Tag Archives: Dystopian

CAPSULE: STREET TRASH (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Ryan Kruger

FEATURING: Sean Cameron Michael, Donna Cormack-Thomson, Joe Vaz, Warrick Grier,

PLOT: The year is 2050, in the city of Cape Town, and it’s up to Ronald and his posse of paupers to thwart the mayor’s evil plan to liquidate the homeless.

Still from Street Trash (2024)
Street Trash (2024)

COMMENTS: You can’t choose your own dystopian-bum name, but I reckon I’d go by “Cardigan.” I might rub elbows with the likes of Chef, Wors, Pap, or Two-Bit, and meet up with Society whenever I wanted to score some designer drugs. Yessir, a whimsical existence of survival interspersed with skirmishes with police and memorial services for fallen comrades goo-ified by a deadly chemical administered by government drones.

So goes this re-imagining of 2987’s Street Trash, wherein our casually-charismatic heroes do their best amidst poverty and the threat of annihilation, preserving through brotherhood and cunning japes against the well-heeled. In the movie’s world, the middle classes (and, indeed, the working classes) have been eliminated—economically, mind you. You’ve either got more money than you could possibly know what to do with ( I’ve heard good things about “SoyCoin”, the first vegan cryptocurrency), or no money at all. The message sent, again, and again, is that wealth disparity is a grim and growing issue.

Commendably, though, Street Trash doesn’t come across as sermonizing despite its inherent preachiness. The characters are fun—particularly Chef, with his dissections of age-old children’s classics as creepy sex parables. For those hungry for practical effects, they burst from nearly every pore. Some dozen or more characters ooze DayGlo™ liquids, slough skin from hands and head, grow pustulant goiters which pop, and much more. Also to Street Trash ’24’s credit is the presence of Gary Green, unearthly star from Kruger’s feature debut Fried Barry. Green is a fascination in every shot, coming across as half a wavelength removed from his surroundings. Appropriately, Green’s character has an imaginary friend (voiced by Kruger) who is altogether blue and bizarre.

As remakes go, this isn’t quite one. Kruger’s sophomore feature belongs to a genre I’m stumbling across more often these days, in perhaps a sign of the times: a hybrid of post-apocalyptic and cutesy playfulness, taking the edges off the grim reality descending upon humanity like a sack of awful. Or, maybe a sack of offal—considering the vast quantities of sludge to be found in Street Trash.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s a cacophony of fever-dream nonsense that comes together without reason beyond Mayor Mostert’s hatred of the underprivileged. Kruger’s illustrating Cape Town as Tromaville, but even then, obscenities and oddball goofiness are scattershot head-scratchers… It wants to be a pure midnight movie like Mutant Blast, a government-dragging mutation comedy where anything can and does happen, but lacks consistency and command.”–Matt Donato, Daily Dead

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MEMOIRS OF A SURVIVOR (1981)

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DIRECTED BY: David Gladwell

FEATURING: Julie Christie, Leonie Mellinger, Christopher Guard, Debbie Hutchings

PLOT: In a United Kingdom ravaged by disorder and want, a solitary woman is forced by the state to take on a mysterious girl as a boarder; the girl grows up quickly, trying to build a new society in cooperation with a charismatic young man, while the older woman discovers a portal to the past that lets her observe an affluent Victorian family.

Still from memoirs of a Survivor (1981)

COMMENTS: Nobel laureate Doris Lessing once told a group of science fiction fans that the closest she ever got to writing an autobiography was her 1974 novel The Memoirs of a Survivor. The narrator goes nameless in that book, but given that the film adaptation of the work dubs Julie Christie’s quiet tenant with the initial “D” in the endcrawl, it’s safe to guess that she’s meant to be the author’s stand-in. Which is the first of this movie’s curiosities, since D ends up playing only a tangential role in the story that unfolds. What, you have to wonder, was Lessing trying to say about herself?

Two storylines do the lion’s share of the work here. We witness the steady decline of a decently sized English city (most of the location work was done in Norwich) as government structures vanish, resources dwindle, and the populace divides into those awaiting support and those trying to hold the community together on their own. But help is not on the way. We see a man standing next to a placard reading “No News Is Good News” telling a small crowd that a bus is coming to take them… somewhere. Meanwhile, a woman holds out food to a group of feral children, she looking like a typical bird lady and they presenting as rejects from a Quest For Fire casting call. (Every scene with the children is artlessly scored to a cloying rendition of Brahms’ “Lullaby.”) For those trying to keep a stiff upper lip, the end is decidedly at hand.

Of more immediate concern is the arrival of Emily (Mellinger), a teenager whose youthful naivete and optimism are challenged by a society too ill-equipped to give her a chance. Beyond the roof over her head and using her as the occasional sounding board for germinating opinions, D provides her little attention. So Emily quickly takes up with Gerald, a naïve young man whose troublemaking tendencies are sublimated into a growing burden to care for the town’s abandoned children. It’s a daunting task, and his compulsion to help even the most damaged puts enormous pressure on those around him, especially Emily and her unsteady transition into adulthood.

While all this is going on, Christie often feels like a guest star in her own movie. Returning to the screen after a three-year absence, her D is very much a distant observer. She watches the suffering of others but rarely seems to want for much, and Christie is simply too beautiful to pull off the dowdy, threadbare look of her character. In fact, boarder and tenant are moving in two different directions: while Emily invests in the future, D literally retreats into the past. She finds she can pass through the walls of her flat into the Victorian era, where she spies on a quietly unhappy family. A tightly-wound father (played without dialogue by Nigel Hawthorne concurrent with his work on “Yes, Minister”) who may be harboring untoward thoughts about his daughter, a small girl also named Emily. It makes for an interesting contrast, as the child Emily desperately wants to attract her father while the teenaged Emily finds herself drawn to and then repelled by a young man with paternal instincts. But we can never be sure how much of this D sees in her forays into the past, and it’s not something that comes up in her own time, until the film’s final scene.

This is where the movie really plays the weird card, with Christie’s discovery of an egg the size of a room, which is evidently all the persuasion she needs to convince Emily, Gerald, and a host of dirty children to follow her into the portal and leave their broken England behind for good. It reeks of deus ex machina to such an extent that it casts the autobiographical elements in a new light. If Lessing is D, and D’s solution is to escape into an imagined past, it’s tempting to view the author’s whole career as a flight from the ugliness and tribulation of her present circumstances. If that interpretation is right, it’s a powerful self-criticism of her ventures into speculative fiction. But it’s also an abrupt and incomplete finish to the compelling circumstances she herself has created. If you don’t like the reality you’re in, find another one? Perhaps, but I suspect this survivor has postponed a reckoning, rather than come out the other side.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

Memoirs of a Survivor is the sort of film that would never get made these days. It’s grim, thought-provoking stuff… This is not a film with any answers or a trite Hollywood ending; in fact I’m still scratching my head about the ending… there are many elements within the film that are surreal or just plain weird. “–Justin Richards, Blueprint Review

(This movie was nominated for review by Steve Mobia. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

CAPSULE: THE BEAST (2023)

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La bête

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , George MacKay

PLOT: To get a job in a dystopian future, a woman undergoes a procedure designed to dampen her emotional responses by ridding herself of past-life traumas.

Still from The Beast (2023)

COMMENTS: Surely Henry James could never have imagined that, more than a hundred years after he wrote it, a Frenchman would loosely adapt his story “The Beast in the Jungle” as a centuries-spanning science fiction story incorporating a belief in past lives. James’ protagonist suffers a certain paralyzing presentiment of obliteration (the titular Beast), which is shared by (at least one of) Seydoux’s characters; but truthfully, Bertrand Bonello’s ambitious screenplay incorporates almost nothing from the original story—just the theme of loneliness and regret for missed opportunities, and a similar European setting for about 1/3 of the film. It also throws in a metric ton of other concerns, including artificial intelligence, incel culture, and reincarnation.

As suggested by the plot summary and hinted above, The Beast tells three different stories: one set at the turn of the twentieth century, one set approximately in contemporary times, and one set in 2044. This last date is the film’s base reality, despite not being the first story we’re thrown into. The Beast sets up the rather ridiculous premise that past life experiences are encoded in DNA and traumas that lead to automatic emotional responses can be overcome through a therapeutic regression that involves being submerged in a tub of black goo while a computer probes your ear—a concept that sounds like it came out of an esoteric Scientology text. While the procedure, and the theory underlying it, are insane, it doesn’t matter whether we accept them; it only matters that the movie believes in them, and creates a world that operates according to those rules. In Gabrielle’s case, the recurring trauma is her unconsummated passion for Louis, who is a gentleman in the 1900s, a stalker in the early 2000s, and an aspiring functionary like her in his current incarnation. The future’s rationale for the operation is legitimately unsettling, tapping into fears of cybertechnological dehumanization: with so much work automated and taken over by A.I., humans voluntarily try to rid themselves of passion and emotion in order to make more rational decisions that enable them to compete with the dominant machines.

So The Beast is, in a sense, three movies in one. There’s the science fiction fable; the Parisian period piece; and a contemporary stalker drama that quickly shades into (pretty effective) thriller territory.  As a standalone film, the full-length petticoat and starched collars of the Belle Epoque section would have made for a staid and respectable period drama, with a tremendous closing image. The modern day incel story can come off as a preachy, with on-the-nose commentary; MacKay’s portrayal of a 30-year old virgin who vlogs about how he’s “magnificent” and “deserves girls” but “can only have sex in my dreams” would seem like an eye-rolling caricature, if the character were not directly based on real-life incel mass-murderer Elliot Rodger (I believe some of MacKay’s monologues were taken verbatim from Rodger’s YouTube videos). But although each section is merely competent on its own—and arguably make for a bloated picture with a lot of unnecessary fat left in—tying them together in the reincarnation format makes for a whole greater than its parts. Certain conversations are repeated in full in different eras, and recurring themes like dolls/puppets resonate across time. Both previous Gabrielles consult psychics, in radically different contexts, who are able to see through the years and reference things that occurred in other lifetimes. Looking for common threads and shared symbols across the three stories engages the mind more than any of the issues the three tales address. And Bonello sprinkles significant weirdness throughout the project, much of it justified as artifacts of the disorientating effects of the procedure, but some of it freestanding. In the latter category is the opening with in a green screen studio, apparently rehearsing a scene for the upcoming film as she takes direction form an unseen voice (belonging to Bonello). Disorienting editing, uncanny dolls, dream interludes, unexpected clips from movies, a panicky laptop pop-up nightmare, and a nightclub with rotating mid-20th century themes all contribute to the strange flavor. The end result is a challenging art-house feature that doesn’t always hit its marks, but nevertheless remains intellectually stimulating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird sweeping romance and sci-fi dystopia mix that taps into so many contemporary anxieties, from AI stealing our jobs to climate disaster and the overall sense that the world is becoming unfeeling. It’s existential, yes, but it’s at its core a love story.”–Sara Clements, Pajiba (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: THE PLATFORM 2 (2024)

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El hoyo 2

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Milena Smit, Hovik Keuchkerian, Natalia Tena, Óscar Jaenada, Bastien Ughetto, Ken Appledorn

PLOT: A messiah reigns supreme over a cadre of “loyalists” in the pit, whose merciless enforcement of the law both maintains and threatens the lives of those volunteering to survive the platform.

COMMENTS: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia might have done better just sticking to this franchise as a platform for various character studies. The kinds of people who “volunteer” for probable death by starvation are bound to be interesting: life’s losers casting the die for one last chance, be it for success, salvation, or something else. Gaztelu-Urrutia’s opening salvo in the original Platform allowed for dissection of society (rich at the top—literally, at least, food-wise—doomed at the bottom) and how individuals fit in to the whole mess. In his second outing, we meet some interesting people, and witness how zealotry in the name of the masses typically leads to a whole new flavor of injustice.

The platform’s new recruit, Perempuán, begins as a cipher, and despite staggered reveals pretty much remains so. She is the audience’s new window into this purgatorial nightmare, kept company for a time by an ogre of a fellow who may or may not be a mathematician, but is certainly a screw-up. But her pot-bellied cellmate is never a problem; indeed, he’s a sensitive soul with no aspirations to harm anyone other than himself. Harming others is left not just to the platform’s overseers in this outing, but also to a group of fanatics who have taken it upon themselves to enforce “the Law,” which was hinted at in the first film. Eat only your share. Do not eat the food of the dead—’cause it’s unfair. Disobey the Law, and you will be strictly disciplined.

With every thesis (the platform), there is antithesis (the cult of Law), morphing eventually into synthesis. Synthesis, in this case, is a rebellion against the rebellion. The prisoner’s law, as interpreted solely by an impressively mobile messiah—how he travels around the 333-level deep complex never quite clicks—raises some interesting questions: when does enforcement for the greater good become mere barbarism? Is pure equity something to pursue even when it means bringing everyone down to the same level of misery? At one point the messiah’s methods are questioned; he rejoins that they kill now so that they needn’t kill in the future. I’ve heard that before: tyranny thwarted by a rebellion, which turns into a horrible new tyranny. Gaztelu-Urrutia seems to suggest there’s a third, middle-way.

That sensibility usually gets lost in the fervor—and particularly so in the case of The Platform 2. There is much to enjoy this time around: the inmates are fleshed-out people pushed to desperate extremes; the vagaries of populist autocracy are dissected; and spiritual undertones manifest in a semi-elegant allegory. But as other viewers and critics have observed, a muddle (a frenzied, violent muddle) develops. Though the film gnaws at interesting themes, there are a few too many, and the climax feels like an under-chewed story to gulp down as the credits roll.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Eventually, the movie skips ahead to something more novel: an eerie, green-lit sequence that brings both sci-fi and slow-building suspense back into the proceedings. (Even the ever-present blood splatter becomes more poetic.) Then it barrels ahead further, into a head-scratching final stretch that doesn’t gain any clarity by continuing on into the end credits.”–Betsy Reed, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ABRUPTIO (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Evan Marlowe

FEATURING: Voices of James Marsters, Hana Mae Lee, Christopher McDonald, Jordan Peele, Robert Englund,

PLOT: Recovering alcoholic Les Hackels finds himself compelled to follow murderous instructions or a bomb implanted in his neck will detonate.

Still from "Aprubtio" (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Violent twists accumulate to breaking point as the plot lurches toward a supernatural conspiracy, with all its hapless character-victims played by humans-as-puppets.

COMMENTS: There’s societal collapse, a shadowy organization texting orders for murder, ill-conceived genetic experiments, a troupe of levitating aliens with tentacles, and perhaps the creepiest babies ever seen. All told, Les effectively handles these challenges with quiet, almost passive, determination. But that’s not what this movie is about—and what this movie is actually about challenges Les far more than the parade of creepy ultra-violence. Abruptio is about heaping great ladles of intrigue and ickiness, poured over the least proactive protagonist this side of Barry Lyndon.

His calm is broadcast through his medium, for he is a puppet—fortunately, the least creepy of the bunch. Puppetry can hit just about any tonal note from cute to uncanny, and the characters in this film all skew firmly to the latter. They are puppeted human actors, similar to Xhonneux‘s oddities in Marquis. The bodies move like ours, but all the heads and exposed limbs smack of prosthesis. Even the occasional bare breasts are obviously latex facsimiles positioned over the genuine article. This visual choice has its  ramifications—the entire film experience is always at least a little “off”—but is something of a blessing when you consider just what we’re seeing.

Les kills off his co-workers with a gas-spewing typewriter case. He massacred an innocent family. And more. He blindly follows orders sent to him from an anonymous contact on his mobile phone, his dispassionate puppet face, and deadpan tone of voice, suggesting a deeply troubled, but deeply tranquil, mind. These acts of carnage and survival are a lot to take in, but there’s a point in the growing grisliness. Why are we enduring this alongside the “hero”? How are these disparate Saw-style acts and executions tied together? What is “Herason”? Why does the digital alarm continue to blink 10:22? And just what does the police chief want him to confess to?

Abruptio smacks a good deal of The Trial, but with ultraviolence. It also brings to mind two films whose titles would give the game away, but I’ll hint that one stars Anthony Hopkins and the other doesn’t. The uncanny journey Les takes has the grinding feel of a video game as he lurches from one nasty imperative to the next, attempting to keep his new ward (a rape survivor who emerges from the background dystopia) calm while dodging encounters with his overbearing mother. The final reveal comes as tragic relief, through procedural electric shock. The ghoulish veneer is stripped off, pieces fall into place, and Les finds himself staring down something a good deal more unpleasant than mayhem, murders, mutants—and the creepiest babies ever seen.

Abruptio is scheduled to screen in Gardena, CA (filmmakers in attendance), Riverside, CA, Kansas City,  MO, and scattered independent venues starting this week; in Seattle from Oct. 4-13; and there’s also a one-night screening at a drive-in in Orefiled, PA on Oct. 10. Blu-rays drop Dec. 10, streaming is still to-be-announced, and you can keep up with added dates by continually refreshing the film’s home page or following their Facebook page.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film that’s just too weird to ignore… Even viewers who find it too strange to genuinely enjoy will still be suitably perplexed when they watch it. Simply put, this is a film that really does have something for everyone.”–David Gelmini, Dread Central (contemporaneous)

Abruptio
  • Les Hackel hates his life. He works a dead-end job. He discovers a fresh incision behind his neck and his friend says it's bomb.