Tag Archives: Beware

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: INCORPOREAL MAN (2025)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: None (completely generated by AI)

PLOT: A delusional bum with supernatural abilities tries to fight crime and save democracy.

Still from Incorporeal Man (2025)

COMMENTS: From the beginning, something feels off. Characters move clumsily and the imagery alternates between photorealistic and animated with no consistency at all. Then it becomes clear. This is a feature length film completely constructed with the help of Artificial Intelligence. But let’s not be negatively predisposed, assuming it will be the product of laziness and lack of talent, just because it doesn’t use real cameras and actors. Let’s soberly examine it for what it is, or at least attempts to be.

Director Haradon has a background in AI-made films: The Epic of Gilgamesh (2024) is a feature-length A.I. adaptation of the world-famous poem. Now, with Incorporeal Man, he works on an abandoned script of his own from 2004, bringing it for the first time ever on the “big screen.” The plot revolves around Jim, a disheveled drunkard (partly modeled on Haradon’s physical appearance) coming to town to catch the infamous serial killer “The North Butcher.” Jim develops a friendship with Roger, a cartoonish egg-shaped figure working at the Shit Factory—don’t ask–and through their conversations the protagonist’s background and special traits (like his superpower that allows him to travel through walls) are revealed. Pretty basic exposition, but it works.

Through Roger, Jim finds a job at the Shit Factory, too, studying kung fu in his spare time in hopes of saving the city from criminals and sickos. He mostly goes around talking about himself, though, getting trapped gradually in a series of destructive and self-destructive delusions. It all plays out like a dark comedy, with a protagonist who’s an exaggerated combination of two well known archetypes: half superhero, and half deadbeat detective out of a classic noir. Everything is archetypal, in fact, and mostly plays by the rules of classic narrative, with only the somewhat anticlimactic and ironic finale really making a difference.

If this movie wasn’t made by AI it would be basic, forgettable work. Here it has a distinct grotesque aesthetic, with decomposition and degradation imbued almost in every shot, not only in our low-life characters but in their environments, too. There’s also a nod to classic ian thrillers towards the climax.

For sure, there are some WTF elements along the way, such as the Shit Factory. The factory works mostly as an allegory, though, recalling shitty, alienating work environments most of us can relate to. The sound department is also AI software; it works okay, incorporating realistic voices and some classical tunes. There are some weird sound effects, however, like the farting noise heard whenever our character turns incorporeal to pass through walls.

All in all, this movie may appeal to a certain kind of audience that loves bad cinema. It is a Z-movie that might entertain for how outrageously silly it is. We do have to recognize the passion here. The movie is also available for free—legally—on YouTube, so you can check it out if the concept intrigues you. But a final warning: Incorporeal Man is in essence feature-length AI slop, nothing more.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The spirit of the late poet Bukowski becomes a ghost in the machine in the AI-tooled unconventional superhero feature The Incorporeal Man… Fans of Tim and Eric will like it, as this is way stranger and less irritating than the Tim and Eric feature movie.“–Michael-Talbot Haynes, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: VISIONS OF SUFFERING (FINAL DIRECTOR’S CUT) (2006/2016)

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Visions of Suffering is available to watch on video-on-demand in either it’s original 2006 version or the 2016 “Final Director’s Cut.”

BewareWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Anastasia Asafova, Andrey Iskanov

PLOT: A necrophilia-obsessed man is haunted by demons.

Still from Visions of Suffering (Final Director's Cut) (2016)

COMMENTS: Ominously titled, as if to warn potential viewers, Andrey Iskanov’s Visions of Suffering is available both in an original 2006 cut and in a shorter 2016 “Final Director’s Cut.” Given the option of watching both, it seems obvious that 90 minutes of Suffering is preferable to 120 minutes of Suffering. Without having seen the original, I feel confident in saying Iskanov made the right decision to cut out 30 minutes of Suffering.

While the movie is extremely abstract and opaque in its details and methodology, playing like a feature length music video for an industrial noise/death metal crossover band, the basics of the thin plot are not especially difficult to comprehend. Sasha, our bespectacled protagonist, wanders through a misty yellow forest until he encounters a guy wearing a burlap sack on his head (the synopsis explains that this is a shaman and that Sasha interrupts an occult ceremony, perhaps thus bringing a curse on his head). Of course, it was all a dream, and Sasha wakes up and immediately screens a necrophilia porno flick before discovering that his phone is on the fritz. He leafs through books on Jack the Ripper and an anthology of murder scene photos while waiting for the repairman to arrive. While the repairman fixes the phone, they talk about dreams, and the guest casually drops some vampire lore. Phone fixed, Sasha calls his girlfriend (?) Vika, who’s busy shooting lesbian cutter porn. After hanging up, Sasha sees some vampires loitering about outside, and one of them stabs him in the earlobe through the keyhole. Then Sasha has some visions of suffering, and Vika’s car is possessed as she drives to his apartment while wearing iron cross sunglasses. Sasha has some more visions of suffering and calls an exorcist type (played by the director), who explains that Sasha has likely riled up some demons through his desecration of the dead. The director offers to fix the problem for 7000 euros, but that’s too steep for Sasha. So he has some more visions of suffering until the demon Golgatha shows up in his apartment with a sword and starts hacking up the furniture. Then he wakes up, and everything’s OK.

It’s a familiar old story, but Iskanov films it with some genuine style, if not taste or discipline. Much of the film is shot through hazy green/yellow filters that turn cheap costumes and effects that would probably look ridiculous in the full light of day into creepy nightmare fuel. (At times it’s like a less-effective Begotten, without the mythological resonances.) The sound mix is thick, dripping with ooze, spooky noises, and shrieks and moans off one of those atmospheric Halloween sound effect compilations. There is a lot of shock imagery: mutilation, autopsies, explicit sex, implied necrophilia. There are also a lot of superimposed image, especially in the fast-cut opening credits sequence that shows off Iskanov’s gift for montage. But all of this artistry is in service of a juvenile morbidity that seems to arise from listening to too many Marilyn Manson albums under the influence of too much hashish.

Suffering earns the rare and, in some quarters, coveted “” + “” tags. That’s not a recommendation for most folks. The Beware is for content—explicit sex, grotesque real autopsy footage, and some sick stuff that made even me cringe—but even excepting those, the film will prove a bit of a slog for most viewers because of its nonlinearity, tonal monotony, and humorlessness. Still, although it might have worked better chopped up into a series of easily digestible shorts, thanks to some memorably spooky imagery and resourcefulness in disguising his budgetary limitations Iskanov’s movie is not as much of a trial as it sounds like on paper. Fans of experimental extreme horror will eat it up. But please, don’t force me to watch the 2-hour version.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie is really about an endless stream of colorful cinematography and visuals, head-trips, nightmares, atmosphere, bizarre creatures, etc… the plot and characters never really develop. In other words, too undisciplined.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

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

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: VASE DE NOCES (1974)

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AKA Wedding Trough; The Pig F*cking Movie

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Beware

DIRECTED BY:Thierry Zéno

FEATURING: Dominique Garny

PLOT: A young farmer embraces his animalistic side as he romances a sow.

Still from Vase de Noces (1974)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Vase de Noces is an under-appreciated classic of surrealist cinema. Not only it is full of extremities but it remains enigmatic, inviting us to ponder on  possible interpretations.

COMMENTS: The opening shot, somewhere in between the lyrical and the grotesque, the poetic and the nonsensical, sets the tone accordingly. Our protagonist attempts to dress two pigeons with doll heads, in the first of a series of segments where animals fall prey to his whims. The monstrosity he strives to create recalls a pair of malformed angels, and his perverted, personal view of the angelic. And this layered and disturbing—if purely symbolic—act is just the beginning of our tale.

The film is simple from a narrative standpoint. We follow our protagonist, a young peasant, in a series of extreme and illogical acts. He seems at times a pure, innocent, childlike soul, flying his kite without a care in the world and praying before lunch like a proper Christian. He is also capable of the grossest barbarities, like the infamous act of bestiality mentioned whenever this movie is discussed.

What exactly his nature? Is he a real yet disturbed person, a simpleton, and  the film a realistic character study? Or is he purely symbolic, an allegorical personification of the wildest impulses of the human psyche: the id, the beast lurking inside each and every one of us? Probably the latter. Our protagonist is a being of pure emotion, full of contradicting desires, yet always eager to embrace his bestial side.

He seems to find some sort of happiness through bestiality—at first. The female pig gets pregnant and gives birth to three beautiful piglets. It’s almost wholesome. Yet the young man is still unable to find comfort. Unable to help himself, he wreaks havoc through a series of repugnant acts, culminating in a tragic finale. Fully embracing your wild impulses can only bring destruction and self-annihilation, our tale seems to say.

Vase De Noces was Zéno’s feature debut, his second movie after a short documentary portraying schizophrenic artist Georges Moinet. His main interests here are not dissimilar. Zéno once again studies humanity apart from its logical “civilized” aspects, depicting people as amalgamations of impulses, emotions, depravity, and nothing more.

That’s why words—a product of reason—are completely absent from our tale. Instead, we have a rich soundscape full of playful tunes imitating animals’ voices or natural sounds, with classical melodies adding a hint of lyricism. There are also piercing and alarming noises at the most intense moments. The soundscape perfectly aligns with the film’s hypnotic black and white photography.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this Belgian-lensed art-dirge is one of the most foul and pretentious pics ever made. It’s so damned bizarre that simply detailing the plot can’t even come close to conveying the unique combination of utter disgust and absolute boredom you register while viewing it.” – Steven Puchalski, Shock Cinema

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CAPSULE: ELDORADO (2012)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Richard Driscoll

FEATURING: Richard Driscoll, Darren Morgan, , Jeff Fahey, , , , Brigitte Nielsen, , Rik Mayall, Sylvester McCoy, , David Carradine (archival footage)

PLOT: Oliver and Stanley Rosenblum, a Blues Brothers tribute act, accidentally find themselves in Eldorado, where the Sawyer-style family ruling the roost has big plans for the town’s 200th anniversary.

Still from Eldorado (2012)

COMMENTS: I can be very forgiving if a movie has competent sound design: balanced dialogue audio, fleshed-out aural background, and adequate-to-good music. Eldorado failed me here, and in many other ways. This makes sense when you know a bit of history behind the movie: writer / director / producer / &c. Richard Driscoll apparently hoped to succeed in a Producers-style gambit, claiming a big movie whilst making it on the cheap. Sound design, surely, suffers from this underinvestment—but what are Eldorado‘s merits?

These include, and are probably limited to, the following:

  • Darryl Hannah as “The Stranger”, and her delivery of the titular poem by
  • A surprisingly touching reunion of Vietnam veterans, from Jeff Fahey and Bill Moseley
  • An homage to a famous Laurel & Hardy bit
  • Michael Madsen’s face, ever over-reacting in that roguish Madsenian manner
  • Peter O’Toole proving that even in his don’t-give-a-damn super-annuation, his floor of quality is higher than many actors’ ceilings

The rest is, alas, little more than a tedious curio with occasional blasts of badly mixed sound, music, and FX. There’s plenty that’s gross (though well within the average 366er’s tolerance), plenty that’s derivative (the fine line here being that much of said spoofing is by design), and plenty of questions—the most looming of which is, “Why, oh why?”—and the answer comes back: for tax fraud.

It would be remiss of me to recommend this to anyone—ever—except for the most die-hard of Rik Mayall fans. A curious actor, to say the least, and woefully underused. His performance as Mario the Chef transcends the surrounding doofery; and that’s even bearing in mind it consists mostly of lip-synching to a couple of pop-opera tunes. Had Eldorado been put completely under his creative direction, we may have had one of the grandest monstrosities of the new century.

Instead we don’t.

We have Eldorado.

_________________________________________________

Reviewer’s Addendum: Apparently I watched the 90-minute “Director’s Cut”, which I feel is more than sufficient despite being half-an-hour shorter than an earlier release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To say that Eldorado’s cast is eclectic is more than somewhat of an understatement. Quite how Mr Driscoll coerced such a parade of (one-time) A-listers to appear in his ‘Mamma Mia for horror fans’ (the filmmaker’s description – not mine) is beyond me. Surely they didn’t all need the money?  But you certainly get more than you bargain for with this ‘B’ movie: Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and David Carradine (in his last albeit brief role) reuniting from ‘Kill Bill’. Jeff Fahey, Patrick Bergin and Brigitte Nielsen – who deserves a special mention for miming Ottis Redding’s ‘Respect’ in a hair salon whilst kitted out in stockings and suspenders. Throw a cameo by Caroline Munro into the melting pot and you sure have one big steaming pot of erm, surrealism.”–Paul Worts, Fleapits and Picture Palaces

(This movie was nominated for review by nc, who described it as “an incomprehensible mess, a hypnotically bad fever dream, a film so bad it’s hard to believe it even exists.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I NEVER LEFT THE WHITE ROOM (2000)

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AKA My Crepitus

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Todd Schneider

FEATURING: Michael Todd Schneider, Eric Boring, Tom Colbert, Amy Beth Deford

PLOT: Hospital patient Jeffrey has violent, bloody dreams revolving around his life as a sex criminal and murderer.

Still from I Never Left the White Room (2000)

COMMENTS: The general tenor of I Never Left the White Room is established not in the first act, not even in the first minutes, but in the vanity card of the production company. The Maggot Films banner boasts stabs, screams, and gore to assure the viewer can expect only the most unpleasant, blood-curdling material. By that standard, I Never Left the White Room is an honest production indeed.

Schneider expands on a short film, and while one is inclined to salute him for deftly hiding the seams between old and new, the patchwork nature of the movie makes that faint praise. While there’s the suggestion of a narrative spine, I Never Left the White Room is really just a collection of disparate images, scenes whose common thread is their origin inside Jeffrey’s mixed-up brain. The title turns out to be a description of our mise en scene. 

Those visions are largely troubled, and Schneider distinguishes them with varying degrees of stylization. The most compelling is a dialogue set on a railroad trestle that warps the video image with posterization and color correction to suggest the demons inside our protagonist’s mind. Sometimes the beasts are literal, like a monster whose features can be smeared away like shaving cream. Other times, the horror has only the barest pretension to metaphor, like an absurdly lengthy scene in which a man spies on a woman taking a shower, each pleasuring themselves until the woman begins to bleed profusely. If the same central character weren’t involved, you would never know one thing had anything to do with the other. 

What Schneider is going for, other than checking items off a list, is not clear. There’s murder of women, already an infuriating trope but even more so when shorn of any motivation. There’s gore but, aside from the occasional jump scare, nothing that’s truly inventive. The acting and bare minimum of scripted dialogue don’t help, and there’s neither a hint of disgust nor irony. I think it’s supposed to be chilling, not funny, when the psychiatrist (who might also be a cop?) tells his patient, “I should be straight with you: my wife and daughters were raped and murdered last night.” As delivered, though, it’s not momentous; it’s ridiculous. 

I Never Left the White Room is trash. There’s a market for trash, of course, as evidenced by Schneider’s later association with Fred Vogel and the August Underground series. But this isn’t even good trash. Schneider has an hour of video to reveal the depths of his imagination; it proves to be shallow and aimless. Leave the white room. 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the main aspect of this 70-minute piece of headache-inducing insanity is the endless stream of spliced together nightmarish visuals, surreal dreamy encounters, gory visions, bizarre symbolic imagery, lustful masturbatory fantasies sometimes including violence, grating sound effects, eye-slicing color filters, grainy post-editing effects, and so on…. mostly tedious…”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White Room) [Blu-ray]

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List Price : 36.97

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(This movie was nominated for review by Kenshin, who described it as “very insane, very trippy, very surreal and extremely creepy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)