Episode 764: Conspirators of Pleasure (1996)

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I'm your host, Mike White too, and me once again is ms Sam Degan Hello, also back in the Booth as mister Jim Vindiola. Hey guys. We conclude check Timber twenty twenty five with a look at Jan's Funk Myers nineteen ninety six feature length film, Conspirators of Pleasure. This dialogue free film follows a handful of perverts as they indulge in their various fetishes, Their stories intertwined in some unusual and interesting ways, even flipping at one point in the narrative. I know that doesn't make a lot of sense to hear, but we will be doing our best to unravel all the fun as we ruin the movie.

For anyone that hasn't seen it, you have been warned. So, Sam, when was the first time you saw Conspirators of Pleasure? And what did you think? Oh, it's been a long time. I want to say I first watched it maybe when I was in college and starting to get more into Eastern European cinema and at that point kind of struggling to find things that were available.

And I think, because this one, as you say said, doesn't have any dialogue, you don't need subtitles. And I think this might be my favorite spunk Meyer. I'm not totally sure, but he's one of those directors that I think I find more interesting to think about than to actually, like sit down and watch his feature length films, except for this one, which is delightful and. Not a lot of stop motion in this one at all, not a typical smack Meyer film. That's probably part of it too.

And Jim, how about yourself? I actually watched it for the first time for this podcast, and so I am grateful that you invited me to guest spot on this one. You know, it made sense, I guess, given our track record with what I normally rejoin you guys for. But really I have admittedly very little exposure to Jon spunk Meyer. I mean we're talking like the last time I probably boy saw anything of his was back in art school, and that was like, you know, his first feature, the Alice one, and maybe some of his shorts, but that was, you know, twenty five years ago.

You know. Watching this for the first time for this specific episode was super delightful. Yeah, this was also a new one for me. This is one that I've owned on DVD for I don't know how many years, and watched it actually while I was donating platelets at the Red Cross, and I was just very glad that the nurses were leaving me alone or the phlebotomis weren't really peeking over my shoulder. Though, there's not a lot of objectionable stuff in this movie, and I would say probably the most shocking quote unquote is the stuff at the beginning with some of the very old drawings that are going on, and then the pornography that one of our main characters as well.

I mean, there's six people in here. I guess I'm calling him a main character just because he's one of the first people that we see on screen. But the I guess, let's just call him the chickenhead guy. I was going to say, can we call him rooster Man? Sure, rooster Man works as well.

He's the person that we meet the first time, he's the person that is buying pornography, and we get to see some of those magazines that he's looking at. I mean, it's all pretty darn team. It's just magazine spreads, and I do mean spreads, but yeah, nothing too objectionable. But yeah, I was glad that the nurse the phlebotomists were otherwise occupied with the Red Cross duties, so they weren't checking out what I was looking at. I have seen some Sonkmeyer through the years.

It's funny that you brought up Alice. I'm not sure if I've ever talked about this on the podcast before, but I had one date during college and I took that date to see Alice. Oh no, we never had another date. I was gonna say, that's how you knew it wasn't meant to be. It was not meant to be.

No, No, I took a potential philistine out to a movie. So I don't have Heidi in my life anymore. But I still have young Smunckmyers, so I'm glad for that. That's right. But in Heidie's defense, a stop a feature length stop motion film, is a lot to ask from a regular person who's maybe just been exposed to mainstream cinema and animation and not his like weird crossover of the two.

Yeah, and the talking skull with the fake eyes in it and stuff. It's pretty creepy. I mean, I think it's probably one of the most effective versions of Alice in Wonderland that I've ever seen. Yeah, No, I definitely kid. I ultimately enjoyed that, but it's kind of like a rough start if you don't know what you're getting into for sure.

Just to be plunked in the middle of that not knowing and I didn't know what was going on, but I felt frightful, and after I saw it, it was just like, Oh, I want to see more of this guy's stuff. Luckily, the nineties was a pretty good time to be interested in Smackmeyer since he was doing a lot of feature work, and some of it was not too hard to find. Like you said, Sam, this one not knowing though, I have to admit, I was watching the movie and there came the moment pretty early on in the film where he gets a letter and the letters written like a ransom note and it says a word in check, and there were no subtitles, and I was just like, oh my god, there's no subtitles, so they're going to start talking in this movie.

I had no idea that there was no dialogue in this film, so I was just like, fuck, I gotta find the subtitles for this. So I looked high and low and I found a few files and I synced him up to this because I had misplaced my DVD and then when I watched the DVD at the Red Cross, so I had watched it twice. When I watched the DVD at the Red Cross, there are no subtitles on it whatsoever. So I searched high and low for the video file finally found that matched up to it, only for one word to be translated in the entire film. That happens in like the first five minutes, which is which is funny because I opened the one file and I was like, oh shit, this doesn't have subtitles.

I opened the next one and saw the burned in you know, Sunday, and then gleaned like fifteen minutes after that. In that I was like, that's probably the only subtitle we're going to see. So and it's funny whenever we see other words. They're also just days of the week, but they're written in both English and check so it's like literally just that letter. Ultimately, it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the plot whatsoever other than we start on a Thursday and I guess we end on a Sunday.

That's about it. I think it's the lady across from Chicken Man's apartment who sends him the letter saying like, let's do this on Sunday. Is that what you're saying, Mike, that there's no real significance to like the timeline other than they wait like a few days before they have their little like weird date where they don't actually like physically meet up. They're a weird like voodoo ritual fetish sequence. Yes, yeah, this is not a sex film.

It's more of a I don't. Well, I guess there is some masturbation that happens in here, guided by a machine, but it's more just people seeking pleasure in other ways, and definitely not seeking pleasure with each other. Even this whole thing of chickenman on one side of the hall and this woman on the other side of the hall, and yeah, they have this osi relationship. They both have dolls of each other, but they don't they're so free with each other. Oh my god, And especially when they start to stop motion animate those dolls and again with the false teeth and the eyes and everything.

Oh. But yeah, no one is interacting. There's even a I guess they're married, the TV presenter and then her I guess it's her husband who spends a lot of time. Who's the police officer, the cop. Yeah, they seem very distant from each other.

And there's so many scenes of her looking down at his shed where he's doing his stuff, and then she's doing her stuff up in their room. They never connect really like I think. You see them in bed together once and that's about it, and you don't see any sort of affection between each other. Oh, and it's a fraud interaction in bed, right, you know he doesn't. Yeah, she looks really frustrated.

That feels like the most least delightful of the unions or potential unions or you know, pairings in the movie to me, because to me, he kind of like almost feels a little bit like a serial killer tinkering in his garage while his wife likes sort of helplessly wonders like what he's up to, almost like a BTK mustache all but. She discovers her her carp friends. Oh yes, No, I mean I feel like eventually it ends on a delightful almost sitcom like you know worthy uh Little Danumont where everyone yeah, has their little uh has their little moment to enjoy themselves. To connect. Yeah, exactly, connection being in air quotes for those of you who cannot see me.

Yeah, that's my favorite thing about it though, that I don't think you could show this movie to like a thirteen year old. Even though there's nothing in it that's explicit, it's explicit without directly showing sex or nudity. I mean, I guess there are some implied orgasm scenes. Yeah, I mean it's like it is very chaste, and I think what is interesting about it, Like I agree with you that it's not it's certainly not for minors, but I don't know, I feel like they do depict things like you know, definitely audio visually, but it's like the sort of like it's almost up to us to feel how we and react how we're going to react based on our personal experience about it, because I also like I could see, I you know, I've read like other things like you know, letterboxed like thinks it's like disgusting, you know, or a lot of viewers, but it's just like no, I thought it was delightful.

I thought it was like such a celebratory depiction of basically these lovable freaks in a way that I feel like I aligned with, even though like it was obviously I think, like, you know, taken to an extreme where I'm sure like people do have these sort of paraphilic tendencies and even like crazier. But you know, as someone who I feel like, you know, feel like I feel like I relate to this, but given the depictions of this, it's still like I feel like I'm pretty vanilla compared to you know, what a lot of these like folks are doing. And that's like, really the fun part about it for me. So you're saying that you didn't carefully spend hours crafting a rooster head that you then made out of clay glued pornography to uncovered in feathers for your honeymoon.

You're saying you didn't do that. Only because prior to Mike hitting record, I told you we had to fly fly back home the very next day. So okay, fine, we had less than twenty four hours, you know, hope y'all will forgive us. But what the technology today? You could have three D printed yourself a rooster head.

I have one arriving from an Etsy seller. So good thing is not coming from TIMU because then the tariffs on that are just crazy these days. Exactly, it's no longer financially feasible. Well I did get my tetanus booster like two years ago though, so I feel like I'm okay with like, you know, the nail play, the nail and the rolling pin play for another eight years or so. Yeah, all of that is so wonderfully elaborate.

Yeah, he is putting together such a well defined group of fetish objects that he's just bringing all together. And yeah, to see like the lids that he's got and the rolling pins and all of these objects. And that's the thing that I find so fascinating is like when the Chicken man, who I'm pretty sure the whole chicken thing is very well. I mean, chicken's obviously used in like black magic a lot, and there is this whole thing of the woman across the waves cutting the chicken's neck and him capturing the blood, and the blood definitely plays into this whole thing too. But I want to say, like, the thinks in this movie are fantastic.

They're so funny. Oh, I love it. And one of the people that he thinks, that Smockfier thinks is Max Ernst. And Ernst had chicken images going through his stuff like crazy everywhere. Also all the cut up collage stuff, cutting up images of naked women from pornography and adding them to your fine art.

That's peak max Ernst right there, for sure. But to thank the Marquis de Sade as well as Freud, Sigmund Freud, yes, of course, boon Weell, I mean yeah, it's it's I love how open Sponkmeier is about being a surrealist, very much like Boonoell, where He's just like, yeah, this is my bag. You talk to like a you know, like a Lynch or whatever. He's like, I don't want labels, don't label me kind of thing, whereas Fonnkmeyer is just like, fuck yeah, IM surrealist. Yeah, this is all this is what I do, baby, And he does it well.

The elaborate play with objects, whether those be like you're saying, with the clay and the paper and all this stuff very organic, the the postal carrier with the bread, and how she's just so obsessed with hallowing out her crust bread and making these tiny little like marble shapes with the bread. You get that very organic stuff, and then you get the very inorganic. And I don't know if it if I could make a distinction between the men and the women in this, I guess I can. I got to think about the woman across the way, if there's more organic there. Because the TV presenter obviously really likes having your toes stuck by carp right, which is great.

But I love that she keeps a basin, a metal basin under her bed with carp in it that her husband does not know is there. I love it, yeah, seriously, And I didn't know for the longest time because when they show her, she's just petting those and then feeding the little dough balls to them and everything. So again a connection between different characters and all that. Yeah, I didn't realize that she was basically prepping them to suck her toes. It's so interesting the he shows people turning their fetishes into these art projects, and I think seeing that kind of crossover makes me think a lot about some of these more contemporary discussions about how radical pleasure can be.

Like Bell Hooks writes a lot about this, like people talking about how it's not just erotic pleasure or sexual pleasure, it's really just anything tactile that you're taking pleasure in, whether it's a hobby or actually having sex. And here, I think he shows that so clearly because it's like all these people are escaping from their boring lives by getting really into these projects that are also their fetishes and not even like. Just their boring lives. But I think it's funny that the letterbox crowd, you know, and I didn't go through every review, but a lot of them are stout by this, and I'm like, the. Grosser is crazy.

Absolutely the grossest thing to me about this was just like some of the clutter in these spaces, you know, and like this just like yeah, like sort of like the trash that lays lays around, and I'm just like, well, yeah, that's part of like them escaping from their world, right, that's like part of the mundane that is like also like kind of gross and what. A world they live in. Like every time we see the man who runs the magazine shop, the one who's building that remote control sex robot. With the yeah, the sex robot, it's just like Doctor Octavias sex robot. It's just like six arms on the TV screen.

Yeah, I want that franchise me too. And he's just obsessed with this news presenter and every time she's on the news, it's bad news, you know. It's the nightly news that we see these days and that we were seeing back in ninety six in Czechoslovakia. Just one bad thing after that. There's not a lot of human interest stories going on on this.

It's mostly just bad news. That's the one area where I'm like, I would have liked to have had more subtitles, just to see more of like what those news stories are. Like, yeah, I see like the pope and some nuns and some of these things, but a lot of it is fire and bombings and just awful stuff. So yeah, what, no matter, they're always they're trying to get away from some of that shit as well. I think like that's why they have the detritus all over the world that they have.

They live in a shitty place. And I think this would make a really interesting double feature with something like Daisies, where they're also escaping the world through their fantasies, which also involves engaging in pleasure and a lot of tactile stuff, lots of food. And to see how some of those themes are updated, what thirty years. Later, Yeah, close to thirty years, I would say, because that was what sixty sick, so sixty seven. Yeah, and so yeah, thirty almost exactly thirty years later.

And also to see how he basically had to wait until after the fall of check Communism to be able to make the kinds of films he wanted to. He was sort of I don't know. I think for somebody in that particular environment, it must have been so frustrating to be young and have all these ideas and write all these scripts and be part of these art groups, but you're not allowed to make a feature film because nothing that you want to make is approved, so you just have to play the long game and wait fifteen years. Well, yeah, in the meantime, he's helping out other filmmakers with you know, even I can't remember which film we were watching where he had done the title cards. He and his wife did title cards for probably your Ihurtz film.

Or he's doing special effects for older Chlipski, like the inventions in Mysterious Castle and the Carpathians, or. Visitors from our Kanna Galaxy, the Amazing Monster sequence at the end. So it's like he was busy, but it still must have been frustrating to not be able to fully express yourself when you're someone who clearly is just overflowing with ideas and creativity. Yeah, this was based on adea that he had or a script he had back in what nineteen seventy I think, and took parts of that to build this. And I talk with Peter Hayms a little bit later about that, just to talk a little bit about how that earlier project changed into this.

To have so many years where he's literally not allowed to make films inside of his own country. But he still managed to loyally stick to those Gothic and surrealism themes. Like if you just look at his list of shorts and scripts and then his features, it's like he returns to that eighteenth century or only nineteenth century gothic material repeatedly but does such amazing things with it. And I'm I wish that he was. I know, he's still with us and made his last film was what six or seven years ago, but I wish he was a little bit younger so we could he could make us a sequel, so we could find out what happens to the sex arm TV robot.

I mean, if if part of that guy's interest was you know, the actual like headlines in the tragedy, there's there's no shortage of that, so he may even be more aroused, you know, because that was part of my question is was it just like the news anchor, or was it the tragedy itself? Was this like a you know, simp Ophelia, you know, like. The Ona Club finally coming out? Yeah? And what what her sort of relation to that was if she was almost kind of like this mommy slash dom like this purveyor of bad news to him, which I thought was fascinating to sort of ponder.

And I love that you know again that there it's dialogue free because you don't really know what you know, the actual connection is. Well, it feels like he is not interested when the actual clips play, and he's only interested in her, and he's got that great joystick where he can zoom in on her and zoom in on her mouth because he's he's there making love to the television at once one point and it goes away from her and it cuts to water and then you see him spit the water out like it came from the television. There's another part where he basically takes a break at that point because it's like, well, she's not on TV. I'll wait until she's back on. Yeah, once she's back on, and he zooms in again on her lips.

I mean, it is so Debbie Harry from Videodrome to me, and I'm like, is this a reference, because I know video Drome came first. Is this or is it just that they're both playing in this with the same deck. I feel like they're playing with a pretty similar deck, just handling it in different ways. Because I think Cronenberg is also someone very interested in people exploring their fantasies and forbidden pleasures, and also really indebted to that kind of like Gothic surrealism. He's just maybe more conventional than spunk Meyer.

For sure, at least at some point in his career, and at least these days. Well, I don't know. I haven't seen The Shrouds and I haven't seen the last couple of bites. All the Shrouds is so good, Okay. I'll definitely have to check that out.

But a Dangerous Method a little bit more mainstream, you know, and Butterfly, those kind of things, not playing so much with the fetishism that he was. But yeah, he gets back to it here and there, which is. Great well, and his last film is all about people's weird fetishes. So before the Shrouds, oh, Crimes of the Future. Yeah, other Crimes of the Future, I should say, how confusing.

Yes, his recent Crimes of the Future. I think that would also actually be a really interesting double feature with Conspirators of Pleasure because it's about this weird body modification fetish cult basically. No, that's a good point. I would love that double feature. It doesn't come across the same way where it's like people engaging in you know, arts and crafts type of hobbies.

But there is also a connection between like the experimental art world and these fetishes. So I do think there are a couple parallels, like kind of a performance and a spectator component to it is that is really fascinating, that that would pair well with this and is like just really interesting on its. Own, But I think it also does a thing where the way people are connecting to each other is through the spectatorship, and there's less about people having one on one sexual relationships, so you get the same type of distancing that happens here. Though, I think in Conspirators of Pleasure, aside from the husband and wife and the wife obviously feeling neglected, I think Conspirators of Pleasure is not as dark.

It sort of reminds me of children. And maybe I'm saying this as basically an only child, but it sort of reminds me of like kids who don't have any other kids to play with, so they just happily go off in their own fantasy world and like make these dolls and these sculptures and they're collaging and like there is something very kind of whimsical and childlike about it, even though they're I. Mean, it goes back to just how I think, like lovingly they're portrayed. It does feel very like there's an innocence to what they're doing, even though they are like so perverted. There was just like a wholesome potent into it that I really just like, it just felt very affirming.

The only one who doesn't totally feel wholesome to me is the cop who's obsessed with all these different tactile sensations. Like we mentioned, he you know, hammers all these nails into a bat and then rolls it on himself and goes to the market and gets these like latex finger covers and puts them on his fingers and then like sticks his hands in his pockets so no one can see him. But at the very end of the movie, at this crime scene, he's holding a cat, and the way that he's stroking the cat is the same way that he interacts with all these objects, and it's like, Okay, buddy, let's not graduate to other living things. Other than the death of a chicken which is cooked and eaten and properly plus and all that other than that, the characters don't seem to have any sort of malice against anybody, but him cutting the fox fur and then being like, Oh, I don't have enough fetish material.

I need to go out again. And it's almost like a serial killer when he goes out and he's like on the hunt for the next fetish material. I'm like, Oh, okay, that's a little creepy. Does the chicken man Does he steal the cops car? He steals a car.

If it was the cops car, that would be fun. But I didn't. I didn't catch that. Yeah, I didn't clock that either. It just seemed like a car.

I think he was just there was because there was like almost like a little montage of him trying different door handles. So I feel like it was like his third or fourth attempt, or at least that we saw. I feel like it was a Rando car. All right. I thought he just happened to steal the guy's car while he was on the hunt for the next fetish object.

And then you mentioned the word pride, and so much of this is so private, except I'm curious about the newscaster, and like you were saying, I'm curious as far As who all sees this because the man with the sex robot, he seems to be able to control her image on the television with that very special remote control. But then you see the camera you see her starting to basically orgasm, And at first I'm thinking, oh, it's because the man with the sex robot who is kissing her lips on television, that she can feel that through the TV somehow. But then you cut to the studio and you actually see the cameraman tilt his camera down and I guess he's showing the entire world or everyone that's in the viewing audience that she has her feet in the basin.

That's the only real public thing that I can really see this movie as far as people not being in private, because the rest of the time, I mean, so much of this movie takes place or they will have these giant wardrobes and people are going into wardrobes like crazy, at least the Chicken Man and his neighbor. Yeah, it's like horny Narnia, absolutely like horny pervert Narnia, which again I would like to see a sequel to find out more about this wardrobe system. We need that franchise. Oh, I had such a crush on the White Witch from Narnia, the animated version. Oh my god, she's so scary.

She was so hot though, Oh my gosh. Yeah, feed me some Turkish delight. I'm for it. Wrap you in some furs and feed you some Turkish delights, right. And I just take care of that.

Mister Tumnus, Get him the fuck out of here. Mister Tumnus is kind of annoying. Yeah. No, I agree that the cop is the most nefarious, but he is still also, like cartoon initially nefarious. Well, he's also a cop.

So if somebody's going to be creepy in the fairy as, it should be him. And they don't reveal that until the very end though, correct. Yeah, because you see him. And this is where I think it gets especially interesting. So you have chicken headed man and chicken slaughtering lady who lives across the hall, and they make these seemingly without each other's knowledge.

They make these like sex voodoo dolls of one another, these effigy dolls, and they both go on these separate adventures in the countryside where they're torturing and killing these effigy dolls, and then sort of like the magazine seller with the sex TV robot. It's like their actions in private reflect in the real world. And the chicken slaughtering lady actually dies because his fetish seems to be dressing up like a giant rooster, dancing or around her doll ominously and throwing boulders at her until he finally crushes her skull with a boulder. It's like, what is this fetish? I'm crushing your head.

I'm crushing your head. It's wild. I love it. I love it too, and it reminded me of you know, I think any time anyone wears a bird head, I just think of stage Fright. So I think the bird head is a very clear reference to surrealism in the thirties and forties and fifties, because you see all these different the birdheads in Max Ernst, you see it in Judex, you see it in Story of Oh, and the leonor Fini designed basically the masks that were used in the Story of Oh movie.

But she's got a bunch of those kinds of paintings, and so I think he very consciously does have these nods to surrealist artists who influenced him. But my favorite part about this costume. It's like he's got this tall clay paper mache glued together chicken mask. But then he's an I now kind of want to do this for allowing one here, yes, his wings instead of making chicken wings with the feathers and gluing feathers onto them, it's like he's cutt an umbrella in half so it looks like he has bat wings. It's amazing.

Oh, it's so good. It's fantastic. That image when he unveils and lifts up his arms like he's a vampire or something with those great wings under there. And that's one of the first times that we get real stop motion, is him skating around, not lifting up his feet, but he's moving around her and moving everywhere. And then you get, yeah, those boulders that he just keeps throwing and seems to be scaring her each time, Like the voodoo doll like you're saying, has this shocked expression on his face.

It's like, oh my gosh, you know you're gonna kill me with this thing, and he doesn't. He at one point he goes he goes into a building and then it comes back out and he does it some more. Oh yeah, and we see him through the window of the building continuing to throw boulders indoors in this abandoned house. Or is it just the one boulder that like never breaks. It might just be the one boulder looks the same every time.

And then we finally find out why he has saved the blood and he has basically put it under her Sunday go to meat and hat and when he throws that boulder down on top of her, that breaks the balloon with all of the blood. We get that the blood with her actually three times, because we have the blood at the end, and we'll talk about the end scene later, the blood at the end with the blood from this. And then the first time he goes inside of her apartment, it's a rather unpleasant image of a cat chewing on what looks like a sanitary napkin. It's probably that same chicken's blood, it could be. And yeah, like to your point, Jim, with all the people on letterbox, like how gross this is.

Her apartment's a mess. Her apartment is so messy. You know, he has to clear away some stuff to get to the sewing machine so he can make his bat wings. I mean, in a different era, this woman could have just gone on Craigslist and found herself a slave to come over and clean that apartment for her. That would be too vanilla.

You know, you would have to build an effigy of a person you would want to then clean up and stop motion. I suppose. Yeah, what you would need is you would need the six arm TV robot man to build you a six arm house cleaning effigy slave that you could whip while he cleans the apartment. Rip his clothes with your whip and your mask on and everything. And I love how we see the mask in the closet and that comes back with the cop when he's looking through things and the way that he's touching the same sweater and I'm like, yeah, he's going to be very interest in that sweater.

Isn't getting ideas? Yeah, And we see her out buying candles, and again it's very ritualistic, and I don't think that that's any sort of stretch as far as the ritual of the fetish. You know, the whole thing of the cop rubbing the rolling pin with all the nails across him, or the pot lids with the soft things inside of them. But like every time, this is such a ritual, like the food that the chickenman lays out in front of her that he has to then eat afterwards, eat that chicken and her the woman across the way with candles in the chair, and then that mysteriously shows up back at his apartment later on. I mean, I can say this movie not that surreal.

It's completely surreal through and through this, but like the way that things will happen without following in the movie logic that comes up, I would say, what in the last ten minutes of the film. That repetition that feels so ritualistic is really intentional and a really important part of spunk Meyer's work. A lot of surrealists were interested in occult rituals and mysticism and things like folk religion and paganism, and spunk Meyer has talked about how puppets in particular, because like he grew up loving the puppet theater and it being a really big influence on his films and like his future art direction and things like that. He talks about how he sees puppets as this kind of you know, vessel for ritual magic and the way that it plays out repeatedly with the ritual going a little for there each time in this film is such a good example of that.

It's amazing. Well, fetishism is ritualistic, right, you have to say the right words, you have to have the right images, you have to hear the rate music, and gosh, we should talk about the music cues, especially when it comes to the cop and that I guess it's Mario Lanza. According to the credits, there's just little clip of opera. The opera. Yet, oh my god, it is so great.

Every time he gets a little I guess, I don't know if it's aroused or if it's just like he he kind of tunes into an object. That music comes screaming up, so fun crack, it's so great. That's why I don't understand how people could find this gross, Like it's clearly meant to be funny, and a lot of it is clearly pretty joyous. So I don't I don't know. Letterbox these days, letterbox, these days, media literacy these days, that too.

I mean so much of this, Like I've said, they're not hurting anybody, They're just trying to get themselves off. And they are doing this in a world where human connections seem to be very difficult to come by and helping themselves out as at were giving themselves a hand, sometimes six or seven of. Them, sometimes literally, and also some of them are thinking about how to enable their fellow pervert. It's like the lady with the bread marbles that her fetish is all day throughout her work as a postal carrier. She's like making these marbles that she saves for later and then snorts them through this rubber straw and puts them in her ears.

But somehow has leftover marbles that she gives to the fish fetish lady. So it's like this is a whole, you know, self sustaining cycle of perversion. She's busy and also thorough. Like the bread crust that she threw out, I was so impressed by. I was like there was there was not a crumb waisted there, It was just the crust.

Are they ones that are left over or does that become part of the ritual that she has to snort these, put them in her ears and then wait what five minutes for the alarm clock to go off, and then the like are those better for the carp. Yeah, that's the thing. I wasn't sure if they were like kind of sealed by her mucus, like if that made them like kind of water tight for some Like, you know, I don't know if that's part of the ritual or if I'm even like, you know, thinking of it. It seems like it's part of the ritual. I mean, the last time I was in Spain, I was looking all over.

They've got those pedicures that you can get where the fish will come and eat the dead skin off of your feet. They used to have that in the United States and they banned it for sanitary reasons. I guess I was looking everywhere for that because I was like, that sounds amazing, And when I saw her with those carp chewing on her toes, I was like, yes, that's what I'm looking for. This looks great. And in fact, I thought about that because my brother went to the Philippines and got that done at one of the mega malls there, you know, they have these giant malls and without even like, I did not voice this during the family you know, video sharing hour, but I was like, I don't know if I could do that because that might arouse me.

So yeah, I don't know. I thought it was called shrimping. Not carping. The only way to know for sure is to give it a try. I am allergic to shrimp, so it might have to just be the little guppies.

Someone listening to this episode is forming a brand new fetish right now as we speak, I hope. So we're just talking about carp for the first episode of Cheptember this year. The whole thing with the ritual of car for Christmas, where you go out and buy a carp and then you put in the bathtub and let it cycle through the water and everything, and then you remember from the creamat how that's like the big Christmas meal the copper can gole brings home, right, And so when I see the carp in here and she's bringing home the carp I was like, oh, is it Christmas time? It is for her, It's Christmas morning every morning. It's the gift you give yourself.

It's like, what does Dale Cooper say, give yourself a present once a day every day? It's right, also ritual you were talking about that. As far as the surrealist, I mean that the woman across the way who I always think of the landlady. I don't know why, I guess whenever I see somebody giving like Stern looks across the hallway. I think it's a land lady.

She has landlady vibes. She reminds me of the landlady and the tenant. She seems to be having her ritual inside of what looks like a former church. I mean it is completely burned out and everything, but to have the candles and the chair and the bucket, and then of course the wardrobe, and she goes in the wardrobe comes out after a costume change. I just I love that her and him, the chickenman, seem to have that connection so much, with that wardrobe and them going in and out of these different wardrobes, and that she has one set in this place for her ritual and he goes out all the way out in the country and does his thing, and again is in an abandoned church that he goes into.

I'm not sure, but it feels very similar, like these kind of burnt out husks of buildings. I love the stuff with the wardrobe and the fact that the magical realist element increases throughout the film, like we don't start there. I think the first time you see the wardrobe is when the chicken headed guy goes to the porn store or the magazine store, or buys his porn magazine, and he goes home, gets himself all worked up, and then instead of just masturbating in the privacy of his own home, he climbs into the wardrobe. And I think that's the assumption that that's what he's doing in there, because the male lady rings his doorbell and he comes out with like his clothing askew, and he's always sweaty.

Yeah, he's all sweaty, and his like shirt is untucked from his pants, and when she hands him the letter, she looks at him like, I know what you were just doing. She has the most knowing glances. Yes, for sure she does. It's almost like she has a sense for who else is a pervert. They have like these really fun glances, you know that they exchange throughout And it's funny because again, like the cop glances are always like a little more nefarious and granted, you know, newsstand guy a little more pervy, but I think that's just kind of like what he looks like.

But I feel like other other than the detective, the glances are pretty like. My co conspiratal. I guess it is called conspirators of pleasure. The way that the male lady brings several of these fetishes together, she seems to be the deliverer of you know, she's the deliverer of the Sunday message, and she's the deliverer of the breadballs. To the news announcer for her carp, I mean, yeah, it's she's tying them together.

It's so great, the way that these it's kind of like perverted slacker. Well, and it doesn't even feel like a contrivance, right, because I always feel like best freaks, or even like similar enough freaks always kind of gravitate towards one another anyway, you know, we always we always end up finding each other somehow. You know. I talked about how the woman across the way has a bucket. She drowns the man or his effigy in that bucket, so it's like they both of their rituals and in murder the way that he murders her with the stone she drowns him.

This is much less violent, I guess, because he's there's no blood involved with that. That she doesn't have any sort of lease afterwards. And then her wardrobe is fully full when she opens up that wardrobe. Inside of her ritual place, there are all those clothes and she has to put them apart before she can get inside. I'm just like, oh, right, that's interesting, you know that you have all of that there.

And I was just rewatching the scene with the man and the chickenman and his fetish doll. That doll seems to move inside the building and outside the building and then down the railroad tracks. It's moving without him ever being shown moving it. The way that that starts to really ramp up in the second half of the film, I love because maybe I'm reading too much into this or making assumptions, but it sort of seems like when he kills her effigy, she actually dies and that's why the police are there investigating. And then he goes across the hall and it seems like he's preparing to also be killed.

Yeah, because that chair and the bucket are there. Then yeah, he's going into fetish murder Narnia. At the very end of the film. Seven minutes from the end of this, so we've had the two murders. I don't remember.

I think this is after we've seen the newscaster on air with the fish. Possibly I have to double check that, but he goes in. The chicken man goes in back into the magazine shop, and it's like that guy, the magazine seller, is he's co opting other people's fetishes because when he pulls back the towel that he had or the blanket that he had over the electronics. Now he's got a rolling pin, which is the cups instrument, and he's got chicken feathers and he's pasting them onto the rolling pin, just the exact same very ritualistic way that the Chickenman was pasting those on. And he's got the blood balloon.

And he's got the blood balloon, yes exactly. It's like, what are you doing? Are you stealing their fetishes or what's going on. What it reminded me of, weirdly is Exorcist three, where the one serial killer dies but passes his spirit on to another person. I would like to imagine that he goes on to live a rich, fetish life, continuing the Chicken Man's weird boulder throwing dance.

He just absorbs it. Not to say like, oh, this movie doesn't make any sense, but I find it very interesting too that before so it was post her reveal of the carp on air and when you see the chickenman walking back to the magazine shot, it's now in daylight, and it looks like she is just at her orgasm. She's like getting back together, like putting her hair in place and stuff. And she's still on the air and he walks past, and he looks at her, you know, on the TV screen, and she seems to have a big smile on her face. He doesn't seem to, you know, ever smile really, And I think that's also we get to see the postal person looking at fish now in a window like maybe I should try it.

It's wonderful. I love it. I love it. Yeah, And she gives that little like you were saying, that little knowing look at the chicken man, just like I know what you're up to. You're about to go buy some more pornography.

Well the chickenman doesn't. He buy like a book on circuitry. He buys the electronics books. So yeah, it's like they flip places now, and it's so exactly the same as far as at the beginning he's buying pornography. The looks at him gives this kind of like creepy smile, and that freaks the chicken man out, and he just basically throws the money on the counter and then walks out.

And the guy's like, oh yo, your change, kind of thing like holds up a coin. The exact same happens without pornography, but with the secretary magazines. Now it's like he's ashamed of buying this electronics magazine. Well, he knows what he's going to do with it. He knows exactly.

And I love that instead of having a cash register or even like a real cash box, the guy is keeping his money in an empty Marlborough cigarette carton. I literally remember buying those cartons from like nineteen ninety six and they were eleven dollars. I was going to say, back when they were extremely affordable. I think you're right as far as him dying at the end, because he comes in, sees that bucket, sees that chair with the candles on it, and then starts taking off all the c and it just feels like from that, especially that wonderful shot of the water going and the reflection of the candles, and he just seems to have this look of resignation on his face that we end with. And I don't know why murder has to come into it, but you know what, I'm okay with it.

I'm really okay with everything here. He seems excited about it, like maybe a little apprehensive, but like, Okay, this is what we've been working towards. And we do get that shot of the wardrobe opening too. Yeah, it seems like they're both resigned to it and it's almost part of the ritual. And the only thing that is seemingly unexpected is that, like the real world has kind of crept into it.

I e. There's like an investigation that that's happening. And she actually dies because somebody has dropped a boulder on her head. I don't know that the cops are going to be able to be able to solve that one. So I would really love to see that version of the movie where it's like framed as a detective story, like how did this weird fetish enthusiast with a creepy closet manage to get killed by a boulder smashing on her head inside her apartment building?

It would kind of be the best erotic thriller. Wasn't that already made? With Madonna and Wilm Defoe Body of Evidence. I mean, I've seen it. I couldn't tell you what the plot is.

I just remember Joe Maintaine going, is it true you were a dominatrix? This is one of those movies that is crazy in HD because they they don't know that, like they probably didn't know that, like Willem Dafoe's like erect penis is visible in HD. That's amazing. It's as insane as la Lars van Trier, like you know, hints that it is. Have you done Body of Evidence on the show?

Oh, sometime I might be tempted to do that though. It is an absurd movie, completely. Absurd, yes, and so kink shaming. And that's the thing that I like about this is even though all of these characters are into these absolutely bizarro finishes, I feel like there's not a lot of judgment here. No, it's a celebration.

Absolutely. Yeah. I guess this is available on Blu Ray in maybe Czechoslovakia. That seems to be the only thing I've been able to find is one version that is terribly overpriced, But everywhere else it seems like it's just plain old DVD. And it's been a long time since I think anybody's released this, and this came out, like I said, Keino Quinolrbert Well Keino on video.

That was the version I watched, and it had special features, chapter stops, and it had a bonus film of food, his short film Food, which if you're not of vegetarian you might be one after you watch Food, which. I think is a pretty common thing with a lot of the surrealists, Marco Ferrari and Bunuel. They always have these excessive eating sequences, or frequently have them back to. Daisies, daisies and food. And wasn't that why it was banned?

Was the shameful waste of food that was going on. The decadence, the decadent eating that was happening. And I forgot that we had talked about Max Ernstein the show before. He was actually the leader of the bandits in Lodge d'Or at the beginning segment of Lodge d'Or. Yeah, they were good friends, I believe.

Then he was also in Dreams that Money Can Buy, which I still shamefully have not watched. I haven't seen it either. I think I actually owned it on VHS on the shelf over my right shoulder, So maybe eventually I'll finally check it out. I definitely have DVDs that I've now owned for twenty years and still haven't watched. But like one day, Well, it's like.

All the books, right, uh huh, Someday I'll read all these books. Someday I'll watch all these movies. The struggle is real. The show just gives me an excuse to have to watch those. All Right, We're going to take a break and we'll be back with an interview with Peter Hams, the editor of Dark Alchemy, the Films of Jan Spunkmeyer.

Right after these brief messages, looking for something superior to streaming, a place with more than five times the selection available on all the streaming services combined, Select from an unparalleled collection of over one hundred and fifty thousand films and get blu rays, four k's and DVDs delivered directly to your door. Get in on it now at scarecrow dot com and rediscover the wonders of physical media. I'm really excited to talk about spunk Meyer with you, because I know that one of your many areas of study. I was thinking about how long not being dealing with shrank Meyern it's about forty years now. Wow, mind you, it's fifty years since my engagement with Jeck Cinema, so it's not surprising.

Do you remember what was the first funk Meyer film you saw. I think it was Jabbawocke to give it the full title Jabbawockell Straw Hubert's Clothes, and I think that was at a time when I knew nothing about shrank Meyer. It came through as an animated movie. I think it was released in the US as well as the UK at the time, so I was impressed by that, but I knew nothing about schrank Meyer. And of course it was probably mid ages or early ages.

I've probably got recorded somewhere. When he won the award at Annecy for Dementias of Dialogue, I think that was a big breakthrough, and that was followed up by British TV in the Channel four Quay Brother production captin of de bian and I think that triggered everything really from not that just from my point of view, but from everyone else's point of view as well. When you look at his works, do you divide them into certain periods or themes. I don't divide them at all, but I think they do fall into certain categories that before Alice and after Alice at it's the main category short films and feature films. There's the other category.

I think they fall into those categories without me dividing them. What themes do you see in his films as far as what topics he's dealing with or is it just what is happening at the moment, or does he seem to have certain predilections. Well, it's not certainly what's happening at the moment, though of course he would say at any stage that he is living in contemporary society at the all points, and that the debate will be responding to that. Obviously, there are surrealist applications in his work, and clearly even Jabbowakie, which as partly based on the serialist poet as well, and then you have The Pit, the Pendulum and Hope and the Fall of the House of ussha Edar Allan Poe say, the influence of the Marquis Dessar et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I think you could say that there is a surrealist background to his work, but I don't think he would ever claim to be adapting. Their work. I think he's much more concerned with releasing his own imagination. I would say at one stage that he said, I don't work with intentions. In other words, he doesn't pre He does pre plan his work, clearly, but he's not pre planning it to achieve a desired result.

He's planning it to give expression to his imagination basically. I mean, you've had opportunity to actually speak with him. Yes, several times actually, but obviously when I was preparing the book on him, I met him two or three times. For the first edition, I met him a couple of times in his house in Krague, and for the second edition, I met him in his mansion in Horny Sankoff, which is an amazing place full of his prinstance, you go into the barn and you find the marinettes from Faust staring you in the face. Will virtually walk into the theater because from ceramic sculptures and objects and the part of his collection everywhere.

So that's an amazing experience. And so yeah, I admit him on those occasions. The questions I asked him when I was writing my book were all submitted in writing at his request anyway, and he gave very careful consideration to He was very concerned about being misrepresented. He frequently is misrepresented, of course, so he was very careful about those questions. I subsequently did an interview with him in London at the Animation Festival, obviously run into him and some of his exhibitions.

I think it's quite important to recognize that he doesn't only work in film. He works in virtually all media. Has even has even written two novels and there works in career, graphic media, ceramics, sculpture, particularly touch sculpture, you name it. I can't think of anything he done, hardly anything that he does. And this is an aspect of his work which is largely disregarded because people say, oh, and Strength makes animated films.

He doesn't just make animated films. He makes a lot of other things as well as not all his films are animated. It's quite interesting that his exhibitions I've seen three, i think exhibitions in the UK, none of them in London, one in Wales, one in Brighton. I think somehow the orthodox art establishment except oh, he's a filmmaker. They don't accept his other work.

But if you go to his exhibitions, you will see that work reflected there. You will see the objects from Alice in the exhibition. All those objects and creatures and inspirations exist independently of the films, and they have a resonance outside the films as well. I was always impressed by some of the things that he did for other filmmakers, some of the title card work that he and his wife worked on, some of the special effects that he did for Lipski or for Right Hurtz. Felt like he and Hurtz really had some good collaborations.

They both studied together at the puppetry faculty, so they both had that background in puppetry. Of course, Hertz was in shrank LANs first film, The Last Trick, as one of the sort of puppets actors. He also appeared in The Flat's, another one the shank Las films, so there was a close collaboration there and kind of shared perspective to some extent, I think. And of course Shrank worked on The Ferret Vampire, which just a film that Hats made about the car powered by human blood. Apparently some of the more extreme elements so were cut out by the Census, but yeah, so that's what he was doing.

He did that when he a period in the eighties really wasn't allowed to make animated films, and he worked on other people's films in theater and so on. But he always said he was never employed by the state industry. He always offered projects to the short film studios and they either accepted them or rejected them. But the period during the eighties following a number of his films, so I think it was a pit the Pendulum and Hope and down to the Cellar, which they disapproved of, and then he was banned, and then later they disapproved of Dimensions of Dialogue and he was banned again. But he survived, and he seems it's extraordinary, really that he managed to just seemed to be keep to his own ideals and convictions, regardless of what people were doing to him.

He would offer some of he would get things done, and if he couldn't do them, he would work in another media. I think he said during that period of enforced non filmmaking period that he worked on his touch sculpture in particular and developed that, and he subsequently wrote a book called on his Touch Sculpture, So that was significant, I think. But of course when he got to making Alice that was largely funded from outside Czechoslovakia, with Swiss and British and I think probably some other co production money. I remember asking the then head of the Czech Film Institute was it a Czech film, and he said, of course, it's a check film, but actually the money was coming from elsewhere. His first feature film therefore was effectively subsidized from outside.

With those times that you met him, how would you describe him as a. Person very committed for the staff. I think there's no question about his commitment to Surrealism and the Surrealist group, absolutely for them. The other thing I think that struck me, which might not immediately occur to you, is it extremely analytical, very precise, very logical actually, if I could put it that way, because if you think that the conventional notion of surrealism is something which is allogical, he's extremely logical, very clever. I also went to a lecture by him some I think, some years earlier than that, which he was absolutely precise, really good lecturer.

He didn't do it very often, I don't think, but. Seems like you would have to be so precise with all the start motion and just knowing what to move, how to move, and how to shoot all of that. Yeah, he did say that. Well. With a lot of his earlier films, he worked with an animator called Bedrick Glazer, plus who could worked with Trunka, So he had two very good animators.

But he said with Glaser that he almost didn't have to tell him what to do because they were working on the same sort of mental level. The shrike my animated some of them, didn't. He normally directed the animation, as I understand it, but he did do some animation himself as well, But it was his ideas they did. They they produced what he wanted to see. Now, if memory serves.

When I was reading about Conspirators of Pleasure, that project started much earlier than when it came out, Wasn't it based on a script from the early seventies? Is that right? That's right. I think it was a Pale Bluebird. I think it was called which he wrote in the seventies, and then he began it as a short film as a version of this the script or development from the earlier script.

And he said that I think he suddenly realized that he was going to develop it into the feature belt with all the other stories added, and he said, ah, I went to my producer and said, oh, I can't leave this alone now, I've got to turn it into a feature belt and he said, ah, yeah, I've only got the money for short Phil. They managed to do it. That's the main thing. The initial story film, the seventh seventy with obviously just inspired the additional stories. I think the play of Blue Room, that's the guy who creates the fetish as a'n it of the neighbor, and she creates the fetish of him.

Yeah, and I can imagine how that idea Mike's park some other ideas. I really loved the police chief who has to go away and leave his beautiful wife and go into the shed and get erotic pleasure for them various kinds of objects. Everyone seems to touch each other's lives, but they're unaware of each other so much of the time. The film originally had a different title, and he gradually realized as it developed that they were co conspirators. And one of the things I like this is a personal repellection.

Now. When I first saw the film, it was at an afternoon screening in London. I think it was actually the first screening for some reason. It was in the afternoon. There weren't that many people there.

A few many raincoats turned up because they'd heard about it, and I managed to get the seat number one in row number one with the title Conspirators of Pleasure on it. So I was quite pleased with that, but I think I've lost the ticket. Now. What was the audience reaction at the time, do you remember? I think they were puzzled.

I think it's a great comedy myself. It's the humor in it that appears to be I have to say, and sometimes there's a humor which is not readily apparent, but none of this I find it actually enjoyable. But maybe I shouldn't. Well, and then I as a conspirator number one, so. So as a non check person, I'm so curious about certain things in the movie, especially the television presenter, who I understand was a real TV presenter.

Yes, yes, I believe so, yeah, yeah, yes, her name comes from and the Veinska, which is more a Polish name, so I don't know. Yeah. And it's the interesting thing is how many sort of star actors personalities how ready to appear in strength by as almost regardless they just seemed to trust in his vision and call it back. But he did say. What was interesting about one of the things he said about actors is that because I once asked him how he managed to get so many star key actors into his films, and he said, well, I don't select them on that basis.

I select them on their eyes and their mouths. I then treat them like puppets, or he views them as puppets. It's the expression in the eyes and the mouths that seemed to attract him to his lead actors, and he got a lot to perform for him, none better than Pattern Cheppek in Faust, of course, which is that a lot of the brilliant film. Watching Conspirators for the first time a few years ago, I was just surprised about the dialogue and the lack thereof. I just thought it was so well told that you didn't need any words at all throughout this entire film.

Well there the films is. For some reason, when I was just thinking about this interview, that came into my mind was an early film called The Garden, which was he described as his first surrealist film, black and white, entirely acted and extremely weird, that's short. They should be seen. It has some similarities with a later New Wave film called The Party and the Guests in all those early films really incredible, most of them. They he was still relatively unknown at the time.

It's certainly internationally. Do you know what he is still working on, because he's the last film of his I think was just three years ago, which is fairly recent. Yeah, CODs Kampala with the last one, who is twenty two, I think yeah. As far as I know, there's two versions of that. There's the short version, which is the word we've seen, and a longer vertion which is a complete I think record of his collection of the curiosities and ethographic artifacts and so on.

The last I heard, which was not recent and totally that he was going to release the complete version of that, possibly together with the documentary which his colleagues made called The Chemical Furnace, which is a very good documentary on absolutely precise kind of analysis of his work, as the best thing I've seen about it, directed by Daniel who worked with the Serialist group. He worked on feature films as well, but he's worked on I think he worked on some of Shrank Mars later features. It really goes into the surrealis background in a way that nothing else has done. Is it difficult studying and writing about a surrealist filmmaker? Is it?

Yes? Curiously enough? I never intended to write anything about shrank What happened to us I was at a film school in Czechoslovakia, in Pisa actually, and the then director of the Czech Films to shut a man called Jarislav Botchik, who wrote a book on yusual trunka and other things. But he said, could I find a British publisher for a book they were preparing on shrank Meyer. So I went around, not well, all like the British publishers, and they all said no, they weren't interested.

And then a few years back after that, small British publisher said, how would you like to do a book on shrank Iak. I was never going to do a work called Strength Buyer, but if I'm going to do one, I wanted to be a kind of collective text and I felt it was really important to get the view from the inside, and that is absolutely clear, and that's why I did the interviews. And also I got the very difficult piece of writing by Francis Sacrea called the force of imagination, which is also key to strength Bier's work. That was a substantial part of investigating Shrength Buyer. And then of course there was also the background with the Quay Brothers Keith Griffiths film Cabinet of Bead Shrank Buyer.

So I managed to recruit Roger Cardinal, who'd been one of the contributors to that, to write one of the articles, and so gradually it coalesced. But yes, it's certainly it's not something you would think to yourself, Ah, that's going to be an easy job. It is, okay, it came together of its owner called I'm sure surrealism has an explanation to that. And how about yourself? What are you working on these days?

And technically retired, but I've been working on our number of Blu rays now this year. I've done some work on YouTube Artis' short films that was a commentary. I've done an essay on your I Hertz's film Oil Lamps Versus, one of my favorites from years ago. So I'm writing some stuff on the Czecho Slovak animation for upcoming book that's about it. Animation are really surprising that the animation has managed to survive the market, and it seems to be coming that quite strongly, even with feature films.

I hope we can talk again sometimes and it's I was a pleasure. Thanks for about. All right. We were back when we were talking about Conspirators of Pleasure and yeah, my notes for the second part are are there any films that are like this? And we might have mentioned a couple, but I can't think of too many other films that are like this in any way.

I mean I mentioned Slacker. There's other fetashy type films. I mean not like this. There are like films where like certain elements of this movie kind of remind me of like like Delicatessen. It kind of like feels like that a little bit, and also like not really in subject matter at all, but kind of maybe the dead panness or maybe it is just like you know, the European sensibility of it.

But like I think about like Roy Anderson's You the Living, if I remember correctly, is largely dialogue free, and that's like a vignette based movie. But again it's the kind of thing where people will just be like, you know, freaks in this vignette and it's like it's like handled so lovingly and people will kind of like die in cartoonish ways, and it's sort of I think he is Swedish though, but it's a similar sort of like I feel like set up and delivery to this, but yeah, not quite the same. It just kind of like made me remember. It made me think of, like how I want to watch that, same with Delicatessen. But in terms of movies that this feels like very similar to.

No, I'm kind of at a loss other. Than the things I've already mentioned as having some things in common, like Daisy's and a little bit of Cronenberg. The thing that it made me think of, and this is purely coincidence because it's what I was watching. I was rewatching genre Lan's Requiem for a Vampire because you know, we're in fall now. I forgot how little dialogue that film has and how much it feels like just really indebted to silent film serials in a similar way that Conspirators of Pleasure does.

I don't think it celebrates the vampires or the fetishes quite as much because there's a lot of sexual torture and exploitation. Movie elements in that one. But I am always fascinated when contemporary directors who don't have to use silent cinema trappings choose to, because I feel like it makes you pay so much more attention to like the textures and the visual world. And it kind of got me wanting to watch some I don't know, Furad and maybe like House of Usher and other just really visually gorgeous silent films that are also gothic and weird. Well, there was that movie them Rock, I think it was called That's Completely Silent and ironic.

I was just talking with a friend about I Will Up early the day I died and that being a relatively silent film, which is so much fun, especially to see Billy Zane just going absolutely ape shit. I know that the guy that played the newspaper vendor was in one called America with a k which was a adaptation of Kafka's novel, and I think it's very inspired by Carol Zeman, so kind of more of that. Yeah, I've been wanting to see that, but I haven't yet. And ironically, he was also in a movie from two thousand and seven called The Catfish Summer, so I'm not sure if there's any carps catfish crossovers in that one. A carping summer sounds like a summer.

I want to be in. I've really never seen anything quite like this before, and it is so interesting to me that this is so live action. I really thought that this was going to be so much stop motion. But then you go back even to that earliest of the smockmer films, the one with the two guys with the big puppet heads on, and I think your I heard's played one of those puppet creatures, and the way that that's pretty much I know there's a little bit of stop motion in there, but there's so much just human actors doing their thing, and it almost reminded me of Woman Schance. The way that these guys are interacting.

Wow, I haven't thought about Moomen Shance in a long time. I'm glad I could bring that back for you. If only I had like clay on my face and I just started making myself look sad and then I'll be happy. Now, those guys used to kind of freak me out a little bit, like when they showed up on The Muppet Show and stuff, and the one guy who would like grab his ankles and hop around. Yeah, dolls as a kid, Dolls, clowns, puppets all kind of freaked me out.

Yeah, they still do it for me. I think that's part of why I like Conspirators of Play so much, is because those effigy dolls are fucking creepy, especially when they come to life. I'm going to go ahead and admit this to the Internet that my mom gifted us some dolls from a deceased family member for my toddler. No, I was going to say, you have a child in the house, Well, well, one. Of them was so terrifying that we had to We donated it.

You should have burned it, yeah, I mean we passed the cars on to someone else. Clearly, you know, someone's having a fucking bad time because we couldn't have that juju in our house. But you know, yeah, no, keep that away from your kid. FYI. If you hear it and you own the doll, I'm sorry, and you should burn it.

All right. Let's go ahead and take another break, and we're going to play preview for next week's show right after these brief messages. Nineteen twenty three, A Yellowstone Origin story introduces a new generation of the Dutton family as they explained the early twentieth century, when pandemic's historic drought, the end of Prohibition, and the Grave Depression all plague the Mountain West and the Duttons who call it home. The series stars Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford. This release features all eight episodes of the season, plus over two hours of special features.

Own it now on DVD and Blu ray. A mysterious phone. Call, I. Nice raven. A coffin.

A terrible dream. It seems I was in a graveyard. And then. I can't remember everything. A psychic investigator, Missus Stanton.

The Unknown is writing people since the beginning of time. The only cure is understanding. Oh dog, I'm trying to understand. Can't you see that? I'm really am trying to understand.

A family secret. Someone was playing p games with Paul the night of Vision. I don't play games with married men. Luke Stephanie Powers stars in Sweet Sweet Rachel. I know what you're trying to do, Lilian.

It won't wear. As right. We'll be back next week. What they look at the made for TV film Sweet Sweet Rachel. As we kick off s October twenty twenty five until then I want to thank my co hosts Sam and Jim.

So Jim, what's happening with. You, sir? So. I have a feature film that is half financed that we're hoping to pull over the financing finish line and hopefully, you know, do when it's not in the dead of winter and shoot it in Chicago. But you know, if we do shoot it in Chicago in the dead of winter, it's kind of instant production value because everything looks so drab and you don't actually actually have to dress the streets of Chicago like that.

But it is a it's an adaptation of a queer body horror novel called Waif, and we're really excited about it. And so you know, I think the last time we spoke, I had zero dollars in place, and now I have, you know, half the money. So we'll see. Maybe next time we record it'll it'll be out in the way. So well, the next time we record is pretty soon.

We're going to be talking about Door in December for Dirty December. Oh, I forgot about that. I love Door. I forgot about that too, So yeah, fingers crossed that I have the rest of my moneys by the time we speak, it'll be a Christmas miracle. Like the carp you can celebrate by carping.

I was gonna say, You're like, why are you so silent, Jim, And it's like, well, it's because, like you know, the zoom frame cuts off, like you know, my bottom half and I may have my feet and you know, a top of carp a cub full of carpet. Don't hear Jim talking. I just hear splashing. Well, you need to zoom into my face with your joystick as well. So yeah, and Sam, how's the busiest one in New York City?

Hired? But that pretty good? I guess the things I should probably shout out. So my solo podcast, which is called aerosplus Massacre, I just did an episode on the first ten years of Kiyoshi Kurasawa's horror movies and thrillers that I had the best time doing. I started another podcast called Perverse Permission, and we are doing a very long running long Jing series if you like Hong Kong cinema and want to learn more about it in the eighties and nineties, specifically, every time I come on, I'm really bad at remembering what blu rays I've worked on that are announced.

The one that I'm looking forward to is this whole Oshima box that's coming out. Oh yes, Radiants are doing this really incredible nine film Nikisa Oshima set I was super on to do a commentary for Death by Hanging. This has been a very Death by Hanging year for me because I got to screen it on thirty five millimeter in Cleveland in the winter, which was, you know, the bucket list moment. I think the other thing I would want to shout out on kind of a similar note. So Third Window are putting out this Kaizo Hayashi trilogy set of the Mike Uhama films.

If you've seen or heard of the most Terrible Time in my life, they are amazing. Come with the highest recommendation. I love them. I got to do a commentary for The Trap, which is the very strange gothic third entry in the series. So I feel like that's enough shout outs for one episode.

Well, thanks folks for being on the show. Thanks to everybody for listening. Want to support physical media and get great movies by mail, head over to scarecrow dot com and try Scarecrow Videos incredible rent by mail service, the largest publicly accessible collection in the world, you'll find films they're entirely unavailable elsewhere. Get what you want, when you want it without the scrolling, and yes, Conspirators of Pleasure is available. If you want to hear more of me shooting off my Mouth, check out some of the other shows that I work on.

They are all available at Weirdingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community. If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot com slash Projection Booth. I highly recommend joining Sam's Patreon as well. What is your Patreon, Sam?

Oh, thank you? It's You could find it at patreon dot com. Slash my name so Sam Dean. Every donation we get, that's me and Sam helps the Projection Booth take over the world. God Joy money, say it Ah Sheties, call on.

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