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366 Underground, Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER QUEUE: NICK: THE FEATURE FILM (2013)

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Nick: The Feature Film is currently available to watch for free on YouTube.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Chris Alex, Nick Alex, Robert Benfer, Jennifer Alex

PLOT: A documentarian decides to devote an entire film to capturing a typical day in the life of unremarkable Nick, but an acquaintance of Nick’s named Chris shows up and proceeds to derail the project with his own demands, attention-stealing actions, and demonstrations of self-proclaimed genius.

Still from nick: the feature films (2013)

COMMENTS: Jason Steele made his name in 2005 with a Flash animation called “Charlie the Unicorn” that unexpectedly went viral. He followed this breakthrough a sequel, and eventually three more, and further a series parodying the first series, and before you knew it, Steele had inadvertently stumbled into a career. His FilmCow studio has been pumping out material ever since. Somewhere along the way, Steele branched out into live-action, creating a second YouTube channel to showcase his collaborations with brothers Chris and Nick Alex. These are mostly shorts, but our subject today is the time they tried to go for more. 

Reportedly, the film was improvised and shot in an entire day. This checks out. The sketches that comprise Nick: The Feature Film display a similar pattern: Fawning documentarian Robert asks Nick to demonstrate some aspect of his plebeian existence, but before Nick can get too far, insane egotist Chris swoops in to tout his superior inventiveness, break some stuff, and leave irritation in his wake. Chris displays all the hallmarks of an improv nightmare, denying the choices of others, hamming it up for the audience to the exclusion of his castmates, and repeating flop jokes under the notion that the funny is in the callback. To be fair, his scene partners are letting him do this, so they clearly believe he’s on to some comic gold. 

So let’s talk about our comic star. Chris presents himself as a genius; he undercuts this assessment every time he opens his mouth. He’s particularly adept at ruining existing things by attempting to “plus” them, such as his self-serving takes on Battle Monopoly or Double Badminton. He invites cult figures into Nick’s house, he tries to fix a car with a shovel, and just generally wanders around Titusville with a bracing and unearned self-confidence. It’s a fully committed performance, but it sucks up all the air in the room. This may be Nick: The Feature Film, but it’s really Chris: The Nonstop Antics. 

The Monopoly scene shows the limits of this kind of thing as improv:  Chris makes up rules at random, like a newfangled version of fizzbin. Nick blithely goes along with whatever Chris says, while Robert’s role is to question the logic like a proper straight man. We don’t learn anything we didn’t already know—Chris is a consummate BS artist, Nick and Robert are different varieties of pushover—and the scene runs for several minutes through its heads-I-win, tails-you-lose scenario, at which point it just ends with Chris declaring victory and everyone else shrugging their shoulders. To be blunt: if only one character gets the chance to do anything, you don’t have a scene. 

I have to confess that I’m immediately taken out of the concept of Nick: The Feature Film long before Chris arrives. There is absolutely nothing compelling about Nick. Inoffensive but bland to the point of invisibility, he has nothing to show and nothing to say. This renders the smitten Robert as either insightful beyond typical human understanding or flatly stupid, which explains why the narrative is interspersed with interludes that tell extraordinary tales of Nick’s rich life. They are sketched out on chalkboards, with only a photograph of Nick’s face to connect with anything real. The Nick of these stories bears zero relation to the one we see in live-action. In illustration, Nick is a near-superhero, saving lives. In person, he’s a bland doofus who has barely prepared for an entry-level job interview. The gleefully absurd tales of Nick’s exploits stand in stark relief to the passive, featureless nobody whom we see onscreen, so you can either try to take the film at face value or you can accept it as an absurd platform for the comic stylings of the FilmCow collective. Neither approach works entirely.

For a home movie shot on the fly, Nick looks pretty good, and there are small pleasures to be had, like the neo-evangelist who shows up at Nick’s door and proceeds to quietly follow Robert around way too closely. (She’s played by another member of the Alex clan, Jennifer.) And it’s fairly amusing that the film ends with Robert refusing to accept the finale that’s right in front of him—Chris finally earns his chops by standing up to a blowhard who insults his friend —instead creating his own take in which Chris receives a series of increasingly giant swords falling from the sky and lodging up his rectum. But these amusements take a back seat to a conundrum and a frustration: the empty shirt we’re supposed to be interested in and the irritating loon who demands our attention instead. 

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

Nick: The Feature Film (mildly NSFW: language, crude humor)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEATH POWDER (1986)

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Desu Pawuka

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Shigeru Izumiya

FEATURING: Takichi Inukai, Rikako Murakami, Shigeru Izumiya, Mari Natsuki, Kiyoshirô Imawano

PLOT: In a robot’s dying moments, it spews out a mysterious dust that bounty hunter Kiyoshi inhales, causing his body to undergo drastic physical changes and sending him on a terrifying mental journey.

Still from Death Powder (1986)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Death Powder manages to stretch out a visual bouillabaisse to an hour, cramming into a short block of time all of the trippy imagery and body horror that anyone could want. It may be considered a forebear to the “New Flesh” genre, but it easily stands on its own merits as a twisted piece of cinema.

COMMENTS: There are a lot of things a movie can do to catch our attention here, but one surefire way to get us to consider a film for the List is to dispense with the niceties of filmmaking—e.g. discernible plot, delineated characters, visual clarity—but pay them just enough lip service to let the viewer know that they’re going out the window. The first 20 minutes of Death Powder deftly accomplish this, teasing out a proto-neo-Tokyo in which leather-clad, fedora-wearing private contractors chase down robots in a city drenched in neon and rain, like a stepping stone between Blade Runner and Akira. Until Kiyoshi’s hand falls off, that is, at which point Death Powder becomes something very different indeed.

Once he is infected with the titular substance, Kiyoshi can see all, including the impending arrival of the strangely defaced mafia called the Scar People that employs him. He also flashes back to a sort of origin story, a jarring and hilarious jump to what is essentially a rock-star/scientist’s product launch. There’s an immediate change in tone as the robot’s inventor comes leaping in wailing on an electric guitar while the robot—bearing the ominous name “Guernica”—smiles and delivers her personal stats. Kiyoshi also undergoes physical changes, like a grotesquely misshapen face, as well as the sudden ability to punch a man in the face so hard that his head explodes.

Death Powder brings to mind the Greg Bear story Blood Music, in which a man injects himself with self-aware nanoprobes and unwittingly instigates a global biological singularity, as much as it does 1980s Japanese cyberpunk. Guernica speaks to Kiyoshi in his head, making it clear that she intends to propagate herself, and that this is just the beginning. Sure enough, when a group of hitmen arrive, artsy images of maggoty innards and liquid-drenched monster masks convey their demise. It’s not hard to imagine that all of Tokyo will soon join them in an enormous writhing blob.

The copy of Death Powder that I watched (twice, in an effort to make sense of the thing) was dark and muddy, but having seen other clips and stills from the production, I think that’s how it’s meant to be. The film looks like it’s been shot equally on film and video; the good Dr. Loo’s infomercial features classic video toaster effects, and a fight scene includes a character kicking an inset box. But the lo-fi elements only end up adding to the film’s charm. There’s something tight and compact about Izuyima’s vision, how readily he conveys a physiological disaster brought about by technological hubris. This is a movie with the wisdom to get in, confuse and horrify, and get out in a tight hour, with a jaunty saloon singalong to send you on your freaked-out way.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a bizarre and barely comprehensible one-hour short… surreal to the point of madness… ” – James Belmont, AnOther Magazine

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

366 Underground, Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER SUGGESTION QUEUE: BHONER: THE MOVIE (2013)

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Bhoner: The Movie is available to watch for free on Vimeo.

DIRECTED BY: and/or (Frank Anderson & Colin Shields)

FEATURING: Amolia Shells, Mellīza Verǎnda, Angel Gabriel, Taylor D’Andrew

PLOT: Sheltered ingenue Kisses, who lives in fear of the killer who murdered her father, is sent to a public summer school where she runs afoul of various cliques, and possibly the serial killer as well.

Still from Bhoner: The Movie (2013)

COMMENTS: In a Facebook post, the directors of Bhoner offered a simple invitation with a clear expression of their overall goal: “Help us offend a wider audience.” It honestly couldn’t be simpler. With a movie the filmmakers themselves describe as “vulgar, ugly, and stupid,” you can settle in for a straightforward effort to push the boundaries of good taste. 

The feeling from the outset is a satire of afterschool specials or parent-scare films along the lines of Go Ask Alice. The very first scene of the film shows purported innocent Kisses immediately turning to witchcraft in order to cope with the loss of her father and the restrictive atmosphere created by her holy roller mom (director Anderson in a camp drag routine). That should tell you right off the bat that none of this is to be taken seriously. No one in the cast looks remotely like a high schooler. Summer school seems to be held in one section of the cafeteria, with no teachers; students have lockers and the run of the entire building. A rich-kids-go-shopping montage takes place entirely at a thrift shop. It’s all deliberately silly. 

Along those lines, it’s only in this film’s opposite-day-logic that a child falling in with the wrong element would be sent to public school. But that development allows an introduction to a student body in the form of a parade of overinflated stereotypes, including dimwit cheerleaders, too-cool bros, and the occasional student who walks around in fetish gear. The acting runs at one of two speeds: you have a choice of either hugely low-key (such as the pair of jocks who declare they might be gay with all the enthusiasm of a light beer review) or raucously over the top (best exemplified by Verǎnda’s gratuitously evil head cheerleader Dimple). The one consistent trait is casual nastiness, snarkiness, and spouting the title word as every conceivable part of speech, a la Gretchen Wieners trying to make “fetch” happen.

The film’s greatest achievement is Shells pulling off dual roles as guileless Kisses and goth troublemaker Poppy, aided by judicious use of mascara and, ironically, haphazard edits that ensure they’re never quite in the same shot. I’m still kicking myself for how long it took me to recognize the stunt. Shells is no Tatiana Maslany, but she manages to give each of character their own spirit.

The vibe is further enhanced behind the camera, where Anderson and Shields’ directorial technique can be summed up in two words: Dutch angles. They are passionately in love with the tilted camera, and you can find one in very nearly every scene in the movie. That said, they’ve clearly never met a Dutch angle sharp enough for their tastes, so the image is constantly slanted to such an extreme that you half expect cast and props to go sliding off the edge of the screen. Their method is abetted by Gil Turetsky’s score, which consists of three or four cues which initially drop into a wryly cynical groove before becoming infuriating through endless repetition. This happens a lot in Bhoner: The Movie: an idea is treasured for being wild or unorthodox, and then the film piledrives that idea into the ground.

In a description provided for a screening at The New School, co-director Shields outlines very large ambitions for the Bhoner: The Movie. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, he talks in terms of Biblical allegories and mocks the idea of the conservatively minded cautionary tale. The filmmakers want to meet over-the-top storytelling with even-more-over-the-top storytelling, but without even an ounce of subtlety to sell it, it loses any context or grounding at all. Think , but without any of the love he feels for his ridiculous characters. Instead, the film feels like a project put together by a sketch group where everybody is competing to be the most outlandish person in the movie. It’s exhausting, and not terribly funny. Bhoner: The Movie is limp.

(This movie was nominated for review by Frank—most likely co-director Frank Anderson. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CHARLY, DIAS DE SANGRE (1990)

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AKA Charly, Days of Blood

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DIRECTED BY: Carlos Galettini

FEATURING: Fabiàn Gianola, Julieta Melogno, Norman Briski, Adrian Suár, María Pía, Martín Guerrero, Pilar Masciocchi

PLOT: Charly, a troubled young man with a dark past, is invited along on an outing to a remote cottage, but malevolent forces and Charly’s personal demons disrupt the relaxation, romance, and recuperation.

Still from Charly Dias de Sangre (1990)

COMMENTS: There’s a lot of power in the low-budget, shot-on-video feature film. It may be true that everyone has a story in them, but it’s a select few of us who have the determination to do whatever is necessary to bring that tale to life. There’s something admirable about the commitment to making something, even without the benefit of film school training or fancy cameras or even an actual story. Of course, there’s a reason that everyone doesn’t make movies, and the truth is that some of us just aren’t meant to be behind the camera, or in some cases anywhere within a country mile of the camera. For every hidden gem, there are any number of duds best forgotten.

Today’s example of the form takes us to Argentina, where director Carlos Galettini was able to assemble three of the most important elements for any would-be auteur: working video cameras, a space in which to film, and several actresses who were willing to work nude. If the goal is to get a film made, then the bar is cleared. It’s the hoping for much more where things get disappointing.

Charly, Dias de Sangre is the living embodiment of “derivative.” Set aside the fundamental plot of “occupants of vacation home are methodically stalked and murdered.” That’s just basic slasher horror. But it’s the details that really fail to distinguish it from the competition. There’s a dark hooded figure with a scythe stalking the grounds who looks like everyone’s stereotypical vision of Death. Hector Magni’s synthy score brings the expected amount of excessive drama, punctuated by hyperactive tom samples. Even the key art is lovingly ripped off from Nightmare on Elm Street 2. Charly has all the trappings of a fan film, but borrowing more of a vibe than a specific IP.

For a while, the movie plays a waiting game, content to cultivate a sense of unease while making space for some barely clothed canoodling. All the while, our hero alternates between moping around the house in a depressed funk and spasming in his sleep as his nightmares assault him. But in the final act, when the truth about Charly’s dark past is revealed and the murders begin in earnest, the film surrenders any cleverness that it may have had. The soon-to-be victims act in the clumsiest ways possible, the killings are not particularly artful, and everything seems predicated on a last-second twist in which the authorities target the wrong person. It’s frankly impatient, as if the filmmakers themselves are in a rush to get to the stuff that brought us here.

As mentioned, any movie that gets made is a miracle. But being a miracle doesn’t make Charly, Dias de Sangre good, or even weird. Without ambition beyond it’s desire to simply be, it turns out to be a rather bloodless affair.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… it feels as if there’s portions of the script that were tossed out, or sequences of the movie that were deleted as if to make less sense. The film just kind of ends and we’re left scratching our heads trying to figure out if anything truly supernatural was going on… we’re just going to say this is a daft slasher played up for the video market.” – Chris Nichols, The Trash Pile

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

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: HEY, STOP STABBING ME! (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Josh “Worm” Miller

FEATURING: Patrick Casey, Andy “Hippa” Kriss, Maria A. Morales, N. David Prestwood, Sean Hall

PLOT: College graduate Herman moves into a house with a collection of odd roommates where he is challenged by a job with ill-defined purpose, a needy girlfriend, a strange creature who keeps stealing his socks, and the mystery of what happened to his predecessors.

Still from Hey, Stop Stabbing Me! (2003)

COMMENTS: A well-played joke can wash away a multitude of sins. Countless movies over the decades have managed to cast aside lazy plotting or shoddy filmmaking because the audience left the theater laughing. I remain convinced that the success of The Departed can be attributed in large part to Mark Wahlberg’s pitch-perfect delivery of a single snarky retort. So Hey, Stop Stabbing Me!, a movie possessing zero production values but lots of spunk and all-in commitment from a group of plucky amateurs, has one mark which it absolutely must hit. The team behind this movie knows it can’t compete when it comes to the look of the film or the professionalism of the acting. So they go for jokes. And those jokes have got to land.

More often than not, God bless ‘em, they do. Screenwriters Casey and Miller (of late the storytelling masterminds behind the “Sonic the Hedgehog” franchise) adopt the time-honored strategy of throwing jokes of every shape and kind against the wall in hopes that something will stick. All kinds of jokes. The wall is littered with the sheer number of jokes that have been thrown at it. And amazingly, a pretty solid percentage of them hit. The result is a movie that’s certainly not good, but ends up being pretty great.

The primary vein of comedy pursued here is a completely demented world that everyone absurdly buys into. This is, after all, a movie in which a serial killer systematically offs his roommates and buries them in the backyard, yet his actions go completely unnoticed by everyone around him. It’s the kind of thing that would be perfectly at home on Adult Swim (and the folks at Fox clearly thought the same, as they hired Casey and Miller to script the series “Golan the Insatiable” for their “Animation Domination” slate). But wisely, the writers don’t solely rely on this dissonance. There are so many other jokes to try. Among the other styles of comedy they pursue:

  • Satire – Herman puts his degree in World History to work at a job where he wears a tie while digging holes all day (if only he’d gotten that double major in Comparative Lit like everyone else!)
  • Slapstick – Herman takes it on the chin constantly: abandoned by his family, robbed by a Samaritan, and getting the stuffing beaten out of him on a regular basis, most entertainingly at the hands of an 12-year-old boy.
  • Taboo – Herman’s nymphomaniac girlfriend Carrie has a very dark secret, for which the film slyly lays the groundwork without spoiling its horrible reveal.
  • Sheer Goofiness –  Wuzzel, the mischievous mascot reject who stalks the house in pursuit of socks, drives Herman to literal distraction. Aside from being rambunctious, he’s also a vivid example of the movie leaning into its own weaknesses, looking as he does like a cheap gorilla costume with very visible human hands.
  • Contrast – All this takes place in the extremely nondescript Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington (full disclosure: my wife’s hometown). The surroundings are so bland and inoffensive that these characters pull off the trick of standing out and fitting right in at the same time.

The movie is also surprisingly well made. The use of video is unavoidably cheap, but Miller demonstrates a real visual wit, deploying depth of field, handheld scrappiness, and deft quick-pans to sell the gags. And the story moves at a terrific pace, jumping from set piece to set piece with barely a breath. Even if one joke misses, another is sure to follow.

I fear I’m overselling the end product; Hey, Stop Stabbing Me! was shot for $500 and looks it, created by amateurs and shows it, and treated as ridiculous and feels it. But on its own terms, it’s a genuine achievement, pulling off the feat of being simultaneously incredibly dumb and sneakily smart. Hey, Stop Stabbing Me! gives hope to anybody with an iPhone, good friends, a nutty premise, and a dream.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A genuinely wacky and, at times, seriously funny horror send up that somehow avoids most of the clichés of the countless other SOV horror send ups made over the years, Hey, Stop Stabbing Me! might not win over those who don’t enjoy vintage no-budget endeavors, but then again… it might… this one moves very quickly, using Herman’s endless string of bad luck as a launching pad for all manner of unexpectedly bizarre occurrences, many of which build off of one another very effectively.” – Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop!