DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Koike

FEATURING: Takuya Kamura, Yû Aoi, Tadanobu Asano

PLOT: Set in a distant future and moving between multiple planets, this is a fairly simple tale of

a major road race taking place on a militaristic planet that doesn’t want it there.  Racers “Sweet” JP, the big-haired underdog, and Sonoshee, a single-minded gearhead, are the main focus of the story.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Armed with an eclectic cast of alien characters and a host of over-the-top shenanigans, Redline might come off as “weird” to someone unfamiliar with anime, but I’d say the stranger humor and visuals fit in pretty squarely with other properties of the genre.  It’s an imaginative and enormously entertaining film, just not especially Weird.

COMMENTS:  The future laid out in Redline is certainly an intriguing one, if completely ludicrous.  Hot shot reckless racer JP makes it to the titular big interstellar race, held on a militaristic planet that hasn’t consented to be the host.  He cozies up to Sonoshee, a cute green-haired lady who is one of the most serious and intimidating drivers there, and together the two attempt to navigate a strange obstacle course against alien competitors (some with inexplicable magic powers) and large-scale weaponry.  Squeezing in ESPN-like profiles of various racers—from an experienced cyborg who’s fused himself with his machine to a pair of scantily clad pop stars hailing from a magical princess planet—there’s some room for satire, too.

This movie is essentially all spectacle and adrenaline, with very little comprehensible or meaningful plot holding it together, but it’s not like the filmmakers are operating under any pretense of depth.  They’ve created a gorgeously animated, pumped-up sci-fi thriller, and that’s all that’s needed!  The characters are slick, and the vehicle designs slicker, with plenty of exaggerated personalities and colorful attachments for an engaging race line-up.  Sure, there’s a silly romantic/secret-past subplot thrown in there, but it’s never taken very seriously.  Various secondary stories are introduced, such as the military planet’s worker resistance and JP’s involvement in race-fixing, but the race itself remains the focus and it’s easy to forget that anything else is going on (the script certainly seems to by the end).  The set-up can be confusing at times due to an influx of minor characters and limited explanation of the obviously complex political and environmental structures.

The strengths of Redline lie almost completely in its visuals and fast pacing.  The dark shading and bright color schemes, the over-the-top hair styles and imaginative alien creatures, the quick-cut-editing and crazy landscapes: it’s all fantastically sweet eye-candy, set to an ecstatic musical score.  It’s violent but fun, and there’s probably political commentary thrown in there somewhere.  The script is cheesy at points, but vaguely self-aware.  It’s just a very cool movie all around, rarely letting up for a moment in its quest to assault the senses with psychedelic imagery and revving engines.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One of the most visually spectacular toons in recent years, pic is a thumping ride for fanboys, but the script’s underdeveloped central romance and the fizzling out of intriguing plot threads will impede wider acceptance… [Plays] like a twisted combo of “Death Race 2000,” “Speed Racer” and a ’50s hot-rod movie on steroids…”–Variety (contemporaneous)

DIRECTOR: Noboru Iguchi

FEATURING: Takumi Saito, Aya Kiguchi

PLOT: Two sisters compete with each other for dominance in a secret society of geisha

assassins, which is led by the evil head of a steel manufacturing corporation.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Let’s start with the purposefully terrible dialogue. Move on to Tangu twins wearing phallic masks and matching bras. Maybe the absolutely ridiculous weapon placements including armpit swords, breast lasers, and stomach bombs.  The guy with the stomach bomb has cocktail shrimp stuck in his eyes by the way.  Oh yes: all this and much, much more.

COMMENTS:  This movie must have been at least as fun to make as it is to watch.  The first couple times I saw it I was alternating between jaw-dropping awe and side-splitting laughter.  The insane and chaotic visual effects are so delightfully unpredictable and so relentless that around half an hour in you simply give in and enjoy the ride.  It is purposefully bad in a rare way, and on multiple viewings it just seems to get better and better.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…what you might see if you were to watch Power Rangers whilst taking a hit of acid every five minutes.”–Dave Robson, Sound on Sight (festival screening)

FEATURING: Edward Hogg, Simon Farnaby, Verónica Echegui

PLOT: An agoraphobic young man remembers (or hallucinates) a trip he took across Europe

with his hard-drinking, sexually voracious, gambling-addicted pal Bunny.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s a mildly surreal comedy that’s in the weird ballpark, but it’s not nearly unhinged enough to make the List on weirdness alone, and too uneven to be counted among the best weird movies ever made.

COMMENTS: Bunny and the Bull begins by introducing us to Stephen Turnbull, an shut-in with severe OCD issues who files his used dental floss and checks the pH of his urine every morning, then shows in flashback how he degenerated from a functioning neurotic to a full-fledged basket case.  An emergency involving rats violating his boxes of hermetically sealed vegetarian lasagna forces him to phone Captain Crab for a takeout meal, unlocking a flood of memories.  The logo on the takeout box inspires Stephen to remember the time he was stood up by a girl he intended to propose to at a Captain Crab.  In the movie’s first anstract sequence, he imagines a restaurant constructed entirely out of painted paper; even the fish swimming in the aquarium are cardboard cutouts.  The motif carries over in the next scene, where an entire horse race is re-enacted with similar animated, spray-painted two-dimensional figures.  These two scenes set up the expectation that the entire movie will carry through this hazy-dream-version-of-a-high-school-play look, but as Stephen and Bunny begin their tour of Europe, subsequent sequences are shot on realistic looking sets, though sometimes employing blurry rear-projection or other random visual trickery.  Then, halfway through the movie the cinematographer pulls out a new look: a world full of gleaming brass CGI clockwork contraptions.  The different visual signatures each look great on their own, but the schizophrenic hopping about from one to another makes you wonder if they switched art directors halfway through film, then ran out of money in the special effects budget.  Bunny‘s visuals are frequently likened to those of The Science of Sleep, but that comparison only holds for the cardboard-cutout scenes; the lack of a consistent look for the whole film diminishes its visual impact.  As a comedy, Bunny is general a pleasant affair, although there’s one grossout digression involving a homeless Russian man who raises dogs as livestock.  But it’s not wall-to-wall belly laughs; the mismatched buddy/love triangle plot doesn’t pay off comedically the way it should.  I suspect your overall reaction to the film depends on how you view the character of Bunny.  The movie asks you to see him as a lovable rogue whose drinking, gambling and womanizing are endearing, but to my mind Simon Farnaby doesn’t bring the character across that way.  We know that Bunny funds the European road trip, but other than that the movie doesn’t give us a tremendous amount of evidence that this girlfriend-stealing, troublemaking, bear-pilfering bloke is a very good friend to Stephen.  Rather, he comes across as an obnoxious, irresponsible lout who hangs out with the timid Stephen because no one else can tolerate his company.  (Bunny’s irresistibilty to women is another puzzling bit of scripting—maybe if he trimmed up that giant mop of blond hair I could see it…)  At any rate, if you can’t bring yourself to see Bunny as a charming chum, the emotional impact of the ending is muted.  Still, Bunny boasts a number of successes, from its visual triumphs (the mechanical bull made of gears and scrap metal with butcher knives for horns) to moments of inspired comedy (a Captain Crab waitress dressed as a lobster, breaking up with her boyfriend in the middle of taking an order).  And there’s scattered imaginative weirdness to keep you watching: the unreal sets, Stephen hallucinating that characters from the flashback appear in his apartment to comment on the story, and the awkwardly creepy and easily-offended Russian dog herder.  Bunny and the Bull didn’t captivate me with its characters, or make up for that deficiency with loads of laughs, but it’s a movie with a lot of imagination and a basically good heart; I can see how others would respond positively.

Writer/director Paul King is best known for the absurd British comedy series “The Mighty Boosh.”  “Boosh” stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt appear in Bunny and the Bull in small roles (Barratt as the Russian and Fielding as an “expert” matador).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Director Paul King brings his talent for the surreal to the big screen… worth a watch if you fancy something different and an astounding film to look at.”–Alex Zane, The Sun (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Infinity Starr,” who called the movie “a mixture of the movie Amélie and the TV show ‘The Mighty Boosh’ with a dash of The Science of Sleep” and added “if you do not know what I am talking about in either of my references than that would truly be WEIRD.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Spike Spencer, Allison Keith-Shipp (English dub)

PLOT:  Following the events of Evangelion 1.11, the Angel incursions against Tokyo-3 increase

in intensity, and two new teenage Evangelion pilots are integrated into the NERV defense team.  Also, the world ends, I think.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  What to do with Evangelion?  A combo teen soap opera/end-of-the-world saga starring giant robots, the series is weird, but in a way that’s actually sort of conventional (in anime terms).  Even worse, there are now four movies (and a long running TV series) telling essentially the same story—with two more on the way.  Should all the movies make the List?  None?  Only the weirdest one?  Whatever the case, I don’t think this installment is capable of being counted among the best weird movies ever made; but I’m also thankful we get to defer the issue until we’ve checked out the series’ entire run.

COMMENTS:  Here’s a typical battle between an Angel (periodically appearing bad guy) and an Evangelion (giant robot that can only be piloted by a teenager).  Battleships fire pink and yellow shells at the Angel, a wire-frame robot with a pendulum hanging between its legs, as it marches towards them, instantly freezing the blood red sea with every stride and leaving a huge snowflake as a footstep.  It shoots laser beams from a globe and blows the battleships, causing the scarlet water to erupt into cross-shaped spouts.  A warplane drops a giant robot (hereafter “Eva”); it evades the green-tipped black lines the Angel fires at it as it falls.  The Eva blows up the Angel with a gun, but it immediately reconstitutes itself.  The Eva next stomps on the Angel’s laser-firing spike, which causes translucent pink and yellow auras to fill up the sky.  Eventually the Eva’s foot forces the spike all the way into its command globe, and the Angel explodes into a pink cross.  Each melee shot lasts for a second or less, increasing the confusion as to what the hell is supposed to be going on.  In Evangelion Angels can take any form, including scuttling robots with dinosaur-skull heads and 1970s-era Pink Floyd laser light shows, and they operate according to rules that are never explained.  (I’m fairly sure the Angels have no actual protocols or limitations—they simply perform whatever act the director thinks will look most awesome at the moment).  The fight scenes are psychedelically beautiful; but the overall plot is about as muddled as an Eva/Angel smackdown.  Viewers hoping for clarification on what the Angels (or the Evas, for that matter) actually are should steel themselves for further confusion and hints of biblical conspiracy instead.  By way of exposition, NERV chief and jerkwad pop Gendo explains, “Our only desire is the true Evangelion.  It’s awakening will coincide with the resurrection of Lilith and usher in the Time of the Covenant. It is crucial that the necessary rites be performed by then, for the sake of the Human Instrumentality Project.”  As wimpy teen hero Shinji responds after his father delivers a generically profound—but in on way on-target—speech about sacrificing for your dreams, “You say that, but I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean.”  You also may not even know what scraps of dialogue like “I prefer the living chaos of man, instead of this barren wasteland of death” and “it’s transcending the boundaries of humanity!” are supposed to mean, either.  It’s easier to follow the soap opera side of the story, which in this second installment explores a developing love triangle between emo Shinji, mysteriously catatonic, blue-haired Rei, and brash newcomer Asuka, a blue-eyed, Japan-insulting American hottie with a love-hate thing for Shinji and a hate-hate thing for Rei.  Complicating the sexual dynamic is the fact that Shinji is terrified of the fairer sex.  And you would be too, if you were him: naked women kickbox him in the head, and when he’s just minding his own business random babes parachute down from the sky and smother him with their cleavage.  Although Shinji has grown up a tiny amount since the prior episode, and no longer spends the entire movie moping in his room, his shameless self-absorption in his morass of daddy issues is still the primary obstacle for adults (and well-adjusted teens) to enjoying the series.  How can you root for a character who refuses to stop the apocalypse because he’s off throwing a tantrum?  If you’re in tune with anime conventions, or only crave eye candy and fanservice, you’ll see Evangelion as a paragon of the art form.  It’s not a crossover series that will entice the average adult viewer, however.

I originally understood this second cinematic version of the Evangelion saga was to be a straightforward quartet, but according to Twitch’s Ard Vijn (who knows a lot more about these things than I do), the reality is far stranger.  First, despite the unanswered questions, the storyline is apparently complete with this second film (!)  Secondly, there will be two more episodes, which will cover the same events, but from different characters perspectives (!!)  Sometimes I can’t decide whether I’m more confused watching an Evangelion movie, or trying to sort out the chronology and canonicity of this sprawling franchise.  The series seems to be stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fever dream for sure, but one that has been lovingly embellished with details and technically polished until it has become its own weird-yet-beautiful thing.”–Ard Vijn, Twitch (DVD)

FEATURING: Noah Segan, Andrea Renda, Jon Budinoff, Ricardo Gray, Silvia Spross, Ezzra [sic] Buzzington, Elina Madison

PLOT: The spirits of two possessed serial killers who rape their victims to death stalk drug

abusing medical students.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  If you want unlikeable, unbelievable characters and prosthetic mutant penises, this is your movie; if you want something scary or meaningfully weird, however, look elsewhere.

COMMENTS: The strangest thing about Someone’s Knocking at the Door isn’t the variety of killer genitalia on display, but the bed-hopping, skin-popping residents of what has to rank as the Princeton Review’s number one medical party school.  Besides engaging in frequently fatal kinky sex, these medicos in training spend most of their time taking speed, booze, ecstasy, nicotine, Xanax, Oxycontin, nitrous oxide, and attending Halloween parties where the students egg each other on with cries of “chug! chug! chug!”  Fortunately for the kids, when one of their compatriots is killed via graphic demonic anal rape, the school’s hippie chancellor gives them the week off to grieve at the kegger of their choice.  The students also get high off of vials of experimental psychiatric drugs, while listening to snuff audiotapes so they can catch up on the back story.  (Only after shooting up do they think to look up the drug’s side effects, which include increased sexual appetite, hallucinations, and possible coma.  Oops!)  In a stroke of good luck for the audience, the kids are all perfectly detestable human beings, which means we don’t mind much when possessed serial killers from the 1970s somehow show up to rape them to death.  Jon Budinoff, in particular, never says a kind or sincere word and punches his dates when they don’t put out; he’s so loathsome it’s impossible to believe he could have any friends at all.  On the other hand we recognize Noah Segan as the film’s moral conscience when he objects after finding his socially inept buddy groping a half-nude, comatose female partier who may have stopped breathing (although he’s not so judgmental as to try to stop him).  Knocking is a movie that would love to be offensive, but it keeps tripping over its own silliness.  Ridiculous plot and lack of characterization aside, the movie is technically competent, and director Chad Ferris does put some interesting and occasionally very weird ideas up on the screen.  All of the backgrounds are earth tones or sickly avocados; the film has the color scheme of a 1977 kitchenette.  The genital prosthetics are genuinely nightmarish (the film focuses on the phallus, but the other sex gets its moment to, er, shine as well).  Psychotic episodes are effectively conveyed through stuttering editing that mixes alternate views of the present with brief hallucinations, scored to eerie electronic noises.  At one point, the sound effects even mimic a malfunctioning dial-up modem, a scarier effect than you might think.  And, look closely at the funeral procession for an unexpectedly bizarre surprise.  Other odd moments include a fleeing female who falls a modern record seven times (!) while covering a mere ten feet as she’s chased by a shambling but sure-footed killer.  (In her defense, she may have been thrown off by the fact that the soundtrack was blaring an upbeat indie rock tune instead of the expected shrieking violins).  Add a twist ending you’ve seen before and a strong moral against injecting experimental psychiatric medications for kicks, and you have a strange, if uneven, modern exploitation horror.  If grindhouses existed today, this is what would be playing there.  A mixture of time-tested horror clichés, careless scriptwriting, and mucho grotesquerie, Knocking features enough sex, violence and general outrageousness to save it from being boring, and enough stylistic innovation to (mostly) camouflage its derivative slasher story.  Fans of modern disgusto horror will open up gleefully for Someone’s Knocking at the Door, but others will want to turn off all the lights and pretend no one’s home.

A title credit sequence featuring a vintage shower of pharmaceuticals cut with grainy 1960s home movies announces that this is a movie aimed squarely at the horror/stoner crowd, the genre’s largest unacknowledged demographic.  In a clever exploitation-style marketing move, the poster and DVD cover features black censor bars not only over exposed naughty bits, but also over the actors’ and actresses’ eyes, giving the movie an extra aura of pornographic depravity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…eschews the standards of the youth-horror genre, opting instead for something more hallucinatory.”–Michael Gingold, Fangoria (DVD)

FEATURING: Fernando Santos, Alexander David, Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida, Chandra Malatitch

PLOT: A conflicted pre-op transsexual drag queen lives with a suicidal junkie.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  I originally wrote: “it’s in the weird ballpark, but Man would need radical surgery to become the poignantly bizarre gender fairy tale it dreams of being.”  As discussed in the comments below, the version of the film I saw was not the version the director intended; but, the film I watched wasn’t quite strange enough to make it onto the List, and restoring the author’s vision would only make it less weird.

COMMENTS:  Funny story.  It turns out that To Die Like a Man isn’t nearly as annoying as I thought it was.  One of the first notes I jotted down in my initial viewing of the film read “telepathic commandos?”  This is because the film opens with a scene of two men in camouflage in the woods staking out a house occupied by two men in drag.  The soldiers speak to each other and their lips move, but there’s no sound; we read their conversation in subtitles.  It seemed like a curiously weird way to start the film, but the silent dialogue continued through the film’s entire two-hour plus running time; we can hear sounds in the background, we can hear it when characters sing or sob, but when they speak—nothing.  Although we’re accustomed to reading titles in foreign or silent movies, to hear birds singing and leaves rustling, see an actor’s lips moving, and yet be banned from hearing their words proves far more frustrating and irritating than you would think.  It robs the actors of half their expressiveness and inhibits our bonding with their characters.

I assumed the silence was an alienating technique designed to put us inside the estranged worldview of Tonia, the confused pre-op protagonist.  But, it turns out there was a simpler explanation for the motif  that I hadn’t thought of.  As it turns out, someone botched the preparation of the digital version I saw via Netflix’s streaming service so that the dialogue track was completely missing.  Oops.  For that reason, I can’t really give To Die Like a Man a fair hearing; it should actually earn a grade of “incomplete.”

I’m embarrassed about not realizing this was a technical issue on my first screening of the film, but in my defense, there is enough strangeness on display here to make it credible that the director would add another experimental gambit on top.  There’s that prologue with the mysterious soldiers hunting drag queens in the woods.  Then, one of the infantrymen turns out to be Tonia’s long lost homophobic son.  Not to mention the subplot where Tonia, the conflicted crossdresser, and his/her suicidal junkie boyfriend find themselves lost in the woods and come across the very same transsexual gingerbread house—where the happily femme inhabitants take them on a nighttime snipe hunt.  If those bizarre narrative elements aren’t enough, then consider the fact that director Rodrigues sometimes drains the color out of the film and changes it to a red/pink monochrome scheme, proving that he’s not above flippant formal experimentation.

Even without the audio track, what can be gleaned of Man‘s story is a mixed bag of originality and cliché.  Even if you haven’t seen a lot of tragic drag queen movies (and I haven’t), the entire dynamic of the aging performer with the worthless addict boyfriend to whom she’s hopelessly devoted and the younger rival who’s slowly displacing her in the audience’s esteem feels awfully familiar.  The idea of the desperate AWOL son forced to hide out with the transvestite father he despises holds promise, but the possible plot line is introduced and then sidelined.  On the other hand, the scenes in the “magical forest” are mysteriously metaphorical, and the weirdest fun you’ll have in a mildly surreal drag queen movie this year.

Perhaps the most unexpectedly brave thing about Man, however, is how it resists the temptation to turn into a rote plea for tolerance.  Tonia is no simple paragon of transgendered virtue: she is catty and paranoid, and her self-destructive devotion to the worthless Rosario is more masochistic and pathetic than admirable.  He/she is also deeply religious, and hesitant about going through with irreversible surgery.  A psychological hermaphrodite, he can’t decide whether he really is a woman, and is skeptical about whether he actually can change his sex.  By staying true to Tonia’s abiding ambivalence about his decision to live as a woman—never giving him that easy moment of psychological triumph—the character remains a sympathetic, confused living person, and is never reduced to a symbolic pawn in the game of gender politics.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a mysterious, fabulously sad fable about the final months of a fado-singing, pooch-pampering drag diva…”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Amos Gitai, Jeanne Moreau (voice)

PLOT: A series of autobiographical reflections mix with impressionistic recreations of a battle

between Romans and Jews and poetry read by Jean Moreau.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although there are a few moments of effective weirdness, most of Carmel is too personal to convey much meaning to anyone other than its director.  Far too much of the movie is misty flashbacks of characters we can’t place fondly reading letters from relatives we don’t know.

COMMENTS:  Carmel is a confusing movie, and its lack of urgency about telling a story combined with disinterest in avoiding dull patches doesn’t serve it well.  To give it its due, it does announce itself as a “poem”—one supposedly “about people, what they think and what they want and what they think they want”—providing ample warning that, if you don’t like to read poetry, you’re probably not going to like this movie.  Of course, that’s a very different proposition from saying that if you do like to read poetry, you will like this film.  Scattered interesting images and turns of phrase aren’t enough to make great verse; good poetry, after all, exhibits focus, discipline, and communication, which are Carmel‘s weak points.  That said, Carmel does turn a few fine film phrases, which save it from being a complete, solipsistic waste of time.  The first of these phrases happens early on, when Gitai evokes an ancient battle between Romans and Jews.  Moreau narrates the battle over Hebrew dialogue, and, further in the sonic background, an English-speaking voice (could it be Sam Fuller, who makes it into the credits?) chronicles the exact same events, but out of phase with the primary narration.  Visually, two (sometimes three) overlapping images play onscreen at the same time, all featuring centurions in horsehair helmets battling robed Jews by torchlight.  The effect is dreamy and abstract, rather than chaotic; this montage would be successful if were extracted and presented as a short film all its own.  We fast-forward in history for the film’s second meaningful moment, which also utilizes the overlapping dialogue motif.  A father (Gitai himself) is searching for his recently-deployed soldier son at a gas station.  He shares coffee with the attendant, but their attempt at conversation, while taking the outward form of a dialogue, drifts into the two men delivering two completely unrelated monologues.  A metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian relations?  Both those bits occur in the movie’s first third, and (besides an unexpected re-occurrence of the battle scene at the movie’s midpoint) we have to wait almost to the end before encountering the movie’s third interesting interlude, a bizarre bit involving a young couple who wander into an old woman’s home during a terrorist attack, borrow gas masks, recite prophecies and poems, briefly make out, and leave when the air sirens fade out (promising to return for a chat if they’re ever in the neighborhood).  The vast valleys between Carmel‘s high points, however, are filled with autobiographical boredom.  There are pretty establishing shots that establish nothing, and lots of readings of old family letters that lead to pastoral flashbacks.  Characters are shown, but not introduced.  Who is the red-haired boy who writes letters home from boarding school?  One of Gitai’s sons, maybe the one who later becomes a soldier, or Gitai himself as a kid?  (It doesn’t help that the lad looks like no one else in Carmel, not even the kid Gitai is shown auditioning to play the role of his son in [another?] movie).  Who is the pretty brunette woman shown endlessly looking at herself in the mirror while an opera aria plays—a younger version of Gitai’s mother?  Of his wife?  A daughter?  The familial relationships, along with the symbolism, can probably be untangled, but the author gives you little inducement to want to figure out who is who or what they really want, as opposed to what they think they want.  It’s all important to Gitai, but he never makes it important to us—the film seems aimed at an audience of one.

The “Carmel” of the title may refer to Mount Carmel, which is associated with the Old Testament prophet Elijah.  There are several other towns and settlements in Israel called “Carmel,” including one that was involved in the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in the second century A.D.—could this be the site of the battle shown in the film?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gitai seems to care little about what the audience will glean from this oddity, which is its strength and weakness… fuses documentary, narrative and stream of conscious forms in creating a singular, occasionally exasperating, work.”–Mark Keizer, Box Office Magazine (contemporaneous)

In 2008 documentarian Mark Hartley scored an unanticipated film festival hit with Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!, an examination of obscure Australian exploitation movies of the 70s and 80s.  (Striking while the iron was hot, Hartley rolled out a spiritual sequel of sorts with Machete Maidens Unleashed!, which braved the even more bizarre jungle of Filipino exploitation cinema).  2009 saw another surprise critical success in Best Worst Movie, the story of the disastrous making, and triumphant cult legacy, of the ultra-ridiculous vegetarian-goblin horror movie Troll II, which managed to score an astonishing 95% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer.  Whatever the reason (maybe its the flowering of seeds planted by Quentin Tarantino), at this moment in time mainstream critics seem eager to recognize, examine, and even embrace the pleasures of schlock.  Since the last horror/exploitation doc cycle—the duo of The American Nightmare (2000) and Mau Mau Sex Sex (2001)—came about a decade ago, it appears the time is ripe for another down-home survey of the dark and shady sides of American cinema.

The thesis of Nightmares in Red, White and Blue, the 2009 examination of the American horror film, is that particular social conditions and historical anxieties shape the nature of the shock genre from decade to decade.  Brian Yuzna asserts that the variety of disfigured, limbless freaks Lon Chaney specialized in playing in the twenties were inspired by the horrors of World War I and the sights of returning veterans maimed by modern munitions.  The viewpoint that American horror is strictly linked to American angst breaks down fairly early in the analysis, however, as the documentarians are forced to acknowledge that it was German Expressionism, exotic European folktales about nosferatu and werewolves, and immigrants like cinematographer/director Karl Freund, director Edgar G.Ulmer, and actors Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff that were mostly responsible for American horror’s first great boom in the 1930s.  The doc’s decision to focus solely on American productions helps limit Nightmares‘ dauntingly broad subject, but the parochialism inevitably leads to some distortions; because there’s no discussion of Mario Bava and his seminal gloved-killer giallos like Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971), the slasher film appears to spontaneously arise in the 1980s U.S. as a purely American invention.   There are times when the doc’s insights approach the profound (the observation that Jason Vorhees is always associated with the forces of nature, and may represent God’s judgment on a licentious world).  At other times, the theories are more peculiar (e.g., the talking head who suggests Ronald Reagan resembles Freddy Krueger, because they both prey on the next generation—Freddy by killing them off in their dreams, and Reagan by running up the national debt.  I think he may be onto on something).  But in truth, any pretensions the Nightmares might have to novel analysis or academic rigor are beside the point.  There is so much ground to cover—-a centuries worth of clips from over 200 features are shown!—that any insights must be clipped to soundbite length, making the doc more a parade of trivia (King Kong was Hitler’s favorite movie!) than a legitimate essay on how pop culture artifacts reveal cultural preoccupations.  The film works exquisitely well, however, as a trip down repressed-memory lane.  It’s a chance to revisit favorite shock clips (Linda Blair’s head-spinning and pea-soup spitting) and to check out gruesome teasers for flicks that might have slipped your attention.  It’s hard to imagine non-horror fans tuning in to this, and Nightmares displays clear elements of fanservice (often beautifully arranged, as when the entire Friday the 13th series is cleverly compressed into a 90 second montage of beer, boobs and bloody punishment).  Essentially, this patriotic terror tour is inessential—more a refresher than a primer—but still tremendous fun for fright fanatics.

Since it covers the most influential, and therefore the most mainstream, films in the horror genre, the more surreal breed of horror films lurk on the margins of this already marginal genre.  We do see footage from, and sometimes even get brief comments on, Certifed Weird films like Carnival of Souls, Eraserhead, Phantasm, Evil Dead II,  Silent Hill, and Pan’s Labyrinth, along with a few films that are not yet on the List but are destined to make it.

Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Movie (2009). Dir. Andrew Monument.  Featuring Lance Henriksen (narrator), John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Larry Cohen, George A. Romero, Roger Corman, Brian Yuzna (interviewees)

In contrast to Nightmares, which faced the challenge of trying to encapsulate a sprawling genre in a manageable 96 minutes, American Grindhouse covers its shallower subject in more depth (if that makes sense).  No one claims exploitation movies evolved over decades to mirror Americans changing desires.  Men did not suddenly become interested in seeing naked women with the advent of the nudist movies of the 1950s.  Instead, the story of exploitation movies tracks the history of American film censorship, and tells the tale of the brave and venal hucksters who invented ways to feed forbidden sights to hungry eyes.  Along the way they produced a popular underground transgressive cinema that was deliberately outrageous, and frequently bizarre.  The Hays production code tied Hollywood’s hands with respect to depicting nudity, white slavery, premarital sex, drug abuse, and a horde of naughtily entertaining adult subjects, but in doing so it created a market for showmen like Dwain Esper, Dave Friedman, Kroger Babb, and “the Forty Thieves,” who could bypass the studio system and take spectacles like Freaks and the birth-of-a-baby epic Mom and Dad directly to the people.  Later, when the Production Code broke down and the studios replaced it with the MPAA rating system, the exploitationeers were able to release movies unrated, or with self-imposed “X” or “adults only” ratings that allowed them to offer something the big boys couldn’t (although the venues they could show these flicks were limited—thus the “grindhouse,” the cheap 24-hour exploitation theater that becomes a virtual character of its own in the doc).  As Hollywood became bolder, treating previously verboten subjects like promiscuity (Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice) and opiate addiction (The Man with the Golden Arm), the Thieves were forced to further extremes, focusing the one subject that still scared the studios—sex—in a big way.  Grindhouse traces the development of the American sexploitation film from the burlesque movie to the nudist picture to the “nudie cuties” to the “roughie,” and finally to the hardcore sex film.  Other disreputable genres touched on include the VD film, teensploitation (juvenile delinquent movies, beach pictures, biker flicks), Nazisplaoitation, the gore movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis, women-in-prison movies, and blaxploitation.  Grindhouse‘s construction—background narration alternating with interviews with directors and historians, illustrated by lusty clips—is similar to Nightmares‘, but even at a brief 80 minutes, the exploitation side of the equation is covered at a more leisurely pace, with more time spent breaking down “important” individual films like Scum of the Earth and Ilsa, She Wolf of the S.S.  This, along with the schematic history of the exploitation industry, which lends itself to a coherent narrative involving continuous one-upmanship, gives Grindhouse a small leg up on the more meandering tale told in Nightmares, partly compensating for the narrower appeal of the subject matter.  Both films wind up being equally valuable and entertaining, so long as you have an underlying interest in sex and/or violence.

The only Certified Weird movie American Grindhouse discusses is the amazingly deranged mad scientist/metal illness/eyeball eating extravaganza Maniac (1934).  We now have a certain yen, however, to check out a previously-unknown-to-us “Nazis vs. Jesus action thriller” called The Tormentors (1971).

American Grindhouse (2010).  Dir. Elijah Drenner.  Featuring Robert Forster (narrator), John Landis, Kim Morgan, Don Edmonds, William Lustig, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Jack Hill, Fred Olen Ray, Joe Dante,  Allison Anders, David Hess (interviewees)

Nightmares in Red, White and Blue and American Grindhouse were made by different directors and crews (although Joe Dante appears as an expert in both).  Each was created by the same production company, Lux Digital, accounting for the compatibility of style.  The two docs are sold together or separately, and they make for an excellent evening’s double feature.  Watch both and you’ll be up-to-date on the underbelly of American film with a time investment of less than three hours. Lux is currently working on yet another companion project, tentatively (we hope) titled Films of Fury: The Kung-Fu Movie Movie, scheduled for release later this year.

“Why castigate these creatures
Whose angelic features
Are bumping and grinding on trash?
Are they not spawned by our greed?
Are they not our true seed?
Are they not what we’ve bought for our cash?”–poem from Trash Humpers

DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine

FEATURING: Rachel Korine, Harmony Korine, Brian Kotzur, Travis Nicholson

PLOT:  Four rednecks in wrinkled geriatric masks wander around nearly deserted streets drinking wine, demolishing abandoned television sets, tormenting the bizarre outcasts they come across in their wanderings, and humping trash.  One of the humpers explains to the camera that, unlike the suburbanites sleeping in their homes, they “choose to live like free people.”  By the end of the video the focus shifts to a single humper who may be having doubts about the trashy lifestyle.


BACKGROUND:

• Trash Humpers was basically unscripted, although the characters and aesthetic had been thought out beforehand.  According to Korine, the cast wandered through Nashville for a few weeks, sleeping outdoors, and filmed their in-character improvisations; the most interesting bits were edited into the final product.
• Korine assembled this film quickly in reaction to his negative experiences making his third feature film, the relatively big-budget Mr. Lonely; he found the bureaucracy surrounding that production creatively stifling.
• Trash Humpers is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film.  Their other 2009 release, Vernon Chatman’s absurdist Final Flesh, was previously inducted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies Ever Made.
• American DVD-by-mail rental giant Netflix originally declined to stock copies of Trash Humpers.  Drag City circulated a press release suggesting that the movie was refused because of its provocative content, and pointing out other controversial movies the company stocked.  Trash Humpers was accepted into the rental program soon after the press release.
• Trash Humpers was one of two winners of the second “reader’s choice” poll asking 366 Weird Movies’ readership to select films that had been reviewed but passed over for inclusion on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It seems impossible to think of the title without immediately calling up the mental picture of actors in creepy geriatric masks in an alley grinding their groins against garbage bags.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Any film in which four rednecks in latex masks that make them look

Festival teaser trailer for Trash Humpers

like escapees from a nursing home for the criminally insane force a pair of Siamese twins connected at the head by what looks like a giant tube sock to eat pancakes doused in Palmolive has weirdness in its corner.

COMMENTS: Weirdness obviously counts for a lot.  For a movie that goes so far out of its way to alienate the viewer, Trash Humpers has a surprising number of fans, and even a decent number of defenders among established critics; that’s a tribute to the power of the odd imagination on display in this trashy trek through the armpit of America (i.e. the garbage-strewn back alleys of Nashville, TN).  The film’s shabby, uncanny feel flows first from the faces of the wizened old farts themselves: their geriatric masks are calibrated to look almost like real makeup, but are just artificial enough so that you never figure out whether the humpers are actually intended to be old timers, or just miscreants disguised for anonymity.  Watching a gang of hoodlums bumping and grinding bagged refuse would produce giggles; but, put these frightening masks on the figures and it the activity turns from silly into creepy.  And violating the bags you left out for the garbageman last night isn’t the humpers only strange activity. They like to break TVs with sledgehammers and ride around eerily deserted, trash-strewn suburban streets with baby dolls dragging behind their bicycles.  In the course of their wanderings they meet a boy in a Sunday suit whom they teach to slip razor blades into apples, abuse pancake-making fake Siamese twins, consort with overweight hookers who serenade them with a chorus of “Silent Night,” and throw firecrackers while a man dressed in a French maid’s costume dedicates a poem to them.

Among Trash Humpers many qualities, however, weirdness isn’t necessarily the pre-eminent one.  The movie is also repetitive, ugly, pointless, unsavory, deliberately annoying, and tedious.  In fact, the surrealism here is likely just another blunt weapon used to bludgeon the viewer; the film is intended as an anti-audience provocation.  As such, it’s a slog to get through the rubbish: your bourgeois sensibilities may or may not be offended, but they’ll almost certainly be bored and irritated.  The humpers all affect shrill Southern accents, and are prone to endlessly repetitive nonsense chants: “make it, don’t take it, make it, don’t fake it…”  One of them constantly breaks into mirthless cackles.  We get long, lingering shots of streetlamps, toilets, and the rear end of a man’s motionless body found in a field.  We get performance artists improvising: the transvestite poet is joined by a trumpet player who toots an “extrapolated monstrosity of redemption.”   We get tap-dancing.  All this makes Trash Humpers, even at a slim 78 minutes, an avant-garde endurance test.  My favorite, and perhaps the most honest, reaction to the film came from Bill C. of the Film Freak Central Blog: “Harmony Korine dares you to hate this movie…and I accept.”

Mimicking the lo-fi aesthetics of VHS tape, complete with horizontal hold tracking errors and blocky-fonted “play” and “rew” legends appearing on the screen, is a great trick to give Trash Humpers an antiquarian, found footage feel, and the film’s unique look is one of its few undisputed strengths.  The low-tech cinematography makes the picture alternately murky and glaring, depending on the lighting.  At times the lack of sharp detail makes shots look like impressionist paintings: yellow flowers in a field show up as garish smears.  And there is a sad sort of harsh beauty in the montage of streets and parking lots at night, with sickly gold and green glows of neon and halogen casting unnatural light on asphalt and cement surfaces.

But the look isn’t the only anachronistic thing about the movie, which evokes (like a third or fourth generation dub) the punk spirits of earlier shock auteurs like Paul Morrisey (1960s), John Waters(1970s), and Nick Zedd (1980s).  First rejecting conventional cinematography for the camcorder’s glare, Trash Humpers next dispenses with narrative in favor of disconnected episodes celebrating the beauty of vandalism and sadism.  Korine indulges his peculiar obsessions with the grotesque and with white trash anti-culture to the hilt here; the targets of the film’s satire are dumb rednecks, and the implicit sense of classism and self-satisfied superiority grates just as it did in Gummo.  In fact, Trash Humpers resembles nothing so much as the work of a budgetless student filmmaker determined to emulate Korine’s notorious first film.  But the inspired moments that gave life to Gummo, like the spaghetti in the bathtub scene, are missing, as is the stylistic variety and any semblance of emotional involvement with or sympathy for the characters.

Philosophically, the movie is reprehensible. Some generously see in it a critique of disposable consumer society, and the transvestite’s poem supports that view (“Are they not our true seed?”).  But, if you take Korine at his word, he likes and admires the humpers, seeing them as the stand-ins for the outsider artist free from society’s conventions. His director’s statement calls the film “almost an ode to vandalism” and he has said in an interview, “I have a real deep love and admiration for these characters… There can be a creative beauty in their mayhem and destruction.”  The director finds “creative beauty” here in vandalizing narrative (and other cinematic) conventions.  The humper he portrays expresses disdain for working Americans sleeping in their comfortable suburban homes, while he prowls the night looking for something to smash. “That’s a stupid way to live… We chose to live like free people.”

The humpers’ freedom is Sadean, however; they live with no consequences to their actions, free to torment Siamese twins and kill transvestites with hammers for a thrill. They’re hick Übermensch, living outside of society’s conventions according to their own laws, but they’re too stupid and unimaginative to do anything interesting with their freedom.  They smash idols (television sets) but can build nothing of their own.  It’s this “creative,” poetic,” “mystical” form of destruction that Korine, the artist, identifies with in the humpers; at the very least, he finds it preferable to the boring, bourgeois existences of the unseen respectable family folk slumbering inside their homes while the elderly roam the night, raping their trash cans and peeping in their windows.

Or does he?  As in Gummo, Trash Humpers features seventy to eighty minutes of grotesque, pornographic nihilism and ends with quick climax suggesting sudden epiphany, repentance and redemption.  The strategy here is reminiscent of what used to be called, in old roadshow exploitation films of the forties and fifties, the “square-up” reel.  A salacious feature would display with as much explicitness as possible whatever sex, crime, drug abuse, and general depravity the producers could get away with, then end quickly with a finale showing the socially corrupt anti-heroes getting their just deserts (prison, addiction, or a social disease).  The punishment “squared-up” the degeneracy, in a moral sense, and the depravity could be excused as a cautionary tale.  Like a bizarre exploitation film, Trash Humpers is detailed and leering when it’s time to describe surreal debauchery, but glancing when it addresses salvation.  The ending almost comes off as insincere and ironic, but a biographical fact—the director was a new father at the time the film was made—suggests the conclusion was honestly intended.

Korine is very good at shining a flashlight on American ugliness, but his art seldom progresses beyond that point. All he does is look for a new skewed expressionist angle for that beam, and fiddle with the contrast.  He tires to transmutes hideousness to beauty, and in small doses he nearly succeeds (the wrinkled rubber faces of the humpers, or with the tune he himself warbles in a folk-falsetto about the “three little devils” as he films weed-strewn fields.)  But a geek show is no substitute for poetry; he gives us novelty but not insight.  Like the failed cinematic alchemists of ugliness before him, the universal formula remains as elusive as ever.

NOTE:  Trash Humpers originally received a negative review; that stance has been softened only slightly in this reassessment.  366 Weird Movies readers voted the movie onto the List of the Best Weird Movies of All Time, over editor’s objections, and we respect their will; even though we don’t necessarily like the film as cinema, on a pure weirdness level it’s clearly worthy of enshrinement.  We do preserve the original “beware” notice we gave the film, however.  After all, a “beware ” rating on a film isn’t a guarantee you won’t like it… it just means, well, “beware.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a pre-fab underground manifesto to rank beside John Waters’ legendarily crass ‘Pink Flamingos’… riveting beyond all rationality…”–Rob Nelson, Variety (contemporaneous)

“Korine works in an almost blissfully weird utopia of marginalized naughtiness here, and more craftily distills his willful transgressiveness into something strange and watchable.”–Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times (contemporaneous)

“…the most bizarre movie you’ll see this year, guaranteed, maybe ever… proves to be less a scary, ‘found tape’ whodunit than a jaw-dropping shocksploit with one very weird agenda.”–Kam Williams, kamwilliams.com

OFFICIAL SITE: T!R!A!S!H! % H!U!M!P!E!R!S – Features the trailer, links to buy the video, three sound clips suggested for use as ringtones, and dozens of hi-res stills (available in the “press area,” which is open to all)

IMDB LINK: Trash Humpers (2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

His Humps – Interview with the director for the New York Press

NYFF ’09 PODCAST: Harmony Korine – Podcast interview with Korine, hosted by The Village Voice‘s Aaron Hillis for greencine.com

Harmony Talks Trash – Less an interview, as the title suggests, and more an expansive profile of Korine from Clodagh Kinsella of Dossier

Harmony Korine ‘Trash Humpers’ Award Video – Korine’s comic filmed acceptance of a prize from the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival

“TRASH HUMPERS” TOO TRASHY FOR NETFLIX? – Blog report on the minor controversy regarding Netflix’s reluctance to stock Trash Humpers

LIST CANDIDATE: TRASH HUMPERS (2009) – Our original assessment of Trash Humpers

DVD INFO: Drag City’s lo-fi DVD (buy) contains the widescreen version of the film (which is odd, when you think about it—oversight, or joke?) along with a xerox-style 24 page “fanzine.”  It includes a 2 minute short film called “Blood of Havana,” which features one of the masks used in the film but is otherwise unrelated in theme or style.  There are also 16 minutes of outtakes, along with the 27 minute “Mac and Plac,” which, although presented as a freestanding short, is actually one very long deleted scene showing how the Siamese twins got separated.  Though this raw footage is an even tougher slog than Trash Humpers itself, the clip does give the viewer insight into the improvisatory process.

(This movie was nominated for review by our own Cameron Jorgenson, who said “looks very promising [but] it may not make it, because Gummo is already on the list.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)