{Fantastic Fest 2026} Flapjax (2026): Uhmmmm…..What?

I want to be upfront about something before we get into this one. I’m not sure I disliked Flapjax. I’m also not sure I liked it. What I can tell you with total confidence is that it broke my brain a little, and I’m still not sure I’ve put all the pieces back in the right order. Here’s the conceit, at least as far as I can pin it down. An overzealous fast food manager unknowingly carries out the plans of an alien race by serving up a deadly new menu item called, you guessed it, Flapjax. From there, director Rocko Zevenbergen, who also co-wrote with Estevan Muñoz, takes that premise somewhere I genuinely cannot map for you.

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The aesthetic from the very first frame reads like late 90s Nickelodeon, all oversaturated bold colors, goofy looking wallpaper, an element of melodrama that permeates the entire film. It never really lets go of that register even as the film spirals into places Nickelodeon absolutely never went. The restaurant setting itself hit me somewhere uncomfortably personal. My own high school job came roaring back with a vengeance, and not in a nostalgic way. In a lets explore the trauma of our dumb high school jobs kind of way.

Gabriel Cagan plays the manager, and I have to be honest, the resemblance to Charlie Kirk is a little unnerving and I’m not entirely sure what to do with that as a viewer. It’s the kind of detail that sits in your head the whole runtime whether you want it to or not. The restaurant owner, meanwhile, is dressed like the Hamburglar crossed with the guy who framed Roger Rabbit. It is is a genuinely funny image and one of the few things I felt fully equipped to appreciate without qualification. His gang of not so merry aliens feels like it is taking elements from Inspector Gadget’s goon squad and reappropriating them to be in a Mars Attacks style film.

There’s a Kevin Smith flavored suburban nihilism running underneath everything, and it’s paired with tonal and genre shifts so abrupt and so frequent that I started to wonder if my ADHD meds were wearing off mid-screening. To be clear, they might have been. But I don’t think that fully accounts for how hard this film worked to keep me disoriented. It’s a bold choice, jumping from register to register without warning, and I respect the swing even as it thoroughly demolished my ability to track what was actually happening from scene to scene. Black and White.

When Flapjax leans all the way into its own absurdity, it produces some genuinely artful, striking images, shots that clearly came from someone with a real eye. There’s a Pee-Wee Herman quality humming through parts of it too, that specific feeling of a six-pack held together with rope in a fridge, operating on its own internal logic that has nothing to do with our reality. And credit where it’s due, whoever built the pig costume with functioning udders deserves an award of some kind. It was udderly enjoyable….I am sorry but I am who I am.

Things escalate from there in ways I can only describe rather than explain. Mom is running some kind of quasi Sunset Boulevard routine crossed with a healthy dose of Pronhub inspired maternal plot beats, which is a choice. The colors stay wildly, almost childishly oversaturated for most of the runtime, which makes the extended black and white sequences (involving a whole other group of people in a whole other country) land with real, unexpected beauty when it finally arrives, all that fine detail suddenly visible in a way the neon chaos around it never allowed. There’s a full blown musical number dropped into the middle of the movie, immediately followed by a mass tongue-losing event, and somewhere in there I stopped trying to predict what was coming next.

I’ll say this much with total certainty. This might be the weirdest thing I have ever seen at Fantastic Fest, and that is genuinely saying something after years of covering this festival. I mean last year there was an entire movie cast entirely in drag about a killer period. This is weirder than that by a lot. There’s something almost perfect about the film’s Blippi analog turning out to be a towering, incestuous narcissist, in that it feels like exactly the kind of joke this movie was always building toward.

Where Flapjax does unambiguously work is in its creature and gore effects, which are disgusting in the best possible way, all ooey, gooey, early 80s Blob energy. The creature work in the final act in particular is sharp, nasty, and easily the best sustained stretch of the film. I dug it even when I had no idea what it meant.

I don’t think the film is quite funny enough to work as a straight comedy, and there’s something a little off about whatever satirical target it’s aiming at, though I suspect that off-ness is the nihilism talking rather than a miscalculation. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’m cool enough for this movie. It’s a huge, bizarro swing that just didn’t fully connect with me.

I’m not going to pretend I can hand you a clean verdict on Flapjax. I left the screening entertained, confused, a little nauseated, and completely unable to tell you whether the movie is good. What I can tell you is that it’s exactly the kind of gloriously unhinged swing Fantastic Fest exists to program, and if you’re the type of viewer this is built for, you’ll know within the first ten minutes. Flapjax has its World Premiere at Fantastic Fest Thursday, September 17 at 11:30 PM at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. .