Tag Archives: Cult

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BUFFET INFINITY (2025)

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Buffet Infinity is now available to rent or purchase on-demand.

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Simon Glassman

FEATURING: Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald, Donovan Workun, Ahmed Ahmed, and the voice of Simon Glassman

PLOT: An all-you-can-eat restaurant competes with neighboring stores at a strip mall as a sinkhole appears, strange noises plague the area, citizens go missing, and an occult presence seeps into the transmission.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A narrative told through channel-surfing and a combo platter of the ridiculous and the sinister make Buffet Infinity a necessary addition to the Apocrypha menu.

COMMENTS: Westridge County is small, down at the heel, and more than a little boring. The local TV stations showcase a cavalcade of staid businesses: a doggie daycare on the verge of collapse, a pawn shop with a worryingly growing inventory, an insurance broker ready to cover questionable life events, a sandwich shop offering several types of sliced pig along with its signature sauce, a shyster lawyer happy to capitalize on his bitterness, a used car dealership suffering a violent aversion to high prices, and a buffet with suspiciously good deals and no apparent staff. Surfing the area’s TV broadcasts for one-hundred minutes, however, we glean the story of how Westridge County becomes increasingly derelict, dangerous, and decimated.

Simon Glassman is a fellow of who remembers, and, in a way, is nostalgic for a particular broadcast phenomenon which has all but disappeared. His chronicle of Westridge County’s collapse from crummy to cursed cranks true-to-life advertisements and news flashes one further turn on the dial to the absurd. The passive-aggressive war between Buffet Infinity (where something possibly extraterrestrial, and certainly evil, is going on) and Jenny’s Sandwich Shop ratchets up snarkily; though both cheerfully announce the ample parking “in the front”. (The sinkhole growing in the back-lot is the first indication something’s a bit off.) Public service warnings from “The Westridge Society for Religious Freedom” sound typo-ridden alarm bells about an impending supernatural intrusion that will rob the county of its people. But Ahmed Ahmed, the bad-rapping proprietor of the pawn shop, is ready to raise spirits through low prices on goods ranging from sound blockers to personal defense.

Glassman pulls aside the curtains drape by drape, with each surf through the channels unveiling a little more tension and a little more desperation. Glassman remarked during the Q&A session following Buffet Infinity that the film is ultimately just him dumping on a local strip mall. This much is certainly true, but the movie is much more. It dissects quotidian fears and challenges, with a heartier and heartier dose of the surreal, culminating in absurdly large portions of spectacle.

So head on down to Buffet Infinity! Its eighteen-to-twenty staff, each with their own homes and government ID numbers, will serve up platefuls of curious delights in the ever-expanding dining facility.

Just don’t enter the door marked “Prohibited”.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What begins as a satire of small-town local television quickly spirals into a hallucinatory, absurdist descent into the mind of a community being devoured by its own identity. This is weird cinema at its best: committed, chaotic, and unnervingly hypnotic.” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (festival screening)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE BIRTHDAY (2004)

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The Birthday is currently available for VOD rental or purchase.

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DIRECTED BY: Eugenio Mira

FEATURING: , Erica Prior, Jack Taylor, Dale Douma

PLOT: Norman Forrester navigates his girlfriend’s father’s birthday party as he waits for the right moment to tell her how he feels.

Still from "The Birthday" (2004)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Whatever Corey Feldman is doing to portray Norman is up there alongside ‘s turn as a romantic lead in The Room (albeit hovering on the reality-side of believable), and that’s just for starters in this oddball bit of capering which unfurls like a forgotten b-side.

COMMENTS: Norman wears white socks with his tuxedo. His powder-blue ruffled shirt is more appropriate for a high school prom. Alison, his girlfriend, runs hot and cold, making her difficult for him to read. The father, whose birthday is being celebrated, is dismissive of Norman’s pizzeria job. Norman can’t unload a hotel room glass he picked up at the start of the night, an old school buddy insists they watch the strippers together, blackouts begin to plague the main event, and he never finds a moment to give his girlfriend that special gift. All told, it’s not a good night for Norman—and that’s not even taking into account his discovery of a death cult hoping to summon a ian-style god of hopelessness.

Norman is our constant guide for this special evening, whether we want him or not. His eyebrows are always rising and lowering; he often doesn’t know what to do with his hands; and his voice sounds like it should be coming from a tertiary Dick Tracy villain with one line. But we’re with that voice, and that awkwardness, for two hours. It’s a heckuva gambit on the part of both actor Corey Feldman and director Eugenio Mira. This fractured character is what’s needed, though, for channeling this irregular narrative, peopled as it is from the basement to the penthouse with differently aberrant characters. To perform Mira a modest disservice, the dialogue oscillates between the goofiness of The Hudsucker Proxy and the menace of Barton Fink. Is everyone having a great time? Are they doomed? As with life, there’s a bit of both.

The Birthday kicks off with an Art Deco font-flourished title card reading “The Most Amazing 117 minutes in Norman Forrester’s Life,” before fading into a shot of the named character emerging from a creaking elevator whose tinny music, after some repetitions, clarifies itself as a Muzak rendition of “It’s My Party.” Mira’s promise trundles along deliciously for the first hour, as he slaps snips and snatches of eccentricity into the mix—the belligerent father, the Valium-addled mother, the alarmingly eager-but-unhelpful staff, and even the hotel itself, with its strange secrets—culminating in a first act climax of soul-searching and monologue from Forrester as he descends into the basement.

For a reason that baffled me at the time, Mira seems to cut away the entire, hard-earned accumulation of dark wacky and silly foreboding, deciding that the second half will instead travel full bore into a kind of stupid story line. For a stretch, I worried that Yes, the first half is weird enough to carry the film and an apocrypha recommendation, but I’ll have to warn that—and before I knew it, Mira was building again. A final blow-out wraps up this strange birthday party with style and intensity. Norman, who has spent his life ducking down and backing away from conflict, is provided the ultimate test; and despite his white socks, ruffled shirt, and “My Goodness What is that Voice?” timbre, by the very end, my weird hopes had triumphed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a cinematic enigma that most definitely won’t be for everyone. However, for lovers of the wonderfully weird and mesmerizingly Lynchian, it’s a lost gem begging to be discovered.”–Stephanie Malone, Morbidly Beautiful (2024 re-release)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE EMPTY MAN (2020)

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DIRECTED BY: David Prior

FEATURING: James Badge Dale, Marin Ireland, Sasha Frolova, Stephen Root

PLOT: James Lasombra, ex-cop and widower, offers to help find his friend’s daughter and discovers he’s being pursued by a malevolent spiritual force.

COMMENTS: David Prior’s feature debut is a horror movie, a thriller, a melodrama, and an exploration of dark spirituality. It’s stuffed to the gills with cultists, menace, and twists, all drizzled with snark. It’s brimming with so many ideas that its title becomes nearly ironic. Sure sure, it features a tulpa with an appetite whose current manifestation evokes the “slender empty man.” Additionally, the protagonist is empty on the inside: his wife and son died some years prior. In fact, the introductory scene (a thorough twenty-two minutes) culminates with a hapless hiker slipping into an empty space in some Bhutanese mountain. But if any one criticism is to be leveled against The Empty Man, it’s that there is just too much of everything.

It starts with excessive location detail. The Bhutanese mountain in question is precisely identified in a superimposed opening title card, scored by foreign drone-singing, and emphasized further by a passing bus-load of Buddhist monks, a wall of spinning prayer bells, and bunches of fluttering prayer flags. Guess where those four random mid-’90s mountaineers are? Exactly where they shouldn’t be. After they meet their grisly but otherwise nebulous fate, we’re brought back home (and to present-day) with the title card “Webster Mills, MO, 2018”. In case we didn’t trust their word, there’s a shot of a water tower with the town’s name slapped across it. In the (second) introductory scene we meet James Lasombra, a grizzled forty-something who runs a home security business. His adventure features teen disappearances, teen deaths, expository expostulation from a goth-pixie daughter figure, the “covertly” sinister Pontifex Institute, and recurring flashback nightmares breaking through his doxepin regimen.

This rich vein of material coupled with countless I-don’t-trust-the-audience reminders made me feel that its 137 minutes was both too brief and overly long. The camera might linger obviously on a detail in one scene and then swing back to it when James reaches the relevant point in his investigation. As he drives through the rainy nights of Webster Mills, earlier lines of dialogue repeat in his memory. And Prior makes the regrettable choice of providing an uncut version of a key flashback that would have left things more interesting, and still adequately explained, had he trusted his viewer to have been actually watching the movie.

But I can’t dislike a movie for its eagerness to tell as much story as it can. An opening credits tip-off strongly hint that The Empty Man has something to do with a comic book universe, which helps explain the problem. Prior’s movie should have been no shorter than a mini-series. It could then explore: the Himalayan incident in more depth; the unclear history between James and Detective Villiers; the mythos of “the Empty Man” in contemporary American society; and the socio-spiritual machinations of the Pontifex Institute. In future, I hope Prior adopts either an exhaustive or a less-is-more approach−not both.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Advertised, however slightly, as a traditional horror film, this is a truly surreal and strange piece of work, anchored by some top-notch craft elements, but weakened a bit by a bloated running time and a conclusion that likely left the few people who saw it in theaters more annoyed than thrilled… How do you sell a film as surreal and unsettling as ‘The Empty Man’? You don’t even try. If you’re lucky, the audience finds it on their own.”–Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com (contmporeaneous)

 

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LIST CANDIDATE: EMPIRE OF THE DARK (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Steve Barkett

FEATURING: Steve Barkett, Christopher Barkett, Tera Hendrickson, John Henry Richardson,

PLOT: A bounty hunter haunted by the memory of an old flame who was killed by a Satanic cult swings into action twenty years later to bring them to justice and solve the remaining puzzles.

Still from Empire of the Dark (1990)

COMMENTS: The first thing you will notice about Empire of the Dark is that it’s a passion project by writer/director/star Steve Barkett, he of only two directing and three production credits. But give it a chance. Barkett is at the opposite end of the shoestring auteur spectrum from the likes of Neil Breen. Barkett is self-aware, has a sense of humor, and places the audience first. He has every opportunity to turn his story into an ego fulfillment fantasy, but cheerfully writes his script with a female character turning down his advances just to deconstruct that trope. Every decision he makes is based on producing the most entertaining movie possible, given his limited means. Even though Empire of the Dark is a low-budget production with plenty of rough edges, it is by far the best budget vanity project your humble reviewer has ever watched. You can even riff on the silly parts. Recall my rule about distinguishing brainless movies from stupid movies. This is one of the brainless, fun ones.

We open on a Satanic cult hiding out in a cave which is accessed by a portal in the wall of a house. Blades aloft, cultists are about to sacrifice both a woman, Angela (Tera Hendrickson), and her baby on the same altar. Enter our hero Richard Flynn (Barkett), who fights his way through the fanatics, making it to the altar with one bullet left. Two cultists are bringing their knives down on two victims, so he has to choose. Angela screams at him to save her baby; Richard obliges by shooting one executioner and rescuing the kid, running away with him in his arms even as Angela meets her fate. 20 years later, that baby grows up to be Terry Nash, returned to town with a mysterious photo of the cult leader and some news that the Satanists are behind a present-day string of murders deemed the “demon slasher” case. Meanwhile, Angela appears to Flynn in dream sequences, to get good use out of that fog machine.

What follows is a swashbuckling yarn as Flynn, an unlikely action beefcake who knows exactly how out of shape he is, shoots and stabs his way through bad guys. This will take him through a painfully amateur and yet thrilling pursuit within a small-town grocery store, an ambush in the woods from sword-wielding cultists dispatched with exactly one bullet each, and ultimately back to the foam-rock caves of the cult’s lair to confront them and a testy summoned demon. Flynn’s sidekick in this quest is local cop Eddie Green (John Henry Richardson), who plays it hilariously straight as a hard-boiled stereotype who is not the least bemused by demon-summoning Renaissance-fair rejects. Consultations with a nun and a psychic take just long enough to drop a clue, throw in some ham, and move on to the next body-count scene. While the dialog is hokey, with the occasional glib line, there is mercifully little of it. The pace jogs along nicely, with just enough reflective inter-action palette cleansers to allow you to catch your breath. Even though the gins never run out of ammo and can be blessed by the local clergy in preparation for taking down Satanists, Flynn and his team will sometimes abandon them for swords.

While Steve Barkett isn’t exactly a major talent, as a producer he has a talent for spending the money where it counts. Empire of the Dark is chock full of ballsy stunts, cheesy late-80s monster-madness special effects, and a full orchestral score which punctuates the whole movie with a trite, but ear-friendly, action soundtrack. Cinematography is on point and the shooting location (which I’m guessing is in the U.S, Northwest?) does it many favors. Just be advised, it still gets silly! Every cultist is dressed in an identical Dollar Tree hooded robe and mask costume. One after another, they die like flies, yet there seems to be thousands of them, like a video game level you can’t clear. The big bad demon is sometimes a puppet and sometimes stop-motion animated. The fake blood is played by what appears to be dainty smears of raspberry jam. Vast plot holes are never explained. But this movie doesn’t care beans whether you’re cheering it or laughing at it, as long as it kept you amused.

Let’s not kid ourselves: this is the exact movie all of us would have liked to make when we were 14 years old. Empire of the Dark is best served with a bag of Halloween candy and an ice-cold Mountain Dew. The fact that this movie is not better known, even as a cult weird-o fan favorite, is flabbergasting. But that’s life when you’re a vanity project.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Enveloped by an exceedingly melodramatic and non-stop symphonic score, and peppered with delirious optical effects and endearing stop-motion monsters, Empire of the Dark is a trampoline of a movie, repeatedly reaching its ambition before hilariously tumbling down into sublime silliness.”–Laser Blast Film Society

(This movie was nominated for review by “Penguin” Pete Trbovich, whom stumbled upon it thanks to a lucky random Tumblr click. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

223. MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (1966)

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“A cult of weird, horrible people who gather beautiful women only to deface them with a burning hand!”–original poster tagline for Manos, the Hands of Fate

Beware

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Harold P. Warren, John Reynolds, Tom Neyman, Diane Mahree

PLOT: After making a wrong turn on a family vacation, Mike and Maggie and their daughter Debbie find themselves lost in the Texas desert. As night falls they discover a lodge and its mysterious caretaker Torgo, who reluctantly agrees to let the family stay the night. As the night wears on the Master and his wives awake, while Torgo develops an obsession with Maggie.

Still from Manos, the Hands of Fate (1966)

BACKGROUND:

  • Director Hal Warren, a fertilizer salesman from El Paso, had a yen to become an actor, and met and befriended screenwriter Stirling Silliphant when the latter was in El Paso scouting locations for the television series “Route 66.” Warren made a bet with Silliphant that he could make his own horror movie. He scribbled out the initial outline to Manos on a napkin at a coffee shop.
  • Manos was filmed with a hand-wound 16mm camera that could only shoot 32 seconds of footage at a time. There was no live sound and all dialogue was later dubbed in by the principal male actors (Warren, Reynolds and Neyman) and one uncredited actress voicing all the female roles.
  • John Reynolds, who played Torgo, was a heavy drug user who was often high on LSD on set. He committed suicide months after shooting concluded, before Manos‘ debut.
  • Manos had been completely resigned to the grindhouse dustbin, almost never screened on television, only gaining notoriety after being featured on the bad movie-mocking cult TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000” in 1993. (Manos became one of the show’s most popular episodes).
  • For most of its history Manos was available only in scratchy second generation prints with visible defects; many fans believe that the murky visuals add to the film’s outsider appeal. In 2001, cameraman Benjamin Solovey found a pristine work print of the movie  and crowdfunded a digital restoration of the movie, which he released on Blu-ray (via Synapse films).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There is a brief moment when all of Manos‘ bizarre characters share the frame at the same time. Arms outstretched, as always, to display the scarlet fingers lining the inside of his coal-black cloak, the Master points to a shivering Torgo, while two of his nightgown-clad wives pirouette towards him and drag him onto the stone altar, his massive knees pointing towards the nighttime sky. In her review of the film’s opening night, the local El Paso film critic refers to this as the scene where Torgo is “massaged to death.”

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Torgo’s knees; wives’ nightgown brawl; who the heck is ‘Manos’?

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Like most misguided amateur efforts, Manos notches a weird points from anti-naturalistic acting, incoherent editing, strange dubbing, and negligent continuity.  In the case of Hal Warren’s sole feature, the staggering ineptitude magnifies the movie’s strange little bumps until they become looming mountains; the story takes place in some uncanny west Texas wasteland that’s similar to our own world, but permeated by a dreamlike offness.


Clip from Manos: the Hands of Fate

COMMENTS: Manos: the Hands of Fate demonstrates an important Continue reading 223. MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (1966) →