game; a trip on the ice cream train
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Multiple forms of animation and visual styles share space in a bouillabaisse of dread and visual overstimulation. Stop-motion mingles with computer-generated anime, and both appear alongside 2D paper-folding and hand-crafted miniatures. Every scene feels crafted to be as outlandish and disturbing as possible. The randomness of it all is sometimes eclectic, often cacophonous, and frequently intriguing.
Trailer for We Are the Strange (2007)
COMMENTS: This is not the first time that a movie challenges us to Continue reading 63*: WE ARE THE STRANGE (2007)
SATURDAY SHORT: DIDI, YES I DIDI (2025)
The gang has a legendary big night out.
POD 366, EP. 133: I CAN SEE THE TOXIC RIVER UNDER VENICE
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Discussed in this episode:
I Can See You (2008): Read the Canonically Weird review! The “psychedelic campfire tale” arrives on Blu-ray for the first time; includes the short 3D film “The Viewer” and three other shorts (plus a music video) from director Graham Reznick. Buy I Can See You.
Only the River Flows (2023): A Chinese policeman questions whether they have the right suspect in a murder, as he struggles with nightmares that suggest madness. More than one critic described it as “enigmatic”; now on Blu-ray. Buy Only the River Flows.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (2024): The Quay Brothers return with their first feature film in two decades, an adaptation of the same source material as Wojciech Has‘ The Hourglass Sanatorium done in the style of Street of Crocodiles. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass official U.S. distributor page.
The Toxic Avenger (2023): Peter Dinklage (that’s right) takes the lead role in this remake of Troma’s scuzzball hit. In theaters everywhere. The Toxic Avenger official site.
Venice International Film Festival, Aug 27 – Sep. 6: Venice is always worth a peek. This year, Werner Herzog receives an honorary Golden Lion (presented to him by no less than Francis Ford Coppola) as a prelude to what looks like a fairly weird slate. The big item for our eyes is Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Bugonia, a remake of Save the Green Planet! that’s getting great early reviews (but no reports of major weirdness, sadly). Also getting buzz (from us): Mike Figgis’ behind-the-scenes feature about the making of Megalopolis, Megadoc. The “looks interesting” category features three foreign films (two with uncertain distribution prospects): an Azerbaijani film whose title translates as Sermon to the Void, which appears to be a desert quest set during the end of the world; a new animated fantasy from Mamoru Hosoda called Scarlet; and an experimental avant-garde Italian adaptation of the Orpheus legend (Orfeo). Plus, in the not-weird-but-we’ll-be-watching-anyway category: Guillermo del Toro‘s take on Frankenstein. Venice International Film Festival official website.
Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001): Discussion begins. A salaryman romances a village woman who has a river inside her. Shôhei Imamura‘s final movie is a weird romantic comedy focused on female sexuality. A Blu-ray came out in 2023; not sure why there’s a follow-up release so quickly. Buy Warm Water Under a Red Bridge.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest (definitively) scheduled for next week’s Pod 366, but Greg and Giles will return with a look at the week’s weird news and releases. In written content, Shane Wilson considers whether We Are the Strange (2007) lives up to its name, Enar Clarke reviews four (!) Something Weird roughies in one post, Giles Edwards investigates a Dream Hacker (2025), and Gregory J. Smalley plans to report on The Toxic Avenger remake. Onward and weirdward!