Director: George Kuchar
Writer: George Kuchar
Cinematographer: George Kuchar
Cast: George Kuchar, John Keel
Running Time: 140 min
The outer limits were never as far out as this! Cannibals, ufologists, and drag queens are only some of the characters populating George Kuchar’s three-part exploration of the supernatural, the unreal, and the downright uncanny. Although Kuchar, who appears in the film both as himself and as a cross-dressing alien, is ostensibly on a quest to make a “big UFO movie,” the film’s true subject might be the bizarre gallery of experts, fellow filmmakers, and old friends that Kuchar encounters along the way.
Secrets of the Shadow World blends camp and melodrama, generosity and tomfoolery, vintage-film sensibility and digital-video wizardry, into a deeply subversive, underground tour de force that defies easy explanation or categorization. Kuchar describes the overall project this way: “This three-part miniseries explores the mysterious and the mundane in a splash of digital dioramas that wipe across the screen in a cascade of electronic barfs.”
Poised somewhere between home movie and epic spectacular, Secrets of the Shadow World offers long-overdue insights into the bathroom behavior of the elusive Sasquatch, as well as the sex life of the Roswell alien. Kuchar invites intrepid filmgoers, in his words, to “feast upon the food of the gods and regurgitate with scriptural elegance the message that takes shape in the shimmering sludge.”
