It’s Unstreamable! Where Jas Keimig and Chase Burns recommend movies and TV shows you can't watch on major streaming services in the United States. We post on Wednesdays unless we’re tired or busy 😊
CHASE: This week, I wanted to highlight an Unstreamable pick from David Schmader’s new guide to PNW films, Filmlandia!, out now from Sasquatch Books. It’s a tight 152-page book, with color on every page and filled with movies. (Like the two of us, Schmader is a former Stranger writer.) Scarecrow’s got a section up in the store highlighting the Washington films in Filmlandia! That’s where I stumbled into my pick from today…
JAS: I’m ill with COVID right now, so thoughts of death are on my mind. (I’m on the mend don’t worry!) It only seemed appropriate to write about a film dealing with death…and necrophilia.
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USA, 1990, 94 minutes, Dir. Christopher Monger
Yeah yeah, you’re not supposed to jUdgE a bOok By ItS cOveR, but I knew I would like David Schmader’s Filmlandia! when I saw its cover. It nails the PNW palette and it’s cool looking. But I wasn’t expecting every page of the book—which looks at over 200 films and TV series that belong to Seattle, Portland, and the PNW—to be so nicely laid out. Kudos to the whole crew at Sasquatch, who made a book that’s a joy to flip through.
There are the big ones inside here (The Goonies, It Happened at the World’s Fair, Frasier) and newer entries (KIMI, The Jinkx and Dela Holiday Special, Shrill) but also the obscure (or at least obscure to me). I’d never heard of Waiting for the Light, a surreal comedy that follows a single mom (Teri Garr), her vaudevillian aunt (Shirley MacLaine), and kids as they move from Chicago (allegedly, it’s obviously Seattle; there are no hills like that in Chicago) to a small town in Washington to operate a diner. From there, it gets increasingly weird, with ghosts and god and the Cuban Missle Crisis coming into play. It’s not exactly a great movie, but it’s not a terrible one either. I would have totally skipped over it in Filmlandia! if I hadn’t been browning Scarecrow’s Filmlandia! section by hand—that’s the magic of a video store, baby! CHASE BURNS
PS: Some other Unstreamable picks from Filmlandia! include the Seattle classic Scorchy and Stranger philosopher-in-residence Charles Mudede’s Police Beat.
Find it in the FILMLANDIA! special section at Scarecrow.
USA, 1997, 78 min, Dir. Lynne Stopkewich
From 1996 to 1997, two Canadian directors put out films revolving around people having sex with things they shouldn’t have sex with. One, of course, is David Cronenberg’s auto(mobile) erotic Crash, which has gotten the Criterion treatment in recent years. The other is the less well-known but—equally provocative—Kissed by Lynne Stopkewich, centered around a young woman who loves to bone the corpses of young men. And it’s honestly pretty tender!
Kissed is loosely based on Barbara Gowdy’s short story “We So Seldom Look On Love,” which drew inspiration from the case of Karen Greenlee, a necrophiliac who was arrested in 1979 for stealing a hearse and having sex with the dead body inside. Stopkewich’s movie is centered around Sandra (played with depth by Molly Parker), a loner who’s obsessed with death. As a kid, she did ritualistic burials of dead animals, rubbing their grimy corpses over her body before sticking them in the ground. As an adult, she becomes a mortician and does similar rituals before straddling the dead bodies to young men to have sex with them.
Stopkewich doesn’t lean into the sensational aspects of necrophilia, but views it through a spiritual–and almost persecuted–lens. Sandra is a meaty, real character who knows her desires are outside what’s normal but must give in to them. “Love is about craving, our craving for transformation. And all transformation, all movement happens because life turns into death,” Sandra says at one point before mounting a corpse. Shot on a tiny budget, Kissed made a splash in Canada and America for its transgressive subject, so much so that screenings in Vancouver were overflowing with attendees. I’d have been one of them! JAS KEIMIG
Find it in the FOREIGN section under Canada.
Looking for more? Browse our big list of 350+ hard-to-find movies over on The Stranger.
*The fine print: Unstreamable means we couldn’t find it on Netflix, Hulu, Shudder, Disney+, or any of the other hundreds of streaming services available in the United States. We also couldn’t find it available for rent or purchase through platforms like Prime Video or iTunes. Yes, we know you can find many things online illegally, but we don’t consider user-generated videos, like unauthorized YouTube uploads, to be streamable.
