FEATURING: Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne

PLOT: A disturbed man is released from a mental institution and sent to live in a halfway

house.  While there, he traces back to his childhood to remember a troubled past and the tragic events that shaped his current mental instability.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: To compile a list of the weirdest movies ever made, one would be hard-pressed not to include Cronenberg’s entire oeuvre.  Here, the director eschews the “body horror” that encompassed much of his earlier films and focuses solely on the deterioration of the mind.  While this can be just as grotesque as horrors of the flesh, the journey can get so convoluted at times that the weirdness teeters on a fulcrum.  Eventually, the confusion weighs too heavy and topples the weirdness into mere befuddlement.

COMMENTS: A cinematic pet peeve of mine was surely tested with this movie.  Being American, I shouldn’t have to struggle listening to an English film (i.e., UK-Great Britain).  We speak the same tongue, albeit with some slight variances in words and phrases.  The cockney accents in this film can get so thick at times I considered reaching for the subtitle button on the remote.  To make matters worse, the film focuses on the character of Spider (Fiennes) who mumbles and spews gibberish as a means of communication.  Actually, most of his conversations are only with himself.  I loathe having to toggle the volume levels up and down.  I had to do this for the duration of the film.  Aside from this aggravation, Spider is not a bad film; nor is it a great one.

I loved the approach taken in the opening credits.  Various textiles and walls are displayed artistically with corrosion and chipped paint, each frame containing a pattern or form that is open to interpretation.  It is set up to resemble Rorschach inkblot tests used in the psychiatric field (I must be going mad myself because all I see in them are cool looking demons).  These opening credits are effective because they prepare the viewer for a movie that deals with an imbalanced mind.  What we perceive to be truth is certainly going to be skewed from the perspective of a protagonist with warped sensibilities.

Spider enters the picture slowly, exiting a train and returning onto the streets of  London.  Gone are the confines of the mental institution that trapped him for so many years; but that cage must have also been his safe and secure haven.  Now he is obviously uncomfortable and unsure of his surroundings.  The release from the asylum was probably against his will, or in the very least, premature.  The halfway house Spider ventures to next may be a slight step up from his previous residence, but that’s debatable.  It’s full of loonies and a Nurse Ratchet-like overseer.  At least the other lunatics seem somewhat cordial next to Spider.  He remains nearly mute, and when he does speak it’s in the indecipherable mumblings.  Usually, he sits hunched over, wrapped up in his four shirts and fractured memories of childhood.

When left alone in his room he scribbles in a journal he keeps hidden under a rug.  Spider’s schizophrenia is apparent, and the more we watch his body language and behavior, his obsessive compulsive disorder becomes more evident.  The layers of clothing; the disgusting yellowed fingers from chain smoking; the puzzles he pieces together; the crazy handwriting scrawled in his journal (completely unreadable to anyone but himself): all of this indicates a man unhinged, but methodical enough to keep some kind of familiar coherence to hold his frayed existence together.

Spider’s journal contains random thoughts that come rushing back to him concerning his childhood.  The memories play out on screen while the adult Spider lurks somewhere in the background; a strange sight to see, if only because many us have yearned at some point to have this “ghost of Christmas past” capability.  He peers through kitchen windows or sulks in corners of the room.  All the while he recites word-for-word each thing his mother (Richardson) said, and his own 10-year-old reply.  For this purpose his memory serves him well and does not yet seem distorted.  There is an obvious admiration for his mother seen, both in the adult and adolescent Spider.  Kudos to the casting of the young child actor (Bradley Hall), as the adult and child’s eyes look eerily similar.  Whenever the father (Byrne) enters the room, fear overcomes the child, and the adult Spider can be seen backing away from him.

Without giving away too much meat of the story, what unravels in flashbacks is a supposed affair between his plumber father and a floozy at the local pub.  After the sordid affair is discovered by Spider’s mother, the father kills and buries her.  Oddly, Spider’s father never acknowledges her disappearance and fully carries on his life with the drunken bimbo.  When young Spider finally accuses his father of murder, the father becomes enraged and insists the boy is daft and his mother is just fine.

Herein lies the problem with the film and the subject matter of schizophrenia.  The viewer is almost constantly unclear of what is reality and what is imagined.  In this psychologically complex film, entire events go unanswered.  Characters become other characters.  At one point Spider himself asks, “Who are you”?  Richardson deftly assumes three different roles on her own.  Are Spider’s accusations of betrayal and eventual murder directed towards his father justified?  The enigmatic reveal at the end of the film makes it seem the father is innocent of those claims.  Yet, because we are dealing with a cracked psyche, we are never certain what really happened.

All of the performances are convincing turns and realistic portrayals.  Even with Fiennes’ sometimes hard to follow yammerings, he does a fine job.  This is essentially a twisted character study, and Fiennes pulls it off admirably on appearance and body language alone.  As always, Cronengerg’s eye is keen.  The dingy set designs and dreary atmosphere are what appealed to me the most.  One of the most shocking aspect is the lack of violence and gore usually found in Cronenberg movies.  Only one scene of blood, and it is minuscule at best!  I’ll sum it up this way… is Spider weird?  Yes.  Are there better movies covering the subject of schizophrenia which are weirder, yet more centered and coherent?  Absolutely.  Spider weaves a tangled web that ultimately becomes impenetrable, but the intricacy of webs always elicits fascination.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“More poetic than clinical in its approach to schizophrenia, suffused with existential dread, this evocation of psychological torment is both sensationally grim and exquisitely realized. This case history is rigorously hallucinated—a vision of ecstatic, lysergic shabbiness that can find a terrible, formal beauty in its protagonist’s haggard posture or the wretched stains on a flophouse wall.”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

Mullick is currently working on an ambitious project called The 1 Second Film. His goal for this film is to generate one million dollars, and donate all profits to the “Global Fund for Women”. For more information visit The 1 Second Film homepage.

Also, For more of Mullick’s work, go to nirvan.com.

FEATURING: Ryo Ishibashi, Masatoshi Nagase, Saya Hagiwara

PLOT: A shocking mass suicide in a train station attracts the attention of the

police and a curious hacker who may have found a link to the seemingly random act.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: This exercise in the Japanese new school of shock horror does not have enough substance to be considered extremely weird.  There are moments that light up the screen with an inspired energy that recalls the best horror-thrillers.  Yet, like a Noh theater performance, Suicide Club chooses to keep actual events close to the chest, relying on long pauses and slow takes to create the mood . Noh theater has dancing and music to fill up the entire performance, though; Suicide Club languishes with scenes that are filled with empty silence and shots that mean nothing.

COMMENTS:  Suicide Club is the odd story of one country’s affinity for self-termination, represented by a strange and tragic mass suicide in a train station.  Why this happens is never explained in a way that leaves one satisfied, but such is the state of the high suicide rate in Japan, and, to be fair, to ask why is almost besides the point. The point seems to be the journey into the strange underbelly of Tokyo and the detectives who must investigate the suicides by journeying into that hoary netherworld.

Well, the detectives and their sole lead, the idiosyncratic hacker Miyoko– I’m sorry, “The Bat”– who has a strong fascination with the tragedy.  This fascination drags her from the safety of her malicious computer activities to a world where secret messages are written in human skin and dropped off at hospitals and where J-Pop groups wield a heady authority over an unassuming generation.  As she becomes wound up in this mystery that seems to go deeper than anyone could have imagined, a youth named Mitsuko also becomes involved when her boyfriend commits suicide.  She too falls into the web of what is appearing more and more to be a sort of suicide club (how titular!) whose members might even be unaware of their membership.   And the deeper she falls, the closer she comes to realizing that she might even be in this unfortunately named club…

But this is all told through the visual narrative, because dialogue is in extremely short supply in this mannered horror exercise.  As is character development.  Or much of anything, really.  Suicide Club is a very visual film, told through a Morse code string of images that reads normal-normal-normal-weird! And when the images are strange or grotesque, the audience becomes intrigued and downright enthused.  But during the slow mood-building scenes, the movie falters in the wake of the sterile, lifeless Tokyo Sono sets up.  It surrounds and eclipses most moments of tension, replacing the anxiety with a vague sense of ennui that does not behoove a horror-thriller.

There are moments of inspired lunacy in Suicide Club that set it apart from the rest of the Japanese formalists, and if you can make it to the middle of the film where we meet the conspicuous character named Genesis, then your patience has truly paid its due diligence, because the film rolls along by then with images too weird and too delightful to spoil for you.  And Suicide Club feels meticulously fabricated in its down time, where the details brim forth from a lack of any real action; seemingly trivial things like the posters hanging up in Mitsumo’s boyfriend’s room are very well designed and hold little clues to the secret waiting at the end.  When it wants to be, Suicide Club has the potential to be a very good weird movie.

So give it a shot.  Suicide Club is worth trying, even if you find it to be a failure.  It’s a labyrinthine horror-thriller with a touch of mystery that will have you guessing, even if the mystery has no real bearing on what actually happens at the end.  Sono delivers what might be one of the only minimalist conspiracy movies, and on that note alone, it’s worth a gander.  Suicide Club is a valiant effort and a weird movie, just not often enough to make it something special.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sono has been making weird, formalist indie films for more than a decade, but [Suicide Club] represents a shift into weird, free-form exploitation. None of it makes any real sense, but it sure does keep you watching.”–Time Out Film Guide

For more from the creators, visit http://www.whitehouseanimationinc.com/.

DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Harry Dean Stanton, Jack Nance, Catherine Coulson

PLOT: A series of six short films spanning director David Lynch’s career from the

1960s through the 1990s.  We track Lynch from his early years as a highly experimental student to a macabre master of the darkly surreal with these films that show a man who needed to grow and challenge himself as a creative force.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As collections of short films go, this is one of the most mercurial and hard-to-peg I’ve ever seen.  There’s really no denying the odd nature of Lynch’s efforts.  The first film alone, a minute-long animated loop of six hideous plaster sculptures throwing up,  stands as a timeless testament to Lynch’s nightmarish creative vision.  And the gut-wrenching scope of his silent feature, entitled “The Grandmother”, is a window into the mind of a radically different artist than the one Lynch has become.  But, honestly, the quality and sheer atmosphere present in most of Lynch’s features feels absent here, and there’s not enough memorable material to consider this a momentous release.

COMMENTS:  Much like a renowned painter or an extremely colorful luchador, a filmmaker’s work becomes more lionized as his fame grows, even his mistakes.  David Lynch is a very famous filmmaker, so it’s only appropriate that this assortment of short subjects should come out to cement his status as an iconic artist and a true visionary in the world of the nightmarish and the utterly bizarre.  But those die-hard fans of the man who seek a diamond in the rough here, a Pollack behind the frame of this small cache of movies, will likely find themselves disappointed, or at the very least conflicted.

If short films represent the transformation of a filmmaker as as he/she goes from one project to another, this gathering of shorts spanning Lynch’s career is a shadowy, rocky road.  Half of these films don’t desire to be much more than insubstantial experiments, hokey dumping grounds for ideas that are really just there to try something out.  They merely exist in a tangible form for the consumer because of the marketable name of Lynch, not because they actually have some sort of deliciously demented merit and are worth seeing for any length of time.  And while the three that are good are indeed very good, it’s easy to put this one on the borderline with the vibes I get from the other three.

Let’s break it down by feature, shall we?

“Six Figures getting Sick (Six Times)” – A minute long film loop featuring a set of six hideous sculptures, their faces locked in esoteric agony, as vomit and nonsensical animated mess is drawn on top of them while a siren blares in the background.  It is, in essence, Lynch’s first piece of work, and honestly there’s not much to say.  It’s an experiment; a bold experiment, to be sure, that leaves you with a sense of unease, but it’s only worth watching to sate curiosity and say, “Hey, I just saw Lynch’s first movie EVER!”

“The Alphabet” – A superior take on Lynch’s conceptual animation, this one, at a mere 4 minutes, has more of the verve and deep-seated weirdness of his later works. Halved between real footage of a strange woman being tormented by unknown forces and an animated short with letters morphing and killing each other in a macabre, borderline hilarious fashion while creepy children recite the alphabet, “The Alphabet” is less of a throwaway project and more of a statement than its predecessor, and a good addition in this collection.  Keep an ear out for the Monty Python-esque noises emanating from some of the letters!

“The Grandmother” – This is easily the best one of the bunch.  Shot in 1970, this glorious 35mm beauty is Lynch’s first narrative.  It is a silent feature about a boy wanting someone’s care and attention.  His parents are mean and neglectful, so he makes the obvious decision to grow his own Grandmother by planting some seeds (OF COURSE!).  “The Grandmother” succeeds by keeping the narrative simple and the mood very surreal.  The odd, experimental music that moves the narrative along is wonderfully bizarre, and will haunt you long after you’ve turned off the film.  This is a stunning reminder that when Lynch cuts the melodrama and opts for something less pedestrian, he can make art that sings high from the rooftops into the twisted dreams of men.  After you’ve seen it, try getting the image of the young boy’s creepy grandmother cradling him in her arms out of your head; it’s not easy.

“The Amputee” - Lynch’s debut on video, “The Amputee” is another experiment we could have done without.  Literally, the only reason this thing was made was to test out different video stocks.  It is a single scene in which Catherine Coulson is an amputee sitting in a chair writing a very banal letter to someone while David Lynch himself changes her horribly bloody bandages.  That’s it.  Is it strange?  Yes.  But it’s incredibly pointless, and it has no artistic value to speak of.

“The Cowboy and the Frenchman” -  This is without a doubt the worst short here.  And it has the second longest run time, to boot!  I know there are people who will defend this short up and down, but this really is the antithesis of anything artistic, funny, or good.  I love Lynch, but I am ashamed to have seen this short.  Created for French television, this 1988 release is about a Frenchman wandering into a dude ranch run by Harry Dean Stanton, the cowboy.  There’s a big language barrier at first, but with the help of a very altruistic Indian and some mutual understanding, the cowboys and the French guy have a rip-roaring good time.  Whoo.  I’m sure Lynch intended this to be comedic, much as Jim Jarmusch likes to add “comedic” elements to his work that stick out as unnaturally as a stove pipe protruding from a tree, but this was awful, and my only bit of good news about this is that it steadily declines in awfulness as the short goes on.  The end is almost tolerable, but I posit that the first ten minutes hurt too much for that to make much difference.

“Lumiere: Premonitions Following An Evil Deed” - One of my personal favorites, this fifty second short was submitted as part of the Lumiere project in the mid 1990s, which called together all the great directors of the day and presented them with the challenge of making a short film with the very first motion picture camera, developed by the Lumiere brothers.  Having seen the entire Lumiere Project, with all the amazing directors they scrounged up, I must admit that Lynch’s was by far the best, beating out artists like Spike Lee, John Boorman, and Wim Wenders.  The Lumiere camera could only hold about 52 seconds of film, had no sound capabilities, and realistically only three takes could have been shot with it, so Lynch had to work within these constraints, but what comes out of it is sheer madness that really speaks to his talents as a director.  There isn’t a narrative to speak of, but all we know is that a murder has taken place, there is a nude Asian woman being held captive in a tank of water somewhere, and a family’s nervous quality time is interrupted by what looks to be a darkened, deformed man.  The music is eerie and intense, the bad film quality adds to the ambiance, and all together I think it is a definite artistic success.

So in the end, we see that Lynch is an artist who, above all things, wants to push the medium and the message of his work to a very unseen, intangible new realm.  In the evolution of his craft, we can see that quest made manifest through miniature triumphs and pitfalls.  As a collection, this is certainly a dream for devoted Lynch fans and anyone interested in how to make a short that’s far from normal.  But for those hungry for art or a deeper meaning, it’s rough traveling through the thoughts of such a scattered and incongruous soul, especially when his experiments and failures are piled onto his legacy, such as they are.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“These six unnervingly surreal slices may vary in their quality and impact, but they are well nigh unmissable for anyone devoted to Lynch’s special brand of cherry pie.”–Anton Bitel, Film 4

FEATURING:  Marina de Van, Laurent Lucas, Léa Drucker

PLOT: Esther is a nice yuppie girl who enjoys her office job.  She also enjoys dismantling

and consuming her own body.  After disfiguring her leg in an accident, Esther develops a necrotic fascination with herself and begins to self-mutilate.  She engages in auto-cannibalism while having hallucinations of limb disassociation.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: In My Skin is a different kind of horror movie. It plays on those grisly nightmares about things like inexplicably sudden tooth and hair loss, parasitism and other subconscious fears centering on uncontrollable bodily damage. There are no phantoms or monsters in De Van’s film, no outside threat. The horror comes from within as a woman sinks into insanity and demolishes her body.

COMMENTS:  In My Skin is a study of morbid preoccupation with the physical nature of the human condition.  It explores dissatisfaction with body image, and the finding of a decadent delight in its destruction.  The lead character seeks a deep psychological satiation through bodily deconstruction and self-consumption.  She tries in vain to attack inexplicable and inexorable anxiety via the demolition of the human vessel.

Esther (De Van) falls on some construction debris in back of a friend’s house and gashes her leg open.  Oddly insensitive to the pain, she does not sense the severity of her ghastly injury.  She discovers the extent of the damage later, but even then, she goes to a bar before seeking treatment.  When she finally does obtain medical assistance, she perversely declines measures to prevent disfigurement.  At this point, her psyche undergoes a sinister change.

In My Skin is reminiscent of a Ray Bradbury story entitled “Skeleton” (one of two he wrote with the same title, and bundled together in a short book entitled, Skeletons, published by Subterranean Press in 1945).  In the story, a man suddenly becomes preoccupied with and disturbed by his own bones.  A quack doctor convinces him that his skeleton is indeed the source of the problem, and that his is not a unique condition.  The man begins a gruesome journey into madness.  Feeling invaded by his own skeleton, he finally cuts out his own bones.  He feasts on the marrow and fashions one of his femurs into a flute.

Like the Bradbury character, Esther becomes similarly self-destructive.  The film never offers a clear explanation for the progression of her horrifying degeneration, but Esther derives a twisted, repulsive fulfillment from disassembling herself.

Esther is at first ambivalent to her leg injury, but soon becomes obsessed with it.  She fixates on the cuts on her legs.  She is fascinated with their disfiguring nature and with the healing process which she compulsively strives to defeat. Esther stares at, caresses and picks at her wounds.  Then she decides to deliberately exacerbate them.  She slowly, sardonically slices her damaged leg repeatedly with a jagged shard of metal.  She becomes engrossed by her disfigurement, repeatedly and violently abusing herself throughout the film.  Interspersed with these gruesome episodes are scenes of her otherwise normal, daily professional and personal life.  Her boyfriend and office companion become concerned for her, but are unaware of the full extent of her burgeoning psychosis and self mutilation.

At a business dinner, Esther quietly breaks down at the table.  First, she becomes absorbed with the meat on her plate. She impulsively and uncontrollably reaches into it and wads it up several times.  It seems as if the arm and hand performing this action are beyond her control.  She must grab them with her other hand to stop them.  So far, the other diners don’t notice.

Then, in a chilling scene, Esther hallucinates that her arm is completely detached from her body and lying on the restaurant table.  It appears neatly severed, though no one else can see it.  Esther gazes at it in horrified fascination. She is having some sort of psychotic delusional episode regarding her limbs, yet she is still more or less in touch with her surroundings.  She suffers mental turmoil, becoming increasingly agitated and focused on her arm and her injured leg.  She cruelly stabs her arm with a fork under the tablecloth.  Her tension mounts and finally she can’t restrain herself anymore.  She sneaks off to the establishment’s wine cellar and begins to attack herself with a knife and fork.

As Esther’s downward spiral gains momentum, she isolates herself from the world in a hotel room. Then, she engages in an all out orgy of atrocious self mutilation.  Not only has she developed an obvious fetish centered around her own living tissue, she seems to be compelled to separate it from herself and then eat it.  Perhaps she is trying to rid herself of something else.  Excising skin and muscle, then consuming it offers some sort of deliverance.

Esther is the main subject of the film and she is the center of most of the shots.  This centrism on Esther forces the viewer to inhabit her and to see her delusions from her self absorbed perspective.  Esther takes delight in her twisted descent and seems unbothered by her incapacity for self control.  Her actions are appalling and repulsive. One wants desperately for her to stop.

Sheer horror is created when the viewer is forced to experience her acts from this first person perspective.  Esther is driven to cut and, finally, cannibalize herself, biting into and devouring her own arm, sucking her own blood. She smears her blood all over herself and revels in it as if deriving sexual ecstasy.  Then she starts in on her face.  Her macabre obsession snowballs into further mutilation and playing with her detached flesh.  She cuts off a lengthy swath of her skin and tans it to make a grisly souvenir.

Watching a woman’s profane satiation and release via her self destruction is an excruciatingly difficult endurance contest.  The viewer may feel as if he is going to go mad, perhaps as mad as Esther.  The scenes of Esther hacking, slicing, scraping, and eating her own flesh are depicted as non-sensationally as if the director was documenting a tourist on a Sunday stroll.  The film’s visual footprint is foreboding and darkly claustrophobic.  It makes the viewer feel caught in a horrible stifling trap.

In My Skin is a shocking spectacle, but not a blindly gratuitous one.  Neither is it a profound art film.  While it could have had more complexity and depth, In My Skin is not lacking in characterization or purpose.  The film is an examination of morbidity.  It is a superficial exploration of a unique psychotic rejection of the normal human condition and a resulting narcissistic obsession with gruesome body modification and perverse self-cannibalism.  By avoiding a grandiose quest into the sources of Esther’s anguish, de Van allows In My Skin to pass right to the terror element like scissors through paper.  In its simplicity it creates substantial, distilled horror that is more than skin deep.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Poised somewhere in the cut between a kitchen sink docudrama about self-harming and a haemoglobin-heavy horror flick, In My Skin is a decidedly curious film that often feels more like an endurance test than an insightful drama.”–Jamie Russell, BBC (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Michael Almereyda

FEATURING: Clarence Williams III, David Arquette (who also co-produced), Ally Sheedy, former super model Shalom Harlow, model Gloria Reuben, Karl Geary, rhythm and blues star Ernie K-Doe

PLOT: Happy Here and Now is a surrealistic satire in which a young woman tries to find

her missing sister by investigating eccentric New Orleans characters who are entangled in a web of cyber-intrigue.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Happy Here and Now is a dream-like atmosphere piece which artfully combines unusual visual and acoustic elements. This movie is unusual in its story telling structure. It guides us through a netherworld of oddball people, their cryptic actions and strange gadgets via a series of vignettes that are ultimately connected.

COMMENTS: In this quirky odyssey, Canadian actress Liane Balaban plays Amelia. She has come to New Orleans to locate a missing sister who has erased every trace of herself. Clarence Williams III plays a limping ex CIA agent with an unexplained leg wound that just won’t heal.

Williams forensically dissects the sister’s laptop hard drive. He finds traces of cryptic conversations held online with a poetic but sinister misfit (Karl Geary). The stranger uses a special technology to change his real-time appearance and country of origin on webcam-conference.

Amelia attempts to determine the presence of a connection between the late night Internet chats and her sister’s disappearance. She does so with Thomas’ assistance by contacting Geary’s puzzling character and conducting a fresh set of webcam conversations. What are his motives, what is he truly capable of? Why does he change his appearance and answer questions with questions?

Did this enigmatic stranger lure Amelia’s sister to her fate in a snuff film? Amelia must figure out how to trace and outwit him by playing a game of deception online.

Throughout her quest for answers, Amelia encounters a cascade of artistic dilettantes. One of several exceptions is the real-life Ernie K-Doe, famous for his 1961 number one hit, “Mother-in -Law,” who appears as himself in his actual New Orleans club.

Nearly all of the characters are in some way unknowingly interconnected via a subplot orchestrated by David Arquette’s character, Eddie Mars. Mars is a creatively misguided, self-employed exterminator who entwines the protagonists via a film project. It is a soft-porn, direct-to-digital Internet film about a time traveling Nicola Tesla. (And there might be some termites and a spherical fire breaking out in a space station, he hasn’t decided yet.)

Happy Here and Now is a dream-like atmosphere piece which artfully combines unusual visual and acoustic elements. It highlights a smattering of New Orleans lore and culture. Thomas’ character weaves a narrative of local lore as the camera pans by local cemeteries, barbecue joints, The Napoleon House, and a few other unconventional landmarks. We get a nice sample of New Orleans homes and interiors, blues clubs, fauna, and steamy avenues by streetlight. Odd characters such as man wearing Napoleonic clothing wander the streets.

The film is open-ended as to its message. Enthusiasts of movies that conclude with a concrete sense of finality should look at Happy Here and Now as being a piece that is intended to inspire the imagination.

The film features musician, performance artist and electronics whiz “Quintron” (Robert Rolston’s stage name) as himself. Quintron has distinguished himself in arcane circles for, among other things, inventing clever but peculiar electronic musical instruments. One of his Tesla coils is featured in the film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Strange by even its director’s ultra-eccentric standards, Happy Here and Now takes Michael Almereyda’s usual reality-blurring, video-mediated experimentation to new what-the-f*** levels…” -David Ng, The Village Voice (2005)

FEATURING: Richard Gere

PLOT:  A Washington Post reporter loses his wife in an automobile accident,

then finds himself spirited away to a West Virgina town where the residents are spotting monsters and undergoing horrifying precognitive hallucinations.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Not weird enough.  Taking its cues from parapsychology and cryptozoology, and positioning itself as a “true story,” The Mothman Prophecies paranoidly posits a world where omniscient Mothmen are simply a part of the natural order.  I wouldn’t want to dishonor the producer’s sincere “the truth is out there” vision by suggesting there’s something a little weird about it.  On a more serious note, The Mothman Prophecies is an effective chiller with a mildly unique spin on a conventional horror yarn that generates enough unease to make it worth checking out for fans of the eerie side of the weird, but it’s ultimately too lightweight and conventional to be more than a passing diversion.

COMMENTS: Director Mark Pellington, who previously explored themes of conspiracy and paranoia in the thriller Arlington Road, translates his talents to horror well and does a very fine job of pleasantly chilling the viewer’s blood through the early segments of the Mothman Prophecies.  Unexplained occurrences, from an impossible car detour that lands our protagonist on the Ohio border with West Virginia to a yokel who swears he’s been visited by Richard Gere before, pile on top of each other until the viewer is pleasantly on edge and disoriented.  When the antagonist is eventually revealed, his powers verge on the omnipotent and his motives lie firmly in the realm of the inscrutable.  The conclusion ties things up in a nice little bow–sort of, because all the pieces resolved belong to subplots.  The central mystery of  the Mothman is never even touched, which frustrated viewers who crave nothing more than narrative cohesion but shouldn’t bother weirdophiles a bit.  Despite its silly premise, Mothman is a highly effective unease-generating machine, which is (or at least, should have been) its only aspiration. 

The “based on a true story” angle is patently a scam.  Although it’s true that there were “Mothman” sightings in West Virginia in the 1960s and a bridge collapsed soon thereafter, anyone who doesn’t recognize the convenient presence of an attractive romantic foil for Richard Gere and the archetypal visit to the reclusive old wizard for a bit of exposition and dire warnings as the work of a screenwriter rather than a documentarian probably should be permanently ineligible for jury duty.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…thriller that purports to be based on true events but operates in that bombastic plane of reality reserved for the apocalyptic horror movie.”–Jan Stuart, Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Kari Matchett

PLOT: Just as in the 1997 surprise hit, eight strangers wake up stripped of

their memories in a mysterious, deadly cube composed of indistinguishable rooms–but this second generation “hypercube” has some new tricks to play on its captives.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Cube 2: Hypercube can get pretty weird, especially when the film throws in gratuitous alternate realities in an attempt to up the original Cube‘s ante.  The sequel also does a fair-to-middling job of recreating the atmosphere of paranoia and existential anxiety from the original.  The first movie is a classic, but if there is to be room for more than one Cube movie on the list of 366, Hypercube needs to take the series in a startling, original new direction.  This, it fails to do; the sequel merely attempts to provide this audience more of what they loved about the first movie.  It can’t possibly achieve this feat, however, because what people loved about the original was it’s originality: the shock and surprise of finding a low-budget independent science fiction gem that was thoughtful, exciting, and weird.

COMMENTS:  Cube 2: Hypercube is of interest mainly to fans of the original who want to revisit the cube and hope only for a few new twists.  The CGI special effects are mildly upgraded, and the cube has a new gleaming white color scheme, which may make some happy.  One of the things that made the original so exhilarating, however, was the varying reactions of characters to the predicament of being trapped inside the bizarre structure: some fight to survive, some give up hope, some become paranoid and suspect their fellow travelers know something about the cube and are trying to deceive them, some simply go mad.  The way the trapped inmates bounced off one another made Cube at times seem more like a character-centered play rather than an effects-centered movie.  Although Cube 2 tires to recapture this interplay, wooden acting from several of the leads frustrates the attempt.

Cube 2: Hypercube also stumbles when it takes baby steps towards trying to explain why the cube exists.  In the original, although the structure exhibited signs of order that suggested a diabolical intelligence behind it, there was no unambiguous hint to its origin or purpose; this made the cube a powerful metaphor for brute existence.  While trying to recapture the ambiance of the first movie, Cube 2 deliberately takes steps towards demolishing its essence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Cube 2 is somewhat more gimmicky and certainly less conceptually neat than the first Cube was. There’s lot of fascinatingly weird happenings and these are all eventually given an explanation – alas not one that comes with the beautiful sense of a puzzle falling into place that we saw in the first film. The disparity can clearly be seen in comparing the story structure of the two – the first film has the logic of a detective story unfolding, whereas Cube 2 is merely a flight through a collapsing labyrinth.” –Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Movie Review Site