An ethereal nightmare ride through the outskirts, alleys, and woods of northeastern Ohio. It’s the first feature film from director and musician Todd Tobias, whose most well-known project is the Circus Devils, a dependably weird recording collaboration with Robert Pollard. Tobias directed without a script, but he did have a story, which is loosely drawn from Pollard’s lyrics.
The presentation is trashed-out avant garde. It’s thrift store props and abstract imagery. Cheap digital effects and minimal dialogue. Beer bellies and surrealism. Ass cracks and existential angst. Beneath the weirdness sits a classic science fiction scenario that Phillip Jose Farmer could have written in the 1960s. There’s a new drug that causes instant brain damage and physical deformity. Users become aliens, monsters, weirdos; some of them develop dangerous powers. They’re mutations who walk the streets with you and me. Some regular people find them charming (and others want to stomp their guts out), but, nevertheless, these freaks cultivate a loose underground, complete with a would-be mob kingpin in the form of Mother Skinny, a cross-dressing man who’s so powerful that his/her piss can create new life. Our two main characters are The Sergeant, a guy who constantly wears a cheap paper mask and yearns to get back in touch with his humanity, and The Professor, The Sergeant’s drug buddy who doesn’t see a damn thing wrong with getting high forever and living as a mutant.
David Lynch is a touchstone here, mostly in the way that Tobias likes to let mysteries lie unexplained, but the largest looming influence is the early film work from Devo (fellow Ohioans). Like in 1976’s The Truth About De-Evolution, many of the characters here wear masks and live out their own brand of absurd “de-evolution”. Tobias also fills the film with his own music—it’s a demonic blend of Raymond Scott’s madness and John Carpenter’s eeriness in a noisy guitar rock stew—complete with an entire scene devoted to the Circus Devils song “Let’s Go Back to Bed”.