1976 Directed by Craig Denney
Craig Alexander, a con-man "psychic" on the carnival circuit receives the opportunity to pilfer some legendary rubies in Kenya. His luck holds and he winds up the sole beneficiary of the ill-gotten wealth, which he parlays into an astrological broadcasting empire. But once he reaches the top, there's only one direction he can go...
Craig Denney Darrien Earle Rocky Barbanica Boyd Hamlyn Jacqueline Day Lawrence Lee James Moore Harvey Hunter Solomon Mathenge Robert Ballagh Joe Kaye Diane Di Sibio Allene Albano Avon Adele Julie Moon Donald Davies Arthyr W. Chadbourne Florence Marly Mercedes Risconsin Irmgard Pancritius Géza Palásthy Maria Palásthy John Kaiser Father Donald Kohane
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USA
lowkey obsessed with this one-time writer/director/producer/actor who woke up one day in the early 70s and said "im going to make a no-budget sci-fi Citizen Kane for dudes into horoscopes and tarot cards" and then disappeared from the face of the earth. ostensibly a rise-and-fall biopic about a carnival fortune teller who becomes a media mogul but it takes so many psychedelic, inscrutable detours (including african prisons, diamond smuggling, sail boats, the making of this movie within the movie, galactic office mirrors, hints of werewolves?? and slomo murders) that by the time it hits the part of the story where he's rich and alienated all of his friends and a quote from king lear pops up on the screen i…
As enigmatic as the spawn he may or may not have created as a random side effect of pursuing his highest dreams and talents, director/writer/producer Craig Denney, is perhaps the Godfather (with a capital “G”) of the hyper-egotistical with-lack-of-talent-but-intense-passion artist creating film that reflects his raw id on celluloid. The only other way of describing this is if Nicolas Cage directed the way he acted; huge emotional swings, breakneck pacing smattered with random techniques, bizarre editing, but with not an ounce of shame and basking in all its flaws. Did I just describe “method directing”?
Previous to watching The Astrologer I had no idea how big of a white whale this is for some folks. The amalgamation of distinct vision here…
GOD IS DEAD___SHIT ON LIFE
______HELL IS EARTH_____
love the 5 minutes this turns into a werewolf movie. fuck the tropicalists!!
Like drinking Mad Dog out of a crystal champagne glass. A work of accidental genius, in which an egomaniac dumps all of his fantasies onto celluloid, without the basic know how to execute his vision (though he seems to have wrangled quite a bit of resources for his inexplicably globe hopping adventure). But there's such a love of cinema that drips from every oddly conceived frame, as he lays stolen Moody Blues instrumentals over languid helicopter shots of pleasure boats, transitions scenes using every known wipe in the editing bay, and creates layered, slow motion tableaus of loving memories and couples fighting over dinner (in what might be one of the greatest escalations in filmic history). If you devote enough…
The deranged retelling of Citizen Kane that I never knew I needed. The Astrologer is bewildering, ambitious and an ego trip of epic proportions. All in under 80 minutes. Narrative threads pop-up out of nowhere, we follow them for a little while and then they are discarded for the next crazy idea. It's quite something. Writer/director/star Craig Denney created nothing short of a masterpiece in my opinion.
God Is Dead | Shit On Life | Hell Is Earth
A big thanks to RetroMovieNerd for posting the link to the movie in his review.
Citizen Kane by way of someone who didn't know how to make a film and structured it according to numerology. The least predictable film I have ever seen.
“You're not an astrologer...you're an asshole!"
You know what I love? That Craig Denney, the crazy mf who financed, directed, and starred in this batshit insane movie appears to have paid for the rights to use The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed (I’m only guessing, because he uses almost the whole damn thing and actually credits them at the end) but seems to have cheaped out and didn’t pay for Nights in White Satin, swapping in a Procol Harum song about silk sheets instead.
One of those movies that’s simultaneously terrible and awesome - I place a high premium on actually being surprised and goddamn, this was one of the least predictable movies I’ve ever seen. An actual astrologer…
"This is really going well."
Local crazy man Craig Denney chronicles himself in a self-styled semi-autobiographical Charles Foster Kane fable of his rags-to-riches rise to stardom. To best illustrate his colossal ego, revel in the knowledge that Craig Denney directs a movie titled The Astrologer within The Astrologer which achieves universal acclaim, leaving him rich and famous. What sets this apart from other no-budget nonsense, ranging from your Sam Mraovich's and Vitaliy Versace's to the higher echelon of Neil Breen and Tommy Wiseau, was the budget Denney was some how able to raise to bolster this vanity project, which when adjusted for inflation likely exceeded the millions Wiseau spent making The Room. Filmed on location in Kenya, Tahiti, France, and…
This thing’s reputation precedes it, so I was steeled for hardcore inscrutable “outsider cinema” - imagine my surprise to find this was just deeply idiosyncratic self-funded* pulp! Full of outré touches, to be certain, but lands most of them with surprising confidence - this is genuinely good and compelling in ways I was definitely not expecting. Don’t think for a second that it’s not knock-your-socks-off weird, but I think it’s more “artsy 70’s” weird (edited with numerology, apparently) than actual singular weird - make no mistake, though, I am a huge fan of artsy 70’s weird. Happy to finally be able to watch this for what certainly won’t be the last time.
* Maybe the only appropriate point of comparison between this and The Room - a mysteriously rich director/star.
If I didn't know how movies were made I would have assumed that everything from the acting to the opticals was improvised. More a game of "Exquisite Corpse" than a logical narrative, it's loosely tied together by a series of montages set to 70s AM radio rock and full of flying and spinning calendar pages and newspapers... sometimes. Other times large jumps in location and time just sort of happen. What determining factor informed which events would play out fast, which events would be off-screen, and which events receive the slow, music montage treatment (one of them literally in slow motion) is as mysterious as anything else in this movie.
The Astrologer easily fits into the category of outsider visions…
How much of the budget just went to goofy wipes and opticals of calendar pages and newspaper headlines
