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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FRANKENHOOKER (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Frank Henenlotter

FEATURING: , Patty Mullen, Joseph Gonzalez, Shirley Stoler,

PLOT: When sweet Elizabeth dies in a terrible lawnmower accident, her grieving fiancé—power plant technician and amateur scientist Jeffrey Franken—sets out to restore her to life by assembling a new body made from the parts of prostitutes he kills with a new explosive strain of crack cocaine. 

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: If ever there were a film that could make our list just by wishing for it really hard, Frankenhooker is that film. Starting with the decent-enough premise to set Mary Shelley’s classic tale in the waning days of Times Square grunginess, it piles on characters who soar well past cartoonishness, ladles on strange behaviors and absurd reactions, and tops it off with enough coarse sexuality and Guignol-lite gore to make the whole confection gleefully repellent. It knows what it is, and it revels in it.

Still from Frankenhooker (1990)

COMMENTS: Frankenhooker makes me regret that we’ve never created a tag called “On-the-nose Titles.” We’ve talked before about movies where the title does the heavy lifting, and this is one such film. A Frankenstein’s monster made from hookers. Why even bother with a synopsis?

If you were to subject Frankenhooker’s screenplay to intense analysis, you’d find very little at its core. It’s not a one-joke movie, but probably no more than five: the Frankenstein myth set in New Jersey, the mad doctor is an overachieving electrician, his creation is built out of random hooker parts, the Bride is a murderous sex-starved brute, and New York City prostitutes react to crack like desperate parents at a Walmart on Black Friday. Fortunately, those jokes are merely the foundation for what Frankenhooker is really about: silly stereotypes and outrageous gore.  These are things that Frank Henenlotter knows how to deliver, and he doesn’t hold back.

The film has to overcome a significant demerit in the form of our hero himself. Lorinz is a black hole: even when he’s drilling a hole in his own head for a little light trepanning, he has the bland, conventional good looks of Andrew McCarthy and the placid demeanor of a low-energy standup comic. (His voice suggests teaching a yoga class.) He teases a bolder character than we get, which is surprising considering he’s a mad scientist from New Jersey. His refusal to go as over-the-top as the plot that surrounds him may be the strangest thing about Frankenhooker.

Former Penthouse Pet Mullen has a better handle on the material as the unfortunate Elizabeth. Following a brief pre-accident scene in which she dials up the tropes of the bland-but-adoring fiancée, she gets to go full monster, staggering about town with her jaw awkwardly jutting to the side and demanding “Want a date?” in a shrill Jersey accent. (I tried for ages to figure out who Mullen’s demented lady of the night reminded me of until I realized it was Rapunzel from this magnificent “Sesame Street” sketch.) If anything, she inspires the rest of the ensemble to go hard, from the gum-smacking ruffian ladies of the night to thinks-with-his-fists pimp Zorro to recognizable “That Guy” David Lipman’s cameo as Monster-Elizabeth’s overenthusiastic john. In a cast where everyone but the lead is playing to the cheap seats, Mullen is a stand-out.

Not every scene is this extreme, and in fact Henenlotter almost seems to be making a bid to become the genteel Lloyd Kaufman. Long scenes of Lorinz monologuing his plans drag things out, and often the movie opts to run headlong into insanity instead of giving it a minute or two to build. However, Frankenhooker absolutely nails the landing with two separate showcases of wildly inventive craziness in the final 15 minutes: first with a grotesque revenge on behalf of the murdered hookers who have inadvertently been reassembled into hilariously awful human meatballs, and then the ultimate comeuppance for the mad doctor as a repaired Elizabeth saves the day in a most amusing manner. As much as Frankenhooker is out to deliver exactly the eyes-covered, laughing-in-shock amusement you’re expecting, the movie genuinely surpasses itself in the finale. The title may be on the nose, but the tale it tells is a refreshing punch in the groin.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This film is…well, weird.  With a name like Frankenhooker, I suppose that you expected that.  Even beyond that though, it’s a weird, weird film. …  There’s no ‘normal’ way to do this story, but it still tries hard to be extra insane.  If you’re into the wacky side of Cinema, check this one out. It may blow your mind though..” – Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro         

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

Frankenhooker (Blu-ray)

Frankenhooker (Blu-ray)
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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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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MAGDALENA VIRAGA (1986)

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DIRECTED BY: Nina Menkes

FEATURING: Tinka Menkes, Claire Aguilar, Nora Bendich

PLOT: A sex worker endures a dreary, repetitive existence soliciting and servicing clients, and then is accused of murdering a trick.

Still from Magdalena Viraga (1986)

COMMENTS: One ever-present danger in reviewing films is that your assessment will miss the boat because you, the reviewer, are not the movie’s intended audience. Yes, cinema is a mass media and no creator can guarantee that their work will be understood as intended by everyone, but issues of language, race, gender, culture, and the like are always out there, hinting that you may not get all the nuance you need to give a movie a fair shake. So my antennae are out for a film whose director describes it as a “hallucinogenic journey through the boundless vortex of unadulterated Female space.” It just may be that this particular film has not been crafted to reach me.

Of course, even I can recognize that the life of Ida (played by the director’s sister, Tinka) is pretty grim. We watch her ply her trade with nearly a dozen different clients, and the scenes of Ida at work are brutal in their length and detachment. Menkes shows nothing explicit, but the drudgery of the experience is awful enough. She employs a steady closeup that never leaves Ida’s deadened, detached expression. Even as we watch her endure the grunts and pants of her john, she evinces no emotion whatsoever, completely removed from the moment. On one occasion, we’re treated to the preamble to the act—two people seated on a bed, tired and unmoving and refusing to make eye contact—which is possibly worse. Another time, her partner bounces atop her so manically that she is forced to enter the moment, pleading, “Slowly!” It is a joyless existence, categorically designed to render her passive and intellectually irrelevant. Not that anyone would be up to the challenge of a conversation. At the end of one such encounter, she tries to engage: “I dream that I often long for water. I dream that when I close my eyes, I see water. When I close my eyes, I do see water. What is water?” Her trick’s vacant response: “I dunno.”

When demonstrating the dehumanizing situation in which Ida finds herself, Magdalena Viraga is potent cinema. Menkes defiantly subverts the decades of entropy that have enshrined the male gaze in the fundamentals of filmmaking. Unfortunately, there’s another layer of story that feels less like a feminist cri de cœur and more like a thumb on the scale. Ida’s tale is told in a nonlinear fashion, so we know from the outset that she has been arrested for murder. As the details of the crime and the case against her are revealed, we’re forced to reckon with a movie that wants to present facts that demonstrate the unfairness of the situation while insisting that we ignore the absurdity of those facts. It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose bargain.

Some explanation: we see the murder itself (a cold act with all the speed, action, and even nudity that the rest of the film steadfastly avoids), and it would seem impossible for the crime to be blamed on Ida, especially since her explanation that the blood covering her is menstrual should be easy to establish. Regardless, there’s no hint of a trial. Instead, we get a scene where the prison warden tells Ida’s friend, hilariously, “I’m sorry, but we must execute murderers. It’s absolute policy,” as though she had been trying to negotiate the return of a faulty product. And then there’s the jail itself, with an interior that resembles a monastery, complete with a cell containing a stained-glass window, a table like an altar, bars composed of ornate metalwork, and a large crucifix on the wall. The fact that everyone in the prison is forced to attend mass in a well-appointed chapel gives the game away; Menkes is also here to call out the Church for its role in the oppression of women. It’s a reasonable charge, but the realism and the allegory mix poorly.

I can imagine a version of Magdalena Viraga where Menkes commits entirely to a presentational, Brechtian style. Tinka Menkes’ delivery of her lines is uniformly flat, a fact the film leans into by staging scenes where she and her fellow sex workers stare directly into the camera and intone resigned koans. Much of the impenetrable dialogue in the film is actually drawn from the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Mary Daly, and Anne Sexton, meaning our characters literally have no words of their own. In this version of the film, Ida isn’t a person at all, but symbol of all the women who quietly suffer the indignities heaped upon their sex. The efforts to make her relatable, to lend credibility to her as a character, only shortchange the message. I guess what I’m saying is, I wish that Magdalena Viraga wasn’t quite so concerned with being crafted to reach me.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[a] visually appealing but plotless surreal film … It’s an unusual and powerful tale that is filmed in a dreamlike landscape and in a metaphysical world where meaning is not always rationally apparent.” Dennis Schwartz, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews

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

MAGDALENA VIRAGA

MAGDALENA VIRAGA
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