Capsules

CAPSULE: LES SAIGNANTES (2005)

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AKA The Bloodettes, The Bloodiest

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DIRECTED BY: Jean-Pierre Bekolo

FEATURING: Adéle Ado, , Emile Abossolo

PLOT: When a high-ranking government official dies, Majolie enlists her best friend to segue the disaster into a business opportunity by throwing a trendy W.I.P.: “Wake for an Important Personality.”

COMMENTS: As said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro; and that’s exactly what these plucky heroines do. Set in the neon-drenched perpetual night of Yaounde, Cameroon, twenty years in the future, Bekolo’s genre-hopping Afro-futurist tale depicts a city caught up in the competing influences of power, money, sex, and an ancient elemental force called Mevoungou.

Majolie only discovers her client’s identity when searching his wallet after he suddenly expires from a heart attack during an acrobatic aerialist kink session. To her distress, he’s nearly ninety years old and not just a “granddaddy” but the “SGCC”: Secretary General of the Civil Cabinet. She calls her friend Chouchou to help her out of this mess, then promptly gets drunk.

After killing a bottle of whiskey together, the girls acknowledge the ominous presence of the spirit Mevoungou. Risking the danger of channeling this ambiguous power, they steal the SGCC’s AI driven car to dispose of the official’s body. To further complicate matters, Chouchou’s mother, attended by a bevy of mysterious Bene Gesserit-like priestesses, keeps calling her, arousing the suspicions of an idealistic young cop.

Throughout the course of their night the girls dodge a number of questionable characters, including an insolent cab driver and a nosy neighbor who invites herself along for the ride, along with the mundane inconveniences of a society rife with sexual harassment and government corruption. After bribing a cannibal butcher to chop up the body (he weeps when he tastes SGCC flesh), the girls hit upon the idea of holding a wake—except they need a full corpse to make that happen, and they now only have the head.

Bribing a mortician turns out to be a troublesome task. He’s annoyed at being dragged out his bed in order to supply a body and asks for far too much money. Chouchou doesn’t want to pay him, but Majolie insists the fee will be worth it. In an office decorated with a fish tank full of body parts they continue to haggle over the price. Once they reach a deal, the girls look over the unclaimed bodies to find a good match.

After a narrow escape from the Madame Director of the hospital, the girls dress for the funeral. The Wake for an Important Personality at first goes off without a hitch: a crowd shows up, there’s lots of food and drink, and even the SGCC’s family attends. The only minor disturbance occurs when his wife and daughter tearfully insist the body isn’t his. The girls catch the eye of Minister of State and target him as their new patron. Unfortunately, he too knows how to channel Mevoungou, and they find themselves facing a daunting adversary.

Simple and effective camera techniques (dissolves and double-exposures) conjure a world animated by unseen forces. The futuristic 2025 technology, from camera phones to self-driven cars with English-speaking interfaces, appears disconcertingly accurate (as does the tag line “We were already in 2025, and nothing much had changed”).

Action sequences pay homage to The Matrix, but the derivative fight scenes quickly give way to Majolie and Chouchou’s mesmerizing synchronized dances. In the final showdown they confront their enemy, and in order to preserve their autonomy must also fight off the potentially destructive influence of Mevoungou. Much remains unexplained about this enigmatic entity which kills, and laughs, and dances. It flows through the film like a current of weirdness and, much like in real life, whether the weird brings change for good or ill all depends on how you react to it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as fascinating as it is obscure… Although the production values of this digitally shot film are threadbare, the bizarre visions of writer-director-editor Bekolo are not.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366, EP. 117: KRYPTIC FRIENDSHIP, EMPIRE TALES

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YouTube link

Discussed in this episode:

The Empire [L’Empire] (2024): Commandant Van der Weyden and his sidekick Charpentier are back (although they may have a smaller role to play) in this sci-fi spoof about warring tribes of aliens in human form. This film, aimed squarely at fans of ‘s curious brand of Gallic absurdity, arrives on Blu-ray and VOD this week. Buy The Empire.

Friendship (2025): brings his awkwardly surreal shtick to the feature film format as a man trying to make friends with his cool neighbor. Getting excellent reviews, although critics sometimes seem confused as to whether its a comedy or a psychological horror movie. Friendship at A24.

Kryptic (2024): Read Giles Edwards’ festival summary. The horror about a woman encountering a mysterious cryptid in the Canadian wilderness may be playing theaters somewhere, but you’re more likely to find it in its simultaneous VOD incarnation. Kryptic official site.

Tall Tales (2025): A visual album by Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke, with surrealistic visuals from artist Johnathan Zawada. We learned about this too late to warn you about its one-night-only theatrical debut on May 8, but we are confident it will show up later in one form or another–Oscilloscope is involved and will likely be treating it in a similar fashion to Godfrey Reggio‘s Once Within a Time , with limited engagements followed by a physical and streaming release. Tall Tales official site.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

As announced, next week’s guest will be contributor/friend-of-the-site Alex Kittle, who contributed to the latest Re-Animator 4K UHD box set release from new player Ignite Films (order here). In written reviews, Shane Wilson revisits God Told Me To (1976); Enar Clarke responds to our call to review more weird stuff from Africa with a look at Cameroon’s Les Saignantes [The Bloodiest] (2005); Giles Edwards checks out ‘s Mutant Aliens (2001); and Gregory J. Smalley preps for summer by taking in the madness of ‘s The Surfer (2025). Onward and weirdward!

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SHROUDS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: An entrepreneur who’s obsessed with his dead wife invents a graveyard which allows the bereaved to watch their deceased love ones’ bodies decompose in real time; when some of the graves are vandalized, he’s led to investigate a mysterious conspiracy.

Still from The Shrouds (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Starting from a typically Cronenbergian premise–straddling the line that separates the just barely plausible from the utterly implausible, but presented as if it were perfectly natural—the august director takes a deep dive into human depravity and loss, accompanied by plentiful hallucinations. (Walkout report: there was one other person in the theater with me when the film started; I was alone when the end credits rolled, although I didn’t notice when the other guy left.)

COMMENTS: “How dark are you willing to go?,” asks the improbably named Karsh of a first date, before taking the at-first-game lady on a walk to see a live feed of his wife’s decomposing corpse. Needless to say, he doesn’t get a second date.

When vandals attack Karsh’s hi-tech necrovoyeur cemetery, his business model is jeopardized. He seeks out the culprits with the help of his nerdy ex-brother-in-law and an A.I. assistant who looks suspiciously like his deceased wife, with paranoid suggestions offered by a sister-in-law who also looks suspiciously like his late wife. His investigations suggest abnormal growths on dead tissue, and the possibility that a cabal of international hackers are behind the whole thing. Meanwhile, Karsh has disturbing erotic dreams—all the more disturbing because he finds them comforting—about his deceased love. While probing into the mystery, Karsh also revives his sex life, after years of post-marital celibacy. More impossible, or nearly impossible, events follow, the plot becomes muddled, and The Shrouds wraps on a hallucinatory note.

Now an octogenarian, Cronenberg, who lost his own wife eight years ago, is still able to invent delicious perversities—Karsh’s sexy amputation nightmares, conspiracy theories as aphrodisiacs—even as he seems less and less interested in conclusive narratives. The conspiracies of The Brood (1979) or Videodrome (1983), as bizarrely unlikely as they may be, at least gave you a sense of who the enemy is and their motivation. In Shrouds and Crimes of the Future (2022), the menace is inconclusive, leading to a situation where the audience gets involved in the mystery only to be left hanging at the end. It is clear enough that the thematic enemy here is grief, jealousy, and death itself; but on the narrative side, the antagonist remains murky to the end.

Cronenberg leaves us with plenty to think about, however, including the question of why all of Karsh’s precious memories of his wife revolve exclusively around her body. Is this a personal flaw of Karsh’s, or an honest philosophical recognition that the ultimate reality is the material? Like the motives and identity of The Shrouds’ antagonists, it’s left to you to decide.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Watching The Shrouds dribble its way through a third act that’s as anticlimactic as it is knotty, we can only lament all the weird, intrepid endings Cronenberg might have found for a story about the destiny of flesh – none of which, alas, he actually chose.”–Tim Robey, The Telegraph (festival review)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LILAC BALL (1987)

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Лиловый шар

Liloviy shar, AKA Purple Ball

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DIRECTED BY: Pavel Arsenov

FEATURING: Natalya Guseva, Vyacheslav Nevinnyy, Vyacheslav Baranov, Boris Shcherbakov

PLOT: In the year 2087, a research spacecraft discovers the wreck of “The Dark Wanderer,” a legendary doomed ship containing mysterious purple spheres.

COMMENTS: Enmity is nasty business, and were it not for one plucky little girl, the future of mankind would fall to self-destruction. So we learn in Arsenov’s science-fiction/fantasy outing, Lilac Ball. It covers a span in time from a century into mankind’s future—when computerized intelligence facilitates deep-space exploration—to the ancient past, the time of Legends, wherein man and myth coexisted (if not in harmony, then at least side by side). In those days, myriad dangers arose for the common peasant by way of the dark sorcery of Baba Yaga and her three sons.

Events kick off in grand future style. Captain Green, the commander of the Pegasus who speaks nearly as mechanically as the ship’s computer, is tasked with escorting Professor Seleznyov and his daughter Alice to a research vacation. All of a sudden, the ship’s sensors detect an anomaly: a craft too large and too strange to be found in the database. Behold, it is The Dark Wanderer, and its floating ruins contain dispiriting records of the crew’s fate, a fair number of vitreous spheres, and the lovable four-armed archaeologist, Gromozeka. The spheres contain a horrible doom, but little Alice knows just where on Earth to find the purple ball secreted—thousands of years in the past—by the Dark Wanderer’s crew to destroy humankind at just the right time.

This movie is not without its charm, and its seventy-odd-minutes breeze by on the winds of adventure and whimsy. The first act, very much typical science fiction, is well executed; the filmmakers push their skills and budget to the limit. The Pegasus’ interior design is refreshingly dissimilar from most outings of the genre, with an open-plan cockpit/convening area (tea is served often) featuring computer consoles, greenery, short staircases, and a central table for four. Zipping back thousands of years into the past—I had had no inkling of a time machine until Alice mentions it for the purposes of returning to the “Era of Legends”—is rather less satisfying, albeit involving some endearing puppetry. (The baby roc is cute—and wholly undeserving of its fate at the hands of the Wanderer’s evil crew.)

Arsenov appears to aim for an all-the-young-adult-adventure-tropes experience, but his reach, alas, exceeds his grasp. Still, it is impossible to feel hostile toward such winsome narrative meanderings of future and past.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Curious mash-up of fantasy and science-fiction from the Soviet Union…  a strange mixture of mythologies, to be sure; part Sinbad, part fairytale, part Wizard of Oz. All in a film whose first act was straight science-fiction! There’s nothing wrong with blending genres, of course, but it’s a tricky business, and the disconnect between the two aspects of the story here is a little jarring, to say the least.” — Mark David Welsh

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan after seeing some clips and remarking that they “resemble something that AI watched in its early stages and picked up on.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

The Purple Ball / Lilac Ball / Liloviy shar (English Subtitles)

The Purple Ball / Lilac Ball / Liloviy shar (English Subtitles)
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