Tag Archives: Science Fiction

Capsules

CAPSULE: IRON LUNG (2026)

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DIRECTED BY: Mark Fischbach

FEATURING: Mark Fischbach

PLOT: In the far future, when humanity is dying off, a convict is sent to the bottom of an ocean of blood on a distant moon in search of… something or other.

Still from iron lung (2026)

COMMENTS: If you’ve heard the rags-to-riches DIY success story of the fan video game adaptation Iron Lung, which played in 4,160 theaters worldwide in early 2026 based purely on a grassroots campaign where fans of YouTuber-turned-feature-film-director markiplier (Mark Fischback) begged cinemas to show it on the big screen, and are wondering whether the non-initiate will enjoy this, my answer is a firm “no.” While the film is a phenomenal success story on its own terms, it was made for a narrow niche audience, and unless you’ve played the video game or count yourself among markiplier’s 38 million YouTube channel subscribers, you ain’t it.

At least 90% of Iron Lung takes place inside a cramped submarine the size of a living room, crowded with metal apparatus and sensors. Convict pilot Simon (Fischback) is alone for almost the entire film, with occasional conversations over intercoms with bad connections to break his solitude. The craft is rickety, has no portals to see the outside world (which would just be a wall of opaque red anyway), has frequent blood leaks, and lunches a lot. You get to know every sharp corner and blinking light in the sub in the film’s 2-hour runtime; you almost feel like you could pilot this tub yourself. The detailed set conveys the feeling of a metal prison, and the sound design is superlative: drips, scrapes, static, echoes, thumps, all sorts of dreadful alarming noises to remind you that you are in a tin can surrounded by certain death. Based on the editing in the climax, I think that Fischback could direct a thrilling action scene—assuming you knew who, what, and where the antagonist was and what the hell was going on.

But as impressive as the film’s technicals may be, the script is simultaneously boring and confusing. I mentioned that the film was 2 hours long, and it makes sure you feel every minute. Reports suggest the game itself can be finished in under and hour—an hour and a half if you dwaddle—so there is a lot of padding added here to convey the combination of tedium and dread the protagonist would experience. Watching the movie, you get the sense that the game is nothing but a long test of your ability to press buttons, flip switches, and turn knobs, because this mostly what Fischback does on screen. There is a part where he accidentally irradiates some of his handlers, which has no payoff. There is a tormented personal backstory delivered in monologue, meant to humanize the an anonymous explorer. But mainly, it’s Fischback flipping switches, turning knobs, and bemoaning his fate.

The mystery of this abandoned moon is where the film’s claim to weirdness comes from. The premise itself is absurd: supposedly all the stars and planets have suddenly disappeared except for a single moon with an ocean of blood. Although the technology here comes from hard science fiction, the scenario is entirely mystical. The ocean floor contains mysterious artifacts (which I won’t spoil) and something that might be an entity—or, it could all be an oxygen-deprivation hallucination. There is some body horror, some monstrous visions, a blood-soaked cosmic climax, and no clear resolution. The lack of explanations would not be a problem if we cared about the protagonist in more than a theoretical sense, but it’s hard to become engaged with the convict’s plight. We root for humanity to survive more out of a sense of general obligation to the species than because the movie has caused us to care about this particular band of plucky survivors. So, in short: play the game first. If you want more, see the movie. Don’t reverse the process.

Iron Lung is currently available for rental or purchase solely on YouTube.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s slow, weird, and draining in a way that feels oddly beautiful.”–Roberto Tyler Ortiz, Geek Vibes Nation (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Anonymous,” who suggested it “[h]as enough questions about what f***ed up stuff we’re seeing is real or not, and ends with one of the goriest climaxes in all of film with a battle with a sentient ocean of radioactive human blood..” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Apocryphally Weird

69*. FLAMING EARS (1992)

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“In the year 2700, the year of the toads, ‘Asche’ was a burnt-out city.
Too big for its souls who banded together in dark basements.
It was an unrestrained wild animal,
ready to pee in Death’s face at any time.
And its residents were equal to it in every way.
Highly unlikely for a pure heart to survive.”–Flaming Ears introductory narration

DIRECTED BY: Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek

FEATURING: Susanna Heilmayr, Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl

PLOT: The lives of a comic book artist, a serial arsonist, and an extraterrestrial converge when Volley burns down the comix press. The artist, Spy, goes in search of vengeance, only to be beaten up by the bouncers at the club where Volley performs; Nun, Volley’s alien girlfriend, then finds Spy lying unconscious in the gutter and falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Volley develops the hots for her chauffeur, and a young girl graffitis the city with the image of a flower vase.

Still from Flaming Ears (1992)

BACKGROUND:

  • Scheirl and Pürrer became lovers in the 1980s and started making “lesbian punk home movies” in Pürrer’s Vienna apartment with a Super 8 camera and homemade props. They would later form the band Sta-Prestto make their own film soundtracks.
  • The Catholic symbolism in the film reflects the predominant conservatism of Viennese society at the time, in contrast to its very small punk scene of musicians and artists.
  • The soundtrack features the music of local punk bands, sometimes even capturing live performances. None of the music was formally licensed.
  • When Scheirl and Pürrer’s films toured women’s and feminist film festivals in the 1990s, the S&M content often proved controversial and sometimes led to walkouts.
  • The then-contemporary popularity of Fluxus theater led some viewers to assume Flaming Ears‘ outrageous style was a deliberate mockery of their performance art. This was not the intention of the filmmakers, who were simply expressing their punk aesthetic.
  • A. Hans Shceirl (Nun), also credited as Angela Hans Scheirl, is a transgender man who transitioned with testosterone in 1996. He later directed the infamous Dandy Dust (1998) and became a painter and professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s a lot of eye-catching and provocative imagery throughout Flaming Ears, with a plethora of unusual proclivities on display. But one of its most mysterious moments occurs when the otherwise unknown Blood suddenly shows up out of the blue to grant Spy’s rotting corpse the kiss of life. It’s confusing, oddly touching yet revolting, and emblematic of Flaming Ears‘ fairy tale combination of enchantment and grotesquerie. It’s also a major pivot point in the splintered narrative.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Erotic arson; the healing power of alien saliva

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: What isn’t weird about this movie? The two items listed above are only the very weirdest elements. There’s also furniture humping (with lighter fluid used as lube), an immortal alien whose severed limbs come back to life, and an oddly suggestive conversation about gardening cacti. With a rough and ready DIY aesthetic, Flaming Ears is art-house done No Wave-style. At any moment the live action can be interrupted by a stop-motion animated sequence, a prop, or a painting. In one memorable scene a cardboard cutout, with a cartoonish line-drawn face, replaces one of the actors. The dialogue is obscurely poetic and the futuristic setting thinly sketched, leaving the viewer on their own to figure out what exactly is going on, like an alien crash-landed on an unknown planet.

Flaming Ears re-release trailer

COMMENTS: Usually, films that take place in a future dystopia explain the reasons behind societal collapse, but Flaming Ears ignores Continue reading 69*. FLAMING EARS (1992) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: I LOVE BOOSTERS (2026)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Keke Palmer, , Naomi Ackie, , , , Will Poulter,

PLOT: A gang of shoplifters develop a vendetta against an arrogant billionaire fashion designer and determine to ruin her.

Still from i love boosters (2026)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: For his sophomore feature, Boots Riley takes everything that worked in Sorry to Bother You—absurdist comedy that builds until it approaches surrealism, Oakland grit, an insane third act sci-fi twist, and casually shoehorned-in communist propaganda—and piles it on even thicker. It’s arguable that he piles it so high that the story totters by the climax, but then again, that’s not exactly a disqualifier for a weird movie.

COMMENTS: Fashion—which, as Oscar Wilde quipped, is a form of ugliness so intolerable that it must be altered every six months—is an easy subject for satire. Boots Riley uses haute couture as an entry point to criticize the wider world of capitalism, though he doesn’t skimp on the cheap jokes afforded by crazy attention-getting getups and pretentious gits who value high thread counts more than high IQs. The three (later four) members of the shoplifting consortium known as “the Velvet Gang” are just scraping by financially; Corvette squats in an abandoned chicken shack, and frequently sees herself chased by a giant ball formed from bills and eviction notices. Their crimes aren’t excused so much as minimized compared to the legally-enabled theft practiced by the fashion industry. You root for them like you would for any outsiders fighting against the Man (or, in this case, the Woman).

Everyone in the expansive cast pulls their weight, with Demi Moore’s megalomaniacal fashionista and Will Poulter’s aggressively shallow middle-manager emerging as standouts. But best of all is Lakeith Stanfield, a dreamboat male model who isn’t even given a name in the movie. He’s a left-field oddball in a cast that includes skinwalkers, moguls who work in slanted skyscrapers, and pyramid-scheme cult leaders, and he’s so sexy that whenever the camera tries to focus on him it visibly starts to swoon.

Boots has a message, but he wraps it in laughter and awe. When Eiza González gives a lecture on dialectical materialism in the middle of the movie, it’s integrated into the film’s comic fabric so that it doesn’t seems out-of-place or preachy. You don’t have to buy into the ideology to enjoy the unfolding madness, but Boots wouldn’t be Boots if he didn’t take time out to testify. And just give costume designer  Shirley Kurata her Oscar right now; from Poulter’s color-matched hair and glasses to the swollen with booty shoplifting sweats to outrageous outfits that André 3000 would pass on for being “too much,” she matches Boots’ mania for satire and spectacle. It’s entirely fair to argue that the plot completely loses its bearings by the time the climax at Christie Smith’s eyeball-themed runway gala arrives—some of the details of the capacities of the technology at the center of the plot are so rushed through so that you’re not sure what it’s capable of, and it even gets hard to figure out where the characters are in relation to each other during a chase scene—but that’s a small price to pay to enjoy this explosion of creative spleen. I Love Boosters goes over the top early on, then just keeps soaring higher.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sometimes, you have to let the weirdos do their thing and we should always let Boots Riley do whatever he wants… It is weird, out there, and you may want to suddenly dress in monochrome outfits for the foreseeable future, but there is so much more to I Love Boosters outrageousness.”–Rachel Leishman, The Mary Sue (festival screening)

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: KRAKATIT (1948)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Karel Höger, Florence Marly, Florence Marly, Eduard Linkers, František Smolík, Jiří Plachý

PLOT: Prokop, a chemistry genius, invents a deadly compound which attracts the attention of shady consortiums hell-bent on world domination.

Still from Krakatit (1948)

COMMENTS: Science aids life. We learn this at the start, as a doctor and his able nurse spare an unidentified man from a febrile, clenching death. This man, however, is a different kind of scientist than his saviors. He is Prokop, a genius in the field “destructive chemistry,” and tucked away in his burning mind is the secret to Krakatit, a deadly compound capable of ending the lives of millions. His fate is not only in the hands of the healers, but his own: as he writhes and dreams on the clinic cot, his life story and personal character are scorched in a crucible, tested by demons both psychological and supernatural.

Krakatit slots itself into an ill-defined position in a number of ways. Heavily influenced by German Expressionism, it was made on the heels of two nuclear explosions. It concerns the lives of calculating scientists and (differently) calculating politicos, but it also has romance, both simple and complicated. Krakatit is a deadly serious meditation on man’s capacity for annihilation of self and others—and yet it has one of the best wisecracking cads in the history of the silver screen. (Eduard Linkers’ Carson is cut from the same shady cloth as Claude Rains’ Renault.) The chemistry is ubiquitous; but upon the introduction of a minor character and then a major one, so too becomes religion—old and new. Keep an eye out for a carriage-driver and a suspiciously named aristocrat.

Director Otakar Vávra, along with the stellar performances and glorious noir-dream cinematography by Václav Hanuš, ably walks the many tightropes laid down in Karel Capek’s source novel. Krakatit maintains its moments of ambiguity long enough to pique the curiosity, but never teases the viewer with outright incomprehensibility. It is mostly a dream, but liberally interspersed with stretches of dreamier dreaming. I am reminded here of several odd elements that only make sense later: student Prokop in an infinite amphitheater amongst innumerable photorealistic cut-outs of his classmates, the looming mystery of the Krakatit canister—why doesn’t that explode? And just how did all these Wehrmacht hold-overs end up in post-war Czechoslavokia?

The films lands on an ill-defined plane, too. Vávra opts for a nebulous non-ending which still leaves the viewer optimistic that science must—nay, shall—be harnessed to aid all mankind to live better lives. Despite the the ever-looming dangers of annihilation.

Gregory J. Smalley adds:

I have no issues with Giles’ appraisal, other than his omission of the following section:

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The muddled memories of a guilt-ridden “destructive chemist” provide the perfect substrate for exploring nascent anxieties about the apocalyptic potential of 20th century weaponry, told through a dreamy mix of Expressionism, film noir, and hallucinatory interludes out of the surrealist playbook.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… builds tension and envelops its audience in an enigmatic shroud of mystery through the wonderfully bizarre and clever ways it perpetually disrupts the reality within the film… [this] deeply strange and unsettling sci-fi mystery about a world hellbent on self-destruction rings as true today as it surely did in the wake of World War II.”–Derek Smith, Slant [Blu-ray]

Krakatit [4k UHD + Blu-ray]

Krakatit [4k UHD + Blu-ray]

  • Czech director Otakar Vávra’s astonishing mix of Film Noir, Thriller and Atomic Bomb Sci-Fi

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HELTER SKELTER (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Mika Ninagawa

FEATURING: Erika Sawajiri, , , Kiko Mizuhara, Nao Ômori

PLOT:  The struggle to keep up appearances and growing pressure from younger models pushes supermodel Lilico’s physical and mental well-being to the breaking point.

Still from Helter Skelter (2012)

COMMENTS: A helter skelter is a slide. A lighthouse-shaped structure that you climb up through the inside to then slide down on a curving ramp nailed to the outside. The Beatles’ song of the same name gives it away in its opening lyric: “When I get to the bottom, I go back to the top of the slide.” Regardless of what Charles Manson thought it meant, it’s supposed to be about something that’s fun for a brief moment, but it’s also a reminder that everything that goes up must eventually come back down, and sometimes right quickly at that.

If the higher you go means the faster you fall, then Lilico is about to come crashing down at light speed. She is living her peak life: impossibly beautiful, her face graces countless magazine covers and advertisements. She’s about to branch out into film acting, and every girl in Japan knows her by name. So when she spots a sizeable flaw in her perfect skin, it’s a literal crack in her facade, the augur of an explosive downfall. Helter Skelter is all about that implosion, the slow-motion train wreck of her discovery that perfect beauty has always had an expiration date, and that page on the calendar has finally turned.

It’s hard to work up a lot of pity for someone who is rich, famous, and ridiculously attractive, but Helter Skelter does a solid job in showing how Lilico’s life of luxury is not especially enjoyable. She is monstrous but also desperate, and how her misery expresses itself is the primary source of Helter Skelter’s weirdness. She takes out her rage on her doggedly loyal assistant Hana through sexual abuse and humiliation, and starts to have out-of-control hallucinations at inconvenient moments. The fact that she is being tracked by a pair of detectives who resemble the cast of a Japanese reboot of “The X-Files” is appropriate, because Lilico herself is otherworldly. These moments of panic and cruelty are so outlandish, so extreme, that the biggest surprise is that we are expected to view them realistically. Perhaps tales like The Substance have trained us to expect a supernatural element, but Helter Skelter offers no twist. The film straightforwardly insists that Lilico’s beauty has a scientific (if illegal and amoral) explanation, and that her behavior is all her own. The arrival of her very own Eve Harrington, the naturally stunning Kozue, who achieves success despite expressing apathy toward the  fashion business, reinforces that point. Kozue doesn’t expect to be beautiful forever, and while she knows some regurgitation goes with the job, she plans to give it up someday. By contrast, considering everything Lilico has done to secure her position, her fear of decline and the collapse of her enhanced body utterly short-circuit her.

Japanese culture is both fascinated and repelled by celebrity, and Helter Skelter enlists exactly the right people to delve into its darker side. Director Ninagawa was a fashion photographer herself, and she films with the barely controlled energy of a wild photo shoot. Sawajiri also knows the world, having been a successful model before turning to acting. (She gained notoriety for a press conference where she was viewed as disrespectful to reporters and her castmates alike, so audiences in Japan would experience art imitating life in Lilico’s ultimate, disastrous encounter with the media.) Their bona fides are beyond reproach, and there’s no question that the team produces a motion picture with a unique sensibility, bringing their personal experience to the story. The thing is, while Helter Skelter is a beautifully crafted film, a certain sameness creeps in as the story seems to be building toward something cataclysmic, but never quite gets there. Lilico’s fate is inevitable—it is painfully obvious that she is going to crash—but given the many omens of doom and the explosive nature of Ninagawa’s camera and Sawajiri’s volcanic performance, the impact ultimately feels blunted. Lilico’s fate can’t quite live up to the drama of what precedes it.

Helter Skelter is based on a popular manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and it feels like it. It jumps storylines and techniques like a page turning, and the bold and vibrant colors and off-kilter angles feel like they could have jumped straight out of the pages of a comic book. The film’s most striking image, when Lilico faces a room full of popping camera flashes, has the veneer of illustration. But like fashion itself, the movie is successful at delivering style and attitude but quickly moves on to the next new thing without imparting a message beyond the surface. It’s a fun, fast ride, but it’s just a ride. Then I get to the bottom and I see you again.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a feverish character study about fame, vanity, and the terrifying fragility of manufactured perfection… The visuals never settle into a comfortable place. Scenes are filled with exaggerated color palettes and surreal staging, making the environment feel beautiful and suffocating. It’s a world built entirely around image, and Ninagawa constantly reminds the audience how artificial that image really is.” – Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews

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

Helter Skelter

Helter Skelter

  • This lurid body horror, based on a manga by Kyoko Okazaki and directed by Mika Ninagawa (Sakuran), is a candy-colored nightmare!

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