According to The Party, the proper marriage proposal requires roses, champagne, breakfast foods “and a king-size floating raft.” Beverly Hills’ heretofore most eligible bachelor, Richard Wells (Mark Derwin), uses those items to pull an “I will” out of his window-dressing girlfriend, Cathy (Kati Chesney).

Before going out of town, Richard quickly sets up her bachelorette party. Although taking place in daytime, the event comes complete with banana-hammocked male models to guide Cathy through a “treasure hunt.” This involves a game of ring toss with an inflatable clown penis.

The party is ambushed by a nosy TV reporter and cameraperson, capturing all these shenanigans and unwrapping of such gifts as anal beads, a rather threatening dildo, one open tube of fruit-flavored oral lube and — thanks, Grandma! — a VHS on sensual massage. As the theme song goes, this love will be extraordinary.

Then Cathy and her friends go for a ride in a limousine, despite the magician performing rudimentary tricks inside. All fun comes to a halt when the limo gets pulled over by a motorcycle cop — oh, never mind, it’s just Richard in disguise! He wasn’t out of town after all! Rich people, such scamps!

The end.

Shot on VHS, this oddity bears no plot, story, stakes or point. At just 60 minutes, it’s literally amateur hour. At no point does The Party not appear to be on the verge of going porno; mind you, for all its sex talk, no sex exists. I’m not even certain its director exists, credited under the assumed pseudonym of C.J. Leverton.

Against all odds on display here, Derwin continues to act steadily, including such big-studio pics as Accepted and Everest. Meanwhile, Chesney and most of her remaining cast members have zero other screen credits, which is clearly for the better.

The Party: Cry if you want to. —Rod Lott

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After announcing her engagement, the sheltered Ana (Emma Cohen, Horror Rises from the Tomb) is shattered to learn how her widowed father takes the news: by squeezing his head through a noose and taking one giant leap off a chair. (Dramatic much, Pops?) Given the dead dad is played by the bug-eyed Howard Vernon (Revenge in the House of Usher), the sight of him hanging with tongue jutting makes him look like an emoji.

It’s not intended as funny, of course, nor is the Jess Franco film another of his bugaboo fright fests. Instead, The Other Side of the Mirror is a Euro-arty examination of grief with brief touches of the psychosexual and briefer hints at the supernatural.

Unable to marry after tragedy, the guilt-ridden Ana flees her comfy, seaside mansion life to hobnob with the Portugal art crowd in the city. Falling into bed with a number of partners, however, proves deadly, with each man meeting the business end of well-kept cutlery. She’s like a black widow without the vows … but is dear ol’ Dad bidding her post-bedding acts? That one of her victims is the director (Ramiro Oliveros, The Swamp of the Ravens) of a production of Medea is not accidental; in fact, it’s Oedipal.

Classy yet spotty, Mirror finds Franco showing restraint from his usual zooms-and-wombs affairs. The movie ambles; one scene holds a hypnotic power, while the next dissipates into apathy. In many ways, it reads like a less-effective revisit of his Venus in Furs, complete with jazz. And therein lies Mirror’s highlight: Cohen’s cooing rendition of “Madeira Love,” backed by a live band and thankfully shown in full. If only the whole were as groovy. —Rod Lott

A gastronomic grotesque, Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet explores issues of patriarchy, intimacy, trauma, oppression, artistic integrity and unrelenting flatulence — “seldom malodorous,” mind you.

At the Sonic Catering Institute, a three-person culinary collective undertakes a four-week residency. Fronted by Elle (Fatma Mohamed, Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy) the trio is a dysfunctional, codependent mess. That could also describe its performance art, if said act can be properly described at all, being displays in which the auditory co-exists with the alimentary. The institute’s head (Gwendoline Christie, Strickland’s In Fabric) puts Elle and her teammates (Assassin’s Creed’s Ariane Labed and Hugo himself, Asa Butterfield) through seemingly nonsensical exercises involving graph paper or grocery-store improv. A glacial-level fracture forms.

Documenting this monthlong experience of epicurean toxicity is a journalist (Makis Papadimitriou, Chevalier) struggling with a secret: painful, excessive farting. Strickland being Strickland, that’s hardly the film’s most outrageous aspect, as he marries concepts from the two aforementioned films with the sound-dependent conceit of his 2012 breakthrough, Berberian Sound Studio. Then he bakes that mix at an exponent of 350˚ for 111 minutes until unclassifiable, and serves with avocado paste, mint sauce and an omelet-related fetish. You won’t know what hit you — a great thing indeed.

Although sound designer Tim Harrison (Censor) is the picture’s unsung hero, Mohamed’s performance looms large with an absolute fearlessness. As discomforting and disturbing as Flux Gourmet is, it’s also brutally funny, with comedy as dark as the innermost section of the human intestinal tract. Those laughs serve as a salve as Strickland transports his audience from the EVOO to the OMFG. Prepare to swear off Nutella and smoothies for life. —Rod Lott

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At the age where teens tend to feel most alienated, the short, spunky Casey (Anna Cobb) is further alienated by living in a dreary small town. Entertainment provides her escape. In fact, she loves scary movies so much, she’d like to live in one.

Wish granted.

Casey tells this to the camera — both the one on her phone and the one employed by Jane Schoenbrun to make We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. In doing so, Casey broadcasts every brooding thought of her boring life, often painfully and in real time, to the world — or, more realistically, about 50 followers.

The DIY ADD horror show opens with her taking “the World’s Fair challenge.” What it involves — a Candyman-style chant, a pricked finger and a trippy video — is of no importance against its supposed consequence: a gradual loss of self-control. Indeed, as she reveals via chat to a total stranger (predator?) known only as JLB (Michael J. Rogers, Beyond the Black Rainbow), she’s starting to feel … changes.

Cobb makes quite an impression and an assured screen debut as Casey, best exemplified when dancing to a pop song and … well, I won’t spoil it, but the moment is terrifying. Throughout, to say Schoenbrun implies more than shows or tells would be an understatement. Her picture is itself a challenge — so aggressively unconventional in all regards, it seems to dare viewers to like it. Given the fervent cult already forming around it and its experimental narrative, enough have taken that dare and urged others to do the same.

Feeling empty at its closing, I wondered: What had I failed to see? Turns out, a transgender subtext. As a heterosexual male, that completely escaped me, yet I still found chunks of the movie to be fascinating: the clip-based ones between the parts cast (purposely, no doubt) in a heavy shade of blah. The videos Casey lets play at random possess a peculiar, near-narcotic pull to her and us, knowing we can’t wait to see what might confront us next. —Rod Lott

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Nearly a decade before Macon County Line brought in bank, notorious exploitation producer Jerry Gross rounded up a few pennies to tread similar territory with his debut, Girl on a Chain Gang. Just as his Teenage Mother isn’t really about a teenage mother, Girl on a Chain Gang is equally misleading and just as scandal-minded.

In the (too-)simple story, three young activists driving through the Deep South get pulled over in Carson’s Landing, a backwater town of shallow-minded people. The corrupt, cigar-chomping sheriff (William Watson, 1978’s Stingray) steals their cash and tosses them in the hoosegow. He also sets traps for them, both metaphorical (using hooker Arlene Farber, the Teenage Mother herself, to pry a false confession) and physical (“forgetting” to lock the cell door so he and his deputies have justification to shoot if the youths escape).

What I haven’t mentioned yet is one of the trio is Black, the least favorite skin color of Carson’s Landing residents. Thus, Gross’ little black-and-white picture is a race-charged look at the antiquated-moralled. His heart is in the right place, but Girl on a Chain Gang, which he also wrote and directed, is as slow, meandering melodrama with only the scarce blip of activity. The proceedings look not unlike a local stage production.

The only memorable moment is an uneducated, bigoted presentation (read: “pree-zen-tay-shun”) to the already uneducated, bigoted law enforcement on the visual difference between Black and Caucasian “spermatozoa.” And that’s not nearly enough to merit the long sit. —Rod Lott

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