A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

I dreamed last night that I was working on a David Lynch movie. It was called Slow Loris, and was a horror movie about a slow loris. He had fallen in love with the loris playing the loris, and went everywhere with it clinging to his shoulder, its enormous eyes slowly blinking.

In 2003, I ate in a restaurant where two people at the next table were earnestly discussing a movie whose title appeared to be Up the Butt. I was baffled by how seriously they were taking the acting, and also by how casual they seemed to be about saying the title in public, until the background chatter hit a lull and I realized that they were actually talking about a movie called In the Cut.

21 years later, I finally saw Up the Butt! I mean In the Cut. Having seen it, I think the former is a better title. There is no explicit butt action per se, butt but it is an amazingly horny movie. Also an amazingly bizarre one. It was directed by Jane Campion, who has since made other extremely horny - but much better - films. It was a giant flop at the time, but has since been reassessed as a slyly witty exploration of female desire and female gaze, unfairly panned by people who couldn't cope with Meg Ryan having sex.

I can cope with Meg Ryan having sex. What I could not cope with was the plot. And the screenplay.

This is the opening dialogue from In the Cut.

Pauline: "What does "broccoli" mean?

Frannie: "Depends on the context. Pubic hair or marijuana. It's a noun.

Pauline: "And 'Virginia'?"

Frannie: "Vagina. As in, 'He penetrated her Virginia with a hammer.'"

Frannie (Meg Ryan) is an English professor who's learning slang from one of her students. She's not paying him, and I suspect he's making up all the slang. Pauline is her half-sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who lives over a strip club and is stalking a doctor. While Frannie is going to the bathroom in the restaurant where she meets her slang coach, she sees a guy with a tattoo of the three of spades, getting a blowjob in the basement.

The next day a woman is murdered in her neighborhood. Two cops spot Frannie in the street. One of them (Mark Ruffalo) is named Giovanni Malloy, presumably because his parents wanted to make sure he'd be a cop so they gave him the most Irish and Italian name possible. They make her get in their car and interrogate her, explaining that the murder victim went to the same restaurant Frannie was at and Frannie might have seen her. Also, the dead woman's head was found in Frannie's backyard. They show her photos of the head.

Frannie: "Am I a murder suspect?"

Giovanni Malloy: "Look, I was wondering if you want to go for a beer or something."

If you're struggling to make sense of this, don't worry! Things become even more incoherent later!

Frannie and Giovanni Malloy go on an absolutely bizarre date. He informs her that his partner carries a water pistol because he's been banned from carrying a gun because he tried to murder his wife. (The partner does, in fact, carry a water pistol instead of a gun - we see him madly spraying it.)

Frannie sees that Giovanni Malloy has the three of spades tattoo. He says it means he's in a secret club. From then on, Frannie is convinced that he's the basement blowjob guy and possibly the murderer, as it never occurs to her that a secret club could have more than one member.

I'm making this scene sound more coherent than it actually is. It's mostly Malloy monologuing in non-sequitors. This is the kind of movie where you keep turning to the person you're watching it with and saying, "Did he actually say...?"

Frannie leaves the bar, gets attacked by a masked man, and, in a truly laugh-out-loud moment, is suddenly hit by a taxi. She calls Giovanni Malloy and they have sex. He sniffs her feet.

After the sex, in a tone like Jack Nicholson on the stand in A Few Good Men, she demands, "I WANT TO KNOW!!! WHO TAUGHT YOU TO DO THAT?!"

It seems like she's referring to oral sex, which I guess she never had before? ("You know nothing, Jon Snow.")

Giovanni Malloy explains that the chicken lady taught him. He delivers another batshit monologue about being molested by an older woman when delivering chickens. Frannie, grasping at some semblance of normalcy, asks him about his children. He says his oldest son wants to be a teacher, which he inexplicably finds extremely bizarre.

Frannie: "What does he want to teach?"

Giovanni Malloy: "Shmoogs." He shakes his head in disgusted astonishment. "Can you believe it??"

I watched this with scioscribe. We both heard "Shmoogs." I looked it up later. It's up the butt in the cut in the script. Urban dictionary says it means "someone who is uncool," but that can't be the meaning in this context as Frannie asks WHAT he wants to teach, not WHO he wants to teach.

If anyone has any idea what "shmoogs" means, please let us know. It sounds like it might be derived from Yiddish (a language commonly spoken by Irish-Italian cops)?

Frannie then goes to a cafe and orders "a dry latte. Very, very dry."

At this point I was just bursting out laughing at random moments, along with every time anyone actually spoke.

She's accosted by her stalker ex, who is with an adorably ugly dog. He asks her to take care of his dog. She says she's sorry but she can't. He screams, "YOU'D RATHER CUT HIS HEAD OFF!"

(The dog is fine.)

I forgot to mention that we periodically get sepia flashbacks to the meeting of Frannie's parents, who are inexplicably ice skating in some kind of period clothing, maybe Victorian, even though the movie is set in modern times so they logically would have met in the 1960s. At one point, Frannie has a hilarious nightmare where her mother has a skating accident that amputates her legs.

Also, the subways have posters of poetry that seems directed at Frannie.

( It scares me that this guy knows about drains )

This is a review of a truly terrible movie I watched because I loved not one, not two, but THREE movies by the same creators. I did not review the ones I loved. I will hopefully do so later. I am a bad person. SORRY Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead!

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead wrote and directed three fantastic movies, all of which are best enjoyed knowing as little as possible in advance.

The Endless is a horror/suspense/multigenre movie about two brothers who fled a UFO cult, then return for a visit as adults. The horror is of the creeping tension/appalling realizations variety; there's minimal/brief violence/gore. It's unpredictable and excellent.



Resolution is related to The Endless. I watched it second and was very surprised to learn that it had been made first. It's about two friends in a cabin, one trying to help the other kick a nasty drug habit, and plays mostly like a naturalistic buddy comedy-drama with elements of horror/suspense. Again, extremely minimal/brief violence/gore. It's also brilliant.



Spring is not related to the other two and is almost impossible to categorize. Half the fun is figuring out what genre it even is. IMO the best experience is to go in knowing absolutely nothing about it, except that it's about a young American man grieving the death of his mother, who goes to Italy and meets a young woman. I loved it and found it very touching. It has some violence and IIRC a cat dies.



OKAY now let's talk about Synchronic, their shockingly terrible and accidentally hilarious movie. All I knew going in was that it was by Benson & Moorhead, was about time travel, and starred Anthony Mackie - good signs, right?

I watched it with scioscribe and will include some of our comments.

It opens with a man and woman in bed. There are weird noises! The room dissolves! There is a desert! The man is flying! A snake rears up between the woman's legs! She is in a swamp and a person wearing weird mask like a gas mask is gesticulating at her! Stock footage of the Milky Way! A person merges with the wall! I probably forgot some things!

Cut to paramedic Anthony Mackie and his partner, Jamie Dornan, who walk into a weird scene with heroin addicts, a dead guy stabbed with a sword, and an empty packet of a designer drug, Synchronic.

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Roll credits!

Written and directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

Rachel & scioscribe, simultaneous: HOW

I honestly don't understand how this movie happened. They made it the same year they made The Endless, which was fantastic. You can see some similar themes as in some of their other movie, but every element of this movie was bad.

Maybe they really needed to use up some stock footage of the Milky Way.

Since Baahubali and RRR were so great, I decided to look up S. S. Rajamouli's other movies. This is how I spent two and a half hours watching a movie about a housefly taking revenge on a human. No regrets.

Let me attempt to recap the absolutely batshit premise of this movie. It's framed as a child's bedtime story and all I can say is that I wish mine were this entertaining.

Bindu (Samantha) is a micro-artist who makes things like carved hearts that can only be enjoyed with a magnifying glass. She also works at some sort of charity and is pursued by men. Nani (played by Nani) is her stalker extremely persistent suitor who follows her like a golden retriever hoping to some day get thrown a ball. Sudeep (played by Sudeep) is some kind of businessman who's either also a gangster or just behaves like one. Whenever he sees Bindu, a chorus of LAVA LAVA LAVA starts playing, along with lyrics like "I am a volcano waiting to explode on you."

Sudeep gets mad when he sees Nani flirting with Bindu. (LAVA LAVA LAVA!) So he kidnaps Nani and steps on him to death with his bare foot.

If you watch enough S. S. Rajamouli movies, you will get the distinct impression that he has a thing for a barefoot person pressing their foot onto someone else's body, stalking is romantic, and sheer awesomeness.

Nani is reincarnated as a CGI housefly. After a series of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids type adventures, he recovers his memories and goes on a mission of vengeance. As a fly.

The rest of the movie explores exactly how a fly can destroy a man's life. It's inventive and hilarious and I don't want to spoil it for you, except that I have to say that Fly Nani has a lot more chemistry with Bindu than Man Nani and I finally started rooting for that crazy couple, especially once her being a micro-artist suddenly became plot-relevant, and that at one point Fly Nani writes I WILL KILL YOU on Sudeep's windshield.

Eega probably didn't need to be quite as long as it was, but it's hilarious and bonkers and 100% commits to its premise. If you've ever wanted to see a fly taking revenge, it's a must-watch. Also, I need to object to the English word "fly" being nowhere near as fun to dramatically proclaim as "eega." EEGA!

Available on Netflix. At least, it is in the US.

I watched this horror movie based on its deeply creepy trailer. It is, indeed, sometimes very scary. Unfortunately, that's the only thing it does well. Smile is wrong about human behavior, it's wrong about police procedure, it's wrong about hospitals, and it's incredibly wrong about mental health care, which is unfortunate as its protagonist is a psychiatrist. Probably. One of the many things this movie doesn't know is the difference between a psychiatrist and a therapist.

Smile is basically three or four great scares and 50 pounds of WTF in a trenchcoat.

Dr. Rose Cotter is a doctor working in the psych ward of a large hospital. A young woman is brought in, apparently traumatized after witnessing a bizarre suicide. Rose interviews her in what seems to be their standard interview room. It's huge and empty, with two chairs in the middle like the cubicles in Severance, plus a convenient china vase in case some suicidal or homicidal person would like to break it and obtain a sharp object.

After saying that she sees creepy smiling people everywhere, the woman breaks the vase, smiles creepily, and cuts her own throat. There is a bright red emergency phone, but it's on a wall in a room the size of a warehouse, so Rose is unable to get from the chair to the wall in time to get help.

This is not the only ginormous empty room with two people huddled in the middle in this movie. Another one turns up later in a prison, of all random places. I have no idea why the director thought this was a thing.

Rose gets interviewed by a douchey-looking cop whom I will call Douchecop, who turns out to be her ex-boyfriend. She then has an encounter with another mental patient, who yells at her and freaks her out. She shouts, "I need a 5150!"

A 5150 is an involuntary detainment in a mental hospital. The guy she wants it for is already a live-in patient at a mental hospital. So she's basically saying, "Put him where he is some more!"

Kal Penn as Dr. Desai, her supervisor and the only person in the movie who 1) can act, 2) reacts like a human being, puts her on leave. Rose goes home to her fiance who can't act and to her cat. At this point scioscribe, who was watching this with me, confirmed that the cat dies and how its body is found - this will be relevant later. (I only realize now, while writing this, that having seen the entire movie, I have no idea who killed the cat.)

Rose then starts having spooky smile encounters. One of these is an absolutely brilliant scary scene involving a call to home security. Like I said, the scares are mostly good to excellent. It's everything else that's the problem.

Rose goes to her own psychiatrist, where a scene ensues which gets like sixteen things wrong about therapy, trauma reactions, medication, etc in ten minutes.

Her psychiatrist condescendingly chides Rose for diagnosing herself and requesting medication for what she thinks are post-traumatic hallucinations, saying, "I don't think this is about the woman who killed herself in front of you. You only knew her for about ten minutes. I think this is really about your mother's suicide."

WHEN SOMEONE SLASHES THEIR THROAT IN FRONT OF YOU, IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW LONG YOU KNEW THEM.

The psychiatrist then says she can't be hallucinating because she's clearly not psychotic (PTSD-based hallucinations are not the same as psychosis, and people who have any kind of hallucination can seem perfectly fine at other times) and refuses to give her meds. GIVE THIS POOR WOMAN SOME XANAX.

I forgot to mention that basically everyone but Kal Penn is randomly mean. Douchecop is randomly mean, not in a scary cop way but in a petty whiny way. Rose's sister and her husband are randomly dicks to her. I would call this a theme, but this movie doesn't have themes, so it's more of a pattern with no apparent reason.

Things get even more batshit from here on out. Cut for spoilers and the only dead cat scene I've ever enjoyed, because it's accidentally hilarious.

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Of all genres, horror is perhaps the best at constructing a story around a single powerful image or concept that represents its central theme: the Tethered in Us, the biological blending of the Shimmer in Annihilation, the sexually transmitted curse in It Follows. All of those concepts also represent the themee of the movies. The image Smile is built around, the smile, has nothing to do with trauma or anything else.

The credits have three completely random music/sound cues play over them: first "Lollipop," then a song I forget, then screeching and mumbling that I assume was Douchecop's soft metalcore band. (You just know he had one.)

Smile a movie made by someone with a real skill for being scary, which is not easy, and apparently no experience whatsoever with human beings or their institutions. Smile is about 1% brilliant, 9% very good, 90% terrible, and 100% batshit. I have never laughed so hard at a dead cat.

In conclusion, "Mental illness is hereditary! I looked it up!"

https://amzn.to/3FQiCO3

This was my third favorite of the movies I saw at virtual Sundance. It's very strong up until the end, which leaves a lot of threads hanging.

Gail (Regina Hall) is appointed as the first Black master of an elite New England university. On the surface, she's welcomed; not very far at all beneath the surface, she's a curiosity appointed to a historically deeply racist college by a lot of white people patting themselves on the back so hard, they're about to seek care for back bruises and shoulder sprains.

While she's still trying to navigate this situation, a Black student accuses her of racism, and Black students become the target of racist attacks which may or may not be supernatural. Meanwhile, there are extremely fraught tenure hearings. Gail investigates, and learns very unsettling things about the college's racist past, which may be very literally still haunting it. A woman was hanged in the area hundreds of years ago for being a witch. Was she a witch, or an innocent victim of prejudice? Either way, could she still be haunting the campus?

The horror aspects are fantastic as horror and as sociopolitical commentary, but the last act fell apart for me - it worked on a metaphoric level but not on a plot level.

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Master on Amazon Prime Video.

Here is another installment of my belated-reviews-of movies poll. Very sadly, there are several not listed because all I remember is that I hated them. I will still be reviewing movies from the previous poll, don't worry.




Have you seen any of these? What did you think?

This is one of the most batshit movies I have ever seen. My description really won't do it justice. Not only is the plot completely nuts, but so is the acting, the sets, and sometimes even the cinematography. I don't think it's a good movie, exactly, but it's an amazing experience and I sincerely recommend it. I also don't think it's a bad movie, exactly. There are aspects that are genuinely well-done. Some of those aspects are also completely insane. I've honestly never seen anything quite like it. As soon as I finished watching it I began plotting to watch it with other people.

Part of what makes Malignant such a bizarre experience is that, after a pulp horror opening and a gross title sequence, the entire first half of the movie is odd and off-kilter, but in a subtle way. The entire second half is not subtle at all.

It's most fun if you're completely unspoiled, so if you want to enjoy the full Malignant experience, stop reading now. There will be a second "stop reading here" warning for the second half, after which everything goes under a cut.

Content notes: Standard horror movie gore/violence, domestic violence, a miscarriage. There's no eye trauma that I recall - the poster is an allusion to the heroine seeing through the eyes of a killer a la The Eyes of Laura Mars.

The movie begins with a bang, in a fantastically Gothic hospital where doctors and staff are being massacred by a patient named Gabriel who can control electricity. In case we don't get it, someone screams, "He's drinking the electricity!"

Gabriel makes noises like a velociraptor and projects his voice over speakers, saying stuff like "I will kill you all!"

"My God!" someone gasps. "He speaks!"

There's screaming and bone-snapping and blood flying! Dr. Weaver says he has to be killed: "THE CANCER MUST BE REMOVED!!!"

Credits! They have lots of surgical imagery and are gross.

28 years later, our heroine Madison is pregnant and living with her abusive asshole husband in a big Gothic house, very suitable for hauntings. He bangs her head against the wall until she bleeds; she passes out, he goes downstairs, the electricity goes wibbly, he's attacked by someone hanging from the ceiling, she goes down and finds his body, and the killer attacks her. She wakes up in a hospital, where her sister Sydney tells her she lost the baby.

Madison moves back into the house, where the electricity continues to be wibbly. She has weird visions of people being murdered, which turn out to be real. A tour guide who gives tours of the underground town beneath Seattle which is apparently a real thing is kidnapped and kept prisoner, while other people are just killed. The two cops who interviewed Madison about her husband's death investigate these murders and kidnapping.

Okay. This part sounds like fairly straightforward supernatural horror about a woman who has a mysterious connection to a killer. But the way it plays is really strange, in ways where it's hard to convey just how peculiar everything is.

The police station is a gigantic open plan office with ceilings like a cathedral, brutalist architecture, and floor-to-ceiling windows in an ornate pattern. If I saw it without context, I'd think it was either a church, an art gallery, or an expensive artisanal gastropub.

After Madison comes home from the hospital, she locks herself in. Her sister Sydney surprises her by climbing in a window... into a room on the second floor! They then have an extremely odd conversation in which Madison says, with no preamble and in a way which made me burst out laughing, "Sydney, I'm adopted."

The age difference (eight years) does make it possible for Sydney to not know, but it plays as so weird. It's plot-relevant that she was adopted and has no memories prior to age eight, but there has got to be a more graceful way of dropping that in.

One of the murder victims, who is a wealthy doctor, lives across from a gigantic red neon sign so his apartment is always bathed in red light.

Another murder victim, also a wealthy doctor, has a shelf of DOCTOR TROPHY CUPS with inscriptions like BEST SURGEON.

All the white women in the movie have the same haircut (very long with bangs straight across the forehead.)

The dialogue is all slightly stilted in a peculiar way, both in writing and in speech.

Here is where the truly batshit spoilers begin. Seriously, this movie is amazing experienced unspoiled.

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I regret to say that this summary really doesn't do justice to the absolute bizarreness that is this movie. The plot is only about half of how nuts it is.

Like at one point there's a childhood flashback to what is supposed to be an ordinary, nice family. The mother, reminiscing about when a kid was eight or nine, says, "You wanted a birthday party so much, you nagged us until your father gave in."

Why is a kid having a birthday party presented as this huge and unusual favor the kid needs to beg for?

The whole movie is like that. Things that shouldn't be weird are weird. Characters who should be normal are slightly off. Dialogue is written and delivered oddly. Parking a car is inexplicably bizarre. The architecture of everything is incredibly weird. But the budget is high, it's shot beautifully, and a great deal of care was clearly lavished on this completely fucking bonkers movie.

scioscribe and I watch movies together, including virtually attending Sundance, about 90% of which I never get around to reviewing. What would you be interested in seeing reviews of? Note that 1) the reviews may be one paragraph, 2) I am posting the poll in chunks as otherwise it would be very unwieldy.

Has anyone else seen any of these? What did you think?

"Bats, Dr. Casper. Bats."

scioscribe and I decided to watch a pair of B-movies, Bats and The Big Clock. The latter is tonight, the former last night.

"So you're a bat scientist?"

I knew I was in for a treat when before the movie even started, the title card for Bats flipped upside down and roosted. I felt even more certain when attack bats appeared within the first two minutes of the movie. And by the end of the totally incomprehensible yet ineffably delightful opening sequence, in which I think bats attacked a train and then violently ejected a kissing couple from a parked car by hurling them through the windshield which possibly made the car explode, I was in a state of bliss which only increased throughout the rest of the movie.

"Are you saying some kind of bat did this?"

Bats is the movie equivalent of every book in Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell. It stars Lou Diamond Phillips as a sheriff in a cowboy hat and Dina Meyer as a bat scientist, plus her assistant (wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a bat skeleton), a mad bat scientist, and some bat experts from the CDC, all of them turning in reasonably good and 100% committed, straight-faced performances, which makes everything 100% more hilarious. I have no idea how they got through the entire shoot without expiring of laughter, given that approximately 25% of all dialogue consists of the word "bat."

"Bats, sheriff. I work with bats."

Everyone's personality consists of various aspects of their relationship to bats. The good scientist loves bats, wears a bat charm, and has a bat-related backstory. Her assistant is sensibly afraid of bats. Lou Diamond Phillips is stalwart in the face of bats. There is flirting by means of transferring a bat into a cage. Everything is bats, except for the part where Lou Diamond Phillips explains that he's an opera fan so we can have diagetic opera music scoring the sequence where they attempt to bat-proof a high school. It's glorious.

"Bats can be anywhere in a hundred mile radius. That's their range."

Many earnest bat facts are stated, and it is made very clear that these are no ordinary bats. They are omnivorous attack telepathic ultra-intelligent gremlin bats, engineered as weapons because, according to the mad bat scientist, "Because I'm a scientist. That's what we do." No one finds this explanation the slightest bit odd.

"We think this was done by some sort of... bats."

Bats attack cars, plastering themselves all over them like bat mache. They attack Main Street. They stalk people. They hover in mid-air to jeer at people. Sadly, they never actually fly off with anyone, but other than that my desire for bat action was more than satisfied. So was my desire for random explosions. In this movie, things explode at the slightest pretext. In fact, I think the bats might also have Firestarter powers because a lot of things explode and burst into flames that really shouldn't.

"If you blow it up the bats will scatter!"

This movie's entire budget was apparently spent on beautifully designed bat puppets for close-up shots and Lou Diamond Phillips (good choice), so background shots of bats often appear to be a bunch of Halloween-style black paper cut-outs. In fact I am pretty sure that is exactly what they were. We envisioned the crew's kids cutting them out, perhaps with the incentive of getting a bat puppet after the shoot was over.

"We'll freeze their little bat asses."

scioscribe remarked that the film strangely resembled Dante's Peak, but with bats instead of a volcano. We promptly envisioned the blockbuster movie Batcano, about a volcano which ejects bats. But it would not be better than the actual movie, which is a perfect example of what it is.

"Our bats must be infecting other bats with the virus."

You want to talk about leaning into a premise? Bats leans into its premise. Watching it, I can't offhand recall an hour-and-a-half span of time when I was happier.

"You don't want to die choking on no batshit fumes."

Free on Amazon Prime

"Bats."