DIRECTOR: Ken Russell

FEATURING: Roger Daltrey, Ann-Margret, Oliver Reed , Eric Clapton, Elton John, Jack Nicholson, Tina Turner, Paul Nicholas, Keith Moon, Pete Townshend, John Entwhistle

PLOT: Captain Walker is missing and presumed dead in World War II, but when he turns up

alive, his wife’s new lover kills him. Unfortunately, Walker’s son Tommy witnesses this, and the trauma leaves him deaf, dumb and blind. But Tommy can still play a mean pinball, and he becomes an odd messiah to an army of idol worshippers.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Because, with that story line, it’s a musical—literally a “rock opera”—and because Ken Russell stages every single scene like something out of a bad acid flashback.

COMMENTS: The Who’s original 1969 album, “Tommy” is wonderful to listen to, but its supposed story is impossible to figure out without, so to speak, illustrations. In this film, one of the first recorded in multi-channel sound, director Russell “illustrates”everything in the most garish hues possible—and that’s a good thing. This grotesque, excessive rock musical was clearly a predecessor to MTV, with its non-stop assault of insane imagery; Russell, not exactly the most subtle of filmmakers, is aided and abetted all the way through by an all-star cast. The Who’s lead singer, the great Roger Daltrey, inevitably plays Tommy with a vacant, blue-eyed stare, and belts every song to the back of the theater in the manner that made him famous (on the original “Tommy” album, his singing is much more low-key). Elton John, as the Pinball Wizard, parades around on stilts, while Tina Turner, as the Acid Queen, threatens to rip the screen apart with her intensity (although Paul Nicholas, as Tommy’s physically abusive Cousin Kevin, gives her a run for her money). Meanwhile, Eric Clapton as the Preacher, Keith Moon as the sexually abusive Uncle Ernie, Jack Nicholson (Ann-Margret’s old co-star from 1971’s “Carnal Knowledge”) as the Doctor, and Oliver Reed, as Tommy’s stepfather, are relatively subdued (and, yes, the last two are pretty terrible singers). Topping them all is Ann-Margret, in an unforgettable Oscar-nominated performance, as Tommy’s guilt-ridden mother. Obviously, Ann-Margret’s show tune-trained voice is really not suited to singing Pete Townshend’s music, but that only adds to the film’s strange appeal. Ann-Margret manages to be simultaneously brilliant and over-the-top (as she often is—see her Blanche Dubois in the 1984 version of Streetcar Named Desire), but when the part calls for her to roll around in baked beans and chocolate sauce, she doesn’t hold back. Then you have any number of frenzied images: Sally Simpson’s husband—a dead ringer for the Frankenstein monster, Tina Turner transformed into a giant hypodermic needle, Clapton preaching in a church filled with statues of Marilyn Monroe, Paul Nicholas burning Daltrey with a cigarette—this is a musical, all right, but it’s not exactly Meet Me in St. Louis. This version of Tommy may be bizarre to the point of self-parody, but anyone who’s ever seen the disastrous, but similar, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (produced, like Tommy, by Robert Stigwood), will understand the very special talents of the late Ken Russell.

Unfortunately, the Region 1 DVD (as well as the Blu-Ray) of Tommy has no extras, except for a paper insert describing the film’s “Quintaphonic” soundtrack. Luckily, the movie looks and sounds just fine.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Russell correctly doesn’t give a damn about the material he started with… he just goes ahead and gives us one glorious excess after another… Tommy’s odyssey through life is punctuated by encounters with all sorts of weird folks, of whom the most seductive is Tina Turner as the Acid Queen.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden, Tom Aldredge

PLOT:  A space pilot trades a cat for a “real live girl” whom he can exchange for the “Boy Who

Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast,” whom he intends to swap in turn for the remains of a dead Venusian stud in order to collect a reward.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Genrewise, The American Astronaut could be described as many things—space western, garage band musical, nonsense comedy—but the one thing it indisputably is is a cult movie.  That is to say, it’s a specialized and peculiar little flick that has a devoted group of followers, and a larger contingent of outsiders who are nonplussed by its popularity.  I have to admit that in this case I lean slightly towards the second group.  American Astronaut is very weird (it has a character named “the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast,” for goodness sake), but some of it is tedious, like ninety minutes spent watching a clan of hipsters swapping in-jokes you aren’t let in on.  I can sense the magic other people get from the pic without being able to directly experience it myself.  This is a movie on the cusp of being certified as one of the Best Weird Movies Ever Made, but it will require some reader acclaim to sway my opinion towards adding it to the List.  So get to promoting the movie in the comments, Astronaut fans.

COMMENTS:  How many movies can boast a line like “Gentlemen, the Boy Who Saw a Woman’s Breast has left our planet” or a musical number like “The Girl with a Vagina Made of Glass”?  How about a villain who is incapable of killing unless he has no possible grudge against his victim and a “real live girl” who (in this early stage of her development) is just a suitcase that plays a rock tune when you lift a slat on the casing?  The American Astronaut creates a unique, absurd, but consistent universe through a dry, deadpan DIY approach.  It’s set in a boy’s cosmos, where women are strange creatures who live on one planet while the men live on another.  The movie’s nonsense proclivities are a narrative film incarnation of the free-associative lyrics of writer/director Cory McAbee’s mildly punkish band, the Billy Nayer Show.  One song goes, “A-E-, A-E-I, A-E-I-O-U, I owe you nothing, but sometimes you owe me I-U-A-I-E”; another consists of one singer repeatedly chanting “no” while another harmonizes with a rhythmic “tee-nee-oh-yeah.”  When they start smiling and singing about “the baby in a jar with glasses on and a gun,” it seems like a return to the real world.  Visually, the movie does an excellent job disguising its low-budget origins with black and white photography that keeps the backgrounds in deep shadows, suggesting the existence of a wider, deeper world than they can actually afford to show.  Silhouettes are used to create an illusion of grandness, as when the Boy Who…—dressed, as is his habit, like the messenger god Mercury in an art-deco winged helmet—dances in a spotlight for the workers of Jupiter and casts a massive shadow on the crumbling factory wall behind him.  The musical numbers, which sometimes sound like fractured nursery rhymes with odd, childlike melodies, and sometimes like a tight-knit garage band, aren’t half bad.  It’s amusing that the featured singers (for the most part) aren’t glamorous rock star types, but average-looking middle aged white guys; paunchy, baggy-eyed bartender Eddie (character actor Bill Buell) rocks harder than anyone in the cast.  It’s easy to see, and to admire, the love and care that went into the production; predicting whether this highly peculiar vision will click with you in particular is a trickier proposition.  One downside is that McAbee’s spaceman-for-hire isn’t the charismatic rake in the Han Solo mold the film wants him to be; the star is outshined by his co-stars.  Another minus is that the film is slow to get into gear, starting off with longish and not particularly rewarding scenes of McAbee shaving and taking a long spacewalk to the Ceres bar.  Things don’t start to take off until the dance contest kicks in, about twenty minutes into the running time.  That’s when my favorite scene occurs.  It’s a long, rambling warmup joke about “hertz donuts” told by an aged emcee (Broadway veteran Tom Aldredge) with multiple misemphasized punchlines.  The bar full of rogues and roughnecks laugh at all the wrong places as the shaggy-dog gag drags on and on, ending with the comedian confessing “I’ve never understood this joke” amidst peals of laughter.  The tale is a condensed metaphor for the American Astronaut, a movie that paces itself like a comedy but, when it comes time to tell a joke, consistently zigs into nonsense when you expect it to zag into a laugh.

The American Astronaut has a small but rabid cult, but it could have a much bigger one if it had landed a distribution deal.  As it is, the film is mainly sold through McAbee’s personal website, and has never received the widespread distribution from Netflix or other rental outlets it would need to become a breakout cult hit.  The professionally-made DVD features an interesting, off-center variation on the director’s commentary—McAbee discusses the picture while screening it for a bar full of patrons who ask him questions.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.”–Hazel-Dawn Dumpert, L.A. Weekly (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Rob” who called it “A strange little film put out by the band the Billy Nayer Show” and added, “It may not make your list, but it’s definitely worthy of watching. The movie features a character known only as ‘The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast.’  I’m pretty sure you couldn’t not watch that.”Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Kenneth Anger

FEATURING: Bruce Byron, Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, Mick Jagger, André Soubeyran, Claude Revenant, Nadine Valence, Donald Cammell, Marianne Faithfull, Myriam Gibril

PLOT: The disc includes six short, experimental, largely non-narrative films by Kenneth Anger

made between 1964 and 1972.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Compilations are ineligible for inclusion on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.  Short films have an uphill battle to take a spot on the List that could be occupied by a feature, but either or both of Scorpio Rising and Lucifer Rising (each clocks in at just under 30 minutes long) are meaty and weird enough that they could hear their names called on the final roll.

COMMENTS: Kenneth Anger is one strange dude.  Author of the tabloid-style scandal tome Hollywood Babylon, devotee of Aleister Crowley, pal of rock stars Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page, notoriously unreliable self-mythologizer, and winner of a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute, Anger spends years working on films that only play for a few minutes (his most extensive work is only 35 minutes long).  He sometimes returns and reworks older movies a decade or more after they are released.  Even if you’ve never seen an Anger film, you’ve seen dozens of movies that have been influenced by his work; due to his innovation of scoring parades of surrealistic images to pop music, he’s sometimes considered the father of the music video (though he hates the form and has turned down offers to make videos).  The refracted images of films like Invocation of My Demon Brother also helped define the film style we now think of as “psychedelic.”  This collection contains Anger’s most important and influential works, from the 1960s and early 1970s—the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, when the formerly struggling underground academic filmmaker found himself embraced by the upcoming generation of hipsters. In order of presentation, the films covered in this collection are:

Scorpio Rising (1964): A young motorcyclist named Scorpio polishes his bike, gets dressed in leather, goes to a wild biker Halloween party, then participates in a race.  Scenes of James Dean, Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and a “life of Jesus” movie are intercut into the documentary-like footage, along with images of swastikas, comic books, and altered pop art canvases (the image of a death’s head smoking a cigarette labeled “youth” with Christ now appearing in its mirrored shades).  Motown music hits of 1963 play on the soundtrack, often with clever ironic juxtapositions (when “He’s a Rebel” begins, we are shown a quick shot of both Scorpio and Christ).  It includes scenes of a bikers holding down one of their own (an initiate?) and rubbing mustard on his crotch, the apparent desecration of a church as Scorpio urinates on an altar, and skulls popping up everywhere the eye can see.  It’s a eroticized, mythologized vision of the biker lifestyle, with astrological suggestion that Scorpio and his kind are fated to replace the old Christian guard.  Scorpio Rising is frequently cited as one of the most influential avant-garde films ever made, particularly for its innovative use of contemporary pop music and for its taboo-breaking homoeroticism.  Seen through today’s jaded eyes, it’s as much a curious relic of its time as anything; in many ways, it’s actually tamer and duller than Anger’s more abstract movies.

Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965): A fragment of an uncompleted project that looks like a retread of Scorpio Rising.  Shot in a pink color scheme to a girl group rendition of Bobby Darrin’s “Dream Lover,” it features a young man in tight jeans polishing his custom-built, gleaming-chrome vehicle with a giant powder puff.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969): Anger has claimed that his films are actually “magickal spells” that are capable of raising demons.  The ratio of literalism to metaphor in this belief is uncertain, but the trancelike, ritualistic Invocation could make you sense that there is a demon standing over your shoulder.  More likely, it will make you think someone secretly slipped magic mushroom elixir into your gin and tonic.  It’s a series of rapid fire psychedelic/occult images, often superimposed one on top of the other, set to an abrasive, repetitive Moog synthesizer figure (“composed” by Mick Jagger) that sounds like a malfunctioning paper shredder.  This is what most people imagine when they think of the term “avant-garde film”; it’s the archetypal hippie drug movie.   Among the jumbled flood of images are an albino blinking in the glare of kleig lights, male full frontal nudity, sped-up clips of Anger performing a magick ritual in Haight Ashbury, kaleidoscopic mirrored shots of a male torso sprouting multiple limbs like a faceless Hindu god, occult and Tarot images imprinted over the film, glimpses of the Rolling Stones, and Anton LaVey in front of a skull altar dressed as a silly-looking cartoon devil (horns and all).  There is, reportedly, a continuous loop of subliminal Vietnam war footage that plays throughout the film but doesn’t register to the naked eye.  Weird fans who can tolerate the soundtrack (there is an option to play a more melodic alternate score by Bobby Beausoleil) will find this short trip on a ten-minute mind-melting machine worth taking.

Rabbit’s Moon (filmed 1950/completed 1972.  The version shown here is the seven-minute, re-cut 1979 edition): Rabbit’s Moon, a re-working of an older film, is a refreshing change of pace showcasing a different, radically calmer Anger, and rates as one of the most interesting pieces in this collection.  Shot in glowing, moonlight-tinted black and white, it’s a commedia dell’arte pantomime wherein the clown Pierrot longs for the moon (where, unaccountably, a rabbit lives).  He is tormented by the sudden appearance of the bushy-eyebrowed Harlequin, who uses a magic lantern to conjures up the female Columbina to entrance him, then steals her for himself.  The classical, poetical influence of Jean Cocteau (an early Anger fan who invited the filmmaker to visit France in the late 1940s) is overwhelmingly evident here, and the movie proves that Anger’s depth of mythological reference goes much deeper than just Aleister Crowley.  The moonlit forest glade set is beautifully artificial, littered with silvery leaves.  The musical accompaniment is a catchy British Invasion styled piece called “It Came in the Night” by the otherwise unknown band A Raincoat.

Lucifer Rising (begun 1970/completed 1980): Mixing the astrological/mythological resonances of Scorpio Rising with the restless psychedelia of Demon Brother, Anger’s last major film is a synthesis of much of his previous work and a fitting cap to his career (he stopped making films for 20 years after Lucifer).  Molded this time around Egyptian mythology and Crowley’s notion of an approaching “Aeon of Horus,” it features appearances by Isis, Osiris (played by Donald Cammell), Lillith (heroin-addicted singer Marianne Faithfull) and the titular Lucifer (a “light-bringing” figure who bears little relationship to the Christian devil in Anger’s personal theology).  The ancient Egyptian gods summon the other deities amidst images of erupting volcanoes and magickal rituals.  A glowing orange flying saucer appears in Luxor over Ramses II’s shoulder.  The growling, apocalyptic rock guitar score was composed by Charles Manson associate and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil from prison! 

The Man We Want to Hang (2002):  Virtually a throwaway piece included as a DVD bonus, this 13-minute short is nothing but a series of shots of canvases painted by Aleister Crowley, scored to classical music.  The paintings themselves are competent, but only mildly interesting to those of us not in the cult.

Played end-to-end, the films occupy about 90 minutes of running time.  Fantoma’s DVD presentation of these pieces is exceptional.  Each entry contains a separate demonstration of each film’s restoration alongside commentary by Anger.  Anger’s discussions are curious, because the notoriously temperamental auteur—known for burning his own films in public, snapping at interviewers, and threatening to put a curse on Jimmy Page after a private spat—comes across as a mellow, erudite, retired professor type when discussing his movies.  Some of his commentary may be unreliable; for example, I found it difficult to swallow his insistence that all of the leather-bound motorcyclists in Scorpio Rising—the guys who dressed in drag, bared their buttocks, and rubbed condiments on each others’ crotches—were straight men who insisted their ever-present girlfriends not appear on camera.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…mystic and frequently inscrutable.”–Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Astron-6

FEATURING: Adam Brooks, Conor Sweeney, Matt Kennedy, Mackenzie Murdock, Amy Groening, Lloyd Kaufman

PLOT: A crazed cannibalistic killer goes after fathers in his rape/murder spree.  One-eyed

assassin/maple syrup maker Ahab, young priest Father John Sullivan, paranoid streetwalker Twink, and mystery-solving stripper Chelsea all seek revenge, teaming up for a strange and scattered mission.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: An eye-patched vigilante, a topless stripper with a chainsaw, a nearsighted cannibal rapist, incest, demonic possession, trips to both heaven and hell, a non sequitur commercial for low-budget sci-fi “Star Raiders,” hallucinogenic berries: Father’s Day has a lot of weirdness to recommend it. It starts off as a fairly standard (and insanely gory) grindhouse throwback, but evolves into a bizarre and fantastic adventure that just might be weird enough for the List.

COMMENTS:  Known for their impressive output of horror and comedy shorts, Winnipeg-based collective Astron-6 combines DIY filmmaking with a sick sense of humor and unadulterated love for 80′s straight-to-video schlock.  After making a trailer for the fake exploitation flick “Father’s Day,” Troma offered the group $10,000 to produce a full-length feature of the concept.  At the start it seems like a standard, and completely gruesome, grindhouse throwback with grisly close-ups of penis mutilation and sickening rape/murders set alongside over-the-top character archetypes and an enthusiastic score.  As Ahab (Adam Brooks), Father John (Matthew Kennedy), and Twink (Conor Sweeney) team up in the wake of several close-to-home father murders, it begins to take a turn for the ludicrous and eventually plunges into all-out wacky fantasy, seeming to forget its initial narrative and stylistic leanings—and becoming better for it.

With real pig intestines, buckets of fake blood, and a well-laid green screen, Father’s Day maintains a dark, grungy aesthetic that works well with its 70′s appropriations while exuding DIY innovation that sets it apart from some of its peers.  Steven Kostanski’s stop-motion hell creations and an extended trip around the world for Father John are among the many segments that vary in style and tone.  There’s even a goofy commercial for a fake Star Wars rip-off thrown in about two-thirds of the way through (the feature itself is introduced as a “midnight movie” tv program).  Astron-6 seems to have hundreds of ideas and little interest in streamlining, resulting in a surprisingly dense 99 minutes as myriad references, off-kilter jokes, side-trips, and subplots arise and descend.  Luckily, most of them work, but the ones that don’t result in some unevenness, especially in the overall tone.  The noticeable shift towards the middle is somewhat jarring, but not a dealbreaker.

Father’s Day may be sick and twisted in many ways, but it manages to be most of all fun.  The Astron-6 gang looks like they’re having a blast just being silly together as the plot becomes more and more ridiculous.  The whole cast is great, injecting equal amounts of parody and imagination into their roles, and I especially enjoyed the main three male leads, who have excellent comedic chemistry.  The film’s biggest flaw is its tonal inconsistencies, but for many viewers the inclusion of so many ideas and exploitation references will likely be appreciated.  Astron-6 decided to really go all-out for this film, and by holding nothing back they will impress many and alienate those who wouldn’t get it anyway. And I have a feeling they’re fine with that.

Father’s Day official site.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“With a surreal plotline, exceptional acting, a host of hilarious one-liners, and a large, beautiful cast of many many almost naked women this is one highly recommended giggle & gorefest you really shouldn’t miss.”–Rick McGrath, Quiet Earth (festival screening)

DIRECTED BY: Jean Vigo

FEATURING: Delphin, Jean Dasté, Louis Lefebvre, Gilbert Pruchon, Coco Golstein,Gérard de Bédarieux

PLOT: Schoolboys stage a revolt at a French boarding school.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Zéro de conduite is an important historical film.  It founded the boarding school subgenre, creating a template used by Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and more weirdly by Lindsay Anderson (If…)  With it’s dwarf headmaster, disappearing balls and drawings that come to life, the film is as playful and experimental as a mock rebellion staged by schoolboys before Sunday dinner.  Its mildly surreal oddness nudges the needle on the weirdometer, but, despite its near-legendary status, it’s not thoroughly strange enough to make its way onto the List on the first ballot.

COMMENTS:  Jean Vigo’s extraordinary backstory is almost as fascinating as his films.  The son of an anarchist who died in prison, the auteur left a tiny (about three hours worth of film) but extremely impressive body of work before succumbing to tuberculosis, the age-old nemesis of romantic poets, at the age of 29.  Adding to his mythological stature is the possibility that he may have contributed to his own demise by laboring on his final film up until his last moments, instead of getting much needed bed rest; he may have actually worked himself to death, literally giving his life for his art.

By banning Zéro de conduite, the director’s film about an imaginary rebellion in a boys’ boarding school, for thirteen years, the French censors only augmented Vigo’s legend.  From the perspective of patrons who are used to seeing political leaders openly mocked and clitorises graphically snipped off in movie theaters as they munch on popcorn, the idea of a movie with only a single “merde!’ and no violence, fetal rape, human centipedes, or even an obvious political target would be banned for over a decade is almost unimaginable.  The film contains hardly audible whispers of schoolboy homosexuality, but it was suppressed not for these but for its “anti-French spirit” and “praise of indiscipline.”  Vigo’s anarchic, anti-authoritarian philosophy, which pervades the film’s 44 minute running time, was too hot and subversive for 1933 sensibilities.

Today, of course, the movie is notably tame.  In fact, if you’ve been exposed to any of the anti-authority movies made since Vigo’s film, you may go in expecting to see Nurse Ratchet-styled psychological abuse and sadistic cane lashings.  But there isn’t even one blow delivered in Zéro, much less 400.  The student’s major complaints are being awakened early in the morning and served beans meal after meal.  Their teachers aren’t madmen and dictators, but ineffectual buffoons.  The headmaster is a dwarf with a fake beard; far from being an imposing figure, he’s at eye level with the boys he lords over.  The lack of any real oppression and outrage here expresses Vigo’s libertarian philosophy far better than if  had overplayed his hand and identified authority with excessive cruelty.  What the school is guilty of imposing on the children isn’t tyranny, but a dreary, drab, linear conformity: the rows of beds, the marching in lines, the short-pants uniforms.  The boys don’t revolt against a corrupt social order; they rebel against the ridiculous notion of order itself.  It’s the purest ideal of anarchy.

Vigo wasn’t a card-carrying Surrealist, despite being a contemporary of the movement.  He nonetheless relied on a few of the same shocking, reality-busting techniques as the Un Chien Andalou crew.  His philosophical anarchism extends to the movie’s form; Zéro de conduite refuses to be restrained by logic or possibility.  There’s a scatterbrained teacher who breaks into a Charlie Chaplin impersonation during recess; a ball that magically disappears and reappears; and a cartoon sketch of a “Mr. Beanpole” who animates and morphs into Napoleon.  The children’s first revolt is a dreamlike pillow-fight with slow-motion and backwards sequences, scored to eerie music: a wordless anthem accompanied by a back-masked accordion.  (The music for this scene was actually written out first, then inverted and performed by musicians in reverse, then played backwards on the soundtrack to restore the original melody in a distorted form).  The ridiculous headmaster keeps his hat under a glass dome on a mantlepiece that’s too high for him to reach without standing on his tiptoes.  The weirdest touch of all may occur at the final ceremony that the boys disrupt as their pivotal act of rebellion: the principal and his honored guests and associates sit in chairs in front of bleachers, watching soldiers performing on pommel horses.  The bourgeois dignitaries arrayed behind them are a row of life-sized dolls.

The seldom-seen Zéro de conduite is one of those films you once read about in musty old reference books (or, these days, on a cached blog entry buried deep in your bookmarks) that turns out to be somewhat underwhelming when you finally see it.  The pacing is creaky, the drama underdeveloped.  The grand revolution the film has been building towards consists of about thirty seconds of the boys throwing coconuts and pots down on the heads of the established order, who meekly depart, stage left, without putting up a fight.  It’s a noteworthy and original work, but had the French not banned the film, I doubt it would carry the legendary reputation it has today.  Censors are the best marketing department a movie can have.  Zéro is worthwhile to see for its historical importance, and it’s a work of art, to be sure; but to my mind, it falls just short of masterpiece status.

While it’s combination of weirdness and reputation make Zéro de conduite the most significant title for our purposes, it’s not the headliner of the Criterion Collection’s “The Complete Jean Vigo.”  That honor goes to L’Atalante, Vigo’s only full-length feature, a masterpiece of sentimental romance about a barge captain who takes his young wife to live on board his vessel.  While this tale of love and betrayal is a surprisingly conventional work from the anarchistic Vigo, there are a two famous impressionistic sequences that have a weird-ish poetry to them.  In one, the captain (Dasté, the sympathetic teacher from Conduit) sees a vision of his wife floating in the muddy depths of the Seine; the other is a wispy, sadly erotic montage of the two lovers writhing in separate beds, connected only by a shadowed polka dot motif.  The Criterion disc also contains Vigo’s only two shorts.  Taris is a profile of a French swimming champion.  It features beautiful underwater photography, but shows little true passion, and feels like work done for hire.  Far more interesting is À propos de Nice, an experimental pseudo-documentary (some scenes are staged for comedic effects) on the vacation city of Nice, filmed partly during a street carnival.  Nice features lots of crazy Dutch angles and pans, strange faces, juxtapositions (a shot of a primping woman is followed by an ostrich), and a healthy interest in sex (dig that upskirt camerawork!)  There are a few sequences that qualify as lightly surrealist: tourists who turn into dolls and are raked along with the chips by a roulette croupier, a man with a politically incorrect case of sunburn, and a surprising nude scene.  Like the rest of the disc, Nice won’t be to most modern tastes; but it’s fascinating because it was made before the rules were laid down, by a director making up a visual language as he went along.  It’s novel and enthusiastic enough to catch the interest of anyone serious about cinema.  Vigo scholar Michael Temple provides commentary on each film in the set.  A second disc is full of interviews and documentaries about Vigo, and also contains a (very short) animated tribute by fellow filmmaker Michel Gondry.

Zéro de conduite is in the public domain and may be viewed or downloaded at the Internet Archive, among other venues.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a series of vignettes lampooning the faculty climaxed by a weird, dream-like rebellion of the entire student body. These amorphous scenes, strung together by a vague continuity may be art but they are also pretty chaotic.”–A.H. Weiler, The New York Times (1947 re-release)

DIRECTED BY: Paul Bartel

FEATURING: Ayn Ruymen, Lucille Benson, John Ventantonio

PLOT: A sexually curious teenage runaway negotiates the deviant scumbags in her crazy

aunt’s creaky boarding house.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  It might make the List thanks to the atmosphere of sleazy psychosexual depravity that’s slathered on thicker than the blue eye shadow teenage Cheryl cakes on to try to make herself look like a woman.

COMMENTS: Private Parts is a haunted  house movie, except that the ghosts bedeviling the heroine are the bizarre, boozy boarders at her aunt’s decrepit hotel, and she’s not nearly as wary of them as she need to be.  This is a movie full of creaking floorboards, turning doorknobs, and unseen men peeping through knotholes in a dusty old hotel.  Adding to the atmosphere is a wonderfully overwrought Bernard Hermann-inspired soundtrack that’s with us so constantly that it actually creates tension when it disappears for a moment to allow the characters to speak.  Not that what this collection of skid-row oddballs has to say would be particularly reassuring.  We have the Reverend, who at one point suggests he should slip out of his clerical vestments into something more comfortable; the spooky old hag who calls young Cheryl “Alice” after a resident who disappeared a long time ago under suspicious circumstances; and there’s the hotelier herself, Aunt Martha, who loves funerals, hates painted women and believes “the body is a prison.”  There’s also George, the silent young photographer with the darkroom in the basement and the creepy stare that focuses on pubescent Cheryl whenever she’s in the room.  Each of these weirdos has deeper secrets in their closets, which Cheryl will uncover when she starts snooping around their rooms against her Aunt’s orders (hint to future runaways: you should never trust a guy who owns a customized carrying case for his personal syringe).  Obviously, this is no place for a naïf like Cheryl, but she’s not oblivious to the degeneracy—she’s actively drawn to it.  Curious about sex but totally inexperienced, she enjoys the feel of a grown man’s eyes on her developing body, without understanding the difference between healthy lust and sick perversion.  All she knows is, after receiving presents of erotica and spiderweb lingerie from a secret admirer, boys her own age suddenly seem boring.  Although the movie sports a body count, the tension comes from hoping Cheryl will somehow escape what seems to be her inevitable seduction and corruption.  If IMDB is to be believed, Ayn Ruymen was 25 years old when she played the part, but you may have a hard time believing the actress is a day over 16.  Not only does she have an adolescent build, she plays the part with a wonderful mix of innocent naughtiness; she mischievously snoops and pranks the boarders, but still sleeps with a teddy bear and isn’t half as sophisticated as she thinks.  The bits with a bizarre, customizable “blow up” doll are unforgettably creepy.  After playing as straight psychohorror through most of the running time, Private Parts takes a strange detour into black comedy territory for the conclusion with the arrival of a couple of ludicrously blasé cops, and throws out a couple of scarcely believable twists at the very end as the weird capper.  All told, Private Parts a deliciously depraved debut from oddball Paul Bartel.

Private Parts is a should-be cult movie that’s still searching for its cult forty years after release.  For some reason, MGM picked the movie up for distribution, then apparently balked at the pseudo-pedophiliac subject matter and buried the movie.  The flick has been consistently overlooked since; those who caught it in its brief theatrical run or stumbled upon its unheralded VHS or DVD releases remember it, but word of mouth has never made it a hit, despite its midnight movie feel and pleasing perversity.  Ironically, director Paul Bartel received more exposure making films like Death Race 2000 for Roger Corman (Roger’s brother Gene was producer on Private Parts) than he with this Hollywood debut.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for pure excess and surreal humor, it’s something of a minor pop art masterpiece; a careful blending of the eccentric and the sleazy, very much akin to other midnight revival mainstays like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the ’70s films of John Waters, with a wickedly unique take on repressed desire and secret shame.”–Paul Corupe, DVD Verdict (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Gerby” who called it “a strange one!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Tony Palmer & Frank Zappa

FEATURING: Howard Kaylan, Mark Volman, Theodore Bikel, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, Jimmy Carl Black

PLOT: 200 Motels is a series of sketches, experiments and concert footage loosely organized

as a reflection on the mixture of insanity and tedium experienced by a rock and roll band on tour.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The movie’s wild visuals, absurd jokes and attention deficit disorder pacing are enough to bring it to our attention.  But if anything sets 200 Motels apart from the other psychedelic cinematic noodlings of the hippie era, it’s Frank Zappa’s extraordinarily weird music—a unique mix of jazz-inflected blues/rock, avant-garde 12-tone classical music, and junior high school sex jokes.

COMMENTS:  Ringo Starr plays Larry the Large Dwarf, portraying Frank Zappa.  The Who drummer Keith Moon is a female groupie dressed like Sally Field in “The Flying Nun.”   Theodore Bickel plays an omniscient Master of Ceremonies who brings Zappa’s band, the Mothers of Invention, a cheeseburger, and demands they sign for the delivery—in blood.  Bickel’s character (or at least one of them) also explains the movie’s philosophy to the band: “You must remember that within the conceptual framework of this filmic event, nothing really matters.  It is entirely possible for several subjective realities to coexist.”  Zappa himself is barely in the movie and never speaks (or sings).  He’s only briefly glimpsed in concert footage—although the other band members reference him as a godlike figure who spies on them through an empty beer bottle.  Other than appeasing the great god Frank, the Mothers only care about three things—scoring dope, getting paid, and getting laid.  The characters in this “surrealistic documentary” drift in and out of various skits, animations, and drug trips, and also find time to perform numbers like “Mystery Roach,” “Lonesome Cowboy Burt,” and an oratorio in praise of the penis.  One highlight sees lead singers Kaylan and Volman taking a “trip” to everytown “Centerville,” which is full of churches and liquor stores and bathed in wavy zebra stripes that lysergically distort the small town parade of priests, drunken construction workers and majorettes.  There’s also “Dental Hyegine Dilemma,” a crude (in every sense of the word) cartoon that sees a drugged-up band member reject good spirit Donovan (a self-described “cosmic love pump matrix”) in favor of a devil who convinces him to break away from “comedy music” and start his own band; the imp also persuades him to steal ashtrays from the motel and to roll up and smoke a six week old unwashed bath mat.  Want more?  There’s experimental film splicing, a full orchestra playing Zappa’s dissonant compositions, topless groupies, a chorus of Klansmen, and a closing benediction that starts with the words, “Lord have mercy on the people in England for the terrible food these people must eat…”  Basically, 200 Motels is a freak-out revue that comes off like a particularly undisciplined 90 minute episode of Monty Python interspersed with obscene songs and cacophonous experimental compositions.  Zappa may not appear, but his bawdy, short-attention-span spirit is definitely the soul of the film.  200 Motels is the perfect definition of an uneven movie, but it’s worth checking out; if for nothing else, as a document of the anarchic psychedelic era and of Zappa’s deranged genius.  It’ll blow your mind, if not expand it.

200 Motels‘ trippy look, consisting largely of colored solarized images laid one on top of the other, was achieved by shooting on videotape and compositing several negatives together to make one roll of 35 mm film.  The visual gimmickry, courtesy of Tony Palmer (who went on to a long and successful career documenting rock and classical musical performances), is artistic and effective, although the effects look antiquated and quaint today.  At the time, no one had ever used this process before, and even the negative reviewers marveled at what they were seeing.

DVD NOTE: the Amazon link above is for a VHS version of the film.  A Region 0 DVD copy, released together with a booklet by Tony Palmer, does exist—I purchased one from Amazon over a year ago.  It’s since been removed from the site, however, suggesting that Palmer never properly obtained the rights to re-issue the film from the notoriously stingy and litigious Zappa estate.  There is currently no legitimately licensed DVD version of the film for sale and, so far as I am aware, no imminent plans to release one.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Whatever else it may be, Frank Zappa’s ’200 Motels’ is a joyous, fanatic, slightly weird experiment in the uses of the color videotape process. If there is more that can be done with videotape, I do not want to be there when they do it… overbearing is the word for this movie. It assaults the mind with everything on hand.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Bruce,” who called it “very funny and very weird” and advised us to “take a break from you ‘heavy’ films and watch this one.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Carlos Atanes

FEATURING: Marina Gatell, Ana Mayo, Paco Moreno, Ardiana Ferrer, Ignasi Vidal

PLOT: On the night before the world is to be swallowed up by a black hole, a man discovers a

world underneath his bed ruled by a chess-obsessed dominatrix queen.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Carlos Atanes is a defiantly, and proudly, surrealistic director, and his brief filmography (three features and dozens of bizarre shorts) already constitutes a body of weird work that could be worthy of recognition on this List.  With its wardrobe of black leather and chrome dental restraints along with a powerful musical score that ranges from 40s show tunes to 80s synth pop, Maximum Shame is perhaps Atanes’ most ambitious and polished—not to mention weirdest—feature work.

COMMENTS:  You have to love the tagline for Maximum Shame, which describes the movie as “an apocalyptic fetish horror musical chess sci-fi weird feature movie.”  The surprising thing is that the film, which plays like a combination of “Alice in Wonderland” and the Orpheus legend staged by refugees from a leather bar in a deserted warehouse, largely lives up to that description.  The words “apocalyptic,” fetish,” and “chess” define the three motifs that keep the film (somewhat) grounded.  The story, such as it is, takes place as a black hole is encroaching on earth (or so we are told), and characters mention the total destruction of the world sometimes as an imminent cataclysm, and sometimes as a disaster that’s already come to pass.  The film’s s&m/b&d fetishism is obvious from the costuming, most notably the deviant dental equipment used to keep slaves’ mouths perpetually splayed.  (Although the Queen plays games of dominance and submission, there is no overt sexuality in the film—which, together with its alienating weirdness, makes it of only marginal interest to the bondage crowd).  All of the characters have, or are given, the names of chess pieces, and talk of gambits and sacrificing rooks makes up a large part of the plot.  “Horror” and “sci-fi” turn out to be the least accurate of the descriptors.  The film does speak of black holes and invokes a theory of infinite parallel universes in a throwaway bid to explain the inexplicable existence of a decaying warehouse ruled by a roller-skating dominatrix under the protagonists’ bed, but, unlike Atanes’ previous feature Proxima, Shame is not hardcore (or even softcore) science fiction.  As for horror, the overall feel of Maximum Shame is disquieting, and the male and female leads both find themselves in some sort of jeopardy, but the rules of the movie’s world are too fluid and arbitrary to create a relatable terror; characters are just as likely to break into a friendly song as they are to to tie you up, insert a ball gag in your mouth and imprison you in a cardboard box.  Indeed, the film could almost as easily be called a “comedy” as a sci-fi or horror picture; there are as many absurdly funny moments as there are terrifying ones.  As far as the “musical” designation, while the score by immensely talented newcomer Marc Álvarez is eclectic and impressive—I love the bit where he has a distant xylophone shadowing Ana Mayo’s words for emphasis—there are actually only two full-fledged production numbers in the film.  Both pieces are wonderfully incongruous, like a Gilbert and Sullivan arias arising in the middle of a Cinema of Transgression atrocity.  They’re also beautifully belted out (one actress is dubbed by professional soprano Dulcinea Juárez), but there’s little to no choreography to go along with the singing—if only the ghost of Busby Berkeley had been available to give these pieces the surrealistic staging they deserved!  Of course, of the seven major tagline adjectives (we leave “feature” to one side as too obvious) “weird” is the superlative that fits the movie tighter than a slave girl’s latex corset.  If the above description hasn’t made that abundantly clear, I’ll leave you with a teaser for the movie’s “Queen of Catalan Love” sequence, in which the Queen nearly has an orgasm while receiving a foot massage and channeling the lovely British model Eleanor James on her magic mirror, but becomes confused when the image begins eating handfuls of cooked spaghetti and trans-dimensionally dripping them from her mouth onto the cement floor while upbeat New Age music straight out of a tender montage from a 1984 romantic comedy plays in the background.  The sequence is funny, erotic, and genuinely creepy all at the same time; it’s sort of the distilled essence of the shameless craziness that is Maximum Shame.

I do have one clear complaint about Maximum Shame, but it relates to the burn-to-order DVD, and not the film itself.  Although the packaging is attractive, I encountered playback annoyances.  When I inserted the disc into my Blu-ray/DVD player, it began playing automatically and immediately without going to the usual title screen.  When I brought up the DVD menu to see what I might have missed, I found a menu design with the movie title, but nothing that could be selected.  I had to eject and re-insert the disc to resume play.  When I tried to play the film on my personal computer with VLC media player, it consistently crashed.  The program could be immediately restarted, but it defaulted to that dead-end menu screen.  The movie could only be viewed by manually selecting “Title 1″ from the software’s playback menu.  On both machines, I could eventually play the movie, but the botched DVD architecture made it a hassle.  It’s possible my disc was specifically defective, but I can say that there are no special features on the DVD—and not even any standard features like individual chapter stops.  Since DVD-R’s can be changed on the fly, these problems may be addressed in the future. UPDATE: I’ve been informed the problems with the DVD-R are being looked into and should be corrected within a few days.  UPDATE 2: I’ve been informed that the DVD architecture has been fixed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Carlos Atanes has stuffed the allegorical envelope so full that very little in his down-the-rabbit-hole fantasy Maximum Shame remotely resembles anything that could be considered reality.”–Mike Everleth, BadLit.com (DVD)

DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by producer.

DIRECTED BY: Shane Carruth

FEATURING: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

PLOT: Two engineer/entrepreneurs accidentally discover a box that allows time travel, and

soon get themselves into trouble.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Primer‘s baffling story gives you an untethered, free-falling in reality feeling.  But although the dense, complicated, and deliberately obtuse plot produces a level of confusion comparable in effect to the weirdest David Lynch movies, I’ve got the sinking feeling that, if you dissect  it carefully, there’s a perfectly logical explanation for everything that happens.  (That complaint makes the 366 project the only outlet in the world to potentially reject Primer because it makes too much sense).

COMMENTS: If what you most value in a movie is a plot that will inspire you to sit down and create a schematic flowchart—maybe using multiple ink colors to illustrate various contingencies—in order to figure out what’s going on, then have I got a recommendation for you!  Made for an incredible $7,000 on suburban locations with only two major characters and no special effects, Primer relies entirely on it’s smart, knotty script to keep the viewer interested—and succeeds admirably.  After a pre-time travel prologue, joltingly edited and spoken largely in an untranslated engineerese that’s fairly bewildering in itself, Aaron and Abe (A & B?) stumble upon a box that will allow them to travel backwards in time for about a day at a time.  Like any of us would, they initially use the box to play the stock market, investing in the day’s biggest mid-cap mover.  After placing their online orders in the morning, they agree to carefully lock themselves in a hotel room away from the rest of the world so that they won’t accidentally kill their own grandfathers or meet their doubles wandering around on the street.  The plan goes well for a while, but then strange, logic-defying events start happening, and each of the two men wonders if the other is cheating on their agreement, secretly going back a day to change events for personal reasons.  Paranoia mounts as they become suspicious of each other and of reality itself.  That brief synopsis actually makes Primer sound more (initially) coherent than it is; the fact is that only a few very subtle clues are strewn about to explain to us what is actually happening at a given moment, the timeline can’t honestly be tracked on a single viewing (because some scenes replay for a second or third time as time-traveling doubles and triples rewrite events), and Carruth frequently deploys vicious jump-cut editing to further disorient us.  It’s extremely confusing, but that’s the point: when Aaron and Abe begin casually screwing with causality, both they, and we, lose track of what’s going on and which timeline we’re actually in.  At one point, a voice on the soundtrack (making a phone call from some future past) reminds us that “the permutations were endless;” if either of the time trippers are tempted to change the future once, they might change it a thousand times, and even if you trust yourself, can you trust your double?  You can approach Primer in one of two ways: you can look at it as a puzzle to be solved, or you can simply enjoy soaking in the free-floating possibilities of the scenario.  I’m in the second camp: to me there are consequences that are unexplored in the narrative that are as interesting, potentially more so, than the ones that are delineated.   But if you find yourself in the first camp, where your fellow campers huddle about the TV screen watching the movie over and over again with a notepad in hand to transcribe the clues, you should realize that any fan “solution” to the movie is going to necessarily involve some conjecture.  In his director’s commentary, Carruth is candid in saying that he did not want the audience to clearly understand everything that happens, because the characters through whose eyes we experience the story don’t understand everything that is happening to them.  With some time alone with a pen and pencil you can reconstruct most of what happens, but, to my mind, you’d be better off focusing on relishing the possibilities and the “feel” of the story.  To Primer‘s detriment, there is no great emotional core to this highly intellectual story, and there are no wondrous images or masterful scenes for the movie to hang its hat on.  However, considering the budget, Carruth (a former engineer who decided he wanted more from a career and taught himself filmmaking from scratch) does an amazing job of making a professional looking-film.  The cinematography, sound and editing seldom become a distraction by betraying their low-budget origins, and the acting is solid and naturalistic; but, Primer earns its recommended rating entirely on the basis of its clever, novel, and ingenious script.

This Jason Gendler article for Nebula magazine contains a convincing elucidation of the plot (it also uses some technical terms from the field of literary analysis that you may have to look up).  If you enjoy this mini-genre of the time-travel puzzle movie, you’ll want to check out Donnie Darko (of course), Triangle, and Timecrimes as well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… Mullholland Dr. for math geeks…”–Aaron Hillis, Premiere Magazine (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Snowcrash,” who advised, “check it out, it is weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Ingmar Bergman

FEATURING: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Nils Poppe, Bengt Ekerot, Bibi Andersson

PLOT:  A disillusioned knight and his cynical squire return to a 14th century Sweden ravaged

by the Black Plague; Death comes for the knight, but he entices the Reaper to play a game of chess for his soul.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The Seventh Seal is undoubtedly a great movie, but its weirdness is in doubt.  In fact, trying to decide if this film is strange enough to make it on the List almost makes me feel like Antonius Block wondering if there’s a God out there.  As an existential allegory, the film has a significant amount of unreality in its corner; although much of the movie is a starkly realistic portrait of medieval life, Bergman often ignores logic in minor ways when necessary to make his larger metaphorical points.  He also incorporates the fantastic in one major way, by making Death a literal character in the film, a “living, breathing” character who not only plays chess but also poses as a priest and chops down a tree with his scythe.  That’s not much weirdness to go on, though, and the best external support I can find for considering the movie “weird” is the fact that it’s been (inaccurately) tagged with “surrealism” on IMDB.   I’m torn; the weird movie community will need to chime in on this one.

COMMENTS: The Seventh Seal has a big, imposing reputation as a masterpiece of world cinema, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you may be surprised to find that most of what you think you know about it is wrong.  In the first place, it’s not nearly as gloomy as you may have heard.  True, every frame of the film is suffused with the foreknowledge of death—Bergman is very in-your-face with his message that you are going to die, and it’s going to be horrible—but the grim scenes alternate with lighthearted, comic ones.  The entire dynamic between the drunken smith Plog, and his unfaithful wife Maria, and her unlucky paramour Scat, for example, has a tone of bawdy Shakespearean comedy.  The idyllic scenes where the knight enjoys a meal of milk and wild strawberries with the juggler Jof and his family have a warmth that temporarily drives away the chill—even though there is a skull peering over the picnickers’ shoulders.  The movie is also not as challenging or enigmatic as you may have been led to believe.  While Seal is an allegory, it’s not exactly an obscure one: you don’t need to scratch your head and try to figure out which character represents death.  It’s the guy in the black robes with the skull face who says, “I am Death.”  Characters have deep thoughts about the meaning of life, but they don’t hide them under layers of poetic obfuscation: they say exactly what they think (in fact, they say what we all sometimes think, but are afraid to say out loud).  One final thing that may surprise you is that, despite the fact that the knight’s chess game with Death makes a powerful plot hook, Max von Sydow‘s troubled paladin doesn’t dominate the film.  The Seventh Seal is a true ensemble piece, full of episodes and subplots that simultaneously evoke a believable medieval milieu and give each cast member a moment to shine.  There’s Bergman’s recreation of what a Dark Ages variety show might have looked like, an amazing pageant of flagellants, and a minor villain who threads his way in and out of the story and gets his comeuppance. Von Sydow’s performance is actually a bit theatrical, and the best thing about it is the way at a mere twenty-six years of age he projects a much older figure, one who’s been crushed by the weight of the world. As the earthy squire, Gunnar Björnstrand, a calmly atheistic counterpoint to von Sydow’s tormented agnostic, makes a bigger impression.  He’s more nuanced than the one-note knight, capable of singing a bawdy song one moment and rescuing a damsel in distress the other, and we suspect that Bergman admires the squire’s unflinching defiance of death and refusal to grasp at existential straws (even when he’s about to fall into the void, he exults that he is still able to roll his eyes and wiggle his toes).  One thing about the film that doesn’t belie its reputation, of course, is the imagery.  Gunnar Fischer’s cinematography, with its many subtly unnatural lighting schemes, is a triumph.  The bookend images of Death playing chess, then leading his new conquests on a macabre dance on a hillside by a fjord, burn themselves into your mind’s eye and endure through the ages.  There’s a reason they’ve been parodied in everything from Woody Allen’s Love and Death to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and it’s not because they’re risible or easily forgotten.

The Criterion Collection 2-disc DVD contains all the usual bells and whistles plus a bonus feature, the documentary Bergman Island, an 83 minute series of interviews with the venerable director shot after his retirement to the remote island of Fårö.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The actor’s faces, the aura of magic, the ambiguities, and the riddle at the heart of the film all contribute to it stature.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

(This movie was nominated for review by “Nightingail,” who said, “it’s on a lot of critics’ lists as one of the greatest movies of all time, but it’s also wonderfully weird, I think :-)” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)