FEATURING: Aramis Sartorio, Thea Martin, Brett Hundley, David Reynolds, John Karyus, Karen Sartorio, Vincent Cusimano, Tom Devlin, Damon Packard, Evan Stone, Debbie Rochon

PLOT:  Everyone hates Frank. Especially his wife Katie and his best frienemy Tommy Spioch,

who asked to crash on their couch two years ago and never left.  Tommy spends most of his time lusting after Katie who seems to hate him just as much as she hates Frank. Frank’s existence is stupid.  After two possibly accidental homicides, two kidnappings and a visit from a talking spider, Frankie’s world is turned upside down as he drifts through Blunderland searching for his missing wife.

COMMENTS:  The second feature from Caleb Emerson (Die, You Zobie Bastards!), Frankie in Blunderland shows a modicum of restraint compared to the previous film—it’s a bit more structured than the ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ approach of Bastards, yet it pumps up the surrealism.

Scripted by Marta Estirado (who appears in the film and died shortly after principal shooting was finished), Blunderland plays as a post-modern L.A. hipster bounce on Lewis Carroll’s well known tale, and possibly “The Odyssey” as well.  Aramis Sartorio (The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol) plays Frank, a loser who’s not so loveable, and who, truth be told, is probably his own main problem.  Despite everything, Frankie still believes that things can only get better, even after two possible murders, and the kidnapping of his wife, which leads him to wander the Blunderland landscape (AKA L.A.) looking for her and encountering various other misfits and oddkins such as a hobo prophet (John Karyus), a Mormon missionary who may actually be a space alien ( John Christopher Morton), lesbian robots, oracle spiders (Debbie Rochon), and just plain slackers all of whom either help or hinder his search for Katie.

Blunderland would make be a good double-bill companion with Tommy Pistol, in that both are absurdist looks at life in The City of Angles (and they share some of the same actors).  It’s a good candidate for The List mainly for its visual style and cast of crazy characters, but also because it’s an anti Rom-Com that’s actually successful and doesn’t cop out at the end.

Aramis Sartario and screenwriter Marta Estirado (R.I.P.)

Official Site /Facebook

DIRECTED BY: Louis Malle

FEATURING: Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart, Joe Dallesandro

PLOT: A 15-year old girl flees a shooting war between the sexes and ends up at a farm estate

inhabited by a bedridden old woman, a brother and sister both (like her) named “Lily,” a gang of naked children who herd pigs and sheep, and a unicorn.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:   If we were making a list composed only of European-style arthouse surrealism, Black Moon would easily make the List.  Here at 366, Black Moon has to fight for its space not only with other Buñuel-based concoctions, but also with the mutant species of crazed B-movies, the maddest of midnight movies, and intentional and unintentional oddities of every stripe; the competition makes this (admittedly very weird) experimental art movie a more marginal choice.

COMMENTS:  Mercurial auteur Louis Malle (Au Revoir les Enfants) had dabbled in light absurdity with 1960′s Zazie dans le Metro, but audiences weren’t prepared for the sudden onslaught of full-on surrealism he unleashed in 1975 with Black Moon.  The movie concerns a young girl’s flight from an absurd world—where camo-clad men line up female prisoners of war and execute them, with gas mask-wearing ladies returning the favor to their male captives—into a totally irrational one.  With Malle behind the camera, we know that this will be a deliberate, quiet, beautifully-shot film.  Indeed, there are lots of long atmospheric shots and no dialogue at all for the first fifteen minutes, until Lily, the fleeing girl, finally comes upon the villa hidden deep in the woods and meets its insane inhabitants.  Her adventures are loosely inspired by that old weird warhorse, “Alice in Wonderland.”  There’s a pig /baby that may be an explicit reference to “Pig and Pepper,” and the characters Lily meets have the casually insulting demeanors of the denizens of Wonderland: the bedridden old lady says she looks “stupid… and she has no bosom, no bosom at all!’  In a Caroll-esque exchange, the unicorn accuses her of being “mean” for trampling some daisies (who, disturbingly, scream), while the myth is munching down on the selfsame flowers.  But don’t let the Alice references confuse you into supposing Malle’s film is a light absurdist comedy; although there are funny moments (as when Lily’s panties keep magically falling around her ankles while she’s trying to keep up a dignified conversation), Moon frequently shows its darker, adult side.  The old lady dies and is resurrected when her daughter breastfeeds her.   A chicken eats the heart of a corpse.  Joe Dallesandro decapitates an eagle.  Black Moon warbles back and forth between humor and nightmare, with lots of pauses for abstruse meditation, and it never nails down a tone; that lack of consistency may be intentional, but it doesn’t make the movie easy to get a hold of, or to fall in love with.  Pure, unstructured surrealism is tough to pull off at feature length—even Buñuel and Lynch rarely attempted it—and, as exceptional a filmmaker as he is, Malle doesn’t prove ready to step right into the dream genre.  Black Moon is a movie with some great individual visions—breastfeeding the unicorn, the concerto for nude children—not a completely immersive and enchanting experience.  It’s uneven, but it’s definitely worth a look for fans of the outrageously, unapologetically weird.  It makes you wonder how wonderful it would have been if every great director had indulged himself by unleashing one completely surreal film on the world (I’d love to see what Hitchcock would have come up with).  Cathryn Harrison is very pretty, petulant and appealing as the star; it’s surprising that her future acting career involved mainly small-screen roles in made-for-BBC movies.  Wisely cast as a mute, Joe Dallessandro adds another notch to his cool belt by becoming the only actor to work for both Andy Warhol and Louis Malle.  After the commercial (and, to a large extent, critical) failure of Black Moon, Malle would return to relatively mundane subject matter with the arthouse hits Pretty Baby and Atlantic City, before unleashing another (this time, reality-based) experiment with the literal conversation piece My Dinner With Andre.

After an uneventful theatrical release Black Moon quickly became a seldom seen curiosity in Malle’s canon.  In 2011 The Criterion Collection selected it for release, together with Malle’s second weirdest film, Zazie dans le Metro.  The Criterion edition features the exceptional technical quality you expect; extras are light, however, including only the original trailer (which is surprisingly uninspiring), a booklet essay, and ten minutes of contemporaneous insights from the auteur courtesy of the French television program “Pour le Cinéma.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie evokes the dream state without once resorting to the use of fuzzy filters, slow-motion photography or even lap dissolves… baffling and beautiful and occasionally very funny.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

DIRECTOR: Norman Z. McLeod

FEATURING: Charlotte Henry, Gary Cooper, W.C. Fields, Cary Grant, Mae Marsh, Billy Barty, Alison Skipworth, Charlie Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, Sterling Holloway, and many others.

PLOT: A teenage girl named Alice travels through a mirror into a nonsensical fantasy world

where animals talk, mad tea parties are held and queens threaten beheadings.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Because of the source material, and because of this version’s especially creepy use of bizarre, grotesque masks on many members of its all-star cast.

COMMENTS: Before Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland, every big-screen adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic book had flopped at the box office, and this early 1930’s curio was no exception.  Directed by Norman Z. McLeod (known for the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business and Horse Feathers), and with a screenplay by Joseph L, Mankiewicz (All About Eve) and William Cameron Menzies (better known as the art director on Gone With the Wind), this primitive-looking extravaganza rounded up some 22 stars from the Paramount lot and immediately hid most of them behind very unpleasant-looking masks and bulky costumes.  This Alice was made only five-and-a-half years before The Wizard of Oz, but some of the technology on display here looks like it was left over from the Victorian era.  (Incidentally, Alice’s then-starry cast now consists of three legends—Cooper, Fields, Grant; a lot of character actors familiar to viewers of Turner Classic Movies—Horton, Holloway, Ruggles; and then a host of performers unknown to even the most die-hard classic film buffs—-Jackie Searle? Raymond Hatton?) The results are a bit too disturbing, even for Lewis Carroll, but at least it captures the madness of the novel(s) in a way that Burton’s neutered, watered-down disappointment never really does.  Like most films based on Alice, this one liberally combines elements of both “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass.”  This time, Alice (Babes in Toyland’s Charlotte Henry) first finds her way through a mirror and then tumbles down a rabbit hole, where she meets the usual suspects—a vast cast of rude and abrupt creatures who make her recite poetry and generally boss her around.  The exception is, as always, the White Knight (Cooper, whom one can actually recognize), whose kindness toward the girl leaves her exclaiming, “Why, he’s the nicest one yet!”—a little odd, since, as far as we can see, he’s the only “nice one” that Alice meets on her travels.  Henry’s Alice is probably the sunniest and least perturbed in any film version, which makes an interesting contrast against the especially eerie backdrops.  Since this film combines elements of both books, it plows through most of “Wonderland” very quickly (Alice meets the Queen of Hearts at about the 38-minute mark), and halfway through, the Gryphon simply transforms into the Red Queen (the perfectly cast Edna May Oliver), which is not true to Carroll, but somehow fits.  The movie then turns into highlights of “Through the Looking Glass,” ending with that book’s chaotic royal banquet, which is a far weirder note to go out on than “Wonderland”’s more famous courtroom climax.  Alice leaves her dream (or is it a nightmare?) while being literally throttled by the Red Queen, which is an even more sinister finale than Carroll provided, while the other Wonderland denizens (Fields’ Humpty Dumpty, Grant’s Mock Turtle) advance menacingly toward our heroine.  What were they going to do?  Kill her?  The film leaves it an open question, although Alice still doesn’t seem very upset by it all.  Alice completists owe it to themselves to see this version which manages to be “trippy” some 35 years before the widespread use of hallucinogens.

Unfortunately, the Universal DVD has no extras, although at least the image looks darn good for a film made in 1933.  Unsurprisingly, the music (a very early score from Dimitri Tiomkin) sounds tinny in Mono 1.0 sound.  According to IMDB, the film originally ran 90 minutes, but the version here is 77 minutes.  This is the cut that has been running on TV since about 1956.  The movie was never even released on VHS; it finally hit DVD in 2010.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“For baby boomers who first encountered it on television in the 1950s, the Paramount ‘Alice,’ with its ominous atmosphere, distorted sets and cast of contract players (including Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and W. C. Fields) hidden behind heavy, outlandish makeup based on the famous John Tenniel illustrations represented something closer to a horror movie than a benign children’s fantasy…  This Wonderland is not the proto-psychedelic playground of the 1951 Disney animated version, but a distorted, claustrophobic environment populated by menacing, bizarre figures.”–Dave Kehr, The New York Times (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer

FEATURING: Kristýna Kohoutová, voice of Camilla Power (in English dubbed version)

PLOT: A bored young girl sits in a drab room throwing stones into a teacup when she suddenly sees a stuffed white rabbit in a display case come to life, pull a sawdust-covered stopwatch from inside its torso, and disappear into a desk drawer.  She follows it and winds up in a strange land full of talking socks, slithering steaks, and menacing skull-headed animals with razor sharp teeth.  The girl follows the white rabbit through a series of bizarre rooms until he leads her to a playing card king and queen who order the rabbit to cut off her head with the pair of scissors he carries.

BACKGROUND:

• Alice was Jan Svankmajer’s first feature length film after making award-winning short films for twenty-four years.  After Alice he returned to making shorts for six years before he made his next feature, Faust, in 1994.
• Before branching out into filmmaking, Svankmajer’s primary training had been in building marionettes.
• Svankmajer sneaks a couple of references to classic horror/suspense films into Alice: a scene where Alice is menaced by a flying creature is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and a scene where the White Rabbit takes an axe to a door and then sticks his head through the hole is a blackly funny citation to Kubrick‘s The Shining (1980).

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Although it’s difficult to top the bony “animals” that look like they were reassembled at random from a jumbled pile of a paleontologist’s relics, it’s the White Rabbit who makes the biggest impression, from the moment he comes to life and pulls his paws out from the display case floor where they had been nailed.  His strangest habit is licking sawdust (his own guts) off the pocket watch he keeps stashed inside a wound-like gash in his torso.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  “Alice in Wonderland” is a nonsense fantasy, a fairy tale of fractured

Clip from Alice

reality; it makes a perfect template for a weird movie, but no adaptation has taken the story so deep into the frightening labyrinths of the subconscious as this uncanny animation.  Carroll’s and Svankmajer’s opposite talents and sensibilities complement each other perfectly, like pure cane sugar mixed with white powder heroin.

COMMENTS:  “Alice in Wonderland” has been adapted for the screen a dozen times, and the reusable framework of an episodic journey to a land of nonsense filled with lovable public domain characters has served as the outline for dozens more movies.  It’s ironic, therefore, that Neco z Alenky, arguably the most artistically successful film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s book, is nothing at all like its source.  Or, to be more accurate, Svankmajer’s Wonderland is almost exactly like Carroll’s, but as a shadow: Svankamjer is frightening where Carroll is whimsical, obscure where Carroll is incisive, visual where Carroll is verbal, internalized and neurotic where Carroll is chatty and sociable.  Despite the fact that the credits tell us that the film was only “inspired by Alice in Wonderland“, many of the incidents in Alenky are taken directly from the book—the sea of tears, Alice growing until she’s stuck inside the White Rabbit’s house, the Mad Hatter’s tea party—but always with a strange, unexpected twist.  The White Rabbit is a taxidermy exhibit, the Caterpillar is a sock stretched on a knob, and in her shrunken incarnation Alice herself turns into a doll baby.  Other passages come entirely from the Czech’s mind, such as the socks that live under the floorboards and bore holes in the planks, but seem to fit perfectly into the new Wonderland these two giants have co-authored.

As in the book, the trip down the rabbit hole (or drawer, in this case) is a dream, but whereas the English lass’ adventures are the product of a pleasant daytime riverbank reverie, the Czech girl’s dream contains uncomfortable elements of nightmare, as if she’d fallen asleep on a hard floor with her back pressed against the spokes of a wooden chair (she has).  Alice begins her dream in a dingy room cluttered with an odd assortment of objects; before she nods off, the camera pans around to show us the everyday, real life items that her mind will twist into the creatures and features of her disturbed fantasy: a mushroom-shaped thread spool, tiny fossils, a teacup, a harlequin’s hat hanging from a puppet head, the rabbit’s Latin nameplate (“Lepus cuniculus” later serves to identify the White Rabbit’s Wonderland abode).  The first appearance of the jerky, bug-eyed White Rabbit, whose teeth are capable of biting through nails, should be terrifying, but in her dream state Alice is merely fascinated, and she turns the tables on him—as in the book, he flees when she accosts him, rather than the other way around.  Such is the topsy-turvy nature of Alice, where expectations stand on their heads.

We can’t be hurt in dreams, and Alice was immune to injury in Carroll’s books; Humpty Dumpty might toss her a few feet with an act of verbal jujitsu, but the danger of looking the fool was about as much as Alice ever risked.  Svankmajer’s Alice, wandering around the decrepit rooms of her own psyche, seems to have a similar immunity to physical injury.  In a scene that didn’t appear in Carroll, but could have, a mouse swims through Alice’s tears (which have risen to her nose) and climbs her hair with his chest of belongings to perch on top of her head, where he begins to cook a stew.  Alice looks mildly uncomfortable as he drives wooden stakes into her skull, but her curiosity to find out what he will do next gets the best of her; her eyes peer upwards in disbelief, even though she can’t actually see what’s happening above her brow.  It’s only when he lights tufts of her hair on fire that she decides “that’s going too far!” and dunks him in the saltwater.  The scene reminds us that, just like in the book, Alice can come to no harm, no matter how strange and scary the world around her turns.  Later, the White Rabbit will cut of the heads of a pair of dueling jacks with his scissors; the decapitation doesn’t effect their bout at all.

We can’t be hurt in dreams… or can we?  Earlier, the White Rabbit had disappeared down a desk drawer; when Alice finally pries the drawer open, expecting to find a portal to another world, she immediately pricks her finger on the point of a compass, screams “ow!,” and sees a drop of blood oozing from her skin.  Objects in dreams may be sharper than they appear.  Our expectations are again thwarted, and we’re not sure whether Alice is in real trouble or not.  This ambiguity comes to a fore when the film suddenly and unexpectedly heads into horror movie territory.  An oversized Alice is stuck in the White Rabbit’s dollhouse as a result of some ink she’s unwisely consumed, and the Rabbit calls to his “animals” to assist him in evicting her.  The “animals” are a bunch of bony fossils—a fish, a lizard, a bird—dressed in red jester caps with bells on the end.  Their skeletal parts are mismatched: one is a skull with two tiny hands that drag what appears to be part of a broken spine behind it. They all have razor sharp teeth.  Alice runs from them and barricades herself in a room, but the White Rabbit breaks down the door with an axe.  They grab at the hem of Alice’s dress and she beats them off with her fists.  Everywhere she turns, a new adversary appears.  A duck-billed skull bursts from out of a jar of brown muck, and the Rabbit summons a flying bed with razor sharp talons to chase the girl up a plank that leads to what appears to be a bucket of milk…  The scene is so intensely nightmarish that we’re immediately reminded of Alice’s opening narration: “A film for children… perhaps?”

Even when the world isn’t actively threatening Alice, things are fairly discomfiting.  Surrealistic interludes, like the pantry where she finds eggs that hatch baby bird skulls, bread that sprouts nails, and a slithering steak that’s crawling about blindly, are weird nightmare moments, despite the fact that Alice isn’t directly threatened.  But the biggest contributor to the saga’s continual creepiness is Svankmajer’s stop-motion animation.  If these visions had been created in today’s seamless, fluid CGI, they wouldn’t have nearly the same impact.  Stop motion is uncanny; it looks simultaneously real and unreal.  Moving almost like a real animal, but not quite—skipping frames—the White Rabbit and his friends and minions are conjured from another world, or from a dream.  Not only are its mannerisms, the way it clicks its teeth and licks its pocket watch and eats sawdust with a spoon, strange, its physical existence itself is an affront to the way we instinctively believe objects should look and behave.  Its face we can’t read, with its bulging, expressionless eyes, adds to the intensely alien effect.  And it’s not just the White Rabbit: all the entities that Alice encounters in her journey to the other side have the same out-of-place, out-of-time feeling to them, as do many of the animate objects.  Alice herself succumbs to the stop motion spell, when she shrinks into a doll, and when he is swallowed up by the desk drawer on her initial plummet into Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll’s tale took place almost entirely under the sun, in woods and open croquet fields.  By contrast, Svankmajer sets his film mostly indoors. Alice travels from one room to another inside some haunted, decaying house.  The prologue is set out of doors by a babbling stream, but Alice, once rebuffed by her mother, soon heads inside.  She briefly chases the White Rabbit across a rocky brown field before diving back indoors through the desk drawer.  There is one other time she is briefly in the open air, when she wanders through a courtyard and is able to see the sky overhead, visible over tall surrounding walls.  The rest of the film takes place entirely inside, in drab rooms that all have bare wooden floors and dingy off-white walls with peeling paint; everything looks covered in dust, and you can almost smell the must.  Carroll’s story is sunny, Svankmajer’s is in shadows.

There’s a claustrophobic effect to these interiors, one that seems to underscore the idea that the action is all taking place inside Alice’s bounded mind.    But these severe peasant rooms and their plain objects also appear very Eastern European; Svankmajer’s Alice clearly takes place behind the Iron Curtain.  In the early part of the century in the West, surrealism had been used to critique capitalism and the middle classes; but it found new life in the East, where censorship was strict and outright criticism of the state in the arts was dangerous.  Surrealism implicitly criticizes the status quo. It’s a way of opening closed eyes, pointing at fantastical absurdities that may bring to mind real outrages, and of implying that reality may not be what it seems.  It says that what seems normal may actually be strange, if you look at afresh; but it makes its points in sneaky ways that fool dull censors into thinking its mere childish nonsense.  Svankmajer grew up in the bosom of totalitarianism, in a world of severity and repression where coded languages were necessary, because speaking your mind outright could get you killed or imprisoned.  In Svankmajer’s Alice, the King and Queen of Hearts try to force the little girl to read a scripted confession (which requires her to beg for the court’s strictest punishment) as a prelude to having her head scissored off by the White Rabbit, now revealed to be the royal executioner.  The film ends on a strange and unexpected note; not only are we suddenly unsure that the preceding has really been entirely a dream, but passive, docile Alice, who’s been pushed around from the beginning of the film until now, reacts to her ultimate discovery with uncharacteristic ruthlessness.  One year after Alice was produced (with the assistance of Western European production companies), the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia stepped down.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…moves from one surreal profusion of images to another.”–Caryn James, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Svankmajer’s sinister visual music has an irresistible potency and allure. Watching it, we feel the enthrallment of the irrational.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“…strips Alice to its proto-surrealist core.”–Sam Adams, The Philadelphia City Paper (screening)

OFFICIAL SITE: Alice – First Run Features Alice page doesn’t contain very much content besides a product description and quotes from reviews, but you can find the  four minute “caterpillar” sequence there in its entirety

IMDB LINK: Alice (1988)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Alice: The New Cult Canon – Scott Tobias’ insightful entry on Alice for the Onion A.V. Club’s series on cult films

Czech Horror: Jan Svankmajer’s Neco z Alenky (Alice) – Brigid Cherry’s article examines Svankmajer’s Gothic themes to explain why this non-horror work appeals to horror movie fans

Alice Through the Lens – the British Film Institute’s excellent survey of important Alice adaptations includes a segment on Neco z Alenky (as well as one on Tideland)

Recommended as Weird: Alice [Neco z Alenky] (1988) – Alex Kittle’s earlier short review of Alice for 366 Weird Movies

DVD INFO: The First Run Features DVD (buy) is presented in full frame (presumably the original aspect ratio) and with dubbed English vocals by Camilla Power. There is only one extra on the disc, but it’s a good one: Svankmajer’s 1989 short claymation film Darkness Light Darkness, a witty and macabre story of body parts assembling themselves into a whole person.

There are reports that the British Film Institute is planning to release Alice on Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD, in the original Czech with subtitles (only the dubbed version has been heretofore available in English).  At the time of this writing, however, the Institute had not made an official announcement on the project.

DIRECTOR: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske

FEATURING: Voices of Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Sterling Holloway, Verna Felton, J. Pat O’Malley, Bill Thompson

PLOT: A young girl named Alice follows a talking white hare down his rabbit hole and into a

world of talking animals, smoking insects, walking playing cards, and other nonsense creatures.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Because of the source material.  Disney animator Eric Goldberg explains Alice‘s appeal: “I think the book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is popular because it’s completely absurd… The book, in its kind of weirdness, persists because people like weird.”  The question becomes, does Disneyfication destroy the story’s weirdness?

COMMENTS: Though it doesn’t reach the level of the classic-era Disney animated masterpieces Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or Pinocchio (1940), Alice in Wonderland is certainly in the next tier—notwithstanding the fact that it didn’t fare well on its initial release.  The animation, obviously, is glowing and superlative, and the anything-can-happen-here surrealism of the story gave the Disney artists the license to let their imaginations run wild without being fettered even by cartoon realism.  As might be expected, the result is worlds away from the staid, quaintly absurd black and white line drawings of Sir John Tenniel (the standard vision of Alice and Wonderland up until that time).  The rabbit hole, with its grandfather clocks and rocking chairs floating at different rates, doesn’t follow the rules of gravity; the flexibility of the playing card royal guards allows the animators to arrange them into pickets or to spontaneously form roller coasters to take Alice for a ride.  Scarcity of spectacle is not an issue in Wonderland.  As an adaptation, this Alice is surprisingly smooth.  Episodes from the book have been shuffled around and mixed with characters and events from “Through the Looking Glass,” an example that future Alices would follow (since no one wants to leave out Tweedledee and Tweedledum).  Even digressions like the “The Walrus and the Carpenter” interlude, which plays like a self-standing Looney Toons cartoon inserted into the middle of the action, don’t break the rhythm.  At only 75 minutes, the film zips along at an impatient child’s pace, yet manages to catch all of Wonderland’s major attractions: shrinking and expanding cakes, the hookah-smoking caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat with his variable opacity and detachable noggin, the Mad Hatter’s eternally insane tea party, a game of flamingo croquet with the queen, and a trial that plays like a Kafka nightmare viewed through a head full of laughing gas.  There’s even enough time for new Disney additions to Wonderland: a menagerie of surreal nonsense creatures (the visual equivalents of Lewis Carroll’s wordplay) including rocking horseflies, bread butterflies, umbrella vultures, accordion owls, and a bird whose body is a birdcage housing other birds.  The main issue is tone: the original story was capable of amusing children and adults on different levels, but Disney aims squarely for the lower age brackets.  Overcuteness was an inevitability.  Alice’s eyes match her dress, the Mad Hatter has a lolling tongue and a vaudevillian’s comic voice, and there are too many zany sound effects—Tweedlee and -dum’s midsections honk like bicycle horns, and the Walrus’ cane makes a pronounced “boing-g-g” when he brings it down on the Carpenter’s head.  These Bugs Bunnyisms don’t fit comfortably into Wonderland, and are even a bit degrading to Carroll’s creations; youngsters, of course, won’t realize it.  The syrupy sweet score, sung by white-bred choruses with perfect enunciation, has not held up well over the decades.  As a glimpse at the sensibilities and methods of 1950s popular music, it gives insight into why rock and roll to conquered the airwaves so easily a few years down the road.  The overabundance of musical numbers, more than any previous Disney effort, may have been inspired by the success of The Wizard of Oz, but here the compositions slow down and interrupt the action rather than illustrating it.  Overall, this Disney effort manages to capture Carroll’s world reasonably well, while at the same time making it even more madcap and cutesy; it’s as if the story here is being told by a child, rather than by a sly adult seeking to entertain a child.  Still, Disney could have damaged the tale far worse (and did, in 2010), so we should be grateful that Uncle Walt let so much of Lewis Carroll’s genius and invention shine through.

Disney’s 2-disc “Un-Anniversary” edition of Alice houses a vast library of supplemental material, many of which is aimed at either very young children or at their great-grandparents who are nostalgic for the 50s. Among the former are the “Virtual Wonderland Party,” a series of “delightful activities” hosted by the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter, and the “Adventures in Wonderland Set Top Game,” a series of very easy challenges that may amuse a pre-school kid for ten minutes. Counting among the latter is the hour long 1950 Christmas special/Coke advertisement “One Hour in Wonderland,” with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, a crazy genie, and clips from Disney features (including two scenes from the “controversial” Song of the South), as well as a 30 minute excerpt from “The Fred Waring Show,” with musical theater renderings of the treacly soundtrack. Conventional featurettes include trailers and two openings for TV showings from “The Wonderful World of Disney”; “Operation Wonderland,” a contemporary Disney “behind the scenes” promotion; a 13-minute “Reflections on Alice” mini-documentary; concept art for the “Pig and Pepper” scene where a baby turns into a pig that was rejected (probably as too weird and scary); a new recording of the rejected song “I’m Odd,” which was to be sung by the Cheshire Cat; the Wonderland-themed Mickey Mouse short “Thru the Mirror.” The gem of the collection is the 1923 silent 8-minute Disney short “Alice’s Wonderland,” a technical marvel of its day that mixes a live actor with animation: watch Virginia Davis flee from cartoon lions and jump off a cliff to save herself from being shredded by their fangs, all thanks to the miracle “Laugh-O-Gram” process!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the weirdest of Disney’s animated features… Disney’s Alice In Wonderland wedges Carroll’s puns and asides between songs and free-floating surrealism, effectively throwing the jokes away.”—Noel Murray, Onion A.V. Club (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer

FEATURING: Kristýna Kohoutová

PLOT: Experimental Czech animator Jan Svankmajer crafts a decidedly creepier version of

Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, moving the action to a decrepit house and replacing most of the characters with crude stop-motion dolls.  A live-action Alice moves among them, making her way through various rooms that correlate to scenes in the original story.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Svankmajer’s remarkably innovative visuals, haunting use of sound effects, and minimalist storytelling render a familiar tale almost unrecognizable, removing sugarcoated elements of childhood fantasy and replacing them with a macabre surrealism.  His unsettling animation techniques and intricate set design are undeniably bizarre, giving the proceedings a shiver-inducing aspect that’s difficult to identify.  It’s a strange, imaginative film whose weirdness is guaranteed to leave an imprint on viewers.

COMMENTS: Most casual filmgoers associate animation with twirling princesses, talking toys, and catchy music numbers—just pleasant family fun.  Jan Svankmajer rejects this notion.  In works like Alice, he employs the undeniably off-putting technique of combining live-action actors with stop-motion figures.  The effect is a memorably uncanny take on a classic story, making an already-weird children’s tale even weirder.  Alice makes her way through cupboards, paper walls, and doors of varying sizes in a seemingly never-ending, decaying house (sometimes inexplicably opening up into a woodland field), encountering numerous recognizable characters in unrecognizable forms.  The source material is naturally altered in this re-imagining, both in plot and tone.

The White Rabbit is a rejuvenated taxidermied bunny, with wide plastic eyes and a stomach leaking sawdust.  He chatters his large teeth menacingly and licks his pocketwatch with a humanoid tongue.  The Caterpillar is a torn sock puppet with human eyes and teeth, presiding over a litter of phallic cloth creatures moving rapidly within the floorboards.  The Mad Hatter is a bearded wooden marionette, and the Queen of Hearts is a 2-D cut-paper drawing.  Alice herself becomes an old-fashioned china doll whenever she’s miniaturized.  Each character design fits both the unsettling atmosphere of the film as a whole and the dusty, antique look of the “Wonderland” house.

An extraordinary facet of Alice is the sound design.  There is absolutely no music.  Svankmajer instead opts for a range of effective, often gratuitous sound effects.  There is very little dialogue, and the few spoken lines by any character are all said by Alice herself, often accompanied by a close-up shot of her mouth as she indicates who is talking.  The special attention to sound effects and lack of conversation among these fantastic creatures actually keep it from becoming a typical fantasy.  Despite the unreal nature of the visuals, it feels more grounded in reality without the specific music cues or over-scripted conversation typical of other films, even while we are consistently drawn back to its status as a fairy tale when Alice’s lips are shown narrating.

Alice is the kind of film that isn’t especially frightening—at least, not in a standard horror-movie sense. Viewers are thus affected because they can’t actually figure out what is so scary about it.  Perhaps it’s our innate fear of taxidermied animals coming back to life, or the unnaturalness of food moving about on its own, or the inherent creepiness of abandoned houses, or the frequent use of close-up shots, or the eerie stillness that comes with lack of a musical score.  Perhaps it’s just the utter uncanniness of everything that happens in this movie.  Whatever it is, it’s really weird, and completely captivating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…has an irresistible potency and allure. Watching it, we feel the enthrallment of the irrational.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Leslie Rae,” who called it “one of the most visually disturbing/surrealistic films I’ve ever seen.”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Maggie Grace, Danny Dyer

PLOT:  American Alice gets amnesia after being hit by a taxicab while fleeing unknown

pursuers; she tries to figure out her identity while traveling through a hallucinatory Wonderland of London gangsters.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s a diverting weird movie and a must for Alice-adaptation completists, but it’s neither weird nor good enough to be on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.

COMMENTS: Malice in Wonderland may not be the ultimate trip to Wonderland, but you have to give scripter Jayson Rothwell major props for one thing: unlike other “Alice in Wonderland” updates (*cough*, Burton, *cough*), he doesn’t shy away from wordplay and nonsense.  A riddle (delivered by a talking billboard) serves as a major plot point, although the answer is a bit bungled at the end.  Puns are scattered throughout the movie (check out the way Alice steals the tarts), and some characters speak only in rhyming couplets.  Whitey addresses Alice as “Britney,” and when the amnesiac objects that that’s not her name, he shoots back with the Humpty Dumpty-esque rejoinder, “You don’t know who you are, so you don’t know who you aren’t.”  There’s a cleverness to this script and a love of nonsense that goes beyond just re-imagining the beloved characters in a novel setting.  That part’s admirable, but the script also falls into one of the more annoying rabbit holes that plague Alice adaptations; giving Alice a romantic interest (or a platonic boyfriend to serve the same purpose, like Johnny Depp‘s Mad Hatter in the latest Disney version).  Ideally, Alice should wander through Wonderland meeting bizarre entities who help and hinder her in equal parts, with no way of predicting which will come next.  The romantic anchor, always ready to lend Alice his aid and rescue her when things get tough, is an unnecessary safety net and an unwelcome intrusion of Hollywood reality.  In Malice‘s case, the misstep is aggravated by the fact that there’s no real chemistry between leads Maggie Grace and Danny Dyer, and no motivation for them to get together; in fact, their dalliance only distracts from Alice’s quest to rediscover her identity.  Grace’s performance (or her direction) can also be faulted for not being beleaguered and bewildered enough; she’s suddenly thrown into a world of grimy, loony London lowlifes, and accepts the insanity too easily, never seeming the slightest bit endangered or even very concerned.  True, that world seems only a tad bit more off and dangerous than a typical Guy Ritchie movie—the gangsters’ extreme quirkiness defangs them—but a little more fear and urgency would have helped involve the viewer in her plight.  One last criticism: when the movie reverts to reality to wrap up the psychological loose ends, the transition from the psychedelic London underground of hoodlums to the physical London Underground of mass transit is awkward and arbitrary.  Malice may not go very deep, but it’s entertaining, clever, colorful, and zips along at a nice clip.  And what lover of light absurdity won’t respond to a smoky midnight ride with a rapping Rastafarian and a hooker, a mobile brothel in the bed of a sixteen wheeler, continuous trippy flashbacks, and a competition among thugs and con-men to deliver an impressive gift to the gangland kingpin who has everything?

Malice in Wonderland received shockingly low marks from the critics (only a 10% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes?)  A quick analysis of that data reveals the negative reviews coming from the United Kingdom, and they seem to be largely related to some sort of national Danny Dyer fatigue.  Dyer wasn’t spectacular (which may be as much the fault of his part being underwritten as his talent), but I had no objection to the bloke other than his sometimes incomprehensible Cockney accent.  Looking at his résumé, it appears he may be a bit overexposed at the moment, and if he’s repeating basically the same shtick in every BBC role as he does in this movie, I can see how he might grow tiresome.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Despite its faults, for fleeting moments the movie is both visually striking and enjoyably bizarre, although all too often positioning the camera at a jaunty angle is mistaken for a surreal perspective leading you to spend much of Malice In Wonderland’s 90 minute duration wondering whether a broken tripod is responsible for your skewed view of proceedings.”–Daniel Bettridge, Film 4 (contemporaneous)

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

FEATURING: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, the head of Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover, voices of Stephen Fry and Christopher Lee

PLOT:  About to be proposed to by a doltish fop, Alice excuses herself to tumble down a

rabbit hole where she learns she has been chosen to slay the Jabberwock[y].

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Not weird enough.  Burton, perhaps fearful of angering the gravy-train drivers at Disney, dims down the absurdity in this version of Alice, recasting the tale as an epic fantasy war fought by a cast of weirdos.

COMMENTS:  Alice in Wonderland (which should have been titled Alice in Underland, if anyone had been paying attention) is a good-looking film with a few positives, but a recycled story that’s far from enchanting.  The candy-colored visuals are as top-notch as expected, with plenty of little details to soak in: look for a dragonfly-sized flying rocking horse and a moat with floating stones that appear to be petrified severed heads.  Helena Bonham Carter’s macrocephalic visage is almost worth the price of admission, and her performance as the Red Queen is suitably comic and imperious.  But the story—ouch!  Alice’s previous visit to Wonderland—oops, make that Underland, as it’s denizens insist it’s properly called—nine years ago was real, but she’s forgotten it for some reason, which is fine because her past adventures served no purpose whatsoever.  In this sequel, the poem “Jabberwocky” is a prophecy that predicts Alice will find the vorpal blade and snicker-snack it into the neck of the dreaded Jabberwock(y) on Frabjous Day.  The Mad Hatter reads the verse word for word to the disbelieving Alice, neither of them noticing that the lines refer to a “beamish boy;” Alice may be beamish, but she’s no boy.  But who cares about such details?  They can’t even get the monster’s name right after reading it off the page: everyone refers to the Jabberwock as the “Jabberwocky” (which is like calling Odysseus “Odyssey”).  We may wonder about such inconsistencies, but such uffish considerations only matter in a tightly constructed nonsense world like Wonderland; we’re in Underland, and here there are quirky companions to collect before galumphing off to slay dragons with magical swords.  Burton’s non-nonsense epic fantasy plays like an original concept by Lewis Carroll that’s been script doctored by J.R.R. Tolkien, then sent back by the corporate suits to add more fight scenes to appeal to boys and a feminist moral about self-actualization for the girls.  Despite the occasional chase scene by a pack of guards who look as much like Terminator robots as playing cards, curiously, for the most part the early story plays out much as in Carroll’s tale.  Alice retraces her steps, eating and drinking shrinking and growing potions and cakes and meets a hookah smoking Caterpillar.  The Cheshire Cat directs her to a mad tea party.  But things get less and less curiouser and more and more familiarer as the tale continues.  It turns out that the tea party really isn’t mad, it’s just a ruse by the Resistance to avoid detection by the authorities. Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter isn’t mad either (and certainly not bonkers); perhaps he’s slightly perturbed, but his faculties are all about him as leads the fight for freedom, even taking up a sword for the final battle.  I have no problem with taking liberties with Carroll’s tone and story, but if you’re going to depart from the original you should replace it with something interesting, not just a generic fantasy quest rehash.  Nick Willing’s Alice, with it’s human “oysters” being drained of their emotions, tapped into a more cusiously skewed Alice scenario.  It’s a shame that that premise couldn’t have been matched to this budget.  Tim Burton’s Alice isn’t bad, it’s just forgettable—something that could only happen in Underland, not Wonderland.

To some extent, Burton may be the victim of high expectations.  Carroll and Burton seemed the perfect match, and there were high hopes that this material might allow Tim to return to the glory days of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas, when his fantasies managed to tap the popular consciousness while still dripping with edgy originality. Those of us who got our hopes up should have recognized that Alice in Wonderland is a kids’ movie intended as a blockbuster; Disney isn’t about to let Burton take chances with the story.  His commission directed him to deliver Tim Burton visuals inside a safe script, and that’s what he did.  The movie works fine for the little ones, but offers little to adults besides eye candy and a couple of chuckles.  If Burton’s going to bounce back (and I’m starting to doubt he ever will), we’ll have to wait until he feels like he’s finally garnered enough dough and Hollywood validation to start taking chances again.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…neither is [Burton's] Alice, sad to report, in the least bit lysergic. On the contrary, the movie is positively sober in its positive image projection and concern with itself as a business model. Like more than one recent movie, Alice seems a trailer for a Wonderland computer game—and it is. The final battle is clearly designed for gaming.”–J. Hobermann, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Nick Willing

FEATURING: Caterina Scorsone, Andrew Lee Potts, Kathy Bates, Matt Frewer, Colm Meaney, Philip Winchester, Eugene Lipinski, Tim Curry, Harry Dean Stanton

PLOT: Karate-instructor Alice finds herself in Wonderland, 150 years after her

predecessor of the same name; things have changed drastically, as the Red Queen now rules a totalitarian society with an economy that depends on a fresh supply of people from our world to keep the natives pacified.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Alice is an imaginative, solid fantasy/adventure/comedy/romance, but it has only a few shadings of weird to it.  A SyFy channel production, it passes as “surreal” by basic cable standards, but this is the big time, guys.

COMMENTS: Tonally, Alice is only distantly related to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland,” but at least the movie has a decent explanation for that: 150 years have passed since Alice first fell down the rabbit hole, in which time technological advances and two world wars changed our world’s landscape and psyche forever.  An equal length of time passed in Wonderland, and things there have changed for the worse, as well.  They’ve developed automatic weapons, for one thing; for another, the anthropomorphic animals have evolved into full-fledged humans, with complex motivations and back stories.  Most importantly, thanks to the Queen of Hearts’ tyrannical rule, the halcyon days of whiling away the time with wordplay, nonsense verse and tea parties have been replaced by a deadly power struggle between the Queen, who controls the populace through narcotizing potions of curious manufacture, and various underground resistance movements.  That synopsis makes Alice sound a bit darker than it actually is; in fact, there’s plenty of comedy and whimsy running about in this postmodern Wonderland.  Much of the silly fun is provided by Kathy Bates’ arrogant Queen (always a plum role in Alice adaptations), who reminds Alice that she’s “the most powerful woman in the history of literature.”   The most memorable comic performance; however, goes to Matt Frewer’s White Knight, a bumbling, mumbling relic with delusions of grandeur.  As we might hope in an Alice movie, the costumes and set design are a plus.  Instead of a castle, the Wonderland monarchy has set up shop inside a 1960′s mod casino that might have come out of an Austin Powers movie.  Weird notes are struck by an assassin with a Brooklyn accent and a porcelain rabbit’s head, and Alice’s hypnotic interrogation in “The Truth Room” by the Naziesque Drs. Dee and Dum.  All of the major characters from Carroll’s books are referenced, often in clever ways, and part of the fun of the movie is in catching the cameos and tributes to minor characters (the unexpected appearance of the Borogoves is a particular favorite).  Downsides to the production are cheap CGI (a disappointing Jabberwock), action sequences that often fall flat (karate instructor or not, it’s difficult to credit the sylphlike Alice repeatedly knocking grown men about like cardboard cutouts), and a grand finale that swiftly gallops from merely contrived to the utterly cornball.  The cameos by cult icons Curry (as Dodo) and Stanton (as Caterpillar) are short and disappointing.  Still, Alice‘s strengths overcome it’s weaknesses, and the movie delivers solid entertainment.  The adventure and romance threads are balanced with narrative skill, the comic relief generally works, and its three hour running time allows it to invest Wonderland and its characters with an impressive amount of detail without ever seriously dragging.

British director Willing specializes in the underutilized miniseries format.  He made a star-studded, straightforward adaptation of Alice and Wonderland for NBC in 1999, featuring Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Kingsley, Martin Short, and Miranda Richardson, and others.  He also helmed Tin Man, a 2007 “re-imaging” that did for Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz what Alice did for Carroll’s books.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What ultimately sinks ‘Alice’ is that it is too normal. Carroll’s nonsense, anarchy and druggy weirdness always turned the tale into a fevered dream. Here, Alice disappears instead into a tired missing-father subplot.”–Randee Dawn, The Hollywood Reporter (TV broadcast)

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Loren Cass (2006):  Merely going off the film’s own press release, it’s difficult to discern what this movie is, although we learn a lot about how difficult it was to bring to the screen.  More research reveals it to be an experimental angry teen drama about the 1996 race riots in St. Petersburg, Florida, with poetry interludes (featuring spoken word contributions by Charles Bukowski and other underground figures) and mondo-style documentary footage of a televised suicide added for shock value.  Jacob Reynolds (the “weird-looking kid” from Gummo) has a role as “The Suicide Kid”.  The few reviews are good, describing it basically as raw but intense.  Opening this week in New York, with a short limited release across the rest of the U.S. to follow before it seeks out its core audience on DVD.  Loren Cass official site.

NEW ON DVD:

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1966):  A movie about a middle-class housewife prostituting herself on the side; but director Jean-Luc Godard breaks the fourth wall and philosophizes about consumerism and the Vietnam war while telling his story.  The movie was shot at the same time as Made in U.S.A. (see below) and both films are receiving Criterion Collection editions this week. Buy from Amazon.

Coraline (2009):  From our March review: “a welcome dark fantasy for children, although its themes of evil Doppelgänger moms, frightening buttons, and implied eye-gouging are too scary for very little ones… Though there’s nothing really weird to be found here, Coraline, in the best children’s movie tradition, is worth a trip even for adult fans of fantasy and pure escapism.”  Available in a single disc version including 2D and 3D versions (with 4 pairs of glasses) (buy), a two disc collector’s edition (buy), and Blu-ray (buy).

Made in U.S.A. (1966): Jean-Luc Godard’s avant-garde, Pop Art remake 0f Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep, with a female detective and an even more convoluted plot, gets the Criterion Collection treatment.  Shot at the same time as 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her.  Buy from Amazon.

Visioneers (2008): An absurdist black comedy about a mysterious epidemic that is causing people to explode.  It sounds promising; hopefully the presence of Zach Galifianakis (who scored a mainstream hit with his role as the slob in Hangover) will help this independent corporate satire do well in the rental market. Buy from Amazon.

Watchmen (2009): From our April review: ‘The setting is so original that the film has the power to relocate you into it’s own peculiar universe, which is what escapist entertainment is supposed to do.”   Available in a single disc theatrical cut DVD (buy), a dual disc special edition director’s cut with an extra 25 minutes of footage (buy), and on Blu-ray (buy).  Fans might want to save their money, since word on the street is there will be a 5 disc (!) set released in December.

IN PRODUCTION:

Alice in Wonderland (2010):  Alice in Wonderland has long been a source of weird movie inspirations, and offbeat fantasist Tim Burton has the pitch-perfect voice to make a live-action Alice.  Despite the fact that it’s way too soon to get excited about this, Disney released a teaser trailer today: enjoy!

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.