Now this is some real freak-hours curation. Outer Order Video isn’t just screening movies—they’re summoning spirits. With this double header, they’ve cracked the cinematic skull wide open and let the dreams ooze out: one soaked in celluloid rot and the other in medieval trauma watercolor. Two films, one ritual: an ecstatic plunge into hysteria, artifice, and mind-melting beauty.
The Forbidden Room (2015)
Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room is less a movie and more a decaying archive that came to life and forgot how to behave. It’s a nested-doll hallucination—a pulp noir inside a submarine inside a dream inside a memory, all narrated like a lost TV transmission from a deranged museum tour guide.
The editing is gleefully chaotic, the visuals a degraded fever of silent-era melodrama and lost exploitation reels. Soap and volcanoes, banana bandits, skeleton insurance salesmen—this isn’t plot, it’s pathology. It’s cinema eating its own history and vomiting it back up as poetry.
Think of it like Borges doing bumpers for Night Flight. It’s a film possessed by its own ghosts. You don’t watch The Forbidden Room—you dissolve into it.
Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
And then comes Belladonna, Eiichi Yamamoto’s cursed flower. If The Forbidden Room is a cinematic séance, Belladonna is a pagan sacrifice painted in blood and ink. This anime is what happens when art nouveau is corrupted by psychedelic revenge. It begins with tragedy—a peasant woman raped on her wedding night—and spirals into a kaleidoscope of feminist rage and demonic transformation.
The visuals are static but not still, like illuminated manuscripts animated by grief. Jeanne’s suffering mutates into power, and her voice—silent but screaming—echoes through every swirling line and burst of crimson.
It’s erotic, terrifying, and mournfully gorgeous. A feminist scream in a world that only wants to paint her pretty and burn her after.
The Pairing
Outer Order’s programming here is alchemy. The Forbidden Room dismantles cinema—Belladonna of Sadness weaponizes art. Both films feel like forbidden texts: one scribbled by an insane archivist, the other etched by witches into sacred parchment.
Together, they create a ritual of disorientation and transformation. It’s not just about watching movies—it’s about being unmade and rebuilt by them.
Final Verdict:
10/10 – A double feature that leaves you reeling, altered, and grateful. You came for the maniac mayhem. You left baptized in beautiful madness.
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