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CAPSULE: FRESH KILL (1994)

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DIRECTED BY: Shu Lea Cheang

FEATURING: Sarita Choudhury, Erin McMurtry, Abraham Lim, Jose Zuniga

PLOT: When their daughter disappears after developing green-glowing hands, her moms begin to suspect a mega-corporation involved in a tainted cat food scandal.

COMMENTS: Claire and Shareen are just trying to get by. Shareen works as a trash picker. Claire waits tables at a trendy sushi joint called “Naga Saki,” whose only perk is the free sushi she brings home to their daughter. Honey, one of those unusual four year olds who prefers raw fish and wasabi to mac n’ cheese, can’t get enough of Naga Saki’s specialty roll, “kissing fish,” a variety with obscenely red lips. When the little girl starts intermittently glowing green—a phenomenon her mothers never directly witness—they take her to various specialists. A pediatrician, a child psychologist, and a fortune-teller all fail to figure out the cause of the “green.” Honey then mysteriously vanishes, as stories about glowing cats begin to take over the news.Fresh Kill innovatively conveys its central mystery through endless streams of information. News reports, radio broadcasts, snippets from talk shows, and commercials regularly interrupt the narrative, adding clues to the overarching plot. Accounts of the real-life debacle with the infamous garbage barge alternate with fictional news items, like the corporate takeover of a major television news station by “GX,” a conglomerate that over the course of the film also buys up pet food products. The GX slogan, “because ‘We Care’” ominously repeats amid stories of a stray hydrogen bomb “harmlessly” dissolving in the ocean and a recall of GX’s recently acquired cat food brand.

Along with the many communication technologies on display—from televisions, to radios, to Web 1.0—the diverse cast speak a variety of languages, often code-switching in the middle of a sentence. Despite an unconventional makeup, family remains the anchor of the narrative, even as it spins off into various directions. While searching for Honey, Claire and Shareen interact with the residents of a neighborhood homeless enclave, their friends, and their own difficult parents. Claire’s mother is the diva-like talk show host of a program on public access who refers to Shareen as “Shirley.” Shareen’s father is a retired cop whose wife left him because he could never be off-duty, and who hasn’t caught on that his daughter isn’t straight. Supporting characters represent such various voices as the queer community, Wall Street, the homeless, computer hackers, immigrants, and environmental activists, contributing to the channel-surfing aesthetic.

The owner of Naga Saki rushes to buy the last of the kissing fish stock, just as her customers, too, begin glowing green. One night,  a friend of the sushi chef/hacker Jiannbin sees the kissing fish glowing, but no one else does, and so they remain skeptical. Eventually, Claire puts two and two together, insisting the contaminated fish must have infected Honey. She convinces Jiannbin to hack into the GX website to see what he can find.

Director Shu Lea Cheang pioneered the use of what we called “new media” back in the ’90s. Primarily known as a visual artist who works with digital technologies, one of her early works comprised a website complete with interactive chat rooms. A similar sense of hypertext and polyphony pervades her first feature film. The messages of corporate news sources contrast with the word on the street. Text scrolls sometimes appear along the bottom of the screen, and -ian intertitles with phrases like “Security = Control” intercept the imagery.

The “green” people’s speech gradually becomes glitched and warped until it’s completely unintelligible. Just as the image modes skip around, the soundtrack features varying styles of music, like a radio set to scan all available channels. A song by Sheila Chandra, who rarely allows her work to be licensed, pairs beautifully with an emotionally charged moment of Claire and Shareen grappling with Honey’s absence.

While the story of a missing kid could easily get dark and depressing, Fresh Kill maintains an ironic sense of black humor. The script consistently plays on the many meanings of the word “green” and its cultural connotations. Everyone gets mocked, from the finance tycoons who speak in corporate buzzwords to people who mindlessly follow the “green” movement by buying into eco-branding.

It’s easy to see why Fresh Kill experienced a resurrection in the 21st century with a 2026 Criterion Collection release. The seeming prescience of its themes demonstrates how these “contemporary agita” were already a part of American cultural discourse thirty years ago. Green may equal “environment,” but Cheang never loses sight of how it also always equals “money.” In the closing scenes, Naga Saki gets re-branded as “Mumbo Gumbo,” now specializing in farm-raised catfish, completely free of toxins!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Unfolding as a hallucinatory montage of Marxist critiques, ecofeminist diatribes, and queer, futuristic, dystopian imagery, the multimedia artist’s 1994 feature-length directorial debut is a prescient work of sci-fi agitprop from the early internet era. Think of it as a Godardian cinematic essay restructured for the MTV, channel-surfing age.”–Derek Smith, Slant (Blu-ray)

Fresh Kill (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Fresh Kill (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

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    CAPSULE: THE NAPA BOYS (2025)

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    AKA Napa Boys Present: Napa Boys 4: The Sommelier’s Amulet

    DIRECTED BY: Nick Corirossi

    FEATURING: Armen Weitzman, Nick Corirossi, Sarah Ramos, Jamar Neighbors, Nelson Franklin, Mike Mitchell, , Paul Rust, Vanessa Chester

    PLOT: The Napa Boys and a slew of friends and hangers-on assemble for one last wine country adventure in this fourth installment of a franchise whose first three movies were never made.

    Still from "The Napa Boys" (2025)
    Nick Corirossi and Armen Weitzman in THE NAPA BOYS, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

    COMMENTS: The Napa Boys are, as near as I can tell—having, like everyone else, missed the first three movies—Miles Jr., Jack Jr., and Kevin. And maybe, once upon a time, Stifler? Miles Jr. is a neurotic virgin in his 30s with a dead wife and son (just roll with it). Jack Jr. is a lecherous jackass. Kevin is… well, so forgettable that he disappears without explanation for most of the movie. They are joined in their wine country adventures by fill-in Boy Stifler’s Brother and stowaway Puck, a female fan with a Napa Boys podcast. There’s also affable ally Mitch, owner of Mitch’s Winery, and fascistic enemy Squirm, owner of Squirm’s Winery. Three of the characters acquire love interests, a female drug dealer and a pair of waitresses. Adding to the crowd are unexpected cameos by Jay and Silent Bob and . Not to mention the Milfonator.

    All of that sounds like fertile ground for a wacky comedy, but that’s not what’s on the filmmakers’ minds. The high concept here implies that, as the fourth film in a franchise, the blush is fading off the rosé. Thus, the in-universe movie script is desperate for new twists and turns, while continuing to work the formula and deliver bits the in-universe fans have come to expect. That means a lot of apparent references to past events that Napa Boys fans would know about, but we don’t. Corirossi and company are going for clever rather than funny, with the “joke” being ultra-meta. The cast act badly on purpose, delivering their lines in an anti-comedy game of coming as close to a joke as they can possibly get without actually making one. (For example, when Mitch spills wine down his chin, Puck observes that he’s dribbling, and the vintner explains no, he just prefers wine filtered through his beard.) There were about three jokes in the whole thing that made me giggle. I’m sure they were included by accident; no anti-comic can bat a thousand.

    A surprising number of critics misdiagnosed the film’s humor because they hadn’t encountered the concept of anti-comedy before. And if professionals are missing the point, you can be sure 99% of the film’s potential audience is, too. (It’s a shame that Rex Reed never lived to see this; the film’s writers would have treasured his dismissive takedown). The Napa Boys was designed to alienate and encourage walkouts; not only is the anti-humor off-putting until (and maybe even after) you get what they’re up to, but they also put the grossest of gross-out scenes relatively early in the first act. Anyone who makes it through Jack Jr.’s desperate encounter with a wine barrel without heading for the exits is in for the long haul.

    There are three possible reactions to Napa Boys: you either don’t get it, or you get it, or you get it but conclude it wasn’t worth getting. I vacillate between the last two options. But what kept me watching was the unpredictability. The plot seems road-movie random, but is more structured than it first appears: subplots that appear to have been dropped reappear at unexpected moments. And even after all the plot threads seem to have been wrapped up, the movie keeps going on in a long epilogue, introducing new characters intended to set up the in-universe sequel or a spin-off. And the stop-motion moose surprised me, too. The Merlot may have been foul at times, but I can’t say my trip to wine country was entirely wasted. If you want to go, just be sure to pack a lot of patience.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…one of the most surreal comedies in recent memory… this movie tells our nature to eff off, challenging us to flow with its exquisitely honed stupidity and simply laugh at the gross, awkward, un-PC and just-plain-weird moments it presents… The film has the cheery look and tone of a dumbass comedy…. Now cross that with the bizarre disassociation from reality you feel while watching a David Lynch film, and you’ve bullseyed The Napa Boys…”–John Serba, Decider (contemporaneous)

    The Napa Boys

    The Napa Boys

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    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ROWS (2015)

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    Rows is available for rental or purchase on-demand.

    DIRECTED BY: David W. Warfield

    FEATURING: Hannah Schick, Lauren Lakis, Nancy Murray, Joe Basile, Kenneth Hughes

    PLOT: The daughter of a prolific real estate developer must find her way out of a mysterious maze after she attempts to deliver an eviction notice to a malevolent tenant.

    COMMENTS: If you’ve driven across the American Midwest and Great Plains in summertime, you’ve probably been witness to a notably dissonant image: vast fields of corn and wheat, dotted with a mix of ramshackle, rotting old farmhouses and barns teetering on the brink of collapse, contrasted with brand-new, modern houses with lush green lawns and a pair of fresh-off-the-line pickup trucks parked out front. You zip through an economic metaphor, a thruway uniting past and present, a great big landscape of disconnect. Rows knows this feeling. Rows is clearly stimulated by the perplexing feelings that this vision inspires. And Rows is still trying to figure out what comes next.

    The world that Rose (get it?) stumbles into bears some of the marks of that confusion. She’s a pretty, rich girl whose only job is doing office chores for her daddy. She’s already feeling the pain of her privilege. As a result, she’s nervous long before she first sets foot inside the house of Mrs. Haviland to boot her from the premises, but her encounter with the woman (and her highly suspect cookies) is proof of how dangerous it is to leave suburbia to venture into America’s breadbasket. We know Rose is going to have to do some penance. What’s intriguing is that her punishment seems to be mental, as she finds herself in a recursive loop which drags her and her friend Greta into the inescapable maze of the cornfield, with escape leading inevitably back to the farmhouse. It’s very nearly Groundhog Day meets Drag Me to Hell.  

    Writer-director Warfield puts a lot of skill on display. The film is fantastically shot, making the endless fields of corn look both alluring and ominous. (Surprisingly, the classically Midwestern settings were shot in Maryland.) He also has a knack for pacing; even when Rose’s traps and time loops feel inevitable, there’s a steady unfolding of dread that keeps the psychological horror fresh and visceral. If you aren’t particularly interested in logic or the familiar beats of storytelling, then Rows is a reasonably impressive effort. If anything, the cracks start to show when the script actively adds new elements to keep things interesting, like the addition of an outsider character posing another threat to Rose and Greta, or the out-of-left-field introduction of some malevolent spirit trying to seduce Rose’s father. Rows plays the weird card very effectively, especially once you recognize the repetition that serves as Rose’s purgatory.

    When you move past the film’s gimmick, you have a production that looks good but has no real depth. The movie never invests in its characters, for example, especially Schick, the only person in the film we can be certain is real. Without that, the appeal is reduced to its lead actresses wandering through the cornfields in tight tank tops. (The performances are serviceable, although the leads seem to have matriculated at the Joey Tribbiani School of Acting.) The script never really wraps up its intriguing plot, framing the climax as Rose finally learning to look deep inside herself, but then couching it inside other Twilight Zone-ish twists. Rows has some solid tricks up its sleeve, but that only makes the stab at some sort of relevance feel not just unearned but premature. It’s a pity, because there’s genuine filmmaking talent at work, and Warfield has stumbled on to an issue and a community that could really be at home in the thriller and horror genres. There’s some interesting houses along this road, but ultimately a lot more empty fields of grain.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…events become increasingly surreal… a difficult film to synopsise without giving too much away. Partly because its story is such a strange, dreamlike one… becomes something of a chore to keep caring for an answer to its mystery once you hit the midway point. Interesting, but flawed.” Stuart Willis, Sex Gore Mutants (DVD)

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

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    CAPSULE: HOUSE OF DREAMS (1963)

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    “The house stood alone,
    a mere ghost in the midst of the modern, uncaring world.
    Within her skeletal fibers secrets remained secluded forever.
    The only one who might have revealed them
    was now lying in a world where neither time nor flesh existed.”

    – quote from Lee Hansen’s novel in House of Dreams

    DIRECTED BY: Robert Berry

    FEATURING: Pauline Elliott, Robert Berry, Charlene Bradley, Lance Bird

    PLOT: An author writing about a haunted house begins having eerily prophetic nightmares.

    COMMENTS: A low-budget horror film made by college students, House of Dreams is, understandably, an amateur effort. It’s also rather impressive for what it manages to accomplish with limited resources and a novice crew. It contains way too many uninteresting scenes of marital bickering, broken up by far too few dream sequences. Reverse the proportion of dream to reality and it would be a satisfyingly weird little chiller along the lines of Carnival of Souls (to which it’s often compared). House of Dreams doesn’t quite succeed in sustaining a spooky atmosphere but, in its best moments, it conjures surreal dreamscapes worthy of ‘s Blood of a Poet.

    Lee Hansen (Berry) suffers from writer’s block. As he struggles to complete his latest novel, he begins experiencing disturbing dreams. If that wasn’t bad enough, his wife Elaine, a recovering alcoholic wrestling with her own demons, accuses him of neglecting her. She wants to take a vacation to rekindle their romance but he insists on finishing his book first. What seems like a responsible adult decision backfires on him as the subject of Lee’s book, the “old Winninger place,” takes over his unconscious mind.

    Filmed on location in an actual rural Indiana “haunted” house owned by the director’s mother, House of Dreams makes good use of a genuinely creepy setting. Each of Lee’s nightmares begins with him driving to the dilapidated house and slowly approaching it from the front walkway. He reluctantly enters the front door which, of course, opens on its own to welcome him. What happens next varies from dream to dream but, amid the usual ghostly tropes, some startlingly original images appear, each nightmare concluding with a frightening final scene.

    Creative use of interior architecture and unusual camera angles add to the mood of unease. With a few simple props and generous use of chiaroscuro lighting, Berry and his cinematographer show how less can be more when it comes to crafting suspenseful horror. The minimalist soundtrack, an original score, also takes a less-is-more approach.1 Occasional metronomic tappings add tension to the scenes of everyday life, and menacing electronic organ strains accompany the dream sequences. A scene in which Elaine suddenly appears in Lee’s study, wearing a ghostly white dress, feels all the more unsettling for taking place in complete silence.

    As tragedies begin to befall Lee’s family members, he realizes his dreams foreshadow things to come. Unfortunately, the family drama element of the plot isn’t very compelling. The student actors aren’t quite up to the task, and unnecessarily long conversations are a major weakness in the script. Pauline Elliot isn’t bad as Lee’s wife,  and Berry does his best in the lead (a role intended for a professional actor who ended up declining the part). As director, actor, writer, and editor, Berry demonstrates a solid grounding in the fundamentals of storytelling. Footage of the Winninger place, including shots of the dramatic staircase and the overgrown well, periodically intercuts the domestic moments, illustrating the house’s growing hold over Lee and his relatives. White roses, briefly glimpsed in the opening act, recur throughout, a symbol whose full significance isn’t revealed until the very end.

    Eventually, Lee decides to investigate the Winninger house in real life—or is he already trapped inside the nightmare? His penultimate foray plays out like all the other dream sequences. Lee drives to the house, he hesitates on the walkway, and the front door hangs open, taunting him to enter. Will Lee escape the house’s strange power or has he already become its final victim? Fans of low-budget ’60s horror will find House of Dreams worth a visit.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…an arduous regional horror, shot for peanuts in Decker, Indiana by a group of film students in 1963. Like the long-lost sibling of Herk Harvey’s altogether more interesting Carnival of Souls (1962) this throws any established notions of narrative and logic to the wind but, unlike Harvey’s enduring diamond in the rough, fails to engage the hapless audience.”–Kevin Lyons, The EOFFTV Review 

    1An alternate score written in 2019 received Berry’s approval, and the latest Blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome/Bleeding Skull includes both.

    House of Dreams [Blu-ray]

    House of Dreams [Blu-ray]

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    CAPSULE: SECRETARY (2002)

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    The second installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.

    Recommended

     

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: , ,

    Plot: A tightly wound, obsessive, repressed lawyer meets a meek, neurotic typist who suffers from low self esteem and a compulsion to cut herself.

    Still from Secretary (2002)

     

    COMMENTS: Let it never be said that 366 Weird Movies turns its back on plain old love stories. We treasure lopsided romances such as Harold and Maude, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It goes to show, you can still have a weird movie even if it’s just a boy-meets-girl story. This time around we have more of a “boy beats girl” scenario, and that becomes our weird angle. The only reason  not to recommend this movie for the Apocrypha is because everything weird about it is done even weirder in other movies. Secretary (2002) stands alone as a truly frank examination of the phenomenon of kink relationships, the one which even the self-identifying “leather community” points to as the  movie that gets BDSM relationships closest to right. That, in itself, is an incredible rarity—but it should be less rare.

    It’s not like we get into the floggers and spreader bars right away. It’s a slow-burn progress, starting with Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) being released from a mental institution. She attempts to re-adjust to normal life, hampered by a dysfunctional family including an overpowering mother and by her own neuroses that manifest in a compulsion to secretly cut and stab herself. Lee is mousy and anxious, seeming like she’d shatter at a harsh word, and usually far too intimidated to express herself. She applies for a job in the title profession, at the law office of one E. Edward Grey (James Spader, eight years before the Fifty Shades of Grey books came out). Grey is a demanding and controlling boss, so much so that he apparently needs a custom-made sign to advertise for help. Lee gets the job, since Grey assures her that it’s dull work and Lee responds that she sincerely likes dull work.

    Soon their dynamic spins off-center from standard employer-employee. Grey is a stickler for detail who takes special delight in catching every typo in Lee’s work, amassing a collection of red markers for highlighting flaws and lining them up on his desk in OCD fashion. One day while rummaging around the office he discovers Lee’s secret box of self-harm toys and confronts her about it. When he paternally orders her never to engage in such behavior again, the two start to show some magnetism. She is more drawn to him with every new demand he makes and every scolding he gives her, while he is spellbound by her unquestioning obedience to his every whim. It’s obvious that neither of these people ever expected to encounter anyone quite like the other. Finally the tension breaks when Grey gambles on smacking Lee on the rear while she hunches over a desk proofreading, and Lee—instead of running off to file a sexual harassment lawsuit—is totally cool with it. Once the lid is off this boiling pot of kinky sexual tension, the two enter an awkward dance, escalating games of domination and submission, and alternately retreating in fright from their mutually acknowledged dark sides.

    Some of their play is point-blank role-playing, such as when he dictates that she take her dinner in tiny portions, while more involved games have her prancing about the office in restrictive bondage gear with a spreader bar holding her arms out like a cross, still handling her secretarial work. Even sillier scenes flash by in montage, most notably Lee on a desk on her hands and knees saddled like a pony. Eventually Grey suffers a classic case of “top drop,” the point where every out-of-the-closet sadist asks themselves for the first time “what kinda sick monster enjoys this?” Even though he tries to break things off, Lee is single-minded. She is deaf to the pleas of her vanilla boyfriend on the sidelines, a sweetheart of a guy who nevertheless just can’t handle Lee with the firm hand she seeks. Will our star-crossed lovers ever be able to relax and enjoy their attraction without judging it?

    The amazing thing about Secretary is the poise and balance it maintains while deconstructing a taboo relationship between two little-understood personalities. This could easily have been gross-out schlock, seedy porn, or silly camp, but the characters themselves are treated with dignity, and the relationship is presented as a positive thing for them. The humor is gentle and cherishes the human, flaws and all. As two ostracized, repressed weirdos both attracted and repelled by this energy between them, Gyllenhaal and Spader are downright cute and fun to watch. Finally, we viewers have to accept that, while this relationship wouldn’t work for most of us, it works for these two, and more power to them. As Woody Allen observed in Annie Hall, “we need the eggs.” Secretary may not be the weirdest depiction of the leather lover in the wild, but it is likely to be the most respectful and heart-warming one for many decades yet.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

     ““Secretary” approaches the tricky subject of sadomasochism with a stealthy tread, avoiding the dangers of making it either too offensive, or too funny. Because S/M involves postures that are absorbing for the participants but absurd to the onlooker, we tend to giggle at the wrong times. Here is a film where we giggle at the right times.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

    Secretary

    Secretary

    • Lee Holloway is a smart, quirky woman in her twenties who returns to her hometown in Florida after a brief stay in a mental hospital. In search of relief from herself and her oppressive childhood environment, she starts to date a nerdy friend from high school and takes a job as a secretary in a local law firm, soon developing an obsessive crush on her older boss, Mr Grey. Through their increasing

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