Capsules

CAPSULE: MEAT (2010)

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Vlees

DIRECTED BY:  Victor Nieuwenhuijs, Maartje Seyferth

FEATURING: Titus Muizelaar, Nellie Benner

PLOT: An emotionally neutered detective investigates a murder at a butcher shop where all the employees have high libidos.

Still from Meat (2010)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There is no question that this is a weird one. But Meat never really matches its mystery to the grand theme or emotional resonance it’s searching for. It’s main virtue is that it’s short and sexy, making for a relatively easy watch despite its challenging narrative format.

COMMENTS: Here are some things that happen in Meat: a butcher has sex with a co-worker in a meat locker while another employee secretly videotapes it. A woman plummets to her death. The butcher is found murdered. Here are some things that may or may not happen in Meat: The woman who lives in the room above the shop is a prostitute who meets tricks there during business hours. The prime suspect is raped by a man wearing a skull mask the night of the murder. The murder investigation is conducted by the victim’s doppelganger. Here are some things that probably don’t happen in Meat, despite being shown: Three middle-aged customers approach the meat display case, totally nude. The detective watches man being led away from a slaughterhouse, one of them dressed like a chicken, while blood drips down his windshield. Cows, lambs and pigs find their way into the butcher shop at night and urinate on the floor.

It’s that kind of movie. After a set-up that is only marginally odd, focused more on eroticism than surrealism, the last third of the movie surrenders entirely to dream logic. Cryptic shots of a butterfly and a woman submerged in a bathtub, plus elliptical monologues about sheep-slaughtering, are spread through the early sections as harbingers of the all-out weirdness to come. Our dumpy middle-aged butcher has some sort of sexual arrangement with a woman who lives at the shop and whose main duty seems to be to sleep with all the male employees; yet, he naturally fancies the slim blond college-aged part-time worker whose short skirt is half-hidden under her floor-length butcher’s apron. He comes up to her from behind and whispers his dirty old man fantasies into her nubile ears. In the real world, his come-ons would be actionable sexual harassment; here, because they occur while the girl is breathlessly videotaping a dish full of animal organs, it’s mere sexual absurdism.

Later, the phraseology of this scene will be mirrored in the investigator’s language as he interviews the girl, now a suspect: seduction has become interrogation; desire, guilt. Meat‘s strategy is to vacillate between opposites: the body as a sexual canvas, and as a collection of organs to be hacked apart and sold; genitals as organs of pleasure, and portals for the release of bodily waste. Desire goes to war with disgust, as rationality yields to irrationality. Meat explores issues of sex, carnality and guilt—maybe with a side of vegetarianism.

After screening at a handful of European film festivals, Meat spent six years in a post-presentation, pre-distribution netherworld before Artsploitation Films picked it up for belated September 2016 DVD release. With no clear audience besides arthouse curiosity seekers, Meat is an orphan that needs your love.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…bizarre, chilling little character drama …”–Matthew Lee, Screen Anarchy (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE CURSE [NOROI] (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Kōji Shiraishi

FEATURING: Jin Muraki, Rio Canno, Tomono Kuga, Marika Matsumoto

PLOT: A paranormal investigator discovers a connection between a succession of mysterious phenomena.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though innovative and solidly crafted, the film remains too structurally close to a standard horror to be considered genuinely weird. Noroi stretched for—and, to a great degree, attained—innovation and uniqueness as a work of horror. But there’s little sense that it was ever aiming to be genuinely weird, at least not as this site defines the word. There’s an atmosphere of unreality brought about by the persistent otherworldly presence that wafts throughout the film, but nonetheless, the world in which it manifests is a sane and recognizable one, presented in the plain, organic style that befits the better-crafted sort of found footage film.

COMMENTS: The roots of the found footage style can be traced back as far as 1980’s infamous piece of cannibalsploitation nastiness, Cannibal Holocaust. Found footage, in its early days, represented a promising breath of fresh air for horror. After the genre had spent the last few decades building itself up on a foundation of excess, The Blair Witch Project and its imitators introduced a fresh appreciation for minimalism, implication, and the power of atmosphere in horror—as well as a new way to stretch a budget.

As was inevitable, however, the ugly side-effects of popularity began to kick in; and, as exemplified in the latter films in the Paranormal Activity franchise, the style become an overused parody of itself, completely abandoning the subtleties that gave it its appeal and intrigue for the sake of greater marketability. The “in-universe camera” aspect became little more than an excuse to underpay the cinematographer.

Fortunately for Noroi, it hopped on the found footage bandwagon before Hollywood had fully awoken to its exploitability. Or, put another way, it came out four years before Paranormal Activity, when found footage was still mildly novel.

And, though there’s far more to Noroi than its handheld camera style, this is undeniably a defining aspect of the movie. Noroi is, in short, a horror film that, though distinctly Eastern in general content, is presented in a cinematic style invented and grown almost entirely in the Western world of cinema. Put simply, it’s perhaps one of the most literal cases of J-Horror through a Westernised lens.

Noroi’s director, Kōji Shiraishi, while perhaps not enjoying ‘s levels of cult recognition in the West, has nonetheless solidly established himself as one of Japan’s more prominent 21st century horror directors. Citing both local directors and several of Hollywood’s classic horror masters (, Raimi , et. al.) among his influences, his affinity for experimentation within the genre shows clearly in the broad and diverse body of his work.

Noroi, perhaps his most recognized work in the West, is striking for its slick and effective blend of the familiar and the unexpected. In many ways, his cinematic telling of this particular tale of horror does not shy away from indulging in well-worn genre standards. The J-Horror aficionado will immediately recognize the ominous shrines and the stringy-haired ghost girl in a billowing white gown; the found-footage enthusiast will recognize the journalist protagonist whose relentless drive to document the truth serves as the reason the in-universe camera is always on; and more or less anyone with a taste for horror in any form will recognize the disquieting little girl with the less-than-enviable bonds to the world of the paranormal, or the curse that stubbornly hangs around after centuries.

And yet, in many other ways, Noroi distinguishes itself, particularly in its portrayal of its main horror.

It’s long been established that, in horror, vagueness is often the key to effective chills. From the beginning, it’s clear that Noroi understands this well. It’s not an excessively subtle film, by any stretch of the imagination—the psychic, with his hyperactive paranoia and affinity for tin foil, couldn’t be anything but comedic in any context—but in its presentation of its central threat, Noroi is strikingly effective. The film’s unfortunate protagonists are plagued by a demonic presence that makes itself known in a far more underhanded way that the petty, poltergeist-like antics of the Paranormal Activity ghost and its ilk. At the same time, however, the threat it presents is never undermined; its presence lurks throughout the film, mercilessly persistent, and all the more haunting for its vagueness.

Of course, like any horror scenario built on vagueness, the payoff needs to be meticulously crafted. Personally, I found Noroi‘s conclusion, perfectly functional as it was, to be rather mediocre in comparison with the rest of it. Still, Noroi is a solidly founded work of J-Horror, and, moreover, one of the sadly overlooked examples of the found footage style as it ought to be implemented (most of the others, incidentally, being zero-budget webseries uploaded to YouTube). It is not, however, an example of “weird” cinema to any significant degree. It’s unique, original, and evokes an excellently crafted atmosphere; but pretending that those elements are synonymous with being “weird” only cheapens the art of cinematic absurdity we’re so fond of around here.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…overstays its welcome with an unnecessarily complicated and increasingly absurd final act…”–Neil Young, Neil Young’s Film Lodge (festival screening)

Pipelines (Archived)

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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First off, until this Tuesday you can still participate in our latest Blu-ray giveaway contest just by suggesting a movie to go on the List of the 366 Weirdest Movies of All Time. There are a lot of entries already but we are giving away two prizes, so it all evens out. Details here.

And here’s what’s on tap next week: Simon Hyslop helps clear out that massive reader-suggested review queue with a look at the found footage J-horror Noroi. The we’ll bring you a sneak peek at Meat, a surreal and erotic Dutch mystery set in a butcher shop. We’ll also hit the delirious Spaghetti Western Django Kill (If You Live, Shoot!) one more time, and Alfred Eaker returns to his irregular “exploitation triple feature” series with a triptych from 1962 (a lineup that includes Mondo Cane, the original “shockumentary”). All that plus we’ll announce that contest winner… another busy week for us, which means more weird fun for you.

The weather is (slowly) cooling down, but weird search terms that brought people to the site are heating up this week. There’s a lot of searches highlight this week, so let’s get right to our survey with a couple of quick hits: “wacky rubbers allegro” and “movie big bloody boob.” Then there’s “australia girl open is bra or pantly of nude,” which sounds like it might be dirty if it were more coherent (“pantly of nude”?) The porn movie searches, a (frequently unprintable) staple of this weekly survey, were definitely intended to be dirty: yet, we can hardly imagine who would find either “list of porn grandmother’s on a sick bed” or “asian woman pretending to be a cow full porn” erotic. Strange as this week’s search slate was, though, they all pale before “green coloured monkey hollywood movie oriented by cristamus.” This phrase has it all: vivid, bizarre imagery; odd misspellings; and words that don’t mean what the user thinks they mean. The result is the weirdest search term we saw in a weird week.

Here’s how the ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing reader-suggested review queue now stands: Noroi (next week!); Candy; The Shape of Things; On the Silver Globe; The Last Days of Planet Earth; A Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 9/9/2016

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Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Trailers of new release movies are generally available at the official site links.

SCREENINGS – (Boston, MA, Coolidge Corner Theater, Fri., Sep. 9 (midnight):

El Topo (1970): Read the Certified Weird entry! It’s great to see ‘s surrealist Spaghetti Western, the first midnight movie ever, back in regular rotation on late night screens across the country. El Topo at Coolidge Corner Theater.

SCREENINGS – (New York City, IFC Center, Sep. 9 – 15):

Fellini Satyricon (1969): Read the Certified Weird entry! IFC Center’s retrospective rolls on with screenings of one of the maestro’s very weirdest, most self-indulgent experiments. Also screening on Friday and Saturday night at 11:20: Blue Velvet, a Certified Weird nightmare that is fast becoming one of IFC’s go-to midnight movies. Fellini Satyricon at IFC center.

SCREENINGS – (United Kingdom, multiple locations, beginning Sep. 9):

The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976): Read the List Candidate review! ‘s weird sci-fi parable, starring as an alien stranded on this planet, returns to cinemas in the UK this week in a new 4K restoration. The film’s out-of-print soundtrack was also released on Sept. 9, and there are promises of a new Blu-ray and DVD release on the horizon, plus future screenings in the USA. Unfortunately we haven’t located a site with the names and showtimes of the actual theaters, but you can read more at Bowie’s official site.

FILM FESTIVALS – Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) (Toronto, Canada, Sep. 8-18):

TIFF has become the North American destination for sub-blockbuster films and the most important marketplace for independent releases, including (occasionally) weird ones. It’s importance (if not its prestige) has surpassed Cannes and Sundance. We found a number of intriguingly bizarre nuggets hidden in TIFF’s massive film buffet, and that’s excluding shorts and movies (like ‘s post-apocalyptic cannibal satire The Bad Batch) that already debuted at other festivals. If we’re lucky, half of the potential gems listed below will emerge from this festival with reasonable distribution deals:

  • Ayiti Mon Amour – Three stories intertwine in this Haitian magical realist fable: a teenager finds a superpower, a fisherman searches the sea for a cure for his wife’s illness, and a character tries to find its way out of the story an author is writing. Screening Sep. 10, 12, 13, and 18.
  • Blind Sun – An immigrant house-sitter finds himself persecuted by authorities in the midst of a record-setting heatwave in this slow-burn psychothriller. Sep. 9, 14, 15, 17.
  • My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea – A crudely animated story that literally describes the disaster of its title. Sep 11, 13 & 16.
  • Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – Attend a special, free 10th anniversary screening of the Certified Weird fantasy/war classic tomorrow, Sep. 10.
  • Planetarium – A movie director seeks to exploit two psychic sisters ( and Lily-Rose Depp) in between-the-wars Paris. Sep. 10,11 & 17.
  • The Untamed – Mexican horror about an unhappy marriage and some sort of creature; programmers call it “uncompromisingly weird.” Sep. 13, 15 & 16.
  • Weirdos – In 1976 two Canadian teens hit the road, accompanied by the ghost of  (who was still alive in 1976). True weirdos will catch it on Sep. 11.
  • Yourself and Yours – A painter breaks up with his girlfriend but discovers multiple woman who look identical to her all around town. Korean. Sep. 13, 15, & 18.

Toronto International Film Festival official site.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Tale of Tales (2015): A triple fantasy of tales of three magical kingdoms; it’s sexy, it’s gory, and eats a heart (which is both sexy and gory). Available on Blu-ray only, no DVD—is that an indication we’re coming to the Blu-standard tipping point? Buy Tale of Tales [Blu-ray].

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

KEN RUSSELL’S VALENTINO (1977)

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Of all the star-worshiping that went on during silent cinema, it is perhaps the obsession with Rudolph Valentino that is most mystifying today. When he died prematurely, at the age of 31, numerous fans were so distraught as to commit suicide. His funeral was besieged by thousands, and a legend was born when a mysterious lady in black began annually placing funeral wreaths on his tomb for decades to come. Valentino had such an impact on pop culture that everyone from to were influenced by him.

Yet today, there are relatively few Valentino film festivals or revivals, and when his films are seen (rarely), they will inevitably prove disappointments. Valentino never made a great film. In fact, most of them are dreadful. (In his defense, he didn’t make very many). Of course, someone will inevitably make the tiresome 21st century claim that this is true of most movies from the silent era, despite the fact that there are plenty of films from that period that have good writing, performances, direction and hold up even better than many films of the Fifties and later. We could attempt to produce examples of stellar acting in lesser films, however, this does not work with Valentino. Although his charisma scorches, his acting is extreme in its use of silent film cliches, mechanical and bizarrely exaggerated to the degree that it elicits amusement today as opposed to the near orgasmic reaction of his contemporaneous fans. Undeniably eroticized, his screen persona was also amoral; he was a rapist. Otherworldly, he doesn’t even seem human, which is perhaps why he is primarily known by name alone. It’s doubtful if many today would even recognize his image.

Rudloph Valentino
Rudloph Valentino as “The Sheik”

Sometimes, the reason for stardom is more for a colorful biography than an actual body of work (e.g. Tallulah Bankhead), but this isn’t necessarily the case with Valentino. His biographers contradict each other with bullet point details, which is to be expected since the star’s press kit was largely fiction. What we do know is that he was born in Italy and immigrated to the United States in 1913 looking for employment. Some reports have him working as a male prostitute, but that is widely disputed as well. He bussed tables and briefly found work as a taxi driver, which is how he met actor Norman Kerry, who convinced Valentino to try a career in the new cinema business. Valentino became an “overnight” star with 1921’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (although he had been doing small parts as exotic heavies in film for seven years), became a superstar with The Sheik later that same year, and became Continue reading KEN RUSSELL’S VALENTINO (1977) →

Certified Weird (The List)

247. WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964)

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Suna no onna

“TO see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour…”

–William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Recommended

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida

PLOT: An schoolteacher and amateur entomologist’s search for an elusive beetle takes him to a remote seaside village. Needing a place to stay, he asks the townspeople for lodging and is offered shelter with an odd young widow who lives in a shack at the bottom of a pit. The next morning, as he prepares to leave, he finds that the villagers have tricked him and he is trapped in the pit, forced to shovel sand in return for food and water, presumably for the remainder of his days.

Still from Woman in the Dunes (1964)

BACKGROUND:

  • Kōbō Abe wrote the novel “The Woman in the Dunes” in 1962 and was in the rare and enviable position of adapting it for the screen himself two years later. Abe wrote a total of four screenplays for director Hiroshi Teshigahara, all of which were scored by legendary composer Tôru Takemitsu.
  • Takemitsu’s score was recorded by a string ensemble, then electronically distorted.
  • The film was cut by  about twenty minutes during its original release. The full length film runs about two and a half hours.
  • Woman in the Dunes was nominated for a Best Foreign Language film Oscar, and, more impressively for a Hollywood outsider, Teshigahara was nominated for Best Director. Dunes lost in 1965 to Italy’s Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, while Teshigahara was personally nominated for the 1966 awards instead (losing to Robert Wise for The Sound of Music).
  • The nudity and sex in the film were daring by 1964 standards, causing the import to be marketed in the U.S. with the tagline “The most provocative picture ever made.”
  • Teshigahara retired from filmmaking in 1979 to enter the family business—flower arranging!

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Sand, endless sand. Shifting sand, cascading sand, crumbling walls of sand, grains of sand stuck between toes. But to narrow it down, the dream sequences where the entomologist sees women superimposed over the sand, once with the sand ripples mimicking strands of hair, and once with a dune tracing the curve of a hip.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Feminine mirages; rotting sand; voyeur drum circle

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The plot of Woman in the Dunes—a man trapped into slavery in a remote village, forced to labor to earn his keep—is almost plausible, allowing the unimaginative to view it as a dull version of an escape movie. The hypnotic pace, bleakly beautiful cinematography, and Toru Takemitsu’s unnerving score inform this fable’s weird construction, however, creating a sense of strangeness that slowly gets under your skin like beach sand gets under your swimsuit.


Original Japanese trailer for Woman in the Dunes

COMMENTS: A man, a woman, sand: those are the triangular borders of Woman in the Dunes. Within this minimal landscape, the Continue reading 247. WOMAN IN THE DUNES (1964) →

Miscellanea

CONTEST: SUGGEST A WEIRD MOVIE, WIN A BLU-RAY – “DER BUNKER” OR “OBSERVANCE”

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It’s time once again to disburse some of the distributor loot we collect to our faithful readers. We’ll make this contest easier to enter than the last one, because we have two prizes to give away instead of just one.

As you might have noticed, with the List now standing at 246 Certified Weird movies, this 366 movie project is now nearer the end of its run than the beginning. Only 120 titles to go! That’s not a lot of spots, and that’s why we want to listen to our readers as much as possible to determine which films get those precious final slots.

So, to enter this contest, all you have to do is make a one sentence comment, on this post, explaining why a movie not currently on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies should be placed on it (for easy reference, you can see the complete current List in the sidebar to your left). Your movie can be one we’ve never considered, one that’s currently marked as a List Candidate, or even a movie we’ve previously rejected that you believe we should reconsider. More than one person can offer the same movie choice. You can use the format, “[movie title] should be put on the List, because…” Entries will be judged by persuasiveness, with extra points given for cleverness. Entries that are longer than one sentence or that nominate a movie that’s already on the List will be not be considered for a prize. Make as many entries as you like (although every individual will be able to win only one of the two prizes).

The staff will chose the best response and a runner-up for prizes. The best response will get his choice of two Blu-rays (see below), while the runner-up will get the other one. Winners must provide an email contact and a U.S. mailing address to receive your prize. If the winner does not respond to us by email with an address and choice of either the Der Bunker or Observance Blu-ray prize within 48 hours after his or her name is announced, choice of prizes will be offered to the runner-up instead. Contest closes at midnight Eastern Standard Time on September 13, one week from today, and winners will be announced on September 14.

The winner’s entry will not automatically be elevated onto the List, but winning the contest will be persuasive as we try to select those final 120 movies.

And now, for the prizes, both supplied by by Artsploitation Films (distributors of the Certified Weird Der Samurai). These are factory-sealed Blu-rays, not used review copies.

DER BUNKER (click for more information on this prize)

Der Bunker Blu-ray

List Candidate! From our review: “a solid hit, with more than enough surprises to keep lovers of the weird glued to the screen.”

From the box cover: “Surrealistic yet strangely heartwarming, Der Bunker is a funny and bizarre modern fairy tale. A student rents a room in a bunker home and becomes involved in the bizarre dramas of his landlord’s family which includes a precocious 8-year-old who, despite being German and ‘learning-challenged,’ is being home-groomed to become the President of the United States.”


clip from Der Bunker

-or-

OBSERVANCE (click for more information on this prize)

Observance Blu-rayFrom our review: “Lovers of the weird need fear not; the ending plunges down a rabbit hole, never to resurface.”

From the box cover: “A frightening psychological horror tale reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s THE TENANT and Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW.  A troubled private investigator is assigned to observe a woman from an abandoned apartment but he slowly becomes aware that the derelict building he is on has a dark, threatening presence.”


Trailer for Observance

OK, begin… NOW!

Guest Reviews

GUEST REVIEW: MEET THE HOLLOWHEADS (1989)

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Guest review by “Penguin” Pete Trbovich

AKA Life on the Edge

DIRECTED BY: Thomas R. Burman

FEATURING: , John Glover, Richard Portnow

PLOT: Henry Hollowhead works as the top meter reader for United Umbilical, and today’s his lucky break: his boss wants to come over for dinner, which Henry hopes will lead to a promotion. His wife Miriam fusses over making dinner for the special occasion, while the three Hollowhead children scamper about getting up to antics.

Meet the Hollowheads

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: We’ll let this quote from Keith Bailey’s Unknown Movies speak to it’s qualifications: “Even for a world of insanity that the Hollowheads lives in needs to be depicted with some kind of logic to it, to have some kind of (twisted) explanation for every unconventional gadget, location, and action. Otherwise, such a world is simply ‘How about I wear this suit to court, Mr. Soprano?’ weird for weird’s sake, with no point and no purpose except seemingly to put up as many bizarre things all chained together in a stream that could be best described as non-sequitur.” When a person whose whole gig is reviewing the most obscure movies possible levels the “weirdness for weirdness’ sake” accusation, you know it’s not your average cup of tea. On its own, the movie is an onslaught of colorful, even cheerful, but disturbing images. The highly cliched plot just lets its style take over the stage.

SUGGESTED INDELIBLE IMAGE: You could throw a dart at most any frame of this movie, but one scene defines it early on: eldest Hollowhead son Bud practices music in his room, playing an instrument that looks part trombone, part accordion, and part rubber chicken. Daughter Cindy enters to “tell Bud to choke it” but ends up singing along in accompaniment. As she sings “I feel good about myself; would not be anyone else,” the movie has by this time firmly established its stride and at the same time is bluntly telling us that it doesn’t care beans for our rulebook.

SUGGESTED THREE WEIRD THINGS: Tentacle for dinner; pulling the bugs off Spike; feeding grandpa

COMMENTS: Unlike many of the 366 Weirdest Movies Ever Made, Meet the Hollowheads is very easy to describe: it is a 1950’s sitcom from an alternate dimension. There, we’re actually done! If you take any TV saccharine slice of suburbia, from “Leave It To Beaver” to “The Brady Bunch” to “The Honeymooners,” then run it through the filter of (pick one) , Terry Gilliam, or David Cronenberg, everything you’re imagining in that description is 90% of what you’re going to see. This movie starts with that premise and stays fearlessly committed to it to the last scene.

The Hollowheads’s world is a claustrophobic—perhaps even underground—domain defined by their household, other households whom we never visit, a corporation called “United Umbilical” which seems to provide every necessity of life, and two policemen who may even work for United Umbilical. There they dwell, in a colorful “Peewee’s Playhouse” set apparently taken over by Cthulhu: their lives revolve around tubes, pipes, ducts, tentacles, squishy life forms, valves, spigots, sludge, slime, industry, and “The Edge,” an apparent hazard spoken of in whispers by two of the younger cast and sternly invoked by mother Miriam, who warns them not to fall off as she sends them out for an errand. Dialogue is festooned with references to plumbing, sewage, and other mucky slang. A tentacle with an eyeball on the end lies untidily piled in a glass jar in the Hollowheads’s home, silently watching the events; we know not whether it’s a pet or an appliance.

When the boss shows up for dinner and begins the second half of the film, the evening degenerates into everything that can possibly go wrong going wrong. There’s a few laughs to be had, but nothing enough to point to this as a comedy. It’s more of an exercise in the avant-garde. Because our familiar frame of reference has been yanked out from under us in this alien environment, we have no clue as to how outrageous any character’s behavior is in this universe. Boss Mr. Crabneck is nasty and vile almost beyond description, and Station Master Mrs. Battleaxe at United Umbilical barely fills the kids’ order while threatening them with all kinds of slimy fates, but everybody seems to take these behaviors in stride.

The tilted world also affords a heap of innuendo. When Mrs. Battleaxe sneers “I suppose your mother thinks it’s our fault that her tubes are blocked?,” or when police advise the Hollowheads to have their drugged-out daughter “pumped,” or when Mrs. Hollowhead has to conquer a phallic section of waggling tentacle coming out of her kitchen dispenser before castrating—oops, we mean slicing—it to chop up for an ingredient, we can’t escape the feeling that this movie wants us to snicker at it. We haven’t even mentioned “softening jelly,” a substance treated as scandalous here, but we have no idea what it is.

But it’s too strange to be fully funny. If anything, this is a very punk style applied to a sitcom world. Like Repo Man or Tank Girl, it mixes the familiar with the bizarre, getting us to accept the perverse because all of the characters accept the perversity. Like the best of weird movies, it makes no attempt to explain or justify itself. We have intercepted a sitcom from another reality, and we’re not being given a peak into the rest of that universe. You’re free to come up with your own point or even dismiss it as having no point. But this movie does assure us that the people in its universe would no doubt find our own world equally baffling, were the interception reversed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A weird and wonderful cinematic misfire, alternately repulsive and ridiculous…”–Steven Puchalski, Shock Cinema (VHS)

 

 

Capsules

CAPSULE: ANTIBIRTH (2016)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Meg Tilly, Mark Weber, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos

PLOT: A hard living party-girl finds herself pregnant, without remembering how.

Still from Antibirth (2016)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Antibirth is satisfying for horror fans looking for a few surreal thrills, but it’s more of an announcement of what Perez might be capable of in the future than it is a current achievement in weirdness. In the end, despite some bizarre plotting, Antibirth resolves itself as standard scare fare.

COMMENTS: Antibirth is a stoner version of Rosemary’s Baby, with a touch of Cronenbergian body horror and a dab of hallucinatoriness (and maybe a bit of Jacob’s Ladder in there, too). Disquieting dream sequences, paranoia, peeling skin, and a grossout birth highlight the horror; but what is perhaps even more surprising is that the film almost works best as a character study. When you’re in your twenties, wasting your weekends on joints, pills and whiskey at all night raves is adventurous. When you enter your thirties and you’re still chasing that buzz every day, it’s clear that you’ve given up on getting anything more out of life—including a family. This is where Lou finds herself, when she puts down the bong for five minutes of self-reflection. Hedonism has become a pleasure-free hassle for her, a hazy daily obligation. She takes the news that she might be pregnant with the resignation of someone who thinks she might be coming down with the flu. The news has no effect on her smoking, toking and drinking decisions, though perhaps some effect on her snacking choices.

Natasha Lyonne was absolutely the right choice for Lou; her defiant, almost principled refusal to take responsibility for the life growing inside her holds the film together while the plot is simultaneously spinning out of control and spinning its wheels. Traditional thinking might have been to cast the more glamorous Sevigny as the victim, putting the quirkier Lyonne into the wisecracking sidekick role; but having the heroine and the comic relief inhabit the same body works better in this context. Half of her dialogue is delivered while trying to hold in pot smoke, and she gets off some good lines: “I don’t talk about aliens when I’m getting high. I have a strict policy.” As Sadie, Sevigny gets a couple of involuntary zingers, too: “We need to accept this, every pregnancy is different,” she offers, when Lou’s already full-term after a week’s gestation.

The dream sequence featuring furry purple Teletubby mutants with expressionless porcelain faces presiding over an alien insemination is Antibirth‘s take-home vision, but there is enough oddness—a cleft-palette Russian urine slave, and the plethora of public access weirdos glimpsed briefly on antenna TV stations—to put the timid mainstream viewer off long before that pièce de résistance arrives. Overall, Antibirth is uneven, but highly watchable thanks to the compulsive trainwreck bad behavior of Lyonne’s anti-heroine. Some people just shouldn’t procreate.

We first met Danny Perez with 2010’s Oddsac, the psychedelic, feature-length “visual album” for freak-folkers Animal Collective. It’s something of a surprise that he had to wait six years before giving birth to his first feature; the material may not be mainstream, but the result is accomplished.

It is a complete, but happy, accident that this review is originally published on Labor Day.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Weird, messy and oddly fascinating, this low-budget horror movie parlays its ‘Rosemary”s Baby-to-the-nth-degree premise into a gross-out fever dream aimed at fans of the way, way out.”–Maitland McDonaugh, Film Journal International (contemporaneous)

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