Obex

 Conor (Albert Birney, who also writes and directs) lives as a shut-in in a small Baltimore house with his dog Sandy (Dorothy), where he runs a small mail-order business: People (kids, mostly) send him pictures along with five dollars, and he sends them back a portrait rendered in the futuristic medium of ASCII on a dot-matrix printout.

 Can you think of a more 1987 job than that? Connor even runs an ad in Personal Computing magazine, and the issue it's on gets flipped through lovingly on-camera. Birney, who made this film with a tiny handful of collaborators and a diminutive budget, was five in the year Obex is set, but does a good job of capturing the feel of being into computers in that decade (some petty technical quibbles aside). I should probably note that he co-directed the (also) very enjoyable Strawberry Mansion; This one's got a similar sense of warmth, wry humour and weirdo sensibilities. The humour, slow pacing and nerd-nostalgia-driven setting also reminded me a little of Andrew Bujalski's Computer Chess.

 It's a slow, slow film, easing us into the particulars of Conor's life before the truly weird shit arrives. Our protagonist is good company, and Sandy is a very, very good girl, but be warned you'll be also be treated to a midi-assisted, strangely sedate karaoke rendition of Gary Numan's Cars, and a prolonged taping of Nightmare on Elm Street before anything really happens. Eventually the plot does kick off: Obex, a dodgy computer game Conor signs up for on a whim, ends up summoning a demon into his house (a wonderfully creepy, well realized scene); The demon, Ixaroth, kidnaps Sandy and takes her back into its evil castle, forcing Conor to put on a Legend of Zelda cap and venture out past the cicada-infested wilderness out back and into the computer game, running into a couple of friendly NPCs and some hilariously naff insect-headed, army-jacketed goons.

 While Conor's quest never quite gels as high adventure (not with this budget), it does manage to make its otherworldly jaunt feel adventurous and weirdly creepy. Angry skeletons are put to rest, an ubiquitous storekeep (Callie Hernandez) lends help and exposition, and perilous locations are traversed via the medium of overlaid maps. Birney and his cinematographer (and co-star) Pete Ohs have a gift for dream-like imagery; Their black & white digital photography gives the film an effective, uncanny atmosphere and an enveloping sense of darkness, even when it's inevitably punctured with a goofy joke or two. It's all rounded out by a lovely, on-point retro synth score by Josh Dibb (he of Animal Collective).

 Obex is a slight - very slight - dark fantasy, one that balances its fundamental sweetness (remember, this is the tale of an overtly shy guy that risks everything for his dog) and gentle sense of humour with some surprisingly dark moments and a fairly effective sense of dread. It's DiY to a fault and takes its sweet time to get anywhere, but if you have the patience and the temperament for this sort of thing, it does so in an extremely likeable way.

Rumours

 There's a tiny subgenre of action that pits world leaders (well, ok, usually the US president) against terrorists or some other threat. It's never been very popular, but for whatever reason there's been a spike in their production lately (I won't get into the politics of it, but it is pretty concerning, particularly in the current climate). One of them even takes place at the G20 summit.

 I'd say Rumours is a direct response to that one movie, but it came out before it. It pits the members of the G7 as they face an unexpected siege by the wanking dead (no, that's not a typo and no, I won't expand on it). As you might  expect from a movie written and directed by Guy Maddin and frequent collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson, it attacks its material at a rather... oblique angle.

 The premise an obvious joke, if a pretty good one: The leaders of the free world convene to tackle on some (unspecified) world crisis only to be faced with a more immediate and dangerous one... and they dissolve into an ineffectual muddle of infighting, grandstanding, and incompetence.

 They're all so self-absorbed and so far removed from any real issues that they can't deal with one that directly threatens their survival, and I have to admit that I laughed several times even when the punchlines were only slightly different variations on a theme. I also laughed when the French President starts to look for hidden meaning within the events of the night, which feels like Maddin and co. gently poking fun at themselves and trolling their audience.

 The cast is very, very game and a lot of  fun to watch; The Chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett) awkwardly tries to hold things together. The president of Canada (Roy Dupuis) is basically a stroppy teen; The POTUS (Charles Dance with his native English accent) is an artifact stuck firmly in the glories of the past. The Japanese PM (Takehiro Hira) is pretty much a non-entity who goes along with anyone else's plan, and the French president (Denis Ménochet) is a pretentious windbag. The UK PM (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is stuck as the voice of reason along with the German Chancellor. And the Italian president (Rolando Ravello) is a sweet idiot who's just happy to be included, and provides some of the biggest laughs in the movie.

 Oh, and Alicia Vikander (adorable) puts in a short appearance as the leader of the European commission.

 While technically this is a zombie movie, this is first and foremost a bizarre surreal movie that's only barely interested in being a comedy, much less a horror film. It does find a couple of moments to play with genre aesthetics (a garishly-lit 80's style scene in the woods, and a beautiful mist-bound scene at a ferry dock drenched in sodium light), but other than some ambiance the scarce horror elements are strictly there for  laughs or as a surrealist sting.
 The satire, meanwhile, is a mixed bag; Some of its barbs are clear and cogent, like the president of France making pompous, grandiloquent statements while being carried in a wheelbarrow by the leaders of other countries. Others are way too obvious, like the US president falling asleep and being generally out of it (I do wonder if this movie would have been more interesting had the it been released a year or two later). The general thrust of the script - Germany timorously trying to herd a bunch of unruly idiots in order to perform a clearly ineffectual, unnecessary exercise, everyone being completely unable to prioritize or competently take charge of the situation - remains funny throughout . And there is, of course, a whole lot of surrealist What. The. Fuck.

 If you're tickled by the premise, well then, you'll remain tickled by the premise, but as with all of the movies from these filmmakers, it's somewhat hostile to the viewer. Guy Maddin is, for good or ill, unable/unwilling to produce surrealism that still functions within the genre it inhabits, as opposed to someone like Quentin Dupieux.

 I personally don't regret watching this, but found the experience of getting through it often exasperating; It feels like it could have worked much better at half its length. But... I can't discount a film with situations as funny as a man trying to thread the line on how much pedophilic flirting is appropriate, or lines as gloriously unhinged as when someone proclaims that a giant brain is female, because "it's not as big as a male giant brain".

Smoking Causes Coughing (Fumer fait tousser)

 I'm pretty fond of French nutjob Quentin Dupieux. His movies may be somewhat half-baked, indifferently shot, and often frustrating - the guy has next to zero interest in conventional narrative - but they're always funny, batshit crazy, and at the very least interesting.

 Smoking Causes Coughing is, as far as I know, his first superhero movie. And by that, I mean it's a Super Sentai (Power Rangers, basically) spoof that soon loses interest in its setup and digresses into a series of short stories first told by the cast, then characters who stumble into the frame, and then... well, best not to spoil one of the film's biggest laughs.

 Benzène (Gilles Lellouche), Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier), Mercure (Jean-Pascal Zadi) and Ammoniaque (Oulaya Amamra) are the Tobacco Force, a group of superpowered avengers that assemble into a deadly, toxic force. They are introduced fighting a beautifully crafted Power Ranger-esque walking turtle in a scene that has got it all: Flying kicks, ineffective shuriken, the line "Let's give him a cacer!", and a joyful shower of viscera that somehow reaches a distant family watching the fight through binoculars.

The actors actually stumble back before the barrage of oncoming entrails. It's glorious.

 During the fight, Mercure has some problems focusing his powers, as apparently he's not sincere enough. And sure enough, after the fight their splinter-like boss (Alain Chabat voicing and operating a hilariously dingy puppet) tells the team that they must go into a retreat to learn to work together again.

 There's an intergalactic threat they need to prepare for, and all sorts of interpersonal conflict and insecurities they obviously need to work through, but that'd be boring. So when Benzène tells a scary campfire story (a ridiculous, but mostly deadpan Deerskin-like slasher tale), different characters come out of the woodwork to tell their own bizarre horror-adjacent stories.

 Dupieux films everything with his usual flat style and a washed-out '70s palette. It's not a bad-looking movie, but part of the fun is how ramshackle and workmanlike it looks. The soundtrack is all dusty, cheesy French pop, and the gore effects are basically people hurling buckets of offall at the characters from off-screen. There is a pretty nifty disembodied mouth effect I imagine was done with CGI, but other than that it's not really the sort of movie that distinguishes itself visually. The cast, which consists mostly of French and Belgian TV and comedy vets (plus Adèle Exarchopoulos) is game, but this is the sort of material with which even the best acting would feel stilted... and you wouldn't be able to tell if that was the intention or not.

 On the plus side, it's a great showcase for the writer/director's inventiveness, it boasts a genuinely surprising, unpredictable structure, and the gags range from genuinely solid jokes to absolute headscratchers that are somehow still funny. If you have any tolerance for truly surrealist humour and some patience, this is a great point of entry to Dupieux's bizarre filmography.

Adult Swim Yule Log / The Fireplace

 You know those fireplace videos everyone keeps putting up on youtube and streaming services? They're basically animated backgrounds, a long, fixed take on a fireplace (usually), meant to be played on a loop as a fancy-ish decoration.

 A couple years ago, Adult swim put out a generic one. It looks like any other entry in its genre... until a couple minutes in you hear a conversation, see some legs go by in the foreground; A woman is cleaning the room the fireplace is in, talking on the phone. Then there's a break-in, a horrific-sounding sexual assault... and all the time, the camera stays fixed on the fireplace.

 The camera was set up by Alex (Justin Miles), who has a side business doing YouTube yule log videos . He's booked the cabin for a romantic getaway with his girlfriend Zoe (Andrea Laing). When they return to the cabin, they almost catch the maniacs just after they've cleaned up their crime. Alex zooms out from the fireplace to encompass the whole living room, and next thing you know it's a long, drily funny conversation where the focus keeps shifting every now and then to show a reflection of the murderers on a champaign bottle in the foreground as they peek into the room.

 Then the sheriff and his goofy deputy pay a visit, warning the couple of another murder nearby. He also notices that the yule log they're burning is from a nearby cursed tree, and after putting it out he warns them to never light it up again - he even admonishes Alex to delete the video, lest the curse spread, J-horror style. Later the cast increases as a group of stoned podcasters intrude (they've timed their edibles to take effect on arrival), there to investigate the area, which is apparently, some sort of "hillbilly Bermuda triangle".

 The maniacs are still lurking just off-screen, and in a lesser movie they would be the villains. But this was written and directed by Casper Kelly, who gained viral fame with his 'Too Many Cooks' bizarro fake trailer (which also aired on Adult Swim), so things get proper weird; There's a genteel, time-travelling southern gentleman in a David-Lynch-inspired-room behind the fireplace who seems to be trying to undo overpopulation one birth at a time, the cursed tree provides the titular menace, and there's a late-movie... let's call it complication which is so ridiculous - even after all the ridiculous shit already in the movie - that it made me laugh.

 All this is intercut with time-warping vignettes that show us the cabin as it was at different times in its existence, showing us the tragic events that befell a few of its prior inhabitants. A theme emerges, and though it's more open questions than any sort of cogent message (or maybe a meta-commentary about how so much horror these days is about individual or shared trauma?) it provides yet another undeniable jolt of surrealist coolness.

 It's not a great-looking film, to be honest, but it's very impressive technically. The first twenty minutes consist of a single unbroken take, the time warps line up just so, the sound design is great, and I really liked that the camera finally unmoors itself from the living room wall when the story's main murderous force literally takes flight, locking the film into a more traditionally shot horror movie.

 As ridiculous as it is, the time warps, especially, as well as some good gore, some uncomfortable moments and its batshit craziness give it a bit more heft than your typical horror comedy. The acting is a bit flat except for Laing, who's pretty good. The script has a penchant for quietly funny dialog, with some killer lines every now and then.

 If you have any sort of fondness for Adult Swim's specific brand of drug-addled comedy, or the films of Quentin Dupieux, this is a very easy recommendation. Otherwise it'll depend on how much tolerance for nonsense you can deploy before it overwhelms you; There's enough imagination and craft on display here though that I think it's worth giving it a chance.

 It's a shame that it's not really a very Christmas-y movie, really - there's barely any elements of the holiday in it, aside from the log itself. But given that it'd be almost impossible to innocently stumble upon this in the spirit it was originally intended, if you can engineer a situation where you can surprise other people with the film's stealth horror in a yule log video conceit... well, that would be a Christmas miracle.

Perpetrator

 Perpetrator is an interesting surreal horror movie thing from writer/director Jennifer Reeder. I arrived at this one after liking Night's End, her previous feature (yay for auteur theory!); While that one was a fairly straightforward film that went off the rails towards the end, Perpetrator's a film that barely has any rails from the beginning.

 It's got a simple plot that provides some very basic structure, but then it's happy to forget about it for a while and provide all sorts of weird diversions. And it definitely has themes, but they are, again, all over the place, and never get a lot of traction. It's a cagey, ornery film that focuses on the feel it's trying to communicate rather than on any mundane concerns like coherence or plausibility.

 Jonquil 'Jonny' Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan) is a delinquent teen with huge hair (which, in a nice touch, keeps changing shape throughout the film) who's introduced breaking and entering. The earnings from her modest heist go towards paying the rent, as her father has some unspecified illness which seems to have left him invalid.
 After a nasty attack of whatever it is he's got, Jonny's dad sends her over to live with her aunt (Alicia Silverstone, giving a wonderfully unhinged performance), and to a new school run by a rampaging misogynist (Christopher Lowell, also very funny) who delights in screaming at the girls that they're dead after he mock-kills them in a school shooting drill (announced over the intercom as 'code massacre - level bloodbath!'. Oh, and a bunch of girls around Jonny's age have been disappearing recently around her new neighbourhood. Just a small detail, nothing important.

 Jonnie is also developing some sort of supernatural power - her aunt, who acts as a sort of paranormal tutor, describes it as 'extreme empathy' and calls 'the forevering' which we can all agree is a really stupid name that we will never mention again. In practice, Jonny mostly uses it to make digital-looking ripples course through her face and to weird out other people.
 When it's an acquaintance's turn to go missing, Jonny decides to harness her newly discovered powers towards  constructive ends and hatches a pretty stupid plan to find the (pregnant pause) Perpetrator.

 That almost sounds normal! But, as mentioned, the film constantly veers off on (often funny) little tangents, and doesn't really pay a lot of attention to its own plot. It's not that much more egregious at it than, say, the last few Mission Imposibles, except that in those movies the story goes down the toilet so Tom Cruise can jump off some really high place - here instead you get a scene where Jonny is forced to eat a lipstick (a scene that, incidentally, really grossed me out). And there's never any pretense that the story makes sense.

 There's a tangle of feminist messages running through the script, none of them subtle, but the main thrust of the movie seemed to me to be about young people figuring things out and banding together against the previous generation (even the sympathetic older women are flawed and kind of part of the problem). Critically, there's a shift in Jonny's attitude as soon as she gets her superpowered empathy; I've seen way worse ways to signal maturity.

 Blood and other bodily fluids flow freely, and there's a tiny bit of body horror (grafted anuses which later turn into vaginas; Freud would have a field day here). But it's not particularly gory and it never even tries to be scary, either, though it's got a good handle on atmosphere (cinematographer: Sevdije Kastrati). I guess you could say it will not conform to genre norms (badabum-tish!).

 So... it's a mess. An interesting, entertaining mess that's full of weird little vignettes that never seem to pull in the same direction. Some of them are funny, some of them are insightful; None of them boring.

Strawberry Mansion

 There's a quote in Waking Life where a guy basically goes "You know when people tell you that they're going to tell you about a dream they had, you're in for a boring fifteen minutes". I'm paraphrasing heavily here, but it's stayed with me for the couple of decades since I've last seen it - It's proven true over and over again. Dreams are personal; You lived through it, it was real for you. For others, not so much.

 That hasn't stopped people from trying to portray dreams in their stories and in their movies. They range from Inception's "Why did they bother making this happen in dreams if it was going to be so realistic?" to Nightmare On Elm Street's horror with extra craziness to Waking Life's surreal attempt to portray a pseudo-lucid dream. That's not even going into Surrealism proper or the use of dream logic in other genres.

 Strawberry Mansion opts for the surrealist approach, but it's an overtly twee, suffocatingly precious take. Not saying it doesn't work, but it's the sort of dream that would be portrayed in an oversized picture book with rococo illustrations and very curly writing. Cute but cloying.

 Set in a of those retro-futuristic futures that mashes up the fifties with a tiny bit of future-tech, the main thing as far as the movie is concerned is that everyone can record and play back their dreams. Also, the government has found a way to audit and tax people's dreams, because... that is a perfectly sane and logical thing that would totally happen. It's a funny idea, well executed (we actually see a little of how it works).

 The story follows Preble (co-director Kentucker Audley) - a tax auditor who sports a trilby and a bad moustache - as he is sent to interview an older woman who is suspected of tax evasion.

 And that is correct; The woman, Arabella (played by Penny Fuller, Bella from here on out) never bothered to update her dream-recording hardware, so she has several years of unaudited recordings on her top-loader VHS (more than two thousand tapes, she says). She welcomes Preble, and once the extent of his task becomes clear, she gives him room and board. Bella's a little batty, but a very gracious host.  

 Preble settles in and starts going over the tapes; And as he starts auditing the tapes, he starts falling in love with Bella's younger dream persona (Grace Glowicki).

 Meanwhile, in real life, the waking Arabella shows him that it isn't just the government that is getting into people's dreams. She opens Preble's eyes to a... well, a shockingly obvious conspiracy, but at least it gives the film some, none-too-alarming, stakes. Time folds in on itself, dreams intrude into reality, and a few other very gentle mindfucks are deployed. If it works, it works, if it doesn't make sense, well, what do you expect? It's purposefully silly, it's dreamlike, etcetera etcetera. Seems like a copout, but the movie is charming enough to pull it off. Also, criticizing this movie too much would feel like kicking a kitten.

 It embraces whimsicality wholeheartedly. That's not my thing, but its daft, home-made special effects (which mix stop motion, bad green screen compositing and giant papier-mâché masks) are pretty endearing. Also, the story takes so many leaps it kept me engaged if only to see where it would go next; The way things keep looping back to reality might not really cohere, but they keep things interesting.

 The love story at its center is feather-light - young Bella is too much of a passive, cutesy figure, and not a whole lot else - but it's sweet... as is the movie as a whole. The acting is uneven but enthusiastic, with Audley doing a pretty good job of anchoring things. He co-wrote, co-directed, and co-edited the film along with Albert Birney. The cinematography (Tyler Davis) is digital but with a very grainy filter and saturated colours. While it's not always distinctive, it does manage a some pretty cool images every now and then. Dan Deacon rounds things up with an excellent, synth-driven soundtrack.

 For all its annoyances, Strawberry Mansion is distinctive, and it leaves behind a good impression (for context, I was one of those people that kind of hated Swiss Army Man). It's extremely mannered but its earnestness feels genuine, and its goofy twists never feel manipulative or contrived.

  Plus, it really helps that it is can be very, very funny when it wants to.

Spirits of the Air - Gremlins of the Clouds

   1988's Spirits of the Air - Gremlins of the Clouds (what a title!) puts its best foot forward. As its credits roll, they're intercut with footage of a man clad in black advancing through the desert, walking by some pretty stunning bits of near-surrealist wreckage: Oversized crooked utility poles, a car graveyard where the cars are the headstones, a ridiculously complex set of wooden rigging. When he arrives at a dusty farm, he scares a woman who was playing along to the beautiful title song on what looks like a mixture between a shamizen and a kokyu; he promptly collapses of exhaustion as the woman panics and goes to get her brother.
 It's one hell of an opening, as beautiful as anything I've seen in a while.

I could fill this thing with screenshots; it's a gorgeous movie.

 The hiker is Smith (Norman Boyd), a drifter running away from... let's call them bad guys - for unspecified reasons. It doesn't matter. The woman, Betty (Melissa Davis), is a religious nutjob who dons a new elaborate outfit, makeup and hairpiece for almost every scene, and her brother Felix (Michael Lake) is wheelchair-bound and flight-obsessed. Yep, it's going to be a weird one.

 Especially when you realize that the movie is, more than anything else, a willfully quirky psychodrama. Felix takes Smith in and nurses him back to health, much to his sister's chagrin (she's convinced he's the devil). Once the newcomer comes back to, Felix talks him into helping build his flying machines, luring him with the prospect of getting over the mountains that bar the way north. And so the household settles into a routine - Felix and Smith try to get their creations off the ground, while Betty seethes in the background, with the unspoken threat that her insanity might escalate beyond childish hissy fits and bizarre passive-aggressiveness into actual violence.

 It's a very, very weird movie, but if (and this is a very big if) you can get over its languid pacing and the sometimes very broad acting, there's a lot to like here.
 Not the least the production design. This was Alex Proyas's first movie, and the amount of detail and invention on the sets is really impressive. Every scene has been fussed over and has at least a couple of cool touches; "MTV video directors" was a charge levied at a lot of people a few decades ago who tried to inject some style into their movies (Proyas's fellow Aussie director Russell Mulcahy was a perennial target), and... well, yeah, this is a very 80's-MTV-video looking movie. It definitely tends to put style before substance.
 Most people have gotten over using that particular zinger to put down movies a long time ago, especially when the style is as good as it is here. The ridiculously elaborate sets and costumes combine with some great cinematography (DP: David Knaus), saturated colours and a couple instances of Proyas's penchant for unorthodox camera placement to great effect.

 The near lack of a plot is probably the biggest problem here. The script (written by Proyas) is not bad - the dialog is sometimes clunky but it mostly works, and the siblings at the heart of the story do eventually get a little depth; Enough to allow for some effective bits of pathos towards the end (some of it ably aided by the production design (Sean Callinan) - Felix's room is a good example) which I at least found pretty affecting.
 But, as far as actual plot... nothing much happens.

 I'd be lying if I said it didn't drag at points, but the film had me firmly under its spell for the duration after those amazing first few minutes. Australia is a pretty dependable source of genre oddities, and few of them are as odd, cool looking, or beguiling as this.

Kuso

 Well, stop the search. This year's prestigious "The Fuck Did I just Watch?" award goes to...

 Kuso is an unhinged, deeply bizarre surrealist comedy in the vein of Tim Heidecker and Eric Warheim's Awesome Show shot through with an unhealthy amount of body horror.
 And if that doesn't tell you anything, well, congratulations: that puts you one peg closer to normalcy. Tim and Eric are a couple of anti-comedians who do purposefully tacky, off-putting shows for Adult Swim that try to recreate the most cringe-inducing, crappiest lows of public access television.

This film's the brain-child of Rapper Flying Lotus (Steve Ellison), who's obviously a fan of Tim and Eric, and whose music has featured in some Adult Swim shows. It's a series of alternating vignettes set in a plague-ridden Los Angeles where reality was disrupted in weird ways by a series of earthquakes.

 (I'm going to go into the film in some detail now. Kuso goes all-out in an attempt to offend and/or disgust, and absolutely revels in bad taste... so, well, be warned. It qualifies as a pretty extreme movie.)

 Does the Phrase 'David Cronenberg porn' sound amusing to you? The man himself has gotten close to pornography a few times in his own, clinical way -he certainly never shied away from sexual themes- but this movie gets explicit with it. I won't spoil it, but that's basically the most apt description for the punchline to one of the stories here.

 A more concrete example, and a spoiler for the most unhinged thing in the movie (skip until after the capture to avoid it): There's a subplot where a man gets cured of his crippling fear of boobs (mastophobia?) by drinking the juices from the nipple of an insect residing in George Clinton's gaping anus.
 Yes. George Clinton. I love that he would lend himself to this. And yes, we get a perspective shot from within Clinton's bowels, looking out his sphincter; Bless this movie for giving me the chance to write that sentence.

Wait, George Clinton does what now?

 And here are some more bits, out of context: people jam things in their dickholes. Insects get bitten in half. A bloody, recently aborted fetus gets thrown around like a football. A dead child is used on a throwaway gag. All sorts of bodily fluids get thrown around and smeared on people.
 It's all purposely pretty fake-looking and over the top, so it can still be funny... But even so some of the stuff still made a little queasy. 

 Stylistically most of the stories are live action on a shoestring budget, but there are a few cheap-looking CGI interludes and some pretty creative Terry Gilliam-esque collages (he gets name-checked via a big-ass book on a shelf early on).

 I won't detail all the 'plots'; In case you're interested, here's a Wikipedia entry that goes pretty in-depth into them (and explains some details I completely missed while watching.)
 Some of the skits are followed up on, and three or so narrative threads emerge - don't expect a proper story, but they do build up to something approximating a punchline, and some of them are even funny. All are creative as hell, but there's a fairly low hit ratio for the material - which will probably be lower for most people, and higher for those that prefer to chemically enhance their movie watching, the Adult Swim crowd should be satisfied.

 The effect the whole thing has is hard to describe. I found it off-putting, but it did make me laugh several times; When it's funny, it's really fucking funny, and that makes it infinitely better to me than some of its more straight-forward competitors.
 There were long barren stretches that were a bit of an endurance test, though. It's not just that there's a (sometimes literal) shitload of gross-out... well, some of it is humour - and that it's actively unpleasant in every possible way Flying Lotus can conceive of.

 My issue is that a lot of it is weird for weirdness's sake, and the result isn't all that interesting. While the bizarre imagery and concatenation of ideas kept me from fast-forwarding through any of it, this is not something I'd enjoy sitting through again to expose my friends to it the way I routinely do with something like... I dunno, Boxer's Omen.

 Ellison directs and has a writer credit on all of the segments. Rapper Zack Fox co-wrote the funniest short (the one with George Clinton). David Firth, he of Salad Fingers fame, collaborated with Ellison on the weirdest one - guess that won't surprise anyone.

 I should probably say some nice things about the music and sound design. While there are a few random fart and shitting sounds that kind of work against the movie's... ah hell, let's call it spell- the music side of things is very well made. I can't claim to know any Ellison's stuff, but he got Aphex Twin and Akira Yamaoka working on the soundtrack, and I really enjoyed what they all did on that front. My favorite detail comes during a hilarious turn by, um, Lexington Steele -dunno him from anywhere, no sir!- where his lines are underscored by short staccato strings; a bizarre, funny touch I genuinely loved.

 Oh, and since we're listing actors now: Tim Heidecker puts in a short appearance, waving his pasty white bum at the camera as usual. Rapper Busdriver also does a very cool, pretty funny number at the beginning with some great practical effects.

 So yeah, your mileage will very much vary on this one. I suspect you'll know whether you'll like it -whether you can like it, maybe - going in. God help me, despite all my misgivings I really dug it.