Tag Archives: Drama

Capsules

CAPSULE: HALLUCINATION GENERATION (1966)

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AKA Hallucination

DIRECTED BY: Edward Mann

FEATURING: George Montgomery, Danny Steinmann, Tom Baker, Renate Kasché

PLOT: A young man becomes embroiled with beatniks, drugs, and…  murder!

Still from Hallucination Generation (1966)

COMMENTS: Hallucination Generation is a cautionary tale about the dangers of vacationing in Ibiza, doing free drugs, and falling in love. This is not your typical ‘60s scare-tactic film, though. For one thing, it’s full of beatniks, not hippies. For another, the first (and only) freak-out doesn’t start until the halfway mark, meaning writer/director Edward Mann is either bad at exploitation or he’s trying to make a real movie here.

Danny Steinmann, who would later helm the likes of Savage Streets (1984) and Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (1985), plays our lead, William Williams. Bill Williams goes to Ibiza on vacation and falls in with a group of layabouts who follow Timothy Leary-esque guru Eric (George Montgomery). It’s all bikini babes and smoking pot out of two-foot-long pipes, until Bill falls in love, immediately gets married, and is cut off by his wealthy family. After determining that his terrible poetry isn’t going to support him and his new wife, instead of getting a job, Bill flees back to Eric’s, solo.

As the drug-pushing guru, George Montgomery may be the best part of this movie (besides the psychedelic special effects). He was well known for his chiseled good looks and his work in dozens of Westerns, even guest starring on “Bonanza” the same year Hallucination Generation came out. Sinking his teeth into something different, Montgomery goes for it here. The “enlightened” Eric is mean to his son and cheats on his wife, spouts ridiculous wisdom, and he hatches a plan for Bill to steal from a timid old man in Barcelona.

Finally, some LSD! Eric uses it to brainwash Bill into agreeing with his plan. (Drugs are bad, kids!) In this early attempt to represent an acid trip on film, photographer Paul Radkai and editor Fima Noveck are constrained only by the technology at hand: quick cuts, loose focus, a gun turning into an animated bat, color swirls, painted faces, fractals, rats, more animation, naked women, masks, more swirling colors.

Two versions of Hallucination Generation are included on Blu-ray: one is black and white, the other is tinted pink (although distributor Diabolik calls it “sepia”). The pink one has the trip effects in color.

As far as cautionary tales go, Bill’s dialogue while dosed doesn’t seem well-crafted to warn people away from the drug: “Don’t want to go too far in, I would get to like myself.” “Why question? It’s enough just to be.” Of course, he’s also yelling, “It’s bad!” between statements of self-transformation, which is pretty convincing.

Still from Hallucination Generation (1966)

There’s a botched robbery, a murder, a weird pick-up, and the climax has fantastic funky architecture and giant sculpture. But really, the whole second half of the movie feels tacked on and too long. There are fun details, like, where did the dog on the bed come from? Or where will Bill’s wife’s accent be from in this scene?

Hallucination Generation has pacing problems, acting problems, and equipment problems (e.g., unintentional shaky cam). But it’s also a time capsule, a pre-hippie bad-beard-beatnik psychedelic freak-out-in-Ibiza time capsule. And for a certain kind of viewer, it is right up their dark, prostitute-filled, Barcelonan alley.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this is the type of boring flick that could give illegal psychedelic drugs a bad name! Fun for the tolerant Acid Flick completist though.”–Steven Puchalski, “Shock Cinema”

Capsules

CAPSULE: BREATHING HAPPY (2022)

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Breathing Happy is currently available for VOD rental or purchase (or free with a Fandor subscription).

DIRECTED BY: Shane Brady

FEATURING: Shane Brady, June Carryl, Augie Duke, Brittney Escalante, , John D’Aquino, Hugh Scott, Owen Atlas, voices of , Sarah Bolger,

PLOT: A recovering addict undergoes a metaphorical hallucination on Christmas Eve, which happens to be the anniversary of his first year sober.

Still from Breathing Happy (2022)

COMMENTS: It can’t be stressed enough that Breathing Happy is made with a particular audience in mind: people within the recovery movement, and specifically, people within the recovery movement who also enjoy oddball movies. Within that extremely niche demographic, Breathing Happy‘s audience clearly loves it. Like faith-based movies, recovery movies are fraught with the danger of relapsing into the preachy and pedantic. Shane Brady here uses disorientation, impudent comedy, and a high (if seldom difficult to decode) level of metaphor to overcome those pitfalls. Mostly, it works: insider jargon and platitudes rarely intrude, are often subverted when they do, and the movie never feels like a lecture. And it is provocative—almost perverse—to make a recovery movie that plays like a psychedelic trip movie.

And Breathing Happy, a movie which features not one but two talking doors, is trippy through and through. It begins with a man sitting alone doing magic tricks with multicolored playing cards, intercut with a series of shots of blossoming clouds of colored pigments, emerging into a rapidly changing montage of decades-spanning home video footage, before slowing down a bit to introduce Dylan, its one-year-sober protagonist, alone on Christmas Eve. Things quickly take another turn for the surreal when he almost immediately awakens from a short winter’s nap to find his dog missing, alarms going off all over the house, weird lighting, and his old dealer, who talks like French Stewart, eating the Christmas pudding in his living room. From there, we embark on a non-linear journey of memory and discovery, achieved mostly through schizophrenic dream-logic editing that cycles through ghostly visitations, flashbacks, a comic 911 call, fractured bits of therapy and meditation sessions, and hallucinatory conversations with a couple of talking doors that represent the poles of sobriety and relapse. Breathing Happy rarely pauses to catch its breath, instead expressing the racing thoughts and regrets of its protagonist, who at one point tearfully confesses that his mind is like “a popcorn machine, fireworks, a bunch of hyenas fighting for attention…” The film dedicates itself to realizing that confusion, although it also sorts it out at the end and provides the expected happy grace notes.

Recovering addict Dylan’s backstory is revealed slowly and in a fragmentary manner. He’s adopted into a multiracial family, suffers a gruesome hockey accident that presumably puts him on the Oxycontin highway to hell, alienates everyone in his family, and loses everyone in his family—and then his dog gets cancer. Let’s face it, the guy’s going through a lot. The film is sympathetic to Dylan—maybe to a fault. Everything is seen from the addict’s perspective, how his addiction affects him rather than those around him. Sure, it’s hinted that his family has legitimate reasons for shunning him, but we’re not directly made privy to them: it seems like he ruins multiple Christmases through nothing more than impoliteness and slurred speech. We never see a big rock bottom moment, no stealing of his mom’s jewelry, no taking a swing at sis, not even nodding off face-first into the mashed potatoes at dinner. His sisters’ decision to cut Dylan out of the family therefore comes across as needlessly cruel. The movie is overprotective in its sympathy for the addict; the same events seen through an Al-Anon lens would have a quite different tenor. We don’t even know what Dylan’s drug of choice is (we default to polydrug addict popping whatever comes along, but I would have found it more interesting to take a deeper dive into the particular failings of a junkie, a tweaker, or a dedicated drunk). Dylan is at the same time incredibly specific in his personal history, but extremely generic as an addict: likely a deliberate choice to make his story as universal as possible. Still, I personally would have preferred Breathing Happy to include more direct and honest dysfunction, to show us more of Dylan’s drug-induced transgressions, to treat him with rougher gloves. The film’s pro-addict bias is admirable, but overplayed.

Although I am not part of Breathing Heavy‘s primary target audience, I was never bored with the movie, which always has a new angle at the ready. If you like weird movies, I suspect you will find it an easy watch. If you like recovery movies, I suspect you will find much to identify with. And if you’re a recovering addict who also likes weird movies—what are you waiting for? This was made specifically for you.

Breathing Happy is obviously a labor of love for star Shane Brady, who has previously been glimpsed as an actor in weirdish indies like The Endless, Tone-Deaf, Synchronic and King Knight. Brady wrote, directed, and edited (good job there) the film, as well as holding down the role of Dylan. and ‘s Rustic Films produced, and the acting/directing duo cameo as disembodied voices.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird Christmas redemption story that defies genre… a mind-bending story about recovery, redemption, and grief with a pinch of magic for good measure.”–Sharai Bohannon, Dread Central (festival screening)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ORLANDO (1992)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Sally Potter

FEATURING: Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Charlotte Valandrey, John Wood, Lothaire Bluteau, Quentin Crisp, Jimmy Somerville

PLOT: A young English nobleman looks for his place while exploring the vicissitudes of life over the course of several centuries, delving into love, politics, war, and poetry; eventually, he becomes a woman.

Still from Orlando (1992)

COMMENTS: Tilda Swinton is the Mona Lisa. Not “looks like.” I say she’s the genuine article, galvanized by the muse Melpomene and reveling in the mask of placidity that she uses to conceal any deep feeling she might harbor. With her narrow, skeptical eyes and lips that betray only the barest hint of her bemusement with the world, Swinton is truly the living embodiment of that icon of mystery. What a magnificent piece of luck, then, to secure her services in the leading role of a person who views the trappings of gender and power with a maximum level of detachment and disinterest. An actor perennially dismissive of the limitations of gender, she navigates between sexes with hardly a hesitation. Orlando proves to be an excellent launchpad not only for her talents but also for the way she likes to deploy them.  

We first meet Orlando in 1600 as an aimless boy who comes into the orbit of the Virgin Queen herself (played, in a piece of thematic foreshadowing, by the English raconteur Quentin Crisp). The Queen is eager to welcome this bare-faced boy into her orbit, but under one condition: “Do not fade. Do not wither. Do not grow old.” A modest request to be sure, but he will spend the next four centuries honoring the Queen’s command, steadfastly bypassing death or even aging  in favor of a lengthy exploration of love, sex, and self.

If you didn’t know Orlando was adapted from a Virginia Woolf novel published 95 years ago, it might easily be branded as a fantasia of feminism or a revisionist history of transgenderism. As it stands, the film (like its source material) proves to be surprisingly prescient. The film is littered with historical examples of gender fluidity, from the songs performed by castrati to the stunning costumes of Sandy Powell, in which Restoration-era men are adorned with enough frills and artifice to make the patrons of the Met Ball look Amish, while women are sometimes indistinguishable from furniture that has been mothballed for the season. Orlando seeks to demonstrate that if you think androgyny and gender blurring are modern phenomena, well, crack open a history book.

Part of the film’s delight is that it is intensely interested in the strange, but the word is never applied to the things we find most unusual in it. “How strange,” the new-found Lady Orlando notes as she castigates the leading poets of the day for their indulgence in casual misogyny even as they extol the virtues of their feminine muses. “How strange,” she repeats as she apologizes for her failure to acquire the name of the fascinating man who arouses love in her for the first time. But the fact of her femaleness in spite of her previous masculinity? Not weird at all. The fact of the gender shift (which is portrayed less as a binary switch and more as a clarification) is the one thing Orlando seems entirely certain about. The moment where Orlando first lays eyes on her new form is immensely powerful, not for the shock of the change or for any eroticism attached to the nude, but rather for the gentle and pleasant surprise she finds in discovering that her sense of self is fully intact, completely divorced from language or attitude or anatomy.

While watching Orlando, there’s an inclination to feel that not very much is happening, and Swinton’s nonplussed vibe can feel at odds with the engagement you might expect as a viewer. But she’s a sly one, that Orlando, and her tale has a vivid afterlife in the brain as you consider the whole of their experiences and realize that nothing has lingered in quite the way you expect. You feel pity for the deluded Archduke Harry rather than anger at his effrontery. You find unexpected grace in the romantic overtures of Billy Zane. And most of all, you discover that the seemingly empty gaze of Tilda Swinton is in fact triumphant, because she knows so much that you never will. And to demonstrate it, all she needs is the hint of a smile.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sally Potter’s marvelous 1992 film of this undeniably strange, altogether wonderful book now makes its way back to theaters after a digital restoration, and in a bleak cinematic landscape, this oddball film feels especially vital.” – Chris Wisniewski, Reverse Shot (2010 re-release)

(This movie was nominated for review by wuzzyfuzzums, who describes it thusly: ” Based on an equally weird novel by Virginia Woolf, our hero/heroine is an immortal aristocrat who transforms half-way through the movie from a man into a woman, for no particular reason.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THEY CAME BACK [LES REVENANTS] (2004)

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AKA The Returned

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DIRECTED BY: Robin Campillo

FEATURING: Géraldine Pailhas, Jonathan Zaccaï, Frédéric Pierrot, Victor Garrivier

PLOT: A small French town struggles to cope with the sudden appearance of thousands of people who have mysteriously returned after having died years ago; initial bureaucratic problems give way to uncertainty about the motives of the newly resurrected.

Still from They Came Back (2004)

COMMENTS: In a film with arresting imagery, there may be no scene more powerful than that which opens They Came Back: the once dead slowly making their way into town, clean and outwardly healthy and dressed in light pastels and creepy as all get out. It is a high concept made manifest: all those we have lost over the past decade, back in the world as if they’d never been gone. It’s a powerful notion, given strength through the haunting visuals, and it’s something the film will struggle to get back to for the length of its running time.

In contrast to the visceral scares of the many risen-dead flicks that have graced screens in recent decades, They Came Back is more interested in a looming atmosphere of dread. By all appearances, the dead look and behave normally, but everyone begins to notice that they are somehow… off. Indeed, the medical community issues repeated warnings that the resurrected are not quite right (and develop a drug to render them unconscious), and one doctor in particular takes an interest in strange late-night meetings the undead are holding. From the get-go, we’re distinctly aware that there is an unseen threat that no one can understand. But that mystery is only about half the tale.

Writer-director Campillo is equally concerned with how individuals cope with this unprecedented situation. There’s the town’s mayor, who can barely stand to look at his wife when she first beckons to him. Or a couple who have very different reactions to the reappearance of their 6-year-old son. Most prominent is Rachel, a bureaucrat who avoids her lost love Mathieu until he follows her home one day like a beloved puppy. All show a determination to pick up where they left off, but each seems filled with deep and rueful reservations.

This is where the movie’s struggle to balance an examination of people pushed to their limits with a straight-out horror film becomes most acute. There’s still juice in the sight of humans moving resolutely in sync, and in particular, a scene where the mayor is confronted by a group of returnees comes as close as any moment in the film to outright shock, and even then it is far more horrifying to contemplate its ideas than to look upon anything on the screen. The movie knows it has to build to something big, that it needs to throw in something momentous to justify the journey. But it’s just not that kind of movie.

And ultimately, that dictates the finale; it just sort of ends. The dead are gone again, and the living are left to reckon with the impact of what they’ve experienced. It’s nice that the film doesn’t feel pressured to manufacture something big, but it also feels like a cheat. If you’re going to offer a “what if” premise, you probably need to offer some suggestion as to what the “if” would be. As it stands, we have a mix of character study and sci-fi mystery that doesn’t ever fully invest in either.

Like many ideas that are promising but not fully explored, the notion behind They Came Back is solid enough to have returned from the dead itself. There seems to be agreement that a single film doesn’t have the space to explore the conflict and the characters with sufficient weight, and that TV might be a more effective platform. An attempt in 2007 to adapt the material to television in the US didn’t make it past its pilot, but a French series in 2012 was a substantial hit, and eventually the concept finally went stateside with a different Americanized version. Our fascination with the frustrating permanence of death is animating a lot of popular entertainment, so we surely can expect more takes on the idea to return at any time.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an eerily elegant ghost story, all the more surreal for the realist mode of its telling… Campillo’s astonishing debut is as unnervingly oneiric as it is oddly moving.”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (originally published in Film4)

(This movie was nominated for review by Dwarf Oscar, who called it “creepy in an unusual way.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SOMETHING IN THE DIRT (2022)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead

FEATURING: Aaron Moorhead, Justin Benson

PLOT: A bartender and a divorcee witness supernatural phenomena and fall into an increasingly disturbing—and increasingly compromised—investigation into patterns, aliens, multiple dimensions, and secret societies as they try to come to terms with their own reality.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Returning to their Endless musings, this filmmaking duo once again fuse unsettling metaphysics with comedy-tinged chamber drama, creating a fantasy which straddles the cosmically significant and the piercingly mundane.

COMMENTS: Levi has the aura of a past-his-prime surfer bro, crashing through life as he tries to stay ahead of an unfortunate criminal past. He awakens in a spartan apartment, crummy even by dirt-cheap Los Angeles standards, and encounters another tenant in the side alley. Bumming a cigarette, Levi learns in brief that this is John, who recently separated from his husband—and so is new to the whole “smoking” thing. They hit it off, more or less, despite John being a bit stilted and over-eager and Levi being disconcertingly cryptic; is Levi actually a bartender? And what’s this “charity” work he mentions? After John drops off some old furniture in a neighborly gesture, the trap is sprung for their strange investigation: there’s a play of light through a crystal ashtray, and as Levi enters from the kitchen, both men witness it hovering.

The LA setting and pervasive mystery-cum-layered-conspiracies brings to mind Under the Silver Lake, but this digs more deeply through time and space while achieving a personal, claustrophobic tone. Nearly all the action—supernatural and otherwise—occurs in the two-room apartment. (Well, three-room, I suppose, but we never see an oft-mentioned bedroom.) While John and Levi pursue answers to the localized irregularities (suspects come to include an ancient Pythagorean Society, pre-historic alien visitors, and brain maggots from cats), the pair attempt to document their findings. However, both are prone to lying and to showmanship. What is on-screen is unreliable, and there may be nothing really going on outside the norm.

But that’s the point. This is actually a film about two men, reaching middle age, having achieved nothing. John is professionally washed-up and a member of an evangelical apocalypse cult, Levi is a registered sex offender (for reasons both amusing and tragically bureaucratic), burdened by guilt over his responsibility for his sister’s unfortunate downfall. The exploration of the mystery around them acts as a vehicle for their own self-revelation. A poignant scene near the finale has the pair of them recording the other, going blow-by-blow about how they’re both losers who have either destroyed their lives or never built one in the first place; as they exchange accusations, every item in the apartment floats around ominously.

The cinematic world of Something in the Dirt exists within The Endless‘ troubling confines, and the ultimate fate that Levi faces echoes that risked by the two brothers in their earlier film (itself an expansion of the vision first laid out in Resolution). The implication is that the inscrutable entity which is playing with time and space is now broadening its grip. The nonsensical conspiracy-fluff behind the rabbit holes within rabbit holes is interesting (“We’re not going into Dan Brown territory, are we?” a skeptical Levi inquires of John early on), but the meat of Benson and Moorhead’s message is closer to the philosophy found in Steppenwolf. We are doomed to repeat and re-digest this farce that is our life; but this condemnation brings with it our hope for salvation. Eventually, we might figure out the true pattern, and everything will make sense.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Once again, Benson and Moorhead prove that they can produce a stellar, original film with a tiny fraction of the budget of bigger Hollywood filmmakers. The movie landscape is a far better, weird, and beautiful place with them in it.”–Chris Evangelista, Slash Film (festical screening)