Tag Archives: Mental illness

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: STATIC (1985)

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DIRECTED BY: Mark Romanek

FEATURING: Keith Gordon, Amanda Plummer, Bob Gunton, Lily Knight

PLOT: A quiet young man in a small Western town believes he has invented a machine with life-changing potential, if only he could find someone else who could see it operate successfully.

Still from Static (1985)

COMMENTS: Throughout the summer of 2001, buzz was building over a mysterious new invention codenamed “Ginger.” Mastermind Dean Kamen had impeccable credentials as an innovator, and his creation was being touted by some of the biggest names in business, but Kamen held details of the project in such secrecy that supposition and rumor ruled the day. A hoverboard, some speculated, or some other anti-gravity device. Or some suggested it was some new hydrogen-fueled form of transportation. The mystery and the hype fueled each other in an escalating cycle, so perhaps disappointment was inevitable when the true nature of Ginger was revealed: the Segway.

Ernie Blick (Gordon) is also an inventor with a secret, but despite lacking any of Kamen’s advantages, everyone feels his widely discussed invention is certainly real and likely to be a big success. In a way, he has none of the narcissistic personality issues we often associate with creators: he’s unassuming and unfailingly nice, good-natured despite the recent loss of both parents, deferential to others, outwardly humble, and unflappable even when being laid off from his job at the town crucifix factory. (It’s hard to imagine a more perfect locale for a film featured on this website than a crucifix assembly line.) He’d be just another one of those quiet guys in a loudly quirky town were it not for the amazing thing he claims to have invented.

Commencing spoilers: what Ernie has invented is a TV that relays images of heaven. Ernie knows this has the potential to change the world; he imagines Q&As with excited reporters that bandy about talk of Nobel Prizes. Ah, but here’s the rub: no one else can see the live reports from the great beyond. They get the same thing we do: the titular snow and hiss. Reaction is poor, Ernie is understandably crushed, and we’re left to wonder why anyone thought such an invention might be in his skillset.

Up to this point, Static has been a rather charming accumulation of surprises and quirks. Ernie’s possible girlfriend Julia (Plummer, in an uncharacteristically straightlaced role) is a disillusioned rock keyboardist—just because. Ernie’s cousin Frank (Gunton, charming in his gracelessness) is a doomsday prepper and a hostile street evangelist—just because. (He’s also terrible at small talk. Upon meeting Julia, he wishes her well by saying, “I hope your death is painless.”) Everyone’s a little offbeat like this, and it’s okay because that’s just the kind of town it is. But once the heavenly cable box is revealed and no one can see what Ernie sees, we’re confronted with the question of what it all means, and that’s when things go careening wildly off the rails.

Static is right on the edge of asking some interesting questions about the nature of faith versus proof, about the role of artists and creators in society, about tolerance for ideas outside the mainstream. But instead, the movie lurches into a scenario wherein Ernie takes a busload of senior citizens hostage in order to generate publicity for his invention. Admittedly, Ernie is just as affable a kidnapper as he is a diner customer, and the standoff has the humor and light satire we might expect from a British sitcom. But it ends just as terribly as you could expect, with bullets fired, everyone dead, and not a single lesson learned. It’s a bold choice, sure, but a cheap and cynical one.

Director Romanek has reportedly disowned the film as juvenalia, which seems unfair. The movie looks good and is well acted. It just has absolutely no idea what it wants to say, and therefore ends up saying nothing. Static serves as an interesting collection of “wouldn’t it be cool” notions, but ask yourself what happens during the time between when Plummer comes rolling into town and when she heads back out. It may look like there’s a lot going on, but cut through the snow and the noise and all you really get is a fancy scooter.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s always tempting to find a strange cult film all the more alluring if it’s hard to get to see it in the first place… Static serves up a near-surreal helping of small-town America just before Lynch himself had got to Blue Velvet, let alone Twin Peaks.” – Andy Murray, We Are Cult

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

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: TRIPLE TROUBLE (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Homer Flynn, The Residents

FEATURING: Dustin York

PLOT: After a crisis of faith, a priest (and son of a deceased member of the Residents) becomes a plumber and goes insane as he is consumed by his theory about a fungus-led conspiracy.

Still from Triple Trouble (2022)

COMMENTS: “Junior” is an ex-ponytailed skateboarding priest who’s lost his faith and become a plumber. His mom just died. His only friend is a malfunctioning A.I. drone. He finds semen-like fungus clogging up every drain he services. He sometimes sees the ghost of his dead father, a former lead singer of the Residents. From his cell phone, the news blares about a Night of the Living Dead style plague striking white people in prisons and meat-packing plants. So his life is pretty full. His main hobby is theorizing about the omnipresent fungus and its possible lunar origins, but Junior obsesses over many things: a kidnapping from his past, a local radio tower, the nice Wiccan girl he has a crush on, the unusual number of white vans in his neighborhood, and the Residents’ unfinished movie “Vileness Fats.” And every now and then he finds himself drawn into short dream sequences featuring dancing eyeball-headed men.

Yes, the Residents’ Triple Trouble lays a strong claim to weirdness, as one would expect from a movie proffered by a band fronted by giant eyeballs. A lot of the experimental video work, featuring spinning backdrops and the mini video-art dream sequences, is cool. Scraggly Dustin York does fine enough, acting most of the time alongside disembodied voices (partly a function of the pandemic-era shooting schedule). But, unfortunately, the project as a whole never comes together, or goes sideways in a truly interesting manner. It’s inspired by a combination of lockdown paranoia and Residents nostalgia, but nothing coheres thematically; its 90 minutes don’t seem to be about anything much in particular. The plot eventually unwinds as a portrait of a delusional schizophrenic, an approach which feels lazy and almost anti-cathartic. (In another disappointment, there’s little actual Residents music on the soundtrack; no full-fledged songs, just snippets of the kind of incidental accompaniment you’d find in any similar indie project.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Triple Trouble is aimed at an audience who are already fans of the band—it’s obviously full of in-jokes and references your reviewer missed (along with a few he caught). Whether the resulting concoction intrigues the novice enough to hunt down more from the Residents in a vain quest to understand what it all means will vary from person to person.

To a large extent, the backstory behind the making of Triple Trouble is more interesting than the finished project (as well as helping to explain its air of, um, unevenness.) Director and Residents co-founder/current spokesman Homer Flynn embeds a lot of the band’s lore into this project, starting with both references to and actual footage from “Vileness Fats.” “Fats” was an elaborate unfinished avant-garde video project about one-armed dwarfs, conjoined twins, and dirty laundry, shot on sets aping The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which the band worked on for four years in the mid-1970s, shooting fourteen hours of footage before abandoning it to the dustbin. Triple Trouble also rests on the bones of Double Trouble, a planned Residents feature which began shooting in 2016, which shut down in 2019 after the death of Gerri Lawler (who plays Junior’s mother). The color flashback footage in Triple Trouble featuring Junior as a priest comes from that half-completed film. Perhaps sensing that working for years on unfinished projects was getting them nowhere, the Residents shot the remaining material that makes up Triple Trouble in ten days. So if Triple Trouble seems a little cobbled-together, Residents fans can at least rejoice that the stars finally aligned for long enough to bring a movie to completion.

The 2023 Blu-ray offers some interesting supplements. There are four deleted scenes (one of which should have been included in the film, as it outlines Junior’s conspiracy theory in relatively lucid detail) and a blooper. It also includes trailers for Triple Trouble, the original teaser for Double Trouble, and a promo for the Residents’ performance of “God in 3 Persons Live.” The disc sports a reel of unused stop-motion animated footage from “Vileness Fats” (I don’t know whether this has appeared elsewhere). The most significant extra is the 17-minute long “Vileness Fats Concentrate,” a short which gives you a good sense of the pretentious, unhinged wackiness that the unfinished project might have been. “Concentrate” had been released before, but presumably this 2022 “remaster” is higher quality. Residents completists will obviously be all over this like fungus on a drainpipe.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If all this sounds profoundly weird – as well as weirdly profound – that’s because it is. The Residents wouldn’t have it any other way. Don’t miss it!”–Nicole V. Gagné, A Shaded View of Fashion

Guest Reviews

GUEST REVIEW: MAN FACING SOUTHEAST (1986)

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Guest review by Amy Vaughn

Hombre mirando al sudeste

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DIRECTED BY: Eliseo Subiela

FEATURING: Lorenzo Quinteros, Hugo Soto, Inés Vernengo

PLOT: A man appears in a mental hospital claiming to be an alien.

Still from Man Facing Southeast (1986)

COMMENTS: Man Facing Southeast is a meditation on the human condition. Like Mindwalk or  Waking Life, it’s best to know what you’re getting into, and that there will be monologuing and pithy one-liners like, “I am your hallucination.”

It is plenty deep, and it was appreciated when it came out in 1986, garnering much praise and many awards in its home country of Argentina. For good reason: it’s well made on a slim budget ($600,000 USD), the acting is tight, the script leaves you with take-home ideas, and at the time the story hadn’t been done to death.

But now, everything seems predictable, from the worn facades of the sanitarium, to the jaded psychiatrist, to the mysterious (possibly alien) patient who may or may not save the doctor from himself. Even the patient/alien becoming ever more Christlike, gaining an entourage of sedated mental patients, and using psychokinesis to help a hungry mother feed her children—it’s all kind of ho-hum.

Rantés, the mental patient/alien played expertly by Hugo Soto, tells the psychiatrist that, because he is an alien hologram, he is unable to feel human emotions. He says he was sent/projected to Earth to determine what is wrong with humans, why we are so awful to one another.

Throughout the film, the psychiatrist vacillates about believing Rantés. He labels him delusional but does not put him on anti-psychotics. He broods about him and goes home to play the saxophone. A lot. There is a lot of saxophone in this movie.

An hour in, another possible alien enters the story. Her name is Beatriz Dick (apparently named in honor to Philip K.). She is meekly mannered and conservatively dressed. Rantés tells the psychiatrist she is a rogue alien, seduced by “sunsets and certain odors” to want to stay on Earth. The psychiatrist, predictably, falls in love with her. There are two odd things about Beatriz: she often exchanges her shoes for shoes that are exactly the same, which she carries with her in a shopping bag; and her saliva is blue, which we see once.

That’s it. That’s all the movie gives us to determine whether or not they are aliens: Rantés has psychokinetic powers and Beatriz has blue saliva.

The weirdest thing about this movie is that Rantés cannot feel, yet helps people anyway. As things progress—mostly as he is exposed to music—Rantés begins to smile and dance and experience joy, which becomes his undoing.

As much as Man Facing Southeast downplays its science fiction aspects, it spoon-feeds us its philosophy. But that’s what these movies do. Meant to be a timeless study of humankind’s inhumanity to itself and what it means to be human, decades of intervening movies on similar themes (both sci-fi and phi) have overshadowed it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…it shows huge promise — its mystery, its patient pace and its eerie resonance sometimes transcend its didactics.”–Rita Kempley, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

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

Capsules

CAPSULE: A WOUNDED FAWN (2022)

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DIRECTED BY: Travis Stevens

FEATURING: Josh Ruben, Sarah Lind, Malin Barr

PLOT: A schizophrenic serial killer takes a date to his remote cabin, but things don’t quite go as he plans.

Still from A Wounded Fawn (2022)

COMMENTS: Despite some classical allusions (to the Erinyes, who are described in the opening in as much detail as is necessary), A Wounded Fawn begins its life looking like it will be a relatively straightforward thriller. In the prologue we see killer Bruce dispatch a victim and meet the Red Owl, the hallucinatory entity who prompts him to murder against his will. We then fast forward to meet protagonist Meredith, who has unwisely swiped right on Bruce, and after a dinner of tacos has even more unwisely agreed to an overnight date at his remote cabin. When she gets there, she seems to be hallucinating, too, as we encounter mysterious bumps and shadowy figures (disruptions which only intensify after she plays a vinyl single impishly titled “LSD.”) But at almost exactly the halfway point, a movie that looks like it’s about to become a cat-and-mouse game between predator and prey undergoes an unexpected detour into the utterly surreal.

When this horror movie promotes itself as “surreal,” it doesn’t use the term in the usual “we’re going to show you some WTF stuff, man” sense. Travis Steven’s imagery was explicitly modeled on the work of two modern Surrealist painters: Dorothea Tanning and Leonara Carrington (who also supplies the film’s epigraph). The Red Owl is strange enough, but other entities soon appear: a nude woman attached to a moving stovepipe, a cartoonish blood-red cross between Cthulu and a beetle with google eyes, a woman in a red-lipped volto mask with long auburn ringlets with snakes crawling across her head. Rarely has the spectacle of a man battling his inner demons been depicted so literally.

Bruce is an unusual case: a character who is simultaneously a charming sociopath and a functional schizophrenic. It’s a difficult tightrope that Ruben walks admirably, eliciting about as much sympathy as we can expect to feel for such a monster. Although most have interpreted the film as a feminist allegory about abusive partners (which is almost certainly the intention), there remains an open question as to whether Bruce’s homicidal tendencies are a result of an irresistible compulsion, or whether that’s just a convenient excuse for him to give in to his depraved fantasies. Of course, from the perspective of his victims, the question of free will is moot. The entire final act of the film is an extensive psychoanalysis where Bruce’s brain is literally picked. Be sure to stay tuned for the end credits, which are as unforgettably odd and audacious as any I’ve ever seen. If you like your horror on the surreal side, A Wounded Fawn is sure to scratch your festering itch.

A Wounded Fawn debuts exclusively on Shudder starting today (Dec. 5). Normally, Shudder exclusives will show up at other outlets after a few months; we’ll be sure to update you when that happens.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This movie came to get weird, tell you men aren’t that great, and send you back into the world an even stranger person.”–Sharai Bohannon, Dread Central (contemporaneous)

A Wounded Fawn [Blu-ray]

A Wounded Fawn [Blu-ray]
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