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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FRANKENHOOKER (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Frank Henenlotter

FEATURING: , Patty Mullen, Joseph Gonzalez, Shirley Stoler,

PLOT: When sweet Elizabeth dies in a terrible lawnmower accident, her grieving fiancé—power plant technician and amateur scientist Jeffrey Franken—sets out to restore her to life by assembling a new body made from the parts of prostitutes he kills with a new explosive strain of crack cocaine. 

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: If ever there were a film that could make our list just by wishing for it really hard, Frankenhooker is that film. Starting with the decent-enough premise to set Mary Shelley’s classic tale in the waning days of Times Square grunginess, it piles on characters who soar well past cartoonishness, ladles on strange behaviors and absurd reactions, and tops it off with enough coarse sexuality and Guignol-lite gore to make the whole confection gleefully repellent. It knows what it is, and it revels in it.

Still from Frankenhooker (1990)

COMMENTS: Frankenhooker makes me regret that we’ve never created a tag called “On-the-nose Titles.” We’ve talked before about movies where the title does the heavy lifting, and this is one such film. A Frankenstein’s monster made from hookers. Why even bother with a synopsis?

If you were to subject Frankenhooker’s screenplay to intense analysis, you’d find very little at its core. It’s not a one-joke movie, but probably no more than five: the Frankenstein myth set in New Jersey, the mad doctor is an overachieving electrician, his creation is built out of random hooker parts, the Bride is a murderous sex-starved brute, and New York City prostitutes react to crack like desperate parents at a Walmart on Black Friday. Fortunately, those jokes are merely the foundation for what Frankenhooker is really about: silly stereotypes and outrageous gore.  These are things that Frank Henenlotter knows how to deliver, and he doesn’t hold back.

The film has to overcome a significant demerit in the form of our hero himself. Lorinz is a black hole: even when he’s drilling a hole in his own head for a little light trepanning, he has the bland, conventional good looks of Andrew McCarthy and the placid demeanor of a low-energy standup comic. (His voice suggests teaching a yoga class.) He teases a bolder character than we get, which is surprising considering he’s a mad scientist from New Jersey. His refusal to go as over-the-top as the plot that surrounds him may be the strangest thing about Frankenhooker.

Former Penthouse Pet Mullen has a better handle on the material as the unfortunate Elizabeth. Following a brief pre-accident scene in which she dials up the tropes of the bland-but-adoring fiancée, she gets to go full monster, staggering about town with her jaw awkwardly jutting to the side and demanding “Want a date?” in a shrill Jersey accent. (I tried for ages to figure out who Mullen’s demented lady of the night reminded me of until I realized it was Rapunzel from this magnificent “Sesame Street” sketch.) If anything, she inspires the rest of the ensemble to go hard, from the gum-smacking ruffian ladies of the night to thinks-with-his-fists pimp Zorro to recognizable “That Guy” David Lipman’s cameo as Monster-Elizabeth’s overenthusiastic john. In a cast where everyone but the lead is playing to the cheap seats, Mullen is a stand-out.

Not every scene is this extreme, and in fact Henenlotter almost seems to be making a bid to become the genteel Lloyd Kaufman. Long scenes of Lorinz monologuing his plans drag things out, and often the movie opts to run headlong into insanity instead of giving it a minute or two to build. However, Frankenhooker absolutely nails the landing with two separate showcases of wildly inventive craziness in the final 15 minutes: first with a grotesque revenge on behalf of the murdered hookers who have inadvertently been reassembled into hilariously awful human meatballs, and then the ultimate comeuppance for the mad doctor as a repaired Elizabeth saves the day in a most amusing manner. As much as Frankenhooker is out to deliver exactly the eyes-covered, laughing-in-shock amusement you’re expecting, the movie genuinely surpasses itself in the finale. The title may be on the nose, but the tale it tells is a refreshing punch in the groin.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This film is…well, weird.  With a name like Frankenhooker, I suppose that you expected that.  Even beyond that though, it’s a weird, weird film. …  There’s no ‘normal’ way to do this story, but it still tries hard to be extra insane.  If you’re into the wacky side of Cinema, check this one out. It may blow your mind though..” – Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro         

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

Frankenhooker (Blu-ray)

Frankenhooker (Blu-ray)
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SOUL TO SQUEEZE (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: W.M. Weikart

FEATURING: Michael Thomas Santos, Danielle Meyer

PLOT: Jacob signs up for a dangerous psychological treatment to overcome his anger issues and finds himself trapped within a small home.

Still from Soul to Squeeze (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Soul to Squeeze doesn’t wear its metaphor on its sleeve so much as encase the protagonist. This narrative framework allows for a psychological deep-dive which proffers as much ambiguity as it does clarity.

COMMENTS: A young fellow emerges from debris on the roadside. He’s bleary-eyed, but looks content—even happy. In fact, he’s doing so well that, when a kindly passerby offers help, he politely declines. The preceding ordeal nearly broke him, for this trash pile is the site of a rebirth. As he limps to the roadside, it is clear that our protagonist, Jacob, has had his soul squeezed, but not how you might think.

Certainly not how I thought, until some days after watching the movie when the title’s implications finally became clear. Weikart uses a number of tools to form the narrative, but a television documentary (which seems to be the only channel available where Jacob’s locked himself away for “treatment”) is nearly as omnipresent as the allegorical house the film was shot in. Alongside Jacob, we learn about the mysteries and wonders of the eye: its nerves, cones, strata, apertures, and, most importantly, the aqueous humour. You’ll develop an understanding and appreciation of this unlikely organ from watching Soul to Squeeze, if nothing else.

Jacob’s ordeal begins immediately upon signing the medical release for an unclear procedure—someone, or some force, locks the exit the moment he lifts the pen from the contract line. As Jacob angrily goes through his routines in confinement, he encounters an array of characters who probably aren’t there, though it’s difficult to be certain. (Surely there isn’t a kitchen game show titled “Don’t Fuck This Up!” lying in wait to pounce on the unsuspecting breakfaster.) As the story unfolds, and Jacob’s psychological journey dives deeper into the source of his omnipresent anger, the surrounding pressure of recollection and contemplation forces him (and us) to focus on his true ailment.

The documentary narrator explains: we know much about the hardware involved inside the eye, but there’s no concrete theory as to why it all works. As with the eye (a window to the soul, we’ve been told), so with the mind. Weikart’s one-set drama, putting actor Michael Thomas Santos through the wringer, features much that is obvious. But like an eye (which comes up as much in this review almost as much as in the film), it transcends the sum of its parts through an alchemical process that cannot be easily dissected into its constituent parts without destroying it. Apologies if I’ve veered too far into bio-philosophical rambling, but that’s just the kind of thing Soul to Squeeze catalyzes. With a little focus, life’s debris can be put into perspective, and you are free to move on in the world.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s a haunting stillness to the production design—this is not a surrealist explosion of dream logic, but something more intimate and grounded… for those willing to surrender to its slow, aching rhythm and deeply personal approach, it offers something rare: a film that doesn’t just explore the mind—it mirrors it” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (contemporaneous)

Apocryphally Weird

62*. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022)

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“If we say that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds.” ― Ted Chiang, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom

DIRECTED BY: Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert)

FEATURING: Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jamie Lee Curtis, James Hong

PLOT: Evelyn Wang is overwhelmed operating a Simi Valley laundromat, caring for her elderly father, enduring an ongoing IRS audit, and trying to maintain her strained relationship with her daughter. Into this maelstrom steps an alternate-universe version of her husband, who informs her that a rage-fueled supervillain incarnation of her daughter is threatening to destroy the entire multiverse. Only Evelyn, using martial artistry and emotional intelligence that she never knew she possessed, can traverse dimensions and embody wildly different iterations of herself to stave off disaster.

BACKGROUND:

  • The original script was written with in mind, with Yeoh envisioned in a supporting role. Once the lead character was switched to a woman, Yeoh was the only choice for the role.
  • The Daniels cited inspiration from sources as diverse as the films of Wong Kar-Wai, the video game Everything, and the children’s book “Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. “
  • The directors began work on the film after turning down an opportunity to work on Marvel’s “Loki” series, itself a show set against the backdrop of a multiverse. The duo worried that other contemporaneous multiverse projects, including Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and “Rick and Morty,” would make their concept out-of-date.
  • The film was released under different Chinese-language titles depending upon the market, including In an Instant, the Entire Universe in mainland China, Mother’s Multiverse in Taiwan, and Weird Woman Warrior Fucks Around and Saves the Universe in Hong Kong.
  • The team of martial arts performers and choreographers includes self-taught brothers Andy and Brian Le. (They are showcased in the fight over a suggestively shaped IRS auditing award.) Daniels discovered them on YouTube and hired them based on their familiarity with Hong Kong-style fighting techniques.
  • Appropriate to the diverse backgrounds of her family, Evelyn speaks Mandarin with her husband but Cantonese with her father, while her daughter’s Chinese is that of someone unskilled in the language.
  • An unexpectedly dominant force at the 95th Academy Awards, snagging 11 nominations and taking home seven statues for Best Picture (one of only a handful of films with science fiction/fantasy elements ever to take the top prize), Directing, Original Screenplay, Editing, and acting honors for Yeoh, Quan, and Curtis. More importantly, Yeoh took home the Weirdcademy Award for Best Actress.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: I know, I know. The hot dog fingers, right? They do make for a superb visual shorthand (sorry) for the film’s breed of weirdness, it’s true, especially when an alternate Jamie Lee Curtis uses her encased-meat digits to tickle the ivories in a rendition of “Clair de Lune.” But is it truly greater than a spectacular bagel that truly has everything on it? Or the transdimensional power of eating lip balm to imbue the consumer with extensive martial arts abilities? Or the introspective moment featuring two rocks as the only souls in the world? EEAAO luxuriates both the oddities of universes different from our own and the peculiarities unique to each realm. Fortunately, the film spares us from having to pick one of them by concocting a spectacular montage of our heroine across all universes and timelines, including some we will never explore outside of this split-second vision. It’s a dizzying triumph of editing and a wonderful visualization of both Evelyn’s dilemma and her power.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Hot dog fingers; rocky relationship

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Everything Everywhere All At Once is a family drama festooned with the trappings of Matrix-style ontological discussions, multiversal alternates, elaborate martial arts set-pieces, and parodies both reverential and cheeky. That mix alone would garner our attention, and the decision to center the story on characters well outside the Hollywood norm —Asian, immigrant, working-class, gay—further pushes it outside the mainstream. On top of that, the glorious and unexpected choice to ground all this mayhem in an atmosphere of playfulness and joy gives the film further offbeat credentials. It exemplifies this movie’s wonderfully deranged logic to employ googly eyes to stave off the apocalypse. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fun.

Original trailer for Everything Everywhere all at Once

COMMENTS: “I thought you said when she says (stuff) like that, it Continue reading 62*. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SURFER (2024)

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The Surfer is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

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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)