4 Movies for Wackos that I’ve Loved Recently: A New Love in Tokyo, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Deranged, and Room Temperature

Being buried under precarious, emergency-surgery-threatening heaps and heaps of snow, ice, and slush is the perfect opportunity for obsessive movie-watching. Not schlepping around to galleries, climbing over the road gritty, dog-and-human shit-covered ice mountains that collect at the edge of every sidewalk in New York, to gaze disappointingly at mostly bland art (Not to mention the experience of gallery-hopping in the waning days of the American Empire is a discombobulating experience that feels like visiting a completely different planet entirely). Shivering my way to sit in a warm dark theater or finding a strange old movie lingering on Tubi are how I plan to while away my days until…looks at Weather app…May, I guess. A year and a half ago, I made a movie wrap-up for sickos in the sweltering days of summer, semi-ripping off Dennis Cooper’s frequent lists of recently beloved reads on his blog (which I can confidently do again here since I’m reviewing Cooper’s own film with Zac Farley, Room Temperature). While it often takes me a while to revisit certain series on this website, I’ve returned to the concept. So here are four movies for wackos (yes, there was going to be a fifth) I’ve watched and loved recently:

A New Love in Tokyo (1994)

“Of course, it’s fun,” remarks Rei (the gorgeous Sawa Suzuki) to a journalist who inquires about her entry into her chosen profession as a dominatrix. She’s not kidding. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun as Rei and her newfound call girl best friend, Ayumi (Reiko Kataoka), do in Banmei Takahashi’s buddy comedy for sexual deviants, A New Love in Tokyo (currently showing in newly restored form at Metrograph).

Viewers are introduced to Rei first as she cackles her way through a heavy whip sesh with a client. Afterward, she perches regally on her cold metal throne, chides him into licking her shiny stilettos (with a few kicks for good measure), and denies him his desired elixir, her piss. This isn’t just shock value: Rei thrives as a dominatrix, whether piercing a mafioso-turned-slave’s nipple in order to penetrate it with her dangly pearl earring or abandoning an obstinate, overly academic client, tied and masked, in order to break him. More girlish than stoic Rei, Ayumi’s sex work is less fetish-driven, though she’s no less enthusiastic about it. Pluckily ringing the endless stream of hotel doorbells, she transforms into whatever fantasy her paunchy middle-aged johns desire, even if it’s nauseatingly a pedo playact. Since Rei and Ayumi work nights, they spend their days on their hobbies. Rei participates in an amateur theater troupe (perhaps explaining her draw to the theatricality of BDSM), boinking each one of the dweeby men in the production on rotation, while Ayumi revolves through a series of seemingly serious relationships with future doctors and lawyers.

Though a film about sex work, the movie has as much humor and heart as it does spank bank material. Sure, there are striking still shots of gimp masks stuffed with ball gags. Rei, in particular, is filmed with breathtakingly dramatic lighting in her dungeon, which is juxtaposed with the garish motel glare of Ayumi’s workplace. The baffling inclusion of black-and-white photos of Rei by prominent Japanese photographer and notorious pervert Araki Nobuyoshi, who also appears in a short scene, provides the film’s most lurid offering, interspersed randomly like a renegade family slideshow of porno pics. I’ll be honest, I barely know what to make of this choice, alongside the equally arbitrary appearance of childhood videos of presumably Rei. But A New Love in Tokyo is so beguiling that I rolled with it.

One of the reasons the film feels so refreshing even over three decades on is that sex work is not depicted as an act of desperation, a tragedy, or a stop on a fall from grace. It’s also not understood as some pretentious high art endeavor, like in another BDSM-based flick I recently watched, Elfi Mikesch and Monika Treut’s Seduction: A Cruel Woman, which centers on dom Wanda (Mechthild Grossmann) as she tires of her clingy beau Gregor (Udo Kier) and stages elaborate sexual performances in a gallery that appears to be located in a dank and damp sewer. Though this sounds like a riot, Seduction: A Cruel Woman is so unmistakably Germanic in its overintellectualization and perfunctorily anti-eroticism. Hell, even licking the filthy tiles on a bathroom floor in a horny frenzy seems miserable, a real surprise from an art film I watched on a smut site whilie batting away pop-ups of anime AI babes.

A New Love in Tokyo offers anything but misery. Both on and off work, Rei and Ayumi exude an unwavering zest for life and sex, unhampered by knife-wielding johns or surprise venereal diseases. The latter only earns a jaunty skip away after informing a litany of thespian partners that they may want to get tested. Even with these hiccups, sex work in A New Love in Tokyo is simply a profession like any other, featuring overloaded administrative assistants, office banter, and breakroom brawls. Off the clock, Rei dithers around her house, cleans, feeds the birds and the bees (wink wink), waters her sunflowers, and avoids suitors’ calls. My favorite scene in the film shows Rei vacuuming a tangled ball of black hair from under her kitchen cabinets. Same, Rei!

Yet, the central joy of the film is the bubbly, unflappable, inexhaustible friendship between Rei and Ayumi, just two young working girls finding themselves in a booming city. The new love in A New Love in Tokyo isn’t romance, but an exhilarating platonic love with each other, as they stay out past dawn, caterwaul karaoke, pick up men and ghost them in bars, run through the abandoned streets of neon-lit Tokyo, fantasize about watching the sunrise on a far-flung beach, and ride the train home. Only to do it all over again! Just try not to be jealous of their freewheeling friendship. Impossible!

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

I went to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple without having seen the first installment of the zombie flick reboot, 28 Years Later. I recognize this will horrify horror purists, especially the completists on Reddit who insisted curious viewers had to see 28 Years Later to fully understand (you don’t…it’s really not that complicated of a movie). The only reason I sought out The Bone Temple, directed this time by Nia DaCosta, was for one reason and one reason alone: Jack O’Connell as a Jimmy Savile-inspired, Teletubbies(or Teletummies as he calls them)-obsessed, purple tracksuit-wearing, cunty bobbed, beringed, tiara-and-upside-down-cross-adorned cult leader, Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal. O’Connell previously earned my unending affection by chewing up the scenery as another unhinged villain, the jigging, centuries-old Irish vampire in need of a manicure, Remmick, who is desperate to sway to the blues in the Smokestack Twins’ Clarksdale, Mississippi juke joint in Ryan Coogler’s August Wilson-at-his-most Gothic-gone-blockbuster, Sinners. All I had to see was O’Connell as a Heath Ledger Joker-rivaling rotten-toothed, peroxide nightmare, and I was sold. And he didn’t disappoint. Think Charles Manson if he fixated on children’s television rather than The Beatles.

Sure, there is more to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple than Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, but let’s be honest, not all that much more. The film switches between Jimmy Crystal and his band of murderous, flesh-carving, matching tracksuit and ratty, bleach blonde wig-sporting underaged Merry Prankster followers, all also renamed Jimmy, otherwise known as the Fingers, as they do charity…I mean, commit atrocities, worship Old Nick aka Satan by way of whatever voices are muttering in Jimmy Crystal’s psychotic head, do the Dipsy dance, fight each other to the death, and terrorize survivors of the zombie-making Rage Virus, and Ralph Fiennes’s isolated, iodine-covered Dr. Ian Kelson in his pillar of bones, which he asserts over and over again is a memento mori ossuary and not some deranged outsider DIY art project worthy of Ed Gein’s house. Dr. Kelson spends his days blasting Duran Duran and Radiohead, getting high, and dancing with (and eventually attempting to cure) a muscle-bound, well-hung infected man he names Samson, played by Chi Lewis-Parry. Parry plays Samson with remarkable empathy, though mostly silent, even though he’s also responsible for one of the grodiest, skull-ripping, brain-devouring scenes in the film. As much as Samson drifting off to dreamland, staring up at the moon, while stoned on Dr. Kelson’s morphine is strangely sweet, it’s Sir Lord Jimmy that has my heart, a performance so gleefully demented that I only hoped the Jimmys kept ripping people’s skin off so he remained on screen. Howzat!

When Dr. Kelson and Sir Lord Jimmy’s paths inevitably cross, the film pits science, reason, and kindness against poisoned childhood-turned-bloodthirsty belief as potential responses to the world going to shit during the dystopian zombie apocalypse. All of which can only culminate one way: a command drag show with Satan lip-syncing for his life with rampant pyrotechnics. The scene has to be seen to be believed. Or, you could just scroll X, which is filled with so many spoilers and sneaky rip-off clips of the film that you can basically cobble together the experience with just a scroll.

Deranged (1974)

I recognize that some of you faithful Filthy Dreams readers hoped I abandoned Ed Gein’s stardom back in 2025. But, you’re in no such luck. My Gein-ophilia was rekindled after watching Alan Ormsby and Jeff Gillen’s aptly titled 1974 low-budget Canadian flick Deranged, or, if you prefer its full title (which I do), Deranged: Confessions of a Necrophile. Rather than a direct—or ok, a fan-fictionalized—adaptation of Gein’s true-crime abominations like Monster: The Ed Gein Story, Deranged centers on Ezra Cobb, a Midwestern, flannel-wearing sorta-loner played with rampant facial tics, thoughtful lip juts, and incel eye bugs by character actor Roberts Blossom. Like Gein, Ezra also happens to have, uh, unique hobbies, like grave robbing, hanging out with rotting corpses, wearing faces, and leatherwork like the “tummy drum,” which earned him the cribbed mythologized nickname “The Butcher of Woodside.” He also has a serious case of mommy issues, but who wouldn’t, considering Mama Cobb (Cosette Lee)’s bedridden rants like, “The wages of sin are gonorrhea, syphilis, and death,” a phrase so oft-repeated that Ez mouths the words as she’s spewing them. Unfortunately for both the audience and Ez, that’s not all she spews, exiting the film early in a shockingly camp fashion mid-pea soup slurping. The colorful collision of puke-green soup and ketchup-red coughed-up blood must be witnessed!

That uneasy mix of horror and hilarity traverses Deranged, a tone so destabilizing and, well, deranged that it’s a discomforting watch, bolstered by the grating, grinding organ music that pervades the film. Deranged has no shortage of memorably camp scenarios, from Ez being pulled over with a body riding shotgun to the amusingly cheesy conceit of the bespeckled journalist narrator popping up in random locations, including at the bar where Ez guzzles whiskey sours, to nudge the story along and warn that you’re watching “a human horror story of ghastly proportions and profound reverberations.” True, these reverberations are profound! The most profound is wacky, wig-wearing spiritual medium, Maureen Selby (Marian Waldman). Selby is mentioned in Mama’s dying breaths as the only woman Ez can trust. Why? Well, because she’s fat. Seriously. No more explanation is given. Apparently, fat women are exempt from being “filthy black-souled sluts with pus-filled sores.” After being told by his only friends, the Kootzs, that he should consider finding a lady, Ez contacts Selby, and the lovebirds bond over their mutual ability to chatter with the dead. A match made in mental illness! Ez seems more into Selby’s thiccness than their mutual posthumous convos, though, as he returns home to postmortem Mama to confirm that he’s into Maureen’s flabby arms while snacking on a chicken wing. Even with relationship advice coming from his dead mother, Selby and Ez’s date somehow goes more off the rails than anticipated. Maureen appears in a blonde wig to channel her husband, who demands that Ez satisfy “his” wife as he “misses the carnal aspect of our marriage.” This sex séance is pure, unmoored, undead zaniness so trashy that it feels straight out of John Waters.

Yet, the film uncomfortably pairs the screwball with the bloodlust of Gein’s murders. Only Deranged spins Gein’s actual crimes through the sleazy exploitation genre, transforming Gein’s middle-aged victims into Cobb’s hotties: a seen-it-all frosty eyeshadowed bar floozy, Mary Ransum (Micki Moore), who the journalist impolitely calls a bit long in the tooth at 34 years old, and a cutsie teenage hardware store employee, Sally Mae (Pat Orr). Ransum’s fate still treads the line between terror and amusement, as Ez secretly slashes her tires, offers her a ride, and brings her to his house of body bits, wherein she finds him decked in a hag wig, a literal face mask, and an old lady shawl, sitting among his deader friends and cranking some ancient music box. Ok…time to go! While Ransum’s ending is certainly unfortunate (being beaten with a femur has to be a rough way to go), poor Sally Mae gets a particularly gruesome finale that rattles as much for its gore as for the film’s sudden tonal shift. And apparently, an even gnarlier cut than the one I watched on Tubi is out there (I’m good!).

Still, the worst violence in Deranged doesn’t come from dressing women up like a deer, but the atrocious interior decorating. The garish floral wallpaper alone is a heinous crime against humanity. To me, the Cobbs should be tried for felonious ocular manslaughter!

Room Temperature (2025)

Every so often at night, I look out my bedroom window and see flickering lights in one of the high-rise apartments across the street. What the hell is going on over there? An in-home rave? A distress signal? An electrical issue their slumlord refuses to fix? A studio apartment transformed into a home haunt? That same question introduces Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s Room Temperature. A small home isolated within the sprawling California desert (though it also resembles the remote Southwest of Eddington) flashes and smokes ominously from each of its many windows, like the spooky gas station in Twin Peaks: The Return. This eeeeeelectricity, though, is a bit more earthbound, though no less curious, drawing awkward school janitor Paul (Chris Olson) into its vortex.

For Paul, this means getting dragged into the homeowning family’s annual in-home haunted house, driven by a fixated and artistically frustrated father (played by John Williams with the tension of a man ready to murder-suicide his family at any minor inconvenience). Dad’s extreme monomaniacal drive to construct the most elaborately terrifying spectacle for his neighbors not only leads him to, in one of my favorite scenes, leap out of bed in the middle of the night in a fit of inspiration to moan spooky sounds into a tape recorder, but thoroughly warp his poor family in the process who all have the thousand-yard stares of hostages. Is the home haunt worth it? Not at all. In a delightful turn, the amateur haunted house at the core of Room Temperature sucks. There are indications early on that the home haunt wouldn’t be quite as magnificent as intended. Dad’s cracked enthusiasm as he meticulously explains each step within the immersive experience to Paul, while the house sits mid-construction, screams doom and failure, further emphasized by Paul’s observation of a critical error in spatial judgment for an indoor train ride. Not to mention Dad’s walkthrough also includes his nagging desire to kill his son Andre (a revelatory performance by Charlie Nelson Jacobs) as a part of the performance, a role with which Andre is less satisfied, and his overt hostility toward the French kid who has lived with them since he was eight and Andre’s not-so-secret boyfriend, humorously named Extra (Ange Dargent). Awkward tension abounds, which makes you feel for the haunt’s eventual attendees.

Yet, the haunted house is worse than expected. Part of the issue is its scares were overhyped with genuinely foreboding flyers inquiring, “Where’s your God now?” What attendees find, though, is cheap werewolf costumes, a plastic gator-filled swamp lined with garbage bags, and daughter Marguerite (Virginia Adams) being lamely dragged into hell. Not even a sudden, shocking real-life murder and hastily dug grave, transformed into scenery marked with a living-dead zombie hand, could save this family’s descent into pure schlock, a wonderful twist on all those prior Cooper characters who consider unchecked homicidal mania to be transcendent in some way. What the murder does achieve, though, is turning this terrible haunted house into at least a real one, with the camera zipping around representing the ghost’s silent perspective.

That blurred division between tacky home haunt and actual haunted house is reflected in the murder itself (I don’t want to give away who it is because the shock is half the fun). This murder is shot through such a highly aestheticized haze that at first I had no idea the murder was REAL rather than yet another staged eruption of violence for Dad’s outsider art project. Even Andre’s grunting, teeth-grinding response seems too restrained to be true, especially after his delivery of one of the greatest micro-penis compliments I’ve heard in my life (Again, I refuse to ruin it for others. Room Temperature is a masterpiece just for this line). This is a stunning achievement of the obscured boundary between reality and fiction, made possible by the exceedingly flat tone of the film. The strobe lights, smoke, and concurrent blood-spurting staged carnage at its beginning are actually some of the most frenetic action within Room Temperature. From the stilted dialogue to the purposefully slow pacing to the staging so precise that stills could double as photos of the unraveling of the American suburbs and, by proxy, the mid-20th century American Dream, the film’s overarching tone is so emotionally blunted that the entire thing feels like a tribute to clinical depression. While comparisons can be made to other auteurs of emotional detachment—Wes Anderson, Nathan Fielder, and Cooper/Farley fav, Robert Bresson, Room Temperature, as far as I’m concerned, lies in a category of its own in its inexpressive extremity (Hell, even Cooper and Farley’s previous Permanent Green Light feels less muted). In fact, after the film ended, I felt unsettled and unsure what to make of it. On some level, I still feel this way! Which to me means Room Temperature is a remarkable feat of pleasurable cinematic torture!