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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TURBO KID (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell

FEATURING: Munro Chambers, Laurence Leboeuf, Aaron Jeffrey, Edwin Wright, Michael Ironside

PLOT: In a post-apocalyptic future, a young kid discovers the fighting gear of the legendary Turbo Rider and sets out to topple the tyrannical overlord Zeus.

Still from Turbo Kid (2015)

COMMENTS: Turbo Kid lays down its ace right from the get-go, as a gravel-voiced narrator describes the grim vista of a tomorrow carved out by nuclear winter and acid rain. “This is the future,” he intones, as a boy on a BMX bike pedals into frame. “This is the year 1997.” Time for a quick double-check on the year this came out… yep, and we are truly underway.

The 366 Weird Movies archive does not lack for films from four decades ago that employed a low budget and suitably barren locations to depict the world-after-the-end-of-the-world to audiences. (Just off the top of my head, I can think of three such movies that I myself have reviewed.) Recent years have seen several attempts at nostalgic pastiche, but Turbo Kid stands alone for setting “80s desolation romp” as a target. In particular, it’s the product of the serial nostalgist collective Road Kill Super Stars (aka RKSS, which consisted of this film’s three writer-directors, until Simard was booted last year for criminal sex charges); when their proposed contribution to the anthology The ABCs of Death was rejected, they had more than enough ideas to expand the concept into a feature.

Considering that Turbo Kid’s sole objective is to recapture that special 1980s mix of futuristic nihilism and naïve can-do spirit, the effort is remarkably successful. The empty fields and gravel pits in Quebec that stand in for the future’s wastelands are suitably desolate. Costuming and production design tap into the mixed milieu of flashy colors and big hair roaming around what look like abandoned sewage treatment plants. Plenty of props serve as icons of the era, from Rubik’s cubes and Nintendo Power Gloves to the ubiquitous BMX bikes that serve as everyone’s transportation around the barren wasteland. (Not that bicycles would be the most unusual form of transport to dominate the coming hellscape.) Plus, the synth-fueled musical score by Le Matos is both pitch-perfect and tiresome in a way that’s era-appropriate, and is supplemented in the font-of-the-future opening credits with the most fitting rock song choice imaginable, a fist-pumping anthem from Stan Bush (of “The Touch” fame). If you’re fooled for a moment into thinking that this was churned out in 1985, that’s fully intended, because Turbo Kid doesn’t want to just capture the feel of these 80s low-budget sci-fi epics; it wants to be one of them.

This commitment to verisimilitude extends to the film’s cast, who play everything straight enough to sell the movie’s central joke. Chambers is just the right kind of bland hero, not looking anywhere as young as his outward level of maturity, but fully selling The Kid’s sweet ignorance. As his sidekick and love interest, Leboeuf’s perky Apple turns out to be the most delightful, refreshing thing that Turbo Kid brings to the party. Her indefatigably chipper vibe initially seems like it’s going to become annoying fast but quickly becomes the animating force in the film, with a naively joyful spirit that makes a crucial revelation about her character land with a nod of approval instead of a roll of the eyes. And then there’s the filmmakers’ most crucial piece of casting, landing master of scene-chewing villainy Michael freaking Ironside to do the thing he does. Undoubtedly, he could play this part in his sleep, but while his work here is effortless, he’s in no way phoning it in. He plays the heel with all the acid-tongued vigor of his younger days, in which he no doubt celebrated getting cast over Kurtwood Smith. Ironside even makes a virtue of the directors’ most questionable choice, surrounding Zeus with a less-than-skillful set of minions who leave the overlord shy of his most supervillainous aspirations. It’s a bit of postmodern irony that’s out of place in Turbo Kid’s otherwise resolute commitment to the homage.

Perhaps the thing that most distinguishes Turbo Kid from its ancestors is the remarkable level of gore. It’s not as though these films are devoid of viscera, as any Mad Max entry will demonstrate, but RKSS is relentless, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fake blood spewed via every manner of stabbing, decapitation, and explosion. This festival of fluid is impossible to take seriously, presented in an extremely cartoonish manner, and resembling nothing so much as Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days. It can be outright funny at times, like a sawblade on a helmet that turns its victim into a screw top, or a body that lands squarely atop another person like the most unwieldy hat. So it’s one of Turbo Kid’s better surprises that the orgy of violence ends up showcasing the film’s sweetest moment, a romantic tableau that’s only enhanced by the surrounding rain of blood.

Given the opportunity for parody, Turbo Kid opts instead for direct mimicry, an odd choice by itself, but one that makes the finished film more earnest than weird. That does make the film a charming watch, if a weightless one. That 80s trash was pretty fun, and this re-creation is pretty fun, too. It’s a low bar, but clearing it is a decent way to spend an hour or two.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a wildly discordant, schizophrenically adorable, gore-soaked fantasy set in an deserted industrial wasteland… Add in the other nutso, hilarious touches, and you have the garnish you need to turn your sweet tale of friendship into a Friday night blood feast.” – Patrick Feutz, Inside the Blue Paint

(This movie was nominated for review by film izle. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

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    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WELCOME HOME, BROTHER CHARLES (1975)

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    AKA Soul Vengeance

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    “Too bad the title ‘Shaft’ was already taken.”–Peter Hanson, “Every ‘70s Movie”

    DIRECTED BY: Jamaa Fanaka

    FEATURING: Marlo Monte, Reatha Gray, Stan Kamber, Ben Bigelow, Jake Carter, Jackie Ziegler

    PLOT: After a three-year stint in the pen, Charles returns home with an extraordinary new ability that will help him settle scores with the racist cop who nabbed him and the former friend who stole his drug-dealing business and his old girlfriend.

    Still from "Welcome Home, Brother Charles" (1975)

    COMMENTS: Jamaa Fanaka rejected the term “blaxploitation” to describe his films. He felt it was more apt to describe the movies that white producers made to exploit the market, as opposed to home-grown productions representing the real concerns of black people. But he was no elitist; this is, after all, the man behind the Penitentiary series (one of which also has a spot in our reader-suggestion queue). So it’s interesting to see what Fanaka had in mind when he first had the chance to tell a story of his own. Welcome Home, Brother Charles, a movie that he cobbled together on weekends during his tenure at UCLA film school, contains plenty of sex and violence to titillate audiences, and the portrait of an African American society ridden with drugs, booze, and prostitution would be right at home in the genre. But this is a film with a genuine anger to express, and it manifests itself in the most extraordinary revenge.

    (The story of Fanaka’s name is too good not to be told. The aspiring filmmaker born Walter Gordon attended a screening of Cooley High and was shocked to discover that director Michael Schultz, name notwithstanding, was black. Determined to avoid any confusion, he got hold of a Swahili dictionary and invented a new name for himself that roughly translates as “through togetherness we will find success.”)

    Things look bad for our hero from the start: we open with the title character on the edge of a building, with a white cop trying to talk him down. Then we flashback to when all the trouble began, most notably his arrest by a cop so bigoted that he tries to cut off Charles’ genitals even before he’s read him his rights. (Not surprisingly, this earns the cop a mild “knock it off” from his superiors as punishment. He gets more of a smackdown from his cheating wife, who notes that he’s not only bad in bed, but doesn’t even have the fortitude to slap her around.) Monte’s scream is purely derived from pain, but it serves as a howl of injustice.

    To this point, this has all been extreme and unfair, but not unexpected. The hint that something weirder is coming first arrives during Charles’ stay in jail, when he has terrible dreams with suggestions of illicit experimentation. It’s clear that something much stranger is going on when Charles pays a visit to the racist cop’s home and seduces the bigot’s wife. She is flat-out hypnotized by the sight of him, literally dropping her panties and agreeing to do nothing while he seeks vengeance on her odious husband. In fact, that turns out to be his whole plan: find the men who railroaded him, seduce their ladies with his superior sexual prowess, and then kill the damned racist pig. It’s a simple, straightforward scheme, only complicated by Charles’ weapon of choice.

    You see, while we recognize the trope of the well-endowed black man, Charles’ gifts are considerably  greater than that. In fact, his manhood is incredibly large, unthinkably long, and fully prehensile. (If you were paying close attention during the opening credits, you are rewarded for spotting the foreshadowing.) Yep, his trouser snake is actually a 15-foot boa constrictor, and it operates in similar fashion, wrapping around the necks of the white men who wronged him and choking them until they’re dead. This is the astounding plot twist that kicks Welcome Home, Brother Charles into the strange stratosphere, because while this site is no stranger to giant johnsons pursuing justice, this killer anaconda is on a whole other level.

    Perhaps the surest sign that Fanaka did not want a run-of-the-mill blaxploitation film is his determination to end the film on a dark note. Despite the monster in his pants, Charles can’t hold off institutional racism for long, and the fact that going out on his own terms is the victory reflects this movie’s mindset. Brother Charles finishes with a serious-minded epigram—“Let them indulge their pride if thinking I am destroyed is a comfort to them; let it be”—that isn’t really earned, and which suggests a very different film in Fanaka’s head from the one we just watched. If that film existed, the third act strangled it to death with its audacious twist. Maybe Welcome Home, Brother Charles isn’t blaxploitation. But something’s being exploited, that’s for sure.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…really, really weird… one of the most insane movies you will ever see. It’s also not very good, but it’s not awful, and I still wholeheartedly recommend it, at least to lovers of all things cheese related.”–Ryan McDonald, Shameless Self Expression

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

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    62*. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)

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    “If we say that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds.” ― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

    DIRECTED BY: Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)

    FEATURING: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong

    PLOT: Evelyn Wang is overwhelmed operating a Simi Valley laundromat, caring for her elderly father, enduring an ongoing IRS audit, and trying to maintain her strained relationship with her daughter. Into this maelstrom steps an alternate-universe version of her husband, who informs her that a rage-fueled supervillain incarnation of her daughter is threatening to destroy the entire multiverse. Only Evelyn, using martial artistry and emotional intelligence that she never knew she possessed, can traverse dimensions and embody wildly different iterations of herself to stave off disaster.

    BACKGROUND:

    • The original script was written with in mind, with Yeoh envisioned in a supporting role. Once the lead character was switched to a woman, Yeoh was the only choice for the role.
    • The Daniels cited inspiration from sources as diverse as the films of Wong Kar-Wai, the video game Everything, and the children’s book “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. “
    • The directors began work on the film after turning down an opportunity to work on Marvel’s “Loki” series, itself a show set against the backdrop of a multiverse. The duo worried that other contemporaneous multiverse projects, including Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and “Rick and Morty,” would make their concept out-of-date.
    • The film was released under different Chinese-language titles depending upon the market, including In an Instant, the Entire Universe in mainland China, Mother’s Multiverse in Taiwan, and Weird Woman Warrior Fucks Around and Saves the Universe in Hong Kong.
    • The team of martial arts performers and choreographers includes self-taught brothers Andy and Brian Le. (They are showcased in the fight over a suggestively shaped IRS auditing award.) Daniels discovered them on YouTube and hired them based on their familiarity with Hong Kong-style fighting techniques.
    • Appropriate to the diverse backgrounds of her family, Evelyn speaks Mandarin with her husband but Cantonese with her father, while her daughter’s Chinese is that of someone unskilled in the language.
    • An unexpectedly dominant force at the 95th Academy Awards, snagging 11 nominations and taking home seven statues for Best Picture (one of only a handful of films with science fiction/fantasy elements ever to take the top prize), Directing, Original Screenplay, Editing, and acting honors for Yeoh, Quan, and Curtis. More importantly, Yeoh took home the Weirdcademy Award for Best Actress.

    INDELIBLE IMAGE: I know, I know. The hot dog fingers, right? They do make for a superb visual shorthand (sorry) for the film’s breed of weirdness, it’s true, especially when an alternate Jamie Lee Curtis uses her encased-meat digits to tickle the ivories in a rendition of “Clair de Lune.” But is it truly greater than a spectacular bagel that truly has everything on it? Or the transdimensional power of eating lip balm to imbue the consumer with extensive martial arts abilities? Or the introspective moment featuring two rocks as the only souls in the world? EEAAO luxuriates both the oddities of universes different from our own and the peculiarities unique to each realm. Fortunately, the film spares us from having to pick one of them by concocting a spectacular montage of our heroine across all universes and timelines, including some we will never explore outside of this split-second vision. It’s a dizzying triumph of editing and a wonderful visualization of both Evelyn’s dilemma and her power.

    TWO WEIRD THINGS: Hot dog fingers; rocky relationship

    WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Everything Everywhere All At Once is a family drama festooned with the trappings of Matrix-style ontological discussions, multiversal alternates, elaborate martial arts set-pieces, and parodies both reverential and cheeky. That mix alone would garner our attention, and the decision to center the story on characters well outside the Hollywood norm —Asian, immigrant, working-class, gay—further pushes it outside the mainstream. On top of that, the glorious and unexpected choice to ground all this mayhem in an atmosphere of playfulness and joy gives the film further offbeat credentials. It exemplifies this movie’s wonderfully deranged logic to employ googly eyes to stave off the apocalypse. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fun.

    Original trailer for Everything Everywhere all at Once

    COMMENTS: “I thought you said when she says (stuff) like that, it Continue reading 62*. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022) →

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    CAPSULE: THE WAVES OF MADNESS (2024)

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    DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost

    FEATURING: Jason Trost, ,

    PLOT: Agent LeGrasse is charged with investigating a distress signal from an ocean liner which has veered off course into the center of the Spacecraft Cemetery.

    COMMENTS: A throwaway line at the start of The Waves of Madness reveals a great deal in hindsight. Ambling drunkenly to the bar on a massive ocean liner, a passenger seeks a final drink for the night—some Scotch—and is mistakenly served rum. No matter, he assures the embarrassed bartender, “It’s all going to the same place.” Little does our tippler know: it is indeed. Every single passenger, all of them doomed.

    Jason Trost wastes no time laying down the story and style in The Waves of Madness, a tight little bit of Lovecraftian adventure that appears to be the launch of his next recurring movie universe. We quickly meet Agent LeGrasse, a professional working under the direction of an unspecified global organization. “The Elders of the Sea” (an ominously christened vessel if ever there was one) has an emergency—one so dire that its distress signal explicitly advises against anyone coming to the rescue. Despite this, LeGrasse boats over, docks his craft, and explores the floating derelict with nothing but his handgun, a few flash-bang grenades, and backpack stuffed with “Plan B.”

    Anyone familiar with survival horror video games and  side-scrollers will immediately observe Trost’s inspiration. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen lateral camera movement packed so densely anywhere else. Trost nails ‘game logic,’ too, adding to the experience. LeGrasse discovers an in-g̶a̶m̶e̶ -movie clue about how light can stop the menace, and before a pivotal bit of actioneering, counts aloud to determine how many seconds he has to enact a tricky maneuver. There’s even what appears to be a escort mission (and like most gamers, LeGrasse wants nothing to do with that); but this ends up being part of an underlying ambiguity explored more thoroughly through the three timelines that concurrently unfold as our jaded agent delves deeper into the mystery.

    Trost knows his roots in the gaming world—and has now provided evidence beyond the delightfully ridiculous foray into epic levels of DDR in his FP saga. The Waves of Madness isn’t groundbreaking. We’ve seen most of these pieces before: lost cruise ship, strange cult doings, mysterious eldritch entities, hard-boiled gunman, and so on. But the director (and screen-writer, and producer, and one of the soundtrack musicians…) has distilled his various inspirations into a pleasingly particular experience, which will click on all the nostalgia switches for many viewers—and hopefully inspire others to investigate what it is Trost is celebrating.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…as the strong-jawed, eye-patched, laconic Legrasse wanders through this seaborne hellscape as though he were trapped in a Thirties horror adventure or a surreal noir – even though he comes with technology (mobile phones, digital downloads, a portable ‘nuke’) very much from our own age – his own past, present and future become similarly confounded…The highly mannered nature of Legrasse’s experiences on the ship has the viewer too constantly questioning their reality… this is hokey retro fun, turning one man’s trauma into genre-bound pandemonium, and reinterpreting cinema’s fantasy worlds as (un)safe spaces for drifitng pyches [sic] to explore.”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (contemporaneous) 

    The Waves of Madness

    The Waves of Madness
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    Capsules

    CASPULE: NINJA TERMINATOR (1986)

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    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: , Jack Lam, Jonathan Wattis, Jeong-lee Hwang

    PLOT: Three renegade ninjas each capture a part of a golden statue that will give them magical powers; they frequently call characters in a completely different movie who, through the magic of re-dubbing, deal with assassinations and kidnappings that appear to tangentially involve ninjas.

    Still from ninja terminator (1986)

    COMMENTS: Pity poor Jaguar Wong. He just wants to be a too-cool-for-school ass-kicker rescuing, then bedding, hot chicks, but he keeps being interrupted by telephone calls coming from another movie entirely from disinterested ninja Richard Harrison. Adding insult to inconvenience, the incoming calls are made from a Garfield phone! That’s right, Godfrey Ho is at it again, taking an undistinguished ninja-free catalog film (in this case, Korean chopsocky The Uninvited Guest) and adding newly shot footage to make an all-new movie all about then-trendy ninjas! Or at least, that’s the idea. As always, the plots of the two badly-fused movies make about as much sense as an owl’s head stitched onto a turtle’s body.

    I have watched this film multiple times and am still not 100% certain how the theft of the ninja statue is supposed to fit into the Korean guys’ plotline1. I just know that Richard Harrison telephones the good guy (on a Garfield phone) and Jonathan Wattis telephones the bad guy (not on a Garfield phone; Garfield phones are reserved for good guy ninjas). But most of the time, Jaguar Wong just does his thing, and the ninjas do their thing. From the viewer’s perspective, it’s like flipping back and forth between two UHF channels showing competing martial arts flicks on a Saturday morning in 1986.

    Absolutely no one is watching Ninja Terminator for the plot, anyway. They’re watching for the action scenes and for the bizarre directorial decisions that continually crop up. And the film disappoints on neither score. Of all the Godfrey Ho cut-and-pastes, Ninja Terminator may have chosen the best fighting to paste in. Jack Lam has a Bruce Lee (or at the very least a Bruce Le) quality about him. He fights effortlessly, moving as little as possible, letting assailants waste their energy before knocking them down with a standing kick to the head. No one’s a match for him until he faces endboss Jeong-lee Hwang (Drunken Master, a fighter so legendary that it is said he once killed an attacker with a single kick to the temple—in real life). All the fights are athletic spectacles, and the final battle is both epic and ridiculous. (Meanwhile, the ninja battles are athletic enough but look more like gymnastic exhibitions, with ninjas doing a lot of pointless cartwheels in the middle of combat). As far as strange touches go, take your pick, from the infamous Garfield phone to toy robots delivering messages from the evil ninja empire to a crime boss in a blond Prince Valiant wig to ninjas slicing watermelons for target practice to a random domestic crab attack to ninjas who wear more eyeliner than J.D. Vance. To top it all off, the film is scored by Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Ennio Morricone, and others (without their knowledge, of course—Ho’s musical taste greatly exceeds his scruples).

    Ninja Terminator is the rare movie that’s impossible to recommend—yet everyone should see it.

    Ninja Terminator sits in an odd situation regards our Canonically Weird List. Ho’s work is already represented there by Ninja Champion, which lacks the wind-up toy robot but has a shot of the iconic Garfield phone along with other highlights, such as ninjas who wear headbands reading “Ninja” and dialogue that is absurd even by Ho standards. Terminator, however, is probably the best-known, best-loved, and overall most-watchable of Ho’s ninja franchise. You can substitute Terminator for Champion in a pinch and still earn full credit on your weird-movie transcript.

    Cauldron Films’ 2025 Blu-ray edition of Ninja Terminator has all Ho fans could ever want and more, including two (!) commentary tracks and interviews with Godfrey himself.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…an incoherent mess that someone manages to engage and entertain throughout.”–Michael Den Boer, 10K Bullets (Blu-ray)

    1. Wikipedia actually does a good job of reconstructing the plot, but, inspired by the spirit of Godfrey Ho, the summary includes nonsensical sentences like “Meanwhile, Ninja Master Harry and Ninja Master Baron, each the other has already tried to assassinate them.”

    Ninja Terminator [Blu-ray]

    Ninja Terminator [Blu-ray]
    • Years after being assaulted, a young woman (Juliet Chan) seeks bloody revenge on the five men responsible.
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