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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1972)

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La mansión de la locura; AKA Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon

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DIRECTED BY: Juan Lopez Moctezuma

FEATURING: , Arthur Hansel, Ellen Sherman

PLOT: A journalist visits a celebrated mental health asylum in this loose adaptation of ‘s 1845 short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.”

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A surrealist exploration of insanity from within the walls of a 19th century asylum should be a shoo-in for us. Add to this premise Panic Group-style theatrics, trippy sequences blurring the line between delusion and reality, and low-budget constraints which up the surrealism factor, and it becomes an even stronger contender.

COMMENTS: Poe’s satiric tale “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether” begins in Gothic style: “Through this dank and gloomy wood we rode some two miles, when the Maison de Santé came in view. It was a fantastic chateau, much dilapidated, and indeed scarcely tenantable through age and neglect. Its aspect inspired me with absolute dread. . .” The Mansion of Madness begins with a horse-drawn carriage swallowed up by fog. The image then solarizes into contrasting pale blue light and blood red shadows, plunging the viewer into a psychedelic journey.

American journalist Gaston (Hansel) has finagled an assignment to report on the innovative methods of treating mental illness developed by renowned Dr Maillard. After a disturbing encounter at the mansion’s gate with armed guards dressed as rejects from Napoleon’s army, Gaston’s traveling companions desert him. His friend Couvier has an abhorrence of the mentally ill and his female cousin is near to fainting. He assures Gaston his card will serve as an introduction; their carriage turns around and the intrepid reporter proceeds on his own.

While Gaston meets the distinguished Maillard (Brook), and his charming young niece Eugénie (Sherman), Couvier’s carriage succumbs to a violent attack by the “guards” before it can leave the forest. With his coachman overpowered, Couvier proves himself comically useless in a fight; after commanding his cousin to flee, he leaves her to save herself. The trio end up being taken captive, while Maillard takes Gaston on a tour of the sanitarium while explaining his “system of soothing.”

Sensory overload best describes the experience of entering The Mansion of Madness. Artfully arranged actors and still-life accumulations of everyday objects fill every frame. We never see a single establishing shot. Gaston appears to enter the maison through its boiler room, passing through a maze of industrial piping and blazing furnaces as curious faces stare out of the machinery. The “soothing system,” as Maillard explains, allows the inmates their freedom; there are no straight jackets here.

Moctezuma studied art in college before turning to film making (which he called “painting at 24 frames per second”). He began his directing career in television. On one of his shows none other than destroyed a piano as a musical performance; Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MANSION OF MADNESS (1972) →

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SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: IN THE MOUTH (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Cory Santilli

FEATURING: Colin Burgess, Paul Michael

PLOT: Merl, a shut-in forced to take in a roommate to cover the rent, fears his giant head that slumbers on the front lawn.

Still from In the Mouth (2025)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The central premise, as explained above, is enough to make this an easy in; but Santilli’s one-set comedy also lays on plenty of quirky flourishes on top of this (massive) conceit.

COMMENTS: Merl lives in a world of his own. This world is made up of an undefined number of rooms, and a narrow hallway just long enough for him to scooter around through it—kind of. Making the corners is a little tough. Merl cannot leave his home, relying on a pulley system to retrieve his mail, and a dino-head bite grip to pull in the larger parcels which do not fit in his mailbox. His world ends at his front door. Beyond that door is our world, peopled by complicated types demanding rent, and inhabited by a head that’s roughly one story tall. It usually slumbers, but intermittently reminds Merl of its presence with booming yawns.

Writer/director Cory Santilli builds a narrative terrarium for his protagonist. Merl lives a highly unscheduled life: puttering around, arranging objets, and avoiding the invader, Margaret, who owns the property in question. Informed both by classic “creature features”—see credit’s title font and hear the title music—and noir—jazz music flairs and crisp, black and white cinematography pleases the eye—Santilli bends these livelier genres to his own quiet ends, and then upends the tone and action by introducing a criminal on the run. Interloper Larry is both a lens to view our subject anew and a means of creating empathy for the odd protagonist. He calls Merl “brother”, and insists that Merl do please call him “Lah”—because it’s easier. (Merl matter-of-factly inquires, “Is it?”)

Whether or not Merl’s rent gets paid is something of a moot point. Santilli takes his viewers on an up-close journey through the daily struggles and joys of an agoraphobic, choosing a delightfully apt metaphor to do so. It’s a funny film, too, with ’90s nostalgia (how many people have AskedJeeves™ how to dispose of a corpse?) and genre-twisting (this first time I’ve witnessed the Good Cop / Deaf Cop trope). Complications leave Merl with a bag of cash and a body to dispose of. This, despite all the “baby cameras” (not cameras for babies, mind, but cameras hidden in the creepy little baby-headed figurines Merl accumulates) secreted about the house. So, where else to put the corpse, but…

In The Mouth is a strange little character study kept under the watchful eye of an absurd premise: this head in the front lawn. Merl’s head. It is Merl’s keeper, and in true form of a domineering partner, his protector.  While Merl’s world appears to be large enough, we know—and he knows—that a paradigm shift must eventually come to a head.

In the Mouth debuted at Slamdance Film Festival in February 2025. We’ll keep you abreast of any distribution plans when we know more.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…such a bold, weird, creative film…”–Shane Conto, Wasteland Reviews (festival screening)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE DEVIL’S CHAIR (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Adam Mason

FEATURING: Andrew Howard, , Louise Griffiths, Elize du Toit,

PLOT: Having witnessed his girlfriend’s brutalization and disappearance by an evil chair, Nick returns four years later with a group of psychology students to recreate the experience.

COMMENTS: The Devil’s Chair could have been a pretty neat movie: a ’70s / ’80s throwback, telling a tale about evil science intersecting with dark occultism: about a sinister device crafted by a mad psychologist to separate the body from the soul in a manner most horrible. Alternatively, it could have been a decent exploration of criminal insanity, from a skewed perspective maintained up through until the very end, leaving us uncertain about the grisly narrative we’ve endured. Instead, it was a third thing, facetiously tossing aside and spitting on the better possibilities.

Despite this decision, The Devil’s Chair has glimmers of promise and possibility. Nick is hitting well out of his league with Sammy, a gorgeous young woman whom he takes on a date to an abandoned mental institution; the pair drops acid and things go pear-shaped. He convinces himself (and us) that the sinister device bloodily violates her before poofing her out of existence. The psychology department at Cambridge is intrigued both by his condition (it must have been a psychotic vision) and the occult possibilities (Dr. Willard knows more than he initially lets on). They take Nick to the scene of the awful for psycho-supernatural tests and observations.

What the movie does right is mostly in the title. The furniture piece in question is one prop I’d be happy to own. A combination of electric chair and sacrificial restraining device, it springs into action when a hidden needle pierces the skin of any finger foolish enough to rest within a cunningly-placed aperture. The doctor behind this machine is one of those classic “brilliant scientists gone wacky,” and the parallel world (with its requisite flickering lights, endless corridors, and gooey-boney demon thing) is derivative, but delightfully imagined. Matt Berry’s presence as an academic toff—at one point clad in a radiogram-skeleton shirt, long underwear, and cowboy boots—adds a chuckle.

But alas, the whole thing feels as if director Adam Mason watched too many movies. He constantly sabotages the experience through snarky asides and observations, rendering his protagonist not only unsympathetic, but also irritating. (This is only worsened by a tendency to freeze the frame as Nick spits out his dumb little witticisms.) There’s also an odd little tirade arriving at what should have been a stirring demonic climax, admonishing the viewer for watching this kind of thing in the first place. Still, The Devil’s Chair had enough momentum to carry me through the “Ahahah, gotcha!” bloody finale, and makes me hopeful that another filmmaker out there might swipe some of its better elements. Bring unto me the horror throwback about an evil chair and the dark arts behind its manifestations.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…The Devil’s Chair, alas, is dumb sensationalism that trusts blood-buckets dumped on thesps are enough to raise a fright, then undercuts even that via laddish, winking audience asides… The eventual twist only makes the scenario seem more crassly lacking in motivational logic.” — Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

The Devil's Chair (Unrated) [DVD]

The Devil's Chair (Unrated) [DVD]
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CAPSULE: PSYCHOSIS (2023)

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Psychosis is currently available fro rental or purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Pirie Martin

FEATURING: Derryn Amoroso, Kate Holly Hall, James McCluskey-Garcia, Pj van Gyen, voice of Lindsay Dunn

PLOT: Van Aarle, a criminal “fixer” who hears voices (but is not otherwise obviously schizophrenic) reluctantly takes a case involving drug dealers, zombie-like assailants, a vigilante, and a master hypnotist drug kingpin with a connection to his own past.

Still from Psychosis (2023)

COMMENTS: “They said you’d be weird,” observes a dim-witted pusher after Van Aarle explains how his paracusia (auditory hallucinations) give him a “unique perspective” that helps him to tap into “unknowing awareness.” We, the audience, directly experience that auditory condition—sometimes as a murky choir of overlapping advisors who sound quite a bit like those YouTube videos that try to put you inside the head of a schizophrenic, and sometimes in the form of an omniscient narrator, whose commentary may or may not be audible to Van Aarle. The voices are sometimes helpful to our fixer, alerting him to the presence of hidden enemies or whispering clues, but just as often they’re warning that everyone is going to die, or simply reminding him to keep up his psychotic coffee regimen (Van Aarle apparently does not sleep while on a case). Although Derryn Amoroso looks more like than a matinee idol, Van Aarle is in the  lineage of hard-bitten, haunted, and cynical-yet-decent private investigators: the great-grandson of Mike Hammer or Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade, with an Australian accent. The official narrator, a chatty sort who fills in quiet spaces and is sometimes almost comically redundant (“in the distance, he sees something”), adds another film noir note to a movie already flavored with dashes of action, horror, psychological thriller, and science fiction.

Stylistically, you will immediately notice that Psychosis is (95+%) black and white, and with a boxy 1:1 aspect ratio, the narrowest I’ve ever seen in a feature film. You actually get used to it fairly quickly, but along with odd camera angles and other tricks (one scene is shot upside-down) it puts your mind in an odd space. Unusually for a film of this budget, there are a lot of action scenes, and director Martin compensates for a lack of ace action choreographers and athletic stunt doubles by shooting scenes in disjointed styles: schizophrenic editing, strobe lights, woozy double-vision cam for an under-the-influence melee, the upside-down sequence previously mentioned. The fights aren’t as involving as the movie’s concepts, but their ingenuity allows for a richer and more exciting cinematic experience.

Obviously, there is a lot going on in Psychosis—-we haven’t even gotten into the hypnotically-induced hallucinations, or the Batman-like LoneWolf character prowling about. While there is some “is he hallucinating or not?” ambiguity—heck, the title suggests as much—Psychosis doesn’t lean into that motif, but treats its world as if it were a genuine alternate reality, one where advanced mesmerists have almost magical mind-control powers. This means the struggles of Van Aarle (and LoneWolf) have real stakes—that punch to the gut hurts, that knife slashing at him is no metaphor, and the villain may really kill our hero, or drive him insane. A few scenes drag, and not every stylistic embellishment feels utterly necessary, but overall Psychosis is an insanely ambitious debut film that nails the madness of a man whose mind is in the process of being shattered.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an insane thriller from the jump… offbeat and surreal, exactly as Martin intended… each cast member works wonderfully to bring this strange tale to life.”–Bobby LePire, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TRACK 29 (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Roeg

FEATURING: Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd, Sandra Bernhard,

PLOT: Linda leads a boring existence in a small southern town, taken for granted by her model-railroad aficionado husband; she is roused from her stupor by the arrival of Martin, a volatile young Englishman who claims to be the child she gave up for adoption at birth.

Still from Track 29 (1988)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: If Track 29 were only about the taboo subjects at its heart – sexual assault, incest, adoption, infidelity – it might get our attention for that audacity. But those touchy subjects pale in comparison to the outlandish manner in which these characters behave, seemingly immune to any rational expectations of behavior. For what could have been (and once was) an intimate drama, it’s a lot.

COMMENTS: The pairing of a screenwriter with a message and a director with vision is a risky thing. Two strong points of view can sometimes coalesce, but they can just as easily result in conflict and confusion. Usually, one of those voices has to dominate the other. Now, I’m not 100% certain what happened when a Dennis Potter screenplay wound up in the hands of Nicolas Roeg, but I’m willing to hazard a guess: Roeg won.

Potter’s script is based upon his BBC teleplay “Schmoedipus,” and it’s instructive to watch both because you can see where expanding the material has taken it from a comparatively sedate affair to become hyperactive and exceedingly peculiar. Much of Potter’s dialogue makes the transition intact, but the whole tone of the piece changes significantly. Opening up the setting from a cramped suburban London rowhouse to a sun-kissed beach community in the Outer Banks changes the stakes, as does the creation of a more violent backstory for the child’s conception and the introduction of railroads as an unexpectedly prominent theme. (The title is a reference to the lyrical location of the Chattanooga Choo Choo.) The characters themselves have undergone an enormous transformation. The middle-aged Elizabeth becomes Russell’s youthful, childish Linda; her husband’s tedious office job becomes Lloyd’s doctor with a toy train fixation, and the quietly seductive stranger played by Tim Curry on television is a wholly different animal as embodied by Oldman, fresh off his portrayal of Sid Vicious and primed to play the angriest of young men. 

Oldman is fully schizoid, turning on a dime from deranged madman to bereft toddler. (There is no reason for his character to be British, except that it reverses Potter’s gambit in the teleplay, where the young mother’s child has been shipped off to Canada.) His unpredictability is magnetic, as he lures Linda in with sweetness and just as quickly turns antagonistic. Amazingly, though, Oldman shares the wackiest scene in the film with Lloyd’s appearance at a model train convention that unexpectedly turns into a rabble-rousing political rally. As Lloyd becomes more histrionic on behalf of (double-checks notes) toy railroading, the crowd gets increasingly amped up. This is intercut with Oldman’s full-blown assault on Lloyd’s personal track Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TRACK 29 (1988) →