Tag Archives: Body horror

Capsules

CAPSULE: ELSE (2024)

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Else is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Thibault Emin

FEATURING: Matthieu Sampeur, Edith Proust, Lika Minamoto

PLOT: A shy young fellow and an outgoing woman he recently met shack up together during a lockdown as a strange, body-altering disease runs rampant worldwide.

COMMENTS: Intricate foley work, meditative shots of organic geometry, creepy flesh holes in the wall, a sparky female protagonist, and laconically philosophical overtones: Thibault Emin’s narrative feature debut is a mélange of ingredients as offbeat as the inhabitants of an apartment for the cinematic French middle class. There’s whimsy; there’s melancholia; there’s paranoia; there’s political messaging; the style’s heady as a strong cognac; and there are lots and lots of creepy body morphing closeups, leaving to the viewer to run the cerebro-emotional gamut from “Oooh,” to “Ick,” to “Hmm..” And it’s accomplished with tasteful eroticism sprinkled throughout.

This is art-house drama with requisite lashings of romantic comedy. The aptly named Anx, who is often anxious, doesn’t quite fear being with others, but rarely seeks their company. He prefers to tinker away amongst the relics of his childhood home. He hosts a party, however, and there makes the acquaintance of Cass, a manic-pixie-dream-girl in the true French mold, who first forces him out of his shell, before the strange disease converts her into his… But I’m getting ahead of myself. Anx and Cass are stereotypes in many ways, but at least they’re believable. (Having attended a particular variety of liberal arts college in the early Aughts, I have met both of these archetypes in the flesh.) Seeing as we spend nearly the whole film with this pair, in one apartment, it is no small relief that their doings remain largely within the realm of the relatable and interesting.

Far more interesting is the nature of the affliction which begins striking down the world’s citizens within the first twenty minutes or so. It’s a skin condition (you have been warned), which has hints of mineral development along the lines of metamorphic rock formation (you have now been intrigued, I’d wager). The makeup effects—eventually morphing into set design, if you gather my meaning—are a wonder to observe, as the victims struck down by this ailment do not simply die: in most cases, they become something Else.

Else‘s building blocks are sourced, built, compressed, stretched, and twisted from and into any number of things. And the title and film—like the featured disease—isn’t explainable: it’s just there. There for us to ponder on, chuckle at, think about, and occasionally reel from with squicky ill-ease.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To be honest, the theme of the movie should’ve tipped you off already, but just in case, get ready for goo, sticky things, and lots of weird close-ups…” — Lucy Muñoz, Cut to the Take (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

3 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Coralie Fargeat

FEATURING: , Dennis Quaid,

PLOT: An aging actress loses her job as hostess of an aerobics show on her 50th birthday and is recruited into trying a bizarre underground “anti-aging” substance, with instructions and regimens that must be followed precisely to avoid unwanted side effects.

Still from the substance (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: In the third act, an unhinged black comedy emerges from the carcass of what to this point had merely been an odd, satirical horror movie.

COMMENTS: Incredibly, just about everything in Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore film—which mixes sledgehammer satire and comedy with clean ian interiors, squicky Cronenbergian body horror, and a third act tonal shift often described as “bonkers”—works. It’s a message movie that doesn’t spare the blood and guts or the leering nudity (the movie is of the view that you can’t satirize the male gaze without indulging it). The cinematography is ace, the soundtrack on point, the practical effects astonish, it never drags despite a almost 2.5 hour runtime, Qualley appears to be the most beautiful woman in the world, Quaid hams it up delightfully as an empty-suit corporate cad, and has never given a better performance. It’s both elevated horror and degraded horror, equally indebted to the art-house and the grindhouse, and it never goes halfway when it could instead go to twice the length you expect.

The high concept plot gives Fargeat space to make lots of obvious—but funny—jokes about men reduced drooling idiots when confronted with a beautiful woman, and why women might lust after that kind of power. We are a superficial species, after all. That’s why we fall for blatantly Faustian bargains, as when Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is offered the opportunity to create a “better version of herself” by picking up a packet of suspect medical gear from a back-alley beauty supply company. Set amidst L.A.’s glitz, the script addresses our obsession with surface beauty, but as it intensifies it peers deeper into human psychology. Sure, youth and beauty is associated with fame and success, but it’s also the inverse of decay and death: even slowly fading beauty like Elisabeth’s is a reminder of mortality. The scenario also invites concepts of split personality and addiction (there are a lot of needles here, and literally self-destructive behavior). Besides the satirical jibes at such follies, The Substance offers a good deal of heart and empathy. Moore reveals her (gracefully) aging body to public scrutiny in an uncomfortable nude scene, and is compensated with a wonderful scene in front of the mirror as she desperately attempts to achieve an impossible ideal of female beauty, despite the fact that it’s obvious to everyone but herself that she’s more than glamorous enough for the occasion.

The Substance‘s first two acts take place in an exaggerated reality that allows it to focus solely on satire and psychology. Just about everyone other than Moore and Qualley act like caricatures (Quaid is the lynchpin here). Why is the substance apparently offered to Elisabeth for free? Why are network TV aerobics programs so lucrative and influential? How does Sue manage to build that secret room, and why is there no super in her million-dollar apartment? What are the chances either Elisabeth or Sue are always the featured image on the billboard right outside her own window? And just how in the hell is this Substance supposed to work, in a biological/continuity of consciousness sense? You take everything on faith: details that are irrelevant to the main characters’ psychological realities are simply ignored. But your ability to suspend disbelief is shattered in the third act, which is a pure B-movie nightmare hallucination. The practical effects, which previously recalled Cronenberg, now look like a blend of Screaming Mad George’s work on Society,  Toxie from The Toxic Avenger, and something out of a freak movie—in fact, the entire finale resembles something that might result if Henenlotter were given a multi-million dollar budget for stage blood and access to an crack cinematographer. Even with those hints, the results are nothing you could possibly anticipate.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…while the film’s escalating weirdness eventually spirals out of control in the final sequence—it’s not quite camp; it’s more like John Waters- or Lloyd Kaufman-style trash—I was certainly never bored during the 140-minute runtime.”–Sonny Bunch, The Bulwark (contemporaneous)

The Substance [4K UHD]

The Substance [4K UHD]
  • The Substance [4K UHD]
Check Price
Capsules

CAPSULE: HOUSE OF SCREAMING GLASS (2024)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: David R. Williams

FEATURING: Lani Call

PLOT: After her mother’s death, Elizabeth inherits her grandmother’s school building and moves in.

House of Screaming Glass (2024)

COMMENTS: In a story such as this one, told in this particular style, a good deal is left up to the viewer to either figure out—sooner or later—or choose to overlook. It requires a certain ambience, and a compelling lead. She needn’t be a great actor so much as a curious presence (in both meanings of the modifier). Crafting a liminal space as much as a narrative film, in this dreamy wibbly-bit between sleep and waking, between story and mood, there can be a captivating pathway for the viewer to follow along. While Lani Call nails her task as protagonist—indeed, as the only human character—of House of Screaming Glass, at the half-way mark David R. Williams throws a Necronomicon-sized spanner into the work’s erstwhile smoothly-ticking gears, knocking the entire experience into a gooey netherworld of tedium.

What the film does right is feature Lani Call. Her narration is deadpan, sometimes bordering on comatose, lulling the listener into a sort of mental surrender. Her character, Elizabeth, seems done with life before the movie has even begun, and a great deal of the House of Screaming Glass experience is us watching her looking at things in the creepy building she has come to own. (Worry not, she’s as confounded at the turn of events as we are, so we’re in good company.) She tours the abandoned, semi-converted school building in fast-motion, with the camera locked on her face (à la Angst-cam). We enter a daze with her as she builds routines and gets a feel for the place, talking to it in her narration. She plays a bit of piano and a strange entity approaches over her right shoulder. She finds some photo albums, and a child’s book of doodles—which holds a set of nudie photos, quite probably of her grandmother.

So far, David Williams has done well. You probably know the type of thing going on here—something akin to Enys Men, or a less minimalist Skinamarink. It is a meditative and repetitious experience, but summons growing ill-ease. But (oh, but!) at the half-way point, Williams decides this is not what he wants to do any more. Improbably, Elizabeth finds a box full of occult props, tools, liquor, and reading material. The revelation scene, as she drinks the potion from the tentacle bottle and looks over a tome on loan from the Evil Dead museum, is pretty darn cool: colors sicken and glowing text cycles across the screen as she gains understanding.

But it comes at too high a cost, as far as I’m concerned. It is here that House of Screaming Glass stops being interesting and becomes just kind of gross. The thorough gear-shifting wrenched me from the reverie the film had worked so hard to put me under, and I spent the next forty-five minutes Hm-ing, Hrm-ing, and occasionally wishing there were fewer skin lesions. Better luck next time, maybe? I’m certainly interested to see what Lani Call ends up doing. She’s better than what Elizabeth is ultimately obliged to go through.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In due course we will get to body horror… we enter a world in which hallucination is added to the litany of possible visual and psychological interpretations… The juxtaposition doesn’t quite work, and yet its very oddness signals that we have now crossed over into a different interior space… A lovingly made entry in the tradition of feminine psycho-horror, House Of Screaming Glass pits a stubbornly lifeless vérité against the allure of the Gothic.”—Jennie Kermode, Eye For Film (contemporaneous)

House of Screaming Glass [DVD]

House of Screaming Glass [DVD]
  • DVD
Check Price
It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEATH POWDER (1986)

1 Comment

Desu Pawuka

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Shigeru Izumiya

FEATURING: Takichi Inukai, Rikako Murakami, Shigeru Izumiya, Mari Natsuki, Kiyoshirô Imawano

PLOT: In a robot’s dying moments, it spews out a mysterious dust that bounty hunter Kiyoshi inhales, causing his body to undergo drastic physical changes and sending him on a terrifying mental journey.

Still from Death Powder (1986)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Death Powder manages to stretch out a visual bouillabaisse to an hour, cramming into a short block of time all of the trippy imagery and body horror that anyone could want. It may be considered a forebear to the “New Flesh” genre, but it easily stands on its own merits as a twisted piece of cinema.

COMMENTS: There are a lot of things a movie can do to catch our attention here, but one surefire way to get us to consider a film for the List is to dispense with the niceties of filmmaking—e.g. discernible plot, delineated characters, visual clarity—but pay them just enough lip service to let the viewer know that they’re going out the window. The first 20 minutes of Death Powder deftly accomplish this, teasing out a proto-neo-Tokyo in which leather-clad, fedora-wearing private contractors chase down robots in a city drenched in neon and rain, like a stepping stone between Blade Runner and Akira. Until Kiyoshi’s hand falls off, that is, at which point Death Powder becomes something very different indeed.

Once he is infected with the titular substance, Kiyoshi can see all, including the impending arrival of the strangely defaced mafia called the Scar People that employs him. He also flashes back to a sort of origin story, a jarring and hilarious jump to what is essentially a rock-star/scientist’s product launch. There’s an immediate change in tone as the robot’s inventor comes leaping in wailing on an electric guitar while the robot—bearing the ominous name “Guernica”—smiles and delivers her personal stats. Kiyoshi also undergoes physical changes, like a grotesquely misshapen face, as well as the sudden ability to punch a man in the face so hard that his head explodes.

Death Powder brings to mind the Greg Bear story Blood Music, in which a man injects himself with self-aware nanoprobes and unwittingly instigates a global biological singularity, as much as it does 1980s Japanese cyberpunk. Guernica speaks to Kiyoshi in his head, making it clear that she intends to propagate herself, and that this is just the beginning. Sure enough, when a group of hitmen arrive, artsy images of maggoty innards and liquid-drenched monster masks convey their demise. It’s not hard to imagine that all of Tokyo will soon join them in an enormous writhing blob.

The copy of Death Powder that I watched (twice, in an effort to make sense of the thing) was dark and muddy, but having seen other clips and stills from the production, I think that’s how it’s meant to be. The film looks like it’s been shot equally on film and video; the good Dr. Loo’s infomercial features classic video toaster effects, and a fight scene includes a character kicking an inset box. But the lo-fi elements only end up adding to the film’s charm. There’s something tight and compact about Izuyima’s vision, how readily he conveys a physiological disaster brought about by technological hubris. This is a movie with the wisdom to get in, confuse and horrify, and get out in a tight hour, with a jaunty saloon singalong to send you on your freaked-out way.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a bizarre and barely comprehensible one-hour short… surreal to the point of madness… ” – James Belmont, AnOther Magazine

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

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: EXTE: HAIR EXTENSIONS (2007)

Leave a comment

エクステ

AKA Ekusute; AKA Exte; AKA Hair Extensions

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY: Sion Sono

FEATURING: , Miku Satô, , Ken Mitsuishi

PLOT: A woman’s corpse found in a human-hair-filled shipping container spews forth beautiful black hair, inflicting grisly fates upon those who use it as hair extensions.

Still from Exte: Hair Extensions (2007)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA:  Paranormal hair attacks alternate with domestic drama, making a strange weave of narrative that slides the viewer ever more tightly between its strands as it braids into a frightening, heartwarming climax.

COMMENTS: You may note that the word “hair” appears three times in the plot description. This is not enough times. The hair in Exte is ubiquitous, vexing its victims in increasingly strange ways. An extension harvested from an organ-harvest victim poises itself ominously at the ear canal of its wearer; a stylist is bombarded with harrowing recollections of illegal surgery. The hair tips jab into her brain, and she jabs her scissors into the side of her customer’s head. Later, the victim’s daughter views a violent, bloody thrashing through a hair-cut gash in door of the cupboard where she hides. An apartment window smashes outward as copious human hair bursts through the living space. And those are just small snips of the sinister proceedings.

Simultaneously, we hear the story of Mizushima Yoku, an up-and-coming young stylist who cheerily bombards an unseen audience with exposition—a habit that she and a co-worker picked up from a crummy television show. At work, Yoku cheerfully goes about her styling under the firm, but kind, tutelage of the master stylist. She has a jerk-bag sister, Kiyomi, who abandons her submissive daughter at Yoku’s house for a few days while Kiyomi goes out to party with her scum boyfriend. This mix of filial tension and sober depiction of child abuse exists as its own story universe while, on the other side of the narrative, a creepy coroner with a hair fetish steals the body of a mystically charged woman who grows hair at a furious pace in response to the wrongs she endured. When paths cross, as they must do, things get… hairy.

Exte juggles its tones so deftly that it’s only upon reflection that it dawns that Sion Sono is up to something very strange. To be sure, the hair-murder set pieces made me want to cheer Exte on. But the fusion of that strand with small gauge melo-tragedy is simultaneously incongruent and perfectly blended—like a cunning weave of ever so slightly off-colored hair done at the hands of a master stylist. And this tangle of a reaction has barely even mentioned Ren Ôsugi as the manic-pixie-psycho-coroner, all creepiness, whimsy, and song in his seaside shack-cum-shrine to beautiful human hair.

Sono proves once again a master stylist, lovingly curling this absurd story together from its disparate strands (in case this all was coming across as too simple, there’s also “police procedural” thrown into the mix, as detectives investigate the increasing body count). The perfect pacing, balance of soft and terror lighting, and the finessed performances calibrated to a scissor-edge between high drama and silly splatter are a sheer delight.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Even by the standards of Japanese horror movies, Exte is a very weird film. This is a movie all about hair, not just tangentially but intrinsically. Hair isn’t the McGuffin, it’s not the setting, it’s everything.” — M.J. Simpson, MJ Simpson Films (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Chris Thurlow, who describes it as “a possibly weird film about a man obsessed with hair who, while working in a police morgue, discovers a woman’s body that continues to grow copious amounts of hair despite the fact that she is dead.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Exte: Hair Extensions (Double-Disc Special Edition)

Exte: Hair Extensions (Double-Disc Special Edition)
  • Factory sealed DVD
Check Price