Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 9/25/2020

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

Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…

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

IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):

Akira (1988) 4K remaster: Read the Canonically Weird entry! Despite the utter confusion it generates in the uninitiated, the seminal cyberpunk anime is getting a gratifyingly wide release in theaters across the U.S. this week. (Apologies if you missed the IMAX release, which was yesterday only).  Akira 4K info page at Funimation.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Kajillionaire (2020): A family of con-artists take on a new swindle as the daughter questions their relationship. That synopsis doesn’t sound too weird, but this one is from and a mainstream critic warns that it may be “a little too weird to handle…” (that warning is not addressed to you, btw). Kajillionaire official site.

FILM FESTIVALS – Fantastic Fest (Austin, TX and online, 9/24-10/1):

Just a reminder that this year’s Fantastic Fest has started, is largely online, and is free. We won’t repeat our brief rundown from last week’s Weird Horizon, but you can follow the link if interested. Or simply visit the Fantastic Fest home page to see what’s playing now.

FILM FESTIVALS – Nightstream (Online [geolocked to U.S.], 10/8-11):

“Nightstream” is a 2020 collaboration between five smaller film festivals that were canceled due to the pandemic: Boston Underground, Brooklyn Horror, North Bend, Overlook, and Popcorn Frights. Selections Climate of the Hunter, Dinner in America, and Time of Moulting have already been reviewed on these pages. Also included are a number of webcasts/podcasts and special events, including cocktails, trivia, and a feature where , , and critique their early home movies. We’d also like to highlight the following films:

  • Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (1995/2012) – This seldom-seen gore feature, filmed in 1995 but not released until 2012, is like the Japanese Evil Dead with bodybuilders.
  • Mandibles – ‘ latest is about two friends who try to exploit a giant fly they find in their car’s trunk.

Nightstream Festival official homepage.

FILM FESTIVALS – Sitges Film Festival (Sitges, Spain 10/8-18):

Despite the pandemic, Spain’s venerable Sitges Festival soldiers on with a hybrid of live screenings and online presentations. As far as we can tell, unlike most other festivals, online screenings do not seem to be geolocked to particular countries (but we admit we did not try to buy tickets to test that out). Among their massive slate, here are some we’ve previously mentioned or reviewed: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964), Fried Barry (screening online), ‘ Mandibles (see above, screening online), Minor Premise (online), Monster Seafood Wars (online), She Dies Tomorrow, Spookies (1986), The Old Man Movie (online), and Viy (1967). Sitges will also screens early previews of ‘s Possessor and A24’s delayed St. Maud (neither available online). The films and revivals highlighted below are of special interest:

  • Anonymous Animals [Les Animaux Anonymes] – Animal-headed creatures hunt humans in this dialogue-free French experiment. 10/8 or online.
  • The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920) / The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1962) – The 1962 version is a Robert Bloch-penned riff on ‘s theme. The original screens 10/9 and the tribute film on 10/16.
  • The Dragon Lives Again [AKA Deadly Hands of Kung Fu] (1977) – Bruce Lee dies and goes to Hell, where he teams up with Popeye to fight James Bond and eleven more assassins bent on killing him (again). Screens 10/14 only.
  • Saint-Narcisse – Bruce LaBruce blasphemy about a man’s erotic longing for his long-lost identical twin. Screening live on the 15th, 16th and 18th, and also online.
  • Sky Sharks – another absurdist shark B-comedy, this time featuring flying sharks piloted by Nazi zombies. Oct 10-11 and online.
  • The Trial (1962) – adaptation of ‘s existential classic plays on the 17th.

Sitges Film Festival official site.

STREAMING (Amazon Prime):

“Utopia”: A TV series about fans of the graphic novel “Utopia” who discover that events predicted in the story are coming true in real life, and whose investigation leads to a cultlike leader played by . It’s based on a British TV show that ran from 2013-2014 that was canceled despite a cult following. Debuts today. “Utopia” on Amazon Prime.

NEW ON HOME VIDEO:

The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (2005): Read our review. Alphabetically, this is the first of several features re-released on DVD and Blu-ray this week. Buy The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.

The Brothers Grimm (2005): A couple of fairy-tale writing charlatans find themselves trapped in a real fairy tale. The frustration of filming what turned out to be a flop fantasy encouraged a bitter to make Tideland (2005). Re-released on DVD or Blu-ray. Buy The Brothers Grimm.

Fellini’s Casanova (1976): plays the famous libertine as he bed-hops across ‘s avant garde vision of Europe. Casanova is almost a forgotten Fellini film, since it hasn’t been available in the U.S. in forever; it is, however, in our reader-suggested review queue. (This is a preorder: the Blu won’t be available until Dec. 8). Preorder Fellini’s Casanova.

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996): Read our review. ‘ –penned vampire movie is getting another Blu-ray release, for unknown reasons (we just report ’em, we don’t explain ’em). Buy From Dusk Till Dawn.

Lord Love a Duck (1966): Read Shane Wilson’s review. Kino Lorber releases a remastered version of this cult high school satire on Blu-ray for the first time. Buy Lord Love a Duck.

“Rob Zombie Trilogy”: This Blu-ray release of the serial-killing Firefly family saga features the weird (but annoying) House of 1,000 Corpses, the popular (but not weird) The Devil’s Rejects, and the few-bothered late sequel 3 from Hell. A bare-bones Blu that may be of interest to philes. Buy “Rob Zombie Trilogy”.

Sin City (2005): Read the Canonically Weird review! Like From Dusk Till Dawn (above), the reason for this re-release of another Rodriguez/Tarantino classic at this time is not clear, but it does show up in Amazon’s listings with no details given. Your choice of Blu-ray or DVD. Buy Sin City.

“Stanley Kubrick 3-Film 4K Collection”: Includes the Canonically Weird 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Shining (1980), and Full Metal Jacket (1987), all restored in 4K. Buy “Stanley Kubrick 3-Film 4K Collection”.

“The Vincent Price Collection”: Includes the horrors The Pit and the Pendulum, The Haunted Palace, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, Witchfinder General, and, most notably, the canonically weird The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971). This in-time-for-Halloween release is a reissue of a 2013 set previously reviewed on this site by Alfred Eaker; it loses the Price introductions from the original set, and adds an extra minute of footage to the Red Death disc. Buy “The Vincent Price Collection”.

CANONICALLY WEIRD (AND OTHER) REPERTORY SCREENINGS:

Independent theaters are cautiously starting to reopen across North America at diminished capacity, and we’re seeing a trickle of new screenings. You’ll have to use your own judgment as to whether it’s safe to go to movie theaters at this time.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE: This week’s weird Amazon Prime party screening is Guy Maddin‘s fragmentary The Forbidden Room (2015). Join us tomorrow at 10:15 PM (ET), won’t you? We’ll provide the link to join about 10 PM here, on Facebook, or on Twitter.

In reviews, next week El Rob Hubbard reports on the unexpectedly and sadly relevant “12 Monkeys” TV series; Giles Edwards explores The Wild Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (1968); and looks at ‘s newly-released biopic Tommaso (2019). We wouldn’t rule out (or necessarily expect) a surprise pop-up review in what turns out to be a crowded week. Onward and weirdward!

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

Capsules

CAPSULE: SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (2007)

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

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Hideaki Itô, Yūsuke Iseya, Kōichi Satō, Kaori Momoi, , Masanobu Andô,

PLOT: A nameless gunman rides into a town where two rival gangs of samurai scheme to find and seize a hidden cache of gold.

Still from Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

COMMENTS: A hawk grabs a snake in its talons and flies off into a painted sunset. A man wrapped in a Navajo blanket (Quentin Tarantino) rolls onto his back, shoots the bird out of the sky, catches the snake as it falls, and in one swift motion uses a knife to slit the body and remove a bloody egg from the serpent’s neck. While he’s absorbed in that operation, three Japanese gunslingers get the drop on him. Tarantino, using a fake Western accent, then describes a rivalry between the red Heike and the white Genji clans, as he slips into an even weirder take on a cowpoke with a southern drawl mimicking a Japanese accent. Not surprisingly, the nameless man turns the tables on the three interlopers and kills them all, without breaking the egg.

This opening suggests a level of stylized surrealism that Sukiyaki Western Django doesn’t quite maintain. Tarantino’s character is not the non sequitur narrator he initially appears to be, and the rest of the movie generally takes a more straightforward tone. Essentially, it’s a series of spaghetti Western archetypes, clichés, and homages—a Man with No Name, a hidden cache of treasure, a weapon stashed in a coffin—wrapped in a gimmick: the action all takes place in a mythical version of feudal Japan where desperadoes pack both six-shooters and katanas. In the strangest directorial decision, the Japanese cast delivers their cowboy dialogue (“you gonna come at me… or whistle ‘Dixie’?”) entirely in heavily accented English (learned phonetically, in most cases).  Because the actors’ English pronunciation ranges from passable to difficult to understand to nearly incomprehensible, this odd, distancing choice will be an insurmountable barrier for some.

If you can clear the dialogue bar, the rest of Sukiyaki‘s recipe will be familiar to Miike fans: fast-paced action, absurd comic violence, heavy doses of morphing style, and throwaway bits of surrealism. Holes are blown through torsos, through which crossbow bolts are then fired; bright flashback scenes are graded toward the extreme yellow and green ends of the spectrum; babies are found curled up in hybridized roses. We also learn that, in old West saloons, samurai were fond of interpretive dance performances scored to didgeridoos. All this nonsense leads to a heart-pounding, if hackneyed, finale that proves the old maxim that the more important a character is to the plot, the more bullets they can take without dying. After the gunsmoke clears from the village-sized battlefield, a silly closing epilogue will make Spaghetti Western fans groan.

Tarantino’s involvement in Sukiyaki is a testament to the mutual admiration between he and Miike, and it’s noteworthy that his role here comes five years before his own revisionist take on Spaghetti Westerns in 2012’s Django Unchained. As for Miike, in some ways Sukiyaki marks the beginning of the winding down of his weird movie period; his next major work seen in the West was the excellent but entirely realistic Thirteen Assassins (2010), and since 2015 has been spending more time on Japanese television series aimed at elementary school girls than on making weird cinema.

In 2020, MVD visual released Sukiyaki Western Django on Blu-ray for the first time (in the North American market). All of the extras—a 50-minute “making of” featurette, six minutes of deleted scenes, and a series of clips and promos—are also found on the 2008 DVD. The one thing that makes this release special is the inclusion of the extended cut that played at the Venice Film Festival and in Japanese theaters. The box cover claims this extended cut is 159:57 minutes long—a typo for 1:59:57, as the cut clocks in at almost exactly two hours. There are no significant differences between the two versions; Miike simply snipped away insignificant bits from many once-longer scenes, resulting in a shorter, faster-paced, and improved film. (A detalied list of the differences can be found at the always-excellent movie-censorship.com).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…utterly deranged homage to westerns all’italia… dialogue is delivered in phonetic English so weirdly cadenced that self-conciously cliched lines like ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ approach surreal poetry.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

Capsules

CAPSULE: COMA (2019)

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Recommended

Koma

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

DIRECTED BY: Nikita Argunov

FEATURING: Rinal Mukhametov, Lyubov Aksyonova,

PLOT: Viktor awakens in his apartment to find the walls decaying in reverse and a strange cavalcade of architectural wonders dotting the skyline at improbable angles; then, he finds himself on the run from giant monsters.

COMMENTS: The title gives away the gimmick, and I knew it did—but I didn’t care. Even before we see our protagonist try and fail to obtain his bearings when he awakens in his apartment, we’re smacked with a beautiful show of some top-notch, wonderfully creative CGI buildings making up a future city whose center is graced with what looks like a modern reimagining of the Monument to the Third International. St. Basil‘s architectural motifs round out the metropolis. What is Coma? It’s a Dark City/Inception knock-off, sure, but a vodka-drenched one. And it’s all the more entertaining for it.

Viktor (Rinal Mukhametov), we eventually learn, was in a car crash while fleeing out-of-focus assailants. In Coma-land, Viktor immediately has to flee all-too-menacingly in-focus monsters: tall, thin-limbed beasts made of an ever-flowing inky substance catch sight of him as he exits his apartment. Just in the nick of time, a grizzled gang of survivors spots him and hoofs him out of trouble. There’s Phantom, the cynical soldier; there’s Fly, the female healer. Back at the survivor’s camp—reached via a multiplanar, but very stationary, bus wreck—there’s Yal, the older leader guy and… many more. Why did Yal send out his crack squad to get this ungainly beardo? We learn through exposition, montage, and a Moment of Trial.

The dismissiveness you may have detected here is meant as no more than gentle ribbing. Coma does a number of things incredibly well, not the least of which was keep my rapt attention throughout. Disregarding the (fairly) serviceable story and the (not too terribly) cardboard characters, we are left with a ceaselessly interesting vista of interconnected, odd-angled planes: different memories, we are told, of different inhabitants of Coma-land. They’re connected by wisps of ground; or not, as Viktor learns when he has to run straight down a pier to jump up into a piazza looming above. Firefights in this realm give “death from above” new meaning. And when our hero—an architect—learns how to use his special gift, things get even cooler.

The explanation provided for all this fantasy undermines the narrative while building its intellectual merits. I shan’t reveal the reveal, but suffice it to say, (movie) science has an explanation for all the goings-on, and it seems we may be bearing witness to one man’s pursuit of immortality. This being a Russian film, I cannot help veering into some sociopolitical observation. Viktor, in his waking life, seems to have been an idiot savant, an architect ahead of his time who was led to believe he could go on to create great, new things. As Yal makes very clear: in modern day Russia, change is only possible in your dreams.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Surreal, engaging, and philosophical, Coma’s creativity designs action around any possibility while debating life’s reality.”–Matt Paprocki, Do-Blu.com (Blu-ray)

Miscellanea

AMAZON PRIME WATCH PARTY POLL FOR SEP. 26 SCREENING

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Here’s the poll to vote in our latest Amazon Prime watch party, scheduled for Saturday, Sep. 26, at 10:15 PM ET. If you plan on virtually attending, please vote for the movie we’ll be watching below. We’ll screen the movie that gets the most votes.  Management will break any ties. Note that unlike our other polls, you can only vote once. Poll closes at midnight EST on Wednesday, Sep. 23. You may vote for multiple movies, but not for every movie (because that would be pointless). Now, vote!


Miscellanea

AMAZON PRIME WEIRD SEPTEMBER WATCH PARTY NOMINEES AND RSVPS: TAKE 2

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We didn’t get the required five RSVPs for our Saturday, September 9 party, so we canceled it. However we have received an RSVP for next week, so we’re starting a new announcement poll.

As stated, we have one RSVP so we’re looking for four more. If you RSVP’ed for the canceled party, you’ll need to do so again (and re-nominated a movies for screening). We will carry over two nominations from the previous post: Capone (2020) and The Forbidden Room (2015).

If we get four more RSVPs (and, optionally, screening nominations), our next party will be scheduled for September 26 at 10:15 PM. After we get the minimum number of nominees and likely attendees, we’ll put up a poll.  Management will break any ties.

Amazon Prime’s catalog of movies is larger (and less exclusive) than Netflix’s. Ed Dykhuizen’s availability spreadsheet is a good resource to check for Canonically Weird movies (look for ones marked “free w/ Prime” in the “Amazon” column). Or, do your own research and come up with a title from Amazon. Eligible movies will have a “watch party” button on their Amazon page. You must be a Prime subscriber; you don’t have to download an extension or additional software.

We will not provide tech support; you’re on your own. Help each other.

When the party is set to begin we’ll announce it in three places:

  • On this site (if you’ve signed up for regular email alerts via the sidebar you’ll also get a notice that way)
  • On our Facebook page
  • On Twitter

Now, RSVP and make your nominations in the comments below.

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!