Hummingbirds sip on beer, and poodles transform into leaf blowers in the sunny suburbs.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 8/14/2020
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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…
IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):
Spree (2020): An Uber driver livestreams his murder spree. A black comedy with a premise that’s been done before, and sounds offbeat at the most—but we did see this single recommendation from Johnny Oleksinski at the “New York Post,” who advises “Check it out if you can, if weirdness is your thing.” Spree official FaceBook page.
NEW ON HOME VIDEO:
Diva (1981): Stylish French cult thriller about an opera-obsessed mailman and some swapped audio tapes. KL Studio Classics puts it out on Blu-ray with a ton of interviews and featurettes and a commentary track from film critic Simon Abrams. Buy Diva
Gemini (1999): A doctor plans to marry an amnesiac woman during a plague, until his lost twin interferes. Mondo Macabro releases this Shinya Tsukamoto adaptation of an Edogawa Rampo short story on Blu-ray for the first time; a fine companion to Arrow’s “Buy Solid Metal Nightmares
The Lady Kills (1971)/Pervertissima (1972): In the first flick in this Jean-Louis van Belle double feature, a lady kills; Mondo Macabro describes the curious and rare Pervertissima as “a bizarre – and possible unique – combination of mondo movie and mad scientist flick.” Two films, one Blu-ray. Buy The Lady Kills (1971)/Pervertissima (1972)
CANONICALLY WEIRD (AND OTHER) REPERTORY SCREENINGS:
Independent theaters are cautiously starting to reopen across North America at diminished capacity, although the big chains remain shuttered. That said, we have one special online-only event and several Canadian venues to report on. We expect this section to continue to grow slowly throughout the summer, although we wouldn’t predict things to return to anywhere near normal until the fall, at the earliest. You’ll have to use your own judgment as to whether it’s safe to go to movie theaters at this time.
- Kitchener, ON
- The Apollo – Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010), 8/15-16, 20
- New York City, NY
- The Metrograph – Mind Game (2004) (online, members only), 8/14
- Vancouver, BC
- The Rio
- Mandy (2018), 8/15
- Fight Club (1999), 8/19
- The Rio
WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE: This week’s weird Amazon Prime screening will be—by a whisker—She’s Allergic to Cats (2016). Please join us tomorrow (Saturday 15) at 10:15 PM ET for the screening. As usual, we’ll post the link to join around 10 PM here, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
As for reviews next week: Giles Edwards will definitely enlighten those of you who missed our second Amazon Prime party about the no-budget weirdness of My Neighbor Wants Me Dead (2019), which is about a man whose neighbor wants him dead. We’ll also be creeping out some advance reviews of films from Fantasia’s 2020 online festival—stay tuned for titles. 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.
CAPSULE: LITTLE DEATHS (2011)
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DIRECTED BY: Sean Hogan, Andrew Parkinson, Simon Rumley
FEATURING: Jodie Jameson, Luke de Lacey, Siubhan Harrison, Holly Lucas, Tom Sawyer, Kate Braithwaite
PLOT: Three anthologized shorts: a wealthy couple toys with a homeless girl, an ex-junkie and ex-prostitute joins a pharmaceutical trial, and a young couple’s sadomasochistic relationship turns sour.
COMMENTS: For weird purposes, we can dispose of two of the three sexually-charged horrors that make up Little Deaths quickly. The opener, “House & Home,” is a well-produced but obvious R-rated “Twilight Zone” thing where a couple who exploit homeless women find the tables turned. Even though you might not guess the exact details, the twist is something less than a surprise when it arrives. The closer, “Bitch,” is a bit more involving because of its depiction of unusual fetishes (canine roleplay among them) in the context of a very dysfunctional S&M relationship, and its exceptionally cruel ending. It’s essentially sleazy sex life portraiture, though with a climax that’s equal parts troubling and ridiculous.
That leaves the middle segment, “Mutant Tool,” which is indeed about as weird as its title suggests. The central character is Jen, a recovering junkie and ex-prostitute who’s finding it hard to go straight. Her drug-dealing boyfriend enrolls her in an experimental pharmaceutical treatment with a major side effect: she hallucinates about a strange man (or monster) hanging in a cage. The plot gradually brings an old Nazi experiments and a develops a cyclical pharmaceutical ecosystem somewhat reminiscent of the one in Upstream Color (2013) (if less rigorously developed). The film is visually murky, with only brief glimpses of the dingy mutant behind a face shield and a shower curtain, though the restrained imagery can be effective—and there is one WTF closeup that is both creepy and sort of funny. The exposition can be a bit clumsy: Jen keeps taking calls from her escort agency, even though she claims to be no longer working for them, just so we can sense the pressure she’s under. And there’s a crusty old caretaker character who keeps coming up with excuses to volunteer mutant backstory to a trainee. Plus, it seems like an awfully bad idea for Frank to refer Jen to Dr. Reese, considering the ghoulish nature of his prior dealings with the physician. Still, if you can overlook those narrative shortcuts, “Mutant Tool” has a strong and weird conceit, and also has the only likeable characters in the triptych—Jen and Frank are lowlifes, sure, but they’re at least trying to escape from the horror rather than hurtling into it like the others.
Although perversity abounds throughout, and “Mutant Tool” perks some interest for seekers of the eerie, none of Little Deaths offerings are essential shock-horror. But at thirty minutes each, none of them outstay their welcome, either.
Little Deaths has been accused of misogyny, and although there’s some basis for the charge (e.g. the uncomfortable verbal lingering over a rape scene), it’s overblown in general. In Little Deaths, people are simply cruel to one another, and males are victims as much as females. The one exception might be that final episode, Rumley’s provocatively-titled “Bitch,” which invites (though doesn’t demand) the misogyny-minded to identify with its emasculated antihero. To their credit, the directors do anticipate these charges and address them in a series of interviews included on the DVD—although Parkinson has nothing to answer for, and Rumley glibly dismisses the objection with a shrug.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review by “Donatien,” who qualified his recommendation: “i don’t think all three short films can be classified as weird, only the 3rd one.” Maybe he misremembered the order of the tales? Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
AMAZON PRIME WATCH PARTY POLL FOR AUG 15, 2020 SCREENING
Here’s the poll to vote in our latest Amazon Prime watch party, scheduled for Saturday, Aug 15, 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. Your host, Gregory J. Smalley, will personally break any ties. Note that unlike our other polls, you can only vote once. Poll closes at midnight EST on Thursday, Aug 13. You may vote for multiple movies, but not for every movie (because that would be pointless).
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CAPONE (2020)
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DIRECTED BY: Josh Trank
FEATURING: Tom Hardy, Linda Cardellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Matt Dillon
PLOT: Released to his Florida home on humanitarian grounds, Al Capone spends the last year of his life rapidly deteriorating in body and mind, while trying to remember where he hid ten million dollars.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA LIST: Capone alternates between being uncomfortably realistic and markedly dreamy, with the former often seamlessly segueing into the latter. By the time we see Al Capone, clad in diaper and dressing gown, chomping on a carrot and madly firing a gold-plate Thompson submachine gun at his staff, it’s hard to guess what’s actually happening.
COMMENTS: Capone plays like an anti-biopic: there’s no glamorization, and virtually no sympathy elicited for its protagonist. As a star vehicle for Tom Hardy, it also veers off the beaten path. Hardy’s performance is a strange hybrid of tin-pan-alley grandiosity and bloodshot malevolence. Capone‘s reception by the common viewer has been unsurprisingly frigid—it holds a damning 4.7 rating on IMDb. But for those who want a haunting, sickly, and uncomfortable dissection of the mental deterioration of history’s most notorious gangster, Capone is as priceless as the treasure that eludes the titular character.
Al Capone’s sentence for tax evasion is cut short to allow him to spend his final days in his sprawling mansion surrounded by a sprawling swamp. His homestead’s grounds are infested with crocodiles of the literal variety; its hallways are infested with metaphorical ones. Al Capone sounds like a dying horse, croaking out random threats and random pleas. He is prone to incontinence—so much so that his doctor (Kyle MacLachlan, both slippery and terrified) supplies Capone’s long-suffering wife (Linda Cardellini, emanating frustration) with diapers for her husband. When not staring at his lake, while puffing endless cigars and listening to his radio, Capone endures encounters with friends both past and present. On a fishing trip with an old criminal associate, he casually lets slip that he has hidden ten million bucks, but he can’t remember where.
As in Bronson, Tom Hardy makes this movie, delivering an unnerving performance of a former kingpin suffering from syphilitic dementia and the effects of two strokes. The film begins with a wild-eyed Capone in night attire, wandering a dimly lit hallway while holding a fire poker, pursuing someone. He finds his target—a little girl—and makes a play at attacking her. She screams, then laughs, then runs, and soon Capone is chasing a bevy of little ones through his mansion, out to his rain-drenched yard, and ending up the playful victim of a pile-on. This is, alas, the high point for the frail gangster. Waking dreams and hallucinations occur with increasing frequency as his mind and body shut down.
Capone’s mental fragility contrasts with the precise formality of the rest of the movie. Each scene is impeccably orchestrated around Hardy’s characterization, the surrounding cast providing the struts on which Capone’s quiet madness is displayed. The dream sequences often manage to be unpredictable—the final blow-out only showing its hand at the scene’s watery collapse—while at other times there’s obvious pathos. The recurring symbol of gold—in the form of a balloon held by a boy, the metal trim of a shotgun Capone uses to shoot a crocodile that stole his fish, or the gaudy submachine gun used on his rampage—acts as a clue to the viewer, but also as a metaphor for what Capone has lost. His youth and power are gone forever; what’s left is a tragic cartoon ever veering between rage and collapse.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: