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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE THINGY: CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE PLACENTA (2013)

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AKA The Miracle of Life

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DIRECTED BY: Joël Rabijns, Yves Sondermeier

FEATURING: Pascal Maetens, Karel Vingerhoets, Celine Verbeeck

PLOT: Marianne loses her child at birth but the placenta miraculously lives, is named and baptized, and grows up to endure scorn and loneliness.

Still from The Thingy: Confessions of a Teenage Placenta (2013)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: When trying to describe Thingy, you inevitably think of Basket Case, but in doing so you miss the mile-wide streak of pathos that this movie feels for its grotesque hero. Here is a film that dares to place an oozing lump of Silly Putty at its center, and insists on presenting it as a cautionary tale about intolerance. The film sees the obvious joke of this ridiculous premise, but forces you to view it through the saddest possible lens.

COMMENTS: Whenever you think life is handing you the short end of the stick, poor Luke is here to assure you that it could be so, so much worse. Just being a teenager is difficult enough, what with having to navigate the land mines of high school hierarchies, recognizing your elders for the flawed human beings they are, and trying to get a sense of your own personality. It’s infinitely more complicated to look in the mirror and see, looking back at you, an unholy mashup of Grimace, tandoori chicken, and a Pink Pearl eraser.

You could easily be misled by the title into thinking that this is a wild romp through the fields of giddy indecency. It’s a marketing ploy suggesting a level of camp and silliness appropriate to the label. But Luke is never addressed by the title’s demeaning sobriquet, and he never confesses to anything. Curiously enough, the sensationalist approach lends the film a certain credibility, because despite the creepy extremism of the scenario, this is a painfully serious film, a sympathetic plea for tolerance for all the sentient birth membranes out there whom society treats appallingly.

If ever a character manifested his own disappointment into existence, Luke is that hero. He has just one eye, uses what remains of the umbilical cord as his only limb, relies on a toy jeep to get around, and he speaks with a sad, resigned voice that can only be described as Flemish (the actual actor goes uncredited). He’s utterly ridiculous, which is the cue for Rabijns and Sondermeier to keep putting him in the most normal of situations and watching as he completely fails to fit in. At school, at home, at work (as a front-of-the-house order taker at a fast food joint notably called “Hamburger Holocaust”): everywhere Luke goes he meets with derision. It’s just drawn to him, as it would be. He is truly a sad sack.

Even if the movie didn’t have Luke, it still has a collection of parts just as unusual, just as disturbing. Leading the pack is Luke’s mother Marianne, played for no obvious reason by male actor Maetens. She isn’t played for laughs or irony or even to make a point. In fact, the casting becomes completely irrelevant once Marianne fully gives in to her work-out addiction, which consists of exclusively building the muscle of her right arm to ‘roided extremes. (Why only one arm? She explains: “I get what I want with only half the work.”) Less showy but equally strange is Father Gritty, the priest who magnanimously grants the little lump the rites of baptism. It initially feels like a gesture of supreme grace, but it starts to seem like he has no other parishioners, and the man of the cloth has a peculiar interest in his godson’s growth, eagerly asking for details about the legs of a girl Luke is sweet on. Plus, there’s the overall sense that everyone in the film is committed to the fact of Luke’s existence, but equally as certain that he will endure nothing but scorn. The Thingy has the feel of a Weekly World News article transformed into an ABC Afterschool Special.

The Thingy feels peculiarly American, a strange sensation given that this Belgian production barely tries to hide its accents. It’s tempting to look for some trace of satire: the sensationalized news perpetually running on TV, the familiarity of the class-conscious high school, the fact that Marianne has been passing Luke’s father off as having been fighting in Vietnam for seemingly years… it all of it points to a strangely cartoonish view of the States. Even so, the film seemingly has no axes to grind. In fact, it’s only in its final scenes that the movie loses the sheen of its strangeness by descending into an orgy of nihilistic violence. Only here, in pursuit of its final tragic punchline, do the filmmakers run out of story and decide to punctuate the climax with a series of horrible acts. If The Thingy falls apart just short of the finish line, the fact is it remains a singular work, creating an unthinkable situation and treating it with the gravity, sincerity, and honesty that it demands. Poor Luke. There but for the grace of God go you and I.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s one thing The Thingy: Confessions of a Teenage Placenta is for certain … and that’s weird… this film is less spectacle and more beyond spectacle – which is quite a feat and results in a very unusual movie!” – Mike Haberfelner, (re)Search My Trash

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

I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average

The Thingy: Confessions Of A Teenage Placenta

The Thingy: Confessions Of A Teenage Placenta (Blu-ray)

  • The Thingy: Confessions of A Teenage Placenta

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE 4TH MAN (1983)

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De vierde man

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DIRECTED BY: Paul Verhoeven

FEATURING: Jeroen Krabbé, , Thom Hoffman, Dolf de Vries

PLOT: A writer prone to waking nightmares encounters a mysterious woman who he hopes to use to reach a man for whom he lusts, but realizes that his urges may have led him into a dangerous trap.

Still from The 4th Man (1983)

COMMENTS: A sentence that has never been uttered regarding the career of Paul Verhoeven is, “I admire his subtlety.” His whole ethos is big, bold, and blatant. That made him particularly well-suited to transition from European art cinema to American box office. His refusal to put limitations on his excesses would ultimately cause its own set of problems, but let’s turn the clock back to Verhoeven’s pre-Hollywood days, when his budgets were smaller but his subversive imagination was still unbounded. That’s where we find him making The 4th Man, the enjoyably twisty psychological thriller that raked in millions of guilders and punched the director’s ticket for greener pastures in the States.

Based on the novel by Gerard Reve, the film stars Krabbé as a writer named Gerard Reve. (“Reve” is the French word for “dream.”) Gerard has a suitcase full of issues, including unchecked alcoholism, a voracious bisexual appetite, a long-term relationship that now fills him with disgust, an alarmingly low bank account, and a devout Catholic faith. These elements combine early on to produce striking images—peepholes become eyeballs, blood pours down the walls of a train car—as Gerard slips into waking nightmares that deliver visions of impending death. These have a corresponding comical mirror image as Gerard is confronted with the reality of his visions, such as when a wreath on a casket bearing his name is pulled back to reveal the actual occupant. Whatever the cause, Gerard is an exposed fuse, ready to spark at any moment.

The match turns out to be Christine. An archetypal icy blonde, Soutendijk plays up the self-evident sweetness and innocence of the character, even as Gerard keeps uncovering evidence that she may be secretly sinister. (Careful observers of the opening credits will note that Verhoeven provides a pretty on-the-nose metaphor.) If anything, Gerard is the more obvious villain, tripping clumsily over his honest feelings (during sex, he covers her breasts and tells her she looks like a beautiful boy) and blatantly wagging his tongue at a beefcake photo of Christine’s occasional boyfriend Herman. As he dives deeper, though, he learns more about her past husbands and the circumstances of their collectively untimely demises. The ensuing battle between his uncontrollable urges and his devotion to the protective interventions he is certain are coming from God and the Virgin Mary will send him hurtling to the shocking and amusing climax.

A lot of the tricks Verhoeven pioneers here will return in his Hollywood ventures. His affection for cartoonish violence will appear in Robocop and Total Recall, the defiantly cavalier attitude toward sex is a hallmark of Showgirls, and the whole noirish plot feels like a rough draft of Basic Instinct. His most important trick, however, is his state of mind. There’s no subtext that can’t quickly become text, and the sheer outrageousness of Gerard’s plight is what keeps viewers in suspense. For a little while, this approach would make Verhoeven one of the more unpredictable directors to top the global box office. It’s nice to catch him at a time when his audacity still had an undercurrent of hunger.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…so loaded with symbolism that the film leans toward camp… The 4th Man is one of the most audacious movies ever made, but the imagery isn’t just fancy trimmings because Verhoeven grounds the movie’s bizarre flights of fancy within the twisted yearnings and fears of Gerard’s mind.” – James Newman, Images Movie Journal (DVD)

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

The 4th Man (1983)

The 4th Man (1983)

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    List Candidates

    FANTASIA 2026: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HER PRIVATE HELL (2026)

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    DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn

    FEATURING: Sophie Thatcher, , , Charles Melton, Dougray Scott, Diego Calva

    PLOT: It’s Elle’s birthday, and her father is heading out of town, leaving her in the company of her BFF-turned-step-mother and a beautiful new “sister,” as a sinister fog heralds the arrival of The Leather Man.

    Still from Her Private Hell (2026)

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Refn doesn’t waste our time with nonsense like clarity. Space encounters with Candy Flux ray-guns, mega-crystal caverns, rent rib cages, and daddy issues laid on as thick as the ambient mist is all we need to get by in this surreal fairytale.

    COMMENTS: It’s kind of a chamber drama, with a cast of six. Plus two. Plus some flashback goons. And it all takes place in the penthouse suite of a luxury hotel. Except, of course, those bits on a movie set. And that violent string in post-WWII occupied Japan. And, now that I think of it, that club consisting primarily of sharp shadows, strobing neon, and dozens and dozens of Romanesque statues. Oh, and that nebulous underworld with the jutting rods of serrated crystal, too. And Refn’s exploration of a lachrymose psyche would have been incomplete without the pair of seamstress-cum-manitous manipulating events, one of them maneuvering like an interpretive dancer.

    Suffice to say, the story is one of remorse, grief, sibling rivalry, and just about everyone being very attractive and dressed in the highest of bleak-chic.

    This last bit is true, at least for the trio-plus-two of the female protagonists. The fellows look more along the lines of middle-aged Harry Dean Stanton (Elle’s father, Johnny Thunders), young Harry Dean Stanton (Nico, adversary of said father), and violently clean-cut angel of vengeance in a US army uniform (Private “K,” also a father, who’s lost his daughter to a mythical murderer who manifests mainly with diamond-studded gloves and seems unbound by temporal limitations). Regardless, these half-dozen orphic oddities keep events moving forward, from the lobby to the suite to the sinister backrooms of 1940s Japan to the candy crystal caves.

    This disjointed recollection of the characters and events is, upon consideration, probably more true to a narrative through line than I credit. Her Private Hell is very much about Elle: she is the first character we see, aside from the truly bizarre cityscape with towers, lights, a massive Ozymandiosian bust, and fog, fog, fog, which is a character in its own right. The hotel (named, I believe, “Fog Tower” or something like that) is a grim-glittery wonderment, as if gave ‘s Megalopolis a good once over. The props for the movie within the movie look like the best low budget doo-dads a groovy ’60s space epic could ask for. And while Elle’s birthday cake looks delicious, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to feel about her former BFF hand-feeding it to the anniversary girl before breaking into dog-speak.

    At an early point in the movie, a choice presents itself: ponder deeply about symbolism and implications for clinical understanding of this grisly vision, or turn your brain off and allow scattered mental impulses to soar and bounce amongst the cavalcade of sickly grandeur summoned by this witch’s brew. I opted for the latter, and I believe Refn would approve. As he explained during his introduction, the point of a film is to enjoy it, with all the sex, violence, sickness, and humor that may have been tossed in the cauldron.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a bizarre new fantasia moodscape, a midnight movie of fear and dreamy disquiet…resists interpretation, like so many of Refn’s recent films, but executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic strangeness.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (Cannes screening)

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    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DOGRA MAGRA (1988)

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    ドグラ・マグラ

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    DIRECTED BY: Toshio Matsumoto

    FEATURING: Yôji Matsuda, Shijaku Katsura, , Eri Misawa

    PLOT: Waking in a sparse cell, a young man tries to piece together the reason for his confinement, assisted—and thwarted—by adversarial psychologists.

    Still from Dogra Magra (1988)

     

    WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: From the get-go, the viewer is in for disorientation and dismay, spiked with foetal philosophizing and sinister slides.

    COMMENTS: Conspiracy, by its nature, is insidious—lurking in the background until the moment of impact. Consider the conspiracies of history: events from over a millennia ago, aging and festering, awaiting their catalyst. The conspiracies of society can blossom into a nefarious constellation of constraints and crucibles. And perhaps most perfidious of all, there is the conspiracy of the mind, wherein the dark elements of the subconscious band together to wreak havoc on waking life.

    So imagine all these conspiracies themselves colluding, and you can glimpse the terrible fate of Ichirô Kure (Yôji Matsuda). He awakens to a blurry yellow light, rising from the floor in troubled wonder, unable to remember his name, his past, or even his face. Enter an older gentleman, going by the name Professor Wakabayashi, who shares with the young man a tale set 1100 years prior. This dark narrative of a mad artist who wishes to capture decomposition, a fixation beginning with the corpse of his murdered bride, is related by one Professor Masaki, hissing out from a phonographic record from beyond the grave.

    Or is Masaki actually dead? Director Toshio Matsumoto depicts his protagonist’s madness with seamless aplomb, but that by no means makes things any clearer. Poisoned flashbacks shudder coherency, as do imagined encounters that appear all too real. Kure is a brilliant student, or was, who had begun groundbreaking research of the mind—we observe him lecturing to a gallery peopled by asylum inmates, with none other than Professor Masaki joining the growing chaos chanting an “Ahodara Sutra” (or “Fool’s Prayer”) as he traipses merrily through the classroom. Or maybe Kure is just lecturing to himself in his cell. As with the cryptic prenatal visions, little is clear aside from these facts: Kure’s mother was killed; Kure’s fiancée was killed; and the two professors observing the fellow gravely overstepped their ethical bounds.

    Intriguingly for a film engrossed by narrative slight-of-hand and the malleability of memory, the truth can be found in the film within-the-film. Professor Masaki records the wards of his care, all undergoing a “freedom” regiment akin to the inmates chronicled in Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” A chance encounter with a janitor leads to a projector in an abandoned storage room, its information triggering a cyclonic hallucination. The elements swirl and bombard the pitiable Ichirô Kure, as the three agents of conspiracy crash down together on his consciousness.

    He awakens to a blurry yellow light.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…[A] puzzling work that blends reality with fantasy. I expected a horror movie of sorts. While that classification does kind of work, labelling it as such doesn’t do the film any favors. This is one of those movies that defies genre classification.” — Bret Oswald, Irish Film Critic

    Dogra Magra

    Dogra Magra

    • A man wakes in an asylum with no memory. Dr Wakabayashi helps him to recall his past in which he killed his bride on their wedding day

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    366 Underground, Interviews

    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)