Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366, EP. 119: HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING TO IN THE MOUTH’S CORY SANTILLI AND JESSE MURO

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Discussed in this episode:

In the Mouth (2025): Read Giles Edwards’ review. Merl finds himself afraid to leave his house because his own giant head is growing out of his lawn. In the Mouth official site.

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. Details on this one were scant, and the teaser trailer made it look like a family drama, so we were afraid that Julia Ducournau‘s third feature might mark a retreat from surrealism; early reviews from Cannes suggest this is not the case. It’s already been acquired by Neon (who also released Titane), so we’ll get to it by the end of the year. Alpha at Cannes.

“Delirium Magazine, Issue #41”: The Spider Baby-themed latest issue of the genre magazine (produced by Full Moon studios) includes a new interview with Beverly Washburn and a rediscovered interview with the late great . Plus, great cover art! Buy “Delirium Magazine, Issue #41”.

How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989): Read the Canonically Weird entry! The reacquired the rights to Advertising and releases it on Blu-ray (sorry, hypervideophiles, no 4K UHD this time—surviving elements must not have been good enough.) Buy How to Get Ahead in Advertising.

The Iron Rose (1973): Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. Indicator continues their releases with this Gothic fave in a limited edition 4K UHD or Blu-ray; includes two cuts of the film (including an alternate English language version), multiple interviews, video essays and appreciations, and an 80 page booklet.  Buy The Iron Rose.

Kung Fury 2 (202?):  Writer/director/star goes into more detail about the legal issues plaguing the sequel (which we discussed last week) and reveals he’s been working on a “similarly bonkers” secret new project in the meantime. Variety has all the details.

Themroc (1973): An experimental French movie made in a nonsense language, starring as a man who chooses to live like a savage in the contemporary world. We never expected this obscurity to be reissued, but we’re thrilled. Buy Themroc.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

No guest scheduled for next week’s Pod 366; but then again, there was no guest scheduled for this week’s Pod 366, so who can say definitively? At any rate, Giles and Greg will return to discuss the week’s weird news and new releases. In written content, Enar Clarke covers the recently uncovered Czech fairy tale The Golden Fern (1963), Shane Wilson digests the cannibalism tale Grimm Love (2006), Giles Edwards sings the praises of arthouse indie An Evening Song (For Three Voices) (2023), while Gregory J. Smalley is hoping to finally encounter Friendship (2025). Onward and weirdward!

Capsules

CAPSULE: HURRY UP TOMORROW (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Trey Edward Shults

FEATURING: Abel Tesfaye, Jenna Ortega,

PLOT: A pop megastar who’s spiraling downward after a bad breakup has a one-night stand with an unhinged, obsessed fan.

Still from Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025)

COMMENTS: Although Hurry up Tomorrow is pitched as a “psychological thriller,” you may want to dial down your expectations for the “psychological” part, while exercising extreme patience awaiting the eventual arrival of the “thriller” aspect. Capably directed by Trey Edward Shults (They Come at Night), the movie, about a pop star losing his mind, features a ton of style. The concert scenes are decent, but there is also a lot of bold-yet-hazy lighting, disorienting coked-up disco scenes, and a pan to a burning building that’s almost Tarkovskian. The problem is, all this great style is employed in service of a pedestrian script full of music industry cliches, self-indulgence, and less-than-profound psychological insights.

The semi-autobiographical screenplay, written by star Tesfaye in conjunction with Shults and “nightlife entrepreneur” Reza Fahim, makes a stab at serious soul-searching, but fails to connect with the average movie patron. Abel, our star, starts out already at the emotional bottom; devastated by the desertion of an unknown lover, he is not merely vulnerable, but utterly pathetic, demanding his loyal bro manager (Keoghan) call his estranged beau for him, since he’s tired of leaving pleading messages on her voicemail. Abel’s eternal moping eventually leads him into the arms of groupie Jenna Ortega, whom we have previously seen torching a house. (I believe Jenna has a backstory, but frankly, my mind drifted.) She’s not really a character so much as an accusation (her name is Amina, which you might notice is a quick letter shift away from her intended plot function). Ortega gives off big Misery energy, and after an opening hour of Abel pouting, botching performances, and swilling whisky, the third act finally gets the thriller element moving. There’s a dream sequence in there, but you probably won’t remember much about it except that they managed to shoot some quick scenes in a depopulated Los Angeles, in sort of a West Coast nod to Vanilla Sky. In the end, the movie all seems to be some sort of guilty confession from Abel about the way he’s treated women, with some hints about an absent father thrown in—typical “woe is me” multimillionaire rock star complaints. But Amina’s role as anima never really works properly, because (although he has a brief moment as a cad) Abel began the film already debased and contrite. There’s no comeuppance to be had. His character arc is flaccid, because the script wants us to sympathize with him right from the get-go, instead of working through the movie to earn our sympathy.

I confess that I had seen the trailer for Hurry up Tomorrow about a half-dozen times before I was informed that the film’s pop star star was none other than former Super Bowl halftime-featured songster The Weeknd. The movie’s target audience of Weeknd fans will certainly know this going in (and will know that there’s already a final Weeknd album with the title “Hurry up Tomorrow”). Apparently, Abel Tesfaye will be retiring “The Weeknd” moniker to work under his real name henceforth; this movie may be intended as a first salvo in this new phase of his career, which will presumably include a lot more acting. I assume fans will be reasonably satisfied with the offering here; there is one big production number (performed twice to open the fictional pop star’s concerts), samples of songs scattered throughout the film, and an a capella performance at the end that’s meant to be climactic, maybe even epiphantic. As far as his acting goes, Tesfaye is not bad, if not yet up to carrying a major film as a leading man. Casting him alongside top-notch thespians like Ortega and Keoghan may not have been the best way to showcase his talents, since it’s guaranteed his co-stars will steal every single scene he’s in. Hurry up Tomorrow’s title tempts easy put-downs, but the film is totally watchable, if underwhelming; an effort that will likely only score with Tesfaye’s most intractable fans. Others can, and should, skip it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an exciting vanity project with surrealist imagination but stiff writing, no stakes, limited emotional weight and an unclear narrative.”–Maria Sherman, Associated Press/Newsday (comtemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Parmesan74 (letterboxd),” who guessed, based on the trailer, that it “seems to have the potential to be weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Apocryphally Weird

59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972)

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Requiem pour un vampire, AKA Vierges et Vampires, Caged Virgins

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“[M]ore than thirty years later, Requiem remains one of my favorite films. In my view, it’s a real naïve film, written naively without thought, almost automatic writing, without prior idea and above all without reflection. It’s nothing else but a simple stream of ideas out of an unconstituted imagination. It’s a real ‘B’ movie with all that that involves. No intellectual reflection, no intentional symbolism. Nothing but this free and disordered imagery which I care so much about.” —, “The Making of Requiem for a Vampire” (2005)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: , Mareille Dargent, Dominique, Louise Dhour, Michel Delesalle

PLOT: Two teenage delinquents disguised as clowns escape unknown pursuers in a car; their getaway driver is gunned down in the chase. After escaping they remove their harlequin makeup and make their way across the countryside. They are eventually bitten by bats and wind up trapped in the medieval castle lair of a dying vampire and his minions.

BACKGROUND:

  • Rollin’s script for his fourth film, written in two days in a stream of consciousness, evolved out of two scenes: the car chase through the countryside and the piano concert in the cemetery.
  • The first half of the film is nearly silent. Inspired by the pioneering adventure serials of Louis Feuillade, Rollin chose to emphasize the action sequences by keeping them mostly dialogue-free.
  • The art direction was inspired by surrealist painters Clovis Trouille and Paul Delvaux.
  • The dungeon scenes were filmed in the twelfth century Château de la Roche-Guyon, after the crew was evicted from their first choice of castle when the owner caught sight of the film’s nudity. Edmée, Duchess de la Rochefoucauld never saw the script; she agreed to rent her chateau for filming under the impression the story was, in Rollin’s words, “a sort of fairytale.”
  • The dungeon torture scene is ten minutes long, the minimum length of sleaze sales agent Lionel Wallman required in order to sell the film on the international grindhouse circuit. Wallman also donated the getaway car that gets shot to pieces and set on fire.
  • Interpol briefly investigated the film’s production after local gendarmes discovered the shot-up car with Belgian plates in a secluded patch of forest and assumed it belonged to foreign drug traffickers.
  • The cemetery scenes were filmed in a burial ground for medieval plague victims in Crèvecoeur-en-Auge, a small village in Normandy, believed by locals to be cursed.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Many fantastic scenes in Requiem haunt the mind (the vampire Erika playing the organ in a chapel to an audience of skeleton monks, the crimson torture chamber, the master vampire’s coffin in a green-glowing crypt), but the two main characters dressed as stock clowns stand out whenever they appear, whether in a golden field, a collapsing barn, or a cemetery at dusk.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Clown car getaway; vagina bat

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A car chase gunfight along a winding country road; a solitary food truck in the middle of nowhere; a motorcycle in an abandoned water tower; a chapel doorway glowing crimson in the dead of night. Requiem for a Vampire transitions from scene to scene with the abrupt illogical shifts of a dream, as the intrepid heroines traverse a deserted landscape freighted with mystery. Mysterious themselves, the girls transform from clowns to teenage outlaws with handguns in their miniskirts. It remains unknown quite how they’ve ended up here, who was chasing them, and even where “here” is.

Trailer for Requiem for a Vampire (1972)

COMMENTS: Disregard for normal narrative conventions (establishing the setting, introducing the characters) give Rollin’s films a Continue reading 59*. REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1972) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SUBWAY (1985)

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DIRECTED BY: Luc Besson

FEATURING: Isabelle Adjani, , , Michel Galabru, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Jean Reno

PLOT: Fred, a free-spirited thief, absconds with valuable papers belonging to Héléna, the kept wife of a powerful criminal, and escapes into the underground world of the Paris Métro, where he enlists the help of an entire community living off the grid.

COMMENTS: Subway gets started with a truly satisfying kick. We meet Fred in media res, tuxedo-clad and barreling down a Parisian highway in a cheap car with a load of similarly attired muscle in hot pursuit. But he even knows that the chase doesn’t really begin until he’s got the proper music, and so he ignores the impending threat just long enough to give him the chance to slam in a cassette tape and queue up Eric Serra’s punchy synth-funk beat. Once that roars in, we’ve got ourselves a bona fide chase.

It’s a very Luc Besson kind of joke that, once Fred (Lambert, only a year after being introduced to English-speaking audiences as Tarzan) eludes his pursuers in the underground, we’ll never see him in the sun again, and we definitely won’t have another thrill ride. Instead, we’ll join Fred in discovering the very different way of life taking place in the tunnels of the Métro. It may seem familiar, with commerce and law enforcement and entertainment, but it’s a very different attitude down there. It’s a laid-back, “que sera, sera” kind of vibe, and Fred adapts to it quickly; in his first night, he meets friends who give him food, new clothes, and a place to sleep; he makes the acquaintance of an incredibly strong man who can pry open handcuffs with his bare hands; and he pops into an impromptu party where he immediately starts making friends. If Fred is a natural fit for subway life, Héléna, the gangster’s wife who Fred is both smitten with and cheekily blackmailing, is a more surprising addition to the community. Adjani is stunning in a series of terrifically 80s outfits, but she is possibly most striking in a scene where she returns to her above-ground life and realizes that she can’t stomach it. She gently ingratiates herself into the Métro culture, because that’s what the good guys do in Subway.  

Subway is one of the pivotal entries in the French movement known as “cinéma du look,” in which Besson and fellow directors like Jean-Jacques Beineix and Leos Carax cast aside distractions like narrative in favor of maximum style. Subway has style to burn. Indeed, logic is not anyone’s top priority. One thing may be important at one moment and forgotten the next. Sure, Fred is on the run from zealous policemen and vengeful gangsters, but that’s no reason he can’t take a quick time-out to rehearse the amazing new band he’s assembled out of the various buskers hanging out in the underground. There’s even time for him to team up with the well-connected flower salesman for a quick payroll robbery. Things just happen in Subway because it would be nice if they did. If you’re spending time wondering where Fred finds the explosives to blast open an office safe, or where the band comes up with their matching safari outfits, your head’s in the wrong place.

What’s most fascinating about Subway is how little it cares for the basics of story construction. There are a host of characters, all interesting but defined by the fewest possible characteristics, from the hard-bitten police detective who despises his junior officers, to the friendly purse thief whose primary trait is wearing roller skates, to the bemused drummer played by Jean Reno who hardly utters three sentences but still seems cooler and more relaxed than in any other role in his career. There’s a romance, but it’s conducted almost entirely smoldering looks and chill dialogue. There’s even a climactic collision of passion and violence that is tempered by a happy song to such a degree that even a corpse can’t help but nod along. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not supposed to. Subway is made of pleasant little moments, and like the people they depict, we just take them as they come.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s nothing that’s ever boring in this one, but it is definitely paced differently than many may be used to.  It is less about the Plot directly and more about the ambiance of the area…  Getting the balance between ‘weird, slice of life Story’ and Plot-driven Film is tricky.  Thankfully, this one balances it quite well… The Ending is a bit odd, but, you know, French.” Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizzaro

(This movie was nominated for review by Gary Simanton. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

Miscellanea

NOMINATE APOCRYPHA, WIN A BOOK

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We’ve gotten several individual comments requesting us to add particular movies onto our Apocryphally Weird list, and it’s time to listen to the readers. We’re going to let you guys nominate a slate of movies (from our “List Candidates“) that you’d like to see elevated into official Apocrypha, and give you a chance to win a hardcover copy of the “366 Weird Movies Guide, Volume 1” at the same time. Win, and you’ll be halfway to a full set!

Reminder/notice: Volume 2 of the “366 Weird Movies Guide” is currently scheduled to appear in June.

Nomination process: simply name up to 3 movies you’d like to see apocryphacized in the comments. Movies must be from our “list candidate” category (here’s a quick link to the relevant section of our movie index). We will leave the comments open for 2 weeks for nominations. After this, we will put up a poll allowing readers to select which movies will actually be apocryphacized. Contributors to the original book are welcome to make nominations, but are ineligible for the contest.

CONTEST INFORMATION:

We will randomly select one commenter to receive a copy of the book. To win, you must include an email address to contact you (do this when filling out the “email” box in the comment form—do not leave your email in the public comment!) and have a mailing address in the continental United States (again, obviously, don’t make it public: we’ll email the eventual winner). You can nominate a movie without entering the contest (but please tell us you are doing so), and you can also enter the drawing without nominating a movie. If the first winner is ineligible for a prize, we’ll select an alternate.

Hopefully this is all clear enough. Now get to it! Nominations close on June 1.

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