366 Weird Movies

“Nothing fixes a thing so intently in the memory as the wish to forget it.”-Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d …”–Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

DIRECTED BY: Michel Gondry

FEATURING: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson

PLOT: A shy introvert named Joel and a kooky gal named Clementine with ever-changing hair colors meet and fall in love.  After a fight Joel tries to reconcile, but discovers Clementine has availed herself of a strange and anachronistic mind-erasing technique to remove all memories of him; in a fit of pique and pain, he decides to undergo the same procedure.  But as Joel begins the erasure process, he realizes he doesn’t want to go through with it, and he travels through the landscapes of his memories to find and hold on to the rapidly vanishing Clementine.

BACKGROUND:

• Charlie Kaufman came up with the idea for this fascinating tale and co-wrote the script with the help of director Michel Gondry and obscure Parisian performance artist Pierre Bismuth.
• The title is taken from the classic Alexander Pope poem Eloisa to Abelard, which reflects a number of philosophical and emotional touchstones of the film.
• Before Jim Carrey expressed a desire to play Joel, the likeliest candidate for the part was Nicolas Cage (!)
• The scene where Mark Ruffalo scares Kirsten Dunst is completely genuine: director Gondry asked that before each take that Ruffalo hide in a different spot to really scare the pants off her!

INDELIBLE IMAGE: This bold and invigorating trip into the subconscious has a myriad of off-the-wall images that are sure to stick in your head. From faceless creatures to over-sized environments to entire train stations being drained of its inhabitants due to memory loss, there is a lot of weirdness going on here.  But as far as an indelible image, the one I pick is the simple scene in which Joel remembers when he and Clementine snuggle beneath an old ratty blanket and he consoles her after she recounts a touching story about a doll she named after herself as a child.  As the memory seeps out of his head and Clementine’s body disappears, Joel crawls through the ratty blanket of his imagination begging to be able to hold on to this particular memory.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Any film birthed from the madcap imagination of Charlie

Original trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Kaufman and surreal visualist Michel Gondry has at least a pretty good shot of being kind of different.  But this movie in particular, a film about memories literally being erased from people like they were organic hard drives, really takes Kaufman’s dry strangeness and Gondry’s unhinged wild-eyed wonderment and melds it to a delightful perfection that muses on life while simultaneously compelling us with images of collapsing landscapes and Jim Carrey bathing in a sink.

COMMENTS: Some would say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie about [Read the rest of this entry...]

Hi, boys and girls, it’s time to check in again and take a sneak peak at what’s coming to 366 next week…

First, our long awaited treatment of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is ready to go tomorrow… so be sure to check back in 24 hours!  We’re going to try to get out another major review as well, for Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man.  We also plan to finish up our treatment of the Toxic Avenger series with a look at 1999’s Toxic Avenger IV: Citizen Toxie, which we’re praying will remain the final entry in the series…

In terms of weird search terms used to locate the site, lonely men (and probably gals too—hey, it’s the 21st century) looking for freaky porn remain our weirdest demographic.  Our favorite search term was “yogic intellectual porn.”  But we have to give ourselves a pat on the back for ever so briefly scoring as the #1 result on a Bing search for “weird sex movies.”

Our reader-suggested review queue continues to grow at an alarming and gratifying rate.  We want to make one change: research has shown that Survive Style 5+ has never been released in North America in any form, so we’re not going to review it right away.  We’re going to put it on our “pray for a Region 1release” list instead and get to it immediately when it comes around.  In it’s place we’re going to cover an alternate suggestion for a weird Japanese film, Takashi Miike’s Visitor Q.   Taking that substitution into account, the queue looks like this: Visitor Q; The Short Films of David Lynch; Santa Sangre; Dead Man (next week); Inland Empire; Monday (assuming I can find an English language version); The Abominable Dr. Phibes; Barton Fink; What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams); Meatball Machine; Xtro; Basket Case; Suicide Club; O Lucky Man!; Trash Humpers (when/if released); Gozu; Tales of Ordinary Madness; The Wayward Cloud; Kwaidan; Six-String Samurai; Andy Warhol’s Trash; Altered States; Memento; Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie; The Science of Sleep; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (jumping in line to come out next week!); Gothic; The Attic Expeditions; After Last Season; Getting Any?; Performance; Being John Malkovich; The Apple; Southland Tales; Arizona Dream; Spider (2002); Songs From The Second Floor; Singapore Sling; Alice [Neco z Alenky]; Necromania (1971, Ed Wood); Hour of the Wolf; MirrorMask; Possession; Suspiria; Mary and Max; Wild Zero; 4; Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Ninja Scroll; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Danger: Diabolik; Faust; Sublime; Battle Royale; Pink Floyd: The Wall;Escanaba In Da Moonlight; Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter; Zardoz; The Films of Suzan Pitt; Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; and The Holy Mountain.  Wowie!

Today’s Saturday Short was suggested by a reader, Nina. Our protagonist in this short, Gustafer Yellowgold, is an alien from the sun who only dreams in green. In the midst of all those kid shows that encourage children to dance around and shout out answers to questions comes one that actually has a calm, soothing nature to it. It’s fanciful personality makes it acceptably weird.

A 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 on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Terribly Happy [Frygtelig lykkelig](2009): Danish film noir about a police officer assigned to a strange and insular town after he has a nervous breakdown; often compared to the Coen brothers or David Lynch, Slant calls it a “surreal noir” and The Hollywood Reporter called it “seriously weird.”  The Danish submission for the foreign language film Oscar; too weird to be nominated.  Terribly Happy official site.

NEW ON DVD:

The Time Travelers Wife (2009):  Romantic sci-fi/fantasy about a man born with a gene which causes him to become unstuck in time at random intervals.  Scripted by Bruce Joel Rubin of Jacob’s Ladder fame from a bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger.  Few critics thought it was too good, but at least one (Brandon Judell) thought it was “too weird,” which may be considered an endorsement. Buy The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Triangle (2009): Time-travel tale about passengers on a capsized yacht who escape to a mysteriously deserted cruise ship.  Some viewers call it a surrealistic mindbender, while others suggest its a bigger-budget version of the intriguing but non-weird Spanish film Los Cronocrimes [Timecrimes].   Looks like we’ll have to view it and weigh in. Buy Triangle.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas (1998): You often hear the hackneyed phrase “an acid trip on film”, but the description actual fits Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s hallucinogenic counter-cultural touchstone fairly literally. A big weird Blu-ray addition! Buy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [Blu-ray].

The Man from Earth (2007): Philosophical, independent sci-fi film about a college professor who claims to be 14,000 years old. A thinking man’s picture, which explains why you’ve probably never heard of it before. Buy Man From Earth [Blu-ray].

The Time Travelers Wife (2009): See description in DVD above. Buy The Time Traveler’s Wife [Blu-ray].

Triangle (2009): See description in DVD above. Buy Triangle [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.

The 2009 Academy Awards nominations are out, and they are every bit as tepid and conventional as we would have predicted.  The small sliver of hope is that, by expanding the field to 10 nominations, one mildly weird film did manage to worm it’s way into Best Picture contention: the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, which also garnered a well-deserved “Best Original Screenplay” nomination.  The beautiful looking Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus also got mentions for “Best Art Direction” and “Best Costumes.”

A few non-weird titles we covered in the past year got noticed by the Academy.  Coraline received a nomination for “Best Animated Film”: an honor, but a win isn’t in the cards considering the competition it’s Up against.  Stanley Tucci was mentioned for his chilling performance as a child murderer in the otherwise unremarkable The Lovely Bones.  And, to our shock, the musical snoozer Nine gathered a stunning four nominations: a Best Supporting Actress for the lovely and talented (but for this performance, undeserving) Penélope Cruz; one for art direction; one for costume design (corset and fishnet stocking fetishes are obviously common among members of the Academy); and one for the original song “Take it All” (now, which one was that, again?)

With all due respect to the Academy, we’d like to offer this alternative, weirder slate of nominees:

BEST WEIRD PICTURE OF 2009:

• Antichrist: torture-porn in the style of Tarkovsky
• The Box: a confusing sci-fi fable about moral dilemmas
• Cold Souls: Paul Giamatti misplaces his soul and it winds up on the black market in Russia
• Dark Country: Noir/horror hybrid about a couple that hit a man on a lonely desert road on the way back from their honeymoon
• The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: An ancient mystic with the power to make dreams real in a magic mirror tries to weasel out of a deal with the devil
• Ink: A mysterious creature kidnaps a young girl and takes her into the world of dreams
• Ponyo: A goldfish becomes a real live girl
• A Serious Man: An absurdist retelling of the story of Job embodied by a Jewish physics professor in 1960s suburban Minnesota
• Thirst [Bawkji]: A Korean Catholic priest tries and fails to suck blood ethically after he is cursed with vampirism
• Where the Wild Things Are: A rambunctious boy travels to a storybook land to meet symbolic psychological monsters

WEIRDEST ACTOR:

[Read the rest of this entry...]

DIRECTED BY: Brian Yuzna

FEATURING: Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Simón Andreu

PLOT: A brilliant young med school graduate gets himself assigned to the institution

where Dr. Herbert West is imprisoned so that he can enlist the good doctor’s assistance in continuing his forbidden experiments in reanimating the dead.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Beyond is a welcome third installment in the Re-Animator saga that continues the series’ tradition of going way over-the-top, but though it’s deranged, nonsensical fun, it’s not even the weirdest entry in its own franchise.

COMMENTS: Fans of the taste-challenged Re-Animator series should be pleased with this charmingly grotesque third sequel, which zips along briskly with a delightful disrespect for logic to a phantasmagorically bloody zombie prison riot finale.  Jeffery Combs, now middle-aged but still looking like a eternally perturbed boy genius, returns as Dr. Herbert West to inject his deadpan wit into the proceedings while the world goes mad around him.  A large part of Dr. West’s mad charisma comes from the fact that he’s constantly sowing seeds of chaos by pushing forward into realms where man was not meant to meddle, then staring at the carnage with a slightly befuddled frown as yet another reanimated corpse unexpectedly turns homicidal.  Obsessed and opportunistic, he’s a nerdy Dr. Frankenstein with an unabashedly amoral streak, who always emerges from his own foul ups unscathed while his unlucky companions end up in the charnel house.  West’s experiments on rats in prison have led him to believe that he can use electricity to restore the souls of re-animated corpses and keep them from killing off the nubile women who always happen to be standing around whenever a new zombie pops up.  This time around, it’s a Doogie Hauser-esque young prison MD who risks everything to help West better the lot of mankind by mixing up a new vat of glowing green reanimation juice, but through a long string of unfortunate occurrences ends up getting kickboxed about the head by a hot zombie dominatrix for his troubles.  Even though this entry aims more for comedy than horror, the atmosphere is eerie: what’s spookier than a half-abandoned post-riot prison, with sounds of massacres echoing in the background while burning toilet paper rolls cast the shadows of iron bars on gray stone walls?  The crazed climax gives us about as many zombie-hyphenates as any reanimated corpse fan could hope for: zombie-rats, zombie-girlfriends, a half-zombie, zombie-vision, zombie-fellatio.  There’s also a pill-popping prisoner who gets hooked on reanimation fluid, leading to the flick’s most bizarre and surreal gag, and a “cockfight” that must be seen to be believed.  All in all, Beyond Re-Animator should leave your lower jaw hanging reasonably close to the ground, which is all we ask for in any movie with “Re-Animator” in the title.

Technically inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, though not at all uncanny, Beyond Re-Animator is set in mythical Arkham, Massachucets.  To get that New England ambiance down perfectly, Yuzna hired a team of regional filmmakers—guys like screenwriter José Manuel Gómez and executive producer Carlos Fernández—guys with mucho dinero, who understand that an authentic Massachusetts prison looks exactly like something you’d find on the outskirts of Barcelona.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…leads to a wonderfully degenerate 30-minute final sequence that involves not only lotsa gore and f/x but also some genuinely surreal visual wit.”–Jonathan Holland, Variety (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: John R. Hand

FEATURING: Jeremy Hosbein, Amanda Edington

PLOT: A survivor of the apocalypse is conflicted about his mother, who is addicted to a

black fluid that keeps her eternally young but causes disorientation and scarring.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Scars of Youth is a beautifully lensed film, filled with dreamlike images and montages. Although not impenetrable, the tale comes across mysterious and weird, thanks to the oblique, overwhelmingly visual storytelling. Unfortunately, all this beauty pads a thin and unengaging storyline.

COMMENTS:  Scars of Youth is easy to critique.  It’s visually and sonically entrancing, on its own terms and even moreso when you consider the low budget and lack of any special effects.  On the other hand, the story is slow, yet hard to follow, and what we do discern of the tale doesn’t add up to very much.  The audio in some of the necessary background exposition is deliberately distorted in an attempt to create atmosphere that creates frustration instead.  The performances are substandard throughout; the amateur actors can’t convey complex emotions, and the third main character—a sort of adventurer who smuggles immortality fluid past the checkpoints of an unseen civilization to our hero—sports an unnatural laugh that is particularly off-putting.  Almost every scene is drawn out for far too long, with actors staring off into space with melancholy expressions or wandering around state parks, disconsolately staring at wire fences.  These elements of pure mood can’t take the place of dialogue or action.  There is full-frontal nudity to liven things up, but the mother-son incest subtext, intended to provoke, is laid on far too thickly, with sexual symbolism slathered on with so little subtlety that it becomes embarrassing.  On the plus side, the eerie ambient music is a highlight, and the photography is especially beautiful and far more professional than the narrative aspects of the film.  There are beautiful shots of rippling ponds, closeups of bustling ant colonies, sun-dappled forests, and a consistent, painterly eye for color and composition.  Blue filters are used on the interiors in the protagonist’s lonely room, which turn what would otherwise look like a garage with white sheets hung about for walls into something reasonably mystical.  The black and white dream and flashback scenes are crisp and lovely; one brilliantly conceived sequence is grainy and filled with afterimages, as well as some of the film’s loveliest symbolism.  These short, impressionistic moments are where Scars shines; they could fit comfortably as mood pieces inside a major production with more of a story to tell.  They just can’t carry an entire film. 

Hand’s earlier film, Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare, was a collage-like creation inspired by the visual styles of cheap and crazy 1970s drive-in horror movies. The look, sound and pace of Scars of Youth is, insted, a tribute to Tarkovsky’s Stalker.  Hand captures the general feel of the Russian minimalist master, but whereas the murky grindhouse visuals of Nightmare made the lack of locations, story and acting talent almost appropriate, the ultra-clean, professionally shot look of Scars of Youth highlights these deficiencies.  Both films contain a few gorgeous images which, if they could be judged in isolation, would earn five star ratings; but, in both films we also get the feeling that we’re watching the work of a brilliant cinematographer and sensualist who has yet to find a meaningful story to tell.  If Hand’s storytelling abilities ever catch up to the level of his technical skills, he’ll become the Stanley Kubrick of homemade videos.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…another successful experimental tweaking of a familiar genre for Hand.”–Mike Everleth, BadLit.com

“The script was original, it had this carny/circus thing which I’ve always associated with Hollywood.  Let’s face it, it’s a freakshow out here, it’s a circus, we’re all on the merry-go-round.  And this cartoonish, kind of weird sensibility this film had, it was almost like a weird childhood memory of these local television shows I remember watching as a kid…”–Bill Paxton on why he was attracted to the script of The Dark Backward

DIRECTED BY: Adam Rifkin

FEATURING: Judd Nelson, Bill Paxton, Wayne Newton, Lara Flynn Boyle, James Caan

PLOT: Marty Malt is a garbageman and aspiring stand-up comic with no talent and no confidence.  One day, a third arm begins to spontaneously grow out of his back.  Although his act hasn’t improved, the gimmick is enough that greasy agent Jackie Chrome takes interest in him and his accordion-playing, garbage-eating buddy Gus.

BACKGROUND:

• The Dark Backward was the first script written by Adam Rifkin, who was only 19 years old at the time.  He would direct the film six years later at age 25.
• The title was selected by opening the complete works of Shakespeare to a random page (the quote comes from “The Tempest,” Act I, Scene II: “How is it/That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else/In the dark backward and abysm of time?”
• James Caan reportedly agreed to appear in the film only after an insistent Rifkin called him at the Playboy Mansion.
• Judd Nelson auditioned for the role by performing Marty Malt’s comedy routines, in disguise, at open-mike nights in Los Angeles.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Probably, one of the many images of Marty’s third arm, whether he displays it to the audience by mechanically spinning around after delivering another lame joke, or as doctor James Caan examines the embryonic fingers sprouting from the his back.  Individual viewers’ mileage may vary, however; you may be indelibly grossed out by the orgy with three morbidly obese women, or by Gus’ nauseating midnight snack of rotting chicken.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The premise alone—the world’s worst stand-up comic becomes a

Clip from The Dark Backward

success after he sprouts a third arm from his back—immediately qualifies as weird.  For better and worse, director Rifkin doesn’t shy away from going whole hog into grotesquerie, churning out a first feature that looks like a technically polished version of an early John Waters film.

COMMENTS: If a therapist laid The Dark Backward down on a couch and psychoanalyzed [Read the rest of this entry...]

Apologies first: last week, I said the Dark Backward review would appear, but real life intervened and we couldn’t get it out.  Expect to see it appear early next week.  Other reviews that are planned, but may or may not appear next week: our long-anticipated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind treatment, John Hand’s low-budget sci-fi followup to Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare, Scars of Youth (2008), and, just for giggles, Beyond Re-Animator.

For our weirdest search term used to locate the site last week, we’ll go with someone’s attempt to track down info on a very obscure film sub-genre: “ElectroMagnetic Field comedy movies.”

The reader-suggested review queue looks like this: Survive Style 5+ (looking for a copy); The Dark Backward (next week–this time, I swear!); The Short Films of David Lynch; Santa Sangre; Dead Man; Inland Empire; Monday (assuming I can find an English language version); The Abominable Dr. Phibes; Barton Fink; What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams); Meatball Machine; Xtro; Basket Case; Suicide Club; O Lucky Man!; Trash Humpers (when/if released); Gozu; Tales of Ordinary Madness; The Wayward Cloud; Kwaidan; Six-String Samurai; Andy Warhol’s Trash; Altered States; Memento; Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie; The Science of Sleep; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (possibly jumping in line to come out next week); Gothic; The Attic Expeditions; After Last Season; Getting Any?; Performance; Being John Malkovich; The Apple; Southland Tales; Arizona Dream; Spider (2002); Songs From The Second Floor; Singapore Sling; Alice [Neco z Alenky]; Necromania (1971, Ed Wood); Hour of the Wolf; MirrorMask; Possession; Suspiria; Mary and Max; Wild Zero; 4; Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Ninja Scroll; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Danger: Diabolik; Faust; Sublime; Battle Royale; Pink Floyd: The Wall;Escanaba In Da Moonlight; Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter; Zardoz; The Films of Suzan Pitt; and Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]. Wow!

David Firth, creator of our first Saturday Short “Crooked Rot”, receives his second appearance on our site with the eighth episode of his bizarre comedy series, Salad Fingers. (If you haven’t seen the previous seven, don’t worry. There’s no background information you’ll need in order to understand this one.) Whether you laugh so hard you puke, or curl up in the fetal position during this clip, one thing is certain, David is a master of weird.