A mysterious word sparks a deadly contagion that cannot be contained. CONTENT WARNING: Contains generative A.I. and sadness.
POD 366, EP. 157: IN THE GUTTER WITH TOM LEE RUTTER OF “POCKET FILM OF SUPERSTITIONS”
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Discussed in this episode:
The Pocket Film of Superstitions (2023): A narrator elucidates various superstitions whilst they are presented onscreen.
Arco (2025): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. France’s remarkable (but only kind of weird) sci-fi children’s story about a time-traveling kid in a rainbow suit is now available on VOD for purchase or rental (premium pricing, so purchase is currently the better option). Buy or rent Arco (premium pricing).
Boys Go to Jupiter (2024): Read Giles Edwards’ review. Julian Glander‘s comic animation about a gig economy teen hustler and aliens comes to Blu-ray with a number of neato extras: commentary, music videos, and four Glander shorts. Buy Boys Go to Jupiter.
The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001): A Cold War barber finds himself involved in a blackmail scheme that goes wrong. This existential noir from the Coen Brothers is in our reader-suggested queue, and is now on 4K UHD from the Criterion collection in a new transfer (otherwise the same as the original Criterion Blu-ray). Buy The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Pink Narcissus (1971): Read Enar Clarke’s review. As expected, this groundbreaking homoerotic arthouse experimental feature has finally appeared on Blu-ray after its restoration and rerelease. Buy Pink Narcissus.
Tank Girl (1995): Read Ryan Aarsets review. The 90s feminist post-apocalyptic cult film about a girl and her tank joins the ranks of 4K UHD releases this week. Buy Tank Girl.
Terror Firmer (1999): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. Troma rolls out another 4K UHD of one of their catalog “classicks,” as always packed with bonuses. Buy Terror Firmer.
“Your Life is on the Line!: A Joe Christ Anthology”: Five films from a punk DIY 80s-90s filmmaker whose work is unfamiliar to us, but who is compared to early John Waters and Nick Zedd. Buy “Your Life is on the Line!: A Joe Christ Anthology”.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest scheduled for next week’s Pod 366 (unless you count a pop-in from “Penguin” Pete Trbovich). The week after, we should have Ryan Verrill and Billy Ray Brewton from new boutique distributor Antenna Releasing on to discuss the current state of cult film distribution and other topics of interest to our core audience. At any rate, we’ll bring you all the weird movie news that’s fit to discuss. In written content, Giles Edwards will catch you up on the rest of the SlamDance 2026 slate (shorts and a feature); Micheal Diamades takes another bullet for the rest of the staff and covers the infamous, frequently banned bestiality-themed Belgian feature Vase de Noces (1974); Shane Wilson recommends the only-slightly-less-transgressive and “actually insane” trash talk show satire United Trash [AKA The Slit] (1996); and Gregory J. Smalley tries to find a purpose for Thailand’s reincarnated vacuum cleaner romance A Useful Ghost (2025). Onward and weirdward!
“KRAZEE KIDZ VIDEO PARTY”
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Let’s get this out of the way first: despite containing five “films” (although one is only 25 minutes long and two others are under an hour), “Krazee Kidz Video Party” is not a box set. There’s no box. There’s no booklet. There are no meaningful special features: a few drive-in “snipes,” ads and intermission notices, serve as the sole extra, unless you consider the option to watch all the features end-to-end in “slumber party mode” a bonus. And—get this—all this content—301 minutes—is crammed onto one (1) disc. Forget 4K transfers: these VHS-y resolutions hover closer to the quarter-K level.
Needless to say, this collaborative release from Something Weird and American Genre Film Archives isn’t exactly Criterion Collection quality. That does not mean, however, that it is not recommended—highly recommended, in fact, to the right oddballs, many of whom are regular readers of this site. That is because of the quality (can that be the right word?) of the curiosities on display here. True to the title, it’s children’s entertainment at its most deranged: a treasure trove of the cynical subgenre that has come to be known as children’s grindhouse. Well, at least some of it is. The rest of it is just, well, kinda weird—with one legitimate exotic egg hidden inside this dime-store Easter basket.
That crackerjack isn’t the set’s first offering, 1957’s The Big Bad Wolf [Der Wolf und die sieben jungen Geißlein, AKA The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats], although this opener sports the highest uncanny valley quotient—which is really saying something in this collection. From the first time Mother Goat appears in her Satanist-adjacent horned mask as a talking crow demands the unseen narrator recite the names of her ritual sacrifices cute kids, you’ll wonder if you’ve stumbled into a badly deteriorated, repurposed Kenneth Anger short. Ultimately, this German movie (the dubbing was unobtrusive, thanks to the masks worn by 90% of the cast) is more of a live-action cartoon, of the kind Hanna-Barbera would have executed in a crisp 5 minutes, but stretched out to almost an hour’s running time. Still, there is something endearing about this material being played earnestly by adults in inarticulate fuzzy masks. The cast really commits to the bits: the wolf’s involuntary plummet in a wheelbarrow down a very slight incline, for example, goes hard. There are also a couple of memorable moments where the lupine-headed monster interacts with live actors, ruthlessly bullying a grocer and a flour merchant (who fights back with his trademark good). And it ends with a note of genuine horrifying folk surrealism straight from the Grimm Brothers’ source material: the wolf eats six of the seven kids, then, as he sleeps off his meal, the lone survivor slices open his belly (with scissors, but without anesthetic) to save his kin. Overall, it’s a highly watchable oddity, and a nice way to start your marathon of Continue reading “KRAZEE KIDZ VIDEO PARTY”
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MATAPANKI (2026)
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DIRECTED BY: Diego Fuentes
FEATURING: Ramon Galvez, Antonia McCarthy, Rosa Peñaloza, Diego Bravo, Rodrigo Lisboa
PLOT: Punk kid Ricardo unlocks superpowers from a mysterious alcoholic admixture and reluctantly pursues the path of a superhero.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The punk DIY aesthetic goes quite a ways in making this one a bit different—but the apocalyptic, kaiju-scale showdown with the US prez takes it over the finish line.
COMMENTS: Punks and their punk movies. Jerky camera maneuvering, hand-painted ¡Poder! effects, naturalistic acting, boozing, cigarette-lighter huffing, amiable grandmothers… Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, and they can’t even afford to film in color!
Of course, I jest. (And I’m something of a square.) To be honest, this film is quite charming. Ricardo and his pals have a healthy social thing going: the cover charge at the club they frequent can be paid through second-hand books. All they’re trying to do is live their low-key party lives on their own terms. But as is always the case, the Man (in particular, the Gringo) wants to bring ’em down.
With an opener straight out of Stan Brakhage‘s dark alchemy, Matapanki‘s punk cred is never in question, despite the feel-good throughline. The superhero storyline unspools in thrash time, taking somewhere under an hour (if you don’t include the credits). Viewers get a wallop of antiestablishmentarianism, with fast cuts and vibrant doodles whenever our hero (and later, the supervillain) pumps up the ¡Poder! Matapanki jouncily stumbles toward the finish line, keeping merely oddball throughout (with more than a few hints of Repo Man) until culminating with a BANG! when Super Punk Boy battles Super Neocon Gringo Man.
Take that, you square! And don’t you ever mess with our anarcho-drunken heroes again.
Matapanki does have a worldwide distribution deal with Italy’s Minerva Pictures, so it should become available to the general public in the nearish future.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LFO (2013)
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DIRECTED BY: Antonio Tublen
FEATURING: Patrik Karlson, Izabella Jo Tschig, Per Löfberg, Ahnna Rasch
PLOT: An acoustical engineer discovers a technology to implant hypnotic suggestion and tests out his new-found skills on his neighbors.
COMMENTS: Fundamental to science fiction is not only its ability to predict the future, but to anticipate the otherwise unforeseen consequences that the future will bring. As Isaac Asimov noted, “It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem.” So it goes with LFO, which starts with a tried-and-true premise—what if we could bend others to our will?—and then dives into the havoc that could be wreaked if someone with highly questionable morals wielded this ability. It could easily be a “Black Mirror” episode, but writer/director/composer Tublen has something more specific in mind. Beyond the dangers of trying to control other people’s minds, he’s interested in the kind of person who would be inclined to misuse this power.
It’s hardly accidental that the camera never leaves the tiny, cramped house of Robert, the quiet loner who immediately applies his discovery to manipulating the couple that just moved in across the street. While Robert’s ambitions might be large (he practices an anticipated Nobel Prize acceptance speech), he’s a very small man, and his home serves as a mirror for his chaotic mind. He is insular both by fate and by choice, choosing to interact only with those whose responses he can predict. A spiritual descendant of The Conversation’s Harry Caul, Robert is mystified and frightened by others’ emotional needs. Unlike Harry, though, Robert finds a way to interact with others on his own terms, which is how he can embark on a manipulative and even cruel path without an ounce of malevolence in his heart.
There’s an unsettling humor to how Robert pursues his research. We don’t know much about Linn and Simon, the new neighbors, and Robert doesn’t really care about them except for how he can use them (Linn as a mindless sex object, Simon to wash his windows and rob banks). When we do learn something about the couple’s personal life, Robert feeds that back through his own personal filter, inserting himself as an ersatz therapist and finding new ways to maneuver their lives for his benefit. There’s even an element of screwball comedy as more interlopers—a rival acoustician, a dogged investigator, even Robert’s ex-wife—show up to turn the screws and threaten the world he has made for himself, forcing him to use his mind-control tactics more widely and urgently. But Tublen never loses sight of the essential horror at the story’s foundation: people are having their freedom destroyed by someone only interested in himself.
Karlson expertly taps into the confident ignorance of Robert, who follows in the great tradition of cinematic nerds whose buttoned-up exterior conceals black motives. Even if he weren’t using his technological breakthrough to manipulate others for personal interest, we’d be wary of him. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses and short-sleeved dress shirts with neckties that invariably have a mustard stain somewhere on them, rocking a perpetual 10 o’clock shadow, and radiating an uncomfortable intensity, he’s off-putting before he’s even said a word. We’re not surprised to see his home in a state of disarray, nor are we taken aback by the dark, equipment-littered basement in which he squirrels himself away. He’s the Dangerous Nerd, the dark Dilbert scorned by society, whose intelligence will only be magnify his revenge.
LFO is a simple but smart little piece of sci-fi horror, a worthy companion piece to other low-budget successes like Coherence that pack a lot of ideas into a compact space. Even its whirlwind final minutes, when the global scope of Robert’s terrible ambition is revealed, it stays focused on his sadly isolated, blithely arrogant mind. The traffic was never the fault of the cars, but of the people driving them.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by WithoutTheA, who said “there was a fair amount going on that was strange throughout the entire movie. The ending was pretty bizarre too.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
