366 Weird Movies curates 10 of the weirdest moments from Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010). Did your favorite make the cut?
Apropos of nothing but wanton chance, Penguin Pete is pledging to turn out a new Ten Weird Moments video on this channel for every $100 donated to this GoFundMe campaign he is running on his son’s behalf.
A woman records a message for her as-yet-unborn grandchild.
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Discussed in this episode:
Bugonia (Oct. 2025): Yorgos Lanthimos‘ Save the Green Planet! remake (starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons) has an approximate release date (October 2025) and a first trailer. We’ve been waiting for this for years, so what’s a few more months? Bugonia official site.
The Bunny Game (2012): B&W experimental shocksploitation about a prostitute named “Bunny” picked up and ritualistically tortured by a trucker named “Hog.” Just now debuting on Blu-ray. Buy The Bunny Game.
Dark City (1998): Read the Canonically Weird entry! This massive Arrow 4K UHD release contains every feature you could ever want, including both the theatrical and director’s cuts and six commentary track (two new). Check carefully to be sure you are ordering either the 4K UHD or the standard Blu-ray edition, depending on your requirements. Buy Dark City.
Fascination (1980): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. The standard edition release of Jean Rollin‘s relatively mainstream horror. Buy Fascination.
Longlegs (2024): Read Giles Edwards’ review. We note this 4K UHD steelbook version of the occultist nightmare solely due to the presence of Nicolas Cage. The release boasts extra features not on the previous Blu-ray release. Buy Longlegs.
Palindromes (2004): Read Jason Ubermolch’s reader recommendation. Surprisingly, Todd Solondz‘s experimental black comedy was not previously available on Blu-ray (and even the DVD was rare). This Radiance limited release includes a Blu and a UHD disc, new interviews and featurettes, a booklet, and so forth. Buy Palindromes.
Shiver of the Vampires (1971): Read the Apocryphally Weird entry! This is the standard 4K UHD version of Indicator’s previous special edition of Jean Rollin vampire classic. It includes everything in the more elaborate release, sans the 80-page booklet. Buy Shiver of the Vampires.
Sleeping Beauty (2011): Read Pamela De Graff’s review. Another movie that had been weirdly missing from the Blu-ray ranks, IFC now puts out the arthouse film wherein a radiant but dollike Emily Browning volunteers to be a plaything for the ultra-rich. Buy Sleeping Beauty.
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993): Experimental biopic about piano prodigy Glenn Gould; maybe three or four of the short films are weird? Now out from Criterion Collection. Buy Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
Next week’s Pod 366 guest will be Jason Trost (The FP series, Waves of Madness). Also in YouTube content, Pete Trbovich‘s will add to his “10 Weird Things” series with a collection of clips that go Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010). In a busy week of written content, Shane Wilson posts about Post Tenebras Lux (2012), Eugene Vasiliev gives a reading of Palms (1993), Giles Edwards plays The Bunny Game (see above), and Gregory J. Smalley performs his duty by inducting Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure into the Apocrypha. Onward and weirdward!
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Kryptic is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.
DIRECTED BY: Kourtney Roy
FEATURING: Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone
PLOT: Cryptozoology fan Kay catches a glimpse of a monster in the Canadian woods, sparking an identity crisis.
COMMENTS: I think it’s no real mystery why Kryptic fails. It’s not the fault of lead Chloe Pirrie, cinematographer David Bird, or anyone on the visual effects team. The movie is competently shot and acted; it’s a professionally assembled low-to-mid-budget genre film. There is a memorable recurring scene of, shall we say, crytpid gooeyness, and a couple of cool quick-flash shots suggesting hallucinations or buried realities: a face that suddenly takes on a demonic sheen; hands whose fingers, on second glance, appear inhumanly long. All this suggests talent on hand. And the issue isn’t really that the movie is too weird, confusing, or inconclusive, although Kryptic has more than enough strangeness to frustrate the mainstream viewer. But when it works, it works, despite the ellipticality. No, the problem clearly lies with the screenplay.
The first thirty minutes or so, which set up the premise, are perfectly fine. Kay catches the merest glimpse of a cryptid in the woods while on an (all-female) tour hosted by a Jon Lovitz impersonator; this results in near-total amnesia. While putting together the pieces of her life from clues lying around her unfamiliar car and home, she discovers a news story about a woman named Barb Valentine, a cryptozoologist who recently disappeared—and who looks exactly like Kay. It’s a promisingly mysterious beginning, even if there is nothing especially eye-catching (the second-long encounter with the creature is even less illuminating than the Patterson-Gimlin film).
The last twenty minutes or so are also not really the problem. Some will complain that the final events explain too little, but there is at least a legitimately Lynchian flavor to the proceedings. Most importantly, while the events of the finale are still confusing, they are at least confusing in an interesting way.
No, the problem with Kryptic is clearly its long, meandering second act. Kay follows “clues” which lead her from one mildly quirky but scarcely interesting character (nearly all of them women) to another: a hotel owner, a fellow cryptid enthusiast, a magician in a bar, a trailer park family. None of these encounters make much of an impression or provide much of a clue as to where the story is eventually heading. The only meaningful developments in the entire section occur in our heroine’s head. She starts increasingly pretending to be Barb rather than Kay—or maybe she thinks she is becoming Barb? Meanwhile, she has a lot of flashbacks (or maybe flashforwards) to the aforementioned sticky fantasy involving the cryptid, usually sparked by some observation of sex. Kryptic is not up to the challenge it sets itself of illustrating that interior character arc. The encounters that make up the bulk of the movie act are inevitably dry conversations that could be fast-forwarded through without losing much of value. It seems that the script just did not have enough decent ideas for a full 90 minutes; and yet, the movie runs 102 minutes, and feels even longer. This suggests some basic advice for new directors: when padding a film, add only the minimum amount of scenes necessary to reach feature length.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
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DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost
FEATURING: Jason Trost, Tallay Wickham, Ryan Gibson
PLOT: Agent LeGrasse is charged with investigating a distress signal from an ocean liner which has veered off course into the center of the Spacecraft Cemetery.
COMMENTS: A throwaway line at the start of The Waves of Madness reveals a great deal in hindsight. Ambling drunkenly to the bar on a massive ocean liner, a passenger seeks a final drink for the night—some Scotch—and is mistakenly served rum. No matter, he assures the embarrassed bartender, “It’s all going to the same place.” Little does our tippler know: it is indeed. Every single passenger, all of them doomed.
Jason Trost wastes no time laying down the story and style in The Waves of Madness, a tight little bit of Lovecraftian adventure that appears to be the launch of his next recurring movie universe. We quickly meet Agent LeGrasse, a professional working under the direction of an unspecified global organization. “The Elders of the Sea” (an ominously christened vessel if ever there was one) has an emergency—one so dire that its distress signal explicitly advises against anyone coming to the rescue. Despite this, LeGrasse boats over, docks his craft, and explores the floating derelict with nothing but his handgun, a few flash-bang grenades, and backpack stuffed with “Plan B.”
Anyone familiar with survival horror video games and side-scrollers will immediately observe Trost’s inspiration. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen lateral camera movement packed so densely anywhere else. Trost nails ‘game logic,’ too, adding to the experience. LeGrasse discovers an in-g̶a̶m̶e̶ -movie clue about how light can stop the menace, and before a pivotal bit of actioneering, counts aloud to determine how many seconds he has to enact a tricky maneuver. There’s even what appears to be a escort mission (and like most gamers, LeGrasse wants nothing to do with that); but this ends up being part of an underlying ambiguity explored more thoroughly through the three timelines that concurrently unfold as our jaded agent delves deeper into the mystery.
Trost knows his roots in the gaming world—and has now provided evidence beyond the delightfully ridiculous foray into epic levels of DDR in his FP saga. The Waves of Madness isn’t groundbreaking. We’ve seen most of these pieces before: lost cruise ship, strange cult doings, mysterious eldritch entities, hard-boiled gunman, and so on. But the director (and screen-writer, and producer, and one of the soundtrack musicians…) has distilled his various inspirations into a pleasingly particular experience, which will click on all the nostalgia switches for many viewers—and hopefully inspire others to investigate what it is Trost is celebrating.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
