DIRECTED BY: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

FEATURING: Haruhiko Katô, Kumiko Asô, Koyuki

PLOT: A computer expert’s suicide is the first in a series of mysterious events and

disappearances that leave Tokyo, and the world, depopulated; is a website that dials up people on its own and asks if they want to meet a ghost responsible?

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s creepy and weirder than the average scare flick, but Pulse is tuned to the standard turn of the millennium J-horror wavelength.  It’s a good watch for fear fans, and a seminal one for Asian New Wave horror followers, but it doesn’t go that extra weird mile.  Kurosawa’s ambiguous horror/detective procedural Cure (1997) makes for a better bizarre candidate.

COMMENTS: Pulse slips so quietly from reality to strangeness that you hardly recognize the transition; one minute, you’re watching its characters going about their daily lives, dealing with unexpected suicides and alarming computer viruses, and the next minute the world is almost deserted and ruled by ghosts.  The theme of this horror movie is not really fear but loneliness, and how technology fosters isolation more than cures it.  The film is not too subtle in delivering that message.  A plague of ghosts seems to spread via a computer website; one character immediately diagnoses a low-tech character’s sudden interest in the Internet as a desire to connect with his fellow man; a spirit tells the protagonist “death was eternal loneliness” from inside a foil-lined room.  Even scenes occurring before people start disappearing en masse are shot in disconcertingly deserted urban settings, on empty streets and buses and in lonely apartments.  Characters discuss the difficulty humans have making deep and lasting connections, while simultaneously hungering, struggling, and failing to form those bonds with each other.  Those who encounter one of the malevolent spirits in Pulse go through a syndrome (ghost traumatic stress disorder?) that involves locking themselves inside a room alone and sealing the door with red tape.  What the movie intends to say on the metaphorical level is very clear; what’s a little more confused is what’s supposed to be happening on the literal level.  We get half-baked exposition regarding the mechanics of the ghost world, but the spirits’ malevolent motives aren’t ever clearly explained, and it’s not at all certain how all the pieces are supposed to fit together.  If, as one sage tells us, the dead are now leaking into our world because theirs has exceeded its capacity, how do they benefit from convincing the living to kill themselves?  Wouldn’t that just worsen their overpopulation problem?  If the spirits of the dead have no place to go, shouldn’t the world be overrun with ghostly presences, rather than empty?  What purpose in setting up the spectral website that dials up users on its own—other than to scare a technophobic audience?  The movie glosses over answers to these questions, which does make it feel like a weirder endeavor; in this case, however, it seems the material might benefit from a fairer stab at clarity.  But Kiyoshi (no relation to Akira) Kuroswa is all about atmosphere, and he’s an expert at conjuring it.  The long lonely narrative spaces are broken up by several memorable moments, including glitchy technostrangeness involving a metaphysically malfunctioning webcam with a distorting lens, bizarre broadcast television interference from the Beyond, people who melt into black smudges on the wall, and a genuinely frightening trip inside “The Forbidden Room” to discuss matters of mortality with the death’s head who dwells therein.  Mood, not logic or even philosophy, is the glue that holds the movie together, and while it isn’t the horror masterpiece it might have been if that atmosphere was yoked to a better story, it works well on the shiver-inducing level.

The dumbed-down 2006 Hollywood remake with Kirsten Bell, part of a trend of bastardized American remakes of J-horror classics, was widely despised by critics and audiences alike.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…dolorous, shivery, and surreal.”–Wesley Morris, Boston Globe (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Alan Parker

FEATURING: Bob Geldof, Kevin McKeon, Jenny Wright, Bob Hoskins

PLOT: The movie begins with a man sitting motionless in a chair in a hotel room.  A series of scrambled flashbacks, fantasies and impressions tell the story of Pink, who grew up fatherless but became a successful, if unhappy, rock star prone to tantrums and bouts of severe depression.  Eventually, Pink’s manager and a crowd of roadies and doctors break down the hotel room door and give him a shot which revives him; his body rots, he peels it away to reveal himself as a fascist dictator who goes onstage to perform.

BACKGROUND:

• “The Wall” began life as a 1979 concept album by Pink Floyd.  The double LP and the single “Another Brick in the Wall, Part II” both reached #1 on Billboard’s U.S. charts.  “The Wall” remains one of the 50 top selling albums of all time to this day.
• Most of the incidents in The Wall stem from Roger Waters’ personal history; a few, however, are taken from the life of former Pink Floyd lead singer Syd Barrett, a psychedelic drug abuser whose erratic behavior caused him to be kicked out of the band and to eventually become a recluse.
• Almost all of the songs from the original album appear in the movie, sometimes in slightly altered forms.
• With Alan Parker as producer, The Wall movie was originally intended to be a concert film with animated sequences and a few specially shot live action scenes.  When the concert footage was found to be unusable, the project was reimagined as a (semi-) narrative film with Parker as director.
• Pink Floyd singer/bassist and Wall librettist Roger Waters originally wanted to play the lead, but after a poor screen test fellow musician Bob Geldof was cast instead.  Ironically, Geldof, lead singer for the Irish punk band The Boomtown Rats, was reportedly not a Floyd fan.
• Parker and Waters clashed on the set, with the director almost quitting several times.
• Designer/animator Gerald Scarfe was a caricaturist and political cartoonist before he began collaborating with Pink Floyd.
• The cheering extras at the fascist concert were actual white supremacists.
• Director Parker called The Wall “the most expensive student film ever made.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Picking a single image to represent The Wall is a tough assignment.  Among the live-action sequences, the vision of British schoolchildren in faceless blob masks marching into a meat-grinder is fairly unforgettable.  It would be criminal, though, to elevate any mere photograph over Gerald Scarfe’s animations; even picking among them is a tough call.  Though short, these bizarre and horrific images blaze across the screen in such a haunting way that their impact makes up for the brevity. We’re going to select the scene of the goosestepping fascist hammers as the most unforgettable (partly because the hammer imagery that recurs throughout the movie reaches a startling peak with this scene, and partly because Sacrfe’s crossed hammer symbol proved so iconic that it was adopted by actual fascist groups).  If you chose the genitalia-shaped flowers who entwine, mate, and then grow teeth and viciously rip into each other before the female swallows the male whole, however, we couldn’t argue against it.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Pink Floyd: the Wall is a collaboration between three separate

Original trailer for Pink Floyd The Wall

creative talents.  In 1979 Roger Waters performed a public self-psychoanalysis by writing a bombastic, self-indulgent rock opera, full of catchy melodies and sardonic lyrics.  When it came time to adapt the album into a movie, he enlisted political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe to provide animated segments, which ultimately included a surrealistic version of the bombing of London during World War II, a judge who is literally an ass, and some of the scariest cartoon vaginas ever drawn.  Bringing it all together was director Alan Parker (Midnight Express), who devised fantastic over-the-top live action visuals to complement the music and found a way to weave the competing thematic strands (autobiography, social commentary, and spur-of-the-moment surrealistic flights of fancy) into something comprehensible, while nonetheless keeping it defiantly weird.  Trying to meld these three separate creative egos on a project whose source material was already grandiose and scattershot could easily have produced an incoherent, pretentious mess.  Remarkably, the result instead is a semi-coherent, pretentious near-masterpiece.

COMMENTS: Watching, or listening, to Pink Floyd: The Wall is one miserable experience. All the key elements of a depressing film are on display: madness, alienation, the atrocities of war, mind-numbing drug addiction, infidelity, fascism… well, you get my drift.  This is not an upbeat or fun movie by any stretch of the imagination.  Yet, the film is constructed in such a skillful manner by director Alan Parker that it is hard not to justify its reputation as a work of art.

Upon the opening scene we see the protagonist rock star “Pink” (Bob Geldof) in his hotel room staring blankly at the television screen with a long burned out cigarette perched between his fingers.  Pink is in this position and state of mind for many of his scenes.  It is open to interpretation, but perhaps all of the scenes of the film are what is playing out in his unraveling mind.  The images correlate to the lyrics of each song.  We start off learning of Pink’s father’s death in World War II.  His bunker was blown to bits in an air raid bombardment.  Pink never knew his father and it is clear that this had a major impact in his childhood, as evidenced by a scene where he is playing in a park as a young child and desperately tries clinging on to a hand of an unsuspecting and unwilling male father figure.  As Pink grows up and goes to school he’s subjected to the harsh British educational system.   He is caught scribbling poetry into his notebook and is promptly humiliated, then smacked on the knuckles by his teacher’s pointing stick.   This gets him sent directly to the evil headmaster’s office.  During this sequence, however, we are privy to a weird fantasy in Pink’s young mind: students, marching like mindless drones onto a conveyor belt and wearing creepy faceless masks, fall limp into a grinding machine which churns them out as strands of meat.  Yet, rebellion and anarchy eventually take over the fantasy as students trash the school and set it on fire.

Now that the themes of war and education have been touched upon we can move on to another main component of the film: sex.  Pink’s descent into madness is exacerbated by his wife’s infidelity.  In an early scene, she strips in an unsuccessful attempt to seduce him; he only becomes annoyed that she is blocking the soccer game on TV.  His lack of affection drives her away to the arms of another man.  Sex seems to be a mere diversion for Pink, and one that he’s seldom interested in.  Of course, being a rock star you will get your share of groupies; however, no girl could prepare for being alone with this guy.  A female fan’s amazement at his array of guitars and vast bathtub quickly turns to fear as he trashes his hotel room in true rock star fervor, winging furniture and wine bottles in her direction.

Bob Geldof does an impeccable job as the deadened rock star.  He has almost no lines of dialogue outside of screaming “stop!” or howling obscenities as he trashes his hotel room.  Most of his lines are lip synched to Roger Waters lyrics.  His empty stares and body language are all that is needed to make this a good performance.  Geldof’s best scene is when he “transforms” himself by shaving off his body hair… eyebrows included.  (This scene was culled directly from an incident involving former Floyd member Syd Barrett, who once did the same at a dinner party).  For some reason, it is very disconcerting to see a person without eyebrows.  By the end of the film Pink has morphed into a dictator performing for his captive audience/fascist regime, complete with a crossed hammer insignia in place of swastikas and arms struck in Nazi-esque poses.  White supremacists were actually hired as extras for these scenes, adding to the rally’s already chaotic and anarchic nature.

Now that you have the gist of the film, we’ll get to the heart of what’s great and weird about this movie… those animation sequences.  All I can say is…wow!  They are psychedelic in a nature, but bleak nonetheless.  Warplanes turn into crosses.  The Union Jack also becomes a bloody cross.  Flowers that blatantly resemble genitalia writhe and twist in a quest for sexual dominance.  Marching hammers goose-step like rhythmic soldiers.  The coup-de-grace is the final animation sequence that portrays Pink on trial.  Here we witness the judge as a talking anus with a scrotum for a chin; a former parochial teacher hanging by strings like a marionette; Pink’s wife transformed into a monstrous scorpion.

Scarfe’s animations are weird and amazing.  The live action is the meat of the film and the animation is the pudding, but how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…pretty cosmic; employing almost no dialogue, it uses fantasies, animation and assorted psychedelic froufrou to flesh out a rock album more enthusiastically than any film has since ‘Tommy.’”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Overwrought live-action sequences, surreal-to-the-point-of-bewildering animation — The Wall grabs your attention but doesn’t know what to say once it’s got it.”–Neil Jeffries, Empire Magazine

“Crossing Privilege with Tommy couldn’t result in anything shallower. All in all, it’s just another flick to appal.”–Time Out Film Guide

IMDB LINK: Pink Floyd The Wall (1982)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Pink Floyd The Wall: A Complete Analysis – A massive website containing a meticulous, book length analysis of the movie/album by Bret Urich; an obsessive, and impressive, achievement

Pink Floyd: The Wall :: rogerebert.com :: Great Movies – Roger Ebert’s appreciative essay on The Wall for his “Great Movies” series

Sonic Youthquake – Short retrospective article on The Wall by Entertainment Weekly’s Sunny Lee

DVD INFO: Sony’s 2005 “25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition” (buy) contains just about all the special features a fan could hope to find on a single disc.  (Oddly, the “25th anniversary” refers to the date of the album release rather than the movie).  “The Other Side of the Wall” is an informative 1982 promotional documentary profiling all four principal collaborators (Roger Waters, Alan Parker, Bob Geldof and Gerald Scarfe).  “Retrospective: Looking Back at the Wall” is another series of interviews conducted in 1999 and featuring reminiscences from Waters, Parker, Scarfe, producer Alan Marshall, director of photography Peter Bizou, and music producer James Guthrie, about forty minutes in length.  (Waters, Parker and Scarfe all independently bring up the issue of clashing egos on the set, and all three independently express deep reservations about the finished product).  Although the raw footage is in poor condition, a big bonus for Floyd fans is the video for “Hey You,” the anthem to loneliness that was cut from the final film. There’s also a new (ho-hum) music video for “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,” the original trailer, and large galleries of stills and concept art by Scarfe.  There’s an option to watch the movie with lyrics subtitled.  The biggest special feature is doubtlessly the film commentary by Waters and Scarfe, who are still chummy after all these years.  (Waters is nothing like you’d probably imagine; he’s upbeat, optimistic and funny.  Recall that he has had 20 years to adjust his medication, however).  Finally, we note a minor Easter Egg: pressing “9″ on any of the DVD’s numerous sub-menus will play a brief sound clip.

Pink Floyd the Wall is not (yet) on Blu-ray; we’ll update this page when it arrives in the format.

FEATURING:  Matt Mulholland

PLOT: A depressed cabaret singer and sometime mime, overwhelmed by the pressures of

life and loneliness, contemplates suicide and drifts off into a symbolic abyss of despair.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  As devastating a portrait of human despair as has ever been painted, on a canvass black as velvet, this  poison break-up letter to a cruel world from an embittered heart compresses into a mere three minutes an agony that  it would take a lesser artist four minutes or even more to convey.   

COMMENTS: The nameless singer, dressed in black, observes the camera from a skewed angle, indicating his unwillingness to face the world head on anymore.  Alone, he sings of the pressures of ordinary life, but as the tension and anxiety build, a doppelgänger (who will later moph into a trippelgänger) appears.  The ghastly mirror image both harmonizes with, and mocks, the protagonist as he agonizes over paralyzing alternatives, eternally unable to choose (“which one can I take?”).  The minimalist set dissolves into a series of melancholy reminiscences; the dateless singer hanging his head in front of the mirror (the recurrence of the doppelgänger motif); he stands trapped in on a traffic island, his black garb blending into the surrounding darkness as unheeding humanity rushes by him in both directions (more dualities); he holds his head in his hands as, utterly alone, he kills off a bottle of Ballantine’s; he hangs his head in dejection as he stares hopelessly at the wall.  Mysterious images are interspersed into these reveries: running water (shades of Tarkovsky here, with an urban update); the bright lights of the teeming city intruding on his solitude, taunting him; a clock ticking down to an unstated but ominous deadline; glass shattering like a broken will (the deadline arives—the time for reflection is over).  In the finale the singer, now a mime, poses in front of the Void itself, trapped in an invisible box before Eternity.  Flakes of white drift through the Stygian abyss like fragments of exploded angels.  As masterfully affecting as these images are, without the searingly aware lyrics—written by a young postfeminist poetess to explore the ironic dualities of spirited youth versus weary wisdom, and of abandoned Dionysian collectivism versus painful Apollonian self-reflection—without such sure, knowing narration, the project would have come off as corny, weepy and bathetic.  Instead, it is a spiritually acute and devastating portrait of how having nowhere to go on Friday night inevitably leads to a loss of faith in life itself.   

The Dark Side of Friday is currently available to watch on YouTube.

DIRECTED BY: Marco Ferreri

FEATURING: Michel Piccoli, Annie Girardot, Anita Pallenberg

PLOT: Glauco designs gas-masks by day.  One night, he returns to the apartment he shares with his wife and live-in maid and, while searching for ingredients for dinner, discovers a gun wrapped in newspaper in his pantry.  He spends an evening puttering around the house, making dinner, watching home movies, playing with his various toys, disassembling and reassembling the gun, painting it, then using the weapon in a senseless final act.

BACKGROUND:

• John Dillinger was a bank robber in the 1930s who became both Public Enemy #1 and a folk hero.
• Ferreri barely directed Piccoli, giving him only simple blocking instructions and dialogue and allowing the actor to improvise the rest of the performance.
• This is the first of six films Ferreri and Piccoli made together.
• Model Anita Pallenberg may be best known for her romantic involvements with two members of the Rolling Stones (first Brian Jones, and later Keith Richards), but she has had small roles in a couple of weird movies besides this one: Barbarella (1968) and Performance (1970).
• The movie was filmed in the apartment of Italian pop-artist Mario Schifano, and some of the painters works (most prominently, “Futurismo Rivisitato“) can be seen in the background.
• The observations that the young worker makes to Glauco in the prologue are all paraphrases from philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s essay One-Dimensional Man, a critique of then-contemporary consumerism, mass media and industrialism.  Marhola Dargis of the New York Times believes that the entire movie is an attempt to give cinematic form to Marcuse’s ideas.
• After it’s initial release, Dillinger is Dead nearly disappeared.  Variety‘s 1999 version of the “Portable Movie Guide” didn’t mention it among their 8700 reviews, Halliwell never heard of it, and Pauline Kael didn’t encounter it in “5001 Nights at the Movies.”  It was seldom screened and never appeared on home video until a 2006 revival led to the film being virtually rediscovered, culminating in a 2010 release by the Criterion Collection.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The gun that may have belonged to John Dillinger, which fascinates the protagonist.  Especially after he paints it bright red and carefully paints white polka dots on it.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Dillinger is Dead is a disconnected, absurdist parable where

Clip from Dillinger is Dead

nothing seems to be happening, and when something happens, it doesn’t make sense. It’s very much a product of its time—the anarchic, experimental late 1960s—yet the world it portrays still feels oddly, and awfully, familiar.

COMMENTS: Dillinger is Dead doesn’t take leave of reality until its very last moments, but it’s doubtful that anyone watching it would fail to recognize that they were seeing a weird movie long before that.  Glauco, the protagonist, has a rather absurd job as a gas-mask designer.  As his latest creation is being unveiled by a model emerging from inside a toxic concrete bunker to demonstrate the mask’s style and efficiency, a co-worker takes a moment to reflect on their job as a metaphor for modern industrial society.  “When individuals identify with a lifestyle imposed from without and through it experience gratification and satisfaction, their alienation is subsumed by their own alienated existence,” he muses, recapitulating an old water cooler discussion we’ve all had a hundred times before and incidentally stating a theme for the movie.

It’s an odd prelude, but it doesn’t really prepare us for what happens next, which is… approximately nothing.  The designer returns home to his fashionably mod apartment (furnished with an impressive collection of artwork, bibelots, and bric-a-brac) and his fashionably blonde trophy wife (equipped with an unsexy headache and a yen for sleeping pills to carry her off to oblivion).  He doesn’t like the meal she’s made, so he sets about gathering ingredients to make his own dinner, listens to the radio, gets bored, watches TV, watches home movies, putters around the apartment playing with various toys (including his comatose wife and the sexy live-in maid).

The first of two major developments in the otherwise uneventful night occurs when he finds, hidden in the pantry, a gun wrapped in newspapers announcing American gangster John Dillinger’s death in a hail of bullets.  Although it’s certainly strange, even inexplicable, to find a gun hidden in your pantry, even this event is downplayed and treated as something ordinary.  Glauco quickly forgets his discovery and returns to cooking dinner, but returns to the gun from time to time throughout the night, to disassemble it, clean it (by marinating the parts in olive oil), reassemble it, paint it, and play around with it as if it were a toy, mouthing a boyish “pow!” as he fires at imaginary bad guys.

For viewers coming in with conventional narrative expectations, the fact that the onscreen incidents don’t seem to be adding up to anything is itself weird.  And also maddening.  For a long time, the mystery of Dillinger is Dead is, why is nothing happening, and will anything ever happen? It would be hard to blame anyone for giving up on the movie at the twenty or thirty minute mark.

But something strange begins to happen.  Glauco’s poking about the apartment becomes more and more hypnotic the longer you watch.  There are some incidentals that keep up your interest, among which is a great, eclectic late sixties soundtrack featuring a cappella baroque Italian pop, gunfighter ballads, Motown soul grooves, sitar drones, sambas, a brisk flute and piano sonata, and some cool exotica-flavored, Morricone-influenced jazz, and mildly psychedelic British folk-pop.  The vast variety of sounds, a snapshot of the era beyond what you’d hear on classic rock stations, can keep your interest during slow parts.  There’s also the impressive clutter of objets de pop art Glauco has amassed to eye: painted busts equipped with colorful gas masks, a laminated Roy Lichtenstein cover for Time magazine dangling from the ceiling on a rope, snapshots of Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man, exotic paintings of Chinese girls with pierced lips hanging on the bedroom walls, and a toy snake attached to a string which he can make slither across a naked body.  It’s a model home of a respectable 1969 space age bachelor pad, even if it’s the abode of a middle aged married man.

Piccoli’s enigmatic performance is of foremost importance in keeping our attention engaged.  As an accomplished professional with distinguished graying temples, he immediately conveys dignity; but Piccoli undercuts that respect as the night goes on and, increasingly bored, he starts acting more and more like a child.  The turning point begins when he starts watching home movies.  He plays around with the projector, stretching the image, projecting it directly on the wall, casting it at various angles onto a screen with bent panels.  Like a bored kid experimenting, he joins in the action as the reels unspool, interacting with the images directly.  A gory bullfight plays and he waves his hanky at the screen.  He opens his mouth and gulps at the light beaming from the lens as if trying to eat the image.  He playfully grabs at images of his wife and a friend as they cavort topless in the waves on vacation.  He walks behind the screen and peers down at the picture.  Watching a film choreographed for ten dancing digits, he adds his own. And when the film runs out, he and his new toy, the gun, start casting their own pictures on the screen, playing out a silly shadow drama of cops and unseen robbers (or perhaps the other way around).  When Piccoli emerges from this screening, he no longer seems quite like an adult to us.  He’s regressing towards childhood, and his actions become increasingly experimental and infantile.  The transformation from respectable man of the world to lost little boy is a subtly fascinating journey to watch, and one that happens so gradually that it’s almost not noticeable while the film is playing.

The less said about the surrealistic finale and epilogue, the better.  It’s enough to say that it’s truly weird, in a way that shocks the viewers expectations and ends the film with a new mystery that casts everything that came before in a strange and enigmatic light.

Dillinger is Dead as a deliberately ambiguous little semi-narrative parable that leaves itself open to multiple interpretations, making it an excellent source of fodder for debate among film school types.  It’s fair to say that there are multiple themes threaded throughout the movie, meaning that those multiple interpretations may be simultaneously valid.  On the simplest level, it’s an unflattering portrait of that segment of society known as the nouveau riche, bourgeoisie, or just middle-class.  Glauco seems to have everything an upwardly mobile Italian might aspire to: a house packed with fashionable consumer goods, a desirable wife, a live-in mistress, high and low tech diversions, a classic record collection.  Yet, it’s clear that he’s bored, that something is missing.  He’s one-dimensional.  It’s a portrait of a man, of a class, with too much luxury and leisure, and too little spirit and soul.  One-dimensional men who try to make meaning out of things, who fully actualize their social potential as consumers, who treat their fellow humans as toys to play with, inevitably grow jaded.  Once their games are exhausted, boredom sets in; and boredom inevitably leads to mischief, mischief to decadence, in a final attempt to jolt their burnt out souls with novel sensations.  This spiral into depravity happened to the aristocratic classes; why shouldn’t it happen again, en masse, when the middle classes grow rich and idle enough to rule as lords in their own apartment fiefdoms?

Another frequent interpretation of Dillinger is Dead is that it’s a reflection on the loss of masculine identity in the modern world.  The title itself prods us in this direction: what is John Dillinger if not an alpha-male, a rampaging barbarian who takes what he needs and wants in combat, risking his life?  And what does his death symbolize, if not the death of the romantic idea of masculine heroism?  The men of Glauco’s world earn their living and win their women not by feats of derring-do, but by scribbling designs on pieces of paper, which they then exchange for other pieces of paper.  No wonder their women greet them with migraines instead of negligees.  More evidence for the loss of masculinity thesis is the nature of the object the engineer finds when he returns home.  A gun—the granddaddy of all phallic symbols.  But our modern antihero is nonplussed by this artifact of hyper-manliness: he doesn’t know what to do with it, doesn’t understand quite how to wield this antique penis from a vanished era.  He’s only seen such things on TV, after all. He takes it apart, looks at the parts quizzically, soaks them in olive oil, plays with the reassembled weapon like a boy with a stick, paints it with polka dots.  (Should you think this interpretation is a stretch, it’s useful to know that Ferreri’s previous Italian films frequently dealt in some way with male anxieties about the changing nature of romantic relationships in modern society: The Conjugal Bed [1963], where a forty year old man marries a virgin and can’t keep up;  The Ape Woman [1964], where a carnival promoter weds and exploits a hirsute freak; Her Harem [1967], where Carroll Baker keeps a bevy of hunks at her beck and call).  Seen in this way, the inscrutable ending becomes even more cryptic: has Glauco learned to use his newly rediscovered penis and found paradise, or is it all a delusion?

Dillinger is Dead is broad, vague and weird enough to support the theories above, and many more—including the possibility that the whole enterprise is just a cinematic prank Ferreri thought up one night after dipping into Keith Richards’ private stash of Turkish hashish.  If nothing else, the film is a nostalgia piece exemplifying a vanished aesthetic: the anything-goes experimentalism of the late 1960s, where the craziest idea scribbled on a napkin might end up played out on the big screen to puzzle intellectuals and common folk alike.  Few would have the courage to make a movie like Dillinger is Dead today, and no one would have the courage to fund it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Those who sense that something truly weird is brewing will nonetheless find what happens next shocking, made all the more unsettling by the movie’s flat-affect aesthetic.”–David Fear, Time Out New York (revival)

“…an exercise in pop art surrealism that captures the aesthetic and political zeitgeist of the 60s. Connoisseurs of avant-garde cinema will be more than pleased with this release. As for others…”–Rodney Perkins, Twitch (DVD)

“The movie has at least one shocking turn of events and a great, weird ending, but none of these detracts from or solves the movie’s theme, which is that — despite all this stuff in his house, and even the people in his house — Glauco’s life is meaningless… a bizarre, fascinating experience, and one that will sink a bit deeper into your psyche than you might expect.”–Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: Dillinger is Dead – The Criterion Collection – This gateway includes press clippings and two essays on the film. You can also watch the artful but odd and misleading trailer there, which incorporates all of the movie’s few nude scenes and looks like an attempt to position the film as an arty softcore romp.

IMDB LINK: Dillinger è morto (1969)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Dillinger is Dead: Apocalypse Now – Michael Joshua Rowin’s essay on the film for the Criterion Collection

Marco Ferreri: Enduring provocations from one of cinema’s singular voices – Article from Vertigo magazine on the 2006 revival of Dillinger is Dead

The Actor and the Secret – interview with star Piccoli from Cahiers du Cinéma; contains a few reflections on working on Dillinger in a section mislabeled LA GRANDE BOUFFE/BLOW-OUT.

Dillinger is Dead (pdf) – writer Michael Atkinson’s piece on the film promoting the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s revival screening

DVD INFO: The Criterion Collection DVD (buy) (as much as resurrection as a release) manages to come up with only a few enlightening extras, considering the obscurity of the movie. There’s a 13 minute interview with Michel Piccoli, a 21 minute interview/analysis with film historian Adrino Aprà (who also appears in the film on a black and white TV set), and 13 minutes of excerpts from a televised roundtable discussion with directors Francesco Rosi, Bernardo Bertolucci and film historian Aldo Tassone. The later feature includes rare archival footage of the notoriously shy and reticent Ferrere. The trailer for the film is also included, along with a 34 page booklet. For non-US viewers, the film is also available in several competing versions (Region 2 and Region 0), including a Russian and an Italian release (search for non-US versions).

DIRECTED BY: Chris Fuller

FEATURING: Kayla Tabish, Travis Maynard, Chris Fuller (as Lewis Brogan), Jacob Reynolds

PLOT:  Bad poetry interrupts episodes in the lives of three teens or twenty-somethings at

about the time of the 1997 St. Petersburg, Florida race riots.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s only fitfully weird, but consistently dull and pretentious. Life on this planet is full of hardships and disappointments; no one should voluntarily compound their woes by watching Loren Cass.

COMMENTS:  A voice says “after the 1997…”   A solo trumpet launches a doomed search for a melody.  A boy wakes up on the floor of a mechanic’s garage.  Another boy, with a shaved head, piercings and tattoos, presumably a skinhead, wakes up on a couch and goes outside to lie in the middle of the street.  A cute blonde girl wakes up next to a black male.  The boy from the garage picks up the skinhead.  The girl takes her own car.  The three drive to school.  The parking lot is full but the hallways inside are empty.  We get a nice look at the urinals.  Someone loads a gun.  We see the urinals from a different angle.  An older man takes a shot of whiskey.  The two boys are next to last to leave the parking lot.  At a stoplight a black guy jumps out of a van and punches the punk kid with through an open window.  They have a fight.  The screen goes blank and a street poet tells us St. Petersburg is “a dirty dirty town by a dirty dirty sea.”  What’s going on here?  The cute blonde works at a diner where no one ever orders anything.  She has car trouble and takes it to the young mechanic.  He fixes it and they go to dinner together.  She shovels gray cubes of meat into her mouth.  He doesn’t eat.  They barely talk but look at each other a lot.  They are in love.  What’s going on here?  Other things happen.  They aren’t interesting, either.  Some kids drink beer and say the F-word a lot until the Man comes and hassles them.  The skinhead’s hobby is to ride the bus at night.  We look at his face.  He looks alienated. Snippets of bad beatnik poetry and drunken ramblings play on the soundtrack.  There is a punk concert.  The skinhead falls asleep on the bus and dreams he’s a victim of spontaneous human combustion.  Years ago an embattled politician committed suicide at a press conference.  The footage is in the public domain so anyone can insert it into their movie at random.  The mechanic and the cute girl have sex.  The skinhead scratches “Loren Cass” onto his arm with a hypodermic needle he finds in a dumpster.  He swallows a handful of pills in a desperate attempt to get out of the movie.  He vomits them up.  The movie won’t let him out that easily.  He wakes up the next morning and looks into the camera.  He looks disaffected.  The trumpet player still hasn’t found a melody.  The credits roll.  What just went on here?  The Variety critic stayed awake and alert long enough to write that he had just seen “a starkly radical film debut of uncommon power and artistic principle.”  Seriously, what is going on here?

The events are set around the times of the St. Petersburg race riots, which we know because we see newsreel footage of the aftermath and hear audio clips of a rabble-rousing black preacher.  The movie supplies no context to suggest whether these incidents take place before, after, or during the riots.  But the subtext makes the film political and important.  Use of the tragically real footage of Pennsylvania Treasurer Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out on camera either says something insightful about fiscal corruption in the Keystone state in the 1980s, or is completely indefensible.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…ingeniously experimental in form… The tone — spaced-out, adrift, grubby yet ecstatic — is reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s experimental youth movies and Harmony Korine’s ‘Gummo,’ while the formal precision brings to mind Robert Bresson’s clipped, oblique allegories.”–Nathan Lee, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Patrick Epino

FEATURING: Al No’mani, Scott McNairy, Rudy Ramos

PLOT: When he’s scarred in an assassination attempt on the eve of the Kuwait invasion,

a mute Saddam Hussein body double with no skills or interests beyond impersonating the Iraqi dictator loses his job and moves to Los Angeles to start his life over.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  More quirky than weird.  There are some offbeat montages, including a nutty but oddly appropriate music video stuck into the middle of the film, but not enough to elevate it to true weirdness.

COMMENTS:  No doubt about it, it’s Al No’mani’s airy and amiable performance as Saddam Hussein impersonator Mounir that keeps Mr. Sadman, a low-key indie comedy with an inventive premise but not quite enough laughs or plot, afloat.  No’mani is the requisite dead-ringer for the fascist dictator.  But more importantly, with his arsenal of friendly, vulnerable, quizzical, and despondent expressions, Iraqi-born No’mani (who died soon after filming was complete) invests his silent character with a surprising amount of humanity, turning him into something like an unhinged but harmless and sweet uncle for whom the audience roots.  It was a gamble to make Mounir mute, but it pays off; the handicap gives the character an unexpected everyman aura that makes his sparse backstory irrelevant.  The film features some mild satirizing of the subculture of struggling L.A. actors and technicians trying to break into the Hollywood film industry; there’s a deeper warning about the absurdity of forging our own identities by emulating celebrities, but there’s no preaching: the message is implicit in the plot.  The script scores occasional chuckles, particularly with a pair of pot-smoking Hollywood wannabes whose minds get blown when Mounir walks past them at a party as they’re watching Saddam on CNN, and a scene where the middle-aged Iraqi plays basketball with some homeboys.  There are also a few groaners: Mounir’s antagonists are FBI Agents Wang and Johnson (a couple of dicks, get it?)  True to the title, there is an undercurrent of melancholy, and Sadman is indebted as much to the classic alienation films of the late 1960s and early 1970s as it is to contemporary quirky indies.  There’s an explicit citation to Taxi Driver, an obvious tribute to The Graduate, and scenes of a man-child in a ridiculous costume strolling down city streets oblivious to urban reactions can’t help but bring to mind Midnight Cowboy.  The spirits of light comedy and despairing loneliness  sometimes mix uneasily—and the laughs are largely jettisoned by the finale—but for the most part, it works okay.  The cinematography, music and editing are all professional.  The script requires some leaps of faith: for example, I wasn’t convinced Mounir’s new-found Hollywood buddies would risk jail time to protect him from the FBI.  With the exception of No’mani and Rudy Ramos as a hotel operator, the performances are spotty.  But the Iraqi’s expressive facial acting lifts the film to something that, while uneven, is often touching.

As appears to be increasingly the case in a movie business convinced its customers are demanding fewer alternatives to repetitive Hollywood fare, Mr. Sadman has not found a distributor.  The director is currently self-promoting the picture, and it can be downloaded for $8 from the Mr. Sadman site.  The picture quality of the download is good, and I had no problem burning it to a standard DVD+RW for viewing on my television screen (individual results may vary).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Fair warning: watching Mr. Sadman does require the viewer to suspend one’s disbelief entirely… [but] Ultimately, Mr. Sadman delivers what it promises: presenting a dark comedy about the face of evil who just wants to be loved.”–Jaimie Mendoza, Asia Pacific Arts (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Oleg Yankovskiy, Domiziana Giordano, Erland Josephson

PLOT: Andrei is a Russian poet is traveling around Italy in the company of a fetching translator, researching a biography of a Russian composer who studied in Italy before returning to Russia only to drink and kill himself.  Andrei becomes homesick and bored with the project, and with life in general, until he becomes fascinated by a insane man living in a small town famous for its natural mineral baths.  The madman gives him a simple symbolic task to perform—which Andrei procrastinates in completing— then leaves for Rome on a mission of his own.

BACKGROUND:

• Tarkovsky was considered one of the finest filmmakers in the Soviet Union; he frequently ran into difficulty with the Soviet censors, however, particularly for his Christian viewpoints.  Although his films won acclaim at international film festivals, they were often shown to limited audiences in edited versions in his own country.  Work on the historical epic Tarkovsky was helming prior to Nostalghia had been halted by the Soviet censorship board because of scenes seen as critical of the state’s policy of official atheism.
• Nostalghia was the first film Tarkovsky made outside the Soviet Union.  Originally intended to be a Soviet/Italian co-production, the state-owned USSR film production Mosfilm withdrew financial support for the project without comment after filming had already begun.
• The film competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, but was awarded a special jury prize instead.  Tarkovsky claimed that the Soviet contingent applied pressure to assure that the film would not be awarded the grand prize.
• Tarkovsky defected to the West soon after Nostalghia was completed, leaving his wife and son behind.  They were eventually allowed to leave the country when he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1986.  Rumors persist that Tarkovsky did not die of natural causes, but was actually poisoned by the KGB in retaliation for his defection.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  There are many fine candidates.  The scene of Andrei attempting to carry a lit candle cupped in his hand across a drained spa may stick with the viewer, if not for its symbolism, then because it audaciously continues for over eight minutes.  But the final, static, picture postcard-like composition of a Russian homestead nestled inside an Italian cathedral perhaps captures Tarkovsky’s theme the best, and is shockingly beautiful, as well.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  The fluidity between the conscious and subconscious worlds. 

Video trailer for Nostalghia

Although it’s almost always clear whether the events depicted actually occur or are imagined, Tarkovsky is much more interested in what is going on inside the heads of his alienated Russian poet and the Italian madman than in what is happening in the “real” world.  He uses strong, sometimes obscure visual symbolism and dreams to convey an affecting mood of existential loneliness.

COMMENTS:  Nostalghia can’t be approached without a word of warning: this movie is slow.  Any film whose climax consists of a man struggling to carry a lit candle from one end of a drained pool to another, carefully cupping it against the wind, seeing it blown out and relighting it and restarting his journey, for almost nine minutes of screen time, can hardly be described by another word.  Very little happens in the story; the meaning is almost entirely conveyed through visual symbols rather than action or dialogue.  Watching Nostalghia is like staring a beautiful painted canvas that very slowly morphs into a different, but equally masterful, landscape.

Anyone who is interested in movies primarily as a visual medium will want to study Nostalghia closely.  The camera pans and zooms constantly, but slowly and deliberately, absorbing every detail.  The characters themselves move through these worlds languidly, as if they’re weary and half asleep, and even their emotions seem mired in molasses: an almost expressionless Andrei slowly opens a creaking door to reveal an almost expressionless Eugenia, whose face very gradually moves out of the shadows and slowly breaks into a Mona Lisa-like smile.  Many Americans, especially younger Americans used to Hollywood movies that sustain interest through a steady stream of events and violent confrontations, will find it to be excruciating going that confirms their worst stereotypes about plotless and obscure European art movies; but, at the risk of indulging in a cliche, Nostalghia rewards the patient viewer.  The prizes are a scrapbook of poignantly beautiful images, a mysteriously satisfying sense of spiritual longing and melancholy, and mystical excursions into a subconscious realm where the weird and the irrational hold sway.

Most of the joy of the movie comes from appreciating the painstakingly assembled and lit shots, which come in three varieties: Andrei’s nostalgic black and white reminiscences of his Russian homeland, a sun-baked Italy that occasionally blazes into brilliant yellows or glows the color of blue-green algae, and a blend of the two worlds, a dim, bleached landscape drenched in shadows so overwhelming that it appears to be monochrome.  Tarkovsky moves between these three visual schemes in an extraordinarily fluid way—there are no hard cuts, no unnatural, stylized transitions.  The ease with which he moves between the color and monochrome worlds echoes the ease with which he moves between the protagonist’s interior and exterior worlds.

As an example of this fluid method, consider the way Tarkovsky handles Andrei’s dream in the Bagno Vignoni hotel.  We have already seen his fading memories of his Russian homestead, where he imagines wife and his old German shepherd romping through a gray countryside.  When he enters the hotel room it’s darkened and shadowy, almost greyscale; when he turns on one light switch, the bulb casts an unnatural pale blue light, while switching on another light reveals that the bathroom wall that looked periwinkle in the shadows is actually bright white.  By flicking various switches and opening his window Andrei changes the color scheme from color to black and white and back.  As he prepares for sleep, accompanied by the sound of rain, he switches off all the lights, invoking the monochromatic color scheme.  As the moon glow changes, causing more and more of the room to fall into inky shadows, we notice that the old dog of his memory has wandered in from the bathroom and settled at the foot of his bed.  In a few minutes we have almost imperceptibly moved from the waking world to the dreaming world, without realizing it, just as if we were falling asleep in our chairs watching the screen.  The black and white dream that follows, while beautiful, is less impressive than the way the transition was achieved.

The key scene for lovers of the weird will likely be Andrei’s trip inside divine lunatic Domenico’s lair, a ramshackle, irrational space that’s a jumbled reflection of his own mad mind.   The home, where the madman once kept his family imprisoned for years, is full of both brick-a-brack and magical secrets, though the paradoxes within are largely created by Tarkovsky’s camera.  The crumbling masonry is white and the house is full of shadows and oddly lit, with sunlight appearing on the walls in random patches, recreating the mock monochrome color scheme the director has used before.  In contrast, there is a window that Andrei and Domenico occasionally wander by that looks out on a forest of verdant green plants.  Another window forms the basis of one of the house’s visual mysteries: as Andrei enters, he views a window that looks out on a Tuscan countryside full of rolling hills.  The camera reveals, however, that there is less to the scene than meets the eye; Domenico has created a marvelous model of the landscape complete with crystalline streams, and positioned his creation directly in front of the window sill so that it seamlessly blends into the view.  In another trick, the camera, tracking Andrei’s eye, pans from the model up to the window, and as it climbs the color leeches away until the zenith of the pan is in black and white, like the gray postcard views of the Russian’s memory.  Tarkovsky deploys other illusions to disorient the viewer and create an interior dreamscape.  The camera will pan around three corners of a room, and Andrei will appear in each corner, seemingly without having moved.  A poster of a frightening baby with a large head and blank eye sockets suddenly appears on a way and fades away.  After having shot the scene so that it appears Andrei and Domenico are conversing in tight quarters, the camera pulls back to reveal that the room is actually cavernous, like a warehouse, and has a leaky thatched roof.  As a final note, notice how “1 + 1 = 1″ appears carved on a wall: it’s a sensible metaphor that Domenico fully explains in dialogue, but a sight which nonetheless appears screamingly irrational when engraved into a madman’s home, and one which is amplified because Domenico has just begun talking to his dog about his guilty conscience as the equation comes into view.  The scenes inside this sanctuary produce a subtly jarring impression of benign madness.

Three other standout scenes deserve mentioning. The first striking image in the film occurs in a cathedral where women pray to an effigy of Madonna for fertility and rip open her torso to free a flock of small birds.  In the second, a homesick Andrei drinks vodka and wanders into an extraordinary, half-flooded ruins covered in green algae, where you can almost smell the stagnant water. There he delivers his finest monologue of the film: a drunken speech to a little Italian girl. (In fact, this is virtually the only scene where stoic Andrei shows any visible emotion).  Finally, the immolation scene, after Domenico has delivered his mad speech to the people of Rome, from atop the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, set to the distorted strains of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—coupled with the bizarre reactions of the assembled spectators—is also likely to burn itself into the viewer’s memory.

If there is one complaint, besides the often overly deliberate pace, it’s that it’s difficult to know what to make of Eugenia.  Her character is constantly unsatisfied.  She cannot understand the devout women who pray to the Madonna of Childbirth, or even bring herself to kneel respectfully at the church.  She haughtily rejects the sacristan’s reactionary idea that women are fulfilled through motherhood, but offers no view of her own to counter that notion.  She is frustrated in her unrequited love for Andrei, and ends up with a powerful man who ignores her.  While the other two main characters are granted a climax to their story arcs, her final act is to go out for a pack of cigarettes (the movie has previously impressed upon us that smoking is a non-act, a waste of time).  Perhaps she exists to only show the alienation of the modern European from her own culture.  Still, she emerges as an unfulfilling character as well as an unfulfilled one; given the amount of screen time Eugenia is given and the heart Domiziana Giordano puts into the role, it seems a shame to leave her character so unexplored.

Like Eugenia, Andrei is also unsatisfied throughout most of the movie.  He begins by saying “I’m tired of seeing these sickeningly beautiful sights,” and progresses to “I’m bored.”  He is in the grips of nostalghia throughout, but he is also simply world-weary, suggesting that his homesickness is not merely for Mother Russia, but for his spiritual home.  He seems to be surprised, and a bit sad, when a little girl tells him she is happy to be alive.  He does not seek to return home, at least not until the very end of the movie.  It’s unclear why he procrastinates in completing the ritual as he promised Domenico, or what he does after he parts from Eugenia, other than drink and dream.  It’s also unclear how, and even whether, carrying the lit candle across the bath brings him redemption.  The symbolism is unforced and open-ended, but carrying the candle to the other side, struggling to keep it lit, suffering false starts and having to begin all over with a new strategy suggests the journey of a life from birth to death.

The final shot, of Andre and his dog reclining in front of their homestead, now nestled inside the outdoor nave of San Galgano Abbey, is beautiful, but I find it ambiguous.  It suggests that those two worlds—the Italian and the Russian, the material and the spiritual—that Andrei has been unable to synthesize, or to translate, have finally been merged.  But the film’s overall tone, up until its final seconds, fills us with such visions of melancholy beauty—a sense of longing that never quite slips and falls into despair or rises to hope–that it’s hard to experience this final, quiet image as a triumphant transformation, or to imagine that Andrei’s nostalghia has been cured by simple (or even by difficult) symbolism.  Although you can’t see Andrei’s expression in the picture, I can’t imagine him wearing anything other than the slightly pained mask he wears throughout the entire film.  The tension inherent in that final shot, which suggests a sudden burst of heavenly grace that is inconsonant with most of what has come before, gives that parting shot a great deal of power.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Mr. Tarkovsky… may well be a film poet, but he’s a film poet with a tiny vocabulary. The same eventually boring images keep recurring in film after film – shots of damp landscapes, marshes, hills in fog, and abandoned buildings with roofs that leak.”–Vicnent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Highly cerebral, beautifully realized, and symbolically obscure, Nostalghia is a cinematic abstract of spiritual hunger.”–Acquarello, Strictly Film School (DVD)

“…Nostalghia represents an important contribution to the Tarkovsky canon, containing some of the director’s most indelible images. Domenico’s self-immolation is surreal and upsetting, played out in an atmosphere that recalls the madhouse in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (the gathered crowd looks dangerously mad), and the final image, of Andrei sitting by a small model of his boyhood home contained within the arches of a ruined Italian cathedral, sums up the film’s dialectic of reality and fantasy as only a powerful image can.”–Nick Burton, Pif Magazine (DVD)

IMDB LINK:  Nostalghia (1983)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Nostalghia.com – An Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site – remarkably complete site dedicated to Tarkovsky with plenty of Nostalghia-specific content; fans of the director will become pleasantly lost here

Nostalghia @ Turner Classic Movies – no real analysis, but plenty of background information on the production

DVD INFO: I reviewed Nostalghia from a VHS copy, so the DVD information here is secondhand.

The most easily obtained version currently in circulation is an all-regions disc from South Korea (buy).  No extras are listed.  Some consumers have stated this version is identical to the discontinued Fox Lorber Region 1 edition (buy), which is still available new (at premium prices) and used.

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

DIRECTED BY: Herk Harvey

FEATURING: Candace Hilligoss, Sidney Berger

PLOT:  Mary Henry, a church organist, is the lone survivor of an accident when the car she’s riding in plunges over the side of an old wooden bridge.  Looking to start over, she takes a job as an organist at a new church in a town where she knows no one.  She finds herself haunted by the sight of a pale grinning man who appears to her when she is alone, and fascinated by an old abandoned carnival pavilion visible from the window of her boarding house that she senses hold a mysterious significance.

BACKGROUND:

• Carnival of Souls was made in three weeks for less than $100,000 (figures on the budget vary, but some place it as low as $33,000).  The film was a flop on its initial release, but gained a cult following through late night television showings.  The film was restored and re-released in 1989 to overwhelmingly positive reviews.
• Director Herk Harvey, screenwriter John Clifford and composer Gene Moore worked together at Centron Corporation, an industrial film company, creating short safety documentaries such as Shake Hands with Danger and high-school propaganda/hygiene films such as What About Juvenile Delinquency? None were ever involved with a feature film again.
• Mesmerizing star Candace Hilligoss acted in only one other feature film, 1964′s The Curse of the Living Corpse, before retiring to raise a family.
• The movie has been very influential on other films, particularly low-budget horror films.  Director George Romero has said that the ghostly figures in Carnival of Souls inspired the look and feel of the zombies in The Night of the Living Dead (1968).  Other writers see a Carnival of Souls influence on films such as Eraserhead (in regards to its ability to evoke the nightmarish quality of everyday objects), Repulsion (disintegration of the mind of a sexually repressed woman), and even Apocalypse Now (the shot of Martin Sheen rising from the water mimics a similar scene involving The Man–thanks to Matthew Dessem of “The Criterion Collection” for the catch).
• Carnival of Souls was “remade” in 1998, although the plot (about a clown killer and rapist) shared nothing with the original except the name and the final twist.  Wes Craven produced.  The remake went direct to DVD and was savaged by critics and audiences alike.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  What else, but the titular carnival?  Ghostly figures waltz to an eerie, deranged organ score on what appears to be an old merry-go-round at the abandoned amusement park.  The tableau recurs twice in the film: once clearly in a dream, and once near the end as a scene that may also be a dream, but may be another state of being entirely.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Carnival of Souls is set in the ordinary, everyday

8 minute clip from Carnival of Souls (with annotations supplied by a youtube user)

world, but as seen through the eyes of an alienated, frightened woman.  The world the film depicts is familiar, but made maddeningly strange, and its the subtle, grubby touches rather than ghostly apparitions that allow this creepy low-budget wonder to seep deep under your skin.

COMMENTS: Carnival of Souls is a minor film miracle.  There was little reason to suspect that this crew—composed of a director, cinematographer and composer who had previously worked only on industrial shorts and hygiene films, a first-time scripter, a featured actress with no previous movie experience, with mostly local amateurs cast in supporting roles, all working with a micro-budget in a genre that made its living off of special effects—could create even a watchable film. In fact, they created a horror classic that has lasted through the years, while hundreds of bigger-budget films have deteriorated into dust.  Everything came together on the set of Carnival of Souls: fortuitous locations; a persistent, weird organ score by Gene Moore that alternates between angelic and demonic; an unforgettable performance by debuting Candace Hilligoss; evocative camera shots filled with moody shadows; technically flawed supporting performances that only add to the otherworldly atmosphere; minimalist makeup and effects that set the eerie mood, but are never so overdone as to become laughable.  Utterly unique, Carnival of Souls seemingly springs from nowhere, and leads (in Terrence Rafferty’s words) into “its own distinctive nowhere.”

After having been nearly lost, surviving only through rare TV screenings and bootlegs passed among fans, Carnival 0f Souls finally got the critical attention it deserved when it was re-released in 1989.  Reviews were almost universally positive, but often qualified their praise by mentioning the cheapness of the production and the amateurism of the acting, as if it’s low-budget genre origins were a muck it could never quite rise above.  Joe Brown of the Washington Post published one of the most condescending reviews, defending it only as “another case for the preservation of the black-and-white movie – in black and white, even this odd little $30,000 sleeper looks like Art now and again.”

Many audiences responded with the same sort of “surprisingly good, considering the budget” attitude.  I conclude the opposite: the amateurism is an essential part of Carnival of Souls unique charm, and had it been made with a huge special effects budget and performed by polished thespians with persnickety perfectionism, a far less compelling nightmare would have been birthed .

Part of an audience’s problem is that the opening scenes of the car crash that sends Mary Henry over the railing of a rickety bridge and into the Kansas river are the film’s weakest, least accomplished sequences.  The daytime establishing shots show little of the visual flair Harvey will deploy later in the film.  As the authorities dredge the river, their voices are badly dubbed in and terribly out of sync with their lip movements, and the voice acting is flat and uninspired.  At this point, the cheapness of the production isn’t yet contributing to the atmosphere.  It’s merely annoying, distractingly bad, giving an initial impression of incompetence that some viewers find impossible to shake.  For the first five minutes, Carnival of Souls gives no indication of being anything other than another forgettable poverty row B-movie fit only to fill out the bottom half of a drive-in double bill, until the first iconic image suddenly appears: a dazed, muddy Hilligoss unexpectedly staggering out of the river, the lone survivor.  From this point on, Carnival of Souls depresses the mood pedal and never looks back.

The most common obstacle viewers create to appreciating the greatness of the movie is an objection to the acting, which is sometimes described as being on a “community theater” level.  But the key to effective emoting isn’t bringing a one-size-fits-all naturalism to each role, but instead finding a fit between the particular characterization and the feel of the film.  Here, entirely by accident, the substandard acting makes Mary’s experience all the more terrifying, because it imbues her world with another layer of the strange and alien.  Imagine being trapped in a nightmare where you not only suffer horrifying visions, but in your moments of ”normalness” and respite everyone speaks to you in a slightly strained manner, as if they were reciting monologues they memorized fifteen minutes ago.  The cast’s performances have the same subliminal effect as the odd, off-key notes in Moore’s organ score—they sound “wrong,” but they are still undeniably lyrical.  The supporting characters’ struggle to express themselves realistically adds to the subtly off-key feeling of Carnival of Souls that everyone acknowledges is the key to the movie’s power.  In fact, the most experienced actress in the film—Frances Feist, the landlady, who had acted on Broadway and starred in at least four of Harvey’s previous shorts—makes the least impression, and I’m not entirely convinced that’s a coincidence.

Take, for example, the final scene in the Church.  While practicing on the pipe organ, Mary is suddenly possessed.  Her fingers begin to slide over the keys like tentacles, her naked feet caress the organ pedals sensually, and her face takes on a trancelike, half-ecstatic and half-terrified expression, as the melody she plays morphs from a reverent chorale into a dissonant carnival tune.  Visions from the haunted pavilion on the horizon dance before her eyes.  Suddenly, the minister breaks the tension as he storms in and stops her from playing, crying “Profane!  Sacrilege!”  He then fires her as organist on the spot, effectively casting her out of the church.  His reaction is unreal, absurd; an organist playing secular ditty is hardly a cause for dismissal, much less religious outrage.  Art Ellison’s melodramatic reading of these lines, with his overly careful enunciation and tones rising to an indignant pitch, as if preaching to unrepentant sinners from the pulpit, only heighten the extreme oddness of the passage, reinforcing the notion that even Mary’s “normal” reality is eerily weird.

Sidney Berger’s performance as Mary’s leering neighbor John is another technically flawed portrait that is actually pitch perfect when placed in its proper weird context.  Berger plays the part like he’s channeling a Bowery Boy as an alcoholic would-be ladies man.  Against our will, we sympathize with poor John, who’s definitely not good enough for Mary and hasn’t the faintest idea how to woo a lady with her class (his offer to spike her morning coffee with brandy is a colossal dating blunder).  At the same time, we recognize him as a threat, a peeping Tom and potential rapist.  Berger’s is a sleazy performance that flits between the cliched and the idiosyncratic, and it’s plausible to posit that a better actor might not have nailed the oily feel of badly forced pseudo-suavity that John exudes when trying to make time with the regal Mary.

It’s a good thing that Berger’s performance is so memorable, because his character plays an often under-appreciated role in Mary’s internal drama.  Mary is emotionally distant, frigid and antisocial.  John’s shabby joie de vivre, his offers of sex and liquor, are an invitation to her to enter back into human society, into a world beyond herself and her terrifying internal preoccupations.  John represents a life force, one that doesn’t quite resemble the good life, but which is nevertheless more tempting than the nightmarish half-life in which Mary is trapped.  That’s why she is so ambivalent towards John; she teases him, never quite stomps out his lustful hopes, and in the end, too late, tries desperately to cling to him.

Besides gripes about the budget, another slight that audiences and critics sometimes levy at Carnival of Souls is to compare it to a feature-length “Twilight Zone” episode (sometimes even going so far as to suggest–sacrilege!–that it would have been a stronger film at 30 minutes).  Not to diminish the achievements of that venerable TV series, but the comparison misleadingly suggests that Carnival of Souls is a movie that depends only on it’s twist ending.  Most people will see the twist coming far ahead of time.  The surprise adds a shock at the end if you haven’t guessed it, but even if you do, you don’t miss out on much.  The beginning and the end of the movie are formally necessary but almost irrelevant; Carnival of Souls is about getting swallowed up in the suffocating atmosphere in between.  It’s the antithesis of a movie like The Sixth Sense, which depends entirely on it’s never-saw-it-coming ending, and whose re-watchability evaporates once the viewer knows the ending.  Carnival of Souls benefits from repeat viewings, and seems to grow deeper, and perhaps even becomes bottomless, the more times you watch it.

Joe Brown might have done well to watch Carnival a few more times.  He dismissively writes that it  ”works well enough as chill-up-the-spine cinema, and one might even go further and argue that Mary’s anomie… suggests something more — an existential horror cheapie. But only if one were inclined to argue about such things.”  We may do well not to argue about Carnival of Souls, because the movie presents us with such a fragile reality that nailing it down to a simple allegory (say, of clinical depression) would endanger its frail beauty.  But to refuse to discuss Mary’s “anomie” or alienation is to abdicate the reviewer’s duty to cut to the core of the film; it’s to avoid the point while covering ones’ tracks with a thin varnish of snobbery.  The movie resonates because it speaks to a deep part of our brains below the rational, the part that is responsible for fugue states and jamais vu, for that frightening feeling of slippage we all experience where our surroundings seem suddenly and inexplicably strange and alien for a tick of the clock, where you wake up beside a longtime lover and for the briefest moment wonder who is that stranger? Carnival of Souls is a catharsis for that feeling, a feeling films rarely address.

Most critics and viewers see Carnival of Souls as an interesting but flawed oddity and give it a very respectable three out of four or four out of five stars.  They dock it a star for its technical failures, which they believe make it impossible to list it among the immortal films.  Fans of the weird will recognize it as a seminal five star classic, only enhanced by the parts to which the mainstream critics object.  If you have a set idea of “movieness” that involves a certain predictable look and feel, a gloss and realism, you’ll find Carnival of Souls doesn’t measure up to that standard.  But I submit that that missing star in the critics’ reviews doesn’t represent the film’s technical flaws; it represents precisely that quality that makes the movie weird.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a creditable can of film considering it was put together for less than $100,000… It isn’t enough story to prevail, but there is a fair share of suspense and some moments of good comedy.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“Has the power to detatch you from your surroundings and put you in the middle of its own distinctive nowhere.”–Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker

“…Harvey makes the familiar foreign and the mundane threatening, and in the sequences set at the already-bizarre Saltair—a gaudy fake castle on a desert lake—he achieves the first, and probably only, example of Great Plains Expressionism… a fine example of low-budget artistry, a creepy horror film, a bizarre and dreamlike death fable, and a true original, Carnival Of Souls thoroughly deserves its unexpected immortality.”–Keith Phipps, The A.V. Club (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Carnival of Souls (1962)

OTHER LINKS OF INTREST:

Internet Archive:  Details: Carnival of Souls: Watch or download a public domain copy of Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Souls (1962) – The Criterion Collection:  Contains a short essay on Carnival of Souls and remarks from screenwriter John Clifford, as well as full details on the contents of the Criterion Collection DVD.

Interview with Candace Hilligoss at THE ASTOUNDING B MONSTER:  A bitter Candace describes how her hopes to remake Carnival of Souls were sabotaged by Hollywood backstabbing

Great Saltair :: History: A history of the Saltair resort, the evocative locale where the creepiest scenes of Carnival of Souls were shot

Trailers from Hell: Mary Lambert on ‘Carnival of Souls’: Director Mary Lambert on the Carnival of Souls trailer

DVD INFO:  Because Carnival of Souls is in the public domain, there are several competing releases.

As usual, The Criterion Collection (buy) does the most thorough job.  Their two-disc release contains both the theatrical cut and the director’s cut with four to five minutes of additional footage, along with several documentaries and commentary by director Herk Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford.

Legend Films has put out a colorized version (fortunately, you can choose to view it in the original black and white as well) (buy) that also includes a mocking commentary track by comedian Mike Nelson of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

The film is also available as part of the Mill Creek 50-pack “Horror Classics,” (buy) with no extras, of course.  Other notable titles in that collection are Metropolis, Nosferatu, White Zombie, and Night of the Living Dead.