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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HAGGARD (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Bam Margera

FEATURING: Ryan Dunn, Brandon DiCamillo, Bam Margera, Jenn Rivell

PLOT: Ryan, aka “Random Hero,” is depressed over having been dumped by his girlfriend Glauren (‽) in favor of a dim-yet-confident lunk named Hellboy; his sulkiness irritates best friend Valo, who determines to break him out of his funk.

Still from Haggard (2003)

COMMENTS: If all Bam Margera and Brandon DiCamillo ever did was the CKY (Camp Kill Yourself) series of videos, they still would have staked out a tiny corner for themselves in entertainment history. These collections of outrageous stunts, puerile pranks, and skateboarding tricks earned a following that eventually included the producers of MTV’s “Jackass.” Invited to contribute to the show, the CKY crew generally did their own thing out in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to be edited into the Hollywood hijinks later. The transformation of Jackass into a movie franchise only brought them more fame, but Margera & Co.’s wildness became too much even for Johnny Knoxville and his band of idiots. Margera got fired, and troupe member Ryan Dunn died after smashing up his car while intoxicated leagues above the legal limit. 

Some people might be surprised to discover that the CKY videos weren’t all Margera & Co. did. In fact, they made more than one attempt to graft their brand of messy, violent humor onto a narrative. In doing so, they followed the number one maxim of storytelling: write what you know. In this case, what they know is bumming around town looking for something to do, drinking too much while depressed over being dumped, and skateboarding.

The film makes no apologies for the fact that nearly all its characters are emotional adolescents. Our Random Hero is deeply unpleasant, launching into a harangue at a girl in a coffee shop so intense that she stabs him in the eye with a fork. Glauren is a tramp with the emotional needs of the men who wrote her. (“I can play all the games I want at the bar,” she teases Ryan.) Side characters include a nude video-game playing distributor of advice called Naked Dave, a toga-clad old man who hangs out in a hot tub while topless girls feed him grapes, and a bunch of women who appear near the film’s conclusion primarily to facilitate a set of makeout sessions.

As you might expect, there are a lot of crazy, gross-out moments thrown in to hold your attention. These range from the genuinely hilarious (a random man clocks Dunn over the head with a watermelon) to the disappointingly crude (Valo and Falcone tape turds to Glauren’s garage door) to the outright inexplicable (Ryan injures himself while perched naked atop a bathroom sink masturbating). The film also traffics in randomness as a source of humor, most notably in a side plot about DiCamillo trying to invent a “reverse microwave.” It’s the kind of small joke that would serve as a minor running gag in most movies, but here gets a lot of screen time to explore the hunt for supplies, the competitors in an invention contest, and the diamond-crusted bicycle that serves as prize.

And when there’s nothing else to say or do, everybody goes skateboarding. Too much stress in everyone’s lives? Skateboarding. Flashing back to happier times? Skateboarding.  (Who’s that making a cameo as a cop who arrests Ryan for hurling his empties at a cinderblock wall? Why, it’s skateboarding legend Tony Hawk, of course.) Considering that’s how he made his name, it’s not at all surprising that Margera would hold a special place for street surfing, but it’s pretty funny how little effort he makes to disguise Haggard’s hidden agenda as a skateboarding delivery system.

As a director, Margera is not untalented. The film moves along briskly, the cast of mostly amateurs is enthusiastic and game, and he enlists cohort Joseph Frantz behind the camera to capture some intriguing angles and settings. But as a storyteller, he’s way too sure that he and his friends’ hijinks and witty repartee are enough to do the job, and they just aren’t. Margera thinks he’s making Clerks with skateboards, but sadly, Haggard doesn’t have a tenth of the wit of Clerks. Making a narrative movie out of a series of stunt videos is a bodacious trick. Haggard just can’t land it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Well, if you loved MTV’s obnoxious, over the top dumb-stunt show Jackass then you’ll love this weird, profane comedy as well…”–The Indie Film Cafe

(This movie was nominated for review by JoE, who raved “If i could compare it’s comedy to anything, it would be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” but then confessed “It has my official seal of approval, which means absolutely nothing lol.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Channel 366

CHANNEL 366: THUS SPOKE KISHIBE ROHAN (2017-2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Toshiyuki Kato

FEATURING: Voices of Takahiro Sakurai; Landon McDonald (English dub)

PLOT: Manga artist Kishibe Rohan recounts macabre tales he has encountered while researching material.

Still from "Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan"

COMMENTS: Although this macabre miniseries stands alone, a small of amount orientation may be helpful for those (like me) unfamiliar with “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure,” the manga/anime from which “Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan” is a spinoff. “JoJo” is a series about… well, I’m not quite sure, but it has been running for about 30 years through various incarnations. My research suggest that, other than Rohan and perhaps a few other character cameos, there are no real links in this one to the main series. There is at least one thing it’s helpful to know: like many characters in the series, Rohan has a superpower (or “Stand”): “Heaven’s Door,” which allows him to pause time and turn people into books, whom he can then read to discover personal secrets (and, occasionally, to jot his own notes inside them, altering their history or behavior). Bizarre, huh?

Originally released as standalone manga, the stories here were made for the Japanese OVA (Original Video Animation) market, then picked up by Netflix. The order of the tales is arbitrary, and the episode sequencing Netflix uses is different than the order of the OVA release (but the same as the order they appeared in the original manga, although, confusingly, the episode numbers in the manga titles are assigned randomly). You can watch them however you’d like, but if you want a suggestion, I would start with either “At a Confessional” (Netflix’s first episode, the third OVA release, and my personal favorite) or “The Run” (the wildest and final story which, based on IMDb ratings, is the fans’ favorite). The entire series is short enough to watch through without feeling like you’re wasting your time, but sampling one of those two first may help you decide whether you want to continue.

The Italy-set “At a Confessional” is a Poe-like story of callous indifference, guilt, and revenge from beyond the grave, with a demonic tongue, a popcorn-eating trial, and a twist ending. “The Run” has a more straightforward narrative; it’s a satire of male narcissism, as an actor/model takes his workout regime to unhealthy, supernatural extremes. It also features the series’ most ambitious animation, with abstract, wavering backgrounds in crazy color schemes; split screens; almost obscene, anatomically incorrect musculature; and surrealish scenes like the one where the protagonist climbs down an apartment building, Spider-man style. The other two stories are equally fantastic: “Mutsu-kabe Hill” features an eternally bleeding corpse, and “Millionaire Village” begins with an interesting premise about an ultra-exclusive suburb, then incorporates local Japanese demigods and an extremely intricate test of etiquette.  Some of the stories have ironic subtexts, but the psychology never gets too deep; the stories are dark in subject matter, but light in delivery.

I have to confess that, after watching all four episodes, I’m not sure why Rohan is such a popular, breakout character. He frankly seems a bit superhero-dull to me. With his “Heaven’s Door” power, he’s too omnipotent; there is seldom much sense of him being in jeopardy. His major character trait seems to be mild arrogance and haughtiness, which comes through in his fey, aristocratic voicing (in both the original Japanese and the English dub). This makes him seem a bit unpleasant to be around, although other characters fawn over him regularly. Perhaps Rohan doesn’t get a chance to shine here, since he is only a narrator for two of these stories, and not really the focus in any of them. Still, because he’s mostly a framing device, Rohan’s lack of charisma didn’t effect my enjoyment of the series, which is not bad, and at less than two hours to take in the whole thing, worth a shot for the curious. It didn’t make me want to explore the wider JoJo universe, though—and if you want some freaky Japanese animated horror, I’d suggest checking out “Jungo Ito Maniac” (also on Netflix) instead.

(As an odd aside, the major characters in this series always have crazy hairstyles: once has four giant bent spikes of red hair, one has random bow-like protrusions growing out of his scalp, and Rohan himself wears a strange circlet that looks like an inverted crown and is mostly covered by greenish locks that jut several inches off the side of our hero’s head.)

We may not be done with Kishibe Rohan: there are plans for a live-action adaptation of the same material.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…retains the straight-faced absurdity of its parent show… Its most tense and tragic stories hold a grim sense of humor—such as the various strange (bizarre, even) rituals throughout, tests of the mind and the body all tinged with otherworldly, life-and-death stakes.”–Kambole Campbell, Thrillist (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: DAMSELVIS, DAUGHTER OF HELVIS (1994)

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DIRECTED BY: John Michael McCarthy

FEATURING: Sherry Lynn Garris, Adimu Ajanaku

PLOT: Country girl Ilsa discovers she is actually the daughter of the dead god Helvis, and travels to the pyramid in Memphis to resurrect him, while Black Jesus races to stop her.

Still from Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis (1994)

COMMENTS: In the first few minutes, standing in a muddy Mississippi field, Black Jesus shoots one of his followers in the head and immediately resurrects him. And so begins Damselvis: a schizophrenic mix of Southern Gothic, grindhouse shocks, and rockabilly culture shot through a distinctively kitsch-surreal lens. It also begins the wild extended universe of John Michael McCarthy (or JMM, as he sometimes styles himself).

Damselvis is a simple hero’s journey (complete with a closing epigram from “Joseph Cambelvis”). Young Ilsa discovers her divine heritage as Damselvis and goes on a quest to fulfill her destiny. There is an unexpectedly serious theme about paganesque iconography (represented by Elvis, the chief deity of the pop culture pantheon) replacing the role of Christianity in American culture (a trend McCarthy celebrates); in other words, how rock n’ roll became bigger than Jesus. But it’s all done in a wacky, surreally comic sexploitation style: the journey is far more important than the destination. You keep watching for the abundant nudity (including a lesbian encounter in the woods), the campy biker violence, and the goofy supernaturalism, which climaxes with resurrected giant-eyeball Helvis emerging from his guitarcophagus to battle Black Jesus, who has transformed into a Rastafarian werewolf. You’re guaranteed never to have seen anything quite like this before (unless you’ve seen another JMM movie).

As a first outing, Damselvis‘ two-thousand dollar budget is painfully obvious. The camcorder photography gives it a Polaroid quality look. (Some cheap, lurid-yet-muted lighting and filters appear during the film’s more psychedelic moments to liven things up, but it still looks cheesy as hell.) The sound goes in and out (closed captions are recommended, though sometimes even they read “inaudible”). Locations are remote fields, back roads, junkyards, attics, cheap diners, and abandoned houses in Mississippi and/or Tennessee (there’s also one surreptitious shoot at a cool waterfall, and a brief stint inside the Egyptology display at the University of Memphis). Makeup is ridiculous. The actors are clearly amateurs winging it. The soundtrack is raucous lo-fi psychobilly from local Memphis bands (including JMM’s own Rockroaches). The highest production value goes into Damselvis’ costume: all angel-white, consisting of a vest with long fringes (reminiscence of a Vegas-era Elvis jumpsuit), thigh-high lace-up boots, and hot pants. This aesthetic is charming to some, and certainly fits the film’s redneck surrealist atmosphere, but I would argue JMM’s future shot-on-film efforts benefit enormously from the infusion of a few extra thousand bucks.

Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis was a surprise Blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome (via shot-on-video specialist partner-label Saturn’s Core). Given its shot-on-video provenance, the movie’s audiovisual quality is awful, including occasional VHS tracking errors. That’s as it should be; it’s key to the movie’s DIY authenticity. Since it’s under the Vinegar imprint, the disc includes a ton of special features, including a commentary from and interview with the director, a reel of behind-the-scenes footage that’s almost twice as long as the movie itself, JMM reading from his own “adult” comix (including the original “Damselvis”), footage of a Helvis-themed punk concert in Memphis, and trailers for other sleazily weird Saturn’s Core releases. JMM recently self-released his third film, The Sore Losers (1997), on Blu-ray, but we’re praying to Helvis to see his second, the long-unavailable Teenage Tupelo (1996), resurrected soon.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an utterly bizarre but completely enjoyable sixty-three minutes of rock n roll craziness… an odd mix of parody, black comedy, exploitation and overall cult movie strangeness.”–Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop! (Blu-ray)

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.)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: WINTERBEAST (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Christopher Thies

FEATURING: Tim R. Morgan, Mike Magri, Bob Harlow, Charles Majka

PLOT: On top of a mountain near the remote Wild Goose Lodge, ancient Indian stop-motion demons are stirring.

Still from Winterbeast (1991)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: There are numerous bizarre touches scattered throughout Winterbeast, but there is one scene that earns this scrappy little amateur film an outside shot at our list: an unexpectedly ian masquerade at about the two-thirds mark of the movie, scored to a scratchy phonograph recording of the children’s song “What Can the Matter Be?”

COMMENTS: Begun in 1986 and released (to VHS) in 1992, Winterbeast is a few minutes of fairly competent stop-motion animation padded with about 75 minutes of totally incompetent live-action story. The action features mostly cardboard characters, with the exception of a hard-drinking, girlie-magazine loving NYC reprobate park ranger, and a plaid-jacketed businessman who sounds like Larry “Bud” Melman and does for New England wilderness lodges what Jaws‘ mayor did for public beaches. It’s nowhere near a good movie, but it has a small cult following for a reason: it’s peppered with weirdness.

Some of the weird bits are just the sloppy mistakes you usually find in bare budget films. There is, for example, a moment when a man breaks out a glass pane in a door window, presumably so he can reach inside and undo the lock. But when he strikes it, the door immediately swings open, because it wasn’t locked at all. So why didn’t he just use the door handle in the first place? (Maybe because the door in question doesn’t even have a handle.) With segments filmed over a period of years, there are constant editing boo-boos: shots from the same scene are often poorly matched, using different film stock and sound equipment (and sometimes costuming). Lead Tim R. Morgan’s mustache appears to change length and even color randomly throughout the movie.

These mistakes are likely the result of little care being put into anything except the monster sequences. But other flakes of weirdness are almost inexplicable: when Charlie opens his case of Indian artifacts, there’s one item that’s very out of place (I won’t spoil the surprise, you’ll know it when you see it). There are just plain goofy moments, such as when a character unconsciously copies a pose of a cigar-store Indian statue. (It’s worth shoehorning in here that Winterbeast‘s understanding of Native American ethnography appears to be based on research done at 1980s off-reservation souvenir shops.) And then there’s the previously-referenced musical number, complete with a plastic Halloween pumpkin prop, which is a genuine mini-masterpiece of microbudget surrealism.

Oh, and did we mention the rampaging stop-motion monsters? There’s a tentacled dream demon, an animated tree, a bug-eyed Bigfoot, a dinosaur, a giant chicken, and more. For the most part, they look pretty good—except when the giant models are shown picking up their quickly-made hunk-of-clay human victims, and either decapitating them or—in the case of one hapless, topless victim—smashing them against the side of a building. The creatures are only seen briefly, but the filmmakers obviously believed they could carry the picture, and they just needed to build enough movie around them to showcase these effects.

Remember how much fun 1970s homemade Harryhausen tribute Equinox was? Now imagine if it was done by a crew with half the talent at animation, and a tenth of the talent at every other aspect of filmmaking. Still fun, but in a different way. Realizing that he had created the perfect film, Christopher Thies never wrote or directed another movie after this.

Winterbeast is available as part of Vinegar Syndrome’s “Home Grown Horrors” box set (for the time being, exclusively available here), where it joins fellow apocrypha candidate Beyond Dream’s Door (1989) and the slasher Fatal Exam (1988) in a triple-feature of some of the best cheapo horror movies of the video store boom. It’s loaded with every possible extra feature you could imagine.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the movie may be uneven in terms of the quality of its cinematography but it is so consistently bizarre and filled with enough seriously WTF moments that you can’t help but love it.”–Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop! (“Homegrown Horrors” box set)