There’s no demon in the movie, but “TRS-80 Seed” just didn’t have the same ring. Pete concludes it’s a weird movie (and a possibly a prophetic one), but not necessarily a great watch ( concluding it’s like The Story of O meets Lawnmover Man). Julie “Don’t Look Now” Christie stars, Donald “Performance” Cammell directs.
Tag Archives: Science Fiction
![Demon Seed (1977) [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/416vb9lYReL._SL500_.jpg)
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WOMB (2010)
AKA Clone
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Benedek Fliegauf
FEATURING: Eva Green, Matt Smith, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, Hannah Murray
PLOT: A woman impregnates herself with a clone of her dead lover and raises the child to adulthood, grappling along the way with the confusing nature of their relationship.
COMMENTS: “She is the victim of artificial incest,” the snooty mom declares. “Her mother gave birth to her own mother.” In the universe of Womb, the battle lines have been drawn, and the detractors of the ability to bring loved ones back through the science of cloning view the procedure as an abomination. What makes the moment funny is that the prickly parents who are lecturing our heroine on the immorality of the practice would be nearly apoplectic if they had any idea how far she’d taken it. They’ll find out soon enough, and we’ll get to see her go even further.
Its shocking premise powers Womb. To his credit, Fliegauf is never coy about what’s going on here. The main character raises the only man she has ever loved as her own child. The implications are significant, and she experiences urges both maternal and carnal, sometimes simultaneously. The most powerful images in the film are the ones that bring this contradiction to the surface. Many a horror movie has labored to create a moment half as shocking as the scene where 10-year-old Tommy stands up in the bathtub he is sharing with the mother who has cloned him from her lover and proceeds to recite a poem while she stares up at him. Is the look on her face pride? Lust? Both? Womb readily embraces every awkward moment, crafting discomfort out of such scenarios as Rebecca’s meeting with college-age Tommy’s new girlfriend, or a wordless confrontation with the biological mother of Tommy’s genetic material upon seeing her resurrected son for the first time.
Watching Perfect Sense was a terrific reminder of how much I enjoy the work of Eva Green, and it’s great to see her particular brand of repressed passion deployed here. With her icy beauty, her deep and commanding voice, and her uncanny ability to balance outward coolness with an interior fire, she presents a vented steeliness, letting out glimpses of her conflicted soul in careful portions. When her adolescent son falls on top of her in what would be a playful moment under any other circumstances, Green carefully betrays an electric thrill that lies beneath her calm demeanor. It’s easy to see what initially attracts her to the laid-back enthusiasm of Smith, and later what drives her to both impulsively bring him back into the world, and then hide him away from it.
Rebecca is a fascinating character, emotionally immature at best and morally corrupt at worst. (Notably, Tommy is killed while en route to conduct some eco-terrorism against the very cloning plant that will soon give him renewed life.) The film suggests that Tommy’s untimely demise has trapped Rebecca in amber, forcing her to bring him back to the very moment when his life stopped in order for her life to go forward. Some critics have noted that Green never seems to age over two decades, but they often fail to notice that she doesn’t grow in any other way, either. There’s a strong suggestion that Rebecca has retained her virginity over all this time (one scene makes explicit that clone Tommy is delivered via caesarean), which gives context to the concluding scenes that take Womb into a new level of weirdness and discomfort.
Here again, Fliegauf doesn’t shy away from the most interesting questions, no matter how skeevy they might seem. If you’re picking up on some will-they-won’t-they vibes, rest assured that you’ll get an answer, and even if you correctly anticipate exactly what is going to happen in Womb’s final 15 minutes, there’s still genuine shock value in seeing it all play out, and particularly watching Green’s shifting reactions. It’s unusual to encounter a movie that so readily indulges your innate morbid curiosities without itself being grotesque or devoid of morality. Womb is patient but focused, sometimes tedious but rarely dull, transgressive but calmly and soberly so. It anticipates the protests of those like that angry mother, and it responds with a nod and a thin smile.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by Duffy Odum. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
![Womb [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41slsaQpeFL._SL500_.jpg)
- Factory sealed DVD
CAPSULE: FREE LSD (2023)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Free LSD is available for VOD purchase or rental.
DIRECTED BY: Dmitri Coates
FEATURING: Keith Morris, Dmitri Coates, Autry Fulbright II, DH Peligro, David Yow, Chelsea Debo, Chloe Dykstra
PLOT: An aging sex-shop owner takes an experimental erectile dysfunction medication that sends him to an alternate reality where he’s lead singer of the punk band Off!.
COMMENTS: Free LSD joins a small group of narrative movies made by bands. Not movies that are basically filmed concerts, or movies made by others to exploit the popularity of a band like A Hard Days Night or Head, or big-budget adaptations of prog-rock concept albums like Tommy or The Wall, or even movies written by musicians but directed by professionals (the Foo Fighter’s Studio 666, Jennifer Lopez‘ This Is Me… Now)—but movies written and directed and performed by the rockers themselves. Successful examples of this subgenre include Frank Zappa‘s 200 Motels, the Talking Heads’ True Stories, and (at least arguably) the Flaming Lips’ Christmas on Mars.
Of course, for every musician-led effort that’s a qualified success, there are many more that are mixed bags at best: the improvised psychedelia of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, Paul Simon’s box office bomb One Trick Pony, Melanie Martinez‘ heartfelt but adolescent K-12. And so it is with punk supergroup Off!’s offering to the genre. Musicians bring a unique perspective to filmmaking, but they aren’t filmmakers. So when they try their hands at this new medium, we hope for something that departs from the usual, but expect something that isn’t overly polished: something raw and ragged and maybe not wholly coherent that nonetheless sustains a level of exotic interest for adventurous viewers. That is exactly what we get with Free LSD.
One of the first problems bands face when making their own movies is that the band members will act in it. Lead guitarist Coates, writing himself an alternate reality role as a coke-sniffing, secretary groping music exec, does the best in front of the camera—but since he also serves as director, it might have been stretching himself too thin to also play the lead. Bassist Fulbright is serviceable as a cult member/ladies’ man. Drummer Peligro has few lines and is in a coma for much of the film, but he had a good excuse—he was undergoing chemotherapy as the movie was being shot. It only seems natural to cast your lead vocalist in the lead role, but that becomes a big problem here, because whatever his talents as a frontman and singer, Keith Morris lacks any emotive qualities as an actor. (At one point the script requires him to do a spit-take; I wasn’t entirely convinced he actually spit, despite seeing the liquid spewing from his mouth). Hidden in a heavy wig and fake beard, Morris plays an aging hippie who runs a sex shop during the day and hosts an Art Bell-style UFO radio show at night, who is also the improbable erotic target of a hot twenty-something barista with pink hair who favors miniskirts and disfavors brassieres, and has a thing for sleazy graying bohemians who can’t act. Unfortunately, Morris’ monotonously-enacted story takes up the entire first act.
On one level, Free LSD serves as a sampler for Off!’s album of the same name: there are a handful of partial performances of album cuts, just enough to tease fans, but not so much that the concert scenes overwhelm the story. As for the plot—it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s not really an issue. It’s not even clear where the bad guys come from—they seem like they should be aliens, but the promotional material claims they’re an “advanced AI species.” Unless I missed a throwaway line, nothing in the actual movie attempts to explain their origins or motives. But Free LSD isn’t a serious hard sci-fi movie, it’s a movie about a group of eccentrics who take an experimental boner medication and find themselves in the region of the multiverse where they’re famous punk musicians. It is loosely structured in three acts—introducing the premise through Morris’ character, getting the band together, triumphing over the baddies at the end—but it wanders all over the place. In this case, the digressiveness is a feature, not a bug; it allows us to take in scenes like James Duval popping in for no real reason as a street hustler with pierced nipples and a red cowboy hat, an erectile dysfunction parody ad, stopovers at a never-explained inter-reality beekeeping waystation, and an ending where Off! goes metaphysically platinum by giving away free samples of their Viagra-based psychedelic (delivered via blotter tabs that look indistinguishable from LSD) with their latest album to inaugurate an era of peace and love. Given the level of acting here and the generally low production values, a conventional narrative would have doomed the film to failure for everyone but hardcore Off! fans. Instead, there’s just enough insanity in the mix to hold your interest.
Musician/comedian Jack Black produced, and has a small role in the film (appearing remotely via cellphone). On a sad note, DH Peligro, who stepped in at the last moment to replace Off!’s regular drummer (who had another commitment), died in late 2022, soon after the film was completed.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
2024 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: AND THE REST, PART TWO
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Montréal 2024
I have taken so much complimentary coffee from the drinks stand in the lobby that I’ve grown somewhat furtive about it.
7/25: Rita
It’s impossible to deny the power found in Jayro Bustamante’s follow-up to his prior Fantasia feature, Piggy. The story, based upon a real-life incident that remains unresolved, concerns a 13-year-old girl who finds herself a ward of the state after running away from an abusive father. On the inside, she encounters various themed gangs—angels, fairies, bunnies, stars, and a fifth, more feral group whose nature eludes me—and is quickly taken under wing of the dominant Angels. Each of these form a function, both narratively and visually, and it is with them that Bustamante attempts to paint a fantastical veneer on a horrible set of circumstances. Unfortunately, he hedges his bets: Rita would have been more powerful as a realistic portrayal of the reasons and conditions of this prison; alternatively, it is not nearly wondrous enough, with the hints at fairy-tale trappings (the crone of a social worker makes for a perfect evil witch, and the pixie-dust powers of the Faery gang are a delight to witness) not coloring the underlying bleakness to any great degree. Still, it has some great set-pieces, as well as convincing performances from the few hundred girls cast from around Guatemala. Uneven, but recommended with reservations.
This Man
Dream Scenario meets J-horror in a fast-moving fusion of romance, comedy, frights, and existential philosophizing. Tomojiro Amano pivots around these loci with a story about a centuries-dead dark wizard seeking vengeance on humanity by appearing in dreams, dooming the dreamer. Deaths pile up, both squicky and hilarious (sometimes both), as two affable cops try to get to the bottom of the mystery (the senior of the pair always says, “It could just be a coincidence”; it’s assuredly not a coincidence). The story focuses on a young mother who consults a freelance sorcerer—he left his group because he disapproved of some of their activities—which results first in the tragic death of her daughter (which is also kind of hilarious), and culminates in the most action-packed-yet-action-bereft supernatural showdown I’ve seen. Bravo for thrash-industrial mystic mummery.
7/26: The Silent Planet
I’m always happy to observe areas of Earth that don’t look like they belong on this planet. Wherever Jeffrey St. Jules filmed this Continue reading 2024 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: AND THE REST, PART TWO
FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: INFINITE SUMMER (2024)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
DIRECTED BY: Miguel Llansó
FEATURING: Teele Kaljuvee-O’Brock, Johanna Rosin, Hannah Gross, Ciaron Davies
PLOT: Mia, an anthropology student partying with her friends for one last summer, finds her revels sabotaged by the mysterious and powerful mood app, “Eleusis.”
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Though not as dingbat nutso as Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway, Llansó’s latest film examines the promise and dangers of technology with plenty of pizzazz, paranormality, and purple gasses.
COMMENTS: Had someone like Ray Bradbury written this, its title could well have been The New Zoo Will Be Free from Suffering. Miguel Llansó, however, has more of a playful—and optimistic—streak than many science fiction writers. His new film is grounded in a realistic here and now, and indeed its opening act plays like a simple coming of age story about three young woman who have just graduated. But as the filmmaker says, “I am no psychologist,” and his deeply rooted bent toward the techno-fantastic quickly rears its head, sending his protagonists and the viewer on a strange and sinister ride through a purple cloud of menace.
This menace (or promise?) is dubbed “Eleusis.” As explained by its chirpy, casual AI guide, it claims to be a guided meditation app. Doctor Mindfulness, who probably isn’t an actual doctor, brings this questionable product—the program’s delivery system is a vapor-cartridge loaded in breathing mask—to Mia and her buddies, who are rightly hesitant about trusting some sketchy beardo they meet on the “Extreme Dating” VR app. Doctor Mindfulness’ insistence overcomes Mia’s trepidation, and the next thing we know, Mia gives Eleusis a try, and begins exploring the possibilities of the purple dust vortex projected in the aether. Her friends overcome their hesitation, too, and under the guidance of the good “doctor,” push the tech to its meditative, orgasmic extremes. Then events take a turn for the worse.
Seeing as we’re watching a speculative science fiction film, it’s reasonable to guess that the changes and effects from a nebulous nebula aren’t going to be good; but seeing as we’re watching a Llansó film, it’s also reasonable to guess that things are going to get a bit wild. Having emphasized the color scheme, I won’t be giving too much away when I say this movie makes mention of the pineal gland, which is stimulated to both summon Eleusis from beyond, and suck in the app users when they reach a certain level of “transcendence.” Eleusis is disarming, with a bubbly feminine voice, often ending its sentences with a reassuring “yo!” to emphasize how hip and harmless it is. It’s a fascinating creature, with a mesmerizing interface—and also a deep cave of lightning and purple that may hold the answers Mia seeks after her friends begin changing.
A compelling character roster fleshes out Llansó’s probe into this theoretical. Mia’s father is an easy-going artist, with his authority tempered by his insecurities. Doctor Mindfulness hits all the notes for a techno-optimist, following the instructions of Eleusis without question. And a pair of Interpol agents add an eccentric buddy-cop element: one of them is both always late, and always eating the other’s food. Infinite Summer has much to offer, much of it in a purple haze. In Mia, Llansó captures our obsession with the past; in the hungry Interpol agent, he captures our enchainment to the present; and in Eleusis, he imagines a future gathering place, between reality and the void: a new zoo, which will be free from some suffering.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: