Recognizing that “weirdest” and “best” aren’t always the same thing, we’ve actually created two top ten lists here: one for the best movies that fall into the weird genre (these are the ones to start your timid friends off with), and one for the absolute weirdest movies we’ve seen (these are the ones to put on at a party when you want to clear the room).  Because we’re giving you two top ten lists for the price of one, you’re actually getting 20 recommended weird movies.  Well, actually 19, since one movie appears on both lists, but who’s counting?  Oh, wait, we are, that’s the entire point…

Feel free to agree with my choices, disagree, or hurl hurtful epithets at me in the comments.  But do remember that this list only covers movies we’ve already reviewed.  Your favorite movie we omitted may be coming down the line, and may make this list the next time we formulate it (in another two years or so).

With that said, let’s get to it!

# 10 Best Weird Movie: Kwaidan (1964). “Although on the surface it’s just a collection of bare-bones ghost stories, in telling these tales director Kobayashi wisely jettisons reality in favor of a stylized, expressionistic, visually poetic aesthetic that gently detaches the viewer from everyday life and floats him into an ancient spirit world that seems simultaneously to have never and always existed.”

#10 Weirdest Movie: House [Hausu] (1977). “Rife with images of flying heads, murderous painos, laughing watermelons, an invisible wind machine, and a truly demonic kitty, the film’s surrealist atmosphere and ever-shifting styles are as hilarious as they are inscrutable.  There is no way to get a handle on Hausu—the viewer is completely at the mercy of Obayashi’s bizarre whims.”

#9 Best Weird Movie: The Wicker Man (1973): “Hardy and Shaffer create an atmosphere like no other; it’s an encounter of civilized man with strange, primeval beliefs…. The viewer himself undergoes a dread confrontation with Old Gods who are at the same time familiar and terrifyingly strange.”

#9 Weirdest Movie: Cowards Bend the Knee, or, The Blue Hands (2003): “Cowards features Maddin’s trademark in-your-face style (a mix of silent film artifacts and glitchy hypermodern editing); crazed, dreamlike narrative (incorporating hockey matches, beauty salons, murder, infidelity, ghosts, and a hand transplant); and a wildly veering, yet somehow coherent tone that moves from melodrama to slapstick to absurdist vintage pornography to Greek tragedy in the space of a few frames.”

#8 Best Weird Movie: The City of Lost Children (1995): “In The City of Lost Children, Jeunet and Caro give us more than we could ever hope for in a movie; indeed, they give us more successful, original ideas than we’d could hope find in three or four movies.  The film is stuffed to overflowing bizarre characters, visual details, and narrative invention.  Jeunet and Caro traffic in unashamedly gratuitous imagination… They give us too much, and we respond: more, please.”

#8 Weirdest Movie: Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989): “Men and women extrude cables, wires, gears, drills, threaded pipes, and miscellaneous machine parts from their skin, in glorious showers of blood.  Nightmare visions in grainy black and white flow at a breakneck pace to the pulsing beat of an industrial soundtrack.  It’s a square plug of a movie forced into the round connector of our cinematic expectations, and it emits dangerous sparks.”

# 7 Best Weird Movie: The Tree of Life (2011): “… a challenging, audacious, experimental and surpassingly beautiful work of cinema, and you’ll be better for having encountered it.”

#7 Weirdest Movie: Alice [Neco z Alenky] (1988): “‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a nonsense fantasy, a fairy tale of fractured reality; it makes a perfect template for a weird movie, but no adaptation has taken the story so deep into the frightening labyrinths of the subconscious as this uncanny animation.  Carroll’s and Svankmajer’s opposite talents and sensibilities complement each other perfectly, like pure cane sugar mixed with white powder heroin.”

#6 Best Weird Movie: Pan’s Labyrinth (2006): “You can have brilliant cinematography, masterful acting, awe-inspiring spectacle, and evocative music—and Pan’s Labyrinth has all of these—but you can’t create a classic without a great, emotionally engaging story to tell.  Although del Toro insists that he tells his stories primarily through images, it’s Pan’s Labyrinth‘s tight, simple, elegant script that delivers a tale that immediately feels timeless.”

#6 Weirdest Movie: Funky Forest: The First Contact (2005): “Watching Funky Forest is like peeking inside the skull of an American schizophrenic stranded in Tokyo on a three day meth and mescaline binge, nodding off into dreams and blacking out in periodic epileptic fits as he flips through the local channels at 4:30 AM, all the while unaware that aliens are attempting to jam the local airwaves with subliminal propaganda designed to prepare us for an imminent encounter with advanced beings our brains are still eons away from being able to comprehend.”

#5 Best Weird Movie: Barton Fink (1991): “A nightmarish, expressionistic, and self-satirizing evocation of the difficulty of creation, Barton Fink pokes a sharpened stick into the deepest wounds of artistic self-doubt.  A pure mood piece, its amazing ending achieves the remarkable triumph of leaving us with nothing but unanswered questions, while simultaneously feeling complete and whole.”

#5 Weirdest Movie: Eraserhead (1977): “…probably the greatest recreation of a nightmare ever filmed, a marvelous and ambiguous mix of private and cosmic secrets torn from the subconscious. Or, as Lynch puts it, it’s “a dream of dark and disturbing things.”

#4 Best Weird Movie: Brazil (1985): “Gilliam’s genius in Brazil was to recast George Orwell’s propaganda-ridden nightmare 1984 not as some disaster that might happen in the distant future if humanity is not vigilant, but as something that has already happened, and went unnoticed.”

#4 Weirdest Movie: El Topo (1970): ” Sergio Leone had already established this legendary West of supernaturally proficient gunfighters as a mythical, dreamlike landscape, a place where modern audiences were willing to surrender disbelief and expecting to encounter demigods and monsters.  Jodorowsky took Leone’s land of myth and exploded it into a billion pieces, transforming it from a desert of legends into a wasteland of mystical, psychedelic splendors.”

#3 Best Weird Movie: Repulsion (1965): “The possibility that our own minds may betray us and drag us down to Hell is a far more frightening than any psycho-slasher in a hockey mask ever could be.”

#3 Weirdest Movie: Naked Lunch (1991): “…anything can happen inside the story of Naked Lunch: typewriters can speak through their anuses, characters can turn into each other or metamorphose into sexually ravenous centipedes, sexual desire can materialize into an amorphous living blob and be chased out of the room by a maid dressed as a dominatrix.”

#2 Best Weird Movie: A Clockwork Orange (1971): “It’s not the ultraviolence in A Clockwork Orange that existentially unnerves us; it’s the way Kubrick holds our eyes open and forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves.”

#2 Weirdest Movie: The Holy Mountain (1973): ” If you tore out pages from the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, The Golden Bough, and a dozen other esoteric works from the Kabbalah to Gurdijeff—throwing in a couple of sleazy pulp novels for good measure—and put them together in a giant cauldron, stirred them up and pulled out sheaves at random and asked a troupe of performance artists, carnival freaks, and hippies tripping on peyote to act them out, you might come up with a narrative something like The Holy Mountain.”

#1 Best Weird Movie: Eraserhead (1977):  Nothing unnerves like Eraserhead.  The distilled essence of weirdness, it’s a masterpiece that gets under your skin, and lives there for the rest of your life.  It’s the cinematic equivalent of a Neo-surrealist manifesto and arguably the most important work in the weird genre.

#1 Weirdest Movie: INLAND EMPIRE (2008): “David Lynch at his most deliberately unhinged, experimenting with how far he can stray from linear narrative while still producing a work that feels thematically whole, searching for the minimum number of recurring images and themes needed to stitch a piece together so that it tantalizingly approaches coherence without ever actually resolving.”

The truly deranged stuff just doesn’t make it into theaters, and 2011 continued the trend of re-releases and delayed DVD releases blowing away the theatrical releases in terms of weirdness.  We finally saw Bill Plympton’s worth-waiting for angelic black comedy Idiots and Angels (2008), Otto Preminger’s amazing psychedelic flop Skidoo (1968) surfaced after almost four decades, and the Criterion Collection resurrected Louis Malle‘s two major forays into weirdness—Zazie dans le Metro (1960) and Black Moon (1975)—along with new editions of cult classics Shock Corridor and Solaris.  In terms of vintage oddities, 2011 was another banner year.

Though weirdness wasn’t omnipresent this year, the cinematically surreal did get a serious prestige boost from our top weird movie of the year.

1. The Tree of Life: The year’s best weird movie is also the year’s best movie, period.  Stunning cinematography, sacred music, the birth of the universe, graceful dinosaurs, childhood hallucinations and a glimpse of the afterlife all mixed together in the most ambitious movie of the past decade.  We dare the Academy to nominate this for Best Picture.
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: Technically a 2010 movie (it won the Palme d’Or exactly a year before The Tree of Life), but we’ll allow it in our 2011 list because it played US theaters this year, and because we didn’t honor it last year.  Per Andreas Stoehr, “It’s not a puzzle box, but a cornucopia of mysteries. In its subdued way, it’s among the weirdest movies in history.”  If you still doubt its weirdness, we have two words for you: catfish cunnilingus.
3. Keyhole: Continuing a longstanding tradition established last year, we once again nominate a movie we haven’t seen for our year-end top 10 list based on nothing more than the trailer and the director’s reputation.  Guy Maddin’s latest looks like another journey into the labyrinths of the subconscious as mobster Ulysses (Jason Patrick) journeys through his own deserted house, room by mysterious room, searching for his wife (Isabella Rossellini).
   
4. Maximum Shame: Another 2010 copyright movie we’re reclassifying to 2011, simply because no one saw it in 2010.  Truth in advertising is a rare thing these days, so when Maximum Shame‘s tagline describes it as “an apocalyptic fetish horror musical chess sci-fi weird feature movie,”  you may be shocked to discover that the movie actually lives up to that description.  Watch in awe as the Queen of Catalan Love drips transdimensional spaghetti into a slave girls mouth.
5. The Oregoninan:  A completely surreal horror movie featuring an astounding “rainbow pee” sequence and a terrifying green Muppet who shows up at the most disturbing times.  We’re not sure about a DVD release but look for it to show up on Video on Demand, at least, in January.
6. Father’s Day: Alex Kittle explains: “An eye-patched vigilante, a topless stripper with a chainsaw, a nearsighted cannibal rapist, incest, demonic possession, trips to both heaven and hell, a non sequitur commercial for low-budget sci-fi ‘Star Raiders,’ hallucinogenic berries: Father’s Day has a lot of weirdness to recommend it.”  Created by the absurdist art collective Astron-6, this is our most anticipated release from Troma Studios in some time.  Look for a limited theatrical run and DVD release in 2012.
7. The Catechism Cataclysm: “It starts off as a funny, somewhat quirky canoe trip, relying on dialogue and a few offbeat stories to entertain its audience. But then it gets weird. Really weird,” teases Alex Kittle.  The second feature from the director of the ultra-quirky The Guatemalan Handshake.
8. Frankie in Blunderland: “Plays as a post-modern L.A. hipster bounce on Lewis Carroll’s well known tale, and possibly ‘The Odyssey’ as well.”  We really liked scream queen Debbie Rochon‘s cameo appearance as a spider.
9. Melancholia: Lars von Trier‘s followup to the deranged Antichrist is a more subtle and measured exploration of depression.  Of course, for von Trier “more subtle” means imagining a giant planet destroying the earth.  The opening sequence is beautiful slo-mo surrealism, with Kirsten Dunst dragging huge vines behind her as she trudges forward fatalistically in a wedding dress.
10. The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol: A low-budget portmanteau film containing three anxious, blackly comic dreams about being a struggling actor in Los Angeles.  It features many of the same cast and crew as Blunderland above.

And that about covers it for 2011.  Take us to task for our choices or tell us what we missed in the comments section.  See you in 2012!

This year, for the first time, I will be voting for the Online Film Critics Society Awards.  Taking this commission seriously, I have watched perhaps a hundred of the most highly acclaimed 2011 movies, with a few nominees still left to see before my vote is due.  From the perspective of a weird movie specialist, this process has provided me two benefits.  First, it’s given me that baseline of movie normality that I need to be able to recognize the stuff that’s really out there to the average viewer.  Watching only the strangest of the strange week in and week out skews your perspectives.  Hopefully, I will never again fall into the trap of thinking The Tree of Life is too conventional, as I did in my initial review of the movie.

Secondly, gathering that “baseline of normality” has made me appreciate the weird all the more.  Conventional award-winning movies are all alike; but every weird movie is weird in its own way.  You can tick off the list of qualities that great movies should have: moving performances, arresting cinematography, sparkling dialogue.  A weird movie may have these qualities too, but it also has a spark of divine madness or folly that sets it apart from the herd.

You may notice that six of my top ten choices could be pigeonholed as children’s movies.  That’s not by design (last year my list would have contained only one, Toy Story 3).  But I did not feel the need to bump the children’s movies off the list to make room for more “adult” fare.  The truth is that children’s films are the most lucrative segment of the movie market right now, and studios are taking more time and care (not just more money) in making them.  They’re writing clever, multi-layered scripts to appeal to adults as well as kids; spending more time on storytelling basics and character development; and crafting more exciting and spectacular set-pieces.  If movies made for grown-ups are to increase their share of next year’s list, well, then, they’ll just have to make better movies.

We’ll start off this list with 10 Honorable Mentions.  I would have been comfortable including any of the films below on my year-end list, but by the narrowest of margins each came up a little short.

50/50; The Artist; Bridesmaids; Cave of Forgotten Dreams; Martha Marcy May Marlene; Melancholia; Tinker Tailor Solider Spy; Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; Weekend; We Need to Talk About Kevin

And on to my Top 10 Movies of 2011:

10. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2: I’ll be honest—although it’s a good film, Deathly Hallows 2 makes it on this list mainly as a lifetime achievement award for the series.  None of the Harry Potter movies were masterpieces, but they were all above average, and such sustained quality over eight movies and ten years deserves recognition.

9. Arthur Christmas:  This surprisingly dense and entertaining animated film (co-produced by the studio behind “Wallace and Gromit”) juggles lots of well-drawn characters and subplots together with an entirely new, technology-influenced mythology of Santa Claus.

8. Winnie the Pooh:  Refreshingly innocent; this feels more like golden age Disney than anything the studio has done in years.

7. Hugo: Martin Scorsese tries to bribe film critics into fawning over his movie by casually slipping film geek fantasies into the narrative—he remakes Georges Méliès shorts in color and 3-D, complete with extra “making of” footage.  It works.

6. Midnight in Paris: Maybe it’s a bit frou-frou, but it’s also like a pleasant conversation with a sharp-witted old friend.

5. Project Nim:  This documentary about a chimp who gets shuttled around to various labs, shelters and foster homes is, surprisingly, the most emotionally affecting and thought-provoking movie of the year.

4. Rango: The animation is excellent, the chase scenes thrilling, and the movie is damn funny; with its numerous citations to classic movies of the past and PG rating for mild language and violence, Nickolodeon Studios aims at a niche audience of older kids and adults.

3. The Muppets:  Simply the most fun you’ll have at the movies all year.

2. 13 Assassins:  Takashi Miike proves he can play it (mostly) straight with this samurai film that’s beyond epic—it’s mythological.  Like the no-name cowboys in Sergio Leone’s Old West, these men are demigods, and the final battle is their Ragnarök.

1. The Tree of Life: Read the Certified Weird entry.  Terrence Malick‘s moon-shot of a movie gives us the birth of the universe, graceful dinosaurs and Sean Penn confused on a Beach of Souls.  It’s not just the best weird movie of the year; it’s the best movie of the year (and, thankfully for us in our role as advocates of the supranormal, it just happens to be weird).

This interview was conducted by Gregory J. Smalley with Mr. Atanes via email in October and November of 2011.  His “Top 10 Weird Movie List” appears at the bottom of the interview.

366:  You’ve announced a new project, Gallino, which you describe as a”pornophilosophical film.”  What can you tell our readers about the movie?

Atanes: It is a step forward in my rise to weirdness. Gallino is related to my last movie Maximum Shame in many of its subjects. There are different actors and characters, other aesthetics and other conflicts, but in fact it is like a next part, a complement to Maximum Shame. Both are like a “double feature.”  Gallino goes deep into parallel realities, meta-narrative and blurred borders between the pornographic and and the non-pornographic.  Why do we consider one thing pornographic and not another, exactly?  Why some things are visible/presentable and other things are not?  So, Gallino is an strange trip along the cracks, halfway between dream and wakelfulness, porn and no porn, skin and flesh, story and essay.  The plot is hard to explain, but in short I can say it is about a group of people who use pornography—in a very particular sense—for seeing beyond everyday life.  For tearing away the Veil of Isis.

366: One of the weird things about your previous film Maximum Shame is that it uses the iconography of the fetish world, with the Queen dressed in leather bondage gear and the slave harnessed in some bizarre restraints, but there is no actual sex in it.  The closest we come is a foot massage.  Can we expect the same approach to the erotic in Gallino, or will it be more explicitly sexual?

Atanes: I have a complex perception of sex in film.  I like porn, but when a film is not porn, the sex scenes almost always bore me.  I think only a handful of mainstream directors—e.g. David Cronenberg—are capable of showing sex in an interesting way.  Maximum Shame and also FAQ are about domination and sexual frustration more than sex itself.  Gallino will be more explicit, but it is not a film about sex either. In Gallino pornography is much more important than sex—don’t forget sex and pornography are not synonymous—so it will be more pornographically explicit than sexually explicit.

366: You call yourself an “underground” filmmaker. In America, the term “underground film” is fairly vague, but I think it’s most strongly associated with low budget experimental movies from the 1960s to 1980s—anything from the homoerotic surrealism of Kenneth Anger to the grubby, transgressive films of Paul Morrisey and Andy Warhol to the bad taste provocations of John Waters.  When the term is used today, it’s often in the context of films that are too experimental and low-budget to be called “independent,” ones that have minimal commercial appeal and almost no chance of being seen outside underground film festivals.  What does it mean to be an “underground” filmmaker today in Spain?

Atanes:  That’s a very good question.  The context in Spain is radically different from the U.S.  In the U.S. you have the mainstream industry—Hollywood majors—, the indie industry—outside the majors but industry anyway—, and underground film—that is not “industry” at all.  In Spain and in Europe by extension we have subsidized films and… subsidized films.  Sometimes somebody tries to make a movie in an “independent” way, but often they reproduce the same working methods, subjects and targets as mainstream/subsidized films.  What to you and me would “feel like” an underground film does almost not exist in Spain—and, I repeat, in Europe.

But, although Underground is mainly an American label, there are also a few cases of it here.  People who work away from main trends, both financially and thematically/aesthetically, and with that “swine” touch that I think is essential in underground films.  Iván Zulueta would be the paradigmatic underground filmmaker in Spain, and his cult movie Arrebato (Rapture, 1978) is his masterpiece.  And such people in the course of time as José María Nunes, Antoni Padrós, Adolfo Arrieta, Pedro Almodóvar’s early films… Nowadays I don’t know if I am the only underground filmmaker in Spain, but I don’t know anybody else.

366: Speaking of the Spanish film industry, your short film “Morfing” (1996) is an absurdly funny film about trying to get a film made: the actresses call you a pervert, your producer can’t afford toilet paper, and you try to hang yourself twice before the movie is finished.  A number of your fellow Spanish directors appear in it, including Nacho Cerdá, who tries to talk you out of killing yourself by saying, “Do you want to end up on the autopsy table, sliced up like a pig? Well, maybe it’s a good idea.” I think only a very few people will understand why that’s funny, but it’s very rewarding if you do get the joke.  I was wondering how this movie came about, and why these particular directors to appear in it?

Atanes: “Morfing” was a television pilot for a local TV in Barcelona.  It would been the first chapter of a weekly show.  I don’t remember what my intention was with that weekly show apart from I was some kind of anchorman who was flowing all my craziest ideas into it, in a shameless exercise of narcissism.  And that is exactly what I did in the first chapter: a feverish pseudo-biopic.  But the TV board watched “Morfing” and slammed the door in my face.  So I adopted it as an autonomous short film—or medium-length film, because the duration is 30 minutes.

In those days (early/middle nineties) there was a rich and frenzied independent film activity in Barcelona and—contrary to present time—I was connected with many directors.  We did a call for the shooting and some of them came: Nacho Cedrá, Jaume Balagueró, José María Nunes, and so.   At the set I told them the sequence and asked them to improvise their speeches.  They did it very well, were concise and idiosyncratic: Nunes made a statement about suicide, Cerdá talked about autopsy…  It was funny.  And useful, because I wished to mix fiction with reality throughout the film and that sequence is a fabulation but also a little piece of history.

366: “Morfing” was included on your short film compilation Codex Atanicus, and, though readers may find this hard to believe, it was the least weird of the three short films. “Metaminds and Metabodies” was set in a bar where a demon ran the floor show and a succubus was invading through the mirrors, and “Welcome to Spain” featured a long battle/feast/orgy on a metal stairway.  Both films feel like nightmares.  To me, they both look like pure Surrealist films.  Watching them I was reminded that Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí—the authors of the first important Surrealist films—were both Spaniards.  So, my question is how important are Buñuel and Dali to you personally, and to Spanish film in general?

Atanes: I would not say that Buñuel and Dalí have exerted too much influence on Spanish film.  They were two “rara avis” (rare birds).  Spanish film and literature has been always mainly focused in realism.  From time to time some directors say that they are influenced by Buñuel, but it is not obvious.  In fact Buñuel is not just unique and unrepeatable in Spain, but in the world.  For me he is unquestionably one of the most important filmmakers. I admire and try to learn from his virtuous sobriety, his cruel humor, and his refined roughness.

Dalí has also marked me but more as thinker than as painter.  I love Dalí paintings, but not everyone knows that Dalí was a great essayist.  His father said that he was better writer than painter, and I think he was right.  Dalí is one of the greatest Spanish writers of the 20th Century, and his writings are an explosion of intelligence, imagination and astonishment.  Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method—a way for relating things apparently unconnected—showed me an entire world of possibilities.  I don’t know what I owe exactly to Buñuel and Dalí, but I am sure it’s a lot.  As Bernard of Chartes said, we are carried aloft and elevated by the magnitude of the giants.

366: Well, continuing that thought, I find a lot of your work, to me, seems to fit in the Surrealist tradition.  But I have never noticed you using the words surreal, Surrealism, or Surrealist to describe yourself or your films.  Would you consider yourself a Surrealist?

Atanes: Strictly no, I don’t. People often use the word “surrealist” for describing anything weird or incomprehensible.  And from that point of view I would be a surrealist.  But Surrealism is a well-defined movement in History, with clear intentions.  Breton said in his Manifesto that Surrealism was “Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express (…) the actual functioning of thought.  Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”  Since I am neither interested in psychoanalysis nor in making films in an automatist way, and I do have aesthetic and moral concerns… I can not be a Surrealist strictly speaking.  My films and writings have meeting points with Surrealism—oneiric situations—but they are also under other art ceilings as Arte Povera, the Panic movement, conceptual art, Romanesque painting and many others.  In short I am not interested in the absurd but in human stupidity, not in automatism but in arbitrariness, not in the unconscious but in the primary instinct.  So many differences move me away from Surrealism.

366: I agree; your reflections about “surrealism” and how the term is misunderstood today are quite correct.  That’s one of the reasons I chose to call this project “366 Weird Movies” rather than “366 Surreal[ist]Movies.” “Weird” is a much broader term that allows us to include things like Dario Argento‘s irrational fantastique films, or some of the more demented or unintentionally strange B-movies, alongside the works of the great Surrealist filmmakers.  I suppose you had similar reasons for choosing the word “weird” to describe your own work.  When and why did you decide to label yourself a “weird” filmmaker?

Atanes: In fact other people labeled me first.  In the course of time I reached the conclusion that it was a good label.  I agree with you, I prefer “weird” because it’s a broader term than “surrealist” or “underground” or “experimental.”  And it defines the indefinable collection of films which I love and the kind of film I want to make.  It’s a highly heterogeneous collection of movies: from Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise to Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit, John Boorman’s Zardoz and Deliverance, Marco Ferreri’s El cochecito, Dillinger is Dead and La Grande Bouffe, Kubrick’s 2001, Herzog’s Aguirre and Heart of Glass, Fosse’s All that Jazz, Carlos Saura’s Raise Ravens, Water’s Pink Flamingos, Claudio Guerín’s Bell from Hell, Pasolini’s Saló…  The list is much longer.  Have you noticed that most of those films are from the Seventies?  What a great decade in film!  It seemed a race to be the boldest!  Nowadays film is comparatively boring.  I was born in 1971, so weirdness is in my veins.

366: Besides strictly “weird” films, you’ve also shown a strong interest in science fiction.  Your first feature film, FAQ, was a dystopian movie about a future world ruled by women that could almost pass as “conventional” science fiction—except for little absurdist touches, like when the leader of the male resistance puts on a clown nose just before he’s about to be executed.  How did your interest in science fiction come about?

Atanes: I have loved sci-fi for as long as I can remember.  And I am sure the fact that I was born in the seventees has influenced my bent, because as child I watched amazing films like the original Planet of the Apes saga, Silent Running and Soylent Green, among many others.  These films also pushed me to read Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Orwell and Lovecraft.  All that stuff constitutes my essential cultural background.  Curiously, I haven’t been a “fantasy” enthusiast.  Tolkien bores me.  I need the rational sci-fi’s hook, its plausibility.  I feel that pure fantasy—like pure surrealism—is often trifling (of course there are exceptions, as in Terry Gilliam’s works).  Sci-fi, which is always an allegory but also an escape, has an unequalable transgressive quality: starting strongly from our reality it puts our reality in a mess.  And this is exactly what I try to do when I make a film.  So I am always close to sci-fi, even when I am not making films as obviously in sci-fi genre as FAQ and Proxima.

366: Certainly, influence of Philip K. Dick is strong in your second film Proxima, which includes a character named “Felix Cadecq” who has some similarities to the real-life author, including the fact that he sees visions.  I think there may be a lot of references scattered in that movie that only dedicated science fiction fans will pick up on.  And of course the main character is a sci-fi fan. Was Proxima intended as a sort of a love letter to science fiction and to its fans?

Atanes: Yes, it is a love letter. But a bit of a bitter one too, because with Proxima I wanted to remember the sense of wonder typical of sci-fi in the past.  It’s difficult for me to know if the loss of that sense is due to the fact I am older or to the fact that sci-fi has really lost it.  I’m sure it is a combination of both factors but I have a well-founded suspician that the second one is the main cause.  I am not accusing sci-fi directly. What I am saying is that sci-fi arose in a period when people felt, for many reasons, a sense of wonder much greater than they do now about space, the future and science.  Sci-fi arrived at just the right moment, not by chance but by necessity, and historians will talk about sci-fi in the future as the great genre of the 20th century, the genre which best showed 20th century people’s fears and aspirations.  Maybe we’ve kept the feelings of hope and threat—often expressed so naively as in the past—but we have lost the astonishment.  And it was precisely that astonishment that made sci-fi so peculiar and charming. So Proxima is a love letter to sci-fi but also the ascertainment of a disenchanment.

366: Those first two features, FAQ and Proxima, were both predominantly science fiction pieces with strong hints of weirdness. I think your third movie, Maximum Shame, was the opposite: a very weird movie with hints of science fiction. Sure, there is talk about a black hole—but mostly it moments like the Queen of Catalan Love appearing in a magic mirror eating spaghetti. Did you consciously choose to move away from harder science fiction and its “rational hook” and back to something more irrational?

Atanes: Ha, ha! You caught me!  I am a man full of contradictions.  Yes, I did it consciously.  In fact I moved in a weirder direction before, when I decided to go beyond the strict edges of sci-fi and I made the short film “Scream Queen”, which is like a relative of Maximum Shame.  And I follow this path making Gallino, a movie even more unclassifiable than Maximum Shame—with some sci-fi drops in it, too.  I would like to justify the “rationality” of my present works, and there are reasons for it.   For example I impose strict and “rational” rules in style and into the very plot, onto the characters.  But the rules are not obvious, and I prefer that every member of the audience draw their own conclusions.

366: Your mention of your current project, Gallino, brings us back to where we started the interview. Readers won’t realize this, but this interview was conducted by back and forth emails, and we had to pause it while Mr. Atanes wnt on a shoot for the picture. So, how far along is the project now? Did everything go according to plan? And given the weird nature of your work, how much of a plan is there? Do you change things up on set, allow improvisation, or incorporate accidents into the final project?

Atanes: Just now we have completed about 20%-25% of the film.  It would be going according to plan if there was a plan.  The only plan that we have is to shoot when we can and as we obtaining funding.  The crowdfunding campaign allowed us to start the machine but we need more cash now (we are still accepting new contributions and guest producers through the official site).  My first aim was to finish the movie by December but it is impossible obviously due (solely) to financial shortages.  In any case we don’t stop, the next filming session will be in two weeks and I hope the film will be completed in January / February 2012.

Apart from these financial and organizational matters, of course I change things up on set.  But this is because I never take the screenplay to the set and I often forget things.  My principle is that the screenplay is just a guide, and if I forget a detail is because it was not so important.  For example, one of the Gallino sequences that we filmed in a forest last month hardly has anything to do with the plot, I created it as I went along.

On the other hand, is essential for me that actors have their dialogue well-memorized, so there is not very much improvisation in dialogue.  But I love accidents and I don’t just incorporate accidents but I also encourage actors to have accidents!

366: Given their anarchic, stream-of-consciousness nature, I am not surprised to hear that you incorporate accidents into your films–that’s something else you have in common with the Surrealists, at least.

At any rate, we’ve covered your entire feature filmography now, and we’ve explored a lot of your influences. Would you care to give us your top 10 list of weird movies now (and honorable mentions are perfectly OK if you can’t limit yourself to 10!)

Atanes: I’ll try to do so.  It’s a difficult selection.  This is my weird films list (not in order of preference, but alphabetical):

1- Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985)

2- Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996)

3- Despair (R. W. Fassbinder, 1978)

4- Dillinger is Dead (Marco Ferreri, 1969)

5- Heart of Glass (Werner Herzog, 1976)

6- Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997)

7- The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

8- Phantom of the Paradise (Brian de Palma, 1974)

9- Toby Dammit (Federico Fellini, 1967)

10-  Zardoz (John Boorman, 1974)

More films that I would like to include into the list because I like them as much as the previous ones (and sure I am forgetting many of them): 12 Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995); Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972); Bell from Hell (Claudio Guerín, 1973); The Belly of an Architect (Peter Greenaway, 1987); The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1972); El cochecito (Ferreri, 1960); Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004); Flash Gordon (Mike Hodges, 1980); La Grande Bouffe (Ferreri, 1973); The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976); Nostalghia (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983); Phantasm (Don Coscarelli, 1979); Raise Ravens (Carlos Saura, 1976); Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972); Rapture [Arrebato] (Iván Zulueta, 1979); Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975); The Sacrifice (Tarkovsky, 1986); Testament of Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1960); There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007); Tideland (Gilliam, 2005).

366: Thanks a lot for your time and your insightful comments.  Find out more about Carlos Atanes and his work at:

Strange Films by Carlos Atanes

Gallino the Chicken System official site

OK, I got asked by Greg (the mastermind behind this AMAZING website, from which I’ve discovered many gems I had never heard of) to do this top 10 weird movies and thought, yeah, I’d love to contribute, ’cause I like weird stuff, and I even like to do weird movies myself!  But I realized that my memory often doesn’t serve me too well, and my choices might not be weird enough…  Anyhow, this is what it came down too, and it could easily change, but this now and so is this list!

In no particular order:

1. I really like Harmony Korine and I couldn’t put down my finger on which movie I prefer between Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy and Trash Humpers… So I’m already breaking the rules already by assembling down those three into one whole bizarre package…

2. Although it’s a TV series and not a film, I really dig “Xavier Renegade Angel”, completely mental material that’s extremely funny.  Trippy, surreal, 2-cent philosophy striking down your brain with a hammer of  retarded genius.  A must.  From the guys who brought you the conceptual porn experiment Final Flesh and the extra-funny series “Wonder Showzen”.

3.  Jodorowsky is up the ladder with The Holy Mountain and Santa Sangre, which I watched again just recently.  It still holds up as a masterpiece, just as the former does.

4.  A few weeks ago I saw Things (1989), recently re-released by Intervision. Wow, this is mind blowing z-grade amateurism that destroys and defies so many cinematic “rules” that it becomes this a total weird-ass entity of the 5th dimension, or something close to that! You can’t fake that. It winds up being a beautiful piece of outsider art in its uniqueness.

5.  The ” Shaye St. John: The Triggers Compilation” DVD collection.  Redundant madness, alienating patterns, crazy voices, wilder concepts, pure insanity.

6.  Naked Lunch.  Do we really need to say how wonderfully David Cronenberg encompassed William S. Burroughs‘ soul and essence? Impressive from start to finish.

7. Rubber’s Lover, a Japanese spiral of clashing neurons enveloped into a furious experimental soundscape that only that country could produce… Intense, violent, made to smack your face and senses.  And it works.

8. A big David Lynch fan I am. So easy to say these days, but he deserves the credit plentifully.  My fave, and what I consider his most lean and flawless film, is Lost Highway.  But I cannot dismiss Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Mullholland Drive.  It’s been eons since I’ve seen Eraserhead, but no doubt we can’t avoid mentioning it, either.

9. The “Jam” series by Chris Morris… Lynch is great, but damn, this kicks me right into what I love the most.  Total deadpan humor blended with an assault of the senses in every kind of way. I HIGHLY recommend this.

10.  Visitor Q.  Been too long since I’ve seen it, but this Takashi Miike film is the true definition of going bonkers.

11. Damon Packard’s Reflections of Evil is simply pure dementia. The sound design is mega-wild and its relentless collection of fractured edits is bound to slap you left and right, above and beyond.

12. Szamanka.  I only saw it once, but it left me trying to catch my breath every 5 minutes or so. Wow, this movie grabs you by the hair and drags you in insane, insane trails of psychological shattered pieces of glass.  This is what I’m talking about.  This movie really attacks the viewer like cerebral cinema should.  Since mentioning Andrzej Zulawski’s work, I should definitely not leave out my favorite of his : Possession.  Take my word.  Just see it.

13. And what about Werner Herzog‘s Even Dwarfs Started Small…  Hilarious, dark and otherworldly.  Hard to beat.  A truly fascinating exercise in strangeness.

I also dig Fernando Arabal’s I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse, and Luis Buñuel in general (but I want to stop expanding this list…!) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could have made it here too, but I consider that movie to be in my top 10 movies of all time…

***If any of you are curious, you can check out the info on my latest feature entitled Hellacious Acres: The Case of John Glass. It’s definitely something different and has a nice dose of weirdness, too!  The official site is www.hellaciousacres.com, and we also have a Facebook page.

But truly strange stuff is showing up on DVD and Blu-ray all the time.  Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is a surrealist classic and a film school favorite, but it didn’t debut on DVD until 2009.  The bizarre haunted house horror Hausu (1977) was ignored and forgotten on release, but was rescued from obscurity more than thirty years later by no lesser entity than the Criterion Collection.  Even something as odd, ignored, and seemingly uncommercial as 1977′s Death Bed: The Bed that Eats—a movie that critics are still unable to confidently classify as incompetent exploitation or self-aware joke—recently showed up in the DVD ranks.  Many fans of cinematic marginalia grew up assuming that Skidoo, Otto Preminger’s 1968 counterculture satire bomb featuring Groucho Marx as God, among other oddities, would exist forevermore only as a brief plot synopsis in dog-eared movie guides, with a turkey symbol eternally etched next to it.  Skidoo was buried, maybe out of deference to the embarrassed stars (besides Marx, it also featured Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, singer-songwriter Harry Nillson and a host of distinguished character actors); but in 2008, Skiddoo showed up on TV, and this July it will make its first appearance on DVD.

The point is, we’ll never give up on anything appearing anymore, so long as someone, somewhere thinks there’s a buck to be made off of it.  There are a number of movies we’re going to hold off on reviewing immediately because they may get a release in the future.  We’ve listed some of the rarest and most important ones below.  In keeping with the venerable Top 10 tradition, we’ve limited ourselves to a decemvirate of titles, but believe us, there are a lot more missing movies out there. We skipped over some high-interest titles which are still available on Region 1 DVD but are extremely rare, such as Institute Benjamenta and Survive Style 5+.

10. Arrebato [Rapture] (1980).  Made in the years after the demise of Franco and film censorship, Arrebato, a drug movie about a filmmaker who believes his camera has a mind of its own, has an enraptured cult following in Spain.  The ideas here are sometimes said to anticipate David Cronenberg‘s Videodrome.  Neil Young (the film critic, not the Canadian songwriter) is one of few English speakers who’s seen and reported on it; he was less than unimpressed, calling it “a mind-blowingly pretentious exploration of creativity, madness and the addictive world of cinema.”  We’d still like the opportunity to judge for ourselves, since mind-blowing pretension is frequently a virtue in the weird movie realm.  In November 2010 Arrebato was released in Region 2 edition by the respected German company Bildstörung, with English subtitles.  Whether there will ever be enough interest to get it released on these shores is another question.

Clip from Arrebato

9. Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968).  Japanese sci-fi with a plane crash, UFOs, and alien blobs that turn their victims into vampires.  The visuals are unreal and stylized but very striking, almost expressionistic; Quentin Tarantino paid homage to Goke with the airplane flying through the blood red/orange sky in Kill Bill.  This film occasionally shows up on Turner Classic Movies late at night; if TCM can get the television rights, they likely can clear the video rights too.  Don’t sit on this masterpiece of classically odd Japanese camp, Ted Turner!

Japanese trailer for Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

8. Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets [Sho o suteyo machi e deyou] (1971).  A psychedelic montage about a dysfunctional Japanese family (before dysfunction was “in”).  It tells the story of an angsty teen caught between a peeping Tom dad, a sister with an unhealthy attachment to her pet bunny, and other unsavory, bizarre kin.  Strictly Film School’s Acquarello calls it “offbeat, garish, unclassifiable, and audacious.“  Almost none of Shûji Terayama’s experimental features are available on DVD; they seem like Criterion candidates.

Still from Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)

7. Happy End (1967).  Czech comedy that begins with a man’s head being detached from his body by a guillotine; the film then literally runs backwards until it arrives at a happy “ending.”  A gimmick, sure, but a gimmick we should have a chance to see for ourselves.  Chances of this ever being released seem pretty slim.

Clip from Happy End (1967)

6. Eden and After [L'éden et après](1970). This mix of Alice in Wonderland by way of the Marquis de Sade, with a heaping helping of LSD on the side, involves a young girl on a hallucinatory, sadomasochistic journey.  Director Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote Last Year in Marienbad and directed other surrealistic movies like L’immortelle (1963) that also aren’t available on DVD.  This is available on Region 2.

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Clip from Eden and After (1970)

5. Death Laid an Egg [La morte ha fatto l'uovo] (1968): A bizarre giallo involving a serial killer who preys on prostitutes; it’s set on a chicken farm, and a subplot involves a plan to breed mutant poultry.  With Gina Lollabrigida, the beautiful Ewa Aulin, and lots of atonal jazz.  Giallos are always a bit off-center, but if you ever wondered what a surrealist filmmaker would do if he chose to dabble in the genre, here’s your answer.  Director Giulo Questi only made three feature films, but all were weird; his first movie was the surreal Spaghetti Western Django Kill! (1967) and his final effort was the strange horror movie Arcana (1972).

Clip from Death Laid an Egg

4. Celine and Julie Go Boating [Céline et Julie vont en bateau] (1974). This three-hour long, whimsical and dreamlike French New Wave comedy seems like the kind of thing that should have the acquisition execs at the Criterion Collection salivating.  We’re not sure what the holdup is on this one getting a Region 1 DVD release, but this one has a great reputation with the Caheirs du Cinema crowd and looks far more likely to see the light of day than any of the other titles on this list.

Still from Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

3. Kin Dza-Dza (1989). A treasure trove of films made in the former Soviet Union are essentially lost to the West at the moment. We’re at the mercy of Ruscico, the Russian Cinema Council, to bring us whichever films they believe would be of interest to outsiders.  One film they haven’t chosen to release yet is this legendary cult sci-fi epic which involves two Russians trapped on an absurd, capitalist planet.  An animated remake of the film, aimed at children, is planned for release to the Russian market in 2011, but we demand to see the original!  Koo!

Clip from Kin Dza-Dza

2. Angel’s Egg [Tenshi no Tamago] (1985).  This nearly silent anime by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) about a young girl protecting a mysterious egg is one of the most requested titles in our Suggest a Weird Movie thread.  Due to the popularity of anime in general you would think there would be an outcry to get one of the legendary early works by a respected practitioner of the form out on DVD.  In 2002 a planned edition by Anchor Bay fell through due to unspecified rights issues, and there’s been no news on a release since then.  The market is definitely there.

Trailer for Angel’s Egg

1. Cremaster cycle (1994-2002). Conceptual artist Matthew Barney made a series of five surrealist films over a period of eight years that together comprise the Cremaster cycle (the titular “cremaster” is the muscle that raises and lowers the testes).  A famous scene features a bee flying out of a boy’s penis.  Altogether, the Cremaster films run six and a half hours, with the third installment accounting for three hours of the total running time.  Barney himself is insistent that the Cremaster series will never be released on mass market DVD, although they tour periodically and may be seen at special screenings.  “The Order,” a thirty minute segment of Cremaster 3, was released to video in 1999.  The cycle’s rarity has made it legendary, but it’s not universally beloved by those critics who have caught it; the dependable J. Hoberman said that Cremaster 5, in particular, “gives the ridiculous a bad name.“  On the other hand, Variety called Cremaster 3 “a masterpiece” full of “intoxicating visual beauty.”  We hope that Barney will relent from enforcing the scarcity of these films (we have a feeling that if he doesn’t, his estate just might).  If not, we’ll have to track the films down somehow.  No list of 366 weird movies can be complete without addressing the (in)famous Cremaster films.

More information about the series may be gleaned at the Cremaster website (then again, it may not).

Still from Cremaster 1

1. Enter the Void: We had to cheat a little to qualify Gaspar Noé‘s neon psychedelic death-trip about a hallucinating expat ghost in Tokyo who sees his sister and best friend making love with glowing genitalia by reclassifying the film from 2009 (copyright date) to 2010 (date the editing was completed and the final version released to theaters), but it was worth it to get the most extravagant Buddhism-on-LSD movie of the last 35 years the top spot.
2. Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) [Prezít svuj zivot (teorie a praxe)]: We’re cheating even more by nominating Jan Svankmajer‘s latest (about a man who impregnates his own anima while undergoing psychoanalysis) because we haven’t even seen it yet.  But based on what we know about the crazy Czech, and what we see in the trailer below, we don’t think we’ll be eating any crow over this choice (unless it’s for not giving Surviving Life the top spot).
3. Black Swan: Darren Aronofsky makes Natalie Portman go crazy for her art in a dance fable mixing backstage melodrama, sexual repression, and body horror.  Portman growing feathers onstage as she dances her little heart out for the audience rates as the most beautifully weird moment of the year.
4. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World:  From the “pee meter” that goes from full to empty as Pilgrim voids to the enemies that shatter into a bunch of coins when vanquished, this beyond-eccentric comedy about a suitor who must defeat a girl’s seven evil exes to win her heart unapologetically adopts the short-attention span of the Playstation generation and produces something too special for the cineplex.  It’s like Tron scripted by the member of Monty Python.
5. Inception:  Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a con artist who specializes in embezzling ideas from the minds of VIPS while they’re asleep; he puts together a team of dream warriors to implant an idea in a the heir to an business empire, but will his subconscious summon his dead wife to wreck the mission?  A great movie, to be sure, mixing James Bond-style action with intelligent fantasy, but not weird enough to merit a higher spot on the year’s end list.
6. Oddsac: Animal Collective’s 52-minute “visual album” is nonstop psychedelia intended to be watched with a roach clip in hand, but is it a movie, or just an extended music video?  Whatever, it gets bonus points for including a melting vampire and a single line of dialogue: “He hates everything but green beans.”
7. Night of the Living Dead: Reanimated:  The public domain zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, remade with the original soundtrack illustrated by dozens of hungry young artists in morphing styles ranging from comic book to anime to baby-doll animation.  The weirdest and most original remake of the year.
8. Shutter Island: Martin Scorsese takes a stab at a melodramatic psychological thriller, and it’s pure atmosphere as Federal marshal Leonardo DiCaprio is stranded on an island housing a Gothic asylum, battling internal demons and suspected Nazis as thunderstorms rage.  It’s a great creepy ride, even if longtime mindbender fans figure out the twist long before the movie ends.  It’s strictly “Hollywood weird,” though.
9. Splice:  Two geneticists create a bizarre creature by fusing human and animal DNA in this throwback to mad scientist pictures of old.  Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Nothing) strikes again, and we wish he’s strike more often.
10. Mega Piranha: If most of the movies above all seem to heavy and dark for you, then this utterly ridiculous SyFy original movie about mega piranhas who jump out of Amazonian rivers and explode may be the perfect alternative.  Co-starring Greg Brady and a plump Tiffany; fortunately, they do not share a love scene.

You are welcome to disagree violently with these choices in the comments.

A while ago I was asked to put together a list of 10 weird movies.  I did this pretty quickly without thinking much about it.  It was, I think, too hastily written, as if I was just writing an email.  Also the movies, while all excellent, were not all particularly “weird” enough.  I decided to put together this better list.

1. The Room – The plot of this movie sounds fairly straightforward and is hardly worth mentioning. It’s a domestic drama about a couple where the woman has an affair and the man becomes jealous and then finds out. The strangeness is in the tone and execution. This cult movie is widely known as an unintentional comedy “so bad it’s good”, but I think there’s something else going on. Notice how the dialog seems to come out of nowhere, how characters seem to say their lines with no particular motivation, or have motivations that change from moment to moment. I think what we’re seeing here is what a movie looks like to an autistic person who is not aware of the inner lives of other people. I think the filmmaker is making a movie of what society looks like to him, where everyone is made of cardboard and another human’s personality is unfathomable.

2. “Happy Days Reunion Special” – This “Happy Days” reunion special, made just a few years after the series ended, never saw the light of day, but a copy was leaked (bad quality with time codes), and you can find it if you know where to look. This was made in 1989, and also set in 1989, so it’s supposed to take place 30 or so years after the original. 90% of this hour long reunion is just dopey sitcom B.S., but there’s a jaw-droppingly incongruous subplot involving Fonzie discovering that he has become infected with the AIDS virus. This was probably due to a well intentioned effort to talk about the disease, but “Happy Days Reunion” was not the place to do it, which is probably why this ill conceived special never saw the light of day.

3. Silhouette – This movie consists of a series of explicit sex scenes, and the sounds and dialog are right out of hard core pornography, but the only images you ever see are shadows of the performers cast on surfaces. At the beginning, the shadows are just shown where you would expect them to be, like on the hotel room wall, or on the ground next to the bed, but as the movie progresses it gets increasingly bizarre, and you see (to cite one example) the shadows of sex acts cast on the rapidly moving ground from on top of a moving train. Often the surface on which the shadow is cast changes, randomly and illogically, several times throughout the sex scene. At first I thought I was watching an art film, but then I got a boner and realized I was really watching a porno. The scenes are several minutes long, have porno music, porno editing, porno dialog, explicit sex acts, and the whole thing is so porn-like that you forget you’re just looking at shadows.

4. Switcheroo! – This dorky 1980s comedy about a father and son who “switch bodies” for twenty four hours sounds pretty typical, and in a sense it belongs in the same category as Freaky Friday, 18 Again, Like Father Like Son, etc. It has the same plot arc with modest family tension, a supernatural accident facilitating the switch, the characters learning something about each other, and then resolution where they end up back in their own bodies. But there’s something about Switcheroo! which sets it in a wholly different category from the others: it is set in a concentration camp.

5. Scared Sh**less – Set in an alternate universe where it is illegal to defecate, this film noir is about a cop whose assignment is to infiltrate an underworld toilet factory. This sounds like it’s a set up for a sophomoric gross out comedy, but no, it’s not toilet humor, it’s toilet drama. A serious, somber tone is maintained throughout, and I think there’s only about two or three jokes throughout the whole film, all clean and corny, none of them having anything to do with bodily functions. The whole movie looks like an early film noir, in black and white, shot on film, with period clothing, cars, and decor, an effect which must have been very expensive to achieve. If it weren’t for the subject matter, you’d swear this was made in 1948, and there is even a very convincing “cameo” by a (surely digital) Humphrey Bogart. I don’t know how a movie like this could come about. Maybe it was written by one person and re-written by another who didn’t understand the intentions of the original author. I think the point of this film is to make some kind of existential statement about society or something. I’ve seen it a few times and haven’t been able to figure out if it’s taking place in a world where people defecate in secret and deny it, or if it’s supposed to be a world where only criminals defecate.

6. Every Young Man’s Battle – This “documentary” is a Christian diatribe against pornography which has it’s opening scene on an old civil war battlefield, with a narrator explaining that the battle against pornography is just as difficult and deadly as the civil war. This seems, at first, like a singularly awkward metaphor, but the movie returns to the topic of the civil war again and again and again, and at one point there’s even some guy drawing diagrams on a white board, so into the specific strategic details that you forget (and he seems to forget) that he’s trying to make a point about pornography. You also have several people talking about how they were financially ruined by their porn addiction, and lots of badly acted, goofily conceived sketches about the dangers of porn. Truly strange and hilarious, this movie was made to be watched with a group of friends and herbal accompaniment.

7. One More Minute – This is sort of a minimalist mafia movie. A hitman takes a victim up to the woods to shoot him. With a gun to his head the victim asks for “just one more minute” of life. The hitman agrees to delay the execution by one minute, then when the minute is up, the victim begs for another minute. The hitman agrees again, and it goes on and on like this for seventy five minutes. If this sounds boring, that’s because it is, almost to a Warholian degree. There’s a tiny bit of tension throughout, several little hints come up of the possibility of escape, but the victim is restrained and is unable to and never attempts to actually run away, so it never really amounts to anything plotwise. The reason I recommend this movie is because the boredom creates a necessary buildup that releases like a burst dam when the hitman finally denies the victim’s request for just one more minute. I don’t know if this unconventional structure makes it weird enough to put on this list, but it’s certainly a powerful movie and continues to horrify me to this day.

8. Samoa’s Greatest Blunder – In Samoa, cars used to drive on the right side of the road. In 2009, the government decided to change that (in order to import cars from Australia), and all cars now drive on the left. Samoa’s Greatest Blunder is a low budget documentary about that decision and its implementation. Sounds pretty dry, but the filmmaker’s angry and conspiratorial (and possibly mentally ill) slant on the subject, as well as his unorthodox and unethical journalistic methods, make for fascinating viewing. I admit that I didn’t understand even half the Samoan political references, but apparently there is a generations old division of some sort in Samoan society, tracing back to colonialism, and the filmmaker believes the traffic switchover relates to it somehow. As for his methods, he planted microphones and hidden cameras not only in government offices, but in government officials’ private homes, and gets several candid conversations about the switchover, as well as a lot of irrelevant and private material that he includes in the movie anyway. By the end of the movie, the whole thing becomes a vitriolic diatribe against the government, with apparently serious accusations of vampirism, and the pointless inclusion of hidden camera footage of the minister of agriculture taking a crap in his own home. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

9. I Am A Sociopath – There’s a lot of good cinematic fiction exploring the minds of sociopaths (“Dexter,” The Bad Seed, Bully, The Night of the Hunter, Rope—the list goes on and on), but until now I haven’t seen any documentaries that go as deep into the sociopathic character. Here we have something, a personal documentary made anonymously by an actual sociopath. It’s rough around the edges, as expected, but incredibly disturbing and insightful. This middle aged sociopath (pseudonym: Frank) is not a killer or anything like that, he just manages the mail room in a large office building, although he hints teasingly at various felonies he may have gotten away with in his youth. We see videotaped sessions with his psychiatrist where his history (painful) and diagnosis (antisocial personality disorder) are discussed. We see footage he made of people in his life who care for him and who think they are cared for (a girlfriend, family members, friends), yet in his voice over narration he details exactly how he is exploiting and using each of these people, and what he actually feels for them (in every case: nothing). It makes all the fictional sociopaths from the movies listed above seem like saints. I really pity the people in Frank’s life, especially if they ever see this movie.

10. The Deadly Art of Survival – I wanted to see this because I wanted to see how a feature film shot on super-8 looked, but ended up with so much more. This is sort of a kung fu movie, with sort of a plot, and some badly choreographed fight scenes and real martial arts experts acting out a terribly written (written at all?) script. But there’s also some moments of sincerity, where the people seem to forget that they’re in a movie and talk candidly about their lives in the inner city—in one case while someone offstage is randomly shining flash lights on their faces. Overall an engaging mess and accidental documentary about a specific time and place (new york in the late 70s). Must watch the extras on this disc.

The Hawks and The Sparrows (1966) – It’s just a really funny, strange, under-appreciated comedy with several gags that are in a class by themselves and have no precedent elsewhere.

Edvard Munch (1974) – This is the only Peter Watkins movie I like much but it makes up for all his other boring preachy movies. I don’t know exactly how he does this but the style is perfectly in sync with the content, and the 3+ hour length is never boring, really effective movie at setting a mood of a life with one or two good things in it, always out of reach.

Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) – Pasolini said he was making some kind of statement about capitalism or something with this movie, but to me it’s the best metaphor for public school I’ve ever seen on film, complete with sadistic teachers, fecal cafeteria food, other students turned collaborator, culminating in a graduation ceremony. A real horror movie where the monster is loss of freedom.

Careful (1992) – The first time I saw this I turned it off in the middle. Later I couldn’t get it out of my head. I picked it up again and now it’s one of my favorite movies and Maddin is one of my favorite directors. Watching this, and also his Cowards Bend The Knee, you get the sense he’s hiding some horrible scar underneath the surrealism. Aesthetically important in showing that a certain style isn’t worth giving up on just because something newer is available.

Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997) – A great documentary that touches on universal themes by focusing on a peculiar idiosyncratic subject, about a guy dying of cystic fibrosis who tries to take ownership of his inescapable pain by falling in love with it and becoming a masochist.  Kind of a classic tragedy about someone who cannot escape his fate.

Last Feast of the Crocodiles (1996)- I saw this wildlife documentary in college and shortly afterward realized it was more than just another National Geographic special to watch on a bored Sunday, but I could never remember the name of it and spent years trying to find it again.  Whenever I would mention it to someone who had seen it, they remember being similarly affected.  It’s about a drought in Africa, and a small pond filled with crocodiles which is slowly drying up.  Thirsty animals from all over the desert gather around this last source of water, but to get close enough for a drink, they have to face the hungry crocs.  The crocodiles feast for a while, but finally the watering hole dries to dust, and the crocs die too.

Naked Army (1987) – This crazy documentary really jerks you around.  It’s about a guy who served in the Japanese army during WWII who realizes that he was doing wrong, and now spends his life tracking down his former war buddies to make them confess their crimes.  At first he seems like an uncompromising Japanese Simon Wiesenthal, trying to bring some justice to evil men who were never punished, but as the movie progresses you realize he’s fucking crazy.  Also a very insightful look into the role of politeness in Japanese culture and what happens when expectations about politeness are violated.  A movie to sharpen your morals by, makes you think about the roles of justice and punishment a lot.

Eraserhead (1977) – Another movie I turned off in the middle only to end up obsessed with it years later.  I was about 13 the first time I saw this, and today I can still watch this again and again and see new things each time.  These days I think it’s a movie about becoming an adult in a strange world, as seen through the eyes of someone with Asperger’s Syndrome.

The Noah (1975) – Really well done movie with only one character.

The Exterminating Angel (1962) – This, along with Obscure Object, are the best two Buñuel movies.  Angel is not necessarily better but definitely a more “weird” movie where an explanation for the ridiculous premise is not provided, and the movie simply gets on with the drama.

A top 10 list! I love making movie lists but narrowing it down my favorite ten weird ones was a real challenge!

Films by David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, José Mojica Marins, Guy Maddin, Ken Russell and Andrzej Zulawski should be included on EVERY list of this type, but I’m guessing that most visitors to this site already have them as part of their own top ten.  I also should have put a Jean Rollin film somewhere on here, but which one?  Lost in New York, maybe?  After eliminating these directors’ works from my list, I still found myself with over 30 movies to choose from.

Hausu should also be on here, but my colleague Graham Reznick recently included it on his top ten, giving me an excuse to trim my list down further.   Begotten, Phantasm, and The Wicker Man are among of my favorite movies in the world, but have already made this wonderful web site’s master list.  Other films that didn’t make it to my top ten were: The Last Movie (one of my favorite films of all time), Rubber’s Lover, The Flew, Daft Punk’s Electroma, Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare, Blood Freak, Arrebato, We Are the Strange, Zardoz, Red to Kill, Jigoku, Dementia (AKA Daughter of Horror), Gusher No Binds Me (AKA Hellevator), Abhay and Goodbye, 20th Century.

Anyway, here’s my (sort of) Top Ten.  I’m sure I’m forgetting at least one of my all-time favorites.  These are the films that make my brain hurt while putting a smile on my face.  Thanks for asking.

Deafula (1974): I used to have friends over to my house every Wednesday for a movie night.  Of all of the oddities I subjected my guests to, none ever went over quite as well as Deafula.

The awkward storytelling and bottom-of-the-barrel production values of this bizarre, so-bad-it’s-good film are almost enough to warrant a spot on any weird movie list. But when you add the fact that this is a vampire movie for the hearing impaired in which every word of dialogue is not spoken, but performed in sign language, this becomes one of the most amazingly strange viewing experiences.  Deafula may not be a “good” movie, but it is never boring and several unintentionally hilarious moments make it a truly entertaining watch.

Zoo: A Zed & Two Noughts (1985): I first saw this movie in Portland, ME in the late 1980′s.  It was my first exposure to the work of Peter Greenaway.  I had never seen anything like it until then and I was instantly a fan.  Greenaway has made several films that I adore, but the beautifully composed shots, striking music, oddball characters and disturbing storyline focusing on death, decay and dismemberment, make this his best (and weirdest) in my book.

Young Playthings (1972):  Sexploitation master Joe Sarno’s most astonishing film is easily the greatest piece of soft-core porn ever made.  Featuring the talents of the delectable Christina Lindberg, Young Playthings starts out as a fairly straightforward story of two women’s sexual exploration.  But when an odd neighbor invites the more timid of the two into her own personal Toyland, things begin to get weird.

The women don white face pantomime makeup as they engage in naked play-acting of fairy tales to pre-recorded narration.  As more and more people join the games, things take a turn toward even deeper insanity and darker sexual depravity.  Beautiful women in strange costumes committing even stranger acts make Young Playthings a must for your next LSD-fueled key party.

Spookies (1987): A beacon of strangeness in the sea of generic horror films that was the 1980′s, Spookies could be described as a poor man’s Phantasm—if said poor man happens to be completely and incurably insane.  Elements of Spookies (such as its synth score and opening scenes featuring a boy wandering alone in a graveyard by an eerily lit mansion) make it obvious that at least part of the film was heavily inspired by Coscarelli’s classic.

Spookies started out as a more traditional teen horror film called Twisted Souls which was abandoned in 1984.  Two years later, the super-odd “phantastic” elements were shot and cut together with the original film.  The two parts make a whole that is a jarring, jaw-dropping experience filled with colorful characters, crappy creatures and non-stop nonsensical action.

The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001):  You can talk about Ichi the Killer all you want, but this is my favorite film by über-director Takashi Miike.  This movie has everything: laughs, zombies, gore, musical numbers and even claymation!  If you haven’t seen it, you must.  Immediately.  It’s one of the most original things I’ve ever seen, even if it is a remake (of 1998′s The Quiet Family).

The Mask (1961):  One of my favorite films of all time, and it’s in 3-D! Well, parts of it are—you put on your 3-D glasses whenever a character puts on the film’s magical mask.  The non-3-D scenes of the film look like they were shot over a weekend.  But the poor lighting, amateurish cinematography and choppy editing actually add to the dream-like atmosphere of the film.  The 3-D segments are all surreal fantasy sequences that appear to be where the filmmakers focused most of their time and energy.  Or maybe the scenes are just so bizarre, one doesn’t notice or care about the flaws.  I certainly don’t.  To me, this is a perfect film.

Thundercrack! (1977):  If John Waters, Guy Maddin and Andy Milligan got together to make a horror-porno film, it would probably be a lot like Thundercrack! This movie is required viewing for any fan of the bizarre.  Known as “the most walked-out-of film of all time,” it mixes long scenes of ridiculous melodramatic dialog with others of very explicit sex.  Oh, and there’s also a killer ape, and a monster of sorts.  The film’s running time of 150-plus minutes will definitely try the patience of many a viewer, but for the rest of us, films like Thundercrack! are why we watch movies.

Death Bed: The Bed that Eats (1977):  Moments of mind-numbing tedium alternate with ones of mind-blowing awesomeness in this odd, dream-like movie that offers up plenty of gore, nudity and inane dialogue.  The majority of the story takes place in one room, as various folks somehow find themselves wandering into an abandoned cellar in the middle of the woods for a quick lie down.  A ghostly narrator (and former victim of the carnivorous bed) describes every action in the film in great detail.  But his is not the only voice-over.  The thoughts of virtually every character in the film are broadcast out loud, describing their every move as they perform it, taking the film’s weirdness factor father beyond the promise of its premise.

If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971):  When I began making the film Satan Hates You, a tribute to Christian “scare” films of the 1960′s and 70′s, I put together a list of several films of the genre for the cast and crew.  At the top of the list was the terrifying Christian classic A Thief in the Night, followed by the amazing Twilight Zone-esque short Stalked.  But at the heart of the list were the films of exploitation director-turned-Christian filmmaker Ron Ormond, most specifically The Burning Hell (a delightfully amateurish production that also deserves a place on this list—check it out on YouTube) and his anti-communist, pro-Jesus masterpiece, If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?

Based on a sermon by the Reverand Estus W. Pirkle, the film takes us to the near future when the Godless commies have taken over.  Illustrating Pirkle’s insane and paranoid theories are a series of episodes featuring the “good” people of the USA suffering all sorts of tortures at the hands of the invaders.  The most famous and shocking of these scenes shows a small boy having his eardrum pierced with a pointed stick, causing him to vomit from the pain.  Good wholesome stuff!

Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966): Forget Iron Man, The Dark Knight and all of that other Hollywood nonsense, this Czech effort is the greatest comic book adventure ever filmed!

The film is a chaotic adventure in a live-action dreamland starring Jessie, a blonde bombshell who wears a pair of “anti-gravity” gloves that give her super strength.  She is pursued by her two comic strip arch-enemies, a powerful “Superman” and his cowboy sidekick.  These characters don’t speak the same way we do; instead of words and sounds coming from their mouths, comic book dialogue balloons emerge and then hang in the air next to them for all to read.  There’s some great imagery in this film, including a look at the happy visions running through a cow’s head—the real, live cow relaxing in a hammock!  The film’s resolution is one that I can guarantee has never been used in a film before and never will again.  Satisfaction is guaranteed with this unique cinematic experience.