DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer

FEATURING: Pavel Liska, Jan Tríska, Anna Geislerová

PLOT: A mentally unbalanced man meets a modern day Marquis de Sade who convinces him

to check himself into a bizarre asylum where the patients roam free.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Readers may think I’m a lunatic myself for not inducting this tale involving the Marquis de Sade, an asylum run by chicken-farming lunatics, and animated steaks onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies on the first ballot.  To tell the truth, Lunacy comes about as close as a movie can to being a first-ballot inductee without making it.  In defense of my decision to leave it off the List for the time being, I point out that Lunacy may actually be Jan Svankajer’s most conventional movie.  If you mentally remove the startling but inessential stop-animation transitions between scenes, then squint hard, it looks like just a regular horror movie; the director insists as much in his prologue to the film.  Given that this is Svankmajer’s most “normal” and accessible movie, if Lunacy makes the List, then all the Czech director’s work should automatically make it.

COMMENTS:  The trailer explains that ” Edgar Allan Poe + the Marquis de Sade + Jan Svankmajer = Lunacy.”  It’s self-evident that combining these three uniquely perverse talents should produce something singularly strange; the fun in watching the movie is in seeing how they actually mix.  Poe adds the least to the recipe, providing mere plot.  Adaptations of two different stories by the doom-laden 19th century Romantic make appearances here; one is a digression from the main plotline that’s fun but unnecessary, while the other supplies the basic conceit for the entire second half of the movie.  Because the first half of the film is devoted to a long introduction to the characters, with that excursion into an interesting but unrelated Poe tale, Lunacy‘s story doesn’t flow as well as it might; the plot doesn’t really get started in earnest until the movie hits the halfway mark on its run time.  Other than basic story ideas, there is not much of a “Poe” feel to the rest of the film, except whatever lingering flavor comes from the passive, psychologically tormented protagonist Jean (stringy-haired, unshaven Liska, who looks like a raggedy Czech Johnny Depp).  It’s De Sade who dominates this blend, just as the character referred to only as “the Marquis” (almost) always dominates the other characters when he’s onscreen.  With his charmingly cruel smile, Jan Tríska attacks the role of the “Marquis” with roguish relish; it’s like watching your kindly grandfather on screen playing a dirty old man.  Svankmajer also takes an obvious delight in staging the blasphemous Sadean rituals the Marquis enacts in his cellar, which become the centerpiece of the film’s first half.  The Marquis hammers nails into a crucifix while devil-worshiping partiers eat chocolate cake shaped like a cross in front of a chained woman; he paints crosses on the backs of naked women and sprinkles communion wafers on them as he rants at God and dares Him to strike him dead.  Like Ken Russell, Svankmajer has a way of ritualizing depravity too make it look elegant, erotic and enticing.  The Marquis gets off one of de Sade’s patented philosophical atheist harangues, and, like the victims in Sade’s novels, Jean is too dim and naive to argue against him effectively.  But, if the Marquis Svankmajer gives us here has a fault, it’s that he’s too kindhearted and likeable.  He pulls his punches, never kills any babies or tortures bound women with hot pokers or plays games with scat; he’s more prankster than monster.  By the end of the movie, by design, the Marquis becomes a sympathetic figure, but even before this, the director’s sympathies seem to be with the Marquis.  As for Svankmajer’s role in the triumvirate, he puts his mark on the affair with the many stop-motion bumper segments that indulge his long-time obsession with animated meat.  We see porterhouse marionettes, disembodied tongues wrestling (or copulating) on an operating table, and meat bursting out of the armpit of a statue, while tinny piano roll music plays. Sometimes the animated segments comment on the action in the narrative (steaks are tarred and feathered), but just as often they are complete non-sequiturs (tongues emerge from every orifice on a marble bust, including unexpected ones).  Though the plot’s unlikely and very twisted, it’s these constant intrusions of segmented surrealism that make the movie truly weird, and brand it as unmistakably Svankmajer.  Overall, Lunacy may not be this director’s best film, but Svankmajer is one of the only filmmakers who’s constitutionally incapable of delivering a boring film; he can play with the same motifs and images (living cuts of meat, chickens, bug-eyed animal skeletons) over and over without ever draining them of their power.  With its familiar horror film structure and the clear segregation of the surrealism away from the plot, Lunacy may make a good “starter Svankmajer” for the uninitiated (though it’s way too perverted for grandma, unless you have a really hip grannie).

Many reviewers see Lunacy as a political allegory on the current state of Eastern Europe, with the Marquis representing the licentious excesses of democratic capitalism and the asylum’s old guard representing the iron-fisted order imposed by the Communists.  Svankmajer himself went to pains to personally record a prologue to the film stating that Lunacy is “just” a horror movie (“with all of the degeneracy peculiar to that genre”) and explicitly saying that the film is not intended as “Art.”  The movie can be enjoyed as “just” a creepy spectacle, and anyone who insists on looking for a “deeper” meaning (as always) runs the risk of missing out on the film’s eerie non-rational magic, but the light allegory does add something to the picture.  Personally, I think that the entire disclaimer is just Svankmajer Jan-king our collective chains.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“These goofy bits — dancing steaks! beer-lapping tongues! — echo at once ‘Gumby’ and the dark Dada whimsy of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animation. Its brazen perversity makes you laugh.  But not as much as Svankmajer probably wants… Svankmajer comes off as the brooding Eastern European pessimist who thrives on hearing himself complain about the hopeless darkness of it all.”–Chris Garcia, Austin American-Statesman (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Newtonian Vibes,” who added that all Svankmajer’s movies  “all be appreciated for the beauty and strangeness of them.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

In this first episode, a drifter searches for an environment that suits him. Alas, the one he finds turns out to be less than satisfactory.

FEATURING:  Elisha Cuthbert, Camilla Belle, Edie Falco, Martin Donovan, Katy Mixon

PLOT: A deaf girl becomes ensnared in her adoptive family’s amoral dysfunctions.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:   The Quiet is an artfully produced, comparatively non-formulaic independent film, but it’s not a dramatic enough departure from the thriller genre to constitute a truly weird viewing experience.

COMMENTS:  Strong sexual themes ground this strange tale of a family slowly going insane.  After her father’s untimely death, deaf-mute teenager Dot (Belle) is taken in by her godparents (Donovan, Falco) who from outward appearances have a conventional, affluently idyllic suburban life along with their cheerleader daughter Nina (Cuthbert).  Dot’s transition is derailed by increasingly disturbing conflicts and revelations. Her new family has dark secrets.

A sick, twisted dysfunctionality plagues the household.  Trapped between an opiate addict mother, licentious father, homicidal sister, and perverted new beau, Dot struggles to keep her perspective.  Unable to readily communicate, and with no outside party to turn to, Dot is at a disadvantage when her demented new family draws her into a sordid web of immorality and charade.  The line between spider and fly becomes blurred, however, when it turns out that Dot harbors her own eerie enigma.

The Quiet rips the facade from blissful, suburban tranquility in the tradition of movies such as American Beauty and The Safety Of Objects.  Less satirical than the former and not as convoluted as the later, The Quiet is a suspenseful drama with an hypnotic narrative tone reminiscent of One Day Like Rain and Make-Out with Violence.

The Quiet is a well produced film with a perverse story.  It does not set out to be a black comedy, or a sophisticated social indictment of suburbia, although it contains some elements of both.  Neither is it a movie with a message or mere exploitation.  The Quiet is a simple, racy, psychological thriller.  With some hauntingly memorable dialogue, it is arty yet lucid, brooding and visually dark.  While more twists and turns would have provided greater depth, it is structurally complete enough to be worthwhile for patrons seeking a departure from blockbusters, crowd-pleasers, and annoying Lifetime Network potboilers.

Feminist director Jamie Babbit’s other films include But I’m A Cheerleader and Itty Bitty Titty Comittee.  Viewers will recognize Cuthbert from the sensational The Girl Next Door.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…flirts with the trappings of exploitation cinema without going all the way. The director… suggestively crowds her two talented leads together, but can’t push them or the film into the fairy-tale surrealism to which she seems to aspire.”–Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

The Quiet trailer

DIRECTED BY: Ilya Khrjanovsky

FEATURING: Marina Vovchenko, Yuri Laguta, Sergey Shnurov

PLOT: Three Moscow strangers meet at a bar and tell tall-tales, and then we follow what

happens to each of them after they leave.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s weird, indubitably. The problem with this cold, wandering drama is that very few viewers will have patience with its molasses pace and murky symbolism; it’s slow without being hypnotic, and mystifying without being mysterious.  It’s difficult to reject out-of-hand a film with high critical marks, excellent technique, and definite weirdness, but 4 seems too dry and directionless to resonate with many non-Russians.

COMMENTS: The shadow of Tarkovsky must still cast over the shoulder of every weird Russian filmmaker, just as the legacy of Lynch haunts their American counterparts.  The master’s influence can be seen throughout 4 in the lovely, leisurely treks through misty tundra; heard in the sound collages mixing mutated railroad clicks and hisses with synths and the baying of far off hounds; and felt in the appropriation of one of Tarkovsky’s favorite symbols, the dog.  The dogs who prowl the rubble of 4‘s Moscow streets and chew up villager’s livelihoods are not the loyal, mystical, otherworldly observers of Stalker and Nostalghia, however; they are remnants of social upheaval and agents of chaos.  With it’s Kafkaesque moments, portentous dialogues, mutant piglets and nightmare crones, incidents of Khrjanovsky’s feature debut conjure up a gloomy mystery that would have fit comfortably into a Tarkovsky film; but unlike its inspirations, it lacks much of a story, is missing an undercurrent of hope that cuts the despair, and has no emotional core.  The film likely reflects the mood of early capitalist Russia, circa 2005: ashamed of the past, already weary of the present, and fearful of the future.  Maybe the fact that the movie captures the latest iteration of Russian melancholy so perfectly is what makes it difficult to watch, and harder to love.  As the story begins we follow three contemporary Muscovites: a meat packer, a prostitute, and a musician.  They meet in a bar late at night and tell each other a series of escalating tall tales, ending with a claim by the meat packer that he has helped oversee Soviet cloning experiments, and that the clones walk among us.  After their  extremely long, attention-taxing dialogue which plays out over several cocktails, the threesome parts; we follow each of their separate stories—in theory.  In practice, the story of prostitute Marina Vovchenko returning to her boozy country village for a funeral takes up far more time than the others.  Vovchenko’s frequently nude body is stunning—a true miracle of nature—but the countryside is nightmarish.  The economy of the isolated village was built around the production of folksy dolls.  The townsfolk have a crude secret for giving their dolls a singularly realistic texture and appearance: the skin is made partly from half-masticated bread.  The dead woman was the only one in the hamlet who could fashion lifelike faces, and the entire fate of the village now seems to be in the hands of Marat, her bereaved spouse, who must figure out a way to revitalize the doll-based economy.  Other than the prostitute and three other beautiful busty females returning home for the funeral, he is the only young person in the village, and the only male.  The rest of the hamlet is made up of old crones whose only talent is chewing bread, and whose main interest is in drinking liters of vodka every night and acting like Hags Gone Wild, St. Petersburg edition.  They slobber, compare sagging breasts, engage in food fights, and make obscene pantomimes with the dolls, night after night.  Vovchenko seems trapped there, unable to leave, and there’s a nightmarish aspect to the nightly bacchanalia: it’s Gummo in the dacha.   In Russian iconography, old women are typically revered as the custodians of the culture, so to see them depicted this way suggests the filmmakers see Russia’s past as no more attractive than the cold, soulless present where stray dogs wander streets that are randomly pounded to rubble by giant pistons.  The funeral excursion is by far the most interesting of the segments (the other two involve an absurd interrogation and a melancholy home life).  But the extraordinary focus on the prostitute’s third of the tale makes the story feel strangely unbalanced—even sloppily planned—and as effectively bizarre as the drunken escapades are, they quickly become repetitive.  4 is worth a look for the patient and those who thrill to the pageantry of perverse geriatric peasantry, but it will probably resonate more to Russophiles (and Russophobes) than to the average viewer.

Look for items grouped in quartets—people, cars, round mutant piglets—which are scattered throughout the movies like clues (but clues to what?  One of the characters tells us that four is one of the few numbers with no numerological significance to any culture—though he’s wrong about that).  The script is by Russian cult novelist Vladimir Sorokin.  Ilya Khrjanovsky is the son of famous Russian animator Andrei Khrjanovsky.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…seriously weird pic has a few flat stretches, but its bawdy comedy, bravura sound design and uncanny atmosphere will turn on auds with a taste for deeply oddball fare and baffle others.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (Venice Film Festival)

FEATURING: Stephanie Leonidas, Jason Barry, Gina McKee, Rob Brydon

PLOT: A bratty teenager who works as a juggler in her parents’ circus is transported to a

devious world of her own imagination after her mother falls ill.  With the help of a cowardly juggler, she navigates a crumbling surrealistic city where everyone wears masks in search of a charm that will help bring her back to her own life.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Dave McKean’s impressively out-there creature and set design certainly gives MirrorMask some memorable visuals, the story and characters are lifted right out of typical fantasy stock, resulting in a beautiful but ultimately conventional movie.  366weirdmovies adds: I agree that MirrorMask shouldn’t go on the List; but, I will admit that when the androids popped out of their pods and gave the heroine a “bad girl” makeover while singing a weirdly harmonized version of the Carpenters’ “Close to You,” I was strongly tempted to nominate it as a Candidate.

COMMENTS: Popular fantasy author Neil Gaiman teamed up Dave McKean, the cover artist for his “Sandman” comics, delivering a script that revisits themes from his young adult book Coraline (which itself draws on archetypes found in The Wizard of Oz and “Alice in Wonderland“) for a movie that recalls the wild, inventive imagery of “Sandman” and his Neverwhere BBC miniseries.  MirrorMask is an allegorical adventure about a girl who grows up quickly, redeeming her past selfish actions through new-found respect for her parents and her own talents.  It’s a family film, and is at times bogged down by patronizing, simplistic dialogue and obvious symbolism, including a world literally divided by “Light” and “Shadow.”  There’s even a girl whose clear displays of “evilness” are fishnet stockings, cigarettes, and (gasp!) kissing a boy.

For all its narrative flaws, the film still charms with the help of a talented cast.  Stephanie Leonidas is excellent as Helena, effectively capturing the many moods of a teenage girl while still creating a sympathetic character.  Jason Barry works well with his chatty, comic-relief sidekick character, despite the inherent cliches in his personality.  But it’s Gina McKee in her triple role as Helena’s mother, the “Queen of Light”, and the “Queen of Darkness” who really leaves an impression.  She navigates between frustrated working mother, soft-spoken adviser, and tyrannical control-freak with ease.

MirrorMask is worth a look if solely for the visuals, which are truly captivating and imaginative.  The sets are infused with yellow and brown tones, soft light, and glowing edges.  Several sequences combine 2-D animation and intricate ink-and-paper drawings.  The live-action actors interact with a wealth of strange digitally-rendered creatures, some of which are freakishly collaged together with video feeds, human appendages, and geometric forms.  Scenes of slow-moving giants contorting in the sky, floating fish swimming through the streets, the main character’s stop-motion make-over to the sounds of “Close to You”—these fantastic images have a lasting impact.  The predictable and familiar story, discordant jazz soundtrack, and slightly dated special effects cannot mask how magnificent an imagination lies behind the film.

366weirdmovies adds:  I found MirrorMask to be a movie whose imaginative virtues slightly outweigh it’s narrative flaws, making it a pretty good choice for anyone looking for a light and dreamy eye-candy fantasy.  Produced by the Jim Henson Company (but virtually puppet free),  the movie features visuals that are always inventive and occasionally astounding.  The orbiting giants, the cubist librarian, the weird little rainbow-winged cats with disturbing convex human faces and the Dark Queen’s automaton handmaids are all high points.  If there’s a downside it’s that this world, while attractive, is too digital; it needed more analog warmth.  It looks like something that was cooked up in a studio with banks of computer monitors rather than in a teenage girl’s unconscious.  The primary emotional trauma young Helena is trying to work through in her dream really isn’t gripping enough to involve us in her psychological journey (she’s upset over having said a few thoughtlessly harsh words to her mom just before she fell ill).   About midway through, almost as if they figured out the primary subtext wasn’t carrying its weight, the movie suddenly springs the “good mom/bad mom” conceit that worked so well in Coraline on us.  Still, with all its faults, I can see how MirrorMask would make a hell of an impression on a girl who saw it at the right age.  Although the movie is awfully pretty, I couldn’t help comparing it unfavorably to Jim Henson’s previous girl-coming-of-age fantasy Labyrinth (1986), which had just as much picaresque adventure but more psychological depth, darkness, and coherence.  Not to mention, David Bowie’s soundtrack blows away the Kenny G-ish smooth jazz theme here, which doesn’t make me think “trapped in a timeless dream world” so much as “trapped in a 1993 Starbucks.”

Alex responds: I’m glad you agree about the soundtrack!  It really takes away from some of the great visual scenes—it’s just distracting.  And while I’ve read many comparisons to Labyrinth, I actually think MirrorMask is a bit better.  I loved Labyrinth as a kid but re-watched it recently and found it lacking.  It’s totally worth it for David Bowie, though, of course!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Landscapes recede vaguely into dissolving grotesqueries as Helena wanders endlessly past one damn thing after another, and since everything that happens in this world is absolutely arbitrary, there’s no way to judge whether any action is helpful or not. It’s a world where no matter what Helena does, an unanticipated development will undo her effort and require her to do something else. Watching ‘MirrorMask’ I suspected the filmmakers began with a lot of ideas about how the movie should look, but without a clue about pacing, plotting or destination.” –Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: George Lopez, Cayden Boyd, Taylor Lautner, Taylor Dooley

PLOT:  Dreamy young Max invents the imaginary superheroes Sharkboy and Lavagirl from

Planet Drool to brighten his dull existence; when his dream journal is stolen by a schoolyard bully, Planet Drool is taken over by tyrants and his imaginary friends whisk him away to his disintegrating dream world to set things right.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  The childishly imaginative The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3D shows all the evidence of having been taken out of the hands of the original scenarist, 7 year old Racer Max Rodriguez, and script-doctored to fit into a kiddie film format that would be more comfortable for adults.  The tale heads off in weird directions, obliterating the line between fantasy and reality as it meanders down a stream-of-consciousness style from superheroes to roller coasters to electrical plug villains to omniscient floating head robots.  It’s a near-perfect exhibition of the hyperactive schizophrenia of a typical seven-year old.  So far, so good; but then, someone—my money is on director Robert Rodriguez—imposed a standard three-act structure on the story, smoothed out the non-sequiturs, and tossed in a moral about realizing your dreams to placate stern, rational adults.  Had they stuck to Racer’s original vision, Sharkboy and Lavagirl, as the first script actually written by a seven year old, might have turned out as one of the weirdest movies ever made.

COMMENTS:  Sharks are not weird.  Pomegranates are weird.  I base this conclusion on the fact that the Armenian director Sergei Parajanov once chose to make a weird movie about pomegranates, but no one has ever made a weird movie about sharks.  Sharks are b-movie heavies, excuses for bad special effects and senseless gratuitous violence.  They serve the same cinematic purpose as other non-weird bad guy archetypes like giant spiders, psychotic killers in hockey-masks, and Paris Hilton.

Mega-sharks, on the other hand, may be weird, but I thought of them too late.

Robert Rodriguez, who alternates making weirdish adult cult movies like Grindhouse and Sin City with wacky children’s movies like the Spy Kids series, loves sharks, a love affair that began when Steven Spielberg’s Jaws premiered on his 7th birthday.  For recreation, he goes scuba diving in shark-infested waters in a steel cage.  He’s passed down his obsession with sharks to his son Racer, who, between the ages of six and seven, made up the character of Sharkboy in stories he told to amuse himself.  In an attempt to recapture the spirit of youth and create a movie that would appeal to directly to kids with as little adult intervention as possible, the elder Rodriguez took Racer’s ideas, dialogue and plot sketches (as verbatim as he could while still making a reasonably coherent movie), cast professional talent in the key roles, and directed his son’s daydreams in front state of the art green-screen special effects as The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl.

I say this to explain why a weird movie website is covering a semi-weird, shark-lite, non-horror movie for the b-movie roundtable SHARKATHALON!, “week-long tribute to everything that has to do with sharks and horror films” scheduled to coincide with the 35th anniversary of the release of Jaws.  Fans of the toothy marine predators looking for tales of blood in the water, prepare for something completely different.

With those flimsy justifications out of the way, let’s jump into Racer’s kiddie shark pool, where the chum floating in the water isn’t chunks off a great white’s latest victim, but shreds of childhood dreams.

First off, forget 3-D.  Part of the reason this film was originally panned is because the 3-D effects, which came along at the very tail end of the red-blue glasses era and just before the contemporary polarized glasses became standard, just didn’t measure up.  The DVD comes with red-blue glasses and offers viewers the chance to torture themselves with them should they so wish, but most will be happy to stick to the standard flat-viewing experience.

The adventures begin with Sharkboy’s origin story: son of a marine biologist, separated from his father and lost in a CGI sea after a storm, adopted by talking sharks; naturally, his exposure to the sharky lifestyle results in him growing gills, fangs and fins.  Lavagirl, the affirmative-action superheroine added to tap into the lucrative girl market, doesn’t get an origin story; she just shows up one day soon thereafter to snatch Sharkboy to Planet Drool (“the planet so cool, it makes you drool”) to deal with an unspecified crisis.

A couple of words about the two principals.  Lavagirl, as played by Taylor Dooley, is acceptable kiddie performer and provides a sympathetic ear for the young protagonist; but, basically, her costume overwhelms her performance.  She’s outfitted in a pinkish-purple wig (admittedly, a less exotic hairstyle today than it once was).  Her costume, made of hard plastic sculpted to look like pink rock, has glowing veins of orange lava running through it.  The most disturbing fact about her getup, which no one seems willing to comment on, is that two of the rocky planes that comprise her uniform just happen to meet on her upper torso to create the tiniest suggestion of nipples.  The costume is also outfitted with plastic hips that are just slightly wider than a typical pre-teen’s.  I am not accusing Lavagirl’s costume designer of being a Lolita-loving perv, but I’m surprised that no one else has mentioned the subtle sexualizing of the design.

Sharkboy, played by another Taylor (Lautner), is the heavy of the duo.  Churlish, sarcastic and quick to anger, though in an adorable way, he threatens to bash the protagonist’s head in more than once.  His costume is a standard Batman-inspired molded plastic number with fake washboard abs.  Basically, he’s a bit of a punk kid, but he does have one great attribute: Lautner is a terrific martial artist and does all his own stunts in the film, including some impressive backflips.  It’s too bad that contemporary casting agents are ignoring this guy’s talent; instead of wasting away in tween crap like Twilight, he could be forging a truly special career in direct-to-DVD martial arts movies with snappy titles like Kill Until Death or Driven to Maim.  Let’s wait a few years and check back on that, shall we?

Back to our regularly scheduled plot synopsis: It turns out that what we have been seeing is Max relating the back stories of Sharkboy and Lavagirl to his 3rd grade class as his “What I Did Over the Summer” report, which rightfully earns him the derision of his classmates.  When Max insists against all logic and reason that the tale is true, his teacher, the oddly named Mr. Electricidad (George Lopez), gives him some very convincing advice about the necessity of abandoning one’s dreams.  But Max’s life gives him plenty of motives for escapism.  His parents are on the verge of divorce due to the fact that dad’s a deadbeat writer, he’s friendless, and schoolyard bully Linus steals his dream journal.  Adding insult to injury, the family lives directly across the street from school (dad moved them to save on gas money), so Max can never quite forget his dread of returning to class for another round of humiliation from his pint-sized peers.

Fortunately for Max, just when his childhood troubles—divorce, getting sent to the principal’s office—seem about to drive him into a pre-puberty nervous breakdown, the real Sharkboy and Lavagirl appear in an electrical storm, wreck his classroom, shame his disbelieving classmates, and whisk him way to help deal with the crisis on Planet Drool.  After a quick ride in a shark-shaped spacecraft, they wind up on Planet Drool, where the surface looks like a half dozen multi-colored lava lamps spontaneously exploded onto a Yes album cover.  Since Max dreamt up the planet, he has the omnipotence necessary to turn back the encroaching darkness and defeat the evil Mr. Electricity; but, he can’t remember how to use his dream powers.  Electricity (played by Lopez’ head) is Sharkboy‘s greatest invention.  George Lopez’s face crammed into a distorting convex watch case, with limbs formed from live electrical currents, is the stuff of childhood nightmares; almost as frightening to a kid as the prospect of sitting through an episode of “The George Lopez Show” would be to a grown-up.  Electricity’s dastardly plan is to keep all of Drool’s kids trapped on an eternal roller coaster ride so they can’t ever dream (as this would be very bad for him, since he’s a bad guy and the movie is pro-dreaming).

Electricity sics his gang of electrical plugs (“the plughounds”) on the trio, giving Lautner the chance to demonstrate his martial arts skills.  Thanks to Max’s inability to dream up godlike powers for himself, though, the three are defeated and banished to the Dream Graveyard—when they really needed to get to the Dream Lair, for reasons that are completely unclear.  Max spends the rest of the movie trying to dream, but at first he can’t fall asleep, thanks to hunger.  Meanwhile, Sharkboy appears to be fighting off the delirium tremens, swatting at floating bubbles with smiley faces that magically appear.  In the Graveyard Max finds Tobor, his old discarded robot head (long story) who uses his magic powers to send the team off to the Land of Milk and Cookies, for some reason.  Abandoning Tobor, who’s now been “freed” (somehow), the trio hops onto the Train of Thought, which steams its way through a forest of brain stems (the cerebellums are in season, blooming with a healthy green glow) towards their destination.  Once there, they float on a cookie raft down a river of milk past sundae mountains, while Max tries to nod off on a marshmallow pillow.  The tyke’s a bit over-stimulated, however; Sharkboy’s break-dancing lullaby gives him nightmares, and the appearance of Electricity’s latest hunters, electrical plugs fashioned into T-Rexes, interrupts his nap.

Fortunately, Max is already learning to dream while awake, and so dreams up an amphibious fudge-spitting banana-split mobile for the team to escape down the Stream of Consciousness, which leads them to an ice bridge they need to cross to get to the domain of the Ice Princess so they can grab the Crystal Heart (one of the great, disorienting things about Sharkboy is that a new plot point pops up about every 90 seconds).  Before they can make it across the ice bridge, they’re captured by Electricity and his plughounds and taken to meet the real tyrant of planet Drool: the bully that stole Max’s dream journal, Linus (here called Minus).  They’re imprisoned, but Sharkboy’s uncontrollable violent proclivities become an asset when those hallucinatory floating smiley-face bubbles appear again, singing an annoying song that drives him into an insane frenzy that gives him the strength to burst the bars of the cage.

Somehow, the trio dreams their way into the Ice Palace, which leads Max marrying the Ice Princess (a doppelgänger of his schoolmate Marisa, who’s also Mr. Electricidad’s daughter) in a creepy prepubescent wedding ceremony performed by her father, a giant ice cube, so he can get his hands on her Crystal Heart.  After Electricity finally manages to kill Sharkboy and Lavagirl using electric eels, the floating robot head appears, shades of Obi-wan Kenobi, and advises Max to dream a better dream, which makes Sharkboy come to life so he can revive Lavagirl by throwing her into a convenient volcano.  This naturally completes Max’s dream power (although what the Crystal Heart and the rest of the plot had to do with anything is anyone’s guess) and brings us to the climax.  Lavagirl becomes a beacon of light who drives away the encroaching  darkness (remember the encroaching darkness?)  Max uses his omniscient dream power to unfreeze Drool’s oceans (who knew they were frozen?) so that Sharkboy can sic his marine minions on Mr. Electricity.  It’s oddly satisfying (emphasis on “odd”) to watch a school of sharks chew on a pocket-watch with George Lopez’s face.  Max becomes the Daydreamer, the One Who Can Dream with His Eyes Open, and heads to the featured showdown with Linus.  The Evil One dreams deadly flying piranhas, and wimpy Max ripostes by encasing them in non-violent bubbles.  After a few fantasy feints, Max stuns Linus with a literal brainstorm: dozens of plummeting gray organs splattering on the ground; he follows with a brain freeze/brain fart combo, and Minus is on the ropes.  But before Max can truly defeat Linus and toss him to Sharkboy’s shark army to rend him from limb to limb, slating the audience’s juvenile bloodlust, political correctness (kid’s style) intervenes, and Max and Linus learn to accept one another’s differences and become fast friends instead.

That should lead to the epilogue, but there’s still a little more climax to go.  Max wakes up from his dream back in the classroom; but now that he dreams while wide awake, his rogue dreams can invade the real world.  A pissed Mr. Electricity, never a party to the Treaty of Drool, storms Max’s classroom, and Electridad’s daughter has to use her ice crystal to freeze his circuits.  Meanwhile, Max’s parents decide to get back together as they’re being blown about by the storm, with a little help from Lavagirl.  That brings us to the epilogue, where everybody gets to live out their dreams, the door is left open for an unlikely sequel, and Max tosses off a final lame platitude about the power of sticking to your dreams.

Fortunately for Sharkboy, the moral babble about realizing your dreams (as in goals) never gets in the way of dreaming your dreams (as in the pretty pictures that float before your eyes when you drift out of consciousness).  On Planet Drool, psychedelic vistas and hallucinatory terrain abound, from the slopes made of fruit sherbet to the forests of brains.  The color scheme is vibrant, neon, and hyperreal, the scenery cartoonish and stylized, and the story seems to be inventing itself as it goes along.  Much of the time the movie really does give the impression of being the work of a seven year old auteur; these are the most interesting parts.

Sharkboy is a movie with the power to divide families; it totally absorbs kids, but makes their parents want to tear their hair out.  Though it’s far from a perfect movie, I lean to the kids’ side on this one.  Junior can’t see things from an adult perspective, but dad and mom should be able to remember what it was like to be a kid.  Nowadays, when grown-ups go to see a children’s movie, they expect something that caters to their narrow parental tastes.  Adults crave predictability, familiar plot lines, stock characters, and recognizable celebrity voice talent like Ed Asner or Eddie Murphy making tasteful double entendres and pop culture references intended to sail over their progeny’s heads.  Kids don’t expect any of these things, because they haven’t learned what “proper” assembly-line movies look like yet.  For an adult, watching a genuine kid’s movie like Sharkboy can and should be a temporary vacation from rationality.  Leave your knowledge of mortgages and original sin behind, and remember how weird the world is when seen through the eyes of a seven year old.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Once again employing abundant blue-screen wizardly and state-of-art high-def vid technology, helmer Rodriguez drops his actors into a fantastical realm of cartoonish surrealism… . Special effects appear at once playfully cheesy and intricately sophisticated, reinforcing the overall impression of ‘Sharkboy and Lavagirl’ as an elaborate home movie fairy tale produced by a child-prodigy computer whiz.”–Joe Leydon, Variety (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Kang-sheng Lee, Shiang-chyi Chen, Sumomo Yozakura, Kuei-Mei Yang

PLOT: During a nationwide drought, a Taiwanese porn star courts a shy and lonely

apartment dweller obsessed with watermelons; characters occasionally burst into fantasy song-and-dance numbers.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As a romantic, pornographic, hallucinatory musical that makes sure you will never see watermelons or Taiwanese sex movies quite the same way ever again, The Wayward Cloud is audacious and, yes, weird.  The powerful downside is the fact that, outside of the musical sequences, Tsai’s minimalism—long takes, a motionless camera, and the absolute minimum amount plot and dialogue he can possibly get away with—is the most acquired of acquired tastes.

COMMENTS: There are seven memorable scenes in The Wayward Cloud—three bizarre sexual encounters (and a couple of ordinary ones) and four outlandish musical numbers.  Given all that’s going on, it’s amazing that writer/director Ming-liang Tsai still managed to keep the script so arid, and to convey an overall feeling of malaise rather than excitement.  Without these seven scenes, the movie would hardly exist; the wisp of a plot involves a boy-meets-girl-and-never-quite-loses-her story that’s told in nearly dialogue free episodes of long takes of actors reacting to nothing.  The meet-cute (or in this case, meet-mute) involves Shiang-chyi coming upon Hsiao-Kang while he’s napping, then sitting down across from him and taking a nap herself.  It’s five minutes of hot napping action before they exchange their first words.  (It’s helpful to know that these characters have met before, in Tsai’s What Time Is It There? [2001], and in a subsequent short film.)  Hsiao-Kang doesn’t divulge his job as a professional video gigolo to his new girlfriend, but there’s no cover story, no sense of urgency that she might discover his vocation, and there’s nothing divulged about her to suggest she would care either way.  There is a quiet, believable sort of intimacy in scenes where Hsiao-Kang smokes a cigarette held between Shiang-chyi’s toes; the lovers are so comfortable together they don’t have to say anything to each other.  But we, the viewers, still wish they would say something for our benefit.

Fortunately, there is the sex.  It’s graphic, but not explicit: there’s no visible genital-to-genital contact, although the squeamish may be grossed out by the simulated semen.  The first tryst is earnestly erotic, but as the scenes mount, the pornographic interludes become perfunctory, and finally loathsome.  (That progression is by design).  After a typically overlong setup involving a shot of a branching corridor, the first sexual encounter is unforgettable: a woman in a nurses’ uniform grasps a halved watermelon between her thighs, and her lover manipulates the fruit’s flesh as if it were human.  It’s an amazing X-rated image that will stick with you for a long time, bizarre and erotic in equal parts.  After some intercutting to introduce the female lead (watching a television broadcast that gives us the background on Taiwan’s drought and the watermelon fad that’s sweeping the nation) we return to the sex, where the poetic foreplay has ended and the rutting begun; the coupling is still arousing, with melon husks and innards put to good use, but the intercourse is already turning into repetitive pounding.  The second major sex scene picks up on that building monotony, with the indefatigable stud jackhammering his hips in a shower sequence—the joke being that the pornographers chose to shoot this scene during a drought, when the city’s water service is intermittent.  By the time the final pornographic sex scene arrives, the coupling is repulsive—for reasons I won’t spoil, except to say that Takashi Miike would have been proud to use the final scenario in Visitor Q.  Incredibly, this final scene takes over ten minutes to play out; Tsai seems to savor rubbing the viewer’s nose in every disgusting implication, making him or her drink in every distasteful drop.

As attention-grabbing as the sleazy sex is, the musical interludes are the most interesting element of The Wayward Cloud.  They illuminate the inner lives of the characters and invest them with emotions—longing, happiness, degradation—that the dramatic scenes are unwilling to deliver.  More importantly, they force the pace, causing Tsai to experiment with elements that are otherwise foreign to his style: things like camera movement, multiple angles, words and concepts, and events.  The musical accompaniment is a survey of post-WWII, pre-rock n’ roll pop and torch songs, the kinds of innocently jazzy pieces Peggy Lee or Bing Crosby specialized in; there’s even a loony polka, and a number that sounds suspiciously like the old American country/folk standard “Sixteen Tons.”  The choreography and visuals are always interesting.  The scenarios involve the male lead as a fish-man serenading the moon from a water tank; a love song performed by women who suggestively caress a statue of Chiang Kai-shek; an aging porn actress who imagines herself beset by men dressed as spiders; and a finale where the increasingly reluctant stud imagines himself as a dancing penis in a men’s room, harassed by a mob of plunger-wielding women led by a ringleader in a traffic cone bra.  All together, the production numbers take up less than about fifteen minutes of the two hour running time, but you often find yourself wishing one would sweep through the movie like a thunderstorm and temporarily relieve the dramatic droughts.

Mixing graphic sex with colorful musical numbers is a recipe for notoriety, at the very least, and if you go in hoping to see sights you’ve never seen before, The Wayward Cloud will reward your expectations.  But Tsai’s insistence on making the dramatic scenes an endurance test is off-putting.  We watch the porno shoots in the film from a static camera, but while we are stuck in an unchanging omniscient view, we can see the pornographers choreographing shots and positions, changing angles, and we realize that their final product will be heavily edited to keep the viewer’s interest from flagging.  It’s almost as if Tsai is saying that fluid camerawork and crisp editing is for the pornographic hacks; his slow, unadorned style, by contrast, is real art—difficult art, art that doesn’t pander to the audience’s taste for excitement.  Although it’s drenched in pornography, The Wayward Cloud isn’t pornographic, because the audience is insulated from arousal by a deliberately inserted layer of artful dullness.  Unlike a Tarkovsky, though, I don’t find Tsai’s use of minimalism revealing: other than a few obscure emotions flitting across his actors’ faces, there isn’t that sense of slowly unfolding detail, or of hypnotic morphing beauty.  It seems more like a style chosen for the style’s sake, rather than one picked because the material demands it.  Word has it that this is Tasi’s most visually active and eventful movie; thank God he had the inspiration to liven it up with the musical numbers.  This is the only movie I can honestly say desperately needs a dancing penis.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…emphatically not to all tastes, fans of the obscene, the experimental and the outrageous should make every effort to get along… keep things impressively weird right up to the eye-watering climax.”–Jonathan Trout, BBC (contemporaneous)

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

FEATURING: Issei Takahashi, Aoba Kawai

PLOT:  Alien parasites infect human hosts, morphing their bodies into bio-combat

machines who then fight each other to the death; shy factory worker Yôji and Sachiko, the lonely girl he fancies, soon find themselves caught up in the struggle.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Meatball Machine‘s alien gladiator-parasite setup is bizarre, but the movie never really tries to top its strangeness.  Rather, the weirdness pretty much stops at the premise, as the producers instead spend their energy indulging their true loves: gore and special effects.  The result is a movie that’s well within the weird genre, but not an outstanding example of it. (NOTE: upon further reflection, Meatball Machine was upgraded to “Borderline Weird” on 7/5/2010).

COMMENTS: To say that Meatball Machine‘s storyline is thin would be an insult to the relatively dense scripts of Michael Bay. In fact, the entire last half hour of the movie is nothing but an extended melee that persists long after the dual directors have run out of combat hooks.  To keep us emotionally involved in between (and during) the fight scenes, the plot takes a perfunctory stab at a touching love story between two losers; viewers will have to buy into this romance on their own, as neither the script nor the actors sell it.  But though Meatball Machine might be light on depth, what the movie does have going for it is unforgettable costume design and a few endearing oddnesses; and, of course, buckets of gore, for those who consider that a plus.  The alien parasites who populate this film thrive by inserting themselves inside humans and mutating the host body to create an ever-evolving arsenal of extremely implausible organic weapons, among which are biochainsaws, bioflamethrowers, and, for the necroborg who has everything, a visor complete with a windshield wiper to keep blood from splashing into his new issue, lead-soldered eyes.  The aliens also create bulky exoskeletons festooned with tubing and spikes, which make them look like members of a Japanese GWAR knockoff band.  (Due to budgetary restraints, all body modifications effect only the upper torso).  In their natural state, the aliens are pinkish blobs scuttling around in horseshoe crab shells and have the power to assault people with a whirring blur of tentacles far in excess of their body mass; once they set up shop inside a host, they clear out lungs, intestines and pancreases, and fuse with the remaining tissue to create a command bridge for themselves. They then control the host by pulling on a series of pink fleshy levers.  The effect of all this absurd body modification can be awfully weird, particularly in the first third of the movie, when we don’t fully understand what’s going on yet.

What I found unexpectedly strange, however, is that the movie takes the viewpoint of an adolescent male who is terrified of sex.  The hero, Yôji, is a factory worker who lives on his own, but the actor’s looks are so boyish that he appears to be a teenager among men.  He doesn’t fit in with his working class peers, the cool guys who spend their breaks discussing their sexual conquests and planning parties to which he’s not invited. Terminally insecure, he often hears the sound of laughter ringing in his ears after a failure, whether it’s coming from a prostitute or an alien parasite.  He’s awkward around women and can’t even bring himself to speak to Sachiko, the neighbor girl he fantasizes about and idolizes.  We’re not shocked to learn that he’s a virgin.  His experiences with sex are consistently humiliating or painful, and he can’t even penetrate the parasite shell he finds with his industrial drill press.  (By contrast, the parasites naturally use a wickedly phallic organ to hook into their host’s bodies).  When Yôji finally does get a willing girl alone in his apartment, the awkward seduction devolves into scarring horror, with a disquieting disrobing and a climax that ends in tentacle rape porn instead of tender, emotionally fulfilling lovemaking.  Since he never actually scores, he remains sexually pure, and he’s finally able to consummate his passion via a scenario he can presumably relate to: a manga-style battle royale.  In another movie, I might wonder if there was some deep psycho-sexual meaning to be found in all this fear-of-sex symbolism.  Here, I have the nagging suspicion hat the script is merely trying to empathize with the concerns and obsessions of the group it perceives as its core audience.

Meatball Machine should appeal to those attracted to over-the-top Japanese “splatterpunk” movies (Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police); it’s a solid example of the form.  But it’s not a movie to convert those who aren’t already immersed in this gory manga-influenced subculture; it doesn’t transcend or reinvent its specialized subgenre.

As a final note, the Danger After Dark DVD is lavish, including a 30 minute making of featurette and two short films, among other goodies.  The first short is the original Meatball Machine film that inspired the feature, but the second short, Meatball Machine: Rejects of Death (2007) is more interesting.  It’s a ten minute, highly politically incorrect music video-style production inspired by Meatball Machine‘s world and directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura, the special effects and makeup guru for the original movie.  I found it far more jaw-droppingly bizarre than the feature film, and at a brisk ten minutes, it didn’t wear out its welcome.  If your on the fence about getting this DVD, the extra features just might push you over the edge.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…probably the strangest thing about the film is the fact that its central romance rings true, and is oddly moving, even when the blood and severed limbs are quite literally hitting the screen… Of course, it’s the violence and bizarre transformations which are the film’s main selling point, and on this score, ‘Meatball Machine’ is an absolute must-see for all fans of wild exploitation and gore.”–James Mudge, BeyondHollywood.com (DVD)

This review was suggested by reader “Keith.”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.