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Overview
Today we discuss Baskin, a rare Turkish cinema horror film. The director pulled out some interesting tricks to get this movie into the world, and the passion in the project shows. A very high quality horror movie.
There’s a lot of things to like about this movie, especially the Bollywood scene in the police cruiser. And that’s the job – police. But, these police aren’t prepared for what befalls them – or does it? The use of dream sequences in this movie help build the horror.
A good kick off to this seasons movies with plenty of job upcoming. Of course, I bet these cops wish they had a different job, which could be said for all the jobs we focus on.
Trailer
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Transcript
And now the first episodes of season four, because, between that intro that people have been listening to for weeks and weeks we’ve spent so much time preparing for this season. About 3.2 seconds, I think.
Difference. That’s right.
Rhys: Yeah. The movie for today is Baskin. There is a list Of 15 movies that I thought for myself I should see. And I’ve been working my way through it. And it’s not horror movies like like the Phantom Carriage or like the original Friday the 13th. These are ones that are notorious for one reason or another.
Okay. Martyrs was on that list. I’m trying to think what else audition was on that list. You know the ones that we start the season off with?
Stephen: Yeah. The big hitters. The ones that really nobody wants to go see except us. And that’s the ones we’ll recommend you go see. And
Rhys: Today’s movie was one of those movies on that list.
Oh, okay. This is Baskin. It is a Turkish film from 2015
Stephen: and one of the few that is completely notes captioned because I did not see a dubbed version anywhere.
Rhys: Yeah. It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t know. Again, I’m not really sure about financials on this one. But I don’t know that it had a really big theater tour.
I, I would be really surprised if it made a whole lot of money.
Stephen: But the thing is, it’s overall a very well made movie. Yeah. We watched range of budgets and I would not have been able to tell you watching this if it was super high budget, super low budget or what it was very, what you might consider a very professional done.
It didn’t feel like some of the college student ones that we’ve seen. Yeah.
Rhys: I do have financials here in my notes. I don’t know what Oh, crazy. I was talking about, yeah, the movie runs an hour and 37 minutes, which again hits that perfect. Horror movie, sweet spot of about an hour and a half, right?
It was made on a budget of quote, under $500,000 quote. So how far under was it? 499 and 9 99. But the box office gross worldwide, however, stands at $318,000. Wow. Yeah. Wow. And when, back in the day when I first saw this movie, I had to order it to come in. Yeah. And it took six months to come in.
I remember very difficult to get a hold of this film. And then I saw as I was doing research on this, at one point in time this was on Netflix and I was like, what? Wow. Yeah. To this day you can still not unlike Martyrs get this on YouTube, but again, you can’t rent it. You have to purchase the film.
It,
Stephen: It’s interesting cuz it’s an I F C at night or something like that. It was a I Ffc midnight. Yeah. Iffc, it was a sponsored thing, all the award contest, award winners or the British lottery ones and stuff. There’s somebody out there helping fund and push these to get ’em out.
Rhys: Now before we do too much more, we need to talk a little bit about Turkish. Oh, yes, let’s, oh, and I, this is gonna kinda date this episode so I apologize for that. But we happen to be recording this like a day or two after a massive earthquake hit Turkey and killed thousands of people. So our hearts and thoughts with all the people who are dealing with
Stephen: that nonsense, which especially was scary for me because as I said, I went and saw a knock at the cabin door, the night movie.
And there was an apocalypse happening, and there was multiple big earthquakes. So to come home from seeing that movie, to hear that I was like, wow.
Rhys: Yeah. Turkish cinema has been around since the 1920s. It hit this golden point in the 1960s. A lot of their films of the times were more popular than the American imported versions in Turkey.
But it also was insular because For the longest time, Turkish movies never left Turkey. They really didn’t cross over under, into other places. The cinema itself started to die out in wow. I’m thinking that’s the sixties in my note, it just says zero apostrophes. So apparently the number disappeared from the front of it.
So at that time the population in Turkey turned to television instead of movies. So the cinema started to die out. And by the eighties, the government attempted to keep the industry afloat and it pushed exporting films, but it didn’t have a whole lot of success. Then in the nineties you had these newer, younger directors.
They started making short films and then moving on to full length features in the 2000, at which point in time the industry enjoyed this renaissance where people started going back to the theater. And historically there have always been very few Turkish films that were successfully exported.
And John Eversol ever Knoll, the director of Baskin, is to his knowledge, the first horror director to make a full length Turkish horror movie that was exported out and accepted worldwide.
Stephen: Ah, nice. Okay. There’s some good trivia for Jeopardy fans. Yeah.
Rhys: And if you’re one of those people who is considering watching this movie he did a short.
First it was like, it’s only like 10 minutes long, 10 or 15 minutes. It’s called Baskin. You can find it on YouTube. It is age restricted, so you have to be signed in and YouTube needs to think you’re over 18 in order for you to watch it. But it’s there and it is a good like work in progress kind of glimpse you.
There’s not a whole lot of story to it. It’s just this, it’s basically if you took a chunk of 15 minutes of the last half hour of the movie and threw it up there, that’s what it is. Got it.
Stephen: He pro, did he do that to show proof of concept to get funding? Maybe?
Rhys: No, I think he just, I think he did it because he wanted to, and then he saw the potential of the story and the cast to expand.
Stephen: Yeah. No I love that type of story
Rhys: behind it. Yeah. The film was nominated for 15 awards and it took five of those, including the best directory. He took that twice Best makeup, best film, and best bloodbath international film. Interesting. Yeah. The film debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 11th, 2015.
Everal was actually at the debut and he said somebody in the industry, he wouldn’t say who, whether it was an actor or a director, walked up to him after the movie, really started getting going and leaned down and shook his hand and said, congratulations on your success, but I really can’t sit here and watch this.
That’s Wow. Theater. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, he was pretty thrilled with that.
Stephen: Yeah, I bet.
Rhys: So the director his name is John ever Everal, it’s spelled can c a n, but in Turkish a c is a j a soft J sound. So it’s actually John Everal. He was born and raised in Istanbul and studied film and art history at the University of Kent in Canterbury.
He worked in the world of television commercials in Turkey where he made a lot of connections and those connections he made helped him make his own little shorts on the side. He began as many of the directors in the nineties, did doing short horror films, and he actually won international awards for his shorts back then.
And in two th 2013, he had this idea for a short film about a team of police officers intervening in a black mass and it going all wrong. And that’s what he made. And he called it Baskin. And you, like I said, you can watch it on YouTube. He didn’t win any awards for that short, but he did get three nominations for it.
Oh that’s good. The the actual film itself was shot during the height of the getsy protests in Turkey, and those protests were marred by frequent very public incidents of police brutality. Taje everyone, he’s in charge of Turkey and over time he has become more and more kind of fundamentalist theocratic, strong man kind of thing.
And in 2015, Or 2013 in this area called Getsy. He was gonna tear down a park, I think, in the city and replace it with, I don’t know, some kind of building. And the citizens didn’t want the park pulled down and they started this protest. And, it was not unlike the Arab Spring, the protests started in this small town and spread nationwide and the police were just brutal and cracking down on this.
And that’s why while two of the police officers in the squad of police in this movie aren’t bad there’s a lot of times where the police are doing inappropriate stuff or people have really bad attitudes about these guys in the movie because at that time, The police really had a very negative public personification at the
Stephen: time.
Got it. Okay. That makes sense. And I was even noticing, we have our own problems with police in this country that’s getting Sure. Big attention and brought out and I’m watching this. And noticing. I’m like, yeah, different countries, man. They have different, feelings and thoughts on the police and that, so it is an interesting cultural thing there.
But the one, everything I noticed though and I love this about some of the movies we watch is, oh, I get to see another country, but hardly any of these show us like a city or lots of people. It’s always somewhere in the woods or it’s one house. That’s what we get. You don’t get a lot of culture out of this movie.
Not regular cult Turkey culture, I’ll say. Yeah. They,
Rhys: I did a whole lot of research into Turkish culture and folklore and stuff like that. We’re researching for this. But at the time, because of Erdogan’s kind of cracking down on, social norms in Turkey Eval had to actually do this movie on the slide.
Wow. This was all done gorilla Warfare style. Wow. So he did their pre-production for 30 days before they shot, and then they shot for 28 nights straight. And then their post-production was completed in two weeks for a total of 72 days from when he started the project to when he finished it.
So he wouldn’t ask for permits to shoot, he would just roll up to sites in the middle of the night, unload everything, quickly, do the shoot, and load everything up and take off before anybody could show up or bust them for what they were doing. Wow. The other thing that he did that was, I don’t know.
I’d lo I bet it was intentional. The other thing that he did that was brilliant was that he sent it out internationally and the movie got such great acclaim that the pu that’s like the sensors in Turkey didn’t actually want to take action against him because he was successfully exporting Turkish film.
So he protected himself a little bit that way, but he still felt the need to shoot the whole thing completely in secret. Wow. So you’re not gonna see the hockey of Sophia or, any of the other famous things outta Istan Bowl in this film. All done, on the side in the dark.
He points to Gasper Noe and David Lynch and George Romero and John Carpenters, his influences for direction in general. He has a love for the. Northern Renaissance period as far as like painting goes. And so he likes that kind of dark, almost claustrophobic feel that you get with the northern Renaissance.
He cites Cronenberg Lovecraft Barker as like authors that he’ll enjoys. And he, for this film specifically, he was pulling from the new French extremity and from the First Doom game. Wow. Okay. Yeah. He said, I watched a lot of interviews with him and there have been times when I’ve seen interviews with directors and I’ve said it where they’re like, oh, blah, blah, blah, Hollywood, yada yada.
And then there have been guys like the guy who did the autopsy at Jane Doe, who was like yes, okay. It’s all great, but it’s all due to the pa actors and the crew and. This guy’s a completely different kind of interview because he is just super excited to be there and he can’t wait to talk about it.
And you bring something up and he just like wraps around the subject and just talk, talk about it. So he’s one of those guys who’s just authentically pumped to talk about his work.
Stephen: That’s great. I love that. I’m glad to look up a couple interviews now just cause I, I wanna see that,
Rhys: He said that one of the things that was a big influence on him in this is his love of Heavy Metal album covers the late eighties specifically Man of War and Iron Maiden.
He really liked the art on those album covers and they became a thing for. He wanted the film to feel surreal and nightmarish and kind of art housey. Okay. And I think he accomplished that. Yeah. The movie’s super surreal, especially once you’ve watched it like three times and you’re like, wait, this is a dream.
In a dream. In a dream,
Stephen: right. Yeah. I even said, okay, so obviously he has seen Jacob’s Ladder and because there’s so much of it, I was like, okay, this is like the real horror version of Jacob’s Ladder.
Rhys: Yeah. He was also a big fan of Lucia fci. And we talked about Lucci FCI at Halloween. He was the, one of the competitors to ATO with the whole GAO film movement.
Everal has directed 17 pieces total, the first six of which were shorts. This was his first full length film and he is gone on to do three other features, four television series and a music video. I haven’t seen any of his later work, and I’d like to. In quotes, I don’t know if you watch this movie three times,
Stephen: there’s something wrong with you that, oh wait, that wasn’t where you were going.
Rhys: I, it’s weird cuz on the one hand you appreciate it more cuz you pick up more stuff, but on the other hand it’s a little more disturbing cuz you pick up more stuff.
Stephen: I was I was kinda thinking that I was following along the movie and I’m like, wow, this is definitely a movie. To see, again, to pick up what you missed or what didn’t make sense the first time and all that, and I got done.
I’m like, yeah, there’s a few things that are going to have to be watched again to get some of this. There was a
Rhys: review that I read about this film that said the brilliance of this film is how ridiculously layered and complex it is. With the ridiculously thin plot that’s provided to it.
Stephen: That’s, that sounds very derogatory, but it’s accurate.
It
Rhys: is. Because, the plot of this is five guys get called into a building, bad stuff happens. And that’s pretty much the whole story in a nutshell.
Stephen: And that’s funny you say that too because I made a note here that like a lot of horror. This has a lot of buildup to get to the, where the story kicks off in a way.
Yeah. And hort does that a lot. And part of the problem in today’s audiences and other authors say this a lot they want the story. Right now you gotta have pa if I can’t, if I can’t tell what’s going on, by page two, I’m done and I’m out and I’m like, really? Page two. I’m like, Stephen King writes 800 page books.
You can’t tell me that reading the first two pages is going to set everything up for 800 more pages. For the good books, let’s say. Yeah. So in a story aspect, this had a lot of buildup, but it’s interesting because A, as we’ve already said, there’s some dreams within dreams and flipping back and forth between what’s happening and it needs that buildup to really.
Get to that point where they have all those things going on, especially then the ending.
Rhys: Yeah. It’s 50 minutes from the start of the movie until they’re actually in the haunted house. Pardon? Yeah. Part of the thing. So there is a whole lot that builds up to that without
Stephen: lots of music. Yeah.
It’s low notes that are very intense, but not music. I was listening to that right away and I’m like, wow. The, that, that’s building the feel without having all the music and there were no dogs hurt. Maybe a couple frogs, but I don’t think there are any dogs hurt. There’s the
Rhys: implication for buckets of frogs to be hurt.
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I’ve only made notes on three of the actors. Okay. Because I saw interviews with two of them, and then only one of them have you ever seen in any other film ever And I am going to slaughter their names.
Stephen: Which please forgive us. We are so not cultural enough to get multiple countries pronunciations correct, for sure.
Rhys: The first is Meit Kehau. And he played the character of the father or Baba. He’s done eight films in total, and Baskin was his first. Wow. He had a bit part when Everal did the short and as soon as his Everal saw him, he knew away right away that he wanted this guy to be the character of the father in the full-length piece.
Mez has. Birth was born with some sort of condition, not unlike Javier Bote who plays mother and all those other, but instead of being tall and thin, he’s very short and like hairless and very distinctive facial features. I was going
Stephen: ask about that. When he came up on my, is that prosthetics?
Is that what he really looks like? That’s intense.
Rhys: That’s really him. Up until that point, he was the disabled guy in the village, they gave him a job as like a parking lot attendant and, that was his job. But he started putting out auditions and Jann saw his audition tape and thought he looked interesting enough to put into the shorts.
And once he actually met, The guy super intense. Like he got a te a sketchbook and just started drawing stuff that he thought would fit into the movie. And like he came in with his own opinions and ever knows that’s a good idea. And he would take those opinions. Wow. So one of the things he loves was at the end of Apocalypse Now the lighting when Martin Sheen is going after Marlon Brando, it’s super dark, shadowy, kiro kind of lighting.
And mimics like, that’s what we need. And Everal really plays with that through the entire film. Very much and there’s even a scene which I’ll, I mention in the notes later when we get to it, that is like almost. Frame by frame taken directly from Apocalypse Now, which I just thought was super cool.
Oh man. Because it goes by and you’re like, oh, but if you knew the connection, you’re like, oh, I can, that’s Marlon Brando right there.
Stephen: Oh, good. Yeah. That’s cool. I didn’t pick up on that. Yeah. Oh, it’s been a while since I saw Apocalypse Now.
Rhys: GaN Kaku or Chu played Remsey. And in the movie, it’s funny, there’s two guys, oppo and Remsey, and they both have nicknames.
And Oppo is the chief and Remsey is the boss. And I think the difference seems to be that the chief uses the radio. I’m
Stephen: not really sure. They, there were five policemen and I’m like, what is this like a a science fiction or a superhero anime? You always have the five characters.
Rhys: Yeah. So Ergen has been in 39 pieces. He had been in a lot of television series and almost all of them, he played the villain. And so he was actually excited this time. He wasn’t playing the villain. He was actually playing the hero almost in this movie. Yeah. Yeah. And the interviewer was talking to and asked him what his favorite movie was and he said, it’s a wonderful Life.
He’s a big Jimmy Stewart fan.
Stephen: Wow. Ok. I’m gonna be in horror movies.
Rhys: You’re pretty much as far from Jimmy Stewart right now as you could be, right? Exactly. Yeah. Mohara Bayer Beak played Yahoos and he’s been in 21 Pieces, and I included him here because he was actually in Taken two. Oh,
Stephen: The bad guys, I assume I, I’m
Rhys: sure he was one of the bad guys, cuz you know, that’s what.
Western directors do with Muslim people. They make the bad guys. But he was the only one on the list who showed up in any title that anybody who listens to this would actually know so well,
Stephen: Hey, this movie could get us a really big Turkish following and they’ll have to get the reading, the bottom of it.
Debate be great. I’d love it.
Rhys: This movie, unlike the starter for season three, there’s not gonna be any debate about whether this is a horror movie.
There’s also not gonna be any debate about how much of this happens in one. Is this one person going insane? I don’t think it is. May be a whole bunch of people going insane, but I don’t know how much I went into this movie taking it at face value the first time I saw it.
Stephen: It I’m definitely gonna have to watch this one again at some point.
Just because of all the layers, like you said, and then how it, the ending, I was kinda like, Wait a second. Hold on. I’m about to like, take notes where we’re at. Like you said,
Rhys: The VI film also vaguely suffers from like black Mountainside syndrome because you have five guys, at least three of them are wearing like leather with a beard and a mustache and very short hair.
And their names are foreign, which makes it that much more difficult. And then some of them have nicknames which get used on occasion, which makes it that much more difficult. It’s hard to keep track of who’s doing what when.
Stephen: Yes. But I also don’t think it affects understanding and watching the movie as a whole cause a lot of what they say and do could be as several characters and it wouldn’t matter,
Rhys: right?
It not unlike Black Mountainside, I can’t tell. Who the cook was and what his final fate was. I think he might have been shot, but most of ’em were, most, a bunch of ’em were. That was the safe
Stephen: guess.
Rhys: But it didn’t really affect the film, so as soon as this movie begins, there’s a chance it’s gonna be good because it’s being distributed by if c under the midnight tag.
Yeah. And not all if C Midnight tags films are good, but a lot of them are. Y you got a good chance. Yeah. It is worth noting. For anybody listening to this, the film is not rated. It’s very brutal. There’s sexual situations, there’s torture, there’s all kinds of stuff. Contemplate before you watch
Stephen: this it is very brutal.
But I wouldn’t say that they. They don’t focus on that to make it like, oh, this is going to creep people out. This is gonna make people jump and shriek and oh, this is gonna be, it’s part of the movie because it’s part of the story and it’s not dwt upon as the major focus at the moment.
The story is the whole time. Yeah. Whereas all the graphic elements are to enhance the story, but not taking away and being the focus at some point, which I think a lot of horror movies make the mistake of doing. Correct.
Rhys: It is a necessary part of the narrative. It’s not put in there additionally to make it shocking.
Exactly. However, When the film starts like the first three to five minutes of the film, you’re watching it, it could be Goonies. Yeah.
Stephen: Yes. I said I said, wow, I love all those toys. That’s some great toy choices. Yeah. It has
Rhys: that feel about it. And it’s really not
Stephen: Which I think may help set up, shock value.
Correct. In a subtle way.
Rhys: Yeah. In general, the film is shot in like three different locations. You have what I’m calling the actual world, which is the one with roads and vans and restaurants and people in it. Then you have the film that is in Art the World that is in Art’s Head, and he is the youngest member of this police squad of five.
And then the last is hell itself. And so the movie kind of fluidly flows between all of these and it doesn’t necessarily tell you when it’s changing.
Stephen: It’s a little now that you said it that way, it’s a little hints of Silent Hill going on.
Rhys: Again, three worlds in Silent Hill.
Yeah. So the film opens with this kind of creepy 1980s sounding horror music. And it fits really well with the camera work because it looks like a late eighties, early nineties kids horror movie. Yes. You see a bunch of toys and a boy’s room that’s dark at night and the camera kind of. Pans across and there’s a boy lying on bed and he gets up and leaves his room.
And here’s the thing, a little hint that it might not be a kid’s movie, cuz it sounds like there’s sex going on behind this door that he walks
Stephen: past. And I made that comment too. I’m like, wow. Very few of the horror movies we watch involve sex. You have that trope of, oh, they’re having sex, they’re gonna die, or, oh, she lost her shirt, she’s gonna die.
That’s how Kevin Bacon lost his life in Friday the 13th. And yet these movies don’t have sex hardly at all. This was one of the maybe the first one I think we’ve watched where there’s sex in the movie. Yeah. Even though they don’t show it, what’s going on behind closed doors?
Or at least tho those of you that have had sex know what’s going on behind closed doors.
Rhys: I actually came across a fan theory. Saying that because eval does this thing with the lighting in this movie where the lighting in the middle is neutral and then it’ll be red tinted or blue tinted. Oh.
And they were saying because the boys walking past the door and their sex sounds from the other side of the door, and the door is tinted red, that his mother is having sex with the devil, and that this boy is actually a prodigy of the devil
Stephen: himself. Just the fact that this movie has fans with fan theories is pretty impressive.
Rhys: Oh, yeah. This movie definitely has a cult following. If feel like debating with him on social media, you better come loaded for bear. Yeah. The kid gets up, leaves his room, he’s in the hallway. His mom’s having a good time in the other room. All even though her door’s lit with a red light.
And the TV’s on in the living room. And he goes in and it’s just static, like in the eighties, right? You fall asleep, you wake up Poltergeist. Yeah. He turns the TV off. And then he turns his head to the side and there’s this filthy hand with this long ratty sleeve reaching out towards him, and he’s terrified.
So he runs to his mom’s room and starts beating on the door. But there’s another door somewhere in the hallway that slams shut and the title card comes up and it says Baskin and Typographically. It’s what I do. The le the hole in the letter A is a keyhole.
Stephen: I didn’t catch that. Yeah I saw it, but I didn’t realize that, ah,
Rhys: are a huge theme throughout this whole
Stephen: film.
Yeah. Okay, nice.
Rhys: So here’s the tricky, here’s the really sneaky thing that he did to this movie on your first watch. This whole thing is a red herring because you have this boy who wakes up in the middle of the night TV’s on, he turns it off, there’s this ratty robed hand that reaches out for him, and then boom, something drastic happens.
Then you have this following scene, and in the following scene the camera starts panning almost evil. Dead style. Yeah, it’s like on a dolly floating above the street, heading towards this diner. There’s a van parked outside the restaurant and it goes through the back of the van and through the interior of it.
And you can see from a photograph over the dash, it’s a police squad. Which I thought was really interesting actually, and it not surprising, but in Turkey they have like police vans and police cars, and the van has five guys in the van. Each one has their own job and so they can show up and they’re like instant police presence, which is.
Kind of an interesting concept for policing,
Stephen: and I thought about that exact thing because they sounded like they were heading back to the station after they were done eating, after they were done doing their job for the day and they were driving. He’s no, I know there’s a turn up here.
And I was thinking, I don’t know Turkey that well. And I don’t know the area that they filmed this at, but it sounded like it was very out there in rural and things were separated, so they needed the van to, this part of this area. We need some police for the day. That’s your job, but we need a whole crew to go at one time.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. It might be. I didn’t know for sure, but it was, yeah. I’m not,
Rhys: I’m not really sure about the intricate workings of it, but that could be it too. Yeah. Just you have this mobile police force that you can send from a city to a more remote area. Yeah. And actually have enough manpower to do the.
Stephen: But I’m assuming that this was not un-normal for Turkish people. Cause you know Yeah. We filmed it and, for us it, it stood out. So I’m assuming that this is a common type of thing,
Rhys: an interesting cultural difference
Stephen: for us. Exactly. Exactly. So see, all the great things we learn Yeah. On this podcast.
Rhys: Yeah. So here comes the red herring. This robed figure walks by carrying a bucket and the hand holding the bucket with the sleeve on the robe. Looks suspiciously like the hand at the opening of the film. The figure stops at the entrance to the restaurant where the policemen are talking and it stays outside.
And the, I think it’s VUS is talking about a plan to get additional money. They’re gonna vote, they’re going to do some soccer brackets and they’re having this very animated discussion. Busboy comes in, grabs some plates from the table and takes ’em out. He’s completely faceless in the frame. In fact clear up until he actually interacts with the characters.
It’s always shot with his head out of frame.
Stephen: Yeah, he is some interesting camera. Work with us. And as a side note, both Colin and I thought the newest mite movie had some of the best camera work we’ve seen in a movie in a while. Oh. The most interesting camera work that probably helped me make like it.
Rhys: So he walks back in the back to get rid of some dishes. There’s a knock on the door. He opens the door and the cloaked figure hands him the bucket, which he takes to the cook who pulls out some meat and starts to cut it up.
Stephen: Very Dexter have you’ve ever seen
Rhys: Dexter? You’re sitting there thinking, so the hand grabbed the kid and butchered the kid and the kids
Stephen: in the bucket.
And they focused on that meat a whole lot. Correct.
Rhys: When we get to the end, if you remind me, I’ll give you the most prevalent fan theory about that whole thing. Okay, cool. Cuz it would just give away too much to do it right here at the start.
Stephen: Go watch the movie. Stop the podcast.
Rhys: Yeah. The camera goes back out to the officers who are filling out the bracket.
They ask the input of SEFA who is sitting apart from the rest of the group. He’s also like wearing a tie. He’s one of the most official looking members of the police. He’s got a headache and he says it’s from them gambling. And you can really see like that chiaroscuro lighting technique in these scenes where it’s like dark and neutral in the middle with a little tinge of red on one side and blue on the other to show, what’s closer to the edge of the film.
They’re a police unit. They travel around in the van outside. SEFA is the driver of the van. That’s his. Remsey they refer to as the boss. There’s a guy, Arta, who’s young. He’s the rookie. Remsey has raised him since his parents died. Oppo, they refer to as the chief. And like I said the only chief thing I saw him do is he made a radio call at one point in the film.
And then you have your boots.
Stephen: And this is where I got the most confused because at the very beginning, safely was the focus. He was leading us into the story, but then it becomes arta and I actually confused the two for a while in the show. Yeah. And that, that could be a cultural thing with us watching it as opposed to someone else.
But it, that did get me confused in the whole thing. They’re
Rhys: the only two without facial hair and short hair. And they weren’t wearing leather. Yeah. The two you had the whole units broken down. Two groups, one short-haired facial hair, leather wearing, and then two wearing button downs with clean shave.
Yeah. So they start talking about sex and apparently ya Fuz is known for his sexual peccadillos, and he tells this story about how he took a prostitute home only to find out he was a transvestite, he had sex with him anyway, and then mildly assaulted him along the way, yeah. And interspersed with these, you have these really close, detailed shots of the cook, putting this meat on the grill, which at this point in time, we think is a boy who’s been brought here by a bucket.
It’s not very appetizing. And it’s all about the setting, right? Because ordinary, that’s a Sizzler ad right there if you take it outta there and put some bouncy music behind it. About this time the server shows up and he is distributing around the table and he is laughing.
He’s really just smiling. His backs to us. And VUS is offended by that. And it begins to escalate and he’s offended by it like Joe Pesci and Goodfellas, right? You call me clown. What did it make you laugh, kind of thing, right? And the whole thing starts to escalate. The cook comes out from the back and he’s trying to settle everything down and he continues to escalate.
And while it is safe was just looking worse and worse. And he eventually just gets up and runs for the door. He heads to the bathroom, making it in barely. The bathroom is lit purely in blue. He vomits everything in the sink. We go back
Stephen: to the restaurant. See now when I watch, I thought it was the toilet.
And when he started splashing his face, I was like, oh, that’s nasty that’s not right.
Rhys: Back in the restaurant, Remsey has managed to get everyone towards the door and everything seems cool until the server says under his breath. If only you weren’t cops and all of a sudden it’s all going again.
And Yaz is talking a big game and Remsey calls him out and he takes his gun off of him and says, go ahead, let’s see what you can do. And they start to fight. And Yaz actually does do a pretty good job of getting on top of the dude and just pounding the out of it. Yeah. Safe’s in the bathroom and he is splashing water in his face.
And he looks, and there’s this frog sitting in the soap dish. And the amount of time he’s spent on that shot lets you know that this frog is like an important thing. Yes. SEFA manages to shoe it away. It’s not afraid of him at all. And he rinses his face off again and looks in the mirror and he seems to be looking at his forehead and his eyes go wide in terror.
And he just starts screaming someone at some point in time. And I’ve seen it three times. I did not see it, but mentioned that you could see the reflection of Baba in the mirror.
Stephen: I, I thought I saw something
Rhys: but I, I missed it. But it’s a cool little ad if it’s actually there. Yeah. So the rest of the cops run out of the restaurant.
They come out and they’re like, APOs got his gun out. He’s ready to shoot the lock off the door. And all of a sudden the door opens up and Yahoo’s and Arter waiting by the van. And Apo comes out and tells him, SEFA said he felt like he was losing his mind, but he’s fine. He can still drive.
Stephen: I felt like I was losing my mind.
I scream now I’m better. Yeah,
Rhys: they all pile in the van. The van drives off and the camera goes back to the restaurant. And the interesting thing here is the restaurant seems completely deserted. So it makes you wonder did they kill the staff?
Stephen: True. And this again, ses, the one kind of going crazy, the, and then, and then it flips over tota.
So again, there’s arguments over which parts of this are real and which parts are dreams. Even this beginning you could argue one way or the other. It could be both.
Rhys: Just to lend some weight to, did they kill the staff VUS at one point in time in this says we’ve got the gun, we’ve got the badge.
So he feels ridiculously entitled to do whatever he wants because of the job that he
Stephen: has. And it doesn’t seem to bother the other officers. No that’s how it’s,
Rhys: yep. Remsey wasn’t gonna stir a fight with the guy, but he certainly wasn’t gonna stop one. What happens next is Sefa, in order to reassure the crew that he’s okay, turns the radio on.
And for the next two and a half minutes you have a music video.
Stephen: Which is some of the craziest lyrics I’ve seen are like, what are they singing about? Could be bad translation. I’ll give it that.
Rhys: It’s really interesting to me because Turkey has always been a crossroads culturally. It sits, between Asia, Eurasia, Europe and that kind of thing is something in Bollywood films all the time.
You watch even Bollywood horror movies, you’ll watch them and there will be a three minute music video stuck in the middle of it, maybe two, and you’re like, it just kinda took me out little bit. As they’re driving along, the song ends and the camera flips upside down Before it happened, as the van was driving along, it was in blue light when the camera flips upside down.
The van is now lit and red. Yeah.
Stephen: Another silent hill, like Yes. Call out to what’s going on.
Rhys: Yep. They get a call for backup to a neighborhood called Enoch, and Oppo says they’ll respond and Sefa claims he knows how to get there. And they compare notes on what they know about Enoch. There are three sh shrines in the area, but Sefa says he’s heard nasty stories and he never goes into any detail about any of them.
The radio quits working, and while they’re arguing about whether or not safe is lost, some figure naked kinda runs out in front of the van and disappears into the brush on the other side of the street. Sefa gets the van stopped and everyone gets out. He seems to be the only one who saw it.
But everyone’s backing him, they’re not questioning about it. They’re all out there flashlights in the darkness, yelling, threats. And while they’re doing that, something bumps the van on the other side hard and the whole van rocks. So they run around to that side and they find no one, but the side of the van is all scratched up.
And then you UFO sees there’s an entire swarm of frogs on the side of the road, just piles of them. He makes a certificate about maybe the frogs pushed the van.
Stephen: And again, there’s a lot of hints of, is this real or is this a dream now? Or is it some, alternate reality? Every part of this movie, you could find little things like that and
Rhys: argue.
Yeah. Frogs have always been seen as a portent, especially in those kind of numbers as a plague or some sort of oncoming threat.
Stephen: And I looked that up actually. They also in some times and cultures have been importance of ancient wisdom, which fits this in some ways also. Oh it does.
Rhys: In fact, at the end of the movie, there’s this whole thing about wisdom and just exactly what enlightenment is good and would enlightenment is bad.
And who gets to decide that? Yeah. They decide, whoever’s done it is long gone. So they climb back into the van and head off down the road. And then VUS gives seus some crap about what he actually saw. And when Sefa turns to retort back, he turns back and there’s a person in the middle of the road, directly in front of the van.
I did, of course, as I want to do, pause the video exactly. To look at the figure. And it is just a ragged figure. And it’s just like the hands up in front of their face like. Protection kind of thing as they smack against the glass, cuz Sefa hits the figure hard, loses control of the vehicle.
It cranes off the road down in embankment and into the water below. And here we shift and we’re shifting directly into Art’s Mind, which is, the third venue of this film. You see a footage of some Turkish game show and VUS and APO are watching it laughing. They think it’s hilarious. Safe was sitting there staring off while the cook from the diner stoking the grill.
And Remsey is sitting there fingering his prayer beads, which he does a lot in this movie. Yeah, I noticed that kind of as a sign of maybe spirituality or wisdom. Arter relates a saying of his fathers, you shouldn’t talk about your dreams at night, which I think is a cool little.
Stephen: Yeah. That’s about, as comforting, as if you die before you wake.
Yeah.
Rhys: Son, don’t speak about your dreams at night. He says that his name came to his father in a dream before he was born, and his parents were really into dreams. So now we see that there’s perhaps this mystical spiritual side from both of his parents. Perhaps this has been passed down to him. We find out later that it has.
He then starts to relate this story about his f childhood friend named Kaska and Kashan claimed to have actually seen his own father’s soul leaving his body. When he died, his brother who was there too, didn’t see anything, and they made a pact that whoever died first would appear to the other without scaring them.
Then Kos left on a ferry that day, and Arto went to bed when he got home, he had a dream where everyone was glaring at him and he was scared of something, but he didn’t know what, have you ever had dreams like that?
Stephen: Yeah. They, some of them have been a awake, but yeah,
Rhys: you have this unknown, unseen thing and you should be scared of it, but you don’t know why.
You don’t even know what it is. And,
Stephen: and a lot of that times though I know it’s a dream, but that doesn’t change how you feel in the dream. Yeah,
Rhys: right. Kashan cuts through the crowd and he holds his hand and tells him not to be scared, and then he awakens from that dream into another. And here’s where we find out what a red herring the start was.
Because the other dream that he woke into is what we saw at the start of the movie. Whereas mom’s in her room, he hears her groaning and then no one’s there and the television’s on. It’s only static. He heads to his. But instead of a, just a hand reaching for him, he knows it’s KO in there and he’s scared to see him.
So it runs to his mom’s room and pounds on the door. And then he awakens for real. Then he found out that Ko died that night. So he continues to have that dream to this day, and he had it that morning and he says, it’s like I’m still dreaming. Intent. Yeah. He lost his parents a year later in a car crash.
And Remsey points out that there’s no one else in the diner now, and so this is like a remsey who is possibly a figment of art’s imagination in this dream state. And he’s guiding him. He’s do you know there’s no one else in the diner
Stephen: now? It’s like the like I said Jacob Ladder, the friend, that’s the angel that guides him that, I’ve, I saw the parallels between those two movies in this scene very
Rhys: heavily.
Yeah. The lighting and the music turn ominous. And then there’s this hooded figure in the kitchen area, and Remsey says this is the first time that someone other than he can see it, water starts to drip on art’s head from the stealing, and then blood just starts gushing from under his hands across the table.
The water over his head turns to blood and we look down and his feet, he’s ankle deep in water and he falls backwards and is completely submerged in water. And this giant hand reaches down to grab him.
Stephen: Yeah, that was a cool imagery. There’s a
Rhys: cool shot. Yeah. Yeah. And then we’re back to the present. Two members of the squad are pulling them outta the water and they’re arguing.
Of course about, whose fault this is. And then this super tall, bizarre looking guy with a lantern on his staff comes up, they climb out of the water to discover a group of homeless people living next to the bridge. Everal in an interview called them the Frog Hunters. And then he talked, he talks about this and he is, Stephen King is one of the only other people I’ve heard refer to like this.
He’s they’re the borderland
Stephen: people. Yes. I, that’s almost exactly what I put.
Rhys: Yeah. And King talks about this all the time in interviews where you have a settlement that’s on a border between two places and it’s always shady and like morality and law and everything are mixed.
Because it’s proximity to the border.
Stephen: And I was even when this happened, this is where arguably this could still be a dream. You could say this is part of a dream. Because tho those people just conveniently were right there for one thing, but they seemed a little bit like the borderland people or on the river sticks, like they were guiding them across to the other world.
Is what I got out of these guys reluctantly. Yeah. Ok. Yeah.
Rhys: Remsey wonders who they hit with the van. Nobody at the campfire seems to know anything about it. They hang around the campfire and assessor or situation. They’ve got no radio, they’ve got no van. They asked the big guy where they are, and he says
Stephen: In Y where they were looking for, which they were looking for another argument. It’s still a, it’s a dream.
Rhys: Yeah. He’s it’s that way to the woods. You should go through the grove. The place the backup call came from is through the woods, about 200 meters away. And they try to get a guide.
No one’s excited about it. They basically force one guy into doing it. One woman is actually really nice. She’s you should just stay here and rest. And they’re like, we’ve got important stuff to do. I think it was Yahoo saying that. And she’s if you got stuff to do, you better get at it.
Stephen: With her saying that and acting like that’s another argument that they were like, guiding them into the underworld, into the wor netherworld or whatever, because that’s the type of thing.
You always get that one character. It’s maybe you wanna stay on this side. We gave you a chance. There you go.
Rhys: Then they head off across this bridge and this girl says something and it’s not subtitled. Yes. And in this one interview I saw this guy saying, so this girl says something in Turkish and you don’t subtitle it.
And John’s it’s not Turkish, she was speaking in French. Ah, okay. He wanted to throw a line in French there to make this kind of mysterious goodbye from the borderland people. But the girl didn’t know French and her pronunciation was horrible.
Stephen: I say, it didn’t sound French, but Okay. The
Rhys: translation roughly of what she said was happier.
Those who march in ignorance to death. Which is
Stephen: about what I guessed it would be.
Rhys: Pretty much. Yeah. Abandon all hope you who exited exactly. Yeah. Happier. They who march in ignorance to death. They find this abandoned police car parked outside this ancient police station. It was a police station in the Ottoman Empire.
The, yeah. Then it was a stable and now it’s just this abandoned ruin. They head in to try and find the missing police as they do Remsey pulls Arta aside and he says he was supposed to look after him and he says, don’t worry, I have the key to all this. Everyone pulls their guns and heads towards the door.
Artis stops and notes that there’s some really bizarre. Blair Witch mobiles hanging around the outside, right? Yes. You got twigs and just random stuff hanging off of wire. Say if it checks the car and there’s no key or a working radio, and he’s freaking out about it a little bit and oppo comes up reminding him they have the gun and the badge.
Then he is what? How does the Turkish national anthem start? And safe was like Fear Knot. And he starts singing. He is and the Turkish national anthem, the first line is fear, not the crimson flag waving in these Dawns will never fade. So the first, yeah, about that time, their guide just beats feet.
He’s I’m outta here. Yeah. Smart man. The first thing they note when they get inside is this overpowering stench. Then the place seems completely empty and abandoned. Inside we have more of what I have in my notes written down as Satan’s Mobiles. It’s a mess. Wire and meat.
Stephen: It’s satton art and craft.
There’s a macaroni thing on the fridge.
Rhys: They find more of these meat mobiles and now the floor surface is squishy, and then they find a clutch of eggshells. They’re broken, open, not shattered, just like broken open and they’re full of blood. Yeah. And eggs are always seen as like a sign of renewal life spirituality.
But finding ’em in this state is a really bad sign. Yeah. Yeah. They hear this pounding from deeper in the building, and they go to track it down and they discover a policeman. He’s just standing there beating his head against the wall. He’s really basically catatonic.
Stephen: Yeah. And that was very disturbing.
Yeah. Because that’s an argument that it’s not a dream state along with the guide running away if it had been that dreams that he would’ve just disappeared. Disappeared, right?
Rhys: Yeah. They ask the guy where his unit is, he eventually raises his arm and points to a doorway that exits the room where there’s one solitary policeman’s hat sitting on the floor.
SEFA gets the job of escorting this officer back to his car, which you would think that’s a good gig. I get to leave. You would be wrong.
Stephen: Like you are quite often in horror movies.
Rhys: They find this flight of stairs and it goes down. In Turkish mythology, I don’t even necessarily wanna say mythology.
This could actually be current. There’s a place called ta, and that is what they call hell. And it is described as being below the surface of the ground. Wow. So they come to this place and they find spiral stairs going downstairs, deep into the earth, you know where you’re
Stephen: headed. I agree with Javez here.
I’m like, yeah, it’s pitch black and steps going down. I’m, no, I would stay and a tries
Rhys: to get Arta to stay with him and art’s I’m not staying, I’m going with you guys. And then is oh, now I have to stay by myself. I don’t. And he goes with him.
Stephen: His part was
Rhys: They start to head down and as Sefo and the comatose man head out, the lighting changes.
And then he sees a frog on the floor and the frog hops around the corner and Sefa follows it. And part of me thinks this was the frog that he chewed off of its perch in the bathroom. Oh yeah, I can see that. And as he’s walking, he turns around the corner and finds some couple just screwing right there.
Except it’s not just some couple. Cause they’re, pardon the derogatory nature of the commentary, but they’re doing it doggy style. And the person who’s on their knees, their face seems to be in a bowl of what looks like
Stephen: crap. Yeah. It’s very disturbing imagery. Yes.
Rhys: Everybody in this film, all of the general players that we’ll be talking about are wearing some kind of mask.
It like covers their face. They have things that are bound around them. They’re wearing. Rags if they’re wearing anything and there’s a whole lot of filthy, oily skin. Yeah. It’s
Stephen: overall like the toxic avenger having an orgy Yes. Trash pit
Rhys: was the phrase that I heard
Stephen: referred to it. Yeah. There you go.
Rhys: So there’s a whole, there’s this whole black, there’s full head, black masks, chains and he drops his gun cuz it startled him.
Yeah. And then he bends down to grab it and all of a sudden all of these hands come outta nowhere and grab him and just pull him screaming into the chaos. And the catatonic guy just stands there giggling. Yeah. Or crying. Just he’s a mad man.
Stephen: Now this is, now we’re into it. This is definitely the most disturbing thing yet in the movie.
Yes.
Rhys: And that thus is the end of safe hook. So if you thought he was the main character, not unlike Martyrs, where you’re like, what? Yeah. All of a sudden your main character’s gone.
Stephen: But also he’s just around the corner. He’s screaming, these people are having sex. They make noise, but the others don’t come running right then to see it.
So again, there’s something not right with the world in this place if it’s something’s outta step,
Rhys: right? Yeah. The guys downstairs find a blood stained room with a couple of boxes and candles and a book and a pile of locks chains hanging from the ceiling and their paintings and illustrations all over the wall, including the camera takes time to focus on three or four specific ones.
There’s a frog there’s a devil. There’s an incredibly intricate anatomical drawing of the inside of some goat. Human hybrid thing. Yeah. And then there’s even an image of the devil taking someone from behind. And by taking, I mean screwing them from behind.
Stephen: And it looked, some of the flashes looked kinda like some frog people hybrids having sex like we just saw a minute
Rhys: ago.
Yeah. Oppo in his explorations finds the side room and their bodies wrapped in plastic. And now they’re not just lying on the floor, they’re hanging from the ceiling. And there’s a woman in this little cage and he’s shocked. Yet Curious. Arta on the other hand, is falling this blood trail that leads a different direction and it leads to these masked figures who are butchering humans.
Oppo in the other room reaches for the cage, and this towering figure comes outta nowhere and claps ’em on the head with a sledgehammer. Yep. And he drops.
Stephen: And they do a good job. He does a good job with his face. And then you see the blood dripping down. Yeah. In the sound without actually seeing some special effect of the sledgehammer buried in his skull.
Yeah. Very effective.
Rhys: Yahoos actually sees this and starts screaming of them all. Arta is the only one who actually shoots. All these guys have guns in their hands. Arta is the only one who shoots, and his shots are like 15 feet in the air over anything.
Stephen: Yeah. Which again, and I could be wrong.
We’ve talked a little bit about the cultural differences with the police. I don’t know how much training they get. These cops seem, from our viewpoint, a little corrupt, a little power hungry that, they can do whatever they want. So I question how much training they really have. Cause they didn’t go about this search in a way that seemed logical.
And he shot crazy as he’s running, which I, On our cop TV shows, which however close that is, to real cops, I don’t know. But you don’t see that, right? And I can’t believe, after all the training, of course this is an unusual situation. I’ll give them. It is.
Rhys: And Everal is really good to like linger just for a second too long on various things.
So like you can see the body that’s hanging up that the butcher is literally taken the right leg off of. Yes. Yes. This hoard of bestial creature people, things start giving chase. These guys start running. They end up tumbling down this hole in the wall. And Remsey and Arta see hands reach out and grab and Holloway Yaz.
So now safe is gone. Gone. Apu, they left back in the other room. Yeah, Fuz gets dragged away somehow. Remsey and Arta end up separated. And art around. Crazy. Yeah. Art is running down a tunnel, which just seamlessly melts into his childhood hallway.
Stephen: Yes. Again, a lot of similarities to Silent Hill.
Keep coming up. When I was watching this he may not have meant that, it’s just a good way of doing something like this
Rhys: for sure. He sees his younger self there at the end of the dream and the hooded hand reaches out to him and leads him, leads his child’s self away.
Stephen: Then he grabs ’em and pulls him in at the very end.
Rhys: And then shuts the door. Anger all uses these dream sequences to segue from one scene into the other. He just does it so well because it goes from that to art of drinking water. Yeah. He’s back in the diner and he’s choking now drinking the water. And Remsey, he’s with him and he realizes something’s off.
He can feel it, but he can’t put his finger on it. Remsey replies that not everything has a clear answer. Arta, which you could say for this movie, for that matter, he goes on to say they’re at a crossroads and he’s not sure if it’s him or if it’s Arta, who’s at the crossroads, or if it’s all of them, which again, Remsey typically like Arta is the personification of the audience.
In this film, right? They do this in horror movies a lot where there’s somebody that the audience can identify and relate to. But Remsey is what’s going on in the audience’s head, really. I don’t know if it’s Remsey who’s in this horrible situation, or if it’s Arta or is it all of them, right? Having seen it three times, I don’t, I still don’t know.
He says that they were summoned there that night. There was no call for backup. Then he goes on to say he’s always seen them like his grandmother did something that’s always looking for something. It’s searching, it’s haunting. He can feel it, and he points out to Arta that Arta can feel it too. He just doesn’t realize it.
Stephen: And I liked that because, in the supernatural world and all that, they always talk about how animals and little kids can see things that maybe we can’t. That because of the way their brain doesn’t filter things right. Like we’ve learned to, they see things we don’t cause our eyes don’t see up.
It’s our brain. And that fits this movie really well. Yeah. And I liked that concept. Yeah.
Rhys: Arta then, I don’t know, wakes up. Because where he is this any more real than anything else? We’ve now moved to the third section, which is hell. He wakes up, he’s chained to a pillar as is Remsey, Enz and Oppo.
They all had bags on their head and a figure that I refer to as Baba’s Lieutenant is taking the bags, the masks off their head. The lieutenant claps. Oh wait, this, I’m sorry. The focus is all kind of soft and fuzzy and what I am calling Baba’s court can be seen and heard anticipating his arrival and those dirty half dressed oily people wearing masks.
It’s just a whole bunch of them down there. Yeah, it’s
Stephen: definitely looking dark mass. There’s just no, Ozzy might step out of the shadows, right?
Rhys: The lieutenant claps and the court, the entire court prostrate themselves as the baba begins to descend the stairs. There’s an altar in this vaulted room with lit candles and a book on it and hanging above the altar I’d be surprised.
I don’t wanna say surprised. I’d be interested to hear if you saw it, cuz I didn’t see it till my third watching. It’s a giant. No, did not touch that. It blends in really well with the staircase cuz the staircase is a wire framed spiral staircase. But there’s this giant key hanging over the altar.
Stephen: Ah, nice. Good touch.
Rhys: Yeah. Vus starts hurling insults and threats at him. And he just completely ignores him and he walks over and sits down. The lieutenant brings this bowl of water, which he dips his hands in, and then he starts to just pat his head. And that is the exact shot from Apocalypse. Now, Marlon Brando does that as he sits up, he’s in the sweltering heat to Vietnam and he puts his hands in the butt and the camera frames on the back of his head.
Is he like, I was like, oh, that’s so cool
Stephen: that, that. I love that.
Rhys: Baba walks over to you Booz and just laughs at him like, huh. He then goes to the center of the room and he begins by telling them that he sees that they are there to join them tonight. And it is their job to welcome the police officers on a night like this.
When doors open and realms unite, we’re here in this chamber together. Hell is not a place you go. You carry hell with you at all times. It is inside you.
Stephen: And now we’re waiting for the cytes to show up.
Rhys: Hell Razr actually got mentioned in one of the other reviews I read. They’re like, it makes the, makes Pinhead and his friends seem like a walk in the park or something.
Yeah, it
Stephen: does. Yeah. Tell Are all these goth p posers here?
Rhys: Yeah. And this is where we get the part where Baba, this is with all the horrific stuff that happens in the next 10, 15 minutes in this movie, Baba is like this. Premium philosopher.
Stephen: Yeah. It’s like the evil twin Gandhi.
Rhys: Yes.
Here we are at this place when all of these realms are uniting and you have hell inside you, you carry it with you all the time. He says that fate has put them first among the creatures that they’re here to herd. He then goes to oppo and oppo has what looked like fresh sutures in his abdomen.
Yeah. And the guy just reaches down and pulls him out and starts to disempower him
Stephen: with his finger. Just pulls. That’s it.
Rhys: That’s the disturbing part. It’s not Braveheart, where they just cut you open and then the stuff falls out. He’s like pulling the stuff out. Yeah.
Stephen: Like a yarn.
And I know. It, it’s not clean, and all that. But the intestines looked shriveled and old and like they’ve been decayed already. Which a again, made you made me at least look at it and wonder what’s real, what’s not. Where are we actually at? Is it saying diseased inside?
Oh, yeah. Or, is it that coming to this place turned him into, something that he wasn’t that there again, good horror, lots of possibilities. Yeah.
Rhys: He starts coiling at like a rope. Yeah. Yeah. The lieutenant releases the chains and oppo falls to the floor. He’s done. Yeah. Sfu.
He then says, you die as you sleep and you resurrect as you wake up.
Stephen: Because sleeping is the little death, more little
Rhys: philosophical nuggets there for you to chew on as he’s cutting pieces off of your body.
Stephen: Isn’t calling sleep the little death? Isn’t that French also? Isn’t that where that came from?
Rhys: The most famous one that comes instantly to my mind because I’m neurotic. It’s Frank Herbert from Dune.
Oh,
Rhys: okay. It was the, it’s the prayer. Paula Tradies does fears to die, the little death. They don’t refer to it as dreams. Just the little death is like specifically that, but Hamlet in his soliloquy Right.
To sleep, to dream to win. Yeah. Yeah. Baba’s lieutenant walks over to the altar and casts some bones, like rolls him, like dice and Baba removes his robe to reveal a. The dude’s jacked.
Stephen: He’s cut for a
Rhys: guy who’s four foot tall. And he also has this necklace made like almost entirely of giant ancient locks.
He heads over to Avu and this stool is brought over so he can crawl up onto the stool and look him in the eye. And this is a pretty disturbing next couple minutes of film.
Stephen: Yeah. And we watched Martyrs. Yeah.
Rhys: He asked you if it was what his name is, and he replies that they’re the law. Then Baba says do you think the law is here with you now?
And then he calls him out. He’s you look tough, but you’re really scared. He says, the human soul is corrupt, only looking for power and searching for new things to. He takes this knife out and asks him, are you ready to give up? Searching for power to join us? Are you willing to give up your worldly eyes?
To open your eyes to what’s beyond? Open your heart to me. Open your soul to me. Yeah. And then he cuts out you, us, his eyes
Stephen: not just cuts it out. He pokes multiple
Rhys: times. Yeah. It’s one of those scenes where you see him all the time in horror movies where like something gets really close to the eye and then they cut away.
They don’t do that here. And in fact, he like rounds out the eye sockets, make sure he gets everything out.
Stephen: But that’s not even the
Rhys: worst part. No. The court is all excited when he does this. He pulls the knife out and then he licks it and he says, open the eyes of your heart. And then he tongues his eye socket.
That’s terrible.
Stephen: That was like, are you kidding
Rhys: me? Yeah. Yeah. Then he takes a cloth and places it over his eyes and kisses his forehead and says, don’t let me down your fuz. And the thing that really shocked me when he really shocked me when he put the cloth over his face, all of a sudden I was like, oh my gosh.
He looks just like all the people down there on the floor. Yeah. This is where he gets these people.
Stephen: Yeah. And when you just listen to what he’s saying, ignore all the horrible parts. The philosophy of it is a good discussion piece. And we said the same thing about martyrs, remember? Yep.
Here we are watching all this horror thing. It’s yeah. I like what he’s saying. Yeah. Ignore the horror stuff, but yeah. Yeah. It’s what
Rhys: makes it disturbing.
Stephen: Yes, exactly. At this
Rhys: point we find out that goat person hybrid sketch from the wall is real. The lieutenant leads her in on a chain.
She’s wearing a grass skirt, and that’s about it. She has like a goat skull permanently fixed to her head. VUS is unchained and led behind her, and they pull down his pants and forced him to copulate with her,
Stephen: which I don’t know how I’d be able, there’s some mechanics involved after I got my eyes poked out.
I don’t know about that happening. No blue pill or anything.
Rhys: Yeah. He appears to finish and then he sits on the floor as she crawls away. And then Baba accuses him of not fully opening his heart and mind, and he seems to have this kind of seizure and collapses to the floor. His mouth opens and the tarantula crawls out.
Yeah. I think it’s safe to assume that he’s dead.
Stephen: I wondered why it wasn’t a frog, though.
Rhys: Ooh. Yeah. Baba takes this lap through the flock as they all adore him, and
Stephen: good way of
Rhys: putting it. Yeah. He re returns the last two and he tells Arta, maybe you’ll get to do it. And they’re bringing the stool over.
Remsey is yelling at him. He’s just a kid come to me. But Bob gets his knife out and he licks it again. He gets up on his stool and he is standing by Arta and he licks it again. Then he licks his finger and it leaves a bloody fingerprint. He leaves blood on his finger, which he puts on Art’s Forehead.
So Arta has this mark right in the middle of his
Stephen: forehead, right? What’s that called? In the Hindu religion?
Rhys: It’s where your pineal gland is located. Oh, third eye.
Stephen: Yeah. What do they call the, they put the marks or the gems there? Yeah.
Rhys: To the, to know whether you’re married.
Stephen: Yeah. I apologize. I don’t remember what that’s called, but yeah, all of those things are interesting.
Placement. Yeah.
Rhys: He then says, I wasn’t wrong, Arta. And then he steps up to Remsey, who just defiantly is come on. Baba says he thought that Remsey was the one they were after. Like they came here specifically for this, but now there’s two. And Arta won and he thanks him for raising Arta so well.
And he is sure that Arta is now ready to see the mysteries for himself. Without further ado, he slits Ramsey’s throat. And then he washes his hands in the blood and like bathes his head with it.
Stephen: Yeah, I know there’s an Azzie song about this. Yeah.
Rhys: Now he returns to Arta and he grabs him by the head.
And we get this vision of a road leading to this station of the station itself of the goat woman unceremoniously giving birth to this lump.
Stephen: Yeah. That was disturbing too. Yes. Stands in a bucket or a
Rhys: pan. The lieutenant grabs it and then scurries off with it.
And then Baba removes his hands off of Art’s Head and Artis back of the diner. Remsey is on the floor in a pool of blood. He’s not dead yet. And he quotes cor can back to Arta, that whoever dies first shall appear to the other without scaring him. And so apparently this is the soul of Remsey who is appearing before Arta now.
Yes. Remsey says he only has one key in this life, and now it is Arta. And then Arta looks, and there’s this key in the incision in Ramsey’s neck, which he pulls out. The Baba comes in through the kitchen of this diner in a dream. Mind you Yes. And says everything ends, but everything starts anew. But when Arta looks at him, there is a keyhole in the Baba’s forehead.
Artis slams the key into this keyhole and bam, they’re out of the dream,
Stephen: which everything up to this point with all the dreams and all that. And then this got so much more surreal. Just the key the interpretation I, this is another one of those I would like Bob to watch and see what he says about all the symbolism.
Rhys: Bob’s not watching this film.
Stephen: You don’t wanna know about it if he does. Oh,
Rhys: I’m just saying he does not like these kind of films and this is very much over the line of what he
Stephen: would not like. Oh God. It is, but it does the amount of symbolism you can interpret and what it means in the particular place, it’s at.
It could take, like you said, theological research to centuries of Yeah. Looking at this movie, seriously, A simple
Rhys: plot with a whole lot layered in it. Yes. Regular horror lasagna. Five. It’s all ride Woo.
Stephen: Season four. So
Rhys: the, that completely freaked me out is that they’re back in reality, for lack of a better term, the Bobba is falling backwards.
The key from the dream is still in his head. Yes. Which is, whoa. So he grabbed this key from a dream, brought it into reality. The Baba’s collapsed on the floor. Arta gets the chains off of himself, grabs the step stool and just bashes the Baba’s.
Stephen: Several times and we could probably explain a lot of this if we got some like quantum physics scientists in here.
Cause I’m sure there’s some quantum explanations for these dreams and the worlds and what’s happening, or a heavy dose of acid. I think it’s the same thing sometimes,
Rhys: The congregation just ride around on the floor. They don’t challenge arta as he moves through. In fact, they kind of part, and some of them tried to reach out and touch him like he has now taken on the mantle.
Stephen: Yes. And I looked at that. It’s like they’re not, I don’t even think the baba was concerned about his death because I think it’s, renewal. I think everything ends and everything is written. Yes. That’s another thing. The frog symbolism was said, was resurrection is another use of the symbolism.
Bask him by Oh, eggs. Yeah. And bask him by the way. I looked it up. Uhhuh. It means sculptor or artist. Oh. Which, nice one. That totally helps put a spin on everything. Yeah.
Rhys: I just kept thinking of ice cream.
Stephen: What the follow up is gonna be called Robins. Yes.
Rhys: That’s the sequel. Artis starts to make up the stairs.
This, his bloody hand reaches out and his hand has been used several times in short flashes throughout the movie. His hand reaches out, he makes his way out of the station moving erratically, laughing like the mad man. He now. He heads off through the woods he starts to cough, as if the fresh air now is poisoning him because of what he’s been through.
He makes it to this road and he starts running down the road and he gets to this curve in the road and a police van comes around the corner. He tries to wave them down only for safe to hit him, lose control of the van and put it in the ravine. He is the thing that they hit earlier in the movie. Yes.
Roll
Stephen: credits. Yes. Yes. Which what the Baba was saying with the key and how it ended the comment I made was, so he got the key to see beyond himself and see the other world. Which again, is he now the new Baba at which part of reality was he living in at any point, if he was in the van that hit
Rhys: himself?
Yeah. It’s the fan theory. Yes. Yes. Is that the lieutenant? Is the figure in the robe at the start of the movie who shows up to the diner delivering a bucket of meat carved off of the people, probably the pre previous policeman. And that the diner itself was actually like the entrance to this whole
Stephen: situation.
I could see that, what just popped into my head with you saying that. What’s that? The guy with the bucket and the meat in it. That’s the baby blob. That was the guy running off giggling. Yeah.
Rhys: And it hit safer, really hard. Like he was nauseous Yeah. Feeling sick from eating it all.
The rest of ’em, all we ever see is them sitting around drinking coffee or water or whatever. But yeah, that’s some people. Yeah, there’s just a lot of discussion online about what this movie is, what it means. In general, I just find it a very well crafted film. Yeah. With some philosophical stuff thrown in there.
And I actually like the mystery of the whole thing. It’s, I have enjoyed surrealism and this is one of those cases where it seems like, you’re trying to interpret a dream. Yeah. And sometimes you can’t because the world is very different in reality than it is in a dream.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
That’s a good point. But the real question of the movie remains. Who won the soccer bes.
Rhys: Yes. That’s what the whole thing was. That’s what the sequel’s gonna be,
Stephen: right? There you go. It’s gonna be about the soccer bes. So there’s another one. This is another movie that’s probably not gonna make our starter list of, Hey, if you’re looking to go look, go watch.
This is not it. This and Martyrs. Yes. Two of one. The two most disturbing, I think so far. And the thing is, it’s only the last little bit that’s so disturbing on this one. Yeah,
Rhys: yeah. Audition was the same way where you had the disturbing part at the end and loved ones.
Stephen: Yes, but loved ones had that almost tongue in cheek, like it was on the verge of being a tongue-in-cheek comedy.
And it played it off very well because it never really crossed the line into that. And that I, that’s what sticks out about that one. Plus it was all in the daylight, not all in the daylight. A lot of it was it’s a more daylight movie than the other ones. They’re very dark movies.
Well,
Rhys: we’re gonna shift gears now. Okay. Not horribly, drastically. The next movie is not comedic, but it’s super meta. It’s a found footage film called Behind the Mask, the Rise of Leslie.
Stephen: Yes, and I’ve got that for us to watch. So I will make sure you get that. I did get that one. Yeah that one intrigues me because it’s a documentary.
Rhys: It is, it’s it’s a documentary, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Still it’s it’s quite the trip.
Stephen: Cool. Can’t wait for it. All righty. All right, man. Thanks.
Rhys: Yep.
