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Tag Archives: Experimental
IT CAME FROM THE READER SUGGESTED QUEUE: IT COULDN’T HAPPEN HERE (1987)
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“I’ve just been fishing with Salvador Dali. He used a dotted line. . . caught every other fish.”
DIRECTED BY: Jack Bond
FEATURING: Neil Tennant, Chris Lowe
PLOT: From West End towns with dead end walls, the Pet Shop Boys travel around England before ending up at King’s Cross; all the while, singer Neil Tennant recalls his childhood memories in a narrative postcard to his mother.
COMMENTS: By 1987 the Pet Shop Boys had produced two hit albums with a number of chart-topping singles but they still couldn’t afford the expense of touring. When a planned concert fell through, their manager suggested they make a film, something like The Beatles did with A Hard Day’s Night. Director Jack Bond, whose prior credits included the documentary Dali in New York (1965) and a series of experimental films with Jane Arden, proved integral to the project. Structured as a road movie, Bond turns the film into a Surrealist game of free association. Though punctuated by popular songs, It Couldn’t Happen Here sank into obscurity after being panned by film critics.
Anyone expecting this to be a typical band film must have been surprised by a movie that’s anything but. It lacks concert footage and behind-the-scenes interviews; instead, the Boys meander through a series of vignettes. Lyrics suddenly crop up in the dialogue as spoken word poetry or snippets on the radio. Fans of Tennant’s literate compositions, in which love, romance, and commerce all intertwine, will instantly recognize them. To anyone less familiar with the music, the isolated refrains make the film even more enigmatic.
The road trip begins at the seashore. Tennant stops by a souvenir stand to purchase bawdy holiday postcards. He reminisces about his family nearly being kicked out of a boarding house due to his bad behavior. The scene then cuts to Chris Lowe, narrowly escaping the same overbearing landlady after he throws his breakfast in her face. “Chrissy, baby,” she moans, “what have I done to deserve this?”
The present day continually blends with the past as Lowe joins Tennant at the seaside and a blind priest chases two schoolboys through a carnival. After Tennant recalls how his father once spent their family’s savings on a blue and cream-colored Ford Zephyr, the priest then reappears as a hitchhiking serial killer. While Lowe drives and Tennant lip-syncs to himself on the radio, the hitchhiker gleefully recounts his murderous exploits with Salvador Dalí as they continue their journey across the country.
A pitstop at a diner stars a ventriloquist’s dummy who rants about the nature of time, sparking an existential crisis in a pilot seated nearby. A plane and car-chase scene, reminiscent of North by Northwest, ends in front of a phone booth being vandalized by Neo-Nazis, who politely cease in their destruction so Tennant can call the landlady.
And so it goes, passing from one bizarre set-piece to another, the proceedings occasionally interrupted by MTV-style dance breaks. Tennant and Lowe retain deadpan expressions throughout, observing everything from a man on fire and zebra keepers with black-and-white striped faces with incurious nonchalance.
Re-considering It Couldn’t Happen Here, some commentators are kinder to it in hindsight, uncovering clever political critique lurking beneath the odd sensibility. Others are not so nice, declaring it a misguided foray best left forgotten. Dedicated fans of the Pet Shop Boys should seize opportunities to check it out on physical media or streaming; there’s a certain nostalgia to hearing the group’s hits again in this context. For others, it’s an interesting, if not entirely successful, attempt at making a film according to Surrealist principles; at least, that’s my impression.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Chris R.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
SATURDAY SHORT: VIL (2014)
Abstract psychedelic shapes overcome and mirror woods, water, and a cabin in this visual experiment.
366 UNDERGROUND: AFAR (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost
FEATURING: Jason Trost, voice of Tallay Wickham
PLOT: A private detective is tasked with finding a contestant from a doomed reality gameshow in the heart of the Australian wilderness.
COMMENTS: A strange saturation fills the spectrum, bringing unearthly hues and twitches in the transmission—and I’m not just talking about Aurora Australis. (Those are the Southern “Northern Lights”, if you will; I know this, and you know this, and so does depressed-and-intrepid private detective, Brian Everett.) Jason Trost is a product of his times, and like so many of his (and my) generation, he has a strange nostalgia for the objectively inferior media formats of days of yore. Videotape can radiate the warmth of bygone familiarity, even while harnessed to augment creepiness.
And there’s creepiness, mystery, and tracking-issues aplenty in Afar, a film which takes multiple viewings to get a full grip on, because Trost has cut the story up into different kinds of journeys, selectable on-screen by the viewer. Do you want Brian to Run or Help? (One of those may kill him.) Do you want him to investigate the River Bed, or the Mysterious Ruins? (One of those will kill him, while the other only might…). And so on. Every few minutes or so, you will be presented with a choice to be made. There’s no “saving” your progress, but the director is good enough to allow a re-think on occasion after a jagged font informs you that Brian has snuffed it thanks to your poor decision.
Having made it this far into the review, I presume you wish to continue. Afar is a neat little movie, and I say that in no way to sound dismissive. Jason Trost has, once again, crafted something new and nostalgic on his own terms, staying true to a guiding ambition, and the result is both intriguing and entertaining. Presuming you enjoy Trost’s screen presence (which is something of a must, as he’s in the frame perhaps nine tenths of the time, as a cross between Tex Murphy and Henry Jones, Jr.), you’ll have a fine time digging around the various clues, back-stories, and pathways tucked within his interactive horror film. And while I enjoyed Afar on its own merits, I am hopeful that it will eventually stand as more of a “proof of concept.” I’d be most pleased to experience a grander, deeper, and more labyrinthine narrative interaction, even if it results in many more “You are dead” cut-screens.
The film is available to download on Steam (that’s a first), or to buy on DVD from Kunaki, There’s also a tie-in choose-your-own-horror paperback.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: PHANTASMATAPES (2025)
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DIRECTED BY: Annie Choi, Joseph A. Ziemba, Norman Earl Thompson (The Revenge of Dr. X), Joseph Green (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)
FEATURING: James Craig, Tota Kondo (Revenge of Dr. X); Jason Evers, Virginia Leith (The Brain That Wouldn’t Die)
PLOT: A double-feature of The Revenge of Dr. X and The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, presented as if it was taped off of a local TV broadcast complete with VHS tracking errors, amateur commercials, and more surprises.
COMMENTS: OK, so TV stations used to broadcast cheapo horror films late at night (especially weekend nights), interrupted by badly acted commercials for local pizza parlors, shoe stores, and video rental joints. If you never experienced this phenomenon—or if, for some sick reason, you want to relive this insomniac entertainment—the retro-weirdos at Bleeding Skull have come to your rescue.
Thankfully, they don’t recreate the experience faithfully, but instead imagine the broadcast as it might have appeared if you were dead tired and fading in and out of consciousness, or if you had the flu and had taken a greater than recommended dose of Nyquil before tuning in. First off, the movies are heavily edited, to fit into a brisk 72 minute total runtime, including commercials, station IDs, and a few other intrusive surprises I won’t spoil. The ruthless edits are not a problem with the Ed Wood Jr.-scripted Dr. X, an extremely dull and padded Frankenstein variation about a NASA scientist who decides to spend his vacation in Japan engineering a giant, mobile Venus flytrap. In fact, this crap still drags a little when cut down to about 30 minutes. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die moves much faster, and is still relatively coherent in the edited form, but they unfortunately cut out one of the WTF-iest moments (the catfight scene). The nearly-coherent editing exaggerates the surreal elements of the originals, while jettisoning a lot of blah filler. (Watching Dr. X unedited is recommended to cinema masochists only.)
Secondly, the two movies are not only edited, but manipulated. First off, synthy new 80s vintage soundtracks have been added— a pipe organ patch with a Casio keyboard beat underneath, that kind of thing. The digital doodling is more profound in the colorful Dr. X. Tracking errors and faded color are kept (and new ones are added), along with overlaid images: sometimes from other scenes from the original film, and sometimes from outside sources, so that suns and galaxies and landscapes and abstract dust storms occasionally play over the duller imagery. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is less altered than Dr. X—it plays straight for most of the time—but there are a few fun stylizations. One motif is that, in the more delirious second half, the mad doctor’s assistant is always shown in a different “film stock,” which looks like they played a battered VHS tape on a particularly staticky cathode tube TV set, filmed it with a cheap camcorder, and re-edited the new footage into the movie. Another cool idea is that when Jan’s severed head is monologizing, the “camera” does a slow zoom to focus directly on her mouth. Along with the soundtrack, these experiments supply the new reimagined content. I only wish they had pushed things even further. (The trailer is actually a little misleading, implying more video manipulation than actually shows up in the finished product.) The concept of using public domain B-movies as canvases for Stan Brakhage-type experiments is a thrilling one, and that potential is barely scratched here. Hopefully they will push the conceit further with the promised “Phantasmatapes 2.”
The Blu-ray includes uncut versions of both features, in VHS full-frame scans complete with lousy sound and picture quality. The Blu-ray wraps the whole package up with a commentary track from Choi and Ziemba and three nostalgia-themed shorts: a mini-documentary on the “Max Headroom” pirate signal broadcast from 1987, a supercut of “Casper the Friendly Ghost” scares, and another mini-doc on the early 80s moral panic around the Dungeons and Dragons game. All in all, this compilation will resonate strongly with a certain demographic—you probably have already decided if you’re in it—and is at least worthy of a gander for others.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
No other critics’ reviews located.
![Phantasma Tapes: Volume One [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/517+kf4mNAL._SL500_.jpg)
- Region Free Blu-Ray