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Apocryphally Weird

34*. THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION (1985)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Rubbo

FEATURING: Mathew Mackay, Siluck Saysanasy, Alison Podbrey, Michael Hogan, Michel Maillot

PLOT: After suffering a terrible fright while exploring a derelict house, young Michael’s hair falls out, leaving him completely bald; possible salvation arrives in the form of a strange cure proffered by a pair of ghosts, which involves smearing a bizarre concoction atop his head. When an impatient Michael adds too much peanut butter to the recipe, his hair commences to grow wildly out of control. Not only does Michael have a new set of challenges associated with his uncontrollable coif, but he becomes the target of a dubious art teacher who covets the boy’s locks for the manufacture of magical paintbrushes. 

Still from The Peanut Butter Solution (1985)

BACKGROUND: 

  • Quebecois producer Rock Demers made his mark in the world of youth-oriented cinema with 1970’s The Christmas Martian, which was made to take advantage of Canadian tax breaks.  
  • The Peanut Butter Solution was the second of a planned dozen kids’ movies by Demers’ Les Production La Fete studio under the banner “Tales For All.” The success of the series earned the studio the moniker “Disney of the North.” 
  • The soundtrack includes two songs performed by future music titan Celine Dion. She was seventeen at the time, and these were her first English-language recordings.
  • The script began as a bedtime story director/co-writer Rubbo would tell his 6-year-old son.
  • Co-writer Vojtech Jasný, best known as director of The Cassandra Cat (1963), was a veteran of the .

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are many memorable shots of Michael’s ever-growing hair, but probably the most lasting is the contraption he is forced to devise to prevent the hyperactive follicles from killing him in his sleep, resulting in a ‘do that resembles one of St. Basil’s onion domes. 

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Way too much hair down there; paintbrush sweatshop

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: What doesn’t? The film starts out with an unusual premise, surrounds it with a cast of characters who act in ways that bear no relationship to the way humans behave, and then sends the story in random directions that only magnify the craziness. You’ve heard the hype; the buzz is justified. It’s exactly as strange as you think it will be, and then some.

Original trailer for The Peanut Butter Solution

COMMENTS: I don’t remember how many years ago it was that my Continue reading 34*. THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION (1985) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HONEYCOMB (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Avalon Fast

FEATURING: Sophie Bawks-Smith, Jillian Frank, Mari Geraghty, Henri Gillespi, Destini Stewart, Jaris Wales, Rowan Wales

PLOT: Five friends escape to an abandoned cabin for the summer and form an unsettling commune.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Generally I try to approach my “gut instincts” through a rational lens, but that is failing me. Avalon Fast has made a puzzling DIY mumble-core that feels infused with the spirits of both Gaspar Noë and Mark Region.

COMMENTS: But first! A bonus mini-review of the festival companion piece: Joel Potrykus‘ latest short film.

“Thing From the Factory by the Field” is, as best I can guess, Potrykus’ small-town rejoinder to Wheatley‘s A Field in England. In this American field—probably somewhere in the rust-belt, going on prior Potrykus (pre-trykus?) experience—things begin with synth-y dirge music; clattered shots of legs traversing ditches and grass; a ritualist, blindfolded ordeal; and some smart-ass, dumb-ass kids talking band names, local legends, and Jim Morrison. Maddie’s initiation into a young trio’s rock group (name not yet determined, but then neither is Maddie’s instrument) goes awry when the initiation arrow fells a demon-chicken. Maddie’s sheepishness flips as she summons her religious upbringing to guide her new companions through something kind of occult, rather silly, and, as one expects from Potrykus, a little gross.

The theme of errant behavior in nature continues with the evening’s feature, Honeycomb, a new, strange kind of something written and directed by Avalon Fast, with her friends shunted both in front of and behind the camera. This choice (or more accurately, necessity) goes a great deal to explain some of the qualms I was left with afterwards. The remainder of those qualms pertain to the subject matter on screen. Mostly. There is something missing here…

Putting that aside for the time being, the story: Willow has discovered an abandoned house in a field by a lake in the middle of nowhere. With virtually no convincing required, she and her four friends decide to abandon their drab summer lives and live together in this house; at least, for the summer. Ambitions of permanent residence flare up intermittently during the sometimes stilted, other-times organic conversations. These five young women are mirrored by five young men: buddies all in the same rock band, who have an established history of spending their summers getting blitzed together, typically with the girls along. But the guys get elbowed out as the ladies develop closer, and increasingly unhealthy, bonds with one another.

The society they form has nasty overtones of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its public shamings (for group cohesion), immediately applied revenge for perceived wrongs (for group cohesion), and submission to the young woman who emerges as the leader (despite her being by far the least charismatic)—also, of course, for group cohesion. Events turn nasty, while generally remaining not altogether clear. The confusion extends even to the methodology: are the actors stilted? Or playing stilted? The characters’ cognizance of the camera is intermittent, with the lads never seeming to “know” they’re being filmed. The whole shebang may well be as ponderously assembled as part of me suspects, or it may not. Regardless, I am hopeful that this is not the movie to remember Avalon Fast by: this jaded critic’s eye sees here in Honeycomb scattered pieces that allow me to imagine her molding devilish narratives in the future.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a wild, wandering, wonderous film, a dreamy, abstracted portrait of that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood.”–Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Alliance of Women Film Journalists (festival screening)

Capsules

ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: A COMPENDIUM OF FOLK HORROR

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Severin Films. 15 disc set.

“Folk Horror” is a buzzword that has blossomed over the past decade to become a marketing phrase. It brings to mind things British, pagan and ancient/medieval, usually in that order. This makes for a nice narrow niche to categorize and sell to the audience; if a film has certain elements that are on the checklist checked off, it’s officially Folk Horror®.  The genre even has its Unholy Trinity: The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw, Witchfinder General. Of course, with some digging, we find that there’s a lot more to the subject to beyond those tentpoles.

It’s a massive subject tackle, and we’re fortunate that the person taking it on is Kier-la Janisse (film-programmer/editor; founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Stories; author of “House of Psychotic Women“) with Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021), a 192 minute documentary serving as a primer/immersion into Folk Horror. It’s the foundation for “All The Haunts Be Ours,” a massive boxs et with 19 feature films (some making their debut on Blu-ray) and tons of bonus material. In short, this is a college semester course compressed into 15 discs; and although it’s pricey, it’s a lot less than what one would be paying for an actual college class. This is the most ambitious box set  that Severin Films has done to date—and they’ve done collections of Al Adamson, Christopher Lee’s European Films, and Andy Milligan in just the past three years!

Woodlands (the first disc in the set, also available as a standalone release) comprehensively examines Folk Horror, beginning with its roots in folklore and literature and moving into film, starting with that Unholy Trinity and other British films, plus television programs like “The Owl Service,” “Children of the Stones,” “Doctor Who,” and the work of Nigel Kneale. The documentary then shifts to North America, examining it by region: New England (Washington Irving, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King); the South (influences of folk music and Evangelicalism), and the West (Native American lore). After that, the film goes global, focusing on horror in Eastern Europe, Australia, Japan, and Brazil, addressing a lot of films you’ve heard of (Viy, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and the Coffin Joe movies, to name just a few), along with many more that you probably haven’t.

For a 3+ hour documentary, you don’t feel the time drag, and you’ll spend a lot of time afterwards Google-searching availability of titles. Even though it’s a deep dive into the subject, it also feels like it’s just scratching the surface and not even close to being the Last Word in Folk Horror. The subject is thoroughly examined, and even though you could walk away with some sort of definition, “Folk Horror” doesn’t seem “defined” in a way that traps it in a box. It’s a fluid term Continue reading ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: A COMPENDIUM OF FOLK HORROR →

Capsules

CAPSULE: HANGER (2009)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Ryan Nicholson

FEATURING: Dan Ellis, Nathan Dashwood, Wade Gibb, Ronald Patrick Thompson, , Candice Lewald (as Candice Le), Alastair Gamble

PLOT: A deformed 18-year old who survived a coat hanger abortion teams up with a vigilante to hunt down the pimp who killed his hooker mom.

Still from Hanger (2009)

COMMENTS: Tastelessness is one of the very few weapons low-budget filmmakers have in their arsenal that their big-budget counterparts can’t match. That is, at least, an explanation for Ryan Nicholson’s Hanger, if not an excuse. There is not much a movie with this kind of budget and shooting schedule can do to set itself apart from the pack of cheap VOD horrors—which themselves have to compete for scarce viewing eyes against the huge glut of what most audiences consider “real movies”—except to try to show you what Hollywood doesn’t dare.

In simpler times, exploitation films could survive on nudity, sex and violence, but since the big studios now dominate these niches, too, the scum at the bottom of the entertainment bucket are nudged instead towards the scatological, the pornographic, and the nihilistic. Hanger exists as a string of shock scenes hung on a dull and talky narrative that leads nowhere. We get a graphic (if incredibly fake-looking) coat hanger abortion; penis grilling; grotesque prosthetic putty slathered on nearly every character; prostitutes murdered with car doors; misogyny and homophobia; yellowface and Asian stereotyping; fart torture; the N-word; an explicit female masturbation scene; a stoma rape with chocolate pudding prop; tampon tea; bad gore effects, bad sound, and bad attempts at comedy. And, because talk is cheap, lots of talking.

Half-assed is the aesthetic choice here. Like its title character, Hanger is an ugly, angry outsider, fated to be a loser and pissed off about it. Unlike its title character (but like its comic relief character), it believes itself to be funny. I think. I didn’t laugh once, but it does appear that parts were intended to be humorous: specifically, scenes of the intensely annoying Wade Gibb, in a prosthetic mask narrowing his eyes to slits, talking in a high-pitched sing-songy “Chinaman” squeal straight out of a WWII-era propaganda film about how he loves tampons and other unfunny topics that are difficult to discern due to a combination of fake buck teeth, a badly crafted accent, and abysmal sound. These scenes double as painful comic relief and interminable padding. The movie’s highlight is Lloyd Kaufman’s appearance as a “tranny” prostitute who gets his penis burned off; Lloyd flew in, learned his lines when he arrived, shot his scene, and (wisely) got the hell out of there. If you’re unfortunate enough to see Hanger, you’ll spend more time watching it than Kaufman spent filming it.

The DVD and (2 disc!) Blu-ray are filled with an unusually high number of extras. Kaufman’s 11-minute behind-the-scenes home video is more entertaining than the entirety of the feature.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If you like this sort of stuff, have a good sense of humor, a strong stomach, and a pad on your floor, (you’ll need it for the number of times your jaw drops) you’ll come away from this singular experience with a new red badge of courage.”–Kurt Dahlke, DVD Talk (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by jef t-scale, who advised “think street trash but more trash and more weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)