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366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: MATADOR BOLERO (2026)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Rosado

FEATURING: Yves Tumor, , Jack Irv, Stephee Bonifacio

PLOT: A high-profile murder at a nightclub triggers various factions into action, including a computer intelligence from the depths of space.

Still from Matador Bolero (2026)

COMMENTS:  Matador Bolero looks good in that DIY, retro kind of way, at times feeling like a down-at-the-heel Koyaanisqatsi with a nebulous crime story tacked on. But I would like this filmmaker—and his team—to consider a project stripped of a plot, or at least stripped of explication. The murder of a beloved actress at the beginning isn’t nearly as important as the camerawork capturing the fascinating motion of the topless dancers and their viewers. Yves Tumor is better with ardent bed-dance performances than meekly relaying cryptic “information” to an overzealous detective (Kansas Bowling, whose physicality is not well served by dialogue in this film). And the young blonde pulling a magician’s handkerchief from a notch in the beach? I am on board with all of this—except for one thing,

To clarify, I’m a “style-over-substance” kind of guy. I revel in cinematic excess, be it sets or sound production or costuming, or what-have-you. But Matador Bolero is one of the few films where I actually became somewhat annoyed when substance cropped up. What is this narrative you’re trying to tell? Who are these recurring characters? Shoo, shoo. Rosado is in his element when he’s playing around in post-production to further dreamify his already dreamy shots and vignettes. Three scantily-clad young women in wolf masks pursue a fourth (non-masked) woman down a sinister corridor and tear her dress to ribbons while a purple-glowing super-intelligence orb thing pulsates conversationally? I don’t need a “Why” for that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“So there’s our justification for the film’s the title, but are we still feeling confused? Almost certainly; Matador Bolero is confusing by design – if we accept that the film is much more about blending moods, impressions and visual styles than telling a story… a bold project but a strange prospect, pushing the boundaries in what feels like both experimental, but recognisable ways, and coming up with something off-kilter, but visually strong.” — Keri O’Shea, Warped Perspective (contemporaneous)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BLOOD, BULLETS, BUFFOONS (1996)

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DIRECTED BY: Zachary Winston Snygg

FEATURING: Zachary Winston Snygg, Amy Lynn Baxter, John Paul Fedele, Carl Burrows

PLOT: When terminally dweeby patsy Jack lands in jail after getting caught up in a drug deal gone bad, he emerges from prison determined to seek revenge on those who hung him out to dry, including his hot girlfriend.

Still from Blood, Bullets, Buffoons (1996)

COMMENTS: It’s hard to overstate the impact that Quentin Tarantino’s one-two punch of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction had on the film world, especially to indie moviemakers who were looking for a seat at the table. While horror has always been a good entry point into the business, the genre elements and risks from too-effective shocks and gore would sometimes keep talented directors and screenwriters waiting at the kids’ table. Tarantino offered another way in: high-impact violence, often outrageous in nature, supported by snappy, adventurous, reference-laden dialogue that invigorated actors and thrilled audiences. This turned out to be such a successful formula that cinemas were soon inundated with low-budget, microbudget, and even no-budget copycats that checked boxes for gunplay, smug smuttiness, and a deluge of word vomit without any of the original’s flavor or depth. (To be fair, one of the perpetrators of this unfortunate trend was Quentin Tarantino.) 

This is how we come to Blood, Bullets, Buffoons, a clear debtor to Pulp Fiction‘s legacy two years after that film’s release. A true hustler, Snygg has racked up 44 directorial credits to date, many under the name “John Bacchus.” Titles like Lust in Space: The Erotic Witch Project IV,  Beaster Day: Here Comes Peter Cottonhell, and The Heaping Bouncy Breasts That Smothered a Midget that tell you everything you need to know about his auteurial aesthetic. To peruse his IMDb page is to scan a catalog of softcore horror flicks, reality show spoofs, and blockbuster parodies with production values that would make Asylum Entertainment blush with embarrassment. BBB is actually one of his earliest efforts, so if anything, expectations should be kept even lower.

One endeavors to be kind to a production with limited resources. Should it matter that a courtroom looks like someone’s living room has been lightly dressed (right down to the curtains covering the windows behind the judge)? Can we overlook the fact that Jack’s prison houses only two inmates, or that the warden’s office is located in a foyer and is open at all times? Is it worth noting that no one in the entire production can afford a suit, let alone a scene-appropriate costume, and that Jack spends a large portion of the film in the T-shirt and shorts that he might wear to the gym? Honestly, I think we can probably let all that go, because verisimilitude and visual splendor are not really the selling point here. No, what we’re after is… well, it’s all in the title, isn’t it?

This is where the movie falls apart, because while there is a fair amount of cartoonish violence, those first two Bs are not really that present. Instead, there’s a lot a scenes where men talk about their difficulties with women in thick Jersey accents and language that more than hints at an inherent lack of respect. (There’s a charitable interpretation of this as a knock on toxic masculinity, but it is desperately unfunny Z-grade Tarantino jibber-jabber, and frankly reads as a tacit endorsement of said toxic masculinity.) There are also a fair number of scenes where a topless woman is shoehorned into the frame in a wild stab at sex appeal. So perhaps Boorishness, Breasts, Buffoons would be a better title. But the most accurate B would be Boring, because much of the film is given over to long stretches of nothing happening whatsoever. In one scene, for example, Jack goes to a strip club with his posterized portrait of one of the people upon whom he intends to enact revenge. He enters and watches a nearly nude woman writhe around him before she directs him to a topless dominatrix, who extracts ten dollars from the hapless Jack while she is abusing a paying client, before finally getting around to telling him that his target will be here tomorrow at noon. Cost to us: five minutes of unrecoverable life. Uncovered breasts: four. Plot advancement: none at all. Much of the movie is like this. Jack’s pre-crime life, his recruitment into the operation, his time in jail and his daring escape, his plans for revenge and his artful dodging of the police, and all the poorly choreographed action… staged in the longest, least compelling, drawn-out manner possible. 

Snygg hangs most of his film’s potential on the appeal of Penthouse Pet Baxter, who plays the utterly uninterested love interest. Though she is much talked about, her presence is limited almost entirely to some black-and-white flashbacks in which Jack struggles to get her attention, plus a final scene where her character’s arc meets a stupid and pointless conclusion. It seems Snygg can’t even figure out how to use the closest thing he has to a star. He can’t even finagle a topless scene out of her. It’s important not to classify this as poor-man’s Tarantino, because poor men deserve better. Blood, Bullets, Buffoons is depressing, bearing few assets and wasting them anyway. It is strange to see an opportunity like this spoiled in such a cavalier manner. But after all: a buffoon is a clown, a bumbling fool. You can’t say the title was wrong about that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The dialogue is largely sub-Tarantino wannabe nonsense, but the more original ideas, such as staging fights to the soundtracks from kung-fu films, work surprisingly well. There just aren’t enough of them to keep your interest going.” – Jim McLennan, Film Blitz

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

In the Flesh/Blood Bullets Buffoons [DVD]

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    366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DAYMAKER (2007)

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    DIRECTED BY: Joe LiTrenta

    FEATURING: Joe LiTrenta, Michael Nathanson, Cristina Marie Proctor, Myla Pitt, Sakura Sugihara, Carrie Terraccino, Sara Weibel

    PLOT: On a clear day in New Jersey, twentysomethings meet up, chat, drink and take drugs, dream, and reconvene in new combinations.

    Still from Daymaker (2007)

    COMMENTS: Not too long ago, we talked about the options available to the no-budget filmmaker. They can go for taboo. They can go for shock value. They can try for goofball comedy. They can aim at surrealistic nonsense. They can go for flat-out absurdism. Whatever the approach, the goal is to demonstrate what an aspiring filmmaker can do even without all the bells and whistles and the fancy equipment and the support of a whole industry. And if there’s an important message about the human condition to convey in the process, then that’s just gravy.

    Which brings us to Daymaker, a DIY debut from writer/director Joe LiTrenta that is about drugs. It’s not about the drug trade, or drug abuse, or drug profiteering. It’s not a hard-hitting exposé or a harrowing descent into addiction or even a psychedelic celebration. It’s just about drugs. We know this because it’s the only thing anyone in the film talks about. Any other topics—work, relationships, a movie someone saw—are filtered through the ongoing use of drugs, like a benzo-laced Bechdel Test that the film cannot pass. No one wants to leave it to chance that you might miss this reading of the text, so characters come out and say it at every opportunity. “I’m addicted to cocaine.” “Janice has a drinking problem.” “We did a bunch of molly.” “That’s right, no more acid for me.” “I’m supposed to have been sober for a month now and I can’t even stop my hands from shaking.” This feature is most amusing/bananas when a woman tells her daughter, “Mommy has an illness,” and the girl replies, “Because you like beer?” Daymaker is not a coy film.

    Having laid its cards on the table, it has precious little to say about the subject. There’s a slot machine-approach to scenes, with characters from previous scenes coming together to start a new one. This hints at a La Ronde-esque format in which each new pairing reflects on the interactions we’ve seen before, or where a single character or object leads us on a picaresque journey, but there’s nothing so orderly. The unpleasantly rude boyfriend we meet at the very beginning of the film hasn’t gone any further emotionally or geographically when he returns halfway through to proposition a girl for her pink motorcycle helmet, nor has his now-ex-girlfriend when she turns up as the subject of a hastily staffed photo shoot with cigarettes and highway flares. People just come together willy-nilly, and there’s a good chance that when they do, they’ll be drinking or snorting or talking about having drank or snorted.

    After a while, you start to get the sensation that it’s not the characters that have done drugs, but that the movie itself is high. It has that drifting lope to it, that sense of being in a conversation with someone who can’t hold the plot and who seems to be way too into whatever distraction comes up next. The comparison that kept coming to mind, unfavorably, was A Scanner Darkly, a film legendarily successful at putting the viewer inside the minds of its aimless, drug-addled protagonists while revealing their world for the hollow dead end that it is. Daymaker has some of those same moves, with significantly less plot to interfere. Drugs are certainly not glorified—people are either being told they need to get off that stuff or are admitting themselves that they need to get off that stuff—but there are no consequences. The most devastating impact of their addictions is that they are dreadfully boring. At more than two hours, Daymaker really needs to have something to say to justify itself, and it decidedly does not.

    Daymaker is bad, but often in intriguing, surprising ways. The actors—you might assume they were all amateurs doing the director a solid until you see the surprising number of them with more than one credit to their name—deliver their dialogue with the desperate hopefulness of amateurs who have been asked to improvise, but the words they speak are so carefully assembled that they leave no room for an ad-lib. (At least one performer stumbles on her lines and they just leave it in.) Repeatedly, characters tell each other that they’ve just said something funny, and their word is all we have. Locations bounce between the basement of a rec center, a cellar decorated with cinder blocks and unpainted drywall, a series of sparsely decorated bedrooms and living rooms. These spaces are meant to suggest how low these people have fallen, but in fact scream “a friend loaned us their house for a day.” Twice, the film breaks into a dance number. You want it all to mean something, to add up to a message that has been lurking amidst the randomness, but it never does—and it doesn’t seem to want to.

    There is at least one moment that I can take to the bank. It’s a dream sequence where a girl walks through a field of perfect green, leaving behind her the faintest trace as she cuts through the tall grass, while a boy stares after her clutching a childish mash note. The image is genuinely captivating. The guy who shot it must have some talent; somebody ought to throw a few bucks at him and see what he can do.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    No other critics have published reviews of this movie.

    (This movie was nominated for review by Desmond, who said it was “damn weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

    List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: MATAPANKI (2026)

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    DIRECTED BY: Diego Fuentes

    FEATURING: Ramon Galvez, Antonia McCarthy, Rosa Peñaloza, Diego Bravo, Rodrigo Lisboa

    PLOT: Punk kid Ricardo unlocks superpowers from a mysterious alcoholic admixture and reluctantly pursues the path of a superhero.

    Still from Matapanki (2026)

    WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The punk DIY aesthetic goes quite a ways in making this one a bit different—but the apocalyptic, kaiju-scale showdown with the US prez takes it over the finish line.

    COMMENTS: Punks and their punk movies. Jerky camera maneuvering, hand-painted ¡Poder! effects, naturalistic acting, boozing, cigarette-lighter huffing, amiable grandmothers… Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, and they can’t even afford to film in color!

    Of course, I jest. (And I’m something of a square.) To be honest, this film is quite charming. Ricardo and his pals have a healthy social thing going: the cover charge at the club they frequent can be paid through second-hand books. All they’re trying to do is live their low-key party lives on their own terms. But as is always the case, the Man (in particular, the Gringo) wants to bring ’em down.

    With an opener straight out of ‘s dark alchemy, Matapanki‘s punk cred is never in question, despite the feel-good throughline. The superhero storyline unspools in thrash time, taking somewhere under an hour (if you don’t include the credits). Viewers get a wallop of antiestablishmentarianism, with fast cuts and vibrant doodles whenever our hero (and later, the supervillain) pumps up the ¡Poder! Matapanki jouncily stumbles toward the finish line, keeping merely oddball throughout (with more than a few hints of Repo Man) until culminating with a BANG! when Super Punk Boy battles Super Neocon Gringo Man.

    Take that, you square! And don’t you ever mess with our anarcho-drunken heroes again.

    Matapanki does have a worldwide distribution deal with Italy’s Minerva Pictures, so it should become available to the general public in the nearish future.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a perfect rendition of a superhero flick made in the style of the cinema of transgression… Like a good punk song, it stuffs a lot of chaos into a very short running time…”–Micheal Talbot-Haynes, Film Threat (festival review)

    366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I NEVER LEFT THE WHITE ROOM (2000)

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    AKA My Crepitus

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    DIRECTED BY: Michael Todd Schneider

    FEATURING: Michael Todd Schneider, Eric Boring, Tom Colbert, Amy Beth Deford

    PLOT: Hospital patient Jeffrey has violent, bloody dreams revolving around his life as a sex criminal and murderer.

    Still from I Never Left the White Room (2000)

    COMMENTS: The general tenor of I Never Left the White Room is established not in the first act, not even in the first minutes, but in the vanity card of the production company. The Maggot Films banner boasts stabs, screams, and gore to assure the viewer can expect only the most unpleasant, blood-curdling material. By that standard, I Never Left the White Room is an honest production indeed.

    Schneider expands on a short film, and while one is inclined to salute him for deftly hiding the seams between old and new, the patchwork nature of the movie makes that faint praise. While there’s the suggestion of a narrative spine, I Never Left the White Room is really just a collection of disparate images, scenes whose common thread is their origin inside Jeffrey’s mixed-up brain. The title turns out to be a description of our mise en scene. 

    Those visions are largely troubled, and Schneider distinguishes them with varying degrees of stylization. The most compelling is a dialogue set on a railroad trestle that warps the video image with posterization and color correction to suggest the demons inside our protagonist’s mind. Sometimes the beasts are literal, like a monster whose features can be smeared away like shaving cream. Other times, the horror has only the barest pretension to metaphor, like an absurdly lengthy scene in which a man spies on a woman taking a shower, each pleasuring themselves until the woman begins to bleed profusely. If the same central character weren’t involved, you would never know one thing had anything to do with the other. 

    What Schneider is going for, other than checking items off a list, is not clear. There’s murder of women, already an infuriating trope but even more so when shorn of any motivation. There’s gore but, aside from the occasional jump scare, nothing that’s truly inventive. The acting and bare minimum of scripted dialogue don’t help, and there’s neither a hint of disgust nor irony. I think it’s supposed to be chilling, not funny, when the psychiatrist (who might also be a cop?) tells his patient, “I should be straight with you: my wife and daughters were raped and murdered last night.” As delivered, though, it’s not momentous; it’s ridiculous. 

    I Never Left the White Room is trash. There’s a market for trash, of course, as evidenced by Schneider’s later association with Fred Vogel and the August Underground series. But this isn’t even good trash. Schneider has an hour of video to reveal the depths of his imagination; it proves to be shallow and aimless. Leave the white room. 

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…the main aspect of this 70-minute piece of headache-inducing insanity is the endless stream of spliced together nightmarish visuals, surreal dreamy encounters, gory visions, bizarre symbolic imagery, lustful masturbatory fantasies sometimes including violence, grating sound effects, eye-slicing color filters, grainy post-editing effects, and so on…. mostly tedious…”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

    My Crepitus (I Never Left the White

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    (This movie was nominated for review by Kenshin, who described it as “very insane, very trippy, very surreal and extremely creepy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)