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366 Underground, Capsules

366 UNDERGROUND: PSYCHO APE: PART II – THE WRATH OF KONG (2024)

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Weirdest!

Psycho Ape 2: The Wrath of Kong Indiegogo page for more information, including ordering

DIRECTED BY: Addison Binek, Greg DeLiso

FEATURING: Bill Weeden, Kansas Bowling, Floyd Cashio

PLOT: During the trial of Psycho Ape, the filmmakers make a sequel to Psycho Ape.

Still from Pyshco Ape Part II: The Wrath of Kong (2024)

COMMENTS:

Good afternoon, reader, we now take you to the Psycho Ape Part II -the Wrath of Kong review, already in progress:

…and that moment when the presenter is challenged to a staring contest with the camera lens and proceeds to gaze at the viewer for  several minutes—all while clips of this, that, and particularly the other spool out on the in-frame—it’s clear that these jokers (by which I mean Binek and Deliso) are really just doing whatever they want. The scattershot approach to this compelling nonsense keeps you on your toes, because who knows what will happen next? Will it be flashback? Complaints from Psycho Ape actors about not being in the sequel? More courtroom shenanigans? Or maybe it will just be a long segment featuring Bill “Doctor ZOOmis” Weeden getting his right ear pierced after avoiding this for decades?

This mash-up of , , and has everything to say, virtually all of it about how this is a sequel to a film, set twenty-five years before, during, or after the original, an original which…

I’m going to have to ask you to hold that thought as we have just received a live-breaking report from our man in the field, Giles Edwards.

 

[ON THE SCENE REMARKS FROM GILES EDWARDS]

Shocking, if true. We now return to Giles in the studio.

…so I’m not sure what more to say. From the nonsensical trial of Psycho Ape, to the odd nod to prey-predator polyamory, to the direct re-creations of classic film scenes (Titanic, The Dark Knight, and The Temple of Doom, among others), to the regular blasts of product placement, this is goofy, meandering, and defiantly pointless—with a degree of self-awareness not usually becoming for a feature film. But it’s always lively, and wraps up well before interest might wane. The talent gathered for this (presumably from a deep well of friends and acquaintances), though mixed in proficiency, is invariably cheerful, with a deep, deep, deep awareness that while they probably shouldn’t bother with this thing of a movie, they Can, and so, boldly, they Do.

Back to you.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It does not matter if one finds this to be good-bad, bad-bad, or just plain blah; this is an experience that should be had by everyone interested in low-budget and experimental filmmaking.” — Bobby LePire, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

 

List Candidates

FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ANIMALIA PARADOXA (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Niles Atallah

FEATURING: Andrea Gomez

PLOT: In a world of little water and plenty of debris, a creature wishes to find refuge in the sea.

Still from Animalia Paradoxica (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: For a couple of reasons, Atallah’s film brings to mind Begotten; for other reasons, it brings to mind Hotel Poseidon. For these reasons, Animalia Paradoxa is easy to describe as “weird.”

COMMENTS: There were a number of walkouts, there was an immediate rush by others when the credits clicked onto the screen, and a pair of young women sitting behind me were disappointed at the paucity of stop-motion animation. Their criticism was somewhat sound, as there is little of that element in the film; however, it is a credit to them that they remained to witness the entirety of Animalia Paradoxa as it languidly built its world and approached its bizarre climax and whisperingly uplifting denouement.

The experience begins with a shabby red curtain, drawn back by a marionette hand, revealing a reel-to-reel film viewer behind the crimson barrier. The hand cranks a lever and documentary footage of oceans, life, destruction, and more unspools, and eventually we meet our unnamed, and understandably mute, protagonist. She is covered head to foot in shabby, skin-tight habiliment, with only her milky eyes visible. Her exploration of the near-empty shell of a building in a wasteland is both skulking and lithe, implying she is not native to this terrain. There are occasional silent onlookers, and intermittently a group of cultists pass through the courtyard, spouting messianic fervor and hate.

Andrea Gomez, who performs the main character, captures its gentle soul through movement. She artfully and desperately crafts tchotchkes to offer up to a hand which emerges from a crack in a wall. She needs water for comfort, perhaps to live, and the gummi worms proffered by this hand, when fed to a mutterer suspended in a web of her own hair, releases water down her matted locks. The xylophonic sound cues and other chime and thump-based music underscores the unreality of this mythic exercise. Dialogue, though little is to be found, always grates, whether it be the megaphone-distorted tirades from the patrolling zealots, or the sinister coughs and utterances from a bloated basement-dwelling creature whose face is obscured by a suspended cellophane sheet done up in makeup.

This film oozes over you, which by and large is a satisfying, if not always pleasant, experience. The trash world Atallah assembles (alongside the collective Diluvio, which also includes the pair Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal Leon) is ugly and beautiful—and I hate phrases like that. The title, were I to guess, refers to us. Humans. Dry-land entities, yearning for water. But shortly after the screening, I decided not to think too much on this film. Its themes are clear, even as its execution is obtuse. The cryptic dream of Animalia Paradoxa is better handled indirectly, lest the clumsy fingers of reason shatter its eerie presence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In certain theatrical moments, it feels like silent cinema, yet it is also strikingly contemporary in its concerns and approach to genre. As some of the best films are, it is difficult to categorize. This elusiveness plays to the film’s strengths.”–Alex Brannan, CineFiles Movie Reviews (Fantasia Screening)

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE ABSENCE OF MILK IN THE MOUTHS OF THE LOST (2023)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Case Esparros

FEATURING: , Gary Wilson

PLOT: A mysterious milkman helps a grieving mother deal with the loss of her child.

Still from absence of milk in the mouths of the lost (2023)

COMMENTS: I could give The Absence of Mil k in the Mouths of the Lost a “” tag, because the average viewer will immediately want to flee during the opening scene of a cow giving birth in real time. But, if you are reading this, chances are you are not the average viewer. Instead, I’ll just remind you that when you brave Milk, you are venturing into the strange and treacherous world of microbudget DIY surrealism—so calibrate your expectations accordingly.

A milkman (when exactly is this supposed to be set?) delivers glass bottles to a house where a young woman bathes in filthy black liquid with a blank expression; she doesn’t answer the bell when he rings. The milkman lives in a dingy basement decorated with pictures of missing children cut out from milk cartons—and a breast hanging on his wall that drips white liquid into a bowl. Meanwhile, in an alternate plane of reality, mute, cigar-smoking, boxer-wearing devils covered head-to-toe in white greasepaint plot mischief against a trio of masked children. The milkman has buzzy schizophrenic hallucinations where he sees a masked woman knitting and delivering electronically altered monologues while walled in by -style “paint-on-the-film” moving canvases. A few dramatic sequences, and much moping about the dilapidated house, advance the woman’s story, until she and the milkman finally meet for an exposition dump to tie (some of) the plot strands together. The children find it almost shockingly easy to best the middle-aged demons that beset them.

Milk clearly suffers from its low budget. The visuals often display thrift-store ingenuity, but the sound can be a serious issue: many sections were filmed without any, and there are several moments when what might be meaningful dialogue is muffled. At other times, the dialogue is both nearly inaudible and digitally altered. It’s needlessly frustrating. It’s also a pity that so much of the middle of the film has such poor sound quality, when in the opening and closing, where Esparos’ musician friends contribute songs (including a deranged cover of the gospel standard “I’ll Fly Away”), the sound mix is crucial and well-executed.

There’s a difference between having a lot of creativity on display and everything clicking. If you can focus on the former, Milk has a lot to offer. Some of the imagery is arresting: the cigar-smoking demons are as brilliantly conceived as they are easily achieved, and sequences like the woman who pierces her milk-bag bra (!) with a knife are hard to forget. And although some of the imagery is shocking, its always purposeful and empathetic. The movie has a good heart. It helps to love cows.

The Absence of Milk In the Mouths of the Lost [Blu-ray]

The Absence of Milk In the Mouths of the Lost [Blu-ray]
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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.)

Apocryphally Weird

45*. SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974)

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“I am strange,
my mind is tinted with the colors of madness,
they fight in silent furor in their effort to possess each other,
I am strange.”–Sun Ra, “I Am Strange”

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Ray Johnson

PLOT: Sun Ra returns to earth from his cosmic explorations with plans to relocate black folk to a new planet. Arriving in his spaceship in Oakland, Ra visits a youth community center and opens an outer space employment agency to spread his message.; NASA agents kidnap him, hoping to learn his technological secrets. Meanwhile, in a desert dimension, Ra and the pimp-like Overseer play a card game for the future of the black race.

Still from Space Is the Place (1974)

BACKGROUND:

  • Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount. He dropped out of college after he had a vision in which he was transported to the planet Saturn (or so he claimed). Never signed to a big record label, Ra toured and recorded prolifically, especially throughout his 1950s and 1960s heyday, releasing albums himself. His music was highly avant-garde, incorporating free jazz, synthesizers, chanting, oddball poetry incorporating mythological and space-faring themes, Egyptian costuming, and lavish stage productions.
  • The producer originally envisioned the film as a documentary, but input from many sources (including Ra himself) eventually led to this narrative movie.
  • Filmed in 1972 at the same time and on some of the same sets (and with one of the same actors) as the pornographic film Behind the Green Door. Space Is the Place was briefly released theatrically in 1974. It then disappeared until an edited version surfaced on VHS in the early 1990s.
  • Sun Ra improvised all of his dialogue, as did the kids interviewed at the community center.
  • Confusingly, Sun Ra’s classic 1972 album “Space is the Place” is not the soundtrack to this film, despite the fact that Ra wears a costume from the production on the cover. The actual soundtrack album was recorded contemporaneously but not released until 1993. The two albums share only the title track in common, in a radically different performance.
  • In 2003, scenes were restored which were missing from the VHS release. These scenes, featuring nudity, violence, or other debauchery inserted by co-screenwriter Joshua Smith, had been removed by Sun Ra himself; therefore, the 64-minute VHS cut is sometimes known as the “Sun Ra cut.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Su  Ra’s Egyptian costume, especially his crown combining a King Tut-styled headdress topped by an enormous solar crystal flanked by golden antlers. (It resembles the crown worn by Isis.) Ra’s fashion choices earn him some genuine stares from pedestrians as he drives through Oakland streets in a convertible, flanked by a golden-headed lion and a falcon. This majestic Pharonic helmet was so striking it made both the cover of both the movie poster and the identically titled jazz album.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Tarot blackjack for black souls; “Dixie” torture

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: An improvised mashup of surrealism, blaxploitation tropes, bizarro cosmic jazz, and messianic intergalactic Egyptology, Space Is the Place is an outsider artifact that could only have come from one man: the great Sun Ra.

DVD release trailer for Space is the Place

COMMENTS: Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and Sun Continue reading 45*. SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) →