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@crumbsroom

I watched Relaxer yesterday, and saw that you had recently rated it and a few other Joel Potrykus films on LB. Curious to hear your thoughts. I'm not sure how I feel about Relaxer quite yet, beyond an overwhelming desire to fumigate my house. Certainly one of the stickiest films I've ever seen.

I like movies that bring me places. They have a clear view of what they want to do and obstinately do it even if no one is going to want to come near it.


Relaxer is a deeply unpleasant watch. I could tell exactly what it was going to do within minutes and that it was going to be a rough ride. Not because it is violent, because it's not. Not because it is really even overwhelmingly gross. It's just that it demands you spend all of your time with the kind of guy who you wouldn't want sitting next to you on a bus.


But it doesn't flinch in its purpose, even if 90 percent of any audience will be completely alienated by what is happening. And then, as the movie continues, it becomes a bit of a marvel at how it can continuously reinventing what it can do with such a demented and annoying and repetitive premise.


While we certainly don't need another Relaxer in the world, we definitely need more movies this obsessive and weird and thoughtful about something that seems as if it is mostly designed to irritate. Once I got in its rhythms, I enjoyed it, as a person who likes film to reach those outer limits of expression. And all those Potrykus films do this to varying degrees. The Alchemist is even weirder and maybe even more alienating than Relaxer, but is so tonally wild it is a real trip (especially if you know nothing going on). And Buzzard is also really great and probably his funniest. The Thing in the....is just a short and I would have liked to see more of his penchant for pushing things long past their breaking point with that one, but as a little taste of what he does, it's good.


I haven't seen Ape yet, but it's clearly a must watch. This guy is someone to watch.



I'm very conflicted about this whole idea of kids acting, but I also can't help myself from being very amused by the whole idea of my nephew playing Chucky.



https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cd-0B..._web_copy_link
Is he the one and only Chucky or do they have multiple kids taking turns on different days?
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I haven't seen Ape yet, but it's clearly a must watch. This guy is someone to watch.

Ape is in most ways the weakest of the lot. Probably every way. It isn't quite as daring, isn't quite as funny, isn't quite as disorienting as the other ones. It also has more of those moments that don't quite work, that are in all of his movies, but are maybe even more noticeable here.


But, for anyone who likes what this guy is doing, this is still worth watch just to see where he's come from. All the brattiness and nihilism and despair and weirdness and aloofness is still there. But it's before he knew how to really do something with such inarticulation. Before he started making films built on a rage that burns so fiercely he can't decide if his movies are screams of terror or an ambivalent shrug of indifference. And so instead just settles on a kind of slacker poetry.






No you don't want to see this.

Yes, it is one of the great lost trash horror movies.

Stupidity can be beauty. So can a mouthful of fake milky vomit. And since the world is clearly not prepared to accept such truths, and we aren't already all wearing matching Demon Wind hats and t-shirts as would only make sense, I'm just going to keep shrugging at the coming Apocalypse. Civilization has still clearly not figured out how to spend its free time wisely. Bring on the asteroids!






With the first day of my dream job behind me (cleaning the toilets of patients in a psych ward) THIS is the kind of movie one wants to come home to. It almost allows me to feel like I've never left those bathrooms, and am still staring deep into toilet water, jiggling a handle, while medicated eyes bore into the back of my head, wanting me to leave.

Heaven!

No film besides Zulawski's "Possession" quite articulates madness with such violent physicality as this. But here instead of Isabelle Adjani, we have Isabelle Huppert as the woman clawing through the screen to cover you in frothing spittle. It's also maddeningly incomprehensible at times, but I'm mostly okay with that. As pure wild texture, this is a great sometimes over powering film.
What is the name of this opus? I can't see a lot of your pics for some reason.



I should probably watch that at some point.


In Isabelle I trust.






No you don't want to see this.

Yes, it is one of the great lost trash horror movies.

Stupidity can be beauty. So can a mouthful of fake milky vomit. And since the world is clearly not prepared to accept such truths, and we aren't already all wearing matching Demon Wind hats and t-shirts as would only make sense, I'm just going to keep shrugging at the coming Apocalypse. Civilization has still clearly not figured out how to spend its free time wisely. Bring on the asteroids!
Intermittently brilliant and boring in equal measure.



The boring parts are better on second viewing.


Watch it twice. Immediately.
It's possible but when will I have time to watch my 4K and alternate cuts of Miami Connection???



It's possible but when will I have time to watch my 4K and alternate cuts of Miami Connection???

You have time. Gimme a break. You watch slasher remakes for **** sake.


I thought it was 40 percent boring the first time I watched it about 6 months ago. But this last time, I was on board all the way.


It's like the last gasp of garbage 80s horror, all compacted into 90 minutes.



You have time. Gimme a break. You watch slasher remakes for **** sake.


I thought it was 40 percent boring the first time I watched it about 6 months ago. But this last time, I was on board all the way.


It's like the last gasp of garbage 80s horror, all compacted into 90 minutes.
Interesting. I found myself seeing about 50/50 or even 60/40 boring to fun levels. Most of the fun packed into the beginning and end of the film with a whole lotta sag. It was no Death Warmed Over. That's for damn sure.



It's possible but when will I have time to watch my 4K and alternate cuts of Miami Connection???
Awww man, there's an alternate cut of Miami Connection?



Awww man, there's an alternate cut of Miami Connection?
Yup. The VS release comes with the original "Escape from Miami" work print version.







This really worked to put me off. It lives in world of dead pan cutesy weirdness that, unless brilliantly rendered, is just going to grate. And because of the films obvious budgetary limitations, as well as being under the finger of a filmmaker who clearly wasn't capable of tightening all the screws as necessary, it frequently came off as a cheap bit of home made surrealism. Kind of like something by Gondry, yet without his marvellous eye and imagination (but with all of the things I think ultimately sink a lot of his work ie. whimsy overkill).

But, about half way through, as I began to take its attempts to navigate its underlying themes of the relationship between dream life and reality, the flexibility of time, the pervasiveness of advertising etc. less and less seriously, and just paid more and more attention to what a silly thing it really was, the more I warmed up to it. And the more I took it on its own terms, the more I began to see light parallels between its crappy looking goofiness and the deliberately shoddy special effects David Lynch sometimes employs (specifically on his Twin Peaks reboot). Or how its attempts at grand emotions aren't all that different from the overt melodrama someone like Guy Maddin infuses his weirdness with. And slowly all these things which at first seemed like a draw back, became charming.

Now this doesn't absolve it of the fact that I don't think as a film it entirely passes muster. It frequently sags where it needs to pop. But there is the real genesis of some kind of vision going on here. Sort of like how you could see glimpses of what Tim Burton would become with Pee Wee's Big Adventure. It's there, even if its not completely assured yet. And the climax, beginning with an effective and kind of weirdly hilarious nightmare sequence, works well as everything slowly goes completely off the rails.






Lives in a universe where a young suitors trip to surprise a girl he just met while she is on vacation with her family, is less the point of the whole affair, than the catalyst for many other friendships and loves to develop over the course of a week. The movie seems to understand the strange and nebulous way relationships develop when we are at an age when strangers are always coming in and out of our lives, making an indelible impact and disappearing just as quickly. A quietly observant movie that doesn't cheat in delivering its warm and summer tinged pleasures. Simple and yet never predictable. Optimistic, yet never naively so. A real treat.



Hey Crumbsroom! Can you put the titles of the movies in your posts? I can never see your pictures and would like to know what you are writing about. Thanks.



Hey Crumbsroom! Can you put the titles of the movies in your posts? I can never see your pictures and would like to know what you are writing about. Thanks.

The one above is L'Abordage (All Hands On Deck)