SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! After years of it being a lost art, the psychedelic acid trip movie has been resurrected by the cult-on-purpose Brazilian feature Tony Odyssey, which was directed by Thales Banzai and written by Banzai with Kelson Succi. Shot in black-and-white, the movie opens with Ivy (Iraci Estrla) hitching a ride from nowhere into the city to see Tony (Kelson Succi). He is slaving away at a bar that is a front for a local criminal enterprise. She comes in brandishing firepower and ends up stealing a huge bag of drugs. Then Tony and Ivy make their getaway.
Both Tony and Ivy hate reality and want to fight back against it as hard as possible. Their weapon of choice is a drug known by the street name paste. You take the drug by lying back and applying the ooze directly to your eyeballs. They hole up on the concrete floor of an old warehouse and are transformed into an electric dimension, freed from the mundane. There, they meet all sorts of odd characters along a twisted path through unimaginable locales. On a quest, Tony and Ivy are determined to find God, as they want to snip this reality s**t right in the bud.
Banzai has a nearly impossible psychedelic task: Tony Odyssey has to trip out the viewer not only in black-and-white, but also without any noticeable CGI or artificial intelligence. So the filmmaker relies on those ancient elements of movie magic to summon the psych-out: costumes, format tricks, and imagination. To show that the drugs are kicking in, the director messes with the resolution around the outlines of the frame. While to the viewer this is recognizable as a technical flaw caused by over-adjustment, the result is your senses being teased by translucent fires.
“On a quest, Tony and Ivy are determined to find God, as they want to snip this reality sh*t right in the bud.”
The costumes are out of this world, pulling off the amazing feat of being a multi-color extravaganza in monochrome. You can’t see the colors, but you sorta can, thanks to the outfits’ outlandishness. Instead of compensating for a lack of color, Banzai harnesses it to create a Warholian level of weirdness that defies color. The imagination is evident in the scenarios and depictions along the journey. Once you have made three steps in the weird direction, it then takes ten steps up an even weirder avenue. This helps recreate the unpredictability associated with tripping.
Watching Tony Odyssey makes anyone not on drugs experience the hallucinogenic effects of an acid trip. Paste is a different drug than LSD only because of its ingestion through the eyeballs, otherwise, it is in the same animal kingdom as acid. It doesn’t just augment reality, it retaliates against it. In his quest against reality, Banzai sends his characters straight to the source by challenging God, who is technically the creator of the stuff. This may seem ambitious on the surface, but in the realm of weird films, God hunts are fairly pedestrian. Because heresy is such an easy target, folks confront God, Jesus, and the many faces of the Holy Ghost all the time in weird movies and cartoons. While the trip is fun, there isn’t much big anticipation of meeting the divine face-to-face. The pity of that is Banzai pays off our patience with one of the most adorable depictions of God ever seen.
Still, the finale is intriguing, confounding, and cute as a button. Tony Odyssey is the ticket to ride if you want to head into the newest level of cult movie madness. Tune in, turn on, and sit down!
Tony Odyssey screened at the 2026 Slamdance Film Festival.
"…makes anyone not on drugs experience the hallucinogenic effects of an acid trip."
