DIRECTED BY: John Cameron Mitchell

FEATURING: John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Andrea Martin

PLOT: We first meet Hedwig as she and her band the Angry Inch are performing at a seafood buffet in Kansas City. In flashback, and in music videos, we learn that she was born a boy named Hans in East Berlin, and underwent a (botched) sex change operation so she could marry an American G.I. and leave for the West. Now, she and her band are shadowing the cross-country tour of Tommy Gnosis, Hedwig’s ex-boyfriend turned arena rock star, whom she accuses of having stolen her songs.

BACKGROUND:

• John Cameron Mitchell, then a professional stage actor, debuted the character of Hedwig in 1994 at a drag show at a punk nightclub in New York City. With the help of songwriter Stephen Trask, he built an off-Broadway play—originally staged in the ballroom of a fleabag hotel in Manhattan’s meat packing district—around the androgynous chanteuse.
• In the early drafts of the play Tommy was the main character and Hedwig a supporting player.
• Mitchell’s father was U.S. Army Major General John Mitchell, and the younger Mitchell spent much of his childhood in Berlin where his father was stationed during the later part of the Cold War.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Is it Hedwig’s androgynous Aryan visage, half-hidden under a pound of glittery makeup and a sculpted blond wig big enough to double the diameter of her head? Or is it the animated retelling of Aristophanes fable in “The Origin of Love,” with a squiggly line drawing of Zeus cutting the legs off whales? Fortunately, thanks to split-screen technology, we don’t have to choose; we can get Hedwig’s glacial glam mug on the left and a severed half-moon face yearning to swallow her up on the right together in one still.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Well, it does feature a rock star who’s the victim of a botched sex

Original trailer for Hedwig and the Angry Inch

change searching for love and vengeance and telling her life story through song while playing on a tour of discount seafood restaurants with her band of Eastern European refugee musicians, which is a plot you don’t see everyday. If that’s not enough to satisfy your weird desires, however, stick with it until the end, when it drifts into a dreamlike series of music videos that see characters swapping sexes and changing into other characters.

COMMENTS: He may not be widely acknowledged as the West’s weirdest philosopher, but Plato has inspired two of the most bizarre movies ever made. His “Allegory of the Cave” was the obvious inspiration for the cavelike reality of the children imprisoned by walls of words in Dogtooth. John Cameron Mitchell pays even more straightforward tribute to another famous Platonic metaphor in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. When Hedwig says, “It is clear that I must find my other half, but is it a he, or a she?” it’s an explicit reference to the myth of love proposed by Aristophanes in Plato’s “Symposium.” In Plato’s account of the contest by Athens’ best and brightest to deliver a speech about love, the hungover, hiccup-suffering Aristophanes, a famous satirist, explains the impact of Eros by suggesting that humans were originally creatures with two heads and eight limbs, two hemispheres fused together back-to-back, and that the angry gods split in half them as punishment for hubris. Each individual then spends the rest of his or her life looking for his or her severed other half, and only feels complete when they finally find them. Aristophanes’ story is partially an attempt to account for the existence of homosexuality, and he therefore awkwardly introduces the idea that there were originally three joined sexes—a man-man, a woman-woman, and a man-woman—in order to explain same-sex attraction. Of course, he also discloses that these creatures used to roll around the ground “like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air” when they wanted to cover a lot of ground, so maybe we shouldn’t take his account too seriously. (Socrates’ entry in the contest, by the way, propounds that the love of wisdom is more divine than simple erotic love—a footnote that Hedwig‘s script may not be entirely ignorant of).

You don’t have to take my word on the Platonic citation—Hedwig‘s score is explicit on that score. Hedwig herself sings the story to the lobster-bibbed patrons of Bilgewater’s restaurant (Chicago franchise—the Angry Inch has an exclusive contract to play at the budget seafood chain), illustrating the tale of Zeus’ thunderbolts splitting bulbous hermaphrodites in half with storybook slides projected onto a bedsheet hung in front of the salad bar.

You might call “The Origin of Love,” performed as a wistful power ballad, one of Hedwig‘s knockout numbers—except that they’re pretty much all knockout numbers. Stephen Trask’s score is full of earworms and flat-out tear-jerking, butt-shaking, fist-pumping tunes performed with punk panache in an eclectic array of styles. Hedwig might have remained a special interest curiosity, closeted in the gay community, if not for the power of its music to push a universal message about a dispossessed outsider desperate for love. Each high-energy number is tightly tied to the narrative, either coming out of Hedwig’s personal experience or (like “The Origin of Love”) illustrating a central theme. Although we dub the music “punk” because of its insurgent spirit, the score is eclectic; there’s something for everyone, and enough texture and change-ups to keep you interested no matter your musical proclivities. “Tear Me Down” is solid introductory rocker that showcases Hedwig the rebel and, by highlighting her Cold War Berliner origins, establishes her as a divided personality. An American G.I. seduces a pre-op Hedwig (then a “slip of a girly boy” named Hansel) with a trail of candy (including the boy’s favorite, “goomy bears”), a scene which segues into a performance of the country-tinged “Sugar Daddy.” The title song is the punkest number, explaining Hedwig’s dilemma with a literalism that puts the Bilgewater diners off their bread sticks: “My sex change operation got botched/My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch/Now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch/I got an angry inch…” (The performance erupts into a homophobic riot, but the band magically manages to keep playing their instruments even while their fists are flying). As good as all the songs are, it’s hard to point to one song as a show stopper, but if forced to choose many would pick “Wig in a Box.” It’s the production that celebrates Hedwig’s invention of herself as a drag rock goddess: it starts off as a piano ballad and mutates into a poppy doo-wop bubblegum number with a Bowie-esque melody. Hedwig’s trailer wall descends and turns into a stage, and a bouncing wig encourages us to sing along with the lyrics. The musical climaxes with an impressionistic, surrealistic 15-minute medley consisting of the melancholy “Hedwig’s Lament,” the punk-freakout “Exquisite Corpse,” an arena-rock reprise of the earlier “Wicked Little Town” with new lyrics, another intense glam-rocker in the triumphant “Midnight Radio,” and ending with a reprise of “Origin of Love” for the last shot fadeout. It’s one hell of a ride, and the highest compliment you can give the score is to point out that it works as a stand-alone release even without the framing narrative: it almost sounds like a lost concept album collaboration between David Bowie and the Stooges, with Bob Mould on guitar (Bob Mould really is on guitar).

If the rocking tunes are the most obvious factor that pulls Hedwig out of the pure gay-interest genre, we shouldn’t undersell the fact that Hedwig is a damn funny movie. The script is smart and isn’t afraid to lovingly mock its rock influences; the movie’s comic mix of philosophical and pop-culture obsessions is perfectly exemplified by the title of Hedwig’s rejected lecture on “the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock and roll”: “You, Kant, Always Get What You Want.” Hedwig is full of quotable lines delivered by its laconic, passive-aggresive heroine in her studied Nordic drone: “Tommy, can you hear me? From this milkless teat you have sucked the very business we call show!” Hedwig provokes chuckles when she strings together pop music lyrics or geographical band names into free-associative monologues, or lists the influential Yank singers who touched a young East German girly boy listening to Radio America (including Anne Murray, “who was actually a Canadian working in the American idiom”) alongside the equally intriguing “crypto-homo” artists (including David Bowie, “who was actually an idiom working in America and Canada”). Her comic adventures have her honing her musical skills headlining a band of Korean army wives, before eventually growing big enough to play the folksy “Menses Fair.” With the Angry Inch, she develops a corny (not to say fruity) stand-up routine (complete with rim-shots) to warm up the plump audiences after they’ve loaded their buffet trays before she launches into another ear-blistering gay punk number. She’s smart, droll, and quick with a catty comeback, the kind of person you’d think twice about putting down for fear of a devastating verbal reprisal; her saving grace is that she usually turns her biting wit on herself.

Self-conscious, campy humor—the ability to deal with anticipated rejection through a preemptive quip—is an essential part of the drag queen archetype. Although Mitchell has created a living, breathing character with peculiarities and a nutty backstory all her own, he’s done so within the confines of a positive gay stereotype: the mildly grotesque, mildly bitchy femme who triumphs over society’s ostracism by being too damn interesting to ignore. Hedwig’s story is more than the typical tragically gay tale, though; it’s a positively monstrous one. The surgeon’s scalpel has left her sexless—worse than that, has left her with a inch long lump reminding her that she’s neither man nor woman, not even a hermaphrodite. She has no sexual identity. Her scarred and useless crotch serves as an exaggerated symbol of the stigma and shame many homosexuals feel. It’s no wonder that Hedwig’s response to her circumstance is to don a wig, a mask of makeup, and a larger than life persona that hides her core of loneliness from prying eyes. (The song “Wig in a Box” features Hedwig trying on various personae via hairpieces—the beehive, the Farrah Fawcett, the Dorothy Hammil—until she stumbles upon the rug representing the “punk rock star of stage and screen” and concludes “I’m never turning back”). Mitchell’s performance, honed through years of playing the same character, masterfully captures the full pathos and humor of Hedwig’s dual existence, the facade of gay glitter and the bitter soul underneath.

Hedwig’s story, which begins as a quest for her other half, by the end morphs via music video magic into a Jungian journey of self-realization. For most of the film, Hedwig pursues protégé Tommy Gnosis, her presumptive soul mate, across America on a tour that’s half revenge, half torch-carrying. But the film’s finale jettisons both the rock-and-roll rise-and-fall and the romantic comedy tropes in favor of expressionistic tableaux and psychodrama played out on a glam stage. The conclusion is vague to the point of being mystical, and deliberately invites interpretation (warning: don’t read on if you want to avoid spoilers). After an unlikely series of events Hedwig gets her comeuppance on the plagiarist Gnosis, and finds her talent recognized. What little reality the movie had to cling to is then discarded as Hedwig begins a major concert at “Bilgewater, Times Square.” At the end of the frenetic and fractured experimental punk number where she sings about being “all sewn up,” she rips off her wig and tears off her top to reveal that the two breastlike bumps under her bra were supplied by tomatoes (which she smashes against her flat-chested male torso). Suddenly, the crowd and the band are gone and Tommy Gnosis is singing a song of apology on an empty stage, as the unwigged Hedwig approaches him from afar. Gnosis sings to him/her, “there’s no mystical design/no cosmic lover preassigned…” Gnosis disappears, but the trademark silver cross on his forehead—the mark Hedwig originally gave him along with the stage name that means “knowledge”—now appears on the stripped singer, who materializes on a new stage reunited with the Angry Inch. Hedwig—or Hans?—then gives his wig to his backup singer and reluctant lover, Yitzhak, who puts it on and is transformed into a woman (the masulizing makeup job on Miriam Shor was impeccably done). Hedwig, now unmasked and (at least psychically) merged with Gnosis, ends the film stripped of her clothes and her glamor in a dark alley, marching forward naked into the glare of the streetlights and who knows what new reality.

Naked Hedwig in the alley is like the star child from 2001. She’s transformed through some process of evolution and transformation too profound to be stated in words. There’s almost too much symbolic meat to chew on here, but it seems that Hedwig has cast aside both her need for a mask to hide herself from the world, and her yen for another being to complete her. Aristophanes was wrong—or maybe the comic playwright was only half serious all along. Hedwig has become whole by discovering the wisdom that the him or her half she needed to complete him or herself lay buried deep inside him or herself all the time. That’s a heavy message for a rock and roll musical about a botched sex change operation to carry, but Hedwig finds itself strong and confident enough to bear the load.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Filmed with ferocious energy and with enough sexual variety to match late Fellini, it may be passing through standard bookings on its way to a long run as the midnight successor to ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“One way of looking at this clever, funny, wildly innovative film tricked out with surreal pop embellishments and Day-Glo colors is to see it as the kind of movie David Bowie might have made had he pushed his early-70′s gender-bending persona to its logical limit.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“The film’s not only funny and weird, it’s oddly poignant.”–Desson Thomas, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: New Line Cinema: Hedwig and the Angry Inch – There’s not much here anymore on this one-page site, just the synopsis and six hi-res stills. Even the trailer appears to be missing.

IMDB LINK: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Hedwig and the Angry Inch | Film | The New Cult Canon – Scott Tobias’ entry on Hedwig for The Onion A.V. Club’s “New Cult Canon” series

Hedwig in a Box [Archived] – An archived version of the large but inactive-since-2007 fan site, with a FAQ and an archived forum with a scary amount of discussion about the play and film. The archived home page even contains a link to an earlier archived version of the site.

DVD INFO: The New Line “Platinum Series” DVD (buy) is out-of-print but still widely available. Extras include a commentary track with writer/director/star John Cameron Mitchell and cinematographer Frank DeMarco, two deleted scenes, the trailer, cast and crew bios, and a long (85 minute) documentary showing the evolution of Hedwig from nightclub character to off-Broadway play to feature film. Thanks to its dedicated cult we would not expect this to stay out of print for very long; a re-release and Blu-ray edition is to be expected.

Hedwig is also available for rental viewing or download on Video-on-Demand (rent/buy).

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

FEATURING: Peter Mullan, David Caruso, Josh Lucas, Stephen Gevedon, Brendan Sexton III

PLOT: A hazmat crew removing asbestos from an abandoned asylum uncover secrets about the

long-dead but deeply disturbed residents—and arguably more chilling secrets about each other.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  The weirdometer registers only trace amounts of bizarrity in this eerie, complex psychological horror.  It’s worth a viewing for fright fans, but not thanks to its strangeness.

COMMENTS: Before Session 9, director Brad Anderson was best known (if he was known at all) for his romantic comedies.  Anderson co-fashioned Session 9‘s complicated, haunted script to take advantage of the availability of an abandoned mental institution, a dream location to shoot a horror movie, and wound up finding a more successful niche as a specialist in psychological suspense.  Disdaining shock violence and other teen horror tropes, Session 9 hoes a tougher row by creating its suspense through characterization, hidden secrets, and (for the most part) by encouraging the audience to imagine unspeakable carnage rather than to get off on seeing it laid out in splattery crimson glory.  The idea here is to throw five average Joes into a pressure cooker situation (finishing a three-week asbestos removal job in one week) inside a suggestively creepy locale, and let the tension build organically as they begin to crack under the stress.  Gordon is the most preoccupied of the bunch: he may lose his struggling business if he doesn’t complete this contract on time, and he’s got a newborn baby back home to feed.  Phil, his right hand man, has his own tense dynamic with the obnoxious Hank: they share an uncomfortable history with a common woman.  Mullet-headed young Jeff is the neophyte kid who gets picked on by the others, and Mike is the thoughtful guy who’s too good for this job (for unknown reasons, he’s dropped out of law school to schlep around in a hazmat suit).  The characterizations aren’t deep, but they’re efficient; we know these guys, we get their conflicting agendas.  Mike’s discovery of old tape recordings of hypnotherapy with a schizophrenic woman—reels labeled sessions 1 to 9—provides a parallel dramatic line, as we periodically hear a tranquil doctor probe the mind of a psychopathic woman with buried issues that may continue to haunt the hosptal’s halls to this day.  Like the Overlook Hotel in Session 9‘s closest ancestor, The Shining, the empty spaces of the asylum are virtually a separate character (there are plenty of tracking shots down abandoned corridors to remind us of Kubrick‘s horror).  The grounds are full of memories of the departed: Satanist graffiti scrawled on the walls by the teens who broke in to party there on weekends, old mementos and clippings pasted onto the walls of the patients rooms, and broken bric-a-brac left there by the long-gone staff and by homeless squatters.  Everything is linked by dark, dank underground tunnels connecting the various buildings.  It would be almost impossible to shoot a film in this setting that didn’t raise at least a couple of hairs on the back of your neck, and Anderson’s restrained direction and the ensembles’ paranoiac acting ably amplify the institution’s inherent creepiness.  The ending is too obvious to qualify as a twist, and I wish Anderson had shown Kubrick’s courage to go shamelessly over-the-top every now and then, but Session 9 satisfies as a mature, eerie, and mostly quiet horror—a type of film that’s all too rare nowadays.  What could be scarier than an isolated, crumbling building that may be full of ghosts?  The answer: an isolated, crumbling building that may be full of schizophrenic ghosts.

The asylum in the movie, Danvers State Hospital, was a real abandoned mental institution in Massachusetts. It holds the dubious honor of being known as the birthplace of the prefrontal lobotomy (a fact referenced in the movie), and later became infamous for overcrowding and inhumane treatment of its inmates.  Most of the buildings on the sprawling campus were torn down in 2006 to construct an apartment complex.  The units burned down in 2007 in a mysterious fire, though they were soon rebuilt.  A 12-minute featurette on the DVD documents the cruel history of the institution.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Save for the disappointing finale, Session 9 proves to be a remarkably spare journey into the confines of the mind and a unique evocation of just how terrifying it is to loose one’s mind.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (contemporaneous)

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

DIRECTED BY: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

FEATURING: Haruhiko Katô, Kumiko Asô, Koyuki

PLOT: A computer expert’s suicide is the first in a series of mysterious events and

disappearances that leave Tokyo, and the world, depopulated; is a website that dials up people on its own and asks if they want to meet a ghost responsible?

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s creepy and weirder than the average scare flick, but Pulse is tuned to the standard turn of the millennium J-horror wavelength.  It’s a good watch for fear fans, and a seminal one for Asian New Wave horror followers, but it doesn’t go that extra weird mile.  Kurosawa’s ambiguous horror/detective procedural Cure (1997) makes for a better bizarre candidate.

COMMENTS: Pulse slips so quietly from reality to strangeness that you hardly recognize the transition; one minute, you’re watching its characters going about their daily lives, dealing with unexpected suicides and alarming computer viruses, and the next minute the world is almost deserted and ruled by ghosts.  The theme of this horror movie is not really fear but loneliness, and how technology fosters isolation more than cures it.  The film is not too subtle in delivering that message.  A plague of ghosts seems to spread via a computer website; one character immediately diagnoses a low-tech character’s sudden interest in the Internet as a desire to connect with his fellow man; a spirit tells the protagonist “death was eternal loneliness” from inside a foil-lined room.  Even scenes occurring before people start disappearing en masse are shot in disconcertingly deserted urban settings, on empty streets and buses and in lonely apartments.  Characters discuss the difficulty humans have making deep and lasting connections, while simultaneously hungering, struggling, and failing to form those bonds with each other.  Those who encounter one of the malevolent spirits in Pulse go through a syndrome (ghost traumatic stress disorder?) that involves locking themselves inside a room alone and sealing the door with red tape.  What the movie intends to say on the metaphorical level is very clear; what’s a little more confused is what’s supposed to be happening on the literal level.  We get half-baked exposition regarding the mechanics of the ghost world, but the spirits’ malevolent motives aren’t ever clearly explained, and it’s not at all certain how all the pieces are supposed to fit together.  If, as one sage tells us, the dead are now leaking into our world because theirs has exceeded its capacity, how do they benefit from convincing the living to kill themselves?  Wouldn’t that just worsen their overpopulation problem?  If the spirits of the dead have no place to go, shouldn’t the world be overrun with ghostly presences, rather than empty?  What purpose in setting up the spectral website that dials up users on its own—other than to scare a technophobic audience?  The movie glosses over answers to these questions, which does make it feel like a weirder endeavor; in this case, however, it seems the material might benefit from a fairer stab at clarity.  But Kiyoshi (no relation to Akira) Kuroswa is all about atmosphere, and he’s an expert at conjuring it.  The long lonely narrative spaces are broken up by several memorable moments, including glitchy technostrangeness involving a metaphysically malfunctioning webcam with a distorting lens, bizarre broadcast television interference from the Beyond, people who melt into black smudges on the wall, and a genuinely frightening trip inside “The Forbidden Room” to discuss matters of mortality with the death’s head who dwells therein.  Mood, not logic or even philosophy, is the glue that holds the movie together, and while it isn’t the horror masterpiece it might have been if that atmosphere was yoked to a better story, it works well on the shiver-inducing level.

The dumbed-down 2006 Hollywood remake with Kirsten Bell, part of a trend of bastardized American remakes of J-horror classics, was widely despised by critics and audiences alike.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…dolorous, shivery, and surreal.”–Wesley Morris, Boston Globe (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden, Tom Aldredge

PLOT:  A space pilot trades a cat for a “real live girl” whom he can exchange for the “Boy Who

Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast,” whom he intends to swap in turn for the remains of a dead Venusian stud in order to collect a reward.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Genrewise, The American Astronaut could be described as many things—space western, garage band musical, nonsense comedy—but the one thing it indisputably is is a cult movie.  That is to say, it’s a specialized and peculiar little flick that has a devoted group of followers, and a larger contingent of outsiders who are nonplussed by its popularity.  I have to admit that in this case I lean slightly towards the second group.  American Astronaut is very weird (it has a character named “the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast,” for goodness sake), but some of it is tedious, like ninety minutes spent watching a clan of hipsters swapping in-jokes you aren’t let in on.  I can sense the magic other people get from the pic without being able to directly experience it myself.  This is a movie on the cusp of being certified as one of the Best Weird Movies Ever Made, but it will require some reader acclaim to sway my opinion towards adding it to the List.  So get to promoting the movie in the comments, Astronaut fans.

COMMENTS:  How many movies can boast a line like “Gentlemen, the Boy Who Saw a Woman’s Breast has left our planet” or a musical number like “The Girl with a Vagina Made of Glass”?  How about a villain who is incapable of killing unless he has no possible grudge against his victim and a “real live girl” who (in this early stage of her development) is just a suitcase that plays a rock tune when you lift a slat on the casing?  The American Astronaut creates a unique, absurd, but consistent universe through a dry, deadpan DIY approach.  It’s set in a boy’s cosmos, where women are strange creatures who live on one planet while the men live on another.  The movie’s nonsense proclivities are a narrative film incarnation of the free-associative lyrics of writer/director Cory McAbee’s mildly punkish band, the Billy Nayer Show.  One song goes, “A-E-, A-E-I, A-E-I-O-U, I owe you nothing, but sometimes you owe me I-U-A-I-E”; another consists of one singer repeatedly chanting “no” while another harmonizes with a rhythmic “tee-nee-oh-yeah.”  When they start smiling and singing about “the baby in a jar with glasses on and a gun,” it seems like a return to the real world.  Visually, the movie does an excellent job disguising its low-budget origins with black and white photography that keeps the backgrounds in deep shadows, suggesting the existence of a wider, deeper world than they can actually afford to show.  Silhouettes are used to create an illusion of grandness, as when the Boy Who…—dressed, as is his habit, like the messenger god Mercury in an art-deco winged helmet—dances in a spotlight for the workers of Jupiter and casts a massive shadow on the crumbling factory wall behind him.  The musical numbers, which sometimes sound like fractured nursery rhymes with odd, childlike melodies, and sometimes like a tight-knit garage band, aren’t half bad.  It’s amusing that the featured singers (for the most part) aren’t glamorous rock star types, but average-looking middle aged white guys; paunchy, baggy-eyed bartender Eddie (character actor Bill Buell) rocks harder than anyone in the cast.  It’s easy to see, and to admire, the love and care that went into the production; predicting whether this highly peculiar vision will click with you in particular is a trickier proposition.  One downside is that McAbee’s spaceman-for-hire isn’t the charismatic rake in the Han Solo mold the film wants him to be; the star is outshined by his co-stars.  Another minus is that the film is slow to get into gear, starting off with longish and not particularly rewarding scenes of McAbee shaving and taking a long spacewalk to the Ceres bar.  Things don’t start to take off until the dance contest kicks in, about twenty minutes into the running time.  That’s when my favorite scene occurs.  It’s a long, rambling warmup joke about “hertz donuts” told by an aged emcee (Broadway veteran Tom Aldredge) with multiple misemphasized punchlines.  The bar full of rogues and roughnecks laugh at all the wrong places as the shaggy-dog gag drags on and on, ending with the comedian confessing “I’ve never understood this joke” amidst peals of laughter.  The tale is a condensed metaphor for the American Astronaut, a movie that paces itself like a comedy but, when it comes time to tell a joke, consistently zigs into nonsense when you expect it to zag into a laugh.

The American Astronaut has a small but rabid cult, but it could have a much bigger one if it had landed a distribution deal.  As it is, the film is mainly sold through McAbee’s personal website, and has never received the widespread distribution from Netflix or other rental outlets it would need to become a breakout cult hit.  The professionally-made DVD features an interesting, off-center variation on the director’s commentary—McAbee discusses the picture while screening it for a bar full of patrons who ask him questions.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.”–Hazel-Dawn Dumpert, L.A. Weekly (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Rob” who called it “A strange little film put out by the band the Billy Nayer Show” and added, “It may not make your list, but it’s definitely worthy of watching. The movie features a character known only as ‘The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast.’  I’m pretty sure you couldn’t not watch that.”Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux

PLOT:  A woman (Harring) is involved in a nighttime accident on Mulholland Drive and flees into the city of Los Angeles with amnesia; she sneaks into an apartment soon to be occupied by naive young Betty (Watts), who has come to Hollywood hoping to find stardom.  Meanwhile, a film director (Theroux) finds himself pressured by mysterious mobsters to cast an unknown actress in his upcoming project.  Betty helps the amnesiac woman try to recover her identity, but the clues only lead to a strange avant-garde nightclub, a key, a box, and a sudden reality shift that throws everything that came before into confusion.

BACKGROUND:

• Lynch originally intended Mulholland Drive as a TV series in the mold of “Twin Peaks.”  When the networks passed on the pilot, the French producer Studio Canal stepped in with additional financing to turn the pilot into a feature film.  In between ABC’s proactive cancellation of the series and the creation of the film version, all of the sets and props were dismantled, forcing Lynch to come up with a different way to complete the story.
• Monty Montgomery, whose appearance as “The Cowboy” is an uncanny show-stopper, is a Hollywood movie producer (who produced Wild at Heart for Lynch).  Mulholland Drive is his only acting credit (he’s listed as “Lafayette Montgomery” in the credits).
• Lynch insisted no chapter stops be included on the DVD.
• The original DVD release included an insert from Lynch containing “10 Keys to Unlocking This Thriller.”
• Mulholland Drive received significant critical acclaim, nabbing Lynch a Best Director award at Cannes (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There) and a Best Director Oscar nomination.  It was voted best picture of the Year by the Boston Film Critics Society, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the new York Film Critics Circle, and the Online Film Critics Society (where it tied with Memento in the voting).  It was also voted best foreign picture by the Academy Award equivalents of Brazil, France, Spain, and Australia.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Silencio nightclub, decorated in Lynch’s trademark red velvet drapes and staffed by his trademark subconscious monsters.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If the massive reality shifts and actresses unexpectedly playing

Original trailer for Mulholland Drive

multiple roles is not enough for you, then the monster behind the Winkie’s, a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” delivered by a woman who collapses onstage, and a mafia-style media syndicate run by a deformed dwarf who uses an eyebrowless cowboy as his right-hand man will convince you that we are deep in that subconscious pit of eroticism, kitsch and weirdness that can only go by the name Lynchland.

COMMENTS:  Oddly enough, what may be the most important scene in Mulholland Drive involves a marginal character, a thick-browed man whose name or profession we never learn.  After this scene we will see him again exactly one time. The man is eating breakfast at a Winkie’s (David Lynch’s mythical version of Denny’s) with a friend.  He’s recounting a dream that he had that occurred in the very diner they’re sitting in.  He goes out of his way to precisely outline the differences between the dream and the way things are now.  In the dream, his breakfast companion was standing in a different place, and he was frightened.  The light was different; it was neither day nor night, but a kind of twilight.  And, most importantly, in the dream there was a man behind the restaurant—”he’s the one that’s doing it”—and the dreamer could see him through the wall.  He’s come to Winkie’s that morning, together with his friend from the dream, to check behind the dumpsters in the light of day and convince himself there’s no one there, to rid himself of that awful fear.

But, this being a David Lynch movie, he doesn’t rid himself of that awful fear.  Quite the contrary.  And because of what happens, we’re left unsure whether this really is his description of the dream, related in the light of day, or is actually the nightmare itself.

Mulholland Drive is a dream of a movie, one with (at least) two sets of realities and characters, inhabited by one set of actors.  Each separate universe is a looking-glass version of the other, reflecting events as if in a funhouse mirror.  $50,000 in cold hard cash is a mystery in one world, and a sin in the other.  And, unlike some of David Lynch’s other movies, there is a solution (of sorts) to the mystery of Mulholland Drive, although it’s a solution that doesn’t betray the film’s mysteriousness.

In terms of penetrability, Mulholland Drive perches somewhere between the eerie off-ness of Blue Velvet and the relative inscrutability of Eraserhead.  This movie is clearly in the tradition of the psychological thriller (a genre that, somewhat surprisingly, Lynch had never tackled before, at least not head on).  And yet, there are plenty of mystical red herrings and pure dream interludes hanging in the heavy Los Angeles air that envelops Mulholland Drive.  Unlike in a typical mystery tale, with Lynch it’s the sumptuous surrealism, not the solution, that puts the thrill in the thriller.  It’s the red lampshade, the phone calls to nowhere, the dwarf in the wheelchair that drive Mulholland.

As always, Lynch releases beautiful, delicate narrative butterflies into the cinemas, but certain fans (you know who you are) insist on trying to catch them, pin them by their wings, and dissect them to death.  This time around, Lynch explicitly (and in my view, perversely) encourages the segment of his audience that prefers to treat his films as puzzles rather than as experiences to analyze the film to death by releasing a flyer called “Ten Clues to Unlocking This Thriller” (thereby negating his own advice, quoted above, to never “demystify” a movie.  No one ever accused David Lynch of a foolish consistency).

Other, more perceptive souls have pleaded with viewers not to try to understand too much of Mulholland Drive. Rather than delighting in Lynch’s clever construction of the puzzlebox, the always perceptive J. Hobermann writes instead that the movie is as “withholding in its narrative as anything in Buñuel” and, after considering that either half of the story might be an illusion, concludes—with a blithe indifference to the carefully constructed plot—”not that it matters.”  In a survey of film critic’s interpretations of the film, nearly everyone resisted the analytical mode.  Roger Ebert insisted, “There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery”;  Jonathan Ross accepted the standard dream interpretation but demurred that it was “counterproductive to keep analysing it”; Tom Charity offered explanations but worried “I’m not sure if it helps to be so specific;” Neil Roberts was ” wary of over-analysing it,” warning that “[w]e should be careful not to let all this analysis detract from a fantastic film”; and Jane Douglas offered this advice: “in some ways it is better to just watch it without constantly trying to work out what it means.”  After working intimately on the script over a span of two years, Laura Harring concluded, “You want to get it, but I don’t think it’s a movie to be gotten.  It’s achieved its goal if it makes you ask questions.”  And co-star Justin Theroux reminds us “I think [Lynch is] genuinely happy for [Mulholland Drive] to mean anything you want.  He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations.”

For the sake of those who have unwisely followed Lynch’s Ten Clues to their logical conclusion, traversing the entire length of Mulholland Drive, I offer, as a way to recapture the film’s mysterious magic, the following

TEN MYSTERIES THAT RE-LOCK THIS THRILLER

1. Why does David Lynch ask viewers, in his “10 keys to unlocking this thriller” to consider where Aunt Ruth is?  What difference would it make if Aunt Ruth were alive, dead, or never existed?
2. Who is the man who thinks a monster lurks behind Winkie’s?  If he is a dream, then why would Dianne have a dream from the point of view of a total stranger?  Other than its metatextual mood setting role,what reason is there for the man and his nightmare to exist?
3. Why does a second actress (Melissa George) play Camilla Rhodes in the first part of the film?
4. Why is the syndicate so insistent that Adam cast Camilla Rhodes?  The entire conspiracy plotline, which occupies a large part of the first ninety minutes of the movie, gets dropped.
5. Speaking of the syndicate, why don’t they “shut everything down” after Mr. Roque tells them to?  Is “shut everything down” Hollywood gangster talk for “turn up the heat by calling in the Cowboy”?
6. Does Adam ever see the Cowboy again?  (We do, and Diane does, but does he)?  Why draw so much attention to the number of times the Cowboy would appear—other than that, when he says something so strange with such an aura of threat, it’s terribly frightening?  Unless—Diane is really Adam??
7. Why is the director the only main character whose identity doesn’t change (though his circumstances do)?
8. Why do tiny old people come skittering out of a brown paper bag, laughing maniacally?
9. Why does Robert Forster get a special mention in the opening credits, yet appear in the film for less than a minute, doing nothing even mildly important?  Why did he even get a special bio segment on the DVD release?  Is his agent just that good?
10. Seriously, WTF is the deal with Silencio?  Why is there no band?  Why does Betty have a brief epileptic fit while watching the stage show?  And what about the key?  (Why does the hit man think its funny when Diane asks what it opens?)  And the blue box?
11. Are there actually more than ten unanswered questions about Mulholland Drive?

Getting lost in all this talk about the film’s meaning, or lack of same, are the film’s amazing cinematic qualities: the neon-noir cinematography; Angelo Badalamenti’s brooding ambient score, which fits the director’s vision like a well-worn glove and immediately drops the viewer into a Lynchian world; and Naomi Watts’ eye-opening performance, which moves from ingenue to conniving bitch with a seriously invigorating stopover as seductress of both sexes.  There are great individual scenes, including Watts and Harring’s two tender but scorching love scenes, a murder-for-hire that goes comically amiss with a series of human and non-human witnesses that have to be dispatched in turn, and a heartrending, and very weird, Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” that inexplicably reduces Watts and Harring to tears.   Not only that, but as a bonus you get to see Billy Ray Cyrus cold-cocked onscreen, perhaps the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy for millions of Americans who suffered through the darkness of the “Achy Breaky Heart” weeks in 1992.

One of Lynch’s greatest gift is that he skirts the borderline between Surrealism and Symbolism; no one can quite nail him down.  In some movies (this one, for example) lists towards the psychological symbolism end of the spectrum, while in others (INLAND EMPIRE, which is essentially Mulholland Drive on acid) he strives for unadulterated bizarrity.  Most of the time, he mixes comprehensible, relatable psychological symbolism with a deeply irrational and fearful subconscious stream.  He’s pulled off the unique trick of rallying two philosophically opposed film factions: those who treasure the challenge of solving puzzle movies, and those who value the sense of “mysterious fullness” that satisfies precisely because it’s meaning can never be pinned down.  Though claimed by both, he can’t actually belong to both camps.

Can he?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the compelling but intentionally inscrutable return of the ‘weird’ David Lynch that will please his hardcore fans even if it has them scratching their heads as well… for the final 45 minutes, Lynch is in mind-twisting mode that presents a form of alternate reality with no apparent meaning or logical connection to what came before… the sudden switcheroo to head games is disappointing because, up to this point, Lynch had so wonderfully succeeded in creating genuine involvement.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

“The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it… The way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a friend, ‘I saw the weirdest movie last night.’ Just like you tell them you had the weirdest dream.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“The worst movie I’ve seen this year… a load of moronic and incoherent garbage from David Lynch that… predictably ended up at the New York Film Festival, where pretentious poseurs sit with their eyes glued to any screen as long as the projector is still running. From this bizarro atrocity, they should get astigmatism.”–Rex Reed, The New York Observer (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:  Mulholland Drive – some of the features on this ten year old site are broken (like a link to a chat transcript with Lynch), but Universal deserves credit for continuing to pay fifteen bucks per year to renew the domain name a decade after the film’s release—something studios rarely do

IMDB LINK:  Mulholland Dr. (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About ‘Mulholland Drive’ – Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein outline the standard (and almost certainly correct) interpretation of Mulholland Drive.  Obviously, this essay contains major spoilers.

Lost on Mulholland Drive – Film fansite featuring guides, essays, a discussion forum for floating personal theories on the film, and even fan-made music videos

Understanding Mulholland Drive: Nice Film—If You Can Get It – Six film critics (Roger Ebert, Jonathan Ross, Neil Roberts, Tom Charity, Philip French, and Jane Douglas)  give their brief interpretations of Mulholland Drive

All You Have to Do Is Dream – Interpretation of Mulholland Drive by Frederick Lane, a Freudian dream analyst, courtesy of salon.com; a fascinating article, although you’ll learn more about dream states than you will about the film

The Naughts: The Romantic Pair of the ’00s – Charles Taylor of the Independent Film Channel selects Betty and Rita as the emblematic romantic couple of the first decade of the 21st century

Sinnerbrink on Lynch -Cinematic Ideas: David Lynch’s _Mulholland Drive_ – An academic treatment of Mulholland Drive from philosophy professor Robert Sinnerbrink, originally published in “Film-Philosophy,” Vol. 9 No. 34, June 2005; insightful but very technical

The Madman and his Muse – From Film Score Daily comes this interview with composer and frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, focusing on his relationship with the director as well as the score for Mulholland Drive

DVD INFO: As David Lynch eschews both director’s commentaries and chapter stops, the Universal DVD (buy) contains no special features beyond the original theatrical trailer and cast bios (including, of course, one for Robert Forster).  The film is also available for download or rental via video-on-demand services.

(This movie was nominated for review by “MtnGoat,” whgo one year ago complained about a “striking lack of David Lynch” on the site. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Shinichirô Watanabe

FEATURING: Voices of Kôichi Yamadera, Unshô Ishizuka, Megumi Hayashibara, Aoi Tada (Japanese version); Steve Blum, Beau Billingslea, Wendee Lee, Melissa Fahn (English dub)

PLOT: Based on the popular anime series, the film brings the core bounty hunting team

together for another mission, while adding a few new characters involved in an experimental super soldier program and a deadly virus outbreak on Mars.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: For the most part, Cowboy Bebop is straight sci-fi, notable for its stellar animation, eclectic soundtrack, and fascinating characterization.  It’s got a few strange bits—especially the character of “Ed”, an androgynous child hacker who speaks in nonsense—but nothing especially out of the ordinary, especially in the world of anime.

COMMENTS: As a television series, Cowboy Bebop was a mix between comedy and drama, action and mystery, single-story episodes and an overarching plot.  Released after the initial 26-episode run, the film takes place sometime before the end of the show, and can stand on its own as a film for anyone unfamiliar with the series.  The titular “Bebop” is a spaceship that serves as home and headquarters to a bounty hunting crew.  Spike Spiegel is a laid back but highly skilled fighter with a shady past; Jet Black is a gruff and sometimes fatherly former cop; Faye Valentine is a wily, scantily-clad con artist with a gambling addiction; Ed is a brilliant and fanciful young hacker.  Of course there’s also Ein, their fluffy “data dog.”  While chasing after a low-level bounty on Mars, the crew stumbles upon a sociopathic killer and his massive plot to infect the planet with a new kind of virus.

The dynamics of the group (always shaky as it is) are explored as each goes off on his or her own mission at various points, chasing down personal leads and hunches.  Spike and Faye are content to be on their own, while Jet and Ed hope for a more familial camaraderie.  New characters Vincent—the soliloquizing killer with a tragic past–and Electra—a government agent with impressive martial arts skills and questionable motivations—further the film’s investigation of isolation and outcasts  The city they explore (the capital of Mars) is packed with crowds preparing for a big Halloween festival, but our protagonists wander alone through the throngs with the weight of the world on their shoulders, adding occasional philosophical and mystical mutterings.  Well, all except for Ed, who seems content to hop around dressed as a pumpkin.

The story is solid, combining mystery and crime drama with thrilling action sequences and a dash of comedic relief.  The animation is gorgeous and incredibly fluid, with exciting fight scenes and high-speed chases (usually involving a space vessel) packed with R-rated violence . The colors vary from soft to bold, with hazy backgrounds and intricate settings that include fun futuristic details and references to antique technology.  The sharp HD upgrade is a welcome sight after the TV-quality Cartoon Network reruns that introduced Cowboy Bebop to many American fans.  Aside from the luscious visuals, the film features a truly kickin’ soundtrack from inimitable composer Yoko Kanno.  The combination of syncopated jazz, kooky soul, and thumping rock perfectly suits the story’s changeable tone and offbeat pacing.

So it’s not weird, especially not by sci-fi anime standards, but Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (also known as Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door) is a fun and involving film for longtime fans and curious newcomers alike.  It’s a little overlong but never boring, and the impressive action, set pieces, and ultracool characterizations are enough to keep everyone entertained!

BLU-RAY INFO: Unfortunately there are no special features for the US Blu-ray release. It’s a beautiful high-def transfer (1080p/AVC- encoded image), with Linear PCM 2.0 stereo sound. There’s a Japanese and English track (the English dub uses the same voice actors from the series, which I always liked).  Honestly, I think the visual upgrade is enough of a reason for fans to check this out on Blu.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This switched-on futuristic anime noir is visually stunning — and it makes a lot more sense than ‘Spirited Away’!” –Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

DIRECTED BY: Jeremy Kasten

FEATURING: Andras Jones, Seth Green, Jeffrey Combs, Beth Bates, Ted Raimi

PLOT: Awakening from a dream to find himself on an operating table, an amnesiac is

informed that he is a schizophrenic murderer who has been committed to a private institution and is now being sent to a halfway home—nicknamed “the House of Love”—to be rehabilitated.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The Attic Expeditions sounds echoes of some (better) weird movies: Jacob’s Ladder (in the way that the script offers different possible explanations for the protagonist’s hallucinations, and jerks the viewer back and forth between those theories) and Donnie Darko (in that it seems the director intended to tell a fantastical story that “made sense” on a literal level, but lost control of the story when he took it one paradox too far).  An interesting, confusing, out-of-control picture, it’s as fascinating for its misses as for its hits.  It falls just short of a general recommendation, but it is recommended to anyone interested in psychological, mindbending horror seasoned with heaping doses of confusion and who isn’t a stickler for great acting.  This is the kind of curious, singular picture that could wind up filling one of the final slots in the List.

COMMENTS: Trevor Blackburn may be a schizophrenic murderer, or he may be an amnesiac sorcerer, or he may be the victim of an unethical psychological experiment; or he may be all three.  It’s impossible to tell, especially since The Attic Expeditions is full of contradictions and contains segments where the timeline suddenly resets and the action repeats itself with slight variations.  The mystery promiscuously throws out clues, but every possible explanation for Trevor’s woes seems chained to its own refutation.  Trevor is an unreliable narrator in triplicate: he’s a definite amnesiac, a possible schizophrenic, and, to top it all off, his state-appointed guardian appears to be deliberately playing with his loose grip on reality.  Psychiatrist Dr. Ek (played by Jefferey Combs as a variation on Herbert West as a pot-smoking, skin-popping headshrinker) uses Trevor as a case study for an experiment in housing madmen together, with hidden cameras studying their movements, “Big Brother” style.  Ek is either searching for a cure to schizophrenia, somehow, or else spying on Trevor to try to discover the occult secret locked away in his mind.  Trevor keeps having flashbacks to a bloody Crowley-esque sex and death ritual that ended the life of his girlfriend and sent him to the madhouse.  Of course, as the only convicted murderer in group therapy, suspicion naturally falls on him when his fellow residents start turning up dead.  Amateurish Andras Jones, unfortunately, wasn’t ready to play the tormented protagonist here; in fact, though cast as the lead, he may be the least expressive actor in the entire movie.  Fortunately, Seth Green is around as a fellow paranoid pensioner to take up the thespic slack. The twitchy Green has “R” and “L” written on the appropriate hand and shows an uncomfortable attraction to Trevor. He simultaneously feeds the recovering madman’s conspiratorial delusions by suggesting that everybody in his life may actually be an actor performing for his benefit; he simultaneously acts as Trevor’s only ally in the House of Love, encouraging him to explore the spooky attic with the locked chest that keeps showing up in Trevor’s nightmares. Inside that trunk lies either the traumatic secret to Trevor’s amnesia and lunacy, or else a paradox that will make your head spin and eyes roll. In the end, the film makes no sense, though it appears to want to believe in the occult resolution. What we get instead is the paradoxical spectacle of a movie that uses hallucinatory storytelling to mask and muddle a mystical but comprehensible plot, but botches the serious explanation by including too many leaps of logic and irreconcilable red herrings. The result is an irrational experience that’s legitimately, but not intentionally, a surrealist film. And, fortunately, there are a few great horror images embedded in the mess of a script: there’s little that’s more horrifying than the idea of suddenly waking up on an operating table and gazing up at nurses wearing non-standard uniforms—their faces unnecessarily masked by what appears to be fishnet mesh pantyhose with homemade eye holes cut into them. It’s shivery stuff, one of a set of curiosities that make Attic worth the expedition for horror fans who can overlook uneven acting and aren’t hung up on their nightmares making rational sense.

The Attic Expeditions script had an odd genesis that may help to explain its ramshackle and nearly incoherent final form. The screenplay began its life intended to be the fourth installment of the direct-to-video Witchcraft series, the soft porn/horror line that was a staple of video stores in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Director Jeremy Kasten though the script had potential to be more than just another sexy exploitation horror, so he sent the script to his film-school buddy and writing partner Rogan Marshall for retooling. Here, things get interesting. Marshall claims that he didn’t trust Kasten’s intellect and that he made the script deliberately hallucinatory and incoherent because he recognized that the director was only good at one thing: shooting dream sequences. Kasten, on the other hand, claimed in a podcast interview that Marshall’s script was written in five days, on drugs, and that he had to cut out a lot of the writer’s unsuitable ideas, as well as adding new central elements, like the character of Dr. Ek. So in the end, we may have three different visions of The Attic Expeditions embedded in the movie: Kasten’s occult puzzle fighting Marshall’s hallucinatory nonsense, with the ghost of the original “boobs and broomsticks” exploitation movie occasionally peeking through.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an overly ambitious slice of Grand Guignol that is none too grand in conception or execution… doesn’t make it as horror, sci-fi spoof or psychological thriller, despite strained efforts in each direction.”–Ken Eisner, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was first nominated for review by “Holly,” who said “I love it every time I watch it; and it has always struck me as strange.” After the initial review disappeared, it was re-suggested by “engineerd2011″, who called it “a total mind trip…” Suggest a weird movie of your own).

FEATURING: Phil Caracas, Maria Moulton, Murielle Varhelyi

PLOT: The Son of God recruits retired Mexican wrestler “Santos” to help him defeat the

vampires who are preying on Ottawa’s lesbian population.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s defiantly odd, but not consistently funny or entertaining enough to rank among the all-time greats.  If you saw any two-minute stretch of JCVH selected at random, you might be convinced that this was a work of camp genius; but string 45 such segments together, and the comedy value runs a little thin.  It’s a hard movie to peg: in its own way, given its low budget, its a sort of masterpiece, and at the same time it’s sort of a disaster.  I think that if it had offered us one less overlong kung fu battle, and one more song and dance number, it might have had a shot at exalted weirdness. Ultimately, though, just as the tone is more irreverent than blasphemous, the style is more zany than weird, and that should keep it off this particular List.

COMMENTS:  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is a stew of pop-cinema leftovers, mixing kung fu with horror, Mexican wrestling and even scraps of blaxploitation, all seasoned with a hint of sacrilege.  Like all peasant cuisine, it will be comfort food for many, but offend some refined palates—it’s definitely an acquired taste.  The technical aspects effectively evoke the feel of late seventies/early eighties exploitation movies, with drab urban cinematography, sound obviously added in post-production, and even a cheesy “waka-waka” funk theme as the heroes cruise down the highway. The action scenes are a problem here: for one thing, there are too many, and they’re too long. They’re just competent enough to remind us that they’re not quite up to snuff; Phil Caracas’ Jesus shows reasonable high-kicking athleticism, but he’s no action hero, and it would have been funnier and more endearing if he’d been clumsier. At any rate, the movie can’t be accused of false advertising. The campy/sacrilegious title scares off the squares and the fundies (though it’s obvious the filmmakers are clearly fans of JC’s philosophy of love and tolerance, if not proponents of his divinity). More to the point, the movie delivers exactly what the title promises: the Prince of Peace staking multiple bloodsuckers through the heart. As if that weren’t strange enough, there are plenty of absurd little low-budget surprises along the way: a crazed, shaggy narrator who jumps out from hedges and spouts Bible verses; punk monks; a martial arts melee between J.C. and a gang of atheists; a talking cherry sundae; a fat masked wrestler with his own theme music. There’s even a musical number, which is decently choreographed and librettoed (“C’mon now gentlemen, c’mon now ladies/We’ll kick these vampires straight back to Hades!)”  Still, with all that deliberate jokey absurdity inserted into the movie, it’s the idiosyncratic oddities that catch the mind’s eye.  For one thing, there’s the movie’s obsession with lesbians—not fetishized lipstick lesbians, but unglamorous, butch tattooed lesbians.  In the movie’s view, they represent the dispossessed—Jesus’ kind of people—the modern day equivalent of the New Testament’s tax collectors and harlots.  At one point, the Virgin Mary, speaking through a night light, tells us that God loves lesbians because “they get so much done in a day!”  Then there’s the minor character named Gloria Oddbottom (possibly the only heterosexual woman in the film). She’s equipped with a huge prosthetic bottom, and every man she passes gives it a squeeze; she has no other function than to serve as a bizarre running joke. But possibly the weirdest thing about Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is the fact that the messiah’s first act in anticipation of his grand apocalyptic battle with hordes of sapphic nosferatu is to tool into Ottawa on his wimpy blue motor scooter and go and get a shave and a haircut. Through the rest of the movie Christ sports close-cropped hair and a pair of earrings, and he even dumps his iconic white robes for a nondescript navy blue t-shirt. No explanation is ever offered for this un-Christlike behavior; it’s one of those unconsciously weird touches that turns the film into something a little odder than your typical revered-religious-icon-battling-the-undead comedy.

Actually, I have an explanation to offer for Jesus’ mysterious haircut. If you watch Caracas’ pre-shearing scuffle with the lesbo vamps, you’ll see that his long wig is constantly blowing across his face, making it difficult to execute his stunts. The scene probably required multiple takes because of follicle-induced visibility issues, and a directorial decision was made to lose the flowing locks for subsequent tussles. Jesus’ new, hip look is therefore more the result of practical considerations rather than aesthetics. I consider the above theory to be my foremost contribution to the massive body of Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter scholarship.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a chopsocky, zero-budget masterpiece that has ‘cult classic’ written all over it in big, bloody letters.”–Adam Nayman, EyeWeekly.com (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Funakdelic,” who added, “fair warning, though it’s weird, J.C. Vampire Hunter really is BAD.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Jeff Daniels, Harve Presnell, Joey Albright, Wayne David Parker, Randall Godwin, Kimberly Guerrero

PLOT: 42-year old Rueben must bag a buck during this year’s deer season or he’ll become

the oldest male in the history of the Soady family never to have done so; with the help of a potion supplied by his Native American wife, he encounters strange supernatural forces that help him in his quest.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Escanaba is unique, at least: it’s got an interesting subject (the deer hunting subculture in Upper Michigan), lots of local color, and evil spirits (or UFOs, or God) haunting the woods.  Jeff Daniels has a lot of ideas here, but most of them fail: the crude quirk and sporadic weirdness never gels into something either meaningful or mirthful.  It ends up as a regional indie curiosity.  Escanaba does have its share of dedicated fans (mostly Michiganders)—must be a Yooper thing, eh?

COMMENTS:   The name Escanaba in da Moonlight sounds pretty cool, but doesn’t really fit the film—almost none of the action takes place in the town of Escanaba, and what little that does happens in the glare of the sun.  There’s plenty of moonlight, but it all falls well outside the town’s borders.  That’s pretty much the story of the movie, which puts things in just because they seemed cool at the time, without paying attention to whether they fit or not.  The movie knows where its soul is—holed up in the woods of the Upper Peninsula in a shack stocked with of maple whiskey and Leinenkugels, pronouncing its “th”‘s as “d”‘s, worried whether this will be the year middle-aged Rueben Soady finally shoots a deer.  It’s a recipe for a low-key male bonding comedy, but Escanaba loses its way when it expands beyond deer camp and goes cosmic.  Rueben is determined to break his curse before he becomes the record holder for oldest buckless Soady male, so he drinks a potion brewed by his mystically-attuned Indian wife and things get a bit weird.  Rueben and his camp pals—crusty but supportive dad, superstitious brother, and a family friend named “da Jimmer” who’s had a speech defect ever since he was abducted by an alien—chug down the brew and endure a night that’s half vision quest, half mushroom trip, with a touch of demonic possession and religious ecstasy thrown in for good measure.  They endure the flashing lights of UFOs, denatured whiskey, impossible euchre hands, a DNR ranger who’s just seen God, anxiety dreams, possession, epic flatulence, and a “bearwalk,” an evil spirit from Algonquin folklore.  The Soadys and their guests aren’t nearly as freaked out by these events as folks from under da Bridge would be; no matter how unsettling the paranormal events should be, the tone remains consistently stuck on coarse quirk, with jokes revolving around the supposed magical properties of jars of porcupine urine and the humiliation of accidentally drinking a moose testicle.  The movie’s message seems to be that in order to self-actualize and shoot a deer, it’s necessary to believe in something—anything—and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s aliens, ancient spirits, God, or the power of love.  That’s why all the supernatural occurrences that afflict the cabin are so damnably arbitrary; the trials Rueben goes through in that long night of the soul aren’t tightly tied to his psychological journey, and anyway, helpful spirits will show up at the end to solve his problem in about two minutes.  The unique Upper Peninsula flavor, deer-hunting rituals and likable rustic characters give Escanaba a lift, but the weirdness doesn’t work for the film, the comedy is gutshot and the spiritual triumph is lame.

Jeff Daniels, who grew up in Lower Michigan, not only starred, but also directed and scripted Escanaba, from his own play.  In the public mind, Daniels’ Golden Globe for The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) has long been overshadowed by the scene where he suffers sudden and severe colonic distress in Dumb and Dumber (1994).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…suggests Evil Dead II as directed by a lobotomized Garrison Keillor…”–Nathan Rabin, The Onion A.V. Club

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Wycuff,” who called it “defiantly weird” but hedged with “It probably wont make the list but it’s at least worth a review and an honorable mention.”   Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)