Watch this rebranded, darker version of Mickey Mouse before Disney lawyers pull it down (or worse, use it as a pretext for war).
CONTENT WARNING: This film contains strong language and sacrilegious depictions of beloved copyrighted cartoon characters.
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DIRECTED BY: Nick Gatsby
FEATURING: Christoper James Taylor, Skye Armenta, Nick Gatsby
PLOT: Godlike beings direct banana-wielding “zappers” in a game to recover pieces of a puzzle in order to access a mystical skateboard.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It’s low, low budget makes it a long shot, but ZAPPER! is a movie best represented by a scene where a hippie in a ski mask fires a banana laser at a flying moose head. That’s enough to keep it in the game.
COMMENTS: Let’s be upfront here: ZAPPER! was inspired by, sponsored by, and endorsed by LSD. It includes characters named “Lucy” and “Tabs.” The movie’s only bar only serves “electric kool aid.” The opening titles warn “The trip you are about to embark on contains sequences of flashing lights.” And at one point a guy (played by director Gatsby) takes a dropper full of blue liquid and drips it onto the perforated squares of a Grateful Dead dancing bear blotter, then drops it on his tongue. So ZAPPER! is not exactly subtle about its lysergic origins.
Of course, even without those nods to acid culture, you might have detected some psychedelic influence from the constant colored kaleidoscopic filters covering everything on the screen. While ZAPPER! incorporates actors and a rather wild script, all the other cinematic elements take a back seat to the visuals. Nearly every frame of film has some sort of color filter applied to it, cycling through every shade of the rainbow, sometimes within a couple seconds. Layered on top of that obsessive chromatic fiddling you’ll see digital snow, superimposed images, snatches of animation, animated figures painted on live action (at one point “Persistence of Memory” melted clocks drift across the screen), lavish green screen backdrops, actual lava lamps and black lights, and local psychedelic graffiti incorporated into the imagery. The “game master” scenes, shot in simple black and white, provide short breaks for your tired eyes. The visual twists are constant: wearisome for some, exhilarating for others, but in either case offered with tremendous love and dedication.
All of this trickery is desperately needed, because otherwise the film is just a glorified home movie. At times, the lack of production value peeks through the psychedelic overlay: you can become painfully aware of the bananas, lunchboxes and toy gun props, the public spaces and apartment locations. Acting is amateur, and Gatsby doesn’t turn the actors’ lack of glamour into an asset the way a John Waters would. The script is full of crazy ideas, which naturally don’t always work: in particular, a couple of times Gatsby deliberately shows the crew shooting the scene, which breaks the spell without adding anything thematically. Still, there is just barely enough structure to the story to keep it from totally floating off into a purple haze. ZAPPER! sells itself as a trip movie, and it is that, but it’s also a demo reel for Gatsby’s advanced design sensibilities, which have grown more lavish and assured since his microbudget debut My Neighbor Wants Me Dead. I could see him finding work as a visual effects specialist or credits sequence designer on bigger budget projects. If you’re dropping acid tonight, give ZAPPER! a spin; even if you’re not, if you’ve got a craving for cinematic adventures beyond the bounds of reality, this is a drug you might want to just say “yes” to.
ZAPPER! currently exists on Tubi and other free streaming platforms.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Thomas.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
A circa 1968 Soviet bureaucrat undergoes an existential crisis when he accidentally burns a roast he intended to serve his superior.
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FP 4EVZ is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.
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*: Frrlz
DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost
FEATURING: Jason Trost, Tallay Wickham, Ryan Gibson, Leigh Myles, Mike O’Gorman
PLOT: The wet shit threatens to 187 the FP, and so JTRO and CHAI-T must B.E.A.T. into the futuredoo with their daughter to save the nowsies.
COMMENTS: Let me be abundantly clear: there is no reason for this movie to be this good. No, we are not talking love-child of Kubrick and Harron—that’d be a real masterpiece. FP 4EVZ, a passion-continuation of Jason Trost’s lifelong FP passion-project, is not high cinema, or even middle cinema. But it’s a refreshing blast to the face, made in the difficult style of haute stupidité. The premise is idiotic—as it has been, it seems, for over a decade now; for those of you not in the knowsies, Trost has been exploring the intersectionality of dystopian living and DDR (re-named in this universe “BEAT”, probably for legal reasons, but also because “Balance/Expeditiousness/Aggression/Tempo” is a delightfully silly sum-up of that whole arrow-stomp-dance nonsense) for his entire professional career.
I have not seen the first three parts of the FP franchise, but that’s okay: this chapter begins with a thorough recap of the machinations so far. Space Ducks once lorded over humanity, which was saved by a visitation from a cosmic entity who brought with it a comet-ful of booze. Civilizations have risen, and fallen. Humanity—or at least, sober humanity—is hanging on by its finger-nails. JTRO, the scion of a BEAT bloodline, is married to the warrior queen CHAI-T, and their daughter CHAI-LATTAY is the chosen one. Chosen to what? Dance. Dance at the direction of flying neon arrows.
There are many flying neon arrows. And countless examples of dum-dum “modern” speak rips and dialogues. No other framework could allow a destiny child be praised as having “the body of a mortal—but the blood and soul of a duck.” Or for a long-dormant thinking machine to not only insist on being referred to by name (“Monsieur Computer”), but sport a stupid beret on its Frenchie AI head graphic.
I eventually gave up on scribbling down the saga-style exposition, the pun-soaked quips, and the genuinely heartfelt speeches, all of which were crafted in an hilarious pastiche of idiotic slang from the past decade. It was all delivered ably—and delivered in all seriousness. And that is the main reason why FP 4EVZ works as well as it does: it never winks at the audience. All the DDR combat, the plot-twists, the CGI desolation: never once did I disbelieve. So take my recommendation with a few grains of salt, perhaps, but Trost’s latest outing is something to revel in—preferably, as they themselves advise before the feature, with at least a few drinks in you.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
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DIRECTED BY: Uncredited
FEATURING: Bill Milsap (English dub)
PLOT: Twenty short, dreamlike horror stories from manga artist Junjo Ito, spread out over twelve episodes.
COMMENTS: A woman’s sneering face appears in a monsoon of psychedelic mandalas, singing along to the raucous theme song as various scars and deformities flicker across her visage. A nail-chewing boy in a yellow raincoat climbs out of an abandoned refrigerator and into the vertical-hold challenged stories playing on a TV set across the alley.
Those are the opening and closing sequences of “Junjo Ito Maniac,” and they set a maniacal tone that the content they bookend rarely matches. Not that the actual stories lack for deranged imagination; any anthology containing the tale of an angelic blond salesman in a bow tie who peddles mounds of deadly, addictive ice cream to children isn’t short on creepy inventiveness. But there are two basic problems with the series. One is the animation itself, which, despite the rambunctious promise of the opening and closing numbers, often isn’t really animated. It’s usually a succession of stills where only the characters’ mouths move. Ito’s images are often eerily beautiful, but the series comes off as too cheaply produced to do them justice. The other issue is that the majority of the stories, some of which run for just over five minutes, are often inconclusive, feeling like simple statements of surreal premises rather than fleshed-out horrors. Their brevity does, perhaps, makes them more dreamlike; their economy means they tend to serve best as bedtime snacks to fuel snippets of nightmares.
The biggest exception is the one must-see episode in this collection, “Layers of Terror.” At a mere fifteen minutes, this twisted psychological parable about a mother who longs to return her child to a state of infantile dependency delivers its meaty anti-moral through a grotesquely literal (and bizarrely impossible) metaphor. Other highlights include “The Hanging Balloon,” about an unlikely apocalyptic plague of floating heads with nooses attached, and “Tomb Town,” a story that starts promisingly with a trip to a neighborhood completely overrun by tombstones. The series assays an effective variety of horror moods, from the prominent surreal horror to stories evoking the spirits of Lovecraft (“Library Vision”) and Charles Addams (“The Strange Hikizuri Siblings”) to ironically cruel fables (“The Bully”). Even though few of the entries are solid hits, the diversity of textures coupled with the ultra-short format makes “Maniac” an assortment of poison bon-bons worth sharing with your best friend… or enemy.
As a bonus, the conclusion of each episode includes a few short spoken sentences of a continuing story about a man driven mad by bugs that seem to be… well, you can find out for yourself. Aside from that perk, the episodes can be watched in any order, or selectively skipped.
Junjo Ito is perhaps best known to readers here as the original author of the killer-spiral horror story adapted into the live action feature Uzumaki (2000). He’s a prolific manga storyteller in Japan, alternating between short story collections like these, longer works like “Uzumaki,” and collections featuring recurring characters (including the bewitching Tomei, who appears in one story here, and impish nail-chewing teen Soichi, who appears twice in “Maniac” and also anchors the closing segment.) “Junjo Ito: Japanese Tales of the Macabre” was created by Studi Deen, who had released a previous collection of Ito shorts in Japan, in collaboration with Netflix, who owns exclusive streaming rights.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: