DIRECTED BY: Run Wrake
PLOT: A young girl finds a magical dancing idol when she cuts open a rabbit.
COMMENTS: Run Wrake’s Rabbit is a beautifully frightening, and award-winning, parable about greed that taps into the ancient, grim fairy tale tradition of placing children in harm’s way to illustrate a cautionary point. Rabbit, however, turns that motif [...]
DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam
FEATURING: Heath Ledger, Christopher Plummer, Lily Cole, Tom Waits, Colin Farrell, Johnny Depp, Jude Law
PLOT: A 1000 year-old mystic enlists the help of a seedy amnesiac to save his
daughter, whose life he exchanged for eternal youth, from the clutches of the Devil.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus [...]
AKA: Blood Island
DIRECTED BY: David Green
FEATURING: Oliver Reed, Gig Young, Flora Robson, Carol Lynley
PLOT: In this H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, a a string of grisly killings is linked to an
unnameable creature inhabiting the loft of an abandoned New England mill inherited by newlyweds.
WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The Shuttered Room showcases a strange story of monsters and madness. [...]
“…Gilliam fearlessly brings the logic of children’s literature to the screen. Plunging headfirst into history, myth, legend, and fairy tale, Gilliam sends his characters—a boy and six good-natured if rather larcenous little persons (i.e. seven dwarves)—careening through time-twisting interactions with Napoleon, Robin Hood, and Agamemnon (played, respectively, by Ian Holm, John Cleese, and [...]
DIRECTED BY: Paul Morrison
FEATURING: Robert Pattison, Javier Beltrán
PLOT: In Madrid in the 1920s, with Dadaism in full flourish and Surrealism in its infancy,
soon-to-be-famous poet Federico García Lorca flirts with soon-to-be-famous painter Salvador Dalí while soon-to-be-famous director Luis Buñuel hangs around.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s subject is Surrealism, but its style is conventional historical [...]
“The story functions, of course, on several levels, political, sociological, philosophical and, what’s most important, on a dreamlike psychological-symbolic level.”–Stanley Kubrick
DIRECTED BY: Stanley Kubrick
FEATURING: Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee
PLOT: Alex is the leader of a small gang of violent, thrill-seeking youths in England sometime in the indefinite near future. After a home invasion goes bad, his [...]
“You’ve seen all kinds of movies, but you’ve never seen anything like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is wonderfully weird. It’s fabulously freaky… The story is strange… the scenery is smashing… the cast is completely crazy!”–ad copy from the extended 3 minute trailer
DIRECTED BY: Jim Sharman
FEATURING: Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, [...]
“This fearful worm would often feed on cows and lamb and sheep,
And swallow little babes alive when they lay down to sleep,
So John set out and got the beast and cut it into halves,
And that soon stopped it eating babes and sheep and lambs and calves.”
–Lyrics to “The D’Ampton Worm” from Lair of [...]
“I think it is a film fantastique in a way… a film fantastique can have almost anything in it, it’s based on facts but it can take flights of fancy which are still rooted to the truth, to the reality of the story, so the imagination can roam.”–Robin Hardy
DIRECTED BY: Robin Hardy
FEATURING: Edward Woodward, Christopher [...]
AKA A Venezia… un dicembre rosso shocking
DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Roeg
FEATURING: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie
PLOT: John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) lose their daughter in a freak drowning accident. Life goes on, however, and they travel to Venice as planned, where John is directing the restoration of a Gothic cathedral. While there, they [...]
