FEATURING: Christine Lahti, Sara Walker, Andrea Burchill

PLOT: Two orphaned girls are joined by their transient aunt who becomes their

unconventional guardian in this dreamy, pensive study of nonconformity and the breaking of social mores in a restrictive 1950′s environment.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Housekeeping has an original plot about unusual characters doing unusual things, it is not truly weird.   If anything, the entire point of the movie is to illustrate that what many consider odd is perfectly normal, depending on the angle of interpretation.

COMMENTS:  Housekeeping is a surreal atmosphere piece that questions right and wrong, debates the meaning of normality and examines the consequences of non-conformity.  The story follows the erratic behavior of two teenage girls and their seemingly irresponsible caretaker.

In the 1950′s Pacific Northwest, a series of bizarre events unfold leading to the abandonment of two adolescent girls.  In a dramatic early scene, the girls’ misfit mother amiably asks some young boys for help in getting her car out of a muddy rut.  When they do, she casually commits suicide in front of them by driving over a cliff.  Her daughters, long abandoned by their father, become the wards of their grandmother and aunt, who see them into their early teens.  When the deceased mother’s sister shows up, the grandmother and great aunt disappear into the night, leaving them in the care of the newly arrived “Aunt Sylvie” (Lahtie).

Sylvie, as it turns out, is an avowed nonconformist with an unconventional lifestyle and unique view of the world.  Her permissive parenting evolves into the enabling of an alternative existence for her nieces.  This new freedom includes skipping school, stealing boats, riding the rails, and other risky, unstructured behavior—acts which are particularly outré when performed by young women in the conservative 1950s.

The film is an odyssey of self discovery as Ruth, from whose point of view the story is presented, begins to question social convention and accepted folkways.  As Ruth comfortably gravitates toward Sylvie’s atypical values, her sister Lucille is upset by the lack of structure and begins to embrace social norms.

This evolution of the girls’ characters and personalities is presented through a series of ethereal misadventures and explorations.  This transition is further influenced by the recounting of early childhood impressions, and their observations of the unique geography of their home which is located on a surreal lake surrounded by wooded mountains.  Different story segments are connected by symbolism of ice and snow, the depth of the huge lake they live on, and of railroads and trains, particularly a spectacular train derailment disaster that occurred many years in the past.  The lake itself, a massive body of deep cold water holding the wreckage and bodies from the doomed train, embodies concepts of obstacles, boundaries, mystery and the transcendence of space and time.

Ultimately and inevitably, outside authoritarian interference descends upon the trio; the tale alludes to fear of witches by the unsophisticated locals.  Nonconformity is equated with a dread of the unknown.  At this point, the slowly building tension between the girls’ independence and the mainstream establishment comes to a rolling boil.  The three must choose between two extremes, either one of which will create dramatic and permanent consequences.

Some credit Housekeeping with exploring themes concerning transience, self reliance, dependency, female marginalization, and freedom.  This may be true, but the literary eye rollers —that crowd who seek to distinguish themselves intellectually via the effete discovery of a plethora of symbolism, real or imaginary, in any work—are likely to perceive Housekeeping as being an exploration of feminist issues.  This would not be the best interpretation of the story.   Housekeeping is not a women’s movie.  It is a beautifully photographed, thought-provoking atmospheric fantasy about unconventionality and its consequences.  The events are experienced from the point of view of a youngster who happens to be a girl.  The choice of gender serves more to facilitate this study of social taboos than to make any sort of statement.  Those who wish to interpret Housekeeping as being a feminist vehicle will miss the nebula for the stars.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the strangest and best films of the year… not a realistic movie, not one of those disease-of-the-week docudramas with a tidy solution. It is funnier, more offbeat, and too enchanting to ever qualify on those terms.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Jörg Buttgereit

FEATURING: Daktari Lorenz, Beatrice M.

PLOT:  A necrophiliac who works for a corpse disposal service loses his job, his perverted

girlfriend, and finally his mind.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although Nekromantik is indisputably weird—not simply in its bizarre concept, but in its numerous nightmare digressions from linearity—it can’t be recommended as a viewing experience.  It’s a badly made, tedious parade of revolting and nihilistic imagery with no ambition other than to shock the viewer.  When the film does utilize weirdness, it does so shallowly and irreverently, solely in service of its intent to disturb.

COMMENTS:  Like sex, inherently shocking imagery in film can be used well, to explore the human experience, or (more commonly) it can be used badly and exploitatively.  The ironic celebration of evil in A Clockwork Orange disturbs the viewer deeply, but the purpose of the film isn’t to shock us; it’s to provoke us into thinking more deeply about the problem of evil by forcefully confronting us with the paradox of free will.

Too many artists, however, have noticed that offending huge numbers of people is a far easier way to draw attention to themselves than working hard at their craft and creating something thoughtful and meaningful.  Sometimes, artists get confused and adopt a simple logical fallacy: much great art, like Nabokov’s “Lolita” or Buñuel‘s Un Chien Andalou, has shocked and offended large numbers of people; therefore, the purpose of great art must be to shock people.  (This artistic disorder is commonly known as ”John Waters Syndrome”).  Most shocking art, however, is made with a more cynical hand, made with the artistic integrity of a freakshow proprietor.  This is the category into which Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik falls.

Un Chien Andalou opens with a shot of a woman’s eyeball being slit by a straight razor, juxtaposed with a shot of a cloud passing in front of the moon.  The image is shocking but artistic, suggestive and numinous.  Nekromantik opens with a shot of panties dropping and urine streaming onto the grass; the image is banal, and, besides breaking an excretory taboo, boring.  With this shot Buttgereit announces that Nekromantik means to treat us to a glimpse of the forbidden, but foreshadows that the visions will be thoughtless and done for novelty’s sake, with no aesthetic intention.  If we watch on, we will get to see fresh corpses sliced in half in an auto accident; our hero taking a leak in urinal; organs in formaldehyde; a woman bathing in bloody water; the (real) execution and skinning of a bunny rabbit; a badly filmed non-sequitur sequence involving an accidental shooting; the “famous” lovemaking scene with a corpse; eyeball sucking; the (fake) murder of a kitty cat; a sleazy stalking, rape and breast-slitting scene from a film-within-the-film; the moon changing into a skull; a hallucination sequence where our hero and a dream girl toss a severed head back in forth on a hill; a sloppily conceived and executed prostitute murder; a man having his head sliced in half from a single shovel blow; and the grand finale, in which the hero ejaculates from a fake penis as he disembowels himself with a knife.  It’s a laundry list of freakishness many people can’t resist peeking at, but few will be happy with what they see if they do, any more than the people who couldn’t resist the temptation to sneak a peek at Joey the dog-faced boy in a seedy carnival tent felt better for having slated their curiosity.

On a technical level, Nekromantik is bottom of the barrel grindhouse cinema.  There’s only a shred of a plot, no attempt at characterization, poor acting, and rudimentary Super-8 cinematography.  Without the shock scenes, it would be a D-minus student film project; add scenes of a carnal frolic with a dead body, and it becomes a legendary, sought after cult classic.

Because there are no real human characters in it, Nekromantik, while shocking and offensive, lacks the power to truly disturb.  Necrophilia is simply depicted; it’s not explored.  We have no more clue than the director does why someone would want to make love to a corpse.  When characters with no character engage in repulsive activities with no explanation or motivation, there’s nothing to be disturbed by; it’s just a game of suppressing our moral gag reflex.

Nekromantik is not entirely worthless, although the few treats to be found here can’t compensate for the misanthropic feeling you get from watching peoples’ worst instincts pandered to for over an hour.  The music is actually quite well matched to the imagery; it’s abrasively maddening during the animal skinning sequence, then ironically romantic during the threesome with the corpse.  There is also some humor to be found, such as the absurdity of our hero’s girlfriend leaving him because he’s a loser who can’t keep his corpse disposal job (you mean, she thinks she can find a necrophiliac who’s got his shit together to shack up with?), and the scene where the couple carefully places a prophylactic on the pipe they’ve added to a corpse to substitute for his presumably rotted member.  It’s often difficult to tell whether these bits of humor are intentional or unintentional.  Given the depressed, incompetent and nihilistic tone of the film, it’s a stretch to conclude that the final sequence, with its ridiculous, improbably spurting phallus, was intended as anything more than a desperate attempt to top the shocks that had come before.  But the effect is so badly done, and the “horror” so grossly oversold, that it’s hard to imagine anyone not laughing out loud at it; it’s almost like another, more clever filmmaker parodying Buttgereit’s excessive style.

There have been some attempts to defend Nekromantik as art, and to insist that it has a meaningful theme beyond the cynical desire to shock, but I remain unconvinced.  Despite a few badly botched attempts at film school artiness, Nekromantik has far more in common with Cannibal Holocaust than it does with Salo.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Buttgereit is a director who engages creatively with that strand of Romantic irrationalism that has lain at the heart of German culture since long before the nation’s first unification in the 1870s… Existing somewhere between the nightmare world of the ghost train, the crazy logic of dreams and the representational strategies of avant-garde or experimental cinema, Buttgereit’s films joyfully participate in this irrationality— especially through the frequent inclusion of lengthy or repeated sequences of highly perplexing viscerality.”–Linnie Blake, Kinoeye: New Perspectives on European Film, Vol. 3, Iss. 6 (2003)

DIRECTED BY:  Sam Raimi

FEATURING: Bruce Campbell

PLOT:  Young Ash takes his girlfriend to a deserted cabin in the woods for a weekend of romance; unfortunately, the hideout was the former abode of a deceased archaeologist who had discovered a “Book of the Dead” the ancients believed could call forth an evil spirit and allow it to possess the bodies of the living and the dead.  Ash plays an old tape by the professor in which he reads the magical words of summoning, and the spirit does indeed come and possess Ash’s girlfriend (whom he is forced to dispatch gruesomely).  That’s only the beginning of Ash’s troubles, however, as, trapped in the cabin, now must fight off a horde of demonic presences, at first all alone and later with the help of the professor’s daughter and her companions.


BACKGROUND:

• Evil Dead II is much more a remake of, rather than a sequel to, Raimi’s low-budget drive-in hit The Evil Dead (1981) (although that point is technically debated among fans).  Where The Evil Dead was a straightforward horror movie, Evil Dead II is a comedy in a horror setting.  Actor Bruce Campbell reprises his role as Ash from the first film; it was this performance that made him into a cult actor.
• This was Raimi’s third feature film, after The Evil Dead and the weird, Coen brothers scripted comedy Crimewave! (1985).  He would go on to mainstream success when he was tapped to direct the Spider-Man series.
• Powerful horror novelist Stephen King, a fan of the first Evil Dead, introduced Raimi to Dino de Laurentiis and convinced the producer to fund Evil Dead II after Raimi declined an offer to adapt King’s story Thinner.
• Followed by a sequel, Army of Darkness (1992).  Rumors of a fourth film in the series have circulated since the mid nineties; currently, an Evil Dead IV is listed as “in development” on the Internet Movie Database, although this is far from an assurance that a fourth film will be made.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Ash fighting his own disembodied hand: a scene that starts out creepy, but becomes a slapstick routine, ending up in a groan-inducing pun.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Oddly, Evil Dead II‘s credentials as a weird film are called into

Original trailer for Evil Dead II

question by its almost unqualified embrace by critics and gorehounds alike: can anything that is so widely beloved, anything that fails to alienate either the high or the lowbrow, really be authentically weird?  In fact, Evil Dead II is only slightly weird, but the events of the cabin feverish middle portion of the film—where the battered Ash seems to be hallucinating the horrific events—are just bizarre enough to make Evil Dead II eligible for inclusion on list of the weirdest films of all time.  Add to those scenes the over-the-top gore, slapstick and constant surprises of the film’s last half, and you get a lovable mish-mash of a movie with a one-of-a-kind comic tone that is too exhilarating to be left off a list of the weirdest movies of all time.

COMMENTS:  The quality and sheer fun of Evil Dead II don’t need a defense.  It’s hard to find a critic who has a bad thing to say about the film.  Humorless horror-hater Gene Siskel gave it a mildly negative review on the basis that the film was funny, but wore out its welcome.  Other than that, the film’s harshest snipes came from a very few fans of the original Evil Dead who were upset that the film focused on comedy rather than horror.  Other than a handful of sad puritans who can’t share the ridiculous yuks when a woman accidentally eate a flying eyeball because her mouth is agape in horror, almost everyone responds to the comic excesses of Evil Dead II positively, and enough people responded to the film’s unhinged craziness with awed reverence to make it number 19 on Entertainment Weekly‘s “Top 50 Cult Films of All Time.”  So, rather than adding my own praise to the stack of reviews lauding Evil Dead II, I’m going to spend my few inches of text describing the scenes that justify classifying Evil Dead II as a weird film.  (For that reason, this comment section may contain more spoilers than usual; anyone who has not yet seen this classic and wants to be totally surprised should continue reading with caution).

One of the odd things about Evil Dead II is that it hangs together despite having so many drastic shifts in tone, veering back and forth between horror and comedy.  The beginning of the film is standard, if exciting, horror fare that gives little hint of the madness to come; in fact, the setup is expertly rushed by director Raimi so that he can immediately establish the milieu and get straight to the mayhem.  By the time that the film starts to get weird around the fifteen minute mark, Ash has already decapitated his girlfriend with a shovel, briefly become a zombie, and been thrown through the windshield of his sedan after losing a high speed chase with an Unseen Presence.  At that point, as we reach the movie’s richly bizarre middle section, Evil Dead II starts throwing us its weird curve balls:

• Corpses dance in the moonlight: As Ash sits alone in the eerie cabin, with the unseen evil force lurking outside, the piano begins, on its own, to tinkle the love song he had earlier played for Linda.  Nervously, he looks out the window to see a hand rise from the shallow grave he had dug for his ex.  Soon enough, a bony-but-curvy, and very headless, corpse pops up from the ground and begins pirouetting in the moonlight.  With a girlish chuckle, a headless corpse rolls through the clearing and leaps atop the body’s neck.  The macabre dance continues as, rather than merely tipping her hat, the capering cadaver tips her entire head, rolling her cranium gracefully down one arm and reattaching it in one fluid motion.  The dance itself is bizarrely balletic and ghoulish at the same time, and the dreamlike effect is enhanced by that Ray Harryhausen style of stop-motion animation that looks simultaneously ultra-real and disconcertingly artificial.  Ash soon discovers that the entire episode was a nightmare, but one that is far from over as the demented spirit seems intent on driving him insane before killing him.
• Ash turns his hand against himself:  Emotionally devastated after having chopped off his lover’s head and chainsawed her zombified corpse into tiny pieces, either Ash’s own guilty conscience or the maleficent supernatural force has driven him mad. His own image jumps at him from out of the mirror, but is quickly revealed as a mirage.  But Ash is still divided inside; his hand, possessed by an evil spirit, now claws at his face.  The sequence that follows is the film’s masterpiece, as Campbell demonstrates his gift for physical comedy by smashing plates and bottles over his own head and giving himself stiff uppercuts to the jaw, all while wearing a perpetually goofy look on his distressed face.  Heedless of it lack of vocal chords, the possessed hand squeaks and squeals at him throughout the melee. In the end, Ash is forced to self-amputate, but that hardly solves his problem: the disembodied hand continues to scurry about and bedevil him like Thing from “The Addams Family.”  Thirty minutes in, the movie has completely shifted from horror to the rawest species of comedy, and somehow the audience accepts this radical change without complaint.
• The stag’s head taunts him:  Now sans hand and doubtlessly giddy from a combination of demonic possession and lack of blood, Ash glances around the deserted cabin and suddenly sees the trophy deer mounted on the wall turn and chortle at him cruelly.  Other inanimate objects in the room soon join in the mockery: a desk lamp that guffaws like Popeye the sailor, and cackling bookshelves and lamps.  Ash himself eventually sees the humor in his absurd situation and joins in the raucous laughter, until he’s awakened from his madness by real-life visitors to the cabin, the foursome that are soon to be zombie chow.

All of the above occurrences are wonderfully weird, focusing on Ash losing his mind trapped alone in the cabin.  I would have been happy to stay locked in that crazy cottage with Ash for the rest of the movie, watching him go not-so-slowly mad.  The arrival of other humans to interact with snaps him out of his delirium, and snaps the movie into zombie-holocaust survival mode.  Ash’s companions now become fodder for demonic possession, and give him the opportunity to fulfill his destiny as a horror movie hero.

Just because the movie’s weirdness starts to wane when Ash is returned to reality (well, a reality in which the woods are infected with demonic entities and the basement houses a zombie, anyway) doesn’t mean that it subsides into a conventional horror snore, though.  Raimi still has oddities at his disposal, and he continues to throw his various inventions at the audience hard, knowing we’re not quite sure when the next pitch is coming or exactly what kind of spin he’ll put on the ball this time.  There’s the flying eyeball scene; more of the crazy, off-kilter experimental camerawork that’s a calling card of the first two films in the series; additional sound effects from the mounted stag’s head (who’s almost a separate character at this point); impossibly obscene geysers of human and zombie blood that come in all the colors of the rainbow, and unexpected apparitions; a sentimental demon with a serpent for a neck stalk; and Ash making the best of a bad situation by strapping on a chainsaw where his disobedient right hand used to be.  And there’s always Campbell’s campy charm to keep us involved.  It’s strange and funny how Ash’s first response to whatever horrors he’s subjected to is always an inappropriate action-movie one-liner (“let’s head down into that cellar and carve ourselves a witch!,” “groovy!,” “swallow this!”).

With it’s relentless energy and willingness to throw the kitchen sink at the viewer, Evil Dead II was destined to be a cult hit.  Due to Raimi’s skill and Campbell’s charisma, it achieved much wider fame and acclaim.  With the recent Drag Me to Hell, Raimi showed that he could deliver largely the same degree of rollercoaster thrills in a more conventionally structured tale, without resorting to absurd gore effects or going overly weird.  Evil Dead II can be claimed by fans of horror, gore, comedy and general extremity and outlandsishness; thanks to that maddening middle portion, with Ash stewing in his own mind in the foresaken cabin, we of the weird can stake our own special claim to this classic, as well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“More an absurdist comedy than a horror film…”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“…a strange, almost hallucinogenic cartoon nightmare of flying eyeballs, bleeding walls, and possessed limbs.”–Matt Ford, BBC (DVD)

“This is literally one of those films that have to be seen to be believed—it’s outrageous, over-the-top, and beyond what you could possibly imagine… The tone is enhanced by the occasionally surreal special effects, including some miniatures and blue screen shots that are transparently obvious. Instead of undermining the film’s effectiveness, they help set it in its own weird little world where all this outrageous stuff seems possible.”–Steve Biodrowski, Cinefantastique Online (DVD)

IMDB LINK:  Evil Dead II (1987)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Deadites Online – The Fan’s Official Source for Evil Dead: A fan site for all three films in the Evil Dead trilogy containing updates on what the cast and crew is doing today, an extensive catalog of pop culture references to the movie, exclusive interviews, and a forum.

At the Movies:  Siskel & Ebert’s review from the popular television show.  Verdict: one thumb up, one down.

Shooting Down Pictures: Video Essay for The Evil Dead II: 4 minute video review of Evil Dead II with plentiful clips, notes via subtitles, and a transcript.  Even more highly recommended is the same author’s Evil Dead 2 page that collects quotes and links about the film from all over the web.

Evil Dead the Musical – homepage of the Toronto-based musical theater adaptation of Evil Dead II

DVD INFO:  The Anchor Bay release (buy) contains humorous commentary by director Raimi, star Campbell, co-writer Scott Spiegel and makeup guy Greg Nicotero; the 30 minute featurette “The Gore the Merrier,” focusing on the film’s special effects; the original trailer; a stills gallery; and bios of Raimi and Campbell.

The Blu-Ray release (buy) retains the same features as the DVD, adding a trivia subtitle track.

A collectible “Book of the Dead Limited Version” of the film, which comes in a groovy box designed to look like the Necronomicon complete with pages of artwork, also features a newer transfer of the film personally approved by Raimi and is still available (buy). Even bigger Raimi fans with lots of disposable income may want to snag the even rarer two-disc The Evil Dead/Evil Dead II “Book of the Dead Collection,” where both movies come in forbidden tome packaging (buy).

Finally, fans who are more interested in starting a basic zombie Blu-ray collection than in the Evil Dead series per se can buy the three movie “Zombie Bundle,” which contains George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead along with Evil Dead II (buy).

DIRECTED BY: Jackie Kong

FEATURING:  Rick Burks, Carl Crew

PLOT:  At the direction of their uncle Anwar, a talking brain in a jar, two restaurateur brothers assemble a vessel composed of body parts harvested from immoral women to receive the spirit of the ancient Egyptian goddess Sheetar.  They are opposed by a pair of mismatched cops and the owner of a rival vegetarian restaurant intent on stealing their secret recipe.  After many bloody murders, they must complete only the last ritual, a “Lumerian feast” where Sheetar will take the life of a virgin, along with the attendees at the banquet. 

BACKGROUND:

• Blood Diner was originally intended to be a sequel to Herschell Gordon Lewis’ transcendently bad Blood Feast (1963), but when the collaborators could not agree on a scenario the project was changed to a black comedy tribute in the spirit of Lewis’ movie. 
• Blood Diner was originally banned in some Canadian provinces and in Iceland, and was heavily cut for release in other countries.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  As drug-zombies rave and cultists in Egyptian dress attempt to channel the goddess into a stitched-together corpse, a punk band (composed of a singer in a Roman helmet, two backup singers in blue wigs, four sidemen dressed as Hitler and a pantomime horse roaming the stage) plays in the background. 

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Most movies featuring talking brains in a jar (as

Original trailer for Blood Diner

more than side characters) are weird, and Blood Diner is no exception.

COMMENTS: There was little in female exploitation director Jackie Kong’s brief oeuvre to suggest she had the capacity to produce a movie as unremittingly odd as Blood Diner.  Her previous work consisted of only three movies, including the pedestrian 1983 horror flick The Being (distinguished mainly by the unusual casting of Martin Landau, Ruth Buzzi and Kinky Friedman) and the forgotten sex comedy The Underachievers (1987).  The only small hint of what was to come was from her painfully unfunny 1984 spoof Night Patrol (with Linda Blair and “The Unknown Comic”), which prefigured Blood Diner‘s leaden sense of humor.  Night Patrol contained such flat gags as a perpetually flatulent Billy Barty as a chief of police, and a “backup squad” that literally strolls backwards into a crime scene. 

Blood Diner substitutes more mean-spirited, but equally lame and sophomoric, laughs.  When a police detective is paired with an attractive lady cop, he wiggles his tongue obscenely at her, so extravagantly that he sprains it.  When the antihero brothers Michael and George Tutman (dressed in outrageously anachronistic 1970s disco-wear and pompadours) are denied entry to a nightclub by a bouncer, George tosses him into the street, where his head is immediately crushed under the wheel of a lowrider with hydraulic wheels as it bounces by.  Later, while listening to a mambo on the radio, George will strike a fat pedestrian with his van.  When he notices the man is still walking, he’ll back up and run over him again, but the man still limps away.  It takes several more failed hit-and-runs before George finally gives up.  (The scene itself is not that funny, but there is a hilarious delayed punchline).

This style of humor may work for teenagers and a few others who are deep into the vibe of (funnier) gore-comedy hybrids like Dead-Alive [AKA Braindead].  If Blood Diner stopped there, it would be a forgettable failure, but drollery through dismemberment isn’t what earns this movie its seat at the weird banquet.  The lame humor simply provides a base on which the movie overlays its true weirdness. 

Blood Diner‘s clumsy comedy sets an odd tone of failed deliberate camp.  Authentic camp occurs when we watch bad actors botch sincere lines.  Such scenes can be unintentionally hilarious.  Deliberate camp occurs when a decent actor delivers insincere lines meant to poke fun at sincere beliefs; the laughs are delivered with a wink that lets the audience know that the performer is in on the joke.  We’re supposed to be laughing with the players, not at them.  But when we have bad actors misfiring on insincere lines, we get a situation where they are telling us they’re in on the joke—but it’s a different joke than the one we’re getting.  It’s an uneasy feeling, being constantly uncertain whether you should be laughing with or at the folks who are bringing you Blood Diner. 

Failed camp is not what makes Blood Diner weird, but it certainly is a different starting point for a weird film.  Ultimately, it’s the exotic flavors that are promiscuously thrown in to the blood-red comedy stock that gives this stew it its uniqueness.  Of course, there’s Uncle Anwar, the talking brain with eyes and the ridiculous “Egyptian” accent.  There’s the topless aerobics massacre.  There’s the rival vegetarian restaurant owner with the ventriloquist dummy sidekick, who the rest of the cast addresses as if he were a breathing actor.  There’s the fact that both the principals and the extras laugh like kids in a schoolyard making fun of a nerd who just got pantsed every time someone loses a hand or head in a of geyser of blood.  There’s the time Anwar reminisces about the days when he had a body, and his memories take the form of old black and white rape-themed stag films.  And there’s a subplot about a professional wrestler with the toothbrush mustache and swastika armband performing under the name “Little Jimmy Hitler.”  

Oh, about that Hitler character.  The idea of a wrestling heel modeling himself after the universal symbol of evil is actually amusing, clever and daring, considered in isolation.  But what’s odd is that the movie does not stop there with it’s Hitler imagery.  Der Führer pops up again, this time in quadruplicate, as the backing band at the “Lumerian feast” of the movie’s climax.  Two Hitler shout-outs would be enough to raise an eyebrow, but Kong adds another, subtler and perhaps even accidental, tribute to the Nazi leader.  As Hitler’s punk band bangs out its frenetic tune and the concertgoers, turned into cannibalistic zombies by drugs, feast on each other on the dance floor, the beat fades out and the strains of the “Overture and Bacchanalia” from Richard Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” fill the air as Sheetar is revived from the sleep of the gods.  Wagner, of course, was Hitler’s favorite composer, and to choose this tune with Aryan associations as the theme music for the avenging goddess, accompanying a scene of orgiastic (almost genocidal) slaughter is, to put it mildly, a bit of a weird coincidence.

With so many gory strands and peculiar preoccupations going into the mix, Blood Diner feels stitched together, like the Frankensteinish corpse made up of parts of immoral women.  As the Internet enthusiast said, “it’s an insane movie [composed of] insane parts.”  But the insanity of Blood Diner isn’t the wacky insanity of a film like Evil Dead 2, although it appears superficially similar.  The thread which stitches these parts together is meanness.  From the cruel hilarity to the eroticized misogyny to the Hitler tributes, Blood Diner is bitterly nihilistic, even for a black comedy.  It’s enough to make one wonder what exactly was in Jackie Kong’s head when she made this, the swan song of her short and otherwise undistinguished career.  It seems the work of an incompetent psychotic with a movie camera and an agenda against the world.  The result is fascinating, for reasons the director never intended, and disturbing, in ways the director probably never intended.  It’s not funny, either in the way intended or unintentionally, but it’s worth viewing if you’re mining the depraved depths of weird cinema.  Guys, just don’t use it to try to impress the artsy girl you met in your Women’s Studies class with your knowledge of obscure cinema.  It’s not that kind of movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Don’t think for a second… that ‘Blood Diner,’… is at all similar to ‘Eating Raoul’ or any other real movie. It pretends to have a comic plot, but that’s just a shabby excuse for the brothers to hack up naked women. The production is conspicuously low-budget, and the dubbing, lighting and continuity are pathetically amateurish, but none of that matters. This is not a real movie; it’s celluloid swill.”–Caryn James, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“This is a very gory, dumb comedy/horror takeoff on… Blood Feast… but it’s bad in a way that the original wasn’t.”–Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Video Guide (video)

“…a film that delights in its own stupidity. Kong’s outrageous inventiveness and lack of pretension makes it a far more perversely enjoyable film than many big budget studio counterparts.”–Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Review (video)

IMDB LINK:  Blood Diner (1987)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST: 

FILM FEROX Interview with screenwriter Michael Sonye

Carl Crew Interview

DVD INFO:  Somewhat surprisingly, Blood Diner has yet to receive a DVD release, which has held it back from becoming the cult hit it otherwise might be.  The VHS video (buy) was released by Vestron Video.

DIRECTED BY: Alan Parker

FEATURING: Mickey Rourke, Robert De Niro, Lisa Bonet

PLOT:  1950s private eye Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) is hired by a suave,

sartorial client (Robert DeNiro) to track down a crooner; as the search takes him from Harlem to New Orleans, Angel finds that every lead he interviews ends up dead.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  With its (sometimes literally) dripping atmosphere, mysterious dreamlike flashbacks, and a conclusion that will chill the blood if you don’t see it coming, Angel Heart appeals to lovers of the weird. In the end, however, this macabre film noir is simply too conventional to be weird, a standard detective story with the supernatural grafted onto it.  The fact that the mystery is completely and satisfactorily resolved at the end leaves us little wonder to carry forward.

COMMENTS:   There was one throwaway scene that almost tipped Angel Heart into the weird column.  Angel is standing on the beach at Coney Island, backing off from the oncoming tide, wearing a plastic nose shield on his sunglasses (more than a little reminiscent of the bandage Jack Nicholson wore in Chinatown) on an overcast day, and talking to the wife of a carnival geek as she soaks her varicose veins in the Atlantic.  Now that’s a situation you don’t find yourself in everyday!  Had there been more subtly off-kilter scenes like this peppered throughout, Angel Heart could have been a weird classic.

On its original release, the film was notorious for the bloody, MPAA-enraging sex scene with recent ex-Cosby kid Lisa Bonet.  The scene still packs a wallop today, and is even more memorable because it isn’t wholly gratuitous, but has a horrifying significance within the context of the story.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Angel Heart,’ with its stigmatic sets and satanic text, makes the perfect cult movie just as the Rev. Jones made the perfect batch of Kool-Aid. It already has assured itself a limited audience, as most moviegoers will be repulsed by the needless gore, including sudden open-heartsurgery and assorted other murder-mutilations. The lot overwhelms this devilishly clever detective allegory, a supernatural variation on ’50s pulp mysteries.” –Rita Kempley, Washington Post (contemporaneous)