DIRECTED BY: Kôji Wakamatsu

FEATURING: Shinobu Terajima, Keigo Kasuya

PLOT: Lieutenant Kurokawa loses all four limbs and is rendered deaf, dumb and disfigured

during the Japanese invasion of China on the eve of World War II; when the Emperor declares him a “Living War God,” his wife Shigeko is ordered to care for the living torso, including fulfilling all her usual wifely duties.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite its perverse premise and its superficial similarities to the Certified Weird Johnny Got His Gun, Caterpillar isn’t that weird; its an intense domestic drama about duty.

COMMENTS: Lieutenant Kurokawa is a monster. Scarred by the war, unable to hear or to speak (with great difficulty, he can sometimes painfully squeeze out a single syllable), he’s essentially a torso, an esophagus and a fully-functional phallus. Flashbacks reveal that the caterpillar, now revered as a god, was actually a moral monster long before his physique was carved up. The duty to care for the god-monster falls upon long-suffering partner Shigeko, who must feed him, wipe him, and cater to his suddenly insatiable sexual needs.  For the wife, the mangled Lieutenant combines the worst aspects of an infant and a spouse—completely dependent, demanding, and incoherent, but with no compensatory cuteness.  She lives alone with him in a one-room house of horrors. Yet, perversely, this seeming disaster delivers an unexpected upside for the poor farm wife. She gains social standing in the village as the caretaker for a god. She is sure to wheel him out in his cart daily to shore up the morale of the rapidly depopulating village as all available able-bodied men are shipped to the front to help failing war effort (even as the daily radio broadcasts detail Japan’s magnificent martial victories). On the home front, Shigeko also eventually learns to enjoy the petty power she has to deny the god a little bit of rice or sex, becoming herself a mini-dictator of an empire consisting of one subject on a straw mat. Caterpillar starts slowly but draws you in to the compellingly claustrophobic dynamic between these two unlikely mates yoked together by fate and obligation. Shinobu Terajima’s performance as the wife is brave and sympathetic (she won many awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival), but Keigo Kasuya’s turn as the caterpillar is even more crucial to the film’s success. His ability to convey mute fury and desperation with just his eyes, stutters and howls humanizes his role as a symbol of national and domestic fascism. The film never becomes truly exploitative, but there is plenty of caterpillar/human sex, in multiple positions, to titillate the curious. The cinematography is mostly cast in a drab browns that are effective at evoking a backwater rural lifestyle but aren’t particularly pleasing to look at. The budget is obviously tiny: for events outside of the hut and the village, the movie mainly relies on archival footage, along with one war crime recreation with distracting CG flames superimposed over the scene.  But the inherent horrific drama and Wakamatsu’s insistent indictment of unthinking duty overcome the cheapness, and Caterillar metamorphoses into an anti-authority parable worth paying attention to.

Like many Japanese directors, Kôji Wakamatsu began his career in the trenches making “pink” films before graduating to more serious features. His filmography contains some titles he’d probably prefer we forgot: movies with names like The Embryo Hunts in Secret, Diary Story of a Japanese Rapist, and Violated Angels. In the 1970s Wakamatsu began slipping more politics into his exploitation films, culminating in  United Red Army (2008), an entirely serious drama about the collapse of the Japanese radical movement in the 1970s, and in this film. Caterpillar was adapted from a 1929 short story by Edogawa Rampo that was originally banned as perverse and unpatriotic.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a sexually charged two-hander with blunt allegorical implications… Audience interest will be limited to Wakamatsu devotees and the kind of cult-oriented audiences who automatically perk up at the chance to see simulated amputee sex.”–Vadim Rizov, Boxoffice Magazine (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Koike

FEATURING: Takuya Kamura, Yû Aoi, Tadanobu Asano

PLOT: Set in a distant future and moving between multiple planets, this is a fairly simple tale of

a major road race taking place on a militaristic planet that doesn’t want it there.  Racers “Sweet” JP, the big-haired underdog, and Sonoshee, a single-minded gearhead, are the main focus of the story.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Armed with an eclectic cast of alien characters and a host of over-the-top shenanigans, Redline might come off as “weird” to someone unfamiliar with anime, but I’d say the stranger humor and visuals fit in pretty squarely with other properties of the genre.  It’s an imaginative and enormously entertaining film, just not especially Weird.

COMMENTS:  The future laid out in Redline is certainly an intriguing one, if completely ludicrous.  Hot shot reckless racer JP makes it to the titular big interstellar race, held on a militaristic planet that hasn’t consented to be the host.  He cozies up to Sonoshee, a cute green-haired lady who is one of the most serious and intimidating drivers there, and together the two attempt to navigate a strange obstacle course against alien competitors (some with inexplicable magic powers) and large-scale weaponry.  Squeezing in ESPN-like profiles of various racers—from an experienced cyborg who’s fused himself with his machine to a pair of scantily clad pop stars hailing from a magical princess planet—there’s some room for satire, too.

This movie is essentially all spectacle and adrenaline, with very little comprehensible or meaningful plot holding it together, but it’s not like the filmmakers are operating under any pretense of depth.  They’ve created a gorgeously animated, pumped-up sci-fi thriller, and that’s all that’s needed!  The characters are slick, and the vehicle designs slicker, with plenty of exaggerated personalities and colorful attachments for an engaging race line-up.  Sure, there’s a silly romantic/secret-past subplot thrown in there, but it’s never taken very seriously.  Various secondary stories are introduced, such as the military planet’s worker resistance and JP’s involvement in race-fixing, but the race itself remains the focus and it’s easy to forget that anything else is going on (the script certainly seems to by the end).  The set-up can be confusing at times due to an influx of minor characters and limited explanation of the obviously complex political and environmental structures.

The strengths of Redline lie almost completely in its visuals and fast pacing.  The dark shading and bright color schemes, the over-the-top hair styles and imaginative alien creatures, the quick-cut-editing and crazy landscapes: it’s all fantastically sweet eye-candy, set to an ecstatic musical score.  It’s violent but fun, and there’s probably political commentary thrown in there somewhere.  The script is cheesy at points, but vaguely self-aware.  It’s just a very cool movie all around, rarely letting up for a moment in its quest to assault the senses with psychedelic imagery and revving engines.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One of the most visually spectacular toons in recent years, pic is a thumping ride for fanboys, but the script’s underdeveloped central romance and the fizzling out of intriguing plot threads will impede wider acceptance… [Plays] like a twisted combo of “Death Race 2000,” “Speed Racer” and a ’50s hot-rod movie on steroids…”–Variety (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Jean-Luc Godard

FEATURING: Marine Battaggia, Catherine Tanvier, Christian Sinniger, Gulliver Hecq, Eye Haidara, Élisabeth Vitali

PLOT: Snippets of scenes involving passengers on a cruise ship are followed by a long segment

exploring a rural French family who run a gas station; it’s topped off with impressionistic travelogues to Egypt, Palestine, and other locales.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s weird—by way of being random and impenetrable—but it’s also boring.  Really boring.  Had Jean-Luc Goddard’s name not been attached, this movie would remain happily unseen by all but a handful of unlucky film festival attendees.

COMMENTS: Jean-Luc Goddard has been telling French magazines that “cinema is dead” (though he would say “le cinéma est mort” and translate it as “film    dead.”)  Film Socialisme is the work of an auteur who truly believes that sentiment: it’s a dispassionate, bloodless dissection of moving images.  It offers us actors but no characters, situations but no drama, incidents but no story, ideas but no argument, and challenges but no rewards.  Deliberately obtuse, Film Socialisme sets out to frustrate: the first thing English speakers will notice is that Godard chooses not to fully translate the French dialogue, opting instead to tell the story through what he calls “Navajo English.”  Large portions of the French dialogue are left untranslated, and when the viewer does see subtitles he reads only snatches like “watch    notell    time” and “itshim    wariswar.”  Sometimes the language will switch from French to English or German or Russian, sometimes in the middle of a conversation; one presumes that this provides brief  opportunities for Francophones to enjoy “Navajo French.”  Structurally, Film Socialisme is divided into three chapters.  The first, titled “Des choses comme ça,” takes place aboard a cruise liner and explores fragments of stories from various travelers that don’t appear to add up to anything: a woman is trying to learn to speak cat by watching kitties on her laptop, a couple have a conversation about the Allied landing in North Africa while ignoring an apparently drunk woman careening into the window behind them, Yank chanteuse Patti Smith plays a few lines of a new song and wanders around the poop deck with her guitar, and so on.  The “action” is frequently broken up by intertitles reading “Des choses” and/or “comme ça.”  There are also  (randomly inserted but) lovely images of choppy waves, schools of fish shot from below, and sunset seascapes.  Experimental photography is sometimes used for the ship’s interior; supersaturation and odd filters turn the casinos and bars into drunken, blurry riots of primary colors.  (Cinematography is the one area where Film Socialisme occasionally shines).  After forty-five minutes on this ship to nowhere we arrive at our next destination—”Quo vadis Europa”—and the pace slows as we observe the lives of a couple running a gas station in rural France.  A pesky film crew shows up to interview them.  They have a llama, a burro, a kid, and a pretty teenage daughter, and that’s as interesting as their lives get.  Wikipedia suggests this segment involves the kids “summoning their parents to appear before the ‘tribunal of their childhood,’ demanding serious answers on the themes of liberty, equality, and fraternity.”  With only a smattering of French and no assistance from the subtitles, it’s impossible for me to judge whether this is accurate or not (the reporters seem more focused on the upcoming elections).  I describe the segment by saying that nothing happens for thirty five minutes; possibly in an attempt by Godard to make us long to get aboard that cruise ship and sail from inconsequentiality into incomprehensibility.  We finally reach the last section, “Nos humanités,” which an impressionistic tour of Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Napoli, and Barcelona.  Most of these locales were mentioned in passing by people on the cruise ship; all of them are Mediterranean ports the vessel might have visited, with the exception of Odessa, which Godard threw in so he could insert his re-edit of Eisenstein’s famous “Odessa steps” montage.  Hellas is represented by some washed-out scenes from old sword and sandal features, and Barcelona by brief shots of a bullfight.  This segment is exciting only because we know we’re getting to the end of this massively self-indulgent cinematic essay on—well, Godard only knows what.  I’ve heard theories that it’s a depiction of the fragmented state of modern Europe, or a mediation on the fragility of film, or even that it’s about Godard’s feelings about copyright law (!)  The problem is that no insight we could glean from a close study of the film could compensate us for the frustration and boredom of watching it.  Postmodern past the point of self-parody, this is the kind of movie only Jacques Derrida could love.  You may be sick to death of the shallowness, predictability and bourgeois sensibilities of “film capitalisme,” but Film Socialisme should convince you that the situation could be much, much worse.

Godard was the leading light of the French New Wave, creating the experimental hits like Breathless (1960), Alphaville (1965), and Week End (1967).  His output sharply declined after the 1960s, and he focused on shorts and documentaries (including Histoire(s) du cinéma, a 266-minute free-associative survey of film history).  Film Socialisme was his first new feature in six years, but at 82 years old he is reported to have a new project in mind: titled A Farewell to Language, it would feature a talking dog.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…stubbornly obtuse, even by [Goddard's] gnomic standards… The cumulative effect of this plotless collage is bizarrely comforting…”–Jason Solomons, The Observer

FEATURING: Peter Mullan, David Caruso, Josh Lucas, Stephen Gevedon, Brendan Sexton III

PLOT: A hazmat crew removing asbestos from an abandoned asylum uncover secrets about the

long-dead but deeply disturbed residents—and arguably more chilling secrets about each other.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  The weirdometer registers only trace amounts of bizarrity in this eerie, complex psychological horror.  It’s worth a viewing for fright fans, but not thanks to its strangeness.

COMMENTS: Before Session 9, director Brad Anderson was best known (if he was known at all) for his romantic comedies.  Anderson co-fashioned Session 9‘s complicated, haunted script to take advantage of the availability of an abandoned mental institution, a dream location to shoot a horror movie, and wound up finding a more successful niche as a specialist in psychological suspense.  Disdaining shock violence and other teen horror tropes, Session 9 hoes a tougher row by creating its suspense through characterization, hidden secrets, and (for the most part) by encouraging the audience to imagine unspeakable carnage rather than to get off on seeing it laid out in splattery crimson glory.  The idea here is to throw five average Joes into a pressure cooker situation (finishing a three-week asbestos removal job in one week) inside a suggestively creepy locale, and let the tension build organically as they begin to crack under the stress.  Gordon is the most preoccupied of the bunch: he may lose his struggling business if he doesn’t complete this contract on time, and he’s got a newborn baby back home to feed.  Phil, his right hand man, has his own tense dynamic with the obnoxious Hank: they share an uncomfortable history with a common woman.  Mullet-headed young Jeff is the neophyte kid who gets picked on by the others, and Mike is the thoughtful guy who’s too good for this job (for unknown reasons, he’s dropped out of law school to schlep around in a hazmat suit).  The characterizations aren’t deep, but they’re efficient; we know these guys, we get their conflicting agendas.  Mike’s discovery of old tape recordings of hypnotherapy with a schizophrenic woman—reels labeled sessions 1 to 9—provides a parallel dramatic line, as we periodically hear a tranquil doctor probe the mind of a psychopathic woman with buried issues that may continue to haunt the hosptal’s halls to this day.  Like the Overlook Hotel in Session 9‘s closest ancestor, The Shining, the empty spaces of the asylum are virtually a separate character (there are plenty of tracking shots down abandoned corridors to remind us of Kubrick‘s horror).  The grounds are full of memories of the departed: Satanist graffiti scrawled on the walls by the teens who broke in to party there on weekends, old mementos and clippings pasted onto the walls of the patients rooms, and broken bric-a-brac left there by the long-gone staff and by homeless squatters.  Everything is linked by dark, dank underground tunnels connecting the various buildings.  It would be almost impossible to shoot a film in this setting that didn’t raise at least a couple of hairs on the back of your neck, and Anderson’s restrained direction and the ensembles’ paranoiac acting ably amplify the institution’s inherent creepiness.  The ending is too obvious to qualify as a twist, and I wish Anderson had shown Kubrick’s courage to go shamelessly over-the-top every now and then, but Session 9 satisfies as a mature, eerie, and mostly quiet horror—a type of film that’s all too rare nowadays.  What could be scarier than an isolated, crumbling building that may be full of ghosts?  The answer: an isolated, crumbling building that may be full of schizophrenic ghosts.

The asylum in the movie, Danvers State Hospital, was a real abandoned mental institution in Massachusetts. It holds the dubious honor of being known as the birthplace of the prefrontal lobotomy (a fact referenced in the movie), and later became infamous for overcrowding and inhumane treatment of its inmates.  Most of the buildings on the sprawling campus were torn down in 2006 to construct an apartment complex.  The units burned down in 2007 in a mysterious fire, though they were soon rebuilt.  A 12-minute featurette on the DVD documents the cruel history of the institution.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Save for the disappointing finale, Session 9 proves to be a remarkably spare journey into the confines of the mind and a unique evocation of just how terrifying it is to loose one’s mind.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Jack Mort.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

FEATURING: Haruhiko Katô, Kumiko Asô, Koyuki

PLOT: A computer expert’s suicide is the first in a series of mysterious events and

disappearances that leave Tokyo, and the world, depopulated; is a website that dials up people on its own and asks if they want to meet a ghost responsible?

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s creepy and weirder than the average scare flick, but Pulse is tuned to the standard turn of the millennium J-horror wavelength.  It’s a good watch for fear fans, and a seminal one for Asian New Wave horror followers, but it doesn’t go that extra weird mile.  Kurosawa’s ambiguous horror/detective procedural Cure (1997) makes for a better bizarre candidate.

COMMENTS: Pulse slips so quietly from reality to strangeness that you hardly recognize the transition; one minute, you’re watching its characters going about their daily lives, dealing with unexpected suicides and alarming computer viruses, and the next minute the world is almost deserted and ruled by ghosts.  The theme of this horror movie is not really fear but loneliness, and how technology fosters isolation more than cures it.  The film is not too subtle in delivering that message.  A plague of ghosts seems to spread via a computer website; one character immediately diagnoses a low-tech character’s sudden interest in the Internet as a desire to connect with his fellow man; a spirit tells the protagonist “death was eternal loneliness” from inside a foil-lined room.  Even scenes occurring before people start disappearing en masse are shot in disconcertingly deserted urban settings, on empty streets and buses and in lonely apartments.  Characters discuss the difficulty humans have making deep and lasting connections, while simultaneously hungering, struggling, and failing to form those bonds with each other.  Those who encounter one of the malevolent spirits in Pulse go through a syndrome (ghost traumatic stress disorder?) that involves locking themselves inside a room alone and sealing the door with red tape.  What the movie intends to say on the metaphorical level is very clear; what’s a little more confused is what’s supposed to be happening on the literal level.  We get half-baked exposition regarding the mechanics of the ghost world, but the spirits’ malevolent motives aren’t ever clearly explained, and it’s not at all certain how all the pieces are supposed to fit together.  If, as one sage tells us, the dead are now leaking into our world because theirs has exceeded its capacity, how do they benefit from convincing the living to kill themselves?  Wouldn’t that just worsen their overpopulation problem?  If the spirits of the dead have no place to go, shouldn’t the world be overrun with ghostly presences, rather than empty?  What purpose in setting up the spectral website that dials up users on its own—other than to scare a technophobic audience?  The movie glosses over answers to these questions, which does make it feel like a weirder endeavor; in this case, however, it seems the material might benefit from a fairer stab at clarity.  But Kiyoshi (no relation to Akira) Kuroswa is all about atmosphere, and he’s an expert at conjuring it.  The long lonely narrative spaces are broken up by several memorable moments, including glitchy technostrangeness involving a metaphysically malfunctioning webcam with a distorting lens, bizarre broadcast television interference from the Beyond, people who melt into black smudges on the wall, and a genuinely frightening trip inside “The Forbidden Room” to discuss matters of mortality with the death’s head who dwells therein.  Mood, not logic or even philosophy, is the glue that holds the movie together, and while it isn’t the horror masterpiece it might have been if that atmosphere was yoked to a better story, it works well on the shiver-inducing level.

The dumbed-down 2006 Hollywood remake with Kirsten Bell, part of a trend of bastardized American remakes of J-horror classics, was widely despised by critics and audiences alike.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…dolorous, shivery, and surreal.”–Wesley Morris, Boston Globe (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Juan Solanas, Andrea Arnold, Christopher Nolan, Roy Andersson, Toby MacDonald, Lynne Ramsay, Jan Svankmajer, Mathieu Kassovitz, Run Wrake, Virgil Widrich, Ridley Scott, Lars von Trier, Balint Kenyeres, Anders Thomas Jensen, Martin McDonagh, Nanni Moretti

FEATURING: Natalie Press, Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, Klas-Gösta Olsson, Kris Marshall, Johannes Silberschneider, Tony Scott, Ulrich Thomsen

PLOT: This collection of sixteen award-winning shorts made by Europeans (mostly Brits) is a

mix of dramas, comedies, and experimental pieces.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Compilations aren’t eligible for the List.  Although there are several short films on this set that are both weird, and great for their length, none of them have the weight it would take to displace a full-length feature film from the List.

COMMENTS: Like any box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get with this collection of sixteen shorts—it could be a caramel, a raspberry creme, or one of the dreaded coconuts.  The wide array of styles from artists working free of commercial concerns makes collections like this excellent primers on what cinema can accomplish, and this selection  from short film specialists Cinema 16 is one of the most award-studded compilations you’ll find.  Not having to worry about the box office receipts allows short film-makers to experiment with technique and go weirder than they otherwise would; indeed, about half of the movies here have at least a nodding acquaintance with the bizarre, while a couple are full-fledged works of surrealist art.  But no matter what direction your tastes run, rest assured there is something here to delight, and to bore, every film fan.

For completeness’ sake, I’ll briefly run down the realism-based entries first, in ascending order of quality.  We’ll then spend a little more time with the experimental offerings, a few of which are extremely important to the world of weird film.

The oldest film, Ridley Scott’s 1956 Boy and Bicycle, about a lad who takes a bike ride to the beach and carries on an inner monologue the whole time, is a tedious exercise that will remind you of the worst film school indulgences.  It’s included here because of the stature of the director, but it shows off little of the talent he would later bring to Alien and Blade Runner.  Pierre le Pou (1990) is an inconsequential comedy about an uncoordinated man trying to impress a talented and attractive female with his basketball prowess.  Seemingly aimed at flattering film festival fans for their superior taste—though there’s sly satire in the portrayal of the pompous manager of an art theater—The Opening Day of Close-up shows the arthouse fallout when Close-up get steamrolled by The Lion King on its opening day.  Extremely thick Scottish accents make Lynn Ramsay’s Gasman, a drama about a man who takes his children to spend one day a year with their half-siblings, very difficult to follow for American viewers.  Before Dawn is the story of illegal immigrants trying to enter a country through a cornfield.  It’s done in a single 13-minute tracking shot and is a technically amazing feat of choreography and camerawork, but there is little for the audience to connect with storywise.  The mildly amusing Election Night is a satire involving a principled liberal desperate to get to the polls before they close who finds himself in a taxicab driven by an obnoxious racist.  Funnier is Je T’Aime John Wayne, a jazzy black and white portrait of an English man who patterns his life after French New Wave films; anyone should find it hilarious, but a knowledge of cinema trivia will pay extra dividends for film fans (e.g., the love interest is a pixie girl named Zazie).  The most memorable of the “straight” films is Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning Wasp, a sadly believable and strangely sympathetic portrait of a very unfit single mom struggling to feed her four children while longing to find a sex life for herself.

On to the weirder offerings:

The Irish black comedy Six Shooter is another Oscar winner, and one of the best films in the collection.  It isn’t strictly a weird movie, but it deserves an honorable mention thanks to a funny fantasy sequence wherein a “short fella” repeatedly stabs a cow with a screwdriver to relieve it’s “trapped wind.”  The scenario, by playwright Martin McDonagh, here directing his first movie, involves Brendan Gleeson losing his wife, then sharing a train ride home with the most obnoxious traveler imaginable.  Corpses pile up as Glesson’s character experiences the worst day of his, or anybody’s, life.  Rúaidhrí Conroy is extraordinarily loathsome as the foul- and motor-mouthed sociopath.

Nocturne was Lars von Trier‘s final film school short before moving on to features.  Sadly, it has a stereotypically pretentious “film school” look and feel, but it’s clearly an experimental work.  The “story” concerns a woman who’s afraid of sunlight.  All of the shots are low-light and murky; it’s often a struggle to make out what we’re seeing.  There are some memorable shots, like the double image of a woman watching as a solarized man breaks through a plate-glass window in the background.  In the commentary, the director is more than a little amused by the odd visual theories of geometrical correspondences espoused by his earlier self.

Doodlebug is a one-effect, one-joke effort from Christopher Nolan.  It’s amusing and lightly Kafkaesque, but at a mere three minutes it doesn’t hint at what the director is capable of.

Cinematographer Juan Solanas’ directing debut, The Man Without a Head, won a short film Jury Prize at Cannes, and is a favorite for many.  It’s about a man without a head (naturally), who lands a hot date and decides he needs to buy a noggin for the occasion.  Comic complications result. The scenario is similar to Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s short “La Cravatte” (1957).  Unlike some others, I didn’t find this affectionate fable about self-acceptance moving, but the art direction and music are unquestionably excellent.  The headless man in a tuxedo dancing like Fred Astaire in his dingy apartment is unforgettable.  The imaginary French city (based on Marseilles) has a grimy but elegant Europe-between-the-wars look, and it’s entirely draped in drab olives, greens and yellows that clearly evoke The City of Lost Children (1995).

Copy Shop is about a man who works at a copy shop and one day discovers that things he photocopies show up in the real world; he decides to photocopy himself over and over, resulting in an anarchic world of doppelgängers on top of doppelgängers.  The movie’s unique look results from the fact that what we see on the screen is really a painstakingly fluid animation composed from 18,000 actual paper photocopies, with copy errors and low-toner moments included (and sometimes deliberately induced).  The minimalist score by Alexander Zlamal is reminiscent of Philip Glass; the string lines chase each other like a rondo, aurally mimicking the visual copies.  It’s an impressive experiment that results in a wonderfully distressed film.

Roy Andersson‘s World of Glory (1991) prefigures the precise, absurd cinematic hypnotism the auteur would perfect in Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007).  In a scene that’s never placed in context, the movie begins with a crowd silently watching nude people being loaded into the back of a truck, gassed, and driven away.  A middle-aged man keeps glancing back at the camera with a mildly disturbed expression.  (Throughout the film minor characters continue to acknowledge the camera with the same strange look).  We then follow the man through a series of static, repressed tableaux showing his daily life, including his son getting a corporate logo tattooed on his head, his refusal to release the wine cup while taking communion, and finally his insomnia caused by the fact that he hears someone screaming in the distance.  Andersson’s dim view of humanity as a species of moral cowards obsessed with meaningless banality gets under your skin.  It’s cruel and ridiculous, but it’s also frighteningly accurate.  Fans of the director’s grim feature films will feel at home here.

Jabberwocky (1971) is another movie that foreshadows a director’s later work: in this case, Jan Svankmajer signals his intent to mix Lewis Carroll and Sigmund Freud together into a horrifying yet whimsical witches’ brew, an alchemy that would come to full ferment in Alice (1988).  The Czech stop-motion surrealist indulges his love of vintage objects here, particularly dolls.  Weirdophiles will chuckle with delight as Svankmajer takes us on a tour of his unfiltered subconscious.  A narrator reads the poem “Jabberwocky” while a wardrobe wends its way through a forest, then winds up in an apartment full of toys.  The poem soon ends but we continue to watch as Svankmajer manipulates the objects in the room: a suit of clothes dances and rides a rocking horse, dolls indulge in cannibalism, and branches spontaneously grow and drop apples which immediately rot and split open to reveal worms.  An important short film in the history of stop-motion animation, and Eastern European surrealism.

The gem of the entire collection is Run Wrake‘s fabulous (in both senses of the word) Rabbit (2005).  The story of greedy children who slaughter animals for personal gain but are frustrated by a magical idol, it’s told using images from an old English reading primer.  The names of common objects hover in the air.  Rabbit is such an amazing weird film that we gave it its own post years ago (you can watch the embedded movie at that link, as well).

A review by the Sunday Times described one Cinema 16 collection as “film studies in a box.”  That’s only a slight exaggeration.  Any aspiring filmmaker who watched all of these sixteen movies and paid close attention to the included commentaries would be inspired, and fairly well prepared, to go out and make his own short film.

One final note: Cinema 16 has put out two DVDs titled European Short Films, one available in Region 1 (U.S. and Canada) and one in Region 2 (UK and Europe).  The lineups on the two sets are different.  We reviewed the U.S. version.  Copy Shop, Opening Day of Close-Up, World of Glory, The Man Without a Head, Election Night, Nocturne and Jabberwocky overlap both sets, but the Region 2 version has nine different films, including entries by Jean-Luc Goddard, Tom Twyker, and Chris Morris.  If you’re looking for a particular title check carefully to make sure it’s included in the set you’re ordering.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… these directors seem to prefer surrealism and unusual imagery… for the most serious of viewers, but it meets its goal of introducing viewers to the range of European short film.”–James A. Stewart, DVD Verdict (DVD)

FEATURING: Edward Hogg, Simon Farnaby, Verónica Echegui

PLOT: An agoraphobic young man remembers (or hallucinates) a trip he took across Europe

with his hard-drinking, sexually voracious, gambling-addicted pal Bunny.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s a mildly surreal comedy that’s in the weird ballpark, but it’s not nearly unhinged enough to make the List on weirdness alone, and too uneven to be counted among the best weird movies ever made.

COMMENTS: Bunny and the Bull begins by introducing us to Stephen Turnbull, an shut-in with severe OCD issues who files his used dental floss and checks the pH of his urine every morning, then shows in flashback how he degenerated from a functioning neurotic to a full-fledged basket case.  An emergency involving rats violating his boxes of hermetically sealed vegetarian lasagna forces him to phone Captain Crab for a takeout meal, unlocking a flood of memories.  The logo on the takeout box inspires Stephen to remember the time he was stood up by a girl he intended to propose to at a Captain Crab.  In the movie’s first anstract sequence, he imagines a restaurant constructed entirely out of painted paper; even the fish swimming in the aquarium are cardboard cutouts.  The motif carries over in the next scene, where an entire horse race is re-enacted with similar animated, spray-painted two-dimensional figures.  These two scenes set up the expectation that the entire movie will carry through this hazy-dream-version-of-a-high-school-play look, but as Stephen and Bunny begin their tour of Europe, subsequent sequences are shot on realistic looking sets, though sometimes employing blurry rear-projection or other random visual trickery.  Then, halfway through the movie the cinematographer pulls out a new look: a world full of gleaming brass CGI clockwork contraptions.  The different visual signatures each look great on their own, but the schizophrenic hopping about from one to another makes you wonder if they switched art directors halfway through film, then ran out of money in the special effects budget.  Bunny‘s visuals are frequently likened to those of The Science of Sleep, but that comparison only holds for the cardboard-cutout scenes; the lack of a consistent look for the whole film diminishes its visual impact.  As a comedy, Bunny is general a pleasant affair, although there’s one grossout digression involving a homeless Russian man who raises dogs as livestock.  But it’s not wall-to-wall belly laughs; the mismatched buddy/love triangle plot doesn’t pay off comedically the way it should.  I suspect your overall reaction to the film depends on how you view the character of Bunny.  The movie asks you to see him as a lovable rogue whose drinking, gambling and womanizing are endearing, but to my mind Simon Farnaby doesn’t bring the character across that way.  We know that Bunny funds the European road trip, but other than that the movie doesn’t give us a tremendous amount of evidence that this girlfriend-stealing, troublemaking, bear-pilfering bloke is a very good friend to Stephen.  Rather, he comes across as an obnoxious, irresponsible lout who hangs out with the timid Stephen because no one else can tolerate his company.  (Bunny’s irresistibilty to women is another puzzling bit of scripting—maybe if he trimmed up that giant mop of blond hair I could see it…)  At any rate, if you can’t bring yourself to see Bunny as a charming chum, the emotional impact of the ending is muted.  Still, Bunny boasts a number of successes, from its visual triumphs (the mechanical bull made of gears and scrap metal with butcher knives for horns) to moments of inspired comedy (a Captain Crab waitress dressed as a lobster, breaking up with her boyfriend in the middle of taking an order).  And there’s scattered imaginative weirdness to keep you watching: the unreal sets, Stephen hallucinating that characters from the flashback appear in his apartment to comment on the story, and the awkwardly creepy and easily-offended Russian dog herder.  Bunny and the Bull didn’t captivate me with its characters, or make up for that deficiency with loads of laughs, but it’s a movie with a lot of imagination and a basically good heart; I can see how others would respond positively.

Writer/director Paul King is best known for the absurd British comedy series “The Mighty Boosh.”  “Boosh” stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt appear in Bunny and the Bull in small roles (Barratt as the Russian and Fielding as an “expert” matador).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Director Paul King brings his talent for the surreal to the big screen… worth a watch if you fancy something different and an astounding film to look at.”–Alex Zane, The Sun (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Infinity Starr,” who called the movie “a mixture of the movie Amélie and the TV show ‘The Mighty Boosh’ with a dash of The Science of Sleep” and added “if you do not know what I am talking about in either of my references than that would truly be WEIRD.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Spike Spencer, Allison Keith-Shipp (English dub)

PLOT:  Following the events of Evangelion 1.11, the Angel incursions against Tokyo-3 increase

in intensity, and two new teenage Evangelion pilots are integrated into the NERV defense team.  Also, the world ends, I think.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  What to do with Evangelion?  A combo teen soap opera/end-of-the-world saga starring giant robots, the series is weird, but in a way that’s actually sort of conventional (in anime terms).  Even worse, there are now four movies (and a long running TV series) telling essentially the same story—with two more on the way.  Should all the movies make the List?  None?  Only the weirdest one?  Whatever the case, I don’t think this installment is capable of being counted among the best weird movies ever made; but I’m also thankful we get to defer the issue until we’ve checked out the series’ entire run.

COMMENTS:  Here’s a typical battle between an Angel (periodically appearing bad guy) and an Evangelion (giant robot that can only be piloted by a teenager).  Battleships fire pink and yellow shells at the Angel, a wire-frame robot with a pendulum hanging between its legs, as it marches towards them, instantly freezing the blood red sea with every stride and leaving a huge snowflake as a footstep.  It shoots laser beams from a globe and blows the battleships, causing the scarlet water to erupt into cross-shaped spouts.  A warplane drops a giant robot (hereafter “Eva”); it evades the green-tipped black lines the Angel fires at it as it falls.  The Eva blows up the Angel with a gun, but it immediately reconstitutes itself.  The Eva next stomps on the Angel’s laser-firing spike, which causes translucent pink and yellow auras to fill up the sky.  Eventually the Eva’s foot forces the spike all the way into its command globe, and the Angel explodes into a pink cross.  Each melee shot lasts for a second or less, increasing the confusion as to what the hell is supposed to be going on.  In Evangelion Angels can take any form, including scuttling robots with dinosaur-skull heads and 1970s-era Pink Floyd laser light shows, and they operate according to rules that are never explained.  (I’m fairly sure the Angels have no actual protocols or limitations—they simply perform whatever act the director thinks will look most awesome at the moment).  The fight scenes are psychedelically beautiful; but the overall plot is about as muddled as an Eva/Angel smackdown.  Viewers hoping for clarification on what the Angels (or the Evas, for that matter) actually are should steel themselves for further confusion and hints of biblical conspiracy instead.  By way of exposition, NERV chief and jerkwad pop Gendo explains, “Our only desire is the true Evangelion.  It’s awakening will coincide with the resurrection of Lilith and usher in the Time of the Covenant. It is crucial that the necessary rites be performed by then, for the sake of the Human Instrumentality Project.”  As wimpy teen hero Shinji responds after his father delivers a generically profound—but in on way on-target—speech about sacrificing for your dreams, “You say that, but I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean.”  You also may not even know what scraps of dialogue like “I prefer the living chaos of man, instead of this barren wasteland of death” and “it’s transcending the boundaries of humanity!” are supposed to mean, either.  It’s easier to follow the soap opera side of the story, which in this second installment explores a developing love triangle between emo Shinji, mysteriously catatonic, blue-haired Rei, and brash newcomer Asuka, a blue-eyed, Japan-insulting American hottie with a love-hate thing for Shinji and a hate-hate thing for Rei.  Complicating the sexual dynamic is the fact that Shinji is terrified of the fairer sex.  And you would be too, if you were him: naked women kickbox him in the head, and when he’s just minding his own business random babes parachute down from the sky and smother him with their cleavage.  Although Shinji has grown up a tiny amount since the prior episode, and no longer spends the entire movie moping in his room, his shameless self-absorption in his morass of daddy issues is still the primary obstacle for adults (and well-adjusted teens) to enjoying the series.  How can you root for a character who refuses to stop the apocalypse because he’s off throwing a tantrum?  If you’re in tune with anime conventions, or only crave eye candy and fanservice, you’ll see Evangelion as a paragon of the art form.  It’s not a crossover series that will entice the average adult viewer, however.

I originally understood this second cinematic version of the Evangelion saga was to be a straightforward quartet, but according to Twitch’s Ard Vijn (who knows a lot more about these things than I do), the reality is far stranger.  First, despite the unanswered questions, the storyline is apparently complete with this second film (!)  Secondly, there will be two more episodes, which will cover the same events, but from different characters perspectives (!!)  Sometimes I can’t decide whether I’m more confused watching an Evangelion movie, or trying to sort out the chronology and canonicity of this sprawling franchise.  The series seems to be stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fever dream for sure, but one that has been lovingly embellished with details and technically polished until it has become its own weird-yet-beautiful thing.”–Ard Vijn, Twitch (DVD)

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)

FEATURING: Srdjan Todorovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Jelena Gavrilovic, Katarina Zutic, Slobodan Bestic

PLOT: An ethical and well-intentioned ex porn star collaborates with an Eastern syndicate to
produce a series of art-house pornographic films. In the process he is unwittingly ensnared in the dark, serpentine morass of his film executives’ depraved madness.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the colorful controversy surrounding A Serbian Film, including claims that it is torture porn and even child porn, the movie is a straightforward—if transgressive—cross-genre thriller, a skillfully blended mix of mystery, horror and suspense elements.  Adventurous viewers who choose to watch A Serbian Film should seek the uncut version.  The controversial scenes are a crucial part of the plot.

NOTE: Director Srdjan Spasojevic was confronted by the international press and informed that his movie A Serbian Film is nothing more than thinly veiled torture porn, perhaps even child pornography.  He responded by asserting that the movie is in fact “a political allegory,” intentionally resplendent with metaphors for the historical, systematic repression of the Serbian people. For example, Spasojevic tells explains that the shocking baby scene “represents us and everyone else whose innocence and youth have been stolen by those governing our lives for purposes unknown.”

Is he being serious?  Or does he believe the most effective way to point out the absurdity of detractors’ allegations and deliberate misinterpretations is to posit an equally absurd response?  A thorough consideration of this controversy is beyond the scope of this review.  The viewer should watch the movie and judge for himself.  I present my own ideas regarding what I think the film discursively accomplishes in the addendum which follows the review.  Whether Spasojevic intends the film to deliver any of these meanings is a matter of speculation.  Despite what I think are some very good points made in the film, it’s my personal belief that he primarily set out to make an offbeat, tense thriller that was shocking enough to be sure to attract attention.  He succeeded.

COMMENTS: Lurid and grim, suspenseful and exciting, A Serbian Film is a well crafted, taut thriller that doesn’t insult one’s intelligence.  Sporting a chic visual signature and structured with a non-linear, temporally shifting plot, this sensational shocker fires off images that range from bizarre and salacious to astounding and stupefying.  By applying the element of satire, A Serbian Film impels its audience to appraise the controversial predicament of contemporary mass-produced culture.  The result is provocative, visceral and shocking.

Milos (Todorovic) is an easy-going family man who used to be a successful pornographic movie actor. Needing additional income, he grudgingly accepts a mysterious offer from an enigmatic production company to star in their flagship project, a series of “high art” experimental adult films. What Milos doesn’t know, however, is that the producer, a government agent named Vukmir (Trifunovic) with obvious Russian Mafia affiliations, is quite completely insane.  Without Milos’s consent, he doses the unsuspecting actor with a futuristic cattle stimulant.

Poor Milos has no idea what is in store. The real details of the scripts are kept secret from him. Production is arranged like a sort of reality show. Multiple cinematographers with digital cameras lead and follow him in real time as directions are fed to him through a small earpiece.

The films turn out to be an avant-garde exercise in taboo extremism. Appalled by requests to violently degrade women and seduce minors, Milos finally grasps the full extent of the producer’s intentions. Deeply disturbed by the crew’s pernicious agenda, Milos possesses a progressive, but genuine moral compass. His conscience compels him to resist. Yet even the actors he works with possess a malignant bent. Behaving like miscreants some of them seem to actually enjoy being degraded.

A classic good and evil struggle ensues between Milos and Vukmir. Vukmir praises Milo’s “talent,” but wants to ferociously exploit him, to use him up, drain him dry, steal his soul and discard him like a paper cup. He schemes to eventually dispatch Milos with an end fitting for an exhausted stag goat. Milos flees, only to be recaptured, sedated, and forced to participate.

Now at the mercy of the sinister syndicate, a sexy, diabolical biochemist keeps Milos subdued with cocktails of powerful, mind-altering narcotics. When the armed crew of jack-booted production technicians is ready to film, she injects her brainchild livestock aphrodisiac into Milos with reckless abandon. In large amounts the potion turns a subject into a bellicose, crazed rapist, easily incited to violence. The producers don’t just want a sexual performance from Milos. They want brute-force physical aggression, and the formula renders even the most abject perversion irresistible to him.

The bovine sex stimulant compels Milos to confront the most grim, primal dimensions of biological programming run amok. He finds himself helplessly driven to desperately gratify himself by committing horrifying, depraved atrocities of sexual barbarism. Plunged into a bedlam of psychotic excess, Milos is trapped on the other side of the looking glass. There is no salvation for him. The filmmakers have powerful government and organized crime associations. They’ve thought of everything and covered every angle. Milos must find a way to deliver himself, but how? Subjected to violence and sexual assaults alongside the films’ other subjects, will Milos manage to achieve deliverance before he is ravaged of his last vestiges of humanity?

As Milos plunges into a nightmare of lust and death, some of the sex acts that A Serbian Film depicts are appalling. They are supposed to be sickly pornographic in the fictitious concept of a film within a film. The images are not, however, prurient from the audience’s perspective. Presented through Milos’s point of view as an unwilling participant, copulation is filmed in such a way as to reveal little explicit nudity other than some quick shots of heaving breasts. Rather, the frames are composed in a manner that tricks the audience’s sense of perception. This is a cornerstone of theater and magic; people see what they think they are being shown, or what they want to see.

A Serbian Film contains violence that is controversial because it is sexually related, but the piece brandishes less mayhem than many action movies, and remember, it is a work of horror. Moreover, unlike many action and splatter films, the violence is not a gratuitous exhibition. It furthers the plot and the terror.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ”In its histrionic dream logic, the movie says as much about Eastern Europe as Twilight does about the Pacific Northwest. Frankly, you’d be better off self-abusing.”–Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York (contemporaneous)

A Serbian Film – sanitized trailer

—————————————————

ADDENDUM:

A Serbian Film Is Socially Apposite and Cinematically Significant

It is tempting to deliberately misconstrue A Serbian Film, but it would be a miscalculation to dismiss this effort for being symptomatic of the controversy that it addresses. Granted, the filmmakers’ primary objective was to create a provocative thriller, an effort at which they impressively succeeded. The film is unique however, not only in its portrayal of a porn star as a sympathetically conscionable character, but in it’s exposition of audience malleability.

Notably, the picture conveys a grim social observation about the runaway train effect of ever-increasingly deviant pornography. This idea doesn’t break new ground. It’s not one that hasn’t been considered independently of A Serbian Film. What makes A Serbian Film so cogent is that it adds a chilling dimension to the contention. When an increasingly fiendish and jaded audience demands snuff movies, who will answer the casting call?

A Serbian Film builds credibility to set the stage for its postulation not just by being shocking, but by employing exaggeration. The movie operates on a dual plain of horror and subtle, dark satire. Some of the imagery illuminates realities so abhorrent that the element of mockery may not be immediately evident. Satire is detectable however, when sensational elements in the film are very slightly over-the-top, without being contrived.

Three concepts are played on: the misguided idea of justifying porn as art, pornographic contrivances in general, and outright perversion. In accordance with the first, Vukmir aggrandizes himself as being a break-through auteur and pornography prophet. For him, this new brand of pioneering smut is nothing short of visionary. Like Theatre of Cruelty French playwright Antonin Artaud, Vukmir conceptualizes the organic essence of theater as consisting of the coarse elements of naked emotion. Plot, storyline, and method are secondary to a surreal atmosphere conveyed with minimalist, but dreamlike sets, and a nearly psychedelic parade of alarming visual sensationalism.

To Vukmir, the highest form of drama, the best-selling subject matter, and thus the best pornography is based on the most striking reality: the reality of horror and victimization. “The victim feels the most and suffers the best,” he proclaims to Milos. Vukmir takes Cinema of Transgression to a philosophical plain. What appears on the screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, taboo and violent pornography is reality, and reality is less than taboo and violent pornography.

Perhaps not as dramatically, real-life pornographers have clung to similar, albeit watered-down versions of these grand sorts of delusions, believing that they employ genuine craftsmanship to produce solid works of art. This has been depicted in the popular media. Examples are found in parodies of the adult film industry, such as the biographical Rated X about the notorious Mitchell brothers, and in the reality-inspired black comedy, Boogie Nights.

In addressing the notion that pornography (as opposed to explicit erotica) can be a valid medium of expression, A Serbian Film‘s aphotic send up of smut strikes some common ground with David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome. In the latter, producer Max Renn discovers a secret, pornographic BDSM torture program. It consists of a nude woman being strapped to a wrought iron grate in front of a clay wall, and savagely whipped, presumably, eventually to death by leather-hooded executioners.

Harlen, Renn’s media technician, observes that the torture show is “for perverts only.” Unable to discern any significant difference between the poetically substantial and the superficially sensational, Max fires back, “Absolutely brilliant. I mean look, there’s almost no production costs. You can’t take your eyes off it. It’s incredibly realistic. Where do they get actors who can do this?”

It’s a revealing and sardonically humorous reply, in that Max completely misses the point. The dreadful truth is that those are not actors at all, but genuine victims. Similarly, in A Serbian Film, Vukmir tries to enlighten Milos by demonstrating the cutting edge of profound drama and ready marketability, concepts which are interchangeable to him. During the screening of a film in which a brutish, incognito man delivers a baby and then rapes it, a shocked Milos runs out of the room in disgust. Vukmir roars after him that he has just seen high art, but can’t accept it. “Can it be that you don’t get it? This is a new genre, Milos! The new porn is newborn porn!” He triumphantly shouts.

A Serbian Film wryly, sublimely lampoons pornographic clichés. It not only demonstrates the artificiality of commercial pornography, but also stresses it’s superficiality. For instance, in the above scene to which Milo was just subjected, the mother revels in the rape, ecstatically savoring the penetration of her offspring as if she herself were the sexual vessel. This is an exaggeration of the phenomenon of transferred gratification, a form of male ego-stroking for the sake of audience patronization. A staple of adult films, the most common example occurs when an actress expresses as much pleasure and enjoyment in her partner’s exhibitionistic ejaculation as she would derive from her own climax. A Serbian Film satirizes the absurdity of this canon by taking it to the extreme with the new mother’s ecstasy.

Other grist for A Serbian Film‘s burlesque of triple-x entertainment include the male fantasy of the completely and enthusiastically submissive female. A throbbing Venus-like icon of instant sexual gratification, she worships at the altar of the turgid male sexual organ, and revels in abundant facefuls and mouthfuls of scalding, sanctimoniously-sprayed semen. It is an additional tenet of the pornographic representation of reality that women are merely licentious tureens. They are not to be gently made love to, but rather vigorously assaulted, and it is this axiom that the film enlarges upon so effectively. In Vukmir’s production, the assault evolves from the exaggerated, rough, comically frantic sex of garden variety porn, and explodes into a fury of genuine violence.

This leads to the central tent of A Serbian Film, which is its statement about pornography’s deleterious effect upon contemporary culture by way of the slippery slope. In the story, victim porn is the ultimate, “priciest sell.” In the movie’s setting, this is what the social climate has degenerated to.

Traditionally, many forms of perverse and deviant behavior are condemned or restricted. Society pressures its citizens to deny or suppress facets of the human condition, e.g. inappropriate primal instincts. Due to social controls, relatively few people will ever have to confront the disconcerting fact that under the right set of circumstances, they are capable of just about anything.

Pulling out the stops can produce a cumulative, or domino effect. Like domesticated pets becoming feral without human supervision, a dramatic example can be found in the curious case of the 16th Century Scottish Sawney Beane clan. Having isolated themselves from society, the Beanes became inbred and mad, turning into genetic mutants, living off highway robbery and pickling and eating their victims.

The idea of a cumulative effect applies as well to viewers becoming jaded by progressively far-fetched prurience. As the Randy Marsh character laments about his addiction to Internet porn in the irreverent animated comedy South Park, “I need the Internet to jack off. I got used to being able to see anything at the click of a button, you know? Once you jack off to Japanese girls puking in each other’s mouths you can’t exactly go back to Playboy!”

Given that so much commercial porn seems to cater to the gross-out factor at the very bottom of the medulla oblongata’s intellectual barrel, it’s understandable that Randy has become hardened, so to speak. Indeed, if the bizarre, runaway nature of society’s perversions as reflected in everything from crush erotica and felching, to plushophilia and the sexual aspects of furry fandom is any indicator of what can happen when people are allowed to freely indulge unfettered in their kinky twists, then A Serbian Film posits a provocative proposition. If there is no mechanism in place to limit widespread, commercial indulgence in perversion, will sexual deviance compound on itself until the demand for crush videos and Japanese girls puking gives way to cravings for snuff movies and baby rape?

Can we take a cue from history? There is nothing new about barbarous savagery and violent sexual perversion. They have been around for a long time. For instance, during looting and pillaging of those they conquered, Attila’s Huns would engage in a form of monstrous gang-bang in which numerous soldiers would dismount from their horses and fall upon a single woman. The first three men occupied her primary orifices, the additional rapists would cut their own in her body cavity.^[1]

In ancient Rome, bestiarii trained all nature of wild beasts, from horses to lions to giraffes, to rape immobilized girls for a leering public. Author Daniel P. Mannix describes a scene in which a prostitute and her pimp were tricked into performing an exhibition of lovemaking positions in the arena, and just when the crowd was growing bored of watching, a wild bear was released to rip the couple apart and devour them mid-coitus. This delighted the audience who considered the stunt to be a very good joke.^[2]

Historians attribute the origins of the eventual Roman Colosseum spectacle to a boxing style, gladiatorial match staged between three pairs of slaves in 246 BC. Arranged by Marcus and Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva to honor the memory of their deceased father, the event drew a large crowd to the Forum Boarium in Rome. One thing led to another and centuries later, the Roman mob was showing up regularly at the Colosseum to behold an astounding width and breadth of atrocities.

This is an oversimplification of course. The factors giving rise to the nature of the games in the Colosseum are varied and complex. It is nevertheless illustrative of the notion of the runaway train phenomenon that occurs when an audience is cultivated around, and continually bolstered with aberrant debauchery and violence.

Obviously perversion unraveling to its extremes is nothing new, but its mass production and global distribution are relatively recent developments. Avenues of modern exposition now include Internet sites that deliver video satiation at the touch of a button. One can “jack off,” as Randy Marsh so elegantly phrased it, to anything from coprophelia and foot fetishes to bestiality and child pornography.

This form of electronic dispensation makes paper and ink publishing of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days Of Sodom seem as antiquated as waiting for a town crier to shout breaking news. It is this high tech and widespread commercial marketing of outrageous deviance that A Serbian Film addresses. The movie impels a consideration of the domino effect of an increasing demand for perversion in concert with unprecedented, broad dissemination. It does so with a striking and engaging bearing that abstains from being preachy.

This makes A Serbian Film as thought-provoking as it is horrifying. That’s important because perhaps we should consider the consequences of a commercial brutality industry. Going back to the Max Renn Videodrome quote above, if the runaway train of cultural degradation should in fact, give way to another era of Colosseum-style cruelty, “where will we find the actors who can do this?”

1. G.L. Simons, Simon’s Book Of World Sexual Records (Random House:1982)
2. Daniel P. Mannix, Those About To Die (Ballantine: 1974)