DIRECTOR: Noboru Iguchi

FEATURING: Takumi Saito, Aya Kiguchi

PLOT: Two sisters compete with each other for dominance in a secret society of geisha

assassins, which is led by the evil head of a steel manufacturing corporation.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Let’s start with the purposefully terrible dialogue. Move on to Tangu twins wearing phallic masks and matching bras. Maybe the absolutely ridiculous weapon placements including armpit swords, breast lasers, and stomach bombs.  The guy with the stomach bomb has cocktail shrimp stuck in his eyes by the way.  Oh yes: all this and much, much more.

COMMENTS:  This movie must have been at least as fun to make as it is to watch.  The first couple times I saw it I was alternating between jaw-dropping awe and side-splitting laughter.  The insane and chaotic visual effects are so delightfully unpredictable and so relentless that around half an hour in you simply give in and enjoy the ride.  It is purposefully bad in a rare way, and on multiple viewings it just seems to get better and better.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…what you might see if you were to watch Power Rangers whilst taking a hit of acid every five minutes.”–Dave Robson, Sound on Sight (festival screening)

DIRECTED BY: Ki-duk Kim

FEATURING: Seung-yeon Lee, Hyun-kyoon Lee (Jae Hee), Hyuk-ho Kwon

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  3-Iron is a love story in which the lovers communicate their joy, grief, fear, trepidation, trust, and insecurities – believably – without ever exchanging dialogue. Plus, the subtle uncanniness of a man who can move silently, without being seen, adds a poignant surreality to the last quarter of the movie.

PLOT & COMMENTS: The protagonist of 3-Iron is a young Korean man who breaks into people’s houses while they’re on vacation and lives in their homes.  He eats their food, listens to their stereos, and sleeps in their beds, but he also fixes their broken appliances, cleans their laundry, and, more or less, earns his keep.  One night he occupies a house in which a beaten wife, Sun-hwa, is hiding with a bruised and bloodied face; she trails him silently, unseen, as he goes about his chores.  When her husband returns from his business trip and begins to beat her, the young man pelts the husband with golf balls, and then rides off with Sun-hwa on his motorcycle.

In the next half of the movie, the squatter and Sun-hwa continue to live out their innocent breaking-and-entering lifestyle, turning into an efficient and silent house cleaning team.  In a photographer’s apartment, Sun-hwa learns the trade.  In a boxer’s house, the nameless man is beaten by the owner and it becomes Sun-hwa’s turn to feed and nurse a bruised victim. In another house, the hero and Sun-hwa shyly woo each other and kiss.  And in yet another, they discover an old man who has died; they prepare his body for a funeral and bury him, only to be accosted by the deceased’s long-absent family and arrested.

After her release, Sun-hwa returns to her house, but remains silent and cold to her still-abusive husband.  The squatter goes to jail, where he teaches himself to move silently, shadow his guards, and be practically invisible, even to the most attentive observer.  He is eventually set free, and he returns to Sun-hwa and lives in the shadow of her husband.  Elated, she becomes herself again, and her husband believes she has once again fallen in love with him; but the one word of dialogue spoken by our two heroes—Sun-hwa’s simple but honest “I love you”—is meant for the man behind her husband.

It is hard to capture in text the weirdness of a movie in which there is sound, but almost no dialogue.  The depth of emotion the two main characters communicate without using their voices is amazing.  The young man, for instance, whiles away his time by using the three iron (the same one he used to beat the husband) to whack at a golf ball tied to a tree with wire; Sun-hwa interrupts him by standing, vulnerable and crestfallen, in front of him, expressing in a way that words simply cannot how implicitly she both trusts and fears him.  The man, concerned, refuses to hit the ball with her in front of it, acknowledging but refusing her helpless supplication.  Later, as they sit in the living room of one of the houses, drinking tea, Sun-hwa delicately uses her foot to caress the young man’s foot, shyly, with trepidation, but also clearly with love and gratitude.  He looks at her with a mix of surprise and satisfaction and it is at that moment that we know, long before Sun-hwa says it, that they are in love.

Perhaps it is more useful to discuss the few times when dialogue does happen.  The first words we hear are on an answering machine.  But this is not “dialogue.”  Flatly mixed into the soundtrack, the words announcing the absence of a family from their home sound more like the other noises of the movie—traffic, glasses clinking, phones ringing—just objects, like any other.  Real dialogue—from the husband directed at Sun-hwa, between the policemen, from the boxer—is almost always the harbinger of violence or anger.  Most of the attempts at communication fail to verbalize anything deeper than lies, threats, or conspiracy to violence.  The most striking example comes from a policeman accusing the man of having kidnapped and raped Sun-hwa.  He yells, “What have you done to her to keep her so silent!,” not realizing that not only does she choose to be silent, but that it is the husband, not the lover, who has spurred her into her speechlessness.  That a movie can highlight the futility of words to communicate so poignantly is remarkable and ironic, and that it can do so in such a calm, quiet, beautiful manner as this film does is, frankly, shocking.

Obviously, visuals must play a great part in setting the mood here, and the compositions in this movie are flawless.  When the young man interrupts the husband beating his wife, there is a brief shot of the husband looking out the window at the man in the garden, with the reflection of his wife foreshadowing that the young man will come between them. At the photographer’s house, there is a poster of Sun-hwa (who used to be a model) which she cuts into squares and reassembles haphazardly, as an expression of the chaos of emotions and uncertainty inside her.  The scenes in which the young man slinks around in the shadows of his hosts are largely shown from his point of view, and are at once ominous and sweet, certain in their footing, but uncertain in their intent.  This culminates in the end at breakfast: the husband thinks he has won his wife back, the lover is able to live gracefully and quietly with the woman he loves, and Sun-hwa has regained her spirit and happiness. Nothing more than that needs be said.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s actually quite satisfying, in a weird, magical-realism sort of way that manages to disturb and confound as much as it appeases the romantic.”–Michale O’Sullivan, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“In the final count, I think we must have buzzed 20,000,000 behinds.” – William Castle

DIRECTED BY: William Castle

FEATURING: Vincent Price, Judith Evelyn, Darryl Hickman (the older brother of “Dobie Gillis” star Dwyane Hickman)

PLOT: There are two plots running simultaneously in The Tingler. In the first, Dr. Warren Chapin (Price) frees the parasite that lives in the human spine and grows when the host experiences fear, and must save the unsuspecting public from the menace he’s unleashed by stressing the importance of screaming.  In the other plot, film director William Castle raises his penchant for outrageous gimmicks to new heights by running shocks of electricity through auditorium seats.

BACKGROUND:

• As was his wont, director/producer Castle supported the release of The Tingler with several gimmicks, including hiring actresses to play nurses to stand outside the theater and planting audience members to scream and faint at key moments in the picture.  His piece de resistance was called “Percepto.”  For the theatrical release, Castle arranged for a handful of auditorium seats to be wired with war-surplus electric vibrators.  At a key moment during the film’s climax, the projectionist would activate the zappers, buzzing unsuspecting viewers (or eagerly-hoping viewers) with a jolt of electricity, thereby breaking the fourth wall in a way 3-D never could.
• William Castle earned his reputation for his attention-getting publicity stunts. Beneath his huckster’s heart, however, lays a surprising credibility. Castle served as assistant director on Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai, and produced the horror classic Rosemary’s Baby.
• Directors Stuart Gordon and John Waters both included The Tingler in their Top Ten lists for “Sight and Sound”‘s 2002 Top 10 poll.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: A blank projection screen, onto which ambles the shadow of a large rubber insect puppet, followed immediately by blackness, the sound of faux audience members shrieking their heads off, and the unmistakable command of Vincent Price: “Scream! Scream for your lives! The Tingler is loose in this theater!”

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: William Castle always dabbles in oddness. The Tingler’s means of engaging the audience certainly ups the ante in this regard. Whereas previous auditorium gimmicks were content to merely startle theater patrons, The Tingler was now actively complicit in harming the audience, by attempting to electrocute select viewers.  On another level, though, The Tingler represents a fascinating metatextual experience. On the one hand, Percepto pushes the film beyond the boundaries of the screen by affecting the audience physically, rather than through the usual avenues of picture and soundtrack.  The movie not only breaks the fourth wall, but actually rebuilds it behind the audience. Consider Price’s admonition: “The Tingler is loose in this theater!”  He means the very theater we are sitting in.  We have suddenly assumed the role of the audience in the film-inside-the-film, and for a moment, we are actually part of the action, not merely in front of it.  Castle’s prank destroys the proscenium.  Many films play games with the insurmountable distance between the screen and the seats.  Castle is happy to throw it away entirely.

COMMENTS: Vincent Price’s legend is built on a reputation for portraying elegant, velvet-throated villains, but The Tingler stands as an unusual break from type.  Ostensibly our hero, Price’s Dr. Chapin conducts ethically-dubious experiments, engages in acid-tongued repartee with his wife, and exhibits a cavalier disregard for good judgment.  Still, in this film, he’s all the hero we’ve got (aside from his pretty boy assistant Hickman), and Price carries the film with his fully-committed acceptance of the absurd premise.  In the capable hands of Vincent Price, the battle with the ridiculous rubber centipede that plays the title character is fun, rather than ludicrous.

Castle has a lot of screen time to kill before the revelation of The Tingler’s great gimmick. So he spices up the film with bizarre interludes that range from the darkly comic to the genuinely creepy.  The fun begins right from the outset, when Castle himself introduces the film, as well as the pseudoscientific nonsense contained within.  Outwardly mild-mannered, Castle betrays a prankster’s eye, like a carnival barker daring wide-eyed innocents to enter his hall of mirrors. (He looks like John Mahoney. Interesting that, to embody a Castle-like character in the film Matinee, director Joe Dante chose the booming personality of John Goodman.)

Early in the film, we learn about the state of Vincent Price’s marriage to the shrewish Isabel (Patricia Cutts) through a bitter exchange with his spouse which sounds like a meth-fueled reading of Private Lives.

Isabel: You know, Warren, you’ve lost touch with living people. Nobody means anything to you any more unless they’re dead – and you can root around inside them with your sharp little knives. There’s a word for you.
Chapin: There are several for you.

Later, in an attempt to better understand the terrified mind, Price takes LSD, thereby providing the American cinema with its first ever acid trip, and Price with a histrionic acting showcase. (Castle is so determined to show the audience what Dr. Chapin is up to, he prints the name of the scientific monograph Price is reading on the back cover.)

In another thread of the plot, he introduces a deaf-mute character whose condition renders her physically unable to release the tension of horror by screaming (a clever device, and the woman is portrayed by Judith Evelyn, who previously went speechless as Miss Lonelyhearts in Hitchcock’s Rear Window).  Her terror is depicted in a surprising color sequence spotlighting a bathtub full of bright crimson blood.  Even if the film weren’t black & white, the vivid color and texture of the blood would be shocking, and it’s no surprise that it does Evelyn in.

But when all is said and done, The Tingler is all about its gimmick, and neither home video nor repertory cinema can re-create the expectation that yours might very well be the seat that will fire a few dozen volts of electricity into your tuchus.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…it’s a complete original. There’s nothing like The Tingler. No film made before or after it quite matches it for its mix of the imaginative, the creepy, the funny, and the downright weird.”—Lyz Kingsley, And You Call Yourself a Scientist!

“It is as much fun – deliberate, campy, tongue-in-cheek fun – as any movie from that grand era of drive-ins and Saturday matinees. It is a very silly movie, but a movie that has no desire to be thought of as serious.”—Tim Brayton, Antagony & Ecstasy

“…William Castle at the height of his gimmick-based ingenuity…a wonderful little B film that lives up to its cult reputation in every way.”—Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review

IMDB LINK: The Tingler (1959)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Top 10 William Castle Film Gimmicks: The Tingler only places third on the list, which seems low by about two slots, but this does serve as a nicely compact-yet-comprehensive roll call of some of the master’s greatest stunts.

DVD INFO: The original DVD release (buy) hit stores in 1999 in a crisp 40th anniversary edition, including a featurette about Castle and the drive-in theater version of the fabled “Scream for your lives!” scene.  In 2009, The Tingler was packaged as one of the eight films in The William Castle Film Collection (buy), along with such Castle classics as 13 Ghosts and Mr. Sardonicus. The set also includes a feature-length documentary, Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story.

DIRECTED BY: Jaromil Jires

FEATURING: Jaroslava Schallerova, Helena Anyzova, Petr Kopriva, Jiri Prymek

PLOT:  13-year old Valerie lives with her grandmother in a small rural village in

Czechoslovakia; on the week of her menarche she drifts into a sensual, and at times threatening, dreamworld.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST:  This is a gently weird film, as close to representing a dream on film as I have yet seen.  Every shot is a thing of beauty.  The plot is loose but generally true to its own dream logic.  As she approaches adulthood Valerie finds herself the object of desire for men, women and weasel-men alike.  Responding to all the strange occurrences around her with unflappable calmness, Valerie is a passive heroine, but Schallerova oozes charm and is a complete eye magnet whenever she is onscreen.

COMMENTS: A tight, coherent plot is not the strength of this piece, it has to be said.  It’s very much like the moments when you first wake from a puzzling dream, before your conscious mind has started to add little bridging details to try and make sense of it.

Valerie lives with her grandmother, and at the age of 13 has her first period.  Her grandmother tells her that this is the same age as her mother was.  It seems to be an occasion for neither celebration nor shame.  Valerie tells her grandmother that she is excited at the prospect of a troupe of actors arriving in the village and is informed that she’d do better to be excited about the arrival of the bishop and his priests.  You’d be forgiven for thinking that her grandmother is a bit of a party pooper, but like everyone in this film she’s not just what she appears to be at first glance.  Throughout the film religion and sexuality arm wrestle for dominance, but it’s rather like both arms are on the same body.

The performers arrive, as do the clergy.  The bishop has come to deliver a sermon to the virgins of the village, and it’s a pretty inappropriate one.  The bishop himself is a tad inappropriate at times, and has a face not designed to inspire confidence, looking like the hideous love child of Graf Orlak and Bergman’s Death, but with some of the most terrible teeth ever committed to film.  Again though, by the end of the film you’ll see him in different light.

During the course of the film Valerie will see transforming weasels, a hairy priest striptease and the nubile young women of the village will invite her to join them in a game of “hide the fish down your bodice” in the sun dappled river.  She will cure a young women of a strange vampiric ailment by sleeping with her, spy on her grandmother in a odd sexual situation while the toothy bishop lurks at her shoulder and will laugh in the face of being burned at the stake.  Throughout it all Valerie is protected by her mother’s magic earrings and is watched over, in a slightly creepy way by her brother (or would be lover?) Eagle.

Films about girls “coming of age” are few and far between and this is a gorgeous example.  Valerie is surrounded by sexuality both threatening and inviting.  She is on the receiving end of aggressive approaches from the hairy priest and her domineering female cousin, but also sees a guiltless, inviting sensuality in the form of the women in the river, the young woman she spends the night with and the gentle Eagle.

In the end Valerie seems to have explored both the dark and the light of impending womanhood and emerged into the sunlight, where even the toothy bishop seems a bit of a sweetie.

This would make a perfect double bill with Neil Jordan and Angela Carter’s Company Of Wolves, if you fancy an evening of oestrogen-heavy weirdness.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a collection of dream adventures, spurred by guiltless and poly-sexual eroticism. Virtually every shot is a knockout…”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader (rerelease/screening)

DIRECTED BY: Antonio Margheriti

FEATURING: Tony Russel, Lisa Gastoni, Massimo Serato, Franco Nero

PLOT: In 2015, the space police fight to stop an organ-miniaturizing mad scientist from

building a utopian community.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST: Although the synopsis might make it sound like a typical space opera, Wild, Wild Planet is anything but. Everything about the film simultaneously screams “bad!” and “weird!” The dubbed dialogue, for example, is as laughable as any Toho monster movie, with a mix of technobabble and would-be ‘60s clichés like “That’s the wildest, most way-out I’ve ever heard!” The grandstanding villain, Nurmi, constantly repeats his ill-conceived master plan, and his kidnappings are carried out by beautiful women teamed with bald, four-armed mutants.  This is 1960s Italian sci-fi at its wildest and most way-out.

COMMENTS: I’m not sure why Margheriti (who was credited as “Anthony Dawson”) hasn’t become more of a cult figure, though being name-checked in Inglourious Basterds might raise his status among film geeks.  Wild, Wild Planet displays much of the same untalented passion you might expect from Ed Wood or Coleman Francis, and with the screenplay so awkwardly translated into English, it feels even more delirious.

The film’s futuristic aesthetic, which was already outdated in 1965, involves bad model cities and psychedelic dresses; it’s like “The Jetsons” meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers by way of “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”  TVs advertise “Computo-dolls,” and the only remaining form of art has performers dressed as butterflies prancing around in a circle.  When the mutant henchmen attack, they do so by suggestively enclosing victims in their trench coats; one scientist escapes in the midst of this process, and ends up as a comatose midget.  It may be ridiculous, it may be cheap, but it sure ain’t predictable.

Who, after all, could guess that the climax would take place on a resort planet amidst an exploding river of blood (that looks suspiciously like cranberry juice)?  With its bizarre interior design and enough hilarious non sequiturs to rival Plan 9, Wild, Wild Planet is a weird, weird movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Wild, Wild Planet has a colourful bizarreness to it… But despite throwing up such an outre and colourful plot, the way Antonio Margheriti allows it all to transpire on screen is really rather pedestrian and dull. This rather wild skew of ideas ends up as a rather murky plot.”–Richard Scheib, Moria: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review

DIRECTED BY: Zack Braff

FEATURING: Starring Zack Braff and Natalie Portman with Peter Sarsgaard, Gideon Largeman and Method Man

PLOT: Andrew Largeman (Zack Braff) returns home to New Jersey to attend his mother’s

funeral.  While there, he realizes the funeral was only the beginning.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST:   There is a family who repeatedly kills hamsters, grave robbing, argumentative spin the bottle, conversations in Klingon, marijuana, ecstacy and a man dressed up as a knight in shining armor.  Random moments through out the movie shine of weirdness and that alone will keep you glued to your seat.

COMMENTS: When you’ve finish watching this movie you may be puzzled.  I can see you now with that tilted head and unsure expression.  You will probably want to take a moment and allow the movie to ferment in your mind.  However, that doesn’t make a movie “weird” by itself.  But, considering the flashes of nearly 2 hours of surprise and complexity… I’m not sure if I have a better adjective to describe the movie.

Also, not to mention, the cinematography is amazing and the soundtrack is absolutely perfect.   It fits clip by clip and moment by moment with the movie and I recommend it to anyone. The movie, from beginning to end is strange and odd in the purest sense of the words.  All in all it is a really a great movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it’s smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail, as when Andrew arrives at work in Los Angeles and notices that the spigot from a gas pump, ripped from its hose when he drove away from a gas station, is still stuck in his gas tank. Something like that tells you a lot about a person’s state of mind” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

DIRECTOR: Nobuhiko Obayashi

FEATURING: Kimiko Ikegami, Miki Jinbo, Yôko Minamida

PLOT: A group of fun-loving Japanese school girls plan to spend their summer at a

beautiful, isolated mansion, but after experiencing some paranormal activity they eventually realize the house itself may want them DEAD!

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST:  “Weird” doesn’t even begin to describe this movie.  A floating head, a ravenous piano, sporadic animation, a laughing watermelon, a dancing skeleton, a glowing cat, gusts of wind that only affect one person, a host of aggressive, mobile objects, and a group of girls who REFUSE to acknowledge the weirdness: it defies explanation, really.

COMMENTS:  House is a wondrous sight to behold, with delightfully trippy colors, spontaneous animated sequences, and experimental horror imagery; several sequences are reminiscent of home-made youtube music videos.  The effects are noticeably antiquated, but that just adds to the fun!  The entire film is really a collection of incredible, strange, and under-explained moments that left me as incredulous as I was tickled pink.  Cats fly, clocks bleed, mattresses, logs, and floating heads attack, skeletons dance, and a score of other ridiculous, unexpected things happen at every turn.

The bluntly-nicknamed characters are hilariously one-dimensional, each one relegated to her specific interest/trait.  Mac talks about nothing but eating, while Melody is only the focus when there’s a piano in the room (a very… hungry piano).  Fantasy is the only one who plays witness to most of the strange occurrences, and of course no one believes her for her overactive imagination.  Kung-Fu is by far the best character, handling every obstacle with badassery and no questions asked.  Also: she has the best hair.  Supporting characters include the girls’ heavily-sideburned teacher en route to the House but finding an impediment in bananas (that will make sense when you see it, I promise- well as much sense as it can make), a pudgy salesman with talking watermelons, and Gorgeous’s new step-mother, who literally cannot go more than 2 seconds without a gust of wind blowing romantically around her.  It’s a remarkable talent.

The dialogue oscillates between being frivolous and insanely over-dramatic, but the best part about it is its frequent insistence on completely ignoring what’s happening in its own movie.  Most of the weirdest scenes are just passed over by the characters without comment, and that just makes the “WTF?!” factor that much better.  House is a strange, strange, strange film and I absolutely loved it.   It’s hilarious, inventive, utterly unexpected, and lends no comparison to any other movie I’ve seen.  Look for it on Criterion in September 2010!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“You, my friend, lover that you are of the obscure, the grotesque, the inscrutable, and the just flat-out funky and awe-inspiringly eccentric, have never, ever seen anything like House (aka Hausu). Even by my permanently warped standards, House is beyond the pale: a surreal, indefinable piece of proto-Japanese horror/comedy that was made in 1977 (it was director Obayashi’s debut feature), only to find a second life at Austin’s Fantastia International Film Festival, Sitges, Fantasia Fest, and wherever connoisseurs of the outré, the outrageous, and the seriously freaky gather.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (rerelease)

DIRECTOR: Hal Ashby

FEATURING: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon

PLOT: Twenty-something rich kid unfulfilled with his life stages fake suicides to peeve

his uppity mother and ultimately finds meaning in life when he meets carefree 89-year-old Maude.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST: The May-December romance theme is taken to the extreme by romantically entangling (yes, I mean sexually) a very young man with a very old lady.  Considered taboo by most people, the film makes a plea that the perversion is justified because these two odd souls truly do make a bona fide connection with each other, regardless of age or what society deems as acceptable.

COMMENTS:  First off, I’ll admit that I’m biased when it comes to this film. It has been my all-time favorite for about as long as I can remember. Excepting The Dark Crystal (which just frightened me) it was the first truly “weird” film I encountered as a child.  Like any other kid of my generation, I was enamored by the spectacle that was Star Wars.  Fantasy consumes a child’s existence, and there was no greater escape than those first three films.  I’m guessing around ’84 I first came upon Harold and Maude on HBO.  I was engrossed immediately.  Here was a movie that did not rely on fantasy to hold your attention.  Sure, there is some reality-based whimsy involved.  The humor is dark for sure, some may say morbid, but to a 10-year-old kid watching someone feigning multiple suicides comes off as hilarious.  At least it did for me at the time, and yes it still does.

I know this movie has a huge and dedicated cult following.  Without trying to sound completely snobbish, I hope it stays within that circle.  It deserves to be seen by those who like their cinema offbeat.  I find this movie to be so perfect that I cannot fathom anyone not enjoying it.

Now let’s talk about what makes this movie weird.  The May-December theme is basically a couple who is one-half old and one-half young.  It has been explored many times over in movies, usually in dreadful Hollywood romantic comedies.  Usually, it is the older man falling for the younger girl… yes, tracing a semi-origin to “Lolita,” one of the most popular novels written about the subject, which was made into a couple of “controversial” films.  There are exceptions of good films exploring this theme.  Ghost World (I agree a bit creepy for a couple) or Lost in Translation are good examples, but they never really surpassed plain ol’ sweetness.  What sets Harold and Maude apart, other than the gender-role age discrepancy being reversed, is that they give each other hope and a true purpose for life.

Harold’s mother ceaselessly tries to find a respectable mate through dating services.  Harold wants no part in this shallowness, and bizarre fake suicides are performed to ward each one off.  Upon meeting Maude at funeral services, for which neither one knows the deceased, they hit it off.  Maude takes part in several shenanigans that involuntarily involve Harold.  He starts to see this chaos/anarchy as a means for living and loving.  He tells his mother early on that he has found a companion in Maude and provides evidence with a picture of her.  I believe initially the affair was meant to once again irk his mother, but eventually unfolds to true and devout love.  Of course his mother is aghast and she stops at nothing to prevent the relationship.  Again, the results are nothing short of hilarious.

I have always been fascinated by two people who are linked together and it seems to be a complete mismatch.  The beauty of Harold and Maude is that they are not mismatched at all.  Only the age factor makes it seem that way.  I compare it to seeing a strange couple walking down the aisle of a store.  One is obese and the other is pencil-thin.  It makes you raise and eyebrow and think, “that’s weird.”  Is it?  If they are happy I salute them. Love truly knows no boundaries and it makes this life what it is.  Films like Harold and Maude can show you that love exists, in spades.  It may also tell you to take that spade and dig up that city tree and transplant it in the forest where it belongs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a doggedly eccentric film which some will reject out of hand. Others will find it profoundly moving and life affirming.”–TV Guide

DIRECTED BY: Brian Yuzna

FEATURING: Billy Warlock, Devin DeVasquez, Patrice Jennings, David Wiley

PLOT: Teenage Bill Whitney (Warlock) ostensibly lives on easy street.  He lives with his

filthy rich parents and hottie sister in posh Beverly Hills, plus he has a babe cheerleader girlfriend and is reasonably popular.  His future looks bright.  For Billy, all this makes him “uneasy”.  He tells his shrink that he thinks something very weird and possibly evil lurks under his upper-class society.  As he tries to scratch the surface to uncover what’s beneath, he soon finds something unlike anything ever.  In the history of society.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST: Simply, the bravura finale.  Society takes it’s time towards it but when it comes…watch out!  Surreal, disgusting, unique, and an absolute must see.  People melt, melt into each other, melt into…things . To continue would be giving away the film’s powerhouse trump card placed securely up it’s sleeve.  But I find the film’s overall tone to be the second weirdest aspect.  It plays out like a made-for-TV melodrama and keeps you intrigued enough to stick with it, then the “shunt” (ending). Powerful stuff, the shunt is.

COMMENTS: Society really is an (purposefully?) overlooked gem.  Perhaps it’s greatest shortcoming , and maybe the reason it doesn’t have a greater cult following, is that for most of it’s run time it plays like a queasy hybrid of “The Hills” and “The Twilight Zone.”  Bland, beautiful people with bland problems living in a sort-of alternate universe; Society is a not so subtle satire on the lifestyles of the rich and shameless.  Society is a rare, off-the-wall, and greatly satirical American film that offers a lot of food for thought.  Which is a good thing, because you’re not going to be hungry after.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A bizarre fable that starts like a TV soap but soon darkens into a disturbing thriller… the ‘surrealistic make-up designs’… will stretch even the most inelastic mind.”–Time Out Film Guide

DIRECTED BY: Hitoshi Matsumoto

FEATURING: Hitoshi Matsumoto

PLOT: Not-so-lovable loser transforms into significantly larger loser to battle some of the

weirdest monsters to ever threaten Japan.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: On a purely visual level, Big Man Japan has a bizarre aesthetic that nobody else would rightly consider.  Beyond that, the film’s humor is often so subtle that you don’t realize what strange territory you’ve stumbled into until it ends up battling it out on the screen in its underwear.  This film is just weird.

COMMENTS: Did you ever watch Mike Myers defend the male nudity in Austin Powers by claiming that the naked male form has been a comedic stereotype in British humor for years, but you still got the sense that he just enjoyed running around naked?  Well, Japanese comedian Hitoshi Matsumoto has taken Myer’s original intent and literally writ it large for the big screen.  Prepare yourself for a loving CGI rendition of the male form, with every stray hair delineated and a paunch that could kill.

Matsumoto doesn’t stop there.  His film, Big Man Japan, is as loving a tribute to pure loser-dom as you could hope to film.  His character is the none-too-bright heir to monster fighters in an alternate-reality Japan where giant monsters attack on a regular basis.  Unfortunately, while his monster-battlin’ grandfather was considered a hero, he is now a national joke, fighting inexplicably ridiculous monsters for increasingly little ratings.  (His show now only airs in the wee hours of the morning.)  As if being a national joke was not enough, our current Big Man manages to fail every time he is called up to bat.

Big Man Japan is a slow burn of a film.  If you are familiar with celebration of wrong-headed intentions Christopher Guest has been putting out for years, you should be comfortable here.  The majority or the film focuses on interviews with our loser as he is subtly confronted with his abject shame in society. Luckily for us, every twenty minutes or so, he must fight against a bizarre menagerie of monsters in CGI battles that are, to say the very least, uncomfortable.

This is an odd film.  But before you throw it out, stick around for the ending.  I’m not going to give it away here, and I’m not even sure I could if I tried.  Suffice to say, I laughed like a maniac, probably to the consternation of all my friends.

Big Man Japan is nothing else other than Big Man Japan.  Before you venture in, I recommend you watch the preview.  If it looks at all interesting to you (you’re a small crowd), watch it.  You may be unpleasantly surprised.  Or the opposite.  No real way to predict your fate with this film.  Suffice to say, don’t expect to get out unscathed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Part character study, part media satire and, by its finale, altogether bizarre, ‘Big Man Japan’ plays a bit like a quieter, weirder version of ‘Hancock’… the most impressive special effect here is Mr. Matsumoto’s hilariously restrained performance, a tour de force of comedic concision in a movie bloated by increasingly surreal developments.”–Nathan Lee, The New York Times (contemporaneous)