Tag Archives: Satire

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CAPSULE: BARBECUE THEM (1981)

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Souvliste tous! Etsi tha paroume to kouradokastro

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DIRECTED BY: Nikos Zervos

FEATURING: Konstantinos Hristidis, Dimitris Poulikakos, Thekla Tselepi

PLOT: The daily escapades of a group of hippies, two men and two women, in 1980s Athens.

Copy Barbecue This! (1981)

COMMENTS: The tale begins after the clumsy introduction of our protagonists, each presented with a distinct musical theme. We follow a group of wannabe hippies with weird names like Daisy, Oratios and Kyros, as if taken out of Mickey Mouse comics.  This group, vagabonds in the eyes of society, live without regular jobs, indulging in free love, listening to rock and roll, and finding money mainly by asking their middle-class relatives. They wander through Athens and the surrounding countryside without clear purpose at first, but find one towards the end of the movie when they attempt to save a friend of theirs from a satanic psychiatrist. Yes, it is as silly as it sounds.

What we have here is a free-form, not exactly coherent, almost improvisational narrative portraying the underground rock music scene of 1980s Greece. Segments attack middle-class hypocrisy, from the pseudo-intellectual reporters who approach our characters pretending to be interested in the underground rock scene to portraits of traditional nuclear families hiding  wild instincts and a myriad of pathologies under a pretense of normalcy. This becomes the main focus of the second half of the film when one family’s daughter, Elenitsa, is put in a psychiatric hospital against her will. Our deadbeats attempt to save her.

This is not a movie that takes itself or its main characters too seriously, however. Daisy, Oratios, Kyros, and even Elenitsa claim to be idealists, but are proven hollow in the end, unable to bring about real social change. An alternative title of the movie roughly translates as “This is how we are waiting to take the castle made of shit?” This is exactly what one of group wonders about himself and his friends, underlining the hollowness of their rebellion. Their fight against the castle made of shit is in vain—because they do not really want to fight, they just want to have fun.

Dimitris Poulikakos, a well known rock musician in Greece, narrates the tale in voice-over. Polikakos also appears in Aldevaran (1975), an earlier Greek movie of a similar style portraying the underground art and music scene of the 1970s.  This movie also shares some DNA with other works of its director, Nikos Zervos, like Exoristos stin kentriki leoforo ( 1979). Not only are there common themes like the hollowness of the hippie lifestyle, but they share similar narrative approaches, defying traditional structures.

If it is not already clear, this is not exactly a surreal movie. It is a parody and deconstruction of middle-class morality and of counterculture idealism, but this only makes it slightly eccentric. It should be noted that technical aspects make it a difficult watch, as the audio quality is really bad. It will also be a real challenge for non-Greeks to find this one. Copies exist online—though not in well-known legit platforms—and some DVDs can be found, but without English subtitles.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other reviews found.

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DEEP DARK (2015)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael Medaglia

FEATURING: Sean McGrath, Anne Sorce, Denise Poirier

PLOT: An failed artist’s last stab at success is given an unexpected boost by a mysterious creature living inside a hole in his shabby studio apartment, but the hole’s motives are not entirely charitable, and the arrangement may come at an unexpectedly high cost.

Still from Deep Dark (2015)

COMMENTS: Among the unsung heroes of modern cinema are the home-video closed-caption writers. They must not only transcribe the dialogue but provide detailed descriptions of sound effects that offer meaningful context for the mood and the stakes of a scene. Surely some sort of award is owed to the unknown captioner for Deep Dark, who was tasked with delivering a full accounting of the first appearance of the hole in the wall who will change the life of our protagonist, and came through with this masterpiece: “[eerie sounds, vaguely wet, vaguely female]”.

It’s an auspicious introduction. We’re told that the Hole has inspired Pollock, Warhol, and Patrick Nagel, and she sparks a sea change in the artistic output of tiresome whiner Hermann by expelling pearlescent orbs that drive art patrons to ecstatic distraction. Her sultry, needy entreaties (delivered by Poirier, best known for voicing the title character in the “Æon Flux” animated series) leave him completely in her thrall, so much so that it is far from surprising that she eventually demands more of him, culminating in an encounter that reveals the Hole to be, shall we say, glorious. One of writer/director Medaglia’s craftier decisions (in his only feature to date) is to leave details about her true nature or origin completely unaddressed. The mystery only enhances her power over everyone who encounters her.

What we have here is a Little Shop of Horrors scenario, in which a monster provides a loser with the key to success, only to demand more and more in return—up to and including blood. Deep Dark is clean and efficient at delivering its story in a tight 80 minutes and taking advantage of a small cast and limited locations to convey its thrills. The film looks good, too, with a crisp editorial sensibility and evocative use of locations both publicly bright and privately grimy. Outside of Poirier’s very good voicework, the actors are definitively fine, turning in perfectly workmanlike performances that deliver the material without enhancing or undercutting it. Like Hermann’s art, though, Deep Dark is missing something. All the pieces are in place, professionally delivered, but it just doesn’t feel like there are any stakes. Events unfold almost entirely as expected, and even the movie’s most graphic moments are evocative, but not shocking or surprising.

Where the film falls the furthest from the goal line is in developing a voice or message uniquely its own. There’s the hint of satiric intent—Medaglia subtitles Hermann’s art and life with ironic descriptions, a tool that will be echoed a few years down the line in The Menu—but the targets are lame and the delivery is weak, especially since there’s a strong argument that we don’t see a single piece of good art in the film. Characters who could provide depth or further complications are assigned subplots that never fully take shape; a curious landlady is the most notable, but Sorce’s influential gallery owner is frustratingly inconsistent, by turns mercenary, snobbish, and weak-minded as needed. Medaglia has his straightforward horror tale, complete with a notably interesting monster. He just doesn’t have much more than that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Both deeply disturbing yet strangely alluring, the film offers audiences something inherently crazy and incredibly macabre… if like me you have a fondness of the strange and bizarre then Deep Dark is a film worth seeking out.” – Jon Dickinson, “Scream” (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Patricia, who called it “hilariously disturbing” and added “gotta love the weirdness of it…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Deep Dark

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: EL CONDE (2023)

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DIRECTED BY: Pablo Larraín

FEATURING: Jaime Vadell, Gloria Munchmeyer,, Paula Luchsinger,

PLOT: Auguste Pinochet, former dictator of Chile and centuries-old vampire, contemplates whether it is time to finally die, and invites his family to his remote compound to discuss the dispersal of the fortune he looted from the country.

Still from El Conde (2023)

COMMENTS: In a world filled with so much death, it is one of the cruelest ironies that the people you want most to die never seem to oblige. Day after day, they go around fouling the very air they breathe and incurring your helpless wrath, a fact that honestly seems to fuel them and stave off their seemingly inevitable demise even longer. Sure, they may give off signs of ill health or mental decline, but they never actually take the crucial stuff of shuffling off, no matter how many Big Macs and Diet Cokes they clutch in their tiny hands. It’s exasperating.

Pablo Larraín feels your pain. Augusto Pinochet finally exited the Chilean presidential palace in 1990, but he continued to linger in the world for another 16 years, and in the public consciousness still after that, his crimes having had an immeasurable effect on the psyche of the nation. It probably explains why so much of Larraín’s career (when not profiling the notable unhappy women of the 20th century) has been devoted to examining Chile’s troubled soul. Still, El Conde marks the first time that he has confronted the man directly, and that appears to be because he has finally figured out who Pinochet really was: an undying, bloodsucking vampire.

Mapping the traits of a legendary monster onto the life of the man who disappeared thousands of dissidents turns out to be a fairly short walk. Pinochet’s hunger for power is attributed to his beginnings as a loyal soldier in the army of Louis XVI, where his distaste for revolution and anti-monarchal movements were born. From there, he goes from country to country helping to stamp out uprisings, until he finally arrives in Chile to lead the violent overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. Invoking the vampire legend is a canny choice, because it not only connects Chile to the broad historical arc of oppressive dictatorships, but provides a context to help understand the grotesque body count under Pinochet’s rule. It actually becomes more comprehensible to attribute it to a monster.

The luscious black-and-white cinematography (courtesy of Edward Lachman) lends an authenticity to the story of exclusively awful people. Vadell is suitably cadaverous as Pinochet, and his retinue — his duplicitous wife, his loyal majordomo, his venal children — all embrace their evil eagerly. The one character who never really clicks is Carmen, the undercover nun who Luchsinger infuses with a kind of wide-eyed wonder in almost every moment. This is intriguing when she openly encourages Pinochet and his family in their delusions of victimhood and entitlement, confusing when the narrator is telling us that she is an immensely powerful instrument of vengeance, and truly spectacular when she clumsily but eagerly takes on the capacity to fly. Compared with the vampire Pinochet’s austere, imperious flights over Santiago, Carmen’s tumbles in the sky are genuinely enchanting.

Ah, that narrator. She turns out to be the most important character in the piece, as her plummy upper-crust British tones point the way toward the film’s larger thesis. If you have an ear for voices and think she sounds awfully familiar, you’re probably right. It really is too delicious a secret to be spoiled (if you absolutely must know, let me just say that giving it away even by showing you a picture would be Crass), but it speaks to the larger metaphor that Larraín wants to convey. Pinochet, he tells us, did not arise out of the mists unbidden and commence a reign of terror. He was made, birthed by the same forces that always seek to enforce a rigid division of haves and have-nots and to reap the benefits. Ultimately, El Conde is not really concerned with the specifics of Pinochet or even Chile. It’s about the vampires who have sucked the lifeblood of humanity for centuries and (as the epilogue shows us) will continue to do so. We can take some comfort in the knowledge that death comes for everyone, but the evil that feasts on our ideals, our arts, our conception of what it means to be free… that evil is undying and elusive. The wish is not enough.

El Conde is a Netflix exclusive.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…kinda funny, very weird… The quirkiness of the characters and their brutal honesty create dialogues brimming with acid humour and sarcasm. This form of communication, along with the surreal situations that take place, make a very original and entertaining piece…” – Lucía Muñoz, Cut to the Take (contemporaneous)

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

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GORY GORY HALLELUJAH (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Sue Corcoran

FEATURING: Angie Louise, Tim Gouran, Jeff Gilbert, Todd Licea, Joseph Franklin

PLOT: Four aspiring actors on their way to New York run afoul of increasingly dangerous obstacles, including a group of rowdy Elvis impersonators, a backwards fundamentalist hick town, and a zombie apocalypse.

COMMENTS: Satire, the playwright and Algonquin wit George S. Kaufman opined, is what closes on Saturday night. Nevertheless, aspiring filmmakers frequently turn to satire as a means to walk the line between mass-appeal populism (near-parodistic references to familiar material) and fringe-appeal provocation (harsh critique of sociopolitical foes). All of which is to say, Gory Gory Hallelujah has the aspirational sweat of satire all over it. Unfortunately, Kaufman seems to have its number; Gory Gory bleeds out quickly.

Gory Gory has so many targets for its smug disdain that it plays like a sketch film. The opening salvo takes on the insular and pretentious world of theater, which is admittedly made even more amusing with the reveal that this delusional production of the Gospel is being staged in the theatrical mecca of Seattle. But that’s all forgotten once we set off on a road trip, a genre that revels in wacky mismatched personalities. From there, the targets are set up like the shooting gallery at a fair: here’s the crazy fight with a gang in a bar, here’s the hypocritically moralistic small town, here’s the evil lurking in the woods. The scenes are mileposts, rather than logical stops along the way.

This is a film that is not the slightest bit interested in nuance. Consider our central quartet of heroes, who check an impressive collection of boxes for character stereotypes: militant black man who nonetheless endures countless indignities; self-proclaimed feminist whose sexual and materialistic impulses frequently overrule the cause; nebbishy Jew who finds every opportunity to remind you of his faith; blissed-out hippie flower child whom the film wants to position as closeted, but who is actually ravenously omnisexual. That’s all there is to them; barely 24 hours after having watched the film, I’ve completely forgotten their names, and that’s just fine. They’re not characters; they’re trope delivery systems.

Title notwithstanding, Gory Gory Hallelujah isn’t really a horror film. The screwed-up small town feels like a low-rent retread of Nothing But Trouble, the witches’ coven is just an excuse to take a jab at man-hating lesbians, and the undead are lumbering actors with Green Goddess dressing smeared on their faces. I suspect if you asked director Corcoran and screenwriter Louise, they’d tell you they were making a comedy, a -esque everyone-is-awful romp that lets them flirt with edginess without having to catch any flack. Every once in a while, the film threatens to go somewhere truly daring, like the smarmy land baron’s reference to some “accidental lynchings” that hints at a truly vengeful motivation for the zombie uprising. Most of the time, though, the targets are only the most obvious, offering variations on the theme, “Aren’t these people just awful?” They are. It’s not a revelation.

The closest the film gets to a point-of-view comes in the admittedly unexpected finale, when the death of absolutely everyone presages a revival-hymn closing number that suggests we’ll all be equal in the great beyond. Whereas before everyone was greedily nasty to each other, now they’re all dancing arm-in-arm, united in brotherhood after they’ve cast off the pesky need to breathe. It would make for a solid mission statement if there’d been even a hint of it prior to the closing minutes of the film. As it stands, it’s just one more radical shift in tone for a movie that has already lurched awkwardly from one setpiece to the next. Gory Gory Hallelujah has a lot to be angry about, but just doesn’t have the heart for it. Maybe in the next life.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Tripping over the line between silly and stupid, camp comedy “Gory Gory Hallelujah” — the title is the best part — emerges more sub-Troma than subversive…aims for bad-taste hipster satire in the John Waters vein. But co-creator/editor/thesps Sue Corcoran and Angie Louise should have left at least one job — screenwriting — to a third party.” Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

Gory Gory Hallelujah

Gory Gory Hallelujah
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Capsules

CAPSULE: EDDINGTON (2025)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Pedro Pascal, , Deirdre O’Connell, Cameron Mann, Micheal Ward, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Luke Grimes

PLOT: Spurred by his dislike of mask mandates and by personal animosity, an asthmatic sheriff in the tiny town of Eddington, NM runs for mayor, a decision that leads to a web of lies and violence and brings him into conflict with BLM protesters, antifa, and a pedophile-conspiracy cult.

Still from Eddington (2025)

COMMENTS: Come with Eddington and venture back in time to distant 2020, when a plague encompassed the Earth. Remember people’s noses constantly sliding out of their masks? Lining up to enter grocery stores spaced six feet apart? Conspiracists seizing upon citations of the word “coronavirus” from before 2019 as evidence of a “plandemic”? A swab roughly jammed up your nasal cavity at a drive-through testing clinic? Kids with assault weapons becoming YouTube celebrities? Banners hanging off cars bearing messages like “YOUR BEING MANIPULATED” [sic]? Incoherent anger and incipient violence in the air everywhere? It’s all here, in a cinematic memorial marking the moment America broke.

Eddington pits Joaquin Phoenix, a sheriff who commands little respect from his counterparts at the Pueblo tribal police, the populace at large, or even his own frigid wife, against Pedro Pascal, the incumbent mayor who’s cloyingly conciliatory in public, a hypocrite in private, and in bed with a data-center development, to boot. Phoenix’s impulsive plan to run for mayor against Pascal is the first of many poorly planned decisions. Things are complicated by incestuous love affairs in the town of about 2,000 lost souls. The politics of the wider world impinge on this microcosm in a sometimes humorous way; BLM protesters numbering in the dozens “block” Eddington’s main street, and a campaign rally at a Mexican restaurant draws even fewer folks. Still, although the political stakes are small, the body count will eventually be shockingly high.

Aster’s mockery is broad when it comes to the young privileged white kids too-eagerly radicalized by the Black Lives Matter movement—despite the fact that there is only one African American in this dusty hamlet, and he’s a policeman. The conservatives are treated with a bit more nuance. Sheriff Joe’s reluctance to mask up has a reasonable basis in asthma, and his wife and mother-in-law’s seductions into conspiracy culture are well-founded in mild mental illnesses greatly exacerbated by the stresses of lockdown. Aster makes every fevered scenario he dredges up from those dark days  feel as crazy and relatable as it really was. The cast is excellent: Joaquin Phoenix stumbles and follows a gut feeling that always leads him astray, Pedro Pascal plays perhaps his least likable character, melancholy Emma Stone mopes in bed until she finally breaks. And, although it is not a particularly weird movie for most of its running time, the climax gets wild and disorienting, as Aster puts Phoenix through misfortunes and anxieties recalling Beau at his most fearful. No one comes out of this experience unscathed; the survivors all suffer from long Covid.

Had Eddington been made in 2015, it would have played like an outlandish satire in the vein of Southland Tales. Coming in 2025, it seems almost like a story you dimly remember scrolling past on your Instagram feed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a laborious and weirdly self-important satire which makes a heavy, flavourless meal of some uninteresting and unoriginal thoughts…”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (festival screening)