Essentially prisoners, these children are like experiments to the father (much like the dog training he is introduced to at one point in the story).  Each day they learn new words that have no correlation with what they actually mean in the outside world.  They are told that they can leave home only once their canine teeth fall out—a thing that of course we know does not happen without a bit of forceful persuasion.  At one point, the father begins bringing home a young woman he works with (blindfolded, of course) to have her engage in sexual relations with the son—a thing that is done without emotion, without fanfare and without any seeming pleasure on either end—only to have her betray his confidence by beginning to have a sexual relationship with the youngest daughter in exchange for presents.  Again, this is done without any semblance of emotion or passion; the daughter simply tells the girl if she licks her “there” (pointing to the obvious spot) she can have a gift.

Playing off Shyamalan’s The Village (though without the ridiculousness of that film) but done in a very matter-of-fact style typical of Greek cinema (or any Balkan cinema really) and especially of the nation’s cinematic icon Theo Angelopoulos, Lanthimos’ odd little movie reeks of possible exploitation, both in character and in style.  But, instead, it comes off as almost experimentation—as much as the father’s experimentation (i.e., the dog-like training) upon his unknowing children.  Yet, even with the passionless approach to characterization (including the most banal sex scenes ever filmed) we can feel the tremors begin beneath the surface, and we know that eventually there is going to be a deeply felt emotional explosion from at least one of these children.  Of course this emotional A-Bomb does eventually come (culminating in that aforementioned forceful persuasion) and we are left with a haunting final image that may be the inevitable conclusion to a psychologically dangerous tale such as Lanthimos’ bizarre Dogtooth.

This review was originally published at The Cinematheque in a slightly different form.

DIRECTED BY: Werner Herzog

FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer

PLOT: While investigating the slaughter of an immigrant family, a pill-popping and coke-

sniffing New Orleans cop’s penchant for gambling and for rolling his escort girlfriend’s clients gets him into deep trouble with his department and with dangerous men; to save his life, clear his name, and crack the case, he must pull off several double crosses while strung out and sleep deprived.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Watched with a doggedly literal mind, this version of Bad Lieutenant could almost be seen as a straightforward thriller/police procedural, but most who check out this flick will come away with the nagging feeling that there’s something exceptionally strange afoot in NOLA these days.  Less than a handful of hallucinations dog our drug-soaked antihero through the port, but the visions that do appear pack one hell of  a wallop.  Cage’s jittery, over-the-top performance and the enigmatic, dreamlike ending Herzog supplies notch two more points in the “weird” column.

COMMENTS: In 1992 underground auteur Abel Ferrara made a notorious movie about a corrupt New York City cop who shoots heroin, smokes crack, molests teenage girls, shakes down criminals for bribes, and tries to solve a case involving a raped nun while hallucinating and dodging a bookie he owes an unpayable debt.  Bad Lieutenant was an overwrought, magnificent Christian parable that sought to demonstrate God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness by presenting a character that audiences couldn’t forgive.

In 2009 renowned German auteur Werned Herzog made a movie about a corrupt New Orleans cop who snorts heroin, smokes crack, molests young women over the age of 21, rolls johns for drugs and money, and tries to solve a case involving a murdered family while hallucinating and dodging a mobster he owes an unpayable debt.  Herzog defiantly claimed never to have heard of Ferrara or the first Bad Lieutenant movie, but screenwriter William M. Finkelstein notably kept his mouth shut.

It’s a good thing that Herzog, who apparently wanted to title the film Port of Call New Orleans, relented and let the producers include “Bad Lieutenant” in the title, because it defused almost certain criticism that the story was a Bad Lieutenant ripoff and put critics instead in the mindset of focusing on the ample tonal differences between the two movies.  Many reviewers even asserted that Herzog’s film has “nothing at all” to do with Ferrara’s, beyond the two depraved, over-the-top performances of Keitel and Cage.  Keitel spent his movie cursing, slurring and drooling, and is most remembered for kneeling in a church, mewling and spitting out half-formed epithets as he hallucinated a visitation from Jesus Christ.  His was a literally and figuratively naked performance; asked to be completely sincere, Keitel risked looking ridiculous.  Cage, on the other hand, never disrobes; he sleeps in the same rumpled tan jacket night after night (on the rare occasions he does sleep).  His jittery, disjointed, often deliriously hammy performance is like Hunter Thompson as assayed by Dennis Hopper on a meth binge.  Gaunt, bursting into laughter at dangerous times, imagining iguanas, and pinching off old ladies’ oxygen supplies during interrogations: Cage is clearly having fun being bad.  In Cage, Herzog figures he’s found his next Klaus Kiniski, a much mocked actor whose scenery-chewing proclivities he can turn from an embarrassment into an asset by matching him to mad material.  Nic even gets off what may be the best gonzo line of the decade: “Shoot him again!  His soul’s still dancing!,” delivering it with an unhinged spontaneous delight that it suggests an ad-lib (the accompanying visual, the movie’s most memorable, proves it ain’t).

The difference between Keitel’s Lieutenant and Cage’s is like the difference between a bag of uncut heroin and uncut cocaine: they’re both white crystalline powders that melt your mind, but you’d never mistake the effects of one for the other.  The tone in Port of Call: New Orleans is more detached and ironic than the bruisingly sincere New York film; at times, it’s a black comedy and a parody of a police procedural.  It’s hard to imagine an uneasy, ridiculous scene like the one where the iguanas appear to sing “Please Release Me” in Ferrara’s hellish Gotham.  At one point, the perpetually inebriated Cage find himself simultaneously toting around a dog, a kid, and a hooker with a heart of gold; it’s as if the script couldn’t make up its mind on a humanizing companion cliché, so it winkingly decides to cover all the bases at once.

Despite the lighter tone and the leavening humor, Port of Call New Orleans shouldn’t be mistaken for a comedy.  Cage’s Terrence McDonagh is a more complex character than Keitel’s nameless Lieutenant—who was little more than walking, fornicating, blubbering sin—and has a different character arc.  Bad as McDonagh is, he’s not thoroughly evil.  He’s given a backstory to explain his drug addiction and slide into cynicism, he shows loyalty to those closest to him, and he does have a legitimate devotion to solving the murder case.  The script highlights opportunities when he could have abused his legal authority, but chose to back off.  As he says, in an ethical double entendre near the end of the film, he “has bad days,” though more of them than most of us, to be sure.  McDonagh is an unexpectedly realistic character, a true antihero with a few virtues that we can root for even while we disapprove of him.  He’s a more nuanced and mature Lieutenant than the original, which is not to say a better one; each script chooses the correct spin to put on the character for that film’s purpose.

McDonagh needs a few redeeming characteristics, because the plot requires us to root for him.  He is, after all, ultimately on the side of justice, at least where his own crimes aren’t concerned.  The double-stranded story is surprisingly engaging.  The investigation of the massacre of the Senegalese family draws us in, but eventually McDongah’s own misbehaviors pile up on him and push that plotline into the background.  The drugs, the gambling debts, shaking down the wrong johns, the internal affairs agents sniffing around… McDonagh may have been able to juggle these issues for years, but they all come crashing down on his head at once at the worst possible time.  Cage’s cop sinks to the lowest level imaginable, into a septic hole with slimy walls that it should be impossible to claw his way out of.  Then, the script amazes us as, starting anew from nothing, playing off one faction against another and taking advantage of some outrageous good luck, he rebuilds his position.

By the end, McDonagh even ends up better off than he started.  Lest we think vice has been rewarded, he even decides to clean up his act—or does he?  True, the observing iguanas slither away into the bayou, but the Lieutenant he has his backsliding moments, his “bad days” when he rapes women in parking lots and holes up in a sleazy hotel room with a bag of heroin.  Still, the good fortune Cage strikes at the end of the film is so incredible, his immediate transformation so unlikely, that we can’t help but be reminded that Cage’s last good role prior to this one was in Adaptation, and we can’t help but wonder if the director is hoping we remember that role, too.  To puzzle us the more Herzog adds a highly enigmatic, “fishy” epilogue which concludes with a long shot of Cage and an unlikely companion sitting in front of an aquarium, as if lounging in the Mississippi by a pier once again submerged under Katrina’s waters.

The original Bad Lieutenant superficially ended on a downer, but there was no question about redemption: you either took the movie on faith, or you didn’t.  Herzog is agnostic as to whether salvation is possible, and won’t let the audience know for sure if the ending is grace or delusion.  Does Cage remain forever evil at heart?  Or was he ever truly depraved—that is, in the Biblical sense?  Ferrara knew the answer, and Herzog doesn’t; but they both make their case as well as it can be made.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…punchy, seriously strange (if less seriously essential) film… [Cage is] back in the resplendently weird form of films like Raising Arizona and Wild at Heart…”–Michelle Orange, Movieline (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Adam Elliot

FEATURING: Voices of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries, Toni Collette, Bethany Whitmore

PLOT: A lonely 8-year old girl in Australia picks a random address out of the New York City

phone book so she can ask where babies come from in America and begins a lifelong pen-pal relationship with Max, a middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger’s syndrome.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s very good for a sentimental drama, but the crazy, damaged characters and intriguing stylized look still won’t rank it any higher than “offbeat” on the weird spectrum.

COMMENTS: The first figure you see in Mary and Max is a depressed, distressed carved koala bear clinging to a mailbox post; it sets the tone of solemn whimsy and announces Adam Elliot’s art style, a heaping dollop of cute cut with a tablespoon of the grotesque.  (When the action shifts from Australia to New York, the first figure you see is a glum and manly Statue of Liberty).  Mary, the little girl, is dowdy, with glasses and a “poo” colored birthmark, but Max is an ogre: a husky pinhead with ears on stalks, a dingy gray Shreck, magnificently voiced in a weary monotone by Hoffman.  The two main characters rarely speak, except in monologues when they read the missives they exchange; the tale is mostly narrated in a child’s storybook style, which gives the movie a literary flavor and a frequent undercurrent of irony (the narrator explains that Mary wishes she too had a friend to play piggyback with, as the lonely girl gazes out the window at a pair of dogs preparing to mate).  The story is sad—Mary’s ugly existence is particularly bleak, and made even worse by bursts of false hope—but the relationship between the two misfits is legitimately heartwarming.  The main characters are almost novelistically complex, and the first act, the most rewarding, is devoted to getting to know the Aussie girl with the birthmark the “color of poo” and the overweight New Yorker who always wanted a friend who was not imaginary, a pet, or a figurine.  Quirky secondary characters include a Mary’s agoraphobic neighbor (who Mary thinks suffers from “home-a-phobia”), her “wobbly” sherry drinking mom, and Max’s half-blind neighbor Ivy, who smells like urine and cough drops.  Tiny details and running jokes are embedded in the claymation designs, like the series of rhyming epitaphs and the homeless man in front of Max’s tenement with a sign that changes over the years of the friend’s correspondence.  The Australian scenes are colored in a drab, rustic sepia, while New York is a noirish black and white; both locations have brilliant splashes of red representing the rare intrusion of joy into the character’s dim lives.  Humor—from the wry to the laugh-out-loud hilarious, as when Max explains where babies come from—is a near constant companion, at least for the first two thirds of the film.  The movie is intoxicating while it takes its time introducing the pen-pals, but once they’re characters are established, the plot hurtles through incidents as Mary grows up, loses her parents, goes to university, finds love and a career and many setbacks, and finally travels to New York to meet Max.  Ironically, the more that happens in the story, the more momentum it loses; it was more fascinating as a series of leisurely, anecdotal correspondences.  Further, as the story heads towards its climax, the humor drains out, as a series of personal disasters pile up on poor Mary and drive her to the psychic breaking point.  Although it scarcely ruins a great film, Elliot overplays the pathos in the climax, ending the story depressingly; he final ray of sunlight, though it brings a tear to the eye, can’t relieve the heavy, heavy clouds that cast the final act into darkness. This bittersweet animated feature isn’t kids’ stuff, or really weird stuff, but it’s worth your time if you have a sentimental old softie buried somewhere inside you, and he likes to laugh.

Mary and Max is the feature length culmination of a theme Elliot had worked on in a series of short films: the relationship between a “normal” person and an eccentric, disabled outcast (the cousin in “Cousin” suffers from cerebral palsy; the title character in the Oscar-winning short “Harvie Crumpet” is afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome). Having finally explored this terrain for a full ninety minutes, it will be interesting to see if the talented director tries something different next.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I can’t remember seeing an animated feature so dark and funny and bizarre and sad, all at the same time.”–James Plath, DVD Town (DVD)

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

FEATURING: Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane, Joanne Whalley

PLOT: Four men (presumably gangsters, though it’s never made explicit) kidnap the lover of a

cuckolded mate’s wife and try to goad the bereaved man into killing him for revenge.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not weird, although it is an example of how an isolated weird scene can creep into a mainstream drama.

COMMENTS:  44 Inch Chest sets up an intriguing conflict that captures our interest, but it fails to capitalize on the inherent drama and its force gradually dissipates into a wisp.  When sexy Liz (Whalley) announces she’s leaving Colin (Winstone), he first pleads with her not to go, then winds up beating the name of her lover out of her.  Afterward, Colin is so emotionally spent he can’t even get up off the floor or stop listening to Harry Nilsson wail “I can’t live, if living is without you” over and over. His four friends, shady characters at best, kidnap the adulterer and deliver him to their comatose mate so he can extract his vengeance.  There’s no evidence that Colin ever asks for their assistance or that his buddies kidnap the loverboy as a favor to him.  They are prodding him to do his duty; they take it upon themselves to set up the ritual revenge, and as they egg him on, it becomes clear that if the cuckold fails to conform to the code of gangster honor and kill the man who disrespected him, their value system will be undermined.  The problem is that Colin is a clinically depressed, blubbering, lovesick mess who’s barely capable of lighting his own cigarette, much less pulling a trigger and taking another man’s life.  The conflict isn’t between between Colin and his wife’s helpless lover (who spends the movie stuffed into a wardrobe or tied to a chair), but between Colin and the bad angels standing two on each shoulder, each using a different tactic to convince him to uphold his “honor.”  An actor’s movie, 44 Inch Chest unspools like an overextended one-act play, with each of the major characters getting a monologue and a turn in the spotlight.  Winstone’s performance is nuanced, burly and scary, but even more pathetic.  As a suave homosexual, Ian McShane dominates whenever he’s onscreen; despite his sophistication and questionable sexuality he’s one of the gang, as crudely masculine as any of them at bottom (in fact, his “love ‘em and leave ‘em” sexual philosophy is, if anything, the most authentically guy-ish).  John Hurt is also excellent as the bitter and shriveled “Old Man Peanut,” who’s as dried up a bundle of bigotry and spite as you’d ever have the misfortune of encountering outside of a Mafia nursing home.  Tom Wilkinson does well as Archie, the regular guy of the group and frequently the mediator among clashing egos, and Stephen Dillane is fine, if underused, as the youngest member of the group.   As Liz, Whalley is sexy, elegant and distant; the unknowable (to these guys, at least) feminine.  The F-word and C-word laden dialogue strives for profane poetry and strikes a reasonably nasty rhythm, though it never sails to the heights of a David Mamet.  The problem is the plot, which peters out long before the end and winds up in a philosophically sound but dramatically unsatisfying anticlimax. 

A couple of fantasy sequences explain why this vulgar gangster drama is being covered on a weird movie site.  When Colin is left alone in a room with his bloodied-up romantic rival, he begins to hallucinate.  The visions elucidate his psychology and provide somewhere for the movie to go when the droogs seems to have run out of misogynist arguments.  Even when you’ve been warned they’re coming they may catch you by surprise, as its not always completely obvious where the objective world ends and Colin’s internal fantasies begin.  Nonetheless, they’re a diversion and don’t really substitute for a more thoughtful plot resolution.  Watch 44 Inch Chest for the performances by a superlative collection of British actors, and for the brief glimpse a John Hurt in a black cocktail dress; don’t watch it for the story, or for weirdness.

Louis Mellis and David Scinto, co-writers of the 2000 hit Sexy Beast, wrote the screenplay for Chest.  The movie also stars Beast‘s Winstone.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The actors go at the material with obvious relish… On the debit side, and it’s a doozy, the picture’s narrative trajectory fails to deliver a third act that takes the story anywhere of note except into a silly realm of cut-rate surrealism. Final reel ends not with the expected bang but with an almost inaudible whimper.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Cory McAbee, Crugie, David Hyde Pierce

PLOT: Ex-con/lounge singer Stingray Sam grudgingly joins his former partner the Quasar Kid

in a quest to save a little girl, with frequent musical breaks featuring songs by The Billy Nayer Show. David Hyde Pierce narrates intermittent segments of animated collage that explain their futuristic society.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: It’s a wacky, memorable space musical with western flair, crisp black and white visuals, and imaginative, nonsensical notions of the future, but all that can be found in slightly more intriguing form in McAbee’s earlier work The American Astronaut, which better serves The List by being a feature-length movie (Stingray Sam is an hour-long serial).  But it certainly contains enough of its own charm and inventiveness to stand alongside its predecessor, and it shouldn’t be wholly dismissed just yet.

COMMENTS: Conspicuously sponsored by the fictional “Liberty Chew Chewing Tobacco” and excitedly asking what our heroes will be up to next at the end of every episode, Stingray Sam is a fitting tribute to old-fashioned serials, keeping many of the western and sci-fi elements of such shows while incorporating a wealth of inspired new ideas. There are several weird inventions and convenient technologies to place it in the futuristic space setting, but the sets are wonderfully low-key and familiar. McAbee’s incredible charm seeps through the screen in everything from his performance to the silly dialogue, aided along by the excellent musical numbers and gorgeous animated collage sequences.

By the time the second episode’s explanatory animated piece details the upper class invention of gender-determining drugs, male-on-male baby-making, and a delightful portmanteau naming system, what started out as a fairly straightforward quest to rescue a maiden quickly evolves into a madcap journey through McAbee’s unpredictable imagination.  The layers of references, backstory, character, and pseudo-science wrapped up in a musical comedy-adventure are impressively nuanced.  David Hyde Pierce’s articulate and tongue-in-cheek narration (which delights particularly in the word “Durango”) offers a range of ideas, inventions, and happenings that don’t always make sense but never fail to spark interest.  The first time around some of this information goes by too quickly, as viewers are hit with so many novelties and humorous animation at once, but subsequent watches prove McAbee’s involved story and unique futuristic vision to be unavoidably successful, if preposterous.

With catchy tunes that probably sit somewhere in the rock and roll spectrum yet manage to remain without a definable genre classification, The Billy Nayer Show (who also comprise several main cast members) craft a fun soundtrack that usually leads to manic dancing and wide smiles.  Each episode contains one song, which never encroaches on the action or comedy (and often increases the latter), along with a curt opening theme that reminds us “Stingray Sam is not a hero, but he does do the things that folks don’t do that need to be done.”  They serve to make the strange story even more memorable, describing stingray babies, entertainment on Mars, and peg-legged fathers, and add an extra element of goofy joy to the work.

Looking past the wonky sci-fi premise and western trappings (complete with cowboy hats and “yes ma’ams”), the heart of Stingray Sam lies in the unbridled glee the entire project exudes. As Sam, McAbee swings his way into everyone’s hearts with his jerky dance moves, easy smile, and affable demeanor, while Crugie keeps his cool as the Quasar Kid, offers some gruffer tunes, and frequently betrays a weakness for olives.  Their intricate secret handshake is just icing on this lovable, quirky cake of a partnership.  The beleaguered faces of many supporting cast members seem somehow twisted and plasticine, suiting the off-kilter atmosphere perfectly as they help or hinder our heroes’ proceedings.  There’s not much else like Stingray Sam.

Stingray Sam is currently only available directly from director Cory McAbee at his personal site (click here to purchase).  If the film follows the marketing plan of The American Astronaut, it will eventually be released via normal distribution channels as well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sounds weird? You bet your ass… Cory McAbee manages to cram enough story and song in to each episode, each more ridiculous than the other and still come out with a coherent story and structure.”–Swarez, Twitchfilm

DIRECTED BY: Ron Carlson

FEATURING: Sophie Moon, Anya Lahiri, Charles Napier

PLOT: As they head home from a 1968 New Year’s Eve party, God stops two lesbian fashion

models on a deserted highway and turns them into vampires so they can do Her will on earth.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Life Blood squanders it’s weird premise and settles for being just another undistinguished B-movie.

COMMENTS: The literal message of this Ron Carlson film is that vampires are God’s avenging lesbian angels.  (Pause for a moment and try to wrap your mind around that weirdness).  Returning from a 1968 topless New Year’s Eve party, two lipstick lesbians meet the super-sexy Supreme Being on a deserted highway.  She turns them into vampires, dresses them in lingerie and buries them by the side of the road to ripen for forty years (?), after which they rise to do their holy duty (which is never fully explained, although it has something to do with selectively killing off the wicked so She won’t have to flood the world again).  The movie plays this wacked-out premise with a straight face, but something sad happens to Life Blood on its march to psychotronic immortality: it wimps out on weirdness and abandons originality.  Besides lots of lesbian tongue kissing and a grisly hairpin murder, in the first half-hour we also get a dwarf deputy, a truck stop inexplicably named “Murder World,” and a wonderfully wacky TV show called “Chics Chasing Chickens,” wherein bikini-clad babes stalk the titular poultry.  But then, rather than exploring the interesting idea of vampires as avenging angels, the script simply has one of the pair go rogue, turning into a standard bloodsucking baddie.  The movie holes up inside a mini-mart, dispatching the occasional customer but more importantly killing off the burgeoning weirdness and the dramatic thrust.  B-movie cliches take over, a major character disappears, and after a couple of desperate-for-work actors are sacrificed, a deus ex machina in a see-through negligee shows up to send the plot hurtling to an anticlimax.  Pouty Sophie Moon tries to have fun playing a villainess, but hearing her purr repetitive threats wears thin fast; the rest of the acting is serviceable.  Editing, camerawork, and sound are pro.  The movie went through three name changes before distributor Lionsgate finally selected the most generic title it could come up with.  Apparently, the average person knows who someone named “Scout Taylor-Compton” is, because she gets co-top billing on the DVD box (although I couldn’t guarantee she was in the movie). The lesbian scenes are sparse and not hot. All in all Life Blood ends up being a watchable (in a train-wreck sort of way) disappointment, a movie that makes you wonder “what were they thinking?” on many different levels.

Life Blood‘s mystical lesbian hook is so outré it’s hard to imagine the movie’s not conscious of its own ridiculousness, but it never becomes clear whether writer/director Carlson falls on the Ed Wood (clueless fetishism) or the Russ Meyer (deliberate exaggeration) end of the B-movie self-awareness spectrum.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie is a (CGI) total black hole, sucking in your time and energy…and unfortunately, no negligée-wearing God-broad is going to emerge from that black hole when it’s over to make out with you.”–Stacie Ponder, Final Girl

FEATURING: Dany Boon, Julie Ferrier, Dominique Pinon, André Dussollier, Nicolas Marié

PLOT: After video store clerk Bazil gets a stray bullet to the head and survives, he joins

up with a ragtag group of trash sorters who help him conspire in a prank war against rival arms manufacturers.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Micmacs is a sweet, whimsical, and slightly surreal comedy, but it never reaches truly bizarre status.  For the most part its story and characters make sense, all set in a world not exceedingly different from our own.

COMMENTS: Once again Jean-Paul Jeunet effortlessly slips his audience into an anachronistic, slightly off-color world with wacky characters and ingenious devices, and this time he even manages to work in some anti-war (or at least, anti-weapons) statements.  As a filmmaker his strengths reside in his fantastic visual aesthetic and dedication to interesting characters, but not necessarily effective storytelling.  These characteristics apply to Micmacs, as the story is interesting but confusingly structured and underdeveloped.  It takes a while to really come together, with several curt scenes following one right after the other until the fun fully starts when Bazil joins the energetic trash heap crew.  Once everything gets going, the movie becomes a very enjoyable and unpredictable comedy complete with goofy disguises, high-concept stratagems, and plenty of breaking and entering.

The characters are fun and detailed—quirky but not in the annoying “indie-cliche” way.  They all have their own talents and interests that lend them their nicknames, and there are some imaginative schemes that involve everyone working together and putting their specific skills to use in unexpected ways.  The cast is excellent, as everyone imbues his or her personage with emotion and a good dose of silliness.  Dany Boon exudes a sort of hapless confusion coupled with a go-to spirit, while Dominique Pinon manages to always stand out in anything.  Omar Sy has some of the best comedic moments as Remington, a wannabe anthropologist obsessed with idioms.  Julie Ferrier shines as the outspoken contortionist, and both Nicolas Marié and André Dussollier put in delightfully devious turns as the villainous CEOs.

While clearly the film is quite character-heavy, the ensemble works so well together that no one is lost in the shuffle, and the focus remains on Bazil to ground the story. The script is funny and lighthearted but not fluffy, and of course the visuals are breathtaking: it’s filmed in slight sepia hues with an array of innovative gadgets and home-made clothes, and everything has a very homey, lived-in feel.  The atmosphere is slightly surrealistic and kooky and the characters are instantly lovable. Incorporating a clear penchant for high-concept stratagems and offbeat humor, Micmacs is an unavoidably cute diversion from the real world with a few narrative weaknesses.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Some of the extravagant visual eccentricity of [Jeunet's] debut feature, ‘Delicatessen’ (still his best and strangest film), of which he was co-director, is echoed in the smoky streetscapes, weird mechanical gizmos and comic-grotesque human figures on display here.  But his pacing is more deliberate, almost classical in its precise calibration of cause and effect… the film roams and rambles and sometimes stalls, straining for a charm that should come effortlessly.”–A.O. Scott, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

NOTE: This review is published in a slightly different form at Film Forager.

FEATURING: Aino Kishi, Dai Mizuno

PLOT:  In a timeless mystical forest, a rape survivor takes on the souls of her eleven

dead sisters and becomes a cyborg to avenge them.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Samurai Princess is a relatively unambitious attempt to cash in on the biohorror/splatterpunk formula established in Meatball Machine (2005); fans of this stuff will be probably be reasonably entertained, but newcomers would be better off checking out the aforementioned Meatball Machine or Tokyo Gore Police instead.

COMMENTS: In a few short years, the works of an incestuous group of Japanese writers/directors/FX gurus have created a new Japanese splatterpunk formula focusing on slim but fantastic storylines; extreme, absurd gore effects; and the modification of body parts into bioweapons.  This phenomenon is only five years old, but it’s already reminiscent of what happened to Troma: the studio had a hit, and spent the rest of its existence remaking The Toxic Avenger over and over under different names.  Samurai Princess is a lesser entry in this new genre, and at times it feels like the square peg of the splaterpunk formula is being forced into the round hole of a gentler, more reflective fantasy.  The idea of a justice-seeking living vessel infused the souls of eleven raped virgins feels like an old Japanese legend, but making that instrument of vengeance a cyborg with detachable boob-bombs is a faddish approach that doesn’t click.  The movie’s setting—a primeval forest haunted by brigands, loners and mad scientists, a place that’s even “out of Buddha’s jurisdiction”—is promising.  It’s a place out of time; the kimonos and katanas suggest feudal Japan, but there are plenty of anachronisms like chainsaws, cameras, and novelty sunglasses with blinking Christmas lights on the frame.  The cast that romps through the forest is nicely bizarre: besides the main character (who’s neither a samurai nor a princess), there’s one mad doctor who collects body parts to build “mechas,” a rival cyborg-building maniac with a pair of female sidekicks who speak in unison, a Buddhist nun with magical powers, a wandering renegade who uses power chords from his electric guitar as a weapon, and a pair of fashion-obsessed teenage girls with teleportation powers who are risking their lives mecha-hunting as a lark.  Princess is a tiny bit light on the gore relative to other entries in the genre (though for the average viewer the extreme, cartoonish dismemberment will be off-putting), but in one memorably absurd scene a man carves up his enemies with his chainsaw leg; as the limbs and organs are sliced off they magically arrange themselves into a pagan altar, and he and his paramour dance around in celebration as gushing blood showers around them.  There’s also mediocre English dubbing, a penis monster and campy dialogue like “You’re a nun, right?  So it’s easy to put souls into a mecha.  Fantastic!”  With all of this going on, it’s a surprise that Princess falls so flat as entertainment; Kaji is so much in a rush to get to the next gore or battle scene or introduce the next crazy character that he forgets to tell a meaningful story or get us interested in what he’s already given us.  In the end its like a dish made entirely of spices, with no meat.  Just like with a Troma movie, the first one of these splatterpunk epics you see may seem astoundingly unique; but there’s a diminishing return of weirdness with each new entry you view.  Some will call in love with the formula, others will get bored quickly, but either way, Samurai Princess is not one of the better examples of the genre.  More than anything it seems like a missed opportunity, bringing up interesting fantasy ideas but failing to exploit them, falling back instead on crowd-pleasing cyborg gore.

The films comprising the new Japanese splatterpunk canon are Meatball Machine (2005), The Machine Girl (2008), Tokyo Gore Police (2008), Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl (2009), and this, with more undoubtedly to come.  Some of the key figures in the genre are Yûdai Yamaguchi, Jun’ichi Yamamoto, Yoshihiro Nishimura, Naoyuki Tomomatsu, and Noboru Iguchi.  Directors and writers often show up as crew members on each others projects; for example, Kagi, the director of Princess, was also the co-writer of Tokyo Gore Police.  Nishimura, who supervises special effects and makeup on most of these films as well as directing, may be the most important figure in the movement.

At the time of this writing, Samurai Princess is available to watch for free on YouTube.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The mutant creations are bizarre, the effects satisfyingly squishy.  The ‘new flesh’ proposed in Tokyo Gore Police is in full effect here, combatants on both sides remolded and reshaped into nightmarish new forms… While he may struggle some under his budget limitations, writer-director Kengo Kaji injects the story with his distinctive brand of madness.”–Todd Brown, Twitch