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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE WHEEL OF HEAVEN (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Joe Badon

FEATURING: Kali Russell, Jeff Pearson, Vincent Stalba

PLOT: Purity navigates a Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel as Joe Badon flips channels through his own narrative.

Still from The Wheel of Heaven (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: The Wheel of Heaven unspools before the viewer as a direct conduit into the filmmaker’s mind (including his rapid-fire attention span). With Death, derricks, sex, and banana splits in the proceedings, Badon’s movie is as strange as it is hurried.

COMMENTS: Decades ago, in college, I received a professor’s feedback on a short-film screenplay I had submitted: “I don’t quite follow what’s going on, but it seems to be the screenplay you want to write.” This, perhaps, was the apex of my cinematic career. His (good natured) reaction came to mind recently concerning Joe Badon’s latest film, The Wheel of Heaven. First, because he includes an early scene wherein he explains his writing process; second, because, like my film teacher those many years ago, I did not quite follow what was going on, but strongly feel that this is the movie Badon wanted to make. It’s been argued (by me, at least) that art is best done for an audience of one; and it’s fortunate that Badon’s audience of one has such a scattered field of interests.

The Wheel of Heaven has a little something for everyone who is likely to find their way to this review (and indeed, this website). Do you enjoy silly humor, executed intelligently? Are you curious about the many elements of creative process behind filmmaking? Were you seeking a dessert-fueled monologue on the destruction inherent in creation? And, have you or any chill deuces in your ‘board crew been vexed by the man?

With the latter scenario, I recommend you telephone “Rad” Abrams, Skateboard Attorney. His information—as well as everything else I’ve been on about in the paragraph above—can be found in The Wheel of Heaven: a film as personal as it is unpretentious. The staccato pacing keeps an eyebrow raised and a smirk ever-forming as we travel between science fiction, philosophical thriller, news flashes, and ubiquitous ad parodies on Badon’s own BBDCCVTV station.

This acronym, like much of the film, is never explained. But the focus here is the process. That process? Creating—however you are able so to do. Badon has assembled a movie from cracked cathode-memories molded into a series of querical doorways. With only 100 minutes, he can only open and explore so many of them; but it isn’t life without choices. Perhaps, at the end of it all, we may be lucky enough to explore those prior paths unchosen. Until then, the only way to go is forward, even if it leads you back for a do-over.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Completing a cycle of meta-chaos and matryoshka doll storytelling, filmmaker and master of the cosmic weird Joe Badon has crafted his most awesome and best movie to date.”–Bill Arcenaux, Moviegoing with Bill

The Wheel of Heaven [DVD]

The Wheel of Heaven [DVD]
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Apocryphally Weird, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

63*: WE ARE THE STRANGE (2007)

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“We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.”–Douglas Adams

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: M dot Strange

FEATURING: Voices of Halleh Seddighzadeh, David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Chaylon Blancett, M dot Strange

PLOT: In the phantasmagorical metropolis of Stopmo City, two outcasts—eMMM, a boy with the head of a doll, and Blue, an ethereal, suffering young woman—search for a cherished ice cream parlor. Ongoing battles between grotesque monsters make their journey perilous. An avenging hero, Rain, defeats many of the monsters, but when the ultimate evil is revealed to be a harlequin-faced beast of a man called HIM, eMMM and Blue will have to confront the menace themselves.

Still from we are the strange (2007)

BACKGROUND:

  • M dot Strange is the nom de cinema of San Jose-based Michael Belmont, who in addition to dappling in animation is a  web designer, musician, and video game creator.
  • Demonstrating multiple animation styles, the film was created on multiple platforms of varying sophistication and complexity, ranging from Adobe After Effects to Mario Paint.
  • M dot chronicled the making of the film in a series of videos (like this one) that built a fan base of more than a million YouTube followers. Upon its release, the trailer for We Are the Strange racked up 500,000 views in its first four days.
  • The film received the Golden Prize for Most Groundbreaking Film and the Silver Prize for Best Animated Film at the 2007 Fantasia Film Festival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: So it is foretold: “He will return and strike down evil with a fist made of aluminum foil. Then, we will celebrate with many scoops of iced cream.” And so it comes to pass, when a bubble-shaped automaton emerges to face off against the big bad, and the hellscape Power Ranger at the controls is revealed to be our diminutive dollboy with the M on his forehead. For a film that devotes itself to style over substance and a pervasive gloom, it’s an unexpected flourish of feel-good storytelling and a nifty summation of the director’s particular blend of high-tech and lo-fi animation techniques. Alas, the promised ice cream is not in evidence.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Living, hungering arcade game; a trip on the ice cream train

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Multiple forms of animation and visual styles share space in a bouillabaisse of dread and visual overstimulation. Stop-motion mingles with computer-generated anime, and both appear alongside 2D paper-folding and hand-crafted miniatures. Every scene feels crafted to be as outlandish and disturbing as possible. The randomness of it all is sometimes eclectic, often cacophonous, and frequently intriguing.

Trailer for We Are the Strange (2007)

COMMENTS: This is not the first time that a movie challenges us to Continue reading 63*: WE ARE THE STRANGE (2007) →

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ANYTHING THAT MOVES (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Alex Phillips

FEATURING: Hal Baum, , Nina Hartley, Ginger Lynn Allen, Jiana Nicole, Frank Ross

PLOT: Liam loves his job as a prostitute, but then his clients end up getting murdered.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Equal parts joyous, explicit sex and sinister, gory violence, Anything That Moves is a light romp with a heart of darkness.

COMMENTS: Who are these people? What does this title mean?  Where is this story going? Why am I both titillated and unnerved? And how can I hope to write about this fleshful oddity?

Having hit dizzying heights of strange with Jacked Up and Full of Worms, Alex Phillips strikes again with the twice-sold-out feature, Anything That Moves. Phillips and his team (including plenty held over from Worms) arrange the screen with cheerful workers, sympathetic clients, and glowing orgasms. There is love, sex, tenderness, sex, comradery, and sex. But there is also a malignant element advancing from the edges.

What does one do to “anything that moves”? To the best of my knowledge, one of two things: fuck it, or shoot it. Liam, our hero, does the former; he serves his clients very well indeed. The latter appears in the form of two questionable cops who are increasingly suspicious as mutilated bodies pile up. Cop One (he’s got a name, doesn’t really matter) makes no secret of wanting to pop caps in woke millennials. Cop Two, the “good cop,” is no less judgmental, but at least isn’t inclined toward drug-and-violence sprees like his partner.

This hero’s journey takes Liam from a life of lucrative sexual service into the alleyways that turn increasingly dark as the shadowy menace becomes increasingly choate. Bacchanalian bliss sours into bilious nihilism. Our sunshiny sex worker Liam never loses his sparkle, but he is forced to harden in a manner his clients don’t pay for. Shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm, Anything That Moves’ gauzy visual grittiness nicely complements the film’s tone. Ridiculous episodes accentuate the overarching cockeyed tone: the “smoking funeral” scene was quite touching. The movie itself, in its way, is also touching. No matter how dark the nights become for Liam, he remains defiantly innocent and awed by life’s elements and opportunities.

So perhaps there is a third reading of the title: it behooves us to find the beauty in anything that moves.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Phillips leans into that absurdity, blending porn fantasy with grindhouse grime, and letting his characters operate in a version of Chicago that feels more like a fever dream than any reality-based urban landscape… Editing contributes to the film’s dreamlike quality, but also plays a part in its confusion. Jarring cuts and sudden tonal shifts give the film a surreal rhythm. Still, they also undercut any sense of pacing or escalation… For those who crave transgressive cinema and aren’t bothered by a messiness, this could find a cult following. However, for viewers seeking something coherent, satisfying, or emotionally resonant, this one is likely to fall short of expectations.”–Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (festival screening)

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: F*CKTOYS (2025)

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DIRECTED BY: Annapurna Sriram

FEATURING: Annapurna Sriram, Sadie Scott, Damian Young, François Arnaud, Brandon Flynn

PLOT: A sex worker learns she’s under a curse, and must come by one-thousand dollars for a sacrificial ritual to banish the black magic.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Sure, sure, it’s got leather-bondage cops, ritual sacrifice, a golden phallus, and so on. But what truly makes F*cktoys an odd duck is that its dirty NC-17 veneer encloses a warm-hearted romantic comedy adventure that shines through from underneath the sleaze.

COMMENTS: Outside the cinema, an individual in a hazmat suit haphazardly scrubbed any and all surfaces with a cleaning brush. The doors opened, and the house was packed by jolly rowdies from all different walks of life. (Some of them rather different indeed.) Much scurrying to and fro, as Fantasia staff ushered key people to key places. A hush, and a roar, and the presenter intoned the title “F*cktoys!” (without the asterisk.) Enter Annapurna Sriram, beaming with excitement. Few could deny her her joy, for she was about to exhibit her film to a Fantasia audience—an audience that couldn’t have been a better fit for F*cktoys if it had been lab-grown for the purpose.

Our hero’s journey begins, ends, and never departs from the mystical alternate 1990s reality of “Trashtown.” There is plenty of trash, scattering the roadways, littering overgrown industrial facilities, and filling the sordid interiors. The plucky heroine, known only as AP, receives shocking news from a shockingly fabulous fortune teller: she must somehow gather a wad of cash (and a baby goat) to rid herself of ill fortune. With her good friend Danni in tow (unexpectedly, as AP was fairly sure this buddy had snuffed it), she rides, hustles, and endures many trials on her path to deliverance.

That path is strewn with odd sex, odd venues, and oddballs. Danni takes a gig catering to sexuo-philosophical celebrity James Francone (not to be confused with a similarly named individual), shutting him up about his water-coloring through use of a lubed fist. AP’s client-friend Robert apologizes for culminating so quickly (but then, “I’m, like, 90% gay”). A robbery (hah) goes awry, the screw turns, and AP is forced to cater to a mysterious gentleman known as “The Mechanic”: a true sweetheart, and loving to the core—apart from his penchant for sexual mutilation.

This all unfurls to the beat of a bouncy quest-comedy, with AP haplessly—but cheerily—sliding from one fun or strange or dangerous set piece to the next. Special note should be made of Sadie Scott’s performance as the best friend, Danni. Gender-ambiguous, rough-and-tumble, their energy and zeal makes them reminiscent of Toyah Willcox’s “Mad” character from Derek Jarman‘s Jubilee. Danni’s tragic fate is equaled in intensity only by their love of AP (and of donuts).

As befits a journey on a moped, F*cktoys is a bit of a bumpy ride. Most of its parts work, however—the extended Robert-ex-machina scene alone is worth the price of admission—and overall, the pieces fit together with cheerful clunk and whirl. It was made lovingly for our kinds of people,  kinds of people: joyful perverts, joyful outcasts, and joyful subversives. So if you want to smooth the corners of some square in your life, trick them into a F*cktoys screening and watch as they uncomfortably squirm their prudishness away.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story of a Southern sex worker’s bizarre adventures trying to reverse a curse remains witty and watchable for its entire running time, juggling an abundance of strange characters and story threads en route to a surreal and unexpectedly heartfelt ending.”–Murtada Elfadl, Variety (contemporaneous)

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE BUNNY GAME (2011)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Adam Rehmeier

FEATURING: Rodleen Getsic, Jeff F. Renfro

PLOT: A prostitute is abducted by a trucker for five days.

COMMENTS: My goodness, that was something. Where to begin…

Slapping on the “Beware” label is a step in the right direction—The Bunny Game is a real piece of work. The film starts with super-creep: a female victim suffocating under a white plastic bag on her head. The shot is mere seconds long, but shows the filmmaker’s cards. Rehmeier has some nasty things in store for the viewer. The second shot, much longer—too long, certainly, for comfort—shows the card hiding up his sleeve: some John, viewed at the waist, his erect penis thrust into the mouth of the protagonist, forcefully “encouraging” her to fellate him. This shot goes on, it seems, until the act’s completion.

Events like this unfold for the unnamed woman (dubbed “Bunny” in the credits), going from rather bad to unimaginably worse when she proffers a blow job to a trucker who then abducts her and sexually and psychologically tortures her for five days. Heartbeat foley dominates one scene, where the muffled grunts and screams sound like they are coming through a door whilst a steady thump-thump-thump batters like an amphetamine dirge. Squeals of torsion wrench, as one nightmarish sequence blurs into the next, the timeline skipping between Bunny’s ordeal in high resolution, and a previous victim’s in grainier video. The trucker (dubbed “Hog”) mutters, snorts, smokes—coming across as a miserable, furious wreck of inhumanity as he breaks his victim.

Flash cuts, reverse footage, shaky camera, and other stylization tools simultaneously undercut and enhance the visceral malice. The movie weaves a subtle, but pernicious, electronic score throughout. The two leads obviously give us their all. But to what end? The Bunny Game technically qualifies as a narrative, I suppose: there is at least a through-line of events to follow. However, there is no climax, and no conclusion. As once observed: “If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.” Rehmeier makes an experience with this film—a journey through malignant refuse, or a distillation of white hot agony.

In the Blu-ray disc extras, Rehmeier explains, “…we tried to maintain this negative energy throughout the production, and I think we were successful.” (And if pretentiousness through understatement is a thing, the filmmaker nails it.) But if The Bunny Game might be written off as pretentious Art-House-Shock-Shlock, at least it spares the viewer any affectations of deeper meaning: what you see is what you get—and what you see is mightily disturbing.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sort of an unholy merger between extreme performance art and experimental horror film, The Bunny Game essentially dares viewers to sit through it without crying uncle.” — Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital

The Bunny Game [Blu-ray]

The Bunny Game [Blu-ray]
  • A prostitute is abducted by a deranged trucker who subjects her to five days of torture and madness.
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