The Lure is a 2015 film from Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska that’s finally enjoying a theatrical run stateside this month. It is an aggressively weird and unsettling film, a musical comedy that is almost never funny and never all that musical, even with half a dozen song and dance routines. It is mostly a washed-out, glam-grunge descent into surreal depravity where romance, tragedy, lust, and alienation intermingle in a bizarre alt-world filled with slime and cigarette smoke.
 

Singing/dancing/man-eating sister act Silver and Golden
 
The story involves two young mermaid sisters, Golden (Michalina Olszanska) and Silver (Marta Mazurek), who use their siren song to lure a couple of low-rent musicians to a Warsaw beach to rescue them from the briny deep. They join the band as a singing/dancing mermaid sister act and perform nightly in a dingy cabaret show that looks like some zero-budget post-Soviet nightmare of polyester and short-circuiting synthesizers. When they dry out they grow legs, but they’re smooth like Barbie dolls from the waist down. Silver falls in love with the curly-haired guitar player in the band but has no human genitals to offer him. She does have a goopy fish vagina on her tail, but he’s not into that. Luckily, they find an off the grid doctor willing to perform radical fish-to-human surgery. Golden does not approve and starts going out nightly to feast on the local hornballs in protest. All of this high weirdness is bracketed with kooky cabaret numbers that sound like they just discovered disco a week ago and are still trying to figure out exactly how it works. I mean, this film really does have it all.

Watch the trailer for ‘The Lure’ after the jump…

‘Paradise Lost,’ a painting by Dariusz Zawadzki.
 
According to his bio at the Morpheus Gallery, Polish artist Dariusz Zawadzki sees himself following in the footsteps of another surrealist Polish painter, the great Zdzislaw Bekinski. Zawadzki started painting when he was just eleven and when he expressed interest in pursuing formal training in art school he was told that his eyesight wasn’t good enough for him to become skilled in his chosen medium. This opinion didn’t deter Zawadzki and the young aspiring surrealist instead taught himself how to paint, developing unique methods along the way that helped him work around any issues he had with his vision.

In an interview Zawaszki said once said that most of the images he paints come from his dreams and his desire to discover “unreal worlds.” Zawadzki is also fascinated with birds and the symbolism they represent and will often incorporate aspects of bird-like features such as beaks and the suggestion of feathers.

In addition to his incredible paintings, Zawadzki is also a skilled sculptor and uses metal materials to create three dimensional futuristic works of art. I’ve included a few of Zawadzki’s sculptures along with many of his grimly beautiful paintings below. Zawaszki’s work is also the subject of an upcoming book that presents his large catalog of artwork in chronological order, The Fantastic Art of Zawadski which is due out in 2017. Some of the images that follow are slightly NSFW.
 

‘Leviathan.’
 

‘Follow the Violin.’
 
More after the jump…

 
OK, so the first few posters shown below are for actual scary movies—Rosemary’s Baby, Poltergeist, Alien, and The Birds all get grotesque posters, and completely appropriately so. But while I’m not denying the utter coolness of all these designs, most feel, if not misleading, totally out of left field.

First of all, Planet of the Apes has a spoiler right there in the damn poster—enraging? Yes. Allusive to the tone of the film? Not so much. It could also be argued that the Star Wars poster has a spoiler as well—if this is for Return of The Jedi, it’s definitely alluding to the Death Star’s explosion. Not cool, Poland! So not cool! (Though I do appreciate the decidedly Hebraic font on the use of the word “Jedi.”)

But the Cabaret poster looks like a fucking Cronenberg film, and can you guess what the next one is? Young Frankenstein. That is a poster for the Mel Brooks comedy classic Young Frankenstein. After that we have the 1980s pseudo-feminist love letter to Wall Street finance, Working Girl, which again, looks more than a little Cronenberg if not Kafka. And Tootsie has shades of Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. But in my opinion, it’s the final poster, for a Charlie Brown movie, that really takes the cake. I know Charles Schulz’s brand of kiddie entertainment wasn’t candy-coated, but—based on the poster alone—I get the distinct impression that this movie is about a bunch of children who drown.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Lots more hilariously inapt Polish posters after the jump…...

 
Earlier this year, the Holy See’s Chief Exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth claimed, “The Devil resides in the Vatican and you can see the consequences. He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, or even appear to be sympathetic. At times he makes fun of me. But I’m a man who is happy in his work.” He also said that the 1973 film The Exorcist gave a “substantially exact” impression of what it was like to be possessed by the Devil.

“People possessed by evil sometimes had to be physically restrained by half a dozen people while they were exorcised. They would scream, utter blasphemies and spit out sharp objects.

From their mouths, anything can come out – pieces of iron as long as a finger, but also rose petals,” said Father Amorth, who claims to have performed 70,000 exorcisms. “When the possessed dribble and slobber, and need cleaning up, I do that too. Seeing people vomit doesn’t bother me. The exorcist has one principal duty - to free human beings from the fear of the Devil.”

Old Nick finds work for idle hands, and this week sees the National Congress of Exorcists in Poland, as increasing numbers of Poles struggle with Satanic possession, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Since 1999 the number of Polish exorcists has surged from 30 to over a 100, despite the influence of the Catholic Church waning in an increasingly secular Poland.

Exorcists attribute the increase in their numbers to growing scepticism in psychology in the wider Polish population, and people looking for spiritual reasons for mental disorders.

In recognition of modern science, however, exorcists now work in tandem with psychologists in order to distinguish between psychiatric problems and the work of the devil.

But while some cases of Satanic work are difficult to diagnose others manifest themselves in shocking circumstances explained exorcist Father Andrzej Grefkowicz.

“An indication of possession is that a person is unable to go into a church, or, if they do, they can feel faint or breathless,” he said.

“Sometimes if they enter a church they are screaming, shouting and throwing themselves on the ground.”

The national congress comes as part of a policy by Poland’s Catholic Church to lift the veil on what was once a secretive practice. Frustrated by the Hollywood image of cross-wielding exorcists engaged in dramatic conflicts with demons the Church intends to show the complicated and often more mundane world of exorcism.

Father Grefkowicz stressed that the most of the time exorcism required quiet prayer.

Quiet prayer? I was hoping it would be a bit more like this…