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Tag Archives: Black Comedy
CHANNEL 366: DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED (2011-2016, 2022)
DIRECTED BY: Becky Sloan, Joseph Pelling, Baker Terry
PLOT: Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck find their days consistently interrupted by anthropomorphized objects in their home and uninvited guests who insist on teaching them lessons about life via song, dance, and increasingly unsettling interactions.
COMMENTS: There’s a reason that children’s television is, on the whole, weird. After all, there are two competing, even contradictory goals at work: these shows often want to teach young people some valuable life lesson (the alphabet, how the mail is delivered, treating your friends with decency and respect), but hold the audience’s notoriously wandering attention while doing so. All those talking aardvarks and talking Blue Heelers and talking magical unicorns are handwaving determined to steal a child’s focus with any degree of strangeness necessary. Landmarks of the genre going back decades—“Captain Kangaroo,” “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” —have all danced along the line where oddness tips over from charming to off-putting. Even the grand poobah of them all, “Sesame Street,” had to overcome initial concerns that its central conceit—humans and puppets living side-by-side—would be incomprehensible to children. Obviously, the kids figured it out.
Any success inspires parody, satire, and critique. Children’s TV has certainly earned its fair share, as can be seen in the stressful adulthood of the characters in Avenue Q, the aggressive surrealism of “Wonder Showzen,” and the oppressive nightmare of today’s subject, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.” This British web-series-turned-TV-show is perfectly captures the way that just living in the world can feel like unavoidable oppression. The machinations of people who are venal, stupid, or both conspire against “Don’t Hug Me”‘s characters, through the lens of two puppets and a guy with a crimson mop for a head who just want to get through the day. For anyone who remembers childhood as an endless series of grownups trying to kill your fun with their wondrous tales of adulthood and education, this is a show that sees you clear as day.
“Don’t Hug Me” began as a web series, and it establishes its theme—the world is fundamentally cruel—right away. In the very first short, a singing sketchpad shows up to share the wonders of thinking with boundless imagination, and after engaging the trio, she immediately proceeds to shut down their creative efforts with helpful corrections like “Green is not a creative color.” And there’s always room for things to get worse. A collection of creatures trying to describe love pile on more and more parameters and qualifiers, culminating in the revelation that they worship a giant idol and feed it gravel. An interest in food spurs on a storm of questionable nutrition advice, recommending aspic and referring to vegetables as “soil food.” These Continue reading CHANNEL 366: DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED (2011-2016, 2022)
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: UP THE CATALOGUE (2024)
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DIRECTED BY: Alastair Siddons
FEATURING: Lyndsey Marshal, John Macmillan, Morgana Robinson, Anastasia Hille
PLOT: Hailey, the lead presenter for a shopping network, is forbidden from suspending her performance on a set where it’s always still morning.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Hailey’s journey to the end of the film is by turns comical, confusing, and surreal, culminating in a quick-but-profound moment of “hmm.”
COMMENTS: Judging from the Kafka dreams I suffered after watching this, I’ll advertise that angle first. An eager makeup artist preps protagonist Hailey for broadcast, interrupted by odd exchanges with an unseen Dave who runs hot and cold: snippy one moment, flattering in the next. “Forever Bread,” the invention of a gruff fellow in military-style fatigues, is among the never-fully-explained items for sale on 4QTV (quality, quantity, quintity, and never any Q’s), and we learn of Hailey’s aversion to bread mold and of her son, whose name she can’t quite remember. Derek—a regular caller, it seems telephones and goes on to confess his fear of dying (not unreasonably for a nonagenarian). Quick break, and on to the next item.
Alastair Siddons skewers one of television’s more ridiculous and unsettling genres, home shopping programs, through a ridiculous and unsettling little film. Up the Catalogue never goes anywhere; first Hailey’s is unable to leave the production set, then the building, and the finale is an extended pursuit down a repeated cycle of stairwell. Her boss, Dave, is the hellish counterpart of a Chris Morris TV producer, dangling the promise of implied freedom in front of Hailey only if she agrees to the terms of the rent-to-marry companion owl, Maureen, who used to be the network’s star hamster.
Up the Catalogue left me with a feeling of “Whelp, that just happened”, followed thereafter by a none-too-restful bit of sleep. The film cruises along the comedy-cringe line in true British fashion, adding a hearty dose of cramped infinity-space as the story unfolds within an endless backstage labyrinth. By the end, I wanted out as much as Hailey did, and I was relieved that my visit to this world wrapped up in only a little over an hour. That said, I strangely enjoyed the distressing journey—a sentiment which leaves me as confused as the climax did.
Rolling again in Five-Four-Q-Two-Action!
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
![Up the Catalogue [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41mXh6buBAL._SL500_.jpg)
366 UNDERGROUND: INCORPOREAL MAN (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Zeb Haradon
FEATURING: None (completely generated by AI)
PLOT: A delusional bum with supernatural abilities tries to fight crime and save democracy.
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 Hitchcockian 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:
65*: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)
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DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly
FEATURING: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, Wood Harris, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, Bai Ling, Jon Lovitz, Mandy Moore, Holmes Osborne, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, Lou Taylor Pucci, Miranda Richardson, Zelda Rubinstein, 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.
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 Janeane Garofalo’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)