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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: A NEW OLD PLAY (2021)

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Jiao ma tang hui

椒麻堂会

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A New Old Play is currently available for VOD rental.

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DIRECTED BY: Qiu Jiongjiong

FEATURING: Yi Sicheng, Guan Nan, Qiu Zhimin, Xue Xuchun, Gu Tao

PLOT: Two affable demons come for the soul of Qui, a famous Chinese opera clown; on his way to the afterlife, he reminisces about his life’s experiences.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The saga unfurls on stage-like sets using theater tricks and practical effects, with an easygoing charm bubbling throughout. The mindless catastrophes besetting the Chinese from the 1930s through 1980s batter fruitlessly against a quiet resolution to survive. Demons, symbolism, wit, and magic realism co-mingle with the tragedy, creating an experience unlike anything this reviewer has ever seen.

COMMENTS: This is a daunting prospect: stage-theater style, a deep-dive into Chinese cultural politics, and an epic length. The day before watching A New Old Play, I quipped that I was certain that this three-hour film would be sooo good, I’d want it four hours long. But I can admit when I’m mistaken. Its theatrical nature gives Qiu Jiongjiong’s film a stylish and deeply cultural resonance; the deep-dive into the darkest times of the People’s Republic of China is tempered throughout by playful humanity; and when the film wrapped up, I could have happily sat through another hour—or more. From the protagonist’s friendly acquisition at the hands of two neophyte demons (they had just taken over from their recently retired fathers), during the long reminiscences at the Netherworld inn, and up through Qui’s final, memory-washing meal at the river to Hell, A New Old Play is a jaunty, enlightening ride.

Old Qui learns that his fame as an opera clown performer transcends the Earthly plane. The King of Hell himself has sent his death invitation in the care of two escorts—demons whom Qui recollects from his childhood days during China’s “Great Leap Forward” and Cultural Revolution, when they come to collect the soul of his briefly adopted sister. As Qui travels from our world to the next, he makes a stop at a wayside inn established by a fellow Sichuan who owned an inn topside, and staffed by the handyman for Qui’s troupe. The “New New Players” were an elite band of performers founded by Commander Pocky to maintain the morale of the troops: first the anti-Japanese rebels, then the Chiang Kai-shek Nationalists, and then the Maoist People’s Liberation Army. Always the same troupe, shuffling to and fro as factional powers ebb and flow.

Qiu Jiongjiong sets the stage with humor from the get-go. One demon laboriously employs a bicycle pump to inflate the front tire of the faerielight-lined rickshaw on which he and his fellow demon travel. The opening memory corrects the demon’s information about when Qui joined the acting ensemble (they admit that certain records have been lost), introducing the concept of “New New Players” via a committee-style exploration of the merits of the repetitive term. The war against Japan is framed as a competition for theater funds and an irritating lack of flour for steamed buns. The civil war is nearly reduced to the swapping-out of a poster on the theater building: first anti-communist, then anti-nationalist.

The bulk of the melodrama (if I might even to call it that) occurs during the famine and cultural destruction unleashed by Mao as he sought to maintain his grip on the fledgling new (new) country. But the focus is on the the actors, and how the downtrodden manage to cock a snook at the gun-toting thugs. As happened to nearly all those caught in the vortex of the “Cultural Revolution”, Commander Pocky falls out of favor, and his actors are forced into self-abasement; Qui, the clown, stands amongst the troupe, dressed shabbily, wearing ridiculous makeup, and wearing a sign advertising his transgression. But as he is a clown, he manages to gather a small adoring crowd with a near-immobile performance, turning those who came to shun and gawk back into human beings through the power of his performance. Qiu Jiongjiong has nothing good to say about the evils of the Maoist regime, but refuses to grant that blood-soaked tyrant even a semblance of power over him. Like his film, all of time is a new-old play, as we stumble forward with a trip and a laugh, forever escaping from the inhumanity which the evil among us would subject us to.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… filmed as theatrical tableaux, complete with blatantly contrived sets and supernatural fantasy sequences, which virtually shout at viewers not to take the depicted events as literal truth.”–Richard Brody, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZAPPER! (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

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.

Scene from ZAPPER! (2023)

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 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:

“…exist[s] in the liminal space between needing psychedelic drugs to enjoy it and feeling like you are already half a carton of magic mushrooms on a wild trip… This may be just the wild hunt through acid-drenched technicolor weirdness you need.”–Benjamin Franz, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Thomas.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: PLAN 9 FROM ALIEXPRESS (2022)

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RecommendedBeware

DIRECTED BY: Diana Galimzyanova

FEATURING: Ekaterina Dar, Elizaveta Shulyak, Lilit Karapetyan,  Diana Galimzyanova

PLOT: A gothic princess wishes to commit suicide, but a dastardly prince charming steals her rope.

COMMENTS:

The rope. The trolley. Trolley 54. Chthulu.

Flick-switch DIY? They can do, they can do.

A meaningless quest line jellies about.

Nonsense everywhere. No way out.

Where is this cryptic nonsense bound?

Who gave them a camera, or was it just found?

What’s with this denticulated review?

Why do you ask? And what’s it to you?

Stalin’s bust, a princess, a faerie, a door.

Interference lines dance on the floor.

A jaunty yellow crown. A scythe, tag-fresh glinty.

If only the French were this fun in the ’60s.

Fed black and white and sepia treats,

The perplexion’d sun faces hasty defeat.

Toss in drag, and mime, and some derelict sets—

This film makes no sense; and yet… and yet…

[Submitting this review took major testicles.

Plan 9 is playing select film festivals.-Ed.]

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this film is not some sort of brainheavy meta movie or anything like that but a pretty mad comedy carried by humour reminiscent of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, held together exactly by the fact that nothing really holds the story together… A very unusual film for sure…” -Mike Haberfelner, Search My Trash (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ONE SOLDIER (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Steven Wright

FEATURING: Steven Wright, Sandi Carroll

PLOT: A Civil War soldier looks back upon his life and contemplates the nature of human existence in the days leading up to his execution for murder.

Still from One Soldier (1999)

COMMENTS: For years, Steven Wright built his comedy empire on peerless one-liners that required 5 seconds to fully sink in and another 30 to stop laughing. Long before successors like Mitch Hedberg and Demetri Martin picked up the torch, Wright was unspooling hour-long sets built out of dozens upon dozens of jokes that lay like unexploded mines waiting to go off. It’s frankly all I can do to resist the temptation to just spend the whole review quoting him. (I’ll allow myself this one famous joke for the unacquainted: “I spilled spot remover on my dog… and now he’s gone.”) This earned him many opportunities to apply his hangdog stare and drier-than-the-Sahara monotone to a variety of projects as a supporting actor and voice artist, but there have been fewer opportunities to try to translate his voice as a writer to the screen. In 1988, he wrote, produced, and starred in “The Appointments of Dennis Jennings,” the tale of a hapless psychiatric patient that earned Wright that year’s Academy Award for live-action short. That success under his belt, he then waited 11 years to make another short, this time assuming the director’s mantle as well.

The initial joke is that, even though his milieu is now the American Civil War, Steven Wright in a Union uniform is still Steven Wright. The elements are in place for a “Drunk History”-style collision of history and comedy, as mournful violins accompany Wright’s walks through an empty New England landscape. But when he launches into his narration in his classic disaffected drone, the subject matter is immediately more philosophical, touching on the inscrutability of life and the inevitability of death. Soon enough, his wife Becky joins in with her own reflection, and each hints that his fate may already be sealed. Essentially, “One Soldier” is like if “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” were a comedy sketch.

Of course, Steven Wright can’t not be funny, or at least not indulge his quirkier side. Particularly as regards his fate, which he anticipates by plucking petals off a flower. Even his deepest musings are tinged with silliness, like his recollections of his job in the war, playing the concertina to soothe the nerves of the top brass. A heartwarming reunion with his wife is tempered somewhat by his insistence on wearing a harmonica, even during intimate moments. And there’s a comedian’s love of the absurd, best typified by this line of dialogue which is no less bizarre when heard in context: “When she said the number 25 in German, it drove me wild.”

Wright’s soldier is a philosopher who hasn’t done the work and doesn’t have the language to describe the uncertainties he feels. That makes “One Soldier” a most unusual vanity project: it can’t carry the burden of the weighty issues it confronts, so it leans into that weakness. But there’s still something haunting that comes through, perhaps best exemplified by the film’s final thoughts: “First you don’t exist, then you exist, then you don’t exist. So this whole thing is just an interruption from not existing.” Steven Wright finds the comedy in the tragic notion that a person’s last thought on this earth is that he’s been thinking too much about the meaning of life.

“One Soldier” is available as a bonus feature on “When the Leaves Blow Away,” a recording of a one-hour Wright stand-up set from 2007.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fine blend of deep theological ponderings, modern Zen koans, and comic schtick. Like Wright’s live stand-up, the film’s slow pace and ponderous subject matter have a rather hypnotic effect, drawing one into the skewed reality of Wright’s brilliant mind.” – J. C. Shakespeare, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by RobinHoodsun, who mused “it was very very weird and it left me with a starnge feeling lol.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE ADULT SWIM YULE LOG [AKA THE FIREPLACE] (2022)

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Adult Swim Yule Log has been promoted onto the List of Apocryphally Weird movies. Please check out (and make any comments on) the official entry.

The Adult Swim Yule Log is currently available for VOD purchase.

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Andrea Laing, Justin Miles, Charles Green, Tordy Clark, Brendan Patrick Connor

PLOT: It begins as an ambient shot of a Yule log, but then the cleaning lady walks into the frame, and soon enough we’re dealing with serial killers, aliens, occultists, flashbacks, and the Little Man: is this log haunted, or are the edibles hitting early?

Still from adult swim yule log [AKA The Fireplace] (2020)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Considering the source, this prank probably caught no one off guard, but it is utter madness in seasonal horror. Don’t believe us? Read some responses on the Twitter thread.

COMMENTS: It would have been amazing if The Adult Swim Yule Log had managed to remain in that tight closeup on the crackling log for it’s entire 90 minute run time—a one shot, static found footage film—but that challenge exceeds even Casper Kelly’s ingenuity. He’s eventually forced to pull back and resort to a conventional omniscient third-person camera. Excepting a few haunted flashbacks, however, he does manage to stay locked into that perspective (with a small adjustment) for the entire first act.

But don’t be disappointed if you were looking forward to Yule Log pushing its fixed-camera conceit to the limit. The movie has plenty of other tricks up its sleeve. After a few minutes of a lightly orchestrated carols over hypnotic flames, the cleaning lady comes in tovacuum. Then there’s a knock at the door, and a couple of strangers arrive complaining of car trouble. A bit later, the couple who’s rented the cabin for a romantic weekend come in, and the film briefly turns into a relationship drama. And then some other visitors arrive with a dire warning, And then a quartet of attractive young podcasters arrive. And then things get… odd. The movie follows several threads at once, exploring a tragic backstory hearkening to the antebellum South, while introducing multiple inconsistent antagonists: serial killers, aliens, and the log itself, who puts in an inanimate performance nearly worthy of Robert the tire. And of course, there’s the dapper Little Man, who adds a real element of supernatural horror (and probably has a great recipe for fried chicken). What comedy there is arises naturally from the absurdity of the situation. But what impresses more is Kelly’s ability to create genuine unease and suspense amidst all the kookiness: a bit where a killer feeds a victim pimento cheese from a jackknife during a psychological cat and mouse duel, while another, more mentally-challenged killer selects a victim in the next room, creates horror tension worthy of a chef’s kiss. Then, of course, the scene resolves in the only way possible: through completely ridiculous deus ex machina. The unknown cast all competently enact slasher movie stereotypes, without ever winking at the camera. So accept your time privilege, grab a Nurse Nutmeg, and sit down by the fire to enjoy the soothing chaos of Adult Swim’s Yule Log. Yule like it.

Casper Kelly caught the world by surprise with his interminable viral sitcom introduction spoof “Too Many Cooks” in 2014. That success encouraged Panos Cosmatos to subcontract Kelly to direct the memorable “Cheddar Goblin” sequence in Mandy. Still, although Kelly continued to work on short projects for the edgy/surreal “Adult Swim” block on the Cartoon Network, his feature film debut was kept secret, coming as even more of a surprise than the fact that Adult Swim’s version of a Yule Log would go terribly awry. Now that Kelly’s broken out of the TV short game, it will be interesting to follow his career and see if he indulges his imagination with more conventionally distributed—if never conventional—material. For those who missed the original broadcast, Adult Swim’s Yule Log can be seen on HBO Max or purchased VOD (it’s a true bargain at $2.99 to own—not just to rent for the usual 48 hours). Here’s hoping it also receives the physical media release it deserves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Adult Swim’s first fright flick is in the vein of schlocky ‘80s midnighters, where chaos trumps coherency. Maybe burn this hallucinogenic strain after you already have the munchies?”–Matt Donato, IGN (contemporaneous)