A boy asks his dad to squish a spider and gets a folk song about the sanctity of life instead.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 12/26/2025
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Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
Bugonia (2025): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s Apocrypha Candidate review. The Bugonia Blu-ray dropped two days before Christmas (showing you just how much big studios value new-releases on physical media these days). Buy Bugonia. Also available in 4K UHD or 4K Steelbook editions (both come with standard Blu-rays included).
Dream Story [Traumnovelle] (2024): A man attends an erotic ball put on by a secret society of debauchees. A low-budget German based on (but more faithful to) the same source material as Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut, starring Nikolai “son of Klaus” Kinski. Click here for the NSFW trailer. On VOD only. Rent or buy Dream Story.
Perfect Blue (1997): Read the Canonically Weird entry! Shout! Factory’s lavish 4K edition of Satoshi Kon‘s anime psychological horror (released two days before Christmas, sadly) includes a 4K UHD disc, standard Blu-ray, booklet, art cards, poster, almost two hours of never-before-seen lectures from Kon, and more. Buy Perfect Blue.
NEPOTISM CORNER:
Davy & the Goblin: Giles Edwards (as Orson Bennet portraying Old Reuben Hayseed) narrates this “odd little children’s novel from 1884” (audio only).
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
We resume Pod 366 next week after Christmas break with our official unveiling of the staff’s consensus picks for Weirdest Movies of 2025. Meanwhile, we continue with written content: Micheal Diamades addresses the post-socialist, pre-Satanist Working Class Goes to Hell, Enar Clarke chews on the Criterion Collection’s selection of Man Ray shorts, Return to Reason, Shane Wilson dives back into the reader-suggestion queue for 1999’s The Adolescence of Utena, and (alongside that staff list of weird movies) Gregory J. Smalley shares his list of his personal top 10 of his favorite mainstream movies of 2025 with you. Happy Boxing Day to all who celebrate!
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that we have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004)
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DIRECTED BY: Robert Zemeckis
FEATURING: Tom Hanks, Nona Gaye, Eddie Deezen, Michael Jeter, Peter Scolari, Daryl Sabara
PLOT: A boy on the verge of abandoning his belief in Santa Claus is visited by a magical train that whisks him away to the North Pole, but the journey is filled with perilous diversions.
COMMENTS: There are two characteristics define Robert Zemeckis’ career: an eagerness to push the boundaries of visual effects technology, and an affection for frenetic, breakneck action. Sometimes the pendulum swings more in one direction than the other, but every now and then a Who Framed Roger Rabbit comes along to provide a healthy dose of both. So on the one hand, it is utterly unsurprising that Zemeckis would be captivated by the boundless potential of motion-capture CGI animation to deliver the kind of non-stop, eye-popping visuals that have always been impossible to realize in live action. On the other hand, it’s completely baffling that the property with which he would christen this new era would be the Caldecott award-winning children’s classic “The Polar Express.”
In fairness, it’s not a mystery that someone would come along to take a stab at turning this small book into a big motion picture. After all, Chris Van Allsburg draws cinematically. His page-wide illustrations capture action and emotion in an artistic splurge, summing up minutes of action and dialogue in single images, like oil pastel versions of Cindy Sherman photos. Building out from those lush Van Allsburg drawings probably felt instinctive, far more than other children’s book adaptations that expanded waaaaay beyond their source material, often to their detriment. There’s something very sweaty about the way absolutely nothing goes right for our Hero children, ladling on complications to make everything so much more EXCITING; but that’s not even the film’s greatest drawback. Rather, the problems arise when Zemeckis deploys his fantastic tech, which he has so often done in service of his story: shoehorning Forrest Gump into history, for example, or placing viewers in an impossible perch above Philippe Petit in The Walk. Here, though, the story is buried in spectacle, and repeated efforts to pad out the characters and give them more heft only make the spectacle push back harder. In The Polar Express, CGI beats Van Allsburg’s book into submission.
The movie wants to bedazzle you into a state of exhaustion. A raucous dance number in which flat-faced acrobats ricochet off the ceiling while singing the virtues of hot chocolate is aimed more at demonstrating the physics-defying capabilities of the technology than actually enchanting the children on the train. It’s immediately followed by the extended journey of a wayward train ticket, which takes a rollicking tour outside of the locomotive, floating through a pack of snarling wolves, flitting through a snowy forest, nearly becoming dinner for a flock of newly hatched eagles, before finally returning to the train compartment, all in an elaborate one-take that is Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004)
CAPSULE: RABBIT TRAP (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Bryn Chainey
FEATURING: Dev Patel, Rosy McEwen, Jade Croot
PLOT: In the Welsh countryside, the lives of a musician and sound engineer are interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child imbued with supernatural awareness.
COMMENTS: They emerge from the Welsh countryside, bearing questions and a rabbit offering. They know the purpose of plants and the dangers they can keep at bay—or entice. They coming knocking with joy, and with fervor. They wonder at a strange man in his 30s, who apologizes a lot even while he may tackle an unsuspecting kid.
The film is set in the mid-1970s. The man is Darcy Davenport (Dev Patel), a sound engineer married to underground music sensation Daphne. For reasons omitted, they’re deeply out of the way of any neighbors, exploring each other, sonic phenomena, and melancholia. Darcy spends his days wandering about with his boom mic and recorder in hand; Daphne futzes around with microphones, synthesizers, and oscilloscopes, trying to craft something interesting. Enter small child. This child, the “they” mentioned above, is ambiguous in a number of ways. They’re boyish, girlish, a bit unearthly—indeed, no other pronoun would suit them, and perhaps no proper noun, either, as they never reveal their name. Events turn strange as the group—in varying ones, pairs, and trios—explore sounds, visions, faerie rings, and even more terrible dangers of the woodland.
The denouement suggests we may have witnessed a metaphor, but in the spirit of the film’s general turbidity, I will merely mention that it is there, and that I shan’t be scrutinizing events further. Chainey has achieved something impressive through his story, as has Jade Croot with their performance: summoning a deep well of mystery, uneasiness, and candid emotion. The hazards of Nature where it straddles the veil are frightening and glorious, and Rabbit Trap‘s dangers should be approached with an open mind—and open ears.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Rabbit Trap [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41epMyWTFdL._SL500_.jpg)
Rabbit Trap [Blu-ray]
- Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision
- Fairy Folklore
- “Particularly Frightening and Very Haunting” – Slashfilm
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MELANCHOLIE DER ENGEL (2009)
DIRECTED BY: Marian Dora
FEATURING: Zenza Raggi, Carsten Frank, Janette Weller
PLOT: Two middle-aged men, an old artist, and some women embark on a series of depravities.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It is not only one of the most disturbing movies ever, but an incoherent mess that most of the time does not make any sense.
COMMENTS: German extremism has a rich cinematic tradition stretching from Jörg Buttgereit’s infamous Nekromantik in 1988 until today. In the 21st century, where extreme cinema has developed as a distinct genre worldwide, even more disturbing works of dubious artistic quality appear. And in the extreme horror landscape of our day, Buttgereit is no longer at the forefront. A new voice has emerged, as out of our worst nightmares. The name of that voice is Marian Dora.
Melancholie der engel (The Angel’s Melancholy) remains Dora’s most widely known movie, considered by many to be the most disturbing film to ever exist. We follow two men, seemingly with no purpose in life, who seduce three women and take them to an isolated building deep inside a creepy forest, full of dead animals, worms, and slugs. An old friend of theirs introduces himself as an artist early on, bringing another, handicapped, woman with him. And the depravity begins.
Many scenes of violent torture, mostly of a sexual nature, take place both towards the women, and towards living (or even dead) animals. The violence persists from the first moment of the movie, even when its narrative function is not always clear. Rapid editing and many close-ups create a sense of disorientation, while grotesque imagery attacks the viewer from every direction. No coherent story emerges. In the tradition of contemporary extreme cinema, as we read in “Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media” by Aaron Michael Kerner and Jonathan L. Knapp, we have something more akin to an episodic structure, with the disturbing events being the episodes.
What kind of extreme imagery are we talking about? Images of decay, mostly, in its many forms. Worms, corpses, and decomposition are always in the background. However, the cinematography maintains a painterly quality, especially in its blurry landscapes. The dreadful forest that engulfs our characters reminds us of the forest in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), if it was even more extreme and perverted. But the real evil remains inside our protagonists, the three men, and their disgusting acts.
The women are not always the typical female victims of a slasher flick or torture porn. Sometimes they seem to enjoy the depravity around them, which makes the movie even more disturbing and difficult to watch. The exhausting duration, around two and a half hours, does not help either. It is surely a weird movie, but it is recommended only for hardcore fans of extreme horror. Everyone else, stay away from this.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Dee Coles.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)