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Apocryphally Weird, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

63*: WE ARE THE STRANGE (2007)

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“We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.”–Douglas Adams

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: M dot Strange

FEATURING: Voices of Halleh Seddighzadeh, David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Chaylon Blancett, M dot Strange

PLOT: In the phantasmagorical metropolis of Stopmo City, two outcasts—eMMM, a boy with the head of a doll, and Blue, an ethereal, suffering young woman—search for a cherished ice cream parlor. Ongoing battles between grotesque monsters make their journey perilous. An avenging hero, Rain, defeats many of the monsters, but when the ultimate evil is revealed to be a harlequin-faced beast of a man called HIM, eMMM and Blue will have to confront the menace themselves.

Still from we are the strange (2007)

BACKGROUND:

  • M dot Strange is the nom de cinema of San Jose-based Michael Belmont, who in addition to dappling in animation is a  web designer, musician, and video game creator.
  • Demonstrating multiple animation styles, the film was created on multiple platforms of varying sophistication and complexity, ranging from Adobe After Effects to Mario Paint.
  • M dot chronicled the making of the film in a series of videos (like this one) that built a fan base of more than a million YouTube followers. Upon its release, the trailer for We Are the Strange racked up 500,000 views in its first four days.
  • The film received the Golden Prize for Most Groundbreaking Film and the Silver Prize for Best Animated Film at the 2007 Fantasia Film Festival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: So it is foretold: “He will return and strike down evil with a fist made of aluminum foil. Then, we will celebrate with many scoops of iced cream.” And so it comes to pass, when a bubble-shaped automaton emerges to face off against the big bad, and the hellscape Power Ranger at the controls is revealed to be our diminutive dollboy with the M on his forehead. For a film that devotes itself to style over substance and a pervasive gloom, it’s an unexpected flourish of feel-good storytelling and a nifty summation of the director’s particular blend of high-tech and lo-fi animation techniques. Alas, the promised ice cream is not in evidence.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Living, hungering arcade game; a trip on the ice cream train

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Multiple forms of animation and visual styles share space in a bouillabaisse of dread and visual overstimulation. Stop-motion mingles with computer-generated anime, and both appear alongside 2D paper-folding and hand-crafted miniatures. Every scene feels crafted to be as outlandish and disturbing as possible. The randomness of it all is sometimes eclectic, often cacophonous, and frequently intriguing.

Trailer for We Are the Strange (2007)

COMMENTS: This is not the first time that a movie challenges us to Continue reading 63*: WE ARE THE STRANGE (2007) →

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: BUFFET INFINITY (2025)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Simon Glassman

FEATURING: Kevin Singh, Claire Theobald, Donovan Workun, Ahmed Ahmed, and the voice of Simon Glassman

PLOT: An all-you-can-eat restaurant competes with neighboring stores at a strip mall as a sinkhole appears, strange noises plague the area, citizens go missing, and an occult presence seeps into the transmission.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: A narrative told through channel-surfing and a combo platter of the ridiculous and the sinister make Buffet Infinity a necessary addition to the Apocrypha menu.

COMMENTS: Westridge County is small, down at the heel, and more than a little boring. The local TV stations showcase a cavalcade of staid businesses: a doggie daycare on the verge of collapse, a pawn shop with a worryingly growing inventory, an insurance broker ready to cover questionable life events, a sandwich shop offering several types of sliced pig along with its signature sauce, a shyster lawyer happy to capitalize on his bitterness, a used car dealership suffering a violent aversion to high prices, and a buffet with suspiciously good deals and no apparent staff. Surfing the area’s TV broadcasts for one-hundred minutes, however, we glean the story of how Westridge County becomes increasingly derelict, dangerous, and decimated.

Simon Glassman is a fellow of who remembers, and, in a way, is nostalgic for a particular broadcast phenomenon which has all but disappeared. His chronicle of Westridge County’s collapse from crummy to cursed cranks true-to-life advertisements and news flashes one further turn on the dial to the absurd. The passive-aggressive war between Buffet Infinity (where something possibly extraterrestrial, and certainly evil, is going on) and Jenny’s Sandwich Shop ratchets up snarkily; though both cheerfully announce the ample parking “in the front”. (The sinkhole growing in the back-lot is the first indication something’s a bit off.) Public service warnings from “The Westridge Society for Religious Freedom” sound typo-ridden alarm bells about an impending supernatural intrusion that will rob the county of its people. But Ahmed Ahmed, the bad-rapping proprietor of the pawn shop, is ready to raise spirits through low prices on goods ranging from sound blockers to personal defense.

Glassman pulls aside the curtains drape by drape, with each surf through the channels unveiling a little more tension and a little more desperation. Glassman remarked during the Q&A session following Buffet Infinity that the film is ultimately just him dumping on a local strip mall. This much is certainly true, but the movie is much more. It dissects quotidian fears and challenges, with a heartier and heartier dose of the surreal, culminating in absurdly large portions of spectacle.

So head on down to Buffet Infinity! Its eighteen-to-twenty staff, each with their own homes and government ID numbers, will serve up platefuls of curious delights in the ever-expanding dining facility.

Just don’t enter the door marked “Prohibited”.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What begins as a satire of small-town local television quickly spirals into a hallucinatory, absurdist descent into the mind of a community being devoured by its own identity. This is weird cinema at its best: committed, chaotic, and unnervingly hypnotic.” — Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews (festival screening)

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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK (2025)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Kana Aoi, Daisuke Kasuya, Atsuko Nakata, Sayaka, Kei Taniguchi

PLOT: A missing-persons case steers Tamala and her friend into a world of corporate nefariousness, deep-time conspiracy, and staggering cosmic implications.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: To quote Fantasia programmer Rubert Bottenberg: “The Japanese kawaii paradigm of Hello Kitty and Hatsune Miku collides with cabalistic capitalism, cataclysmic prophecy, and the ruptured realities of , , and in… a deviously dreamlike, metaphysical mind-melt of high-fructose, retro-futuristic, paranoid pop-art brilliance.”

COMMENTS: Having your eyes bombarded at the end of a long day can be rather refreshing: something to wipe away the accumulated impressions, and leave your perception open to embrace the crazy world anew. This effect was indeed welcome, for as Tamala likes to say: “Another f*cking day is about to begin.” This line, delivered in a childlike, brat-girl, cutey pie kind of way, kicks off the (*deep breath*) Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in the Dark experience. An experience unlike any other I’ve witnessed on the big screen. An experience, if I may, whose existence hinges on the manifold developments of the past century and a half, and on the strange minds of the enigmatic t.o.L team.

For those unfamiliar with the Tamala phenomenon (as I was, until the screening), she was introduced to the world—at Fantasia, I believe—in 2010. Per her bio, she is “[a] young female cat, born in the Orion Constellation on the Odessa star; cute, but uses much foul language. She was genetically engineered in Cat Year 1869 to always remain a year and a half old, in order to be the immortal mascot of the mega-conglomerate CATTY & Co.” Which should give you the gist of things.

Where the gist may slip from your grasp may depend, but having missed the gist before the Tamala movie screening, I was still a happy viewer as Tamala 2030 washed over me like a wave of strange black and white purréed media. Tamala dances, Tamala curses, Tamala munches on pocky, and all the while the movie spools out impossible amounts of ambient details. Seven cities in seven different prefectures have seen simultaneous disappearances of seven different two-year-old cats. (The fact that one of them handsome spurs Tamala to join her boy-friend’s [?] investigation of the matter.) The specifics clatter on-screen at a blistering pace as Tamala, always boing-boinging in her steps, saunters fearlessly through class riots, cabalistic postal machinations, and onward to her empyrean duel amongst the stars.

t.o.L. manage the difficult hat-trick of fusing several graphic styles into a cohesive—albeit capital-“I”-Incredible—world. Tamala 2030 is a symphony of sight, walking a devilishly narrow through-line of technique where any slight variation would have catastrophically cacophonous results. Echoes of late ’90s screen-saver loops, mid-19th-century advertisement figures and fonts, flash™-y forms, and 3D-celestiality are all here, and all coexist. This film is a dizzying march through time and space, an appropriately epic-length adventure with pathos, frog-licking, reincarnation, cow spotted sports cars, intrigue, graffiti—and more than one explosion of Tamala into swarms of mini-Tamalas.

Oh yes, this will cleanse and flush your mind’s palette, and you’ll feel jumbled and pumped and ready to rock—’cause another f*cking day is about to begin.

Tamala‘s theatrical release date is uncertain, but Deaf Crocodile has acquired the physical media rights and plans to release the film in 2026.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other reviews were found at time of publication

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: KUSO (2017)

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BewareWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Flying Lotus (credited as “Steve”)

FEATURING: Bethany Schmitt, Ouimi Zumi, Iesha Coston, Zack Fox,  Shane Carpenter, George Clinton, , voice of

PLOT: Survivors of an L.A. earthquake are stricken by disease and experience bizarre events.

Still from Kuso (2017)

COMMENTS: “Kuso,” the Blu-ray’s liner notes explain, is Japanese for “shit,” and you’ll see plenty of kuso in the course of Kuso. The film opens with a shot of maggots wriggling in trenches spelling out the film’s name, followed by a shot of a jerking seismograph. That intro segues into the opening sequence, in which two straight-laced white news anchors reporting on an earthquake are interrupted by a black man in putty-makeup who performs a free jazz scat explaining that “no one will save you” (among the more coherent lines). Then the kuso-show begins in earnest.

The brief earthquake mention is about all the context we get for the segments that follow, which are intercut together and interspersed with surreal (and usually obscene) collages and animations. There’s a couple with a pus-based love life, a flatulent bald kid in a dunce cap who finds a giant anus in the woods, a woman who loses her baby in a hole, a stoner girl who lives with two fuzzy Muppet creatures with TV monitor faces (and who has an exceptionally tasteless date rape/abortion subplot), and a man who undergoes scat therapy to cure himself of his fear of breasts. It’s not clear that all of these characters live in the same universe, except on one occasion when two of them meet and converse in a doctor’s waiting room.

None of the individual stories have much structure or go anywhere interesting, and none of the individuals have any characterization beyond their surface deformities. The lack of storyline and of characters of course contribute to Kuso‘s surprising dullness, but there’s also the lack of variation in the suffocating atmosphere: there’s no real humor, no joy, just endless darkness, cruelty, and a fetishistic focus on disease and bodily fluids. There’s no tonal contrast in the film, which is surprising for a director who’s a musician. It’s no symphony, but instead the cinematic equivalent of a 90-minute bass solo.

There is so little African-American surrealism out there that it’s a crime that this lump ends up as one of the more prominent examples of the form. The film seems pointless, never applying its vision to any end beyond the most juvenile variety of shock possible. It depicts a world of cruelty and disease unrelieved by any sort of thought or emotional investment. That is a sort of vision. But it has nothing to do with Flying Lotus’ anarchic but groovy and joyful music, which is experimental and challenging but harmonic—unlike Kuso, which is a harsh blast of formless noise. Because Lotus is so talented, I hope that he will aim higher in future filmic excursions, and that one day we’ll look back at this movie as a lonely misfire in his artistic catalog. But as it stands, Kuso does a great disservice to weird films. , and their brethren often shock, but you never doubt that deep down the fillmakers actually like people. Kuso has nothing good to say about our species, and actually appears to actively hate humanity—including, by extension, its audience.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…inevitably whets the appetite of people who 50 years ago would have been lining up for their 10th viewing of ‘Mondo Cane’ — the sort of audiences forever on the lookout for something weirder or more extreme to make them go, ‘Ewwwww!’ Those viewers, as well as some among the habitually-stoned, will constitute the primary fans of this first feature… Everybody else is going to want to take a wide detour around this insufferable mishmash of interwoven segments — aimless in themselves, even more so as a whole — almost entirely concerned with bodily functions and bodily fluids.”–Variety (festival screening)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Dan M.”, who said “I’m assuming somebody else has already suggested it but there you go.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Kuso [Blu-ray]

Kuso [Blu-ray]
  • Region A Blu-Ray
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Apocryphally Weird

52*. ONCE WITHIN A TIME (2022)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Godfrey Reggio, Jon Kane                                                   

FEATURING: Sussan Deyhim, Apollo Garcia Orellana, Tara Starling Khozein, John Flax, Brian Bellot, Mike Tyson

PLOT: The Kindergarten of Eden, a pastoral playground populated by children and watched over by a majestic singing tree, is invaded by a devilish serpent in the form of technology. A technomage captures the attention of twins wearing wicker space helmets, and the quiet paradise is soon overrun with unpleasant imagery and mindless distraction. The children are encouraged to fight for their innocence and escape the fallen world with the help of a kindly mentor.

Still from once within a time (2022)

BACKGROUND:

  • Reggio is best known for directing the experimental landmark Koyaanisqatsi and its two sequels. Co-director Jon Kane was editor on Naqoyqatsi, the third in the series, as well as Reggio’s previous feature, Visitors (2013). Once Within a Time marks the 83-year-old director’s first foray into (sort of) narrative cinema.
  • The fifth feature collaboration between Reggio and composer Philip Glass.
  • The film was shot entirely at a soundstage in Brooklyn. Many of the sets are miniatures built by leading Broadway production designers Scott Pask and Frank McCullough, who found themselves sidelined from their usual stagework during the pandemic.
  • Although the movie relies heavily on digital technology, there is no 3D CGI animation. Digital rotoscoping was accomplished by human effects artists frame-by-frame.
  • The costumes designed by Machine Dazzle were included the artist’s first museum show at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2022.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: One of the first images in the film–Sussan Deyhim’s mother tree singing to the peaceful residents of her youthful utopia–is among its most memorable, but there’s a tableau that repeats throughout the movie to signal the world’s decline. In the center of this park sits a merry-go-round, and as the garden slips deeper into despair, new icons hover over the spinning wheel, most potently a syringe in which children swim about in an endless swirl.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Commedia dell’emoji; The Mentor’s lesson in a boxing ring

 WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In finally choosing to create his own images instead of merely assembling them, Reggio does not disappoint. He takes the same green-screen and compositing technology used to create comic book blockbusters and makes the film that Georges Méliès (who gets a visual shout-out) undoubtedly would have produced, if given the tools. The result is a philosophical tone poem that blends a didactic lament for the world with a heartfelt embrace of handmade craft. It’s a mystifying wonder.

Original trailer for Once Within a Time

COMMENTS: At 52 minutes (which includes a lengthy endcrawl), Continue reading 52*. ONCE WITHIN A TIME (2022) →