DIRECTED BY: Michele Soavi

FEATURING: Rupert Everett, Anna Falchi, François Hadji-Lazaro

PLOT: Together with his nearly-mute associate Gnaghi, Francesco Dellamorte is a groundskeeper at a cemetery; his most important duty is to blow out the brains of the zombies (“returners”) who rise from their graves after seven days. Weary of his life as a zombie-slaying gravekeeper, Dellamorte is reinvigorated when he falls in love with a beautiful young widow. Things grow stranger when he hears the voice of Death speaking to him, suggesting another approach to his job…

BACKGROUND:

• Cemetery Man is adapted from the novel (or possibly graphic novel) “Dellamorte Dellamore” by Tiziano Sclavi, who went on to enormous popular success in Italy with his “Dylan Dog” comic book series about a supernatural investigator with a Groucho sidekick.
• In Italian “della morte” means “of death” and “dell’amore” means “of love.”
• Michele Scoavi has had an odd directing career. He apprenticed under Italian exploitaion impresario Joe D’Amato, and later worked as a second unit director for both Dario Argento and Terry Gilliam. Given the opportunity to direct his own features, between 1987 and 1991 he produced three solid but conventional horror films (Stagefright, The Church, The Sect), but nothing suggesting he would produce anything as demented as Dellamorte Dellamore. Despite the fact Dellamorte was a domestic and critical success in Italy and eventually became a cult hit around the world, at the peak of his acclaim Soavi retired from both horror and feature film making, choosing to direct movies for Italian television instead.
• Scoavi has talked from time to time of possibly making a sequel. In 2011 fellow Italian director Luigi Cozzi informed Fangoria magazine that Scoavi had started on the script and planned to make the film in 2012, but there’s been no further news on the project since that notice.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: An honorable mention must go to the eerily erotic midnight interlude when Everrtt and Falci make love in a Gothic graveyard lit by spermatoza-like glowing will-o’-the-wisps. It would be a crime, however, if the movie’s most indelible moment didn’t involve Cemetery Man‘s two weirdest characters, the mute child-man Gnaghi and his girlfriend, an underage severed head (buried, for some reason, in a bridal veil) whom he keeps in the broken shell of his television set. You won’t forget what happens when she unexpectedly reveals that she can fly…

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: It’s a film criticism fallback cliché to describe an outrageously

Clip from Cemetery Man [Dellamorte Dellamore]

eccentric movie using the following formula: “it’s [insert name of familiar movie or genre] on acid!” I’m not above recycling useful boilerplate, though: Dellamorte Dellamore is a George Romero movie on acid. The world’s only surrealist arthouse zombie black comedy is too unique (and too poetic) to leave off the List.

COMMENTS: The typical zombie-movie enthusiast will find Dellamorte Dellamore strange and frustrating, but it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the movie decisively flies off the rails and our hypothetical horror fan realizes that he’s watching something uniquely unhinged. Dellamorte starts out off-center and just keeps getting weirder and weirder, like a gravedigger shoveling deeper and deeper into the unconscious earth. It begins with a manageable horror-comedy premise: what would happen if a cemetery caretaker’s duties included putting a bullet in the heads of any corpses that spontaneously clawed their way out of their graves? This is the vocation Francesco Dellamorte finds himself pursuing, and despite the constant danger of being bitten by the ravenous carcasses, it seems his work has already become comically routine. In the opening scene he casually pauses a phone call to dispatch an undead insurance salesman at his door, then returns to the conversation without comment. There are times when work gets a little hairy—when he discovers he’s misplaced his pistol and is forced to locate a spade to use to split open a revenant’s head, for instance—but the job has basically become a graveyard grind. His only companion is his fat assistant Gnaghi, who looks like a cross between Curly from the “Three Stooges” and Igor from the Frankenstein films (Francesco explains that his ID card reads “distinguishing marks: all”).  Gnaghi is a loyal friend but not exactly an engaging conversationalist: his vocabulary consists of a single word, “nyah.” Francesco is bored with his life; like any good romantic hero, he’s half in love with easeful Death. In Dellamorte’s case, perhaps more than half…

 Strange enough so far, but nothing your average gorehound couldn’t accept as a workable horror hypothesis. Queue the first plot twist: Dellamorte sees a grieving young widow in a curve-hugging black mourning dress and is immediately smitten to the core. He thinks to himself that she’s the “most beautiful living woman I have ever seen” (and we think to ourselves, how odd to qualify the phrase “most beautiful woman” with the word “living”). It’s also a bit strange that, even as their love starts to flower among the gravestones, the widow never reveals her name. She’s even more thanatonically fetishistic than Dellamorte, considering “you’ve got a real nice ossuary” and irresistible pick up line and insisting they make love for the first time on her deceased hubby’s grave. And perhaps it’s at this point that the casual viewer begins to realize that something unusual is going on in this zombie film: the movie’s just gone fifteen minutes without an undead attack. That, and the lovers are entwining limbs amongst gravestones while electric-blue balls of spermatozoa-shaped swamp gas hover about them…

Our hypothetical horror fan will forgive the artily-lensed digression (especially since Falci’s nudity already softened the blow) and be briefly cheered when the dead once again rise to munch on the living. After so much time spent waddling about with character development instead of decomposing corpses, a firm plot and a body count finally appears to be developing. True, certain of the “returners” are now showing significantly greater verbal skills than previous “grr-grr” type of zombies, but that inconsistency is easily overlooked. The fact that Dellamorte’s love interest has disappeared only one-third of the way through the movie seems unusual, but when a disastrous accident brings of a busload of biker and boy scout corpses to the cemetery, the promise of shambling cadaver chaos lingers heavy in the air. That promise is met, leading to brain-spattering suspense sequence as the zombies invade Dellamorte and Gnaghi’s shack; a transvestite nun is among the attackers, but the viewer simply assumes that all kinds of weirdos are buried in the boneyard. Besides, it’s all being played for laughs, as Gnaghi is zoned out with headphones in front of the tube while Francesco fights for his life directly behind him. Even the sight of undead bikers bursting out of their graves on their Harleys is more awesome than weird.

As the movie reaches the halfway point reality (or what passes for reality within the rules of a zombie flick) has been stretched to the breaking point, but has not yet torn apart. The point at which our Dellamorte officially abandons any pretense of normality comes when Gnaghi digs up the corpse of his living crush, the mayor’s daughter. Her head comes off of her body as he yanks her out of her glass coffin, but Gnaghi’s ardor isn’t cooled; neither the sickly pallor of the grave nor her unsightly stitches bother him. Oh, and despite her recent decapitation, she talks. A lot. That’s not the part the viewer will find weird, though. What’s impossible to swallow is that she’s now attracted to the portly laborer who repulsed her in life, daring him to kiss her. “Take advantage; I’m certainly in no position to refuse,” she purrs. We now seem to be deep inside Gnaghi’s innocently sick fantasy world. The gorehound has been pushed past the limits of suspension of disbelief; the dead coming back from their graves is one thing, but a romance between an idiot man-child and a severed head is pushing things too far (even if, as the torso-free girl argues, “I’m not such a great catch, either”).

Still, this bit is obviously in the service of (very dark) comedy, so perhaps our fan will let it slide. But what will they make of it when Death itself materializes to Francesco from the ashes of a pile of burning phone books, sending the plot off in an entirely different direction? Or when romantic doppelgangers, and even trippelgangers, start showing up? At this point it becomes impossible to salvage either ordinary horror or comedy from the surrealist carnage Soavi sews. By the third act all the rules have rotted away, and what began as an innocuously offbeat zom-com winds up beyond imagination, where the road to nowhere ends.

Dellamorte Dellamore‘s refusal to stick to a recognizable narrative or tonal plan makes the movie a failure to the conventional-minded, but even the film’s harshest critics have to give the film credit for its many unforgettable moments. The cinematography and makeup are astounding. The Everett/Falci graveyard love scene is a standout, but there are also amazing shots of a woman’s corpse rising in front of a field of bones in the ossuary, and an embedded-throat-camera view of a zombie attack. Individual scenes—the severed head-cam, a bit of provincial satire about the mayor planning to use his dead daughter as the trump card in his upcoming re-election bid, a shot of a fencepost earth in front of a moon reflected in a puddle—are impeccably executed, even though each piece seems to come from entirely different movies.

Perhaps Dellamorte‘s strangest feature is that, despite its obvious schizophrenia, the movie feels unified and of a piece. Francesco’s obsession with phone books, the rumors of his impotence that are common knowledge to the townsfolk, and the fact that multiple characters inexplicably call him “engineer” are unelucidated ligaments of backstory that tie the story together. Everett is effective as a metaphorical example of the living dead, and his master/faithful servant relationship with Gnaghi develops into the film’s emotional spine. Although it veers wildly from horror to black comedy to unabashed weirdness, Dellamorte Dellamore‘s technical excellence and “existential” feel lends the entire enterprise an arthouse feel that elevates its exploitation components into something that feels weighty, even if its difficult to describe what the movie’s substance actually is. Dellamorte Dellamore is consistent in its twin obsessions with love and with death; it invokes both the death of love and the love of death. But Soavi doesn’t raise any clear issues for contemplation, unless you consider “can you really call it necrophilia if it’s sex with the living dead?” a meaty discussion topic. Then again, this is a movie about death and its polar opposite, sex. Are these topics that are best discussed within a rational framework? These two themes generally show up in horror movies as boob shots and monsters, and the modern horror fan expects to see both—separately. Start breeding the two together, though, and the result inevitably becomes uncomfortably weird. Fortunately for our hypothetical viewer, in Dellamorte Dellamore the cross-fertilization is also poetic and hilarious. We hope that he will dig it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the bastard progeny of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and any number of Fellini films. It’s compelling, bizarre, and distinctly Italian in its stylish mixture of sex, violence, and scattershot plotting that only Dario Argento could truly love.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“…if you don’t mind horrific, grotesque comedy that mixes the gore of George Romero and Dario Argento with the quixotic irreverence of Monty Python and Delicatessen, Cemetery Man provides the opportunity for a funny, strange time at the movies…. plenty of violence (wall-to-wall blood-and-gore), sex (occasionally with dead bodies), and general weirdness.”–James Berardinelli, Reel Views

“The opening might suggest a conventional zombie film… but soon it has become a necromantic comedy (with increasingly articulate undead), a giallo-like slasher and a hallucinatory psychodrama, as we are bidden by Dellamorte’s bone-dry narration to wonder whether we are witnessing Lynchian small-town surrealism, an emergent undead apocalypse or a nightmare in a damaged brain… the sort of gothic mindbender that is remembered less as film than as dream.”–Anton Bitel, Little White Lies (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Cemetery Man (1994)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Dellamorte Dellamore (Cemetery Man) – Cult Labs – A message board for fans devoted to the movie, from Cult Labs (distributor of the Region 2 DVD)

DVD INFO: Anchor Bay’s Region 1 DVD (buy) is out of print but still widely available. The print is, unfortunately, full screen. Extras include the original Italian trailer, a Soavi biography, and the informative 30 minute documentary Death is Beautiful. Readers with Region 2 capabilities are luckier, as they have access to Shameless Screen Entertainment’s 2012 release, which is widescreen and contains a commentary track by Soavi and screenwriter Gianni Romoli. The film is currently not available anywhere on either Blu-ray or through on-demand video services.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Dylan,” who called it [with some understatement] a “very unusual and interesting film with Rupert Everett.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin

FEATURING: Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale

PLOT: Villagers of the Alpine town of Tolzbad believe that avalanches will bury them if they are not meticulously careful to keep their voices low and their movements measured.  The film follows the adventures of a family of a widowed mother and her three sons: Johann, who is engaged to be married; Grigorss, who is training to be a butler; and Franz, a mute who never leaves his chair in the attic. Presaged by the appearance of the blind ghost of the father, the family’s repressed emotions eventually erupt into suicide, duels, and even the dreaded avalanche.

BACKGROUND:

• This was Guy Maddin’s third film, and his first fully in color (Archangel featured a few tinted scenes). The chromatic process used in the film mimics the so-called “two-strip” Technicolor which was used before 1932.
• The setting of Careful was inspired by “mountain movies,” a 1920s subgenre popular in the German national cinema, although Maddin admits in the DVD commentary that he had not actually seen any mountain movies when he made the film.
• Long-time Maddin screenwriting collaborator George Toles appears in Careful as a corpse in drag.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: I am tempted by the vision of the mountain mineworkers—women stripped down to their underwear, wielding pickaxes while wearing candle-bearing diapers on their heads—but the film’s most significant image is Johann gazing manically at his mother sleeping under her goat’s-head headboard while spreading the limbs of his massive garden shears.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If movies themselves could dream, their dreams would look like Guy

Original trailer for Careful

Maddin movies: sludgy jumbles of styles, moods, and melodramatic preoccupations, composed of fragmented images made up from bits of misplaced, distressed celluloid. Like Maddin’s other movies, Careful keeps us at two removes from reality: it displaces us once by its narrative dislogic, and then a second time by its archaic stylization. In Careful the technique is particularly appropriate, since the subject matter—repressed incestuous desire—demands to be buried under layers of mystery.

COMMENTS: Careful begins with what amounts to a pre-Code Public Service Announcement, as an elder of the high-altitude Alpine village of Tolzbad warns, in a calm, hypnotic voice over carefully plucked harp arpeggios: “Children! Heed the warnings of your parents! Peril awaits the uncautious wayfarer, and strews grief where laughter once played.” The dangers of living in a craggy burg are, apparently, legion. There is the obvious danger of falling off the mountain slope. The fear of avalanches is so great that all domestic animals have their vocal cords severed lest they unwittingly bring death from above down upon the town. The citizens make a virtue of caution, so necessary to their survival, and they have perfected it as a habit to guard against the remotest dangers, for the residents of Tolzbad have many sad tales of the tragedies that result from heedless behavior. A baby once lost an eye when his mother foolishly clasped him to her bosom without making double-sure her brooch pin was fully closed. That same child lost his other eye as an adult when he peered too close to a cuckoo clock just as it burst forth to announce the dawn of a new hour. The elders have a rich storehouse of tales of woe with which to educate the young, but no number of cautionary fables can protect from every possible threat, from the “wild uncontrolled sound of nature,” the avalanche-tempting cries of migrating geese and the folly of the undisciplined human heart. That is why the citizens must always be alert, must carve the instincts of discretion and reserve into their bodies and souls, must always be careful.

The warning prologue is delivered, appropriately enough, in a monochrome print tinted a cautionary traffic-cone orange. In his third feature, Guy Maddin works for the first time in color, and like a 1920s German filmmaker given unlimited access to a two-strip Technicolor machine, he seizes upon the possibilities afforded by this new visual dimension to invent new forms of Expressionist storytelling. The Tolzbadians practiced public blandness is belied by the movie’s flamboyant color schemes: their repressed desires bleed onto the screen. Careful‘s visual compositions look like turn of the century Swiss postcards from which most of the dye long ago faded away. Early Technicolor processes usually used a green filter and a red filter, which in combination covered most of the color spectrum and resulted in an image that projected vaguely realistic hues. Throughout Careful Maddin experiments with using, for example, a yellow filter and a pink one, creating chromatic combinations that are as off-key as the concept of the sexually repressed Alpine village itself is.

Early scenes, such as the Feast of St. Mathilde where the village youths serenade a crowd of swooning maidens with a concerto blown on their grotesquely oversized Alpine horns, are rendered in pleasing, if unnatural, pastoral shades of cornflower and periwinkle. These halcyon days glow as pure and blond as the Aryan hair of young Johann, who chastely woos a village maid by the name of Klara. Of course it is not always so; at moonrise in Tolzbad, the amber sun fades away and is replaced by a purple moon. A violet moonbeam casts a blotch on the face of Johann’s older brother Franz, a lame mute who sits covered in cobwebs in the family attic eternally staring out the window. Bathed in lavender revelation, Franz sees a vision of his blind dead father, who warns the shut-in that his brother now “dreams of your mother like a bridegroom; he is confused; his virginity has become a curse,” that his mother’s unfulfilled desire haunts the house, and that poor Johann has “breathed it in.” Such is the moonrise in Tolzbad. In the next scene the once harmonious color palette is completely broken; tormented by his forbidden desire, Johann confesses to Klara “purity sickens me” and wonders if “the sounds of angels singing hymns to our virginal love was in reality a choir from the deepest pits of Hell?” The lovers’ figures are indistinct and shadowy, veiled in a dense color fog that Maddin calls “sickly urine yellow.” From this point on, the chromatic schemes swing as wildly as the characters’ cascading emotions; Klara will go to labor in the purple and gold mines of Tolzbad, Johann’s brother Grigorss will graduate butler school and land a position in Count Knotkers hunter green castle, and we’ll visit the glacial blue heights of Mitterwald’s Tongue and the electric orange peaks of Mt. Uhlander.

The visual exuberance is a sharp contrast to the acting; as in Maddin’s previous Archangel, the characters deliver their outrageously melodramatic lines (“God has left this mountain to the devil. We have all joined his unholy dance”) as if they were half-asleep and speaking in a daze. Here, the narcotized underacting is appropriate to the theme of repression, but it doesn’t help us bond with the characters, and the hard-to-hit tone of buried passion the script requires exposes the amateurism of a few of the cast members. (Franz, whose complete immobility makes him the safest and therefore most exemplary citizen of Tolzbad, is also the film’s exemplary actor; he’s forced to perform like a silent movie star, and his face is free to express an unfettered alarm and bereavement that the others, bound to language, must suppress). The plot, while not awful, is one of Careful‘s few negatives. It lingers too long at the setup. It’s hard to identify with the characters. There’s no one who engages our sympathies, the story switches the main character on us a third of the way through, imposes an unconvincing romance on us in the third act, and the continues after the natural climax of the duel to follow what is essentially a subplot. These failings far from ruin the film, since Careful has more than enough amazing atmosphere, style and psychological queasiness to admire, but to me they do keep it from being one of Maddin’s top works. The extra features of a master work—the deep involvement in Lt. Boles’ amnesiac tragedy in Archangel, the manic energy of Cowards Bend the Knee, the professional exuberance of Isabella Rossellini and Mark McKinney’s performances in The Saddest Music in the World—are missing in Careful, leaving us with little more to enjoy besides Maddin’s extraordinary style and the cleverness of the incest conceit. These minor flaws make Careful more a film for those who are already in the Maddin cult than an entry point into the canon (I recommend newbies start with Saddest Music, which is Maddin’s most accessible movie while still remaining astoundingly strange to the average person).

Like all of Maddin’s movies, Careful is a tragicomedy, and one that succeeds only because the humor is so absurd and dreamlike that it tempers the tragedy without mocking it. Maddin peppers his tepid Freudian melodrama with moments of full-bore Surrealism. An egg drops a fully developed, moving bird when cracked into a frying pan. There’s a confession of incestuous rape delivered during a yawning fit. In Careful, when two characters have a duel, it involves a drawn out ritual of frantically unbuttoning overcoats, interrupted as the contestants blow on their hands to keep their digits from freezing in the Alpine chill, followed by a frantic round of unbuttoning of waistcoats. It’s funny, but it doesn’t diminish the dramatic stakes of the contest: two men are fighting for their lives, and younger combatant could kill his spiritual father. Dead birds fall out of the sky around the victor. He carefully arranges their jumbled corpses into orderly rows. Such are the psychological avalanches of Tolzbad, where it always pays to be careful.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hilariously bizarre… like some lost masterpiece from a time-warped alternative dimension — a strange artifact that time forgot.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“…the film remains one long ‘look what I can do, Ma,’ drawing attention to the director’s conceits just when the viewer should be focusing on, oh, say, some sort of coherent plot… Too strange for its own good.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“Uniquely weird, subtly macabre, and utterly compelling.”–Time Out Film Guide

OFFICIAL SITE: Careful at Zeitgeist Films – A synopsis, stills, quotes from positive reviews, and a detailed Guy Maddin biography

IMDB LINK: Careful (1992)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Technicolor history – For the technically inclined, here is a discussion of early film color technology that Maddin mimics in Careful

DVD INFO: Zeitgeist’s “Remastered and Repressed” DVD (buy) preserves Maddin’s uniquely bizarre color and sound schemes, faithfully reproducing each imperfection. There is a buried treasure of bonus material; a commentary with the director and under-appreciated writing partner George Toles is of primary interest. There’s also the utterly surreal five minute short film “Odilon Redon” (which can be watched here, though with a different soundtrack). The most impressive extra is the informative one hour documentary Waiting for Twilight, narrated by none other than Tom Waits, which covers Maddin’s early history and was filmed as the nervous auteur was fretting over the production of 1997′s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.

This title is also available, with all the same features, as part of the four-disc set “The Quintessential Guy Maddin” (buy): other movies featured are the aforementioned Ice Nymphs, the Certified Weird movies Archangel (1990) and Cowards Bend the Knee (2004), the 2003 vampire ballet Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, and the magnificent Surrealist/Constructivist short “The Heart of the World.” “Quintessential” is the only box set available anywhere to date containing an incredible three Certified Weird movies. At the time this review was published the compilation was priced at only a few dollars more than the single disc, making it an almost irresistible bargain.

Careful is also available for online purchase or rental (rent).

(This movie was nominated for review by Eric Gabbard, who argued “Careful ‘out-weirds’ both [Archangel and Cowards Bend the Knee] easily. In fact, I would definitely put it in my top 10. Such dreamlike photography puts you in a trance.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sharon Wilkins

PLOT: A teenager falls in with a group of anti-abortionists in her quest to become pregnant.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: As if the plot isn’t off-beat enough, Palindromes‘s teenage porotagonist is played by a variety of actors of different ages, sizes, races, and even genders.

COMMENTS: The standout feature of Palindromes is the unorthodox casting of a series of different actresses (and one actor) in the role of Aviva Victor. The variety of thespians allows Solondz to express the evolution of Aviva’s self-image, physically reflecting changes in her emotional state during the movie. When we first meet Aviva, she is played by a young African-American girl who wears her emotions on her sleeves and in her facial expressions. She is the only child to middle class parents (Barkin and Masur) living in an anonymous suburb in the Northeast United States. Horrified at the probable suicide of her cousin Dawn and alienated by the material nature of her mother’s love, Aviva becomes obsessed with the idea of having lots of babies to ensure she has someone to love her. Then, as a Caucasian brunette in her early teens, she has an ill-advised encounter with the son of a family friend, and gets pregnant. As a reedy, red-haired, slightly older girl, she strenuously resists but eventually accedes to getting an abortion. As a more confident and more attractive brunette, she runs away with the help of a truck driver, with whom she has sex in the hopes of once again getting pregnant. Abandoned by the truck driver, she wanders through wilderness in the shape of a teenage boy and then is discovered—now as a large, older African–American woman—by the driven and very Christian Mama Sunshine, who runs an orphanage for children with medical infirmities. Here Aviva is least like herself: in a completely alien environment, she has to lie about her name and her past to fit in, and her self-doubt and anxiety are apparent in her magnified size, awkward movement, and change in race. The plot unfolds from there involving more pedophilia, a quest to assassinate the doctor who aborted her fetus, and a shootout in room 11 of a seedy motel, with Aviva switching from shape to shape, becoming more assertive and mature. At the point where she feels most grown-up, she returns to her family as a world-weary, bedraggled 20-something waif (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She holds her own in an existential debate with her older cousin, Mark, and easily wins arguments with her parents. But, as the title of the movie suggests, things come around: Aviva meets up with the boy who got her pregnant to begin with, reverts mentally through the chain of actors who have portrayed her, until she is once again the vulnerable, out-of-place, emotionally needy little black girl. As seductive as the message is that everything eventually returns to its beginning state, palindrome-like, some things in the film are irreversible: death, certain operations, and murder among them. In the end, it’s these things that will eventually shape the person Aviva will eventually become, but she’s not yet become them yet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What makes this strange story even stranger is Aviva is played by eight different performers… Solondz constructs a deadpan sheltering bubble around his film, thereby defusing most of the issues he raises. It’s all one Warholian shrug. Still, ‘Palindromes’ is unlike anything you’ve seen at the movies.”–Bob Longino, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Rolf de Heer

FEATURING: Nicholas Hope, Carmel Johnson, Claire Benito, Ralph Cotterill

PLOT: With only a rudimentary vocabulary but a gift for mimicry, middle-aged Bubby has been raised by his mentally ill, abusive mother with no knowledge of the outside world inside what is essentially a fallout shelter. One day an interloper enters their underground hovel, shattering the only reality Bubby has ever known. Eventually he finds himself released into a modern Australian society he can hardly comprehend, but must learn to fit into somehow.

BACKGROUND:

•  Partially as an experiment and partially for practical reasons, de Heer chose to shoot the film with thirty-two different cinematographers, essentially one for every location.
• Bad Boy Bubby uses binaural sound: the film’s soundtrack was recorded and mixed from two microphones Nicholas Hope wore behind his ears, so that the audience would experience the sonic world exactly as it would be heard from Bubby’s perspective. On home video the effect is largely lost, with the end result being only that a few of the conversations in the film sound frustratingly muffled.  The director suggests that the theatrical experience can be reproduced by listening to the movie while channeling the sound through a pair of stereo headphones.
• Originally, the underground scenes were to have the sides matted to create a narrow, claustrophobic aspect ratio, and the film was to expand into widescreen when Bubby surfaces into the outside world.  Director De Heer thought the effect was too intense and made the film “unwatchable” and dropped the idea.
• Bad Boy Bubby won a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, along with several less significant festival awards.
• We initially passed Bad Boy Bubby over for inclusion on the List, declaring it to be only “borderline weird.” You can read the original review here.
• A search for reviews of “Bad Boy Bubby” on the Los Angeles Times website yields no results, but offers the helpful suggestion, “Did you mean ‘bat boy’ bubbly?”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Bubby the punk rock front man performance artist, on stage in a priest’s collar, holding a blowup doll with enormous breasts wearing a gas mask, backed by a band whose heads are swaddled in cling wrap.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: In my original review of Bad Boy Bubby, I demurred adding the film to

Short clip from Bad Boy Bubby

the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies by noting that the movie “has a unique tone that’s hard to capture, but the first words I’d choose to characterize it are ‘relentlessly offbeat,’ rather than ‘weird’…  for the most part de Heer chooses to tell his story using a straightforward, realistic narrative style that makes us believe bizarre Bubby is a real person in a real world.” The first words I’d use to describe it are still “relentlessly offbeat,” but on further reflection I’ve concluded that Bubby‘s offbeat moments come relentlessly enough that “weird” is a fine choice for the second word I’d use to describe it. I do not want to be in the business of denying the weirdness of movies that feature middle-aged feral children, cling-wrap murders and bizarre swings in tone, especially when they have rabid cult followings and excellent critical reputations.

COMMENTS: Bad Boy Bubby is a film that moves slowly from deep darkness into light. It is often shocking and depressing, particularly in that dingy first third, where Bubby’s unnatural relationship with his deranged mum in their claustrophobic basement is made into a suffocating reality in which we are forced to share. The saving grace is that the movie always treats Bubby with true affection. Most of Bubby’s misbehavior, such as his tendency to shake a woman’s breast instead of her hand when he first meets her, comes out of childlike innocence. But even when Bubby’s intentionally being a “bad boy,” we understand what he’s suffered—even though he doesn’t fully—and we remain firmly on his side. The script, which could have been ruthless to poor Bubby, rewards him (and the viewer) in the end, and the happy ending feels earned rather than tacked on.

Bubby begins, however, in a relentlessly poisonous atmosphere. Bubby and his Mum live—exist is a better word—in a one-bulb basement, and you can almost smell the mold, stale beans, and body odor. His only playmates are cockroaches and feral cats, neither of whom profit by knowing him. Bubby is washed and shaved, slapped, choked, insulted, lied to, and and used as a sex toy by Flo, his portly and obviously mentally ill mother. His vocabulary is limited, but despite his minimal opportunities for socialization, he hungers for new forms of expression; he listens intently to everything his mother says and parrots it back to her, a skill that the script will play with later. He’s taught that he will die if he goes outside without a gas mask and that the Jesus hanging on the wall spies on him and will tell Mum if he moves from his seat at the table while she’s out. Bubby is abused, but like the children of Dogtooth who are taught that cats are vicious killers and airplanes are toys, he has no way of knowing it; this the only existence he’s ever known. The abuse Mum rains on her bad boy is worse than mere beatings and the name calling: she denies Bubby the chance to be human.

The segments inside the cement fallout shelter are nihilistic and painful to view, and things only get worse when Bubby’s seedy, deadbeat dad shows up in his clerical collar. If events continued in this vein for another hour, the film would be unwatchable. Remarkably, though, de Heer lightens the tone dramatically in the second act, turning it from tragedy to comedy on a dime. The effect should be jarring, but we accept it, probably due to our immense sense of relief when we escape that concrete bunker. Comic possibilities that were buried with Bubby in the basement apartment emerge when he escapes into the relative light of modern Australian society. Bubby’s gift for mimicry raises endless prospects for satirizing the absurdity of modern times (a la Peter Sellers in Being There), but the movie largely skirts these opportunities and instead focuses on fleshing out Bubby’s character and experiences. In this middle portion of the film, after Bubby escapes from the underground and before he finds his place in the world, his wanderings become almost maddeningly random. He accumulates adventures by being picked up by one Good Samaritan—a Salvation Army band girl, a socialite, a struggling rock group, a rich guy who dresses him up and takes him out on the town—and simply handed off to another, usually without much explanation for the transfer. His adventures are picaresque and more than a little incredible, hedging towards the weird side of quirky. He gets laid on his first night in polite society, but it’s a one-night stand. A kindly woman in an eclair shop tries to help him, but after a policeman drags him from her convertible and punches him in the gut for being unintentionally obscene, a musician grabs him and throws him in the back of his van… and so it goes. This second act is in some ways the weakest part of the movie, but just as you’re starting to tire of the aimless episodes, bits of those seemingly random experiences start to recur in Bubby’s life, become integrated into an overall character arc, and cohere into a satisfying ending.

With Bubby, Nicholas Hope has the role of a lifetime, a part like no one else has ever played. It’s an unglamorous role, requiring nudity, cockroach eating, and submission to the gaze of a camera fixated on the greasy, scraggly hair circulating around his bald spot. The performance requires equal parts debasement, comedy, and dignity, and the (appropriately named) Hope realizes the character perfectly.

Bad Boy Bubby is essentially a character study, albeit of an often uncomfortably bizarre individual, but it also invites interpretation as a fable about the process of growing up and discovering purpose in life. Bubby undergoes a muddled religious journey through the course of the movie. The illegitimate offspring of a drunken, disgraceful priest, he begins life suffocated by false dogma about a Jesus who will beat him brainless if he misbehaves. Destitute, he’s exposed to a callous world where no one will truly help him (he’s even screwed by the Salvation Army). His wanderings symbolically lead him to the depths of religious despair when an organ player Bubby encounters leads him from a church to a factory and absurdly lectures the uncomprehending man-child on materialism, advising him that he must “think God out of existence.” A free-associating Bubby repeats the atheistic dogma at a funeral for a cat, but he also puts on a priest’s collar and performs miracles by translating the thoughts of a patient with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Then, after being lectured on the evils of organized religion by a rock and roller who stands on a rug whose design keeps magically changing to reflect the various “mobs” who’ve “cling-wrapped” each other throughout history, in the end he finds peace in the arms of the not-so-subtly-named Angel.

Perhaps Bubby is finally able to find happiness because he’s finally been successful in thinking God out of existence; it’s not entirely clear where all the religious imagery is meant to lead us. What is clear is that Bubby ends up in a happy place. He overcomes his cruel upbringing and finds a place in an alien world: a soulmate, an artistic vocation, and some degree of self-understanding. Back in his hovel, Bubby’s overbearing, omnipresent Mum, who dubbed the long-suffering lad her “bad boy,” was as God to him. By the end, married and running around and playfully spraying his own offspring with a hose in a suburban garden, it’s clear that Bubby has, at the very least, thought Mum out of existence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Rolf de Heer’s film is pretty much a weirdo… It may be muddled, but one can’t deny its ambitions, or the integrity of Hope’s performance.”–Geoff Andrew, Time Out Film Guide

“No David Lynchian surrealscape or David Cronenberg psychosexual gross out can compare to the stellar, sinister magic director Rolf De Heer (maker of the critically acclaimed 1996 film The Quiet Room) makes in this amazing masterpiece. Certainly he borrows from his demented brothers in arms, but De Heer has a unique style and vision all his own…”–Bill Gibron, DVD Talk (DVD)

“It’s blatantly obvious that director Rolf De Heer was making the film as weird as he possibly could, but yet it all seems to fit together as a whole… a compelling, funny, occasionally moving and undeniably memorable experience.”–Troy Howarth, Eccentric Cinema (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Bad Boy Bubby @ Rolf De Heer’s Vertigo Productions – An incomplete site, but it contains basic information on the film, many positive reviews, and interesting behind-the-scenes production stills

IMDB LINK: Bad Boy Bubby (1993)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Rolf de Heer Interviews – This archived fan page contains a director’s statement and short interviews with de Heer and Nicholas Hope by film critic Andrew Urban

DVD INFO: Despite being a festival hit, Bad Boy Bubby received little theatrical distribution outside of Australia. The film somehow gathered a small cult following via VHS until Blue Underground’s impressive 2005 DVD release (buy) brought the movie to a much wider audience. Extras include interviews with writer/director de Heer (entitled “Christ Kid, You’re a Werido”) and star Hope (“Being Bubby”). There’s also stills, the theatrical trailer, and the short film “Confessor Caressor,” a mockumentary where Hope plays a serial killer; de Heer said that watching this performance convinced him that the actor was right for the part of Bubby.

2009 saw Blue Underground upgrade Bubby to Blu-ray (buy), with the same special features.

Bad Boy Bubby is also available to rent or buy through video-on-demand and, at the time of this writing, it was available via Netflix streaming service.

(This movie was originally nominated for review by “Una,” who called it a ” weird movie” and a “black++ comedy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Ralph Richardson, Michael Hordern, Rita Tushingham, Richard Warwick, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Marty Feldman, Spike Milligan, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook

PLOT: After the Bomb falls, a family who lives on a still-functioning subway train travels to the

surface in search of a nurse for their pregnant daughter.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This absurd anxiety nightmare about the Bomb could only have come out of the Swinging Sixties; it’s one of the weirder relics of an era when filmmakers felt it was their patriotic duty to laugh in the face of the imminent apocalypse.

COMMENTS: The Bed Sitting Room began its life as a one-act play, written by comedian Spike Milligan and John Antrobus in 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that time, at the height of Cold War paranoia, nuked-up powers were playing games of chicken with each other and worldwide nuclear annihilation seemed inevitable. In the average person’s eyes the world and its leaders had gone insane, and who better to depict the inevitable aftermath of our self-destructive impulses than Milligan and his “Goon Show” squad, under the cheerfully absurd direction of A Hard Days Night‘s Richard Lester? The results are a ridiculous apocalypse the likes of which has never been depicted on screen before. Looking like it was shot in a Welsh garbage dump, with heaping mountains of discarded boots and crockery and the police flying through the sky in a burnt-out VW bug attached to a balloon, the movie anticipates the junkyard visuals of post-apocalyptic films to follow. Tonally, however, Bed Sitting Room is miles away from the cutthroat scavenger worlds of Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog; it’s Theater of the Absurd performed by vaudevillians. The jokes are almost feather-light, contrasting with the inherent horror of the situation. ”I’m not eating,” complains a patient. When the doctor asks why, he answers matter-of-factly, “can’t get the stuff.” In another scene a lonely recluse asks “would you do for me what my first wife did?” to a nervous middle aged woman who’s fallen into his fallout shelter. Having no choice, she reluctantly agrees, and he hands her pots, pans and teacups to throw at him as he dodges them shouting “she means nothing to me!” The movie is full of corny one-liners that are uncomfortably ludicrous coming from refugees of a collapsed civilization; other aspects of post-nuke England are even weirder. Radiation causes some survivors to spontaneously mutate into cupboards, parrots or (of course) bed sitting rooms. The holocaust even caused bug-eyed comic Marty Feldman to dress in nurse drag. Sometimes it seems like the only thing that survived the “nuclear misunderstanding” intact were civil servants and the British class structure. A man on a bicycle generates the electricity that keeps the Underground running, officials roam the wasteland personally delivering death certificates to survivors, and the BBC keeps broadcasting by sending a correspondent around to give live reports from inside of the empty shells of television sets. The Queen may have burnt up into an irradiated husk and blown away, but the survivors have switched allegiances to a new symbolic head of state; they patriotically sing “God save Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone,” in honor of the woman who’s next in line for the throne after 40 million citizens were incinerated. A father still prefers to marry his daughter to a man of breeding, rather than the father of her child; maybe he can get a political appointment out of the connection… Even after Armageddon, the British keep plugging on as they always have. After the bomb drops Australians might grow mohawks and go racing about the Outback in muscle cars fighting over oil and water, but in the United Kingdom, there are proper channels to be followed; you may be starving for food and supplies but you’ll still think twice about breaking into a locked room (“that’s public property!”) There’s (almost literally) a gag a minute, and although many wind up as duds, enough get through to ignite your sense of black humor. In the end it’s all more silly than satirical, but there is some affectionate lampooning of British propriety. In a 1988 interview Spike Milligan said his purpose in the play was to show that after the Bomb, “the moment the cloud had dispersed and sufficient people had died, the survivors would set up all over again and have Barclays Bank, Barclay cards, garages, hates, cinemas and all… just go right back to square one. I think man has no option but to continue his own stupidity.” That is a sentiment we suspect that Mrs. Ethel Shroake of 393A High Street, Leytonstone would fully endorse.

The Bed Sitting Room (and the work of Lester, Milligan and their cronies in general) was an obvious influence on Monty Python (whose television series debuted on the BBC the very same year). Unlike the Pythons, however, this cataclysmic farce was a big flop with audiences, and Lester did not work again for four years. Promoters acknowledged the film’s “specialized” appeal with the tagline “we’ve got a BOMB* on our hands” and the footnote (“*BOMB – a motion picture so brilliantly funny it goes over most people’s heads”). The film is rarely screened and has never been released on DVD in Region 1, but at the time of this writing it is available on Netflix’s instant streaming service (which may be the wave of the future for obscure films).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A field day for funny collection of Brits. Weird picture originated in a well-known weird place, the mind of ‘Goon Show’ alumnus Spike Milligan… the players manage to keep the laughs flying thick and fast.”–TV Guide

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

“If you don’t eat, you won’t die.”–Ugo, La Grande Bouffe

DIRECTED BY: Marco Ferreri

FEATURING: Phillipe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli, Marcello Mastroianni, Andréa Ferréol

PLOT: Four middle-aged, upper middle-class men (a judge, a TV personality, a pilot and a chef) hole up at a country villa to feast; it is gradually and casually revealed that they plan on eating themselves to death. They gorge themselves constantly, but the pilot can’t stand to go even for a day without sex, so prostitutes are invited to join them—along with a schoolteacher who attaches herself to the group willingly. As the gluttonous orgy continues the whores flee in disgust, but the teacher joins in the bacchanalia with gusto.

BACKGROUND:

• All of the main actors use their real names. All four of the male stars were well-established (Mastroianni, of course, was an international star and sex symbol). Except for Noiret, each had worked with director Ferreri before. Each had also had prominent roles in weird films from other European directors (Mastrioanni, most famously, in Federico Fellini films, but Noiret appeared in Zazie dans le Metro for Louis Malle, Piccoli was a mainstay in Buñuel movies, and Tognazzi had small roles in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella and  Fellini’s Satyricon). The quartet would reunite with the director the next year for a surrealist rendering of Custer’s last stand called Don’t Touch the White Woman (starring alongside another weird favorite, Catherine Deneuve).
• The scatological content of the film scandalized some viewers at Cannes, but the film nonetheless won a FIPRESCI prize for Ferreri.
• At its British showings La Grande Bouffe was protested by infamous decency crusader Mary Whitehouse; her attempts to have the movie banned ironically led to modification of the Obscene Publications Act to exempt films with artistic merit.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The visions that will probably stick with you when you think back on La Grande Bouffe are scenes of four great European actors stuffing their faces with turkey legs, a castle made out of pâtés, and a pair of matching cakes shaped like breasts. Michel Piccoli dancing with a pig’s head is another strong candidate, as are the numerous gross scatological moments. But, the strangest and most lingering image may be the final one: sides of meat scattered around the villa lawn—a slab of beef wedged in the crook of a tree—and a pack of dogs sitting and looking attentively at the carcasses, making no move to eat.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: La Grande Bouffe takes an absurd premise—four men decide to eat

Brief scene from La Grande Bouffe

themselves to death—and plays it out with illogical realism, proffering no explanations or motives for what happens.  It’s an unnatural but straight-faced parable that suggests nothing about how we’re supposed to take it. It’s a grotesque spectacle, but a strangely engrossing one, with a fascination that comes largely thanks to a dream cast of 1970s Euroweirdos.

COMMENTS: In the course of their Grande Bouffe, the four suicidal gourmands scarf down oysters, kidneys for breakfast, crusty baguettes, cakes, quail served on skull skewers, turkey legs (convenient for gnawing on during sexual congress), a suckling pig roasted over a spit in the garden, Provencal pizza, steaming bowls of tortellini with cream and mushrooms, crepes doused in Cointreau, brioche dipped in milk, and a three-poultry pâté molded into a Faberge-egg cathedral, among other delicacies. The quartet (later quintet) nosh at all moments: in the bedroom, while picking out a tune on the piano, while taking schoolchildren on a tour of the grounds (a poet of local renown once lived there). In the beginning the mouthwatering spread may make your tummy rumble, but even before the gluttonous consequences—Michel’s flatulence, the exploding toilet— show up on screen, you may start to lose your appetite, as you imagine the men forcing all that food down their throats despite being stuffed full to bursting. As they get near the end of their blowout, each succeeding bite becomes a painful trial. Just look at poor sick Michel’s face as he lies on the bed, straining to swallow a spoonful of chestnut purée as his friends goad him on, telling him it’s a question of will and advising him to imagine himself as a starving child in Bombay.

One of the reasons La Grande Bouffe fascinates, even though not much really happens in the film, is because the men have chosen such an appealingly appalling form of suicide. If we have to die (and we do), why not go out with a banquet of food and sex, in an orgy of pleasure? The feast is at the same time tempting and revolting. In our daily food lives we restrain ourselves because we know the downside of overindulgence—indigestion, nausea, vomiting—but these men keep going at it, as difficult as it becomes. It’s a wish fulfillment fantasy for us to vicariously experience their hedonistic excesses; we aren’t given a free ride, though, because Ferreri makes sure we pay a price for our vicarious delight by giving us vicarious revulsion, too. We get an eyeful (and earful, thanks to the most egregious farting soundtrack ever attached to an arthouse film) of the result of that food after it passes through the debauchees digestive systems. The mixture of lust and disgust demonstrated here is the essence of decadence, simultaneously attractive and repellent.

In researching opinions on La Grand Bouffe, I lost track of the number of times viewers either confessed they did not get what Ferreri was getting at, or scolded him for giving no explanation for the men’s desire to eat themselves to death. Because the raw spectacle here is so hard to get a handle on, so unlike what we see in ordinary narratives, people constantly look for a reference point to compare it to.  The most obvious influence is Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), where the guests at a dinner party find themselves unable to leave (in what may be an explicit Angel nod, Marcello gets disgusted and in fact tries, but fails, to exit the feast). Distancing surrealism is not on the menu in Bouffe, however. The scandalous scatology and perverse sensibilities made some see it as a precursor to the 1975 shocker Salò, but the comparisons don’t go very far. Salò is rife with sadism and cruelty, which is noticeably absent in the genial La Grande Bouffe; all the debauchery is scrupulously consensual, there are no victims anywhere to be found. Bouffe shares many similarities with Peter Greenaway‘s The Thief, the Cook, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), although in that banquet there again is a layer of stylization and allegory standing between us and the material, which is missing in the Ferreri’s unvarnished film. The movie that Bouffe most resembles may be Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas (1995), where Nicolas Cage steadfastly drinks himself to death, for reasons he’s forgotten, as faithful whore Elisabeth Shue takes care of him in his final days.

Shue’s Vegas hooker may have been the illegitimate cinematic daughter of Bouffe‘s Andréa Ferréol, who plays a similarly nonjudgmental caretaker to the four suicidal epicures. Andréa, a zaftig schoolmarm whose eyes light up at the idea of days on end of continuous eating and fornicating, may be this feast’s most interesting and troublesome character. She’s also a surprise co-star, holding her own against the four male acting titans. The five thespians hold the inherently implausible scenario together; there’s a real feeling of camaraderie between the four men, who seem to have known each other for decades, and the Rubenesque Ferréol convincingly worms her way into the pal’s hearts and beds as a party guest who immediately clicks with the assembly. Tognazzi, who plays the chef, was the least distinguished of the crew coming in to this film and exits with the same reputation, although he has a featured moment doing a Marlon Brando impression. Piccoli shows more depth; it’s slowly revealed that he’s a closet musician and philosopher, and probably secretly in love with Mastrioanni’s character as well. Speaking of Marcello, he has the most fun here, playing off his image as a ladies’ man. In Bouffe he’s ridiculously insatiable, insisting the party expand its roster to include three or four prostitutes because he’s unable to go half a day without sex. He’s also the only one of the foursome to show misgivings about the pact, which are apparent almost from the beginning (watch how, in the space of a second, his face goes from apprehension to bemused resolution after he announces “the feast begins!”)

Along with Ferréol, Noiret emerges as the most fascinating character, and despite his often passive personality he is in fact the movie’s driving force. A judge and the apparent ringleader of the cadre, he’s decidedly odd in his stiff mannerisms and his ironic concern with propriety (he insists on storing a fallen comrade in a meat locker rather than interring him because “the illegal burial of corpses is highly reprehensible.”)  He has a twisted sexual backstory that makes it entirely appropriate for his final meal to be a cake in the shape of ripe bosoms. He stands awkwardly at attention, staring straight ahead like a guard at Buckingham palace, on the two occasions where women service him. He’s repressed and droll, and where the other three men in some sense seem to “regular guys,” Phillipe is “off” by quite a bit, the kind of citizen who’s respectable on the outside but who you would not be shocked to find out is secretly a stalker, sex addict or serial killer. He falls in love with Andréa immediately after she shows him just a bit of attention and asks her to marry him. He persists in his ardor despite the fact that she insists on having regular intercourse with the rest of the company, often as Phillipe lies in the same bed. For her part, Andréa seems to return his affections, even though she seems to be more sexually attracted to everyone else at the party, and despite the fact that she knows he’s soon to depart this world. They make for a strange couple indeed.

As weird as Phillipe is, Andréa remains the most interesting and troubling character because she breaks the movie’s template. The four men are all representatives of the bourgeoisie, the bored and decadent upper middle class. For them to enter into a pact to eat themselves to death seems like the type of simple satirical stab at that strata of society that leftist filmmakers were required to take to retain their credibility. But Andréa is a schoolteacher, presumably a virtuous member of the hardworking proletariat, and she proves as gluttonous and oversexed as the men—actually, more so. She forces the movie to widen its lend to accommodate her, making it more a portrait of humanity’s failings then an attack focused on a particular class. Some reviewers even criticized the inclusion of her character as destructive of the satire, but that’s only the case if you’re convinced going in that the movie should be a satire of the bourgeoisie. Ferreri doesn’t force that view upon us. He deliberately gives us no explanations, and none are needed. It’s obvious, predictable, and comfortable to read the movie as an attack on bourgeois consumerism. But perhaps that’s not the point at all. Perhaps the film is deliberately intended to be as senseless as life itself: you’re born, you eat, and you die.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the satire is implicit, and the action is strangely devoid of content, comedic or otherwise… a quiet and observant screed, a cousin to Pasolini’s ‘Salò’… laying waste to modern man and refusing to tell us how to feel about the process.”–Michael Atkinson, IFC.com (DVD)

“…no satire, no tragedy or insight, and no message. Just shocking brainless art posing as an allegory.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre (DVD)

“…a satisfying piece of surrealist satire, recommended to fans of boundary-pushing art-house cinema.”–DVD Holocaust (DVD)

IMDB LINK: The Big Feast (1973)

DVD INFO: The 2009 Koch Lorber DVD (buy) contains no extras other than a five-minute excerpt from the documentary The Director Who Came from the Future discussing the film and the scandalized reaction to it.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Irene,” who called it a “wonderful and quite bizarre movie… a kind of a modern burlesque, a farce reminding me of the Luis Buñuel films…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Steve Ballot

FEATURING: Frank Meyer

PLOT: Frank, a mentally challenged old man with a speech impediment, kills various people he

meets as he searches for true love from a woman with large breasts.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As an authentic piece of goombah outsider art, The Bride of Frank is actually weird, but it’s also bad. And I mean real bad, not “entertaining” bad.

COMMENTS: The movie begins with a toothless old man tricking a five year-old girl into getting into his big rig, trying to get her to kiss him, then crushing her head under the wheel of his truck after she calls him a “dirty bum.” If that scenario sounds like can’t miss comedy gold to you, then you’re The Bride of Frank‘s target audience. All others will want to observe that “beware” rating. That opening scene of child molestation played for laughs does have the virtue of driving away most of the audience before the film can even get started; anyone who continues on past that point can’t pretend to be surprised by the senseless killing, simulated defecation, and sexual perversion that follows. Tonally, the opening, which makes us want to destroy Frank with fire, is a huge problem because it’s out of character with the way the rest of the movie wants to portray him—as a hideous-looking but childlike outcast, a la Frankenstein’s monster, who only kills bad people after they insult and reject him. To wit: Frank decapitates a nerd and relieves himself inside the corpse after being insulted at his birthday party, rips the face off a transvestite who tricks him into a sexual encounter, tears the eye out of a 300 pound exotic dancer and violates her corpse because she’s a tease, and so on. Yawn. Are we jaded yet? More conventional comic relief comes from the poetically obscene homoerotic/homophobic repartee between two of Frank’s coworkers, which is slightly amusing, but nothing you haven’t heard before if you’ve ever worked with Jersey teamsters on a loading dock. Frank, the weatherbeaten, dim, ex-homeless killer whose speech impediment is so thick he’s often subtitled, is played by real-life ex-homeless man Frank Meyer. Frank is like John Waters regular Edith Massey, except he’s not in on the joke. He’s not acting, he’s simply repeating lines as best he can as they’re fed to him one at a time by the director. Except for the serial killing part, this is Frank’s real character, including shots of his real living quarters and his real pet stray cats. So if you’re laughing at the way he mumbles out his scatological threats, you’re not laughing at a performance, but at a real person. (In real life, Frank Morgan is actually a skid row hero, a survivor who’s played the bad hand life dealt him as well as he possibly could). If you can stomach Pink Flamingos levels of bad taste, at least Frank‘s not boring; even though it has no narrative plan and looks entirely improvised, there’s always something going on. There’s even a talented person in the movie: one of the blind dates who answers Frank’s personals ad is an opera diva who sings “you’re not a man of society, you’re not a man of wealth/I think that you should be condemned by the Board of Health”—while juggling! She’s so classy, Frank doesn’t even gouge out her eyes. Another high point is a nightmare sequence that features Frank and his mothers’ heads bounding around on their solarized bodies; it has a crude MS-Paint-meets-el-cheapo-VHS-editing-suite charm. Still, the film’s minor amusements don’t make up for its moral and aesthetic bankruptcy—these guys just aren’t smart and witty enough to pull off transgressive. They genuinely think fake feces made out of peanuts and brownie batter constitutes side-splitting prop comedy; the movie’s not even nihilism, unless you’d call it naïve nihilism. If Beavis and Butthead grew up and filmed a tribute to John Waters, The Bride of Frank would be the result.

If The Bride of Frank looks like it was made by a bunch of amateurs fooling around making a gory horror movie on the loading dock after work, well, that’s pretty much what happened. You have to give this to Steve Ballot: against all odds he realized his dream and actually made a movie. The Bride of Frank played a few underground film festivals, but Ballot refused a distribution deal from Troma, comparing their proposed contract to an offer of sodomy. He printed a few copies on VHS and word got out in the underground, where the movie was bootlegged and passed around enough among trash aficionados to convince Sub Rosa to take a chance on releasing it on DVD. This disc is packed with a freakish amount of extras for those who can’t get enough Frank, including audio commentary, outtakes, a thirty minute (!) alternate ending, and even a featurette on “Buttersound,” the faux-surround sound used on the soundtrack. It’s the Criterion edition release of amateur sleaze movies.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If Fellini had grown up in New Jersey and only had fifteen bucks to make a movie, The Bride of Frank might very well be the one he made… oh, and if he had been really insane too!”–Alternative Cinema Magazine

(This movie was nominated for review by Jason, who correctly predicted it “should be in the beware section I think.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Rutger Hauer, Molly Dunsworth, Brian Downey

PLOT: A hobo rides the rails into a surreally depraved “Scum Town” (formerly Hope Town) and is

pushed into grabbing a shotgun and sweeping the streets clean of pimps, pushers, and bum fight promoters.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Hobo is one of the better postmodern grindhouse spoofs out there and will rate a “must see” for fans of that extremely specific genre, but—although it’s certainly bizarre in its complete disregard of non-B-movie logic—it doesn’t do enough to transcend it’s inspirations in order to earn a general weird recommendation.

COMMENTS: Hobo with a Shotgun has a real eye for shabby detail—just look at the period poster that features disheveled Rutger Hauer, teeth bared, firing a sawed-off shotgun. The artist drew in fold lines as if it was a one sheet that had been filed away in some producer’s desk and forgotten about for thirty years. As strange as it might sound in a movie that features barbed wire decapitations, flame-broiled school children, and post-apocalyptic ninja robots, what impresses me most about Hobo is that kind of subtle detail. Sure, the movie gets most of its mileage from its ludicrous levels of bloodletting—dig that chick dancing around in a mink coat and bikini as blood showers on her from a neck-geyser—but I expected that in a postmodern grindhouse revenge flick. What I didn’t expect is that the absurd violence would be served with a side of style and deadpan wit, sans jokey winks to the audience. Everyone catches on to the B-movie madness, like the land-based octopus in the villain’s lair and the human piñata smacked by topless ladies, but the truly strange touches are easy to miss: the hipster newscaster with the soul patch and earring, the Byzantine icon of Jesus on the Drake’s wall (next to a photo of the Hobo) with his eyes marked out with red paint, the way Hauer grabs a convenient bottle of vodka from a random passerby in a hospital corridor. Any notion that this movie takes place in any world outside movies is dispelled early on when the Hobo enters the town’s top nightspot—a video arcade that doubles as a murder emporium, where oblivious teens spend their allowances on video games while stereotyped 1980s punks crush homeless heads between bumper cars a few feet away. Director Jason Eisener plays it pretty damn straight, like a 1980s period piece intended for airing on the old “USA Up All Night” show.  He lets the absurdity of the plot speak for itself and trusts the audience to get the joke (yes, this is a “terrible” movie) without leading us by the nose. The dialogue is droll; ridiculous speeches are delivered with straight faces, such as the brilliantly melodramatic monologue Hauer delivers standing in front of a hospital incubator full of babies, shotgun in hand. The scripting is carefully clichéd every step of the way, devised with a studied thoughtlessness. Lines like “you can’t solve all the world’s problems with a shotgun!” (and Hauer’s weary response, “It’s all I know”) are delivered with utmost sincerity. But it was the following exchange, delivered when the Hobo discloses his dream of starting a lawn-mowing business, that convinced me I was in the presence of great faux-incompetent writing. “I got my own slogan—you grow it, I cut it,” the Hobo brags. His Platonic hooker companion immediately corrects him: “No, you grow it, we cut it!” The movie’s Technicolor palettes are extravagantly schizophrenic, changing every few minutes, from the hunter’s vest oranges highlighting the Hobo’s train ride into Scum Town to the neon pinks of the emergency room parking lot; they supply another level of arch artificiality. As unreal as everything in the movie is, the enterprise is grounded by hobo Hauer’s magnificently grizzled, whiskered mien, which forms a tired, scowling reality of its own. Hauer’s weather-beaten face and nearly-beaten-down attitude sells the impossible; it’s difficult to imagine the film could have worked with another living actor (outside of Clint Eastwood). Hobo hits that difficult sweet spot between deliberate camp and shameless exploitation; it’s the movie Troma studios have been trying, and failing, to make for over 20 years now.

Hobo With a Shotgun originated as the winner of a contest to make a fake trailer for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez‘s Grindhouse (see the original trailer here). Eisener ran with what could have been a throwaway viral curiosity and made it into a major feature. The director has obvious talent; the danger is that he will look at Hobo‘s success and start to repeat himself. Here’s hoping he challenges himself and takes on a different type of project next; one Hobo is enough.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“With its high degree of farcically unreal gore, Hobo With a Shotgun arrives at a level of cartoonishly surreal absurdism not unakin to The Evil Dead II (1987) or early Peter Jackson films…”–Richard Schieb, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (DVD)

“What is this, a freak out?”–Violet Beauregarde

DIRECTED BY: Mel Stuart

FEATURING: Gene Wilder, Peter Ostrum, Jack Albertson, Julie Dawn Cole

PLOT:  Charlie is a poor boy supporting his mother and four bedridden grandparents with the earnings from his paper route.  When eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka announces he will be awarding a lifetime supply of chocolate and a tour of his mysterious candy factory to the finders of five golden tickets, Charlie wants to win more than anything.  When he, along with four bratty companions, finally meets the exceedingly odd Mr. Wonka,  Charlie finds the factory, and its owner, far stranger and more magical than anything he could have imagined.

BACKGROUND:

• A note for those who believe product placement and corporate tie-ins are a recent phenomenon in movies: although this film was based on Roald Dahl’s bestelling children’s novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” it was retitled to incorporate the Wonka name in order to promote the release of real-life Wonka candy bars (which were still made up until 2010) by Quaker Oats, who financed the production.
• Dahl himself wrote the original script, but it was extensively rewritten by an uncredited David (The Hellstrom Chronicles) Seltzer, reportedly to Dahl’s displeasure.  (It’s worth noting that Dahl, like most authors, pretty much hated every adaptation of his work).
• This was the only movie Peter Ostrum (Charlie) ever acted in.
• The movie just broke even at the box office, but became a cult sensation thanks to television screenings and home video.  In 2003, Entertainment Weekly ranked Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as the 25th biggest cult movie of all time.
• The score was nominated for a “Best Music, Scoring Adaptation and Original Song Score” Oscar but lost to Fiddler on the Roof.
• Despite the fact that he was rejected for the role of the candy shop owner in the film, Sammy Davis, Jr.’s 1972 rendition of the film’s first musical number, “The Candy Man,” became a #1 hit and a staple of his live shows.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton‘s 2005 adaptation of the same material with Johnny Depp as Wonka, is somewhat closer to Dahl’s original novel.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Wonka’s face, bathed in flashing red and green lights, as he shrieks incoherently at the end of his terrifying trip down a psychedelic tunnel of horrors.  It’s the capping image of a horrifying scene that’s been scarring unsuspecting children for 40 years now.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Is it Gene Wilder’s ultra-eccentric performance as the charming

Original trailer for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

but vaguely demonic candyman in a purple velvet jacket and burgundy top hat who suavely arranges for wicked children to hang themselves with the licorice ropes of their own vice?  Or the chorus of orange-faced, green haired, dwarf laborers who sing moralizing “Oompah Loompah” tunes after each victim ironically offs him or herself?  No, we all know it’s the bad trip boat ride, where Wonka recites Edgar Allan Poe inspired verse (“By the fires of Hell a’ glowing/Is the grisly reaper mowing?”) as the craft careens down a tunnel of horrors while colored strobe lights flash and avant-garde footage plays on the walls that tips this celebration of imagination into the weird column.

COMMENTS: When I was a kid, they used to play Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ontelevision exactly once a year (just like that other annual TV staple Wonka so closely resembles, The Wizard of Oz).  The first time I saw it, what lodged itself in my mind was the singing and dancing Oompah Loompahs.  I think “oompah loompah doompity do” must have been stuck in my head throughout the third grade.  When the next year’s showing rolled around, I eagerly tuned in, expecting more hot candy, child jeopardy, and painted-midget action.  The second time around, I remember being disappointed at how long it took to actually get inside the magical candy factory; it was an eternity of waiting, 45 whole minutes of sickly singing, corny comedy, and a weepy family poverty drama before the debonair Mr. Wonka rolled himself down that red carpet and let the kids inside to try way too many experimental confectioneries and have some good, scary fun.

If there’s one legitimate criticism to be lodged against Wonka, it’s my old childhood complaint—it takes too long to get out of dreary reality and into the chocolate factory.  Remember how quickly Oz whisked us out of drab Kansas?  Wonka loiters in a mundane Munich.  As an adult, I find the pre-factory scenes mildly amusing—the worldwide furor over the chocolate contest, the incompetent teacher who multiplies Charlie’s candy bars by a factor of one hundred because he can’t figure out decimal percentage—but the movie, which limps along pleasantly enough to start, suddenly reveals hidden greatness when Gene Wilder somersaults onto the stage as Wonka.  Dressed like a Victorian fop outfitted by Hugh Hefner, quick with an erudite non sequitur (when a girl tells him there’s no such thing as a snozberry, Wonka replies “we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams”), Wonka is, to say the least, an unpredictable fellow.  Wilder prances about, swinging his cane haphazardly at his guests, plucking hairs from their heads at random, and expressing mock concern for their fates after they disobey his direct orders. (“I don’t understand it, the children are disappearing like rabbits,” he says nonchalantly).  He’s sarcastic, and insults everyone in the tour group without their realizing it, yet he remains a lovable father figure—to Charlie, at least.

It’s partially his sincere, childlike love of “pure imagination” that makes any transgression Wonka commits seem harmless, but mainly its the fact that Wonka reserves his wry wrath for those who truly deserve it.  Besides pure-hearted Charlie, the chocolate mogul has invited along four of the most wickedly bratty children anyone could ever hope to see get their poetic comeuppances, along with their equally despicable chaperone parents.  Each kid represents some sort of childhood deadly sin—gluttony, greed, and, uh, gum-chewing and TV-addiction.  Wonka has filled his candy factory full of deadly attractive nuisances, like a river of chocolate and a teleportation machine, calculated to lure naughty children to their doom.  Each tot meets a nasty fate when they let their baser natures get in the way of good behavior.  One is half-drowned and sent to be boiled; another bloated with juice and threatened with explosion; one falls down a garbage chute leading to a furnace; and the final victim is shrunk and sent to be stretched on the rack.  Even Charlie himself has a moment of weakness that almost leads to him and his grandpa being cut to ribbons by fan blades.  The parents freak out, and Wonka shows an amusingly appalling lack of concern, explaining at one point that a kid’s odds of survival are pretty good, as the furnace is only lit every other day.  There’s an Old Testament pitilessness to the ironic punishments each sinful child endures; there’s a black and white moral lesson to be learned, but kids also thrill to the spectacle of bad kids getting theirs (as long as the good one gets his ultimate reward).  It’s as black of a comedy as most kids can endure, but they savor being pushed to their limits.

That punishment/reward morality play forms Chocolate Factory‘s basic structure, but what lodges the film in the memory is the parade of extravagant, imaginative, and often weird set pieces.  There’s the living coat hangers that grab visitor’s hats off their heads unbidden.  Our first glimpse of the Chocolate Room, with its liquid chocolate waterfall, candy toadstools, and lollipops growing on the banks of a muddy cocoa stream.  The refugee race of Oompah Loompahs, with their orange complexions, green hair, bushy white eyebrows, and synchronized dance numbers.  Violet turning into a blueberry and being rolled off for juicing.  Veruca Salt’s show-stopping, foot-stomping dance tantrum “I Want the World!” (“I want the world, I want the whole world/I want to lock it all up in my pocket, it’s my bar of chocolate!”)  Fizzy lifting drinks.  Wonka’s office with it’s half-lamp, half-clock and half-safe.  “You get nothing!”  And, of course, the cherry on the sundae, the mad boat ride through the chocolate factory’s tunnel of horrors, which looks like what Kenneth Anger would have delivered if he’d been hired to design the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World.  Among the images that play on the tunnel walls as the Loompah-propelled gondola speeds heedlessly along are a giant eye, a man with a snake slithering across his lips, and a chicken being decapitated (!)

Willy Wonka likely looks weirder to an adult than it does to a child, for whom it’s splendiferous wonders are just everyday magic.  But—and here’s why the film belongs on a weird movie list—Wonka‘s sugar-rush produces the kind of candy-coated hallucinations that stick with you for a lifetime.  Face it, if you saw this as a kid, a Greek chorus of Oompah Loompahs are forever bobbing up and down in your memory, warning you about the dangers of greed, gluttony, and gum-chewing every time you even think about climbing out on the precarious banks of a chocolate river.  Admit it—the mere thought of a three-course dinner compressed into a stick of gum now fills you with unthinking dread.  This is the sort of delightful lifelong psychological trauma Willy Wonka breeds in us.  It’s what makes it the perfect gateway weirdness for that treasured tyke in your life.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…never finds an appropriate style; it’s stilted and frenetic, like Prussians at play.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…captures the spirit of Dahl’s children’s literature, which mixed typically bright and cheery flights of imaginative fantasy with unexpectedly dark and bizarre undertones… the film also reflects a sort of last gasp of ‘60s psychedelia: the bright colors of Wonka’s factory would not be inappropriate on a poster advertising a rock festival, and a scary boat ride through a dark tunnel (complete with flashing lights and horrifying images, like a chicken’s head being chopped off) feels like a bad acid trip… The supporting cast (including veteran character actors Jack Albertson and Roy Kinear) does a nice job of embodying Dahl’s weird caricatures.”–Steve Biodrowski, Cinefastique (DVD)

“For all the wonder of a film, with its bouncy, silly songs, art design in candy colors, and mix of innocence and strangeness, there is also an edge to Gene Wilder’s simultaneously weird and warm eccentricities, like a mix of storybook fantasy and Grimm Fairy tale updated to the industrial world of the twentieth century.”–Sean Axmaker, MSN Movies (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Golden Tickets to Hell: Willy Wonka – Tour Guide of the Abyss – Good analysis by science fiction author Lou Anders, pointing out Wonka‘s debt to Dante’s Inferno

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory Fan Club – There are some fun quizzes, polls and so forth on this FanPop page dedicated to the movie

Willy Wonka’s everlasting film plot – A BBC article on Dahl’s reaction to the adaptation of his book

20 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ – trivia nuggets about the film courtesy of the moviephone blog

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Dahl’s orginal children’s novel

Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – Director Mel Stuart’s account of the making of the film

I Want it Now! A Memoir of Life on the Set of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – Memoir by actress Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca Salt)

DVD INFO:  As befits a peculiar movie, Willy Wonka has had an interesting video release history.  Wonka became one of the best-renting titles on VHS, far surpassing the popularity of its original theatrical run.  Today the Wonka fan has a large variety of options to choose from to own the film. In 2005, Warner released a “special edition” DVD containing numerous extras including the original trailer, the featurette “Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (named after director Mel Stuart’s memoir), a photo gallery, four karaoke-style sing along numbers, and commentary by the five grown-up child stars.  The odd thing about the release is that, underestimating the cultiness of the film’s rabid audience, Warner originally planned to release it only in a chopped pan n’ scan full screen version; after a letter writing/e-mail petition, they added a widescreen option.  Though now out of print, both of these DVDs are still widely available and can be purchased at bargain prices (Full Screen/Widescreen).

2011 saw Warner do it right (or go overboard, depending on your viewpoint) with the release of a deluxe 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray/DVD combo set (buy) that includes all the special features of the previous release but adds a new interview with director Mel Stuart and a short original promotional film and comes in a collector’s box with a 144 page (!) book, and even includes a pencil case shaped like a Wonka bar.

If you’re not interested in the knicknacks you can save money and purchase the DVD (buy) or Blu-ray (buy) separately (no word on special features available in these editions).

An even cheaper option is to rent or buy the film through Video-on-Demand (Video on Demand).

(This movie was nominated for review by “MCD,” who reminded us it comes “complete with one of the scariest moments in movie history, the infamous boat ride.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Bill Plympton

PLOT:  A loathsome man spends his days in a dingy, depressing bar where he lusts after the blonde barmaid, who is also the bartender/owner’s wife.  One day he discovers he is growing wings on his back; initially, he’s thrilled to be able to fly, but comes to hate them when they develop a mind of their own and force him to do charitable acts.  Other, equally venal, men plot to steal the wings to use them for their own selfish purposes.

BACKGROUND:

• Bill Plympton has been nominated for Oscars twice for his animated short films.
• Plympton made Idiots and Angels independently with a small team of four assistant artists for an estimated $125,000.
• Per Plympton, the film consists of 30,000 drawings.
• Per Plympton, the film was rejected by thirty distributors.  The animator is self-distributing the movie.
• Idiots and Angels won the Best Film award at the Fantasporto festival in 2009 (previous Fantasporto winners that were Certified Weird are Toto the Hero and Pan’s Labyrinth).
• Idiots and Angels is “presented by” Terry Gilliam.
• The amazing soundtrack, featuring Pink Martini, Nicole Renaud, Tom Waits and others is not available for purchase at this time—and due to licensing issues probably never will be.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The obvious choice would have something to do with wings: maybe a manacled butterfly, or a fat stripper showing off her wingspan to a crowd of leering males, or an angel mooning a passing airliner.  More shocking and unforgettable, however, is the moment near the film’s climax when a full-grown man, wrapped in a placenta, emerges from another man’s navel.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Plympton sets his pitch-black parable about a wicked man who

Scene from Idiots and Angels

grows angel wings in a dialogue-free barroom Purgatory.  Fantastic daydreams mix with increasingly surreal realities to paint a wordless portrait of the eternal, internal struggle between good and evil.  A hip, hypnotic art-pop soundtrack helps sweep the viewer away into Idiots and Angels‘ weird world of bitter cocktails and unexplained appendages.

COMMENTS: The unnamed antihero of Idiots and Angels (the official plot synopsis calls him “Angel”) is a truly loathsome man, as we gather from his literally inflammatory treatment of a motorist who steals what he believes should be his personal parking spot in front of Bart’s Bar.  Dressed in a three-piece suit, briefcase in tow and cigarette affixed to lip, Angel spends his entire workday in the bar, every day, drinking cocktails, abusing the clientele, and savoring lustful fantasies about the shapely barmaid.  He’s the kind of guy who is only genuinely happy when savoring the feel of  the butterfly guts he’s just squished between his fingers.

When Angel awakens one day to find he’s grown a pair of wings, his initial thoughts are only of the embarrassment he’ll suffer for being a freak.  He soon considers an unforeseen upside: unseen, he can glide down from above and snatch women’s purses, or swoop down on unsuspecting ladies sunbathing in the nude in their fenced-in backyards.  His elation turns to grief, however, when he finds that not only do the wings frustrate his attempts to use them for evil purposes, they actually force him into duty as an unwilling Good Samaritan.  He soon finds himself going to extraordinarily painful lengths to rid himself of the unwanted wings; but other men, just as evil as Angel but with an ingenious plan to force the feathery limbs to their wills, have their eyes on the appendages as well.

A strange story demands to be told strangely, and animator Bill Plympton delivers the oddness as always with his highly stylized artwork.  It’s squiggly and full of penciled-in crosshatching, rendered this time out in dampened shades of grey and brown.  This nearly monochromatic palette creates a noirish effect, particularly in the scenes in the dank bar where most of the action takes place (there are numerous moments when Plympton plays with light/shadow effects, as when a driver shoots bullet holes in the roof of his car, causing shafts of light to appear).  The cartoon reality of Idiots and Angels is fluid, moving according to its own associative logic; Angel’s morning ritual sees water rinsed off his face turn into milk pouring on his cereal, and a spoon inserted into his mouth morphs into a car key in the ignition.  At one point the road Angel drives every morning to the bar is depicted as an endlessly spinning treadmill; the trees lining the avenue cast shadows that look like bars on a moving cell.  The absurd physical visual gags we expect from Plympton are out in full force, but there is also an unexpectedly sincere emotional component.  At one point, Angel sheds a single tear but, unwilling to experience tenderness, he gathers it up with a finger and stuffs it back into its duct.

 These visual metaphors are crucial because the story is told without any dialogue, a neat abstracting trick that helps the cartoon parable take on a dreamlike, universal aspect.  Pantomime scenes convey the players’ essential characters.  When a butterfly appears in the dank saloon, the regulars each have a revealing daydream that tells us what we need to know about their personalities.  The owner cooks up an idea for opening a “Butterfly Bar” where patrons flock to see his captive lepidopteron; the aging, overweight floozy playing solitaire at the corner table imagines an act where an audience of mustachioed men in tuxedos shower her with jewelry when she spreads her own wings on stage; the lonely barmaid has a pastoral fantasy where a giant butterfly carries her away into the sky, incidentally making aerial love to her along the way.  Characters even take on different aspects depending on whose eyes we see them through.  When we first see the barmaid dancing to salsa music in an objective third person view, she’s expressing an innocent joy in rhythm and movement; when the angle changes to show the view from Angel’s barstool perspective, she suddenly looks like an exotic dancer, and her broomstick becomes a stripper’s pole she’s humping.  Silent movies at least used intertitles to convey slight amounts of dialogue and narration; Plympton sets the bar even higher here with no words at all (except for bar marquees and newspaper headlines).  The fact that we can follow the story easily—despite all the impossible events and surreal digressions—marks Idiots and Angels as a masterpiece of non-verbal storytelling, one that stacks up favorably against the works of Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati.

With no dialogue to speak of, music becomes paramount, and Plympton assembles an impressively moody, melodic soundtrack.  The main theme is ethereally doubled by a warbling whistle and a musical saw, with a French accordion providing rhythmic accompaniment.  The background sound textures range from Hawaiian swing to classical guitar; most of the selections have a consistent cocktail lounge/Playboy-Club-after-hours feel to them that befits the film’s smoky, retro-barroom ambiance.  Avant-garde accordionist/singer Nicole Renaud‘s otherworldly soprano performance in “Le Gris” is a stratospheric accompaniment to Angel’s first flight.  Back on Earth, an abstract sexual assault is scored to Tom Waits’ grungy “Kommienezuspadt”; the husky troubadour’s whiskey-soaked ballad “Flowers Grave” also supplies an emotional highlight.  In a pleasingly coincidental parallel to 2010′s Black Swan, the theme from “Swan Lake” backs a climactic scene where a character spouts wings.  Sound designer Greg Sextro deserves a shout out for integrating the musical snatches, foley effects, and the sparse grunts and gasps that pass for voice acting here into a flowing, effective river of sound that serves as the perfect complement to Plympton’s constantly morphing visuals.

The concept of a man dead-set on battling his inner angel is at the same time funny and moving, and what may be most impressive in Idiots and Angels is how confidently the film manages its complex, contradictory tone.  It’s dark without slipping into nihilism, and hopeful without turning sappy; it manages to be sweet and sour, cynical and romantic, satirical and Gothic all at once, and the dichotomies all merge together and harmonize beautifully.  The movie’s flowing images, atmospheric music, oneiric lack of dialogue, and bits of free-floating weirdness (Angel’s bird-based hallucinations, bars patronized entirely by burn victims in full-body casts) all add up to something unlike any other animated product out there.  But Idiots and Angels gives us even more than that: the movie has a brain and a heart, which together make a soul.  It’s a weird one, sure; but we can see our own humanity, in all its grotesqueness and nobility, reflected in Idiots and Angels.  After all, we’re all part idiot, part angel.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Plympton mines elegance from the utterly gonzo.”Aaron Hillis, The Village Voice (festival screening)

“In this bleak environment – it looks and feels like a David Lynch hangover – the ridiculous mutant wings appear as a symbol of divine intervention, or of a belief in mankind’s better nature. “–Greg Quill, The Toronto Star (contemporaneous)

“…the expected Plymptonesque comedy soon gives way to more uncharacteristic, serious-minded gothic horror, romanticisms, and surreal drama, and this would be great if not for the fact that the morality is simplistic and the plot points belabored.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: Idiots and Angels Official Movie Website – clips, stills, a downloadable press kit with and miscellanea

IMDB LINK: Idiots and Angels (2008)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Idiots and Angels Filmmaker Interview – 10 minute videotaped interview with Pympton made for the American Film Institute

Cartoonist Bill Plympton Talks About Idiots and Angels and Finding Success on His Own Terms – This interview with San Francisco Weekly is very short but one of the few available print publications wherein Plympton discusses the film

Ani-Cam at Bill Plympton Studio – While production was ongoing a webcam (dubbed the “ani-cam”) captured Plympton making his pencil sketches for Idiots and Angels live; it’s now available archived

DVD INFO: Unfortunately, the self-distributed DVD (buy) contains no features other than the film itself.