This is an updated version of a review that was originally published in Bleeding Skull! A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey.
In college, I lived in a co-op, which is basically a boardinghouse where each resident does five hours of chores a week. Once I walked into the kitchen for a snack and a housemate was there quietly eating a bagel. Hours later, he knocked on my bedroom door. He stared at me, his eyes wild and dark.
“WHY DID YOU PUT ACID IN MY FUCKING BAGEL?”
Turns out, he had eaten a bagel and started tripping. He saw things, mostly bad things. Nefarious visions of unspeakable acts. He got paranoid. He got scared. He blamed me because I was the last person seen near his bagel. I explained, “No, dude, if I had acid, I would put it in my own bagel. Thank you very much.”
Here’s the truth: I don’t totally like bagels. It’s too much . . . bagel. But if it had acid in it, I’d probably eat it.
The point is that sometimes bad drugs happen to good people, and then they lose their minds and blame bagels and the people who sort of like them. Acid is not for everyone. I’ve seen people really enjoy themselves on a trip and roll around in a pile of leaves and stare at their hands in absolute wonder: Why do fingers only bend in one direction? But I’ve also seen acid destroy people’s brains where they’re never quite the same again. So, you need a certain kind of mental constitution to handle hallucinogens—an ability to understand that reality will be on hiatus for the next 12 hours and maybe you’ll see the Grim Reaper, but it might also just be a bathrobe.
Disembodied is a 90-minute hallucinogenic adventure, and, like acid, you need a certain mental wherewithal to watch it. But it’s well worth trying.
A girl checks into the Grand Hotel, which is neither of those things. There’s disintegrating furniture, moth-eaten carpet, broken light bulbs, and a flurry of flies. The bathroom is truly the dirtiest you’ve ever seen, even worse than the one at the bus stop where someone had smeared shit all over the stall door. The bathtub is crusty and black, and the tiles are covered in furry mold that you could use to knit a blanket for someone you hate. You get a horrifying feeling that inside the mildewed walls, there’s a bustling metropolis of cockroaches. You can almost hear their hard candy shells clatter against each other. This place is less of a fleabag motel and more of an open sewer that happens to have rooms.
The front desk clerk looks like the undead; he’s pale with dark, sunken eyes. He wears a threadbare shirt with yellowed armpits, and that might be the cleanest thing in the whole joint. He offers Connie a room. Connie is exactly 76% goth. Her black hair hangs over her pasty face and she shuffles around silently. Through a giant hole in her wall, Connie spies on her neighbor, who is entertaining a john. Connie settles into her new home. She unpacks her clothes, organizes her rock collection, and places potions on the table. Then she puts her brain on the table. It’s in a gurgling tank. “God, I need some coffee.” She pours coffee into her brain. She instantly feels chipper.
At night, Connie terrorizes people in the neighborhood. She turns them into slime and eats them. Then, as she sleeps, a monstrous, penis-like deformity on her face oozes spores, which look like starfish made out of Play-Doh. Her filthy bathtub is filled with algal blooms and alien organisms that look like severed vaginas. Symbolism is at work here, though it’s unclear what the symbols mean in the context of the film.
Disembodied is less about plot and more about the experience. Nothing really happens in this movie and even if it did, it’d be secondary to the mood. This film plunges you into a surreal, haunting world and keeps you there for 90 mesmerizing minutes. It’s dark and dirty, claustrophobic and grotesque, hypnotic and inescapable. This is not a movie with explosive gore or violent twists. This is not a movie with histrionic characters and outrageous dialogue. In fact, there’s hardly any dialogue at all. Or music. This is a film that’s eerily silent and most of what you hear is the sound of your own breath and the occasional low whisper out of Connie’s mouth.
The film offers dreamy imagery of erupting volcanoes and toasting marshmallows. We see alien lifeforms that bubble and ooze and crawl across the floor. We see stop-motion animations of a carrot hitting a potato. We also see a rock with an eyeball. There’s a mysterious budding flower, a tap-dancing sequence, potions that move on their own, and a scene where Connie changes out of her drab black garb and puts on a Technicolor dress. It’s unclear what any of it means, but it doesn’t matter. Like an acid trip, it’s best to accept it all without questions and escape into a trance, one where you’re rarely bored even when you literally see a goth fall asleep in a chair.
Director William Kersten mixes the gritty darkness of David Cronenberg, the foreboding uneasiness of David Lynch, and the surreal production design of Tim Burton (when he was good). Disembodied is equal parts horror and experimental art, but it never feels pretentious. This is a film that lives in the details. The set, costume, and props perfectly serve a cinematic acid trip, one where very little happens but much is communicated. It’s just never clear what exactly is being communicated. Describing Disembodied is like describing your acid trip to someone; words fail the actual experience.
For the record, I did not put acid in my housemate’s bagel.
Also for the record, the Blu-ray edition of the film has been updated with new digital effects and music and I highly recommend watching the original VHS or DVD. You know what to do.
