FEATURING: Pavla Marsálková, Milos Ctrnacty, Frantisek Havel, Josefa Pechlatová, Václav Zák, Vera Mrázkova, Vladimír Boudník, Alzbeta Lastovková, Dana Valtová, Ivan Vyskocil

PLOT: Short adaptations of five stories from Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal: racing enthusiasts

are obsessed with crashes, two old men in a nursing home reminisce, functionaries try to sell insurance to a mad artist, a man who may be a killer meets a bride in a restaurant, and a timid apprentice plumber falls for a fiery teenage Gypsy girl.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Only two of the five segments in this anthology are significantly bizarre, and a paltry 40% weird rate is not going to get your omnibus movie onto the List.

COMMENTS: The Czech New Wave was part of a fascinating period of creativity that resulted from an unprecedented liberalization of film and literature in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1960s; the movement brought the world the novels of Milan Kundera and the films of director Milos Forman. During this time writers and filmmakers often turned towards surrealism as a way to implicitly critique the absurdity of the totalitarian status quo while maintaining deniability about their political aims (after all, they were merely writing obscure nonsense fiction in the tradition pioneered by national icon Franz Kafka). The New Wave essentially ended in 1968 when, concerned that the rapid pace of democratization might lead Czechoslovakia to exit the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet Union invaded the country and installed a hard-line regime. Based on short stories by New Wave writer Bohumil Hrabal and featuring entries from five of the top directors of the New Wave, Pearls of the Deep is a sort of sampler of this moment in history when Iron Curtain artists briefly wiggled out of the shackles that had bound them to an ideological wall for decades.

In the wild, you have to open a lot of oysters to find a single pearl; something similar is true of feature length anthology of short films, where the entries have an inevitable tendency to average out. Although even Hrabal’s straightest stories contain small doses of absurdism (which show up in non sequitur dialogues or little narrative oddities), only two of these adaptations have conceits baroque enough to form surrealistic pearls. Since our focus is on weird films, we’re going to briefly open and reject three out of these five New Wave oysters before looking more carefully at the two more peculiar specimens.

The first selection, Jirí Menzel’s talky “Mr. Baltazar’s Death” involves three death-obsessed fans who go to a motorcycle race hoping to see a fatality; they do. It’s a strange choice for an opener, since it’s both a bit boring and the only film not from an established director (Menzel was still a film student at the time). In Jan Nemec’s “The Impostors,” two elderly men reminisce about their careers; it ends with an easily guessed twist that isn’t worth the wait. This is the worst and most pointless of the short films, giving no hint of Nemec’s talent. One of Pearls‘ flaws is that the two segments which start the film are the least interesting installments, but at least the final entry, Jaromil (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) Jires’ “Romance,” is one of the strongest. It compresses a strange romance between a teenage peasant and a young plumber—a relationship that morphs from flirtation into prostitution into an engagement as the manic Gypsy dream girl changes her moods and motives—into a matter of hours. The unreality of this scenario, combined with the fact that the tale ends inconclusively with a surprise shot of a gypsy boy tinkling towards the audience, makes it a borderline weird film experience, but even the most dogmatic cinematic realists will appreciate the genuine chemistry between the two young leads. The unknown Dana Valtová (like most of the actors here, this is her only known role) oozes exotic sex; her seduction of the Czech lad seems not so much easy as inevitable. It doesn’t matter how crazy she acts, she has him from the first moment he glances at her, and she knows it.

The two weirdest pearls are sandwiched in the middle of the film. Centered around a crazy artist who is painting pictures over every inch of his abode (even the windowpanes), Evald Schorm’s “The House of Joy” is the anthology’s least subtle entry, and the only film shot in color. Two Communist functionaries try to sell the obviously deranged painter unnecessary insurance policies; it’s a broad and strange comedy, with aggressively dissonant blasts from a pipe organ deployed at odd points like absurdist punctuation marks. As the artist reveals more and more eccentricities, one of the agents becomes fascinated and repeatedly asks him where he gets his ideas (“it’s inside me, like the inside of a goat” is the clearest answer), while his partner presses ahead with his hard-sell sales pitch. We meet an unexpected muse, and are treated to scenes illustrating the painter’s mad inner life: he dances with a knife in a field of livestock, erects a sheet-metal crucified Jesus at a crossroads in a double-time flashback, and a dream of a line of prepubescent girls waiting to take communion inspires his latest work. It’s a strange, chuckle-inspiring sketch with the take-home message “some things should be left as they are.”

Even weirder is Vera (Daisies) Chytilová’s offering, “Automat Svet” (translated as “The Restaurant the World”). It’s the only pure surrealist segment; it’s also the favorite of many critics, thanks to some remarkable slow-motion black and white photography. The dreamlike plot defies rational explanation, but it involves the discovery of a corpse in a restaurant/bar that forces the patrons out into the rainy city streets. The sounds of revelers singing polkas at a wedding party next door seep into the depressingly empty saloon. A few favored customers are allowed in for a glass of beer while crowds outside wait patiently at the window to be let back in. One of the inner circle is a factory worker/artist who makes industrial engravings with tools and dies, and also crafts death masks for his friends to cheer them up; he tells a involved, wandering tale about his lost fiancée.  The police arrive and then, soaked with rain, the bride from the party next door somehow enters the automat through the locked door, angrily fills her shoe with water from the faucet, and takes a drink from it. It is revealed that her groom was arrested for punching one of the cops in the eye; she’s horny on her wedding night, so she picks up the artist (who likes her because her hair “looks like it was cut at a juvenile detention facility”). In slow motion the newly-minted couple dances away into the rainy street, with the bride’s gown and massive veil billowing magically in the wind. Among other lingering mysteries, we’re left to wonder if the corpse of the woman found in the automat is the artist’s missing fiancée…

Pearls of the Deep is the structural center of the Criterion Collection’s 2012 Eclipse series box set “Pearls of the Czech New Wave.” The compilation contains one feature length effort from each of Pearls’ contributors, for a total of six movies (on four DVDs). Two of the features, Nemec’s unsettling A Report on the Party and the Guests and Chytilová’s psychedelic Daisies, are significantly weird enough to merit separate reviews in upcoming weeks. The other three pieces, in increasing order of interest, are Schorm’s Return of the Prodigal Son (1967) (a bleak drama about a suicidal man that owes a little too much to Western influences like Antonioni and Godard); Menzel’s Capricious Summer (1967) (a chaste Czech sex comedy); and Jires’ The Joke (about an apolitical college student who is sentenced to six years hard labor for writing “long live Trotsky” as a joke on a postcard). The Joke, which only played for a few weeks in the Prague spring of 1968, is likely the most anti-Communist movie ever produced in a Communist country. It was immediately banned after the Soviet invasion; it is a small miracle that this film even exists.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…fascinating omnibus film… based on semi-surrealist tales by national literary lion Bohumil Hrabal… the films look totalitarian life square in the eye, but they’re also living testaments to the era’s lovable, grungy Euro-slacker esprit.”–Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin

FEATURING: Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale

PLOT: Villagers of the Alpine town of Tolzbad believe that avalanches will bury them if they are not meticulously careful to keep their voices low and their movements measured.  The film follows the adventures of a family of a widowed mother and her three sons: Johann, who is engaged to be married; Grigorss, who is training to be a butler; and Franz, a mute who never leaves his chair in the attic. Presaged by the appearance of the blind ghost of the father, the family’s repressed emotions eventually erupt into suicide, duels, and even the dreaded avalanche.

BACKGROUND:

• This was Guy Maddin’s third film, and his first fully in color (Archangel featured a few tinted scenes). The chromatic process used in the film mimics the so-called “two-strip” Technicolor which was used before 1932.
• The setting of Careful was inspired by “mountain movies,” a 1920s subgenre popular in the German national cinema, although Maddin admits in the DVD commentary that he had not actually seen any mountain movies when he made the film.
• Long-time Maddin screenwriting collaborator George Toles appears in Careful as a corpse in drag.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: I am tempted by the vision of the mountain mineworkers—women stripped down to their underwear, wielding pickaxes while wearing candle-bearing diapers on their heads—but the film’s most significant image is Johann gazing manically at his mother sleeping under her goat’s-head headboard while spreading the limbs of his massive garden shears.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If movies themselves could dream, their dreams would look like Guy

Original trailer for Careful

Maddin movies: sludgy jumbles of styles, moods, and melodramatic preoccupations, composed of fragmented images made up from bits of misplaced, distressed celluloid. Like Maddin’s other movies, Careful keeps us at two removes from reality: it displaces us once by its narrative dislogic, and then a second time by its archaic stylization. In Careful the technique is particularly appropriate, since the subject matter—repressed incestuous desire—demands to be buried under layers of mystery.

COMMENTS: Careful begins with what amounts to a pre-Code Public Service Announcement, as an elder of the high-altitude Alpine village of Tolzbad warns, in a calm, hypnotic voice over carefully plucked harp arpeggios: “Children! Heed the warnings of your parents! Peril awaits the uncautious wayfarer, and strews grief where laughter once played.” The dangers of living in a craggy burg are, apparently, legion. There is the obvious danger of falling off the mountain slope. The fear of avalanches is so great that all domestic animals have their vocal cords severed lest they unwittingly bring death from above down upon the town. The citizens make a virtue of caution, so necessary to their survival, and they have perfected it as a habit to guard against the remotest dangers, for the residents of Tolzbad have many sad tales of the tragedies that result from heedless behavior. A baby once lost an eye when his mother foolishly clasped him to her bosom without making double-sure her brooch pin was fully closed. That same child lost his other eye as an adult when he peered too close to a cuckoo clock just as it burst forth to announce the dawn of a new hour. The elders have a rich storehouse of tales of woe with which to educate the young, but no number of cautionary fables can protect from every possible threat, from the “wild uncontrolled sound of nature,” the avalanche-tempting cries of migrating geese and the folly of the undisciplined human heart. That is why the citizens must always be alert, must carve the instincts of discretion and reserve into their bodies and souls, must always be careful.

The warning prologue is delivered, appropriately enough, in a monochrome print tinted a cautionary traffic-cone orange. In his third feature, Guy Maddin works for the first time in color, and like a 1920s German filmmaker given unlimited access to a two-strip Technicolor machine, he seizes upon the possibilities afforded by this new visual dimension to invent new forms of Expressionist storytelling. The Tolzbadians practiced public blandness is belied by the movie’s flamboyant color schemes: their repressed desires bleed onto the screen. Careful‘s visual compositions look like turn of the century Swiss postcards from which most of the dye long ago faded away. Early Technicolor processes usually used a green filter and a red filter, which in combination covered most of the color spectrum and resulted in an image that projected vaguely realistic hues. Throughout Careful Maddin experiments with using, for example, a yellow filter and a pink one, creating chromatic combinations that are as off-key as the concept of the sexually repressed Alpine village itself is.

Early scenes, such as the Feast of St. Mathilde where the village youths serenade a crowd of swooning maidens with a concerto blown on their grotesquely oversized Alpine horns, are rendered in pleasing, if unnatural, pastoral shades of cornflower and periwinkle. These halcyon days glow as pure and blond as the Aryan hair of young Johann, who chastely woos a village maid by the name of Klara. Of course it is not always so; at moonrise in Tolzbad, the amber sun fades away and is replaced by a purple moon. A violet moonbeam casts a blotch on the face of Johann’s older brother Franz, a lame mute who sits covered in cobwebs in the family attic eternally staring out the window. Bathed in lavender revelation, Franz sees a vision of his blind dead father, who warns the shut-in that his brother now “dreams of your mother like a bridegroom; he is confused; his virginity has become a curse,” that his mother’s unfulfilled desire haunts the house, and that poor Johann has “breathed it in.” Such is the moonrise in Tolzbad. In the next scene the once harmonious color palette is completely broken; tormented by his forbidden desire, Johann confesses to Klara “purity sickens me” and wonders if “the sounds of angels singing hymns to our virginal love was in reality a choir from the deepest pits of Hell?” The lovers’ figures are indistinct and shadowy, veiled in a dense color fog that Maddin calls “sickly urine yellow.” From this point on, the chromatic schemes swing as wildly as the characters’ cascading emotions; Klara will go to labor in the purple and gold mines of Tolzbad, Johann’s brother Grigorss will graduate butler school and land a position in Count Knotkers hunter green castle, and we’ll visit the glacial blue heights of Mitterwald’s Tongue and the electric orange peaks of Mt. Uhlander.

The visual exuberance is a sharp contrast to the acting; as in Maddin’s previous Archangel, the characters deliver their outrageously melodramatic lines (“God has left this mountain to the devil. We have all joined his unholy dance”) as if they were half-asleep and speaking in a daze. Here, the narcotized underacting is appropriate to the theme of repression, but it doesn’t help us bond with the characters, and the hard-to-hit tone of buried passion the script requires exposes the amateurism of a few of the cast members. (Franz, whose complete immobility makes him the safest and therefore most exemplary citizen of Tolzbad, is also the film’s exemplary actor; he’s forced to perform like a silent movie star, and his face is free to express an unfettered alarm and bereavement that the others, bound to language, must suppress). The plot, while not awful, is one of Careful‘s few negatives. It lingers too long at the setup. It’s hard to identify with the characters. There’s no one who engages our sympathies, the story switches the main character on us a third of the way through, imposes an unconvincing romance on us in the third act, and the continues after the natural climax of the duel to follow what is essentially a subplot. These failings far from ruin the film, since Careful has more than enough amazing atmosphere, style and psychological queasiness to admire, but to me they do keep it from being one of Maddin’s top works. The extra features of a master work—the deep involvement in Lt. Boles’ amnesiac tragedy in Archangel, the manic energy of Cowards Bend the Knee, the professional exuberance of Isabella Rossellini and Mark McKinney’s performances in The Saddest Music in the World—are missing in Careful, leaving us with little more to enjoy besides Maddin’s extraordinary style and the cleverness of the incest conceit. These minor flaws make Careful more a film for those who are already in the Maddin cult than an entry point into the canon (I recommend newbies start with Saddest Music, which is Maddin’s most accessible movie while still remaining astoundingly strange to the average person).

Like all of Maddin’s movies, Careful is a tragicomedy, and one that succeeds only because the humor is so absurd and dreamlike that it tempers the tragedy without mocking it. Maddin peppers his tepid Freudian melodrama with moments of full-bore Surrealism. An egg drops a fully developed, moving bird when cracked into a frying pan. There’s a confession of incestuous rape delivered during a yawning fit. In Careful, when two characters have a duel, it involves a drawn out ritual of frantically unbuttoning overcoats, interrupted as the contestants blow on their hands to keep their digits from freezing in the Alpine chill, followed by a frantic round of unbuttoning of waistcoats. It’s funny, but it doesn’t diminish the dramatic stakes of the contest: two men are fighting for their lives, and younger combatant could kill his spiritual father. Dead birds fall out of the sky around the victor. He carefully arranges their jumbled corpses into orderly rows. Such are the psychological avalanches of Tolzbad, where it always pays to be careful.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hilariously bizarre… like some lost masterpiece from a time-warped alternative dimension — a strange artifact that time forgot.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“…the film remains one long ‘look what I can do, Ma,’ drawing attention to the director’s conceits just when the viewer should be focusing on, oh, say, some sort of coherent plot… Too strange for its own good.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“Uniquely weird, subtly macabre, and utterly compelling.”–Time Out Film Guide

OFFICIAL SITE: Careful at Zeitgeist Films – A synopsis, stills, quotes from positive reviews, and a detailed Guy Maddin biography

IMDB LINK: Careful (1992)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Technicolor history – For the technically inclined, here is a discussion of early film color technology that Maddin mimics in Careful

DVD INFO: Zeitgeist’s “Remastered and Repressed” DVD (buy) preserves Maddin’s uniquely bizarre color and sound schemes, faithfully reproducing each imperfection. There is a buried treasure of bonus material; a commentary with the director and under-appreciated writing partner George Toles is of primary interest. There’s also the utterly surreal five minute short film “Odilon Redon” (which can be watched here, though with a different soundtrack). The most impressive extra is the informative one hour documentary Waiting for Twilight, narrated by none other than Tom Waits, which covers Maddin’s early history and was filmed as the nervous auteur was fretting over the production of 1997′s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.

This title is also available, with all the same features, as part of the four-disc set “The Quintessential Guy Maddin” (buy): other movies featured are the aforementioned Ice Nymphs, the Certified Weird movies Archangel (1990) and Cowards Bend the Knee (2004), the 2003 vampire ballet Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, and the magnificent Surrealist/Constructivist short “The Heart of the World.” “Quintessential” is the only box set available anywhere to date containing an incredible three Certified Weird movies. At the time this review was published the compilation was priced at only a few dollars more than the single disc, making it an almost irresistible bargain.

Careful is also available for online purchase or rental (rent).

(This movie was nominated for review by Eric Gabbard, who argued “Careful ‘out-weirds’ both [Archangel and Cowards Bend the Knee] easily. In fact, I would definitely put it in my top 10. Such dreamlike photography puts you in a trance.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Dziga Vertov

FEATURING: Mikhail Kaufman (cameraman)

PLOT: A plotless record of twenty four hours of life in the Soviet Union of 1929, exhibited

through series of experimental camera tricks.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Man with the Movie Camera is a visually inventive, historically important and formally deep movie that reveals more secrets with each viewing; but, the only quality in it that might be called “weird” are the surreal camera tricks it occasionally employs. It’s a movie that demands space on the shelf of anyone seriously interested in editing techniques or film theory, but as far as weirdness goes, it’s purely supplemental viewing.

COMMENTS: Reviews of Man with a Movie Camera often spend as much, if not more, time discussing the history and philosophy of the production and its influence on future films than they do describing what’s actually in the movie. That’s because the challenge the movie sets for itself—to create a “truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature”—is more fascinating than the film’s subject matter (the daily lives of Soviet citizens in 1929). On a technical level, Movie Camera is a catalog of editing techniques and camera tricks, many of which were pioneered in this film but are commonplace or obsolete now. Be on the lookout for double exposures, tricks of perspective, slowing down or speeding up the camera speed, freeze-frames, reversed footage, split screens, and even crude stop-motion animation. One of the most interesting techniques is the amphetaminic editing of Movie Camera‘s climax, which moves almost too fast for the eye or mind to follow (a technique Guy Maddin would fall in love with and use to ultra-weird effect in the Constructivist/Surrealist hybrid The Heart of the World). Structurally, the film flows along as a series of counterpoints, alternating between two sets of scenes to create ironic contrasts (cross-cutting a funeral procession and the birth of a baby), metaphors (scenes of soot-covered workers in the mines followed by women being pampered in a beauty parlor to suggest the dignity of the worker compared to the frivolousness of the bourgeoisie), or other surprise connections (the cameraman getting dangerously close to the being hit by a speeding train is intercut with a sleeping woman tossing and turning as if having a nightmare). Other sequences interlace shots of the cameraman and film crew with the footage they’re shooting so the audience can see how the movie is made; for example, we see the cameraman filming horse drawn carriages, then watch the reaction of the bonneted women out on a Sunday ride trying to act nonchalant as if they don’t realize there’s a camera aimed at them from the car speeding along beside them. At several points the movie pauses and we focus on Vertov’s wife working in the editing studio splicing the footage together into a montage, as if we’re watching the movie being assembled before our very eyes.

Philosophically, Movie Camera advocates a pure Marxist agenda; thanks to the distance of time and circumstance, the preaching is not as heavy-handed and obvious to the modern viewer as it may have been to the film’s intended audience. The common worker, whether miner, factory worker or clerk, is spotlighted and glorified throughout. All that footage showing the cameraman and the physical process of making movies serves double duty here, reminding the audience that the propaganda artist is not a privileged class but is a fellow worker sweating away in the trenches. The film also advances temporary policies of the time: in 1927, Stalin had embarked on a policy of rapid industrialization to close the technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West. Movie Camera therefore fetishes the machine, taking a voyeuristic delight in glorifying belching smokestacks, pumping pistons, and particularly in the clicking shutters and winding cranks of its own favorite apparatus, the camera (I half-suspect director Vertov only shows the explicit birth of a baby because the vagina reminds him of a camera aperture).

At a more abstract level, the non-narrative, everyday subject matter of the film expresses the director’s ideological hostility to the fictional films of the West. Like Leon Trotsky, Vertov saw the spectacle and fantasy of fictional films as an opiate for the masses that needed to be reformed into something useful to the socialist state. This last position, turning the cinema away from escapism and towards practicality, was Vertov’s central concern in Movie Camera, but it resulted in two ironies. First, there is a paradox in that Vertov wants to limit himself to depicting reality, but so many of the images he chooses are fantastic and even surreal: a man with a movie camera standing on top of mountainous movie camera, a building collapsing on itself via split-screen manipulation, a plate of cooked prawns coming to life and slithering around. Presumably, Vertov resolves this apparent inconsistency between concern for reality and addiction to fantasy by constantly reminding the audience that they are watching a film and not a story, by emphasizing the role of the omnipresent unhidden cameraman and showing how he accomplishes his tricks, thereby unmasking the illusion and revealing the reality behind it. There remains, however, a (not unpleasant) tension between the director’s championing of reality over fiction and the way he continually undermines the reality of his motion picture.

The second irony is that, despite the fact that Movie Camera‘s foundation was doctrinaire Marxist theory, the movie was rejected and disavowed as avant-garde and decadent after Stalin adopted the official Soviet aesthetic of “social realism.” The Communist stance became that filmmakers should depict easy-to-digest, non-stylized narratives that could inspire the average theatergoer, showing him exemplary citizens and uplifting historical victories such as Alexander Nevsky‘s victory over the Teutonic Knights. Vertov stopped making his own films after 1934 and finished out his career as nothing more than an editor. Invented to celebrate the proletariat, Man with the Movie Camera ended up of interest entirely to the cultural elites; intended as a leftist manifesto, it proved too radical in its formalism for the Marxists.

Man with the Movie Camera is a recommended film, but with a qualification: you almost certainly must have an interest in film history or film theory to enjoy it. If anyone without such predilections were to call the movie insufferably tedious, I wouldn’t be able to refute them. Because the movie itself is in the public domain, but the various soundtracks are not, you have several options to watch the film. It can be streamed or downloaded from the Internet archive, but there is no musical accompaniment. The three main competing DVD versions currently available are distinguished by their unique soundtracks, each made in different styles but all following Vertov’s broad original scoring notes. Kino’s 2003 release (buy) features a minimalist score by Hollywood composer Michael Nyman. The record label Ninja Tune released a DVD (buy) with a hipper score from the electronic jazz outfit The Cinematic Orchestra. The version I watched to prepare this review was the 2002 Image disc (buy), with a very good soundtrack from the Alloy Orchestra that is hypnotically rhythmic and occasionally exotic; it plays as both period-appropriate and “futuristic” at the same time, and reminds me a little of the style of George Antheil. The Cinematic (digital version) and Alloy (digital version) versions of the movie are both available for online rental or purchase.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the] wiggiest effects would seem to violate the idea of verit. But that’s the intoxicating power of making movies–you start out trying to record realism, and you end up animating a plate full of prawns.”–Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (DVD)

As we begin our review of the candidates for our Weirdest Search Term of the Week contest, we wish to highlight a surprisingly persistent fallacy: many searchers out there believe that Google is psychic. How else to explain searches for “weird movies that i like” and “what was this film about?” To get one more preliminary mention out of the way, we’d like to give special recognition to “onlion saxy grail and hores” for being the only search term we’ve ever seen that does not bring up a porn site in the first page of Google results. That’s some impressive mangling of the English language! On to our standard contestants: we really liked “free longpantys” (for some reason we like to imagine “Longpantys” is the pseudonym of some sort of feminist rabble rouser who’s been imprisoned in Iran, but that’s just us). The judges were also impressed with “hustler sad clown and his love nurse,” which might be the title of an abandoned Larry Flynt video project. But nothing caught our attention like “adult diaper rubber pants made in thailand burnout video,” which gave us a startling mental image while warning us about a potential geriatric health catastrophe, thus earning right to be named 366 Weird Movies’ Weirdest Search Term of the Week.

Here’s how the ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing reader-suggested review queue looks at this moment in history: Careful (next week!); “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium pod klepsidra] (out of print in North America, but we’ll keep looking); Liquid Sky (re-review); 3 Dev Adam; Fantastic Planet; “Twin Peaks” (TV series); Society; May; Little Otik; Final Programme; Sweet Movie; The Triplets of Belleville; “Foutaises”; Johnny Suede; The Tale  of the Floating World, Un Chien Andalou, Bloodsucking Freaks; Three Crowns of the Sailor;  8 1/2; Dororo; Lost Highway; Valerie and Her Week  of Wonders (official review); Dogville; Julien Donkey-boy; Amelie;  The Ten; The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao; 1; Fast, Cheap and Out of Control; Tokyo Gore Police; At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul; The Trial [Le procès] (1962); Marquis;  Hell Comes to Frogtown; Seom [The Isle]; Allegro Non Troppo; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; Lust in the Dust; Celine and Julie Go Boating;  “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life;” The Magic Christian; Black Cat, White Cat; The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T; Abnormal: The Sinema of Nick Zedd; Robot Monster; Nightdreams; 3 Women; “To Oblivion”; Rubin & Ed; Teeth; Vera; Weirdsville; Prospero’s Books; Inferno; Garden State; Persona; The Real McCoy; Rat Pfink a Boo Boo; Themroc; Candy (1968); Run Lola Run; Pink Flamingos; Buffalo ’66;  Northfork; Weekend; The Room; Glen or Glenda?; Night of the Hunter; The Fox Family;  Midnight Skater; Angelus; Cloudy with a Chance of  Meatballs; Twister (1989); Yokai Monsters, Vol. 1: Spook Warfare [AKA Big Monster War]; Britannia Hospital; This Filthy Earth; Conspirators of Pleasure; Piano Tuner of Earthquakes; Clean, Shaven; Bubba Ho-Tep; Sheitan; Innocence; “Chingsao the Clown”; Léolo; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Blue Velvet; ID (2005); Master of the Flying Guillotine; Yesterday Was a Lie; The Ninth Configuration; Love Me If You Dare;  Forbidden Zone; The Cell; My Dinner with Andre; The Illustrated Man;  Fando y Lis; Rampo Noir; Head; Christmas on Mars; “Broken Glass”; Videodrome; Air Doll; The Ossuary and Other Tales; Arrebato; Symbol; Wicked City (1992  live action); Barbarella; Picnic at Hanging Rock; The Cars that Ate Paris; The Boxer’s Omen [aka Mo];  Portrait of Jennie; Salo, the 120 Days of  Sodom; The Last Sunset (1961); Orpheus (1950); A Scanner Darkly; Safe; The Atrocity Exhibition; Slacker; Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell; Color of Pomegranates; Horror Express; Noroi; Cutie Honey; The Shape of Things; On the Silver Globe; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; 2012 Aficionado DVD Zine Issue #0; The Last Days of Planet Earth;  “Charleston Parade”; Tales from the Quadead Zone; A Snake of  June; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; The Neverending Story; Cat Soup; Jack and the Beanstalk (1974, Japan); Drowning by Numbers; Fudge 44; From Beyond; The Saragossa Manuscript; The Drifting Classroom; Brain Dead; Uncle Meat; Meet the Hollowheads; Nuit Noire; Screamplay; Grendel Grendel Grendel;  Eyes Wide Shut; Twilight of the Cockroaches; The Ruling Class; Indecent Desires; Daughter of Horror [AKA Dementia];  The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie; Daisies; Beauty and the Beast [Panna a Netvor] (1978); Parents; Dark City; Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters; 1 Day; The Doom Generation; Black Devil Doll;  Multiple Maniacs; Phantasm IV; and Vermilion Souls (2007) (depending on availability); Lovers on the Bridge; No Smoking (2007); Reflections of Evil; The War Zone; Gahjini; Natural Born Killers; The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb; One Eyed Monster; Reflections of Evil; Natural Born Killers; The Fountain; Save the Green Planet; Crimewave (d. Sam Raimi); Wool 100%; Murder Party; The Annunciation (1984); Funeral Parade of Roses; Stroszek; Bad Taste; Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Audition; The Fall; Me and You and Everyone We Know; Visitor of a Museum [Posetitel muzeya]; “Serial Experiments: Lain” (TV show); Darc Arc; Russian Ark; Genius Party; Watership Down; Tampopo; Goodbye Uncle Tom; The Idiots; Repo Man; Der Todersking [The Death King]; Titicut Follies; Mr. Nobody; The Shout; “Premium” (depending on availability); Sleepaway Camp; The Pit (1981); Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams; The Falls; Spermula; Killer Condom; The Godmonster of Indian Flats; Perfect Blue; I Am Here Now; Sir Henry at Rawlinson End; The Bothersome Man; Moebius; Skeletons; Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song; The Brave Little Toaster; The Adventures of Picasso; Charly: Dias de Sangre (depending on availability); Meet the Feebles; The Adventures of Mark Twain; Tourist Trap (1979); Thundercrack!; SLC Punk; Anguish (1987); Buddy Boy (1999); Bliss (1986); La cicatrice intérieure; Avida (2006); Brain Damage; Amazon Women on the Moon; Chronopolis; Blue (1993); Metropia; Zachariah; Labyrinth; Battle in Heaven; The Taste of Tea; Evil Ed; I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse; Cafe Flesh; Buffet Froid; Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam [AKA Turkish Star Wars]; The Signal; “Alma” (short); The Double Life of Veronique;  “Chick”, Felidae; Spirited Away; Decasia (2002); Killdozer;  I (heart) Huckabees;  Electric Dragon 80,000 V;  Santa Claus (1959); Strange Circus; Mad Detective; Wild at Heart; Revolver; The Tenant; A Zed and Two Noughts; Litan (1982) (depending on availability); Dark Waters; La Razon de Mi Vida (pending English language DVD release); The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea; Bernie (1996) ( depending on availability); The Ruling Class; Tank Girl; Things (1989); Hair Extensions; Haggard; Svidd neger (depending on availability); RoboGeisha; Schramm; Executive Koala;  Coonskin; Time Masters; Hard Candy; Waiting for Godot (2001); Crash (1996); La Dolce Vita; La Cravate; Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (depending on availability); Last Year in Marienbad; Alphaville; Savages; Big River Man; This Must Be the Place; Heart of Glass; Little Deaths; Akira; L’Ange; La Teta y La Luna; Finisterrae;  The Adventures of Baron Muchausen; L’Âge d’or; Breakfast of Champions; Heavenly Creatures; Vase de Noces; Lucky; Ichi the Killer; La antena; Mystics in Bali; Feherlofia; Versus; “Meshes of the Afternoon”; Birth of the Overfiend; A Dog Called Pain; The Bed Sitting Room; Memento Mori; That Deadwood Feeling; Happiness; Let the Right One In; Porcile [AKA Pigpen]; Lisa and the Devil; Django, Kill!; Underground; Caligula; Hotel (2004); Hardgore; Survive Style 5+; Fantasia; Philosophy of a Knife; The Last Movie; Lord Love a Duck; Amarcord; The Swimmer (official re-review); I Married a Strange Person; Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale; The Canadian Films of Paul Driessen; And The Ship Sails On; Mondo Trasho; Teorema; Marat/Sade; Darjeeling Limited; Casino Royale; The Phantom of Liberty; Space Thang; Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life; Drunken Wu Tang; Insidious (2010); The Earl Sessions (2011); Sitcom; They Came Back, Prometheus’ Garden, “Harpya”; Bruce Lee vs. Gay Power; Dumplings; Attenberg; Return to Oz; “Star Maidens”; “The Mighty Boosh”; The Element of Crime; Lo; Roller Blade; “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes”; Mind Game (2004); Down and Dirty Duck; Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure; The Tin Drum; Dante’s Inferno; Bad Timing (AKA Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession); Troll 2; Calamari Wrestler; Death Powder (1986);  Big Man Japan (official review); Angel in the Flesh: The Confidential Report on Mr. Dennis Duggan aka The King of Super 8 (if it’s released; the director says it might be); Static; Ichi the Killer; “The Big Shave”; Incubus; W.R.-Mysteries of the Organism; Marebito; The Appointment (1981); “The Big Shave,” Pierrot Le Fou; and The Cement Garden; Visions of Suffering; Singapore Sling (re-review); Koyaanisqatsi; and In the Mouth of Madness.

DIRECTED BY: Commodore Gilgamesh, Ghoul Skool

FEATURING: None (found footage and movie clips, although you can catch glimpses of faded celebrities like Tim Allen and Gary Busey)

PLOT: 55 minutes of 1 to 5 second clips of strange and funny dog footage from movies and

videotapes, arranged into a psychedelic montage that loosely follows the plot of Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s surrealist epic The Holy Mountain.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: You would think a “remake” of The Holy Mountain made up from found footage of dog movies would easily qualify as one of the 366 weirdest movies of all time. There are only two obstacles to adding Doggiewoggiez! to the List immediately. One is a philosophical issue: since this is just a compilation of clips—albeit one put together with wit and skill—with no original material save for a few kaleidoscopic canine collages, does it even meet the definition of a “movie”? The second objection is more practical than philosophical: if Doggiewoggiez! is in fact a “movie,” it potentially fails “the grandma test.” When considering a movie for the List, I imagine showing the movie to my grandma (God rest her soul); if at any time during the imaginary screening she leaves the room, muttering under her breath, “that was weird,” I add the film to the List. Now, I didn’t show this movie to my dead grandma, but I did show it to a living grandma—and she loved it and thought it was cute. Can a movie be truly weird if dog-loving grandmas find it adorable?

COMMENTS: A startling indictment of the indignities desperate Hollywood producers will inflict upon man’s best friend in the name of cheap entertainment, Doggiewoogiez! features every terrible sub-Disney talking dog movie in which an uncomprehending pooch is forced to recite a horrible pun acting against a slumming Dave Thomas, Fred Willard, or Cuba Gooding, Jr. And it’s not just the major Hollywood players that are into abusing the long-suffering fidos, either, as Doggiewoggiez! collects plenty of examples of amateurs touting undignified forms of dog massage, puppy training, and owners posing nude with their pooches. The consortium at Everything is Terrible! bring us morphing mutt montages of lifted legs, doggie-style rutting, and bitches attacking crotches. Watching this compilation you’ll see more footage of dogs surfing or riding dolphins than you ever thought existed, along with vintage racist dogs, dogs in sports, dogs going to heaven… well, you get the picture. It’s a non-stop assault of pop-culture canine iconography, often trippily manipulated (where else but in Doggiewoggiez! “The Dog Molecule” segment will you see a dog puffing on a tiny duplicate pipe version of its own head, that’s also puffing on itself?) And, as promised, the organization of this dog show does mimic The Holy Mountain, from the opening scene of “ritual” poodle shaving to the “zoom back, camera!” fourth-wall smashing finale. Much of Jodorwosky’s music and dialogue is slyly integrated into the compilation; the line “your sacrifice has completed my sanctuary of one thousand testicles” is followed by a dog breeder observing “the more testicles you cut off, the fewer dog fights there are.” There’s no real meaning to the cross-breeding of Mexican surrealists with preposterous puppy clips, other than that Everything is Terrible! (correctly) thinks that both are cool, and that the mixture is uniquely bizarre. Picking out the clever correspondences is a fun bonus for those intimately familiar with Mountain, but it’s not necessary to enjoy the bow-wow barrage of barking mad dog clips.

Doggiewoggiez! runs 55 minutes, which is about the perfect length to keep it from overstaying its welcome. Fortunately, there’s almost 3 hours (!) of “extra” material on the disc, so you won’t feel ripped off. The supplemental features are divided into three separate categories. “2 Minute Movies” are expertly compressed versions of ten truly horrible films like Revenge of the Red Baron, featuring a wheelchair-bound Mickey Rooney haunted by a remote controlled toy airplane possessed by the spirit of the WWI ace. “Best Of” contains a selection of demonically bad found-footage discoveries including several accidentally frightening Christian puppet shows (and, to show that bad taste knows no denomination, scenes from a terrible Jewish children’s video called “Torah Tots” featuring a character who promises to float around the world vacuuming up all the Jews and depositing them in Israel). And, just so you won’tbe shocked when you come across it, we’ll mention that hidden inside the ten minute “Mondo Bigfoot” compilation collected from the 1970s Sasquatch craze are the fake hardcore porn scenes from the Bigfoot rapist oddity The Geek (1971) (grandma would not approve). Finally, there’s a special section devoted to “Music Videos,”of which the most famous number is Tim Curry’s rendition of “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” from The Worst Witch; the strangest item, however, is “Don’t Do Drugs,” in which a teenager in a skimpy black bikini falls asleep on a beach, dreams about four much younger kids doing an anti-drug rap while imagining herself buying smack and being arrested for vagrancy, then wakes up to a guy offering her a bottle of booze. Because of copyright issues (the main feature constitutes fair use but some of the supplements are problematic), new copies of Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! is unlikely to be sold through legitimate retail sites. Look for used copies or buy directly from Everything is Terrible! while supplies last.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie could easily coast on the ridiculous amount of work that went into realizing its weird conceit… Seemingly thousands of videos ranging from the obscure to the I-wish-it-were-obscure (Tim Allen’s public nude scene in The Shaggy Dog) have been shredded like the morning paper into seconds-long fragments, and then meticulously sequenced into a variation on Jodorowsky’s psychedelic-surrealist masterpiece that conveys pretty much every memorable image in the film…”–Benjamin Pearson, Tiny Mix Tapes (DVD)

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

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Meeting Evil: Samuel L. Jackson plays a serial killer who sucks an average white male suburbanite into a “surreal, nightmarish murder spree…” Directed by Chris Fisher… now where have we heard that name before… oh no, that isn’t promising. Meeting Evil official site.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie remake: Does this sound like a pitch you would accept if you were a studio head? “Let’s remake a creepy 1987 flop kids movie based on a gross-out novelty card fad that was popular for about three weeks twenty five years ago!” Apparently, if you’re Michael Eisner, you say “yes, please.” Mike, this kind of decision is exactly why you’re the former CEO of Walt Disney. Deadline breaks the story, and not on April 1 (we double checked the date).

Zomboobies! (est. 2013): How to describe this: possibly what would result if Lloyd Kaufman was hired by a Japanese B-movie studio to direct a high concept Lucio-Fulci-meets-Russ-Meyer script? Whatever it is, it already has a website with a NSFW (in this case, “nearly safe for work”) teaser trailer. Zomboobies official site.

NEW ON DVD:

There are no new weird releases on DVD this week. I’m not sure we remember that ever happening before. Nonetheless, the Blu-ray equipped may find something of interest this week (see below).

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Miramax Triple Feature: eXistenZ (1999)/B. Monkey (1998)/Malevolent (2002): Multi-movie packs are the latest studio gimmick; they can be good deals if you happen to like the movies featured. This particular collection seems fairly random. eXistenZ, David Cronenberg‘s virtual reality thriller, is by far the most interesting title here. B. Monkey (1998) is a neo-noir with Asia Argento as a femme fatale, and the generically-titled Malevolent (2002) is a generic-sounding maverick cop picture with Lou Diamond Phillips. Buy Existenz /B. Monkey /Malevolent [Blu-ray].

“The Tim Burton Collection”: Speaking of multi-movie packs, now this one is a good deal; seven films on Blu-ray for what you expect to pay for two discs, plus a collectible booklet. The set includes all of Burton‘s Warner Brothers output, meaning you get Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Batman Returns, Mars Attacks!, The Corpse Bride, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This set is (currently?) exclusive to Amazon.com. Buy “The Tim Burton Collection” [Blu-ray].

The Wizard of Gore (1970)/The Gore-Gore Girls (1972): See what we’re saying? They can’t sell just one movie per disc anymore. This Something Weird double feature lives up to the brand name with two of goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis‘ weirdest efforts, made in an era when he was trying to reinvigorate his violence formula by adding a dose of surrealism. The Wizard of Gore concerns a grand-guignol stage magician whose illusions become reality after the show is over. The Gore-Gore Girls is about a slasher of strippers, is a comedy, and was Lewis’ final movie for 37 years until he made Blood Feast II: All U Can Eat. Buy The Wizard of Gore/The Gore Gore Girls [Blu-ray].

FREE ONLINE MOVIES:

This is Why Everyone Hates You (2011): This thirty-minute long, self-effacing comedy is a DIY 8 1/2, only with bananas crushed between toes, Spaghetti-O spitting, and a leather slave in a cardboard box. It’s also pretty darn funny. We highlighted the trailer (which you can see here) last week, but since nothing on YouTube caught our fancy this week we thought we’d give you another chance to catch it. Watch This is Why Everyone Hates You free.

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.

DIRECTED BY: W.D. Richter

FEATURING: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli

PLOT: We are first introduced to Buckaroo Banzai as he rushes by helicopter from completing a delicate neurosurgery to test-drive a trans-dimensional race car in the Nevada desert. Banzai successful breaches the Eighth Dimension with his oscillation overthruster, but the experiment attracts the attention of the mad Dr. Lizardo, as well as a gang of Lectroid aliens who also want the device. Between rock and roll gigs and particle physics press conferences, Buckaroo and his band of scientist/musician/adventurers, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, will uncover an alien conspiracy that (naturally) threatens the fate of the world.

BACKGROUND:

• This was writer W.D. Richter’s first directorial effort after having half-a-dozen screenplays produced (including the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Banzai eventually became a hit on VHS but was a huge flop in theaters, losing six million dollars and bankrupting the production studio. Richter only directed one other movie, the 1991 independent comedy Late for Dinner, although he continued to write screenplays (including Big Trouble in Little China). Richter did not write the script for Buckaroo Banzai, however; it was penned by his pal Earl Mac Rauch.
• The name of the evil front corporation in Banzai, Yoyodyne, is a reference to a fictional corporation that appears in Thomas Pynchon’s novels.
• In 2003 Entertainment Weekly ranked Buckaroo Banzai as the #43 cult movie of all time.
• The sequel promised by the end credits, Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League, was of course never made, although legend has it that Richter is still trying to get it produced to this day. In 1998 pre-production work was done on a Buckaroo television series for the Fox network, but the show was never picked up. The Buckaroo brand has persisted through the years with a novelization and comic book adaptations.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We require a flashback to show how the Eighth Dimension was originally discovered by a then-sane Dr. Emilio Lizardo—but how to introduce it without disrupting the flow of the story? This movie believes the most natural way to incorporate the memory is to have a now-insane Dr. Lizardo hook electrodes onto his tongue and shock himself so that arcs of lightning fly out of his eardrums. We have to assume this bizarre home-electroshock therapy explains the perfect cinematic precision of the following flashback sequence, because no other sane theory is offered for Lizardo’s act of high-voltage masochism.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Refer to the plot synopsis. Any movie that successfully incorporates

Original trailer for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension

a band of rock and roll scientists, an invasion by aliens uniformly named “John,” the Eighth Dimension, inexplicable watermelons, and Jeff Goldblum as a New Jersey neurosurgeon who dresses like a cowboy—while working inside the Hollywood system, with a $12 million dollar budget—has worked hard enough to deserve a space on the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: According to an unofficial Buckaroo Banzai FAQ, the most frequently asked question about The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is not, as one might expect, “what in the hell did I just watch?” or “how in the world did this thing get made?” or even “why does Jeff Goldblum dress up like a cowboy if he’s from New Jersey?” but instead, “what exactly is the watermelon doing there?” To those not yet in the know, this query refers to the point in the movie where alien John Bigboote has infiltrated the Banzai Institute to try to re-kidnap Professor Hikita and obtain the overthruster, and Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers are prowling the corridors looking for him. As they pass through one lab area, New Jersey asks Reno why there is a large watermelon lodged in an industrial vice. “I’ll tell you later,” promises the senior Cavalier, but he never gets around to it.

No one ever wonders about the fact that, in the very same sequence, Buckaroo passes a fire that’s inexplicably burning in a file cabinet and makes no comment—he simply shuts it with his foot, not even bothering to put out the flames. Nobody asks “what exactly is that spinning plastic musical elephant carousel doing in the middle of a hallway in Yoyodyne corporation?” There are lots of unanswered questions in Buckaroo Banzai—why does Lizardo shock himself on the tongue? Why do good aliens appear as Rastafarians?—but people focus on the watermelon because that’s the point at which the movie draws attention to its own background craziness and pledges to answer one single absurdity. Of course, it never delivers the promised resolution, because this is a case of Buckaroo‘s script explicitly tipping you off to the entire story’s shaggy dog nature. Pressed by fans, director W.D. Richter later concocted an explanation which involved the Banzai Institute working to create a watermelon with a super-hard shell so that the fruit could be clandestinely dropped from airplanes into starvation-plagued regions of third world dictatorships without shattering. A likely explanation; but I have my own little theory about the watermelon, which I’ll provide later in the review.

It’s fruitless to obsess about the watermelon, because large swaths of Buckaroo Banzai make little sense. If you’re not hopelessly confused half an hour into this picture, then you haven’t been paying attention. The script seems to have been edited down from something about three times as long, with subplots that are hinted at but not followed up on and characters who are mentioned but never appear. There’s simply not enough time in the 100 minutes allotted to flesh out all the ideas Richter and Rauch are anxious to get on the page, so the plot rushes by with a heedless recklessness that sweeps you along. Buckaroo has a love interest in the charming person of Penny Priddy, who by a freak coincidence happens to be the spitting image of his dead wife, but he’s so busy dealing with subplots and shootouts he barely has time to romance her between abductions. We never get time to draw a bead on any of Buckaroo’s boon companions and backing band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. They have names like Reno Nevada and Rawhide, but few distinguishing characteristics beyond uncanny competence and killer chops (both instrumental and karate). Of the Cavaliers, Lewis Smith makes the biggest impression as “Perfect Tommy,” but that’s largely because of his improbably blond mane of hair. With all of these guys standing around in the background just waiting for their moment in the sun, Buckaroo goes out and recruits yet another sidekick who demands his share of screen time, in the person of fellow neurosurgeon named New Jersey, who dresses inconspicuously in a cowboy hat, bright scarlet shirt and shaggy llama-hair chaps. There’s also a helpful Jamaican alien who joins the fray, and a father-son pair of Buckaroo Banzai Irregulars who chip in to put the beatdown on evil. And as if this weren’t enough, the characters reference other characters who never made it into the final script, like Cavalier Pecos (who we’re told is in Tibet).

This colorful army of good guys is opposed by an even more colorful gang of alien miscreants. (Keep in mind that the good aliens are Black Lectroids, and they come from Planet Ten and say “hey mon,” while the bad aliens are Red Lectroids who hail from the Eighth Dimension and carry guns that shoot spiders—got it?) A pair of fine character actors in Dan Hedaya and the angular Vincent Schiavelli are bumbling, none-too-bright foot soldiers in the alien army. The Red Lectroids’ chief lieutenant, John Bigboote (pronounced, he is anxious to remind everyone, “Bigboo-tay,” not “Big-booty”) is memorably portrayed by the great Christopher Lloyd (fresh off his stint as Reverend Jim on “Taxi”). But it’s John Lithgow as Dr. Lizardo (who, we figure out after multiple viewings, is possessed by the spirit of a Red Lectroid named John Whorfin) who steals the show. With bad teeth and an even worse Italian accent, Lizardo is prone to rambling lines like “we’re home free… home is where you wear your hat… I feel so break up, I want to go home!” and “laugh-a while you can, monkey boy!” Lithgow rants like Chico Marx with a God complex and slinks around like Ygor in a Frankenstein movie. Lithgow’s performance throws both good taste and sanity out the window, and he gets more into the spirit of the material than anyone else involved in the production.

Peter Weller, by comparison, is totally deadpan, and to me this is the movie’s greatest flaw. His coolness certainly contrasts with Lithgow’s craziness, but for a guy who’s a combination secret agent and rock star, he shows little charisma, just a bland handsomeness. Weller’s restrained, somewhat arrogant persona is perfect for Robocop, or for the emotionally shut-down writer William Lee in Naked Lunch, but he lacks the spark to portray a larger than life character like Buckaroo. We’ll never know how the film would have played out with a more vigorous Banzai—maybe it would have pumped the movie up too much, to the point where it exploded—but I would have loved to see what would have happened had Weller and Jeff Goldblum’s roles been switched. Goldblum is underutilized as a gimmicky sidekick, and it seems the lead role could have benefited from the nervous energy he brings to the screen.

Halfway through the movie, Banzai recaps the plot thus far for the President of the United States. The Prez’ bemused reaction speaks for the audience: “Buckaroo, I don’t know what to say. Lectroids, Planet 10, nuclear extortion, a girl named John…” There’s another quote near the beginning of the movie that’s even more to the point, considering this venue. Buckaroo has just performed neurosurgery and penetrated solid matter by accessing the Eighth Dimension. He caps off the evening by headlining at a nightclub, soloing on electric guitar, trumpet and piano. He stops in the middle of a rollicking blues number, having psychically sensed that someone in the audience isn’t having a good time. In fact, the stick in the mud is a depressed woman who’s “down to her last nickel in this lousy town.” Buckaroo tries to cheer her up by putting a spotlight on her, advising her that “wherever you go, there you are,” and launching into a cover version of that comforting ballad “Since I Don’t Have You.” As Buckaroo sits at the piano and croons, “I don’t have plans or schemes, I don’t have hopes or dreams” to the sobbing suicidal gal with smeared mascara, one of the backup saxophonists turns to another and says, “This is weird.” To which his companion says, “Sure is.” To which I would have responded, “You’re just noticing that now?”

By the way, the reason that they put a watermelon in the vice is because a grape wouldn’t have shown up on camera.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Richter doesn’t bring out the baroque lunacy of the material—a kind of fermented parody of M*A*S*H, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the TV series ‘The A-Team’—but though the characters don’t develop and the laughs don’t build or come together, the film’s uninflected deadpan tone is somehow likable.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…like coming into the middle chapters of some hilariously overplotted, spaced-out 1930′s adventure serial, neither the beginning nor the end of which ever comes into sight. At its best, which it frequently is, it’s a lunatic ball…pure, nutty fun.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Some movies become cult classics by being bad in a charming and/or entertaining way, some by being transgressive in ways mainstream society isn’t prepared to deal with, others by just being flat-out weird. I submit, with great fondness, that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, belongs to the latter category.”–Danny Bowes, Tor.com (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: MGMs Official Site for the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – Basically, a one-page ad to buy the film with a trailer, synopsis, cast list and some stills. Of course, most movies this old aren’t given even that much attention by major studios.

IMDB LINK: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

BANZAI INSTITUTE – This repository of news items and trivia is written in a style similar enough to the DVD supplemental material (e.g., referring to the movie as a “docudrama”) that you halfway suspect director Richter and/or writer Rauch is behind the site

Banzai Institute – Facebook – From the makers of the above site, now conveniently on Facebook for more frequent updates

World Watch Online: The Buckaroo Banzai Mailing List – Another Buckaroo Banzai fan site. There’s a wealth of archived material here for fans to plow through, including downloadable newsletters dating back to 1985!

NYFF: Buckaroo Banzai Intro + Q&A – Complete question and answer session with Peter Weller and John Lithgow, hosted by Kevin Smith at the 2011 New York Film Festival (this YouTube video is over an hour long)

Buckaroo Banzai Frequently Asked Questions – Almost all the Buckaroo minutiae that you would ever want can be found in this online FAQ

Yoyodyne.com – A fake website for the fake corporation in Buckaroo Banzai. Why? The Banzai fan base is just that thorough. You may use this site to email John Bigboote, should you wish.

Rotten Tomatoes Show: Top 5 Aborted Franchises – The Rotten Tomatoes Show names Buckaroo Banzai the top aborted franchise of all time, explaining that it was “a tad to weird for America”

Buckaroo Banzai: Across The 8th Dimension, The Adventures of Easter Eggs – information on accessing the hidden features on the Buckaroo Banzai DVD

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension: The Novel”- Scriptwriter Earl Mac Rauch’s 1984 novelization of the movie, which adds much-needed backstory and supplemental material to flesh out the legend

“Buckaroo Banzai: Return Of The Screw” – A 2007 Rauch-penned graphic novel continuing Buckaroo’s adventures

DVD INFO: MGM’s 2002 Special Edition of Banzai (buy) did this cult classic right and thrilled even the movie’s demanding fan base. The commentary track features Richter and Rauch, with the director pretending the film is a biopic of a real life figure and Rauch pretending to be one of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. An optional subtitle track serves up additional tidbits of information about the Banzai universe. Many deleted scenes are included, most notably one where Jamie Lee Curtis plays Buckaroo’s mom in a flashback. There’s a 22-minute featurette called “Buckaroo Banzai Declassified” with Richter which, like the commentary track, stays in character, pretending Buckaroo is real. Character profiles provide even more background information on the Banzai mythology, and photo galleries, promotional materials and the original trailer round out a treasury of special features.

Banzai is also the weirdest offering on MGM’s 3 disc “Astronomy 101″ collection (buy), which also contains the mildly weird Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Mel Brooks’ not-so-weird (but inexplicably popular) Star Wars spoof Spaceballs.

Buckaroo Banzai is not yet available on Blu-ray, though it seems like a likely candidate for an upgrade. It is available on Video-on-Demand, for rental only (rent on demand).

(This movie was nominated for review by multiple readers.  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Rollin

FEATURING: Jean-Loup Philippe, Annie Bell (as Annie Brilland), Natalie Perrey, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel

PLOT: Sparked by a castle he sees on a poster, a man has visions of a long-forgotten girl he

fell in love with as a boy; mysterious forces try to stop him from finding the locale in the photograph, while a vampire coven helps him from afar.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Slow, atmospheric, with vampires in see-through nighties; Lips of Blood seems a little strange to the ordinary horror fan, but by the surreal standards Jean Rollin set for himself, it’s a bit blasé.

COMMENTS: For a movie about the living dead, Lips of Blood is lifeless. For a supposedly erotic movie, most of the time it just lies there. Only Rollin’s trademark dreamy cinematography and a few bold images save this action-and-suspense-free horror from being a complete bore. The scenario sets up a mystery that is not very mysterious, and posits a timeless romance in which we feel only a theoretical involvement. The movie is peppered with poorly scripted moments that don’t come across so much as absurd as simply awkward. For example, when protagonist Frédéric tracks down the photographer who snapped the photo of the castle he sees in his visions, she just happens to be photographing a nude woman masturbating (in a surprisingly explicit moment). When he asks the photographer, herself a beautiful woman, for the location of the mysterious château, she promises to tell him later at a midnight rendezvous, strips naked, and gives him a long wet kiss! Not only is this whole diversion a shameless device to shoehorn in two more nude scenes, it actually damages Frédéric’s character, since he’s supposed to be pining for the mysterious dream girl with whom he has a deep psychic connection, not fooling around with nude models. In a more exploitative movie this brand of brazen sleaze would be entertainingly incongruous, but in a film with serious ambitions as a moody psychological horror, it’s a misstep. The intended eroticism is somewhat better integrated when Frédéric accidentally awakens a coven of female vampires, who then walk around a Paris graveyard in sheer, gauzy babydoll burial shrouds from Victoria’s Secret. Among the sexy bloodsuckers he raises are sensual twins Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel (Rollin favorites, for obvious reasons). They shadow the doomed hero, saving his bacon from the shadowy forces trying to keep him from locating the mysterious castle. At one point they go undercover as nurses (sexy twin vampire nurses—now that’s mixing fetishes!), while at another juncture they save Frédéric from cinema’s longest stare down the barrel of a gun by turning on the fountains outside the aquarium. After a “twist” resolution that depends on the notion that the actors can’t distinguish an obvious prop from the real thing, it all ends with some torrid lovemaking on the beach and a coffin floating out to sea. I’ve hit the highlights here, which make the movie sound more entertaining and ludicrous than it actually is. In fact, Lips of Blood is mostly talking, walking, and a thug holding the hero at gunpoint for what seems like ten minutes, deciding whether he wants to pull the trigger or not.

With this review of Lips of Blood we’ve now covered all five of Redemption’s 2012 Rollin remastered releases; time for a rundown. Lips is the least interesting and essential of the bunch, essentially a standard softcore Eurohorror with a few unusual touches. For weird fans, Fascination (1979) is a step up; it’s a solid horror outing with a some memorable scenes (aristocratic ladies drinking ox blood, a topless Grim Reaper). The Iron Rose (1973) is the most challenging of the quintet; this graveyard tour shows Rollin’s at his most deliberately surrealist, but at times the film seems to mistake “slow and uneventful” for “poetic.” Shiver of the Vampires (1971), with its pair of scraping “bourgeois vampires” and a bisexual bloodsucker emerging from a grandfather clock, features the director’s most successful blend of dreamlike weirdness and solid Gothic filmmaking. Shiver would make a good entry point into Rollin’s erotically weird universe, but we have to say that our favorite of the five is the earliest entry, The Nude Vampire (1970). It’s raw filmmaking, especially in the acting department, but it’s the fastest moving of his minimalist stories, and features all the usual dreadful atmosphere while adding enough concentrated craziness for four Rollin romps. Of course, there are still several Rollin films of potential weird interest that weren’t included in this Redemption drop, including his first movie, the notorious Rape of the Vampire (1968).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… equal parts creepy, silly, and disturbing.”–Tom Becker, DVD Verdict (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Drew Goddard

FEATURING: Kristen Connolly, Fran Kranz, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Anna Hutchison, Chris Hemsworth, Jesse Williams

PLOT: Five college kids find themselves trapped inside an impossibly clichéd horror movie

situation at the titular locale; if they somehow manage to survive the redneck zombies, they will still have to worry about the puppetmaster pulling the strings.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Cabin in the Woods is a brilliantly deconstruted, offbeat horror movie exercise, but even with its squiggly plotline it remains a bit too normal and mainstream for us. But if you’re a horror movie fan, Cabin is the can’t miss event of the year.

COMMENTS: You’ve seen it before. That’s the point. Five young archetypes—the virginal girl, her slutty best friend, the jock, the shy regular guy, and the anti-establishment stoner comic relief guy head out to the cabin in the woods for a weekend of fornicating and imbibing heavily while playing “truth or dare.” Instead, they get chopped up into teen sausage by some hungry revenant whose slumber they’ve disturbed. If you’ve been watching horror movies in the last twenty years, you’ve also seen plenty of films where the kids trapped in the cabin are horror movie experts who know the rules of the game (this one, for example); so, when the jock says “we should split up” and the stoner looks at him incredulously and says in disbelief, “really?,” you’ve seen that before, too. That, too, is the point. In the self-aware horror movie subgenre The Cabin in the Woods is unique in that it doesn’t just parody slaughter flick conventions, it honors them at the same time—speculating about why it’s so crucial that the slutty girl takes off her top, why the chaste chick must outlive her, and about why the killings are so formulaic and so… ritualistic. To point out that Cabin is a genuine horror flick and not a simple parody of kill conventions isn’t to say that it isn’t as blackly comic as any horror-comedy to come down the pike in recent times. Every scare flick needs a crusty old gas station owner to act as Harbinger of Doom and give the kids an unheeded warning not to poke around at the old Miller (or wherever) place. Cabin gives us a Harbinger who’s crustier than the stuff that Freddy Krueger picks out of the corners of his eyes in the morning. And while he’s slyly amusing in his over-the-top tobacco-spitting spiel, Cabin brings him back for a hilarious pure-comedy cameo that shows how hard it is for a Harbinger to get out of character even when he’s not obliquely prophesying the death of college kids. I laughed as much at Cabin the Woods as I did at last year’s full-bore gore-comedy outing Tucker and Dale vs. Evil; but, despite its winking jokes and metafictional flirtations, Cabin works because its postmodern conceits are side dishes and not the main course. It serves us a genuine and very rare course of scares, with real stakes for characters who are not as cardboard as they first appear. Cabin also feeds us the freaky images we go to horror movies to see. The monster design is a big draw, even though the creatures are glimpsed fairly briefly. A scene of a slut making out with a stuffed wolf’s head is icily strange and erotic, there’s the ghost of a Japanese schoolgirl flitting about the edge of the plot, and the carnage of the third act is something I can guarantee you haven’t seen on film before. Cabin‘s only caveat is that it’s aimed squarely at those who are already fans of what Joe Bob Briggs used to refer to as “Spam in a cabin” movies; if you’re not familiar with the tropes, this pop-autopsy of the genre might not win you over. But good horror films are rare, and horror films with original concepts are even rarer; when you find a movie that has both, it’s worth the trek into those dark woods to check it out.

Though helmed by co-scriptwriter Drew Goddard, who acquits himself brilliantly in his first time in the director’s chair, Cabin is most notable as part of a huge year for co-writer/co-producer Joss Whedon, who will have two hit films playing in theaters simultaneously when his comic book blockbuster The Avengers debuts next week.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…starts in familiar territory, then gets delightfully strange… the most inventive cabin-in-the-woods picture since The Evil Dead and the canniest genre deconstruction since Scream.”–Christopher Orr, The Atlantic (contemporaneous)