366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Discussed in this episode:
Kill the Jockey (2024): A jockey who’s addicted to horse drugs (!) and in debt to the mafia suffers a concussion and is reborn. The distributor describes it as “a wild and surreal crime comedy.” Buy or rent Kill the Jockey.
Toronto International Film Festival (Sep. 4-14): Toronto is a huge film festival, and a huge commercial market for upcoming films looking for distributors. Most TIFF films are reliably mainstream, but with over 200 features, there will inevitably be some weird ones. Here are the ones we’ll be tracking in the coming months:
- Barrio Triste – a “hallucinatory” found footage movie set among Medellin’s juvenile delinquents; from Harmony Korine‘s EDGLRD productions
- Dead Lover – a gravedigger reanimates her dream man in a campy and gonzo spin on Frankenstein
- Egghead Republic – Swedish satire set in an alternative history where Kazakhstan was nuked, and the aftermath may have produced radioactive centaurs; programmers say it “teeters between a surrealist farce and an incisive critique of the media-industrial complex”
- F*** My Son! – a decrepit mother tries to get her mutant son laid; from Todd Rohal, so probably even stranger than the premise already suggests
- Junk World – a robot tries to unwind time-travel anomalies in Takahide Hori’s stop-motion prequel to his oddball Junk Head
- Levers – explores the effects of a “global day of darkness” on the residents of a small Canadian town; dreamlike and per the director shot in 16mm on “broken Bolex cameras”
- The Man in My Basement – Charles is in financial trouble; a mysterious businessman comes to his rescue by requesting to rent his basement for an exorbitant sum
The Wheel of Heaven (2023): A female mechanic reads a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book that leads her through wild, surreal scenarios. Director Joe Badon will return to Pod 366 to discuss this one when it hits streaming/VOD, but for now you can get it on Blu-ray, with two cast and crew commentaries and an interview linking the film and the Tarot. Buy The Wheel of Heaven.
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:
No guest on Pod 366 next week (we think), but Greg and Giles will return with a look at upcoming weird movies. In written content, Shane Wilson goes psychedelic Snorkeling (2025), Giles Edwards decides to Kill the Jockey (see above), and Gregory J. Smalley makes one post about Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993). Onward and weirdward!
Just a note, Everything Everywhere All at Once & We Are the Strange haven’t been added to the Apocrypha list on The List and the margin on the side of the website.
Yes, I am behind in updating those pages. Too many higher priority things to do at the moment, we’ll get caught up.