A psychedelic animation made to celebrate the United States of America’s 1976 bicentennial, paid for with taxpayer dollars.
Tag Archives: Psychedelic
CAPSULE: WETIKO (2022)
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DIRECTED BY: Kerry Mondragon
FEATURING: Juandaniel García Treviño, Dalia Xiuhcoatl, Neil Sandilands
PLOT: A Mayan boy delivers hallucinogenic toads to a jungle love cult led by a Western shaman and is sucked into their petty intrigues.
COMMENTS: It’s all fairly coherent until the moth flies into Aapo’s ear. Zake, sus shaman of the “Empire of Love,” wants to host a ritual trip for a tour group in the Mexican jungle. As an outsider, he can’t legally buy the necessary psychedelic toads, so through his sexy right hand gal Luz he drops a wad of cash to rent the toads and milk their trippy secretions for a night of enlightened debauchery. Teenager Aapo motorbikes into the heart of darkness to deliver the bufo, but through plot contrivances ends up staying there all night, despite his mother’s wise warnings to stay away from the unsanctioned ceremony. The Empire of Love compound is inhabited by assistant shamans, a cadre of quiet servants all bearing the first name “Maria” (one of Wetiko‘s creepiest ideas), and a cray-cray drug-damaged westerner who seems like he will play an important role in the plot, but quickly disappears. Aapo spends an inordinate amount of time prepping the frogs, since his skill with them may be less than the group requires; then, while touring a sacred cave, he gets the aforementioned moth lodged in his ear. Of course, Zake has him chug a bottle of vile-looking green liquid to expel the bug, and of course, the fluid makes Aapo start trembling, sweating, and seeing montages. Although he will sober up every now and then, the remaining two-thirds of the movie are basically a long psychedelic trip. Although everybody seems pretty high, the actual toad ceremony takes forever to arrive, particularly since everyone continually loses track of the frogs themselves.
A lot of people inside the Empire have their own agendas, but with the distracted and fragmented narrative, we never get a clear sense of where the players stand. Even so, lack of clarity in the plot is not a huge impediment for the movie. But the lack of clarity in character motivation is. Aapo is positioned to go on a vision quest, but his character is so bland and ill-defined that we have no sense of what that might entail, other than, perhaps, his sexual initiation into adulthood. The movie is more concerned with villain Zake, who is suitably Machiavellian but whose schemes and plans are little more than a bundle of anti-colonialist and cult-leader tropes, as nebulous the gobbledygook (“welcome, star beings, to our Empire of Love…”) he uses to manipulate his dupes. Sure, the movie drops hints of sleazy land purchases, sexual exploitation, even murder, but what is Zake’s end game? Aapo supplies the hallucinogenic toads, but why Zake is specifically interested in him beyond providing that simple service is left to your imagination. That’s not to mention all the other people in the cult, some of whom may be playing their own games, but all of whose motives remain a mystery, making their eventual power grabs seem arbitrary. Zake is a baleful influence, sure, but he hardly feels real: he’s more a non-specific, obvious symbol of destructive western exploitation.
The rich opportunity to satirize ethnobotanical tourism—the phenomenon of crunchy rich white people traveling to the jungle to take drugs with native shamans—is barely grasped at. Although not strictly a horror movie, Wetiko fits into the folk horror tradition, the kind of flick that might share space on a disc in 2040’s “All The Haunts Be Ours, Vol. 9.” There’s a scene intended to remind you of the ending of Midsommar, and you might almost be tempted to dub it The Wicker Mayan. What Wetiko lacks in logic it seeks to make up through febrile atmosphere, although the low-budget drug scenes relying on odd camera lenses, echo-y audio, neon lighting, and incoherent editing are nothing you haven’t seen before. What’s more effective is the setting itself, the feeling of being abandoned deep in the jungle with no civilization around to help out if things take a turn for the worst. In fact, the movie is at its best in its sober first act, when everything is new and feels more ominous and portentous than events eventually justify. Wetiko initially seems exotic, but ultimately it’s little more than Aapo getting sucked into a bad trip of colonialist metaphors. I’ll stick with street drugs.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: VENUS IN FURS (1969)
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The third installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.
DIRECTED BY: Jess Franco
FEATURING: James Darren, Maria Rohm, Barbara McNair, Klaus Kinski
PLOT: A trumpet player becomes obsessed with a woman after witnessing her murder and finding her body washed up on the beach, then watches as she comes back to avenge her death.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Venus in Furs is at least twice as surreal as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, while telling a similar story of a man obsessing over a woman who might be anything from a dead ringer for the deceased to a ghost to a tulpa. On top of that, it gets way freakier between the sheets than most giallos, and tops itself off with psychedelic audio and visuals like the Summer of Love never died. All that, and it also has piss-all to do with the novel.
COMMENTS: Hang onto your lids, folks, because you’re in for a surprise. More than likely you came to Venus in Furs, as did I, expecting a hedonistic wallow in the giallo end of the Eurosmut pool. After all, this is Jess Franco making an erotic thriller with the same name as the 1870 novel whose author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, gave masochism its name. With those credentials, you would expect a kinky, sex-crazed fetish festival that would make The Story of O look like a high school prom episode of the “Brady Bunch.” At least that’s what I’d expect, having first discovered Franco via the gory Bloody Moon (1981) and working through his horror pieces from there. What, nobody gets their brain buzzsawed this time? Awwww…
Color me surprised to find what has to be one of the tamest movies in Franco’s catalog—and also a class act that deserves to be better known. There’s little full nudity until act three, and even the topless shots are sparse, while gore is barely whispered. There is no particularly graphic cuffs-and-whips action going on. In fact, it’s hard to tell what the hell is going on at all, since the entire movie is told in random scenes shuffling through flashbacks, dreams, and memories. Franco (who also wrote the screenplay) throws away everything of Leo’s novel but the name of one of the characters and the title. Like many of our favorite surreal movies here, the plot’s open to interpretation, including the possibility of a circular narrative.
Bear with me while I piece this thing together. Jimmy (Darren), a jazz trumpet player, plays a gig where he witnesses Wanda (Rohm) murdered by what seems to be a group of aristocrats led by Kinski in what appears to be a snuff party. Jimmy flashes back to these events when he finds Wanda’s knife-scarred body washed ashore on the beach. He then wanders off in a fugue state to Rio during Mardi Gras (note to directors: please set more movies here), where the same woman returns, alive and well. The (ghost? zombie? vampire?) Wanda seduces Jimmy and stalks each of her murderers one by one,
Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: VENUS IN FURS (1969)SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TONY ODYSSEY (2025)
Antônio Odisseia
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DIRECTED BY: Thales Banzai
FEATURING: Kelson Succi, Iraci Estrela
PLOT: After robbing his father’s restaurant, Tony runs off with his girl Ivy and they share a “paste”-fueled transdimensional journey.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Tony Odyssey is down-to-Earth dramedy meets high theological physics, with motorcade bunnies, a lusty ur-Mother, and a game show God amongst its otherworldly revelations.
COMMENTS: Tony hates reality. We first find him cleaning an uncooperative toilet in his family’s restaurant, slipping on a damp patch and landing his hands in something best left unmentioned. It’s worth mentioning that this restaurant seems to be nothing but a front for a drug (and firearms?) operation, run by Tony’s cold-hearted father and his one-legged brother. Being down a leg doesn’t stop the would-be Lothario from hitting on Tony’s girl, Ivy, who’s popped by for a visit, snatching a firearm from a motorbike parked out front on her way in. Things then happen quickly: guns drawn, hostage taken, drugs stolen, and Tony and Ivy escape to a not-far-enough-away warehouse to take some of dad’s mind-bending chemicals.
Banzai’s dream blast has energy to spare, and does its best to keep the viewer unmoored. The opening credits spool over a craggy quarry, with a horse-drawn cart slowly making its way up the spiraling ruins of the access road. Sergione-y guitar licks thrum out a jagged, ambiguously Western tune, while the fonts for the credits evoke early ’80s computer text. Space and time are not our enemies—but they are not our friends, either. It is key that Tony manipulate these elements, and with his witchy friend Ivy, he unlocks a door. But where does it lead?
The short answer is: nowhere, and everywhere. The mind-altered pair drop a dark, gluey goo in their eyes, and find themselves in a taxi driven by a man who cannot remember his own name. Tony parts with a necklace of untold wealth to fly a boy’s kite, soaring at first into the air before jerkily crashing down. Desserts overflow at a chic boozery where a self-avowed Contrarian holds court, monologuing at length about how art means nothing any more, and that art patrons may as well just nail their money on the walls. Ivy’s and Tony’s fates diverge for a stretch, during which time Tony apparently dies, and after a brief wait in Hades’ check-in, has an awkward encounter with a bazonga’d matriarch. Watching violent milk porn, he is eventually pulled into the presence of God themselves.
This dream quest is a delightful affair, shot in a crisp black and white that renders the experience old-fashioned while oozing a vibrant surrealistic pop. Kelson Succi is perfect as the plebian dreamer, and Iraci Estrela is the perfect foil as the down-to-earth occultist. The soundtrack pulsates jauntily, often performed by cool-cat jazz men on invisible instruments. It inspires thought, too, about many of the unknown and unknowable angles concerning fate, life, facsimile, and destiny. Are we all God’s avatars? What grand drama—or nonsense—is the end game? And how can we hope to control our reality when we exist in it at such a finite and arbitrary intersection? Who knows. Just dance like a bunny as you bend your mind to the rhythm of flickering lights.
Tony Odyssey has a worldwide distribution deal (excluding UK and Ireland) from Kaleidoscope Film Distribution, and should show up for viewing somewhere in the future.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
APOCRYHA CANDIDATE: SHE LOVED BLOSSOMS MORE (2024)
Agapouse ta louloudia perissotero
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She Loved Blossoms More is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Yannis Veslemes
FEATURING: Panos Papadopoulos, Aris Balis, Julio Katsis, Dominique Pinon
PLOT: Three brothers try to cope with their mother’s untimely death.
WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Hallucinating your dead mom as a talking vaginal flower, complete with glowing clitoris, might be a totally natural Oedipal response for a son still processing grief and loss. But when Hedgehog then makes a psychedelic drug from said flower so he can hold a séance with a transdimensional severed head to perfect his time travel experiments, things get pretty weird.
COMMENTS: You can tell life just hasn’t been the same for Dummy, Japan, and Hedgehog since their mother passed away. They try to maintain some semblance of normalcy, coming together for meals and decorating their house for the holidays as Christmas rolls around. But they inevitably drift apart into their own mournful rhythms. Dummy, a failed scientist, spends all his time making and taking pharmaceuticals, then sleeping in the family car with his hands tied to the steering wheel. Japan, the computer nerd, prefers to play chess online before getting drunk on cognac and passing out in the bathtub. Only Hedgehog feels seriously devoted to their family and their ongoing project: he even sleeps in their mother’s Art Deco armoire, the very piece of furniture the brothers are converting into a time machine so they can bring her back from the dead.
After a series of experiments, with variable success (one results in a chicken with its head in another dimension), Mom’s garden has become a pet cemetery (where she also lies buried). Her sons need more money for additional equipment, but Hedgehog avoids taking calls from Logo, their mysterious Parisian funder. Logo (Pinon, in an excellent cameo) has set a daunting deadline, and seems to have questionable motives of his own for pursuing time travel.
When Dummy brings his dealer/girlfriend Samantha to join the party, an increasingly desperate Hedgehog begins hearing his mother’s voice, begging him to bring her back. During a heavy trip she urges him to “try it” with the girl. Needless to say, Hedgehog doesn’t interpret “it” the way most people would; but do his subsequent actions disrupt the time-space continuum. Or is everyone still high on grave flowers?
Like Panos Cosmatos, Yannis Veslemes clearly has a deep love of late seventies to early eighties cinema. A sensuous trippy vibe pervades Blossoms from beginning to end, but this is lo-fi sci-fi: a blend of neon light filters enhanced by distorted sound and visuals with the bluish static of cathode-ray televisions and glowing green text on early computer monitors. The strategic use of animatronics ups the weirdness factor as the plot veers into an uncanny valley. Veslemes may be the only contemporary director to have not only seen, but taken inspiration from the obscure films of Alain Fleischer (a close examination of the computer screen in the opening sequence reveals the user’s handle: “zoozero79”.)
Veslemes composed scores for films before turning to directing and, also like Cosmatos, he displays a interest a soundtrack that adds to the film’s unique ambiance. She Loved Blossoms More features mainly neoclassical compositions, with some electronics, but avoids clichéd over-reliance on imitating the stereotypical sounds of ’80s movies. The music always complements the visuals without trying to overpower the imagery’s otherworldliness.
The story provides no plausible explanation for how hooking electrodes up to a closet could create a time machine. Blossoms requires a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief, or perhaps outright cynicism. The characters’ plight generates sympathy; the retro technology on display leaves the viewer wondering whether we’re actually witnessing groundbreaking DIY research, or a family caught up in a collective delusion. As the identity of Logo and the backstory of Mom’s tragic death are gradually revealed, it only adds another layer to an already ambiguous reality.
As Hedgehog, Papadopoulos gives an understated performance that sometimes recalls Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, displaying a similarly creepy dead-eyed intensity. It’s an interesting point of comparison, given that both films explore ’80s nostalgia, weird physics, and altered states of consciousness, though in entirely different ways.
As with most time travel narratives, the story loops around on itself, but the ending is not quite the same as the beginning. You can’t travel through the back of the wardrobe and come out unchanged.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: