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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK (2025)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Kana Aoi, Daisuke Kasuya, Atsuko Nakata, Sayaka, Kei Taniguchi

PLOT: A missing-persons case steers Tamala and her friend into a world of corporate nefariousness, deep-time conspiracy, and staggering cosmic implications.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: To quote Fantasia programmer Rubert Bottenberg: “The Japanese kawaii paradigm of Hello Kitty and Hatsune Miku collides with cabalistic capitalism, cataclysmic prophecy, and the ruptured realities of , , and in… a deviously dreamlike, metaphysical mind-melt of high-fructose, retro-futuristic, paranoid pop-art brilliance.”

COMMENTS: Having your eyes bombarded at the end of a long day can be rather refreshing: something to wipe away the accumulated impressions, and leave your perception open to embrace the crazy world anew. This effect was indeed welcome, for as Tamala likes to say: “Another f*cking day is about to begin.” This line, delivered in a childlike, brat-girl, cutey pie kind of way, kicks off the (*deep breath*) Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in the Dark experience. An experience unlike any other I’ve witnessed on the big screen. An experience, if I may, whose existence hinges on the manifold developments of the past century and a half, and on the strange minds of the enigmatic t.o.L team.

For those unfamiliar with the Tamala phenomenon (as I was, until the screening), she was introduced to the world—at Fantasia, I believe—in 2010. Per her bio, she is “[a] young female cat, born in the Orion Constellation on the Odessa star; cute, but uses much foul language. She was genetically engineered in Cat Year 1869 to always remain a year and a half old, in order to be the immortal mascot of the mega-conglomerate CATTY & Co.” Which should give you the gist of things.

Where the gist may slip from your grasp may depend, but having missed the gist before the Tamala movie screening, I was still a happy viewer as Tamala 2030 washed over me like a wave of strange black and white purréed media. Tamala dances, Tamala curses, Tamala munches on pocky, and all the while the movie spools out impossible amounts of ambient details. Seven cities in seven different prefectures have seen simultaneous disappearances of seven different two-year-old cats. (The fact that one of them handsome spurs Tamala to join her boy-friend’s [?] investigation of the matter.) The specifics clatter on-screen at a blistering pace as Tamala, always boing-boinging in her steps, saunters fearlessly through class riots, cabalistic postal machinations, and onward to her empyrean duel amongst the stars.

t.o.L. manage the difficult hat-trick of fusing several graphic styles into a cohesive—albeit capital-“I”-Incredible—world. Tamala 2030 is a symphony of sight, walking a devilishly narrow through-line of technique where any slight variation would have catastrophically cacophonous results. Echoes of late ’90s screen-saver loops, mid-19th-century advertisement figures and fonts, flash™-y forms, and 3D-celestiality are all here, and all coexist. This film is a dizzying march through time and space, an appropriately epic-length adventure with pathos, frog-licking, reincarnation, cow spotted sports cars, intrigue, graffiti—and more than one explosion of Tamala into swarms of mini-Tamalas.

Oh yes, this will cleanse and flush your mind’s palette, and you’ll feel jumbled and pumped and ready to rock—’cause another f*cking day is about to begin.

Tamala‘s theatrical release date is uncertain, but Deaf Crocodile has acquired the physical media rights and plans to release the film in 2026.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other reviews were found at time of publication

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366 UNDERGROUND: THE BUNNY GAME (2011)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Adam Rehmeier

FEATURING: Rodleen Getsic, Jeff F. Renfro

PLOT: A prostitute is abducted by a trucker for five days.

COMMENTS: My goodness, that was something. Where to begin…

Slapping on the “Beware” label is a step in the right direction—The Bunny Game is a real piece of work. The film starts with super-creep: a female victim suffocating under a white plastic bag on her head. The shot is mere seconds long, but shows the filmmaker’s cards. Rehmeier has some nasty things in store for the viewer. The second shot, much longer—too long, certainly, for comfort—shows the card hiding up his sleeve: some John, viewed at the waist, his erect penis thrust into the mouth of the protagonist, forcefully “encouraging” her to fellate him. This shot goes on, it seems, until the act’s completion.

Events like this unfold for the unnamed woman (dubbed “Bunny” in the credits), going from rather bad to unimaginably worse when she proffers a blow job to a trucker who then abducts her and sexually and psychologically tortures her for five days. Heartbeat foley dominates one scene, where the muffled grunts and screams sound like they are coming through a door whilst a steady thump-thump-thump batters like an amphetamine dirge. Squeals of torsion wrench, as one nightmarish sequence blurs into the next, the timeline skipping between Bunny’s ordeal in high resolution, and a previous victim’s in grainier video. The trucker (dubbed “Hog”) mutters, snorts, smokes—coming across as a miserable, furious wreck of inhumanity as he breaks his victim.

Flash cuts, reverse footage, shaky camera, and other stylization tools simultaneously undercut and enhance the visceral malice. The movie weaves a subtle, but pernicious, electronic score throughout. The two leads obviously give us their all. But to what end? The Bunny Game technically qualifies as a narrative, I suppose: there is at least a through-line of events to follow. However, there is no climax, and no conclusion. As once observed: “If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.” Rehmeier makes an experience with this film—a journey through malignant refuse, or a distillation of white hot agony.

In the Blu-ray disc extras, Rehmeier explains, “…we tried to maintain this negative energy throughout the production, and I think we were successful.” (And if pretentiousness through understatement is a thing, the filmmaker nails it.) But if The Bunny Game might be written off as pretentious Art-House-Shock-Shlock, at least it spares the viewer any affectations of deeper meaning: what you see is what you get—and what you see is mightily disturbing.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sort of an unholy merger between extreme performance art and experimental horror film, The Bunny Game essentially dares viewers to sit through it without crying uncle.” — Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital

The Bunny Game [Blu-ray]

The Bunny Game [Blu-ray]
  • A prostitute is abducted by a deranged trucker who subjects her to five days of torture and madness.
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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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