Tag Archives: Microbudget

CAPSULE: ED AND ROOSTER’S GREAT ADVENTURE (2025)

AKA Ed and Rooster’s Big Adventure

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DIRECTED BY: Lucy Fazely

FEATURING: Voice of Bryan Crespo

PLOT: Two seagulls discover a laptop containing a spell that allows them to access alternate realities.

Still from ed and rooster's great adventure (2025)

COMMENTS: Sometimes I wonder whether there is a point to reviewing movies that no one else will ever see. I’ve concluded that the value to the reader is the same as when they encounter any description of a thing they will never experience directly: they get to add one more item to their mental catalog of things of which they are aware. So, if you’ve read this far, your life has been enriched (although perhaps imperceptibly)  by your knowledge that Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure exists.

Still reading? Then you are not content to simply know that a thing called Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure exists, and wish to learn what it actually is. I applaud your curiosity. Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure consists of footage of seagulls on the beach, with voice actors dubbing in fanciful and humorous conversations between the elder (Ed, with a faux British accent) and the younger (teenager Rooster, who’s slightly dumber than birdbrained Ed). The two feathered friends find a portal to alternate realities and get lost in a dimensional vortex, moving from a universe where they are suddenly avian Lotharios to one where humans have set up free feeders to one where gulls are completely unknown species, and so on. Usually the alternative reality seems immediately superior but then reveals some major flaw: e.g., in the world where the female gulls are all attracted to Ed and Rooster, Ed’s favorite snack, cheese puffs, do not exist. Therefore, the pair continually try to get back to their own universe, but instead end up in another slightly novel variant.

My goodness, you’re still here? Well, I’m guano drop some more knowledge to make you a certified expert on Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure. The voiceovers can be mildly amusing, but hardly drip with wit (“wanna flock?,” an amorous female gull asks Ed). There are a lot of shots of seagulls pooping, and in fact pooping, or more precisely, the inability to do so, becomes a major plot point in the second new reality the pair visit. Unless you’re a fan of seagulls pooping, though, the film is visually dull—the same local birds pooping on the same local beaches for over an hour. Perhaps bird-watching hobbyists would find it tolerable. There are a few moments of Adobe After Effects-style visuals—the green spiral inter-dimensional portals, animated flapping bird silhouettes, a snapshot of a child that gets sucked into a portal—which are tossed out with an impish disregard for realism. In the best effect, they simply reverse the film to show fish and shrimp shooting out of a bird feeder; it’s completely goofy, in the best sense of the term. But overall, the entirety of Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure is like a feature film version of a 20-watch YouTube that never showed up in your feed. The movie is available for rental on YouTube or Google Play, but the filmmakers will probably never make back the $50 they spent on it. That’s OK; you get the feeling that getting rich is not the motivation for the team behind Ed and Rooster’s Great Adventure. They wanted to have a fun time making a cheap movie, and they did so. And now you know they did it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No reviews other than this one currently exist

51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)

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 “We had the spirit of Jean Nicolet and Werner Herzog with us as we were attempting to make the greatest Wisconsin film of all time. Hopefully.” ― Mike Cheslik

 DIRECTED BY: Mike Cheslik                                                                                      

FEATURING: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Doug Mancheski, Luis Rico, Wes Tank

PLOT: Following the destruction of his home and factory, applejack purveyor Jean Kayak attempts, and fails, to outwit a variety of woodland creatures in his quest to find food and shelter. Thanks to the tutelage of a master trapper, he learns the fur trade, and his exploits catch the eye of a pretty furrier; however, her merchant father demands that he bring in hundreds of dead beavers to obtain her hand in marriage. Jean sets out to fulfill this request – under the watchful eye of a pair of bucktoothed detectives – whereupon he stumbles upon a massive supervillainous plot.

Still from Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

BACKGROUND:

  • High school best friends Cheslik and Tews worked together previously on Apocrypha candidate Lake Michigan Monster. The idea for Hundreds of Beavers was concocted at a bar during the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival, where Lake Michigan Monster was screening.
  • The film was shot near small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan over the course of 12 weeks, spread across two winters in 2019 and 2020.
  • Some of the cast have found fame outside of film acting. Graves (the Furrier) has earned renown under the name The Witch of Wonderlust as a folk magician, travel blogger, and pole dancing instructor (the latter talent of which she demonstrates to great effect in a surprising moment in the film), while Tank (the Master Trapper) gained viral fame for his mid-pandemic video series featuring rap performances of Dr. Seuss books.
  • Cheslik and producer Kurt Ravenwood put the total budget at $150,000, with a full $10,000 allotted to the purchase of the mascot costumes. All told, the filmmakers purchased 6 beavers, 5 dogs, 2 rabbits, one raccoon, one wolf and one skunk. (The horse costume, such as it is, is bespoke.) The vast number of woodland creatures on screen at any given time were courtesy of the film’s 1,500 visual effects, all composed in Adobe After Effects.
  • Recognizing that selling the film to a traditional distributor would likely result in a cursory release before being dumped on video, the producers retained the exhibition rights and commenced a roadshow tour of festivals across North America, complete with live wrestling battles between Tews and a beaver mascot. They report that more than half of the $500,000 in box office receipts came after the film became available through video-on-demand.
  • The film’s poster is modeled after the one-sheet for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
  • Named to multiple “Best of 2024” lists, including the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. The movie took the prize for Best Narrative Film at the Kansas International Film Festival, while Cheslik was named Best Director at the 2023 Phoenix Film Festival. The film also claimed both of those awards at that year’s Wyoming Film Festival.
  • The consensus pick by the writers of this site as the Best Weird Movie of 2024.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: From start to finish, Hundreds of Beavers is almost nothing but indelible images. After the zany animated prologue, there’s the silly running gag of surprise holes in the ice that turn out to be integral to the plot; every single appearance of an animal costume, including gay rabbits, overfed raccoons, and dogs playing poker; mascot guts; ice pond pinball; and so many groups of beavers that take the form of construction crews, a police force, and even a jury. There are no wrong answers. But nothing sums it all up quite like the sight of Jean Kayak on the run from the eponymous horde, his absurd raccoon hat flying off his head while innumerable human-sized Castor canadensis give chase. It’s an intentional borrow from Buster Keaton, solidifying the connection with the glory days of silent comedy and making good on the promise of the provocative title.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: The unhittable spittoon; Elementary, my dear Beaver

 WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: For a film that looks and feels like it should be a two-reeler from a hundred years ago, Hundreds of Beavers pulls off the astounding trick of using current-day, commercially available technology to assemble vintage styles and hoary-chestnut jokes into something new and entirely unexpected. Between Cheslik’s endlessly inventive microbudget solutions that result in an action film to rival a Fast and Furious entry (at .03% of the bankroll) and Tews’ gloriously full-bodied, rubber-faced performance, the elements are in place to build a tale of ever-escalating silliness and absurdity. Most of the time, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen next, and even in those moments where you might anticipate what is to come, it is accomplished with grin-inducing surprise and wit.

Trailer for Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

COMMENTS: Jean Kayak’s applejack distillery is called “Acme.” That Continue reading 51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)

366 UNDERGROUND: IRISH CATHOLIC (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Katie Madonna Lee, A Great Male Artist

FEATURING: Avalon Rayne and assorted misfit Catholics

PLOT: Shavon rebels against her Irish-Catholic family only to find herself similarly repressed by the gaggle of punks she moves in with.

Still from Irish Catholic (2023)

COMMENTS: Katie Madonna Lee and A Great Male Artist [sic] really hit the nail on the head with this one. Indeed, they hit so many nails on the head that, once her baseball bat has been bolstered by the nails, it’s ready for them to truly wallop something—and boy-howdy do they wallop it. All of it: Catholicism, sisterhood, hypocrisy, the patriarchy, inflexible feminism, shame, conformity, and all manner of other injustices and annoyances of life. Irish Catholic is appropriately staged and shot like a morality play—with tunes!—with young Shavon navigating adversity as she frantically paddles toward self assuredness.

The lights come up, and we open on a bedraggled, middle aged mother praying for a parking space. Her makeup is slapdash, her eyes as keen as an irritated hawk, and her hair is festooned with a bouquet of infant dolls. Shavon and her siblings are crammed in the vehicle space; her sisters pray along, in song, with the mother, and Shavon tries to silence her demanding stomach (which has its own voice credit), ultimately bowing to the temptation of the bag of potato chips being brought to the soup kitchen. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The family serves the poor with guilt, and they sit through a guilt-themed sermon which ends on the hymn line, “Guilty, Forever Guilty.”

Oddly enough, Irish Catholic is also a rather fun, sometimes whimsical experience. Sure, Shavon’s brother is molested by the hot priest, but that’s offset by the smirk-inducing machinations of the sisters as they attempt to out-pray to God (the competition here being just how many starving Africans they hope to save when they grow up). Shavon’s slide from her miserable lower middle class Irish Catholic family existence to bohemian life with a quatro of questionably punk “enlightened” types is tempered by various visitations from (the appropriately credited) Hot Jesus, who at various times pines for Arby’s and is stoned out of his mind. There’s also the special celebrity guest, “the Poop Bucket” (with it’s own musical number), but I won’t get into that.

All told, Irish Catholic has quite a bit to say; much of it about religion. Greenaway came to mind more than once, despite his comparative grisliness; this skewering is far more of a  romp, despite claims of how very dark (very dark) the film is. Young person hates her life, falls in with a seemingly carefree crowd who ultimately prove to be just as controlling and image-conscious as the ostensibly more repressive traditional life she has fled. I’ve seen this, but I was happy to see this spin on it. Life can be frustrating and much too difficult. But as Jesus famously preached, “Your life’s gonna get worse, so you might as well learn to sing and dance. …it worked for the gays.”

At the time of this writing Irish Catholic is available for free on YouTube, courtesy of co-writer/director Lee.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This peculiar film blends satire and drama in a quest to unravel the complexities of faith and the timeless human yearning for acceptance… [it] exemplifies avant-garde filmmaking.” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (contemporaneous)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: NITWIT (2002)

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Weirdest!

Nitwit is currently available to watch for free on YouTube.

DIRECTED BY: Xan Price

FEATURING: Agnes Ausborn, Daniel Brantley, Wilder Selzer, Philly Abe

PLOT: A couple licks pictures of horses; the woman grows an unusually large blue proboscis. A wig screams and moans, while a baby cries out for a mommy; a man digs up a furry monster named Tongue and agrees to be its mommy and buy it a red dress. Microscopic creatures scheme to implant a baby in the woman so that the ensuing explosive birth will produce an anus; rollicking games of “Hot Damn” and “Damn Slow” are played.

Still from Nitwit (2002)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Nitwit checks all the boxes. There are monsters and manipulative babies. The characters are cartoonish and never make any choice you expect. The acting is wildly over-the-top. The filming is amateurish but confident. And the authorial voice is all there on the screen, neither judgmental nor protective. Nitwit is bracingly odd and unashamed. It plays by no rules, and doesn’t even pretend to make sense.

COMMENTS:  Having spent a couple years working my way through the 366 Weird Movies Reader Queue, I’ve been impressed with the perceptiveness of our contributors; even when I didn’t find a movie to be all that weird, I’ve always understood where the suggestion came from, the glimmer of surprise and wonderment that undergirded the suggestion. But when it comes to Nitwit, my immediate reaction was an unwavering, “Oh, yeah, this is the stuff.” The opening vignette, in which a boy and a girl (they are adults chronologically, but emotionally they are definitely children) become so enraptured by a visual encyclopedia of horses that they attempt to taste the pictures, followed by chomping on a piece of steel wool, is but a mere amuse bouche for the full menu of eye-widening surprise this film inspires. There’s something refreshing about a movie that is unmistakably, indisputably weird, and Nitwit is cool, invigorating plunge.

Nitwit plays like a sketch film. There are only a handful of characters, who shift from high to low status as needed, and their stories interweave without ever really connecting. Sometimes these sketches take the form of little dramas, like the way the fresh-faced Minoltuh and her bewigged mama Womma trade off taking care of each other, the sickly one becoming childish and helpless while the healthier of the pair criticizes the patient for being difficult. (When it’s Minoltuh’s turn to be the patient, she grows an enormous azure nose that resembles nothing less than a coiled duct pipe. They do finally manage to cut the appendage off, but when Womma demands to know why the enormous blue schnozz is still in the house, Minoltuh lamely replies, “I was just keeping it, you know… for the memories.”) Other times, the characters engage in random silliness, such as the game Minoltuh and Hootus play in which they climb over each other while lasciviously-but-asexually chanting “hot damn!” to each other. In one of my favorite absurd moments, Hootus meets up with a dog, whom the man says he would love to see dig a hole. Smash cut to both of them, the man and the dog, gleefully pawing at the dirt like the mindless animals they are. 

There are a couple threads that flirt with plot, including Hootus’ encounter with a Davy Crockett cap with dangling tentacles. He brings the strange spider-like creature to his bomb-shelter hovel and nails it to the wall, at which point the beast makes a simple request: it will be the man’s mommy if the man will be its mommy. In the most reasonable statement anyone in this film makes, the man admits that he doesn’t know very much about being a mommy, but the furry thing is undeterred. “Just mash your lips together and spit.” The bargain is made, with the caveat that he can’t call the monster “mommy,” but must instead use its given name, “Tongue.” This is one of the most fully articulated relationships in the entire movie, and it serves as a stark counterpoint to the glowing parasites who are conspiring to put a baby in Minoltuh’s belly in order to force an explosion that will create the anus she currently lacks. Their intent seesaws between charity and cruelty, and it’s only on that emotional spectrum that a character desperately gasping “I’m farting” could be a poignant moment.

Nitwit is an amateurish production, shot on harsh video with novice actors gamely doing every crazy thing Price asks of them in locations like abandoned alleys, empty fields, and somebody’s apartment. But there’s nothing that a gaudier, more professional approach would bring to the material that’s not already here. The film is collected insanity, stuck together like pinned butterflies on display, and the raw presentation only intensifies the surprise of the thing. Nitwit isn’t smart, but it’s content to be exactly what it is, and that’s not dumb.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A doggedly eccentric whatsit of a movie, Xan Price’s debut feature after 10 years of underground shorts stamps its own distinctive weirdness on ideas influenced by ‘Eraserhead’ and early John Waters.” – Dennis Harvey, Variety (festival screening)

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

CAPSULE: DESPISER (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Phillip J. Cook

FEATURING: Mark Redfield, Doug Brown, Gage Sheridan, Frank Smith, Michael Weitz, Tara Bilkins, Mark Hyde

PLOT: A near-death experience pulls a down-on-his-luck artist into Purgatory, where a rag-tag team are waging a losing battle against the Despiser.

Still from Despiser (2003)

COMMENTS: Phillip Cook loves action: gunfights and explosions abound. He also loves metaphysics: purgatory is real. He loves, too, hearty doses of ambiguity: is this death-world really purgatory, or just another dimension? Most of all, though, he loves his CGI: its delineations, its vibrancy, its rudimentality—its ubiquity. Despiser will cater to any number of genre enthusiasts, but if you’re not on board with his late ’90s, classic-Windows era aesthetic, you should just keep walking.

Personally, I was fully on board with watching the action-machinations of a gang of do-gooders, who exhaust any amount of bullets, burn any amount of tire tread, and quip any amount of one-liners, as they careen through an uncanny world of angular churches, Day-Glo lava, and boxy sports cars. Despiser‘s backdrop is an odd and exciting one, contrasting greatly with the humdrum doings in the living world of our reluctant hero, Gordon: unmotivated painter, failed graphic designer, and, in the end, savior. His dreams—and a near-death experience or two—may be a flashy, dark, and stripped-down nigh Hellscape, but that sure beats his (and our) ho-hum, beige existence. The visual clash is bold, as observed by Gordon himself: “This place doesn’t look real”, he muses upon arrival. And no, it does not. Thank goodness.

The plot twitches along from action set-piece to action set-piece, with religious overtones not quite saturating the atmosphere. The gun-toting team of righteous actioneers who take Gordon into their fold is led by a wisecracking, scripture-quoting Army Ranger from the turn of the 20th century: Carl Nimbus, who never met a Bible passage he couldn’t twist into a badass threat. Despiser almost comes across as something of a gotta-be-cool Christian movie, but Phillip Cook has it both ways (indeed, he has it several ways). Just when the God-and-Thunder motifs threaten to show their hand, Cook deflates them, most notably when Carl quotes, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—Psalms: 23”. Gordon rejoins, “We’re on a highway to Hell. AC/DC: 1980.” This is not a movie to take entirely seriously.

But the characters do, and that’s key for us being on board with the imaginative nonsense which unravels, re-ravels, and ultimately ends up as an entertaining crochet of in-your-face foolishness, bullet-flying fantasy, and desperate characters going to desperate measures to thwart the titular Despiser. (A being so evil, it could only have been properly voiced by author/producer/director Phillip Cook.) I spent two bucks renting this diversion, but golly if I’m not tempted to buy the modestly priced super-duper Blu-ray. Not to sound too religious here, but it’s a small blessing that this singular cinematic extravaganza (made for video though it was) came around the first time, but also to be released in tip-top form on a disc featuring all the great love for the material that makes Despiser the funtime oddity it is.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… weird, convoluted, all around dumb and yet completely fucking awesome…. [Cook’s] bizarre fetish for low quality CGI and green screens spreads through his entire work history and you gotta respect a guy for sticking to his guns. If you want low budget action that’s determined to be itself and be refuses to take itself anything less than seriously, you’ll love what the guy has to offer…” — Mikey Ward, Mondo Exploito