Tag Archives: Joe Badon

POD 366: JOE BADON, ROGUE

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Audio only link (Soundlcoud download)

Interpretative notes: When Smalley says “screeners” he means “trailers,” except for the one time he means “screener.” When Smalley says “Wheel of Time,” he means “Wheel of Heaven.”

Quick links:

Weekly movie discussion begins: https://youtu.be/3K_pE-DIzxU?t=76

Joe Badon interview begins: https://youtu.be/3K_pE-DIzxU?t=1112

What to eat in the Big Easy: https://youtu.be/3K_pE-DIzxU?t=2154

Discussed in this episode:

Joe Badon centralCosmic Family FilmsJoe Badon art

A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse (1975): A bizarre Japanese rarity, a mashup of pink movie/yakuza film/”ghost cat” horror, about a prostitute who seeks ghostly revenge on her pimp husband in the titular locale. On Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro. Buy A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse.

“The Man Who Fell to Earth”: The TV adaptation/expansion of the Canonically Weird movie stars Chiwetel Ejiofor (as a different alien of ‘s species), streams on Paramount+ or Showtime, and has likely been deweirdified for a mass audience. Season 1 releases on DVD this week. Buy “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”

Trouble in Megalopolis: We still don’t know much of what ‘s dream/vanity science fiction project, which the octogenarian director has sunk $120 million of his own money into, is about, or whether it will be weird. We do know the set is a catastrophe right now, with the entire art department either fired or resigned as shooting continues. A legendary Hollywood story may be happening right before our eyes. “The Hollywood Reporter” reports on the chaos.

The Seven Faces of Jane is available for rental or purchase on VOD.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

The pod will return next week. We currently have no guest to announce.

In upcoming reviews next week, Shane Wilson rolls the reader-suggested dice on Vegas in Space (1991); Amy Vaughn trips on the pioneering psychedelicsploitation film Hallucination Generation (1966); Giles Edwards goes Big Time (1988) (the Tom Waits concert fantasia); and Gregory J. Smalley handles Beautiful Beings (see trailer above).

Also, we will be hosting more Weird Watch Parties this week! You can see the schedule in the sidebar, but we’ll reiterate here:

Friday, Jan. 13 (TONIGHT!) at 10:15 PM: Night Train to Terror (1985) on Tubi via Discord (free)

Sunday, Jan. 15 at 7:30 PM ET: Sorry to Bother You (2018) on Netflix (subscription)

Tuesday, Jan. 17 at 7:30 PM ET: Dead Leaves (2004) on Tubi via Discord (free)

Onward and weirdward!

2022 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: “BACK AGAIN”, PART ONE

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Montréal 2022

Guess who’s back—back again?

Giles is back: tell a friend.

7/14: Polaris

The Facts:

  • It is very cold
  • It is the year 2144
  • Languages have fallen out of fashion
  • Little girl has supernatural powers
  • Young woman has (probably) superterrestrial origins
  • I observed no men in this merciless snowscape

Polaris works more than it doesn’t, and why it doesn’t work for me is hard to pinpoint. Perhaps it is too bright? (But no, that’s an appropriate choice for a film set so far north and with so much snow.) Maybe the ferality of the people is off? (Eh, so long after societal collapse, that makes sense.) That green goo found throughout is a bit “much”? (Again, as a catch-all symbol for Earth’s empoisonment, it is up to the task.) Carthew crafts moments of powerful emotion, genuine wonderment, and striking brutality, making this an interesting choice to kick off our return to “normal”; worthy of another look by a different eye than mine.

7/15: Cavalcade of Perversions: A Regular Little Orgy

There was something about sitting in a darkened theater full of people, witnessing a middle-closeup of an emission on screen, that felt, I dunno—”cosmopolitan.” In one way I was not surprised by the string of erotically-charged (and in a few cases, outright explicit) short films being so up front, but in another way I can’t shake the feeling that the organizer for these various Cavalcades (there are two more to come, so to speak) would be happy to tilt the festival more towards poetical pornography.

But the films: there were nine in total, and while each could suffice with its own writeup, we’re on a byte budget. “Aspirational Slut”, “Pretty Pickle,” and “SOS Extase” all showed sex can be fun and funny, as well as be gen-yoo-ine film films, with “SOS” proving that absurdism, sex, and cinematography fit hand in (leather) glove. The last also wasn’t above some visual word play, giving literal manifestation to the term “leather fetish.” It wasn’t all fun and games, though. “Creature” was proof-in-celluloid that a women-loving-women cinema can be eye-droopingly boring while crushing you underfoot with a melodramatic bombast that, if pushed half a notch further, would have landed squarely in parody. The men-loving-men-eroticism of “Exalted Mars” (featuring that big-screen emission I mentioned) stood neck-and-neck with the yawn-inducement of “Creature”—but at least was more tranquil about it.

Top prize for most unabashed fun (and gayness and sex and &c.) goes Continue reading 2022 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: “BACK AGAIN”, PART ONE

366 UNDERGROUND: SISTER TEMPEST (2020)

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DIRECTED BY: Joe Badon

FEATURING: Kali Russell, , Holly Bonney

PLOT: Anne must defend her version of a complex series of misunderstandings, tragedies, and hallucinations before an inter-dimensional tribunal.

Still from Sister Tempest (2020)

COMMENTS: I do not research a film before watching it. This typically works in a film’s favor: having formed no preconceptions of what it should be, I tend not to measure it against the wrong yardstick. As in general, so with Joe Badon’s sophomore feature—a rather messy, rather creative, and rather abstruse story about two sisters, several dramatic mishaps, and the nature of memory. Sister Tempest (or, as the credits arrange the title, “Sister Temp Est”), over the course of two hours that felt alternately drawn-out and hasty, presents me with some difficulty. I want to make this review a pitch for it, but I don’t think I can. And I feel a little awkward about that.

It starts off with a breezy sense of promise. The death-of-parents montage that begins the movie had the not-uncharming feel of a Maddin and Brakhage co-production for Troma Studios. The “confession” gimmick, involving a six-entity tribunal headed by a cosmic judge who could moonlight as a Rankin/Bass cartoon-land king, was perhaps an obvious choice, but that didn’t make it a bad one. Slices of temporally re-arranged scenes are smattered alongside hallucinations and false awakenings, but the crux of the narrative is: older sister, Anne the art teacher, alienates younger sister Karen after years of acting as a parent figure. Karen leaves in a huff to spend time with her drug-dealer boyfriend; arriving in her stead is Ginger Breadman, a fragile young art student who appears one day in Anne’s class.

I try to eschew dismissing opinions as being “wrong.” But now, having read up a bit on Sister Tempest, I wonder if my own opinion is in error. (The rest of the IMDb-ternet appears to be in love with this thing.) The film has quite a lot to unpack—symbols, metaphors, metaphoric symbols, allusions, illusions, nods, acknowledgements, Jeff the Janitor—so I wouldn’t say it lacks substance. I never really mustered the will to care, though. It didn’t help that the film was sliced into eight pseudo-cryptically-titled chapters that came across as a, “Hey guy, check out these Smarty-Pants we’re putting on,” more than as anything narratively useful.

From what I’ve read about Badon’s first movie, I presume that he’s improving, which brings to mind the opening sequence’s wrap-up.  Alone at a desk, manning his typewriter, sits the screen-writer. Rolling out a sheaf, we watch him read it, crumple it up, and toss it aside. His presence echoes throughout the film, as distant type-clacks occasionally occupy the soundscape. It was an interesting scene that set up an interesting aural motif. There was also good fun to be found in Sister Tempest (even the final iteration of the “gingerbread man” joke got me laughing). But spare me the Looney Tunes gimmicry; spare me the needless musical numbers; and for Heaven’s sake, spare me the multi-Messiah finale. In Tempest‘s spirit of cryptic cognomens, I shall thus conclude with, “The Movie’s Blood is in the Execution–Please do not get blood everywhere.”

Sister Tempest is in online theatrical release until May 31. You can find information on how to watch the film at the official website.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Club MC Jason Johnson (playing himself) introduces a karaoke act on stage with the words: ‘I’m gonna show you something new tonight, something ethereal, something trippy, something you haven’t ever seen before.’ His words might as well be describing Sister Tempest itself…”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (contemporaneous)

366 UNDERGROUND: THE GOD INSIDE MY EAR (2017)

DIRECTED BY: Joe Badon

FEATURING: Linnea Gregg, Dorian Rush, Collin Galyean, Alex Stage

PLOT: Eliza, an average Jane in a contemporary US city, has lost her boyfriend to a mystic cult; she gets pulled into the cult too, experiencing how much it sucks to be without a man in the 2010s, as a big Roman-candle middle finger to Alison Bechdel.

Still fromThe God Inside My Ear (2017)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This is a banal, vanilla, ordinary, trite lover’s lament about a woman getting dumped by her boyfriend, with a stale can of film-festival cliche symbolisms spray-painted over its face. The weirdest part of this movie is the realization that apparently 366 Weird Movies is now so popular that impostors are wearing a disguise and flashing our gang signs in the hopes of infiltrating our cool kids’ club. If that makes you feel dirty just for liking weird movies, just watch some good Buñuel or Gilliam and the hangover will vanish in minutes.

COMMENTS: We’ll save some time here if you want to take shortcuts: The God Inside My Ear starts out faintly clever and then loses one IQ point per minute of runtime until its brain-dead ending. The cold open skips the credits to flash a series of images, eyeballs and teeth, pyramids and dolphins, little girl in an orchard and mysterious red-robed figure in fog. Nice try, but I take notes, and these better all tie together later! The image of the tattoo of an ear on the palm of a hand at least gets explained first, as in the first scene Eliza’s boyfriend dumps her at a cafe because he’s found this cult that’s showing him enlightenment, see, and he gets messages through the ear-palm job. Goodbye plot, it was nice knowing you! In case you missed it, the entire point to this movie is: “boy dumps girl; girl sad.” Thank you, folks, goodnight.

Now we have 95 minutes for the autopsy of Eliza’s achy-breaky heart. Her coworker unsympathetically tries to hit her up for a rebound date, while her barfly friends tell her she’s better off without the loser, and her nosy neighbor pries into her business. Eliza recounts a long parable about the magician who yanks the tablecloth off the table to illustrate how she feels shattered like a wine bottle. Valentine’s Day gets brought up a lot, as her friends push her back into the dating pool. Cue the montage of quirky failed date candidates, babbling dialog that sounds like they’ve watched too many Richard Linklater films. Her only friend seems to be a sympathetic telemarketer, whose mysterious voiceover gives the the wisest counsel, but the script even drops that bit to opt for the telemarketer to become just one more male creep in Eliza’s life. Alas, he will be back as a creepy stalker, because this cruel world is out to get Mary Sue—oops, I mean “Eliza”—which is why it stole her boyfriend.

Are you ready to tell Eliza to just buy a vibrator already? By this time, anybody watching cannot possibly give a damn whether Eliza ever finds love again, because she has been given no character development, no backstory, and no B-line subplots for the movie to hang onto. We also saw nothing of her much-lamented lost relationship; the all-important sperm donor gets one goofy scene at the very Continue reading 366 UNDERGROUND: THE GOD INSIDE MY EAR (2017)