FEATURING: Karl Hardman, Duane Jones, Judith O’Dea

PLOT: An animated recreation of the classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead:

Reanimated features a number of talented animators filtering Romero’s original vision through their own artistic viewpoints, expressing the universal messages therein in their own mediums.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  While aesthetically intriguing and at times very eerie, there never was much that jumped out as being incredibly weird about Romero’s zombie movie.  Although it was the first of its kind in what is now a celebrated genre, Night of the Living Dead was always more of a message film than a meditation on the dead rising from their graves.  This animated version does indeed add some visual quirks, but there is no real strangeness here.

COMMENTS:  For fans of the zombie film, it doesn’t get much more better than the simple-yet-satisfying claustrophobia of the grandpappy of them all, Night of the Living Dead.  More than a horror flick, this grainy 1968 indie is a meaningful, smart work of art that pushes the boundaries of what the genre is capable of and what it can stand for.  So above any horror I can think of, this one definitely deserves an animated homage that explores it from a stylistic point of view.  And Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated doesn’t disappoint in that department.

Using a cadre of young, experimental artists, this exercise explores the original movie nearly shot-for-shot with different styles of animation.  The styles are incredibly varied: parts are simply still images, sometimes it’s a comic book-style series of cels, while at other times it takes on an anime quality. One artist takes the real footage from the film and animates over it to generate an eerie reality that blurs the line between realism and otherworldliness. The different mediums at work boggle the mind; whether it’s claymation, pencil sketches, Flash cartoons, or sock puppets, this project has something to evoke just about anyone’s personal aesthetic. It’s amazing what the creators do here to make you think of the movie in a whole new way.  The different animators break from the stark reality of the original to steep the entire world in a haunting, eerie mood that was not there before.  My favorite style, personally, is when they use the real life baby dolls to simulate some of the action scenes!  It doesn’t fit well with the other styles to create that perfect sense of dread and the unknown, but it’s just too funny to leave out!

Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated is definitely a success in my book.  The unsettling black-and-white animation combined with the oddly displaced archive voices of the original actors creates a mesmerizing experimental film that goes beyond the norm and pulls off something that few people have.  The various styles of animation work fluidly together to pay homage as well as to press the boundaries of the original zombie survival template.  My only complaint would be that the ending is the most clinical part of the film, when I thought it should be a bit more erratic in style.  In those desperate moments before daybreak, Reanimated doesn’t hit any crescendo notes that the original did not already sound, making the last few scenes almost redundant if you’ve already seen NOTLD.  That caveat, compounded with this film’s lack of utter weirdness, knocks Reanimated out of contention for a spot on the List, although it must be considered one of the more impressive movies released in2010.

If you’re a fan of the original, or just a lover of experimental animation, Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated has something for you.  It’s a very strong feature that builds upon Romero’s work with a love and a care that is both heartfelt and reverent.  Despite its lack of general weirdness, it is still one of the better films in a year devoid of cinematic life, and a must-have for any fans of the zombie sub-genre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an ideal midnight movie for film geeks who don’t mind the animators occasionally taking some liberties or tweaking the material.”–Rob Gonslaves, efilmcritic.com (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Ryo Ishibashi, Masatoshi Nagase, Saya Hagiwara

PLOT: A shocking mass suicide in a train station attracts the attention of the

police and a curious hacker who may have found a link to the seemingly random act.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: This exercise in the Japanese new school of shock horror does not have enough substance to be considered extremely weird.  There are moments that light up the screen with an inspired energy that recalls the best horror-thrillers.  Yet, like a Noh theater performance, Suicide Club chooses to keep actual events close to the chest, relying on long pauses and slow takes to create the mood . Noh theater has dancing and music to fill up the entire performance, though; Suicide Club languishes with scenes that are filled with empty silence and shots that mean nothing.

COMMENTS:  Suicide Club is the odd story of one country’s affinity for self-termination, represented by a strange and tragic mass suicide in a train station.  Why this happens is never explained in a way that leaves one satisfied, but such is the state of the high suicide rate in Japan, and, to be fair, to ask why is almost besides the point. The point seems to be the journey into the strange underbelly of Tokyo and the detectives who must investigate the suicides by journeying into that hoary netherworld.

Well, the detectives and their sole lead, the idiosyncratic hacker Miyoko– I’m sorry, “The Bat”– who has a strong fascination with the tragedy.  This fascination drags her from the safety of her malicious computer activities to a world where secret messages are written in human skin and dropped off at hospitals and where J-Pop groups wield a heady authority over an unassuming generation.  As she becomes wound up in this mystery that seems to go deeper than anyone could have imagined, a youth named Mitsuko also becomes involved when her boyfriend commits suicide.  She too falls into the web of what is appearing more and more to be a sort of suicide club (how titular!) whose members might even be unaware of their membership.   And the deeper she falls, the closer she comes to realizing that she might even be in this unfortunately named club…

But this is all told through the visual narrative, because dialogue is in extremely short supply in this mannered horror exercise.  As is character development.  Or much of anything, really.  Suicide Club is a very visual film, told through a Morse code string of images that reads normal-normal-normal-weird! And when the images are strange or grotesque, the audience becomes intrigued and downright enthused.  But during the slow mood-building scenes, the movie falters in the wake of the sterile, lifeless Tokyo Sono sets up.  It surrounds and eclipses most moments of tension, replacing the anxiety with a vague sense of ennui that does not behoove a horror-thriller.

There are moments of inspired lunacy in Suicide Club that set it apart from the rest of the Japanese formalists, and if you can make it to the middle of the film where we meet the conspicuous character named Genesis, then your patience has truly paid its due diligence, because the film rolls along by then with images too weird and too delightful to spoil for you.  And Suicide Club feels meticulously fabricated in its down time, where the details brim forth from a lack of any real action; seemingly trivial things like the posters hanging up in Mitsumo’s boyfriend’s room are very well designed and hold little clues to the secret waiting at the end.  When it wants to be, Suicide Club has the potential to be a very good weird movie.

So give it a shot.  Suicide Club is worth trying, even if you find it to be a failure.  It’s a labyrinthine horror-thriller with a touch of mystery that will have you guessing, even if the mystery has no real bearing on what actually happens at the end.  Sono delivers what might be one of the only minimalist conspiracy movies, and on that note alone, it’s worth a gander.  Suicide Club is a valiant effort and a weird movie, just not often enough to make it something special.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sono has been making weird, formalist indie films for more than a decade, but [Suicide Club] represents a shift into weird, free-form exploitation. None of it makes any real sense, but it sure does keep you watching.”–Time Out Film Guide

FEATURING: Anthony Head, Paul Sorvino, Alexa Vega, Sarah Brightman, Bill Moseley, Paris Hilton

PLOT: A worldwide epidemic leaves humanity on the brink, but a biotechnology

company saves everyone…for a price.  Anyone unwilling or unable to pay becomes the prey of a killing machine known as the Repo Man, who repossesses organs after he kills deadbeats!

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Musicals, by their very nature, are weird, pseudo-realities that insist that in some situations, you just HAVE to sing.  And dance. And harmonize with other people who also sing.  And dance.  And while it is difficult to say how that is not weird, Repo! The Genetic Opera manages to be oh-so pedestrian.  Despite a plot that is a very distinct hybrid of Parts: The Clonus Horror, any random season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and Tommy, there is no real imagination here, no sense of true creative force or even the vaguest idea how to be artistically subversive.  It’s just throwaway horror movie culture pap that would have been forgotten already if it weren’t so damn awful.

COMMENTS:  Every now and then a movie comes along that is so strikingly different and weird, people just have to stand up and take notice.  Such a movie can become a cult film overnight, igniting passionate statements online like “[Repo!] is such an amazing and very cool artistically rich and collaboratively ingenious of characters with rich metal Gothic and opera soul.”  But then again, sometimes a movie can seem original at first glance yet really be quite plain when one takes a closer look.  Such is the case with Repo! The Genetic Opera.  It is a collection of ideas from the bowels of the Joss Whedon fan-club message boards that is not so much weird as it is totally silly.  To the casual observer, this might look like something that hasn’t been done before, but all it is at closer inspection is a series of things that have been done before, set to music.

Repo! The Genetic Opera is an idea that started in the cabaret as a 10 minute performance, grew into a short film, then somehow transformed into a 90 minute feature. And if you could tell a story in 10 minutes but stretch it out to 90 minutes, much like a taffy pull, you can bet there will be heaping gobs of sag at various points.  So, it’s the future.  The date is kind of fuzzy, and so are a number of details here, but there is a massive swell in organ failures.   It’s an epidemic that nearly crippled the globe, but luckily one company came to save the day: GeneCo!  From the smoldering rubble, they alone created a ready supply of genetically engineered organs for the masses.  They alone saved humanity.  But that saving hand did not come for free, and in more ways than the obvious financial setbacks involved in purchasing organs.  Because now GeneCo holds so much sway, that they passed through Congress a bill to allow organ repossession!  Anyone found to be skipping payments on their bills are now hunted down by the dreaded Repo Man, an agent of GeneCo whose sole purpose is to rip the organs from their recipients as swiftly as possible!

The film follows the problems of the dwellers of this 21st century dystopia.  Everybody has very maudlin, operatic issues: blood ties, family betrayals, mistrust of those closest, etc.  It makes sense here, though, because almost every spoken word here is SUNG!  That’s right; Genetic Opera takes on a whole new meaning as this kitschy sci-fi horror premise is belted out with more verve than Meat Loaf’s orgasms.  It’s a non-stop sing-along, with musical theatrics explaining the story and the central conflicts, with pieces like the classic… or the ribald… or what about the somber melodies of…

Yikes!  I just watched this movie and I can’t remember a damn song.  That’s never a good sign.  Seriously, I could not spout out one memorable or hilarious chorus, not one impressive piece of the score.  It just didn’t take with me.  If a musical is really good, you’ll be singing or humming tunes from it for months to come.  I still sing “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd, and I haven’t seen that in months!  Repo’s number one flaw, and arguably its number one attribute, is its musical nature.  But even I, a former fan of musicals, cannot put a mental bookmark on anything of merit here.  Looking at a track list, the song names sound familiar, like “Zydrate Support Network,” “Genetic Emancipation,” and “We Started This Op’ra Sh*t!,” but no lyrics or melodies spring to mind.

The insipid script is easier to recall, and of course the acting, which was churlish and vaudevillian, including surprise visits from Paris Hilton and Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy fame, and even Sarah Brightman of genuine vocal fame.  That, plus the premise, which revolves around a guy who rips overdue organs out of still-living bodies, could make for quite a gothic, bloody, ultra-campy affair.

Repo! isn’t the worst viewing experience, because admittedly some of the scenes were gleefully kitsch, and watching spines being pulled out of people’s backs and placed in bags for transportation is a pleasure we should all experience.  But Repo! The Genetic Opera is a musical that isn’t memorable, a horror film that doesn’t deliver, and a comedy mostly in the unintentional sense.  If this is your thing, it’s probably already a staple in your DVD tray, and if so, what are you even reading this for?  If you are new to this film, though, I would wait to watch it with a friend so one might at least have a laugh before returning this non-musical back to the video store.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is a weird movie… for all its glitches and oddities, Repo! impressed me on sheer force of strangeness, originality, and audacity. Love the flick or hate it, there’s little denying that Repo! is definitely something different… I expect Repo! to be embraced and adored on DVD by the movie fans who help turn “weird” flicks into “cult” favorites.”–Scott Weinberg, FEARnet (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Ronald Bronstein

FEATURING: Dore Mann, David Sandholm, Paul Grimstad

PLOT: A pathetic loser named Keith lives a putrid existence in his sigh-

inducing apartment. He is horribly flawed in every way; vacuous, temperamental, and repulsively stupid. He lives with a roommate he wants to rid himself of, he tries to romance women to no avail, and his attempts to better himself in any way only exacerbate his terminal lameness.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  The titanic sadness at the center of Frownland is certainly profound enough to be considered weird.  It calls to a part of us that we all carry within: that anti-social, misfit side who feels that, truly, in our heart of hearts, we are ugly and alone.  Only, in Keith, we find that part magnified, personified to a hideous degree.  There is something quietly disturbing about a man struggling with so many problems adapting to society, trying to overcome the shame he feels in himself and his deplorable condition.  But to say that it is weird based on that facet alone is to ignore the unflinching blandness surrounding Keith and the lack of any character whatsoever in the world Frownland creates.

COMMENTS: Cited by many media outlets as a comedy, Frownland is a crushing personal statement of loneliness and isolation in a city of millions.  If this is a comedy, then it is a comedy of the absurdity to which modern life is betrothed.

From the very first moment, Ronald Bronstein fashions an air of shame and anxiety around the central character, Keith, that is hard to shake.  Keith is a dreg of humanity, a product of a lack of any esteem or dignity, and while it doesn’t excuse his behavior at times, it is worth noting that he isn’t exactly like the hideous beast he watches on a televised horror movie in an early scene.  But everything about him is unappealing, from his appearance to his treatment of his semi-friends to the way he lies just to try to relate to other human beings.  He is not even an anti-hero: he’s an anti-anything, a character that admittedly took a lot of guts to commit to film, and one that will live in infamy in the indie circuit for years to come.

Bronstein has a very dark, organic vision that threatens to swallow the viewer in a miasma of dilapidated retro culture.  It has the heart of an angst-ridden 70s independent feature, the set pieces of an 80s European film, the youth-centric mindset of a low-budget 90s film, but for all we know it is set in 2007.  Nothing is given as far as details, and we can only guess while the unsettling score drifts in and out of the background.  It is an effort that many will compare to John Cassavetes, with its heavy mood and deeply troubled characters, but in the rhythms and pacing of the hypnotic dialog Bronstein traces out, I think there is a real visionary here who stands out from his peers.

Frownland is a work of art that tests us on a very cerebral level, and I for one am glad to have seen it.  I think it’s fair to keep this on the borderline for now, but with enough support behind it, it may very well earn its own spot on the List.  For a comedy in which I never laughed once, this might just be the best comedy I’ve seen all year.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…either a primal scream issued from a potentially dangerous mind, a wildly original work of outsider art, a doctoral thesis on how not to make friends and influence people, or all (or none) of the above. Only this much is certain: It’s been a while since something this gonzo turned up at a theater near you.”–Scott Foundas, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

This movie was suggested for review by reader “Rob”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.

FEATURING: Dylan McDermott, Stacey Travis, Lemmy, voice of Iggy Pop

PLOT: A desert wanderer in a post-apocalyptic wasteland discovers a relic.  It’s the

dismembered skeleton of a cyborg used by the government in the war that destroyed civilization, and when a man conveniently buys the creepy-looking thing for his metal sculptress girlfriend (!!!), she pieces it back together and unleashes a mechanical nightmare upon both of them.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Hardware suffers from a terrible bout of conventionalism.  It’s essentially a post-apocalyptic version of Alien set in the confines of a ratty apartment complex.  There’s nothing truly weird about it, other than the cast, which is lousy with hard rock stars.

COMMENTS: Well, it must be said outright that this movie wasn’t bad.  It was breezy, very streamlined.  This is a cyberpunk horror movie about a robot run amok, simple as that.  Usually, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi likes to wax poetic and lament on our ever-dwindling lack of human compassion and kindness toward our Mother Earth.  And I don’t have a problem with that, but when your movie is actually about a killer robot and not about the fate of man’s heart as we hurtle deeper into the future, perhaps being an armchair philosopher is not par for the course.  The plot is based on a story in the British comic staple “2000 A.D”. called “SHOK! Walter’s Robo-Tale”, and it certainly takes the cyberpunk vibe from that series and really goes with it despite a $1.5 million budget.

Well, it’s the 21’st century (THE FUTURE!!!!), and America is devastated by an undisclosed nuclear disaster.  People have to make a living any way they can, and many times that includes scavenging the technology of the past.  One disturbing fellow, called a Zone Tripper, finds the menacing remains of a robot (it is called a cyborg, but since there there are no organic mechanisms implemented into the device, let’s just assume they wanted it to sound cooler than just a plain ol’ robot) in the distant, post-apocalyptic desert.  This intimidating fellow comes to sell his scrap at the typical oddball junk broker in town, but at the counter he meets an interested buyer named Mo, a Space Marine (THE FUTURE!!!) on leave who decides that his girlfriend Jill would like the parts due to her hobby in metal sculpting (excuse me?).  He buys the head and a few other assorted parts for 50 future-bucks and takes off after commiserating with the oddball scrap dealer about the weird robot and how everything sucks in the future.  He brings the parts to his girlfriend, she is happy, they have sex.  Post-coitus, Mo gets a call from the junk dealer in the dead of night telling him that something is up with the robot.  He tells him to bring the rest of the creepy metal menace with him and come back to the shop immediately.  He gets up quickly and goes to the shop, but not sensing the real urgency of the situation, he doesn’t bring the parts.  And that leaves Jill all alone with the robot head.  What Mo finds is that the robot is a government experiment and that its primary capability is killing.  He also learns that the robot can regenerate itself with various scraps, and that leaving it at the house of a metal sculptress was the worst possible thing he could have done.  Oops!

The robot really sells this movie.  Called the M.A.R.K. 13, it is a creepy creation that the designers should be proud of.  It freaked me out on a number of occasions.  It is scary not only because of it’s skull-like head, but its malformed hodge-podge body.  And when it kills people, it rips into them.  There is blood everywhere during a kill sequence, and I was a little shocked at how long they linger on the brutality.  They were excited about the effects, and I can see why.  It skulks around Jill’s cramped apartment at inconsistent speeds, much like the conveniently fast creature from Alien, but I won’t hold that against it too much.  It still creates a palpable claustrophobia with its relentless pursuit of the living, and that is the whole point, isn’t it?

The cast and crew are decent for a shoestring budget.  Director Richard Stanley is quite good at working something out of nothing, and  he pulls a cybernetic rabbit with all the working parts in order out of thin air.  I am impressed, and I hope to see more from him soon.  Our Space Marine hero Mo is played by a young Dylan McDermott; it’s only his fifth movie, and only his second as a leading man.  He is hunky and handsome and all that jazz, but I find him insufferably slick, even in the future.  I cannot believe this guy has ever been in something other than a soap opera, and his performances can’t either because he plays cool so close to the chest in this movie I thought for a moment he turned into the Fonz.  I have never liked him, and while I tolerated him in this movie, he is no leading man for me.  Stacey Travis is Jill, the uh… metal sculptress.  She has done a lot of bit parts, and this looks to be one of her only leading lady roles.  She does a good job.  I am in no hurry to watch her in anything else, but I think she deserves a little more recognition.

Hardware features a number of cameos from rock and roll royalty.  Carl McCoy, lead singer of Fields of the Nephilim, makes an appearance as the Zone Tripper.  He is the only character on the DVD box, and he is very intimidating.  Unfortunately, his screen time can’t even be calculated.  He only has one line, a throw-away one at that.  Lemmy is also in the movie as a boat-cab driver.  He plays his own band’s song, “Ace of Spades”, on the car-boat radio and reminisces on the good old days when you only needed to carry a knife with you when you walked downtown (?).  And Iggy Pop is Angry Bob, an unseen radio DJ who is angry about being in a dystopia.  He is typically obnoxious, but not nearly as bad as an actual DJ.  GWAR can also be seen on a television set doing weird things on stage.  All of these appearances are unbelievably short, but whatever gets you on IMDB, right guys?

So if you like cyberpunk dystopian movies like Demolition Man or Judge Dredd or extremely short rock and roll cameos, you’ll enjoy Hardware, but its weirdness is pretty low on the totem pole, and for seekers of odd movies this isn’t much of a priority viewing.  Otherwise, it’s not bad, but on such a small budget and with a very lean script there is not much movie beyond the menacing robot.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…gritty, trippy and frightening.. one of the best horror movies you’ve never seen!”–Fangoria

DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Catherine Coulson

PLOT: A series of six short films spanning director David Lynch’s career from the

1960s through the 1990s.  We track Lynch from his early years as a highly experimental student to a macabre master of the darkly surreal with these films that show a man who needed to grow and challenge himself as a creative force.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As collections of short films go, this is one of the most mercurial and hard-to-peg I’ve ever seen.  There’s really no denying the odd nature of Lynch’s efforts.  The first film alone, a minute-long animated loop of six hideous plaster sculptures throwing up,  stands as a timeless testament to Lynch’s nightmarish creative vision.  And the gut-wrenching scope of his silent feature, entitled “The Grandmother”, is a window into the mind of a radically different artist than the one Lynch has become.  But, honestly, the quality and sheer atmosphere present in most of Lynch’s features feels absent here, and there’s not enough memorable material to consider this a momentous release.

COMMENTS:  Much like a renowned painter or an extremely colorful luchador, a filmmaker’s work becomes more lionized as his fame grows, even his mistakes.  David Lynch is a very famous filmmaker, so it’s only appropriate that this assortment of short subjects should come out to cement his status as an iconic artist and a true visionary in the world of the nightmarish and the utterly bizarre.  But those die-hard fans of the man who seek a diamond in the rough here, a Pollack behind the frame of this small cache of movies, will likely find themselves disappointed, or at the very least conflicted.

If short films represent the transformation of a filmmaker as as he/she goes from one project to another, this gathering of shorts spanning Lynch’s career is a shadowy, rocky road.  Half of these films don’t desire to be much more than insubstantial experiments, hokey dumping grounds for ideas that are really just there to try something out.  They merely exist in a tangible form for the consumer because of the marketable name of Lynch, not because they actually have some sort of deliciously demented merit and are worth seeing for any length of time.  And while the three that are good are indeed very good, it’s easy to put this one on the borderline with the vibes I get from the other three.

Let’s break it down by feature, shall we?

“Six Figures getting Sick (Six Times)” – A minute long film loop featuring a set of six hideous sculptures, their faces locked in esoteric agony, as vomit and nonsensical animated mess is drawn on top of them while a siren blares in the background.  It is, in essence, Lynch’s first piece of work, and honestly there’s not much to say.  It’s an experiment; a bold experiment, to be sure, that leaves you with a sense of unease, but it’s only worth watching to sate curiosity and say, “Hey, I just saw Lynch’s first movie EVER!”

“The Alphabet” – A superior take on Lynch’s conceptual animation, this one, at a mere 4 minutes, has more of the verve and deep-seated weirdness of his later works. Halved between real footage of a strange woman being tormented by unknown forces and an animated short with letters morphing and killing each other in a macabre, borderline hilarious fashion while creepy children recite the alphabet, “The Alphabet” is less of a throwaway project and more of a statement than its predecessor, and a good addition in this collection.  Keep an ear out for the Monty Python-esque noises emanating from some of the letters!

“The Grandmother” – This is easily the best one of the bunch.  Shot in 1970, this glorious 35mm beauty is Lynch’s first narrative.  It is a silent feature about a boy wanting someone’s care and attention.  His parents are mean and neglectful, so he makes the obvious decision to grow his own Grandmother by planting some seeds (OF COURSE!).  “The Grandmother” succeeds by keeping the narrative simple and the mood very surreal.  The odd, experimental music that moves the narrative along is wonderfully bizarre, and will haunt you long after you’ve turned off the film.  This is a stunning reminder that when Lynch cuts the melodrama and opts for something less pedestrian, he can make art that sings high from the rooftops into the twisted dreams of men.  After you’ve seen it, try getting the image of the young boy’s creepy grandmother cradling him in her arms out of your head; it’s not easy.

“The Amputee” - Lynch’s debut on video, “The Amputee” is another experiment we could have done without.  Literally, the only reason this thing was made was to test out different video stocks.  It is a single scene in which Catherine Coulson is an amputee sitting in a chair writing a very banal letter to someone while David Lynch himself changes her horribly bloody bandages.  That’s it.  Is it strange?  Yes.  But it’s incredibly pointless, and it has no artistic value to speak of.

“The Cowboy and the Frenchman” -  This is without a doubt the worst short here.  And it has the second longest run time, to boot!  I know there are people who will defend this short up and down, but this really is the antithesis of anything artistic, funny, or good.  I love Lynch, but I am ashamed to have seen this short.  Created for French television, this 1988 release is about a Frenchman wandering into a dude ranch run by Harry Dean Stanton, the cowboy.  There’s a big language barrier at first, but with the help of a very altruistic Indian and some mutual understanding, the cowboys and the French guy have a rip-roaring good time.  Whoo.  I’m sure Lynch intended this to be comedic, much as Jim Jarmusch likes to add “comedic” elements to his work that stick out as unnaturally as a stove pipe protruding from a tree, but this was awful, and my only bit of good news about this is that it steadily declines in awfulness as the short goes on.  The end is almost tolerable, but I posit that the first ten minutes hurt too much for that to make much difference.

“Lumiere: Premonitions Following An Evil Deed” - One of my personal favorites, this fifty second short was submitted as part of the Lumiere project in the mid 1990s, which called together all the great directors of the day and presented them with the challenge of making a short film with the very first motion picture camera, developed by the Lumiere brothers.  Having seen the entire Lumiere Project, with all the amazing directors they scrounged up, I must admit that Lynch’s was by far the best, beating out artists like Spike Lee, John Boorman, and Wim Wenders.  The Lumiere camera could only hold about 52 seconds of film, had no sound capabilities, and realistically only three takes could have been shot with it, so Lynch had to work within these constraints, but what comes out of it is sheer madness that really speaks to his talents as a director.  There isn’t a narrative to speak of, but all we know is that a murder has taken place, there is a nude Asian woman being held captive in a tank of water somewhere, and a family’s nervous quality time is interrupted by what looks to be a darkened, deformed man.  The music is eerie and intense, the bad film quality adds to the ambiance, and all together I think it is a definite artistic success.

So in the end, we see that Lynch is an artist who, above all things, wants to push the medium and the message of his work to a very unseen, intangible new realm.  In the evolution of his craft, we can see that quest made manifest through miniature triumphs and pitfalls.  As a collection, this is certainly a dream for devoted Lynch fans and anyone interested in how to make a short that’s far from normal.  But for those hungry for art or a deeper meaning, it’s rough traveling through the thoughts of such a scattered and incongruous soul, especially when his experiments and failures are piled onto his legacy, such as they are.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“These six unnervingly surreal slices may vary in their quality and impact, but they are well nigh unmissable for anyone devoted to Lynch’s special brand of cherry pie.”–Anton Bitel, Film 4

“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 an intimate and revealing 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
the heart, while others would say it’s about the mind, and still others would say it’s about the soul.  That so many people have such diverse opinions on it speaks volumes, especially when one considers the crux of the movie for a moment: Joel and Clementine are simply two lovers who have opted to forget about one another, albeit with their fair share of doubts left behind.  On the surface, it appears to be little more than a quirky romantic drama, and even with the fabulous imagery it still maintains its simple core of a love regretted.  What makes this different than something you would find in the indie film bargain bin is an intelligence and a philosophy behind it that not many other features can boast.

It is a film that speaks to the sad core of a relationship.  Joel and Clementine’s romance is dysfunctional in its optimism.  It is a love that is woefully mismatched and tries to work against it, and the film succeeds in showing the heartache of the divide between two very different people who care for each other.  Clementine is a punky extrovert, wearing her emotions on her sleeve with a loud mouth and wacky colored hair.  Joel is much more insular, opting to watch his carefree spirit from afar.  Their personalities don’t exactly compliment each other, which explains their later tensions and eventual dissolution.  Most films would gloss over the details of such a mismatch and assume that love conquers all, but the gulf between these two and how it weathers a love over time is a refreshingly realistic touch for a movie draped in the fantastique.

What a fascinating idea.  A concept like this, in the wrong hands, could have ended disastrously, but in the capable grasp of Gondry and wunderkind Charlie Kaufman, this film came out almost flawlessly.  You are transported to a world of dreamlike memories that fall away in the face of a procedure that begins to look more and more like a terrible mistake.  It’s as terrifying as it is tragic, and its inevitability bears down upon our hearts every second, even though we still secretly hope for a second chance between Joel and Clementine.  The world inside Joel’s mind is equally impressive as a visual spectacle.  The way the memories manifest themselves—be they half-remembered words and ideas, sketchy faces, childhood fears revisiting the adult manifestation of Joel, or endless loops of seemingly unimportant details—all are lovingly rendered in a style that is both technically impressive and emotionally stirring.

This sumptuous feast for the mind is bolstered by breakout performances by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.  While I never expected any less from real-deal actress Winslet, Carrey genuinely surprised me.  As Joel, he made me feel so deeply for him that it shook me to my core as an ol’ softie.  There is such a vulnerability there that I never saw before, never would have imagined before.  He changed my opinion of him forever with this role, and for the first time I can look at Jim Carrey with unbiased eyes as a seriously talented actor with a range that can be aptly described as phenomenal.  But let’s not forget that Kate deserves her due for being half of this curious relationship.  Clementine is a free-spirit who doesn’t like being told what to do, doesn’t like boundaries, and it hurts her when Joel seeks to reign her in.  There are a number of scenes here in which she showcases an emotional range that solidifies her as one of the greatest actresses of this decade, and even with badly-dyed blue hair I can take a woman like her seriously.

But the peripheral characters also take us aback with their complex lives.  Lacuna Inc., the shady company that erases people’s memories, has an incredibly strange staff that somehow pull off the illusion that it’s a well-run, totally professional business, when in reality it’s the medical equivalent of hiring someone to steal all the photos in your wallet.  Headed up by Dr. Wierzniak and his assistant Mary, Lacuna uses some strange technology to do their dirty work, sending out slacker techies to make house calls and erase people’s memories from the comfort of their own home.  One of the technicians even tries dating Clementine by using the memories takes from Joel as he is erasing them!  Seedy, but it’s not nearly as bad as the relationship between the doctor and his assistant, which makes for some compelling drama.  The climactic scene between those two will have you aching for these characters, basking in their tragic realities.

So in the end, whether Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about the heart, the mind, or the soul, its expressive visuals and its candid storytelling weave an emotionally ecstatic film that will leave you fascinated and captivated.  It is an experience that you will want to hold onto in your memories for as long as you can.

366weirdmovies adds: Sunshine proposes a brilliantly simple “what if” scenario— “what if you could completely erase the memory of your ex-lover?”—that is a universal daydream of everyone who’s ever been on the “dumpee” side of a dumping. The movie gives an answer that rings emotionally true, and is at the same time shamelessly romantic, life-affirming, and melancholy. In a crucial way, it’s irrelevant whether Joel and Clementine get together and live happily ever after; the key triumph is when Joel decides he doesn’t want to forget, when he decides the temporary pain of their breakup shouldn’t be allowed to betray the beauty of their shared past, decides he’d prefer to stumble down the hard path to recovering from heartbreak than to take a shortcut that would wipe out something precious. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Synechdoche New York) is often accused of being overly intellectual, distant and tricky; this is his most emotionally authentic and sincere script, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the one that’s fervently embraced by the widest audience. It’s an amazing and affecting movie, even if you’re not a fan of strange cinema.

As far as weird goes, I find it to be starter-level stuff, more speculative and offbeat than surreal. There is some delightfully resolved confusion resulting from playing around with the timeline, and Gondry’s set-pieces have a music-video type of oddness to them, but once the impossible premise is established the story plays out with a relentless narrative logic. Still, it’s within the weird genre, however tenuously, and it’s such a lovely and beloved movie that I’m afraid readers would hang me in effigy if I denied it it’s rightful place on the List of 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. It’s a great entry point into the deranged cinema of Kaufman and his bizarre cinema kin; starting from here, you can branch out into ever-weirder vistas.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the director always insists on an excess of surreality by pedantically realising visually every strange detail of Joel’s memory-angst… All very wacky and Dick Lester-ish, like a grad-school Beatles movie, and for about five or ten minutes it’s funny and exhilarating. But it’s over-extended, and tends to undermine the rigorous realism which made the idea funny.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

“Filled with the writer’s trademark neurotic characters, grungy atmospherics, and downbeat emphasis on domestic discord, it’s a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“In this season of abundance for amnesiac romances, Eternal Sunshine – with its laughs and its weirdness and its contemplation of some of the big issues regarding memory and identity – is the hands-down winner… a delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Focus Features – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

IMDB LINK: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Lacuna Inc. – the fake website for the memory-erasing corporation of Eternal Sunshine that was part of the original marketing campaign for the movie

Roger Ebert’s Great Movies Essay – In-depth meditation by Roger Ebert as to what makes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind such a classic.

The Science of Memory Loss – Slate.com chimes in with an intriguing essay about the realities behind the Eternal Sunshine ”memory erasure” technique.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at Being Charlie Kaufman – A fansite devoted to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Here you can find stills, fan art, audio, video, and even drafts of scripts from Eternal Sunshine.

Christian Review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – An… interesting take on the film from an interesting source!

DVD INFO: The original one-disc edition of this DVD (buy), which is incidentally the one I saw, isn’t incredibly flattering as far as the special features go, but I have seen much worse.  It comes with a Michel Gondry-Jim Carrey interview, which is playful but uneventful, some pretty good deleted and alternate scenes, a fake commercial for Lacuna Inc., and a terribly banal music video for a song The Polyphonic Spree lent to the film. The commentary is an acquired taste, but absolutely seminal if you like your commentary tracks. It’s performed by Kaufman and Gondry, and while it’s really quite informative, it sounds a bit like the David Lynch short The Cowboy and The Frenchman. Kaufman is very droll and American, Gondry is very giggly and French, so it makes for an interesting pairing in the recording booth when they’re both trying to relay their own experiences. Recently, a two-disc edition has emerged that blows the previous version out of the water (buy). It contains an “Anatomy of a Scene,” sit-downs with various cast members, some featurettes, and even a screenplay book! If you can, I would buy that edition, but for the filmgoer on a budget, the standard edition is more than adequate. Eternal Sunshine is also available on Blu-ray (buy) and as a rental on Amazon’s video on demand (rent).

DIRECTED BY:  James Felix McKenney

FEATURING: Don Wood, Christine Spencer, Angus Scrimm, Reggie Bannister, Debbie Rochon, Michael Berryman, Larry Fessenden

PLOT: In this re-imagining of the “Christ-sploitation” films shown in churches and

probably a few Southern gynecologists’ offices of the 60s and 70s, we follow a young man and woman who make all the wrong choices in a haze of drugs, alcohol, and rock music while unknowingly under the influence of two demonic imps.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Satan Hates You, while initially very jarring in its lack of self-explanation, is a satisfying experience in terms of its Troma-esque shock horror and its acute satirical edge.  But its freaky imagery leans too often on a bland naturalistic style that mars its individuality and chokes the weirdness out of the movie.

COMMENTS: Satan Hates You is a very hard film to place.  Being a satire, a dark comedy, and a horror film is no ordinary pedigree, and Satan Hates You maniacally shifts from one of these genres to the next every few minutes.  It is a wicked send-up of those fear-mongering Christian PSA films that pop into existence every generation about the dangers of doing ungodly things like having abortions and doing drugs.  But it honestly doesn’t hit you that way when you watch it if you don’t do your research.  The first time watching it, I felt this to just be a dark, meandering horror-comedy about two idiots who make a lot of bad choices.  Director James Felix McKenney doesn’t really go out of his way to make this idea pop out at the audience with staples of the “Christ-sploitation” genre, like cheesy acting, an oversimplification of right and wrong, and loads of self-righteous condemnation.  We are instead tossed quite objectively into these people’s lives, full of sex, murder, and self-sabotage, and don’t get dropped many hints that we’re supposed to be in on a joke.

Once one understands the idea, everything falls into place a little more, and it does indeed become a more cohesive movie, and a weird one to be sure.  There are a lot of hideously violent moments that heighten the weirdness factor quite a bit, including an abortion performed with what looks to be a wet vac in a basement and a gruesome, surreal gay-bashing scene.  And sprinkled amongst the film are strange scenes of televangelists preaching the word of God, played by various horror film alumni, such as Angus Scrimm of Phantasm fame, and the prolific John Levene!  And they’re not the only horror icons here, either.  Reggie Bannister (also from Phantasm) fame plays a seedy bartender, and Michael Berryman of The Hills Have Eyes plays a hotel owner!  That in itself is a little weird, but what’s arguably stranger is that holding this movie together are long stretches of normalcy and banal minutia.  Sure, there are violent murders, but to get to those, we have to hear some righteously boring conversations about characters and places we’ll never see, events we’ll never care about, and sit through moments of moral quandary that really just add up to actors spacing out on camera.  It can be a sour juxtaposition, and it might even make me a bad person for saying this, but there is a very large part of me that wanted people to get hurt just to break up the monotony in the middle of this little indie horror.

Satan Hates You can’t be faulted too much, though.  It’s funny at times, the horror can be genuinely cringe-inducing, and I found myself satisfied with the in-your-face approach to the style.  It is a pleasurable feature from a low-profile director whose talent brings forth an assortment of surprising innovations.  The acting is fair, the cinematography is wild and youthful, and the violence is simply spectacular.  Satan Hates You is a decent feature overall, but it just doesn’t feel weird enough to recommend.  The spark of imagination is there, and it feels like something truly bizarre could have been hacked out of it in the editing room, but as it stands it’s a case of “close, but no dice.”

366weirdmovies adds: I think one of the key points Eric brings out is this: if you’re not familiar with the obscure genre of Christian scare films, you’ll probably be nonplussed by Satan Hates You (although I would have expected that missing info to make it a weirder experience).  When I watched this I was in on the joke from the get-go, so I experienced the movie differently, and ended up liking it better (I’d give it at least a half star higher rating, though I agree it’s not weird enough for Listing according to our exceedingly high standards).

Even more than a parody of Christian scare films, I see it as an attempt to adapt a Chick tract quite literally, right down to the final comic-book looking cameo from Christ at Calvary.  (The pair of scheming imps are also a motif that frequently shows up in these tracts).  I mean, how many movies feature drug dealers who play Dungeons and Dragons while their Wiccan womenfolk stay in the back, brewing up abortifacients?  That’s a paranoid Pentecostal worldview made flesh, and I admire the objective approach and the way McKenney (for the most part) resisted the easy temptation to mock his fundamentalist characters, instead letting them hang themselves with their own doctrinal ropes.  Even so, I found Scrimm’s final speech unexpectedly sincere and moving.  His character added needed balance and a recognition that, however peculiar their worldview and ridiculous their scare tactics, there’s a significant kernel of genuine compassion motivating the proselytizers.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There are so many wild ideas going on in SATAN HATES YOU that I had trouble wrapping my mind around its first half, but once I grasped the experimental approach I was completely immersed by its second half, when the various threads came together seamlessly.”–Greg Lamberson, Fear Zone (screener)

FEATURING: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Tom Waits, Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp, Jude Law

PLOT: A 1000 year-old mystic enlists the help of a seedy amnesiac to save his

daughter, whose life he exchanged for eternal youth, from the clutches of the Devil.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a return to extreme fantasy for Terry Gilliam, who hasn’t delved so deep into the realm of untethered imagination since The Adventures of Baron Muchausen.  It is a madcap vaudevillian escapade that is anything but ordinary, a rekindling of the fires of whimsy in modern cinema that has not been lit in some time.  Gilliam conjures a tale that comes from the divine and the pedestrian, fills it with colorful, albeit thin, characters, and lets the magic happen as the elements coalesce into a Victorian sideshow of epic proportions.

COMMENTS: Set over a thousand years of the titular character’s life (although it’s mostly set in modern day England), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a fantastical meditation on choices: good ones, bad ones, the weight-laden overabundance of decisions we all face at some point, and the demeaning lack of options we also experience.  From literal metaphors involving people choosing their destinies in a realm of imagination to the figurative posturings of the opposition between that which is right and that which is merely easy, director Terry Gilliam muses with this film on the ages-old dilemma of free will and how these characters will go about using it.

But forget about that!  What everyone wants to know is how well they shoe-horned in all of Heath Ledger’s stand-ins during post-production!  As you’re well aware, I’m sure, this is the final performance of the late, great Heath Ledger.  Mr. Ledger died during the production of this feature, leaving his role, that of the amnesiac Tony, woefully incomplete.  Gilliam, being ever the professional, and no stranger to ill circumstances befalling his films, decided to soldier on and finish the film with various other leading men filling in for Ledger in the remaining scenes.

How is such a thing possible?!  Well, luckily for Gilliam, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, or as I’ll soon be calling it for brevity’s sake, TIoDP, is heavy on the fantasy, so Gilliam comes up with a fair explanation for the sudden change of face and build of our main character.  TIoDP is about a 1000 year long rivalry between the devil and Doctor Parnassus, a decrepit old man who runs a nasty vaudeville side show with a little person, a wispy teenage runaway assistant, and his own hot daughter, where he exhibits his ability to take people into the world of imagination.  Throughout the years he and the devil have made wagers, and they have each outwitted each other more than once.  But Parnassus ended up losing the last wager they made, and now when his hot daughter turns 16, which will be very soon, he will be forced to relinquish her to Satan.  It’s a terrifying reality for him, and in these last few days before her 16th birthday, he grows desperate and morose.  But, as fate would have it, two extreme coincidences happen withing minutes of each other.  First, the devil shows up completely unannounced with one more bargain for the soul of the hot daughter—the first one to seduce five souls into putting their faith in him wins.  Almost immediately following this extraordinary stroke of luck, Parnassus’s show encounters a nearly dead man strung up by the neck named Tony, a real charmer with no memory of his past.  He has the ability to charm anyone into doing anything, it seems, and he appears to be the blessing that Parnassus needs to win this wager.  But this man is not all that he seems, and neither the devil or Parnassus can truly see the heart of this strange ne’er-do-well or the role he will play in their wager.

This is a good film, but nowhere near Gilliam’s dizzying past heights.  TIoDP has a problem with tone in that it can’t take itself seriously for very long.  To be honest, I was never sure whether I was supposed to take anything seriously, when Verne Troyer is the wise-but-wisecracking second-in-command to Parnassus and the devil is Tom “Gravel Throat” Waits!  There are moments here when the forces at work seem sinister and malicious, and Satan’s wager really means a lot to him, and then the next minute, WHAM!, a line of police officers starts can-canning a la Magical Mystery Tour in a whimsical dream world!  It makes for a weird experience, to be sure, but the results feel mixed.

Gilliam’s fancy of the occult, the wonders of magic, and imagination break no new ground with his fans, but anyone new to his unique vision will be surprised by what they find.  This is a director obsessed with fanciful imagery, and TIoDP is a film fueled by the bizarre, the fantastic, and the slightly macabre.  This too, feels bittersweet, but one cannot deny this film’s ability to stick in your head.  Two images stick in my mind very vividly; one scene where Parnassus falls from the sky alone in the desert of his imagination, where a giant thumb tack, as big as a mountain, barely avoids skewering him, and another scene where Parnassus’s hot daughter (played by apple-faced model Lily Cole) and charming Tony act an entire scene with what appears to be a freshly dead chicken in their hands.  One scene evokes some mental stimulation from me, making my brain work a bit, while the other makes me want to wash my hands more thoroughly.

It’s definitely a very good final performance for Ledger, but not nearly as iconic as his take on The Joker in The Dark Knight, the role for which he will be remembered. This is a much more subtle, mannered performance that is typical of all Gilliam heroes or antiheroes.  It is a performance that will be recalled for its humor and its clumsy, casual tone, a tone that invites you in and makes you comfortable in the grandiose nature of the film, much like the smile of the charming Tony.  Ledger here is warm and reeks of cheap perfume and cheaper drinks, his charisma springing forth from a place where the bars stay open after 2:00 AM and the streets are filled with cocked necks and bitten lips.  Ledger finished all the scenes in the real world, but when the scenes involving the world of imagination are involved, he is replaced by the likes of Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp, and Jude Law (which easily explains away the character’s lack of Ledger-ness.  Clever!)  Their performances are admirable, and the reasons they stepped in to complete the movie are noble indeed, but this is nobody’s real time to shine.  In the face of Ledger’s Tony, these three leading men wither in the wake of his memory.  In order of appearance, Depp gets a B-, Jude Law gets a slap on the wrist and a D, and Colin Farrell skates by with a C-.

This movie as a whole, however, has a lot of heart, character, and, most importantly, imagination!  TIoDP is a terribly unique vision, and while it isn’t Gilliam’s best film, it has more than enough remarkable qualities to put it into this List. A good friend of mine once said about this list of the 366 weirdest movies, “The weirder it is, the less it has to be jaw-droppingly good,” and although my jaw remains planted firmly on my skull, the feet of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus are nowhere near the tame earth of Hollywood, and that is a testament to both Terry Gilliam’s inventiveness as a director, and Heath Ledger’s insight as an actor.  And a testament to the weirdness of a mountain-sized thumb tack.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Fantasmagorical is the word that comes to mind, this lavishly bizarre and gloriously ramshackle film from Terry Gilliam, with its Victoriana design elements jutting into contempo London and the psychedelic world of Dr Parnassus’ mind… Dr Parnassus is the kind of film that a hard nosed cynic may dismiss as balderdash, but for a flight of imaginative fancy, the film is pretty well unparalleled, with breathtaking sequences that take place on the other side of the travelling show’s silver mirror.”–Andrew Urban, Urban Cinefile

DIRECTED BY: Jeremy Alter

FEATURING: Anton Pardoe, Roselyn Sanchez, Patrick Bauchau

PLOT: In a dark, nameless city, a man must return to a city in which he is despised to

save the life of “the one who got away.” He must travel to the rotten heart of this noirish nightscape to get her back, putting his life at risk and his very soul at hazard while navigating the streets and his own past for clues as to her whereabouts.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While the features of a shadowy noir city full of hyper-naturally Hammett-esque characters smack of something rather strange, it really isn’t all that odd, nor is it really that good.  It’s more of a hyperbolic homage, a sort of tip-of-the-hat to the noir films of the 40s and 50s that’s so hard and abrupt that it tips the person under the hat.  There’s tribute, there’s parody, and then there’s The Perfect Sleep, both somewhere in-between as well as something else entirely.

COMMENTS: There’s something to be said for the positively assaulting aesthetics that pervade this film.  This town The Perfect Sleep exists in, extreme (and extremely hilarious) anachronisms aside, fully commits to the idea of the dark and atmospheric urban sprawl that populated so many crime dramas after World War II.  Every alleyway seems dangerous, and nobody is who you think they are once you pass them in the night that seems to last forever.  But once one soaks in the impressive scenery, The Perfect Sleep quickly becomes a bland song-and-dance routine that feels like an amalgam of Last Man Standing, Dark City, and Double Indemnity, aped poorly and without the safety net of an exorbitant budget.  I feel, personally, that this movie’s prime directive should have been to let me in on the story at hand, what will be happening soon.  Instead, we are allowed to get lost while the hero, Anton Pardoe, reads exposition distantly from a poor script.  It’s like the story, and what our nameless hero is doing, is none of our business, and we’re supposed to just continue blithely along, hoping it will all get sorted out in the end.  The Perfect Sleep makes for a very passive movie watching experience that could have taken an example from The Big Sleep, a noir that had a rather weak story but a dynamic style that kept everyone engaged, thus making the mile-long plot holes seem to vanish into thin air.  Instead of taking a page from that movie, though, we find ourselves locked into a story that the characters take incredibly seriously, but whose meaning is lost on the audience.  As a weird movie, I would not even suggest it for its unusual moments.  Some scenes, like when a freaky doctor punctures the lungs of a couple of strangers with a scalpel, work as unorthodox thriller moments or unnerving horror.  But these moments are insignificant compared to the massive time spent amidst the cliches of a period crime drama/dark gangster flick. The critics were, for the most part, unanimous about The Perfect Sleep‘s banality, and I’m afraid I have to throw my hat into the ring with them, this time.  It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and there’s nothing very weird about that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Unfortunately, Alter’s often inventive work is kneecapped by a deliriously nonsensical script, which misses the mark as both over-the-top parody and straight-faced homage, and could have been intended as either.”-Andrew Barker, Variety