A woman finds herself trapped in a pit.
POD 366, EP. 152: UNTITLED GEEK RETURNS TO THE SUNDANCE CIRCLE
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Discussed in this episode:
Luther the Geek (1989): A maniac uses his custom metal dentures to bite his victims to death. A psychotronic slasher film notorious for the fact that the killer clucks like a chicken. Buy Luther the Geek.
Return to Silent Hill (2026): Guy gets letter, guy drawn to Silent Hill, experiences mysteries and jump scares, etc. Christophe Gans from the Canonically Weird original returns to the director’s chair for a direct adaptation of the video game “Silent Hill 2” that isn’t making a lot of noise with critics. Return to Silent Hill official site.
Straight Circle (2025): An absurdist comic satire about two border guards (played by real-life twins) from fictional adversary countries who become disoriented when a dust storm obscures the border line. This Venice Film Festival hit will be released by new distributor Joint Ventures in US theaters later this year. Variety reports the acquisition.
Sundance Film Festival (Park City and Salt Lake City, UT, Jan. 22-Feb. 1):
The 2024 film season officially kicks off at Sundance, which celebrates its 46th (and final) year in Park City, Utah before relocating to Boulder, Colorado in 2027. We can usually find a single weird film making its initial bow at Sundance; last year, it was Obex; in 2024, it was I Saw the TV Glow. Unless we missed one (which very well might happen), this year we again have only one weird feature contender, plus a curious short:
- Buddy – Nothing is yet known about Casper Kelly‘s (theatrical) debut feature aside from this synopsis—“a brave girl and her friends must escape a kids television show”—and the promotional still of a unicorn Muppet with a bandaged head carrying an axe.
- “Homemade Gatorade” – From the shorts competition, this animation (which you may be able to find on YouTube) is about a woman delivering “creamy” Gatorade online. What fascinated us even more was director Carter Amelia Davis’ pro-weird “Meet the Artist” interview, which led us to bookmark her various social media pages.
Sundance film festival homepage.
Untitled Cory McAbee project (“Lincoln Movie”) (mid-2026?): McAbee (The American Astronaut) has been quietly working on a new movie. All we know about it is in the clip below: it’s a musical about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, it’s narrated by an immortal, and it’s told with repurposed vintage video and music. McAbee has a Patreon where you may be able to find more information from time to time.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest scheduled on next week’s Pod 366, but Greg and Giles will return with a look at the week’s new weird news and releases. In written content, Micheal Diamades encounters the grief parable The Thing with Feathers (2025), Shane Wilson grooves to the 80s retro-futurism of Turbo Kid (2015), and Gregory J. Smalley reveals and explains his votes for the Online Film Critics Society’s 2026 awards. Onward and weirdward!
CAPSULE: ELDORADO (2012)
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DIRECTED BY: Richard Driscoll
FEATURING: Richard Driscoll, Darren Morgan, Daryl Hannah, Jeff Fahey, Bill Moseley, Michael Madsen, Patrick Bergin, Brigitte Nielsen, Steve Guttenberg, Rik Mayall, Sylvester McCoy, Peter O’Toole, David Carradine (archival footage)
PLOT: Oliver and Stanley Rosenblum, a Blues Brothers tribute act, accidentally find themselves in Eldorado, where the Sawyer-style family ruling the roost has big plans for the town’s 200th anniversary.
COMMENTS: I can be very forgiving if a movie has competent sound design: balanced dialogue audio, fleshed-out aural background, and adequate-to-good music. Eldorado failed me here, and in many other ways. This makes sense when you know a bit of history behind the movie: writer / director / producer / &c. Richard Driscoll apparently hoped to succeed in a Producers-style gambit, claiming a big movie whilst making it on the cheap. Sound design, surely, suffers from this underinvestment—but what are Eldorado‘s merits?
These include, and are probably limited to, the following:
- Darryl Hannah as “The Stranger”, and her delivery of the titular poem by Edgar Allan Poe
- A surprisingly touching reunion of Vietnam veterans, from Jeff Fahey and Bill Moseley
- An homage to a famous Laurel & Hardy bit
- Michael Madsen’s face, ever over-reacting in that roguish Madsenian manner
- Peter O’Toole proving that even in his don’t-give-a-damn super-annuation, his floor of quality is higher than many actors’ ceilings
The rest is, alas, little more than a tedious curio with occasional blasts of badly mixed sound, music, and FX. There’s plenty that’s gross (though well within the average 366er’s tolerance), plenty that’s derivative (the fine line here being that much of said spoofing is by design), and plenty of questions—the most looming of which is, “Why, oh why?”—and the answer comes back: for tax fraud.
It would be remiss of me to recommend this to anyone—ever—except for the most die-hard of Rik Mayall fans. A curious actor, to say the least, and woefully underused. His performance as Mario the Chef transcends the surrounding doofery; and that’s even bearing in mind it consists mostly of lip-synching to a couple of pop-opera tunes. Had Eldorado been put completely under his creative direction, we may have had one of the grandest monstrosities of the new century.
Instead we don’t.
We have Eldorado.
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Reviewer’s Addendum: Apparently I watched the 90-minute “Director’s Cut”, which I feel is more than sufficient despite being half-an-hour shorter than an earlier release.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by nc, who described it as “an incomprehensible mess, a hypnotically bad fever dream, a film so bad it’s hard to believe it even exists.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I NEVER LEFT THE WHITE ROOM (2000)
AKA My Crepitus
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DIRECTED BY: Michael Todd Schneider
FEATURING: Michael Todd Schneider, Eric Boring, Tom Colbert, Amy Beth Deford
PLOT: Hospital patient Jeffrey has violent, bloody dreams revolving around his life as a sex criminal and murderer.
COMMENTS: The general tenor of I Never Left the White Room is established not in the first act, not even in the first minutes, but in the vanity card of the production company. The Maggot Films banner boasts stabs, screams, and gore to assure the viewer can expect only the most unpleasant, blood-curdling material. By that standard, I Never Left the White Room is an honest production indeed.
Schneider expands on a short film, and while one is inclined to salute him for deftly hiding the seams between old and new, the patchwork nature of the movie makes that faint praise. While there’s the suggestion of a narrative spine, I Never Left the White Room is really just a collection of disparate images, scenes whose common thread is their origin inside Jeffrey’s mixed-up brain. The title turns out to be a description of our mise en scene.
Those visions are largely troubled, and Schneider distinguishes them with varying degrees of stylization. The most compelling is a dialogue set on a railroad trestle that warps the video image with posterization and color correction to suggest the demons inside our protagonist’s mind. Sometimes the beasts are literal, like a monster whose features can be smeared away like shaving cream. Other times, the horror has only the barest pretension to metaphor, like an absurdly lengthy scene in which a man spies on a woman taking a shower, each pleasuring themselves until the woman begins to bleed profusely. If the same central character weren’t involved, you would never know one thing had anything to do with the other.
What Schneider is going for, other than checking items off a list, is not clear. There’s murder of women, already an infuriating trope but even more so when shorn of any motivation. There’s gore but, aside from the occasional jump scare, nothing that’s truly inventive. The acting and bare minimum of scripted dialogue don’t help, and there’s neither a hint of disgust nor irony. I think it’s supposed to be chilling, not funny, when the psychiatrist (who might also be a cop?) tells his patient, “I should be straight with you: my wife and daughters were raped and murdered last night.” As delivered, though, it’s not momentous; it’s ridiculous.
I Never Left the White Room is trash. There’s a market for trash, of course, as evidenced by Schneider’s later association with Fred Vogel and the August Underground series. But this isn’t even good trash. Schneider has an hour of video to reveal the depths of his imagination; it proves to be shallow and aimless. Leave the white room.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
My Crepitus (I Never Left the White Room) [Blu-ray]
- Region Free Blu-Ray
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(This movie was nominated for review by Kenshin, who described it as “very insane, very trippy, very surreal and extremely creepy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
CAPSULE: TRAUMNOVELLE (2024)
AKA Dream Story
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream. . .
– Edgar Allan Poe
DIRECTED BY: Florian Frerichs
FEATURING: Nikolai Kinski, Laurine Price, Nora Islei
PLOT: Disturbed by his wife’s fantasies of infidelity, a physician crashes a secret orgy.
COMMENTS: “Wanna go. . . someplace else?”
Although not a Surrealist, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle tells the tale of a married man who, for twenty-hours, basically lives his life according to what André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, called “objective chance.”1 After arguing with his wife and losing a patient, Jakob (Kinski) wanders aimlessly around Berlin, ping-ponging from one chance encounter to another, searching for that elusive else, while preoccupied with thoughts of death and sex.
So, if Schnitzler’s story can be interpreted as a Surrealist tale, then what do we expect to see when it becomes a film? Is a Surrealist story necessarily a weird movie? Does it have to contain the cinematic equivalent of melting clocks, or can it treat dream reality in more varied and subtle ways?
Traumnovelle contains only one melting reality scene: when the wife, Amelia, describes her dream to her husband and an animated sequence takes over the narrative. The morphing visuals depict the couple in a variety of landscapes according to constantly shifting art styles. The rest of the film depicts a Berlin filtered through Jakob’s daydreams and imagination. Nothing in the live-action sequences is impossible in reality, but a build-up of eerie coincidences and uncanny repetitions create the slightly sinister atmosphere of a nightmare.
Viewers familiar with Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), also based on Schnitzler’s story, will recognize the major plot points. During an evening at a nightclub, where Amelia dances with a masked man, a pair of women in domino masks tries to pick up Jakob. The question of escape, paired with the teasing offer to play with their VibrateApp, solicits only an echo from the stupefied Jakob: “Someplace else?”
Ultimately, he leaves the girls to their remote vibrator, rescues his wife from the masked man and takes her home. The couple have a heated discussion over whether or not they are both sexually attracted to other people. Amelia then thoroughly shocks Jakob by revealing she would have left him for a random officer, glimpsed in their hotel during their previous summer’s vacation.
To avoid her while he thinks this through, Jakob spends the night on the town. He’s awkwardly hit on by the daughter of his dead patient, follows a prostitute back to her room only to leave without enjoying her services, and eventually runs into a former classmate and medical school dropout, Nick Nightingale, now a shady nightclub performer.
During his strolls through the city, Jakob’s thoughts continually intrude into everyday life in genuinely startling moments. While listening to Verdi’s “A Masked Ball” he pictures himself as one of the Continue reading CAPSULE: TRAUMNOVELLE (2024)