Tag Archives: Guilt

Capsules

CAPSULE: CAMP (2025)

Leave a comment

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

DIRECTED BY: Avalon Fast

FEATURING: Zola Grimmer

PLOT: A traumatized college girl reluctantly volunteers as a counselor at a camp for “damaged” kids, but when she gets there she finds the other female counselors are practicing homemade witchcraft.

Still from Camp (2025)

COMMENTS: Poor Emily has had it rough the past couple years. Already wracked with guilt for a fatal accident that wasn’t really her fault, she finds herself responsible for a second unintentional death, making her feel like a serial killer. She leans on her father for support, and when he suggests the depressed girl could benefit by serving as a counselor at a Christian-themed camp for “damaged” kids, she agrees. There, she finds herself eagerly embraced by her fellow counselors, who aren’t nearly as Christian as management would prefer: every night is an campfire bacchanalia of dancing, flirting, pot, and alcohol. But, just as the Christians warn, weed, booze, and dancing are inevitably a gateway to witchcraft—and, perhaps, to psychic healing as well.

Where Camp is good is in the dreamy cinematography and imagery. Fast’s movie is shot through with experimental impulses, from fuzzy montages underlaid by indie ballads to a red-midnight rendezvous to overlays of twinkling stars as females cavort (and levitate) in the moonlight. Although the Alberta forest is entrancing, occasionally, mountainous backdrops seen from out the window are obvious matte paintings instead of natural vistas. After the indie dramatics of the first two acts, things slide towards the surreal: there’s a pay phone that pops up in the middle of a sylvan glen in the late going at a moment of crucial decision for our protagonist. In terms of setting a dreamy mood, Camp hits the notes it aims at, and for some, that will be enough.

But where Camp is bad is, sadly, pretty much everything else. Not only does the plot wander around aimlessly for most of the film, the characters are unmemorable. Emily’s female confidants are hardly developed: there’s the ringleader, there’s the kinda sexy one, and there’s… two others. The male characters are even sketchier, with only the camp’s senior leader, a wait-until-marriage hymn-singing straight-arrow, receiving significant attention. (There’s another guy who’s positioned as a potentially darker influence, but his plotline seems to fall victim to the cutting room floor.) And, although other critics seem to disagree, Emily herself is too much of a cipher: a knot of guilt, and little more. (What are her interests and hobbies, besides self-medicating and moping?) It’s not the actress’ fault: Grimmer portrays all the appropriate emotions, but why (beyond the obvious) and, more specifically, how her tragedies makes her “damaged” remains something of a mystery.

The overall result is disappointing, because Fast’s visual sensibilities are so engaging and the story has such a weighty theme that you wish these virtues had been wedded to a more affecting narrative. Instead, we get an often lovely mood piece with sincere impulses that’s undone by draggy pacing. If you’re looking for fun at a late-summer Camp, book Miasma instead.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Surreal in a manner that evokes aspects of David Lynch by way of Jane Schoenbrun, Fast’s atmospheric film is more interested in embracing the protagonist’s emotional damage than presenting her with a tidy way out from under it.”–Josh Goller, Spectrum Culture (contemporaneous)

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

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: IRISH CATHOLIC (2023)

1 Comment

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

DIRECTED BY: Katie Madonna Lee, A Great Male Artist

FEATURING: Avalon Rayne and assorted misfit Catholics

PLOT: Shavon rebels against her Irish-Catholic family only to find herself similarly repressed by the gaggle of punks she moves in with.

Still from Irish Catholic (2023)

COMMENTS: Katie Madonna Lee and A Great Male Artist [sic] really hit the nail on the head with this one. Indeed, they hit so many nails on the head that, once her baseball bat has been bolstered by the nails, it’s ready for them to truly wallop something—and boy-howdy do they wallop it. All of it: Catholicism, sisterhood, hypocrisy, the patriarchy, inflexible feminism, shame, conformity, and all manner of other injustices and annoyances of life. Irish Catholic is appropriately staged and shot like a morality play—with tunes!—with young Shavon navigating adversity as she frantically paddles toward self assuredness.

The lights come up, and we open on a bedraggled, middle aged mother praying for a parking space. Her makeup is slapdash, her eyes as keen as an irritated hawk, and her hair is festooned with a bouquet of infant dolls. Shavon and her siblings are crammed in the vehicle space; her sisters pray along, in song, with the mother, and Shavon tries to silence her demanding stomach (which has its own voice credit), ultimately bowing to the temptation of the bag of potato chips being brought to the soup kitchen. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The family serves the poor with guilt, and they sit through a guilt-themed sermon which ends on the hymn line, “Guilty, Forever Guilty.”

Oddly enough, Irish Catholic is also a rather fun, sometimes whimsical experience. Sure, Shavon’s brother is molested by the hot priest, but that’s offset by the smirk-inducing machinations of the sisters as they attempt to out-pray to God (the competition here being just how many starving Africans they hope to save when they grow up). Shavon’s slide from her miserable lower middle class Irish Catholic family existence to bohemian life with a quatro of questionably punk “enlightened” types is tempered by various visitations from (the appropriately credited) Hot Jesus, who at various times pines for Arby’s and is stoned out of his mind. There’s also the special celebrity guest, “the Poop Bucket” (with it’s own musical number), but I won’t get into that.

All told, Irish Catholic has quite a bit to say; much of it about religion. Greenaway came to mind more than once, despite his comparative grisliness; this skewering is far more of a  romp, despite claims of how very dark (very dark) the film is. Young person hates her life, falls in with a seemingly carefree crowd who ultimately prove to be just as controlling and image-conscious as the ostensibly more repressive traditional life she has fled. I’ve seen this, but I was happy to see this spin on it. Life can be frustrating and much too difficult. But as Jesus famously preached, “Your life’s gonna get worse, so you might as well learn to sing and dance. …it worked for the gays.”

At the time of this writing Irish Catholic is available for free on YouTube, courtesy of co-writer/director Lee.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This peculiar film blends satire and drama in a quest to unravel the complexities of faith and the timeless human yearning for acceptance… [it] exemplifies avant-garde filmmaking.” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: AMNESIA (2001)

Leave a comment

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Martin Koolhoven

FEATURING: Fedja van Huêt, Carice van Houten, Sacha Bulthuis, Theo Maassen

PLOT: After receiving a call that his mother is ill, a photographer returns to his family estate (“AmnesiA”) to face his gangster twin brother and a traumatic childhood memory.

Still from AmnesiA (2001)

COMMENTS: You will seldom see a film where you will be as uncertain if the characters really exist as in AmneisiA. The base story of Alex returning to his old, abandoned homestead—improbably and tellingly dubbed “AmnesiA”—can be seen as nothing more than a symbolic depiction of Alex wrestling with the unresolved internal conflict of a seen-in-choppy-flashbacks childhood trauma. And although that is an extraordinary event, it is far and away the most believable thing you’ll see.

It’s not that anything truly impossible happens in AmnesiA. It’s just that no one in the movie acts in ways that make sense, but rather in ways that are unnerving or absurd. After an efficient, if ominous, setup, things start to feel off when Alex discovers pretty Sandra stowing away in his car. She refuses to explain who she is or what she’s doing there, and rather than panicking or throwing her out, Alex lets her tag along, and doesn’t correct his mother when she assumes the girl is his fiancee. Twin brother Aram brings home an even stranger companion, Wouter; the two have just returned from a bungled robbery, and Wouter sports a massive gut wound, acquired under mysterious circumstances. Every now and then someone will comment that he really should see a doctor, but basically everyone ignores the fact that he’s bleeding all over the furniture. Although the house receives other visitors, this fivesome takes up the bulk of the screentime. We are privy to many perversions along the way—disrespectful urination, a son turning into his father in unhealthy ways, and cucking twins—but introspective psychodrama, rather than shock value, remains the focus.

Fedja van Huêt is excellent in his two roles; even without their slightly different hairstyles and dress, we would never confuse the brooding Alex for the simmering Aram, or vice-versa. Carice van Houten (who would later find international stardom in “Game of Thrones”) is simply lovely, and really gives the sense that she doesn’t know what her character is doing at Alex’s childhood home (not in uncomplimentary sense, but by design; we aren’t supposed to know what her character is doing there, either). Mother Sacha Bulthuis and wounded thug Theo Maassen provide comic relief—bloody comic relief, in the latter case.

AmnesiA received positive reviews on release, but for reasons unknown never made it onto DVD in North America. Cult Epics rescues this nearly forgotten (heh heh) feature with a pristine DVD/Blu-ray release, featuring a moderated commentary from the director and star and supplemental interviews with Koolhoven and van Houten. The double Blu-ray release also includes two of Koolhaven’s two previous made-for-TV movies, Dark Light (1997) and Suzy Q (1999), made with some of the same cast. Kudos to Cult Epics for putting this overlooked, surreal Dutch psychothriller in front of more eyeballs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The hoary myth about identical twins — that one is good and the other evil — must tap into some primal notion of the divided self in which the two halves claw at each other’s throats, each seeking dominance. The concept gets a weird but intriguing workout in ‘AmnesiA,’ a surreal Dutch film that carries the comic menace of a play like Harold Pinter’s ‘Homecoming’ to the brink of horror.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: MEN (2022)

1 Comment

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

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu

PLOT: Harper rents a remote English manor house to recover after what could euphemistically be called a “bad breakup”; she finds herself haunted by a strange nude stalker, and condescended to by the odd and unsympathetic men of the nearby village.

COMMENTS: Alex Garland does his latest movie no favors by giving it the in-your-face,  on-the-nose title Men, provoking accusations of “wokeness” and scolding responses of “not all men…” From the other side of the aisle, it’s simultaneously eliciting complaints that Garland is Men-splaining toxic masculinity. The title frames the film in a way that undoes a great deal of its subtlety and ambiguity; there would surely be less controversy had Garland named it A Question of Guilt or The Haunted Village or The Randy Vicar or somesuch.

Broad message aside, there’s a lot to enjoy about Men, considered strictly from a psychological horror perspective. The acting is top-notch; Buckley ably and sympathetically carries the film, with quiet moments fearfully wandering the woods as well as a few big outbursts of terror and anger. Rory Kinnear is even better in multiple roles, some subtly uncanny (his friendly but increasingly snoopy landlord) and some less subtly so (an uncommonly mannish schoolboy). The cinematography and sound design are superlative, particularly shining in a scene set in a long lonely tunnel with an unnatural echo that allows Harper to perform an unaccompanied a capella symphony—before she’s interrupted by the sight of a stiff silhouette lurking at the tunnel’s far entrance.

That’s all part of the eerie atmosphere Men sets up before Garland launches into bonkers territory for the third act, basically a long home invasion where characters blink in and out of existence and morph into one another, ending in a climax that one-ups Takashi Miike‘s Gozu. The madness rolls on for so long that, by the end, Harper’s attitude switches from terrified to resigned. But even before that resolution arrives, Garland deploys eccentric and fascinating touches. The local chapel with pagan faces carved on its altar. A shot of a dead deer, its eye perfectly hollowed out by maggots. Dandelion seeds hang in the air, and get swallowed. A horny vicar spouts classical allusions. A naked stalker turns into the Green Man, then into a hermaphrodite. All of the imagery and references don’t quite add up at first glance, but they make Men more interesting than the simplistic “gee-don’t-men-behave-badly?” reading suggests.

The evil of Men is supernatural, but, although symbolic and psychological sources are clear, events are never explicitly justified or explained from inside the narrative. It seems Harper suffers from a curse, one that’s enacted as pure metaphor. Men is more interesting as a psychological horror study unfolding from a specific scenario than as a manifesto on gender relations. Those wider implications should have been left to hang in the subtextual background. Alex Garland has said that he may give up directing to focus on writing. I say, stick with both writing and directing—but let other people come up with your titles.

Men is currently in theaters; we’ll let you know when it arrives on streaming and home video.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Near the end, Garland ramps up the surreal elements and the special effects, gliding towards an over-the-top ending… It’s easy to admire his audacity, even if it is too much even by surreal standards.”–Caryn James, BBC (contemporaneous)

Canonically Weird (The List)

330. AFTER HOURS (1985)

3 Comments

“Different rules apply when it gets this late. You know what I mean? It’s like, after hours.”–After Hours

Must See

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , John Heard, Linda Fiorentino, Terri Garr, , Verna Bloom, , Tommy Chong

PLOT: Paul meets an attractive woman in a Manhattan coffee shop after he gets off work. Under the pretext of his buying a paperweight from her roommate, she gives him her number. He calls her, is invited over to her SoHo loft, loses his money on the cab ride over, and is plagued by a bizarre series of missteps and coincidences that result in a dead body and his pursuit by a lynch mob as he tries in vain to make his way back home.

Still from After Hours (1985)

BACKGROUND:

  • Originally titles Lies, the script for After Hours was Joseph Minion’s thesis project for Columbia Film School. His professor was . He got an “A.”
  • Minion lifted about a third of the film (much of Marcy’s character) from a radio monologue by Joe Frank, who won a plagiarism lawsuit against the producers.
  • Minion would go on to write the script for another Certified Weird pick: Vampire’s Kiss (1988).
  • Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, then-struggling actors who took up producing, optioned Minion’s screenplay. They pitched the project to Martin Scorsese, but when they did not hear back from him they began negotiations with , who had yet to make a feature film at the time. Months later, when Scorsese’s first attempt to make The Last Temptation of Christ fell apart, he expressed interest in the project. When Burton heard this news he gracefully withdrew, saying he did not want to stand in the way of Scorsese.
  • The ending of After Hours had not been decided on when shooting began. (One proposed, and unused, surrealistic ending had Paul climbing into Verna Bloom’s womb and being reborn uptown). The first cut used a downbeat attempt at a conclusion that bombed with test audiences. Scorsese then went back and re-shot the ending we see today. (Director suggested the resolution Scorsese finally used).
  • Scorsese won the “Best Director” award at the Cannes Film Festival for After Hours.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Kiki’s papier-mâché sculpture of a man staring up at the sky, mouth agape and gnarled fingers held before his face, like a flash-fried Pompeii victim preserved in ash. Paul thinks it looks like a three-dimensional version of “The Shriek.” The statue turns up unexpectedly later in the night, and an eerily and ironically similar piece plays a key role in the climax.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Burn victim?; “Surrender Dorothy”; mummified escape

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: No other black comedy has ever captured such a perfect mix of unease, absurdity, melancholy, and danger with the light, unforced touch that Scorsese does here. Man’s fate in an uncaring universe ruled by the iron fist of coincidence has never seemed so horrifyingly hilarious.


Original trailer for After Hours

COMMENTS: Years ago, I wrote an article for this site about Continue reading 330. AFTER HOURS (1985) →