Tag Archives: Microbudget

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

My Crepitus (I Never Left the White Room) [Blu-ray]

  • Region Free Blu-Ray

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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.)

366 Underground

CAPSULE: HOWLER (2025)

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Howler is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Richard Bailey

FEATURING: , , Abel Flores, Blake Hackler, Laura Martinez

PLOT: A grisly hunter threatens the woods as Leni, an attuned poet, prepares to accept a life-changing award.

Still from Howler (2025)

COMMENTS:

“Your life is going to change.”

—”How do you mean that?”

“Oh, not in the sense you might hope.”

This exchange is intended more as a kindly tip-off than as a threat, but, as with most wisdom, it is not well received. The words here are talismanic; but then, in a way—and especially to a poet—all words are. Words are simultaneously weighty and evanescent. They are everywhere, and nowhere. And, from my vague understanding, one primary task of a poet is to nail them down and convey them—at least in their fleeting significance.

Howler is another meditation from director Richard Bailey on the nature of communication, perception, and the intersection of reality and unreality. Two earthly plot lines anchor the discourse: one concerning a poet, the other concerning the “grisly hunter” mentioned prior. But as per usual form, Richard Bailey the (word) poet and Richard Bailey the (image) poet are inseparable. Time and again the screen is just non-human sound and natural imagery. A triptych of floating blossoms recurs throughout as punctuation between conversational musings on vengeance, serenity, annihilation, and regrowth.

A poet’s lot is often an unhappy one,  toiling away at building spiritual insight using words, punctuation, and line breaks. But the joy it can bring, even to just one witness, makes their ordeal worth the sacrifices. Bailey dissects his vocation and that of his peers, through the lens of natural and human friction and coexistence. The ominous figure of the hunter is, I’d wager, symbolic: though I could not commit as to what. Perhaps he is our path toward ruination of self and surroundings; perhaps he is more tragic than malevolent.

There is much to misunderstand about humans and humanity. With Howler, Bailey takes another stab at capturing truth essence through the primitive tools of language, image, and sound.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Howler is not a horror film, despite what the opening 3 minutes suggest. While that will undoubtedly disappoint horror hounds, stick with it. The story is interesting, the characters engaging, and the direction dreamy.” — Bobby LePire, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: HAUNTERS OF THE SILENCE (2025)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Tatu Heikkinen, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen

FEATURING: Tatu Heikkinen, John Haughm, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen

PLOT: Strange events beset a grieving husband in the wee hours of the night leading into October 31st.

Still from Haunters of the Silence (2025)

COMMENTS: The facts, as best they might be determined, are these: 1) the unnamed lead character has lost his beloved wife, and 2) his night-vision exterior surveillance camera picked up more than just a midnight rodent behaving in a silly manner. As for the rest of Haunters of the Silence, it’s just about all up for interpretation. A faded photographic image loses a balloon, a father (?), and finally a boy; ceremonial drumming may be a temporary cure for mind de-anchoring; and if a dream facsimile of your dead wife mutters “It’s okay”, perhaps it’s best to take her at her word.

Or not.

In the hopes of better explaining the Haunters of the Silence experience, I quote from director Tatu Heikkinen’s IMDb bio: “His work embraces abstraction and emotional stillness—rejecting the fast-paced editing in favor of grounded, contemplative storytelling.” This statement, as reflected in Haunters, is true in many ways. Heikkinen (and his real-life wife and co-director, Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen) embraces abstraction and emotional stillness. Abstraction comes in many forms, many of them being unlikely camera foregrounds framing background action, for instance, but also long stroboscopic sequences, and plenty of forays into straight-up dream imagery. (The protagonist retreating through a large storm drain through the center of the Shadow Man’s menacing outline in the cosmos is of particular note.)

Haunters of the Silence does have fast-paced editing, though. Shots hastily flicker from one to the next, which might risk leaving the viewer disoriented if weren’t for the meticulous, subtle, and grounding sound design: the listener, as it were, is rarely if ever jarred from the dream-logic ordeals put before them. This sensory-tension works nicely with the temporal-tension: time does not pass per usual in this film, and the Ancient and the Modern co-exist, with incense-burning and buzzing smartphones pulling upon each other across the millennia of human ritual.

As the reader will have noticed, my remarks fell into abstruseness more quickly than usual here, but I blame that on what I saw (and heard). Haunters of the Silence is a weird thing to experience—and it is more in the realm of an experience than a customary film. Tatu Heikkinen and Veleda Thorsson-Heikkinen have built a precise sequence of sounds and images, which is as often baffling as it is beautiful. I give nothing away with this observation on the final scene when the Shadow Man emerges through the bedroom door of now-waking protagonist: life—like time, memory, and grief—does not finish so long as we are on this Earth.

If not longer.

Currently streaming on Relay, check the Haunters of the Silence official website for future updates.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Haunters of the Silence is avowedly experimental; this is not a narrative piece of filmmaking in any recognisable way, so this review opens with a proviso: it will not be for everyone, and in fact it will probably appeal to a very select band of film fans.” — Keri O’Shea, Warped Perspective (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: AJ GOES TO THE DOG PARK (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Toby Jones (II)

FEATURING: AJ Thompson, Crystal Cossette Knight

PLOT: Mild-mannered AJ’s life is thrown into disorder when Fargo’s mayor changes his beloved dog park into a dog-free “blog park,” so he decides to run for mayor himself.

Still from AJ Goes to the Dog Park (2025)

COMMENTS: Comedy is subjective. Surreal comedy is even more subjective. AJ Goes to the Dog Park bills itself as “a surreal and gag-driven comedy.” I suppose the jokes are “surreal,” if you consider The Naked Gun “surreal.”

OK, so I guess the part where AJ’s dogs randomly turn into stuffed animals for some scenes is mildly surreal. But mostly, the gags are like the one where AJ and his future elbow-wrestling coach stand in the library perusing an old dusty tome together; when they leave, it is revealed that the book is not being held by the coach but by a pair of disembodied hands supplied by an extra crouching out of frame. This visual pun is unexpected, sure, but like 90% of AJ‘s jokes, it’s straight out of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker playbook.

Not that that’s a bad thing. The jokes mostly didn’t land for me, but when you fire off 2 or 3 gags a minute, it’s inevitable that a few are going to get through. And this Fargo, North Dakota-based project, while cheaply done—it looks like an extended YouTube sketch, with uniformly amateur actors and self-consciously bad CGI/practical effects—is entirely earnest and refreshingly unafraid to fail. (AJ also takes a soupçon of spiritual inspiration from fellow Midwestern comedy indie Hundreds of Beavers, although it’s nowhere near as relentlessly original, witty, or—yes—as surreal as that cult hit.) AJ himself is a pleasantly bland slacker with no ill-will in his soul who just wants to walk his lapdogs and follow his daily routine, and it’s impossible to root against him. The plot, at least the first section, is brisk and easy to follow, with AJ tasked with completing a sequential set of challenges to wrest the Fargo mayoralty away from its arrogant, dog-unfriendly current occupant, helped along by the aforementioned elbow coach, a freshwater pirate, and a pair of turncoat civil servants. With regular surprises thrown into the mix, this makes for an easy and pleasant watch through the first 50 minutes or so. After (mild spoiler) AJ achieves his goal, however, the movie sort of continues on with far less direction, indulging a big flash forward as it segues into a sort of wistful reverie about losing track of its own plot that doesn’t entirely jibe with the movie’s first part—then ending with an apocalyptic finale with helicopter gunships fighting a D&D demon and his army of haunted skeletons that really doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie, but will at least wake you up. Well, maybe that last part does hit the “surreal” note they were bragging about…

Director Toby Jones must not be confused with the top-rank actor of the same name. This Toby Jones is a writer best known for his work on the Cartoon Network’s “The Regular Show.” This is actually the third (and most ambitious) “AJ” movie: the Jones/Thompson pair had made two shorter films (one was animated) starring the AJ character, and apparently have since they were teenagers in Fargo. Dog Park debuted as a “secret screening” mystery movie in some markets, where audiences felt ambushed by a way-off-center low-budget offering that many felt didn’t constitute a “real movie.” That unfortunate marketing ploy resulted in a barrage of angry 1-star IMDb ratings. AJ is probably not a movie meant for the big screen, but if you go into it knowing what to expect, there shouldn’t be anything here to offend your cinematic sensibilities. It’s juvenile, but not crude, like a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon; something your inner 10-year old might enjoy. “Modest-but-zany” is the keyword here.

AJ Goes to the Dog Park can be streamed on multiple services (some free); there is also a Blu-ray with director’s commentary and other extras,

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Cartoon Network veteran Toby Jones brings his animation sensibilities to live-action with this aggressively weird comedy that feels like a feature-length sketch stretched beyond its natural limits.”–Jim Laczowski, Director’s Club (contemporaneous)