Scenes from Carnival of Souls are given an experimental, occasionally abrasive electronic score and edited with a blender to create the epileptic fit cut of a movie that was already a nightmare.
CONTENT WARNING: Flickering images that may not be suitable for persons with seizure disorders.
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Discussed in this episode:
Antenna Releasing: A new boutique theatrical/physical media distribution company run by guests Billy Ray Brewton and Ryan Verrill along with Francis Galluppi (not appearing in this episode)
Alpha (2025): After a girl gets a homemade tattoo, her mother fears she may have acquired a disease that will turn her into a statue. Julia Ducournau’s third feature has not earned the critical or audience buzz of Raw or Titane, but still appears to be strange stuff. In limited release this week. Alpha US distributor site.
The Bride! (2026): A mad doctor reanimates a woman to serve as companion for his male monster creation; for some reason, this happens in 1920s Chicago. Last week, we ignored Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s “punk feminist” remake of The Bride of Frankenstein, and it’s tanking at the box office, but some reports (“chaotic, weird and beautiful”–Cleveland Plain Dealer) suggest that this may be a wilder and more interesting mess than we originally supposed. The Bride! official site.
Blue Sunshine (1977): Read El Rob Hubbard’s review. The “bad acid turns people into bald maniacs year later” cult film just got a 4K release last year; this stripped-down standard edition lacks the booklet, poster, and the soundtrack CD, but includes all the other numerous extra features. Buy Blue Sunshine.
Dead Lover (2025): A gravedigger reanimates her dream man in a campy and gonzo spin on Frankenstein. These special screenings in the UK and Ireland only are advertised as being presented in Stink-O-Vision (stench unspecified.) We hope it presages a US theatrical run in the near future. Dead Lover venues and tickets (UK & Ireland, Mar. 20-Apr. 10).
Viridiana (1961): Read Alfred Eaker’s review. Luis Buñuel‘s celebrated anticlerical drama from the end of his Mexican period isn’t weird by the director’s early and late standards, but is still recommended. This is the 4K UHD upgrade (standard Blu-ray included) of the previous DVD-only Criterion collection release. (Also note: when we checked, it was $3 cheaper to buy the 2-disc combo than it was to buy the solo Blu-ray.) Buy Viridiana.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest scheduled for next week’s Pod 366, but Giles, Greg, and Pete will return to discuss the week’s weird movies. In written content, Shane Wilson knocks the conjoined twin pseudo-documentary musical biopic Brothers of the Head (2005) out of the reader suggestion queue, Micheal Diamades investigates whether there’s any substance to Zeb Haradon‘s latest AI feature Incorporeal Man, and Enar Clarke takes a Splendid Outing (1978) on Blu-ray, while Gregory J. Smalley plans to check out what’s the deal with The Bride! (see above). And on Sunday we’ll announce the winners of the Weridcademy Awards (still time to vote for features and shorts if you haven’t cast your ballot yet). Onward and weirdward!
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Visions of Suffering is available to watch on video-on-demand in either it’s original 2006 version or the 2016 “Final Director’s Cut.”
DIRECTED BY: Andrey Iskanov
FEATURING: Alexander Shevchenko, Anastasia Asafova, Andrey Iskanov
PLOT: A necrophilia-obsessed man is haunted by demons.
COMMENTS: Ominously titled, as if to warn potential viewers, Andrey Iskanov’s Visions of Suffering is available both in an original 2006 cut and in a shorter 2016 “Final Director’s Cut.” Given the option of watching both, it seems obvious that 90 minutes of Suffering is preferable to 120 minutes of Suffering. Without having seen the original, I feel confident in saying Iskanov made the right decision to cut out 30 minutes of Suffering.
While the movie is extremely abstract and opaque in its details and methodology, playing like a feature length music video for an industrial noise/death metal crossover band, the basics of the thin plot are not especially difficult to comprehend. Sasha, our bespectacled protagonist, wanders through a misty yellow forest until he encounters a guy wearing a burlap sack on his head (the synopsis explains that this is a shaman and that Sasha interrupts an occult ceremony, perhaps thus bringing a curse on his head). Of course, it was all a dream, and Sasha wakes up and immediately screens a necrophilia porno flick before discovering that his phone is on the fritz. He leafs through books on Jack the Ripper and an anthology of murder scene photos while waiting for the repairman to arrive. While the repairman fixes the phone, they talk about dreams, and the guest casually drops some vampire lore. Phone fixed, Sasha calls his girlfriend (?) Vika, who’s busy shooting lesbian cutter porn. After hanging up, Sasha sees some vampires loitering about outside, and one of them stabs him in the earlobe through the keyhole. Then Sasha has some visions of suffering, and Vika’s car is possessed as she drives to his apartment while wearing iron cross sunglasses. Sasha has some more visions of suffering and calls an exorcist type (played by the director), who explains that Sasha has likely riled up some demons through his desecration of the dead. The director offers to fix the problem for 7000 euros, but that’s too steep for Sasha. So he has some more visions of suffering until the demon Golgatha shows up in his apartment with a sword and starts hacking up the furniture. Then he wakes up, and everything’s OK.
It’s a familiar old story, but Iskanov films it with some genuine style, if not taste or discipline. Much of the film is shot through hazy green/yellow filters that turn cheap costumes and effects that would probably look ridiculous in the full light of day into creepy nightmare fuel. (At times it’s like a less-effective Begotten, without the mythological resonances.) The sound mix is thick, dripping with ooze, spooky noises, and shrieks and moans off one of those atmospheric Halloween sound effect compilations. There is a lot of shock imagery: mutilation, autopsies, explicit sex, implied necrophilia. There are also a lot of superimposed image, especially in the fast-cut opening credits sequence that shows off Iskanov’s gift for montage. But all of this artistry is in service of a juvenile morbidity that seems to arise from listening to too many Marilyn Manson albums under the influence of too much hashish.
Suffering earns the rare and, in some quarters, coveted “Beware” + “Weirdest!” tags. That’s not a recommendation for most folks. The Beware is for content—explicit sex, grotesque real autopsy footage, and some sick stuff that made even me cringe—but even excepting those, the film will prove a bit of a slog for most viewers because of its nonlinearity, tonal monotony, and humorlessness. Still, although it might have worked better chopped up into a series of easily digestible shorts, thanks to some memorably spooky imagery and resourcefulness in disguising his budgetary limitations Iskanov’s movie is not as much of a trial as it sounds like on paper. Fans of experimental extreme horror will eat it up. But please, don’t force me to watch the 2-hour version.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Josh.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
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DIRECTED BY: Kamal Swaroop
FEATURING: Anita Kanwar, Gopi Desai, Lalit Tiwari
PLOT: A young boy named Om comes of age amidst diamond breeding frogs, melodramatic love affairs, and other absurdities.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Almost completely incomprehensible at first, like a Hindi “Finnegan’s Wake,” Om Dar-B-Dar requires at least a second viewing to fully appreciate its eccentricities and chaotic nature.
COMMENTS: At first, the narrative seems straightforward, but don’t be fooled, this is as surreal as a movie can get. We follow a family, father Babuji and his two children, a thirty-year-old woman named Gayatri and a young boy with the unique name Om. After a short voiceover introduction giving us a bit of a socio-political background, Om seems to emerge as the tale’s main character. However, something is off.
Dialogues between Om and his family start casually but stray immediately into the absurd. A love affair begins between his sister and a young man, full of extravagant musical numbers in the familiar Bollywood style, albeit with nonsensical lyrics. Early on, the movie shows a willingness to break with stylistic conventions and to parody and deconstruct long-established genres through absurdism. Gayatri’s love affair subverts the language of erotic melodramas, for instance, while the main narrative of Om’s life plays like an epic saga on steroids.
And then it really gets weird! Characters rant about space travels or express a longing for female emancipation, while embarking on a variety of bizarre schemes involving diamond breeding frogs, or imitating God for profit. Humorous sketches pseudo-poetic and pseudo-philosophical ramblings abound, all while delivering caustic commentaries on the commercialization of spirituality.
Om’s life flash-forwards before our eyes through rapid editing full of jump cuts. Occasional gaps in time or space create a sense of disorientation and the fragmented narrative contributes a dreamy quality. Hypnotic sound effects like voice echoes, or psychedelic futuristic tunes, are applied. There’s even a complete, albeit momentary, disruption of the audio at one point.
Om Dar- B -Dar is an enigmatic puzzle thanks to the unconventional way it combines the everyday with surrealism. It will appeal mostly to those that have some familiarity with Hindu tradition and history, though, as many mythological and cultural references can be found among the absurdity. The rest of us will scratch our heads and open an online encyclopedia.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by debasish dey, who suggested it with the following background: “…a 1988 Indian Postmodernist film directed by Kamal Swaroop. The film, about the adventures of a school boy named Om along with his family, employs nonlinear narrative and an absurdist storyline to satir[ize] mythology, arts, politics and even philosophy. The movie was described by its director as a story of Lord Brahma, and it sprouted from the idea that in Hinduism, although Lord Brahma was considered the father of the entire universe, strangely no one ever worshiped him. The director also said that the film’s script was written based solely on dreams and images that he had and claimed he ‘cannot think in words.’ ” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
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DIRECTED BY: Ivan Doan
FEATURING: Ivan Doan, Maria Glazunova, Konstantin Gerasimyuk, Eric R. Gilliatt, Bill Konstantinidis, Philippa Peter
PLOT: Christopher Gabriel emerges from a dream to find himself a pawn in an international game of geopolitical warfare, and attempts to uncover the meaning of his role and explore his newly discovered abilities.
COMMENTS: “What do you mean?” It’s easily the most common line of dialogue in Overturn: Awakening of the Warrior. A character unleashes a complex metaphysical monologue with a raised eyebrow and a self-satisfied smile, smug in their superior knowledge. Their conversational partner invariably responds with narrowed eyes and the tone of someone with a well-used BS detector, “What do you mean?”
It’s a crucial question for the film itself, which tries to fake importance by spouting a lot of dialogue that doesn’t “mean” anything at all. The barest scraps of a plot revolve around a young man’s discovery of a titanic battle between good and evil, but neither the scale of the conflict nor the stakes of the outcome are ever articulated. His interactions aren’t with characters so much as with signifiers with names like The Servant, The Judge, or The Informer: all portent, no content. Every other scene is one of those dialogues where characters say big words with great conviction, broken up with occasional martial arts demonstrations and—most oddly—vlog posts where Christopher alludes to all the crazy stuff going on. (Said crazy stuff is never detailed with any specificity.) What passes for tension is mostly bluster, and what passes for conflict is merely pronouncement.
At this point, I should note that, while researching this film, I discovered that it’s a continuation of a webseries called “Overturn” featuring several of the same actors and characters. Is it a direct sequel, or a re-imagining of the same premise, à la Adolescence of Utena? That’s not really clear, and while I could try speedrunning the series, I don’t think there’s much value in doing so, because the film is so lacking in anything concrete that it honestly doesn’t matter what the connection is. There’s nothing in the feature that would suddenly become more explicit with the background provided by a 3-minute episode. It’s just bigger.
The thing is, Overturn: Awakening… is actually a pretty good-looking film. Cinematographer Sergey Kachanov stages attractive vistas in and around the lively parks and gardens of Kyiv circa 2013. (Given current events, seeing the city in this way is bittersweet.) And the cast looks the part, from the pretty Glazunova to the ominously grizzled Gerasimyuk. Given that exactly one actor in the film can call English their first language, they deliver their word-salad speeches with reasonable skill overall. In particular, I strongly suspect Gerasimyuk is delivering all his English dialogue phonetically, but with no discernible decrease in menace. Doan, a strikingly handsome lead who sports the film’s best American accent and demonstrates decent martial arts skills, anchors the film. (It’s often obvious when punches are being pulled, and the faceless ninjas he fights do that thing where they gang up on Doan but then attack him one-by-one. Let’s give the fight scenes a B-.) Parts of Overturn et al pass themselves off quite effectively as a new addition to the spy canon.
Unfortunately, Doan the actor is significantly hamstrung by Doan the screenwriter, Doan the director, and Doan the editor. Aside from the frustrating lack of anything actually happening, Overturn: AOTW has absolutely no pacing whatsoever. Scenes slam into each other with no regard for logical development, intriguing ideas are quickly dropped and forgotten, and rhythms repeat without variation to the point of tedium. There are almost no scenes with more than two people, and an excessive number of them take place on park benches and riverwalks. What’s ultimately weirdest about the movie is that its perception of itself is so wildly different from what it actually presents. It thinks it’s a deep exploration of the psychology of self. It’s mainly people talking in circles.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Dick, who described it as “Bruce Lee meets Andrey Tarkovsky.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)