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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WOMB (2010)

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AKA Clone

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DIRECTED BY: Benedek Fliegauf

FEATURING: Eva Green, Matt Smith, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, Hannah Murray

PLOT: A woman impregnates herself with a clone of her dead lover and raises the child to adulthood, grappling along the way with the confusing nature of their relationship.

Still from Womb (2010)COMMENTS: “She is the victim of artificial incest,” the snooty mom declares. “Her mother gave birth to her own mother.” In the universe of Womb, the battle lines have been drawn, and the detractors of the ability to bring loved ones back through the science of cloning view the procedure as an abomination. What makes the moment funny is that the prickly parents who are lecturing our heroine on the immorality of the practice would be nearly apoplectic if they had any idea how far she’d taken it. They’ll find out soon enough, and we’ll get to see her go even further.

Its shocking premise powers Womb. To his credit, Fliegauf is never coy about what’s going on here. The main character raises the only man she has ever loved as her own child. The implications are significant, and she experiences urges both maternal and carnal, sometimes simultaneously. The most powerful images in the film are the ones that bring this contradiction to the surface. Many a horror movie has labored to create a moment half as shocking as the scene where 10-year-old Tommy stands up in the bathtub he is sharing with the mother who has cloned him from her lover and proceeds to recite a poem while she stares up at him. Is the look on her face pride? Lust? Both? Womb readily embraces every awkward moment, crafting discomfort out of such scenarios as Rebecca’s meeting with college-age Tommy’s new girlfriend, or a wordless confrontation with the biological mother of Tommy’s genetic material upon seeing her resurrected son for the first time.

Watching Perfect Sense was a terrific reminder of how much I enjoy the work of Eva Green, and it’s great to see her particular brand of repressed passion deployed here. With her icy beauty, her deep and commanding voice, and her uncanny ability to balance outward coolness with an interior fire, she presents a vented steeliness, letting out glimpses of her conflicted soul in careful portions. When her adolescent son falls on top of her in what would be a playful moment under any other circumstances, Green carefully betrays an electric thrill that lies beneath her calm demeanor. It’s easy to see what initially attracts her to the laid-back enthusiasm of Smith, and later what drives her to both impulsively bring him back into the world, and then hide him away from it.

Rebecca is a fascinating character, emotionally immature at best and morally corrupt at worst. (Notably, Tommy is killed while en route to conduct some eco-terrorism against the very cloning plant that will soon give him renewed life.) The film suggests that Tommy’s untimely demise has trapped Rebecca in amber, forcing her to bring him back to the very moment when his life stopped in order for her life to go forward. Some critics have noted that Green never seems to age over two decades, but they often fail to notice that she doesn’t grow in any other way, either. There’s a strong suggestion that Rebecca has retained her virginity over all this time (one scene makes explicit that clone Tommy is delivered via caesarean), which gives context to the concluding scenes that take Womb into a new level of weirdness and discomfort.

Here again, Fliegauf doesn’t shy away from the most interesting questions, no matter how skeevy they might seem. If you’re picking up on some will-they-won’t-they vibes, rest assured that you’ll get an answer, and even if you correctly anticipate exactly what is going to happen in Womb’s final 15 minutes, there’s still genuine shock value in seeing it all play out, and particularly watching Green’s shifting reactions. It’s unusual to encounter a movie that so readily indulges your innate morbid curiosities without itself being grotesque or devoid of morality. Womb is patient but focused, sometimes tedious but rarely dull, transgressive but calmly and soberly so. It anticipates the protests of those like that angry mother, and it responds with a nod and a thin smile.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds, but sadly not as exciting… The upswing is that Fliegauf has created a certain mood for the film through its staging and its cold bleak setting works well with the subject matter. It’s just a shame that the script can’t match it.” – Niall Browne, Movies in Focus

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

Womb [Blu-ray]

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Elio Petri

FEATURING: Franco Nero, Vanessa Redgrave, Georges Géret, Rita Calderoni, Gabriella Boccardo

PLOT: After relocating to a run-down mansion in an attempt to recharge his imagination, a famous painter begins to suspects that the ghost of the previous owner, a beautiful young woman with nymphomaniac tendencies, may be endangering his sanity.

Still from A Quiet Place in the Country (1968)

COMMENTS: A filmmaker has to know what he’s doing when he opens a film called A Quiet Place in the Country with a cacophonous opening credit sequence, flashing snippets of famed pieces of art (which will be visually referenced throughout the film) to the sounds of percussive crashes from Ennio Morricone and the improvisational ensemble Nuova Consonanza. Sure enough, the only thing noisier than those titles is the mind of our protagonist, whom we first meet tied to a chair, nearly naked and surrounded by unnecessary electric appliances bought by his hot girlfriend. This ought to be a moment of supreme satisfaction, an introduction to someone at the top who is about to be brought low for our entertainment and edification. But Leonardo, the handsome and successful painter with money and public adulation and said hot girlfriend, is already in free fall. The point of the movie is to show how much further he’s going to go.

Nero plays a man in the grip of maddening dissatisfaction. He’s stricken with a drought of creativity; the works he produces are dissonant blotches of color, and he seeks inspiration in images of war, famine, and smut. His libido is barely under control: he molests women on the street (or imagines he does) and he greedily collects skin mags at the local newsstand despite knowing that Redgrave (arguably looking as beautiful and certainly as overtly sexual as she had ever been on film) is waiting at home for him. He’s desperately seeking something, and it isn’t until he comes across a decrepit mansion on the outskirts of the city that he gets anywhere close to figuring out what it is.

Did I mention that A Quiet Place in the Country is a giallo? The house contains a supernatural murder mystery, with the previous tenant allegedly gunned down during the war, but the townsfolk may be keeping some secrets about her, especially the old groundskeeper. Leonardo’s obsession with the woman leads him to have bloody, violent thoughts that he doesn’t do a great job of keeping in check. The threats only grow, while Leonardo’s grip on his sanity slips. He attacks a photographer, he terrifies his live-in housekeeper (although he seems to accept her absurd assertion that the young man sharing her bed is her little brother come to keep her company), and he grows ever more paranoid about his girlfriend Flavia. He dreams of her killing him, and sees visions of her everywhere he goes, often pushing him around immobilized in a wheelchair. By the time insanity erupts into violence, it seems inevitable.

Perhaps that’s what leaves me cold about A Quiet Place in the Country. Director Petri (whose work I have reviewed previously) has unquestionably put together an efficient piece of shock cinema with a highbrow veneer. But because Leonardo seems pretty unstable from the outset, there’s not really any suspense or surprise in his story. He’s like a jack-in-the-box: you know he’ll pop, and it’s only a question of when. And because we are rooted in his point of view, the twist ending loses a lot of its punch. Rather than recontextualizing all that has come before, it just reinforces the fact that we’ve been watching everything through the lens of a crazy person. That makes A Quiet Place in the Country an interesting piece of art, even unique. But it doesn’t linger. Once it’s through, we’re on to the next piece in the gallery.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the weirder, more vaguely satirical contemporaries of Argento’s definitive Italian post-BLOW-UP giallo; it’s the brother, not the son, the cool uncle the Argento generation never sees anymore except on rare holidays when they can get away to visit him at the ‘funny’ farm… It defies expectations for a giallo while riffing on them in a deadpan absurdist abstraction that puts it more aligned with Spasmo and nothing else.” – Erich Kuersten, Acidemic Journal of Film and Media

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

A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]

A Quiet Place in the Country [Blu-ray]
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: WISE BLOOD (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: John Huston

FEATURING: Brad Dourif, Amy Wright, Dan Shor, Harry Dean Stanton, Ned Beatty, William Hickey, Mary Nell Santacroce

PLOT:  In a small Southern town, WWII veteran Hazel Motes  proclaims the foundation of his new Church of Christ Without Christ, but runs into obstacles including a deceptive preacher and his wily daughter, a simple young man who is determined to help by providing a Native American mummy, and a huckster who gloms on to Hazel’s pitch in pursuit of a quick buck.

Still from wise blood (1979)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Wise Blood pulls off the trick of translating the quirky voice and complex themes of Flannery O’Connor’s writing to the screen, delivering both the surrealism of her situations and the aspirational delusions of her characters in a way that’s faithful to the source material but fitting for the new medium. There’s a lot that an adaptation like this might leave by the wayside, but this one includes every audacious, blasphemous, ridiculous moment.

COMMENTS: I would never have expected to encounter as much John Huston in my tenure at 366 Weird Movies as I have, but a look at the last decade of his career reveals a man who was fiercely determined to do his own thing, but also savvy enough in the ways of Hollywood to play ball half the time in exchange for freedom the other half. So the man’s going to flirt with weird at about a 1:1 ratio. Stints behind the camera for Annie, Victory, or Phobia seem like down payments for more dedicated efforts like Prizzi’s Honor, Under the Volcano, or The Dead. Wise Blood definitely falls into the latter category, as the director waited patiently for his chance to adapt O’Connor’s first novel, undertaking more commercial ventures until his neophyte producers finally came up with the funding. Once he had it, he worked fast and affordably but without compromise.  

I almost feel like all I need to tell you is that it’s a grand showcase for Brad Dourif. A legendarily weird character actor, Dourif takes to a leading role with gusto. His Hazel Motes is an astoundingly meaty part, a character made up of vast contradictions and competing emotions that all somehow fit together logically. He rails against the unkept promises of organized religion, but becomes irate at the sight of false devotion. He yearns for connection to others, but recoils at anyone who would try to attach themselves to him. (He’s at his happiest with the prostitute whom he pays for her affections.) He tools around in a beat-up Ford Fairlane that even he seems to recognize is beyond repair, but he insistently defends its honor against any criticism. We will quickly learn that Hazel is a parfait of fierce pride and acute embarrassment, and the combustible mix only makes him more ardent in pursuit of a purer truth. Each setback heightens his intensity, each failure leads him to repeat with ever more determination.

Alone, Hazel might seem too weird to endure, but Wise Blood surrounds him with a murderer’s row of supporting players who demonstrate that he’s as much a product of his surroundings as he is his own mass of peculiarities. Stanton is a con man whose tongue drips with moral superiority, while granddaughter Wright hopes to use her skills of deception to trick Dourif into a marriage bed. Beatty has a small but crucial role as a sidewalk swindler who infuriates Dourif by not only being better at street preaching but using that talent to fleece the readily gullible masses. Most eccentric of all is Shor, a simpleton with a fascination for mummies and gorillas for whom no surprise revelation of the truth is ever a disappointment. And all this strangeness is just part of the fabric. Everyone’s weird, but no more so than the next guy.

Which points to Huston’s oddest and most successful trick: Wise Blood is a film truly out of time. Are we seeing O’Connor’s 1952, with the settings, costumes, and attitudes of a society still finding new footing after a world war? Or is this the Macon, Georgia of 1979, neck-deep in national malaise and taking an initial stab at a post-racial new South? Huston chooses not to choose, turning O’Connor’s characters into unwitting time travelers who occupy the physical present day but live in a spiritual yesteryear. It makes for a curious watch, but perfectly fits these people who long for change but refuse to be changed themselves.

It says something about both author and director that the final scene of Wise Blood, in which our protagonist’s unyielding principles lead him to his ultimate fate, is both sad and funny. Not bittersweet, but ruefully humorous. It’s the perfect coda to the tale of a man who refused to be relatable and never stopped wondering why he couldn’t relate. O’Connor and Huston were both one-of-a-kind artists, so it’s a lucky outcome that blending the two results in a movie that’s not much like anything else.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Wise Blood is based on Flannery O’Connor’s extraordinary first novel, which infused the conventions of Southern gothic fiction with fiery Catholicism and surrealistic wit. Huston takes to O’Connor’s hothouse style like a gambler to a royal flush. The inevitable results are the very essence of weird.” – Frank Rich, Time Magazine (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by future contributor , who said it “seems a must for the list in my opinion.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Wise Blood

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE APPOINTMENT (1982)

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DIRECTED BY: Lindsay C. Vickers

FEATURING: Edward Woodward, Jane Merrow, Samantha Weysom, John Judd

PLOT: Ian informs his daughter Joanne that he will be forced to miss her upcoming violin concert; Joanne takes the news poorly, and terrible dreams and mysterious occurrences ensue.

Still from The Appointment (1982)

COMMENTS: The Appointment is one of those movies that I’d seen before seeing it, thanks to the pervasiveness of memes. The film’s climactic car crash has been excised and circulated on the web as a bizarre mishmash of extreme closeups of screeching tires, unconvincing steering wheel acting, and a downright gymnastic final moment on the road before the car plunges over the side of a cliff. It’s absurd in isolation, but a notable demonstration of the crucial role of context. Restored to its surroundings, what seemed funny is revealed to be tragic, what was ridiculous is horrifically unavoidable.

The Appointment stands out for being so irrepressibly British. Not merely in its origins, with writer/director Vickers taking his first and only spin in the lead director’s chair after a career as an assistant with Hammer Films, a pastoral country home tailor made for a Britbox mystery series, and a budget bankrolled by the pension fund of the British Coal Board. Not even due to the casting of the quintessentially English, pre-Equalizer post-Wicker Man Woodward, or Weysom’s droopy voice that sounds like a Mike Myers character. No, the thing that makes The Appointment a cinematic version of a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster is the ongoing and concerted effort to depress the stakes and make this horrific situation as mannered and emotionless as possible.

In many respects, ’s Carrie could be seen as a similar film, with telekinetic powers in the hands of a teenage protagonist confused by oncoming womanhood. But in the hands of De Palma (and original author Stephen King), the scenario is laden with intense drama; the potent subjects of acceptance and rejection fuel cataclysmic events. What The Appointment brings to the party is that classically British sentiment that says, “What if all that, but with everyone making a heroic effort to avoid talking about anything unpleasant?” Joanne’s possible supernatural abilities take a backseat to what the film considers a more compelling subject: a decent middle-aged man beleaguered by the conflicting demands of work and family. Consider that the most intense moment in the film involves a father walking past his daughter’s room, stopping outside the door, and standing motionless for many long seconds while both father and daughter wait for something to happen. Nothing does, and yet with the weight of repressed feelings and damaged psyches, the moment hits as hard as a bucket of pig’s blood.

That doorway scene serves as a litmus test for the viewer; you get to decide just what’s been going on between them, and how distasteful it is. But there are other signs that the rot runs deep in this family. Merrow petulantly complains that her husband ignores her in favor of their daughter, a sentiment he ratifies by absentmindedly complaining that she’s hogging the sheets. There’s the event that calls Woodward away in the first place, an unexplained inquest in which he must testify in place of his (mysteriously) absent business partner about the events that led to an employee (mysteriously) dying.  And that’s the say nothing of the prologue, an effectively shocking scene—that almost seems to have been flown in from another movie—in which a music student two years prior is violently attacked by an invisible force. Death is in the air. Perhaps young Joanne doesn’t come by her covetous rage honestly.

The Appointment goes exactly where it intends to, never straying from its course. This deprives the film of suspense, but it also gives it an unsettling feeling of inevitability. Ian repeatedly tells his daughter that he has no ability to change his plans, and this happens to be true; his fate is set. His dreams and those of his wife predict the circumstances of his demise. Both his own car and its replacement acquire similar damage, as if to ensure that there is no avenue for escape. Time itself is against him; moments that should pass in a heartbeat stretch out before us. Woodward is constantly out of sync with the clocks in his house, and his watch stops working during his drive (before he loses it entirely). That car crash which seemed sloppily edited turns out to be deliberately extended beyond linear time, showing every element of the incident from multiple angles and perspectives and lingering in the moment past what one would reasonably expect. The Appointment is about 10 minutes of story and 80 minutes of mood, but that’s less a shortcoming and more a choice.

The title ends up being the key to the whole film. Woodward has an appointment with death, a fact the film elides to preserve some degree of suspense (and to sidestep litigation from the estate of Agatha Christie). In some respects, that feels like a cheat, like a shaggy dog story that takes an awfully long time to reach its punchline, and with suggestions of more substantial plotlines that never quite materialize. But The Appointment has an almost noble focus on its primary aim, to capture the exquisite discomfort of watching every detail of the last 24 hours of a man’s life as he goes about it in blissful ignorance. Show me the meme that can do that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an odd, not entirely coherent work, but obvious faults aside, it’s also something rather special, with a couple of stand-out, set-piece sequences which mark it out as a ‘must see’ for genre fans… The suburban doom theme finally manifests itself in an extraordinary, absurd yet chilling climax…” – Eddie Harrison, Film-Authority

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan, who remarked “it begins with an eerie opening and leads into a chilling accident sequence, one that had me muttering “W…T…F……. Truly a visual wonder.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

The Appointment (Flipside No 44) (Blu-ray)

The Appointment (Flipside No 44) (Blu-ray)
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CHRIST – THE MOVIE (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Mick Duffield

FEATURING: Crass

PLOT: Collages of images reflecting the confluence of Thatcherite policies and the consumerist habits, all intended to accompany live performances by a punk-agitprop band.

Still from christ the Movie (1990)

COMMENTS: Crass never wanted to be called “punk.” In fact, performing music appears to have been only one part of the collective’s messaging arsenal. Their numbers included artists, writers, and campaigners alongside musicians, and you’re as likely to remember Crass for their iconic logo, the fake wedding song they tricked a UK romance magazine into distributing for free, or the mocked-up phone conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan that pranked the State Department, as much as anything they put out on vinyl. (This AllMusic bio is an great introduction to the band’s political and artistic ethos.) Music was a means to an end, specifically the end of an elitist system engineered to propagate itself on the backs of the masses. The one time they really poured themselves into making a cohesive, artistic musical statement, 1982’s “Christ – The Album,” the Falklands War had commenced and concluded before the band had any opportunity to comment. That seems to have been assessed as a failure caused by mission creep, and going forward, there would be no confusion about what was most important.

It is in this context that we must assess Christ – The Movie, a film that exists mainly to provide background color at Crass concerts, rather than to be screened to an attentive audience. Moviemaking was Duffield’s contribution to the collective, and although the band eventually released Christ – The Movie as a standalone home video some years after disbanding, it’s best to imagine these images being projected on the wall of a dank, crowded club while vocalists yell out the lyrics to songs with titles like “Nineteen Eighty Bore” and “It’s the Greatest Working Class Rip-Off.” It’s best to do this because without that context, the images start to get repetitive and rather dull.

Christ – The Movie is actually a compilation of three separate montages by Duffield. “Autopsy,” the first and shortest of the trio, is also the most haphazard. News clips trade off with banal conversation, with snippets of commercials and dissections. “Autopsy” does contain the most surprising and entertaining diversion, as a camera captures the visitors to a modern art gallery being serenaded by a distorted version of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Amidst this, a security guard realizes he is being filmed, and his intense discomfort at finding himself on display hints at the spotlight Crass would like to shine on the unjustly powerful.

The next segment, “Choosing Death,” comes closest to succeeding as a film to be watched on its own. Images of war machines and torn bodies are interspersed with clips from a video encouraging couples to take out a second mortgage in order to rehab their kitchen. The juxtaposition makes clear that the military-industrial complex is counting on the power of shiny things to distract the masses from the atrocities being committed against them and in their name, and the buildup to catastrophe is both inevitable and strangely satisfying. After all, if these are our priorities, maybe we deserve our fate.

The final segment, “Yes Sir, I Will,” best exemplifies the band’s intention for the film: to accompany performances of the album of the same name. Crass eschews any kind of tunefulness, with thrashing guitars and slamming drums that nearly drown out the furious speeches that pass for vocals. With lyrics like “Television is today’s Nuremberg!” and “To ensure control, the superpowers need to maintain the imbalance,” anger at nearly every aspect of capitalist society is the point. To help focus the rage, Duffield repeatedly returns to the same image to represent all that is wrong in the world: the snooty, impassive face of Margaret Thatcher. The passionately despised former prime minister appears on the screen time and again, usually superimposed over footage of military machines, angry protestors, and emaciated children. But it’s almost 45 minutes long, and a little goes a long way. Images of Thatcher and the world she has wrought give way to more of the same, and if you’re not there to scream and mosh and engage in Crass’ version of the Two-Minute Hate, then the novelty wears off pretty quickly.

Crass was, from beginning to end, utterly committed to their ideals, and it’s a mark of their authenticity that the visuals of Christ – The Movie match up so well with their other artistic endeavors. As a snapshot of just why the most left-leaning voices were so angry during the early 1980s, Duffield’s work is peerless. But these movies fall prey to diminishing returns, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts. If you really want to get the maximum value out of Christ – The Movie, I think you’re gonna need a very loud and pissed-off band down front.

(This movie was nominated for review by Robin Hood sun, who said it was “definately weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)