366 Weird Movies

GUEST REVIEW: DOGTOOTH [KYNODONTAS] (2009)

Kevyn Knox — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:02:29 +0000

Imagine a world where up is down, hot is cold, red is black, dandelions are zombies and that mysterious slit between a young girl’s legs is called a keyboard. Welcome to the bizarre world of Giorgos Lanthimos’ deep black comedy-cum-Greek tragedy oddity, Dogtooth.

The strange story of a father who keeps his three adult children locked away on their country estate, allowing them no knowledge of the outside world other than what he and their mother (almost a prisoner herself) let them know—most of which is a twisted version of reality. Never allowing the children (and though they all seem to be in their twenties, they are still very much children emotionally) to set foot outside of the family gate, the father tells them no one can venture outside the home except in the family car. Only he ever does. He drives his car ten feet past the gate to retrieve the son’s lost toy airplane. Down on all fours and barking at unseen terrors lying in wait just outside of the family compound, these are not your normal cinematic children. Though they live in what they perceive to be reality (and the only world they know) they could very well be living on another planet.

Essentially prisoners, these children are like experiments to the father (much like the dog training he is introduced to at one point in the story). Each day they learn new words that have no correlation with what they actually mean in the outside world. They are told that they can leave home only once their canine teeth fall out—a thing that of course we know does not happen without a bit of forceful persuasion. At one point, the father begins bringing home a young woman he works with (blindfolded, of course) to have her engage in sexual relations with the son—a thing that is done without emotion, without fanfare and without any seeming pleasure on either end—only to have her betray his confidence by beginning to have a sexual relationship with the youngest daughter in exchange for presents. Again, this is done without any semblance of emotion or passion; the daughter simply tells the girl if she licks her “there” (pointing to the obvious spot) she can have a gift.

Playing off Shyamalan’s The Village (though without the ridiculousness of that film) but done in a very matter-of-fact style typical of Greek cinema (or any Balkan cinema really) and especially of the nation’s cinematic icon Theo Angelopoulos, Lanthimos’ odd little movie reeks of possible exploitation, both in character and in style. But, instead, it comes off as almost experimentation—as much as the father’s experimentation (i.e., the dog-like training) upon his unknowing children. Yet, even with the passionless approach to characterization (including the most banal sex scenes ever filmed) we can feel the tremors begin beneath the surface, and we know that eventually there is going to be a deeply felt emotional explosion from at least one of these children. Of course this emotional A-Bomb does eventually come (culminating in that aforementioned forceful persuasion) and we are left with a haunting final image that may be the inevitable conclusion to a psychologically dangerous tale such as Lanthimos’ bizarre Dogtooth.

This review was originally published at The Cinematheque in a slightly different form.

65. MANIAC (1934)

366weirdmovies — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:59:44 +0000

AKA Sex Maniac

“Unless you regularly do mushrooms and go to Lady Gaga concerts with your good friend Crispin Glover, then watching Maniac is guaranteed to be the weirdest experience you have ever had.”–ad copy for the Rifftrax version of Maniac

DIRECTED BY: Dwain Esper

FEATURING: Bill Woods

PLOT: An on-the-lam vaudevillian kills and impersonates his mad scientist employer, driving

himself mad in the process.

BACKGROUND:

Dwain Esper was a successful building contractor who, it is rumored, only got into the movie business when he came into possession of a cache of filmmaking equipment that was abandoned in a foreclosed property. He worked outside the film distribution system, taking his exploitation movies on the road and showing them in rented venues, accompanied by lurid advertisements promising forbidden fruit for “adults only.” Esper obtained the rights to Tod Browning’s Freaks from MGM for a song, and took the movie on the road with his other exploitation hits. Other films he directed or produced had titles such as Marihuana, the Weed with Roots in Hell and How to Undress in Front of Your Husband.
Made outside of the Hollywood system, Maniac was not subject to the Hays Production Code, although it probably ran afoul of most local censorship laws. Audacious directors like Esper deliberately put racy material into their films that the major studios could not touch. Maniac contains a scandalous amount of nudity, which had been extremely rare in motion pictures up until that time and was banned outright when the Hays Code began to be enforced in 1934.
The film incorporates (steals) footage from Maciste in Hell (1925), and reportedly also from Häxan (1920) and Fritz Lang‘s Sigfried (1923), for its delirium sequences.
Named one of the 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made in The Official Razzie Movie Guide.
One gruesome scene involving a cat’s eyeball appears to be a real case of animal abuse, but is almost certainly a convincing illusion.
The movie’s ending rips off the Edgar Allen Poe short story “The Black Cat.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are lots of strange, unexpected sights to be seen in this time capsule of man’s freakish desires, but you won’t forget the cat’s eyeball.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Maniac promises to show us the life of a madman as a shameless

Scene from Maniac

pretext for delivering multiple shock scenes in an educational context, but the final product is so disjointed, feverish and crazily assembled that it seems to be the work of an actual madman.

COMMENTS: Most bad movies are just bad. A rare breed are so bad they’re “unintentionally” entertaining (famously, Ed Wood Jr.’s Plan 9 from Outer Space). Another rare breed are so bad—so cluelessly revealing of their auteurs skewed worldviews—that they assume a mantle of weirdness (see List entries Horrors of Spider Island and The Beast of Yucca Flats). But probably no film in history has been as simultaneously bad, weird, and entertaining as the unique Maniac. Aside from Esper’s exploitation masterpiece, perhaps only Wood’s Glen or Glenda? could be considered as having completed this unholy hat trick ; but that 1950s pro-transvestite pseudo-documentary contained dry passages that thrill bad movie enthusiasts highly attuned to continuity errors and strangled prose but alienate regular folk, whereas Maniac is packed with wall-to-wall jaw-droppingness that cannot fail to stun and impress the most straight-laced viewer.

The claim that Maniac is weird, entertaining, and bad brings to mind that old metaphysical conundrum about bad movies: if a movie is entertaining, then can it also be bad? Movies are generally meant to entertain, after all, so isn’t an “entertaining bad movie” be an oxymoron? Maniac is one of those oddities that obliterates the distinction between “good” and “bad”: it carves out its own insane realm where deranged overacting, insane plot twists, and superimposed Satanic stock footage converge to create a self-contained universe of consistent absurdity. Abominable acting and illogical story aside, if we consider the way in which the director realized his intended vision as the standard for a “good” film, then Maniac is a masterpiece. Esper created exactly the shocking, impossible-to-turn-away-from movie he set out to make. He was almost certainly as pleased to see the final product—which made him a mint on the roadshow circuit—as lovers of deranged cinema are to view this maniacal curio.

The one feature of Maniac that is unquestionably bad, but in a fun way, is the acting. Early in the film, our hero’s mad scientist benefactor utters—in his bad German accent, drawing out every syllable as if he’s being paid per second of dialogue—the immortal, unintentionally ironic words, “Once a ham… alvays a ham. You… an actor?” He’s addressing the main character, but the charge could be leveled at anyone in the cast. The movie is a grand tour through all the pre-war styles of over- and under-acting. Starring as a vaudevillian with legally spotty past indentured to a man trying to bring the dead back to life, Bill Woods seems to think he’s in a Shakespearean tragedy. He enunciates, and conveys immense psychic distress via his eyebrows. (Woods does deserve credit for mimicking the deceased doctor’s ostentatious accent almost perfectly when he impersonates his ex-boss). One character, Mrs. Buckley, is uncannily calm and levelheaded when, just after her husband absconds with a zombie girl, she uncovers a murder. She delivers the lines “Doctor, what have you done? This looks like murder!” in a tone reminiscent of a bad actress scolding a naughty child. Minor characters seem to have been grabbed from a rest homes or dancing halls and given their lines to learn five minutes before filming starts. There’s the cat-raising imbecile next door (known in the script as “Goof”), who thinks he’s auditioning for a role as the slow-witted Dead End Kid, despite the fact that he’s in his forties. There are the four women chosen mainly for their willingness to act their scene in lingerie, including one with an improbable chipmunk voice that sounds like Betty Boob with a lungful of helium. Even the woman hired to play a corpse isn’t convincing. And of course there’s the incredible “transformation” performance (see clip above), which might actually be good acting: although it looks like Shemp Howard struggling to complete a monologue from Tennessee Williams while undergoing an epileptic fit, for all anyone knows, this is exactly how a man who believes he orangutan acts when accidentally shot up with an overdose of superadrenaline.

Although Maniac‘s acting is unquestionably terrible, the script’s awfulness is more ambiguous. Managing to shoehorn in reanimation of the dead, a mad doctor, a murder, an orangutan man rapist, two topless scenes (so the adults-only audience gets their money’s worth), a one-eyed heart-eating cat named Satan, two scheming women, a subplot on the unexpected economics of cat skinning, a catfight with hypodermic needles, a protagonist serially suffering from three or four major psychiatric disorders, and an Edgar Allan Poe finale, all in under an hour, is no mean feat; it’s no surprise that logic had to be cut to make room. Still, it’s remarkable that things flow together as well as they do: the mad doctor’s experiments lead to his murder, the murder leads to the Maxwell’s impersonation, which leads to his blackmail by Mrs. Buckley, which leads to his plan to dispose of her and to his eventual capture. There is a dream/nightmare logic at work here. It’s also hard to imagine that the screenwriter (Hildegarde Stadie, Esper’s wife) wasn’t at least partly aware of the absurdity of the script. There’s a strand of what appears to be deliberate black humor at play, as when Maxwell examines a cat’s eyeball and proclaims (in full ham mode) “It’s not unlike an oyster, or a grape!” It’s hard to imagine that even the most inept hack could type that line, or a speech like “The murderous Satan—the wretch that ate Meirschultz’s heart! He still has the gleam…” without chuckling knowingly to herself.

Esper clearly can’t direct actors—unless he had a hidden genius for coaxing deliberately campy performances from them—but he does add some unique, memorable touches to the film. Most notably, it was a stroke of demented genius to take the infernal footage from the old silent film Maciste in Hell and superimpose it over Maxwell’s face to show his descent into madness. The effect is striking and incongruous in it’s juxtaposition of the ridiculous (Bill Wood’s spasming face) and the sublime (hazy imps and long-nailed warlocks). Also, his cinematography is not as static and stagebound as some films of the era; rather than nailing the camera in one spot and filming the action, Esper changes the angles and makes the film visually tolerable. A less successful directorial gambit, but one that also adds to the movie’s singular atmosphere, is his decision to interrupt the action with occasional intertitles describing dementia praecox, paresis, paranoia, and manic depression. These tidbits serve as funny, blatantly insincere reminders of the educational value of the motion picture which we are watching unspool before us.

Maniac is a cautionary tale. The prologue, by Wm. S. Sadler, M.D., F.A.C.S., warns of “the disastrous results of fear thought not only on the individual but on the nation” and reminds us that it is “the duty of every sane man and woman to establish quarantine against fear.” Dr. Sadler also coins a snappy slogan that today would land him a gig as a syndicated TV psychologist: “fear thought is most dangerous when it parades as forethought.” The movie’s message is obvious: if we give in to fear for even a moment, we will go insane, murder our employer, accidentally inject a patient with an experimental drug, and orchestrate a syringe duel between our wife and our blackmailer in a basement. Either that, or Esper was looking for some flimsy moral/educational justification to show topless women and a guy eating an eyeball, as a defense in case of an obscenity prosecution. Whichever the case, it’s the audience that benefits: Maniac is one of the wildest cinematic rides you’ll ever take, an experience not soon forgotten. Thank God for Dwain Esper’s sleazy courage in bringing to light the timeless, titillating pitfalls of poor mental hygiene.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Jaw-dropping weirdness, a real piece of showmanship history, and a must for genre aficionados.”–”VideoHound’s Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics”

“Don’t pass up an opportunity to see this incredible old adults-only oddity… You won’t believe it.”–Michael Weldon, “The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film”

“Even seeing it isn’t believing!”–Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Maniac (1934)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Maniac script – The complete Maniac script (including parts that weren’t filmed) as written by Hildegarde Stadie Esper, Dwain Esper’s wife

Maniac B-movie review – a hilarious synopsis, stills, audio clips and a snippet of film from Andrew Borntreger of badmovies.org

Maniac (1934) – Turner Classic Movie’s Page on the film contains a complete plot synopsis, but little else

DVD INFO: Maniac is in the public domain and can be watched or legally downloaded at the Internet Archive. The best available DVD edition may be the Kino Dwain Esper double feature disc (buy), which contains both Maniac and the almost-as-wild Narcotic (1933); the print is supposedly the best available, and there are even extras including the unedited footage from Maciste in Hell and audio commentary by an exploitation movie expert. Alpha Video has put out a cheaper Maniac only edition with no extras (buy). The best deal, though not the best print, comes in Mill Creek’s 50 Horror Classics Movie Pack (buy), which also contains a copy of the Certified Weird Carnival of Souls along with other public domain classics like White Zombie>, Metropolis (unrestored version), Night of the Living Dead, The Phantom of the Opera, Nosferatu, and a host of truly awful movies.

Do not confuse this film with Joe Spinell’s 1980 slasher Maniac, which also has its share of fans.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Bruce,” who claimed “this movie is so weird that your lawn will die as you watch it.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 16:56:58 +0000

Reviews definitely appearing next week: we’ll be covering Desperate Living (1977), the third and final entry in John Waters‘ “Trash Trilogy;” looking into the 2009 “Un Certain Regard” winner, Dogtooth (2009), the absurd story of three children hidden away from the real world by rich parents; and rolling our eyes at Thankskilling, the DIY horror-comedy about an axe wielding turkey puppet. From the reader suggested review queue, we’ll be tackling the “Beat” Kitano comedy Getting Any? and Michel Gondry‘s surreal Science of Sleep. And don’t forget to check back this evening for our review of one of the most outlandish exploitation movies ever made, 1934′s incredible Maniac.

It was a good week for entertainingly weird search terms used to locate the site. The perverts (God love ‘em) were out in full force, scouring 366 for info on “Georges Melies adult movies,” “overdeveloped jugs,” “weird sissy sex movies,” “mofo sexo,” and hoping for the opportunity to “watch a movie of sexual footmen and his daughter.” The most striking search term, however, in our view was “wierd girl has unusualy tiny vagina.”

Here’s the state of the reader-suggested review queue: Trash Humpers (still waiting for the DVD); Maniac (1934) (coming later today); The Science of Sleep (next week); Getting Any? (next week); The Attic Expeditions; After Last Season; Performance; The Apple; Arizona Dream; Songs From The Second Floor; Singapore Sling; Alice [Neco z Alenky]; Necromentia; Hour of the Wolf; MirrorMask; Possession; Suspiria; Wild Zero; 4; Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Ninja Scroll; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Faust; Sublime; Battle Royale; Pink Floyd: The Wall; Escanaba In Da Moonlight; Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter; Zardoz; The Films of Suzan Pitt; Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; The Holy Mountain; Brazil; The Casserole Masters; Dark Crystal; Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets; The Nines; The Pillow Book; Final Flesh; Lunacy [Sílení]; Inmortel; Tetsuo; Dead Ringers; Kairo [AKA Pulse]; The Guatemalan Handshake; Dead Leaves; The Seventh Seal; Primer; Hausu; A Boy and His Dog; 200 Motels; Private Parts (1972); Saddest Music in the World; Mulholland Drive; The American Astronaut; Blood Tea and Red Strings; The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. II (for Lucifer Rising, among others); Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ; The Bride of Frank; La Grande Bouffe; Uzumaki [Spiral]; Hedwig and the Angry Inch; Even Dwarves Started Small; Bunny & the Bull; “I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at Disney” (assuming I can find it); Cinema 16: European Short Films; Freaked; Session 9; Schizopolis; Strings; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium pod klepsidra]; The Addiction; Liquid Sky; The Quiet; Shock Treatment; Tuvalu; “Zombie Jesus” (if we can locate it); 3 Dev Adam; Fantastic Planet; “Twin Peaks” (TV series); Society; May; The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension; Little Otik; Final Programme; Careful; Sweet Movie; The Triplets of Belleville; “Foutaises” (short); Johnny Suede; “Jam” (TV, UK, 2000), The Tale of the Floating World, Un Chien Andalou, Bloodsucking Freaks; Fellini Satyricon; Three Crowns of the Sailor; 8 1/2; Death Race 2000; Dororo; Lost Highway; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders; Dogville; and Julien Donkey-boy; Amelie; The Ten; The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao; 1; Fast, Cheap and Out of Control; Tokyo Gore Police; At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul; The Trial [Le procès) (1962); Marquis; Hell Comes to Frogtown; Hellzapoppin’; Seom [The Isle]; Allegro Non Troppo; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; Lust in the Dust; Celine and Julie Go Boating; “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life;” The Magic Christian; Black Cat, White Cat; The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T; Abnormal: The Sinema of Nick Zedd; Robot Monster; Nightdreams; 3 Women; Rubin & Ed; Teeth; Vera; Weirdsville; Prospero’s Books; Inferno; Garden State; Persona; and The Real McCoy; Rat Pfink a Boo Boo; Themroc; Candy (1968); Run Lola Run; Pink Flamingos; Buffalo ’66; Northfork; Weekend; The Room; Glen or Glenda?; Night of the Hunter; The Fox Family; Midnight Skater; Angelus; Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs; Twister (1989); Yokai Monsters, Vol. 1: Spook Warfare [AKA Big Monster War]; Haxan; This Filthy Earth; Conspirators of Pleasure; Piano Tuner of Earthquakes; Clean, Shaven; Bubba Ho-Tep; Sheitan; Innocence; “Chingsao the Clown”; Léolo; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Blue Velvet; ID (2005); Master of the Flying Guillotine; Yesterday Was a Lie; The Ninth Configuration; Forbidden Zone; The Cell; The Illustrated Man; The Man Who Fell to Earth; Fando y Lis; Rampo Noir; Head; Christmas on Mars; “Broken Glass”; Videodrome; Air Doll; The Ossuary and Other Tales; Arrebato; Symbol; Wicked City (1992 live action); Barbarella; Picnic at Hanging Rock; The Cars that Ate Paris; The Boxer’s Omen [aka Mo]; Solyaris (1972); Portait of Jennie; Salo, the 120 Days of Sodom; The Last Sunset (1961); and Orpheus (1950).

SATURDAY SHORT: LADY BLUE SHANGHAI (2010)

Cameron Jorgensen — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 16:32:28 +0000

I believe a “thank you” is in order for all the companies that are making advertisements less monotonous for their viewers. David Lynch was, once again, commissioned to make a short to promote a product, and this sponsor, Dior, seems just as unlikely as the last (42 Below Vodka).

To avoid disappointment, be informed that Lynch held back a little on his eldritch style. It has an otherworldly feel to it, but it’s weirdness pales in comparison to some of his more famous work.

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 9/3/2010

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 16:19:11 +0000

A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):

Machete: A machete-wielding vigilante chops up his enemies in this grindhouse-styled (expanded from one of the fake trailers in Grindhouse, in fact) action flick featuring some major star power (in mostly minor roles). Starring Danny Trejo, with Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Segall and Lindsay Lohan. Weird? We’re betting no, but cult director Robert Rodriguez‘s numerous followers will be checking this out for sure. Machete official site.

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: SEP 9 – 19

The TIFF is one of the world’s top film festivals; frankly, though, we dropped the ball by not covering the horror-oriented alternative festival, Toronto After Dark, last week. Next year, TAD (though we admit we’re skeptical about any festival that could give The Human Centipede a silver medal). Regardless, here are some of the movies featured at TIFF of interest of that we’ll be keeping an eye out for in the upcoming months:

13 Assassins – Takashi Miike’s latest is a bloody but reportedly non-weird period samurai film

The Adder’s Bite – this 9 minute short film (described as “deliciously surreal” by Twitch) is based on a chapter of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and has been garnering positive buzz for upcoming director Firas Momani; perhaps he’ll get a feature deal out of it

At Ellen’s Age [Im Alter von Ellen] – an airline hostess falls in with a group of radical animal rights activists in a story that’s described as containing “a pinch of the surreal”

Black Swan – highly anticipated psychological thriller from Darren Aronofsky about rival ballerinas, starring Natalie Portman

Bunraku – alternate reality dystopian actioner starring Josh Hartnett, Woody Harrelson (as a samurai bartender), Ron Perlman and Demi Moore

Deep in the Woods [Au Fond des Bois] – in 19th century France a bourgeois woman is abducted by a magical wild man and taken into the forest for a “nightmare of carnal sex” (?)

The Four Times [Le Quattro Volte] – the four stage journey of a shepherd’s soul through the afterlife, told according to one of geeky Greek cult leader Pythagoras’ lesser-known theorems

The Illusionist [L'illusionniste] – Sylvain Chomet’s followup to The Triplets of Belleville is a nearly silent animated feature about an out-of-fashion magician, from an unproduced script by Jacques Tati

John Carpenter’s The Ward – thriller about a woman in a mental institution; we’ll be watching simply to see if Carpenter has returned to form yet

The Last Circus [Balada Triste] – from Alex (The Day of the Beast) de la Iglesia comes a parody of the Spanish Civil War with killer clowns battling over a circus dancer

L.A. Zombie – hardcore gay porn/gore horror/art film from oddball Bruce LaBruce

Machete Maidens Unleashed! – best-of exploitation compilation in which director Mark Hartley tries to do for the Philippines what he did for Australia with Not Quite Hollywood

Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake - the title explains it: a remake of the groundbreaking Russian classic Man with a Movie Camera recreated by folks who uploaded their recreations of scenes to a website

Passion Play – fantasy fairy-tale starring Mickey Rourke as a jazz musician and Megan Fox as a “Bird Woman”

The Sleeping Beauty [La Belle Endormie] – before we’ve even had a chance to catch Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat is back with another postmodern fairy tale

The Strange Case of Angelica – story of a photographer who sees the dead as the living when he looks through his camera, from 101-year old director Manoel de Oliveira

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – for some reason we didn’t notice this Thai fantasy about the afterlife until after it won the Palme D’Or

You Are Here – a series of absurdist narrative snippets make up Daniel Cockburn’s feature debut; promoters are bandying about Charlie Kaufman‘s name as a stylistic touchstone

There’s also an exhibit of Tim Burton‘s artwork to check out for Torontoians (Torontites?) Toronto International Film Festival official site.

SCREENINGS (NEW YORK CITY: ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES)

Our Beloved Month of August [Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto, AKA This Dear Month of August] (2008): A narrative experiment: the filmmaker (Miguel Gomes) could not find funding for his movie but starting filming anyway, creating a documentary about vacationers in the Portuguese mountains in August. Then, he introduced a fictional drama without explaining to the audience what was documentary and what was scripted. It’s questionable whether this is truly weird, but it’s definitely experimental and “postmodern.” Aquele Querido Mês de Agosto Official Site (French).

NEW ON DVD:

Lorna the Exorcist (1974): There’s nothing truly weird debuting on DVD this week, but if you’re desperate to rent something off-the-wall you might give this Jess Franco lesbian-heavy occult fairy tale a go-go. Buy Lorna The Exorcist.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

The Evil Dead (Limited Edition) (1981): Sam Raimi‘s bloody low-budget debut, which was half remade/half sequelized as the Certified Weird Evil Dead II. There are a veritable zombie host of extras, but all of them appeared on one or another of the film’s previous video incarnations with the exception of a new commentary track from Raimi, star Bruce Campbell and producer Robert Talpert. Buy The Evil Dead (Limited Edition) [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Boxing Jesus [Il Pugno di Jesu] (2007): An odd title and plot description (Jesus returns to earth as a boxer but is sent to a madhouse where he meets John the Baptist). We couldn’t swear that this unknown Italian film is weird, rather than a lame comedy, but you can try it out and report back to us. Watch Boxing Jesus free on YouTube.

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

BATMAN RETURNS (1992): A SUPERHERO BURLESQUE

Alfred Eaker — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 16:10:43 +0000

In 1992 some damn silly, so-called Christian organization threw a bullying hissy fit at McDonalds for its Happy Meal deal tie-in with Tim Burton‘s Batman Returns. McDonalds, true to form, prematurely withdrew its merchandising. Rumor has it that McDonalds issued a stern warning to Warner Brothers not to tap Burton for the next Batman film. For whatever reason, Warner Brothers caved into the golden arch and ,consequently, put its franchise into a decade long grave with the unwise hiring of director Joel Schumacher.

Only the fundamentalist mindset can associate Big Macs with a certain brand of morality. Looking at Batman Returns (1992), one wonders what the Christian organization was bitching about. The Bible is all throughout the film and, actually the good book itself has far more sex and violence than Batman, Tim Burton, Warner Brothers and McDonalds combined.

Regardless, Batman Returns remains the greatest cinematic comic book movie to date and one of Tim Burton’s most uniquely accomplished films. Admittedly, I am not a fan of comic book movies, even if I did read comics some when I was kid, but then most kids I knew did. I was in the minority in preferring DC to Marvel, and I guess I am sort of looking forward to the new Green Lantern movie, mainly because the Green Lantern/Green Arrow comic was a favorite when I was a wee lad in the 1960s and 1970s. That was a comic that was delightfully of its time, a bit like Star Trek in espousing an ultra-liberal message with all the subtlety of a pair of brass knuckles. Even though Green Lantern himself was a bit too righteous and bland, I liked that he was obsessed with the color green and was rendered impotent by the color yellow. There was something surreal in that, and I find the insistence of realism in comics to be a huge oxymoron. Perhaps that’s why the dark surrealism of Batman Returns did not bother me like it did mainstream audiences, comic book geeks, and militant pseudo-Christian organizations.

Even though I will acknowledge that Christopher Nolan‘s Dark Knight (2008) was well crafted, it would not have worked without Ledger’s performance holding it together. Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne, however, pales compared to Michael Keaton’s much more intense, internalized, subtle and complex Wayne. Finally, Nolan’s film feels like it has one subplot too many. Comparatively, Tim Burton’s Batman Returns is a genuine freak show, which is as it should be. This is the Dark Knight filtered through a young Tim Burton still channeling the influence of Tod Browning. It is an inimitable, energetically enthusiastic film which revels in its weirdness with a style and texture all its own.

The deformed Penguin is born to rich parents (Paul Reubens and Diane Salinger, both of 1985′s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure) who dispose of him in the sewer like Moses being dumped in the Nile (choreographed to composer Danny Elfman’s wordless choral music). Penguins and circus performers rescue their potential deliverer, and the saga begins 33 years later (Christ allegory there). Characteristically, Burton propels us into a yuletide world, only this is a season as envisioned by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come in the expressionist land of silent film forefathers. Fritz Lang, Guy Maddin and Jack Skellington know this Gotham.

Christopher Walken emerges as the beautifully ludicrous-wigged energy tycoon Max Schreck (named after the actor who played Count Orlock—AKA Dracula—in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu). Schreck lives in his Metropolis-inspired ivory tower and emerges to give a holiday speech to the crowd below. The infamous Circus Gang interrupts the proceedings via a giant Christmas present which literally rolls into the town square, shooting forth clowns on motorcycles, strongmen, fire eating jesters, and a machine gun wielding monkey.

Commissioner Gordon (Pat Hingle) turns on the Bat Signal not a moment too soon, because Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) is alone in his mansion, getting ready to turn on “Blue Christmas.” Batman saves Schreck’s secretary, Selena Kyle (Michelle Pfeifer), from a killer clown with a tazer, but Schreck is nowhere to be found. That’s because he has unwittingly stumbled upon the underground sewer abode of the legendary Penguin Man (Danny DeVito). The Penguin’s lair looks like a cross between the Phantom of the Opera’s cavern and Vincent Price‘s Theater of Blood (1973).

This is not Burgess Meredith’s Penguin (taking nothing from Meredith). Devito’s Penguin is, by turns, empathetic, repulsive and genuinely threatening. With Schreck’s help (via blackmail) Penguin intends to ascend to the world above, locate his parents (already dead, probably by the Penguin’s hands) and take over Gotham as the new mayor. He also has a secret plan of revenge against the whole of Gotham by killing every first born male child (shades of Ramses and King Herod). Meanwhile, Schreck “kills” Selena by pushing her out a window after she stumbles upon some hidden files. However, Selena is revived by flesh-eating kitty cats. She returns to her Barbie doll apartment, turns “Hello There” into “Hell Here”, fashions a black leather cat suit on an old sewing machine, and Catwoman is born.

Pfeifer, who can often be stoic, is amazing here. It is the best performance of her career and she is full of surprises. Like Penguin, she arouses empathy and she arouses Batman/Bruce Wayne as well. Not only is Wayne sexually attracted to her, but he senses a truly kindred spirit. In the first Batman (1989) Wayne’s romantic relationship seemed a mismatch but here Wayne’s falling in love with Selena/Catwoman is natural and understandable. You really want them to make it, although you know it is, as Catwoman predicts, “not a fairy tale to be.”

Even the loathsome Schreck has a degree of empathy in his love for his son, which leaves us the character of Batman. Here, Keaton’s Wayne is not saddled with the unfolding of his origin story, as he was in the previous film. Oddly, many critics of the first film commented that Keaton’s performance paled next to the extroverted Jack Nicholson. Seen today, Nicholson’s performance seems obvious while Keaton’s has grown considerably in stature. Keaton’s Batman is the eye of the hurricane. In Returns, Wayne’s inner angst is already firmly established. Here, he suffers more from restlessness, lack of direction, his inability to connect, boredom, intense loneliness, and seasonal blues, which makes his unease with the world much more vivid. In the guise of Batman, Wayne is not above igniting one opponent and blowing up another (in fact he clearly enjoys it), all while lecturing Selena for wanting to kill Schreck. Keaton does not resort to a tried and true lazy playboy act. It is very apparent to all that Bruce Wayne is as disturbed as Batman. Batman/Bruce Wayne fully fits in this quartet of freaks.

When his collaboration with Schreck predictably sours, Penguin, with the help of rocket launching penguins and a henchman who must have taken kidnapping lessons from Robert Helpmann’s Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), ignites his plan to mass murder the children.

The scene in which Selena and Wayne find out the truth about one another is well done and probably is the only time this plot element has worked in any comic book film (the uncovering of the ‘secret identity’ did not work at all in the first Batman film, in Superman, or in the Spider-Man film). The boat ride in the sewer recalls Phantom of the Opera (1925), and the unmasking of Batman in front of Selena echoes Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin. Despite Penguin’s terrible plans, his fate is a sad one.

Batman Returns erupts in a dizzying apocalypse straight from the theater of the absurd. This is a superhero burlesque as only Tim Burton, at this stage in his career, could have delivered. At the center of this burlesque are freaks we care about; only they are not really freaks, and the film ends with a bit of sad reflection and an urge to turn on “Blue Christmas.”

CAPSULE: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD [JOHEUNNOM NABBEUNNOM ISANGHANNOM] (2008)

Alex Kittle — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:52:33 +0000

DIRECTED BY: Ji-Woon Kim

FEATURING: Kang-ho Song, Byung-hun Lee, Jung Woo-sung

PLOT: Set in 1930′s Manchuria (during the Japanese occupation of China) and loosely based

on Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, the film concerns the mad-cap, gunslinging antics of three men in search of a mythical treasure.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Sure it’s got a fun premise and goofy atmosphere, but the weirdest thing about the film is the “Weird” of the title, who’s primarily a wacky take on Eli Wallach’s “Ugly” character from Leone’s film, with spiky hair and the best jokes in the script. It’s an excellent, peculiar movie, but never reaches List-worthy levels of bizarre.

COMMENTS: Yoon Tae-goo—AKA “The Weird” (Song Kang-ho)—is a resilient petty thief who chances upon a treasure map while robbing a group of Japanese soldiers. Park Chang-yi—AKA “The Bad” (Lee Byun-hun)—is a malicious assassin sent to reclaim the map, who resigns himself to hunting down Tae-goo. Park Do-won—AKA “The Good” (Jung Woo-sung)—is a taciturn bounty hunter chasing after both men’s rewards, who eventually teams up with Tae-goo in the search for the treasure. Sprinkle in some curious Manchurian bandits and a dedicated group of Japanese soldiers, and soon you’ve got an all-out chase replete with wackiness, gunfights, and thrills!

There’s a lot going on in this film, but the sheer enthusiasm that brings it together makes it all completely work. The story is fun and interesting, the action is loud and inventive, the characters are appealing, and the visuals are detailed and colorful. There’s a range of costumes, weapons, and gadgets, giving the movie a slightly anachronistic/steampunk feel. The premise is both an homage to and appropriation of Leone’s original, but infused with its own imaginative mythos and offbeat sense of humor, distinguishing it from a simple remake. The addition of complex Manchurian history involving a multinational conflict gives the story a unique perspective.

The three leads are superb, but Song Kang-ho really owns the film. As “The Weird” he’s hilarious, likable, and unexpectedly capable. Plus, he’s got a secret past! The writers did well to make him the central character, devoting the most time to his story and giving him the best lines. Song is adept at wacky comedy but never slides into flat characterization, making him both engaging and intriguing to watch. Lee Byun-hun as “The Bad” spends most of his time being incredibly badass and looking sharp. Jung Woo-sung as “The Good” is a bit bland, and it doesn’t help that there isn’t much attention paid to his character. He has impressive firearms and his mustache looks silly.

There is very little about this movie to criticize (except perhaps the under-utilization of The Good’s character). With its oft-frenetic pace, out-there stunts, and silly, exuberant atmosphere, it had the audience laughing out loud and gasping at crazy moments in equal measure. The final chase scene at the end is guaranteed to have everyone riveted, while the film itself leaves viewers instinctively smiling from ear-to-ear. I believe the technical critical term is “a rip-roarin’ good time.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s a live-action comic book. More good than bad, and with a liberal sprinkling of weird, it’s got a rock ‘em, sock ‘em energy that knocks the dust off a dying breed of storytelling.” –Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

NOTE: This review is published in slightly different form at Film Forager.

CAPSULE: SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (2010)

366weirdmovies — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:06:18 +0000

DIRECTED BY: Edgar Wright

FEATURING: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Jason Schwartzman

PLOT: Slacker bassist Scott Pilgrim must defeat seven evil exes in order to win the girl of his

dreams.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: An alternate reality comedy that at times feels like something Monty Python would have come up with if they’d been raised on video games and graphic novels instead of “The Goon Show” and Oscar Wilde, Scott Pilgrim has substantial cult movie potential. The movie dispenses with logic scene by fractured scene, but probably its weirdest joke is casting Michael Cera as an action hero. It’s shiny surface sheen is fascinating, but at heart it’s a conventional coming-of-age tale for the PlayStation set; despite it’s comic leaps of illogic, it’s weird-ish, at best.

COMMENTS: With its role-playing game quest to defeat seven escalating opponents (right up to the final “boss” battle) and it’s onscreen scoring system (defeated enemies turn into piles of coins as a digital score rises from their corpses), Scott Pilgrim becomes the first film in history to use the video game as a metaphor for growing up. The movie milks maximum mileage from this conceit: when Scott goes to the bathroom, we watch a pop-up pee meter go from full to empty so we can stay informed on the condition of his bladder. The viewer is stuffed inside a video game console, treated to constant text updates on the characters’ status. But even beyond that basic technique, director Edgar Wright piles on the artificiality and stylization whenever an idea crosses his mind: multicolored valentines bloom from young lovers locked lips at first kiss, 1960s Batman-style “KAPOWS!” accompany fight scenes, and when a character’s profanity is bleeped out on the soundtrack a black bar also appears over her mouth. The bent humor sports a pop-absurdist tone; this is the only movies where a villain sets up a duel to the death by email, then brings his own Bollywood backup singers to the fight. Sometimes Wright’s choices become overly referential and fall flat, as when one expository scene is announced by the “Seinfeld” theme song, but you have to admire his willingness to try absolutely anything, and there are more hits than misses in the mix. The film moves almost too fast at times, with dream scenes emerging back into reality with no warning (there’s little difference between the two states anyway), and jarring leaps forward in time. But Wright embraces the short-attention span aesthetic and makes one of the cornerstones of the film; it’s neither a satirical jab at youth culture nor an unconscious adoption of its rhythms, but a stylistic choice that works in the context of the zeitgeist he’s trying to evoke. The fast-cut style is also necessary to fit in all the film’s teeming ideas: Scott Pilgrim is delightfully overstuffed, a real bargain for your matinee dollar. There are six big, comic fight scenes, multiple romantic subplots and back stories, a Battle of the Bands, and so many quirky supporting characters you almost need a scorecard to keep up. Besides everyboy Pilgrim, there’s cool love interest Ramona Flowers (whose shifting dye jobs call to mind Kate Winslett’s Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), jailbait romantic rival Knives Chow, wisecracking gay roommate Wallace Wells, Scott’s band-mates in the awkwardly named “Sex Bob-omb,” evil exes who’ve become Hollywood action stars or Vegan bass players… and even with that list I’ve still omitted somebody‘s favorite of the dozens of significant characters. The film is anarchic and ramshackle in spirit, but it’s actually tightly controlled and easy to follow and connect with. With it’s ADD edits, it’s geeky embrace of everything pop culture and willful ignorance of any other type of culture, and its amiable twenty-somethings who act like John Hughes’ teenagers of an earlier era, Scott Pilgrim suggests either that the onset of adulthood is slipping ever closer to 30, or that the film is aimed at a demographic aged much younger than its protagonists. I prefer to believe the latter; and, like the aforementioned Mr. Hughes’ film, the movie’s innocence about love and the easy answers about life’s big lessons creates a nostalgic crossover appeal for adults, even if they don’t get every NES video game system reference.

Edgar Wright’s previous two films were cultish genre spoofs: the zombie film parody Shaun of the Dead and the cop burlesque Hot Fuzz. Scott Pilgrim sees Wright stretching his talents with a far more baroque, but equally hilarious, approach. With Scott Pilgrim Wright’s no longer exaggerating the conventions of an existing genres to ridiculous lengths; he’s inventing an entirely new genre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The style is Sega surrealism, the narrative strategy 30% Bunuel and 70% Bally.”–Andy Klein, Brand X Daily (contemporaneous)

CAPSULE: THE PROMISE [LA PROMESA] (2004)

Pamela De Graff — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:08:16 +0000

DIRECTED BY: Héctor Carré

FEATURING: Carmen Maura, Santaigo Barón, Ana Fernández, Juan Margallo, Evaristo Calvo

PLOT : A devout nanny’s religious convictions are tested when a clairvoyant child implores

her to murder his father.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The events in La Promisa unfold in a weird way, making the story bizarre. The nature of these events, however, is no different from those in any occult film; the film is as conventionally produced as any horror movie. While the story is definitely out there, the overall viewing experience is not quite weird enough to be certified as such.

COMMENTS: Solid performances and Santiago de Compostela locations compliment this creepy, offbeat occult tale. Gregoria (Maura) is a modest housewife leading a life of quite desperation. Her marriage is suffocating, her husband (Margallo) is an ogre and her spirit is repressed. When her husband’s abuse takes its toll, Gregoria seeks refuge in the ecclesiastical. Finding solace in religious fervor, she plunges into the deep end of delusional thinking. Or does she? Taken to episodes of brief catatonia, Gregoriia becomes accident prone and paranoid. Every shadow hides a demon and every accident is a sign of manifest evil. Her chosen solution is to pray incessantly.

When a bizarre tragedy leads her to a chance encounter with a dying soothsayer, the doomed man implores Gregoria to fulfill a prophecy at a mysterious church in a remote mountain village. Supernatural voices drive Gregoria to murder her husband, after which she flees to the strange hamlet. There, on a fog enshrouded mountain estate, she takes a job as caretaker to a telepathic boy named Daniel (Barón).

Haunted by voices and fearing that she is losing her mind, Gregoria is drawn into a divine good versus evil enigma. Her snowballing predicament becomes centered around a secret passage, a well that presents a nasty fall hazard, the ghost of her husband, and her young ward’s murderous psychic manipulations. But the answer and her fate are inexplicably intertwined. The key to it all lies grounded in the sinister old church that she is destined to visit. The clairvoyant Daniel will use any means necessary to entice her there to fulfill The Promise.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an offbeat, mostly effective story of madness that combines a psychological study, a supernatural yarn and a tale of domestic violence to surprisingly rounded effect.”–Jonathan Holland, Variety (contemporaneous)

64. BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999)

366weirdmovies — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:53:57 +0000

“I don’t think my characters are a joke. I take them seriously. And no matter how outlandish or weird their situation, their situation is real and a little tragic. I think that’s what gives people something to hang onto as they watch the film. We had to find a way to make everything play on a very naturalistic level, so it didn’t just turn into wackiness.”–Charlie Kaufman on Being John Malkovich (Salon interview)

“I’m sure Being John Malkovich would be regarded as a work of genius on whatever planet it was written.”–possibly apocryphal comment from a movie studio rejection letter

DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze

FEATURING: John Cusack, Catherine Keener, Cameron Diaz, John Malkovich

PLOT: Craig Schwartz is an unemployed puppeteer who performs a marionette version of “Abelard and Heloise” on street corners for passersby. His wife Lotte convinces him to get a job, and he winds up working as a file clerk on floor seven and a half of a Manhattan office building, where he falls for sultry and scheming coworker Maxine. When he discovers a portal hidden behind a file cabinet that leads into the mind of John Malkovich, Maxine devises a plan to sell tickets to “be” the title actor, but things become extremely complicated when a confused love quadrangle develops between Craig, his wife, Maxine, and Malkovich…

BACKGROUND:

The feature film debut for both director Spike Jonze and sreenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who would work together again on Adaptation).

In Being John Malkovich John Cusak re-enacts the story of Abelard and Heloise with puppets; the title Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is taken from Alexander Pope’s poem on the same subject, “Eloisa to Abelard.”

John Malkovich reportedly liked the script, but didn’t want to star in it and requested the filmmakers cast another actor as the celebrity who has a portal into his head; eventually he relented and agreed to appear in the film.

The film was nominated for three Oscars: Keener for Best Supporting Actress, Jonze for Best Director and Kaufman for Best Original Screenplay. As is usually the case with uncomfortably weird films, it won nothing.

The film was originally produced by PolyGram, who were unhappy with the dailies they were getting from Jonze and threatened to shut production down; however, before they could make good on the threat the company was bought out by Universal, and Jonze was able to complete the movie in the ensuing confusion.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The recursive (and hilariously illogical) result of John Malkovich daring to enter the portal that leads inside John Malkovich’s head.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make a movie

Original trailer for Being John Malkovich

about a secret portal that allows anyone who crawls through it to see the world through actor John Malkovich’s eyes for fifteen minutes before being spat out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike and not end up with a weird result. The inhabitants of Being John Malkovich, like the denizens of a dream, don’t recognize the secret portals leading into others minds, the half-floor work spaces designed for little people, and the chimps with elaborate back stories as being at all unusual, and their matter-of-fact attitudes only throw the absurdity into stark relief.

COMMENTS: Synecdoche, New York may be Charlie Kaufman‘s weirdest script, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind his most emotionally affecting, and Adaptation his cleverest, but he’s never written anything funnier than his debut, Being John Malkovich. From the moment Craig Schwartz steps onto the 7 1/2th floor, stooping so he doesn’t hit the ceiling, talks to executive liaison who insists his name is Juarez, interviews with the boss who insists he has a speech impediment, and watches the orientation video where an 19th century industrialist (who talks like a pirate) explains he built this floor for his short-statured wife so there would be one place on earth where her and her “accursed kind” could live in peace, Being John Malkovich demonstrates its devotion to deadpan absurdist yuks. Add in running jokes at the expense of puppeteers, a chimp undergoing psychoanalysis, and the low comedy of John Malkovich being struck on the head by a beer can thrown from a passing vehicle, and about a dozen other crazed gags, and you have a movie that’s like what might happen if someone found a cache of old unused Monty Python sketches and miraculously crafted them into all into a coherent narrative.

Not to take away from director Spike Jonze’s work on Malkovich—he orchestrates the ensemble cast beautifully and has the good sense not to inject too much of himself into the story—but any halfway competent director could take a Kaufman script and make, at the minimum, a near masterpiece. Kaufman is the only writer working today whose scripts are unique enough to completely dictate feels of the movie; it doesn’t matter if Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry or Kaufman himself directs, the result is still as immediately recognizable as Kaufman as is the style of a Kubrick or a Hitchcock. All the movies contain the same slanted, dream-logic humor; the neurotic intellectual protagonists; the appealingly weird “why didn’t I ever think of that?” premises; the unpredictable constructions leading to ingenious conclusions; and the glancing philosophical implications that allow the movies to be read and enjoyed on multiple levels. There’s also the metafictional conceit that inhabits 75% of Kaufman’s scripts (excepting only Eternal Sunshine), the constant recursive subtext that this story is actually about the process of creating this story. These singularities act like anti-theft devices making it impossible for directors to hijack Kaufman’s vision; if they try to turn off the story’s perfectly planned path, the vehicle would stop working and shut down.

Being John Malkovich touches lightly on philosophical issues—as Schwartz says, the ability to enter someone else’s head and see life through their eyes “raises a metaphysical can of worms”—but it doesn’t explore them seriously. Take, for example, the result when Malkovich dares to risk trying out the portal into his own mind. The answer to the intriguing question of what happens when someone enters into their own consciousness as an observer ends up as just another surreal joke (how does Malkovich end up at a restaurant?) Kaufman was probably wise not to delve to deeply into the unanswerable questions of the mind/body paradox. But he does explore another issue dearer to his heart: the role of the writer in creating a character. Schwartz’s marionettes (which he uses as an escape, a chance to live a more interesting life and creepily fulfill romantic fantasies when he has a puppet Schwartz seduce a puppet Maxine) are a metaphor for the portal into Malkovich, and vice versa. And both are a metaphor for the way a writer controls that simulacrum of person, the onscreen character, by pulling the strings on the script to make them dance and speak. Kaufman is self-deprecating about the role of the puppeteer/author: after Schwartz is beaten up (again) for his inappropriately erotic sidewalk show and Lotte asks him why he puts himself through this, his answer is a fatalistic, “I’m a puppeteer.” The substitution of the slightly ridiculous “puppeteer” for the pompous “artist” suggests an author uncomfortable with his own role, but willing to laugh about it. It’s one of the film’s subtle meta-jokes that Kaufman is the only one who actually gets to enjoy the experience of “being John Malkovich” that Maxine promises to clients who answer her newspaper ad.

Kaufman’s Malkovich, of course, isn’t the real Malkovich: I’ll bet the real Malkovich doesn’t call up Charlie Sheen to talk him down after he’s suffered a psychotic identity crisis. The real Malkovich was married at the time of filming, but he’s a bachelor in this story. John Malkovich was brilliant selection to play the man with the secret portal. The tunnel behind the file cabinet could have led into anyone; it didn’t have to be a real person. Choosing an actor for the vessel gives the story another layer, affording anyone anxious to seize upon some sort of social relevance as an excuse for liking the movie the opportunity to discuss how it addresses the issue of contemporary celebrity worship (even though this delightfully superficial movie doesn’t address that concern any more thoroughly than any of the other conundrums it raises). But Malkovich is a weird, random choice. As an actor, he’s ever so slightly effeminate, but there’s a gonzo gleam in his eye that suggests he might go off the hook at any moment. A great but enigmatic performer, Malkovich had a distant, vaguely cultured public person; he’s never in the tabloids, but he’s the sort of actor you might expect to show up on Charlie Rose’s late night PBS show discussing his latest project. He’s recognizable, but not so famous that anyone he meets in the movie can remember the name of something he was in. It’s a publicist’s dream that Malkovich relented and agreed to appear in the film and permanently lend it his name. The script has tremendous fun with his sub-major celebrity, making a joke not only out of the fact that people on the street can’t remember his roles but also of how ordinary and boring his private life is (people pay good money to experience what it’s like to order towels over the phone as John Malkovich!)

Malkovich is game to laugh at himself, which makes him all the more appealing, but he also does a fantastic job in a multifaceted performance that requires him to play not only a comic version of himself but also a man in the throes of being possessed by someone inside his head, Richard III, and John Cusack. The actor proves himself worthy of the faith Kaufman put in him, knocking the ball out of the park.

Other performances are equally stellar. Cusack is suitably pathetic as the romantic but spineless artist with a bad case of unrequited love. The two female leads do an interesting switcheroo; Cameron Diaz is a gorgeous actress who acts pretty here, and Catherine Keener is a pretty actress who acts gorgeous here. Their performances suggest that sex appeal is a matter of attitude rather than looks. Diaz wears baggy clothes, little makeup and an unflattering perm. Doting on the menagerie of pet store rejects she populates her apartment with to make up for her unrequited need for a child, she starts the film as an agreeably frumpy mate for Cusack, but the discovery of the portal unhinges her and turns her into a romantic schemer. Keener, who looks like she has too many teeth for her mouth whenever she flashes her sarcastic smile, is a man-eater who makes herself sexually irresistible by being impossible to impress. She always has a cruel putdown and a selfish plot ready to deploy, and only gets off on control—a fact that Cusack eventually picks up on in order to control her. Orson Bean and Mary Kay Place have hilarious turns as the horny executive geezer and the secretary with a hearing impairment, respectively. Besides the great acting by the featured cast, there are a host of cameos—from the unnoticeable (Jonze and fellow director David Fincher) to the eyeblink (Brad Pitt, Wynona Ryder, Andy Dick, and then-popular boy-band Hanson) to the amusing (Charlie Sheen, who tweaks his own image even more impishly than Malkovich does)—making Being John Malkovich a minor feast for fans of celebrity-spotting.

Being John Malkovich sets up its absurd scenario and then pushes its ideas to the outermost limits, but it retains control right up to the very end. It starts as a surreal comedy and moves seamlessly into a postmodern screwball sex farce: by the time the main characters start jockeying to get into Malkovich’s head and each others’ pants, we’ve already bought in to this crazy world and forgotten how insane it all is. We start to enjoy watching the characters jockeying for position just as if we were watching a “normal” movie, and then the script suddenly slaps us in the face with one of its oddball inventions, like when we’re thrust into the chimp’s head as he flashes back to being captured in the African savanna. Being John Malkovich is smart without being preachy, and daringly original without being alienating. If your significant other won’t let you pick the Saturday night flick anymore after you’ve burned him or her one too many times by trying to get them to sit through Stalker or Funky Forest, then Being John Malkovich is a flick you can pull out to mend fences. That alone makes it an essential tool to have on your DVD shelf. Plus, it’s kind of funny.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“While its title might sound bizarre anywhere other than on a docu portrait of the actor, the work itself goes beyond odd, taking its unconventional outlandishness to hilarious, dizzying heights. Yet what makes it so fresh is the decision to treat even the story’s most surreal inventions in real, rather than fantastical terms…”–David Rooney, Variety (contemporaneous)

“The filmmakers are stoned on weirdness for its own sake…”–Stephen Farber, Movieline (contemporaneous)

“The movie handles [the Malkovich portal] not as a gimmick but as the opportunity for material that is somehow funny and serious, sad and satirical, weird and touching, all at once… stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Being John Malkovich (1999)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Salon: Being Charlie Kaufman – Michael Sragow’s essay/interview with the screenwriter after Being John Malkovich‘s release

Being John Malkovich @ Being Charlie Kaufman – the Being John Malkovich page on the Kaufman fansite

Spike Jonze and the Art of the Ramble – Movieline piece about a New York Times profile on Jonze culls a couple of nice tidbits about Being John Malkovich

Drunk Dude throws can at Malkovich on Set – a YouTube clip of a purported snippet of the DVD commentary for the beer can scene; an interesting hoax (perpetrator unknown), since there’s no director’s commentary and the scene appears in Kaufman’s script exactly as it plays out onscreen.

What John Malkovich Sees When He Reads This Review – thanks to Ka-Ping Yee for creating the Malkovich Mediator

DVD INFO: The Universal Special Edition DVD (buy) features some of the oddest extras your likely to find, and we’re not just talking about the motormouthed woman hired to play an anonymous motorist on the New Jersey Turnpike who’s paranoid about a fellow driver because she prefers canned green beans to fresh ones. There’s also an abruptly interrupted interview with Jonze, a featurette on the art of marionettes featuring interviews with student puppeteers on what they thought of the film, and a menu item with nothing there (it warns you there’s nothing there, but it’s still an irresistible visit). You can also watch the “7 1/2 Floor Orientation” film complete and uninterrupted, as well as the film’s mock TV segment spotlighting Malkovich’s career. On the more conventional end of the spectrum there’s a set of production stills and the theatrical trailer, but there are also three impossibly bizarre TV spots that just had to be created specifically for the DVD (one doesn’t even mention the film). Each menu item is accompanied by a different piece from the soundtrack: you can hear the evocative end-credits track by the ever-weird Bjork by going to the language menu. These oddities almost—but not quite—compensate for the lack of a commentary track (even a facetious one). Hopefully, they’re saving that tidbit for a Blu-ray edition.

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

366 Weird Movies

GUEST REVIEW: DOGTOOTH [KYNODONTAS] (2009)

65. MANIAC (1934)

Scene from Maniac

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

SATURDAY SHORT: LADY BLUE SHANGHAI (2010)

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 9/3/2010

BATMAN RETURNS (1992): A SUPERHERO BURLESQUE

CAPSULE: THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD [JOHEUNNOM NABBEUNNOM ISANGHANNOM] (2008)

CAPSULE: SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD (2010)

CAPSULE: THE PROMISE [LA PROMESA] (2004)

64. BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (1999)

Original trailer for Being John Malkovich