Joe D’Amato has made more than 200 films. That’s a lot, even for a porn director, but Joe isn’t just a porn director. He’s made films in every genre. They happen to all be awful, but there are an impressive amount of them. Sometimes when you are finished using your…

I was unfamiliar with Nobita and Doraemon when I first went to watch Nobita’s Three Visionary Swordsmen. I recognized the image of Doraemon, he pops up everywhere in Japanese media. He’s been around since 1969 and has made an indelible mark on the country’s psyche. Nobita was originally a manga…

Goran Stolevski’s 2020 debut film You Won’t Be Alone is a poem. There is almost no dialogue between characters, but we are able to hear the heroine’s inner voice as she learns about the world around her. She has no education and has been raised in isolation, so the words…

In 2002, French filmmaker Marina de Van wrote, directed, and starred in . It is a body horror film, but it’s free of supernatural conceits, alien shapeshifters, or psychic powers. In My Skin is a stripped-down psychological portrait of a woman who cannot resist the urge to cut or bite…

is a very popular manga and anime series in Japan. It began in 1990 and is still ongoing. It also happens to be pretty strange. Even though the titular character is a five-year-old boy named Shinnosuke, he is not entirely the main focus. The series is about the whole Nohara…

Like Golem (1979) and The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981), Piotr Szulkin’s O-Bi, O-Ba: The End Of Civilization (1985) is an ugly film. A really ugly film. It is shot in a dark series of catacombs or bunkers, and uses a lot of blue bare bulbs as its…

Piotr Szulkin (1950–2018) was a Polish director, screenwriter, animator, novelist, theatrical director, and painter. In 1979, he released the first of four films that would become known as his “Apocalyptic Tetralogy”, or his “Science Fiction Tetralogy”. Szulkin did not approve of either label. He called his work “asocial fiction”. As…

William Kentridge was born in Johannesburg in 1955. He is white. He spent the first forty years of his life living under apartheid. Both of his parents were lawyers specializing in representing black people who were marginalized by the system. Regardless of his parents, Kentridge was born into a system…

Robert Ground’s The Weird World of LSD is not a sober public service announcement about the dangers of lysergic acid diethylamide. It’s really just a license to screw around with film. It’s not an overwrought drama like Reefer Madness (1936) or Gun Crazy (1950). Rather, it’s a collection of goofy…