Tag Archives: Documentary

Capsules

CAPSULE: JOHN LILLY AND THE EARTH COINCIDENCE CONTROL OFFICE (2025)

1 Comment

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

 

DIRECTED BY: ,

FEATURING: Voice of

PLOT: A biography of pioneering cetologist and “psychonaut” Dr. John C. Lilly.

 

COMMENTS: John Lilly may best be known to readers of this site as the inspiration behind the canonically weird Altered States. The real Lilly seems to have lived a life that actually was “stranger than fiction.” A neurophysiologist by training, Lilly began his research career during the height of Cold War paranoia. The term “brainwashing” was first coined in the 1950s, when Lilly’s initial studies of mammal brains were designed to achieve “push-button control of animals and people.” In the 1960s he embraced the use of psychedelic drugs, leaving behind military research in favor of the counterculture. He described his moment of enlightenment as a “very bizarre and weird feeling.”

Almereyda and Stephens’ documentary traces the gamut of Lilly’s life-long research interests, from his early days hooking monkey brains up to cathode ray TVs to a daily self-experimentation regimen involving hourly doses of ketamine. What comes across is a portrait in contrasts. Though he came to see himself as living outside the bounds of mainstream “consensus reality,” American culture readily absorbed Lilly’s ideas.

Lilly is responsible for our belief that dolphins are intelligent creatures, and inspired the Greenpeace effort to “Save the Whales,” igniting an interest in environmentalism. He popularized the analogy likening the human mind to a “biocomputer”; he believed that only through the perception of other realities can we break free from our “programming.”

Lilly’s “feeling of weirdness” resulted from the realization that the animals he had been researching were not just test subjects but thinking, feeling creatures, whose intelligence and sense of consciousness could equal that of humans and, in some cases, even exceed us. After studying the brains of cats, monkeys, and dolphins, he decided to focus on dolphins, convinced they would have some ancient wisdom to impart to human beings.

The film’s makers present all facets of Lilly’s research and impart his intense curiosity regarding the mind and how it works. His evolution from straight-laced government scientist to drugged-out psychonaut proceeds without judgment. In the beginning, Lilly comes across as eccentric even when appearing on ’60s talk shows, likening inter-species communication to an alien encounter. In one episode the host is quick to point out that Lilly is a real doctor and not “some nut!”

The narration touches on important ethical issues regarding animal research, but never delves too deeply. Lilly’s personal fortune gets a

Continue reading CAPSULE: JOHN LILLY AND THE EARTH COINCIDENCE CONTROL OFFICE (2025) →

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE VAMPIRES OF NEW ORLEANS (2026)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Courtnee Carter, , Andrew Rakich, , Monica R. Harris, Mekhai Lee, , Carl Sailor, ,

PLOT: When Brigitte Jackson’s sister is found dead under mysterious circumstances on the streets of New Orleans, she begins an investigation which leads her to a trinity of vampires; interspersed with this story is documentary footage exploring the city’s vampire heritage.

COMMENTS: “Y’all believe in vampires?”

It begins with the clap of a slate and an interview with “Sanguinarian Vampire” couple “Louis De Pointe Du Lac” and “Lestat De Lioncourt,” who found each other and moved to New Orleans’ French Quarter, in their words, “to live authentically regardless of society.” Then comes a series of interviews with various experts on “lifestyle vampires,” people self-identifying as vampires. This phenomenon appears to have started in the 1970s –80s in the NYC occult scene and grown in the1990s, with the Internet allowing more people to connect and converge on New Orleans to “live the Life.”

America has a love affair with vampires. They’re almost inescapable, everywhere you look.

Atun-Shei Film’s The Vampires Of New Orleans, a follow-up to their independent debut feature The Sudbury Devil, brings that same energy and cheek to a survey of tortured Americana that promises to be “the final word on the New Orleans Vampire as a pop culture figure.” It’s a big swing for an experimental docudrama. An epic one, in fact, clocking in at 159 minutes (including an Overture and Entr’acte, like a Hollywood roadshow picture). It will be interesting to see how audiences receive it.

The main narrative which hits the expected tropes of a vampire tale. Shania Jackson (Unique) is abducted by Nate Debney (Guiness), the human familiar for Jean-Louis D’Hemecourt (Rakich). D’Hemecourt has two sires: Josephine Macarti (Gregg) a Southern Belle turned vampire after her husband’s death in the Civil War, and the Axeman of New Orleans (Sailor), a (real) serial killer who preyed on Italian immigrants in 1918–19. This trio has been hunting and feeding in New Orleans for some time, with D’Hemecourt stressing that he “does not kill humans”—“humans” defined as “Whites.” Shania’s sister, Brigitte (Carter) crosses the path of the vamps while looking into the death, and with the assistance of her aunt Saffron (Harris) and street hustler/Voudon priest Dr. Tom (Lee) attempts to avenge her sister. It doesn’t play out as easily as they may hope.

It’s a straightforward narrative, but it’s all interspersed with those “expert” interviews—historians, tour guides, vampires (Sanguinarian and psychic)—who provide context and  commentary on vampire folklore, specifically that which involves New Orleans: the LaLaurie Mansion, the Casquette (casket) Girls, Jacques St. Germain, and the Axeman. They also provide a critique. While there proves to be rich and horrific historical lore in New Orleans, most, if not all, pertaining to vampires stems from a single source: Anne Rice’s “Interview With The Vampire,” published in the early to mid 70s, which fed the fantasies of self-identifying vamps and their acolytes and created a cottage industry of ghost tourism goosing up dry historical facts with the hook of the lurid supernatural. As one interviewee states, they’re “very grateful to Anne Rice for the tourism she brought.” “Interview” also helped sanitize the image of the vampire from the bloated, pestilent corpse depicted in European lore into a dark romantic figure, the aristocrat of Southern Gothic tales.

The real history became superseded by fictional legend: “a form of cultural amnesia, because Americans don’t like to face their real history; fictional stories drag us away from facing reality,” as one interviewee states. Vampires uses the fiction of D’Hemecourt to tell the actual stories it wants to impart about the metaphorical vampires of  New Orleans: corporate tourism replacing the soul of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; incarcerated labor as modern slavery, multi-generational poor communities turned into modern plantations. It may throw audiences expecting a more conventional vampire tale, but it’s rewarding for those willing to set expectations aside and go with the flow. The performances are good (most of the cast are veterans of Sudbury Devil). The length might be an issue for some, but the film doesn’t drag, helped immensely by Dillon Derosa’s score, which is as epic as the scope of the film.

The Vampires Of New Orleans is available to rent or buy via Atun-Shei Films’ website, and will drop on YouTube on 10/31: Halloween.

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994)

Leave a comment

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

DIRECTED BY: Kevin Hull

FEATURING: Kenji Sugimoto

PLOT: A documentary account of a Japanese math professor who comes to America in search of his hero, Albert Einstein— specifically, the scientist’s brain, which was extracted during an autopsy and removed to points unknown.

Still from "Relics: Einstein's Brain" (1994)

COMMENTS: Among the most cherished books of my childhood were the three volumes that made up “The People’s Almanac,” a peculiar reference book that purported to comprise only the most interesting and widely unknown stories and facts from the span of recorded history. Where else would biographies of fictional characters who have become immortal through extended popularity sit comfortably alongside histories of some of the world’s leading news publications? A particularly memorable story was the one told in “People’s Almanac #3” by journalist Steven Levy about his successful search for Albert Einstein’s mind-meat, harvested (and possibly pilfered) by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey. Levy chronicled the strange afterlife of the physicist’s brain, culminating in his memorable description: “I had been granted a rare peek into an organic crystal ball. Swirling in formaldehyde was the power of the smashed atom, the mystery of the universe’s black holes, the utter miracle of human achievement.” So the result of screening a documentary about another person’s hunt for this very same organ 15 years after Levy’s article was a uniquely odd sensation for me specifically. For a film that proposes to solve a deep and thought-provoking mystery, I kept watching with a nagging question in my mind: “Didn’t we already figure this out?”

Maybe Levy’s report was lost to history, or only the barest of information made it through time’s game of telephone to tickle the fancy of a Japanese math professor. In any event, Einstein’s Brain kicks off the search with a retroactive information deficit, armed with only the knowledge that the mind behind relativity was plucked from its braincase during an autopsy in Princeton in 1955. From there, we pick up the trail with Professor Kenji Sugimoto in hot pursuit as he crisscrosses the country in search of the wayward noggin-nugget, encountering a university professor in New York, a neuroscientist in California, a police officer in Missouri, a pile of redacted FBI records in Washington, DC, a biologist in New Jersey, William S. Burroughs (who plays him a clip from “The Day After” and provides directions to Harvey’s home), and even Einstein’s granddaughter, working our way ever closer to Albert Einstein’s cranial cortex.

Einstein’s Brain has its origins in television, airing on the long-running BBC documentary program “Arena” as part of a series called “Relics” that purported to be about treasured artifacts but was really more interested in the people who sought them. That makes Prof. Sugimoto an intriguing subject, because the only thing we know Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: STRANGE JOURNEY: THE STORY OF ROCKY HORROR (2025)

Leave a comment

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

DIRECTED BY: Linus O’Brien

FEATURING: Jack Black, Susan Sarandon, ,  , Peter Hinwood, ,

PLOT: Most of the cast and crew of The Rocky Horror Picture Show gather to re-tell their experiences making the landmark cult classic that became the ultimate midnight movie.

Still from "strange journey: the story of rocky horror"

COMMENTS: It isn’t enough just to call The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) a “cult movie,” because it is the first movie to attract a cult at all. As fan after fan raves, it’s not just a movie, it’s an event, a lifestyle, an anthem uniting all us rainbow freaks into the collection of beautiful cosmic blueberries we are. For the 50th anniversary of this phenomenon, Strange Journey (2025) reunites most of the major cast and production team to tell how this movie came to be.

The documentary is everything you’d expect. The producers spared no effort in tracking down everybody for a chat. Although sadly missing rock legend Meatloaf (RIP 2022), we still get sit-down interviews with Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Bary Bostwick, Patricia Quinn, and even the rarely-appearing Peter Hinwood. Most prominently, we get Rocky creator and Riff-Raff himself, Richard O’Brien, giving us the complete story of how the story came to be: from its inception as a stage play to creation of the film, its initial flop release, and its subsequent discovery as a cult hit. We even get O’Brien on acoustic guitar singing the hits from the show as he originally composed them.

The documentary is well-produced, with a nice flow alternating interviews and voice-overs with montages of photos and theater review clippings. The fandom gets its say as well, including veteran “shadow cast” performers speaking about how the cult around Rocky allowed them to live out their dreams as their out-of-the-closet selves. Jack Black provides cultural commentary. I don’t even question Jack Black appearing in anything anymore; he’s a free-range media personality who’s attracted to the smell of any camera.

Your humble author was a tad young to catch The Rocky Horror Picture Show when it first came out, but I still heard about it. Over the years, a steady trickle of friends and acquaintances turned up saying they’d caught the show at some midnight campus event. I ended up with a cassette tape of the soundtrack before I ever saw the movie. As soon as I saw it, I got it immediately. The 1970s were a decade of hard-fought social issues, and a time when Americans were maddeningly obsessed with everybody else’s peepees and what they were doing with them. Rocky hit at the exact crest of a wave of social change, throwing off the persecution of alternate lifestyles and expression and wrapping sexual rebellion up in a tribute to rock ‘n’ roll and vintage horror. It was destined to be a hit, because this movie urgently needed to be made at that time.

Naturally, any Rocky fan worth their feather boa needs to run right out and see this doc. So should cultural historians, and for that matter, rock music fans, because Rocky is the singularity around which all things cool revolve.

Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror can now be rented on Plex, Apple TV, or Google Play, and a Blu-ray release drops on July 7, 2026.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I reminisced, I learned a few new things, and I walked away with an even greater appreciation for this wonderfully weird phenomenon.”–Louisa Moore, Screen Zealots

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025)

Leave a comment

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Josh Johnson, Grayson Tyler Johnson

FEATURING: Hope Stansbury, Gerald Jacuzzo, John Borske, Jimmy McDonough, Alex DiSanto, Stephen Thrower

PLOT: The Degenerate recounts the life and film career of “gutter auteur” Andy Milligan through the reminiscences of his collaborators and friends, and insights from film historians.

Still from The Degenerate: The Life and Films of Andy Milligan (2025)

COMMENTS: The Degenerate aims to answer the question: how did a man with a promising career as a television actor in the 1950s, who then played a pivotal role in New York’s Off-Off Broadway avant-garde theater scene in the 1960s, end up directing low budget exploitation and horror films for the rest of his life? The short answer seems to be a lack of business acumen and a difficult personality, but the long answer provides a genuinely fascinating and entertaining dive into ‘s uniquely nihilistic world.

Milligan has been dubbed “the Fassbinder of 42nd Street.” This documentary explores just how he earned that dubious distinction. Born in 1929, Milligan’s life spanned all the major innovations in the American media landscape of the 20th century. He acted in live television in the early ’50s when the medium was brand new, appearing in Kraft Theater and Armstrong Circle Theater productions that also featured Leslie Nielsen and James Dean. He was an instrumental part of the theater community centered around the off-Broadway institutions Caffe Cino and La Mama, writing, directing, and acting in plays, as well as designing stage sets, lighting, and costuming. He would make at least twenty-nine low-budget feature-length films until his death in 1991.

His creative life changed in the mid-1960s, when he bought a portable Auricon motion picture camera, a model mostly used by news reporters, which records poor quality sound. But Milligan was determined to try his hand at filmmaking, even with second rate equipment. His second film, Vapors, directed in 1965 and originally written as a stage play by friend and fellow Caffe Cino member Hope Stansbury, remains a groundbreaking work of queer cinema.

Though Vapors portrays the gay bathhouse culture of New York in a sympathetic light, given the subject matter (and a very brief shot of full-frontal male nudity) it also became Milligan’s first exploitation film, playing in the burgeoning grindhouses of NYC and LA. Since most of these theaters were open all night, they were desperate for films to fill the hours and would screen anything considered even remotely racy. This debut was both Milligan’s triumph and tragedy. He would go on to make grindhouse fare for the next twenty years.

The Degenerate provides a mostly positive view of Milligan’s determination, his creativity, and his sheer chutzpah, while never shying away from the difficulties he faced—many arising from his own surly personality. He developed a method of cranking out elaborate films quickly and on the cheap. With an average budget of ten thousand Continue reading CAPSULE: THE DEGENERATE: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF ANDY MILLIGAN (2025) →