Tag Archives: Absurdist

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: SWOLLEN CREEK (2026)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Dominic Martella

FEATURING: Mandy Lahey

PLOT: A woman with a conjoined twin in her torso seeks romance, but runs into an evil insect queen and her fly-headed, dung-harvesting assistant instead.

Still from swollen creek (2025)

COMMENTS: Once upon a time, making a feature film required commitment: cameras were expensive, technical expertise was rare, and even film stock cost money and reshoots were costly. Even the most cynical exploitation pictures had to reach a certain level of skill and resources before they could proceed, and if you actually persevered and made your movie, you’d need to find a distributor with knowledge and contacts to get the finished work in front of an audience. And although today serious films still have those requirements, the advent of iPhones, free software editing suites, and YouTube uploads have meant that the only commitment required of anyone wanting to make their own movie today is time and friends who will work for free. This has unleashed a wave of vibrant creativity on the world. It has unleashed a much larger wave of dreck that never could have seen the light of day in a gatekept era.

The taxonomy of these no-budget movies, which now find ready homes on Tubi, YouTube, and similar non-to-lightly curated venues, is more fascinating  than the vast majority of films themselves. Why were these things made? Some are by young film students more interested in learning the craft than creating a marketable project. Some are experimental films from artistically-oriented filmmakers with no resources at their disposal (the majority of films covered on this site fall into that category). Some moviemakers just hope to make a few meager bucks while having a good time on set. A few are made by delusional folk who, inspired by the legend of ‘ $5000 hit El Mariachi, believe that their stories are so compelling that they can compete for eyeballs with Hollywood (or at least budgeted indie) productions. And some movies are just made as a goof, to amuse the filmmakers themselves, with no serious intent of appealing to a wider audience.

I suspect the last is the category Swollen Creek falls into. Though pitched as a surreal anthology, it’s a complete narrative, not an anthology at all. And it’s “surreal” in only the most bastardized sense: the tone could charitably be described as absurd, although ridiculous and goofy are even better fits. Almost everyone in this movie, even disposable victims, wears an ill-fitting rubber mask. Rubber flies are pulled by strings with no attempt made to hide them. The protagonist has a Siamese twin in her belly—which I’m guessing is a blow-up doll—but the character never has any payoff. The film is congested by pounds of poop and fart humor. The moral seems to be that romance isn’t for freaks, and you should trust your controlling, repressive mother when she says the external world is full of nothing but cruel normies who will try to kill you. Swollen Creek seems like the kind of movie that would be made by teenagers in their back yards over the course of a few weekends, but the only unmasked actor we see—Mandy Lahey, who gamely plays 3 roles—is middle-aged. It’s all less amusing than it sounds, although it’s clear the cast had a blast. And somehow they got to show up for five minutes, either under a mask or providing voiceover for a stand-in under a mask.

I bear no ill will to the makers of Swollen Creek, but I must conclude it is not intended for an audience beyond friends and family. If you’re a non-professional and you’re tempted to try one of those obscure little movies with weird amateurish box cover art on Tubi, I recommend you don’t try it—not even once.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Will SWOLLEN CREEK win many awards or grace the screens of thousands of people’s home televisions? Probably not. Is this one for people who love the truly bizarre and things that are so in left field that you are left scratching your head in the end? Absolutely and 100%, Yes!”–K. Sellers, Sound View

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

 

Swollen Creek

Swollen Creek

  • It’s all here at Swollen Creek. Enjoy.

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FANTASIA 2026: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DANCE FREAK (2025)

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RecommendedWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Robby Rackleff, Alan Resnick

FEATURING: Robby Rackleff, Megan Koester, Sheila Mears, Jamel Johnson

PLOT: Obie’s crummy life becomes dangerous when a mysterious freak appears in town to murder those caught up in his hypnotic moves.

Still from Dance Freak (2026)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: I’ll pitch this as “The Residents Present: Guy Maddin‘s Jekyll & Hide“, to give you an approximate idea what to expect.

COMMENTS: There are few sacks sadder than Obie. He is timid, depressed, seems to own only one sweatshirt, and cannot build a bird house to save his life, no matter how much coaching—both practical and existential—his teacher provides. To add to his woes, his go-getter girlfriend, Dorty, a young woman with a big heart, a big club, and mayoral aspirations, dumps him. And now, enter the Dance Freak: a humanoid entity whose motion and rhythm crushes the heads of anyone who dares gaze upon its wondrous moves.

Dance Freak is a masterful example of the possibilities encountered when creativity slams into the wall of zero resources. Obie’s town is a ghost town, populated by quietly angry people (or, in the case of the Salad Gang, loudly angry). Obviously animated birds attack and peck at the protagonist, and mist permeates the peripheries. Special effects crumble and melt into themselves and into each other, reflecting not only Obie’s fractured mind but also the “just add another layer” attitude that runs throughout the production. The Dance Freak itself is nothing more than co-director, co-screenwriter Robby Rackleff (who, incidentally, was wearing the Dance Freak’s khaki slacks on the film’s opening day); if you’re looking for something below Z-grade for your monster, you can’t do better than have one of the filmmakers just jamming his unchoreographed body onscreen to the unheard strains of a famous piece of pop film music.

The one professional actor (the directors words) is Sheila Mears, playing Dr. Dilly Gorgul. She earns her fee and then some as an evil scientist who exemplifies the excitement that draws someone to expanding knowledge in the first place: science is cool, especially mad science. Her giddiness is a refreshing novelty amidst the trip-wire tempers and hyper-caffeinated visuals. Most importantly, she still fits in with the milieu as a slightly plus-person alongside all the other heightened townsfolk, from father-issues Detective Gittit to Megaman, Obie’s manager who suffered from a filthy childhood that interfered with his one true love of drinking clear water fresh from the tap.

Rackleff and Resnick thread a tricky needle in this microbudget bit of madness: for the story of Dance Freak, there needs to be hyperbolic imagery and acting, but also enough relatability to keep the viewer invested. For the look of Dance Freak, there needs to be consistent “otherness” that doesn’t break the bank. And while not every movie needs to have a moral, Dance Freak opts for one, taking on itself the further task of showcasing the three possible paths we face when our life is in a rut: keep digging in, break something, or build something. We would do well to remember that there is a potential Dance Freak in all of us; will we dance for destruction—or creation?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“100 minutes of pure irreverent nonsense in a gorgeous visual package that utilizes what appears to be old-school compositing, direct animation, and trippy transitions to augment some gnarly distortions, repurposed glue guns, and an out-of-body skin suit that’s as much a prison as it is a home… Would I watch it again? No. Should you watch it once? As long as you’re prepared to wonder whether you’ve had a stroke.”–Jared Mobarak, The Film Stage (Fantasia screening)

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNITED TRASH (1996)

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aka The Slit

Weirdest! 

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DIRECTED BY: Christoph Schlingensief

FEATURING: Udo Kier, Kitten Natividad, Joachim Tomaschewsky, Johnny Pfeifer, Jones Muguse, Thomas Chibwe

PLOT: The wife of a gay German UN commander stationed in Africa gives birth to a child who is declared the new messiah; when an accident causes the boy to be horribly injured and endangers the UN mission, an escalating battle for power arises between the power-hungry commander, a religious leader who has declared war on the Vatican, and a chieftain who is attempting to actualize his dream to ride a ramshackle rocket into the White House to kill the American president.

Still from United Trash [AKA The Slit] (1996)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Movies can be weird, they can be strange, they can be bizarre, but it’s rare to come across a movie that is actually insane. Under the trappings of satire on a global scale, United Trash offers a critique of international affairs forged in the crucible of late 20th century daytime talk shows. There is not a single character in the film who isn’t as awful as they can be, nor a situation that is not plussed to become the most grotesque version of itself. So many fluids are spattered across the screen, everyone is subject to abject humiliation, and not a single institution fails to be undermined. Rarely has a film’s contempt for its subjects been so blatant and so complete, nor has a commitment to the most base appeals for a laugh been pursued so vigorously.

COMMENTS: In a career cut appallingly short by cancer, Christoph Schlingensief racked up a remarkable number of achievements, including staging a Wagner opera at the Bayreuth Festival, making plans to build a performing arts center in Burkina Faso, and curating a retrospective of his art that was staged posthumously at the Vienna Biennale. In cinema, he created a trilogy of films exploring the trauma caused by both the rise of Hitler and the process of German reunification. (The last of those, Terror 2000, also sits in our Reader Queue.) And in the middle of all this, he directed a film in which Udo Kier paints himself in blackface, dons a skirt made of bananas, and dances like a monkey in front of an audience of Africans while stroking the center banana aggressively. It’s an extraordinary career.

United Trash features one of the most game casts I have ever seen. There’s not an ounce of shame among the lot of them. They got the note that subtlety would be punishable by death, and they responded by going furiously over the top. Keir leads the way with his relentless prissiness, matched by a frequently naked Natividad raving maniacally about her lack of sexual satisfaction. They are surrounded by actors working just as hard to win the title of Least Restrained Performance, including a Hitler-mustachioed doctor/rocket scientist, an amoral, sexually ravenous, Vatican-hating priest, and Keir’s absurdly bewigged, unexpectedly jacked, child-molesting Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UNITED TRASH (1996) →

Apocryphally Weird

65*: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

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“Some audience members get very angry if they can’t process and understand the story in one viewing, and they see that as a design flaw in the film itself. Other people are more open to obscurity and complexity and the idea of needing to revisit something. Those are my favorite kinds of films.”–Richard Kelly

DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly

FEATURING: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, Wood Harris, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, , , Mandy Moore, Holmes Osborne, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, , Miranda Richardson, , Will Sasso, Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith

PLOT: In the near future, a terrorist attack transforms America into a cryptofacist police state. The third anniversary of that attack proves to be a day of great significance, with the launch of a new national surveillance agency, the release of an energy source/mind-altering drug called Fluid Karma, and the debut of an enormous luxury zeppelin improbably named for the wife of Karl Marx. On this day, the fates of multiple citizens collide, including an amnesiac action star who has written a startlingly prescient screenplay, a porn actor overseeing a burgeoning branding empire, a former beauty queen-turned-spymaster, a venal fundamentalist vice-presidential candidate who is being bribed by an assortment of neo-Marxist agitants, an international cadre of cult members whose purported invention of a perpetual motion machine masks an effort to bring about the end of the world, and, maybe most importantly of all, a war veteran and his twin brother searching for each other.

Still from Southland Tales (2006)

BACKGROUND:

  • Kelly envisioned the film as part of an epic multimedia saga. In-film titles identify sections of the movie as chapters 4-6; the first three chapters were released as graphic novels (now out-of-print collectibles).
  • The film had a notorious premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival when Kelly submitted the film before it was completed. He finished neither the editing nor the visual effects in time, and the extremely poor reception received by the work-in-progress prompted him to cut more than 20 minutes prior to general release (including virtually all of’s performance as an Army general). The version shown at Cannes has since been released, although Kelly himself describes the film overall as unfinished.
  • Several members of the cast are alums of “Saturday Night Live.” Kelly intentionally cast them to play up the screenplay’s satirical elements, and in general wanted to give his actors a chance to play against type.
  • Budgeted at $17 million, Southland Tales grossed less than $400,000 at the global box office.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s little agreement as to whether Southland Tales is a good movie or not, but the one thing that seems to be beyond dispute is that is Timberlake’s Venice Beach lip sync to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” is the standout scene. Timberlake’s yokel narrator Pilot Abilene spends the bulk of the film drawling overheated speeches that rely heavily on the Book of Revelation, which he delivers in the tone of a pothead conspiracy nut vainly trying to lift the scales from your eyes. But here, as he struts through a rundown arcade in a drug-induced haze wearing a blood-soaked undershirt and cavorting with a kickline of PVC-clad nurses, Pilot Abilene claims the screen for himself, demonstrating more comfort with the film’s absurdities than anyone we’ve seen thus far. It’s the one moment where Kelly’s delivers his commitment to over-the-top imagery with any degree of lightness; instead of the ponderousness of significance that accompanies every other set piece, this dance scene really dances.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Mirror on delay; rehearsing the performance-art assassination

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Richard Kelly is ambitious to a fault, a spectacularly indulgent filmmaker who never had an idea he didn’t want to film and who makes sure you notice every element of his worldbuilding. Southland Tales is a quintessential Kelly experience, with one layer of Philip K. Dickian paranoid surrealism piled upon another layer of Altmanesque interconnectedness, rinse and repeat. The film has been carefully crafted to confuse, with absurd situations, offscreen backstories, and red herrings combining to keep characters and viewers equally at sea.

Original trailer for Southland Tales (2006)

COMMENTS: What good is a blank check? If cinematic success affords a director the chance to fulfill their dream, what dream should Continue reading 65*: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006) →

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BUFFET INFINITY (2025)

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Buffet Infinity is now available to rent or purchase on-demand.

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Simon Glassman

FEATURING: Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald, Donovan Workun, Ahmed Ahmed, and the voice of Simon Glassman

PLOT: An all-you-can-eat restaurant competes with neighboring stores at a strip mall as a sinkhole appears, strange noises plague the area, citizens go missing, and an occult presence seeps into the transmission.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A narrative told through channel-surfing and a combo platter of the ridiculous and the sinister make Buffet Infinity a necessary addition to the Apocrypha menu.

COMMENTS: Westridge County is small, down at the heel, and more than a little boring. The local TV stations showcase a cavalcade of staid businesses: a doggie daycare on the verge of collapse, a pawn shop with a worryingly growing inventory, an insurance broker ready to cover questionable life events, a sandwich shop offering several types of sliced pig along with its signature sauce, a shyster lawyer happy to capitalize on his bitterness, a used car dealership suffering a violent aversion to high prices, and a buffet with suspiciously good deals and no apparent staff. Surfing the area’s TV broadcasts for one-hundred minutes, however, we glean the story of how Westridge County becomes increasingly derelict, dangerous, and decimated.

Simon Glassman is a fellow of who remembers, and, in a way, is nostalgic for a particular broadcast phenomenon which has all but disappeared. His chronicle of Westridge County’s collapse from crummy to cursed cranks true-to-life advertisements and news flashes one further turn on the dial to the absurd. The passive-aggressive war between Buffet Infinity (where something possibly extraterrestrial, and certainly evil, is going on) and Jenny’s Sandwich Shop ratchets up snarkily; though both cheerfully announce the ample parking “in the front”. (The sinkhole growing in the back-lot is the first indication something’s a bit off.) Public service warnings from “The Westridge Society for Religious Freedom” sound typo-ridden alarm bells about an impending supernatural intrusion that will rob the county of its people. But Ahmed Ahmed, the bad-rapping proprietor of the pawn shop, is ready to raise spirits through low prices on goods ranging from sound blockers to personal defense.

Glassman pulls aside the curtains drape by drape, with each surf through the channels unveiling a little more tension and a little more desperation. Glassman remarked during the Q&A session following Buffet Infinity that the film is ultimately just him dumping on a local strip mall. This much is certainly true, but the movie is much more. It dissects quotidian fears and challenges, with a heartier and heartier dose of the surreal, culminating in absurdly large portions of spectacle.

So head on down to Buffet Infinity! Its eighteen-to-twenty staff, each with their own homes and government ID numbers, will serve up platefuls of curious delights in the ever-expanding dining facility.

Just don’t enter the door marked “Prohibited”.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What begins as a satire of small-town local television quickly spirals into a hallucinatory, absurdist descent into the mind of a community being devoured by its own identity. This is weird cinema at its best: committed, chaotic, and unnervingly hypnotic.” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (festival screening)