Capsules

CAPSULE: ENTER THE DRAG DRAGON (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Beatrice Beres, Sam Kellerman, Jade London, Samnang Tep, Mark MacDonald, Phil Caracas, Natalia Moreno

PLOT: A kung fu proficient drag-queen detective investigates a missing dog, which leads to a hidden treasure, an Aztec mummy, and zombies.

Still from enter the drag dragon (2023)

COMMENTS: In a movie so silly that the lead is played consecutively by three different actors—Crunch gets a drag makeover and a whole new look each time she awakens in the hospital after a trauma—it’s hard for even the anti-wokest viewer to take offense. (The film’s disclaimer that it was shot on land stolen from the Algonquin and Kanein’keha:ka Nations may raise some colonist ire, though).

Detective Crunch and roller-skating delivery girl/hot cis chick Jaws live in an abandoned (and haunted) movie theater owned by Fast Buck, where they screen old kung fu flicks 24/7 for training purposes. They are opposed by F.I.S.T. (Fearsome International Spies and Thieves), a cabal of ersatz Bond henchmen led by Gorch. There’s also an ancient Aztec mummy to deal with. The story may traffic in occasional immorality, but not amorality; it’s irreverent, but too goofy and harmless to be offensive, and it’s surprisingly chaste when it comes to sex. The heroes are loyal and determined, and the villains all reap the rewards of their infamy. Take off the drag, lose the dildo wipes, and tone down the gore and nudity, and it’s a wholesome adventure the Hays Office would gladly pass. (Instead, the poster informs us, it was “rated X by an all straight jury.”)

This is, if you haven’t guessed yet, an extremely silly movie. There’s lots of Z-movie gore—the kind where zombies pretend to yank intestines out of their victim as the actor plays dead, or people get telescopes slammed through their eye sockets. There are a handful of cheesy kung fu battles, which actually look like the choreography has been slowed down rather than sped up. There are minor cult cameos from ,  and from pal . We also get musical numbers, poison bosoms, laser hula hoops, a character named Dick Toes, and lots and lots of deliberately lame jokes, many involving dildos or kicks to the nuts. The location manager found some really keen outdoor locations to exploit, with mossy cliffs, waterfalls, and shallow caves, and our heroes even get a skydiving scene (in drag, of course). No one in the large cast can really act, or shows much interest in trying to. In other words, Lee Demarbre (best known for 2001’s similarly campy and transgressive-adjacent Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter) throws everything he can think of at the screen without breaking the bank, having a blast in the process. The results are in the vein, but with less mean-spiritedness or jagged satire. It’s woke trash, to be sure, though perhaps not as woke as it pretends to be. Drag Dragon does fully deliver the trash, however, just like a drag queen delivers a nunchuck dildo upside a bad guy’s head.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…high camp where comparisons to the work of John Waters are apt, especially when logic is dropped for gags and the performances have an awkward stiltedness to them.”–Addison Wylie, Wylie Writes (contemporaneous)

Enter The Drag Dragon [Blu-ray + DVD]

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366 Underground, Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER QUEUE: NICK: THE FEATURE FILM (2013)

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Nick: The Feature Film is currently available to watch for free on YouTube.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Chris Alex, Nick Alex, Robert Benfer, Jennifer Alex

PLOT: A documentarian decides to devote an entire film to capturing a typical day in the life of unremarkable Nick, but an acquaintance of Nick’s named Chris shows up and proceeds to derail the project with his own demands, attention-stealing actions, and demonstrations of self-proclaimed genius.

Still from nick: the feature films (2013)

COMMENTS: Jason Steele made his name in 2005 with a Flash animation called “Charlie the Unicorn” that unexpectedly went viral. He followed this breakthrough a sequel, and eventually three more, and further a series parodying the first series, and before you knew it, Steele had inadvertently stumbled into a career. His FilmCow studio has been pumping out material ever since. Somewhere along the way, Steele branched out into live-action, creating a second YouTube channel to showcase his collaborations with brothers Chris and Nick Alex. These are mostly shorts, but our subject today is the time they tried to go for more. 

Reportedly, the film was improvised and shot in an entire day. This checks out. The sketches that comprise Nick: The Feature Film display a similar pattern: Fawning documentarian Robert asks Nick to demonstrate some aspect of his plebeian existence, but before Nick can get too far, insane egotist Chris swoops in to tout his superior inventiveness, break some stuff, and leave irritation in his wake. Chris displays all the hallmarks of an improv nightmare, denying the choices of others, hamming it up for the audience to the exclusion of his castmates, and repeating flop jokes under the notion that the funny is in the callback. To be fair, his scene partners are letting him do this, so they clearly believe he’s on to some comic gold. 

So let’s talk about our comic star. Chris presents himself as a genius; he undercuts this assessment every time he opens his mouth. He’s particularly adept at ruining existing things by attempting to “plus” them, such as his self-serving takes on Battle Monopoly or Double Badminton. He invites cult figures into Nick’s house, he tries to fix a car with a shovel, and just generally wanders around Titusville with a bracing and unearned self-confidence. It’s a fully committed performance, but it sucks up all the air in the room. This may be Nick: The Feature Film, but it’s really Chris: The Nonstop Antics. 

The Monopoly scene shows the limits of this kind of thing as improv:  Chris makes up rules at random, like a newfangled version of fizzbin. Nick blithely goes along with whatever Chris says, while Robert’s role is to question the logic like a proper straight man. We don’t learn anything we didn’t already know—Chris is a consummate BS artist, Nick and Robert are different varieties of pushover—and the scene runs for several minutes through its heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenario, at which point it just ends with Chris declaring victory and everyone else shrugging their shoulders. To be blunt: if only one character gets the chance to do anything, you don’t have a scene. 

I have to confess that I’m immediately taken out of the concept of Nick: The Feature Film long before Chris arrives. There is absolutely nothing compelling about Nick. Inoffensive but bland to the point of invisibility, he has nothing to show and nothing to say. This renders the smitten Robert as either insightful beyond typical human understanding or flatly stupid, which explains why the narrative is interspersed with interludes that tell extraordinary tales of Nick’s rich life. They are sketched out on chalkboards, with only a photograph of Nick’s face to connect with anything real. The Nick of these stories bears zero relation to the one we see in live-action. In illustration, Nick is a near-superhero, saving lives. In person, he’s a bland doofus who has barely prepared for an entry-level job interview. The gleefully absurd tales of Nick’s exploits stand in stark relief to the passive, featureless nobody whom we see onscreen, so you can either try to take the film at face value or you can accept it as an absurd platform for the comic stylings of the FilmCow collective. Neither approach works entirely.

For a home movie shot on the fly, Nick looks pretty good, and there are small pleasures to be had, like the neo-evangelist who shows up at Nick’s door and proceeds to quietly follow Robert around way too closely. (She’s played by another member of the Alex clan, Jennifer.) And it’s fairly amusing that the film ends with Robert refusing to accept the finale that’s right in front of him—Chris finally earns his chops by standing up to a blowhard who insults his friend —instead creating his own take in which Chris receives a series of increasingly giant swords falling from the sky and lodging up his rectum. But these amusements take a back seat to a conundrum and a frustration: the empty shirt we’re supposed to be interested in and the irritating loon who demands our attention instead. 

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

Nick: The Feature Film (mildly NSFW: language, crude humor)

Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366, EP. 76: R.I.P. SHELLEY DUVALL; PREVIEWING FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 EDITION

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Quick links/Discussed in this episode:

The Blue Rose (2024): Discussion begins. A “surrealist noir” about two rookie detectives trying to solve a homicide over a single night. Releasing simultaneously to (select) theaters and on VOD. The Blue Rose official site.

Boy and the Heron (2023): Discussion begins. Read Gregory J. Smalley’s Apocrypha Candidate review. Shout! Factory, in conjunction with GKids, releases ‘s latest fantasy, in your choice of a conventionally packaged Blu-ray + DVD or a 4K UHD + Blu-ray Steelbook. Buy The Boy and the Heron.

Fata Morgana [AKA Left-Handed Fate] (1966): Discussion begins. A model stays behind in a Barcelona that’s nearly deserted after the populace flees a serial killer. An extremely obscure find by Mondo Macabro, this appears to be a Swinging Sixties, pop-art take on a surreal, science-fictiony psychological thriller/giallo. Buy Fata Morgana.

“My Last Movie” (202?): Discussion begins. 69-year old has taken to Kickstarter to raise funds for what he describes as his “last movie.” It will be an adaptation of Nicolai Gogol’s satire “Dead Souls” set in the Old West. The modest funding goal of $75,000 was met quickly, and the project is now into its stretch goals, the second of which, at $125,000, is to shoot a scene or two at El Condor. As I write this, the effort has a little more than two weeks to go. “My Last Movie” Kickstarter.

“Fantasia Festival 2024”: Discussion begins. Long-time readers know how we revere this particular festival (we’re in our ninth year of coverage). As its name suggests, Fant-Asia began by specializing fantasy films from Asia, but has since expanded to cover all types of genre filmmaking from around the world, including the more accessible experimental and would-be-cult films. Here are just a few of the top features roving correspondent Giles Edwards will be looking into at this year’s Fantasia, which begins on July 18 in beautiful Montreal:

  • The A-Frame – A woman resorts to black market quantum physics in an attempt to cure her cancer in ‘s sci-fi satire.
  • Animalia Paradoxica – An experimental post-apocalyptic collage from Chile.
  • Cuckoo – (Luz) returns with a bigger-budgeted feature about a teenage woman undergoing strange experiences as a hotel desk clerk.
  • Infinite Summer – returns with the story of a sinister mindfulness app.
  • Kryptic – A woman loses her identity while searching for a cryptid and a missing cyptozoologist.
  • The Tenants – In a near-future dystopian Seoul, a young man sublets part of his apartment to an eccentric couple whose behavior increasingly disturbs.

Fantasia International Film Festival home page.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

Next week, Giles Edwards will begin delivering reports from the Fantasia Festival, which starts on Thursday, July 18. We’ll try to check in with him on the pod over the next three weeks, but Pete Trbovich will handle primary co-host duties. In written reviews, Shane Wilson tackles another that Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue with the 2013 YouTube feature freebie Nick: The Feature Film, while Gregory J. Smalley braves the self-proclaimed “woke trash” kung fu/drag queen mashup Enter the Drag Dragon. Onward and weirdward!

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE ABSENCE OF MILK IN THE MOUTHS OF THE LOST (2023)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Case Esparros

FEATURING: , Gary Wilson

PLOT: A mysterious milkman helps a grieving mother deal with the loss of her child.

Still from absence of milk in the mouths of the lost (2023)

COMMENTS: I could give The Absence of Mil k in the Mouths of the Lost a “” tag, because the average viewer will immediately want to flee during the opening scene of a cow giving birth in real time. But, if you are reading this, chances are you are not the average viewer. Instead, I’ll just remind you that when you brave Milk, you are venturing into the strange and treacherous world of microbudget DIY surrealism—so calibrate your expectations accordingly.

A milkman (when exactly is this supposed to be set?) delivers glass bottles to a house where a young woman bathes in filthy black liquid with a blank expression; she doesn’t answer the bell when he rings. The milkman lives in a dingy basement decorated with pictures of missing children cut out from milk cartons—and a breast hanging on his wall that drips white liquid into a bowl. Meanwhile, in an alternate plane of reality, mute, cigar-smoking, boxer-wearing devils covered head-to-toe in white greasepaint plot mischief against a trio of masked children. The milkman has buzzy schizophrenic hallucinations where he sees a masked woman knitting and delivering electronically altered monologues while walled in by -style “paint-on-the-film” moving canvases. A few dramatic sequences, and much moping about the dilapidated house, advance the woman’s story, until she and the milkman finally meet for an exposition dump to tie (some of) the plot strands together. The children find it almost shockingly easy to best the middle-aged demons that beset them.

Milk clearly suffers from its low budget. The visuals often display thrift-store ingenuity, but the sound can be a serious issue: many sections were filmed without any, and there are several moments when what might be meaningful dialogue is muffled. At other times, the dialogue is both nearly inaudible and digitally altered. It’s needlessly frustrating. It’s also a pity that so much of the middle of the film has such poor sound quality, when in the opening and closing, where Esparos’ musician friends contribute songs (including a deranged cover of the gospel standard “I’ll Fly Away”), the sound mix is crucial and well-executed.

There’s a difference between having a lot of creativity on display and everything clicking. If you can focus on the former, Milk has a lot to offer. Some of the imagery is arresting: the cigar-smoking demons are as brilliantly conceived as they are easily achieved, and sequences like the woman who pierces her milk-bag bra (!) with a knife are hard to forget. And although some of the imagery is shocking, its always purposeful and empathetic. The movie has a good heart. It helps to love cows.

The Absence of Milk In the Mouths of the Lost [Blu-ray]

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