Category Archives: Reader Recommendations

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: THE CREMASTER CYCLE

1 Comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Reader review by Enar Clarke

“The Cremaster cycle defers any definitive conclusion.”–from the synopsis of “Cremaster 5”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Norman Mailer, Aimee Mullins, Richard Serra, Matthew Barney

PLOT: Over the course of five films, through a series of loosely interconnected stories in various film genres, characters metaphorically portray the drama of sexual differentiation in the human reproductive system during the early stages of fetal development.

Still from the Cremaster Cycle

COMMENTS: As has been remarked on this site before, the Cremaster Cycle, directed by and starring visual artist Matthew Barney, is a nigh-legendary series of films. The Cycle tends to be screened once approximately every ten years, hence its mystique. Aside from a highly-priced limited edition run of DVDs, only a 30-minute cut of Cremaster 3 (The Order) is readily available on disc. The films were originally elements of an art installation that also included drawings, photographs, and sculptures; for this reason, they are usually screened by contemporary art museums.

With that in mind, the question readers of this site are probably asking is, are these films weird enough to be worth the effort of trying to see them?

This isn’t an easy question to answer. The five films in the Cremaster Cycle are undoubtedly weird, an endless progression of strange and inscrutable imagery that can honestly be as boring as it is compelling. Each film has at least two settings and sets of characters, but only the most threadbare of plots. Barney’s minimalist website provides the basic details, which can be useful for interpreting the subject matter. To avoid spoilers, I would recommend reading the cast lists prior to viewing, and saving the synopses for afterwards. All of the films, except Cremaster 2, are dialogue-free, and until the credits roll, it can be impossible to identify who, or what, the characters are supposed to be.

Like the best weird movies, the Cycle has divided both critics and viewers. New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman famously declared Barney “the most important artist of his generation.” Film scholar J. Hoberman, in his book “Film After Film,” dismissed the Cremaster Cycle as “an overwrought 57th street yard sale.” Viewers on IMDB have variously described the films as “flamboyant,” “bizarre,” “campy,” “grotesque,” and most commonly, “pretentious.” Directors Barney has been compared to include , David Cronenberg, , , David Lynch, , and Ken Russell—all of whose work is represented on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies. Fans of these directors are just as likely to detest the Cycle, however, as they are to Continue reading READER RECOMMENDATION: THE CREMASTER CYCLE →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: FREDDIE GOT FINGERED (2001)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Reader recommendation by June Culpepper

DIRECTED BY: Tom Green

FEATURING: Tom Green, Harland Williams, Marisa Coughlan,

PLOT: Gord Brody (Tom Green), a slacker with a dream of becoming a cartoonist, goes to California to get his cartoon made.

Still from Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Panned by critics to this day, this film is a -esque prank on both the film industry and the audience, more of a nightmarish combination of Sweet Movie, Adaptation, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie than another Jack and Jill.

COMMENTS: Tom Green did not want to make a movie. After his meteoric rise from Canadian public television to MTV fame with “The Tom Green Show” (a late night talk show that combined gross-out stunts with surrealist humor, predating “The Eric Andre Show” by two decades), Hollywood most certainly took notice.  “We don’t understand him, but the kids seem to love him,” the execs probably said. “Let’s give him 15 million dollars.” After handing him the check, Tom went back to a shack in the middle of the Canadian wilderness, and came out nine months later with Freddy Got Fingered.

Freddy Got Fingered works as a sort of deconstruction of the gross-out comedy schlock of the era, taking every trope of these sorts of films and stretching them to their absolute limit, to the point where the audience is left to wonder why they liked these gags at all. The angry father who disapproves of his son’s wild dreams is played by Rip Torn, a screaming warthog in a human skinsuit. The love interest, who in most of these films is just there to satisfy the lead’s sexual needs, is a wheelchair-bound Marisa Coughlan, who is obsessed with rocketry and fellatio.  Green takes the essential pillars of gross-out comedies and breaks them down to the point where you can never build them up again.

Freddie Got Fingered also has a meta-cinema tinge to it, almost as if the film itself is the joke. The movie, in a weird way, is about the movie itself being made. Gord, who is obviously a stand-in for Green himself, has a meteoric rise to fame, in a way that almost feels out of his control. He then blows all of his money on pointless nonsense (the movie itself).  In his own words, “Easy come, easy go.”

This film is an over-the-top combination of meta-cinema, surrealism, punk spirit, and weird gross-out moments that caught me so off-guard that I don’t even want to spoil them. Tom Green got to make his perfect film, and weirdos making their magnum opuses are what this site is all about.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this movie is super weird…  someday it will be acknowledged as a triumph of absurdist filmmaking.”–Andrei Alupului, Spectrum Culture

(This movie was nominated for review by “Frank,” who said ” I feel the farcical, insanity of Freddy Got Fingered is at least worth a look.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Reader Recommendations

READER REVIEW: MY “THE DUNE” REVIEW

4 Comments

Reader recommendation (of sorts) by Daniel Ableev. Begins in medias res.

Apparently not, because Frank Heibert’s worm-building classic is somewhat of an epic, at least judging by the number of the pages involved (I haven’t actually read the scan template in question). Therefore it does not seem beneficial to wish for a reduction of such an extensive, grandiose, downright monstrous larger-than narrative to a three-minute flick. Of course this is a rather original artistic approach, but whether Villeneuve will be able to convince die-hard fans, as opposed to Davin Lynch‘s infamous attempt, remains to be seen (or doubted). In any case, there is not much room for strong storytelling or relationships in Dennis’s new work. After his already remarkably short thrillers “The Prisoner” and “The Sicario”, the undoubtedly talented Frenchman has now finally penetrated the heart of the avant-garde. Hectic cuts and cryptic off-screen dialogues turn the badly fragmented Deconstructor into an intensely dense deity in dire need of getting used to. Guest appearances by Dave Bautista and Jason Mamoa, both of whom seem to have stiffened their “-a”, and the fact that Oscar Isaacs is unwilling to leave the sci-fi genre would be even more commendable if he didn’t keep forgetting something (cf. shaving). As for the main character, the naive linnet’s Canadian-sounding surname provides a valuable clue—but what for? Viewers, severely maimed and crippled into question marks made of flesh and blood, have been for years in search of time to be lost, yet what they’ve managed to find is not more than three effing minutes of film material. Understandably they start pushing for answers without even having formulated the slightest of questions: Why does the crowd-pleasing worm twister at the end insists on being called The Big Lebowski? Why are those neo-Nazis, gracefully lowered on nylon threads, planning an eye-2-butter conversion intervention of sorts? And wouldn’t it be way more efficient to stretch the film so that the rather lavish CSI can finally come onto its own? Fun Fact: Hans Zimmer will undoubtedly go down as one of the most oven shots in film and cinema history, the simple reason for that being that Villeneuve had only time for one single song which wasn’t even composed, let alone Zimmer-ed.

We now realize: The spice melange lies in its brevity and the giant lies in its duneability, as does the perforated hoaxbox of sorts that has found more than one way into a fishnet. Uncanny Ville directs out of his hole, and a collection of grotesque vistas emerges: While Ed Wood himself keeps some of his favorite UFOs suspended, ambitious hyper-flies buzz along the sandtime continuum and animatronic sun rays accelerate the frementation process. Always dependent on artificial respiration, the indigenous Cyanos flee into Tremorpaul’s imperceptibly, yet all the more tightly pinched kneecap-jerking fantasies. Conclusion: “Independence Day” meets “Langoliers” with PS5 graphics and a threat extension of swords.

1 out of 5 stars

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: SUPER MARIO BROS. (1993)

Leave a comment

Reader Review by John Klingle

DIRECTED BY: Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: Two plumbers from Brooklyn are unwittingly warped into an alternate dimension populated by human-dinosaur hybrids, and  discover a plot to invade the Earth that only they can prevent.

Still from Super Mario Bros. (1993)

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The fugitive Princess Daisy discovers her long lost father, the King: a sentient mass of yellow fungus drooping from the ceiling above his old throne.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Combining slapstick humor and trite wordplay with a penchant for grotesque visuals and fascist imagery completely disconnected from its beloved source material, Super Mario Bros. seems determined to shock and disturb its supposed target audience.

COMMENTS: The original sin of video game-to-movie adaptations, Super Mario Bros. is widely regarded as a transgression against its beloved source material and a discordant mish-mash of half-baked, poorly-executed ideas. But while it’s true that the film is unforgivable as an adaptation, looking at Super Mario Bros. for its own merits reveals a unique Gothic fantasy filled with psychedelic imagery.

Rather than making any real effort to replicate the experience of playing Shigeru Miyamoto’s foundational game series, Super Mario Bros. instead takes the bare skeleton of the Mario games and builds its own dystopian adventure around it. The elements the film plucks from the games are well-chosen ingredients for a cult film, too: it borrows the game series’ central fish-out-of-water fantasy world conceit (The Wizard of Oz), its recurring theme of bodily transformation (Videodrome), and its visual obsession with ducts and pipes (Brazil ) and, of course, mushrooms (“,” take your pick). The filmmakers (“Max Headroom” creators Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton) unfortunately don’t manage to create any sense of cohesion among these various elements, but this doesn’t prevent each of them from being deeply memorable on its own.

Mixed in liberally with these ingredients from the games are the film’s own inventions, whose connection to the Mario universe is much more tenuous. The most notable of these is the corporate fascist imagery. The movie adaptation re-imagines the games’ draconic King Koopa as a Donald Trump-like plutocrat who runs a mechanized police state under the guise of democracy. This conceit is perhaps the film’s most powerful source of tonal dissonance: the bumbling, Stooges-like antics of Koopa’s minions do little to detract from the horror of seeing a street busker forcibly converted into a devolved monster as punishment for political dissidence.

Much like Labyrinth, Super Mario Bros.’ commitment, however lackluster, to being a commercial children’s film prevents it from pursuing its darker themes to any satisfying conclusion. In some ways, this makes it all the more disturbing; the film consistently dips its toes into dystopian or psychosexual territory only to retreat back into John Leguizamo and Bob Hoskins’ yukking and shucking, depriving the viewer of any catharsis. Super Mario Bros. is a movie that doesn’t leave you, its most bizarre moments sticking like burrs to the minds of the children who saw it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Bizarre, replete in often stunning special effects and verrrry strange from the outset, Super Mario Bros is curiously entertaining, even though it often makes little sense.” – Roger Hurlburt, South Florida Sun Sentinel (contemporaneous)

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: ESCORIANDOLI (1996)

Leave a comment

AKA Trash – T.R.A.

Reader recommendation by “Tracian”

DIRECTED BY: Antonio Rezza

FEATURING: Antonio Rezza, Valeria Golino, Claudia Gerini, Isabella Ferrari, Valentina Cervi

PLOT: Five connected stories where the protagonist is always played by Rezza. An affair during a funeral is spiced up by the occasional comments of the deceased; the two lovers of a woman suddenly exchange their ages; a terminally bored girl is forced to join a totalitarian rehab clinic; a poet consumes his life searching for forgiveness for having stepped on a man’s toe; and a professional event-crasher loses control of his own body and is forced to cut it to pieces until only the head remains.

Still from Escoriandoli (1996)

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Because it is a rare example of an arthouse film that is not pretentious but actually fun, highly committed to weirdness and yet serious in its (admittedly well-hidden) message.

COMMENTS: While you have to understand Italian to fully appreciate the lyrical, offbeat and hilarious dialogues, everyone will be amazed by the physical and vocal contortions of the protagonist(s). Pretty much everything in Escoriandoli (the title itself is a pun that roughly means “confetti-like joy in excoriating them”) is odd: an example may be how all the actors on a bus react to its movements—although the vehicle is explicitly shown as being still—but almost no scene can be considered “normal”.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Italian surreal comedy consisting of a series of satirical vignettes… Fun at times, but the acting is way too silly.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre