BACURAU

Brazilian writers / directors Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Filho take on race and class in their 2019 bizarro sci-fi Western flick “Bacurau”. The film bends genres and realities whilst following a small town and eccentric set of characters in the Brazilian outback; the town’s inner quarrels are exploded by an insidious existential threat. For sure, a heavy dose of psychedelic storytelling layered with criticism of Brazilian politics and Western economic imperialism. Available on prime video premium and other platforms if you’re willing to pay a small fee. 🇧🇷

VIDEODROME

David Cronenberg’s 1983 psychotronic, psychotropic fringe film starring James Woods as a sleazy TV station manager and Debby Harry as his sadomasochistic girlfriend, explores Marshall McClaren’s maxim “The Medium is the Message” in a frightening (albeit low tech) vision of television as a drug that blends into and transforms reality - an erotic pilot program turns out to be a snuff production; and so goes the film, ... caustic energy and bizarre sequences, frenzied sardonic sci-fi, a critique of our relationship with media prophesizing future dilemmas of the technological media age. 

“The very existence of imagination means that you can posit an existence totally different from the one you are living… if you accept at least on some level the Freudian dictum that civilization is repression, than imagination and unrepressed creativity is very dangerous to civilization.” - David Cronenberg