In it’s own words, Rich Ragsdale’s award-winning experimental short is a “sideshow at the end of the world” assembled from “snapshots, silver gelatin prints, polaroids, pinhole photos, muybridge motion studies, sequential xerography, archival photos and computer generated textures.”
POD 366, EP. 61: “GUESS THAT WEIRD MOVIE” WITH YOUR HOST, GILES EDWARDS
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Quick links/Discussed in this episode:
“Guess That Weird Movie”: Jump to the game show. Play along as Giles Edwards describes weird movie posters and our panel of Terri McSorley, El Rob Hubbard, and Gregory J. Smalley attempt to guess them. If there’s interest, we may try this with readers as contestants sometime.
Late Night with the Devil (2023): Discussion begins. Read Giles Edwards’ Apocrypha Candidate review. It’s “The Merv Griffin Show” meets The Exorcist when a Halloween broadcast gimmick leads to a real-life demonic possession. In limited release now. Late Night with the Devil official website.
Lynch/Oz (2022): Discussion begins. Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. This Blu-ray of the thoughtful essay film (recommended for most, essential to David Lynchheads) includes an interview with doc director Alexandre O. Philippe as an extra feature. Buy Lynch/Oz.
Problemista (2023): Discussion begins. An El Salvadoran immigrant navigates the whimsically Kafkaesque labyrinths of American bureaucracy. From A24, with Tilda Swinton. Problemista official home page.
Riddle of Fire (2023): Discussion begins. Per the programmers at TIFF 2023, Riddle of Fire is “a neo-fairytale that evokes the sensation of tuning into a late-night broadcast of an obscure and wackadoo children’s film from another dimension.” Riddle of Fire official site.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest scheduled for next week’s Pod 366, but Giles Edwards and El Rob Hubbard will hold down the fort discussing the week’s releases. Also on YouTube, Pete Trbovich gives you rare 366 coverage of a slasher movie as Weird View Crew celebrates 1981’s Bloody Birthday. In print reviews, Shane Wilson looks back at Suddenly, Last Summer (1959); Giles Edwards analyzes The President’s Analyst (1967); and Gregory J. Smalley takes in the 2022 doc Godard Cinema (along with glimpse of Godard‘s unfinished final film, “Phony Wars: Trailer of a Film That Will Never Exist.”) Onward and weirdward!
45*. SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974)
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DIRECTED BY: John Coney
FEATURING: Sun Ra, Ray Johnson
PLOT: Sun Ra returns to earth from his cosmic explorations with plans to relocate black folk to a new planet. Arriving in his spaceship in Oakland, Ra visits a youth community center and opens an outer space employment agency to spread his message.; NASA agents kidnap him, hoping to learn his technological secrets. Meanwhile, in a desert dimension, Ra and the pimp-like Overseer play a card game for the future of the black race.
BACKGROUND:
- Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount. He dropped out of college after he had a vision in which he was transported to the planet Saturn (or so he claimed). Never signed to a big record label, Ra toured and recorded prolifically, especially throughout his 1950s and 1960s heyday, releasing albums himself. His music was highly avant-garde, incorporating free jazz, synthesizers, chanting, oddball poetry incorporating mythological and space-faring themes, Egyptian costuming, and lavish stage productions.
- The producer originally envisioned the film as a documentary, but input from many sources (including Ra himself) eventually led to this narrative movie.
- Filmed in 1972 at the same time and on some of the same sets (and with one of the same actors) as the pornographic film Behind the Green Door. Space Is the Place was briefly released theatrically in 1974. It then disappeared until an edited version surfaced on VHS in the early 1990s.
- Sun Ra improvised all of his dialogue, as did the kids interviewed at the community center.
- Confusingly, Sun Ra’s classic 1972 album “Space is the Place” is not the soundtrack to this film, despite the fact that Ra wears a costume from the production on the cover. The actual soundtrack album was recorded contemporaneously but not released until 1993. The two albums share only the title track in common, in a radically different performance.
- In 2003, scenes were restored which were missing from the VHS release. These scenes, featuring nudity, violence, or other debauchery inserted by co-screenwriter Joshua Smith, had been removed by Sun Ra himself; therefore, the 64-minute VHS cut is sometimes known as the “Sun Ra cut.”
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Su Ra’s Egyptian costume, especially his crown combining a King Tut-styled headdress topped by an enormous solar crystal flanked by golden antlers. (It resembles the crown worn by Isis.) Ra’s fashion choices earn him some genuine stares from pedestrians as he drives through Oakland streets in a convertible, flanked by a golden-headed lion and a falcon. This majestic Pharonic helmet was so striking it made both the cover of both the movie poster and the identically titled jazz album.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Tarot blackjack for black souls; “Dixie” torture
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: An improvised mashup of surrealism, blaxploitation tropes, bizarro cosmic jazz, and messianic intergalactic Egyptology, Space Is the Place is an outsider artifact that could only have come from one man: the great Sun Ra.
DVD release trailer for Space is the Place
COMMENTS: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Sun Continue reading 45*. SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974)
CAPSULE: STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS (2022)
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State of Consciousness is available for VOD rental or purchase.
DIRECTED BY: Marcus Stokes
FEATURING: Emile Hirsch, Tatjana Nardone, Kesia Elwin
PLOT: As part of a plea deal for a murder he claims he did not commit, Stephen undergoes a questionable medical procedure which leaves him uncertain what his past, and reality, actually are.
COMMENTS: Stokes’ mind-bendy-straw is dripping with competence. The editing is smooth or jagged, as appropriate; the performances are dismayed, vicious, or cold, as appropriate; the images are clear, the lighting never draws attention to itself, and the various twists embedded in State of Consciousness work just fine. I should take a moment, however, to admit something again here: when it comes to thrillers, I am an idiot. I never see what’s around the corner until the reveal. I easily get sucked into the story and turn off my thinking mind.
But at least I generally know when a movie is merely okay, like State of Consciousness. The credibility of the protagonist is shaky. Stephen (Emile Hirsch) is seemingly dropped into a “wrong man” scenario. Or so it seems. Sometimes, it seems otherwise, as he has a knack for survival and comfort with violence we probably wouldn’t expect from a more upright citizen—evidenced most forcefully by his casual execution of two individuals at the mental institution he’s been rescued by (or doomed to). The recurring “red pills” are an obvious nod to another, more famous reality-questioning film, twisting on that particular color scheme. (Another more famous film gets its nod in the form some social commentary about freedom of choice and rendering individuals fit for society.) Memories, reality, hallucination, electro-stimulation, all of it is not much layered or sequenced so much as smashed together and soldered until a narrative line—of sorts—runs from the opening, a jazzy sex thing, up through a final, unresolved encounter with the authority figure.
I have a soft spot for Emile Hirsch, so I enjoyed this more than most might expect to, and thus am able to trumpet State of Consciousness‘ one delightfully absurd sequence. Stephen and his long-suffering girlfriend are in the bedroom after he awakes from a nightmare (or what-have-you). The weather outside is thunderous, like the emotions in the boudoir. She is near the end of her tether; for his own reasons, Stephen is, as well. They make a peace together, a plan, and we hear an ominous metal creaking—and into this now-calm tumult smashes a “Last Stop” neon sign, to tragic effect.
Or so it seems.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
WEIRD VIEW CREW: THE ITEM (1999)
In The Item, the chick, the fat guy, the mustache guy, and Dan Clark pick up a mysterious briefcase in a scenario that was intended to evoke Pulp Fiction as made by Frank Henenlotter. The result, instead, is a 2.7 IMDb rating. Pete soldiers on gamely, with some herbal assistance.
(This movie was nominated for review by Val Santos. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
![The Item [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/511DFG502VL._SL500_.jpg)