Tag Archives: Independent film

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SURFER (2024)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim

PLOT: A divorced father (Nicolas Cage) plans to buy the Australian beachside house he grew up in and teach his son to surf the waves like he did as a boy, but local “surf gangsters” torment him, insisting the beach is for “locals only.”

The Surfer (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The metaphor is obvious, but apt: this is a movie where you just catch Cage’s wave and ride it where it takes you, relishing the lack of control.

COMMENTS: As we open, Nicolas Cage (whose character is never named, merely credited as “The Surfer”) merely wants to take his kid (credited as “The Kid”) surfing on the beach where he grew up. He promises, in a bit of ironic foreshadowing, that catching a particularly gnarly wave is nothing short of a “short sharp shock of violence on the shore.” His dreams are dashed when a self-appointed surf cop in a Santa hat informs him that this public beach is for “locals only.” Outnumbered by the surf-gangsters (“Bay Boys”), Cage retreats to the overlook-cum-rest stop where he will spend most of the rest of the movie, anxiously attempting to contact his associate Mike to raise the additional $100,000 he needs posthaste to purchase his father’s old homestead on a cliff overlooking the beach. The Bay Boys’ bullying continues, however. First, Cage loses his surfboard; then, after his car battery and cell battery die, he finds himself stranded and subjected to increasing harassment. All the while, more details emerge suggesting that he may not be the completely together businessman he presents himself as, while golden-hued flashbacks suggest a youth that might not have been as carefree as he remembers.

What follows for Cage is a complete breakdown, as the script strips the bourgeoisie accoutrements of civilization away from him one by one, leaving him—at least temporarily—destitute. Accumulating a series of small wounds and suffering from short-term malnutrition and dehydration as he bakes in the Christmas sun, Cage drifts into a second-act fever dream where his very identity comes into question. About the only local who isn’t outright hostile to him is a scraggly beach bum (credited only as “The Bum”) who bunks in a discarded car in the same parking lot, and who has been bullied by the Bay Boys for decades now. Cage seems doomed to follow in his footsteps.

Theater patrons are advised to wear sunscreen, as the bright cinematography might give you sunburn, and when the screen starts wavering like high tide has briefly crested over the film, you might wonder if you’re experiencing heat stroke yourself. Francois Tetaz’s ultracool score, full of harp arpeggios and wordless vocals, takes its nostalgic period cues more from exotica than surf music, giving it a grandiose moodiness that constantly threatens to teeter into psychedelia. Finnegan’s visuals cross that line in the third act.

Cage himself is relatively restrained, more in Pig than Mandy mode; but of course, restrained for Cage can involve him force feeding a dead rat to a battered enemy. The fact that we expect, and accept, craziness from Cage makes him the perfect actor for this exercise in masculine delusionalism. Research confirmed my suspicions that this script about an upper middle-class man undergoing a midlife crisis explored via a water sport was explicitly inspired by another famous The S____er (among other sources). The Surfer, naturally, doesn’t quite reach its predecessor’s heights; it’s far more scattered, lacking its forebear’s intense focus on a single character, bringing a manospherish cult and hallucinatory red herrings into the equation. But The Surfer (suggested alternate title: The Sufferer) has a similar empathetic effect that hits home for men of a certain age and marital status.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘The Surfer’ is weird and wily, and while it doesn’t always connect, it maintains a strange presence that’s intriguing.”–Brian Orndorf, Blu-ray.com

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SHROUDS (2024)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: An entrepreneur who’s obsessed with his dead wife invents a graveyard which allows the bereaved to watch their deceased love ones’ bodies decompose in real time; when some of the graves are vandalized, he’s led to investigate a mysterious conspiracy.

Still from The Shrouds (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Starting from a typically Cronenbergian premise–straddling the line that separates the just barely plausible from the utterly implausible, but presented as if it were perfectly natural—the august director takes a deep dive into human depravity and loss, accompanied by plentiful hallucinations. (Walkout report: there was one other person in the theater with me when the film started; I was alone when the end credits rolled, although I didn’t notice when the other guy left.)

COMMENTS: “How dark are you willing to go?,” asks the improbably named Karsh of a first date, before taking the at-first-game lady on a walk to see a live feed of his wife’s decomposing corpse. Needless to say, he doesn’t get a second date.

When vandals attack Karsh’s hi-tech necrovoyeur cemetery, his business model is jeopardized. He seeks out the culprits with the help of his nerdy ex-brother-in-law and an A.I. assistant who looks suspiciously like his deceased wife, with paranoid suggestions offered by a sister-in-law who also looks suspiciously like his late wife. His investigations suggest abnormal growths on dead tissue, and the possibility that a cabal of international hackers are behind the whole thing. Meanwhile, Karsh has disturbing erotic dreams—all the more disturbing because he finds them comforting—about his deceased love. While probing into the mystery, Karsh also revives his sex life, after years of post-marital celibacy. More impossible, or nearly impossible, events follow, the plot becomes muddled, and The Shrouds wraps on a hallucinatory note.

Now an octogenarian, Cronenberg, who lost his own wife eight years ago, is still able to invent delicious perversities—Karsh’s sexy amputation nightmares, conspiracy theories as aphrodisiacs—even as he seems less and less interested in conclusive narratives. The conspiracies of The Brood (1979) or Videodrome (1983), as bizarrely unlikely as they may be, at least gave you a sense of who the enemy is and their motivation. In Shrouds and Crimes of the Future (2022), the menace is inconclusive, leading to a situation where the audience gets involved in the mystery only to be left hanging at the end. It is clear enough that the thematic enemy here is grief, jealousy, and death itself; but on the narrative side, the antagonist remains murky to the end.

Cronenberg leaves us with plenty to think about, however, including the question of why all of Karsh’s precious memories of his wife revolve exclusively around her body. Is this a personal flaw of Karsh’s, or an honest philosophical recognition that the ultimate reality is the material? Like the motives and identity of The Shrouds’ antagonists, it’s left to you to decide.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Watching The Shrouds dribble its way through a third act that’s as anticlimactic as it is knotty, we can only lament all the weird, intrepid endings Cronenberg might have found for a story about the destiny of flesh – none of which, alas, he actually chose.”–Tim Robey, The Telegraph (festival review)

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CAPSULE: ASH (2025)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Eiza González, Aaron Paul

PLOT: An astronaut finds herself stranded on an outpost on an alien planet with the rest of the crew missing or dead, and no memory of what happened.

Still from Ash (2025)

COMMENTS: Eight years ago, when we first heard that trippy electrojazz musician Flying Lotus (AKA Steven Ellison) would be trying his hand out at filmmaking, we were excited for multiple reasons. His experimental Afrofuturist aesthetic made it unlikely he would go down a conventional cinematic path; we expected his movies to be as weird as his beats (and his cosmic album covers). There was the hope he would extend the psychedelic lineage of his great aunt Alice Coltrane. And another African-American presence on the weird movie scene would be welcome; it’s a bit embarrassing that weird is so white. So when the first trailer for his debut feature Kuso dropped—with its colorful fuzzy aliens with TV monitor faces, George Clinton as a hip physician, and what looked like an uncooked Thanksgiving turkey flying through the Los Angeles sky—anticipation ramped up into the stratosphere.

But Kuso, which turned out to be more with an NC-17 rating than with a ian spin, arrived as a major letdown. Juvenile, scatological, and borderline undistributable, it quickly and quietly sank out of most weirdophiles’ subconsciousnesses, despite a few collages and images that worked as standalone surrealist stills. An installment in the fifth installment of the long-spent V/H/S horror anthology franchise kept Lotus’ name alive as a filmmaker, but suggested little redemption. Still, when it was announced in 2022 that Neil Blomkamp was backing Lotus in making a relatively large budgeted sci-fi feature (originally to star Tessa Thompson and ), hope sprung up again that he would realize his promise.

The fact that I’ve opened this review by spending so much time on Lotus’ career, rather than his new movie, may clue you in to the main conclusion about Ash: it’s OK. It’s neither good enough nor bad enough to earn much in the way of analysis, or even to be the lede in its own review. Let’s stress this: Ash isn’t bad, and it has its own pleasures, entirely sensory rather than intellectual. The acting by the two leads is good. The ambiance is great: the spacecraft interiors have that fluorescent Alien light, but mostly served up through red (sometimes blue and green) filters. The expressionism in the lighting is influenced by Suspiria, and even more so , whom Lotus consulted for advice. The extraterrestrial planet’s design comes from the “Yes”-album-cover-come-to-life school of sci-fi mise en scène, complete with floating rocks in the sky and a swirling pink mandala. The film’s best sci-fi doodad is the Japanese-speaking medical bot that performs surgeries or autopsies with equal, and sometimes inappropriate, cheerfulness. The music, surprisingly, is generic science fiction ambiance, functional but tending to fade into the background. (It would be interesting to hear Lotus’ original score, which he wrote first and then discarded when he decided it didn’t fit with the movie’s tone.)

The script is, at best, a medium for the visuals. Astronaut alone in a planetary outpost with amnesia, rest of crew appear to be victims of foul play, another astronaut arrives to investigate… it pretty much writes itself. The opening is strong enough, but soon it bogs down, with a second act that fails to generate meaningful paranoia between Eiza’s character and Paul’s (or between Eiza’s character and herself), stumbling into a third act that’s overstuffed with violence and a complete explanation of the story’s rather mild mysteries. You’re unlikely to be surprised by the story’s resolution, but like most other things about the movie it’s… satisfactory.

In a post-Ash “Variety” interview, Flying Lotus says “I would love to do another film soon if the right thing happens, but I’m definitely not in a hurry to get back into it.” He remains a musician first; he doesn’t have a burning passion to make films. This feels like a film that was made by someone with skill, but without a burning passion.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film’s seductive and trippy aesthetics help mask the overall dullness of this two-person chamber drama.”–Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

Apocryphally Weird

51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)

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 “We had the spirit of Jean Nicolet and Werner Herzog with us as we were attempting to make the greatest Wisconsin film of all time. Hopefully.” ― Mike Cheslik

 DIRECTED BY: Mike Cheslik                                                                                      

FEATURING: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Doug Mancheski, Luis Rico, Wes Tank

PLOT: Following the destruction of his home and factory, applejack purveyor Jean Kayak attempts, and fails, to outwit a variety of woodland creatures in his quest to find food and shelter. Thanks to the tutelage of a master trapper, he learns the fur trade, and his exploits catch the eye of a pretty furrier; however, her merchant father demands that he bring in hundreds of dead beavers to obtain her hand in marriage. Jean sets out to fulfill this request – under the watchful eye of a pair of bucktoothed detectives – whereupon he stumbles upon a massive supervillainous plot.

Still from Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

BACKGROUND:

  • High school best friends Cheslik and Tews worked together previously on Apocrypha candidate Lake Michigan Monster. The idea for Hundreds of Beavers was concocted at a bar during the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival, where Lake Michigan Monster was screening.
  • The film was shot near small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan over the course of 12 weeks, spread across two winters in 2019 and 2020.
  • Some of the cast have found fame outside of film acting. Graves (the Furrier) has earned renown under the name The Witch of Wonderlust as a folk magician, travel blogger, and pole dancing instructor (the latter talent of which she demonstrates to great effect in a surprising moment in the film), while Tank (the Master Trapper) gained viral fame for his mid-pandemic video series featuring rap performances of Dr. Seuss books.
  • Cheslik and producer Kurt Ravenwood put the total budget at $150,000, with a full $10,000 allotted to the purchase of the mascot costumes. All told, the filmmakers purchased 6 beavers, 5 dogs, 2 rabbits, one raccoon, one wolf and one skunk. (The horse costume, such as it is, is bespoke.) The vast number of woodland creatures on screen at any given time were courtesy of the film’s 1,500 visual effects, all composed in Adobe After Effects.
  • Recognizing that selling the film to a traditional distributor would likely result in a cursory release before being dumped on video, the producers retained the exhibition rights and commenced a roadshow tour of festivals across North America, complete with live wrestling battles between Tews and a beaver mascot. They report that more than half of the $500,000 in box office receipts came after the film became available through video-on-demand.
  • The film’s poster is modeled after the one-sheet for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
  • Named to multiple “Best of 2024” lists, including the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. The movie took the prize for Best Narrative Film at the Kansas International Film Festival, while Cheslik was named Best Director at the 2023 Phoenix Film Festival. The film also claimed both of those awards at that year’s Wyoming Film Festival.
  • The consensus pick by the writers of this site as the Best Weird Movie of 2024.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: From start to finish, Hundreds of Beavers is almost nothing but indelible images. After the zany animated prologue, there’s the silly running gag of surprise holes in the ice that turn out to be integral to the plot; every single appearance of an animal costume, including gay rabbits, overfed raccoons, and dogs playing poker; mascot guts; ice pond pinball; and so many groups of beavers that take the form of construction crews, a police force, and even a jury. There are no wrong answers. But nothing sums it all up quite like the sight of Jean Kayak on the run from the eponymous horde, his absurd raccoon hat flying off his head while innumerable human-sized Castor canadensis give chase. It’s an intentional borrow from Buster Keaton, solidifying the connection with the glory days of silent comedy and making good on the promise of the provocative title.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: The unhittable spittoon; Elementary, my dear Beaver

 WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: For a film that looks and feels like it should be a two-reeler from a hundred years ago, Hundreds of Beavers pulls off the astounding trick of using current-day, commercially available technology to assemble vintage styles and hoary-chestnut jokes into something new and entirely unexpected. Between Cheslik’s endlessly inventive microbudget solutions that result in an action film to rival a Fast and Furious entry (at .03% of the bankroll) and Tews’ gloriously full-bodied, rubber-faced performance, the elements are in place to build a tale of ever-escalating silliness and absurdity. Most of the time, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen next, and even in those moments where you might anticipate what is to come, it is accomplished with grin-inducing surprise and wit.

Trailer for Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

COMMENTS: Jean Kayak’s applejack distillery is called “Acme.” That Continue reading 51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DARKTOWN STRUTTERS (1975)

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DIRECTED BY: William Witney

FEATURING: Trina Parks, Roger E. Mosley, Norman Bartold

PLOT: Syreena must overcome a series of obstacles in order to track down her missing mother.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If a Blaxploitation-cum-slapstick comedy with motorbike klansmen, racist keystone cops, and a glorious soul song-and-dance behind dungeon bars doesn’t fit our bill, perhaps we’ve gone too jive.

COMMENTS: My reaction to the Darktown Strutters experience immediately runs the risk of banging out a long, long list of “What the…?” reactions. Beyond those listed immediately above, there are countless others, but will try to be strong—strong like Syreena as she thwarts institutional evil, playboy chicanery, and one of the strangest, and most racist, conspiracies ever committed to celluloid. Looking back at the hour-and-a-half of sights and sounds that flew past my eyes, two things stand out strongly.

The first is that director William Witney, alongside screenwriter George Armitage and a ready and willing cast, must have had the time of his life. The movie’s overall quality is, to put it diplomatically, uneven. Maybe. It’s difficult to say, since the whole shebang varies in energy between 9 and 11 on the dial, with some points suggesting the selector knob fell off as the cast and crew tried cranking it even higher. It’s never boring, and any misfires quickly become distant memories. Starting out as something of a traditional vengeance-and-music bit, Darktown Strutters eventually staggers its giddy way into a socio-science-fiction that, though troublingly dark on reflection, is presented to the viewer in such a candy-crazy way that it comes off as Benny Hill meets “Outer Limits”.

The second notable feature is Strutters‘ serious side, which compels me to respect it as a “serious film” (well, no—but at least a serious commentary) despite the gag-a-minute presentation. I’d do well to have years of cultural study to appreciate the fuller implications, but my cursory knowledge of history and cinema lets me appreciate how searing this movie’s satire is. Watermelon, ribs, subservience, and defiance—while one of the most cracker-assed of crackers gripes about not feeling appreciated—this script hits a lot of spots that’d be sore if there weren’t such a fuck-the-Man sense of frolicry going on.

Because this is entertainment! A vengeance and music picture. And there is much to cheer as Syreena and her biker gals rally the town, the dastardly villain gets tarred and feathered, and funk and soul goodness delights the ear.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the idea of an allgirl black motorcycle gang taking on a Col. Sanders surrogate has a nice incongruous absurdity. The performances are so mired down in the endlessly confused situations that it’s hard to judge them, but everyone seems to be having fun, and if the movie leaves you wondering what it was all supposed to be about, maybe it leaves you with half of a silly grin, too.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Darktown Strutters (The Film Detective Restored Version)

Darktown Strutters (The Film Detective Restored Version)
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