Coven (1997)

 

Director: Mark Borchardt

Screenplay: Mark Borchardt

Cast: Mark Borchardt as Mike, Tom Schimmels as Steve, Miriam Frost as Sharon, Robert Richard Jorge as Goodman, Sherrie Beaupre as Daesa, Jack Bennett, Mark Nadolski, Scott Berendt, Barbara Zanger, Donna McMaster, Mike Schank, Cindy Snyder, Nancy Williams, and Wayne Bubois as support group members.

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

For all the infamy of the film pronounced “oven”, from the acclaimed documentary American Movie (1999) about this film and its director-writer-lead Mark Borchardt, what about the film at the centre of that story? What about the short film Coven itself?

Coven is actually great and, even as someone who has defended shot-on-video and no budget films which have wavering acting and questionable plot tangents, it is actually one of the best I have seen. It is not perfect, but is a moody tale where our lead Mike, played by Borchardt, ends up in a hospital after using prescription drugs to help him reach a writing deadline, only to have overdone it to severe bodily harm. Shot in stark monochromatic 16mm film, he ends up pressured by a friend to join a small addicts anonymous group he is part of. It ends up with a more pulp turn – they are set up as a literal coven whose methods of helping their members stay sober involve questionable spiritual transcendence – and whilst it might be criticized for contradicting the sympathetic nature of the members, as I’ll get into, I have softened to this especially as Borchardt for a film that goes for a more complicated psychodrama in its tiny length and tiny budget.

A part of this is also the possibility, whilst leaning to there being a real cult holding sway in an addict’s consolation group, that as much of the paranoia is caused by the lead Mike’s own fed by his drug use, even using stimulants like speed when already part of the group and meant to be overcoming this substance abuse. This sense of all that what is not it seems, whilst not perfect, is set up to the director’s credit when he leaves the hospital from his initial incident, as he witnesses a woman on a gurney suddenly goes into a fit in the elevator, all before he even meets the coven. Even going to a dealer for said speed when he is meant to be on the recovery wagon, it becomes explicit that, even if the cult is real, our lead is already on the edge and there is still a sense of him adding to his own terrors. With a celebratory sole drink with the group where they’ve likely spiked his, his hallucinations like seeing the members confess to murder or starting speaking gibberish, or seeing a male priest on the floor of the public building bathroom they are in starting to mutter apocalyptic babble, there is as much felt this time seeing the sequence with the sense his own demons are feeding them as much as the cult feeding on them.

The mood helps with Coven even when it is literal and those are real hooded cultists the lead is seeing in the Wisconsin woods even high on speed. The opening surreal scene for a film less than forty minutes establishes Borchardt had more on his mind even if American Movie depicted the production’s difficulties, Borchardt running on a rural road with an old guy ranting in a passing car about religion and dead bodies on a road depicting a subjective nightmare. Helping considerably is the shooting within Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin where the rural small town as seen here in stark black and white adds the best production values for a tiny budget film. Not just for the advantages of woodland for any micro budget film where you don’t mind permits, but that, shot at a time when the trees were bare of leaves in winter and look skeletal, with the sky at times washed out white, it looks appropriately ominous for a film which struggled with taking a long time to be completely finished. It has a naturalism with the locations Borchardt shot, likely with local non-actors or local actors in dialogue roles, in real bars and public buildings, but with the choice of monochrome and the production choices, like using post-synched dialogue and sound for moments where the lead’s sanity is slipping, allowing its more fantastical moments to not feel out of place. Without hyperbole, but utmost sympathy, it evokes the front LP cover, let alone with the music itself, of one of my favorite albums Spiderland by Slint, a post rock band from Louisville, Kentucky, and not that far geographically from Wisconsin, nor where its famous cover was photographed at in stark black and white at a quarry lake in Utica Township, Indiana. Spiderland is held as a great album for indie music, but in one of my favorite songs ever Nosferatu Man, you have a potentially cheesy lyrical choice of having a song about a Dracula like vampire living in a rural American community, where he lives with his brides in a place where he constantly has to suffer from the trains running nearby from his castle. That sense of working class, non-metropolis Americana especially when it comes to regional American horror cinema is close to this ideal even with cheesy lines of dialogue and fake red blood, but Coven to its credit manages to allow the unnatural to bleed into blue collar Americana without it feeling tonally wrong. When you have hooded cultists destroying a car with random clubs in weed filled wasteland, possible because the production got hold of an actual car to destroy, it feels not as cheesy as other regional horror films, but like a gang attack where the inappropriate uniform choices without being able to see the faces feels more disturbing.

Helped by the music by Patrick Nettesheim, ultra low budget synth, adds to the atmosphere of an earnest, imperfect but heartfelt attempt at a film, as helped by the naturalism forced onto a film without the budget to have staged locations but shooting in friends’ rooms instead. Coven ends up less subjective at its end in story with the ending becoming a bloody affair in a kitchen, but even that befits the tone of a film that is largely a stripped back homemade drama, especially as one of the more compelling aspects of the entire production are the addicts’ anonymous meetings. Even if they were an actual coven, Mark Borchardt still sets up that its members are there for legitimate reasons, which also feel like real anecdotes that deal with addiction honestly. There are extensive monologues of people talking of their reasons for their addiction, and they all sound painfully real, even the guy who says he started cocaine at twelve or the more explicitly humorous one of another man who tells with deadpan, to prove a point to an official about being stoned, coming to a meeting on the subject whilst high on acid. There are wives whose husbands who stuck out miserable jobs for benefits, people with depression, and men and women of all ages and concerns in their addictions. It all violently contrast the reputation I first learnt of Coven as being a butt of jokes as a disastrous low budget production in their severity, and they add a moral side to the short I have to praise fully. Even our lead Mike, having to make the rent by writing, which caused the damage to himself, is salient in the idea that, in the coven recruiting members, they literally brought in the desperate and the miserable with real problems they could easily bend to their will.

Even with its finale, of the cult wanting to create new members but never explicitly saying anything sinister about their souls and still concerns of enlightening, adds to a different sort of sinister to the story in terms of interpretation. With one cultist having their head caved into a kitchen drawer, it is a sinister that suggests that our lead may have presumed to have fended for his life, but just killed some innocent people in his own kitchen in a cultist fed mental breakdown. That is the things that I can legitimately say Mark Borchardt was able to pull off with Coven, and credit to American Movie, whilst that film became the iconic part of Borchardt’s own career, it thankfully led to people like me wanting to track the original short down. American Movie is a film I want to return to as its own work, even if tied to this fully with a symbolic umbilical cord, but Coven itself is something I wish with hindsight gets more attention. More so especially from the communities which grew, decades after especially in the United States, for shot-on-video and ultra low budget genre films, where they get Blu Ray releases even if preserved on VHS transfers with visible distortion from age and the materials used. It feels like one of the grand tent poles for this fan base that needs more recognition for its virtues with hindsight.

Science Crazed (1991)

 

Director: Ron Switzer

Screenplay: Ron Switzer

Cast: Cameron Scholes; Tony Della Ventura as The 'Fiend'; Robin Hartsell

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)  /An Abstract Film Candidate

 

I Suggest nerve gas tests in the following countries...[Long pause] France...[Even longer pause]...Canada...

 

Where did this Canadian SOV film come from? Chronologically even Science Crazed's date of birth is confusion. Some say 1991, others 1989 thus making it a film from the year of my birth, and I have belief it was at least shot in 1987 or around that period, due to a Toronto telephone directory book and how, with all the horror posters on the walls, some like Evil Dead 2 (1987) and Creepshow 2 (1987) time stamp the period. What cannot be denied that, between this and Things (1989), Canada in its dips into micro-budget cinema could get weird, Science Crazed one of those true oddities from this world with the added strangeness of disembodied voices, strange pacing and random tangents.

The notoriety of this film is immediately established when you notice how everything is s-l-o-w. Not Leonardo DiCaprio reduced to a bag of meat crawling to his car due to out-of-date Quaaludes as in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), nor even slow minimalist cinema, but a perplexing one-off form of minimalism. Half suspecting, with a shot of a book on Hegel on the left and a horror book on the right of the table, this was made on purpose like this at times, and at other times clearly by accident and by an unknown psychological influence. The opening is full of pregnant pauses, as a doctor researching a serum that causes quick pregnancies is told by the board funding him to stop the research, represented by one man. Both have dubbed over post-synch voices. The doctor, rocking sunglasses, still continues the experiment with a willing female subject where, in exactly three hours, she will become pregnant, and in twenty one hours, give birth. The unfortunate issue of a bloody aftermath transpires where the woman dies, and the male and female assistants have to cover up the incident whilst keeping the baby. Said baby gestates, rapidly, into a full grown man with a bloody bandaged head, elf ears, a bloodied white shirt and jeans, and a taste for strangling random people to death including the doctor himself, unhappy about his existence.

Science Crazed takes a very simple premise and runs it into a form of ultra minimalism. Said son, looking like Marlon Brandon in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) after a horrifying shaving accident, making insanely deep breathing noises (especially in how they are mixed on the soundtrack among the disembodied and repeated synth) and drags himself along with a lame leg. Anyone, anyone, he encounters he chokes, sometimes with one hand, and kills in his random path in a building complex which is a stand in for a lab and a variety of environments. Science Crazed for those who know it is notorious for its strange narcoleptic tone, the set up a traditional one for any horror, only to drift off between the VHS hiss silence between music strings. It is a film set in its own world of logic due to budgetary restrictions - when the cocky detective is called at a Video Shed rental store, looking at a Rambo VHS tape, and takes the call as if at a police station whilst the clerk makes funny faces during the conversation. And of course, the film places its gonads on the table by how extreme this gets through a ten minute exercise sequence. It is what this sentence suggests - two woman, one in a pink tutu whilst the other in a form fitting piece, exercising in-between shots of the monster limping along in a corridor for what does last ten minutes of running time. Maybe because I was prepared for this notorious sequence, it did not beat me down, and was amusing instead, but it is literally the scene that makes or breaks a viewer's experience because it early on in the production. It warns you how more random, and how prolonged and dragged out, the film will get.

It is abstract? Science Crazed does eventually ware you down into a daze, as in terms of a plot, it is barely one baring the detective and the doctor's assistances tracking the Fiend down. The production feels improvised but in a peculiar way as a result. You can struggle in padding out a film, as has been found in micro-budget genre cinema, but how does one explain the scene where a woman, behind a desk, says extremely slowly with length pauses names of countries to start nerve gas tests in, which is never explained or elaborated upon, baring that it is the definition of random improvisation? Or the prolonged scene that does make sense in context, but lingers, of a woman approaching the Fiend calmly in a room with silhouettes drawn on the white wall, caressing the heavily breathing monster for a prolonged moment, avant garde film levels in pace, all for a backbreaking bear hug as a receipt? Or the other woman with a very Canadian accent, as the camera spins around her in the dark, speaking to herself (without sound) in prayer despite looking like an eighties day glow punkette? The accidental minimalism of this monster film is its own strange experience.

The film in its final act, by the time the fiend has terrorised an indoor swimming pool with wooden panelling, does feel the burden of its weight if you cannot engage with its tone, as liable as it did when I first saw the film to cause the viewer to drift off into the visuals. Ultimately, between this and Things, Things is so consistently strange that you do keep alert once you understand its logic. Science Crazed in its own way is just as fascinating, but in terms of being a film that is a repetition of shots, of the fiend limping along or watching bystanders at the swimming pool, which are stretched out to an extreme. Not a lot actually happens in terms of a film, one which could have been less the sixty minutes or shorter, and as a result it is closer to a monster film distorted beyond recognition. Even for a horror fan, there is not a lot of the luridness of gore either and any practical effects, barring some fake blood, with a lot of the film following an old b-movie trope of a monster strangling a person, sometimes with one hand, which is very easy to act out but for most people is usually a sign of a terrible horror film. It is an acquired taste.

As a film openly hostile to a conventional viewing experience, this is in itself strange and unconventional, which is, ultimately, why it has developed the reputation over a decade it has. It is abstract though? There are as potentially strange concoctions done on purpose you could imagine - if Michael Snow, the Canadian avant-garde film maker, or a slow cinema director had helmed a b-movie horror film but kept in Bela Tarr length long takes. One can imagine, shot from a distance the exercise sequence, in a one take ten minute sequence, in real time before a monster killed the participants, and whilst not for everyone, that would have been memorable in the annuals of horror cinema in itself. Science Crazed itself, for all the moments clearly intentional in structure, is not intentional at other times, and thus is something else, and part of its legacy as an obscure oddity, which is the entire micro-budget genre where some due to their form and budgetary restrictions leads to perplexing distortions in audio-visual content as much as ones which fully succeed. Many, frankly, most people would not find appealing in the slightest; however for someone like me, whether shot on videotape camera or a digital one from the early 2000s, with just limited resources, they seem to exist in their own little worlds with their own rules that are compelling to witness and their own form of abstraction. That the film promised a sequel in the end credits, the "Revenge of the "Fiend"" is almost a cherry on top to this particular example. That, with its director having disappeared entirely, it is the ultimate what-if mystery of what the blue hell a sequel to Science Crazed would have turned out like if he kept making films.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist/Psychotronic/Random/Slow

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Killjoy 1 & 2: Deliverance from Evil (2000-2)

 

Director(s): Craig Ross (Killjoy) / Tammi Sutton (Killjoy 2)

Screenplay(s): Carl Washington (Killjoy) / Douglas Snaffer and ammi Sutton (Killjoy 2)

Cast(s):

Killjoy: Ángel Vargas as Killjoy The Demonic Clown; Vera Yell as Jada; Lee Marks as Jamal; D. Austin as Monique; Jamal Grimes as Michael; William L. Johnson as Lorenzo; Corey Hampton as "T-Bone"; Rani Goulant as "Baby Boy"; Napiera Groves as Kahara; Arthur Burghardt as the Homeless Man

Killjoy 2: Trent Haaga as Killjoy; Charles Austin as Nic Gordon; Logan Alexander as Lieutenant Harris Redding; Debbie Rochon as Denise Martinez; Nicole Pulliam as Cecile “Ce-Ce” Washington; Choice Skinner as Raymond “Ray-Ray” Martin; Olimpia Fernandez as Charlotte Davis; Jermaine Cheeseborough as Eddie Jasper; Tammi Sutton as Lilly; Rhonda Claerbaut as Kadja Boszo

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

The original Killjoy, the only one of the franchise I had ever seen over years, was one of many low to micro-budget horror films I picked on for that reason. A lot has changed over the years with my tastes in cinema, and Killjoy is interesting, from Full Moon Pictures and Charles Band, as a film made by a black filmmaker making a horror film set around a black cast, which should not be the immediate thing to pick up from in a review on the film aside from the fact, with mostly white directors and productions making the most well known horror films at this time into the Millennium, you get here a minority voice when even the horror genre did not feel as well representated as it probably should have always been. This story opens with a young man named Michael whom, asking a woman named Jada out, gets brutalised by her boyfriend Lorenzo and his gang. They do not suspect him to practice occult arts and try to bring forth the titular Killjoy, a homicidal clown figure. Michael neither expected to be killed by Lorenzo, who takes him to the woods to scare him, only to realise too late his gun was still loaded.

Killjoy is an odd one to try to review as, over seventy minutes, you cannot really elaborate on its premise, where the ominous creepy clown arrives a year late to bump off Lorenzo and his friends in an ice cream truck with a dimensional wormhole in the back. This is insanely economical in getting to the chase in the beginning, getting through the plot with little chaff, and concluding in a short running time. Set around Jada being under threat from this spectre, despite having long split from Lorenzo, this still has a personality, just in terms of being an early digital 2000s film, such as the vaporwave Windows 95 synth score if disarming for a horror film, or how Killjoy's opening gambit, in an ice cream truck that sells bootleg Sonic the Hedgehog headed lollies, is to drive up to Lorenzo's friends and offer them special weed. Effectively, this character is inspired by Freddy Krueger if not preying on people in dreams, able to wander in real life and taking people into the ice cream truck. Said truck sends them to a scary warehouse out of dimension where he can kill you in a variety of ways with wisecracks following. It cannot really do the elaborate effects of the Elm Street franchise, though this presents the warning to never smoke a random joint you find lodged in a chain link fence, or you will be lit up in many ways than one, and at its short length, there is no time to mood building. Thankfully you do get, in its swift length, Ángel Vargas as Killjoy, someone who brings energy to the proceedings because he decided to swing for the fences with the performance, plus a subversion of a genre trope of a no bullshit elder sage who cuts past being mocked for his supernatural warning to the leads by just providing them the truth psychically.

Sadly with Killjoy 2, a lot of this established lore goes out the window, and it feels more disappointing for me because a) this is a female filmmaker, again which should not need to be pointed out barring how at the time female filmmakers even in genre cinema were more a minority voice, and as someone who has come to admire micro-budget films, I have to respect anyone who tries to make a film. This is especially the case as a film where J. R. Bookwalter, a director of this field behind the likes of The Dead Next Door (1989), helped as a co-producer. Nonetheless, I have to admit I was not taken by this sequel, which promises a more elaborate premise, a group of criminals, petty thieves alongside a few women, including a sex worker caught for soliciting and a psychologically traumatised woman who was done for pyromania, who are taken by two police under orders to help construct a house to compensate for their crimes. You can also see a semblance of a very interesting premise as one of these criminals had cocaine planted on his by two white cops, a semblance of a political critique if there ever was one.

All minor demeanour figures, regardless, find themselves stuck in the woods with just the two cops sent to keep an eye on figures who double their number, a logic gap not of concern when the guys are goofing about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and getting condoms thinking they can seduce the female officer. Things go south when, after the car breaks down, someone is shot by a local thinking they are trespassing, by the director herself playing a hillbilly stereotype with a shotgun. In the chaos afterwards, Killjoy is summoned presuming he could heal him only to cause bloodshot, despite the warning of the voodoo priestess they wander into the home of. Killjoy is abruptly introduced after said priestess introduces him for the first time in the dialogue, and it is here that the film feels very disconnected from the original, sadly as much because Ángel Vargas is not here to reprise the role.  Whilst the new actor Trent Haaga does a good chicken impression and tries, what they established with the character in the first film is lost, and the sequel in general is a significant step down from before. Barring one scene where chattering teeth are used to gruesome effect off-screen in a wooden outhouse, there is a film here which feels too restrained to fully embrace a chaotic tone, trying to tell a story which is less interesting than if it had jettisoned it.

As her first film, thankfully Tammi Sutton would continue to direct and produce after this production, which in mind to how IMDB can be challenged for accuracy, was a film shot in only eight days¹. That does not necessarily equal a film can falter, but in this case struggles there is the sense they could not get much onscreen barring the essentials, and what they were able to create was material which did not win me over. Craig Ross Jr., the director of the first film, directed other films and television, never returning to the franchise as did Angel Vargas, never returning to the Killjoy role whilst Trent Haaga would reprise the role in sequels. There is a significant gap where the franchise was put on ice by Full Moon, taking to 2010 with Killjoy 3. This leaves this as a double bill of the early version of the character, before a reboot in many ways, from the 2010s onwards. Killjoy would come dormant for those eight years before the additional sequels would fully immerse this as part of the many franchise that Full Moon Entertainment would have under their belt; truthfully, Killjoy 2, if I still had any of the venom of my younger self, would replace the first film as one I once had on a "Worst List", but I do not even feel that way inclined anymore, only disappointed it did not appeal to me whatsoever, wishing what is here over rewatches will grow on me in spite of that initial disappointment so I can be able to appreciate it. Killjoy is an economically put together film which does not have the lurid weirdness of other micro-budget films, but I can appreciate for what it does, accomplished and tries, so I find the long time to reach it with happiness.  

=====

1) IMDB's trivia page for Killjoy 2: Deliverance from Evil.

Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine (2000)

aka. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine in Daehakroh

Director: Gee-woong Nam

Screenplay: Gee-woong Nam

Cast: So-yun Lee (as the Teenage Hooker), Dae-tong Kim (as The Teacher)

An Abstract Candidate

 

When I first approached Teenager Hooker..., there was no wonder I hated this, as I had a zero taste for micro budget films which went against the norms of genre cinema just in terms of budgetary limitations, let alone their unconventionality. Now I love these films, and Teenager Hooker... is an idiosyncratic production for those who share that similar taste. It has a premise you would expect from Japanese films made with an eye for the West as from Sushi Typhoon in the mid-2000s - a schoolgirl prostitute (So-yun Lee) is caught having sex with a client against the wall of a older woman's apartment, the son the schoolgirl's teacher (Dae-tong Kim) who gets his three brothers to dispose of her gruesomely as punishment...only for a secret organisation to bring her back as a biomechanical assassin. The twist is that this is a South Korean production just in the cusp of their great cultural wave in terms of Korean cinema getting huge recognition in the West. Director/screenwriter/cinematographer Gee-woong Nam's filmography sadly stops into the mid-2010s, but it delights me that he managed to get a long run from his debut here, include a TV movie, which I will bring up later.

Suffice to say, I was not prepared for what is on the surface a premise I found in a lot of films from this DVD era I got to by the late 2000s and hovered old DVDs from the early half of the decade even a few decades after; this was a time not just of the "Tartan Asian Extreme" era, in reference to the side label the late British film distributor Tartan managed to ride a hugely successful wave on at this time, but the time of the likes of groups like Arts Magic who brought lower budget films, including early V-Cinema era Takashi Miike to our sources, who is a good comparison in terms of the abrupt curveballs this has. Even then, his films were ones I liked back at a time when I hated this one, which turned out to be an eccentric mood piece. The immediate thing to bring up beyond how distinct its soundtrack cuts are, between Primal Scream's Swastika Eyes (a Chemical Brothers remix) to Mozart, is that this is a standard definition digital camera film which looks even more unreal nowadays as the images have become more blurry. Taking a while even to start as a sixty minute film, languidly letting our female lead wander dingy dark streets, you have the harsh lighting of the format that film was shot on, where blue parts of the streets mix with the orange yellow of artificial street lighting that immediately started to win me over rather than put me off as my younger self may have react to.

Visually as a result, this absolutely would have disappointed someone expecting a film Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl (2008) from Japan; while it belongs tentatively in the same camp as this area of eccentric genre films on lower budgets coming from the East Asian countries at the time imported into the West, this is a far and away more confounding one to sit through. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an eye-catching title but the results, only sixty minutes long, are a lot more unexpected than anyone could expect, especially as that led to why I once hated this film to the point I held it up as one of the worst films I ever saw, all because the title catch my attention in a DVD review magazine, and I went out of my way to see it. Instead of the obviously weird, I ended up witnessing something much more using its idiosyncratic plot and moments of lurid content in very obtuse ways.

The result feels like an attempt to cross mutate an avant-garde film with lurid genre cinema, especially in how director Gee-woong Nam emphasises and lengthens minor parts over major plotting. Having such a small space of time at hand should force one to be economic but this film takes a different attitude completely to this notion, deciding to have six minutes or so taken up by just the opening credits as mentioned, the titular schoolgirl stood still in the middle of a Korean urban street as music plays. Immediately drastic tonal shifts are found where, after the serious presentation of the opening credits, the film starts with the female protagonist asking a potential client if he wants to pay for "voluntary date-rape", leading to him "chasing" her with a Cronenbergian phallic gift, and then (dry) humping against a wall where she's bored and texting on her phone mid-coitus. The film goes even further with going to an older female widow losing her mind hearing them having sex against her building wall, clearly meant to be humorous but quite disturbing in how she rants immediately into a phone in the middle of the night with a deranged tone to her voice. The production design here also emphasises Gee-woong Nam was deliberately taking advantage of the eerie nature of his standard definition camera as much as it was a practical choice, as he shots the widow's scene in a darkened room with painstakingly lit candles, multiple candles to the point of having been a nightmare to collect together, as the main source of lighting for the scene. This introduces the viewer to the main antagonist, the putty faced and giant chin welding school teacher, which to this day I cannot decide is a prosthetic or his actual magnificently rubber face, catching the schoolgirl working at his home and waking his grandmother up. This leads to her demise but not before you get a prolonged few minutes of the two, when she asks for forgiveness by offering free sexual services, of them recreating a mating ritual animals do by swaying on the spot to non-diegetic music.

The film goes along from here with a mix of styles with avant-garde leanings even if by accident, a lo-fi visual I can justify comparing to video art installation work, specifically from an older review I did a long time ago to Bill Viola's Hatsu-Yume (1982) in terms of lighting and style if shot in digital. Back then, this was a credible comparison as Viola, an established American video artist, with that project was shooting on eighties video cameras around places Japan and thus (even from my own faded memories) emphasised the artificial urban lighting in certain locations chosen, something you find here as Gee-woong Nam is working around a lot of real locations and the liminal spaces in-between, especially as night where artificial lighting would be needed, between public bathrooms to obscure diners. This is set around a very low budget movie tone that includes the slow pace, emphasis on dialogue and minor actions, and interspersed splat sticks prosthetic effects driven content. The result is unpredictable and leaves a viewer thrown between tones wildly. You can go from a heartfelt and serious monologue, post-coitus and done directly to the camera, from the schoolgirl about her life and how she wants her newly conceived baby to grow up into a opera singer, set to a piece from Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns, to a bizarre gore scene in a bathroom where a foetus still attached by the umbilical cord is floating in the air after she gets blasted through the stomach by the teacher with a gun.

What was once an off-putting aspect of the film for me, the DV photography, actually contributes a great deal to the film for me in how its muddy image appeals as an aesthetic in its own right. The imperfect can have a beauty to it even if it is in the eye of the beholder, and the lo-fi aesthetic sticks out for me on this viewing because of its murkiness and distorted colour lighting, a style as much as the richness of celluloid film or the clearness of high definition in later low budget genre films. Some very striking images start to come to be because of this, such as that incident in the bathroom which is shot in luminous green lighting, almost Vaseline smeared, with the deliberate harshness of the saturated lighting insanely stylish. The more overtly lurid moments, such as intercutting between the teacher and three brothers having their way with the lead, sawing her into pieces, or actress So-yun Lee bravely dealing with nude scenes and/or strapped to machinery built from metal beans and tubing, are contrasted by ones I would expect from video art I have watched, such as intercutting to an actual opera singer never addressed by the cast singing in the scene nearby. These later details now I see are more overtly unconventional choices on purpose.

Particularly with the shots in the open streets or an empty night road, it evokes video art from a variety of decades as mentioned by way of a video camera which distorts the lighting and the colour, in how the failing image adds to the sense of environment that crisp photography might not do well with all the time. Even the moments of scenery consuming colour lighting adds to the distorted sense of reality the film has where everything is out-of-whack to suit the messy visual look. It almost takes one back, for a moment of unintentional comedy, when I spotted a prominent KFC restaurant out of nowhere in a moody scene over turntable music in real South Korean streets. The music is surprisingly strong as already mentioned, and anyone who hates the film would still appreciate the choices immensely. The director has a good taste in classical music and remixes by the likes of Massive Attack, where even in scenes that might frustrate people, such as an opera singer inexplicably stood on a pier as mentioned, masked by the bright white light in front of the camera above them, you still have good music being played that has a grandeur to it. These tonal switches are further fudged by the brief inclusion of an assassin subplot with sci-fi trappings where the schoolgirl, now a biomechanical cyborg, has to kill a person in a restaurant. The further genre changing does pull the film fully into the lurid genre cinema of the time though closer to Takashi Miike's, in both how he abruptly undercut these premises with moments of quietness, or that when he did ramp up the absurdity, he was glad to. The crotch gun that ends this film, subverted as a phallic object inside a man's mouth from a woman in this case, is something he could have done in one of his films.

The experience of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an acquired taste, a lot of its strange tone one which would catch a lot off. It's the blurring of the artistic and the lurid that causes a lot of this, but I have come to love this as time has gone on, where you find yourself both with the pacing of a more atmospheric film, but contrasted by your antagonists being a high pitched voice man with rubber putty all over his head and three strange brothers by his side, one calling himself a girl and their method of dismemberment being a comically large saw a magician would use for a magic show, the artistic aspirations clashing continually with these creative decisions that now win me over. We can only thank an early DVD release by Third Window Pictures in Britain for licensing this - an unsung hero especially for Japanese cinema like Shinya Tsukamoto to Sogo "Gakuryū" Ishii on Blu-Ray - in fully translated English subtitles, as we never got any of the other films from Gee-woong Nam.  As a director, he would continue with these very idiosyncratic titles - Chow Yun-Fat Boy Meets Brownie Girl (2002) furthers this eye catching title with a premise about a jar the former finds that allows him to turn snails into human beings, whilst Never Belongs to Me (2006) sounds like a premise to a Shinya Tsukamoto or Miike film we sadly never got, of a man who on request of his girlfriend in an act of revenge has his penis replaced with a gun that fires on orgasm to use on those who did them wrong. Whether they were any good or not is entirely not for the place of this review, but if any of them demonstrated the style and idiosyncrasies of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine, that would make them more enticing.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Debbie Does Damnation (1999)

Director: Slain Wayne

Screenplay: Slain Wayne

Cast: Ernest Brummer, Jeanin Lake, Tony Nittoli, Lisa Pete, Charles Pinion, William Smith, Michael Sonye and Slain Wayne

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Now I’ve got your horn motherfucker.

We are in for something out of the ordinary, and not for the widest of audiences, when in stark black and white a cannibalistic demon is munching through corpses in a room with a nude woman tied up on her stomach on a nearby table, ready to be his next meal. A stop motion skull spider with a British accent named Tregor comes to the rescue, on condition to kill the cannibal and go on a quest on his behalf for the Devil’s horns. Unfortunately she gets eaten by a stop motion Hell Dragon and Tregor is forced to find another woman for the quest, one named Debbie who has fallen into Hell recently, despite her guardian angel attempting to save her, and will be centre to multiple sides taking note of her.

A labor of love that looks like it took years to even complete, there will be many stop motion monstrosities onscreen, as there will be a lot of full frontal nudity, as initially Debbie finds herself is Hell without clothes, and a lot of content which will be off-putting for many. There will be content which has not aged well, content that will be random and abrupt, or just perverse, and there will be moments I still have to admire the fact the forty plus minute production even got made. Debbie finds herself in a war over the Devil’s horns, Satan himself reduced to a hornless head who wishes her to get them back, betrayed by two men who have the horns and are now about to start warning with each other in the film to get both for themselves. One of these two men, introduced briefly with two mouse traps on his cheeks, is the MVP for all the profane dialogue with eloquent choices of wording he has as a torture loving figure in the midst of a lo-fi medieval fantasy war with the other betrayer with soldiers and stop motion figures.

Debbie Does Damnation is only corpse paint away from a black metal video at times, scored to ambient music with guitar noodling, full of evil deviants from the Morph plasticine family tree and built from sets varying from Forbidden Zone (1980) to a bizarre avant-garde theatre production primarily using cardboard. Within such sets is stuff that is definitely not-PC nowadays, moments where this is a very unconventional fetish video, and stuff that is unintentionally ridiculous as other moments are pure bravado in getting them onto the screen with clear hard work and visible duck tape. It is unconventional to say the least, all which has to be ingested as really rough material, yet made with love by a porn director with a taste for kink. It was made before he fully went into the video porn director’s chair with titles which do not hide their content, some sounding a tad extreme for comfort, and others involving Kung Fu Girls 3 (2003) which do however ask interesting questions of what they are about even as porn films from the straight-to-DVD era. More so as I learnt of this film from Annie Choi of Bleeding Skull, this is a bizarre experience to get to, strange but undoubtedly a labor of love, hard earned in getting finished and crafted in a way I have to admire even if its own stream-of-consciousness will throw a lot of people off.

As Debbie finds herself with clothes, a sword and a quest between a civil war, as female warriors fight male ones, we see a film shot on Super 8, the director’s last bang (according to the making of including with this) before his full porn career began. In context, it makes sense how its attitude is with zero fucks given in wanting to do whatever it wants. Said to exist with the “R Rated version” I saw and an x-rated version, director Slain Wayne literally built the sets to what feels like being in someone’s skull for a near hour. Made from the gut of what was cool or sexy or deliberately edgy, I openly think aspects of this production are juvenile, some of it is tasteless and an issue, like a monster dubbed “a fucking spud monkey” said to be possibly on crack, but also has moments I have to admire. Even if you have to get into the gruel, weird improvised dialogue in the post-synched dialogue, or the fetishistic moments, like the random scene of Debbie being spanked by a warrior, or a scene of women being threatened with torture that show its hand for wanting to be kinky too, there are others where you did not need to take the time to have all the extensive homemade stop motion monsters which would have been painstaking to animate on any budget, but this nonetheless decided to have. Its extensive use of Barbie dolls in cutaway scenes or mannequin body parts to depict decapitations, sword stabbings and being eaten by plasticine hell hounds makes this considerably a higher bar in terms of a film trying to make a memorable micro budget film, even if it is a very nihilistic take on Hell where no one survives or is safe, even a flying skull finding itself forced into being a flesh light against its will. Its aspects of kink and very rough dialogue will put people off, and I will not defend it whatsoever; the virtues of the film come from the moments away from these which are ridiculous in tone and in actually being realized.

Even its sense of perversity at times has to be admired for its complete disregard for the expected, as you have a sex scene with a Mistress of Darkness involving a man bobbing for tentacles between her thighs, and if that is off-putting to hear, obviously Debbie Does Damnation is not recommended. But with that scene actually a highlight for intentional bad taste and funny lines, there is someone to admire of a film which is completely gunning to be memorable, and never is a lazy ironic way either. It is one which truly lives up to the notion of putting your heart and soul into a project, even if said project is as profane as this. 

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Grotesque

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (1995)

Art by Graham Humphreys

Director: Shinichi Fukazawa

Screenplay: Shinichi Fukazawa

Cast: Shinichi Fukazawa as Shinji, Asako Nosaka as Mika, Masahiro Kai the Psychic

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

A guy needs muscles after all!

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell from the get-go has the story of its director Shinichi Fukazawa. An outsider to the Japanese film industry, he was interested with bodybuilding, splatter films imported into Japan like the Evil Dead series started by Sam Raimi's 1981 independently made horror film¹, deciding to make what would become a film just over an hour in tribute. It belongs to a long history of Japanese lower budget films like this with homemade splatter effects and mid-nineties video production. The difference to others, like those made for the straight-to-video market, like Jôji Iida's Cyclops (1987), which were forty plus or so minute mini-features which got released soon after they were filmed for the video market, Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell was left unfinished and unseen for fifteen years¹. It took, according to its star/writer/director/practical effects creator Fukazawa seven and a half years just to shoot the film, between re-scheduling, problems with the film stock he was forced to film on, and working around his and his cast's lives, and another seven and a half years for post-production¹. Fukazawa was finally able to complete the production in 2009 after beginning the editing process of all the 8mm film started on from 2005². Including having to take an additional two years for the original independent version of DVD¹, Fukazawa was finally able to complete the production which would become a work of international interest as well.

Those two obsessions of its lead/director Shinichi Fukazawa are very clearly visible in the film itself, and far from a critique to note the clear tributes to the Evil Dead films, as a tribute that came to us long after originally intended, by the time the Evil Dead became a pop culture institution, this really stands out again because of this. The plot is very simple, set up in a thirty years earlier prologue where a man accidently kills the girlfriend, he was about to leave, when she was trying to kill him with a knife. Burying the body in the house, this is the father of our lead Shinji (also played by Fukazawa), aptly leaving a curse for the son of a different woman he would marry that will haunt Shinji. Keeping the house as an heirloom, in real life a house the director's real father was going to scrap that was in a Tokyo suburb and his son took advantage of to film within¹, Shinji will only go back when convinced by an ex-girlfriend and journalist Mika (Asako Nosaka). With her fascination in haunted houses and wishing to write about examples like her old flame's, when learning of the strange goings-on in the premises, Mika takes him to the building.

He does not believe in ghosts, only in fitness and that smoking ruins one's beauty by sapping away the vitamin C in one's body, but the curse of his father before he met his mother now is in his lap. He goes with Mika and a male psychic (Masahiro Kai), and the later becomes the start of the hauntings as he has legitimate psychic abilities, allowing the ghost of the jilted girlfriend to possess him, thinking Shinji as his lookalike is his father and deserving punishment. It feels a homemade production, which begins because when wanting to use another 16mm or Betacam, Shinichi Fukazawa for the budget had to use 8mm, which caused as much as the problems which would cause this film to take as long as it did to be finished even in terms of digitizing the footage in the extended post-production¹.  Thankfully, with a complete film, it has the charm and atmosphere of a home movie of the time, played on a projector with actually sprockets, adding a distinct look. With hindsight, especially as its production history adds a layer like it was rediscovered and rebuilt, that helps in mood as, in mind to the homemade quality of the first Evil Dead, you see a one-man band show an incredible amount of moxy and quality to this, as well as provide a distinct tone to this film. There are visible lifts from The Evil Dead, as the psychic is possessed and even dismemberment will not stop a spurned lover who confuses son for father, but there is as much its own spin on the material even when Shinichi Fukazawa does get a moment to say "Groovy" like Bruce Campbell.

It has its own atmosphere, helped by the small house the production was able to spill fake blood within and furthered by the practical methods to depict this gory splatter fest, the later entirely of Shinichi Fukazawa's own craft and in itself worthy of incredible praise. Some moments have eerieness to them, such as the father returning from the dead on a TV, and others are funny, such as the punch line to a random criticism of Mika's smoking biting the leads when trying to dispose of evil sentient corpse pieces. The practical effects, even the moments where they seemingly took still images and coloured over them, are memorable especially as it is overtly humorous and deliberately repulsive in the "slapstick" tone. As a fan of films like Evil Dead or Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) when he wanted to make the film, Fukazawa got the right tone with what he loved from these films, in touches like the hand-feet meldings to the attempts at dynamic shots like the camera following flying projectiles taken from Raimi. His interest in body building does come into play, being able to hulk out of his shirt onscreen and use gym equipment as an improvised crossbow at one point, itself adding a distinct touch to the proceedings.

Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell even in terms of its turbulent gestation history really exemplifies what entices about micro-budget cinema for me. It is about outsiders who get to make films away from industries to their personalities, putting everything including probably actual blood into the materials to get it made. Shinichi Fukazawa has yet to make another film, but he can at least be proud he completed this one, with the warm reception received even globally as the perfect introduction to this type of cinema in attitude.

======

1) An Interview with Director Shinichi Fukazawa, Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, written by Ken Wynne for Attack from Planet B and published on April 28th 2017.

2) Reel Review: Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell, written for Morbidly Beautiful and published October 11th 2017.

Zombie Rampage (1989)

 

Director: Todd Sheets

Screenplay: Erin Kehr & Todd Sheets

Cast: Dave Byerly as Tommy / Mime, Erin Kehr as Dave, Stanna Bippus as Sheila, Beth Belanti as Sherry, Brian Everad as Pusshead, Deric Bernier as Hammerspike, Lisa Cottoner as Fox, Laura Young as Tracy, Larry Hodges as Piggy, Danon Park as George, Jason Ayers as Roger, John Welch as Jason, Ed Dill as Brian

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Kicking off with a metal cover of Norman Greenbaum's Spirit in the Sky as rival gangs of punks, one in a suit, beat each other up, it is for Todd Sheet's feature length debut, after a series of shorts, a good opening to a career which lasted for decades. Whether the original cut or the Director's Cut I had watched, I do think however, with sincerely, even he might view this as a mess. As a veteran micro budget director who visually showed improvements over time from this first film, even if it has the perfect (and goofy) opening to a career, it is an acquired taste to witness despite the fact this actually has some higher production value, and at least locations in use, than some of the films he made later on. It is an erratic film to say the least.

Premise wise a gang leader, looking like a white collar middle manager in a tie and grey suit, but with a prominent left ear ring, acquired a book to be able to resurrect a recently slain member from the graveyard, even if it cost the group their beer money. The other gang they were against, with another copy of the book, make the mistake instead to use the text, this accidently causing an undead epidemic. Even though this is set up, Zombie Rampage does not properly established the undead hordes appearing until abruptly into itself part of the way through, and does feel like huge chunks of the plot are missing. My younger self would have called this one of the worst films ever made, and even now able to appreciate this and micro budget cinema in its flaws, this one definitely requires a patience to be able to appreciate this as it feels like a mass of ideas and fragments placed together.  Clearly, Sheets had some production value it hand with this, with extensive scenes in a variety of buildings and streets, unlike ones in the few years after confined to one location, but it also feels like a stream of consciousness. The loose nature of micro budget cinema, when allowed to drift, is felt at an extreme here when even the zombie outbreak central to the film is abruptly introduced, instead focusing on a side character we will never see again go on a deranged tangent about his dog named Butthead.

I will be more sympathetic to Sheets’ debut than most, unlike the first time I saw this, as much because I have seen him over his career climb in terms of craft with these films, and also because, with no expectations, there is a joy I can now have watching a film like this which is literally a collage of pieces which jut and stick out from each other. This feels like it had to be improvised over weekends, and was a mad editing nightmare, with audibly noticeable voice over added for dialogue and harsh edits which feel, even in a battered VHS copy, as if the tape was failing. The cool Italian horror inspired synth in the score notwithstanding, it feels like a half remembered film, half dreamt, in ways I have to honestly say in the negative if I am still going to say positively I still enjoyed this. A lot of this is because, despite the zombies being the centre of the film, this feels like a disconnected take on its own premise, even in mind that zombies are an easy premise for any low budget film to work with. It was ambitious beyond its means, and thus becomes a barely cohesive form, where it will be a struggle for those who would appreciate later Todd Sheets work like Moonchild (1994) where the technical quality and pacing, still with the homemade quality, are noticeably improved. This debut’s ambition goes as far as even taking advantage of the public domains status of Night of the Living Dead (1968) to borrow its radio announcer, but in wanting to recreate the ending of Return of the Living Dead (1985) without access to stock explosion footage, you also see the flaws when you have the most abrupt conclusion possible too.

A random serial killer of women is among the cast, random figures will talk about their arguments with family about inheritance whilst in fear of their lives from zombies in a basement, and grandpa will be talked of having chewed on grandma, all whilst this begins Todd Sheets’ use of organ meat from butchers, combined with the fake blood to the point here it would permanently stain wash denim bloody red. Random abrupt nudity, when an older female patron offers herself to a bar keep to pay the tap, who has no interest, and Todd Sheets gets to rock out his metal hair as a rival gang leader despite his gang disappearing from the film entirely. There is one moment which is pretty striking, in which a mother with her baby in a pram are got by zombies, which is pretty extreme even for this type of cinema, but tonally the rest of Zombie Rampage is goofier, intentionally and not, for its length. There are also plenty of things which are pretty random, such as the mime faced guy in a baseball cap, possible based on the baseball furies from The Warriors (1979), which just emphasises the chaotic mix of the resulting product. Zombie Rampage is not a film I would recommended unless you were used to Todd Sheets’ work, as I am, and prepared for its messy nature. Sheets would return to this theme of zombies in other films, so he was able to rework this as his skills would improve. This is just a curiosity which proves that everyone begins somewhere, and your first attempt can sometimes show this.

Odd Noggins (2015)

 

Director: Joe Sherlock

Screenplay: Joe Sherlock

Cast: Melody Berg as Amanda; Juniper Bloodraven as Miss Garland; John Bowker as the Drunk Grandpa; Emily Howard as Shannon; Richard Johnson as Tom; Bryn Kristi as Liberty; Morgan Mayhem as Tammi; Rob Merickel as Uni; Roxxy Mountains as Tami; Bob Olin as John; Kirk Sardonis as Jeff; Connor Sherlock as Jeff

An Abstract Candidate

 

Half Gator

Half Man

Caught on security cam!!!

Aliens. Always the menace, abducting women and pulling out their intestines in nightmares, but in this context, Joe Sherlock's Odd Noggins comes with the knowledge that, whilst they are integral to the film, everything you would normally expect even from a micro budget film, and what to presume with one about said aliens, flies out the window. The woman we are introduced to have these nightmares, clearly believing she was abducted by aliens, is sympathetic and takes a stance. Where things abruptly turn is the moment she dissolves into yellow custard and all that remains is a skeleton...in a film watched by another woman.

I was aware, through a podcast named No-Budget Nightmares, Odd Noggins was going to be a perplexing experience even for a micro-budget film, and there is the additional context that the original version they covered was from 2000, whilst this is the 2015 remake I am covering, still a weird amalgamation of non-sequiturs, a UFO plot and going against expectations of conventional genre films. This was where I first learnt of pimento loaf, a food item I never heard of until learning of this film's existence, and this clearly shows that director-writer Joe Sherlock either has a thing for women drinking beer in the bath, or does but also enjoys doing so himself, with drinking beer in the hot tub the more decadent option to really enjoy life. For the version I saw, it is a film that, even if shot in many people's homes, has its own gleefully playful sense of logic you have to accept or you will hate this film. Expect to be befuddled on purpose, as this repeats and refers to small details in a noodle map of logic not following its plot in great elaboration. That film within a film for starters is referenced throughout, mostly following various women who end up watching the film and/or referencing it without greater context, but there is never context given for it, even if linked to the central plot, nor considered related to the aliens in that film proper.  In one scene a male bar keeper jokes about an art house film which just leads from one person than to another's path they cross with, than onwards. It is breaking the forth wall in talking of how that is the structure here, and inexplicably, I can reference a film like Max Ophüls' La Ronge (1950), a film literally about a circling narrative of interlinked romances, as a comparable example with Odd Noggins of all things. That is respect for Sherlock himself as, playing in its own logic, this toys with leading the viewer around the garden path deliberately, so any unexpected similarities to acclaimed art house cinema from French is entirely because this film itself is structured this unconventionally on purpose too.

This follows a string of characters in strange scenarios, including a "Bellygram" dance, a belly dancing strip-o-gram figure without the nudity, a sad female clown, and various women that are part of a UFO conspiracy with many drinking beer in the bathtub, even still wearing the clown makeup. I bring that up again, and I will probably get a weird look from the reader from across the internet for this, but this is a behaviour which happens a lot here to the point you have to address it, with many of these female characters doing this. And yes, the nudity as a result by the female cast is far more frequent than even some erotic films, surprisingly so. In mind to concerns about this, if one is going to have exploitative factors like this, Odd Noggins can also legitimately claim to be a standard bearer for body positivity even when it is doing this for titillation. It is amazingly positive as, something clearly through his career, Sherlock casts a diverse cast of actresses, of various ages and figures, larger women to smaller, and Odd Noggins at least bothers to have a wider view of women of all shapes and sizes being attractive. Even as a goofy free flowing piece, it is also about its female cast, frustrated workers in a variety of jobs, whilst the men are almost all weirdoes and doofuses on purpose. The exception is the man who needs special modification and dresses like a man in black. Clearly, in his case, he is connected to the aliens and really does not count, alongside the fact he also eats large jars of mayonnaise with a spoon.

All of this is part of this film's logic, to repeat little touches ad nauseum to befuddle the viewer. This feels unlike some films from this area of having improvised their plots with little, but a micro budget film with a fixation on deliberately repetition, Twin Peaks references, and finding concepts like a Renaissance fair and pimento loaf in the abstract inherently funny as concepts. Occasionally, as want of its alien premise, people melt into luminous lemon meringue filling barring the bones, the kind you get from even English cafes underneath Perspex covers. Most, if you cannot vibe with this, will hate Odd Noggins, a film which does the "it was all a dream" twist as a standard moment. [Huge Spoiler] The actual twist is that most of the female cast are working with the aliens, to take men's heads and take them up to the mother ship in cardboard boxes. [Spoilers End] How Odd Noggins plays, since we follow the female cast, means that its finale never comes off as misogynistic symbolism of female tempters that sadly comes into storytelling a lot, but more like the men are, as mentioned, patsies. Figures like "Sir Porkalot", as he is dubbed by his girlfriend, and the rest of the male cast, obsessed with these women, are always side characters that are clueless and/or horny until the film reveals its actual plot. [Another Spoiler] Always too late when their heads are ripped off by pure strength. [Spoilers End]

The end is a pimento loaf sandwich being made with an insane amount of sauce and slices, in close up as the plot is actually explained, used aptly to conclude how this strange film closes out. This is an acquired taste, probably like that sandwich itself, but I have to credit Joe Sherlock for making something idiosyncratic. He was also also editing and scoring this, with the score itself too a compellingly odd synth score meant to evoke Theremin, drones and an end credit piece where "Shake your booty" is repeated, playing with the mood of proto vaporwave or recorded on musty tape on purpose. Throughout the film, characters also read a magazine like Weekly World News, famous for its UFO sighting claims and the cult hero Bat Boy, and that really suggests a lot of the tone. It is a film about the eccentric and the strange on purpose, and it actually lives up to the attitude that made me want to cover such films like this as a fan, of the film seemingly of "no purpose" defying expectations over and over again.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Non-Narrative

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low